#0005 Mel Gibson

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On this episode, we cover the Joe Rogan Experience 2254 with guest Mel Gibson.

The No Rogan Experience starts now.

Welcome back to the show.

This is a show where two podcasters with no previous Rogan experience get to know Joe Rogan.

Joe Rogan is one of the most listened-to people on the planet whose interviews and opinions influence millions.

He's regularly criticized for his views, often by people who've never actually listened to Rogan.

So we listen and where needed, try to correct the record.

It's a show for those who are curious about Joe Rogan, his guests, and their claims, as well as anyone who just wants to understand Joe's ever-growing media influence.

I'm Cecil Cicarello, and I'm joined by Michael Marshall.

And today, we're going to be covering Joe's January 9th interview with Mel Gibson.

So, Marsh, how did Joe introduce Mel in the show notes?

Yeah, so Joe introduced him as Mel Gibson is an award-winning actor, director, producer, and screenwriter.

And he included look for the new film Flight Risk, directed by Gibson and starring Mark Wahlberg in theaters on January 24th.

We are not being paid.

We are not being paid for that promotion, to be clear.

Also, like, I just want to very quickly just aside that they don't talk about flight risk very much in this event.

Oh, very, very little.

They're there clearly to plug flight risk, but they do not spend a lot of time on it.

Which it's that's to their credit, I guess.

It's

to their credit.

Is there anything else that we should know about Mel Gibson?

Well, I think there's a lot of things people will already know about Mel Gibson that could be relevant here.

For example, he was arrested in 2006 for drink driving, at which point he yelled at the cop who was arresting him about how the Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.

And, you know, I'm not going to judge him for his substance addictions, because that can influence people in all sorts of different ways, but he can't really argue that this is a one-off incident.

Because he once asked the actress Winona Ryder in conversation if she was an oven dodger because she's Jewish.

Yeah.

He's given media interviews about how disgusting he finds gay people.

That was in the 90s.

In that same period of time, when he was asking Winona Ryder that horrible question, he asked a gay actor if he'd catch AIDS from talking to him.

Double yegs.

And he also made threatening and racist phone calls, including rape threats, to his ex-wife.

Triple yegs.

So there's a lot there.

Those are all the things that are pretty well known.

Slightly less well-known, but I think also very relevant to kind of all of that and sort of all of this interview today, is that Gibson was raised in a set of vacantist traditional Catholic religion.

which is a movement in Catholicism that says there has been no legitimate pope since 1958.

There was like a coup in the in the Vatican, and it's all been one big conspiracy since 1958.

And he was raised in this fairly extreme sort of sect of

offset of Catholicism by his father, Hutton Gibson, who also happens to be a Holocaust denier and vocal anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist.

Okay, all right, certain add-ups.

That upbringing kind of seems relevant to where we're going to be talking about today.

And then also, just to throw in a last detail here, in 1993, he started in a commercial that demonized the FDA because they were coming after unregulated vitamin supplements.

So that's a lot.

That's a lot to swallow.

Yeah.

It's like a giant vitamin supplement to swallow.

What else did they talk about?

Well, this was very much a classic Rogan Shaw that kind of rolls through a whole host of subjects.

We touch a little on spinal health.

We talk about the LA wildfires.

We talk about the Aztecs, the Mayans, the Amazon, the Ark of the Covenant, the Shrouded Turin, the afterlife, evolution, ivermectin, vaccines, AIDS, Qigong, martial arts, good, evil, and an awful lot of religion.

So there's a lot in here.

There sure is.

Before we get into our main event segment, I do want to do a little bit of housekeeping.

First, we want to make a correction.

So in our first episode that was released earlier this week, we said that Mark Andreessen was the CEO of Coinbase.

That is not true.

He was one of the larger shareholders at the time, one of the largest shareholders, in fact, and he sold a lot of his holdings.

He is also on the board, but he is not the CEO.

And I'm absolutely mortified that I made this mistake in our first episode.

That mistake was very

quickly corrected.

Chances are, if you're listening to the show, you didn't hear that mistake.

That mistake was corrected very early on.

The number of downloads was not at peak at all at that point, and we had corrected it.

I was the one.

Cecil was one.

This is not on Marsh.

I just want to make sure that.

It was my voice.

It was Marsh's voice, but I used him.

I'm a puppet master and used Marsh here.

I apologize to Marsh and I apologize to the audience.

I made a mistake.

And I also want to say, like,

you know, it's important to own every mistake you make.

And I also want to say, too, like, that is definitely not going to be the only mistake I make on the show.

I've been doing this for 15 years.

I've made my mistakes, but I am 100% willing to be corrected and mention the correct here on the show.

That's something I try to strive to do.

I try to live in the fact that I'm not going to be 100% correct.

I'm going to do my very best.

And if my best isn't enough, I can't do any better than that.

In fact, if there was a segment like this on Joe Rogan every week, we wouldn't even need to do this show.

Like this show wouldn't exist.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And also thanks to the people on Reddit who picked that era up and then kind of alerted us to us because that allowed us to change it pretty quickly.

And then also, I want to say thank you to everyone for sharing and commenting on the shows in all the different places that you've done that.

The sport so far, it's been really amazing, really encouraging.

We've loved to see it all.

And if you're listening now and you do like the show and you really want to help it grow, please go to your podcast player and do the rating thing, give it a rating and a review, and all that kind of stuff.

One of the most important things you can do to help us out is to rate it, to share the show, to tell your friends about it, and to help this kind of grow so more and more people get to see this who'd be interested, and more and more people get to see it who you think might need to hear this sort of counter to the stuff that Joe Rorgan is putting out.

Well, it looks like Joe does a lot of bad history in this particular episode, and that's what we're going to be covering in our main event.

So we're going to start the episode today, the main event here, talking about bad history.

This clip here is talking about

the Aztecs and why the Aztecs eventually, why their empire fell.

The accounts of like people that visited Mexico and visited the Aztecs, like what the markets looked like and how insane it was and how gorgeous it was.

And then just

disease.

Yeah, disease.

I don't know if it was disease or what.

I think the people were pretty dissatisfied.

It would have been hard for

Cortez with his limited numbers to actually take over a civilization like that unless they kind of happened upon a civilization that was pretty dissatisfied with the way things were going.

Yeah.

So I think they had people to help them sort of.

Yeah, the Aztecs were checked out, and that's what the cause was.

Quiet quitting.

A pretty vocal quitting, actually.

You know, this misses a lot of why the Aztecs, the Aztec civilization fell.

It passes off disease, too.

It just sort of hand waves off disease and replaces it with people are unhappy.

Yeah, exactly.

But passing off the disease like that, the disease is a really big factor.

If you look into the stats around this, the actual figures, within a year of the Spanish arriving, like half of the Aztecs had died from smallpox.

And the other half, I imagine, weren't doing fantastic through all the other stuff that was happening.

So disease is such a massive effect here.

Yeah, disease is huge.

And also there's other factors that he seems to be hand-waving away when he mentions people being unhappy.

The introduction of horses was a huge thing.

When it comes to, you know, weaponry of that time, horses were a huge advantage.

Weaponry itself, having cannons and guns and things like that.

You know, there's also one of the things, too, is that there's other tribes that are allied.

And I don't know, and I'm not going to, I will admit, I don't know if he's saying, you know, people were dissatisfied or unhappy.

Maybe he is in some ways mentioning those other tribes that were upset.

That's possible, although it doesn't, I don't know that that's exactly what he's saying, but that is what something what happened.

I mean, Cortez, he allied with a lot of those other tribes to help him attack the Aztecs.

Yeah, but I mean, the key is here that it's, it's way more complicated than Mel Gibson is playing out.

Absolutely

of introducing cannons, having steel weapons rather than kind of the other tools that they would have had at the time.

These are such a kind of a magnifier on your ability of your army that, of course, they're going to give you this huge advantage.

But there was no real evidence, as best we can tell, of like unrest at the time beyond that allying with tribes.

But it feels like he's invented that because it fits his narrative.

He's decided on what the answer is because it fits the narrative he has and kind of ignores the evidence we have for the real factors.

And that kind of feels like a tool, a technique that Mel Gibson is going to do throughout this interview for the various things that he believes in.

Yeah, I'm trying to link.

sort of a current unhappiness to an unhappiness then, right?

Because he was talking just before this about the fall of civilizations and how do they fall.

Yeah, like we're also about to fall as well.

Yeah, because

so this next clip is trying to find archaeologists that actually agree with some of the things that he mentions in his movie, Apocalypto.

And then I had all these people come out of the woodwork, hey, we're

archaeologists and scientists, and that never happened.

So there's this revisionism about it, too, that it didn't happen.

But there are accounts from the time where, yes, people did witness these things.

And

of course, I had a bunch of battery of archaeologists and scientists and professors on my own that say, yeah, well, this stuff did happen.

And

here's the

depictions of it in paintings and images.

And, you know, so it's like, it did happen.

Yeah, and this is our old friend cherry picking that we talked about in the previous skeptical toolbox.

You start with what you want to be true, that the thing that I've made, my interpretation of it is correct, and then you look for the experts who will agree with you rather than taking a step back and looking at what the majority of experts say.

So when archaeologists are arguing with you, instead of saying, well, you guys might have a point because you work in this area and you're experts, he's saying, well, hang on, I'll find some archaeologists.

I'll scour the world for archaeologists who happen to agree with me.

And again, this is something that we'll revisit throughout this conversation: Mel Gibson, and to an extent, Joel, looking for the people in a certain field who agree with them and then saying, well, it must be true because these people in this field agree with me.

And, you know, scholars argue that in the movie Apocalypto, he kind of squashes cultures and times together.

So while there are certain aspects of the thing that he's doing that are sort of historically accurate, there's a lot of squashing going on of both the Aztecs and the Mayans and the timeframe.

He's squishing timeframes together to make it seem like all these things sort of happened all around sort of contemporaneously when there's no evidence that they did.

I think, like, one of the things that always bothers me is people could just say, this is a work of historical fiction that's relying on things that are similar, that happened at a similar time.

And, you know, we're sort of, we're just, we're just changing things because it's more interesting to fiction.

And instead, what they do is they always just try to say, no, this is 100% accurate.

And I found a bevy of archaeologists, just say it's historical fiction.

That's okay, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If he's, if he just said he's taken his, he's taken a degree of like creative license to tell a real story based on, or tell a story based on real things that happened, but put it together into a different narrative, we wouldn't be having an issue here.

But for him to say, this is fact, this is how it really worked, and any archaeologist who disagreed with me are wrong, that is where this starts to get into some murky territory, for sure.

Yeah.

And if you want to just tell a bullshit story, just tell Braveheart.

You know what I mean?

Like, just tell that story.

Well, it's funny you mentioned Braveheart because when he was talking about how you couldn't have conquered these people without there being some sort of unrest there, it did sort of feel a bit like he's kind of a little too influenced by his experiences making Braveheart.

You know, it feels like kind of like you're not an expert on all rebellions because you played Rob Roy once.

Yeah, that's that's true.

That's true.

Uh, William Wallace.

William Wallace.

Sorry, that's not yours.

History, Marsh.

This is your history.

That's not yours, but it's around you.

It's new.

All right, the next piece is Mayan Spaceships.

Joe is talking very specifically about an image, which I will try to link in the show notes.

This is a popular image that talks about sort of

alien archaeology, where alien and archaeology sort of meet.

You ever see the very bizarre carving where it looks like there's a guy who's sitting in a cockpit of a spaceship, like looking through some sort of an

eye thing.

Yeah, they got some weird stuff.

It's like weird.

Yeah.

With his fire underneath the chair.

Like, what is that?

They got dudes that look like Europeans.

They have these guys with red beards and helmets and stuff.

Yeah.

It's like these Phoenician guys who probably traveled over there early on.

Yeah.

So this particular image, I think this is straight out of Eric van Danigen's famous Chariot of the Gods, which is a pseudo-archaeology, pseudo-historical book from, I think, the sort of the late 60s, early 70s, somewhere in that kind of time.

And in particular, he's talking about a sarcophagus that he claims depicts this alien astronaut, but it's quite a famous example brought up.

And it's not quite what he's making it out to be.

It really isn't.

This is one of those things, Marsh, when I look at it and I hear Joe describing it.

It's almost like you're asking someone to describe a cloud or an inkblot to you, because if you don't know the correct symbolism that's behind this, you could find a lot of different things in this.

Yeah, absolutely.

And for Joe to say, oh, yeah, this is the, there's a fire underneath the chair, I can't see the fire in this.

I can, if I look around, I can find someone trying to explain it.

But basically, what we're looking at here is the actual carving.

It's got a range of imagery that I think would have been culturally familiar to the Mayan people or the people at the time.

You have a character here, Pakal, who's kind of lying, sitting back.

This is, I think, on the

sarcophagus of this guy, it's kind of showing kind of him.

And he's like lying there in the center, meant to be kind of at the center of the universe.

Underneath him, that Joe thinks is all fire those are depictions of the underworld so kind of you have the below underneath him there's a serpent above him which you can kind of see kind of a double-headed serpent with with mouths either side is what's directly above his head there and that's all about power you've got the tree coming out of him that kind of cross is meant to be a tree which is like the tree of life on top of that you've got a bird which is meant to be like a bird deity like all of these things would have been culturally familiar when they were carved they're references they would know and so what Joe and I think von Danigen before him, what they're doing is kind of the equivalent of having a future-like culture come along and look at a depiction in art of like Adam and Eve and then concluding that they must have been fruit sellers because they're holding an apple.

When it's like, well, actually, no, there's a reason they're holding an apple.

It's just maybe in the future that that reason would have been lost because you're not part of the culture that it's from.

But now you're putting your own kind of assumptions on.

That's kind of what we're doing here.

And my favorite thing about the exchange, though, is while Joe's talking about that, Mel doesn't really engage that at all.

So Joe's like talking about Mayan spaceships and aliens, and Mel starts talking about, yeah, and there's people who looked like Vikings.

He's like, Right,

fine.

I mean,

people did look a bit like Vikings, it's perfectly plausible that someone looked a bit like a Viking.

It's not what Joe was talking about, he was going for the aliens thing and not the uh, the Norse guys.

He 100% does not bite on the aliens, like he tries to get him to bite on the aliens, he's like, No, I'm sorry, I'm a young earth creationist.

I don't believe in aliens.

That's it.

I never even got to mind.

We will find out he's a young earth creationist, so like, yeah, you can't explain aliens if there is no nowhere out there to have aliens.

I mean, that's a real short amount of time for them to get here.

All right, so now we're going to move into some other bad history.

Now, this is treating the gospels as if they are actual history.

Well, I regard the gospels as history, it's a verifiable history.

Some people say, well, it's a fairy tale.

He never existed, but he did.

And there are other accounts, verifiable historical accounts outside the biblical ones that also bear this up, that yes, he did exist.

And

the other aspect of that is that

all the evangelists, the apostles who went out there,

every single one of those guys died rather than deny their belief.

And nobody dies for a lie.

Nobody.

People die for lies all the time.

Mel, Jonestown, COVID deniers, people die for lies all the time.

What he does is he misses the option here that it was a lie that they didn't know was a lie.

So they died for their belief.

It just happened their belief was wrong.

People die for stuff that's wrong all the time, but they're completely sincere in what they believe.

You bet.

And he says that there are accounts out there that bear out that Jesus existed.

The gospel is historic.

It's verifiable history because there's accounts that bear out that he existed.

And there might be accounts that bear out that someone called Jesus existed.

But that doesn't mean that they verify that he was the Son of God who also returned from the dead and performed miracles and things.

A little harder to verify.

Just a little bit.

Yeah.

It's a little bit like saying that all of the stories about Santa Claus are true because you can verify that there was a guy who was called Saint Nicholas, that St.

Nicholas was a real person.

It's like the fact that the guy existed doesn't mean everything that came afterwards.

That's not the same thing.

Very true.

Very true.

And if the Gospels, if they were meant to be like historical record,

verified historical record, we'd have to countenance the fact that there are some real issues in them, some inconvenient issues.

You know, like, for example, the Gospels talk about Herod was trying to kill Jesus as a baby.

Well, Herod died in 4 BCE, which is four years or three years before Jesus was born.

So how did he spend his time trying to kill a baby that wasn't yet born?

And you can say, well, maybe they got the date of Jesus' birth wrong.

But if that's the case, well, apparently in the Gospel of Luke, they say apparently that Mary and Joseph were going to

Judea from Nazareth where they lived because they were going for a census.

And we know that sentence happened in 6 CE, which is six years after Jesus was born.

So we have an impossibility on the timeline here.

And Matthew solves that problem by saying, well, they didn't come for a census from Nazareth.

They were just born in Judea anyway.

So even Matthew disagrees with Luke about whether.

So these are real issues that would need to be reconciled if this was verifiable history.

If this isn't that, if this is storytelling, then we don't need to say this is literally true and these inconsistencies don't matter as much.

But once you start saying this is historical record, you've got to actually explain these issues.

And he's tied to this.

We're going to get to it in a few minutes.

But he's tied tied to this because the young earth creationism

very much needs every single story in the Bible to be 100% true.

And if it's not 100% true, then you're in, then you're in real trouble.

So

in order to remain consistent in their own beliefs, and I say I'm using consistent here

with a lot of air quotes around it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I'm saying in order for them to at least feel consistent, they have to make sure that everything is true.

So he can't look at the Bible and say it's not true.

All right, next, now we're going to talk about, for a couple of clips, we're going to talk about the Shroud of Turin.

The Shroud of Turin, Marsh, just in like a couple words, can you explain what the Shroud is if people don't know what it is?

Yeah, absolutely.

So the Shroud of Turin is a, it's meant to be the

cloak in which Jesus, the rags in which Jesus was buried, like the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, which was, it emerged like in the medieval times, somewhere in that kind of era,

carrying what they claim was the depiction of the body of Christ on the cloth as proof that he really was buried in this cloth and therefore was buried and resurrected.

So that's what it is, and it's held up as like a holy relic by lots of people.

And this relic still exists today and people still study it.

Yeah.

All right, so here's that clip.

I mean, just recently they verified the Shroud of Turin.

Have you seen that?

I've been reading about it and I know that there's some contention, there's some discussion and debate about it, but they used to think that it was only a couple hundred years old.

Yeah.

And now they've changed that.

Yeah, they've said, no, it is back then.

They also don't understand how it was made, which to me is very fascinating because it's not paint.

It's not, they don't know what caused the image itself and how that technology would have even been available

a couple thousand years ago.

An intense light, I mean, atomic

to leave almost like a photographic imprint on a piece of cloth.

Yeah.

And it's wild.

Pull that up.

Pull the shroud of Turin up.

And you can see it, that it depicts a first century Hebrew male, because the hairstyle was from the first century, and a Hebrew hairstyle, that he was about six feet tall, that he was completely scourged all over his body.

He was crucified.

And the pollens that they found in the cloth were from that region.

Yeah.

Also, the weave was a first century weave.

that was typical.

So yeah, from time to time, every few years, there's a study that claims the shroud was real.

And then there's another study that will point out why it isn't and those kinds of things.

The reason these studies that claim it's real keep coming up is that there's a lot of money in preserving the

religiosity of this miraculous cloth.

Yeah, good point.

There's a lot of invested interests in this.

But again, what we're talking about here, just like we saw with the Mayan spaceship, When they talk about it, it sounds way more remarkable than the thing actually is.

When you see the picture, you know, Mel describes it as an almost photographic imprint.

But even the picture they bring up, it pretty clearly isn't a photographic imprint.

And even that, most of the images you've ever seen of the Turin Shroud are like x-rays and negatives and enhanced in order to get something up.

When you see the actual thing, it's a barely stained cloth, essentially, which you can't just pull that up and say, look how remarkable this is, because it becomes clearer that this isn't as remarkable once you actually see what it is.

You have to show the enhanced stuff to make it look really, really impressive in any kind of way.

And they go to great pains to say all the different details that are in it, right?

His hair length, his scourge, scourged, et cetera.

But one thing they don't mention is that he's sort of modestly covering up his own junk.

And that seems to me, you know, like if you're going to bury somebody, why would you cross their hands and place them over their privates?

Like, why would you do that?

Well, what's the purpose?

Other than if you were going to depict something in an image that you were going to paint in a time where that is immodest, maybe you would do that instead.

Yeah, absolutely.

He looks a bit like he's kind of covering himself up because he's in a wall in a football game, like a soccer game, like that's a free kick wall.

He's sort of doing that.

He doesn't want to get hit.

But like, if you take the story as true, that this is a cloth that was wrapped around a dead body and somehow like the image kind of seeped through, we immediately have issues with this because a cloth is a relatively 2D thing.

Once you kind of wrap it around and unwrap it again, you end on it with a 2D surface.

wrapped around a 3D body, you would see massive amounts of distortion.

If you take just around his face, just wrapping a cloth around his face and unwrapping it, you're going to end up with a head that looks like it's like five times the width or four times the width of a normal head.

So, what we have here is it's much more like you've kind of, well, it looks more like a painting.

It looks more like a depiction in that kind of way.

We don't, we should see like a Makata projection level of distortion on some of the things that we're seeing, and we don't see that.

His, I'll tell you, man, his, his, his head looks like the size of Africa there.

Look at that, enormous, right?

It's Greenland, it's the size of Greenland.

Oh, yeah, Greenland, because they shrink Africa on that one.

That's right, that's right, that's right.

But the thing is, when they say they, the amazing thing is they don't know how it was made.

Well, in 2009, there was an Italian scientist and skeptic called Luigi Galaschelli who remade the Chewin Shroud using technologies, only technologies that were available during the medieval period.

And it involved some sort of slightly acidic powers and kind of a model that he put them onto and things like that.

I actually saw him present that remade Chewin Shroud in 2009 at a conference in Budapest.

So it was certainly possible to do.

And there's evidence out there that people have tried to replicate other kind of sides of it.

But of course, we're not looking at that evidence, really.

Yeah.

And he mentions that there's no way that they could recreate it and they like all this stuff is lost.

And you're like, no, there's a guy who literally did it like 15 years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's part of the Italian skeptics.

Yeah, absolutely.

And the other thing is, like, one of the things that Mel brings up is that, well, we know it's right because look at the hairstyle.

This is of a first century Hebrew guy and you know, the crown of thorns, which is mentioned, all the scourging, that's in the detail.

The accounts of the crown of thorns and the scourging preceded when this fake was made.

So the accounts that we've got, they had as well.

So the person who created this fake knew what they were trying to create.

So we can't be like, we're both pulling from the same material.

So of course, if we could know that, if we could say Jesus had a crown of thorns, they could say it as well.

They could draw it.

And as for

the hairstyle being that of a first century Hebrew guy, it's just long hair.

I think long hair was pretty common throughout all ages.

We went through peaks and troughs of of uh of fashion but you know when you when you when we look back to like the 15th 16th century people had long hair sometimes then as well it's just hair grows sometimes and that happened throughout history i think we all during the covid years relapse to those medieval haircuts none of us went out and got

one but of course all this kind of again for the fakery the if we say well why would they fake this why would they lie about this the market for holy relics throughout different parts of history have been incredibly lucrative All manner of things have been claimed as being a holy relic.

And not only do they then allow you to sell them up to more

affluent people who want to touch the divine, but you get to put them in your church and invite people to your church from all over from pilgrimages.

And it was like it was part of an industry of religiosity.

And so we have to see it in that context.

It's funny that when certain things have to do with the prophet motive, Joe is right on it.

But in other times, he doesn't even touch it.

And this is a point where he never even touches it.

Yeah.

All right.

This is the second clip about the Shroud of Turin.

But they have now verified that it does actually go back to that time period.

For a while, they were testing pieces that had been repaired in the 13th century.

Right.

You know.

What is the latest on that, Jamie?

Can you see, like,

I was trying to get that?

I have two different articles from within the last six months saying I smashed the thing.

So

I was digging into which one sounded the most accurate.

Well, it's such a crazy thing to even

try to verify.

What are you saying?

You're saying that this is really the shroud that Jesus was covered in?

So you're saying Jesus historically absolutely did exist and we think that this is the shroud that covered him.

Just that alone.

Incredulity, people immediately,

their hackles raised, like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

And they just, instead of like looking at it objectively, they almost always want to look at it from a point of view of

disproving it immediately, dismissing it immediately.

But that's science, isn't it?

You have to sort of, you know, you play the devil's advocate.

And that's okay.

Go for it.

Yeah, they look at it.

They don't look at it objectively.

They almost always want to look at it from a point of view of disproving it.

They're looking at something and testing claims made by people who have the shroud, who say the shroud is one thing, and they're testing it.

Like, that's, they're saying it's from a certain place in time, and people test to see if it's from a certain place or time.

They cannot, and they will not test to make sure that it's Jesus's.

They can't.

There's no, what is proposed the test that we could test that could say it's Jesus's shroud?

Yeah, although I think there was actually a million dollar challenge issued by the Catholic Church for you to disprove that the Shroud of Turin was

real, but obviously disprove it on their, to their standard, to what they would kind of they would kind of accept.

Yeah.

What's interesting as well for me here is that Mel actually brings up what is a fairly decent grasp of science here, of the scientific method, because he says, you know, it's science.

You have to sort of play devil's advocate.

And that's kind of true here.

You do have to sort of say, someone's brought this up.

How do I disprove it?

Because that's how we advance things with science.

You try really hard to disprove something.

And if you still can't disprove it after you've tried as hard as you can, then you can accept that it's maybe real.

Because the opposite of that, the alternative is to think something and try as hard as you can to prove it.

But then all you can do is you'll end up finding the thing that you want to be true, which is very easy to do, but you risk completely fooling yourself along the way.

For sure.

So now let's talk about, they're going to mention a person in this that we might cover later, but there's there they are going to talk very specifically about the Ark of the Covenant in this particular clip.

Are you aware of Graham Hancock?

Oh, no.

Graham Hancock is

sort of a historian that has a very,

he's got a series on Netflix.

He's a fascinating guy.

And his career started because he was investigating

these accounts in Ethiopia of the Ark of the Covenant, and that they believe the Ark of the Covenant is in this one church that's protected by all these monks that wind up getting cataracts and radiation disease and sickness.

And they think that it's because they're protecting this Ark of the Covenant, this actual thing, that it's an actual physical thing that's there.

And if you touch it, you get zabbed too.

Yeah, and that even being in its presence fucks these people up.

Maybe.

Maybe.

Who knows?

I mean, it's got to be someplace, right?

They buried it, they lost track of it.

Yeah.

But, man, it used to be.

And all the stories are if you even touched it, you fall over, you know, because it was constructed electrically somehow.

Yeah, like, what is that?

What's in there?

Yeah, why is it giving people cancer if they're really protecting it?

I think it's the actual structure of the container it's in that that is the problem.

That's my thought on it.

I could be wrong.

But I think inside it, they have

things from like when Moses was like mana and you know, stuff like that.

Yeah, well, we all know that if you if you collect too much mana and you don't use it in one turn, it gives you a mana burn.

So it's like radioactive.

So you can't, there's like one Magic the Gathering nerd who made a lot of joke.

I didn't get the reference, but I knew where you were going with it.

I could have told you where it was from, so I can appreciate the reference.

The thing is here, like this is kind of one of the issues that we have, I think, when it comes to Joe Rogan on these shores is that he's bringing up the Ark of the Covenant here.

He's taken kind of at face value what he's been told.

And rather than asking interested, curious questions about it, he's now just

like repackaging it wholesale to the point where he's saying, Well, what is it about the Ark of the Covenant that's causing cancer?

That's now the question we need to answer: is what is it about the Ark of the Covenant that they found that keeps giving people cancer?

Before we even get near that question, we have to say, Is anyone getting cancer?

Have we found the Ark of the Covenant?

Is any of this real?

But we sidestep all of those to get to a question which is like layer upon layer of presupposition, none of which is actually founded in anything anything real.

And so it's kind of a waste of, it's a waste of Jaws time raising that question, really.

Yeah, and the way he depicts it is there's all these people who are in this one monastery.

They're having all these problems.

They're clearly having some issue.

They think it's the Ark of the Covenant.

And I'm like, okay, where's the Ark then?

If that's what we think, why are there not people scouring the place with all manner of tools in order to find this particular relic that you seem to be thinking exists?

The reason why that isn't happening is because one of those things you said probably isn't true.

And I think like the problem is, like you say, Joe is hanging his hat completely on what this person, Graham Hancock, who I'm sure we're going to cover in a future show

is talking about.

And so he is taking for face value what Graham Hancock has said to him.

And now he's now laundering that to his audience, just like you said.

Yeah, absolutely.

And if there was a monastery out there where monks are getting cataracts and cancer and things from having found the Ark of the Covenant, you should ask yourself, is the first place you're likely to hear about that on the Joe Rogan Show?

Would that not be news anywhere else, or would it be the first time that you ever stumble across that?

Is that the Ark of the Covenant has been located and the news broke on Joe Rogan?

It's just very, very unlikely.

It feels like he's reporting on a documentary, Raiders of the Lost Ark, which I think he's made an error on.

Just take the thing off.

Mel's face, blood completely melts.

All right.

Next one is the this is where we actually get to the part where they do sort of confirm that Mel is a young earth creationist.

Yeah.

Well, I don't know how to explain those, Joe.

I don't know.

But you do think that human beings were created by God.

I do.

When do you think that happened?

When?

Oh, probably

and not that long ago.

Really?

No, not really.

Like, what do you mean by not that long ago?

Probably only about 8,000 years ago.

Really?

Yeah.

So what do you think things like Gobekli Tepe are when they find these constructions that are dated, carbon dated to 11,000 plus years old?

I question carbon dating.

Really?

Yeah.

That makes things a lot simpler.

Well, yeah,

well, there's a lot of money in

claims.

Well, carbon dating seems to be pretty rock-solid studies.

Yeah.

I mean,

the science behind radiocarbon dating and detecting carbon isotopes, it's like

that's

pretty legit.

Yeah.

I don't know.

I can't square it.

Yeah.

Well, you don't have to.

And I don't have to.

And what difference is it going to make to me?

Yeah, that's the thing.

It doesn't make a difference in terms of your experience in this life on Earth.

No.

Like,

you can have your faith and your ideas and live a great life from beginning to end.

And it might not suit you to really ponder evolution and all the puzzles and problems.

No.

It doesn't.

Yeah.

So, I mean, I'd agree that it doesn't necessarily suit suit Mel Gibson

to ponder the puzzles of evolution and the edge of the earth if he's coming to the solution that it's just 8,000 years old.

The question you have here, Mel Gibson is saying he questions, he's got a lot of questions about carbon dating.

But what makes, what I think to this is, well, on what basis does the actor Mel Gibson doubt carbon dating?

Because the reason he can't square it, in my opinion, is that he first came in wanting to dismiss it because it disagrees with what he thinks.

And as I say, we've seen this multiple times in Mel's reasoning.

I want to believe this thing here.

I will therefore ignore what the experts say, or I will find my own experts who agree with me.

But there are hundreds, if not thousands of people who've studied and researched their entire lives and made discoveries in this field to figure out the age of the earth.

So like maybe they have more of a handle on how old the earth is than the actor guy.

Like we don't take acting lessons from those people.

And so we shouldn't take lessons on the age of the earth from the actor.

Like we stay in, stay in our lanes of expertise to a a degree.

Absolutely.

And obviously, there's more evidence for the age of the earth than simply carbon dating.

For one thing, you can do radiometric dating on other elements.

Yeah.

So you don't have to do carbon dating.

And that's one of the ways that they figure out the ages of things: they do carbon, they pick some other isotopes, pick some other elements, they do the radiometric dating on each of those.

And if they coalesce around a certain date, that gives you even more confidence that that date is right.

You kind of triangulate it through multiple means.

We've also got evidence of agriculture and animal domestication from around 10,000 BCE.

So it must have been kind of awkward for those farmers one day when they were like tending to their field and the world suddenly started existing around them, you know, when they were busy tending to their animals things.

Or maybe they were around before that because humans have been around for longer than 8,000 years.

One of the farmers screamed and said, Tony, what did you do?

What did you do, Tony?

Nobody moved.

Also, I just want to just want to throw this out there, Marsh.

He questions carbon dating here, but he doesn't question it at all when the shroud is sort of confirmed by carbon dating.

He doesn't say anything.

He 100% agrees with it when it's a thing he wants to be true.

That's an excellent point.

When it's something he doesn't want true, he just doesn't agree with it.

He's like, no, I just throw that out.

I don't have to square that circle.

And I also want to say, too, like,

it does matter.

what you believe when it comes to younger creationism because younger creationists don't think that things like climate change are real.

They are mostly, for the most part, and I don't know if that's it's 100%, but it is certainly a large portion of young earth creationists are climate change denialists because they don't think you can change the climate.

They don't think they think that the world was created by a God and that God controls everything.

So they don't think we do anything to change the climate.

So if you're espousing ideas that are attached to your young earth creationism, you are now espousing bad ideas that we know like 97% of climate scientists think is real.

So it does matter what you believe and how you, and especially when you have a large

microphone that you're speaking to a large group of people on and they're taking what you're saying at face value.

Yeah, I think that's true.

And I think the other thing, I think it's a really good point.

I think the other thing that also stems from it, and I think that is relevant to Mel Gibson, is that When you train yourself

to throw away science in favor of ideology when it comes to the age of the earth, because you need your specific biblical account of the creation of the world to be true, you're training yourself not to trust science.

And that can work out really badly when it comes to other things that science that rely on science, things like health.

And as we'll come to actually in a moment, Mel Gibson's views on health seem to follow the same kind of route of you can't trust the experts, you can't trust scientists.

I should believe in the thing that I want to be true, first of all.

Yeah.

And Mel Gibson's thoughts on health really do stem from anecdotes.

And so that's what we're going to talk about in our toolbox section.

Wow.

So that's the tool bag and something just fell out of the toolbag?

So today in the toolbox section, we're going to be talking about the argument from anecdote or anecdotal evidence.

So for instance,

if you take only your experience with medicine and you say, this is the experience and this is the proof that something works, that's anecdotal evidence.

Yeah, absolutely.

The argument from

Anecdote kind of essentially boils down to, well, it worked for me.

But the thing is, if it didn't work for you, you wouldn't be telling us.

And that's kind of the problem we have with the argument from Anecdote: it really self-selects what gets told.

And not everyone is around to tell you the fact that it didn't work for them.

All right.

So this next clip is about Mel's experience with addiction.

You know, there's other logical reasons why I believe.

Like, what are those?

Oh, okay.

Stuff that happens in your own life.

The results you get from actually appealing to a power greater than yourself, you know.

And I mean, I don't think it's any secret.

I am flawed in the fact that I am by nature born an alcoholic, right?

I did drugs, I did alcohol.

And there was nothing that could stop

me from doing that.

Nothing.

So I was really kind of on, you're on a downhill run.

So I regard the fact that I was able to appeal to something greater than myself to help me and actually stop me doing that.

I think that's a miracle.

It is.

For me, it is.

And for many.

You know, so.

Well, that is the thing about AA, right?

It's a part of the whole process is appealing to a higher power.

Sure.

It's a spiritual program.

Yeah.

Because you're suffering your spiritual malady.

Yeah.

So it's a spiritual cure.

And that's the essence, I think, of why it works.

Because you can't explain it otherwise.

I mean,

well, you kind of can.

And the first step in any of that sort of stuff is accepting that you are powerless over it.

That's the first,

that's the most powerful step you can do, is that you're powerless.

When you realize that, you're like, okay.

Yeah.

There's fuck all I can do about this.

I have to appeal to something better than me.

And that to me is a miracle.

I just want to mention, too, there's a lot of of studies that show that AA is not great.

It doesn't have a great track record.

People do, and it has worked for some people, but it doesn't work with the numbers that they seem to

suggest that it works.

There's something to be said about peer mentoring.

I think that that's something that he doesn't actually mention, which AA is, right?

It's a peer mentoring system.

And that's something that is positive.

And a lot of people think is positive.

But he blames it on God, right?

He says, God is the thing.

Like if you're thinking about what Mel is saying here, Mel is saying, God is the reason why you quit.

You have to appeal to it.

Well, why do I have to do it in a group of people?

Why do I have to sit around and why can't I just appeal to God without a group of people around me?

Why can't I just ask God and then skip the meetings?

That is one of the problems with AA is that many secular people do not feel welcome in those places because they do not believe in a higher power and it is a prerequisite to be part of AA.

Yeah, and I think it's several of the steps kind of reference off to a higher power.

And look, in terms of an anecdote, if this worked for Mel, good for Mel, like genuinely, sincerely, if this is what's helped him deal with his addiction, even if it only worked for a while and he had lapses, addiction, people will lapse in addictions occasionally.

Not all kind of, not all

people can get off immediately.

It takes several times for certain people.

That is all fine.

But the key is that it doesn't work for everyone and it can be actively harmful.

And as we've seen, while his reliance on God might help him kick his addictions in some place, potentially, it also leads him into some some positions that are actively bad for him and lead him into kind of other knock-on effects.

And so getting people down that route to say that if you're addicted, you should start to get into the AA and therefore be as much into God as I am and therefore into these other places.

This is kind of a conveyor belt into some pretty dark territory.

So yeah, this is a personal anecdote and it doesn't work for everyone.

Next up is Mel talking about smoking and stem cells.

If I hadn't had the stem cells afterwards, my lungs completely healed from that, by the way.

Did it do it intravenously?

Yeah, intravenous.

And it gets stuck in your lungs.

Was this Dr.

Riordan?

It was Riordan.

Yeah.

Yeah, we talked, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It worked.

Stem cells are incredible.

And the fact that you can't get them the way they can get them in overseas, the way you can get it in Panama where Riordan has his clinic, and Tijuana.

They're getting better here.

They're getting better, but there's so much resistance because of the FDA.

Yeah, sure.

And the resistance is purely because of money.

It's, again, it's an evil thing.

It's not because they're not effective.

It's not because they're dangerous.

It's just because of money.

I think so.

And, you know, there's an agenda.

I think, you know, pharma wants to keep you on stuff.

Yeah.

They want to sell you something.

So if there's a surefire cure for something, it's not necessarily hailed.

Yeah, so there's a lot going on here, but this is all, first of all, about the argument from anecdote.

And what we have here is an it worked for me anecdote.

We're supposed to take Mel's word for it that the thing that got him off smoking and also healed from years of smoking smoking was intravenous stem cell injections from a clinic in Panama.

This is not reflective of what could work for everybody.

This is kind of, there are a lot of people who might try this kind of thing who don't end up in a really good position.

And we'll talk about that in a moment.

One thing I want to get out of the way first is

they seem to always keep going back to profit motive.

All the time, when they talk about medicine, they talk about profit motive.

I do not think they are giving away these stem cell treatments for free.

They are doing it because panama it has

like probably not as much oversight as the united states am i wrong no that is that is exactly it so they mentioned dr neil raden okay dr neil radin operates the stem cell institute in panama i looked this up i managed to find the doctor that mel gibson is going to that he says he's going to on their website they say the starting cost for any of their treatments for adults is twenty seven thousand dollars woof and i think mel says he has to go back several times because you've got to kind of get reopened i think he says that at some other point as well so he's having minimum $27,000.

Now, that might not be a lot to the American healthcare system, but when I see numbers like that, I see that as an awful lot of money.

Nice dig there, Marsh.

Geez.

But the thing is, Reagan used to have a clinic in Costa Rica, but that got shut down because there wasn't enough evidence behind his treatment.

So the healthcare regulators shut it down for being dangerous.

And that's why he moved to Panama, where the regulations are more permissive and give you the space.

And we've got evidence for that we can put in the show notes.

So Mel's own doctor here has been shut down because it's dangerous.

So we, when we talk about the argument from anecdote, Mel's anecdote misses out some really key stuff here that this stuff is not well evidenced.

So whenever you hear someone talking about, well, there is a miracle cure, it's wonderful.

The only place to get it is Costa Rica or Panama or Mexico or in Europe, it's Turkey and Hungary.

You ask, well, why is the cutting edge medical technology only available in those places?

And if the only answer you can come to is, well, there's a profit motive on keeping people ill so they'll silence the cure, if you're selling that cure, that profit motive argument just does not hold up.

And I checked, Gibson actually appeared on Rogan previously, a few years ago, praising the same doctor for the stem cell treatments that he got in his shoulder.

That's why his shoulder is all fine now.

His shoulders are messed up.

He kind of mentions it at some point in this interview, but he was there previously talking about his shoulder being all messed up.

He got stem cell treatments from Dr.

Readin.

So it's the same miracle treatment for completely different parts of the body, both both available from the same guy in a place where the healthcare regulation and oversight isn't particularly good.

These are all massive, massive red flags.

And like stem cells, they are a promising technology.

The idea being that you take cells that haven't yet turned into a specific type of cell, so they're called stem cells because they still have the potential to become other cells, and maybe you can encourage them to turn into the type of cell that you want in the place that you want.

But just injecting them into the body is not the way to do that.

And while there's a lot of very interesting science been done to see what we can do with stem cells, there's also a lot of people who recognize that they can rush into the market to sell this new emerging technology before the evidence is there, before we know how to administer it safely or effectively.

And they will get a lot of custom, especially from people who are desperately looking for answers.

So that's what we're seeing here.

And I think it's interesting if Mel Gibson started off going there for his shoulder, well, once you've been told that it works and you might have had some physio on your shoulder or whatever as well, maybe you're starting to feel a bit better.

Well, now I know this definitely works because my anecdote proved it.

So now when I'm giving up smoking, I'll go and get my lungs injected or my, you know, intravenous injections for my lungs.

This just all shows why you can't just trust a single story on this.

You have to actually look into the actual, what the body of evidence actually is.

Yeah.

And when they have a study and it's a wide study and it's been done in a proper way and there's evidence for it, you should believe it.

But when it's just a guy who's operating in a one clinic in a far away land because of less regulation, be very skeptical of that.

Especially when his other clinic was shut down.

Yeah, I I mean, just be skeptical of that.

And they also seem to keep saying they want to get big pharma wants to get you hooked on something.

And I'm thinking to myself, well, wouldn't they want to get you hooked on stem cells if they worked?

I mean, it's not like you or I can just go out and harvest random floating stem cells in the air.

Like it can't pick those things.

You have to, there has to be a doctor who handles all this stuff and they will charge you a lot of money.

Look at the cost, even if it's easy to do.

And I'm not saying it is.

I don't know exactly how they harvest them and what they do.

But even if it is easy to do, look at the cost of what insulin costs for people, right?

In our country specifically, and in the United States, it's very expensive, prohibitively expensive.

Now, I know that there was some attempts to bring that down in costs through Congress, but you know, there's at a certain point, it was intensely expensive in the United States to just get insulin.

Insulin, that's just a regular drug that a lot of people have to have.

But our market boosted it and lifted it up.

Don't you think they would do the same thing if stem cells worked?

Wouldn't Wouldn't they do the exact, I mean, if there's a profit motive and they're already making profits, wouldn't they just include this in their profits?

It just doesn't make any sense.

Yeah, I think you're completely right.

And I think you've just made me think of something that I think is quite

indicative here.

You say you're not quite sure where they get the stem cells from.

Well, one of the places they get stem cells from is from fetal lines, from things like abortions and those kind of things.

And, you know, so, or from placentas, I think as well.

So if you're getting

the stem cells from fetal lines, Mel Gibson, as someone who's against abortion, as he kind of mentions in this interview elsewhere, should be completely against it.

So this may be another instance like the carbon dating where he doesn't question the thing when it's on his side.

Yeah.

There's been reasoning there.

Yeah.

I want to mention too, and this is, you know, this is again, going back to the money motive.

And I think this is so, this is such a missed opportunity for Joe.

Joe keeps talking about the evils of the money being involved in medicine.

And he keeps talking about it.

Well, this is a, this is an American problem, primarily, right?

It's an American problem that

we have a middle person between us and our doctor, and we pay that middle person, and that middle person occasionally says, no, you can't get that treatment.

And there's definitely a different system here than in many other parts of the world.

And our system costs more money for us in it.

And it is a system that a lot of different industries do get rich in.

But what Joe misses is sort of the evils of capitalism and how they have wrung every bit of good out of a certain system.

Instead of attacking that, he seems to be missing it and seeing, well, what I'm going to do is go after the science of medicine and not capitalism as a whole and how it's corrupted the medical system.

And I think there's a missed opportunity for Joe here.

Yeah, yeah, because I think his instinct that there's too much, like there are profit motives and those can be corrosive.

I think that's a good instinct.

That's a genuinely good instinct.

You have to follow it up to actually sort of think about what the ramifications of that are.

When it comes to things that you need to survive, anything we need to survive, the second there's a heavy profit motivation in there is the moment that you start introducing barriers for people accessing it.

So I think those are genuine issues that he should take up.

But unfortunately, he kind of divorced from the reality of the profit motives.

And so he's looking at it in these kind of niche places of like, well, it's the people who are trying to stop you getting stem cells.

Those are the bad guys.

Next up is Mel Gibson telling us about cancer cures.

I don't believe that there is anything that can afflict mankind that hasn't got a natural cure for it.

I think that there has to be.

It just makes sense to me.

Now, I couldn't prove that, but I just believe that.

Yeah.

That there's got to be something that cures things.

And I'll tell you a good story.

Okay.

I have three friends.

All three of them had stage four cancer.

All three of them don't have cancer right now at all.

And they had some serious stuff going on.

And what did they take?

Jesus.

They took some,

what you've heard they've taken.

Ivermectin,

fabendazole.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm hearing that a lot.

They drank hydrochloride, something or other.

There's studies on that now where people have proven that they're a lot of people.

They've been drinking methylene blue and stuff like that.

Yeah, methylene blue, which was a fabric dye.

Yeah.

Yeah, it was a textile dye.

And now they find it has profound effects on your mitochondria.

Yep.

Yeah.

This stuff works, man.

There's a lot of stuff that does work, which is very strange

because,

again, it's profit.

When you hear about things that are demonized and that turn out to be effective, you always wonder, well, what is going on here?

How is our medical institutions, how have they failed us so that things that do cure you are not promoted because they're not profitable?

That they can't control it.

They don't have a patent on it, whether it's vitamin d k2 and magnesium yep you know yeah so one thing i'll point out at the start he says you know there's nothing that can afflict mankind that it that we that we haven't got a natural cure for well the thing is the natural cure for a lot of stuff was you just died the natural cure was you've had kids so and your kids are now old enough to look after themselves so you're done here we're fine at this moment you're just taking up resources that was nature we have made

well we have controlled nature to a point where our lives have meaning beyond procreation but that was kind of what nature was doing So, the idea that nature would therefore leave lying around the clues for you to kind of macyver together a cure for whatever it had given you, that is just that, that is kind of that they call it teleological thinking, which is kind of like, well, the world must work in this way for me.

If this, if I'm here, then anything that is happening must have an explanation of like, it must be able to kind of relate it to what it does for me kind of thing.

There must be a motive, like the universe has a motive, and I just don't buy that.

But what we are getting here in terms of the anecdotes are stories that Mel Gibson assures of some people he knows, was it three or four, three people he knows who have definitely cured their cancer this way.

Who are these people?

Are their stories true?

Is he telling us the full story?

Did they tell him the full story?

We have absolutely no way of knowing any of these things.

So we just accept it instead.

I want to mention too, Joe did not take this from his alien interview he did last time that we covered James Fox.

James Fox said, I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy and Joe's like, I think that is horseshit.

He didn't take it from Max.

That's a very good point.

That's a very good point.

But he takes it from Mel because it agrees with what he believes.

Yes, yeah, absolutely.

And let's say absolute best case scenario here that Mel Gibson is absolutely right.

Those people are absolutely right.

All of them had cancer.

None of them have cancer anymore.

They're now cured.

What about all of the people who tried those things and didn't get better?

Can we have their stories?

Can we interview them?

No, because they are not here.

They're no longer here to tell the picture.

So we only ever get a very narrow piece of the picture.

This is a project I actually worked on in my day job working for a charity.

I work as a skeptical researcher for a charity.

I spent six months going through every single story I could find in the media of people who went abroad for a miracle cure for cancer, where the newspapers were like, this person just needs to get to Germany and their miracle cure was there.

I went through six months of finding those.

I found like hundreds and hundreds of stories.

And I went through to see what happens after they go to that clinic when the newspapers don't report on them.

And like 60 or 70% of them were finding that there were obituaries.

Those people don't survive.

Those people aren't interesting stories once they die.

Person cures themselves of miracle cure is an interesting story.

Person with cancer dies of cancer isn't an interesting story.

So it never gets told.

So the only things you hear are the miracle cures.

This is why the argument from anecdote is a real issue because you don't hear the negative anecdotes sometimes because the people aren't here to tell them.

I read an article recently about how saints are created and how they create saints in the Catholic Church.

And one of the pieces of the article is really interesting.

They had had a saint researcher.

So the saint researcher was working on seeing if miracles that people professed, very specifically medical miracles, were actually miracles.

And she was researching these things and looking into these people's pasts and asking questions.

And something that she came across was these people would say that they were cured of cancer because of a miracle.

But what they wouldn't mention is that they were on aggressive chemotherapy, aggressive cancer meds.

They were doing things that doctors had recommended, but then they also prayed.

And then they said that what happened was, is there was an intercessor or a prayer that

helped cure them of this malady when, in fact, you can't point to the prayer and say that's what did it if you're doing other stuff also to mitigate that cancer.

And so, you know, I think that that also happens too.

We have no idea what's happening behind the scenes with Mel's friends.

They could be on aggressive chemotherapy and also taking some of these other things because what the hell?

I might as well try to do something else.

And if, and if I'm not sure if any of this stuff he's saying is true, but if it was, we would need to check also their medical history and see if there are doing chemotherapies and things like that.

Yeah, absolutely.

Although, just to be clear, when it comes to ivermectin, that has been lucky for cancer and it isn't effective.

Fembendazole is a antiparasite, an antiparasitic drug used in animals.

It's an antiparasitic drug generally.

It is highly unlikely that

it's going to be going to be particularly effective for cancer.

Often its use is based in the idea that cancer behaves like a parasite, and that is pseudoscientific as well.

So the things he's talking about, the chances that these are actually going to be effective are incredibly small and have as much as prayer.

Absolutely.

Exactly.

Absolutely.

All right.

So the last piece here, we are talking about how to stay young with Melon Joe.

Do you do the saunas too?

Oh, yeah.

Do you do the red light bed?

I have a red light bed.

Yeah.

I I have a sauna, red light bed.

I have a hyperbaric chamber.

Wow.

I have everything.

Hyperbaric chambers are the best.

Yeah, man.

It's incredible.

Incredible.

I got to get back in there.

I feel like I got more holes in my head.

It's phenomenal for just overall recovery for everything.

And it's also been shown to lengthen telomeres.

They did a study out of Israel.

Yeah, they gave people a protocol over 90 days.

You do 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days.

And it's shown to lengthen telomeres and decrease your biological age.

And you just feel fucking great.

That makes sense to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You're flooding your body with oxygen.

Most diseases, a lot of them, come from a lack of oxygen.

So, again, there's a lot in here.

It's only when I was listening to it there that I realized he's talking about doing 60 sessions of 90 minutes over 90 days in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

So like, if it does make you last longer, you're spending that time in a hyperbaric oxygen chamber.

All these anti-aging things sound like they take a lot of your time.

Yeah, they take an awful lot of time up.

And so let's talk about hyperbaric oxygen therapy.

Like, there's, there's pretty good evidence, as far as I can tell, that it's useful with wound healing.

That can be something that exposure to oxygen is pretty good.

There have been some studies that suggest it can have an effect on aging, but as far as I can see, the evidence isn't particularly strong.

Even though there is a lot of clinics that are rushing to sell you it as a treatment before the evidence is actually really compelling, just like we saw with the stem cells.

The second that you get some studies that are indicative in some way, people will rush to market because they recognize that everybody wants to live longer.

Everybody wants to look younger.

If there was a really strong and compelling set of evidence, like body of evidence, that it did arrest or reverse aging, we'd be hearing about it a lot because there is massive amounts of money in the anti-aging industry.

You know, every fourth product on the shelves, every fourth chemical on the shelves is anti-aging in some way.

You can't watch television without being bombarded with adverts for anti-aging.

If this was effective, all of those companies that make their money that way would be jumping on that particular bandwagon.

But just to be sure, I asked my colleague, Dr.

Alice Howarth, who's a cell biologist and my colleague at the Skeptic magazine, what she thought of this.

And she said, she let me quote her on this.

She said, the thing is, it's way more complicated than just being made out.

Growing telomeres, that Joe's talking about using hyperbaric oxygen therapy to grow telomeres.

She says, growing telomeres isn't easy because they're essentially designed to be degraded.

Now, for any listeners who aren't aware, telomeres are kind of the things that are on the end of your DNA, that the degradation of which is kind of one of the ways that leads towards aging.

So they kind of, they're there to say to the DNA, stop replicating at this point, essentially.

So Alice says we can slow degradation there, but growing it again is complicated.

And it's an aspiration that we have some promising early research on.

If hyperbaric oxygen therapy can grow telomeres, we need to understand the mechanism.

And she says there does to be some evidence, but that it does link to longer telomeres, but how is it contributing to growth?

And is it doing so safely?

And she says, on top of all of that, although we know that telomere degeneration is related to aging, we don't actually know that preventing degeneration has an impact on aging.

In some cases, you might lengthen the telomeres and then acquire an autoimmune response to telomerase, which is the enzyme that effectively grows telomeres.

So it's an area for investigation and scientists think it's worth pursuing, but we don't have the evidence that it works yet.

So it's all very embryonic and it might turn out to not work at all.

We shouldn't be selling it.

Did Alice mention that most diseases come from lack of oxygen?

Did she happen to mention that as well?

She didn't.

I mean, she is a cancer researcher and I could have put that to her, but I didn't want to waste the time of a very professional cancer researcher.

Cancer isn't caused by a lack of oxygen.

Death is caused by a lack of oxygen, but usually through one of several well-understood ways, not every single thing.

If you've got athletes' foot, it's probably not caused by a lack of oxygen.

You know, we know that diabetes has nothing to do with a lack of oxygen.

If you list a load of diseases, you'll find most of them have nothing to do with a lack of oxygen.

Sure.

Yeah.

But like the confidence in which Joe says that, he says that very confidently.

Well, you know, that most diseases are caused from lack of oxygen.

That confidence is, first of all, it's wholly unfounded, but it's also kind of why I was so interested in being involved here, because when he asserts stuff with such confidence, people believe him.

Yeah.

And they'll say, I won't believe everything that Joe says on the show.

But when he's making confidence statements like that, they're more likely to take that as fact than when he's sort of spinning off about

Mayan astronauts and things.

When he just says, well, we know that most diseases are caused by lack of oxygen.

The confidence there is going to leave some people with that impression.

I think too,

people look for for easy answers and sort of quippy, very easy things to remember.

And when they hear something like that, that's something that will stick with people, right?

If somebody says something like that, that's how all these quacks make their living is they sell little bits like that to you that make it sound like there's something profound there, right?

And they'll make it sound like because it's easy to remember and it's easy for you to wrap your brain around because you don't understand the complexities of the human body.

And so you immediately think, like what Mel said earlier, I think all

there's all natural cures for everything because everything's natural.

Like that to me just sounds like something a quack told him and he believed it.

And then he remembered it.

And the same thing here when he says, all diseases come from a lack of oxygen.

I just recognized that there was somebody in Joe's past who was trying to get one over on him.

And

they clearly did because he keeps repeating.

Yeah, for sure.

I want to talk to you real quickly about how rich people, really rich people, talk about how they have this, you know, they have this amazing diet or they have this amazing regimen that they do.

These guys are working out and

putting in time in certain places in their home, saunas and hyperbaric chambers and things.

These things cost as much as a car sometimes, right?

So we're talking about expensive equipment that you personally could never have.

Don't take advice, workout advice, don't take diet advice from people who are rich and have a lot of money.

They don't have a lot of stress in their life, which is probably one of the biggest factors in why they are able to do the things they do.

But also very specifically, like you just can't afford some of the things that they can do.

And a lot of people forget time in there, right?

Like people seem to say like, well, I can, I can go and cook a natural meal for myself and that's better than, you know, other stuff.

But like, you're forgetting that you also have to put into your day a million other things to make it so your day runs correctly.

Whereas Joe, might have people who help him out with a lot of things that you don't have to, that he doesn't have to worry about that you do.

So you have to cut time into there too.

And people seem to neglect and forget that time is a super important thing and it's also very stressful too on the human body.

So just don't listen to these people.

When they talk about the diets they have and they talk about their workout regimens, chances are you can't recreate the same things that they have in their life.

And so don't try to emulate them.

Find things that work for you specifically, but don't listen to these people.

Yeah, I completely agree.

It reminds me of when we heard Evan Hayfer on a previous episode talking about, well, why do you go and buy meat from the supermarket?

because it's so easy to go out and hunt?

Exactly.

It's easy for you to go out and hunt because you don't have to do the other things that average regular people who've got jobs and lives have to go off and do.

And the thing to bear in mind as well, you're absolutely right.

Joe Rorgan, he lists the hyperbaric oxygen chamber amongst a million other things there, the infrared, the red lights, the infrared saunas, saunas, all this kind of stuff.

And he's, as you say, he's got the kind of life that's going to be missing the kind of stresses that lots of people face around money or access to healthcare.

You know, when he's unwell, he can probably pay very quickly for a very good private doctor.

Not everyone can do that.

He has good access to nutritious food because he's got the money to do that.

So if he is as healthy as he says, and if he does have as slow an aging process as he says, it's

impossible for him and for us to know what he's doing that's working.

If he feels good, everything he's doing is going to get the credit.

But it might well be that none of the stuff he's talking about is actually what's doing it.

What's actually useful is living a fairly affluent life free from relative stress.

And so any time he's spending in an oxygen chamber, he's not spending doing the school run and worrying about how to pay his bills.

Great point.

I'm the last person that thinks I'm smart.

Trust me.

Marsh, was there anything in here that you thought was good?

I did actually admire the fact that Joe, for all the faults I can have, he did a pretty good job of pushing back when it came to evolution.

Like he had to hand the names of some of our ancestor species that I wouldn't have been able to come up with on the spot.

That's not my area kind of knowledge.

So, like, he was like, Well, what about this species?

What about this particular thing?

And I thought that was pretty good.

And then, when Mel was trying to deflect by saying, Oh, well, that particular species, that could have just been a mutated form of humans because we know that people been born with mutations.

Joe didn't let him get away with that.

He was right there to saying things like, he brought up things like genetic sequencing as evidence.

Well, it can't be just a mutation because they've genetically, they've sequenced the genome and it's not the same.

That was genuinely good.

If more of the show was like that, I'd be much more interested.

I think you're right.

I think that that is the piece that I'm going to seize on too.

Although I will point out, you know, many people, when you bring up this criticism of Joe that he doesn't push back, they say, well, these are just conversations.

They're not meant to be these debates.

They're meant to be these conversations.

But when Joe cares about something, he very much pushes back about certain things.

What we get a chance to see on most of these shows is Joe's bias.

So what you get a chance to see is when Joe is biased against something, he will push back to make sure that his bias is concluded.

In this case, his bias happens to include something that you and I also believe the science behind.

But this is, this is clearly motivated by Joe's bias.

And it shows me that there's just like when they make this claim that you can't push back, that's just not true because he, he makes, he essentially, you know, if we're talking about fighting metaphors, he makes Mel submit.

He's like, Mel's finally just like, well, I just, I just don't know.

I just, I don't know, I don't know.

And then they just continue to talk for another two hours about other stuff.

It doesn't interrupt anything.

It doesn't change anything.

And Joe continues to ask him other questions.

So I don't feel like it's one of those, it doesn't feel like it's a conversation ender that a lot of people seem to place that sort of pushing back.

They seem to say, that's a conversation ender.

You can't do that because that's going to kill the conversation.

He does it in this conversation.

No problem.

It doesn't kill anything.

Yeah, for sure.

All right.

That's going to wrap it up for this particular episode.

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Experimental.

Here we go.

Oya, it's 23.

Ah, no, Mija, check the internet.

Video, like,

obtain Wi-Fi

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