Althouse: "Billy doesn't respond well to pressure. Leave him alone."

May 12, 2020

"Billy doesn't respond well to pressure. Leave him alone."

Joe Rogan and Brendan Schaub talk about people who can't deal with any kind of adversity:

34 comments:

Bay Area Guy said...: To paraphrase the great William F. Buckley, you'd get more wisdom and common sense outta 5 minutes with these two palookas than from the entire faculty at Yale law school.; 5/12/20, 9:24 AM
MayBee said...: 100%; 5/12/20, 9:26 AM
Howard said...: It takes a progressive liberal to defeat progressive liberalism; 5/12/20, 9:33 AM
Never-Biden Never-Putin said...: "listen to Elon"

Heh. oh yes.; 5/12/20, 9:38 AM
Beloved Commenter AReasonableMan said...: I am in favor of fat shaming just as I was in favor of cigarette smoking shaming.; 5/12/20, 9:42 AM
Mike (MJB Wolf) said...: Karen says you’re fat. Go away Karen.; 5/12/20, 9:45 AM
PubliusFlavius said...: A portion of my occupation is guitar instruction.

Billy's ability to read is also atrophying at a rapid rate.; 5/12/20, 9:50 AM
bagoh20 said...: I'll carry Granny, but Billy needs to be left on the ice flow.; 5/12/20, 9:57 AM
bagoh20 said...: Billy needs a bully.; 5/12/20, 9:58 AM
Lucid-Ideas said...: I remember 10 years ago when Elon was 'killing it' globally...his rep had never been higher a la Tony Stark analogies yadda yadda yadda and to quote the old phrase, 'you can't bullshit a bullshitter'.

10 years ago he was a snake. He's still a snake. He sells snake oil. The physics and economics dealing with the pie-in-the-sky projects he touts can't and don't work in the way he says they work. It took 10% of US GDP in the 60s and the concerted effort of almost 1 million high-powered scientists and intellectuals just to get to the moon...which btw ended up being pretty worthless.

He's a snake. Now 10 years down the road he's a super-ultra-leveraged snake that is super-ultra-in-debt making a less-than-ideal electric car.; 5/12/20, 9:59 AM
wild chicken said...: They're wrong about us kids in the 60s. We were considered terribly out of shape at the time. Hence the president's council on physical fitness and all the testing that went on. This was circa 1962.

A regular moral panic it was.; 5/12/20, 10:18 AM
Churchy LaFemme: said...: They're wrong about us kids in the 60s. We were considered terribly out of shape at the time. Hence the president's council on physical fitness and all the testing that went on. This was circa 1962.; 5/12/20, 10:25 AM
elkh1 said...: Beloved Commenter, cigarette smoking protects you from COVID-19.; 5/12/20, 10:32 AM
BarrySanders20 said...: "Covid says, 'Oh, this is too easy.'"

"If this doesn't scare your fat ass into shape . . ."; 5/12/20, 10:35 AM
bagoh20 said...: I've noticed too that old photos of average people show very few obese ones, especially the young. The older folks got thick sometimes, but still nowhere near as many as today.

I was in Walmart the other day with a friend, and we actively looked for people who were not obese. Very very few, especially the women. Unfortunately that does not dissuade them from wearing the tightest possible clothes. Spandex seems to be favored by the people who should be the last to wear it.; 5/12/20, 10:38 AM
I'm Full of Soup said...: Bago:

Spandex must have give the wearer a super power that makes you appear thinner in a mirror.; 5/12/20, 10:46 AM
chuck said...: Living in NYC or a nursing home are far more predictive of death from covid-19 than obesity.; 5/12/20, 10:48 AM
Howard said...: Lucid Ideas: You might not appreciate how primitive the world was pre-1970. Normally first world vs first world warfare spawned big technology advancement. Going to the moon spawned the computer and communication revolution and brought the world closer together. A win-win-win and we only wasted a handful of guys. Vietnam gave us the Huey and Nuoc mam.; 5/12/20, 11:05 AM
Karen said...: Hard cases make bad law,; 5/12/20, 11:06 AM
Howard said...: Spandex is better than corduroys, less friction fire danger.; 5/12/20, 11:07 AM
Howard said...: Many WWII recruits were weak from depression induced borderline starvation.; 5/12/20, 11:10 AM
chuck said...: Many WWII recruits were weak from depression induced borderline starvation.

IIRC, Vera Brittain wrote that the American soldiers arriving in England during WWII looked far worse than they had in 1918. I don't know how much that impression depended on her own maturity and circumstance, but there you are.

My dad gained 30 lbs after he joined the army in the summer of 1941.; 5/12/20, 11:20 AM
Bay Area Guy said...: "They're wrong about us kids in the 60s. We were considered terribly out of shape at the time. Hence the president's council on physical fitness and all the testing that went on. This was circa 1962."

Hmmm. My recollection of the 70s was that we all played a lotta sports outside on asphalt, always got banged up, and rarely stopped for lunch. I really only recall 1 fat kid, who eventually put on some muscle and became a darn good offensive tackle in high school.

Recall, too, a lotta teens smoked cigarettes, which kept you thinner. Most kids -- at least in Norcal in the 70s -- were thin.; 5/12/20, 11:23 AM
Tomcc said...: I started HS in 1972. Catholic school; I assumed the fat kids went to public schools.; 5/12/20, 1:01 PM
John said...: Check it out! Remove background from Image for $5 on #Fiverr https://www.fiverr.com/s2/4347f4bf26; 5/12/20, 1:11 PM
Bill Peschel said...: Two bullshitters bullshitting. I'd hate to rely on them for my opinions. Some of what they're saying is fine, but they're so ignorant.

Yeah, it'd be nice if the government said, "Lose weight. Don't eat sugar." Except that the government was paid to advocate against fat and in favor of carbs, which helped cause the explosion in obesity.

And it was hilarious when they whined about Billy being so delicate, and then act scared about Michael Yon ("Michael, don't come on this show and scare us or else we'll fuck you up.")

What a pair of Billies.

"My dad gained 30 lbs after he joined the army in the summer of 1941."

My father-in-law, who grew up on a farm in South Dakota, loved Army chow (he served in Germany from about 1946-on, never saw battle, and married a German girl). It was so much better than the food his mother and grandmother served.

Life was very different back then.; 5/12/20, 1:16 PM
Nonapod said...: People like to poke fun a Brendan Schaub for being too much of a Rogan sycophant and for his bad standup. But I think he generally makes a good podcast guest as a foil for Rogan's musings.

Plus you always gotta remember that even though the dude was a mediocre UFC fighter at best, that still means that as a heavyweight in a fair unarmed fight he could still beat the living tar out of about 99.999% of all human beings.; 5/12/20, 1:16 PM
tim maguire said...: The lack of a commute has been hell on my podcast listening. Loved the dig on Brian Stelter at the end.; 5/12/20, 1:17 PM
tim maguire said...: Once or twice a year, someone posts a photo on Facebook/Twitter from the 60's or 70's commenting on the fashion, but everybody else comments on how thin everyone was. Every class had 1 and only 1 kid who was over weight, and he was bullied for it.; 5/12/20, 1:21 PM
exiledonmainstreet, green-eyed devil said...: "IIRC, Vera Brittain wrote that the American soldiers arriving in England during WWII looked far worse than they had in 1918. I don't know how much that impression depended on her own maturity and circumstance, but there you are."

William Shirer was still living in and reporting from Berlin when WWII started and he was shocked when he saw the first British POWs. He said they were sallow and had sunken chests and looked terrible compared to the healthy young Germans, who had extensive fitness training in the Hitler Youth. He noted that it was a sign of how badly Britain had neglected its' young people between the wars.; 5/12/20, 1:24 PM
Michael McNeil said...: The physics and economics dealing with the pie-in-the-sky projects he [Elon Musk] touts can't and don't work in the way he says they work.

Indeed! Musk's “pie-in-the-sky” space projects are such abject failures that in the last half-dozen years he (his SpaceX company) has completely destroyed the Russian (hitherto dominant in the world) commercial launch business — as this ArsTechnica article points out: [quoting…]

As recently as 2013, Russia controlled about half of the global commercial launch industry with its fleet of rockets, including the Proton boosters. But technical problems with the Proton, as well as competition from SpaceX and other players, has substantially eroded the Russian share. This year [2018], it may only have about 10 percent of the commercial satellite launch market, compared to as much as 50 percent for SpaceX.

[/unQuote]

Soon Musk will do likewise to the Chinese launch business, and the Europeans. Anybody left?; 5/12/20, 3:09 PM
mandrewa said...: It makes a great deal of difference just how you try to lose weight. Most people think they know how and most people are quite wrong.

I know this is true because almost no one wants to be overweight and that means that they have pretty much all tried to lose weight. And yet they failed.

So what is this idea for weight loss, in one form or another, that almost everyone believes in and yet almost always fails?

It's will power. People think that if they eat few calories, that is if they make themselves eat fewer calories, that they will lose weight.

Well of course that is true. It is obviously true. But somehow if you actually try to do that you will discover, or most of us will discover, that somehow it doesn't work. Or at least it doesn't work in the longer run.

For most of my life I have been fortunate and have not been overweight. But for the last 15 years this has gradually changed and as of last summer, and probably for some time before that, I was definitely fat.

I have turned that around in the last nine months. I have lost something like 50 pounds of fat and according to my scale my body fat percentage is now down to 17%. Now I think the scale is probably optimistic and the real fat percentage is probably higher than that, but what is undeniable is that I feel hugely better and have far more energy than I did last summer.

And yet I'm eating as much food as I want to eat.

Now here's the hard part. I don't know how to explain this in a way that most people will get it. It's a simple idea, almost. But it seems to me that for reasons I don't understand most people will miss the point when I say this. Or they will seem to get the idea as I say it. But will somehow forget it later.

Now I did not come up with this idea. I got it from a book about weight loss and the neural circuitry of our brains and how it relates to weight loss. And it's actually only one neural circuit mentioned out of the many in that book that I'm exploiting.

So here's the idea. We eat most of the time automatically. Most of your eating is not a conscious activity. Oh, you are aware in a sense, but you aren't really paying attention. You eat when get hungry.

So why do you get hungry? There is a part of your brain that is constantly tracking how much fat you have in your body. It has a target percentage for how much fat it wants you to have. If your percentage drops below the target -- and this is tracked very precisely -- you get hungry.

Fat people have a high fat percentage target. Thin people, unless they are ill, have a low fat percentage target. But fat people were once thin people, if only briefly, that did not have a high fat percentage target.

The neural circuit that controls the fat percentage target can be manipulated by what you eat.

Certain foods will very slowly and very gradually push up the fat percentage target. Other foods will, with equal slowness, push down the fat percentage target if they are the only things that you eat.

I try to slightly overeat every day -- I'll repeat that again -- I lose weight by overeating foods that will push down the fat percentage target.

You have to work at the overeating a bit because -- surely this is not a surprise -- the kind of food causes your fat percentage target to fall is not the most interesting food that is out there.

Now it takes some will power to do this, to restrict the kinds of food one is eating, but it is not nearly the amount of will power that it takes to lose weight by eating less.; 5/12/20, 3:53 PM
mandrewa said...: The Hungry Brain: Outsmarting the Instincts that Makes Us Overeat by Stephan Guyenet.; 5/12/20, 4:02 PM
Nonapod said...: Rogan's got a guy on now (Michael Yo) who had a really bad experience with the covids.; 5/12/20, 7:13 PM