In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast, Joe and his good friend Ari Shafir talk about the placebo effect and why it's actually pretty dumb. They also talk about Ari's new book, "The Human Brain" and how the human brain works and how it can be fooled by a placebo effect. Also, they talk about what it's like to be trapped under a car and how to get out of a car without getting crushed to death by a car. And how to deal with the pain of being stuck in a car with a car accident. Joe and Ari talk about how to survive a car crash and how you can get out if you're not prepared for it. And Ari talks about a new invention that could change the way you think about sex. Thanks to our sponsor, AlphaBrain. AlphaBrain is a cognitive enhancer sold by Onnit. It's also available in Amazon Prime and Vimeo. If you go to Onnit and click on the Onnit link, enter the code ROGAN. You get 15% off the entire AlphaBrain product line, and 10% off your entire purchase when you sign up for the AlphaBrain trial. The Fleshlight. I use it and Brian uses it too, too. It has its detractors like all wonderful things, but Mayhem Miller's a big fan of it too. I have one for you if you want one for $5, and I have it for $10, and it's also $5 for $20, and $20 for $25, and the rest is $10 for $50, and so on the rest of the deal is $15, and you get $50 for the chance to get $25.00 and I'm giving you $50 and I get $10 and I'll give you $25 and $50.00, and they get the rest for the rest. That's a discount code: JOERogan Experience Podcast. JOE Rogan Podcast, I'll be giving you an ad-free version of the podcast. Thank you for listening to the show. . Joesrogan podcast, I hope you enjoy it! I'll send you a review of the show and you'll leave me a review and review it in the podcast and I won't forget to tell me what you think it's great. XOXO, Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Brian and Brian
00:02:49.000And I ran into his, I believe it's his cousin at one of the shows, and the guy gave me the book, and then he contacted me on Twitter, and he's going to come on and explain it to us, and he's a scientist, so he'll be able to break it down and explain exactly What the fuck they believe is going on with the human brain.
00:08:22.000If you see how he gets in front of the camera and starts screaming, and the The fucking government doesn't want to fucking save these bears!
00:10:46.000Yeah, if you're really turning on me like that, you're the problem, dude.
00:10:49.000You know, if the world was filled with cool people, partying would be the shit.
00:10:52.000You know, if the world was filled with people who could hold their liquor, keep their weed under wraps, and when you went out, everybody was cool, and everybody was friendly to everybody, and you didn't have to worry.
00:12:40.000It's funny how, I mean, all those action news people, like, if you watch, like, any of those action news people or any of those e-entertainment people, they're just interchangeable to me.
00:16:15.000I was at Walmart, and Walmart has those t-shirt sections where it's like the cool kid t-shirts, like it's Elmo, it's like Angry Birds, it's like for people, like, you know, cool people to buy, right?
00:16:29.000They have special Olympic shirts now, in the middle, and I almost bought one, but I was like, that's rude, because I would be wearing that as a joke.
00:16:37.000And I'm like, wait a second, this is in Walmart, wait a second, this is supposed to be a joke.
00:17:44.000They just changed in New York, they changed at Starbucks, they changed the gender-biased bathrooms to have male and female is, whatever the root is, rude.
00:21:12.000Someday we will, ladies and gentlemen.
00:21:13.000But right now, due to contractual obligations that I have with Fear Factor, we have to keep some shit under wraps.
00:21:18.000When that gets on the air, dude, there's a bunch of shit that we did this season that was so way more over the top than anything we ever did before.
00:21:27.000We were just sitting there, standing there, shaking each other's heads like, what the fuck are we doing?
00:26:59.000But that said, isn't it more fun to have what's essentially a super body?
00:27:05.000Isn't it more fun to have a body that can do all kinds of crazy shit that a regular body can't do?
00:27:10.000So when Eddie's in there deadlifting and shit and putting these big lifts in and Doing these crazy kettlebell workouts and shit, you just start feeling like, wow, I feel fucking vibrant.
00:28:09.000And then he got his food, and he was getting salsa from the salsa bar, and he was putting it in his bag, and he folded the bag down so angry.
00:28:16.000Or not angry, but it had to be folded like all the lines had to be perfectly...
00:32:45.000Yeah, and they're selling all these, like, real props, like the Iron Man, like, vest and stuff like that, and one of the things was the Hulk head.
00:33:29.000Yeah, I took acting class with his wife once a long time ago, and we were all standing outside, just waiting around during a break, so we were all smoking.
00:33:37.000And he was sitting in the car waiting for her to come out, and he's like, hey, you shouldn't smoke.
00:33:43.000And I was like, yeah, I know, it's bad for me, I know.
00:33:46.000And then I turned back around to my friend, and I turned back around to see him after like a minute, and he's still just staring at me, and he goes, I said you shouldn't smoke.
00:36:09.000It looks so much better than that fake Star Wars stuff.
00:36:12.000When that thing was in London, when it was fucking people up in the streets, when it came out of the dirty movie theater, it kills everybody in the dirty movie theater, and then it's walking on the London streets, they showed just enough of it to scare the fuck out of you.
00:36:27.000They didn't have to close up, show the thing, move it around, because when you do that, then people get used to it.
00:38:16.000And then you'll do some CGI, like his legs were CGI'd, so they bat backwards, like all dogs' legs and shit like that, which is really weird that he's walking upright on those.
00:39:04.000Because they just played it just enough where you don't even get to see it.
00:39:08.000He sees it and you can see it in his eyes and he runs and then you hear the thing in the background making this crazy noise and he's running and you can't see it.
00:39:16.000And then finally, in the end of the scene, you see it at the bottom of the stairs.
00:45:25.000She had this weird way of like, she would tell you, like she told my father just out of nowhere, or my grandfather rather, she told him out of nowhere, Joe, call your mother.
00:46:32.000My grandparents lived in Newark, New Jersey.
00:46:34.000And it started out in an all-Italian neighborhood, and then it became an all-black neighborhood, then it became an all-Puerto Rican neighborhood, and Dominicans, and all these other people moved in.
00:46:44.000And my grandparents, they stayed there forever.
00:46:47.000And at one point in time, they were renting the room out, apparently, to some dude, and the dude died.
00:46:52.000And they swore that this dude was still in the house.
00:47:55.000- Yeah, yeah, yeah. - One of the first threads I ever did on your message board was, my sister, I think it was, she went to this haunted house, a famous haunted house in West Virginia, and they stayed at, and she took a photo using her camera, and one of the first things I ever posted on your forum was like these photos, because it actually had like a person that looked like because it actually had like a person that looked like a ghost standing on the porch, And it was fucking creepy.
00:48:17.000I've been trying to find that photo for so many years.
00:49:36.000What they believe is, some people believe that when you have all this positive energy, that that positive energy actually manifests itself in these spheres, but that you cannot see it.
00:49:46.000It can only be viewed when it's photographed.
00:49:48.000How do they know that they are positive fairies, not negative energy fairies?
00:49:52.000Because they say, if you talk to the people who really believe in it, Eddie Bravo, they say that it shows up when you have positive thoughts and positive energy.
00:50:01.000I've seen some really compelling pictures.
00:50:03.000I've seen some really interesting pictures of people happy, smiling, and they're holding their hands up, and there's orbs all around their photo.
00:50:38.000If you take a photo, say, and it's like a blurry photo, it can calculate where each image went wrong and how it all stretched out, and it can turn it into an un-blurry picture.
00:50:51.000What it pretty much looks, it looks at the photo and does its math, like how the blur is.
00:50:57.000And it finds the path that if you're holding the camera...
00:51:00.000It just infers what it would have been?
00:51:01.000Yeah, like if you're holding the camera and you're taking a photo and it goes a little right when you take a photo, it can see that in the camera by the blur, like how the blur is.
00:51:09.000And so it tries to reverse that and straighten it back together.
00:51:39.000But does that mean if you lose your phone, someone's going to see all your dick pictures?
00:51:44.000No, because you have a password lock on it.
00:51:47.000By the way, I just found out about this program.
00:51:49.000I can't find it yet, and I can't remember the name, but there's this program that you can put on your iPhone that if somebody gets the passcode wrong, it will automatically take a photo using the front camera.
00:52:01.000And so then if you lose it, then you can track it also using Google Maps, and you can play alarms, and you can have it recorded.
00:52:42.000You know what bugs me about it is that now people are going to be using that shit all day and just having fucking conversations with their phone.
00:52:51.000There's going to be all these robots talking everywhere.
00:52:54.000You're going to be in a coliseum and you're just going to hear like tons of robots.
00:53:51.000You want that, don't you, you little bitch?
00:53:53.000Thousands and thousands of programmed responses to various questions that possibly could come up, and you could just talk dirty to this bitch.
00:54:01.000They should have an app where a girl, you can keep track of her cycle, and the way it'll show you where you are in her cycle is how much a guy can get away with not using a condom.
00:54:40.000We're so gross, we give each other cooties through our dicks and pussies.
00:54:44.000I mean, it's not just an issue of making people, which is most certainly a fucking issue, because there's a lot of people you fuck that you don't want to make people with.
00:54:53.000That's a dirty goddamn trick of nature that we need to fix.
01:00:15.000Okay, yeah, well, I just want to know if this is the Attorney General, or if it's Obama, or if it's the state's attorneys.
01:00:21.000Like, is Obama saying, okay, go for it?
01:00:23.000The Obama administration changed its stance, and the stance was originally that they would only go after people who violated both state and federal law.
01:00:39.000Yeah, but the problem with state and federal law is the state law, I've seen parts of it, it said you can't operate for profit, which everyone sort of does.
01:00:47.000And it's just sort of like, what's for profit, what's not?
01:00:50.000I don't think you're allowed to have profit, but you're definitely allowed to make money to actually pay for employees, I think, and things like that.
01:00:58.000So I think if you do do it by the book, and not like some of these places that's also selling cocaine and shit.
01:01:01.000No one gives all their money to the employees.
01:01:07.000I wish I believed that what they were really doing was eradicating the evil people who were a part of this peaceful medical marijuana scene.
01:01:14.000Peaceful and helpful medical marijuana scene.
01:01:15.000And what we're going to do is just eradicate the ones that are problems.
01:01:19.000But if you really were caring about people, that's not what you would concentrate on first.
01:01:23.000You wouldn't concentrate on people distributing marijuana.
01:02:12.000Well, they're first starting, supposedly, they're supposedly starting in San Diego, because I guess San Diego is, like, one of those areas where everyone around it, there's a very high, like, people don't want it there as much as Los Angeles.
01:03:03.000I don't think kids are smoking as much.
01:03:05.000I think you can't smoke in public places.
01:03:08.000I think one of the biggest things for me is back in the day, you know, you smoked cigarettes, but everybody, you could smoke in restaurants, you could smoke anywhere.
01:03:25.000According to an article in the LA Times from 2007, American smoking rates declined in the seven years leading up to 2004, but remained steady from 2004 to 2007. Wow.
01:03:37.000Largely due to a cut in funding for smoke prevention programs.
01:03:50.000Since 1997, tobacco consumption in developing countries has increased at an annual rate of 1.7% according to the UN Food and Agricultural Organization.
01:04:03.000Is that heavy marketing from the tobacco industry?
01:04:07.000It seems like it steadied off when this study was made or whatever in 2007. When I was growing up, my first high school, there was no question I would not be smoking.
01:06:01.000So carbon monoxide was leaking in there?
01:06:03.000Brick walls on one side and then shitty windows on the other side and it was drafty.
01:06:08.000And so there was only one heat vent that came out of this brick that I had my bed right underneath because I lived in Ohio so it was fucking cold.
01:06:17.000And so the heat would just come out of this vent and warm up the whole entire room.
01:07:52.000And the guy said that when you write and you get used to writing things, it helps you form sentences and phrases in your head better.
01:07:58.000Yeah, but you know, when I'm out, like, off the air, you know, when I'm off the air, I'm, like, at the Olive Garden, or I'm sorry, Applebee's, or wherever I'm at, I'm just having a conversation, so I'm not stuttering, I'm not finishing sentences.
01:09:40.000When you hang out with somebody that's not crazy and you meet somebody new, you're like, oh my god, I can see that this person's not crazy and I just hang out with crazy so much that I feel like everybody's that.
01:09:51.000Yeah, there's so many weirdos that hang out at the comedy store that you just sort of take it for granted, like a boom shakalaka.
01:09:56.000And you're like, oh, it's just a normal part of your life having to deal with those people.
01:09:59.000Whenever I was around that dude, I was always ready to kick him in the chest.
01:10:03.000I was always ready for a bum rush that I don't expect.
01:10:06.000He'll hit people and fucking scream at people.
01:11:38.000He thought he was next in line to host The Tonight Show because he'd attended more tapings of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson than anyone else.
01:15:15.000And on stage, it's become so horrible.
01:15:17.000There's been a couple times lately that I've been going there, and this is like prime, not prime, I guess, but like Sunday, 10 p.m., 9.30, nice crowd in the audience.
01:15:28.000Well, that's when they have friends at the comedy store.
01:15:52.000The weird thing about those nights, well you've seen them too, the open mics, is they sat through so much shit that at some point they just lose faith in stand-up.
01:16:01.000So if you go on, the employees are going right after that.
01:16:03.000And they're like, what are you going to do to us now?
01:18:07.000I read some fucking studies, the strangest study that I've ever read.
01:18:11.000And it's a bunch of scientists that are convinced that there is no free will.
01:18:17.000And that the moment you decide and make up your mind to do something, in reality, you had already decided several seconds before this subconsciously.
01:18:40.000And I really don't fully understand it, because a lot of what I understand about it could be completely opposite from the way he intended it.
01:18:45.000Well, here's my take on it, because I thought about it.
01:18:48.000I'm like, this is a fascinating thing, because you essentially have philosophers that are arguing with scientists.
01:19:02.000Maybe there is no real free will, but maybe it's because this seven-second thing that happens before you make up your mind to whatever the choice is going to be that you're going to pick.
01:19:13.000Maybe that's just a random thing, but the results of that, maybe that's what they can't measure.
01:19:19.000The results of you changing the way you think, and that essentially is free will.
01:19:23.000The free will essentially is how you steer it.
01:19:53.000Right, where it's like, you're going to make this decision this way.
01:19:55.000You're going to struggle with it, and then they come to this...
01:19:58.000Could you imagine if under further investigation they show that there really is a code that we're all picking out through the air and that code is like a genetic code or like a computer code and that it's a wireless frequency that we're tuned into that is moving us in a very specific direction.
01:20:17.000We're all programmed to do exactly what we do.
01:20:19.000If this is what they're saying, if they're saying that your mind has made moves to make this decision seven seconds before you consciously decide it.
01:20:27.000They say this about God, where it's like, if God knows what we're going to end up doing, because there's no time to God in the normal concept of God, then there's no free will.
01:20:36.000He knows we're going to make a decision this way or that way.
01:20:38.000And this is the best way I've explained how that maybe is not the best way of thinking about it.
01:20:41.000If you go and see Jurassic Park with someone who's never seen it before, and you say, oh, this guy's about to get killed, and then he gets killed, your friend isn't going to be like, why did you make that dinosaur do that?
01:21:50.000But they said when he was playing the thing and all you hear the sound drop off and all you hear is the bumping of the keys, the physical keys hitting his fingers.
01:22:41.000That's why I was saying you should write.
01:22:43.000Because I think you have a lot of really funny ideas, but you keep them all in your head.
01:22:48.000You bounce them out on stage, and you write things down that you're going to do.
01:22:51.000But I think if you wrote a blog, like a funny blog, I think you would really get into it.
01:22:56.000You would have some really funny shit, and it would really help your stand-up.
01:23:00.000It really helps your word, your forming sentences, and it really helps your material.
01:23:05.000Because when you sit down to write a blog, at least for me, when I write, I never restrict myself, unless I'm working on a particular bit that I'm trying to tighten up, I don't restrict myself to what subject or how I'm going to do it.
01:23:26.000And as you're writing, then, you know, it's like it takes longer to write the word neuroscientist than it does to think of a neuroscientist.
01:23:34.000But it makes you keep thinking about it.
01:23:35.000Right, it makes you keep thinking about it.
01:23:44.000Yeah, when you actually write things down, there's something to it, I think, where it enriches the angles.
01:23:49.000It's hard to keep your concentration, too.
01:23:51.000Like, if you're thinking about, like, whatever it is, I don't know, the skulls, and you're trying to write a bit about skulls without writing it down, without putting a pen to paper, your mind then wanders to something else, and you're no longer doing the writing about the thing.
01:24:01.000That's why I've said it before, I'll say it again, that Write Room application is the shit.
01:24:05.000If you have a Mac, it's called Write Room, and I know there's a PC variation before it, but I'm on Team Mac, so you can suck it.
01:24:13.000The best real-world advice I got on writing came from Damon Wayans, actually, once when I was starting.
01:30:00.000I believe there's a bunch of history that's obviously lost in North America because North America used to be covered in a glacier and the glacier fucking crushed everything and melted and created the Great Lakes and all that shit.
01:30:13.000But the other thing, I always see Filipinos and they're always somewhat Mexican.
01:30:18.000They look sort of Mexican for the Asians.
01:30:20.000I talked to Edwin San Juan yesterday, and he was like, yeah, the Spanish came and raped the fuck out of us.
01:31:56.000If you look at the evolution of the earth and the progress of people moving around, it is a very strange thing that this one awesome spot that used to be connected to everything was completely empty.
01:32:09.000Except for a few tribes of nomadic people.
01:32:21.000For the short period of time when the Indians were in the best situation, before the white men found out what the fuck was over here, this must have been the dopest playground of all.
01:38:25.000Joey Diaz always talks about how funny he is.
01:38:27.000He was talking about, when we did the Ness show in Toronto two years ago, the summer before this one, that he had this bit about the worst thing about your girl having a miscarriage is that you have to act upset.
01:40:36.000There will be a zombie apocalypse at some point.
01:40:37.000Well, we all know that there's too many fucking people for the amount of resources that we have in this one area that we've all chosen to reside in.
01:40:43.000And eventually that shit's going to fall apart.
01:40:45.000If we don't figure out this whole petrochemical dependency thing, we're eventually going to run out of fucking oil.
01:40:51.000I mean, whether it's 100 years from now or 10 years from now.
01:40:53.000In the grand scheme of it, we'll run out of oil.
01:41:15.000And then you smell it cooking, and you look over the window, and you see your fucking neighbors chewing on your dog, looking like fucking monsters.
01:41:21.000And you're like, oh, why'd you guys do that?
01:41:22.000I ate my fucking dog because they were hungry.
01:41:26.000Yeah, people are going to start eating dogs, and then they're going to start eating people.
01:41:28.000We're going to realize we're going to have to eat some of each other.
01:45:23.000I think it has, you know, I think it's probably one of these things that, yeah, whatever they're making, what, $200 a month or whatever it is.
01:46:18.000Maybe that reality is so much better than the zombie apocalypse that they were living in before this fucking Chinese sweatshop factory opened up.
01:46:25.000And they're probably getting medical on that.
01:46:27.000I'm not sure if they do, but they probably are.
01:46:29.000Everybody sort of wants to say, well, maybe everything's okay.
01:48:43.000I think we should just have a country bias out.
01:48:46.000What's the most successful country right now?
01:48:48.000I think we might be the most successful, which is the scariest thing.
01:48:50.000That means that the banks are the really ones controlling everything.
01:48:53.000If everybody's fucking broke, if everybody's broke, there's that one country where everybody's just fucking balling Jay-Z style 24-7 in their underwear, pop I've been bottles with models on the top of a yacht.
01:49:19.000I like the rising up and stating your mind and stuff.
01:49:22.000I just don't understand who you're picketing for and what results you're hoping for.
01:49:25.000Well, they want change, and I don't know what that means.
01:49:27.000But the super rich, they're the ones...
01:49:30.000I mean, are they going to be like, well, you're not affecting me in any way?
01:49:32.000The good thing is what they're doing is getting people to think that this is a very unstable situation, because it is, and that people are fed up, because they are, and they should be.
01:49:41.000This is a fucking terrible financial system.
01:49:55.000Yeah, they forced an audit, and Ron Paul had something to do with this, and they found out there was just fucking insane amounts of money loaned to all these different creepy cunts all over the world, and bailouts just pushing left and right, and it's all our tax money, man.
01:53:34.000That's the reason I didn't want to switch over to Mac, is because their OS 9 and before was really hard to use.
01:53:39.000You couldn't see what was open, it was just way harder to use.
01:53:42.000I remember when John Carmack started coding for the Mac, when they first tried to port id software games over to the Mac, and he was like, oh my god, these things are crap.
01:53:52.000I remember there was no multitasking in the operating system.
01:53:56.000No preemptive multitasking, no memory protection, and things would just shut down, crash.
01:54:00.000He was talking to me to make a blog about how many times he had a reboot, and it would just crash.
01:54:05.000But then they got that OSX, and it became like...
01:54:54.000I saw one on the sidewalk the other day, and I wanted to pick it up, and I'm like, I wonder what the fuck's on this floppy disk on the sidewalk.
01:55:00.000But I was like, wait, I don't even have a floppy disk drive anymore.
01:55:58.000They do them in this factory in Brazil.
01:56:00.000I think they just are mixing it up because the company that is manufacturing the 4S actually had this idea in their head how many they were going to have to make.
01:57:55.000Hardee's on the Midwest, but you know that new steak burger they show where it's this humongous steak burger with blue cheese and onion rings and it falls onto the TV and it's bouncing and beautiful and huge?
01:58:05.000CJ. Yeah, it looked like CGI, exactly.
01:58:08.000I just got it the other day and it looked like somebody sat on it.
01:59:45.000I rolled by this high school on the way over here, and they were playing lacrosse, and all these high school girls had their short shorts on.
02:00:54.000No, what we're talking about is when a person turns 18. That's what we're talking about, goddammit.
02:00:59.000It's just weird that we have a little fucking eight-timer.
02:01:01.000It is weird, especially when you see those girls that are 17. You look like you're 26. I live by a horse stable, so there's all these really hot, rich chicks that have horses.
02:01:11.000So I'll be in Starbucks just waiting in line, and just some of them, man, with their little horse boots on and their little horse outfits.
02:01:18.000You're just looking, and I'm going, goddammit, this is not fair.
02:01:37.000Because men's power is right around that age when girls, they're at their best when they're 17. If anyone is past that, you've gone downhill.
02:03:51.000I know it was a fact at one point in time that one state had that.
02:03:53.000I thought it was New Mexico and I was using it in this piece that I was writing about Catholics and how weird it is that they take Catholics when they get accused of child molesting and they just ship them out of state.
02:06:53.000If you could get one of those helmets that record brainwaves and put it on that chick's head, it would just be like 4th of July in the air.
02:07:03.000Everything's just going in all sorts of different directions.
02:07:05.000What if the whole thing is viral marketing?
02:07:53.000Wild wiggling and jauntily jiggling myself into jolting jams as I friskily flaunt a flirty outfit completed with sexy white 7-inch go-go boots.
02:08:41.000The first five minutes of the video is just four minutes and 59 seconds, four minutes and 58 seconds.
02:08:46.000An underage is in a porno, but she's not doing any porn until she's 18. Yeah, well, she sits there with her ass up in the air with her pants on.
02:08:54.000Maybe playing with blocks on the ground or something.
02:08:57.000With her hands on her button, the moment it hits one...
02:23:47.000Yeah, being live at a stand-up show, even if there's 40 people in the room, it's still better than any CD or special.
02:23:52.000And I think that, yeah, and I think that really if you're going to record a CD, if you're going to record a special, the real way to do it is 200 people.
02:24:00.000That's not what anybody ever wants to hear.
02:24:02.000Everybody wants to do these big, giant...
02:24:04.000I think that's what this place is, around that.
02:25:48.000It was real small, and it was one of the few rooms that I would do for cheap, because I knew that I would go up there and have a real good time, and I knew this would be a good place.
02:25:55.000It's a good place to fuck around, work on my material.
02:25:59.000Give me a shitty wage, but make it a good show.
02:26:02.000Yeah, but they went from that to a giant place.
02:26:04.000Now their place is like $4.50 with a big high ceiling and a balcony.
02:29:01.000You ever hear old albums of a band before they sign with a major album, and you're like, eh, I see where you were going, but you're not there yet.
02:29:09.000But it's still like, I want to have it.
02:29:10.000And that, to me, that CD represents a sort of an awakening that I had with stand-up comedy, too, because I was doing news radio.
02:29:20.000And when I was doing news radio, there was a long time where I got fucking really lazy, man, and I wasn't writing any new material.
02:29:29.000I was just doing the TV show, and when I was doing the TV show, I'd get tired from doing it, and then I would fuck off, and I wouldn't write any new shit.