Jan. 15, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:58:44
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| Pow Pow Pow and we're back. | ||
| This episode of the Joe Oregon Experience podcast is brought to you by LegalZoom. | ||
| To start the new year correctly, ladies and gentlemen, I believe it's a perfect time to get your life organized. | ||
| Organized? | ||
| How do you say it, Brian? | ||
|
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Organized. | |
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| It's not low. | ||
| He's a madman, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Go to stamps.com and before you do anything, click on the microphone at the top of the homepage and type in J-R-E. | ||
| Brian uses it to send those t-shirts from deskquad.tv. | ||
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| It is a very easy way to send postage from your home. | ||
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| Brian Dunning's community. | ||
|
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The Joe Rogan experience. | |
| Train my day. | ||
|
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Joe Rogan podcast by night. | |
| All day. | ||
| Rejoice, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Brian Dunning. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| Thanks for coming on. | ||
| One of the cool things about the internet is that you can get connected to all these weird and unusual folks. | ||
| And you can also exchange a lot of information back and forth and find out a lot of things about each other. | ||
| And I read about you. | ||
| No, nothing's coming. | ||
| This is fun, friendly. | ||
| I read about you and I read some of the things. | ||
| And I didn't know when you had contacted me that you had included me in your... | ||
| It was the top ten most wanted celebrities promoting harmful pseudoscience. | ||
| And in that, I read about myself, and I was shocked to learn that I believe that 911 was created by the government. | ||
| I did not know. | ||
| I didn't know that I believed that. | ||
| I don't think you've ever said that. | ||
| I've never said that. | ||
| We can talk about the whole genesis of how this list came to be. | ||
| Well, but that one is poorly researched. | ||
| I've absolutely never said that I think that the government engineered 9-11. | ||
| Well, you know, this was an episode I did in 2008, which was, I don't know, five, six years ago now. | ||
| And so before coming here today, I wanted to make sure and get all my sources for all of these. | ||
| And unfortunately, back in 2008, I was not yet keeping very good records and saving my notes. | ||
| So for the things that I have listed here, unfortunately, I can't give you the source for any one of them. | ||
| But any one of them you want to tell me is not true, I will happily retract it. | ||
| Well, first of all, the 9-11 won 100%. | ||
| In fact, I was on the phone with Alex Jones the night that 9-11 happened. | ||
| The government engineered this, Joe Rogan. | ||
| We have the documents. | ||
|
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They've been planning this since Operation Northwoods. | |
| I'm sure it didn't take him till that night to figure it out. | ||
| He would probably, well, I think he actually might have even predicted it. | ||
| But when you say that, like, people go, whoa, is he a psychic? | ||
| He predicted a billion things that never happened. | ||
| You know, every possibility. | ||
| FEMA camps. | ||
| They've got coffins, plastic coffins. | ||
| That doesn't mean that he's a clairvoyant. | ||
| It means he's a tightly strung, tightly wound-up fella. | ||
| Oh, do you think? | ||
| But we debated it online on the air. | ||
| I was like, how do you, you can't say that. | ||
| Like, there's no evidence that shows that the government did it. | ||
| Just because you suspect them of doing it, you can't say it. | ||
| There's also crazy shit that happens when planes fly into buildings. | ||
| And I have a doctor, not a real good doctor, but he's a pot doctor. | ||
| He's a doctor that hands you out medical marijuana prescriptions, but I guess he went to medical school. | ||
| I go to him the other day, and he hands me this book, and he's like, this is very important information. | ||
| And I go, okay. | ||
| So I start reading it, and it's about Tesla technology that they use to make the Twin Towers disappear. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| That the Twin Towers, the reason why they turned into dust and they just didn't fall apart into big chunks is because Tesla tech, I thought he was like having a mental issue. | ||
| Like I thought something had blown a fuse or something. | ||
| I was so confused by the conversation. | ||
| I didn't know what he was saying. | ||
| Like, you're saying they used unknown technology to make the buildings disappear. | ||
| How did you know then? | ||
| He's got a thick book. | ||
| You see, the whole thing, Tesla mythology is a whole other area of BS, which is amazing. | ||
| So many of the things that Tesla's known for never happened. | ||
| He was certainly a very brilliant man, certainly an innovative engineer, but he didn't invent AC. | ||
| He didn't invent electric motors. | ||
| These are all things that already existed that he continued working on. | ||
| He never invented a death ray. | ||
| He was completely nuts by the time of his life. | ||
| He said he had a death ray. | ||
| He and Edison did have the competition or the competing ideas about alternating current and direct current, and he was an advocate of alternating current where Edison, in fact, did tests to show, or did displays, rather, demonstrations, to show the dangers of this. | ||
| And one of the things they did is they fried an elephant. | ||
| It's really fucked, man, if you watch it. | ||
| And he called it Westinghousing. | ||
| He called it, we're going to Westinghouse this elephant now. | ||
| He was hoping that that word would catch on. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| So I don't know where you got the 9-11 thing from. | ||
| But if I had listened to me talk about the moon landing, I'd probably assume that I was also a non-believer in 9-11. | ||
| So, no, never said that and never believed that. | ||
| The only thing I've ever said that's controversial at all is that Tower 7, when you watch it fall, it looks like in controlled demolition. | ||
| And I don't think that's controversial because it looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| Yeah, but when you look at just the top half of it, it does. | ||
| Well, you look at the whole thing. | ||
| The way the structure collapses. | ||
| There's no video of the whole thing. | ||
| You can only see the video of the top, really the top quarter of it as it disappears behind the building. | ||
| And I agree, it does look exactly like a controlled demolition. | ||
| Oh, I believe it's more than the top quarter. | ||
| Pull the video up of Tower 7 dropping. | ||
| There's some pretty, I mean, this is at least 30 floors, you're saying. | ||
| You're seeing a lot of it. | ||
| It's not really, I wouldn't say it's the top quarter. | ||
| It's a 48-foot building. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I believe I can argue the fraction, but you don't see the bottom of it. | ||
| Well, that's true, but it is very unusual how it falls into its base instead of falls over. | ||
| It didn't. | ||
| It started to fall down straight, but then it almost destroyed two other buildings that it fell against. | ||
| It didn't fall into its own footprint. | ||
| Right, which any building that they were demolishing would probably do as well if they were that close to each other and it went wrong, right? | ||
| Yeah, watch it again. | ||
| Here, look at that. | ||
| Yeah, that's way more than a top quarter. | ||
| Okay, it's not. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's almost the entire building. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| Okay, let's see it again. | ||
| Let's see it again because we caught that in the middle. | ||
| Let's see it again. | ||
| Let's see it from the top. | ||
| This is not the best angle of it either. | ||
| There's a bunch of different angles all the time. | ||
| Okay, let's see it again. | ||
| Pull that one back. | ||
| I mean, it disappears into the smoke before you can see much of it. | ||
| Right, but I think it's a bit disingenuous to say that that thing doesn't fall into its base. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| It doesn't. | ||
| I mean, look at it. | ||
| It's already going at an angle. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Okay, but it all fell to the bottom. | ||
| I mean, let's look at that one again. | ||
| It's not going to fall to the top. | ||
| Okay, but you're being kind of silly. | ||
| That thing collapsed into its base. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| Watch. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| That is most of the building vanishes out of sight. | ||
| Who knows what happens from then on? | ||
| And for sure, it ran into other buildings. | ||
| The point is, this had never happened before, and it looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| I'm not saying it, but let me be clarify, because this is important. | ||
| I'm not saying it's a controlled demolition. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But that's what it looks like. | ||
| To say it doesn't look like that is kind of silly. | ||
| No, I agree. | ||
| But if you want to see how it fell into its own base, quote unquote, just look at the aerial photographs that were taken the next day when all the smoke had cleared, and you can see that it didn't remotely fall into its own base. | ||
| It fell down the street and practically destroyed two other buildings. | ||
| Well, that's a matter of physics. | ||
| I mean, all that material has to go somewhere. | ||
| You had 48 floors of material. | ||
| It all comes down and collapses. | ||
| It's going to fly to the side of the side. | ||
| And I'm not saying. | ||
| Well, it didn't fly to the side. | ||
| It fell over. | ||
| It didn't fall down and then out to in all directions like it splattered. | ||
| It fell over. | ||
| It started going down, and then it went to an angle and fell off to the side. | ||
| But this is an interesting thing because this is a thing that a lot of people want the world to be very black and white. | ||
| And they want things like this to be really simple to categorize. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| And I don't agree with you that that didn't fall into its base. | ||
| Sure, a lot of other shit happened, and Probably big chunks of it landed on buildings nearby, but that thing collapsed into its base. | ||
| Did it collapse into its base because of a gigantic diesel fire that had consumed the innards of the building and weakened the structure considerably? | ||
| Fuck, for sure that's possible. | ||
| I don't know a goddamn thing about it. | ||
| My dad's an architect. | ||
| You know, I asked him about it and he said, well, it's unusual, but you don't know what the hell was going on inside of it. | ||
| You don't know what kind of damage it sustained from having the building fall out of it. | ||
| You don't know what that diesel fuel burning, what it does to the structure. | ||
| You don't know how they built the inside of it. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| It's weird, but weird things happen when things break. | ||
| That was his take on it. | ||
| But you can't say that that doesn't look like a controlled demolition. | ||
| And I didn't. | ||
| I said it does look like a controlled demolition, the property that you can see. | ||
| most controversial thing I've ever said about 9-11. | ||
| I've never said once that I think that the government engineered it or that it was, I think it's very possible that big events happen and then people capitalize on those events and then things happen like the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| They were probably looking for an excuse to do anyway, but the idea that it was all one big grand scheme to me seems ridiculously unlikely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Let me, this, this is actually a good segue into what we started to talk about, which was this, this inclusion that I had of you back in this list of top celebrities promoting pseudoscience. | ||
| Because what it's, if someone had just listened to our last five minutes here of the exchange, it sounded like you were trying to convince me that 9-11 was a hoax. | ||
|
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By who? | |
| To who would say that? | ||
| I think anyone who, who listens to that five minutes, it would sound like you were trying to convince me Building 7 was a demolition. | ||
| No, it wouldn't. | ||
| It was very specific that I don't think it's a gray area. | ||
| I don't think it's a black and white issue. | ||
| I think it's a very gray area. | ||
| I think that that building looked like it was demolished. | ||
| Was it demolished? | ||
| I absolutely don't know. | ||
| I'm too dumb. | ||
| I have zero education when it comes to structural engineering, zero education when it comes to the damage that a fire can do to a structure and cause it to collapse and big chunks of buildings hitting it, what that can do. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But when I look at it, it looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| That does not sound like I'm trying to convince you that 9-11 was a hoax. | ||
| Because I said very specifically that I don't think it is. | ||
| And then I think that it's ridiculous to assume that someone could be so organized that they could talk these guys into flying planes, into buildings, and that they can make it that these buildings are rigged with explosives secretly, you know, some clandestine operation with the banks and the NSA and the DEA and the CIA, everyone coordinating together so that we could invade Iraq. | ||
| It sounds ridiculous. | ||
| If you're a betting man, if you had to bet yes or no, was 9-11 orchestrated by the government, if you had to bet, would you bet yes? | ||
| I would bet on no. | ||
| I would 100% bet on no. | ||
| You bet 100% bet on no. | ||
| Yes, I would 100% bet on no. | ||
| But I wouldn't be surprised if two additional possibilities. | ||
| One, it was something that they knew possibly could happen and didn't prevent against because either of A, incompetence, or B, you have to look at things like Operation Northwoods. | ||
| You have to look at the Gulf of Tonkin. | ||
| You have to look at real events that took place or real plans that were separate questions. | ||
| Those are separate questions. | ||
| Well, and then I would say there's always the possibility that there was some knowledge of it beforehand. | ||
| But that's a separate question also, then they orchestrated it and caused it to happen. | ||
| I do not have enough faith that the government is so competent that they could pull off this amazingly intricate attack. | ||
| So if you're 100% betting no, then you're going to be aware of that. | ||
| Why wouldn't that mean it's a bet? | ||
| I mean, I might bet no, but it doesn't mean anything. | ||
| I'm asking for your personal level of confidence, your opinion, and your personal confidence. | ||
| If you're forcing me to bet, then I would bet no. | ||
| But I would never say I know one way or the other. | ||
| So if I asked you, what is your bet on whether Building 7 was a controlled demolition, are you still 100% no? | ||
| I certainly wouldn't bet. | ||
| I certainly wouldn't bet because I don't know enough. | ||
| But if I looked at it the way a person who's objective, a person who understands what they know and what they don't know in this life, I would have to say it would be pretty fucking difficult to rig a building with explosives and not have anybody know about it. | ||
| It would be pretty fucking difficult to make that building implode and have it be some sort of a secret that people kept. | ||
| It seems highly unlikely. | ||
| It seems more likely to me that there's some sort of a catastrophic structural failure. | ||
| But I would fucking sue the shit out of those people that built that movie, that building rather. | ||
| If I was Larry, what's his name? | ||
| Larry Silverstein, I would sue the fuck out of the people that built that building. | ||
| I was like, look at this building just fall down when it gets on fire. | ||
| Like, you assholes. | ||
| I guess he got paid, though, from insurance, right? | ||
| He didn't need to do that. | ||
| That's the other part of the conspiracy, is that money was made off the conspiracy. | ||
| The words, the wording, pull it. | ||
| Pull it. | ||
| You know, the fact that he said pull it. | ||
| It's my take that anytime there's any sort of a catastrophic event, whether it's a murder or an accident or anything, there's a bunch of people that look for patterns in the chaos. | ||
| There's a bunch of people that look for a following plot line and look for some sort of a nefarious connection between people that would profit off this event and just the randomness of chaotic, of being attacked, of death and about destruction. | ||
| I think it's more likely that. | ||
| It's more likely that people are looking at this and trying to make some sense out of it, about this crazy, chaotic event where there's a bunch of suicide bombers that flew planes into buildings. | ||
| You know, when Neil Tyson was here, how long ago was that? | ||
| Three, four months ago, something like that? | ||
| It's about a year ago. | ||
| He was making the point about how he tries very much to give people the tools to... | ||
| And he made some points about why that's a valuable thing to have, why it's good to have, to be able to make good decisions about the way the world works and to understand the way things really happen. | ||
| And it sounded to me like you pretty generally agreed with him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I would too. | ||
| So in the case of this, 9-11, as an example, I mean, we've got 100 different conspiracy theories here, et cetera, et cetera, and not even conspiracy theories, but just plain up pseudosciences. | ||
| It makes sense to help people to come to the right conclusion, to come to a conclusion that's probably true, because that's symptomatic of all the other areas in their life where they're going to have to consider issues and make up a good, informed opinion that's probably more likely to be true. | ||
| Wouldn't you agree with that? | ||
| I mean, that's really the same thing he's saying. | ||
| So if it then makes sense for you to promote the idea that 9-11 was probably not a government conspiracy, then why would you spend five minutes showing me this video and bringing it to the attention of everyone on your show saying, hey, look at this, look how it was probably controlled demolition. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Look how much it looked like a controlled demolition. | ||
| Because it does, because it's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, but unless you're framing that within the context of, look how easy it is to be mistaken, which is not what you said. | ||
| Well, why do I have to do that to just observe something that's fascinating? | ||
| You don't have to do it, but what Neil WisTyson was trying to sell you on was the value of doing it. | ||
| Help giving people the tools to understand the way the world probably actually works. | ||
| Okay, how does that relate to you listening to me go on about how it looks like a controlled demolition? | ||
| You agree that it looks like a controlled demolition, and just because I'm expressing that, you're saying that if someone listened to that, they would think rather that I'm trying to convince you that 9-11 was a hoax. | ||
| I think that's a giant stretch. | ||
| An enormous stretch. | ||
| I think that's what it sounded like. | ||
| It didn't sound like that to me. | ||
| To most rational, objective people listening, they would have heard all the caveats that I threw in there, all the times that I said. | ||
| Now, I don't believe this. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| But looking at that and watching it collapse like that, it looks like a controlled Demolition. | ||
| I think you would be a fool to disagree. | ||
| It looks exactly like that. | ||
| Is it one? | ||
| That's not what I'm saying. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've said very clearly, I know nothing about architecture. | ||
| I know nothing about engineering. | ||
| I know nothing about the impact of diesel fire on concrete and steel. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Okay, well, let me go back again to how this is a good segue to what I wrote back in 2008. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Which hopefully the end result of me being here today will be I will get back to all my listeners and say I'm retracting your appearance on this list. | ||
| Okay, so just a paragraph. | ||
| Okay, if I read this? | ||
| Sure, please. | ||
| Okay, so I think you are number eight on my list of top 10 celebrities who promote harmful pseudoscience. | ||
| And here's the paragraph that I wrote on you. | ||
| Number eight, Joe Rogan. | ||
| Comedian Joe Rogan does what he can to promote virtually any conspiracy theory that he stumbles onto, apparently accepting them all uncritically with a wholesale embrace. | ||
| Now, I know you would disagree with that now. | ||
| Of course I would. | ||
| And I want to give you that chance. | ||
| So let me continue. | ||
| He believes the Apollo astronauts did not land on the moon. | ||
| He believes the U.S. government was behind the 9-11 terrorist attacks. | ||
| He believes the Oliver Stone version of the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| He believes aliens crashed at Roswell in 1947 and the government is covering it up. | ||
| He thinks men in black from Project Blue Book stole his friend's camera, even though Project Blue Book ended over 38 years ago. | ||
| My friend was 10. | ||
| He's 60, by the way. | ||
| And they didn't steal his camera. | ||
| I want to hear that story, but... | ||
| He took a photo of something. | ||
| Who knows what it was? | ||
| I never said it was Project Blue Book guys. | ||
| I told you what my friend, who's a flight surgeon, told me. | ||
| I wish to hell I had that reference for that. | ||
| But let me just call Steve and get him on the phone. | ||
| Steve Graham? | ||
| That would be fun, actually. | ||
| The worst part is that he promotes these ideas to the public at every interview opportunity, but gives himself the intellectual get-out-of-jail free card of not needing any evidence by hiding behind the childish debate technique of saying, hey, I'm just the guy asking questions. | ||
| God, this makes me sound like an asshole. | ||
| Well, it's just factually inaccurate on so many different levels. | ||
| I don't understand why you wrote it like that. | ||
| Like, there's things that you said that I believe that I don't, that I've never said that I do. | ||
| What I'm willing to do is look stupid. | ||
| And by talking about things and saying that looks like a controlled demolition, I know that puts you in the nutter camp, but I'm not saying it's a controlled demolition. | ||
| But I say that not being willing to debate it and being insecure, to discuss it rather, not debate it, but to discuss the reality of what you're viewing is silly. | ||
| It's preposterous. | ||
| It doesn't mean I'm promoting the idea that 9-11 was an inside job or that it was a plot by the government. | ||
| I don't think that. | ||
| I've never thought that. | ||
| But I do think that building looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| That's all. | ||
| I don't think there's anything wrong with saying that. | ||
| I think at the time that I did this, I think you had, it was shortly after when you went on Penn Gillette's radio show and talked with Phil Plate about the Moonland. | ||
| You remember that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And you kicked his butt. | ||
| Well, unfortunately, look, I would not have handled that the way I handled it then today, but there's two unfortunates. | ||
| One was that I really wanted him when we first went on to give me a reason to not believe what this Fox documentary showed me. | ||
| But the more I talked to him, the more I realized that he was almost like talking in a religious sense, in that he wasn't willing to criticize any aspect of NASA or any aspect of what was going on during that time, including the point where he was trying to deny the fact that Werner Herzog, or Werner von Braun rather, and many other scientists were actually Nazis that would come over in Operation Paperclip. | ||
| And he's like, you know, he's trying to deny that they were Nazis. | ||
| I'm like, well, this is crazy. | ||
| Like, you're trying to deny historical fact because you think that historical fact shades NASA in a bad way. | ||
| And I don't think it does. | ||
| I think the NASA of 1969 or 63 when Kennedy was in office is not the NASA of 2013 or 14. | ||
| These people are long dead and gone. | ||
| And to deny that there was a bunch of Nazis involved seems to me that's not healthy. | ||
| It seems to me like it's fucking with the facts, and it doesn't support your argument. | ||
| In fact, it makes me question all the other stuff. | ||
| So then I started getting aggressive with him because I'm like, well, you're being silly because this isn't, you're not, you're not being honest about the Nazis. | ||
| You're not being honest about this connection. | ||
| Okay, well, I got to throw that back at you. | ||
| What the hell does whether they're Nazis or not have anything to do with whether we went to the moon? | ||
| Well, it doesn't. | ||
| But denying the fact that they were Nazis has something to do with what kind of information I'm getting from him. | ||
| I'm not getting unbiased information. | ||
| Well, I remember, I don't remember that part of the conversation, but I remember that Werner von Braun had gone to Antarctica to collect rocks, to collect meteors. | ||
| And you brought that up, and I think you said words to the effect of, you know, why the heck would he have done that unless it was part of some grander scheme to fake bringing rocks back from the moon? | ||
| Am I correct about that? | ||
| Well, I said Werner von Braun did go to Antarctica. | ||
| He did when they were preparing for the moon landing. | ||
| And Phil had no idea. | ||
| In fact, I think he said he had never even heard that fact. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of photos online of Werner von Braun and this big crew. | ||
| It was one of the few places where they could go that they could study meteors that were definitely from the moon. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Phil was unaware. | ||
| Phil's an astronomer. | ||
| He's not a space historian. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| He'd have no reason to know that. | ||
| But why were you bringing that up? | ||
| What does that have to do with the question? | ||
| Well, the big conspiracy was, of course, that he had brought these rocks back from there, and then somehow or another, those were the ones they forged for the moon rocks. | ||
| When they talked about where did they get these rocks that were from the moon? | ||
| Well, there's absolutely meteors that came from the moon that are in Antarctica. | ||
| You can find them. | ||
| They can retrieve them. | ||
| They've documented them. | ||
| So that the idea is this, you have a chunk of the moon. | ||
| Here's the rocks we brought back from the moon. | ||
| We want to know what to look for. | ||
| We want to know what kind of mass they've got, things like that, how to make room for them in the spaceship. | ||
| Yeah, what they're made out of, what their contents are. | ||
| And as an alternative, that could be seen as being consistent with the moon landing was a hook. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Would you call it evidence, or would you call it consistent with? | ||
| Or would you say those are the same thing? | ||
| I wouldn't say it's evidence. | ||
| I mean, look, let's say that they could land on the moon, okay? | ||
| Let's say, which by the way, I believe now. | ||
| And let's say that they took spaceships and they went there and they brought back moon rocks. | ||
| I think if you knew for sure that there were some moon rocks in Antarctica, you would absolutely go there and study them. | ||
| I don't think it's a bad thing. | ||
| But I do think that if you were a guy looking for something that confirms your suspicions of a conspiracy, which I was, I would say, Well, look, they went to get moon rocks, and that's because that's the big thing they always say. | ||
| They brought back X kilograms of moon rocks. | ||
| Where'd they get those? | ||
| They went to Antarctica. | ||
| They got them from the Antarctica. | ||
| And look, here's a photo of Werner von Braun in Antarctica collecting moon rocks with a fucking cast on his arm for some strange reason. | ||
| How did he break his arm? | ||
| Do you know? | ||
| I didn't know that he had. | ||
| No. | ||
| Some old school cast, too, man. | ||
| Some fucking funky cartoon cast with like a bar in between. | ||
| Yeah, he must have really jacked his arm. | ||
| Well, they probably broke his arm to get him to lie about going to the moon. | ||
| See? | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Got it all locked up. | ||
| Yeah, look, like I said, I wouldn't have, I wasn't podcasting then, and I certainly wasn't watching as many documentaries, reading as many books. | ||
| I was in the middle of doing Fear Factor and working for the UFC, and I'd watch this documentary on the Fox documentary on conspiracy theory, Did We Really Go to the Moon? | ||
| And it was incredibly compelling, especially if you're a retard like me. | ||
| And you're watching Brian O'Leary, who's an astronaut saying that he could see that they could fake it. | ||
| And you're watching Bill Casing, who's the guy who worked at Rocket Die and who said that the engineers all agreed that no one could do this. | ||
| And then you look at the different backgrounds that they showed in different trips, and they were basically the same background, but they were nowhere near each other. | ||
| They had done a really good job of piecing together all this weirdness and then do it with a narrator and spell it out for you. | ||
| And I bought it hook, LottenSinker, for sure. | ||
| The real issue, there's a bunch of real issues with faking the Moonling, of course. | ||
| The numbers of people that would be involved, the amount of technology that you would have to discount where people could track the lunar module as it went, the lineage of creating the Saturn V and how the stages of detachment, all the different mathematical calculations they did to create the moon. | ||
| But if you break it down to an hour documentary for a dummy and you put some spooky music in it and you keep cutting back and forth to commercials, you're going to believe that we didn't go to the moon. | ||
| Yeah, it's the easiest idea in the world to sell. | ||
| Conspiracy theories are so just people want to believe them. | ||
| They satisfy so much. | ||
| They're fun. | ||
| They're fun. | ||
| It makes you feel like you've got some secret insider information. | ||
| But there's also, there was evidence that NASA did fake some publicity shots. | ||
| They did from the Gemini program, Michael Collins. | ||
| They used a photo of him where he was in a simulator, and they used it, and they blacked it out and had the exact same image and released it as a press photo. | ||
| So what is this deception? | ||
| Does that mean that there was deception across the board? | ||
| No, but I did this sci-fi show. | ||
| And in the middle of the sci-fi show, someone who was an editor took some footage and spliced in some sound and faked something and said that a user sent it in. | ||
| Not to my knowledge. | ||
| And I found out about it and freaked out. | ||
| And I said, well, when you fake one thing, like we spent this entire show trying to figure out the truth about something. | ||
| And you guys, for dramatic effect, faked one thing. | ||
| You fucked up the whole show. | ||
| Because what you did is you cast doubt on everything else this show is ever going to say ever. | ||
| Like literally it has to almost die right here. | ||
| Because the ethic of creating a completely honest show has already been gone. | ||
| It's already been washed away. | ||
| And when you watch, you know, something like the moon landing and you, you know, you look at these guys hopping around on the moon, you kind of almost want it to be bullshit. | ||
| Kind of like, what? | ||
| They got fucking, they got to, come on, man. | ||
| How the fuck are they? | ||
| You look up at the moon. | ||
| How the fuck are they getting up there? | ||
| And then you find shit like this where they show these images of Michael Collins in the simulator and then the exact image all blacked out background saying that he's actually in space. | ||
| Like, oh, he's in space. | ||
| Who's taking this picture of him in space? | ||
| Like, he's not in space. | ||
| This is the same image. | ||
| Like, you guys lied. | ||
| So because of that, NASA's, they're not perfect. | ||
| They weren't perfect in the fact that they hired a bunch of Nazis and brought them over from Germany. | ||
| They weren't perfect in the fact that, you know, I'm sure some people in the publicity department told some tall tales and spun some yarns. | ||
| And, you know, they had to make up for Gus Grisham dying in that simulator. | ||
| There's a lot of like horrible publicity snafus, terrible things that went wrong that eroded people's confidence in NASA. | ||
| I could easily see a fake here or there, a photograph that was staged here or there that they said happened on the moon or that they said happened in space. | ||
| I don't think that that means necessarily that the moon landing's fake, though. | ||
| Then I did. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty common piece of feedback that I'll get when I do an episode on any given conspiracy theory. | ||
| And let's say it's one like this that involves the government. | ||
| The feedback that I'll get is, so you believe the government loves us and is perfect in everything they do. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's like, well, that's false. | ||
| It's not necessary for NASA to be perfect for us to have gone to the moon. | ||
| It's not necessary for the government to be perfect for 9-11 not to have been an incident. | ||
| That's the classic straw man black and white argument. | ||
| And that's exactly what I said about the building collapsing. | ||
| It's basically the same thing. | ||
| It doesn't mean that the government is beautiful and perfect in every way because they managed to go to the moon. | ||
| Agreed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So should we go through this checklist here and see which of these I can take off? | ||
| Yeah, what was the other one? | ||
| You had another one that I violently disagreed with. | ||
| It was the first one. | ||
| Oh, the first assassination. | ||
| Okay, he believes the Apollo astronauts who did not land on the moon. | ||
| That's gone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, that's gone. | ||
| I'm checking it off. | ||
| I would love it if it was a hoax, though. | ||
| If I found out it was a hoax, I got to tell you right now, I would love it almost more than I love the fact that people went to the moon. | ||
| I would love it if it was a hoax. | ||
| Capricorn 1, best movie ever. | ||
| No, it wasn't. | ||
| It wasn't even close. | ||
| It was a good movie, but Alien was the best movie ever. | ||
| Alien 1, the first one, in my opinion. | ||
| But we're different, brother. | ||
| It had the evil corporate government conspiracy behind it. | ||
| I do not believe in Oliver Stone's version. | ||
| In fact, I've criticized that film on this podcast many times because Oliver Stone created in the Donald Sutherland character, that he used this vehicle for this general that's giving him this information in order to spell it all out to the Kevin Costner character. | ||
| I've never said that. | ||
| You know what I've said? | ||
| I said, if you look at that bullet, it doesn't look like it went through people. | ||
| That's what I've said. | ||
| Because if you look at the single bullet, it does not look like it penetrated bone. | ||
| See that bone, sir? | ||
| You see that skull? | ||
| I'm a hunter. | ||
| I'm an actual bona fide hunter. | ||
| I know what it looks like when bullets hit meat. | ||
| And that bullet does not look like it went through two people. | ||
| Did you eat it? | ||
| Yeah, I eat the fuck out of that thing. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| Did you save any? | ||
| I have some. | ||
| Yeah, I'll get you some. | ||
| Do you like venison? | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I just got one In Wisconsin last month. | ||
| Relatives in Austin, Oregon, they're sending us stuff all the time. | ||
| It's the best meat. | ||
| It's so delicious and so healthy. | ||
| And I like the fact that it's wild. | ||
| It's running around wild, and then you take it out of the mix. | ||
| But I've never said that Oliver Stone was right. | ||
| In fact, I liked the movie. | ||
| I think Kevin Coster knocked it out of the park. | ||
| I think it was an interesting movie. | ||
| But what I like about it is that it opens up this idea where people start to question what happened. | ||
| Okay, I think what I meant by that statement was you don't believe that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| I do not believe Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| No, I think there's ample evidence that there was other people involved, but that doesn't mean that Lee Harvey Oswald wasn't involved. | ||
| There's another black or white thing. | ||
| Everybody wants an either or. | ||
| I think it's very possible that Lee Harvey Oswald was in cahoots with that murder. | ||
| First of all, Lee Harvey Oswald was on the scene. | ||
| Second of all, Lee Harvey Oswald was known to be in bed with all these fucking weirdo characters. | ||
| He had gone to Russia and brought back a woman and was allowed to re-enter the United States. | ||
| The fact that Jack Ruby got to Lee Harvey Oswald in a really high pressure situation. | ||
| She shot the fucking president and you just have him wandering through with this gangster can run up to him and put a bullet in him. | ||
| It plays out like a movie. | ||
| So you've got a lot of anomalies that are consistent with any conspiracy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But my take on it is not that I know or that I believe in Oliver Stone. | ||
| My take on it is what a colossal, strange event, a changing of U.S. history, a changing of the way we look at the power of being a president, a changing of the way we look at what can happen to someone in this lifetime when someone who is so beloved as John F. Kennedy disappears off the face of the earth and the world instantaneously changes. | ||
| I think it's a fascinating story. | ||
| And I also think it's fascinating how many enemies he had. | ||
| You can't discount when you're talking about people who were involved with people who have created wars, people who have absolutely been responsible for the death of untold thousands of people. | ||
| You can't discount the idea that they would organize a coup. | ||
| I don't know if they did, but I do know that that thing was one colossal clusterfuck, a crazy thing. | ||
| And that the fact that the film was held back until Geraldo Rivera, of all people, put it on television with Dick Gregory, who a lot of people don't even realize is a great comedian, was a great comedian and an activist at the time. | ||
| And it was way into the 70s that Dick Gregory played this on Geraldo Rivera's show. | ||
| And you get to see Kennedy's head snap back in the Sapruder film. | ||
| I don't think that that means that someone else did it. | ||
| I think it means there's probably more than one person involved. | ||
| And when you look at the Warren Commission report and you look at the inconsistencies in it, there's a great book about it called Best Evidence by David Lifton, who was actually an accountant and was hired to go over the Warren Commission report and found inconsistency after inconsistency over and over again and detailed these in great order. | ||
| Difference in the inconsistency of the autopsies, inconsistencies of the various reports of what went down, inconsistencies in the Warren Commission of their findings that would cancel out each other's findings. | ||
| He was one of the few guys, with the first guys, to go through the entire 900 volumes. | ||
| Fascinating, fascinating book that I read when I was living in New Jersey. | ||
| I was living in New York rather, and I was doing a gig on the road, and I read it and fucking bombed that night. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| I was in my hotel room all day reading this freaky conspiracy book, shit in my pants, and I was like 23 years old. | ||
| And then I went on stage that night and just I ate it. | ||
| It was terrible. | ||
| And I learned a very valuable lesson from that book. | ||
| Don't read or watch depressing shit right before you go on stage. | ||
| Did you break into big conspiracy mongering in the middle of your set? | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That book, Best Evidence, was what threw me over the top. | ||
| Well, you know, I did an episode on the JFK assassination about a month or two ago, and I'd been putting it off for years because there is so much BS and so much real information on that that I found it, this is impossible. | ||
| How am I going to distill this into a 12-minute show? | ||
| Because my show is keptoid is 12 minutes long every week. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| You need to spread out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what I decided to do was not to address any of the conspiracy theories, but just talk about why in general the conspiracy theories, individual and myriad as they are, why they don't stand up to what we unfortunately call the official story, quote unquote, kind of a weasel word. | ||
| And really the thing is that what all conspiracy theories have in common is that they are united only in that they dispute the official story. | ||
| For example, you can say the Cubans killed Kennedy, or you can say the Russians killed Kennedy, or you can say the mob killed Kennedy, or you can say the Secret Serviceman running alongside accidentally shot him. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| And all the people who promote those conspiracies, they consider themselves united as a group, even though their theories are absolutely factually exclusive of one another. | ||
| Almost like competing religions. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| They cannot possibly be brought together. | ||
| The only thing they have in common is that they simply say the government's lying. | ||
| And as long as you say the government's lying, then, hey, you're okay. | ||
| You're in the club. | ||
| Your theory's all right. | ||
| Your theory is more likely. | ||
| Did you hear that? | ||
| That's the government. | ||
| They found out we're talking about this. | ||
| It's happened. | ||
| It's happened. | ||
| Yes, you're right. | ||
| You know, Ven Spugliosi's book. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I didn't like it. | ||
| What was it called? | ||
| Case Closed. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Wasn't it called Case Closed? | ||
| We don't have to accept anything. | ||
| This is Google. | ||
| He talked about one person that he interviewed who believed. | ||
| He was Posner. | ||
| Just Cyril Posner is case closed. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He believed one person he interviewed believed that Kennedy was still alive. | ||
| That's most likely. | ||
| And that he had committed suicide? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I heard the Secret Service man shot him. | ||
| I heard you could see him shoot him on the video. | ||
| I've heard that. | ||
| I've heard the driver shot him. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| The driver turned around under his. | ||
| So Even one person having their own belief that is self-contradictory seems more likely than believing what the government says. | ||
| And the government, obviously, is not perfect, but you cannot say that just because the government agrees with one particular version of events, that that event is therefore wrong. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And that's a huge, hugely popular argument that I get. | ||
| Reclaiming history, the assassinating. | ||
| I didn't read this. | ||
| I read the other one. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| However, it doesn't exclude the possibility that there was, in fact, some sort of a conspiracy. | ||
| No, it certainly doesn't. | ||
| But the fact that the government found one version of the events more compelling and wrote their official version on that doesn't make that version wrong. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| And that's the hardest point to communicate to the people who believe that. | ||
| It certainly doesn't. | ||
| The inconsistencies that are troubling in the Warren Commission's report are there's several, but one of the big ones is the single bullet theory or the need for the single bullet theory. | ||
| The reason why they needed to formulate the single bullet theory is because they had to account for three shots. | ||
| They had a new bullet that had hit ricochet against the curbstone under the overpass, and a guy had gotten hit by the ricochet. | ||
| So he was in the hospital, and they had seen the mark on the curbstone. | ||
| So they attributed that to a bullet. | ||
| So they say, okay, well, we know for sure someone was shooting from the direction of the Schoolbook Depository. | ||
| That's one thing then that confirmed actually supporting the idea that Oswald did it or that someone in Oswald's position did it. | ||
| So a bullet did come from there. | ||
| But now they had to account for all these wounds. | ||
| And so how did they do that? | ||
| Well, instead of saying, well, maybe there was more than one bullet, maybe there was more than three shots, maybe there was more than two people shooting, they had to come up with some sort of a reason why one bullet could do all this damage. | ||
| That, to me, seems a much less likely scenario than there's more than one shooter. | ||
| The more than one shooter, if you're going to kill the fucking president, and if there is a conspiracy, and we haven't proven that there's not, nor that there is, but if there's going to be a conspiracy, I would doubt you would give it to one guy named Lee Harvey Oswald, one guy, and give him a rifle that's not even that fucking good and put him in a window and give him this crazy shot that most people are not going to make. | ||
| That's not a good shot. | ||
| If you've ever shot at something, moving targets are incredibly difficult. | ||
| And moving targets, when you have this shitty bolt-action rifle and you've got to reload it, it's a long time to do that. | ||
| You can get it off if you're, I mean, I've seen the people that have pulled it off in a test where they've said try to reproduce it and they can do it. | ||
| You can get those shots off and you can do it, but you're not going to be accurate. | ||
| You need a couple of seconds to be accurate. | ||
| You're fucking shooting the president. | ||
| This is not some low-pressure situation. | ||
| This is the first person you've ever assassinated with a rifle. | ||
| My position is that it's more likely that they had a predetermined outcome that they were trying to reach. | ||
| That outcome is that they wanted to tie up everything with Lee Harvey Oswald. | ||
| And one of the best ways to do that is to attribute all these different wounds to one bullet. | ||
| Does it mean that all those wounds were not created by one bullet? | ||
| No, because it's one of the weird things that happens when you shoot things. | ||
| Things hit bone and they ricochet and they go weird directions and strange anomalies happen to bullets where a bullet will kill someone and you look at it. | ||
| It looks like it's virtually undisturbed. | ||
| Every now and then, shit gets weird. | ||
| But for the most part, when a bullet goes through two people and shatters bone in both of them, especially the wrist of Connolly on the end of it, and then winds up in the gurney in this pristine form like the single bullet theory did when they found that bullet, that's unlikely. | ||
| I've got a 50 caliber round that we found in Death Valley left over from the days when they would do fighter planes just shooting their machine guns over from China Lake. | ||
| And what it is is a completely flattened, smudged, irrecognizable piece of copper. | ||
| And protruding out from the center of it is this absolutely pristine tungsten missile that looks like it's fresh from the factory, absolutely sharp, completely undamaged, and it's inside this copper jacket that's been peeled away from it and completely smashed out to unrecognizable. | ||
| In fact, when I found it, we're looking at it going, what the heck is this? | ||
| Is this a bullet that somebody shot into something and it's still hanging on? | ||
| Yeah, so I understand what really, really weird stuff can go on with bullets. | ||
| Weird stuff can go on with bullets. | ||
| One of my favorite paperweights. | ||
| I love to talk about it. | ||
| Yeah, I'm really getting into ballistics lately. | ||
| I've been doing a lot of target shooting and talking to, I have a very good friend, my friend Justin, who is a complete gun nut. | ||
| And if I have any questions about ballistics and things, I will talk to him about it. | ||
| And he'll tell you, like, weird shit happens. | ||
| Sometimes you shoot a person and the bullet will come back at you through their eye. | ||
| Like, that's happened to guys. | ||
| Like, guys in special forces, they've assassinated somebody or shot, killed somebody, and the bullet hits bone and somehow or another figures out a way to pop out of their eye. | ||
| Like slides around the inside of the skull like a racetrack. | ||
| Somehow or another, somehow or another, ricochets in the... | ||
| So is it possible that a bullet went through Kennedy and then went into Connolly? | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| Weird shit happens. | ||
| But does it look like that bullet did that? | ||
| Not at all. | ||
| No, it looks like that bullet they fired into a tank of water. | ||
| That bullet doesn't look like it hit anything because it's a lead bullet that's jacketed. | ||
| And the jacket isn't bent. | ||
| It's not disturbed. | ||
| And to my knowledge, people have tried to recreate that. | ||
| I know Penn and Teller tried to do it. | ||
| I think MythBusters tried to do it. | ||
| They weren't able to do it when they hit bone. | ||
| They were only able to do it if they passed just through the flesh. | ||
| You can pass through flesh and leave a bullet relatively undisturbed. | ||
| But if you hit bone and you shatter that bone, most likely you're making a mess out of that bullet. | ||
| Didn't they find pieces in the body also? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And pieces in Connolly's wrist that did not match what was missing from the bullet. | ||
| There was more pieces in Connolly's body than were missing from the bullet. | ||
| Does that mean that he didn't get hit with some random shrapnel? | ||
| I mean, bullets are fucking flying and weird shit happens. | ||
| And there's a lot of weird shit that goes on when you're in a gunfight. | ||
| But I think you would probably have to attribute that to more than three bullets. | ||
| Aliens in Roswell. | ||
| Never said that. | ||
| In fact, have a joke goofing on it on my comedy special from 1999 where I say that people said the government actually printed in the paper they have recovered a crashed UFO and alien bodies. | ||
| And then the next day they made a mistake. | ||
| Oh, sorry, it was just a weather balloon. | ||
| Like, well, what about the aliens? | ||
| Those are Mexicans. | ||
| Apparently, they were on the balloon. | ||
| They were drinking. | ||
| Some shenanigans took place. | ||
| They mistook the balloon for a piñata. | ||
| It's very tragic. | ||
| You know, I never said that I think that. | ||
| What I did say that is an absolutely fascinating and fun thing to think about. | ||
| The fact that they could have found some crashed UFO from another planet and hushed everybody up and hid these bodies in little child's coffins and run away with them. | ||
| But everybody that I've talked to that has ever told me a story about being abducted by UFOs or taken aboard a craft or any of they're fucking crazy. | ||
| That's the one thing they all share. | ||
| They all share this nutty disconnect with reality. | ||
| I've talked to people that have told me some weird things about animals. | ||
| I talked to a woman that was very convincing that told me she had a Bigfoot sighting. | ||
| A very convincing Les Shroud, who's a survivor man, told me some animal was bipedals running through the woods. | ||
| But as far as UFOs, I'm still waiting for the one guy who tells me anything that makes sense. | ||
| I got in 100 arguments with people when I was filming the sci-fi show that were believers when I was asking them for evidence. | ||
| I was like, well, where's the evidence? | ||
| Like, we have sworn affidavits. | ||
| I go, that's not evidence. | ||
| He goes, that is evidence. | ||
| That's evidence in a court of law. | ||
| You can convict people for murder unless. | ||
| I go, that's not scientific evidence. | ||
| I go, you have a story. | ||
| That's all you have is a story. | ||
| Nobody wants there to be aliens more than me. | ||
| But all I see when I go looking for aliens is a bunch of unfuckable white dudes with stories about spaceships and flying saucers and all sorts of things that make their regular, mundane, boring life seem insignificant because of this greater threat, greater mystery, greater enigma, this huge thing that's going on where we're being observed by aliens. | ||
| It adds this excitement to an otherwise mundane life. | ||
| And does that mean that there are no aliens? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| Does it mean that aliens aren't observing us? | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| What it does mean is that the consistency that I've found in talking to people that claim to have had alien experiences make me think that the aliens are so intelligent that they only pick dummies. | ||
| They're so intelligent that they pick people that were easily discounted. | ||
| So you would listen to their stories and go, go ahead, dude, tell somebody. | ||
| Who the fuck is going to believe you? | ||
| You're crazy. | ||
| So they find people that have a problem with the truth and then abduct them. | ||
| That's the only thing that makes sense. | ||
| Would you describe yourself as a science advocate? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I'm a huge fan of science. | ||
| It's one of the things that I forgot to argue with Stefan Molyneux when he was on the podcast recently. | ||
| Not argue, but he argues against funding scientific research and space exploration. | ||
| To me, it fuels my day. | ||
| If I get up in the morning and I read about some new thing that they're doing where, I mean, even I'm been following this idea of putting a manned mission on Mars and these people that are going to have to go there on this one-way trip and my fucking hands sweat just thinking about it. | ||
| Those things fuel my day. | ||
| I'm fascinated by science. | ||
| Absolutely fascinated by science. | ||
| The thing that I love doing the skeptoid episodes, my favorite part of it is solving the mysteries that people usually leave unsolved because they stop at the paranormal explanation. | ||
| For example, the whole aliens in Roswell, take that as an example. | ||
| If you take the National Enquirer version of events, it's sensational and it's fun. | ||
| Aliens are here. | ||
| Aliens are visiting us. | ||
| The government's covering it up. | ||
| It's got all of that, all the compelling qualities of a story that we love. | ||
| But the fact is that those people haven't solved the mystery. | ||
| And what I enjoy most is completing the process, going all the way through it, actually finding the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, actually finding the solution to what happened whenever possible. | ||
| Well, isn't what makes it exciting to these people that you never really can do that? | ||
| Unless you can get a time machine and go back to Roswell, New Mexico in 1940, what is it, seven? | ||
| Was it seven? | ||
| 1947, yeah. | ||
| I have the actual front page of the Roswell Daily Record on my home framed. | ||
| Oh, do you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Very cool. | |
| It's fascinating. | ||
| What's also fascinating historically, just to look at all the other things that were in the news that were stories, try to picture yourself living at this time, you know, 70 years ago. | ||
| It's weird, 77 years ago. | ||
| But the other thing that's weird about it is that you can't go back. | ||
| So you can't know. | ||
| You've got a bunch of different people, and some of them tell you they saw aliens, some of them tell you they say bodies, and Max Roswell, you know, Max Brazil, whatever the fuck his name was, swears and all these different people. | ||
| And then you see the press conference where they have this stuff, look, it's just this stuff, you know? | ||
| It's so delicious to think in terms of conspiracy, to think in terms that the government has this unbelievable magical information that they're not sharing with us because they don't think that we can handle it. | ||
| And it becomes this thing that makes average everyday life more exciting. | ||
| And on that same vein, in the question of going all the way back to Building 7, for example, to me, let's say... | ||
| Let's say we're just going to leave that unsettled. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| Maybe it was, maybe it wasn't. | ||
| But to me, what's really interesting about that is the underlying science is how would a building made of steel and covered with concrete or whatever it was made of, how would that melt? | ||
| Why would it collapse? | ||
| And understanding the actual science is to me far more interesting than simply doing this anomaly hunting that is so much more popular and trying to point fingers and turn it into a whole political ideological thing. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| What is your background? | ||
| What is your education in? | ||
| My background is in computer science, but I never really worked in the field. | ||
| I did software consulting, basically, for most of my career until I became a science writer about six, seven years ago. | ||
| How would you feel if someone with no software knowledge whatsoever started criticizing software development that you were involved with if they were, say, like an architect? | ||
|
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Since I was always really bad at it, I'd some problems. | |
| Yeah, no, I would say I'd say just as you expect, I'd say, well, you know, I probably know better than you do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now, when you see architects and engineers for 9-11 Truth, when you see this group of people. | ||
| How many architects are involved, Brian? | ||
| Google that shit. | ||
| Architects and engineers for 9-11 Truth. | ||
| There's a substantial number of people. | ||
| Yeah, but unfortunately, it's something of the people who actually are in that field, and most of them are not, it's, you know, a tiny fraction of a percentage of all the people who work in that period overall. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So if you're trying to look at what do most architects and engineers say, overwhelmingly, they have no problem with, quote-unquote, the issue. | ||
| Do you think, honestly, that it's been studied by most architects and engineers? | ||
| And again, just for the record, again, I don't believe in a conspiracy for 9-11. | ||
| I never have, but I'm saying that, you know, this kind of throws in the face of what you said. | ||
| Like, these are educated people that are trained as architects and engineers, and they have this issue with building seven. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, 2,134 architects and engineers. | ||
| That's kind of a lot. | ||
| I will say this. | ||
| The people who have spent the most time on the question are overwhelmingly believers in the conspiracy. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But where is the causal relationship there? | ||
| It's not that they spent most time, learned the most information, and then made a rational decision based on what they learned. | ||
| It's the other way around. | ||
| They spent time obsessing with it because they were ideologically married to the idea from the very beginning. | ||
| Well, if you say that, that dismisses them. | ||
| And that's a good thing to say if you're trying to dismiss them. | ||
| But I don't think you know them. | ||
| And I don't think you've really examined why they came to these conclusions or why they were interested in investigating it in the first place. | ||
| Well, this is what I do for a living is I talk to people. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| But what I'm saying is I know you didn't interview 2,000 people. | ||
| You didn't ask all those different guys. | ||
| So to say that in a blanket general statement, that this is the reason why they came to this conspiracy is a little disingenuous. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Generalizations are always wrong. | ||
| That's an issue. | ||
| I think that's a real issue. | ||
| And I think that's what we're dealing with here, where you had this reluctance to accept the fact that I wasn't saying that 9-11 was an inside job just because I was saying Tower 7 looks like a demolition. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| Well, if I listen to this, I would think that you're trying to convince it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| It's not a black and white issue. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness in the world. | ||
| And there's a lot of weirdness in perception. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness in people that are educated but are also incorrect. | ||
| It's a common thing. | ||
| It happens all the time. | ||
| And you're absolutely correct that 2,000 people out of what number, vast number of architects and engineers there exist in the world. | ||
| The real question is, how many of those other people that exist have examined this as thoroughly as these people? | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| The ones that examine it, the ones who are looking to find some sort of a conspiracy. | ||
| Does that mean they're wrong? | ||
| Well, in this case, you and I both believe that they're wrong, but it doesn't mean they're wrong. | ||
| Well, there's not a lot of people, realistically, who work in the field of failure analysis for building structure. | ||
|
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But those who do, No one can call in. | |
| We shouldn't guess. | ||
| Let's not go this way. | ||
| My supposition is that the people who work in failure analysis of buildings had no problem with what they saw happening on television. | ||
| I wouldn't guess that's going to go on. | ||
| Jesus, why would you guess? | ||
| Because I didn't need to. | ||
| Well, I mean, it's clear if you just watch any documentary on how the structure collapsed. | ||
| Well, if those people that believe in the engineers and architects from 9-11 Truth created a documentary, maybe it would be convincing in the other way. | ||
| You know, I mean, it really depends on what perspective you're coming from. | ||
| When you're as uneducated about the subject as you or I, we're kind of crazy in making a conclusion one way or another. | ||
| Okay, that's true. | ||
| But I mean, there's a certain amount of information that's widely available about how the building was constructed. | ||
| According to those guys. | ||
| According to the people who make it widely available. | ||
| Who knows who really built the building? | ||
| They built those buildings in New York. | ||
| That's a part of the problem. | ||
| They were skimping on the concrete and fucking Joey. | ||
| What's up with this old reball? | ||
| This thing's going to fall down. | ||
| I'm hearing a generalization about New Yorkers here. | ||
| It's about my people. | ||
| They're scum. | ||
| They're dirt. | ||
| They should stay down. | ||
| No, what my issue with all this is, is that you came to this instant conclusion that I probably would have reached as well about me, about certain subjects. | ||
| Well, if he believes this, he probably believes that. | ||
| If he's discussed this, then he believes that. | ||
| If he's discussed that, then he believes that. | ||
| He's promoting dangerous pseudoscience. | ||
| But I'm not. | ||
| I mean, I certainly have promoted a nonsensical idea in that we never went to the moon, but it was based on a lot of really fascinating, weird pieces of evidence that are really amazing once you start going down that rabbit hole and following them and watching the Neil Armstrong speech that he gives, the 25-year anniversary speech, where he talks about removing truth's hidden layers and all this weird cryptic shit that he did. | ||
| And then all the shit when you're looking at the videos of them bouncing around where it looks like they're on trampolines. | ||
| If you're inclined to be conspiratorial, it's all there for you. | ||
| The speech from President Clinton's book where he talks about when he was working with a carpenter when the first moon landings took place and the carpenter told him that he didn't believe anything those TV fellers said, that they could show, they could fake anything and put it on TV. | ||
| And he said, back then I thought that guy was a quack. | ||
| But during all my years in the White House, I started to think maybe he was just ahead of his time. | ||
| That's Bill Clinton in his book said that. | ||
| So if you're conspiratorially minded, you start looking, you know, confirmation bias. | ||
| You start looking for things that confirm your idea. | ||
| Look at these intersecting shadows, man. | ||
| You know, look at this. | ||
| That picture's fake. | ||
| Even if that picture's fake, it still doesn't mean people didn't go to the moon. | ||
| And consequently, if you're inclined to think that 9-11 was a government conspiracy, you're going to be one of the people who spends the most time, quote-unquote, studying it, which really means reading the same stuff that confirms your belief on the movie on the internet. | ||
| Most likely. | ||
| Or you could be someone who's absolutely obsessed with proving that 9-11 was not an inside job. | ||
| And you could chase that down and look at the conspiracy of confirmation bias that resulted in all these crazy books and documentaries and all these different things where people came to these erroneous conclusions. | ||
| Who spends the most time looking at pictures of UFOs? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Pilots, astronomers, or UFologists? | ||
| Mostly chicks. | ||
| Can I get into that anything? | ||
| Get a couple more of these. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine it's people that are obsessed. | ||
| And I would imagine that a lot of those people are obsessed. | ||
| They're entertaining unhealthy ideas. | ||
| That's what I said, though, a minute ago when we were talking about architects and engineers on 9-11. | ||
| You kind of jumped on my logic. | ||
| But that's different. | ||
| We're talking about people that are observing it, not people who are trained in that field. | ||
| When you get 2,000 plus, 2,100 people that are trained in that field, me personally as a non-architect and non-engineer, I have to look at it a little bit differently. | ||
| There's nobody more trained in ufology than ufologists. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
|
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Me. | |
| I am the most trained in ufology. | ||
| You don't even know. | ||
| I'm the guy. | ||
| If you have any questions. | ||
| I'm going to use this because I just had it. | ||
| If you need a go-to guy, I will give those guys ecstasy and strippers, and we'll cure all this search in the skies. | ||
| A bunch of unfuckable white dudes. | ||
| That's what we're dealing with, Brian doing. | ||
| That's the real issue. | ||
| Well, you're right in some ways, you're right in some ways, and we agree in some ways. | ||
| And I absolutely agree with you that I've been 100% irrational in the past about certain things. | ||
| And also, I get caught up when I get into a discussion with something about like Phil Plate with the moon landings. | ||
| I'll get caught up in trying to be correct, or I'll get caught up in trying to counter his moves and treat it like it's a jiu-jitsu match. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Why didn't you just make it a jiu-jitsu match? | ||
| Well, we weren't even in the room together. | ||
| If we were in the room together, it probably would have worked out better. | ||
| He was on the phone, and I was on the phone once. | ||
| I was in studio once, he was in studio once, and we were on the phone once. | ||
| Let me ask you this question. | ||
| Are we on time, by the way? | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| We can go as long as we wanted. | ||
| We don't have a boss. | ||
| One of the things that I put in my paragraph about you, which I hope to, would love to completely retract, was a criticism of what you say so often is that I'm just the guy asking questions. | ||
| Shouldn't we be looking at this? | ||
| Shouldn't we be asking these questions? | ||
| Am I saying that? | ||
| Am I saying that right now? | ||
| I mean, I have said that. | ||
| I was saying that you're not going to be able to do that. | ||
| I'm just asking questions. | ||
| Joe Rogan questions everything. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Right, but when I'm, well, if you go, that's not a good example, because if you go over that, it's me destroying pseudoscience. | ||
| If you go over that show, it's like I got attacked by more people that fucking believe in chemtrails because of that show, explaining the actual science behind chemtrails. | ||
| I mean, it's the thing that I sent you with Roseanne, where I explained the science behind jet engines. | ||
| Great job, Metaway. | ||
| I thought you did a wonderful job going talking to Roseanne about the chemtrails. | ||
| Well, that's all credit to Mick West from Metabunk. | ||
| He was a software engineer and a brilliant guy, software engineer like yourself. | ||
| Software business. | ||
| What was the Tony Hawk? | ||
| You did Tony Hawk? | ||
| Tony Hawk, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He beat Epic Games, and he sold his share in that and just decided to debunk conspiracies. | ||
| And he's brilliant at it. | ||
| And he breaks it down so eloquently on the show. | ||
| We brought him on the show to sort of establish the science behind contrails and chemtrails. | ||
| So my point with the whole asking questions things and the validity of saying that, it goes a lot toward the idea of is it smart to debate questions of pseudoscience? | ||
| I guess right now what's happening is Bill Nye is, I'm not sure if it happened yet already, but Bill Nye is going to the Creation Museum to debate creationism. | ||
| I know, I heard about that. | ||
| Yeah, now that triggers a lot of pro and con thought in the science communication business because many of us, myself included, think that it does more harm than good because you're suggesting to anyone who might be on the fence, you're suggesting to them that there is a debatable question here. | ||
| When you have something that is clearly an established fact backed up by all available evidence and something that's crazy and has no possible evidence for it, we don't hold scientific debates about that. | ||
| We move forward with our lives. | ||
| And when you go out and you hold a debate, when you agree to have a debate, you're going to convince anyone who's on the fence, oh, maybe there is a question here that needs to be looked at. | ||
| And in fact, I think it's arguable that you do more harm than good. | ||
| And so by the same token, I say that it's really possible when you say, hey, I'm just the guy asking questions about Building 7 or whatever the subject is, that you're potentially doing more harm than good by suggesting that there is a questionable subject here. | ||
| Roswell, let's take, for example, hey, I'm just the guy asking questions. | ||
| Isn't it strange that there were three small bodies that needed coffins? | ||
| Well, let's just stop with the one example. | ||
| You think that potentially addressing a reality, a reality in the way something looks, that that could be dangerous, that somehow people could misconstrue that for being support for a conspiracy theory? | ||
| I think that when you ask questions and you make an argument that says, hey, shouldn't we ask questions about this, which is the answer is usually yes. | ||
| But when it's on a matter of basically settled science, I think you're doing more harm than good by suggesting, hey, shouldn't we question whether 2 plus 2 equals 4? | ||
| Isn't it okay to ask, does 2 plus 2 equals 5? | ||
| Well, you know that there's massive inconsistencies in the studies that were done about 9-11 that are disputed about the free fall speed of tower science. | ||
| I know there's a lot of anomalies that people have picked out, but I wouldn't say that there's any inconsistencies in the evidence when we're talking about testable evidence that you can hold in your hand. | ||
| Well, what I mean by inconsistencies is things that, anomalies is a better word. | ||
| Things that you don't usually find, like buildings falling at free fall speed and then saying that it's one second less than free fall speed. | ||
| All these things fuel the debate. | ||
| All these things get people excited about it. | ||
| But to deny that these things exist, I think, is silly. | ||
| Because then you fuel the conspiracy theories even more because you're denying something that seems obvious to the eye. | ||
| The average person that looks at that building says, yes, that does look like a controlled demolition. | ||
| Does that mean it is? | ||
| No, it doesn't. | ||
| But to pretend that it doesn't look like that is ridiculous. | ||
| To pretend that it's not odd that it falls at free-fall speed is... | ||
| I'm not sure anyone is denying that it looks like a... | ||
| So you criticize me for what you agree with. | ||
|
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No, I don't know. | |
| You agree that it looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| Discussing it. | ||
| No, that's not what I'm criticizing you for. | ||
| I agree that it looks like a controlled demolition. | ||
| That's not the question. | ||
| The question is whether it should be brought up? | ||
| Well, I mean, we're sticking on this one example of Building 7. | ||
| But it's because we haven't resolved it yet. | ||
| It's a good example, because it's an example that you use as an example of you thinking that if you listen to me just describe what I see with my eyes, that it sounds to me like I'm supporting some sort of a conspiracy theory when I'm 100% not. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Would you? | ||
| It seems like you have topics that are off limits. | ||
| And that discuss something like that, even to look at the reality of the speed that it fell, just to even bring it up is off limits. | ||
| Even if you say, I don't believe in the conspiracy, but isn't it crazy that that building looks like a controlled? | ||
| The only reason that this is a difficult example to talk about is because it's one that's so ideologically charged. | ||
| Right. | ||
| As is Bill Nye talking about creationism. | ||
| There's really nobody who's on the fence about that. | ||
| You're either a creationist or you're not. | ||
| I mean, there might be some people who are on the fence, but I don't quite buy it. | ||
| Well, let's look at the numbers. | ||
| The Gallup poll, the most recent Gallup poll on the age of the Earth was more than 46%. | ||
| Come tell me. | ||
| More than 46% think the Earth is less than 10,000 years old. | ||
| I don't want to know. | ||
| It's shocking. | ||
| Well, we know exactly where it comes from. | ||
| First of all, how many of those people have been exposed to actual science, actual research, actual data? | ||
| Someone who's really chasmatic, like Anil deGrasse Tyson, who could break down what we know about science, what we've done, what great work has been shown that we can carbon date things. | ||
| We know about the date of stars. | ||
| We can follow the radio waves that we can measure in space and prove that there was a big bang 14 billion years ago. | ||
| All that stuff is so exciting that if it's done correctly by a guy like Neil Tyson, it can be unbelievably culturally valuable. | ||
| But those 46% of the people that believe that the Earth is 10,000 years old, I can almost guarantee that they haven't had that in their life. | ||
| They just haven't been exposed to a charismatic scientist or a documentary that was unbelievably compelling, that jived with their Christian ideology so much they could absorb it. | ||
| You know, they've been brainwashed. | ||
| They've been fucked over by their own culture. | ||
| They've been fucked over by their community. | ||
| They've been fucked over by these dummies that raised them and taught them this silly idea that's so easily disproven that it makes them a joke to anybody that's had any sort of formal education whatsoever. | ||
|
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And it's almost half the population. | |
| Let me point out something that's kind of a surprising similarity between belief in creationism and belief in the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| There are, like we talked about, there are a dozen, well, there's hundreds, but let's say that there's a dozen different Kennedy conspiracies that are mutually exclusive. | ||
| Just for sake of argument, let's pretend it's a dozen. | ||
| You've got about just as many theories of creation that are completely incompatible, which is nothing existed until 6,000 years ago, everything poof appeared with exactly the appearance of age. | ||
| You've got the Earth is actually old, but life is a recent creation. | ||
| You've got all the other animals are old, and evolution happened in everything except humans, which were a special creation event. | ||
| You've got humans did evolve the way science tells us, but then suddenly we were given souls on the Adam and Eve Day. | ||
| So you've got all of these. | ||
| Now that we found out Columbus is an asshole, you can come up with science, and a lot of people have. | ||
| They've come up with quote-unquote science to support each one of these different theories. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| What qualifies in their mind as scientific support for them? | ||
| So exactly like the people who support all these different versions of the Kennedy conspiracy, even though all of their theories are mutually exclusive, yeah, completely incompatible, they all consider themselves to be on the same page in that they reject the quote-unquote official explanation. | ||
| I find that to be a disingenuous argument because the argument for the Earth being billions of years old, the universe being billions of years old, is unbelievably, unfathomably overwhelming. | ||
| Genius after genius has broken down all the various particles of the fucking universe and the dark matter and the skies and the fact that inside every black hole may ultimately be another universe with hundreds of billions of galaxies inside of it with black holes in each one of them. | ||
| The number of people that have worked on provable conclusions about the age of things using carbon dating or what is the other way, radiocarbon dating and what's the new one that they're doing? | ||
| Oh, there's all sorts of them. | ||
| Yeah, but the sheer overwhelming numbers, to ignore that because you read some stupid old book, I think is way more ridiculous than to look at a guy who was murdered and know that someone shot him and that it might have been this guy that this other gangster came and shot and killed, but we'll never know because he's dead. | ||
| There's so many other pieces. | ||
| Vince Bugliosi could sit here and make exactly the same argument in reverse. | ||
| But he's chasing ghosts. | ||
| You're chasing ghosts. | ||
| You can't go back to 1963. | ||
| You know, how are you going to prove what happened to ghosts? | ||
| You can't go back to 6,000 years ago and see, were you there? | ||
| And did you see dinosaurs running around a billion years ago? | ||
| That's not compatible because you could take a piece of wood and you could carbon date that piece of wood and you could find out, well, this wood is 5,000 years old. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| That's done. | ||
| That's a real thing. | ||
| What you're doing with the Kennedy assassination is, yeah, you've got some stories and yeah, you've got some facts and yeah, you've got some circumstances, but putting it all together is there's a very complicated series of events that took place in order to kill that guy and take his body and fly it to Bethesda, Maryland, and who got in front, how did Jack Ruby get in there and who benefited from all this? | ||
| There's a lot of variables that don't exist. | ||
| Hold on, but variables that don't exist when you're examining, say, like the core of the Earth, when you're examining the birth and death of stars, hypernovas, all these things that we can absolutely prove are a part of our natural world that we live in. | ||
| Okay, but again, you're talking down to ignoring the question of what constitutes evidence, because there are people who will make a compelling speech about why carbon dating is invalid. | ||
| Or maybe the Lord has changed the route, the speed at which elements decay over the centuries. | ||
| Now, that's something you can't argue with because it's what we call a special pleading. | ||
| It's this is in humans, we small humans are not able to understand this. | ||
| And that's an argument that can be used to defend just about any pseudoscience or just about any pseudo-history. | ||
| So, I mean, you can apply exactly the same thing. | ||
| Alternate versions of the Kennedy history are always going to be just as valid as alternate versions of the age of the earth and evolution. | ||
| And they're made invalid. | ||
| They are presented as being valid using evidence that cannot be argued against because it's theoretical. | ||
| Sort of. | ||
| Here's the problem with the government. | ||
| The government has been proven time and time and again to be full shit. | ||
| So when you look at official government stories and you say, Well, let's take this as our conclusion and then let's work backward from here and find out what took place. | ||
| Well, we know that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone because the government says we know that Jack Ruby was a bad guy and he was very patriotic and he was really sad and so that's why he did what he did. | ||
| And case closed, wrap it up, tie, boom. | ||
| When you look at all that, it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. | ||
| It just doesn't. | ||
| It doesn't if you're dealing with a liar. | ||
| If a liar told you this crazy story, damn man, I was on your way over to your house, man, but a fucking asteroid came down and knocked my tire off and I need another tire so I had to wait in line and dude, I'm so sorry I'm late. | ||
| You're like, that guy's a liar. | ||
| He lies all the time. | ||
| He probably lied about this too. | ||
| Well, if you're dealing with something like the United States government that's shown itself over and over and over again to be full of shit, to be very convenient, to tell the people what they want the people to think rather than what is actually the truth. | ||
| And then you start citing instance after instance. | ||
| It's not just blind accusations, but instance after instance. | ||
| No longer do I think that it is not likely nor is it logical to assume that the, let's go official story, which is a douchey term. | ||
| It's a very loaded term, the official story. | ||
| Oh, I agree. | ||
| Because it makes it question. | ||
| But to assume that the story that we have been told in the mainstream media and the news is correct. | ||
| It doesn't make sense. | ||
| Why would you assume it was correct? | ||
| You're talking to a liar. | ||
| But scientists have told us that carbon dating works. | ||
| Right, but we're talking about the carbon dioxide. | ||
| It's a matter of faith. | ||
| We have to have faith in the scientists to accept carbon dating. | ||
| Oh, certainly not. | ||
| You read the science on it. | ||
| You read how they come up with the conclusions. | ||
| I'm an idiot, but I read about carbon dating when I was trying to figure out why they can figure out that dinosaurs existed 65 million years ago. | ||
| I'm unbelievably terrified and fascinated by asteroidal impacts. | ||
| It's one of my main obsessions when it comes to late-night freak outs, watching the Discovery Channel and watching just the idea that one day we could get hit by one of these 800 plus thousand near-Earth objects that are fucking gigantic stones flying through the Earth. | ||
| I'm fascinated by that shit. | ||
| So I got pretty deep into the whole idea of carbon dating and the whole idea, like how they figured it out. | ||
| And I read a bunch of articles on it and I watched documentaries on it. | ||
| It's pretty easy to figure out from an idiot's point of view, like how they're doing it. | ||
| Like I don't understand the science behind it. | ||
| I can't really replicate it. | ||
| But I listen to them describe it and it clicks with me and it makes sense. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| But I mean, so my argument is that disagreeing with carbon dating, disagreeing with the scientific view of the earth is very similar to disagreeing with kind of the standard model of history. | ||
| The standard model of the JFK assassination as told by the U.S. I hate to use the term official story because I don't care. | ||
| I've never read. | ||
| It's called the O.S. I've never read the Warren Commission report. | ||
| I've never read the 9-11 Commission report. | ||
| To be honest, I don't know what's in them. | ||
| But I can tell you what happened to Kennedy and I can tell you what happened on 9-11 according to what I would call our standard model of history, which probably agrees in most respects with the quote-unquote official story. | ||
| The issue with the standard model of history, though, is disseminated by the U.S. government, which people find easy to distrust. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| It's not? | ||
| No. | ||
| When you were watching it on that morning, when you had your TV on, you're watching the towers fall, and you got broadcasters with a microphone, they were not being influenced by the government. | ||
| They didn't have an earpiece in with someone from the CIA telling them what to say next. | ||
| You were pretty much watching it happen live through no government filter. | ||
| Well, right. | ||
| But wait a minute. | ||
| But when you're talking about the official story of it, it's not the news being told as the event goes down. | ||
| It's the explanation of why the event took place after the fact that people disagree with. | ||
| No one disagrees that the towers fell or that planes hit them. | ||
| Sure, they do. | ||
| There's people who think the planes were holograms. | ||
| Okay, you're getting really crazy, though. | ||
|
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Hey, I mean, there's all of these different theories. | |
| Well, there's people that believe the Earth is hollow. | ||
| There's people that believe that life is but a dream. | ||
| Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, right? | ||
| Life is but a dream. | ||
| The hollow earth stories are awesome, buddy. | ||
| They're awesome. | ||
| They're all awesome. | ||
| I've talked to those people. | ||
| They're fucking crazy. | ||
| Well, look, people are nuts. | ||
| You know, there's people that walk down the street and talk to people that aren't there. | ||
| You know, that doesn't mean that the government is correct about Kennedy. | ||
| It doesn't mean that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone. | ||
| It doesn't mean that there's nothing other than the reason to conclude that a single bullet inflicted all that damage is nothing other than the need to tie up the fact that they had committed to the idea of three bullets. | ||
| That that would be the only thing that would be logical that this guy could get off. | ||
| Nobody thought he could get off four bullets. | ||
| That was just like, it was too crazy. | ||
| Three, maybe he could fucking just shoon, shoom, spoon, and get off three bullets in five seconds with a, what is it, Milk Roller, Carkano shit rifle? | ||
| When we were talking about that before, I was desperately on my iPad here. | ||
| I was trying to look up, because at the beginning of my episode, I did a recreation of the time of the pouch, pouch, and then it's a long, hella long pause until the final shot. | ||
| Pouch, chch. | ||
| Short. | ||
| Because it's something like nine seconds or something. | ||
| And that's a long time. | ||
| I believe it's a little less than that, but I thought it was five. | ||
| But yeah, it can be done. | ||
| That's the space between the last two shots. | ||
| The number of seconds that you're usually told is the space between the last two shots. | ||
| Well, and also something against the conspiracy that I would like to point out that people keep pointing out was that the scope in that rifle was off. | ||
| That was one of the things that people kept saying, that the scope in that rifle was a bad scope. | ||
| As someone who's fucked up their scope before, you could just put a rifle down hard, you drop it, and it falls and the scope bounces off the ground, that scope's off. | ||
| So the chain of evidence between Lee Harvey, the idea that they found this scope and it was impossible for them to fire with this gun because the scope is off is preposterous. | ||
| Because anybody could have dropped that gun after Oswald left it there and fucked up that scope. | ||
| So the fact that who knows how many days or hours or whatever later they went to check that scope to see if it was sighted in, that's stupid. | ||
| Hunters have to site their scopes in after every trip. | ||
| Every time you put your stuff in luggage, packed in with all this cushioning and everything to make sure in hard cases, you still have to recite your scope when you get to a range. | ||
| You have to because to be ethical, to make sure that you hit the animal where you want to hit it, because they go off. | ||
| They bounce around and they move. | ||
| Same issue with telescopes. | ||
| The sights on those are very similar. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, that doesn't mean, though, that the whole ball of wax, the whole government story is exactly what happened. | ||
| We're chasing ghosts. | ||
| We're talking about some shit from the 60s and trying to piece it together and Say, case closed. | ||
| I think it's preposterous. | ||
| I think it's ridiculous. | ||
| I do think it's fascinating, and I do think that people can lose their mind in chasing it down and in investigating it. | ||
| And I certainly did myself back in Pennsylvania when I was working at that fucking club, reading that stupid book all day, and then going on stage that night and just bombing. | ||
| I mean, I had two shows that night. | ||
| The first show, I just ate a plate of shit. | ||
| And then the second show, I pulled it together and got back. | ||
| But I was depressed. | ||
| Why? | ||
|
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I mean, what were you, were you forgetting your material? | |
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| It's my mindset. | ||
| I've had two really distinctive times where the things that I saw before I went on stage fucked me up. | ||
| And that was a big one. | ||
| That was probably the first one. | ||
| Might have been the second one. | ||
| It was all the same time. | ||
| I was a slow learner. | ||
| But the other one was I went with this guy named JB Smooth. | ||
| You know JB Smooth? | ||
| Funny fucking. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| And JB and I were doing a college together in New Jersey. | ||
| And JB was, it was really hard to find. | ||
| And JB was running late. | ||
| So they had me go on first. | ||
| And I wasn't prepared because I was sitting in the, they had a little rec room with a TV on. | ||
| And the TV was showing this documentary on the Malibu fires. | ||
| Oh, it was so fucking depressing. | ||
| It was in the early 90s. | ||
| And these people had lost everything. | ||
| And this guy was crying. | ||
| He was a fireman. | ||
| And he was crying and weeping. | ||
| His house was still there, but his neighbors had lost their houses. | ||
| And he was just crying and weeping. | ||
| This girl was looking for her dog. | ||
| And they're like, all right, Joe, JB is still late. | ||
| So what we're going to do is we're going to put you on, and you do your set, and then he'll go on after you. | ||
| I was like, oh, no. | ||
| So I went on stage thinking about this guy crying, not even for his own loss, but for his neighbor's loss. | ||
| And that girl looking for a dog. | ||
| And I just got so sad. | ||
| And I went on stage and a shit. | ||
| Yeah, that just the tidal wave in Japan really messed me up for a few days. | ||
| I'd been to Japan just a few years before. | ||
| And man, just seeing all that destruction. | ||
| And you just know, you know, watching those rivers washing down the streets and everything, you know it's full of people. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I was messed up for days. | ||
| Yeah, it's horrible. | ||
| So those, I mean, comedy require, I mean, you know, people are paying to see you take them out of this reality and have them escape into some fun world. | ||
| You know, and I just, I wasn't good at it. | ||
| You know, I was only 20, maybe 23 or something at the time. | ||
| I just was clumsy. | ||
| I didn't know what the fuck I was doing. | ||
| And the idea of like reading this conspiracy book all day and freaking out, I just also was bad at perspective, at putting things into perspective. | ||
| Well, listen, listen, this took place in 63. | ||
| Here we are in, you know, 1990. | ||
| Why am I thinking about this? | ||
| You know, I didn't have that ability to switch gears. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Well, stand-up comedy is one of the careers that I have the most respect for because you can't not be smart and get away with it. | ||
| You've obviously never seen Brian on stage. | ||
| He kills and he's not smart at all. | ||
| You've got to be a great speaker. | ||
| You've got to be good on your feet. | ||
| I mean, I'm just impressed. | ||
| Yeah, he's not a good speaker. | ||
| He barely can talk. | ||
| He talks like he's got worms in his mouth. | ||
| Okay, my theory is disproven. | ||
| Well, he also has a cheat code. | ||
| He's got the God code. | ||
| He became famous and then he started doing comedy again. | ||
| I just do prop comedy without a prop. | ||
| The prop is his personality. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| That's very nice of you to say. | ||
| My friend Joey Diaz says it best. | ||
| He says it's the hardest, easiest thing you'll ever do. | ||
| When you're good at it and you get good at it and you stay at it and you develop momentum, then it's easy. | ||
| But to get to that point, it's very hard. | ||
| And that was my birth or my entering into the world of conspiracies and the fascination with them came from that, from that one book. | ||
| 100%, no doubt about it, that I can trace it back to that one book that made me start questioning the reality of what I had been taught. | ||
| Are there other roads you've gone down that you've since turned away from? | ||
| The moon landing is the most drastic. | ||
| Like again, I say, just as a caveat, I always wish the moon landing was fake. | ||
| And I would be much more happy if it turned out it was a giant hoax than if people went to the moon. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because I'm a silly bitch. | ||
| And because I like silly things. | ||
| And I love, I think it'd be a greater accomplishment for people to fake that we went to the moon than it would almost even be to go to the moon. | ||
| That was what Neil said, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, that's also what, you know, I mean, a lot of people that have argued against it have said. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even scientifically, that it would be more impressive. | ||
| It would. | ||
| And I think the point that the number of people who would be expected to keep a secret. | ||
| Well, okay, this is something that a road we went down with flight, was it flight 93 or flight 77? | ||
| Flight 93 was the one that got shot down over Pennsylvania. | ||
| Flight 93. | ||
| So I've got a friend who does not believe in any of the 9-11 conspiracies, except he believes that we did successfully shoot down that plane. | ||
| Well, I will tell you this, without saying anyone's name or speaking any further, that I know people that are in the military, and I asked them, is it possible that in a situation where a plane was going to be flown into the Pentagon, that they would have fighter jets shoot it out of the sky? | ||
| Do you think that would be possible? | ||
| And they said, 100%. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 100% possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, we'd love to do that. | |
| Not only that. | ||
| They would do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We would do it. | |
| We had planes on the way to do it. | ||
| They didn't get there in time. | ||
| Allegedly. | ||
| I have no problem with the fact that they were on the way to get it. | ||
| But the thing is, that's another case where you've got to look at the number of people involved because if a missile gets shot, a missile getting shot is a big deal because you've got all kinds of accounting that has to happen for that missile. | ||
| Not only do you have the ground crew and everyone who loads the missile launch and takes it off, you've got civilian oversight for all the supplies that happen. | ||
| Again, for a plane to shoot a missile that nobody knows about, that's, again, going to involve a pyramid of people. | ||
| 100 people at the base, maybe at a minimum. | ||
| 1,000 people in the civilian oversight contractors. | ||
| It just goes on and on and on. | ||
| The number of people that would have to do with the camera. | ||
| I could agree with that, but I can't. | ||
| Because of the fact that they have black-funded projects, because of the fact that they develop things in total, complete secrecy in Area 51 that involve billions and billions of dollars. | ||
| That's where the stealth technology came from. | ||
| That's where many different advanced technologies have come from without any knowledge whatsoever by the American people. | ||
| So, to say that it would be hard to hide a missile, it would certainly be an issue. | ||
| It would certainly be an issue. | ||
| But I don't think that a government that could make a fucking stealth bomber would have a hard time hiding a missile. | ||
| Well, okay, but these planes did not come from Area 51. | ||
| They couldn't matter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're just totally open bases that people walk on and off of every day. | |
| That's true. | ||
| But if you can, well, people walk on and off of Area 51 every day, too. | ||
| They just come in by buses. | ||
| They just come in on planes and buses from Vegas. | ||
| But that doesn't necessarily mean that that's what happened. | ||
| But it does. | ||
| The idea of saying this could never happen because you would have too many people, not really. | ||
| Think about all the shit that they have designed, that no one knew they had until they had. | ||
| There's a lot of secrecy still in government. | ||
| When they do it right and they're really good at it, when it comes to national security, they can keep things secret for a long time. | ||
| But also those things weren't all that remarkable. | ||
| There was nothing, nothing that ever happened at Area 51 turned out to really be all that interesting. | ||
| Blackbird? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't think that that's remarkable? | ||
| These unbelievable jets? | ||
| You don't think that stealth technology is remarkable? | ||
| The fact that they look like UFOs and they can hide from radar? | ||
| God damn, you're hard to impress. | ||
| No, Google. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did Google come out of that? | ||
| Yeah, that's where Google came from. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Area 51? | ||
| That's a joke. | ||
| Oh, you're joking. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, I mean, there's... | |
| Anyone. | ||
| That's how conspiracy gets started. | ||
| I'm a big aerospace nut, and I follow a lot of the aerospace reporting. | ||
| And anyone in that industry knows what goes on at Area 51 because it's basically the national test facility is what it's actually called. | ||
| They simply, that's where they're testing the next generation planes. | ||
| I wouldn't be surprised to see what they're testing there now because we pretty much have a pretty good idea of what it looks like. | ||
| And that was the case in the 1960s, was the case in the 1970s. | ||
| You've obviously never seen the interviews with Robert Lazar. | ||
| Our favorite guy. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Yeah, you have, huh? | ||
| Oh, I know all about Bob Lazar. | ||
| Yeah, I did a whole episode on his thing as well. | ||
| Well, he's a fascinating cat because he seems so smart, and then you find out he lied about his college education. | ||
| Oh, you might be crazy. | ||
| Yeah, that was really quite a wonder. | ||
| But I mean, anyone who was in the know was laughing at him from the beginning. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| He only fooled people in the UFO community. | ||
| Well, that sounds like an ad hominem attack, sir, and that doesn't do very much to support your arguments. | ||
| This is a terrible debating skill you have here, Brian Dunning. | ||
| He is wrong because of who he is. | ||
| Skeptic to the end. | ||
| Nobody wants UFOs to be real more than me. | ||
| Like, nobody wants Bigfoot to be real more than me. | ||
| I'm silly. | ||
| I'm a silly person. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| I don't have any vested interest in keeping the status quo and standard operational procedure in place. | ||
| I like it all falling apart. | ||
| I would love it if a UFO flew over the city and people started shitting their pants and throwing bedpans out the windows. | ||
| I would love it. | ||
| I told you when I first got here to the studio, I told you that Bigfoot is something that I believed in until five years ago. | ||
| Fairly recently. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, not just that. | ||
| You said you believed the Patterson-Gimlin footage. | ||
| Oh, yeah, no. | ||
| I always believed that the Patterson-Gimlage footage, did I just call it Patterson? | ||
| Gimlin. | ||
| Gimledge Gimledge. | ||
| I always believed that that looked incredibly good, and I still do now. | ||
| The people who say that's the worst fake I've ever seen, I think they're being disingenuous because I think it's a brilliant fake. | ||
| I think it looks great. | ||
| You're hilarious. | ||
| Now, I know the whole history of the film and everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Bob Hieronymous. | ||
| Bob Harony. | ||
| Yeah, the whole thing with, you know, when was the film where, when was the film purchased, when was it developed? | ||
| How did it get from A to B. And we know that pretty much everything he said about it was a lie, and we pretty much have a good picture of the film's history, and we know that it was faked. | ||
| We also know that he was arrested for larceny for writing a bad check. | ||
| The very camera that he used to film those Bigfoot photos. | ||
| And he had been paid, he was on a hunt to make a Bigfoot documentary, for God's sake. | ||
| Don't bring this up to Bobcat Goldwaite. | ||
| He will get fucking crazy. | ||
| He will get crazy with you. | ||
| We had on my show, I had, well, here's the video. | ||
| Let's watch the video real quick just so we can show how silly you are that you think that this looks real. | ||
| So get the stabilized version because this one's horrible. | ||
| Because this is how it was first released. | ||
| It was first released in this sort of like weird, shaky, shaky version. | ||
| This is actually probably stabilized. | ||
|
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I mean, I think that looks so stupid and fake. | |
| How can you say it looks fake because it's so bad of quality? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| If there was anything in there that gave it away, like a zipper, it wouldn't be visible because of the low graininess. | ||
| The way he walks, he walks like a person. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't mean that it's not a big giant person, but he walks like a person. | ||
| And I don't think when you watch an elephant walk, there's a reality to the weight that they carry around. | ||
| And that thing is not walking with the reality of the weight of an 800-pound, 1,000-pound animal. | ||
| That thing is walking like a person. | ||
| Maybe he's 5'6 ⁇ . | ||
| Well, they decided they were going to measure off all the different trees in that area and figure out how tall he was. | ||
| I didn't say 6-foot. | ||
| I thought it looked like he was over 6 feet tall. | ||
| I said it looked like a real animal to me. | ||
| Well, it doesn't to me. | ||
| It looks like a guy in a monkey suit. | ||
| It looks stupid as a titanium. | ||
| What I'm doing is I'm admitting where I have had, where I've been susceptible to. | ||
| I wanted Bigfoot to be real. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| And in finding yourself that you were indeed a silly bitch, now what you're doing is you're bouncing the other way and going, was, I'm sorry, excuse me, at the time. | ||
| And now you're bouncing completely the other way and hardcore skeptic. | ||
| Skeptic by, not just by choice, but by default. | ||
| Instantly, automatically lean towards the skeptic. | ||
| Shouldn't we all be? | ||
| I think we should be very objective, for sure. | ||
| And I think it can be very confusing if you're not. | ||
| You know, if you do go looking around for conspiracies, the better alternative is most certainly to be skeptical by default. | ||
| But I also think that you miss a lot of shit. | ||
| Like, okay, here's a perfect example. | ||
| And I use this one all the time. | ||
| Unfortunately, for people who listen to this podcast, do you believe that 9-11 happened? | ||
| Do you believe that planes flew into buildings? | ||
| Do you believe that happened? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Then you believe in conspiracies. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because they conspired to do that and they pulled it off. | ||
| A bunch of people hijacked planes simultaneously in different spots in the country. | ||
| They got control of the planes, flew those planes into buildings, caused those buildings to collapse. | ||
| Thousands of people died. | ||
| It was a conspiracy. | ||
| It was a successfully executed conspiracy And only one of many that we know of all throughout history. | ||
| So if you automatically take the skeptic point of view, you miss out on the possibility of exposing something that is a true conspiracy because they do exist. | ||
| Well, when you say the skeptic point of view, what do you mean? | ||
| I would say the null hypothesis. | ||
| The null hypothesis is that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone? | ||
| The null hypothesis is that probably nothing remarkable happened. | ||
| But why would you say that? | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| Remarkable things happen all the time, though. | ||
| Why would that be a default? | ||
| What I mean in that case is take the guy for a different example of a shooting, take the guy who shot all the people in the movie theater. | ||
| The null hypothesis is that a guy shot all the people in the movie theater as was reported by everyone who was there. | ||
| The null hypothesis in the Kennedy situation would be that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone as discovered by the cops who chased him down and tackled him and arrested him in the movie theater. | ||
| The null hypothesis for 9-11 would be that what happened generally as we saw it on television and was reported by the people who were there is what happened. | ||
| That would be the null hypothesis. | ||
| And anything remarkable would be something that goes against what appears to have happened on that day. | ||
| So I would say that the null hypothesis is going to generally be right most of the time until we've got some remarkable evidence to prove it wrong. | ||
| Well, how do you factor in contradictory evidence from reputable online news sources? | ||
| Like, for example, like let's the NSA. | ||
| It's a perfect example. | ||
| Before it was revealed by Edward Snowden that the NSA was indeed spying on all these different Americans and detailing records of your phone calls and who were surprised by that. | ||
| Very few people were, but the people that were had argued against it vehemently. | ||
| And they had said there's no way it would be such a huge conspiracy. | ||
| You would have to hide that from so many people. | ||
| So many people would be in the know. | ||
| There's no way that that could be possibly true. | ||
| I heard that. | ||
| I witnessed Alex Jones having that discussion with a person where Alex Jones, who predicted this shit a long time ago, almost a decade before it actually happened, I believe it was 2003 or 4, Alex Jones was saying, if you don't think they're keeping detailed records of every phone call you make, everything you do, every email you send. | ||
| He was on it way before, and I thought it was crazy, nutty conspiracy talk. | ||
| Meanwhile, he was right. | ||
| They really were. | ||
| They really figured out how to do it. | ||
| They developed this technology. | ||
| They created this storage facility that they're in the middle of building right now in Utah that's going to be this massive warehouse of data and information. | ||
| That's a real conspiracy that turned out to be true. | ||
| I don't think that there was, well, I can't say that Alex, I don't give him credit for predicting that. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| There's nothing that Snowden revealed that I don't think was pretty much generally suspected anyway. | ||
| We know that cell phone companies have always had all your cell phone records. | ||
| Therefore, the government has them. | ||
| That's not surprising to me. | ||
| Well, they could access that. | ||
| To me, it's surprising that someone would be surprised by that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's funny, because I thought it was a pretty big revelation, cause for alarm. | ||
| A lot of people were up in arms about it. | ||
| It was a pretty big deal. | ||
| I don't think you could downplay that. | ||
| I think people have always been up in arms about it. | ||
| There's been a lot of people saying, hey, privacy, the cell phone company shouldn't have any way to track my calls or to do it. | ||
| But they can. | ||
| And they own their cell phone company, so they can do whatever the heck they want. | ||
| And as long as those records exist, it's pretty naive to believe that nobody has access to them. | ||
| Well, sure. | ||
| Well, that is not the issue. | ||
| The issue is that they're doing it for every single American all the time. | ||
| They're constantly following you and constantly watching your emails and constantly. | ||
| It's not a matter of looking at suspicious people or people that have been accused of crimes. | ||
| It's a matter of people that are just law-abiding citizens that are taxpayers and doing nothing wrong, but yet they're being almost like held because they're checking all their information. | ||
| It's like this thing that they hold over your head and the idea that this could be used to intimidate political opponents or this could be used to intimidate business rivals. | ||
| You know, that was a huge conspiracy. | ||
| And I think to deny that that was pretty shocking to the American people when we found out that they not only did indeed have this power and capability, but they had been utilizing it for a long time. | ||
| Something's only shocking if you didn't have enough information to be aware that that was going on. | ||
| And I mean, I come from the Silicon Valley background. | ||
| With the formation of all the big search engines and things like that, having worked at enormous, ridiculously huge data centers and everything, and having a general idea of how the technology works, I mean, it's to me, it's nothing, nothing in that is surprising that data is being collected on that large of a scale or that anyone would have access to it. | ||
| Nothing I've heard coming from Snowden surprised me in any way and wouldn't surprise most of the people from a similar background as me, I think. | ||
| I think for a lot of people, it was quite shocking. | ||
| I'm sure it was. | ||
| But I think if you know anything about the way that technology works and about the whole data storage and collection industry, the null hypothesis has got to be that, hey, anyone who wants access to it has access to it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But wasn't the null hypothesis when Obama gave that speech and said that we're not doing it and this is just metadata? | ||
| Didn't people believe that? | ||
| Wasn't that essentially what everyone was reporting in the news and everyone was saying, listen, this is a much ado-about nothing. | ||
| This is just metadata. | ||
| Don't worry. | ||
| And then it turned out that that wasn't the case at all. | ||
|
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|
Well, the null hypothesis also, I think, is that the government. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe presidential press releases are not always exactly accurate. | ||
| But if that's the case, how do we apply that to everything else? | ||
| How do we apply that to the Kennedy assassination? | ||
| And how, I mean, the Nutters hear this, and they're going to apply it. | ||
| Sorry for calling you Nutters, folks. | ||
| But the 9-11 Truthers, how about that? | ||
| They apply that to 9-11 Truth. | ||
| They say this is, you're contradicting yourself. | ||
| The whole idea that what they're saying is not the null hypothesis? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Well, you said that the government tends to be a liar when it comes to press conferences. | ||
| Oh, okay, okay, I got you. | ||
| The official story, as it were. | ||
| The official story is a lie because it's the official story because it's coming from the government compared to the null hypothesis Being that the government always lies about everything, or frequently is not completely truthful. | ||
| Well, no, wasn't it the null hypothesis that the story that's being produced in the media is the actual story? | ||
| That whatever, the conclusions that mainstream has accepted about Osama bin Laden and these hijackers from Saudi Arabia and all these different things that factor into the events of 9-11 are in fact exactly how it went down when you in fact just said that when it comes to the NSA and the Obama administration not being correct or being truthful about metadata and what was being collected, that, well, the United States government tends to lie. | ||
| Well, if they tend to lie, they tend to lie. | ||
| And if they tend to lie, why would you assume that there are other explanations for all the different things that have taken place were true at all? | ||
| That wouldn't be the null hypothesis. | ||
| It's a fascinating subject and obviously very complicated. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| That's the point, yes. | ||
| But also, when you say the official story, when you're talking about what the government says, that's not necessarily the source of information that people are relying on. | ||
| Nobody has read the 9-11 report. | ||
| Nobody has read the Warren Commission report. | ||
| You and I, we don't even know what the government's position is on those. | ||
| We assume we do. | ||
| We assume that it's whatever's in those reports is what people generally believe about it. | ||
| But that's not our source of information. | ||
| We didn't go to the government for our information. | ||
| I don't think I've ever had a question about 9-11 that I've gone and Googled a government website to find out what should have happened, what I'm supposed to believe is that. | ||
| I don't even think there are government websites that spell out history. | ||
| Is there a government website that spells out history? | ||
| I don't think that exists. | ||
| Boy, they would fucking crush that thing. | ||
| The thing is you can't conflate the government's version of events with – The standard model is what probably most historians, whatever the field is, whatever the scientists are, whatever the historians are, if it's a historical, what most lawyers think, if it's a legal question, I don't know. | ||
| I would call it the standard model. | ||
| I would not use the term the official story because that suggests government involvement, which is not an authoritative source. | ||
| The government, quote unquote, is not an authoritative source on anything. | ||
| It's not where people get their 9-11 information. | ||
| We get that from basically from historians, from modern history. | ||
| It's not the official source on how many neutrons are in a boron atom. | ||
| We get that from the standard model of science. | ||
| So I don't think it's too much of a boy, I'm twisting myself into knots here. | ||
| I don't think it's hypocritical for me to say that when Obama says something that we shouldn't accept as the truth, that that conflicts with the government's official position on 9-11 or Snowden or what the NFL is. | ||
| Or the Kennedy assassination. | ||
| I think what I'm saying makes sense. | ||
| Well, the issue with that is, of course, the news outlets, especially in the Kennedy assassination, got all their information from the government. | ||
| They got all the reports from spokespersons that were assigned this position to give this press conference and explain what the details were. | ||
| The president was found in Bethesda, Maryland. | ||
| Where do you think that guy got his talking points? | ||
| Is he winging it? | ||
| You know, they're not winging it. | ||
| Those guys were told what to say and when to say it, and they were put on television because it was an easily controlled thing back then. | ||
| Weren't there reporters on the site? | ||
| Sure, but what do they know? | ||
| What do they know? | ||
| They know the president was dead, and then they took the president's body away. | ||
| Everything else is information from the government. | ||
| Well, I mean, what does that mean? | ||
| Were they handed a press release that says White House at the top and said told, report this? | ||
| Well, it depends on. | ||
| Well, where were they getting their information? | ||
| It depends on, I mean, there's many, many, many, many outlets. | ||
| There's different doctors who talked about it. | ||
| There's different people who were on the news. | ||
| There's Tom, who is the guy who explained it on television for the first time, that classic speech that the president has been shot. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Who was it? | ||
| That famous. | ||
| Dan Rat? | ||
| I don't believe it was Dan Rather. | ||
| I believe it was before his time. | ||
| I want to say. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's pointless. | ||
| The point is that where are they getting that information? | ||
| I don't see how the government fits in that loop. | ||
| Well, the government had Kennedy's body, and they release a press statement. | ||
| That's a fact. | ||
| I mean, they tell people that the president has been shot. | ||
| The president's dead. | ||
| This is what's going on. | ||
| And, you know, when the news outlets, whether it's local or national, ABC, NBC, whatever it is, they need to get the information from the official source. | ||
| The official source would be someone who's in the government that has a press conference that explains the events as they took place. | ||
| Okay, so we're kind of spinning around in circles here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That might be annoying for people like me. | |
| Yeah, I was basically going to circle around and say the same thing. | ||
| I think we agree on more than we disagree on. | ||
| And I think that what I'm trying to say is that there's weirdness to the world. | ||
| And that to automatically take the skeptical position is oftentimes just as silly as automatically taking the conspiratorial position. | ||
| Okay, what do you mean by the skeptical position? | ||
| What do you mean when you say from that, I'm getting the message that you think I tend to take a silly position. | ||
| No, no, no, skeptical. | ||
| That it is silly to take this I don't want to be fooled position, just as foolish as it is sometimes to take this double, double silly. | ||
| Either one fell. | ||
| Crazy. | ||
| Just as silly as it is to automatically knee-jerk take the conspiratorial position when we know for a fact that certain conspiracies have not just been planned out, but have been executed. | ||
| Whether it's the Gulf of Tonkin that led us into Vietnam, whether it's Operation Northwoods, which was a planned attack on American civilians and American military that was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. | ||
| They were going to make a jetliner explode. | ||
| They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and have them attack Guantanamo Bay. | ||
| All this to blame on the Cubans so that we could go to war with Cuba. | ||
| When you know that that kind of information exists and was real and is provable and it's in the Freedom of Information Act releases, when you know about all that, that has to be factored into the spectrum of possibilities. | ||
| Okay, but you can't use the fact that there have been real conspiracies in history. | ||
| You can't use that to defend conspiracy theories. | ||
| Because conspiracy theories, as defined by the way you and I are discussing them, are future predictions. | ||
| The conspiracy theory about 9-11 having been an inside job, for example, predicts that one day it will be discovered that the government orchestrated 9-11. | ||
| It's a prediction of evidence that will someday exist in the future. | ||
| And future predictions really have never come true. | ||
| I say that there, I've said this in print many times, that there are no conspiracy theories that have ever come true. | ||
| A conspiracy theory being something that has existed as a theory among conspiracy theorists unknown to the general public, unknown to L.S. I'll dispute that right away. | ||
| I'll dispute that. | ||
| What about the LSD experiments they did on civilians? | ||
| That did not exist as a conspiracy theory until it was discovered. | ||
| It most certainly did. | ||
| It existed in my high school. | ||
| People talked about them doing LSD experiments on soldiers. | ||
| It was an urban legend. | ||
| It was a myth that they gave soldiers LSD and they drugged people to find out what the acid would do to them and it rotted their brain out. | ||
| We'd hear all these stories. | ||
| You'd hear about it from people that were in the military. | ||
| You're talking about MKUltra. | ||
| I'm not talking about MKUltra. | ||
| talking about Operation Midnight Climax, where the CIA drugged up people that were in brothels in New York and San Francisco so that they can study the effects of LSD on innocent civilians. | ||
| So I think that was part of MKUltra. | ||
| I mean, there was a lot of programs related to MKUltra. | ||
| Okay, hold on. | ||
| That's basically the same thing. | ||
| Operation Midnight Climax. | ||
| 1950s. | ||
| 1950s. | ||
| 1950s, that's pretty early. | ||
| Well, it was also the various things that they did to soldiers, many of them documented to this day. | ||
| Those were all legends at one point in time. | ||
| Those were all the mind control experiments that they did to Timothy, what's the fuck his name? | ||
| The Unibomber. | ||
| What's his name? | ||
| Timothy. | ||
| No, not Tim Excellent. | ||
| Ted Kaczynski. | ||
| Ted Kaczynski. | ||
| He was part of the Harvard LSD studies. | ||
| Ted Kaczynski, they fucking dosed that guy up with acid. | ||
| Rosie, I didn't know that. | ||
| Yes, he was. | ||
| That's very cool. | ||
| There was a documentary on it. | ||
| I think it was called The Net, and it was all about tracing back the roots of his insanity to these LSD experiments, and that he may very well have signed up for something that fried his fucking brain. | ||
| Okay, let me ask for something right now. | ||
| I'd like to ask your listeners, of whom you have, how many? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Eight? | ||
| What? | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| More than eight. | ||
| Definitely more than eight. | ||
| Okay, I'd like to ask, for all of Joe's listeners out there, if you have an example of a conspiracy theory that existed as a theory among conspiracy theorists before it became generally known by law enforcement, media, general public, whatever, please let me know. | ||
| Email me, brian at skeptoid.com. | ||
| Because I still maintain that there are none and I would love to be proven wrong about that. | ||
| Isn't what Alex Jones said, isn't that a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true, that the government is spying on your emails and listening to all your phone calls? | ||
| That wasn't something that was known only to conspiracy theorists. | ||
| That was something that's, I mean, that's the point. | ||
| From the people who were in that industry, that doesn't surprise anyone. | ||
| But from someone like me, it was very surprising. | ||
| And for people that were listening to the official government story, it was absolutely contradicting that. | ||
| Okay, and the first time you learned it. | ||
| 16 conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. | ||
| Let's read that. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Ha ha, you're funny. | ||
| Oh, here, your voice is not objective, sir. | ||
| They put cancer viruses into other vaccines. | ||
| ATM machines will someday use facial recognition technology. | ||
| Yeah, but those are silly. | ||
| Those are not conspiracy theories. | ||
| That's just prognosticating projecting. | ||
| Well, there must be something there. | ||
| The U.S. government and Monsanto are teaming up against opponents of genetically modified food. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| Is that a conspiracy theory? | ||
| It's not? | ||
| No. | ||
| It kind of is. | ||
| That the U.S. government and Monsanto are teaming up to make money? | ||
| Oh, pro-wrestling's fake. | ||
| Whoa, that's not real. | ||
| Shut the fuck up, dude. | ||
| Dude, don't break my world in half. | ||
| Scientists all over the world are creating extremely bizarre human-animal hybrids. | ||
| Okay, is this true? | ||
| Not long ago, Chinese scientists embedded genes for human milk proteins into a mouse's genome and have since created herds of humanized milk-producing goats. | ||
| Well, that's just ignorance. | ||
| They don't understand what's going on there. | ||
| They're not making human hybrids. | ||
| They're just utilizing genes for certain specific actions. | ||
| Using a cell phone could cause cancer? | ||
| Yeah, that's not been proven unless you talk to Cheryl Crowe. | ||
| Cheryl Crowe thinks she got a brain tumor from listening to the cell phone all the time. | ||
| Fluoride is harmful for your teeth. | ||
| Okay, is that true? | ||
| The Department of Health and Human Services and the Environmental Protection Agency are proposing the change because of an increase in fluorosis, a condition that causes spotting and streaking of children's teeth. | ||
| These are not conspiracy theories. | ||
| This is promotions of anti-science. | ||
| This is stupid. | ||
| Prescription drugs kill large numbers of Americans. | ||
| Fucking everything kills people. | ||
| No, but if someone out there does have a conspiracy theory that turned out to be true, please email me, brian at skeptoid.com. | ||
| I would love to be able to report on it. | ||
| One of the most common episode requests I get is for conspiracy theories that turned out to be true. | ||
| And I always answer that email with the same thing. | ||
| I say, great, give me a suggestion. | ||
| I've been looking for them. | ||
| A lot of the times they confuse incompetence with conspiracy as well. | ||
| Like, here's one. | ||
| The Federal Reserve is a perpetual debt machine that is designed to create inflation. | ||
| Then it goes on to show that the U.S. national debt has gotten more than 5,000 times larger and the value of the U.S. dollar has fallen by more than 96%. | ||
| I think that's more of an example of greed and incompetence and just fucking fools running things than it is a massive conspiracy to diminish the wealth of the United States. | ||
| Just people are stealing from the system. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
| They put cancer viruses in our vaccines? | ||
| Did you know this, Brian Dunning? | ||
| I know that they've got all kinds of different things in vaccines for different purposes. | ||
| And a lot of the times what the things that people report, like there are aborted fetal tissue in vaccines, that's not completely untrue. | ||
| There are certain lines that can only be grown in human tissue. | ||
| And so there's two particular lines of fetal tissue that have existed for, boy, I think they're nigh on 40 or so years old now, these two particular lines. | ||
| And we grow the cultures in those tissues of human tissue. | ||
| And then the cultures are removed from the tissue. | ||
| Once in a while, a spare cell or something will get stuck in and be included with the vaccine, but it's not harmful in any way. | ||
| And it kind of misrepresents the way it happens to say that we include human fetal tissue in vaccines. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Someone sent me one that's legit. | ||
| The Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. | ||
| That was a conspiracy theory long before it was ever proven true. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| I haven't done an episode on that. | ||
| That's been a frequent request. | ||
| I'll put that, bump that to the top of my list. | ||
| That's a real one. | ||
| But I have a feeling that you're going to somehow or another shade it so that everything's going to be okay. | ||
| You're going to dance around it and make it seem like, listen, enlighten me. | ||
| What about the Gulf of Tonkin was known only to conspiracy theorists before law enforcement slash media slash whoever got a hold of it? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Well, how about the fact that it happened at all, that they actually did fake this incident? | ||
| You know, that is established historical fact. | ||
| Okay, but that's saying that a conspiracy happened, sure, but that's not the same thing as a conspiracy theory happened. | ||
| But no, it's a very important thing. | ||
| Who were the conspiracy theorists who were shouting about it on the street corners before it was discovered by the general public or by law enforcement? | ||
| I'm pretty sure that that was something that people had talked about. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, obviously I'm too young to know, but the Gulf of Tonkin conspiracy before. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's the information I'm looking for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When have conspiracy theorists who, you know, from their New York apartment basements or wherever they were figured out these things? | ||
| Yeah, I can't say people who should have known about them found out about them. | ||
| What about Watergate? | ||
| Well, that's not really a conspiracy theory. | ||
| What that is, is just standard operational procedure amongst crooks, and then one guy got busted. | ||
| I mean, there was... | ||
| Alex Jones was not on his radio show screaming about what happened about Watergate. | ||
| Well, he was a baby. | ||
| Bernstein and Woodward reported it. | ||
| He wasn't even a baby. | ||
| He wasn't even born then. | ||
| Alex is younger than me. | ||
| He looks like he's like 60, but he's like, I think he's 40. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, he's a young guy. | ||
| When I first met him, I believe he was 28. | ||
| He's actually younger than me, if I remember correctly. | ||
| That's depressing. | ||
| Yeah, he does look pretty bad, doesn't he? | ||
| Fucking burns at both ends. | ||
| Alex, I'm sorry if you're listening. | ||
| He's a sweetie. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| He's a sweetie, but yeah, he's fucking, look, if your whole day was doom and gloom and new world order, you'd be shitting your pants too. | ||
| I don't know if we got anywhere with any of this talk, but we still have plenty of time. | ||
| So let's continue. | ||
| I think I could shed light on faulty thinking that I have had myself. | ||
| Please. | ||
| And I think that confirmation bias and that you can go online and find fringe sites and all these different things that support your ideas and then not objectively look at it, like completely objectively. | ||
| We all get attached. | ||
| We get our egos attached to statements and we get our egos attached to positions that we've taken. | ||
| And I think that those egos and those statements and positions that we've taken oftentimes can be the enemy of objectivity. | ||
| And I agree with you that there are most, I don't want to say most things, but when you're looking at information online, what you should do is look at all the different arguments, pro and con, and then look where the intelligence is. | ||
| Look where the smart people are leaning. | ||
| Look where the educated people are leaning. | ||
| Look where the experts are leaning. | ||
| And try to figure it out. | ||
| And also know that no matter what there is in this world, if you haven't been there and you're reading someone's take on it, there's going to be a bunch of different opposing opinions that make no fucking sense. | ||
| There's going to be some that are close. | ||
| There's going to be the full range from fucking whackadoodle. | ||
| The planes were holograms. | ||
| There was explosions that were, look at this is not a civilian plane. | ||
| They took the people to the moon. | ||
| There's this whackadoodle shit on every subject, everything that exists. | ||
| And some of it you have to wonder, we know that there's techniques and tactics of disinformation. | ||
| Well, they'll take a bunch of things that are absolutely true, then attach them to one thing that's blatantly ridiculous. | ||
| And that one thing sort of diminishes all the other things. | ||
| One thing that I always tell people, and I always get criticized for it, is if you have a question on any given matter, go to the experts in that subject. | ||
| If you want to know how old the Earth is, go to the people who actually work in that field. | ||
| You're not always going to be right, but you're going to be right far more often than you're wrong. | ||
| So no matter what the question is, what the pseudoscience is, for example, cancer, bullshit cancer remedies. | ||
| If you want to know whether this works, go to the experts in cancer. | ||
| Go to the American Cancer Society, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| You won't always be right, but you'll be right far more often than you're wrong. | ||
| We had a real problem with that on our show with Peter Duisberg. | ||
| Peter Duisberg, who's a professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley, esteemed scholar who also believes that HIV doesn't cause AIDS. | ||
| And we had him on the podcast, and it was unbelievably baffling. | ||
| And my statement was, it's very frustrating when you're too dumb to know who's stupid. | ||
| But it was listening to him and listening to the absolute outrage of all the actual scientists that work in the field of HIV research and how angry people were about it. | ||
| And unfortunately, I couldn't get anybody to debate him. | ||
| And I think that much like people are criticizing Bill Nye of visiting the Creation Museum, it's almost like people don't want to debate Holocaust deniers. | ||
| They did not want to debate this guy because it somehow or another gives his ideas credence. | ||
| Yeah, and I agree with that. | ||
| I would say just let him hang out in the wind. | ||
| For anyone with any credibility to spend time on that, you're communicating to the general public that there's a question here that needs to be looked at, and that's not right. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's baffling, though. | ||
| It's really confusing when you have this guy who's this incredibly intelligent man who's very well respected and educated and has done some amazing work on cancer research as well, even since then. | ||
| So it's baffling. | ||
| Okay, let me ask you something else. | ||
| I want to kind of call you out a little bit on something else. | ||
| This call you out is some new shit that people are doing in the last 10 years. | ||
| Notice that? | ||
| Yeah, right on. | ||
| There was no calling out before that. | ||
| You know, nobody ever had a problem. | ||
| But did any conspiracy theorists believe that they were calling you out? | ||
| No. | ||
| So, okay, you had a guy on your show a couple of weeks ago. | ||
| When I come on a show, I try to listen to some recent episodes. | ||
| You had a guy on who was a doctor, doctor something or other. | ||
| Gordon Mark. | ||
| Mark Gordon. | ||
| Mark. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I listened to that episode. | ||
| I turned it off in a rage at nine minutes because I couldn't take any more. | ||
| He came on, and I believe you said you'd had him on several times before. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| He's my friend. | ||
| Okay, you know the guy. | ||
| He came on, and he starts promoting his miracle supplement that you take and you can drink as much alcohol as you want and not get drunk. | ||
| Well, he's talking about glutathione. | ||
| It was a meal. | ||
| He was selling a product that you can take and sell it. | ||
| No, he doesn't sell it. | ||
| He doesn't sell glutathione. | ||
| I beg to differ. | ||
| That was the central thrust of the first nine minutes of the episode that I listened. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I'm not incorrect. | ||
| I'm not incorrect. | ||
| What I want to discuss with you is something you said to him. | ||
| You said, that sounds too good to be true. | ||
| I wish I knew enough to call you out on your bullshit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You should have known enough to call him out on your bullshit. | ||
| I didn't know he was going to bring that up. | ||
| Well, I mean, okay. | ||
| That wasn't like the topic of conversation. | ||
| Like, when I have someone on the show, the idea of having people on the show is just a conversation, just with you. | ||
| There's no, we didn't discuss much. | ||
| We said, let's just have fun. | ||
| Let's just talk. | ||
| The same thing with Mark. | ||
| I mean, Mark is a friend of mine, and he's an interesting guy, and he can ramble on forever and relay all sorts of information. | ||
| He's also an expert in traumatic brain injury. | ||
| He's helped a lot of soldiers, helped a lot of athletes, helped a lot of football players, mixed martial arts fighters, boxers. | ||
| He's helped a lot of people understand the delicate balance of the human mind. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| He came on your show and told people that here's a supplement they can take and drink all they want and not get drunk. | ||
| That gets people killed. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I said that. | ||
| Is he right, though? | ||
| No, he's not right. | ||
| What happens when you take glutathione if you're drunk? | ||
| Does it have any effect? | ||
| The body is a lot more complicated than that. | ||
| A great example that I like to give of this is the idea of oxidation and antioxidants. | ||
| Oxidation causes aging, it causes bad things, so take an antioxidant. | ||
| And that sounds really simple, but it's far more complex than that. | ||
| And in fact, it's so complicated that statement doesn't even mean anything. | ||
| It's one of these things that's so wrong, it's not even wrong, as the saying goes. | ||
| You can't just take something that's produced in your liver and counteract the effects of drinking alcohol. | ||
| There is no direct line from anything you eat to any part of your body. | ||
| If you're working out, if you're trying to get buff and you take a protein supplement, you're thinking, hey, protein coming in, that's going to go to my muscles and help them get strong. | ||
| That's something that is incredibly wrong, but it sounds so simplistically true. | ||
| It's not correct. | ||
| That's not the way the body works. | ||
| That's not the way the digestion system works. | ||
| You cannot take something orally and have it go as a direct line to any given part of your body. | ||
| That's not the way our digestive system and our blood works. | ||
| And when you say that there's a supplement that can prevent you from getting drunk, you're I'm sorry, you are against all reasonably established science. | ||
| And you're trying to make a buck off of people potentially getting killed. | ||
| And I had a huge problem with that to the point that I had to turn the show off. | ||
| I was just getting mad driving in my car. | ||
| Okay, keep going. | ||
| And I think that as someone with a huge audience, as you have, I think you have more of a responsibility to make sure that people like that are called out on it. | ||
| If he surprises you with it, then say, okay, then I've got to get someone on next week. | ||
| I've got to go and get Stephen Novella or someone like that, someone who is a promoter of science-based medicine, to counteract that. | ||
| Because I think you could have left some of your listeners with the impression that, hey, they can now buy something and drink all they want and then drive home safely. | ||
| Okay, I'm looking online and immediately I find articles that discuss glutathione and its role, vital role in alcohol detoxification. | ||
| In the liver, it binds to the toxin acetyl, which acetyl dehyde, I don't know, whatever. | ||
| Acetaldehyde. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Which is a product of alcohol and is 10 to 30 times more toxic than the alcohol itself. | ||
| Glutathione then transforms, say it again, acetaldehyde. | ||
| What? | ||
| What acetaldehyde into compounds that can be excreted? | ||
| Alcohol therefore depletes our store of glutathione. | ||
| When depleted by excessive alcohol consumption, glutathione becomes unavailable for normal and natural antioxidant effects, leading to a host of health problems. | ||
| And this article is actually saying that you should take glutathione when you drink. | ||
| What you're talking about is reducing the effects of a hangover, getting over the hangover quickly. | ||
| It does not, underscored, does not prevent you from getting drunk or in any way mitigate the intoxication. | ||
| So it doesn't diminish it or shrink it like as if he said. | ||
| That's the belief one of his statements were, is that when you were drunk, you could take this stuff and it would bring you back to baseline rather quickly. | ||
| That is not true. | ||
| You can reduce the effects of a hangover, but you cannot prevent yourself from getting drunk. | ||
| Have you ever tried this? | ||
| Do you know this for a fact? | ||
| I've never tried his product. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, it's not his product. | ||
| Glutathione is available pretty much everywhere. | ||
| You can buy it in health food stores. | ||
| You can buy it online. | ||
| I have never tried anyone's product that was intended as a miracle drunk cure. | ||
| But, I mean, it would make sense, though, that if alcohol and alcohol consumption and the reaction that it has in the body is a chemical reaction, that there could be possibly something that could counterbalance it or swing it in one way or another, just like many other chemical reactions and symbiotic reactions that we have to things inside the body. | ||
| Now, when you read something about this, it seems like what your dispute is that he said that it could diminish the effects of alcohol while you're drunk. | ||
| And you're saying that's not true. | ||
| It just helps with the hangover. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If it helps with the hangover, it's still really potent and pretty interesting. | ||
| I would like to do a test on it. | ||
| I would like to see two people's blood alcohol levels measured. | ||
| I think if you don't do that test, yeah, you're fucking saying something kind of irresponsible, which he did. | ||
| I don't know if that test has been done, though. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I have not searched the literature for it. | ||
| But what if it has been done and he's right? | ||
| Then that would have been all over the literature. | ||
| But as someone who follows the literature fairly closely, I can tell you that it has not been all over the literature, that you can now drink and not get drunk. | ||
| Well, I mean, maybe he was exaggerating. | ||
| I think he was exaggerating because he was selling a product. | ||
| Do you think that's what it was? | ||
| Because he doesn't have a store. | ||
| He doesn't have anything. | ||
| When you say selling a product, where's he selling it out of? | ||
| He doesn't have a store. | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Look, this was the nine minutes of his episode. | ||
| He was talking about what he sells. | ||
| If I'm wrong about that, then I'm damn wrong about it, and I'm surprised. | ||
| This is another thing. | ||
| There's a thing that's talking about saving you from being too drunk is taking glutathione before you drink. | ||
| Where are you seeing it? | ||
| Some fucking journal. | ||
| It's a long, Look, it's impossible to have a conversation and Google things at the same time. | ||
| But it's also on, there's a scientific article on Reddit about large amounts of glutathione have the potential to sober people up in a very short time. | ||
| They're researching a chemical drug. | ||
| This is, listen, man, he's not the only one that's talking about this. | ||
| This is being discussed in many different forms. | ||
| I don't know if he's right or wrong, but I don't think you do either. | ||
| I would like to have him on with someone who disputes it and find out. | ||
| That's what I would recommend. | ||
| He's a very smart guy, and he wasn't saying that many outlandish things where I'd have to pull him down like the towers were destroyed by Tesla technology. | ||
| That's not the same doctor. | ||
| He's a pretty reasonable guy. | ||
| He's a little bit out there. | ||
| He's kind of wacky. | ||
| What is he out there on? | ||
| Oh, he's out there on. | ||
| It's a good thing you say he's out there on. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'd have to listen to it and go over it. | ||
| I like the guy a lot. | ||
| I'm very biased when it comes to him. | ||
| He's a fun guy. | ||
| He's very, very smart. | ||
| But I'm looking at more than one thing that's showing that you could advance your sobriety. | ||
| You could sober up quicker by taking glutathione. | ||
| I don't know if they're right or he's right or you're right, but I don't know that you should be saying that if you're not a doctor. | ||
| What if it turns out that is true? | ||
| I'm not a doctor, but I'm a science writer, and I do Google this. | ||
| I do follow this stuff. | ||
| I've written on Google. | ||
| I did an episode, oh, probably three, four months ago on hangover. | ||
| What exactly is the cause of a hangover? | ||
| What's the nature of the toxicity? | ||
| He could use that information. | ||
| Why don't you hook us up? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| It's a really complicated subject. | ||
| It's an immunosuppressant, the dehydration. | ||
| There's a lot of factors, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it basically comes down to, yeah, it's a depletion of glutathione and your body can't keep up with it. | ||
| Oh, snap. | ||
| Sounds like Dr. Gordon's right. | ||
| No, it's not as simple as that. | ||
| That's the thing, is it's easy to sell products by giving an oversimplified description of it. | ||
| I'm telling you, though, you're pinning it on this guy. | ||
| He doesn't have a store. | ||
| Like, you're saying he's selling products. | ||
| He's not selling anything. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He was certainly talking about a product that's available there. | ||
| Yeah, because he takes it. | ||
| But he was talking to me about it even before the podcast, that he takes it. | ||
| I know Dave Asprey from the Bulletproof Exec, he takes glutathione, but he never brought up anything about it doing anything for alcohol. | ||
| Okay, well, I would just like to leave you with my opinion that since listeners got the impression that here's something that they can take and drink all they want and not get drunk is potentially lethal advice. | ||
| Guess who else got that information? | ||
| Who? | ||
| Me. | ||
| I don't know if it's right either. | ||
| Me and the listeners got fed some information that we don't know it's right. | ||
| I don't have any obligation other than to talk to people. | ||
| My obligation is to ask questions if I'm curious. | ||
| But in broadcasting these things, I make the very clear distinction that I'm not an expert. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck I'm talking about when I'm talking about things like health and medicine. | ||
| But I'm fascinating. | ||
| So if I'm talking to someone and they're an expert and they bring up something that I didn't prepare for, I'm going to ask them questions about it. | ||
| And I will say, I wish I knew if you're full of shit. | ||
| But that's about as good as I can do. | ||
| The reason I initially did this episode five years ago about celebrities who promote harmful pseudoscience is because when you have a large audience, I believe you do have an obligation to not give harmful information. | ||
| But I'm not giving it. | ||
| I don't think for a minute that you've ever knowingly given any harmful information. | ||
| I'm not accusing you of anything at all. | ||
| But if it has been given by one of your guests and you are in the position of having to say, that sounds too good to be true, I wish I knew enough to call you out on your bullshit. | ||
| It seems to me like a reasonable step to follow that up with would have been to find out with, get somebody on who can address the other side of that question. | ||
| Perhaps I could turn this around on you and say it would be so easy for you to research all those different things on that list that you accused me of, many of them which are not true at all and never have been true, but yet you printed them. | ||
| I did. | ||
| So why did you do that if you're a man of science? | ||
| What information would you possibly have had? | ||
| Because I was using the internet in 2008. | ||
| And look, every probably three, four months or so, I do an episode that is nothing but corrections. | ||
| It's corrections of things I've been wrong about in the past. | ||
| I think that's a great plan. | ||
| I think it's great that I do that. | ||
| I want to continue doing it. | ||
| I need more things to be wrong about so I can produce those episodes more often. | ||
| But what you wrote is very specific. | ||
| And what I came here today to do was to find out which of those are wrong and so that I will correct them. | ||
| Yeah, but even this one thing you just said, he wasn't selling it, but you got that wrong, but you're saying that he was selling it. | ||
| That wasn't on my show. | ||
| I was listening to this show. | ||
| Yeah, but you still got it wrong and you're saying it's true. | ||
| And so now you're sending it out to the world that this guy sells a product that he doesn't. | ||
| You're doing the exact same thing that you're blaming Joe for. | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| You are, though. | ||
| You're saying this guy sells something when he doesn't. | ||
| Yeah, you're saying he's pitching his product. | ||
| That's hardly the salient point. | ||
| The salient point is that information is being given that could potentially kill people. | ||
| Right, but you're saying that he's giving this information as a medical expert, which he is, under the guise of selling a product, which is erroneous. | ||
| Okay, but I've also said that I don't know whether it's his store or someone else's store, but it's a product that he's talking about. | ||
| That's the salient point. | ||
| Whether it's his store or someone else's store doesn't really make a lick of difference compared to the fact that it's potentially deadly advice. | ||
| And what he's saying is that he uses it. | ||
| He doesn't sell it. | ||
| And you're saying that he's saying that because he sells it. | ||
| That was very specific. | ||
| You had taken this very cynical approach to why he's disseminating this information. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| And right now, if I said that, I was wrong. | ||
| Oh, the sweetie. | ||
| You apologize. | ||
| And that's to say that these are dumb people that can't realize that they're drunk and they're taking a pill and they're going to go drinking. | ||
| Well, I said to him why it was going on. | ||
| I was like, that sounds like horseshit. | ||
| You did. | ||
| You did. | ||
| But I don't know. | ||
| I mean, he's a fucking smart guy. | ||
| Like, I know for a fact that that guy has helped a lot of people with traumatic brain injury. | ||
| That's a different subject. | ||
| He talks about it. | ||
| He travels around. | ||
| But he's a doctor. | ||
| He's a legit scientist and a doctor. | ||
| I mean, he's a really brilliant guy. | ||
| So when he talks to me about the issues with pituitary gland and impacts and his expertise on the human mind, that relays to me that he has a very vast understanding of The human body itself. | ||
| When he tells me something like this, and then I start reading that there's more than one different article that sort of confirms what he's saying, I don't know if you're right. | ||
| You might have gotten harsh on my friend Dr. Gordon for no reason. | ||
| What if he's right? | ||
| I think it's a very good reason. | ||
| If he's giving advice that's potentially killing people, I think that's a very good reason to err on the side of this information should be checked. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But if you're so dumb that you're just pounding alcohol and trusting that glutathione is gonna do it and it's gonna kill you, that's a Darwin Award winner. | ||
| Yeah, you'll puke before you die. | ||
| You're using glutathione to fucking, I mean, he never said that. | ||
| He never said there's no risk involved. | ||
| What he was saying is it can help you get sober quicker. | ||
| I don't know if he's right, but I don't think you do either. | ||
| That's not what I heard. | ||
| What did you hear? | ||
| I heard him say you can drink and not get drunk. | ||
| We could listen to it. | ||
| We have the internet. | ||
| Okay, see if you could pull it up. | ||
| If there's a very small sample that we could find. | ||
| I think we're kind of splitting hairs here. | ||
| I could see why you would be upset, and I could see why you would think that I have the responsibility to call someone out. | ||
| I would have to be the expert on a million different things, and then I would have to have people on and have people counteract them and have people go back and forth in debates. | ||
| And that's all well and good in the real world if you can organize those debates and if you can get those people together. | ||
| But for the most part, I'm lucky to get someone to sit down once. | ||
| I'm lucky to get someone who can fit into a time that I have and have them on the show. | ||
| And I just want to have a conversation with them. | ||
| I didn't have any idea that guy was going to bring up glutathione. | ||
| In fact, we wanted to highlight his work on traumatic brain injury because there's a big issue with mixed martial arts these days. | ||
| And the big issue is, there's twofold. | ||
| One, traumatic brain injury, and two, the depletion of testosterone because of traumatic brain injury. | ||
| It's been shown in people that have come back from war and suffered head injuries. | ||
| And it's been shown from boxers and people that have sustained long-term, even sub-concussive impacts to the head that the pituitary gland gets fucked up. | ||
| And he's trying to sort of spread this information and keep fighters from taking testosterone to counteract that and then competing to, and continuing to compete, continuing to damage the brain. | ||
| And it's an issue in mixed martial arts. | ||
| And it's one of the reasons why I had him on because he's a brilliant guy. | ||
| And he is very troubled by this idea that we're going to put a band-aid on traumatic brain injury by giving these guys testosterone use exemptions. | ||
| He thinks it's wrong. | ||
| He thinks if your body is producing less testosterone because of impacts, you shouldn't give it testosterone and continue receiving impacts. | ||
| That was the whole premise for him coming on the show in the first place. | ||
| So for me, I felt like he's the smartest person I know in regards to this particular subject. | ||
| So I felt it was kind of important to discuss it with him. | ||
| I had no idea this glutathione shit was going to come off this week. | ||
| But here's what he said. | ||
| We're going to put it over after you drink and you take this. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Glutathione. | ||
| Pull that thing closer to your face so people hear you better. | ||
| Glutathione. | ||
| Glutathione. | ||
| And that helps your liver when you drink alcohol? | ||
| Well, it helps you with just about anything that the liver is responsible for digesting or metabolizing. | ||
| As you metabolize certain drugs, chemicals, and so forth, the liver uses up its ability to continue the process, so it spills over into the blood, and that's how you get drunk, because your liver can only deal with a certain amount. | ||
| So if you replenish or replace the glutathione in the liver, you get incredible benefits of it. | ||
| Not only does it help with metabolism, but it's an incredible antioxidant for the brain and for the eyes and for the heart. | ||
| What is it made out of? | ||
| It's three amino acids that are together. | ||
| It's in our body, but we don't have enough of it to really generate the metabolism that we need if we're drinking. | ||
| Now, where do they get that? | ||
| Where do they get glutathione? | ||
| Because I know Dave Asprey's really into that stuff, too. | ||
| He has a version of it. | ||
| Yeah, it's manufactured. | ||
| But how do they make it? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Well, it's three amino acids that they put together. | ||
| And the products that we interact with are, it's a delivery technology where you wrap the vitamins or you wrap the supplement in a, what's called a liposome, which is like a cell wall. | ||
| It's from lecithin, it's from soy, and it protects whatever it is that you're ingesting. | ||
| Because a lot of the things that you take, like I think I shared with you, if you take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C by mouth, you only absorb 19%. | ||
| The rest of it is destroyed by the acid that's in the stomach. | ||
| But if you wrap it in this protection called the liposome, you'll be able to absorb 93%. | ||
| So taking something like glutathione, which normally when you take it in its natural form, it's destroyed. | ||
| Most of it is destroyed and then absorbed and then remanufactured in the blood. | ||
| But if you wrap it in this protective outer coating, a liposome, you can absorb it more readily. | ||
| And the effects are unbelievably positive. | ||
| For instance, a gentleman who went out drinking three high balls and five shots of tequila went home and subsequently was very dizzy, nauseous. | ||
| He forgot that I gave him a sample of this glutathione. | ||
| And he used four puffs under the tongue, held it for 30 seconds, and then 30 minutes later, clear as a bell, woke up the next day, went out partying again, couldn't get drunk. | ||
| What? | ||
| That sounds like nonsense. | ||
| It isn't nonsense. | ||
| I wish I was smart enough to call you on your bullshit. | ||
| Talk to my office. | ||
| Aaron will tell you everything. | ||
| That sounds crazy. | ||
| Maybe that guy was. | ||
| Cut it off right there. | ||
| That was actually at the beginning of the podcast, I remember. | ||
| That was about where I got mad and drinking. | ||
| That was right in. | ||
| I don't buy the, he says he couldn't get drunk the next day. | ||
| That's very anecdotal, though. | ||
| And what he was saying was just hard science. | ||
| A good doctor is not going to go and tell people anecdotes like, you can take this product and not get drunk. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Maybe he was nervous being on a podcast, and he probably shouldn't have said it, knowing that a million people plus are going to listen to it. | ||
| However, what he said was all hard science. | ||
| What he said was, okay, here's the things he said that led me to believe that it was his product, at least remembering. | ||
| But obviously, here you watch it again, it wasn't his product. | ||
| He wasn't selling it. | ||
| He said, I gave him the supplement, and he said, here's the delivery thing that we're working on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So maybe I misinterpreted that. | |
| Let me tell you something about this guy. | ||
| He's a very generous guy, and he gives people vitamins all the time. | ||
| He's like, here, try this out. | ||
| I've been taking this. | ||
| This is an incredible amino acid. | ||
| It's blah, blah, blah, grape seed. | ||
| And he's just a, He gives things out to people. | ||
| He said it has all of these amazing effects. | ||
| Your heart, your brain, your eyes. | ||
| Antioxidants. | ||
| And he's using language like extraordinary and amazing. | ||
| And in my experience, in my experience dealing with many quacks of many different duck species, if it looks in the quacks like one, it's usually a quack. | ||
| And he was using very quack-like language and making very quack-like points. | ||
| I don't know what he's doing. | ||
| You could accuse him of hyperbole. | ||
| You could accuse him of hyperbole, but what he's saying is essentially hard science about the liposomal, the digestion of nutrients using the liposomal method as opposed to just normally being broken down by stomach acids. | ||
| All the things he's saying, it's not that ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if you usually take something, if you take some kind of an enzyme or something in your mouth, your saliva is going to start breaking it down into the constituent amino acids right away. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| What he said was great. | ||
| It's not going to get used as glutathione in your body. | ||
| Those amino acids are going to go their separate ways and become used for whatever else your body actually is looking for at the time. | ||
| I don't know about his particular delivery method that he's talking about, but when he says… I guarantee you're not the particular delivery method he's talking about. | ||
| But when he says you can take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C and your body's going to absorb 93% of it, that's, in my experience, medically nonsensical. | ||
| Your body doesn't need that much. | ||
| Well, your body doesn't use that much. | ||
| 93% of what, though? | ||
| The vitamin C you took in your 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| But what? | ||
| If it's a small amount. | ||
| If he's saying that your body absorbs 93% of vitamin C, he's not saying that you need 1,000 milligrams and your body absorbs 93%. | ||
| But he's saying that if you deliver it in a liposomal form, you get a 93% bioavailability. | ||
| He's not giving a specific number that you should take. | ||
| He was saying that if you take vitamin C, most of it gets destroyed unless you use it liposomally, which I think is correct. | ||
| But your body doesn't have any use for 93% of 1,000 milligrams of vitamin A. But he didn't say that. | ||
| He didn't say you need 1,000 milligrams and then 93% of it is absorbed. | ||
| What he said is if you take it liposomally, it's a higher rate of bioavailability and it's up to 93%. | ||
| He didn't say you have to take 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| Do you think he was implying that it's better to do that? | ||
| He didn't give a dosage. | ||
| He was trying to say that it's better to have liposomal vitamin C because it's more bioavailable. | ||
| That's all hard science. | ||
| Well, how is it better? | ||
| If it's going to give you more than you can use, how is it better? | ||
| No, you're adding that. | ||
| He didn't say that you have to have 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| What he said is that if you take it, 19% is going to get absorbed. | ||
| You take it through the traditional method. | ||
| If you take it liposomally, then you get 93% absorption. | ||
| He didn't give you a dosage. | ||
| He wasn't suggesting or implying that you're going to be able to do it. | ||
| You're trying to find them to be wrong, Zyron. | ||
| This is not cool. | ||
| Look, I'm just saying it looks and quacks like a damage. | ||
| It's disingenuous. | ||
| What you're saying is disingenuous because that's not what he's saying. | ||
| What he's saying there was that the bioavailability of liposomal nutrients is better. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| You're saying that he's saying 1,000 milligrams, and your point of contention is you don't need 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| He never said you need 1,000 milligrams of liposomal vitamin C. All he said was that when you take vitamin C liposomally, your body absorbs it better. | ||
| Whether it's really 93%, okay, yeah, it is. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| They're saying on live and labs, liposomal science, saying a bioavailability of 98%. | ||
| There's another one that says over 90%. | ||
| So what he's saying is true. | ||
| What he's saying is fact. | ||
| And you're shitting on him because you don't want him to be right about what I think you're correct about is this idea, this anecdotal story of a guy taking this stuff, feeling better 30 minutes later, and then the next day he couldn't get drunk. | ||
| That sounds like bullshit to me, too. | ||
| But all that other stuff that he said, that's all science. | ||
| I'm shitting on anyone who is selling snake oil, basically. | ||
| Oh, come on, man. | ||
| Or pitching snake oil to be bought or suggesting that buying supplements and things that you don't need is a good way to spend your money. | ||
| But wait a minute. | ||
| If someone likes to drink, isn't it a smart thing to take glutathione after you drink to shorten your hangover? | ||
| Isn't it effective? | ||
| I would have to look at the research before I would tell you that. | ||
| You said it. | ||
| You said it before. | ||
| You said that it aids in reducing hangover. | ||
| Okay, yes. | ||
| So why wouldn't you take that? | ||
| You're saying that he's selling something that you don't need. | ||
| And why wouldn't you need it? | ||
| It's not as simple as that. | ||
| But wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| None of these issues are as simple as that. | ||
| No one's saying it is. | ||
| But you're saying that you take glutathione when you're hungover and it reduces the length of your hangover. | ||
| He's saying take glutathione. | ||
| You're saying saying to take glutathione is unnecessary. | ||
| You're saying that you don't need it. | ||
| Well, neither. | ||
| You don't need nutrients. | ||
| You could live on cheeseburgers and get to be fucking 60 years old just eating shitty food. | ||
| That doesn't mean that your life holds... | ||
| It doesn't mean that your life isn't enhanced by raw vegetables and nutrients and having a balanced diet. | ||
| You saying that you don't need glutathione is pretty ridiculous. | ||
| If you can get glutathione into your liver, your hangover will be reduced. | ||
| So why don't you? | ||
| Whether this method of taking a supplement will get glutathione into your liver is something that I don't know, and I would have to look at the research before I would tell you that. | ||
| But you're already accusing him of being wrong. | ||
| I'm accusing him of being wrong that you can take a product and not get drunk after trying to get drunk and not able to get drunk. | ||
| I'm saying that that's wrong and it borders on being really, really unethically wrong. | ||
| We agree on that, but you've set up all sorts of strawman arguments for why he did it and what he's doing and what he's saying and the bioavailability of vitamin C. Those all fall apart under scrutiny. | ||
| Let's have him come on and correct it then. | ||
| He's not going to come on and debate you. | ||
| He doesn't know you. | ||
| I wouldn't say that. | ||
| He's not going to want to. | ||
| I'd get someone who knows the business. | ||
| Look, he's a silly guy, and sometimes he might speak in hyperbole, but what he's saying that you corrected, you're wrong about. | ||
| About the bioavailability. | ||
| You attributed him to this erroneous number of 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| He didn't say that. | ||
| He did. | ||
| You want to play it again? | ||
| Let's play it again. | ||
| Let's play it again the liposomal indication of the business. | ||
| We don't need to play Jackson. | ||
| If you take 1,000 milligram vitamin C and you take it liposomally, you'll absorb 93%. | ||
| That's not what he said. | ||
| What he said was, if you take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C, your body only absorbs 19%. | ||
| And he said, if you take vitamin C liposomally, your body absorbs a giant amount of it. | ||
| He said 93%. | ||
| 19% and 93%. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| He didn't say you take 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| No. | ||
| You're saying you don't need that much vitamin C, and That's why he's wrong. | ||
| But high levels of vitamin C, that's debatable as well. | ||
| Because high levels of vitamin C have been shown to be potent antioxidants that can prevent against certain types of diseases. | ||
| A lot of people think it boosts your immune system. | ||
| It helps fight off various pathogens. | ||
| There's a lot of research, hard data, that shows that high levels of vitamin C is probably pretty good for you. | ||
| In my research, all of that has turned out to be nonsense. | ||
| Your research on vitamin C is extensive? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What's your research on vitamin C? | ||
| God, I can look up my episode for you. | ||
| I mean, it was a few years ago. | ||
| We talked mostly about – it was invented by, of course, Linus Pauling, who by this time in his career was something of a crank and came up with this notion that vitamin megadosing would cure cancer. | ||
| And he wrote the book called – But that's essentially what started off the whole vitamin supplement movement that still exists very strongly to this day. | ||
| And what we have found by testing is that vitamin C does not significantly affect cancer, the length or duration or severity of a cold, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| All of these things that we take it for. | ||
| This caused a great rift between him and science, and he spent most of the rest of his career, which was fairly short because he was quite elderly by that time, basically widening that rift and debating with the medical profession and trying to defend his vitamin mega-dosing idea. | ||
| And what you'll find now, I mean, this is pretty much everywhere in recent scientific literature, is the idea that vitamins really don't do anything for you. | ||
| Because very few people have vitamin deficiencies. | ||
| National Institute of Health published evidence demonstrating that vitamin C's anti-cancer properties, that high levels of vitamin C kills cancer. | ||
| This is the National Institute of Health. | ||
| And read the whole thing. | ||
| I bet you all that's talking about in vitro. | ||
| In vitro or IV? | ||
| You mean? | ||
| In vitro means if you put something in a Petri dish and you put some cells in there and you pour something in it and it kills the cells, that's in vitro. | ||
| It's got very little to do with in situ, which means actually doing some tests in your body. | ||
| So would it be IVC? | ||
| Is that what they would call it? | ||
| High-dose IVC? | ||
| Is that in vitro? | ||
| No, it would be just that. | ||
| It would be written out in vitro. | ||
| No, it's not saying that. | ||
| It's saying high-dose IVC, a non-toxic chemotherapeutic agent that can be given in conjunction with conventional cancer treatments. | ||
| Based on the work of several vitamin C pioneers before him, Dr. Riordan was able to prove that vitamin C was selectively toxic to cancer cells if given intravenously. | ||
| This research has recently reproduced and published by Dr. Mark Levine at the National Institute of Health. | ||
| So meaning that the bioavailability is at its highest because it's intravenously introduced, meaning that what he was saying about the bioavailability because of liposomal science, that that would also be a higher absorption rate than eating it normally. | ||
| So what he's saying is, I mean, what this article is saying is that there's benefit to taking high-level vitamin C. Look, I don't have that article in front of me, but I will tell you in my experience that you can find an article making any point you want to very easily about anything. | ||
| But does that mean that having researched this extensively myself and being very familiar with science writers and science journalists in virtually every field, I can tell you that the current thinking is not that vitamin C has any beneficial effect on cancer. | ||
| I have no idea what this article is that you're looking at. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think it's complicated, man. | ||
| You know, I think there's a lot of work being done that shows that there are benefits to taking in nutrients. | ||
| There was a study NBC. | ||
| Well, the various various vitamins, supplementing various vitamins. | ||
| There was an interesting one that I'm looking at right now. | ||
| They were talking about the prevention of vitamin C. Here's one, infectious illness prevention. | ||
| And this is an NCBI website. | ||
| It's a National Health Institute, National Institute for Health. | ||
| Mood and stress, cognition, and they've shown that it's actually that you could take high level, that vitamin C and different antioxidants and multivitamins have been shown to decrease juvenile delinquency. | ||
| Like I said, you can find an article. | ||
| What did you search for, by the way? | ||
| What was your search term? | ||
| I don't remember. | ||
| Benefits of vitamin C? | ||
| Suck dick, vitamins. | ||
| Threw that all together. | ||
| You know, man, I see where you're going with all this, and I see your point of view. | ||
| You're a no-nonsense guy. | ||
| And I agree with you for the most part. | ||
| And I think that, you know, in the case of Dr. Gordon and his description, it's probably rather unfortunate that he decided to give that anecdotal story along with this very interesting aspect of research and nutrition. | ||
| Fair assessment. | ||
| I'll agree with that. | ||
| But it would never make me angry enough to shut it off and yell at him. | ||
| And your descriptions of even what he said in the event is off. | ||
| And I think that's from this hard stance, no-nonsense approach you have. | ||
| And I don't blame you. | ||
| If you look in the world that we live in, it's filled with bullshit. | ||
| And a no-nonsense guy gets fucking tired of dealing with bullshit on a regular basis all day long. | ||
| And I think you're a bit knee-jerk in your reactions there, fella. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're certainly not the only person to have said that. | ||
| Well, you used to believe in Bigfoot five years ago, man. | ||
| Lighten up. | ||
| The best definition of skepticism is the intersection of science education and consumer protection. | ||
| If people have better science literacy, they are less likely to take advantage of products that are worthless. | ||
| Okay, that is a way of looking at it. | ||
| It aids in consumer protection. | ||
| That is my motivation. | ||
| I believe that information aids in consumer protection. | ||
| All information. | ||
| Eventually, right now we're dealing with this rudimentary sort of a way of assimilating it and distributing it. | ||
| And I think ultimately all the bullshit that we're dealing with in this world will stop to be valid. | ||
| I think what we're dealing with right now is like we Google things when we have an answer about something. | ||
| I think one day we're going to have an unstoppable base of knowledge. | ||
| And I think that it's probably sooner than later. | ||
| But right now, when we do have these discrepancies and these issues, Any gray area, anywhere that you're wrong and you take this hard stance, this hard no-nonsense stance, it actually does more harm than it does good. | ||
| Because if we could show that you're wrong, then even though your message is correct, I agree with your message. | ||
| I said it at the time, and he's my friend. | ||
| I wish I could call you out and you're bullshit. | ||
| I wished I could because I know him and he's kind of crazy. | ||
| But you saying all those things diminishes your initial point because your initial point was very valid. | ||
| He was being irresponsible and saying that you could take this stuff and not get drunk. | ||
| It seems ridiculous. | ||
| He shouldn't have told that anecdotal story. | ||
| But you shouldn't have insisted that he had said 1,000 milligrams and that it's 93% bioavailability. | ||
| And then you're trying to find some way that he's wrong. | ||
| So you're going, well, why do you need that much? | ||
| And he didn't say that. | ||
| He's trying to sell this stuff. | ||
| He's not selling shit. | ||
| He doesn't have a store. | ||
| He's not selling a goddamn thing. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, agree to disagree on whether he said that. | ||
| Oh, we played it. | ||
| We played it back, and I heard it. | ||
| We played it again. | ||
| Okay, let's hear it again. | ||
| Play his 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| Well, and you've given me some great advice as far as health and fitness and exercise and all sorts of different things. | ||
| Scoot ahead a couple of minutes because it's always the whole thing. | ||
| Every conversation, you go, I know I forgot something. | ||
| I know I forgot to scoot ahead to the vitamin shit that helps your liver after you drink and you take the scoot ahead. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Glutathione. | ||
| No, but go a little bit ahead because we want specifically glutathione. | ||
| And the products that we interact with are, it's a delivery technology where you wrap the vitamins or you wrap the supplement in a, what's called a liposome, which is like a cell wall. | ||
| It's from lecithin, it's from soy, and it protects whatever it is that you're ingesting because a lot of the things that you take, like I think I shared with you, if you take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C by mouth, you only absorb 19%. | ||
| The rest of it is destroyed by the acid that's in the stomach. | ||
| But if you wrap it in this protection called the liposome, you'll be able to absorb 93%. | ||
| So taking something like glutathione, which normally... | ||
| He didn't say you take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C. He said if you do, you absorb 93%. | ||
| He's saying, if you take 1,000 milligrams of vitamin C, he's not recommending that as a dose. | ||
| He's saying, if you do, your body absorbs 19%. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| He's saying if you wrap it in a liposomal structure, your body absorbs 93%. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| kind of stunned on what you're saying I got wrong. | ||
| I said, he said, a thousand milligrams of vitamin C and you'll absorb 93% of it if you take his... | ||
| He wasn't telling you to take anything. | ||
| What he's saying is if you take a thousand milligrams of vitamin C, your body will only absorb 19%. | ||
| If you wrap it in this liposomal structure, your body will absorb 93%. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He's not recommending that as a daily allowance. | ||
| He's not telling you to take it. | ||
| You're trying to find a way to be right here. | ||
| It's kind of weird. | ||
| I think I'm repeating exactly what you just said. | ||
| I'm just kind of stunned that you're pointing out what I said was wrong. | ||
| I said, I mean, this is kind of, we're deteriorating in the containment quality here. | ||
| No, no, this is explaining where you err in the way you cast judgment and that you're incorrect about what he was saying. | ||
| But your main point where he's wrong is why do you need that much vitamin C in the first place? | ||
| What's the big deal about this liposomal thing? | ||
| You were trying to diminish him. | ||
| You're trying to find ways to diminish his point. | ||
| But he's correct. | ||
| All he gave you, he gave you a number. | ||
| If he didn't give you a number of 1,000 milligrams, what if he said 100 milligrams? | ||
| What if he said 500 milligrams? | ||
| His point was your body, he came up with a number for a point of reference. | ||
| But his point was your body only absorbs 19%. | ||
| He said then if you take it liposomally, your body absorbs 93%. | ||
| He didn't mean that you have to take 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| He doesn't tell you to take 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| He just gave you a point of reference for explaining the bioavailability of liposomal products as opposed to the standard form of digesting. | ||
| Can I just summarize my position and we can move on? | ||
| Just in two points. | ||
| Point number one is he used very quack-like language throughout the nine minutes that I listened to. | ||
| By saying it's amazing? | ||
| And I became sweetie? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What do you say? | ||
| Which made me very skeptical of his motivations and of the quality of his information. | ||
| Number two, you do not need to take 1,000 milligrams of the music. | ||
| He didn't say that. | ||
| He didn't say you do. | ||
| This is a straw man. | ||
| Not a straw man. | ||
| This is summarizing my point. | ||
| My point, not his point, my point is that you do not need to take doses of any doses of vitamins or other supplements unless you're one of the rare people who for some reason has a vitamin deficiency, which is, you know, you need to be pretty sick or have some problem to have any need for any supplements. | ||
| But you were criticizing him for saying you need 1,000 milligrams, which is in fact not what he said. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't think he would have said that unless he was trying to imply or suggest that he's going to be able to do that. | ||
| No, he's coming in with a point of reference. | ||
| He's going to take vitamin C. I'm sure he thinks it's a good thing to take vitamin C. As a matter of fact, that's the reason why people don't get scurvy, right? | ||
| Take vitamin C. It's good for you. | ||
| Keeps that from happening. | ||
| If you go on a long boat trip with a bunch of assholes who are eating dried meat, take your vitamin C. Look, there's nothing wrong with vitamin C. What he's saying is he gave a point of reference. | ||
| He started with 1,000 milligrams. | ||
| If you take that, it's a figure of speech. | ||
| You absorb 19%. | ||
| If you take it liposomal, you absorb 93%. | ||
| We're beating a dead horse. | ||
| You're wrong here. | ||
| I am flabbergasted that you're saying I'm wrong, but let's just move on. | ||
| I mean, this is just going around in circles. | ||
| Well, it is, but it is. | ||
| But it's highlighting the way you think. | ||
| And one of the things about the way you think is this desire to be right. | ||
| And you have a very strong desire to, when you're criticizing him, to be right. | ||
| And I think you're wrong. | ||
| And I think you're wrong about a couple of things. | ||
| You're wrong about your initial description of the way he described things as wrong. | ||
| And you don't like the way he used adjectives or hyperbole. | ||
| You said it was very important. | ||
| Okay, that's not exactly what you're talking about. | ||
| His type of language was what I was criticizing. | ||
| I think your real good point is that he said that you could not get drunk or that his friend wasn't drunk. | ||
| That's a real good point. | ||
| That sounds like nonsense to me. | ||
| Still sounds like nonsense. | ||
| I think he exaggerated. | ||
| Or I think he told an anecdotal story of someone who's bullshitting him. | ||
|
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Or it's one of those nights where you drink and drink and drink and you just can't get drunk. | |
| You've had that. | ||
| He's had that experience. | ||
| He gets fucked up. | ||
| What I'm saying is, man, you're a hardline dude. | ||
| You don't smoke any weed at all, do you? | ||
| No. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| That's what you need. | ||
| You need a little pot cookie and a massage. | ||
| You ever get a Thai massage? | ||
| They pull your arms back, they walk on your back. | ||
| You need to relax, man. | ||
| There's a lot of merit in what you're doing, and there's a lot of merit in what you're saying. | ||
| And I understand your arguments for this hard stance. | ||
| I totally understand it. | ||
| But I also think that sometimes it diminishes your actual point, which can many times be very valid. | ||
| Such as? | ||
| Well, this, this whole shit we're doing, this dance about vitamin C. Why do you think he brought it up? | ||
| Why do you think he talked about it? | ||
| He wanted to talk about glutathione. | ||
| And he, you know, goes into depth. | ||
| He's a very interesting and very charitable guy. | ||
| He's not a bad guy at all. | ||
| So I was confused as to, I could see how you would get upset at that statement, absolutely. | ||
| But all that other stuff leading up to the statement to sort of flavor the statement and make it even worse and grander turned out to not be true. | ||
| Anytime you're suggesting, selling, promoting miraculously easy solutions to complicated problems, that should raise a huge red flag. | ||
| And all of the language he was using suggested a miraculously easy solution. | ||
| Words like, you know, the words he was using, the being. | ||
| I think he actually, in his defense, he used a lot of those words just to describe its effects as an antioxidant, which are pretty much universally accepted online. | ||
| Effects as an antioxidant? | ||
| It's a strong antioxidant. | ||
| What has been... | ||
| The antioxidants that you get from your normal diet are more than enough that your body can, will, needs to use. | ||
| Supplementation has no benefit. | ||
| Well, how do they enlighten me? | ||
| How do they test to see the benefit of antioxidants and antioxidant supplementation? | ||
| This goes back to the whole, the question of oxidation versus antioxidant. | ||
| Sounds like it's a really simple question, good versus bad. | ||
| Oxidation is part of so many different parts of your metabolism. | ||
| Converting your energy in cell to, converting your chemical energy in cell to kinetic energy, that's oxidation. | ||
| You can't just simply say antioxidants good, oxidation bad. | ||
| It's not as simple as that. | ||
| Okay, but no one's saying that. | ||
| What you're saying is antioxidants have no benefit if you take them as a supplement. | ||
| Supplementation of antioxidants has been found to have no benefit. | ||
| Where is that? | ||
| Is that published somewhere? | ||
| If you Google that sentence, I'm sure you'll find it. | ||
| Supplementation of antioxidants. | ||
| But how do they know the difference between the benefits of taking it with food and the benefits of taking it as a supplement? | ||
| Well, because we can chemically measure what's in food. | ||
| We can chemically measure what's in a supplement. | ||
| We know how much your body uses. | ||
| And the number of tests that have been done are all going to use different methodologies, and I'm sorry I did not memorize them. | ||
| Well, that's okay. | ||
| I can't tell you. | ||
| I'm honestly curious. | ||
| What I do as a science writer is summarize the available research. | ||
| So this is what I'm confused about. | ||
| If you are taking it in food, there's a benefit from it. | ||
| The amount of oxidation that you get in a normal diet, yes. | ||
| If you don't eat a normal diet, then I presume that if you were going on a water starvation diet or something, then I suppose you'd probably want to take a multivitamin. | ||
| You'd at least get your vitamins. | ||
| You wouldn't be getting anything else you need, but you'd be getting vitamins. | ||
| I suppose the same is true of just about any supplement if you're going to starve yourself. | ||
| But the best advice of all is to simply eat a normal, healthy diet. | ||
| Because those things, those aspects of nutrition are available in that normal, healthy diet, and they're bioavailable. | ||
| There's six basic things that you get in food. | ||
| Number one is water. | ||
| Number two is amino acids. | ||
| Number three is carbohydrates, sugar. | ||
| Number four is fats. | ||
| Number five, number six, what am I missing here? | ||
| Oh, five is vitamins. | ||
| And six is minerals. | ||
| So these are all the different classes of things that you need. | ||
| And any normal, healthy diet has all of those that your body is going to use. | ||
| Because actually you need quite tiny amounts of all of those things. | ||
| Your body actually uses very tiny amounts. | ||
| Any normal diet, the reason you poop and pee is because you ate more than you needed. | ||
| Supplementation is trying to pour water on a bucket that's already overflowing. | ||
| Wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. | ||
| The reason you poop and pee is not because you ate more or drank more than you needed. | ||
| You're going to poop and pee if you just drink the exact right amount, too. | ||
| You can poop and pee all the way to starvation. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| You'll stop pooping at least. | ||
| You stop eating. | ||
| If you keep drinking water, like you're, when the water passes through your body, it's not because you drank too much water. | ||
| If you drink a glass of water, okay, and that water goes through is exactly what your body needed, in a few hours you're going to need it as a waste eliminator. | ||
| Your kidneys are going to continue producing urine until there is until you're dehydrated. | ||
| Right, but there's not a balance enact where you could hit the certain sweet spot where you eat exactly what you need or drink exactly what you need. | ||
| Look, I'm not talking about finding a sweet spot. | ||
| What I'm saying is that you're saying pooping and peeing is because you ate too much or drank too much. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| You're taking my words too literally. | ||
| Well, that's a very literal statement, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, come on, that's a ridiculous medical statement. | ||
| A doctor would listen to that. | ||
| I'm just calling you out on the same shape. | ||
| What are you saying then? | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What I'm saying is supplementation of any of these things is pouring water on a bucket that's already overfull. | ||
| You don't need more sugar than your body's going to use. | ||
| You don't need more minerals than your body's going to use. | ||
| You don't need more vitamins than your body's going to use. | ||
| Anything that you'd eat of those that is more than you're going to use is going to get excreted from your body somehow or other sooner or later. | ||
| That makes sense? | ||
|
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That's what I'm saying. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I would love to know what studies they did on antioxidants and what they know the benefits of. | ||
| I mean, they absolutely have measured the benefits of it from food, the individual nutrients of antioxidants and what sort of effect they have on the human body. | ||
| And what I'd really be curious to find out what studies disprove that or prove that. | ||
| Okay, here. | ||
| If you're on Google right now, Google skeptoid antioxidants. | ||
| I'm not going to read your stuff, silly. | ||
| If I'm going to Google stuff, I'm going to Google people that disagree with you. | ||
| But there's a lot of people that do agree with you, in all fairness, online. | ||
| If you want to find out, if you want to ask what my sources were, where I got the information, that's where you'll find it. | ||
| The reference is at the bottom of the episode. | ||
| I just wonder what the motivation of these studies were, what the protocol was. | ||
| I mean, there's a lot of variables. | ||
| Like this new study that came out that said case closed, you know, multivitamin researchers came out and said that multivitamins don't work. | ||
| Well, if you know what the study was, that they actually studied, the protocol that they used and what they actually tried to do, it's a kind of irresponsible statement to say vitamins don't work case closed. | ||
| What they did was they gave multivitamins, these hard multivitamins, to physicians over age 65, and they showed no improvement in cognitive decline. | ||
| So they took people that were already declining, they gave them vitamins that were these hard fucking synthetic vitamins, and they showed no decline, no ceasing in the declining of their cognitive function. | ||
| Another one, high-dose multivitamins had no effect on the progression of heart disease and heart attack survivors. | ||
| So these people were already fucked. | ||
| They already had a heart attack. | ||
| They give them high levels of these, again, synthetic multivitamins, these compressed pill form, you know, centrum one-a-day jammies that nobody digests. | ||
| And then another one, the third study, which actually is fairly positive, concludes that limited evidence supports any benefit from vitamin and mineral supplementation for the prevention of cancer or cardiovascular disease. | ||
| Two trials found a small borderline significant benefit from multivitamin supplements on cancer in men only and no effect on cardiovascular disease. | ||
| So that's a small, barely measurable effect from these shitty synthetic vitamins on people who are fucked, people who are already sick, people who their bodies are already dying. | ||
| To say that vitamins don't work based on those three components is ridiculous. | ||
| Well, you know, a really unfortunate aspect of the world of science reporting, something that I've come to learn over and over again, and it's pretty depressing, is how news makes it from the lab into people's computers. | ||
| The gotcha aspect of the title, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The fact is that universities where so much research is done, they have PR departments, and they are responsible for keeping attention on this university, keeping the money flowing. | ||
| And the PR department at a university is going to spend what they see as the most reportable aspect of the research being done. | ||
| They send out the press release, and then the press does exactly the same thing. | ||
| They look at it and look for the most reportable aspect of this. | ||
| And it's often completely wrong by the time it gets to the presses because they'll report the sensational aspect of it. | ||
| And what you'll often see, I follow a lot of science writers who do this a lot, is they kind of reverse engineer these headlines that have become so prominent. | ||
| And it's always some, you know, scientists find that this will kill you. | ||
| Scientists find that this is a miracle cure. | ||
| And when you reverse engineer those headlines and go back and look at the original research that was done, you'll find often it said exactly the opposite of what the headline says. | ||
| It's really difficult to come up with kind of a journeyman's interpretation of science news by reading mass media. | ||
| Yeah, they did publish the study, though. | ||
| I mean, the title of the study is Enough is Enough. | ||
| Stop Wasting Money on Vitamin and Mineral Supplements. | ||
| I mean, this is the title of the article that was released. | ||
| I think they took an inflammatory position that I don't think is supported by the evidence and the research that they presented. | ||
| And it's very short-sighted. | ||
| There's many, many aspects to health. | ||
| And when you're dealing with someone who is already really fucking sick, which is all three of the people that they described, that they tested these things on, all groups of the people, you know, you're dealing with a situation. | ||
| I mean, to try to, like, the rate of decline in people that have Alzheimer's and the rate of decline in people with cognitive decline, we don't have anything that's going to stop that. | ||
| Like, what makes you think that vitamins are going to stop it? | ||
| Because if vitamins don't stop it, things that would be beneficial for health are not stopping something that we've never been able to stop. | ||
| That seems preposterous to say vitamins don't work based on that evidence. | ||
| It seems to me like this is something that was a predetermined conclusion or the most inflammatory response, which, look, we're talking about it, so it's effective in that sense. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So 10 minutes. | ||
| We're almost out. | ||
| We turn into a pumpkin and three hours in. | ||
| Well, there's a really unfortunate word, and it's consensus. | ||
| And the word consensus, I describe it as unfortunate because it has a very different meaning in popular usage than it has in scientific fields. | ||
| In scientific fields, we describe a consensus as something not merely that most scientists generally agree on, although that's often true. | ||
| What a scientific consensus really means is that this is research that has been repeated in other labs and the results have been confirmed, the results have been scrutinized, people have tried to disprove them, people have tried to find alternate explanations, and it has truly passed a certain level of scientific rigor. | ||
| Then we say we have a scientific consensus. | ||
| In science circles, consensus means a lot more than it does in popular usage. | ||
| And you will find that the consensus is that supplementation has no benefit among healthy people who don't have a deficiency due to some strange cause, whatever that might be. | ||
| I think you're not. | ||
| You will always find articles to the contrary. | ||
| Or articles like this that sensationalize that into something that it's not. | ||
| Sensationalize the negative aspects of it. | ||
| I don't think there's really a consensus about supplementation because in order to really totally completely monitor the variations between two human beings, you'd have to have two people that were exactly the same genetically, exactly the same as far as their life experiences, their life stress, all the different factors that add up to health. | ||
| There is a massive range of factors that come into play when you're dealing with a person's health. | ||
| If you measure a bunch of people with very good diets, rich in green leafy vegetables and live foods and all these different healthy things and no bullshit and processed foods. | ||
| And then you measure people who have the typical American fast food diet, I think you're going to see that these nutrients are certainly beneficial. | ||
| The people that eat healthy food are certainly going to have a greater instance of being healthy. | ||
| But to really break it down and figure out how much of an effect a nutritional supplement would have based on that would be like you would have to take the exact same people living the exact same lives and one of them would take a supplement and one of them wouldn't. | ||
| I mean, it'd be really hard to figure out. | ||
| And then you'd have to say like, well, if you eat healthy, it's the best way. | ||
| Everybody agrees on that. | ||
| I don't think I've heard a single person who knows about health and nutrition that says that you could eat shitty food and just take vitamins. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| It doesn't work that way. | ||
| There's certain aspects of food that's just missing in pill form. | ||
| You're always better off getting fresh, leafy vegetables that are right out of the ground. | ||
| But taking supplements as well with a varied diet, especially if your diet doesn't balance out, as long as we're aware of the bioavailability of those supplements, and then we're also aware that your body can absorb some of those supplements, it seems to me like you're hedging your bets. | ||
| It seems like it's a good idea to take a good, strong, natural, food-based supplementation program. | ||
| I think generally there's no harm in them. | ||
|
unidentified
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No harm in them. | |
| Except to the wallet. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're just unnecessary. | |
| I don't know if they're unnecessary if your diet is not totally balanced. | ||
| Well, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| But I think it may be able to make up some slack. | ||
| And if it can make up some slack, then I think that they're beneficial. | ||
| I think if you have a healthy diet, you're right. | ||
| You don't need it. | ||
| But there's a lot of shit that you get from vitamin supplementation. | ||
| There's certain, like 5-HCP, like 5-HCP, which produces serotonin. | ||
| If you're trying to get that from food, you got to eat like a fucking garbage bag full of grass. | ||
| The amount that you could take in a couple of pills, the extracted form of the active nutrients, fuck, you'd have to eat a lot of stuff to get that. | ||
| And I think that that's science. | ||
| These people have figured out how to extract these things. | ||
| They're not just guessing. | ||
| They're not just guessing what the effects are on the body or guessing how to get this stuff out of food or what contains it. | ||
| They know, and that is science as well. | ||
| It always amazes me how the human race managed to survive until this decade before all these things were invented. | ||
| Well, we survived. | ||
| But that's not the idea. | ||
| The idea is, are we optimized? | ||
| And many times, no. | ||
| Many times we're not optimized. | ||
| You know, we're optimized when we add supplements sometimes. | ||
| You know, sometimes supplements can, if you are in a situation where you're not getting all the beneficial nutrients, but you add them and then try to balance out your diet as well, I think it can aid you. | ||
| I don't think it's an either or. | ||
| I think undeniably, healthy food is the number one thing for health. | ||
| Healthy food, your body is what, I was talking to these hunters yesterday and they were talking about how bears that eat certain foods are not good to eat. | ||
| Like if bears eat rotten fish and you eat them, like you literally taste the rotten fish. | ||
| But if bears eat blueberry, they're delicious. | ||
| And they actually had a hunting episode about catching bears, blueberry bears that come out of the dens and just feast on these huge hills of blueberries and they get fat with blueberry fat. | ||
| It's amazing because as they're cutting this fat off, it's like a bluish fat. | ||
| Like the dye from the blueberry actually makes it into their cells. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| But it just stands to reason that we are also what we eat. | ||
| And if we eat a ton of healthy foods, that our flesh is enriched with nutrients. | ||
| Our tissue is enriched with this purified water and these healthy vegetables and good lean proteins and all these different things that are good for us. | ||
| If you could take a little bit of that in pill form as well, I don't think it's a bad thing for you. | ||
| Like I say, I agree. | ||
| It's not a bad thing for you. | ||
| It's just almost always unnecessary. | ||
| If you lead a super balanced diet. | ||
| No, I think if you have any kind of a diet and if you don't live in Chad or Somalia, you're doing pretty well. | ||
| So you think that it's not worth it? | ||
| Your call is that it's not worth it. | ||
| Like the amount of money you spend for vitamins is pretty expensive. | ||
| Oh, huge. | ||
| It's tremendous in that. | ||
| Multivitamins, if you're going to buy the, I buy these packs, these men pure packs, these athlete pure packs, because it's easy for me to do. | ||
| And I think they cost, I forget what it costs. | ||
| It's probably like a dollar a pill pack or something like that. | ||
| Maybe a little bit more. | ||
| And over time, yeah, that could add up. | ||
| But for me, I think of it as hedging my bet. | ||
| I want to make sure I get as much nutrients in my body as I can. | ||
| If I started to get a lot of stuff, there's a lot more substantial things to worry about in life. | ||
| There's also things, though, that the average person doesn't need that athletes do. | ||
| And I think that that's another issue when it comes to supplementation. | ||
| Athletes find a lot of benefit in food and supplementation. | ||
| I can't always have more food, depending on what you're in. | ||
| Some athletes have to watch their weight. | ||
| Got to watch their girlish figure. | ||
| So they just need to make sure they get some exercise, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hopefully they do. | |
| You and I agree on more than we disagree. | ||
| Oh, certainly. | ||
| I'm sorry if I was rough with you about certain things, like defending my friend Mark, but if I didn't, he would have fucking killed me next time I saw him. | ||
| And I would have had to deal with glutathione talk for an hour and a half. | ||
| I just want to review the tweets and how many people have called me an asshole over the last few years. | ||
| Oh, you can't. | ||
| Listen, if anybody's calling Brian an asshole, he's not an asshole. | ||
| And I think that your ideas, essentially, the hard stance that you take is because you know there's so much bullshit out there, and I think it's a good stance. | ||
| I think it's the right stance most of the time. | ||
| And I think that, you know, by being this, you know, hard-edged no-nonsense guy, though, it does eliminate some of the flexibility of this world. | ||
| The real conspiracies are automatically dismissed for the standard, you know, official report. | ||
| You know, I think that's not always good either. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the old saying, extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you go around questioning, you know, whether this table's real or whether it's an illusion, obviously that's silly, but you got to draw the line somewhere. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I had Dr. Amit Goswami, the theoretical physicist, and he made me question everything, man. | ||
| I started talking about string theory and fucking particles in the state of superposition where they're moving and still at the same time they appear and disappear. | ||
| Well, his name is Dr. Amit Goswami. | ||
| Oh, oh, I'm sorry. | ||
| Don't get all racist, man. | ||
| Dude happens to be Indian. | ||
| They'll come down on you hard, son. | ||
| There's a billion of them. | ||
| I want to thank you for coming on the podcast, first of all, and I want to thank you for Just discussing all this stuff with me. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| And like I said, I think we agree more than we disagree. | ||
| And I'm glad we cleared up, hopefully, some of the misconceptions about how I approach things. | ||
| Because I certainly am easy to criticize, and I'm certainly easy to categorize as well, as a lot of my ridiculous comments on various things have suggested. | ||
| Well, I will certainly be following this up on skeptoid.com. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| The battle continues? | ||
| That sounds like a warning, man. | ||
| Battle? | ||
| Come on, this is a little bit of a battle. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| And people can find you on Twitter. | ||
| It's Brian Dunning on Twitter. | ||
| Brian with an I and D U N N I N G. And Skeptoid is a podcast. | ||
| Please download and subscribe to that. | ||
| Anything else people should go to to check you out? | ||
| Go to to check me out. | ||
| I mean, your stuff, you know, information. | ||
| Tender. | ||
| What do you want to say before we wrap this pitch up? | ||
| I'm on Facebook, but it's a very unfortunate page name. | ||
| It's Brian Dunning fan page. | ||
| Ah, the fan page. | ||
| Humiliates the hell out of me. | ||
| Did you enjoy this conversation or was it frustrating? | ||
| I had a great time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay, good. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| It makes me feel much better. | ||
| I hate when people leave you're in their mouth. | ||
| I don't want anybody mad. | ||
| I think I would love to do this again. | ||
| We'll talk again, and maybe we can address some of the things that people have said online and the mean things they're going to call you and me. | ||
| We're going to have some fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank you, everybody. | ||
| Thanks for tuning into the podcast. | ||
| We'll be back Friday with the one and only Stephen Rannella, who is taking me pig hunting this weekend, sir. | ||
| I can't wait. | ||
| I'm very excited. | ||
| And as far as dates, tomorrow, it is going live on Twitter. | ||
| I'm going to be in Dallas at the Verizon Theater. | ||
| And that is in March. | ||
| I think it's March. | ||
| Hold on a second. | ||
| March 14th. | ||
| Friday at 10 a.m. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Pre-sales tomorrow. | ||
| Pre-sales tomorrow. | ||
| Friday a.m. is regular sale, but tomorrow the pre-sale is at 10 a.m. | ||
| And the ticket password is first. | ||
| So if you type in the word first, you can buy tickets tomorrow. | ||
| And it's at the Verizon Theater. | ||
| I don't know who's coming with me. | ||
| I'm putting it all together right now. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Anything else? | ||
| Oh, Chicago, we're at the Chicago Theater on January 24th. | ||
| It's me and the renegade Jew, Ari Shafir. | ||
| That's his new nickname. | ||
| Call him that from now on. | ||
| My goal is to have the TSA meet him and go, oh, it's the renegade Jew. | ||
| Come on through, sir. | ||
| Just immediately recognize that he's a silly man. | ||
| You don't have to frisk him. | ||
| He's not blowing anything up. | ||
| So that's January 21st, 24th, rather, at the Chicago Theater. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| Thank you to our sponsors. | ||
| Thank you to Squarespace. | ||
| To enter into the Squarespace competition, go to hashtag, put this up on Twitter, hashtag J-R-E Squarespace. | ||
| And by this Friday, or is it Saturday the 17th? | ||
| What's the 17th? | ||
| 456. | ||
| 17th. | ||
| Is it Friday or Saturday? | ||
| Friday. | ||
| This Friday, we're going to decide the winners. | ||
| So this Friday is the last day to send them in. | ||
| I'll decide the winners over the weekend. | ||
| And I will give away four free years to Squarespace. | ||
| Four different people will get a free year. | ||
| And also, I will give away a higher primate t-shirt to all four winners as well. | ||
| And then Squarespace has a bunch of other swag that goes along with that. | ||
| Ting, is that what the other one today? | ||
| And Ting is one of our all-time favorite. | ||
| ZeagelZoom? | ||
| Well, Ting, too. | ||
| Let's give a little love to Ting. | ||
| Rogan.ting.com. | ||
| Go get yourself a phone, son. | ||
| And LegalZoom, of course. | ||
| LegalZoom is one of our favorite sponsors because Brian has used it. | ||
| Onit was formed with LegalZoom. | ||
| It is something that we absolutely believe in. | ||
| It's an awesome way to deal with a lot of legal issues that are otherwise very difficult and costly. | ||
| Go to legalzoom.com and enter Rogan in the referral box at checkout for more savings. | ||
| And go to Onit, O-N-N-I-T, use the code word Rogan and save 10% off any and all supplements. | ||
| Much love, you super freaks, and we'll see you on Friday. |
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