Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 521: Alan Levinovitz

Episode Date: August 11, 2022

Alan Levinovitz, author, professor, and genius skeptic, joins the DTFH! Check out Alan's latest book, Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science, wherever you buy your books! Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Herb Stomp - Use code DUNC15 at checkout to receive 15% OFF your first order! Babbel - Sign up for a 3-month subscription with promo code DUNCAN to get an extra 3 months FREE!

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And this is the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. Thank you for joining us by us. I mean, I guess the sum total of everyone listening to the podcast, which is a trillion people. It expands out through time and space. People in Hollow Earth listen to this podcast. Obviously, denizens of other realms listen to this podcast. It shows up in a lot of different ways.

Sometimes it's the sound of a cat fucking. That's in the Quadrinus Zalvago Nexus. And sometimes it's this deep, thick, beautiful, silky, masculine, alluring, charming, dazzling, lovely, magnificent, pleasing, exquisite, grand, and splendid voice that you are currently listening to. Did I train? I just want to put this out for all my journalists out

there listening. Because honestly, I'm tired of answering the question. I get it all the time. How did you train your voice to sound like a combination, sonic boom, and goddess orgasm? The answer, muskrat come. Yeah, you heard me right. The semen of muskrats contains within it

a very powerful vocal resonator that wraps itself around the human vocal cords. You try to swallow muskrat come, and you're going to get a big surprise if you think it's going to go slithering down your neck tube into your bag of acid. Because it has its own kind of strange sentience. It's been compared to a slime mold,

the way that a slime mold is simultaneously one thing and a lot of things, also known as a synchocynchobeta top for the simultaneous oneness and difference. A slime mold can solve wordal puzzles. A slime mold will help you if you're in a bad relationship. And most importantly, a slime mold is the best friend you will ever have. And the stoic philosopher, Desicus,

claims that 100% of his wisdom came from communicating with the slime mold. Now, muskrat come is not a slime mold. In fact, they're completely different. But what they do have in common is that they both feel good when they splatter all of your face. The difference between the two is if you eat a slime mold, it will go right into your bag.

Whereas if you drink muskrat come, it's going to tendril around your vocal cords. And it's going to create a kind of strengthening resonance that over time will produce the exact kind of voice that you're listening to right now. So there you go. A little bit of insider baseball about how to make your voice perfect for podcasting.

You're going to ask another next question. Where do I find these muskrats? You don't find the muskrat. When the student is ready, the muskrat will come. Ah, we've got a great podcast for you today. The brilliant Dr. Alan Levenivitz is here with us. We're going to jump right into it, but first, this. Mom and wife, daddy is sick again.

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Just had a nice hot glass of muskrat come and I'm ready to tell you about some upcoming shows I have. I'm going to be, if you're listening to this, on the week of August 9th, I'm going to be at the La Jolla comedy store this weekend. All the shows are almost sold out. We added another show, but if you're in La Jolla and you want to come see me do stand up,

don't sleep. Get the tickets now. The following week, I'm going to be at the Miami Improv. You can find all my shows at DuncanTruzzle.com. I'd also love it if you would subscribe to my Patreon at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. You're going to get commercial free episodes of this podcast, though I don't know why you would want that

because my commercials are part of the podcast. Also, we have weekly gatherings. We just did a meditation today and every Friday or just about every Friday, we have a family gathering and it's a blast. It's a brilliant, thriving community of glorious people. Glorious people not afraid to admit that they happily imbibe the sweet juice of the muskrat.

You can find us at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Today's guest is brilliant. He's an associate professor of religion at James Madison University. He's written a book, Natural How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws and Flawed Science. But how did I find Dr. Alan Levenovitz on Twitter? His Twitter is so cool.

He brings up so many awesome ideas that I didn't even notice it in the sense that I was like, wow, this is a really interesting Twitter thread until I thought, holy shit, this is like a good, this is, wait, Twitter can be good. It was mind-blowing. Then he was tweeting something about his skepticism regarding ghosts and I tweeted at him

that I'd had a pretty weird ghost experience and from there, we entered the land of podcasting. So in this episode, you're going to hear a ghost story told to a genius skeptic. My hope was that he would be able to help me see where my biases had caused me to sort of hallucinate a paranormal experience. Did that happen?

Well, keep listening and you'll find out. Everybody, please welcome to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast, Dr. Alan Levenovitz. Music playing Welcome, welcome on you That you are with us Shake hands, glory to be blue Welcome to you

It's the Duncan Trussell Family Hour Welcome to the DTFH. Alan, I cannot wait to talk to you. I've got a lot of hard questions for you, but please, you're about to mention one of my favorite musicians, John Prine. Please continue. Yeah, so we were talking about how my office is here in heaven

and you were talking about how there are options in heaven and how that was great. And in the John Prine song, I play it for my students all the time. I'm blanking on the name. But basically, check out the music video. It's like a cartoon and he says he's going to smoke a cigarette. He's going to do it in heaven.

Cigarette that's nine miles long. Yeah. He's going to make a vodka and ginger ale. He's going to like go on a go on a Ferris wheel. He's going to start a rock and roll band. He's going to forgive all of his syphilitic critics. Critics. It's just a fucking fantastic song about what he does in heaven.

I love that song. It's incredible and it ends with. Wait, how is it? Like his dad told him, when you're dead, that's right. I love that. I love that.

His dad's tell. Wait, is his dad telling him that in heaven, in which case his dad would be wrong? No, it's before. You see what I'm saying? Like if his dad, no, his dad told him this before he before heaven, because obviously he's alive.

His dad apparently was telling him what you can't hump in heaven. Is that what he means? Is he referring to impotent? Like dead pecker. A dead pecker. A dead dickhead. Like when you're dead, you're a dead pecker.

Was his dad saying the most creepy thing? Like when you die, you become a flaccid penis. It's crazy, crazy. That's like it. I'm actually reading for the first time I'm reading The Sun Also Rises, this Hemingway book. Oh, wow.

And so first of all, check this out. We got the video so I can show you. Great. I like nice looking books, right? It's just one of those things I like. So I like the British editions of Hemingway. They're really beautiful. And I was like,

I'm going to get the British edition of this to read the nice looking copy. Cool. So check it out. It's not called The Sun Also Rises in England. What's it called? I can't see it because of the... Fiesta.

It's called Fiesta. That's the... Look, look. That's it. It's still called that. If you ask a Brit what their favorite Hemingway book is, they'll be like, I like Fiesta.

Fiesta's my favorite. You know what? I got to say, Sun Also Rises is... Maybe this is my own bias. I think that's better. Sun Also Rises is better. Well, you know,

because speaking of dicks, that's why it reminded me. I think... I think the guy... You never find... I'm only... I'm like 62% through, but my friend already gave it away.

I don't think he can get it up. And he falls in love with this woman and then she basically... She falls in love with him, but he can't fuck her. And listen, listen, listen. I think The Sun Also Rises is like The Sun Also Rises.

And I think it's just devastating. I think so. I think it's a double entendre. I know. I don't know. I know. I think so. I'm not done with the book yet, though,

so I don't want to make any promises. Wow. Okay. In that case, Fiesta, it's better. It's better. No, it's less mean. It's less mean.

It's less mean. It's like you're not titling... It's not a dad joke. It's on the cover of this great book. It just both suck. But Fiesta... Honestly, both. Fiesta didn't mean what it means today.

You know what I mean? In 2019, whatever, 25, it wasn't like Fiesta. That was like a new word, right? It was exotic. It probably sounded like, you know... You know what I mean? Now it's like Fiesta. It sounds like a car.

It sounds like a shitty Ford Fiesta. Isn't it literally a car? Oh yeah, it is a Ford Fiesta. The Ford Sun Also Rises. That's actually... Well, all right. Not bad. I'm not a good marketer.

It's not bad. Well, I've got some questions for you. We obviously... I love... First of all, let me just say, I love your Twitter. I don't like a lot of... I don't like... I don't know what you call them.

Twitter feeds or whatever. Yours is just fantastic. The conversations you have with people on there are so interesting. And it's just a source. You know, I follow a few... You know, you're an example of, like, how... Like, I think the dream the Twitter people had of Twitter when they were making it, your feed is an example.

It could be like this. I really appreciate that, man. Part of it is the truth. Like, I have a lot of strategies for doing it. It's taken me a long time to get myself to the place where I think I can do that. And also, I'm just lucky. I got a lot of great... There's a lot of great people out there.

And it's just... I don't know. It's a great blessing to me. What are your strategies? What do you mean? What strategies? Well, I actually have a Twitter thread about how I use Twitter. That a lot of people seem to find useful.

But let me think of some of the things I do. Okay. One. What are your strategies for how I curate it or for how I behave? The whole... I would love to know your whole theory on it. I would love to know your entire theory of Twitter. Sure.

Well, for one, it's not dissimilar from my theory of reality. But... Okay. So, okay. Always admit when you're wrong. So, it's like a superpower on Twitter. Just the other day, I was arguing with some guy. Like, you know, some random dude about abortion or something.

He was being really... Like, you know how people are on Twitter, really mean. But he made a good point. He made a good point. And I was like, that was a good point. How to rethink what I was just arguing. And it was like, his mind just leaped out of his ears. He was like, holy fuck.

Like, what just happened? You've earned yourself a follow. Like, I've never... Like, it was like... You know what I mean? Like, it's not weakness to admit you're wrong on Twitter or in life. It's a sign of strength. And that's not why I'm doing it.

I mean, I just did it because he made a good point. So that's one thing. Let me think of some other important ones. Don't share... Honestly, don't mock people. It's just a rule for me. It's not even like a punch up, punch down thing. Yeah.

I'm just not in the business of mocking people. I can do it other places, but not on Twitter. May I push back? Yeah, yeah. Not that you should mock people, but I must say it is punched down. I think that there is a... Depending on who you're arguing with, I guess. But ultimately, if you have a ton of followers, no matter what, it's not fair.

You're a person standing in the playground with... You know, I don't know how many of those followers are bots. Not that that makes it any better. That's even creepier, in fact, if you're about to get in a fight with someone at a playground who has bots and people... It's actually a robot. How crazy would that be? You're like fighting with a bully and then it turns out that they're just like a robot

that you've been fighting with. It's like, how scary. Yeah, but I think that in general, even though so many people will invite your wrath. And it's so easy sometimes. And God knows anyone who's on Twitter is... I'm sure you at some point you didn't realize how much of a slippery slope that can be. And then how sticky it becomes. And then suddenly it just...

But yes, okay, I do think it's punching down, though. For me, no, it's just... I wouldn't do it either way, right? So it's like, I think a lot of what's happening on Twitter... This is actually maybe another way that Twitter has become better for me. Because I think a lot of people are shouting in pain or shouting in fear. And so I'll tell you a story. When I was in grad school, there were these people...

It was like a protest. I think it was like a divest from Israel protest. It was like Palestinian divest from Israel kind of thing. And I went up and I think... I don't want to get the details wrong, but it was something like come over and ask us why we believe in this. And I did. Like you said, people are inviting you in.

But that's not what they were actually there to do. What they were there to do was shout in pain and anger. And I mistook... Because they were actually deceiving people, right? I mistook them. I didn't understand what was going on. And so I tried to engage in an argument. It did not work out well.

And in retrospect, I realized that what they were really doing was shouting in pain. And you got to let people do that, right? I mean, there's no way you can't... It's like telling someone to relax, right? And never works. So you just got to let them do it. It's like if they're shouting in pain, you're just like, hey, man, I get it.

I'm sorry you're in pain. Take it easy. Like I hope we can meet again under better circumstances. Right. Right. Learning how to distinguish those two is probably a pretty important skill set for people. It is. Because I've noticed whenever I start trying to rationalize with someone who's shouting

in pain, generally the way it goes is I just start shouting in pain in a different way. It's contagious. It's contagious. That's right. You've got to put... I know masks are over, but you've got to put on a spiritual mask when the viruses come your way. Let's see.

Or build up your immune system. I don't know how the metaphor works. Another, like some basic stuff, don't quote, tweet things that you don't like. So like if it's something you're arguing, if you're arguing with it, here's a couple of things I do. I can... So I'll reply and then retweet my reply. That's one thing I can do.

If people are interested in the conversation, they can come into it that way, but I don't... Or I can take a screenshot of it if I don't want to engage with the person. But I... Oh, I think there's something ritually inappropriate about quote tweeting something that you dislike or disgusted by. It's like, why are you doing that, man? Why are you sharing the thing that is the virus, right? It's like, I don't know.

Right. So I just don't do that. I've got a romantic dream. I want to take my sweet, beautiful, hyper-sexy wife to Paris, take her down in the Parisian catacombs, break off from the tour group, and make sweet love to her among the bones. While I whisper French poetry in her ear, perfectly, fluently, and you know who's going to help this dream come true, it's Babbel. For all of your summer travels, whether you're going abroad or staying domestic and want

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That's Babbel.com slash Duncan for up to 60% off your subscription. Babbel, language for life. Check this out. You want to hear something crazy, man? Okay. We're in China. 1600s are thereabouts. I'm terrible with dates.

There's missionaries who are coming to China for the first time. These are people who are just shocked. You have to imagine. Just shocked that there's a civilization with great spiritual traditions in it that they've never encountered before. They've got their own religions. They show up and, of course, they start evangelizing. The Buddhists and the Confucians who coexist because in China, unlike with Abrahamic religious

faiths, the faiths are not mutually exclusive. Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism, they do compete for resources, but it's not like you are either a Confucian or a Buddhist or a Daoist. You might participate in all of them to greater or lesser extents depending on the party. You might perform Confucian rituals in order to figure out when to get married, but you might go to a Daoist for fortune telling, and then you might go to a Buddhist for whatever. That's great. I love that.

These missionaries show up and they're just fucking shit up. They're trying to destroy these religions and replace them with Christianity. This one, I think he's a Tantai Buddhist. If not in name, then in spirit, that my friend Ziporin was working on, he comes up with this theory that in fact the missionaries are super secret bodhisattvas, that actually they are ultra skillful, hidden bodhisattvas that have come to improve Buddhism, probably to take away the list and stuff, by challenging the bad doctrines so that Buddhism can be better. Which means at a certain point in Tiantai Buddhism, of course, everyone is a hidden

bodhisattva. Everything, actually at a certain point, but that's the opposite of the lists in the hierarchies. There are no lists in hierarchies because my fucking bourbon tumbler is a bodhisattva. You know what I mean? So it's like, where's the hierarchy? As Zhuangzi says, where's the Dao? It's in the piss and the shit.

The person who can ride the wind and turn into a dragon and have magical powers and live forever, that person is no more or less fully realized than like a piece of shit. OK, to back you up, let me grab this book real quick. No, are you kidding? I love it. Hold on. Whoa, what? That's that's that's like Wizard of Oz.

That was amazing. I found in this great book here. It's called the Ningma School of Tibetan Buddhism by Dujong Rinpoche. Oh, yeah, sounds fairly familiar. I don't know. I mean, the name Rinpoche Rinpoche I've seen. That's literally the extent of my knowledge of whatever you're about to talk about. I think I found it. OK, here it is.

OK, to back up what you're saying, I'm just going to start reading from this first paragraph. It goes there's a few paragraphs before I think it goes into more detail. It should be known that the indestructible play of these magical emanations is inconceivably secret. For example, it is by no means contradictory that fields containing atoms of oceanic infinity exist on the surface of a single atom. Bodies of oceanic infinity are gathered in a single body and each body also covers an oceanic infinity of fields, fields, not fields, such is said in the Tantra of the secret nucleus. In the manner of the trichlycosm?

Never heard of that before. The trichlycosm is a hell of a word, man. I love that. Freaking cool. In the manner of the trichlycosm, absorbed in a mustard seed, one should make offerings after inviting the mandala from the expanse. And in the great bounteousness of the Buddhas on the surface of a single atom or as many Buddhas as there are atoms.

So the whole thing is made up of the awakened mind. The whole thing is enlightenment. And here you are beating yourself up for this or that when there's more Buddhas than you, than there are atoms, according to this very serious looking red book. Actually, I think what's funny is that, OK, and we could get to ghosts, I think, because that was one of the things we talked about a long time ago. But ghosts, I think there's a lot more people in the world who find the idea of ghosts plausible than find the idea that there are infinite Buddhas

dancing on a shit atom, right? They would be like, well, that's crazy, but I did see a ghost the other day. Whereas in fact, whereas in fact, no, I'm serious, listen to me, let me hear me out, hear me out, hear me out, whereas in fact, one of them is true and the other is not. Ghosts don't exist, but there are infinite Buddhas dancing on that shit atom. You know what I'm saying? Well, oh my God, this, I think, needs to be a public debate between people who believe there is infinite Buddhas and shit and people who believe in ghosts.

I will take the side of this. You want to take ghosts? Well, I'm taking ghosts now. Now, I just have to, as an aside here, I did read that flat earthers look down on hollow earthers. I don't know if you've ever heard that or not. We tell me about this. What is this? So the people who believe the earth is flat, apparently like it, like it conventions where you're, I don't know if there's like, like, like shape of earth.

Conventions, nonstandard shape of earth conventions. Yeah, apparently the flat earthers, like they bully the hollow like they see the hollow or yeah, they, the, they see the hollow earthers is like, I may be being adjacent to finally waking up and realizing it's flat, motherfucker. If anything, it's like flat and I guess there's pockets in the flatness or something, but it's not a sphere so that they flat earthers bully, bully hollow earthers, apparently. And it sucks, you know, because the hollow earth is way cooler than flat.

It also makes more sense. I mean, I don't think, you know, obviously I don't go to these conventions, but if I had to take a side, I'd go with hollow earth. If I had to bet on one, you know what, we might get invited to one where we get to do a debate versus shampoo. I don't think they're interested in us though, because I bet those conferences are very serious. Well, I imagine they are.

You know what? I am enough of a fool that I could get serious about, you know, the problem is, I believe in both. I believe, I believe that there are ghosts and there's Buddha's in the atomic. The earth is flat and hollow. Oh, man, you just blew my mind. I thought you were referring to. I'm going to grab my ball, man.

I never took it that far, dude. It's the same thing I would say, because I'm such a rationalist. I would say it's one or the other, man. You can't have them both. You got to pick. You can't have both. OK, let's. OK, now we might as well.

Longs were here though. When we started chatting on Twitter, it was so fun because we're talking about ghosts and I realized that you, like so many people out there, you don't believe in ghosts and you've said it here. You know, it's probably going to. It's probably going to come back to heart. Honestly. Dad jokes, dad jokes for the week.

That no, that was a seriously good dad joke. That was amazing, amazing. Oh my God. So but I can't recall exactly what the point you were making was regarding your and maybe you just saying, look, there's no ghosts. Well, it's not just that. So I actually think it's really important that people understand in my opinion. It's I always say in my opinion, because I've learned to be gentle instead of an

asshole, but it really just means what I am about to say is what I know is true. OK, so I know that this is true and I think it's important that people understand why they believe in ghosts when they don't, in fact, exist. And I think it has to do with the fact that humans are extremely intolerant of there's a couple of reasons. One reason is humans are very intolerant of ambiguity and uncertainty. So when something happens, that's remarkably astonishing and there seems to be no explanation, our minds like frantically fill it

with some kind of explanation. And that's because cognitive load rises in the face of uncertainty. So when we don't understand something, our minds just reflexively try to figure it out and that takes up a lot of energy. And that energy we need for doing stuff like, you know, paying the bills and and figuring out what to eat and like get into school on time. So you can just say to your brain, I think it was a ghost. All right, we're done. That's great.

I don't have to deal with that anymore. Or we think it was a big foot or it was an alien. Or it was, you know, those are all the same class of thing, which is to say they are cognitive load reducing explanations of mystery. The other thing, the other reason I think that people believe in ghosts and again, I don't want to put either of these on you and there might be more is that the world is not the world is not cool enough as it is. So in other words, like ghosts and big foots and aliens,

like, like they are they are, in my opinion, sometimes, sometimes, not always. I think the cognitive load is more common. But you know how people say I want to believe, right? That's the ex files thing I want to believe. I want to believe in aliens. Yes, the reason I think like, so it's not I believe in them. I think it's really important difference because I think people like, well, if the world had ghosts in it, if the world had fairies,

if the world had magic, if the world had whatever, then it would be an enchanted place. And the and the error there is that it already is enchanted without those things. There's already butters in the ship. It's already crazy that that I have a play behind me that fucking grows pods and attracts bugs and eats them in its pods. Like, this is way easier than a ghost. The fact that this thing exists, right?

And so what I believe is is one is a kind of blindness to the miraculousness of reality as it is. And the other is a cognitive load reducing mechanism. And I think those two things together are a more parsimonious explanation of ghosts, then sure ghosts actually existing. OK, yeah, yeah. It's like, you know, like you're when you're a kid, you, you know, the cartoons our kids watch or the dream of like the unicorn

or the whatever the thing may be. You you're reading the fantasy book and you are even not even a unicorn. I mean, I don't know if you had this dinosaur thirst. You know what I mean? We're like when you're a kid and it dawns on you, you're never going to see a living dinosaur. I mean, this spawned Jurassic Park is the every kid wants to see a living, breathing dinosaur.

And you get this weird dino grief when you're a kid. When it dawns on you like, no, no, no, you could see their bones. You could see, you know, recreations of them, but there ain't no dinosaurs. I'm sorry. It hurts. I don't know if you remember that pain. So I would say so this funny thing. This guy, Chesterton, who's great. Interesting, interesting figures, Catholic thinker.

I think he was responsible for, you know, Tolkien and and eventually and like Louis indirectly becoming Christian. He he says this funny thing. He says fairy tales are not actually what kids should be reading. Kids find everyday banal reality extremely enchanting. So it's not actually that kids need unicorns and fairies and stuff like that. That's just adults pretending that kids need the stuff that adults need. Kids are fine with just stupid, boring, everyday shit.

They don't need unicorns. They just need like, like that's the third flower your son has ever seen in his life. He's like, what the hell is that? And you're like, dude, come on, I got to get to my work plus my phone's calling me. And he's like, no, no, no, stop. There's this flower. You are not going to believe this. And you're like, no, I believe it.

I've seen a lot of flowers. Shut the fuck up, kid. You know that. So the world is actually already enchanted for kids. It's that it becomes disenchanted for adults. We're the ones who need the unicorns and the fairies and the ghosts and the aliens and the big foot and the eternal life and the hierarchies of Bodhisattvas. Kids don't need any of that shit.

They just need to wake up in the morning. OK, wait. But I just must tell you as a kid, when I found out I wasn't going to see dinosaurs, it was way, it was a lot more crushing than the non-existence of unicorns or whatever. Or Santa Claus. Because kids are crushed by everything. They're crushed when they discover they're not going to get an ice cream. They're crushed by the kids are infinitely disappointed by everything. I guess I'm just OK.

I'm trying to draw just a parallel from my own experience. And but to get to get to the good, to not refuting what you're saying. I'm trying to like summon up like the thirst for the thirst for that, which is not real. I got the suffering that must go along with needing, you know, to to add to the already. Sometimes I wonder if by summoning up the dream of the of the whatever supernatural thing you want to summon up,

you're actually trying to evade the overwhelming wildness and magical quality of reality as it is. Because it's too much to take. Yeah, that's a really interesting way to put it, definitely. That's what I hadn't thought of. I actually think that makes a lot of sense. And it's not as judgmental as mine. I'm a very judgmental person.

I'm sorry, Duncan. I'm working on it. I don't I don't think it's no, it doesn't feel. I mean, I don't I think you've I you've identified probably a great explanation for why we do go looking for these things. I mean, I don't by the way, it never came out. I have to I'm trying to give you all my skeptical versions of it. So before I tell you my story, I'm very excited. But they so and I and I am looking forward to you

expunging it with rationality. No, I it's like it's an exorcism, so to speak. No, because I see what those look like in movies. I don't want I don't want to see your head spinning, Duncan. Yeah, yeah, to redundantly go back to your dad joke. I am haunted by this thing that happened to me. And I look forward to not being anymore. So the the so yeah.

Anyway, the the what was I just saying? Shit, maybe I should just get to the ghost story because I already lost track of what I was saying that. Why do we want there to be? Well, you said the overwhelming miraculousness and magicalness of reality is so intense that this is like an escape from that, which I think is so beautiful and interesting. Exactly. And also, maybe in the blindness

that many people seem to have for just the whatever you want to call it, the primordial wildness of fundamental reality. Because that because of that, we fragment and then potentially project these kinds of like inventions of the mind that are the simple that are more manageable. Some are manageable, right? Like totally. That makes sense. But anyway, you know, you speculate, speculate.

I think I also like that, you know, it's just it's too much like if we can come up with these cabinets where we can put, you know, things that generally happen, you know, ghost encounters happen really quickly and, you know, you for most of human history, there haven't been video cameras or whatever. So you can go back and look at the camera and be like, oh, it was a moth. That was a moth. So so so to fix the problem of what of like, you know,

the aching reality that are nervous, our ability to perceive reality is imperfect. OK, I'll put it in the ghost cabinet and forget about it. It was a fucking ghost. So so it. But I must say, also. This is, I think, by trying to do that level of trying to trick yourself in that way. I think long term, you probably experience the same cognitive load, right? Because now you got to deal with like shit.

Way more, way more cognitive load, way more. Well, because because for one you've got you've got as soon as you allow in a false belief into your web of beliefs, it's the ramifications of it. So what it takes to sustain belief in ghosts, right, is all kinds of other stuff. There's like belief in heaven when I talk to my students, right? So I'm like, OK, you believe in heaven, right? What does that look like? And they're like, well, I never thought about it.

I'm like, well, so are your relatives there? And they're like, yeah, they are. And I'm like, OK, how old are they? They're like, well, the age they were when they died. I'm like, OK, so all the so but that's weird. Like so then all the old people just old forever, like are their clothes there? And so the problem is like when you allow in a belief like eternal life in heaven with the fam or like ghosts, it drags along with it.

A bunch of unexamined assumptions that are necessary to sustain it, which which are also false, which then or or not coherent. And then that fucks around with the rest of your web of belief. And it makes you vulnerable, because if you have these incoherent ways of thinking that exists to support the false belief that you've allowed in, people at Satan can come and exploit those. The conspiracy theorists can come in and exploit those. And that's super dangerous, in my opinion.

Like if we're going to look at things from the perspective, like, let's imagine a, I don't know, I'm going to use the wrong words here. But, you know, some metaphysical biome where like there's predatory creatures that are drawn to certain colors or shapes. You sure don't want your color or shape to be all your irrational ideas. It's a matter of time before something swoops in. It's like, I'm just exactly, exactly, exactly, exactly. I'm Jesus.

And you're like, I know that actually kind of makes sense. Well, you know, you might be a secret bodhisattva. What, what Jesus, what do you want? And inevitably Jesus is like, would you suck my dick? That's right. Like exactly what he does. It's always, always ends in sucking dicks. And the thing about secret bodhisattvas, unlike Jesus, is their fucking secret.

They keep that shit to themselves. They keep that shit to themselves. They wander through the world and everything harmonizes itself. And they never disclose themselves. As soon as the bodhisattva discloses itself, it's going to be asking for a dick sucking soon enough, you know. Well, I must say, I mean, where I, and maybe this is our, hopefully you'll do another podcast with me.

We can do another podcast. I'm not on dick sucking. Please. I'm a professional. I'm telling you, but I'm still, I'm still a little wary. I know it was like my friend, my friend who loves you show. I told him I was going on and he was like, and I'd been talking to him about like this other thing where like part of what I was talking about was like my mom sucking my dick.

And he was like, you got to talk with talking about that. He's the only guy who would be okay with this metaphor. And I was like, there's no way I'm talking about my mom sucking my dick. Like she might hear it. In fact, I just did it, though. So I'm in trouble. You want me to take it out? I could take it out.

Let me mark the clip. You can't take it out once it's in there. It's in there. Oh, OK. But you did say it was a metaphor for a second before you, but you didn't lead with metaphor that for a moment. I'm like, you know, I'm not OK with that. I tell your friend, I'm actually not OK with your mom.

Sucking your dick. Either I'm OK with it. That was the whole point of the story. It's I mean, I don't want to get into that. We'll do it on the other podcast. No, the other podcast is not about dick sucking your incest. No, the other podcast, I would love to talk with you about lame new age methods for dealing with evil or unfairness in the world.

But this is a different. You mean like this thing I just brought home? Well, this is not new age, but I just got this today. Like, you know, this kind of thing, although this isn't lame, this is cool. So this is not what you mean. You mean the lame new age ones. This is like an evil. I think that goes back a long way.

No, I'm talking about the and it gets into your having. I'm talking about that you die and you go to like, essentially some kind of really nice spot where you chill out and then you choose your next incarnation. That thereby putting the the anyone in a rotten predicament instead of having to just deal with the soul crushing reality that sometimes people end up in the most rotten predicament. You can think, well, you know, you chose that because you wanted to that's you're the universe wanting to learn about what it's like to be human

trafficked and dying, suffocating in the back of it. So that to me is one of the I like it as a personal. Like, I don't know how that's crazy. You say that stuff out loud. That's absolute craziness. Never say that. Yeah, you're driving the truck. You're driving the truck and you realize I'm going to have to bail.

And you're like, gang, you all picked you pick this as your incarnation. You probably shouldn't have. I'm at it. Yeah, so you're getting in a lot of a lot of people who say those things that first they lead with don't say this to anybody. But here's an idea. Now, OK, all that should decide. That's for other podcasts.

I remember what I was going to tell you. So for there was an episode of Drunk History that I've been on Drunk History many times. I don't know if you've seen the show. You get hammered. Yeah, it's a fun show. And it's but the last episode I did was in a haunted house where I can't remember his name, a ghost hunter, so to speak, came and we went up

into the attic of the house. I'm all drunk and I'm ready to go home and we go up in the attic of this freaking house and I've never seen the filming of a ghost hunter show. I think you should do it as some kind of I don't know, web series or something. I because, you know, you're you're you're in a ghost hunter show and you need you need it's the the money shot is the creek. You just need any please, God, let something fall. Please, God, let you're watching them do it like the mercenary.

Like they're they're looking for it. You're watching them. Yeah, you're seeing. Eight hours, twelve hours of sitting in a freaking dark room where someone killed themselves going, Johnny, are you here? Show us if you're here and then, you know, for eight hours. But you don't see that you just see the one anomalous event that happened where they're like, what was that?

I'm shook. And then all you need is that one event and one of them and every like, I feel a chill. Do you feel a chill? Everyone there is like, no one's feeling the chill. They want to go back to the hotel and go to bed. So I feel your chill. Are you? Oh, God, what is happening?

You just need the sound and then it becomes, you know, content. You can use that. So you know, but you're it's well, it's showbiz, you know, you're making you're making entertainment for you, but you're not lying. Well, but when I'm what, you know what? When I'm I know it's a whole school of thought when it comes to entertainment or art or whatever, which is, look, this is show business. I could go into like, you know, the famous Bacowski story, like Bacowski

apparently was being a complete asshole on an airplane and like was like hitting on the flight attendant and like just being a drunk, vile, drunk. Anyway, he's there with this guy. The guy reads a story he wrote and in the story, Bacowski makes the guy he was with him and Bacowski heroically stops that guy from being an asshole. The guy's like, what are you? Why'd you write that? It's not true. That's a different.

I think that's I think that's different. So I think with Ghost Hunters, the different is the Bacowski story is fiction. The Ghost Hunters show is nonfiction and that's what's not OK. Listen, I mean, it's different. It's a different thing, right? It's a different thing. If you're doing fiction, I think it's different from like, I don't know, I think the genre is important.

Maybe that's another podcast. But I think that's a really important distinction. It's a fun idea of talking about it because like the ethics of like doing like shows like that when, you know, and also I think to get deeper into it, it could be that just to deal with the cognitive dissonance of feeling like some kind of charlatan every day, your fucking life, you are imagining this stuff is happening. And that's that's the scary part, though, right?

Then you're just a hollow shell shambling through life, you know, locked in in an endless series of deceptions. I mean, how terrifying God save us. It is. Well, yeah, especially, you know, if your source of income gets connected to Dr. Oz's example, you know, what this is why we have right livelihood in Buddhism, you know, like this idea of you want it to be honest and real and true. All livelihoods are. But what's your ghost story?

Anyway, I don't mean to. I don't mean to. And also to my ghost and her friends out there, I believe some of you really might believe what you're doing, and you're not hollow shells. And you're just trying to document up his people. There are ghost writers out there, actually, who probably hate those other ghost centers who are genuine, who are actually like, no, there you go. Don't fake it, right?

It's like the alternative medicine people, right? There are alt met people who are really genuinely healing people and trying to find forms of healing. Yeah. And there are others who are charlatans. And I know that they hate you for making the distinction charlatans as much as I. Yeah. Yes. OK, great. OK, great. Yes. Thank you. Because I'm feeling guilty now because I know some ghost owners

and they didn't strike me, but they're not the ones filming that show. OK, so here's the ghost story. And I am I cannot wait for you to. OK, so I am in New Orleans with someone I was in a relationship with. We're at this hotel. It's the I think it was that I'll have to look it up. The Omni. I have an Omni in New Orleans. That's cool. Fortunately, all this stuff is documented.

So I'm in this hotel. I have this awful dream, awful, awful dream in the dream. I am in the Arctic and I'm in it. I'm in a tent and. I hear something fall out of the sky. Now, I don't know how I knew it was falling out of the sky, but you know, you know how like bags sound when they land on the ground or something? It was like something hits the ground in this dream.

So I go out of my tent again. It's obviously it's a dream. You're not like, what? Why am I in a tent? I go out of the tent and there in front of the tent is a body bag. Now, I go over and I unzip the body bag and I open it. And in the body bag is someone in the dream who looks like Pete Holmes, the comedian, my friend. And this Pete Holmes comes out of the body bag and all confused and immediately starts hitting on my girlfriend.

Now, I was scared of the corpse, but then when the thing's hitting on my girlfriend, I'm immediately like, also, there is a note in his pocket, which is like some kind of love letter to my girlfriend. And OK, the thing shambles off. There's this. There's a thing. I was such a disturbing dream that I wrote it down in a journal, which I don't always write my dreams down, but I wrote this down at the time, at the time, wrote it in the journal.

OK, cut to that night at the bar. I were talking to the bartender. Everyone knows New Orleans, Haunted City, whatever. So I say to the bartender, is do you know any ghost stories about this hotel? And she goes, you want to know the one we're not supposed to tell the guests? And I'm like, yeah. And she's like, well, that dude who cut up his girlfriend jumped out of the

jumped off the roof of the hotel and committed suicide. I didn't know anything about this, by the way. But I will give you his name. You can look it up on your device. Look up this guy. He looks similar to Pete Holmes. So I have a dream that involves a body falling out of the sky with a note in its pocket that's kind of romantic about a dude

who killed his girlfriend during Hurricane Katrina. And he kind of looks like Pete Holmes. And that was where I got in my head. Oh, there, you know, the shining idea or something. Like it's not like there's spiritual entities floating around. But in the same way, a player piano or ink in a printer or something translates certain data feeds that in the world, our brains take the symbols that we have in them, weave them together

when they come into contact with whatever this haunted energy is. And that produces the thing we call ghosts, which is just some extra sense of something. That was my. That's what I've thought of. I've had many, many, many experiences where I'm like, that's a ghost. I'm like, that's not a ghost. I don't know why it's not a ghost, but I know it's not a ghost.

Anytime anyone, you know, I hear anyone talking about ghosts in general. I'm like, I don't know if that's a ghost, necessarily. I don't know. But this one in particular of all the weird, supernatural encounters I've ever had, I can't quite like it's too many coincidences connecting at once. And also I wrote the dream down to probably somewhere there's the actual dream that is written down before I knew anything about.

The event itself. So free me, free me, help me out and get it out of my head. I wish I could, but I have bad news. I guess the first thing I would say is this is a very interesting definition of a ghost. Oh, damn it. You know what I mean? OK, yeah, it's actually not a ghost at all. What it is, what you're talking about is like what you said, I forget exactly how

you put it was much better than whatever I'm going to say. But like that there are these sorts of confluences of energy that emerge out of the kind of subconscious symbolic stuff. And then you talk about like kind of haunted energy and then those things come together and they produce these sorts of synchronicities. I mean, I'm not I am not in the way that I'm sure that ghosts don't exist, AKA like the concretized energy of a once living being moving through the world and doing stuff like picking up glasses or talking to people or whatever.

Those don't exist. Is there is there a mysterious like a set of like is there mysterious non temporal symbolic energy that can hang around in certain ways? I mean, for sure. I mean, it's not that mysterious in general, right? So like for one, like places can be haunted. We talk about haunted, right?

This word haunt right now. The dad joke is just becoming straight philosophy. It's like I'm like I'm haunted by a memory, right? So or like you could say like this place, like, you know, in Charlottesville, right? There's like there's an entrance. There's the entrance that black people had to use to get into the theater, right? It's it's fucking haunted. Like it's haunted by by the sins of our past.

And people who analyze ghost stories often talk about how they tend to be located in places where there was an unjust death. This is in every culture, cross-culturally trans historically, like an unjust death or an unresolved sin. Is it possible that those things infuse the cosmos, physical cosmos with some kind of energy that can then be connected to by other people? I would not be nearly as like strong in my like, no, that's impossible.

I would say personally, I would say it's it's unlike. I'm not sure that that happens, but I'm much, much less sure about that. So that's the first thing I would say. OK. So yeah, so I don't know what to tell you. I mean, like I'm open to that idea. I'm open to that ghost. That's kind of interesting. I could be talked into this, you know? I mean, I think it's unlikely because I don't think the physical world works that way. So like I don't I don't believe, for example,

that I can I think almost all miraculous healings are false because I don't think that your mind can reach into the physical world and and do stuff exactly like that. At the same time, I take it back because obviously, like I can will myself to do things. So my mind is obviously that's not an illusion, you know? And so I well, I mean, you could say induction of the placebo effect by a charismatic exactly. Exactly. That's exactly right. So I don't I don't know, man.

I guess I would say I'm I'm I'm open to it. The other I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I wish I could like I wish I could perform an exorcism, but in fact, I've just been possessed. I'm not I'm not thinking I'm not thinking harder about it. Well, yeah, I'll tell you my most like the most skeptical place I can go to with it. It's just like, OK, this was a big story.

This was a big story. I missed it, but I have a foul. Exactly. So if I'm going to have to like break it down to like the like Occam's razor, you know, then that is going to be. No, here's what happened. Somebody chopped up their girlfriend in during Hurricane Katrina and you read an article about it because you're a mind like shit like this. You read an article about it and you skimmed the article to get to the murder part

and you just went through the Omni Hotel or whatever. And but it got in there somehow. So you go to the Omni Hotel having forgotten you've read the story, seen the picture of the dude and your brain somehow, whatever part of your brain that encodes this stuff is like, oh, my God, we're in the suicide hotel and then regurgitates it in the form of. Oh, yeah, actually, you just exercised me. I think that's much more plausible.

I guess I'm going to bet on that. Here's another explanation. It's just a coincidence. Sometimes people in the lottery, man. Sometimes your dreams just going to be weirdly like something else. I mean, we live long enough. There's infinite butters and a piece of shit. There's infinite moments of the life.

There's going to be coincidence. Everyone is going to experience at least one extreme. Well, technically speaking, all things are extremely unlikely, but we only we only see them when we only see the ones were oriented to see by conditioned reality. But this is going to be sometimes we're going to experience coincidences that we are oriented to see by conditioned reality, like something looking like something else or someone having the same birthday.

Right. Kurt Vonnegut hated that shit, right? It's like, oh, my God, you have my birthday. Wow. That must mean something. It's like, no, dude, 300 and one in 365 fucking people are going to have your birthday. Like, chill out. People got bored on that day. You know, it's OK. It's OK. It's not a big deal.

You know, so that's going to happen, except instead, it'll be like a one in 300,000. You know, so that's another explanation. Is it just a coincidence? Now, just as doing the right there because and this goes back to what I was saying earlier, the truth is, it's all fucking crazy. It's all incredibly significant, but it's too overwhelming to allow that in, as you said before. So we only allow in the enchanted reality in these in these flashes, right?

Because if we just allowed it in all the time, it would be overwhelming, possibly, or it would just be awesome. I don't I don't I mean, I don't know. I don't have the, like, you know, bandwidth to sure everyone dies. You're already a Buddha, remember? Well, she does tell people, you just can't tell it about yourself. Are you asking me to suck it up? No, I'm just kidding.

I'm sorry. That's not I didn't say it. That's what I just want to think it through. If I call you a Buddha. No, I think it's totally photonic in that case. You brought it. I want to know because you haven't recorded it just like your dream. I want to make sure when my friend comes to me,

that I don't think I brought up the digs. I think my wife's downstairs. She's like, will you please not talk about pedophilia? Like, I'm like, like, like that. No, we're not going to. We're not going to. I I brought it. Listen, here's the thing. I brought it up by saying if you are one of the one of the things

you can look forward to, if you find yourself being extremely irrational, is that someone will seduce you using their whatever. The trick is that they're their powers. Now, that is so funny. Oh, my God. It's going to happen. It's going to happen. Now, the OK, so I am not sat. I appreciate your I appreciate your point of view.

And I and thank God for you. My wife is like you in the sense that she will. She knows me and like she knows how my mind veers towards the irrational habitually, meaning that like when the pandemic was happening, I'd been on the conspiracy forums and I got into my head that a meteor was going to hit the earth and that the lockdowns were actually some like secret way of getting people inside to store up

food without causing a panic. And I told my wife this and she's like. No, she's not what's happening. I'm not even know the look on her face. I mean, she sounds like a woman. I went on Rogan's podcast and told him that and he pauses for a second and he goes. The only reason I'm pausing is because that's the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. Alan, I got to ask you.

This is something that you have written about and I've thought about it myself, but not so brilliantly as you've articulated it. I want to talk a little bit about your idea of how people have like the idea of the natural world or naturalism being a kind of religion. Can we talk about that for a second? Will you explain your philosophy in that regard? Absolutely. So long story short, I think that especially nowadays where people are looking for

non-religious justifications for the decisions that they make, whether it comes to who they sleep with, what they eat, how they raise their children. It used to be what I'm going to raise them as God intended. Right. But now we don't go to our rabbi or our priest or a mom to figure out what foods we should eat or how we should raise our baby. We go to the psychologist or we go to the doctor or nutritionist or whatever it is. Yeah. But that's complicated. And it means outsourcing authority to another human being,

which people don't like to do. So what you can do instead of outsourcing authority to God, which feels like you're not submitting yourself to a human, right? You're you're you're still free to do what you want, but you also have guidance. People are outsourcing their decisions to nature. And what I'm arguing is that nature is exactly like the monotheistic God of Abrahamic religions. It's prior prior to everything that existed.

So it's a creative force that's responsible for all organization we see in the universe. It's benevolent. Yes. So if you harmonize with it, then things will be good. And you can explain all suffering, right? Like, why did why does pregnancy hurt? Because you're sitting in unnatural positions all the time. Or why is it that people are sick because they eat unnatural foods? So yes, nature is a synonym for God.

Natural is a synonym for holy. And we can see that everywhere from economic theory to medicine, so on. That is so cool. That's so controversial. That's so so interesting. There's a lot of reasons it's controversial. You know, also, I think like to add to the idea of like, you know, God is the authority. Obviously, like when you're like, you're not going to God when you have some

like religious and have a parenting issue, because probably I mean, probably you're not going to get a response. You're going to an intermediary. This is the rabbi. This is the priest. So interestingly with that, with that, with that, right? So now where do people go when they're trying to? Why are my kids bratty, right? They go to like hunter-gatherers.

This is the sort of stand in for the pre, you know, this is the Edenic before the fall. How did people live naturally? Oh, well, the hunter-gatherers, their kids are, you know, shucking, shucking oysters at age three and they never misbehave. And there's these New Yorker articles about how, you know, oh, these these hunter-gatherer kids, they're the way we should be raising kids. So that's the the instead of Adam and Eve, right? You have the secular version of that, which is the sort of romanticized noble

savage that lives according to the laws of nature and hasn't been corrupted by modernity and technology. OK, I have. So actually, one of the schools we toured at one point was one of these schools, which was there's a name for it. I can't remember, but it's like, like just what you're saying. The idea is like, look, this the modern education system is like prohibitive and unnatural in the sense that when,

well, how does it make sense to make kids sit still and listen to someone talk? That's not how people learned in the wild. So the kids like there's mud pits and like, you know, it's it's it's wild. Anarchy gets somewhat organized. So, yeah, and radical in the sense that as far as I'm aware, there hasn't been versions of that for for like at least since the Industrial Revolution, the Greerian Revolution, probably, it makes it makes here's the thing,

though, and I'm pretty clear about my thesis. It's ridiculous to think that things are good because they're natural. So let's take this school, right? Presumably, they teach kids how to read, which is about as unnatural as it gets. The reason I'm wearing glasses is because I read too much. You know, there's an explosion after literate communities. So the truth is things are good when they when they create, you know,

happiness and when they create harmony and when they relieve suffering and things are bad when they don't. And, you know, with a school like this or or or anything for that matter, the word that people will say is good because it's natural. It only takes a moment's reflection to see all of the ways in which the school. I mean, these kids are going to be wearing shirts, for example.

They're going to be living the kids that are coming to the school with their parents. They're probably not living with extended kinship groups the way that hunter-gatherers did. You know, they're not there. I mean, there's there's so many ways in which we have accepted and celebrate the unnatural, which is awesome, right? This is that means like, you know, a lot of these kids wouldn't have made it to this school because they would have died by the age of five.

I mean, you know, infant and child mortality rates were 10, 20 times what they are today. So I think what people have trouble with, but what we need to get over is that you can love nature and you can love what's natural without worshipping it. I think that's really, really important. And so we shouldn't confuse natural. You know, we shouldn't think of natural as a synonym for good. It's not OK.

If you like of all the things, all the variables, what do you think is the most like what comes to mind when you think of unnatural? Like what's something out in the world that you would consider to be unnatural? Sure. So I think that I think natural and unnatural are actually useful terms. There's some people out there like everything's natural. Like Neil deGrasse Tyson, right? Everything's natural. All stardust, right? The this computer is no less natural than than a plant, which is ridiculous.

So New York City is really unnatural place, whereas Yellowstone Park is a really natural place. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is that natural equals the absence of willed human organization. Unnatural is willed human organization. So when humans will something to be organized in a particular way, that's what we mean, I think, usually by unnatural. And when things emerge organically, that is to say, without the intervention

of willed human action, then it's natural. So anything anything before humans, right? Dinosaurs are 100 percent natural, right? Yellowstone's not because we got a road through it. OK, so I'm this is I'm interested in this only in the sense of like you may be right, you may be wrong, but you're still finding yourself in the as a kind of philosophical speaker. For the world, this is natural.

This is unnatural. I think, you know, there's it would be a really awesome debate between you and Neil deGrasse Tyson, and it would be really fun to watch. And I think both of you would really enjoy it. But no matter what, whether Neil deGrasse Tyson is saying, no, no, no, everything's natural, or you're saying here's where the distinction is between natural and unnatural, no matter what. Because you like if I if I were Neil deGrasse Tyson, which I'm definitely

not, I can't barely I can't use I don't use the remote control. But the the the if I were like wanting to debate what you just said, I think the biggest argument would be, OK, human organization as it appears in the world, unnatural, meaning the language you just used to articulate the point itself is unnatural, meaning that in that, how can you really can't like make these distinctions, right? Like you're still the unnatural thing. Qualifying nature from unnatural.

In other words, something unnatural. You're something you're basically saying you are unnatural. I am. That's right. So humans, I think the word the way in which natural and unnatural are used cross-culturally, trans-historically. So take, you know, ancient China, which is my own area of expertise. The word that people use that's typically translated as natural, saying like proto-daoist classics is Zeran, which literally means self so

or so of itself. So things that are kind of spontaneously themselves in contrast to things that are willed by humans. So they're not so of themselves that organized by humans. Now, there's a you can ask the question, is this a useful distinction? I happen to think that it is. And I'll give an example as to why there's something in in it was pioneered by a child psychologist called the environment of evolutionary

adaptiveness, it's complicated term that basically means the environment in which an organism sort of calibrated its own like through evolution, calibrated itself. So if you are, let's say there's a bunch of turtles that are laying eggs too early on a beach, a great hypothesis generating heuristic is perhaps there is some unnatural, that is to say human willed form of organization that's interfering with the turtles environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. And then you look and it's like, oh, there's these skyscrapers with bright

lights. Those are confusing the turtles as to what time of year it is or whatever. So that's that's a helpful hypothesis. And and sometimes when you depart from the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, you get problems like our teeth problems, for example, we're eating foods that are not a part of an environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. So we get problems or my glasses, right? I'm reading things, looking at tiny little things, not a part of my environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

However, that doesn't mean necessarily that depart. So I think it's a useful thing, right? Again, natural, it's a spectrum, natural and natural, a useful thing. Here's the thing, though, we just came up with fucking glasses. Now, great. Now I can see I'm happy with the solution. I and I also get to read shit. I also get to use like I get all of these incredible things. You know, we can fly to space using documents that we have written down

and exchanged with other humans. Yeah. So again, I think the distinction is useful. And I even understand loving things that are natural just because they are. And I have real plants in my office, not plastic plants. Why? Because it's fucking crazy than beyond and before human beings. There was some kind of organizing principle that barfed up plants and planets and and and all of the stuff that we had no hand in. That's just I mean, whether you're secular or religious, that is a goddamn

miracle. So celebrating it in our lives and trying to harmonize with it makes a lot of sense. Just don't confuse that shit with God. It's not God. It kills kids. It gave us cancer. It causes viruses that. Well, hey, no, that nature kills kids out, of course. But I don't want to get into that. I don't want to get into.

I know. I know. It's the murder of children. Strangely throughout the Old Testament, it's how he's asking for people to sacrifice their kids. He doesn't like kids. I wouldn't let the Abrahamic God babysit my fucking kids. I'll tell you that.

No, no, no, I don't want to bite off more than I can chew. If I'm going to criticize nature, I got to leave criticizing God for at least a different episode. OK, OK, so here's another reason that I have a problem accepting the idea of the human world as unnatural. And it's like because I don't make my thoughts. I don't make my ideas.

The ideas pop into my head and then I maybe I'll pick them and then write about it or hopefully create something through it. But the origination point of ideas seems to be the same or mysterious origination point of all things, meaning that whatever made plants pop out of the earth, whatever the forces or whatever, we don't know. Whatever it may have been seems to be the same thing, making human innovation pop out of humanity, meaning that because we had the idea of ownership of human civilization by humans seems to be centered

on this notion that humans are creating their own ideas. That the epiphanies come from some, you know, something. What's the word? Autonomous. Yeah, I was going to say this. So this is a parallel, I think. So again, this is and this can get into like really interesting philosophical weeds, I think it's a parallel to the freedom versus, you know, autonomy versus not.

Right. So it's the free will debate is here. Right. So in other words, another way of putting the definition, working definition I'm using is free will versus that, which was a part of our, you know, biology or our, our sort of spontaneous psychology, whatever you want to call our appetites, whatever you want to call it. So to the extent that someone would reject a distinction between willed activity and own willed activity, that maps onto rejecting the distinction of natural activity versus unnatural activity.

To me, though, I think the way to get out of it is just to say, and when nature is not these working terms are not the nature is not the thing that produced everything because we've already defined it as that which is not willed human activity. So the Dow is not nature. God is not nature. Whatever it is that people believe in, the Dow is responsible for everything. Or if you want to call it the Dow, you can't because it gets into the paradoxes. But but the thing that comes before all the other things is responsible for

everything. That's just not nature is not that. It's it's something else. And the thing is, look, if you look in, this stuff is just it's so embedded in our our culture and our ways of thinking. It's in Shakespeare, right? An unnatural death is like you didn't live out your years, right? You got murdered or something like that. You look at the Declaration of Independence. I mean, this is crazy, right?

It run in the course of human events, blah, blah, blah, blah, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them. So right there in the first paragraph of the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson basically says, look, there are these there are these laws of nature that exist beyond and before human beings. Yeah. Now, whether or not he's right, like, whether that's how whether democracy was built into nature, I think that's bullshit, right? That's crazy. What Jefferson sort of said is the best way to govern people

is with the shit we've come up with. You know, it's not because it's natural. It's because it works well. You know what I mean? Let's just like, I don't know. Like why? But people don't declaration of independence had that in it. I don't know. But when he's convincing, right, people love to hear they walk into the store. They want to hear this is the best because it because, you know,

a long list of complicated reasons. They just want to know that it's natural. It's like a kosher symbol, right? It's the kosher symbol is right next to the organic symbol. Right. It's the same thing. Just secular. OK. So so we don't get caught up in philosophical weeds. I want to get to the next controversial thing about this idea,

which is the separation of church and state and that, you know, so what gets really interesting here is if this naturalism is just a new close on an old thing. If it is just actually a form of weird theism or whatever you want to call it, we just shifted the the idea of God to like you mentioned earlier, nature. And and you have like environmental environmentalism and laws that are springing from environmentalism.

And in school, you're being taught, you know, this idea of this is natural. This is nature. Is it if it's if it's if we determine this is a religion, it really kind of like changes the landscape of it seems like it would change the landscape of what's legal to talk about in public schools. You know what I mean? Like if if if if because you sure, you know, in public schools,

you can't have prayer and the reason you can't you can't have prayer not because necessarily I think they think prayer is evil, but because there's so many different forms of prayer and there's so many different religions that are appearing in public schools. It you can't like hierarchize one over the other. But if this is another form of, I don't know, theism or I don't know what you call it. Naturalism equals theism, right?

Doesn't this? Yeah. So what are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I have. So the the the idea of naturalness or nature is not inherently theological. It's only theological when you confuse natural with good or holy and nature with God. So in schools, if you're teaching, for example,

whatever is natural is good. And we always, you know, so why did the pandemic happen? Because we violated nature's laws and we were punished. That's that's a religious teaching that does not belong in schools. But if you say something like, look, the natural world is a wonderful place and we value things that are natural and it's important to preserve it. Or if you violate very quickly, a kind of homeostasis in an organic environment,

whether of an organism or of, you know, an environment, that can cause trauma to the organisms in the environment. If we don't want trauma, we should avoid that. That's not religion. That's just that's just thinking about what it is that we do and don't value. I mean, an analogous thing is freedom, right? So or beauty, we value freedom. If we were to say, though, for example, only things that create freedom are good

and freedom is actually the standard to which we should hold everything. Then we'd be getting into religious teachings, right? Then we turned freedom into God and it's become the sort of value out of which everything sprints. So that's how I think we avoid the kind of thing that you're talking about, which I think is really important. I mean, you had this, you had this fucker, the guy with the horns, the January six shaman guy.

Oh, yeah, demanding. Yeah, demanding that he be given organic food because it was his religion that he has to eat organic right now. Oh, yeah. This is in a way, it was really nice to see that because right, organic food is not inherently good. And if you think it is, that really is a kind of religious claim. It's a claim that turns nature into God and that, which is spontaneous

or organic or non-willed by humans into that, which is good or holy. So you keep that out of schools, right? If you're teaching that that's how you figure out what's right or good, that's a problem. Wow. That is a lot for me to think about over the next few weeks. I'm not smart enough to immediately be like, oh, yeah. But I really love that idea. I love it makes sense.

I hope it makes sense at least. I know I like talk fast. No, no, it absolutely. No, it totally makes sense. And I imagine you've gotten some really interesting emails from people about your stance on this matter. Haven't you? You must have gotten some serious. Well, so absolutely.

I mean, I think what happens is just like God, right? People aren't thinking about what's what nature wants all the time. Generally speaking, people just live in their lives, right? They're like, how can I get a promotion? How can I like, you know, my kids upset? How do I calm down? It's in moments of crisis or when your cognitive load is really high, that you need a simple heuristic for making important decisions.

Yes. And so there will be people who, you know, I have all sorts of unnatural things in their lives, right? They've got their computers, they've got their air conditioned homes. They've got, you know, whatever it is, right? Like all the people that want to raise their kids naturally still use temperature control. Maybe some of them don't, but like most of them do, right? They're not releasing wild animals into their homes, right?

In all ways, their lives are are extremely controlled and isolated from the natural world. However, the blowback I get is when, for example, let's say there's a crisis and they're like, well, what do I feed my kid? I'm really worried about this. I'm going to use, well, natural must mean good. That's when you go to the simple heuristic. You're right. You're right.

You're like, OK, I'm just going to feed him what's natural. And when someone comes in and goes, actually, that's some bullshit. They're going to be mad because if you take that away from them, it's going to take away the thing that allowed them to make decisions without increasing their cognitive load. It's going to return their anxiety. The same thing with religion, right? People are like, Jesus is great.

Like he tells you to turn the other cheek. And it's like, well, what about the thing in the Sermon on the Mount where he says that marrying a divorced woman is adultery, right? And you'll find that Christian apologists are like, well, OK, hold on. You have to read that differently. It's actually a metaphor or like that was just for the time. Jesus was actually secretly telling men to be nice to their wife. You know, the couple of all kinds of crazy readings because

if you take away what would Jesus do as your cognitive load reducing heuristic, in other words, Jesus is just actually whatever you whatever is good. If you challenge that, it causes stress because you need that precisely at the times when you're most freaked out or you're having the most difficulty making decisions. So I get a lot of blowback from people who have at some point or another used that heuristic, what is natural is what is good

to help them get through a crisis or perhaps they've developed a ritual around it. Maybe they're really anxious about eating. And so they've used that as a way to calm themselves about the choices they make with food. When I come in and I'm like pissing on their idols, they get upset understandably, right? And I wouldn't want to, you know, I don't know, this actually reminds me of the stuff

we talked about the ghosts last time in a way. I don't want to just waltz into someone's church and something I used to do with my first book. I did it with food, right? I was walking in the church and I'm like, this is fucking ridiculous. Look at this. And I'm like, that's so logical. And I lay out all the evidence. I'm like, drop in the logic grinder, turn the crank and like out pops

like a good person, right? But that's actually not true. It's just me being an asshole. So I'm not sure. You went into churches? No, I didn't metaphorically speaking. No, I didn't actually go into churches. I want to see the video. That's what the new atheists would do, right? They're going into these churches metaphorically speaking

and they're like, look, this is what doesn't make sense. And this is what doesn't make sense. And this is stupid. And what does heaven look like? Right? I mean, same, you know, same hairs in these cats who are smart, smart people and like understandably upset. If you do that to people, if you rip away the the simple almost divine heuristics that they use in moments of crisis without providing an alternative, right?

Or without being gentle or without knowing them and understanding where they're coming from. You're not you're not doing something good. You're doing you're you're you're you're wronging them. And so I would want to say to anyone listening to this. And I say this in the book a little bit, look, man, I get why we do this. And sometimes it's a useful heuristic. And you know, I try to express as much as I can that I you know,

if Jefferson's doing it, you know, like I get it, right? This dude's way, way, way, way smarter than I am. And he he understands that these kinds of principles are important. And he and he thinks of them at least as persuasive, right? If not, even if he doesn't believe in them. So, yeah, I'd want to be careful, you know, if eating naturally works for you, man, whatever you happen to think natural is, of course, right? Because there's people who are putting protein powder into their natural

smoothies, right, which is a little weird if you think about it. But that's fine, right? Whatever works for you. If you got a smoothie, it works for you. Don't let Alan Levinevitz come along and tell you it's stupid, right? It works for you. But the reason it's good is not because it's natural. It's because it works for you. Well, you know, I mean, in the old days, in the ancient times,

when people had blenders, that's right. In the, you know, in the ancient times, when trucks drove their natural food across the country from farms hundreds of miles away, you know, there are a lot of, like, you know, when you spread this circumference of natural out, like someone is like, oh, I'm eating natural foods and living a natural life. It's like, right. Yeah. But like the way the shit's getting into your house is we're going to make a nature argument.

It's as unnatural as you could possibly get if nature is like growing your own food. It's a it's brilliant. It's a really, really cool idea. And though I am a theistic person and I love God and would enjoy the band getting ripped away, you know, he's the band. It always comes back and I'm happy with that, you know, because what what happens when you like plunge into oblivion, when you're breathing your last breath, you're like, oh, I guess I was wrong.

I'm dead forever. Who cares? You know, it's it's like, and if you're right, wow, cool. I was right. But at that point, it probably won't matter either. It's just fun. I think we should all be allowed to, you know, you're supposed to try to break apart all this stuff, whatever it may be. Right. I mean, that's the you want to talk about personally, not for other people. Yeah, I don't know.

I yeah, not for other people. But the problem is when you're, I mean, and you know this better than I do, when you're not just talking to yourself, you know, you put stuff out there and, you know, those ideas hit other people and you don't know how they're going to hit those people or when they're going to hit those people. And so. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I personally, I struggle. I struggle with this, right?

It's like, well, what am I going to put out into the world as opposed to what is that I do to myself? And and I do think, you know, in the case of what's natural, right? I do think it's helpful. It'll be good for us when it comes to conservation, when it comes to our health to separate the idea of natural from good. Like I do think that is that is something we need to, you know, yet Germany right now or let's look at here's a great example.

It's in Sri Lanka. There is I want to make sure it's Sri Lanka. I'm terrible with geography. Yeah, Sri Lanka. There's this crazy crisis going on right now where the government basically embraced naturalness. Yeah, they went all organic for their farming. And the countries now that their their output of their crops

dropped by like 30 percent, I think, maybe higher. There's a huge crisis because because it turns out that doesn't that didn't work as well. And the reason it didn't work as well is because it didn't work as well. You know, natural is not inherently good. And there's going to be people that people are defending it and be like,

well, they didn't go natural enough, right? You know, it's always like that's always how they argue. We're your cancer. Oh, the vegetarian smoothies didn't cure your cancer. That's because you were using like non-organic vegetables. But I really think we need to get away from that idea. Germany would have nuclear reactors right now and they wouldn't be turning to coal

in the face of this crisis if they hadn't had a kind of naturalistic aversion to nuclear energy. Right. So I think that I do think this idea is important at the same time. Like I said, if you're doing something natural and it's working for you,

if you read some article about raising hunter-gatherer kids and you were like, that really speaks to me. I'm going to raise my kid pooping in the corners of the house instead of using these diapers. And it works. That's terrific, man. I'm not here to tell you that that was stupid or wrong or bad. And so it's hard to kind of separate out

the justificatory schemes that people use from the relative goodness of what it is that they're justifying. I get it. Yeah, no, totally. I get it. I think that is really the, I think that's probably in this line of thinking where you could go astray is because of some kind

of confirmation bias, you're ignoring the fact that your attempt at quote naturalism is causing you all kinds of problems. And that's where it becomes superstition. That's where it becomes religious. And that's where it becomes counterproductive to you and probably everyone in your family. And especially, I'm a cancer survivor, man.

Radiation, baby. I would be dead if I didn't get my lymph nodes blasted with a fucking beam of high powered radiation. So I went to a natural healing clinic in Florida, run by this guy who I swear to God looks like central casting for Satan. I don't know if we talked, did we talk about this last time?

No. I don't think we did. He's got like a crazy widow's peak, like an artificial teen, a goatee. I mean, it's like crazy, this guy. And he runs this place called the Hippocrates Institute and they can't say that they cure cancer because it's illegal and they'd get in trouble,

but they do basically promise that they cure cancer. And I went there because two First Nations kids with leukemia, the First Nations is indigenous people of Canada, they heard about this place and decided to go there and eschewed traditional cancer treatment, which is a highly curable cancer, leukemia. And one of the kids died.

And the other one was dying and finally opted for traditional cancer treatment. Now in the natural medicine world, I don't know if you know the terms for, it's cut, burn and poison are the terms they use for surgery, chemo and radiation. And the reason they demonize these because they say they're unnatural.

And at this place, at this clinic, you pick your wheatgrass, you juice your wheatgrass, not native to the United States, but whatever, not a native crop, invented by Ann Wigmore, Lithuanian American, whatever. You juice your own wheatgrass, you do your veggie smoothies and that's how you try to cure your cancer. Now on the one hand, it sounds,

I mean, to a cancer survivor, I can only imagine what you think of this, right? I mean, it's like, what the fuck are these people doing? They're gonna die, they're gonna die here. On the other hand, when I was walking around this place and talking with the people there, there were like plants everywhere. It was beautiful, you had good food,

you were in charge of your own health. It was empowering, it was green, it was everything I would want if I was dying. It made me feel alive. Whereas a hospital is stainless steel and bright fluorescent lights, you're literally a patient, all your autonomy is taken away from you, you outsource it to the doctors,

this goes back to the autonomy thing. No one wants to be, no one wants to put their life, I mean, some people do, I guess, but sometimes you don't wanna put your life in the hands of another human, right? And so I understood, despite the fact that this place was run by like Mr. Satan, I understood why people were there.

I understood why they wanted to be there. And I think we could learn some lessons from that when it comes to our own medical system. Look, you know, my mom died of breast cancer and she, the doctor, you know, told her you're gonna be dead in a year and was so certain about this. He was telling her like, start planning your funeral,

you're done. She did use natural remedies and lived an extra three years past what the doctor said she would live. But she didn't, it didn't like heal her, it just extended her life. And she actually was pretty healthy up until the end. And she was also using poison.

Right, I was gonna say, I was gonna say, we don't know in those situations, almost always there was surgery, chemo, radiation alongside the natural remedies. And of course, three years, like there's outliers, all these cancer curves, as you know, right? The laugh or whatever curve or I don't know what it's called, but like the physicians that say this kind of thing,

and often the physician doesn't say you've got a year to live, they'll say something like, I mean, when you have cancer again, as you know better than I do, the way that, especially at the moment of diagnosis, the way you hear, right? As in any crisis is very unusual. The world is kind of, it's like a fun house mirror

of your own mortality through which all of the, the, so like, did the doctor say like, you got a year to live lady, or did the doctor say something like, on average, which is again, doctor shouldn't be saying this, on average patients with this kind of cancer at this stage have about a year to live. And if I were you, one of the things I would consider

is hospice care preparations or thinking about how if your life ends at that average time, you know what I mean? Like that's what the doctor said, what do you hear through the fun house mirror? You hear like a big face going like, in a year you will be dead. No, I'm pretty sure he was like,

did he actually say a year you'll be dead? Pretty stomp, like pretty like, you know, there's a, like, my friend was telling me some doctors, they have to get like, like bedside manner training just because the type of mind that makes it its way through medical school, it's not exactly a social, a lot of them aren't, they're not social, they're mathematicians with,

and like they have to be, cause yeah, what you're saying is it's like, yeah, my doctor was just like, when I'm like, what happens if I don't get treatment for this? Like what, you know, cause I wanted to ask all the questions, I'm like, what if I don't get, do anything? He's like, oh, well then there's a 60% chance that the cancer will progress and with this,

with this kind of, with testicular cancer. And so you, and I, like my kind of brain likes that, that logic and I understand where it's coming from and it didn't really, all of it made sense to me, but I'll tell you the reason I have a kind of bitterness in my heart regarding, like where you went and stuff is because my, my mom went to John of God. You ever heard of John of God?

Oh no, no, no, I haven't, tell me. So John of God, this was, he got really famous, he was a healer, he got really famous. I bet he did it for free. Ah, he's a, he was a famous, he was made famous by Oprah. You would go there, he would channel these various like physicians, do these healings. He's in jail now for sex trafficking,

but the, who would've thunk, but, but you know, I was like, you said last time I'm Jesus, suck my dick, right? And then it's just every fucking time. Yeah, yeah, and, and, but you know, I remember her saying to me, he told me, I'm not gonna die of cancer. And it's like, that's so fucked up, man.

It's so fucked up. And so, and again, I'm equating healing centers and like the way I look at it is this, if you, you, it's your body and we for sure know that there is something called, what's it, what's the name of it? You must know the name, spontaneous healing. There's a name for this happens where,

where it's a spontaneous remission, a remission, remission, spontaneous remission. Some will have cancer, they, they, and they study these people because it's like, wait, what were you eating? Where did you go? What were you reading? Yeah, yeah, what is your genetics or whatever it is?

Yeah, totally. But, but, cause the, the human immune system, we'll just figure out, oh shit, we gotta go rid of that and it gets rid of it. And these new, the new cancer treatments coming out, speaking of like hyper fucking unnatural, getting into your DNA and telling it, this is not good. Get rid of it.

It is creating spectacular results. I just feel like the slippery slope in those places you're talking about is instead of saying, hey, this is one of the, this is something that is, that could help. Also what could help? Chemotherapy. Also what could help?

Hey, check this out. This is what we know about this new cutting edge therapy, genome therapy, or this is what we know so that the patient isn't being shoved into this weird specialized thing that, that, that, you know, who knows? Are you like, you should be like, have all, like some hybrid of all these things

would be incredible along with the honesty, the honesty of like, look, the honesty is, the honesty is important, man. We don't have the studies for turmeric. We don't, you know, there haven't been stud, here's, or even a precursor, here's why we have this data. Here's the number of people who have died of the type of cancer you have.

Here, every single one of them gave a gift to us, the doctors, which is in their dying, it helped us understand a little bit more why and what and how it progresses and what it does. So we have infinite amounts of data about this, but the turmeric, the, whatever the thing, the hyperbaric chambers, we don't have as much data, meaning I can't tell you the probability

of this stuff working or not working, but maybe, maybe. Well, so I tell you, I tell you funny story, I was working on something. I was going to write a piece, but I never did a long time ago about this guy, Rick Bedlak, he's at Duke University. He's like the world's leading ALS researcher. So this is a guy, I mean, I never really thought about it.

This is a man who's, a main part of his job is taking pretty young people, walk into his office and telling them, I'm sorry, you have a neurodegenerative disorder that we have no, we literally don't know how to cure. You've got anywhere between a year to five years, you know, there's outliers like Stephen Hawking, right? But at the end of the day, this is what you got.

So that's what does for living. And you know, he also researches this. And at Duke, there's this like alternative medicine clinic where they're like acupuncture and all this other kind of stuff. And he was telling me that he will often refer his patients there. I said, Rick, you know, this was back

when I was a skeptic, more of an asshole. I'm equally skeptical now, but less of an asshole. I was like, Rick, come on, this shit doesn't work. And you know it and I know it, right? I had just gotten off the phone with the director at the NIH who was telling me, you know what, acupuncture is basically theatrical placebo, right?

This is it. Like that we know this, you know, it's a theatrical placebo. And I was like, okay. So I'm talking to Rick about this. And he's like, well, what, you know, Rick dresses just, you know, when he dresses in these sparkly,

like tuxedo outfits, like ridiculous outfits. And he dresses in them. I asked him why. And he was like, because it's the best we've got for ALS right now. Wow. And so I was like, well, so why are you sending these patients?

And he said, well, what am I gonna do? Tell them there's no hope. I tell them the truth. I say, look, there are some people down the, you know, down the road who have a bunch of treatments that they have said that their patients appreciate and they think maybe, you know, the patients feel better when they take them.

I don't have any data on those. We don't know what they do or don't do for ALS. But if you are interested in pursuing those treatments, you can go down there. Yeah. I don't know, it's just such a wise, to me, like, you know, I would have been like, nope, down the road, stupid.

You know, like Rick was just like, why, you know, it's like, he understands something about how hope works and how you can be honest without, you know, allowing people to kind of, I don't know, a space to be hopeful without being dishonest, right? You don't have to be John of God to give people hope. Also, the placebo effect,

one of the most powerful effects in medicine, the placebo effect causes all kinds of weird shit to happen to people. This is documented and it's not always good. Like, you know, what my friend is is like, I was just telling me that there's one of the cases, somebody, I don't know how, oh yeah, someone's in a trial, a clinical trial.

They have been given the placebo medication. They fuck up the dosage. They end up eating way, way more than they were supposed to. And they realized- So many sugar pills, so many sugar pills. They ate too many fucking sugar pills, but they don't know it's sugar. They think, and there's all these warnings on the thing,

because you know, if you're gonna do a clinical trial, let's say identical, everything. So this person goes into the fucking hospital, like having seizures, a complete fucking wreck, because he thinks he's overdosing, he's poisoned, and they're like, you ate sugar. That was sugar. It doesn't, the placebo effect doesn't just work

towards the spontaneous remission thing. They call it the nocebo effect. I saw this when I was writing my first book on gluten, and I was looking at a trial of gluten. And in the blinded arm, in which there was no gluten, a couple of people dropped out of the trial because their reactions were so severe. That.

So when your friend is like, go down the hall, you know, he's basically saying, look, placebo effect, it might work for you. It's, you know, it is a very powerful thing that we don't understand. And that's why- Especially for pain. Or nausea, or, you know, kind of chronic stuff.

And this has always been like, when I think about my mom going to John of God, I always just think, well, placebo. Like if you put, you know, maybe he puts on enough of a show and it like, it like does something that we don't like, because if people spontaneously heal from cancer, just like watching Fox News or sitting in their house or whatever, then theoretically, purely, deeply, theoretically,

maybe there is some way of theatrically convincing their immune system to work. Yeah. The thing is though, the thing with people like St. John, John of God. So again, this actually happened with Bedlak. So there was a guy who had cured a woman with late stage ALS, a healer who did these like hand things,

you know, hold his hands over people and heal them. And Bedlak found out about this. You know, he'd been on the talk shows, right? You know, she had been on the talk shows with this healer guy. It was a very famous healer guy in the 80s and 90s. And Bedlak was like, well, her ALS was documented at UVA. It was documented at Duke. Like this was genuinely late stage ALS

that completely remitted. You know what he did? He invited this guy to come to Duke to do a blinded trial. You think the guy came? Fuck no. Because at the end of the day, in my opinion, these healers are our charlatans. And it may be the case that through giving people hope,

they can extend their life because if you don't want to live, you die sooner. And if you want to live and you have hope, you live longer. So maybe through that, they get people to live longer. Maybe their pain goes away, but these people are not curing ALS or cancer and they know it. And that is why they don't participate in these trials.

If they really did, that guy would have been, if that guy really thought he was curing ALS through the mechanisms that he was talking about, he would have been at Bedlax Hospital the next day, being like, give me all your ALS patients, you know? Right. And that to me, I mean, I can't, who knows what goes on in the hearts of men.

I don't know whether Dr. Oz thinks Reiki works or whether John of God really thought he was curing people. You know, when your job depends on it, you can force yourself to believe almost anything. But that's where I kind of draw the line. Like that stuff is, that freaks me out, man. I don't want people out there doing that, you know, and then when they're called on it,

being like, oh, I can't come to your trial because my curing ability only works when I'm like in my, you know, special chamber. Who what a thunk? Who what a thunk? Wow, that's shocking. Wow, it's got to be secret, you know? Alan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Can you tell people where they can find you? Yeah, so on Twitter, I love Twitter. I'm at Alan Levinevitz, that's, it's hard to spell, but it's just A-L-A-N-L-E-V-I-N-O-V-I-T-Z. I was actually, I was Dagjevitz and my wife was Levin and we combined our names, so here we are. Pissed my dad off. Yeah, so they can find me at Alan Levinevitz,

Google around, I write about a lot of different kinds of topics, my last book was about the meaning of natural, so it's all out there on the internet. Follow this, it's Twitter, it's amazing. Obviously we've got a brilliant mind here. Please come back on the show, I really enjoyed chatting with you. I would be a privilege to do so, seriously.

Howdy. That was Dr. Alan Levinevitz, everybody. You can find all the links to Alan at dunkintrussell.com. Subscribe to my Patreon, won't you? It's patreon.com, d-t-f-h, much thanks to our sponsors and if you wanna come see me in San Diego, grab the tickets now. I never do that, you'll notice, I never do the fake,

like we're selling out thing, but the La Jolla comedy store emailed me and said that was happening, so get the tickets, I procrastinate tickets all the time. It's my thing, I'm never gonna buy a ticket, I won't go to the day of, I'm just not organized, but get the tickets now. I love you, I'll see you later on this week with Jack Cornfield.

Until then, Hare Krishna. We are family. A good time starts with a great wardrobe. Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne,

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Next stop, JCPenney. Family get-togethers to fancy occasions, wedding season two. We do it all in style. Dresses, suiting, and plenty of color to play with. Get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne, Worthington, Stafford, and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute, man, extra affordable.

Check out the latest in-store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up, everywhere to go. JCPenney.