September 9, 2020 • 61 mins
How much power does the mind wield over physical matter? Could certain human beings, through the force of focused thought alone, walk on fire, lay on nails, and survive being buried alive for days at a time? Listen in to learn more about the fact, fiction and controversy surrounding the famous feats of the mystics.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Mett, my name is Note they called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decond Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. We're entering today's episode with an
image that may be familiar to everyone, especially fans of
(00:48):
film in the West, and it's a somewhat stereotypical image
that of the Indian mystic often called a fake here
f a k i r, someone using the power were
of the mind to accomplish seemingly extraordinary feats. Fake here
is a Muslim or Hindu religious ascetic, traditionally a mendicant
(01:10):
monk who is sometimes thought of as a miracle worker.
And we've heard the tales, right they sound they have
let's be diplomatic. They range and plausibility. The idea is this,
through intense meditation, these individuals are able to do things
like walk on fire without being burned, they can be
(01:30):
buried alive for days at a time, they can lie
on a bed of nails with no injury, and allegedly
they can even do things like levitate or survive for
forty days without food or water. So what is happening here?
Today's question? Could the mind alone be responsible for these astonishing,
(01:52):
seemingly miraculous feats. Here are the facts. First of all,
really quickly, though, you literally just described stuff that's like
David Blaine type material. I think he's done all of
those things. I think he's uh survived for however long
without food and you know, walked on broken eat, swallowed glasses,
(02:12):
and peeked up frogs. I don't know. I'm wondering if
that's if if he's got some of these these abilities.
But let's get to the facts. For sure, the mind
is absolutely capable of of extraordinary feats. In the previous episode,
we've explored things that could technically be considered mind over
matter um, the most widely acknowledged examples being the human
(02:33):
mind affecting physical changes within the human body, specifically the brain.
And we're not talking about telekinesis yet, but there is
evidence for this that is super fascinating. Uh, let's start
with mental health and the immune system. Yeah, we we
know for sure that someone's mental state can actually affect
(02:56):
whether or not they are vulnerable to specific certain disease eases.
It can also affect how quickly someone recovers from something
or how well their immune system responds to something that
is invading their body. Again, that sounds weird, but again,
the mind is kind of the control mechanism for a
lot of these things, even the ones that occur without
(03:17):
our uh, conscious input. Right. There's a professor named Steve Colt.
He's a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University
of California in Los Angeles. He has been looking at
this link between the way people feel emotions essentially and
the way that can affect biology. So that link between
(03:38):
biology and emotion, And as Steve Cole, this professor explains
that the immune system has two essential programs that can run.
One that's going to fight off viral infections viruses like
all corona um, and then another that fights bacterial infections.
And this one causes the body to become inflamed, is
(03:59):
what it's called inflammation. You like red warm, You've you've
had it before somewhere in your body, I assure you. Um. Now,
this bacterial fighting program, the one that causes inflammation in
a response like that, it has a really big downside.
In an effort to keep everything healthy, to keep your
(04:19):
immune cells functioning, the ones that actually fight that good fight,
the body can also cause tissue damage through this process
and this program that it runs to protect itself. That's
a that's a big problem, right, m right, And and
his work shows us pretty conclusively that what we would
commonly call negative experiences maybe uh in a cancer diagnosis
(04:43):
or depression PTSD, and interestingly enough, lower socioeconomic states, which
should which I wish people would talk about more often,
All of these things, all of these things that could
be at the very least described as downers, are also
associated with increased activity of inflammation genes in your immune cells.
(05:05):
That's that's not completely a horrible thing, because it seems
logical then that if a negative experience and negative emotions
lead to problems with your immune system, positive experiences like
happiness might have the opposite effect. And this leads Professor
Cole to ask himself a very strange question. How he asked,
(05:28):
can an immune cell register and abstract concept like happiness.
It's something philosophers have argued about before the dawn of
recorded time, and skeptics out there, including those in this room,
may think, well, there's got to be some kind of
explanation there with UH, like a biochemical reaction, something that
(05:51):
gets released when you're feeling happiness, as we because we know,
and we've talked about in previous episodes that the brain
releases all kinds of varying chemicals depending on what you're feeling, um,
everything from love to hate, and you know, perhaps there's
something they're happening, but perhaps it's different than that, it's bigger.
Let's let's keep our minds open as we go through this. Yeah,
(06:12):
and you know philosophy UH talks about this. I think
it's a platonic concept, the idea of you diamonia, which
is UH happy. It's it's like happiness, but it's not.
It's more of like a sense of purpose and well
being and kind of it's a bigger concept than just
like I'm happy right now. It's more of like a
life happiness than I'm momentarily happy because I'm cuddling a puppy,
(06:36):
um and that is the concept that Professor Cole kind
of leaned on. UM. And one of the categories is
this demonic happiness, the idea of well being uh and
all of that stuff that with that purpose. And then
there's hedonic, which again would you think of as being
like hedonistic, which is experiencing being flooded with positive emotions. Um.
(06:58):
He talks about you dimonic happiness is more like, I said,
that direction in life, having like an internal compass and
knowing that you're doing the right thing. Um, even connectedness
to like the universe or the idea of a god
or what have you. UM. And he led us study
where eighty healthy adults took questionnaires about their sense of
(07:18):
well being UM, which were used to assess their level
of you, demonic and hedonic happiness. Then he drew blood
to study how their immune cells reacted UM. And the
response summed up in the Atlantic is pretty fascinating, that's correct.
The researchers found that a high score on you demonic
(07:39):
well being correlated with a more favorable genetic expression profile.
This means that when you feel that you are part
of something bigger, that's your demonic happiness. When you feel
like you matter in the universe, you have a destiny,
You're going in a direction. Your immune cells show high
levels of ti viral responses and low levels of inflammatory response.
(08:05):
This this means, when we think about it, oddly enough,
all those people that were once called hippies turned out
in a way to be right. Positive vibes matter, bro
or whatever you would say. Things that boost this sense
this you demonic well being. Things like meditation reduce that
(08:26):
inflammatory activity, increase anti viral response, they improve the function
of specific strains of immune cells, and then they also
lead to higher antibody production. That that is real mind
over matter. Yes, and we as we do on the
show all the time. That is one specific study, right.
(08:46):
It doesn't mean that's the end all, be all truth
of the matter, but it definitely appears to be showing
us that it's a possibility, right yeah. Yeah, And that's
a good point map because Professor Cole has worked ext
pensively in this field. So that's one study to give
you a snapshot, but you can read more about his
work to your heart's content on your browser of choice.
(09:10):
And this idea, this weird relationship of mind over matter,
because that's really what we're talking about when we talk
about the claims of various mystics. This idea goes much
further than just an anti viral response. Next, we have
to talk about not just meditation, but taxi drivers, Buddhist monks,
(09:31):
the human brain. What are these all have in common?
It's weird. I know that was click baity, but it
got us there. Yes, you may recall an episode we
did a little while back on real life Superhumans. Does
anybody remember a fellow named Iceman or Yes? He is?
(09:52):
He the one who cometh he if it's cold enough, Yes,
he comes. He's he don't dieth power. Yeah, dude. Um,
he's world renowned. He's been on numerous I don't I
don't know which television shows, but a ton He's been
featured all over the place because he has a real superpower.
(10:16):
He can withstand the most freezing temperatures that are available.
We're talking temperatures that would kill most mortal humans such
as I Uh. It's intense stuff. And he doesn't do
it like he wasn't born with some special DNA. What
he does is mind over body techniques including it's it's
(10:39):
mostly breathing techniques seriously, and and body movements like flexing
muscles and tensing things, and he increases his temperature, He
increases his internal temperature with his mind and and just
breathing like yeah, he also exposes himself to cold temperatures
more than the average person. But that doesn't swillly. So
(11:01):
it's that's sort of the equivalent of like taking a
little bit of poison over time so that when a
snake bites you you're immune. No, it's really just like
I'll tell you what it's like. I'll tell you what
it's like. And I'm not comparing myself to to you
ice man, if you're listening, you you are a god
among men. Uh, spicy things like kep say us in
(11:21):
levels and exposing yourself to higher and higher doses over time.
Not unlike poison. In this it's more of your mind
deciding that the pain doesn't matter. It's changing the threshold,
it's changing your but right, It's just it's sort of
like like raising the bar for your threshold of pain
or what you can handle. It's not necessarily the same
as like giving yourself building up an immunity to something
(11:42):
that actually affects your body and could kill you. It's
more but I'm still confused. It's like, what about things
like frost bite? Like what about things that like, you know,
if you touch us a surface that's so cold it
affects your skin, it can rip the skin right off.
I mean, there's all kinds of crazy things that can happen.
How does he How does he deal with that? Uh?
He has limits. Typically, the feats that you will see
(12:04):
him accomplish again through the power of the mind are
things like running marathons and freezing weather barefoot, uh, sitting
for extended amounts of time, meditating in as you said, Matt,
conditions that would kill an ordinary person. The specific he
calls it the whim Hoff technique, and you can learn
it the specific pattern of of breathing and meditation. But
(12:27):
he didn't make this up out of whole cloth. There
have been other people who have been conquering their nervous
system responses through meditation for years, and in some cases
it begins to physically affect their brains. Before we move on,
if you want to learn more about whim Hoff and
other real life superpowers, we have two podcasts on it
(12:48):
because we kept finding really really bizarre things. I also
still have a list somewhere of and I don't want
to offend anyone of the uh, the superpowers that I
arbitrarily thought were like not to the threshold of us
being able to put him in a real life superpowers
episode of The Great Lakes Guys, right, yes, yeah, like
(13:11):
the Doorman exactly. Uh. But when we talk about these superpowers,
let me talk about mind over matter. We we get
it right, everybody's saying, guys who get it meditation It
makes you feel better and your body does a little
better and you may not freeze to death quite as quickly.
What gives meditation does much more than that. And we
(13:33):
have two stunning examples. The first one Buddhist monks speaking stereotypes.
The stereotype of Buddhist monks is that they meditate all
the time. Right. Well, I'm storrying to keep belaboring the
point here, but back to a Womenhu just for two seconds,
if you would indulge me. Ben. I'm looking at some
images of this guy, and he's a fascinating looking character.
(13:54):
He has that uh, that that sirpa kind of vibe
that you were talking about the top of the show.
That's the wrong term. But I see an image of
him in a bath, a bath of ice with like
measurement little suction cups on his body. So I'm assuming
like this stuff has been verified, Like, I mean, it's
not some kind of like hoax. Like you guys both
seem to be fully on board with this guy's abilities.
(14:15):
Uh would would you do you think sciences as well?
Or is there still like the jury is out as
to like is he really doing this with his mind?
I see a peach. I can assure you this guy
is legit. He is real. I have watched uncut shots
of this dude doing crazy stuff there. Yeah, it's real.
I love it. Okay, I'm sold. But there is research
(14:37):
beyond just this gentleman that that dates back much further,
showing that the Buddhist monks who spend long hours meditating
on a regular basis have somehow managed to slow the
aging of their brain um. In one particular case, brain
scans verified that a forty one year old monk named
young gay ming your rin pushe Um had man edge
(15:00):
to retain the brain of a thirty three year old person.
His brain is essentially functioning at a capacity eight years
uh better than what it actually should be eight years younger.
He has managed to slow the aging of his brain.
I want to bring up just a point of contention
(15:21):
here that i'd love to get somebody's, like y'all's opinion on.
And then also you listening, Um, I wonder if there's
anything happening there where the complications of young Gay's life
are slightly less than that of someone existing, let's say,
(15:43):
just in a city who's running around meeting a bunch
of different people, UM, tackling varying problems in bringing new
information in at all times that they're processing at all times,
not getting as much sleep, Like I wonder, I wonder
it seems like a difficult thing to compare like those
(16:04):
two people's experiences, I guess in like how the brain functions. Yeah,
and I don't mean to project this because I don't
know if this is correct at all, but it does
seem like the life of a monk is so very different, um,
and the essentially the input that goes into the brain
is so vastly different. I probably have the brain of
a seventy five year old man, honestly, with all of
(16:26):
the rapid fire multitasking and lack of sleep, and like
you said, just the existence in a much more fast
paced world and uh shorter attention span, you know, whereas
like I, that's a really good question, like if if
if if if reading and studying and meditating is exercise.
You know what what is little nuggety bits of information
(16:48):
that we uh as as modern humans you know, that
tend to to build our lives around. What is that?
Is that just junk food? Is our brain atrophying because
we're only feeding it little bits at a time as
opposed to longer form stuff that maybe works it out better.
I don't know, this is all hypothetical. I'm just asking
what you guys think. So Matt, to answer your question,
I would say that, um, this is a tremendous This
(17:12):
is a tremendous issue in the methodology because with long
hours of meditation also comes long hours of what we
call focused attention. So you're not to your point knell
shooting off emails or kind of living in the A
d H D environment that is foisted upon us by
(17:33):
the modern era when everything is connected and people, for
some ridiculous reason get mad if you don't instantly respond
to their text, which what is that? Anyhow? The like,
the big part of this is that this isn't just
a study with one monk. This is one example, but
we see that these long periods of time are like
(17:55):
when we say brainy is younger. What we're really talking
about is neuroplasticity, which tends to degrade over time. Something
this person is doing, and meditation scientists believe is a
big part of it based on other studies they've done.
Something this person is doing is allowing them to retain
neuroplasticity at a level that should not be happening. Because
(18:20):
think about this. If we wanted to disprove this, or
if we wanted to not disprove but to separate the
conflation of a quote unquote simpler life and you know,
Buddhist meditation, then we would want to have a study
where we take someone else who is probably not as
inundated with technology, communication, pollution, new variables of day to
(18:43):
day life, and say a city, but doesn't practice meditation.
We would want to compare the two and I think
physically we would see some commonalities, but mentally it looks
like focused thought mind over matter is the is the
prime mover in this situation. Yeah, I think the next
step also you do that study. You do studies then
(19:04):
as well of Uh. City folk who are you know,
working every day, have a family, busy lifestyle, who also
meditate on a regular basis. See where everything lies? Just
you know, I'm just putting that out there. Who knows.
Let's let's talk about Let's talk about something else. No, no, no,
no no. I love what you're saying. And I love
(19:26):
the idea that we're pitching research to post grads. Letsten
it to the show. This is what if you're after
that grant money, come to us if you need a
really weird idea. Because furthermore, that meditation physically changes part
of the brain. It doesn't just preserve it, you know
what I mean. We're not keeping the boat just on
(19:47):
the top side of the ocean. We're building bigger decks
on on the vessel. Speaking of decks, I really just
want to find out if I'm meditating about magic cards
all day, is that equivalent to me, you know, doing
the practices of Buddhist monk. Because if it is the same,
then we're good to go. Right what what? What? What
(20:09):
If I like binge a really smart television series over
the course of three days, does that count? Maybe? Yeah?
I can't hurt you, right, Uh, can't can't it though,
I feel like I'm definitely going to get dementia that
I'm just putting that. I mean, it's if look, it's
twenty we are aware of so many terrible things, you know.
(20:31):
If like when I hear someone say that they're doing
great and they're okay, I don't believe them. And if
I do believe them, I think that they're just not
as which sounds terrible and cynical. But but we do know,
we do know. Um, this is this goes beyond the
power of mind over matter, goes beyond that association of meditation,
(20:57):
esoteric breathing techniques and so on. As a matter of fact,
if you have ever been to London, you have encountered
or at least seen somebody with phenomenal power over their brain.
They've actually they've physically changed their brains, and not on purpose.
It's it's we did a car stuff episode about this
(21:18):
years ago. I don't even know how many. Uh. If
you want to drive one of those famous black cabs
in London, you cannot use the GPS to pass to
get You have to instead memorize thousands and thousands and
thousands of streets and thousands of alternate routes between these
streets from any given place within a certain circumference of
(21:40):
the city. This test is so hard that people just
call it the knowledge and they're there are these kids,
these young these young folks riding around on like little
motor scooters trying to memorize streets. That's all they do
all the time, all day so they can pass the knowledge,
which has on a good day a fifty percent failed
(22:00):
rate pretty consistently. Do do London cabbies make like a
really good wage. The black calves are expensive. Yeah, yeah,
you you've you've heard us mentioned this before. I think
it's the same whim off episode where it's something beyond
normal learning. What's happening here is these people who are
studying for this knowledge, who get the knowledge, they are
(22:22):
physically altering their brains. They're like the folds are changing,
the physical makeup is changing. Uh, It's it's intense stuff.
It's mental exercise and it's working. Like, how crazy is
that your thoughts are changing? Like imagine if you looked
at your hand and you thought so much about your
(22:43):
hand that your hand, your your right hand or your
left hand can do I would do one for this exercise,
you know, teacher, and so you hold up, just hold
up a hand. It's convenient to you. And imagine if
you stared at this hand and for hours a day
for years, and then you held up your other hand
(23:05):
you didn't stare at and let me do a trick
of the it was like way smaller. That's what that's
what's happening with the people who take the knowledge and
work as black cap taxi drivers. Their hippo campus. Specifically,
this is the scientific term. I read this in the study.
I'm not saying this to be glib. Their hippocampus balloons balloons. Uh.
(23:27):
And they have better spatial memory than far beyond that
of the average human person. And this may come at
a cost to other other types of memories. But the
important part is they thought enough about something and it
physically changed their body. And these are these are profound examples. Yes,
(23:51):
and they're familiar to longtime listeners, but a lot of
us are probably in the audience saying, hang on this,
this isn't the whole story, right, What about people you
guys talked about mystics, right, the you're telling us about
people who slowly, over a period of years or decades
do have power of mind over matter, but their mind
(24:13):
is the matter they're affecting tends to be the human brain.
Are there people who really can, for example, lie on
a bed of nails without bleeding, walk across fire and
not be burned. It's firewalking. It's the stuff of legend.
It is often associated with divinity or some sort of
mental capacity beyond what we know today. But could someone
(24:37):
actually do this? The answer is maybe a little more
complicated than you'd like to think, and we're gonna get
into it right afterward from our sponsor. Here's where it
gets crazy. So good news, Yes, people can really do
(24:59):
these things. In fact, this maybe be even better news.
It is nowhere near as difficult as you might think.
And yes, your mental state, the correct mindset is important. Uh,
but that's far from the only ingredient in the recipe here.
Some folks are perhaps gonna take this as bad news.
(25:20):
They might see us as debunking this. But other folks,
you know, in the audience, may feel empowered firewalking. That's
what it's called a little bit misleading. But how does
firewalking work? Fire walk with me? Oh boy, I thought
about I had that plane. Well, I was slinking at
(25:42):
some of this stuff, just imagining him like, uh, interrogating
a small I think maybe, or primate. Okay, I love
his voice through the Lynch voice. But firewalking nowadays seems
like a kind of isolated practice. It's it's not something
a lot of people get together to do with their
(26:03):
friends on the weekend all the time. Uh. We have
this stereotype that squarely places it in India, right, But
people have been doing this for thousands of years in
places across the globe. The earliest documented reference does go
back to India b C. But you'll see firewalker You'll
(26:26):
see people calling themselves firewalkers in Spain, Greece, Fiji, Polynesia.
And there's nothing supernatural about it. There is zero supernatural
stuff at play here. Uh. You can probably do it yourself,
but but don't don't legally, We are not telling you
(26:49):
to do this. It's a bad idea. Don't go to
the e er with your feet all messed up and
say that Ben, Matt and Noel told me this would
be a cooling to do, because we're not. We're just
saying you're probably physically capable of doing it. Yes, I
would say, don't do it unless you have production insurance.
Like the cast of the Office, let's think of the
(27:11):
same thing. That's a very epic moment of team building
as a team building that's right, Probably probably not something
that most offices that get approved as a team building exercise,
But I I like the gesture. I couldn't even get
a budget for us to play laser tag, which is ridiculous.
But but should I watch The Office or here? And
I haven't seen the US version that is wild? Yes
(27:32):
you should. And the second season of Community, Oh my goodness,
I have seen The Office all the way through, probably
nine times. It's like my comfort food show. I just
put it on when I want to feel okay. So
let's talk about what firewalking actually is, or you know
what it generally refers to. There's usually a nice long
(27:54):
bed of coals, really hot coals, stuff that will burn
you for sure. You know. Let's say it's about ten
feet long. Then on one end you've got human beings,
actual human beings with no shoes, no, no foot coverings whatsoever,
lined up, ready to just walk across it and guess
what happens they do. In the instance of some of
(28:16):
the mystics, we're talking about a lot of times it
will be an individual person that is taking a walk
across the coals and then maybe waiting for a moment
and taking a walk back across the coals. And it
really is just science. It's it's something that science can
pretty quickly answer. Sadly, I don't know if it's sad,
it's pretty I find it inspiring. It was mystic, man,
(28:39):
it was incredible. It was mind blowing, at least for me.
I remember it. But remember when there was magic in
the world. Guys, there's still science came along. It just
has nothing to do with coals on the crowd. Okay, Yeah,
it's true, because I mean, you don't see there's a
lot of work that goes into making one of these scenarios.
You know, like when you hire the company to make
your coal pit for your team building I exercise, they
(29:00):
show up well in advance of the actual exercise, and
they gotta dig a trench first. Then they got to
lay out the coals. They gotta light them, and you
probably would notice that these coals aren't like flame and hot,
and you're not shooting like, you know, an accelerant on them.
They're not shooting flames out left and right, they're basically embers. Uh,
they've been allowed to burn down to the point that
(29:23):
they're not you know, actually actively on fire anymore. So
are hot they are? They can they can be hotter
than a thousand degrees fahrenheit. But Ben, you turn us
onto this fact. This is fascinating there because of the
actual coal. And by the way, so firewalking is kind
(29:44):
of a as a misnomer would be more accurately described
as coal walking. Ben, as you pointed out to us,
Um and Uh, the carbon structure of coal is really
bad at conducting heat. So if you kind of zip along,
you know, hot footed lye um, you're gonna there's a
(30:04):
little bit of a lag and how quickly it conducts
heat from the coal to your actual bare feet. And
that's why you don't see a bunch of people getting
together to have either a social rite of passage or
a corporate team building exercise by walking on a tin
foot row of burning metal sheet pands. You don't don't
(30:27):
do it. There's a reason, there's a science to this. Yeah,
coal is just a terrible, terrible conductor of heat. Water
also has a high thermal capacity, So you don't see
the prep work before you see that amazing walk. There
are hours of people very carefully organizing, igniting the coal
(30:48):
and then letting it burned down while they smooth it out. Uh,
they let the wood burn so that the embers don't
retain water. And they use specific types of wood, So
hardwood embers like cherry and maple, like low red orange,
look hot, but they don't burn as hot as other
types of wood like olive wood. And and you know
(31:10):
the the firewalk pros know this, the tony Robbins of
the world and so on. That's right. And another major
factor here is essentially what I do with my grill,
what maybe you do with your grill when you're cooking,
if you set the coals up, if you cook with coals,
but you set coals up kind of in a pile
you set on fire. Then once the pyramid right like almost, yeah, well,
(31:34):
what's fires going? You spread that baby out, so you've
got essentially a flat layer of coals across the entirety
of that surface. The same thing is happening here. The
coals are then spread out specifically so that you're not
going to when you place your foot on top of it,
you're not going to go into coals. Right, You're not
gonna surround your foot with a step with coals. You're
(31:56):
gonna step across one single layer or as close to
in single layer as possible. You might also might also
dip your feet in some water. And that is because
when liquid meets intense heat, it forms an insulating, albeit
a temporary layer of steam. This is something called ZENA
(32:18):
didn't frost effect. Sorry what was that? Oh yeah, it's
I meant to say frost effect. Okay, I just want
to make sure I got it. It's the reason why
you can lick your the tip of your fingers and
then snuff out a candle without hurting yourself. Uh. And yes,
we are pronouncing that correctly. It does have to be screamed. Yeah,
(32:41):
it's in all caps anywhere that it's printed right. Right,
So with with all this, you know, like what you
were saying earlier, and uh, we do see a paste
mattering because if you have prepared this way, your wood's right,
your your surface is flat, there's not actual flame being admitted.
(33:01):
And you just walk at a brisk pace, you know
what I mean? You walk like it's kind of cold
outside and you're in a hurry. Then you are going
to receive a relatively small amount of harmless heat with
each step, but that changes very quickly if you saunter
too much or you meander, and it differ changes. Yeah,
it also changes if you run. It just it gets
(33:23):
worse on either side of the spectrum. Just slow and steady.
That's what the tortoise was talking about, or the turtle
or whatever other slow animal in that parable. You don't
want to run. So it really is all about just
like a nice even saunter continue across. Um. Wow, you
know it's it's funny that it is so simple like that,
(33:46):
and it does seem like anybody could do it and
it's not hard necessarily, But that really isn't the point,
at least in a lot of the ways it was
done in the past and the way it's viewed as
a ritual, right, It is more about mind over body,
almost convincing yourself that it's gonna be okay if I
(34:08):
do this, or I have the mental strength to go
through with this thing that seems terrifying. Yeah, it's it's
so I think could mean like it's it's it's a
little bit different. But if you're someone who's terrified of
like roller coasters or heights heights, let's just say, let's
just simplify it, and then you psych yourself out to
go on a really terrifying roller coaster. That's mind over
matter as well, because you know, in reality that thing
(34:31):
could break down and eject you, you know, at the
very top of the of the you know, biggest loop,
and you could fall to your death. You accept that
that's a possibility, but you submit yourself to this situation
and agree and agree with yourself with your mind that
you're going to be okay, and you get a no
fear T shirt at the end, you know what. No spoilers.
(34:56):
But now that I think about it, that's really what
the office episode was all about. Oh really, I thought
you were about to say I still have those T
shirts and and I was shaking my head and I
was thinking, I knew it. I know he's still well,
of course, all my shirts are now like UFC mm
A shirts, you know, all the really really good ones. No,
(35:17):
like this one. I think this is a UFC shirt
somewhere I've got, uh, yeah, I have. I have a
bunch of shirts that are just names of podcasts from
announcements where they handed us shirts and I was, and
I was like, well, I'm not gonna keep buying shirts now.
So that's where I have a Stamps dot Com shirt
(35:38):
that says something about podcasts, like I made a podcast
and all I got was this lousy Stamps dot Com
shirt or something. Someone someone was bound to do that.
But okay, So if you're a perspective cole walker, it's
fine to call yourself a firewalker. Just know that you're
being intentionally misleading. Uh. If you walk too slowly, your
(35:59):
feet will sink into the coal, You'll go through those
temporary insulators, and your day will take a bad turn
because these folks will burn like any other ordinary person.
If you go too fast, you will run the risk
of kicking up embers, burning yourself again like any other person.
Or you'll be doing everything right and a little piece
(36:20):
of coal gets stuck between your toes. Also, you have
to add you could slip and fall and that can
turn fatal pretty quickly, so be very cautious. Also, we're
not telling you to do it, We're just telling you
how it works. You may be asking yourself, hey, why
is this always shown happening at night so often? That's
(36:42):
all that's all in the pr it's the pizzas baby.
It turns out that uh, firewalking at night minimizes the
visibility of the ash that covers the coal. Ash is
another just trash heat conductor. It's terrible at it, and
when it covers these coals, it blocks the heat. So
(37:02):
during the daytime it might look like people are just
making a great to do about a weird, crumbly gray pathway,
But if you show it at night, it looks like
things are on fire totally. No. I minimizes the the uh,
the bad optics and maximizes the good optics because you're
not gonna they're not gonna seem nearly as glowy during
the day, right, exactly exactly, And so this is all calculated, uh,
(37:28):
and explained this way, it may seem more like a
simple science experiment, even though it is risky. But to
a point you made earlier, Matt, we have to remember
that this occurs as a right of passage, So people
experiencing this are viewing it through the lens of ritual.
Just because it's not supernatural doesn't mean it can't be
(37:51):
a fundamentally transformative act. Ordinary things can change your life. Yeah,
that's right, just like the first box of magic cards
you ever get. Hey, we we're gonna keep going down
this pathway of looking at some of the more seemingly
mystical things that mystics do, and we'll tell you more
(38:14):
about him after another word from our sponsor. Okay, So,
if you're still with us after we pretty much demystified
walking on coals, thanks for coming back. I hope you
had a good break. Uh, this is something, honestly, Matt Well,
(38:36):
this is something that just uh, I think Chuck would
say it squigs me out. Yeah, it's uh, it's another
very popular thing, uh, lying down on beds of sharp
nails without without being harmed physically. But Ben, it's not
the sharp part that squigs you out. It's the materials
(38:59):
right on the metals. Yeah. No, I I I get it, paraly.
I I think a lot of us out there get it. Ben,
Maybe not to the extent that that you experienced it,
but yeah, it does. It's like, even though you could
do it safely, guys. For me, honestly, it's like the
(39:20):
same idea of being forced into a bathtub filled with
dangly key rings. It's just it's just unclean. That one
triggered me. I don't understand why because it's all their
hands on you. You know, that's true. That's true, That's
very true. UM. But yeah, this is an interesting one
and one that i've I've you know, this is actually
(39:42):
the kind of thing that you might even see if
you if you've been to a Myrtle Beach esque type
town where they have a place called Ripley's believe it
or not, Um, you may have have experienced one of
these situations yourself. Oh yeah, sure, um. And you know, look,
I hope you're still around for the ride for this one. Everybody. Um,
(40:04):
we are doing some myth busting over here. But this concept,
this practice, the act of laying down on a bed
of nails, has a really mundane explanation. It's it's pretty
basic science. It has to do with weight distribution um
(40:25):
like overall and pressure placement essentially like um pressure per
square inch essentially. Yep, and our our colleague and friend
of the show, Tracy Wilson, who you may recognize from
stuff you missed in history class, uh, did a great
breakdown of this from the house stuff workstays that's exactly
(40:47):
what you're talking about, Matt, and she brings up the
example of a person in high heeled shoes. I didn't
know this, but if you are walking in high heeled shoes,
you are exerting more pressure on the ground than an elephant.
And it's entirely due to this distribution you're talking about
matt Like mathematical terms, pressure is equal to force divided
(41:09):
by area. So and wait, wait, wait that's true. Yes, yes,
so an elephant will tend to weigh more than the
average person, not to not to body shame elephants or people,
but its feet have so much more surface area than
the pointy heel of the shoe. So despite despite the weight,
(41:29):
overall the real estate where that weight connects is much
smaller in the shoes, so there's there's more force. There
are four points of contact with an elephant. Right, wow,
that's mind blowing. Ben, thank you for that. And Tez.
So what what if you fell from a very high
height onto one of these beds of nails? Different story, right, yeah,
(41:53):
very very much so, because now you have we say fall.
But if you think about it, gravity is just holling
you viciously, so you're not you're not in control then
of your of your speed reproach. So imagine, just to
mess with Averybuy's mind. I don't know if Paul, I
don't know if you're gonna do sound effects for this, Okay,
(42:15):
So imagine that you have unfortunately stepped on a nail.
This is not a thought exercise for a lot of
us in the audience today. This is a terrible memory.
Your foot is exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on
a very very tiny point of connection, the tip of
the nail, and so that's the sound effect. I'll do
(42:37):
the So so the nail goes into your foot, you scream. Uh,
your partner is like, oh my god, you're ruining prom
or something like that. Are they're They're like Harry, Harry,
(42:59):
and then you get and then you get tetanus and
you die. Uh. I always say, whenever I think of this,
I think of that scene at Home Alone. That kid
was sadistic. He really really overdid it with those poor
wet bandits. I mean, you would think after the first
trap someone would say, we should go that's this kid
(43:20):
is way. This kid is demonic. He's obviously as a psychopath.
You know, we and we we have wear no match
for him. Yeah, because like think about that, it feels
to me that the dark heart of Home Alone is
that Kevin would have done that to anyone who went
in the house, a male postal worker, a relative. He
(43:42):
just wanted the blood. I think he just wanted the blood. Guys,
Come on, come on now, it's actually about the magic.
It's about the magic of Christmas. Let's be real, guys,
which is also kind of about Okay, no, we've got
a Christmas episode that you would check out. Lady ruined Christmas.
We've ruined magic. Now we've ruined Home Alone, and now
(44:05):
we've ruined Christmas. No, not at all. You know, Santa
Claus is the number one most popular conspiracy theory for
most US children. We can't ruin Christmas. As a matter
of fact, Christmas is part of the reason this show
exists if you look at the structure, like the philosophical
framework of discovering what is or isn't true. So so
(44:25):
it's true and nail will mess up your foot, but
it is also true that you can lay on a
bed of nails. Yeah, Matt, I love that you just
have nails. I have a tiny little nail here. You
just imagine hundreds of these, like thin time we hang
out in person, I'm going to do an experiment. Well
(44:47):
just be like, hey, Matt, do you do you happen
to have any nails? And I'm always with nail, always
with nails, because you never know when you'll have to
make a bed of nails. And this is safer than
a single nail, safer with a lot of coffeatts. What
you know. There's another another one that this brings to mind.
Um when you see like suspension artists who have hooks
(45:11):
that go through their skin um or they can hang
either from like two points of contact from their shoulders
or uh prone with like multiple hooks, and you know,
your mind immediately thinks, oh, those are gonna rip out,
and they're gonna fall, and and they're gonna be completely shredded.
Their their backs are gonna be shredded. But it's the
same concept, right, It's all about weight distribution with those
(45:33):
as well. It's about weight distribution. That's I would say
that's an order of magnitude more complicated, however, because the
people who are the people who are inserting those hooks
have to have a pretty good knowledge of human anatomy
and physiology if they want to avoid lasting harm. But yes,
(45:54):
The thing with a bed of nails is that we
still have just the tiny, the tiny point of contact
like you saw Matt's nail collection, but we have a
bunch of them and they're all close together, so collectively
this is a lot of surface area for the human body.
They distribute the pressure of your you know, not yet
(46:15):
carcass and voi la. Usually everything goes all right. Your
body will not put enough pressure on any single individual
nail for it to break your skin, which means we
can extend this, throw a second bed of nails on
top of yourself while we're there, and they get one
of your buddies to break a cinder block on it,
and if everything goes according to plan, you're gonna be okay. Again,
(46:39):
we're not telling you to do this. We're just saying
that you're gonna look super awesome. We're not not telling
you to do this. We are don't do any of this, okay,
But you're also you know, you're in your your own
master of your own destiny. At the end of yeah,
we're just telling you that all your crush as we'll
(47:00):
fall in love with you. Your boss will see it
and they'll say that's the kind of initiative. Guys, the
lawyer phone is ringing. It's so if you have experienced
this without like before hearing from us, we played no
part in this. We're just giving you information. We do
(47:21):
want to hear your story, though, because one of the
most dangerous parts of this practice has nothing to do
would you actually lying there with beds of nails being
on top of you or even center blocks. The real
dangerous part is getting yourself on and off the thing.
Once you get on there, you're fine, but you're most like, yeah, yeah,
(47:47):
it goes right through. But they're they're pretty close together though, right,
that's the whole point. So they're definitely close together. So
even your hand if you're not putting a ton of
way on it, which still the whole principle would hold you. Now,
maybe it wouldn't. It's too focused. I think it needs
to be more are distributed than that, more widely. Yeah,
that makes sense. You can take it easy like a
Sunday morning man, like soft rock in an elevator. You
(48:08):
gotta lay that groove on slow. Uh. But what if
they were knives, though, guys, what if they were knives?
Different people have attempted things in principle it's something that
that would work just from the concept of the pressure
and distribution, and you will see people who are doing
(48:32):
those things are purporting to do so I guess someone
check me on this. Um. It would obviously depend on
the knife, right, you wanted to play it safe, you
could just blunt the tip of the knife, which is
probably with someone someone with nails in the past. Um.
But I'm just speculating here. It feels like maybe it's
(48:52):
the difference between somebody juggling with bowling pins and then
somebody juggling with you know, uh, tennis balls or so
I'm sorry, something more dangerous. Uh lit torches and uh chainsaws. Well, uh,
the Internet did not deliver on bed of knives, but
(49:14):
it did deliver a really grizzly photo of a dude
in the hospital had been stabbed in the face. So
thanks Internet. Uh, I've got just the thing for you,
piercing the body. Um. Oh yeah, what we were just
talking about, like suspension, right, and also like putting nail
or another sharp object through your cheek or into your
(49:37):
nose or down your throat. Um. A lot of that
stuff has to do, like you said, been with knowledge
of human anatomy. Where it's actually going remaining calm. Is
there anything else to that preparation practice having an instructor? Yeah, uh,
and you can you can read some great articles and
(50:00):
what are called human blockheads. You can see some uh,
there's some fantastic forums on how to safely conduct suspension.
But again that's none of None of those things are
things that you want to just watch a YouTube video
and attempt for you to do yourself. But the point
is people are able to do these. There are two
(50:21):
other things that we should mention when we're talking about
other feats, just briefly because these might be future episodes.
One is the idea of being buried alive consensually saying hey,
I've thought about it. Put me in the ground and
then take me out and uh, you know, let's see
what happens. Yeah, that it doesn't seem real. And we
(50:43):
found instances, historical alleged instances where people have been buried
for elongated periods of time. I think the one that
we got for this was from a long time ago.
Someone was supposedly buried for forty days that right, Yeah,
that was his name was Jesus only three. I need
(51:06):
to brush up on my my Bible verses. Ah. Yeah,
his name was Sadu Harridas. Yeah, he was. This was
allegedly to have occurred in eighteen thirty seven. He was
buried alive for forty days and survived. And there It's
interesting because there were multiple I witness accounts and they
(51:31):
they sound just unimpressed enough for me to think at
least a few of them are true. These people did
get fooled. There's one British guy who who recounts the
story and says, uh, they dug him up and like
within half an hour he was kind of back to normal,
but he was still really frail and feeble, and then
half an hour after that he was just he would
(51:52):
talk to people who asked him questions and uh, he
still looked really weak. We were convinced that happened, and
so we left. That's how that's what they did. That's
sound I mean, that sounds unbelievable to me. Um. But
the thing is, everybody, there might be something to this.
That doesn't mean that that particular story is true and
(52:15):
there wasn't some kind of swindling or weirdness going on there,
but there could be something to this, right, and it's
something that we might be talking about later. No spoilers though, Okay, No,
you're right, Matt, You're right. It's hard to bite our
tongues on this one. But this is this is a
future episode. We think we figured it out and not again,
(52:38):
not necessarily in a debunking way. We we found something, uh,
and we want to bring it to you soon. But
while we're here we're talking about feats, there's another big one.
I think it's interesting, uh, because it's one of the
more extreme. It's one of the more controversial. It's one
that is pretty divisive. Back shouldn't. It's impossible. That's that's
(53:04):
why it's divisive. It's divisive because it's physically impossible. Pack.
In two thousand and ten, it was a guy named
Plade Johnny and he's a religious teacher. Some people considered
him a profit. Uh. He was about eighty two in
two thousand and ten, and he was located in Gujarata.
He claimed that he had not consumed get this, any
(53:25):
food or any water of any sort in more than
seventy years. Uh. This was this occurred after a an
encounter he had with divinity when he was eleven years old,
and so science came to bear a. Doctor Sakir Shah,
the director of neuroscience at the Sterling Hospital in a
(53:45):
Meta bad decided to investigate. He and a team monitored
Johnny for ten days and two thousand and three, during
which time they confirmed that he did not eat anything,
drink anything, urinate, or generate bowel movements, which is a
really unnecessarily formal way to say he wasn't whooping. Those
(54:06):
are all superpowers and in and of themselves, each of
those broad portfolio of freakish abilities there well, there are too.
There are two schools of thought here though. The first
is ten days. People fast for a long time. People
who are serious about fasting can do that m with food.
(54:28):
But water is a different story because huh, let's technically
maybe that's not the right word. Scientifically, according to what
we understand about humans and bodies and water, you shouldn't
be able to go more than I would say, maximum
four days? Is that about right? Without water? And they're
(54:49):
saying they monitored monitored him for ten days and he
didn't take in any water or expel anything any of
the by products of water. That seems that seems impossible.
It does, and that's why they went back with the guy.
In two thousand and ten, they monitored him again, and
this time they extended the monitoring period to fifteen days.
(55:13):
They got the same results. Uh, no urine, no feces,
no food, no drink and outside of a couple of
very limited circumstances that we're not going to talk about
Jesse yet. Uh this this is impossible and and I
hate to be the downer here, but Nightline got wind
(55:36):
of this and they went to investigate. They saw what
this man was calling his or what have been described
as his cave to studio apartment, and in on video
you can see that this apartment as a refrigerator. When
the people working for Nightline asked one of this teacher's followers, hey,
(55:57):
it's a very reasonable question. Why does a guy who
doesn't have to eat, why why does he need a refrigerator?
And then the follower apparently became very very defensive, refused
the crew entry into the dwelling, and they walked away
with it still being a mystery. MM doesn't sound like
a mr made on me. But maybe he's just got
(56:18):
an ice maker in there and he needs the ice
for another purpose, right, Um, maybe the ice isn't to drink.
It's to cool down something or to feed some house plants,
can gently caress his body with you know, he practices
his whim Hoff meditation. That was the full circle, guys,
(56:38):
full circle open. I I don't I mean, we don't
want to be It seemed like we're being entirely dismissive.
These are just the things that we know to be
true about this case. Please do not attempt to starve yourself.
Please do not attempt to be a breath arean or anything.
The stuff is dangerous and every every technique we've described
(57:00):
has given people serious injuries at some point over history.
So if you want to achieve these sorts of things,
that what you'll need to do is study with the
experts in these uh, in these feats. Right, find someone
who has walked over coals and and look at their
feet first before you decide whether or not you're gonna
(57:20):
pay them to teach you. But now f and g
to a bunch of balloons and go up way too high,
and or get someone like Darren Brown to convince you
that you did it and you just don't remember it. Uh.
That's a great idea. Uh. It seems then that the
(57:40):
question of mind over matter in the world of mysticism
is often at least misrepresented. We know thought can alter
the structure of the human brain to the point where
if you maybe listening to a bunch of podcasts might
do something to your brain too. We don't know yet,
because podcasts haven't been around long enough for us to
find doubt. But it also turns out that many of
(58:02):
the physical feats that are thought to be the result
of mental or cognitive superpowers turn out to be the clever,
ritualized application of well established scientific principles. We can dismiss
some of these folks as hoaxters and frauds, but there's
one crazy thing here. We have to remember the primary
tool they are using to trick the crowds and the
(58:25):
followers isn't a prop like a nail. It's it's not
some coals and some ash. The primary tool is their mind,
which means they are wielding mind over matter. Maybe not
as much, but they're using their mind to exert influence
over the minds of others. So we ended up with
(58:47):
mind over mind, which sounds way less. I don't know,
they're using your mind as a weapon too. No, that's true,
at least as far as we know now, we may
be off base there. One thing we didn't talk about
was the uh uh levitation, right, the purported acts of levitation.
(59:07):
We also didn't talk about the infamous but rarely witnessed
trick of climbing up a rope that's not you know,
that's not attached to anything seemingly And we want to
hear from you. Have you witnessed physical feats that cannot
be explained by ordinary means. We're talking seemingly superhuman whim
(59:29):
Hoff kind of stuff. If so, let us know we
want to hear from you because, as always we want
to see actual cases of this. How amazing would that be?
First put in a call to us one eight three
three std w y t K. Leave us a message,
Tell tell us what you saw, send us some I
(59:51):
don't know if pictures or something on one of our
socials or something. And immediately after that, called James Randy
or whoever is representing him in his hot line and
collect a million dollars or whatever they're bounty is right
now for something um intensely like E S P powers
or something mystic like that. But first call us one
eight one eight three three std w I T k
(01:00:15):
mm hmmm. If you don't want to use a telephone,
if you've got germ, you know, a phobia or something
like that, or you don't like handling plastic, or I
don't know what if funds made up these days? Who knows,
another mystery. We'll sort that one out later. You can
use social media to get in touch with us. We
are on Facebook or on Instagram, or on Twitter or
Conspiracy Stuff, Conspiracy Stuff Show, one of those. You're gonna
(01:00:35):
find us. UM, we recommend highly that you join our
Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. Just name a
name associated with the show, any of the three of us,
any of our superproducers, a joke for Ben, you know,
anything to let us know that you're aware of what
the show is and you're in um lots of fun,
meme exchanges and uh communication between conspiracy realists and we
(01:00:58):
hop into the fun as well. And if none of
that quite bags your badgers, never fear. We have one
more way that you can always contact us, Rain or
Shine until we get black bagged. It's our email address
where we are conspiracy at I heart radio dot com.
(01:01:34):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of I Heart Radio For more podcasts from my heart Radio,
visit the i heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies. History is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of I Heart Radio. Hello, welcome back to the show.
(00:25):
My name is Mett, my name is Note they called
me Ben. We are joined as always with our super
producer Paul Mission controlled decond Most importantly, you are you.
You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't
want you to know. We're entering today's episode with an
image that may be familiar to everyone, especially fans of
(00:48):
film in the West, and it's a somewhat stereotypical image
that of the Indian mystic often called a fake here
f a k i r, someone using the power were
of the mind to accomplish seemingly extraordinary feats. Fake here
is a Muslim or Hindu religious ascetic, traditionally a mendicant
(01:10):
monk who is sometimes thought of as a miracle worker.
And we've heard the tales, right they sound they have
let's be diplomatic. They range and plausibility. The idea is this,
through intense meditation, these individuals are able to do things
like walk on fire without being burned, they can be
(01:30):
buried alive for days at a time, they can lie
on a bed of nails with no injury, and allegedly
they can even do things like levitate or survive for
forty days without food or water. So what is happening here?
Today's question? Could the mind alone be responsible for these astonishing,
(01:52):
seemingly miraculous feats. Here are the facts. First of all,
really quickly, though, you literally just described stuff that's like
David Blaine type material. I think he's done all of
those things. I think he's uh survived for however long
without food and you know, walked on broken eat, swallowed glasses,
(02:12):
and peeked up frogs. I don't know. I'm wondering if
that's if if he's got some of these these abilities.
But let's get to the facts. For sure, the mind
is absolutely capable of of extraordinary feats. In the previous episode,
we've explored things that could technically be considered mind over
matter um, the most widely acknowledged examples being the human
(02:33):
mind affecting physical changes within the human body, specifically the brain.
And we're not talking about telekinesis yet, but there is
evidence for this that is super fascinating. Uh, let's start
with mental health and the immune system. Yeah, we we
know for sure that someone's mental state can actually affect
(02:56):
whether or not they are vulnerable to specific certain disease eases.
It can also affect how quickly someone recovers from something
or how well their immune system responds to something that
is invading their body. Again, that sounds weird, but again,
the mind is kind of the control mechanism for a
lot of these things, even the ones that occur without
(03:17):
our uh, conscious input. Right. There's a professor named Steve Colt.
He's a professor of medicine and psychiatry at the University
of California in Los Angeles. He has been looking at
this link between the way people feel emotions essentially and
the way that can affect biology. So that link between
(03:38):
biology and emotion, And as Steve Cole, this professor explains
that the immune system has two essential programs that can run.
One that's going to fight off viral infections viruses like
all corona um, and then another that fights bacterial infections.
And this one causes the body to become inflamed, is
(03:59):
what it's called inflammation. You like red warm, You've you've
had it before somewhere in your body, I assure you. Um. Now,
this bacterial fighting program, the one that causes inflammation in
a response like that, it has a really big downside.
In an effort to keep everything healthy, to keep your
(04:19):
immune cells functioning, the ones that actually fight that good fight,
the body can also cause tissue damage through this process
and this program that it runs to protect itself. That's
a that's a big problem, right, m right, And and
his work shows us pretty conclusively that what we would
commonly call negative experiences maybe uh in a cancer diagnosis
(04:43):
or depression PTSD, and interestingly enough, lower socioeconomic states, which
should which I wish people would talk about more often,
All of these things, all of these things that could
be at the very least described as downers, are also
associated with increased activity of inflammation genes in your immune cells.
(05:05):
That's that's not completely a horrible thing, because it seems
logical then that if a negative experience and negative emotions
lead to problems with your immune system, positive experiences like
happiness might have the opposite effect. And this leads Professor
Cole to ask himself a very strange question. How he asked,
(05:28):
can an immune cell register and abstract concept like happiness.
It's something philosophers have argued about before the dawn of
recorded time, and skeptics out there, including those in this room,
may think, well, there's got to be some kind of
explanation there with UH, like a biochemical reaction, something that
(05:51):
gets released when you're feeling happiness, as we because we know,
and we've talked about in previous episodes that the brain
releases all kinds of varying chemicals depending on what you're feeling, um,
everything from love to hate, and you know, perhaps there's
something they're happening, but perhaps it's different than that, it's bigger.
Let's let's keep our minds open as we go through this. Yeah,
(06:12):
and you know philosophy UH talks about this. I think
it's a platonic concept, the idea of you diamonia, which
is UH happy. It's it's like happiness, but it's not.
It's more of like a sense of purpose and well
being and kind of it's a bigger concept than just
like I'm happy right now. It's more of like a
life happiness than I'm momentarily happy because I'm cuddling a puppy,
(06:36):
um and that is the concept that Professor Cole kind
of leaned on. UM. And one of the categories is
this demonic happiness, the idea of well being uh and
all of that stuff that with that purpose. And then
there's hedonic, which again would you think of as being
like hedonistic, which is experiencing being flooded with positive emotions. Um.
(06:58):
He talks about you dimonic happiness is more like, I said,
that direction in life, having like an internal compass and
knowing that you're doing the right thing. Um, even connectedness
to like the universe or the idea of a god
or what have you. UM. And he led us study
where eighty healthy adults took questionnaires about their sense of
(07:18):
well being UM, which were used to assess their level
of you, demonic and hedonic happiness. Then he drew blood
to study how their immune cells reacted UM. And the
response summed up in the Atlantic is pretty fascinating, that's correct.
The researchers found that a high score on you demonic
(07:39):
well being correlated with a more favorable genetic expression profile.
This means that when you feel that you are part
of something bigger, that's your demonic happiness. When you feel
like you matter in the universe, you have a destiny,
You're going in a direction. Your immune cells show high
levels of ti viral responses and low levels of inflammatory response.
(08:05):
This this means, when we think about it, oddly enough,
all those people that were once called hippies turned out
in a way to be right. Positive vibes matter, bro
or whatever you would say. Things that boost this sense
this you demonic well being. Things like meditation reduce that
(08:26):
inflammatory activity, increase anti viral response, they improve the function
of specific strains of immune cells, and then they also
lead to higher antibody production. That that is real mind
over matter. Yes, and we as we do on the
show all the time. That is one specific study, right.
(08:46):
It doesn't mean that's the end all, be all truth
of the matter, but it definitely appears to be showing
us that it's a possibility, right yeah. Yeah, And that's
a good point map because Professor Cole has worked ext
pensively in this field. So that's one study to give
you a snapshot, but you can read more about his
work to your heart's content on your browser of choice.
(09:10):
And this idea, this weird relationship of mind over matter,
because that's really what we're talking about when we talk
about the claims of various mystics. This idea goes much
further than just an anti viral response. Next, we have
to talk about not just meditation, but taxi drivers, Buddhist monks,
(09:31):
the human brain. What are these all have in common?
It's weird. I know that was click baity, but it
got us there. Yes, you may recall an episode we
did a little while back on real life Superhumans. Does
anybody remember a fellow named Iceman or Yes? He is?
(09:52):
He the one who cometh he if it's cold enough, Yes,
he comes. He's he don't dieth power. Yeah, dude. Um,
he's world renowned. He's been on numerous I don't I
don't know which television shows, but a ton He's been
featured all over the place because he has a real superpower.
(10:16):
He can withstand the most freezing temperatures that are available.
We're talking temperatures that would kill most mortal humans such
as I Uh. It's intense stuff. And he doesn't do
it like he wasn't born with some special DNA. What
he does is mind over body techniques including it's it's
(10:39):
mostly breathing techniques seriously, and and body movements like flexing
muscles and tensing things, and he increases his temperature, He
increases his internal temperature with his mind and and just
breathing like yeah, he also exposes himself to cold temperatures
more than the average person. But that doesn't swillly. So
(11:01):
it's that's sort of the equivalent of like taking a
little bit of poison over time so that when a
snake bites you you're immune. No, it's really just like
I'll tell you what it's like. I'll tell you what
it's like. And I'm not comparing myself to to you
ice man, if you're listening, you you are a god
among men. Uh, spicy things like kep say us in
(11:21):
levels and exposing yourself to higher and higher doses over time.
Not unlike poison. In this it's more of your mind
deciding that the pain doesn't matter. It's changing the threshold,
it's changing your but right, It's just it's sort of
like like raising the bar for your threshold of pain
or what you can handle. It's not necessarily the same
as like giving yourself building up an immunity to something
(11:42):
that actually affects your body and could kill you. It's
more but I'm still confused. It's like, what about things
like frost bite? Like what about things that like, you know,
if you touch us a surface that's so cold it
affects your skin, it can rip the skin right off.
I mean, there's all kinds of crazy things that can happen.
How does he How does he deal with that? Uh?
He has limits. Typically, the feats that you will see
(12:04):
him accomplish again through the power of the mind are
things like running marathons and freezing weather barefoot, uh, sitting
for extended amounts of time, meditating in as you said, Matt,
conditions that would kill an ordinary person. The specific he
calls it the whim Hoff technique, and you can learn
it the specific pattern of of breathing and meditation. But
(12:27):
he didn't make this up out of whole cloth. There
have been other people who have been conquering their nervous
system responses through meditation for years, and in some cases
it begins to physically affect their brains. Before we move on,
if you want to learn more about whim Hoff and
other real life superpowers, we have two podcasts on it
(12:48):
because we kept finding really really bizarre things. I also
still have a list somewhere of and I don't want
to offend anyone of the uh, the superpowers that I
arbitrarily thought were like not to the threshold of us
being able to put him in a real life superpowers
episode of The Great Lakes Guys, right, yes, yeah, like
(13:11):
the Doorman exactly. Uh. But when we talk about these superpowers,
let me talk about mind over matter. We we get
it right, everybody's saying, guys who get it meditation It
makes you feel better and your body does a little
better and you may not freeze to death quite as quickly.
What gives meditation does much more than that. And we
(13:33):
have two stunning examples. The first one Buddhist monks speaking stereotypes.
The stereotype of Buddhist monks is that they meditate all
the time. Right. Well, I'm storrying to keep belaboring the
point here, but back to a Womenhu just for two seconds,
if you would indulge me. Ben. I'm looking at some
images of this guy, and he's a fascinating looking character.
(13:54):
He has that uh, that that sirpa kind of vibe
that you were talking about the top of the show.
That's the wrong term. But I see an image of
him in a bath, a bath of ice with like
measurement little suction cups on his body. So I'm assuming
like this stuff has been verified, Like, I mean, it's
not some kind of like hoax. Like you guys both
seem to be fully on board with this guy's abilities.
(14:15):
Uh would would you do you think sciences as well?
Or is there still like the jury is out as
to like is he really doing this with his mind?
I see a peach. I can assure you this guy
is legit. He is real. I have watched uncut shots
of this dude doing crazy stuff there. Yeah, it's real.
I love it. Okay, I'm sold. But there is research
(14:37):
beyond just this gentleman that that dates back much further,
showing that the Buddhist monks who spend long hours meditating
on a regular basis have somehow managed to slow the
aging of their brain um. In one particular case, brain
scans verified that a forty one year old monk named
young gay ming your rin pushe Um had man edge
(15:00):
to retain the brain of a thirty three year old person.
His brain is essentially functioning at a capacity eight years
uh better than what it actually should be eight years younger.
He has managed to slow the aging of his brain.
I want to bring up just a point of contention
(15:21):
here that i'd love to get somebody's, like y'all's opinion on.
And then also you listening, Um, I wonder if there's
anything happening there where the complications of young Gay's life
are slightly less than that of someone existing, let's say,
(15:43):
just in a city who's running around meeting a bunch
of different people, UM, tackling varying problems in bringing new
information in at all times that they're processing at all times,
not getting as much sleep, Like I wonder, I wonder
it seems like a difficult thing to compare like those
(16:04):
two people's experiences, I guess in like how the brain functions. Yeah,
and I don't mean to project this because I don't
know if this is correct at all, but it does
seem like the life of a monk is so very different, um,
and the essentially the input that goes into the brain
is so vastly different. I probably have the brain of
a seventy five year old man, honestly, with all of
(16:26):
the rapid fire multitasking and lack of sleep, and like
you said, just the existence in a much more fast
paced world and uh shorter attention span, you know, whereas
like I, that's a really good question, like if if
if if if reading and studying and meditating is exercise.
You know what what is little nuggety bits of information
(16:48):
that we uh as as modern humans you know, that
tend to to build our lives around. What is that?
Is that just junk food? Is our brain atrophying because
we're only feeding it little bits at a time as
opposed to longer form stuff that maybe works it out better.
I don't know, this is all hypothetical. I'm just asking
what you guys think. So Matt, to answer your question,
I would say that, um, this is a tremendous This
(17:12):
is a tremendous issue in the methodology because with long
hours of meditation also comes long hours of what we
call focused attention. So you're not to your point knell
shooting off emails or kind of living in the A
d H D environment that is foisted upon us by
(17:33):
the modern era when everything is connected and people, for
some ridiculous reason get mad if you don't instantly respond
to their text, which what is that? Anyhow? The like,
the big part of this is that this isn't just
a study with one monk. This is one example, but
we see that these long periods of time are like
(17:55):
when we say brainy is younger. What we're really talking
about is neuroplasticity, which tends to degrade over time. Something
this person is doing, and meditation scientists believe is a
big part of it based on other studies they've done.
Something this person is doing is allowing them to retain
neuroplasticity at a level that should not be happening. Because
(18:20):
think about this. If we wanted to disprove this, or
if we wanted to not disprove but to separate the
conflation of a quote unquote simpler life and you know,
Buddhist meditation, then we would want to have a study
where we take someone else who is probably not as
inundated with technology, communication, pollution, new variables of day to
(18:43):
day life, and say a city, but doesn't practice meditation.
We would want to compare the two and I think
physically we would see some commonalities, but mentally it looks
like focused thought mind over matter is the is the
prime mover in this situation. Yeah, I think the next
step also you do that study. You do studies then
(19:04):
as well of Uh. City folk who are you know,
working every day, have a family, busy lifestyle, who also
meditate on a regular basis. See where everything lies? Just
you know, I'm just putting that out there. Who knows.
Let's let's talk about Let's talk about something else. No, no, no,
no no. I love what you're saying. And I love
(19:26):
the idea that we're pitching research to post grads. Letsten
it to the show. This is what if you're after
that grant money, come to us if you need a
really weird idea. Because furthermore, that meditation physically changes part
of the brain. It doesn't just preserve it, you know
what I mean. We're not keeping the boat just on
(19:47):
the top side of the ocean. We're building bigger decks
on on the vessel. Speaking of decks, I really just
want to find out if I'm meditating about magic cards
all day, is that equivalent to me, you know, doing
the practices of Buddhist monk. Because if it is the same,
then we're good to go. Right what what? What? What
(20:09):
If I like binge a really smart television series over
the course of three days, does that count? Maybe? Yeah?
I can't hurt you, right, Uh, can't can't it though,
I feel like I'm definitely going to get dementia that
I'm just putting that. I mean, it's if look, it's
twenty we are aware of so many terrible things, you know.
(20:31):
If like when I hear someone say that they're doing
great and they're okay, I don't believe them. And if
I do believe them, I think that they're just not
as which sounds terrible and cynical. But but we do know,
we do know. Um, this is this goes beyond the
power of mind over matter, goes beyond that association of meditation,
(20:57):
esoteric breathing techniques and so on. As a matter of fact,
if you have ever been to London, you have encountered
or at least seen somebody with phenomenal power over their brain.
They've actually they've physically changed their brains, and not on purpose.
It's it's we did a car stuff episode about this
(21:18):
years ago. I don't even know how many. Uh. If
you want to drive one of those famous black cabs
in London, you cannot use the GPS to pass to
get You have to instead memorize thousands and thousands and
thousands of streets and thousands of alternate routes between these
streets from any given place within a certain circumference of
(21:40):
the city. This test is so hard that people just
call it the knowledge and they're there are these kids,
these young these young folks riding around on like little
motor scooters trying to memorize streets. That's all they do
all the time, all day so they can pass the knowledge,
which has on a good day a fifty percent failed
(22:00):
rate pretty consistently. Do do London cabbies make like a
really good wage. The black calves are expensive. Yeah, yeah,
you you've you've heard us mentioned this before. I think
it's the same whim off episode where it's something beyond
normal learning. What's happening here is these people who are
studying for this knowledge, who get the knowledge, they are
(22:22):
physically altering their brains. They're like the folds are changing,
the physical makeup is changing. Uh, It's it's intense stuff.
It's mental exercise and it's working. Like, how crazy is
that your thoughts are changing? Like imagine if you looked
at your hand and you thought so much about your
(22:43):
hand that your hand, your your right hand or your
left hand can do I would do one for this exercise,
you know, teacher, and so you hold up, just hold
up a hand. It's convenient to you. And imagine if
you stared at this hand and for hours a day
for years, and then you held up your other hand
(23:05):
you didn't stare at and let me do a trick
of the it was like way smaller. That's what that's
what's happening with the people who take the knowledge and
work as black cap taxi drivers. Their hippo campus. Specifically,
this is the scientific term. I read this in the study.
I'm not saying this to be glib. Their hippocampus balloons balloons. Uh.
(23:27):
And they have better spatial memory than far beyond that
of the average human person. And this may come at
a cost to other other types of memories. But the
important part is they thought enough about something and it
physically changed their body. And these are these are profound examples. Yes,
(23:51):
and they're familiar to longtime listeners, but a lot of
us are probably in the audience saying, hang on this,
this isn't the whole story, right, What about people you
guys talked about mystics, right, the you're telling us about
people who slowly, over a period of years or decades
do have power of mind over matter, but their mind
(24:13):
is the matter they're affecting tends to be the human brain.
Are there people who really can, for example, lie on
a bed of nails without bleeding, walk across fire and
not be burned. It's firewalking. It's the stuff of legend.
It is often associated with divinity or some sort of
mental capacity beyond what we know today. But could someone
(24:37):
actually do this? The answer is maybe a little more
complicated than you'd like to think, and we're gonna get
into it right afterward from our sponsor. Here's where it
gets crazy. So good news, Yes, people can really do
(24:59):
these things. In fact, this maybe be even better news.
It is nowhere near as difficult as you might think.
And yes, your mental state, the correct mindset is important. Uh,
but that's far from the only ingredient in the recipe here.
Some folks are perhaps gonna take this as bad news.
(25:20):
They might see us as debunking this. But other folks,
you know, in the audience, may feel empowered firewalking. That's
what it's called a little bit misleading. But how does
firewalking work? Fire walk with me? Oh boy, I thought
about I had that plane. Well, I was slinking at
(25:42):
some of this stuff, just imagining him like, uh, interrogating
a small I think maybe, or primate. Okay, I love
his voice through the Lynch voice. But firewalking nowadays seems
like a kind of isolated practice. It's it's not something
a lot of people get together to do with their
(26:03):
friends on the weekend all the time. Uh. We have
this stereotype that squarely places it in India, right, But
people have been doing this for thousands of years in
places across the globe. The earliest documented reference does go
back to India b C. But you'll see firewalker You'll
(26:26):
see people calling themselves firewalkers in Spain, Greece, Fiji, Polynesia.
And there's nothing supernatural about it. There is zero supernatural
stuff at play here. Uh. You can probably do it yourself,
but but don't don't legally, We are not telling you
(26:49):
to do this. It's a bad idea. Don't go to
the e er with your feet all messed up and
say that Ben, Matt and Noel told me this would
be a cooling to do, because we're not. We're just
saying you're probably physically capable of doing it. Yes, I
would say, don't do it unless you have production insurance.
Like the cast of the Office, let's think of the
(27:11):
same thing. That's a very epic moment of team building
as a team building that's right, Probably probably not something
that most offices that get approved as a team building exercise,
But I I like the gesture. I couldn't even get
a budget for us to play laser tag, which is ridiculous.
But but should I watch The Office or here? And
I haven't seen the US version that is wild? Yes
(27:32):
you should. And the second season of Community, Oh my goodness,
I have seen The Office all the way through, probably
nine times. It's like my comfort food show. I just
put it on when I want to feel okay. So
let's talk about what firewalking actually is, or you know
what it generally refers to. There's usually a nice long
(27:54):
bed of coals, really hot coals, stuff that will burn
you for sure. You know. Let's say it's about ten
feet long. Then on one end you've got human beings,
actual human beings with no shoes, no, no foot coverings whatsoever,
lined up, ready to just walk across it and guess
what happens they do. In the instance of some of
(28:16):
the mystics, we're talking about a lot of times it
will be an individual person that is taking a walk
across the coals and then maybe waiting for a moment
and taking a walk back across the coals. And it
really is just science. It's it's something that science can
pretty quickly answer. Sadly, I don't know if it's sad,
it's pretty I find it inspiring. It was mystic, man,
(28:39):
it was incredible. It was mind blowing, at least for me.
I remember it. But remember when there was magic in
the world. Guys, there's still science came along. It just
has nothing to do with coals on the crowd. Okay, Yeah,
it's true, because I mean, you don't see there's a
lot of work that goes into making one of these scenarios.
You know, like when you hire the company to make
your coal pit for your team building I exercise, they
(29:00):
show up well in advance of the actual exercise, and
they gotta dig a trench first. Then they got to
lay out the coals. They gotta light them, and you
probably would notice that these coals aren't like flame and hot,
and you're not shooting like, you know, an accelerant on them.
They're not shooting flames out left and right, they're basically embers. Uh,
they've been allowed to burn down to the point that
(29:23):
they're not you know, actually actively on fire anymore. So
are hot they are? They can they can be hotter
than a thousand degrees fahrenheit. But Ben, you turn us
onto this fact. This is fascinating there because of the
actual coal. And by the way, so firewalking is kind
(29:44):
of a as a misnomer would be more accurately described
as coal walking. Ben, as you pointed out to us,
Um and Uh, the carbon structure of coal is really
bad at conducting heat. So if you kind of zip along,
you know, hot footed lye um, you're gonna there's a
(30:04):
little bit of a lag and how quickly it conducts
heat from the coal to your actual bare feet. And
that's why you don't see a bunch of people getting
together to have either a social rite of passage or
a corporate team building exercise by walking on a tin
foot row of burning metal sheet pands. You don't don't
(30:27):
do it. There's a reason, there's a science to this. Yeah,
coal is just a terrible, terrible conductor of heat. Water
also has a high thermal capacity, So you don't see
the prep work before you see that amazing walk. There
are hours of people very carefully organizing, igniting the coal
(30:48):
and then letting it burned down while they smooth it out. Uh,
they let the wood burn so that the embers don't
retain water. And they use specific types of wood, So
hardwood embers like cherry and maple, like low red orange,
look hot, but they don't burn as hot as other
types of wood like olive wood. And and you know
(31:10):
the the firewalk pros know this, the tony Robbins of
the world and so on. That's right. And another major
factor here is essentially what I do with my grill,
what maybe you do with your grill when you're cooking,
if you set the coals up, if you cook with coals,
but you set coals up kind of in a pile
you set on fire. Then once the pyramid right like almost, yeah, well,
(31:34):
what's fires going? You spread that baby out, so you've
got essentially a flat layer of coals across the entirety
of that surface. The same thing is happening here. The
coals are then spread out specifically so that you're not
going to when you place your foot on top of it,
you're not going to go into coals. Right, You're not
gonna surround your foot with a step with coals. You're
(31:56):
gonna step across one single layer or as close to
in single layer as possible. You might also might also
dip your feet in some water. And that is because
when liquid meets intense heat, it forms an insulating, albeit
a temporary layer of steam. This is something called ZENA
(32:18):
didn't frost effect. Sorry what was that? Oh yeah, it's
I meant to say frost effect. Okay, I just want
to make sure I got it. It's the reason why
you can lick your the tip of your fingers and
then snuff out a candle without hurting yourself. Uh. And yes,
we are pronouncing that correctly. It does have to be screamed. Yeah,
(32:41):
it's in all caps anywhere that it's printed right. Right,
So with with all this, you know, like what you
were saying earlier, and uh, we do see a paste
mattering because if you have prepared this way, your wood's right,
your your surface is flat, there's not actual flame being admitted.
(33:01):
And you just walk at a brisk pace, you know
what I mean? You walk like it's kind of cold
outside and you're in a hurry. Then you are going
to receive a relatively small amount of harmless heat with
each step, but that changes very quickly if you saunter
too much or you meander, and it differ changes. Yeah,
it also changes if you run. It just it gets
(33:23):
worse on either side of the spectrum. Just slow and steady.
That's what the tortoise was talking about, or the turtle
or whatever other slow animal in that parable. You don't
want to run. So it really is all about just
like a nice even saunter continue across. Um. Wow, you
know it's it's funny that it is so simple like that,
(33:46):
and it does seem like anybody could do it and
it's not hard necessarily, But that really isn't the point,
at least in a lot of the ways it was
done in the past and the way it's viewed as
a ritual, right, It is more about mind over body,
almost convincing yourself that it's gonna be okay if I
(34:08):
do this, or I have the mental strength to go
through with this thing that seems terrifying. Yeah, it's it's
so I think could mean like it's it's it's a
little bit different. But if you're someone who's terrified of
like roller coasters or heights heights, let's just say, let's
just simplify it, and then you psych yourself out to
go on a really terrifying roller coaster. That's mind over
matter as well, because you know, in reality that thing
(34:31):
could break down and eject you, you know, at the
very top of the of the you know, biggest loop,
and you could fall to your death. You accept that
that's a possibility, but you submit yourself to this situation
and agree and agree with yourself with your mind that
you're going to be okay, and you get a no
fear T shirt at the end, you know what. No spoilers.
(34:56):
But now that I think about it, that's really what
the office episode was all about. Oh really, I thought
you were about to say I still have those T
shirts and and I was shaking my head and I
was thinking, I knew it. I know he's still well,
of course, all my shirts are now like UFC mm
A shirts, you know, all the really really good ones. No,
(35:17):
like this one. I think this is a UFC shirt
somewhere I've got, uh, yeah, I have. I have a
bunch of shirts that are just names of podcasts from
announcements where they handed us shirts and I was, and
I was like, well, I'm not gonna keep buying shirts now.
So that's where I have a Stamps dot Com shirt
(35:38):
that says something about podcasts, like I made a podcast
and all I got was this lousy Stamps dot Com
shirt or something. Someone someone was bound to do that.
But okay, So if you're a perspective cole walker, it's
fine to call yourself a firewalker. Just know that you're
being intentionally misleading. Uh. If you walk too slowly, your
(35:59):
feet will sink into the coal, You'll go through those
temporary insulators, and your day will take a bad turn
because these folks will burn like any other ordinary person.
If you go too fast, you will run the risk
of kicking up embers, burning yourself again like any other person.
Or you'll be doing everything right and a little piece
(36:20):
of coal gets stuck between your toes. Also, you have
to add you could slip and fall and that can
turn fatal pretty quickly, so be very cautious. Also, we're
not telling you to do it, We're just telling you
how it works. You may be asking yourself, hey, why
is this always shown happening at night so often? That's
(36:42):
all that's all in the pr it's the pizzas baby.
It turns out that uh, firewalking at night minimizes the
visibility of the ash that covers the coal. Ash is
another just trash heat conductor. It's terrible at it, and
when it covers these coals, it blocks the heat. So
(37:02):
during the daytime it might look like people are just
making a great to do about a weird, crumbly gray pathway,
But if you show it at night, it looks like
things are on fire totally. No. I minimizes the the uh,
the bad optics and maximizes the good optics because you're
not gonna they're not gonna seem nearly as glowy during
the day, right, exactly exactly, And so this is all calculated, uh,
(37:28):
and explained this way, it may seem more like a
simple science experiment, even though it is risky. But to
a point you made earlier, Matt, we have to remember
that this occurs as a right of passage, So people
experiencing this are viewing it through the lens of ritual.
Just because it's not supernatural doesn't mean it can't be
(37:51):
a fundamentally transformative act. Ordinary things can change your life. Yeah,
that's right, just like the first box of magic cards
you ever get. Hey, we we're gonna keep going down
this pathway of looking at some of the more seemingly
mystical things that mystics do, and we'll tell you more
(38:14):
about him after another word from our sponsor. Okay, So,
if you're still with us after we pretty much demystified
walking on coals, thanks for coming back. I hope you
had a good break. Uh, this is something, honestly, Matt Well,
(38:36):
this is something that just uh, I think Chuck would
say it squigs me out. Yeah, it's uh, it's another
very popular thing, uh, lying down on beds of sharp
nails without without being harmed physically. But Ben, it's not
the sharp part that squigs you out. It's the materials
(38:59):
right on the metals. Yeah. No, I I I get it, paraly.
I I think a lot of us out there get it. Ben,
Maybe not to the extent that that you experienced it,
but yeah, it does. It's like, even though you could
do it safely, guys. For me, honestly, it's like the
(39:20):
same idea of being forced into a bathtub filled with
dangly key rings. It's just it's just unclean. That one
triggered me. I don't understand why because it's all their
hands on you. You know, that's true. That's true, That's
very true. UM. But yeah, this is an interesting one
and one that i've I've you know, this is actually
(39:42):
the kind of thing that you might even see if
you if you've been to a Myrtle Beach esque type
town where they have a place called Ripley's believe it
or not, Um, you may have have experienced one of
these situations yourself. Oh yeah, sure, um. And you know, look,
I hope you're still around for the ride for this one. Everybody. Um,
(40:04):
we are doing some myth busting over here. But this concept,
this practice, the act of laying down on a bed
of nails, has a really mundane explanation. It's it's pretty
basic science. It has to do with weight distribution um
(40:25):
like overall and pressure placement essentially like um pressure per
square inch essentially. Yep, and our our colleague and friend
of the show, Tracy Wilson, who you may recognize from
stuff you missed in history class, uh, did a great
breakdown of this from the house stuff workstays that's exactly
(40:47):
what you're talking about, Matt, and she brings up the
example of a person in high heeled shoes. I didn't
know this, but if you are walking in high heeled shoes,
you are exerting more pressure on the ground than an elephant.
And it's entirely due to this distribution you're talking about
matt Like mathematical terms, pressure is equal to force divided
(41:09):
by area. So and wait, wait, wait that's true. Yes, yes,
so an elephant will tend to weigh more than the
average person, not to not to body shame elephants or people,
but its feet have so much more surface area than
the pointy heel of the shoe. So despite despite the weight,
(41:29):
overall the real estate where that weight connects is much
smaller in the shoes, so there's there's more force. There
are four points of contact with an elephant. Right, wow,
that's mind blowing. Ben, thank you for that. And Tez.
So what what if you fell from a very high
height onto one of these beds of nails? Different story, right, yeah,
(41:53):
very very much so, because now you have we say fall.
But if you think about it, gravity is just holling
you viciously, so you're not you're not in control then
of your of your speed reproach. So imagine, just to
mess with Averybuy's mind. I don't know if Paul, I
don't know if you're gonna do sound effects for this, Okay,
(42:15):
So imagine that you have unfortunately stepped on a nail.
This is not a thought exercise for a lot of
us in the audience today. This is a terrible memory.
Your foot is exerting a tremendous amount of pressure on
a very very tiny point of connection, the tip of
the nail, and so that's the sound effect. I'll do
(42:37):
the So so the nail goes into your foot, you scream. Uh,
your partner is like, oh my god, you're ruining prom
or something like that. Are they're They're like Harry, Harry,
(42:59):
and then you get and then you get tetanus and
you die. Uh. I always say, whenever I think of this,
I think of that scene at Home Alone. That kid
was sadistic. He really really overdid it with those poor
wet bandits. I mean, you would think after the first
trap someone would say, we should go that's this kid
(43:20):
is way. This kid is demonic. He's obviously as a psychopath.
You know, we and we we have wear no match
for him. Yeah, because like think about that, it feels
to me that the dark heart of Home Alone is
that Kevin would have done that to anyone who went
in the house, a male postal worker, a relative. He
(43:42):
just wanted the blood. I think he just wanted the blood. Guys,
Come on, come on now, it's actually about the magic.
It's about the magic of Christmas. Let's be real, guys,
which is also kind of about Okay, no, we've got
a Christmas episode that you would check out. Lady ruined Christmas.
We've ruined magic. Now we've ruined Home Alone, and now
(44:05):
we've ruined Christmas. No, not at all. You know, Santa
Claus is the number one most popular conspiracy theory for
most US children. We can't ruin Christmas. As a matter
of fact, Christmas is part of the reason this show
exists if you look at the structure, like the philosophical
framework of discovering what is or isn't true. So so
(44:25):
it's true and nail will mess up your foot, but
it is also true that you can lay on a
bed of nails. Yeah, Matt, I love that you just
have nails. I have a tiny little nail here. You
just imagine hundreds of these, like thin time we hang
out in person, I'm going to do an experiment. Well
(44:47):
just be like, hey, Matt, do you do you happen
to have any nails? And I'm always with nail, always
with nails, because you never know when you'll have to
make a bed of nails. And this is safer than
a single nail, safer with a lot of coffeatts. What
you know. There's another another one that this brings to mind.
Um when you see like suspension artists who have hooks
(45:11):
that go through their skin um or they can hang
either from like two points of contact from their shoulders
or uh prone with like multiple hooks, and you know,
your mind immediately thinks, oh, those are gonna rip out,
and they're gonna fall, and and they're gonna be completely shredded.
Their their backs are gonna be shredded. But it's the
same concept, right, It's all about weight distribution with those
(45:33):
as well. It's about weight distribution. That's I would say
that's an order of magnitude more complicated, however, because the
people who are the people who are inserting those hooks
have to have a pretty good knowledge of human anatomy
and physiology if they want to avoid lasting harm. But yes,
(45:54):
The thing with a bed of nails is that we
still have just the tiny, the tiny point of contact
like you saw Matt's nail collection, but we have a
bunch of them and they're all close together, so collectively
this is a lot of surface area for the human body.
They distribute the pressure of your you know, not yet
(46:15):
carcass and voi la. Usually everything goes all right. Your
body will not put enough pressure on any single individual
nail for it to break your skin, which means we
can extend this, throw a second bed of nails on
top of yourself while we're there, and they get one
of your buddies to break a cinder block on it,
and if everything goes according to plan, you're gonna be okay. Again,
(46:39):
we're not telling you to do this. We're just saying
that you're gonna look super awesome. We're not not telling
you to do this. We are don't do any of this, okay,
But you're also you know, you're in your your own
master of your own destiny. At the end of yeah,
we're just telling you that all your crush as we'll
(47:00):
fall in love with you. Your boss will see it
and they'll say that's the kind of initiative. Guys, the
lawyer phone is ringing. It's so if you have experienced
this without like before hearing from us, we played no
part in this. We're just giving you information. We do
(47:21):
want to hear your story, though, because one of the
most dangerous parts of this practice has nothing to do
would you actually lying there with beds of nails being
on top of you or even center blocks. The real
dangerous part is getting yourself on and off the thing.
Once you get on there, you're fine, but you're most like, yeah, yeah,
(47:47):
it goes right through. But they're they're pretty close together though, right,
that's the whole point. So they're definitely close together. So
even your hand if you're not putting a ton of
way on it, which still the whole principle would hold you. Now,
maybe it wouldn't. It's too focused. I think it needs
to be more are distributed than that, more widely. Yeah,
that makes sense. You can take it easy like a
Sunday morning man, like soft rock in an elevator. You
(48:08):
gotta lay that groove on slow. Uh. But what if
they were knives, though, guys, what if they were knives?
Different people have attempted things in principle it's something that
that would work just from the concept of the pressure
and distribution, and you will see people who are doing
(48:32):
those things are purporting to do so I guess someone
check me on this. Um. It would obviously depend on
the knife, right, you wanted to play it safe, you
could just blunt the tip of the knife, which is
probably with someone someone with nails in the past. Um.
But I'm just speculating here. It feels like maybe it's
(48:52):
the difference between somebody juggling with bowling pins and then
somebody juggling with you know, uh, tennis balls or so
I'm sorry, something more dangerous. Uh lit torches and uh chainsaws. Well, uh,
the Internet did not deliver on bed of knives, but
(49:14):
it did deliver a really grizzly photo of a dude
in the hospital had been stabbed in the face. So
thanks Internet. Uh, I've got just the thing for you,
piercing the body. Um. Oh yeah, what we were just
talking about, like suspension, right, and also like putting nail
or another sharp object through your cheek or into your
(49:37):
nose or down your throat. Um. A lot of that
stuff has to do, like you said, been with knowledge
of human anatomy. Where it's actually going remaining calm. Is
there anything else to that preparation practice having an instructor? Yeah, uh,
and you can you can read some great articles and
(50:00):
what are called human blockheads. You can see some uh,
there's some fantastic forums on how to safely conduct suspension.
But again that's none of None of those things are
things that you want to just watch a YouTube video
and attempt for you to do yourself. But the point
is people are able to do these. There are two
(50:21):
other things that we should mention when we're talking about
other feats, just briefly because these might be future episodes.
One is the idea of being buried alive consensually saying hey,
I've thought about it. Put me in the ground and
then take me out and uh, you know, let's see
what happens. Yeah, that it doesn't seem real. And we
(50:43):
found instances, historical alleged instances where people have been buried
for elongated periods of time. I think the one that
we got for this was from a long time ago.
Someone was supposedly buried for forty days that right, Yeah,
that was his name was Jesus only three. I need
(51:06):
to brush up on my my Bible verses. Ah. Yeah,
his name was Sadu Harridas. Yeah, he was. This was
allegedly to have occurred in eighteen thirty seven. He was
buried alive for forty days and survived. And there It's
interesting because there were multiple I witness accounts and they
(51:31):
they sound just unimpressed enough for me to think at
least a few of them are true. These people did
get fooled. There's one British guy who who recounts the
story and says, uh, they dug him up and like
within half an hour he was kind of back to normal,
but he was still really frail and feeble, and then
half an hour after that he was just he would
(51:52):
talk to people who asked him questions and uh, he
still looked really weak. We were convinced that happened, and
so we left. That's how that's what they did. That's
sound I mean, that sounds unbelievable to me. Um. But
the thing is, everybody, there might be something to this.
That doesn't mean that that particular story is true and
(52:15):
there wasn't some kind of swindling or weirdness going on there,
but there could be something to this, right, and it's
something that we might be talking about later. No spoilers though, Okay, No,
you're right, Matt, You're right. It's hard to bite our
tongues on this one. But this is this is a
future episode. We think we figured it out and not again,
(52:38):
not necessarily in a debunking way. We we found something, uh,
and we want to bring it to you soon. But
while we're here we're talking about feats, there's another big one.
I think it's interesting, uh, because it's one of the
more extreme. It's one of the more controversial. It's one
that is pretty divisive. Back shouldn't. It's impossible. That's that's
(53:04):
why it's divisive. It's divisive because it's physically impossible. Pack.
In two thousand and ten, it was a guy named
Plade Johnny and he's a religious teacher. Some people considered
him a profit. Uh. He was about eighty two in
two thousand and ten, and he was located in Gujarata.
He claimed that he had not consumed get this, any
(53:25):
food or any water of any sort in more than
seventy years. Uh. This was this occurred after a an
encounter he had with divinity when he was eleven years old,
and so science came to bear a. Doctor Sakir Shah,
the director of neuroscience at the Sterling Hospital in a
(53:45):
Meta bad decided to investigate. He and a team monitored
Johnny for ten days and two thousand and three, during
which time they confirmed that he did not eat anything,
drink anything, urinate, or generate bowel movements, which is a
really unnecessarily formal way to say he wasn't whooping. Those
(54:06):
are all superpowers and in and of themselves, each of
those broad portfolio of freakish abilities there well, there are too.
There are two schools of thought here though. The first
is ten days. People fast for a long time. People
who are serious about fasting can do that m with food.
(54:28):
But water is a different story because huh, let's technically
maybe that's not the right word. Scientifically, according to what
we understand about humans and bodies and water, you shouldn't
be able to go more than I would say, maximum
four days? Is that about right? Without water? And they're
(54:49):
saying they monitored monitored him for ten days and he
didn't take in any water or expel anything any of
the by products of water. That seems that seems impossible.
It does, and that's why they went back with the guy.
In two thousand and ten, they monitored him again, and
this time they extended the monitoring period to fifteen days.
(55:13):
They got the same results. Uh, no urine, no feces,
no food, no drink and outside of a couple of
very limited circumstances that we're not going to talk about
Jesse yet. Uh this this is impossible and and I
hate to be the downer here, but Nightline got wind
(55:36):
of this and they went to investigate. They saw what
this man was calling his or what have been described
as his cave to studio apartment, and in on video
you can see that this apartment as a refrigerator. When
the people working for Nightline asked one of this teacher's followers, hey,
(55:57):
it's a very reasonable question. Why does a guy who
doesn't have to eat, why why does he need a refrigerator?
And then the follower apparently became very very defensive, refused
the crew entry into the dwelling, and they walked away
with it still being a mystery. MM doesn't sound like
a mr made on me. But maybe he's just got
(56:18):
an ice maker in there and he needs the ice
for another purpose, right, Um, maybe the ice isn't to drink.
It's to cool down something or to feed some house plants,
can gently caress his body with you know, he practices
his whim Hoff meditation. That was the full circle, guys,
(56:38):
full circle open. I I don't I mean, we don't
want to be It seemed like we're being entirely dismissive.
These are just the things that we know to be
true about this case. Please do not attempt to starve yourself.
Please do not attempt to be a breath arean or anything.
The stuff is dangerous and every every technique we've described
(57:00):
has given people serious injuries at some point over history.
So if you want to achieve these sorts of things,
that what you'll need to do is study with the
experts in these uh, in these feats. Right, find someone
who has walked over coals and and look at their
feet first before you decide whether or not you're gonna
(57:20):
pay them to teach you. But now f and g
to a bunch of balloons and go up way too high,
and or get someone like Darren Brown to convince you
that you did it and you just don't remember it. Uh.
That's a great idea. Uh. It seems then that the
(57:40):
question of mind over matter in the world of mysticism
is often at least misrepresented. We know thought can alter
the structure of the human brain to the point where
if you maybe listening to a bunch of podcasts might
do something to your brain too. We don't know yet,
because podcasts haven't been around long enough for us to
find doubt. But it also turns out that many of
(58:02):
the physical feats that are thought to be the result
of mental or cognitive superpowers turn out to be the clever,
ritualized application of well established scientific principles. We can dismiss
some of these folks as hoaxters and frauds, but there's
one crazy thing here. We have to remember the primary
tool they are using to trick the crowds and the
(58:25):
followers isn't a prop like a nail. It's it's not
some coals and some ash. The primary tool is their mind,
which means they are wielding mind over matter. Maybe not
as much, but they're using their mind to exert influence
over the minds of others. So we ended up with
(58:47):
mind over mind, which sounds way less. I don't know,
they're using your mind as a weapon too. No, that's true,
at least as far as we know now, we may
be off base there. One thing we didn't talk about
was the uh uh levitation, right, the purported acts of levitation.
(59:07):
We also didn't talk about the infamous but rarely witnessed
trick of climbing up a rope that's not you know,
that's not attached to anything seemingly And we want to
hear from you. Have you witnessed physical feats that cannot
be explained by ordinary means. We're talking seemingly superhuman whim
(59:29):
Hoff kind of stuff. If so, let us know we
want to hear from you because, as always we want
to see actual cases of this. How amazing would that be?
First put in a call to us one eight three
three std w y t K. Leave us a message,
Tell tell us what you saw, send us some I
(59:51):
don't know if pictures or something on one of our
socials or something. And immediately after that, called James Randy
or whoever is representing him in his hot line and
collect a million dollars or whatever they're bounty is right
now for something um intensely like E S P powers
or something mystic like that. But first call us one
eight one eight three three std w I T k
(01:00:15):
mm hmmm. If you don't want to use a telephone,
if you've got germ, you know, a phobia or something
like that, or you don't like handling plastic, or I
don't know what if funds made up these days? Who knows,
another mystery. We'll sort that one out later. You can
use social media to get in touch with us. We
are on Facebook or on Instagram, or on Twitter or
Conspiracy Stuff, Conspiracy Stuff Show, one of those. You're gonna
(01:00:35):
find us. UM, we recommend highly that you join our
Facebook group. Here's where it gets crazy. Just name a
name associated with the show, any of the three of us,
any of our superproducers, a joke for Ben, you know,
anything to let us know that you're aware of what
the show is and you're in um lots of fun,
meme exchanges and uh communication between conspiracy realists and we
(01:00:58):
hop into the fun as well. And if none of
that quite bags your badgers, never fear. We have one
more way that you can always contact us, Rain or
Shine until we get black bagged. It's our email address
where we are conspiracy at I heart radio dot com.
(01:01:34):
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Ben Bowlin
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