492: The Earthing Movie

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There's a couple of key pieces of bullshit.

One is that the doctors all told him he was going to die.

Right?

Which doctors do all the time.

They're always constantly like, oh, fuck, you're going to die, man.

You do that a lot, Steve.

And we also tell people they're never going to walk again.

Yes.

That is really cool.

Don't let Steve catch you even seated for too long because he's like, oh, no, you're never going to walk.

Never.

Never going to happen.

But then you hit play on like that montage music.

And they give you like months, number of months to live.

Yeah, you have exactly 53 days to live.

Yeah, right, right.

God awful

movie.

Movies.

Movies.

Welcome back to the Gamcast, where each week we sample another selection from Christian Cinema in hopes that if we make fun of one of them hard enough, they'll stop making them.

I'm your host, No Illusions, and sitting 700 miles to my immediate left is my good friend Heath and Wright.

Heath, welcome back.

I have lightning powers.

Very exciting.

Awesome.

Or do I?

We'll find out.

We're all going to have superpowers by the end of this.

And sitting 900 miles to my northeast is my bad friend Eli Bostick.

Eli, how are you this fine afternoon, sir?

Oh, it's a good one this week.

No illusions.

It's a good one.

A bit of a who's who.

Did you get the powers too?

Well, and we're also excited to welcome in a brand new guest masochist, Dr.

Stephen Novella, as the host of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe podcast, the author of the Skeptics Guide to the Universe book, as well as the Skeptic's Guide to the Future.

And in his spare time, he's a clinical neurologist and an associate professor at Yale.

Steve, welcome to God Awful Movies.

Thanks for having me, guys.

Looking forward to it.

That is the most impressive resume of any guest I've ever introduced on the show.

So,

congratulations on that title that you now hold.

Thank you.

So, tell us, Heath, I know where that is in New Haven.

I know where that is.

Oh, nice.

And they see it's all coming from.

It's a really good pizza there, actually.

Oh, yeah, New Haven-style pizza is a winner.

It's so good.

It's the second best in the world.

Yeah, well, I was gonna say, this is a New Yorker say in it, so that's good.

Yeah, I'm like, I'm admitting a lot there.

Yeah, that's a straight-up cucking.

So,

I did it to myself.

I enjoy it.

Yeah, so tell us, Heath, what will we be breaking down today?

We watched the Earthing movie.

Earthing.

It's an activity.

It's the story of just some guy doing the like static zappy thing with footy pajamas and thinking he's Jesus Christ like Peter Griffin did and that he can cure every disease.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah, pretty much.

And Eli, how bad was this movie?

Well, if you love the pseudoscientific bullshit that makes up so much of the fodder we use here on God-awful movies, but you're tired of all the scientific rigor-marole that comes with UFOs and

staring directly into the sun.

You

will love this movie.

It's literally nothing, the scam.

It's the scam that's nothing.

Right.

So I want to ask you, Steve, because you, you, obviously, you know a lot of different pseudosciences.

Is this the laziest of the pseudosciences?

Not even close.

Oh, I think there's a whole, there's really a lot of bad ones out there, but this is the format of this documentary is pretty much standard.

Like, this is every single documentary about some pseudoscientific medical, alternative medicine nonsense.

You could literally plug and play with, like, there's a lot of things that they say where I'm thinking to myself, you could have just said anything at that point.

Yeah.

You know,

and it would have had the exact same, exact same meaning, exact same result.

It's manipulative in every way that they're all manipulative.

It's, you know, cringy throughout.

It's, you know, again, it's, it's boilerplate, really, boilerplate nonsense.

You can insert any nonsense in a lot of places.

We're brainstorming.

We're coming up with good ideas for our new businesses.

I like it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

So is there anything you guys want to nominate this one for being the best at being the worst at?

Yeah, I'm going to go with best worst

ideas.

Just overall, I hate their ideas.

I hate all of it.

They're bad people with bad ideas.

Their ideas are dumb.

Yeah.

Bold claim.

So I got a very narrow one.

I want to go with best, worst, very authoritative title.

One guy in this movie introduces himself as, quote, senior research medical scientist at North American Science Associates.

Yeah.

That's just wonderful bullshit to have on a business card, I think.

I bet he says NASA for sure.

Yeah, he Chirons himself like someone being escorted out of a skeptic's guide live show in handy.

I'm actually the senior research.

I said I'm going.

I've said I'm going.

This is is technically nasa i'm not resisting and i'm going to go with best best surprise villain so most of the con men in this movie that we experience are unknowns right because this is their niche of nonsense except we get a surprise i'm going to say all-timer in this movie that when he appeared on screen i screamed like the beatles on sullivan i was like oh my god he's here oh my god he's here i don't there's honestly there's two people you could be talking about

talking about.

So, Steve, do you have a best worst for us?

This was, I think, the best worst use of sappy music throughout.

Like, you get diabetes just watching this.

Yes.

Yes.

All right.

Well, I'll tell you what.

We've got some next level stupid to deal with here.

So we're going to take a minute to ramp up, but we'll be back in a flash with all the dangerous idiocy that is the Earthing movie.

Okay, how about this?

I wish for the perfect body.

Turn you into a perfect sphere.

Of course, the perfect sphere.

Hey, guys.

What what are you doing?

Oh, Keith and I are just getting into shape.

Really?

You guys are in your jammies.

Well, we're preparing.

Preparing to work out?

No, silly.

To find a genie, and we want to make sure we don't get Wishmaster or Monkey Spod.

What's the difference?

Oh, there's a difference.

Big difference.

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All right.

Thanks, Noah.

Wish you'd been here earlier.

Wait, no!

Okay, how about I wish for a perfect body?

Damn it.

Okay, everyone.

Welcome to the bullshit Woo Merchant Think Tank, where all ideas are bad ideas.

That's right.

So this morning, Zach gave his lovely workshop on magnet therapy for disease and general unwellness.

And I now believe that it is Clint's turn.

Oh,

are you sure?

I thought I was tomorrow.

I'm pretty sure I was tomorrow.

No, no, it's right here.

No, you're today.

Are you not ready?

What?

No, no.

I am ready.

I'm ready.

I'm just.

Okay, no, I got it.

I got it.

So

my thing is we're going to, it's called.

He did this last year, too.

He's totally.

Please don't interrupt.

Please interrupt.

My thing is called

Earth

thing.

Earthing.

It's called Earthing?

That is.

Yep.

That's what I said just now.

Okay, all right.

What is Earthing?

What do you actually do?

Great question.

You stand on.

the

earth

that's it you stand on the earth Yum.

I mean, can you sell a bunch of shit about standing on the earth?

I mean, Zach is just telling magnets.

No, yeah, you got a point.

You said it was lovely.

Relax, Zach.

You're okay.

And we're back for the breakdown.

And we're going to open up on this disclaimer that might as well just be a picture of their lawyer chugging Pepto.

You can't sue us.

We're on base the opening, Chiron.

Yep.

Yeah.

We got another movie for novelty purposes only.

This was fun.

So the disclaimer is like, this doesn't count, not intended to help with any disease.

And then it's like, smash cut, I cured my cancer with dirt.

Let me tell the story.

Yep.

It's even worse.

It's my kid's cancer or my kid's ailment.

It's terrible.

Right, right.

Yeah.

The disclaimer says it's intended for educational purposes only.

Also, it has no educational value.

So we're good.

So we get the disclaimer and then we meet the filmmakers, Rebecca and Josh.

And there's an awful lot of can't get mad at the beginning of this documentary.

So they're like, oh, you know, we made films about oil spills.

We're environmentalists, and I got sick from chemicals and like I had a miscarriage from it.

So really, if you think about it, making fun of me on your podcast would be really fucked up.

Insensitive, not cool, not cool at all.

You do good stuff for the environment.

I'm still making fun of RFK Jr.

for all this terrible stuff.

Like you don't get off the hook.

Yep.

I also think it's really funny that like, cause we've watched a lot of pseudoscience documentaries by people who did one good thing.

And they must know they're doing bullshit now because when you're making a second good documentary, you don't go like, hi, I'm Michael Moore.

I made a good one.

Here's another good one.

You just make another good one.

It is only when a filmmaker dives into bullshit that they're like, now, now, now, now, hear me out.

Yeah.

I was a PA on blackfish, okay?

So you guys have to be nice to me.

There's a part here where she's talking about that she's getting sick from the chemicals.

She's like, and I wrote in my notes, oh, wow, the chemicals probably even fucked up her lady bits.

And then I realized the problem with inviting the prestigious podcaster, Dr.

Stephen Novella, on the podcast, I was super self-conscious about writing probably even fucked up her lady bits in the notes, right?

I know.

I was like, I was, do I go back and go, she experienced negative consequences in her reproductive anatomy or something like that?

So apologies in advance for that.

You don't have to get technical.

That's all right.

So, yeah, but she talks about her miscarriage and we all wrote I believe it's called vaginalia.

Yes,

that means womb.

Yeah, it's the same.

So, but yeah, but ultimately, she talks about her miscarriage.

We all write some form of wow, a lot of humor potential in this first scene, huh?

Yeah, my notes at this point were fucking get in there, Steve.

Really roast this birth defect, babe.

Get it.

I wanted Steve to go so hard, just a miscarriage, more like mismarriage.

Am I right?

Yeah, I know.

Like, to me, you gave me the worst possible film to to criticize out of the gate it's not only a sick person because i hate this because every time you wrap up some kind of medical pseudoscience into a personal anecdote it makes it bulletproof in a way emotionally right yeah but this is worse because it's your adorable cute little girl like who's actually the sick one right and it always is right it always that's like like you said this is just paint by numbers pseudoscience documentary but it's always and my kid got sick and then nothing helped and then i tried this yeah it should have to be an ugly kid sometimes to be fair to us right yes you can't have a cute kid every time i gotta be able to roast that kid this is a really cute kid yeah right or like a republican uncle right that was someone we really don't care about yeah but then okay so but we get it but then she's like you know my kid was sick and the doctors couldn't help so i decided nothing was off the table right

Hey, you should take a few things off the table, right?

At least a couple of things.

Yeah.

But then we get our scary pill montage.

Again, this is, this is paint-by-numbers shit, like Steve was talking about, like, right, we see a bunch of pills and we hear the disclaimers from TV commercials about pharmaceuticals in the background.

Yeah.

We also get a clip of what might be my favorite television show that's ever existed, The Doctors, which is just four hacks rotating, saying illegal things so that they can't all get sued at once.

And on it, one of the doctors on The Doctors says, some doctors claim they know literally everything.

And I wrote in my notes, got you steve you do say that you say that all the time all the time

but only because it's true

them doctors it's like bit torrent for lying about medicine you can't actually hit them you know that's good that's good steve's rider to come on our podcast was we had to admit he was the alpha and omega it was it was a lot and everything in between yeah yeah

again it's like this is the boilerplate you got to set up bad pharma right evil pharma you got to set up doctors or arrogant pricks who don't know what they're talking about, but they think they know everything.

And then enter the guru who saved my life, right?

That's...

How can you get mad at that?

Yeah.

Well, but and I love this too.

This one employs a slight little variation in between those two things that basically it's the pseudoscience equivalent of the dollar amounts that they give you before they tell you not to answer yet.

The ones that are supposed to make their day, because they're like, there's a lot of stuff.

Virtual dolphin therapy, snake massage therapy, therapy, urine therapy.

And it's like, yeah, our stuff seems way less dumb now, huh?

I guess you don't have to drink any pea.

So it genuinely wasn't clear to me if the movie thought those were bad, the list they did there with the dolphins and the snakes and the urine therapy or not.

Cause like these people, like drinking urine, that's like exactly this type of documentary, too.

So like we watched that documentary.

We watched that one.

Exactly.

I was like, this is identical.

But just quick question.

Virtual dolphin therapy.

So like

watching people get dolphin therapy and you're on like a Zoom call watching or you're Zooming

dolphins.

You're face timing with dolphins.

I was picturing a dolphin with its face too close to the iPhone camera being like, and you're like, no, no, no, you don't talk to it like a normal, but back away.

Back away.

Can they back up?

Oh, no, there are no actual dolphins.

They're too expensive.

Yeah, I was just thinking of playing Echo and VR or something.

Oh, an AI dolphin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Also, let's just keep in mind, Aaron Rodgers thinks he can heal heal by listening to dolphins fuck near him.

We should probably mention that more often.

That's his version of that.

Like our Pledge of Allegiance.

He also has a big show on Netflix about this right now called Enigma.

It's ridiculous.

I watched a little bit.

But ultimately, they go through all of these pseudosciences.

And then the Rebecca, the narrator of the film, says, but then someone gave us a book about...

standing barefoot on the ground and that changed everything, right?

This is where we get our title.

It says the Earthing Movie.

And she says, you know, we were skeptical at first.

And I'm like, insufficiently so, right?

I feel like, and again, all of the movies we review do this, but it's always such a weird moment where they say they're skeptical at first because obviously you weren't.

You fell for it.

Right.

There's no amount of questions you could have asked above zero that wouldn't have kept you skeptical at this practice.

So by definition, you were not skeptical at first.

Yeah.

But this leads us into our first Gwyneth Paltrow sighting.

Who had four minutes?

Who had four?

And who had RFK Jr.

three minutes, by the way?

And we lost that one for a second when they were like selling CBD, one of the doctor liars.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And it's really telling because they've got Gwyneth Paltrow on Jimmy Kimmel.

And Jimmy Kimmel is sort of like lightly challenging her on some of the bullshit they sell on her website.

And she is like openly laughing at how dumb it is.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Can you believe people give me money for this shit?

Yeah, literally is what she's saying on a talk show.

He's like, so how does that work?

She's like, it fucking doesn't.

Anyway, my vaginal laser kettle with steam, that's $999,000 on goop.com.

Check it out.

That one's real.

Yeah.

And then we meet, I think, evil universe Steve Novella, right?

With their own Dr.

Stephen.

This is Dr.

Steven Sinatra.

And he explains to us that, quote, the earth has electrons, and these electrons are absorbed through your feet.

Interesting.

So don't get all science-y on me, okay?

Now, look, I do have to say, I too would be the evil equivalent of Dr.

Steve Novella if I sounded exactly like Christopher Walken, but was not Christopher Walken.

And that is the case with Dr.

Sinatra, is he's like, I know people tell me all the time, please just take the full antibiotic.

You know what?

I'm becoming a con man.

So now, but his argument is that getting more electrons into your body is what makes you healthy, right?

That's the whole premise here.

So I wrote in my notes, I'm like, wow, the electric share must be the most healthy thing of all then, right?

He also says, and I quote, it's just like taking handfuls of antioxidants.

But eating it with your feet.

Like genuinely, like I, if I made a parody about a stupid medicine thing that i was making up this is funnier and better than anything i came up with as a joke and he's like yeah it's like handful

so throughout the rest of the movie i was like why don't you just like eat antioxidants or like put electrons in you any other way than walking around barefoot it's it doesn't make any sense is this a good point to describe exactly how scientifically full of shit this is oh please it sure is I mean, there's so many different ways, and we'll come back to it, I'm sure, multiple times.

First of all, there's like 10 octillion electrons in your body, right?

Yes.

Like that's a lot, 28 zeros.

So, you know, soaking up a couple more from the ground isn't going to do anything.

Plus, you know, electrons are electrons.

The fact that the electrons come from Mother Earth is irrelevant.

Electrons don't know where they come from.

Farm to table electrons are important.

It's farm to foot, right?

Farm to foot electrons.

You're saying these organic electrons I bought at the grocery store are important

from the ones in the other aisle, Steve?

These are artisanal.

I prefer the free-range electrons.

But no GM electron.

All right.

So the other thing is the antioxidant angle.

Of course, antioxidants, right?

Inflammation, antioxidants, all nonsense.

The thing is, your body makes antioxidants.

They make antioxidants that are thousands of times more powerful than anything you can eat, right?

Any supplement you could take or any pill.

And those antioxidants, those powerful evolved

chemicals, they donate electrons to

free radicals to turn off the free radicals when they're no longer needed.

And so soaking up a few more electrons is not going to do anything.

It's completely not.

They think they've hacked a system that has evolved over millions of years, you know, to be finely regulated.

And it's complete made-up bullshit from beginning to end.

Well, that's why I love that line so much, right?

Because he's like, well, it's like taking handfuls of antioxidants.

And I'm like, well, in terms of efficacy, I guess

right okay but it's it's like saying that like you put your foot onto the ground you get like four extra electrons to go with your like 28 octillion or whatever you said and those four electrons are like oh no no no he's got a pre-cancer cell right in the right in the lung let me get that

got it got it well it and and we're gonna get back to that right because like they're trying to like play on two tracks here one is this like very scientific oh well it's just the electrons that are absorbed by your feet and the other is mother earth knows how to heal you or whatever and and they're gonna try to have their cake and eat it too there.

We'll get to that a little bit later.

Ooh, Steve, can I ask you one other question?

Yeah.

About the electron theory here early on.

The movie will continue to be anti-proton for the rest of the time.

It's all about electrons.

Why would negative charge versus positive charge matter to them that much?

Why are protons like from Aries, the god of war, not the mother earth?

Or like, what's what's going on there?

Proton being negative, positive, both.

I think they're just anti-proton.

okay they're just bigots yeah they're just you know they're they're proton bigots and don't even get me started on neutrons because they have no place anywhere in this movie yeah neutrons seem to think that they they have their horseshoe theory it's all a bunch of bullshit yeah yeah they set up banks for nazis nobody likes that

so okay so but then we're going to meet our second expert this is laura conover md normally i would say doctor but they don't add the doctor and i don't know why so i don't want to be the one to throw it in there but she explains some more of the science to us.

She says, quote, it supports organ systems down to the tissues and cellular levels.

Like, well, listen to all them science words.

Elliot, look at that white lab coat.

How could she be wrong?

Okay, they leave a tell into this cut that is so fascinating to me.

So after she says that, the camera lingers on her for just a second longer than it should.

And she does this big, like, boom,

like, oh, damn, Lauren, you done done it now.

You're on camera saying it.

It's such a weird thing for them to keep in the movie.

It was weird.

Yeah.

All right.

So, and again, I want to highlight that sentence.

It supports organ systems to the tissues and cellular level.

What the fuck would that mean?

What that means, I'll tell you what that means.

That's what they say because that's exactly what they're allowed to say.

Oh, and they say the FDA allows them to say that your bullshit medicine supports tissues and supports organ function.

That's the language that is legally allowed because you can't say it treats a disease.

Right.

Because then the FDA will perk up and go, What?

That's you can't say that.

Then you're a drug and we have to regulate you.

But you could say the supports, whatever.

That's the structure function claims that were written into the law in 94.

So

it's amazing how they say exactly what they're legally allowed to say.

Yeah.

Well, again, like you said, boilerplate stuff, I guess.

Boilerplate.

Totally boilerplate.

So much shenanigans.

All right.

And then we're also going to introduce our third main talking head of the film.

This is James L.

Oshman, Ph.D.

He is a biophysicist and author of Down to Earth.

And he explains, this is even worse than the antioxidant thing.

He's like, when you stand on the ground barefoot, it's like lying naked on the earth.

I mean, I'm like, well, in

your feet, I guess.

What the hell are you talking about?

Yeah, it's the question from that sentence that I had is like, who are you selling to, right?

Who was watching this at this point and being like, yeah, but you're probably not getting all the same benefits as you would if you were lying naked.

Oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa,

huh, I spoke too soon.

Let's not turn this off and watch from.

Let's really, let's stay,

let's stay locked in on this.

You know how shaking hands is like smushing penises, basically the same thing, naked.

Yeah, it's like that.

Well, and then he explains, this is another one of these great bullshit lines.

He explains that every system in the body that they've measured, quote,

goes to balanced normal when you're grounded again what the could that possibly mean

what that could mean that's gobbledygook that's nothing that's not even the law doesn't even can't even regulate it when it's that much nonsensical i like that he mentions lying naked on the earth and then he's like but where i live it's cold sometimes so we had to do it

much bigger when it's warmer so then okay then we meet the father of barefootedness clint ober

right Nobody had ever thought of touching dirt with your feet before Clint came along.

Hell no.

Right.

He actually says most people have never experienced this.

And I was like, touching the ground?

I think

they know about it at least, right?

Stop saying invent.

You didn't invent anything.

Well, I also love this, but you know, he goes, well, you know, you'll never believe it until you experience it.

And I'm like, oh, that's weird because with science-based medicine, you can look at data and stuff and know.

Right.

So

you have to doctor telling you like, well, you know, with chemo, you just, you can't believe it till you experience it.

Steve, do you ever have to pitch patients like that?

Trust me.

Once I get in that noggin and I start digging around in there, I got this ice cream spoon.

It's not an ice cream.

I mean, I use it like an ice cream spoon, but you got to feel it.

Yeah, it's like the opposite of what I try to do.

I'm talking patients out of like, oh, that's anecdotal evidence.

Let me explain to you why that's completely misleading.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, I know.

This is what they're doing.

This whole movie is one anecdote from beginning to end because they don't have the science because the science is nonsense.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, we'll get to it.

I don't know.

I saw an awful lot of studies spread out on a kitchen table at one point, Steve.

We'll get to that.

They mention 20 entire studies later.

Yes, 20.

All written by the same three people in this movie.

Yeah, right.

They're all in this fucking movie.

So, but, and then we get the appeal to antiquity antiquity where clint explains to us that quote i grew up around native american people and i'm like

this ain't gonna be good

okay now to be fair to be fair usually we get i am one 278th cherokee yeah no you're right that's and my and there's like the the music the problematic music in the background that we're like i i don't think that's for you to do this to at least he had the guts to be like i knew some Native American people and they weren't wearing shoes all the time.

He goes, in the Native American culture, you know, that one monolithic culture of a thousand plus tribes and 300 plus languages, quote, nobody owned anything, you see,

that has nothing to do with anything else that he's going to say.

But then he explains that one time when he was a kid, he saw one of his Native American friends' sisters got scarlet fever and they cured her by putting her in the dirt.

He says for several days.

I guess she just laid there in a pit of her own feces and urine for a while.

Yeah.

They brought the girl to a doctor and the doctor was like, yeah, there's no way to cure it.

And then somebody was like,

dirt pile?

And they like did a fire pit and a dirt pile?

It was weird.

I think they might, I think you might have just caught them prematurely burying a sick little girl.

Hey, what are you doing?

It's therapy.

Dirt.

so area trash day is on wednesdays and it's thursday and she's really gonna stink up

no

and then he oh god this is so bad he remembers this time when he was heading into his friend's teepee to be clear native american stopped living in teepees in the 1800s i don't know what they but thank you no okay here's what i wrote in my notes i'm pretty sure native americans don't live in teepees but i'm too stupid to know whether or not they live in teepees so i'm gonna wait until someone else writes whether or not they live in teepees in their notes and then agree vociferously.

I think they still use him ceremonially or whatever, but

you're not going into your friend's teepee, like you're going to your buddy's house or whatever.

But then Rebecca cuts in and VO to explain the real villain of this movie,

shoes.

Right?

It seems like a weak one, but she goes out and she man on the streets a bunch of people.

The prompt is, tell me about your relationship between your feet and shoes.

This is amazing.

Can you imagine if somebody asked you that?

What kind of fucking stumbly ass shit you would manage?

I mean, I'd be very excited to be in a Quentin Tarantino film.

Sure.

You know, that's cool.

Sure.

Okay.

The idea is that shoes like the new ones have soles that are often rubber and that blocks all the electrons from fixing your body through your feet when you walk barefoot or with like old-timey shoes.

That's the idea.

So, like, they genuinely out did the tinfoil hats thing.

It's tinfoil shoes now is what they're doing in this movie.

It's the best.

So, I wrote my notes, of course, at this point, listening to Randos opine on their feelings about barefootedness is what we invited a goddamn Yale neurologist on the show to talk about.

But I love, I love the fact that they're appealing to Native Americans from the 1800s because obviously what they were doing was really healthy because they had a life expectancy of 40 years.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

And what has 150 years of rubber soles gotten us, doubling our life expectancy?

I mean, come on.

Yeah.

Exactly.

I also want to introduce the hero of the movie.

When she's doing her man on the street stuff, at one point, she asks, you know, what do you know about grounding?

And there's this one girl in a blue and black striped shirt that she just goes, oh, that's a load of bologna.

Okay.

And she was never seen in the film again.

I thought you were going to say the hero was the hashtag Van LifeGuy.

It's like, yeah, no, shoes are stupid.

I stub my toes every day, though.

Like, every day, but I stub my toes.

Every day.

I was like, really?

You okay, man?

Every day.

Okay.

Maybe, maybe get a shoe.

Or stop drinking or smoking or something, right?

So, okay, but then the movie makes this claim.

It says, in 1960, we invented synthetic materials.

I feel like they had a couple before that, right?

I don't want to be Mr.

Dictionaried here with the definition of synthetic, but I'm pretty sure we weren't raw dogging it till 1960.

Well, yeah, we should ask Steve.

Doctors know everything.

That's true.

It's true.

That's true.

Plastics.

It was really the middle 1800s when we started making a lot of the synthetic material like that, like plastics and whatnot.

And Dr.

Steve was there.

Yeah.

So in spirit, yeah.

Yeah, no,

according to my Google, 1856 was the early, if that's just, that's a quick Google, but yeah, right, right.

So, yeah.

Why would they lie by a century it doesn't even help such an easy thing to google they were like they were like we put rubber soles on our shoes and i wrote my notes oh no that's gonna block the electrons

sorry did old-timey shoes that were like made of leather have like holes in them to allow the electrons up like doesn't wouldn't leather block a bunch of electrons too well there's a there's a they have a real weird relationship with electrons in this movie right because part of the time they're just like well you know it's the rubber soles of your shoes that are blocking the electrons right?

But at other times, it's like, no, you have to strip completely naked and lay on grass for this to work, right?

Yeah, because there's no other way for electrons to get in your body.

Like,

yeah, they've never walked across the room and touched a doorknob and got a shot.

Right, right, right.

Also, there's a clip in here of fucking Elle Fanning walking through LAX barefooted, and I only bring it up because that's fucking gross.

What's so funny is like, L Fanning wasn't doing that because she's a grounding advocate, she's just a weird, famous person.

So, like, what a way that would be like if they took the Kony 2020 guy who was naked, jerking off at the intersection, they were like, no shoes, huh?

What do you think?

A lot of movers and changers out there, really big fans of our stuff.

Oh, God, they show Clint holding up a shoe, holding up a tennis shoe, and he says, This is an actual quote from the movie.

He says, This is the most destructive invention that man has ever made.

made.

I feel like nukes would be like you're wearing them wrong, man.

Go up there as well, yeah.

Yeah, but Dr.

Stephen Sinatra cuts in one last time to tell us, and again, a quote, this is Nobel Prize level material.

I'm like, it's so weird that the Nobel Committee is entirely unimpressed then, I guess.

Sorry, you're Dr.

Sinatra?

Come on.

Come on.

Yeah, you can start throwing around the Nobel Prize when you actually fucking win one, okay?

Yeah, there you go.

All right, well, clearly we need to get Stockholm on the line, so we're gonna, we're gonna pause for a quick break, but we'll be back in a minute with even more of the Earthing movie.

A bunch of people have your syndrome.

Or maybe it was a Nobel Peace Prize.

We'll call Oslo, just to be sure.

All right, what if the box is full of sand?

How does that change anything?

About the box or the situation?

The situation.

All right, that's enough.

Hey, Eli, what's the matter?

Well, yeah, you look madder than when you found out Pokemon aren't real.

Okay, first of all, that we know of.

80% of the ocean is unmapped.

And two, yeah, I'm mad.

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All right, guys, thanks.

I guess our sponsor this week isn't how many times a number can be exponentially added to itself after all.

Nope, not that either.

I mean subtracted by its own

denominator.

Okay, and then this line here, this always goes in the yellow socket, okay?

You got to make sure the ground is secure.

Now, hold on a second.

Are you telling me that all of these need to be grounded before they go into homes?

I mean, yeah.

Huh.

I wonder if it's like that

with people.

Sorry, what?

Well, I'm just saying, I wonder if people need to be grounded as well.

Why would people need to be grounded?

Like a house.

Like a house.

No, no, no.

I understand like the

two sets of words you're connecting.

I'm asking why you're connecting them.

Grounded

like a house.

No, no,

I hear you.

The issue isn't me hearing you.

You said you said it again.

You know what, what, Gary, I hate to do this, but I've got an idea, and I've just, I got to check on it, man.

Do you mind if I take off a little early today?

I mean, I'd like you to no longer have access to power lines.

So, yeah, why not?

Thanks, Gary.

Grounded.

Still nothing.

He's gone.

And we're back for more of this shit.

We're going to rejoin the action with Clint giving us a

scientific demonstration of earthing.

He brought a science with him.

He has a continuity meter?

A conductivity meter, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, a conductivity meter.

And okay, so what he's doing, and Steve, feel free to jump in here.

You know more of the science stuff than I do, but this is like, in my estimation, if I said I could cure cancer with Reese's pieces, and then I proved it by demonstrating the existence of Reese's pieces.

Yeah, that's about it.

Or that, yeah, they're proving that Reese's pieces have peanut butter in them.

Yeah, Yeah, right.

Have weight or whatever?

Yeah.

Therefore, my other claim is true.

Yeah, that's right.

And what I love is, right, because the bullshit he's making here is such a simple bullshit, right?

Ground is grounded.

That's all he has to demonstrate.

But then he fucks it up because he's like, but then, look, if I'm on, if I'm on the ground and I touch him, he's still grounded.

No wait, because then touching your house would mean you were grounded.

Shit.

That fucks up our whole thing.

Why did I do that second demonstration?

The first demonstration is the only thing I need for my bullshit.

I don't know why I would do the second thing.

Are you guys as confused as I am about whether or not the electrons are supposed to be going into the ground or from the ground?

They say both.

It's like you need to get rid of, you need to ground your electrons, but then you need to get the electrons from the earth, which isn't.

Yeah.

You got to, are you trying to get rid of electrons or get more electrons?

Right.

Presumably, they're saying electrons are good throughout a lot of the movie.

This part's confusing.

So if that's good, sometimes you're going to be like negative compared to that piece of earth that you're touching with your bare feet.

And then that's stealing your sweet fucking electrons.

That's the definition of grounding.

Yes, exactly.

Right.

So the whole title is like, you're just losing your powers.

Yeah.

So, but then we get like the origin story of how Clint discovered standing barefoot in the dirt.

He used to work for the cable industry back in the 60s, and he noticed how you had to ground electricity before you put it in people's houses.

And I looked, I wrote, wow, if we all turn out to be TVs at the end of this, this is going to be super relevant.

But that's the, that's the genesis of the whole thing, right?

He's like, well, what if people are like TVs and need to be grounded?

And can I point out something odd about all the interviews with Clint?

Clint feels caught.

right the entire time he's interviewed in this movie he feels like he was very clear like hey we can't have people film me explaining this this is stupid so every time he's on camera, he's kind of, it's like, if I feel like I'm apologizing for a joke, right?

It's just like, so you understand that the porcupine, I had art, the reason I have quills in my balls, yeah, it's because I fucked it.

Electrons are subject and object.

God,

well, okay, so, but here's the thing, too.

Like, so to the point about are we gaining electrons, are we losing electrons?

They also start sticking in cell phones and Wi-Fi in here.

Like, apparently, those are also related

hey are you scared of other stuff too this would probably take care of that for you as well

little

yeah they didn't seem to know about the uh the fifth g being the big problem they didn't mention anything about that yeah right so we snuck one past them that's good so clearly we're also we're going to meet our next talking head here this is gayton chevalier engineer and physicist and There's a moment with Gayton where I couldn't tell if this was actually a physicist that they'd roped into the movie because sometimes they'll do that, right?

They'll just have somebody on there that's like a real scientist and they explain how lightning works or whatever.

And then they next thing they know, they look and they're in this fucking movie.

But no, no, Gayton is absolutely woo.

You don't have to feel bad for them at all.

He says, unbeknownst to us, we live inside a battery.

That's like the first thing he says.

And I was like, okay, but...

It's known to you because you started.

And now you're telling us.

And I don't think that's right.

Also.

Yeah.

Well, yeah, I don't think it's how batteries work.

Yeah, anyways, he explains how lightning works.

And this is where I had to be the radically vulnerable member of this podcast today and admit that I didn't know how lightning works, so I couldn't make fun of this part of the movie.

I was like, he could be making this shit up, or he could be completely accurate.

I don't know.

So then I'm watching like cartoons for kids that are like, hey, kids, are you scared about lightning?

Well, let's learn about it.

Yeah, right.

I'm like, I gotta, I gotta make fun of another full-grown adult on a podcast.

Hurry it up, Hank Green.

No, but Gayton explains that the sun, quote, spews out electrons, which it does, but Gayton is talking about photons at a certain point and just using them interchangeably as though those are the same fucking thing.

But then, of course, I'm like, well, if we're getting electrons from the sun, what the fuck do I need this ground for, right?

Yeah, they're stepping on the toes of the people who stare into the sun.

Oh, yeah.

Exactly.

And we've done their movie already.

Yeah, what happens if you stare into the sun and ground at the same time?

Do you short circuit?

Nothing.

Turns out nothing.

Do you become Superman at that point?

What happens?

Right, right.

Yeah.

So, yeah, but then, but we cut back to Clint and he starts telling us about his like big revelation of you know, wondering if people needed to be grounded like TVs.

And of course, I wrote in my notes, yeah, you know, no offense to the cable guy, but that's one hell of a qualification to offer up medical advice about inflammation, right?

I used to work for the cable company.

But then he starts explaining about how he bought his kids a computer.

And judging by the image that we're getting, he bought them Willie Higginbotham's tennis for two, I guess.

I don't care how few people get that joke.

That's a really good joke.

But he says, like, you know, our computers back then, all you could do is play games and do checkbooks.

This is 1995 that he's talking about.

Okay.

Steve Comella was like, yeah, right.

You're a fucking idiot.

But Steve was already podcasting by then, okay?

I mean, exactly.

There's all kinds of shit you could do with a computer in 95.

This was 1995 he was talking about?

Yes.

This is where he, I'm pretty sure, claims he invented the internet in 1995.

He 100% does, yes.

Well, I think he feels like when he plugged in his modem, he had invented it.

I don't, I don't know.

He one because he's like, and I thought to myself, because it's so good, because it's very clearly him explaining he invented the internet, and then they try to cut it later to make him seem less insane.

He's like, I thought, what if we connected all the computers together?

So I got this cord and you can see like hard cut.

And he's like, yeah.

So I plugged it in.

and now now we have email at my house

that I invented

Also he there's this weird moment where he has to explain that he had it all right.

I don't know why but he explains he's like you know I had everything and the image that they've chosen for the exemplar of having everything is a painting of a fish dressed as James Monroe.

I get it.

I do get it.

Okay, so this is supposed to be his great Gatsby moment, right?

He's like, in 1994, I was attending a lot of Christmas parties, right?

So we're supposed to picture him like, you know, the belle of the town.

And he had a tremendous art collection.

And we pan over the art collection, which we're later going to learn he sold, but he very obviously still has.

And it is the ugliest.

I bought it at my local coffee shop art you have ever fathomed.

If you saw this at a garage sale, you would keep driving through the surface of the house.

So, yeah, and also, like, this whole like, I had it all thing, it doesn't matter to the movie.

It feels like he's just bragging about how sweet his art was.

I'm very quiet because I enjoyed one of the paintings.

Oh, okay.

Maybe Steve did

Steve did one of the paintings.

He's like, No, that was actually my fish painting.

Yeah, wasn't it supposed to be James Monroe?

It was supposed to be Franklin Pierce, actually.

James Madison.

He's a fish.

It's the Monroe dock.

Stupid.

But he explains that in 94 and 95, he got sick.

He turned yellow.

They took him to the ER.

They said, you know, they couldn't figure out

what was wrong, but his liver was shutting down.

And I'm like, I feel like that's what's wrong, though, right?

Yeah.

Isn't that always fun when the doctors do all the work and figure you out and cure you, but somehow you cured yourself later?

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Yeah.

He admits it here.

He's like, yeah, so I had liver surgery and I woke up a few days later.

And now I'm better.

And I was like, you got saved by surgery.

You're about to set up dirt feet.

It's not that.

It was the surgery, I'm pretty sure, on your liver that was gone bad because you were drinking too much.

Yeah, I wrote in my notes, hey, they did surgery and did not roll you around on the ground outside, right?

I just want to clarify for the record.

Also, I can drink as much as I want if I walk around barefoot is what I learned here.

Yes, exactly.

There you go.

But so before we get to the surgery part, he,

there's a couple of key pieces of bullshit that you find in every pseudoscience testimonial like this that proceed it.

One is that the doctors all told him he was going to die, right?

Which doctors do all the time.

They're always constantly like, oh, fuck, you're going to die, man.

You do that a lot, Steve.

And we also tell people they're never going to walk again.

Yeah.

That is where they go.

Don't let Steve catch you even seated for too long because he's like, oh, no, you're never.

Never.

Never going to happen.

But then you hit play on like that montage music.

And they give you like months, number of months to live.

Yeah, you have exactly 53 days to live.

Right, right.

He also says, I was on every type of antibiotic.

And I'm like, well, that sounds like a terrible idea.

You shouldn't do all of them at once.

They're not like poppers.

Take a couple of those off the table.

But then, yeah, but then he does the surgery and he wakes up and he's better because of the surgery.

And I'm like, okay, what does this have to do with your story at all?

Right?

Like, this story changes in no material way.

If we never find out about his liver surgery,

he can just be like, oh, you know, I realized that I had a lot of art, but I just wasn't happy.

And so I sold all my shit and I went on a road trip.

He could not be more classically describing a midlife crisis if he ends by introducing us to his new 19-year-old wife named Bebel.

Like, it could not be.

This is the narrative, though, right?

So, and this is what people do.

They say, I had this horrible illness.

The doctors did a bunch of stuff, but they didn't really know what they were doing.

And then I did this bullshit and I got better.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

Although they're not even connecting the dots for that right here, but that, but that sort of is implied.

But the, yeah, so they, they diagnosed you with liver disease because you had liver disease, you had jaundice.

That's why you were yellow.

They treated you with medicine.

They did surgery and you recovered.

That sounds pretty normal, right?

That sounds like a pretty par for the course.

And actually, you know, it sounds like you did better than most people, but they have to maximize like doctors had no idea what they were talking about or what was going on.

They also said they have to play that up.

It's all bullshit.

It's, that's never the reality.

Well, and even the way that they like set up the surgery, right?

Because he talks about how they wanted to cut away the damaged liver parts and everything.

Well, I'm like, yeah, man.

Like, you don't have to, like, like, you know, it's so invasive and so like evil.

They're taking parts of my body or whatever.

Like, they saved your life, though.

Describing surgery.

Yeah.

They wanted to stab me with a knife for saving my tum tum.

I think for sure he was also trying to describe his theory that like having a bunch of possessions is evil and it like corrupts the soul and then the soul is like i'm gonna up that liver a little bit and turn you yellow like that's his medical theory oh interesting for sure because he mentions at one point he's like all the possessions i had all that art it owned my soul i think he said something like that

but then he got healed while he still had all those possessions he eventually did sell them after getting healed by surgery yeah not magic yeah so he sold everything he he owned he bought an rv went on a road trip he wound up in sedona arizona a fucking course course he did.

And that's when he noticed shoes.

I'm so close to being introduced to this man's turquoise store.

I can smell it.

I can smell the turquoise store where I'm about to buy overpriced earrings.

So they got to Sedona, and then me and Pebble had a double date with Bill Belichick and Pebble's friend.

It was fun.

So, yeah, but so, but this is, he was in Sedona, which if you've ever been to Sedona, like you get an electric shock every time you touch anything, literally ever.

So he's having that problem, and he was trying to ground stuff so that wouldn't happen.

And that's when he realized that maybe he could ground his bed and

some magic would happen and he would be more healthy.

Right.

So this is where he tries that for the first time.

He puts some metal duct tape onto his bed and he runs a line out his window and plugs that into the ground.

Now, Steve, I am not

a medical doctor, but if I was to do work with electrical equipment, would you recommend I do official grounding with some duct tape and a wire that I just kind of grabbed?

Would you say that's the most scientifically strictured element?

You can't go wrong with duct tape, though.

You got to be able to get it.

That's fair.

But I think what was actually happening was like, shit, I came up with a pseudoscience where you just have to take your shoes off.

How do I monetize this?

100%.

You've got to come up with a way to monetize it.

So I've got to come up with something, some kind of device or mat or thing you plug in, something that I could sell online.

And I think think that's what this is.

What if I invent a hole in a wall that goes to the ground?

That's a window.

It's already we have it.

So if you are trying, if you are going on a trip to figure out how to monetize bullshit, that's why you go to Sedona.

Yep.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and if you think about it, like consider the way that this story is told.

We don't get the aha moment is not like I went out without my shoes on and I stood in the dirt and I realized that things had changed for me.

It was I used this mat that I plugged into my bed and blah, blah, blah.

And that was when I started waking up feeling so much more healthy, right?

The aha moment was when he came up with something to sell.

Yeah.

Okay.

Another question I don't think they answer in the movie.

Why wouldn't like the bed, I mean, all this stuff has electrons in it because it's made of, you know, molecules.

Why wouldn't the bed ground to the like bed frame, which is sometimes metal, and then to the carpet, to the floor, to the foundation of the building, to the ground?

Because the shoes are wearing rubber soles on the house.

The house, the shoes on the shoe.

The house has the shoes on.

Kevin, you've heard of house shoes?

House shoes.

Foundation.

It seems like electrons can just be in all those places I named them.

They wish.

Well, but so he decided he was going to test.

Now, first he went to all of the medical libraries, and there was nothing at all about being barefoot in them.

He says that UCLA, in fact, laughed at him because his ideas are laughable.

But then he decided to put together together his own study.

Anesthesiologist helped him.

Scientist totally counts.

And they don't exactly explain

the protocol of their study here, but what they do explain is nonsense.

They're like, so we grounded 60 people and asked them how they felt.

That's how you science, ain't it, Steve?

He lets us know that the TMJ and the PMS disappeared.

And that's a real, that's a hell of a length of symptoms to be asking about.

Really?

People lost their temporal mandibular joint

that's that sounds painful yeah right so but also like he doesn't like if this was real or even if he was trying for real the way that this sentence would be constructed is something like well you know we grounded 60 people and compared to the control group 60 fewer of them reported whatever right like there would be percentages and control groups and data and all of that shit but he's just like nope we grounded 60 people and wow they felt so much better Yeah, you gotta call.

Look, one time I smoked marijuana and I thought of the octuple-stuffed Oreo, and I called an expert because that's what you're supposed to do.

When you have an idea, you call an expert, and they were like, No, it was called the mega stuff, it existed, it was a special promotion.

It was awesome.

You got to take the, yeah, exactly.

You take the wits.

Heath was my expert in case you're not.

That's the point, right?

You don't, you don't do your own tests if you think your thing is.

Do you know a number word above octuple?

Yeah.

No.

Okay, we're done.

Also, we get this incredible line.

I believe this was James who says this.

He goes, he's talking about, you know, the discovery of plugging your fucking bed into the dirt or whatever.

And he says, quote, like any important discovery, nobody was interested.

They thought he was crazy.

Okay.

Like any important discovery?

All of them.

All of the discovery.

Okay.

Okay.

So to be clear, this guy has a mat on his bed right now with like metal duct tape and a wire going out his window into the ground, right?

And he's convinced that it like prevents or heals stuff.

We could just go to his house, pull that thing out of the dirt, and see if he notices the difference, and he will not for sure.

Nope, no, you want to blind the test, so it don't get crazy.

Well, let's say, you know, who else they thought was crazy?

All the crazy people.

Good point, yeah, like Galileo.

So while he's telling us about these studies,

for some fucking reason, they are showing us side-by-side predator view photos of like hands and penises and stuff.

As James explained, like one side is more or less thermally imaged than the other.

And it's like, and they're saying this is like before grounding and after grounding.

And we're like, what are we looking at, though?

You could have just painted these.

It's just science-y picture.

Yeah, I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, okay.

So then Rebecca cuts in to talk a little bit about mechanism, right?

She brings on Stephen Sinatra, the doctor.

He's the cardiologist.

That's terrifying.

He did science his way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He did his own research.

Yeah.

And he explains that it's one of my favorite pseudoscience buzzwords, inflammation.

Do I mean the medical definition of inflammation or even the dictionary definition of inflammation?

Absolutely not.

It's just badness badness that I'm calling inflammation.

Right.

Well, and again, here you see they accidentally are peeling back the curtain here, right?

Because again, like the aha moment was when they discovered that there was a mat that they could sell.

And then the other, the next big step, right?

The next big step in the development of this pseudoscience is when Clint met this other guy who's like, oh, yeah, just say it cures inflammation.

Right.

That's an umbrella term you can dupe a lot more people with.

Yeah, exactly.

It's on the list.

It's on the list of things that, you know, it's in that structure function support thing.

And then I love, but people talk about reducing inflammation as if it's always bad.

And even, even they say in the movie, there's no inflammation with grounding, none whatsoever.

You have no immune system if you ground?

Wait, that feels bad.

Isn't that a bad thing?

Yeah.

Well, you see, you see, Steve, we have, quote, gazillions of collagen molecules, and our collagen gel absorbs the electrons and it releases them when we get injured.

Somebody help.

Okay, this part I'm pretty sure was real.

That's why I drink a lot of beef dog.

I'm pretty sure this was all real, and that's why I'm super healthy.

That's true.

I will say there was at the very beginning and the very end of this little scene, two flags for me.

It starts with the answer may surprise you.

And I was like, okay, whatever's next is wrong.

It doesn't have to be, but it's going to be.

I know it.

Ma'am, I already clicked on your movie.

You don't have to do that.

There's not a second click you need.

It's a little teaser there.

And then they get into the free radicals thing.

And again, like, I know that's a real thing.

Steve, I'm sure you could tell us exactly what it is as a real thing, but that to me is another flag for like, whatever's next is wrong when I'm talking to somebody at the bar and they say the phrase free radicals or like Heisenberg uncertainty principle or quantum.

They mention the Fed or say the word quantum.

It's all going to be bad.

Yeah.

You want the two-second primer on free radicals?

Sure.

They're generated just by the metabolic activity of your body, right?

You generate energy in your mitochondria.

Your mitochondria produces free radicals

as a side effect.

But your body evolves.

I also knew that thing that everyone said at the same time.

That the evolution utilizes the free radicals to do a couple of things.

One of them is it's part of your immune system, right?

It says, oh, these are really powerful molecules that kill shit.

Let's use that to fight off like dead cells and invading organisms and stuff.

And the other thing is, it's like, this is a good marker for metabolic activity.

So let's react to free radicals by doing all kinds of stuff to protect the body from metabolism, right?

So free radicals are now incorporated into the functioning of your body, and your body carefully regulates them with, again, with antioxidants that are more powerful than anything you could take externally.

And so it's a system.

It's a homeostatic, regulated, evolved system.

And everything they're saying about it, about it, just like it's all bad.

You have to shut it down.

And the only way to shut it down, because your body is helpless against these free radicals, is by getting magical electrons from the earth.

Is again, just pure, pure nonsense.

Yeah, with our $90 bedman.

Right.

If you actually shut down your free radicals, that would, you would be hurting yourself, right?

You would be harming your immune system and you would be shutting off, you know, these signaling molecules that are important to your body's function.

Okay.

But the movie thinks they're like Antifa of the cellular level.

They're all bad all the time and your body can't deal with them.

Right.

Well, and right when they get done with the free radical talk, we get the line that Stephen mentioned where he says, if the body is grounded, you can't have inflammation, which, aside from being, you know, terrifying and bad, is also a really easy claim to test, right?

Right.

But somehow.

All right.

So, but speaking of which, Rebecca assures us that the initial studies, quote, showed promise, but she's like, but could this be the placebo effect?

And you would think to yourself that now we would talk about control groups and blinding studies, but no, we just watch people go like, nah, nah, it doesn't look like a placebo.

Here's another anecdote.

Yeah.

Well,

they went to the wolf of studies, Noah, Richard Cox.

Maybe you've heard of him.

He used to look at studies for a living.

Yes.

That's not an edge you just lose.

He is my, he's my best worst.

He is senior research medical scientist at North American Science Associates.

That's the guy.

And yeah, he talks about he used to evaluate medical devices for the EPA and the FDA.

And I don't know why he stopped doing that, but I have a lot of guesses based on the shit he says in this movie.

But yeah, so he explains that he's talking about his mother, his 94-year-old mother.

She had peripheral artery disease, but One night, he got her a grounding blanket, and in a single night, sleeping on it, it cured both her peripheral artery disease and her tennis forehand.

What the fuck was this?

Flashy Heath just furious, absolutely destroying this 94-year-old woman at tennis.

Okay.

Looks like it's on the ground again, huh?

See, clinical trials.

Fuck you.

Fail.

Yeah.

Better get your rubber blanket.

So he claims that

his mom played tennis for 70 years, but then like forgot how to specifically a forehand, still had a backhand because of an ailment in her heart, maybe.

And then they show us her

after one night of the bullshit mat, and she has allegedly a good forehand.

She does not.

It's fine.

She's 94.

It's not amazing, but don't show us that if you're lying.

Like she has no top spin, like whatever.

It was weird to do that at all.

But how the fuck would body electrons change only your forehands?

Exactly.

What What would that even mean?

It's the same arm you're using.

I don't understand.

Yeah.

And then he concludes this section by saying that now he and his mom play tennis five or six times a week.

Hey, if by some terrible, cruel twist of fate, I live to be 94 years old, I don't want to do anything five or six times.

Eat and sleep.

Yeah.

That's a tennis concentration game.

Let your grandma sit by a window and think about her dead husband leave grandma all alone she's exhausted

she's exhausted she every night she must lie in her cold rubber humming that and think oh please

tomorrow

let tomorrow be the day off please god

Jesus Christ.

But yeah, but no, that's the fucking claim.

He says, like, you know, I saw my mom after one night of sleeping on that mat and she was just, she had so much more energy.

He says, quote, I knew there had to be something to it.

You know, it's what's interesting is we actually use a marker in the hospital to see if somebody is having a placebo effect or a treatment, right?

Sometimes people, their symptoms are very psychologically based.

And one of them, one of the tells is if they go away right away, right?

If they instantly respond to the intervention, as we joke, like they got better before the medicine actually worked its way through the IV tube and got into the patient, then we know that it was all placebo, it was all psychological.

So this idea that a 94-year-old's atherosclerosis is going to be fixed with one night of this treatment, how did that work?

Are these electrons going in her arteries and tearing away cholesterol?

Right.

Is it repairing tendons?

But only from the forehand side of her one arm.

Yeah.

Right.

What is actually happening?

it makes, again,

they try to make the claims sound more impressive, but all they do is make them sound more like bullshit and make them sound more fake.

Yeah.

Well, and also, like, think about what this does to your so-called expert.

This guy is, his job is supposedly an expert medical device tester for the FDA.

And his statement is, well, I saw her after one night and I was convinced.

Yeah.

Well, then you're terrible at your fucking job, man.

Okay, I have an idea.

Tell me if this makes any sense.

If this is all a thing, it's got, you know, like a sleeping mat that's got a bunch of electrons that powers you up or whatever and fixes your heart and your arteries and your fucking forehand.

If that's a thing, we should have the CIA like sneaking proton mats under beds of like foreign spies that were in this thing and steal their electrons and fuck up their forehands or whatever.

Make Putin bat at hockey on one side.

Protons working for us.

Oh, there you go.

Yeah.

You mean like reverse grounding mats?

Yeah.

That's what I'm saying.

Yeah.

skying what would it be called yeah interesting yeah we're workshopping

approved by steve novella we've already got a great endorsement

i also i also want to point out that like when we're talking so granny like hey you know what for 94 granny looks great but we see granny at one point sitting at her desk and she's got her feet on a little mat that is also a grounding mat Right.

So like I just want to point out that now we've got like a mat that you that you have at your desk and something that you put on your bed.

Again, it's for dirt standing.

Right.

So yeah, we're just expanding out the shop a little bit.

Then James shows up to tell us more about the joy of electrons.

At this point, he comes really close to accidentally saying electrons are the powerhouse of the cell, but I happen to know

that is not the case.

He explains,

he always says, you know, I always tell athletes to stand barefoot on the ground for 15 minutes before competitions.

They don't know me, so it's a real weird thing that I'm just yelling at them from the stands, I guess.

No, I asked Simone Biles to take off her shoes and I was arrested.

So I understand.

I can really appreciate.

I was also trying to help the sports.

He says, but if you do that, then if you fall down during your competition,

you're immune to inflammation.

Again, he says immune to it.

And in case we don't believe him.

I'll help test whether you can get inflamed somehow.

I've got an idea for that.

And then we get, I think, Eli's best worst.

Are we talking about my boy, Joseph Mercola?

Yeah, yeah.

Hell yeah, baby.

Yeah, Mercola shows up and they own their Chiron only lists him as founder of Mercola.com, which means he's like, Yeah, I'll do the fucking interview, but you will plug my website the entire time I'm on the screen.

Imagine how many things had to go wrong in Joseph Mercola's life life legally that his Chiron is now, I own this website specifically.

Like, if in four years we had Steve back on the show and we were like, his mom calls him Stevie.

Here he is, everybody.

You'd be like, oh,

he's technically not allowed to have websites in Tajikistan anymore.

That's illegal.

He's dot middle of the Atlantic with Wakefield.

That's it.

You can find me at me.com.

Yeah.

I have an email address.

Yeah, but no, but he heard about grounding through Tour de France, coaches, so it must be some real shit.

I'm pretty sure they show us a montage of definitely a bunch of people doping in the Tour de France.

Probably, yeah.

If it's footage of the Tour de France.

And then, okay, so then James tells us about their failed effort to measure how much electrons, how many electrons, I guess, you get when you stand on dirt.

This is the greatest failed effort at a scientific sentence I've ever fucking heard.

Because this is where he tells us that your body, when you, as soon as you step on dirt, your body fills with electrons, quote, so fast that you can't measure it.

It's the fastest.

They show him saying that and failing in the movie.

He's like, Yeah, we tried to count them up.

I was like, What is the room?

Ah, it's so fast.

You can't even measure it.

But it's like, oh, fucking bunch.

I got to like 12 real fast.

It's in the octillions.

octillions it's somewhere in the octillions

but yeah

and again i correct me if i'm wrong but filling your body with electrons that's getting electrocuted isn't it if you do it fast enough yeah

that's what we're talking about but he they tell us here that electrons keep your red blood cells from clumping up yeah he says this thing like correct me if i'm wrong he says like and you know now that i'm thinking about it i was thinking about this on the way over here yes it's exact quote i was thinking about it on the way over here.

Maybe it's the thinning of the blood that reduces the inflammation.

I don't want any expert, even a fake one, to be like, and you know what?

I was fucking, I was having guns and I was doing shattering artists.

I was thinking about how to fix the cells of the body.

Well, this is, but this is another thing like that, like no inflammation, right?

They're like, well, you know, when you do the grounding, it thins your blood.

And I'm like, well, yeah, it's always good in all instances to have thinner blots.

He said typing too hard and bleeding all over.

Yeah, that's another one of those ones.

It's an excellent point because that's true.

I see that all the time.

This is good for you because it thins your blood.

Really?

How much does it thin the blood?

Because when we give patients treatments to thin the blood, it's very close to the line of killing them or saving them, right?

You thin it too much and you actually kill more people than you save.

And we have to measure it really super precisely to avoid tipping over that line.

But the alternative method is like just send the blood to whatever, how much, who cares, whatever.

It's all good all the time.

No inflammation.

Oxygen's good.

Oxygen's bad.

You want more and less of everything.

You got to get rid of those electrons that you need to get.

Yeah.

Right.

Right.

Okay.

Well, if electrons, you know, all up in the red blood cells makes them repel each other so you have easier circulation.

That's the idea.

Wouldn't that work with protons also?

Don't protons repel people.

Right.

They fucking hate protons.

And you know, that all makes that also makes the blood acidic.

I mean, the protons do.

There's also, yeah, anyway, this is a whole other angle to this thing.

Again, this is something the body carefully regulates for itself.

You can't just make the blood more or less acidic without fucking things up.

But if you need some alkaline water to fix your blood pH, you can just buy some of that and you're all good.

Because the body can't do anything for itself.

You got to, you got to drink your alkaline water.

You got to get the electrons from the earth.

You got to eat your anti, you know, your antioxidants.

Body can't do shit.

Well, yeah, right.

It's amazing that we made it this far.

Suddenly I just basically think of our bodies as like trying to keep a goldfish alive when you're five.

You're like,

you grow.

Oh,

got to go back to the fair now.

Yeah.

So then, okay.

So then we see Rebecca and Josh, they're looking over all the grounding studies.

I've already mentioned this.

This is fucking hilarious because apparently they've taken all these studies and they've printed them out and then they've laid them, they've like arranged them evenly along the table.

they didn't stack them the fuck up right they laid them all side by side on the table so that we could see how many studies there were double spacing the table yeah right right she says uh well you know our favorite study is the one where they grounded premature babies and quote their heart rates stabilized

so there you go i know that they have to test bullshit.

I know that they do, but imagine your baby is born premature.

They have taken it away from you.

You've been waiting to see your baby and hold your baby.

They've taken it away from you.

Your baby is more vulnerable than they will probably ever be any other time in their lives.

You are terrified.

And then someone's like,

Also, we want to see if maybe attaching your baby to the earth

helps.

Can we hook it up to like a thing like the Matrix and all that?

We're pretty sure it's going to do nothing.

We're going to do a laser bath.

but we have to prove clint and his band of assholes wrong

but to be clear

to be clear these studies are all done by the same three assholes that are in this movie yes it's all the same people it's just a circle jerk of you know of doing this of true believers all referencing each other doing studies together that's it it's the same three people and the studies are all crap the the stabilizing the heart rate that's heart rate variability which is like made for pseudoscience it's a noisy system, you know, it's basically how much your heart rate varies over time.

And again, more is good, more is bad.

It's like it could be whatever you want it to be, and it's just generating random noise that you could interpret any way you want.

It's made for pseudoscience.

Okay, but the circle jerk means that they can be grounded with only one personality.

Oh, there's a lot of people.

Interesting, interesting.

But then, sorry, but then, okay, in that case, heart rate stabilized could also mean died, right?

I mean, it's very stable when it's not died.

Exactly.

So very little variability.

and also he cuts it at one point and he goes like well you know James does he goes he goes well you know in addition to getting all the electrons grounding also aligns your bodies with the electrical rhythms of the earth and we're like oh really what does that mean and he's like I'm done with that thought actually I'm we're moving on at this point

He's got to work in as many pseudoscience vibrations, it's frequency, it's whatever.

Yeah.

Meditation.

Just got to throw all it in.

Did they mention quantum at some point?

I forget.

I mean,

we're seconds away from Deepak, right?

That's true.

Yeah, we are.

Right, right.

That's the next fucking scene.

Is the other possible Eli uh best worst, Deepak fucking chopra, right?

God, okay, look, I haven't seen a clip of Deepak in a while, but he mails it in in this clip, right?

Yeah, I feel like he used to be a better salesman than this because he's on Jimmy Fallon, and Jimmy Fallon's just fucking moon face pressed up against the side of his head, and he's like, Can you avail to us our wisdom while eyeing the camera?

and deepak's like yeah fucking i don't know close your eyes or some shit

he crushed you the crab it

exactly

all right kids

okay but deepak's voice even when he's phoning it in it's such a pleasing voice and i feel like that's cheating yeah like that's it's not fair like we need We need like PSAs with like Gilbert Godfried reading all the pseudoscience out loud to make sure everybody knows it's bullshit or something.

There you go.

That's it.

I also, I can't help but notice that Deepak Tropris Chiron just said the word inner space

as like his job title.

He shows up at midnight at Joseph Mercola's door.

Hey, man, I need a new Chiron to shit out.

The regulators got me.

We were all having a fun party.

He's an author

as a protected term.

A girl died.

I need to change my Chiron fast man.

We dumped her in the parking lot of the hospital, but my DNA is all over her.

Steve gets it.

I'm AIZO.

Jesus Christ.

All right.

So,

yeah, but Deepak gives us some fucking Deepak profundities.

He explains that if everything wasn't exactly as it is, things wouldn't be the way that they are.

He explains that your circadian rhythms are like seasons.

And if that's a little confusing, don't worry.

There is an image of light exploding from chakras to help you visualize that relationship.

My favorite nonsense quote here is: if you disconnect from your cosmic body, you, in a sense, create a disconnection.

Oh, man.

Well, he does have us there.

That is

unchanging.

He's got us.

I think that Deepok now is using the Deepok Chopra quote maker website.

Yes, no question.

Like, he saw that thing on Twitter and he was like, jokes on you, assholes.

I just got free material.

And then Gayton asks the $64,000 question, can they measurably reproduce these effects?

And they are like, yes, we can.

And I'm like, oh,

those questions are so much easier when you just lie.

Yeah.

Right?

When you just, because, you know, we talked about the studies.

We didn't mention this too because he's like, you know, these are all peer-reviewed studies and shit.

And I'm like, yeah, what journals are they in?

They're in crap journals.

Oh, just moving on.

Yeah.

Moving on.

So I just wanted to, I was curious.

I was like, 20 peer-reviewed studies, really.

I'm going to do do a quick Google, see the first thing I get.

First one I got is from Chevalier and Ashman, who we met.

It was in the Journal of Inflammation Research, which I don't know what that is, but it sounds like there's a bunch of fake in it.

And then I looked at the references at the bottom.

Five of the references from their study are to the Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, which feels like it's definitely bullshit.

Out of those five references, one was a reference to Ashman himself and two were references to Chevalier himself in that even more bullshit journal.

If you read the paper, it's just this reminds me of all the other papers I wrote and then reference, reference, reference, reference, reference.

All right.

Well, it looks like they brought the scientific studies.

Damn it.

So we might have to rethink our strategy.

Either way, we're going to take a quick break right after I give Act Three the hard sell.

Must there be a better way?

How much would you pay?

Should you answer yet?

Find out the answers to these questions and more when we return for the increasingly grifty conclusion of the Earthing movie.

I mean, I can walk you through the cinematic universe really quick, if you think it helps.

I just haven't seen either movie.

Alec Baldwin, Steve.

I'm just saying it's offensive.

No, no, I hear that, and I'm happy to clear it up on the air.

Thank you.

No, who's this?

I am Count Dracula.

Hi, Steve.

Hey, Vlad.

Wait, you know Dracula?

I am here because your use of the terms parasite, bloodsucker in this week's episode is very offensive to me.

And we are very sorry about that.

We meant that they're like con artists.

I mean, how is that supposed to happen?

No, fair.

But it's just an expression.

Oh, if it's an expression, then what is all fine.

Look, we're really sorry we compared you to the people in the movie, okay?

They're significantly worse than you,

literal Count Dracula.

Okay, thank you.

That's all I wanted.

Okay?

Steve, I'll see you at Pickleball.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'll see you then, Vlad.

I also play Pickleball, you guys know, right?

But we kind of have a four set going there.

Sure, sure.

You got your fourset.

Cool.

Cool.

And we're back for still more of this shit, and we're going to rejoin the action this time with Laura's Earthing Origin story.

She's one of the talking heads that we met at the beginning of the movie.

And like so many of these, again, the, you know, sick baby can't get mad kind of stories, her baby was really colicky.

And all the doctors told her, yeah, babies just cry a lot.

There's nothing wrong with her.

Yeah, what she's describing is not the failure of medicine.

She's describing the parenting experience, which is how you go to a pediatrician.

And unless your baby has something seriously wrong, they're like, I don't know, call us if it dies.

And she's like, my favorite part about this is like, she tries the grounding thing, right?

Which is how she falls for the scam.

And she's like, and it can't be a placebo because she was a baby.

And I'm like, yeah, man, the baby didn't fall for it.

You did.

Yeah, right.

We're not judging the baby's.

We're not interviewing the baby.

The baby was like, you know, my calves feel 20% better circulationally.

And interestingly, the free radicals in my collagen.

Yeah.

So she says, when I would go outside barefooted, my baby would stop crying.

And if I put her in a stroller or a car seat, it didn't work.

That's not the placebo effect.

And I'm like, well, no, that doesn't even rise to the level of placebo effect.

That's just a different fucking thing.

A stroller or a car seat isn't being held by her mother.

Jesus.

But yeah, but so Laura decided she's going to do some research on Google.

She's a fucking doctor.

They show her like, I'm doing my research over here on Google.

But when she did her research, she realized that grounding has, quote, tons of medical literature behind it.

Now, we already established it had 20 studies, right?

Like, so, so, like, even if we accepted the premise that those are legitimate and real, that's not tons of medical literature, it's 20 fucking studies.

Well, each study weighs like a couple hundred pounds

now, Stephen, Stephen, is there like an easy way to be a doctor that I don't know about?

Is there like a a two-week night course that you technically get to use the term doctor.

Listen, if you have a question, all you got to do is you take all the studies that have been published, you stack it up, and the higher the stack, the better.

Oh, okay.

The more real the claim is.

That's all you got to do.

Oh, interesting Christ.

Yeah.

Yeah, no, exactly.

That's how we know Christianity is real.

Yeah.

We read a book about that.

Lee Strouble.

You don't have to mess with looking at the actual quality of the study.

Did they have a control group?

And was their statistical analysis legitimate and height look for patterns in the literature you have to do all that complicated stuff you just stack it up and if it's high enough you're good paper height or weigh it yeah

so

yeah but she explains that you know she she found out that it was real but she didn't incorporate it into her practice right away Why are you keeping big secrets from all your patients?

Right?

You found it works?

Big pharma, probably.

That's unethical.

But yeah, but she tells us that most kids don't, you know, they don't know about being barefoot because we make them wear shoes all the time, even for sports.

Cut to like her kid out there playing the only one and sock playing soccer barefoot.

Ow!

It got me in the foot again.

Fuck.

Also, there's something they keep coming back to in this movie that they establish here where she goes, and even when they are allowed outside, they're on asphalt.

Is asphalt not ground?

It rocks.

That's a great question.

Yeah.

Right?

And it rocks.

I feel like the electronic.

It's more of an insulator than a conductor so i guess there's something i guess yeah but i i like that she fucks it up before she gets to asphalt there she's like they got outdoor recess but it's fenced in a lot of the time wait that's dumb that wouldn't make any sense that just keeps her from running out into traffic that's actually a good thing the electrons can't get through the

asphalt but yeah but then we meet speech and language pathologist Brandina Lancaster, and her expertise in speech and language pathology is a great qualification to tell us about inflammation.

So she's going to tell us about her experiences with grounding.

I guess she went to a retreat.

This is such a weird fucking phrasing.

She says, I went to a retreat for teachers who don't take care of themselves.

I wrote in my notes, okay, I put a lot of the definitions of all those words put together.

Just a bunch of like inner city teachers who are hardworking nine to five and me eating a Subway sandwich.

I exercised in like three years.

They said said you had to let me come.

Special ed teacher with 35 students in one classroom and me just

hitting my vape next to her.

Have you tried vaping?

Just like whatever you buy, you just buy the liquid at the store.

It doesn't even have a label.

It's great.

Why are you crying?

So I was on the way back with my four veggie lights.

I was thinking about electrons.

Let's do an electrons thing.

If you line them up and sort of interweave the ends of the sandwiches, it feels like you're

like a sausage

so yeah but so she's at this retreat they taught her how to ground and again like like like steve saying right away she's better she no longer she's like i didn't need my medication anymore and i'm like really your medication she's like my motron

oh okay all right relax yeah the timing doesn't even make sense it's she's clear like she's like yeah they grounded us within a half an hour i didn't need medicine anymore normally i take two motrin every four hours.

And I was like, so how, how would that necessarily mean after 30 minutes, you don't know

what I'm talking about.

Do another.

Yeah, but then she explains, her and this other teacher named Dawn Murray explain how they're trying to use, God, this is so fucking gross.

They're using the grounding therapy on special needs children in schools.

They're grounding their desks.

Flash cut to be tackling Heath into the grass, pulling off his shoes.

Text me back.

You have to text me back.

Stop it.

The movie says.

Stop it.

The movie.

Stop.

Get on.

You would text me back now.

Okay, I do feel better.

I just feel better.

Okay, yeah.

It's all coming together.

Let's both get naked.

Yeah, so they

again, Steve, if there's anything you're uncomfortable with, you just let me know and I cut it.

I did it to Heath, not you in the funny

and in reality.

So, but they explained that they use this technique

on children who have autism, which is great.

She explains how one time she used, she got a kid with autism to stand on a mat, and he was just normal for like six or seven whole minutes.

Cool.

I love people talking about my son's medical condition like this.

It feels so cash money and awesome.

Yep.

And cool.

Just, I lifted this kid out of his wheelchair and he wobbled for a full three seconds before it was really?

Yes.

It was just, I nailed it.

Yep.

That's exactly.

What is their obsession with autistic kids, with kids with autism?

Yeah.

You know, like every every pseudoscience zeroes in on them like a target.

There is so much pseudoscience that if you have a, if you have a child with autism, you are bombarded with pseudoscience.

Yup.

Yep.

Right.

It's like everyone, they may have the, they may mainly mean well, but it's like, have you tried this pseudoscience?

Why don't you do this?

It's, it's, it's rampant.

And again, it's this kind of stuff, like

all this subjective validation.

He, you saw a spark in his eyes for the first time.

What are you talking about?

You know, there's no, nothing objective here whatsoever.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I get the desperation of not wanting to watch Boss Baby for the 47th time.

I mean, I understand.

Look, no one sympathizes more than me, but at a certain point.

Well, but that's exactly it, right?

There's a level of desperation.

That's why it's always the kids, right, that we started on.

We started on her sick kid and every pseudoscience documentary, pretty much that we've ever done.

We've started on somebody had a sick kid, so they started trying everything and they wound up on this pseudoscience because parents are vulnerable as all hell when it comes to you know chronic conditions

that guy's watching another train video and he's freaking out we're gonna sell him something right yeah right

right so yeah but the point that they're making here now i guess is how much of autism can we just blame on shoes right right Because autism, like everything else, apparently, is inflammation.

Yeah, right.

The free radicals.

Forget the thousands of studies that show otherwise.

You know, there's 20 grounding studies which suggest some bullshit.

I don't know.

Yeah, that all reference each other.

Yeah.

So at one point, one of the two teachers says, imagine if every school was grounded.

And I'm like, I can't help but imagine that and think of all that money, right?

Like all the money to plug these fucking desks into a grounded outlet or whatever instead of paying teachers more or doing any measurable thing to improve the education for the kids.

So gross.

Listen, can we have class outside is something I asked all the time.

It feels like that would just

maybe.

and the collagen from the beef broth.

There's a lot of good stuff going on here.

All coming together.

Steve, I don't want to contradict you, but I'm pretty sure there's some good science in this.

So then we briefly were introduced to Finney, Lauren, and Ryland.

And they sound ex they look and are exactly what you imagined when I said Finney and Lauren and Ryland, actually.

This fucking earthing-based polychule.

Yeah, a hundred,

100%.

This is a thrupel that has broken up already.

I cannot promise you much in this world, but a hard fact that I know in my heart is that this thrupple is broken up right now at this point in time.

So they're the co-founders of Kiss the Ground, which is some organization that they've created to promote earthing.

And I got really sad when I thought about this one as well, right?

Because Like these people are clearly like dedicated to this and they really want to make a difference.

And they're, well, Maybe not, right?

Maybe they're just a couple of grifting assholes or whatever, but it's entirely possible that these are just people who want to make a difference in the world and want to make the world a better place.

And they're just wasting their fucking time and effort and money on absolutely nothing.

Yeah, the alternative medicine world basically has two flavors, although it's a continuum.

You have the grifters, as you say, the con artists who know exactly what the fuck they're doing.

But everyone else are both victims and perpetrators at the same time.

Yes.

Right.

They get grifted themselves.

They get conned by whatever, their own desperation or whatever, and then they turn around and pass that forward to other people.

And so everyone involved becomes both victim and perpetrator.

So again, it gets hard to get mad at them or to blame.

It's like you're kind of a victim of a failing American educational system and mainstream media and all of that.

But at the same time, you're not doing your due diligence.

You have the hubris to think you've sort of outsmarted all the scientists in the world, all the scienticians and now you're selling bullshit to people with without justification so you know you that's on you yeah i'm not finding it difficult to be mad at a lot of this well if you landed on like maple syrup like come on really well but so but here's the thing though is that that becomes really important at the end as as we move on with this movie right like the next like we're going to get to some people who have like serious terrible medical conditions and stuff and are obviously victims of this grip and then are are perpetrating it on so like I said as we get to the end of this movie that point is going to become more and more and that's when Steve's going hard okay

I mean we're we're we're re-editing a lot of this episode and I'll tell you he says some things I think were unforgivable I'm glad we edited this I'm not afraid to say so okay I do have to point out one thing that makes me incredibly happy about this thrupple however right their company which is it appears to be like an outdoor activity after school thing for kids it doesn't seem at least from their website to have anything to do with earthing I think these people were just like, we love the ground.

And they were like, hey, you're suckered into our movie.

Oh, okay.

But you will never know about their educational program because in 2018, it looks like, North Dakota created a program called Kiss the Ground about resoiling North Dakota.

And they have been pushed back to the seventh page of Google results.

Oh,

so no one will ever know about this thruple and their desperate machinations.

That's sad.

They've been prevented from public life by North Dakota's attempt to get more corn or something.

All right.

So now I have warned you that we're going to have some like harder people to make fun of by the time this movie ends.

But before we get there, I want us to really be able to dig into a couple of motherfuckers.

And don't worry, you're not going to have to feel at all bad about making fun of this next couple.

This is Bobby Williams and Mariel Hemingway, actors.

And I'm sure Mariel's work on Superman 4, The Quest for Peace, and Bobby's work on literally nothing.

It's the saddest IMDB page I've ever seen.

Make them great authorities on inflammation.

And I have an IMDb page.

Yeah, right, right, exactly.

I'm including mine when we say that.

Okay, here, I would like to say something brave from my open heart to my fellow skeptics.

I would like to give Ernest Hemingway's granddaughter a pass.

If you know anything about the Hemingway family, I think we should all just be like, yeah, sure, Mariel.

Oh, it's the ground is what's magic, huh?

Cool.

I mean, literally everyone in your family has killed themselves.

She is the Captain Phillips of the Hemingway family, afloat in a boat of exploded skulls.

This lady can believe whatever she wants.

All right, but like...

What she wants is to blame shoes for Ernest Hemingway's suicide, man.

I don't know that I can go there with her.

Okay.

But he didn't even wear that many shoes it's the great yeah right right like he was pretty connected to nature that was this whole thing he was his toe on the gun but yeah but but uh but she explains that brain inflammation causes depression that's right isn't it steve like the no

the depression part just flares off just hard no

but yeah but muriel is like she's like you know this is this is again a direct quote from the movie she says this is a a much bigger thing than just walking barefoot on the ground.

And I'm like, no, it's exactly that big.

It's precisely.

But yeah, so, but they explained to us that grounding pulls you into you, into who you are.

That's not a testable claim, is it?

Damn it.

But we're not, the fame train isn't over yet.

We also get Amy Smart of Starship Troopers fame.

Varsity Blues.

How did, okay, Heath, beyond, I was radically vulnerable for the last talking head.

How hard was it when Amy Smart and her adorable bulldog were like,

how about my bullshit, Heath?

Listen, I was already on board with the movie because of the beef broth thing and the collagen.

So, yeah.

If the next person we interview is like an old Nintendo that was on a spaceship once, we know they make this movie to get a hall pass from our podcast specifically.

Such a good bulldog, too.

Yeah, I know the dog was pretty fucking cute.

But yeah, so we meet her.

She's in her backyard doing, apparently, doing some vaginal grounding when we first meet her in a little sundress.

And what I love the most about her interview is that she says, yeah, you know, when I thought, when I first heard about this, I thought, this makes so much sense.

And literally everybody else in the movie that they've talked about has had to at least admit, like, yeah, you know, when I first heard about this, it sounded crazy.

I was very skeptical.

Amy Smart is the only one dumb enough to go like, no, yeah, it makes perfect sense.

You stand on the ground and you're healthy again.

I know two things.

I know that the script to crank was a movie that I wanted to be in, and that

standing on the ground cures you of stuff.

Did kind of feel like she was trying to horn in on Gwenny P's turf a little bit, though, didn't it?

And she's going to have her own website called Poog or something.

Yeah.

But yeah, she says, she says, you know, but I'm really into grounding.

I'm raising my daughter that way.

And I'm like, what way?

Barefoot?

Raising her daughter groundist.

Yeah.

But she says, you know, but I'm going to keep doing it.

It's like a really strict no-shoes inside the house, family.

It's like, no, please take him off outside.

Take him off outside.

My mom's going to do the whole thing.

But yeah, but she assures us that she's going to keep grounding whether people make fun of her or not.

Yeah.

She also points out that her dog, I assume, doesn't have autism because dogs don't wear shoes.

Yes, uh-huh.

So in keeping with the theme of well-qualified experts on inflammation, this is where we're going to meet Julianne Dallara, who is she's identified as sales slash host at Abilities Expo.

I was going to, I wrote in my notes, do you mean Julianne Dallara of the Abilities Expo?

That's the one.

Yeah.

And she explains that, you know, she used to do naked gardening in Hawaii.

I don't know why she explains that.

It's not relevant to anything else.

It's actually, it's actually a really cool thing that you can do.

I've done that before.

But not relevant to this film,

but she's paralyzed.

I got so many good electrons and several rashes.

No inflammation.

Yeah, right.

There was some inflammation, too.

A lot of bug bites.

Yeah.

Pepsi.

But yeah, but she was a singer slash dancer slash actress for most of her career, but then she woke up one day paralyzed.

Yeah, like I said, some of these people are harder to make fun of than other.

Get her, Steve.

Get her.

Get her.

Yeah.

No, she get in.

Roast hard, Steve.

Roast hard.

She had a real neurological condition.

You have the transverse myelitis.

And what celebrity does she look like, but with like a weird twist on her?

But I love how she goes through the whole grounding thing, right?

And she's still in a wheelchair, but she had a little bit less swelling in her feet, you know?

Yep.

That's the evidence that it worked.

Like, no, I'm still paralyzed, still using a wheelchair.

I didn't do anything for me there.

But I can see the bones in my swollen feet now.

Right.

But the, but the thing that varies on its own vary a little bit.

And there you go.

yeah well and and what's amazing is that she says this right after complaining that the doctors quote just treat the symptoms yeah that's not really true i mean you it's it isn't an autoimmune inflammatory disorder that you treat with anti-inflammatories and that's that is a treating the actual thing that's happening it's not just symptoms not like pain pills you know you're actually treating the inflammation

but these things happen spontaneously on their own they you know they could be caused by a lot of things an infection for example, or just an autoimmune disease.

And sometimes it's part of MS, but sometimes you get it without MS.

And there's nothing to do with grounding with any of this.

There's nothing to do with electrons.

But the question is, if this is an inflammatory disease, why didn't the grounding cure her?

Right.

Great question.

Right.

Great.

Why did it just treat the symptoms?

I mean, like, I know a few paraplegic people and none of them are like, you know, the real problem with this is the feet swelling.

Right.

Like, if it wasn't for that, this would not be like, I've always got a seat.

You know, I get to go right to the front of the line a lot.

Yeah, great parking.

So, but then we get the most, one of the most disgusting things I've fucking ever seen.

It's this entire convention for selling woo to people in wheelchairs.

Yeah, terrible.

So we should clarify that the Abilities Expo is an incredibly important like convention for wheelchair users about making their lives easier and selling bullshit at the Abilities Expo.

Like, look, we know Christian Hell's not real, but if the devil poofed up to me right now and he was like, okay, what about people who just sold big stuff at the Abilities Expo?

I'd have to be like,

you know what?

Dumb, a little bit.

I'm Christian now.

A little Christian.

Okay, I don't know that any of the people in this movie did the following, but I'm certain somebody went to one of these types of conventions with a shill plant who Goldbrick walked out of

matted up with some grounding.

And that's for sure happened.

Okay, when they showed the presentation, again, the presentation ends up just being sit on this bullshit $90 rubber mat, right?

But I thought they were going to just like do like a look, you take off your socks and shoes and you just let them drag and you're grounded the whole time.

And you're just zapping people left and right.

Yeah.

Get some good slippers.

So, yeah, this is also where we meet Martin Zucker.

He's the author of, this is the actual title of his goddamn book, Earthing, the most important health discovery ever.

Okay, so an unbiased source.

I like it.

There's no hyperbole there.

No, no.

It's just asking questions in the title

that ends in a question mark.

But yeah,

but he's written a whole damn book about it.

He's convinced he has seen multiple anecdotes.

Okay.

And then we're going to meet Melanie Monteith.

She is the founder of Adapt Functional Movement Center.

She's got MS and was suckered into this woo and is now promoting it.

Do you guys get uncomfortable that we were making Steve watch this movie at this point?

Because this woman like cries and talks about how much better she feels.

And my notes are just like, sorry, Steve, we usually make fun of like mostly the bad guys.

We skip over the scenes

where the victims are literally weeping at the placebo that has been applied to them.

If you've got some good roast jokes here, Steve, go ahead and get it.

I was feeling about similar in the cold open of the entire movie.

Really?

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, but this, this, Eli, is where I first wrote, I wish there was a hell for the people who sold this shit to her to go to, right?

But again, like, you know, she's like, you know,

I can smile now because I've been grounding.

And they're like, you know, could you smile before?

She's like, well, yes, but not very often or whatever, right?

Like, it's not, again, the grounding isn't curing her MS.

They end her segment.

And again, keep in mind, I was watching this for jokes for my comedy podcast with her saying, I used to feel like a burden.

I'm not a burden anymore.

And I was just like hovered over my keyboard being like, oh,

hair.

Yeah.

Hair.

Weird.

Suit green.

All right.

Well, yeah, no, I just wrote my notes.

Scott, I would really like this to be over.

We're getting there.

We're close, folks.

We have to check back in with Athena.

That is Rebecca's daughter who started this whole journey for us.

Right.

And since she started letting her daughter ground, she got healthier and healthier.

Yeah.

Do they ask the kid, they're like, so Athena, do you know what grounding is?

And the kid says, it's when you put your feet on mama earth and she heals you.

And I wanted the mom to go,

we're not trying to say that directly into the fucking camera.

We've been trying to make it a science thing this whole goddamn time, kid.

You're blowing it.

You're blowing it.

We're messing it up.

Also, if we're doing a cute kid off, I'll bring my kid downstairs and he can say extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.

So, like, if that's what we're doing, we're just having kids say our side.

I've got one.

Yeah, you got three sons cheeks.

Okay.

Yeah.

No, this kid's got nothing on Max.

It was like, right at the end, it's like, and it's all a cult.

You know what I'm supposed to do?

Yeah.

Whoa, back off on that.

Nobody left it in.

Sales are down this quarter.

Shit.

So she's like, and Rebecca, the narrator, she's like, well, you know, and I also ground, but I just lay naked on the ground when when i do it and she's like and after i tried that everything changed and i'm like oh yeah hoa letters the lawn guys fees your good standing status with the parks department everything changed after that

yeah she tells us she lost 50 pounds and regained her sex drive

from naked dirt laying i think she's mixing up the cause and effect there somewhat i think she yeah she lost 50 pounds and she feels better uh-huh then the weight loss may have something to do with that yeah right right you would have thought.

Right.

So, no, it was the shoes.

Remember those Michael Jordan commercials where the guys are like, it's got to be the shoes.

Yeah, it's got to be the shoes.

It must be them.

So, okay.

It's got a little pump that's just like firing electrons.

So then Clint shows up, right?

The Clint Ober, the guy who invented it, and

he's going to show up at her house to sort of wrap the movie up.

She points out he's wearing shoes, so he's full of shit,

clearly.

So they go inside she has a lovely home she explains that her daughter's chronic illness disappeared well she didn't quite say that though i mean no she's right she says well she still gets sick it's not as bad yeah and maybe she's outgrowing it who knows who really knows maybe but it also could be the shoes and again Clint's doing this great bit, right?

Because Clint knows he's a cond, right?

Of the people in this movie who are not fooled, Clint is definitely not fooled.

So she's doing all this like, and I lost 50 pounds, Clint.

And he's like, mm-hmm.

I can confirm that you lost 50 pounds.

We're redrawing.

We're talking about this before the current.

She goes, well, you know, is weight loss one of the things that grounding can do?

And he's like, that's not a claim I can legally make.

Let me check the pilot loss of that.

I can neither confirm.

What I'm saying is that all the Supreme Court justices eat lunch in the same room.

That's what I'm saying.

Okay.

So, also, Clint says at this point, and I just, I have to point this line up because it's so central to so much of the bullshit that they sell here.

He says, you know, health isn't something we need to work on.

We just need to let it be.

And I'm like, what privileged bullshit is that, right?

Like, there are a lot of people out there that are fortunate enough to just be healthy and they don't really have to do a lot.

But imagine what that sounds like to people who have chronic pain or like, you know, who are dealing.

Well, just imagine how that sounds to like 45% of the population when you say that shit.

Ugh.

All right.

So then we finally, we have to wrap up by tackling the question: all right, if this works and you've got all these scientific studies, why don't real doctors do it?

Well, let me tell you, because we all get together and we realize that if we just, if people could cure themselves by walking on the ground, we'd be out of a job.

Right.

No, you couldn't sell them anywhere.

We got to shut this shit down right now.

And let me say, as an overweight man, I have never had a doctor recommend something I could do at home to improve my health.

Not once.

Not once.

I have never been been told any free things I could do to improve my health.

It's just pills, pills,

except

several people in this movie are selling their stupid fucking mats as their job.

Right.

Big pharma isn't blocking that.

I'm watching your movie.

Yeah.

No, what's amazing is that they have this question.

They're like, so why wouldn't doctors just adopt it?

And the best they can do is just go, Yeah, that's a great fucking question.

Why wouldn't they?

But as they're saying that, we're seeing these like spinning nauseous shots of pills and stuff like that, you know.

Now, Steve, you do have to admit

that in the bizarro universe where this was true, it would be a tough pitch, right, after all those years of medical school to have to call.

I assume you'd do some kind of phone tree, you'd have to call up your patients.

This is really embarrassing, but it turns out

you wearing socks right now.

Don't hang up, don't hang up.

everyone's been hanging up on me all day in all honesty the thing is in all honesty if this worked first of all if this actually worked if it worked half as well a quarter as well as they're claiming that it does it would be really easy to demonstrate this in studies that nobody could deny nobody could ignore the other thing is you know we're all people we have families we have our own health issues I would be fucking doing this every day if I thought for a half of a millisecond that it actually had anything to it, that it wasn't complete and utter nonsense, like pretty much all of alternative medicine, right?

Yeah.

And the other thing is, if we did it, you know, it's not as if even if like the the bullshit claims about earthing were true, what is that doesn't mean that everyone's godlike, immortal, perfect health forever.

We would just move, we wouldn't, we would own this shit, we would do a study, do a bunch of studies, prove that it works, we would medicalize it, own it, prescribe it, make people healthy so they would die of other things that we would make money treating.

Right.

Exactly.

That's what's been happening.

That's what's been happening forever.

That, you know, we treat one thing, people live to get something else, and then we do shift over to that other thing.

That's true.

You sound really defeated, Steve.

Until you discover immortality, you're going to be

real negative, Nancy.

I mean, you're still, you're selling medicine to the like 180-year-old electricians who almost live forever because they touch a lot of electrons, right?

Right, exactly.

Would the data on them be pretty telling?

Carrie just gets to convince those people to kill themselves.

It's awesome.

I know, But

they think that we want our patients to die.

That's never good for business.

Right.

We want our customers to live long lives so that we can continue to treat them forever.

And build them.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

So you can keep treating the symptoms and not the cause.

But then we get this, this, we wrap up, you know, everybody has their last couple of words or whatever.

I love this one.

Dr.

Laura, whatever, says, the good thing about grounding is that no doctor has to tell you to do it.

And I'm like, you're a doctor telling me to do it, though.

Right.

Well, you just did, you liar.

And then Rebecca says, and I quote, even if the science isn't considered mainstream yet, there's an undeniable

and growing number of people experiencing the benefits of grounding.

And I'm like, that's not how even if works at all.

Nope.

Right?

Like, even if not many people believe this shit, it's fucking true because I said so.

Yeah.

That was one of those boilerplate moments.

I guess you could insert anything for grounding at that in that statement and it would be true.

Any alternative medicine bullshit could slip into there.

Yeah.

I mean, Aaron Rodgers literally bought a bunch of this like grounding mat stuff.

And like you were just saying, just about every other pseudoscience nonsense thing.

And he has like a whole health regimen that he believes he's doing with all the different stuff.

We could make a YouTube video and get him to do so much weird stuff if we like him good enough.

So, all right.

Well, given all the revelations in this movie, I don't know that we need doctors anymore, Steve.

That's why I'm retiring.

Oh, okay.

Well, that's it.

That's it.

There you go.

Wow.

You didn't get my email about the OnlyFans then.

All right.

Well, Steve, thanks again for all your help with this movie today.

Apologies for making you watch it and apologies for Eli, just sort of in general.

He ends every show that we're doing.

I do.

I do.

I figured.

I just figured.

And mostly I'm apologizing to the audience.

This time it's more to you.

Disclaimer, Eli is for novelty purposes only.

So a quick reminder to the audience, you will find links to the Skeptic's Guide to the Universe on the show notes.

If you haven't checked that show out yet, absolutely check it out.

It was my first podcast.

Love and still one of my favorites.

Steve, thanks again.

A pleasure, guys.

Thanks.

And, well, that does it for a review of the Earthing movie.

That's not going to do it for the episode just yet because we still need to bang our heads into a different wall next week.

So, Eli, tell us what's on deck.

After a man dies in a car crash, he finds himself stuck in purgatory and must fight his way out against the godless tyrant known as the Despiser.

All right, that sounds fucking awesome.

So, with that to look forward to, we're going to bring episode 492 to a merciful close.

Once again, a huge thanks to Dr.

Steve Novello for hanging out with us today.

Be sure to check the show notes for links if you aren't already a skeptics guide listener.

And an equally huge thanks to all the Patreon donors to help make the show go.

If you'd like to cut yourself among their ranks, you can make a per-episode donation at patreon.com/slash godawful and thereby earn early access to an ad-free version of every episode.

You can also help us a ton by leaving a five-star review and by sharing the show on all your various social media platforms.

And if you enjoyed this show, be sure to check out our sibling shows, the scathing ADS citation data, DD Minus, and the skeptic credit led below wherever podcasts live.

If you have questions, comments, just send them out a suggestion.

You can get a godawfulmovies at gmail.com.

Tim Robertson takes care of our social media.

Our theme song was written and performed by Ryan Lotnick, but Ville Drafts on Mars.

All of the music was written and performed by audio engineer Morgan Clark and was used with permission.

I missed a few words in there, but only a couple.

Thanks again for giving us a chunk of your life this week.

For Heath Enright and Eli Bosnick, I'm No Illusions promised to work hard to earn another chunk next week.

Until then, we'll leave you with the breakfast club close.

Aaron Rodgers went on to buy my holistic ninchaku for hitting yourself in the dick therapy that is very real.

The Earth spoke with its lawyer to see if it had an actionable claim against this movie.

Eli started dressing his pug in shoes to see if she got more autistic.

We'll see what happens.

We're really not going to challenge your acting chops here today.

And we didn't put you in the ads as requested.

Thank you.

You're missing out because New Tropics is really, it's a great industry, Steven.

We've got Omega Brain on this episode and some homeopathic supplements.

It's where the real money is.

The preceding podcast was a production of Puzzle in the Thunderstorm LLC, Copyright 2025, all rights reserved.

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