Name: Joe Rogan Experience #904 - Gary Taubes
Uploaded: 2017-01-25T01:57:01.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #904 - Gary Taubes' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-01-25. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #904 - Gary Taubes' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-01-25. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #904 - Gary Taubes

three two one boom and we're live hello gary hi joe thanks for coming man
appreciate it my
pleasure the case against sugar yeah this is uh for me this is a i don't know
how to put this any
other way i've i've kind of consumed sugar most of my life until the last
couple of years and i
slowly sort of tapered off and about about a year ago maybe last february or so
i just pretty much
cut it all out except for the occasional you know occasional dessert here or
there infinitely better
quality of life i feel much better i have more energy and then i started really
getting into it
and then i came across your work and um what i want to know is first of all how
did you get involved
in this and how much resistance have you faced okay this being the sugar case
yes this being the
whole obesity diet nutrition we can get into all of it but the sugar one to me
is absolutely
fascinating when you go down i mean um have you seen that sugar movie yeah yeah
and i'm probably in it
i think i think you are i think i'm one of the talking cereal boxes oh okay
right you know um i watched
it with my kids i made my kids watch it and it's amazing when you know a six-year-old
watches something
like that and then they go why is sugar in everything you know you're it's
funny because my kids live with
all the time right so i mean we had just come back from spending the holidays
with my uh
our grandmother who you know pumps them up with sugar while we're there and
there's nothing i could do
with it and then we get back and i'm having them making my boys dinner they're
8 and 11 and uh my
wife's out and after the dinner my eight-year-old says are we getting dessert
and my 11 year old goes
nick it's dad man are you crazy
wake up son um anyway i got into this you know i
okay i was a physics major in college i was like hard science and then i wasn't
any good at it got a
c-minus in quantum physics and my advisor suggested i find another career
so i went into journalism started doing science writing in the early 80s
because it was the only work
i could get and then my first book i went to live at cern the big uh particle
accelerator lab outside
of geneva and i was what we would call today embedded with the physicists and i
thought i was
going to be following and making this great discovery which is what the nobel
laureate who ran the
experiment was predicting and instead i spent 10 months watching them figure
out how they had screwed up
okay and it was a learning experience and how to do science right and i was
obsessed with how hard
it is to do good science and i had a lot of the physicists in the world really
didn't like this
nobel laureate so they were happy to point out to me how he was screwing up and
how he had screwed up
in the past and how he had even screwed up the work that he won the nobel prize
for
um after i came back i thought that was actually page six in the new york post
when my book came out
the headline was egghead squabble over nobel prize and this nobel laureate was
quoted calling me an
asshole in the newspaper and i'm 29 years old and i assume my journey you know
my career's over what
was he calling you an asshole over well because i ended up writing an expose
about what a bad scientist
he was and about the politics of science you know i thought i was i went to
stockholm with this guy
right when he won the nobel prize i mean we got our tuxes fitted together i was
his guest
at the nobel dinner and the nobel banquet and the party that follows which is
the most fun i've ever had
in my life um students of stockholm throw a party for the laureates and it's
back then it was crazy
um anyway so he was justifiably pissed off that i just wrote what i saw instead
of what a great man
he thought he was and i thought my career was going to be over right you're
called an asshole in the
papers when you're a 29 year old journalist by a nobel laureate but instead
everybody i would interview
in science would say oh you think that guy was bad you should write about this
guy and i just started
covering different aspects and it turns out you could get a long way in science
if you're willing
to sort of cut corners and you know it's not actually cheating it's just you
could discover
a lot of stuff if you're not willing to do the rigorous hard critical skeptical
work
to demonstrate that what you say you've discovered is wrong okay so i wrote a
book about something
called cold fusion which was a great scientific fiasco of the 20th century
except for the stuff
i'm writing about now and some of my friends in the physics community said if
you're interested in bad
science the book was called bad science they said you should look at the stuff
in public health because
it's terrible and so i moved into public health beginning with this idea that
electromagnetic
fields from power lines will cause brain cancer or leukemia and everything i
had learned about what you how
rigorous and meticulous and skeptical and thoughtful you had to do to get the
right answer in physics the
public health people didn't think you had to do they thought it was kind of a
luxury because their science
is harder and it is kind of harder you're dealing with like chronic diseases
that happen over decades
and people and messy systems and you can't measure anything and everything i
had learned was that if
you don't do this stuff you get the wrong answer so by the late 90s i had
stumbled into nutrition research
and this is maybe a longer story than you wanted no good i was living here in
venice california i was
freelancing for the journal science i was called a contributing correspondent
and i needed a paycheck
okay to pay my rent so i called my editor and i said what do you got what kind
of story could i turn
over quickly and he said there was a diet study that was coming out in the new
in journal of medicine
in two weeks and they wanted to do an article about it what i didn't know is
that this diet study had been
leaked to science in advance and the person who had leaked it had given him a
list of
sources to talk to and who leaks a diet study right to a drive and that and
this was a dash diet dietary
approaches to stop hypertension which is the most today u.s news and world
report says it's the
healthiest diet in the world based on you know like force studies that did do
not demonstrate anything
um the way you do those stories as a journalist is you you interview the
principal investigator and
you ask him who to talk to and he gives you a couple names to talk to who can
talk about the study even
though it's published and then you get three interviews which is enough to
justify a page in
the magazine and you get your paycheck um so i interviewed the pi and then i
interviewed one of
the people on the list of documents that had been leaked to science and that
was a former president of
the american heart association and she told me she couldn't talk about the
study or she'd lose her funding
and i said come on man this isn't lisenko era soviet union people don't lose
their funding
talking to a journalist about a diet study and she refused to talk to me i said
let's go off the
record complete confidentiality if i'm gonna miss the story that you're not
telling me that's bad
couldn't get her to talk and then i call one of the people that the pi told me
to talk to and he
sounded exactly like walter matthow on the other side of the telephone was very
weird
and walter starts yelling at me that there's no controversy over salt and high
blood pressure
and i'm going but walter i'm not calling about salt and high blood pressure i'm
calling about this dash
diet coming out and he's keeps going on there's no controversy there's no
evidence that salt doesn't
cause high blood pressure so i get off the phone i call up my editor i said i'm
going to finish the
story but i had this former aha president say she couldn't talk to me and she'd
lose her funding and
then i had walter matthow yelling at me that um there's no controversy over
salt and high blood
pressure there must be a controversy over whether salt causes high blood
pressure right so i'm going to
turn this story in pay my rent and then i spent the next nine months doing an
investigation for science i
interviewed i think 85 sources for one magazine article got paid for like six
weeks pissed off
my fiancee at the time because she thought she's going to date someone they
should have a better
sort of you know work efficiency ratio um the conclusion was that the only way
you would believe
that salt causes high blood pressure from the studies that had been done to
that point was if god told you
so perfect personally so you could ignore all the evidence and all the
randomized controlled trials
even the observational evidence and just but that's what everyone had done well
how did this start
because i i had heard that before as well everybody's heard that before and i
had read a long time ago
that that was yeah and that salt is actually an essential mineral and it's
important for your body and
it doesn't cause high blood pressure and there's a host of other factors that
should be considered
so it was yeah that's the thing it was kind of intuitively it was an
interesting idea it made
biological sense when you consume salt you also have to take in water that's
why they feed you pretzels and
you know salty peanuts at bars because you want to take in liquids so that you
can maintain the same sodium
concentration in your blood because your cells like the the you know the
chemical reactions that
drive your cells are dependent on the sodium ratio in the cells so if you take
in more salt you're going
to drink more fluid and that you're going to have you know more fluid in your
circulation that's going
to increase your blood pressure and it does happen in a very short term but the
question is is this a chronic
cause of high blood pressure and hypertension and once the researchers decided
it was and these guys are
terrible scientists i mean i hate to say this but in my first book good
calories bad calories in the
epilogue i point out i say you know i never use the word scientist to describe
any of these people doing
research except for a few specific examples because they don't really
understand what science is and how to
do it and they weren't to their defense they just were never taught how to be
scientists they were like
physicians and nutritionists who you know had a sloppy scientific training and
they thought it was easy
and you get a hypothesis and you confirm the hypothesis and when they didn't
confirm it they
thought it must be true anyway and then you find the data when people talk
about cherry picking
that means you find the data that does sort of confirm and you ignore the rest
so anyway that was it
i wrote this article it's called the political science of salt you know won
some awards and while i was
doing that uh this walter matthew character took credit not just for getting
americans to eat less
salt putting us on this low salt diet he took credit for getting us on the low
fat diet that we were
all eating in the 90s and i got off the phone with them called my editor of
science and i said when
i'm done writing about salt i'm going to write about fat i have no idea what
the story is but this guy's
clearly one of the five worst scientists i've ever interviewed in my life and
you know everything i learned in my
physics period was that bad scientists never get the right answer so i spent a
year doing an
investigation for the journal science on dietary fat that paid for about two
months
and seems to be a trend here yeah yeah no it was bad um no it's good i mean it
just it's good you
got to do that to get the right answer that's it and that's why so much
journalism is so shallow is
because if you're going to put in the time you get paid for it's all you can do
is a shallow job right
nobody can afford to do that i actually had corporate jobs that allowed me you
know like
writing speeches and press releases for ibm that you kn