1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday

1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday

This transcript is yet untouched by human hands. Please proceed with caution as we sort through what the robots have given us. We appreciate your patience!

[00:00:00] Jordan Harbinger: Welcome to Skeptical Sunday. I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host Professor Dave Farina. You get so much crap for that online, by the way, Dave. Yeah. Your professor name. You had to see that coming though, right? No,

[00:00:15] Dave Farina: I didn't. As I was teaching organic chemistry at a university, and when I started the channel was just my university organic chemistry tutorial, so it seemed apropos at the time.

[00:00:23] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, no, I mean, it seems fair, but whenever people are like, fake Professor Dave thinks the Earth is round. I'm like, well, you can't really say anything about that. Yeah. As

[00:00:31] Dave Farina: though you trust any astronomy or geology or physics professor in the entire world, you hypocrite, right? Yeah. You could

[00:00:38] Jordan Harbinger: be talking to, I don't know, Galileo, and you'd be like, Nope, sorry.

No, I made up my mind. Anyway, 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. Those around you. By the way, I know Galileo was the sun not going around the Earth guy.

Don't email me. Who did figure out the earth was round? Do we even know?

[00:01:01] Dave Farina: Oh, various ancient Greeks and contemporaries, but also Galileo wasn't the first to figure out Helio Centrism. That was Copernicus. And then actually Kepler, I. Confirmed it,

[00:01:10] Jordan Harbinger: so maybe people should email me 'cause clearly I don't know who I'm talking about or have any idea.

Anyway, our mission is to help you become a better informed, more critical thinker like I should be apparently about Helio centrism. During the week, we have long form conversations with a variety of amazing folks, spies, CEOs, athletes, authors, thinkers, performers. On Sundays, though we do Skeptical Sunday, where a rotating guest, co-host and I we break down a topic you may have never thought about and debunk common misconceptions about that topic.

Topics such as flat earth, for example, circumcision, the Olympics being kind of a sham, chem trails, banned foods, GMOs, internet porn, and more. If you're new to the show or you wanna tell your friends about the show, we've got some starter packs, which are collections of top episodes organized by topic, so you can find out what your friend or your grandma or your dad or whatever wants to listen to and spoonfeed him that one.

Topics like psychology, persuasion, influence, China, North Korea, crime cults, and more. Just visit Jordan harbinger.com/start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, today we're gonna look at Feng shui or feng shui or however people mispronounce it. I think it's feng shui. That's just the dialect of manner and that I've been studying no big deal.

Humble Bragg, which is an ancient Chinese practice. Not humble bragging, but feng shui, or some might say in art form. Others mistakenly say it's science. It's not. We'll talk about that today. Regarding the arrangement of objects in the home or other areas, gardens streets, and to help us with this analysis today is your favorite debunker of pseudoscience and mine, Dave Farina of the YouTube channel.

Professor Dave Explains. Dave, thanks for joining us again today.

[00:02:45] Dave Farina: Pleasure as always.

[00:02:46] Jordan Harbinger: So let's start with the very basics. What is Feng shui? And I know you're gonna say feng shui. It's fine. How is it different? I, I go

[00:02:54] Dave Farina: back and

[00:02:54] Jordan Harbinger: forth. You get back and forth, you flip flop on the feng shui. Sure I do. The irony is not lost here in that it is something that is fully malleable.

How is it different though, from just interior decorating? How come If I hire somebody who is a master of feng shui, I'm not just hiring. An interior decorator, for lack of a better term.

[00:03:13] Dave Farina: Spoiler, you kind of are. Yeah. But as you mentioned, this is a concept of Chinese origin and it's quite old, and I'll be honest, I really didn't know too much about it beyond the absolute basics.

So I did do a little bit of research for this conversation so that we can dive into the minutia of it all. But to start the very basics, Fung means wind and shui means water. So this is a clear allusion to nature and to. Fluidity and to humans being connected with the flow of an environment. Of course, energy will be a big buzzword as it is with all mysticism.

But anyway, Feng shui is the practice or art of arranging objects in one's living space to create balance with the natural world. So the goal is to attain some kind of. Perfect harmony with one surroundings concept that, of course, is quite alluring at face value, even if it's meaningless on a deeper level.

[00:04:03] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, I get that. This idea of some kind of oneness with the universe is actually behind a lot of different flavors. I. Of mysticism, right? You take the yin yang symbol and concept and you're like, oh, karate, martial arts, whatever has to be that way. Food now has to be that way. Feng shui has to be that way.

It's the way of the universe, but then it's just selectively applied where people make up a new system for it. Why do you think that is?

[00:04:27] Dave Farina: Yeah, it's an exercise in human psychology. This is the way I look at it. It just sort of mirrors the human condition. So we are finite, we are flawed, we are imperfect.

Speak for yourself. Oh yeah. But we are intelligent, sentient beings that we can conceive of infinity and divinity and perfection merely as abstract concepts. So we naturally lament that we are not those things. We wanna be those things. We seek ways to convince ourselves that we can attain some kind of cosmic perfection.

If we just believe a certain thing or we behave a certain way, we seek to become whole. And if someone wants to believe that you can do that by collecting crystals or contorting their bodies or arranging their living room a certain way, they might just convince themselves of that reality.

[00:05:16] Jordan Harbinger: That sounds pretty on the nose and a bit reminiscent of our astrology conversation in a way, wanting to be intertwined with the cosmos and all that jazz.

[00:05:26] Dave Farina: Yeah, it all comes back to the cosmos. All forms of mysticism inevitably have a kind of crossover like this.

[00:05:32] Jordan Harbinger: So let's dig into the specifics with Feng shui. When somebody acts as a practitioner of this art or whatever you call it, what are they doing? What are they prescribing?

[00:05:43] Dave Farina: Okay, so let's get into the details here.

Right up top. Feng Shui has three principles, those being commanding position, bwa, and five elements. So let's imagine a room of some kind, or we've got a bedroom or office or whatever, and we can start with commanding position. So this refers to the part of the room that you will spend the most time in.

So if we're talking about a bedroom, that's gonna be the bed. Could be a couch if it's a living room, if you're talking about an office that's gonna be your desk and so forth. Feng Shui says that this object should be as far from the door as possible, and at a diagonal with respect to the door. So not immediately next to the door and not immediately across from the door.

[00:06:22] Jordan Harbinger: Hmm. So far I'm looking around my office. So far so good. Okay. That doesn't sound too crazy. I'll admit I can't immediately say. Why I sort of agree with that, but I think of any bedroom I've ever had, and it kind of describes where the bed should go and did go most of the time.

[00:06:37] Dave Farina: Yeah, I mean, it makes sense just in terms of like how to use a space most economically,

[00:06:41] Jordan Harbinger: maybe everything about Feng shui can be justified logically in that sort of way.

Or am I getting

[00:06:45] Dave Farina: ahead of myself? Yeah, don't get too far ahead. The second principle is a bit out there. So next, once the primary piece is placed, you can consider the BWA or the energy map that has to be Oh, yeah. Yeah, so we're right to the energy stuff. This is the energy map. It's gotta be superimposed on the floor of the house or an individual room.

[00:07:05] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah, that took an abrupt, sharp turn for the kooky. I should have probably just waited till I heard the word energy map.

[00:07:12] Dave Farina: Yes. Energy of some kind. Yeah. Right.

[00:07:14] Jordan Harbinger: So there's an energy map or whatever of some sort that you would just place on top of the floor, like a blueprint kind of deal.

[00:07:20] Dave Farina: Pretty much. Yeah. And as one would predict inevitably the energy map, it has eight areas relating to specific things.

So these would be family wealth, helpful people, children, knowledge, fame, career and partnerships. And it's laid out in a grid type format.

[00:07:37] Jordan Harbinger: Yikes. Okay. It's already complicated. And these correlate with specific sections of the map and therefore specific parts of the room. So is there like a career part of the room where the desk is and of whatever.

[00:07:49] Dave Farina: Yes, that's right. Yari, if you want to put it there. And beyond this, the concepts that comprise these areas have associated shapes, colors, seasons, numbers and elements. So like for family, there's a family section. The shape is columer or rectangular. The associated colors are green, blue, and teal. The season is spring.

The number is four. The element is yang wood, and finally at the center of this map, so you got eight around the edges, and then in the center is the ninth area, which represents your overall wellness.

[00:08:23] Jordan Harbinger: What if the room's not rectangular? I.

[00:08:25] Dave Farina: Yeah, that's a good question. I would bet there's not really a satisfactory answer to that.

I guess a practitioner would say, oh, you can just distort the grid in whatever way you want to keep pretending it means anything. Uh,

[00:08:37] Jordan Harbinger: yeah. Like while we're making shit up completely. Yeah. You can make the grid round now. Whatever, man. Yeah, it's fine. Did the check clear? Yeah. So another objection that immediately comes to mind is that if you were to superimpose this map.

Over the whole house, but then also over an individual room, aren't you necessarily, and inevitably going to get conflicting results.

[00:08:57] Dave Farina: Totally. I thought about this too. So if you place it over the whole house, then let's say there's one room that is entirely in the knowledge area. So from the perspective of the house, that has to be like the knowledge room.

But then if you put the bagua over that room, you have a smaller map. Now all eight concepts are represented suddenly. And that's not all. Yeah, it's supposed to work for your whole house, but it can work for a whole city block or like a town like any scale. So the energy map of any area can change in any arbitrary way depending on what you're looking at.

And that just, to me, it leads to all these contradictions.

[00:09:31] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And I'm sure that if you practice this, you have reasons why certain things switch and work and don't and work. But I just hear the mystics in the back of my head. In modern times shouting about quantum mechanics or whatever, like it's different when you're looking from this perspective than this perspective.

It's like, okay.

[00:09:48] Dave Farina: Yeah. The energy map that they would say is in a constant super position until you observe a specific part of the house and then the wave function collapses to give you a discreet, energetic experience.

[00:09:58] Jordan Harbinger: Sure. I mean, that makes no sense to me without any context, but it makes as much sense as Feng shui in the first place.

You can't argue that logic as long as we're just making up our own rules as we go. Let's get that third principle and then we can start to dissect some of this stuff. What's that last principle that you mentioned?

[00:10:14] Dave Farina: Yeah, so the last one we have the five elements, which are earth, metal, water, wood, and fire.

So the point with these is that you can identify some area of your life that needs work and then you can implement one or more of these elements strategically to address those needs.

[00:10:30] Jordan Harbinger: Can you gimme an example of how you would do that?

[00:10:33] Dave Farina: Yeah, so let's say you're stressed or tired or something, you would need rejuvenation.

And so presumably the bedroom might be the place where you would do that. And so you wanna reconnect with the earth and rejuvenate. And so you would use earth tones and you could have clay pottery in the room, or stones or crystals or other things from the earth, and that would bring you the rejuvenation that you seek.

[00:10:58] Jordan Harbinger: It's funny to me because when I think of rejuvenation, I don't think I would go straight to earth. I probably think of water first. It rehydrates you, keeps you alive. You could shower with it. I don't know if I'm thinking like lay on the dirt.

[00:11:10] Dave Farina: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'd be inclined to probably think of water first too, right?

If you take a nice bath or something, and I bet some of the practitioners might go to that first and would suggest a water element or wind element, right? For a breath of fresh air or something. But thus enters the complete and utter ambiguity. Of all of this, which negates any shred of empirical validity it could hope to have.

[00:11:32] Jordan Harbinger: And as far as these primal elements, and I put that in air quotes, 'cause those aren't real elements. I guess they're design elements. I don't know. This is a very old concept. It seems like all ancient civilizations had some version of this because they didn't know what molecules were atoms or anything.

[00:11:46] Dave Farina: This goes way, way back. Ancient Greece and maybe even before. Usually metal isn't one of 'em because that's maybe the bonus one, but the other four, you know, fire, earth, water, wind is usually, we hear about these all the time. We know now that it's totally meaningless. Like it's just wrong. They're not. We have the periodic table of the elements.

Those are the elements. Water and fire and earth are not fundamental elements. Now, that doesn't mean we can't refer to them as elements of design like you were saying. I mean, that's more of a metaphorical way of saying element, and that's perfectly fine. It also makes sense that you could utilize some kind of theme when decorating.

That's fine too.

[00:12:21] Jordan Harbinger: Right? I can imagine a bedroom full of earth tones and rocky sculptures, and so that that's, that could be warm and peaceful.

[00:12:27] Dave Farina: Yeah, totally. And someone else could get some other subjective impression of that sort of a design scheme. And I. Ultimately, that's all this really is. We're talking about interior decoration with a splash of mysticism, and if people would just embrace that fact, there would be no issue.

Right? That'd be totally fine. We could even whimsically refer to the ancients and say, oh, the Chinese in ancient times, they used to do this or that, and you get like a little sense of the passage of time in doing so and adds some weight to what you're doing. The problem is when assertions are made about energy or other rigidly physical concepts, in that there is a correlation with these design elements that ought to be measurable and describable.

You should be able to do something scientific with these things if these claims are true.

[00:13:11] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of chi, you'll have chi out the wazoo if you purchase one of the fine products and services that support this show. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Shopify. Ever try to buy something online and immediately know the company is not using Shopify.

That happened to me just yesterday. I was trying to check out. The process was so clunky. I literally told Jen, this company is definitely not on Shopify because when a business does use Shopify, you can tell it's fast, it's seamless. It doesn't make you jump through 87 hoops just to give 'em your money.

And that's the not so secret. Secret. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. They've got the number one checkout on the planet, and with shop pay conversions can jump by up to 50%. That means fewer abandoned carts. Way more cha-ching moments for business owners. If you're serious about growing your business, your commerce platform better be ready to sell wherever your customers are on your website.

In store social feeds, anywhere they're scrolling. Because businesses that sell more, they sell on Shopify. So whether you're launching your first product or you're scaling up, Shopify makes it ridiculously easy to sell, convert, and grow. And as somebody who buys a lot online, probably more than I should admit, I can tell you firsthand, it makes life easier for customers too.

[00:14:10] Jen Harbinger: Upgrade your business and get the same checkout Mattel and Allbirds uses. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period@shopify.com slash Jordan in all lowercase. Go to shopify.com/jordan to upgrade your selling today, shopify.com/jordan.

[00:14:24] Jordan Harbinger: This episode is also sponsored by Rocket Money. You ever sign up for something, totally forget about it and realize like 10 months later you've been paying for it this whole time?

Yes, we've all been there. Apparently 85% of people have at least one subscription they're paying for, but not even using, which means most of us are throwing money away every single month. That's why I started using Rocket Money. Rocket Money is a personal finance app that helps find and cancel your unwanted subscriptions.

Monitors your spending, helps lower your bills so you can grow your savings. It pulls together all your subscriptions into one place so you can finally see exactly where your money is going to make it stupid, easy to cancel the ones you don't need anymore. One click, it's handled. Track your spending across all your accounts, set budgets even get alerts if a bill goes up or there's unusual activity.

They will even help negotiate lower bills for you. Rocket money has over 5 million users, has saved a total of $500 million in canceled subscriptions, saving members up to 740 bucks a year when using all of the app's premium features.

[00:15:14] Jen Harbinger: Cancel your unwanted subscriptions and reach your financial goals faster with Rocket Money.

Go to Rocket money.com/jordan today. That's Rocket money.com/jordan rocket money.com/jordan.

[00:15:25] Jordan Harbinger: Thank you for listening to and supporting the show. Your support of our sponsors keeps us going. All the links, deals and discount codes are in one place, Jordan harbinger.com/deals. You can also ask the AI chatbot for promo codes.

Please consider supporting those who support the show. Now back to skeptical Sunday, what is the justification? Is any reasoning given to justify any of this? Like you mentioned that one of the BWA has specific colors like blue, the numbers four, all that stuff. So the question is why those, what is there to distinguish any of this from a set of just completely arbitrary made up assertions?

[00:16:05] Dave Farina: Yeah, very good question. And as you might guess, nothing. It's like with astrology. No attempt is made to explain any kind of physical mechanism as to how this could function, why these specific correlations or assignments are as they are. It's gospel essentially, if you are to say that the color purple signifies wealth or helps you attain wealth in some way.

It's a very natural question. Why, how, why purple? How does purple do that? What is the reasoning behind this? What is the demonstration of this correlation? It's never described as nothing empirical. It's just blindly asserted while making vague references to mystical concepts like q. They'll say a sparse room has too much qi and a densely packed room blocks qi or doesn't give Qi, room to flow, things like that.

So Q is life energy for people who've never heard of it or something like that. So QI needs to flow, I guess apparently even with that though, there should be many more questions. Right? Where is the qi in the room? Is it with us right now? Apparently it is with us at all times. It's like the force in Star Wars, but where is it in the room such that it is being blocked by a chair or a table?

Can it go over or under furniture? How tall does something have to be to block Qi? Do humans block qi? Do we block the qi? Why does Qi need to flow in the first place? Uh, you know, these are all important questions.

[00:17:28] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. And I mentioned before that chi is life energy or something, but maybe I should have asked, what is chi?

Exactly, because I don't know what it is. I've heard that it's a life energy 'cause that's what they told me in martial arts, but that even they didn't know anything about this.

[00:17:42] Dave Farina: No, same era. Yeah, it's a pretty nebulous concept. And yeah, most would try to refer to QE as like a vital life force or like a life energy.

But that's, again, this is only good enough for someone with no follow-up questions. Stan, you weren't familiar with the concept of energy. It raises a lot of red flags. I

[00:17:59] Jordan Harbinger: feel like we're about to dive into a physics lesson here.

[00:18:02] Dave Farina: We could a little bit. I mean, it depends on how far you wanna go, but if we're gonna talk about energy, if we're gonna be throwing around this term energy and making all these implications, we should at least elucidate the term energy.

We should know what the word energy means.

[00:18:14] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I feel like that word is used really loosely at times. For a long time, for years, it was actually banned on my show because it had become almost meaningless. If you were talking about, and even now, if you're talking about energy on my show, it doesn't happen as much as it used to.

It has to be like electricity or something that you learned about in your science class, in your physics class in high school. It can't be when somebody goes, everything is energy, right? And just uses that to explain some random thing. I don't allow that. It's become totally meaningless as a word. The meaninglessness.

Is by design. So charlatans, practitioners of Woo, whatever, they can sell us something, claim that it's got something to do with energy, whatever. And you're not supposed to have follow up questions. You're just like too tired to argue with them at that point or whatever.

[00:19:05] Dave Farina: Sure the Grifters do use it that way, but the reason that they're able to do that is because they're exploiting public confusion about the term.

To many people, energy just means some magical, mystical substance. That's what it is. But in physics, it has a very rigid definition. It means, here we go, the capacity to do work. That's it. To elucidate what work is, work refers to action done to induce motion on an object. So basically energy is the thing that allows for motion more or less.

[00:19:35] Jordan Harbinger: I'm going way back to middle school, seventh grade science class here. But aren't there different forms of energy? I remember kinetic energy was the energy of motion. Potential energy was the energy of potential motion. I don't even know. And then, and then heat, is that separate or is that also kinetic? I don't even know.

'cause the molecules are moving.

[00:19:53] Dave Farina: Yeah, for kinetic energy, this has to do with the mass and velocity of an object, and this energy can be transferred through collisions, like a car crash or something. Potential energy is energy held by virtue of an object's position in a field. The higher you lift an object away from the surface of the earth, the more gravitational potential energy it has, and if released, it will fall.

It too can transfer energy upon impact. Now, same thing with heat. The word heat, it means the transfer of kinetic energy from one system of particles to another. So hotter objects have faster moving particles, colder objects have slower moving particles, and if they come into contact, the particles collide and transfer energy until the temperature is uniform and thermal equilibrium has been reached.

[00:20:36] Jordan Harbinger: This is all coming back to me now. And you mentioned those thermal systems. Now I'm understanding why my insulated cup works, right? Because in the, in between these metal walls, there's a vacuum and there's less molecules. So it's hard for the heat to get into my cold drink and vice versa, I guess now that all makes sense.

Okay, so temperature is really measuring exactly that heat is not a substance or something like that,

[00:20:59] Dave Farina: right? It's not a substance. Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energies of the particles in a system. That's all. It's.

[00:21:06] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so I guess what we're saying is that when certain people use the word energy, what they are describing is not energy at all.

[00:21:15] Dave Farina: Completely. Yeah. And the thing is that some people use the word metaphorically and acknowledge that they are using it metaphorically, and that's fine. I might even say, oh, this room has good energy. I just mean that I get a good impression from it. I like the room. It's aesthetically pleasing to me. Right.

I just like it, but she flow as well. Yeah, sure. Of course. It's. But, uh, it doesn't mean it's literally pulsating with some unique aura that can be measured and quantified. It's just an expression.

[00:21:44] Jordan Harbinger: But then some people use the word that way, but they don't realize they're using it that way, the metaphorical way.

And I think that's where the confusion begins. They either don't realize or they're doing it on purpose.

[00:21:54] Dave Farina: That's right. That is all of it is they're taking metaphorical usage and then they're liberalizing it. So that's W with all of this stuff, QI, energy healing, any of that stuff, it stems from a misunderstanding of what energy actually is.

So again, it has this very specific meaning that we talked about, and it has been bastardized by a culture seeking something that isn't there. It's just like, what could good energy or bad energy possibly mean? It doesn't mean anything. How could one measure and categorize such things concretely? It's not a thing.

[00:22:25] Jordan Harbinger: Also positive or negative energy, which I guess that's not a real thing, right? That would be the same issue.

[00:22:31] Dave Farina: No, this is actually part of why it's so easy to diagnose the origin of this kind of confusion. So like in physics, quantities of energy can be assigned positive or negative values and positive or negative, meaning greater than or less than zero.

It's an arithmetic. Not

[00:22:46] Jordan Harbinger: like good or bad is what I'm trying to say. Yeah,

[00:22:48] Dave Farina: no, but it's just, it's a linguistic coincidence that the word positive has an another connotation as meaning good, like a positive experience. So if you're talking about an object that has positive or negative potential energy or plus more or less than zero, somebody might then transfer that over to the alternate connotation and think of good or bad.

I think that's where the concept of good energy and conversely bad energy came from originally.

[00:23:16] Jordan Harbinger: I see. That is confusing, especially if you're trying to confuse people with it. It's pretty easy to do just given that going, like they wouldn't call it. It reminds me of when somebody was talking about essential oils.

The person was like, why do you think they call them essential? It's because you need them. And it was like, no, that it's because it's the essence of something and it's like, no, essential. Like it's essential that you have gas in your car. If you don't buy them, you die. Yeah. I'm like, that's not what they mean.

So we are sitting there arguing over semantics and then I realized I'm just, I might as well ram my head through the wall because I'm gonna get further that way. Arguing semantics with this person, but it's not really the word energy either or not just the word energy. I hear people use words like frequency, vibration all the time, and I would imagine that applies here even with Feng Shui,

[00:24:02] Dave Farina: other critical buzzwords, and I can hear them apply.

I don't know too much about how people talk about feng shui, but I can definitely hear them saying. The correct alignment of furniture will help you achieve a specific frequency or something like that. But, uh, again, just like with good or bad energy, this is completely meaningless.

[00:24:21] Jordan Harbinger: So what do those words actually mean?

[00:24:23] Dave Farina: So frequency just means a number of cycles per unit time. So if something is cyclical, like a rotating object or like a wave. Then the number of rotations or waves, you know, wavelengths per some unit of time, that gives you a frequency. So you could have the RPM of a record or a wheel on a car or a bike.

That's a frequency. How many times around per second or per minute, whatever you could measure the frequency of a sound wave. Right. That has a wavelength. So it's just the number of waves that pass by a particular spot in, let's say one second, right? That's the SI unit for time. So we can count that. And then the number of waves or cycles per second is called hertz.

That's what Hertz is. It's inverse seconds, right? Number of wavelengths per second. But the point is that we're talking about a concrete phenomenon. We're talking about a sound wave, or it could be electromagnetic radiation. We're talking about. A frequency of something. So if someone just says frequency, but they don't specify what they're talking about, what a frequency of what is being measured, it's just meaningless.

The word by itself is meaningless. Such and such has a particular frequency. So this chair has a good frequency. Frequency of what? What are you talking about? Is the chair bouncing or is it spinning around? Do you mean the atoms vibrating inside the chair? What are you talking about? Frequency of what this word is misused constantly again, often by design, right?

With the grifters, just like energy. This is what they do. This is the script

[00:25:54] Jordan Harbinger: and vibration. Same bucket is frequency, wavelength, whatever.

[00:25:58] Dave Farina: Yeah. The thing here though is that do atoms do vibrate? Right. There are vibrations, but that doesn't make the magic. You can't just use that word to mean whatever you want.

Atoms can transfer energy by virtue of their vibrations, but that's heat transfer. That's what we were talking about earlier, right? If faster moving or faster vibrating particles are colliding with slower vibrating ones, that's just heat transfer. It's just thermal equilibrium. That's all that is.

[00:26:21] Jordan Harbinger: Speaking of fortune and prosperity, mine will be increased. If you support defined products and services that support this show, we'll be right back. This episode is also sponsored in part by Taylor Brands. You wouldn't believe how many people ask me, Jordan, you're a lawyer. How do I set up an LLC? And until now, I didn't have a simple go-to recommendation, but I finally do tailor brands.

If you're serious about starting your own business, forming an LLC is usually the way to go. It separates your personal assets from your business assets. So if something goes wrong with your business. Your personal finances, like your house, your savings and your car are protected, and plus an LLC makes you look legit.

Clients and customers take you more seriously when you're operating as an official business. But here's the thing, setting up an LLC on your own can be a nightmare. There's paperwork, state fees, different rules depending on where you live. It's enough to make a lot of people quit before they even start, and that's why Tailor Brands is great.

They handle all of it for you in minutes. They don't just stop at the LLC. You get access to legal documents, licenses, bookkeeping tools, invoices, even a business coaching program to guide you through your first a hundred days. And of course we got a 35% discount for you. All you have to do is go to taylor brands.com/jordan three five to get started.

That's T-A-I-L-O-R-B-R-A nds.com/jordan 35. This episode is sponsored in part by homes.com. homes.com knows that when it comes to home shopping, it's never about the house or the condo. It's about the home. And what makes a home is more than just the house of the property. It's the location and neighborhood.

So if you've got kids, it's also schools nearby parks, transportation options. That's why homes.com goes above and beyond to bring home shoppers the in-depth information they need to find the right home. And when I say in-depth, I'm talking deep. Each listing features comprehensive information about the neighborhood complete with a video guide.

They've also got details about local schools with test scores, state rankings, student to teacher ratio. They even have an agent directory with the sales history of each agent. So when it comes to finding a home, not just a house, this is everything you need to know all in one place. homes.com. We've done your homework.

Thanks again for listening to the show, all the deals, all the sponsors and promo codes at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. Now for the rest of skeptical Sunday. So it sounds like a major problem here is that these words are not well understood, and maybe some people, they started using them metaphorically, maybe to refer to something aesthetically or to convey something subjective.

But then other people took that and tried to turn it into something literal in a way that doesn't make sense. If you know anything about science, and that's where all this mystical stuff comes from,

[00:28:42] Dave Farina: something like that. I look at what happens culturally. I look at how people are using words, what the words actually mean, and the alternate connotations, and that's just my assessment of it.

But to stick with feng shui, I mean, feng shui is essentially interior design. And interior design can obviously be considered an art.

[00:29:00] Jordan Harbinger: What is it exactly that allows us to assign it as an art form? I know this is, sounds a little bit philosophical. Can we be clear about what art really is? Is that a thing we can do in less than five hours?

[00:29:12] Dave Farina: To me it's very clear. I think it could be defined simply. We're just saying that an art is anything worse. Someone is making decisions based on a set of aesthetic criteria

[00:29:20] Jordan Harbinger: as opposed to what other type of criteria

[00:29:23] Dave Farina: as opposed to practical criteria.

[00:29:25] Jordan Harbinger: Okay, so what would be an example of each? Of those things, just so we can be clear, and I realize I'm probably beating this to death, but I think it's important to be clear about.

Things that would be art and things that would be not

[00:29:36] Dave Farina: art. Totally. And it's pretty simple in my mind. Let's say you're building like a wheelbarrow or something. We're gonna be guided by a set of practical criteria. Why are you building a wheelbarrow? 'cause it has to hold things and then you need for it to be easy to roll.

That's what's guiding the wheelbarrow design, right? So someone could include aesthetic criteria in there. Oh, I really want it to be blue or whatever. But most people who make wheelbarrows probably aren't gonna do that. It holds stuff and it's easy to roll. That's it. That's what you're thinking about when you're building a wheelbarrow.

So wheelbarrow building isn't really typically considered an art, but if you're like painting, if you're making a painting. Then the criteria are completely aesthetic. The painting doesn't serve any practical purpose. It doesn't have to roll. It doesn't have to hold objects. The decisions you make, like what colors to use and how to do the shading and whatever else there, these are aesthetic decisions.

I. I wanna paint this box green because I like it green. It looks nice to me like that it's subjective, and we can apply this way of thinking to any art form. So film, music, dance, writing, whatever it is. If you're dancing, why twirl this way and not another way, or music? Why write this melody and not another melody?

These are just aesthetic decisions that you're making. So for no other reason,

[00:30:54] Jordan Harbinger: then that's what seems aesthetically pleasing to you.

[00:30:57] Dave Farina: That's right.

[00:30:58] Jordan Harbinger: Okay. So I guess the reason this is important, 'cause people are like Jesus, let it go already. The reason this is important is that people can take the subjectivity of an art like interior design and all the aesthetic choices that have to be made and paint some.

Mysticism upon it to try to make it seem practical or aligned with some kind of universal truth where it just isn't.

[00:31:20] Dave Farina: Exactly. That's exactly how I view all of this stuff. Virtually anything mystical nail on the head. I think so. It's like. When we say that bamboo represents growth, flexibility, and kindness, or if you say that water fountains represent a flow of energy, of course there's certain context, those assertions are true.

Bamboo is objectively flexible. Water fountains involve flowing water, and if looking at those objects in your home changes your thought process in some way, maybe you look at the bamboo and it reminds you of flexibility. And it reminds you to try to be flexible. That's fine too. Your own experience, right?

Your inner monologue, your subjective experience, it's uniquely yours. No one can tell you're wrong because you looked at a thing and then you had a thought. That's fine, but the line must be drawn when claims are made that the bamboo magically imparts flexibility upon you. Like some kind of incantation, right?

Or that the presence of a water fountain makes your energy flow, it makes the QI flow, right? Or any other absurd concretely physical claim that's baseless mysticism. And I think we shouldn't entertain that in our culture. That's just my opinion. But

[00:32:34] Jordan Harbinger: yeah. Yeah, we talked about that on our longer podcast episode a couple of years ago.

Yeah. Science

[00:32:37] Dave Farina: denial and yeah,

[00:32:39] Jordan Harbinger: science denial, right? Okay. If a plant is supposed to make you feel energized. And you stand in a room first with the plant and then without the plant. How is one gauging the feeling of being energized and how are we accounting for the placebo effect, which is obviously present with anything like this?

I.

[00:32:57] Dave Farina: We're not accounting for that. And inevitably, anyone who reports a greater feeling of being energized when the plant is there is definitely reporting a placebo effect. That is certainly the case. And then of course, the non-believer who would report not feeling a difference would be chastised for not having an open mind or whatever it is.

[00:33:16] Jordan Harbinger: It sounds like you're reading my inbox every Monday morning. Every time we do one of these people are like, excuse me. Even well-meaning people, not just people who are pissed off that I've skewered acupuncture for them. But we did the astrology episode. It aired a while ago, and the next day people were like, ah, you know what?

People do study astrology. I'm like, well, not scientists. And then other people were like, look, here's your horoscope dead on. If I do say so. I know you a little bit through the podcast. This is dead on. I'm like, you could show this to anyone. It's dead on.

[00:33:45] Dave Farina: Come on. 80% of people at least something like that.

80%. 80%

[00:33:48] Jordan Harbinger: right. Some people might be like, oh, actually I'm not organized and I don't like money. Okay, fine. They don't like money. Oh, I guess I, I hate sex actually. Yeah, it's terrible. Yeah. Look, there's still 90% accurate horoscope. Come on. What do you want? All right, so what about mirrors? I would imagine that has a thing.

I see those all over Chinatown. I've asked about that and the answer was feng shui and that was again, not allowed to have follow-up questions. Something about evil spirits.

[00:34:15] Dave Farina: Yeah, I did. I encountered this too while I was reading. Is apparently mirrors equal water. There's some equivocation there with water.

So one of the things is that we need to keep our heads above water. So mirrors should be hung below. Head level

[00:34:30] Jordan Harbinger: mirrors our water. Why water specifically?

[00:34:32] Dave Farina: Why not air? Yeah. The sheer reflecting the atmosphere. Why isn't it air? But with the head level thing, right? The another question is who's head level?

Who are we talking about? Babies are people, if a baby crawls into a room, they're pretty close to the ground there and there's a mirror in the room, they're under the level, the mirror. Right? So do they suddenly experience bad qi? Should we not have any mirrors in any room where a baby might be or they will drown in QI or something?

[00:34:59] Jordan Harbinger: I mean, that might be a good idea for other reasons, but yeah, make sure your mirror is childbirth. Good point. Because. If I'm taller than the majority of people in a given area, do they have to move the mirrors for me or am I just, sorry, buddy. You're the foreigner. We're not moving our mirrors for you.

Right? Or everyone hates your house. Yeah, like thanks for putting the mirror above my head. I'm drowning in negative energy, pal. I agree. It is vague and it's inconsistent. What would you say to an interior decorator who incorporates feng shui in their practice? Is it pointless? Is it harmful, or does it just end up with you having a Chinese aesthetic?

[00:35:35] Dave Farina: Depends how they do it. I'm sure that in ancient China there were practitioners of feng shui who were incredible interior decorators, and you look at images or, uh, this dungeon is fantastic. The top dungeon. Yeah. Or a temple, you know, whatever these really nice spaces inside homes or buildings. A palace, right?

A palace is. Probably incredible. And they instill this impression of serenity or peace, and I'm sure that plenty of people have had an incredible talent for knowing how to place fountains and sitting areas and where to put art and what kind of art and all these things. And they have attributed all of that to the principles of feng shui and actuality.

They're just really talented interior decorators. Some people could look at what they've done in the past and become trained that way and like, that's fine. It doesn't make the magic real.

[00:36:24] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. I think a lot of this is sort of backwards rationalization and some things just seem obvious. Keeping entryways free of clutter.

Okay, fine. Any good decorator is intuitively going to know that I.

[00:36:35] Dave Farina: Yeah. Some of these principles in feng shui, they, they make for good decorating in a practical way. But again, that doesn't make the principles of Feng shui necessarily true, precisely as they're described with all the mystical aspects. It just makes them seem to be true if you want to believe them.

So I. Again, a modern interior decorator could do the same. They could follow all these principles and might help them be really good at their job, and honestly, that's fine. Bet some do that and they know that it's just referencing an ancient art form and getting ideas from somewhere and, and then they just keep the mysticism to themselves, or they don't even believe in the mystical aspects.

It's just a pamphlet, a guideline. You know,

[00:37:15] Jordan Harbinger: it's like a selling point. Like I'm a Feng shui certified master. I remember seeing a show a long time ago, like 20 years ago now. Were they hired? Half a dozen feng shui decorators and said, decorate this room according to the principles of feng shui. And that, of course, each one did a vastly and completely different job of decorating that room.

Everything was positioned differently. All of the colors, the whole thing was different, which sort of proves that it's not really science, right? Because if it's science and each of these people is following those principles, they end up like with 99% accuracy, they're gonna have pretty much the same design.

[00:37:52] Dave Farina: It's like if you give a sample of some molecule to some chemist and say, figure out the structure of this molecule, and they all go and they do their NMR spectroscopy and they do their other ir. They do all their characterization techniques. They're all gonna get the same answer. If you didn't get this one, you're wrong.

That's the structure of this compound. Yeah. So that's why it's Pseudoscientific right there. If there's something rigidly empirical about it, we should all agree on what the answer is. Same with astrology, you know? But we're beating a dead horse, I think, at this point. Yeah, indeed.

[00:38:21] Jordan Harbinger: Yeah. People can go back and listen to the astrology episode Lastly.

I've read that the concept of luck is a big part of this. How does luck tie in here? I know that Chinese people generally, like they're just obsessed with luck, lucky everything, restaurants, and it's a common character in old Chinese writing. You see it everywhere.

[00:38:40] Dave Farina: I. Totally. Yeah. I've always been fascinated by this and never really knew why.

I mean, I've seen it, it is ubiquitous and uh, I think luck is just English translation of fortune or prosperity, but everything is lucky or unlucky. It's everywhere. Like you said, Chinese restaurants that, you know, lucky China Buffet, whatever it is, or, or businesses other you laundromat or something. They got lucky in the name.

Yeah.

[00:39:02] Jordan Harbinger: Plus there's the fortune cookie. That's not really related, maybe.

[00:39:05] Dave Farina: Yeah. Well, no, it is. Yeah. Fortune. Same thing. Right. And that's also their desperate attempt to spice up a cookie that tastes like a manila folder.

[00:39:12] Jordan Harbinger: True. Yeah. And by the way, those were invented in San Francisco in Chinatown. Is that a fact?

Yeah, it is. I was surprised by that. I thought, oh, this is an ancient Chinese thing. I wonder how they made these 500 years ago. And the tour guide on the walking tour was like, actually. They're made right here. We're about to walk in there. And the people that invented that were like the grandparents or great grandparents of this woman who's sitting right here right now making these in this place.

Claim to fame. Yeah. Wow. And they just sit there and make those. And I, I thought, wow. So it's as American as it is Chinese. More so it's just San Francisco Chinatown. Born and bred. A gimmick. A gimmick. 100%. A gimmick. Yes. Congratulations. You invented the worst dessert of all time. Yeah. Where if you're not careful, you bite into a piece of paper with nonsense written on it.

Yes. So my parents, by the way, they went to Chinatown with a bunch of their friends and they accidentally bought like a bag of the dirty fortune cookies. Oh. And they gave them out at a party by mistake, which was hilariously embarrassing for the host of the party. Dirty. Like you're

[00:40:13] Dave Farina: gonna get herpes or like what?

[00:40:14] Jordan Harbinger: No, sorry. They're like dirty sexual fortunes inside those fortune cookies. Yeah, that's, yeah. Oh, I thought you just meant like the cookie itself is gonna give you herpes.

[00:40:22] Dave Farina: Oh, no, no. I meant the fortune is soon you're going to get herpes from all the sex that you do.

[00:40:27] Jordan Harbinger: Probably something along those lines.

They were opening them and they're, you know, my parents are 80 years old now. This happened probably 20 years ago, but. They're still of the generation where they probably don't talk about that stuff at parties. I

[00:40:38] Dave Farina: never,

[00:40:40] Jordan Harbinger: yeah, there's, there's probably a little bit of, I never, I think they also were laughing because they're not totally devoid of the sense of humor, but it's a funny mistake to make sure, and you can't tell those manila folder cookies from the other one.

So I don't know if they bought the bag 'cause it was mislabeled or they just weren't reading the label. At least they had that classic taste. Yes, they did have that classic chalk taste, manila folder chalk taste. So where does luck enter with feng shui? Or is it s uh, separate? Concept

[00:41:04] Dave Farina: I, I think it's just that they view good or bad fortune as something tangible that can be managed and manifested in predictable ways in a way that's like the ultimate reality of it, right?

It's all about the luck and the fortune, the prosperity, right? It's an attempt to situate their environment. So as to maximize good chi, which is supposed to then in turn bring good fortune. And then all the areas of the Bais represent an attempt to direct that good fortune to specific areas of one's life.

So whether that's improving your career or your family life, or your love life or your friendships or whatever's lacking for a particular person. And then objects can have lucky energy, which you can activate with intentions and aspirations according to. Yin and yang principles, it's self delusion. After a certain point,

[00:41:54] Jordan Harbinger: it sort of begins to sound like horoscopes in a way.

It is just that the fortune itself assigned, instead of being assigned by constellations, it's assigned by you making your room look a certain way.

[00:42:05] Dave Farina: Yeah. You put the desk here instead of the Orion is gonna do something to you or Capricorn. And it's not a surprise that Feng shui has a lot of overlap with Chinese astrology.

The more I look at this stuff, I, the more I see it all as one big thing. It's just a big old pit of mysticism that takes on different forms,

[00:42:22] Jordan Harbinger: a big pit of mysticism. That's how I feel about modern society sometimes, at least when I go on the internet. At any rate, thank you for helping us elucidate some of the details of Feng shui here on Skeptical Sunday.

I appreciate it, man. My pleasure. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with geopolitics analyst, Peter Zion.

[00:42:41] JHS Clip: We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding their breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident, the US is going to intervene or not, and I would argue we are not.

I. Safety on the waves is what allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model. Less than 1% of that shipping happens on land, and that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s style conflict and competition countries are increasingly find it in, in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it, and then producing more locally.

We were moving this way before the Ukraine war, before the Chinese started to break down. And before the German industrial model started to implode, this has just sped everything up. So we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next year, especially in the second half of next year, which should suggest that we are gonna have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow.

I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares because I don't see a way to fix it. The biggest loser by far is China. Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed. I think we're in the final decade of the European Union because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model, and without the German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence.

The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around. We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never gonna last and it's, it's gonna be a rough ride. So anyone who thinks this is gonna be easy. Is wrong in every possible way.

[00:44:19] Jordan Harbinger: For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 7 81 of the Jordan Harbinger Show.

Thanks everyone for listening. Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday toJordan@jordanharbinger.com. Show notes@jordanharbinger.com. Transcripts in the show notes. Advertisers deals, discounts, and ways to support the show all at Jordan harbinger.com/deals. I'm at Jordan Harbinger on both.

Well, X and Instagram. It sounds so dumb saying that, doesn't it? Yeah. Instead of Twitter, I'm on Twitter, Instagram X, whatever you wanna call it, or connect with me on LinkedIn where people aren't gonna argue about Q Anon crap in public. Dave Farina. You can find Dave at Professor Dave Explains on YouTube.

This show is created in association with Podcast one. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird, mil Campo, and Gabriel Rahi. Our advice and opinions are our own. I'm a lawyer, but I'm not your lawyer. Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show. God forbid, your chief should be blocked.

Am I right? And remember, we rise by lifting others. Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism. We doled out here today, so maybe somebody's worried about the way their room is arranged, maybe they're worried about that Qi flowing through the house.

In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn, and we'll see you next time.