Making Sense with Sam Harris - #110 — The Change Artist

Episode Date: December 23, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with AJ Jacobs about religion, gossip, polyamory, health advice, our past and future selves, “radical honesty,” human genealogy, tribalism, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers.J. Jacobs. A.J. is the author of several New York Times bestsellers, The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, The Guinea Pig Diaries, and most recently, It's All Relative. He's the editor-at-large of Esquire magazine,

also a contributor to NPR, and he's written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, and other journals. And we talk about many of the topics he's touched over his career. We talk about his full immersion approach to journalism, the way he performs elaborate experiments on himself. We talk about religion, gossip, polyamory, health advice, how to think about one's past and future selves, the ethics of honesty and what's been called radical honesty, his recent adventures in human genealogy in his new book, its connection to tribalism, and many other topics. And now, without further delay, I bring you A.J. Jacobs. I am here with A.J. Jacobs. A.J., thanks for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me, Sam. So you are really a unique sort of writer. I mean, I'm sure there are other people who take a similar approach, but I can't name them off the top of my head. You go into each book and to some of your articles, more or less determined to perform a very elaborate and sometimes painful psychological experiment on yourself and presumably everyone you care about. We're going to run through some of these topics you've touched, but first, just summarize your approach here and describe your background as a writer. Yeah, as you said, I am a writer and a journalist, and what I like to do is I immerse myself in an idea or lifestyle and then report back what I've learned.

So, for instance, I spent a couple of years trying to be the healthiest person alive. I spent another trying to follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. For my new book, I wanted to help build the World Family Tree, which is a family tree with millions of people all connected. And hopefully soon we'll be all seven and a half billion people on earth. So yeah, that's my, people call it experiential journalism, immersion journalism, whatever. But it's a good job. It's a fun job. I think we should go through each of these because they're quite different and they're independently interesting. Was your first the year of living biblically? Actually, no.

My first was where I decided I was woefully ignorant. So I tried to remedy it by reading the encyclopedia from A to Z, Encyclopedia Britannica, when it still existed in print form. I don't recall. How far did you get? Did you get to Z? Well, yeah. I don't want to, you know, spoilers, but yes, I did get to Z. I got to, the last word is Zywiec, a town in south-central Poland. And how long did that take?

That took over a year and a half of reading, about six or seven hours a day. Was that a painful ordeal, mostly, or was it an incredibly enriching, guilty pleasure that you were just amazed that you could get paid to do? Where did it fall in the pleasure index? I would say both. At times it was incredibly painful, including for my wife, who started to, she fined me $1 for every irrelevant fact I inserted into conversation. So she made a lot of money. But at other times, it was a pure joy. And actually, one of the big takeaways was it did make my life better. And it was partly because reading about the full sweep of human history, it really was clear to me that the good old days were not good at all. They were disease-ridden,

violent, sexist, racist, dirty, smelly. So, you know, Steven Pinker's book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, I got to, I sort of saw that through reading the encyclopedia. And it just made me, even when I'm feeling down, even just this three-word phrase, surgery without anesthesia. Surgery without anesthesia. That brings you back. It really does. So yeah, it was overall an uplifting experience, if not for my wife. And how much would you say stuck? Is there a lasting benefit to it? Do you have a sense of what it did to your mind? I would say I retained less than 1%, although 1% of 33,000 pages is a lot more than I was at before. I wish that I could control what I retain, but I think the human brain is drawn to the bizarre.

And for instance, I still remember that the origin of heroin was the Bayer Aspirin Company invented heroin as a cough suppressant. And it is actually a very effective cough suppressant, but it turns out it has some other side effects and they had to take it off the market. But they're the ones who named it heroin after heroism. So that's the kind of, you know, it has to do with sex. Irrelevant fact for which you'll get fined one dollar. Yes. Yeah. If you want me to cut a check right now, I understand. No, that's I like facts like that.

But I do not have to live with you on a daily basis. It's also often forgotten. I mean, it's amazing what Wikipedia has done to the stature of the Encyclopedia Britannica. But it's often forgotten that some of those articles were really well written. I mean, there are famous editions of the Britannica where some of the great intellectuals of the day were writing well written. There are famous editions of the Britannica where some of the great intellectuals of the day were writing the articles. I don't know if that persisted until the final edition. No, no, but you're right.

Early on in the 1900s, you had Houdini writing about magic. You had Freud writing about psychoanalysis. So it really was, and the writing was quite literary. So it was beautiful. At the same time, it was also a sort of a snapshot into the past because a lot of it was incredibly racist. And a lot of it, you know, in the first edition, they said that California was quite likely an island. So you do get to see all of the mistakes as well. All right.

Well, let's go to another book that also has some nice writing in it and some that's not so nice. It has yet to be superseded fatally by Wikipedia or any other resource. And that is the Bible. So tell me how you hatched this plan to become the most religious person in New York City. Right. All right. Well, yeah, the plan was to follow every rule of the Bible as literally as possible. So I had two motivations for writing this book. The first is that I hoped to expose the absurdity of fundamentalism by becoming the ultimate fundamentalist.

So as you know better than me, there are millions of people who say they take the Bible literally, that homosexuality is a sin, that's what the Bible says, creationism is true. It seemed clear to me they were not taking the entire Bible literally, they were taking parts.

It was very selective literalism and they were ignoring other parts and cherry-picking. So I wanted to show what would it look like if you actually took the entire Bible, literally, without picking and choosing. So I followed the hundreds of rules that are often ignored. The Bible says you can't shave the corners of your beard. I didn't know where the corners were, so I just grew this massive topiary. I looked like, you know. You look like Ted Kaczynski at the height of his bomb-making prowess. I definitely had a Kaczynski vibe.

The Bible says no wearing mixed fibers, so no polycotton blends in my closet. The Bible says to stone adulterers, so I thought I should try that. I used pebbles because I didn't want to go to jail for life. But basically, I followed everything and I acted like a crazy person, which is what you will do if you take the Bible literally. So that was motivation number one, to show that fundamentalists are deeply misguided and actually not doing what they say. The second motivation was a little more earnest. I wanted to understand the appeal of religion and see if, are there any aspects of religion that can make my life better?

Because I grew up with no religion at all. I say in the book, I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian. So not very. So you were taking just the Old Testament or did you extend it to the New Testament? I mostly did the Old because of my Jewish background and because that has most of the laws. But I did dabble in the New. So I did about eight months of Old, four months of New. So were you officially a Jew for Jesus for the last third? I suppose so. I did meet with them. They were

interesting. Yeah, I met with all sorts of different groups to see how they interpreted the Bible literally. So that was the second motivation was to see, am I missing anything? Were you missing something? Well, let me, if I could just back up. And one of the ways I looked at religion, which I found very helpful, were the three Bs. I think it was a Jewish scholar who first came up with it, that religion is belief, belonging, and behavior. So encouraging ethical behavior, like no stealing or lying, or going to a weekly meeting of some sort. So through this project, I did see the appeal of two of those three, belonging and behavior. I did see that rituals can be beautiful,

like Passover can be, you know, you get together with your family, eat some food, some of it's good, some of it's disgusting. But I see that and a community belonging to a community, I think we are, as humans, we're built to belong to a community. And there are studies on how people who go to church live longer. And I don't think it's because God likes them better. It's because they have a tight-knit group. So I understood more about two of the three. The belief in the supernatural, I don't buy and I don't.

And I think I was actually a little too easy on supernatural belief in my book. If I were going to write it again, I would come down harder on the dangers of supernatural belief. And that the good of religion, because I do think sometimes religion can do good, like the civil rights movement or anti-slavery. But I think the good of religion can be outweighed by the bad because of these supernatural beliefs can justify just the most horrible behavior. My argument there is always that religion gives people reasons to be good, but it gives them bad reasons where good reasons are actually available. And so it's like, obviously, it's great that some people are inspired to do legitimately good things on the basis of their religious beliefs, but it's just, it's a failure of a wider ethical culture and conversation that they have those reasons as opposed to the

truly unimpeachable reasons one could have for a civil rights movement or anything else that we would agree is good. And I think the danger is you can take the Bible and then interpret it in a hundred different ways. So it was used not just by abolitionists, but it was used by people in favor of slavery and say it's in the Bible and that Cain's offspring are meant to be slaves. So yeah, I think that that is very dangerous in that sense. But again, I do like the belonging and behavior. So I am one of those who believes some sort of secular church, some sort of secular religion might be good for our species.

I would imagine that because the roots of this experiment were so obvious, basically, it's not a sincere conversion experience. You're just trying it on for size and trying it on for the purpose of this writing project. These communities that you interacted with, how did people treat you? Were you pretending to be totally sincere for your interactions with them? Or how did these conversations go? Well, I would say that in terms of sincerity, I do think that I was insincere in trying to learn what the appeal of religion was. And also, it got very murky, because even if you start something as a lark, if you fully commit to the behavior, then your mind eventually starts to turn. So that was, you know, it's basic cognitive behavioral therapy and cognitive dissonance. I was acting as a religious person all the time. And eventually my mind caught up. It faded after I stopped. But I've actually found that that can be a very useful tool. There's a great quote by the founder of Habitat for Humanity that says, it's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking than to think your way into a new way of acting. So I would force myself to visit friends in the hospital. And I would say, even though I hated going to the hospital, and my mind would look around and say, oh, I'm in the hospital. I must be an ethical, compassionate person. And you do that enough and you start to become a little bit better.

You hadn't put any of these friends in the hospital by stoning them for working on the Sabbath or anything like that? No, although I did stone one astrologer as well as an adulterer. She did not think it was funny. She was not into it at all. But yes, so I would say there was an earnestness as well as of the desire to satirize fundamentalism. It was sort of those two prongs. And it was interesting to see, I spent a lot of time with very religious people who were open to me because I was going in there to try to learn their point of view,

even if I disagreed with it. And one of my most interesting trips was going in there to try to learn their point of view, even if I disagreed with it. And one of my most interesting trips was going to the Creation Museum. This was right before it opened. And as you know, that's the museum devoted to the idea that young Earth creationism, the world of 6,000 years. Beautifully done museum, by the way. Millions of dollars. They have beautiful statues of Eve and Adam, although you can't see any of their private parts because, you know, that would be that would be sinful. Basically, how amazing it is that very intelligent people can believe very foolish ideas. And the amount of mental energy and mental gymnastics that these creationists used to

justify their beliefs was astonishing. I mean, I would go, they had a whole book in their library about the feasibility of Noah's Ark. And it was so detailed and well-researched about how the ventilation system would work, how they would get rid of manure. And it was an impressive work. But in my opinion, it was just an exercise in, it was just a crazy use of mental energy, but they were very smart. Yeah, it is interesting. You actually don't have to be irrational across the board to be a religious maniac. You just have to have an initial down payment of irrationality on the basic premise that, say, this single book was

dictated by the creator of the universe. But once you believe that, then you can put all of your remaining rationality to work trying to make sense of the text and getting it to square with all the inconvenient facts that come your way from the wider world, then you can have people who go and get PhDs in biochemistry and view everything they're learning through the lens of how to square it with the book of Genesis. Right. And that is one of the people I met there was fascinating. He was an astrophysicist and he has spent all his time doing just that. He did believe that the universe was billions of light years across.

So how did he square that with the fact that the world was only 6,000, the universe was only 6,000 years old and he had all these complicated theories involving time travel. But it really was remarkable. I will say that one thing that made me more, I don't know if it softened my heart,

but it made me understand a little more that why they were so passionate about it is one of the creationists told me, if evolution is true, we all evolve from pond scum. And how can you have human dignity if we all are just pond scum? And, of course, I do believe we evolved from pond scum, and I believe that you can have, I actually think it's inspiring that we've come so far from pond scum.

But not only that, we have a fair amount of pond scum in us still. If you just look at the, you know, every person's microbiome, the ratio of bacterial cells to human cells in any body is something like 10 to 1. It's just a crazy, I mean, it's a crazy place to try to hang your human dignity on some sort of fundamental material difference between our species and the rest of nature. between our species and the rest of nature. Well, that's it. I think that they really want to separate humans from everyone else.

There's a lot in religion that's about separation. Like, you know, even kosher, just separating milk and meat, separating ourselves from the Philistines. And that is, I view life as more of a spectrum. And so I'm okay with having us be on the same spectrum as animals, but they find it hard to retain the dignity. So the challenge is to try to convince them, you know what, you can still have human dignity without a 6,000-year-old ark. Who were you in dialogue with mostly? Was it mostly ultra-Orthodox Jews, or did you split

your time evenly across a dozen sects? Who did you talk to? And I can imagine that even among the Orthodox Jews you spoke with, your orientation wasn't exactly what they would recommend, or was it? Correct. I tried to spread myself around to at least a dozen evangelical Christians and the Jehovah's Witnesses. the Jehovah's Witnesses. I, by the way, I might be the only person who bored a Jehovah's Witness, who out-Bible talked to Jehovah's Witness. He came to my house, and after three hours, he was like, all right, I've had enough. I'm out of here. Thank you. But yeah, and then the Hasidic Jews, but I also had more progressive rabbis and ministers talking to me. And yeah, you're right about the Hasidic Jews don't actually follow the Bible literally. As you know, they have

the oral law, which is the Talmud. And so something in the Bible, like for instance, it says that you should, in Leviticus, you should not boil a baby goat in its mother's milk. So if you're taking the Bible literally, I just had to avoid boiling a baby goat in its mother's milk for a year, which I was able to do. But very Orthodox Jews have, it's been interpreted over the years and widened and widen widen to mean do not have milk and meat at the same time. So that's where you get no cheeseburgers. So it is actually not, it's an offshoot of Judaism called Karaite Judaism does try to follow the Bible literally, but they are seen as sort of heretics. What was the most surprising or a few of the most surprising changes in your outlook

born of adopting the mere behavior by rote? Well, I would say, yeah, I did become slightly more compassionate. One thing that was, I tried to avoid gossiping, and that can be defined in various ways. But I just tried to cut out any negative talk about anyone. And it was actually a remarkable experience because I did feel a little bit better about humanity. And the way I think it might have happened is my brain, I would start to form a negative thought about someone, and my brain would sort I would start to form a negative thought about someone and my brain would sort of kick in and say, you know what? This thought will never be expressed.

Let's not even follow through on it because it's a waste of energy. So I had fewer negative thoughts and it made my life better. I will say, I mean, I still gossip all the time because I'm human, but I do think I gossip maybe 30% less than I used to. Right. Gossip is very interesting, and there's a similar rule in Buddhism, the whole doctrine of right speech, and gossip is one of the forms of speech that is considered just not useful for building a mind and a life that you want to inhabit. I'm sensitive to the character of my own gossip, and I'm kind of of two minds about gossip, because on one level, you can feel what's wrong with it. If you're at all sensitive to this, you can immediately feel

what's wrong with it, because if're at all sensitive to this, you can immediately feel what's wrong with it. Because if you're talking about people behind their back, one, if you're sort of trading in negative stories about them, especially for their entertainment value, you can see how you're sort of just kind of dining out on the misfortunes of others. And also you're introducing into the conversation with the people you're gossiping with this rarely acknowledged fact, which is you are showing yourself to be the kind of person who will talk about his or her friends in their absence. This can be as stark as, you know, one friend getting up from the table to go to the bathroom and the remaining friends talking

about him or her in his or her absence in a way that wouldn't survive that person's company without some problem. And so everyone is drawing from that experience the message, again, almost never acknowledged, that you're the sorts of friends who will dish about one another in the other's absence. And it just creates a fundamental lack of trust, often unacknowledged. The rule I've set for myself is not really, it's not a non-gossip rule, but I really try to be aware of how I'm talking about other people, and I make every effort to only speak about them in a way that I would be comfortable with them overhearing. I tend never to say something about a person that I wouldn't say to his or her face,

and in many cases that I haven't said to his or her face. And again, it's hard to be perfect here, because sometimes you're caught up in the moment where you're in dialogue with other people who are not at all following that kind of standard, and it's kind of pushing your orientation around. But it's very useful to look at because we'll talk about dishonesty too, because I know you've touched that topic, but gossip can be really corrosive. Although I guess the flip side of it is, and this is where I don't totally align with the Buddhist view that gossip is just bad, it does serve a social function in the need that everyone feels to manage their reputation. If reputation management were not a problem, the door to hell is sort of kicked open

in the sense that you now have totally shameless people willing to do more or less anything because they just have no concern about their reputations. And on some level, we have a new president who fits that mold. I guess he thinks he cares about his reputation, but he's someone who, on some level, just wants to be talked about. He doesn't really care in what vein. And it's probably better for society that people can still be humiliated or embarrassed by trespassing various norms. Right. Yeah, I agree with you. I think you do need some gossip, but it has to be the right kind of gossip. If there's a publisher, I know, and you're in talks with him, but I know that publisher is a horrible person who lies and cheats and doesn't pay, that's the kind of gossip that I think is instructive.

But a lot of gossip is just, as you say, like a Roman holiday, just pure joy in other people's pain. And that is not a good way to go. I actually just learned, this is a little sideline, but I learned of a, for one of my books, I spent some time with the polyamory community. I'm not polyamorous myself, but they had an interesting emotion that they call compersion. Polyamory is an open relationship or polyamory is also conveys some implication of bisexuality? No, it's just ethical non-monogamy. So you could be in any formation.

Wasn't that part of the Bible experiment? You're absolutely right. I actually brought it up to my wife. I was like, you know, David had 12 wives, Solomon had 700. I actually talked to... Well, let's split the difference. Yeah. Actually, that sounds exhausting. I really don't relish that idea. But I did talk to, during my year of living biblically, the head of the Polygamy Association of America,

who is very religious and had just this argument that in the Old Testament, all these men had wives. And he actually had, like I said, it's an interesting idea. How do I do it practically? And he had some very specific advice. He said, I should go out, marry the second woman, come back to my wife and tell her it's fait accompli.

And then it's more likely that she'll accept it. So just pure insanity. Right. That would have been a good article, though. I think your editor at Esquire might have signed off on that one. Yeah, it would have been a good article at the end of my marriage. But yeah, if I were committed. But they talk about compersion, which is happiness at other people's happiness. So being joyful when your partner has sexual relations with another person. And I love the idea. I cannot imagine experiencing compersion whenever I think about my wife with another guy. Is this a neologism of the polyamory community, or is this a word that

I haven't yet read in the OED? I had never heard it. So I think it might be, but maybe there's some precedent for it. But I thought it was a really interesting idea. And their argument is just try to think about if you love someone and your wife goes out and has a really great meal at a restaurant, you would be happy for her, even if you're not there. And you take that to the extreme, and you should be happy if she has a vibrant sex life with someone else. And it's an interesting idea. I cannot do it myself, but maybe the world would be better if you could. It is a pretty Buddhist idea as well. I mean, the Buddhist term for that attitude, it's rarely thought of in the context of extramarital sex, but the name for the mental state of being happy, being made happy by the joy of others is sympathetic joy. I like that. It's more or less the way love feels in the

presence of another person's joy. When you're in the presence of another person's suffering, you feel compassion. But to be made happy by the smile of someone you love is obviously an experience we all share. And then to extend that to all possible reasons why she could be smiling seems like a fairly heroic act, given the level of jealousy many people feel. I mean, I think it is a level, because I do think schadenfreude is one of the worst emotions out there. Have you been able to cultivate this sympathetic compassion in yourself? Yeah, but it's just there are conditions where it comes up against something else you seem to really care about, like something like monogamy. But yeah, no, I can understand it,

even in that context. I mean, just imagine if you had some terminal diagnosis, right? And just what sort of person would you be if you found out you had six months to live, and now you're having to envision your wife's life going on for decades after you. And I don't know, decades after you, and I don't know, do you have children? So you have, you're picturing your wife and your children living long lives after you're gone. Then what do you hope for her in that context? Do you hope that she meets some man who she's happy with and who's a great stepfather to your children? It's pretty easy for me to get there. And obviously, I don't want to think about that happening. I mean, I wouldn't be made happy by this happening. But it's pretty obvious to me that should I find myself in that situation, the only rational and decent ethical commitment

is to want my wife and children to be as happy as possible going forward and not be made needlessly miserable by my absence. Well, I think that is one advantage of not believing in an afterlife or a soul is that I really, since I believe that when the lights are out, the lights are out, what happens after that has absolutely no impact on my joy or pain. So I've actually given some thought to this. And I told my wife, at my funeral, it's totally up to you, even better, crowdsource it, ask what people would want. Do they want a speech? Do they want just drink? Whatever they want, whatever would give them the most happiness is what you should do. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we need not take this in a morbid

direction. Presumably you and I are both healthy enough for the moment to be jealous husbands. And on the topic of health, if there's more to say about the biblical experiment, I want to say it, health, if there's more to say about the biblical experiment, I want to say it, but I do want to touch your experiments in health as well, because obviously that's of interest to every person who does not want to die. Yeah, so that one came about because I did not want to die, as you say, and I was pretty unhealthy for most of my life. I sort of saw my body as a way to carry my brain around. I didn't give much thought to it. I wasn't traditionally fat. I was more what they call a skinny fat.

So my body looked like sort of a snake that swallowed a goat. But I wanted to, I think there's a lot to being healthy and the links between health and emotions and brain. So even if I was just doing it for a better mental state, it was important. So I decided to do a similar project to the Bible where I wrote down hundreds of pieces of health advice. to the Bible where I wrote down hundreds of pieces of health advice and I, um, I tried to follow them all. So I revamped every part of my life, my exercise regimen, my, my diet, uh, the way I slept, my sex life, the way I went to the bathroom. There is, uh, you know, the, the, the whole idea that, that our paleolithic floor parents were squatters, not sitters.

So I, um, I did everything possible. Uh, it was supposed to be a year, but I was so out of shape. It took me two and it was a really interesting, uh, experiment and it did change my life somewhat. Um, and it also made me realize... Did you measure the change in terms of body fat and blood work and all that? I did. I did. I mean, part of it was being aligned with the quantified self movement, which Kevin Kelly, your former guest, was part of. And yeah, so I definitely, I went in all the right directions. I did feel better. But I also discovered just the shocking amount of bunkum and quackery in the health world.

That might have been the most useful takeaway, actually, is just this being able to spot a little better the absurdities that are passed off as science. So if you had to summarize your beliefs now about the best health advice, how would you say someone should live so as to cheat death most reliably? Well, I think one of the lessons was that I could pretty much summarize it in a paragraph or two. They wanted me to write a health column for Esquire. And I was like, all right, but it'll be the same two paragraphs pretty much every month. I'm not sure anyone will want to pay attention. But the basic idea is very simple. Move more, eat less.

And when you do eat, eat real food. I do believe that processed carbs are some of the worst. I think there's a lot of evidence for that. Don't smoke. Get a lot of sleep. There's increasing evidence how important that is. It affects everything from job performance to driving to your IQ the day after. And don't hit yourself in the forehead with an ax. It's really quite basic, but there are millions of people trying to make money by selling some sort of secret. And, you know, there's like Goop is perhaps the biggest violator that comes to mind. Goop being Gwyneth Paltrow's company?

Right, with the insanity that they try to peddle. And Dr. Oz, I've actually been on his show and I like him as a person. And I think he's probably a great heart doctor from all I've heard. But he kind of ran out of things to say. He ran out of real advice and he got into the whole, I don't know if he's done homeopathy, but he's done a lot like that. Well, wasn't he, he was now, now we can get into gossip mode, but I'm pretty, I'm pretty sure I, I won't say anything about him that I wouldn't say to him on this podcast. Was he prosecuted for some, something he touted that turned out to be purely fictitious? Oh, I wish I knew. I can't. I think that there was something, but he has sort of gone

down the path of recommending miracle berries or something that lead to fat loss or something unseemly for a real doctor. So what was your, as far as the dietary advice, where did your research take you on the question of eating meat versus being a vegetarian versus being a vegan? Well, I am actually a vegetarian, but for ethical reasons more than health. As far as I can tell, and this gets to basic epistemological concerns, because I think people like Gary Taubes, who I quoted in my book, are very smart. And he's very much into the idea that the cholesterol hypothesis is wrong. And he's sort of an advocate of the low-carb movement. So you've got Gary Taubes and the low-carb movement on one end of the spectrum.

And then you've got books like The China Diet on the other, which say that eating purely vegan is the way to a long life. From what I can tell, it seems to me that the mostly plants does at this point have the most evidence, scientific evidence behind it. I know that Gary and many of his folks will disagree with that. But one thing that they both agree on is that processed carbs are terrible for you. So staying away from processed carbs and just eating real food, even if they both agree that it should be real food. So whether that's real meat or real vegetables. But it basically got to the idea, I did not have the time to spend three years like Gary investigating whether the cholesterol hypothesis was true.

And I think he's very smart. But for me, in terms of health, I like to think of it as almost like the rotten tomatoes model for deciding what's healthy. Because you can always find an outlier who says bacon is good for you. You should eat bacon three times a week. There are just so many quacks with great academic pedigree who will say the craziest things. So you've got to look at the meta studies and the meta meta studies, and you've got to... So for me, it's looking at what 100 reputable scientists say

and sort of taking the middle of what they say, the rotten tomatoes approach. So if 80% say that it is mostly plants, it has the most evidence now, I'm going to go with that. Yeah. It's quite humbling from a scientific perspective how little consensus there is on some very basic questions about diet. So I had Gary on the podcast, and it's amazing what happens when you touch this topic. I thought I knew what it was to hit whatever third rail I hadn't yet hit as a topic of controversy, but now I get Gary's hate mail, and it's amazing how energized people are around the district diet. So you're saying I should be prepared for lots of... I don't know how hard it comes in the other direction. I mean, there's a vegan mafia out there that will hate

you if you dignify the claim that eating some meat is probably healthier than eating none. I do want to define health because I do think there's a lot of evidence that a very low-carb diet, high-protein diet will help you lose weight in a shorter period of time. What I don't think that there's a lot of evidence on is that this will make your lifespan longer. And since I'm married and sadly, I don't care as much about my waistline as I should, I'm more interested in the lifespan, which I know is linked to obesity, but it's not the same. which I know is linked to obesity, but it's not the same. Yeah, yeah. But it is amazing that the, I think the only totally uncontroversial statement about diet that can be made now, the statement about which everyone will nod their head in assent

is that eating less sugar is generally a good idea. No one's advocating that you eat more sugar, as in more food with added sucrose. And that's pretty much where consensus ends. It's true. Yeah. I mean, even salt, there's no clear consensus on that. Yeah, yeah. I will say in terms of diet, I am very excited for clean meat and lab-grown meat. As am I. I think that could be a huge game changer. Ethically, that feels like the lever that would move the world if we can build it and pull it hard enough, because just to take suffering animals

out of the equation entirely and yet allow everyone to eat meat if they want it, that would be huge. Although I guess there is an interesting ethical wrinkle there where if you imagine that the lives of farm animals or some class of farm animals are better than no life at all, right? So if you imagine that it's possible to give farm animals, you know, even raised for slaughter or raised to produce milk, if it's possible to give them lives worth living that are, you know, better than not existing in the first place, well, then canceling this industry by finding some technological workaround to produce meat and milk without animals is a net negative from that point of view. But I would say that from what I understand, the life of the average industrial farmed animal is not worth living, that the pain outweighs the pleasure. outweighs the pleasure. So that if we are able to do cultured meat, then we can, sure, we can have a bunch of cows having a wonderful life outside of the factory farms. So, I mean, I'm excited

because it also opens up, you don't have to just eat cow meat or chicken meat. You can eat rhinoceros meat or any endangered species. And there's a friend of mine who wrote a book about this, and there's talk of ethical cannibalism. Right, right. I was going to suggest your next book topic could be the cannibal diet. If anyone wants to eat me, I'm pleased to offer up my cells. wants to eat me, I'm pleased to offer up my cells. If we can recover some DNA from the shards of the cross, you can eat the body of Jesus for real. There you go. So is there anything that you are doing now that you weren't doing before that book? If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at

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