1122: Feng Shui | Skeptical Sunday

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I'm your host, Jordan Harbinger. Today, I'm here with Skeptical Sunday co-host, Professor Dave Farina.
You get so much crap for that online, by the way, Dave, your professor name. I mean, you had to see that coming though, right? No, I didn't.
I was teaching organic chemistry at a university, and why I started the channel was just my university organic chemistry tutorial, so it seemed apropos at the time. Yeah, no, I mean, it seems fair, but whenever people are like, fake Professor Dave thinks the Earth is round, I'm like, well, you can't really say anything about that.
Yeah, as though you trust any astronomy or geology or physics professor in the entire world, you hypocrite. Right.
Yeah, you could be talking to, I don't know, Galileo, and you'd be like, nope, sorry. No, I made up my mind.
Anyway, on the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you. By the way, I know Galileo is the sun, not going around the earth guy.
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I think it's feng shui. That's just the dialect of Mandarin that I've been studying.
No big deal. Humble brag, which is an ancient Chinese practice.
Not humble bragging, but feng shui. Or some might say an art form.
Others mistakenly say it's science. It's not.
We'll talk about that today. It's regarding the arrangement of objects in the home or other areas, gardens, streets.
And to help us with this analysis today is your favorite debunker of pseudoscience and mine, Dave Farina of the YouTube channel Professor Dave Explains. Dave, thanks for joining us again today.
Pleasure as always. So let's start with the very basics.
What is feng shui? And I know you're going to say feng shui. It's fine.
How is it different? I go back and forth. You get back and forth.
You flip flop on the feng shui. Sure, I do.
The irony is not lost here in that it is something that is fully malleable. How is it different, though, from just interior decorating? How come if I hire somebody who is a master of feng shui, I'm not just hiring an interior decorator, for lack of a better term.
Spoiler, you kind of are. Yeah.
But as you mentioned, this is a concept of Chinese origin, and it's quite old. And I'll be honest, I really didn't know too much about it beyond the absolute basics.
So I did do a little bit of research for this conversation so that we can dive into the minutiae of it all. But to start the very basics, feng means wind and shui means water.
So this is a clear allusion to nature and to fluidity and to humans being connected with the flow of an environment. Of course, energy will be a big buzzword as it is with all mysticism.
But anyway, feng shui is the practice or art of arranging objects in one's living space to create balance with the natural world. So the goal is to attain some kind of perfect harmony with one's surroundings, a concept that, of course, is quite alluring at face value, even if it's meaningless on a deeper level.
Yeah, I get that this idea of some kind of oneness with the universe is actually behind a lot of different flavors of mysticism, right? You take the yin-yang symbol and concept and you're like, oh, karate, martial arts, whatever has to be that way. Food now has to be that way.
Feng shui has to be that way. It's the way of the universe.
But then it's just selectively applied where people make up a new system for it. Why do you think that is? Yeah, it's an exercise in human psychology.
This is the way I look at it. It just sort of mirrors the human condition.
So we are finite. We are flawed.
We are imperfect. Speak for yourself.
Oh, yeah. But we are intelligent, sentient beings that we can conceive of infinity and divinity and perfection merely as abstract concepts.
So we naturally lament that we are not those things. We want to be those things.
And we seek ways to convince ourselves that we can attain some kind of cosmic perfection if we just believe a certain thing or we behave a certain way. We seek to become whole.
And if someone wants to believe that you can do that by collecting crystals or contorting their bodies or arranging their living room a certain way, they might just convince themselves of that reality. That sounds pretty on the nose and a bit reminiscent of our astrology conversation in a way wanting to be intertwined with the cosmos and all that jazz.
Yeah, it all comes back to the cosmos. All forms of mysticism inevitably have a kind of crossover like this.
So let's dig into the specifics with feng shui. When somebody acts as a practitioner of this art or whatever you call it, what are they doing? What are they prescribing? Yeah.
Okay. So let's get into the details here right up top.
Feng shui has three principles, those being commanding position, bagua, and five elements. So let's imagine a room of some kind where we've got a bedroom or office or whatever, and we can start with commanding position.
So this refers to the part of the room that you will spend the most time in. So if we're talking about a bedroom, that's going to be the bed, could be a couch.
If it's a living room, if you're talking about an office, that's going to be your desk and so forth.

Feng Shui says that this object should be as far from the door as possible and at a diagonal with respect to the door.

So not immediately next to the door and not immediately across from the door.

So far, I'm looking around my office.

So far, so good.

OK, that doesn't sound too crazy.

I'll admit I can't immediately say why I sort of agree with that. But I think of any bedroom I've ever had, and it kind of describes where the bed should go and did go most of the time.
Yeah, I mean, it makes sense just in terms of like how to use a space most economically. Maybe everything about feng shui can be justified logically in that sort of way, or am I getting ahead of myself? Don't get too far ahead.
The second principle is a bit out there. So next, once the primary piece is placed, you consider the bagua or the energy map that has to be.
Yeah. So we're right to the energy stuff.
This is the energy map. It's got to be superimposed on the floor of the house or an individual room.
Yeah, that took an abrupt sharp turn for the kooky. I should have probably just waited till I heard the word energy map.
Yes, energy of some kind. So there's an energy map or whatever of some sort that you would just place on top of the floor like a blueprint kind of deal? Pretty much.
Yeah. And as one would predict inevitably, the energy map, it has eight areas relating to specific things.
So these would be family, wealth, helpful people, children, knowledge, fame, career, and partnerships. And it's laid out in a grid type format.
Yikes. Okay.
It's already complicated. And these correlate with specific sections of the map and therefore specific parts of the room.
So is there like a career part of the room where the desk is and whatever? Yes, that's right. Yeah.
Or if you want to put it there. And beyond this, the concepts that comprise these areas have associated shapes, colors, seasons, numbers and elements.
So like for family, there's a family section. The shape is columnar or rectangular.
The associated colors are green, blue and teal. The season is spring.
The number is four. And the element is yang wood.
And finally, at the center of this map, so you've got eight around the edges, and then in the center is the ninth area, which represents your overall wellness. What if the room's not rectangular? Yeah, that's a good question.
I would bet there's not really a satisfactory answer to that. I guess a practitioner would say, oh, you can just distort the grid in whatever way you want to keep pretending it means anything.
Yeah. While we're making shit up completely.
Yeah. You can make the grid around now.
Whatever, man. It's fine.
Did the check clear? Yes. Another objection that immediately comes to mind is that if you were to superimpose this map over the whole house, but then also over an individual room, aren't you necessarily and inevitably going to get conflicting results? Totally.
I thought about this too. So if you place it over the whole house, then let's say there's one room that is entirely in the knowledge area.
So from the perspective of the house, that has to be like the knowledge room. But then if you put the Bagua over that room, you have a smaller map.
Now all eight concepts are represented suddenly. And that's not all.
Yeah, it's supposed to work for your whole house, but it can work for a whole city block or like a town, like any scale. So the energy map of any area can change in any arbitrary way, depending on what you're looking at.
And that just, to me, it leads to all these contradictions. Yeah, and I'm sure that if you practice this, you have reasons why certain things switch and work and don't and work.
But I just hear the mystics in the back of my head in modern times shouting about quantum mechanics or whatever. Like, it's different when you're looking from this perspective than this perspective.
It's like, OK. Yeah, the energy map, they would say, is a constant superposition until you observe a specific part of the house and then the wave function collapses to give you a discrete energetic experience.
Sure. I mean, that makes no sense to me without any context, but it makes as much sense as feng shui in the first place.
You can't argue that logic as long as we're just making up our own rules as we go. Let's get that third principle and then we can start to dissect some of this stuff.
What's that last principle that you mentioned? Yeah. So the last one, we have the five elements, which are earth, metal, water, wood, and fire.
So the point with these is that you can identify some area of your life that needs work and then you can implement one or more of these elements strategically to address those needs. Can you give me an example of how you would do that? Yeah.
So let's say you're stressed or tired or something, you would need rejuvenation. And so presumably the bedroom might be the place where you would do that.
And so you want to reconnect with the earth and rejuvenate. And so you would use earth tones and you could have clay pottery in the room or stones or crystals or other things from the earth.
And that would bring you the rejuvenation that you seek. It's funny to me because when I think of rejuvenation, I don't think I would go straight to earth.
I probably think of water first. It rehydrates you, keeps you alive.
You could shower with it. I don't know if I'm thinking like lay on the dirt.
Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'd be inclined to probably think of water first, too, if you take a nice bath or something.
And I bet some of the practitioners might go to that first and would suggest the water element or wind element for a breath of fresh air or something. But thus enters the complete and utter ambiguity of all of this, which negates any shred of empirical validity it could hope to have.
And as far as these primal elements, and I put that in air quotes because those aren't real elements, I guess they're design elements. I don't know.
This is a very old concept. It seems like all ancient civilizations had some version of this because they didn't know what molecules were, atoms or anything.
This goes way, way back. Ancient Greece and maybe even before, usually metal isn't one of them because that's maybe the bonus one.
But the other four, you know, fire, earth, water, wind is usually we hear about these all the time. And we know now that it's totally meaningless.
Like it's just wrong. They're not.
We have the periodic table of the elements. Those are the elements.
Water and fire and earth are not fundamental elements. Now, that doesn't mean we can't refer to them as elements of design.
Like you're saying, that's more of a metaphorical way of saying element, and that's perfectly fine. And it also makes sense that you could utilize some kind of theme when decorating.
That's fine, too. Right.
I can imagine a bedroom full of earth tones and rocky sculptures. And so that could be warm and peaceful.
Yeah, totally. And someone else could get some other subjective impression of that sort of a design scheme.

And ultimately, that's all this really is.

We're talking about interior decoration with a splash of mysticism.

And if people would just embrace that fact, there would be no issue.

That'd be totally fine.

We could even whimsically refer to the ancients and say, oh, the Chinese in ancient times,

they used to do this or that.

You get a little sense of the passage of time in doing so and add some weight to what you're doing. But the problem is when assertions are made about energy or other rigidly physical concepts and that there is a correlation with these design elements that ought to be measurable and describable.
You should be able to do something scientific with these things if these claims are true. Speaking of chi, you'll have chi out the wazoo if you purchase one of the fine products and services that support this show.
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Now, back to Skeptical Sunday. What is the justification? Is any reasoning given to justify any of this? You mentioned that one of the bagua has specific colors like blue, the numbers four, all that stuff.
So the question is, why those? What is there to distinguish any of this from a set of just completely arbitrary made up assertions? Yeah, very good question. And as you might guess, nothing.
It's like with astrology, no attempt is made to explain any kind of physical mechanism as to how this could function, why these specific correlations or assignments are as they are. It's gospel, essentially.
If you are to say that the color purple signifies wealth or helps you attain wealth in some way, it's a very natural question. Why? How? Why purple? How does is the reasoning behind this what is the demonstration of this correlation it's never described as nothing empirical it's just blindly asserted while making vague references to mystical concepts like chi they'll say a sparse room has too much chi and a densely packed room blocks chi or doesn't give chi room to flow, things like that.
So chi is life energy for people who've never heard of it or something like that. So chi needs to flow, I guess.
Apparently, even with that, though, there should be many more questions, right? Where is the chi in the room? Is it with us right now? Apparently it is with us at all times. It's like the force in Star Wars.
But where is it in the room such that it is being blocked by a chair or a table? Can it go over or under furniture? How tall does something have to be to block chi? Do humans block chi? Do we block the chi? Why does chi need to flow in the first place? I mean, you know, these are all important questions. Yeah.
And I mentioned before that chi is life energy or something, but maybe I should have asked what is she exactly? Because I don't know what it is. I've heard that it's a life energy because that's what they told me in martial arts.
But that even they didn't know anything about this. No, same era.
Yeah, it's a pretty nebulous concept. And yeah, most would try to refer to she as like a vital life force or like a life energy.
But that's, again, this is only good enough for someone with no follow-up questions. To anyone familiar with the concept of energy, it raises a lot of red flags.
I feel like we're about to dive into a physics lesson here. We could a little bit.
I mean, it depends on how far you want to go. But if we're going to talk about energy, if we're going to be throwing around this term energy and making all these implications, we should at least elucidate the term energy.
We should know what the word energy means. Yeah, I feel like that word is used really loosely at times.
For a long time, for years, it was actually banned on my show because it had become almost meaningless. If you were talking about, and even now, if you're talking about energy on my show, it doesn't happen as much as it used to.
It has to be like electricity or something that you learned about in your science class, in your physics class in high school. It can't be when somebody goes, everything is energy, right? And just uses that to explain some random thing.
I don't allow that. It's become totally meaningless as a word.
The meaninglessness is by design. So charlatans, practitioners of woo, whatever, they can sell us something, claim that it's got something to do with energy, whatever, and you're not supposed to have follow-up questions.
You're just like too tired to argue with them at that point or whatever. Sure, the grifters do use it that way, but the reason that they're able to do that is because they're exploiting public confusion about the term.
To many people, energy just means some magical, mystical substance. That's what it is.
But in physics, it has a very rigid definition. It means, here we go, the capacity to do work.
That's it. To elucidate what work is, work refers to action done to induce motion on an object.
So basically, energy is the thing that allows for motion, more or less. I'm going way back to middle school, seventh grade science class here, but aren't there different forms of energy? I remember kinetic energy was the energy of motion, potential energy was the energy of potential motion.
I don't even know. And then heat, is that separate or is that also kinetic? I don't even know because the molecules are moving.
Yeah. For kinetic energy, this has to do with the mass and velocity of an object.
And this energy can be transferred through collisions like a car crash or something. Potential energy is energy held by virtue of an object's position in a field.
The higher you lift an object away from the surface of the earth, the more gravitational potential energy it has. And if released, it will fall and it too can transfer energy upon impact.
Now, same thing with heat. The word heat, it means the transfer of kinetic energy from one system of particles to another.
So hotter objects have faster moving particles. Colder objects have slower moving particles.
And if they come into contact, the particles collide and transfer energy until the temperature is uniform and thermal equilibrium has been reached. This is all coming back to me now, and you mentioned those thermal systems.
Now I'm understanding why my insulated cup works, right? Because in between these metal walls, there's a vacuum and there's less molecules, so it's hard for the sheet to get into my cold drink and vice versa. I guess now that all makes sense.
OK, so temperature is really measuring exactly that. Heat is not a substance or something like that.
Right. It's not a substance.
Temperature is a measure of the average kinetic energies of the particles in a system. That's all it is.
OK, so I guess what we're saying is that when certain people use the word energy, what they are describing is not energy at all. Completely, yeah.
And the thing is that some people use the word metaphorically and acknowledge that they are using it metaphorically, and that's fine. I might even say, oh, this room has good energy.
I just mean that I get a good impression from it. I like the room.
It's aesthetically pleasing to me, right? I just like it. The chi flows well.
Yeah, sure. Of course.
It's got good feng shui. But it doesn't mean it's literally pulsating with some unique aura that can be measured and quantified.
It's just an expression. But then some people use the word that way, but they don't realize they're using it that way, the metaphorical way.
And I think that's where the confusion begins. They either don't realize or they're doing it on purpose.
That's right. That is all of it is they're taking metaphorical usage and then they're literalizing it.
So that's with all of this stuff, chi, energy, healing, any of that stuff, it stems from a misunderstanding of what energy actually is. So again, it has this very specific meaning that we talked about, and it has been

bastardized by a culture seeking something that isn't there. It's just like, what could good

energy or bad energy possibly mean? It doesn't mean anything. How could one measure and categorize

such things concretely? It's not a thing. Also, positive or negative energy, which I guess

that's not a real thing, right? That would be the same issue.

No, this is actually part of why it's so easy to diagnose the origin of this kind of confusion. So like in physics, quantities of energy can be assigned positive or negative values.
And positive or negative meaning greater than or less than zero. It's an arithmetic.
Not like good or bad is what I'm trying to say. No, but it's just it's a linguistic coincidence that the word positive has another connotation

as meaning good, like a positive experience.

So if you're talking about an object that has positive or negative potential energy

or plus or more or less than zero, somebody might then transfer that over to the alternate

connotation and think of good or bad.

I think that's where the concept of good energy and conversely bad energy came from originally. I see.
That is confusing, especially if you're trying to confuse people with it. It's pretty easy to do just given that going like they wouldn't call it.
It reminds me of when somebody was talking about essential oils and the person was like, why do you think they call them essential? It's because you need them. And it was like, no, that it's because it's the essence of something.
And it's like, no, essential. Like it's essential that you have gas in your car.
If you don't buy them, you die. Yeah.
I'm like, that's not what they mean. So we're sitting there arguing over semantics.
And then I realized I'm just, I might as well ram my head through the wall because I'm going to get further that way than arguing semantics with this person. But it's not really the word energy either, or not just the word energy.
I hear people use words like frequency, vibration all the time. And I would imagine that applies here even with feng shui.
Other critical buzzwords, and I can hear them apply. I don't know too much about how people talk about feng shui, but I can definitely hear them saying the correct alignment of furniture will help you achieve a specific frequency or something like that.
But again, just like with good or bad energy, this is completely meaningless. So what do those words actually mean? So frequency just means a number of cycles per unit time.
So if something is cyclical, like a rotating object or like a wave, then the number of rotations or waves, you know, wavelengths per some unit of time, that gives you a frequency. So you could have the RPM of a record or a wheel on a car or a bike.
That's a frequency. How many times around per second or per minute or whatever.
You could measure the frequency of a sound wave, right, that has a wavelength. So it's just the number of waves that pass by a particular spot in, let's say, one second, right? That's the SI unit for time.
So we can count that. And then the number of waves or cycles per second is called Hertz.
That's what Hertz is. It's inverse seconds, right? Number of wavelengths per second.
But the point is that we're talking about a concrete phenomenon. We're talking about a sound wave or it could be electromagnetic radiation.
We're talking about a frequency of something. So if someone just says frequency, but they don't specify what they're talking about, what a frequency of what is being measured, it's just meaningless.
The word by itself is meaningless. Such and such has a particular frequency.
So this chair has a good frequency. Frequency of what? What are you talking about? Is the chair bouncing or is it spinning around? Do you mean the atoms vibrating inside the chair? What are you talking about? Frequency of what? This word is misused constantly, again, often by design with the grifters, just like energy.
This is what they do. This is the script.
And vibration, same bucket as frequency, wavelength, whatever. Yeah.
The thing here, though, is that atoms do vibrate, right? There are vibrations, but that doesn't make them magic. You can't just use that word to mean whatever you want.
Atoms can transfer energy by virtue of their vibrations, but that's heat transfer. That's what we were talking about earlier, right? If faster moving or faster vibrating particles are colliding with slower vibrating ones, that's just heat transfer.
It's just thermal equilibrium. That's all that is.
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So it sounds like a major problem here is that these words are not well understood. And maybe some people, they started using them metaphorically, maybe to refer to something aesthetically or to convey something subjective.
But then other people took that and tried to turn it into something literal in a way that doesn't make sense if you know anything about science. And that's where all this mystical stuff comes from.
Something like that. I look at what happens culturally.
I look at how people are using words, what the words actually mean and the alternate connotations. And that's just my assessment of it.
But to stick with feng shui, I mean, feng shui is essentially interior design, and interior design can obviously be considered an art. What is it exactly that allows us to assign it as an art form? I know this sounds a little bit philosophical.
Can we be clear about what art really is? Is that a thing we can do in less than five hours? To me, it's very clear. I think it could be defined simply.
We're just saying that an art is anything where someone is making decisions based on a set of aesthetic criteria. As opposed to what other type of criteria? As opposed to practical criteria.
Okay. So what would be an example of each of those things, just so we can be clear? And I realize I'm probably beating this to death, but I think it's important to be clear about things that would be art and things that would be not art.
Totally. It's pretty simple.
In my mind, let's say you're building like a wheelbarrow or something. We're going to be guided by a set of practical criteria.
Why are you building a wheelbarrow? Because it has to hold things and then you need for it to be easy to roll. That's what's guiding the wheelbarrow design, right? So someone could include aesthetic criteria in there.
Oh, I really want it to be blue or whatever. But most people who make wheelbarrows probably aren't going to do that.
It holds stuff and it's easy to roll. That's it.
That's what you're thinking about when you're building a wheelbarrow. So wheelbarrow building isn't really typically considered an art.
But if you're like painting, if you're making a painting, then the criteria are completely aesthetic. The painting doesn't serve any practical purpose.
It doesn't have to roll. It doesn't have to hold objects.
The decisions you make, like what colors to use and how to do the shading and whatever else there, these are aesthetic decisions, right? I want to paint this box green because I like it green. It looks nice to me like that.
It's subjective and we can apply this way of thinking to any art form. So film, music, dance, writing, whatever it is, if you're dancing, why twirl this way and not another way? Or music, why write this melody and not another melody? These are just aesthetic decisions that you're making.
So for no other reason, then that's what seems aesthetically pleasing to you. That's right.
Okay, so I guess the reason this is important, because people are like, Jesus, let it go already. The reason this is important is that people can take the subjectivity of an art like interior design and all the aesthetic choices that have to be made and paint some mysticism upon it to try to make it seem practical or aligned with some kind of universal truth where it just isn't.
Exactly. That's exactly how I view all of this stuff.
Virtually anything mystical, nail on the head, I think. So it's like when we say that bamboo represents growth, flexibility and kindness, or if you say that water fountains represent a flow of energy, of course, in a certain context, those assertions are true.
Bamboo is objectively flexible. Water fountains involve flowing water.
And if looking at those objects in your home changes your thought process in some way, maybe you look at the bamboo and it reminds you of flexibility and it reminds you to try to be flexible. That's fine too.
Your own experience, right? Your inner monologue, your subjective experience, it's uniquely yours. No one can tell you're wrong because you looked at a thing and then you had a thought.
That's fine. But the line must be drawn when claims are made that the bamboo magically imparts flexibility upon you, like some kind of incantation, right? Or that the presence of a water fountain makes your energy flow.
It makes the chi flow, right? Or any other absurd, concretely physical claim. That's baseless mysticism.
And I think we shouldn't entertain that in our culture. That's just my opinion.
But yeah, you know, we talked about that on our longer podcast episode a couple of years ago. Science denial.
Yeah, science denial. Right.
Okay. If a plant is supposed to make you feel energized and you stand in a room first with the plant and then without the plant, how is one gauging the feeling of being energized? And how are we accounting for the placebo effect, which is obviously present with anything like this?

We're not accounting for that.

And inevitably, anyone who reports a greater feeling of being energized when the plant is there is definitely reporting a placebo effect.

That is certainly the case.

And then, of course, the non-believer who would report not feeling a difference would be chastised for not having an open mind or whatever it is.

Thank you. effect.
That is certainly the case. And then, of course, the non-believer who would report not feeling a difference would be chastised for not having an open mind or whatever it is.
It sounds like you're reading my inbox every Monday morning. Every time we do one of these, people are like, excuse me, even well-meaning people, not just people who are pissed off that I've skewered acupuncture for them.
But we did the astrology episode. It aired a while ago.
In the next day, people were like, you know what? People do study astrology. I'm like, well, not scientists.
And then other people were like, look, here's your horoscope. Dead on, if I do say so.
I know you a little bit through the podcast. This is dead on.
I'm like, you could show this to anyone and it's dead on. Come on.
80% of people at least. 80%, right.
Some people might be like, oh, actually, I'm not organized and I don't like money.

Okay, fine.

I don't like money.

I guess I... I hate sex, actually.

Yeah, it's terrible.

Look, there's still 90% accurate horoscope.

Come on, what do you want?

All right, so what about mirrors?

I would imagine that has a thing.

I see those all over Chinatown.

I've asked about that

and the answer was feng shui

and that was, again, not allowed to have follow- up questions, something about evil spirits. Yeah, I did.
I encountered this too while I was reading is apparently mirrors equal water. There's some equivocation there with water.
So one of the things is that we need to keep our heads above water. So mirrors should be hung below head level.
Mirrors are water. Why water specifically? Why not air? Yeah, you're reflecting the atmosphere.
Why isn't it air? But with the head level thing, right? Another question is, who's head level? Who are we talking about? Babies are people. If a baby crawls into a room, they're pretty close to the ground there.
And there's a mirror in the room. They're under the level, the mirror, right? So do they suddenly experience bad chi? Should we not have any mirrors in any room where a baby might be or they will drown in chi or something? I mean, that might be a good idea for other reasons.
But yeah, make sure your mirror is childproof. Good point.
Because if I'm taller than the majority of people in a given area, do they have to move the mirrors for me or am I just, sorry, buddy, you're the foreigner. We're not moving our mirrors for you.
Right. Everyone hates your house.
Yeah. Like, thanks for putting the mirror above my head.
I'm drowning in negative energy, pal. I agree.
It is vague and it's inconsistent. What would you say to an interior decorator who incorporates feng shui in their practice? Is it pointless? Is it does it just end up with you having a chinese aesthetic it depends how they do it i'm sure that in ancient china there were practitioners of feng shui who were incredible interior decorators and you look at images or this dungeon is fantastic the dungeon yeah or a temple you know whatever these really nice spaces inside homes or buildings a palace right a palace is probably incredible and they instill this impression of serenity or peace and i'm sure that plenty of people have had an incredible talent for knowing how to place fountains and sitting areas and where to put art and what kind of art and all these things and they have attributed all all of that to the principles of feng shui.
In actuality, they're just really talented interior decorators. Some people could look at what they've done in the past and become trained that way.
And like, that's fine. It doesn't make the magic real.
Yeah, I think a lot of this is sort of backwards rationalization. And some things just seem obvious, keeping entryways free of clutter.
Okay, fine. Any good decorator is intuitively going to know that.
Yeah. Some of these principles in feng shui, they make for good decorating in a practical way.
But again, that doesn't make the principles of feng shui necessarily true precisely as they're described with all the mystical aspects. It just makes them seem to be true if you want to believe them.
So again, a modern interior decorator could do the same. They could follow all these principles and might help them be really good at their job.
And honestly, that's fine. I bet some do that and they know that it's just referencing an ancient art form and getting ideas from somewhere.
And then they just keep the mysticism to themselves

or they don't even believe in the mystical aspects. It's just a pamphlet, a guideline, you know.
It's like a selling point. Like I'm a feng shui certified master.
I remember seeing a show a long time ago, like 20 years ago now, where they hired out of half a dozen feng shui decorators and said, decorate this room according to the principles of feng shui. And that, of course, each one did a vastly and completely different job of decorating that room.
Everything was positioned differently. All of the colors, the whole thing was different, which sort of proves that it's not really science, right? Because if it's science and each of these people is following those principles, they end up like with 99% accuracy.
They're going to have pretty much the same design. Yeah.
It's like if you give a sample of some molecule to some chemists and say, figure out the structure of this molecule, and they all go and they do their NMR spectroscopy, they do their IR, they do all their characterization techniques. They're all going to get the same answer.
If you didn't get this one, you're wrong. That's the structure of this compound.
Yeah. So that's why it's pseudoscientific, right? If there's something rigidly empirical about it, we should all agree on what the answer is.
Same with astrology, but we're beating a dead horse.

Yeah, indeed. Yeah, people can go back and listen to the astrology episode.
Lastly, I've read that the concept of luck is a big part of this. How does luck tie in here? I know that Chinese people generally like they're just obsessed with luck.
Lucky everything. Restaurants and it's a common character in old Chinese writing.
You see it everywhere. Totally.
Yeah. I've always been fascinated by this and I really knew why.
I mean, I've seen it. It is ubiquitous.
And I think luck is just the English translation of fortune or prosperity. But everything is lucky or unlucky.
It's everywhere. Like you said, Chinese restaurants, you know, Lucky China Buffet or whatever it is, or businesses, other, you know, laundromat or something.
They got lucky in the name. Yeah.
Plus there's the fortune cookie. That's not really related, maybe.
Yeah. Well, no, it is.
Yeah. Fortune, same thing, right? And that's also their desperate attempt to spice up a cookie that tastes like a manila folder.
True. Yeah.
And by the way, those were invented in San Francisco in Chinatown. Is that a fact? Yeah, it is.
I was surprised by that. I thought, oh, this is an ancient Chinese thing.
I wonder how they made these 500 years ago. And the tour guide on the walking tour was like, actually, they're made right here.
We're about to walk in there. And the people that invented that were like the grandparents or great grandparents of this woman who's sitting right here right now making these in this place.
Claim to fame. Yeah.
And they just sit there and make those. And I thought, wow.
So it's as American as it is Chinese more so. It's just San Francisco, Chinatown, born and bred.
A gimmick. A gimmick.
100% a gimmick. Yes.
Congratulations. You invented the worst dessert of all time.
Yeah. Where if you're not careful, you bite into a piece of paper with nonsense written on it.
Yes. So my parents, by the way, they went to Chinatown with a bunch of their friends and they accidentally bought a bag of the dirty fortune cookies.
Oh. And they gave them out at a party by mistake, which was hilariously embarrassing for the host of the party.
Dirty like you're going to get herpes or like what? No, sorry. They're like dirty sexual fortunes inside those fortune cookies.
Yeah. Oh, I thought you just meant like the cookie itself is going to give you herpes.
Oh, no, no. I meant the fortune is soon you're going to get herpes from all the sex that you do.
Probably something along those lines. They were opening them and, you know, my parents are 80 years old now.
This happened probably 20 years ago, but they're still of the generation

where they probably don't talk about that stuff at parties. I never.
Yeah, there's probably a

little bit of I never. I think they also were laughing because they're not totally devoid of

the sense of humor, but it's a funny mistake to make. Sure.
And you can't tell those Minnilofolder

cookies from the other one. So I don't know if they bought the bag because it was mislabeled or they just weren't reading the label at least they had that classic taste yes they did have that classic chalk taste manila folder chalk taste so where does luck enter with feng shui or is it a separate concept i think it's just that they view good or bad fortune as something tangible that can be managed and manifested in predictable ways.
In a way, that's like the ultimate reality of it, right? It's all about the luck and the fortune, the prosperity, right? It's an attempt to situate their environment so as to maximize good chi, which is supposed to then in turn bring good fortune. And then all the areas of the Bagua represent an attempt to direct that good fortune to specific areas of one's life.
So whether that's improving your career or your family life or your love life or your friendships or whatever is lacking for a particular person. And then objects can have lucky energy, which you can activate with intentions and aspirations, according to yin and yang principles.
It's self-delusion after a certain point. It sort of begins to sound like horoscopes in a way.
It's just that the fortune, it's self-assigned instead of being assigned by constellations. It's assigned by you making your room look a certain way.
Yeah. You put the desk here instead of the Orion is going to do something to you or Capricorn.
And it's not a surprise that feng shui has a lot of overlap with Chinese astrology.

The more I look at this stuff, the more I see it all as one big thing.

It's just a big old pit of mysticism that takes on different forms.

A big pit of mysticism.

That's how I feel about modern society sometimes, at least when I go on the internet.

At any rate, thank you for helping us elucidate some of the details of feng shui here on Skeptical Sunday. I appreciate it, man.
My pleasure. You're about to hear a preview of The Jordan Harbinger Show with geopolitics analyst Peter Zion.
We're kind of in this soft moment in history where everyone's holding their breath and wondering if the next time there's an incident, the U.S. is going to intervene or not.
And I would argue we are not. Safety on the waves is what allows us to have the East Asian manufacturing model.
Less than 1% of that shipping happens on land. And that is a recipe for 1910s and 1930s style conflict and competition.
Countries are increasingly finding in their best interest to kind of hoard what consumption they do have and not allow trade access to it, and then producing more locally. We were moving this way before the Ukraine war, before the Chinese started to break down, and before the German industrial model started to implode.
This has just sped everything up. So we'll probably see significant drops in agricultural output next year, especially in the second half of next year, which should suggest that we're going to have significant problems with food supply on a global scale in the months that follow.
I mean, the food issue is the issue that gives me nightmares because I don't see a way to fix it. The biggest loser by far is China.
Everything about China's functionality is dependent on a globalization and a demographic moment that has passed. I think we're in the final decade of the European Union, because without that Russian energy, there is no German manufacturing model.
And without the German manufacturing model, you don't have the money that is used to keep the EU in existence. The pace of the disintegration here is really difficult to wrap your mind around.
We've had a really good run the last 75 years. It was never going to last.
It's going to be a rough ride. So anyone who thinks this is going to be easy is wrong in every possible way.
For more about how globalization and our way of life will change dramatically in the coming decade, check out episode 781 of The Jordan Harbinger Show. Thanks, everyone, for listening.

Topic suggestions for future episodes of Skeptical Sunday to Jordan at jordanharbinger.com.

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I'm on Twitter, Instagram, X, whatever you want to call it.

or at Jordan Harbinger on both, well, X and Instagram. It sounds so dumb saying that, doesn't it? Yeah.
Instead of Twitter. I'm on Twitter, Instagram, X, whatever you want to call it, or connect with me on LinkedIn where people aren't going to argue about QAnon crap in public.
Dave Farina. You can find Dave at Professor Dave Explains on YouTube.
This show is created in association with Podcast One. My team is Jen Harbinger, Jace Sanderson, Robert Fogarty, Ian Baird,

Millie Ocampo, and Gabriel Mizrahi.

Our advice and opinions are our own.

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Do your own research before implementing anything you hear on the show.

God forbid your chi should be blocked, am I right?

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Share the show with those you love. And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else

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So maybe somebody's worried about the way their room is arranged

I'm not sure. share the show with those you love.
And if you found the episode useful, please share it with somebody else who could use a good dose of the skepticism we doled out here today. So maybe somebody's worried about the way their room is arranged.
Maybe they're worried about that chi

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so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time.