The Jordan Harbinger Show - 745: Dave Farina | Debunking Junk Science Myths

Episode Date: November 1, 2022

Dave Farina (@daveexplains) is on a mission to make science make sense for everyone — whether it's through his Professor Dave Explains YouTube channel, his Professor Dave Debates podcast, or his new book, Is This Wi-Fi Organic?: A Guide to Spotting Misleading Science Online (Science Myths Debunked). What We Discuss with Dave Farina: How the Internet went from a promising reservoir of unlimited knowledge for all to an insidious superspreader of disinformation. Why it's easier than ever for people to simply deny inconvenient facts that don't support their worldview. How NASA went from the revered public institution that miraculously landed human beings on the moon to the scapegoat for conspiracy theorists who insist the Earth is flat. Why synthetic doesn't always equate with bad, and natural doesn't automatically mean good. Who profits from the proliferation of fake science, and what can we do to separate the wheat from the chaff when we're bombarded with copious amounts of fact and fiction? And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/745 Sign up for Six-Minute Networking -- our free networking and relationship development mini course -- at jordanharbinger.com/course! Miss our conversation with true crime exoneree Amanda Knox? Catch up with episode 386: Amanda Knox | The Truth About True Crime here! Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. Chemophobia is rampant, and so this idea of chemists, you know, the mean evil scientists in the lab code and they're tinkering and making a Frankenstein's monster of a molecule that's evil and it's going to hurt you is shockingly prevalent. And so I think that's why synthetic has come to have a negative connotation where it should have a neutral connotation. The most potent toxins known to man are of natural origin. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets and skills, the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional legendary Hollywood director, National Security Advisor, former jihadi,

or gold smuggler. And each episode turns our guest's wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs is a place to begin. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that will help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion and influence, crime and cults, abnormal psychology, and more. Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Today on the show, science communicator and YouTuber Dave Farina, we're engaging in one of my favorite vices,

namely exposing pseudoscience and cognitive bias and just a lot of BS from a lot of different places on the internet and in science and otherwise, if you've been listening to the show for a while, you'll see that this episode is very much in the vein of getting past our own traps in thinking, mistakes we make when it comes to beliefs, especially with respect to scientific beliefs, and ruthlessly shredding ignorance. We'll explore dichotomies like synthetic versus natural, the misplaced fear of so-called chemicals and toxins, as well as exposing other non-scientific mumbo-jumbo that a lot of charlatans might use to sell you a bill of goods under the guise of medicine or of science. This is a fun and relaxed conversation that I think you'll

enjoy. Here we go with Dave Farina. Science used to be this beacon, and still is this beacon to all, of future progress and promise, right? When I was a kid, we used to watch the Jetsons and I don't even know. Star Trek, I guess, was a thing. I wasn't much of a Trekkie. But basically, when we watch sci-fi, most of it was utopian. I guess that's changed now, the cyberpunk stuff. But then it seems like that happened with political shenanigans. There's other nonsense where we are politicizing science and we're doing environmental damage. And it's just sort of, would you agree at disillusions us? It makes us jaded when it comes to science, which is actually the opposite of what we need right now. Yeah, it's true. Science used to be Tomorrowland at Disneyland.

Yeah. And now it's sort of this hodgepodge. I mean, I think we definitely retain some optimism, but it's mixed in there with all the other things, partially due to legitimate sentiment regarding corporate behavior and, you know, the environmental movement and things like that. And couple with the fact that large industries do unethical things. But no, there is this anti-establishment sentiment that leads to blanket science denial, which is enormously problematic and seems to be growing. When I was a kid, we agreed largely on lots of things and we were able to teach science or learn science, and look, maybe different perspectives are great, but I think a lot of the different perspectives we have now, especially when it comes to science, are, I mean, I know that some of

these different perspectives are actually funded by industries that want us to have a different perspective that is not necessarily representative of where most slash almost all scientists think we're going, especially once you disclose all the funding that all the scientists get, you're like, wait a minute, it's like 99 to 1 in a lot of these areas. And that scares me a little, because it mirrors what happened with the internet, right? The internet, when I was a kid, when I was 13, there was no web you could click on anything. Netscape was sort of a text-based navigator.

It was a giant library. Libraries had the internet. There was a lot of chat rooms and stuff like that if you knew where to find. Most of it was for librarians or four people in libraries, and it was a repository of truth and knowledge. Back when it was just for nerds. Yeah, when it was just for nerds.

And look, I don't miss those days. I think things are definitely better now with the, internet. Don't get me wrong. I'm not like, oh, the days when you couldn't use the mouse to navigate. That's not what I'm talking about. But now, again, you wrote those in your book. It's like a fun house mirror or a magic mirror that just confirms what we wanted to find when we went looking. And that's so disappointing because, like I said, when I was a kid, I was blown away by this. I knew it was going to be something we used every day. I still make fun of my dad because I told him about Yahoo when that first or that came. He's like, everybody can go to the library. No one's

going to use this. You know, it was just the promise of unlimited knowledge that was so incredible, and now we have unlimited, absolute nonsense that you can find to support the most ridiculous idiotic beliefs ever. And that's why we see, like, flat earth now. And it's like, come on. We move past this in 1530 or whatever. Yeah, the point is just you can find every single narrative that there is, right? Is this company ethical? You can find yes, you can find no. Is this product safe? You can find yes, you can find no. You go on Yelp. Is this restaurant good? A bunch of five-star reviews, a bunch of one-star reviews, right? Where are they coming from? Maybe the good reviews are legitimate, maybe it's the restaurant themselves, you know, pumping it up. Are the ones

legitimate, or is it some other restaurant trying to, you know, ruin their reputation? It's just whatever you want to find on the internet, it's there. All the truth and all the lies. So it's a big problem. That's why we're in the post-truth era. It's no longer the case that there's this, you know, small set of sources where we go for information and we trust the validity of information, whether it's the news prior to the 1980s or, you know, Encyclopedia Britannica or whatever it is, where we go, okay, this is where the facts are. I can trust these facts. The internet's not like that anymore. So you need to be equipped with some ability, some set of skills to be able to discern the validity of information, particularly scientific, also political, but I don't

have much of a political background, but obviously we all know the problems in that sphere. Just the rampant lies all over the place. So it's very, very hard to navigate. And I think It's the biggest problem facing mankind, personally. It sounds hyperbolic, but I do tend to agree, because the internet can confirm your conclusions, support your own bias, provides ammo to take down sources that come to alternative conclusions, even if those are the correct ones. I don't want to pick anything controversial that's actually controversial, so I'll pick on flat earth because, look, I still get emails about flat earth and how I'm wrong and how everyone

else is wrong, and I'm a pilot and the earth isn't curved and stuff like this. And it's just... No, you are not a pilot. Yeah, I'm like, I don't know about that. that. I mean, look, I just don't know how a pilot could possibly come to that conclusion because you can't navigate with a plane if you believe the Earth is flat, but I digress. Yeah, no, there is no such thing as the pilot that thinks the Earth is flat, but they're all liars. I have a lot of experience with these people. Yeah, it's like, why say that when that's

just not true? And then it makes you think, like, oh, I'm actually talking to somebody who's full-on delusional, not just trying to good faith argue a different point. And it does land us in the post-truth era, like you mentioned, we are disconsored. We're discarding science and we're discarding experts for charlatans, influencers. And normally I'd say, you know what, if you're dumb enough to believe, and I'll get to some of these guys later in the show, this guy who says you can heal your spinal injury with your mind, you know, that's tragic, but also like stupid is as stupid does. But now it starts to fool intelligent people because we don't always know who to trust. And of course, with certain ailments, medically speaking, especially, we're just desperate. It reminds me the Andy Kaufman biopic where he goes to, like, Cambodia to have his cancer pulled out of his body by the witch doctor, you know, and he sees the guy palming the chicken, and he just starts laughing.

I love that movie, by the way. Yeah, he starts laughing because he, like, had to fly to the middle of nowhere, and he's like, this was a freaking scam the whole time. Yeah. And he just starts laughing while he's on the bed. The final joke was on him. The final joke was on him, yeah, and it's really tragic. The other problem here is that when disinformation or misinformation is now shared by people we trust on social media, because they're also having the same problem knowing who and what to trust, that bad info slips through our usual

filters, which makes it that much more insidious and dangerous. Yeah, and then that's also coupled with the problem that because there is so much false information on the internet, it's very easy to just baselessly claim that legitimate information is false. Because all the time we're going, no, that's fake, that's fake, here's something real, no, that's fake. We're just so used to disregarding information. I'll explain basic science to flat earthers and they'll go, oh, no, that's fake. Well, what do you mean no, no, that's fake? It's demonstrably true. I can demonstrate for you how true it is. But we're just in this place epistemologically, I suppose, where we can just say no to any information that is inconvenient to the worldview that we've decided to ascribe to. So that's

hugely problematic because it makes it really hard to change anyone's mind because they'll just go, nope, I don't like that. I don't like that story. I can't remember who this was. It wasn't Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Bill Nye or one of those guys, but it was somebody in that same sort of science influence or a thing. And they went to a flat earth convention or a talk. And one of the guys was like, well, what about gravity? And the guy in front of him turns around and goes, don't get me started about gravity. And it's like, you're sitting in a chair, man. You're sitting in a chair that is on the ground. Can you tell us briefly why, what these people say about gravity? Because I'm thinking, this is a really tall order to explain that gravity does not exist.

It really is. So most of them say density. So denser things go down, right, displace. So the obvious question is, why down, right? If I'm holding an object, the air above it is also less dense. Why does it not go up? It's almost like there's this incredible thing pulling everything down towards the earth. What would that be? That's called gravity.

You know, they're not receptive to even the most basic logic that a small child would understand. But yeah, so the denial of gravity, the denial of everything. I mean, the denial, you know, it comes, see, it has to have an anti-estimate. establishment bite to it. It has to be a conspiracy. So they need an institution. So for them, it's NASA and governments and things like that, which is insane because NASA was formed in the 1950s and we've known the Earth as a sphere since like 400 BCE. So it's like, it's just insane to bring that up. All the pictures are fake. All the videos are fake. I mean, they're not, obviously. But also, who cares? We don't need them. We've known since long, long ago, way before there

were such things as photographs. And then just the lies compound, right? guy says, no, we've always known it's flat. We only started teaching it was a globe in the 1960s. No, what are you talking about? There's globes that are thousands of years old. My man, my man, you're just lying. But, yeah, this is the bottom of the barrel. I was saying, oh, we knew the Earth is around since 1530.

It's actually more like, would you say 400 BC? So it's literally been like 2,500 years at this point. No, the 1500s is heliocentrism. That's when we figured out that the sun is the center of the solar system, which, is hard. It's hard to do. This is what I like to say when I'm in other podcasts that I want to talk about Flat Earth. I feel very confident that I could have figured out the Earth's sphere by myself with only just naked eye observations and basic logic. Bring me back to 400 BCE. I could

have figured that out. I definitely couldn't have figured out heliocentrism. That involves really subtle, really sophisticated calculations, observations with telescopes that were, you know, powerful or at least the most powerful at that time. That was very hard to figure out. A lot of math, very abstract. But that the Earth is the sphere, observe the sunrise and sunset, observe the rotation of the celestial sphere.

You know, just very basic observations of the night sky is what shows us that the Earth is this sphere. So these are the kinds of talking points I use in my flat earth debunks that just drive them wild. It's got to be exhausting. And you're right, it's an institutional resistance.

Nobody says, hey man, and we're just all mistaken here. It's always, this is a cover-up, everything is fake. Look at this thing in the rock and the moon landing, so it shows that it's a prop and that's fake. And it's like, you don't think when they were setting up the shot, they noticed this rock had a number etched into it and this is supposed to fool the entire planet.

They didn't check the shot. Moon landing conspiracy, as dumb as it is, just has nothing to do with shape of the Earth. Even if the moon landing were faked, the Earth would still be a sphere, right? We've known this for thousands of years. But, again, they need it to have this conspiratorial tone to it. Now, what cover up? Who is manipulating my naked eye observations of the sky that do not depend

on anything but my own eyeballs? This is why Flat Earth is the bottom of the barrel, because I'm sure later we're going to get into anti-vax and like all kinds of other things where it's also wrong, but it's much more narrow. We're talking about the behavior of a particular industry, you know, unethical or something or other, where it's like, okay, this group of people is doing this thing, And that's like, I can understand how people can fall for propaganda of that nature. But this one we're talking about with Flat Earth, it's just so insane here, disregarding basic observations. The fact that Russia, China, and the U.S. all seem to agree that the Earth is round. I mean, that's a great, these conspiracies, those NASA guys know how to build relations.

We should follow them for everything, right? If they're able to get all of these districts, we can get the Ayatollah Khomeini to agree the Earth is round. It's like, man, these guys are. Amazing. Yeah. Vladimir Putin will stake money on the Earth being around. Ronald Reagan, RIP, still will believe that the Earth is round. They're all puppets.

They're all puppets installed by the lizard people. I don't know. Whatever. Yeah. Well, the Lizard people thing is another thing where I thought, I was talking to Anderson Cooper a while ago. And I was like, do you, have you seen the conspiracy that you are actually a lizard person along with, who else?

Hillary Clinton and basically everybody who's been in power anywhere, or is the CEO of a big company or a world nation leader is actually a reptile and they travel underground. And I hear people talk about this and then talk about how COVID was caused by 5G towers and things like that. And I'm just thinking, this is like mental illness, but people who don't have a diagnosable mental illness seem to be falling for it. This is a different show that I plan on doing, by the way. But it's just such a weird thing to see. It's like a mass psychosis. And I guess probably that's a different show for a different expert here. It just didn't make sense that people who are, you know, maybe just otherwise normal, started to believe absolutely bad shit crazy theories or at least entertain them.

And so it makes sense it has to do with people who think their life is out of control, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. Well, there's so many gradations of it, right? There's so many doors into the conspiratorial thought where you can then go down the rabbit hole. So with COVID or something, you've got so many people saying viruses aren't real. So this is insane. It's insane to claim that viruses aren't real because you have the whole field of virology where we do nothing but study viruses. We know what they are. We sequence their genomes. We use them in medical technology. So that's insane. But then you go a little higher up. Okay, COVID was engineered and then disseminated deliberately as a bio weapon to destabilize the global economy. All right. Also, quite a big pill to swallow, but objectively less insane than viruses aren't real. Right. So, That's a door in, and then you can travel downwards from there because, you know, platforms like YouTube have had to make adjustments to their algorithm because they have come to

understand how much they have been facilitating this destruction of our sociological fabric by allowing people to travel down these rabbit holes and, you know, made some adjustments. I think that was the right thing to do. Of course, everyone screams censorship, you know, but I think that's absurd because they don't actually delete any content. But we're having to reckon with the fact that the internet is doing this to us. It's very much a double-edged sword. It's giving us all the information.

And so it's very hard to, like, you know, censor things politically. Like if there's a country that's, you know, the government is behaving unethically to the people, they're going to record their videos and look at what's happening. And then it's on Twitter and then the whole world knows. So that's great. But then also we have all of these, you know, lies and charlatans and this stuff propagates like wildfire, and it's an enormous problem. We can't just even decide if a product is safe to use, right?

We can't look online because both yes and no are there for us to find. And you kind of mentioned that earlier. I want to talk about how to comprehend the explanations given whether they track with reality, because this is difficult to do. And I would love to get some guidelines to keep in mind, maybe go over some of the common things that trick us when we're researching something. And I think a good place to start is the word synthetic, why it doesn't mean bad, and why natural doesn't necessarily mean good, because these are used in marketing all the time.

And in fact, I have also been quite fooled by, well, this is synthetic, so you don't want to use that. It's not as good as the natural one, which turns out is just, yeah, bullshit. Yeah, it's just marketing. Natural means made through natural processes without human intervention, and synthetic means made by humans or human-built machines, but we can also synthesize molecules. And that's it. those terms aren't inherent to a particular substance. It's just circumstantial. Like water, obviously is a natural product, but we could also synthesize water, right? We could take hydrogen

and oxygen with a spark and make water, and that would be synthetic water, right? You could call it that. It's just talking about a process by which a molecule came to be, but the properties of a molecule have nothing to do with how it came to be, right? Nature builds molecules, we build molecules, it doesn't matter. Molecule is just a bunch of atoms put together. And then the properties of a molecule you'll have to do with its composition and its shape. It's going to interact with biological systems in a particular way. But yeah, the pathway to it coming to exist is just completely irrelevant. Chemophobia is rampant. And so this idea of chemists, you know, the mean evil scientists in the lab code and they're tinkering and making a Frankenstein's monster of a molecule that's evil and it's

going to hurt you is shockingly prevalent. And so I think that's why synthetic has come to have a negative connotation where it should have a neutral connotation. The most potent toxins known to man are of natural origin. You know, nature makes really nasty stuff as well. So, yeah. Yeah, what are some natural, I think it'd be good to give some examples because when I think toxic now, of course, the first thing that comes to mind is fentanyl, which is not something that is made by nature. But I don't know, cyanide seems pretty toxic. I've heard of that before. That's in what apple seeds? Yeah, I mean, it's ubiquitous. It's just a very small molecule. Yeah, I mean, the most Potent ones are these compounds that are in frogs and snakes.

Oh, sure. Or the botulinum toxin and clostridium bocholinum, that is actually the number one most toxic that we know. You know, a gram of it will kill a million people, something like that. You know, it's obviously completely natural. I was going to say, isn't that Botox? Obviously, they water that dish down. It's obviously unbelievably, unbelievably minimal amount, but it's, you know, it's killing cells. But we have a romantic view of nature.

It's a sunny meadow and the sun and it's all, you know, pretty flowers and things like that. But nature is pestilence and natural disaster and destruction and death, right? It's a dichotomy. It's all those things. And so, you know, nature can be pretty rough to us. We have to, unfortunately, know enough about chemistry to be able to examine any molecule on a case-by-case basis and go, okay, these are the properties of this compound. This is what it does. It doesn't matter if I found it in nature.

It doesn't matter if it has. has never existed in nature and is purely synthetic. We invented it ourselves, or it is a natural product, but we made it ourselves. So it's a synthetic version of a natural compound. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter at all. You have to look case by case, see what that molecule does, how it interacts with biological systems, which changes depending on the species, by the way, right? Something that is harmful to us may not be harmful to bacteria or vice versa. I'm trying to think of something that we make synthetic that is slightly different than the natural version, but the molecules, of course, are the active ingredient of the same.

Right. So this is where I think that the negative connotation comes from things like this, where we have like synthetic fabrics or something like that that might be imitations of some, you know, cotton wool, whatever, stuff like that. But those are, they may be mimicking a particular substance, but they're not the same on the molecular level, right? When we make a synthetic molecule, there's some vitamin or, you know, whatever it is, and we're synthesizing it. We're making that molecule. It's not a different substance. So if it's those atoms arranged in that way, it's that molecule. It doesn't mean. matter of nature. Because nature also has to build the molecule. Nature also has biosynthetic pathways where it takes tiny molecules and builds them, whether it's inside an organism with enzymes or enzymes are little machines and they will build molecules. And then we also can build molecules in the lab in a little flask and we can put whatever we want in there and do stuff. But if it's that structure, it's that structure. There cannot be any difference in the properties of the molecule. So how the molecule actually comes to be is irrelevant, basically. Exactly. Correct. What is that thing that they found, like Japanese moss they discover and it's like, oh, something, something hydroxychlorically comes from this. Well, sure. I mean, it's becoming less so. But at one point in the latter half of the 20th century was the primary mode of drug discovery and development is we would find interesting natural products with interesting properties. So you scuba dive down to the bottom of the whatever and you find a sponge and you and you extract something and you take it back to the lab. Okay, we got these molecules. Wow, here's a weird molecule. And it does.

It has these properties that could be medicinal, potentially. All right, well, that's great, but we want to make medicine with it. We can't be scuba diving to look for all these sponges. Let's build this molecule ourselves. So then there's the challenge of you to come up with a synthetic pathway. From very cheap, readily available starting materials, you build that molecule. And when you get that molecule, you have that molecule, right? So we forego the natural process, whatever is going on in the sponge to make that molecule

or in the tree in the rainforest or whatever it is, any other place on Earth. And we find a synthetic pathway to make that ourselves. And we can mass produce it, which means we can use it as medicine. We can, you know, disseminate it around the world. Sometimes that's cheap enough for it to be economically viable. Sometimes it's not very cheap. The compound is too complex structurally. I remember learning about, in the beginning of the pandemic,

they were talking about horseshoe crabs and that there's something in that we need for vaccines. And I was like, how on earth are we still digging up horseshoe crabs out of the ocean, extracting or processing them, hopefully not killing them, I don't know, to get something for a vaccine. How are we not making that in a giant vet in Idaho somewhere? Well, hopefully we are. Yeah, hopefully now. That's the incredible thing about the 21st centuries. We're coming up with all these alternate strategies whereby synthesis and drug development, the way it has been done in the 20th century, it may not be the case anymore. We're figuring out how to do things like

synthetic biology, where we genetically engineer a particular microorganism and sort of install a suite of enzymes in it where we can then feed it some super cheap starting material and it builds the molecule for us. Wow. Right. We can give it the enzymes and you just put it. It's like brewing beer. Obviously, it's very expensive and very difficult to figure out which enzymes and figure out

how to make it do the thing. But once it's doing it, you just put in the raw material and it makes your product for you. It's astounding. That is astounding. It's crazy to think there's some bacteria in a giant vat somewhere with one of those little stirring things, just like a brewery, and you're dumping in, I don't know, sugar and barley and some other stuff, and it's spitting out. This incredible life-saving drug potentially, right? Or honestly, usually, you know, plastics

and other materials. It's utilized in material science a lot, but we can do anything with it. We can install whatever enzymes we want to make it build whatever we want. It's incredible. I was talking about microplastics a long time ago with a friend of mine, not even on the show, And I was like, can we build bacteria that eat the plastic that's floating around in the oceans and lakes and then make it safe enough that we can release it and it ends up just eating the plastic and then it eventually just dies when it runs out of plastic to eat after reproducing a bunch or doesn't, you know, whatever it is. Then I thought we were trying to think of all the problems associated with that and we realized anything that's plastic that's in the ocean, you know, a buoy, a part of a dock, some floaty thing is just, it's only going to last a few months or a year because it's going to get eaten a lot. It's going to get eaten by these living organisms. eventually, but I guess we'll just make something that they can't eat. I don't know. Hopefully it can be localized.

I mean, these are all practical problems. But I mean, this goes back to what you're saying about, you know, the misinformation being the biggest problem, because you can even take something like climate change, which I think that would be probably the number one answer on family feud. What is the biggest problem facing mankind, right? It would be 87, say, climate change. That obviously is an enormous problem. But there are solutions.

And these are already being kicked around in scientific circles like, you know, genetically engineering microorganisms. that suck up CO2 at a thousand times, you know, 100,000 times the rate or whatever it is, and then just poops them out little pellets down to the bottom of the ocean. So we have ways of reducing the carbon content of the atmosphere. But the barriers to implementation are funding, public sentiment, all, you know, their political problems. And they're political problems because, largely because the public is uninformed or unmotivated to try to elicit the change from the powers that be. So that's why it's the biggest problem, because that problem is the

barrier to all the other problems getting solved, in my view. Let's talk about toxins. We kind of mentioned this before. We hear about toxins all the time, but I don't really know what they are. And I think it was Dr. Drew and I mentioned this on his show. What is toxic? Is it a poison? And he's just like, there's no such thing as toxins. I mean, there are toxic substances. But when people say toxins, they can never tell us what the thing is that's toxic. Yeah. Well, it has a definition. So this is the problem is people use toxic and toxin interchangeably. But toxin means a poisonous substance that is generated by a biological organism. So when people use toxin to mean like a synthetic scientists made it thing, so when I was talking

about the poisonous compounds made by snakes and frogs, things like that, those are toxins. Bacteria produce toxins. They're necessarily natural, naturally occurring compounds. And then they have some deleterious effect in other biological systems. So the concept of something being toxic or poisonous, this is also widely misunderstood. I think people have these categories in their minds of these ones are safe and then these ones are bad and nasty, which is not really true, right, because any compound can be harmful in a high enough dosage, right? There's something called the LD50. So that's an amount that would kill 50% of a test population. And every single compound has an LD50, even things that we need to survive. Yeah. So like water, you need,

need water to live, everybody knows that, there's an amount of water you can drink that will kill you, right? And that's not drowning. I'm saying water intoxication, it disrupts brain function and you'll die. Oxygen, if you breathe pure oxygen for a few hours, it's very harmful. You can die. Even stuff that we need to live can kill us if you have too much of it. So now, obviously, there are things that are very, very poisonous and only a tiny little bit will kill you. So that's a much higher toxicity. And we need to identify those compounds. Many of them are natural. Of course, we can. synthesize bad things too. But you have to examine each on a case-by-case basis, see what is happening in the body. In the case of lead, it's interacting with hemoglobin in such a way that that is unable

to transport oxygen. So that will kill you. That's very bad. But there's always a reason, right? A molecule is not inherently poisonous. It's poisonous in the context of how it interacts with your body. What enzymes or what receptors does it interact with such that it disrupts some biological function? And that, again, may change from one organism to another, right? Antibiotics kill bacteria because it disrupts cell wall formation, but our cells don't have cell walls. So they don't hurt us. It kills bacteria, not us.

It depends entirely on the structure of an organism. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Dave Farina. We'll be right but back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these amazing thinkers and authors and creators every single week, it is because of my network. and I'm teaching you how to build your own network for business, for pleasure, whatever it may be for free, over at Jordanharbinger.com slash course.

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subscribe and contribute to this course. So come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now, back to Dave Verena. I hadn't really thought about the idea that we take things that are toxic to other things inside our body deliberately, but yet that's what it is. I mean, that's what medication, or at least antibiotics actually are. Certainly, yeah.

Marketers use the term toxins. I'm thinking of when they try to sell you like activated charcoal water. Oh, you're not feeling so good. Take this and it will absorb toxins or take this kind of vitamin that I sell and it will gather toxins out of your blood and then you can excrete them because it's something, something binds to the toxins. And it's like, well, what's the toxic thing that it's binding to? And they can never really answer that question. Any toxin, right? By what mechanism? Right. And it's like, well, wait, if toxins are different molecules, then how does this one molecule bind to only toxic things and

then get rid of them? And why doesn't it bind to, I don't know, red blood cells that I kind of need to live or white blood cells for that matter or other molecules in my body? Why doesn't it bind to those? And the answer is it doesn't it's freaking water that's got food coloring in it or something and then I pee it out but it's seven dollars if only everyone could apply this level of scrutiny that you just have that is a very healthy thought process that you just applied there yeah that's what I'm rooting for everybody to be able to do that I still had to ask Dr. Drew about this because I was like what am I missing and he's like nothing it's a bunch of bullshit you know like it's a bunch of nonsense it is it's it's marketing see chemophobia has become so prevalent it's just a really easy way in like any other anti-establishment

narrative, right? There's the nasty stuff trying to harm you, and this is the nice, clean, pure nature stuff that is going to be good for you. It's just such an alluring narrative. It's so easy to pedal. We want it to be true so bad. We want the loving nature mother to take care of us. It's just not the case, right? It's just, there's bad and good stuff everywhere. It has nothing to do with nature, synthetic, anything like that. In my conversation recently with Neil deGrasse Tyson, we talked about the LD50 concept as well. I thought that was fascinating, that there's an amount of everything that will kill you if you ingest it, which, of course, I'd never thought about that either. And we talked about Ben and Jerry's ice cream, having some GMO corn syrup, which had like

some tiny amount of, I can't remember what it was, but it's like glyphosate, something in Roundup. Yeah. And it turns out that by the time you ate, you have to eat like 400 million pines or something of Ben and Jerry's flavor that has the GMO corn syrup in it. But it would have killed you after eating like 37 pints at once instead of the $4 million or $40 million or whatever. No, you would die from just sugar. Just sugar. Some other substance in there.

Immediately after filling your stomach, if you even could with that amount of Ben and Jerry's, meanwhile, you couldn't in your lifetime eat enough Ben and Jerry's of that flavor to die from the glyphosate or glyphosate molecule that you're absorbing. It's physically impossible. This concept of concentration is lost on the vast majority. of people. This is what happens with anti-vaccine activists as well. So they'll identify some component of a vaccine like an adjuvant that contains aluminum. And they go, aluminum is toxic. This is terrible. This is in the vaccine. It's like you have thousands of times more aluminum circulating

in your bloodstream currently than is in this. It's such an unbelievably minuscule amount. So it's the other side of this of the same coin. Even the things we need to live can kill you if you have enough of them. Similarly, the things that are the most toxic in unbelievably tiny amounts are not harmful. There's that LD50. If you're well below the LD50, it's not going to be harmful. And even these very toxic things are in your body right now. There was a famous study in like, I forget it was like the 80s or 90s looking at the compounds that are present in just like apples and pears and things like that. And like the amount of formaldehyde in an apple is just so much more than people had thought. It's still not harmful.

But it's a funny thing to compare to when people look at a vaccine or a drug or something, whatever it is, and try to look at it, you know, identify an ingredient and go, this is in there. That's going to kill you. Look at an apple. It's way more, you know, of any one of these harmful things, you know. We have stuff like that in our bloodstream at all times. It's there. I didn't realize we had aluminum in our bloodstream, but I guess it makes sense. I mean, you can't not. It's such a natural. I heard it's in a bunch of, what was this thing? We did a skeptical Sunday about chemtrails. and people say, oh, they're spraying they, the ubiquitous they, government, whatever, is spraying us with chemicals, and the crazies proved it by taking a sample of some lake after they saw this. And it was like, there's a lot of aluminum in this lake bed. And it turns out that any dirt sample, pretty much anywhere on Earth, is going to be absolutely loaded to the gills.

It's one of the most abundant elements in the crust. Its aluminum is everywhere in Earth's crust. So if you're ingesting any amount of dirt in anything, you're ingesting aluminum just because it's freaking everywhere. Well, that's the other thing that is lost on a lot of people is that aluminum-based minerals or, you know, another one with vaccines was a thimerosol, which has a mercury atom in it. People don't seem to understand that compounds with an atom of a particular element present. It just has nothing to do with that element in elemental form. So people would think that thimerosol has a mercury atom in it.

therefore it behaves like elemental mercury, which is very toxic, right? In the thermometers, we don't want to touch it, which is not the case. The elements in a compound don't inform the properties of the compound in the same way that those elements behave, right? You have sodium metal is highly corrosive and reacts, you know, explosively with water, and chlorine gas was, you know, mustard gas in World War I, two highly toxic elements in their elemental form. You put them together, sodium chloride, table salt, yum yum powder. Sodium chloride has sodium in it, it has chlorine in it, therefore it's bad. You know, that's not how chemistry works.

I suppose also kidneys sweating your liver, they clean toxins out. You don't have to buy the thing from the fancy supermarket in Los Angeles. No. That's $19 to do that same thing. Anything that refers to detox is almost invariably bullshit. Yeah, if you have kidneys in the liver, that's what those organs are for. You mentioned the word chemophobia. So chemical is almost like another word for toxins, where we just abuse by we, I mean marketers

online especially. They abuse the word chemical to make us scared because chemicals, when I think chemical, I'm thinking like sulfuric acid or some chemical, something up, WD40 that I'm spraying on the wheels of my bicycle. I'm not thinking of the chemicals that I eat all the time because literally everything is a chemical. Not literally everything, but everything, you know, like light is not a chemical. neutrinos are not chemicals, but anything made of the chemical elements on the periodic table, if it's made of those things, it's a chemical. So water's a chemical, all your food is all chemicals,

oxygen's a chemical. Like anything that we interact with on a daily basis, the things that we touch, they're all chemicals. Is there anything that I can eat that is not a chemical? Probably not, right? No. Okay. There are particles of matter that are not chemicals, because chemicals are made of atoms. So if it's non-atomic matter, there are other kinds of particles, but those are not things that we interact with on a daily basis, unless you're a particle physicist. Yeah, it's been a while since I've had a black hole for lunch or dark matter or whatever. A friend of mine will say, and I mean internet acquaintance here, but whatever, if you can't pronounce it, don't eat it. But there are so many things that sound horrible that are very common and harmless and plenty of things that I can pronounce

easily that I definitely would not eat. Like cyanide. I can say that. My kid can say that he's three. It's just not that hard. I don't want that for breakfast, at least not in large amounts. Dosage is everything, as you mentioned before. But vitamins and things like that are very hard to pronounce. I still, vitamin C is, is it absorbic or abscorbic acid? I still don't know which one it is. A scorbic. A scorbic. So I guess I should never eat that again and die like from scurvy. You will die. That's correct. Yeah. That's the thing. I mean, obviously it's a rubbish mantra. it's completely meaningless and not good advice. You, as you said, you will die.

But the other problem is that there are different kinds of vernacular, right? There's the language of the chemist, right? We have the IUPAC nomenclature of compounds, right, where we very rigorously name it. But then we give things common names, right? We have common names, like the vitamins, right? Vitamins are nicknames. So vitamin C is the vitamin nickname for L escorbic acid. They are synonymous, right?

Chicago, Windy City. It doesn't matter, right? They mean the same thing. But then you'll get the, you know, you'll get these people that are like, no, no, vitamin C is not elisorbic acid. That's the shell of the vitamin C complex. I mean, they're just making things up. It's just complete fantasy. But it's very alluring. It's a very alluring narrative. Like, oh, no, the people in the lab, they're so arrogant thinking that they can match the power of nature. But, you know, nature, this is the real thing. No, ellisorbic acid, right? It interacts with the enzymes for collagen synthesis, That's why you get scurvy collagen is the most abundant protein in the body. So it's just, it's a big part of your body. So that's why if you can't synthesize collagen, you start to get all those lesions all over your body. Your body can't make more body at a fast enough rate, you know what I mean? Because your cells are dying all the time.

So you need to be constantly producing collagen to build new cells and, you know, keep your body like your body is supposed to be. So, yeah, that must have been terrible hundreds of years ago being out at sea. And so you didn't have any citrus. you didn't have any, you know, vitamin C, and there are people going, what is happening to me? What is going on? Why is my body falling apart? And then they had to figure it out.

And, I mean, can you imagine how incredible it is that they figured it out? There's this compound in here and you're not getting it. And that's why that's happening to you. And now let's synthesize it in mass amounts so it can be distributed all around the world. So even if you don't have access to citrus fruits, you can still take a supplement and have plenty of vitamin C. How do you think they found that? Did someone just go, oh, we're transporting these lemons and I want to put one in my tea every day? And that that guy didn't get scared.

How do you figure that? Yeah, at that stage of chemistry, that was very much pre-modern chemistry. It probably was still some kind of observation like that or some kind of trial and error. Really, we had no understanding of molecules at that time, of course. So probably it might have been something like that. Yeah. Yeah, I'm so interested. I guess it might even predate somebody bothering to write about it and how they figured it out.

Maybe they just said, hey, drink this lemon water we keep on the ship because your sailors won't fall apart and bleed everywhere. And it's like, okay, whatever. But back then it was like, and also make sure that you are aligning the stone, the magic crystals on your ship deck in the right way, because one of those things is doing something. I'm not sure which one. And the latter didn't work. We ruled that out.

Right. If they were empirical about it and they isolated the variable. Right. I'm thinking, do they bother with that or do they just keep doing the crystals? Other marketers or activists will often malign something that's in, like a detergent, For example, my wife buys these detergents. I don't know. They're somehow more natural, and we're about to stop overpaying for those, I think, after this

episode. But one of the reasons was there's carcinogens in certain kinds of soap. And it's, well, carcinogens are bad. They cause cancer. But it sounds like dosage is everything, as you mentioned, as we've mentioned a couple times here. So maybe there's more formaldehyde in an apple that we are feeding my baby for breakfast than there is in all of this detergent that is maybe touching my clothing, which then

touches my skin, depending on what watches out? Which we don't ingest. Yeah. Right. Yeah. And so the lesson is we don't necessarily have to freak out about the apple either. These are principles of chemistry in the molecular world that are lost on the masses that creates this hysteria, which is then exploited to sell products. So we don't need to ban apples. No. And even though my son is drinking chemicals, including carcinogens. It's just not that big of a deal at that dose. We ingest carcinogens every single day, every minute of every day that's happening. It's not just, ingesting things, right? There is nuclear decay happening inside our bodies at all times, and we're accumulating mutations to the DNA at all times on all the different cells. You know,

it's just about a rate of mutation and where are the mutations and then do the repair mechanisms in the body catch them? And on a long enough timeline, every biological organism would get cancer. If you didn't die from something else, you'd eventually get cancer because you cannot maintain the fidelity of the genome indefinitely. You'll accumulate enough mutations that cancer will result. It's a given. And that's something for all of us to look forward to, I guess, then, at that level. Yeah. Yeah, great.

Excellent. If we make it a couple hundred years. Why is this misplaced fear problematic? Yeah, nobody's really thinking about banning apples. Maybe we're unnecessarily scared of detergent. It seems manageable. It's okay, we waste some money. But there's a bigger issue here.

Tell us what that is. Well, it's just exploitation. I mean, you can have anybody peddling any product, and it's just a continual division of the masses, right? We're just these people are saying, no, that's bad and that's unsafe, and these people are saying something else. We just want to, if we can, we want to try to be relatively aligned on our conception of reality and, you know, the way things work, the way our bodies work. Otherwise, there are those who will take advantage of us at every turn. That can snowball into, there can be political ramifications and certain lobbyists relying on misinformation to enact some control of the government or whatever it is. Yeah.

We look at the wrong things as causing harm. and we end up ignoring real harm or other things that cause real harm because let's say we're really up in arms about the GMO corn syrup in the Ben and Jerry's because of the, is it, again, glyphosate, is that what it is? That's right. But then those same people, they mean well, right? They're trying to keep people safe from this dangerous thing, but their time is being taken up yelling at Ben and Jerry's over there in Nantucket or wherever the hell.

And they're not focused as much on. Come on. We're the left wing ice cream guys. Like, go yell at somebody else. There's a lot bigger problems out there. Go yell at Breyers. Right, yeah. But they're keeping those same people from maybe focusing on, I don't know, the fact that

there's other serious problems that could use the attention of an activist that gives a crap. Absolutely, yeah. When you wrap your identity around a false cause, you're eliminating yourself from some other possible contribution that you could be making. The other thing is, especially on this show, I just realize it is a hundred times harder to unscare somebody than it is to scare them in the first place. And there's a lot of money in scaring people. And we see this in politics all the time.

We would be having this conversation on my yacht if I were like, and it's these guys on the other side of the aisle that are doing this, because my audience would be 10x or even larger than it is now because there's so much money in creating a tribe that is against another tribe. And I won't do that because it's bad for society. And I think it's talking about, speaking to cancer, The cancer we have now is people becoming tribalized like that and pointing at the other side is saying they're causing all the problems. And we see this and like the show about how civil wars start.

And it's like each side is pointing at the other side. And that's a huge problem. I'm trying to do the opposite, which is bringing people together. And fortunately it's working. You know, I'm able to make a living doing it. But man, I do look at some people who have worked half as long at this and they're 10 times as big or twice as big. And I go, how'd you do that? Oh, oh, you just picked an enemy.

You're a demigarch. And you picked a bunch of bullshit. and you're scaring everyone, it's very difficult to unscare people, which is kind of what I'm trying to do on the show. And it's really hard to do because people, even if you successfully unscare them in one area, they'll go, well, what about this totally equally not scary area that I'm now scared about? Thanks for solving that myth about chemicals.

I'm going to turn over here and be scared of this other thing now, because there's so many things on the menu. Yeah. Hopefully we don't get bogged down by this sense of futility. I'm in a similar boat. I don't know if I'm necessarily trying to unscare people. It's more just, I like to debunk things, right, which I guess is unscaring. You know, if you fell for this, you know, apocalypse peddling guy on the internet, right, I want to be there to go, no, this is lies.

This guy's lying. What do you talk? Come on, get rid of this. Hopefully that eventually, you know, permeates your thought process and you can start to be a little bit more skeptical. But, yeah, I don't think it is pointless. I understand, yeah, I'm with you in that there is a sense of futility sometimes. but yeah, we should remain driven and encourage others to do the same. It's not even futility.

It's just the easy road is to do that, but it's not fair. It's not beneficial to society to do that. So whatever, that's a different soapbox for a different episode. Alternative health people like to say, they like to say things like Western medicine treats the symptoms and not the cause. What are they talking about and how accurate do you think that statement is? It's largely inaccurate. I mean, it's not entirely inaccurate.

Obviously, we have palliative medicine. We have medicine that is to treat pain and to alleviate pain. I mean, that exists. The second part of what they are implying is that it's actually the alternative medicine that is treating the underlying cause, which is 100% fabrication. Alternative medicine is exclusively placebo-based. It is just, I believe this should be working, so I feel a little better. And there's no, it is not correlated whatsoever with the mechanism or whatever that product is.

So whether it's Reiki or homeopathy or whatever. whatever it is, it is 100% placebo. Whereas modern medicine, science-based medicine, again, yes, we have painkillers, but we also have these incredible drugs that circulate throughout the body or they're directed towards a very particular part of the body. They interact with some protein, whether it's a receptor or an enzyme that elicits a physiological effect that directly negates the cause of the condition, right? Whatever it is, if it's, you know, if you have asthma and it's, you know, widening the

bronchials, you know, things like this. this, we're manipulating the body on the, on the, on a very fundamental level. That's what a drug is, right? A drug is something that induces a non-nutritional physiological effect on the body. It changes something about what's going on in the body, except not nutrition. That's just a different category. But it's doing something to the body. It's causing the airways to open up or it's constricting the blood vessels or it's doing something that has a very measurable, tangible effect on what's going on in the body. These other things, alternative medicine, they don't do that. They do anything. It's just, I have magic powers or take this magic water and it's nothing. It's

placebo. And they initially only gathered some steam like homeopathy in particular because they came about in a time where they were alternatives to things that were specifically harmful, like skullsrapanning or things like this were really hurting, you know, bloodletting, things like that. Bloodlet. Yeah. Okay. Homeopathy is better than bloodletting. Would you do it a barber, by the way, right? Didn't barbers bloodlet back then? Like, I can't even imagine going to my bar. Yeah. Well, the reason that the barbapole is blue and red is they, you know what, I'm going to look this up. I'm almost certain that barbers, one of the services, was actually bloodletting. Barbers performed a wide variety of functions at that time. In addition to cutting hair, a barber might, oh my God, a barber might

pull teeth, perform surgery on minor wounds, amputate limbs, or administer leeches. Already prepared with the tools needed to perform venise section, barbers developed a thriving bloodletting practice from the year 1,100 to 1,500. Holy smoke. Thank God. These, they only cut hair now. Can you imagine being like, you know, I really do need a little high and tight, but also my back tooth is bothering me.

Get that thing that you use on everyone else that you don't even wash. And get this pesky leg out of here. Yeah. I've got a bad look. Oh, God. This is what blows my mind. Like, to live in the modern era where we have hospitals and we have surgery, like my wife had open heart surgery,

they stopped her heart and took it. out of her body and did stuff to it and put it back in and she didn't die. Amazing. I mean, are you kidding me that we can do this stuff? It's astounding. That is. And you want to go, you want to disregard, you know, science-based medicine and science-based medical practices for what?

You know what I mean? Rub a leaf on it? It's, I don't know. But that's the romance of it, yeah. I thought bloodletting was only from 1100 to 1,500 based on that little Google snippet. I think later than that. It turns out 3,000 years self-taught. physicians and barber surgeons, which is a thing, I guess, back then, held the practice of bloodletting

to high regard and depended on it as the panacea for all maladies. It was not until the 19th century that this practice was phased out. Can you imagine? That's not that long ago, man, and that was a long time they used bloodletting. Holy crap. Yeah, it was based on humorism, which honestly, when humorism came about, the idea of the humors, the bile and the blood and the flam, all this stuff, was actually a step forward in medicine, because prior to that, it was all of that. It was all about divination and spirits. So it was the first time that medicine took the stance that it's not spirits, it's actual physical mechanisms in the body that we can control. Now, obviously, humorism is wrong. It's not correct, but it was a step forward for the ancient

Greeks, right? But then, yeah, it stuck around a little too long. But what are you going to do? I mean, we didn't figure out, you know, people don't really seem to appreciate that. It was really around the middle of the 19th century, the turn of the 20th century, where we really actually started to figure out human anatomy and physiology and chemistry and all these things that are the way that we view the world now in an enlightened way. So a rejection of that progress is always something that really, really aggravates me. Yeah, it would seem to me that remedies that predate science or at least even remotely modern science also predate our understanding of disease and medicine. So if you're thinking that it is spirits causing something and that bloodletting lets out this negative spirits,

then you're just not taking any science into account. And that's significant when we talk about things like homeopathy. And I'd love to hear your takedown of homeopathy because, again, a thing I never understood that people swear by that my friend who's studying to be a doctor in Canada is taking a class on. I thought, how was there a whole class on this thing that's not real? It's astound. This is what money does. If people want to take that class or that program, they'll start offering it. With the humorism thing, though, it wasn't spirits, though. It was about manipulating the levels of the four humors. It was a physical mechanism. Right. No, I, but it doesn't matter. Anyway, yeah, homeopathy. I meant before that, I suppose. Yeah. But homeopathy is this idea that the thing

that is harmful is also going to cure you, but we got to dilute it, and we dilute it and dilute it and dilute it. So we're talking about an amount of dilution. So you make a little solution, and you have a little bit of the thing, and then you dilute it 100 times. You know, you take a little bit, put it in a new thing, water, and then you do it again and again and again. We're talking about millions and billions and maybe trillions of times diluted to the point where it is objectively the case that there are zero of that molecule in there anymore. It's not there. So forget the fact that mechanistically speaking, it's insane to think that this thing was going to help. But now it's not even in there. And so homeopathy relies on this concept of water memory. The water remembers what's in there, which is just abject insanity.

not the case, and there are a lot of spinoffs with water memory, all kinds of other charlatans trying to sell some stuff with water memory. And then you are administered that, whether it's the solution or a little sugar cube thingy or whatever it is, and that's supposed to cure you. And so it doesn't, and it's a placebo. That's it. That's homeopathy in a nutshell. Still better than bloodletting, which can kill you, I suppose. Yeah, that's true. And that's why it gained traction. That's what I was saying earlier, is that it came about in a time where it's like, well, homeopathy does better than bloodletting, so maybe there's something too. It's like, yeah, because you let all the blood out of that guy and he died.

And homeopathy does nothing, and nothing is better than killing you. So it doesn't mean that it's... Right. Or they told him to drink a bunch of water with the diluted thing in it, and he was at least more hydrated and his body was able to fight off whatever ailment it was, rather than just letting it bleed out at Jerry's Barbershop into a bunch of pulled teeth and a leg on the floor. That's right.

This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Dave Farina. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart, considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. To learn more, to get links to all of the discount codes, all those fancy pants, URLs, they're all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. You can also search for any sponsor using the search box on the website as well. Thank you so much for supporting those who support us.

It really does keep us going and makes it possible to continue creating these episodes week after week. Now for the rest of my conversation with Dave Verena. That makes more sense why that gained traction. The fact that it has not lost traction is the part that's, I think, upsetting. I'm not mad at the person who went to the barber for bloodletting in the year 1,100. I understand why you had a tooth pulled and a leg amputated. That was state of the art at the time. That was cutting edge.

That was state of the art, yeah. Now you have doctors or will soon to be doctors being like, yeah, we're studying homeopathy. And I'm like, is it a five-minute class where they tell you that it's not a real thing anymore? Or is it, you know, I okay, maybe an hour-long lecture on what the history of it and why it doesn't work? No, it's a whole class on why maybe there's something to it, man. And I'm thinking, this isn't a person studying to be a doctor in North Korea. This is a person studying to be a doctor in Canada. What are you doing?

Why does this exist? Why is there a teacher teaching this who also teaches actual medicine? It's mind-blowing. And of course, they are implementing a little bit of skepticism into the course because they know it's not real. It's a freaking medical school, for God's sake. And yet they're charging, of course, tuition for this because why not? Yeah. I mean, it's usually more questionable institutions.

I'm sure Harvard Medical School doesn't have any courses on homeopathy. I hope not. It's usually, you know, a little like trade schools and technical schools and things like that. But it's there because of the demand. It's just money. People think it's real and they want to do it. And so it'll be offered. If somebody's going to spend money on something, somebody will take it.

So schools offer it because they will get the money from the people who want to do that. And so that has a ripple effect throughout society. It's given an air of legitimacy, and then it escalates from there. But it's a big problem. I see a lot of other new age healing these days, and I want to talk about this a little, the idea that quantum something, something can have an effect on your body, as in like, okay, you can heal your spine with your mind, something, something quantum physics. And I don't understand quantum physics, really.

And not many people do. And I think that's why they use this as the newest line of bullshit, because if I look at dilution, I go, okay, I understand that concept because I've made Kool-Aid before, and thus I understand dilution and therefore homeopathy. But quantum mysticism, it's harder to wrap your mind around, which I think makes it more effective for duping ruse. Well, it's just a little black box, right? It's, I don't understand quantum physics, so it's magic. And I want this other magic to be real, so I'll tether them and use the word quantum to make my magic seem like science, right? Because we have this very mysterious realm of science, which honestly, it's hyped up a lot. Like, yes, the quantum revolution was a really incredible time in physics, and there were a lot of empirical results that were at one point

surprising and mystifying, but it's nowhere near as mystical as it's peddled to the public. But nevertheless, it's reported with this air of mystery and magic and wonder. And so it's just a side door. Whatever magical thing you want to be true, just use the word quantum and now you've justified yourself. That's basically quantum mysticism in a nutshell. If someone uses the term quantum and is not a physicist, is it safe to say they don't know what they're talking about and they're trying to sell you something? If they're trying to sell you something and they're using the word quantum. I am not a physicist and I use the word quantum and I try to do so very accurately. But yes, if it's in the context of trying to sell you something, almost invariably, you will, you know that it's bullshit. Yeah. Yeah, not a lot of

physicists are online trying to peddle quantum of anything. They're too busy researching quantum physics and trying to figure out how it all works. I mean, quantum computing, that's a real thing. You know, there's stuff that you, yeah, there are definitely applications to quantum physics, of course. But yeah, in the realm of the healing and the, you know, the alternative arts, no, there's no legitimacy there. I love that you call out Deepak Chopra. I'm surprised how popular that guy's nonsense is. It is just, it's sort of, there's a funny clip of him on Conan O'Brien. He's basically projecting a bunch of insults at Conan O'Brien. And Conan's, of course, it's his show.

He's taking it in stride. But it's really funny because he's trying to psychoanalyze Conan. And Conan is handling it really well. And if you know who Deepak Chopra is, you realize he's just talking about himself. He's like, you have a narcissistic personality and you need to be the center of attention. It's like, is that Conan O'Brien? Maybe, but it's definitely Deepak Chopra as well. Yeah, but Conan's not lying.

Right. He's just trying to make people laugh. Right. Yeah. Yeah, no, Deepak is, he's one of the quintessential charlatans of the movement. Yeah, absolutely. And has amassed quite a tidy net worth from it. Yes, indeed.

There's another fake Dr. Joe Dispenza. Have you heard of this guy? Yeah. He's extremely popular. He's a quantum nonsense peddler as well. But it's more dangerous because his line of bullshit, one of many, is that he healed a spinal injury by using his mind, which is just absolute nonsense. And the problem is when people go to those courses to learn how to do it, they become practitioners or whatever.

But they're also ignoring real medical advice in favor of quantum mysticism. And that's dangerous. That can actually kill people. But he doesn't care. He wants to make money. Like Kaufman in Man on the Moon. Yes. If he had taken the correct path to medical attention, he could have survived.

Maybe. I mean, we don't know. But definitely he would have had a better shot if he got the right treatment. Yeah. It's a shame because we see, I mean, smart people fall for this. Look at Steve Jobs. I don't remember exactly how it went in his bio, but he was all, I'm not going to deal with this cancer in the right way.

I'm only going to eat fruit. And then it was like, oh, I, that was not smart. And now I'm going to. That was a bad idea. Yeah. I have a buddy that is very much antivex, doesn't want to wear sunscreen because of what's in it, all this other stuff. And he got cancer.

And he's like, I'm going to cure it naturally. And then I'm going to tell everybody how to do this. And all of these other sort of friends in our circle, because this is a good, he's a very good person. but he's just misguided on a lot of this stuff. A lot of other people in that circle went, oh, yeah, you can't, don't mess with cancer. Just take chemotherapy.

And he had to be convinced to do it. And he is very much alive now because he did chemo and it was really hard in his body. And he still swears that all these other things are bad. And I'm like, you're alive because of chemotherapy in modern medicine. But okay, old habits, especially belief systems, they die very, very hard.

Yes, because we wrap our identities around them, right? I'm crusading against this thing, right? The mean companies are trying to hurt us. I'm the underdog. This is how I derive a certain portion of myself worth is the concept of me raging against this authoritarian power above me. It's very attractive narrative, right? It gives you a sense of purpose, but it's not real. I was more in the camp of cognitive bias is a hell of a drug, but you're right, it is more identity-based. It is more, I'm the person that solves problems by just having a great attitude and thinking about it and eating healthy and it's like it doesn't work with cancer because cancer doesn't really care what you believe in unfortunately yeah if you don't adjust your

mentality immediately given new information it's because you've based your identity around it right if somebody is like oh i thought new york city was the capital of america oh no it's washington dc oh okay yeah okay sorry i know that now because their identity wasn't wrapped up in it if you say no vaccines don't cause autism no but they certainly do and let me show you all this Okay, well, your identity has clearly been wrapped up around this because no, they don't. And here's how we know. This is who Andrew Wakefield is. This is how he lied.

This is how he cashed out. That's it. Once you know the story, you can stop believing in this. But it takes some doing. For people who don't know who Andrew Wakefield is, he's the guy who wrote this completely fabricated fake paper about how vaccines cause autism. And he did so, was it on behest of the lawyers who wanted to file a lawsuit? And then he went, okay, it's a bunch of crap.

I got paid to do this. Injury lawyers. Yeah. They paid him half a million pounds. And he lost his medical license, but now he's the keynote guy at all these conferences and cashing in like crazy. And so what if a bunch of babies get measles or mumps and die? Yep.

I'm making money, and I can't let go with the wolf I've created. He's a monster. He's actually a monster. He's a sociopathic, horrific, horrible person who's responsible for the death of children. The reason he initially agreed to do that study on top of the half a million pounds is that he had a patent on a measles only that. So he wasn't even saying we shouldn't be inoculating against these things. He was saying, let's stop MMR, the measles Mumps Rebella vaccine. And by the way, I have a measles vaccine patented. So maybe you guys can use this one and I'll make a bunch of money off that. So it was just money. And then he lost his career. And so what was he going to do? He just made a bunch of money. He wants to make more. Let's just keep lying. And now he's, you know, with L. McPherson and they go and do these cruises and lie to these rich idiots. And, Yeah, he's a charlatan to the core.

What about the Tesla quote that people love to misuse? Or they say something, it was, if you want to find the secrets of the universe, think in terms of energy, frequency, and vibration. Great, but I assume he's talking about real energy frequency and vibration, not the vibration of the universe, the frequency of your thoughts, the energy that mysteriously can't be measured that you're radiating from your hands when you're doing fake Reiki healing or whatever. That's 100% correct. Also, let's acknowledge that Tesla was a little bit.

bit nutty. There's this bizarre Tesla warship happening in our culture right now, and that is what is at the base of some weird stuff like electric universe and things that I debunk. But staying in the, you know, normal camp. Yeah, Tesla said these things. And, you know, these are real words that have real scientific meanings, but they're not understood by the public. So frequency in particular, right, people will say, you know, I'm operating on a higher frequency or something like that. Frequency of what, right? Frequency is number of cycles per unit time. We're talking about some cyclical mechanism. Something is happening a certain number of times per second or whatever it is.

Right. So like light has a wavelength, then it also has a frequency. So a number of waves passing by per unit time, right? We can measure in hertz or whatever it is or sound or any of these things, anything that has cyclical behavior. So when you say frequency, but you don't say frequency of what, it doesn't mean anything. It doesn't mean anything. So people use these things, you know, higher frequency or this room has good energy or, you know, I'm on another vibration.

There are these phrases that are okay when used metaphorically. And I think initially what were phrases that came about as metaphors. You know, I can say this room has good energy. It just means it has a nice aesthetic that pleases me. It doesn't mean there is a glowing energy emanating from it that can physically affect me, you know, something like that. But the literalization of this kind of metaphorical usage of these terms is rampant, especially in the quantum mysticism and the alt-health communities. They use these words all the time.

I know we're getting short on time here, but I would love to get your take on the conspiracy theory that big pharma is hiding the cure for X disease, you know, cancer, Crohn's disease, whatever it might be, in order to keep treating the symptoms because there's more money in that. I'm sure you've heard this before. Yeah. But it just seems very far-fetched that a company is high-end. or ignoring something beneficial because of that level of conspiracy. Because one, it's so sociopathic

that it would take a lot of sociopaths all agreeing on one thing to be in one industry to do something like this. And also, when I've researched drug research or talked about it with people on this show, like Dr. John Abramson, who was on episode 709, it takes billions of dollars to find a cure for something. You don't find the cure for a bunch of different types of diseases by accident and then go, whoops, guess we better hide that, and then spend billions more dollars making something less effective so that you can sell it for a longer period of time, you would just cure cancer and then move on to the zillion other diseases and ailments that hurt and kill humans. Yeah, well, cancer is a quagmire, so we'll leave that one aside.

But yeah, definitely that there are these cures that are being hidden. It's very easy to debunk because pharma is a dynamic marketplace, right? The pharmaceutical industry is not one entity with like one guy going like, hmm, I will do this and no, you can't have. No, it's like a bunch of different companies and some are big and then you have startups and they're all trying to vie for, you know, they want to make these products that will be lucrative. And drug development is insanely expensive and insanely difficult. It's like the hardest thing in the world to do to develop a drug that will be effective for some malady. And everybody wants to make the next hot drug, right? And so this idea that we have a cure for

cancer, first of all, people who say about hiding a cure for cancer, I mean, what kind of cancer? Like, what does that mean? Like, cancer is not like the common cold. You know what I mean? It's a very intricate genetic situation. It's not like a pathogen or something, you know. So people who say that just don't really have an understanding of what cancer is fundamentally on the molecular level. But you can take other stuff.

I mean, there's other things that have been cured. You know, they came out with a cure for hep C not too long ago. They're trying to generate products that will be lucrative for them. These are things that will treat conditions. And it's not like, they're not like, oh, we want to help people. No, they want to make money. And that's why you can't hide a cure for something. Because if you're, if you discover it and you hide it, someone else is going to find it. Everybody's working with the same information, the same understanding of anatomy and physiology and biochemistry. And everybody is racing towards these different discoveries, these different medical discoveries. And so someone else finds it and hides it, somebody else is going to get there and they'll make a lot of money from it. It's like pharma, like any other. enormous industry does unethical things. There are unethical things that we can talk about with pharma. But I find that none of the common talking points, the common anti-farma talking points amongst the public have any legitimacy whatsoever. There are other things they do that are bad that we can

talk about. But the main ones like this kind of hiding the cure stuff is just nonsense. It doesn't mean anything. I've done a whole shows on why big pharma is bad, but from doctors who talk about studies and skewed of this and that. And it's never they're hiding the cure for something. It's usually some totally different set of topics. I would say they're hiding the cure for this doesn't even make the top list of fake criticism of big pharma, right? There's so many more real ones. I just think it's conspiratorial thinking. Yeah, they bribe doctors for off-label prescription, you know, they make more money that way.

Prescribe it for this other thing. Well, it's not really for that. We'll do it anyway. We'll give you money. You know, that's unethical. But it's, yeah, yeah, I don't know. It's become this boogeyman in a way that's not really legitimate, at least not more so than any other enormous industry.

Especially, and maybe I'm naive here, I think most scientists working on drugs, yes, they're there to make some money and hopefully a big discovery. But the one that makes a big Nobel Prize winning discovery that's going to make him a billionaire is not going to go bring that to his boss. And then they're going to go, look, look, look, we're going to pay you a lot of money over the course of your career, bury this one for us. And the company has your back for life. They're going to be like, nah, I'd rather have a fleet of private jets and live on in history for the next thousand years. Nobel Prize winners typically don't become billionaires. True. But if you're working for a drug company, you know, you're going to get notoriety.

I'm exaggerating, but you're going to get notoriety and you're going to get a lot of money. You get notoriety, you get a lot of opportunities. And, yeah, you become much more successful. Yeah, of course. It's capitalism. You're going to cash in on the cure for any sort of cancer. You're not ever going to hide that because you can make another drug that's going to sell for longer. It's just, and again, maybe I'm naive, but it doesn't make sense.

economically, even if you're a sociopath, you wouldn't do that because you would make more for yourself and get more validation for yourself bringing that cure to light than hiding it. Yeah, it ultimately comes down to money and that money eschews any kind of narrative of supreme evil or supreme good, right? It's neither of those things. It's just a capitalistic marketplace. Dave, thank you so much for coming on the show here, dispelling some of these myths. I feel like we are just constantly bombarded with this nonsense. And yeah, after a while, it gets tempting to believe some of it, because it is. it's so prevalent, I start to think I'm the crazy one for resisting it. And I think a lot of people

are in that boat. Yeah, happy to be here and happy to help rally everyone around a sense of sanity. I've got some thoughts on this one. But before I get into that, here's a sample of my interview with Amanda Knox, who was coerced into wrongfully confessing that she was at the scene of her roommate's grisly murder without being made aware of her rights or being given access to a lawyer. Here's a quick look inside. I was 20 years old. I was studying abroad in Italy. The day after Halloween, I came home to find a murder scene. The cops arrive. They break down my roommate's door and find her body there. And for the next five days, I was at the disposal and mercy of the police officers, who, unbeknownst to me, had targeted me. as a person of interest. My thought was to just take direction.

I did what I was told. And what I was told was by the police to come in every day for questioning. And I sat for hours and hours and hours and hours. I often worried that maybe the reason that they were upset or short with me was because I just wasn't speaking Italian well enough. I thought that was the reason

why they kept asking me questions over and over and over again. No matter how many ways I answered the same question, they never seemed happy with it. I just sort of submitted myself to what was ultimately a very coercive interrogation technique that culminated with an overnight interrogation and broke me.

I was made to believe that the reason they were upset with me was because I didn't remember correctly. I realized that the truth didn't matter and that I couldn't count on the truth to save me. People believed it. I was convicted. I spent four years in prison. Amanda Knox joins us to discuss

how she put her life back together and how she lives with the residue of tabloid infamy even after being acquitted of this terrible crime. For more, including why a lot of, it's not uncommon for an innocent person to give a false confession to a skilled interrogator. Check out episode 386 on the Jordan Harbinger show. You know, I think it's always just such an interesting way to look at any kind of problem, anything through a scientific lens.

Every biological process, no matter how complex, is simply a, and can be explained by, a series of chemical reactions. When you break our whole body, our amazing brain down, it's just a series of chemical reactions, which in itself is fascinating. We talked a little bit off air about Reiki. We did a whole skeptical Sunday episode on this. I hadn't thought about this before, but it's so funny. People who think they have special powers, psychic, healing, whatever supernatural type

stuff they may have, energy work that they can control. It is a little interesting. You know, some of these people mean well, but a lot of these folks, especially the charlatans, are inherently narcissistic. I mean, just imagine thinking that you or thinking you can get away with telling people that you have supernatural powers. You're the special one. It's just so peak narcissism somehow, especially after our episodes with Dr. Romney, it all starts to make sense.

I don't want to disempower people on this show in general, but I do think that it's important that we realize that we simply do not create our own reality. And that's in internet air quotes, but you know what I mean. Magic is not real, even when we're sick, even when we're lonely, even when we're desperate. But this is okay, because we don't need magic. We have science. We have so many beneficial things going for us here in the modern age. We don't need supernatural healers.

We don't need magic pills and supernatural powers. We just don't need that. We have something better, something that actually works. It's so important for you, for people in general, to be scientifically literate, conspiracy-minded people, the undereducated, these are the easiest people to manipulate, the easiest people to control. Ironically, they're also the ones who think that they are not cheap and they're not being misled not being manipulated and not being controlled, but there's not a whole lot we can do about that right

away. Of course, we also need to know what industries are doing with our science. That's the thing about science. It belongs to everyone. It's knowledge. It belongs to the world. We got to remove pseudoscience from academia, remove it from professional circles. We need to know what corporations are doing with our science, and so that it's not used as a cudgel or a weapon against us and just to make money from us. This is our science. We need to take it back, and the way you do that is by making yourself scientifically literate, and I hope this show is contributing to that in a positive way. Big thank you again to Dave Farina for coming on the show. All things Dave will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes, videos up on YouTube, advertisers, deals,

and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. I've said it once, I'll say it again. Please consider supporting those who support this show. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both Twitter and Instagram, or connect with me right there on LinkedIn. I'm teaching you how to connect with great people and manage relationships using the same software systems and tiny habits that I use every single day. That's our six-minute networking course and that course is free over at Jordan Harbinger.com slash course teaching you how to dig the well before you get thirsty and many of the guests on the show. Subscribe to the course, contribute to the course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger,

Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Millie Ocampo, Ian Baird, Josh Ballard, and Gabriel Ms. Rahi. Remember, we rise by lifting others. The fee for this show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who believes in some of the stuff we debunked today just maybe loves a good debunk or is a science geek like me, share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast should be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like something you should know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast-focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way. Recently, they've covered things like why we care so much what other people think, the benefits of laughter, why sports fans get so invested, and what

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