The Digression Sessions - Ep. 49 - Brian Dunning

Episode Date: September 3, 2012

Hola Digheads! This week, through the powers of witchcraft, strong psychic abilities, and something called “Skype,” Mike and Josh are joined the host of Skeptoid, Brian Dunning! Skeptoid is a weekly science podcast dedicated to furthering knowledge by blasting away the widespread pseudosciences that infect popular culture, and replacing them with way cooler reality. We discuss Brian’s journey from a Mormon upbringing to becoming one of the foremost skeptics in the game. Josh probes Brian on whether he is an agent of disinformation working at the behest of the ruling class of lizard people to get us all to drink bottled water and breathe in chem trails. (SPOILER ALERT!) It turns out that he is not. Mike asks if critical thinking has helped Brian become a better person. In a sense, Brian agrees because when you figure out how the world works, the world can becomes much more fun. Knowledge is power, yo!   We also discuss a number of topics for this episode including, but not limited to: The ruling class of the lizard people, taking vitamin C for colds, that Exorcist kid, faith vs. reality, rumored harmful effects of bottled water, salsa on your face, 17 year old shitheads, and so much more!   Have something to say about this ep? Or do you have anything else Digression Sessions related / unrelated to say? Should we create a Podcasting With Friends app?!?! Say it on our forum!! DigressionSessions.com !! PLEASE rate, subscribe, and provide a nice comment on the iTunes!! It’ll help the podcast climb the charts! Follow us on the Twitters:  @DigSeshPod @BetterRobotJosh @MichaelMoran10 @BrianDunning RATE AND SUBSCRIBE! WANT A DIGRESSION SESSIONS PODCAST SHIRT? EMAIL JOSH – [e-mail]

hidden power secrets cover-ups corruption you think you know the whole story think again welcome to the digression sessions podcast everyone everybody. I am one half of your favorite pair of earbuds. Josh, cotton candy Kaderna. Sitting to my right. The other half of your favorite pair of earbuds. Bad boy, Mike Moran. There he is.

That's right. Known bad boy, Mike Moran. You never know what I'm going to say. What's going on, big heads? Hey, everybody. We got an awesome episode for you today. One of my favorite podcasters in the world, Brian Dunning, granted us an interview. He's the host of Skeptoid Podcast. Excellent podcast. Which Mike's a big fan of. And yeah,

I really enjoyed this interview. Brian is a very intelligent guy and he was very forthcoming and willing to joke around with us as well. that was that was a lot of fun but uh yeah we talked about everything from witches to bottled water to uh chemtrails to lizard people which i think he is one i'm not positive i'm not positive either but i definitely saw a flickering tongue yeah the way he was drinking that dr pepper right yeah i could see it i could totally see yeah very fortunate to have. Dunning on the show. I feel like I kind of sounded like an idiot here and there in the interview. I was a little sleep and food deprived.

You look up to this fellow a lot. I do. I do. So I was a little intimidated. But nonetheless, he brought the goods. And Josh brought the goods. I don't know if bad boy Mike Moran brought the goods in this one. Yeah, you were more like not not-so-good boy.

Not necessarily bad. Because you meet one of your heroes, and you're all like, ooh! You know what I'm saying? That was weird that you kept doing that. Yeah, that is a regret I have. But nonetheless, it was a great interview. A whole lot of fun. How do you feel, Mike?

I don't know. Golly! I like you a lot. I felt like Peter on the Brady Bunch when his voice was changing. Yep, it was a lot like that. It's a fun episode. But if we could plug some things real quick

before we get into it. I'll be performing improv this Friday and Saturday. What performing improv this Friday and Saturday. The what is that? The Friday and Saturday. Yeah, I'll be performing Friday, September 7th at the Fells Point Corner Theater with Bully Union and Gus. Ooh, double header.

Saturday night, I'll be performing with Bully Union again. And Bully Union set's going to be really fun. We're going to do it in the dark. Oh, wow. Radio show style? Yeah, pretty much. We're all just going to sit in chairs. Yeah, that's fun.

I've done things kind of like that before. Yeah, so come check that out. I think, Mike, you have something going on during the day? I do. During the day, before you go see Josh, come to the Hamden Fest, September the 8th on Saturday. We will be doing stand-up on the Wham City stage around 1 p.m. or so. For Hamden Fest, which is always a lot of fun.

It's the Avenue of Baltimore. They shut it down. There's vendors, bands playing. It's like the Punk Rock Hunt Fest. Right. And there's toilet races. Really? Yeah, where people make that's

really not a nice way to refer to races of people josh there'll be plenty of the toilet races there look you know how i feel about indian people all right it's i said it all right yeah so come check us out if you can make it uh friday and And, yeah, enjoy the episode. Thank you, Brian Dunning, and we love you, Diggheads. Yeah. Oh, also, yeah, keep rating the podcast. Tell a friend. Tell a friend. God damn it.

And tell that friend to tell a friend. And tell that friend to tell an enemy so that we switch, we mix it off a little bit. Yeah, just a little bit. So, yeah. All right. Thanks, Diggheads. Enjoy the episode. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye. So, Dig Heads, today we have one of my favorite podcasters. Oh, Mike, you don't have to be so nice to me. I appreciate that. But we have a guest on the show. Actually, I'm talking about Mr. Brian dunning from

skeptoid.com very very grateful to have you here today sir welcome to the show brian thank you very much great to be here in a visual virtual sense brian why skepticism i'm passionate about it and i'm still not sure why and i want to know why you are it's it's not so much the skepticism? I'm passionate about it and I'm still not sure why and I want to know why you are. It's not so much the skepticism, it's the research and all of the interesting subjects. It's learning amazing new stuff every week. That's what I enjoy about producing Skeptoid. research and and just not even recording the show and writing the show it's actually getting out there and doing the research and learning the answers to all these mysteries that we've wondered about for so many years it's fun as heck yeah uh what's your you cover a huge range of subjects

everything from monsters to ufos to global warming to uh bottled water, ghost stories, conspiracy theories, alternative everything. Anything that there's a popular misconception about. Things that aren't true or that have a more interesting untold story behind them. That's what makes a good Skeptoid episode. And what's your favorite kind

of subject to cover? I like doing the ones that require a lot of historical research um you know like a a good example would be uh there's an old story called the bell witch oh yeah i love that one this witch story that comes out of the uh the american south supposedly the only the only ghost that ever killed someone the ghost that killed someone and got in like a personal hand-to-hand combat with the president. Yeah, right before he became president.

All these great stories about it. I hadn't heard about it. George W. would have kicked his ass, by the way. I think so. The Blair Witch Project was, I guess, largely based on the Bell Witch. But that was really fun trying to dig up the original sources where these stories were first told right you know going back and finding the original books and everything it's really cool right yeah that's kind of my those are my favorite subjects to cover

as well the ghost story type stuff the spooky urban legend type of stuff. And so many different stories require the same kind of research. Ghost stories and UFO stories. You know, it's all the same thing. You've got to go back to the 1970s and dig up old newspaper articles. And you've got to go back and find old books and find these old original articles written by people.

It's really neat. Someone recently uncovered the true story of the Exorcist Boy. And it turns out he actually doesn't live very far from josh and i is that right yeah i i the only thing i remember about the exorcist boy that the boy that the exorcist movie was based on they change it to a girl right um was that he ended up being fine and grew up healthy and happy no problem yeah there probably was never much of a problem besides uh

that whole neck spinning thing once they got that figured out he's fine yeah that once they solved that yeah it happened to him a few times in later life you know right in the middle of a board meeting that's when i grew suspicious what is uh what is one thing that you were skeptical about to really surprise you anything that you thought was going to be false or true and then found out the the opposite the most question common question people ask me is similar to that they say what's you know what's what's the time that you found the supernatural explanation to be the true one well i haven't i haven't come upon that one yet i'd love to if anyone's got an idea send it on in the syntech one was was left pretty open

wasn't it which one the the syndec the uh the stendek yeah yeah the uh stendek was a was a plane crash that happened in the andes mountains um I think a lot of people remember the story from Alive, the book and the movie where the plane crashed with a soccer team on board and they had to eat each other sitting in the wheels. Well, this was the exact same kind of crash that happened much earlier in history. The same conditions caused the crash

and they crashed similarly into the mountain. But right before they crashed, they sent a mysterious signal over the Morse code that came out as Stendec, S-T-E-N-D-E-C. And the fact is, nobody knows what the heck it meant. It didn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything to people who know all about the use of telegraphs and Morse codes. And he sent it several times, right?

He sent it twice the guy asked him the guy on the receiving end said what the heck was that and then again he repeated it stendek and if the plane hadn't crashed two seconds later i'm sure we would have gotten a clarification right out that it didn't mean much of anything at all right and you made the point that uh pilots send codes that that you know no one would understand but they usually don't crash right after them. Yeah, and so that happens to be the one that we end up remembering and telling stories about. Right, exactly. Well, let me answer your question, though.

The one time that I was surprised by the outcome was about taking vitamin C for a cold. Because I grew up always taking vitamin C from cold. And I was still doing it even after I did the episode because it was so deeply ingrained that taking vitamin C helps you get over a cold quicker. And the data shows that it doesn't, even though we almost all of us kind of just believe that because that's what we've been raised to believe. Confirmation bias is one of the perceptual phenomenon that causes us to reinforce that belief. Right. And we stick with it. So is there a placebo effect? Possibly. More likely, it's just a perceptual error.

When we get sick, we get better. That's just the way the human body works. Sure. And if we took something, we tend to attribute it to what we took. Right. works. And if we took something, we tend to attribute it to what we took. And that's really the best thing that vitamin C does for us is causes us to remember having taken something. So there's not really even the need to introduce the placebo effect. The placebo effect is amazing, though, because that's one of those things that I would be very skeptical of on the surface, but it seems to be a true phenomenon. It seems to be tested and verified.

Oh, no doubt about it. The placebo effect is real. But what the placebo effect helps you with are symptoms for which there's no disease agent present. Like if you have pain or nausea or sleeplessness, things like that. Depression. Depression, that there's no disease agent. A placebo will not affect the course of a disease. It can affect your perception of symptoms only.

But it won't affect the course of the disease. But you're right. And that's why it's used in clinical trials of medical devices because it does give us an effect that we can directly compare something to. Right. Yeah, I recently just read a study where wearing a lab coat will increase your test scores. Yeah. Yeah, that's all very true.

And just the doctor's manner. If the doctor's giving you a placebo, depending on what he tells you, that makes a difference. I've seen studies like that too, yeah, where they would have the doctor in plain clothes explain something to the patient and the patient would be very skeptical of what the doctor is saying just based on their appearance, even though what they're saying is factually correct.

Yeah, there's so much cool science out there that goes back to why I love doing Skeptoid so much because you learn so much cool stuff that's real that's proven that's testable that's repeatable and that's way more interesting than something like dismissing a story saying oh a ghost

did it or whatever are you in that camp though that you feel like science is interesting and fulfilling enough that we don't need the supernatural because i think you know as as skeptical as i am i feel like there's a part of me that would still love to believe in ghosts or love to believe in ufos and of course believe in an almighty deity that will uh smite my enemies at any given time and i know for sure that the reason we can see you in california right

now is because of witchcraft right yeah. Yeah. Well, actually, some of my psychic energy has something to do with it. Okay. Your aura is looking a little purple today. I was going to say purple. Yeah. I was going to go a little lavender, but absolutely.

I actually can't even see the color purple, by the way. Not the movie. You should rent it. Yeah, absolutely. Nobody rents anymore. What is your background, Brian? Were you involved in science or some type of science background?

Yeah, my background is in computer science, although it's 1980s era computer science. There's probably nothing relevant that I studied in school that's applicable today. Sure. Up all night drinking new cokes but after that i went into i went into screenwriting and i spent basically a decade at ucla really screenplays and yeah writing for film and television and um then i just kind of worked for a long time just just doing kind of lame boring software consulting and it wasn't really until podcasts came out and became a thing like 2000, what, 2004, 2005.

That was when I kind of discovered the ultimate conversion of all of my interests and abilities. And so, yeah. And when did you know that this is what you wanted to do? Oh. I mean, did you toy around with other podcast ideas nope no this skeptoid was my first shot at a at a podcast you didn't do a home and garden podcast first i know i can't dig up some embarrassing uh dungeons and dragons talk

with brian dunning hot gossip with brian on YouTube were the only thing I'd done before. Okay. So, yeah, at the time you had to do five episodes or iTunes wouldn't accept your listing. So I put together five episodes and by the time five weeks had gone by and all five of them had aired, I'd gotten so much feedback that I had to keep going. That's great. And people were already sending me suggestions for more episodes. So it just, it dragged me into it. Did you catch the podcast wave pretty much in the beginning?

Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was, that's largely responsible for Skeptoid success. It's really hard to compete now. It's a lot harder now than it was when I was fortunate to get in. And, you know, by the time the current, whatever the secret iTunes algorithms are for deciding who's a top podcast and who gets appearance on the homepage, as you can see, there's very few independent podcasters on there. It's almost all Discovery Channel, National Geographic Channel podcasts, etc., etc. So I was lucky enough to have had a lot of subscribers by then.

Yeah, that was back in the day when iTunes, you basically had to go through three or four different pages just to find where the podcasts were. There was no spot up top where you could just click podcasts. There was a bunch of different varieties. They had them out back in the shed with the animals. There was no spot up top where you could just click podcasts and there was a bunch of different varieties. They had them out back in the shed with the animals. Ain't no podcast here. Only Mariah Carey albums. Get out of here. The podcast is just an old legend.

There's an old man standing outside with a shotgun. You kids got no business looking for podcasts around here. They're just stirring up trouble. Angering Mr. Jobs. Old man Jobs is standing there at the shotgun. You leave him be.

He's sick. Well, you know, I hope that the culture of Apple is such that they appreciate the contributors of the independent creative forces and i i expect that they will continue to provide some way for small independent shows to continue being able to compete and get some get some screen time on right in the itunes application or whatever yeah it's it's tough it's uh i hear it's a mix of subscribers and new downloads and comments and ratings that goes into to the algorithm to get you on the front page. Yeah, when I first started with the podcast or when I first became reasonably successful with the podcast, people were always asking me, hey, what's the secret?

As if it's similar to the early days of search engine optimization on websites. You know, what are the secret fields we put in our podcast feed? How do I find you on LightGhost.com? How can I pimp my MySpace page? I want to be in your top eight. Really, the secret

is consistently good content. That's the only thing that you can do that I know of. It's the only thing I've ever attempted to do and it's it's what's worked so so kids consistently good content if you build it they will come yeah and it's got to be good a good product got to be decent yeah at least at least decent so how many uh um things are you investigating at the same time? Do you kind of pick one topic and block off two weeks of your life to research, or do you have a couple things going on at once? No, I'm always doing about two or three at once are in my kind of in-progress folder.

And depending on my schedule, my travel schedule, how many conferences I'm speaking at and so forth, what my, what my availability is, I'm either a little bit ahead or, or behind and rushed. So when I'm behind and rushed, I'm working on one episode and I'm just cranking to get it out in that same week. You know, otherwise I sit down and decide which, which of these several subjects I'm working on looks, looks the most interesting this morning. But you love doing it though. What? But you love doing it though what but you love doing it oh it's so much fun yeah it's it's totally fun do you find yourself working harder at it since

you love doing the research than you would you know other jobs you've had oh definitely definitely yeah i mean when you when you sit down in the chair monday morning uh and and start doing the research right it's it's it's great and you know before i know it i look at the clock and it's 12 o'clock it's the time flies yeah yeah yeah i like how you're you're you're a very respectable skeptic you're you're not uh the cruel mean loud fuck you if you believe in j type. I hear that a lot. And that's not necessarily by design. You're more of a fuck you if you believe in Allah guy.

I have found more interesting things to say than people who believe this or that are stupid. I try to find stuff that's interesting for everyone, whether they've heard about the subject or not. And I often get emails from people saying just that. I try to find stuff that's interesting for everyone, whether they've heard about the subject or not. And I often get emails from people saying just saying just that, you know, say, hey, I'm a Christian and I really appreciate that you are the one science podcast that doesn't make fun of me. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's that's really inspiring to me. Do you worry?

Was there a time when you were a believer in any of the things that you've investigated? Besides vitamin C? Let's see. What about vitamins in general? What about vitamin B? I would say definitely because a large part of the reason that I'm doing this is because as a kid, I was constantly reading every book about Bigfoot, UFOs, ghosts, anything. And I believed all of it. Me too.

Me too. That was all awesome, cool stuff. That was cutting edge. I couldn't understand how adults could be writing this and it's not true. You know, they made it seem so real. Never occurred to me that it wasn't completely true. Right, me too. So, yeah, I guess, you know, it's really hard to look back, as you probably know, and pinpoint the moment that you stopped, you know, uncritically accepting every claimed sighting of Bigfoot as a factual, literal account.

But it's just so much more interesting to look deeper into each one of these stories. Right, yeah. You know, the most popular UFO case is probably the Betty and Barney story. Right, yeah, that's a great episode. Yeah, 1906, thank you. The 1960s, they are driving down the road, and suddenly it's two hours later. There's this missing block of time. They have no idea what happens.

Later, they both undergo regression hypnosis. And they both tell exactly the same story that they were. The spaceship came down and took them on board and did medical experiments on them. Now, that's the limit of what got written. That's the version we've heard for decades. And I thought, my God, that's the coolest, most wild thing. And you accept, well, i guess regression hypnosis is a real thing i guess aliens coming down are a real thing and the missing time and erased memories and everything but then you realize that there's actual explanations for exactly what really did

happen there's just so much more story than we learned yeah that's way more interesting right it's way cooler yeah definitely and i'm not going to tell what it is. People have to go and download the episode. It's a good episode, Dickheads. Check it out. Absolutely. Can we talk about chemtrails for a second? What's your

stance on chemtrails? Chemtrails is just one of those things that's a non-complete, non-event that conspiracy theorists just simply make up. Conspiracy theorists tend to, for whatever reason, they doubt the government's motives. They think the government is out to get them, out to get all of us. I've heard it's controlling the weather to putting chemicals in the air to make us dumber yeah whenever they see a contrail up in the air uh coming from behind

a jet they say that jet is spraying the world with chemicals and and yeah those chemicals can be depending which chemtrail conspiracy theorists you talk to those are either controlling the weather dumbing down the population is my favorite um so that we'll be tame when they put us into the extermination camps. Really just about anything and everything, trying to control the weather, trying to block global warming, whatever it is. so silly from from every perspective um and you cannot cannot change the mind of the people who firmly believe this so do you think it's because they've been dumbed down by chemtrails though well i don't see any politicians going around wearing gas masks so they've already been well that's because we know they're all lizard people. That's right. They aren't susceptible.

The gas mask is hidden under the electronic disguise that the lizard is wearing. All those microphones in front of them at press conferences are actually air filters. So, you know, it's interesting because the chemtrail episode was one of my early episodes and in that in the early days i tried to um just tell the real science behind why this wouldn't work um why you wouldn't have you know 50 gallon tanks in a jet aren't gonna make that much smoke to where you'd have to put it in the atmosphere for it not to simply get blown out to sea and rained harmlessly into the oceans, how it would get dispersed. And that's where I stopped. If I were to redo that episode today, I would go more into why this belief exists. Because that's where, to me, the real interesting part of the story is.

Why is this something, as bizarre as it is, why is it something that normally intelligent people are able to embrace so uncritically right and and take so passionately that's the real interesting part of the story and what have you found is the reason i did an episode on that called conspiracy theorists aren't crazy yeah and it basically just goes into the goes into the psychology and the, again, more perceptual phenomenon of why does the brain tend to see agency detection is the term that's often thrown around these days. Why do we have agency detection? Why is that an evolved trait?

Why do our brains, why are we constantly looking out for things that might possibly hurt us? And every little thing, every rustle in the bushes we think might be a saber-toothed cat, it's a survival mechanism to be overly paranoid. And then we have to temper that as we get older. We have to temper that with our personal experience. Well, rustling in the bushes is not necessarily a saber-toothed cat. I can walk on by and probably not get killed and not worry about it. So, you know, everyone finds a balance in there somewhere.

So this tendency to see conspiracies everywhere is really your brain working correctly. You just happen to be further along on the spectrum of what your personal experience has taught you, how you should temper your evolved traits. Right. Where did hear first hear about that theory of uh you know evolutionarily it was an advantage to uh fear to to be uh more paranoid than skeptical wow that's a great question um i don't know it's been it's been a long time it's something that um it's something that i hadn't started paying attention to until after I started doing the Skeptoid podcast. So it's, you know, sometime in the past five years, but I have no idea.

It's a fairly well, well, I shouldn't say it's well established. It's fairly popular. I think Michael Shermer popularized that. He has certainly talked about it, but I know I've heard about it other places as well. I couldn't say where it first came from. Interesting. Have you been accused of being an agent of misinformation? Yeah, he talks about that a lot.

An agent of the things that I hear a lot, too, is that there are these people that they feel that the government has hired people such as yourself to. Your answer is usually like, yeah, they should pay me. I wish they would. Right. Are you losing my audio again? No, we're good. No, we can hear you. OK. Um, yeah, I get, uh, I, I get the, I'm a tool of the government all the time.

Uh, or I'm a tool of, of whatever corporation, whatever it is I'm talking about that week, someone is paying me to do it as if, yes, they, they, they randomly pay podcasters and bloggers hundreds of thousands of dollars over periods of five, six years to do hundreds of episodes on hundreds of unrelated topics just that they can sneak in one little blog post on the internet that makes a lot of sense it would be great if you were telling the truth but you're just so sarcastic about it that we're all like yeah you're right good point but you're just telling the truth i work for the government yeah okay big oil food, big pharma.

Right. I actually got accused of getting free food from Sweet Sin recently for a column, a pro-business column that I wrote about them. Interesting. Yeah. Interesting. And I told them, yeah, I should be getting free food. Pretty serious accusation. I know. I know.

I know. I'm like, you know, I've made it. Actually, this is really cool. Somebody put, let me find this on my website really quick. Someone made me a downloadable disinformation badge. You don't even have to look for it in your cereal anymore? If you go to Skeptoid.com and search for disinformation agent, it links you to a web page where you can just put in your name, you can upload a little picture of yourself,

and it'll create this downloadable badge that you can print out. Cool. Awesome. It's your official government ID badge as a disinformation agent. So it's just that easy. That's all it is. And actually, I went to Dragon Con once, and a girl came up completely dressed as a skeptoid disinformation agent. Nice.

She had not just the badge, but she'd put together an entire costume. It was epic. It was epic. So what do you enjoy besides skepticism are you a reader are you a movie watcher i am ever since i started the podcast i have nothing it takes all of my time i haven't left this room in five and a half years i'm the howard hughes of podcasting we are noticing the jars of urine behind you too they look good nice jars they're under the table um now i was i was on a big science fiction novel kick for a while i was i was reading

trying to get every novel that had won the hugo award and the nebula award and my gosh those guys are so good those books are all great if they've won those awards i mean you're guaranteed that it's going to be a good book. It's certainly been influential. I'm a big fan of the whole Neil Stevenson thing and all of that genre. I feel like I'm the guy

on the military base in Spinal Tap. I'm a big fan, not of yours specifically, but the whole genre. Yeah, I appreciate it. Do you find yourself constantly scrutinizing every scientific impossibility in science fiction books or do you just you're able to throw your brain out the window oh no no um no a suspension of disbelief is is is a huge part of of the enjoyment of life right you'll find that this that there's a huge crossover between people in the whole i have to use the term skeptical that's very true there's yeah between that and

sci-fi uh-huh i feel like it makes it a little more difficult though because you there's certain you can go too far you know in science fiction like with the time traveling okay but there's there's a there's a fine line between coming up with something that's totally fanciful and is not intended to be presented as anything but fanciful, such as, you know, the forecaster portals or warp drives. We accept that. Right, right. But when you're watching a movie and they make a flagrant scientific error, that pisses off science writers and skeptics more than anything you know when they what was this recent movie they were talking about 150 000 miles boy that would put it at the orbit of jupiter or something they were off by 150 000 it's so easy to spend two seconds on wikipedia right yeah and

when they make the flagrant errors that's that's that really makes you cringe because if you're a good sci-fi fan you know, real science. Well, right. And when you see a bad scientist trying to produce science fiction, that's when you get the low quality crap. What do you think are some instances of skeptics just being wrong? Just things that that appear to be false, that that turned out to be true or the opposite. I wouldn't say that it's... I mean, skeptics, by and large, have a great appreciation for the scientific method. And I wouldn't say the cases of skeptics turning out to be wrong are cases like you're talking about. Cases like, well, they dismiss ghosts when ghosts actually are real.

Skeptics, I think, are wrong. There's a huge tendency to make broad sweeping generalizations about people. People who believe this are stupid. That, I think, is probably the most common and most wrong error that I hear skeptics making a lot. Quick dismissal of things, even though they may be right to dismiss them, they may dismiss them for the wrong reason. And just calling large groups of people wrong or deluded or anything like that is, that's, it's not only wrong, but again, you're missing the whole point. You're missing the process that, that makes skepticism truly interesting. A lot of skeptics would say that,

you know, belief in the supernatural, um, causes things like genocides or, you know, children in Africa to be killed as witches or, um, belief in god causes wars and do you um do you think that that's just completely untrue do you think it's um i i you know i think you just you just raised a lot of different subjects there and i don't think you can group all of those together and say those are right or those are wrong but ultimately do you think belief in the supernatural is a destructive thing or do you think it's okay for the most part um that's a false dichotomy uh it's it's not it's boy here's the thing okay witchcraft we can say causes people in africa to

run around and chop off the hands of albinos and sell them as witchcraft devices. That's a terrible thing. And we can say that that's caused by witchcraft. But I don't think that we can say that if they didn't believe in witchcraft, that wouldn't have happened. People who go around doing horrible things, cutting off people's heads, whatever, and they're doing it under some religious banner, I don't think it's the religion that caused them to do that. I think that person's got some kind of a serious problem and would be doing that under some other banner if it wasn't for religion. So on the one hand, having a supernatural belief is not necessarily the cause of a specific problem, but it is still a problem in itself in that it leads to a whole pattern of bad thinking processes, which causes you to lose the ability to make good decisions in your life.

It's not a good decision to go around killing people. Write that down, Josh. Okay. One more time. It's not. I'm a little skeptical of that one. Anything you can, any random paranormal belief you can come up with. The old lady thinks her dog is psychic.

Okay. By itself, that's not a harmful belief. Right. But when she believes that she's more likely to believe the next weird thing that comes along and it may be something that pertains to her health or her financial situation. She might be gullible to the next multilevel marketing business plan or some stupid scam. So it's important that everyone learn critical thinking, not just to protect yourself, but from my perspective, for the enjoyment of the knowledge that it brings. Right. Do you have a hard time not imparting this knowledge on people you meet on a day-to-day basis in public, maybe at the grocery store? somebody's like, hair dye goes into your brain or something.

Do you feel like you have to engage these people? No, I don't because I have enough experience to know that that is never a good thing. I keep my mouth shut and I'm very happy to do so. I go out with friends and someone says something stupid every single time. Yeah. No, no, no. There's no more great Bryans here because Brian keeps his mouth shut. Right.

It's, you know, there's things, there's times when it's inappropriate to jump up and confront people randomly when they were trying to say something that they thought was helpful or interesting. Sure. And, you know, it's usually not the present. It's usually not the time to do that. Right, right. You know, I was home with an injury after a surgery, and a neighbor came by with a business card of his acupuncturist, thinking it would help me out.

You know, he's doing me a kindness. I don't say, you idiot. Acupuncture doesn't work through the card know i thank you very much have you done an episode on acupuncture i don't think you know i have not it's amazing that after 325 episodes there's still so many of the basics that i haven't done yet what about red wine vinegar it's great in salsa i've actually about that i've been putting that on my face recently i have to admit oh yeah yeah i'm trying to to believe that it's going to help me with my skin because i found maybe a little bit of evidence on the internet that it might help you with the skin

and all the other stuff is bs so that's good enough for me you know i already bought the jar so people ask me questions like that all the time. People randomly ask me, because, you know, he's the skeptic, or he's the science guy, and they'll ask me a question that's almost all outside my field. If you'd ask me a computer science question right now, I'd probably know the answer, but you ask me a medical question, and I'm not a doctor. When I do an

episode on a medical subject, I have to do a crap load of research first, or I'm going to keep my mouth shut. So, I keep my mouth shut. I don't know the answer to your question. That's a great question. I hope it does help and I hope it is a real thing. Thank you. I hope there's an afterlife and I hope that one day we can read each other's minds and fly. Were you ever a religious person? I was raised a Mormon for, oh gosh, I don't know, junior high and high school. And I actually went to Brigham Young University for a year.

And it wasn't until I got there that I became a believer. And really it's because I was 17 years old and incredibly impressionable. And the girl that I liked believed it. And that's really what drove my belief. When you're 17, everyone who's listening to this who's 17, I'm sorry, but you're a shithead right now. Josh is actually 17, right? I'll be 18 soon. So, yeah, that's, but I got over it.

I recovered fairly quickly once I got back to UCLA. Wow. Did you ever have that void that Nietzsche talks about when you get the atheism bug, when it finally bites you? I mean, it was a hard transformation for me to go from I'm an immortal spiritual being to I'm an animal that's going to die someday. I don't recall ever having that. You didn't have that exact thought that you were going to be someday i don't recall ever having that um you didn't have that exact thought that you were gonna be an animal that dies you know i i think i think it had to do with when i was a kid um i was literally dragged kicking and screaming to church every sunday because i hated it it was a creepy place absolutely especially a cath a Catholic church that I went to. Everything is so droll.

Images of death everywhere. I know. It's like more like hell. I mean, and you'd rather be home playing. It's as simple as that. Right. So I just hated it. And so I never had a problem, you know, quote unquote, of religion was was was never a problem for me

i've just never really been a been a religious person isn't it uh more of a difficult thing to do with the mormon religion is because you're kind of extricated from the community right if you leave the mormon church were your parents mormon and do they take that hard i i have i have no idea that when i came back from my year in uh in utah they um they had they had left the church i don't know why i think they just had some personal conflict with someone there and stopped going as far no one ever got excommunicated or anything like that nothing like that ever happened to me and i i had nothing but uh nothing but positive experiences there i had it was a fun freshman year in college, a lot of great skiing. I made friends there.

I'm still in touch with today. Yeah, it was a great time. You know, the church part of it was – it's certainly part of the culture that permeates BYU, but it's also at the same time a college like any other. Sure. But it's also at the same time a college like any other. So I don't have anything negative to say about the Mormon people that I've met. And having grown up in a lot of Mormon communities, I think I hate to make generalizations. I won't make a generalization, but there are a lot of really, really good, solid people. Right. Statistically, they make good neighbors, right?

I would say that. You know, there's the rumor that I've never looked into that Howard Hughes only hired Mormons for his inner circle. Yeah, I've heard that too. Because the only people he felt were trustworthy. It would be a great episode.

If Howard Hughes did it, then you know it's the right thing to do. Then you know it made sense and wasn't insane at all. do you think critical thinking has helped you on a personal level to uh live a happier life hmm that's a really good question i don't think anyone's ever asked me that before yeah um you know of course the knee jerk is to say, well, of course, right, right. But, um, I, I would have to say, just to be completely honest with you, I would have to say that I don't recall any instances of, of critical thinking, at least in these last five years, when I've been doing it full time with

Skeptoid, I don't remember any cases of that bringing me newfound happiness. I have found a lot of, a lot of joy in researching the episodes, a lot of joy and knowledge and discovering the solutions to mysteries. That's been a lot of fun. I have, I have found out what an idiot I've been in the past sometimes, um, when I realized that I've been taken advantage of by this or that goofy business opportunity, or that I gave all that money to the vitamin C manufacturers.

Um, you know, those are all moments where you feel like a little bit of an idiot. That's, you know, that's about as good of an answer as I can give you. Be completely honest. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I found for me, like trying to take an honest, critical look at things as they relate to my happiness has been pretty helpful for me to give me, give me an example. Um, accepting that, um, I'm someone who isn't, uh, very healthy physically by nature that I really have to work at it. There's not, you know, when I was a teenager, I'd wonder why I was fatigued all the time. And, you know, I've realized that I have to be someone who exercises regularly and who eats pretty well. Um, and, uh, you know, just kind of accepting that I'm not someone who can, I'm never going to be the guy who, uh, can just talk to

anyone and do anything. I'm always going to have anxiety, you know, like, uh, I'm not the type of person that can wake up at five in the morning and do everything all day long. You know, like just accepting truths about myself as a as a physical entity. I find I find that life in general is is a lot of fun without without the whole religious context. Right. I really enjoy the fact that I'm in charge of what happens in my life and that I don't have to worry about going to hell if I don't please somebody. Right, if there's a man in the sky.

I don't have to worry about satisfying anybody else's rules or regulations or desires about what I must do or what I must think. That's very nice and very liberating. But then again, I've always had that. So that's why I say I can't attribute critical thinking to that because it's something that I've always enjoyed. It does seem like it would make for a happier life, though. I'm a believer that knowledge is power, and it seems like the more things you know about,

the more you know about the world, I think the more comfortable you can be in the world as you continue to learn. Would you agree with that? Yeah, certainly. I think that's a very powerful point. Knowing the way the world actually works. Right, definitely. it may not be something that gives you a tangible benefit every single day but when it does it's a lot of fun

right for me like accepting that life is not like a movie i think has been really helpful like sudden kung fu fights breaking those still happen on occasion. CGI, monsters growling and attacking me. Mike can't stop talking about Unobtainium and I'm like, let it go. It's okay. Can we talk about bottled water for a second? We can. I'm sure...

Have you done an episode on bottled water? I did an early episode on it, yeah. Okay, I apologize, but I haven't heard it. There's a documentary called Tapped. Have you seen that? No. Or heard of it? It was all about how bottled water is the scourge of the planet and not healthy for you. And that there there is the byproducts from the plastics that they use for the bottled water can be harmful. Could you speak to that a little bit?

Yeah. You know, there is a shock doc for just about any subject you can imagine because it's always going to be a successful genre. Right. And it's sort of like the equivalent of, like, the news saying, this household cleaner will kill you. Find out at 11. Because you're like oh my god that's in my house you know we won't tell you which one right on the simpsons yeah people

love to hear that products sold to them are going to kill them uh it's it's it's you know the evil government the evil corporations is always going to be the easiest message to sell to the unsuspecting public deer park more like devil park right right exactly so the thing with bottled water is it wasn't really a thing at all until this one student at uh i'm gonna say the university of idaho i'm pretty sure that's right i hope it's not wrong someone will correct me i'm sure if it is uh he he did a he did a research project in which he tested water that had been in these plastic bottles, and he reported that these toxic substances from the plastic came out in the tests. Right.

And it made headlines all over the world. This was, oh, about 15, 20 years ago. And it's been a thing since then. And it really had not ever been a thing until this happened. What never got reported is that the kid's paper was completely wrong. It was one kid's paper. It was not research published by the University of Idaho. And in fact, the substance that he found was not in the plastic at all. It was contamination from his lab equipment. So his paper was completely wrong. But nevertheless, that's a whole other question than the overall question,

which is can we get killed from drinking bottled water? I guess just drinking from plastic bottles in general, you know, a 20-ounce Coke. That's the thing. When you say plastic bottles in general, there are how many different kinds of plastic? Literally thousands. Sure. And that's because they're designed for all sorts of different applications. Right.

And we use plastic that is intended for whatever the application is. So if it's for plastic for drinking bottles, we use plastic that's going to be safe in all the conditions that a drinking water bottle is likely to encounter. And a lot of it does contain BPA, for example. Yeah, that's the big one. That's the BPA. However, and they say BPA, it may pose some risk of damage to fetuses.

I believe that's the... Who are these fetuses getting bottled water? The thing is... It's part of the 1%. There is no such thing as a safe compound. Every compound in the world is either safe or poisonous. It's all depending on the dose. You can die from having too much oxygen or too much water. You can be just fine with too little rattlesnake venom.

In fact, we all have plutonium in our bodies right now, the most toxic substance on the planet, just naturally. And it's the same with BPA. There is a safe level of BPA, whether you like to admit it or not, there is. And you could eat a hundred plastic bottles, a thousand plastic bottles, and you could be just fine. That amount of BPA is not enough to harm you. We need to take a break. I need to eat. Some bottles. Here's a can.

I smell a challenge. So, yeah, it's a question of dose. The dose is so many orders of magnitude below what's possible to be harmful is that it's a complete non-issue. However, people don't understand that. And people say, oh, well, there's BPA in the plastic. It's therefore harmful. It needs to be removed. So what they've done now is the manufacturers have responded by selling aluminum water bottles.

I'm sure you've seen these. If you go into REI, you see aluminum drinking bottles. And guess what they're coated with on the inside? The same old plastic as always. Otherwise, the water tastes like battery acid. But that's all it takes to satisfy consumers. Sometimes you have to fool the consumers a little bit or their own ignorance is going to prevent them from buying your product. So, no, there's certainly never been a case of any victim or any harm being shown.

There is theoretical harm, but only at much larger doses than it's ever practical to expect to get. Are you familiar with the rapper from Public Enemy known as Professor Griff? I am. I am sadly not. OK, he said he says that if you leave a plastic bottle of water in the sun, that's when it becomes harmful. He's actually a pretty popular YouTube conspiracy theorist these days. Sure. Yeah. And that also is not true.

However, when a bottle gets heated up, it is going to degrade more quickly. And you will get more of the plastic's contents in the water. That's true. But again, like I said, not enough. You could, yeah, the entire bottle would not hurt you. You could, you could eat a hundred bottles a day and you're never going to get enough built up in your system to pose any harm. Might have some digestion problems, but other than that, you might, you might not. So what you do then is you, you just melt them and inject them directly.

Don't try that at home, kids, especially you 17 year old shitheads. Don't try that. I don't think I've ever heard Brian Dunning curse before this episode. Now, I don't usually do it on my show, but I'm on your show now. So I got to go for it. Is there anything else you want to get out of your system? That was the only one I could find. OK, I'll look a little deeper.

Okay. What's a typical week for you? Is there a typical week? Yeah. No, I have to be pretty regimented. I get up at 6 o'clock in the morning, and I start working on my show. And that's my full-time gig. I try to produce it on friday but i've never almost never make it i don't usually end up recording it on on saturday morning do you record uh at your house i do record at my house um it's uh it's got its ups and downs um i the

thing is i've done so many episodes now that uh there's really kind of no point in going and getting a proper sound room. I keep saying I'm going to buy one of these little portable sound rooms that you can assemble in your home office, wherever. They're like $6,000. But the sound quality of my show is good enough. Yeah, it sounds great. Yeah, nobody ever complains. People are always telling me, ah, it sounds great. So it's like you know i bother if someone was paying me to do it then uh you know maybe i'd bother

and you you said you speak at conferences uh sometimes all that i can yeah that's that's one of my my most favorite things to do and going to going to colleges and universities and speaking to students is always fun i've got a i've got a number of live shows that I do for them. That's great. Always a blast. Yeah. And is it mostly about skepticism? Yeah, I've got collections of topics put together.

The one I'm doing a lot this year is called Your Brain Sucks. Oh, yeah. called your brain sucks oh yeah yeah the point is to show people um how unreliable your own perceptions are about your own experiences because when i'm doing skeptoid people will always say to me um you know i saw a ufo myself so i know that they're real right and so the point of my show is to show people firsthand i make everyone in the audience's brain fail at least once during the show. And so I try to make people understand. Pass out water bottles for people to eat. Spray them with a chemtrail.

Take that, 17-year-old college shitheads. And the show that I did a lot last year was called, that was really fun, it's called Sounds From Beyond. And that was a whole collection of really wild and crazy sounds you know skeptoid is an audio program so i have a lot of audio in it and so there's just a whole bunch of mysteries that were solved with sounds and things like that it's not so much here's a weird sound guess what this is it's here's how sound helped us cause solve this mystery so that's a lot of fun interesting shows like that can you uh let

us in on on what ideas you're working on for upcoming skeptoid episodes or is that uh classified nope it's that's that's classified secret information although since i recorded today's um before um uh that'll be out after this podcast comes out. This one was the golden ratio. There is a lot of, there's a lot of misconceptions and pseudoscience about the golden ratio, the ratio of one to fee. It's said to be the ratio that the Parthenon is built on. It's said to be found throughout the human body and in works of art and works

of music. I think you're thinking of the Jim Carrey movie number 23. It's very much the same thing. It's very much the same thing. Yeah. And that, that, that goes back to the whole thing of,

um, agency detection that we're talking about. It's a matter of the brain going into hyperdrive on its pattern recognition, right? Looking for patterns, uh, even though there may not be one there, but seeing one anyway. Right. That's interesting. Um, are you familiar with, uh, Malcolm Gladwell? pattern recognition right looking for patterns uh even though there may not be one there but

seeing one anyway right that's interesting um are you familiar with uh malcolm gladwell and uh his books somewhat i've read uh i've read uh i've read the tipping point i think uh i think that's the only one i've read he has uh he has another book called blink which um is all about how normally your split second decision that you make up in your mind when you see something is normally the correct one so it sounds like you're kind of saying the opposite that your brain will kind of trick you into believing what you want to believe well it's it's it's not that it tricks you into believing what you want to believe it tricks you into thinking what the brain has come up with shortcuts to help you see what probably happened.

Right. Okay. There's something called heuristics, which are these shortcuts of logic. Things like common sense and rules of thumb, those are heuristics. It's things that will help you make a decision quickly based on a limited amount of information, you know, a decision that's probably hopefully correct. Right. And this, you know, a decision that's probably hopefully correct. Right. And this, you know, you know, hey, we've got a blind spot in our eyes. You know, we don't see this whole bottom, bottom outside quadrant because there's a blind spot there. However, we don't notice that. Why? It's because our brain has filled in that missing part of the image with what it thinks is probably there based on its previous experience. Right. That's some

fascinating stuff so it's like we're asking a brain our brains questions and it's cramming for a test that didn't study for it it's like i think it's this i don't know go with that that's very much true that's very much true basically just like our podcasting yeah exactly yeah well uh will your brain sucks be coming to the East Coast anytime soon? Let's see. What's on my schedule? Nothing on the East Coast actually right now.

I've got some stuff here in California. I've got something in Australia next year. That's about it. Will that be your first time in Australia? No, I did the amazing meeting in Australia a year or two ago. You said the amazing meeting the amazing meeting is that where contestants from the amazing race get together from previous seasons and what season were you on yeah that is that is the funnest conference anyone can ever go to is it just like let's collect a bunch of smart cool people and get them in one room and that is

exactly what happens you know guys like guys like the myth busters and penn and teller are always there a lot of really popular science communicators neil degrasse tyson is is often there bill nye the science guy is often there but just just a lot of awesome people it's the it's the annual conference in that's put on by the james randy educational foundation okay and and And if your listeners don't know who James Randi is, then he's the most awesome guy in the world. You've got to look him up on YouTube and check him out. Listener.

Our moms will check him out for sure. All right. Well, yeah, you've been quite generous with your time, Brian. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. And everybody check out Skeptoid. And if you're in the California area, I'm sure your live get-togethers of plastic bottle eating is fun. So check that out.

I'm going to do that. I'm going to melt some and bring some syringes. Sure. Nice. Well, yeah, Thanks again, Brian. We really appreciate it. And we'll send you the link online. Are you on Twitter?

I am on Twitter. It's Brian Dunning on Twitter. Perfect. Wow. You got in early with that one, too. So, yeah. We'll find you on Twitter and send a link to you. And, yeah.

We really appreciate you taking the time out, Brian. Great. Thank you, gentlemen. Have a great day. Thanks. You too.