The Joe Rogan Experience - #846 - Michael Shermer

Episode Date: September 14, 2016

Michael Shermer is a science writer, historian of science, founder of The Skeptics Society, and Editor in Chief of its magazine Skeptic, which is largely devoted to investigating pseudoscientific and supernatural claims.

Three, two, one, boom! Michael Shermer is here, ladies and gentlemen, again, and we've been talking about silly people for the past 15 minutes. We just, we had to get warmed up. The list is endless. We had to get warmed up with body doubles. Conspiracies. Flat earthers. Yeah, flat earthers. Forests aren't real. Is that what they're saying, Jamie? The flat earthers? We're going to talk about the flat earthers for one reason.

they're saying, Jamie, the flat earthers? We're going to talk about the flat earthers for one reason. The reason why I wanted to bring this up is because I think there's a lot of folks out there that are super gullible and I think they're being trolled. I think they're being trolled by people who put together these, it's one of two options. Either they're being trolled by people who put together these elaborate arguments for something that they don't believe because they're just trying to make money off of YouTube views, which is entirely possible. And this needs to be thought of. It really needs to be considered because YouTube videos can be extremely lucrative. If you can get a YouTube video with millions of hits

and a lot of these videos on all sorts of different conspiracies and all sorts of different crazy things can generate that kind of volume, you're making real money. Pennies on the the dollar but if it's millions yes yeah it starts becoming real money and starts and if you do a bunch of them and you can you do them on a regular basis it becomes a gig it becomes like what they do they they create these silly videos but people who just don't have the time or the inclination to actually read scientific papers and articles and journals and all these different things that explain how we've known for a long time that the earth is round. Right. Yeah, it's a myth that Columbus proved that the earth is not flat, that it's round.

The ancients knew, the Greeks knew, Columbus knew, everyone knew then that it was round. The Sumerians knew. Absolutely. Their depictions on clay, when they drew it in clay, they drew all the planets as circles. Right. They knew. Right. I mean, there's some obvious simple ones anybody could do.

If you see an eclipse, like a lunar eclipse, you can see the Earth's shadow on the moon. It's round. like a lunar eclipse, you can see the Earth's shadow on the moon. It's round. You know, if you're high enough and, you know, the ships are sailing out, you can see the mast is the last thing you would see as the hull drops over the horizon first slowly. You know, there's things like that that we know the Earth is round. You know, you travel around, you come back to where you started.

You know, now their explanation, the flat earthers, is that, yeah, it's round like a pizza, but a round, flat pizza, and all the continents are on the one flat face side up. And that the satellites are up there going around. It's like, yeah, but the satellite photos don't show all the continents in one picture because some of them are on the other side of the globe. So that refutes that. Well, not only that, but they think that satellites are actually in planes. They're in planes in low Earth orbit that are just circling around. There's no actual satellites. They don't even believe in satellites. Yeah, so back to your original comment, some of these recent ones are so crazy that you

can't help but think, okay, they don't believe it. They're just yanking our chain for maybe financial reasons. But that does get to the question I always get, which is, do these people really believe it? The cult leaders, the people that make extraordinary claims, are they just making this stuff up? You know, people make shit up all the time. It's called fiction fantasy. Or do they really believe it? Are they, you know, true believers?

And, you know, it's hard to tell. It's hard to get inside people's heads. The old flat earthers in the 19th century, I think they really did believe it. There wasn't much money to be made, you know, on those kinds of things. I mentioned Alfred Russell Wallace, who was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin. I wrote my dissertation on him and wrote a biography of him. And he was quite the colorful character who was so open-minded to new ideas that he was also gullible. So open-minded enough to see this radical new theory of the evolution of life by natural selection.

That's good. Pioneered other fields like biogeography and so on. But he also was really into spiritualism and phrenology, seances. Channeling. All that stuff. And then he encountered an ad in one of the natural history magazines for this 500-pound bet if anybody could prove the Earth is round. So he devised a test, and he went down to the Bedford Canal, which is a long straight, like 10 kilometers long. You can see the whole distance.

and if you put these little sticks in the ground with markers on them and you get a little telescope like a um a surveyor's scope and you line it up you can see that it bends so at each point the stick is you know three meters above the ground at each point and but you can see that it's dropped down in the last one so it's bent so he won the bet but he didn't get paid of course because these people are cranks and so we had to take him to court. This ended up costing him about 15 years of his career, you know, just wasting time, you know, writing letters and getting court dates and suing this guy and, you know, whatever. Just to try to win the bet? Yeah, just try to win the bet. So, and of course, what happens, you get caught up emotionally, like, I'm not going to let this bastard get away with this. You know, he should have just cut his losses and left. But anyway.

And I found these letters that this guy wrote to the Royal Geographical Society about Alfred Russell Wallace. You know, you have one member of your society that should be, you know, he's a quack and a crank. And, you know, he wrote letters to Wallace's wife. You know, you better not sleep in your bed at night quietly because I'm coming to get you guys. It's like death threats. Yeah. So, you know, it's always questionable to deal with cranks because some of them are a little mentally deranged. Sure.

And they can attach themselves to someone like Wallace or Darwin or anybody else. If you can somehow or another connect yourself to them in some sort of an argument, it kind of legitimizes you, at least in a way, because that person is giving you attention, that person is engaging you, and it elevates your standing. And then whenever two people are arguing, a certain amount of people are going to choose sides. They're just going to, even if what you're saying doesn't make any sense, there's going to be a gang of people that go, I like what he's saying.

And they're going to join in. And people love, they love to be on a team. They love to be, they want to be on Team Wallace or Team Crank. Right. That's a natural part of people. Well, and that's also why people, like a lot of the creationists, want to debate Dawkins. Yes.

Because he's the guy. He's the number one top best-known biological scientist in the world, possibly since Darwin himself. If I can get him on stage, and as Dawkins likes to say, this will look better on your resume than mine, so I'll pass. Yeah. And he doesn't need the money. Well, and the contrary argument, or the other position is,

so many people who are actual scientists want to debate Deepak. Oh, well, yes, and I have debated Deepak. Now, so here's, back to this question is, does he really believe it? Because people, most skeptics and atheists think, well, Deepak's just a fraud, a con man selling, you know, snake oil. I don't think so. I've known him now for a number of years, and the last year, I've spent a lot of time with him. And the reason I know he believes it, absolutely what he says, is because he's always working on me privately. If we're at lunch or dinner, I mean, I got half a dozen emails just the last two days from Deepak.

It's not for public consumption. He's not trying to—we're not debating. He's just trying to convince me that he's right. What is he trying to convince you? Well, about consciousness here. Can you do it in his voice, please? When you read them? A quote from Vendanta. about consciousness here. Can you do it in his voice, please? So here, when you read them,

a quote from Vendanta, all of the body is in the mind, but not all of the mind is in the body. Swami Rama. Well, as long as he's quoting Swami Rama, we know. So, I mean,

he's on to something. So he sends me these, not because he's, he's a crank. He, he wants to convince me that his worldview is different from mine but better. Or I should have a more open mind. Well, that's a bizarre quote.

And that quote can be interpreted a bunch of different ways. And, you know, one could say that we really don't know where consciousness is. We believe that it exists in the mind. But, you know, what we do know is if you blow someone's brains out, they no longer exhibit any behavior that you could recognize as being conscious. Right. So in my debates with Deepak, I make the point. I mean, he points out, as you just did, consciousness is the so-called hard problem. Right.

Not how neurons fire. We know how that works, but the experience you have of looking at me and vice versa, how does that derive from just dopamine going across synapses or norepinephrine going across synapses? It's just electric meat. How do you get electric meat to have this experience we're having? As he likes to say, where's the red? If I open your skull up, there's no red in there. There's no room in there's just neurons firing so how does that happen okay so this is the hard problem no one knows you know but but it's not that we know nothing you know we have some ideas about how it works and i think this is just one of those ones that either will never be resolved like free will determinism you

know okay we live in a determined universe uh how can we have free will if that's true okay the words the language that you know there's certain restrictions on our cognition of how we think about the world. And it's very much influenced by the words we use. So that could be one of those mysterian mysteries that, you know, can't be solved simply by the, not that we're not smart enough, that just the limitations of how we perceive the world. And it's just, you know, so there I like to look at like this. There was a big survey of professional philosophers done about three years ago, about 2,600 PhD, either professors or doctoral students in philosophy.

What is your position on like 25 different debates in philosophy? And like free will determinism, it was roughly equally split between determinists and compatibilists. Like Dan Dennett is a compatibilist. Sam Harris is a determinist in a small percentage of libertarian free will. What are the compatibilists? Compatibilists accept the premise that the universe is determined, governed by laws of nature and so on. But that we make free choices within the causal net of the universe is determined, governed by laws of nature and so on, but that we make free choices within the causal net of the universe. That is, I'm making choices, like I chose to come

out here, and that was a choice. Yes, the universe is determined, but my behavior, my actions, my volitional choices within the net, the causal net, is part of it. And in any case, you can't know all the variables, so it feels like you're making free choices. So you are, in essence, making free choices because it feels free, even if you don't know all the determining factors. So the compatibilist is something like that. There's different versions of it. Dan Dennett makes a good argument.

Degrees of freedom. We have this idea of degrees of freedom in engineering. Certain systems are more complex or less complex, and certain systems have more variation than others. So if you think of degrees and freedom, like an insect has very few degrees of freedom. It's almost entirely instinctively driven, small number of neurons and so on. Maybe a rat has more degrees of freedom than an insect, a dog more than a rat, a primate more than a dog, us more than the other primates. Just how many choices, how many variations. So you can come up here, you go this way, this way, this way, this way, this way. With

the human, it's not clear which way they're going to go. With the rat, it's more predictable. They'll take this maze or that maze because the food is over there or something like that. So as Dennett argues, we're freer than the mouse or the dog. We have more choices. And even within human populations, the law has already accommodated this. So first-degree murder is different than second-degree murder. What is the difference? To what extent you intended to kill the person, you planned it out, versus you were out of control, you're in flagrato,

you caught your partner in bed with somebody else, you lost your temper, bam! Oh, okay, but you wouldn't normally do that. So we think, well, violent aggressiveness or drug addiction, alcohol addiction, the tumor on the brain, you know, the famous case of the University of Texas bell tower shooter. Whitman, you know, he left that note. You know, lately I've been feeling not normal and, you know, I'm feeling quite violent. And I'm going to do some bad shit today. So when I'm dead, do an autopsy.

So he went out and killed his mother and then he went to the bell tower and killed 19 people or whatever it'm dead, do an autopsy. So he went out and killed his mother, and then he went to the Balthazar and killed 19 people or whatever it was. They did an autopsy. Sure enough, he's got a tumor. I think it was next to his hypothalamus. So we would recognize, okay, that guy had fewer degrees of freedom than you and I do. It's not that we excuse it. We just say, okay, he had a tumor. So that's the compatibilist argument. Someone like

Sam or a determinist would say, it's all tumors. It's all determined. You're just using different causal vectors to describe the behavior. Some of them are more obvious than others. So the best argument on that case I know of is from a guy named Adrian Rain, who's a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who was the first to scan the brains of serial killers in prison. So he would take this portable fMRI brain scanner to these prisons. And these guys have nothing to do, so they're happy to participate as subjects. And he would scan their brains, and he found that they have very little self-control, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex. And their prefrontal cortexes were pretty quiet, pretty undeveloped,

inactive. So you have all these impulses that bubble up and there's no break. There's no governor on the system to keep it in check. Whereas you and I would count to 10 or walk out of the room if we're getting heated up. They're more likely to just reach out and punch you if you say something like that, lack of self-control. So he argues that if somebody has a tumor, it's obvious you can see it. But what if somebody just has the crappiest background you can imagine? Raised in a broken home, single mom, drug addictions, gang-related, inner city, crappy diets, dropped on their head, and so on. And he gives an example of this young man named Donta Page, an African-American who was convicted for raping and killing a woman. And he's on death row.

I think he got life in prison. In any case, you know, so he describes, spends pages in this book, The Anatomy of Violence, of this guy's background. And it's the worst background you could possibly imagine that surely has effects on his brain. So there's not a tumor. You can't scan and go, look, there's a tumor. Okay, he's got a tumor. But he's had a background that would surely be different than the background you and I have had. And therefore, he had fewer choices in his actions than you and I would have.

And so, you know, the law would deal with that differently. But see, someone like Dan, Danet would say, well, those are degrees of freedom. He had fewer choices than the person that didn't have the awful background. So that's one of these, this is one of those things where it depends what you mean by these words, like degrees of freedom, volition, choice, actions, versus just more of a physics, engineering, billiard table type of causal model. Well, it's a really complex question and subject, and one that people battle with even when you're faced with the determinism argument. you're faced with the determinism argument. Like you, you, if you take in the logic of determinism, like you are the product of your genetics, of your environment, of all your life experiences, of all these different things, and they are what's dictating all your choices. So even when

you're making a choice, the choice you're making is based on all the data that you've taken in your entire life. So do you in fact have free will at that moment? Or has it all been sort of determined by all these experiences? And it's so hard to argue because everybody's life is different. Everybody's take on things are different. Everybody's experience, you could have the exact same experience as I do, but your take from it might be very different than mine. You might be a person who meditates, so you might be really into mindfulness and really into sitting down and trying to objectively analyze all your thoughts and your reactions. You might come out with a completely different decision based on that. So is it still determinism if all of a sudden you start practicing meditation and you change your behavior? Is that determinism or is that a discipline? I would lump that more into the category of freedom.

You may become self-aware, like I have a violent temper and I really need to do something about this. Well, what can I do? Well, meditation. Okay, so then I choose to start meditating. Just like the addict. I mean, we talk about addicts being out of control, but lots of addicts actually stop. They break the addiction. They have.

How do they do it? Well, meditation. They use cognitive behavior therapy. They go to these clinics and so on. But they've got to drive themselves there. They've got to actively do it. They're aware that they're doing that. I would lump that into the you're making kind of a free choice.

You don't have to do that. You could just keep doing your addiction. But if I was a determinism proponent, I would say, well, no, because your decision to make that choice is based on all of your experiences, your genetics, your family, your background, all of your input that you've gotten from other people about your behavior, and you've decided to make a choice based on that data. Correct. That would be the counterargument. Which is very daunting. Yes. So it's like that, I think, also with consciousness. What do you mean by consciousness? It's a hard problem, okay, but is it ever resolvable? So Deepak thinks it's not just

through a neuroscience explanation. Bottom-up molecules, scaling up, emergent property, mind out of brain. That's what most of us scientists think, people like Christoph Koch, who works on this problem. You know, he's scaling up. He's just looking at the visual cortex in the back of the brain and looking at visual conscious experiences. Now, let's see if we can figure that out. So I like that approach.

But someone like Deepak says, it'll never get us there. So I like that approach, but someone like Deepak says, it'll never get us there. So he used language like, the consciousness is the ground of being. Now, I know that phrase from Paul Tillich, who said, God is the ground of being. What does this mean? It's not quite to say that consciousness is everywhere. It's in here, it's in the clock, it's in this table. Because that would be more of a sort of a deism or pantheism or something like that. is in this table, because that would be more of a sort of a deism or pantheism or something like that.

It's more like it's just a part of the universe. I'm not sure I really understand, because, you know, Deepak has a different language. He has sort of that Eastern wisdom traditions, like Rami and so on. You're being very kind. I would call it word salad. Well, to me- There's a lot of word salad going on. It sounds like that to Westerners.

I've tried to put myself into his worldview. So, for example, a few months ago, my wife and I went and spent three days at the Chopra Center at the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California. Okay, this is a great weekend. We did the full immersion, the tea, the diet, the yoga, the meditation, the whole thing. And I did feel much better afterwards but of course you can't go to the la costa spa and resort in carlsbad california at the beach and not feel good i mean if you don't feel good after that you're the problem not the system well it's also the things you're saying you're drinking tea which is great for you doing yoga which is great for you you're relaxing and

then you're also going there with the intent to try to make some positive change in your life and try to get on a good path. That's right. All those things are good. All those things are good. Now, Deepak just released a paper that was published this week. He wasn't one of the authors, but it was on the effects of his program on biomarkers and various physiological changes. So this was conducted by a Harvard medical scientist named Rudy Tanzi.

Rudy is the scientist who discovered the genes for Alzheimer's. So he does a lot of work with Alzheimer patients. You know, to what extent do we have any meds to treat it? Not really. What about meditation? What about diet? These kinds of things. You know, there's, it's not terribly hopeful, but, you know but maybe some of these supplements, who knows. But anyway, he wanted to know what are the effects of meditation on just regular people. So they went to the La Costa Resort and Spa. There's already a six-day program that the Chopra Center runs. It's Ayurvedic, but it's yoga, it's meditation, it's food, diet, massage.

Not massage in this particular one, although they have great massages there too, which is also healthy. And so what they found was that, and so they compared vacationers who were just staying there at the resort. They took all their various biological markers to novice meditators. They taught them right there. This is it, day one. Here's what we do. Go through it 20 minutes and 30 minutes and so meditation, yoga. And then a group of people that were already there that were serious daily meditators. They've been doing it their whole lives, right?

So there was a difference. First of all, everybody got better. Blood pressure goes down, stress hormones are practically zero, and all these great markers, including the vacationers. Then they found a difference between the vacationers and the meditation group. So the claim is that you can go on vacation, but you can't do that every day of your life. But you can meditate every day of your life. So the effects of meditation may be something like you can do it at home. The relaxation, the meditation, the focus, whatever you call that, focus thought on your mantra actually has physiological changes. One of which was affecting beta amyloids, which are the chemicals that cause the plaques and tangles in neurons that cause Alzheimer's.

argument was that it could be, there's sort of a causal chain there, that meditation leads to less stress, less inflammation, and therefore less of these buildup plaques and tangles around the neurons that kills them. Because that's what happens in Alzheimer's, your brain just dies, neurons die. So amongst various factors that might be effective, meditation may work. Now, someone like Sam who does meditation, he would look for a causal chain, you know, from the bottom up. What are the, you know, the effects of having certain thoughts in one part of your brain affects a different part of your brain and it causes neurochemical, hormonal changes and so on. Deepak, of course, wants to use a different argument and say it has to do with mind, not brain, but mind, consciousness that's out there.

But even saying it's out there is not correct. But anyways, it doesn't matter what the worldview differences are in terms of does it work. If it works, who cares? You know, this would be good. And people that meditate, even people that aren't sort of new agey or Eastern religious, they say it works. I haven't done it. I don't do it myself.

I do other things that I think are relaxing. But if it works, who cares what the explanation is initially? It'd be nice to know something that's effective. So it turns out from this new study just published in Nature that meditation seems to be effective for these biomarkers, including telomeres. It increases telomerase, which causes your telomeres at the end of your chromosomes to either stay the same length or to grow a little bit. And that has direct relations to aging, because we know that the Hayflick limit on the number of times a cell can divide, and when you get to that upper ceiling, then the cells are dead.

And that's what causes aging ultimately is genetics. So if there was a way to sort of slow down the process of the telomerase degrading, maybe through the production of more telomerase chemicals that affects that, and if meditation is one of those or diet, whatever, then that, that would be a good thing. Now, do they determine that from studying the exact same person and studying them pre-meditation and post-meditation and studying the rate that telomeres start to decline? This particular study was just the control group versus the experimental group, the meditators versus non-meditators and the vacationers.

And how, but how much of, see, it seems to me that that's something that you would want to study over a long period of time, and then you would actually have to study the person over a long period of time before they're meditating to really get a base. I don't know if anyone's done that yet, but that would be good, yes. We need more, the scientists themselves, Rudy and his team said, well, we have to replicate this. It's just a one-shot deal here. Six days at a resort, that was it.

We've got to do more of this. But the point is that surely there is some value in some of these techniques. Whatever you call it, so take the word salad out and stop using words like ground of being or whatever. Forget that. Your consciousness.

Yeah, there's a certain way of talking that people really enjoy hearing because it makes it sound like, oh, there's some sort of a mystical explanation and solution to all of the problems that modern day society presents you with. And you could find those through this course or this lecture or this book or this practice. I am now engaging in a practice that separates me from the stresses of the modern life. But I think that what you're saying about meditation and other things that you do that relax you, I think it's very important to relax. And I think we all know that. And that's one of the real problems with our world, our society today, especially in America is so go, go, go that it's like, if you are an athlete and you train constantly, one of the most important things is recovery. It's a critical aspect of athleticism. And if you just train and you don't recover, your body breaks down, you're redlining your system and you're not giving your system the proper time to recover.

I think that when you meditate, and for me, my big one is the sensory deprivation tank. I have one in my basement. You do? And I go in it all the time. And it's the most relaxing thing in the world because you're going in there. The water is the same temperature as your body. You're floating. It's amazing.

And in doing that, I feel like there's no motion at all. I'm concentrating completely on my breathing until I achieve this certain state of consciousness that I get to when I go in there. And the way I get to it is just concentrating entirely on breathing in and breathing out. And I just think about in with the good and out with the bad and in with the good. And that's my only thoughts that I try to maintain. Other thoughts get in there. They bounce around and they ricochet out and eventually they stop existing. So that is meditation.

It's meditation. Yeah. But I think any form of just, right. Just give your body a chance to give your heart rate a chance to drop. Give your mind a chance to slow its revolutions per minute. Just give yourself some time to recover. And then also reflection, give yourself some time to consider the momentum of your life. Cause I think that is also a real issue with people is that your life sort of starts taking over you and your actions and the things that you do during the day.

A lot of them get based on the momentum of the things you've already done versus what you actually want to do. Right. And it just kind of gets out of hand and you don't have a chance to step back and look at it and go, I got to stop doing that. Or I need to do more of this. Or I have to figure a way to not I need to do more of this, or I have to figure a way to not do all these things together, whatever the decision you make. But those decisions come out of reflection, which comes out of space, away from the actual thing and time and thought.

Right. My Jewish friends tell me that this is what the Sabbath is for. You know, Friday night sundown till Saturday sundown. That's a time of, you know, family, friends, reflection, no TV, no you're off social media, you know, and all that stuff. That makes sense. I mean, it's a smart thing. And that's an old tradition. So, you know, yes, even my Jewish friends are not religious. It's just a cultural thing and that's probably a good thing. Now, where it gets a little out of hand, I think, like another one of my full immersions,

this is from my chapter on Deepak and Eastern religious traditions in my next book, Heavens on Earth. We went to see Deepak and Eckhart Tolle, who did a show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. The Power of Now. The Power of Now. The Power of Now. I mean, this place, what, there must have been 3,000 people, 4,000 people there, paid 50 bucks a hitter. I mean, I know, it's like, wow, all right. Make it some cash. Yes.

I don't know what it costs to rent the shrine. Those are expensive. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But, you know, the two of them just sort of walked up and down the stage and just talked. Consciousness. Yes, it's very much like that. And, you know, the people that attend, you know, these are fairly well-off people. You can sort of tell in the parking lot how they're dressed.

Same thing with this last weekend. I was at the Sages and Scientists Conference that Deepak puts on every year. This year, instead of at the La Costa Resort, it was at the Beverly Wilshire. Okay, so there's a lot of people from LA that are Deepak fans, and they go, you know, these are not your normal run-of-the-mill folks. You know, these are people that, you know, upper middle class, you know, good looking, well off, driving nice cars. I don't know if you've ever been to the Beverly Wilshire, but if you sit at the, there's a little bar, it's Wolfgang Puck's bar. And, you know, so they have good German beer, which my wife and I like because she's from

Germany. And we just sit there at the window and watch these cars pull up, you know, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, Bentley. And it's like, okay, this is not, you know, one of my Caltech events, you know, with science geeks coming, you know, it's a different audience. So I do wonder, the people that are in that particular study that Rudy Tanzi did, this is not a randomly picked sample from the general population. Who knows?

They have different kinds of problems or issues, a lot of them depression, mental, things that might be affected by psychological states anyway. It's different from the physiological changes they mark, but still. But when you go, we watched the Shrine Auditorium thing with Eckhart Tolle, and he's very effective. He speaks in a manner I can't even imitate. It's just very soft, very slow. I could almost feel myself melting into the chair. Hypnotic.

Very hypnotic, yeah. Have you ever been hypnotized? I have, yep. That's what it feels like right yeah so he is probably doing that yeah he's bringing the audience to a certain state of thinking and i'm sure it is effective for the now and you know technically he and deep bucker write that there really is only the now you know about the three seconds or so of the current state of before after the past and before the future, it's just it, you know.

And even your memories of the past, it's just neurons firing in your brain now of what happened in the past. And the future is really, it hasn't happened yet, but it's just your neurons firing in anticipation of what might happen. So they're right. It really, all the action is now. You know, of course, as I like to joke, you know, my three days there at the Chopra Center or at the New Age place up in Big Sur,

what's that, the one on the, right on the cliffs, the Esalon Institute. I've been there several times and it's super relaxing. And, you know, but the now ends on Monday morning, I go back to work, you know, my, my mortgage has a now coming up pretty soon, called the payment. And, you know, I don't know, to what extent you can live in that condition all of the time. But if you take it in moderation, like, like you said, just once in a while to step back once a week, you know, once a day, whatever, for 10 minutes, half an hour, hour, deprivation tank, once a day, something. That seems pretty reasonable. Yeah, very reasonable and very beneficial.

I think those people that you're talking about, they do have a whole different set of problems because they have achieved material wealth beyond the imagination of the average person. If you're pulling up in a Ferrari, you're essentially pulling up in a house. You're driving a house around. You're driving a $200,000 plus dollar automobile which to most people was just crazy like that someone could have one of those so that kind of a person who isn't happy is the type of person that wants to go to some sort of a seminar by a health guru oh look at that a blue Lamborghini I mean this thing is too much those things will break down on you too, folks. All right?

If you're going to invest, that's not the move. Bahrain. There's probably some oil money here. I was at one of the hotels in Beverly Hills. I had dinner there, and this Bugatti Veyron pulled in that was more than a million dollars. And I think they're like one point what didn't we look it up like 1.3 it doesn't matter 1.3 million dollars or something like that but it had these saudi arabian plates on it and uh it actually had palace plates it said something

palace on it so this was some royal person sent his car over either in a boat or on a plane and uh there was you know that car and then there's a million of these other super expensive luxury cars all over the place those people have their own problems right and we would like the average person who works all day and has a pile of bills and has all this debt is like god damn it I would love to be a rich person how the hell these fucking rich people still have problems right it doesn't make any sense. But you get used to your life. You get used to your life.

And if your life is being an indigenous person, living in Bolivia in the jungle, and you shoot spears at fish, and that's how you get by, you get used to that life. That life becomes your life. And you find problems. And maybe you don't find as many

when you're in a hunter-gatherer tribe as you do if you're some sort of a hedge fund manager who's just on Adderall every day and completely stressed out, and your wife's driving you crazy, and your mistress wants you to leave your wife, and you don't know how the fuck you got yourself into this situation. And then you decide, I'm going to go to this Power of Now seminar and straighten my shit out. Right.

Pull up in your blue Ferrari and it's like, there's problems. People create problems. And just because someone has material wealth, not only does it not eliminate problems, it creates a whole new slew of problems that would lead to the kind of self-indulgent sort of exploration of your condition that these things sort of enforce and cater to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you got to go back to work the next day or whatever.

Yeah. So another point I made in my talk for Deepak, by the way, there he is with the fam. You know, super, super nice guy. I'm sure. He really does care. Seems like a very nice guy. Yeah. He's a super, super nice guy.

I'm sure. He really does care. Seems like a very nice guy. Yeah. But if you go to one of these workshops and you feel much better, so there's been a few studies, not many, like big corporations hire people like Tony Robbins to come in and give the spiel to get the sales force all fired up. And they are. They are fired up.

Here, as we can tell, the effect lasts for a couple of weeks. They go back. They're hitting the phones or making those calls or making more money. It's like, it's work. And then it tapers, and they're right back to where they were. Those motherfuckers. So this is why we published a study on this in Skeptic, that the number one predictor of anybody that would buy one of those books,

self-help books, or go to those seminars are people that have already done so, and they do it over and over and over. So in a way, if it worked, why do you have to keep buying the books and the tapes and going to the seminars? Maybe it only works for just a little while. Well, have you ever heard the expression that inspiration is like bathing? It's very effective, but it must be practiced on a regular basis. That's right. Well, that could be it. I think it is.

So there's two senses in does it work. Does it work for you personally? And then does it work for everybody? So what the scientists want to know is not did you personally feel better when you went to the La Costa Spa and Resort for three days. Of course, I'm sure you did. But can we actually measure the differences and then apply that to anybody? And not just that resort, but any resort,

or is it like, you know, 60% of the people between ages of 25 and 40 that have these medical conditions or whatever, when we apply that technique, you know, 40% of the time, they'll get better. You know, that's really what we want to know. So on the one hand, you know, somebody says, I went to Deepak's place, I felt better. I'm glad that they felt, you know, the world's a little bit better place if you feel better. Okay. From a scientist perspective, if somebody says, I went to Deepak's place, I felt better. I'm glad that they felt, you know, the world's a little bit better place if you feel better. Okay. From a scientist's perspective, like, yeah, that's interesting, but does it really work? Not just placebo or not just temporary.

It's like Netflix just released that documentary based on Tony Robbins. And the film is called I'm Not Your Guru. But clearly watching this, this is what everybody thinks. You know, that's my guru. They want to be like him. And he has this hypnotic effect on the audience. It's incredible. I've never seen anything like it. But the question is when they go home, you know, a week later, two weeks later, did it make any difference? I mean, I'm sure they feel better there. Tony Robbins says a lot of really good stuff. And he says a lot of really motivational things that I listened to. And I was like, this guy's making a lot of sense. I bet he does a lot of people a lot of good.

What I always ask is what has he done other than do these seminars? You know, like he's become really effective in motivating people, but what has he done other than motivate people? I mean, has he produced anything other than these books that are designed to motivate people? It's like I really appreciate what he does, and I don't want to belittle it because I read a lot of his stuff back when I was competing in martial arts. And when I was starting, I was a stand-up comedian. I read a lot of his stuff, and it motivated me, and it gave me some good things to think about. I think I was already sort of on a self-improvement path, and I was trying to take in a lot of information from a lot of different places, including Dianetics. I bought a Dianetics book and they hounded me for 10 years. You're on the list. I ordered it late night on one of those

infomercial things. But I think it's interesting what he's done because it's not like, say if a guy like Steve Jobs or Wozniak who created Apple, if they made a book on how to get motivated and get something done and here's the core aspects of success in this endeavor and I've done this and I want you to know this, I want to spread this knowledge. But when a guy is just motivating people, I'm always like, like, I know a guy who just motivates people and he's a terrible comedian and he's just decided to start motivating people now. I'm like, whoa, what the fuck is going on here? But meanwhile, people buy it because people love that feeling. They love that feeling of someone saying something that makes sense, that gets them going. Yeah, I'm going to eat plant-based and I'm going to go jogging every day.

And I'm doing yoga four times a week. And I'm going to drink only water. And then one day they pass by Krispy Kreme and that hot, fresh sign is on. One of those hot donuts. You get one of those glazed hot babies in your system. Next thing you know know they're having a coffee and they throw sugar in it fuck it already had the sugar in the donut coffee tastes better with sugar you hope it's better than the little joke about you know the guy that took an ad out

in the newspaper and said send me a dollar i'll tell you how to make a million dollars run an ad in a newspaper and set you he's better than that course. He really is a great collector of philosophical points that really can affect you if you absorb them. I think what you pointed out about the amount of people that get involved in these things that don't actually have any long-term change in their life, I think what it's like is like rehab. is like rehab you know my friend Chris Bell who made this recent documentary prescription thugs and he made bigger stronger faster that documentary on steroids a really cool guy and it was really fascinating as he went through making this documentary prescription thugs and then in the process of it had a pretty significant injury that got him on pain pills. And then he got hooked on pain pills himself while he was doing a documentary on pharmaceutical drugs being highly addictive.

He went to this rehab, and when he came on the podcast and was discussing the rehabilitation process for getting off these pills, for getting off these pills. One of the most important aspects was how much time it takes and how you have to be fully immersed in this idea of recovery for a long period of time to do it in this method to, to, in order to enact any real change. And I think that's probably the same thing with motivational speakers. I think you can get that initial burst where somebody could slap you and go, hey, Mike, I'm taking these fucking pills away from you, man. You can't keep taking these things. You're hooked.

You're like, you're right, man. You're right. I got to change. So there's this burst of motivation. You're a good man. You're a smart guy. You're too smart for these pills. You're right.

You're right. You're right. And you get that feeling. You wake up the next day and you go jogging. You get a good sweat and you go and you get some wheatgrass juice and you power that down. You're like, I'm on the path.

But then the inspiration dies off and you so comfortably slide back into your old ways. So I think these motivational speeches by Anthony Robbins or any of these people that I think they can be beneficial. But I think for most people, the comfort of their old path is such a magnet. Their compass just goes towards that magnet. It's almost like they need it every day for like a year or two years or three years or something. Well, Rudy Tanzi from Harvard tells me for a normal habit, it takes about 60 days, two months, every single day of retraining the brain on a new habit. And that's just a regular habit, like drinking coffee or just what time you get up in the morning

or whatever exercise. So I suspect with drugs or alcohol, it's probably a year or two to really completely retrain your brain, rewire the neurons, literally, to change that habit. It's doable. People do it. It's just, you know, it can be very difficult. So I think part of the appeal of the self-help gurus, so-called self-help gurus, is that you keep going because you need the, you know, the sort of retrain reminder every six months or you listen to the tapes once a day or once a week. And it just kind of keeps the new habit reinforced. Probably literally dopamine hits from hearing the voice of the person. And someone like Tony Robbins, I mean, I've met him at TED.

He's just bigger than life. I mean, he's like 6'8", huge hands and deep voice. He talks wonderful. Yeah, he's got a great presence. And he's quite the opposite of Eckhart Tolle. I mean, he comes out on the stage and the music and the lights. He's throwing sidekicks. Boom, boom, boom.

Throwing the side, yeah. He breaks boards and shit. Throws kicks at boards. But in the film, this documentary is really quite revealing. It's called I'm Not Your Guru. It opens with him talking to this young man. I think he's German. And he looks super sad.

He's, what's bugging you, man? Stand up. What's bugging you? You know, and it's like, you know, I'm feeling suicidal. He says, suicidal. He's saying this in front of a large group of people? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

3,000 people in this hotel room, cameras and lights. Jesus. He's going to pow. He's going to heal them. Heal! Well, it was a little bit like that, but in a completely different way. He said, he looks down. He says, is it the red shoes? He goes looks down and he says, is it the red shoes?

He goes, what? He goes, is it your red shoes? Those are the fucking reddest shoes I have ever seen. I mean, those are fucking red shoes, dude. And the camera goes down. He's got these red shoes. And the way he says it is so funny. This guy just starts laughing.

And Tony goes, don't you be laughing now because you're going to spoil the program for suicide. I mean, come on. And then he just kind of worked on him. Why are you feeling this way? And before you knew it, this guy seemed like he was doing much better. It would have been hilarious if that guy pulled out a gun and blew his brains out on the stage. Fuck these shoes. Boom.

I don't think that would have made the film. But the problem with that and another story they show in there is there's no follow-up. I have no idea how this guy does. He had another one with a woman who had weight issues or something emotional. Is it your relationship you're in? Yes. He's kind of like Dr. Laurie. He's figured out after all these years, you know, your problem number seven, yours is number six.

Yes. I mean, there's only like 10 things that covers 90% anybody that would come you know these are them and so he hones in on its relationship you're not happy you love him but you don't really want to be with him forever yes that's it that's it get your phone out what call him right now end it whoa it's like holy shit this is dr laura anthony robbins or the same this well this is tony in the film he says that tony robbins yeah so she calls the guy and he's at work or something he's like yeah what's up honey now i know i this is gonna be really hard but in front of 3 000 people yeah yeah and she dumps him on the phone oh fucking christ and you know this guy is like uh where are you again? I'm here at the hotel.

Oh, oh, click, dial tone. You know, and then Tony says, you did the right thing. Okay, so the question is. But how could you make that call not knowing anything about that person's past, not knowing their behavior patterns, not knowing. I mean, who is she when she's on that stage in front of 3,000 people? Is she really herself? Right. Because most people aren't.

No, no, of course not. So, you know, what I immediately want to know is, you know, two days later, I'm really sorry. Yeah, that seems incredibly irresponsible. Yeah. To get someone to break, to have so little information and to take someone on their word at that moment. Like, there's some people that the one day, for whatever reason, they'll go, you know what, I can't fucking do this anymore. I need to get out of my marriage. And they'll go to the bar and they'll have a drink and they'll get crazy for like a few minutes or an hour or whatever.

And then they'll drive home, they'll listen to a song and then their wife will send them a text. And then they'll go, what the fuck is wrong with me? Like, why did I think that? Why am I this? And then you realize like you were just indulging a certain pattern of behavior So, how does he know that that woman wasn't indulging a certain pattern of behavior? He doesn't possibly know on the other hand. Maybe she's really Really stuck and maybe it was really a good idea. He doesn't know. Oh, that's right

He might he might have given her awesome advice, but he fucking for sure didn't know that it was awesome advice, right? And that's the problem with all these programs, like AA. Does it work? They don't collect data, or if they do, they don't make it public. We can't get the data. How many? What percentage of people that come and last this many weeks or months, and what percentage never take a drink or take one drink or whatever?

We don't know. No one knows. All we have are the anecdotes. It's like, I went, it worked for me. I went, it didn't work for me. Well, which is it? We don't know no one knows all we have are the anecdotes like I went work for me. I went didn't work for me Well, which is it? Yeah, wasn't there a recent study on a where they were determining that people who who leave the pro I? Try to find out if you see if you could find it, but it was a recent study that was talking about

Sobriety and maintaining sobriety and how little of an impact that it actually had it did have an impact on people maintaining sobriety and how little of an impact that it actually had. It did have an impact on people maintaining sobriety. And they think that that impact may have been connected to the sort of sponsor system that they have. And not wanting to disappoint people. And camaraderie that you develop in that sobriety environment. Which makes a lot of sense. And I think it's really clever how they've structured it in that way. Because I think having a mentor, having someone who's already done it. And then also I think a big part of what leads people to alcoholism besides, you know, the genetic markers and all the different things where people have like an inclination to do it is they're trying to medicate themselves.

they there's they're trying to medicate themselves they're trying to and one of the things is they're trying to medicate themselves from a lack of companionship or lack of good meaningful interaction with people and when your your your situation is on the line in sort of a dire way like hey man you hit fucking rock bottom we're throwing this booze in the trash and you're getting your shit together you're going to follow a 12-step program now and you're going to do all now all of a sudden there's some urgency involved and you the trash and you're getting your shit together You're gonna follow 12 step program now and you're gonna do all now all sudden There's some urgency involved and you have someone who you're accountable to you have to call this person you're getting a chip You know hey, I'm 90 days. Hey congratulations Mike You made it to 90 days and then you go up there and you give a speech so you get all this attention Which people so desperately crave you get to be on a podium

Everyone's looking at you. There's a lot involved in it that's not just about sobriety. It's about ritual. Social. Yes. Very social. Very social. And it could be that works.

They've figured it out over the decades. It's definitely got something. Right. But there was an, the thing that was, the study was showing how little

of an effect it is. It's really kind of amazing. It does have an effect, but the effect is not that much different than people that just quit. Like I've known a couple of people that are not involved in any sort of 12 step program. Like my good buddy, Greg Fitzsimmons, he and I have been friends for something like 27 or 28 years. We met as rookie standup comedians. We started like within a week of each other. And when I met him, he was 22, I believe, at the time, and he had

just quit drinking. He realized his parents had issues with substance abuse, and as a young man, he's like, look, I can't fucking do this. I'm getting hammered all the time, and obviously I got the bug. Whatever it is, I'm done. And never drank again. Literally never

drank again his whole life to this day Hasn't drank and is super successful emmy award-winning writer all these but people will still tell him You know you need to get in a program right because you're a dry drunk This is the disease model of alcoholism that's bothersome because it's really a behavioral choice or behavioral problem. But if you treat it like a disease, the good side of that is that it got people off the you're just weak-willed, you know, and you just, that's your problem. No, it isn't that. But it isn't like cancer either. Like, oh, I'm sorry you got cancer.

I'm sorry you have the alcoholic gene or whatever. Because clearly, like your friend, and there's a lot of people like that, that just quit. They are able to do it. And also from the scientific perspective, we don't have much data because we don't know who they are. They just quit. They don't go through a program and then we have them in our database and we know what they did and how long they came and so on. Again, does it work? The only way to know is to really get more data on this. And we just don't have enough from those kinds of groups that do that, like AA. There are academics, scientists who study addiction, you know, and they tell me that, you know, for the addict to take a single drink, what's the harm? Just have a drink here at the bar, social, whatever.

That it's much harder for them to not have the second, third, fourth, and they go till they pass out. Whereas I never drink till I pass out, in a long time anyway, since college. But it's like the determinism issue. For me, it's not a problem. It's not a self-control problem. But for the addict, apparently, the brain is rewired, and it's much harder for them to stop, have that second drink. Is it a rewiring thing, or is it a genetic predisposition thing?

It's both? It's probably a plethora of variables, right, that contribute. Apparently the Native American population, the genetics are such that they have a stronger alcoholism problem, which is exasperated by the poverty and, you know, all the other social issues that go with that on these reservations. And it makes it even worse. But apparently there is a genetic component. I would like to know if that's true, because I remember this discussion being brought up before with someone else. And then I looked it up and I found something that showed contrary evidence. But anecdotally, sort of everybody who knows that story knows that Native Americans, that's what we've always been told.

Native Americans didn't have alcohol in their history. And like there was. I could be wrong on that. I haven't looked at that data in decades. So that could be old material now. Well, genes most certainly do get affected by diet and climate and where people evolve and where their ancestors came from. There was a study today.

I tweeted something today that made sense why some people can follow a vegan diet and be healthy in regards to omega-3s is that if you come from a long line of people who have followed a predominantly vegetarian diet over the course of over 100 years or so, the genetics start to evolve or change and adapt to this diet to the point where your body produces more omega-3s from different things. It was real recently. I tweeted it this afternoon or retweeted it. The other troublesome thing about AA is the religious component.

Not so much you have to believe in God. No, no, no. That's why they should supplement with it. It's more recent than that. Did I say something about omega-3s may not be as healthy as we thought recently? God damn it. I never know what to think, Michael Shermer. I don't have enough time. Science keeps changing.

It keeps, well, it also... But not just that you're supposed to believe in a higher power for AA to work, but that you're, in a much more insidious way, I think, you're like a sinner. You were an original sinner. You are an alcoholic. Say it. I'm an alcoholic. Hi, my name is Michael and I'm an alcoholic. It's like the

born again. I'm a sinner. I was born Michael and I'm an alcoholic. It's like the born again. I'm a sinner. I was born sinful, but I accept Jesus. Wouldn't it be better to say, my name is Michael Shermer and I am a free man? I like that. Yeah. I'm not trapped by any sort of a drug or alcohol. That would be more empowering. Yeah.

That seems way better. And that would be the Tony Robbins approach. Yeah. You can change it. See? He's throwing sidekicks and shit. Did you see the thing that happened with Tony Robbins recently where they had one of those

coal walk things that he does? But these assholes were taking selfies while they were firewalking and they all burnt their feet. People are so crazy! I can't believe he still does the firewalks, you know, because it's a little risky. I've done it twice. We did it once for a Fox TV show. First of all, we had a hard time finding any place to do it.

Well, you did it as a skeptic to prove. Well, explain the whole. Well, I wanted, first of all, I want to know what the experience is like. Right. And then second, what is the explanation? Why is it your feet don't get burnt? Like in one of the shows, we actually strapped raw steaks to my feet and then walked across the coals. And the steaks didn't get burned if you just walked quickly enough. So either dead meat is conscious and thinking positive thoughts, or it has nothing to do with positive thoughts. It didn't get cooked at all?

No, no, because if you move fairly quickly, the conductance of the heat is very slow with wood. So the analogy is this. You turn the oven up to 450 degrees and you put a cake in. And you let it sit there for a while. You open the pan. You put your hand in. The air is 450 degrees, but you don't get burnt. Right.

You touch the cake, and it's 450 degrees. You don't get burnt. But you touch the cake pan or the metal part of the oven, and you're burnt almost instantly. The temperature is all the same. It's the heat conductivity that is how quickly a material transduces heat from it to you. Which is why we cook on steel versus the actual coals themselves. Yeah, yeah, right, because the coals are a poor conductor of heat. So if you...

Science! The thing with firewalking is this. You won't get burned if the bed is about no longer than about 10 to 15 feet. You know, 8 feet is better. And you have maybe a flat of grass that's wet on either side so that the temperature at the bottom of your feet is a little bit cooler. And then you traipse across. Don't stop to take selfies. Big mistake.

But if you go above 15 to 20 feet, the heat's going to start to build up. And there you can get burnt. So my guess is what happened with his people is it was probably a short bed, but probably they didn't scoot across fairly quickly. The two times I did it, it was an eight-foot bed. You know, I didn't mess around, man. I just plowed right across. It's very intimidating. Is's uh no is there yeah these people are so silly if you google michael

schirmer firewalk there's a video yeah that's a very short little fire walk yeah it's very short and so the see the flames on the side they put wood on there after it's burned for hours and hours and then they put um like cooking oil so the flames are coming up so it makes it look from an angle, it makes it look like you're almost walking through the flames, which you're not. Well, isn't it sort of in some ways like kind of a rite of passage or something? What you're doing is like a ritualistic thing, and then you feel like, I made it. Well, Tony says it's a metaphor. It's a metaphor for accomplishing things. Yes.

It really doesn't mean anything. Well, the problem is when you know what you just said now that metaphor is not going to fucking work anymore so you just ruined all the seminars all the people that could have possibly gotten over the hump now you've ruined it Michael Shermer how dare you

well I mean we want to know how does it work so if you had a bed of metal no one could walk on it not even Tony Robbins no matter how positive he was thinking. So dead wood, coals, is a poor conductor of heat. That's it. That's all it is.

Yeah, that makes a ton of sense. That's why when you have a grill, you put the coals down, and then you put that steel grate over the grill because the steel is an excellent conductor. That's right. Yeah, and that's why we choose certain metals as well to cook in, you know. I'm amazed he could get insurance for this because people do get burnt. Yeah. And the ones we did, some of the people, other people had little blisters because, you know, if you walk slowly or you have— you know, I go barefoot a lot, so I have pretty good calluses on the bottom of my feet.

But if you don't, you know, then your skin is thinner and temperature builds up faster for that. And you're more likely to get the blisters. Especially if you get pedicures and you put moisture on your, you know, you're always like. If you're a tenderfoot, literally. Literally. A tenderfoot. That's right. That was the Cub Scout thing, right?

You were a tenderfoot in the beginning. That's hilarious. What a hilarious way to describe it. But with all these things, you know, all things in moderation, it's the extremism that gets people in trouble. You know, it's like you can never have a drink. You can never have a piece of meat. You can never do this or that. And then when you go off the wagon, so to speak, then you feel like a sinner. And it's back to that religious thing. You know, you sin. You're a bad person. And that adds too many, I think, negative emotional elements to behavior.

Right. Then you're connecting all these ideologies to your behavior that are very constrictive and very constricting. And you're not allowed to deviate from these plans. And then you become a part of this sort of team. Right. Like the people that are in CrossFit. You ever met a CrossFit person who can't shut the fuck up about the workout of the day? And it's positive.

They're in shape. They look – but they look crazy. Like they can't wait to go back and do chin-ups. They get out of their mind. And it's a very beneficial thing. Don't get me wrong. But there's a thing that people do when they get a part of a team or a group or you're one of those now. You know, hey, I'm an ultra marathon runner now.

And then like, I'm in that group. That's right. Yeah. I just reviewed this book for the Wall Street Journal on CrossFit training and what it means to be fit now versus when I was in my 20s. And, you know, back when Nautilus was introduced, you know, the idea was you're going to isolate the muscle groups. Everybody's like, yeah, that's good. Isolate the muscle groups. So this author is going,

why is that good? How did it ever get established that isolating a muscle group is a good thing? And he shows that, you know, free weights, you're using all of your body, every muscle tendon, you know, just the balance and the move and all that stuff. It's much better. But then the more I looked at it, I thought, well, of course, this is when high schools started introducing physical education. You got to go in the gym. Everybody's in the gym. You can't turn loose thousands of teenage kids in free weight rooms and not have injuries. So the Nautilus machine, that was the solution. It's isolated. No one's going to get hurt. You can turn loose somebody. You can't clean and jerk a big weight and not have somebody explain how to do it without getting hurt.

Yeah, that's certainly true. But I think the big aspect of it was people like to make things more complicated than they need to be. Or they always like to invent some new way to do things. And sometimes that new way to do things looks awesome, like a Nautilus machine. I mean, they have the big cam system. And there's the cables. And you get the plates. You put the pin in the plate, and you get to move it up and down.

And it's all. Right. I mean, it looks amazing. Yeah. But as far as, like, it being beneficial to promoting functional strength, it's not nearly as good as those, like, Olympic lifts that people do, like clean and press. But those are not that glamorous. Right.

You know, those machines are very glamorous. Right. You know, you machines are very glamorous. Right. You know, you could tell people that you're pulling the whole stack. Look, I've got the whole stack. Right. Those isolating movements at one point in time were thought to be the best way to develop muscle because they're really good for bodybuilding, you know, but there's a difference between like when someone looks really good, like there's certain looks that you can achieve, like giant biceps.

Right. Where they're completely out of balance, but then they have like a little neck and they have no legs. Right. It's not healthy, but they want big biceps. So they just keep constantly doing curls. Right. So you can get like really out of whack doing those sort of exercises if you're not careful. But if you want to be a bodybuilder,

that was always the protocol. Like if you look at how Arnold lifted, now a lot of these Franco Colombo guys, like they were all in isolation exercises, a lot of different, they did a lot of tricep extensions. They did a lot of things to pump those muscles up. They did, you know, squats and leg presses and stuff too, but a lot of it was involving hitting specific muscle groups to accentuate those. But it just wasn't the way to go. But people for a long time thought those machines were the shit. They're like, this is my solution. In my review, I wrote about this guy I met back in the 80s when I got into bike racing named Phil Granasha. He was Mr. California bodybuilder in 1954, the year I was born.

And through the 50s and early 60s, he was just lifting weights, Mr. Bodybuilder. Then he met a cyclist that said, why don't you come out? It was San Francisco. Why don't you come out? We've got the Sunday ride going up in the local hills. Oh, I'm going to kick their ass. Kick their ass. Said he got dropped on

the first hill bye they're gone he realized wait a minute maybe i'm not fit you know he was mr not mr california yeah but also mr fitness or the most fit person in california so he realized i'm not fit i got no cardiovascular so that's he took up cycling and so on but um you know so this crossfit book it was that these people are more balanced. That was the idea, I guess. Because you don't even know what you're going to do for the competition, right? You show up and it could be any one of these different tasks. So you have to be more well-rounded. As opposed to, I can lift this one particular nautilus weight.

Yeah. I read something about CrossFit taking a critical role in our society that there was a comparison to CrossFit and religion and they were saying that essentially as people become more secular and they move away from religion they gravitate towards things like CrossFit that give them this sort of sense of community and shared experience and like uncommon shared experience because like the average person you go to work and you get calluses that are bleeding. Yeah.

Did my workout of the day today. Like there's something like separates Mike from the pack as he passes the break room. You're like, Mike's fucking crazy doing chin ups every morning at 6am with a bunch of other assholes down on Sepulveda at the CrossFit center. And you, you get this feeling like I belong to this group of,

of unusual people doing unusual things. It's a social process. And also that's what religion is doing. Yeah. You know, it's our group here. And we're meeting once a week or whatever. And we have these rituals. It's all like that.

They're very attractive to people, those things. Very. There's a book called Bowling Alone by a sociologist that sort of tracking the decline of social things like bowling, bowling leagues, you know, not very many bowling leagues anymore, but more and more things like that. We're more isolated. We do our own thing on your computer at home or whatever. And that this is actually, it's a good thing to get out there and have a community.

But as always, you know, it's extremism that, you know, I'm going to do this six hours a day. Easy. Right, right. I mean, this guy, Phil Granacci, he ended up dying early because he just worked out like eight hours a day. He keeled over dead in his gym. I don't know what the cause was. Jesus Christ. Yeah.

And, you know, I mean, it's like, God, he had this workout routine that he had like a $5,000 challenge that anybody that could match him for the 45-minute workout routine in his home gym. And Olympic cyclists would come and all these super studly guys, and no one ever made it. Because it was so specialized for just what he does. You know, like one-arm chin-ups or one-arm push-ups or the Stairmaster. He built his own Stairmaster before anyone had Stairmasters. And he would just crank it up at such a high level that you just can't do it. And that's all he did. Right.

So was he fit? Was he healthy fit? I don't know. Well, up to the point where you're dead. Yeah, that's probably right. It's an argument. But once you die from it, you're probably not doing it right. We used to ride around Orange County, and he'd go,

see that lady out there Sunday morning getting her paper, cigarette, coffee, donut? Oh, yeah, she's going to check out early. Meanwhile, that chick's probably still alive, pissing on his grave. There's only so much we can do. She shows up every morning. I just reviewed another book for Wall Street Journal called Why Men Age, about aging, what we know. And we know a lot, but we also know there's only so much you can do. Why is it just men?

The guy, he's a doc who treats men for aging. Right. Is there a specific difference? Well, there are some differences, but I think from a marketing perspective, there's already a bunch of books for women on aging. There's not much about men. Anyway, that was it. It doesn't really matter because it's really all the same process. Ultimately, your telomeres will get you. And the idea, well, we live twice as long as our ancestors did a century ago.

Yeah, that's true, but really no one's living above 120. you go you know yeah that's true but really no one's living above 120 just more and more people are pushing up to the upper ceiling because of public health and just general stuff we do that makes us healthier but in terms of longevity and aging you can't stop it all you can do is kind of hopefully slow it down a little bit and and you want to have a higher quality of life the further up you go as opposed to lying in bed in tubes for the last 10 years of your life or something like that. So that's where the future research is, where the breakthroughs will come. Not radical life extensionists that I've also written about.

You know, we're going to live 500 years. You know, Shermer, don't you want to live 500 years? Look, just get me to 90 without Alzheimer's and cancer, okay? Let's just start one decade at a time. It's just easy. Yeah. You know, because, you know because the problems are really complex. Well, I think the quality of life thing that you mentioned is one of the most important things.

I have this phrase that I've said many times, but I'm going to say it because it fits right here. We all love to sleep, but everyone's afraid to die. We love to shut off. We love to shut off at night. Everybody loves it, and we look forward to it. But that one big shut off when you're not coming back is just too fucked up. It's just too much. But it's inevitable.

This is my next book. I have a chapter called Afterlife for Atheists. So these are not just the radical life extensionists, but the mind uploaders. And so, you know, you're going to scan your connectome, put it in a computer, and then, you know, you'll wake up in the computer like Johnny Depp in that Transcendence movie. Here's the problem. When you go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow, maybe you're groggy for a few minutes, but then you're back.

You still feel like you. There's a continuity between today and tomorrow. Or you get general anesthesia surgery, you wake up, you're groggier for a little bit longer, but the continuity comes back. It's still you. So the question is, if you die and we have a scan of your connectome and we put it in a computer and turn it on, are you going to wake up in the computer like you did from sleep? And I don't think so. I think it would just be a copy of your, if this could ever be done,

which is very unlikely because it's a super hard problem, but let's just say it could. I think there's a break in continuity from death. You're dead. That's it. And this thing we have is a copy of you. It would be like if we cloned your body

and then you die and then we reconstruct the body and there you are. That's not you, that first person through the eyes, me. It's just a copy of me. Devil's advocate. If I was going to play devil's advocate to that, what I would say is with our current understanding and abilities right now, you're correct. However, whatever we have right now, whatever we are right now, if we can understand it down to the subatomic particles, if we can literally understand you as a person, like you as you stand right here, September 15th, 2016, if we can understand every single aspect of you, including consciousness. We're not there yet. Obviously, there's a lot of debates and there's a lot of struggles, but we're looking at it in terms of

what our current understanding is. If we looked at it in terms of the understanding of people that lived in the year 100 AD, it would be a completely different idea of possibilities. Like our possibilities today are incredibly expansive in comparison to people that lived in you know 1776 just the idea of what we what we understand about what it means when you talk about atoms molecules uh the the idea of telomeres all these all the knowledge that we have today imagine that expanding exponentially for the next 500 a thousand years it's entirely possible that if we get to that point we can recreate reality to a point where i have a theory about people and it's completely unqualified and don't listen to me but i think it's entirely

possible that you know how bees make honey i I think people might make the universe. I think it's entirely possible that the way the universe makes itself, it makes a person. It makes a monkey. The monkey eventually figures out how to way to not get eaten by leopards and the smart ones become a monkey. And then they figure out shelter and then they figure out agriculture and then they really get going. And once they really get going, what they start doing is creating technology. They create in the form of a wheel or in the form of a bucket to carry the water so they don't have to keep drinking out of the river and getting crocodiles

and fucking giardia and everybody's dying from inborn disease. We figure things out slowly but surely. And along the way, they make better and better things until they develop computers, until they develop artificial intelligence if it makes something that can think for itself and then they put that thing to work and that thing gets better in two weeks than 10,000 years of human development right and I think that thing probably is how the universe gets created that the universe like this idea the universe has no beginning and no end that it's this infinite cycle of maybe and maybe it does that through

people maybe it makes people and in our through through intelligence yes some sort of intelligence but what we currently understand and know of the known universe we're the only ones that we know of right and we're looking at what we're doing they're like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what are we doing like what are we where we going with this we're just going to keep going like when elon musk starts talking about artificial intelligence who's one of the most important and uh popular and famous technology enthusiasts starts talking about artificial intelligence being summoning the demon yeah i mean that's how he described it we could be summoning a demon i Yep. I mean, that's how he described it. We could be summoning a demon. I know.

I really think that might be what we do. I think we're getting caught up in the Kardashians, and we're looking at who's got a fake butt, and, you know, are those chemtrails in the sky? Right. I'm in the 12-step program. I'm fucking crossfitting. And meanwhile, what we're doing is we're giving birth to some new form of transcendent technology that literally rewires reality itself. Yeah.

Well, that is an actual theory, you know, that we're living in the matrix, that it's all a computer simulation and it's all equivalent of a holodeck somewhere. But I don't even know if we have to be there. If it was so real you couldn't distinguish between the holodeck world you're in and this world, then how would you know? Right. So it really becomes one of these thought experiments that's fun to contemplate. But how would you test it to see if it was true or not? And so there he is.

What is this? What are you pulling up there, Jamie? I just Googled his name in AI and this came up from yesterday. He's talking about neural lace. Oh, my goodness. Well, this is, you know, Kurzweil's been talking about this for a long time. You know, the singularity really will come about with a fusion between human intelligence and artificial intelligence. Well, for people who are listening, read the title there, Jamie.

What does it say there? Scroll up. There. Elon Musk hints at neural lace project to fuse AI with the human brain. Well, in a way, a cochlear implant. You said cuck. Do you know what that means? Cochlear.

Do you know what cuck means? No. We'll go over that another time. It's the new insult on the internet. A cuck? Yes. C-U-K? C-U-C-K.

Okay. It's like cut and fuck? No, no, no, no, no. Well, in some ways. But it started off with cuckold, which was men who want other men to steal their women and have sex with them. And then somehow or another, it became an insult that it seems to have a bunch of different meanings, but it's fun to use because it's new. You know, it's interesting. I'm hosting one of our science-

Cuck-servative. The conservative insult of the month explained. Wow. What's a cuck-servative? Let's pull that down. We need to know what the explanation is. Hmm. Redstate.com's blah, blah, blah, Daily Caller.

Oh, it's- Cuck-servative. Yeah, see, cuckled is just when you've been cheated on. Mm, yeah. Cuck-servative. Okay, poor man. It's just a fun, it's not real. It's just a fun new insult.

But it's interesting because certain, you know, four-letter words, curse words, they have certain characteristics of the words themselves that tend to be short and kind of guttural, abrupt, you know, fuck, cut, shit, and so on. And there's a book coming out called What the F? Benjamin Bergen is a linguist at UC San Diego, and he's coming up to do our science salon in a few weeks. And so the idea is that certain words trigger more sort of deep emotional parts of the brain and the limbic system and so on. They're associated with bodily effluvia, you know, feces, sperm, and so on. It's all this kind of crass, basic human –

because the idea is you want to hurt somebody with your words emotionally. And by associating it with sort of a deep part of the brain that's associated with really deep emotional things that that's the theory isn't there as i could tell about why curse words are what they are you know why certain words are just they're not insulting they're just kind of funny but so this is conky yeah yeah okay yeah right so anything with an e you know that's just not gonna it's too sweet Yeah, right. It's like a nice nickname for a friend. So I'm not surprised at all that that word is what it is. Yeah.

It makes perfect sense. Just based on the structure of the word. It's cunt and fuck. These are two of the worst things you could say to somebody. That's why cuck is so popular. Right. Because it seems like, wow, I think we got a new one. It has that sort of feel.

I'm surprised that it's conservative and cuckled instead of what I thought it was. Well, that's just a new one. That's a new one that they're adding to the word cuck. Okay. Yeah. Well, to make the Oxford English Dictionary, it has to be used like a certain number of times in secondary and tertiary sources in a year. Oh, well, it's done then. It's in for sure. 100%. Yeah. The internet is just the amount of data that gets, what's the figure about how much data gets pushed on the internet in a day that I think it's, there's a short amount of time, I forget what the window is, but in that time, more data gets passed than in the beginning of Peter Diamandis' book on the rapid growth of technology. It's some insane number. Yeah, it was like every month now. It's the equivalent of everything that's ever been printed in the history of humanity.

Ever. I don't have to look. It's just a huge number. Just think about that and then think about how many books Ron Hubbard must have written. Because L. Ron Hubbard wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived. You know, if you go to the Scientology centers around the world, they all have a room with his desk and a writing pad. It's literally like this.

In case he comes back. In case he comes back. Zombie L. Ron comes stumbling through the door with rotten clothes and his skin's hanging off of his bones. And time to write. This chart shows what is being done on the internet every minute. Right. In 2016. So it's got Snapchat at the top with 6,944,044.

Boy, that's the most popular one. 444. Google. Google's the most popular one. 444. Google. Google's the most, but owned by tenfold more than Snapchat, which is kind of crazy. It's translating words. These are different things that are happening. Right. How many different interactions.

Yeah. That's amazing. That is fucking crazy. So, I mean, if you carry out your argument, you know, it's just only a matter of time before uh you know sort of that that singularity is reached and uh i mean one argument for the singularity you create the virtual reality that's indistinguishable it's just that you just need enough data right it's really an engineering problem and time but the question would still be in that world would you feel like you right now? Like through the eyes, first person experiencing IMV. Why not?

I don't know. I'm not sure that it would. I'm not convinced that it would. I'm not sure either. I mean, I kind of see the cryonics argument because being chronically frozen and woken up again, if you could make that happen, that seems like falling asleep, wake up, anesthesia,

wake up, chronically frozen, wake up. It feels to me like it's the same. Michael, the flaw in your thinking is consciousness is not in your mind. Consciousness is in the space that surrounds you. It's eternal. It is transcendent. I needed to study him to get a good Deepak impression because that one's racist as fuck. That one is just your average Indian guy.

Well, this is what he argues. Yes. When you die, your consciousness, your mind goes to where it was before you were born. Yeah, but the problem is you don't fucking know that. Well, no one knows. No one knows that. So you can't say that that's what it does. My argument is, well, where were you before you were born?

I mean, most people go, well, what do you mean? That's a non-question. I wasn't anywhere before I was born. Right. And when you die, you won't be anywhere now. Maybe. But Buddhists think that you just return to the consciousness in the sky, the force, wherever it is. I think our number one problem is that we try to have a place where you go.

We try to have an explanation. Yeah, we feel like it's a place but deep bog tells me this is completely wrong way to say it You're not going any place. There's no place Hmm. Well, here's the problem even with that I think there's an issue with saying that you know anything about what happens after death right you could have a ton of theories you could have like possibilities that you ponder you could sit down and be as creative as you want you could start and think about the the number of known stars in the universe and then start to perceive how immense the universe is and what what is going on in consciousness itself and when it

when it ends does that energy go somewhere and become some thing that we haven't considered you could do that all day long right and it's fun but the problem is when anyone says they know you go back to become a baby again and you start the world from how the fuck do you know you don't the answer is you don't it's interesting to think that you might be a baby again. It's interesting to think that you might live. I've heard the, I forget what religion promotes this possibility, but that you live your entire life over and over and over again until you get it right. And that's where the term old soul comes from.

Reincarnation. Like you're running it. Hinduism. Like you're obviously a very wise man, Michael Shermer. So you probably were an idiot a few hundred thousand generations ago but you've gotten to this point where you've you've figured out how to live your life very harmoniously and in doing that you you exhibit all the traits of an old soul this is a instead of you know there's certain people up there you know we all have seen them on the internet that do ridiculous things and it's just

like why are they so stupid why are they doing well maybe they've only this is their third or fourth incarnation yeah yeah maybe that's that is entirely possible we don't know you don't know why you were born you don't know what happens when you die the problem is in saying that you have an explanation right whether it's a material, very cold scientific analysis of the possibilities in terms of like what we know today and deny any possibilities of anything being, anything other than death being the end. We don't know that either. Well, okay, right.

That's correct. But so from the scientific null hypothesis, that is your theory is not true until proven otherwise, would be when you're – nothing happens when you're dead. You're just gone. Could be. Unless there's some other alternative we can test. Right. So one of my favorite thought experiments comes from Carl Sagan's Demon Haunted World.

Awesome book. Awesome book. The chapter is called There's a Dragon in My Garage. So I tell you, Joe, I have a dragon in my garage. You do? you joe i have a dragon in my garage you do so cool can i see it yeah yeah yeah here here's i open the garage door you look in there's some paint cans a ladder a bike no dragon oh well it's an invisible dragon okay so you say well let's put some powder down on the ground and when he walks walks around, we'll see his footprints. Well, you see, this dragon hovers about three feet above the ground at all times. And you say, well, I got some infrared cameras here.

We could detect the heat. No, this is a cold-blooded dragon. It gives off no temperature at all. You know, well, oh, I have this heat detector, and when it spits out the fire, then we'll see that the fire comes out of it, and that'll prove that it— Well, no, it's coal fire. No, this is not heat-generating fire fire it's a very special kind of fire okay so sagan's point is what's the difference between an you know invisible hovering cold indetectable immeasurable dragon

and no dragon at all so if there's not if there's not some way for us to get at it then we can't assume it exists exactly and that And I apply that to God, because people go, well, God is outside of space and time. How do you know? If he's outside of space and time, there's no way to measure it. Well, he reaches into our world to stir the particles, cure the cancer, whatever. Okay, can we measure that? And does it look different from what happens naturally? In other words, why is it that what God always cures is things that might have gotten better anyway?

You know, tumors do go into remission, but most of them don't. Most people, they get cancer, they die. So why didn't God heal them? He only seems to heal the ones that naturally go into remission. How come he doesn't grow amputated limbs for Christian soldiers coming back from Iraq. How come these are Christian families praying for their Christian loved ones who lost a limb? He's busy curing cancer over here, but why can't he handle the ones that never, ever naturally grow back? What's the difference between an invisible dragon and no dragon?

So always, this is my theory of the afterlife. That's nice. How do you know? You do not. You do not know. And when it comes to religion, the idea of some sort of a powerful being that's in charge of the whole picture and it's got a grand plan for it all is kind of comforting to some people. And it's an interesting possibility. And, again, it's something to consider. some people and it's an interesting possibility.

And again, it's something to consider. It's something to think about. It's an idea that's been around for a long time. Why has it been around for so long? I don't know. Well, let's go over some of the other things that have been around for a long time. Let's look at what else is in that book. Is there any other shit in that book that you might think is ridiculous? Oh, isn't there a story in that book about two children that taunt a man because he's bald?

So they sick bears on the kids? Do you remember that story in the Bible? No, I don't remember. What is his name? Elysius? What is this guy's name who is taunted by these children because of his baldness? So God summons two bears to come out of the woods and maul these children and kill them because they taunted his baldness.

That would be fitting with the Old Testament. I mean, but if you're talking to someone who's a religious person who believes in the Bible and you throw that around, one of the first things that goes, oh, that's the Old Testament. Right. Well, okay. So the Old Testament is not valid. Right. The New Testament, the one that was written by Constantine and a group of bishops, where they got down, they wrote it out, what, 500 years after Jesus

died? That one's legit? I see your point. That one's legit. Yeah. That's a more ridiculous one, everyone, because Constantine wasn't even, he wasn't even Christian. Well, yeah. Well, so, I mean, the Gospels appear to be written 30 to 60, the first one, 30 to 60 years after Jesus died, Book of Mark. The others were copied from Mark, obviously. John is really weird. And, you know, no one knew him. These weren't, you know, the Gospel authors didn't know, they weren't his disciples, they didn't know him.

So this is secondhand, thirdhand, whatever. And there was a committee that decided what Gospels got in and what Gospels just weren't valid. The Gospel of Thomas, for example, was voted out. Why? Who knows? It's like a Twitter poll. It's like a Twitter poll, yeah. It really is.

They got it all together? Medieval Twitter poll, yeah. In any case, when did Jesus become a conservative? I mean, in the Gospels, he talks about giving up your belongings, taking care of the poor. He hung out with hookers the chances of a rich man going to heaven or like going through the eye of a needle you can't do it he was a winemaker yeah he made wine for people carpenter yeah yeah yeah right so um his conservative values would be suspect if he actually read what he said yeah i mean all the depictions of him looks like a fucking hippie. Looks like a dirty white hippie.

Somehow or another, a white guy grew up in the Middle East in, you know, the year zero. I have a feeling they probably looked like they look now. Don't you think? I mean, why does that guy look so, like, he looks like a lost kid who lives in Idaho. He's rebelling

from his parents. Well, I think that's what made The Life of Brian such a great film. Yes. The Monty Python, it's like they really nailed it. And they nailed it a long time ago. Right. Back when you really couldn't do this before Blazing Saddles. Yeah.

It was a super controversial movie at the time and groundbreaking in terms of like, people, we look at comedy from like the 60s or even the 70s and we look at it in terms of what we know to be shocking and crazy today and our bar is so different that it's hard when you go back and watch those things to really take in the context of, I was talking to Guy Torrey about this,

a funny comedian friend of mine, about this last night. We were talking about how good Lenny Bruce was and how we really can understand it because comedy is sort of, it continues to progress and it sort of reflects the attitudes of the times. And we're so much more open-minded

and so much further down the line than we were in 1960, whatever, when Lenny was getting arrested for using bad words. Right. So it's hard for us to appreciate. It's hard for us to really understand. Like if we were kids back then and we went to see Lenny Bruce and we were living in this like really restrictive environment that was the 1950s and 1960s, then we'd be blown away by it. Like, what is he saying? This is crazy.

Right. But today, you listen to it, and it's almost pedestrian, some of the stuff that he has to say, because it's already been said, because he broke down the door. Then everybody's like, yeah, that hole's been there forever. I mean, could you even make Blazing Saddles today? Because they use the N-word constantly throughout there. It's a good point. Could you make that movie?

One of the characters has that line about, okay, we'll let in the niggers and the spics, but not the Irish. Yeah, that's right. Whoa, you wouldn't say that today, even in a satire. Well, think about a character like Archie Bunker. Oh, right, right. All in the family. You couldn't do that show today the way it is.

It would be hateful and horrible and the blogosphere would erupt. The Honeymooners. Yes. Jackie Gleason used to threaten to beat his wife. All the time. To the moon. To the moon, Alice. To the moon.

He was going to hit her. Right. So hard he was going to put her on the moon. Right. Hilarious. Oh, boy. Well, people used to smack people all the time in movies back then. Men were always beating women up.

It was like a natural part of behavior to the point where we didn't even mind it from heroes. Heroes would smack a woman in the mouth and she'd be like, and then they would invariably wind up fucking them. Like right afterwards, they'd smack them and then they'd start making out. Seinfeld has a little riff on Paul McCartney's You Gotta Run For Your Life. You better run for your life if you can, little girl, because I'll get you in the end. And then the other one was, She was just 17, if you know what I mean.

Like, no, Paul, what do you mean? What are we talking about here? But that's early 60s. It was normal. Like, how about Kiss? They had that song, Christine 16. Gene Simmons sang that song. All right. It was normal. Like, how about Kiss? They had that song, Christine 16. Gene Simmons sang that song. Oh, right.

That was a big hit. Christine 16. I've got to have her. I've got to have her. Yeah, well. Or You. I've Got to Have You. Yeah, I think that's that.

Christine. I don't know that one. You don't know that song? Yeah. It's a good song. But it's fucked up when you go back and listen to it. You realize, like, wow. You're singing about a little baby. And you realize when you become, I'm 49 now, when you look at a 16-year-old, you're like, Jesus Christ. As a kid.

Give her a couple years. Even 18 is ridiculous, right? Right. What is legal and what is not legal is very strange but those songs man so you know in terms of moral progress that that kind of change happens just slow enough you don't really notice it but looking back a few decades it's like wow look what they used to say in movies or novels what is this compilation of men smacking women oh Oh, this is Airplane. That's Airplane, yeah, but that's what they're spoofing. Oh, this is hilarious. It's so bad.

Boom, there we go. Those movies were crazy. They were just smacking. He punched her and dropped her. Wow. His backhand, yeah. Sean Connery. Remember when Sean Connery was interviewed by Barbara Walters and he was advocating smacking women?

Yeah. Sometimes they just keep pushing it and they won't let it go, and you have to give them a smack. And she was like, are you saying that you— He was like, that's exactly what I'm saying. Like the Bogart line, I never met a dame that didn't— What is it? Didn't like a smack in the mouth or a cold 45 or whatever. Jesus. Slugged from a cold 45. It's the worst thing to slap a woman now and then. As I remember, you said you don't do it with a cold 45 or whatever. Jesus. Slugged from a cold 45.

It's not the worst thing to slap a woman now and then. As I remember you said you don't do it with a clenched fist. It's better to do it with an open hand. Yeah. Remember that? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't love that.

I haven't changed my opinion. You haven't? No. Totally. You think it's good to slap a woman? No, I don't think it's good. You don't think it's bad, though? I don't think it's that bad.

I think that it depends entirely on the circumstances and if it merits it. What would merit it? Well, if you have tried everything else, and women are pretty good at this. They can't leave it alone. They don't want to have the last word, and you give them the last word, but they're not happy with the last word, and you give them the last word, but they're not happy with the last word. They want to say it again and get into a really provocative situation. Then...

Oh, boy. One and a half million views. I think it's absolutely right. Oh, what was... Holy... What year was that? That looks like maybe 80s. I want to say it was later than that. 90s, maybe. I want to say it was later than that.

90s maybe. I want to say it was the 90s. That's pretty, that's pretty. Well, you know, he's old, but that's his generation. Sometimes they won't let it go. Well, it's Donald Sterling. You know, he's just an old guy. 1987.

Interesting. Well, it's interesting because Barbara's looking away as she says it and then looks at him when she hits him with the question. Like, it's a gotcha moment. Right. And I haven't changed my opinion on that at all. He like hits her with that. Like, whoa. So that was like, there was a lot of, that was a game too.

That was also, she provoked him in this way where, you know, he's a chauvinist. Wasn't it her that did that with Mike Tyson with his wife? Yeah. The beauty pageant woman, I forget her name, that he used to batter. That was the end of the marriage right there on the show. Well, it certainly sent him on a spiral. I think they stayed married for quite a while after the show, but she was on the show talking about how horrific it is to live with him and how he's crazy.

But of course he is. He's Mike fucking Tyson. He's one of the most terrifying combat sport athletes the world has ever known. is it's focused entirely on him being violent as humanly possible beyond the limitations of other people who are professional purveyors of violence like he's the best at it his brand of violence is so much more ferocious than any other fucking person who's ever done it before he makes all these other professional heavyweight boxers look like pussies. They see him and they practically faint. He throws punches that miss and they fall down. Of course he's nuts.

Like, what are we doing here? Why do you have this guy on television? What kind of a person are you? Like, what is this therapy session? Like, what is she doing? Like, the wife. What is she doing? Are you doing this publicly because you believe this is the only way to reach him? Is that the only thing?

There was a minor controversy, but this is before the internet, so it didn't go viral. But the LA Times had a story about the Rams defensive line that was called the Fearsome Foursome in the late 60s, early 70s. And, you know, Rosie Greer was one of them and he was just terrifying i guess and he was talking about how he would head slap the other linemen like you know the snap and he bam like this right and they had an open hole there for the ears so the ear pressure would like break the guy's eardrum if he did it right and this would throw him off a little bit then he could sack the quarterback or whatever this was his thing and then he mentions like in the interview and i you know i head slapped my my girlfriend or my wife or whatever it was like what wait what you do this

to your it's like holy moly and it didn't make a big thing but it was there in the time i remember reading that thinking god dang jesus you know if you're you know if you're six eight and you're weight 300 pounds and you have a helmet that's one thing but if you know a little bam well and this was also probably tolerated so much back then that those women didn't have any recourse. They couldn't go to a TMZ or something like that. They couldn't take video and put it on their phone and then put it on the Internet and have it go viral. They were scared. I mean, if you got some six, eight, 400-pound gigantic dude who wants to hit you and he also has sex with you, like, fuck.

How do you get out of that it's hard enough to get out of a regular relationship right like the poor lady who had to get on stage with anthony robbins and call her boyfriend you know i mean that's rough right but imagine if her boyfriend is a fucking giant football player who likes hitting her right and it was if it was in the movies like that and you have sean connery talking about it on tv it becomes accepted like then we get into this whole determinism thing. Is that guy beating his wife, beating his wife because of the culture that he lives in? And how much is that affecting his conscious decisions?

And does he have the free will to escape that influence? Well, the way that moral progress works in this regard over long periods of time is that it just never enters your mind to do it if you never see it or hear about it right and that reduces the number of people that do it so you know in sean connery's generation you just showed all those movie clips that's probably all he saw was yep that's what you do yeah and it this would never enter my mind to do this i mean it doesn't even no matter how bad but temporarily i'm not going to just reach out and hit a woman. I've got to introduce you to a few chicks. The ones that want the last word?

Just kidding. Yeah, it's called break up with them, Sean. Get out of the house, man. Go drive. You've got a Porsche. I'm going to the hills. Fuck off. Just go drive.

You can get a hotel room somewhere, dude. You're super rich. You don't have to stay with that crazy lady. Well, that's one of the sort of self control techniques right but count to 10 leave the room we are in many ways uh sort of a product of our environment in the way that we imitate our atmosphere so much mean we have patterns of of talking where there's expressions that are like similar or familiar to certain areas. We have accents that distinguish that we belong in this clan of people that live in Boston, for instance. Where I grew up, there's a Boston accent.

It's so clear. And if you talk to people that live there, they're letting you know that they're local. And everybody sort of assimilates with a certain way of thinking and a way of being. And everybody sort of assimilates with a certain way of thinking and a way of being. And it's super common for people to adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior rather than having to think things all the way through for themselves. So if that predetermined pattern of behavior means your girlfriend mouths off, you fucking smack her in the head, they start doing it. Whereas today, it's thought of as a horrific thing to do. You're a domestic violence person. You've hit someone.

You've committed assault. All those horrible words and thoughts that we have attached to these things that were almost non-existent back then. Just 100 years ago. Non-existent. Totally normal. So this process probably started in the late middle ages there's a book called the civilizing process by norbert elliott a sociologist that steve pinker kind of made prominent in his book the better angels of our nature talking about

how just like books of manners and table manners and how you interact with other people non-violently you know don't have a knife Don't carry your knife with you. Or hand a knife to somebody. You're supposed to hand it with the handle forward. And don't do certain things. Don't urinate in the hallways. Don't defecate. Just basically, these people were gross.

And here's how not to be gross. Don't act like a pig. Don't act like a pig. Don't act like... Right. And in a way, it's training your brain to gain self-control over your impulses. Like, I'd really just like

to take a shit right over there. Well, don't do it. I mean, it's not cool. We don't do that. Okay, I won't. And then it never enters your mind to do anything like that. And so the argument is that

we've been on this 500-year-long civilizing process of just training people to control their impulses, impulse control. It's that prefrontal cortex, keeping a break on the sort of lower impulses that bubble up. I'd really like to do that. Not going to do it. And then pretty soon you don't even think about doing it. Now, obviously, there's still a handful of the psychopaths or whatever that don't care.

Now, obviously, there's still a handful of the psychopaths or whatever. They don't care. But fewer and fewer of us. And just from that interview, Sean Connery's generation versus our generation versus our kids. You know, this is just disappearing from our vocabulary, from our repertoire of behaviors that we will employ with other people. You just don't even think about doing that. That's how moral progress happens, from the bottom up. It completely makes sense. And it completely makes sense when you look at the history of humanity, how much safer it is today, relatively, than at any other time, in terms of how much violence you're going to encounter in your daily life. When we see violence, it's incredibly shocking. Whereas if we lived 5,000 years ago, it'd be incredibly rare to get through a life without seeing dead bodies. Like you became much more accustomed to the temporary nature of being and the threat of violence being a real part of everyday life, whereas it's not anymore. So I think one of the things that's happening as we create new technology that sort of alleviates the physical stress of life or the worry of dying or we extend life to the point and fix illnesses to the point where life becomes a little bit more,

a little bit more durable, a little, and people relax more and more about the, like the physical requirements our bodies had, you know, a few thousand years ago, we're hunters and gatherers we're constantly worried about predators the physical physical requirements and the dangers that you had to be able to experience and mitigate and get through every day we're so much more so much more dangerous than what we experience on a daily basis other than like car accidents and things on those lines right but we still have all those fight or flight responses. We still have those reward systems that need to be fed

because we're essentially in the same, you know, give or take a few genetic mutations, the same bodies that people had 10,000 years ago, right? Right. Yep. Yep. It's like that little line, the three Fs, fight, flight, or reproduction. Or freeze. That's the other one, though. Or freeze, yeah. The big one is what people don't consider is

why do people why do certain people not run not fight but panic lock up right and what's going on there because that's a real response that is super common that doesn't get addressed in that fight flight response right there's also people that it freeze. But all those things in a more dangerous world actually do age you faster. Some of the research I was reading in these books about aging is just the more stress you have, those stress hormones leads to more inflammation. There's more and more stuff about inflammation and disease, inflammation and Alzheimer's, inflammation in the telomeres. It shortens your life.

And there was this big study on possums in Florida, the ones that are out in the wild getting run over and attacked and preyed upon versus ones that were put on this island where there was no predators, all the food that they want. And, you know, the ones that lived on the island lived significantly longer, like 50% longer, and not just accounted for by the ones that got run over. Not that. Just their aging, the aging process. Just living in an open, dangerous environment takes its toll on your cellular reproduction

and how long you live, irrespective of predation and accidents. Yeah. So this is back to the meditation. Take it easy. Lower those stress hormones because they do take a toll on your body. Yeah, unquestionably. I mean, it must. The idea that you can get through life redlining it all the time and not have –

Yeah. It's like people ask that don't know much about football. Why can't they play the whole game like the final two minutes? Oh, Jesus. Well, you can't do it. Yeah. I mean, just football in and of itself. Like, how long can you do that?

Like, does anybody ever figure out how many times you can get hit by a guy who's 350 pounds running 30 miles an hour? I mean, those guys are giant and they're huge super athletes and they collide with each other. me can even appreciate the amount of impact that's involved in a lineman who is just a giant mountain of a man using all of his might and running into you. I don't think I can understand it. I think I watch it on TV and I see guys feet are up in the air and they go slam. But I don't think I physically can feel it. I don't think I get it. Right. I just't think I get it. Right.

I just think it's... No, that story of the concussion story that was first broke by ESPN in a front line in a two-hour documentary. That guy that died, the Pittsburgh Steelers center, Mike... What was the guy? I forget his name. Jamie's a big sports fan. Mike, he was featured in the movie that, the Will Smith movie. Yeah. But, but the docs calculated that in the course of his life, say from high school football, college football, and 20 seasons in the NFL, and all the practices all week. And then the game, Mike Webster. Yeah, Mike Webster, he probably got hit, you know, hit the equivalent of a minor concussion, you know, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of times. And that, you know, that's the accumulative effects.

Wow, that is so crazy. What is this? What is this, Jim? The size of an NFL lineman has changed since they started playing football. Okay, so in 1927, they were 190 pounds and 6 feet tall. So 190 pounds is 6 pounds less than me. I'm not a big person. I'm 5'8". So they're a little taller at 6 foot for the average lineman, which is a giant person, right? Now, in 2000 and what is the last one?

8? Jamie, what does it say? Scroll down. 2006, I was just trying to show this part at the bottom, which shows how hard their hits are. 2006, you get to the average lineman is 6'4", 335 pounds.

He's not the average. He's the outlier, though, because he's a little bit big. But still, you can see the curve. Most of them are a little bit smaller than him, but still they're all over 300 pounds. I remember Alan Page. He was huge. He was massive and just one of the greats.

Only 245. He probably wouldn't even make the main team now. Right. And what year was that? Scroll down, please. 67. So in 67, yeah. 67, that guy was like, if you see how big George Foreman was. Right.

When George Foreman was the heavyweight champ, he was gigantic. But I don't – I mean, when he came back, when he started his comeback, he was well over 300 pounds. He was really overweight. But I don't think he was that big when he was fighting. I think he was in the 220s or 230s when he was a heavyweight champ and Ali beat him. Yeah, some of the stuff like the ones on the right there, there's a lot of body fat. Of course. That's just not enough.

Because I guess the more mass, like the sumo wrestlers you want mass not just muscle yeah they you know they also those guys are just all about power they're all about power and weight behind power and a certain amount of time like if you have the same amount of power but more weight behind it you can actually probably have more of an impact when you're colliding with people right like have you ever tried to wrestle with a big person? No. Like, even if they're not strong, like, the amount of mass that you have to move when you're wrestling around with them, like, you don't consider it until someone, like, until

you're in a situation, like, I guess, if you had never played football before, and then you ran out there and you were on the front line, and you'd be like, okay, what is this going to be like? There's no way you know there's no way you know what that 330 pound dude feels like when he's boom right full blast into you what a crazy fucking sport i'm reading this book now called spitting in the soup um about the history of doping in sports that goes back to the late 19th century and and half of it is just for survival. You know, you take these drugs just to get through the next week and the next game, the next contest.

And how it was, this guy's argument is that it was pretty accepted and common and known. The guy that won the Tour de France five times used to say that you can't expect us to do this on bread and water. I mean, you know, we've raced 250 times a year and, you know, six, eight hours a day of killing ourselves. Jean-Claude Cotille, the French great French cyclist. But this appears to be true in most sports in that it wasn't until the, I think it was 1906 Olympics when people started equating doping with sin. Like, this is a moral thing.

Like, you're cheating, as opposed to, it's just a medical thing. You know, I train, I lift weights, I do this, I eat this diet, I take these drugs. It's all kind of part of the mix of being an athlete. And then there was a transition, he argues, socially or morally or whatever. And all these things are good, but this one thing over here is bad. Like, say, in cycling, your hematocrit is important because you're delivering oxygen to your muscles. So if, you know, you and I probably have 45% to 50% hematocrit, that's the number of red blood cells in your blood.

So half are red blood cells delivering oxygen to your muscles. So now if you're, like, in the low 30s, that's anemic. And this drug, EPO, invented by Amgen, was created to save patients that are anemic from cancer treatment or whatever. It's a great drug. But so it wasn't long before the cyclists got a hold of this in the late 80s, early 90s. Like, well, OK, if 45 percent, if I'm naturally at 45 percent and you're at 50 percent, I'm

losing a little edge. So I'll just I'll train at high altitude or I'll sleep in the oxygen tent or I'll just take the injection. And so if 50% is good, how about 55%? Well, that would be even better. How about 60%? And the guy who won the 96 tour, Bjarne Ries, his nickname was Mr. 60%. He's like mud flowing through his veins. But then some cyclists started dying in the early

90s and mid-90s. There was maybe a dozen or two that died mysteriously. And it was never clear what the cause was. So everybody said it's the EPO. The blood's too thick. They're having strokes or heart attacks. And even I bought this idea. Yeah, I guess that's it. I wrote this

article for Scientific American about doping in sports. This is why it's wrong because people are dying. But this guy's argument is it was never proven that these people died. And furthermore, he takes on steroids. You know, this is the whole thing that started with Lyle Alzado, the great Oakland Raiders linebacker who said, you know, I got brain cancer. It was after he was done playing. But he said it was due to all the steroids I was taking. Then the meme started, oh, steroids causes cancer, steroids feeds cancer, causes tumors to grow.

This guy is saying that's never been proven. And so I'd like to look into this more before I review this book. You know, is this really true? How do we know that steroids are dangerous? I mean, isn't it the dosage? You know, as Michele Ferrari said, Lance's doping dosage you know as michele ferrari said lance's doping doctor um you know it's it's the orange juice if you drink too much orange juice is dangerous it's the dose you know so some steroids some epo some growth hormone you know

i mean some of this should be maintenance like what triggered this was looking at those huge guys i mean you get pounded you got to play again next week. How do you do that? Well, I got to get the massage, take the jacuzzi, you know, and take some drugs. That was the premise of Bigger, Stronger, Faster. Oh, right. It was a big thing was that where are all the bodies? Like, where is this steroid epidemic that people are talking about when you're looking at, I mean, even in bodybuilders, I mean, some of them do die from it, but the sheer amount of drugs those guys are taking to achieve those behemoth sizes. Like if you look at some pro bodybuilders that are just outlandishly huge,

a lot of those guys, it's a battle of who can take the most drugs, who can power lift the most, who can lift the most, who can train the hardest, but also who can tolerate the most ridiculous levels of these drugs. And so some of those guys die. Right. Well, there's the dosage issue. Yes, exactly. Because the amount of people that are doing them is off the charts. If you think about professional athletes, you think about all the different athletes that are doing performance enhancing drugs. If they were really dying from this stuff, the body should be everywhere. It should be just dropping like flies.

I think they're just getting smarter about it. They know. It's called microdosing in cycling with the EPO. You just take a little bit. Just give it just a little bump, just for maintenance. When I wrote that story for Scientific American, I interviewed Frankie Andrea, who was one of Lance's teammates in the 99 and 2000 seasons that he won. And he took EPO.

And he didn't really want to avoid it as long as he could. But he said he was just getting dropped from the main peloton. And he couldn't even do his job as just Lance's domestique to carry his water bottles up. You're up there in the front with Lance, drop back to the team car, get some water bottles. Then you got to ride all the way back up to the front, which is hard to do when these guys are cruising along at 30 miles an hour. So he got to be fit. So he said he was getting dropped just doing that. So it was like, I can't even be on the team, can't do my job. So he took it just to stay in the race, just so I could be a bicyclist. Just so you could deliver water.

Yeah. And I think a lot of them do that. It's like I don't want to do it, but I've got to do it because stay healthy and strong and keep going. Well, you'd have a unique insight into it because you did a lot of cycling. Yeah. And you did it at a very high and competitive level. So you had an inside view as to the requirements and i think it's one of the more unique sports in that the requirements are so incredibly grueling in the amount of time that you're working like you might

not be working with as much effort say as a sprinter who's running 100 meter like a usain bolt type character but the amount of time involved in expenditure of energy is huge it's one of the more unique and weird things about cycling is you're doing it for hours yeah like what is one day and the Tour de France notice how I said France France four to six hours four to six hours a long to six hours of racing, of pumping your legs. Four to six hours. That's crazy when you think about it. So even if it's easier than running a sprint, even if it's easier than running up the top of a hill, the amount of time you're spending doing it is another consideration.

And then mentally, the drag on maintaining maintaining must be huge, must be crazy. Well, this is when I interviewed Greg Lamond. He said that his teammates came to him. This was in the 91 or 92 season, his last. And when EPO was rampant in the Peloton, everyone figured it out. Greg didn't want to do it. And his teammates were saying, well, you know, just in the course of a three-week tour, you know, just your hematocrit just drops just from fatigue. He said everybody else, it's not like they're getting an unfair advantage by going above their normal performance. They're just staying level, whereas the rest of us are dropping off, and then the last few stages you're wiped out.

So, you know, it's like we've got to do this just to stay with the rest of the field. So the level playing field argument. I guess, you know, in terms of morals, we sort of draw the line at the needle when there's a needle involved, I guess, or, you know, a patch or a pill. It feels different than training at high altitude or sleeping in the oxygen tent, you know, like the climbers do. You know, taking EPO feels like it's more artificial. This guy's argument of this book, Spitting the Soup, is that it's just a gradation. We've just

arbitrarily drawn the line there. And, you know, I think there's much of it in the NFL has got to just be getting to the end of the season and still being able to play just because it's so hard. Well, I think that argument is very good because there's certain supplements that you can take that are effective, that actually do work. So how do we distinguish between- Yeah, what was the stuff that the baseball players, Andrew- Anderstein-Dyon. Yeah, that's it.

But they, most likely- What is that? Most likely bullshit. Most likely there was an excuse for them doing actual steroids. Okay, right. Because I think that- Mark McGuire. Yes.

I think that some forms of that stuff, some forms of those, what they call pro-hormones, can actually trigger positive test results in maybe primitive, like back then when they were testing people, which is like nothing compared to what they're doing now, which is why, really interestingly, two Russian Olympic wrestlers

have been stripped of their gold medals because of the past. I think from 2008, they didn't even get the 2012 results in because they took their samples that they had back then, and now with newer, more sophisticated levels of testing, they've been able to show that these guys were doing some shit. But the UFC is an interesting proving ground for it because jeff novitsky who was the head of usada and the drug program that got lance armstrong and a bunch of other people novitsky now works for the ufc and he does oh yes oh yes and he has for quite a

while now and he has almost completely cleaned up the amount of people that are doing things people still get caught every now and then but the amount of people who where their physiques have changed where their performance has changed where uh the results inside the octagon have like drastically dropped off is pretty obvious and significant to the point where mma fans and you know the pundits and analysts are looking at this and they're going, wow, this is fascinating. You're seeing people change. There's even a term that we use in MMA, pre-USADA. We use pre-USADA and post-USADA. So they got them off the drugs. Are the fights still as good, exciting to watch?

Yes. Well, the best guys, for sure. Yeah, the best guys are still the best guys. But there's some guys that were the best guys that were on legal stuff. Like they used to allow testosterone replacement therapy used to be legal. So all you had to do was take steroids, go to your doctor, get off the steroids. Your testosterone crashes. You go to the doctor, say, Hey dog, man, I got, I think I got low test. You know what, son, you have a condition. It's called low testosterone. And they would prescribe it for you the same way like when you were talking about alcoholism being a disease. They would decide that testosterone loss is a disease.

This man needs his medicine. And so they would give these guys testosterone. And like 35, 36-year-old guys would be just jacked, jacked and fighting. Not just jacked and going to the beach, but involved in a sport where your whole purpose is to do physical harm to your opponent. Right. So this drug allows you to do more physical harm, which is very different than cycling. If a guy gets really good at cycling and he has to use drugs to get really good at cycling

and he's cheating to win, that's one thing. But if he's doing these drugs and it's allowing him to put other people in the hospital. Yeah things get very weird Well in terms of the moral argument if you're saying that the fights are just as fun to watch they're exciting competitive without the drugs and Fewer people are harmed from taking the drugs. Then maybe that's a good thing That would be argument USADA. The argument could even be said that the fights are more exciting because people are more vulnerable. They get knocked out easier, they get tired easier, and sometimes it makes fights crazier. Because guys have tested positive for EPO after even championship-level fights.

There was this guy, Ali Bagutinov, who's a top flyweight fighter. And interesting enough, he fought a guy who doesn't dope, who's the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, this guy Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson. And Mighty Mouse beat him, and one of the ways he beat him is with volume and pace. Like, this guy couldn't keep up his pace. Right.

And efficiency of technique is also, like, really critical in MMA because a guy who doesn't have efficiency and puts too much kinetic energy and muscle behind techniques, they tend to fade quicker. It can have positive results if you catch someone with a shot, but if you don't, over a long period of time, you're draining your gas tank too quickly. In a single bout, you mean. Yeah, in a single bout. So this efficiency overcame the drugs that the other guy was on, like his physical efficiency

and his technique. So the problem is stopping the arms race, the bodybuilding arms race. The moment somebody can get away with it, then everybody thinks that it's being done, then they have to do it, then you have this behavioral game theory thing of an arms race. So Nowitzki's point, I guess, is we're going to nip it in the bud, no one's going to do it, and we're going to make the consequences. Well, super harsh suspensions. What are the, oh, what is it?

Two-year suspension if you get caught. Right. And a bunch of people have gotten that two years. And also, you have to let USADA know where you are every minute of every day. Out of complication testing. Like, hey, I'm going fishing. I'm going to be on Lake Mead. You know, if you want to find me, that's where I am.

And then you might get a text while you're on Lake Mead, come to the dock. Right. You got to go to the dock, and there's a guy standing there, and he's going to take your blood. I had Chael Sonnen on the the podcast and he was talking about how invasive it was and how crazy it is they just show up wherever you are and he was doing they were they were doing it in like a closet with like a mop and everything he's like this is not sanitary you're taking my blood in this weird environment like this is this is kind of fucked up but they're they're just trying to catch people well it'll be interesting to see what happens with these leaks that are coming out yesterday.

The Russians hacked the USADA database. They had the Williams sisters and the gymnast Biles, Simone Biles. And, you know, they're threatening to release more in the coming days. And they were on all kinds. They didn't say what they were on, but that they had medical exemption. Well, one of them was oxycodone. One of the Williams sisters was on, she was on oxys, right? Simone Biles was taking, I think, Ritalin medication for ADHD. And she came out, I think, today and made a statement about it.

Oh, really? Hmm. Yeah. Well, that's a, isn't ritalin a form of... Isn't it a form of like an amphetamine or something? It is. Well, it's a stimulant. It's a speed, a stimulant.

Yeah. Well, I would think that a stimulant would be a performance-enhancing drug. Why would they let you do that? Right. Right. Well... Pretty impressive.

Launched in the air, though, in that split. Look at that picture. That's crazy. What does it say? I have ADHD and I've taken medicine for it since I was a kid please know i believe in clean sport i've always followed the rules and will continue to do so as far as play fair play is critical to sport and is very important to me what does that mean well what does that mean like what how does adhd how is that affected by ritalin like what does speed do to someone who has adhd it's one of these counterintuitive

things that i can't remember what the biochemistry of it is, but the stimulant actually counters the hyperactivity and it slows you down. It's a weird thing. I can't remember why that is. But is hyperactivity a controversial thing? Well, ADHD as well. This is one of those sort of loose, big categories that more and more people have gotten tossed into. You know, it used to be the little boy in fourth grade was just, you know, he just had a lot of energy

and he was always running around. Now he's got a disease. He's got ADHD. Well, we've got to medicate him. Why not just let him go out and have a little longer playtime? You know, this is one of the counter arguments to the disease model. I mean, again, it's back to that. It's a behavior. No, it's a disease. So we we got to treat it with a drug oh you know so you have this over medication effect now i can't say if i was a parent of a adhd kid i wouldn't be glad to have some meds but

i think the consensus is as far too much medication of children uh who really the behavior it's a spectrum you know if you're just completely out of control over here, but most that are taking the drugs are probably in the bell curve somewhere. Not that bad. I think that's really important that you point that out, that there is this great big spectrum. Like a lot of things we've been talking about, there's people that are almost unmanageable,

and there's people that might, a kid that might just be a little bit rowdy. You know, maybe she just jumps up and down on the couch and you tell her not to. And you're like, I'm getting this fucking kid on some pills. And a lot of it is, you know, teachers want control of the classroom. It's this old, goes back to the 19th century. You know, I'm going to put them all in rows because we're training them to work in industry. You know, or be in the military. It's really all it was.

And that's all it still is. And we're stuck with the echoes of that to the point where if you want to do something, like there's a lot of things that you can do for a living that don't involve the traditional model of what they're trying to teach you in school. And when you think about those things as options, they seem preposterous and they seem like a pipe dream. Like this idea that you're going to be a famous author. Yeah, sure you are. Like you're going to be in a band. Oh, yeah, you too. Congratulations.

Well, someone's in a fucking band. Is someone in a band? Like we get all this music. Someone's playing this music. How come I can't do it? You can't do it? No, I have to work. I have to get up and work.

Like we train these people to think that this is the path that everyone has to take and the occasional person ejects from that path and goes and makes their own knives or you know and start some sort of weird business but why can't anybody who wants to do that do that well they can the problem is the most impressionable part of your life they're teaching a really important things like math and science and English and grammar and we all need those things but they're also teaching you patterns and they're teaching you about the potential for your future and This potential for your future becomes like a reality that you can't escape because everybody else has done it your friends are all doing it What'll call what college you applying to like what do you what are you gonna major?

When you gonna do when going to take the bar? And they're like, oh, I want to be a singer. We've stigmatized people who don't go to college. So everyone feels like, well, I got to go to college. And the fact is not everyone should go to college. There's really no need for it. It's a waste of time and money. They're not going to get any valuable skills that they can actually use.

And they don't even want to be there. But they feel like, well, my parents want me to go, and my friends are all going, and society says I got to have a degree, so I got to go. You know, and so now we have this proliferation of colleges and universities that, and, you know, the skyrocketing costs and so on. What was wrong with trade schools? You know, now trade schools are kind of looked down upon. There's nothing wrong with trade schools.

Trade schools are great, but, you know, we've sort of stigmatized it. And I think it's artificially putting people in places where they feel inadequate because actually somewhere else they'd be making a lot of money at a particular trade that they're really good at and they'd be happy. But we've altered that since the Second World War that's happened. Well, the structure of school, I think it benefits kids and it gives them discipline. Like, well, you've got to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning. You got to get there and you got to figure out how to get your body to get up. You got to figure out how to fire your mind up at your first class at 8 a.m. I think all that's probably good because it's tests. It's like you're overcoming.

And then in overcoming and getting through those tests at school or getting through whatever weird social stuff that you got going on in your classroom, you develop sort of some data. You get some experience about the world. Yeah. There's something to that. But I just think this model that they want people to follow, when I see most people following this model, I'm like, is this just because people haven't been creative? They haven't been imaginative and thinking about what they would like to do better than what they're doing now? Or is it just this pattern is so easy to slip into, and we don't even realize it until you're in it, and then you can't get out of it. Right. I am encouraged by Udacity and the MOOC courses, the teaching company courses, all the Audible books. There's so many ways to get a free education online. Most of the stuff is free or super cheap. The knowledge is accessible. It's there for

everybody. You know, it's, it's sort of the, how are you going to dis in a disciplined way, get the information. I think that that word's the key word, right? Discipline. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because the difference between what you're going to do on your own versus what you're going to do in college are very, very different. Right. Yeah. But then the question becomes what you're going to do on your own versus what you're going to do in college are very, very different. Right. Yeah. But then the question becomes, is it healthy to take some 19-year-old kid in the most promising and fun and exciting moment of her life, right? You're a teenager. You're leaving your parents' house.

And burden them with some insane workload of shit that they have to do to the point where they're always stressed out, they're constantly dealing with tests, they're always turning in papers, they always have to do research, they're constantly working. Like if you look at the workload of a kid in college, like yes, it teaches them discipline.

Yes, it teaches them that it's hard out there and you've got to really figure out how to push yourself. It does all those things, but it also robs them of a lot of fun times in these years of their life. And I'm not exactly sure if everything that they're learning and they're spending all this time on is even ever going to be beneficial. In fact, the argument would be that most of it is fucking nonsense and Right. And you're never going to use it. Right. And meanwhile, you're 19. Yeah. You know, and you should be having fun and enjoying the vitality of youth. I remember when I was at Pepperdine University in Malibu.

I was a member of the first four-year graduating class, 1976, Class of 76. And I was in the jock dorm with a bunch of baseball players and tennis players and just rowdy guys. And they're all, I can't wait to get out of college. I want to get out there on my own. It's like, when are we ever going to live in Malibu again? Here we are playing ping pong and going to heaven. There's the Pacific Oceans right there and the gym.

Unless you're Oprah or something, you're not going to be living like this again. That's so true. That place is in the perfect spot. Imagine that this again. That's so true. That place is in like the perfect spot. Imagine that land now. Oh, my God. Mrs. Seaver bought that and gave it to George Pepperdine's company that ran that school in, I think, 69 or something. That huge hunk of land at Malibu Canyon Road in PCH. That'd probably be billions of dollars now.

Probably would be, right? If you stop and think about how many million dollar houses. If the Coastal Commission would let them build anything. You gotta bribe them. You gotta hook them up. That's right. You gotta get them Laker tickets. Did you see this ITT text?

You mentioned trade schools that made me think of it. This shit that happened like the last two weeks. They got completely shut down by the Department of Education. Whoa. Yeah. It says, former ITT tech students declared debt strike. I am stuck up to my neck in debt for the rest of my life, end quote. Yeah, the problem with the, my argument for tech schools are good, is a lot of them get, you know, they turn into these, like, diploma mills.

They just basically are for profit. Right. It's okay to have a profit company. But, you know, for something like this, you end up churning out students that can't get jobs, but they have this huge debt. And they were. The reason this is the story is because the federal government was financing some of their tuition. But it turns out it was not quite a pyramid scheme, but something along those lines. And so the government just said, well, we're not going to do this anymore. It's tax dollars. And so now the students don't get the financing anymore,

and the school is still charging $50,000 a year or something. It's like that's the end of the game. Wow. So a lot of these private tech schools, or just private schools in general, depend on federal government money through the students. So they're not really for-profit in the sense of we're competing in the marketplace like Apple versus IBM, and the best product will win. It's not like that. They're getting subsidized, heavily subsidized. Heavily subsidized, but yet the price is so elevated that people can't afford

it. Yeah. It's really crazy how much it costs to get an education. And I understand that it's expensive to try to give someone an education. It's expensive to try to run a university, expensive to try to give someone an education. It's expensive to try to run a university. I mean, people that are great teachers and professors deserve a fair pay. They deserve a lot of money. I read this article by David Frum, F-R-U-M, in The Atlantic, Atlantic.com. He published the other day on why colleges are so expensive, and he tracks the number of professors that have increased over the last 50 years, which is, you know, minor, versus the number of administrators, you know, deans and, you know, support staff and so on. If you scroll down a little bit, let's see, right there. So this is California colleges state university system

from 11,600 to 12,000 professors but the number of administrators went from 3,000 to 12,000 that's the money because those are full time jobs and they all have health care and benefits and retirement so that's where the expense is

not in the actual teaching you have a professor with a brain sending the ideas into the brains of the students in the classroom. It's all the support structure around it. Not to mention these gyms and dorms and cafeterias that are now nice restaurants. All that's expensive. This is hilarious. Listen to this. Today's New York Times offers one modest illustration.

This is hilarious. Listen to this. Today's New York Times offers one modest illustration. Over the past 18 months, a time reports 90 American colleges and universities have hired chief diversity officers. These administrators who are hired in response to the wave of racial incidents that convulsed campuses like the University of Missouri over the past year. they are hulking up at an already thriving industry. Wow. March 2016, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education held its 10th annual conference in San Francisco. Hilarious.

Attendance set a new record, 370. The association publishes a journal. It bestows awards of excellence. The association publishes a journal. It bestows awards of excellence. That fucking thing in the University of Missouri was a shocking insight into how colleges really work. That lady was yelling at that student who was a photographer. That was his job. He was working for the school.

Melissa Click was the professor of communications. Yes, which is hilarious. And the guy was an ESPN reporter sent there to cover the protests they were going to have. And here's a professor of communications saying, no press. Not only that, she asked for muscle. That's where it got really offensive. Like, what are you, a goon? You want to bring in the goons?

Oh, and you see that video. She comes up and knocks the camera. But it's this self-righteous right like and this lack of understanding it is there she is yeah it's lack of understanding how other people are perceiving what you're doing and the possibility that what you're doing is not cool at all right that this idea of having this safe space like what this is college like what are you saying like let's explore what happened here what was what was this racial incident? And let's get to the heart of that.

Let's not get angry at some guy who's taking a picture of things and photographing things. You are openly protesting in a public place. I would assume you want attention. Yes, that's the whole point of it. Isn't that a big part of it? Right, right. So this idea that you can get some guy and hit his camera when he's like, this is a crazy person. But it's a person who's, they have too much power.

Right. There's too much authority. Well, on the good side, she was fired and appealed and lost, so she's out. That is good. So that's good. It's sad that she got to that place. And just in the last two weeks, one of the deans at the University of Chicago sent that letter out. Now everyone's read it.

It went viral. Yes. To all the class of 2020 sent that letter out. Now everyone's read it. It went viral. Yes. To all the class of 2020, no safe spaces, no microaggressions. We're not disinviting speakers. You know, you got to grow up. And where I teach at Chapman University, I sent that letter to the president. I said, hey, maybe, you know, maybe we should do something like that. And at first he said, well, I don't know.

You know, we don't really have a problem with that here at Chapman. Everything's cool. I don't want to stir things. And then he decided he'd do it. So he did it. And then the Orange County Register published it. And I thought, this is great. So my first week of class last week to my students, we read it.

I said, this is it. There's no safe spaces here on Chapman and so on. You're adults now. And, you know, they seem fine with that. on. You're adults now. And, you know, they seem fine with that. I think it's if you set up a system of sort of a moral panic and you start looking for any racial slurs or slights or it makes conversation really hazardous. Like, oh, I got to navigate around. I better not use. I better be very careful. And all of a sudden it just shuts people down. It becomes like McCarthyism for morality.

Right. You just you start looking for people becomes like McCarthyism for morality. Right. You start looking for people who are violators of it. And like all these other things that we've discussed, there's a spectrum. And there's people that are on the extreme far fringe who are literally recreationally outraged at everything they see all throughout the world. Without no perspective at all. Without no perspective at all. And instead of being able to look at these things and try to see things from other people's points of view and perspective, every single thing becomes racist or patriarchal or homophobic or transphobic. And there's all these different new phrases that get ableist and fat shaming and all these different trigger warnings that they would like on almost every, and it just becomes this ridiculous nerfed up environment that you're living in.

And when you're in school and you're preparing for the real world, if you really think that you're going to get through school with all this craziness about safe spaces and certain things that trigger you and what should be legal and cultural appropriation. White people shouldn't be wearing dreadlocks and all the nonsense they're showing these kids. It's fucking crazy. It's crazy to assume that you can get through that and then become a functioning member of society and work with 40-year-old people who think you're retarded. Right.

Exactly. I'm giving a talk next week at Cal State Fullerton on this very subject because last year the sorority got in trouble because they held a Taco Tuesday. Yes, I saw that. Cultural appropriation. I saw that.

Really? Part of it is, I think, the lack of realization that there just are assholes in the world, people. There are just bad, nasty people, whatever. The question is, how do you deal with them? So like at Chapman, for example, last year, the LGBTQIA community there. What's INA? These are new ones that have been laid out.

So the Q is questioning or queer. Questioning. I thought it was just queer. Well, no, questioning in case you're not sure where you are. Shouldn't we have two Qs just so we don't discriminate between the queer and the questioners? Yes, right. Let's make that so, please, people. Let's not be insensitive.

Let's see. I think intersectionality. Intersectionality. Intersectionality. I think that's for the biological. You have different genitals than you feel like you should have or something like that have you seen pansexual yes there was a woman who was a congress person i think she was

who came out as pansexual is that what she was no she wasn't a congressman she's state representative i think what the fuck did she do she came out as pansex the first pansexual right politician right what does pansexual mean again? Like it means you're... I think it's everything. You're basically a freak. You're a little bit of everything. Mary Gonzalez, Texas state representative, identifies as pansexual in new interview. Ha ha!

Oh my goodness. Pansexuals don't believe in a gender binary. Oh yes, that's it. No gender binary. So this is called cissexist heteropatriarchy, that you believe there's only two, men and women, and that is discriminatory because there's people that are in between. Well, I think there are. I think there definitely are. I think there's people that have different levels of intelligence.

There's people that are shorter. There's people that have different levels of sexual desire. And there's got to be people that are on the borderline between a man and a woman, and they choose to be neither or. So think of them as fuzzy sets with a little bit of overlapping on the borders. Most people are in one or the other. Yes, there are people in between. Okay, what do we do? Nothing.

You don't have to do anything. Don't discriminate. Yes, there are people in between. Okay, what do we do? Nothing. You don't have to do anything. Don't discriminate. Yes, of course. You know, don't say to an Asian person, you must be good at math because you're Asian or something like that. Yeah, don't be a dick. But isn't that a compliment? Like if you see a black guy and you say, you must have a big dick because you're a black guy. Is he going to go, you racist piece of shit?

He's not, right? If you say to a guy like you must be a genius you're uh an european jew it's like that they get upset at you for that it's like that line in howard howard stern's movie where he's you know jewish kid at a black high school in jersey and he said they say it's a stereotype that blacks have bigger penises than whites and it may be a stereotype but i wish i had a stereotype like that anyway yeah um so last year i went to this little safe space talk discussion at the lgbtq uh i a don't forget the chatman okay so i went sexual what was the last one was the a uh

let's see lgbtq. I forget what that is. Analog. That's right. As opposed to digital. I have to fuck through headphones. I forget what that is now. And cords. What's the A?

Asexual. Asexual. Asexual. That's right. Interesting. You just have no. That's true though. There are people that are like that.

That don't desire sex. So, you know, there's truth in all these things. And the people that were there is maybe a dozen people or so. Very nice, very thoughtful. We just like to help people. I feel left out. I think they should add an H in there. Heterosexual.

So then you can sort of see, I can sort of see in this meeting how a pseudo problem becomes a problem that isn't real. And that is, you know, we're here to meet to discuss the problem we have okay what's the problem well there were some incidences against lgbtqia people here on campus okay what happened well first of all i i just asked well like how many times does this happen like once a day once a week once a year what's the rate? Don't know. We don't have any data. Well, is it worse now?

Oh, yeah, it's much worse. Well, how many times did it happen last year, five years ago? We don't have any data. How do you know it's worse? Well, it just kind of feels worse. We get more emails. That's meaningless. Then it was like, well, give, give me some incidents, like examples.

What happened? Well, I heard about this gay couple. They were walking hand in hand sort of on the perimeter of the campus down the sidewalk of a local street, and some guy in a pickup truck drove by and made a remark. I said, that's it? You know, there's just, you know, there are assholes driving around. You know, it's just, you're know, that's never going to be zero. And there's no place you're going to go where you're going to be safe from that in the world.

And so the question is, how do you deal with that? Well, you can just say, fuck off, asshole, or just ignore them or, you know, whatever. But, you know, the idea of I'm hurt, I'm injured, I'm damaged, and I have to go and meet with my people where we talk about how hurt and damaged we feel, that's going to make it worse, I think. It's going to turn not a non-problem, but a minuscule problem into a big problem that doesn't need to be that way. That's my opinion of that. Well, we're really generalizing here because, right, we don't know what this supposed aggressor said. Right. And there's a bunch

of different things they could have said you know they could have drove by and go i love your hair and then just kept going like this piece of shit he just totally gendered me right you know there's levels right that's right of course there's some preposterous recreational outrage that really and on one hand it's what what is what's bad about it is it's indulgent and silly, but what's also bad about it is it develops this cry wolf mentality where when you see people getting offended by things that are so fucking ridiculous, you will almost be willing to dismiss everything on their team, everything that they're trying to push forth that some of the things might have some merit to them,

some of the things might have some merit to them some of the things might Be really valid right, but it's all in the same camp right of these Ridiculous over sensitive people that are looking to get recreational outrage all the time So they might attach themselves to really legitimate points that people that might be more sort of More rigid or conservative in their ideology they reject it outright they don't even consider it because it's these fucking dummies and they're you know they're they're crazy outrage and they're safe spaces like these people but they might be attached to some

really good ideas about how maybe it's not a good idea to have a bunch of guys on your campus yelling shit out at girls as they walk by and And maybe we can figure out how to stop that. Well, and that's right. So all these have a little kernel of truth and moral progress, as I said, happens, you know, bottom up, change language and so on. So it starts off well intentioned. So the question is, what do you do when somebody, you know, says something offensive? You know, I mean, do we turn it into a massive campus crisis? Or do you just say to the guy, dude, that's not cool.

Just don't say that kind of shit. It's not acceptable. So like the Halloween costume incident at Yale last year. Okay, so the faculty member sent out that email that said, you know, you're adults. We're not going to tell you what costumes you can and cannot wear. And this erupted and they said, well, what if somebody shows up in blackface? Okay, I'll admit, you know, somebody shows up in blackface at a Halloween party, that's getting, that's kind of pushing the boundary.

It's a risky move. You can say you're Al Jolson, though. What if you're a silent film specialist? You have a Mexican hat, a sombrero, or you're dressed up as a Native American. I mean, really? I mean, so there's sort of scales from offensive to inoffensive. Well, is it more offensive to wear blackface

than it is to wear redface? I have no idea, but it seems to be that. You can kind of get away with redface still, right? Well, the Redskins, you know, probably not after we talked about this. They'll pass some new rules.

We have to sit down, decide what to be upset about. But why not just, you know, these are adults. We don't need to tell, you know to tell them how to play in the sandbox. Yes. You know, ladies, if you're catcalled, you know, just tell the guy, shut the fuck up or fuck off or just ignore him. Well.

And tell the guy, guys should be, you know, guys, you know, you want to get laid. Catcalling a woman is going to have the opposite effect. You never know, though. Just don't do it. There's some freaks out there. You call them in call me like a elk call I don't have any data on that I'm afraid there's freaks the freak studies out there they've done some studies on freaks the journal of freak be here obviously I'm joking but I think that when we're talking about the difference

between those films that we watch these men beat the shit out of women and it was like just so standard and the outliers like when a person does show up on campus and they yell out sexist things it's like whoa like this is an outrageous thing because it's so rare because there has been progress right so even though i think that a lot of people in the recreational outrage community are outrageously stupid in their efforts to make everything an offense. I think that the pressure of all that craziness actually somehow can probably tone things down. If the left gets so outrageous in its demands, the right kind of meets them somewhere in the middle. We'll get to here, but settle the fuck down. I'll call Caitlyn Jenner Caitlyn.

I'll call her Caitlyn. Let's just relax on doing that to six-year-olds. Let's figure out a comfortable medium. And then in becoming more and more tolerant as time goes on, it'll just be the norm. Just like slapping people in those movies was normal in 1960, but today it's outrageous.

And in a television show, like To the Moon, Alice! If you had a new guy, like Kevin James. If Kevin James was in some new sitcom where he threatened to beat the shit out of his wife. Right. Like, whoa! How long would that show stay on the air?

Right, that's right. There's been progress made. Right, absolutely. So I think, you know, people getting outrageously upset about things that merit being outrageously upset, it makes everybody think. But when people are outrageously upset it makes everybody think but when people are outrageously upset about someone having a fucking taco tuesday right you know or trying to cut some white dude's dreadlocks off like okay you're losing me here you're going too far you're going

too far the other way you're not reasonable you're looking to get pissed off over nonsense like there's things to be you hear about that kid who got away with raping some girl and he was the girl had been passed out and um he only got six months and now that's six months yeah that is something to be outraged about that that's a real scary thing that you should be really pissed off about not taco fucking tuesday right right so there i think that hurts the cause of real Injustices yeah need to be corrected yeah, then they get lumped in with the silly stuff, and it's not so we have to get away from binary Thinking to scale thinking yes

You know it's a spectrum and choosing gender teams to becomes a real issue because there's pieces of shit on the male side And there's really fucking questionable people on the female side to write like that mattress girl thing all right You know where this Columbia that guy's suing the school now She she collected her diploma with a mattress, and we don't know what happened because we weren't there But there's some crazy text exchanged back and forth where she's asking him to come over and fire in the ass or something Is that what she said did I make that up allegedly find that out I don't want to get sued it's super important that you be real clear I mean I don't know what the fuck happened but if if it really is something like that

what was the the false rape accusation that made it to the New York Times or excuse me Rolling Stone the Rolling Stone yes was it Virginia yeah I mean that is crazy yeah That's crazy. And when something gets to the point where it's in Rolling Stone, it's a complete total fabrication like that, where somebody just made something up and it didn't go through the proper channels because everything dealing with gender and all these issues that are super sensitive issues gets treated with kid gloves. Instead of approaching it with the same kind of skepticism that you would a murder case or a case of theft, instead it gets immediately looked at like

there's one possible scenario here. This woman has been victimized. To question her would be horrific. And you shouldn't even observe the facts. You shouldn't even have an open mind. You have to go into it with this, even though you really don't have any information really whatsoever other than people talking, you have to go into it with this idea that this

person talking is telling you the truth. Right. Otherwise you're blaming the victim. I mean, it's shocked. Fuck me in the butt. Thank you. I got nervous. She said bluntly during one Facebook exchange. Yeah. See, I don't know what happened between them. And if someone sends you a text like that, it doesn't mean that you're allowed to rape them. But his version of what happened versus her version of what happened, you don't know who's telling the truth. You just don't know. And when things get so outrageous that this Rolling Stone thing gets published and gets treated with kid gloves. And one of the most important magazines in American culture treats this as if it's a real story and it turns out to be a complete fabrication. It sort of in some ways highlights the problems with dealing with this kind of stuff in a non-objective way. Carol Tavis wrote a nice piece for us in Skeptic on what we mean when we talk about rape. And again, it's this categorical binary thinking. So there's perfect behavior

and everything else is rape yeah and so she talks about you know the dance of seduction and you know the guy's pressing and you know she's saying no and then he says okay then she kind of hints that maybe okay a little bit more and then you just sort of you know, the whole foreplay process is kind of a way of ending up over here. And yes, absolutely. Whenever she says no, then that's it. It's no. But it isn't like, you know, she said no when they were still at the restaurant and he just raped her anyway. Usually there's a whole series of steps that we never get to see or no one knows.

We weren't there. We don't know what happened and what the gray area was. And when she says no, but no for now, maybe later. And none of that gets recorded. So we have no idea of what happens. Well, we also have to consider that, like we've been talking about with so many different other examples, that there is a giant spectrum of people's behavior. There are men that I know that like to get bossed around by women and smacked around and they like them to do terrible things to them and they will pay these women to

do this. They'll go to a dominatrix and this woman will insult them and hit them and she beats them and paddles them. They do all kinds of crazy stuff to them. And a lot of these guys are like wealthy guys who have, you know, they have like high pressure careers. And I've met these guys. I've talked to them. I've no guys that have had this thing. But if it's the other way, if it's a woman that likes getting smacked around by a guy, then it becomes like you don't even want to know that that girl exists. Like a woman can't hire a male dominatrix to kick her ass and rape her. But a man can hire a woman to humiliate her

piss on her like i know this guy likes girls to piss on him really he's crazy jim norton he's a wild man but he talks about it openly he's a comedian but he's but he's not the the high high pressure uh you know executive type guys that are doing it he's just a nut and a pervert but hilarious hilarious comedian okay but it's okay mean, he doesn't like getting beat up, but it's, it's okay. Like you can, you can be a man and you can hire some woman to kick your ass and you can have this desire to have this happen to you. But we're supposed to pretend that there's not some woman out there who doesn't want to like engage in a similar type of activity with a man and they must exist. They just do.

They just do. They must. And if, is it the same? If, if you decide that you and, um, your, the person that you have sex with, if you guys decide that you, this is the way you do things, you, you decide that she likes to smack you around and she likes to get on top of you and you get off on it

and she tells you when you're going to have sex. No, now, motherfucker. And you're like, oh, and you've got to give in to her. This is this weird game that you guys play. That is completely fine. But if the roles are reversed and you do that to her and you guys both get off on it,

it's a terrible crime. And it's interesting. It's interesting because we're not talking rape. We're not talking being pro-rape in any way, shape, or form or pro-domestic violence. We're talking about people like weird shit. Right. And some people actually want you to commit crimes to them. Well, imagine a scenario in which that was all consensual.

And then six months later, he published a story in Rolling Stones saying, I never consented. She beat me. Yeah reverse those roles. It looks like rape It sounds terrible, but it does you don't know what all the steps were. There's a great little short film It's like this sounds like rape apology talk though. You know that I know we mean you even discussing this you become a rape apologist So we should like be really clear. That's not what I am doing I'm looking at all the possibilities of human behavior, and I'm saying people are fucking weird We're weird you know and our our ideals a lot of times are shaped by popular culture And they're shaped by songs and movies and those in some ways Dictate more of what we expect from our life than the actual lives that we see around

us. Right. People are fucking strange. They're fucking strange. Well, this, this new law in California, you have to have verbal consent. How do you know, unless you record it? Yeah. It's still, he said, she said, well, I asked her verbally. She said, yes. And then she says, I never said yes. How do we know? Did you see the video that got released where this really wealthy billionaire character in Florida filmed his girlfriend beating herself up? She's on the bed and he put in a security camera because, I don't know, maybe he just knew she was going to do something crazy like this. So he's breaking up with her. And she told the police he beat her up. She's on the bed wailing herself in the face.

Holy shit. And there's video of this, screaming at the top of her lungs, working herself into a frenzy, probably with the windows open so the neighbors can hear it. And she's just beating the shit out of herself. So what if he didn't have video? He'd be screwed. Exactly. Yeah, many people have been, for sure.

I mean, this is not, again, this is not being a domestic violence apologist. This is not saying that men don't beat women. It's just saying when we look at things as, you know, I'm a man, so I side with all men. Or I'm a woman, so the women must be telling the truth. They're just people. There's awesome people that are men. There's awesome people that are women. There's awesome people that are asexual.

There's a really good little film short online i can't remember the producer it might have been reitman is there a reitman producer uh yeah ivan reitman is that what it is maybe that was it anyway it's a young couple like in a dorm room and they're on the bed clothes on they're making out and foreplay and at some point he says you know i think i i better get the you know the thing and she goes yeah yeah i think you should and you think he's going to reach for a condom, and he pulls a contract out. And he's like, all right. And then his lawyer comes in, and then her lawyer comes in, and they're like, okay, my client would like to touch your client on the breast.

Now, will your client agree to this? Okay, so we check this, and the whole thing goes through that. Yeah, it's called Consent. It's made by his son, Jason Reitman. Oh, that's it. Oh, there we go yeah there's a hilarious one that was a pro consent video that they had released to try to get people acclimated with this idea and it's a attractive young couple like hipster looking dude he had

like a funky mustache and he's with a girl and they're making out and he's like can i touch your leg and she's like yes and uh and then she's like can i touch out. And he's like, can I touch your leg? And she's like, yes. And then she's like, can I touch your leg? And he's like, yes. And he's like, can I kiss you? And she says, yes. And he goes, can I take your shirt off? She goes, not yet. And they keep making out.

And it's kind of hot. It's kind of hot. Like, I don't think you should fucking have to do that all the time. Right. And especially if you're in a relationship with someone, then it's ridiculous. And I can understand the first couple of times you do it. But the video, I don't support that being a rule but if two people want to do that on their own that video is kind of hot like it looks like wow eventually she said no and then

she said yes the shirt came off we're making progress some things are happening she's she's obviously enjoying this makeout thing like it's kind of hot but you shouldn't fucking have to do that most people have never done that this idea and then you make it a law yes and then you got to enforce it how do you enforce the law yeah and it's not going to work with everybody some people don't want to say shit some women don't want to talk about it some men don't want to talk about it and some people want to talk about every single aspect of it right find somebody who meshes with what somebody gave an interview i think it might have been in rolling I think it might have been in Rolling Stone, no, it might have been in The Atlantic, where a college co-ed, and the guy just kept asking her,

and asking her, can I do this? She said, shut the fuck up and just fuck me. Come on. Well, that's, you know, I mean, that's okay too. Right, right, right. Everything's okay. But as soon as you start telling people, you've got to ask every question in the book before you do it.

No, you don't. No, you don't. No, you just don't rate people. Right. Just don't rate people. Right. And then we're all good. Right.

It's real simple. Don't hold anybody down. Don't make them do things. Don't fuck them when they're passed out. We done? We're good. Absolutely. Okay.

Yeah. It just gets a little silly. But the intention behind it is like you're saying the intention behind it ultimately is about progress. Ultimately is about making an environment, whether it's ill-intentioned or not, or whether it's like ill thought out or not. The idea is to create a safer environment. It's just, are you doing that?

Or are you just annoying the fuck out of people? And the same amount of sexual assault is going to go on? I don't know. It's an interesting question because if you pull so far left, do they meet in a different place than they would be if you just let them, well, boys will be boys. Stay away from the fraternity, ladies. You know what I mean? That doesn't fly anymore. So maybe it does in some way help.

And then, you know, that stat we put up with the number of diversity officers. I mean, the moment you hire somebody whose job it is to basically look for diversity, any time it doesn't meet whatever the criteria is at that moment, it's like, okay, we have a problem. Yeah. Okay, do we really have a problem? Maybe a little bit, but now it's a big official problem. We've got to write it up. We've got to make it a law.

Busy work. Yeah, busy work. Yeah, creating work. We've got to write it up. We've got to make it a law. Busy work. Yeah, busy work. Then they're looking for trouble. Unions have been doing that since the beginning of time. Teachers unions, that's a big issue. They've been creating jobs since the beginning of time. That was always like, I had a buddy of mine

who had a job on, what is that where they do the Javits Center? The Javits Center in New York? He had a job where he what is that where they do the big, the Javits Center, you know the Javits Center in New York? He had a job where he doesn't even go there. He got a check every week. He didn't even go there. He never went there. And he was one of those no-show jobs.

It was like some union deal that they had made, probably with quote-unquote organized crime. And so all that stuff's always been fluffed up forever. Quote-unquote organized crime and this so all that stuff's always been fluffed up forever Yeah, so this idea of having all these diversity officers They're gonna fucking create conflict just to keep their job afloat the last thing they want is them to be obsolete You know well look we all just decided like Taco Tuesday is good I like tacos right and yeah, you can dress like an Indian if you really love Native Americans I mean do you really have a respect for you not like being an asshole about it, right? Okay, cool. The blackface, we're going to leave that alone.

We're not going to go with blackface. But that's one of the only- I would say the rule is don't be a dick. And most people know when they're being a dick. And if they don't, then your colleagues and friends should tell you. But can you be a dick and be funny? Like, okay. You can as a comedian.

I can't. But if a white guy, like what if a black guy dresses like a white guy and puts white face on and just starts doing the most ridiculous white stereotype well remember when um uh ted danson came was it was it the oscars or something right he was dating her at the time and he made a little joke about Will Chamberlain's record. He showed up in blackface. Yeah, he showed up in blackface. Remember that?

And that was a big controversy. Yeah. I mean, at this point, whatever that was, that was... That's not even blackface. That's like bronze. 1980s, I think. That is hilarious that he did that. No longer funny.

Isn't that crazy, though, that this is one specific look with makeup we do not allow? Right. You cannot pretend to be a white person who, or you cannot be a white person who's pretending to be a black person, but you can pretend to be anything else. Right. Like, a white man can pretend like- There's probably good reasons for that in our history. Well, who the fuck was, who played Charlie Chan?

It was a white guy, right? The famous Chinese detective that was a white guy. And when John Wayne played Genghis Khan, do you remember that? Didn't Tom Cruise play an Asian in one of the films? No, he was the last samurai, but he was a European guy. Oh, okay, all right. Okay, that's good. Yeah, that's good.

No, man, it's interesting, and I get it. There was slavery until 200 years ago. I get, I understand the whole thing, but it's still quite odd, you know? Yeah, yeah. And when a black person puts on white face and pretends to be a white person, no one gives a fuck.

Oh, there we go, right. Warner Oland is Charlie Chan. That is the most non-Chinese. I know. He looks totally Puerto Rican, his mustache. There we go. Right. Warner Oland is Charlie Chan. That is the most non-Chinese. He looks totally Puerto Rican, his mustache. What nationality was that guy? Did he have some weird stuff that they put on his face? Let's find out what nationality he is.

If you had to guess, what do you say? I say maybe he's got a little Native American in him. Swedish. Swedish. Oh, God. Boy. Well, that's practically Native American. That's practically Chinese.

He's not close to anything. He's so white. That's like the whitest race you could pick. Like, what's more white than Swedish people? That's the whitest ever. Swedish meatballs and shit. Like, Swiss chocolate. Switzerland. That's a different country.

But that's really white. For him to believe Charlie Chan is hilarious. I just started reading this book on audio, The 50-Year Mission, the sort of oral history of Star Trek. Oh, wow. So they start with... Dork alert. Oh, yeah, totally.

But the actors, black, Asian, and so forth, they actually got to play a real black, a real Asian in a real job. And that was 1966. That was pretty innovative at the time. It's really important. The guy that played Sulu, what's his name? George Takei.

George Takei. Japanese. He was talking in his oral history about what kinds of jobs he had before Star Trek, which, you know, you play the sort of obnoxious, the servant or the obnoxious agent, Asian or whatever, but never like an actual real job where you have an important position. George Takei lived in an internment camp when he was a kid. Right, right, yep. Terrifying.

Yep. That's how recently that was. Yeah, so, you know, Roddenberry was something of a visionary in that sense. Oh, yeah. A little bit ahead of his time on that. Dude, that show's awesome. Yeah. Even to this day.

Yeah. It's hit that corny place. Like, I watched one where Captain Kirk has to fight that lizard dude with the shitty outfit on. That was done right here at Vasquez Rocks. Was it? Right up off of 14. You can go there and you can see where Captain Kirk pushed him off. Like near Topanga?

Like that way? No, no. Vasquez Rocks is up off of Highway 14. Where's Highway 14? So you take 5 North 14 that goes up to Lancaster, Palmdale. Oh, okay. Way out there. Yeah.

And we did a lot of- All those Westerns were shot out there. We did a lot of Fear Factor stuff out there. Oh, right. In Palmdale. Oh, that's so pretty. That's it. Yep.

Oh, wow, man. That is beautiful. Yep. So that's where that is? That's out near Palmdale? Yeah, there it is. Watch this video. This is awesome, awesome, awesome.

This guy who's playing, the lizard guy, is so bad. Like, everything is so bad. The outfit's so bad. The movement's so bad. Like, look how slow this is. Look at this. This is fucking incredibly bad. He swings. Look how slow this is. Look how slow this is. This is fucking incredibly bad. He swings. Look at this.

This is not in slow motion. This is how the show is really playing out. Look how slow this is. Look, he throws a kick. Oh, Captain Kirk. You let him catch your kick. That's bad Muay Thai. You're supposed to kick the leg out. You don't throw the guy in the air like that. And if you definitely throw him in the air, you follow up.

Where's your ground and pound bitch? Okay look at this? How come the lizards so much now? He's got to do the helmet slap with the eardrums. All right look at this He's trying to bite him look how bad this is my god. This is amazingly bad Yeah, but when you're 10 years old this is really really high drama. Oh, it's incredible back then look he does He does the double ear smack and the lizard can't handle it. And then he runs away like the slowest white guy that's ever walked the face of the earth. I mean, this is so stupid. Here he's got this styrofoam rock.

Styrofoam rock. Yeah, and watch how it looks fake, too. Like, even when he's picking it up, like, he's not even straining. Look how weak this is. He throws it. Boom, and it hits him right in the chest. Nothing. He's like, I. He's not even straining. Look how weak this is. He throws it. Boom. And it hits him right in the chest. Nothing. He's like, I can't believe this.

Meanwhile, go back to hitting him in the ear, motherfucker. You hit him in the ear and he was hurting. There's another video that was just released a few weeks ago of Shatner and the lizard monster on his couch. And they're watching a TV show or something. And they start fighting. Keep the thing playing because I want to find out how this ends. I don't remember how stupid it was at the end. Oh, it doesn't end until he makes gunpowder and shoots him with a makeshift cannon.

Oh, that's right. Boy, talk about giving a guy a lot of room. Look at that. He threw a big, giant rock at him, and it looks so fake. This lizard all of a sudden is so strong that he can take a 500-pound rock and throw it like it's basketball. But just a few minutes ago, he was struggling a 500-pound rock and throw it like it's a basketball. But just a few minutes ago, he was struggling with weak-ass Captain Kirk. That's right.

And then the technique, look, you hit him in the ear, you did some serious damage, and you let that go and started throwing rocks. Right. Go back to hitting him in the fucking ear. Just go whack him in the ear. It seems to be he has a soft spot. Keep doing that. Yeah, but then the show will end before the 48 minutes is up.

I don't think it will. They'll find it. It just looks so hilarious how slow that thing was moving. It was worse than I thought it was. See, that's also. That is. There it is. Oh, look at this.

The same technique. Look. That's hilarious. A couple old guys. Oh, oh, oh. They're both. That is hilarious. He's holding himself. Oh, oh, oh. They're both, that is hilarious. He's going after him again. That's hilarious.

This is really funny. I mean, Shatner's got a good sense of humor to do a send up of himself. Yeah. But that is that show and that scene. It shows in a lot of ways how far our entertainment has evolved. Yes. I mean, that's a comedy today.

Like, if you had that on Comedy Central today, if you had a ridiculous space show, if you called it ridiculous space show, and you essentially just have a lot of the same shit that was in regular space movies, just reenact them, people would laugh. Right, yeah. They would laugh. You have the right lines that went along with how stupid that looks. Yeah. Well, like Mike Myers end up on all the spy movies.

Right. But if you watch like a science fiction movie today, like have you ever seen that Netflix show Stranger Things? No. I just got into it. I'm four or five episodes into it. It's fucking great. Brian Redband told me it was bad.

He's crazy. It's really good. Stranger Things on Netflix. It's with Homegirl that steals shit. Winona Ryder. She's in it. No, that's crazy. It's really good. Stranger Things on Netflix. It's with Homegirl that steals shit, Winona Ryder. She's in it. No, that's bad. She's awesome in it, too. And Matthew Modine, the guy from Vision Quest, he's in it.

It's really good. It's a really good show. Fun show. Reading this oral history, though, because I just have these fond memories when I was 12 years old loving that show. Well, Shatner wanted more money and then when Nimoy became famous he got pissed and started cutting his lines and then Nimoy wanted a raise and it's like I don't really want to know those guys should keep that shit to themselves and that's probably pretty common with any business I suppose that when Screech wrote

that book about Saved by the Bell I was crushed it was that inside MMA? No. Screech Saved by the Bell. You know what Saved by the Bell is? No. It was a ridiculous children's sitcom. Was it on Nickelodeon? Is that what it was on? It was on TNBC. TNBC? What was it? It was like Saturday morning NBC. Oh, huge show though. Huge show amongst the little kids. And one of them rebelled

and became, he did porn. Wrote books. Got in a knife fight. got in a knife fight club. Celebrity boxing. Celebrity boxing. Yeah, somebody beat the shit out of him, right? Didn't Danny Bonaduce, he beat the shit out of him, right? No, he beat up Welcome Back Cotter.

There's the... Yeah. Screech. Did he go to jail? I think he went to jail too. Or in jail now again? He stabbed somebody, didn't he? Yeah, somebody.

Yeah. Like literally stabbed somebody. Behind the bell, okay. He's crazy. And so he wrote an autobiography saying that Tiffany Evertheism was banging everybody. Celebrity boxing. Mario Lopez was banging everybody. Well, I'm like, yeah, duh.

It's Mario Lopez. What? I was in a, here we go. He wrote that? That Mario Lopez, don't even read that. You can do that yourself, folks. I like Mario. I was in a pitch meeting one time at Fox, Fox Reality.

Mike Darnell was their big reality show guy. He's the one that brought all the big American Idol type shows, including American Idol. Anyway, we were pitching a skeptic show. So I had a production company and myself, and we had our waiting in the little room for him to be done with his meeting. And he came out to apologize that he was late because they were supposed to have a big celebrity boxing match that night. Paula Jones versus Tonya Harding. Oh, Jesus. And Tonya Harding got arrested that day for beating her boyfriend up with a hubcap in their trailer park or something.

Oh, Jesus. I remember sitting there thinking, what am I doing here? Didn't Paula Jones wind up doing like Penthouse or something crazy? Didn't she do one of those? Well, she did celebrity boxing, I think. Yeah, there we go. Well, Tonya Harding did. Is that Paula Jones?

Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah, there it is. Paula Jones is the woman who accused Bill Clinton of doing dirty things to her, right? Oh, yeah. Paula, not Paula Jones, Tanya Harding boxed Doug Stanhope on The Man Show. Oh, really? Yeah, we had a boxing match when Tanya Harding became a boxer for a while.

Remember? Right. Yeah, she was doing like boxing things. Maybe this was her start. Yeah. She was just, she's nice. I met her. She's a nice person. All right. She's desperate for money. Yeah. She was doing like boxing things. Maybe this was her start. Yeah. She was just, she's nice. I met her. She's a nice person.

All right. She's desperate for money. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, boy. Doesn't look like an ice skater there. Yeah. She's thick.

She must have been a good athlete, though. I mean, you can't be an Olympic ice skater. Oh, yeah. For sure. Or be a good athlete. No, she was. But that was a weird view into athletics, right? When Nancy Kerrigan got beaten up.

He hit her in the legs, right? Like hit her in the leg with a stick or something like that. No, like a tire iron. Was it a tire iron? Yeah, yeah. He bashed her. I think he shattered her, not the kneecap, but right next to it or part of it or cracked it or something. Yeah, it was pretty heavy.

I thought she was able to compete. And I think it was Tanya Harding's boyfriend that hired the guy so she was indirectly involved right yeah and um they were planning on tanya harding winning the olympics right they wanted her to right although i mean oh she it was her and um and uh nancy kerrigan they were the golden medal you know sort of the compete competition for the gold medal, I don't remember the extent of the injury. I remember Nancy Kerrigan was screaming and she was holding, like there was a video of it, right? Yeah, yeah. Which is crazy.

But she came back. There's a video. Was there a video of the guy doing it? I don't think so. I think they just got this aftermath part where she's screaming. She ended up competing in those Olympics, I think, too. That is so crazy that someone could do that. Just run up to this girl and smash her with a tire iron.

Is that what it was? Yeah, I was trying to find out. I think so. Fuck, that is so crazy. That's so crazy that someone could do that because of an ice skating competition. That instead of competing and trying to win and trying to be the best, you hire someone to smash. It says collapsible baton. Oh, so it was one of those batons that they used for that.

Her ex-husband. Her ex-husband did it? Oh, it was the ex. Shane Stant had been hired by Jeff Goulier. Yeah, that's what Michael said. That's crazy. She was never convicted of being associated with it at all. It was just indirectly.

Well, how could you know what words were said, right? Yeah, that's right. But crazy that someone would do that for an ice skating competition. You smash some girl's leg. Wasn't there a Texas cheerleader mom that attacked the other mom's daughter who was competing with her daughter for the cheerleader? There was something a few years ago. Maybe even killed her or just attacked her brutally

or something like that. Yeah, Texas cheerleader murdering mom. Yeah, that's it. Oh, my God. It's like a Lifetime movie story kind of thing. Oh, but it's real? It's based on real? Yeah, for sure, yeah.

They add a few things to those based on reals. I was devastated when I found out the Revenant wasn't real. Oh, really? Oh, my God. Not only was it not real, apparently they don't even say it's real, but everybody says it's real. Because I'd heard the story before from my friend Steve Rinella,

who was like a, he's really kind of a historian on the Wild West, got some great stories about the conflicts between Native Americans and settlers. He knows all about the pioneers and the mountain men. He said that that guy, first of all, the guy that Leonardo DiCaprio played, never had a son. That was one of the main motivations of him going after this guy. The guy killed his son. Didn't have a son. The only thing that was true was he got attacked by a bear, and they left him to dead, and he survived.

But he didn't kill anybody. He was killing people and surviving, and the guy never killed anybody. There really were trappers, and there really were Native Americans, and there really were bears. Yes, all those things existed. But it's so funny when you have a movie like that, and you put words in people's mouths, and you just decide what they could have said that sounded cool.

You shouldn't be allowed to do that. Based on on means we're gonna make some shit up right like you could kevin costner you could do dances with wolves because you got a fake character but you know when you did wyatt erp you made a bunch of shit up right you decided what wyatt erp said how do you know we don't have a recording no it. Historical recreations like that are very strange. All right, sir. Did we hit the wall, Michael Shermer? Yeah, it's three hours and 20 minutes now, somewhere around. I know that's not the record, but...

Listen, I know your bladder is ready to give out. Well, there is that. There's that. Well, thank you, man. Listen, let everybody know where they can get a hold of you, where they can read your work, where they could... Skeptic.com or MichaelShermer.com is the best place. You're the first guy I've ever tapped out like that, too. You're like, that's it?

Oh, no. Really? We're done. Oh, no. We're done talking. I can't do it anymore. I appreciate it. I was ready to wrap it up, too.

I got a dinner to go to. I understand. So thank you very much. It's always an awesome time talking to you. You're the best. You're the best conversationalist. No, you're the best. I really do appreciate it. And anytime you want to do it. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, always an awesome time talking to you. You're the best conversationalist. No, you're the best. I really do appreciate it.

And anytime you want to do it. Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks, everybody. See you tomorrow. Bye. Dan Carlin's going to be on tomorrow. Woo!

Oh, wow. Really? Oh, cool. Oh, cool. Oh, cool.