The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #846 - Michael Shermer

00:00:00.000 Three, two, one.

00:00:02.000 Boom! 0.99

00:00:03.000 Michael Shermer is here, ladies and gentlemen, again. 0.97

00:00:05.000 And we've been talking about silly people for the past 15 minutes. 0.84

00:00:09.000 We had to get warmed up. 0.95

00:00:11.000 The list is endless.

00:00:12.000 We had to get warmed up with body doubles.

00:00:14.000 Conspiracies.

00:00:15.000 Flat earthers.

00:00:16.000 Yeah, flat earthers.

00:00:18.000 Forests aren't real.

00:00:19.000 Is that what they're saying, Jamie?

00:00:20.000 The flat earthers?

00:00:21.000 We're going to talk about the flat earthers for one reason.

00:00:24.000 The reason why I wanted to bring this up is because I think there's a lot of folks out there that are super gullible, and I think they're being trolled.

00:00:32.000 I think they're being trolled by people who put together these elaborate arguments for something that they don't believe.

00:00:44.000 Because they're just trying to make money off of YouTube views, which is entirely possible.

00:00:48.000 And this needs to be thought of.

00:00:50.000 It really needs to be considered.

00:00:51.000 Because YouTube videos can be extremely lucrative.

00:00:55.000 If you can get a YouTube video with millions of hits, and a lot of these videos on all sorts of different conspiracies and all sorts of different crazy things can generate that kind of volume, you're making real money.

00:01:06.000 Pennies on the dollar, but if it's millions, you can...

00:01:08.000 It starts becoming real money, and if you do a bunch of them, and you do them on a regular basis, it becomes a gig.

00:01:13.000 It becomes like what they do. 0.81

00:01:15.000 They create these silly videos.

00:01:17.000 But people who just don't have the time or the inclination to actually read scientific papers and articles and journals and all these different things that explain how we've known for a long time that the Earth is round.

00:01:33.000 Right.

00:01:34.000 Yeah, it's a myth that Columbus proved that the Earth is not flat, that it's round.

00:01:39.000 The ancients knew, the Greeks knew, Columbus knew, everyone knew then that it was round.

00:01:46.000 The Sumerians knew.

00:01:48.000 Absolutely.

00:01:49.000 Their depictions on clay, when they drew it in clay, they drew all the planets as circles.

00:01:54.000 They knew.

00:01:55.000 Right.

00:01:56.000 I mean, there's some obvious simple ones anybody could do.

00:01:58.000 If you see an eclipse, like a lunar eclipse, you can see the Earth's shadow on the Moon.

00:02:03.000 It's round.

00:02:05.000 You know, if you're high enough and, you know, the ships are sailing out, you can see the mast is the last thing you would see as the hull drops over the horizon first slowly.

00:02:14.000 You know, there's things like that that we know the Earth is round.

00:02:17.000 You know, you travel around, you come back to where you started.

00:02:22.000 You know, now their explanation, the Flat Earthers, is that, yeah, it's round like a pizza, but a round flat pizza, and all the continents are on the one flat face side up, and that the satellites are up there going around.

00:02:34.000 It's like, yeah, but the satellite photos don't show all the continents in one picture, because some of them are on the other side of the globe, so that refutes that.

00:02:42.000 Well, not only that, but they think that satellites are actually in planes.

00:02:47.000 They're in planes in low Earth orbit that are just circling around.

00:02:51.000 There's no actual satellites.

00:02:52.000 They don't even believe in satellites.

00:02:53.000 Yeah, so back to your original comment, some of these recent ones are so crazy that you can't help but think, okay, they don't believe it.

00:03:02.000 They're just yanking our chain for maybe financial reasons.

00:03:05.000 But that does get to the question I always get, which is, do these people really believe it?

00:03:09.000 The cult leaders, the people that make extraordinary claims, are they just making this stuff up? 0.99

00:03:14.000 You know, people make shit up all the time. 0.98

00:03:15.000 It's called fiction fantasy. 0.99

00:03:17.000 Or do they really believe it?

00:03:19.000 Are they true believers?

00:03:20.000 And it's hard to tell.

00:03:21.000 It's hard to get inside people's heads.

00:03:23.000 The old flat earthers in the 19th century, I think they really did believe it.

00:03:27.000 There wasn't much money to be made, you know, on those kinds of things.

00:03:30.000 I mentioned Alfred Russell Wallace, who was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin.

00:03:35.000 I wrote my dissertation on him and wrote a biography of him, and he was quite the colorful character who was so open-minded to new ideas that he was also gullible.

00:03:43.000 So open-minded enough to see this radical new theory of the evolution of life by natural selection.

00:03:49.000 That's good.

00:03:50.000 He pioneered other fields like biogeography and so on.

00:03:54.000 But he also was really into spiritualism and phrenology, seances, channeling, all that stuff.

00:04:01.000 And then he encountered an ad in one of the natural history magazines for this 500-pound bet if anybody could prove the Earth is round.

00:04:11.000 So he devised a test, and he went down to the Bedford Canal, which is a long, straight, like 10 kilometers long.

00:04:18.000 You can see the whole distance.

00:04:20.000 And 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.

00:04:31.000 So at each point, the stick is, you know, three meters above the ground at each point.

00:04:36.000 But you can see that it's dropped down in the last one.

00:04:38.000 So it's bent.

00:04:39.000 So he won the bet.

00:04:41.000 But he didn't get paid, of course, because these people are cranks.

00:04:44.000 And so we had to take him to court.

00:04:45.000 This ended up costing him about 15 years of his career, you know, just wasting time, you know, writing letters and getting court dates and suing this guy and, you know, whatever.

00:04:54.000 Just to try to win the bet?

00:04:55.000 Yeah, just try to win the bet. 0.99

00:04:56.000 And, of course, what happens, you get caught up emotionally, like, I'm not going to let this bastard get away with this. 0.99

00:05:02.000 You know, he should have just cut his losses and left, but anyway. 0.95

00:05:05.000 And I found these letters that this guy wrote to the Royal Geographical Society about Alfred Russell Wallace.

00:05:14.000 You 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.

00:05:27.000 It's like death threats, yeah. 0.96

00:05:28.000 So, you know, it's always questionable to deal with cranks because some of them are a little mentally deranged.

00:05:36.000 Sure, and they can attach themselves to someone like Wallace or Darwin or anybody else if you can somehow or another connect yourself to them in some sort of an argument.

00:05:45.000 It kind of legitimizes you, at least in a way, because that person is giving you attention, that person is engaging you, and it elevates your standing.

00:05:53.000 And then whenever two people are arguing, a certain amount of people are going to choose sides.

00:05:58.000 They'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?

00:06:04.000 And they're gonna join in, and people love, they love to be on a team.

00:06:09.000 They love to be, they want to be on Team Wallace or Team Crank.

00:06:12.000 That's a natural part of people.

00:06:13.000 Well, and that's also why people, like a lot of the creationists, want to debate Dawkins.

00:06:16.000 Yes.

00:06:17.000 Because he's the guy.

00:06:18.000 He's the number one top, best known biological scientist in the world.

00:06:23.000 Possibly 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.

00:06:31.000 And he doesn't need the money.

00:06:32.000 Well, in the contrary argument, or the other position is, so many people who are actual scientists want to debate Deepak.

00:06:40.000 Oh, well, yes, and I have debated Deepak.

00:06:43.000 And now, so here's, back to the question is, does he really believe it? 0.78

00:06:46.000 Because people, most skeptics and atheists think, well, Deepak's just a fraud, a con man selling, you know, snake oil.

00:06:53.000 I don't think so.

00:06:54.000 I've known him now for a number of years, and the last year, I've spent a lot of time with him.

00:06:58.000 And the reason I know he believes it, absolutely what he says, is because he's always working on me privately.

00:07:05.000 If we're at lunch or dinner, I got half a dozen emails just the last two days from DPOT. It's not for public consumption.

00:07:13.000 We're not debating.

00:07:14.000 He's just trying to convince me that he's right.

00:07:18.000 Was he trying to convince you?

00:07:19.000 Well, about consciousness.

00:07:21.000 Can you do it in his voice, please?

00:07:23.000 When you read them?

00:07:25.000 A quote from Vendanta.

00:07:26.000 All of the body is in the mind, but not all of the mind is in the body.

00:07:31.000 Swami Rama.

00:07:33.000 Well, as long as he's quoting Swami Rama, we know.

00:07:37.000 He's on to something.

00:07:38.000 So he sends me these not because he's a crank.

00:07:42.000 He wants to convince me that his worldview is different from mine but better, or I should have a more open mind.

00:07:52.000 Well, that's a bizarre quote, and that quote can be interpreted a bunch of different ways.

00:07:56.000 And, you know, one could say that we really don't know where consciousness is.

00:08:00.000 We believe that it exists in the mind.

00:08:02.000 Right.

00:08:02.000 But, you know, what we do know is if you blow someone's brains out, they no longer exhibit any behavior that you could recognize as being conscious.

00:08:10.000 Right.

00:08:11.000 So, in my debates with Deepak, I make the point, I mean, he points out, as you just did, consciousness is the so-called hard problem.

00:08:20.000 Not how neurons fire, we know how that works, but the experience you have of looking at me and vice versa, how does that derive from just dopamine going across synapses or norepinephrine going across synapses?

00:08:34.000 It's just electric meat.

00:08:35.000 How do you get electric meat to have this experience we're having?

00:08:38.000 As he likes to say, where's the red?

00:08:40.000 If I open your skull up, there's no red in there.

00:08:42.000 There's no room in there.

00:08:43.000 It's just neurons firing.

00:08:45.000 So how does that happen?

00:08:46.000 Okay.

00:08:47.000 So this is the hard problem.

00:08:48.000 No one knows, you know, but it's not that we know nothing.

00:08:51.000 You know, we have some ideas about how it works.

00:08:53.000 And I think this is just one of those ones that either will never be resolved, like free will determinism.

00:08:59.000 Okay, we live in a determined universe.

00:09:01.000 How can we have free will if that's true?

00:09:03.000 The words, the language, there are certain restrictions on our cognition of how we think about the world.

00:09:09.000 And it's very much influenced by the words we use.

00:09:12.000 So that could be one of those mysterian mysteries that can't be solved.

00:09:17.000 Not that we're not smart enough, but just the limitations of how we perceive the world.

00:09:26.000 There I like to look at like this, there was a big survey of professional philosophers done about three years ago, about 2,600 PhD, either professors or doctoral students in philosophy.

00:09:39.000 What is your position on?

00:09:41.000 And there's like 25 different debates in philosophy.

00:09:44.000 And like free will determinism, it was roughly equally split between determinists and compatibilists.

00:09:49.000 Dan Dennett is a compatibilist, Sam Harris is a determinist, and a small percentage of libertarian free will.

00:09:56.000 What are the compatibilists?

00:09:57.000 Compatibilists accept the premise that the universe is determined, governed by laws of nature and so on, but that we make free choices within the causal net of the universe.

00:10:08.000 That is, I'm making choices, like I chose to come out here, and that was a choice.

00:10:14.000 Yes, the universe is determined, but my My behavior, my actions, my volitional choices within the net, the causal net, is part of it.

00:10:25.000 And in any case, you can't know all the variables, so it feels like you're making free choices.

00:10:30.000 So you are, in essence, making free choices because it feels free, even if, because you don't know all the determining factors.

00:10:37.000 So the compatibilist is something like that.

00:10:39.000 There's different versions of it.

00:10:40.000 Dan Dennett makes a good argument.

00:10:42.000 Degrees of freedom.

00:10:43.000 We have this idea of degrees of freedom in engineering.

00:10:46.000 Certain systems are more complex or less complex, and certain systems have more variation than others.

00:10:51.000 So if you think of degrees in freedom, like an insect has very few degrees of freedom.

00:10:56.000 It's almost entirely instinctively driven.

00:10:58.000 Small number of neurons and so on.

00:11:01.000 Maybe a rat has more degrees of freedom than an insect, a dog more than a rat, a primate more than a dog, us more than the other primates.

00:11:09.000 Just how many choices, how many variations?

00:11:11.000 So you can come up here, go this way, this way, this way, this way, this way.

00:11:14.000 With the human, it's not clear which way they're going to go.

00:11:16.000 With the rat, it's more predictable.

00:11:18.000 They'll take this maze or that maze because the food is over there, something like that.

00:11:24.000 So, as Dennett argues, we're freer than the mouse or the dog.

00:11:31.000 We have more choices.

00:11:32.000 And even within human populations, the law has already accommodated this.

00:11:36.000 So, you know, first-degree murder is different than second-degree murder.

00:11:41.000 What is the difference?

00:11:43.000 To what extent you intended to kill the person, you planned it out, versus you were out of control, you have inflagrato, you cut your...

00:11:51.000 Partner in bed with somebody else.

00:11:53.000 You lost your temper.

00:11:54.000 Bam! 0.98

00:11:55.000 Okay, but you wouldn't normally do that.

00:11:57.000 So we think, well, violent aggressiveness or drug addiction, alcohol addiction, the tumor on the brain.

00:12:04.000 You know, the famous case of the University of Texas bell tower shooter.

00:12:10.000 Whitman, you know, he left that note. 0.99

00:12:13.000 You know, lately I've been feeling not normal and, you know, I'm feeling quite violent and I'm going to do some bad shit today. 0.99

00:12:21.000 So when I'm dead, do an autopsy. 0.99

00:12:24.000 So he went out and killed his mother and then he went to the Baltar and killed 19 people or whatever it was.

00:12:28.000 They did an autopsy.

00:12:29.000 Sure enough, he's got a tumor.

00:12:31.000 I think it was next to his hypothalamus.

00:12:33.000 So we would recognize, okay, that guy had fewer degrees of freedom than you and I do.

00:12:38.000 It's not that we excuse it.

00:12:40.000 We just say, okay, he had a tumor.

00:12:43.000 So that's the compatibilist argument.

00:12:46.000 Someone like Sam or a determinist would say, it's all tumors.

00:12:50.000 It's all determined.

00:12:51.000 You're just using different causal vectors to describe the behavior.

00:12:55.000 Some of them are more obvious than others.

00:12:58.000 So the best argument on that case I know of is from a guy named Adrian Rain, who's a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who was the first to scan the brains of serial killers in prison.

00:13:10.000 So he would take this portable fMRI brain scanner to these prisons.

00:13:15.000 And these guys have nothing to do, so they're happy to participate as subjects.

00:13:19.000 And he would scan their brains and he found that they have very little self-control, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex.

00:13:27.000 And their prefrontal cortexes were pretty quiet, pretty undeveloped, inactive.

00:13:32.000 So you have all these impulses that bubble up and there's no break.

00:13:36.000 There's no governor on the system to keep it in check.

00:13:39.000 Whereas you and I would count to 10 or walk out of the room if we're getting heated up.

00:13:43.000 They're more likely to just reach out and punch you if you say something they don't like.

00:13:47.000 Something like that.

00:13:48.000 Lack of self-control.

00:13:49.000 So he argues that if somebody has a tumor, it's obvious you can see it, but what if somebody just has the crappiest background you can imagine?

00:14:00.000 You know, raised in a broken home, single mom, drug addictions, gang-related, inner-city, crappy diets, dropped on their head, and so on. 0.95

00:14:08.000 And he gives an example of this young man named Donta Page, an African-American who was convicted for raping and killing a woman. 0.94

00:14:15.000 And he's on death row.

00:14:18.000 I think he got life in prison.

00:14:20.000 In any case, you know, so he describes, he spends pages in this book, The Anatomy of Violence, of this guy's background.

00:14:27.000 And it's the worst background you could possibly imagine that surely has effects on his brain.

00:14:33.000 So there's not a tumor.

00:14:34.000 You can't scan and go, look, there's a tumor.

00:14:36.000 Okay, he's got a tumor.

00:14:37.000 But he's had a background that would surely be different than the background you and I have had.

00:14:42.000 And therefore, he had fewer choices in his actions than you and I would have.

00:14:46.000 And so, you know, the law would deal with that differently.

00:14:49.000 But see, someone like Dan, Dannett would say, well, those are degrees of freedom.

00:14:53.000 He had fewer choices than the person that didn't have the awful background.

00:14:58.000 So, 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.

00:15:13.000 Well, it's a really complex question and subject, and one that people battle with even when you're faced with the determinism argument.

00:15:22.000 If 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.

00:15:33.000 So even when you're making a choice, the choice you're making is based on all the data that you've taken in your entire life.

00:15:39.000 So do you in fact have free will at that moment or has it all been sort of determined by all these experiences?

00:15:47.000 And it's so hard to argue because everybody's life is different.

00:15:51.000 Everybody's take on things are different.

00:15:53.000 Everybody's experience You could have the exact same experience as I do, but your take from it might be very different than mine.

00:16:01.000 You might be a person who meditates, so you might be really into mindfulness and really into sitting down and trying to objectively analyze all your thoughts and your reactions.

00:16:11.000 You might come out with a completely different decision based on that.

00:16:15.000 So is it still determinism if all of a sudden you start practicing meditation and you change your behavior?

00:16:20.000 Is that determinism?

00:16:21.000 I would love that more.

00:16:23.000 Discipline.

00:16:23.000 I would lump that more into the category of freedom.

00:16:25.000 You may become self-aware, like, I have a violent temper, and I really need to do something about this.

00:16:31.000 Well, what can I do?

00:16:32.000 Well, meditation.

00:16:34.000 Okay, so then I choose to start meditating.

00:16:37.000 Just like the addict, I mean, we talk about addicts being out of control, but lots of addicts actually stop.

00:16:43.000 They break the addiction.

00:16:44.000 They have.

00:16:45.000 How do they do it?

00:16:46.000 Well, meditation.

00:16:46.000 They use cognitive behavior therapy.

00:16:49.000 They go to these clinics and so on.

00:16:51.000 But they got to drive themselves there.

00:16:53.000 They got to actively do it.

00:16:54.000 They're aware that they're doing that.

00:16:56.000 I would lump that into the you're making kind of a free choice.

00:16:59.000 You don't have to do that.

00:17:00.000 You could just keep doing your addiction.

00:17:02.000 But if I was a determinism proponent, I would say, well, no, because your decision to make that choice is based on all of your experiences, your genetics, your family, your background, all of your input that you've gotten from other people about your behavior,

00:17:18.000 and you've decided to make a choice based on that data.

00:17:22.000 Correct.

00:17:23.000 That would be the counter-argument.

00:17:24.000 Which is very daunting.

00:17:25.000 Yes.

00:17:26.000 So it's like that, I think, also with consciousness.

00:17:28.000 You know, what do you mean by consciousness?

00:17:31.000 It's a hard problem, okay, but is it ever resolvable?

00:17:36.000 Deepak thinks it's not just through a neuroscience explanation.

00:17:40.000 Bottom-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.

00:17:50.000 You know, he's scaling up.

00:17:51.000 He's just looking at the visual cortex in the back of the brain and looking at visual conscious experiences.

00:17:57.000 Now, let's see if we can figure that out.

00:17:59.000 So I like that approach.

00:18:00.000 But someone like Deepak says, it'll never get us there.

00:18:05.000 So he used language like, consciousness is the ground of being.

00:18:10.000 Now, I know that phrase from Paul Tillich, who said, God is the ground of being.

00:18:14.000 What does this mean?

00:18:15.000 It's not quite to say that consciousness is everywhere.

00:18:18.000 It's in here.

00:18:19.000 It's in the clock.

00:18:20.000 It's in this table.

00:18:21.000 Because that would be more of a sort of a deism or pantheism or something like that.

00:18:25.000 It's more like it's just a part of the universe.

00:18:29.000 I'm not sure I really understand.

00:18:32.000 Because, you know, Deepak has a different language.

00:18:34.000 He has sort of that Eastern wisdom traditions, like...

00:18:37.000 You're being very kind.

00:18:38.000 I would call it word salad.

00:18:40.000 There's a lot of word salad going on.

00:18:42.000 It sounds like that to Westerners.

00:18:44.000 I've tried to put myself into his worldview.

00:18:46.000 So, for example, a few months ago, my wife and I went and spent three days at the Chopra Center at the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California.

00:18:55.000 Okay, this is a great weekend.

00:18:56.000 We did the full immersion, the tea, the diet, the yoga, meditation, the whole thing.

00:19:01.000 And I did feel much better afterwards.

00:19:04.000 But, of course, you can't go to the La Costa Spa and Resort in Carlsbad, California, at the beach and not feel good.

00:19:11.000 I mean, if you don't feel good after that, you're the problem.

00:19:14.000 Right.

00:19:14.000 Not the system.

00:19:15.000 Well, it's also the things you're saying.

00:19:16.000 You're drinking tea, which is great for you.

00:19:18.000 You're doing yoga, which is great for you.

00:19:19.000 You're relaxing.

00:19:20.000 And then you're also going there with the intent to try to make some positive change in your life and try to get on a good path.

00:19:26.000 That's right.

00:19:26.000 All those things are good.

00:19:27.000 All those things are good.

00:19:29.000 Now, Deepak just released a paper that was published this week.

00:19:33.000 He wasn't one of the authors.

00:19:34.000 It was on the effects of his program on biomarkers and various physiological changes.

00:19:40.000 So this was conducted by a Harvard medical scientist named Rudy Tanzi.

00:19:45.000 Rudy is the scientist who discovered the genes for Alzheimer's.

00:19:50.000 So he does a lot of work with Alzheimer patients.

00:19:53.000 You know, to what extent do we have any meds to treat it?

00:19:56.000 Not really.

00:19:57.000 What about Alzheimer's?

00:20:00.000 What about meditation?

00:20:00.000 What about diet?

00:20:01.000 These kinds of things.

00:20:03.000 It's not terribly hopeful, but maybe some of these supplements, who knows.

00:20:07.000 But anyway, he wanted to know what are the effects of meditation on just regular people.

00:20:12.000 So they went to the La Costa Resort and Spa.

00:20:15.000 There's already a six-day program that the Chopra Center runs.

00:20:19.000 It'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.

00:20:30.000 And so what they found was that, and so they compared vacationers who were just staying there at the resort, they took all their various biological markers, to novice meditators, they taught them right there, this is it, day one, here's what we do, go through it 20 minutes and 30 minutes,

00:20:46.000 and so meditation, yoga, and then a group of people that were already there that were serious daily meditators, they've been doing it their whole lives, right?

00:20:54.000 So there was a difference.

00:20:55.000 First of all, everybody got better.

00:20:57.000 Blood pressure goes down, stress hormones are practically zero, and all these great markers, including the vacationers.

00:21:05.000 Then they found a difference between the vacationers and the meditation group.

00:21:08.000 So the claim is that you can go on vacation, but you can't do that every day of your life.

00:21:13.000 But you can meditate every day of your life.

00:21:15.000 So the effects of meditation may be something like you can do it at home.

00:21:19.000 The relaxation, the meditation, the focus, whatever you call that, focus thought on your mantra actually has physiological changes.

00:21:29.000 One of which was affecting beta amyloids, which are the chemicals that cause the plaques and tangles in neurons that cause Alzheimer's.

00:21:39.000 So 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.

00:21:53.000 That's what happens in Alzheimer's.

00:21:55.000 Your brain just dies and neurons die.

00:21:57.000 So amongst various factors that might be effective, meditation may work.

00:22:02.000 Now, someone like Sam, who does meditation, he would look for a causal chain, you know, from the bottom up.

00:22:08.000 What 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.

00:22:17.000 Deepak, of course, wants to use a different argument and say it has to do with mind.

00:22:22.000 Not brain, but mind, consciousness, that's out there.

00:22:26.000 But even saying it's out there is not correct.

00:22:29.000 But anyways, that...

00:22:30.000 It doesn't matter what the worldview differences are in terms of does it work.

00:22:35.000 If it works, who cares?

00:22:36.000 You know, this would be good.

00:22:38.000 And people that meditate, even people that aren't sort of New Agey or Eastern religious, they say it works.

00:22:47.000 I don't do it myself.

00:22:48.000 I do other things that I think are relaxing.

00:22:50.000 But if it works, who cares what the explanation is initially.

00:22:56.000 It'd be nice to know something that's effective.

00:22:58.000 So it turns out, from this new study just published in Nature, that meditation seems to be effective for these biomarkers, including telomeres.

00:23:07.000 It increases telomerase, which causes the telomeres at the end of your chromosomes to either stay the same length or to grow a little bit.

00:23:14.000 And that has direct relations to aging.

00:23:18.000 Because we know that the Hayflick limit on the number of times a cell can divide, and when you get to that upper ceiling, then the cells are dead.

00:23:26.000 And that's what causes aging, ultimately, is genetics.

00:23:29.000 So 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,

00:23:44.000 whatever, then that would be a good thing.

00:23:46.000 Now, 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?

00:23:56.000 This particular study was just the control group versus the experimental group, the meditators versus non-meditators and the vacationers.

00:24:04.000 And how, but how much of, see, it seems to me that that's something that you would want to study over a long period of time and then you would actually have to study the person over a long period of time before they're meditating to really get a base.

00:24:18.000 I don't know if anyone's done that yet, but that would be good.

00:24:22.000 Yes, we need more.

00:24:23.000 The scientists themselves, Rudy and his team said, well, we have to replicate this.

00:24:27.000 You know, it's just a one-shot deal here.

00:24:29.000 Six days at a resort, that was it.

00:24:31.000 We've got to do more of this.

00:24:32.000 But the point is that, you know, surely there is some value in some of these techniques.

00:24:38.000 Whatever you call it, you know, so take the word salad out and stop using words, you know, like ground of being or whatever.

00:24:45.000 Forget that.

00:24:46.000 Your consciousness.

00:24:48.000 Yeah.

00:24:49.000 There'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.

00:25:05.000 Through 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?

00:25:14.000 But I think that what you're saying about meditation and other things that you do that relax you I think it's very important to relax And I think we all know that and that's one of the real problems with our world our society today Especially in America is so go go go that it's like if you are an athlete And you train constantly.

00:25:33.000 One of the most important things is recovery.

00:25:36.000 It's a critical aspect of athleticism.

00:25:38.000 And if you just train and you don't recover, your body breaks down.

00:25:42.000 You're redlining your system.

00:25:43.000 You're not giving your system the proper time to recover.

00:25:46.000 I think that when you meditate, and for me, my big one is the sensory deprivation tank.

00:25:52.000 I have one in my basement.

00:25:53.000 You do?

00:25:53.000 And I go in it all the time.

00:25:55.000 And it's the most relaxing thing in the world because you're going in there.

00:25:59.000 The water's the same temperature as your body.

00:26:01.000 You're floating.

00:26:02.000 It's amazing.

00:26:02.000 And in doing that, I feel like there's no motion at all.

00:26:07.000 I'm concentrating completely on my breathing until I achieve this certain state of consciousness that I get to when I go in there and the way I get to it.

00:26:16.000 Is just concentrating entirely on breathing in and breathing out.

00:26:20.000 And I just think about in with the good and out with the bad and in with the good.

00:26:23.000 And that's my only thoughts that I try to maintain.

00:26:27.000 Other thoughts get in there, they bounce around and they ricochet out and eventually they stop existing.

00:26:32.000 So that is meditation.

00:26:33.000 It's meditation.

00:26:34.000 But I think any form of just...

00:26:39.000 Just give your body a chance to give your heart rate a chance to drop.

00:26:43.000 Give your mind a chance to slow its revolutions per minute.

00:26:47.000 Just give yourself some time to recover.

00:26:49.000 And then also, reflection.

00:26:51.000 Give yourself some time to consider the momentum of your life.

00:26:55.000 Because 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.

00:27:14.000 Right.

00:27:15.000 And it just kind of gets out of hand and you don't have a chance to step back and look at it and go...

00:27:22.000 I gotta stop doing that.

00:27:23.000 Or I need to do more of this.

00:27:24.000 Or I have to figure a way to not do, you know, all these things together.

00:27:30.000 You know, whatever the decision you make.

00:27:32.000 But those decisions come out of reflection, which comes out of space, away from the actual thing and time and thought.

00:27:41.000 Right.

00:27:42.000 My Jewish friends tell me that this is what the Sabbath is for.

00:27:45.000 You know, Friday night sundown till Saturday sundown.

00:27:48.000 That's a time of, you know, family, friends, reflection, no TV, no, you're off social media, you know, and all that stuff.

00:27:56.000 That makes sense.

00:27:57.000 I mean, it's a smart thing.

00:27:58.000 And that's an old tradition.

00:27:59.000 So, you know, yes.

00:28:01.000 Even my Jewish friends are not religious.

00:28:03.000 It's just a cultural thing in that that's probably a good thing.

00:28:07.000 Now, 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.

00:28:17.000 We went to see Deepak and Eckhart Tolle, who did a show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.

00:28:24.000 The Power of Now.

00:28:25.000 The Power of Now.

00:28:25.000 I mean, this place, there must have been 3,000 people, 4,000 people there.

00:28:33.000 Paid 50 bucks a header.

00:28:34.000 I know, it's like, wow, alright.

00:28:36.000 Make it some cash! 1.00

00:28:38.000 Yes, I don't know what it costs to rent the shrine.

00:28:41.000 Those are expensive.

00:28:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:43.000 But, you know, the two of them just sort of walked up and down the stage and just talked.

00:28:47.000 Consciousness.

00:28:47.000 Yes, it's very much like that.

00:28:50.000 You know, the people that attend, you know, these are fairly well-off people.

00:28:53.000 You can sort of tell in the parking lot how they're dressed.

00:28:56.000 Same thing with this last weekend.

00:28:58.000 I was at the Sages and Scientists Conference that Deepak puts on every year.

00:29:01.000 This year, instead of at the Lacoste Resort, it was at the Beverly Wilshire.

00:29:06.000 Okay, so there's a lot of people from L.A. that are Deepak fans, and they go, you know, these are not your normal run-of-the-mill folks.

00:29:13.000 You know, these are people that, you know, upper-middle class, you know, good-looking, well-off, driving nice cars.

00:29:18.000 I don't know if you've ever been to the Beverly Wilshire, but if you sit at the—there's a little bar.

00:29:23.000 It's Wolfgang Puck's Bar.

00:29:27.000 And, you know, so they have good German beer, which my wife and I like because she's from Germany.

00:29:30.000 And we just sit there at the window and watch these cars pull up, you know, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, Bentley.

00:29:35.000 And it's like, okay, this is not, you know, one of my Caltech events, you know, with science geeks coming, you know, it's a different audience.

00:29:43.000 So I do wonder...

00:29:45.000 The people that are in that particular study that Rudy Tansy did, this is not a randomly, you know, picked sample from the general population.

00:29:52.000 You 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.

00:30:07.000 But when you go, we watch the Shrine Auditorium thing with Eckhart Tolle, and he's very effective.

00:30:11.000 You know, he speaks in a manner...

00:30:13.000 I can't even imitate it.

00:30:15.000 It's just very soft, very slow.

00:30:17.000 I mean, I could almost feel myself like melting into the chair like...

00:30:20.000 Hypnotic.

00:30:21.000 Yeah, very hypnotic, yep.

00:30:22.000 Have you ever been hypnotized?

00:30:23.000 I have, yep.

00:30:24.000 That's what it feels like, right?

00:30:25.000 Yeah.

00:30:26.000 So he is probably doing that.

00:30:27.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:30:27.000 He's bringing the audience to a certain state of thinking.

00:30:31.000 And I'm sure it is effective for the now.

00:30:34.000 And, 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.

00:30:45.000 It's just it, you know, and even your memories of the past, it's just neurons firing in your brain now of what happened in the past.

00:30:54.000 And the future is really, it hasn't happened yet, but it's just your neurons firing in anticipation of what might happen.

00:31:00.000 So they're right.

00:31:01.000 It really, all the action is now.

00:31:04.000 You know, of course, as I like to joke, you know, my three days at the Chopra Center or at the New Age place up in Big Sur.

00:31:14.000 What's that?

00:31:15.000 The one on the, right on the cliffs, the Esalon Institute.

00:31:17.000 I'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.

00:31:24.000 You know, my mortgage has a now coming up pretty soon called the payment.

00:31:29.000 And, you know, I don't know to what extent you can live in that condition all of the time.

00:31:33.000 But 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.

00:31:45.000 That seems pretty reasonable.

00:31:47.000 Yeah, very reasonable and very beneficial.

00:31:50.000 I think those people that you're talking about, they do have a whole different set of problems because they have achieved material wealth beyond the imagination of the average person.

00:31:58.000 If you're pulling up in a Ferrari, you're essentially pulling up in a house.

00:32:02.000 You're driving a house around.

00:32:03.000 You're driving a $200,000 plus automobile, which to most people is just crazy that someone could have one of those.

00:32:11.000 So that kind of a person who isn't happy, Is the type of person that wants to go to some sort of a seminar by a health guru.

00:32:20.000 Oh, look at that.

00:32:21.000 A blue Lamborghini.

00:32:22.000 I mean, this thing is too much.

00:32:24.000 Those things will break down on you too, folks.

00:32:26.000 If you're going to invest, that's not the move.

00:32:30.000 Bahrain.

00:32:30.000 There's probably some oil money here.

00:32:32.000 I was at one of the hotels in Beverly Hills.

00:32:36.000 I had dinner there, and this Bugatti Veyron pulled in that was more than a million dollars.

00:32:43.000 And I think they're like 1.3 million dollars or something like that.

00:32:49.000 But it had these Saudi Arabian plates on it.

00:32:52.000 And it actually had palace plates.

00:32:55.000 It said something palace on it.

00:32:57.000 So this was some royal person sent his car over either in a boat or on a plane.

00:33:02.000 And there was, you know, that car and then there's a million of these other super expensive luxury cars all over the place.

00:33:09.000 Those people have their own problems. 0.95

00:33:11.000 The average person who works all day and has a pile of bills and has all this debt is like, God damn it, I would love to be a rich person. 1.00

00:33:19.000 How the hell do these fucking rich people still have problems? 0.99

00:33:22.000 It doesn't make any sense, but you get used to your life. 1.00

00:33:26.000 You get used to your life.

00:33:27.000 And if your life is being an indigenous person, living in Bolivia in the jungle, and you shoot spears at fish and that's how you get by, you get used to that life. 1.00

00:33:38.000 That life becomes your life.

00:33:41.000 And you find problems. 0.98

00:33:42.000 And maybe you don't find as many when you're in a hunter-gatherer tribe as you do if you're some sort of a hedge fund manager who's just on Adderall every day and completely stressed out and your wife's driving you crazy and your mistress wants you to leave your wife and you don't know how the fuck you got yourself into this situation. 0.98

00:34:00.000 And then you decide, I'm going to go to this Power of Now seminar and straighten my shit out. 0.98

00:34:05.000 Pull up in your blue Ferrari. 0.98

00:34:08.000 It's like...

00:34:09.000 There's problems.

00:34:10.000 People create problems.

00:34:11.000 And just because someone has material wealth, not only does it not eliminate problems, it creates a whole new slew of problems that would lead to the kind of self-indulgent sort of exploration of your condition that these things sort of enforce and cater to.

00:34:30.000 Yep.

00:34:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:32.000 So you got to go back to work the next day or whatever.

00:34:34.000 So another point I made in my talk for Deepak, by the way, there he is with the fam.

00:34:40.000 Super, super nice guy.

00:34:41.000 I'm sure.

00:34:42.000 He really does care.

00:34:44.000 But if you go to one of these workshops and you feel much better, so there's been a few studies, not many, like big corporations hire people like Tony Robbins to come in and give the spiel to get the sales force all fired up.

00:34:58.000 And they are.

00:34:59.000 They are fired up.

00:35:00.000 As we can tell, the effect lasts for a couple of weeks.

00:35:04.000 They go back, they're hitting the phones, they're making those calls, they're making more money.

00:35:07.000 It's like, it's work!

00:35:08.000 And then it tapers, and they're right back to where they were. 1.00

00:35:11.000 Those motherfuckers. 1.00

00:35:12.000 So this is why we published a study on this in Skeptic, that the number one predictor of anybody that would buy one of those books, self-help books, or go to those seminars, are people that have already done so. 0.99

00:35:21.000 And they do it over and over and over.

00:35:24.000 So in a way, if it worked, why do you have to keep buying the books and the tapes and going to the seminars?

00:35:31.000 Maybe it only works for just a little while.

00:35:33.000 Well, have you ever heard the expression that inspiration is like bathing?

00:35:36.000 It's very effective, but it must be practiced on a regular basis.

00:35:39.000 That's right.

00:35:40.000 Well, that could be it.

00:35:41.000 I think it is.

00:35:42.000 You know, so there's two senses in does it work.

00:35:45.000 Does it work for you personally?

00:35:48.000 And then does it work for everybody?

00:35:50.000 So what the scientists want to know is not did you personally feel better when you went to the La Costa Spa and Resort for three days.

00:35:57.000 Of course, I'm sure you did.

00:35:58.000 But Can we actually measure the differences and then apply that to anybody?

00:36:03.000 And not just that resort, but any resort?

00:36:05.000 Or is it like, you know, 60% of the people between ages of 25 and 40 that have these medical conditions or whatever, when we apply that technique, you know, 40% of the time they'll get better.

00:36:16.000 You know, that's really what we want to know.

00:36:18.000 So on the one hand, you know, if somebody says, I went to Deepak's place, I felt better.

00:36:22.000 I'm glad that they felt, you know, the world's a little bit better place if you feel better.

00:36:26.000 Okay.

00:36:26.000 From a scientist's perspective, like, yeah, that's interesting, but does it really work?

00:36:31.000 Not just placebo or not just temporary.

00:36:33.000 It's like Netflix just released that documentary based on Tony Robbins, and the film is called I'm Not Your Guru.

00:36:42.000 But clearly watching this, this is what everybody, you know, that's my guru.

00:36:45.000 They want to be like him.

00:36:47.000 And he has this hypnotic effect on the audience.

00:36:49.000 It's incredible.

00:36:50.000 I've never seen anything like it.

00:36:52.000 But the question is, when they go home, you know, a week later, two weeks later, did it make any difference?

00:36:57.000 I mean, I'm sure they feel better there.

00:36:59.000 Tony Robbins says a lot of really good stuff.

00:37:01.000 And he says a lot of really motivational things that I listen to.

00:37:04.000 And I'm like, this guy's making a lot of sense.

00:37:05.000 I bet he does a lot of people a lot of good.

00:37:08.000 What I always ask is, what has he done?

00:37:12.000 Other than do these seminars.

00:37:14.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:37:14.000 You know, like, he's become really effective in motivating people.

00:37:17.000 But what has he done other than motivate people?

00:37:20.000 Right.

00:37:20.000 I mean, has he produced anything other than these books that are designed to motivate people?

00:37:25.000 It's like, I really appreciate what he does.

00:37:27.000 And I don't want to belittle it.

00:37:29.000 Because I read a lot of his stuff back when I was competing in martial arts.

00:37:32.000 And when I was starting out as a stand-up comedian, I read a lot of his stuff.

00:37:36.000 You know, and it motivated me and it gave me some good...

00:37:39.000 Good things to think about.

00:37:40.000 I think I was already sort of on a self-improvement path, and I was trying to take in a lot of information from a lot of different places, including Dianetics.

00:37:47.000 I bought a Dianetics book, and they hounded me for 10 years.

00:37:51.000 You're on the list.

00:37:52.000 I ordered it late night on one of those infomercial things.

00:37:56.000 But I think...

00:37:57.000 It's interesting what he's done because it's not like, say if a guy like Steve Jobs or Wozniak who created Apple, if they made a book on how to get motivated and get something done and here's the core Core aspects of success in this endeavor,

00:38:19.000 and I've done this, and I want you to know, I want to spread this knowledge.

00:38:23.000 But 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.

00:38:31.000 And he's just decided to start motivating people now. 0.98

00:38:33.000 I'm like, whoa, what the fuck is going on here? 0.87

00:38:35.000 But meanwhile, people buy it because people love that feeling. 0.99

00:38:39.000 They love that feeling of someone saying something that makes sense, that gets them going.

00:38:44.000 Yeah, I'm going to eat plant-based and I'm going to go jogging every day and I'm doing yoga four times a week and I'm going to drink only water and I'm going to...

00:38:53.000 And then one day they pass by Krispy Kreme and that hot, hot, fresh Oh, man.

00:39:03.000 Yeah.

00:39:20.000 He's better than that.

00:39:21.000 Of course.

00:39:22.000 Absolutely.

00:39:39.000 I think what it's like is like rehab.

00:39:41.000 You know, my friend Chris Bell, who made this recent documentary, Prescription Thugs, and he made Bigger, Stronger, Faster, that documentary on steroids.

00:39:52.000 A really cool guy.

00:39:54.000 And it was really fascinating as he went through making this documentary, Prescription Thugs, and then in the process of it, had a pretty significant injury that got him on pain pills.

00:40:06.000 And then he got hooked on pain pills himself while he was doing a documentary on pharmaceutical drugs being highly addictive.

00:40:13.000 He 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.

00:40:34.000 In order to enact any real change.

00:40:37.000 And I think that's probably the same thing with motivational speakers. 0.99

00:40:41.000 I think you can get that initial burst where somebody could slap you and go, hey, Mike, I'm taking these fucking pills away from you, man. 0.99

00:40:48.000 You can't keep taking these things. 1.00

00:40:50.000 You're hooked.

00:40:50.000 You're like, you're right, man.

00:40:51.000 You're right.

00:40:51.000 I got to change.

00:40:52.000 So there's this burst of motivation.

00:40:54.000 You're a good man.

00:40:55.000 You're a smart guy.

00:40:56.000 You're too smart for these pills.

00:40:57.000 You're right.

00:40:58.000 You're right.

00:40:59.000 And you get that feeling, you wake up the next day, and you go jogging, you get a good sweat, and you go and you get some wheatgrass juice, and you power that down.

00:41:05.000 You're like, I'm on the path!

00:41:06.000 But then the inspiration dies off, and you so comfortably slide back into your old ways.

00:41:14.000 So I think these motivational speeches by Anthony Robbins or any of these people, I think they can be beneficial.

00:41:20.000 But I think for most people, the comfort of their old path is such a magnet.

00:41:26.000 Their compass just...

00:41:28.000 It just goes towards that magnet.

00:41:30.000 It's almost like they need it every day for like a year or two years or three years or something.

00:41:37.000 Well, Rudy Tanzi from Harvard tells me for a normal habit, it takes about 60 days, two months, every single day of retraining the brain on a new habit.

00:41:46.000 And that's just a regular habit, like drinking coffee or just what time you get up in the morning or whatever, exercise.

00:41:53.000 So I suspect with drugs or alcohol it's probably a year or two to really completely retrain your brain, rewire the neurons, literally.

00:42:02.000 To change that habit.

00:42:04.000 It's doable.

00:42:04.000 People do it.

00:42:05.000 It's just, you know, it can be very difficult.

00:42:08.000 So 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.

00:42:28.000 Probably literally dopamine hits from hearing the voice of the person.

00:42:31.000 And someone like Tony Robbins, I mean, I've met him at TED. He's just bigger than life.

00:42:35.000 I mean, he's like 6'8", huge hands.

00:42:38.000 He talks wonderful.

00:42:40.000 Yeah, he's got a great presence.

00:42:42.000 And he's quite the opposite of Eckhart Tolle.

00:42:46.000 I mean, he comes out on the stage and the music and the lights.

00:42:49.000 He's throwing sidekicks.

00:42:50.000 Boom, boom, boom. 1.00

00:42:51.000 He breaks boards and shit. 1.00

00:42:53.000 He throws kicks at boards. 1.00

00:42:55.000 But in the film, this documentary is really quite revealing.

00:42:57.000 It's called I'm Not Your Guru.

00:42:58.000 It opens with him talking to this young man.

00:43:01.000 I think he's German.

00:43:03.000 And he looks super sad.

00:43:06.000 What's bugging you, man?

00:43:07.000 Stand up.

00:43:07.000 What's bugging you?

00:43:08.000 And it's like, I'm feeling suicidal.

00:43:11.000 He says, suicidal?

00:43:12.000 Is he saying this in front of a large group of people?

00:43:14.000 Oh, yeah.

00:43:14.000 3,000 people in this hotel room.

00:43:15.000 Cameras and lights.

00:43:16.000 Jesus.

00:43:17.000 He's going to power.

00:43:18.000 He's going to heal them.

00:43:18.000 Heal!

00:43:19.000 Well, it was a little bit like that, but in a completely different way.

00:43:22.000 He looks down and he says...

00:43:24.000 Is it the red shoes?

00:43:26.000 He goes, what?

00:43:27.000 He goes, is it your red shoes? 0.99

00:43:28.000 Those are the fucking reddest shoes I have ever seen. 1.00

00:43:31.000 Man, those are fucking red shoes, dude. 1.00

00:43:33.000 And the camera goes down. 1.00

00:43:34.000 He's got these red shoes.

00:43:35.000 And the way he says it is so funny.

00:43:38.000 This guy just starts laughing.

00:43:40.000 And Tony goes, don't you be laughing now because you're going to spoil the program for suicide.

00:43:44.000 I mean, come on.

00:43:45.000 And then he just kind of worked on them.

00:43:48.000 Why are you feeling this way?

00:43:49.000 And before you knew it, this guy seemed like he was doing much better. 0.98

00:43:53.000 It would have been hilarious if that guy pulled out a gun and blew his brains out on the stage. 1.00

00:43:57.000 Fuck these shoes. 1.00

00:43:58.000 Boom! 1.00

00:43:59.000 I don't think that would have made the film.

00:44:01.000 But the problem with that, and another story they show in there, is there's no follow-up.

00:44:06.000 We have no idea how this guy does.

00:44:08.000 He had another one with a woman who had weight issues or something, emotional.

00:44:13.000 Is it your relationship you're in?

00:44:15.000 Yes.

00:44:16.000 He's kind of like Dr. Laura.

00:44:17.000 He's figured out after all these years, you're problem number seven, yours is number six, and so on.

00:44:23.000 I mean, there's only like 10 things that covers 90% of anybody that would come.

00:44:27.000 These are them.

00:44:28.000 And so he...

00:44:29.000 Hones in on it.

00:44:30.000 It's a relationship.

00:44:30.000 You're not happy.

00:44:31.000 You love him, but you don't really want to be with him forever.

00:44:34.000 Yes, that's it.

00:44:34.000 That's it.

00:44:35.000 Get your phone out.

00:44:36.000 What?

00:44:37.000 Call him right now.

00:44:39.000 End it.

00:44:40.000 Whoa. 1.00

00:44:40.000 And it's like, holy shit. 1.00

00:44:42.000 Is this Dr. Laura or Anthony Robbins, or the same? 0.99

00:44:45.000 Well, this is Tony in the film.

00:44:46.000 He says that?

00:44:47.000 Tony Robbins, yeah.

00:44:48.000 So she calls the guy, and he's at work or something.

00:44:50.000 He's like, yeah, what's up, honey?

00:44:52.000 Now, I know this is going to be really hard, but... 1.00

00:44:55.000 This is in front of 3,000 people, this shit? 1.00

00:44:57.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:44:57.000 Oh, Jesus Christ. 1.00

00:44:57.000 And she dumps him on the phone. 1.00

00:44:59.000 Oh, fucking Christ. 1.00

00:44:59.000 And, you know, this guy is like, where are you again? 1.00

00:45:04.000 Yeah.

00:45:04.000 I'm here at the hotel.

00:45:06.000 Oh, oh, click.

00:45:07.000 Dial tone.

00:45:08.000 You know, and then Tony says, you did the right thing.

00:45:10.000 Okay, so the question is...

00:45:11.000 But how could you make that call, not knowing anything about that person's past, not knowing their behavior patterns, not knowing...

00:45:19.000 I mean, who is she when she's on that stage in front of 3,000 people? 0.72

00:45:22.000 Is she really herself?

00:45:23.000 Right.

00:45:24.000 Because most people aren't.

00:45:25.000 No, no, of course not.

00:45:26.000 So, you know, I immediately want to know is, you know, two days later, I'm really sorry!

00:45:31.000 Yeah, that seems incredibly irresponsible.

00:45:33.000 To get someone to have so little information and to take someone on their word at that moment.

00:45:39.000 There's some people that one day, for whatever reason, they'll go, you know what? 0.97

00:45:43.000 I can't fucking do this anymore. 0.96

00:45:44.000 I need to get out of my marriage. 0.99

00:45:46.000 And they'll go to the bar and they'll have a drink and they'll get crazy for a few minutes or an hour or whatever.

00:45:51.000 And then... 0.99

00:45:53.000 They'll drive home, they'll listen to a song, and then their wife will send them a text, and then they'll go, what the fuck is wrong with me? 0.93

00:45:58.000 Like, why did I think that? 0.95

00:46:00.000 Why am I this...

00:46:00.000 And then you realize, like, you were just indulging a certain pattern of behavior.

00:46:05.000 So how does he know that that woman wasn't indulging a certain pattern of behavior?

00:46:09.000 He doesn't.

00:46:09.000 He can't possibly know.

00:46:10.000 Or, on the other hand, maybe she's really...

00:46:14.000 Really stuck, and maybe it was really a good idea.

00:46:16.000 Right, right.

00:46:17.000 But he doesn't know.

00:46:17.000 No, that's right.

00:46:18.000 He might have given her awesome advice, but he fucking for sure didn't know that it was awesome advice. 0.97

00:46:23.000 Right, right. 0.94

00:46:24.000 And that's the problem with all these programs, like AA. You know, does it work?

00:46:28.000 They don't collect data, or if they do, they don't make it public.

00:46:31.000 We can't get the data.

00:46:32.000 How many, what percentage of people that come and last this many weeks or months, and what percentage never take a drink or take one drink or whatever?

00:46:40.000 We don't know.

00:46:40.000 No one knows.

00:46:41.000 All we have are the anecdotes.

00:46:42.000 Like, I went, it worked for me.

00:46:43.000 I went, it didn't work for me.

00:46:44.000 Well, which is it?

00:46:46.000 Yeah, wasn't there a recent study on AA where they were determining that people who leave the program...

00:46:53.000 I 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.

00:47:04.000 It did have an impact on people maintaining sobriety, and they think that that impact...

00:47:09.000 May have been connected to the sort of sponsor system that they have and not wanting to disappoint people and camaraderie that you develop in that sobriety environment, which makes a lot of sense.

00:47:21.000 And I think it's really clever how they've structured it in that way.

00:47:24.000 Because I think having a mentor, having someone who's already done it.

00:47:27.000 And 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.

00:47:55.000 Your situation is on the line in sort of a dire way. 0.99

00:47:58.000 Like, hey, man, you hit fucking rock bottom. 0.99

00:48:00.000 We'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. 1.00

00:48:05.000 Now, all of a sudden, there's some urgency involved, and you have someone who you're accountable to. 0.99

00:48:09.000 You have to call this person.

00:48:11.000 You're getting a chip.

00:48:12.000 You know, hey, I'm 90 days.

00:48:13.000 Hey, congratulations, Mike.

00:48:15.000 You made it to 90 days.

00:48:26.000 Right.

00:48:35.000 It's definitely got something, but the study was showing how little of an effect it is.

00:48:43.000 It's really kind of amazing.

00:48:44.000 It does have an effect, but the effect is not that much different than people that just quit.

00:48:49.000 I've known a couple people that are not involved in any sort of 12-step program, like my good buddy Greg Fitzsimmons.

00:48:55.000 He and I have been friends for Something like 27 or 28 years.

00:49:00.000 We met as rookie stand-up comedians.

00:49:02.000 We started within a week of each other.

00:49:04.000 And when I met him, he was 22, I believe, at the time, and he had just quit drinking. 0.97

00:49:09.000 He realized his parents had issues with substance abuse, and as a young man, he's like, look, I can't fucking do this.

00:49:16.000 I'm like, I'm getting hammered all the time, and obviously I got the bug.

00:49:19.000 Whatever it is, I'm done.

00:49:21.000 Right.

00:49:21.000 And never drank again.

00:49:23.000 Right.

00:49:23.000 Like, literally never drank again his whole life.

00:49:25.000 To this day, hasn't drank.

00:49:26.000 And is super successful, Emmy award-winning writer, all these...

00:49:30.000 Right.

00:49:30.000 But people will still tell him, you know, you need to get in a program.

00:49:34.000 Right. 0.83

00:49:34.000 Because you're an alcoholic. 0.83

00:49:35.000 You're a dry drunk. 0.99

00:49:36.000 This is the disease model of alcoholism that's bothersome.

00:49:39.000 Because it's really a behavioral choice or behavioral problem.

00:49:43.000 But if you treat it like a disease that...

00:49:46.000 The good side of that is that it got people off the, you're just weak-willed, you know, and you just, that's your problem.

00:49:52.000 No, it isn't that.

00:49:54.000 But it isn't like cancer either.

00:49:56.000 Like, oh, I'm sorry you got cancer.

00:49:58.000 I'm sorry you have the alcoholic gene or whatever.

00:50:00.000 Because clearly...

00:50:02.000 Like your friend.

00:50:03.000 And there's a lot of people like that that just quit.

00:50:05.000 They're able to do it.

00:50:06.000 And also, from the scientific perspective, we don't have much data because we don't know who they are.

00:50:11.000 They just quit.

00:50:12.000 They don't go through a program and then we have them in our database and we know what they did and how long they came and so on.

00:50:18.000 Again, does it work?

00:50:19.000 The only way to know is to really get more data on this and we just don't have enough from those kinds of groups that do that, like AA. There are academics, scientists who study addiction and they tell me that You know, for the addict to take a single drink—what's the harm?

00:50:36.000 Just 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.

00:50:43.000 Whereas I never drink until I pass out.

00:50:46.000 In a long time, anyway.

00:50:48.000 Since college.

00:50:50.000 But it's like the determinism issue.

00:50:53.000 For me, it's not a problem.

00:50:55.000 It's not a self-control problem.

00:50:57.000 But for the addict, apparently, the brain is rewired, and it's much harder for them to stop to have that second drink.

00:51:05.000 Is it a rewiring thing, or is it a genetic predisposition thing?

00:51:09.000 It's both?

00:51:10.000 It's probably a plethora of variables, right, that contribute?

00:51:14.000 Well, 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,

00:51:29.000 and it makes it even worse.

00:51:31.000 But apparently there is a genetic component.

00:51:32.000 I would like to know if that's true, because I remember this discussion being brought up before with someone else, and then I looked it up and I found something that showed contrary evidence.

00:51:41.000 But anecdotally, sort of everybody who knows that story knows that Native Americans didn't have alcohol in their history.

00:51:54.000 I could be wrong on that.

00:51:55.000 I haven't looked at any of that data in decades, so that could be old material now.

00:51:59.000 Well, genes most certainly do get affected by diet and climate and where people evolve and where their ancestors came from.

00:52:09.000 There was a study today, I tweeted something today that made sense why some people can follow a vegan diet and be healthy in regards to omega-3s, is that If you come from a long line of people who have followed a predominantly vegetarian diet over the course of over a hundred years or so,

00:52:33.000 the genetics start to evolve or change and adapt to this diet to the point where your body produces more omega-3s from different things.

00:52:42.000 It was real recently.

00:52:44.000 I tweeted it this afternoon or retweeted it.

00:52:48.000 The other troublesome thing about AA is the religious component.

00:52:52.000 Not so much you have to believe in God.

00:52:54.000 No, no.

00:52:54.000 That's why they should supplement with it.

00:52:56.000 It's more recent than that.

00:52:58.000 Did I see something about omega-3s may not be as healthy as we thought? 0.98

00:53:02.000 God damn it, I never know what to think, Michael Shermer! 0.98

00:53:06.000 I don't have enough time! 0.99

00:53:07.000 Science keeps changing. 0.56

00:53:08.000 But not just that you're supposed to believe in a higher power for AA to work, but that you're, in a much more insidious way, I think, you're like a sinner.

00:53:17.000 You were an original sinner. 0.99

00:53:18.000 You are an alcoholic. 1.00

00:53:20.000 Say it. 0.99

00:53:21.000 My name is Michael, and I'm an alcoholic.

00:53:23.000 It's like the born again.

00:53:24.000 I'm a sinner.

00:53:25.000 I was born sinful, but I accept Jesus.

00:53:27.000 Wouldn't it be better to say, my name is Michael Shermer, and I am a free man?

00:53:33.000 I like that.

00:53:34.000 I'm not trapped by any sort of a drug or alcohol.

00:53:37.000 That would be more empowering.

00:53:38.000 Yeah, that seems way better.

00:53:40.000 And that would be the Tony Robbins approach.

00:53:42.000 You can change it.

00:53:43.000 See? 1.00

00:53:44.000 He's throwing sidekicks and shit. 0.99

00:53:45.000 Did you see the thing that happened with Tony Robbins recently where they had one of those coal walk things that he does? 1.00

00:53:51.000 Yes, yes, yes. 0.99

00:53:51.000 But these assholes were taking selfies while they were firewalking and they all burnt their feet. 0.99

00:53:55.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:53:57.000 It was so crazy!

00:53:58.000 I can't believe he still does the firewalks, you know, because it's a little risky.

00:54:01.000 I've done it twice.

00:54:02.000 We did it once for a Fox TV show.

00:54:05.000 And first of all, we had a hard time finding any place to do it.

00:54:08.000 Well, you did it as a skeptic to prove...

00:54:10.000 Yeah.

00:54:10.000 Explain the whole...

00:54:12.000 Well, first of all, I want to know what the experience is like.

00:54:14.000 Right.

00:54:15.000 And then second, what is the explanation?

00:54:17.000 Why is it your feet don't get burnt?

00:54:18.000 Like, in one of the shows, we actually strapped raw steaks To my feet and then walked across the coals and the steaks didn't get burned if you just walk quickly enough.

00:54:29.000 So either dead meat is conscious and thinking positive thoughts or it has nothing to do with positive thoughts.

00:54:35.000 It didn't get cooked at all?

00:54:37.000 No, no, because if you move fairly quickly, the conductance of the heat is very slow with wood.

00:54:43.000 So the analogy is this.

00:54:44.000 You turn the oven up to 450 degrees, and you put a cake in.

00:54:47.000 And you let it sit there for a while.

00:54:49.000 You open the pan.

00:54:49.000 You put your hand in.

00:54:50.000 The air is 450 degrees, but you don't get burnt.

00:54:53.000 Right.

00:54:53.000 You touch the cake, and it's 450 degrees.

00:54:56.000 You don't get burnt.

00:54:56.000 But you touch the cake pan, or the metal part of the oven, and you're burnt almost instantly.

00:55:02.000 The temperature is all the same.

00:55:03.000 It's the heat conductivity that is how quickly a material transduces heat from it to you.

00:55:10.000 Which is why we cook on steel versus the actual coals themselves.

00:55:14.000 Yeah, yeah, right.

00:55:15.000 Because the coals are a poor conductor of heat.

00:55:19.000 Science!

00:55:21.000 The thing with firewalking is this.

00:55:23.000 You won't get burned if the bed is no longer than about 10 to 15 feet.

00:55:29.000 You know, eight feet is better.

00:55:30.000 And you have maybe a flat of grass that's wet on either side so that the temperature of the bottom of your feet is a little bit cooler.

00:55:38.000 And then you traipse across.

00:55:39.000 Don't stop to take selfies.

00:55:41.000 Big mistake.

00:55:43.000 But if you go above 15 to 20 feet, the heat's going to start to build up.

00:55:48.000 And there you can get burnt.

00:55:50.000 So my guess is what happened with his people.

00:55:53.000 It was probably a short bed, but probably they didn't.

00:55:56.000 Scoot across fairly quickly.

00:55:58.000 The two times I did it, it was an eight-foot bed.

00:56:00.000 You know, I didn't mess around, man.

00:56:02.000 I just plowed right across houses like that.

00:56:04.000 Because it's very intimidating.

00:56:05.000 Is that you?

00:56:06.000 Oh, that's...

00:56:06.000 No.

00:56:07.000 Is there a... 1.00

00:56:08.000 Yeah, these people are so silly. 0.99

00:56:10.000 If you Google Michael Shermer firewalk, there's a video. 0.99

00:56:13.000 Yeah, that's a very short little firewalk.

00:56:14.000 Yeah, it's very short.

00:56:15.000 And see the flames on the side?

00:56:17.000 They put wood on there after it's burned for hours and hours, and then they put cooking oil so that the flames are coming up.

00:56:25.000 From an angle, it makes it look like you're almost walking through the flames, which you're not.

00:56:29.000 Well, isn't it sort of in some ways like kind of a rite of passage or something?

00:56:34.000 What you're doing is like a ritualistic thing, and then you feel like, I made it!

00:56:37.000 Well, Tony says it's a metaphor.

00:56:38.000 It's a metaphor for accomplishing things.

00:56:40.000 Yes.

00:56:40.000 It really doesn't mean anything.

00:56:42.000 Well, the problem is when you know what you just said, now that metaphor is not going to fucking work anymore. 0.73

00:56:47.000 So you just ruined all the seminars. 0.96

00:56:49.000 All the positive thinking, yes.

00:56:50.000 All the people that could have possibly gotten over the hump, now you've ruined it, Michael Shermer.

00:56:55.000 How dare you?

00:56:56.000 Yep, yep, yep.

00:56:57.000 Well, I mean, we want to know.

00:56:59.000 How does it work?

00:57:00.000 So if you had a bed of metal, no one could walk on it.

00:57:03.000 Not even Tony Robbins, no matter how positive he was thinking.

00:57:07.000 So dead wood, coals, is a poor conductor of heat.

00:57:10.000 That's it.

00:57:11.000 That's all it is.

00:57:12.000 Yeah, that makes a ton of sense.

00:57:14.000 That'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.

00:57:21.000 Yeah, and that's why we choose certain metals as well to cook in, you know.

00:57:27.000 I'm amazed he could get insurance for this because people do get burnt.

00:57:30.000 And the ones we did, some of the people, other people had little blisters because, you know, if you walk slowly or you have, you know, I go to bed for it a lot, so I have pretty good calluses on the bottom of my feet.

00:57:41.000 But 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.

00:57:48.000 Especially if you get pedicures and you put moisture on your...

00:57:51.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:57:51.000 You're a tenderfoot, literally.

00:57:54.000 Literally.

00:57:55.000 A tenderfoot, that's right.

00:57:56.000 That was the Cub Scout thing, right?

00:57:58.000 You were a tenderfoot in the beginning?

00:57:59.000 That's hilarious.

00:58:01.000 What a hilarious way to describe it.

00:58:02.000 But with all these things, you know, it's all things in moderation.

00:58:05.000 It's the extremism that gets people in trouble, you know?

00:58:07.000 It's like, you can never have a drink.

00:58:09.000 You can never have a piece of meat.

00:58:11.000 You can...

00:58:11.000 Never do this or that.

00:58:13.000 And then when you go off the wagon, so to speak, then you feel like a sinner.

00:58:17.000 And it's back to that religious thing.

00:58:18.000 You sin. 1.00

00:58:19.000 You're a bad person.

00:58:21.000 And that adds too many, I think, negative emotional elements to behavior.

00:58:25.000 Right.

00:58:25.000 Then you're connecting all these...

00:58:28.000 You're good to go.

00:58:58.000 There's a thing that people do where they get a part of a team or a group, or you're one of those now.

00:59:06.000 You know, hey, I'm an ultra-marathon runner now, and then, like, I'm in that group.

00:59:11.000 That's right, yep, yep.

00:59:12.000 I just reviewed this book for the Wall Street Journal on CrossFit training and what it means to be fit now versus when I was in my 20s, say.

00:59:18.000 And, you know, back when Nautilus was introduced, you know, the idea was, you know, isolate the muscle groups.

00:59:25.000 Everybody's like, yeah, that's good.

00:59:26.000 Isolate the muscle groups.

00:59:27.000 So this author is going, why is that good?

00:59:30.000 How did it ever get established that isolating a muscle group is a good thing?

00:59:34.000 And he shows that, you know, free weights, you're using all of your body, every muscle, tendon, you know, just the balance and the move and all that stuff.

00:59:41.000 It's much better.

00:59:43.000 But then the more I looked into it, I thought, well, of course, this is when high schools started introducing physical education.

00:59:49.000 You've got to go in the gym.

00:59:50.000 Everybody's in the gym.

00:59:51.000 You can't turn loose thousands of teenage kids in free weight rooms and not have injuries.

00:59:56.000 So the Nautilus machine, that was the solution.

00:59:59.000 It's isolated.

00:59:59.000 No one's going to get hurt.

01:00:00.000 You can turn loose somebody.

01:00:02.000 You can't clean and jerk a big weight and not have somebody explain how to do it without getting hurt.

01:00:07.000 Yeah, that's certainly true, but I think the big aspect of it was people like to make things more complicated than they need to be, or they always like to invent some new way to do things, and sometimes that new way to do things looks awesome, like a Nautilus machine.

01:00:22.000 Right.

01:00:22.000 I mean, they have the big cam system, and there's the cables, and you get the plates, you put the pin in the plate, and you get to move it up and down, and it's all...

01:00:30.000 Right.

01:00:30.000 I 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.

01:00:41.000 But those are not that glamorous.

01:00:42.000 Those machines are very glamorous.

01:00:44.000 You could tell people that you're pulling the whole stack.

01:00:48.000 Look, I've got the whole stack!

01:00:51.000 Those isolating movements at one point in time were thought to be the best way to develop muscle because they're really good for bodybuilding.

01:00:59.000 But 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.

01:01:13.000 It's not healthy, but they want big biceps, so they just keep constantly doing curls.

01:01:18.000 So you can get really out of whack doing those sort of exercises if you're not careful.

01:01:24.000 If you want to be a bodybuilder, that was always the protocol.

01:01:28.000 If you look at how Arnold lifted, now a lot of these Franco-Colombo guys, they were all in isolation exercises. 0.93

01:01:35.000 They did a lot of tricep extensions.

01:01:38.000 They did a lot of things to pump those muscles up. 0.93

01:01:40.000 They did squats and leg presses and stuff too, but a lot of it was involving hitting specific muscle groups to accentuate those.

01:01:50.000 But it just wasn't the way to go. 1.00

01:01:52.000 But people, for a long time, thought those machines were the shit. 1.00

01:01:56.000 They were like, this is my solution. 0.99

01:01:58.000 In my review, I wrote about this guy I met back in the 80s when I got into bike racing named Phil Granasha.

01:02:03.000 He was Mr. California Bodybuilder in 1954, the year I was born.

01:02:10.000 And through the 50s and early 60s, he was just lifting weights, Mr. Bodybuilder.

01:02:15.000 Then he met a cyclist in San Francisco.

01:02:18.000 Why don't you come out?

01:02:18.000 We got the Sunday ride going up in the local hills.

01:02:21.000 Oh, I'm going to kick their ass! 1.00

01:02:22.000 Kick their ass! 1.00

01:02:24.000 Said he got dropped on the first hill. 1.00

01:02:25.000 Bye-bye!

01:02:26.000 They're gone.

01:02:26.000 And he realized, wait a minute, maybe I'm not fit.

01:02:28.000 He was Mr. California, yeah, but also Mr. Fitness, or the most fit person in California.

01:02:34.000 He realized, I'm not fit.

01:02:35.000 I got no cardiovascular.

01:02:37.000 So he took up cycling and so on.

01:02:40.000 So this CrossFit book, these people are more balanced.

01:02:43.000 That was the idea, I guess.

01:02:45.000 Because you don't even know what you're going to do for the competition, right?

01:02:47.000 You show up and it could be any one of these different tasks.

01:02:51.000 So you have to be more well-rounded.

01:02:53.000 As opposed to, I can lift this one particular Nautilus weight.

01:02:57.000 Yeah.

01:02:57.000 I read something about CrossFit taking a critical role in our society that there was a comparison to CrossFit and religion.

01:03:07.000 And they were saying that essentially as people become more secular and they move away from religion, they gravitate towards things like CrossFit.

01:03:14.000 They give them this sort of sense of community and shared experience and like uncommon shared experience.

01:03:22.000 Because like the average person, you go to work and you got calluses that are bleeding.

01:03:25.000 Yeah.

01:03:26.000 Did my workout of the day today.

01:03:27.000 There's something that separates Mike from the pack. 1.00

01:03:30.000 As he passes the break room, you're like, Mike's fucking crazy. 0.99

01:03:34.000 Doing chin-ups every morning at 6 a.m. 1.00

01:03:36.000 with a bunch of other assholes down in Sepulveda at the CrossFit Center. 0.80

01:03:40.000 And you get this feeling like, I belong to this group of unusual people doing unusual things. 0.97

01:03:47.000 It's a social process, and also that's what religions do in part.

01:03:51.000 You know, it's our group here, and we're meeting once a week or whatever, and we have these rituals.

01:03:56.000 It's all like that.

01:03:57.000 They're very attractive to people, those things.

01:03:59.000 Very.

01:03:59.000 There's a book called Bowling Alone by a sociologist that's sort of tracking the decline of social things like bowling, bowling leagues.

01:04:10.000 You know, there's not very many bowling leagues anymore.

01:04:13.000 More and more things like that.

01:04:14.000 We're more isolated.

01:04:15.000 We do our own thing on your computer at home or whatever.

01:04:19.000 Actually, it's a good thing to get out there and have a community.

01:04:22.000 But as always, it's the extremism that I'm going to do this six hours a day.

01:04:27.000 Easy.

01:04:27.000 Right, right.

01:04:29.000 This guy Phil Grenache, he ended up dying early because he just worked out like eight hours a day.

01:04:34.000 He keeled over dead in his gym.

01:04:35.000 I don't know what the cause was.

01:04:36.000 Jesus Christ.

01:04:37.000 Yeah.

01:04:38.000 And, you know, I mean, it's like, God, he had this workout routine that he had like a $5,000 challenge that anybody that could match him for the 45-minute workout routine in his home gym.

01:04:48.000 And Olympic cyclists would come and all these super studly guys, and no one ever made it because it was so specialized for just what he does.

01:04:56.000 You know, like one-arm chin-ups or, you know, one-arm push-ups or, you know, the Stairmaster.

01:05:01.000 He built his own Stairmaster before anyone had Stairmasters.

01:05:04.000 And he would just, you know, just crank it up at such a high level that you just can't do it.

01:05:09.000 And that's all he did.

01:05:11.000 Right.

01:05:11.000 So, you know, was he fit?

01:05:13.000 You know, was he healthy fit?

01:05:15.000 I don't know. 0.59

01:05:16.000 Well, up to the point where you're dead.

01:05:18.000 Yeah, that's probably not it.

01:05:19.000 It's an argument.

01:05:19.000 But once you die from it, I hope you're probably not doing it right.

01:05:23.000 We used to ride around Orange County and he'd go, see that lady out there Sunday morning getting her paper cigarette coffee donut?

01:05:30.000 She's going to check out early.

01:05:32.000 Meanwhile, that chick's probably still alive, pissing on his grave. 1.00

01:05:37.000 There's only so much we can do.

01:05:38.000 She shows up every morning.

01:05:40.000 I just reviewed another book for Wall Street Journal called Why Men Age, about aging, what we know.

01:05:46.000 And we know a lot, but we also know there's only so much you can do.

01:05:53.000 Why is it just men?

01:05:55.000 The guy, he's a doc who treats men for aging.

01:05:59.000 Is there a specific difference?

01:06:01.000 Well, there are some differences, but I think from a marketing perspective, there's already a bunch of books for women on aging.

01:06:08.000 There's not much about men.

01:06:10.000 Anyway, that was it.

01:06:11.000 It doesn't really matter because it's really all the same process.

01:06:14.000 Ultimately, your telomeres will get you.

01:06:16.000 And the idea, well, we live twice as long as our ancestors did a century ago, you know.

01:06:20.000 Yeah, that's true, but really no one's living above 120. Just more and more people are pushing up to the upper ceiling because of public health and just general stuff we do that makes us healthier.

01:06:31.000 In terms of longevity and aging, you can't stop it.

01:06:34.000 All 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.

01:06:45.000 So that's where the future research is, where the breakthroughs will come.

01:06:49.000 Not radical life extensionists that I've also written about.

01:06:53.000 You know, we're going to live 500 years.

01:06:54.000 You know, Shermer, don't you want to live 500 years?

01:06:56.000 I said, look, just get me to 90 without Alzheimer's and cancer, okay?

01:07:00.000 Let's just start one decade at a time.

01:07:03.000 It's just easy.

01:07:04.000 Yeah.

01:07:04.000 Because the problems are really complex.

01:07:07.000 Well, I think the quality of life thing that you mentioned is one of the most important things.

01:07:11.000 I have this phrase that I've said many times, but I'm going to say it because it fits right here.

01:07:17.000 We all love to sleep, but everyone's afraid to die.

01:07:20.000 We love to shut off.

01:07:22.000 We love to shut off at night.

01:07:23.000 Everybody loves it.

01:07:24.000 And we look forward to it. 0.99

01:07:26.000 But that one big shut off when you're not coming back is just too fucked up. 0.99

01:07:30.000 It's just too much. 0.99

01:07:32.000 But it's inevitable.

01:07:33.000 In my next book, I have a chapter called Afterlife for Atheists.

01:07:38.000 So these are not just the radical life extensionists, but the mine uploaders.

01:07:43.000 And so, you know, you're going to scan your connectome, put it in a computer, and then, you know, you'll wake up in the computer like Johnny Depp in that Transcendence movie.

01:07:50.000 Here's the problem.

01:07:51.000 When you go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow, maybe you're groggy for a few minutes, but then you're back.

01:07:57.000 You still feel like you.

01:07:59.000 There's a continuity between today and tomorrow.

01:08:01.000 Or you get general anesthesia surgery, you wake up, you're groggier for a little bit longer, but the continuity comes back.

01:08:08.000 It's still you.

01:08:09.000 So the question is, if you die and we have a scan of your connectome and we put it in a computer and turn it on, are you going to wake up in the computer like you did from sleep?

01:08:21.000 And I don't think so.

01:08:22.000 I think it would just be a copy of your...

01:08:25.000 If this could ever be done, which is very unlikely, because it's a super hard problem, but let's just say it could.

01:08:32.000 I think there's a break in continuity from death. 0.79

01:08:35.000 You're dead. 0.84

01:08:36.000 That's it. 1.00

01:08:36.000 And this thing we have is a copy of you. 1.00

01:08:39.000 It would be like if we cloned your body, and then you die, and then we reconstruct the body, and there you are.

01:08:45.000 That's not you, not first person through the eyes, me.

01:08:49.000 It's just a copy of me.

01:08:52.000 Devil's advocate.

01:08:53.000 If 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.

01:09:00.000 However, whatever we have right now, whatever we are right now, if we can understand it down to the subatomic particles, if we can literally understand you as a person, like you as you stand right here September 15th,

01:09:16.000 2016, If we can understand every single aspect of you, including consciousness, we're not there yet.

01:09:25.000 Obviously, there's a lot of debates and there's a lot of struggles, but we're looking at it in terms of what our current understanding is.

01:09:31.000 If we looked at it in terms of the understanding of people that lived in the year 100 AD, it would be a completely different idea of possibilities.

01:09:41.000 Like, our possibilities today are incredibly expansive.

01:09:45.000 In 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.

01:10:00.000 Imagine that expanding exponentially for the next 500, 1000 years.

01:10:05.000 It's entirely possible that if we get to that point, we can recreate reality to a point where I have a theory about people and it's completely unqualified and don't listen to me.

01:10:17.000 But I think it's entirely possible that, you know how bees make honey?

01:10:22.000 I think people might make the universe.

01:10:25.000 I think it's entirely possible that the way the universe makes itself, it makes a person.

01:10:31.000 It 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.

01:10:42.000 And once they really get going, what they start doing is creating technology.

01:10:45.000 They create in the form of a wheel or in the form of a bucket to carry the water so they don't have to keep drinking out of the river and getting crocodiles and fucking Jardia and everybody's dying from inborn disease. 1.00

01:10:55.000 We figure things out, slowly but surely.

01:10:57.000 And along the way, they make better and better things until they develop computers, until they develop artificial intelligence.

01:11:05.000 They make something that can think for itself.

01:11:08.000 And then they put that thing to work, and that thing gets better in two weeks than 10,000 years of human development, right?

01:11:15.000 And I think that thing probably is how the universe gets created.

01:11:20.000 That the universe, like this idea that the universe has no beginning and no end, that it's this infinite cycle of...

01:11:26.000 Maybe.

01:11:27.000 And maybe it does that through people.

01:11:29.000 Maybe it makes people.

01:11:31.000 Or through intelligence of some kind.

01:11:33.000 Some sort of intelligence.

01:11:34.000 But what we currently understand and know of the known universe, we're the only ones that we know of.

01:11:39.000 And we're looking at what we're doing and we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

01:11:42.000 What are we doing?

01:11:44.000 Where are we going with this?

01:11:45.000 We're just going to keep going?

01:11:46.000 Like, 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.

01:12:02.000 I mean, that's how he described it.

01:12:03.000 We could be summoning a demon.

01:12:04.000 I know.

01:12:05.000 I really think that might be what we do.

01:12:07.000 I think we're getting caught up in the Kardashians, and we're looking at who's got a fake butt, and, you know, are those chemtrails in the sky? 0.99

01:12:14.000 And I'm in the 12-step program, and I'm fucking crossfitting. 0.97

01:12:17.000 And meanwhile, what we're doing is we're giving birth to some new form of transcendent technology that literally rewires reality itself. 0.96

01:12:28.000 Yep.

01:12:29.000 Well, that is an actual theory, you know, that we're living in the Matrix, that it's all a computer simulation and it's all equivalent of a holodeck somewhere.

01:12:37.000 But I don't even know if we have to be there.

01:12:40.000 If it was so real you couldn't distinguish between the holodeck world you're in and this world, then how would you know?

01:12:46.000 Right.

01:12:47.000 So it really becomes one of these thought experiments that's fun to contemplate, but how would you test it to see if it was true or not?

01:12:54.000 And so the...

01:12:56.000 What is this?

01:12:57.000 What are you pulling up there, Jamie?

01:12:58.000 I just Googled his name in AI, and this came up from yesterday.

01:13:01.000 He's talking about neural lace.

01:13:03.000 Oh, my goodness.

01:13:04.000 Well, this is, you know, Kurzweil's been talking about this for a long time.

01:13:06.000 You know, the singularity really will come about with a fusion between human intelligence and artificial intelligence.

01:13:13.000 Well, for people who listen, read the title there, Jamie.

01:13:16.000 What does it say there?

01:13:17.000 Scroll up.

01:13:17.000 Elon Musk hints at neural lace project to fuse AI with the human brain.

01:13:23.000 Right.

01:13:23.000 Well, in a way, a cochlear implant.

01:13:27.000 You said cuck.

01:13:29.000 Do you know what that means?

01:13:31.000 Cochlear.

01:13:32.000 Do you know what cuck means?

01:13:33.000 No.

01:13:35.000 We'll go over that another time.

01:13:36.000 It's the new insult on the internet. 0.92

01:13:38.000 A cuck? 0.94

01:13:39.000 Yes.

01:13:40.000 C-U-C-K? C-U-C-K. Okay, so it's like cut and fuck? 0.97

01:13:44.000 No, no, no, no, no. 1.00

01:13:45.000 Well, in some ways, but it started off with cuckold, which was men who want other men to steal their women and have sex with them. 0.98

01:13:54.000 And then somehow or another, it became an insult that it seems to have a bunch of different meanings, but it's fun to use because it's new. 0.97

01:14:02.000 You know, it's interesting.

01:14:04.000 I'm hosting one of our science...

01:14:06.000 Cuck-servative.

01:14:07.000 The conservative insult of the month explained.

01:14:10.000 What's a cuck-servative?

01:14:12.000 Let's pull that down.

01:14:13.000 We need to know what the explanation is.

01:14:15.000 Hmm.

01:14:16.000 Redstate.com's blah, blah, blah.

01:14:18.000 Daily Caller.

01:14:19.000 Cuck-servative.

01:14:20.000 Yeah, see, cuckled is just when you've been cheated on. 1.00

01:14:24.000 Yeah.

01:14:25.000 Cuck-servative.

01:14:26.000 Okay, poor man.

01:14:27.000 It's just a fun—it's not real.

01:14:29.000 It's just a fun new insult. 1.00

01:14:30.000 But it's interesting because certain, you know, four-letter words, curse words, they have certain characteristics of the words themselves that tend to be short and kind of guttural, abrupt, you know, fuck, cunt, shit, 1.00

01:14:45.000 and so on. 1.00

01:14:47.000 And there's a book coming out called What the F? Benjamin Bergen is a linguist at UC San Diego, and he's coming up to do our science salon in a few weeks.

01:14:55.000 And so the idea is that certain words trigger more sort of deep emotional parts of the brain and the limbic system and so on.

01:15:06.000 Bodily effluvia, you know, feces, sperm, and so on.

01:15:12.000 It's all this kind of crass, basic human—because the idea is you want to hurt somebody with your words emotionally, and by associating it with, you know, sort of a deep part of the brain that's associated with really deep emotional things.

01:15:26.000 That's the theory, isn't there, as I can tell, about why curse words are what they are.

01:15:32.000 You know, why certain words are just, they're not insulting, they're just kind of funny.

01:15:36.000 Like congee.

01:15:38.000 Yeah, yeah, right.

01:15:39.000 So any with an E, you know, that's just not gonna...

01:15:42.000 It's too sweet.

01:15:43.000 Yeah, right.

01:15:43.000 It's like a nice nickname for a friend.

01:15:46.000 So I'm not surprised at all that that word is what it is.

01:15:49.000 Yeah.

01:15:49.000 It makes perfect sense.

01:15:50.000 Just based on the structure of the word.

01:15:52.000 These are two of the worst things you can say to somebody.

01:15:55.000 That's why cuck is so popular, because it seems like, wow, I think we got a new one.

01:15:59.000 It has that sort of feel.

01:16:00.000 I'm surprised that it's conservative and cuckled instead of what I thought it was.

01:16:04.000 Well, that's just a new one.

01:16:05.000 That's a new one that they're adding to the word cuck.

01:16:08.000 Okay.

01:16:09.000 Well, to make the Oxford English Dictionary, it has to be used a certain number of times in secondary and tertiary sources in a year.

01:16:17.000 Well, it's done, then.

01:16:18.000 It's in.

01:16:19.000 For sure.

01:16:20.000 100%.

01:16:21.000 Yeah, the internet is just...

01:16:23.000 The amount of data that gets...

01:16:25.000 What's the figure about how much data gets pushed on the internet in a day that I think it's...

01:16:31.000 There's a short amount of time.

01:16:33.000 I forget what the window is.

01:16:34.000 But in that time, more data gets passed than in the entirety of human history.

01:16:39.000 I have that.

01:16:40.000 That's...

01:16:41.000 That was at the beginning of Peter Diamandis' book on the rapid growth of technology.

01:16:50.000 It's some insane number.

01:16:51.000 Yeah, it was like every month now.

01:16:52.000 It's the equivalent of everything that's ever been printed in the history of humanity.

01:16:57.000 Ever.

01:16:57.000 I don't have to look.

01:16:57.000 It's just a huge number.

01:16:58.000 Just think about that and then think about how many books Ron Hubbard must have written.

01:17:04.000 Because L. Ron Hubbard wrote more books than anyone who's ever lived.

01:17:07.000 You know, if you go to the Scientology centers around the world, they all have a room with his desk and a writing pad.

01:17:14.000 It's literally like this.

01:17:16.000 In case he comes back.

01:17:18.000 In case he comes back!

01:17:20.000 Zombie Elrond comes stumbling through the door with rotten clothes and his skin's hanging off of his bones.

01:17:27.000 Time to write.

01:17:28.000 This chart shows what is being done on the internet every minute in 2016. Wow.

01:17:35.000 So 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.

01:17:49.000 That's just translating words.

01:17:51.000 These are different things that are happening.

01:17:53.000 How many different interactions?

01:17:56.000 Yeah, that's amazing. 0.99

01:17:59.000 That is fucking crazy. 0.96

01:18:00.000 So, 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. 0.99

01:18:07.000 And then, I mean, one argument for the singularity, you create the virtual reality that's indistinguishable.

01:18:14.000 It's just that you just need enough data.

01:18:15.000 Right.

01:18:16.000 It's really an engineering problem.

01:18:17.000 And time.

01:18:18.000 But the question would still be, in that world, would you feel like you right now?

01:18:23.000 Like, through the eyes, first person experiencing I and me.

01:18:26.000 Why not?

01:18:28.000 Why not?

01:18:28.000 I don't know.

01:18:29.000 I'm not sure that it would.

01:18:31.000 I'm not convinced that it would.

01:18:32.000 I'm not sure either.

01:18:32.000 I mean, I kind of see the cryonics argument, because being chronically frozen and woken up again, if you could make that happen, that seems like falling asleep, wake up, anesthesia, wake up, chronically frozen, wake up.

01:18:46.000 It feels to me like it's the same.

01:18:48.000 Michael, the flaw in your thinking is consciousness is not in your mind.

01:18:52.000 Consciousness is in the space that surrounds you.

01:18:55.000 That's right.

01:18:56.000 It is transcendent. 1.00

01:18:58.000 I needed to study him to get a good Deepak impression because that one's racist as fuck. 1.00

01:19:03.000 That one's just your average Indian guy. 1.00

01:19:08.000 Well, this is what he argues.

01:19:10.000 Yes.

01:19:10.000 That when you die, your consciousness, your mind goes to where it was before you were born.

01:19:15.000 Yeah, but the problem is you don't fucking know that. 0.98

01:19:18.000 Well, no one knows. 0.99

01:19:19.000 No one knows that.

01:19:19.000 So you can't say that that's what it does.

01:19:21.000 My argument is where were you before you were born?

01:19:24.000 I mean, most people go, well, what do you mean?

01:19:26.000 That's a non-question.

01:19:27.000 I wasn't anywhere before I was born.

01:19:29.000 Right. 0.71

01:19:29.000 And when you die, you won't be anywhere now. 0.71

01:19:32.000 Maybe.

01:19:32.000 But Buddhists think that you just return to the consciousness in the sky, the force, wherever it is.

01:19:40.000 I think our number one problem is that we try to have a place where you go.

01:19:45.000 We try to have an explanation.

01:19:46.000 Yeah, we feel like it's a place.

01:19:48.000 But Deepak tells me this is a completely wrong way to say it.

01:19:52.000 You're not going any place.

01:19:53.000 There's no place.

01:19:56.000 Well, here's the problem even with that.

01:19:58.000 I think there's an issue with saying that you know anything about what happens after death.

01:20:04.000 You could have a ton of theories.

01:20:07.000 You could have possibilities that you ponder.

01:20:10.000 You could sit down and be as creative as you want.

01:20:12.000 You 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.

01:20:24.000 And when it ends, does that energy go somewhere and become something that we haven't considered?

01:20:30.000 You could do that all day long.

01:20:31.000 Right.

01:20:31.000 And it's fun.

01:20:32.000 But the problem is when anyone says they know, you go back to become a baby again and you start the world from... 0.99

01:20:40.000 How the fuck do you know? 0.99

01:20:41.000 You don't. 1.00

01:20:42.000 The answer is you don't.

01:20:43.000 It's interesting to think that you might be a baby again.

01:20:46.000 It's interesting to think that you might live...

01:20:48.000 I forget what religion promotes this possibility, but that you live your entire life over and over and over again until you get it right.

01:20:57.000 And that's where the term old soul comes from.

01:20:59.000 Reincarnation. 1.00

01:21:01.000 You're obviously a very wise man, Michael Shermer, so you probably were an idiot a few hundred thousand generations ago. 0.99

01:21:08.000 But you've gotten to this point where you've figured out how to live your life very harmoniously. 0.99

01:21:13.000 And in doing that, you exhibit all the traits of an old soul.

01:21:19.000 There's certain people out there... 1.00

01:21:21.000 We all have seen them on the internet that do ridiculous things, and it's just like, why are they so stupid? 1.00

01:21:26.000 Well, maybe this is their third or fourth goal around. 1.00

01:21:28.000 They're in a pre-carnation.

01:21:29.000 Yeah.

01:21:30.000 That is entirely possible.

01:21:33.000 We don't know.

01:21:34.000 You don't know why you were born.

01:21:35.000 You don't know what happens when you die.

01:21:37.000 The problem is in saying that you have an explanation.

01:21:40.000 Right.

01:21:41.000 Whether it's a materialist, very...

01:21:45.000 Cold scientific analysis of the possibilities in terms of what we know today and deny any possibilities of anything other than death being the end.

01:21:55.000 We don't know that either.

01:21:56.000 Well, okay, right.

01:21:58.000 That's correct.

01:21:58.000 But the scientific null hypothesis, that is, your theory is not true until proven otherwise, Nothing happens when you're dead.

01:22:08.000 You're just gone.

01:22:09.000 Could be.

01:22:10.000 Unless there's some other alternative we can test.

01:22:13.000 Right.

01:22:13.000 So one of my favorite thought experiments comes from Carl Sagan's Demon-Haunted World.

01:22:17.000 Awesome book.

01:22:18.000 Awesome book.

01:22:19.000 The chapter is called There's a Dragon in My Garage.

01:22:23.000 So I tell you, Joe, I have a dragon in my garage.

01:22:26.000 You do?

01:22:26.000 So cool.

01:22:27.000 Can I see it?

01:22:28.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:22:28.000 Here.

01:22:29.000 Here.

01:22:29.000 So I open the garage door.

01:22:30.000 You look in.

01:22:31.000 There's some paint cans, a ladder, a bike.

01:22:33.000 No dragon.

01:22:35.000 Well, it's an invisible dragon.

01:22:38.000 Okay, so you say, well, let's put some powder down on the ground, and when he walks around, we'll see his footprints.

01:22:43.000 Well, you see, this dragon hovers about three feet above the ground at all times.

01:22:48.000 And you say, well, I got some infrared cameras here.

01:22:51.000 We can detect the heat.

01:22:52.000 No, this is a cold-blooded dragon.

01:22:54.000 It gives off no temperature at all.

01:22:56.000 You know, well, oh, I have this heat detector, and when it spits out the fire, then we'll see that the fire comes out of it, and that'll prove that it...

01:23:03.000 Well, no, it's coal fire.

01:23:04.000 This is not heat generating fire.

01:23:06.000 It's a very special kind of fire.

01:23:07.000 Okay, so Sagan's point is, what's the difference between an invisible, hovering, cold, indetectable, immeasurable dragon, and no dragon at all?

01:23:18.000 So if there's not some way for us to get at it, then we can't assume it exists.

01:23:23.000 Exactly.

01:23:24.000 I apply that to God.

01:23:26.000 Because people go, well, God is outside of space and time.

01:23:29.000 How do you know?

01:23:30.000 If he's outside of space and time, there's no way to measure it.

01:23:33.000 Well, he reaches into our world to stir the particles, cure the cancer, whatever.

01:23:38.000 Okay, can we measure that?

01:23:40.000 And does it look different from what happens naturally?

01:23:43.000 In other words, why is it that what God always cures is things that might have gotten better anyway?

01:23:49.000 You know, tumors do go into remission, but most of them don't.

01:23:53.000 Most people, they get cancer, they die.

01:23:54.000 So why didn't God heal them?

01:23:56.000 He only seems to heal the ones that naturally go into remission.

01:23:59.000 How come he doesn't grow amputated limbs for Christian soldiers coming back from Iraq? 0.91

01:24:05.000 How come, you know, these are Christian families praying for their Christian loved ones who lost a limb?

01:24:10.000 You know, he's busy curing cancer over here, but why can't he handle the ones that never, ever naturally grow back?

01:24:18.000 What's the difference between an invisible dragon and no dragon?

01:24:21.000 So always, you know, this is my theory of the afterlife.

01:24:25.000 That's nice.

01:24:26.000 How do you know?

01:24:27.000 You do not.

01:24:28.000 You do not know.

01:24:29.000 And when it comes to religion, the idea of some sort of a powerful being that's in charge of the whole picture, and it's got a grand plan for it all, it's kind of comforting to some people, and it's an interesting possibility.

01:24:45.000 And again, it's something to consider.

01:24:47.000 It's something to think about.

01:24:48.000 It's an idea that's been around for a long time.

01:24:51.000 Why has it been around for so long?

01:24:52.000 I don't know.

01:24:53.000 Well, let's go over some of the other things that have been around for a long time.

01:24:57.000 Let's look at what else is in that book. 0.99

01:24:59.000 Is there any other shit in that book that you might think is ridiculous? 0.99

01:25:02.000 Oh, isn't there a story in that book about two children that taunt a man because he's bald, so they sick bears on the kids? 1.00

01:25:10.000 Do you remember that story in the Bible?

01:25:11.000 No, I don't remember.

01:25:12.000 What is his name, Elesias?

01:25:13.000 What is this, the guy's name, who is taunted by these children because of his baldness. 0.97

01:25:18.000 So God summons two bears to come out of the woods and maul these children and kill them because they taunted his baldness. 0.88

01:25:27.000 That would be fitting with the Old Testament.

01:25:29.000 I mean, but if you're talking to someone who's a religious person who believes in the Bible and you throw that around, one of the first things that goes, oh, that's the Old Testament.

01:25:38.000 Right.

01:25:38.000 Well, okay, so the Old Testament is not valid.

01:25:41.000 Right.

01:25:41.000 The New Testament, the one that was written by Constantine and a group of bishops, where they got down, they wrote it out, what, 500 years after Jesus died?

01:25:51.000 That one's legit?

01:25:52.000 Right.

01:25:53.000 I see your point. 0.98

01:25:55.000 That's a more ridiculous one ever, because Constantine wasn't even Christian. 0.79

01:25:59.000 Well, so I mean, the Gospels appear to be written 30 to 60, the first one, 30 to 60 years after Jesus died, Book of Mark. 0.90

01:26:07.000 The others were copied from Mark, obviously.

01:26:09.000 John is really weird.

01:26:11.000 And, you know, no one knew him.

01:26:13.000 These weren't, you know, the Gospel authors didn't know, they weren't his disciples, they didn't know him.

01:26:17.000 So this is second-hand, third-hand, whatever.

01:26:20.000 And there was a committee that decided what Gospels got in and what Gospels were in the valley.

01:26:24.000 The Gospel of Thomas, for example, was voted out.

01:26:26.000 Why?

01:26:27.000 Who knows?

01:26:28.000 Took a Twitter poll.

01:26:29.000 They took a Twitter poll, yeah.

01:26:31.000 It really is.

01:26:32.000 They got all together?

01:26:33.000 Medieval Twitter poll, yeah.

01:26:36.000 In any case, when did Jesus become a conservative?

01:26:38.000 You 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.

01:26:50.000 Dude, he was a winemaker.

01:26:52.000 Yeah.

01:26:52.000 He made wine for people.

01:26:53.000 Carpenter.

01:26:54.000 Yeah.

01:26:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:26:55.000 Right.

01:26:56.000 So...

01:26:58.000 His conservative values would be suspect if he actually read what he said. 1.00

01:27:02.000 Yeah, I mean, all the depictions of him looks like a fucking hippie. 1.00

01:27:05.000 He looks like a dirty white hippie. 0.99

01:27:07.000 Somehow or another a white guy grew up in the Middle East in, you know, the year zero. 0.99

01:27:14.000 I have a feeling they probably looked like they look now.

01:27:16.000 Don't you think?

01:27:17.000 I mean, why does that guy look so like...

01:27:19.000 He looks like a lost kid who lives in Idaho.

01:27:23.000 He's rebelling from his parents.

01:27:25.000 Well, I think that's what made The Life of Brian such a great film.

01:27:28.000 Yes.

01:27:28.000 The Monty Python.

01:27:29.000 It's like they really nailed it.

01:27:31.000 And they nailed it a long time ago.

01:27:33.000 Right.

01:27:33.000 Back when you really couldn't do this before Blazing Saddles.

01:27:37.000 Yeah.

01:27:37.000 It was a super controversial movie at the time and groundbreaking in terms of, like, people...

01:27:45.000 We look at comedy from, like, the 60s or even the 70s, and we look at it in terms of what we know to be shocking and crazy today, and our bar is so different that it's hard when you go back and watch those things to really...

01:28:00.000 Take in the context of...

01:28:02.000 I was talking to Guy Torrey about this, a funny comedian friend of mine, about this last night.

01:28:07.000 We 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.

01:28:19.000 And we're so much more open-minded and so much further down the line than we were in 1960-whatever when Lenny was getting arrested.

01:28:28.000 Right.

01:28:44.000 What is he saying?

01:28:45.000 This is crazy!

01:28:46.000 But today, you listen to it, and it's almost pedestrian, some of the stuff that he has to say, because it's already been said, because he broke down the door, and then everybody's like, yeah, that hold's been there forever.

01:28:56.000 I mean, could you even make Blazing Saddles today?

01:28:59.000 Because, you know, they use the N-word constantly throughout there.

01:29:01.000 It's a good point.

01:29:02.000 Could you make that movie? 0.98

01:29:04.000 One of the characters has that line about, okay, we'll let in the niggers and the spics, but not the Irish! 1.00

01:29:09.000 Yeah, that's right. 0.98

01:29:11.000 Whoa, you wouldn't say that today, even in a satire.

01:29:14.000 Well, think about a character like Archie Bunker.

01:29:17.000 Oh, right, right.

01:29:18.000 All in the family?

01:29:19.000 You couldn't do that show today the way it is.

01:29:22.000 It would be hateful and horrible, and the blogosphere would erupt.

01:29:27.000 The Honeymooners.

01:29:28.000 Yes.

01:29:28.000 Jackie Gleason used to threaten to beat his wife.

01:29:30.000 All the time!

01:29:31.000 To the moon, Alice!

01:29:32.000 To the moon!

01:29:34.000 He was going to hit her so hard he was going to put her on the moon.

01:29:37.000 Right.

01:29:39.000 Hilarious!

01:29:40.000 Oh boy.

01:29:41.000 Well, people used to smack people all the time in movies back then.

01:29:44.000 Men were always beating women up. 1.00

01:29:45.000 It was like a natural part of behavior to the point where we didn't even mind it from heroes. 1.00

01:29:52.000 Heroes would smack a woman in the mouth and she'd be like, and then they would invariably wind up fucking them. 1.00

01:29:58.000 Like, right afterwards, they'd smack them and then they'd start making out. 0.99

01:30:01.000 Seinfeld has a little riff on Paul McCartney's, you gotta run for your life, you better run for your life if you can, little girl, because I'll get you in the end. 1.00

01:30:11.000 And then the other one was, she was just 17, if you know what I mean.

01:30:15.000 Like, no, Paul, what do you mean?

01:30:18.000 What are we talking about here?

01:30:20.000 But that's early 60s.

01:30:22.000 It was normal.

01:30:22.000 Like, how about Kiss?

01:30:23.000 They had that song, Christine 16. Gene Simmons sang that song.

01:30:27.000 Oh, right.

01:30:28.000 That was a big hit.

01:30:29.000 Christine 16. I've got to have her. 0.98

01:30:32.000 I've got to have her.

01:30:34.000 Yeah, well.

01:30:35.000 Or you.

01:30:35.000 I've got to have you.

01:30:36.000 Yeah, I think that's that.

01:30:37.000 Christine.

01:30:38.000 I don't know that one.

01:30:38.000 You don't know that song?

01:30:39.000 Yeah.

01:30:40.000 It's a good song. 0.99

01:30:40.000 But it's fucked up when you go back and listen to it. 0.99

01:30:43.000 You realize, wow, you're singing about a little baby. 0.99

01:30:47.000 And you realize when you become...

01:30:50.000 I'm 49 now.

01:30:51.000 When you look at a 16-year-old, you're like, Jesus Christ.

01:30:56.000 As a kid.

01:30:57.000 Give her a couple years. 0.99

01:30:58.000 Even 18 is ridiculous, right? 0.93

01:31:00.000 Right.

01:31:02.000 What is legal and what is not legal is very strange.

01:31:04.000 But those songs, man...

01:31:07.000 So, you know, in terms of moral progress, that kind of change happens just slow enough.

01:31:10.000 You don't really notice it.

01:31:12.000 But looking back a few decades, it's like, wow, look what they used to say in movies or novels.

01:31:18.000 What is this?

01:31:18.000 Compilation of men smacking women?

01:31:21.000 Oh, this is airplay.

01:31:22.000 That's airplay, yeah, but that's what they're spoofing.

01:31:25.000 Oh, this is hilarious.

01:31:29.000 Boom, there we go.

01:31:31.000 Those movies were crazy.

01:31:32.000 They were just smacking. 0.98

01:31:33.000 He punched her and dropped her. 0.71

01:31:35.000 Wow.

01:31:36.000 He's backhanding.

01:31:37.000 Sean Connery. 0.59

01:31:39.000 Remember when Sean Connery was interviewed by Barbara Malters and he was advocating smacking women?

01:31:44.000 Yeah.

01:31:44.000 Sometimes they just keep pushing it and they won't let it go and you have to give them a smack.

01:31:51.000 And she was like, are you saying that you...

01:31:54.000 That's exactly what I'm saying.

01:31:55.000 Like the Bogart line, I never met a dame that didn't... 1.00

01:31:58.000 What is it?

01:31:59.000 Didn't like a smack in the mouth or a cold 45 or whatever.

01:32:03.000 Jesus.

01:32:04.000 Slug from a cold 45. It's not the worst thing to slap a woman now and then. 0.96

01:32:06.000 As I remember, you said you don't do it with a clenched fist.

01:32:09.000 It's better to do it with an open hand.

01:32:11.000 Yeah.

01:32:12.000 Remember that?

01:32:12.000 Yeah.

01:32:13.000 Yeah.

01:32:14.000 I didn't love that.

01:32:15.000 I haven't changed my opinion.

01:32:16.000 You haven't?

01:32:17.000 No.

01:32:18.000 Not at all. 0.98

01:32:18.000 Do you think it's good to slap a woman? 0.98

01:32:20.000 No, I don't think it's good.

01:32:21.000 You don't think it's bad?

01:32:22.000 I don't think it's that bad.

01:32:25.000 I think that it depends entirely on the circumstances and if it merits it.

01:32:28.000 What would merit it?

01:32:30.000 Well, if you have tried everything else, and women are pretty good at this. 1.00

01:32:35.000 They can't leave it alone.

01:32:38.000 They don't want to have the last word, and you give them the last word, but they're not happy with the last word.

01:32:44.000 They want to say it again and get into a really provocative situation.

01:32:51.000 Then...

01:32:52.000 Oh, boy.

01:32:54.000 One and a half million views.

01:32:55.000 I think it's absolutely right.

01:33:01.000 What year was that?

01:33:02.000 That looks like maybe 80s.

01:33:05.000 I want to say it was later than that.

01:33:07.000 The 90s maybe.

01:33:08.000 I want to say it was the 90s.

01:33:09.000 That's pretty.

01:33:10.000 That's pretty.

01:33:10.000 Well, you know, he's old, but that's his generation.

01:33:13.000 Sometimes they won't let it go.

01:33:17.000 Well, it's Donald Sterling, you know, he's just an old guy.

01:33:20.000 1987. Interesting.

01:33:23.000 Well, it's interesting because Barbara's looking away as she says it and then looks at him when she hits him with the question, like it's a gotcha moment.

01:33:31.000 Right.

01:33:31.000 And I haven't changed my opinion on that at all.

01:33:33.000 He like hits her with that, like, whoa.

01:33:35.000 So that was like, there was a lot of, that was a game too.

01:33:39.000 That was also, she provoked him.

01:33:42.000 Yeah.

01:33:42.000 In this way where, you know, he's a chauvinist and someone...

01:33:46.000 Wasn't it her that did that with Mike Tyson? 0.83

01:33:47.000 With his wife? 0.65

01:33:49.000 Yeah.

01:33:50.000 The beauty pageant woman, I forget her name, that he used to batter. 1.00

01:33:55.000 That was the end of the marriage, right there on the show.

01:33:57.000 Well, it certainly sent him on a spiral.

01:34:01.000 I think they stayed married for quite a while after the show, but...

01:34:04.000 We're good to go.

01:34:20.000 It's focused entirely on him being violent as humanly possible, beyond the limitations of other people who are professional purveyors of violence.

01:34:32.000 Like, he's the best at it. 0.99

01:34:34.000 His brand of violence is so much more ferocious than any other fucking person who's ever done it before. 1.00

01:34:40.000 He makes all these other professional heavyweight boxers look like pussies. 1.00

01:34:44.000 They see him and they practically faint. 0.99

01:34:46.000 He throws punches that miss and they fall down. 1.00

01:34:48.000 Of course he's nuts! 0.99

01:34:51.000 What are we doing here? 0.99

01:34:53.000 Why do you have this guy on television?

01:34:54.000 What kind of a person are you?

01:34:56.000 What is this therapy session?

01:34:58.000 What is she doing?

01:35:00.000 The wife, what is she doing? 1.00

01:35:02.000 Are you doing this publicly because you believe this is the only way to reach him?

01:35:05.000 Is that the only thing?

01:35:07.000 There was a minor controversy, but this was before the internet, so it didn't go viral.

01:35:11.000 But the LA Times had a story about the Rams defensive line that was called the Fearsome Foursome in the late 60s, early 70s.

01:35:21.000 And, you know, Rosie Greer was one of them, and he was just terrifying, I guess.

01:35:25.000 And he was talking about how he would head slap...

01:35:28.000 The other lineman, like, you know, the snap, and he, bam, like this, right?

01:35:31.000 And they had an open hole there for the ears. 0.97

01:35:33.000 So the ear pressure would, like, break the guy's eardrum if he did it right.

01:35:37.000 And this would throw him off a little bit, then he could sack the quarterback or whatever.

01:35:40.000 This was his thing.

01:35:41.000 And then he mentions, like, in the interview, and I, you know, I head-slapped my girlfriend or my wife or whatever it was.

01:35:47.000 Like, wait, what?

01:35:48.000 You do this to your...

01:35:49.000 It's like, holy moly.

01:35:51.000 And it didn't make a big thing, but it was there in the time.

01:35:53.000 I remember reading that thinking, God dang.

01:35:54.000 Jesus.

01:35:55.000 You know, if you're 6'8 and you weigh 300 pounds and you have a helmet, that's one thing.

01:36:00.000 But if, you know, a little...

01:36:02.000 Bam! 0.98

01:36:02.000 Well, and this was also probably tolerated so much back then that those women didn't have any recourse. 0.98

01:36:08.000 They couldn't go to a TMZ or something like that.

01:36:11.000 They couldn't take video and put it on their phone and then put it on the internet and have it go viral.

01:36:16.000 They were scared.

01:36:17.000 I mean, if you've got some 6, 8, 400-pound gigantic dude who wants to hit you... 1.00

01:36:22.000 And he also has sex with you. 1.00

01:36:23.000 Like, fuck. 1.00

01:36:24.000 How do you get out of that? 1.00

01:36:25.000 It's hard enough to get out of a regular relationship.

01:36:27.000 Right.

01:36:27.000 Like the poor lady who had to get on stage with Anthony Robbins and call her boyfriend.

01:36:31.000 You know?

01:36:31.000 I mean, that's rough.

01:36:33.000 Right. 1.00

01:36:33.000 But imagine if her boyfriend is a fucking giant football player who likes hitting her. 1.00

01:36:37.000 Right. 0.99

01:36:37.000 And if it was in the movies like that, and you have Sean Connery talking about it on TV, it becomes accepted. 0.99

01:36:43.000 That's right.

01:36:44.000 Then we get into this whole determinism thing.

01:36:46.000 Like, is that guy beating his wife, beating his wife because of the culture that he lives in?

01:36:50.000 And is that...

01:36:51.000 Is it...

01:36:51.000 I mean...

01:36:52.000 How much is that affecting his conscious decisions, and does he have the free will to escape that influence?

01:36:58.000 Well, 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.

01:37:06.000 Right.

01:37:07.000 And that reduces the number of people that do it.

01:37:09.000 So, you know, in Sean Connery's generation, he just showed all those movie clips, that's probably all he saw was, yep, that's what you do.

01:37:17.000 And this would never enter my mind to do this.

01:37:19.000 I mean, no matter how bad, I'm not going to just reach out and hit a woman.

01:37:23.000 I've got to introduce you to a few chicks. 1.00

01:37:27.000 The ones that want the last word?

01:37:28.000 Just kidding.

01:37:29.000 Yeah, it's called break up with them, Sean.

01:37:31.000 Get out of the house, man.

01:37:32.000 Go drive.

01:37:33.000 You got a Porsche.

01:37:34.000 I'm going to the hills. 1.00

01:37:35.000 Fuck off. 1.00

01:37:36.000 Just go drive. 1.00

01:37:37.000 You can get a hotel room somewhere, dude.

01:37:39.000 You're super rich.

01:37:40.000 You know? 1.00

01:37:41.000 You don't have to stay with that crazy lady. 1.00

01:37:42.000 Well, that's one of the sort of self-controlled techniques. 0.89

01:37:46.000 Right.

01:37:47.000 Count to ten.

01:37:48.000 Leave the room.

01:37:48.000 We are in many ways sort of a product of our environment in the way that we imitate our atmosphere so much.

01:37:56.000 I mean, we have patterns...

01:37:58.000 Of talking.

01:37:59.000 There's expressions that are similar or familiar to certain areas.

01:38:04.000 We have accents that distinguish that we belong in this clan of people that live in Boston, for instance.

01:38:11.000 Where I grew up, there's a Boston accent that's so clear.

01:38:14.000 And if you talk to people that live there, they're letting you know that they're local.

01:38:19.000 And everybody sort of assimilates with a certain way of thinking.

01:38:23.000 And it's super common for people to adopt...

01:38:36.000 Right.

01:38:38.000 Right.

01:38:40.000 Right.

01:38:48.000 You've hit someone.

01:38:50.000 You've committed assault.

01:38:52.000 All those horrible words and thoughts that we have attached to these things that were almost non-existent back then.

01:38:59.000 Just a hundred years ago.

01:39:00.000 Non-existent.

01:39:02.000 Totally normal.

01:39:03.000 So this process probably started in the late Middle Ages.

01:39:06.000 There'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,

01:39:23.000 you 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.

01:39:32.000 Don't do certain things.

01:39:33.000 Don't urinate in the hallways.

01:39:35.000 Don't defecate. 0.99

01:39:37.000 Just basically, these people were gross. 0.97

01:39:40.000 And here's how not to be gross. 0.99

01:39:42.000 Don't act like a pig. 0.98

01:39:45.000 And in a way, it's training your brain to gain self-control over your impulses. 1.00

01:39:50.000 Like, I'd really just like to take a shit right over there. 0.99

01:39:52.000 Well, don't do it. 0.99

01:39:53.000 I mean, it's not cool.

01:39:54.000 We don't do that.

01:39:55.000 Okay, I won't.

01:39:56.000 And then it never enters your mind to do anything like that.

01:39:59.000 And so the argument is that We've been on this 500-year-long civilizing process of just training people to control their impulses, impulse control.

01:40:09.000 It's that prefrontal cortex, keeping a break on the sort of lower impulses that bubble up.

01:40:15.000 I'd really like to do that.

01:40:16.000 Not going to do it.

01:40:17.000 And then pretty soon you don't even think about doing it.

01:40:20.000 Now obviously there's still a handful of the psychopaths or whatever, they don't care.

01:40:23.000 But fewer and fewer of us, and just from that interview, Sean Connery's generation versus our generation versus our kids, you know, this is just disappearing from our vocabulary, from our repertoire of behaviors that we will employ with other people.

01:40:41.000 You just don't even think about doing that.

01:40:43.000 That's how moral progress happens.

01:40:45.000 From the bottom up.

01:40:46.000 It completely makes sense.

01:40:48.000 And it completely makes sense when you look at the history of humanity, how much safer it is today, relatively, than at any other time in terms of like how much violence you're going to encounter in your daily life.

01:40:58.000 When we see violence, it's incredibly shocking.

01:41:01.000 Whereas if we lived 5,000 years ago, it'd be incredibly rare to get through a life without seeing dead bodies.

01:41:06.000 Right, right.

01:41:07.000 Like you became much more accustomed to the temporary nature of being and the threat of violence being a real part of everyday life.

01:41:14.000 Right.

01:41:14.000 Or is this not anymore?

01:41:16.000 So I think one of the things that's happening as we create new technology that sort of alleviates the physical stress of life or the worry of dying or we extend life to the point and fix illnesses to the point where life becomes a little bit more 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

01:41:46.000 about predators.

01:41:47.000 The physical requirements and the dangers that you had to be able to experience and We're good to go.

01:42:16.000 Yep, it's like that little line, the three Fs, fight, flight, or reproduction.

01:42:21.000 Or freeze.

01:42:22.000 That's the other one, though.

01:42:23.000 Or freeze, yeah.

01:42:24.000 The big one is, what people don't consider is, why do people, why do certain people not run, not fight, but panic, lock up, and what's going on there?

01:42:34.000 Because that's a real response that is super common that doesn't get addressed in that fight-flight response.

01:42:39.000 Right.

01:42:40.000 There's also people that- But it can work. 0.99

01:42:42.000 Fucking freeze. 0.97

01:42:43.000 But all those things in a more dangerous world actually do age you faster. 0.99

01:42:49.000 Some of the research I was reading in these books about aging is just the more stress you have, those stress hormones leads to more inflammation.

01:42:58.000 There's more and more stuff about inflammation and disease, inflammation and Alzheimer's, inflammation and the telomeres.

01:43:03.000 You know, it shortens your life.

01:43:05.000 And there was this big study on possums in Florida, the ones that are out in the wild getting run over and attacked and preyed upon versus ones that were put on this island where there was no predators, all the food that they want.

01:43:17.000 And, 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.

01:43:29.000 Just living in an open, dangerous environment takes its toll on your cellular reproduction and how long you live, irrespective of predation and accidents.

01:43:38.000 Yeah.

01:43:38.000 So this is back to the, you know, meditation, take it easy, lower those stress hormones, because they do take a toll on your body.

01:43:46.000 Yeah, unquestionably.

01:43:48.000 I mean, it must.

01:43:50.000 The idea that you can get through life redlining it all the time and not have...

01:43:54.000 It's like people ask that don't know much about football.

01:43:57.000 Why can't they play the whole game like the final two minutes?

01:43:59.000 Oh, Jesus.

01:44:00.000 Well, you can't do it.

01:44:01.000 Yeah, I mean, just football in and of itself.

01:44:05.000 Like, how long can you do that?

01:44:08.000 Like, does anybody ever figure out how many times you can get hit by a guy who's 350 pounds running 30 miles an hour?

01:44:14.000 I mean, those guys are giant and they're huge super athletes and they collide with each other.

01:44:17.000 I 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.

01:44:32.000 I don't think I can understand it.

01:44:33.000 I think I watch it on TV, and I see, where guys' feet are up in the air, and they go slam.

01:44:38.000 But I don't think I physically can feel it.

01:44:43.000 I don't think I get it.

01:44:44.000 Right.

01:44:45.000 I just think it's...

01:44:46.000 No, that story of the concussion story that was first broke by ESPN or Frontline in a two-hour documentary.

01:44:55.000 That guy that died, the Pittsburgh Steelers Center, Mike, what was the guy?

01:45:00.000 I forget his name.

01:45:00.000 Jamie's a big sports fan.

01:45:02.000 Mike, he was featured in the movie that...

01:45:05.000 The Will Smith movie?

01:45:06.000 The Will Smith movie, yeah.

01:45:07.000 But the docs calculated that in the course of his life, say from high school football, college football, and 20 seasons in the NFL, and all the practices all week and in the game...

01:45:19.000 Mike Webster.

01:45:20.000 Yeah, Mike Webster.

01:45:21.000 He probably got hit, you know, hit the equivalent of a minor concussion, you know, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of times.

01:45:27.000 And that, you know, that's the accumulative effects.

01:45:31.000 Wow, that is so crazy.

01:45:33.000 What is this?

01:45:34.000 What is this, Jim?

01:45:35.000 The size of an NFL lineman has changed since they started playing football.

01:45:38.000 Okay, so in 1927, they were 190 pounds and six feet tall.

01:45:44.000 So 190 pounds is six pounds less than me.

01:45:50.000 And I'm not a big person.

01:45:52.000 I'm 5'8".

01:45:53.000 So they're a little taller at 6 foot for the average lineman, which is a giant person, right?

01:45:58.000 Now, in 2000...

01:46:00.000 And what is the last one?

01:46:02.000 8?

01:46:02.000 Jamie, what does it say?

01:46:03.000 Scroll down.

01:46:04.000 2006. I was just trying to show this part at the bottom, which shows how hard their hits are, but...

01:46:07.000 In 2006, you get to the average lineman is 6'4", 335 pounds.

01:46:14.000 He's not the average.

01:46:14.000 He's the outlier, though.

01:46:16.000 He's a little bit big.

01:46:18.000 But still, you can see the curve.

01:46:20.000 Most of them are a little bit smaller than him, but still, they're all over 300 pounds.

01:46:23.000 I remember Alan Page.

01:46:25.000 He was huge.

01:46:25.000 He was massive and just one of the greats.

01:46:28.000 Only 245. He probably wouldn't even make the main team now.

01:46:34.000 Right.

01:46:34.000 And what year was that?

01:46:35.000 Scroll down, please.

01:46:36.000 67. So in 67, yeah.

01:46:38.000 67, that guy was like...

01:46:40.000 Like, if you see how big George Foreman was.

01:46:42.000 Right.

01:46:42.000 When George Foreman was the heavyweight champ, he was gigantic.

01:46:45.000 But I don't...

01:46:47.000 I mean, when he came back, when he started his comeback, he was well over 300 pounds.

01:46:50.000 He was really overweight.

01:46:51.000 But I don't think he was that big when he was fighting.

01:46:54.000 I think he was in the 220s or 230s when he was the heavyweight champ and Ali beat him.

01:46:58.000 Yeah, some of the stuff, like the ones on the right there, there's a lot of body fat.

01:47:02.000 Of course.

01:47:02.000 That's just not...

01:47:04.000 Because I guess the more mass, like the sumo wrestlers, you want mass, not just muscle.

01:47:08.000 Yeah, you know, they also, those guys are just all about power.

01:47:12.000 They're all about power and weight behind power.

01:47:15.000 And 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.

01:47:24.000 Right.

01:47:24.000 Like, have you ever tried to wrestle with a big person?

01:47:26.000 No.

01:47:27.000 Like, even if they're not strong, like, the amount of mass that you have to move when you're wrestling around with them, like...

01:47:32.000 You 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?

01:47:44.000 There's no way you know.

01:47:46.000 There's no way you know what that 330-pound dude feels like when he's...

01:47:50.000 Boom! 0.99

01:47:52.000 Full blast into you. 1.00

01:47:54.000 What a crazy fucking sport. 1.00

01:47:56.000 I'm reading this book now called Spitting in the Soup about the history of doping in sports that goes back to the late 19th century. 1.00

01:48:03.000 And half of it is just for survival.

01:48:07.000 You know, you take these drugs just to get through the next week and the next game, the next contest.

01:48:13.000 And this guy's argument is that it was pretty accepted and common and known.

01:48:18.000 The guy that won the Tour de France five times used to say that you can't expect us to do this on bread and water.

01:48:25.000 I mean, you know, we've raced 250 times a year and, you know, six, eight hours a day of killing ourselves.

01:48:32.000 Jean Concatille, the great French cyclist.

01:48:34.000 But this appears to be true in most sports in that...

01:48:37.000 It wasn't until the, I think it was 1906 Olympics, when people started equating doping with sin.

01:48:44.000 Like, this is a moral thing.

01:48:46.000 Like, you're getting, you're cheating.

01:48:49.000 As opposed to, it's just a medical thing.

01:48:51.000 You know, I train, I lift weights, I do this, I eat this diet, I take these drugs.

01:48:55.000 It's all kind of part of the mix of being an athlete.

01:48:57.000 And then there was a transition, he argues, socially or morally or whatever.

01:49:02.000 And all these things are good, but this one thing over here is bad.

01:49:06.000 Like say, in cycling, your hematocrit is important because you're delivering oxygen to your muscles.

01:49:11.000 So if, you know, you and I probably have 45 to 50% hematocrit, that's the number of red blood cells in your blood.

01:49:18.000 So half are red blood cells delivering oxygen to your muscles.

01:49:23.000 Now, if you're like in the low 30s, that's anemic.

01:49:26.000 And this drug, EPO, invented by Amgen, was created to save patients that are anemic from cancer treatment or whatever.

01:49:33.000 It's a great drug.

01:49:35.000 So it wasn't long before the cyclists got a hold of this in the late 80s, early 90s.

01:49:38.000 Like, 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.

01:49:50.000 And so 50% is good.

01:49:52.000 How about 55%?

01:49:53.000 Well, that'd be even better.

01:49:54.000 How about 60%?

01:49:55.000 And the guy who won the 96 tour, Bjarne Reese, his nickname was Mr. 60%.

01:50:01.000 He's like mud flowing through his veins.

01:50:04.000 But then, some cyclists started dying in the early 90s and mid-90s.

01:50:09.000 There was maybe a dozen or two that died mysteriously.

01:50:12.000 And it was never clear what the cause was.

01:50:14.000 So everybody said, it's the EPO, the blood's too thick, they're having strokes or heart attacks.

01:50:20.000 And even I bought this idea.

01:50:22.000 Yeah, I guess that's it.

01:50:23.000 I wrote this article for Scientific American about doping in sports.

01:50:25.000 This is why it's wrong, because people are dying.

01:50:28.000 But this guy's argument is it was never proven that these people died.

01:50:32.000 And furthermore, he takes on steroids.

01:50:34.000 You know, there's this whole thing that started with Lyle Alzado, the great Oakland Raiders linebacker, who said, you know, I got brain cancer.

01:50:41.000 It was after he was done playing, but he said it was due to all the steroids I was taking.

01:50:45.000 Then the meme started.

01:50:46.000 Oh, steroids causes cancer.

01:50:48.000 Steroids feeds cancer, causes tumors to grow.

01:50:51.000 This guy is saying that's never been proven.

01:50:53.000 And so I'd like to look into this more before I review this book.

01:50:57.000 You know, is this really true?

01:50:58.000 How do we know that steroids are dangerous?

01:51:01.000 I mean, isn't it the dosage?

01:51:03.000 You know, as Michele Ferrari said, Lance's doping doctor, you know, it's orange juice.

01:51:09.000 If you drink too much orange juice, it's dangerous.

01:51:10.000 It's the dose.

01:51:12.000 So some steroids, some EPO, some growth hormone.

01:51:15.000 Some of this should be maintenance.

01:51:18.000 What triggered this was looking at those huge guys.

01:51:21.000 I mean, you get pounded.

01:51:22.000 You've got to play again next week.

01:51:23.000 How do you do that?

01:51:24.000 Well, I've got to get the massage, take the jacuzzi, and take some drugs.

01:51:31.000 That was the premise of Bigger, Stronger, Faster.

01:51:33.000 Oh, right.

01:51:34.000 It was a big thing was that where are all the bodies?

01:51:36.000 Like, 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.

01:51:54.000 Yeah.

01:51:54.000 Like if you look at some pro bodybuilders that are just outlandishly huge, a lot of those guys, it's a battle of who can take the most drugs.

01:52:03.000 Okay.

01:52:03.000 Who can power lift the most, who can lift the most, who can train the hardest, but also who can tolerate the most ridiculous levels of these drugs.

01:52:12.000 And so some of those guys die. 0.81

01:52:14.000 Right.

01:52:14.000 Well, there's the dosage issue.

01:52:16.000 Yes, exactly.

01:52:17.000 Because the amount of people that are doing them is off the charts.

01:52:20.000 If you think about professional athletes, you think about all the different athletes that are doing performance-enhancing drugs, if they were really dying from this stuff...

01:52:27.000 The body should be everywhere.

01:52:29.000 Everywhere.

01:52:29.000 It should be just dropping like flies.

01:52:31.000 See, I think they're just getting smarter about it.

01:52:33.000 And they know it's called microdosing and cycling with the EPO. You just take a little bit.

01:52:38.000 Just give it just a little bump, just for maintenance.

01:52:40.000 You 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.

01:52:52.000 And he took EPO. And he didn't really want to avoid it as long as he could, but he said he was just getting dropped.

01:53:00.000 From the main peloton, and he couldn't even do his job as just Lance's domestique to carry his water bottles up.

01:53:06.000 You know, you're up there in the front with Lance, drop back to the team car, get some water bottles.

01:53:11.000 Then 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.

01:53:16.000 So you've got to be fit.

01:53:17.000 So he said he was getting dropped just doing that.

01:53:20.000 So it was like, I can't even be on the team, can't do my job.

01:53:23.000 So he took it just to stay in the race, just so I could be a bicyclist.

01:53:29.000 Just so you can deliver water.

01:53:30.000 Yeah.

01:53:31.000 And I think a lot of them do that.

01:53:33.000 You know, it's like, I don't want to do it, but yeah, got to do it because stay healthy and strong and keep going.

01:53:38.000 Well, you'd have a unique insight into it because you did a lot of cycling.

01:53:41.000 Yeah.

01:53:41.000 And you did it at a very high and competitive level.

01:53:43.000 So you had an inside view.

01:53:46.000 As to the requirements.

01:53:47.000 And I think it's one of the more unique sports in that the requirements are so incredibly grueling in the amount of time that you're working.

01:53:56.000 Like, 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.

01:54:09.000 It's one of the more unique and weird things about cycling is you're doing it for hours.

01:54:13.000 Hours!

01:54:14.000 Yep, yep.

01:54:14.000 Like, what is one day in the Tour de France?

01:54:16.000 Notice how I said France and not France.

01:54:20.000 Oh, there's, you know, usually four to six hours.

01:54:22.000 Four to six hours of racing.

01:54:25.000 That's a long time.

01:54:25.000 Of pumping your legs.

01:54:28.000 Four to six hours.

01:54:29.000 That's crazy when you think about it.

01:54:31.000 So even if it's easier than running a sprint, even if it's easier than running up the top of a hill, the amount of time you're spending doing it is another consideration.

01:54:41.000 And then mentally, the drag on maintaining it must be huge.

01:54:46.000 It must be crazy.

01:54:47.000 Well, this is when I interviewed Greg LeMond.

01:54:49.000 He said that his teammates came to him.

01:54:52.000 This was in the 91 or 92 season, his last.

01:54:56.000 And when EPO was rampant in the peloton, everyone figured it out.

01:55:00.000 Greg didn't want to do it.

01:55:02.000 And 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.

01:55:11.000 He said, everybody else, it's not like they're getting an unfair advantage by going above their normal performance.

01:55:15.000 They're just staying level, whereas the rest of us are dropping off, and then the last few stages, you're wiped out.

01:55:21.000 So, you know, it's like, we've got to do this just to stay with the rest of the field.

01:55:25.000 It's a level playing field argument.

01:55:27.000 I guess, you know, in terms of morals, we sort of draw the line at the needle, when there's a needle involved, I guess, or, you know, a patch or a pill.

01:55:35.000 It feels different than training at high altitude or sleeping in the oxygen tent, you know, like the climbers do.

01:55:43.000 You know, taking EPO feels like it's more artificial.

01:55:46.000 This guy's argument of this book, Spitting the Soup, is that it's just a gradation.

01:55:51.000 We've just arbitrarily drawn the line there.

01:55:53.000 And, you know, I think there's much of it in the NFL has got to just be getting to the end of the season and still being able to play just because it's so hard.

01:56:03.000 Well, I think that argument is very good because there's certain supplements that you can take that are effective that actually do work.

01:56:08.000 So how do we distinguish between...

01:56:10.000 Yeah, what was the stuff that the baseball players...

01:56:13.000 Anderstein died on.

01:56:14.000 Yeah, that's it.

01:56:16.000 Most likely...

01:56:17.000 What is that? 1.00

01:56:17.000 Most likely bullshit. 1.00

01:56:18.000 Most likely there was an excuse for them doing actual steroids. 1.00

01:56:21.000 Okay, right.

01:56:22.000 Mark McGuire.

01:56:23.000 Yes.

01:56:23.000 I 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.

01:56:40.000 Which is why, really interestingly, two Russian Olympic wrestlers have been stripped of their gold medals. 0.97

01:56:47.000 Because of the past, I think from 2008, they didn't even get the 2012 results in, because they took their samples that they had back then, and now with newer, more sophisticated levels of testing, they've been able to show that these guys were doing some shit.

01:57:01.000 But 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,

01:57:17.000 he does?

01:57:17.000 Oh, yes.

01:57:18.000 Oh, yes.

01:57:18.000 And he has for quite a while now.

01:57:20.000 And he has almost completely cleaned up the amount of people that are doing things.

01:57:27.000 People 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.

01:57:41.000 To the point where MMA fans and the pundits and analysts are looking at this and they're going, wow, this is fascinating.

01:57:49.000 You're seeing people change.

01:57:51.000 There's even a term that we use in MMA, like pre-USADA. We use pre-USADA and post-USADA. So they got him off the drugs.

01:57:58.000 Are the fights still as good, exciting to watch?

01:58:00.000 Well, the best guys, for sure.

01:58:02.000 Yeah, the best guys are still the best guys.

01:58:04.000 But there's some guys that were the best guys that were on legal stuff.

01:58:08.000 Like they used to allow testosterone replacement therapy.

01:58:11.000 It used to be legal.

01:58:13.000 So all you had to do was take steroids, go to your doctor, get off the steroids.

01:58:17.000 Your testosterone crashes.

01:58:18.000 You go to the doctor and say, hey, dog, man, I think I got low tests.

01:58:21.000 You know what, son?

01:58:22.000 You have a condition.

01:58:23.000 It's called low testosterone.

01:58:25.000 Yeah.

01:58:25.000 And they would prescribe it for you the same way like when you were talking about alcoholism being a disease, they would decide that testosterone loss is a disease, and this man needs his medicine.

01:58:35.000 And so they would give these guys testosterone, and like 35, 36-year-old guys would be just jacked.

01:58:41.000 Jacked! 0.73

01:58:42.000 And fighting!

01:58:43.000 Not 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.

01:58:52.000 So this drug allows you to do more physical harm, which is very different than cycling.

01:58:57.000 Like 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.

01:59:04.000 But if he's doing these drugs and it's allowing him to put other people in the hospital, things get very weird.

01:59:10.000 Well, in terms of the moral argument, if you're saying that the fights are just as fun to watch, they're exciting, competitive without the drugs, and fewer people are harmed from taking the drugs, then maybe that's a good thing.

01:59:21.000 That would be an argument for USADA. The argument could even be said that the fights are more exciting because people are more vulnerable.

01:59:28.000 They get knocked out easier, they get tired easier, and sometimes it makes fights crazier.

01:59:33.000 Guys have tested positive for EPO after even championship level fights.

01:59:38.000 There was this guy, Ali Bagutinov, who's a top flyweight fighter.

01:59:42.000 And interesting enough, he fought a guy who doesn't dope, who's the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, this guy, Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson.

01:59:49.000 And Mighty Mouse beat him, and one of the ways he beat him is with volume and pace.

01:59:53.000 Like, this guy couldn't keep up his pace.

01:59:56.000 Right.

01:59:57.000 Efficiency 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.

02:00:07.000 It can have positive results if you catch someone with a shot, but if you don't, over a long period of time, you're draining your gas tank too quickly.

02:00:13.000 In a single bout, you mean?

02:00:15.000 Yeah, in a single bout.

02:00:15.000 So this efficiency overcame the drugs that the other guy was on, like his physical efficiency and his technique.

02:00:22.000 So the problem is stopping the arms race, the bodybuilding arms race.

02:00:26.000 The moment somebody can get away with it and everybody thinks that it's being done, then they have to do it.

02:00:31.000 Then you have this behavioral game theory thing of an arms race.

02:00:35.000 So Nowitzki's point, I guess, is we're going to nip it in the bud.

02:00:38.000 No one's going to do it, and we're going to make the consequences.

02:00:40.000 Well, super harsh suspensions.

02:00:42.000 What are the—oh.

02:00:43.000 Yeah, two years suspension if you get caught.

02:00:45.000 And a bunch of people have gotten that two years.

02:00:48.000 And also, you have to let USADA know where you are every minute of every day.

02:00:53.000 Like, hey, I'm going fishing.

02:00:55.000 I'm going to be on Lake Mead.

02:00:56.000 You know, if you want to find me, that's where I am.

02:00:58.000 And then you might get a text while you're on Lake Mead, come to the dock.

02:01:01.000 You got to go to the dock and there's a guy standing there and he's going to take your blood.

02:01:04.000 Right.

02:01:04.000 I had Chael Sonnen on the podcast and he was talking about how invasive it was and how crazy it is.

02:01:08.000 They just show up wherever you are.

02:01:10.000 They were doing it in a closet with a mop and everything.

02:01:14.000 He's like, this is not sanitary.

02:01:15.000 You're taking my blood in this weird environment. 0.99

02:01:17.000 This is kind of fucked up, but they're just trying to catch people. 0.91

02:01:23.000 Well, it'll be interesting to see what happens with these leaks that are coming out yesterday. 0.99

02:01:26.000 The Russians hacked the USADA database.

02:01:32.000 They had the Williams sisters and the gymnast Biles, Simone Biles, and they're threatening to release more in the coming days.

02:01:45.000 They didn't say what they were on, but that they had medical exemption.

02:01:49.000 Well, one of them was oxycodone.

02:01:52.000 One of the Williams sisters, she was on Oxys, right? 0.95

02:01:55.000 Simone Biles was taking, I think, Ritalin medication for ADHD, and she came out, I think, today and made a statement about it.

02:02:01.000 Oh, really?

02:02:02.000 Hmm.

02:02:03.000 Yeah.

02:02:04.000 Ritalin.

02:02:04.000 Isn't Ritalin a form of...

02:02:06.000 Isn't it a form of, like, an amphetamine or something?

02:02:10.000 It is.

02:02:10.000 Well, it's a stimulant.

02:02:10.000 It's a speed, a stimulant.

02:02:11.000 Yeah.

02:02:12.000 Well, I would think that a stimulant would be a performance-enhancing drug.

02:02:15.000 Why would they let you do that?

02:02:17.000 Pretty impressive.

02:02:19.000 Launched in the air, though, in that split.

02:02:20.000 Look at that picture.

02:02:21.000 That's crazy.

02:02:22.000 What does it say?

02:02:23.000 I have ADHD and have taken medicine for it since I was a kid.

02:02:25.000 Please know I believe in clean sport.

02:02:28.000 I've always followed the rules and will continue to do so as far as fair play is critical to sport and is very important to me.

02:02:33.000 What does that mean?

02:02:35.000 What does that mean?

02:02:36.000 How does ADHD... How is that affected by Ritalin?

02:02:40.000 What does speed do to someone who has ADHD? It's one of these counterintuitive things.

02:02:44.000 I can't remember what the biochemistry of it is, but the stimulant actually counters the hyperactivity and it slows you down.

02:02:51.000 It's a weird thing.

02:02:53.000 I can't remember why that is.

02:02:54.000 But is hyperactivity a controversial...

02:02:58.000 Well, ADHD as well, this is one of those sort of loose, big categories that more and more people have gotten tossed into.

02:03:05.000 You know, it used to be the little boy in fourth grade was just, you know, he just had a lot of energy and he was always running around.

02:03:11.000 Now he's got a disease.

02:03:12.000 He's got ADHD. Well, we've got to medicate him.

02:03:15.000 Why not just let him go out and have a little longer playtime?

02:03:19.000 You know, this is one of the counterarguments to the disease model.

02:03:22.000 I mean, again, it's back to that.

02:03:23.000 It's a behavior model.

02:03:25.000 No, it's a disease, so we got to treat it with a drug.

02:03:28.000 You know, so you have this over-medication effect.

02:03:30.000 Now, 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,

02:03:46.000 but most that are taking the drugs are probably in the bell curve somewhere.

02:03:50.000 Not that bad.

02:03:51.000 I think that's really important that you point that out, that there is this great big spectrum, like a lot of things we've been talking about.

02:03:56.000 There's people that are almost unmanageable, and there's people that might, a kid that might just be a little bit rowdy. 0.98

02:04:02.000 You know, maybe she just jumps up and down on the couch and you tell her not to, and you're like, I'm getting this fucking kid on some pills. 0.91

02:04:07.000 And a lot of it is, you know, teachers want control of the classroom. 0.97

02:04:10.000 It'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.

02:04:19.000 That's really all it was.

02:04:20.000 And that's all it still is and we're stuck with the echoes of that to the point where if you want to do something like there's a lot of things that you can do for a living that don't involve the traditional model of what they're trying to teach you in school and when you think about those things as options they think they seem preposterous and they seem like a pipe dream like this idea that you're going to be a famous author Yeah,

02:04:47.000 sure you are.

02:04:49.000 Like, you're gonna be in a band?

02:04:51.000 Oh, yeah, you too?

02:04:52.000 Congratulations. 1.00

02:04:53.000 Well, someone's in a fucking band. 1.00

02:04:55.000 Is someone in a band? 1.00

02:04:56.000 Like, we get all this music, right?

02:04:58.000 Someone's playing this music.

02:04:59.000 How come I can't do it?

02:05:00.000 You can't do it?

02:05:01.000 No, I have to work.

02:05:02.000 I have to get up and work?

02:05:03.000 Like, we train these people to think that this is the path that everyone has to take and the occasional person ejects from that path and goes and makes their own knives or, you know, and starts some sort of a weird business.

02:05:16.000 But why can't anybody who wants to do that do that?

02:05:20.000 Well, they can.

02:05:21.000 The problem is the most impressionable part of your life.

02:05:24.000 They're teaching you really important things like math and science and English and grammar and we all need those things.

02:05:29.000 But they're also teaching you patterns.

02:05:31.000 And they're teaching you about the potential for your future.

02:05:34.000 And this potential for your future becomes like a reality that you can't escape.

02:05:38.000 Because everybody else has done it.

02:05:39.000 Your friends are all doing it.

02:05:41.000 What college are you applying to?

02:05:42.000 What are you going to major?

02:05:44.000 When are you going to take the bar?

02:05:47.000 I want to be a singer!

02:05:49.000 We've stigmatized people who don't go to college.

02:05:51.000 So everyone feels like, well, I've got to go to college.

02:05:53.000 The fact is, not everyone should go to college.

02:05:55.000 There's really no need for it.

02:05:57.000 It's a waste of time and money.

02:05:59.000 They're not going to get any valuable skills that they can actually use, and they don't even want to be there, but they feel like, 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.

02:06:10.000 You know, and so now we have this proliferation of colleges and universities and, you know, the skyrocketing costs and so on.

02:06:16.000 What was wrong with trade schools?

02:06:18.000 You know, now trade schools are kind of looked down upon.

02:06:20.000 There's nothing wrong with trade schools.

02:06:21.000 Trade schools are great, but, you know, we've sort of stigmatized it.

02:06:24.000 And I think it's artificially putting people in places where they feel inadequate, because actually somewhere else they'd be making a lot of money at a particular trade that they're really good at, and they'd be happy.

02:06:36.000 But we've altered that.

02:06:38.000 Since the Second World War, that's happened. 0.85

02:06:40.000 Yeah.

02:06:40.000 Well, the structure of school, I think it benefits kids and it gives them discipline.

02:06:44.000 Like, well, you got to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning.

02:06:47.000 You got to get there and you got to figure out how to get your body to get up.

02:06:49.000 You got to figure out how to fire your mind up at your first class at 8 a.m.

02:06:53.000 I think all that's probably good because it's tests.

02:06:56.000 It's like you're overcoming.

02:06:58.000 And 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.

02:07:07.000 You get some experience about the world.

02:07:08.000 Yeah, there's something to that, but I just think this model that they want people to follow, when I see most people following this model, I'm like, is this just because people haven't been creative, they haven't been imaginative, and thinking about what they would like to do better than what they're doing now,

02:07:26.000 or is it just this pattern is so easy to slip into, and we don't even realize it until you're in it, and then you can't get out of it.

02:07:33.000 Right.

02:07:34.000 I am encouraged by like Udacity and the MOOC courses, the teaching company courses, all the Audible books.

02:07:42.000 And, you know, there's so many ways to get a free education online.

02:07:45.000 Most of the stuff is free or super cheap.

02:07:48.000 The knowledge is accessible.

02:07:50.000 It's there for everybody.

02:07:51.000 You know, it's sort of the how you're going to, in a disciplined way, get the information.

02:07:56.000 I think that that word's the key word, right?

02:07:58.000 Discipline.

02:07:58.000 Yeah.

02:07:59.000 Because the difference between what you're going to do on your own versus what you're going to do in college are very, very different.

02:08:05.000 But then the question becomes, is it healthy to take some 19-year-old kid in the most promising and fun and exciting moment of her life, right?

02:08:17.000 You're a teenager.

02:08:18.000 You're leaving your parents' house. 0.99

02:08:21.000 Burden them with some insane workload of shit that they have to do to the point where they're always stressed out. 0.99

02:08:27.000 They're constantly dealing with tests. 0.99

02:08:29.000 They're always turning in papers.

02:08:31.000 They always have to do research.

02:08:33.000 They're constantly working.

02:08:35.000 If you look at the workload of a kid in college, yes, it teaches them discipline.

02:08:40.000 Yes, it teaches them that it's hard out there and you've got to really figure out how to push yourself.

02:08:45.000 It does all those things.

02:08:46.000 But it also robs them of a lot of fun times in these years of their life.

02:08:51.000 And I'm not exactly sure if everything that they're learning and they're spending all this time on is even ever going to be beneficial. 0.97

02:08:59.000 In fact, the argument would be that most of it is fucking nonsense, and you're never going to use it. 0.98

02:09:06.000 And meanwhile, you're 19. Yeah. 0.99

02:09:08.000 You know, and you should be having fun and enjoying the vitality of youth.

02:09:11.000 I remember when I was at Pepperdine University in Malibu, I was a member of the first four-year graduating class, 1976, class of 76. And I was in the jock dorm with a bunch of baseball players and tennis players and just rowdy guys.

02:09:23.000 And they're all, I can't wait to get out of college.

02:09:25.000 I want to get out there on my own.

02:09:27.000 It's like...

02:09:27.000 When are we ever going to live in Malibu again?

02:09:29.000 Here we are, playing ping pong and going to heaven.

02:09:33.000 There's the Pacific Ocean right there and the gym.

02:09:37.000 Unless you're Oprah or something, you're not going to be living like this again.

02:09:41.000 That's so true.

02:09:43.000 That place is in the perfect spot.

02:09:46.000 Can you imagine that land now?

02:09:47.000 Oh my god.

02:09:48.000 Mrs. Eever bought that and gave it to George Pepperdine, the company that ran that school, in I think 69 or something.

02:09:56.000 That huge hunk of land at Malibu Canyon Road and PCH. That'd probably be billions of dollars now.

02:10:02.000 Probably would be, right?

02:10:04.000 If you stop and think about how many million dollar houses.

02:10:06.000 If the Coastal Commission would let them build anything.

02:10:07.000 You gotta bribe them.

02:10:08.000 You gotta hook them up.

02:10:09.000 That's right.

02:10:09.000 You gotta get them Laker tickets.

02:10:11.000 Did you see this ITT Tech?

02:10:13.000 You mentioned trade schools.

02:10:14.000 It made me think of it. 1.00

02:10:15.000 This shit that happened in the last two weeks. 1.00

02:10:16.000 They got completely shut down by the Department of Education. 1.00

02:10:19.000 Whoa.

02:10:19.000 It says, Former ITT Tech students declared debt strike.

02:10:23.000 I am stuck up to my neck in debt for the rest of my life.

02:10:26.000 End quote.

02:10:27.000 Yeah, the problem with the, my argument for tech schools are good, is a lot of them get, you know, they turn into these, like, diploma mills that just basically are for profit.

02:10:38.000 Right.

02:10:38.000 It's okay to have a profit company, but, you know, for something like this, you end up churning out students that can't get jobs, but they have this huge debt.

02:10:47.000 And they were.

02:10:48.000 The 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.

02:10:58.000 Oh, God.

02:10:58.000 And so the government just said, well, we're not going to do this anymore.

02:11:01.000 This is tax dollars.

02:11:02.000 And so now these students don't get the financing anymore, and the school is still charging $50,000 a year or something.

02:11:08.000 It's like, that's the end of the game.

02:11:09.000 Wow.

02:11:10.000 So a lot of these private tech schools, or just private schools in general, depend on federal government money.

02:11:16.000 Through the students.

02:11:18.000 So they're not really for-profit in the sense of we're competing in the marketplace like Apple versus IBM and the best product will win.

02:11:26.000 It's not like that.

02:11:27.000 They're getting subsidized, heavily subsidized.

02:11:30.000 Heavily subsidized, but yet the price is so elevated that people can't afford it.

02:11:34.000 Yep.

02:11:35.000 It's really crazy how much it costs to get an education.

02:11:37.000 And I understand that it's expensive to try to give someone an education.

02:11:42.000 It's expensive to try to run a university.

02:11:45.000 People that are great teachers and professors deserve a fair pay.

02:11:50.000 They deserve a lot of money.

02:11:51.000 Look at this article by David Frum, F-R-U-M, in The Atlantic.

02:11:55.000 Atlantic.com.

02:11:56.000 He 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,

02:12:11.000 support staff and so on.

02:12:13.000 If you scroll down a little bit...

02:12:16.000 Let's see.

02:12:18.000 Right there.

02:12:20.000 So this is California colleges, state university system, from 11,600 to 12,000 professors.

02:12:28.000 But the number of administrators went from 3,000 to 12,000.

02:12:32.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:12:32.000 That's the money, because those are full-time jobs, and they all have health care and benefits and retirement and all that. 0.71

02:12:39.000 So that's where the expense is.

02:12:41.000 It's not in the actual teaching.

02:12:44.000 You have a professor with a brain sending the ideas into the brains of the students in the classroom.

02:12:50.000 It's all the support structure around it, not to mention these gyms and dorms and cafeterias that are now nice restaurants.

02:12:58.000 All that's expensive.

02:12:59.000 This is hilarious.

02:13:00.000 Listen to this.

02:13:28.000 March 2016, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education held its 10th annual conference in San Francisco.

02:13:35.000 Hilarious.

02:13:36.000 Attendance set a new record, 370. The association publishes a journal.

02:13:41.000 It bestows awards of excellence. 0.99

02:13:45.000 That fucking thing in the University of Missouri was a shocking insight into how colleges really work. 0.99

02:13:51.000 That lady was yelling at that student who was a photographer. 1.00

02:13:56.000 That was his job.

02:13:58.000 He was working for the school.

02:14:00.000 Melissa Click was the professor of communications.

02:14:02.000 Yes, which is hilarious.

02:14:03.000 And the guy was an ESPN reporter sent there to cover the protests they were going to have.

02:14:10.000 Here's a professor of communications saying, no press!

02:14:13.000 Not only that, she asked for muscle. 0.92

02:14:16.000 That's where it got really offensive.

02:14:17.000 Like, what are you, a goon? 0.99

02:14:19.000 You want to bring in the goons? 1.00

02:14:21.000 Oh, and you see that video?

02:14:21.000 She comes up and knocks the camera.

02:14:23.000 But it's this self-righteous, and this lack of understanding.

02:14:29.000 There she is.

02:14:30.000 It'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.

02:14:37.000 That this idea of having this safe space, like, this is college.

02:14:41.000 What are you saying?

02:14:42.000 Let's explore what happened here.

02:14:44.000 What was this racial incident?

02:14:46.000 And let's get to the heart of that.

02:14:47.000 Let's not get angry at some guy who's taking a picture of things and photographing things.

02:14:52.000 You are openly protesting in a public place.

02:14:55.000 I would assume you want attention.

02:14:57.000 Isn't that a big part of it?

02:14:59.000 So this idea that you can get some guy and hit his camera when he's like, this is a crazy person, but it's a person who's, they have too much power.

02:15:09.000 Right.

02:15:09.000 There's too much authority.

02:15:11.000 Well, on the good side, she was fired and appealed and lost, so she's out.

02:15:15.000 That is good.

02:15:16.000 So that's good.

02:15:17.000 It's sad that she got to that place.

02:15:18.000 And just in the last two weeks, one of the deans at the University of Chicago sent that letter out.

02:15:23.000 Now everyone's read it.

02:15:24.000 It went viral.

02:15:25.000 Yes.

02:15:25.000 To all the class of 2020. No safe spaces.

02:15:28.000 No microaggressions.

02:15:29.000 We're not disinviting speakers.

02:15:31.000 You got to grow up.

02:15:33.000 And where I teach at Chapman University...

02:15:36.000 So I sent that letter to the president and I said, hey, maybe, you know, maybe we should do something like that.

02:15:41.000 And at first he said, well, I don't know, you know, we don't really have a problem with that here at Chapman.

02:15:45.000 Everything's cool.

02:15:46.000 I don't want to stir things.

02:15:47.000 And then he decided he'd do it.

02:15:48.000 So he did it.

02:15:49.000 And then the Orange County Register published it.

02:15:51.000 And I thought, this is great.

02:15:53.000 So my first week of class last week to my students, we read it.

02:15:56.000 I said, this is it.

02:15:57.000 There's no safe spaces here on Chapman and so on.

02:16:00.000 You're adults now.

02:16:01.000 And, you know, they seem fine with that.

02:16:03.000 I 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.

02:16:15.000 Like, ooh, I've got to navigate around that.

02:16:18.000 I better not use that.

02:16:18.000 I better be very careful.

02:16:20.000 And all of a sudden, it just shuts people down.

02:16:22.000 It becomes like McCarthyism for morality.

02:16:25.000 Right, right.

02:16:42.000 Right.

02:17:00.000 Right.

02:17:00.000 Fat shaming and all these different trigger warnings that they would like on almost every and it just becomes this ridiculous nerfed-up environment that you're living in and when you're in school and you're preparing for the real world 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,

02:17:25.000 you know, cultural appropriation, white people shouldn't be wearing dreadlocks and all the nonsense that they're showing these kids. 0.99

02:17:31.000 It's fucking crazy! 1.00

02:17:33.000 It's crazy to assume that you can get through that and then become a functioning member of society and work with 40-year-old people who think you're retarded. 1.00

02:17:42.000 Right, exactly.

02:17:44.000 I'm giving a talk next week at Cal State Fullerton on this very subject because last year the sorority got in trouble because they held a Taco Tuesday.

02:17:51.000 Yes, I saw that.

02:17:53.000 Cultural appropriation.

02:17:54.000 I saw that.

02:17:55.000 Really?

02:17:56.000 Part of it is, I think... 1.00

02:17:59.000 The lack of realization that there just are assholes in the world, people. 1.00

02:18:03.000 There are just bad, nasty people, whatever. 1.00

02:18:05.000 The question is, how do you deal with them?

02:18:07.000 So like at Chapman, for example, last year, the LGBTQIA community there...

02:18:13.000 What's INA? These are new ones that have been laid on.

02:18:15.000 So the Q is questioning or queer. 1.00

02:18:19.000 Questioning.

02:18:19.000 I thought it was just queer.

02:18:20.000 Well, no, questioning in case you're not sure where you are.

02:18:23.000 Shouldn't we have two Qs, just so we don't discriminate between the queer and the questioners? 0.97

02:18:28.000 Yes, right.

02:18:29.000 Let's make that so, please, people.

02:18:31.000 Let's not be insensitive.

02:18:32.000 Let's see.

02:18:32.000 I, I think intersectionality.

02:18:36.000 Intersectionality.

02:18:37.000 If you're in between sex, I think that's for the biological.

02:18:40.000 You have different genitals than you feel like you should have or something like that. 0.99

02:18:45.000 Have you seen pansexual? 0.99

02:18:48.000 There was a woman who was a congressperson, I think she was, who came out as pansexual. 0.88

02:18:53.000 Is that what she was?

02:18:54.000 No, she wasn't a congressman.

02:18:55.000 She was a state representative, I think. 1.00

02:18:57.000 What the fuck did she do? 1.00

02:18:58.000 She came out as pansexual, the first pansexual politician. 1.00

02:19:03.000 What does pansexual mean again?

02:19:04.000 I think it's everything. 1.00

02:19:06.000 You're basically a freak. 0.99

02:19:07.000 Mary Gonzalez, Texas state representative, identifies as pansexual in new interview. 0.99

02:19:16.000 Oh my goodness.

02:19:18.000 Transsexuals don't believe in a gender binary. 0.97

02:19:20.000 Oh yes, that's it. 0.91

02:19:20.000 No gender binary. 0.91

02:19:21.000 So this is called cissexist heteropatriarchy.

02:19:26.000 That you believe there's only two, men and women, and that is discriminatory because there's people that are in between.

02:19:32.000 Well, I think there are.

02:19:33.000 I think there definitely are.

02:19:35.000 I think there's people that have different levels of intelligence.

02:19:39.000 There's people that are shorter.

02:19:41.000 There's people that have different...

02:19:43.000 There's different levels of sexual desire.

02:19:46.000 And there's got to be people that are on the borderline between a man and a woman, and they choose to be in neither or. 0.67

02:19:53.000 So think of them as fuzzy sets with a little bit of overlapping on the borders.

02:19:57.000 Most people are in one or the other.

02:19:59.000 Yes, there are people in between.

02:20:01.000 Okay, what do we do?

02:20:03.000 Nothing.

02:20:03.000 You don't have to do anything.

02:20:04.000 Don't discriminate.

02:20:05.000 Yes, of course.

02:20:06.000 You know, don't say to an Asian person, you must be good at math because you're Asian or something like that. 1.00

02:20:13.000 Yeah, don't be a dick, okay? 0.99

02:20:14.000 But isn't that a compliment? 1.00

02:20:16.000 Like, if you see a black eye and you say, you must have a big dick because you're a black eye. 1.00

02:20:21.000 Is he going to go, you racist piece of shit? 1.00

02:20:23.000 He's not, right? 1.00

02:20:24.000 If you say to a guy, like, you must be a genius, you're a European Jew, do they get upset at you for that? 0.98

02:20:31.000 It'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. 0.98

02:20:45.000 Like that? 0.99

02:20:46.000 Anyway.

02:20:47.000 Yeah.

02:20:48.000 So last year I went to this little safe space talk, discussion, at the LGBTQ group.

02:20:55.000 IA. Don't forget the IA. IA. Chapman, okay.

02:20:57.000 Intersexual.

02:20:58.000 What was the last one?

02:20:59.000 What was the A? Let's see.

02:21:03.000 LGBTQIA. I forget what that is.

02:21:05.000 Analog?

02:21:05.000 No, that's right.

02:21:06.000 As opposed to digital. 1.00

02:21:07.000 I don't fuck digitally. 1.00

02:21:07.000 I have to fuck through headphones. 1.00

02:21:09.000 I forget what that is now. 1.00

02:21:10.000 And cords. 1.00

02:21:12.000 Shut up. 1.00

02:21:13.000 What's the A? Asexual. 1.00

02:21:16.000 Asexual.

02:21:18.000 That's right.

02:21:18.000 Interesting.

02:21:19.000 You just have no...

02:21:20.000 That's true, though.

02:21:21.000 There are people that are like that, that don't desire sex.

02:21:23.000 So, you know, there's truth in all these things, and the people that were there is maybe a dozen people or so.

02:21:28.000 You know, very nice, very thoughtful.

02:21:29.000 You know, we just like to help people.

02:21:31.000 Okay.

02:21:31.000 I feel left out.

02:21:32.000 I think they should add an H in there.

02:21:35.000 Heterosexual. 0.86

02:21:36.000 Absolutely.

02:21:37.000 So then I can sort of see in this meeting how a pseudo-problem becomes a problem that isn't real.

02:21:44.000 And that is, you know, we're here to meet to discuss the problem we have.

02:21:49.000 Okay, what's the problem?

02:21:50.000 Well, there were some incidences against LGBTQIA people here on campus.

02:21:55.000 Okay, what happened?

02:21:58.000 Well, first of all, I just asked, well, like, how many times does this happen?

02:22:02.000 Like once a day, once a week, once a year?

02:22:04.000 What's the rate?

02:22:05.000 Don't know.

02:22:06.000 We don't have any data.

02:22:07.000 Well, is it worse now?

02:22:09.000 Oh, yeah, it's much worse.

02:22:10.000 Well, how many times did it happen last year, five years ago?

02:22:13.000 We don't have any data.

02:22:14.000 How do you know it's worse?

02:22:16.000 Well, it just kind of feels worse, you know, like we get more emails.

02:22:20.000 Okay, that's meaningless.

02:22:21.000 Okay.

02:22:22.000 Then it was like, well, like, give me some incidents.

02:22:24.000 It's like examples.

02:22:25.000 What happened?

02:22:27.000 Well, I heard about this gay couple.

02:22:29.000 They 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.

02:22:37.000 I said, that's it? 1.00

02:22:39.000 You know, there are assholes driving around. 1.00

02:22:43.000 You know, that's never going to be zero. 1.00

02:22:46.000 And there's no place you're going to go where you're going to be safe from that in the world.

02:22:50.000 And so the question is, how do you deal with that? 1.00

02:22:53.000 Well, you can just say, fuck off, asshole, or just ignore them, or, you know, whatever. 1.00

02:22:57.000 But, you know, the idea of, I'm hurt, I'm injured, I'm damaged, and I have to go and meet with my people where we talk about how hurt and damaged we feel, that's going to make it worse, I think. 1.00

02:23:09.000 It's going to turn...

02:23:10.000 Not a non-problem, but a minuscule problem into a big problem that doesn't need to be that way.

02:23:15.000 That's my opinion of that.

02:23:17.000 Well, we're...

02:23:18.000 We'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.

02:23:26.000 You know, they could have drove by and go, I love your hair! 1.00

02:23:29.000 And then just kept going, like, this piece of shit, he just totally gendered me. 1.00

02:23:35.000 There's levels. 1.00

02:23:36.000 That's right, of course. 0.98

02:23:37.000 There'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, 0.96

02:23:55.000 you will almost be willing to dismiss everything on their team. 0.91

02:24:00.000 You know, everything that they're trying to push forth that some of the things might have some merit to them.

02:24:04.000 Some of the things might be really valid, but it's all in the same camp. 0.88

02:24:08.000 Of these ridiculous, oversensitive people that are looking to get recreational outrage all the time.

02:24:15.000 So they might attach themselves to really legitimate points that people that might be more rigid or conservative in their ideology, they reject it outright. 1.00

02:24:26.000 They won't even consider it because it's these fucking dummies and they're crazy outrage and they're safe spaces, like these people. 0.99

02:24:34.000 Be attached to some really good ideas about how maybe it's not a good idea to have a bunch of guys on your campus yelling shit out at girls as they walk by. 1.00

02:24:44.000 And maybe we can figure out how to stop that. 0.98

02:24:45.000 Well, and that's right.

02:24:47.000 So all these have a little kernel of truth and moral progress, as I said, happens, you know, bottom up, change language and so on.

02:24:52.000 So it starts off well-intentioned.

02:24:56.000 So the question is, what do you do when somebody says something offensive?

02:25:00.000 I mean, do we turn it into a massive campus crisis?

02:25:03.000 Or do you just say to the guy, dude, that's not cool. 1.00

02:25:06.000 Just don't say that kind of shit. 1.00

02:25:07.000 It's not acceptable. 1.00

02:25:09.000 So like the Halloween costume incident at Yale last year.

02:25:13.000 Okay.

02:25:14.000 So, you know, the faculty member sent out that email that said, you know, you're adults.

02:25:19.000 We're not going to tell you what costumes you can and cannot wear.

02:25:22.000 And this erupted.

02:25:23.000 And they said, well, what if somebody shows up in blackface?

02:25:26.000 Okay, I'll admit, somebody shows up in blackface at a Halloween party, that's kind of pushing the boundary.

02:25:31.000 It's a risky move.

02:25:32.000 You could say you're Al Jolson, though.

02:25:34.000 What if you're a silent film specialist?

02:25:37.000 You have a Mexican hat, a sombrero, or you're dressed up as a Native American. 0.95

02:25:41.000 I mean, really?

02:25:42.000 So there's sort of scales from offensive to inoffensive.

02:25:45.000 Well, is it more offensive to wear blackface than it is to wear redface? 0.83

02:25:49.000 I have no idea, but it seems to be that...

02:25:51.000 You can kind of get away with red face still, right?

02:25:55.000 Well, the Redskins, you know.

02:25:56.000 Probably not after we talked about this.

02:25:58.000 They'll pass some new rules.

02:25:59.000 We have to sit down, decide what to be upset about.

02:26:02.000 But why not just, you know, these are adults.

02:26:04.000 We don't need to tell them how to play in the sandbox.

02:26:07.000 Yes. 1.00

02:26:08.000 You know, ladies, if your cat called, you know, just tell the guy, shut the fuck up or fuck off or just ignore him. 1.00

02:26:16.000 And tell the guy. 1.00

02:26:17.000 Guys, you want to get laid.

02:26:20.000 Cat-calling a woman is going to have the opposite effect.

02:26:23.000 You never know, though.

02:26:24.000 Just don't do it.

02:26:24.000 There's some freaks out there.

02:26:25.000 You might call them in.

02:26:26.000 You might call them in like an elk call.

02:26:28.000 I don't have any data on that.

02:26:51.000 I'm afraid.

02:26:51.000 This is an outrageous thing because it's so rare, because there has been progress.

02:26:55.000 So even though I think that a lot of people in the recreational outrage community are outrageously stupid in their efforts to make everything an offense, I think that the pressure of all that craziness actually somehow can probably tone things down. 0.98

02:27:11.000 If 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. 0.99

02:27:18.000 I'll call Caitlyn Jenner Caitlyn. 0.99

02:27:20.000 I'll call her Caitlyn.

02:27:22.000 Let's just relax on doing that to six-year-olds.

02:27:25.000 Let's figure out a comfortable medium.

02:27:27.000 And then in becoming more and more tolerant as time goes on, it'll just be the norm.

02:27:32.000 Just like slapping people in those movies was normal in 1960, but in today it's outrageous.

02:27:38.000 And in a television show, like, to the moon, Alice!

02:27:41.000 Right.

02:27:41.000 If you had a new guy, you know, like Kevin James.

02:27:46.000 If 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? 0.93

02:27:53.000 Right, that's right. 0.98

02:27:54.000 There's been progress made.

02:27:55.000 Absolutely.

02:27:57.000 People getting outrageously upset about things that merit being outrageously upset, it makes everybody think. 0.98

02:28:04.000 But 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. 0.98

02:28:15.000 You're going too far. 0.99

02:28:16.000 You're going too far the other way.

02:28:18.000 You're not reasonable. 0.98

02:28:19.000 You're looking to get pissed off over nonsense. 0.96

02:28:22.000 You 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. 0.96

02:28:33.000 That is something to be outraged about.

02:28:36.000 That's a real scary thing that you should be really pissed off about. 0.98

02:28:40.000 Not taco fucking Tuesday. 0.98

02:28:42.000 Right, right. 0.96

02:28:43.000 So there I think that hurts the cause of real injustices that need to be corrected.

02:28:48.000 Yeah.

02:28:48.000 Because then they get lumped in with the silly stuff and it's not.

02:28:51.000 So we have to get away from binary thinking to scale thinking.

02:28:56.000 Yes.

02:28:56.000 You know, it's a spectrum.

02:28:58.000 And choosing gender teams, too, becomes a real issue. 0.99

02:29:01.000 Because there's pieces of shit on the male side, and there's really fucking questionable people on the female side, too. 1.00

02:29:07.000 Like that mattress girl thing. 1.00

02:29:09.000 Oh, right. 1.00

02:29:09.000 You 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. 1.00

02:29:24.000 Is that what she said? 1.00

02:29:24.000 Did I make that up, allegedly? 1.00

02:29:26.000 Find that out.

02:29:27.000 I don't want to get sued.

02:29:28.000 Super important that you be real clear. 0.88

02:29:30.000 I 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? 0.91

02:29:39.000 Or excuse me, Rolling Stone. 0.98

02:29:40.000 The Rolling Stone.

02:29:42.000 Was it Virginia?

02:29:43.000 Yeah.

02:29:44.000 I mean, that is crazy.

02:29:46.000 That's crazy.

02:29:47.000 And when something gets to the point where it's in Rolling Stone, it's a complete, total fabrication like that, where somebody just made something up and it didn't go through the proper channels because everything dealing with gender and all these issues that are super sensitive issues gets treated with kid gloves.

02:30:01.000 Instead of approaching it with the same kind of skepticism that you would a murder case or a case of theft Instead, it gets immediately looked at like there's one possible scenario here.

02:30:14.000 This woman has been victimized. 0.99

02:30:15.000 To question her would be horrific, and you shouldn't even observe the facts.

02:30:19.000 You shouldn't even have an open mind.

02:30:20.000 You have to go into it with this, even though you really don't have any information really whatsoever other than people talking, you have to go into it with this idea that this person talking is telling you the truth.

02:30:29.000 Right.

02:30:30.000 Otherwise, you're blaming the victim.

02:30:31.000 I mean, shock? 1.00

02:30:32.000 Fuck me in the butt. 1.00

02:30:33.000 Thank you. 1.00

02:30:34.000 I got nervous.

02:30:35.000 She said bluntly during one Facebook exchange. 0.96

02:30:37.000 Yeah, see, I don't know what happened between them, and if someone sends you a text like that, it doesn't mean that you're allowed to rape them.

02:30:43.000 But his version of what happened versus her version of what happened...

02:30:47.000 You don't know who's telling the truth.

02:30:50.000 You just don't know.

02:30:51.000 And when things get so outrageous that this Rolling Stone thing gets published and gets treated with kid gloves, and one of the most important magazines in American culture treats this as if it's a real story and it turns out to be a complete fabrication,

02:31:08.000 it sort of in some ways highlights the problems with dealing with this kind of stuff in a non-objective way.

02:31:15.000 Carol Tavis wrote a nice piece for us in Skeptic on what we mean when we talk about rape.

02:31:21.000 And again, it's this categorical binary thinking.

02:31:24.000 So there's perfect behavior and everything else is rape. 1.00

02:31:29.000 And so she talks about the dance of seduction and the guy's pressing and she's saying no.

02:31:36.000 Then he says okay.

02:31:37.000 Then she kind of hints that maybe, okay, a little bit more.

02:31:40.000 The whole foreplay process is kind of a way of ending up over here.

02:31:46.000 And yes, absolutely.

02:31:48.000 Whenever she says no, then that's it.

02:31:50.000 It's no. 0.97

02:31:50.000 But it isn't like she said no when they were still at the restaurant and he just raped her anyway. 0.97

02:31:56.000 Usually there's a whole series of steps that...

02:31:59.000 We never get to see or no one knows.

02:32:02.000 We weren't there.

02:32:02.000 We don't know what happened and what the gray area was.

02:32:06.000 She says no, but no for now, maybe later.

02:32:11.000 And none of that gets recorded.

02:32:12.000 So we have no idea of what happens.

02:32:14.000 Well, we also have to consider that like we've been talking about with so many different other examples that there is a giant spectrum of people's behavior.

02:32:21.000 There are men that I know that like to get bossed around by women and smacked around and they like them to do terrible things to them and they will pay these women to do this. 0.99

02:32:31.000 They'll go to a dominatrix and this woman will insult them and Right. 1.00

02:32:35.000 And she beats them and paddles them. 1.00

02:32:37.000 They do all kinds of crazy stuff to them.

02:32:39.000 And a lot of these guys are wealthy guys who have high-pressure careers.

02:32:44.000 And I've met these guys.

02:32:46.000 I've talked to them.

02:32:46.000 I know guys that have had this thing.

02:32:49.000 But if it's the other way, if it's a woman that likes getting smacked around by a guy, then it becomes a crazy... 1.00

02:32:55.000 You don't even want to know that that girl exists. 1.00

02:32:58.000 A woman can't hire a male dominatrix to kick her ass and rape her. 1.00

02:33:04.000 But a man can hire a woman to humiliate her, piss on her. 1.00

02:33:07.000 Like, I know this guy likes girls to piss on him. 1.00

02:33:09.000 Really? 1.00

02:33:10.000 He's crazy! 0.98

02:33:10.000 Jim Norton. 0.98

02:33:11.000 He's a wild man.

02:33:13.000 But he talks about it openly.

02:33:14.000 He's a comedian.

02:33:15.000 But he's not the high...

02:33:18.000 High-pressure, you know, executive type guys that are doing it. 0.98

02:33:21.000 He's just a nut and a pervert, but hilarious. 0.97

02:33:23.000 Hilarious comedian. 1.00

02:33:24.000 But it's okay.

02:33:26.000 I mean, he doesn't like getting beat up, but it's okay. 1.00

02:33:29.000 Like, 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. 0.99

02:33:35.000 But we're supposed to pretend that there's not some woman out there who doesn't want to, like, engage in a similar type of activity with a man. 0.99

02:33:45.000 And they must exist.

02:33:46.000 They just do.

02:33:47.000 They just do.

02:33:49.000 They must.

02:33:50.000 And is it the same?

02:33:52.000 If 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,

02:34:07.000 and she tells you when you're going to have sex. 1.00

02:34:10.000 No, now, motherfucker. 1.00

02:34:11.000 And you're like, ugh. 1.00

02:34:12.000 And you've got to give in to her.

02:34:13.000 This is this weird game that you guys play.

02:34:15.000 Right.

02:34:15.000 That is completely fine.

02:34:17.000 But if the roles are reversed, and you do that to her, and you guys both get off on it, it's a terrible crime.

02:34:23.000 And it's interesting.

02:34:24.000 It's interesting because we're not talking rape.

02:34:26.000 We're not talking being pro-rape in any way, shape, or form, or pro-domestic violence. 1.00

02:34:31.000 We're talking about people like weird shit. 0.99

02:34:34.000 And some people actually want you to commit crimes to them. 0.99

02:34:38.000 Well, 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.

02:34:48.000 Yeah.

02:34:49.000 Reverse those roles. 0.94

02:34:50.000 It looks like rape. 0.98

02:34:51.000 It sounds terrible. 0.98

02:34:51.000 It does. 0.98

02:34:52.000 You don't know what all the steps were.

02:34:53.000 There's a great little short film.

02:34:55.000 It's like five minutes long.

02:34:56.000 This sounds like rape apology talk, though.

02:34:57.000 You know that, right?

02:34:58.000 I know.

02:34:59.000 Even discussing this, you become a rape apologist.

02:35:02.000 So we should be really clear.

02:35:03.000 That's not what I am doing. 0.99

02:35:05.000 I'm looking at all the possibilities of human behavior, and I'm saying, people are fucking weird. 0.98

02:35:11.000 We're weird. 0.78

02:35:12.000 And 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.

02:35:25.000 Right. 0.99

02:35:26.000 People are fucking strange. 1.00

02:35:28.000 They're fucking strange. 1.00

02:35:30.000 Well, this new law in California, you have to have verbal consent. 0.99

02:35:33.000 How do you know?

02:35:34.000 Unless you record it.

02:35:36.000 Yeah.

02:35:37.000 It's still, he said, she said, well, I asked her verbally, she said yes, and then she says, I never said yes.

02:35:42.000 How do we know?

02:35:43.000 Did you see the video that got released where this really wealthy billionaire character in Florida filmed his girlfriend beating herself up?

02:35:51.000 She'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.

02:36:02.000 She's on the bed, wailing herself in the face. 0.99

02:36:05.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:36:05.000 And there's video of this, screaming at the top of her lungs, working herself into a frenzy, probably with the windows open so the neighbors can hear it, and she's just beating the shit out of herself. 1.00

02:36:15.000 So what if he didn't have video? 0.99

02:36:16.000 He'd be screwed. 0.96

02:36:17.000 Exactly. 0.99

02:36:18.000 Yeah, many people have been, for sure.

02:36:20.000 I mean, this is not, again, this is not being a domestic violence apologist.

02:36:24.000 This is not saying that men don't beat women.

02:36:27.000 This is just saying, when we look at things as, you know, I'm a man, so I side with all men.

02:36:32.000 Or I'm a woman, so the women must be telling the truth. 1.00

02:36:34.000 They're just people.

02:36:35.000 There's awesome people that are men.

02:36:37.000 There's awesome people that are women. 1.00

02:36:39.000 There's awesome people that are asexual.

02:36:41.000 There's a really good little film short online.

02:36:45.000 I can't remember the producer.

02:36:46.000 It might have been Reitman.

02:36:47.000 Is there a Reitman producer?

02:36:49.000 Yeah, Ivan Reitman, is that what it is?

02:36:50.000 Maybe that was it.

02:36:51.000 Anyway, it's a young couple, like in a dorm room, and they're on the bed, clothes on, they're making out and foreplay.

02:36:57.000 And at some point he says, you know, I think I better get the, you know, the thing.

02:37:01.000 And she goes, yeah, yeah, I think you should.

02:37:03.000 And you think he's going to reach for a condom, and he pulls a contract out.

02:37:07.000 And he's like, alright. 0.98

02:37:08.000 So, 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.

02:37:15.000 Now, will your client agree to this?

02:37:17.000 Okay, so we check this, and the whole thing goes through that.

02:37:20.000 Yeah.

02:37:21.000 It's called consent.

02:37:21.000 It's made by his son, Jason Reitman.

02:37:23.000 Oh, that's it.

02:37:23.000 Oh, there we go.

02:37:24.000 There's a hilarious one that was a pro-consent video that they had released to try to get people acclimated with this idea, and it's an attractive young couple, like a hipster-looking dude.

02:37:37.000 He had like a funky mustache, and he's with a girl, and they're making out.

02:37:41.000 And he's like, can I touch your leg?

02:37:43.000 And she's like, yes.

02:37:44.000 And then she's like, can I touch your leg?

02:37:46.000 And he's like, yes.

02:37:47.000 And he's like, can I kiss you?

02:37:48.000 And she says, yes.

02:37:49.000 And he goes, can I take your shirt off?

02:37:50.000 She goes, not yet.

02:37:51.000 And they keep making out, and it's kind of hot!

02:37:54.000 It's kind of hot. 0.99

02:37:55.000 Like, 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. 0.97

02:38:01.000 And I can understand, like, the first couple of times you do it, but the video, like, I don't support that being a rule. 0.95

02:38:07.000 But if two people want to do that on their own, that video's kind of hot.

02:38:11.000 Like, it looks like, wow, eventually she said no, and then she said yes, the shirt came off, we're making progress, some things are happening, she's obviously enjoying this make-out thing, like, it's kind of hot. 0.96

02:38:23.000 But you shouldn't fucking have to do that. 0.94

02:38:25.000 Most people have never done that. 0.97

02:38:26.000 This idea.

02:38:27.000 And then you make it a law.

02:38:28.000 Yes.

02:38:29.000 And then you've got to enforce it.

02:38:30.000 How do you enforce the law?

02:38:31.000 Yeah, and it's not going to work with everybody. 0.99

02:38:33.000 Some people don't want to say shit. 0.98

02:38:35.000 Some women don't want to talk about it. 1.00

02:38:36.000 Some men don't want to talk about it.

02:38:37.000 And some people want to talk about every single aspect of it.

02:38:39.000 Right.

02:38:40.000 Find somebody who meshes with what you're looking for.

02:38:43.000 Somebody gave an interview.

02:38:43.000 I think it might have been in Rolling Stone.

02:38:44.000 No, it might have been in The Atlantic.

02:38:46.000 Where a college co-ed.

02:38:48.000 And the guy just kept asking her and asking, can I do this? 1.00

02:38:51.000 She said, shut the fuck up and just fuck me. 1.00

02:38:53.000 Come on! 1.00

02:38:55.000 Well, that's, you know, I mean, that's okay, too.

02:38:59.000 Right, right, right.

02:38:59.000 It's like, everything's okay.

02:39:01.000 But as soon as you start telling people, you've got to ask every question in the book before you do it.

02:39:07.000 No, you don't.

02:39:08.000 No, you don't.

02:39:09.000 No, you just don't rape people. 1.00

02:39:10.000 Right.

02:39:10.000 Just don't rape people, and then we're all good.

02:39:13.000 Right.

02:39:13.000 It's real simple.

02:39:13.000 Don't hold anybody down.

02:39:14.000 Don't make them do things. 1.00

02:39:15.000 Don't fuck them when they're passed out. 1.00

02:39:17.000 We done? 1.00

02:39:17.000 We're good. 1.00

02:39:18.000 Absolutely.

02:39:18.000 Okay, yeah.

02:39:20.000 It just, it gets a little silly.

02:39:23.000 But, you know, the intention behind it is like you're saying.

02:39:26.000 The intention behind it ultimately is about progress.

02:39:30.000 Ultimately is about making an environment, whether it's ill-intentioned or not, or whether it's, like, ill-thought-out or not.

02:39:37.000 The idea is to create a safer environment.

02:39:40.000 It's just, are you doing that, or are you just annoying the fuck out of people, and the same amount of sexual assault is going to go on? 0.58

02:39:45.000 I don't know. 0.98

02:39:46.000 Right.

02:39:47.000 It's an interesting question because if you pull so far left, do they meet in a different place than they would be if you just let them, well, boys will be boys.

02:39:54.000 Stay away from the fraternity, ladies. 1.00

02:39:57.000 You know what I mean?

02:39:58.000 That doesn't fly anymore.

02:39:59.000 So maybe it does in some way help.

02:40:01.000 And then, you know, that stat we put up with the number of diversity officers.

02:40:05.000 I 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.

02:40:16.000 Yeah.

02:40:17.000 Okay, did we really have a problem?

02:40:18.000 Maybe a little bit, but now it's a big, an official problem.

02:40:21.000 We've got to write it up.

02:40:22.000 We've got to make it a law.

02:40:24.000 Busy work.

02:40:25.000 Yeah.

02:40:25.000 Yeah, busy work.

02:40:27.000 Then they're looking for trouble.

02:40:29.000 Unions have been doing that since the beginning of time.

02:40:31.000 Teachers unions, that's a big issue. 1.00

02:40:35.000 They've been creating jobs since the beginning of time.

02:40:38.000 I had a buddy of mine who had a job on, what is that where they do the Javits Center?

02:40:45.000 You know the Javits Center in New York?

02:40:46.000 He had a job where he doesn't even go there.

02:40:49.000 He got a check every week.

02:40:50.000 He didn't even go there.

02:40:52.000 He never went there.

02:40:53.000 And he was one of those no-show jobs.

02:40:55.000 It was like some union deal that they had made, probably with quote-unquote organized crime.

02:41:02.000 So all that stuff's always been fluffed up forever. 0.57

02:41:04.000 So this idea of having all these diversity officers, they're going to fucking create conflict just to keep their job afloat.

02:41:10.000 The last thing they want is them to be obsolete. 0.86

02:41:13.000 You know, well, look, we all just decided, like, Taco Tuesday's good.

02:41:16.000 I like tacos.

02:41:17.000 And, uh, yeah, you can dress like an Indian if you really love Native Americans. 0.88

02:41:21.000 I mean, do you really have a respect for it? 0.99

02:41:23.000 And you're not, like, being an asshole about it, right? 0.99

02:41:24.000 Okay, cool. 1.00

02:41:25.000 The blackface, we're gonna leave that alone. 1.00

02:41:27.000 We're not gonna go with blackface, but that's one of the only... 1.00

02:41:29.000 I would say the rule is, don't be a dick. 1.00

02:41:32.000 And most people know when they're being a dick. 0.99

02:41:35.000 And if they don't, then your colleagues and friends should tell you. 0.99

02:41:38.000 But can you be a dick and be funny? 0.99

02:41:40.000 Like... 1.00

02:41:41.000 You can as a comedian.

02:41:43.000 I can't.

02:41:44.000 But if a white guy... 0.99

02:41:45.000 What if a black guy dresses like a white guy and puts white face on and just starts doing the most ridiculous white stereotype? 0.99

02:41:52.000 Well, remember when Ted Danson came... 0.99

02:41:56.000 Was it the Oscars?

02:41:58.000 Whoopi Goldberg.

02:41:59.000 She had a roast or something, right?

02:42:01.000 He was dating her at the time.

02:42:03.000 And he made a little joke about Will Chamberlain's record.

02:42:06.000 He showed up in blackface. 0.87

02:42:07.000 Yeah, he showed up in blackface. 0.92

02:42:08.000 Remember that?

02:42:09.000 And that was a big controversy.

02:42:12.000 Yeah.

02:42:13.000 I mean, at this point, whatever that was...

02:42:14.000 That's not even blackface.

02:42:15.000 That's like bronze.

02:42:18.000 1980s, I think.

02:42:19.000 That is hilarious that he did that.

02:42:21.000 No longer funny.

02:42:22.000 Isn't that crazy, though, that this is one specific look with makeup we do not allow?

02:42:29.000 Right.

02:42:29.000 You cannot pretend to be a white person who...

02:42:33.000 Or you can't be a white person who's pretending to be a black person. 0.82

02:42:35.000 But you can pretend to be anything else. 0.85

02:42:38.000 Right.

02:42:39.000 Like, a white man can pretend...

02:42:41.000 There's probably good reasons for that in our history. 1.00

02:42:43.000 Well, who the fuck was... 0.99

02:42:44.000 Who played Charlie Chan? 1.00

02:42:46.000 It was a white guy, right?

02:42:48.000 The famous Chinese detective?

02:42:50.000 That was a white guy.

02:42:52.000 And when John Wayne played Genghis Khan, do you remember that?

02:42:56.000 Didn't Tom Cruise play an Asian in one of the films?

02:42:58.000 No, he was the last samurai, but he was a European guy.

02:43:01.000 Oh, okay, all right.

02:43:01.000 Okay, that's good.

02:43:02.000 Yeah, that's good.

02:43:04.000 No, man, it's interesting, and I get it.

02:43:07.000 There was slavery until 200 years ago.

02:43:09.000 I understand the whole thing, but it's still quite odd, you know?

02:43:14.000 Right, yeah. 0.99

02:43:14.000 And when a black person puts on whiteface and pretends to be a white person, no one gives a fuck. 0.99

02:43:19.000 Oh, there we go. 1.00

02:43:20.000 Right.

02:43:21.000 Warner Oland is Charlie Chan.

02:43:23.000 That is the most non-Chinese. 1.00

02:43:25.000 He looks totally Puerto Rican.

02:43:27.000 His mustache.

02:43:28.000 What nationality was that guy?

02:43:30.000 Did he have some weird stuff that they put on his face?

02:43:34.000 Let's find out what nationality he is.

02:43:36.000 If you had a guess, what do you say?

02:43:38.000 I say maybe he's got a little Native American in him.

02:43:41.000 Swedish!

02:43:42.000 Oh, God.

02:43:43.000 Boy.

02:43:43.000 Well, that's practically Native American.

02:43:45.000 That's practically Chinese. 0.98

02:43:47.000 He's not close to anything. 0.74

02:43:50.000 He's so white! 0.96

02:43:51.000 That's like the whitest race he could pick. 1.00

02:43:53.000 Like, what's more white than Swedish people? 0.99

02:43:56.000 That's the whitest ever. 1.00

02:43:57.000 Swedish meatballs and shit. 1.00

02:43:58.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:43:59.000 Like, Swiss chocolate.

02:44:01.000 Switzerland.

02:44:01.000 That's a different country.

02:44:02.000 But that's really white.

02:44:04.000 For him to be Charlie Chan, it's hilarious.

02:44:06.000 I've been reading this, just started reading this book on audio, The 50-Year Mission, the sort of oral history of Star Trek.

02:44:12.000 Oh, wow.

02:44:13.000 So they start with... 0.97

02:44:14.000 Dork alert. 0.91

02:44:15.000 Oh, yeah, totally. 0.95

02:44:17.000 Totally.

02:44:19.000 But, you know, the actors, you know, black, Asian, and so forth, they actually got to play a real black, a real Asian in a real job.

02:44:27.000 And that was, you know, 1966, that was pretty innovative at the time.

02:44:30.000 It's really important.

02:44:31.000 The guy that played Sulu, what's his name?

02:44:35.000 George Takei?

02:44:36.000 George Takei.

02:44:37.000 You 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.

02:44:54.000 George Takei lived in an internment camp when he was a kid.

02:44:59.000 Terrifying.

02:45:00.000 That's how recently that was.

02:45:04.000 Yeah, so, you know, Roddenberry was something of a visionary in that sense.

02:45:08.000 Oh, yeah?

02:45:08.000 A little bit ahead of his time on that.

02:45:10.000 Dude, that show is awesome.

02:45:11.000 Yeah.

02:45:12.000 Even to this day.

02:45:13.000 Yeah.

02:45:13.000 It's hit that corny place.

02:45:15.000 Like, I watched one where Captain Kirk has to fight that lizard dude with a shitty outfit on. 0.97

02:45:21.000 That was done right here at Vasquez Rocks. 0.95

02:45:23.000 Was it?

02:45:24.000 Right up off of 14. You can go there and you can see where Captain Kirk pushed him off the- Topanga?

02:45:28.000 Like that way?

02:45:29.000 No, no.

02:45:30.000 Vasquez Rocks is off of Highway 14. Where's Highway 14?

02:45:33.000 So you take 5 North 14 that goes up to Lancaster, Palmdale.

02:45:37.000 Oh, okay.

02:45:38.000 Way out there.

02:45:38.000 Yeah.

02:45:38.000 We did a lot of...

02:45:40.000 All those westerns were shot out there.

02:45:41.000 We did a lot of Fear Factor stuff out there.

02:45:43.000 Oh, right.

02:45:43.000 In Palmdale.

02:45:44.000 Oh, that's so pretty.

02:45:45.000 That's it.

02:45:45.000 Yep.

02:45:46.000 Oh, wow, man.

02:45:46.000 That is beautiful.

02:45:47.000 Yep.

02:45:48.000 So that's where that is?

02:45:49.000 That's out near Palmdale?

02:45:49.000 Yeah, there he is.

02:45:50.000 Watch this video.

02:45:50.000 This is awesome, awesome, awesome.

02:45:53.000 This guy who's playing, the lizard guy, is so bad.

02:45:57.000 Like, everything is so bad.

02:45:59.000 The outfit's so bad.

02:46:00.000 The movement's so bad.

02:46:01.000 Like, look how slow this is.

02:46:03.000 Look how slow this is. 0.99

02:46:03.000 This is fucking incredibly bad. 0.99

02:46:05.000 He swings. 0.99

02:46:06.000 Look at this.

02:46:07.000 This is not in slow motion.

02:46:09.000 This is how the show's really playing out.

02:46:12.000 Look how slow this is.

02:46:13.000 Look, he throws a kick.

02:46:14.000 Oh, Captain Kirk.

02:46:15.000 You let him catch your kick.

02:46:17.000 That's bad Muay Thai. 0.87

02:46:18.000 You're supposed to kick the leg out. 0.99

02:46:20.000 You don't throw the guy in the air like that.

02:46:22.000 And if you definitely throw him in the air, you follow up. 1.00

02:46:24.000 Where's your ground and pound, bitch? 1.00

02:46:25.000 Okay, look at this. 1.00

02:46:27.000 How come the lizard's so weak now?

02:46:29.000 He's got to do the helmet slap with the eardrums.

02:46:32.000 Oh, right.

02:46:32.000 Look at this.

02:46:33.000 He's trying to bite him.

02:46:34.000 Look how bad this is.

02:46:35.000 My god, this is amazingly bad.

02:46:38.000 Yeah, but when you're ten years old, this is really, really high drama.

02:46:41.000 Oh, it was incredible back then.

02:46:42.000 Look.

02:46:43.000 He does.

02:46:43.000 He does the double ear smack, and the lizard can't handle it.

02:46:46.000 And then he runs away like the slowest white guy that's ever walked the face of the earth. 1.00

02:46:52.000 I mean, this is so stupid. 1.00

02:46:54.000 Harry's got this styrofoam rock. 1.00

02:46:57.000 Yeah, and watch how it looks fake, too.

02:46:59.000 Like, even when he's picking it up, he's not even straining.

02:47:01.000 Look how weak this is.

02:47:03.000 He throws it.

02:47:04.000 Boom! 0.99

02:47:04.000 And it hits him right in the chest. 0.99

02:47:06.000 Nothing.

02:47:07.000 He's like, I can't believe this. 1.00

02:47:09.000 Meanwhile, go back to hitting him in the ear, motherfucker. 1.00

02:47:12.000 You hit him in the ear and he was hurting. 1.00

02:47:13.000 There's another video that was just released a few weeks ago of Shatner and the lizard monster on his couch and they're watching a TV show or something and then they start fighting.

02:47:22.000 Keep the thing playing because I want to find out how this ends. 0.98

02:47:25.000 I don't remember how stupid it was at the end. 1.00

02:47:26.000 Oh, it doesn't end until he makes gunpowder and shoots him with a makeshift cannon. 1.00

02:47:32.000 Oh, that's right. 0.99

02:47:33.000 Boy, talk about giving a guy a lot of room.

02:47:35.000 Look at that.

02:47:35.000 He threw a big giant rock at him and it looks so fake.

02:47:39.000 This lizard all of a sudden is so strong that he can take a 500-pound rock and throw it like it's a basketball. 0.95

02:47:45.000 But just a few minutes ago, he was struggling with weak-ass Captain Kirk. 0.94

02:47:48.000 That's right. 0.86

02:47:49.000 And then the technique, look, you hit him in the ear, you did some serious damage, and you let that go and start throwing rocks.

02:47:55.000 Right. 1.00

02:47:55.000 Go back to hitting him in the fucking ear. 1.00

02:47:57.000 Just go whack him in the ear. 1.00

02:47:59.000 It seems to be he has a soft spot. 0.99

02:48:01.000 Keep doing that.

02:48:01.000 Yeah, but then the show will end before the 48 minutes is up.

02:48:04.000 I don't think it will.

02:48:06.000 It just looks so hilarious how slow that thing was moving.

02:48:09.000 It was worse than I thought it was.

02:48:11.000 See, that's also...

02:48:13.000 That is...

02:48:14.000 There it is.

02:48:15.000 Oh, look at this.

02:48:16.000 The same technique.

02:48:17.000 Look.

02:48:21.000 That's hilarious.

02:48:22.000 He's holding himself.

02:48:24.000 Oh, oh, oh.

02:48:27.000 That is hilarious.

02:48:29.000 He's going after him again.

02:48:31.000 That's hilarious.

02:48:32.000 This is really funny.

02:48:33.000 I mean, Shatner's got a good sense of humor to do a send-up of himself.

02:48:38.000 Yeah.

02:48:38.000 But that is, that show and that scene, it shows in a lot of ways how far our entertainment has evolved.

02:48:46.000 Yes.

02:48:47.000 I mean, that's a comedy today. 0.94

02:48:50.000 If you had that on Comedy Central today, if you had a ridiculous space show, if you called it Ridiculous Space Show, and you essentially just have a lot of the same shit that was in regular space movies just reenact them, people would laugh. 0.94

02:49:01.000 They would laugh. 0.99

02:49:02.000 If you had the right lines that went along with how stupid that looks. 1.00

02:49:05.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:49:05.000 Well, like Mike Myers send-ups on all the spy movies. 1.00

02:49:08.000 Right, but if you watch a science fiction movie today, have you ever seen that Netflix show, Stranger Things?

02:49:14.000 No.

02:49:14.000 I just got into it.

02:49:15.000 I'm four or five episodes into it. 0.99

02:49:17.000 It's fucking great. 0.98

02:49:18.000 Brian Redband told me it was bad. 1.00

02:49:19.000 He's crazy.

02:49:21.000 It's really good.

02:49:22.000 Stranger Things on Netflix. 0.99

02:49:23.000 It's with Homegirl That Steals Shit, Winona Ryder. 1.00

02:49:28.000 Oh, no, that's bad. 0.99

02:49:29.000 She's awesome in it, too.

02:49:31.000 And Matthew Modine, the guy from Vision Quest, he's in it.

02:49:34.000 It's really good.

02:49:35.000 It's a really good show.

02:49:36.000 Fun show.

02:49:36.000 I'm reading this oral history, though, because I just have these fond memories when I was 12 years old loving that show.

02:49:42.000 And now I get, well, Shatner wanted more money.

02:49:44.000 And then when Nimoy became famous, he got pissed and started cutting his lines.

02:49:48.000 And then Nimoy wanted a raise.

02:49:50.000 And it's like, I don't really want to know. 1.00

02:49:52.000 Those guys should keep that shit to themselves. 1.00

02:49:55.000 And that's probably pretty common with any business, I suppose. 1.00

02:49:58.000 When Screech wrote that book about Saved by the Bell, I was crushed.

02:50:02.000 Was that Inside MMA? No.

02:50:05.000 Screech, Saved by the Bell.

02:50:06.000 You know what Saved by the Bell is?

02:50:07.000 No. 0.98

02:50:07.000 It was a ridiculous children's sitcom. 0.98

02:50:09.000 Was it on Nickelodeon? 0.95

02:50:11.000 Is that what it was on?

02:50:11.000 No, it was on TNBC. TNBC? What was it?

02:50:13.000 It was like Saturday morning NBC. Oh, huge show though.

02:50:16.000 Huge show amongst the little kids.

02:50:18.000 And one of them rebelled and became... 0.99

02:50:21.000 He did porn. 0.94

02:50:22.000 Wrote books. 0.99

02:50:23.000 Got in a knife fight.

02:50:24.000 Got in a knife fight.

02:50:25.000 Celebrity boxing.

02:50:26.000 Celebrity boxing. 0.98

02:50:27.000 Yeah, somebody beat the shit out of him, right? 0.94

02:50:29.000 Didn't Danny... 0.94

02:50:32.000 Bonaduce? 0.99

02:50:32.000 He beat the shit out of him, right? 0.99

02:50:33.000 No, he beat up Welcome Back Cotter. 0.95

02:50:35.000 Yeah.

02:50:37.000 Screech.

02:50:37.000 Did he go to jail?

02:50:38.000 I think he went to jail, too.

02:50:40.000 He stabbed somebody, didn't he?

02:50:41.000 Yeah, somebody.

02:50:42.000 Yeah.

02:50:43.000 Like, literally stabbed somebody.

02:50:44.000 Behind the bell.

02:50:44.000 Okay.

02:50:45.000 He's crazy. 0.98

02:50:45.000 And so he wrote an autobiography saying that Tiffany Evertheism was banging everybody. 0.98

02:50:50.000 Celebrity boxing.

02:50:51.000 Mario Lopez was banging everybody.

02:50:52.000 Well, I'm like, yeah, duh.

02:50:54.000 He's Mario Lopez.

02:50:55.000 What?

02:50:56.000 I was in a...

02:50:57.000 Here we go.

02:50:59.000 He wrote that?

02:51:00.000 That Mario Lopez...

02:51:01.000 Don't even read that.

02:51:05.000 I was in a pitch meeting one time at Fox, Fox Reality.

02:51:10.000 Mike Darnell was their big reality show guy.

02:51:12.000 He's the one that brought all the big American Idol type shows, including American Idol.

02:51:19.000 Anyway, we were pitching a skeptic show.

02:51:21.000 So 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.

02:51:39.000 Oh, Jesus.

02:51:40.000 And Tonya Harding got arrested that day for beating her boyfriend up with a hubcap in their trailer park or something.

02:51:46.000 Oh, Jesus.

02:51:47.000 I remember sitting there thinking, what am I doing here?

02:51:49.000 I mean...

02:51:50.000 Didn't Paula Jones wind up doing like Penthouse or something crazy? 1.00

02:51:54.000 Didn't she do one of those? 0.99

02:51:56.000 Well, she did celebrity boxing, I think.

02:51:57.000 Yeah, there we go.

02:51:58.000 Well, Tonya Harding did.

02:51:59.000 Is that Paula Jones? 0.90

02:52:01.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

02:52:02.000 Yeah, there it is.

02:52:03.000 Paula Jones is the woman who accused Bill Clinton of doing dirty things to her, right?

02:52:07.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

02:52:09.000 Paula, not Paula Jones, Tonya Harding boxed Doug Stanhope on The Man Show.

02:52:14.000 Oh, really?

02:52:14.000 Yeah, we had a boxing match when Tonya Harding became a boxer for a while, remember?

02:52:20.000 Right.

02:52:20.000 Yeah, she was doing boxing things.

02:52:22.000 Maybe this was her start.

02:52:24.000 Yeah.

02:52:24.000 She's nice.

02:52:26.000 I met her.

02:52:27.000 She's a nice person.

02:52:28.000 All right.

02:52:28.000 She's desperate for money.

02:52:29.000 Yeah.

02:52:30.000 Yeah.

02:52:30.000 Oh, boy.

02:52:32.000 Doesn't look like an ice skater there.

02:52:34.000 Yeah, she's thick. 1.00

02:52:36.000 She must have been a good athlete, though. 0.93

02:52:37.000 I mean, you can't be an Olympic ice skater without being a good athlete.

02:52:40.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.

02:52:40.000 No, she was.

02:52:41.000 But that was a weird view into athletics, right?

02:52:44.000 When Nancy Kerrigan got beaten up.

02:52:47.000 He hit her in the legs, right?

02:52:49.000 Like hit her in the leg with a stick or something like that?

02:52:51.000 No, like a tire iron. 0.88

02:52:52.000 Was it a tire iron?

02:52:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:52:54.000 I think he shattered her, not the kneecap, but right next to it or part of it or cracked it or something.

02:53:00.000 Yeah, it was pretty heavy.

02:53:01.000 I thought she was able to compete. 0.59

02:53:03.000 And it was, I think it was Tonya Harding's boyfriend that hired the guy, so she was indirectly involved.

02:53:09.000 Right.

02:53:10.000 Yeah, and they were planning on Tonya Harding winning the Olympics, right?

02:53:14.000 They wanted her to make all the... 0.99

02:53:16.000 Oh, it was her and Nancy Kerrigan that were the golden medal, you know, sort of the competition for the gold medal.

02:53:24.000 Yeah, I don't remember the extent of the injury.

02:53:26.000 I remember Nancy Kerrigan was screaming and she was holding, like there was a video of it, right?

02:53:30.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:53:30.000 Which is crazy.

02:53:32.000 I bet she came back.

02:53:33.000 There's a video, was there a video of the guy doing it?

02:53:37.000 I don't think so.

02:53:38.000 I think they just got this aftermath part where she's screaming. 1.00

02:53:40.000 She ended up competing in those Olympics, I think, too.

02:53:44.000 That is so crazy that someone could do that. 0.94

02:53:47.000 Just run up to this girl and smash her with a tire iron. 1.00

02:53:50.000 Is that what it was? 0.99

02:53:51.000 Was it a tire iron?

02:53:52.000 Yeah, I was trying to find out.

02:53:53.000 I think so. 1.00

02:53:53.000 Fuck, that is so crazy. 1.00

02:53:56.000 That's so crazy that someone could do that because of an ice skating competition. 1.00

02:54:00.000 That instead of competing and trying to win and trying to be the best, you hire someone to smash her with something.

02:54:05.000 It says collapsible baton.

02:54:08.000 Oh, so it was one of those batons that they used for that.

02:54:10.000 Her ex-husband.

02:54:11.000 Her ex-husband did it?

02:54:13.000 Oh, it was the ex.

02:54:13.000 Okay.

02:54:14.000 Shane Stant had been hired by Jeff Goulier.

02:54:18.000 Yeah, that's what Michael said.

02:54:20.000 That's crazy.

02:54:22.000 She was never convicted of being associated with it at all.

02:54:27.000 It was just indirectly.

02:54:28.000 Well, how could you know what words were said, right?

02:54:32.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:54:33.000 Crazy that someone would do that for an ice skating competition. 0.86

02:54:36.000 You smash some girl's leg.

02:54:39.000 Whew.

02:54:41.000 Wasn't there a Texas cheerleader mom that attacked the other mom's daughter who was competing with her daughter for the cheerleader? 1.00

02:54:49.000 There was something a few years ago.

02:54:52.000 Maybe even killed her or just attacked her brutally or something like that. 0.89

02:54:57.000 Yeah, Texas cheerleader murdering mom. 1.00

02:54:59.000 Yeah, that's it.

02:55:00.000 It's like a Lifetime movie story kind of thing.

02:55:02.000 Oh, but it's real?

02:55:04.000 It's based on real?

02:55:04.000 Yeah, for sure, yeah.

02:55:05.000 They add a few things to those based on reals.

02:55:07.000 I was devastated when I found out The Revenant wasn't real.

02:55:11.000 Oh, really?

02:55:12.000 Oh, my God.

02:55:12.000 Not only was it not real, apparently they don't even say it's real, but everybody says it's real.

02:55:17.000 I'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...

02:55:25.000 The conflicts between Native Americans and settlers.

02:55:28.000 He knows all about the pioneers and the mountain men.

02:55:30.000 He said that that guy, first of all, the guy that Leonardo DiCaprio played, never had a son.

02:55:35.000 That was one of the main motivations of him going after this guy.

02:55:38.000 The guy killed his son.

02:55:38.000 Didn't have a son.

02:55:40.000 The only thing that was true was he got attacked by a bear.

02:55:43.000 And they left him to dead.

02:55:44.000 And he survived.

02:55:45.000 But he didn't kill anybody. 0.93

02:55:47.000 He's killing people and surviving.

02:55:49.000 The guy never killed anybody.

02:55:50.000 There really were trappers.

02:55:52.000 And there really were Native Americans.

02:55:54.000 And there really were bears.

02:55:55.000 Yes.

02:55:55.000 All those things existed.

02:55:57.000 But it's so funny when you have a movie like that, and you put words in people's mouths, and you just decide what they could have said that sounded cool.

02:56:03.000 Like, you shouldn't be allowed to do that, you know? 0.98

02:56:07.000 Based on means, we're going to make some shit up. 0.99

02:56:09.000 Right. 0.98

02:56:10.000 Like, you could, Kevin Costner, you could do Dances with Wolves, because you've got a fake character. 0.99

02:56:14.000 But, you know, when you did Wyatt Earp, you made a bunch of shit up. 0.99

02:56:17.000 Right. 0.99

02:56:17.000 You decided what Wyatt Earp said. 0.99

02:56:19.000 How do you know?!

02:56:21.000 We don't have a recording.

02:56:22.000 No, historical recreations like that are very strange.

02:56:27.000 All right, sir.

02:56:28.000 Did we hit the wall, Michael Shermer?

02:56:30.000 Yeah, it's three hours and 20 minutes now, somewhere around.

02:56:34.000 I know that's not the record, but...

02:56:36.000 Listen, I know your bladder is ready to give out.

02:56:38.000 Well, there is that.

02:56:39.000 There's that.

02:56:40.000 Well, thank you, man.

02:56:40.000 Listen, let everybody know where they can get a hold of you, where they can read your work, where they could...

02:56:45.000 Skeptic.com or MichaelShermer.com is the best place.

02:56:49.000 You're the first guy I've ever tapped out like that, too.

02:56:51.000 You're like, that's it?

02:56:52.000 Oh no, really?

02:56:53.000 We're done.

02:56:53.000 Oh no!

02:56:54.000 We're done talking.

02:56:54.000 I can't do it anymore.

02:56:56.000 I appreciate it.

02:56:56.000 I was ready to wrap it up.

02:56:57.000 I got a dinner to go to.

02:56:58.000 I understand.

02:56:59.000 So thank you very much.

02:57:01.000 It's always an awesome time talking to you.

02:57:02.000 You're the best conversationalist.

02:57:03.000 No, you're the best.

02:57:04.000 I really do appreciate it.

02:57:06.000 And anytime you want to do it.

02:57:07.000 Okay, sounds good.

02:57:07.000 Really, thank you very much.

02:57:08.000 Thanks everybody.

02:57:09.000 See you tomorrow.

02:57:09.000 Bye.

02:57:10.000 Dan Carlin's going to be on tomorrow.

02:57:11.000 Oh wow, really?

02:57:12.000 Oh cool.

The Joe Rogan Experience - September 14, 2016

Joe Rogan Experience #846 - Michael Shermer

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