Modern Wisdom - #458 - Phrost - Fighting The World Of Fake Martial Arts

Episode Date: April 9, 2022

Phrost is Editor at Bullshido and a podcaster. The introduction of MMA and the UFC has been the ultimate stress test for fake martial arts. No-touch knockouts and chi-push energy blasts have been arm barred and head kicked out of existence. Yet the ability to detect and defeat BS, whether physical, martial or conceptual is no less useful. Expect to learn whether Will Smith should have swung harder, Phrost's justification for why you should always get into online arguments, the most ridiculous martial arts which were disproved, what it was like to create a real life Fight Club, how hard Steven Seagal actually was, whether everyone should learn to fight and much more... Sponsors: Join the Modern Wisdom Community to connect with me & other listeners - https://modernwisdom.locals.com/ Get 10% discount on everything from BioOptimizers at https://magbreakthrough.com/modernwisdom (use code MW10) Get 20% discount on the highest quality CBD Products from Pure Sport at https://bit.ly/cbdwisdom (use code: MW20) Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Extra Stuff: Check out Phrost's website - https://www.bullshido.net/  Get my free Reading List of 100 books to read before you die → https://chriswillx.com/books/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/modernwisdompodcast Email: https://chriswillx.com/contact/  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hello friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Frost, he's editor at Bullshido and a podcaster. The introduction of MMA and UFC has been the ultimate stress test for fake martial arts. No touch knockouts and chi push energy blasts have been on-board and head kicked out of existence. Yet, the ability to detect and defeat BS, whether physical, martial or conceptual, is no less useful. Expect to learn whether Will Smith should have just swung harder, frosts justification for why you should always get into online arguments, what it was like to create a real-life fight club, the most ridiculous martial arts which were disproved, how hard Stephen Segal

really was, whether everyone should learn to fight, and much more. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Frost. It's been a few days now. We've had enough time for the lessons from Will Smith slapping Chris Rock to percolate around the internet and their philosophical significance to embed themselves. What were your thoughts when you first saw that and what your thoughts now having had time to reflect on it? Well, like every single human being that is even moderately aware of this, I had my own take on this and it was basically that you know just, you know, I thought, well, Smith could hit harder, you know, but, you know, it's not the most earnest way of looking at that. Yeah, I mean,

he's, I don't think he was trying to knock Chris Rock's head off. A lot of people give him what we do at Bolsheeto, but it was a work. It was staged. It was, you know, the Oscars, nobody cares about him anymore. Now we're all talking about it. So I don't have strong opinions one way or another. But yeah, I was just like, hey, action movies aren't reality. Let's just take this opportunity to remind you of that. Interesting one. I, on balance, I don't think that it's a fake event. I don't think it makes as much sense. I'd heard that if it came about through whatever your equivalent of off-com regulators are that they'd staged this and that in the script

for it had been swear words, that the Oscars would be looked at being slapped with like a $10 million fine, that if you were to purposefully, you can accidentally say swear words and it's about quarter of a million. I was with a guy from Hollywood yesterday on the Drinking Bros podcast.

If you script a swear word in and it's not supposed to be there, it's some insane fee, some ridiculous. So I think that that seems unlikely and just the reactions from pretty much everyone, including if you play the tape a bit longer and you see Chris try to get himself kind of back to what's happening. I'm aware he's an actor and that's their job, but dude, that's some, he should have got

an Oscar for how he dealt with the slap if that slap was a fake slap. Yeah, no, I mean, he was great and he looked like he was in some, you know, you could see the wheels turning in his head. He was like, trying to come up, well, how do I spend this and keep the show going and and yeah, and somebody was like Well, he I'm surprised you didn't knock out and my joke, you know, was that well his he's not Chris paper after all Oh, very funny very very very funny. Yeah, well, I go for low hanging fruit. You've seen those slap fighting championships, right? Yes, those are awesome. I love that. Is there a concern? Is there a concern with that slap-fighting stuff that we're

basically watching people get CTE live on like on air for our entertainment? I mean, that would be the same thing for the UFC, like any, you know, release or allow to defend yourself. Yes, but I mean, come on, statistically, you're going to get hit, you know, probably fewer times in a slap competition than you are in the UFC. Yeah, that's fair. Oh, that's fair. So yeah, what about your reflections on why whether will should have reacted shouldn't

have reacted? There's a whole spectrum of things that we can talk about with that with regards to a man's role in defending the honor of his wife. And oh man, then you throw out the buzz phrase toxic masculinity, whether that plays a role in it. I mean, obviously, Jada's Jada Pinkett Smith can defend herself. She doesn't have, she doesn't lack for a, you know, the wits or the charmer and the ability to be sassy back in a situation like that.

So I don't know. I honestly couldn't even say what I would do in the same situation. I know it would be a step between what he did, what Will Smith did and what Ted Cruz didn't do and somebody made fun of his wife. What's the Ted Cruz situation? Oh, Ted Cruz did in the campaign in the 2016 Donald Trump basically just straight up called Ted Cruz's wife ugly. He's like, oh, you're American ugly woman or some some sort of thing. And then Ted Cruz's response to that was to help him campaign. So, uh, okay, that's the running joke here in Texas, you know, okay. So I got a you go of poll the day after this happened one in five Brits. I think it was acceptable for Will Smith to hit Chris Rock at the Oscars. A majority of Britain's 57% say that Smith hitting rock was not acceptable.

22% say that Smith's actions were acceptable. Men, 26% were slightly more likely than women's 17% to say his actions are acceptable, perhaps, unsurprisingly. Taking offense, many people might sympathise with Will Smith taking regarding the joke made about his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, Alopecia, Hellos, but how many Britons reacted in the same way as Smith when they felt offended, 14% say that they have punched or hit someone in response to something offensive. That is a very low number, and I think speaks a lot to the British passive aggressiveness. Most Britons, 80%, however, have refrained from doing so. Men, 20%, or twice as likely as women, 9% to have lashed out physically. This

was an interesting one and this comes to what you just said there. Honourbound, some have suggested that Jada Pinkett Smith didn't need her husband to defend her honour in this way and that this notion is outdated. But when asked today, three quarters of Britain's 77% said it is appropriate for a husband to defend his wife's honor if another person offends them. One in 10, 10% said that it is not appropriate for them to do so. And women, 79% are more likely than men at 75% to say it is appropriate for a husband to defend his wife's honor. I thought that was quite interesting.

Yeah, no, I mean, there are deeply rooted evolved reasons for that. Just, I mean, at the level of a woman who sees that her husband is not going to do anything, just let it happen. It's probably not gonna be, he's probably not gonna be her husband for very long. Just because, I mean, you wanna know that that,

even there is a perspective of gender. You wanna know that that person person is as they would say down for you to, you know, the writer die kind of stuff. So you don't, you want to know that the person you with it would be good in a situation like that. It's got your back. And, but more so for men because traditionally we are seen as the gender that does the more physical sort of interactions with world responding to threats and that sort of thing. So, yeah.

Would it have been different if Jada had gone up and slapped him? Absolutely. It would have been 100% different conversation. And I think the vast majority of people would have cheered it on. And I think people would have even thought that was more scripted because first of all, she would have gotten away with it completely. There would have been no controversy, minus a few people that are, you know, on the far the manosphere, you know, types of like, how dare she, how can she slap that kind of thing.

But, um, no, I think that would have been the ideal scenario. And if he was just sitting back there with the camera on him, just clapping, I mean, that would have been the perfect way, minus, you know, just a conversation to resolve that issue. Well, I mean, if Willid leaned over and said, darling, darling, I already think they should go up and walk him. That might have taken away a little bit of the spontaneity. There is, there's definitely an argument to be made that kind of like in roast battles,

if you go to an award ceremony now, you know what you're in for, whether it's Kevin Hart or Ricky Gervais or Chris Rock that's presenting it, it's kind of the job of the comedian to take the whankeness out of this highfalutin, very sort of bourgeois event by going around the room and pointing it all of the hypocrisies of Hollywood

and making fun of people and stuff like that. So, I mean, out of all of the jokes that you can make about Will Smith's wife, especially with Will Smith in the room, that's quite a low bull wand. There's, you know, stories about him being cooked by his own wife. There's videos of him having podcast episodes and stuff. And I mean, that, that to me is another interesting conversation around why we have a particular concern about going after groups. Let's say that Chris Rockett said something racist up on stage, right, against any group condemned across the world.

But the insult about one particular person is significantly more painful to that person as opposed to an entire group. And yet, everybody's fine for that joke about an individual person to go, but not fine for a joke about an entire group to go. I find that an interesting disparity between the way that we judge hurting feelings or making value judgments goes. Yeah, I know. I agree. I think that had he, I mean, we would have absolutely everybody. Well, most people, most decent people would have taken an exception to him making fun of the alopecia community, you know? I mean, that is, but going after, and then again, Jada herself isn't exactly the a-list celebrity that Will Smith is.

So going after Will Smith, there's also a power imbalance there. You're, there's the, I hate the term punching down. Yeah, yeah. No matter where you are, you, you know, you kind of deserve to get punched in some, you know, metaphorical sense, if not literal. But it's not going after Jay to ping a Smith is a totally different scenario than going after Will Smith

who is, you know, a plus list Hollywood, you know, almost at this point royalty now. Some whole generations have grown up with a guy. And then, you know, she's, yeah, her career's not exactly at the same level. So, and she's been going through some stuff. And yeah, there's so many different factors to play here that, you know, I welcome all the different takes on it. So I mean, personally, I've just focused on the part where he is hand-contaxed,

the other guy's face because, you know, that's what we're pretty disposed to look at. Well, you pretty experienced with this, right? Your background is in fighting, calling out, fighting fighting understanding what it means to sort of deploy physical aggression and then also having online confrontations that sometimes end up in physical aggression. Yeah, yeah, well she do got it start. it'll be 20 years, where it was just a bunch of MMA athletes, martial artists, etc., people that are actively training, calling out the people that are just pretending to be tough guys in the martial arts. We've long since expanded our topic range to more things, but back then, this is what we're into, and this is what seemed to be important, because a lot of people had no idea what a real fight looked like, so they had grown up in the 80s with the, you know, karate kung fu action, so even some other ridiculous.

Yeah, especially Steven Zagall, I've got a great story with that. I never refrain from sharing about Steven Zagall. And but anyway, the, so the internet was, was new online communities were new. This was before people were using the word meme even. There were, there was no Facebook, there wasn't even a MySpace back then. So we all kind of got together and just hashed out our own little space where we could call these people out without being, you

know, censored or shut down or anything like that. And I got interested in, and I ended up being the accidentally Tyler Durden in a sense because we have all these people like, yeah, well, you're full of shit, you're full of shit. And because we have all these people like, yeah, well, you're full of shit, you're full of shit. And then we'd have these things where people would get together and just beat the crap out of each other. And we call them throw downs. What's it like running a real-life fight club? Well, it was awesome. I don't think there were no, surprisingly, there were no real, seriously legal consequences for the fighting because it was within a martial arts context. I mean,

these people are sparring. It's all, you know, consensual. Yeah, we may not have had exactly, like waivers or things signed or anybody got like a clearance from their doctor or anything official because it wasn't sanctioned. But you know, guys would show up and, you know, throw blows. And it was, it was cool.

It was like, you know, the golden area of the internet as far as I'm concerned. But this was the same time that Kimbo slice would have probably been doing backyard brawls for money. Yes. Yeah. Kimbo slice. Uh, he kind of did his own thing and I think it was like Florida was where he was coming up. Like guys are just throwing punches and stuff.

And we just we're doing the same thing. But those those guys are sort of unregulated, like not even associated with martial arts at all. They were just dudes that were like banging. It was- They were people that wanted to throw hands. It feels like you guys were trying to stress test different martial arts and or how much bullshit certain people were talking about online.

We would invite people to come and come to the events. Most of them were friendly, but every now and then there was some dude who's like, yeah, man, you guys, I don't like the, what you've been saying about us, you know, we're gonna show up and, and you know, it was usually hilarious. We had a couple of famous incidents

that are still on the internet somewhere, like one guy showed up at a fight of dude in like a backfield somewhere. He actually left like a comic convention because he was dressed up in cosplay and showed up to fight the dude, the guy from Bolsheetos in cosplay and showed up to fight the guy in the backyard

of somebody's house. And that beat his ass dressed as like Lupin or some anime character. And so, yeah, that dude's awesome. And then we've had one guy, we had a whole crew of people drive like 16 hours from was Austin to DC to Maryland area or something to fight a dude in a parking lot over like some challenges. Like he was like talking about his kung fu ability. And the fight itself

didn't happen, but a fight between the two people that had gone with those two groups ended up doing. And it was pretty cool. That guy ended up on his back and got punched a few times. And yeah, so we used to have fun. What were the most common martial arts that were the ones that were being called out? And what were the most common ones

that were being used to stress test the bullshit? Well, usually it was somebody that had trained in mixed martial arts or Brazilian jujitsu specifically because when you do those things, you know exactly what your limitations are because the guys that are and girls that are going that are rolling that are sparring in the classroom, they're sparring. They're seeing what they can get away with and a very loose open rules set where I mean, sort of, you know, nasty stuff like poking somebody in the eye or, you know, trying to bite or that kind of thing.

You'll see sort of rules. You know what your limitations are. And so the guys that do the sparring like IKIDO, which basically has no sparring or styles like Wing Chun or just other forms of Kung Fu, not all of them, but most of them, they don't do any sparring at all. So they would be hurt. Their images would be hurt by the fact that they had up until we came along,

or people similar to us, everybody just said to assume that, you know, you guys, yeah, I mean, you do this, you know, train for 10 years. You're probably a badass. And you know, guys like to be thought of as bad asses. So yeah, their feelings get hurt when you're like dude you've never even taken a punch in your life. How do you know that you know all this floppy crap that you're doing is gonna help? Has you ever done a whatever more traditional martial art like a laoga or a kung fu or a karate or so I guess karate is relatively applicable in some aspects but what about the more fluffy stuff? Have you ever tried to do that?

I personally, like when I was first getting in martial arts just way back in the 90s, I did a little Wushu and some Wing Chun. So, I mean, I have familiarity with that. And then, you know, the UFC came along and we were like, hmm, there'd be cool to see some of those dudes in that. And then, you know, the UFC came along and we're like, hmm, that would be cool to see some of those dudes in that. And then, you know, you just didn't do too well. There was one guy that did Wing Chun and the UFC. And he immediately got put on his

back and punched into, you know, the mat. So yeah. The reason that I say that is I did Laogha for probably six years when I was in my teens and it was a real formative part of growing up. I was doing Tai Chi. I was teaching Tai Chi as well. And it's strange. Thinking now in a world that stress tested by UFC. I mean, it would have been stress tested. It was like 2004, 2000 like once, 2006 or something like that. I wonder whether you still see a value in people doing those more traditional styles of martial arts. I actually, I do. I'm not like, I guess the term would be a bigot

against those sorts of things. First of all, there's the cultural relevance and I mean, some of those things are just beautiful. To see, like even in the Ikea, I bag on Ikea all the time because it's a goofy style that's created by a weird cultist vegan Japanese hippie guy. But there's beauty in the motion.

It is in a way almost a form of dance that reflects older things. And I can even rationalize how some of that It is a in a way, almost a form of dance that reflects older things. And I can even rationalize how some of that would have been applicable to a battlefield hundreds of years ago. It's just so far removed from that context. It's not practical to, you know, doing anything today. So yeah, I mean, I think Tai Chi, especially for the movement, you know, it just like

a sort of walking yoga, you know, keep yourself limber as you age and that kind of thing. That's great. That's good stuff. I really enjoyed it. And it was super formative. I think that you're right. When you, the problem comes when you start talking about applicability and it's the further away from UFC. I mean, what else, what else is that?

I'm going to guess Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, your straight-up boxing, kickboxing, tie boxing, Samber, and then wrestling. Are those probably like the main styles? Is there anything missing from them? I really is. I mean, there has been some of the Kiyoku Shun Karate. I think was it Leo de Machita? Is that the one that's, is that the one that, whether they try and punch each other in the sternum? It's a full contact, just not to the, you can kick to the head, but you can't punch to the head. What's that one that Michael Page did,

shoot fighting? Shoot fighting? Yeah, I mean, well, that's, to my knowledge, that's just a, it's just another rule set. So, and there was, there were, I think one of those, no pancreas was the one where you,

you had to use open hands. So that was back in the day. That's what Will Smith should have learned. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think there were a couple of chaos from open hand chaos for some of those dudes. Shit. And what's that?

You mentioned if Will Smith had had, had KO'd Chris Rock with a slap. I'm just going to use Chris, I'm going to use Chris Rock and Will Smith now as the benchmark for the rest of time, but whether or not some things an effective strategy in martial arts. Yeah, that works. In fact, I really want to give Chris Scott credit for taking that, assuming, and I'm leaning towards effective, was real, assuming that it was, yeah, he, he took that like a champ. I mean, he just enrolled with the, uh, the slap. And like I said, you can knock somebody out with a damn slap, especially if the palm

of your hand wasn't a damn slap, especially if they palm your hand. It wasn't a light one, man. It was, Wilson is not a small dude. He's trained for pretty much all of his life. And he's a big guy. For anyone as well that hasn't ever been slapped or hit. The sensation of being fully slapped in the face is pretty shocking.

Like there's the flood of everything that just comes through you. Oh yeah. I've just been fucking slapped. You completely shocked. So yeah, I think you're right. I think one of many, many interesting lessons to take from that is Chris Rock's ability to hold his poise in that is pretty impressive. Yeah.

Like I said, you can see the wheels turning. He was like, how can I follow this up with a joke or something? And I think what he said was, I was like, well, that was the best moment in Oscar history. So good for that, dude, man. What about, what do you think about the importance of learning how to fight? I have this conversation a lot with friends who are untrained in a very applicable style of martial arts, like an MMA or a boxing or a Brazilian jujitsu. Do you think that it is, I wouldn't say, a moral obligation, but you could even say that a quasi necessity for especially men to perhaps spend some time learning

how to fight. Yeah, well, yeah, absolutely, because I mean, are especially if you have a like a slightly higher than normal testosterone count, you're gonna think that you can fight, whether or not you actually can. I mean, you run into so many dudes that are like, man, I just see red and I just start throwing, you know, it's like, they have in this, in their head,

this idea that, yeah, it's just, I can go coup my way out of this shit. I can power up just based on anger and red bull or whatever and, and when a fight, when the difference between, and this is one of the things I try to explain a lot of people, the difference between somebody who's trained for like just six months in a Brazilian jujitsu or a moitai or even boxing or wrestling versus somebody who's, you know, watch those things on TV maybe is it's astronomical that the amount of ability that's there just for learning the basics. So yeah, if you care about the people around you, whether you're a man or woman, but I mean, especially dudes, because we fall into that role a lot, you should be physically capable

to handle a situation like that, whether it's, you know, you're confident enough that if it comes to that, you can handle it. But that also reinforces your ability to deescalate because you know, at the end of the day, deescalating, even if you have to take a little bit of hurt your pride, doesn't really hurt your pride as much as if you were unsure that you could kick that dudes ass So it's easier to to back down from a fight. You're like, okay, yeah, man. You're okay. You're a tough guy In a situation like that when you know that if if you had to you would have just tore him up Well, the difference there is kind of like the difference between being homeless or going camping

One of them is a choice and the other one is mandated on you. It's what Peterson says. Peterson says, you know, a harmless man is not a good man, a good man is a very dangerous man that has that under voluntary control. And that's the difference. You're backing down because it's your choice to, because you want to deescalate as opposed to you're backing down because that's the only option that you have that doesn't involve you getting the shit kicked out of you. Yeah, absolutely. It's the better to be a warrior in a garden, than a gardener in a war. Yeah.

That's, I mean, yeah. I, it's, it's interesting. There's a part of me that, that knows a bunch of dudes that I think would really, really benefit from spending a year or a couple of years doing some Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu or some striking, because I think there's a lot of nervous energy around masculinity that comes out due to a fear of inferiority, if anything, was to get physical. And I think that based on what I see, I'm right next to the sauna place that I go to in Austin.

You mean the Koo-ya yet? I've seen it, yeah. Yeah, it's opposite 10th planet. Yes, I mean Austin as well. We could have just shouted it out of the window. Oh, okay, yeah, yeah, I'm just down the road. We got hit by the tornado last week. Oh shit, yeah.

So Koo-ya, which is there, I get a lot of the 10th planet guys that are coming in and I'll be hearing them talk. And all of them are so softly spoken. These Brazilian kids, 17 years old with full cauliflower ears, but they're all coming in and they're all really quietly talking about whatever it is that they've got going on. And yeah, there's just a sense of sort of poise and certainty that those guys have that I think a lot of dudes that I know I've worked the front door of nightclubs

for 15 years as a club promoter. And I've watched a lot of situations in which people who don't know how to fight have tried to fight probably because of a fear that they don't know how to fight. Yeah, yeah, I mean, it, I like to compare it to a Chihuahua. You know, a Chihuahua knows he's going to get his ass kicked, but he's, he's going to snap and bark and grow as much as he possibly can to convince you that he's not going to get his ass kicked. So there's, there's a little bit of that at play. And yeah, it's the overconfidence thing.

It's just, we're dudes are, we're just host to a whole cocktail of chemicals that send like all these signals to us like you need to fight or you know if you don't fight then you know you're going to regret it in the future or all these sorts of things and they lead to bad decisions and the the older you get the easier it is to manage those because you have experience but I'm man being a teenage dude with a little bit of you know know, like T running through you, you're, I mean, it's easy to go the wrong direction with some choices. You look at the violent crime risk for men and I think it's between 26 and 29 and it just falls off a cliff.

You know, and this is why the vast majority of gang members are at that young age. I mean, also, if you've been in a gang for 10 years since the age of 16 or something, you're probably maybe dead or in jail or one of a bunch of other things. But one of the best things that I think that you could do for young men, especially ones that might live in an impoverished neighborhood or guys that have got a little bit more of anti-social behavior tendencies when they're young, is to try and get them into a place where they can funnel that aggression, right? Absolutely, yeah, for sure. Create a positive outcome for that as opposed to it happening on the street. Yeah, no, I inject every time that that situation comes up, you see a kid in school,

but public schools aren't going to do that. They're not going to say, hey, you should go there. We barely even have contact sports in public schools anymore. So I remember when I was a kid, and this was some podunk rural Texas, like they'd never do this today. This is like in late 80s, actually. We did boxing in gym class. You know, we put on big, you know, fluffy gloves

and we're like just swinging at each other. And there's no way you can do that today. So it's a nice 30 ounce huge mitt that you've got like comedy ones that you get at a tag fair. Sock and boppers, you know, the toddler toys, but, uh, you know, it was great. I remember being impressed with my ability because I was, you know, less than confident. I was a scrawny kid. I, uh, yeah, I was scrawny nerdy kid.

And so there's this kid I didn't like. And of course the coach has paired us up because, you know, they're, they're Dix and that's what coaches do. But, um, so I mean, I just floored the guy. I just spun him around. I threw a punch and yeah, he went, you know, like a cartoon top and I was like, huh,

I might have a affinity for this sort of thing. So, but yeah, it was, we need that. We need, um, not all violence in the sense of the sociological, you know, ivory tower academic sense of the term is necessarily a thing we should avoid. If we're learning to express that in a healthy, consensual, reasonably safe manner,

it's probably so much better than just, you know, letting people do whatever they're gonna do without any supervision. One of the things that I've realized is that a lot of the time, policymakers and people that are doing public commentary about big, important, whatever they consider to be important, rules aren't built the same as the people

that they're making the rules for. So, one of the good examples of this is the feminist movement when they decided that getting rid of chivalry would be a good way to further equalize the world for women that a man holding a door open for a woman or men being taught very, very aggressively that you shouldn't hit a woman, you shouldn't do blah, blah, blah, blah, because women are their own. That was a bourgeois idea that didn't take into account

that women from slightly different backgrounds where men, perhaps, didn't have as many guardrails in on their behavior were benefiting from chivalry still being a thing. And that as soon as you get rid of that reason for men to decide to do it, simply because it's a norm in terms of respect, a lot of women that were from different backgrounds

to those that were promoting the reduction of the behavior were the ones that were going to suffer. And it kind of feels like the same with regards to violence as well, that most of the people who are going to talk about the toxic masculine effect of someone going into an MMA gym and learning how to punch somebody in the face, whether that be a politician or somebody that writes in the media, whether that be a politician or somebody

that writes in the media, it's very unlikely if you've got to that sort of a position in society that you are the sort of person who would need a violent outlook or an outlet for you when you were a 13-year-old raging with adolescent hormones. Yeah, I mean, the similar sort of detached from a ground reality thing, it comes in like

in discussions of firearms as well. It's like, why would anybody need a firearm at their house to protect, you know, well, the cops are always there in my neighborhood, you know, they'll show up within two minutes if I call. Yeah, that's not how it is for everyone else. Everyone doesn't live in your, community with security in this and that. So, policy needs to be made for the people that suffer the most. It needs to be focused on those who are more likely to be victims and not necessarily the people that are just looking at life through their very stunted small lenses. We have very differing opinions about whether or not to engage in arguments online.

Can you please put forward your proposition about why you do it? My, okay, the people, I've actually written this down in a piece, but the idea is that a lot of people will say, don't argue with idiots. Because I mean, the idea, there's so many, Mark Twain in a piece, but the idea is that a lot of people will say don't argue with idiots. Because I mean, the idea, there's so many Mark Twain had to quote, is like, he'll like pull you down with his experience or don't, it's like playing chicken or chess with a pigeon, it'll just knock over all the pieces and shit on the board. So I look at it from a longer term sort of spectrum. So you should argue with idiots if there's an audience. So if it's just you and an idiot,

I mean, unless you genuinely care about that person and you wanna steer them in the right direction, you wanna make them a non-idiot, yeah. That would probably be a waste of your time. But when you argue with an idiot in front of an audience, just like you're having a debate with somebody, you're talking for the audience. So just don't focus so much on the person

that you're arguing with as in, make the points that other people who are maybe on the edge are the, they could go the wrong way, they could go from believing in modern medicine to homeopathy or something like that. So steer that argument for those. Those are your audience. The idiot in the argument is just your punching bag. Are you saying online arguing is a spectator sport? It absolutely is. In fact, the algorithms for those things are so tailored now to get that to the engagement because, you

know, a Twitter thread of like three people all agreeing on, you know, whatever, it is nothing. Nobody's going to tune in to look at that. But of like just people piling on and just like, this is that in sub tweets and threads and, you know, yeah, cancel mobs and all that shit. Yeah, that's what gets people engaged. So of course, so I mean, yeah, you have to play in that battle because there are some people out there that are pretty good at that. And they're doing it for, you know, either selfish or the absolute wrong reasons. So it's one of those, honestly, on some level, not to make it sound too grandiose,

but, you know, all that's needed for, was it the Edmund Burke quote, I think, was that for, for, for able to try out his good men to do nothing, that kind of thing. Are you, are you saying that your, your online arguments are a public service? Uh, actually, I think literally are now. I mean, personally, I don't know. My argument arguments are kind of, you know, for my own benefit, but as the organization that we run, yeah, we're a nonprofit educational media foundation. So yeah, we're trying to do some good. And, you know, maybe if we have

a little fun in it, it's an incidental. So I think, I think it's only because of the presence of people like you and the people that you argue with that I'm able to take my stance, which is, this is somebody's fight, but it's never my fight. Like for me, an online argument, the cost to benefit ratio is just way, way, way off. And I do think that there are some people, I mean, Chris Kavanaugh is a perfect example of this. I, every so often someone will tag me in a halfway through as an example or you know, and this is one of the most annoying things right about Twitter.

Someone's having a big argument. Early on in the exchange, you somehow become tagged as an example or a whatever. And then for the remainder of the day, you have now been like by the scruff of your neck or by the seat of your pants, your now mentions are just annihilated by everyone. And you're just like desperately hoping that someone decides to quote tweet it, which is kind of like the ejecto seat button that means that you're no longer a part of this thread. And it's happened with me where I've been kind of intrigued, tagged in at one point into a Chris Kavanaugh thing.

And it makes me feel physically uncomfortable because I know that this is going to be a battle of attrition. This isn't going to be something that's going to be let go. This is going to go on for many, many tens of replies. And yeah, I salute you for your patience or perseverance or boredom that sort of pushes you to be able to do this online, but dude, it's not for me. Yeah, no, I mean, you have to waste so much time in it. And if you're not seeing, if you're not trying specifically to affect some kind of change, if you're just trying to engage with ideas,

then I have no, I don't begrudge anyone for saying, yeah, this is ridiculous. I'm going to go in my phone down. Yeah, I'm going to walk outside touch grass. So what's the Steven Seagull stories? I want to know more about him. And you must have some others about crazy fake martial artists. Give us some of those. The Steven Seagull story is, and I think, actually, I don't give a shit whether he's offended because he gave up his citizenship. And now he's a Russian, I think. So whatever. So back in the day, I think forget one of the movies, one of his three word movie titles. He hard to kill, like just kicked ass, whatever.

He has a, he had some stuff in on the set and he was like talking shit, like man, like all this stuff and nobody could choke me out. And that was the claim that he made. And one of the stunt men happened to be judo gene labelle gene labelle is legendary as a stunt man and as a martial artist I mean judo just extraordinary guy and he does not get enough respect and love over the years I think he's dead but you know anyway so he was he wasn't so many movies now that

if if you look through the all the old eighties and nineties and both be up before movies Bruce Lee stuff uh... you can see in the background you play spot gene level but uh... gene levels on the studies like i'll take you up on that that and um... so as the story goes uh... i'm not sure whether or not stevens to go was wearing brown pants when he showed up to the set that day

but he certainly left wearing brown pants. And then lawyers got involved and Jean was like, you know, sued for, you know, signing non-disclosure and all that shit. So, but yeah, Jean Lebel, like put him in a rear naked joke and made a Steven Sagole shit his pants. Wow. Yeah. And I've had this confirmed by several people in the industry.

And then over the years it so I have High confidence a lot of faith and urban legends. Yeah, I've got pooped himself. Oh, yeah, plus I mean I also want to believe it so yeah, well that's that whatever confirmation bias against even so got I mean everybody has that what else then because there's been there was like this period I suppose I don't know what the Wonder Years would have been when video cassettes you were able to sell of these magic dojos and you've got these old and styly videos of nontouch knockouts and force pushing and Chi energy and shit like that. What wasn't wasn't that movie that what's his face started about the fighting pit wasn't that based on a fake story as well.

Oh yeah, Van Damne played Frank Dukes and he was yeah, and he was that was a fake story right. Yeah, Frank Dukes is a real person but his whole story is manufactured like he was a CA ninja guy that fought an underground tournament in Asia called the Kumite. Back in the day, actually, this was even before we got involved in this, I think was a soldier or a fortune magazine, some publication that wasn't exactly mainstream. Doug did all the actual legwork on this track down his tournament trophy to a to a trophy store right down the street from his house. So it just I mean they source it the whole story's bullshit but Frank Duke's is still out there like giving ninja

seminars and a lot of in Europe because you know very few people in the US believe in ninjas now unless they're into anime but um yeah so he's still trying to cash in on that cow and then there was a shita cam who was one of the first big guys we tangled with that shita cam published a bunch of books in the eighties like ninjas secrets of invisibility or ninja magic skills or this or that. And so we're like okay, and he had this uh $10,000 challenge is like I can defeat anybody just put $10,000 challenge. He's like, I can defeat anybody, just put $10,000 up. So one of the members of our forums, it's like, cashed out $10,000 and put it and stack the bills on his desk. And like, let's do this.

And then, you know, the himming and the hog and the, just started. And so, yeah, we punked him out. And, I don't want to tell the story because this is the nerdy thing that anyone's ever heard and every time I tell this I feel a little ashamed. But so instead of fighting somebody from Bullshit O, he went on Wikipedia and started threatening the founder of Wikipedia Jim Wales and started saying, we should take down the Bullshit O

article and take down the article about me because it included the information about us, you know, calling him out and his $10,000 challenge to BS. And so Jim Wales himself, the guy, the head of the Wikimedia Foundation, deleted a Shita Kim's article off Wikipedia. And so I'm like, how is this a real world thing where I'm and she can't accuse him of being an arrival ninja gang. It was just the most bat shit. This is can only happen in the earlier days of the internet where you know, you could actually interact with people

and it was so wild and it's hard to tell this story and expect people to believe me, but it was a smaller world back then. I love the fact that this guy everything to him is Framed through ninja gangs or not. Yeah, everything that occurs the reason that Will Smith slapped Chris Rock is because they were in rival ninja gangs Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah We were different clan or something whatever we eventually tracked him down to the real guys real names was redford Davis He lived in a trailer in Florida. I think we had somebody dig through his garbage

to confirm that it was really the same guy and stuff like that. We've done a few things. I don't know if you should be proud of that, but I mean the guy, just there's so many people. I remember seeing those books on bookshills as a kid at like a bookstore It's like ninja magic and a bit of this ability and I can see how you get taken in by that. It sounds cool, so What were you looking at to do with chiropractors because I've heard rumors about the efficacy of efficacy of Shiropady, what a chiropractic work. Yeah, I've heard sort of rumors about this for ages. What's the actual breakdown of where it came from

and whether it's effective or not? So chiropractic was created and then the late 1800s by a man named D.D. Palmer. D.D. Palmer up until then had been like sort of a for the time, a grifter's, Naked Oil Salesman. I think professionally he like, like did grocery distributions or something. Until one day as the story goes,

he cracks somebody's back, because you know, I mean, you crack in your back makes you feel better. And then all of a sudden, and keep in mind that this is in the time period where there was a lot of interest in spiritualism and um, alter science was just getting rolling and rural scientific method kind of stuff and we're still figuring out I think they had just started washing their hands

before operating on people at the time. And so, D. D. Palmer's story that he went public with to say the new field of uh, caracryct are they, they say it, is um, was imparted to him in a dream by a ghost doctor, by a dead ghost doctor. So somehow that became a thing. I mean, yeah, with relentless marketer, I mean, like Steve Jobs level marketing. And so, yeah, the thing that muddies the water on chiropractic is that a lot of the people that do chiropractic just want to help, just basically want to be physiotherapists. Just want to do physical therapy, occupational therapy, that stuff, and get you back to,

you get your skeletal muscles and everything like that, all back working properly. Because, you know, I think most people sit on their ass all day or have bad posture or habits like that, and it's a necessary service. Your general practitioner's not gonna give a shit about that. They're gonna, you know, even especially in the US, they're gonna give you, you know, five minutes of attention,

prescribe you something and, you know, cash and money. But so, chiropractor have filled in a gap where a lot of people like, I need this kind of, I need something to help me out because I got a shitty mattress and I'm on my feet all day and so my back hurts. Yeah, it's gonna hurt. And the part of chiropractic that works

is the actual evidence-based medicine because they do some of that. They do chiropractors have, when you go to chiropractor school, you learn the real things, you learn the stuff that works, but you're also the differences that you're taught, things like subluxations, which are not a thing. What's that? Basically, the bones are misaligned, so you're bringing them back into line.

Usually, chiropractic subluxation is different than an actual medical one, where things are really the hell out of whack. Chiropractic is like there's just a, you got to just slightly just a spine. No. Car practice teaches that you, in its true form, car practice teaches that you can cure any disease by adjusting the spine. And that's, well, patently ridiculous. There's also another central concept of car practice called the innate, which is a like a life force, almost like a cheese sort of thing that you

won't hear a lot of the more contemporary, the ones that are out there talking about chiropractors. They won't sell it to you, just like Scientologists won't talk about Zeno, but it's there. And so that's another fundamental part of their practice. And so you can get all the things that work out of chiropractors, you can get from a physiotherapist. But the problem is car proctors are easier to see. They're more available there and they do provide what feels like relief. When you get your back cracked, it feels good. The problem is then they'll take that and expand it and then you'll see videos of car proctors cranking the next of infants.

that and expand it and then you'll see videos of carpractors cranking the next of infants or my favorite one is I don't know I guess this guy's a celebrity car tractor on YouTube or so I don't know the dude's name but there's a video of him taking like a hammer and like a chisel device and just he has it right up against the dude's tailbone and he's just hammering it just whacking the shit out of it with a big little smile on his face I'm like no please I mean unless you're doing that versus as a stunt or like an episode of Jackass, no, that's not a medical thing. So you can get all the benefits of a chiropractor by seeing a physical therapist.

Problem is that they're harder to access. And that's the problem with a lot of the alternative medicine out there. It's hard to get good medicine medicine. It's hard to get seen by somebody that's an expert. Why do people choose to become chiropractors if they want to be physical therapists? Is it easier to get the qualification to be a chiropractor? Well, it's absolutely easier to become a chiropractor than the licensing and regulation. I mean, simply because it's less of an evidence-based practice, so I mean bullshit is an inherent part of it.

Can chiropractice call themselves doctor? You can be a doctor of chiropractic, so you technically yes. Right, okay. I was pretty sure that I'd seen something around that that whatever, like, doctor fletcher is a status thing, right? You say the word doctor, you don't know if you're a doctor of law or a doctor of shiropa deo whatever. Dr. Filosophy. Yeah, bricky precisely, what are you gonna do?

You're gonna like debate my back better. Yeah, I know, it's like that meme, it was like a, is there a doctor on board? The airplane? Yeah, yeah, I'm a doctor of philosophy. It was like, well, he's gonna die, it was like, we're all gonna die uh...

but uh... yeah so they but they they take advantage of the fact that there is a doctor in the the uh... the fuzzy gray area in the public understanding of the word doctor versus physician uh... which is the term that you know it's it's more you know appropriate to call the the medical doctors now because

everybody can be a you can be a doctor of education or basket weaving or whatever now. And... Have you ever looked at the evidence behind acupuncture or dry needling or anything like that? I haven't dealt into it in depth. I, so I'm low to speak on that because I'm not, I try not to chime in on something. I don't have a firm solid grip on it. I mean, my intuition says it's it's hokey

of stuff because I know a lot of the things considered, for example, just to specify one thing, traditional Chinese medicine. That term traditional Chinese medicine is a entire fabrication from the Mao era of China because they were, there was a sort of deficit of actual physicians. So they wanted to like institute some sort of nationalistic healthcare. And so they ramped up the idea of traditional Chinese medicine. I mean, every culture has its own traditional medicine, herbs and that sort of thing and folk remedies. And so, but they played that up to us like a state thing.

They milled it in with the Chinese national identity for a while. And so, it's still deeply entrenched in there. So, you'll find journals, Chinese, which, you know, I'm not good enough on Duolingo to read it yet, but it's, you'll find some that are just like, in fact, you'll find chiropractor journals that sort of launder the ideas that they're trying to put into the mainstream for medicine because, as the saying goes, alternative medicine that actually works, it's just called medicine.

It's just medicine. I have been thinking about this for quite a while, like what it is about these different pathways where people seem to show some sort of recovery afterwards. Now, I had this guy on David Robson who's just written a book called the expectation effect. A man, this shit blew my mind, absolutely blew my mind. So you understand the placebo effect, right? That one of the most replicable effects in pharmacology is this panacea where the placebo effect accounts for sometimes over 50% of the impact of particular drugs.

And the expectation effect, which you've said in your book, goes through, this is present in anything that you care to care about, man. Like absolutely everything. My favorite, there's something called a no-cebo as well, which is a negative, kind of like a hyper-contract that creates their own symptoms. Gluten intolerances were 3% 10 years ago,

and they are 30% of people now. But think about the last 10 years, we've had a lot of messaging around the dangers of gluten and bloating and hives and sensitivity and all that stuff and gluten-free into the lab. They fed all of these people food, which did not contain gluten, but told all of these people that it did. And you ended up with people who weren't allergic to gluten, who hadn't eaten gluten, having a gluten reaction. And this is the power of expectation. And this is where more degrees of freedom, I think, need to be given when we're talking about alternative solutions to things because you can't deny the fact that that person does have diarrhea, does have hives, does have bloating.

The problem it is, it's not because of the reason that they think it is, and let's roll that into something else. Let's say that it is acupuncture, right? That somebody having faith, let's get beyond the fact that simply spending a bit of time doing some self care in a quiet room with some nice incense burning is a way to activate your parasympathetic nervous system for a while, which might be the only part

of your entire week where you're not thinking about the kids and debt and whatever, which is a value and it's not like that to genuine value outside of the expectation effect. Then on top of that, the fact that you've done something that feels like self-care, that makes you feel like you're in control. So it's such a bizarre situation to be in, right?

Because let's say, I don't know, the studies in acupuncture, let's say that acupuncture doesn't have an impact on this person's injury or whatever it is they're trying to do, but they feel better because of the very, very robust and effective expectation effect, you go, okay, did the acupuncture work? Well, it didn't work for the reason that you thought it worked.

It didn't work on the mechanism that you thought it was working on, but you can't deny the fact that by going and doing this thing, the person feels better, so the outcome that you needed is created just not through the means that you thought it was. And it's just, it's such a really interesting world to think about. The fact that what you're actually looking to do with a lot of people, especially if they're trying to fix ailments, is actually find the solution. What would be ideal would be to find the solution that speaks to them, which also assists them genuinely through some sort of biological mechanism, but failing that, finding a

mechanism which speaks to them to maximize that expectation effect is perhaps slightly disingenuous, but actually something that if you're thinking what's the best way we can get good outcomes for this person, that could actually be a really, really effective way to look at it. Yeah, no, I don't begrudge anyone

for seeking a remedy to alleviate their suffering to reduce their suffering. Anyway, it's just the issue that I have, I mean, it's on two levels. The systemic issue is that we have a broken healthcare system with all the wrong incentives and all the wrong priorities, and it's just not serving the public health. So, but I'm from a second level, on an individual level, if you find something that treats a problem that makes you feel better, okay, that's the symptoms, but you've got to treat the actual problem, too.

Like, the biggest example that I always go back to is that Steve Jobs would be with us today. If he hadn't sought out alternative, my means of treating his actual pancreatic cancer. 80% chance of survival, right? Absolutely. It was one of the few most pancreatic cancers will just ruin you. We'll just kill you. But he had the one that was treatable by modern medicine.

And instead, he sought out all kinds of hokey nonsense. So yeah, I mean, BS killed Steve Jobs, the alternative medicine did, because he had in his head that we can take care of this problem by, you know, it's like, okay, well, you know, no, do what you need to do, do the right thing. And that's where I get frustrated at all the problems with alternative medicine.

It gets in the way. If you wanna be on the side, you know, That's where I get frustrated at all the problems with alternative medicine. It gets in the way. If you want to be on the side, I don't have a problem with somebody burning essential oils or whatever in their house. As long as you're getting in chemotherapy as well. Yeah. I mean, don't skip the chemo so that you can smell lavender. You know?

Yeah. I do understand. I also think that there's probably a threshold here. If you've hurt your internal rotation of your shoulder, and that's the degree to which you're playing fockery with typical versus non-typical solutions for it, okay, the externalities there aren't too bad. If you're playing with, I've got pancreatic cancer, it feels like it's a little bit more of a serious discussion and you should, I don't know, maybe go with modern medicine.

But it seems generally at the moment that there is a, I'm gonna be interested to find out what happens post-pandemic generally around people's views of typical medicine, big pharma overall. We already had the seed sowed with people being disgruntled to do with opioid addiction for pain medicines. We recently had that, what was that series about the family that created oxycodone?

Oh yeah, the sacriors. Yes, there's been like, I think a documentary, a real documentary and a dramatized series that's kind of like a quasi-documentary about them. And it just seems like there is probably going to be, and the problem with this is, right, that when it comes to, do I really need this tablet to fix my back pain?

Can you not just refer me to a PT? That is a virtuous skepticism around big farmer. And yet there's how much baby's going out with the bathwater here. Does this lead to people maybe not getting cancer treatments that they really, really need? And Steve's jobs in it. It's a difficult one, man. This is one of the things, and we're seeing this everywhere. The danger and the challenge of just lots of information. We presume that people who were better informed, who had access to an unlimited amount of information, would be able to get better outcomes. Kind of not the case, right? Because for every good thing that's out there, there's maybe

five or six contrary conflicting, mutually conflicting bad things. So more information isn't always the solution. Exactly. And if you don't know how to process information, you're going to be a victim of bad information. And that's kind of one of the things that we try to focus on. Since we don't necessarily do martial arts as much anymore because I mean honestly it's not an existential threat. There's bigger things going on in the world. We're focused on self-defense against bullshit. That's what Bullshit is doing now because we're trying to teach people how to think to be responsible consumers of information because if you don't have

the tools to defend yourself against all that bullshit, you're going to be somebody else's tool yourself. They're going to manipulate you into voting against all that bullshit, you're going to be somebody else's tool yourself. They're going to manipulate you into voting against your own interests, to buying products you don't need, to living a lifestyle that is inauthentic. And so there's just so many, our whole system from the ground up is almost predatory in a way. And so I understand how people are like skeptical. I don't believe anyone with

this amount of power. I don't, you know, pharmaceutical industry is out there and they're trying to make profits and they don't do not, they legitimately do not give a crap about the end user. They're not ethical entities. And you can't, like, you're not going gonna try a pharmaceutical company for murder. You can't put them in jail. You can't even a capital punishment. You can't execute a company, at least not in the system that we have. So I get it. I understand the skepticism. So what I want to do is, I mean, what everyone sort of has a moral obligation to do is go train, train their understanding of how to read news, how to parse news, how to see, okay, this is a gender driven bullshit, this is what is this agenda, because everybody has an agenda.

But where is the actual underlying fact in all of that, sort through that and try and find the actual path to navigate through that, because it that. Because the saddest part about it, as I think about it, is that most people don't have the free time. They don't. They're busy living their lives. They're busy trying to enjoy those lives. And so even the few people that are out there just like wired in a weird way to be like I am to try and say,

no, no, this is BS, this is BS. I mean, what's my agenda? I mean, are you going to believe me? Because I'm not you. I have my own thoughts and priorities and stuff like that. So it's hard. So I mean, we have to be better at communicators and as a community, like to push the bad actors out, at least marginalize them, and to try and have conversations so that we reach the people that have questions, legitimate questions and concerns and fears. And because those are the first people they get preyed on by the grifters, the con artists, the must-ass twirling assholes and the, you know, the big pharma

companies and that kind of thing. Yeah, the top hats and the canes that they're twirling along. Yeah, I understand. It's, it's never been so difficult to be a person just trying to work out what the fuck's going on. You know, no, I don't know. Maybe in the past, the information that you would have got by your local barren or whatever would have probably not been very truthful, but at least it wasn't on you if it was, you didn't need a sophisticated sense-making apparatus to try and actually discern what was happening. And I can't work out.

It's a genuine question whether or not it's better to live in a world with suboptimally accurate information which you don't need to spend most of your time trying to discern, or a world in which you have access to all of the information, but every single mistake that you make is on your head, because you didn't do enough fact checking before you decided to make a decision. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, I don't think we're going to be able to escape that unless we just sort of have some kind of apocalypse and we regress back to the Fuck it. I'm in for Mad Max. I'm in for Mad Max. Fuck it. Let's do it

Look ladies and gentlemen Frost it's been a pleasure. Where should people go if they want to check out your stuff? I'm on Twitter at PhD RST, but bullshito.net is the website. We have podcast We live stream on Twitch and that kind of thing and so we have forums on bullshito.net We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do.

We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have a lot of things to do. We have, hey, just to do your own, you know, research, you know. So I appreciate you. Right. Cheers, man.

All right. Thanks, man. It's been great. you