Oh it BURNS!

Motivational speaker Tony Robbins recently got a number of idiots to walk on a bed of hot coals. Apparently if you really believe in yourself and release your inner power you won't get burned and if you don't....well, then you get what's coming to you NANCY!

I listened to an interview with one of the believers who did not get burned and he basically blamed the victims. If they don't believe in themselves properly, well, then that's what happens!

From another participant: Carolyn Graves, a 50-year old real estate agent from Toronto, claimed that those who were injured “were out of state,” and thus not in the correct frame of mind to walk painlessly across the fiery floor. She glamorized the event to the New York Times, noting that the fire walk “transformed people’s lives in a single night,” serving as a “metaphor for facing your fears and accomplishing your goals. [Note to self: why am I still so poor when there are so many cretins willing to give away their money? Oh yeah. . . scruples. Damn!]


Now here are two possible explanations for the walking on coals deal.

1. If your feet are sweating or damp you have a layer of that moisture between you and the coals. If you keep moving fast enough the heat won't get through the moisture to your feet. That's pretty simple high school physics. In fact I've seen physicist perform this very demonstration to show how it works.

2, If you "believe in yourself" or are "in state" then I guess this suspends the laws of physics for you. In other words everyone would get burned wet feet or not but belief in yourself suspends that. OK, by what mechanism? If it is a real thing then it works in some real way. How? Explain it. Demonstrate it in a repeatable way.

Well you can't do a controlled experiment and Tony Robbins and others like him (Kevin Trudeau) don't want to do or say anything that CAN be tested empirically.  In this case you can't really measure 'believing in yourself' so as to make two sets of people, those who do and those who don't, and see who gets burned. No, the zeolot lets the phenomena itself, which they made up, determine who has the required level of belief or not which is completely ass-backwards.

Does any of this sound familiar? How about going to heaven. Or hell? Or god sparing a life during a tornado? Or just the all encompassing - God works in mysterious ways. Yeah, so do all snake oil salesmen!