The Joe Rogan Experience - #1020 - Amy Alkon

Episode Date: October 5, 2017

Amy Alkon, also known as the Advice Goddess, writes a weekly advice column, Ask the Advice Goddess, which is published in over 100 newspapers within North America. Look for her new book called "Unf*ckology: A Field Guide to Living with Guts and Confidence" coming out in 2018.

5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Everybody, I mean, these things that happen that sort of just change the whole world. You got to think that's probably one of the reasons why these psychos do it in the first place, right? So that everyone talks about them. It becomes their big, you know, fireworks, Fourth of July, grand finale before they leave. Yeah, there was a very interesting post by a guy named Robert King on Psychology Today. And I guess he's doing research in this, and he talked about it as a way for men to get or chase status, and that he saw two bumps. I think one was at 23 and one at 41 in terms of the ages that people do this, and it does tend to be men who have some kind of their marriage breaks up, they lose their job in their 40s, or the young

men are just chasing status. So it's at least some kind of explanation other than, oh, someone just went wild, they just went crazy, which is not helpful, because it doesn't tell us really what we can do to maybe prevent it or look at how do we look for these people who do this? Yeah, well, to prevent it, you have to lock all men up. Not for that. That's the only way. I mean, obviously not the only way, but it's all men. That's a giant issue, right?

I mean, you never see women go on mass shootings. But, well, without men, we'd still be living in grass huts. No, listen, I'm a man. I'm all pro men. But it's it's very weird that it's entirely men who do mass shootings and drive trucks into crowds and that kind of thing. Well, I think we may start seeing women do that. But actually, I don't think it's weird that it's men because men, if you look at how men and women evolved to get partners. Women just have to look hot. You have to look like you're fertile and young and have good genes, which is what we consider beauty. What feminists say are

arbitrary standards of beauty aren't anything like that. They're very, across cultures, men like women with this hourglass figure and who have long shiny hair and who are not 72. Because if you had sex with a 72-year-old, your genes died out. Yeah, the feminist thing about arbitrary standards of beauty, as a person who is deeply entrenched in science, that's got to be frustrating, right? Because you're looking at something that's not accurate. You're pushing a narrative that's just not accurate. There's this very takeaway culture,

takeaway, all your personal feelings about human beings. And you look at the mammal, the human mammal, and it's very clear why certain males are gravitating towards certain females and conversely, why certain females are gravitating towards certain males. It's biological. Right. And it's so unhelpful. It's really awful, this idea that people should like you for what's on the inside. We don't see the people, if you look at porn, it's not the woman who buys a homeless man a sandwich who's in the porn.

It's the woman with those features that are just cross-culturally appreciated by men. Right. What's also too, we're talking only about sexual, right? Because people do like you for who you are on the inside. Like Melissa McCarthy is a perfect example. She's this vibrant, hilarious woman and no one's holding her up as the standard of beauty or sexual attractiveness. You know, you're looking at her as this fun person. And that's why millions of people go see her in movies and her TV show is this giant hit. I mean, it's literally what's on the inside and how she carries herself.

Right. And she is very vibrant. And if you look at that cross-cultural research, David Buss, who is an evolutionary psychologist, did the big, big cross-cultural study. And kindness was what both men and women wanted. I think that was the top of each list. But if you prioritize, well, okay, what are my must-haves in a partner? A guy is not going to want a very old, unattractive woman as his partner if he can do better.

And a woman is not going to want to have the guy who is sleeping in grandma's basement playing Atari. Atari. Or whatever. I'm a girl, so I don't know anything about football or video games. My boyfriend tried to educate me on the way over about some, I don't know, some guy who'd said something insulting to a female sports announcer. Cam Newton, pretty popular quarterback, said he got a question from a beat reporter that works for his team and asked him something about a wide receiver's route running. And he said it's surprising that a girl is asking about route running or something like that. And he got a lot of shit about it right now.

He got a drop from a sponsor. And it's also going on further now. Is that all he said? It's surprising that a girl? I believe so. I heard that they went further into it off the record a little bit, and he was rude is what she said. Oh, okay. But, okay, we really expect the football quarterback to be the height of politeness and social etiquette.

And, okay, he shouldn't have said this and I think that these, there are some incredible women who are sports announcers, so I'm told by the boyfriend. And I think it's sexy to be a knowledgeable woman in sports. However, we now prosecute

everybody for everything and the reason we do that is there's too much media. Everybody's got a microphone, everyone's on Twitter. So now this stuff, the dumb stuff people would have said

in another era that would have just gone off into the ether. Now it is just, it's a news story. Do you think it's that, I mean, I'm sure it is that, but isn't it also that we're examining behavior on a much more intense scale than we've ever done before? And we see things that we don't like, and we're highlighting those things in a much more aggressive way than we've ever done before. It's almost like there's accelerating social evolution that's going on right now. And along the way, you're getting a lot of bumps and a lot of weird stuff that's happening, a lot of social justice warrior stuff. And then you've got a lot of alt-right stuff on the other side and they're battling it out with each other.

a lot of alt-right stuff on the other side, and they're battling it out with each other. And it's almost like these intense extremes on this new landscape, and people are jockeying for positioning on this new cultural standard playing field. Well, I think what's happened is that now everyone has a microphone. So everyone's on Twitter. Everyone can make a tweet that, put out a tweet that gets tweeted and retweeted to four million people. And so people are looking to have standing and they're doing it by putting out their opinions. And they also when you're saying this about these tribes, they do it to signal, look, I'm part of this tribe. I'm a social justice warrior. I'm on the right. I'm Antifa.

And so I think that that's a big part of it. So they're looking for criminal behavior, socially criminal behavior. And whereas, you know, this guy, I mean, do I really expect every quarterback to have the most PC views? No. And okay, he's going to lose his sponsorship when he says something like this. But, you know, if you open the quarterback can, you're going to see quarterback stuff in there. And it's not, you know, the Emily Post. Well, first of all, with quarterbacks and with any football players, you're dealing with head trauma. You are 100% dealing with head trauma. There is an extremely high likelihood that all those guys on the playing field have erratic behavior due to the fact their head's been smashed 150 fucking times a year since they were a kid. And that is just a fact. There's no getting around that. Yeah. And actually, I really appreciate that we're starting to see people look at that and bring that out.

So parents know, you know, do you want your son to play football or to play some other sport? Yeah. I mean, look, I have kids and I wouldn't want my kids to fight, even though I'm a commentator in fighting. I just think, like, God, if you really want to do it, I mean, I'll support them in anything they really want to do. But I would tell them, like, it's just the upside and the downside. Like, if you can get out, like some guys get out, like Floyd Mayweather. I mean, he's just a brilliant tactician and incredibly good defensively. And he got out relatively unscathed.

But you really won't know how unscathed until 10, 15 years from now when you see him struggling with his words. Right, right. It's just not worth it. Life is short, but it's long if you're fucked up. Oh, absolutely. And you see that from these guys. I read some story about that the other day. I'm trying to think who is the guy. So, so sad. And this thing about it showing up much later where you get terribly mentally ill. People, they make those tradeoffs where they think, OK, well, I can get money and fame this way and it's quick and everything like that. But they don't really realize what the long term consequences will be. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of people when they got into football and even people that got into fighting, they didn't know as much back then when they first entered this

sort of journey. Yeah. You know, especially football. I mean, football, I mean, we really, there was no conversation about that. Think about like the OJ trial. You know, I've been kind of on this OJ kick lately because I started watching that Cuba Gooding Jr. series where they sort of, you know, reenact. Right. and it's really kind of freaking me out. It's bringing back the memories of the 90s and what it was like when that thing went down. I was with my girlfriend at the time, and we were sitting in front of the television, holding hands and waiting for the verdict. And when they said, not guilty, she threw her hands on her face like she had just seen a

horrible car accident. She's like, oh, my God. Oh, my God. And she kept saying, oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. Oh, my God. And now today they're saying the very doctor that was working with OJ said if they were going to do that case again today, they would absolutely bring up CTE. Yeah, I think you're right about that. Absolutely. And there's so many football players who got in just not knowing who will come out like that, I think, within a number of years. Yeah, that was only 20 years ago, 23 years ago, whatever it was. That's not that long ago. So 23 years ago, nobody thought about brain trauma when it came to football, which is just nuts. Like, how's that possible?

And now these guys are debilitated. There's a whole bunch of different lawsuits that are going on right now with the NFL. And you're seeing these older players. I mean, they have on Real Sports at Brian Gumbel. And they're sitting there and they're shaking and they can't control themselves. And you're like, wow, this is unheard of 20 years ago, 30 years ago. We never even thought of this. This was never in the public discourse. Yeah.

And I suspect if you go back and look at those tapes sort of forensically that you'll see that kind of thing, the shaking. And also that if you look at take a look at over football players, how many people have these diseases and mental illness that's related to this head trauma? Yeah, I'm sure quite a bit. But I mean, this football player guy that we're talking about, Cam Newton, you know, what the only thing that's wrong with, I mean, it's not even wrong. I mean, he's trying to get sponsors. That's the whole deal. Yeah. And if you're whatever, Coca-Cola or whatever the company is, you don't want someone representing you that does something like that. No. And so it's sort of normal yeah well it's normal that they say okay we're dumping you and it's normal that he would say it but

what's always funny is that these these companies they um profess surprise when it's like really you know you thought that this person was going to be the sort of curtailed reigned in person it's like with kathy griffin oh you just figured out that she says offensive things yeah that was a surprise to you well it wasn't i mean with with her it was just like so poorly thought out it's like what do you what's the message there you're holding up a bloody head like jesus christ yeah like when i mean if you want to hold up the bloody head of some murderous dictator who's you know killed, killed a bunch of people, then I kind of understand. But even then, like, what

is, are you ISIS? Like, what's this message? Right. Well, I think she didn't think it out and it was just, okay, outrage. She's trying to be shocking. She's trying to be shocking and then the sort of the fake apology and then, okay, take it back. It was the fake apology and then it was like, he's a bully and he broke me and like, what?

Oh, come on. on like they're playing the victim card yeah you're a comedian yeah you know and i know comedians have like that then you know what someone's gonna heckle you on and so you have stuff ready for that and this thing like where she's all like poor me you know i mean well it's just my career's over i don't have a career now it's like oh all right just take a couple months off you'll be fun yeah right people forget there's some new people forget there's some new outrage well there's always gonna be it's always some new crazy fucking thing and there's also gonna be a bunch of people that are probably excited that you did that too

yeah they'll calm down after a while it won't be in the news anymore and yeah it's just we live in a time where everything is hyper examined yeah it is and and so that's standard and that's why i think we have to be more lenient with people. This idea that you say something awful, and then you're excommunicated, you lose your job, you're going to be living in a dumpster. This is really wrong. We need to understand that to be human is to be an asshole. We're all assholes. We all say shitty things to people. And I try to recognize my assholishness and apologize when I've been awful and make good. Sometimes you have to put some money into making good.

It's what the situation calls for. Well, you never know, right? Especially when you run into someone in traffic and they're screaming at someone and giving them the finger. You don't know what that poor person has been through that day. Obviously, they're at nine. They didn't start at one when they were in that traffic incident. They're probably at nine already. And then this happened.

Oh, you motherfucker. Right. And that's where they're coming from. Raw nerve. Yeah. And so it really is important. People see it as a sign of weakness, but it's actually a sign of strength to say, I'm ashamed. I did this bad thing.

I did this recently. I shouted on the phone very bad to this really nice person at the Kaiser Pharmacy just because, you know, she should magically solve my problem. It wasn't a problem she could solve. But after I did that, I thought like, oh, this is so terrible. Number one, I talked to her. She's kind. She didn't deserve this. So I actually I went in and I asked for her and I said, I'm so ashamed. I spoke to you terribly. You didn't deserve this. You're very kind to me. So you did it in purpose? Excuse me, in person? Oh yeah, in person. Because, well, I was going there anyway to pick up a medication, so it was easier. But I actually asked to speak to her because I think it means something to people. When you do that thing where you say, you put your ego aside and say, look, I was bad and I was wrong. People appreciate that you're doing that. It gives them something back and it steals from people to just do something and then think haha I got away with it because you didn't you know it and actually they know it and they feel bad and I don't like to make people feel bad well also you feel less about yourself and I think that's as important as anything like one of the things about unless

you're a sociopath when you do something mean to someone, you feel bad about yourself. You don't judge yourself the same way. You look at yourself and your own behavior and you go, well, I'm faulty. I'm like, I don't, I'm not proud of that. That's awful. Like what I did was a bad thing. I feel bad about who I am. And if you just deny that, you're just building up this weird wall of disconnect between you and reality.

And you're going to make more and more shitty choices if you do that. Right. And you are. I think that you are the sum total of your behavior. So you can feel all sorts of ways. You can feel wimpy and afraid and feel like you don't want to apologize. But if you behave the good way, the better way, the way you want to be, then you're that person. Right.

It doesn't matter what your feelings are. Well, this is one of the main issues that I have today with this right versus left social justice warrior thing that's going on. It's like people are being so fucking aggressive and so rude. And so just the way they are trying to silence people from speaking the way they are describing people and attacking people it's a it's a very aggressive way and it's very short-sighted because when you have that sort of short-sighted aggressive bit what you're doing is like you're yelling shut the fuck up well when you yell shut the fuck up nobody wants to shut the fuck up right they don't just go oh okay like you're Like, this is a childish way of approaching an issue.

Like, the more objective, nuanced, more thought-out way of approaching it is to take into an art of some sort of an argument or some sort of an idea that is both polite and well thought out. And and there's no social issue involved in it. Like there's no negative back and forth between you where you're trying to get them and they're trying to get you. The only way to get someone to really take into consideration your ideas is to have them in some way respect you or like you. And as soon as you tell someone, shut the fuck up. Like, well, that's out. Okay, well, that's out. And now it's just like, you're just going to win by having more people yell.

Or what are you going to do? You're going to put a ski mask on and break windows? Like, is that how you're going to get this done? You're not. You're just going to cause? You're going to put a ski mask on and break windows? Like, is that how you're going to get this done? You're not. You're just going to cause an action reaction. You're just going to cause this sort of rubber band effect where you pull it back and then it snaps. And then you've got some sort of ridiculous infighting where people go full tribal and they get one side goes against the other side. And this is what you're seeing today. And you're seeing people do it to

get attention as well. You're seeing people do it clearly when they know the cameras are on. They ramp it up and start, you know, yelling obscenities and being more ridiculous about it. And it's very odd. It's very odd to watch it play out, you know, because it's so short-sighted. Yeah, they practically wait. Okay, are you rolling? Yeah. Three, two, one. Okay, smash the window. You know know what you said reminded me the worst thing a man can say to a woman is calm down it always has the opposite effect a cop once said that to me i called our local police station about some problem the guy told me calm down i'm like does that work on your girlfriend because it's not working on me it never works on any woman so here's a tip dude well it

doesn't work on men either doesn't work on anybody maybe it works on kids no it doesn't work on men either. It doesn't work on anybody. Maybe it works on kids. No, it doesn't even work on kids. It doesn't work on anyone. I tell my kids to calm down. They go, ah! Opposite effect always. You know, like shut up or any of these things, these rude approaches. And so the thing is when you get somebody, what you do is you provoke somebody's defensiveness. It's a fight or flight reaction. You know, this happens to us on an emotional plane as well.

And so you're provoking that whole reaction that's designed to make you get away from a bear or some type of wild animal. But instead of running and burning off all those biochemicals, it's all pooling in you. You're filling with hate and rage. So this is not a state in which you can listen to anyone. And so the moment you take it up to that area of invoking somebody's hate and defense and rage and all that stuff, they are so far away from listening, you might as well just crawl under the desk and go read a novel. It's just so pointless to even engage with them. And maybe, possibly, if someone is just not totally reeled in by confirmation bias, they might listen. And confirmation bias, of course, is that thing where we believe what not change our views, then maybe you have a hope of changing your views. And maybe if you try to listen to other people who, you know, their differing views who are polite and trying to engage on a rational level, you can learn something.

I try to be open-minded. I try to take criticism. I try to not reject it out of hand. Of course, I don't take the criticism that comes from, dear bitch, whore like you get those yeah but I always think like just drop the deer if you're gonna bitch you ugly whore you know just start with bitch you ugly whore the humor comes in yeah right humor comes in when they're being polite while they're criticizing yeah I love that I love that it's so funny well people when they get in arguments it becomes a competition you know and that's that's a big part of the whole insult thing. And the part with the shouting down thing, it's like, you're trying

to win and you're trying to win an argument that very few people ever win. I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's usually like both people walk away, just disgusted with a loss. You know, it's, it's very rare that unless someone is egregiously incorrect and you literally have to shout them down because what they're doing is horrific and you need to point it out to them. But that's usually not the case. Well, usually it's disagreement, you know, most of the time. Right. And these people think they're so convinced it's religion. They think that they're right. We're on the left. We're right. We're on the right. We're right. And they are just unwilling to listen. It's cartoonish. Now, I saw something the other day about this great girl at

Barnard, Toni Araxanen. She's this young journalist student there. Say her name again. Toni Araxanen. A-I-R-E-K. Anyway, I can't spell. Araxanen. What a strange name. I know. She's from Ohio and from a poor family and got a scholarship to Barnard. And you see how hard she works. She's a journalist and she looks to see different sides of things. And I really respect that in her because you don't see that in a lot of people that age. There's just such polarization. I forget why I was bringing her up. It's this thing. Oh, I know. She posted something. So she wrote an article. They have, you know, Columbia Republicans who are, you know, who know, what do they want to bring in? Like Ben Shapiro.

I love the idea that anyone would be afraid of Ben Shapiro. If I saw him behind me on the street, I'd be like, oh, great. Fantastic. Dark alley. Ben Shapiro. No problem. Sorry, Ben. But he's a nice guy. I don't know him, but, you know, he seems fine. You know, where it's a little yarmulke and everything. I'm post-Jewish, so I can make Jewish jokes. Post-Jewish. Yeah. So I drifted. I'm an escaped Jew. And so somebody posted something about being against white supremacists. And it was really about like they're going to have a Republican speaker. Yeah. You know, and they were so ugly about Republicans. And I thought, God, have you ever talked to one?

My parents are Republicans. My friend Tom, who's this Christian lawyer, I know he feeds the homeless because he thinks that's what Jesus said he should do. These are not horrible people who are burning crosses and lawns. They're your next door neighbor, depending on where you live. Well, it's a gross generalization that doesn't do anyone any good, especially when you're talking about someone like Ben Shapiro. I mean, Ben is a very well-read, very well thought out, very reasonable. And when you talk to him in person, he's a very kind guy. There's nothing wrong with him. He's just conservative, you know, and whether I agree or disagree, and I'm sure I disagree with him on a lot of things. I had a really pleasant time talking to him. I think he's a very nice guy. His ideas and his, his, the way he speaks is

very well thought out. He speaks very quickly and it's intimidating to a lot of people. His ideas and the idea that he is this extremely articulate right-wing guy. Immediately, the best way to silence that is white supremacy, KKK. He's a Nazi. I've seen people call Ben Shapiro a Nazi. He wears a fucking yarmulke.

I know. He's an Orthodox Jew. Right. It's hilarious. It's so amazing. It's so amazing. And that kind of thing, we see it on both sides. And there was something the other day.

So Dana Loesch, she's a commentator and she's apparently very pro NRA. So people send her just the ugliest tweets. And I'm sure I disagree with her on a number of things. her just the ugliest tweets. And I'm sure I disagree with her on a number of things. I don't really look at her views, you know, extensively, but they were things like, you know, I hope you die in a hail of gunfire or something like that along those lines outside the NRA headquarters. But I love this one.

The guy said, dear God, and he spelled God G-D. Oh, boy. We really are going to pussyfoot on the O in God on the vowels. Oh, boy. I love that. That's like extreme left people that won't even acknowledge the existence of God. So even as they write it, they put like an asterisk. I think he might have been a religious guy or something.

Oh, maybe so. I write books with fuck in the title and I always want them to write the full fuck. But it's just it was like enough to get the fuck in there with the asterisk and everything. Isn't that funny that we're afraid of words like that? Oh my God. Like, what do you, what do you think you're confusing someone with that asterisk? Right. Like, oh, they actually meant, oh, Petunia, you know.

Asterisk makes it all okay. Right. There are people, my favorite, when some people reviewed one of my books, they would say like, this book is filled with profanity. I mean, it has fuck on the cover what was your first fucking clue yeah it's uh people are really really weird with that kind of stuff it's just you know what what they get upset about um i know dana i've met her she's very nice you know i've been on her show once um right after that cecil the lion thing happened and oh, right. I vaguely remember that.

She's like a right-wing woman. I'm pretty sure she started her life, I think she was very left-wing at one point in time and saw a lot of hypocrisy in the left and switched over to the right. But again, it's like we were talking about before. She's very tribal. She's NRA, tribal, pro-gun, Second Amendment, and they dig their fucking heels in and that's it. Right. You know, bump stocks. I want the bump stocks. I want the fucking full auto. I want magazines, big magazines, like no matter what happens. Right.

And I think, you know, to be, I call myself a neither. I'm neither a Democrat nor Republican. I'm libertarian, fiscally conservative. And I think that helps me identifying as sort of a nothing helps me to not succumb to so much of that. You know, I, of course, right. Being human, I do have views and I tend to stick to them, but I try to be open. Well, when you go NRA though, I mean, this is the thing is like, if you're like a very outspoken NRA person and she was famously involved in one of those really aggressive videos about the NRA. Did you see that video? I don't think so.

It was like a sort of like, it was really recently, very controversial video talking about gun ownership. And it was like a sort of pro-NRA video that was like widely criticized on the left. video that was like widely criticized on the left. And I think the, I, you know, the subject of gun ownership and just what happens to these mass tragedies. I mean, it is, it is a conversation that stirs up tribalism logic. It's, it's a very complex, very, and also mental health issues. I mean, I want to know what was going on with this guy. I want to know this Vegas guy, was he on some sort of psych meds? Because a giant percentage of these people are, and what's the ramifications of that? And what is causing this fucked up behavior? Is it simply, you know, what people love to call toxic masculinity manifesting itself in the most horrific form? Or is there some other factors? I mean, are these disassociative

psych meds that they put these people on that allow them to just deal with life in a way where they just, they don't feel, you know? I mean, have you ever been on psych meds? Yeah. I took Zoloft once and, oh, and I take, I forgot. I take Adderall every day. Do you? Damn, you're pilled up. Fuck, it's great. No, I'm not on it now because I would talk so fast I might hurt people with my speech. I've had a lot of people in here that are on Adderall because they feel like when they do a podcast, they need to be ramped up to keep up. And Jesus, it's so obvious. You're like slow.

I want to get them drinks. And sometimes I offer them drinks. I'm like, let's have a drink. Oh, no, I know better. Even though it slows me down and I'm on the same dose of 7.5 milligrams, I'm the total lightweight of lightweights. It slows me down and I'm on the same dose of 7.5 milligrams. I'm the total lightweight of lightweights. But so the Zoloft I took because I went to a psychiatrist in New York and, you know, they actually tried to give me like lithium and all these other things.

Like for manic depressive people. My friend said, you're manic, but you're not depressive. And basically it's so crazy because all I was, it wasn't some kind of inexplicable, horrible depression. I didn't have a boyfriend. I didn't have any money and I was bummed. And I took Zoloft and then I realized it just shaved off half my personality. So I did the really dumb thing you're not supposed to do, which is just, I thought like, fuck this shit, flushed it down the toilet. And then I like fell off a cliff emotionally. I think that was a bad idea. Not only that, what'd you do to those poor fish?

Yeah, right. They got all that Zoloft. East River, my fault, all those bodies. Well, they said that there's like noticeable trace elements. Like you could actually measure trace elements in some water supplies of antidepressants. Probably sorry, everybody. That's you. You did it, Amy.

But isn't that funny that saying that? Like I've talked to people that are extremely defensive about their use of antidepressants. And anybody discusses, especially someone like you who has tried them and is open about like what was the cause. Well, here, I was bummed out I didn't have a boyfriend. Like if you say that to people, they love to generalize depression as a disease. It is a disease. There is a mental issue. And no exercise, diet, change of lifestyle, you know, love in your life.

None of that's going to fix it. Having a career that's really fulfilling, none of that's going to fix it. I have a disease and I need medicine for my disease. See, that's such a, just a sort of wary one note idea. And I love the research of this guy, Randy Nessie. I love him. He's a psychiatrist and an evolutionary psychologist. And he talks about Nessie. It's N-E-S-S-E. And you can go on his website. He's now at University of Arizona because he was in Michigan. It's freezing there. Everybody eventually moves to Arizona, all these professors. Anyway, so he talks about how depression, you know, the sad feelings, these are adaptive. And so when something bad happens to you, being sad causes you to slow down. You have the features of a sad person, which causes other

people to gather around you and be empathetic. Now, if it goes on for too long, you may chase people away. But this allows you to think about what dumb fucking thing you did that made you get in this state. And I talk about how emotions are motivational tools. We think of them as sort of like wallpaper for our head to decorate our life, but they're not. Emotions, when you're happy, that says do more of that. When you're depressed, stop doing that, reflect on it. And so there are different kinds of depression. There's a kind that is this medical depression that's inexplicable and that maybe

drugs are needed for. But often I think that doctors, psychiatrists, my experience was and my experience listening to other people, because I write this advice column and I get letters from everybody, and I've been doing this for a long time, since the early 90s, is that doctors just say, here's a pill. And a lot of these antidepressants, they've been shown that they don't really work. And so maybe it's a placebo effect, which actually is a thing. But a lot of times it's people are medicating away this helpful part of depression and sadness, which is reflecting and drawing people to you and all of this. And so this idea of it's a disease that, you know, it's also used with alcoholism. It's just this

idea people like to put these things in these neat boxes and it doesn't really work. Yeah, I couldn't say that any better. And I think that there are people that do have mental issues that do need medication. We're not generalizing. I think just like some people have liver problems, some people have thyroid issues. There are absolutely people that have issues with their brain's ability to produce serotonin. I mean, it's just a fact. And how many of those people is the real question. And to

generalize completely, let's say, you know, all depression is a disease that should be medicated or all depression can be cured with exercise. I don't know if, I don't think it's healthy to go either way. I think there's, I know many people that have been in really bad places in their life. They got on some sort of an SSRI and then they started feeling better and then they weaned themselves off and now their life is in a way better place. Like a good buddy of mine, he was suicidal. He got on – and the really interesting thing is when he got on medication, like he couldn't find the right one. And that is really so baffling. So it's science, obviously, right? And you're talking about medicine, you're talking about based, maybe even most of our medical care is. It's so terrible. And I'm

lucky that I have a psychiatrist now, who is really evidence based and went on for future training, further training, because I had been taking Ritalin, which just made me jumpy. It didn't really help me with my focus. You are filled up, Amy. Jesus Christ. Ritalin and Zoloft and Adderall. Well, this guy, he changed me. I told him, I actually started taking, I was self-medicating. This is bad. This is before I read as much science as I do. I was taking Mucinex and the guy's like, oh my god.

Mucinex? What is that? The kind you get behind the counter. It's some kind of like they make meth out of it. You have to sign. I was buying at different pharmacies and hoping I wouldn't get arrested. You know, meanwhile, I'm just taking it to write, not, you know, do anything. I don't have a meth lab in my basement. I don't have a basement.

So that helps. But so this guy said, OK, we're going to change you because I told him I couldn't focus. He said, you can't take this. It's, you know, making your heart race or whatever. And he said that this Adderall, what it does that's different, it pushes a little dopamine out into your brain besides being a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, which we hear with serotonin with antidepressants. So it

regulates that, but it also goes like squirt, here's a little dopamine. And the first day I was on that, the first pill I took, it was the best writing day I'd had really in 20 years. It was amazing. And so I'm still on the same dosage and everything. But this guy, he gave me my life back because it was torture to write before that. And

that really was a big deal. And so much of our medical care, if you look at the stuff on diet, Nina Teicholz has been great on this, Gary Taubes, the Eads, you know, there are other people on this who have shown that, look, don't eat this high-carb, low-fat diet the government recommends. It will make you sick and fat. And here, this high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, for many people, maybe not all because we have individual differences, this seems to be the most healthy diet. And also not eating polyunsaturated fatty acids and stuff like that that we know about more and more.

And you see more and more on that. Yeah, right. And so but my doctor Kaiser, I love to save those healthy whole grains on the wall. There's no such thing as healthy whole grains. I haven't eaten a bun on a hamburger since 2009. No, I just wouldn't. It's just dumb. I eat bacon and grease all day. And I'm very healthy. I even though my doctor actually thinks I'm going to have a heart attack by next week, the truth is if you actually— Why does your doctor think that? Well, because my cholesterol is like 303. But what I know, and this is from Mike Eads, the doctor who wrote Protein Power. He has this great blog where he talks.

He's very evidence-based but explains it very well. There are these ratios you look at. What's a ratio of your triglycerides to your HDL? And so basically my ratios, which the doctors at Kaiser don't understand, they are so good that I say that I'm as likely to have a heart attack as I am to be kicked in the knee by a unicorn. I'm so not in danger of that. And it's just terrible though. They sent me this letter to say, eat a low-fat diet. Thanks. Isn't that crazy though, that doctors are doing this? I mean, I understand that they went to school a long time ago and I understand that a long time ago, that is what people thought that if your cholesterol hit a certain point, you needed to take some sort of

medication to lower your cholesterol. But if you eat a healthy diet and your body is doing well on that healthy diet, like you have to take into consideration like what are the whole what are the what are all the factors involved in in health and vitality and the understanding of HDL versus LDL and the balance of triglycerides if you're a doctor and you don't understand that and you're giving advice and you're telling people to get on statins. It's fucking disturbing. It's terrible.

It's terrible. And those statins are fucking terrible for you. Terrible effects. They can cause diabetes. They have just the worst side effects. And this is the thing that I look at when I'm looking at research or looking at, because I do what I call applied behavioral science. So it's science help as opposed to self-help.

I look at what are the tradeoffs. If I tell you this, what are the tradeoffs in doing this? Where are you going to have a problem? How worthwhile is this solution? And that's what doctors aren't looking at when they give people statins. It's sort of like from the drug company's mouths to your gut. Well, it's just so many doctors are basing their decisions and the advice they give on really old evidence. Or excuse me, really old knowledge.

Evidence, quote unquote. Yeah, I shouldn't say evidence. Ancel Keys' fraudulent, quote unquote, science. And it's so terrible. Ancel Keys? Yeah, he did this, quote unquote, research, but he excluded countries that didn't show. What research is this? This is, it was in the, I think it was in the fifties.

He did this multiple country study where he looked at what people ate and what he did. It's like this, there's a story from the Holocaust where a guy shot all these bullseyes in the wall and some army person came up to him and said, how did you learn to shoot that way? He said, it's easy. I first shot the wall, then I drew the bullseye. And so that's what Ancel Keys did with this research. And he excluded any countries that didn't fit what he wanted to say, which is eat this diet that we've been eating, our government told us to eat for years, this high carb, low fat diet that actually causes you to be

just a hungry motherfucker all day. Yeah. And then also spikes. Yeah. And so, you know, what I learned from Gary Taubes, who's actually a friend of mine, so I got in early on the low carb thing, because I heard while he was writing this, that carbs, so this is potatoes, starchy vegetables, fruits, fruit juice, sugar, these things cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat. Fat makes you diabetic and all these things. And there's some indication that maybe Alzheimer's is diabetes 3, diabetes of the brain. They need more evidence on that. But personally, I do not eat sugar.

I eat one tiny little ice cream thing a week just so I won't feel totally deprived. But when I eat bacon and stuff all day, steak and green beans drowning in butter, I don't feel deprived. And it's better for me. And, you know, if you can do that, that's not much of a sacrifice. Okay, I won't eat the bun. Big deal. I read Gary's book and I had him on the podcast as well. It's a fascinating thing and very controversial, too.

A lot of people email me, I need to get on and refute what he said. All right, relax. I literally got dozens of people that did that to me. But the thing that's most shocking, I started following Mark Sisson's Primal Blueprint Diet. And when I started doing it, cut out all the sugar pretty much. I mean, I fuck around every now and then.

But one of the things that was so shocking was my appetite. Like my appetite was so unmanageable. Like it used to, I was ravenous. I would eat and then I would be exhausted and then I would be fucking ravenous. Like four hours later, like if I went three hours or four hours without eating, I was starving. And I've, I regularly do intermittent fasting now where I'll, you know, I do 14 hours between, between, it's really good for your body. And I lost a lot of body fat doing that.

But the big thing was that when it came time to eat, it wasn't like I was holding my breath the entire time. I was like, finally. It wasn't that at all. It was just so normal. And I was like, oh. So there's some other process that I thought I attributed to hunger. I was thinking, oh, okay, I get really hungry. But it's not just hunger.

It's insulin. It's insulin. It makes you hungry in that way. Before I stopped eating bread, I went to Starbucks in Culver City, and I would always get the thing that was the regular fatty thing, croissant, whatever. Yeah, those are great. I know. I love all that kind of food.

So good. whatever yeah and i know i love all that kind of food so good but um i got by accident somebody gave me the sugar the fat free whatever and after about 20 minutes i mean i wanted to bite off somebody's arm in line i wanted to kill people in line to the counter get something it makes you feel so terrible and i looked at all those years i had dieted and i at one point i just thought like you know what if anybody doesn't like me a little rounder than other people, fuck them. And I started going to Bubby's Diner, New York City, having this chicken potato burrito, which now I wouldn't eat the bread and the potato. And I started losing weight just by eating like a normal human being and not excluding fat. And that was sort of instructive for this. And now

I just basically try to eat fat all day, grease, grease, more grease. And you don't have that hunger. And also, I know it's so much healthier for me to not eat bread and to not eat these. We don't eat bad oils anymore. And just to tell you another weight loss story, my boyfriend, he was Elmore Leonard's researcher, the crime writer, for 33 years. And he had to do this book, Djibouti, and I begged him not to go to Africa because my boyfriend, his look is, I'm American, kidnap me. You're scared he's going to get kidnapped in Africa? I knew he would get kidnapped. You knew it?

Yeah. So I just, you know, I begged him not to go. Did they kidnap a lot of people in Africa? No, but they would kidnap my boyfriend. Oh, all right. You're nervous. Yeah. Was that the pills talking? No, he's going to be mad at me for saying this, but he once got his pocket picked in Paris. He just looks like the American guy that you do something to.

And he's a big guy from Detroit, so it's not like he's wimpy or anything. But he needed to lose some weight, and some doctor gave him these candy bars that were $230. And the thing of being from Detroit and not wanting to be ripped off, I said, okay, if you do exactly what I say, because he's a guy guy, so he's not like, I'll do exactly what you say. But I said, you will lose weight and you will not be hungry. So I put him on a diet of bacon, eggs. He could eat meat, no vegetables, and just coffee and spring water. No vegetables? Yeah.

This is like, remember Dr. Atkins, sort of the Atkins induction diet. You have to take magnesium or you'll be blocked up like the Berlin Wall inside. But he lost 30 pounds in five weeks while sitting in his chair researching Djibouti, the book Elmore ended up doing. And he did not leave his chair. He charms librarians on the phone

and embassy people and stuff like that. But is no vegetables a good idea? It seems like you need vitamins. Well, eventually. But actually, Thompson said, we talked about this once, and he said basically that meat has all the vitamins except vitamin C. And I'm sort of paraphrasing from a long time ago, so forgive me if I get this wrong. But if you are eating meat rather than carbs, maybe you don't get vitamin C deficient. Look at the Maasai and also the Eskimos. I think it's the Inuit. I think Stephenson was a guy who was up there.

And before they started eating a Western diet, they just ate blubber and whale meat. I guess they may be a penguin here and there. Seals and stuff. Yeah. I don't know if they ate the penguins. Penguins, I think, are in Antarctica. Dealing with a different part of the world. Penguin nuggets.

Yeah, I'm really good on geography. What can I say i failed geography obviously yeah right but i know what you're saying though that they and they also had extremely low rates of cancer right they were just healthier humans right which changed as soon as they started eating the western diet and toms brings up the pima Indians. Same thing, too. They have horrible problems with diabetes. Also, though, to throw some other stuff in there, there was also an issue with alcoholism and cigarettes. There's the cancer and the heart attacks and a lot of things that happen with the Inuit. A lot of people, there's a correlation between extreme consumption of cigarettes and alcohol. So it's not just the American diet. It's also all the vices that go along with that.

We're good at producing those. Yeah, we suck. We import horrible things. I mean, look what we did to, not we, obviously you and I weren't a lot back then, but whoever looked like us that did that to the Native Americans, introducing alcohol to them, and they didn't know what to do with it. Their bodies weren't used to it.

Yeah. There's a doctor that I'm going to have on the podcast soon who is on Twitter. I mean, I have no idea if this guy's nuts or not. Yeah, everybody is. I'll tell you right now. But this gentleman, he's a full carnivore. All he does is eat meat, and he holds a bunch of records in athletic pursuits. It's really kind of interesting.

It's not Stephen Finney, is it? I'll tell you in a minute. I'll pull him up real quick. But he and I have been going back and forth trying to figure out a time to get him on the podcast. But he's 50 years old, and it's pretty impressive what he's been able to do. And all he does is eat meat. He doesn't eat anything but meat. You know?

And he's an MD. So, of course, the fucking internet's not working here. What's going on with the internet here, young Jamie? Mine's working. Yeah? It's a piece of shit laptop. This laptop has been the worst one I've ever had. Really?

As far as, like, connecting. Like, it takes forever to reconnect. Yeah. I hate that. Anyway, I never leave the house. So I'm always on my big computer. You never leave the house? Not lately. I wrote a book for three years that spent three years trying to kill me. So I know my boyfriend brought me food. Otherwise I would have eaten frozen hot dogs for three years. Like the meat guy, but that's not good, right? I wasn't, but the book, you know what happens? So you plan on writing this book. And I thought, oh, this will be easier.

This is a book on how to transform to be confident. And I thought, OK, this will be easy because I've been writing this in my column for so many years. And then I look into the science and I look a little deeper and I think, oh, my God, this is so horrible. And what happens is, so this professor will do these people, these researchers, they do some research, but they don't totally support it. And then they don't work in a transdisciplinary way. So you have to support this one's research with that one's research. And this became this big thing. And I just kept having nightmares about my editor, who's a nice man, chasing me down the street, asking for my advance back with an axe. An axe? An axe. Or an axe. He held like an X. Yeah, right. Well, this guy's,

I don't even know his full name. His Twitter name is S. Baker. He is, here, let me get it to here.

I like the like charades. S. Baker MD is his Twitter name. Haven't heard of him. Multisport, world record holding, Masters 50 plus athlete,

nutrition for performance and health, healthcare, not sick care, no's 50 plus athlete, nutrition for performance and health, health care, not sick care, no medical advice here. And all he does is eat meat. He's nothing but meat. The guy I mentioned, so Stephen Finney, he is a dietary researcher. He and Jeff Volokh wrote a very good book on low carb. Jeff Volokh is also a dietary researcher. And Finney, I think, a dietary researcher and um finney i think bicycles competitively or very intensely and um he says that um eating low carb there's apparently some hump you get over but then that is better it gives you more energy than this whole like drink some gatorade that people have held as the conventional wisdom yeah but is that the case with extreme endurance sports?

There's one guy that we talked about before. What do we got here? Sean Baker, Dr. Sean Baker, carnivore diet, zero-carb diet plan. Guy looks healthy as fuck. He's on the right hand, right side. Yeah, he does. I mean, he's jacked. Yeah.

And he dunks basketballs and lifts weights and shit, but he might just be some athletic freak. I just don't know. It's part genes, too. It could be. I'm lucky. I have good genes. You know, the boyfriend looks at a saltine and he gains three pounds, and I'm lucky. So my family were Eastern European shithole Jews, and, you know, probably wasn't a lot of food.

And I don't know, somehow my body learned to manage that having a lot and having not a lot, and it manages it better. Sure. I'm just wondering whether or not that's a really viable diet to just eat only meat. It just seems like... Well, the Maasai do it. And the Inuit did it. And so the question is, are you missing nutrients?

And I'm not the person to answer this. Are you missing nutrients? And that's the problem with being a vegetarian. There's a guy named Chris Kresser who's posted on this. I've had him on as well. Oh, great. I love this. He's great.

Yeah. And so he has some really good posts about what you're missing if you're a vegetarian. And people say, oh, I take vitamins. But can you get the vitamins in the way you need, in the way your body uses them, from taking vitamin pills or even from eating? You have to eat a ton of this, you know, I don't know, bean curd or something. And I don't want to have soy. That's the problem. That's the dishonesty about vegetarianism.

And some people knowingly make that tradeoff. But I sure wouldn't. I'm sorry as much as the bunnies are cute. Well, Chris Kresser was a vegan for a long time. And, you know, he had some pretty serious health consequences because of that. But, you know, that's just him. Some people are fine with a vegan for a long time and you know he's he had some pretty serious health consequences because of that but you know that's just him some people are fine with a vegan diet and that's one of the most important things to talk about is that the the biodiversity in human beings is very it is a broad broad spectrum of what people need and what people don't need which is why some people like my friend brian his mom can't even touch Brazil

nuts. If she ate a Brazil nut, she'd go into shock and she'd be dead. I mean, I can eat them all day long. They taste like shit. I don't totally like them. But you know, there's there's a giant curve with right now, this is the individual differences thing that I was talking about before. And there's this big push to say, oh, men and women are alike and groups are no different from each other. But, you know, you don't see Jews as NBA basketball stars. You know, and Jews and people from northeastern Europe tend to have lactose tolerance in a way other people do not. So where we are from, where we mainly our evolution took place, that, you know, and I mean, that goes back way, way, way, way back, that that affects our skills, our abilities, as well as our digestive abilities, you know, can you eat this kind of thing? Can you drink liquor

and not be really affected by it, all those things. And so that's the stuff that people don't like to look at. The way you were talking about before that people like to say, it's just like this. It's this thing. This is a disease and it's horrible. That lack of nuance, that's just so stupid and it's so sort of anti-solution. What people like to do when people do that thing of saying things are one way, it's often in a way to, I think that people try to do when people do that that thing of um you know saying things are one way it's often in a way to i think that people try to feel superior they try to simplify things too much they do so that too because we like to understand things so i think it's that and then

also there's um a tendency to want to prosecute people to say you are a slovenly fat person and the reason you are heavy is that you did not go to the gym. And I went to the gym and I am a holy gym goer. And you are a scummy, terrible couch sitter. And that's not the case. In fact, Tobbs wrote a great piece for New York Magazine about how we think exercise makes us thinner, but it doesn't. And the reasons you were saying before for doing it for mental health, I try to do that when I'm feeling just my worst. I make myself get on the bike and do these high intensity intervals because I know that that'll help me mentally, even though I feel like shit. Let me stop you there. Are you saying exercise doesn't

make people thinner? That's what Taubes in this piece says. And that's what I see over and over again. And believe me, we don't want to believe that. And I think people can lose weight through exercise, but they get hungrier. That's the problem. You exercise, you get hungrier and you replace that. I don't have all the nuances on this. So everyone should look up that Tubbs piece in New York Magazine because he's just fantastic. But the problem with all that is it's very anecdotal. You know, when you start saying that diet is the way to go and that exercise does not make you thin, it's anecdotal because some people exercise absolutely makes them thin. I mean, there's, I know a lot of people that have started

doing jujitsu and lost 30, 40 pounds. I know a lot of people that have done that and it works, you know, because it's extremely strenuous, extremely rigorous. You burn off a ton of, a ton of calories. You accelerate your metabolism. Your metabolism starts burning off fat at an unprecedented rate for your body. And it does work. But it's like, what kind of exercise are you engaging in? You know, that's another factor. Like, are you just doing like a long, slow jog with a very low intensity? Or are you doing like powerlifting? Like, there's a lot of evidence that actual weightlifting is way better for burning fat than anything else

because when you weightlift, your body makes more muscle, more muscle consumes more calories, and if you have the same amount of calorie intake but now your body has more requirements, it'll start burning off some of that fat. Yeah, I think that's a really great point. And I am not one to, I'm not an expert in this area and I haven't read very much in it, but I have read this,

what's the guy's name? Shoot, I'm not going expert in this area, and I haven't read very much in it, but I have read this. What's the guy's name? Shoot, I'm not going to remember it. Mike Eads wrote a book with him. It's slow burn fitness. And actually, I do that. I lift weights. You lift them until your muscles are just screaming, and I can lift like eight pounds because I'm totally wimpy. And you do it really slowly, like so slowly, like time's barely moving. And that does

increase your metabolism, it improves your heart, improves your cardiovascular system. And what's the other thing? And it does help weight loss. So the new there are nuances on that. And I just, I say that because when I look at the TOBS thing, all this stuff, he supports stuff very well. It makes sense, but I'm a little light on what the details are. So admittedly, I think you bring up a good point on that. And also the individual differences, things that we are different.

And so some people are able to lose weight in ways that other people maybe are not. But I think this- Oh sure, I mean, you see it with kids. Do you have kids? No. I have kids and one of the things you see is, you see kids that can just fucking eat anything. They eat anything and they're skinny. And then you see other kids that they're just really struggling

at a really early age and their, their body packs on a ton of fat and they have those extreme endomorph bodies. And there's, you know, there's clear differences and they, they're both on the playground together at the same time. They're both the same age. You're not dealing with a lifetime of abuse. You're talking about 10-year-olds. And so it comes down to me, too. How does your body process nutrients?

How does it process the food you take in? And how well does it do it? And where does it store it? And so, you know, those kids who are, you know, if you have them do the same kind of play, you will see that one kid ends up being fatter and one isn't. And it's not, you know, if you fed them the exact same things, you can see that the factory is just working differently in one kid. Yeah, genetics are real. You know, and the other thing to take into consideration, you were talking about lactose intolerance and tolerance. lactose intolerance and tolerance. One of the things that I read really recently is that a big part of lactose intolerance could be attributed to the homogenization and pasteurization

of milk. And that, you know, we're very concerned about diseases, rightly so, and that's why, and freshness. But milk's not supposed to be able to sit on a shelf for three weeks. It's just not supposed to. You're supposed to get milk, and if you drink it at all, it should be fresh, and that way it has the enzymes in it. And that what we're doing by boiling this milk and pasteurizing it and homogenizing it is where you're creating this dead protein liquid shit that your body doesn't know what the fuck to do with. And then the weirder ones is when you take it and you suck the fat out of it. Like when you have low-fat milk, and a lot of people don't even realize that low-fat milk has sugar in it. They literally add sugar to low-fat milk to make it palatable.

So disgusting. I didn't know that. You're not getting anything. It might be low-fat as in fat content, but as in the effects it's going to have on your body, it's not low-fat at all. Yeah, actually, Jeff Volokh, that dietary researcher, basically agreed with me when I said to him,

so is it basically child abuse to feed your child skim milk? I mean, here we are, America, we're a very wealthy country. People are feeding their children nutrient-free food. It's so crazy. Well, they just have not had enough time to study the research. Most people, what they hear is if you eat cholesterol, you'll get fat. If you eat saturated fats, you'll have a heart attack. And you're talking about like 1960s knowledge. You talk to top of the food chain researchers today, no pun intended, in 2017, and they'll tell you quite the opposite. They'll tell you that saturated fats and cholesterol are actually good for you, that they are the precursors for hormones.

Your body uses them to produce testosterone. Your body uses them to produce hormones. And that this idea that eating cholesterol raises your blood cholesterol, that's not true. Right. And actually, we've been so credulous as people. I think probably it's not just us. It's probably around the globe for many, many decades.

And now part of the good part of having all this media is that more of the sort of the counterpoint gets out there. And so it's been sort of a religion. People have believed this because the government put it out. The American Heart Association, the AMA put it out saying fat is excuse me fat is bad and recently they did it again with coconut oil it's so terrible so not evidence-based i know i and i had to send it to a bunch of people like ronda patrick and all the doctors and scientists that i know am i am i wrong here or is this crap and on it wrote a piece one of the the researchers for on it wrote a piece essentially one of the researchers for Onnit wrote a piece

essentially saying the American Heart Association is essentially whack. It's kind of a whack institution and they're not on top of the ball. Yeah, I just found this with another medical association in this piece I'm writing. And it's really terrible because what happens is, so doctors say that you go to an HMO, those doctors, they go by the recommendations of these big associations. So you've got the big associations telling basically medical fairy tales. They're continuing to tell the same fairy tale that they've told, and people are basing their healthcare decisions on that. Doctors are, and then the patients are listening. They assume, okay, you're wearing a white coat,

and you went to medical school, and I went to school of Google, I guess I'll listen to you. And that's really, really damaging. And this is why I think Nina Teicholz, Dr. Eads, Gary Taubes, all these people who have done this work to put out the real science, they have saved an enormous amount of lives and stopped people from having horrible diseases. I really think that they're all heroic because it's been a fight to put that stuff out. It's been a big battle for them, and they have people fighting them all the time. Well, most people, they go to a doctor for advice. But the reality about medical school is you take very little time to learn about nutrition. Right.

So a lot of these guys, whether it's an orthopedic surgeon or whatever their specialty is, the idea that these people are the go-to expert on every single area of the body, including nutritional absorption, is ridiculous. It's just not the case. And there's a great many people that know more about nutrition, and especially state-of-the-art nutrition, than your doctor does, unfortunately. But see, if you realize that, then you're already ahead of the game and you can say, okay, I'm going to use you for tests and try to-

But that sucks. It really sucks. Unless you have a great doctor. I mean, there are obviously some great doctors out there that can give you some, like my doctor, Dr. Gordon, Mark Gordon, he's also an expert in traumatic brain injury. And he's a really nuanced guy. And when I talk to him about cholesterol and all these different factors and LDL and HDL and triglycerides, he can give me a research-based sort of point of view on it because he's doing it himself.

I mean, he's eating this way himself. He's paying attention to all the latest stuff. But he's got a voracious appetite for that stuff. There's a lot of people that just don't want to be bothered. They got their degree in 1982 and they're done. I know. And it's so terrible. And see, if your doctor just closes that to you, if they say, look, I really know nothing about diet and I'm going to give you advice because they say that I should give you advice, but really it's not based on anything other than they printed out some sheets here, then okay, because then you're informed. It's not like your doctor is leading you on with the white coat, but most people are being let on.

Well, it's just, we have this idea, you know, we have this idea that, you know, what do I need to do to be healthy? Well, you know, maybe I should go on a vegetarian diet. That'll be healthy. Well, listen, if you eat fucking cupcakes and burritos and fucking cheese doodles all day, yeah, a vegan diet is going to be amazing for you. It's going to really do a great job. The question is, is it optimal? It might be. It might be optimal for you, but it might not be optimal for you. You know, it might be for me.

Maybe it's my thing, you know, but if trying and trial and error becomes really difficult for people because most people have jobs and families and obligations and hobbies and things they like to do. They don't want to spend time going through PubMed studies and trying to figure out what the fuck is the good thing to eat and the bad thing to eat. And, you know, what are the variables? Is it based on, you know, the origin of my ancestors? Do I have to like think about, you know about those ancestral diet people that are really into that? Where are your people from? What did they grow up doing? Right.

Boy. No, it's very hard. It's hard. The great thing is that there is more stuff out there that's written for lay people where people who read the research explain it to people in a way that is very clear and understandable so people can make more of their own decision, I think, than they ever could before. And there's also people that are super cynical. They're like, hey, man, I grew up with Dr. Seuss and the food pyramid was always wheat at the bottom and at the top was all this other stuff.

But now everybody's flipping the food pyramid and he's taking out the bottom part entirely. And so what's going to happen five years from now? Are you going to tell me, well, high fat is actually terrible for your brain. People are understandably tired of all this stuff. And it's real easy to just sort of compartmentalize and just push it away and just listen to your doctor. Yeah, it really is. And the point you made before about the people who are eating the Cheetos and cupcakes diet, well, of course, if you start eating a vegan diet, you're not eating Cheetos and cupcakes, you're going to see an effect.

But is that a good effect in terms of your long-term health? And we see that vegetarians don't have necessary proteins that you get very easily from meat and nutrients. If you eat balanced amino acid profile foods like, like I know pea protein and hemp protein is very good, quinoa. You know more than I. And this isn't my area because I don't care about that stuff since I'm not vegetarian and wouldn't eat that way.

But I see that. So people like Chris Kresser try to help people to say, look, here's the deal. And so you can make some choices and decide, you know, is there a way for me as a vegetarian to get the nutrients I need or am I always going to be deficient and how might that affect my health? So what are the tradeoffs? Yeah, but some people, they don't think of it purely as a health issue as well. They also think about it as an ethical and moral issue.

You know, they say, look, I don't want to be a part of factory farming. I don't want to have anything to do with the death of animals, which I completely understand. And I respect and appreciate that what they're doing is they're trying to leave a smaller footprint on the world. Yeah, that makes sense, too. Well, I can see that because I mean, I don't think that animal cruelty is a good thing. And I think animals should be humanely slaughtered and kept. And so I think that that's a really good argument. I have friends who are vegetarians for that reason, who know about eating meat and and being a healthier way to to have a diet, but they they choose to make that trade off. And as long as you're making a choice, a reason choice, and you know what you're trading off,

then I'm fine with that. Yeah, no, I think that's... And again, for some people, vegetarian is probably the way to go. And that's what gets really confusing. It's like, how do you figure out what is the right way to go? And what is the...

For you, I mean, you really... What you're supposed to do is get blood tests. You're supposed to do it on a regular basis. You're supposed to consult with someone who actually knows what they're talking about. And really just sort of just make these choices, test the results, and then make an educated decision based on that. And here's a problem. How do you find the evidence-based doctor?

Right. Because I'm in an HMO, so I can just switch doctors forever and ever, but I just stay with the doctor and then read stuff myself because I can do that. That's what I do for a living. But for other people who aren't in an HMO, people want to find an evidence-based medicine practitioner. People will say they are, but then you hear what they suggest and they really aren't. And that's a really big problem. It would be great if somebody could make a lot of money maybe doing a site saying, look, I'm this doctor and here's what I look at and think. And so you could choose because we tried to find one for my boyfriend in Los Angeles and like, well, nobody knows. Right. It's hard. Yeah. I mean, they're out there, but it's hard to find them.

Yeah. Because you try five, six doctors, you go through them and these are all doctor appointments. You have to pay for them and everything. And then you find, okay, you don't know anything. Right, on to the next. And it's also incredibly time-consuming. When I go to my doctor, when I get blood work done, we have a 75-minute consultation. We have to sit down for 75 minutes and go over all the various micronutrient levels and all the different levels of everything, niacin, B12. And we go over diet, and we over, like, when are you eating? What time are you eating?

Like, when are you eating before you take the blood tests? And, you know, how much water are you consuming? Are you dehydrated? There's a lot going on. I mean, if you want to, like, truly optimize your health, it's better than ever, but still extremely hard to find someone who knows what they're doing. So the doctor you go to, that seems like a smart, if you're going to spend money, because that guy's probably really expensive. But if you're going to spend money, you know, a doctor who sees you for 72 minutes and looks at you that way, that seems like a really wise investment in your future. future, even if you're maybe somebody who is not doesn't have money to burn, that that seems a really smart place to put it if you even if you have to make some sacrifices in other areas.

Yeah, no, I think so too. And I think read as much as you can about not just read books by people on nutrition, but read articles about those books, you know, read, I mean, pro and con, and I've read a lot of con. And you know, you got to go over that stuff with a fine-tooth comb. Look for bias. And it's hard to do. It's hard to do. It's really hard to do. Some of the important things are to look at the sample size.

Look at people. Look at the limitations. Sometimes they'll say them at the end. I always like those studies that do that. Sample size, you know, when somebody has like, oh, we had 22 people in this study, you know, that's not the one you want. Look for, you know, and you can't say necessarily, oh, it must be this number or that number. But look for a lot of people. And what else?

Like if they say something's really significant, then I'm always, I'm immediately suspicious. Right. What does that mean? That word significance. You know, well, there's this whole argument about p-values and that's probability measure that's going on now. And, well, okay, let's take that. Some people are saying, let's take that out of the equation. And because that's people are using this as this sort of golden thing to say, okay, we had this finding, and it's fantastic. And to look at the whole study and the findings in a more nuanced way than just the p-value. study and the findings in a more nuanced way than just the p-value? Yeah, it's hard for people. I mean, one of the things that we've talked about a couple times recently that people keep throwing around is the recent studies that show that people who eat a lot of red meat are more likely to get

cancer. And the issue with these studies is a bunch of issues. One, they don't differentiate what kind of meat. They don't differentiate whether or not you eat it with vegetables or whether you eat it with white bread and spaghetti. And that's huge, whether you're eating grass-fed bison or whether you're eating some bullshit burger. And you're just saying you eat meat five times a week. That doesn't show me what's in your diet. Right. These are called cohort studies. And I call them, if you see that cohort studies are observational or population-based observational study study I call them leap to conclusions after the fact and they're just like the the shit of studies you know because did the person you know like you're saying what

caused this this thing that we're seeing okay they are there you know have this effect um is it processed foods right yeah and and it's just And it's just, it's such a crappy way. And you see it reported in the media, you know, these articles that say, oh, my God, everyone should never eat this type of food ever again. It's terrible for you. And it doesn't say that at all. But the reporters don't know that. And they just. They don't even care.

It's just clickbait. They just want to get a bunch of hits on their article and you yeah and you'll see articles like that that even in like really respectable publications that have this really attractive headline and then you read this the actual article itself you're like wait what are you basing this on yeah it's really terrible and so that's the thing what you said to look at studies look at the opposite you know the the opposite point of view um that's really important to look at. It's just it's hard to read some of these studies. I really appreciate researchers who write in clear language. I think that's more and more important as people can get studies. There's a site called Sci-Hub where you can get studies that are protected that the journals don't let you get. And you can find them on professors' websites. There are ways to find these studies if you want to find them. You can use Google Scholar to look up the thing. So it's just scholar.google.com. And then you can start finding these and try to get them through other

sources if they are password protected. Because you don't want to just read the abstract because they can say, the abstract's the part at the top where they tell you what the study's about. Oh, we had this significant finding and we found this and that. And you will often not often, but you will sometimes read a study and you'll see that the thing that they say they found is not what they found. And that's why it's important to not just be this lazy person who reads only the abstract and the conclusion, but to look at the methodology and see if there's stuff screwed up. I saw a study done by Harvard professors where they didn't have a control group for their third experiment. And I thought, did you forget? I mean, you're at Harvard. If you guys don't know to put in a control group, you know, come on. What was the study about? It was a study on, God, I'm not going to remember now. It was,

shoot. It was, the third part was in a train station. And I can't remember what the study was about. I just, I brought it with me to an evolutionary psychology conference thinking, this will be easier to write a column from because I had a question that kind of matched. I can't remember, but it was in a train station and they should have done better. A study in a train station? Well, no, they did two of the experiments. The first two experiments were where they played videos or something. I think it had something to do with cell phones or something. I can't quite remember.

Oh, was someone trying to borrow a cell phone? Someone's saying, can we borrow your cell phone? And I like these professors. I reference both of their work in my book, my next book. So it was a psychology study? Yeah, it was a social psychology study. And I thought, you know, why don't you have a control for your third experiment? my next book but um it was a psychology study yeah it was a social psychology study and i thought you know that why don't you have a control for your third for your third experiment and so then

i had to do a new question for my second question in my column and i was all annoyed too so i remembered it well um there's a difference between science and then headlines from articles that are written about science by people that might not even necessarily be scientists or really truly understand the science. They just want to get an article out there that people are going to pay attention to. Well, I'm sensitive to credentialism as I don't have a PhD and started out giving free advice in the street corner in Soho as a joke. So, but I've since then, I started out giving advice on a street corner. Yeah. Well, wacky broad. So what were you doing?

Well, I had these two friends, and we just thought it would be funny, so we set up on the corner of West Broadway and Broome with a card table and some folding chairs. You just said advice? It said free advice from a panel of experts. We were called the advice ladies, and like love and dating. What year did you do this? This was in the late 80s and then in the 90s. You just decided to do this on a whim? Yeah.

Well, we thought we'd just do it once. I act like I'm drunk at all times. So, no, I'm just a weird person. And we did this and we just thought we'd sit there and people walk past and laugh. Because I always like making people laugh. I once went out in an evening dress and a goatee and a mustache just to be funny. I frightened a child. And we did this and people, it was New York, you know, free.

They lined up around the block and they didn't just ask us like about like their eyelashes or whatever. Like, what can I get directions to Grand Street? They were asking us serious questions. And I thought, holy shit, I better know something. And so I read through all of psychology. And when you're not reading psychology in school, you think like, oh, my God, Freud just made shit up. It was really crazy. And I discovered this guy, Albert Ellis, who was the father at the same time as Aaron Beck of cognitive behavioral therapy, basically, and then started reading more

and more and immersing myself more and more in science and going to scientific conferences. And then because this thing where I look for people to criticize me so I can get mean, not the people who are like, hey, whore on the internet. But I would ask professors, like, did I get this wrong? And sometimes I'd say yes. And so I learned more and more, and got better and better and incorporated more science. So now what I do is sort of a synthesis from across science. So I read a cognitive neuroscience textbook, and I use evolutionary psychology, I use that as sort of an underpinning theory to everything. So I look at social science research and say, how would this have made sense in an ancestral environment? Because if there's no sense to it, then there's something empty and wrong with what they're finding or what they're concluding.

Now, so you started out doing this. You set up this card table and some free advice. And then how did it progress to you having this column? Well, so we're doing this. And just because it was so fun and we got so much out of it. And I learned this, that basically if you help people, if you do kindness to other people, for other people, you feel really good. So there's self-interest in being kind, especially to strangers. And that's what we were doing. And um we did this for a few years and this guy walked by he wrote for the

new york times style section he did a little teeny piece on us like and then it got all cut down eric messenger and then because i'm a garmento jew i do like five things well one of those selling things what does that mean that means like you're in the garment district, you're like hawking clothing. So I can like get dressed. Notice I don't say like, you know, I get dressed, eat, not cook. What else? Anyway, psychology, that's one of them. And then selling things. And so I got us a TV deal with De Niro, my partners and me. And then I got us a column, the Daily News and a book agent. And one of my partners ended up dying. It's very sad. And so I ended up doing the column myself at that point and then just syndicated my own column because I thought, well, you know, I'm writing this for one paper. I don't make very much money. How do I make more money? And I was an entrepreneur. And so I got it in a whole bunch of papers, even though all the syndicators who do that. And by the way, if anyone asks, it's not possible anymore. Papers are all going out of business. Is that true? Papers are all going out of business? They're really struggling. But back then, I went to syndicators. They said, yeah,

we think you write a really great column, but Ann Landers and Dear Abby, of all the real estate, you'll never make any money. And so I went to an alternative weekly newspaper conference in Montreal. I stayed in the Hooker Hotel because I couldn't afford the real hotel. And I just went around saying, here are my little samples. Here are my little samples. And so paper started picking up my column. So I built a business out of doing this, out of free advice. And then over the years became increasingly science-based.

I had to learn statistics. I have a book I weep reading under my desk, Biostatistics, The Bare Essentials. I read a lot of stats websites and try to improve in that area in terms of scientific thinking and understanding statistics so I can be better at assessing studies. People gravitate towards advice. They really do. The advice columns and advice, like call-in advice shows. People love Dr. Laura, that kind of shit. When people call on, you know, what should I do? What should I do? It was very reason-based. I always loved critical thinking and reasoning and logic.

And so now, you know, I'll look at somebody's question and I'll sometimes think I know the answer, but I'll always read to see, oh, actually, no, it's this. I'll read a bunch of papers and I look for what's called the most parsimonious answer because there can be a bunch of answers to something. But it's like, what is the thing that most closely, narrowly answers this person's question? And then also there's this thing, I see advice columns all the time, they tell someone to do something that nobody would ever do. So I always have like this sort of bullshit check on there of like, come on, is anybody ever going to do this? What kind of stuff? Well, it's like write stuff down. I write stuff down. I know, but you might do it. And when people read those books, self-help books, it says, okay, write this worksheet and do all this stuff. I've never done that in my whole life.

You don't write things down? No. Say if you have like a list of things to do. Oh, no, I have I have stuff written. My house is like it's a fire hazard with a bed and an oven. It's like a walk in paper pile. So, no, I write everything down. Actually, I type everything out.

I'm a blowhard in print. everything down. Actually, I type everything out. I'm a blowhard in print. But the thing is that in books, when they say fill out this worksheet, I like reading, I don't want to stop and do this thing. And so I've never done that. And so in this next book that I wrote, I have two ways to do something that lazy ass Amy Elkin way or the way that's actually more efficient and will do better. It's the way I changed because I was this loser with no confidence and I transformed myself. And actually, it's based in good science. What I did, I didn't know that I was just desperate and miserable. But I say, look, if you make a list of these problems that you have, the things you're afraid of, this will help you, then you can tackle them. This is smarter, but I didn't do that. I still, you know, got to where I needed to go. But it's

just dumb to do it my way. Because you can just do a little writing work and get to tackle the stuff you need to tackle. So you give advice that you don't really take. So like saying, write down all the different things that you have issue with and then you can tackle those. You didn't really do that? Well, because I didn't do it based in science. What I'm saying is that I recognize that some people will be too lazy to write stuff down or they just don't do that. And so but I what I did is I said, here are the consequences if you do it my way, like it's going to be slower and, you know, you might not be as successful. back and say, like, hey, miserable, loserish person, here's what you do. And write this down because then it's going to take you, you know, this many years instead of, like, that many years. I would do that now.

And so what I tried to do is persuade people to be smarter than I was, basically. Well, you're giving advice based on your personal experience. Like, this would have been a better way to do it. Right. This is a better way. And I see that based in the science. But I realize that some people won't do it. So you can choose. This is the thing. It's like with the diet.

Okay. You eat that cupcake. You're going to enjoy it. But here's the trade-off. Well, writing things down, one of the things that's important about that is it cements those things in your memory and it puts them in especially in my opinion physically writing i don't know why but like for notes like um i have notes on my phone that i keep from like comedy sets of like things that i need to do but they're not as effective as a notebook i keep a notebook

as well and my notebook is not where i write in i write on a computer. But my notebook is where I write things down that I need to remember, like the subject of bits and the important points in bits. And maybe even if it's a new bit, I'll go over like the important punchlines and where they fit in. And I'll write all this stuff out. But that way, like for some reason, when you physically write things down, they get cemented in your mind, the act of putting pen to paper and moving your hand around. It makes sense. See, this is the subject of my next book. It's embodied cognition. It's that we don't just think with our mind, that our body is intimately involved. And there is research that finds you are actually going to remember stuff more if you

write it down. That's why they say in class, you should take notes in pen and ink rather than typing. And so the truth is, I mean, I've lists all over my house. It's just that self-help book, you know, genre that I never wrote anything in where they said to write stuff. But I think that that's very important. And also for memorization, that that's an important thing that to write stuff. When I have, I did a TED Talk and I had to memorize stuff for it. And I can see where I wrote stuff on the pages. So I had the type pages, but then I had stuff where I scratched in notes. And I can picture that still even now, even though I don't have the greatest memory, I don't think, the places that I wrote notes in this colored ink.

There's something very memorable about that where it isn't with a tight page. Yeah, I don't know what it is, but it definitely works, right? Well, the physical is very important. You know, if you look at people who are, you know, feel bad, they, you know, about themselves, they sort of hunch down and everything. There's a different way of standing if you feel good about yourself and good about where you're going and walking, going forward. I mean, all of these things are very important. If you're depressed, it really can help to take a walk. And this is this kind of thing where you have to force yourself. It's like when I force myself to get on the bike, you know, I want to do anything but that, but I know that I just have to do it because I'll feel so much better, not just then, but the next

day. It seems to, I see an effect on mood the next day. You know, with this thing in Vegas, I got very, just in a dark place that day that happened. And I just made myself get on the bike. And it's the time I've felt least like that. And I mean, like how dumb, because all these people are going through this horrible stuff. And I'm like, oh, I couldn't get on a bicycle. But it really is, you have your own little world. That's where you inhabit and you have to take care of it. And that was what I did to just not, I didn't want to go into a depression. Well, it's also a habit. That's a good habit to form the habit of getting to off your ass and putting action to just doing something. Right. And sometimes it's hard for

people that, you know, that you can call it procrastinating. I don't want to do it. I think about not doing it. You have to get in the habit of just doing things, getting in the habit of getting up and doing, where there's no option. You don't have the option to not do it. Force yourself to do it.

And if you can do that, you will appreciate your free time so much more. If you, people think that like, well, I just like being lazy and I like relaxing and I like sitting around. You may. I believe you may. But you won't like it as much as you would like it if you've accomplished your goals first. See, you're so right. Because then you feel good about something.

You've done something. You feel good sitting on the couch. I like sitting on the couch sometimes and watching TV. But it's because I work so much. I get shit done. So when I put my feet up, I can feel good. I'm not fucking off. I'm enjoying leisure time, which is also important.

There's this classic social science research by this guy, Carl Weick, who talked about small wins. And that's really important. And they talk about that in AA, make your bed in the morning. And the thing you were talking about with feelings, I'm a big advocate of not letting your feelings be the boss of you. That's how I say it. And so, for example, I write to a timer because when I sit down to write, so my stuff is funny. So I always think like I'm not funny. I have nothing to say.

I don't know what the science is. I don't know what the answer is. Those are those immediate feelings buzzing around like little flies in my head. And none of that matters because the timer i put on 52 minutes on 17 minutes break and that's all that matters how many times do you write a day um uh it depends on the day because sometimes there's 17 minutes for a break well i'll do that and you know what i'll do 17 how'd you come to that actually i read something i didn't even read the study it just i thought that sounds good there's this thing called a pomodoro where you do 20 minutes but that doesn't

seem like very much. You know, with the humor stuff, sometimes if it's hard, I have to just keep shooting the shit with myself and like looking up things on the Internet. Like, oh, look, a polar bear. OK. And come up with some kind of joke or something like that. And so it takes a while. And I read this somewhere saying that 52, 17, but I didn't even read the paper on it. I didn't care.

OK, good. We'll run with that. Yeah, right. We'll run with that. paper on it. I didn't care. Okay, good. We'll run with that. Yeah, right. We'll run with that. And so what I do often in the 17 minute break period, especially if I'm doing something really hard, is I will clean my house. And I wish I could, you know, no one pays writers anymore. So I'd actually like to have a team of maids and a butler, a little midget butler. I don't know if we're allowed to say, if we're allowed to say midget butler. I don't think you're allowed to

say that anymore. Oh, okay. A little person. Sorry. Little person butler. Why a little person? How about a giant? Because I always loved the Wizard of Oz. I think that they're amazing looking. So it's probably a terrible thing and I'm probably going to have people come after me. What is this, Jamie? What did you just pull up? It's what a pomodoro is.

I've only heard of it in Italian cooking. Yeah, right? Spaghetti pomodoro. Right. It comes out of that little tomato timer. It's 20 minutes. So each 25-minute block of work is a Pomodoro. I thought it was 20. Once you've completed four Pomodoros, take a longer break of 20 to 30 minutes.

This will help your brain relax and refocus before your next session. So this is default mode processing that goes on. What happens is you're more efficient if you take breaks. See, I'm from the family of the Puritan work ethic Jews of like, you know, just beat the horse and have it work for hours. But that's really inefficient because your brain does background processing while you're doing this. You know, you're washing the dishes or whatever. But I find that the thing about not having a maid and doing the work yourself, you like clean the baseboard down here or take the little Clorox wipe and do something. You have these small wins.

So you accomplish something, even though it's just a little tiny thing. You clean your countertop or whatever with bleach that you've done something and where maybe you're writing, it's going, it's frustrating. You haven't really accomplished much. You didn't figure out the thing you needed to figure out. So you have that elevated feeling of being, having done something that you're talking about. I've heard a lot of people say they like to take breaks and walk. And that during the walking, that's when they sort of sort out all the different things they were writing about.

And they usually bring a phone or recorder and then they talk into it if they have an idea and then go over that. Do you use transcription? Do you have a smartphone and use a transcription? Yeah. I have that dragon thing on my phone, which I really like. And the walking does seem helpful. Nietzsche walked, and I've read papers on this that walking is helpful. And so I do that also if I have something that's just where I can't figure something out. What I do is I go to the bank and get $20 out, just so it doesn't seem like a meaningless trip there, and then come home. You just go to the bank to get $20 out just to, so it doesn't seem like a meaningless trip there and then come home and. Just go to the bank to get 20 bucks? Really?

It's near my house. It's like on Lincoln and I walk back and, you know, it's a short trip, but it's enough of a walk that it's a walk. And. Sort of like a symbolic thing of getting the money out? It has no meaning. It's just that, you know, if I just walked to the bank, it would feel purposeless and then maybe I wouldn't do it the next time. So it feels like. I know. I'm a weird girl. What can I say?

But I do that. And that's just such a it's sort of alleviates some kind of that that pressing feeling of you have of like there's not a solution. I don't know. And you're moving. You're doing this thing where you're moving forward. That's this thing about your brain. Not just we don't just think about solutions like we can actually move in ways that help your brain be more powerful. And the walking thing too, is people feel bad if they're not instantly geniuses at figuring something out. And what I like to do is go over and over and over things. So on this thing that I'm writing now, this medical care expose that I'm writing now, the research is really new to

me and complicated. And so what I do is I have a pile of papers, there's like a step stool in my bathroom. It's really crazy. My boyfriend goes in there, he's sort of frightened by the insanity, but the pile of paper, so I put them on the bottom stool, and then I reread them, and I put them on the top. So there's like a, it's like an escalator going back and forth. Because when you do it like that, you get sort of a deep understanding that you don't when you just read it at first. And I know this from writing that there's an understanding. I can listen to somebody present their work at a scientific conference and understand it, but can I explain it to you? And that's a whole different level of understanding, this deeper understanding.

Yeah, that does make sense. And when you're talking about walking, too, do you think that walking has an effect also because it's a very mild exercise? So it's not exhausting you. It's not hard. But you are getting some good circulation because you're forcing your body to pick your legs up and move forward and your heart starts beating. And I think it sort of ignites some systems. Yeah, I think that you're probably right about that.

And you feel just this sense, you know, because you're going forward. So forward's a metaphor for success and progress and all these things. And I think that all of that, it sounds kind of silly, but I looked at all this metaphor stuff and I don't think it's so silly. You know, you know, a success is up. Moving forward is progress. And so our bodies are connected. Our first language as organisms, the little we organisms, they had two things, approach and avoid. It's like, oh, look, a yummy piece of plankton.

I'll approach that. Or, uh-oh, that thing's going to eat me and I'll back up. And those, there's a term called neural reuse by this guy Anderson. And a guy named DeHaan said it in a different way. reuse by this guy Anderson and and the guy named DeHaan said it in different way but the the idea is that the human emotional system comes out of or scap they use the term scaffolded I don't think they use it right but it comes out of the approach and avoid mechanisms of tiny organisms so going forward that's approach you know going backward receding that's avoid um and and so if you look at it that way it makes sense that walking, that going to the bank,

I'm going to walk in my little tennis shoes and wear those Asian pool man sunglasses. What are those? What are you talking about? I got them from my neighbor. She's Japanese at a garage sale. What's an Asian pool man sunglasses? Those giant, they're like those wraparound. It's basically like putting a strap.

You know how they, like if they don't want you identified in a photo, they put a black bar over your face? It's like the sunglasses version of that. They're huge. And they're plastic. And it's like a car windshield. I got them at Herb. Oh, also because, so I'm just like, I'm related to whiteout. And so I'm just hoping to not age like an old Hermes handbag, you know, by living in California.

So do you spray like sunscreen all over your face when you do that too? No, I use FDA banned sunblock. Jesus Christ. Why would you do that? No, because the FDA, they're wrong to ban this. They don't allow the most protective sunblock, which is with Mexoral that they sell in France. No, French people have not been dropping dead in the streets. They haven't been dying of cancer from using sunblock with this very protective ingredient

the FDA allows the sunblock now to be sold here it's called anthelios but it's like with the whatever mucinex I used to take that they now have behind the counter and they sell the one out in the aisle that doesn't work they they remove the active ingredient and they sell the lesser ingredient in America. So if you want to get the Anthelios that actually works, you have to go to France. I buy a case when I'm there. Other people bring back a dress. I bring back $350 worth of sunblock. So you can't even order it online and have it delivered?

No, you can. Well, this is the great thing about the internet now. How do you spell it? It's A-N-T-H-E-L-I-O-S. There's a little French accent mark in there. Oh, the accent. Yeah, accent. A goose. That's the only thing I learned. How would you say there's a little French accent mark in there. Oh, the accent. Yeah, accent. A goose.

That's the only thing I learned. How would you say it if you were French? Antilleos. Antilleos. Yeah. Okay. So this stuff is just way stronger than anything you get here in America? Well, it's this mexoral that's the ingredient that protects you from UVA and UVB.

And it's just, it's really the most protective ingredient. You can also get it in Canada. I got some when I was in Vancouver. But I get it in France because I can get it cheaper there by a whole case. You go to a bad neighborhood and buy it there in some yicky pharmacy there. So when you're taking this stuff, what is the difference between that and, say, Coppertone or something you get in America? Well, I think it doesn't protect. I can't remember whether it's UVA or UVB that it doesn't protect against fully.

The kind with the titanium dioxide protects. But also the other problem with these sunblocks is that, you know, do they affect your endocrine system in terrible ways? Do they? I don't know, but I'm so vain that I just don't want to look like a sheepdog by the time I'm 60. But how could they affect your endocrine system? Well, because you're putting these chemicals on your skin and stuff goes into your skin. But again, I haven't gone outside in a long time, so that sort of mutes the effect. Right.

I guess, right? I have a huge hat, like it could be a witch with a black hat, and that helps, too. You're kind of crazy, Amy. I am. I'm nuts. So it's one of my better qualities, I guess, or worse. I'm nuts. So it's one of my better qualities, I guess, or worse.

But that is an interesting point about affecting your endocrine system that I never really took into consideration. I've been thinking about sunscreen because I was reading this thing about the Great Barrier Reef being destroyed by sunscreen and spray sunscreen in particular. Oh, really? particular. Oh, really? Yeah, someone sent me this message, and I don't know if it's correct, that the spray sunscreen is the issue with reefs and not the rub-on stuff. Oh, good. I hate to be a reef criminal. I don't know if that's true, though.

I don't know if that's right. See if you could find out. You did see something? I think I remember looking this up recently, and I don't want to say it wasn't true, but I'm looking it up again. See, for whatever reason, there's something in the aerosol version that is more dangerous for reefs. But it kind of makes sense. I mean, you're putting this fucking skanky chemical on you, and then you're jumping in the water.

I mean, where's it going? Yeah, well, it would seem, though, that both kinds would work that way. But maybe it's because the lotion kind probably absorbs more into your skin. Here it goes. No, your sunscreen isn't killing the world's coral reefs. Varying studies, I've found those, so I don't know if this one is even accurate. I found two other ones that said it is.

Varying studies produced by the sunscreen industry. I want to believe that. Is it clickbait? I don't care. Scroll up and let's see what it says. Get a little larger there. Thank you, sir. Swimming that swimmers that slather themselves in sunscreen are doing their skin a favor, but it might not be so helpful to any nearby coral reefs.

That claim released in a recent scientific study sparked global headlines, faulting sunscreen for the global decline of these hotbeds of biodiversity. It's a disturbing idea that something so necessary for protecting humans from skin cancer could be doing so much environmental damage, but what weight should we give this scientific finding? Not much, it turns out. The authors of the report, who hail from labs and universities in the U.S. and Israel,

found that, how do you say that? Oxybenzone? Oxybenzone. An active ingredient in some sunscreens that protects against ultraviolet light was present in significant quantities around reefs in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands that were favored by swimmers and divers. They determined that the chemical has a detrimental effect on the DNA of coral in both its juvenile and adult stages.

The study was published in the journal Archives in Environmental Contamination and Toxicology. In the lab, the researchers exposed coral to high concentrations of oxybenzone. Not only did it deform coral larvae by trapping them in their own skeleton, the study found that it was also a factor in coral bleaching. Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, told Mashable Australia he thought the report's findings were inconclusive. He was paid off. This particular study was done in a laboratory, so they actually used artificial seawater, he explained. They put tiny bits into coral in

aquaria and then added some chemicals. It's not surprising the coral didn't like chemicals thrown at them. I don't know. See, this is a good point. And this is something, when you look at studies, this is one of the things I look at. They call it in vivo or in vitro. Are you looking at stuff, do they pull out some cells and do something to them? And does that replicate or not replicate what happens in the human body? Are there other things, other reactions going on that are missing from them? You know, when you do that, when you pull it out and just look at it in a Petri dish. Yeah, I would imagine. But it seems like in that environment, it showed that the coral does not like it.

I mean, I would imagine that's not really terribly surprising. But I'd like to know what are the trace amounts that they're seeing in coral? And can they mimic those in studies or are they just pouring it on them? And, you know, like salt, for instance, right? If you put a little bit of salt in your food, you're going to be fine. You eat a pound of salt, you'll be dead in an hour. Well, this is the thing that, you know, if you look at studies, this is why it's important to read them over and over like that and to really pick them apart if you want to assess them in any sort of reliable way, because you have to look at

those nuances and think, well, wait a second. I call this thing the leave the lab syndrome, where you look at something, they've studied something, you think like, that's not how it works in real life. Why are you doing the experiment that way? That's completely dumb. And this is stuff, you don't have to be a scientist, but it helps to think scientifically, to think logically. And so it's always good to enhance that thinking so you can look at that and look for the bullshit. Yeah, but for a lot of people, they just see that headline. Oh, coral reefs dying because of sunscreen. Sunscreen bad.

Right, and we like to blame people. And I felt bad when you said that. I felt like I sucked. God damn it. I'm out there killing coral. Right. Just for my skin so I won't look like an old hag. Well, also cancer.

Right. We don't want cancer. Well, see, here's the thing, though. There's so much stuff. So much is more complicated than we think. Am I giving myself problems by not getting vitamin D the natural way and by taking a little pill? Because I take a little pill. So that's one of those trade-offs.

And I think like, okay, I eat a ketogenic diet and then I put on the sunscreen. And you look at all that and you try to make the best guess you can that works also within what matters to you. As a woman, I don't want to look really haggard, you know, when I'm 65 or 70 or whatever. Well, you're supposed to be living in like Scotland or something. If you look at your skin color, right? You're supposed to be in some marsh somewhere. Right, exactly.

Clouds overhead. Right, exactly. Sucking vitamin D out of the sky like a giant sunscreen thing. And so, you know, when you change these things in a modern environment, they call it evolutionary mismatch. You know, what are you doing? Are you screwing yourself up in some way because you aren't getting this nutrient or whatever it is, the way your body evolved to take it in? Yeah, it is such a weird thing. The color of people's skin is really just because we changed environments.

Right. The whole race thing is so thrown out the window when you take that into consideration. The way we look, the shape of our noses, the shape of our faces, the color of our skin, all determined by the environment that our ancestors grew up in. That all these people who are, say, Irish, they all grew up in this place. And so they are characteristic Irish features. And it's just, and accepting that. See, what's happened now is we can't make jokes anymore. I skated with 20 black guys in New York. Oh, I stopped the thing you said about the football thing. I thought, okay, I earn a living writing and I really can't do a lot else that if I crack my head open, I might not be able to earn a living ever again. But these guys, they called me white

out, which I thought was hilarious. Yeah. And when you are not racist, I mean, it's not bad to joke about racial stuff. But now, I mean, it's just really the third rail of everything that you even say the slightest thing. You make mention that someone's a different color. I mean, forget it. But also there's no negative connotation to being white. Right. So when you say you're white out, it's not bad. It's not like,

Hey, charcoal, like, Ooh, that people, you call a black guy charcoal. They feel like shit. Charcoal doesn't seem like insulting.

And also black people don't seem charcoal. I thought I had a black boyfriend. He had chocolate. His skin was the color of chocolate. Right. Well, that's not super black. There's like some super black.

Well, I think that really dark, but I think they're beautiful. Those people from, from black. Well, I think that. Like really dark. But I think they're beautiful, those people from Africa. I do too. With that gorgeous, they're amazing. Until they start putting plates in their lips. That's when I go, hey, settle down. I draw the line.

Right, the plate lip thing. How do you kiss someone like that? You lick the plate. Like, is there food left on the plate? Sorry. Well, that is one of the weirdest. Eubankees. What's that?

They're called Eubankees, I think, the people who do that. The women like that? Yeah. It's from Surrey. That's the part of Africa that they do that, I believe. That seems like one of the weirdest sort of habits or behavior patterns that people have ever adopted. Yeah. One of the weirdest cultural traits that's just passed down from generation to generation.

And the larger the plate in their lip, the more cattle they're worth when they get married. It's super twisted. It's like, how did that ever come about? Yeah, no idea. I don't know that area down there, but God, that's some of these cultural things that go on are really crazy. Well, whenever you see body mutilation, which is essentially what that is, I've read that also being connected. It's very vague now. I'm trying to remember it. But I remember it being connected somehow or another to the slave trade and that it made these women less likely to be raped.

Oh, interesting. Yeah. I don't know if that's true, though. So I probably shouldn't say it. But I do always. I hear things. I don't know if they're true, though. So I probably shouldn't say it, but I do always. I hear things. I don't know if they're true. I just repeat it and let people sort it out. Google it, folks. Don't listen to me. But what we were saying about white people before, now actually, I mean, you see this probably all over Twitter, too, this thing of white privilege. I got that. Do you have that?

I guess I must. I caught it. I caught it when I was like 18. I was like typhoid. And so now if you're white, you're just guilty. Yeah. You know, there's nothing you can do. And you see this, there's some, there was a video, it was in Berkeley, some social justice guy. And the woman just, it was like, there's basically, I mean, that's what she said.

There's nothing you can do. You're guilty. I wish I could remember the words of it. Checked your white privilege. Yeah, right. Oh my God. It's okay. It's full.

I'm on F. I love that. Yeah, but it's a way to silence people, and it's also a way for you to be guilty of something, whether or not you're... You can have a clean slate. You are on the defensive instantaneously. You are already a guilty person. Right. So they can virtue signal.

They can decide that you need to be punished, you you need to be punished or you need to be your opinion is invalidated because of the melanin content in your skin. I mean, it's literally crazy. It's the antithesis. I love Martin Luther King and say that content of your character. And that's so beautiful. And it just it's so terrible, this thing of you're white and you're wrong and people don't understand. That's the same thing as the the racism that's been done to blacks, you know, for so, so long. And I'm just, I'm sort of stunned by that and this idea. I mean, basically you're racist is now shut up. Well, did you pay attention to what went on in Evergreen State College in Washington State? I love that guy, Brett Reinstein. Oh my God. He's my hero. He's amazing. And what happened was they, for people who don't know, they essentially said,

we're going to have a, they used to have a day of absence of people of color. And the idea is it's a very progressive school. And they said, look, if we have a day where people of color or people of a variant ethnic, people aren't white, essentially that's what it is. They don't show up. Maybe they will be appreciated more. Maybe we'll take them into consideration more. Their absence will be felt. So then they decided, let's flip that around and force white people to stay home. White staff members, white teachers, white students.

And Brett was like, you're out of your mind. This is racist. It's one thing that you want to call attention to the value of people of color by not being there, which is also arguably not the best way to handle it. But at least you're not saying to someone that they cannot be there because of the color of their skin, which is what you're saying by forcing these people to. And then, obviously, all hell broke out. You know, people were protesting him.

They were looking for him with baseball bats. It was terrible. The whole thing is horrific. But it's this escalation, this war of ideas where you're forcing your ideas and you are shouting people down and calling people guilty before they've ever done anything, which is essentially what this is all about. And, you know, now he's not at the school anymore. So tragic. And the school's imploding. I mean, it's really crazy. And actually, I would argue that, you know, for people who are of color to

make a protest by not going to school for a day after people fought so hard. I love that little girl, the picture of the girls in little rock going to school you know where they segregate they desegregated the school imagine being a little girl and that's you going with these police officers to school it's fucking crazy and and to value an education and to not to skipping school okay so beyond that brett weinstein said his argument was i think this is racist and let's not do it and let's talk about it. And his speech in the hallway there outside his classroom, I saw him and I thought, wow, this is an amazing guy. Look at how rational he is and calm and full of grace.

And, you know, there's this mob there, you know. They're calling him racist and shouting him down. They're shouting him down. And I thought, oh, my God, I want to study with this guy. Can you please do a, you know, MOOC on Coursera so I can take a class from you and learn how to do what you do in a heated situation? Nicholas Christakis at Yale is another one who had people screaming at him and was just a class act, you know.

That was just as crazy. I know. And they've lost. Yeah. So they've lost Brett Weinstein from Evergreen. He is, I mean,

this guy was a valuable guy to have there. And it's so sad that he is now, it just wasn't safe for him when they're there with baseball bats. I mean, it becomes a circus.

It's no longer about education. You can see why he couldn't go back and his wife too. It's very sad. Very, very sad. But this is what's happening that they're not allowing discussion.

This idea, the accusation of you're racist. This is now just this thing. It's a just giant muzzle. You're supposed to shut up. Yeah, well, that's exactly what it is. It's a giant muzzle. Just shut up. And it's a way to silence you.

And it's a way to force their ideas down your throat. See, and you bring something up there. I call it a way to have unearned power over other people. And so I think that part of this, this is the un-PC part, is that we have kids go to college who are not prepared for college. And this is especially true if you go to some terrible school, not if you're the child of wealthy parents who got all the SAT training and everything like that. But so you get promoted because they want a certain color face in there. So maybe you do okay at Duke,

but they send you to Harvard because you can get in there because they're like, oh, we have all these Asian people. Screw you Asians. We're going to like kick you out and not admit you. And we'll admit.

That's the craziest thing is that they're racist against Asian people. It's so terrible. So maybe that if you get- But clarify that because people don't know what we're talking about. So what they do-

The racist policies against Asians. The racist admission policies. So Asians, I mean, I think it has to do something with the culture and the family there. There's, you know, if you're Asian, I had an Asian assistant before. She lived at home with her mother, father, and her sisters and her grandma. You know, grandma answered the phone. You didn't speak Korean. She hung up on you.

But there was a very strong work ethic that you must succeed. There were very strong family ethics. It wasn't a single parent household. And that's what happens to a lot of these at-risk kids. I speak at a school. I created a program to try to help kids make it by showing example, like saying, look, here I am. I failed. I slept on a door in New York on two milk crates. I'm not from a wealthy family. You have to be creative. Apprentice to somebody. all this stuff. Kids don't get that. They don't get that. If you're, if you grew up in a bad neighborhood and your parents don't model that sort of work ethic and the possibility to hope for success, well, why should you think there would be any hope for you? And why should you work? We're getting a little off track. What I want to say is about the standards for Asians being admitted to schools. So they say, oh, look, all of you Asians, we have too many of these Asian faces here. It's so terrible. And so we're not going to admit you.

We're going to take the standards. Standards for Asians are going to be much higher than for everybody else. And so if you get this grade point, say it's like a 3.8 and you're Asian, forget it. You're out. But if you are this person of this face color that we want, we're going to put you in there, even though, you know, you have the same grade point as somebody we're kicking out. Sorry to ramble. I do that.

That's what it is. It's like they have higher standards for admission. Like they've essentially put the bar higher for them. And it's racist. It's racist. It's terrible. It's discrimination against a minority. Right.

And they are a minority. And it's terrible. And so what I... A bigger minority than African-Americans, a bigger minority than Hispanics and Latinos. It's a big minority in America. I was thinking, I was nodding and then I thought, are they? Oh, that's really interesting. So what I suspect, and I could be wrong, this is just a guess on my part, is that when you are promoted to a place where maybe you aren't capable of succeeding, that maybe possibly you instead of putting your energy into succeeding, you put your energy into protesting and saying the system is terrible and racist and unfair because that is the way that you become somebody and you have power and everything if you can't get it through the, okay, I'll work hard way, which isn't to say, so people think that when you say that, you're saying, oh, this group of people, they're stupider

or worse than other people. But if you go back to the schools, if you help those kids, this is what they're doing with charter schools. If you give those kids what they're missing, there isn't, you know, we're individuals. You can help people who might have been throwaway people to succeed if they just see, look, it's possible. And here, how do we put the stability? Or you're a child of a single mother that comes with certain risks if you grow up in a certain kind of risky neighborhood. There's a whole area of evolutionary psychology called life history theory that talks about this. It's called having a fast life history strategy. that talks about this. It's called having a fast life history strategy. It's adaptive if you grow up in a risky, terrible neighborhood where things are unstable, to get pregnant early, if you're a

male, to be violent, all these things that aren't helpful in our modern society. But they're kicked off by that unstable environment where you grow up. So, okay, if instability is a problem, we can't just say, okay, your single mother should go back in time, get in a time machine and go find a man and marry somebody before she has you. That's not realistic. We can't throw away people. And that's what I see people advocating sometimes. You're like, okay, well, we've got to tell people to not get pregnant without a family structure. You can't tell people that. They're not going to listen. It's human nature. And so because they've done that, you don't punish the kids. How do we give those kids the stability they lack? And I think one of the ways is to have people go in from the

earliest grades and model what, for example, my parents modeled for me as these suburban, not wealthy, but just sort of middle class suburban people work hard, do this, do that, and you will be OK. Well, I think also the problem with the Asian folks in universities is they don't complain. And the squeaky wheel gets the grease. And these people aren't protesting and aren't screaming that it's racist. What they're doing is they're putting their head down. They're working and they're working hard. And that's a part of their culture.

You know, I grew up with a lot of Korean kids and they're extremely hardworking to the point that I felt like a lazy fuck when I was around them. And one of my good friends when I was a kid, my friend Jungshik, he was doing his residency for medical school. He was also competing on the U.S. national Taekwondo team. He was going to school all day long, and then he was training two to three hours a night his kid was a fucking maniac and i would be around him and i just felt so lazy no matter how hard i worked it was so late but he never complained about anything ever and it was the culture the culture was to never complain just to work hard and never complain and you're seeing that in universities you're seeing that with their results but you're also seeing that with the fact that even though they're discriminated against, like racially discriminated against by universities, no one's complaining about it.

So they continue to do it. And they do it under the guise of diversity because so many of these Asian people are so successful in their academic careers. They're doing so well and getting into schools. They're pushing them out to try to balance it out. But that doesn't balance out shit. What you're doing is you're encouraging this sort of like weird way of looking at people. You know, you're not, you're not, you want equality of outcome. Okay, that's not real.

You know, equality of opportunity is real. Equality of outcome is not real. You know, just people, the equality of outcome happens when everyone works the same amount. And this is the thing about a free society that people don't like to understand. But when you have inequality, inequality is, in many ways, because of freedom. Because you have the freedom to choose to work as much as you want or as little as you want, you're going to have inequality in outcome. And there's other factors for sure. There is absolutely discrimination.

There's sexism. There's racism. There's all these different factors that play into account as well. But there's also effort. And to deny that and deny that effort is a factor in outcome is preposterous. And it sets up this fantasy land that so many kids live in today while they're protesting Ben Shapiro, calling him a fucking Nazi.

That's where it all comes from, right? That there's these, you know, these, you, you have a campus, uh,

these, these kids that are trying to shut down Republican speaking on campus by calling them and these blanket statements, they're white supremacists and racists. Like, OK, well, what about Ben Carson? He's a fucking Republican, too. And he's black. Right.

There's a lot of people that are black that are Republicans. This is a preposterous way of looking at the world. And it's this sort of isolationist view. And it's weird. It's weird that they don't see how racist it is to discriminate against Asian people. It's terribly racist. And also, you know, if you look at what real diversity is to me, it's bringing in people who didn't have economic advantage because these are the people who have a hard time. It doesn't matter if they're black

or white. You know, I know I have a number of black friends who are highly successful. Some of them are researchers and they grew up in suburban neighborhoods. They grew up like I did. They had a family. Their family was intact. You know, they didn't need a leg up from anybody because they did what I did, which is work hard. My mother told me, so I grew up a Jewish kid in a neighborhood with no Jews and they like egged our house and everything like that. My mother said to me, you know, there are people who hate Jews. So you're going to have to work harder than other people because some people are going to be prejudiced against you and try to keep you out. So that was a message not, oh, we should whine about this and isn't this terrible, as martyrish as my parents can be. Yeah, I don't know. It would be really beautiful if everybody

just did the Martin Luther King thing, right? Just judge people on the content of their character and not the color of their skin, not the origin of their birth or their ancestors' birth. But unfortunately, we are tribal and we do have these weird tendencies to sort of lump ourselves together. And by the way, for people that are listening to this and disagreeing, if you're a fucking social justice war, you're tribal too. If you're a radical lefty, you're fucking tribal. That's a tribal outlook, you know, and we would all be better off if we were a little bit more balanced, me included. Well, me included, too. I mean, and if we listen, what I try to do is to look at the other side, you know, the side I don't agree with, like you were talking about this before,

where you maybe see things, you see their point, or you look at stuff that you want to agree with. There was a Nick Kristof thing, a piece on, okay, here's what we have to do with guns. And I looked at it because we all want, there's this idea of like, do something. We want to do something, but something is not a good thing to do. And I looked at his piece wanting to find something in there that would say, yes, we just do these things and every single thing in there, it was all meaningless stuff that wouldn't have stopped the guy in Vegas. And so I looked at that wanting to see something and you see nothing. And so it's the thing of being honest, being intellectually

honest, and honest when your side is full of shit, too. Yeah. And, you know, when it comes to something like the thing in Vegas, we want to find some sort of solution when it doesn't necessarily exist. There's so many different factors. I mean, obviously, the access to weapons is a big one. It's a huge one. And to deny that is silly. To deny that on the right, like the people that are massive Second Amendment proponents, like to deny that the access to weapons has no factor in someone using those weapons is pretty fucking stupid. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. But then to say that those weapons should not be accessible to people who are not criminals. That's also weird because you're saying like, well, if you have, if we have laws in this

country that allow a person to go and buy a gun for personal safety, and then something like this happens where people get shot and murdered by some crazy person, and then you take those rights away from the people who have done nothing wrong, that's not good either. I mean, yeah, it doesn't stop it either. Look at the Charlie Hebdo thing in France. They don't have guns in France. I don't know if the policemen are armed. I don't think they are. That's a different thing, right? Because that's Muslim extremists that were acting on religious impulses. Well, but they got guns. They got horrible, horrible guns that killed people. I mean, I think they might have even been automatic weapons. I mean, I don't want to use that term

because I don't know anything about guns. So I probably just used that wrong. But they don't allow guns in France, and so they got them. And I think that criminals, I live near the hood, you know, you can get whatever drug you want, you know, in the corner. Adderall? Can you get that there? Adderall? You know, maybe. Maybe now? Good question. Look, access is way, look, Australia is a perfect example. They had one mass shooting.

They rounded up all the guns. They haven't had a single one since. You know, but Australia also has less people than Los Angeles, and it's huge. It's the size of the United States. So, you know, there's a discussion to be had, for sure. And along, you know, the way, we need to discuss access to firearms. That's a part of that discussion. But, you know, I talked about it the other day with my friend Alonzo Bowden,

and immediately people were making articles saying that we were calling for a police state and confiscation of the guns. I didn't say that. No one said that. But this is the right wing, you know, Second Amendment proponent knee jerk reaction to an instantaneously demonize anyone who's critical of the guy having access to 23 fucking rifles. Right. And see, the thing that's happened with the polarization is that now just saying, let's think about this, you know, because I'm libertarian. I'm pro Second Amendment. But I also think, let's think about this, you know, because I'm libertarian, I'm pro second amendment, but I also think let's look at this. That's not bad to say, let's look at this. It doesn't mean we want to take away everybody's guns. It means

that we want to think about things. It's ever been a clear instance that there's a giant problem with someone having access to guns like that. What show to me. Because this guy broke windows in a hotel and shot 500 fucking people. Oh my God, so horrible. If that's not a clear situation where people need to look at it and go, okay, how does this get prevented? And it doesn't get prevented

by burying your head in the sand. It doesn't get prevented by just going back to the Second Amendment and just yelling it out and stomping your feet and pounding your fist on the table. You know, shall not be infringed. That's not how you prevent your children from getting shot by a fucking psycho. See, I think what's hard in this, too, is that we don't have any answers.

There's no, well, if it was just mental health or just this or just that, because it's a mystery. So people are just grasping at things and everybody's standing their ground. They eat the pro-gun, the anti-gun. And they're saying, see, see, and all the disgusting stuff on Twitter. And people did try to curb this a bit, the stuff of people using that as a ramp for their own, whatever their views were.

And that was pretty ugly. You know, seeing those videos. You always have that, right? Well, you always have that. But in this, you know, when it's loss of life and it's not just, oh, Trump said this dumb thing, you know, that's that just barrage. I saw that video of all the people running, you know, that it was there's a it's like a 10 minute video and the police hurrying them along. Some people didn't even realize it was gunfire and you hear that that that constant barrage when you hear that for that period of time that gun going off so many times and so many people um being just that guy's victim that was

so horrible did you see that guy's brother getting interviewed no i just saw a photograph of that a 90 minute interview and is one of the most fucking bizarre interviews i've ever seen in my life he's so removed from his brother doing this. And he's talking about what a great guy his brother is and how quirky his brother was and how his brother was just, he was eccentric and he was just talking about what his brother would have done. And the casino people all knew his brother and to say they didn't know him was crazy. But this guy seems like a guy trying to act normal. It is so weird.

I mean, there might be like some sort of a mental health issue with the entire family because the dad apparently was a psycho and was a serial bank robber. I don't know, but it's the fucking strangest interview where he's not like horrified. He's not crying. He's not stunned. it's so fucking weird and it brings me back to the mental health aspect of it you have there has to be a lot of shit wrong with your mind for you to be able to do something like that what it is what it is i hope we figure it out but i sure do too jesus amy i this was going to be a positive interview. Sorry. Turned out to be a big old bummer.

Crazy girl. What can I say? No, you're fine. This was great. It was fun. I really enjoyed it. Me, too. So for people that want to read your column, it's advicegoddess.com.

Well, yeah. Or actually, I prefer they read it. Look it up in papers. And some of them have changed it to the name I prefer, which is scienceadvicegoddess.com. So don't feel like this chick who's just pulling it out of her butt. And then I have a new book, Unfuckology, a field guide. You're fucking a lot of your books. I know.

It's so terrible. This was an accident, actually. So it's Unfuckology, a field guide to living with guts and confidence and good manners from nice people who sometimes say fuck. Thank you, Amy. You're welcome. It was a lot of fun talking to you. It was great.

All right, folks. We'll be back in a little bit with Russell Brand. See ya. Thanks, dude.