Duncan Trussell: Bad Data is Like Junk Food

You know man, all this gut biome stuff that we're hearing now, like the study I just read about the study today, like they found out that what the gut biome, what you're feeding, your baby affects, there seems to be a correlation between their gut biome and the way they act when they're like five or something, they're two years old or something. Sure, dude. And the autism link, you know, where they're saying they think autism might be related to life. Well, who's saying that? Jamie, would you mind pulling that out before I fucking get guys on the side? There's a guy named Dr. Peter Hotez and he was on the podcast and he is an expert in autism and vaccines and diseases in foreign countries, particularly tropical diseases and warm, moist climate diseases. And he was talking about how they've got it narrowed down to five environmental factors that happen during the womb that they think possibly contribute to autism. But they don't think that it comes from something that happens later. This is current science according to him. Obviously I don't know what I'm talking about, like for sure. I'm not a biologist at all. People looking at us are probably like, how do these scientists not know this? I should barely be able to say those words in order and pretend like I know what they mean. But I listen to experts. The mother's microbiome, the collection of microscopic organisms that lives inside of us is a key contributor to the risk of autism. Some of that might be one of the factors. So it's during the womb and neurodevelopmental disorders and offspring. Well, it would make sense that if your body's not getting the proper nutrition and your body's not healthy, that whatever's going on inside of you is not going to be the best environment for a baby to reach 100% health. That just makes sense. If you're eating terrible while you're pregnant, it's not going to be good for the kid. But if you're eating really well and you're relaxing and taking care of yourself, it's probably better for the kid. I mean, this seems like obvious. It doesn't seem to make any sense that that wouldn't be the case. I think the weird part of it to me, this runs into like ideas of free will or autonomy in the sense that how much is the gut and the neurons in the gut and the neurons in the heart and all the interactions they're having with things that have different DNA than us affecting what we do. They think a lot. That's so weird. I think it contributes to depression. Yeah. Yeah. And it contributes to what else? Autism? What other behaviors? In other words, are we just essentially being driven around by some kind of strange microscopic hive of creatures living in our shit? In some way, yeah. Brian Callan had a pretty bad case of psoriasis, kept coming back. It was nasty. Really bothered him. Tried a bunch of stuff. Couldn't get it fixed. Went to one doctor who's a specialist in gut biomes, connection to autoimmune disorders. One guy fixed him up. Just changed up his probiotics, like what he's taking, prebiotics and probiotics. Gave him some like heavy duty shit. I forget exactly what he said, but it fixed it and it was basically something going on in his gut biome. And that can be affected by stress. Yeah. It can be affected by lack of sleep. There's all sorts of stuff that goes on in your body. We have to think of ourselves as a super organism, essentially like an ecosystem. We have to think of ourselves as like, you think of yourself as you. Hey, it's me. It's Joe. It's Duncan. We're talking. We're friends. Hey, what's up buddy? But really what we are is the keepers of the realm. Okay. We got a whole realm of things living inside of our body and we're feeding it Twinkies. And it's freaking out. And it's like, you fucking moron here, but it feels like when Twinkies go in my face. Yeah. So your fucking knees hurt all the time. Your back is killing you. You have all these inflammation problems getting zits and you're 40 years old. Like what the fuck? It's because you're eating dog shit, man. You're not giving your body anything good. You're the keeper of the realm. And also this is something I've been thinking about is like how much data we're eating, which is equivalent to Twinkies. It's like you eat a bunch of Twinkies, your body starts hurting. Then you're just slurping up whatever the fuck on the phone, right? Which I, by the way, I'm talking about me. This is what I do. I, you know, my bouncing around from like Drudge Report to Huffington Report to Reddit Conspiracy to Reddit, what the fuck? Zip popping. How long before you're looking at like a zip popping video? And then that takes you down into a place of like, oh, let's just move to animal cysts. And then you fall asleep, you wake up screaming. And that's the equivalent of getting like gas, isn't it, from eating like a huge Taco Bell meal. And instead of farting, you're just screaming in the middle of the night because you dreamed a cult was dragging you into the forest. It's like, this is, to me, we seem to have not quite acknowledged that data is as much of, is like a food. And that so much of the weirdness that people are showing these like strange behaviors, it's got to be because of the crazy shit they're sucking into their optic nerves, right? It is. It's also the ability to affect people very rapidly, whether to get a reaction from someone positive or negative. People are so addicted to that. I watch people getting these Twitter beefs back and forth and fucking smart people, man, a smart friend of mine who I respect greatly tried to get me to retweet something mean that he was saying to someone else. I'm like, get the fuck out of here. Like, why are you, what are you doing? Yeah. Like, what are you doing with your time? We get the one thing that I've done over the last week, we did a podcast with Bert and Tom and Ari and we all looked at the amount of screen time we put in our phones. Ari was proposing no smartphones. Yeah. Um, my fucking screen time was like four hours for a day. I was like, what? And I lied to myself and I said, well, we'll let see email and taking care of business. Most of it is going through Google newsfeed looking for crazy stories of like animal attacks. I'm just looking at man. I watched a video today of a guy riding his dirt bike and a bear chasing him. I'm like, what in the fuck? What is happening? Look, man, I don't want to try to like, uh, enable your addiction, but honestly, I think the internet has come to depend on your wild animal attack videos. Like you have kind of become like a news outlet for the best wild animal attacks. People need to know. People need to see this shit, man. Like we don't know. I've never seen a vulture fighter rabbit.