Michael Shermer and Joe Rogan dissect flat Earth believers, exposing how fringe theories exploit historical figures like Alfred Russell Wallace while debunking Chopra’s untestable consciousness claims. They critique CrossFit’s extremism versus balanced fitness, contrast cycling’s EPO dilemma with UFC’s USADA reforms, and highlight Serena Williams’ ADHD exemption. Rogan mocks Saved by the Bell’s absurdity and Tonya Harding’s violent career, while Shermer notes modern campus culture’s over-sensitivity risks undermining real-world adaptability—all questioning whether progress stifles genuine debate or just reshapes old battles. [Automatically generated summary]
We're going to talk about the flat earthers for one reason.
The reason why I wanted to bring this up is because I think there's a lot of folks out there that are super gullible, and I think they're being trolled.
I think they're being trolled by people who put together these elaborate arguments for something that they don't believe.
Because they're just trying to make money off of YouTube views, which is entirely possible.
And this needs to be thought of.
It really needs to be considered.
Because YouTube videos can be extremely lucrative.
If you can get a YouTube video with millions of hits, and a lot of these videos on all sorts of different conspiracies and all sorts of different crazy things can generate that kind of volume, you're making real money.
It starts becoming real money, and if you do a bunch of them, and you do them on a regular basis, it becomes a gig.
It becomes like what they do.
They create these silly videos.
But people who just don't have the time or the inclination to actually read scientific papers and articles and journals and all these different things that explain how we've known for a long time that the Earth is round.
I mean, there's some obvious simple ones anybody could do.
If you see an eclipse, like a lunar eclipse, you can see the Earth's shadow on the Moon.
It's round.
You know, if you're high enough and, you know, the ships are sailing out, you can see the mast is the last thing you would see as the hull drops over the horizon first slowly.
You know, there's things like that that we know the Earth is round.
You know, you travel around, you come back to where you started.
You know, now their explanation, the Flat Earthers, is that, yeah, it's round like a pizza, but a round flat pizza, and all the continents are on the one flat face side up, and that the satellites are up there going around.
It's like, yeah, but the satellite photos don't show all the continents in one picture, because some of them are on the other side of the globe, so that refutes that.
Yeah, so back to your original comment, some of these recent ones are so crazy that you can't help but think, okay, they don't believe it.
They're just yanking our chain for maybe financial reasons.
But that does get to the question I always get, which is, do these people really believe it?
The cult leaders, the people that make extraordinary claims, are they just making this stuff up?
You know, people make shit up all the time.
It's called fiction fantasy.
Or do they really believe it?
Are they true believers?
And it's hard to tell.
It's hard to get inside people's heads.
The old flat earthers in the 19th century, I think they really did believe it.
There wasn't much money to be made, you know, on those kinds of things.
I mentioned Alfred Russell Wallace, who was the co-discoverer of natural selection with Darwin.
I wrote my dissertation on him and wrote a biography of him, and he was quite the colorful character who was so open-minded to new ideas that he was also gullible.
So open-minded enough to see this radical new theory of the evolution of life by natural selection.
That's good.
He pioneered other fields like biogeography and so on.
But he also was really into spiritualism and phrenology, seances, channeling, all that stuff.
And then he encountered an ad in one of the natural history magazines for this 500-pound bet if anybody could prove the Earth is round.
So he devised a test, and he went down to the Bedford Canal, which is a long, straight, like 10 kilometers long.
You can see the whole distance.
And if you put these little sticks in the ground with markers on them, and you get a little telescope, like a surveyor's scope, and you line it up, you can see that it bends.
So at each point, the stick is, you know, three meters above the ground at each point.
But you can see that it's dropped down in the last one.
So it's bent.
So he won the bet.
But he didn't get paid, of course, because these people are cranks.
And so we had to take him to court.
This ended up costing him about 15 years of his career, you know, just wasting time, you know, writing letters and getting court dates and suing this guy and, you know, whatever.
And, of course, what happens, you get caught up emotionally, like, I'm not going to let this bastard get away with this.
You know, he should have just cut his losses and left, but anyway.
And I found these letters that this guy wrote to the Royal Geographical Society about Alfred Russell Wallace.
You know, you have one member of your society that should be – he's a quack and a crank, and he wrote letters to Wallace's wife, you know, you better not sleep in your bed at night quietly because I'm coming to get you guys.
It's like death threats, yeah.
So, you know, it's always questionable to deal with cranks because some of them are a little mentally deranged.
Sure, and they can attach themselves to someone like Wallace or Darwin or anybody else if you can somehow or another connect yourself to them in some sort of an argument.
It kind of legitimizes you, at least in a way, because that person is giving you attention, that person is engaging you, and it elevates your standing.
And then whenever two people are arguing, a certain amount of people are going to choose sides.
They're just gonna, even if what you're saying doesn't make any sense, there's gonna be a gang of people that go, I like, what are you saying?
And they're gonna join in, and people love, they love to be on a team.
They love to be, they want to be on Team Wallace or Team Crank.
So, in my debates with Deepak, I make the point, I mean, he points out, as you just did, consciousness is the so-called hard problem.
Not how neurons fire, we know how that works, but the experience you have of looking at me and vice versa, how does that derive from just dopamine going across synapses or norepinephrine going across synapses?
It's just electric meat.
How do you get electric meat to have this experience we're having?
As he likes to say, where's the red?
If I open your skull up, there's no red in there.
There's no room in there.
It's just neurons firing.
So how does that happen?
Okay.
So this is the hard problem.
No one knows, you know, but it's not that we know nothing.
You know, we have some ideas about how it works.
And I think this is just one of those ones that either will never be resolved, like free will determinism.
Okay, we live in a determined universe.
How can we have free will if that's true?
The words, the language, there are certain restrictions on our cognition of how we think about the world.
And it's very much influenced by the words we use.
So that could be one of those mysterian mysteries that can't be solved.
Not that we're not smart enough, but just the limitations of how we perceive the world.
There I like to look at like this, there was a big survey of professional philosophers done about three years ago, about 2,600 PhD, either professors or doctoral students in philosophy.
What is your position on?
And there's like 25 different debates in philosophy.
And like free will determinism, it was roughly equally split between determinists and compatibilists.
Dan Dennett is a compatibilist, Sam Harris is a determinist, and a small percentage of libertarian free will.
Compatibilists accept the premise that the universe is determined, governed by laws of nature and so on, but that we make free choices within the causal net of the universe.
That is, I'm making choices, like I chose to come out here, and that was a choice.
Yes, the universe is determined, but my My behavior, my actions, my volitional choices within the net, the causal net, is part of it.
And in any case, you can't know all the variables, so it feels like you're making free choices.
So you are, in essence, making free choices because it feels free, even if, because you don't know all the determining factors.
So the compatibilist is something like that.
There's different versions of it.
Dan Dennett makes a good argument.
Degrees of freedom.
We have this idea of degrees of freedom in engineering.
Certain systems are more complex or less complex, and certain systems have more variation than others.
So if you think of degrees in freedom, like an insect has very few degrees of freedom.
It's almost entirely instinctively driven.
Small number of neurons and so on.
Maybe a rat has more degrees of freedom than an insect, a dog more than a rat, a primate more than a dog, us more than the other primates.
Just how many choices, how many variations?
So you can come up here, go this way, this way, this way, this way, this way.
With the human, it's not clear which way they're going to go.
With the rat, it's more predictable.
They'll take this maze or that maze because the food is over there, something like that.
So, as Dennett argues, we're freer than the mouse or the dog.
We have more choices.
And even within human populations, the law has already accommodated this.
So, you know, first-degree murder is different than second-degree murder.
What is the difference?
To what extent you intended to kill the person, you planned it out, versus you were out of control, you have inflagrato, you cut your...
Partner in bed with somebody else.
You lost your temper.
Bam!
Okay, but you wouldn't normally do that.
So we think, well, violent aggressiveness or drug addiction, alcohol addiction, the tumor on the brain.
You know, the famous case of the University of Texas bell tower shooter.
Whitman, you know, he left that note.
You know, lately I've been feeling not normal and, you know, I'm feeling quite violent and I'm going to do some bad shit today.
So when I'm dead, do an autopsy.
So he went out and killed his mother and then he went to the Baltar and killed 19 people or whatever it was.
They did an autopsy.
Sure enough, he's got a tumor.
I think it was next to his hypothalamus.
So we would recognize, okay, that guy had fewer degrees of freedom than you and I do.
It's not that we excuse it.
We just say, okay, he had a tumor.
So that's the compatibilist argument.
Someone like Sam or a determinist would say, it's all tumors.
It's all determined.
You're just using different causal vectors to describe the behavior.
Some of them are more obvious than others.
So the best argument on that case I know of is from a guy named Adrian Rain, who's a psychiatrist and neuroscientist, who was the first to scan the brains of serial killers in prison.
So he would take this portable fMRI brain scanner to these prisons.
And these guys have nothing to do, so they're happy to participate as subjects.
And he would scan their brains and he found that they have very little self-control, which is associated with the prefrontal cortex.
And their prefrontal cortexes were pretty quiet, pretty undeveloped, inactive.
So you have all these impulses that bubble up and there's no break.
There's no governor on the system to keep it in check.
Whereas you and I would count to 10 or walk out of the room if we're getting heated up.
They're more likely to just reach out and punch you if you say something they don't like.
Something like that.
Lack of self-control.
So he argues that if somebody has a tumor, it's obvious you can see it, but what if somebody just has the crappiest background you can imagine?
You know, raised in a broken home, single mom, drug addictions, gang-related, inner-city, crappy diets, dropped on their head, and so on.
And he gives an example of this young man named Donta Page, an African-American who was convicted for raping and killing a woman.
And he's on death row.
I think he got life in prison.
In any case, you know, so he describes, he spends pages in this book, The Anatomy of Violence, of this guy's background.
And it's the worst background you could possibly imagine that surely has effects on his brain.
So there's not a tumor.
You can't scan and go, look, there's a tumor.
Okay, he's got a tumor.
But he's had a background that would surely be different than the background you and I have had.
And therefore, he had fewer choices in his actions than you and I would have.
And so, you know, the law would deal with that differently.
But see, someone like Dan, Dannett would say, well, those are degrees of freedom.
He had fewer choices than the person that didn't have the awful background.
So, this is one of those things where it depends what you mean by these words, like decrees of freedom, volition, choice, actions, versus just more of a physics, engineering, billiard table type of causal model.
Well, it's a really complex question and subject, and one that people battle with even when you're faced with the determinism argument.
If you take in the logic of determinism, you are the product of your genetics, of your environment, of all your life experiences, of all these different things, and they are what's dictating all your choices.
So even when you're making a choice, the choice you're making is based on all the data that you've taken in your entire life.
So do you in fact have free will at that moment or has it all been sort of determined by all these experiences?
And it's so hard to argue because everybody's life is different.
Everybody's take on things are different.
Everybody's experience You could have the exact same experience as I do, but your take from it might be very different than mine.
You might be a person who meditates, so you might be really into mindfulness and really into sitting down and trying to objectively analyze all your thoughts and your reactions.
You might come out with a completely different decision based on that.
So is it still determinism if all of a sudden you start practicing meditation and you change your behavior?
But if I was a determinism proponent, I would say, well, no, because your decision to make that choice is based on all of your experiences, your genetics, your family, your background, all of your input that you've gotten from other people about your behavior, and you've decided to make a choice based on that data.
So it's like that, I think, also with consciousness.
You know, what do you mean by consciousness?
It's a hard problem, okay, but is it ever resolvable?
Deepak thinks it's not just through a neuroscience explanation.
Bottom-up molecules, scaling up, emergent property, mind out of brain, that's what most of us scientists think, people like Christophe Koch, who works on this problem.
You know, he's scaling up.
He's just looking at the visual cortex in the back of the brain and looking at visual conscious experiences.
Now, let's see if we can figure that out.
So I like that approach.
But someone like Deepak says, it'll never get us there.
So he used language like, consciousness is the ground of being.
Now, I know that phrase from Paul Tillich, who said, God is the ground of being.
What does this mean?
It's not quite to say that consciousness is everywhere.
It's in here.
It's in the clock.
It's in this table.
Because that would be more of a sort of a deism or pantheism or something like that.
It's more like it's just a part of the universe.
I'm not sure I really understand.
Because, you know, Deepak has a different language.
He has sort of that Eastern wisdom traditions, like...
So, for example, a few months ago, my wife and I went and spent three days at the Chopra Center at the La Costa Resort and Spa in Carlsbad, California.
Okay, this is a great weekend.
We did the full immersion, the tea, the diet, the yoga, meditation, the whole thing.
And I did feel much better afterwards.
But, of course, you can't go to the La Costa Spa and Resort in Carlsbad, California, at the beach and not feel good.
I mean, if you don't feel good after that, you're the problem.
Now, Deepak just released a paper that was published this week.
He wasn't one of the authors.
It was on the effects of his program on biomarkers and various physiological changes.
So this was conducted by a Harvard medical scientist named Rudy Tanzi.
Rudy is the scientist who discovered the genes for Alzheimer's.
So he does a lot of work with Alzheimer patients.
You know, to what extent do we have any meds to treat it?
Not really.
What about Alzheimer's?
What about meditation?
What about diet?
These kinds of things.
It's not terribly hopeful, but maybe some of these supplements, who knows.
But anyway, he wanted to know what are the effects of meditation on just regular people.
So they went to the La Costa Resort and Spa.
There's already a six-day program that the Chopra Center runs.
It's Ayurvedic, but it's yoga, it's meditation, it's food, diet, not massage in this particular one, although they have great massages there too, which is also healthy.
And so what they found was that, and so they compared vacationers who were just staying there at the resort, they took all their various biological markers, to novice meditators, they taught them right there, this is it, day one, here's what we do, go through it 20 minutes and 30 minutes, and so meditation, yoga, and then a group of people that were already there that were serious daily meditators, they've been doing it their whole lives, right?
So there was a difference.
First of all, everybody got better.
Blood pressure goes down, stress hormones are practically zero, and all these great markers, including the vacationers.
Then they found a difference between the vacationers and the meditation group.
So the claim is that you can go on vacation, but you can't do that every day of your life.
But you can meditate every day of your life.
So the effects of meditation may be something like you can do it at home.
The relaxation, the meditation, the focus, whatever you call that, focus thought on your mantra actually has physiological changes.
One of which was affecting beta amyloids, which are the chemicals that cause the plaques and tangles in neurons that cause Alzheimer's.
So Rudy's argument was that it could be, there's sort of a causal chain there, that meditation leads to less stress, less inflammation, and therefore less of these build-up plaques and tangles around the neurons that kills them.
That's what happens in Alzheimer's.
Your brain just dies and neurons die.
So amongst various factors that might be effective, meditation may work.
Now, someone like Sam, who does meditation, he would look for a causal chain, you know, from the bottom up.
What are the effects of having certain thoughts in one part of your brain affects a different part of your brain, and that causes neurochemical, hormonal changes, and so on.
Deepak, of course, wants to use a different argument and say it has to do with mind.
Not brain, but mind, consciousness, that's out there.
But even saying it's out there is not correct.
But anyways, that...
It doesn't matter what the worldview differences are in terms of does it work.
If it works, who cares?
You know, this would be good.
And people that meditate, even people that aren't sort of New Agey or Eastern religious, they say it works.
I don't do it myself.
I do other things that I think are relaxing.
But if it works, who cares what the explanation is initially.
It'd be nice to know something that's effective.
So it turns out, from this new study just published in Nature, that meditation seems to be effective for these biomarkers, including telomeres.
It increases telomerase, which causes the telomeres at the end of your chromosomes to either stay the same length or to grow a little bit.
And that has direct relations to aging.
Because we know that the Hayflick limit on the number of times a cell can divide, and when you get to that upper ceiling, then the cells are dead.
And that's what causes aging, ultimately, is genetics.
So if there was a way to sort of slow down the process of the telomeres degrading, maybe through the production of more telomeres chemicals that, you know, affects that, and if meditation is one of those, or diet, whatever, then that would be a good thing.
Now, do they determine that from studying the exact same person and studying them pre-meditation and post-meditation and studying the rate the telomeres start to decline?
And how, but how much of, see, it seems to me that that's something that you would want to study over a long period of time and then you would actually have to study the person over a long period of time before they're meditating to really get a base.
There's a certain, like, way of talking that people really enjoy hearing, because it makes it sound like, oh, there's some sort of a mystical explanation and solution to all of the problems that modern-day society presents you with, and you could find those.
Through this course or this lecture this book or this practice I am now engaging in a practice that separates me from the stresses of the modern life, right?
But I think that what you're saying about meditation and other things that you do that relax you I think it's very important to relax And I think we all know that and that's one of the real problems with our world our society today Especially in America is so go go go that it's like if you are an athlete And you train constantly.
One of the most important things is recovery.
It's a critical aspect of athleticism.
And if you just train and you don't recover, your body breaks down.
You're redlining your system.
You're not giving your system the proper time to recover.
I think that when you meditate, and for me, my big one is the sensory deprivation tank.
And in doing that, I feel like there's no motion at all.
I'm concentrating completely on my breathing until I achieve this certain state of consciousness that I get to when I go in there and the way I get to it.
Is just concentrating entirely on breathing in and breathing out.
And I just think about in with the good and out with the bad and in with the good.
And that's my only thoughts that I try to maintain.
Other thoughts get in there, they bounce around and they ricochet out and eventually they stop existing.
Just give your body a chance to give your heart rate a chance to drop.
Give your mind a chance to slow its revolutions per minute.
Just give yourself some time to recover.
And then also, reflection.
Give yourself some time to consider the momentum of your life.
Because I think that is also a real issue with people, is that your life sort of starts Taking over you and your actions and the things that you do during the day, a lot of them get based on the momentum of the things you've already done versus what you actually want to do.
It's just a cultural thing in that that's probably a good thing.
Now, where it gets a little out of hand, I think, another one of my full immersions, this is from my chapter on Deepak and Eastern religious traditions in my next book, Heavens on Earth.
We went to see Deepak and Eckhart Tolle, who did a show at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles.
You know, the people that attend, you know, these are fairly well-off people.
You can sort of tell in the parking lot how they're dressed.
Same thing with this last weekend.
I was at the Sages and Scientists Conference that Deepak puts on every year.
This year, instead of at the Lacoste Resort, it was at the Beverly Wilshire.
Okay, so there's a lot of people from L.A. that are Deepak fans, and they go, you know, these are not your normal run-of-the-mill folks.
You know, these are people that, you know, upper-middle class, you know, good-looking, well-off, driving nice cars.
I don't know if you've ever been to the Beverly Wilshire, but if you sit at the—there's a little bar.
It's Wolfgang Puck's Bar.
And, you know, so they have good German beer, which my wife and I like because she's from Germany.
And we just sit there at the window and watch these cars pull up, you know, Ferrari, Lamborghini, Rolls Royce, Bentley.
And it's like, okay, this is not, you know, one of my Caltech events, you know, with science geeks coming, you know, it's a different audience.
So I do wonder...
The people that are in that particular study that Rudy Tansy did, this is not a randomly, you know, picked sample from the general population.
You know, who knows, they have different kinds of problems or issues, you know, a lot of depression, mental, you know, things that might be affected by psychological states anyway, you know, that's different from the physiological changes they marked, but still.
But when you go, we watch the Shrine Auditorium thing with Eckhart Tolle, and he's very effective.
You know, he speaks in a manner...
I can't even imitate it.
It's just very soft, very slow.
I mean, I could almost feel myself like melting into the chair like...
And, you know, technically, he and Deepak are right that there really is only the now, you know, about the three seconds or so of the current state of after the past and before the future.
It's just it, you know, and even your memories of the past, it's just neurons firing in your brain now of what happened in the past.
And the future is really, it hasn't happened yet, but it's just your neurons firing in anticipation of what might happen.
So they're right.
It really, all the action is now.
You know, of course, as I like to joke, you know, my three days at the Chopra Center or at the New Age place up in Big Sur.
What's that?
The one on the, right on the cliffs, the Esalon Institute.
I've been there several times and it's super relaxing and You know, but the now ends on Monday morning and I go back to work.
You know, my mortgage has a now coming up pretty soon called the payment.
And, you know, I don't know to what extent you can live in that condition all of the time.
But if you take it in moderation, like you said, just once in a while, just step back once a week, you know, once a day, whatever, for 10 minutes, half an hour, hour, deprivation tank once a day, something.
I think those people that you're talking about, they do have a whole different set of problems because they have achieved material wealth beyond the imagination of the average person.
If you're pulling up in a Ferrari, you're essentially pulling up in a house.
You're driving a house around.
You're driving a $200,000 plus automobile, which to most people is just crazy that someone could have one of those.
So that kind of a person who isn't happy, Is the type of person that wants to go to some sort of a seminar by a health guru.
I had dinner there, and this Bugatti Veyron pulled in that was more than a million dollars.
And I think they're like 1.3 million dollars or something like that.
But it had these Saudi Arabian plates on it.
And it actually had palace plates.
It said something palace on it.
So this was some royal person sent his car over either in a boat or on a plane.
And there was, you know, that car and then there's a million of these other super expensive luxury cars all over the place.
Those people have their own problems.
The average person who works all day and has a pile of bills and has all this debt is like, God damn it, I would love to be a rich person.
How the hell do these fucking rich people still have problems?
It doesn't make any sense, but you get used to your life.
You get used to your life.
And if your life is being an indigenous person, living in Bolivia in the jungle, and you shoot spears at fish and that's how you get by, you get used to that life.
That life becomes your life.
And you find problems.
And maybe you don't find as many when you're in a hunter-gatherer tribe as you do if you're some sort of a hedge fund manager who's just on Adderall every day and completely stressed out and your wife's driving you crazy and your mistress wants you to leave your wife and you don't know how the fuck you got yourself into this situation.
And then you decide, I'm going to go to this Power of Now seminar and straighten my shit out.
Pull up in your blue Ferrari.
It's like...
There's problems.
People create problems.
And just because someone has material wealth, not only does it not eliminate problems, it creates a whole new slew of problems that would lead to the kind of self-indulgent sort of exploration of your condition that these things sort of enforce and cater to.
But if you go to one of these workshops and you feel much better, so there's been a few studies, not many, like big corporations hire people like Tony Robbins to come in and give the spiel to get the sales force all fired up.
And they are.
They are fired up.
As we can tell, the effect lasts for a couple of weeks.
They go back, they're hitting the phones, they're making those calls, they're making more money.
It's like, it's work!
And then it tapers, and they're right back to where they were.
So this is why we published a study on this in Skeptic, that the number one predictor of anybody that would buy one of those books, self-help books, or go to those seminars, are people that have already done so.
And they do it over and over and over.
So in a way, if it worked, why do you have to keep buying the books and the tapes and going to the seminars?
So what the scientists want to know is not did you personally feel better when you went to the La Costa Spa and Resort for three days.
Of course, I'm sure you did.
But Can we actually measure the differences and then apply that to anybody?
And not just that resort, but any resort?
Or is it like, you know, 60% of the people between ages of 25 and 40 that have these medical conditions or whatever, when we apply that technique, you know, 40% of the time they'll get better.
You know, that's really what we want to know.
So on the one hand, you know, if somebody says, I went to Deepak's place, I felt better.
I'm glad that they felt, you know, the world's a little bit better place if you feel better.
Okay.
From a scientist's perspective, like, yeah, that's interesting, but does it really work?
Not just placebo or not just temporary.
It's like Netflix just released that documentary based on Tony Robbins, and the film is called I'm Not Your Guru.
But clearly watching this, this is what everybody, you know, that's my guru.
They want to be like him.
And he has this hypnotic effect on the audience.
It's incredible.
I've never seen anything like it.
But the question is, when they go home, you know, a week later, two weeks later, did it make any difference?
I mean, has he produced anything other than these books that are designed to motivate people?
It's like, I really appreciate what he does.
And I don't want to belittle it.
Because I read a lot of his stuff back when I was competing in martial arts.
And when I was starting out as a stand-up comedian, I read a lot of his stuff.
You know, and it motivated me and it gave me some good...
Good things to think about.
I think I was already sort of on a self-improvement path, and I was trying to take in a lot of information from a lot of different places, including Dianetics.
I bought a Dianetics book, and they hounded me for 10 years.
I ordered it late night on one of those infomercial things.
But I think...
It's interesting what he's done because it's not like, say if a guy like Steve Jobs or Wozniak who created Apple, if they made a book on how to get motivated and get something done and here's the core Core aspects of success in this endeavor, and I've done this, and I want you to know, I want to spread this knowledge.
But when a guy is just motivating people, I'm always like, I know a guy who just motivates people, and he's a terrible comedian.
And he's just decided to start motivating people now.
I'm like, whoa, what the fuck is going on here?
But meanwhile, people buy it because people love that feeling.
They love that feeling of someone saying something that makes sense, that gets them going.
Yeah, I'm going to eat plant-based and I'm going to go jogging every day and I'm doing yoga four times a week and I'm going to drink only water and I'm going to...
And then one day they pass by Krispy Kreme and that hot, hot, fresh Oh, man.
Next thing you know, they're having a coffee and they throw sugar in it.
Fuck it already had the sugar in the donut coffee tastes better with sugar You hope it's better than the little joke about you know the guy that took an ad out in the newspaper Says send me a dollar.
I'll tell you how to make a million dollars Run an ad in a newspaper and say yeah, he's better than that of course Of course.
He really is a great collector of philosophical points that really can affect you if you absorb them.
I think what you pointed out about the amount of people that get involved in these things that don't actually have any long-term change in their life, I think what it's like is like rehab.
You know, my friend Chris Bell, who made this recent documentary, Prescription Thugs, and he made Bigger, Stronger, Faster, that documentary on steroids.
A really cool guy.
And it was really fascinating as he went through making this documentary, Prescription Thugs, and then in the process of it, had a pretty significant injury that got him on pain pills.
And then he got hooked on pain pills himself while he was doing a documentary on pharmaceutical drugs being highly addictive.
He went to this rehab and when he came on the podcast and was discussing the rehabilitation process for getting off these pills, one of the most important aspects was how much time it takes and how you have to be fully immersed in this idea of recovery for a long period of time to do it in this method.
In order to enact any real change.
And I think that's probably the same thing with motivational speakers.
I think you can get that initial burst where somebody could slap you and go, hey, Mike, I'm taking these fucking pills away from you, man.
You can't keep taking these things.
You're hooked.
You're like, you're right, man.
You're right.
I got to change.
So there's this burst of motivation.
You're a good man.
You're a smart guy.
You're too smart for these pills.
You're right.
And you get that feeling, you wake up the next day, and you go jogging, you get a good sweat, and you go and you get some wheatgrass juice, and you power that down.
You're like, I'm on the path!
But then the inspiration dies off, and you so comfortably slide back into your old ways.
So I think these motivational speeches by Anthony Robbins or any of these people, I think they can be beneficial.
But I think for most people, the comfort of their old path is such a magnet.
Their compass just...
It just goes towards that magnet.
It's almost like they need it every day for like a year or two years or three years or something.
Well, Rudy Tanzi from Harvard tells me for a normal habit, it takes about 60 days, two months, every single day of retraining the brain on a new habit.
And that's just a regular habit, like drinking coffee or just what time you get up in the morning or whatever, exercise.
So I suspect with drugs or alcohol it's probably a year or two to really completely retrain your brain, rewire the neurons, literally.
To change that habit.
It's doable.
People do it.
It's just, you know, it can be very difficult.
So I think part of the appeal of the so-called self-help gurus is that you keep going because you need the, you know, the sort of retrain reminder every six months or You listen to the tapes once a day or once a week, and it just kind of keeps the new habit reinforced.
Probably literally dopamine hits from hearing the voice of the person.
And someone like Tony Robbins, I mean, I've met him at TED. He's just bigger than life.
I mean, he's like 6'8", huge hands.
He talks wonderful.
Yeah, he's got a great presence.
And he's quite the opposite of Eckhart Tolle.
I mean, he comes out on the stage and the music and the lights.
And that's the problem with all these programs, like AA. You know, does it work?
They don't collect data, or if they do, they don't make it public.
We can't get the data.
How many, what percentage of people that come and last this many weeks or months, and what percentage never take a drink or take one drink or whatever?
Yeah, wasn't there a recent study on AA where they were determining that people who leave the program...
I tried to find out, see if you could find it, but it was a recent study that was talking about sobriety and maintaining sobriety and how little of an impact that it actually had.
It did have an impact on people maintaining sobriety, and they think that that impact...
May have been connected to the sort of sponsor system that they have and not wanting to disappoint people and camaraderie that you develop in that sobriety environment, which makes a lot of sense.
And I think it's really clever how they've structured it in that way.
Because I think having a mentor, having someone who's already done it.
And then also, I think a big part of what leads people to alcoholism besides, you know, the genetic markers and all the different things where people have like an inclination to do it is they there's they're trying to medicate themselves.
They're trying to and one of the things is they're trying to medicate themselves from a lack of companionship or lack of good meaningful interaction with people and when your your your situation is on the line in sort of a dire way.
Like, hey, man, you hit fucking rock bottom.
We're throwing this booze in the trash, and you're getting your shit together, and you're going to follow a 12-step program now, and you're going to do all this.
Now, all of a sudden, there's some urgency involved, and you have someone who you're accountable to.
You have to call this person.
You're getting a chip.
You know, hey, I'm 90 days.
Hey, congratulations, Mike.
You made it to 90 days and then you go up there and you give a speech so you get all this attention which people so desperately crave You get to be on a podium.
Everyone's looking at you.
There's a lot involved in it.
That's not just about sobriety It's about ritual social yes, very social very so and it could be that works.
They've figured it out over the decades It's definitely got something, but the study was showing how little of an effect it is.
It's really kind of amazing.
It does have an effect, but the effect is not that much different than people that just quit.
I've known a couple people that are not involved in any sort of 12-step program, like my good buddy Greg Fitzsimmons.
He and I have been friends for Something like 27 or 28 years.
We met as rookie stand-up comedians.
We started within a week of each other.
And when I met him, he was 22, I believe, at the time, and he had just quit drinking.
He realized his parents had issues with substance abuse, and as a young man, he's like, look, I can't fucking do this.
I'm like, I'm getting hammered all the time, and obviously I got the bug.
This is the disease model of alcoholism that's bothersome.
Because it's really a behavioral choice or behavioral problem.
But if you treat it like a disease that...
The good side of that is that it got people off the, you're just weak-willed, you know, and you just, that's your problem.
No, it isn't that.
But it isn't like cancer either.
Like, oh, I'm sorry you got cancer.
I'm sorry you have the alcoholic gene or whatever.
Because clearly...
Like your friend.
And there's a lot of people like that that just quit.
They're able to do it.
And also, from the scientific perspective, we don't have much data because we don't know who they are.
They just quit.
They don't go through a program and then we have them in our database and we know what they did and how long they came and so on.
Again, does it work?
The only way to know is to really get more data on this and we just don't have enough from those kinds of groups that do that, like AA. There are academics, scientists who study addiction and they tell me that You know, for the addict to take a single drink—what's the harm?
Just have a drink here at the bar, social, whatever—that it's much harder for them to not have a second, third, fourth, and they go until they pass out.
Whereas I never drink until I pass out.
In a long time, anyway.
Since college.
But it's like the determinism issue.
For me, it's not a problem.
It's not a self-control problem.
But for the addict, apparently, the brain is rewired, and it's much harder for them to stop to have that second drink.
Well, apparently the Native American population, the genetics are such that they have a stronger alcoholism problem, which is exasperated by the poverty and, you know, all the other social issues that go with that on these reservations, and it makes it even worse.
I would like to know if that's true, because I remember this discussion being brought up before with someone else, and then I looked it up and I found something that showed contrary evidence.
But anecdotally, sort of everybody who knows that story knows that Native Americans didn't have alcohol in their history.
Well, genes most certainly do get affected by diet and climate and where people evolve and where their ancestors came from.
There was a study today, I tweeted something today that made sense why some people can follow a vegan diet and be healthy in regards to omega-3s, is that If you come from a long line of people who have followed a predominantly vegetarian diet over the course of over a hundred years or so,
the genetics start to evolve or change and adapt to this diet to the point where your body produces more omega-3s from different things.
But not just that you're supposed to believe in a higher power for AA to work, but that you're, in a much more insidious way, I think, you're like a sinner.
Well, first of all, I want to know what the experience is like.
Right.
And then second, what is the explanation?
Why is it your feet don't get burnt?
Like, in one of the shows, we actually strapped raw steaks To my feet and then walked across the coals and the steaks didn't get burned if you just walk quickly enough.
So either dead meat is conscious and thinking positive thoughts or it has nothing to do with positive thoughts.
That's why, you know, when you have a grill, you put the coals down and then you put that steel grate over the grill because the steel is an excellent conductor.
Yeah, and that's why we choose certain metals as well to cook in, you know.
I'm amazed he could get insurance for this because people do get burnt.
And the ones we did, some of the people, other people had little blisters because, you know, if you walk slowly or you have, you know, I go to bed for it a lot, so I have pretty good calluses on the bottom of my feet.
But if you don't, you know, then your skin is thinner and the temperature builds up faster for that and you're more likely to get the blisters.
Ideologies to your behavior that are very constrictive and either very constricting and you're not allowed to deviate from these plans And then you become a part of this sort of team right like the people that are in CrossFit You ever you ever met a CrossFit person?
Shut the fuck up about the workout of the day right and it's positive.
They're in shape They look but they look crazy like they can't wait to go back and do chin-ups, right?
They get out of their mind and it's a very beneficial thing don't get me wrong but there's a thing that people do where they get a part of a team or a group or you you're you're one of those now and You know, hey, I'm an ultra-marathon runner now, and then, like, I'm in that group.
I just reviewed this book for the Wall Street Journal on CrossFit training and what it means to be fit now versus when I was in my 20s, say.
And, you know, back when Nautilus was introduced, you know, the idea was, you know, isolate the muscle groups.
Everybody's like, yeah, that's good.
Isolate the muscle groups.
So this author is going, why is that good?
How did it ever get established that isolating a muscle group is a good thing?
And he shows that, you know, free weights, you're using all of your body, every muscle, tendon, you know, just the balance and the move and all that stuff.
It's much better.
But then the more I looked into it, I thought, well, of course, this is when high schools started introducing physical education.
You've got to go in the gym.
Everybody's in the gym.
You can't turn loose thousands of teenage kids in free weight rooms and not have injuries.
So the Nautilus machine, that was the solution.
It's isolated.
No one's going to get hurt.
You can turn loose somebody.
You can't clean and jerk a big weight and not have somebody explain how to do it without getting hurt.
Yeah, that's certainly true, but I think the big aspect of it was people like to make things more complicated than they need to be, or they always like to invent some new way to do things, and sometimes that new way to do things looks awesome, like a Nautilus machine.
Right.
I mean, they have the big cam system, and there's the cables, and you get the plates, you put the pin in the plate, and you get to move it up and down, and it's all...
I mean, it looks amazing, but as far as it being beneficial to promoting functional strength, it's not nearly as good as those Olympic lifts that people do, like clean and press.
But those are not that glamorous.
Those machines are very glamorous.
You could tell people that you're pulling the whole stack.
Look, I've got the whole stack!
Those isolating movements at one point in time were thought to be the best way to develop muscle because they're really good for bodybuilding.
But there's a difference between when someone looks really good, there's certain looks that you can achieve, like giant biceps, where they're completely out of balance, but then they have a little neck and they have no legs.
It's not healthy, but they want big biceps, so they just keep constantly doing curls.
So you can get really out of whack doing those sort of exercises if you're not careful.
If you want to be a bodybuilder, that was always the protocol.
If you look at how Arnold lifted, now a lot of these Franco-Colombo guys, they were all in isolation exercises.
They did a lot of tricep extensions.
They did a lot of things to pump those muscles up.
They did squats and leg presses and stuff too, but a lot of it was involving hitting specific muscle groups to accentuate those.
But it just wasn't the way to go.
But people, for a long time, thought those machines were the shit.
And, you know, I mean, it's like, God, he had this workout routine that he had like a $5,000 challenge that anybody that could match him for the 45-minute workout routine in his home gym.
And Olympic cyclists would come and all these super studly guys, and no one ever made it because it was so specialized for just what he does.
You know, like one-arm chin-ups or, you know, one-arm push-ups or, you know, the Stairmaster.
He built his own Stairmaster before anyone had Stairmasters.
And he would just, you know, just crank it up at such a high level that you just can't do it.
Well, there are some differences, but I think from a marketing perspective, there's already a bunch of books for women on aging.
There's not much about men.
Anyway, that was it.
It doesn't really matter because it's really all the same process.
Ultimately, your telomeres will get you.
And the idea, well, we live twice as long as our ancestors did a century ago, you know.
Yeah, that's true, but really no one's living above 120. Just more and more people are pushing up to the upper ceiling because of public health and just general stuff we do that makes us healthier.
In terms of longevity and aging, you can't stop it.
All you can do is hopefully slow it down a little bit, and you want to have a higher quality of life the further up you go, as opposed to lying in bed with tubes for the last 10 years of your life or something like that.
So that's where the future research is, where the breakthroughs will come.
Not radical life extensionists that I've also written about.
You know, we're going to live 500 years.
You know, Shermer, don't you want to live 500 years?
I said, look, just get me to 90 without Alzheimer's and cancer, okay?
In my next book, I have a chapter called Afterlife for Atheists.
So these are not just the radical life extensionists, but the mine uploaders.
And so, you know, you're going to scan your connectome, put it in a computer, and then, you know, you'll wake up in the computer like Johnny Depp in that Transcendence movie.
Here's the problem.
When you go to sleep tonight, you wake up tomorrow, maybe you're groggy for a few minutes, but then you're back.
You still feel like you.
There's a continuity between today and tomorrow.
Or you get general anesthesia surgery, you wake up, you're groggier for a little bit longer, but the continuity comes back.
It's still you.
So the question is, if you die and we have a scan of your connectome and we put it in a computer and turn it on, are you going to wake up in the computer like you did from sleep?
And I don't think so.
I think it would just be a copy of your...
If this could ever be done, which is very unlikely, because it's a super hard problem, but let's just say it could.
I think there's a break in continuity from death.
You're dead.
That's it.
And this thing we have is a copy of you.
It would be like if we cloned your body, and then you die, and then we reconstruct the body, and there you are.
That's not you, not first person through the eyes, me.
If I was gonna play devil's advocate to that, what I would say is with our current understanding and abilities right now, you're correct.
However, whatever we have right now, whatever we are right now, if we can understand it down to the subatomic particles, if we can literally understand you as a person, like you as you stand right here September 15th, 2016, If we can understand every single aspect of you, including consciousness, we're not there yet.
Obviously, there's a lot of debates and there's a lot of struggles, but we're looking at it in terms of what our current understanding is.
If we looked at it in terms of the understanding of people that lived in the year 100 AD, it would be a completely different idea of possibilities.
Like, our possibilities today are incredibly expansive.
In comparison to people that lived in, you know, 1776. Just the idea of what we understand about what it means when you talk about atoms, molecules, the idea of telomeres, all the knowledge that we have today.
Imagine that expanding exponentially for the next 500, 1000 years.
It's entirely possible that if we get to that point, we can recreate reality to a point where I have a theory about people and it's completely unqualified and don't listen to me.
But I think it's entirely possible that, you know how bees make honey?
I think people might make the universe.
I think it's entirely possible that the way the universe makes itself, it makes a person.
It makes a monkey, the monkey eventually figures out a way to not get eaten by leopards, and the smart ones become a monkey, and then they figure out shelter, and then they figure out agriculture, and then they really get going.
And once they really get going, what they start doing is creating technology.
They create in the form of a wheel or in the form of a bucket to carry the water so they don't have to keep drinking out of the river and getting crocodiles and fucking Jardia and everybody's dying from inborn disease.
We figure things out, slowly but surely.
And along the way, they make better and better things until they develop computers, until they develop artificial intelligence.
They make something that can think for itself.
And then they put that thing to work, and that thing gets better in two weeks than 10,000 years of human development, right?
And I think that thing probably is how the universe gets created.
That the universe, like this idea that the universe has no beginning and no end, that it's this infinite cycle of...
But what we currently understand and know of the known universe, we're the only ones that we know of.
And we're looking at what we're doing and we're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
What are we doing?
Where are we going with this?
We're just going to keep going?
Like, when Elon Musk starts talking about artificial intelligence, he's one of the most important and popular and famous technology enthusiasts, starts talking about artificial intelligence being summoning the demon.
Well, that is an actual theory, you know, that we're living in the Matrix, that it's all a computer simulation and it's all equivalent of a holodeck somewhere.
But it's interesting because certain, you know, four-letter words, curse words, they have certain characteristics of the words themselves that tend to be short and kind of guttural, abrupt, you know, fuck, cunt, shit, and so on.
And there's a book coming out called What the F? Benjamin Bergen is a linguist at UC San Diego, and he's coming up to do our science salon in a few weeks.
And so the idea is that certain words trigger more sort of deep emotional parts of the brain and the limbic system and so on.
Bodily effluvia, you know, feces, sperm, and so on.
It's all this kind of crass, basic human—because the idea is you want to hurt somebody with your words emotionally, and by associating it with, you know, sort of a deep part of the brain that's associated with really deep emotional things.
That's the theory, isn't there, as I can tell, about why curse words are what they are.
You know, why certain words are just, they're not insulting, they're just kind of funny.
Like congee.
Yeah, yeah, right.
So any with an E, you know, that's just not gonna...
So it's got snapchat at the top with six million nine hundred and forty four thousand four four hundred and forty four Google's the most but owned by tenfold more than snapchat which is kind of crazy.
I mean, I kind of see the cryonics argument, because being chronically frozen and woken up again, if you could make that happen, that seems like falling asleep, wake up, anesthesia, wake up, chronically frozen, wake up.
I think there's an issue with saying that you know anything about what happens after death.
You could have a ton of theories.
You could have possibilities that you ponder.
You could sit down and be as creative as you want.
You could start and think about the number of known stars in the universe and then start to perceive how immense the universe is and what is going on in consciousness itself.
And when it ends, does that energy go somewhere and become something that we haven't considered?
The chapter is called There's a Dragon in My Garage.
So I tell you, Joe, I have a dragon in my garage.
You do?
So cool.
Can I see it?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Here.
Here.
So I open the garage door.
You look in.
There's some paint cans, a ladder, a bike.
No dragon.
Well, it's an invisible dragon.
Okay, so you say, well, let's put some powder down on the ground, and when he walks around, we'll see his footprints.
Well, you see, this dragon hovers about three feet above the ground at all times.
And you say, well, I got some infrared cameras here.
We can detect the heat.
No, this is a cold-blooded dragon.
It gives off no temperature at all.
You know, well, oh, I have this heat detector, and when it spits out the fire, then we'll see that the fire comes out of it, and that'll prove that it...
Well, no, it's coal fire.
This is not heat generating fire.
It's a very special kind of fire.
Okay, so Sagan's point is, what's the difference between an invisible, hovering, cold, indetectable, immeasurable dragon, and no dragon at all?
So if there's not some way for us to get at it, then we can't assume it exists.
Exactly.
I apply that to God.
Because people go, well, God is outside of space and time.
How do you know?
If he's outside of space and time, there's no way to measure it.
Well, he reaches into our world to stir the particles, cure the cancer, whatever.
Okay, can we measure that?
And does it look different from what happens naturally?
In other words, why is it that what God always cures is things that might have gotten better anyway?
You know, tumors do go into remission, but most of them don't.
Most people, they get cancer, they die.
So why didn't God heal them?
He only seems to heal the ones that naturally go into remission.
How come he doesn't grow amputated limbs for Christian soldiers coming back from Iraq?
How come, you know, these are Christian families praying for their Christian loved ones who lost a limb?
You know, he's busy curing cancer over here, but why can't he handle the ones that never, ever naturally grow back?
What's the difference between an invisible dragon and no dragon?
So always, you know, this is my theory of the afterlife.
And when it comes to religion, the idea of some sort of a powerful being that's in charge of the whole picture, and it's got a grand plan for it all, it's kind of comforting to some people, and it's an interesting possibility.
And again, it's something to consider.
It's something to think about.
It's an idea that's been around for a long time.
Why has it been around for so long?
I don't know.
Well, let's go over some of the other things that have been around for a long time.
Let's look at what else is in that book.
Is there any other shit in that book that you might think is ridiculous?
Oh, isn't there a story in that book about two children that taunt a man because he's bald, so they sick bears on the kids?
I mean, but if you're talking to someone who's a religious person who believes in the Bible and you throw that around, one of the first things that goes, oh, that's the Old Testament.
The New Testament, the one that was written by Constantine and a group of bishops, where they got down, they wrote it out, what, 500 years after Jesus died?
In any case, when did Jesus become a conservative?
You know, I mean, in the Gospels, he talks about, you know, giving up your belongings, taking care of the poor, you know, the chances of a rich man going to heaven or, like, going through the eye of a needle.
It was a super controversial movie at the time and groundbreaking in terms of, like, people...
We look at comedy from, like, the 60s or even the 70s, and we look at it in terms of what we know to be shocking and crazy today, and our bar is so different that it's hard when you go back and watch those things to really...
Take in the context of...
I was talking to Guy Torrey about this, a funny comedian friend of mine, about this last night.
We were talking about how good Lenny Bruce was and how we really can understand it because comedy continues to progress and it sort of reflects the attitudes of the times.
And we're so much more open-minded and so much further down the line than we were in 1960-whatever when Lenny was getting arrested.
for using bad words right so it's hard for us to appreciate it's hard for us to really understand like if we were kids back then and we went to see Lenny Bruce and we were living in this like really restrictive environment that was the 1950s and 1960s then we'd be blown away by it like what is he saying this This is crazy!
But today, you listen to it, and it's almost pedestrian, some of the stuff that he has to say, because it's already been said, because he broke down the door, and then everybody's like, yeah, that hold's been there forever.
Seinfeld has a little riff on Paul McCartney's, you gotta run for your life, you better run for your life if you can, little girl, because I'll get you in the end.
And then the other one was, she was just 17, if you know what I mean.
Well, it's interesting because Barbara's looking away as she says it and then looks at him when she hits him with the question, like it's a gotcha moment.
I think they stayed married for quite a while after the show, but she was on the show talking about how horrific it is to live with him and how he's crazy.
But of course he is.
He's Mike fucking Tyson.
He's one of the most terrifying combat sport athletes the world has ever known.
His success is it's focused entirely on him being violent as humanly possible beyond the limitations of other people who are professional purveyors of violence.
Like, he's the best at it.
His brand of violence is so much more ferocious than any other fucking person who's ever done it before.
He makes all these other professional heavyweight boxers look like pussies.
They see him and they practically faint.
He throws punches that miss and they fall down.
Of course he's nuts!
What are we doing here?
Why do you have this guy on television?
What kind of a person are you?
What is this therapy session?
What is she doing?
The wife, what is she doing?
Are you doing this publicly because you believe this is the only way to reach him?
Well, the way the moral progress works in this regard over long periods of time is that it just never enters your mind to do it if you never see it or hear about it.
We are in many ways sort of a product of our environment in the way that we imitate our atmosphere so much.
I mean, we have patterns...
Of talking.
There's expressions that are similar or familiar to certain areas.
We have accents that distinguish that we belong in this clan of people that live in Boston, for instance.
Where I grew up, there's a Boston accent that's so clear.
And if you talk to people that live there, they're letting you know that they're local.
And everybody sort of assimilates with a certain way of thinking.
a way of being super common to for people to adopt a predetermined pattern of behavior rather than having to think things all the way through for themselves so if that predetermined pattern behavior means your girlfriend mouths off you fucking smack her in the head they start doing it like it's right whereas today it's thought of as a horrific thing to do you you're you're a You've hit someone.
You've committed assault.
All those horrible words and thoughts that we have attached to these things that were almost non-existent back then.
So this process probably started in the late Middle Ages.
There's a book called The Civilizing Process by Norbert Elias, a sociologist that Steve Pinker kind of made prominent in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, talking about how just, like, books of manners and table manners and how you interact with other people non-violently, you know, don't have a knife, don't carry your knife with you, or, you know, hand a knife to somebody, you're supposed to hand it with the handle, you know, forward.
Don't do certain things.
Don't urinate in the hallways.
Don't defecate.
Just basically, these people were gross.
And here's how not to be gross.
Don't act like a pig.
And in a way, it's training your brain to gain self-control over your impulses.
Like, I'd really just like to take a shit right over there.
Well, don't do it.
I mean, it's not cool.
We don't do that.
Okay, I won't.
And then it never enters your mind to do anything like that.
And so the argument is that We've been on this 500-year-long civilizing process of just training people to control their impulses, impulse control.
It's that prefrontal cortex, keeping a break on the sort of lower impulses that bubble up.
I'd really like to do that.
Not going to do it.
And then pretty soon you don't even think about doing it.
Now obviously there's still a handful of the psychopaths or whatever, they don't care.
But fewer and fewer of us, and just from that interview, Sean Connery's generation versus our generation versus our kids, you know, this is just disappearing from our vocabulary, from our repertoire of behaviors that we will employ with other people.
And it completely makes sense when you look at the history of humanity, how much safer it is today, relatively, than at any other time in terms of like how much violence you're going to encounter in your daily life.
When we see violence, it's incredibly shocking.
Whereas if we lived 5,000 years ago, it'd be incredibly rare to get through a life without seeing dead bodies.
Right, right.
Like you became much more accustomed to the temporary nature of being and the threat of violence being a real part of everyday life.
So I think one of the things that's happening as we create new technology that sort of alleviates the physical stress of life or the worry of dying or we extend life to the point and fix illnesses to the point where life becomes a little bit more durable and people relax more and more about the physical requirements our bodies had A few thousand years ago where hunters and gatherers were constantly worried
about predators.
The physical requirements and the dangers that you had to be able to experience and We're good to go.
But all those things in a more dangerous world actually do age you faster.
Some of the research I was reading in these books about aging is just the more stress you have, those stress hormones leads to more inflammation.
There's more and more stuff about inflammation and disease, inflammation and Alzheimer's, inflammation and the telomeres.
You know, it shortens your life.
And there was this big study on possums in Florida, the ones that are out in the wild getting run over and attacked and preyed upon versus ones that were put on this island where there was no predators, all the food that they want.
And, you know, the ones that lived on the island live significantly longer, like 50% longer than And not just accounted for by the ones that got run over, not that, just the aging, the aging process.
Just living in an open, dangerous environment takes its toll on your cellular reproduction and how long you live, irrespective of predation and accidents.
Like, does anybody ever figure out how many times you can get hit by a guy who's 350 pounds running 30 miles an hour?
I mean, those guys are giant and they're huge super athletes and they collide with each other.
I don't think a person like you or me can even appreciate the amount of impact that's involved in a lineman who's just a giant mountain of a man using all of his might and running into you.
I don't think I can understand it.
I think I watch it on TV, and I see, where guys' feet are up in the air, and they go slam.
But the docs calculated that in the course of his life, say from high school football, college football, and 20 seasons in the NFL, and all the practices all week and in the game...
Yeah, you know, they also, those guys are just all about power.
They're all about power and weight behind power.
And in a certain amount of time, like, if you have the same amount of power but more weight behind it, you can actually probably have more of an impact when you're colliding with people.
Like, even if they're not strong, like, the amount of mass that you have to move when you're wrestling around with them, like...
You don't consider it until you're in a situation, like I guess, if you had never played football before, and then you ran out there and you were on the front line, and you'd be like, okay, what is this going to be like?
There's no way you know.
There's no way you know what that 330-pound dude feels like when he's...
I'm reading this book now called Spitting in the Soup about the history of doping in sports that goes back to the late 19th century.
And half of it is just for survival.
You know, you take these drugs just to get through the next week and the next game, the next contest.
And this guy's argument is that it was pretty accepted and common and known.
The guy that won the Tour de France five times used to say that you can't expect us to do this on bread and water.
I mean, you know, we've raced 250 times a year and, you know, six, eight hours a day of killing ourselves.
Jean Concatille, the great French cyclist.
But this appears to be true in most sports in that...
It wasn't until the, I think it was 1906 Olympics, when people started equating doping with sin.
Like, this is a moral thing.
Like, you're getting, you're cheating.
As opposed to, it's just a medical thing.
You know, I train, I lift weights, I do this, I eat this diet, I take these drugs.
It's all kind of part of the mix of being an athlete.
And then there was a transition, he argues, socially or morally or whatever.
And all these things are good, but this one thing over here is bad.
Like say, in cycling, your hematocrit is important because you're delivering oxygen to your muscles.
So if, you know, you and I probably have 45 to 50% hematocrit, that's the number of red blood cells in your blood.
So half are red blood cells delivering oxygen to your muscles.
Now, if you're like in the low 30s, that's anemic.
And this drug, EPO, invented by Amgen, was created to save patients that are anemic from cancer treatment or whatever.
It's a great drug.
So it wasn't long before the cyclists got a hold of this in the late 80s, early 90s.
Like, well, okay, if I'm naturally at 45% and you're at 50%, I'm losing a little edge, so I'll train at high altitude or I'll sleep in the oxygen tent or I'll just take the injection.
And so 50% is good.
How about 55%?
Well, that'd be even better.
How about 60%?
And the guy who won the 96 tour, Bjarne Reese, his nickname was Mr. 60%.
He's like mud flowing through his veins.
But then, some cyclists started dying in the early 90s and mid-90s.
There was maybe a dozen or two that died mysteriously.
And it was never clear what the cause was.
So everybody said, it's the EPO, the blood's too thick, they're having strokes or heart attacks.
And even I bought this idea.
Yeah, I guess that's it.
I wrote this article for Scientific American about doping in sports.
This is why it's wrong, because people are dying.
But this guy's argument is it was never proven that these people died.
And furthermore, he takes on steroids.
You know, there's this whole thing that started with Lyle Alzado, the great Oakland Raiders linebacker, who said, you know, I got brain cancer.
It was after he was done playing, but he said it was due to all the steroids I was taking.
Then the meme started.
Oh, steroids causes cancer.
Steroids feeds cancer, causes tumors to grow.
This guy is saying that's never been proven.
And so I'd like to look into this more before I review this book.
You know, is this really true?
How do we know that steroids are dangerous?
I mean, isn't it the dosage?
You know, as Michele Ferrari said, Lance's doping doctor, you know, it's orange juice.
If you drink too much orange juice, it's dangerous.
It's the dose.
So some steroids, some EPO, some growth hormone.
Some of this should be maintenance.
What triggered this was looking at those huge guys.
I mean, you get pounded.
You've got to play again next week.
How do you do that?
Well, I've got to get the massage, take the jacuzzi, and take some drugs.
It was a big thing was that where are all the bodies?
Like, where is this steroid epidemic that people are talking about when you're looking at, even in bodybuilders, I mean, some of them do die from it, but the sheer amount of drugs those guys are taking to achieve those Behemoth sizes.
Because the amount of people that are doing them is off the charts.
If you think about professional athletes, you think about all the different athletes that are doing performance-enhancing drugs, if they were really dying from this stuff...
See, I think they're just getting smarter about it.
And they know it's called microdosing and cycling with the EPO. You just take a little bit.
Just give it just a little bump, just for maintenance.
You know, when I wrote that story for Scientific American, I interviewed Frankie Andreo, who was one of Lance's teammates in the 99 and 2000 seasons that he won.
And he took EPO. And he didn't really want to avoid it as long as he could, but he said he was just getting dropped.
From the main peloton, and he couldn't even do his job as just Lance's domestique to carry his water bottles up.
You know, you're up there in the front with Lance, drop back to the team car, get some water bottles.
Then you've got to ride all the way back up to the front, which is hard to do when these guys are cruising along at 30 miles an hour.
So you've got to be fit.
So he said he was getting dropped just doing that.
So it was like, I can't even be on the team, can't do my job.
So he took it just to stay in the race, just so I could be a bicyclist.
And you did it at a very high and competitive level.
So you had an inside view.
As to the requirements.
And I think it's one of the more unique sports in that the requirements are so incredibly grueling in the amount of time that you're working.
Like, you might not be working with as much effort, say, as a sprinter who's running a hundred meter, like a Usain Bolt type character, but the amount of time involved in expenditure of energy is huge.
It's one of the more unique and weird things about cycling is you're doing it for hours.
So even if it's easier than running a sprint, even if it's easier than running up the top of a hill, the amount of time you're spending doing it is another consideration.
And then mentally, the drag on maintaining it must be huge.
And when EPO was rampant in the peloton, everyone figured it out.
Greg didn't want to do it.
And his teammates are saying, well, you know, just in the course of a three-week tour, you know, just your hematocrit just drops, just from fatigue.
He said, everybody else, it's not like they're getting an unfair advantage by going above their normal performance.
They're just staying level, whereas the rest of us are dropping off, and then the last few stages, you're wiped out.
So, you know, it's like, we've got to do this just to stay with the rest of the field.
It's a level playing field argument.
I guess, you know, in terms of morals, we sort of draw the line at the needle, when there's a needle involved, I guess, or, you know, a patch or a pill.
It feels different than training at high altitude or sleeping in the oxygen tent, you know, like the climbers do.
You know, taking EPO feels like it's more artificial.
This guy's argument of this book, Spitting the Soup, is that it's just a gradation.
We've just arbitrarily drawn the line there.
And, you know, I think there's much of it in the NFL has got to just be getting to the end of the season and still being able to play just because it's so hard.
I think that some forms of that stuff, some forms of what they call pro-hormones, can actually trigger positive test results in maybe primitive, like back then when they were testing people, which is like nothing compared to what they're doing now.
Which is why, really interestingly, two Russian Olympic wrestlers have been stripped of their gold medals.
Because of the past, I think from 2008, they didn't even get the 2012 results in, because they took their samples that they had back then, and now with newer, more sophisticated levels of testing, they've been able to show that these guys were doing some shit.
But the UFC is an interesting proving ground for it, because Jeff Nowitzki, who was the head of USADA and the drug program that got Lance Armstrong and a bunch of other people, Novitski now works for the UFC. Oh, he does?
And he has almost completely cleaned up the amount of people that are doing things.
People still get caught every now and then, but the amount of people where their physiques have changed, where their performance has changed, where their results inside the octagon have drastically dropped off is pretty obvious and significant.
To the point where MMA fans and the pundits and analysts are looking at this and they're going, wow, this is fascinating.
You're seeing people change.
There's even a term that we use in MMA, like pre-USADA. We use pre-USADA and post-USADA. So they got him off the drugs.
And they would prescribe it for you the same way like when you were talking about alcoholism being a disease, they would decide that testosterone loss is a disease, and this man needs his medicine.
And so they would give these guys testosterone, and like 35, 36-year-old guys would be just jacked.
Jacked!
And fighting!
Not just jacked and going to the beach, but like involved in a sport where your whole purpose is to do physical harm to your opponent.
So this drug allows you to do more physical harm, which is very different than cycling.
Like if a guy gets really good at cycling and he has to use drugs to get really good at cycling and he's cheating to win, that's one thing.
But if he's doing these drugs and it's allowing him to put other people in the hospital, things get very weird.
Well, in terms of the moral argument, if you're saying that the fights are just as fun to watch, they're exciting, competitive without the drugs, and fewer people are harmed from taking the drugs, then maybe that's a good thing.
That would be an argument for USADA. The argument could even be said that the fights are more exciting because people are more vulnerable.
They get knocked out easier, they get tired easier, and sometimes it makes fights crazier.
Guys have tested positive for EPO after even championship level fights.
There was this guy, Ali Bagutinov, who's a top flyweight fighter.
And interesting enough, he fought a guy who doesn't dope, who's the best pound-for-pound fighter in the world, this guy, Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson.
And Mighty Mouse beat him, and one of the ways he beat him is with volume and pace.
Like, this guy couldn't keep up his pace.
Right.
Efficiency of technique is also really critical in MMA because a guy who doesn't have efficiency and puts too much kinetic energy and muscle behind techniques, they tend to fade quicker.
It can have positive results if you catch someone with a shot, but if you don't, over a long period of time, you're draining your gas tank too quickly.
Well, ADHD as well, this is one of those sort of loose, big categories that more and more people have gotten tossed into.
You know, it used to be the little boy in fourth grade was just, you know, he just had a lot of energy and he was always running around.
Now he's got a disease.
He's got ADHD. Well, we've got to medicate him.
Why not just let him go out and have a little longer playtime?
You know, this is one of the counterarguments to the disease model.
I mean, again, it's back to that.
It's a behavior model.
No, it's a disease, so we got to treat it with a drug.
You know, so you have this over-medication effect.
Now, I can't say if I was a parent of an ADHD kid, I wouldn't be glad to have some meds, but I think the consensus is far too much medication of children who really, you know, it's a spectrum, you know, if you're just completely out of control over here, but most that are taking the drugs are probably in the bell curve somewhere.
And a lot of it is, you know, teachers want control of the classroom.
It's this old, goes back to the 19th century, you know, we've got to put them all in rows because we're training them to work in industry or be in the military.
And that's all it still is and we're stuck with the echoes of that to the point where if you want to do something like there's a lot of things that you can do for a living that don't involve the traditional model of what they're trying to teach you in school and when you think about those things as options they think they seem preposterous and they seem like a pipe dream like this idea that you're going to be a famous author Yeah, sure you are.
Like, you're gonna be in a band?
Oh, yeah, you too?
Congratulations.
Well, someone's in a fucking band.
Is someone in a band?
Like, we get all this music, right?
Someone's playing this music.
How come I can't do it?
You can't do it?
No, I have to work.
I have to get up and work?
Like, we train these people to think that this is the path that everyone has to take and the occasional person ejects from that path and goes and makes their own knives or, you know, and starts some sort of a weird business.
But why can't anybody who wants to do that do that?
Well, they can.
The problem is the most impressionable part of your life.
They're teaching you really important things like math and science and English and grammar and we all need those things.
But they're also teaching you patterns.
And they're teaching you about the potential for your future.
And this potential for your future becomes like a reality that you can't escape.
So everyone feels like, well, I've got to go to college.
The fact is, not everyone should go to college.
There's really no need for it.
It's a waste of time and money.
They're not going to get any valuable skills that they can actually use, and they don't even want to be there, but they feel like, like, my parents want me to go, and my friends are all going, and society says I've got to have a degree, so I've got to go.
You know, and so now we have this proliferation of colleges and universities and, you know, the skyrocketing costs and so on.
What was wrong with trade schools?
You know, now trade schools are kind of looked down upon.
There's nothing wrong with trade schools.
Trade schools are great, but, you know, we've sort of stigmatized it.
And I think it's artificially putting people in places where they feel inadequate, because actually somewhere else they'd be making a lot of money at a particular trade that they're really good at, and they'd be happy.
Well, the structure of school, I think it benefits kids and it gives them discipline.
Like, well, you got to get up at 7 o'clock in the morning.
You got to get there and you got to figure out how to get your body to get up.
You got to figure out how to fire your mind up at your first class at 8 a.m.
I think all that's probably good because it's tests.
It's like you're overcoming.
And then in overcoming and getting through those tests at school or getting through whatever weird social stuff you got going on in your classroom, you develop sort of some data.
You get some experience about the world.
Yeah, there's something to that, but I just think this model that they want people to follow, when I see most people following this model, I'm like, is this just because people haven't been creative, they haven't been imaginative, and thinking about what they would like to do better than what they're doing now, or is it just this pattern is so easy to slip into, and we don't even realize it until you're in it, and then you can't get out of it.
I remember when I was at Pepperdine University in Malibu, I was a member of the first four-year graduating class, 1976, class of 76. And I was in the jock dorm with a bunch of baseball players and tennis players and just rowdy guys.
And they're all, I can't wait to get out of college.
I want to get out there on my own.
It's like...
When are we ever going to live in Malibu again?
Here we are, playing ping pong and going to heaven.
There's the Pacific Ocean right there and the gym.
Unless you're Oprah or something, you're not going to be living like this again.
Yeah, the problem with the, my argument for tech schools are good, is a lot of them get, you know, they turn into these, like, diploma mills that just basically are for profit.
It's okay to have a profit company, but, you know, for something like this, you end up churning out students that can't get jobs, but they have this huge debt.
And they were.
The reason this is the story is because the federal government was financing some of their tuition, but it turns out, you know, it was not quite a pyramid scheme, but something along those lines.
Look at this article by David Frum, F-R-U-M, in The Atlantic.
Atlantic.com.
He published the other day on why colleges are so expensive, and he tracks like the number of professors that have increased over the last 50 years, which is, you know, minor, versus the number of administrators, you know, deans and, you know, support staff and so on.
If you scroll down a little bit...
Let's see.
Right there.
So this is California colleges, state university system, from 11,600 to 12,000 professors.
But the number of administrators went from 3,000 to 12,000.
Today's New York Times offers one modest illustration.
Over the past 18 months, a time reports 90 American colleges and universities have hired chief diversity officers.
These administrators who are hired in response to the wave of racial incidents that convulsed campuses like the University of Missouri over the past year.
They are hulking up at an already thriving industry.
Wow.
March 2016, the National Association of Diversity Officers in Higher Education held its 10th annual conference in San Francisco.
Hilarious.
Attendance set a new record, 370. The association publishes a journal.
It bestows awards of excellence.
That fucking thing in the University of Missouri was a shocking insight into how colleges really work.
That lady was yelling at that student who was a photographer.
You just you start looking for people who are violators of it.
And like all these other things that we've discussed, there's a spectrum and there's people that are on the extreme far fringe who are literally recreationally outraged at everything they see all throughout the world without no perspective at all.
And instead of being able to look at these things and try to see things from other people's points of view and perspective, every single thing becomes racist or patriarchal or homophobic or transphobic.
And there's all these different new phrases that get ableist.
Right.
Fat shaming and all these different trigger warnings that they would like on almost every and it just becomes this ridiculous nerfed-up environment that you're living in and when you're in school and you're preparing for the real world right if you really think that you're gonna get through school with all All this craziness about safe spaces and certain things that trigger you and what should be legal and,
you know, cultural appropriation, white people shouldn't be wearing dreadlocks and all the nonsense that they're showing these kids.
It's fucking crazy!
It's crazy to assume that you can get through that and then become a functioning member of society and work with 40-year-old people who think you're retarded.
I'm giving a talk next week at Cal State Fullerton on this very subject because last year the sorority got in trouble because they held a Taco Tuesday.
It's like that line in Howard Stern's movie where he's a Jewish kid at a black high school in Jersey, and he said, they say it's a stereotype that blacks have bigger penises than whites, and it may be a stereotype, but I wish I had a stereotype.
Like that?
Anyway.
Yeah.
So last year I went to this little safe space talk, discussion, at the LGBTQ group.
Then it was like, well, like, give me some incidents.
It's like examples.
What happened?
Well, I heard about this gay couple.
They were walking hand-in-hand, sort of on the perimeter of the campus, down the sidewalk of the local street, and some guy in a pickup truck drove by and made a remark.
I said, that's it?
You know, there are assholes driving around.
You know, that's never going to be zero.
And there's no place you're going to go where you're going to be safe from that in the world.
And so the question is, how do you deal with that?
Well, you can just say, fuck off, asshole, or just ignore them, or, you know, whatever.
But, you know, the idea of, I'm hurt, I'm injured, I'm damaged, and I have to go and meet with my people where we talk about how hurt and damaged we feel, that's going to make it worse, I think.
It's going to turn...
Not a non-problem, but a minuscule problem into a big problem that doesn't need to be that way.
We're really generalizing here, because, right, we don't know what this supposed aggressor said, and there's a bunch of different things they could have said.
You know, they could have drove by and go, I love your hair!
And then just kept going, like, this piece of shit, he just totally gendered me.
There's some preposterous recreational outrage that really, on one hand, What's bad about it is it's indulgent and silly, but what's also bad about it is it develops this cry wolf mentality, where when you see people getting offended by things that are so fucking ridiculous, you will almost be willing to dismiss everything on their team.
You know, everything that they're trying to push forth that some of the things might have some merit to them.
Some of the things might be really valid, but it's all in the same camp.
Of these ridiculous, oversensitive people that are looking to get recreational outrage all the time.
So they might attach themselves to really legitimate points that people that might be more rigid or conservative in their ideology, they reject it outright.
They won't even consider it because it's these fucking dummies and they're crazy outrage and they're safe spaces, like these people.
Be attached to some really good ideas about how maybe it's not a good idea to have a bunch of guys on your campus yelling shit out at girls as they walk by.
I'm afraid there's freaks the freak studies out there They've done some studies on freaks the journal of freak behavior Obviously, I'm joking but I think that when we're talking about the difference between Those films that we watch these men beat the shit out of women And it was like just so standard and the outliers like when a person does show up on campus and they yell out sexist things It's like whoa This is an outrageous thing because it's so rare, because there has been progress.
So even though I think that a lot of people in the recreational outrage community are outrageously stupid in their efforts to make everything an offense, I think that the pressure of all that craziness actually somehow can probably tone things down.
If the left gets so outrageous in its demands, the right kind of meets them somewhere in the middle, like, we'll get to here, but settle the fuck down.
I'll call Caitlyn Jenner Caitlyn.
I'll call her Caitlyn.
Let's just relax on doing that to six-year-olds.
Let's figure out a comfortable medium.
And then in becoming more and more tolerant as time goes on, it'll just be the norm.
Just like slapping people in those movies was normal in 1960, but in today it's outrageous.
And in a television show, like, to the moon, Alice!
People getting outrageously upset about things that merit being outrageously upset, it makes everybody think.
But when people are outrageously upset about someone having a fucking Taco Tuesday or trying to cut some white dude's dreadlocks off, like, okay, you're losing me here.
You're going too far.
You're going too far the other way.
You're not reasonable.
You're looking to get pissed off over nonsense.
You hear about that kid who got away with raping some girl, and the girl had been passed out, and he only got six months, and now that's six months.
That is something to be outraged about.
That's a real scary thing that you should be really pissed off about.
You know, where this guy's suing the school now, she collected her diploma with a mattress, and we don't know what happened, because we weren't there, but there's some crazy texts exchanged back and forth, where she's asking him to come over and fuck her in the ass or something.
Is that what she said?
Did I make that up, allegedly?
Find that out.
I don't want to get sued.
Super important that you be real clear.
I mean, I don't know what the fuck happened, but if it really is something like that, what was the false rape accusation that made it to the New York Times?
Or excuse me, Rolling Stone.
The Rolling Stone.
Was it Virginia?
Yeah.
I mean, that is crazy.
That's crazy.
And when something gets to the point where it's in Rolling Stone, it's a complete, total fabrication like that, where somebody just made something up and it didn't go through the proper channels because everything dealing with gender and all these issues that are super sensitive issues gets treated with kid gloves.
Instead of approaching it with the same kind of skepticism that you would a murder case or a case of theft Instead, it gets immediately looked at like there's one possible scenario here.
This woman has been victimized.
To question her would be horrific, and you shouldn't even observe the facts.
You shouldn't even have an open mind.
You have to go into it with this, even though you really don't have any information really whatsoever other than people talking, you have to go into it with this idea that this person talking is telling you the truth.
Yeah, see, I don't know what happened between them, and if someone sends you a text like that, it doesn't mean that you're allowed to rape them.
But his version of what happened versus her version of what happened...
You don't know who's telling the truth.
You just don't know.
And when things get so outrageous that this Rolling Stone thing gets published and gets treated with kid gloves, and one of the most important magazines in American culture treats this as if it's a real story and it turns out to be a complete fabrication, it sort of in some ways highlights the problems with dealing with this kind of stuff in a non-objective way.
Well, we also have to consider that like we've been talking about with so many different other examples that there is a giant spectrum of people's behavior.
There are men that I know that like to get bossed around by women and smacked around and they like them to do terrible things to them and they will pay these women to do this.
They'll go to a dominatrix and this woman will insult them and Right.
And she beats them and paddles them.
They do all kinds of crazy stuff to them.
And a lot of these guys are wealthy guys who have high-pressure careers.
And I've met these guys.
I've talked to them.
I know guys that have had this thing.
But if it's the other way, if it's a woman that likes getting smacked around by a guy, then it becomes a crazy...
You don't even want to know that that girl exists.
A woman can't hire a male dominatrix to kick her ass and rape her.
But a man can hire a woman to humiliate her, piss on her.
High-pressure, you know, executive type guys that are doing it.
He's just a nut and a pervert, but hilarious.
Hilarious comedian.
But it's okay.
I mean, he doesn't like getting beat up, but it's okay.
Like, you can be a man, and you can hire some woman to kick your ass, and you can have this desire to have this happen to you.
But we're supposed to pretend that there's not some woman out there who doesn't want to, like, engage in a similar type of activity with a man.
And they must exist.
They just do.
They just do.
They must.
And is it the same?
If you decide that you and the person that you have sex with, if you guys decide that this is the way you do things, you decide that she likes to smack you around, and she likes to get on top of you, and you get off on it, and she tells you when you're going to have sex.
Well, imagine a scenario in which that was all consensual, and then six months later, he published a story in Rolling Stone saying, I never consented, and she beat me.
Even discussing this, you become a rape apologist.
So we should be really clear.
That's not what I am doing.
I'm looking at all the possibilities of human behavior, and I'm saying, people are fucking weird.
We're weird.
And our ideals, a lot of times, are shaped by popular culture, and they're shaped by songs and movies, and those, in some ways, dictate more of what we expect from our life than the actual lives that we see around us.
Did you see the video that got released where this really wealthy billionaire character in Florida filmed his girlfriend beating herself up?
She's on the bed, and he put in a security camera because, I don't know, maybe he just knew she was gonna do something crazy like this, so he's breaking up with her, and she told the police he beat her up.
And there's video of this, screaming at the top of her lungs, working herself into a frenzy, probably with the windows open so the neighbors can hear it, and she's just beating the shit out of herself.
There's a hilarious one that was a pro-consent video that they had released to try to get people acclimated with this idea, and it's an attractive young couple, like a hipster-looking dude.
He had like a funky mustache, and he's with a girl, and they're making out.
And he's like, can I touch your leg?
And she's like, yes.
And then she's like, can I touch your leg?
And he's like, yes.
And he's like, can I kiss you?
And she says, yes.
And he goes, can I take your shirt off?
She goes, not yet.
And they keep making out, and it's kind of hot!
It's kind of hot.
Like, I don't think you should fucking have to do that all the time, and especially if you're in a relationship with someone, then it's ridiculous.
And I can understand, like, the first couple of times you do it, but the video, like, I don't support that being a rule.
But if two people want to do that on their own, that video's kind of hot.
Like, it looks like, wow, eventually she said no, and then she said yes, the shirt came off, we're making progress, some things are happening, she's obviously enjoying this make-out thing, like, it's kind of hot.
It's an interesting question because if you pull so far left, do they meet in a different place than they would be if you just let them, well, boys will be boys.
And then, you know, that stat we put up with the number of diversity officers.
I mean, the moment you hire somebody whose job it is to basically look for diversity, anytime it doesn't meet whatever the criteria is at that moment, it's like, okay, we have a problem.
You know, Japanese and, you know, he was talking in this oral history about what kinds of jobs he had before Star Trek, which, you know, you play the sort of obnoxious, the servant or the obnoxious agent, Asian or whatever, but never like an actual real job where you have an important position.
There's another video that was just released a few weeks ago of Shatner and the lizard monster on his couch and they're watching a TV show or something and then they start fighting.
If you had that on Comedy Central today, if you had a ridiculous space show, if you called it Ridiculous Space Show, and you essentially just have a lot of the same shit that was in regular space movies just reenact them, people would laugh.
I was in a pitch meeting one time at Fox, Fox Reality.
Mike Darnell was their big reality show guy.
He's the one that brought all the big American Idol type shows, including American Idol.
Anyway, we were pitching a skeptic show.
So I had a production company and myself, and we were waiting in the little room for him to be done with his meeting, and he came out to apologize that he was late because they were supposed to have a big celebrity boxing match that night, Paula Jones versus Tonya Harding.
But it's so funny when you have a movie like that, and you put words in people's mouths, and you just decide what they could have said that sounded cool.
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Like, you shouldn't be allowed to do that, you know?