The Flat Earthers are a group of people who believe that the Earth is round. They don't even believe in satellites. They believe the earth is round like a pizza, but a flat, square pizza. Are they crazy? Or are they true believers? And if so, why do they believe it? Do they really believe it, or are they just making it up to make money off of it? Or is it just another conspiracy theory invented by people who have no idea what they re talking about? This week on Conspiracy Theories, host Michael Shermer and co-host Jamie McKusick take a deep dive into the minds of these people and try to figure out if they really do believe it or if they just make it up. This episode is brought to you by Cracked and Cracked dot com. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, and do not necessarily those of Cracking and/or Cracking. We do not own any of these companies. If you have a dilemma you want us to discuss or a general question you d like us to answer, call us on the phone at 1-800-273-8255 or call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. or visit our website and ask us a question. Thanks for listening and we'll get back to you next week with a new episode! Thanks again for listening, bye! - Your continued support is greatly appreciated. - Mike and Jamie and your support is much appreciated! Timestamps: 1:00:00 - 2:00 3: 5:00 | 3:30 | 4:30 5:10 | 6:40 | 7:00 Is the Earth Round? 6:00 / 8:00/9:00? 7:30 / 9:30/10:00 & 11:00 ? 11:10 12:40 13:30? 14:10? 15:40? 16:20? 17:30 Is the earth round? 16: Is it round? 17: Is there a round Earth a circle? 18: Does the Earth round? 19:00 Or is the Earth Flat? 21:00 or is it flat? 22:30 Or is there a planet in planes in a plane? 23:00 +16:15 25:00??
00:00:21.000We're going to talk about the flat earthers for one reason.
00:00:24.000The 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.
00:00:32.000I think they're being trolled by people who put together these elaborate arguments for something that they don't believe.
00:00:44.000Because they're just trying to make money off of YouTube views, which is entirely possible.
00:00:51.000Because YouTube videos can be extremely lucrative.
00:00:55.000If 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.
00:01:06.000Pennies on the dollar, but if it's millions, you can...
00:01:08.000It starts becoming real money, and if you do a bunch of them, and you do them on a regular basis, it becomes a gig.
00:01:17.000But 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.
00:02:05.000You 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.
00:02:14.000You know, there's things like that that we know the Earth is round.
00:02:17.000You know, you travel around, you come back to where you started.
00:02:22.000You 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.
00:02:34.000It'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.
00:02:42.000Well, not only that, but they think that satellites are actually in planes.
00:02:47.000They're in planes in low Earth orbit that are just circling around.
00:03:21.000It's hard to get inside people's heads.
00:03:23.000The old flat earthers in the 19th century, I think they really did believe it.
00:03:27.000There wasn't much money to be made, you know, on those kinds of things.
00:03:30.000I mentioned Alfred Russell Wallace, who was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin.
00:03:35.000I 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.
00:03:43.000So open-minded enough to see this radical new theory of the evolution of life by natural selection.
00:04:20.000And if you put these little sticks in the ground with markers on them, and you get a little telescope, like a surveyor's scope, and you line it up, you can see that it bends.
00:04:31.000So at each point, the stick is, you know, three meters above the ground at each point.
00:04:36.000But you can see that it's dropped down in the last one.
00:04:45.000This 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.
00:04:56.000And, of course, what happens, you get caught up emotionally, like, I'm not going to let this bastard get away with this.
00:05:02.000You know, he should have just cut his losses and left, but anyway.
00:05:05.000And I found these letters that this guy wrote to the Royal Geographical Society about Alfred Russell Wallace.
00:05:14.000You know, you have one member of your society that should be – he's a quack and a crank, and 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.
00:05:28.000So, you know, it's always questionable to deal with cranks because some of them are a little mentally deranged.
00:05:36.000Sure, 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.
00:05:45.000It 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.
00:05:53.000And then whenever two people are arguing, a certain amount of people are going to choose sides.
00:05:58.000They're just gonna, even if what you're saying doesn't make any sense, there's gonna be a gang of people that go, I like, what are you saying?
00:06:04.000And they're gonna join in, and people love, they love to be on a team.
00:06:09.000They love to be, they want to be on Team Wallace or Team Crank.
00:06:18.000He's the number one top, best known biological scientist in the world.
00:06:23.000Possibly since Darwin himself, if I can get him on stage, and Dawkins likes to say, this will look better on your resume than mine, so I'll pass.
00:08:02.000But, 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.
00:08:11.000So, 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.
00:08:20.000Not 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?
00:08:48.000No one knows, you know, but it's not that we know nothing.
00:08:51.000You know, we have some ideas about how it works.
00:08:53.000And I think this is just one of those ones that either will never be resolved, like free will determinism.
00:08:59.000Okay, we live in a determined universe.
00:09:01.000How can we have free will if that's true?
00:09:03.000The words, the language, there are certain restrictions on our cognition of how we think about the world.
00:09:09.000And it's very much influenced by the words we use.
00:09:12.000So that could be one of those mysterian mysteries that can't be solved.
00:09:17.000Not that we're not smart enough, but just the limitations of how we perceive the world.
00:09:26.000There 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.
00:09:57.000Compatibilists 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.
00:10:08.000That is, I'm making choices, like I chose to come out here, and that was a choice.
00:10:14.000Yes, the universe is determined, but my My behavior, my actions, my volitional choices within the net, the causal net, is part of it.
00:10:25.000And in any case, you can't know all the variables, so it feels like you're making free choices.
00:10:30.000So you are, in essence, making free choices because it feels free, even if, because you don't know all the determining factors.
00:10:37.000So the compatibilist is something like that.
00:12:51.000You're just using different causal vectors to describe the behavior.
00:12:55.000Some of them are more obvious than others.
00:12:58.000So 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.
00:13:10.000So he would take this portable fMRI brain scanner to these prisons.
00:13:15.000And these guys have nothing to do, so they're happy to participate as subjects.
00:13:19.000And he would scan their brains and he found that they have very little self-control, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex.
00:13:27.000And their prefrontal cortexes were pretty quiet, pretty undeveloped, inactive.
00:13:32.000So you have all these impulses that bubble up and there's no break.
00:13:36.000There's no governor on the system to keep it in check.
00:13:39.000Whereas you and I would count to 10 or walk out of the room if we're getting heated up.
00:13:43.000They're more likely to just reach out and punch you if you say something they don't like.
00:13:49.000So 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?
00:14:00.000You know, raised in a broken home, single mom, drug addictions, gang-related, inner-city, crappy diets, dropped on their head, and so on.
00:14:08.000And he gives an example of this young man named Donta Page, an African-American who was convicted for raping and killing a woman.
00:14:37.000But he's had a background that would surely be different than the background you and I have had.
00:14:42.000And therefore, he had fewer choices in his actions than you and I would have.
00:14:46.000And so, you know, the law would deal with that differently.
00:14:49.000But see, someone like Dan, Dannett would say, well, those are degrees of freedom.
00:14:53.000He had fewer choices than the person that didn't have the awful background.
00:14:58.000So, this is one of those things where it depends what you mean by these words, like decrees of freedom, volition, choice, actions, versus just more of a physics, engineering, billiard table type of causal model.
00:15:13.000Well, it's a really complex question and subject, and one that people battle with even when you're faced with the determinism argument.
00:15:22.000If you take in the logic of determinism, 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.
00:15:33.000So 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.
00:15:39.000So do you in fact have free will at that moment or has it all been sort of determined by all these experiences?
00:15:47.000And it's so hard to argue because everybody's life is different.
00:15:51.000Everybody's take on things are different.
00:15:53.000Everybody's experience You could have the exact same experience as I do, but your take from it might be very different than mine.
00:16:01.000You 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.
00:16:11.000You might come out with a completely different decision based on that.
00:16:15.000So is it still determinism if all of a sudden you start practicing meditation and you change your behavior?
00:17:00.000You could just keep doing your addiction.
00:17:02.000But 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,
00:17:18.000and you've decided to make a choice based on that data.
00:17:26.000So it's like that, I think, also with consciousness.
00:17:28.000You know, what do you mean by consciousness?
00:17:31.000It's a hard problem, okay, but is it ever resolvable?
00:17:36.000Deepak thinks it's not just through a neuroscience explanation.
00:17:40.000Bottom-up molecules, scaling up, emergent property, mind out of brain, that's what most of us scientists think, people like Christophe Koch, who works on this problem.
00:18:44.000I've tried to put myself into his worldview.
00:18:46.000So, 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.
00:20:03.000It's not terribly hopeful, but maybe some of these supplements, who knows.
00:20:07.000But anyway, he wanted to know what are the effects of meditation on just regular people.
00:20:12.000So they went to the La Costa Resort and Spa.
00:20:15.000There's already a six-day program that the Chopra Center runs.
00:20:19.000It's Ayurvedic, but it's yoga, it's meditation, it's food, diet, not massage in this particular one, although they have great massages there too, which is also healthy.
00:20:30.000And 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,
00:20:46.000and 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?
00:20:57.000Blood pressure goes down, stress hormones are practically zero, and all these great markers, including the vacationers.
00:21:05.000Then they found a difference between the vacationers and the meditation group.
00:21:08.000So the claim is that you can go on vacation, but you can't do that every day of your life.
00:21:13.000But you can meditate every day of your life.
00:21:15.000So the effects of meditation may be something like you can do it at home.
00:21:19.000The relaxation, the meditation, the focus, whatever you call that, focus thought on your mantra actually has physiological changes.
00:21:29.000One of which was affecting beta amyloids, which are the chemicals that cause the plaques and tangles in neurons that cause Alzheimer's.
00:21:39.000So Rudy'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 build-up plaques and tangles around the neurons that kills them.
00:21:57.000So amongst various factors that might be effective, meditation may work.
00:22:02.000Now, someone like Sam, who does meditation, he would look for a causal chain, you know, from the bottom up.
00:22:08.000What are the effects of having certain thoughts in one part of your brain affects a different part of your brain, and that causes neurochemical, hormonal changes, and so on.
00:22:17.000Deepak, of course, wants to use a different argument and say it has to do with mind.
00:22:22.000Not brain, but mind, consciousness, that's out there.
00:22:26.000But even saying it's out there is not correct.
00:22:48.000I do other things that I think are relaxing.
00:22:50.000But if it works, who cares what the explanation is initially.
00:22:56.000It'd be nice to know something that's effective.
00:22:58.000So it turns out, from this new study just published in Nature, that meditation seems to be effective for these biomarkers, including telomeres.
00:23:07.000It increases telomerase, which causes the telomeres at the end of your chromosomes to either stay the same length or to grow a little bit.
00:23:14.000And that has direct relations to aging.
00:23:18.000Because 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.
00:23:26.000And that's what causes aging, ultimately, is genetics.
00:23:29.000So if there was a way to sort of slow down the process of the telomeres degrading, maybe through the production of more telomeres chemicals that, you know, affects that, and if meditation is one of those, or diet,
00:23:44.000whatever, then that would be a good thing.
00:23:46.000Now, do they determine that from studying the exact same person and studying them pre-meditation and post-meditation and studying the rate the telomeres start to decline?
00:23:56.000This particular study was just the control group versus the experimental group, the meditators versus non-meditators and the vacationers.
00:24:04.000And 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.
00:24:18.000I don't know if anyone's done that yet, but that would be good.
00:24:49.000There's a certain, like, 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.
00:25:05.000Through this course or this lecture this book or this practice I am now engaging in a practice that separates me from the stresses of the modern life, right?
00:25:14.000But 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.
00:25:33.000One of the most important things is recovery.
00:25:36.000It's a critical aspect of athleticism.
00:25:38.000And if you just train and you don't recover, your body breaks down.
00:26:02.000And in doing that, I feel like there's no motion at all.
00:26:07.000I'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.
00:26:16.000Is just concentrating entirely on breathing in and breathing out.
00:26:20.000And I just think about in with the good and out with the bad and in with the good.
00:26:23.000And that's my only thoughts that I try to maintain.
00:26:27.000Other thoughts get in there, they bounce around and they ricochet out and eventually they stop existing.
00:26:51.000Give yourself some time to consider the momentum of your life.
00:26:55.000Because 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.
00:28:01.000Even my Jewish friends are not religious.
00:28:03.000It's just a cultural thing in that that's probably a good thing.
00:28:07.000Now, where it gets a little out of hand, I think, another one of my full immersions, this is from my chapter on Deepak and Eastern religious traditions in my next book, Heavens on Earth.
00:28:17.000We went to see Deepak and Eckhart Tolle, who did a show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
00:29:27.000And, you know, so they have good German beer, which my wife and I like because she's from Germany.
00:29:30.000And we just sit there at the window and watch these cars pull up, you know, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, Bentley.
00:29:35.000And 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.
00:29:45.000The people that are in that particular study that Rudy Tansy did, this is not a randomly, you know, picked sample from the general population.
00:29:52.000You know, who knows, they have different kinds of problems or issues, you know, a lot of depression, mental, you know, things that might be affected by psychological states anyway, you know, that's different from the physiological changes they marked, but still.
00:30:07.000But when you go, we watch the Shrine Auditorium thing with Eckhart Tolle, and he's very effective.
00:30:27.000He's bringing the audience to a certain state of thinking.
00:30:31.000And I'm sure it is effective for the now.
00:30:34.000And, you know, technically, he and Deepak are right that there really is only the now, you know, about the three seconds or so of the current state of after the past and before the future.
00:30:45.000It'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.
00:30:54.000And the future is really, it hasn't happened yet, but it's just your neurons firing in anticipation of what might happen.
00:31:15.000The one on the, right on the cliffs, the Esalon Institute.
00:31:17.000I've been there several times and it's super relaxing and You know, but the now ends on Monday morning and I go back to work.
00:31:24.000You know, my mortgage has a now coming up pretty soon called the payment.
00:31:29.000And, you know, I don't know to what extent you can live in that condition all of the time.
00:31:33.000But if you take it in moderation, like you said, just once in a while, just step back once a week, you know, once a day, whatever, for 10 minutes, half an hour, hour, deprivation tank once a day, something.
00:31:47.000Yeah, very reasonable and very beneficial.
00:31:50.000I 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.
00:31:58.000If you're pulling up in a Ferrari, you're essentially pulling up in a house.
00:33:27.000And 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.
00:33:42.000And 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.
00:34:00.000And then you decide, I'm going to go to this Power of Now seminar and straighten my shit out.
00:34:11.000And 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.
00:34:44.000But 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.
00:35:12.000So 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.
00:35:21.000And they do it over and over and over.
00:35:24.000So in a way, if it worked, why do you have to keep buying the books and the tapes and going to the seminars?
00:35:31.000Maybe it only works for just a little while.
00:35:33.000Well, have you ever heard the expression that inspiration is like bathing?
00:35:36.000It's very effective, but it must be practiced on a regular basis.
00:35:58.000But Can we actually measure the differences and then apply that to anybody?
00:36:03.000And not just that resort, but any resort?
00:36:05.000Or 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.
00:36:16.000You know, that's really what we want to know.
00:36:18.000So on the one hand, you know, if somebody says, I went to Deepak's place, I felt better.
00:36:22.000I'm glad that they felt, you know, the world's a little bit better place if you feel better.
00:37:40.000I 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.
00:37:47.000I bought a Dianetics book, and they hounded me for 10 years.
00:37:57.000It'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 Core aspects of success in this endeavor,
00:38:19.000and I've done this, and I want you to know, I want to spread this knowledge.
00:38:23.000But when a guy is just motivating people, I'm always like, I know a guy who just motivates people, and he's a terrible comedian.
00:38:31.000And he's just decided to start motivating people now.
00:38:33.000I'm like, whoa, what the fuck is going on here?
00:38:35.000But meanwhile, people buy it because people love that feeling.
00:38:39.000They love that feeling of someone saying something that makes sense, that gets them going.
00:38:44.000Yeah, 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 I'm going to...
00:38:53.000And then one day they pass by Krispy Kreme and that hot, hot, fresh Oh, man.
00:39:41.000You know, my friend Chris Bell, who made this recent documentary, Prescription Thugs, and he made Bigger, Stronger, Faster, that documentary on steroids.
00:39:54.000And 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.
00:40:06.000And then he got hooked on pain pills himself while he was doing a documentary on pharmaceutical drugs being highly addictive.
00:40:13.000He went to this rehab and when he came on the podcast and was discussing the rehabilitation process 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.
00:40:59.000And 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.
00:41:30.000It's almost like they need it every day for like a year or two years or three years or something.
00:41:37.000Well, 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.
00:41:46.000And that's just a regular habit, like drinking coffee or just what time you get up in the morning or whatever, exercise.
00:41:53.000So I suspect with drugs or alcohol it's probably a year or two to really completely retrain your brain, rewire the neurons, literally.
00:42:05.000It's just, you know, it can be very difficult.
00:42:08.000So I think part of the appeal of the 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.
00:42:28.000Probably literally dopamine hits from hearing the voice of the person.
00:42:31.000And someone like Tony Robbins, I mean, I've met him at TED. He's just bigger than life.
00:45:53.000They'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?
00:46:32.000How 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?
00:46:46.000Yeah, wasn't there a recent study on AA where they were determining that people who leave the program...
00:46:53.000I tried to find out, 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.
00:47:04.000It did have an impact on people maintaining sobriety, and they think that that impact...
00:47:09.000May 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.
00:47:21.000And I think it's really clever how they've structured it in that way.
00:47:24.000Because I think having a mentor, having someone who's already done it.
00:47:27.000And then also, I think a big part of what leads people to alcoholism, besides the genetic markers and all the different things where people have an inclination to do it, Yeah, I think.
00:47:55.000Your situation is on the line in sort of a dire way.
00:47:58.000Like, hey, man, you hit fucking rock bottom.
00:48:00.000We're throwing this booze in the trash, and you're getting your shit together, and you're going to follow a 12-step program now, and you're going to do all this.
00:48:05.000Now, all of a sudden, there's some urgency involved, and you have someone who you're accountable to.
00:50:19.000The 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 and they tell me that You know, for the addict to take a single drink—what's the harm?
00:50:36.000Just have a drink here at the bar, social, whatever—that it's much harder for them to not have a second, third, fourth, and they go until they pass out.
00:50:43.000Whereas I never drink until I pass out.
00:51:10.000It's probably a plethora of variables, right, that contribute?
00:51:14.000Well, 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,
00:51:31.000But apparently there is a genetic component.
00:51:32.000I 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.
00:51:41.000But anecdotally, sort of everybody who knows that story knows that Native Americans didn't have alcohol in their history.
00:51:55.000I haven't looked at any of that data in decades, so that could be old material now.
00:51:59.000Well, genes most certainly do get affected by diet and climate and where people evolve and where their ancestors came from.
00:52:09.000There 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 a hundred years or so,
00:52:33.000the genetics start to evolve or change and adapt to this diet to the point where your body produces more omega-3s from different things.
00:53:08.000But 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.
00:54:18.000Like, 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 walk quickly enough.
00:54:29.000So either dead meat is conscious and thinking positive thoughts or it has nothing to do with positive thoughts.
00:57:14.000That's why, you know, 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.
00:57:21.000Yeah, and that's why we choose certain metals as well to cook in, you know.
00:57:27.000I'm amazed he could get insurance for this because people do get burnt.
00:57:30.000And 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 to bed for it a lot, so I have pretty good calluses on the bottom of my feet.
00:57:41.000But if you don't, you know, then your skin is thinner and the temperature builds up faster for that and you're more likely to get the blisters.
00:57:48.000Especially if you get pedicures and you put moisture on your...
00:59:12.000I 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, say.
00:59:18.000And, you know, back when Nautilus was introduced, you know, the idea was, you know, isolate the muscle groups.
00:59:27.000So this author is going, why is that good?
00:59:30.000How did it ever get established that isolating a muscle group is a good thing?
00:59:34.000And 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.
01:00:02.000You can't clean and jerk a big weight and not have somebody explain how to do it without getting hurt.
01:00:07.000Yeah, 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.
01:00:22.000I 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...
01:00:30.000I mean, it looks amazing, but as far as it being beneficial to promoting functional strength, it's not nearly as good as those Olympic lifts that people do, like clean and press.
01:00:51.000Those isolating movements at one point in time were thought to be the best way to develop muscle because they're really good for bodybuilding.
01:00:59.000But there's a difference between when someone looks really good, there's certain looks that you can achieve, like giant biceps, where they're completely out of balance, but then they have a little neck and they have no legs.
01:01:13.000It's not healthy, but they want big biceps, so they just keep constantly doing curls.
01:01:18.000So you can get really out of whack doing those sort of exercises if you're not careful.
01:01:24.000If you want to be a bodybuilder, that was always the protocol.
01:01:28.000If you look at how Arnold lifted, now a lot of these Franco-Colombo guys, they were all in isolation exercises.
01:02:57.000I read something about CrossFit taking a critical role in our society that there was a comparison to CrossFit and religion.
01:03:07.000And they were saying that essentially as people become more secular and they move away from religion, they gravitate towards things like CrossFit.
01:03:14.000They give them this sort of sense of community and shared experience and like uncommon shared experience.
01:03:22.000Because like the average person, you go to work and you got calluses that are bleeding.
01:04:38.000And, 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.
01:04:48.000And 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.
01:04:56.000You know, like one-arm chin-ups or, you know, one-arm push-ups or, you know, the Stairmaster.
01:05:01.000He built his own Stairmaster before anyone had Stairmasters.
01:05:04.000And he would just, you know, just crank it up at such a high level that you just can't do it.
01:06:11.000It doesn't really matter because it's really all the same process.
01:06:14.000Ultimately, your telomeres will get you.
01:06:16.000And the idea, well, we live twice as long as our ancestors did a century ago, you know.
01:06:20.000Yeah, 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.
01:06:31.000In terms of longevity and aging, you can't stop it.
01:06:34.000All you can do is hopefully slow it down a little bit, and you want to have a higher quality of life the further up you go, as opposed to lying in bed with tubes for the last 10 years of your life or something like that.
01:06:45.000So that's where the future research is, where the breakthroughs will come.
01:06:49.000Not radical life extensionists that I've also written about.
01:06:53.000You know, we're going to live 500 years.
01:06:54.000You know, Shermer, don't you want to live 500 years?
01:06:56.000I said, look, just get me to 90 without Alzheimer's and cancer, okay?
01:07:00.000Let's just start one decade at a time.
01:07:33.000In my next book, I have a chapter called Afterlife for Atheists.
01:07:38.000So these are not just the radical life extensionists, but the mine uploaders.
01:07:43.000And 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.
01:08:09.000So 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?
01:08:53.000If I was gonna play devil's advocate to that, what I would say is with our current understanding and abilities right now, you're correct.
01:09:00.000However, 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,
01:09:16.0002016, If we can understand every single aspect of you, including consciousness, we're not there yet.
01:09:25.000Obviously, 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.
01:09:31.000If 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.
01:09:41.000Like, our possibilities today are incredibly expansive.
01:09:45.000In comparison to people that lived in, you know, 1776. Just the idea of what we understand about what it means when you talk about atoms, molecules, the idea of telomeres, all the knowledge that we have today.
01:10:00.000Imagine that expanding exponentially for the next 500, 1000 years.
01:10:05.000It'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.
01:10:17.000But I think it's entirely possible that, you know how bees make honey?
01:10:22.000I think people might make the universe.
01:10:25.000I think it's entirely possible that the way the universe makes itself, it makes a person.
01:10:31.000It makes a monkey, the monkey eventually figures out a 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.
01:10:42.000And once they really get going, what they start doing is creating technology.
01:10:45.000They 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 Jardia and everybody's dying from inborn disease.
01:10:55.000We figure things out, slowly but surely.
01:10:57.000And along the way, they make better and better things until they develop computers, until they develop artificial intelligence.
01:11:05.000They make something that can think for itself.
01:11:08.000And then they put that thing to work, and that thing gets better in two weeks than 10,000 years of human development, right?
01:11:15.000And I think that thing probably is how the universe gets created.
01:11:20.000That the universe, like this idea that the universe has no beginning and no end, that it's this infinite cycle of...
01:11:46.000Like, when Elon Musk starts talking about artificial intelligence, he's one of the most important and popular and famous technology enthusiasts, starts talking about artificial intelligence being summoning the demon.
01:12:05.000I really think that might be what we do.
01:12:07.000I 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?
01:12:14.000And I'm in the 12-step program, and I'm fucking crossfitting.
01:12:17.000And meanwhile, what we're doing is we're giving birth to some new form of transcendent technology that literally rewires reality itself.
01:12:29.000Well, 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.
01:12:37.000But I don't even know if we have to be there.
01:12:40.000If it was so real you couldn't distinguish between the holodeck world you're in and this world, then how would you know?
01:13:45.000Well, 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.
01:13:54.000And 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.
01:14:30.000But 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, cunt, shit,
01:14:47.000And 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.
01:14:55.000And so the idea is that certain words trigger more sort of deep emotional parts of the brain and the limbic system and so on.
01:15:06.000Bodily effluvia, you know, feces, sperm, and so on.
01:15:12.000It'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, you know, sort of a deep part of the brain that's associated with really deep emotional things.
01:15:26.000That's the theory, isn't there, as I can tell, about why curse words are what they are.
01:15:32.000You know, why certain words are just, they're not insulting, they're just kind of funny.
01:17:28.000This chart shows what is being done on the internet every minute in 2016. Wow.
01:17:35.000So it's got snapchat at the top with six million nine hundred and forty four thousand four four hundred and forty four Google's the most but owned by tenfold more than snapchat which is kind of crazy.
01:18:00.000So, I mean, if you carry out your argument, you know, it's just only a matter of time before, you know, sort of that singularity is reached.
01:18:07.000And then, I mean, one argument for the singularity, you create the virtual reality that's indistinguishable.
01:18:14.000It's just that you just need enough data.
01:18:32.000I 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.
01:20:07.000You could have possibilities that you ponder.
01:20:10.000You could sit down and be as creative as you want.
01:20:12.000You could start and think about the number of known stars in the universe and then start to perceive how immense the universe is and what is going on in consciousness itself.
01:20:24.000And when it ends, does that energy go somewhere and become something that we haven't considered?
01:21:45.000Cold scientific analysis of the possibilities in terms of what we know today and deny any possibilities of anything other than death being the end.
01:22:56.000You 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...
01:23:07.000Okay, so Sagan's point is, what's the difference between an invisible, hovering, cold, indetectable, immeasurable dragon, and no dragon at all?
01:23:18.000So if there's not some way for us to get at it, then we can't assume it exists.
01:24:29.000And 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, it's kind of comforting to some people, and it's an interesting possibility.
01:24:45.000And again, it's something to consider.
01:25:13.000What is this, the guy's name, who is taunted by these children because of his baldness.
01:25:18.000So God summons two bears to come out of the woods and maul these children and kill them because they taunted his baldness.
01:25:27.000That would be fitting with the Old Testament.
01:25:29.000I 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.
01:25:41.000The 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?
01:26:36.000In any case, when did Jesus become a conservative?
01:26:38.000You know, I mean, in the Gospels, he talks about, you know, giving up your belongings, taking care of the poor, you know, the chances of a rich man going to heaven or, like, going through the eye of a needle.
01:27:37.000It was a super controversial movie at the time and groundbreaking in terms of, like, people...
01:27:45.000We 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...
01:28:02.000I was talking to Guy Torrey about this, a funny comedian friend of mine, about this last night.
01:28:07.000We were talking about how good Lenny Bruce was and how we really can understand it because comedy continues to progress and it sort of reflects the attitudes of the times.
01:28:19.000And 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.
01:28:46.000But 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, and then everybody's like, yeah, that hold's been there forever.
01:28:56.000I mean, could you even make Blazing Saddles today?
01:28:59.000Because, you know, they use the N-word constantly throughout there.
01:29:45.000It was like a natural part of behavior to the point where we didn't even mind it from heroes.
01:29:52.000Heroes would smack a woman in the mouth and she'd be like, and then they would invariably wind up fucking them.
01:29:58.000Like, right afterwards, they'd smack them and then they'd start making out.
01:30:01.000Seinfeld 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.
01:30:11.000And then the other one was, she was just 17, if you know what I mean.
01:33:23.000Well, 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.
01:34:20.000It's focused entirely on him being violent as humanly possible, beyond the limitations of other people who are professional purveyors of violence.
01:36:52.000How much is that affecting his conscious decisions, and does he have the free will to escape that influence?
01:36:58.000Well, the way the 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.
01:39:03.000So this process probably started in the late Middle Ages.
01:39:06.000There's a book called The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias, 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,
01:39:23.000you know, don't have a knife, don't carry your knife with you, or, you know, hand a knife to somebody, you're supposed to hand it with the handle, you know, forward.
01:39:56.000And then it never enters your mind to do anything like that.
01:39:59.000And 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.
01:40:09.000It's that prefrontal cortex, keeping a break on the sort of lower impulses that bubble up.
01:40:17.000And then pretty soon you don't even think about doing it.
01:40:20.000Now obviously there's still a handful of the psychopaths or whatever, they don't care.
01:40:23.000But 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.
01:40:41.000You just don't even think about doing that.
01:40:48.000And 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 like how much violence you're going to encounter in your daily life.
01:40:58.000When we see violence, it's incredibly shocking.
01:41:01.000Whereas if we lived 5,000 years ago, it'd be incredibly rare to get through a life without seeing dead bodies.
01:41:16.000So 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 durable and people relax more and more about the physical requirements our bodies had A few thousand years ago where hunters and gatherers were constantly worried
01:42:24.000The big one is, what people don't consider is, why do people, why do certain people not run, not fight, but panic, lock up, and what's going on there?
01:42:34.000Because that's a real response that is super common that doesn't get addressed in that fight-flight response.
01:42:43.000But all those things in a more dangerous world actually do age you faster.
01:42:49.000Some 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.
01:42:58.000There's more and more stuff about inflammation and disease, inflammation and Alzheimer's, inflammation and the telomeres.
01:43:05.000And 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.
01:43:17.000And, you know, the ones that lived on the island live significantly longer, like 50% longer than And not just accounted for by the ones that got run over, not that, just the aging, the aging process.
01:43:29.000Just living in an open, dangerous environment takes its toll on your cellular reproduction and how long you live, irrespective of predation and accidents.
01:44:08.000Like, does anybody ever figure out how many times you can get hit by a guy who's 350 pounds running 30 miles an hour?
01:44:14.000I mean, those guys are giant and they're huge super athletes and they collide with each other.
01:44:17.000I don't think a person like you or me can even appreciate the amount of impact that's involved in a lineman who's just a giant mountain of a man using all of his might and running into you.
01:45:07.000But 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 in the game...
01:47:04.000Because I guess the more mass, like the sumo wrestlers, you want mass, not just muscle.
01:47:08.000Yeah, you know, they also, those guys are just all about power.
01:47:12.000They're all about power and weight behind power.
01:47:15.000And in 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.
01:47:27.000Like, even if they're not strong, like, the amount of mass that you have to move when you're wrestling around with them, like...
01:47:32.000You don't consider it 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?
01:49:35.000So it wasn't long before the cyclists got a hold of this in the late 80s, early 90s.
01:49:38.000Like, well, okay, if I'm naturally at 45% and you're at 50%, I'm losing a little edge, so I'll train at high altitude or I'll sleep in the oxygen tent or I'll just take the injection.
01:50:23.000I wrote this article for Scientific American about doping in sports.
01:50:25.000This is why it's wrong, because people are dying.
01:50:28.000But this guy's argument is it was never proven that these people died.
01:50:32.000And furthermore, he takes on steroids.
01:50:34.000You know, there's this whole thing that started with Lyle Alzado, the great Oakland Raiders linebacker, who said, you know, I got brain cancer.
01:50:41.000It was after he was done playing, but he said it was due to all the steroids I was taking.
01:51:34.000It was a big thing was that where are all the bodies?
01:51:36.000Like, where is this steroid epidemic that people are talking about when you're looking at, 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.
01:51:54.000Like 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.
01:52:03.000Who 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.
01:52:17.000Because the amount of people that are doing them is off the charts.
01:52:20.000If 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...
01:52:29.000It should be just dropping like flies.
01:52:31.000See, I think they're just getting smarter about it.
01:52:33.000And they know it's called microdosing and cycling with the EPO. You just take a little bit.
01:52:38.000Just give it just a little bump, just for maintenance.
01:52:40.000You know, when I wrote that story for Scientific American, I interviewed Frankie Andreo, who was one of Lance's teammates in the 99 and 2000 seasons that he won.
01:52:52.000And 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.
01:53:00.000From the main peloton, and he couldn't even do his job as just Lance's domestique to carry his water bottles up.
01:53:06.000You know, you're up there in the front with Lance, drop back to the team car, get some water bottles.
01:53:11.000Then you've 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.
01:53:47.000And 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.
01:53:56.000Like, you might not be working with as much effort, say, as a sprinter who's running a hundred meter, like a Usain Bolt type character, but the amount of time involved in expenditure of energy is huge.
01:54:09.000It's one of the more unique and weird things about cycling is you're doing it for hours.
01:54:31.000So 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.
01:54:41.000And then mentally, the drag on maintaining it must be huge.
01:55:02.000And his teammates are saying, well, you know, just in the course of a three-week tour, you know, just your hematocrit just drops, just from fatigue.
01:55:11.000He said, everybody else, it's not like they're getting an unfair advantage by going above their normal performance.
01:55:15.000They're just staying level, whereas the rest of us are dropping off, and then the last few stages, you're wiped out.
01:55:21.000So, you know, it's like, we've got to do this just to stay with the rest of the field.
01:55:27.000I 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.
01:55:35.000It feels different than training at high altitude or sleeping in the oxygen tent, you know, like the climbers do.
01:55:43.000You know, taking EPO feels like it's more artificial.
01:55:46.000This guy's argument of this book, Spitting the Soup, is that it's just a gradation.
01:55:51.000We've just arbitrarily drawn the line there.
01:55:53.000And, 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.
01:56:03.000Well, I think that argument is very good because there's certain supplements that you can take that are effective that actually do work.
01:56:23.000I think that some forms of that stuff, some forms of 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.
01:56:40.000Which is why, really interestingly, two Russian Olympic wrestlers have been stripped of their gold medals.
01:56:47.000Because 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.
01:57:01.000But the UFC is an interesting proving ground for it, because Jeff Nowitzki, who was the head of USADA and the drug program that got Lance Armstrong and a bunch of other people, Novitski now works for the UFC. Oh,
01:57:20.000And he has almost completely cleaned up the amount of people that are doing things.
01:57:27.000People still get caught every now and then, but the amount of people where their physiques have changed, where their performance has changed, where their results inside the octagon have drastically dropped off is pretty obvious and significant.
01:57:41.000To the point where MMA fans and the pundits and analysts are looking at this and they're going, wow, this is fascinating.
01:58:25.000And 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, and this man needs his medicine.
01:58:35.000And so they would give these guys testosterone, and like 35, 36-year-old guys would be just jacked.
01:58:43.000Not just jacked and going to the beach, but like involved in a sport where your whole purpose is to do physical harm to your opponent.
01:58:52.000So this drug allows you to do more physical harm, which is very different than cycling.
01:58:57.000Like 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.
01:59:04.000But if he's doing these drugs and it's allowing him to put other people in the hospital, things get very weird.
01:59:10.000Well, 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.
01:59:21.000That would be an argument for USADA. The argument could even be said that the fights are more exciting because people are more vulnerable.
01:59:28.000They get knocked out easier, they get tired easier, and sometimes it makes fights crazier.
01:59:33.000Guys have tested positive for EPO after even championship level fights.
01:59:38.000There was this guy, Ali Bagutinov, who's a top flyweight fighter.
01:59:42.000And 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.
01:59:49.000And Mighty Mouse beat him, and one of the ways he beat him is with volume and pace.
01:59:53.000Like, this guy couldn't keep up his pace.
01:59:57.000Efficiency of technique is also 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.
02:00:07.000It 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.
02:03:25.000No, it's a disease, so we got to treat it with a drug.
02:03:28.000You know, so you have this over-medication effect.
02:03:30.000Now, I can't say if I was a parent of an ADHD kid, I wouldn't be glad to have some meds, but I think the consensus is far too much medication of children who really, you know, it's a spectrum, you know, if you're just completely out of control over here,
02:03:46.000but most that are taking the drugs are probably in the bell curve somewhere.
02:03:51.000I 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.
02:03:56.000There's people that are almost unmanageable, and there's people that might, a kid that might just be a little bit rowdy.
02:04:02.000You 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.
02:04:07.000And a lot of it is, you know, teachers want control of the classroom.
02:04:10.000It's this old, goes back to the 19th century, you know, we've got to put them all in rows because we're training them to work in industry or be in the military.
02:04:20.000And 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 think they seem preposterous and they seem like a pipe dream like this idea that you're going to be a famous author Yeah,
02:05:03.000Like, 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 starts some sort of a weird business.
02:05:16.000But why can't anybody who wants to do that do that?
02:05:59.000They'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, like, my parents want me to go, and my friends are all going, and society says I've got to have a degree, so I've got to go.
02:06:10.000You know, and so now we have this proliferation of colleges and universities and, you know, the skyrocketing costs and so on.
02:06:18.000You know, now trade schools are kind of looked down upon.
02:06:20.000There's nothing wrong with trade schools.
02:06:21.000Trade schools are great, but, you know, we've sort of stigmatized it.
02:06:24.000And 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.
02:06:58.000And then in overcoming and getting through those tests at school or getting through whatever weird social stuff you got going on in your classroom, you develop sort of some data.
02:07:07.000You get some experience about the world.
02:07:08.000Yeah, 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,
02:07:26.000or 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.
02:07:59.000Because 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.
02:08:05.000But 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?
02:09:08.000You know, and you should be having fun and enjoying the vitality of youth.
02:09:11.000I 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.
02:09:23.000And they're all, I can't wait to get out of college.
02:10:27.000Yeah, 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 that just basically are for profit.
02:10:38.000It'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.
02:10:48.000The reason this is the story is because the federal government was financing some of their tuition, but it turns out, you know, it was not quite a pyramid scheme, but something along those lines.
02:11:56.000He published the other day on why colleges are so expensive, and he tracks like 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,
02:14:30.000It's this 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.
02:14:37.000That this idea of having this safe space, like, this is college.
02:14:59.000So 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.
02:16:01.000And, you know, they seem fine with that.
02:16:03.000I think if you set up a system of sort of a moral panic and you start looking for any racial slurs or slights, it makes conversation really hazardous.
02:16:15.000Like, ooh, I've got to navigate around that.
02:17:00.000Fat 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 right if you really think that you're gonna get through school with all All this craziness about safe spaces and certain things that trigger you and what should be legal and,
02:17:25.000you know, cultural appropriation, white people shouldn't be wearing dreadlocks and all the nonsense that they're showing these kids.
02:17:33.000It'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.
02:17:44.000I'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.
02:20:24.000If you say to a guy, like, you must be a genius, you're a European Jew, do they get upset at you for that?
02:20:31.000It's like that line in Howard Stern's movie where he's a 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.
02:22:29.000They were walking hand-in-hand, sort of on the perimeter of the campus, down the sidewalk of the local street, and some guy in a pickup truck drove by and made a remark.
02:22:39.000You know, there are assholes driving around.
02:22:43.000You know, that's never going to be zero.
02:22:46.000And there's no place you're going to go where you're going to be safe from that in the world.
02:22:50.000And so the question is, how do you deal with that?
02:22:53.000Well, you can just say, fuck off, asshole, or just ignore them, or, you know, whatever.
02:22:57.000But, 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.
02:23:18.000We're really generalizing here, because, right, we don't know what this supposed aggressor said, and there's a bunch of different things they could have said.
02:23:26.000You know, they could have drove by and go, I love your hair!
02:23:29.000And then just kept going, like, this piece of shit, he just totally gendered me.
02:23:37.000There's some preposterous recreational outrage that really, on one hand, 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,
02:23:55.000you will almost be willing to dismiss everything on their team.
02:24:00.000You know, everything that they're trying to push forth that some of the things might have some merit to them.
02:24:04.000Some of the things might be really valid, but it's all in the same camp.
02:24:08.000Of these ridiculous, oversensitive people that are looking to get recreational outrage all the time.
02:24:15.000So they might attach themselves to really legitimate points that people that might be more rigid or conservative in their ideology, they reject it outright.
02:24:26.000They won't even consider it because it's these fucking dummies and they're crazy outrage and they're safe spaces, like these people.
02:24:34.000Be 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.
02:24:44.000And maybe we can figure out how to stop that.
02:26:51.000This is an outrageous thing because it's so rare, because there has been progress.
02:26:55.000So 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.
02:27:11.000If the left gets so outrageous in its demands, the right kind of meets them somewhere in the middle, like, we'll get to here, but settle the fuck down.
02:27:41.000If you had a new guy, you know, like Kevin James.
02:27:46.000If Kevin James was in some new sitcom where he threatened to beat the shit out of his wife, like, whoa, how long would that show stay on the air?
02:27:57.000People getting outrageously upset about things that merit being outrageously upset, it makes everybody think.
02:28:04.000But when people are outrageously upset about someone having a fucking Taco Tuesday or trying to cut some white dude's dreadlocks off, like, okay, you're losing me here.
02:28:19.000You're looking to get pissed off over nonsense.
02:28:22.000You hear about that kid who got away with raping some girl, and the girl had been passed out, and he only got six months, and now that's six months.
02:28:33.000That is something to be outraged about.
02:28:36.000That's a real scary thing that you should be really pissed off about.
02:29:09.000You know, where this guy's suing the school now, she collected her diploma with a mattress, and we don't know what happened, because we weren't there, but there's some crazy texts exchanged back and forth, where she's asking him to come over and fuck her in the ass or something.
02:29:28.000Super important that you be real clear.
02:29:30.000I mean, I don't know what the fuck happened, but if it really is something like that, what was the false rape accusation that made it to the New York Times?
02:29:47.000And 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.
02:30:01.000Instead 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.
02:30:20.000You 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.
02:30:35.000She said bluntly during one Facebook exchange.
02:30:37.000Yeah, 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.
02:30:43.000But his version of what happened versus her version of what happened...
02:30:47.000You don't know who's telling the truth.
02:30:51.000And 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,
02:31:08.000it sort of in some ways highlights the problems with dealing with this kind of stuff in a non-objective way.
02:31:15.000Carol Tavis wrote a nice piece for us in Skeptic on what we mean when we talk about rape.
02:31:21.000And again, it's this categorical binary thinking.
02:31:24.000So there's perfect behavior and everything else is rape.
02:31:29.000And so she talks about the dance of seduction and the guy's pressing and she's saying no.
02:32:14.000Well, 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.
02:32:21.000There 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.
02:32:31.000They'll go to a dominatrix and this woman will insult them and Right.
02:33:26.000I mean, he doesn't like getting beat up, but it's okay.
02:33:29.000Like, 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.
02:33:35.000But 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.
02:33:52.000If you decide that you and the person that you have sex with, if you guys decide that this is the way you do things, you decide that she likes to smack you around, and she likes to get on top of you, and you get off on it,
02:34:07.000and she tells you when you're going to have sex.
02:34:24.000It's interesting because we're not talking rape.
02:34:26.000We're not talking being pro-rape in any way, shape, or form, or pro-domestic violence.
02:34:31.000We're talking about people like weird shit.
02:34:34.000And some people actually want you to commit crimes to them.
02:34:38.000Well, imagine a scenario in which that was all consensual, and then six months later, he published a story in Rolling Stone saying, I never consented, and she beat me.
02:35:12.000And 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.
02:35:43.000Did you see the video that got released where this really wealthy billionaire character in Florida filmed his girlfriend beating herself up?
02:35:51.000She's on the bed, and he put in a security camera because, I don't know, maybe he just knew she was gonna do something crazy like this, so he's breaking up with her, and she told the police he beat her up.
02:36:02.000She's on the bed, wailing herself in the face.
02:36:05.000And 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.
02:37:08.000So, 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.
02:37:24.000There'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 an attractive young couple, like a hipster-looking dude.
02:37:37.000He had like a funky mustache, and he's with a girl, and they're making out.
02:37:55.000Like, I don't think you should fucking have to do that all the time, and especially if you're in a relationship with someone, then it's ridiculous.
02:38:01.000And I can understand, like, the first couple of times you do it, but the video, like, I don't support that being a rule.
02:38:07.000But if two people want to do that on their own, that video's kind of hot.
02:38:11.000Like, 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 obviously enjoying this make-out thing, like, it's kind of hot.
02:38:23.000But you shouldn't fucking have to do that.
02:39:47.000It'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.
02:39:54.000Stay away from the fraternity, ladies.
02:40:01.000And then, you know, that stat we put up with the number of diversity officers.
02:40:05.000I mean, the moment you hire somebody whose job it is to basically look for diversity, anytime it doesn't meet whatever the criteria is at that moment, it's like, okay, we have a problem.
02:44:37.000You know, Japanese and, you know, he was talking in this 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.
02:44:54.000George Takei lived in an internment camp when he was a kid.
02:47:09.000Meanwhile, go back to hitting him in the ear, motherfucker.
02:47:12.000You hit him in the ear and he was hurting.
02:47:13.000There'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 then they start fighting.
02:47:22.000Keep the thing playing because I want to find out how this ends.
02:47:25.000I don't remember how stupid it was at the end.
02:47:26.000Oh, it doesn't end until he makes gunpowder and shoots him with a makeshift cannon.
02:48:50.000If 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.
02:51:05.000I was in a pitch meeting one time at Fox, Fox Reality.
02:51:10.000Mike Darnell was their big reality show guy.
02:51:12.000He's the one that brought all the big American Idol type shows, including American Idol.
02:51:19.000Anyway, we were pitching a skeptic show.
02:51:21.000So I had a production company and myself, and we were 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.
02:55:12.000Not only was it not real, apparently they don't even say it's real, but everybody says it's real.
02:55:17.000I'd heard this story before from my friend Steve Rinella, who's really kind of a historian on the Wild West, got some great stories about...
02:55:25.000The conflicts between Native Americans and settlers.
02:55:28.000He knows all about the pioneers and the mountain men.
02:55:30.000He said that that guy, first of all, the guy that Leonardo DiCaprio played, never had a son.
02:55:35.000That was one of the main motivations of him going after this guy.
02:55:57.000But 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.
02:56:03.000Like, you shouldn't be allowed to do that, you know?
02:56:07.000Based on means, we're going to make some shit up.