874: Ayurveda | Skeptical Sunday

874: Ayurveda | Skeptical Sunday

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: And special thanks to Airbnb for sponsoring this episode of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Maybe you've stayed at an Airbnb before and thought to yourself, "Yeah, this actually seems pretty doable. Maybe my place could be an Airbnb." It could be as simple as starting with a spare room or your whole place while you're away. Find out how much your place is worth at airbnb.com/host.

[00:00:22] Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Dave Farina. On The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. Our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker. And during the week, we have long-form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, from spies to CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, and performers. On Sundays, though, we do Skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest co-host and I break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions. Topics such as why tipping makes no sense, acupuncture, astrology, homeopathy, hypnosis, and more.

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[00:02:10] All right, Dave, now everybody wants to be healthy, right? It seems like everywhere we look, we're met with a barrage of products and services that are meant to help us eat right, exercise, stay fit, center our minds. Become the most effective and enlightened cosmic being that we can possibly be. Well, health and wellness, especially wellness, is a multi-billion-dollar industry, and not without basis, since being healthy allows us to enjoy our lives to the fullest, both in terms of longevity and quality of life, but when this industry overlaps with medicine, the result is not always a paragon of scientific legitimacy. Aspects of marketing and pseudo-spirituality sometimes overshadow foundational scientific knowledge and empirical evidence. One such phenomenon that exemplifies this way of thinking is called Ayurveda. Am I pronouncing that correctly, by the way?

[00:02:56] Dave Farina: I think so. Ayurveda, that's how I say it.

[00:02:58] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, not that I have to respect it too much because it's a bunch of baloney as we're going to get into. But what is this ancient practice? How did it come to be? How is it relevant today? To dissect this, as always, is our resident pseudoscience debunker, Dave Farina of the YouTube channel Professor Dave Explains.

[00:03:13] And Dave, welcome back to the show.

[00:03:15] Dave Farina: Thanks for having me. I'm ready to go.

[00:03:17] Jordan Harbinger: You mean to a higher plane of existence with the ancient practice of Ayurveda. Yeah, I'm right there with you.

[00:03:21] Dave Farina: Absolutely. Yeah, let's do it.

[00:03:23] Jordan Harbinger: So, Dave, I think a lot of people have maybe heard of Ayurveda, especially if they do yoga or other stuff that's tangential to it. Not that yoga's nonsense, we should do one about that because it has a lot of benefits, but I think a lot of people who are into one maybe Indian pseudo-spiritual thing, they grab onto a lot of this because their classmates are into it. We can talk about that another time, but I'm not too familiar with this. I've seen it in emails, I've seen it in kooky YouTube comments. As a baseline, can you tell us a little bit about what it is, the foundational ideas, and so forth?

[00:03:55] Dave Farina: Absolutely. So, Ayurveda is an ancient Indian medicinal practice from India, and it dates back a few thousand years, so this is quite ancient. We're talking before the ancient Greeks, ancient. That also means that it's before science, ancient. And what this belief system proposes is that disease is due to an imbalance in a person's consciousness. So some kind of stress is being placed on a person's consciousness, and that is manifesting as some kind of illness. So the correct response to disease, according to Ayurveda, is to partake in certain kinds of natural therapies and lifestyle changes. So we're talking about changing the diet, massage, yoga, meditation, using certain kinds of herbs. And all of this is meant to restore a balance between mind, body, and spirit, and get you healthy again.

[00:04:40] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so that sounds a little vapid, but not totally baseless, I suppose. We know stress causes or exacerbates a lot of conditions and that lifestyle changes can help with that. So, yeah, I mean, so far so good, right?

[00:04:51] Dave Farina: Sure. Okay, so what I gave you is kind of the least offensive version. So, obviously, it's true that diet is linked with your health and there are some herbs that have medicinal properties and things like yoga and meditation can improve your mental health and so by extension, they can have some influence on your physical health. But this is as good as we're going to get here. Once we dive into some of the specifics and like the terminology, it gets pseudoscientific real fast.

[00:05:14] Jordan Harbinger: I figured it might. A lot of this stuff does, right, because it's great to have this whole hey, you know, you do this for that and everyone goes, "Yeah, I guess I do drink tea for a caffeine boost, so why can't tea cure other ailments?" And you're like, "And then, it's like something, something chakras." All right, so let's get down to another level then. Let's talk about some of the terminology associated with this system of thought because it seems to be heavy in its own language system, as a lot of this stuff is.

[00:05:41] Dave Farina: Yeah, heavy on the jargon. So in Ayurveda, they talk about Prakriti, which is the body's constitution, which is supposed to be unique to each individual, and doshas, which are life forces. So, the goal is to partake in these activities and behaviors which will balance these forces, just like someone else will talk about balancing chakras or things like that. So, additionally, it proposes that the universe is composed of five elements, air, water, earth, fire, and space.

[00:06:05] Jordan Harbinger: Captain Planet, plus one. Yeah.

[00:06:07] Dave Farina: Plus, yeah, they're adding another there, but these combine in different ways to form the humors of the body. So, Vata Dosha, Pitta Dosha, and Kapha Dosha. So these control our physiology, so we're talking about different tissues, fluids, metabolism, and so forth. The funny thing is that it's pretty comparable to other ancient philosophies in terms of the composition of matter and of living organisms, which is simply to say that it is profoundly incorrect.

[00:06:32] Jordan Harbinger: I'm glad you mentioned that because whenever we say it has a lot in common with other ancient philosophies that evolve separately, people go, "See! Proof that they knew something we didn't!" And it's like, no, it's just a very obvious sort of coincidence that they look around and go, "Hmm, we have air, we have water, we have fire, we have dirt, and, you know, I don't know, whatever, space." I assume they didn't mean outer space. They just meant space, which is also air, but whatever.

[00:06:56] Dave Farina: Or they got it from each other, but who cares.

[00:06:57] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah.

[00:06:57] Dave Farina: The point is we moved on. These are wrong, that's not it.

[00:07:00] Jordan Harbinger: Right, I guess a lot of places probably thought that the sun moved around the earth, and that doesn't make that true either, just because multiple civilizations observed that. Something that made that look like that was happening. I have to say a lot of those things sound like appetizers and not necessarily spiritual jargon, but I guess that says more about me than it does about Ayurveda. Okay, so you don't see too many people pointing to these primal elements or the humors anymore?

[00:07:26] Dave Farina: Right. I mean, that's the point. We've moved on, right? Science has moved on. We have the periodic table of the elements to tell us what the matter around us is made of. So water is not an element. It's made of hydrogen and oxygen. We didn't know this back then, so the philosophies can't reflect that, but this is something that we've known for centuries now, so to think that a few millennia ago, we had better knowledge than now, it's just insane.

[00:07:48] So the same goes for humorism, right? We all know about, like, the bile and the blood and the phlegm, and so this was stuff that, well, you know, it lasted a little too long, but sort of an ancient way of looking at this. And it was a forward step thousands of years ago in that it was the first time people were attributing illness to actual parts of the body and physical mechanisms instead of divinity and demonic possession and things like that. But it's still completely wrong, which is why nobody performs bloodletting anymore. But the point is that we have an actual concrete understanding of the human body and how it works now.

[00:08:19] Jordan Harbinger: That makes a lot of sense. I do have to put a little asterisk by bloodletting because I can't remember what show I talked about this on, and I said, that's why we don't do bloodletting anymore. And all these people DM'd me and they were like, "Actually, I have bloodletting done because I have a disease," that I think it's something with too much iron in the blood. And the treatment is actually bloodletting.

[00:08:38] Dave Farina: Interesting.

[00:08:39] Jordan Harbinger: They don't get it done at a barbershop and let it drip out onto the floor into the streets of London.

[00:08:43] Dave Farina: Yes, very controlled.

[00:08:45] Jordan Harbinger: Right, yeah, I assume there's some more sort of sanitary ways of doing this at a doctor's office or possibly in a hospital where they get treated. But apparently it still exists. I don't think they call it bloodletting. Maybe they do, actually. So either way, we mostly don't perform bloodletting anymore, except for things that require bloodletting, which are very small, not because he has chills sometimes. Well, what we have to do is drain his blood because he's got vapors in there.

[00:09:10] Dave Farina: Too much blood, not enough phlegm, right? We got to balance the blood and phlegm.

[00:09:13] Jordan Harbinger: All right. So given what you're highlighting here, it's very clear that we knew very little at the time when Ayurveda came about, and objectively, we know much more now. So in order for people to assign any merit to things like Ayurveda, it seems like one aspect of their worldview has to be about the allure of the ancient way of thought or back to tradition or something like that. Is that a fair assumption?

[00:09:38] Dave Farina: Yeah, I mean, I think that that's definitely part of it. Certain kinds of people are drawn to the ancient world, you know, which, in a way, makes sense. A lot of us maybe have a longing for deeper culture, depending on where you live. Like, we're pummeled by modernity everywhere we look. I mean, especially in America, we have no antiquity here that we've built around. Like, in Europe, you have a sense of the passage of time and things like that, but I know over here is a lot of strip malls and fast food and cell phone towers, you know, depending on where you live.

[00:10:03] So there's something enchanting about ancient India or ancient China or ancient Mesopotamia or whatever. It's fun. It's fascinating from a historical perspective, and it's really fun to think about what those people were doing in those times. But this bizarre notion that they held some kind of like privileged or sacred wisdom that is either forgotten or totally unavailable to us now, especially that they knew how to heal and we don't. I mean, this is just ridiculous, not to mention actually dangerous. You know, thousands of years ago, we were completely clueless as to the fundamental constitution of matter, how the human body works. We didn't know that molecules exist or cells or genes. We didn't know that pathogens exist and that they cause disease. We were just totally and utterly in the dark about all of it. I mean, that didn't stop us from trying to develop modes of thought focused around human health, based partially on the trial and error of ingesting anything we could find in nature, and partially on spirituality and mythology.

[00:10:59] But things are much different now. We have science. Science has been our candle in the dark, and miraculously we've developed an immense body of knowledge regarding all of these phenomena, and this knowledge is what we now use to determine how medicine should operate, not mythology, not superstition, or anything like that.

[00:11:17] Jordan Harbinger: That does make a lot of sense. I actually want to push back on one thing. What you said, we don't have a lot of antiquity here in North America, we do. We had Native Americans. It's just that a lot of us consciously or not look down on that kind of thing because we're like, where are the big buildings? They didn't build it. It's like, well, maybe they didn't do that. So then people go, "Yeah, they were spiritual. They lived as one with nature," which is, you know, they were very spiritual. But a lot of modern quacks, we covered this in our ear candling episode, which I think was the first Skeptical Sunday that we did. A lot of people who wrote to me were furious about that episode and they were like, "No, the Sioux Indians have been doing this for thousands of years." And what my researcher did, Dave Smalley at that time, he went and called the Sioux and was like, "Okay, I'm researching this." And they were like, "Yeah, that is nonsense. We don't do that. People constantly put that on their websites. It's not an ancient tradition. It's what the grifter at earcandling. com is telling his customers because it makes it sound legit. But no, we don't stick candles in our ears and drain them. It's a scam and they're just using our branding, if you will, of our tribe to sell this ancient thing." So actually, for all these people that like have nostalgia or long for a more Ancient world, they're basically just using that same ancient world to market modern-day bullsh*t and harming those exact cultures and people that they are claiming to represent.

[00:12:40] Dave Farina: It's a side door.

[00:12:42] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's a hack.

[00:12:42] Dave Farina: Tethering a scam to an ancient culture gives it an air of legitimacy. They know that.

[00:12:47] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, it's ironic because they're like, we want to go back to the ancient world where these wise people knew and it's like, no, you're actually doing worse than the people who are ignoring us. You're making us seem quacky and you're some, like, white dude from Ohio making money off of us. Like, GFY is the PG version.

[00:13:04] Dave Farina: Yes. Talk about appropriation. Yeah.

[00:13:06] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, exactly. Like, we were better off when you ignored us and let us do our own thing. It is also cute. You just use the word miraculous to describe scientific progress. So, as fun as it seems, the idea that something must be good just because it's ancient, it just doesn't hold any water.

[00:13:21] Dave Farina: Yeah, look, if anything, there's an inverse correlation, right? What we thought back then is quite unlikely to be accurate. I mean, it could be accurate, but the odds are against it. I mean, we thought the Earth was the center of the universe. We didn't know anything about anything, right? Ancient does not equal good.

[00:13:40] Jordan Harbinger: If you want to balance those doshas, you're going to want to hear from the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back.

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[00:16:23] Now, back to Skeptical Sunday.

[00:16:27] There has to be another angle people are taking because I'm not sure that everyone is obsessed with the ancient aspect. It seems like this has a lot to do with nature lovers when you think about it. I'm on the fence here about the ancient versus natural angle.

[00:16:42] Dave Farina: Yes, so that would definitely be the other angle, more than anything temporal, naturalism, there's a lot of allure there, and that's inevitably kind of the centerpiece of the modern incarnation of the system, so that's more of the angle of nature good, man, bad.

[00:16:55] Jordan Harbinger: I think that's a little silly, and I used to get on board with this, it was like, yeah, things are complicated now, and it's easier just to be like, I like simple, I like nature, but then, when you start learning about nature, and you go to the Amazon, you realize that a lot of things there can and will just absolutely willfully kill you without any thought whatsoever. And things we make can save lives. And even people who lived in the Amazon with absolutely no clothes and ate leaves and did things like that that are completely natural, they're like, "Oh yeah, you don't want to touch that. And if you do, you have to go have this shaman help you by sucking the venom out." Yeah, they use smoke and leaves and flowers and paint you, but the real life-saving part is him sucking the venom out of that snake bite. And that is a human invention.

[00:17:40] Dave Farina: Yeah, the naturalism, I mean, it's not just organisms that are killing you. I mean, we're talking about nature in general. I mean, it's a dichotomy, right? Nature is the sun, and water, and trees, and it's the lovely, pretty things, but it's also drought, and famine, and pestilence, and plague. It's tidal waves, and hurricanes. I mean, nature really sucks sometimes. And what humans have done to understand and manipulate nature on the fundamental level, I mean, we're talking about with chemistry and things like that. It's absolutely incredible. I think that people do not have sufficient appreciation for modern medicine and our understanding of human physiology.

[00:18:14] Jordan Harbinger: So it's just sort of a primitive and faulty way of thinking with Ayurveda. We now have this much better understanding of how the body works and what diseases are in terms of pathogens and genetics and epigenetics and other aspects of human physiology. So that should totally eclipse any ancient approach to describing these phenomena in terms of elements, life forces, balancing of things, anything like that.

[00:18:38] Dave Farina: Yes, it should. In fact, the balancing thing, right, that's one of the primary myths that needs to be dispelled. So there's this obsession in Ayurveda with balance. There must be balance of the three doshas and imbalance is what causes disease. This is totally meaningless. Like, apart from doshas not being a thing in reality, more generally there's this misconception that there's, like, a perfect state that one can attain, and that if you just eat the right thing and you do the right amount of yoga and everything will be in this perfect harmony and you'll be purified and transform into a demigod, I mean, it's just total nonsense. There is no perfection possible with the human body. There's no perfection in the natural world in general. The body is imperfect. The body degrades. The cellular machinery makes mistakes. There is no magic recipe to transcend any of this. We are decaying meat sacks, and we have to embrace that aspect of the human experience.

[00:19:32] Now, again, have your healthy diet, have your exercise routine, have your meditation, have your herbs, if you really like them, but it's just that too many people are on this wild goose chase for the perfect state of being, and it's not there. It's a facade, right? Billions of radioactive nuclides are decaying in your body every second of every day, and causing mutations in the genome of every cell in your body. On a long enough timeline, every organism would get cancer for this reason alone. There's nothing about your diet or any of this stuff that can escape the inevitable breakdown of biological systems.

[00:20:07] Jordan Harbinger: What is a nuclide? I don't even know if I've ever heard that word.

[00:20:10] Dave Farina: A nucleus, so a nuclide just means a particular type of atom of that element, essentially. Different isotopes, essentially, yeah.

[00:20:17] Jordan Harbinger: Oh, okay.

[00:20:18] Dave Farina: It could just be a high-energy photon. There are different modes of radioactive decay, but whichever one it is, you've got high energy particles that are flying out of there, and if it strikes DNA, it can cause a change to one of the bases in the DNA, which then, when it replicates, you have the wrong base on the other side. So there's mutations that are happening all the time. Not just because of mutagens that we eat or breathe or something like that. It's just happening. I mean, this is beyond the cellular machinery just making mistakes when it copies the DNA. There's that. But there's also radioactive nuclei in your body that are causing damage to the DNA all the time. It's just happening. That's just how it is, you know?

[00:20:55] Jordan Harbinger: Right. And these radioactive materials are naturally occurring, right? It's not because of Chernobyl or something like that.

[00:21:00] Dave Farina: No, no, no. Potassium. Potassium 40 is the most abundant radio — I'm pretty sure it's 40. I should double-check that. Yeah, I think it's Potassium 40 is the most abundant radioactive nuclide in your body. But all different hydrogen and carbon, I mean, they all have isotopes that decay, right? Some of them decay much more rapidly than others. They have a shorter half-life, and so you get more disintegrations, but you have so many atoms in your body that these decay events are happening constantly all the time.

[00:21:28] Jordan Harbinger: Does that mean bananas are radioactive? Or does that mean everything in the world is radioactive at some level?

[00:21:33] Dave Farina: Pretty much everything in the world. I mean, I can't think of anything that would have zero percent of any radioactive nuclide. I mean, of course, with most things, we're talking about a level that is utterly insignificant, but it doesn't negate the fact that these nuclear processes are happening all around us all the time.

[00:21:49] Jordan Harbinger: So interesting. Probably a totally different show, and thank you for entertaining my tangent here.

[00:21:53] Dave Farina: Sure.

[00:21:54] Jordan Harbinger: So, are there people who try to modernize this at all? Are there people who try to blend this with current scientific knowledge to try and keep it alive? I see that happen a lot with, I won't say scams, but I will say any sort of health trend It's like look how this overlaps with modern science and they're just cramming the square peg through the round hole as hard as they can.

[00:22:13] Dave Farina: Yes, definitely. So some people go away from the ancient thing and they do more of like an anti-pharma thing or something like that. So they try to reinterpret the doshas and the humors and assign them concrete roles within metabolism and digestion and immune function, you know, more of like a modern vernacular. And it's just, I mean, it's meaningless, right? That we don't need any of these things to describe those systems and those functions is what makes them totally superfluous, right? Immunologists understand the immune system and they don't need those words to talk about them, right? They don't add any understanding or knowledge and there's no correlation with anything in a substantive way. So there's no reason to use this terminology or hang on to this way of thinking or anything like that.

[00:22:53] Jordan Harbinger: Unless you're making your living selling it, in which case you have a huge incentive to hang on to this terminology and way of thinking.

[00:22:59] Dave Farina: Yes. Correct.

[00:23:00] Jordan Harbinger: But yeah, people do this anyway, right? Are there actual schools? I mean, of course, there are schools that teach this stuff, but are there accredited schools, medical schools that teach this stuff?

[00:23:09] Dave Farina: So, kind of, yeah, which is alarming. So, I mean, not just because of the cognitive aspect. It's disheartening that people who want to understand the human body feel compelled to shove spirituality where it doesn't belong, but no, more so we're talking about the greedy side of the coin. So in this case, we're talking about the validation of pseudoscience for profit.

[00:23:29] Jordan Harbinger: I've talked about this on my show before. A guy that I know is in medical school in Canada, and he'll tell me about homeopathy, and I'm like, "Well, they'll debunk that in medical school," and he's like, "No, I'm in a homeopathy class in my medical school in Canada," and I'm thinking, "Why is there a homeopathy class in your medical school in Canada when this is not a real thing?" And that's a different episode of Skeptical Sunday. But it's amazing to me that homeopathy is any more than a footnote in one class that says here's a bunch of fake stuff that doctors have tried before and homeopathy is one of them and it's one lecture or it's half a lecture.

[00:24:04] Dave Farina: It's a history of medicine footnote.

[00:24:06] Jordan Harbinger: Right. Yes, exactly. It's up there with chakras and it's up there with humors and different types of vapors or whatever. Right, so, man, so people are profiting off of those who will pay money to get this training, or these certifications, or whatever it is. I've seen this before.

[00:24:21] Dave Farina: Yeah, so, that's part of it. I mean, we're not talking about a Harvard Medical School, or something, you know, but low-level institutions will cash in on the demand as they're not sacrificing much credibility by offering this. But the point is, if enough people are willing to spend money on something, they want it, they want the homeopathy thing, they want the naturopathy thing, or the Ayurveda thing, somebody's going to sell it to them, right? That's just a fact of life. But the educational aspect is nothing compared to the greater marketplace.

[00:24:49] Jordan Harbinger: Of course. So people are going to sell things to make a buck with any sort of pseudoscience. No news there. But what sorts of things are they selling, especially with Ayurveda?

[00:24:58] Dave Farina: Yeah. So, I mean, it's all about this Panchakarma method of therapy. So we're saying it's about bodily rejuvenation and cleansing of toxins. So the thing about it is it's very popular because it merges seamlessly with spa culture.

[00:25:14] Jordan Harbinger: There's a term I've never heard that's funny.

[00:25:16] Dave Farina: I mean, I don't know if I made it up or not, but people love spas, right? I mean, some people really like them and there's nothing wrong with spas necessarily. But with this, you've got your powders and your pastes and your oils and your tinctures and your aromas and to varying degrees of legitimacy or efficacy, but the point is people love this stuff. It's an enormous industry.

[00:25:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I can kind of see it now. The high-end Kardashian line of Ayurveda oils. It practically sells itself. What you mentioned, this thing about toxins. What is that? That's a term that I feel gets thrown around so much. It doesn't even mean anything anymore.

[00:25:50] Dave Farina: Yes, it is very much a buzzword that gets thrown around in practically every variety of alternative medicine, and it is used improperly. It is not well understood. So, the rigid definition, a toxin is a poison or venom of plant, animal, or microorganismal origin. It is a substance that's harmful to the human body, even at low doses, but the key thing is that it is specifically produced by a living organism, and causes disease, so it is produced by a living organism, without exception, by definition.

[00:26:20] Jordan Harbinger: But that's not really how people use the word, right? They're talking about pretty much everything that could maybe be sort of bad for you, and then a bunch of stuff that they just assume now is bad for you, because, why not?

[00:26:30] Dave Farina: Yeah, people do not associate it with living organisms. They generally mean it to mean nasty, harmful, man-made synthetic chemical. Again, naturalism is kind of the centerpiece of all this, so the point is to instill the imagery that all the nasty, man-made, bad man from the factory chemicals are all over you and inside you, and you need this lovely natural stuff to flush it out and return to your perfect state of harmony with nature again. But it doesn't mean that, right? Toxins are made by living organisms exclusively, and the concept of detoxification, I mean, it just doesn't mean anything in this context.

[00:27:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I know people who are just obsessed with the concept of detox, and I tell them I got a liver and two kidneys, and that's kind of all the detoxification that I need. Look, I guess there's probably exceptions, like if I get radiation poisoning, I need some iodine to protect my thyroid, but that's, even that's not detoxification, it's just protecting something against radiation.

[00:27:24] Dave Farina: Correct. Yeah, it's not this concept of, Oh, I got the bad stuff in me and I got to flush it out and I got to sweat it out and I got to drink the smoothie. It's just not a thing.

[00:27:33] Jordan Harbinger: So apart from the potions and creams and whatnot, Ayurveda has something to do with a diet that's prescribed here, right? What's going on with the food aspect?

[00:27:41] Dave Farina: Yeah, so, of course, it's all based on what was available in ancient India. So there's different combinations of butter and rice and honey and milk and other foods. Tasty stuff, I mean, you know, there's no problem with food, it's stuff that they would eat back then, and we still eat, and it's delicious, but some of these combinations are supposed to make you sweat out the toxins, and some of them are supposed to make you vomit out the toxins, and some of them are supposed to make you poop out the toxins, and If you eat the right thing and it makes you do the right thing, then, once again, the theme here is that you can get back to this perfect, normal, balanced state that just is not a real thing.

[00:28:17] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of shameless capitalism and vehicles for marketing, here's a word from our sponsor. We'll be right back.

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[00:29:59] Now for the rest of Skeptical Sunday.

[00:30:03] I hear about this sometimes with certain psychedelics too. They're like, "Oh, I took the ayahuasca, and then I was projectile vomiting to the point where everything was hurting. Then, I was hallucinating, and then I was sweating, and then I was crapping myself." And I'm like, that's just poison.

[00:30:17] Dave Farina: Yeah.

[00:30:18] Jordan Harbinger: I'm not saying there's no benefit to psychedelics, far from it. I mean, there's a lot of research in this area.

[00:30:22] Dave Farina: But it's psychological.

[00:30:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, you're not puking out your trauma from childhood. You're puking out the thing you ate earlier because you ate a poisonous plant. Your body is f*cking freaking out.

[00:30:30] Dave Farina: And then experience helps you deal with the trauma and grow as a person. But the puking is not.

[00:30:36] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, the whole sh*tting yourself thing, potentially optional in the therapeutic sense of the word.

[00:30:40] Dave Farina: Correct.

[00:30:41] Jordan Harbinger: All right, it sounds like we have the general vibe of this system. Disease caused by imbalance. So we have to use these natural things to get rid of the toxins and get back to the balance. But like you said, this is illusory. So is there anything positive that we can take from the system? Do we chuck it all away? Are there aspects of it that can be retained?

[00:31:00] Dave Farina: Yeah, I mean, there's nothing wrong with wanting to have a good diet. It's great. If you want to meditate, that's great. And there's, honestly, there's nothing inherently wrong with herbal medicine, right? The idea that you would ingest an herb is fine. But the romanticization of these things over empirical medical science, that's what's dangerous. And it's just, it's all too prevalent in modern society. People need to understand that diet is great for general health, but it can't prevent everything and it can't cure, I mean, almost anything. So same with meditation, right? People need to understand it. Meditation is great, but it's not magic. There are no chakras. You're not. Aligning anything or purifying anything with herbs, right? People need to understand that anything of medicinal value from an herb can and has been isolated and purified and put into a pill and it has precisely the same therapeutic effect. The plant itself is not magic. And humans are not limited in the laboratory to what nature has produced by chance. Humans can innovate all kinds of drugs that do not exist in nature that address disease on the molecular level and have actual genuine curative ability, not just placebo. So, you know, the main thing is just the obsession that society has with naturalism, it's going to be hard to get rid of, but it's something we have to do as a species if we want to have an informed public that is capable of discussing and understanding medicine in any educated way.

[00:32:27] Jordan Harbinger: So if you were to try and help people understand how modern medicine works, as briefly as possible because that's a whole podcast, right?

[00:32:34] Dave Farina: Yeah.

[00:32:34] Jordan Harbinger: And each episode's seven hours long. Where would you start? How can we help people with no background in chemistry or biology understand any of this?

[00:32:43] Dave Farina: So, yeah, I mean, that's the million-dollar question. If I could flip a switch, that'd be great. If we're being honest, it's not possible in a soundbite. There has to be at least a mild effort on the part of someone to learn just a little bit of information in these areas. Not a lot. I mean, we're saying, like, a high school level understanding, which, I mean, look, technically, we are all supposed to receive in high school, right, with chemistry, biology, physics, but, you know, I feel like it just doesn't stick for a lot of people.

[00:33:08] Jordan Harbinger: Well, there's no way I could pass a chemistry quiz right now. There's no way.

[00:33:13] Dave Farina: And look, I mean, that's fine. Not everybody has to be able to pass chemistry quizzes, but we're looking for some semblance of a scientific worldview to kind of linger so that you can look at things with the right mindset. But for medicine, let's say there's one thing that needs to be conveyed, it is that disease always has a molecular basis, right? It's something very fundamental on the molecular level. If there is an issue with your body on the molecular level, the solution will also be on the molecular level, hence, drugs, which are molecules.

[00:33:43] Jordan Harbinger: I can feel the nature lovers physically recoil at the word drugs. So let's talk about drugs. What are they exactly? What does the word mean without any of the connotations that people tend to put on that word?

[00:33:55] Dave Farina: Yes, so obviously a lot of connotations there, illicit drugs and this and, you know, all these things. So just the textbook definition of a drug is a substance that when introduced to the body generates a non-nutritional physiological effect.

[00:34:11] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, a non-nutritional physiological effect. So the non-nutritional part is in there to exclude food?

[00:34:17] Dave Farina: Yes, so food is not drugs. We're taking that part of the bodily function out of it. Nutrition is not part of this. But anything else that elicits a concrete physiological effect in the body, it's a drug.

[00:34:28] Jordan Harbinger: So what kinds of effects are we talking about here?

[00:34:31] Dave Farina: So, it could be anything, right? Caffeine is a drug because it is a stimulant. It increases activity in your nervous system. Alcohol is a drug because it affects your mood and your motor functions. Psychoactive drugs like hallucinogens affect your cognition and perceptions, that kind of stuff.

[00:34:47] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so how about medicinal drugs? What's going on there?

[00:34:50] Dave Farina: So with drugs, with this connotation of drugs, like the drugs you would be prescribed from a doctor, these are small molecules that interact with some target in the body, typically a protein, like an enzyme or a receptor. So let's say there's a bodily function that is happening too much, or not enough, we can send a drug in to interact with specific receptors. So maybe it activates the receptor and a signal gets sent to help halt the bodily function, or to get it started, right? Depends on the situation. Or maybe it silences the receptor and it negates the signal to again either initiate or halt a bodily function.

[00:35:25] So, it's very complicated and it varies case by case, so this is a very reductive thing that I'm saying here, but in a very general way, that's what's going on. Drugs are small molecules that fit into the active sites of specific proteins in a way that changes how some aspect of the body is functioning.

[00:35:42] So, this is why something like Ayurveda just completely misses the mark. It has zero ability to describe signaling pathways and gene expression, and all of these things that are actually going on in the body that actually correlate with disease, right? It just invents nebulous concepts like doshas that have no basis in reality.

[00:36:01] Jordan Harbinger: I think that was pretty clean. I mean, I'm able to visualize what you were describing about drugs interacting with proteins to an extent, and it does make sense. But there are those who will be able to wrap their heads around that, but still inevitably ask, okay, how does this tie in with pharmaceutical companies, right? Ayurveda is from nature. It isn't part of the whole big pharma show. So that might be part of the allure. I think you talked about this a few minutes ago as well.

[00:36:23] Dave Farina: Yeah. Or just in general, this is the main thing that I think unites all anti-science mentality. There's always an anti establishment bite to it. And so that's where this part comes in here. Pharma makes drugs. Just like the drugs that are in the herbs, in some case precisely the same drugs, in fact. Sometimes they are totally different compounds of our own invention, but, you know, contrary to the fever dreams of rabid anti-pharma factions, Pharma is not trying to poison anyone or keep anyone sick or hide cures or anything ridiculous like that. They are trying to make drugs that have value in the marketplace so they can profit off of them.

[00:37:00] Jordan Harbinger: Right. So it's not like anyone would claim they aren't profit driven. I think that part, we can all agree on that.

[00:37:06] Dave Farina: No, this is not, this is not nonprofit. This is not just charity here. I mean, they're, they're profit driven. Every corporation is profit driven from Pfizer to Hallmark, right? There's nothing that is being sold that isn't intended to generate profit, including alternative medicine, by the way, and including Ayurveda. That's, it's how capitalism works. And the difference here is that big pharma is a very big industry, right? You know, it's any gigantic industry will produce some unethical behavior. So banking, telecommunications, energy, and yes, pharma, as well as the health industry, which, by the way, is a billion-dollar industry, right? It's a very big industry, but the ways in which a pharmaceutical industry can be unethical. It does not infringe on basic scientific facts, right? So what a disease is, what a drug is, how we should make drugs to address these diseases. All of that is true, whether or not pharmaceutical companies even exist. The ways in which these drugs are sold and distributed and prescribed, these are the things where openings appear to abuse the system and increase profits, right? Bribe a doctor to prescribe something that's off label, right? These are the unethical areas where we are failed. But that's why we have regulatory bodies. They're supposed to safeguard all of these avenues, but unfortunately, right, lobbying exists, and corruption exists, and this is the reality of it. But this is not unique to any individual industry. It's not unique to pharma. We deal with it in all of these.

[00:38:31] Jordan Harbinger: So it sounds like it's a good idea to try and separate opinions about how an industry operates from the ways that the body works and the ways that drugs work to separate science from industry, essentially.

[00:38:42] Dave Farina: Exactly. To separate science from industry. That's exactly right. So we should stay vigilant. We need to regulate these industries. And that's why we have the regulatory bodies. But the discussion of how medicine should be developed It just doesn't have anything to do with that. It's another sphere entirely. So, people who turn to things like Ayurveda, specifically as backlash against the pharmaceutical industry, this is totally misplaced, right? Pseudoscience does not become scientific simply because science-based medicine can become corrupted, right? We have to focus on getting rid of any corruption rather than throwing the baby away with the bathwater and turning to completely unsubstantiated pseudoscience.

[00:39:17] Jordan Harbinger: That's a good way to put it. Pseudoscience does not become science simply because there are problems with how science is implemented. I'm going to want to tattoo that on my arm somewhere. Something tells me that you would have the same view of essentially anything that we describe as alternative medicine, naturopathy, homeopathy. I'm going to go out on a limb here and presume that all of the same conclusions apply.

[00:39:39] Dave Farina: Yes, almost without exception. I mean, these are all different flavors of the same delusion. Nature good, man bad. Ancient, smart, modern, dumb, you know, and people are easily ensnared by these things because it gives them an avenue to feel wise and special and worldly and connected and spiritual. So it's like selling the feeling of having circumnavigated the evil system and then now you're connecting with something real, something, a deeper tier of reality, but ultimately it's a facade. It's a vehicle for marketing.

[00:40:08] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of marketing and capitalism, I believe you expand on these themes quite significantly in your book, which I have read. Do you want to give it a quick plug? You talked about it on the show as well.

[00:40:16] Dave Farina: Yes, yeah, it's called Is This Wi-Fi Organic? A Guide to Spotting Misleading Science Online, and I talk quite a lot about alternative medicine and things of all, the nature of what we've been talking about. But then, you know, the basic information in chemistry, biochemistry, biology, and physics, little primers that kind of help you be able to spot this stuff. Really just a handy guide for a more science-based worldview.

[00:40:37] Jordan Harbinger: A noble cause. Also, again, we discussed this book in the episode that I first did with you probably a couple of years ago now. That was episode 745.

[00:40:46] Thanks for joining us again, Dave. Really interesting.

[00:40:48] Dave Farina: Thanks for having me.

[00:40:51] Jordan Harbinger: I've got some thoughts on this episode, but before I get into that, I speak with the infamous Fyre Fest, Billy McFarland from inside federal prison where he's serving six years for fraud and on the hook for 26 million in restitution. Here's a quick bite.

[00:41:06] Female Operator: You will not be charged for this call. This call is from—

[00:41:10] Billy McFarland: William McFarland.

[00:41:11] —an inmate at a federal prison. Hang up to decline the call or to accept dial five now.

[00:41:19] Jordan Harbinger: When I asked before on our first call if you were a con man, we had 10 seconds of silence. Is this the new Billy that we're hearing or are you the same Billy that tried to pull off the Fyre Festival?

[00:41:32] Billy McFarland: When I think about it the mistakes that were made and what happened, there's no way I can just describe it other than what the f*ck was I thinking. I was wrong and I hope now that I can in some small way make a positive impact.

[00:41:43] Jordan Harbinger: Once you knew that the festival wasn't going to go as planned, why didn't you call it off?

[00:41:50] Billy McFarland: So a lot of people don't know, but the decision to cancel the festival was made when I was told that three people had died in the event. Thankfully, no one was actually physically hurt in any way. But up until the last second, I believed incorrectly we could pull it off and obviously, I was wrong.

[00:42:05] We had something called the urgent daily payments document. And basically, it was this Google Excel sheet. Essentially, it was a list of payments that we had to make that day or else the festival couldn't proceed. In a couple of months leading up to the event, it went from a couple of thousand dollars a day to a few million dollars a day. Where I had to wake up at nine in the morning, find three million by noon, and then make the payments by four.

[00:42:26] Jordan Harbinger: How is solitary confinement essentially being locked in a box? Like, that sounds terrible.

[00:42:31] Billy McFarland: It really makes you think, and I think the biggest takeaway was, you know, there was one guy who was serving a 30-year sentence, and he was already locked in the same room for over three and a half years when I was there.

[00:42:42] Jordan Harbinger: You had a big vision. I mean, it was huge. And you got so close to something great that everyone wanted to be a part of, and people still want to be a part of it. I have to wonder if there's going to be a Fyre Fest version two, I assume you wouldn't call it that, but are you thinking of doing something similar?

[00:42:56] Billy McFarland: If there's anything that makes you want to create and build and do, it's being locked in a cage for months or years. Are you going to come?

[00:43:04] Jordan Harbinger: For more with Billy McFarland, including lessons learned on the inside, the value of trust, and Billy's plans for the future once he's served the time he agrees he rightly deserves, check out episode 422 of The Jordan Harbinger Show.

[00:43:19] Thanks so much for listening. Topic suggestions, I believe this was one from a show fan. Those can be sent to me directly, jordan@jordanharbinger.Com. Show notes at jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts are in the show notes. Advertisers, deals, discounts, and ways to support the show, all at jordanharbinger.com/deals. I'm at @JordanHarbinger on both Twitter and Instagram. You can also connect with me on LinkedIn. And you can find Dave at Professor Dave Explains on YouTube.

[00:43:44] Once again, a reminder that the Stitcher app will no longer work for any podcasts as of August 29th, 2023. So if you're using the Stitcher app, time to switch. If you're on Android, Podcast Addict is a good one, Castbox. And if you're on iOS, I suggest Overcast or Apple Podcasts. The Stitcher app is going away, folks.

[00:44:02] This show is created in association with PodcastOne. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jase Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, Millie Ocampo, and Gabriel Mizrahi. Our advice and opinions are our own, and I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. Remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. If you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody who could use a good dose of the skepticism we doled out today. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show, so you can live what you listen, and we'll see you next time.

[00:44:34] This episode is also sponsored by A Little Bit Culty. It's a podcast I'd love to point you to. It's with Sarah and Nippy. I know that's a funny name. He's a good dude. They're former NXIVM cult members whom we had on the show, episode 770 and 771. They're also on HBO's docu-series called The Vow. If you have seen that, it's wild, you know already. If you haven't, definitely check out this podcast. On their podcast, A Little Bit Culty, Sarah and Nippy, they got a lot to share. Fiery questions for folks who've walked in similar shoes to topics like the dangers of multi-level marketing. You know, that's one of my pet targets as well. Coercion and organized religion, the presence of cult-like dynamics in our everyday workplaces. They've got some really good episodes on Scientology, filmmakers unmasking Teal Swan, who is kind of like an online cult leader, new age gurus, NXIVM stuff, and more. You can start by listening to all 100 of their episodes and catch new episodes every Monday. So go find A Little Bit Culty on your favorite podcast app or learn more at alittlebitculty.Com