 Our next panel is Fighting the Fakers. Woo! In martial arts. This should be really cool. Here's the quick haiku for this. You killed my master. Super fast camera zoom in. Don't fight him. Fight me! Please welcome your moderator, one of my favorite storytellers, John Renny. Thank you. Thank you very much. It's a pleasure to get to be here at TEM with all of you once again. I know what many of you are thinking. Yes, I am amazingly lifelike. Thank you. That's... Anyway, we are so glad, all of us who have been involved in putting this together, to have this sort of panel today, to be able to talk about the subject of Woo! In Martial Arts. And I think you may recognize a number of these faces. Starting over there at the end is somebody who's certainly an old friend of TEM, and I like to think of him as an old friend of mine too. Evan Bernstein. He's of course one of the co-hosts of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe Radio Show and Podcast, and he's a chair of the Connecticut chapter of the New England Skeptical Society. He and his wife and his daughter are all Krav Maga practitioners, so don't try to mug any of them. Sitting next to him is Dave Jones. Now Dave Jones is the host of the podcast, which is the most fun to say in the entire universe, the Haya Podcast, which looks skeptically and critically at the world of martial arts in all sorts of different ways. He's also a very experienced martial arts practitioner. He started off in Okinawan Karate and a lot of other systems, though these days he mostly focuses on the Chinese styles of Bagua and Jingyi. Next to him, now, if in the course of this presentation or in the rest of this weekend, if I say something that antagonizes you or irritates you, you can take it up with our next panelist. He's Reed Coon. Next to him is Brent Weidman. So rarely confused in this instance, but Brent Weidman, now he is a professional mixed martial arts fighter since 2005. He competes as a welter weight on the Bellator Fighting Championship Circuit. You've got a record of like 22 and 8 something. Here's the key point. He's beaten up more people today than most of us will in the entire rest of our lives. So it's just great having him here. He is a very active member of the skeptical community and he's just a great voice for outreach to the mainstream community about our interests. And next to him is somebody else who's really pleasure to get to know him in the course of this presentation. Reed Coon. He's a research fellow with Fight Metric. He writes the Fight Science feature. Why would you want to fight science? Perfectly good fight. He writes the Fight Science feature for Fight Magazine and you can find a lot of other things that he writes at Fightnomics.com. He is the author of the upcoming book, Fightnomics, the Hidden Numbers and Science of Mixed Martial Arts, which just sounds amazingly awesome. So really, getting down to the subject of things here, I guess the obvious place to start is why this? Why mixed martial arts here at TAM? Well, for a lot of people, even ones who don't study the martial arts, the martial arts can be a sort of gateway drug for introducing people to a lot of pseudoscientific or mystical ideas or for reinforcing ones that they already have. Now, the term martial arts encompasses a lot of different sorts of diverse practices and the experiences of people in and out of those practices are diverse. So it's not surprising. It can evoke a lot of different reactions and it can mean a lot of things to different people, too. Martial arts can be impressive. They can be terrifying. They can be entertaining. They can seem ridiculous. On the one hand, there's this tremendous amount of history and empirical learning that's gone on through all of the centuries and thousands of years of fighting experience. But there are also a lot of ideas intertwined with martial arts practice that are very far from scientific and or even in some cases very far from effective in terms of fighting for defense or offense or for fitness or whatever else drives people to become involved with the martial arts. And since not all of these ideas, by the way, are ancient ones rooted in old ideas of outdated mythologies, there's a lot of modern pseudoscience and unsupported beliefs and superstition and outright fakery and scamming, all the things that we're referring to here just as woo, that'll have completely modern origins that also find their way into the martial arts. So we're going to try to talk about all of this today with this great panel and they'll have a lot of good suggestions to offer people about how they can engage with the martial arts constructively and happily and still manage to maintain some sort of integrity with respect to their skepticism that way. So guys, I guess a good place to start with all of this is a lot of the old roots of the ideas about mysticism in the martial arts seems to be rooted in the idea of Qi or Qi. Dave, you've got a lot of deep background in the subject of Chinese martial arts. Could you maybe describe some of what the idea of Qi or Qi is supposed to be historically? Sure, one of the first things we ought to think about is, you know, why did people latch on to this so universally? Because Qi, if you look at it, is the same thing as Qi or Prana or Ka or Numa. So, you know, if you're thinking about human society before we had modern science, which is the vast bulk of human history, people didn't know that the brain was the center of consciousness, but people didn't know that blood circulated. But one thing that they could all observe was that you breathe in, you breathe out, you live. You stop breathing in and breathing out, you die. So that sort of led all these different cultures, you know, the Holy Spirit or inspiration, it's everywhere. And to believing that there was something about this activity, you were pulling energy from the universe to keep you alive and then letting it back out. So, you know, that's a good grounding to start with on this topic. It wasn't as ridiculous as it seems today when people first came up with it. Ridiculous? What are you talking about, Brent? I'm sure that you frequently in the course of your fights, you must have frequently just summoned all of your Qi to help you. You went? I'm telling you, if your chakras aren't aligned, your odds are not very good. There you go. Get in the pros. And I think I'd like to add to that that Dave made a really great point yesterday in the workshop about not throwing, he made a comment about not throwing the Buddha out with the bath water, that a lot of these ideas have good elements to them, even if they didn't start so well. My students know, one of my mantras that I constantly repeat is that breathing and posture, the two most important things in the martial arts, and I would argue in life, breath is very important in controlling one's breath, but not because we're influencing our life force, but because breathing brings oxygen and allows you to not die. I mean, mixed martial arts in general certainly is a very no-nonsense, results-oriented kind of practice. Krav Maga is too. Evan, do you, does the subject ever really come up in the training you received? It's interesting, yeah, because it has come up in our studio before, but pretty quickly our headmaster, I think, pretty much abandoned the idea. He basically put his toe in the water to see sort of how the rest of the students would react. Would it be something that they would be interested in learning some more into the credit of the students in the studio? It really wasn't what they were there for. They were there to learn how self-defense tactics, how to really to fight, how to protect yourself. They really weren't interested in it at all, and she is a marketing tool. I think some studios, some practitioners feel it's necessary to sort of give the people what they want. The people want, sometimes want mysticism. They sometimes want the chi to be there as part of it. Masters don't necessarily buy it either partially or fully, but hey, look, this is a business, and if it's going to bring people through the door, yeah, okay, then throw some chi in there. Well, actually, this sort of brings to mind sort of a great example of somebody whose reputation in the martial arts is really built around the idea of this, George Dilman. Reed, do you want to tell us some more about kind of the history of George Dilman and some of his claims in this area? Yeah, hopefully you've heard of George Dilman, maybe if you watch National Geographic, and I think he may have been mentioned in the bullshit series by Penn and Teller. This is a guy who makes a living off teaching chi, and he actually attempts to, if you've seen Star Wars, Yoda can do this. So, he is a real life Yoda, okay? He can wave his hands, and he can knock you out, he can knock you over, he can put up a sheet and put people behind it and knock them all over, and he claims to even do this at Starbucks sometimes, he moves the line. So, the guy, that's practical utility. What is undisputed is that he is a character, and he certainly has a lot of personality, and he's very convincing in what he says, and he has a whole lot of people who come to him and pay money to learn these ideas. But when you listen to him talk, and you hear him explain these concepts, you're going to hear a lot of third eye, and alignment of energy fields, and then you're going to hear a lot of special logical fallacies when things don't work out the way they should, like when someone who doesn't believe in chi walks in and attempts to get knocked out. So, we do have a little bit of video, if I can get the screen back. Bear with me, we are doing this. Well, we're doing that in the slides we're looking at now, that's Guru Jong, and he was a very famous Chinese practitioner around the turn of the last century, hugely influential, a very good practitioner, but he was one of the people that realized that the showmanship of chi was something that could help move people in your students. And it's what some practitioners of the martial arts claim is the basis of their power. Harnessing this energy apparently allows them to break bricks with their hands and even their heads. Chi, it flows throughout the body, without it you don't function, and it's a radio wave. Science can't find chi, it doesn't exist as far as science can tell. Within a doubt, George Dilman is a force to be reckoned with, he's a ninth degree black belt who has taught everyone from Muhammad Ali to Bruce Lee, and he is able to drop just about anyone using applications of pressure to certain points along the body. Now in this case he is actually making contact, so that's a little different, but if we skip ahead we should see some real no-touch use of the force, I mean this is Jedi, real Jedi knight. And they were expected to react in a specific way and they just reacted to the suggestion when this happens in hypnotism, demonstrations on stage, this is the voice of a sceptical scientist that you know. It just gives suggestions and people who are ready to believe that kind of things react. But critiquing a tape and standing up to a karate master are completely different matters. It's time for a showdown. In one corner, weighing in at no more than 125 pounds is chemist Luigi Garnicelli. He thinks he can stand up to a knockout Panchukchi because it doesn't exist. That's a pretty good reason to be fair. In the other corner it's eighth degree black belt Leon Jay, one of George Dilman's top associates and fellow practitioner of a no-touch knockout. This ought to be interesting. In fact when we did the test on Luigi who was not ready to to believe these things or maybe was just staying there seeing what would happen. Not ready to believe in it? Not ready to believe, so even the practitioner himself knows this is more about belief than... He didn't wear anything real. Dilman thinks he knows what went wrong and has come up with a very interesting explanation. I bet he has. Name that logical fallacy. The skeptic was a totally non-believer. Non-believer. Plus, I don't know, I should say that in film, but if the guy had his tongue in the wrong position of the mouth, that can also nullify it. You can nullify it. You can nullify a lot of things then to you. In fact, you can nullify them if you raise those two big toes. If I say I'm going to knock you out and you raise one toe and push one toe down, cannot yell. And then if I go to try again, you reverse it. So the few toes is crimp tonight is what we're hearing. I will stop, yeah. I hope you're all taking notes. That's some high-level martial arts stuff there. Yes. Toes up and down. Brent, are you going to use that? I probably shouldn't say this on film, but I do. I use this in all of the fights that I didn't lose. That's why you have to see flat on the ground. Yeah, yeah. I'd get choked down and wake up and go, the toes. I forgot the toes. No, I mean, this is what we saw here. It's easy to laugh, but the consequences of this sort of It's easy to beat, too. Yeah. I mean, the consequences of this kind of thing are sometimes not always funny when people actually have taken this kind of belief a little too seriously and have tried to test the awesome power of the chi. Yeah, David, maybe you can introduce the idea of the kick-ass miracle while I queue up the next video. Okay. So some of you may have seen this show, Mind Body Kick-Ass Moves. And it was a fellow named Chris Crudelli that traveled around and saw all these famous traditional masters. And while there was a lot of fighting in there, there was also a lot of gesticulation and chi manipulation in these. But the biggest one, the most famous one, is where a practitioner gears himself up to show how he can, it's basically what we would call an iron shirt or a golden bell kind of chi gun, where you make your skin impervious to blades. And he shows off his specially sharpened machete just for the occasion, cuts a couple of saplings down with it. And this fellow is convinced that he can do this. And he gears up and he makes his attempt. And I think the video speaks louder for the results than I can. If you're squeamish, you might want to look away. Don't spoil it. Yeah, spoiler alert. Now they know what happens. In Manila, there's a 15-meter tall statue of the 16th century. All right, let's skip ahead. He's talking about the knife. What Red says he'll show me is his version of the Filipino warrior ritual, which will switch a person into fighting mode. But what I'm most keen on seeing is proof that the ritual will protect him from the hacks of his own razor-sharp machete. Now, if you watch him use his blade, it's obvious he is. He claims to the ritual. Aside from all. But on watching his movements, some slowly won over. They're balanced and powerful. Each sequence, he says, is about channeling the power of the four elements. Earth, air, fire, and water. He's going to do this for a little bit because he's got to get charged up. He's got to align himself. He's got to harness all that power. Ritual is so very important to the perpetuation of a superstition. The thing is, even if this were real, it takes so much buildup, like the Dilman thing, like this, that you would be knocked out by the guy that just swung a punch before it ever got to that point. No practicality. It's like spoon bending. If you do it in one of 15 minutes, you can do it with your hands in a second. Hold on, let's not fight yet. I gotta let my candles. Exactly. There are no candles inside the active gun, by the way. I asked. They're not allowed. Here he goes. We know the blade is real. Although you can do that with a dull blade too. But this one's not. There you go. And there it is. How'd that work out for you, buddy? That startling moment of reality kicking in. It's going to be hard to come back from. I would love to see a follow up with this same gentleman a month later and see if he still believes at this point. He still believes it five minutes later, and this is where it gets insidious. If you are convinced through whatever means that you are capable of this, and this guy obviously was sincere, he would not have done that, then when it goes awry, it's set up just like the secret or anything else where it's victim blaming. You're going to blame yourself for not having done some little fiddly part of that ritual correctly. You will never go back. You're so invested. You almost can't go back and say, whoops, I guess I was on the wrong track for the last 15 years of my life. Outside of the martial arts, we're all accustomed to seeing these kind of the apocalypse cult ideas and the various sects that have predicted, oh, the end of the world is coming, and those predictions come and go, but it doesn't necessarily mean when those have failed that those cults disappear overnight. In some cases, some have, there's an amazing dedication that keeps people attached to the idea. Sure. Well, whether it's built on a elaborate ritual or mystical analysis of the letters arranged in the Bible or whatever it is, there's always an out left there if something goes right. Obviously, I did it wrong this time, but I figured out my mistake, and the world is going to end in a month. And this can be true even when the mistake is made by somebody who's at the top of a system. I know we have some video, maybe should we try to pull this one out too? Yeah, so one more here. Yeah. We have another Japanese master who believes he can do no touch knockouts, and I love this video because first of all, it's entitled The Fact of the, and then the name of the style. The only fact is that the Yoda fight scene in Revenge of the Clones or Attack of the Clones was definitely ripped off from the scene. It's important to note that this Japanese fighter here continues to have a very successful school. This is not in any way, this very famous clip changed anything. So this guy is just knocking people out, his students are, you know... We call that the real man. He can beat any MMA fighter. The challenge has been made. He's really destroying this guy. By the end of this video, I just felt sorry for him. I think I'm going to leave him alone. So in the lead up, you might have noticed actually, there are some scenes where you can see beginners and yellow belts are in the background not participating in this. It's only his deepest students, his black belts that are able to do that. So now here's the challenge. They're actually signing a contract, and what was the term you used? It's basically in case of death. There was a question at our last workshop about, well, in these challenge matches, what if the real martial artist could kill the sport guy? That they're holding it up right now. He just signed the waiver that says, if you disrupt my chi and I die, I can't, you know, my family can't sue me or whatever it is. So this is an all out balls to the wall fight that we should be seeing here. Yeah, now this is what claims to be an MMA fighter. I'm not sure who it is, but it's, he's clearly an actual fighter. He's trained, but he is taking on Yoda. I mean, Yoda in a yellow belt is an intimidating guy. He was throwing people around like ragdolls without actually touching them, but they agree to an actual fight. And I think what is so telling in here is some of, some of the, watch the body language of each person involved after the first few exchanges. And I think it's very telling. Hey Reed, can you do us a favor? Can you switch over to the other video? I like the other angle of this one better because you can actually see, I think, more clearly what happens. It's true. It brings us right up to this point. Yeah. And then, oh, I need the screen again. I need that. Yeah. So they just signed the contract. This is a better angle actually. I might even be able to hear some of the content. Here we go. Look at him. I know. Why do you see the reaction of the master? He is absolutely stunned with what happened. Ouch! That actually hurt. Which is, it's not just the people trying to delude other people. He genuinely deluded himself. So he asked if the fight was over, are you submitting this over? And he had no reaction, so they forced him to continue. So, I mean, and again, I mean, it comes back, sadly, an awful, brutal example of the real difference between a kind of a scientific and a pseudoscientific worldview. And a scientific worldview because science is all about testing your hypotheses and actively trying to disprove them. If you're starting suppositions, lead you to predictions that turn out wrong, you reject those starting suppositions. But here, with this sort of more cult-like behavior, it's really all about constantly just staying within the cult. And if the outcome comes out different from what's expected, it just means there were special circumstances that somehow applied. Sure. And that it's the same danger, you know, in philosophy versus science. If Massimo Piliucci has taught me anything from listening to his podcast, it's that all sorts of things are logically possible. It's, you have to take the empirical evidence and see which ones are actually correct. And some people leave that aside. But so what do we really understand, though, about like, I mean, again, we can sit here, we can sort of, you know, scratch our heads at how can people possibly be sucked into this? And how can the people who are the masters of this, the teachers of this, how can they be sucked into it? What do we know about what feeds into this kind of system of belief? There's a lot of mechanisms at work, and we can, we can almost throw them into the cage one at a time. But think about, first of all, the power of suggestion, which was mentioned in the first video. Then think about the school. I mean, you had a very tight in-group with a very clear, iconic, literally my master, who had a lot of power over that group. And so conforming to what you thought you were supposed to do is very important in that kind of arrangement. So there's a lot of almost cultish behavior that you're witnessing. And whenever you have, I think, a school that operates that way, maybe that's fundamentally a risk sign. It's not just almost, it's textbook. You know, you create an environment that people want to belong to, because they admire some aspect of it, or they feel loved or welcomed by it. And they will do, whether consciously or subconsciously, whatever it takes to belong in that environment. But now, you know, I mean, I think all of us have involvement with the martial arts. We do this, and we run up to some level, against some level of this kind of thing in the modern practice of it as well. How much of a problem is that for those of us who have a kind of skeptical worldview? I mean, is this something that it, does it drive us back out of the martial arts? How do we stay engaged in the system like that? It could. I think you need to find the right system that actually does work. I mean, if you go into something, if you go into one of the arts and you're seeing something like this, yeah, you're going to get out of there probably as fast as you can and go search for something else that really does what it's supposed to be doing. And often it's less about actual system than it is about the individual teaching it and how they handle themselves. And so, you know, whoever's the front of, don't worry so much if you're looking at something about, is it system X or system Y. First off, make sure that the person that's teaching it is someone that you, you know, even if they don't share your exact same beliefs that you can get along with and they're not going to drive you away with this kind of cultish behavior. Brent, are there, you know, you're in the professional mixed martial arts world. I mean, you're obviously working with people. This is their, their livelihood. Do you see a lot of manifestations of, of this kind of mystical thinking showing up there? Sure. Well, as we'd maybe expect in the, in the more combat sports realm, as opposed to, you know, think boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, MMA versus jujitsu, karate, kung fu. In that combat sports realm, it's more athletically minded. And so it's, it's much less. However, I do still run into it because fighters will are notorious for looking for anything, anything that's different. Yeah. Any edge, any 1% difference. My favorite question to ask the few times this comes up is they, they, if somebody's asking me about Chi or life force, and I'll ask, you know, you heard George Jilman say it's like radio waves. Excellent. Okay. So what is the unit of measure of Chi? Is it metric? Is it standard? Because radio waves, we can measure. Yeah. We understand. You can't simultaneously say it's like radio waves and then turn around to say, well, it's a type of energy that science can't measure. And it's always funny to me that all of the fighters, and again, it's a smaller percentage than maybe some guys that spend most of their time in the traditional martial arts realm, but of those fighters that I've met that, that did some sort of Chi Gong, they did some sort of breathing exercises to strengthen their life force. Or I know a few that like to do, like to do Diego Sanchez used to say that he used to meditate in thunderstorms and try and absorb the energy of the, but it's funny to me, he still did some push-ups that morning. He's, he's still, he's still sparring. He's still doing road work. He's still trying to diet. You just don't have to be a fanatic. Yeah. Yeah. And then on top of that, the herbal remedies and the Chi Gong. But just to be clear also, it's, I mean, it's, I'm glad you mentioned herbal remedies, because it's not like all of these problems running through martial arts that they're all just kind of Chi energy belief centric stuff. There's a lot of modern flim-flammery kinds of things that also start to show up. You know, you've had some experience with this kind of thing, too. Yeah. If we can get the slide back. So this past weekend right here in Las Vegas was the UFC Fan Expo. There was a huge event. I was there promoting my book and I went around, walked the floor, took some pictures of myself on, got busted by a, by a, I don't even know what he is, a spiritual healer of some kind from Russia. So each year it's interesting to see different technology, technology related tools work their way into competitive sports. And because you're right, every athlete is looking for an advantage, whether it's nutrition or a different type of training tool. The equipment that we use, for example, in the gym has evolved over time. Get back in here. Training masks, altitude masks are a common thing now. We see a lot of very high-end mouthpieces, extremely expensive ones. There were a few instances of quantum bracelets, you know, power band, power balance. I will, I will note these guys were not back at the UFC Expo this year. I think they're having enough problems thanks to good people like Richard Saunders who called them out and made them liable for their claims. But those guys three years ago were right out there. They had one of the biggest booths they had. They were paying UFC fighters to wear their bands, which they did, including some guys like I think Joe Rogan who is wearing a power balance bracelet for a long time. They have moved on to necklaces and, and quantum oils that will infuse your bloodstream to make your blood vibrate at the proper frequency to align with your personal aura. Yeah. I mean, this guy brought out a flip book full of crazy on me. And when I said, you know, I don't think you keep using this word quantum. I don't think it means what you think it means. He said, well, what are you, some sort of physicist? Well, actually, I do have a degree in physics. And that's when the book closed, he said, thanks for stopping by. See you later. For one that comes to mind is, it was very popular, is very trendy for a little bit. And, and it was funny because it actually had to be addressed with the athletic commission was compressed oxygen, little cans of, like maybe you would spray to clean off your keyboard. And fighters would be sucking on these between rounds. And the idea, of course, we've all heard of like oxygen bars and oh, super oxygenate your blood and they're doing it between rounds. Well, what was funny to me about this, not funny, interesting, but funny, haha, was that it all of these any sort of nutritional supplementation, anything like this has to be clear to the commission. So they had to go to a governmental commission and, and to the doctors that were employed there in and say, is this okay? Can we do this? And across the board, every commission was like, sure, you know, and I didn't have the heart to tell most of my friends that tried it that their lungs are already extracting oxygen from the air pretty well. Kind of what they're for. Exactly. That decoration. And a lot of this, you know, as skeptics, I think sometimes we get the whole, well, why, why even a conference for skepticism? Why, why rock the boat? You know, if you don't believe in something, just don't believe in it. Well, it's because it's not always innocuous. The elevation mess that we talked about, supposedly simulating high altitude training, there's actually been a little bit of research done on this some in some sports labs. And what they found was not only did it not increase endurance, not only did it not oxygenate the blood or red blood cell count or any of these things that they claim, it actually put most users in a state of metabolic acidosis. And, which is not good if you've never been there. No, it's, and, and so it was actually damaging to their bodies. But of course, anecdotally, you know, if you're training and you can't breathe, which is essentially what it does, and then you fight and you can breathe, well, what's, you know, somebody proposed the thing, or predisposed to thinking this is going to say, well, it worked. And then they tell their body, hey, this works for me. And then they read about it online and say, hey, that works for me. I mean, that issue of like, well, what, what works for you? I mean, I guess maybe in the interest of also making it clear that it's not as though the martial arts is exclusively or maybe singularly a hotbed of loony thinking about this. In a lot of ways, the attachment to these kinds of things, what's going to give me that special edge? This is really all kind of just part of the general thing that we see throughout sports of people's attachment superstitious or otherwise to, you know, what's going to help me stay on my hot streak or whatever else people. Traditionally, that's what people want. They're very attached to these ideas. It's the common example we see in all this of the end of one, right? So, you know, I hurt my back. I went to the chiropractor. My back was better in like three days. Well, you didn't have another you that hurt your back and just laid on the couch for three days to see your back better on its own. In a study, people my age who are me were a hundred percent cured by this. It works for me. It must be good. And the post-hoc fallacy really it's pervasive in everything we do and so I have a screenshot of the M&M's commercial from the early 80s and raise your hand if you remember the M&M's baseball commercial. Does anybody, is this so rare that you're going, okay, that's a few people. Basically, it's a 30-second M&M commercial and the one kid asked the other, your batting average is so great. What's your secret? He says M&M's. The blue, you know, the green ones, I hit a triple. The yellow ones, I hit a home run. And then this kid, his turn comes up, he says, quick, you know, give me one of them. Well, here's a triple. Go for it. And then in the background, they're showing M&M's and everybody's happy and you hear the click of the ball and applause. What are we teaching our children? Okay, so performance enhancing, you know, something, you know, every person's performance relies on some external secret and that's what you should be shooting for. And it comes in pill form and Mark McGuire must have had a lot of M&M's that season. Yeah, the green ones. But it's post-hoc fallacy. I mean, we do well and so it's interesting that batters are superstitious because they fail a lot and that's entirely predictable within science. So even when it comes to superstition, it actually follows very predictable patterns that are based on science. We have loss aversion. We don't like to lose things and when we experience randomness and we experience a lot of failure, we start to get superstitious and that's why batters are superstitious, fielders are not. Fielders rarely drop the ball. We actually count how many times they do it. We call it in an error. Now in batting, you fail seven times out of ten, you're actually considered an all-star. So when you fail that that much, it's easy to see streaks and shooters, the myth of the hot hand and it was a behavioral economist, economic guy that Daniel Kahneman, I believe that actually did the study on that. It's so predictable and yet science explains it and yet starting at a very young age, we fall into these traps of it must be something else. I'm hot. I'm not. I didn't take my M&M's. I'm not wearing my lucky socks and some of the stories of superstition in sports are just amazing. You know, there's flies are lucky. That's why I don't wash my socks. So superstition aside, I mean you're involved in looking at the actual metrics of fighting. So when we bring them like a more scientific, quantitative, objective view to this, what do we actually find out matters? What is the kind of thing that say in Brent's experience that actually wins fights? Yeah, I like to use the analogy that video may have killed the radio star but in some ways MMA killed some of that big screen Hollywood kung fu magic and because MMA was, you know, the rubber meets the road, it was originally invented as a science experiment. Okay, who would win? A boxer or a wrestler? Let's put them in a cage and see who wins. And it was so simple. It was elegant but it was also primitive and I think that's what appeals to me about the sport. It's very real but it's still a competition. We've eliminated a lot of like the real risky rules but the reality is is that when you have two highly trained people, basic metrics do matter. Sometimes, you know, having the longer reach when you're otherwise equal the same age, the same size, the same weight class can be a small advantage. It manifests itself in measurable ways such as the South Paw advantage has a small but measurable advantage and certain metrics, it's not that left-handers are better, it's just that right handers are not used to facing left handers. We call that a selection of frequency dependence. So these are inconsistent with what we'd expect from science and we can run these experiments and see how they pan out. Now, I've also run the analysis of our Aries and Taurus people born under those astrology signs. Did they tend to be great fighters? Because of course an astrologer would have you believe that and they would tell you that a Pisces is a peace-loving person. Now, if you graph it, it's pretty close. I think I actually have that graph. There's no real advantage if you're of a certain astrology sign. So have what matters in a fight, you know, youth is important being older, having had prior concussions is a huge problem. As an old short guy who's had a lot of head injuries, I'm not liking the evidence. Are you right-handed? That's a clean sweep. Yeah, I got that going. That's too bad. So here's the UFC win rate by Zodiac sign. The dotted line is a 50%. What you see is that it just bounces around as we would expect. It's somewhat random. The sample size is not huge. So it's roughly like that. Now, what's interesting is that the highest blip on the page is actually Pisces. So this peace-loving pacifist- Thank you. Good night. We'll see. Has a slightly higher win rate. Now, obviously chalk that up to randomness. But it was interesting to put that to the test and to see there are there's a bunch of things that I can predict that matter. And I'm pretty good at predicting outcomes. You know, the birthday, other than the year, is not important. And I think that I'm sorry. No, go ahead. I think that I take it upon myself as a professional athlete, albeit, you know, a smaller level one. But a lot of this stuff starts so young because younger athletes, younger martial artists look to older athletes and older martial artists. And a huge reason, for example, with my my involvement with the JREF is to try and give back a little bit. I know a lot of fighters my age that are that are telling the young fighters about their underwear that they haven't washed in a while, or their special diet, or their special, you know, whatever flimflamid is. And so I think it's important for those of us, I know other fighters who agree with me on this, other skeptical fighters. But I think it's important for us to reiterate, especially to younger athletes that, yeah, I actually do have a superstition. If I didn't train as absolutely hard as I could, leading up to that bite, I just don't feel right. And so that we kind of have to nip that in the butt. And I feel like athletes have a responsibility to that because at a certain level, even if you've deluded yourself into believing that the dirty socks are helping, once you hit a professional level, you understand, you know, inherently, that it was batting practice, not your clothing choice, for example, that affects these things. I mean, because we do, unfortunately, need to start to wrap things up pretty quickly at this point. Actually, it would be good to talk about, again, about what all of us really, particularly those of us who are engaged with the martial arts in some way, what can we try to do to maybe quietly start to try to do things to strip away some of the pseudoscience and the superstition away from what we're doing. Are there things, Evan? What occurs to you on this? Definitely. I mean, it's everything that we learn here at conferences like TAM and everything we read online, you know, our entire community. You just put these tools to work. Skepticism is a tool. You can filter anything, any aspect of your life through it. Martial arts is certainly no exception to that. Use your logical fallacies. Use what you know to make your determinations and to figure out what works and what doesn't work. Yeah. Well, and I think, you made a point earlier too, is that, I mean, this is one of the things that you, as the person going out purchasing martial arts instruction, you can, you can vote with your dollars that way. Absolutely. Absolutely. Your decisions about, you know, how you want to engage with these people or whether you want to engage with certain people that, that way. What about me if, you know, if I am, if I've gotten involved with a system and I'm already, you know, I'm invested in it and I like the system and I believe in a lot of it and then somewhere, some well into it, some of these sorts of ideas start to surface a little bit more. A lot of, especially traditional martial arts is very respect oriented. It does not generally encourage you walking up to your master and saying, you got that all wrong master. So, I mean, is there a better way to engage internally with that? Yeah. Well, I mean, one of the things you have to remember is, you know, your teacher is your teacher, but your practice is your own. So, if you're happy with everything else, but then they have this little frill of woo-woo on the side, you're perfectly within your rights to ignore it. If they're trying to force you to do it as part of the curriculum, that's where the problem is. You know, and there, it's like, if you like traditional martial arts and that's what inspires you to go out and practice and you like what it does for you, it's okay if your teacher teaches qigong. I still teach qigong lessons. I just make it clear to people that I, that levitation is not part of what you will get from it. It's all about breathing and all of that stuff. So, you know, you can always vote with your feet and leave if they're trying to force it on you, but if they're trying to force it on you, you don't have to bite that. Yeah. And on the flip side, I think if you're a parent and you have a child that's doing martial arts, this is, this is universally true about teaching, reward the effort and what went into the endeavor. Don't reward the outcome, because when we, when we look at the outcome only and we got two kids looking at the M&M's going, I need that hit, and they don't care how they get there, but they should have been in batting practice. They should have been confident. They should have said, I gave them my all because I was prepared for this challenge. Reward the effort, not the outcome. Something that's really unique about martial arts and that is very dear to me is that it, because it's different from your job, most of us, or, or, you know, your family life, it's sort of a third place. It's not your work, it's not, it's not your home, it's this other thing that you do, and it appeals to a large number of people, and so it brings together a lot of people. I share the mats regularly with, with extremely religious folks, with creationists, with people that believe in Xi, that people that, you know, I, I, I interact with these people, and this is a great opportunity for us as skeptics to, you know, sort of gather more flies with honey. It doesn't do me much good as an instructor to, you know, toss a guy to the ground and choke him into submission and then stand over him and scream, where is your God now? It, I'm not going to have, although that would be highly entertaining. I'm not going to have much of an effect with that, you know, it might feel good in the short term, sure, but it's not going to have much of an effect. And so, the greatest effect that I've, that I've seen so far with my, with my career as an instructor outside of the cage is, you know, performing well, performing at a high level, succeeding and doing alright for myself, and then having people come up and go, so let me get this straight, you don't do any of the superstitious stuff, you don't do any of the, oh, well, then how did you, and that seems to make a lasting impression, and not only that, we planted a seed that if I can teach a student to think critically about their martial art, then I can teach them to think critically in other areas of their life. Very good. And I think any time that, that skepticism and critical thinking is being spread, I mean, it doesn't matter how small or how niche, we all need to be excited about that, you know, and that's something that we need to try and encourage. You know, this has been, has been a great, I would, I would so love to be able to throw things open to all of you and really take a lot of questions, but honestly, in the interest of trying to keep the train running on time, I don't think I can really do it. However, I and all of our other panelists are here. We would love to be able to take a lot of other questions. Please don't hesitate to try to speak to us after this session or lunch or whatever else, when you're trying to meet all of one another too. Come on, come meet us. Let me just thank everybody on the panel, Reid, Brent, Dave, Evan, thanks for wonderful, this has been really enlightening. Thanks for all the organizers for having us. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks so much. Once again, Evan, Dave, Reid, Brent, and John Brandy, your moderator. Excellent guys. Awesome stuff. Awesome stuff.