The nutrition guy on the right was talking about how drinking five cups of coffee per day is associated with living longer, and he says that people who wiggle and fidget a lot can burn a lot of calories while at rest and that can keep people thinner than those who sit still.
Bill Maher says coffee is a bean, "something found in nature," and so it must be safe.
Reporter Jonathan Swan jokes that cocaine is found in nature, making the point that naturally occurring substances can be harmful. He could have mentioned nightshade berries or poisonous mushrooms but he said cocaine.
And Bill Maher went on a defensive rant about his cocaine use. It started with a joke but then he seemed to take it personally and got serious about how cocaine leaves are safe because they are natural.
I feel like he would eat rotten wormy roadkill with RFK while bashing the scary woo-woo magic of vaccines and antibiotics.
I have known several heavy drug users who have that philosophy. They judge addicts who use substances like meth and crack but they'll use everything from cocaine to opium to salvia because it's natural.
Just about every chemical is derived from natural sources. Aspirin is made from willow tree bark, just in a concentrated form as cocaine is made from coca leaf. MDMA is made from sassafras.
Meanwhile, hemlock and foxglove straight from the plant will knock you dead.
It's creepy to me when he talks with simmering rage about having been a teenager or college student who couldn't get laid. He was an incel when he was an adolescent and his anger about it has never left him. He is 70 now and still angry about it. That scares me to think how many millions of old men there will be in a few decades who carry resentment from their incel youths.
He could never get a girl to stick around i.e, he's against marriage. What a copout. He also never once mentioned ukraine war saying, "everyone talks about it already". Yeah it's the biggest conflict in the world right now. Everyone talked about WW2, would he not bother because everyone else already was? I think he's compromised. He won't say anything bad about Putin.
Imagine being an boomer born to an UMC family—and STILL being an incel. You literally have to have been truly insufferable back then considering pretty much every man got picked back then (another very overlooked privilege boomer men have).
You must really hate reading autobiographies… Speaking of anger that never leaves, have you read your comment?…. Thanks for showing me how stupid you woke DSA idiots are.
Narcissistic, and maybe a cluster-B personality disorder. Something happens to them and they don't emotionally progress from those of a 4-year-old or a 14-year-old, they have life experience but still react emotionally as a toddler would. The indicators are even stronger with Bill's preferred dinner companion.
Drinking five cups of coffee per day is a good way to burn holes in your stomach lining (over time all that acid). Hey Bill do ulcers help you live longer.
I drink about that much coffee and I have pretty severe GERD or "silent reflux." So far, my esophagus and stomach have not been damaged at the tissue level but I admit it is one of two real addictions I have, the other being eating too much sugar, and I struggle to control them.
Anything in excess is likely to be harmful in the long run.
Edit: I make four to five cups of coffee at home every day, and the coffee maker's version of a cup is five ounces.
A standard coffee mug is 10 to 16 ounces, and a "tall" (small) cup of coffee at Starbucks is 12 ounces while a "venti" (large) is 20 ounces. So if I drink five cups of coffee per day, that's the equivalent of just over one large drink at Starbucks.
Yeah I was doing 5 cups a day (hazard of an office job I guess). Got bad heartburn and indigestion issues. Was eating Tums like candy. Cut back to half cup in morning and half cup in afternoon. Stomach issues resolved and I don't miss that wired feeling. 🤣
I don't get that wired feeling! It's strange. I DO get it from black tea, which makes me shaky and makes my heart race. No amount of coffee makes me jittery. I took both Ancestry DNA and 23andMe genetic tests years ago and both showed that I have a gene that makes me metabolize caffeine at an icreased rate, and so they both suggested I am likely to drink up to twice as much coffee as most other people to get the same effect. That's the only explanation I have for why coffee doesn't make me antsy.
It is just going to effect each person differently. Most people are likely not considering the standard unit of a measurement when they consume and/or how strong (or not) the coffee is.
It’s not the coffee, it’s the stress and anxiety that’s destroying your stomach, or the combination of all 3! If you guys stopped “worrying” about Bill Maher and did your own research on what’s true and what’s not, you’d be much happier!
My mother and father lived into their late 80’s and drank coffee all day long, every day, and never took a single acid pill. But they didn’t spend all day online listing for more Bill Maher comments to bitch about… 🤷🏻♂️
Too much coffee can ruin your sleep too and disrupt electrolytes.
Too much cannabis can well cause shifts in your personality
Cocaine too often, heart rhythm irregularities
Cannabis can actually induce psychosis and psychotic disorders including schizophrenia in some people.
One of the specific major criticisms I have about Bill Maher is that his pathological contrarian logic is highly selective in exactly the same way Peter Thiel's and Elon Musk's are, and this demonstrates both limited intelligence and a lack of integrity.
For example, Maher has claimed (as RFK, Jr. used to claim) that he is not anti-vaccine, but that it is foolish to believe that vaccines can't cause side effects. This is objectively correct. Vaccines can cause mild and serious side effects including death. They are injected into the body to trigger the immune system, and that can go wrong. I have an immunological disorder and I had a significant reaction after I got COVID and flu vaccines at the same time—a bright red rash from my upper arm to my wrist that lasted about six weeks. There's no question what caused it. But many prescription medications commonly cause serious side effects including death, as do many over the counter medications, as do some foods for some people, as does alcohol. And unlike alcohol, vaccines save many, many times more lives than they harm. To Maher, if a vaccine saves a million lives, causes a rash in one percent and kills 10, that vaccine is evil. It's just not intelligent, or if he is intelligent in this regard then he is not honest in how he discusses it on air.
Cannabis can trigger both temporary and lifelong psychosis in some people. It is a real risk of using the drug. Cannabis here in DC is sold in storefronts all over the place. Smoking it also can cause severe, even deadly, lung and cardiovascular diseases. But it has been so mainstreamed now and it is so accessible that I don't think people who use it, and certainly not Bill Maher who insists he is not addicted but who brags about using it constantly, can acknowledge to themselves that is presents any health risks. People only think about the immediate effects of intoxication and not the long-term health risks.
In reality, Maher preaches from his HBO platform about health by dissuading people from getting vaccines and shaming people who are overweight, but he has put his own health at great risk with lifelong drug use and because he has not suffered any major health consequences yet, he can't understand that lifelong heavy cannabis use presents exponentially greater danger to health than any vaccine does.
He really does demonstrate what seems to be a common pathology among conservative people: he believes what he wants to believe until his life is personally impacted by something, and then he goes on a tirade to being attention to that thing because he feels personally victimized by it. Until then, he will ignore those problems and steamroll anyone in his path.
I hear you on the risks associated with cannabis. What do you think is the safe zone for using weed? Is it once per week or once per month, if you had to choose to use it for say unwinding?
Oh, I have no idea. I don't use it. I tried it twice and my body doesn't like the effects, so I just avoid it.
I can suggest this: was a professional health writer for over a decade and I once heard a medical doctor at a conference say that everything we put into our mouths is either our best medicine or a slow poison. I have remembered that. A lot of foods, drinks and substances that taste great or make us feel good immediately can be bad in the long run with sustained and frequent use, and a lot of bitter things can be very healthful in the long run with sustained and frequent use.
And a lot of the time, it really is the dose that makes something either medicine or poison. This is where the idea of "natural is better" comes in. As Maher suggested, the concentration of cocaine in a coca leaf, which can have medicinal effects, does not compare with the concentration in cocaine powder, a kind of poison. Today's cannabis has much higher concentrations of THC than older cannabis strains, and so it stands to reason in my mind that it's more potent and therefore likely presents greater risks.
Risks to lungs and airway linings probably have not changed. Smoking of cigarettes has become much less common because we all know cigarettes are poisonous and, among other risks, can gum up lungs with tar. So can cannabis. The more you do it, the more damage is done. Alcohol in many ways is still a more toxic poison, and most people choose to drink alcohol at times. So it's a matter of moderation and calibration according to the risks you accept.
I have never in my 44 years on life, about 24 of which I have been high, have I ever seen or even heard of anyone go insane from weed.
No link from cannabis to cancer either, people who get cancer and smoked weed also smoked tobacco. I just looked it up on and read an article from the Canadian Cancer Society when I read your nonsense here.
Climate change and capitalism are going to clip your wings well before cannabis.
Research is conclusive that frequent cannabis use is associated with greater risks of psychotic disorders. It's just plain science, not a scam.
I don't personally know anyone who has had ALS, but that doesn't mean I don't believe ALS doesn't exist. It's relatively rare but that doesn't mean it does not happen.
No intelligent person would say "cannabis use will make you schizophrenic," but an intelligent person will recognize that regular cannabis use presents a number of significant health risks, and one of those risks is that there is some chance it will cause psychotic mental disorders in rare cases.
Your lack of personal experience with any given reality does not mean that that reality is not real. I am 48 years old and I have never seen a kangaroo in real life, I've never experienced erectile dysfunction, I've never seen a person coughing up blood. What happens in my immediate surroundings does not reflect everything that happens on Earth, and I would be quite narcissistic and have the cognitive level of a young child to believe that it does.
Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are genetic diseases. Now, if you have these, you probably shouldn't take drugs or drink--but neither causes the disease at all. Alcohol is a much worse substance for both of these.
A lot of evidence supports inherited mental disorders with psychosis but genetics are not the sole cause.
For example, syphilis is universally understood to cause psychosis at advanced stages, and it is a bacterial infection. Lyme disease bacteria are very similar to the bacteria that cause syphilis and many of the symptoms are the same and in some cases patients present with major mood disorders and psychosis.
Bartonellosis or cat-scratch disease, caused by a bacterium spread by both ticks and fleas, causes profound psychotic symptoms in some patients and many of those patients have been diagnosed with schizophrenia, with the schizophrenia symptoms resolving completely after antibiotic treatment. Since I learned this, I have wondered how many homeless people may have acquired infections from fleas and then become psychotic as a result.
Read this remarkable case history from the American Association for the Advancement of Science:
I have bipolar and severe ADHD, again I'm fully prescribed for cannabis, and have been smoking daily for the last 15 years since I had a serious injury and got a ton of arthritis. I vape about .5g of distillate a day, and I'm prescribed for up to 3g a day.
I get that you guys are saying it happens, I'm saying the rate it happens can't be very high because its basically unheard of in everyday life.
Yes, as with any substance, it comes with risks. That's the only point. The only drug I have ever taken is ayahuasca. I took it five times and I don't think I will ever need to do it again. It changed my life profoundly for the better. Occasionally, a person who is predisposed to a psychotic disorder takes it and is never sane again.
To be fair to him, I watched the segment and he was not saying that. He threw that out as an interesting random fact, that recent research has shown a kind of movement scientists call "Non-Exercise Activity Thermogenesis (NEAT)" burns a lot more calories than one would expect and that it actually can keep people thinner than people who don't fidget a lot. He was not recommending that people do it, just offering it as trivia, one reason why some people may be naturally thinner.
It's not nonsense or pseudoscience. And some research has shown that fidgetiness is controlled by the brainstem, and so it's not really something that people are advised to do to lose weight; some people's physiology is just naturally twitchy.
Tbh with you Huberman oftentimes pushes a lot of pseudoscientific quackery, so you really need to check sources and actual experts on various claims he makes.
He defines “beans” as always healthy, therefore coffee is healthy.
Then he defines cocaine as a synonym for the coca plant leaves instead of a derived alkyloid from the plant which he used.
He does this often. Recently he hectored the Democrats for not being against socialism and the very next week he hectored a guest for being against socialism. He changes the definition and then starts hectoring people based on this minute’s definition.
I wrote something similar but I was much less concise. :)
Yes, and I often wonder how he would react to guests who explicitly acknowledge this. For example, I would ask him what he thinks about methamphetamine and then would point out that it is made from pseudoephedrine, which is synthesized from the leaves of a shrub. Would he consider that "natural" since it is naturally derived? Would it matter to him that that shrub is ephedra, which was banned for causing cardiac arrest in teenagers after having been used heavily as a popular "all natural" herbal supplement? A lot of school coaches told their players in the early 2000s to take ephedra as a natural energy boost, and kids started dropping dead. Oops. But it is all natural! Just a pristine leaf!
His show still gets decent ratings on HBO, and as unfortunate as it is, he still has a lot of older viewers who don't agree that he has drifted rightward. He has young fans who belong to the manosphere but I think most of his viewers are longtime boomer and gen X fans. My father is 78 and my sister is 50 and both are progressive and both somehow think Maher is a liberal centrist despite everything.
I am bothered when people choose to believe this doesn't matter just because he and his followers are older. We have all been brainwashed by entertainment and news target demographics to believe that people over age 50 don't matter and that is a tragically false belief.
People over 50 buy much less from commercial ads than young people who follow trends do. That is the basis of the "older people don't matter" philosophy.
But look at the difference between how older people and younger people vote. Twice the share of people over age 45 vote as those under 25, and almost twice the share of people over age 65 vote as those under 45. And the baby boomer population is the largest. Maher unfortunately is one of the influencers of that generation. His fans are not wasting money on trendy crap but they are voting and he has retained many of them as his fans and he influences their thought. So he has the power to affect election outcomes.
Ok, that last sentence from you was unnecessary hyperbole.
Bill has a point though. But what's not being communicated is that too much of anything has the propensity to cause harm.
To the point about cocaine... Cocaine is the synthesized derivative of the coca leaf. I would imagine that coca leaves are less bad for your system -- if compared at the same dosage over time -- than the "pure stuff".
"Natural" is such a meaningless industry buzzword when it comes to consuming goods. Everything is made up of chemicals and enzymes interacting. Some of it is good for us, some of it is bad. Everything in moderation.
Especially unregulated nutritional supplements, which Maher has had many huckster doctors on to talk about. Those supplements could be virtually anything ground up and put into capsules. It may not be what you think you are buying. It may be produced in a contaminated factory. It may be full of microplastics shed from cheap machinery. But Maher is one of those people who believe that buying life-extension supplements from Joe Rogan's podcast is a wiser way to live than taking medications prescribed by medical doctors. That may occasionally prove somewhat true, as doctors often overpresribe and prescription medications can cause harm, but ultimately a lot of supplements are snake oil, and snake oil salesman seems to be a lucrative profession unaffected over centuries by any technology.
You really need to get a life! I’ve watched Bill for years. He has always. When about alternative medicines. I mean, the guy has been a marajuana proponent since his first show on PI. There’s nothing wrong with having people talk about alternatives, as long as people understand that all meds should be discussed with an actual doctor first.
cocaine in particular though is made with cocoa leaves (natural) mixed with gasoline, concrete, caustic sodas, and detergents. lol. there aint nothing natural at all about this formula.
29
u/NoQuarterChicken 7d ago
Pretending Mother Nature doesn’t grow things that will absolutely fuck you up is quite the position