The Biggest Problem in the Universe: Uncucked - Episode 97

Episode Date: June 21, 2018

Welcome to the biggest problem in the universe, the show where we discuss every problem in the universe from bad dancers to colon cancers. With over 5 million downloads, this is the only show where you decide what shooter shouldn't be on the big list of problems. I'm Maddox with me as Dick. Hey, what's that funny? Sean, our audio engineer. Hello. How many colon cancers are there? There's got to be at least a handful.

Or a buttload of them, you might say. You can say colon cancers are a handful. Yeah. Yeah, there's a buttload. All right. Yeah, so our first. between Madoff and Tim Changs. Okay, it's Maddox.

We're all waiting for the beef. The beef settling. All right, man. There's so much that pissed me off about last episode. I couldn't sleep. I was so upset. Sleep deprivation. Vote up.

Vote up sleep deprivation because of Tim fucking Chang's. Really? Why? I was a nervous wreck all week. I couldn't drive. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't walk. I couldn't eat.

How could you tell? I was upset. You're nervous with all those things. I was just shaking. Anger shacks. Oh, my God. Yeah, anger tremors. Why?

He was a great guest. He had a lot of, well, he didn't have a lot of research. No. He had a good, he had a strong POV, though. That takes some guts. Yeah. He was just sitting in his lift out there for a couple minutes, putting that together. You know, I'm impressed by that.

I wish he would have stayed in his lift. He had those sick drops, too, like this one. Made off, you some bitch. Shit. My favorite was when he talked about his passion for making pasta. Yeah. Or someone else's passion. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But if your passion was to make a piece of. make pasta. Yeah. Did you see how many... I knew this would happen. We got so many motivational posters that people mocked up with Tim Chang's, his stupid sayings all over them. Yeah, I saw those.

Yeah. But anyway, moving on. Why were you angry about him? Why were you angry about him? Well, you're going to find out why I'm still angry at him. Oh. Because the biggest problem from last week was haters. Oh. It's a big problem, though.

No, it's not. Haters? Why is haters a problem at all? Because they don't contribute. anything. They just hate and tear down. I can't do Tim's whole speech here, but all I know is if you have a dream that's making pasta, maybe the

world doesn't get to feel your, experience your pasta, because you're so busy fighting off haters. It's a little close to home, doesn't it, Maddox? Maybe that's why. I'm a hate... I'm not denying I'm a hater. I'm the biggest hater. I admit that. I was born a hater. My mom knows I'm a hater. My dad knows I'm a hater. You come from

a long line of haters, too, I imagine. I imagine. I bet your parents are tremendous haters. Oh, that's true. They are haters. Oh, man, they'll all make sense now. Yeah. I come from a proud tradition of haters and hating. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, I admit that, but I don't think that we're a problem. I think we're a solution, buddy. What does the audience think, though? Yeah, we know what they think because they voted it. He's dipshits. Followed by poor Jim etiquette. Oh. Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah. I know. It was fluctuating back and forth. And then haters made a surprise rally in the last minute. And then pretty close, actually. the attention deficit disorder diagnosis. All of them were in the same neighborhood of votes, which it was in the lead for a while in the voting,

and then a bunch of butt hurt, crybaby, lacking attention, idiots. You know, people who have a deficit of attention voted it up. I got that. Yeah. Huh. Sounds like you're doing some hating right now. I am hating.

I got a comment, though, from Joshua McCaffrey. He sent this in email. He said, Maddox, I can't begin to tell you how happy I was that you brought this into the show as a problem. I will be 37 in April, and I was around for the initial influx of this diagnosis into the public schools. It's going to be a long comment.

That's how you know it's going to be a long comment when they start with their age. Yeah, well, he said, I had just started in sixth grade when a month in, I was scheduled for a doctor's visit and miraculously enough, diagnosed with ADHD. I was prescribed riddlin and wellbutrin. Reason being, Josh is unable to focus

and pay attention in class. That's all the evidence they need to diagnose you. mask it too. That's what annoys me about that problem that you were talking about. Like, because, like I said last time, class sucks, it's boring. But you have to just be able to sit there and, like, not react

to your feelings. Like, I think a kid who is paying attention in class, I think there would be something wrong with them. Because that's boring stuff you're looking at, kid. Yeah. You know? Keep going, anyway. No, a lot of kids are like that. A lot of kids just are fidgety and they have too much energy and they need to burn it off.

This kid said, he said, I later come to find out that My mother had read about this new disease in children and decided I needed to be checked for it. Ironically enough, after taking that shit for six months and seeing my grades not improve or decline, I realized that the reason I was being prescribed was due to my wanting to simply be a child and enjoy my childhood by screwing around in school and having fun. So I decided to temper my shenanigans in class and pay attention. And without my mother's knowledge, I stopped taking it. And when the school nurse gave it to me, I pretended to swallow it and would spit it out in the garbage can. Wow. Needless to say, that was the first time I had been an honor student with the 3.1 GPA,

and it was then that I finally decided to tell my mother, and she promptly canceled my prescription. Huh. This kid just stopped fucking around in school, and his mom took him off the drugs. Huh. Maybe his mom just pretended to cancel the prescription. I got a comment from Samuel Williams. Madoff, use a bitch. Okay.

Great. How many more of those he got? I know you brought in a ton of them. No, I only brought the one. I don't think it's that funny. This one's from Zach Owen. Madoff, use a bitch Jose Pedro

Maddo Madoff Usa bitch Petto Jose Petto Charles David says Madhoff Use apostrophe F

So presumably it's U's U It's your bitch You're a bitch Uh huh May Dolph from Adam Davis Usa bitch You know I don't even know what that accent is that Tim Chang's brought in

Does he think he's black? He thinks he's black I don't know Yeah Use I don't know. Is it an abbreviation of what, a contraction of what two words? I think he thinks he's half black.

If I were to guess, I'm going to go out on a limb and imagine, I think he imagines one of his parents or perhaps a third parent is black. And he's taking the bad Asian accent and combining it with a stereotypical and a very offensive black accent, I have to say. Super offensive. And we know it's not the bottom half that's black. There's about 50 more of these. You know what's the scariest thing is that he's a lift driver. Yeah.

I got a comment from Jessica Saffron. Jessica, as you know, is one of the illustrators. And a great illustrator. She's a babe. She's an illustrator. She's done some of the thumbnails for the show. She has the Satan Ninja 19X comic. You should check out online.

But anyway, she sent a comment. She said, you made so many good points about ADHD, but sort of went backwards a bit when you'd say that you don't think it's a real disorder. I mean, you could say that about a ton of mental disorders due to their sort of nebulous nature, the fact that the majority of them can't be pinpointed or diagnosed by an observable physiological cause, and each probably include many different causes for different patients. So then she talked about this interesting science Friday episode they did, where they talked about how this sort of thing when the DSM-5 came out, if you're interested in hearing about it.

Anyway, she said that the same could be said of a lot of psychological disorders is that the cause can sometimes be nebulous, so we shouldn't dismiss it entirely or we shouldn't write it off. Are you saying, is this a long way of saying I'm not a doctor? I'm not a doctor. I'm not a doctor. I think I am

a doctor. I know. That's why I think that's why this is taking so long for you to say that. I will never not admit that I'm a doctor. I don't know. This guy, I don't know if this guy agrees or disagrees with what you're saying right now because I don't understand it. Maddoch, you're the dumbest motherfucker

on the face of the other. You're going to complain about ease of use and things like self-checkout lines, but you can't seem to solve a fucking maze that literally any toddler can fucking figure out, all right, retard, go fuck yourself. And they complain about people's check. Okay, I don't know. No, no, what was he going to say? I mean potato. You're the same piece of shit that shows up a week later.

It's like, I don't know why I bought this and when I bought it, because your ass is probably hammered when you decided to buy some fucking razor. I hope so. And then you want to give the customer. First of I, I'd be ordering Razors at home, courtesy of Harry's at the time. But no, of course you don't need a fucking receipt. Retard. Here's another one.

I'm pretty angry about that. Wait, what's he talking about the maze? He's not self-checkout lines. Oh, self-churchout lines. Oh, self-ter-taughts. Hey, Madoff, you fucking retard. You have no idea what it takes to get diagnosed with ADD or ADHD. You end up going to a shrink, and the shrink gives you multiple tests.

Dumb shit, wrong. Written tests. Reading comprehension tests, puzzle tests, word problem test. Absolutely not. Over the course of several weeks or several months. At that point, if you meet enough of the 11 benchmarks, you get diagnosed with ADHD. And then they give you medication, which turns you into a fucking robot. Yeah.

You have no idea what you're talking about. Okay. You fucking armchair psychologist. Okay. Fuck you, Madoff. Dick, you're a cool guy. Oh, okay. Fuck that guy. He's an idiot. He's a dumb shit. He's a moron.

Here's the thing. Where are you going to jump through all these mental gymnastics and all these tests and quizzes and, you know, stipulations? This is not scientific. ADD is mostly diagnosed. I brought in the stats and linked to the sources last episode. ADD is usually diagnosed by parents who think that their child, their son or daughter can't pay attention in school. Therefore, give them riddling. But doesn't the doctor have to prescribe the medication? The parents can't do that. Yeah, but the doctor can based on the parents' recommendation. And by the way...

Really? Yeah. I don't know, man. I've tried to give Vicodin a lot, and the doctors are very resistant to my descriptions of pain. Well, Vicodin is also... Because it says careful patient has drug-seeking behavior on my chart. Yeah, there you go. So Vicodin is one of those things that people get addicted to and people take for pleasure.

But redolin and wellbutrin, things that supposedly help your... Yeah, an Adderall. That help your focus are not. not prone tubus. I guess Adderall is now. Yes, they are. Yeah, of course they are. Yeah, they're like heavily regulated. They're like cocaine. Yeah, but not for kids. Like, they know that if you're buying, if you're getting it for your kids, they're not going to, uh, they're not going to sit there, uh, you know, I've taken kids Adderall. Okay, great. No, that's a real thing that happens. Absolutely. Adderall's an exception. Adderall's an exception

because college kids, it's kind of popular for, uh, as a focus and study drug. Yeah, dexedrine, Adderall. But not riddling. Good drug, too. Yeah, riddling, yeah, riddling, I think for Riddle is a speed type thing. I'm not sure what messes with your brain, dude. People take GHB for fun. That doesn't seem fun, but people take ketamine for fun. That doesn't seem fun at all. It's just a drug. Some people pierce

themselves and hang from hooks from the ceiling for fun. Who knows? What the fuck? Hey, that's just an excuse for everything now, isn't it? Look, dickheads, the point is they're not giving you such, they're not giving you guys such stringent tests and requirements to give you fucking riddle, and they want

to give you that shit. They want to sell it to you. So you think that guy's wrong. Yeah, he's full of shit. How dare you two assholes confront me with facts? Yeah, the facts are that I brought in last episode. Check the sources, idiots. Well, somebody has a problem with your sources, too. Great, let's hear it.

My Manox's opinion on ADD is really bad. The Science of Psychology Today article, which is written by a totally unqualified individual who has written for rigorous scientific journals such as Natural Health, People Magazine. Wall Street Journal This is an ironic Is that true?

Adhomonym attack? I don't know. What have you written for? Literally actually the same anti-science bullshit that anti-Vax people complain about. Is that true? I don't know.

Could be? I mean, here's the thing, man. Look, that's an ad hominem attack. I don't know what else to say. Oh, stop with the fallacy, shit. It's a fallacy. If a reporter is writing for natural health, then goes over to

psychology today and shits one out. You have a good reason not to believe them so much. Look, man, I don't know. I've never heard of the psychology. No, what was it, Natural Health Journal? Yeah. It sounds like it's probably filled. People magazine. No, it's a natural health is like a magazine.

You get on the grocery store newsstand. No, no, but natural health. Is that, oh, was he making a joke that it was not a journal? It was just a magazine Natural Health magazine. I think so. It's the only one I've ever heard of. I mean, I don't know. It's something you'd find it like an OBGYN's office.

Yeah. Next to the highlights magazine. Right. I don't know, man. I don't know. I don't know. look at the value of the article that was published, look at the study. And by the way, that article that I linked to from Psychology Today is simply talking about

why French kids aren't diagnosed with ADHD. When that study came out, when that article came out, it was published in Psychology Today in, I believe, Washington Post, in Newsweek, lots of different publications. I just picked one and posted it on the website. So if you want to shit on that author for, you know, your ad hominem fallacy, whatever shithead, why don't you do the actual research and do the legwork before you criticize your master? Okay, this guy's got a pretty good criticism, though. Okay.

Made up, you the bitch. Great. That's that it. All right. Is that your nephew? No, no. Okay. All right, let's get to the problems.

Okay. My first problem. It's a big one. I think you're going to love it. I think I will. Is decision fatigue. Yeah. Thank you.

All right. I'm on board with this. I've been wanting to bring this in for a while now. This is a really good problem. Okay. I brought it, let's all, let's just be clear that I brought it in, everyone. I threw you a bone.

It doesn't matter. No, that's the highest endorsement that Maddox can give, though. That's true. Well, that's something I would have done. Not that that's smart. Or that's something good resulted from it, just, I would have done that. You know, if I had presented it, it would have gone like this. Oh, shit, I didn't think of that.

Oh, that's true, Sean. That's a preview for next week. Uh-huh. Thank you, Sean. No, but as, as hosts for the show, the biggest problem in the universe, at some point, we have to cover all the problems. And whether or not you bring it in or I bring it in, we're just both doing a gayman's job of bringing in all these problems to discuss

so that the listener can be informed when they're voting on the master list of problems. Yeah. Okay, so it doesn't matter. What we're doing is preventing you from suffering from decision fatigue. Right. You, the listener, are sitting there in your life. You're wondering, what is the biggest problem in the universe? I've got to go through an infinite number of problems and decide what I should dedicate my life to solving.

or how much of my life I should dedicate to solving it. We've given you a mathematical list of ranked problems that you can consult to see what you should spend your life trying to fix because it is objectively the biggest problem in the universe. True or false. Correct. Absolutely correct. True.

So decision fatigue. This occurred to me this week, and it happens to me a lot. And it always gets me bent out of shape, and I don't know why. And I feel like an asshole that this does get me bent out of shape. But it does. You know, I don't act like when this situation happens to me, I don't act like an asshole, or at least I try not to, but it bothers me in my brain. It gives me that annoyed feeling that I trust. What specifically?

This is how it goes. So I was at my parents' house, and I'm only going to give this specific example, but it happens many times in lots of different ways. Yeah. I was at my parents' house, and my mom was coming over to my mom was coming home. And she said, hey, I'm going to stop at this grill down the street and pick up some food. Yeah. What do you want? And I was like, boom, club sandwich, turkey club, right?

Done. And she goes, or I could stop anywhere you want. Here's where I am. You know where I'm going. You pick. That's exactly the reaction I had. Yeah. Right?

And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. I just wanted to like hit like a reset, like go back to a save point. so I could not have this conversation because now I'm in a crisis mode. I'm like sweating because I'm not... Again, she's asking to be as nice as possible. Here's...

I'm not forcing you. She's not forcing me to go to this cafe. She wants me to be able to pick from any restaurant in the world, pretty much. 20 miles of restaurants, as far as you can see, thousands of items that I could choose from. I could get a hummus sandwich. I could get a hero wrap.

I could get a... A doubles hamburger. I could get in and out. Anything I want. But the possibility of choosing from 10,000 things has suddenly made me irate in my brain, right? Yeah. To a point where I just want the original thing,

but now I'm less happy getting that. You know, this might be a couple of things going on. First of all, the paradox, okay, so the more common phrase for this problem that I know of is the paradox of choice. Here we go. I like that you put that I know of on it. Yeah. Okay.

Because that's how I first heard of this problem is the paradox of choice. Now there's that going on. And also there might be a little bit of passive-aggressive behavior going on. What do you mean passive-aggressive? From me? No. Better be from me. Not from you.

From my mother? Possibly. No, you're out of your mind. No way. Here's where it's happened to me in a similar situation where I'll, a friend will ask me where I want to go to eat. Yes, your friend's definitely passive-aggressive. I want. Coming from an authority.

My friends ask me where I want to go eat, I'll say Thai food. I don't know. Dick's not passive aggressive. No, I'm very aggressive. Okay, fair enough. I'll say Thai food, boom, right out the gates, right? And then they'll say, well, you know, we could also do X, Y, and Z, burger, pizza, etc. It's like, well, is that what you want?

They'll say, no, no, Thai food is fine, but, you know, I'm just throwing out more options out there. I said, well, why would you throw more options out there if I already... stated what I wanted. Okay. Because that's what they want. Here's what I think's going on. I think that you're getting the same trigger as me and you're ascribing passive aggression to it. But I actually brought in a thing that shows a study, you know, our favorite thing on this fucking show, a study that shows at a certain number of point, when you have a tremendous amount of choices, no matter what, when you end up with the choice you wanted, which you would think was a choice that, like, your dream choice, because the more choices you have, the more likely that you're

going to get a better version of what you want. You would think. But it makes you enjoy it less, even if it's the thing you wanted, because the act of choosing from so many things is so stressful that it lowers the amount of enjoyment you can have, period. True. That's part of decision fatigue that I'm bringing in today. Yeah. But that's getting a little ahead of myself.

Here's the other things it can do. It's the deteriorating quality of decisions made by an individual after long sessions of decision-making. Yeah. So you make a lot of decisions every day. Right. Like, let's say your job was to be a decision-maker, like to judge one outcome versus another. Sure. Like if you were a judge.

Yeah. Yeah. There's a study I brought in of parole board judges. who they're judging, their decision was based on like a consensus ruling, like after the fact. Do you agree or disagree? Here was the rate of agreement and disagreement over the period of the day. I want you to feast your eyes on that study. Yeah, over the period of the day, earlier on in the day, it's more agreeable, right?

And later on the day... Meaning that all judges agreed this was the correct move. Yes, they agree with the consensus. And then later on in the day, as time goes on, that agreement, They disagree with the consensus. Yeah. Meaning that if you're going up for parole, if you don't get in before 8 a.m., you're fucked. Right.

Because they're not making the right call, right? They're less likely to make the right call later on in the day. You want that decision to be made at the top of the day if you can. Well, what if you shouldn't be, you know, going on parole? Yeah, but that's what the consensus means. Oh, right, right, right. Because the other judges said, yeah, you shouldn't have let this guy go. Why did you?

He's an illegal immigrant. He's going to rape or murder someone. Yeah, build that wall. And good Mexico to pay for it. All right, here's another outcome of this. Poverty. It causes you to be poor and fat. Decision fatigue.

Because, here's why, the stress of making a decision when you're shopping for groceries is so great for poor people that it causes decision fatigue. It's not like someone in the middle class or someone in the upper class who just goes, whatever, throw the bread on there, throw the soup on there,

they get whatever they want. They're going to Whole Foods and just walking down the aisle like at supermarket sweep, filling up the cart. They don't care. There's no decisions involved. Poor person goes in, they got to weigh the opportunity cost of every little thing they buy, right? How long can I stretch this out?

How long can I stretch this out? By the time they get to the register, they're so sapped from decision-making, they're ready to scoop up some candy, right? They're ready to scoop up impulse buys, which are all marketed in order to take advantage of your weakness in decision-making, right?

Of your willpower. Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of interesting phenomenon that's going on in this problem, Dick. There's a book that I would highly recommend to our listeners to check out. It's called Fast and Slow Thinking. And it's about the social scientists

who discover this phenomenon about the human mind where we have two types of thinking. Fast that are impulsive decisions. Wait a minute. Let me guess the second type of thinking. Even faster thinking. No ass. Slow thinking, is this.

Yeah. Yeah. I guess that's the splitting hairs at that point. So I think I mentioned this long time ago. I listened to an episode of Radio Lab a long time ago where they did this experiment where they asked people to memorize a set of numbers between four and I believe 11 digits or something like that. Most people on average have no problem memorizing up to seven digits. But after that it drops off exponentially. Or is it log?

No, it's exponentially. It drops off how likely you are to remember all those digits. So they assigned a control group a bunch of different digits to memorize. Yeah. And then they told them to memorize that number, walk down the hallway, and get a refreshment. The refreshments they offered them. Was Coke and Pepsi? And the idiots shows Pepsi.

No. Right. That would be an interesting thing. Fireball cinnamon whiskey. It was not. And a bowl of pee. It was grapes versus chocolate cake. There you go.

Now, here's the interesting part. The people who are memorizing the longer digits, 7 plus versus 4, overwhelmingly chose the chocolate cake. And that's because the part of your mind that is preoccupied with memorizing those longer digits is also the part of your mind that you use for critical thinking. Right. And the longer it's preoccupied, the less likely you are to make a decision that's right or good or just for you.

And that's what's going on with this phenomenon of poor people when they have decision fatigue when they go out to check out their groceries at the end of the day, they aren't working with all eight cylinders. Well, imagine that you're, instead of just memorizing a number, if you don't remember that number, your kids are going to starve. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of additional stress for them. That number, they're built to make bad choices.

Right, that number they're memorizing oftentimes is how much do I own the phone bill, how much do I owe for my car rent, how much do I have for insurance, or the payday loans, or whatever? How am I going to afford this iPhone, right? They're typical poor people problems. Yeah, poor people with poor decision-making skills use iPhones. That's true. Yes, scientific proof that poor people are bad decision-makers, right in my hands.

And I think it's even worse than this. I'm going to get real crazy with conspiracy shit because I don't want to spend a lot of time on this problem. But here's a good problem. I like this. Well, you know, you make the point and then people vote on it. That's what I like to you. It's so prevalent for us.

Um, when I go, when I go to watch television, used to be when I was a kid, you fire up the TV, and you get a little screen, you get one channel that gives you a grid that tells you everything that's on. It's a list. Yeah. You go through the list, and when you find something that you might not want to kill yourself by watching, like, okay, you know, I'll watch Goonies. Fine. I'm changing it to like Cinemax or whatever. Yeah. Doesn't exist anymore. That was nice and simple. A nice binary choice. Yes, no, yes, no. Each one, yes, no, yes, no. Now, when I go to watch TV,

I have no idea where to go. I go to Netflix. Where the fuck do I start? I got to get out my computer and search for what is not dog shit on Netflix right now because 99% of it is and I don't want to watch?

Where the fuck do I even start with this? How many video on demand services do I even have? I've got someone's Hulu probably plugged into my Apple TV, does that come into the equation at some point? Netflix, Amazon Prime, I've got Netflix, I've got Apple TV, do I have access to my brother-in-law's shows on this?

How many fucking decisions do I need to make before I unwind? And this is every time I want to watch TV. So fuck it, I'll just watch Mad Men over. I'll just watch Trailer Park Boys over again. Yeah. Is it so stressful dealing with all this? I'll go to buy a rice maker. I wanted to make some rice this week.

Yeah. Figure out punch rice maker into Amazon. Oh, I got 15,000 rice makers to choose from. So 45 minutes later, I'm still comparing features. I'm like, well, I don't know how many fucking rice things, how many servings of rice do I want to make every week? How, I've got another tab open that says I should be making four cups of rice at a time and freezing half of it because that is better leftover rice.

I'm chiseling the value of my fucking rice out like a peasant farmer in the middle of China for what? Like this is what all these things have brought me is more fucking decisions and I hate it. Well you talk about the lessening of enjoyment. If I'm watching TV I am constantly menu scanning because I'm afraid there's something else

that's better to watch on. Because there is! There always is! I don't enjoy what I'm watching because I'm always thinking there's something better. My friend Madeline once told me that she never enjoys going to parties in L.A. because she feels like no matter what party she's at she feels like there's one that's better right around the corner.

Oh, dude, and if you try to talk to anyone at those parties, their heads on a fucking swivel. Oh, my gosh, yeah, because they're talking to you. It's so ugly. L.A. is so ugly. They're also scanning the room to see who else is there, and what other person's coming to the party? Who else can I talk to? Dick, this problem, I used to have this problem, two of them that you mentioned, specifically looking at items and comparing them for hours on Amazon. I used to do that, and for me, I realized a long time ago as a form of procrastination.

and also the paradox of choice, which makes your decision finally when you make it less satisfying when you do than had you just impulse bought whatever one. Look, look, if I was going to buy a rice maker or rice cooker today. Yeah, I just go, I pull up the one that has the cheap, it's the cheapest one with the highest reviews done. I don't care. I know some of them are going to be negative.

I know some of them are going to be positive. But overall, I'm probably going to get a decent rice cooker if it has 4,000, four and a half star reviews. Hide the rest of them. that's the Amazon killer. It's going to be another company that opens up and they just sell one of everything. One of everything.com.

So I haven't had cable or dish in a long time. And I remember when, I think the last time I had dish was when I lived at my parents' house because after I moved out, I thought, I'm not out of my fucking mind. I'm not going to order this bullshit in my house and then go through this 300 plus channels

with this matrix of programming and which hours a certain show is on and whether or not it's a rerun or what. I don't have time for that shit. So I canceled, I canceled, I cut my cable a long time ago. It's been at least like six, seven years, something like that, longer than that, maybe. Where now all I have is the... Before it was cool, probably.

Yeah, well, you know, I just didn't find myself watching it. I have nothing against people who watch TV. I'm not going to be one of those pretentious snobs who think that people who watch TV are dollars or idiots. I think that there's a lot of good stuff on TV. I just don't have, I don't, I don't prioritize it in my life. You know, I'm a right. You know, I'm a right. You know, I'm a right.

You know, I'm a writer. By the way, what was the deal with that on iTunes? A lot of people said that they downloaded the episode, and that's all it played. People were emailing me for it, so I asked Randy to upload it, and I forgot that any MP3 in the post gets treated. I'll upload it this time correctly. Randy fucked it up, everyone. That's what happened.

Handy, Randy. Blame it on right. The man who can't defend himself. So anyway, I replace my dish and my cable with an HD antenna, which I highly recommend everyone get right now. I'll link to it on the website. It's called the HD Leaf. It's a simple HD antenna.

You plug into your TV. You get, I don't know, in large metropolitan cities, you get about 60, 70 channels on it, which is more than enough. I get a bunch of shitty public access channels, which is all I like to watch anyway. And then you get the network channels. What more do you need? And let me tell you, Dick, I have never been happier watching TV. I don't remember being this happy watching TV since I was a kid. When you were a kid, you only had like 10 channels, and you just cycled through them all until you found something you liked.

And then he thought, okay, this is what I'm. watching today. Yeah. But when you have all those options on cable and dish, it's overwhelming. And no matter what decision you make, you will not be as satisfied had you just chosen something. Yeah, that's true. I got real quick, or maybe not real quick.

Here's something else it causes. Decision avoidance. Found that people who had more choices were often less willing to decide to buy anything at all. I do that all the time. Confronted with 30 options instead of when they faced six. They gave people 30 options They said, fuck it, I can't.

They gave them six, and I got no problem. It's overwhelming. This is the jam study, right? Is it the jam study? It's the D's study. No, I know that D's Nuts study. This is the jam study, Dick, where they, I think they set up a display case

of jams and jellies in a store one day, and they put up six. People couldn't pick a jam out of 30 jams. They couldn't pick a jam? No, well, what they did occasionally, but they bought fewer jams and jellies when there were 30 choices. versus six. Oh, I see. That's interesting.

And then when they were interviewed about the product quality afterwards, even though it was the exact same brand and the exact same kind of jelly that they were buying, they were less satisfied when they had to choose from 30 as opposed to the six. Yeah. Let's see, I already did the judge's one. I think it plays, it plays a part in cars. Yeah. People buying stupid shit for the car. I think, I think this played not as big as some other factors, but played a factor in the housing crash. Because buying a house, choosing different houses, is so stressful. I bet people just kind of said, oh, you know what, fuck it. I'm just going, I know that I can't afford this. My impulse sector is flaring up like an old disease. I'm just getting this big house that looks pretty that the real realtor's pushing me toward.

That's how I bought my first two cars. There you go. Fatigue, choice fatigue. Also, causes terrorism. That's it. Okay. That's it. attack it on. Big problem. I heard, I don't know if there's an anecdote and I hate mentioning it

because it's Einstein, but I heard this anecdote that Einstein always wore the same outfit every day because he said it was one less decision he had to make. And I have a friend in real life who does that. He wears the exact same outfit all the time. I have decided to kind of not exactly model that in my life, but to model it in a way so that the number of decisions I usually have to choose from is between three things. I always whittle it down to the top three and then I choose between those two. and here's the best friend of a critical thinker, a coin. If you weigh the pros and cons of everything, of every decision, and it comes down to it, flip a coin, move on with your life.

That's true. I always thought that anecdote you tell about the coin is stupid, but after presenting that, I've convinced myself that it's not. Awesome. I'm awesome. I wish it wasn't Einstein, too, in that anecdote. It could be anybody else. It could be. Let's just say it's someone else.

Okay, it's Feynman. Richard Feynman. All right, here we go. I got a real big problem this week, Dick. Sean? What? You might be one of these. Overpopulation alarmists. Yeah.

Big problem. No. I don't know. There's way too many people on her. Oh, yeah, okay. There you go. There we go. Here we are.

Yeah, it's disgusting. Yeah, now we got a game. All right. Overpopulation alarmists or Malthusian alarmists because it's based on this guy you'll hear about in just a second minute. Overpopulation is a problem that either takes care of itself or a problem that is easily avoided with technology. Every few years, like clockwork, there's some overpopulation alarmist dipshit who rings bells to warn everyone that the Earth is overpopulated and that a great cataclysm is about to come. Like from God?

Never happens. No, just that, oh, we're going to run out of food. Oh, there's just going to be a famine. Oh, disease, war, something. I mean, there's a touch of that in global warming. You have to admit that a touch of that type of thing. thinking is in all this global warming propaganda. That, well,

that's cataclysmic thinking. It's not overpopulation. Okay. Yeah. So, one of the earliest overpopulation alarmist was a guy named Thomas Malthus, the guy I mentioned at the top of this. Boy, here. In 1779. Thomas Malthus, right? He was a psychic.

Or if you want to go by the more common name for his occupation, he was an economist. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Here's what he wrote in 1779. He said, the power of population is so superior to the power of Earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must, in some shape, or another, visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. And the vices he talks about is misery and suffering.

He said those are the only reasons we're not overpopulated right now. Is because of misery? Because of misery and suffering. Yeah. Wait. He makes some convoluted argument. Anyway, the guy was a dipshit. Yeah.

Pretty good psychic, though. You're still talking about him 200 years later, 250 years later. Yeah, because he's the butt of jokes. On a podcast, followed by me burping up my food. Boy, he's really arrived. One idiot.

Maybe he's right. Thomas Maldus. He's such a dumb shit. Every lesser mind-dullered idiot ape I talk to online always invokes this overpopulation myth. Really? It's a myth, yeah, all the time. I've never heard it outside of like a cram.

tank pot, like using crazy people as an example, or like listening to some crazy hippie, like some commune hippie who literally understands nothing about how their, how civilization works. Yeah. Like no idea where their clothes came from. Right. No idea where food even comes from. Yeah. You know, it's interesting you mentioned crazy hippies with no idea how the economy works or where

their clothes comes from. Yeah. Because every website I saw him cited on with some more. Marxist website. Yeah. There's all these websites that are just Marxist propaganda and they're all citing

Thomas Malthus here. Here's what he predicted, all of which seems pretty reasonable to a lesser mind. Listen to this. Population level is severely limited by subsistence. Okay.

When the means of subsistence increases, population increases. All right. I'm on board with that so far. Population pressures stimulate increases in productivity. Okay. Yeah, that makes sense.

Yeah, kind of have to. Increases in productivity stimulates further population growth. True. Since this productivity can never keep up with the potential of population, uh-oh, for long, there must be strong checks in population to keep in line with carrying capacity. Okay, there's where he runs into trouble. Well, wait a minute. Is he talking about the whole earth or little microcosms? He's talking about the whole earth.

Okay, that's... Globally. It's not even close. Yeah, not even close. He predicted Earth's carrying capacity was $1 billion plus $1 billion every 25 years at most. I don't know that that's not true. According to Forbes, there was a Times columnist who predicted in 1894 that by 1950 London would be buried in nine feet of manure due to people using horses for travel.

Yeah. He just did some simple math and he figured, okay, well, everyone's going to use horses. The population's growing. More people are going to be riding around with horses, so London's going to be covered in horse shit. That still sounds like global warming. New York will be buried underwater. 90 feet of ocean will be sweeping over the country. Doesn't it?

I mean, cataclysmically, yes, but it's a totally different process. I don't know. Overpopulation psychics, because let's call them what they are. Most economists are glorified psychics with shitty mathematical models that don't work. Oh, no. Right. These overpopulation psychics keep predicting peak oil every few years, too. These are the same people.

Marion Hubbard predicted peak oil in 1956, but he didn't predict ocean drilling or fracking. So, of course, that solved that problem. I didn't see that comment. No, I didn't see that comment. Well. Okay, wait a minute. I just had this thought. So what if his prediction of a billion people?

That's what I'm saying. Like, what if they asked this guy in the 1700s like, okay, wow, well, how many people do you think the earth could hold? And it was like, the actual number was like, I don't know, 200 million at that year. And he's like, I don't know, like a billion. Like, he throws out a number that he's like, that's impossible. Like, what's your prediction then? How many people? Because then in like 100 years they're going to say, this fucking moron Maddox that the world could only hold 500 billion people.

Here we're sitting at 7 trillion, no big deal, because half of them are plugged into the Oculus Rift. Yeah. Oh, man, I can't wait. What's your number then? How many people? Infinite? It's a fallacy to be able to predict. Predictions are a fallacy themselves.

It's fun. It's fine. It's a smart answer. Yeah. It's a smart answer. Yeah. Such a politician. Build that wall.

All right, man, listen, according to Forbes, the popular 1968 book, The Population Bomb, posited that in the 1970s, hundreds of millions would starve to death. The theory was that if food production is growing at X rate and the population growth is growing at a much faster Y rate, that could pose quite a problem. But then, along came Norman Borlaug who invented high-yielding, disease-resistant dwarf wheat, which solved that problem. Well, but wait a minute, there's millions of people starving to death in Africa and China right now. It's a very small...

It's like 2% of the world's population. And by the way, they're not starving because we don't have enough capacity to produce food to feed them. They're starving due to political corruption or the high cost of distribution and various other reasons. It's not starvation because we're overcapacity.

That's an important distinction, a small one, rather. Small but important. The problem with Malthus's predictions and those who agree with him is that they couldn't predict technological advances that allowed for increased population growth. Here are the things that Malthus and his cohorts, his dipshit psychic colleagues, didn't predict.

He didn't predict the full impact of the Industrial Revolution. What an idiot. Moron. What a pun. What an idiot who couldn't predict that. Something that would change the fundamental nature of society. Asshole didn't see the cotton gym coming. You sure didn't.

Watch me blow $100,000 in the stock market overnight, but this dummy couldn't predict the future. You know what? You know what, shithead? Yeah, I'm not going to make a prediction based on technologies that I don't know are going to be invented yet. That's an ad hominem attack. No, it's a fuck you, shit. You've been reading psychology today.

Was he right without the Industrial Revolution? Would he have been right with what they had at the time? No, of course not. The Industrial Revolution. I don't know. No, I told you. During the bonus episode, 133 on the website, check it out. During the bonus episode, I talked about the Industrial Revolution and how it transformed the society from 80% agriculture to 1%.

That freed up a lot of people to work on a lot of different things in productivity. So if without that, he might have been right. Oh, are you saying without the Industrial? Without the Industrial Revolution, how much acreage and people do you need dedicated to agriculture to power the world? What if it is $1 billion? That would be a hell of a guess. If we actually busted that out off the top? Like, how many acres does it take to feed a person using, like, Mennonite tools?

Only things available before the Industrial Revolution. I think the same amount is just that we'd spend more time doing it. I don't know. I think, like, I don't know. Of course, I don't know. I think industrialized farming has let you make a lot of food and a lot of less space. Like, you got a lot of cows driving up to Fresno, and the air is choked with with feces and orange chemical spray.

Yeah. Agent Orange is what they're spraying on the couch. It's awful driving up there. Here's how you avoid being a blowhard when it comes to predictions, okay? Thomas Malthus could have simply just looked backwards. Here we go. Yeah. Shut up, Sean. Listening audio you couldn't know what to do.

He should have got on Google and looked backwards in time. No, all he had to do is look at a history book and see the Iron Age and seeing how much that improved people's lives and improved agriculture and improved the population. All you have to do is look at the past and see that, oh, well, in the past, we've had huge technological advances. What reason do you have to believe that in the future we won't? What evidence do you have? He didn't have that evidence. Yeah, he was a psychic.

He was a psychic. You don't look backwards as a psychic. No, you don't look at evidence. You don't look at past history and evidence and precedent. What you do is you try to predict the future, which always gets you in trouble. And now dipshits on the internet are still citing Malthus for shitty arguments. He invented outrage porn. Yeah.

He really did. He didn't predict mechanized agriculture after World War II. He didn't predict the green revolution that increased agricultural yield tremendously in the developing world. He didn't predict an increase in the use of birth control. He didn't predict the future of our agricultural industry, which is likely vertical farming. In short, Thomas Malthus predicted only two things correctly. Jack and shit. No.

Do these alarmists cite anyone else besides Malthus? Oh yeah, there's plenty of them. This Forbes article that talked about that guy in the Times piece in 1894. He predicted that London would be covered in horse manure. That guy. That guy's really funny. And then they've also lumped people like Marion Hubbard. There's a bunch of these people who are...

What else did they say? I want to hear more global warming from the past. Like, what else would happen? Waves of demons would fly across the plains instead of hurricanes. Yeah. No, that population bomb book in the 1970s was another one. these. There's a bunch in this Forbes article. I'll link to it on the website. But yeah, anyway, in short, this guy didn't predict anything. I once argued with a lesser

mind in the fan forums that death was a good thing. He was arguing that death was a good thing because it was a solution to overpopulation. Which is, first of all, overpopulation has never been a global problem in human history. Never. There have been some regional instances of overpopulation, as I mentioned earlier, because of corruption or cost prohibitive distribution or bad crop yields, but we've never outgrown our capacity to feed and sustain our population, which is the definition of overpopulation. You idiots. Let me float this one by you.

Tell me if you've heard of this experiment. It's called The Beautiful Ones. No, what is it? Oh, it's a good one. It's a juicy experiment. So a team of researchers built a paradise for rats, right? Massive cage, massive cage, tunnels going every which way. cheese as far as the eye could see for these rats and they turned them loose right so at first the

rat population exploded like you would expect there's rat piece rat piece all of a rat town as the rats spread out and infested their new their cage but as population got out of control uh after the initial fights over territory where the rats killed each other you know they found that the male rats instead of becoming aggressively territorial would exhibit this weird phenomenon. Some of them, they would hold up in their little areas, their little nests, and they would sit there and...

What is it called? When you're cleaning yourself. What is that called when animals do it? Preen? Preen themselves? They'd preen themselves? Yeah. They would preen themselves.

They would lick themselves until their coats were beautiful and shiny and straight. They wouldn't pursue women at all. They would just sit there and preen and home make, right, essentially. Right.

The jump is, the jump in thinking is that in cities where massive population is a problem, New York, parts of America, Japan, that young males are doing the same thing these beautiful ones, these rats were doing, because of overpopulation, where they feel no possibility of territorial claims, they just hold themselves up in shitty little apartments,

making their little apartment better beautifying their apartment, maybe working out obsessively, collecting trophies obsessively, not pursuing the opposite sex, exhibiting no traits of like traditional masculinity. Maybe there's a comparison to draw there that overpopulation is having some effect on our generation. I'm obviously not saying that these idiots are correct that Earth could ever be overpopulated. Because Earth could probably support max a trillion people, right? I'm just saying that the study is very interesting because the rats exhibit behaviors that I see in modern men. Well, actually, you're right, Dick.

You touched on something really important here. Some species have self-control measures and refrain from reproduction via abstinence. And in humans, like humans in China, obviously, when China decided that they had a problem on their hands, they had a crisis, they couldn't feed the population, they had self-imposed abstinence measures. and some species even release pheromones that prevent them from reproducing. So that's true. There might be something to that because when you are stressed out due to being in close quarters with people and you don't have enough space or whatever, you are stressed and you do release pheromones that can inhibit reproduction. So yeah, you might be honest something.

Speak for yourself. Yeah. So yeah, anyway, Dick, I just want to end on this one point here. There's one note. there's an economist, Henry George, argued that Malthus didn't provide any evidence of a natural tendency for a population to overwhelm its ability to provide for itself.

There is no evidence for this. It's never happened. And here's the one big prediction. You like that economist. Yeah, you know what? You know what, Sean? Here's the thing. The only reason, the only reason,

oh, look, I don't know anything else. Yeah, you don't fuck you, Sean. Look, I've said, I'm going to. gone on the record saying there's some good economists. Yeah, on Greenspan. Most of them are just psychics, though. They're glorified psychics. Anyway, so here's the thing that overpopulation.

Greenspan admitted that he was a glorified psychic. Did he? He said he was wrong. Yeah. Oh, good. No, he really did. Yeah. Yeah, that's a critical thinker.

Someone who... No, he's a fucking idiot. Oh, okay. Go. Yeah, but why? Because he ceded a point. Here's the thing. Here's what most global...

What overpopulation alarmists aren't taking into consideration in the future. For future technology, something that we have just barely scratched the surface up. Vertical farming. Who knows what the capacity of our food output would be with vertical farming, with hydroponically grown vertical farming that doesn't eat any pesticides, that doesn't eat anything, we don't have to spray because we don't have pesticides in these buildings

or whatever these greenhouses are, whatever it is in the future, skyscrapers full of food. Who knows what the capacity of Earth is? Who knows? I mean, I don't think we're near, anywhere near the capacity of Earth. Well, I guess we'll find out. You know what we are at the capacity of? What's that?

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You always want the F word in an ad read. Over a million guys have made the switch. If you haven't, you're an idiot. Let's go to the next problem. What a dumb shit. All the people who haven't made the switch, dumb shits. I'm going to go on the record saying that. Write your hate mail to me.

I'll take it. Who would write mail over that? I can't hate mail for everything, man. Are you kidding me? I'm still getting hate mail about shit I said in the first episode. Anyway, whatever. Let's move on. Here's my next problem.

Bits. Bits. Bits, bits, bits. Now, I thought, and I think, and maybe you do too. I thought this was a comedy problem because I know a lot of comedians, Maddox knows a lot of comedians, Sean, I don't know if you know a lot of comedians. But comedians do this really horrible thing.

Yeah. Lately it's been assaulting women. But before those scandals, it was something that was almost as bad, which is constantly making jokes. Close second. Very close second. We'll leave it at that. Yeah. Second to the...

Yeah. And I thought it was just a comedy thing. I don't know if you agree with that or not. For the most part, yeah. The first time I noticed it, this phenomenon, was when I was at a cafe with a friend of mine, a couple of friends of mine, and one of them was a pretty...

I'd say he's like a mid-level comedian. Really funny dude. What is a mid-level comedian? Mid-level comedian. Is that like HBO stand-up or... No, pre- Comedy Central stand-up, but not so low level that he's not making a living. He's making a living off his comedy, but nobody's ever heard of it.

Okay. That's a mid-lo-season. Yeah, so you would think a guy who makes a living off this would want to not do it when he's not getting paid for it. Like, I don't see a lot of mechanics when they're out of the shop just going around changing tires on cars in the street, right? They're always on. But please go on, this guy, what happened?

Yeah, well, we were sitting there. This is the first time I noticed this phenomenon. We're sitting at this cafe, and I was just trying to have a normal conversation. Which, like, you know, we were all in the improv community, and you come out, and by the way, I hate myself for even saying that phrase out loud. Community, because it's full of people who would stab you in the back to get on an internet commercial. Well, yeah. Not you, because you're famous, but anyone else, yeah. Yeah, I don't give a shit, whatever.

So anyway, so we're sitting here. I'm just trying to have a normal conversation. I'm asking him questions about his life. I'm asking him where he lives, et cetera, et cetera. And every response is a fucking joke. Is a joke. And at some point, I have to take a step back and ask myself out loud, are you joking with me?

I don't know if you're telling me jokes now or if you're just being real. Can I get a real answer out of you for a minute? Because this is exhausting. It's exhausting to be around these people who are constantly telling jokes all the fucking time. You feel like you can't have a real connection with these people. He probably can't turn it off. It's almost as if he's brain damage. Would you say that?

I could say that. Well, turns out, it's true. Did you see this last week? The pun article, right? The pun article saying that compulsive joking is a symptom of brain damage. And I wouldn't bring this in because, like you, I thought it was just a comedy thing.

But I was talking to this girl after Deadpool came out. And she was like, I hated it. I hated Deadpool because it was just constant jokes. and it reminded me of my friend who would make constant jokes and I was thinking about it was like, well, yeah, I have friends like that too outside of the comedy community and it's exhausting. It's like nails on a chalkboard exhausting. So I think that the voting will show whether or not this is a problem globally.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. Yeah. I brought in that study, if you're in the brain damage study if you're interested in it. Do you want to hear about it? Yeah, of course. Yeah, okay. And I also brought in a test to see if anyone here is brain damage.

Okay. So this guy's wife, or, yeah, this guy was bothering his wife. He'd wake her up to tell her these jokes. Jokes like, I'm not going to read that one. It's horrible. Let's hear these horrible jokes. I like to hear a bad joke. Here's one of the jokes that he woke his wife up to tell her in the middle of the night.

Went to the DMV to get my driver's license. They gave me an eye exam, and here's what I said. ABC, D, EFG, H-I-J-K, L-N-O-P, Q-R-S-T-U-V, W-X, Y, and Z. Now I know my ABCs, can I have my license, please? Oh, man. Does that sound familiar? Oh. Right?

So bad. Sucking your time out of you like a vampire. Yeah. Because you're conditioned to want the joke. I think if I had to listen to that joke again, or I could be hung upside down and had my blood drained like a pig. I would choose the latter. Yeah.

Here's another one of his gems. How do you cure hunger? Step away from the buffet. table. Oh, man. How do you cure? Okay. So there's no cure for it because you're brain damaged.

Oh, no, excuse me. There is a cure for it. Antipsychotic medication. Has been shown this disease that they're calling Witzelchutk. Witzel sucked? Maybe that's a joke. It's German.

They said it's addiction to wisecracking, literally. Whitsle sucked. Brought on, it was brought on by this guy with two strokes, five years apart. One messed up his circuits and the other cinched him permanently. There's a bunch of other examples, too. Some guy in 1929 who was having a tumor operated on, he was still conscious, but as they were operating on it,

he started to make puns one after the other. It was so bad they shot him. Just end the operation. Yeah, they didn't know what to do. You and I have a friend. I know. Yeah, Mr. Bad Punt himself. He can't help himself.

No, dude, according to this research, He's got brain damage. Oh, I completely believe that. No. So how many studies... How many studies did they make? Is this like one of these one-off studies that they came out? And they said this phenomenon's happening.

Well, there was a couple of different examples where people were doing it. Let me see. Yeah, there's a bunch of different cases of it. A 57-year-old Chinese woman who suddenly morphed into a real joke machine had suffered dementia that damage the front temporal lobes of her brain. Hmm. Yeah. Now, Dick, I don't want to bust your balls

too much because I feel like you do that a lot on this podcast. You know, a lot of back-to-back jokes. Sometimes when I'm trying to... But you're not like that in real life. No, I hate joking in real life. I try never to do it. Well, you're a funny guy on and off the air. But on the air, it's a different...

I think it's a little bit different. You're more on because it's a performance. Is that the case? Well, I made the mistake. of thinking it's a comedy podcast. That's a big mistake. Yeah, that's always my mistake. That's what he's talking about. Yeah.

Okay, I brought in the funniest joke in the world I found in my research. Oh, I think I've heard. Yeah, let's hear this. Have you heard it, Sean? The funniest joke in the world? That's what this was deemed by a bunch of researchers. Really? Well, I don't know.

You'll have to read it and then I'll tell you whether I've heard it. Okay. Three guys are stranded on a desert island, and they find a magic lantern containing a genie who grants them each one wish. The first guy wishes he was off the island and back home. The second guy wishes the same. The third guy says, I'm lonely. I wish my friends were back here.

As soon as you started that, halfway through the first sentence, I knew it. Okay, here's another. I'll wrap this up because it sucks. So people are saying that brain damage people, I don't understand complicated jokes. And they got a bunch of these guys together and told them jokes that play on understanding the incongruity of the punchline and why that's funny.

And they didn't understand that but then they showed them like a picture of a woman getting her dress ripped off and they all thought that was hilarious. Like a child. Well, but like a child, a little baby will laugh when you make a goofy face at it

because the baby thinks that there's something, you know, it can't quite pinpoint or enumerate with a vocabulary what exactly it is. They find funny about it, but the dumb kid is laughing, so. Yeah. I brought in a bunch of more bad jokes.

Maddox didn't laugh until he was like 32. That was just gas. It's always been gas. All right, go ahead. That's my bits. I want to talk about this for a minute too because here's a phenomenon. I wish I, well, it's a phenomenon that I started to notice in Los Angeles when I started hanging out in comedy circles.

And I started meeting more and more people who were comedians and people who were doing this for a livelihood. Well, I wish... Lively, that's generous. Yeah, true. You know, whatever, whatever, they're being funded with their parents, you know, to take improv classes or whatever. Right.

Sure. So, here's something I wish I could almost take back, because it's kind of skewed my memory of my friends and things in, people I grew up with in Utah. I don't know if this phenomenon existed and I just didn't notice it or if it's confirmation bias today. But I do notice in the comedy scene, people, there's a higher likelihood of these people to have this weird thing where they don't quite look you in the eyes and they can't engage with you on a deeper level. And I feel like sometimes comedy is a layer that they put between themselves and another person to avoid that connection. Oh, I think that's completely true.

Yeah. So I wonder how much of it is this, like brain damage? versus, I mean, it could be brain damage. It could be all tied together because people who go into comedy a lot of times come from a very, like the funniest people come from a very dark background, I think. They have a very dark history. They have something traumatic or tragic has happened to them. Really?

You think so? Most of the time. Yeah, most of the time. That's why a long time ago, my friend came in, interestingly enough, to an improv show I was at, and said that they just read the new Tina Fey book. And I said, well, is it funny or is it tragic? and they kind of laughed and they said why would it be tragic? And I said, well, most comedians have tragic backgrounds.

Most comedians have tragic swords. She's a comedian? Tina Faye? Yeah. Get out of here. Oh, my God. Nice. Why isn't she in the female Ghostbusters movie then?

Yeah, well, uh... She probably is. Have you seen that photo floating around on Twitter? Oh my gosh. Anyway, man. Yeah, there might be something that goes into... So you have people who are damaged or who have dark histories and dark histories and dark backgrounds who are then trying to cope with their trauma through comedy.

And because of their dark histories and dark backgrounds, they may have also had some kind of psychological event that triggered that may have given them some kind of brain damage. Who knows? Maybe it's all related. Maybe it's all related. But that's very interesting, this bit study. Well, if you know somebody who does it, send them this podcast. I'm curious what the rest of the world, because I feel like you and I, we live in a bubble right now.

See, that's what I thought too. Yeah. But I think it's bigger than that. Because this guy has nothing to do with comedy, this idiot that's keeping his wife awake, this Chinese lady, has nothing to do with comedy. I'm curious, I want to see this in the comments.

If you guys know people like this in your life and you aren't connected to any kind of comedy scene, I want to know if this is a global phenomenon, especially people in Europe who are listening, is this a global phenomenon, or is it something that you and I notice more because we hang out with more comedians? I don't know.

Yeah, interesting. All I know is everyone's stuff. Sucks. Voted up. True. What's your problem? Guys, I got a big problem to, to wrap things up here. Prank bros. Yeah, prank bros. They're assholes. Are those specific people, or are they bros like brohands? They're YouTube pranksters. But is this a brand that you're describing? Prank bros?

Well, that's what they're called pejoratively. They're just called prank channels on YouTube. But most of these prank channels are such, they're such fucking waste. like the cesspool of humanity. And it's people who are, imagine if BuzzFeed and Huffington Post, instead of their click-bait titles to get you

clicks to come to their website, instead of that, imagine it was just like a pan to the face of some stranger. Yeah. And then it was like, hey guys, we hit the stranger in the face with the pan. I don't watch the shit out of that. They got really pissed. There you go. There's the audience.

Well, did you see the one when those kids were throwing milk in the store? Yeah. That was so funny. Yeah, when I mentioned to Handy Randy, our producer that I was doing this problem, he immediately sent me a video of what he thought of as a prank bro. There are these kids, this video went super viral a while back. Yeah. Where these kids walked through a grocery store holding two jugs of, two gallons of milk.

And then they would just throw the milk gallons up in the air. They would fake like they're slipping. It started with them faking like they're slipping really crappily. They're like, whoa! And they throw the milk up in the air. Yeah, okay. Yeah. You know, and then it escalates to, like, they're not really slipping that much anymore,

and they're hucking the milk sideways, like, trying to throw it both ways. And then, and then after it spills, and the people are coming over and trying to help them, they're pretending to slip all over the milk, like, they can't get up and getting milk all over their clothes. Like, that part was kind of funny, but some of them went too far when they actually broke the light bulbs in the store. They did one in a card aisle where they're selling a bunch of birthday cards and Father's cards like whatever. They smashed a bunch of gallons of milk that splashed all over the cards. They ruined all the cards. Hundreds of

dollars in goods in merchandise and then these poor old people are coming up to save that to like help them up and say oh here grab my card and they didn't know these kids are putting them on the entire time. And they're still slipping as they're grabbing the card. Yeah. One of the funny ones in that video I think was the last one where the kid

just drops the gallons of milk and then collapses. He's not even making an effort to slip. Anyway. I think I've seen that video like a hundred times. Randy and I have watched it together. I've seen it a bunch, too. But that spawned a bunch of copycats who went around and took things way too far.

By the way, most people would say they took it too far. Well, that's why it's so funny to me. Well, you know, it's funny until it's your store. It's funny until it's your mom or your date. That's why it's great. Great. Dick, I will never get you on board of this problem. No.

I mean, they're horrible and I'm horrible. I don't care. You are a prank bro. That's what you are. Anyway, man, these prank bros, they, first of all, a lot of these prank bros are exploitive. They just, they go, they go to areas of town where they know they can get a reaction. And it's usually pranks in the ghetto. And that's what they call them.

Whoa. Yeah. Yeah. YouTube, go to YouTube and type in pranks in the ghetto and you'll find hundreds of videos of these dickheads going to, quote, the ghetto and fucking with black people. Yeah. What the hell?

What are they doing? Yeah, listen to this. Here's one from Josh. Like your mom is so fat. They walk up and start a beef with them? No, I mean, stuff like that, but they'll also come up and say, hey, you want to get popped in the mouth. They'll come up to a black dude, just sit in their mind in his own fucking business.

They'll say, hey, you want to get popped in the mouth? And the guy's like, what the fuck are you saying to me? And the kid will then pull out a soda from his pocket and say, do you want a pop in your mouth? That guy's going to get shot. Yeah, exactly. And some of these kids do. They get beat up.

They get knived. One of these kids, I think one of them died during one of these stupid pranks. So what's the problem? Even funnier, it's a double prank. Well, because that's not always... Jokes on you, fuckhead. Yeah, but that's not what always happens, Sean. Like, some of these people feel threatened.

They'll come up to the kid. They'll come up to, like, some of them. a group of black dudes, right? A group of menacing-looking dudes. They may think that they'll come up, they'll pick guys who they think are kind of like menacing looking, right? Sure. And it's a total, they'll just walk up to these dudes.

What do you mean? I know. I'm going down a rabbit hole here. Baggy clothes, looking tough. They look like that because they're trying to look tough. They do, right? Sure. Yeah. Well, anyway, so they walk up to these guys, just sitting there, minding their own fucking business. and they'll say, hey, you want a piece.

You want to buy a piece for me? And this dude, one of these guys got really fucking upset because I think he just got out of prison. He was just paroled or something like that. He's like, you're trying to sell me a fucking gun? And this kid is like, yeah, you want a gun? And he's like, what the fuck is your problem? And he starts to come at this kid.

He's like, get the fuck away from me. And the kid's like, oh, no, do you want a piece of gum or whatever? Like, he just pulls some stupid, it's always a stupid fucking pun. This might be related to your problem, dick. They probably do it. have brain damage. Yeah. They'll always pull out something like that or they'll go up to them. They definitely do. Yeah.

So there's a guy. Wait, did he have gum? Hmm? Did the kid have gum in the end? Yeah, they always have some stupid pun joke in there. And then when they get their asses kicked, they say, oh, it's just a prank. It's just a prank. Huh. There's this guy named Josh Pay Little Lynn. He got a lot of fame because he did this video which a lot of people think is fake.

But he went up to a homeless guy and this is the most exploitive thing. He gives this homeless guy $100. And then they send a secret camera behind the homeless guy to follow him and see what he does with his money, right? The homeless guy walks into a liquor store. Okay, so stereotype confirmed.

And then here's the twist. Here's the heart. The car fit? No, here's the part that pulls at your heartstrings. They follow the guy into the store and he buys a bunch of food with it. And then they follow the guy to the park where he hands the food out to other homeless people. It's a very heartwarming video. And it's one of those things that make you kind of scratch your head and say, huh, I guess I

judge this guy too soon. I guess I judged wrong. And then they give him crack. Yeah, what's the joke? Shut up, Sean. No, but first of all, that wasn't a joke. That one was just one of these videos. A lot of people...

No, it wasn't funny. But that's how this guy got his fame, right? Then he's doing prank videos. Then he went heel. You got famous being a baby face, and he turned heel. Wait, what does that mean? A wrestling term when you... Babyface is like a good guy.

Turning heel is being... Being a prick. Yeah. Well, here's one of his more recent videos. This is a car window prank in the ghetto. He goes and pretends... What the hell with the ghetto?

Yeah, they just harass people. They're afraid of black people. They're afraid of black people. These kids are projecting their fear of black people on the viewer. Exactly. Exactly. So he goes and pretends to break car windows of black people who are coming to their cars. Oh my God.

Who lose their fucking mind. Understandably so. Listen to this one. Here's a video from Josh Paler Lynn. Listen to this. What's up guys? So I'm not going around and smash people's car window like this. Why is he talk like that?

Why is he talk like that? Like he's got a sack of jawbreakers in his mouth. He's got an accent. He's Asian. He's got an accent. Oh, that's the prank. That's God's prank on you. Jeez.

Stop. Anyway, so he's got a rubber hammer, and he's like pretending to break people's windows. And then he has a real piece of glass that he then breaks. So it's an elaborate prank where if someone saw from a distance, someone doing this to your car, you think your window was broken. Pretty elaborate. Yeah, it's pretty erabbit, I would say. Oh, my gosh.

A piece of glass and a rubber mallet. Yeah. How did he come up with that scheme? Anyway, listen to this. And I'm going to just smash my own breakaway window. Let's see how people react. What does he do? He smashed a window.

Look at your window. This poor lady is chasing him saying, what the fuck did you do to my window? And he's just giggling and laughing. And, again, still hasn't revealed that it's a, It's an alleged prank. Okay. So he broke this... And by the way,

this woman comes up to her car and she just wants to get in and drive off. Now she has to step over all this broken fucking glass around her car. Yeah, well, that's... Yeah. That's the least of the bad things that happened to her there. Yeah. Here's another one.

It's by Vitalese... Vitalee TV. It's Egging cars in the hood prank. Oh, my God. Egging cars in the hood. So it's a really hot day, and this guy pretends to go out to... people's cars and cook an egg on their, on their hood.

Listen to, listen to this funny prank. What's up, guys? It's so hot in California today that I decided to fry some eggs. Yo, I'm just cooking, bro. My stove broke. My stove broke. Dude, my stove broke. My stove broke, bro.

I'm sorry. Dude, your car, your car is nice, bro. Your car is very nice. Dude, what are you doing? So he's just like, that fucks up your paint, though. Yeah, well, he used some latex, some latex. like some fake egg, a latex egg. Oh, it wasn't really egg.

I like how he said, oh, he just slapped the egg in there. I like how he said, are you making a fucking Denver omelet on my car? Like, he was very specific. Yeah. Which the guy who came out. So that's the other thing, Sean.

A lot of these pranks are possibly fake. Oh, they're too witty. Yeah. That makes sense. They could be fake. So it's, they're doing this just to get the views. I don't know. If something is fake, it is.

Yeah. I mean, right? But then there's... Something could be fake. It probably is. Sure. Then there are these guys from Auk TV, and they changed their name recently to Mo and E.T. And there's this channel called H3, H3 Productions.

I'm a huge fan of this channel. He just busts on these stupid prank videos all the time. He pointed out, like, these guys uploaded a prank video recently where it was deleted within a day. And that's really unusual for this channel because they leave the most heinous shit up there. They put up these videos where they give people fake parking tickets for parking in front of fire hydrant and these people are so upset. It ruins their fucking day. And then they're sitting there yelling back and forth.

Like I didn't, the fire hydrant wasn't there when I got here. They put a fake one down, right? Oh. They write them a fake ticket. And then these guys argue with them. They're like, fuck you, you have to pay it, whatever. They put them in a bad mood. They get angry.

Some of these people might have high blood pressure. They might have heart conditions. They might have something going on in their lives. And they might just want to live, like, go on with their day without fucking being harassed. But they come out there. And then the big reveal at the end is like, oh, the ticket is fake and it has some money in it. Here you go. Here's 20 bucks or whatever for your fucking time.

I got to say, I don't think this shit is funny at all. No. Not at all. Even the milk throwing one? No. Most of it isn't, man. Yeah. You've seen it and you've laughed.

Did you smile at all? I might have smiled at one. No, I'm not sure. But it's like, man, they always do it when the person's back is turned. So it sounds like they fell really hard, right? Yeah. But there's one time where a guy turned around to kind of see him. do it and I hope that guy

kicked that guy in the fucking face. Yeah. So these guys Mo and E.T., they rebranded themselves from ACH TV. Now it's Mo and Ethan Bradbury, these two dudes. They did this prank recently where they put out an ad on Craigslist where now they're not calling them

pranks anymore, they're calling them social experiments where they invited some girl over to their house who was interested in buying their TV. And this girl comes into the house and they get like four or five of their thug friends to put on ski masks. and get fake knives. Oh, my God.

Yeah, and this poor girl comes in. First of all, the girl comes to the door, and he's like, are you here alone? And the girl's like, yeah, I guess. I mean, should I work here? Oh, yeah, that's your PSA, all right. Yeah, so the girl's already freaking out. She comes into the house. World Trade Center, big PSA.

Yeah. Thank you. Saudi Arabia. So this girl walks into the house of these bros, and she's looking at the TV, and then they ambush her. This guy runs up and blocks the doorway. He says, you're not going anywhere. Shut the fuck up and starts yelling at this girl, right?

And this girl starts screaming bloody murder. And this is why a lot of people felt disturbed, because you can tell the difference between a fake scream and a real scream. This seemed like a real scream. This seemed like it was, you know, that one of those blood-curdling screams where someone's actually afraid for their lives. Because these guys are coming at her with ski masks on,

threatening to do whatever the fuck, possibly murder. her, rape her, whatever it is. And then she collapses out of fear and she's like just huddled up in a little ball in a fetal position just crying and the guy comes out for the big reveal and he says,

I need you to get up and sit on the couch. And this guy is so fucking tone deaf that this woman is sitting there sobbing for fear of her life and he wants her to get up and sit on the couch so he can get a better camera angle because he has cameras all over the house, right, for this big reveal.

And she gets, he's like, it's a It's a social experiment. And he puts his hand on her shoulder. She gets up. She's like, don't fucking touch me and runs out of the house. And he's, and he's chasing after her. It goes, ma'am, ma'am, it's a social experiment. She goes, I don't give a fuck what this is. I'm leaving. And she's running down the street to her car and they're chasing after her with the cameras. And then they finally catch up to her and console her for a few minutes. And finally, when she calms down, she's shaking and crying. They say, well, it's a social experiment. You know, we just want to raise awareness that people can get raped and murdered from Craigslist.

That cannot be real. That's on YouTube? They deleted it. And that's why a lot of people suspect that this was real, because it wasn't even up long enough for them to get that many views. They got a lot of negative reaction to it. That'd be a pretty good way to prove something is real, though, to make something fake and then remove it right away because it's so scandalous.

Well, they have a lot of shit on their channel that is heinous. And they haven't deleted any of it. How is it? How is YouTube not getting sued out of existence with this stuff happening? Well, they could, I mean, here's the thing. Any one of these people could sue for that. Yeah, well, that's... That's why I think it can't possibly be real, because there's a ton of victims.

There's a kind of recordings of victims. Well, a lot of times they'll hire... First of all, there are a lot of hired actors, so a lot of these prank videos are fake. But the ones that aren't, the ones that like this that get deleted, those are the ones that are actually questionable. Those are the big question mark, because, again, they are being deleted off of YouTube. YouTube wouldn't allow that on their website violates their terms of service. They let a ton of other stuff that violates their terms of service on.

Yeah, I mean, look, YouTube's not perfect. Obviously, they're probably, if someone rings it to their attention, they'll delete it. Yeah. But there's another guy, Sam Pepper. Sam Pepper is a notorious prankster who, for a long time, did all these pranks, and he got a bunch of sexual assault allegations from VidCon, where he hooked up with underage girls, etc., etc.

Because of his pranks? Or just in general? Just in general. Okay. Yeah. He had some pranks. He had this one that got him in a lot of heat because he went around in public with a hoodie

and a fake hand sticking out of the hoodie. Or a fake hand inside the hoodie. So he would go up to girls and grab their ass. God, Jesus. Yeah. And then the girl would turn around. That's the one you don't like? Yeah, because it's just.

Just making no one get laid. The last thing we need is girls being more freaked out in public of guys being around them. Yeah, well, that's... It's just salting the fucking earth. Well, it's also sexual assault. Yes, that's what I mean. It's the same thing. You know, a close...

It's just a little bit more annoying than bits, than comedians constantly telling bits. But anyway... The pranks? No, sexual assaults. Do you guys remember that prank show where they would tell guys that underage girls would have sex with them? And then they would lure them to that house. Yeah. Where Chris Hansen would pop out and go like, ha-ha.

To catch a predator. Yeah. That was hilarious. Yeah. So anyway, the Sam Pepper guy, right? He got in a lot of trouble for this video because people are like, dude, that's just sexual assault. And then he came out and said, it wasn't sexual assault because I actually hired these actresses. They were all in on the joke, et cetera, et cetera.

Right? Allegedly. Then he came out, so he took that down, he got a lot of heat for that video. He came out with this big apology and all these, you know, he got a lot of flack for it. His MCN dropped him. His agent dropped him. And he was making a lot of money. He had like something like six, six million subs, something like that.

That's not English to me. What does that mean? Six million subscribers and millions of views on his videos. What does that translate to? That translates to, for every million views on YouTube, you make approximately $1,500, anywhere anywhere from $1,000 to $3,000, depending on when it's really. released. So if you get, you know, three, four million views and on a high season, you're making like 12 grand, 10, 12 grand on per video if you're making, if you're getting those views. So he's

making money, hand over fist. Anyway, his MCN dropped him, his agency dropped him. MCN is a multi-channel network. Then he came out with another video most recently that was, again, way too over the top. These two friends were walking down the street. He ambushed one of them. One of his friends was in on it. They kidnapped this guy and these guys, they look like ISIS terrorists. They took him to a rooftop somewhere, had a hoodie over his head, a hood over his head, they removed it, and they said that they were going to kill the guy.

The guy was crying, snot running out of his nose. It looked like he was afraid for his life. This was on YouTube? Yeah. But I think these are all staged. Well, that's what Sam Pepper said again, when the backlash followed him, caught up to him.

Now, look, if these aren't staged, then all the, like, tort lawyers, all the ambulance-chasing lawyers have just suddenly become, retarded. Yeah, that one seems like it would be staged. Yeah. And I wouldn't, like, the making sexual harassment films, yeah, would be enough to get you dropped from those anyway, whether they were real or not. Sure. You know. Well, that's the, that's the other big problem with these videos, is that they are inspiring a young generation of so-called pranksters to follow in their

footsteps. Sure. And these guys might be pros. They might be professionals. They might know what they're doing, and they might know how to skirt the legal issues that they have with really pranking these people. But their viewers do not. Their viewers are skew younger. Their viewers are imitating them, and they're also going out there and doing real pranks like this. That's a slippery slope, buddy. That's what Beavis and Butthead got blamed for starting fires, and they wanted to kick them off the year. I'm not going to blame artists for copycat crimes.

I can't do it. Yeah, but Beavis and But Headhead. There is a suspension of belief there, because, that it is an animated show. This is just people who are going out there without necessarily disclosing that these are hired actors and doing these pranks. That's a big difference. I just can't do it at a principle.

Well, here's another one. There's another channel called Twins TV and they have all sorts of pranks like jumping people in the hood prank. Yeah, that's got to be fake. They have another one. Leaving car open in the hood prank, social, and then they put in parentheses, social experiment.

We're going to see what happens when we leave a car open. Cops. And then this one, This is this one. It's cops are coming in the hood prank. And then in parentheses it says, extremely illegal. Like that's their cover their ass thing. Yeah.

Yeah, it's got 1.9 million views over three months. And listen to this. These guys got cop uniforms. And then they went into the hood, you know, scaring people saying cops are coming. Listen to this. What's up, guys? Today we're going to be going in the hood,

screaming cops are coming. But this time, we're the cops. So they have like, they have fake guns on. them. They have tasers and shit on them. These are people who are going to potentially get killed. They can give someone a heart attack. They can stress someone out. This shit

is out of fucking control on YouTube. They can fuck up a drug deal. Yeah. They could. Yeah? I guess they could, Dick. There's that. No, man. But these prank videos, these prank bros, as I like to call them,

they are out of fucking control. I think they're a huge problem. And it's only a matter of before more these dipshits get killed. And by the way, they're going to ruin pranks for everyone. These pranks aren't funny, Sean. I agree with you. They're not funny. They're mean-spirited.

The butt of the joke is not the prankster. It's them. There's another prank- That's why I don't mind jackass. Because they do it to each other. Everybody knows. There's another prank. I'll tell you when I like a prank video.

Recently, I saw these French guys. I think it's called News TV or Vooz TV, whatever. The prank was, they take their laptop to a quiet library or a study hall someplace. and they start, they pretend like they're watching a porno and their headphone, their headphone jack is not plugged in all the way. So it's really loud and everyone laughs at them, right? They're the butt of the joke.

Sure. I think that's funny. Another one, Roman Atwood, this, he does a, he did all these like pun pranks back in the day, which I thought were really funny. He would go up to people say, hey, there's a B on you. It's a letter B, just like, you know, or he'd go. Sounds like brain damage to me. I don't know.

Some of his pranks have been pretty funny. But like, these are pranks where, you know, It's not really mean-spirited. They're not making the other person the butt of the joke. I feel like a prank should end in a laugh or a smile from the person getting pranked. Like, you've got to trick them in at some point into losing their temper when they might not. Like that show with Ashton Coucher, when he would tow celebrities' cars. Remember that one?

Yeah. They would lose their cool a little bit. Yeah. But at the end, they would laugh at all. You have to have the reveal where the person being pranked gets in on the joke and they laugh at it off, otherwise you're just a dick. I don't know. Maybe that's the same though. I don't know. Maybe. Anyway, man, my problem...

I want to be a hypocrite. No. My problems this week were overpopulation alarmists and prank bros. Mine word decision fatigue and bits. See you next Tuesday. It's almost like all these kids

on YouTube are a problem. All of them? Yeah, because they're encouraging all this horrible behavior among each other. I don't know. Possibly. Yeah. Guys, it's Kelsey, from a long-time listener of this show. But last episode, you guys were talking shit about adult coloring books.

Yeah. And I just want you to know. Really? Not just last episode. That's my favorite thing to do while listening to your podcast is color. It's the only thing that can calm me down and y'all are yelling at each other. And it ain't no fucking joke, I'm telling you. Don't believe the stereotypes. It's the shit.

Anyways, Dick, are you going to prom with me? Oh, there you. Absolutely. Only of your under 18. So let me ask you this. If you're... Let me ask you this about coloring books, adult coloring books, because I don't understand what's wrong with them.

Because video games are okay, right? Yeah. That's okay. Coloring books are okay too. Oh. I thought they're a big problem. Everybody shits... Everybody tweets at you,

look at this shit, adult coloring books. They're fucking horrible. Yeah, I think people confuse my problem with infantilism as just people who color and coloring books. It depends... Look, guys, again, if you are doing it to avoid your responsibilities or you're doing it to avoid any uncomfortable feelings you might have, or if it's part of your safe space, you're an idiot.

Oh, but isn't that what escapism is? No. Isn't that liquor, video game, sports, coloring books? Isn't it all the same? Well, yeah, all those things can be problems when you avoid responsibility. How is liquor a problem? Okay.