326: Carne Idiota

[FourStopCrossShot]

When they were talking about MEAT WIFE was anyone else thinking about Candy Wife from the Misadventures of Flapjack? What a terrifying show.

Also I love Jimmyfranks' description that they're basically min-maxing their life. That's like eating 100 fortune cookies to win the lottery.

[EYE OF ZA]

The Bulletproof episode was also really big on the min-maxing too.

It's like these people are trying to speedrun life. They're investing time and energy into these micro-optimizations that supposedly make them slightly more alert or slightly less tired, so much so that it seems like the optimization is itself the goal. Maybe not a conscious goal, but these people really seem dedicated to living an optimized life as opposed to living a better life through butter coffee/beef gogurt.

[Puppy Time]

I can't get over the guys who are literally just eating beef tallow. A lot of the terrible meals described are things I can kiiiind of understand, like the dudes trying to come up with "healthier" steak preparations, and even the raw beef dudes I can understand from the perspective of "someone told this idiot that you need to eat your meat raw to preserve the vitamins," but... beef tallow? Just eating straight-up fat, without even the pretense of actual food being involved? How the hell did this even happen?

A long while back, in Something Awful's diet subforum, there was a thread about eating bacon and lard and how extremely healthy it was.  Like, literally just getting buckets of lard and eating it.  This became dismayingly popular, and involved a mod who would probate/ban people for pointing out, "Uh, that is not how nutrition works at all."

It kept going until one of the people on the diet had to be put on statins.

So, the answer is, weird nerds both give and take terrible advice and don't research things.  Especially when there's a dedicated space that allows them to enable each other and silence dissent.

And by "weird nerds," I mean humans in general, really.

[Great Joe]

I can't get over the guys who are literally just eating beef tallow. A lot of the terrible meals described are things I can kiiiind of understand, like the dudes trying to come up with "healthier" steak preparations, and even the raw beef dudes I can understand from the perspective of "someone told this idiot that you need to eat your meat raw to preserve the vitamins," but... beef tallow? Just eating straight-up fat, without even the pretense of actual food being involved? How the hell did this even happen?

A long while back, in Something Awful's diet subforum, there was a thread about eating bacon and lard and how extremely healthy it was.  Like, literally just getting buckets of lard and eating it.  This became dismayingly popular, and involved a mod who would probate/ban people for pointing out, "Uh, that is not how nutrition works at all."

It kept going until one of the people on the diet had to be put on statins.

So, the answer is, weird nerds both give and take terrible advice and don't research things.  Especially when there's a dedicated space that allows them to enable each other and silence dissent.

And by "weird nerds," I mean humans in general, really.

Didn't help that the thread was headed by a mod who'd probate people voicing any point to the contrary.

[Antivehicular]

The Bulletproof episode was also really big on the min-maxing too.

It's like these people are trying to speedrun life. They're investing time and energy into these micro-optimizations that supposedly make them slightly more alert or slightly less tired, so much so that it seems like the optimization is itself the goal. Maybe not a conscious goal, but these people really seem dedicated to living an optimized life as opposed to living a better life through butter coffee/beef gogurt.

This is very true, and it seems like a lot of the time it's "optimized" around a totally opaque metric. I'm still thinking about the claims from the Bulletproof episode about lowering your "biological age," with vague or no reference to what that actually means (cellular function level? Cellular lifespan? Telomere length? What?). It reminds me of the people you see in gaming circles who are focusing on incredibly weird, confusing metrics of achievement, because that way they can be the best in the world at playing with the fewest button-presses or whatever, instead of anything meaningful.