The Joe Rogan Experience - #1437 - Stephen Dubner

Episode Date: March 5, 2020

Stephen Dubner is an award-winning author, journalist, and podcast and radio host. He is co-author of the popular Freakonomics book series and host of Freakonomics Radio and podcast available on Spotify.

Ready, young Jamie. Here we go. How are you, sir? I'm great, thanks. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. We were talking before about Adam Curry, who's just here, who has these crazy ear enhancements that are these software-based so he can tweak it and change levels and stuff like that.

And you were saying that you also have hearing, but you get it from rock and roll. Yeah. I mean, honestly, I've never been tested. I just know that when I'm out eating with my family or friends that everybody can hear everything and i can't hear anything so uh but no i yeah i played loud rock music for six seven eight nine years and uh yeah it it it does what they say it does yeah they know what they're doing those people that tell you not to do that but look i like the technology like i have older relatives who have a hearing aid or whatever they're called now hearing enhancement devices that are like light years better than they used

to be oh yeah yeah so i figure if i can hold out a couple more years mine are gonna like be so good they'll take out the garbage too the ones that adam has sound pretty fucking amazing um he said it just sounds incredible and he can actually tune into people that are 50 feet away 50 feet away having a conversation he can hear them and can you tune out people you don't like that's a good question i bet there is a way i bet he has various settings but i bet there's like a tone the world out setting i don't need to tone the world they're just some people sometimes you know yeah have you used any of those airpods that have the noise canceling technology oh uh not airpods but i wear

bow's noise cancelers almost every day um i wear them a lot you know when i started uh as a journalist in newsrooms uh this was whatever early late 80s early 90s um i didn't like a newsroom is an open place and a lot of people back then were on the phone doing your reporting it was pre-internet reporting right and uh i didn't you're a writer you're writing and you're editing and i i didn't understand how people could think with all this din going on i i couldn't do it so i started wearing just the good foam earplugs they're made by flints i think is the brand that i use they're kind of non-tapered and they're very thick. And if you compress them and put them in, it'll block out like 70, 80%.

So I've been shutting out the world for like 25 years now. So when the noise cancelers got good, I've embraced them. Yeah, some people need it though, right? They need that sound like at a coffee shop. Like they love to go to coffee shops and all the milling around actually helps their creativity. You know, we're doing an episode right now for Economics Radio on noise, basically as, you know, kind of we got into it

thinking about noise pollution, right? Because noise is a funny thing. It's what economists call an externality, a negative externality, meaning you can produce it and it affects me, but I can't charge you for it, right? It's like pollution. If you have a big factory, your pollution goes up, it blows over to someone else. That's an externality on them. So noise is that. But what's really interesting is that there's a huge variance in

how different people receive and perceive noise, as you just said. so some people really need it and want it for some it's a burden and then there's all these rather weird intricacies of noise like have you heard of misophonia you know what that is i have heard of it but i don't remember what it means it is an intensely negative reaction when you hear other people chewing or their mouths making any sound and it can be debilitating for people who have it. But then there's something called, I'm going to get it wrong, AMSR, ASMR, you know that? Yeah, there's all these videos online about that.

Right, right, right. So noise is... What does that stand for, though? I'd have to look it up. Automated sense something. Or someone would have to look it up. Someone. Response.

If someone screams in your ear unexpectedly and hurts your ear, that is a form of assault. You don't think of it that way, but if you saw a girl, she was standing there, and a guy ran up to her and just, in her ear, and she's like, and she falls down because her ear hurts. I agree. You can do that with sound what about when airports play cnn at blast volume yeah that's i mean is that a form of assault borderline what kind of sweet deal does cnn have with airports i think it kind of made everybody hate cnn blasting when you don't want to hear it that's right right it shows that it's a little bit annoying but it's

also it's like you don't want to be looking at all the world's problems when you're about to get on the most stressful thing that a person does. You have a flying, you have to self-medicate pretty heavily before flying, I understand. No, I don't have to. You enjoy it. I enjoy it. You enjoy it more. Yeah. Well, this is the way I think of it.

On a plane, one of two things gets, either I get some work done or I get some entertainment. I watch a movie on the laptop or I'll get some writing in. Right. Or I can get really, really high and then get on that and just freak the fuck out and make it, but go through a roller coaster ride of thoughts. And a lot of times I wind up writing too. Wait, when you get high, you have a worse experience on the plane than you're saying? No, no, no.

It's not worse. It's just scary. It's not worse. And scary is not worse? No, because there's benefits to it. There's benefits in terms of creativity and then insight. I have a whole bit about it, but it is based on the truth. I oftentimes take a heavy dose of edibles and then get on a plane.

the truth like i oftentimes take a heavy dose of edibles and then get on a plane in order to intentionally put yourself in a state that can be somewhat negative but also creativity i don't i see i don't use that word negative i don't think it is negative even when i'm freaking out like if i'm sitting in the chair and i'm like whoo and you know i'm looking out the window we're flying and i'm realizing we're 30 000 feet in the air and i'm you know really fucking high is this uh so i'm not a like a roller coaster personaster person, but is this a similar kind of like you put your intentionally put yourself in a scenario where you're going to heighten some senses? Is that the idea?

No, because I think a rollercoaster is just fun, right? It's just goofs. This is a, an essential thing you're doing. You're traveling to a place where you're going to, And as you're doing it, you're incredibly vulnerable. You're immobilized in a chair while you're going 500 miles an hour in the sky. You're like, whoa. Already you're a little weirded out if you look out the window. But now when you're really, really, really high, it puts you in this very strange state.

And you start thinking about your life. And you start thinking about how you talk to people, and you start thinking about things that you've learned, and documentaries that you find fascinating. You start dwelling on weird things. And then, you know, oftentimes I'll either watch something or I'll start writing. So I get something very productive out of what would be dead time. It makes me, it fires up my, whatever it is that creates creativity for me, whatever the source of it for me, for some reason it gets enhanced oftentimes by being on a plane on edibles. How predictable though is the experience?

Unpredictable. Right. So is that not a little frightening or no? Yes, that's the fun part. You're a lunatic. A little bit. But it's not, nobody gets hurt. That's the thing.

It's not like gets hurt that's the thing yeah it's not like a real fear and in the back of your mind you know this is just a yeah a physiological chemical response and i'm gonna exactly exactly and uh i mean that's what paranoia really is marijuana-based paranoia if i had a guess it's a hyper awareness that you're not not comfortable with and so in taking in all these things it's like if you just can't settle in, you're recognizing every threat that's around you all the time. The fact that a rock could come out of the sky. The fact that the tsunami could hit at any moment. The earth could shake.

What if a super volcano blows up? All those things that you know to be real all of a sudden get dragged into the forefront. You put yourself back into caveman mode. Like every rustle of grass is the lion who's coming to eat. all right let me ask you a question sorry i realize i'm not supposed to be asking you questions but i'm gonna ask you man let's do here's a question um let's say for people who don't use drugs yeah right but they hear you say this and like they say wow that is i recognize the value of putting yourself in a place emotionally, cognitively, kind of unleashing yourself or maybe putting yourself in a new place where you're going to have thoughts, big thoughts, maybe scary thoughts. Is there a way to do that that you know of without drugs?

Yeah, we were just talking about that with Adam, in fact. We were talking about holotropic breathing, and he has had some experiences with holotropic breathing. breathing and he has had some experiences with holotropic breathing it's like a meditation based breathing routine that uh if for whatever reason it activates psychedelic chemicals in your brain and you can really trip out and he was talking about how he's flying for like a half an hour and i've had various friends do it i've yet to experience it you've tried it no yet i've yet to experience it but i've had various friends who've done it who have had spectacular experiences like like full-blown mushroom experiences for several minutes and is it guaranteed like if you do the breathing is it guaranteed to get you to that state or no no i think you have to learn how to

not as reliable as drugs then right and also physically demanding like i think it takes a long time i think you have to work yourself up into this state where this stuff starts to happen and you also have to probably follow some routine that's tried and true. I don't know what that routine is. But I do know that people that I trust, including people like Adam, super smart guys, will tell you that for them it gave them the same experience as like taking a drug. All right. I'm going to look it up because I'm not big on drugs. I don't know why.

Just not. Because you're smart. No, I'm not. I'm also not judgmental about i have i know but no issue i'm not saying that you would be dumb to do them but i see you're a smart guy so if you're a smart guy and you see drugs you see a lot of people have problems with drugs and you're fine with reality yeah i mean i smoked dope in college and it just i mean also the dope was believe me son i smoke dope uh but uh also the dope was Believe me son I smoke dope But also

The dope was a different Caliber then It wasn't very good It wasn't very Predictable And it just I just had Bad experiences

So whatever I like I like whiskey Me too And I like the Predictability of Like Even like the difference

Between if I drink My Lafroig Is my favorite scotch Like and if there's not that And there's another That's the stuff we had the other day we had log volant log volant's good log volant's very close lefroig it's the it's the pd family some people don't like the pd stuff oh pd yeah that was the first time i think i've ever had anything like oh you've never had a day the bottle was half empty though so i don't know what the fuck happened i was probably so drunk that i was drinking it and not even realizing it was

it's a nice thing about scotch so you can sip it kind of forever yeah if you're you know that stuff too i would imagine is even better when you're gently sipping it because you're dealing with this really exotic flavor it's also good for you is it really well let me rephrase it's also good for you. Is it really? Well, let me rephrase. It's not bad for you. In terms of alcohol, I mean, beer, look, it depends how crazy you want to be about caloric consumption and so on. But beer has a lot of calories. Wine has a lot of sugar. And whiskey is actually pretty low-cal, low-sugar, just high-alcohol content. So the sugar works a little bit differently. But no, my doctor fully approves of a couple drinks a night yeah there's been research that shows that a couple of drinks a

night for most people is actually in fact my doctor who's a researcher as well she said that if you look at longevity um the people who have the the shorter life expectancies are the people who drink a lot not a surprise and none so it's the people who drink a lot, not a surprise, and none. So it's the people who drink from like one and a half to maybe two and a half, maybe a little bit more drinks a day, have the longest life expectancy. She doesn't know, though, whether it's the teetotalers. Why do they live shorter? It may be because they can't alleviate the stress, maybe. It could be that alcohol does have physiological benefits, we don't know. But the message seems to me that everybody should drink a little bit yeah there's got to be a benefit in relaxation there's got to be you know uh i was listening to your podcast on loneliness

and um and statistics it's really good i love your podcast by the way i'm a big fan thank you and um and that one You know Talking about loneliness And you know That whole correlation How they came to the conclusion That it's like 15 cigarettes a day But that a bad feeling That a bad feeling

Is bad for you And a good feeling Is probably good for you And the little trade off Health wise Like I kind of feel Like you can get Make that up in the gym

And like you can achieve Like a good balance There's something about Like having a drink Every now and then It's nice. You want to hug people. You want to have smiles.

It relaxes you. Also, this is a phrase that younger people will not remember, but actually I can't remember it either. So I think it's the social lubricant. That's what they used to call alcohol, right? And so the fact is that a lot of people have a lot of trouble communicating with other people, period. Whether it's loved ones, you either say you're too candid or you're not candid enough with strangers.

So a lot of people have a hard time being with other people kind of in the way they want to. And if alcohol can act as that kind of take the edge off, as they say, It's an interesting, but I'm always looking for ways. I'm always trying to isolate the places or the circumstances where I get good ideas. And the problem is it's very, it's unpredictable. Walking is the one thing that I found. And the fact is, is that writers throughout history, a lot of creative people throughout history have embraced walking. Now, in the old days, it was one of the few things that you kind of could do. You know, you weren't going to go out and, well, I guess you could have played golf or whatever, but people have been walking for a long time,

and they say that there's something about what the brain and body do in concert with each other on a walk, which is you're kind of mapping, you're kind of decoding, you're kind of figuring, but you're also getting some physiological stimulation. And i find that's one that's pretty good but i wish there was a thing i could do to make the good ideas flow because that's the hard part i don't i think if there was a thing other than show up and start writing if there really was a thing it would cheapen whatever the fuck it is that makes you have those weird thoughts that come across like where'd that come from yeah a. A gift from the heavens. Yeah.

No, the mystery is beautiful. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But walking, to me, I didn't really walk until really recently. I didn't go on hikes or anything until really recently. I usually would run. And running, a lot of times, you're just so tired, you're not having any good ideas.

You're just thinking like, I've got to get to this top of the hill. How long you lived in LA? Since 94. and before that uh i lived in this is my whole thing new jersey until i was seven san francisco from 7 to 11 florida from 11 to 13 boston from 13 to 24 new york from 24 to 26 ish 27 maybe before 27 I'm on the West Coast. Okay, so did you find that in Boston and New York, which are easily the best walking places of all those places you just said, did you walk a lot more there and did it change anything for you? No, I was busy.

There's no time to be. Well, I was 20, you know, my early 20s. You were working in clubs in New York? Yeah. That ain't right. I was working in clubs in New York and I age, right? I was working in clubs in New York, and I was doing a lot of road gigs, and I was playing a lot of pool, and I was hanging around with a bunch of comedians, and I wasn't going on any hikes.

Right. I would go to the gym occasionally and work out, but we were doing comedy. But as a grown-up, and I usually run with my dog. He loves to run, and I haven't been able to run recently because of a little injury. So for the last two months, I've just been walking with him and then hiking on the trails and he runs around and When I was doing I was realizing like I can listen to podcasts or I can listen to music or I could just do It silent and when I do it silent, it's like really interesting. There's there's there's inner dialogue that starts playing out It's like you're having a conversation with yourself that's a little therapeutic.

So I go on these hour walks with my dog. At the end of it, I feel like I've got a better handle on stuff. I wonder, what you're saying makes me think, and I hope it's not too late for our episode on noise, because this is actually a component that would be good to get at, is the way you just described quiet or solitude, whatever it is, right? I think almost everybody who hears that would say, oh yeah, I definitely see the value of that

because you need time to process your thoughts, to feel things, whatever. But it does make me wonder, the world is obviously more noisy now than it used to be. Yeah, way more. And I do wonder if you just get conditioned out of even thinking about that. Like my kids who are teenagers, like I don't see them ever having silence or solitude. Right.

And again, I don't want to be judging. I don't want to be the generation, because every generation thinks that what the next generation does is horrible. Like the people, you know, when the Rolling Stones came, the people who like Perry Como said, this is the worst music ever. And then the people after that said the Rolling Stones, you know, et cetera. But I do wonder how much we're losing by not having availability of that quiet. Because unless you build your life to have a lot of silence, which I do because I'm a writer and I sit alone all day, not many people get to have that. And I wonder what the loss is.

There's got to be something because there's a shift in attention and there's a shift in focus that's dramatic. We've gone from just looking at the world around us to fixated on a device. You look at people's phone time. A lot of times it's six hours in a day, just constantly on their phone and on the toilet, constantly on their phone when they go to get a coffee, on their phone at their desk, texting people while they're walking to the other office, they're texting and walking down the hallway. I mean, most people are on those goddamn things all day long. And there's for sure, you're putting energy into that little device which means you're not putting

energy into thinking without that device and though you might think of it as a well i'm just i'm still paying attention i'm just doing this but you're not you're not dedicating any resource to being bored and thinking about shit and just walking and talking to yourself yeah like thinking to yourself and there's something about like a long hike you take a dog for a couple mile hike where you're just walking and you hear crunch crunch crunch crunch and you're just thinking and no one's talking to you and you're not talking to anybody you're just walking and talking with your dog and then you're thinking about stuff in a way that is like a tangible sort of meditation on your life it's a it's a real moment and we don't value that

real moment we think of it almost as like wasted i don't not even listening to anything no good tunes but it's really like there's value in thinking and we we we haven't put a value judgment or a number judgment on that it's interesting some of the people you hear these days talking the most about uh really limiting or even forbidding their kids screen time is silicon valley executives oh yeah that's where you know they're smart yeah so you have to say like you know at a certain point you have to say okay the writing is on the wall here but on the other hand look every technology that's ever been invented people get scared of it people embrace it people trash it and, and then, you know.

For sure, for sure. There's always a thing where there's an example in history where people are wrong. But then there's the reality of what it is. What it is is an ever increasingly immersive experience that everyone is addicted to. And when you're walking through abucks and you see nothing but people on their phones like people in line around their phones people sitting down around their phones you go through a mall everyone's on their phone you go through a movie theater people can't put their fucking phone down while movies on people are driving they're on the other hand but you

got to consider the upsides too oh there's a lot of i mean even in the even in the environment you're describing that sounds like let's say starbucks everybody's on the phone you got to think well wait a minute maybe that person over there who looks like they're a slave to it maybe they are maybe they're sending a text to their grandma that they wouldn't have done they wouldn't have been able to do 10 years ago sure so that's the tricky part. I mean, that's why I like economists because economists are ruthless, bloodless. They almost don't know what humans are, but they're very good at measuring costs and benefits. And that's what I feel that our kind of political,

social media discourse is missing. People are all, for the most part, advocates or activists. They pick up up lane and they stay in it and they want to pave over the rest of everybody's lanes and make it theirs yes and it's not a good way to be no it's not you know that's another episode that i was listening to of yours recently about how hard it is to get people to change their mind on things and uh i forget who the expert was who was talking but it was a really interesting point that he had about the mind.

Like people say, change your mind. You don't really have a mind. You have the mind of the community. And if you step outside the beliefs of the community, it can be very bad for you in terms of like your personal connections with people. And I really enjoyed that episode. It's funny. Thanks.

It's a paradox though, because the way you just just said it like if you are in your tribe yes then even though it can be healthier for you and for presumably many other people for you to change your mind or at least think differently about things right you you risk losing credibility or whatever yeah well i mean some religions i mean that's how they keep you right you get ostrac ostracized. There's religions that we know of where if you decide to leave, you don't just get ostracized. You're literally, you have a death sentence. Like, now you've escaped our group. You're an outsider now. My father, who, both my parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism before they met each other.

Whoa. Yeah, it was very unusual. How did that happen? It's a long story. I'll tell you if you really want to know. But anyway, I'll do the short, what I'm getting to. And this was during the Second World War. They were both in New York, both first-generation American Jews.

That makes sense. They converted for different reasons from each other. Then they met. That makes sense. They converted for different reasons from each other. And then they met. My father's family was Orthodox. And his father, a guy named Shepsel Dubner, who'd come here when he was in his maybe late 20s from Poland. He still lived his every day in Brooklyn as if he were still in Poland.

He didn't change at all. When my father converted and his father found out, my father was in the war. He was overseas. He was home on leave, and his father was cleaning up, and from my father's pants that he'd left over a chair, rosary beads slipped out and fell on the floor. That's how his Jewish father, Shepsul Dubner, found out that his son had become a Catholic. So, what he did is he proceeded to sit shiva for him, the Jewish mourning ritual, where for seven days you mourn the dead.

He declared that he would never again speak to his son, and he forbade everyone in his family from speaking to his son. So, by the time I was born, I was the youngest of eight kids in this family because they'd become very Catholic. I was born I was the youngest of eight kids in this family because they'd become very Catholic I didn't know this whole family of my father's was unknown to me entirely so they did exactly what you're saying now holy shit yeah yeah that was what I thought too when I holy shit and my mother's did the same thing but it was less dramatic because her family was less religious. So they still didn't like at all that she had converted. But yeah. Do you have any children?

Yeah, I got a couple. I'm Jewish again, though. It's a long story. The first book I wrote, long before Freakonomics, was called Turbulent Souls, although it got then republished under a different title called Choosing My Religion. And it tells this story of my two parents and then me. I would love to hear that, but I just want to put in your head that what I was going to ask you is like, how could you imagine a scenario where you would be capable of doing that to your children? So, no chance.

No chance. No chance, but. It's so scary. Yeah, it's scary. It is. But on the other hand, I mean, this is what Freakonomics is. What I try to learn through doing Freakonomics is, you know, to measure the what and try to figure out the why, but then not be the judge who says that was terrible. This is wonderful because, you know, different people have, look, if Shepsel Dubner were here, we could ask him, what's your side of the story?

He could tell us a story that might convince us that, you know what, this son of his did a terrible thing to the family. He did a terrible thing, you know, he would say, how could it be that we Jews existed for generations and generations and generations when everywhere we lived, there was always someone trying to, you know, get rid of us. And then we finally come to America, you know, the land of freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom. And here, after generations and generations of forefathers fought to stay Jewish, here my son decides to become Catholic. What are you thinking? So, you know, everybody's got a perspective.

Everybody's got an emotional experience. So I try to respect that, but no, I would not do that to my children. I understand the outrage. I understand being upset. But I can't understand choosing that over your son and over the relationship you have with your son. Yeah. It's ridiculous. The saddest end of the story is then when that grandfather my grandfather who i never met

this was a long time ago uh my father's father my father died when i was very young so i didn't know the story either that was why i wrote this first book was to try to figure out this all the stuff i'm telling you now none of this i knew until i was in my like 20s when i was writing this book but when shepseldubner was dying of cancer in the maybe late 50s or so, a nephew of his who my father used to be very close with and who looked a lot like my dad, and this guy was maybe in his early 20s, late teens by now, he walked into the hospital room and Shepsildubner, on his deathbed really,

thought that that was my father, his son. My dad's name was Solomon. He called him Shloyma. And he was calling out to him, Shloyma, Shloyma, as if he was, you know, happy to see him. It wasn't him, though. It wasn't him, though. And my father didn't go visit his own father dying in the hospital because he'd been forbidden to go anywhere near. So it was terrible. So, look, this is why religion, I've been long fascinated by religion. And I think that, again, if you think about it the way that economists think about things, there are costs and there are benefits.

And it's complicated. I think you're 100% right. And I think that's hard for people to handle when people are hardcore atheists where they don't see any value in it whatsoever, even though people are, they're getting some sort of ethical value, moral value. And the way I always put it is like, it's like a scaffolding to live your life by. You can live within these confines and it really kind of makes sense if you follow it loosely that we're doing to try to, for the benefit of community. And it's also like a

real community sense that comes from meeting in Sunday with all those other, or whatever day it is with your religion. And you meet in a group of other people that are also in the community, and you all basically are saying together that we should do good things and be good to people and treat each other the way God would want us to. All that has undeniable benefits. And anybody that says differently is like you're deluding yourself. Like your points, the atheists who are hardcore, who make points about the preposterous nature of a lot of religious texts, they're on the money. But it doesn't mean that it doesn't give people a benefit and that I couldn't even disagree with them continuing it. Because there's a lot of people that benefit greatly from religion. religion someone wrote to us after that uh loneliness episode came out um and said how did you fail to write about uh this supposed epidemic of loneliness without addressing

the huge decline in organized religion in america which i thought was a very good piece of criticism that would have been a good because you're right it's a community yeah one other thing i would add to the list that you provided of what it can give is humility, right? Because, you know, if you have an image of some superior being, God, deity, whatever you want to call it, you kind of understand that one mortal is, you know, the world does not revolve around me. The other thing I would say, and look, it's hard for me to scientifically, logically embrace a lot of the arguments that a lot of religions make, especially about things like the afterlife, right? That said, even to an atheist, I would suggest one way to think about it is if someone does believe in those rewards or in economic terms, we're talking about them as incentives, even if it's a placebo effect. In other words, if I'm encouraged to treat other people well on the chance that if I do so, I have a reward, an eternal reward, hey, that's not a bad reason to incentivize people to do well.

Sounds like a nice justification for one of them psychic houses. You drive by, they got the neon sign. They're helping people. They're giving people a sense of what the future's going to be like. How do you know they're not? It might be. Imagine if that's where the real psychics are,

those neon signs. Maybe that's where God lives. It could be. I went to one of them in Brooklyn, by the way. The only one I ever went to, I was in Brooklyn for an audition

in the early 90s and I'm like, why not? Fuck it. It was like 10 bucks or something. I walked into this lady. She was wrong about everything. She thought I had a a brother she thought I was trying to get into the family

business you're really tight with your dad no I don't even know him like it was it was it was a disaster all right so maybe you didn't you need we need like a yelp for psychics and that one wouldn't have been the good one yeah I think if we're gonna do something like that we bring in James Randi we have him go by the rules and someone like pen gillette who will be able to because he understands all those carny tricks where they do where they can pretend that they're psychic just by leading you into questions but you know what's funny i think he's a pretty strongly professed atheist right right but somehow i find his talking about the subject incredibly like embracing like he doesn't right because it's a smart way of

doing it he understands he's a generous person he is he's a really really nice person and that's even if he disagrees with you on something he's he'll laugh and joke around but he's um he's a nice person like he'll he'll let you have these conversations and and not like some people try to shove their atheism down your throat and like mock you and i just don't all you're doing is reinforcing the ideas of these people because you're acting like an asshole so they're like well that i'm now connecting atheism with assholes so fuck atheists fucking assholes you know then that's what people do it's like a natural but if someone's nice you know um did you ever, do you know the story of Daryl Davis?

Daryl Davis is a gentleman who's been on this podcast before, and he is a musician by trade, but he has converted over 200 different guys to leave the KKK and Nazi organizations. And he's converted it by becoming their friend. Because he was doing a show, this guy came i'm butchering it and i'm sorry daryl but this is what he said on the podcast i'm sure he'd do a better job of telling the story but he was at a show and he was playing in this band and this guy said you were really good you know and he sat down with the guy and the guy said i never had a drink with a black guy before he's like how is that possible and he shows him his card he's in the kkk and so he's

like he goes well how you're having a rational conversation with me a normal conversation with me like do you you really think that black men are evil or black men are dumb and and they have this conversation a civil conversation and then he gives the guy his uh i think he gave him his phone number said uh i'll call you when i'm back in town if you want to have this conversation again. And so then they become friends. And so they go back and forth for like months hanging out. And then three months or so into the friendship

the guy brings his KKK outfit and he goes, I want to give this to you because I'm never wearing it again. He goes, I'm done. And from being this guy's friend. Unreal. And so then he meets a bunch of other ones. And he starts talking to them. And just nice as pie. Just nice, friendly, intelligent, super articulate, too.

So it's hard to describe him as dumb when he's way smarter than you. Right? You're talking to him, and he's so eloquent. So he converts more and more and more. He converted a guy who was a Nazi. He's converted a bunch of people. It's more than 200 now. And he continues to do it. And there's some pieces bunch of people. It's more than 200 now. And he continues to do it.

There's been, there's some pieces about it online, but hearing him say it and hearing him talk about it is the most amazing. He just, he grew up in a way that he didn't really experience racism until he came to America. I think he's like six years old. He's from Italy, right? That's where he was from before that, up until then, I think. Somewhere where he just from before that, up until then, I think. Somewhere where

he just didn't experience it. And then when he was a little boy, people were throwing things at him in a parade and he had no idea. He couldn't understand it. He didn't know. And they had to pull him aside and say, it's because you're black. He's like, what? He couldn't believe it. So because the fact that he didn't have it in his early childhood, and then he had it when he was a young boy and realized how crazy it was that he didn't experience it in his early childhood, and then he had it when he was a young boy, and realized how crazy it was that he didn't experience this before this one moment, and became obsessed with it. It was Italy. His Wikipedia says he grew up all over the world,

but when he came back when he was 10, he was in an all-white Cub Scout pack in Massachusetts. Yeah, so that's what it was. So he was 10 years old. Man, if you want to pick somewhere to experience kind of straight- up racism, Massachusetts is a good place to start, I would say. There's definitely some spots. I have some thoughts on that. I feel like there's that heirloom civilization that still landed there from boats just a couple of decades ago.

I mean, my grandparents came over in the, I think they were in the the 20s or the 30s from italy and ireland everybody came from somewhere right there's mostly most of them three of them came from italy one of them came from ireland so i'm three quarters italian but it's the the families of those people were risk-taking savages they didn't even have a video to watch right they just jumped in a fucking boat and hoped america was better and then when they got there they got checked in at ellis island they then they started working in factories and scratching and clawing and there's just a lot of struggle that's still in that part of the world that you when you come to california one of the first things you feel is like a lighter a lighter sense of discourse than the east coast

is the east coast i always felt like people had their guard up a little bit more a little bit more tense a little bit more like what the fuck did you say there was a little bit more of that a little bit more sketchy people just the the echoes of the savage past is still in the soil you know i i hear you but there's also so the thing that i like about new york i don't mean to trash california i like california a lot i love new york but man when i'm in california first of all it feels much more like a foreign country to me than any other place in america maybe what makes it seem like a foreign country um it feels uh because i feel people have a manner and a style that is totally divorced from this intensity that i'm used to right in new york now i grew up on a farm in upstate new y, so I grew up not in the hurly-burly. New York City was scared because my parents, once they converted and they became Catholic, they needed to have someplace where you could have tons of kids.

So we grew up in the middle of nowhere. So I grew up – I was a farm kid. And so the intensity of a city scared me until ultimately I moved to New York for a variety of reasons. And then I caught the bug. And now I love cities. So I love California. But when I come here, I feel like it's running on a different voltage. You know?

Yeah. And I am envious of people's ability to run like that. Like they seem, right, like their shoulders. Like you look at me. I'm sitting here. My shoulders are always up to my ears. Like kind of just a built-in tension and i feel like i thrive on it maybe i do i mean things have worked out okay but uh like i said when i look at look at the way people are sort of congenitally relaxed i envy it on the other hand, I think that that intensity produces some things that I like a lot.

Like I like, I also like the environment of a, you know, of university campus. To me, the tricky part is there's that fine line between intensity and competition that treats it like a zero sum game. So I don't like to be around environments where people are trying to win so that they can beat somebody else, except in sports. That's why sports are awesome. Sports are a good proxy for life.

People can be very competitive. You win or lose. You go home. You come back and do it again. Because you've lost, it doesn't make you a bad person. Right. No, sports are very valuable, I think, for people.

Also for war. Yeah. You know, I i mean it's well that was football yeah that's the reason why i invented it right you know about population densities right that you know you can accurately depict or detect how many people live in a given area by putting a camera on one red light and then a camera on another red light and then as the people walk by measure how fast they walk no kidding yeah. Yeah. I didn't know that. And when they do that, if they do that...

I assume faster is denser. Yes, faster is denser. Also, how many syllables that they say per sentence, how quickly they say those syllables, that there's actually a cadence, a speed, that an uptick...

What are you talking about? What are you talking about, John? I don't believe a word you're saying. What the fuck are you saying, bro? There's a... People get to the chase, cut to the chase. And I think that that urge to walk faster, that urge to talk faster, What are you talking about? What are you talking about, John? I don't believe a word you're saying. What the fuck are you saying, bro? People get to the chase, cut to the chase. And I think that that urge to walk faster, that urge to talk faster is an energy. And that energy, we're looking at it in terms of its results, right?

The results are you can actually detect. If you know the formula, you look at a camera here and a camera there. You know a timer. So someone walked from here to there. You add it all up, and you guess Like really accurately Within a million people Pretty neat Someone lives Yeah

I think it's because There's energy That comes out of cities My friend Jeff Lives in New York My manager He's lived there forever And he loves it

He goes I'd never leave New York I love New York The fucking energy of this city Because it gives him juice Right I think Not for everybody

We should say Right Not for everybody Some people I think Just get weirded out should say. Right. Not for everybody. Some people, I think, just get weirded out by it and they need to be alone. And some people like a yard. And some people like peace and quiet. But some people live for that.

Fuck you. They live for being stacked on top of a building with strangers below them. And everyone's all together in this hive feeding off each other. You know what's interesting is, you know, how old are you? 52. Okay. So I'm 56 you look great thank ditto uh so we're the same roughly generation and we remember that back when you know computerization was starting and the internet was starting that all the predictions

were that you know now anybody can do anything from everywhere so nobody's gonna have any reason to have to live anywhere and cities cities are just going to empty out. Yeah, I remember that. Exactly wrong. Around the world, the more digital we've gotten, in fact, the urban population now, the share of the human population that's urban is higher now than it's ever been in the history of the world. Wow. It's unbelievable. So what that says to me is, and this is not about New York versus California anymore, what that says to me is, even when you can engage with people remotely or have a lot of space, whatever, there's something about humans wanting to rub up against each other

physically, intellectually, et cetera, that is incredibly strong. Undeniable. That's why going to live, see live music and things like that, it's a shared experience. You're all seeing something live. There music and things like that it's a shared experience you're all seeing something live there's a benefit to that and i always tell people like if you watch a comedy special on television you that comedy special is at the very best 70 as good as seeing it live it's never 100 because you're not there so it might be great because it's a funny person but you're missing for sure at least 30 and And then when you're live, there's like this intangible quality. You feel it in the air.

When you're all laughing, there's a buzz that everybody gets. You're laughing together. Yeah, like right now. It reminds me of I once watched somebody else's wedding video. I can't remember the circumstances. Did you get forced at gunpoint? It was pretty close to that. And they said it was somebody showing me like their sibling's wedding video because they

thought it was, they said it was such an amazing experience. It was so warm. I was watching it and I felt like I was watching a detergent commercial, like no emotional connection because I wasn't there. I wasn't there. That's the worst thing that people make you do. When they make you sit and watch. The only thing worse is someone who's in a really bad band and they want you to listen to their album in front of you.

And you have to sit there and go, dude, you're making me do this. When I played music, I never – so first of all, when I started in this band, we were in North Carolina and my family was mostly up in new york state and so on so they weren't close but then when we started to travel and tour and and whatnot we would get within their range and they'd come to see us these are like my older siblings who i love they're great people but i would say to them i don't think this really is going to be for you it's going to be pretty loud raucous rock and roll a little bit punky a little bit whatever and they're like no no i want to come see little brother. So then they'd see a show. I remember this one show we played at the old Ritz in New York. And I remember my brother, who's a musician, by the way, and a very good musician, but much more refined than I was. He came up and he said,

you guys really looked like you were having fun up there. Like weren't i wasn't you had so much uh energy up there so yeah the difference between the experience from the inside and perceived experience was a massive gap yeah for sure yeah going to see something live like that where it's bad is actually extra super painful like when you watch a comedian bomb on stage and you're in the audience you're feeling agony like you're mad at this person for putting you through this like oh my god no you can't be mad at him though don't you isn't it more empathy than anger for sure yeah but sure but there's a lot of anger too like because you are you are being tortured like imagine if and it's not really physical pain but there is a certain level of

emotional pain you experience when someone's bombing. When someone's in front of you, you're like, oh, God. Especially me, because I've done stand-up for so many years. I know what it's like to bomb. I've bombed. So I see someone bombing, I'm like, yikes, I've got to get out of here. I can't take it. It's almost like my guts are on fire.

The thing I always wondered about comics is why they don't cheat more. Because laughter is plainly very contagious right yeah so every time i've seen someone bomb i always felt like if one or two people had started going with it laughing responding you mean cheat more by packing the audience something something or just putting your iphone in the audience and having it start laughing. I don't know how to. There's a lot of ways to cheat. Because I've always thought that it's such an obvious dynamic that laughter is very, very contagious. But even like you see kids in school when they're supposed to not be laughing and one kid laughs, they all can't stop. It's this incredibly contagious behavior.

I think if you did pipe in laughter, first of all. I'm not saying, saying well maybe i am saying that yeah you might you did kind of say with the phone in the audience okay that's most drastic let's say you plant people in the audience right you could probably swing things in a way from a really bad set to maybe an okay set but you're never going to make it funny see all the best way to do that is to just make it funny actually because yeah yeah because to bother to be good that's not that cheating thing's not helping you ever it's like it's going to get in the way you make a good point learn anything from it it's like people that steal other people's jokes they never learn how to write you know they

they you have to figure out the language of it and And when you're up there, if you're just doing fake laughs in the background to juice it up, you're not going to know how to get real ones. You're going to feel weird about it. Also, you're going to know that you're doing it. And the audience is going to know that something's wrong. All right, so maybe I'm not talking about cheating per se. You're making sense. As having some – and I'm sure every comic does this already, so it's not like I'm telling anybody anything, but having something in your pocket that's going to get them on your side, even if for a little while, just to get the momentum going in your way.

We certainly do have some bits that you know work. We certainly do have some bits that you know work. Because like when you say, like if you bomb or somebody else bombs, you could give exactly the same set an hour later to a slightly different crowd and it would go great, right? Sometimes. Sometimes you're bombing because you get off on a bad start. Like you'll come up with, like the real sketchy time is when you're writing new material. That's touch and go.

The way I always like to describe it, it's like you have no weapons like you're going in a fight but everything's made out of rubber like fuck like nothing's good yet right like when you you have new material you have a stack of notes and that's like four or five premises one or two of them might be any good but i gotta go through those other premises that suck multiple times to find out for sure that they're no good all right let me ask you a question. When that's happening to you, do you learn over time to not let it hurt your ego to the point where you're going to get even worse? In other words, if you're not doing well,

what you need to do is you need to say, I've got this material, I need to work on it because it's going to get better. But I could imagine that if you start bombing, what happens is you just feel so hurt that you get worse and worse as you go how do you fight against that yeah it's a psychological mind game for sure you you definitely could look and i've seen it happen to comedians while they're writing a whole new hour it's almost like they they lose their glow as a human because they're just eating shit all the time. And we get away from them like they're diseased.

Really? Like if someone bombs and they come off stage, you get away from them because we know what it's like. I don't even want to hug them. Does it feel contagious? A little bit, yeah. You got to get out of the room. One of the worst things that people do, and I don't know why they do it, but a lot of comedians like to bring terrible comedians with them on the road so that they look like a hero. It's a really sneaky move.

And they literally hire people that don't work any other way. Is that a bad idea ultimately? It's a terrible idea because you want everybody to have fun. And if you make them sit through 20 minutes of someone who's terrible, you're torturing them.

Do you end up lowering your own standard because you're around shitty people? You ruin the vibe of the show. It just fucks it up if especially if you're doing it on purpose you know there's a thing that's going on on stage that's not quantified and is that there's a mass hypnosis that's happening when someone is killing for me as an audience member my recognition of this is as a person who performs it and also as an audience member when i'm an audience member and someone's killing i'm letting them think for me right i'm not even thinking i'm just like letting them take me down a trail like say like david tell david tell was at the uh improv

the other night we worked together and he was fucking amazing i mean like the one of the best sets i've seen from him and he's always been been amazing, but God, he was on fire. And we were all, it was me, my friend Owen Smith, and Tony Hinchcliffe, we were sitting in the back room, and we were watching Dave, and we were in a trance. We were just laughing. We were letting him think for us. You know what I'm saying?

Like, he's doing all the thinking. We were just on a little ride that Dave's taking us on this ride. And as an audience member, I recognize that. There's a mass hypnosis. There's a thing that happens where we all get into this mindset. And if someone has like really well-crafted material like Dave Attell and they take you on it, you let them. You're like, wee! Mitch Hedberg's going to take us on a ride.

You know what I mean? You think the same thing happens when a politician is speaking? That's a good question. For sure, Trump has a lot of elements of stand-up comedy in his routines for sure 100 if you watch his most recent speech where he's making fun of joe biden saying 150 million people were killed with guns and he's like i looked at the first lady i mean he's literally doing stand-up who does a very good job by the way i looked at the first lady i'm like where are all these bodies where are all these 150 billion people? That's half the population.

Like, they just let him say. Nobody talks to him. He's like, hello, Idaho. And you're like, you're in Iowa. Oh, like he's doing stand-up. So someone took it, and they made a video saying Donald Trump at the Apollo. And so they put him doing this speech with audience reaction from people watching stand-up comedy and laughing and a laugh track over it. And it seems real.

It seems like he's a comic. What about Bernie? Bernie, for sure, is a powerful speaker, but I don't think he's that funny. I mean, he'll say a funny thing every now and then. Right, but are they the same? When you talk about going along for the ride, they're doing the thinking for you. It's such an interesting idea. Bernie is a trustworthy person.

People trust him. They see him up there. He's not polished. The thing about Bernie, it's like when he's saying things, there's ums and there's uhs. Yeah, but Trump's not polished either. It's a different kind of polish. What do you mean? Trump is a polished performer.

He's like a comic doing scat. He's like that you know it's like yeah i'm telling you that's exactly what it is it's an amazing it's an amazing thing he's like filling in the blanks loading up his weapon for the next line that he's gonna throw and call crazy hillary lock her up it's stand-up it's basically like he's doing stand-up that's why biden is so fucked he's so fucked because he can't talk right he has a really hard time talking he keeps screwing things up and he and it's a real bad horse to bet on because he's an older guy you're still a bernie guy i love bernie right i love the guy i love what he represents yeah like i don't know if he's going to be able to get anything

implemented but i love what he represents is a man who wants to do good for people that don't have much. That's a sentiment. There's a quality to that that I think helps us as a community, as a community of the United States. If we have this agreement, hey, let's see what we can do. Let's see what we can do to balance things out and for the downtrodden, for the people that are hurting concentrate on them and he's made that a huge priority of his life and always has and to deny that it's like look what he's trying to do i don't know if he can get any of this shit passed i don't think anybody knows until he gets in there but the idea is we're saying we want better for people who don't have much yeah that's what he stands for

and you can call it democratic socialism but it's an idea the idea is like helping people just helping people helping people you don't even know what's in the world a little bit better place for the working person what's then the corollary what's the trump idea and why did it succeed bunch of pussies out there trying to ban free speech a bunch of pussies out there come on fuck america's number one fuck yeah fuck yeah there's also he doesn't talk like a politician you know he talks about china you go to them listen motherfuckers when they charge you 25 and everybody's like yeah more stand-up it's more stand-up right it's way more entertaining he's the most entertaining forget about value judgment of who he is as a person.

Without a doubt, the most entertaining president that's ever lived. And not even close. There's not even a close second. He buries all of them. And he drags them into his fight. Even Hillary is now talking differently about other people. She said about Bernie, nobody liked him. She would have never said that.

Before Donald Trump, she would have never uttered those words. His victory over her is deep in her DNA now. And she's starting to exhibit some of his patterns. By saying nobody ever liked him, how could you say that? What kind of crazy? Of course, millions of people like him. They're voting for him. Millions, millions of people.

To say nobody liked him or nobody liked him in the same course of course people like him and then they started writing i like bernie this hashtag i like bernie start popping up like that behavior is a direct reaction to her getting pounded on by donald trump through the entire campaign all right so let me ask you this you've talked to a lot of people from all different realms in here, right? If we can agree, let's say, that being entertaining is not a great prerequisite or qualification for being president, if we can agree on that, which seems pretty easy. Yes, very easy to agree on. the media sphere, putting something in the drinking water to let people, to encourage people to have a little bit more of what you're after, whether it's compassion, whether it's understanding, whether it's balance, whether it's moderation. In other words, why is the entertainment force

winning right now? And if you don't like that notion, what can be done about it? Well, the entertainment force is, for whatever reason, is being portrayed through Trump only. See, he's not a politician. He's a guy who's a media star, and he's been a media star for decades. He knows how to manipulate the media. He knows how to sit on the letterman couch and kill. He's been doing it for a long time. He's very comfortable being in front of cameras none of those

people have those kind of skills and nobody thought of it as a skill they thought of a politician being able to do their politician stuff when this guy's calling you crazy ted or lion ted or you know lion hillary he just makes up names for you sleepy joe i mean and i'm smiling because it's funny because he's good at it he's funny he's good at it. He's funny. He's good at it. Here's the problem. You shouldn't have a goddamn popularity contest to see who controls thermonuclear weapons. That's fucking stupid. It's stupid to allow people to vote based

on a popularity. But it's the system we've got. So that's what I'm asking you is what now? Well, the system's only a couple hundred years old. I know. Or even this kind of I mean, the way that these elections are. I don't think it was. I mean, if you look at Lincoln-Douglas debates, those were actual debates with two people. And they took for hours and hours and hours. It has evolved a lot.

But I mean, let's say that you're not happy with the way it is. And there's a lot of people, even there are people who like Trump quite a bit on some dimensions who are very troubled by other dimensions. So there's a lot of people out there who are open to like, no, let's try to adjust the thinking. Let's try to change our minds. Let's try to not be influenced as much by what we're being influenced by. Do you have any pointers? The real problem that we're having is this tribal battle of left versus right.

And the strongest voices on the left, the loudest voices, and the most extreme oftentimes are the worst representations. And the same with the right. The loudest, most extreme team members. They're the people at the front of the line. Fuck you. We're going to kick their ass. Like, is that guy with me? Am I on this team?

Fuck. Are we in a war now? We're in a war with the left. Like, that's what it is you know and um and there's also these ideas that we have that are cemented in stone that you know if you're a left-wing person you believe in x y and z this is your doctrine if you're right-wing where most of us have like a little bit of this yeah maybe you believe in the second amendment maybe you believe in the first amendment maybe you think that maybe you know uh maybe we should incorporate a lot of things we do with fire department and you know and do that to schools and do that to housing and do that to make sure that all the the stuff's covered make housing like a an important part of a civilization like for everybody we did a piece uh freakonomics radio piece a year or two ago called america's hidden duopoly and it was about the democratic and republican party basically acting like pepsi and coke right they acting like Pepsi and Coke, right?

They kind of divide and conquer the market, and they've built an industry that is incredibly valuable. The thing that's amazing to me is this. Trump won the presidency as the Republican that the RNC most wanted to get rid of. Bernie, last time around, was the Democrat that the DNC wanted to get rid of. They lost by getting their candidate Hillary in. This time, Bernie, who may very well become the candidate, is again the party that the DNC is out to get.

So what does it say that you've got a duopoly? Literally, the machines running the system that we kind of let ourselves get manipulated into buying. Like you said, I've never understood. My mom, my mom and dad were Democrats for a long, long time, typical Catholic. Okay. Maybe not so typical because they were former Jewish Catholic, typical Catholic working class, big family, meat and potatoes issues, no brainer that they're Democrats. Okay. And then, but my mom, as a devout Catholic, she started the local Right to Life chapter in upstate New York where we lived.

New York State had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. So she was fighting that fight early. When that happened and the Democrats lined up in favor of legalized abortion, she switched parties. Everything else about her was still mostly Democratic, but she had to become a Republican. Because of life. And that's another powerful one that gets integrated into the right.

And it happens to all of us, though. There's one issue that kind of sets people off, and then they have to join the team that they may, you know. With a lot of people I know, it's the Second Amendment. People that are afraid of their house being broken into and they don't have anything to protect their family and they'd otherwise be kind of libertarianist democrats yeah and it's almost always guys who have kids yeah once you have kids and you think about someone breaking in your house and and doing something to your family you know you get real scared and then you want to get guns all right

let me ask you a slightly different question or it's actually a totally different question um as i'm sure you know um if you look at any indicator of like prosperity longevity health literacy access to food etc humankind is way better off than it's ever been yes no without question on average there's still a lot of people with a lot of trouble there's still parts of the world that are still in bad shape and so it's trending in an amazing direction. Amazing direction. Why are we so unhappy? I don't think we know how to manage our life correctly, and life doesn't come with a guidebook.

It doesn't come with, when you're in this condition, seek out these remedies. Start exercising. Get together with your friends. Tell them you love them. Meet up and have dinner and hug each other. well sleep well drink water you know there's a whiskey a little bit of whiskey too right and also you know so many of us have a bad head start like you're starting off you know like how about your dad he'd been growing up getting kicked out of the family.

Yeah. I mean, and then starts a family of his own where you don't even know your grandfather. I mean, it's madness, right? Madness. So you're coming out of this stressful pocket or maybe your dad goes to jail or maybe your mom dies when you're young. All these things that happen to people where they have this bad start, right? And then they develop defense mechanisms to deal with other insecurities and they get around similar minded people and you curse the world and fuck everybody and fuck the

police and fuck the this and then you get in these communities of people that think the same way and then maybe there's gangs and maybe there's drugs and maybe there's crime and despair and sadness and maybe just negative people maybe there's none of the above maybe there's no danger it's just fucking annoying every day people complaining about shit and you're stuck in the mud of humanity with people it's real hard to engineer 350 million people out of that but for yourself you can take actions to make your life better and if everybody did that if everybody took actions to make their life a happier experience by doing those things by exercising eating well hugging friends and enhancing community just trying to be nicer to people everybody did that would be a massive shift so let me ask you this i feel like the

list you just gave is basically my list too right i try that's what I try to do pretty much. And they all sound attractive. Yes. So why is it so hard for so many people to do it? Because people are lazy. And the reason why we're lazy is because it's very difficult for us to waste resources on something that we don't currently do. And even though we know something to be true, that if you do this physical thing. Long-term benefits are. Yeah, we know that.

But short-term, it's like, I don't want to do it right now. Right. this physical thing. Long-term benefits are. Yeah, we know that. But short-term, it's like, I don't want to do it right now. Right. Because your body craves relaxation because it used to be a very rare thing to achieve. All right.

So if you could pick one thing, let's say I'm a person- I would never. Why would I pick one thing? It's a comprehensive approach. Well, the first thing. Let's say that I feel like, you know what? Society says everything's great. I'm unhappy.

Exercise. Financially. Okay. Why is exercise the one because you're blood pumping right you release natural endorphins and you legitimately feel better and i also think of the i think about this all the time i think of your body as almost like the energy in your body is like a battery and it requires a certain amount of use and when you don't use it it overflows and then you get weird behavior and overreacting to things and you almost like

get antsy you got to get up and move cognitively it's a big i find what do you do with let's say you have to take two long flights let's say you're unable to exercise for like you know 24 36 hours you're fine you don't have no i mean you you do not you don't know really days off yeah yeah it's fine it's fine the whole key is just to develop regular habits. If you have to take two or three days off, it doesn't matter. The whole key is just regular habits. What's your sleep regime? Well, I have a whoop.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And my whoop tells me every night how much I sleep. Yeah. And has it improved? Has the feedback improved your sleeping? Yeah, because it made me accountable. Like, I was like, ah, I get like seven, eight hours every night. Eh.

I was getting like four and five. And was like oh you lying bitch so it made me it made me concentrate more on getting what do you do to sleep better or sleep well it's just a matter of time it's a matter of when did you change like do you sleep with earplugs eye mask anything like that i don't have a problem sleeping okay i sleep well you just problem is doing things and waking up early and i realize like okay if i'm gonna wake up that early i gotta go to bed earlier yeah i really need to you're not a napper no i don't nap how come um i just never enjoy it really yeah you never tried it no i have no but it doesn't work uh like when i'm done i'm done do you drink caffeine yes have you ever tried the caffeine nap do you know about that yes yes yeah, I know what it is. But that's not my problem.

All right. My problem is when I shut down, I shut down. So a 20-minute nap becomes eight hours of sleep. I'm not interested in that. I got you. I'll be laying down for hours. I don't mean to criticize your productivity. No, it's fine.

You're plenty productive, plainly. But there's a balance. There's a balance between being productive and being happy, right? And I think it's hard to find that balance because we look at like the numbers that come in, whether it's money or productivity or, you know, the number of things you've been able to create. And you think of that as being like, but look, I can get so much done. But if you maybe got less of those numbers, but more of the numbers in terms of the amount of sleep you got, you would enjoy the whole overall experience more. numbers in terms of the amount of sleep you got you would enjoy the whole overall experience more i worry that uh i think for a lot of people who are successful in different realms could be sports business entertainment whatever success is intoxicating yes and then you want more of it

right and then it becomes very easy to see that as the main goal at the expense of loved ones other people i'm looking for uh i'd like to know how and i know some people do manage that really well and i know some incredibly successful people are incredibly generous in spirit to people around them but i find that's pretty rare i find that success often is driven by a sort of ambition that's a little bit unseemly and i'd like to know how to deal with that a little bit better well it doesn't have to be but it seems like it would be if it's a number game right if success meaning like you're in a business you're trying to sell the most placards or whatever like whatever it is you know you have this thing in your head and like you're really driven i just say if you're selling placards, you're already starting behind.

Okay, widgets. You're selling the most widgets and you have this goal in your mind of being number one and you're obsessed and everyone's going to tell your story. Oh, Bob, he wouldn't let it go. Every time I got there, he was in the office and he left after everybody. But look, now Bob's got a fucking yacht and he's also got a pacemaker, right? Bob's ready to tick over any minute now. But also, I think the thing is in pursuit of success i think what often happens that i've seen in people i know and in people i don't know but i've read about is that your moral compass

starts to shift and you're willing that's not necessarily true there's a lot of people that are successful and we're only talking about business, right? We're not talking about athletics, are we? I'm thinking of some people in academia who, you know, even though the average person may not consider the stakes in academia super high. But, like, if you get in a big university department and you start to write papers and get published and then get grants and accolades and so on, you're on a trajectory that's very intoxicating. then get grants and accolades and so on you're on a trajectory that's very intoxicating and then all of a sudden i think it's uh it's more i think it's tempting or not even tempting i don't think it's even a conscious decision you start to make decisions that are not as sound not as morally acceptable as you would have made five years ago when you were starting out and i don't like i see that happening a lot i see it in media i see people cutting corners i see it in business um the academia i don't have any experience with but i i would imagine that would be particularly frustrating because those are the people that you call upon to

be the objective purveyors of knowledge these are the people that are talking to you about this because they're dedicated to being intellectual exactly you don't want to think of them as being a social how strange is this though how strange is it that we talk about economists for just for one example but it's a good example because it's a good example because they're the most involved in policy and so on there are democratic economists and there are republican economists you know that shouldn't make sense right right but it does there's a list that when you're if you're a republican and you win the White House and you start to assemble your Council of Economic Advisors, you get the list of the Republican or the conservative economists. Now, I'm not saying that's a terrible thing, you know, per se.

But the fact is, is that, like we said before, if you're in the tribe, if you're for one thing, you've got to be in for everything. And that's not a good way. Much of what goes on between the two parties, ultimately, in a lot of the cases that we've experienced have been about perception like there's a difference between the perceived actions of barack obama versus the perceived actions of george bush like even though like things that would freak people out about bush people didn't really seem to budge on with obama like drone attacks right like a lot of people killed in drones attacks that were innocent and that happened during the bush administration and happened during obama but people particularly on the left treated the bush administration's

drone attacks very differently than they treated when obama was doing it they seemed to like let it go because it didn't fit with their narrative of the evil you know military industrial complex influenced president who only gives a fuck about money it didn't didn't seem to jive with that so they let it go and they because it's a team thing they were they were rooting for their team to be good so they listen my team's made some fucking slips up this year but i'm with the yankees all the way yeah it's basically what you're doing you're just doing it for the democrats exactly yeah if you're if you're watching a game, let's say you're watching a football game in a bar and you're with, let's say I'm a Steelers fan. So let's say I'm watching with Steelers fan.

We're playing whoever, Ravens. The minute there's a call, let's say a pass interference call, the room divides equally because one side knows that it's a bad call and the other side knows that. And these are people who if you took them out out of a football context they're totally going to have different feel they're not going to experience everything the same way and even if it's a bad call as long as it's for your team absolutely yeah we got it and once in a while if it's such a bad call you say oh we got we got lucky there but almost never it's amazing it's part of the fun in it right the tribal fun I agree and that's why sports

again it's like a low stakes you know replica of life and war and all that stuff relatively

so I'm totally in favor of that I am too but I think it does show how kind of you know suggestible we all are super suggestible and how strange it is

that you could make this format like football you know a ball across the line represents a victory, right? And we've decided to like make huge amounts of money attached to this game and then fill up the biggest arenas we have. We have enormous 50,000 plus arenas of people cheering when a ball goes across the line.

There was this story I read about some rabbi in Europe 100, 200, 300 years ago, something, and he wanted his students at this yeshiva to just study more. And when they would have a break, they would always want to go outside and play football, soccer, they called football. And he would say to them, you know, I don't understand. The treasures of Torah are so huge. They're eternal. Why do you want to go out and kick around a ball? And they said, no, no, no, you don't understand, Rabbi. It is so much fun. It's got a little competitive. It's just great.

He said, they said, you know, just come outside and watch it once and we think you'll see how it works and how great it is. So, this old rabbi comes out once at lunchtime and he's watching the two teams with the ball going back and forth. They come back in after lunch and he says, I think I've solved the problem for you. If you get two balls instead of one, you won't have to be fighting each other all the time over the one ball. Everybody can be happy.

So, you know, different ways of looking at the world. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, if everyone could look at the world yeah for sure yeah if everyone could look at the world that way the world would be a better place yeah it's um i mean it's sports are for whatever reason the best escape for a lot of people because it's it's exciting and unpredictable and it's really happening whereas a movie even though it's an escape you know it's not really happening agree right you watch a sport man if a guy can make a fucking three-pointer at the buzzer and it wins the game and everybody goes nuts that shit's real like yes we fucking did it you turned to your friends everybody's so excited

hey no so this is the universal symbol for yes right but here's the one that also gets me the universal symbol for something great almost happened and it didn't is this hands on the forehead everybody around the world where does that come from in the human what kind of where in the code dictated that that's how we're going to express but everywhere around the world that's what they do that's a really good question yeah i don't have an answer unfortunately i don't know is it like my brain right yeah it must be like it's together my head's still here what's your favorite sport to watch? I like fighting because you do commentary for the UFC. Yeah, that I know.

I find the rest of the sports to be boring. I don't really watch other sports. Do you like fighting because of the tactics, because of the action, et cetera, or is it because of the personality primarily? The excitement that comes from being insanely difficult uh it's the way i describe it sorry if everybody's heard this a million times it's high level problem solving with dire physical consequences so you know that they're on this this crazy path where one guy's trying to slam his shin into the other guy's face and the other guy's trying to do the same they're trying to take

each other down choke each other and and to lose is horrible and to win is glorious and everybody's cheering and then you know when it all plays out live the rush of of these guys that these guys experience and then the rush that the audience experiences it's hard for me to watch like tennis i don't care where that ball goes i get it i get it it's very athletic i'm not there's no knock on the athletes yeah and again i like playing pool so i've watched a lot of dumb shit i watch pool on youtube every day yeah so um so let me ask you this uh ufc let's say is uh i mean it's doing pretty well it's not it's not the bonanza it looked like it might be a couple years ago right business-wise the league's doing better than ever. Is that right?

Yeah. So the athletes themselves, I know the superstars do great. What about the rest of them? Is it a steep pyramid and is it bad news if you're in the middle? It's a less steep pyramid than boxing. In boxing, when you see the undercards of fights, if you see a fight like Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather's biggest boxing pay-per-view fight ever huge fight right millions and millions and millions of dollars the guys further down the bottom of the chain they're getting an awesome opportunity to

fight in front of the crowd that's going to see manny pacquiao versus floyd mayweather they don't make much money and that's the case in boxing overwhelmingly in the early stages of a person's career it's the same as mma and then as they become famous they start making more the difference is there's a floyd mayweather and the closest thing we have to that is a conor mcgregor and maybe ronda rousey floyd mayweather when you people talk about money in boxing you're talking about floyd mayweather i mean maybe you were talking about tyson at one point in time and ali before him and sugary leonard the guys who made the big money roy jones jr but there's only a couple of those guys ever even in boxing it's the same thing at one point in time and Ali before him and Sugar Ray Leonard, the guys who made the big money, Roy Jones Jr. But there's only a couple of those guys ever, even in boxing.

It's the same thing with MMA. There's a couple of guys like Conor McGregor or a few superstars. And once you get beyond them, once you get to number 100, let's say. Then you're trying to become number one. It's not a thing that you're going to have any sort of security doing. Right. Do you like that? So that's what economists call a tournament model, right? Which is where a lot of people are willing to enter it because the winning is so high, but you know that you're not going to make anything unless you advance a whole lot. Would you rather

see MMA like that? Or would you rather see it more like the team sports where you're at least guaranteed you're on a salary right so nfl if you're the 53rd guy on the roster you're not making a ton of money but you know you're going to make money as long as you don't get hurt would you rather see mma a little bit more like that would you rather see the the fighters have more of a league and have more leverage or do you like the way it's set up now fighters are always going to be individuals it's very difficult to get a fighter in a union that's why it's never been done although the pga tour is basically the union for the golf they did that that's what the golfers did and tennis is a little bit different but anyway i mean couldn't they do it if well now ufc has too much leverage i think for that to happen right even if they didn't it would be very difficult to get fighters to not jump in and take a fight because opportunities are rare and when a fight

comes along if you say look i'm going to offer you fight conor mcgregor for x amount of money and you're like i want more they're like look this guy's standing right right and that's always going to be that case until you're conor mcgregor yeah and that's the business model that's always been the business model in boxing but in ufc model in boxing, but in UFC it's different. In UFC it's controlled by one company so they can force big fights, whereas there's a lot of big fights in boxing. So this is their justification for the structure that they have. Those big fights in boxing didn't occur, and it frustrated the fans.

And the reason why it didn't occur was because there's multiple promoters. Under one banner, you have one promotion that has the most fighters and the ones who and the best presumably and the ones who are the most popular make the most money the question is should the guys at the bottom make more i think they should and i've always thought that because i think it's a very very very difficult thing and i think we should be trying to give them enough money so they can do their best and we can see the best fighters come up. I think one of the impediments of guys coming up is that in the beginning you have to work a full-time job as well as fight. And it's really hard to train. It's hard to make that leap.

And if we get someone, we can sign it. I agree with you. There should be some sort of a minimum. And that minimum, we would agree upon something that would be sustainable if you're fighting, say, once or twice a year. On the other hand. twice a year on the other hand twice a year at least okay especially in the beginning you'd fight you probably fight as many times as you can in the beginning you'd fight three times a year if you could four even um and guys like donald serrani even at the top still fights like four or five times a year just because

he's a wild man so theoretically like if you're looking at a supply and demand it seems that there's a lot of supply of fighters right it seems like there's a lot of supply of fighters, right? It seems like there's a lot of audience demand. But what UFC is doing is, according to you, kind of smartly constraining the supply so that the quality is high. Yes. If you were to come in, let's say you or 10 other people were to come in with alternate leagues to UFC right now and take, you know, UFC as whatever. Let's say there's 100 very good fighters right now or 50 i have no idea but let's say you take the next 200 and make those other leagues are you saying that would basically be what happened to boxing and then end up well people are doing

that i don't know if you know but there's multiple organizations that actually are doing that there's one called bellator that's huge on the param on the Paramount Network. It's enormous. And it's the biggest rival to the UFC in America, but still pales in comparison. But there's world-class fighters there, and they're starting to get people from the UFC that they get their contract up, and they're still in their prime, and then Bellator comes with a better, more attractive offer, and they take that offer. Also, in Bellator, they're allowed to have sponsors. The UFC is solely sponsored by Reebok, so the fighters all have one sponsor. They wear Reebok gear. And do the athletes all have one sponsor. That they wear Reebok

gear. And do the athletes get a share? Yes, they get a share. I don't know how it's structured, but I know that the fighters prefer the Bellator model, which is they can find their own sponsors and if they have a good management company, the management can get three or four sponsors on their shorts and they might make more money

from sponsors than they do from the fight itself, which is what was in the UFC, so a lot of fighters were really bummed out when they switched over to a different business model so that I think would probably be better for fighters but then here's another thing those fighters have to enforce that they have to chase those down chase those sponsors down a lot of them go bad on you and a lot of them don't pay and there was a real problem with that with fighters where you know they would gotten fucked over by a couple different sponsors and it created a hassle and so so then you have fighters who didn't get paid but the sponsor did get put on the UFC oh boy and that

yeah so is the UFC responsible like who who's responsible for that and it turns out it's the fighters that are responsible but that's a fucking giant burden on them while they're in the middle of training to try to go sue some you know fight gear company that didn't pay them their money i don't think it's a justification for not giving them the freedom to choose their own sponsors i think a better scenario would probably be have one sponsor available that you you know like everyone couldn't choose this sponsor or a competing sponsor you know like maybe something else so like you could have a rebot guy that's fighting against a guy who's like some motor oil company sponsoring them it's like making it mandatory it takes some of the power away from the fighters

for negotiations so forgive my ignorance but getting back to just the actual fighting uh two fights a year it sounds kind of like standard three is kind of a lot four is a whole lot why uh it's hard but i mean like i've seen fighting a little i've obviously i mean you look at me you can tell i've never done it myself you get busy um but uh i mean like the nfl is hard right and they're playing 16 games a year plus pre-season practice why why is it how how can it be that hard that you can only do it a few times these are adorable questions because it's this sport of hurting people yeah football hurting people is an accidental occurrence no that's not true not if you're playing on the line yeah but they're colliding into each other but they're not doing something

specifically to knock you unconscious or to break your liver all right there's techniques that you're doing that are trying to fuck a guy's knee up i understand that but is it that you need three four five six months between to literally recuperate from the pain even if you win is that what it's about not just pain it's punishment there's guys that their leg it takes randy couture um he fought this guy named pedro hiso pedro his Hizzo was this Brazilian kickboxer that had the most devastating leg kicks maybe in the history of the sport. He would slam his shin into people's legs, and you could see them visibly hobbled by it. And Randy's leg was so fucked up from their first fight

that he had to wait six months before he was fully recovered. Six months just from a guy kicking his leg, slamming his shin into the thigh. His legs were just chopped meat they were just destroyed all the the tissue was broken up there was blood inflamed his legs were swollen up i mean it's horrific i have to say you're reinforcing the validity of my decision to become a writer yeah it's not a fighter yeah it's a long career it's exciting but not too exciting so why okay so i don't mean to sound even more naive than I've sounded now, but why do you choose the life of a fighter if it's that punishing?

Well, initially they do it for self-improvement. They get involved for self-improvement. They want to learn how to defend themselves. Maybe they want to learn some self-confidence. Then they get excited about improving and they get better at it and then they achieve a level of expertise that makes them the person in the gym that is above the other new people that come in and then you get to experience what it's like to be an assassin you get to strangle people all the time and then you get to a point where you're like i want to test myself and then you say i'm just going to take an amateur

fight so then you take an amateur fight and then you go you know what i think i can do this for a living and then you think about being stuck in some fucking cubicle selling insurance or maybe making conor mcgregor money maybe i can get to the port i know how to talk shit i think i can hurt people i think i get in there and make some money and i don't have to fight three or four times a year and i don't have a fucking boss no one tells me what to. I can talk shit and I can go out there and just do something that I really enjoy doing, martial arts, and just continue to be as good as I can and be a professional athlete. It's attractive, especially to risk-seeking young males or females. That totally makes sense.

But let's say it's you. Let's say you're 21 years old, you, and you have the ability to do that, right? You're discovering that you have the ability to do that. And then if you could project that decision forward, let's say 30 years and say, okay, I'm going to go for this and I'm going to factor in the probability that I'm actually going to make really good money or have an amazing life-changing or life-affirming experience for 10 years and then get out and do something else versus do that insurance cubicle job? In other words, you know, it's kind of the short, the high probability, high risk bet versus the longer steady one, where you might have more of a center of gravity to have a family, et cetera.

Which would you choose and why? Well, first of all, why would I only have two choices? That seems ridiculous. Because I'm only giving you two right now. Hypothetical questions are fine. I used to fight. I stopped fighting when I was 21 because I was worried about head injuries. It was too dangerous. And when I was doing it, there was no money. There wasn't a UFC there. If you were making that decision now, though, with the money now, do you think the decision would be different? Well, there was no UFC then.

So there was no choice. But take 21-year-old Joe. Yes, I would have fought. For sure. 100%. I definitely would have. I was excited by it. It was scary. I was terrified, but I also

knew that I could get good at it. And then while I was getting good at it, it's a wild rush. It's a wild, crazy rush because it's so dangerous to do. And the risk-seeking, those kind of people that are risk-seekers, the ones that do rock climbing and BMX bike running and base jumping,

that's a type of person running and base jumping, that's a type of person. For whatever reason, that's a type of person. And they gravitate towards those fights and they gravitate towards martial arts. And some of them are the nicest people I've ever met in my life. They are some of the nicest, kindest, most interesting, introspective people, deep thinking people, people that read a lot, they can talk to you about things that can be honest and personal about things they have a really good control of their ego because they're getting

trounced in training all the time everyone's getting humbled all the time but you you're you're on the path of of a professional fighter and it's a it's a very dangerous path and so there's an incredible camaraderie between the people that do it so there's they understand that very few people have the stones to do something like this or the the nuts the the or the you know the chaos in your brain or the insanity that lets you risk your life like this versus take that cubicle job what for them it's insanely attractive what's the long-term um health complications from mma do we know a lot about it yet i mean we're learning a lot about football as any combat sport football is like a car accident these two giant dudes are slamming into each other and i tend to think that there's some impacts that i've

seen in football that it's not recreatable in an mma ring because you don't have momentum you're not yeah you're not running at each other but that said there's plenty i mean i've seen dudes get kicked into oblivion and women get kicked unconscious multiple times in one event and i've worked i don't know how many events i've called more than probably i have to say like 1500 professional fights like easily somewhere in that neighborhood definitely more than a thousand definitely without question that's being real super conservative so out of those you know how many people have been had like legitimate brain damage because of fights a lot of them yeah they know going in there that

there's going to be a risk and they got to know when to get out and sometimes they don't and sometimes friends and family have to intervene and it's a scary thing to watch someone slide down that road when you know oh my god he's chin, which means you can't take a punch anymore, which means you're starting to develop some severe damage from all the sparring and the fighting. And you've got to know when to stop. And some people can stop, and they're fine. And they can live a long, healthy life as long as they stop in time. Yeah. Similar to boxing?

Very similar. In that boxing? Very similar. In that regard? Very similar. I think maybe boxing has a little bit more damage because all you're doing is punching. You're not kicking the legs. You're not taking each other down. You're not choking each other. So the accumulation of blows to your head, you might be able to argue that they get more.

But then there's a guy like Floyd Mayweather who doesn't get hit at all. He's so good at not being hit. He's probably been hit less in his entire boxing career, 50 victories and zero defeats, than most MMA fighters in their entire life, like tenfold. They get hit ten times more than him easily so imagine that uh i came down from mars and i look at you know human civilization i think you know this makes sense this makes sense this makes sense this one doesn't make any sense fights well i was going to use fights as an example yeah what about the coliseum i mean it's always been a part of humans right we we've been interested in people beating the shit out of each other since the beginning of

time yeah because it scares us. So it's entertaining to watch other people do it. That's why we want to watch a bar fight. I don't want to be in a bar fight. You don't want to be in a bar fight, right? But if you saw a bar fight, you'd be like, what the fuck? Is this really happening? So a lot of the people who have turned against football the last, let's say, five or ten years,

fueled by CTE, which is obviously a legitimate thing. We don't really know the magnitude and the scope yet. But a lot of people who've turned against it do it for a kind of moral argument by CTE, which is obviously a legitimate thing. We don't really know the magnitude and the scope yet. But a lot of people who've turned against it do it for a kind of moral argument that I don't want to support an endeavor where people are hurting each other, period, right? How do you feel about that? I mean, there's a libertarian argument to say, what are you talking about? People can do whatever they want. They can do drugs. They can go bungee jumping. They can work stock trading, which is stressful. You can do whatever you want.

So where do you lie on that? Well, I think, first of all, they're right. And you are doing something that's definitely going to harm you. However, I feel like if you want to do something that you enjoy doing that's going to take some time out of your life that's finite anyway, who the fuck am I to you you can't do that right am i going to tell where am i going to draw the line am i going to say no gymnastics yeah like where am i going to draw the line you know didn't know soccer causes tremendous amount of cte do you know that yeah lacrosse is a lot of subconcussive trauma yeah just heading the ball causes a lot of cte i know a lot of youth leagues now are starting to cut out which i think is probably a pretty good it's a very good idea they should probably eliminate

it totally. Often it's not the ball. It's the collision with the guy in the hair. Yes, often. But they think heading has a huge impact. No, no, no. What I'm saying, when you're going up for headers, you're often knocking heads. You're knocking a shoulder into a head, an elbow into a head.

Yeah, I mean, you're running around on a field in full clip. You're going to collide with each other. Where do you stand on paying for organs? But let's keep going with this because we didn't even touch the surface of this. I'm in favor of people doing what they want to do with their life. If you choose to do something with your life, are we going to take away race car driving? Because that's one of the scariest goddamn things a person could do. Not as much anymore.

Oh, what are you talking about? Did you see that recent? No. Yeah, but you know what? These guys are getting fucked up. Did you see that recent crash? I did. But the fact These guys are getting fucked up. Did you see that recent crash? I did. But the fact that we remember that so well, one reason is because there have been so few

since Earnhardt died back in whatever that was, 2000. Listen, I had Dale Earnhardt Jr. on this podcast and he went in depth about brain damage that he's gotten from multiple crashes. He talked about the severe impact of the concussions. He talked about the difficulty coming back and the different modalities, the different medical treatments that he's had to have. That's Dale Earnhardt Jr.

This is after his dad is gone, right? This guy talked like really extensively on this podcast about his personal struggle with brain damage that he's received from car accidents. It's a fucking scary way to make a living and arguably more scary than fighting because there are guys like mighty mouse demetrius mighty mouse johnson who's like this elite mma fighter that barely gets touched there's guys like him that don't take any damage and then there's guys who are elite nascar drivers who wind up in these

crazy collisions and go sent through the air and they wind up in the hospital all fucked up the impact just the impact even if you're in a cage just your brain rattling around inside your head fucks you up and we're letting people do that and i don't think we should stop i think we should let people do whatever they want if they want to do they want to take a tightrope walk across the grand canyon and film it on youtube i can't i'm not the guy unless it's over private land or public land and there's a law against using it who who are we to tell people they can't rock climb who are we to tell people they can't ski where do we draw the line yeah where do you decide a person can't do a thing i don't know you make a good argument i don't think there's a bad argument with what you're saying though and saying that saying that it causes damage to people.

You're right. By the way, I love the NFL. I would cry if it went away. On the other hand, and I know a few NFL, well, now former NFL players, one of whom stopped playing in his fifth year way earlier than he had to because he was worried about CTE, but also he was getting a PhD in math from MIT at the same time. Wow. So he had a plan. He had an alternative.

But then there's another guy. It's a crazy combination. You should have him on your show. John Urschel, his name is. U-R-S-C-H-E-L. Okay, we'll talk about it after the podcast. Fascinating guy. There's another guy, Dominique Foxworth.

Both these guys happen to play for the Ravens, which happens to be the team i hate most but i've gotten to be friendly with them dominique foxworth uh had a great money-making career because he kind of got his big contract in his whatever fourth fifth year well took out insurance on it then got hurt and really never played again so he banked enough money after that that, he went and got an MBA from Harvard because he's a bright and interesting and ambitious guy. He will never let his son play football. It's like you hear these stories about the guys who've done it, who've made a life out of it.

And it just really makes me think about you're right. Everybody should have the right to do anything for their own livelihood or for their own excitement. Right. On the other hand, like if we had the Coliseum today per se, like what we have is a modern version of the Coliseum. If we had the Coliseum per se, fighting the tigers, slaves getting thrown in to fight the tigers, we don't like that. It's like the line, things are repugnant until they're not. And it's hard to predict where that line is. A lot of things that used to be not repugnant until they're not and it's hard to predict where that

line is a lot of things that used to be not repugnant slavery fine the whole world if you had the ability to do it right and then get go straight back to the coliseum it's the same thing it's like we we have a line and whatever the cultural line is especially depending upon how many people die around us how much plague and murder and how much you know how much you're dealing with war that line moves yeah yeah right now people find it repugnant to use a plastic shopping bag so is how good and that's a dangerous argument if if it's not a good decision right because if you can feel like oh we stopped using plastic shopping bags therefore this is called moral licensing i i licensed my because i've made one good moral decision now i can license myself to do other stuff so it's great

on paper right like if you had to bring every time you go to the supermarket you have to bring a reusable bag right it's great on paper until you don't have a reusable bag and so then you have to buy a paper bag and then it rains then your groceries fall on the street i mean that's the extreme no but these are i mean the problem is bags, if you look at the menace to the environment overall, plastic bags are a pretty, pretty small part. The danger is when people feel that they've contributed by doing something small and then stop thinking about bigger, better things to do. It's interesting, too, that we just accept an inevitable amount of litter. Yeah. Because it's really a garbage disposal issue.

Yeah. It's true. How hard is it? I know. It's interesting. Because sometimes there's accidents, right? Things fall off things. Things blow down the street.

You can't get to them. But a lot of it is just asshole-ishness. I agree. I happen to play golf, which I'm a little embarrassed about. How dare you? I know. I grew up as the kind of person that looked at golfers like, that's not my club. When did you start?

Like eight, ten years ago. I love it. I absolutely love it. It's also nice because you're outdoors for a long time. You're often alone for a long time. And another thing I really like about it is I get to be around other people, often men, in a way that you don't get to be around other men in that way. You know what I mean? It's like it's good for the soul in a way.

And I just like the competition. It's a really hard game, so I like trying to get better at it. But the thing that amazes me is how much crap there is, how much garbage there is on a golf course. I'm like thinking it'll blow out of your bag. And I'm just like, I don't know. I like nature a lot. I don't like the idea of like candy wrappers all over. So then I, right, I extrapolate and think bigger like you do.

Plastic bags, should it be that hard to take it home, use it maybe once or twice again, and then throw it away? And I understand that they're less recyclable, but we have a lot of landfill space. But even landfill space, that's where a lot of it goes. I mean, you've seen landfill space where things are flying around in the wind. It's just like, God damn it. It's hard to contain all of our garbage. We produce so much crap.

It's true. We really do. Although much less per person weight-wise than we did 50, 100 years ago. But that's mostly because garbage used to be heavier. Used to be wooden crates. Well, we make technological improvements that are difficult to see while you're in the moment. Like if you go back and look at photos of Los Angeles in the 60s

and you see the pollution, it was insane. It was literally like there was a fire, right? And now it's gotten a lot better. It still sucks, but it's gotten a lot better. Question, would it have gotten a lot better without, let's say, regulation? Yeah. Would industry have done it on its own? No chance.

No. They would have accepted it. Clean Air Act. Which president? Do you know that? I don't. Nixon. Oh, wow.

That's crazy. Go to Mexico. Go to Mexico City. Wild. Yeah. When we were flying in, I was like, holy shit, that's real? Like crazy pollution. Yeah.

I took photos of it and put it on Instagram. I'm like, this is wild. Yeah. Have you been to China? No, never been to China. Bring your face mask. I'm sure, yeah. No, I've seen videos.

I am hoping that technology catches up to our pollution. At the same time, we're remedying our situation by trying to be better with recycling. But I'm hoping that someone figures out some giant building size filter some huge thing they put in the middle of every city and it sucks all the carbon it just seems like in the particulates there are so particulate pollution has gotten so much better in fact one wrinkle of uh climate change and global warming is that the particulates, the soot in the atmosphere in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was apparently what kept things a little bit cooler because it refracted sunlight and heat, right? That's hilarious.

So, the irony is you clean up the air and you allow more heating. Global warming. Yeah, exactly. Oh, Christ. Anyway, global warming is a very complicated issue. Yeah. This is another example where when people reduce it to the headlines and then divide people into tribes, it's exactly the opposite of what you want. Perfect example because it's clearly a right versus left thing, too, in some people's circles.

If you're on the right, you're supposed to say it's exaggerated. It's a hoax. It's this. It's that. It's not my concern. My concern is jobs. My concern is that. Like, you repeat the talking points.

And if it's on the left, it's, how dare you? It's Greta Thunberg. I think the biggest, that was not the best Greta Thunberg. How dare you? That was actually, now that I know it's her, it was not a bad imitation. It's not bad. I think one of Obama's biggest mistakes, he plainly wanted to address climate change, global warming, but he did it in a kind of standard left Democrat way by calling it global warming, by saying that there were bad actors, which is true.

The thing that astonishes me that Democrats haven't done is talk about it in a language that every republican every conservative every hunter fisher would respond to which is pollution which is what it is by the way right why why it became a conversation about a much bigger much more abstract much more difficult to understand and act on problem is strange to me because um you know humankind comes together we came to look polio vaccine it wasn't like everybody was working on it but there were enough people concerned about it then you had a president who said hey march of dimes let's have everybody raise money come up with a vaccine and then interestingly you know salk with the vaccine so it's just interesting about the way medicine works today he basically

said no no i don't want to patent i don't want to own this patent he could have become a billionaire right you know this was this is was this is the way we've have thought in our past as humans about solving big problems we seem to have gotten away from that a little bit and i think that's where to me the tribalism is the most dangerous it's not about the political charades i don't care about that i don't think that's particularly damaging. Where I think it's damaging is by dividing yourself into these tribes that are so exclusive and they have these purity tests. What we're doing is we're actually diminishing our collective ability to come together

to solve problems. The good news is there's a million people out there at academic institutions and garages, groups of one and two people who are working on solutions that keep coming. You know, humans are cool species is what I'm trying to say. Yeah, we're awesome. We really are.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's interesting, but Jonas Salk, when he did create that vaccine you know has such a strong ability to influence the way people look at things through advertisements and just through the way they influence politicians where there's it's a different world so to compare the bounty that was awaiting jonas salk for coming up with the polio vaccine it's just a different world true the world's different didn't he like wasn't there some controversy that he didn't give credit to the other people that helped him with the vaccine yes there was and i don't i read okay with money but not good with

giving people i haven't read this in a long time so i can't i can't speak to it but uh but even like i've been um do you like richard feinman you know richard feinman so so you know when he talks about i love hearing him talk about uh when he was drafted to work on the manhattan project and you think about it america was, it was an existential fear. Yes. Legitimate, right? Sure. I mean, we wound up using it.

We did. They could have used it on us. We did indeed. Yes. And when you hear Feynman talk about all the complication of that, we have an enormous scientific challenge. We have an enormous competition against the Germans who are trying to do the same thing. And then, even if we win then we

have another whole challenge which is the moral challenge but but there's a way of thinking about those things and again what measuring the costs and benefits that people who might disagree aggressively and they did about the manhattan project can sit down and say okay here's what we're going to do what's what's the lesser of the two evils and i feel like right now i don't know it's as much progress as we've had i feel we've gotten worse at looking at the lesser of two evil paths that looking at weighing costs and benefits well what is the lesser of two evils in that regard is it drop the bombs and stop the war or is the lesser of two evils never drop the bomb and stop the war later? Yeah, I mean, look, there's a million books been written about this.

I could make an argument in either case. I mean, Japan, we were very, very scared of Japan. Japan had shown a lot of ability to punish the United States. Even though Germany was out, America still felt very fragile. So I totally get the argument that it was meant to be, you know. I get it too.

Yeah. On the other hand, you're picking some pretty big cities to drop it on and you're picking two. So, you know. And you're killing mostly civilians. Yeah.

Yeah. So it's hard to imagine that decision would be made today. But as you just said about, you know, polio vaccine, different, different case,

but roughly same time era, you know, it's very hard to project your morals onto, you know, 50 years from now, we may have a very different view about MMA, for instance, it's very hard to project it.

Well, that I think that's far more intense and extreme than MMA. I mean, we're talking about nuking people literally out of existence but i think that just the fact that these brilliant scientists were forced into that moral dilemma like one of my favorite videos online is oppenheimer when he's discussing what he said when the first atomic bomb was detonated and he quoted the bhagavad gita and he said i am become death destroyer of worlds and it's just to say that, to see, have you seen it, the video?

Oh, please, let me play this for you. Play Oppenheimer right after, describing what it was like, because it's so eerie. Because here you have one of the most brilliant scientists ever who completed this fantastic project. Yeah. The Manhattan Project created bombs that literally were nuclear weapons. Never happened before in all of human history as far as we know. And here, the guy that did it, that knew, that knew that that was going to be the death of untold amounts of people. Listen to this. Listen to what he says.

He knew the world would not be the same. Few people laughed. Few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that one way or another. Dude. Imagine being that guy. I mean, here's a guy, first of all, was quoting the Bhagavad Gita in 1945.

A little ahead of his time. Pretty incredible. Or was it 46? When did they first detonate? or 40 was 46 when are they when did they first detonate 40 uh the tests were i think 44 and hiroshima and nagasaki 45 correct somewhere in that range and being this guy who you know he's just a brilliant scientist he's not supposed to be the guy who destroys a half a million people in one moment one brief flash of light and vaporizes a half a million people in one moment, one brief flash of light and vaporizes a half a million people. He went to this school in New York City called the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which is where my kids went.

So Oppenheimer is kind of a patron saint for having the brains to do something almost unimaginable and having the ethics and courage to know that what he'd done was unacceptable on some levels. You know, on the other hand, but look, if we're talking about costs and benefits, let's think about nuclear power, nuclear bombs as a deterrent against others down the road, right? So you have to say, killed a lot of people. How many lives did it save? Impossible to say. You sound like a Republican, sir.

I know. I know. But I mean, no. That's the argument, right? Then you also have to talk about, then let's also talk about nuclear power, which was the byproduct of this, right? And there are those who could argue, and I would probably aid this argument to say that if the U.S. had continued on the path of nuclear power in the 70s rather than totally flipping out after,

well, after Three Mile Island and then later Chernobyl, which was a much worse accident than Three Mile Island, if that had continued what we'd have now is probably much much much um cleaner cheaper safer nuclear fuel and instead what happened because we basically stopped building nuclear plants instead for the next 40 years we burnt a crap load of coal that's been terrible for the environment for lives a lot of lives lost in mining coal but then the pollution so on so you know actions have consequences what seems to be all benefit

often has a lot of costs and life is complicated but i think the more that we can measure and weigh things sensibly the less screaming there is i i just you you know, I love changing my mind. I love hearing somebody make an argument that makes me say, oh, you know, the way I thought about that before, I see why I thought it. I don't feel like a fool for having thought it, but wow, now that you've laid out some facts and laid out some counterfactuals,

I appreciate the opportunity to change my mind. I enjoy that. I don't know why. I do too. Well, I think we're so often married to our ideas like our ideas are a part of us and we're losing if our ideas that we've been discussing are incorrect if our assumptions were incorrect it's a value judgment against us right you know i think um the nuclear thing is interesting because i think one of the problems with what happened was the

shitty design of like fukushima where they can't shut it off it's freaked people out rightly so and it's in there it's built in a bad spot it's terrible spot yeah and the backup plan sucked everything's wrong and now they have this nuclear hot spot that they're you know it's going to be like that for a hundred thousand years right there's a better way and they never had a chance to find that better way right because they've had a better way for everything else in the later ones the ones that they're operational now are far better than the Fukushima one. And they could have gotten way, way, way, way, way better. And that is – it's one of those things that doesn't seem like it makes sense.

Like, wait a minute, nuclear is clean? It's fucking really clean. It's really clean if it's done right. And if they allowed them to innovate over those 40 years, we would have got to some place where it's like super efficient, just like everything else. If you look at a 1970 car, right? And then you look at a car from 2020, how about a Tesla? Zero emissions.

Right. Like maybe they would figure out how to really knock it down to something. There are still a lot of people working on next, next, next, next generation nuclear power, including Bill Gates is involved in, and including some that are working with using using as fuel what's called spent fuel in a traditional nuclear reactor which takes care of two big problems at once right right right so look yeah yeah reasons to be cheerful bunkers filled with shit that's eventually going to crack through the bunker and toxify everything around it maybe or you could also theoretically use that as literally as fuel. So, you know. Well, not only that, have you seen the thing where they've discovered bacteria in Fukushima that's adapting to eating nuclear waste?

No, that's interesting. Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's Fukushima. Pull that up. Bacteria that eats nuclear waste. Yeah, they're discovering bacteria that's, life is so sneaky. Life just finds a way, like those vents, those volcanic vents. Right. At the bottom of the

ocean you're like what are you doing here this sounds like the way you know crisper you know what crisper is gene editing this was discovered it was found the mechanism for that was basically these bacteria that were living in some deeply inhospitable place like this radiation eating bacteria could make nuclear waste safer all right yeah where Yeah. Where do we buy those? Like a Walmart? You get those bacteria? What was the date you just highlighted there, Jamie? 2017, April 11th. I think that's a different one. But that's probably something they've been talking about.

But I think there was something recently where they discovered some bacteria that was eating radiation. All right. I got a question for you, Joe Rogan. All right, I got a question for you, Joe Rogan. Let's say that we collectively decide that protein is a really important intake for most humans, but that some people either don't want to eat meat, or they find that meat is too resource intensive, etc, etc. But they also don't want to eat the kind of processed fake meat, which is, food, et cetera. And let's say that we decide that one of the best, most available sources of protein, if you develop it well, is insects. Okay? But that most people find that disgusting. What do you do to make people less disgusted by something they find disgusting? Well, with all these things, I think it's very important to give people the opportunity to choose for themselves.

Right? Especially with things they've been doing forever like eating meat people are terrified of someone coming along and legislating that they can't eat meat and that they disagree with this agree with this argument they have an argument that life eats life and that we've been doing this for thousands of years and that's why we became human in the first place right and that agriculture has allowed us to have these cities and yeah it's cruel to these animals but you know what you can do it ethically and you can do it morally and that's why we became human in the first place. Right. And then agriculture has allowed us to have these cities. And yeah, it's cruel to these animals, but you know what? You can do it ethically and you can do it morally and it's not like they're going to live forever anyway. Right. So you can have that argument.

Right. But then there's the people that don't want to eat bugs. Well, then don't eat bugs. Right. But here's the thing. Hold on. Here's the thing for the people that do want to eat bugs. It's a good source of protein.

Yeah. And ethically, we don't feel as bad about killing bugs as we do about killing cows. We really don't. I was at an ashram once, and I had a friend that was renting a place that the ashram had for rent. So I'm hanging out with this lady who's a monk, I guess. I don't know how you would call her. But she ran the ashram.

Very nice lady. But she had bug spray. And I go, why have bug spray? She goes, we have an ant problem. They're getting into the garbage. I go, whoa. I go, do you bug spray? She goes, we have an ant problem. They're getting into the garbage. I go, whoa. I go, do you understand what you're saying? I go, we're at an ashram,

and you're fucking, you're spraying death from the sky on these little life forms. Like, imagine if she was running around killing kittens with a hammer, right? We would go, no fucking way. She's like, they shit everywhere. They're pissing on my garbage.

I gotta kill these fucking kittens. Well, to a Buddhist, spraying ants with bug spray should be the same as killing a fucking kitten with a hammer. What an arbitrary decision, right? The kitten's okay. It's a very arbitrary choice. You see many vegans slap mosquitoes. You don't just let them eat you.

There's a thing where we decide that an animal is not as valuable. And big furry animals are the most valuable animals you know one of the horrible truths about monocrop agriculture and there's a video that a friend of mine put up on his instagram page the other day um about farmers this farmer was talking about like when i grow avocados you have to understand like you think you're getting this organic avocado and nothing else to die he goes i have to kill thousands of gophers thousands of them yeah he goes i'm gonna kill untold numbers of bugs he goes i'm spraying all this organic pesticide down that's gonna kill weeds he goes i'm fucking up the ecosystem i'm churning up the land i'm displacing all these animals all the places

that i'm putting things on there should be wildlife i'm moving it i'm getting getting rid of i'm fucking up this system. And that's an uncomfortable truth, that if you even want to buy lettuce, which is the most harmless thing, like, oh, I just plucked that head and I'll be fine. No one's getting hurt. No one's dying. But they are because monocrop agriculture is devastating. And unless you are growing an organic garden, which I firmly encourage people to do, And I think that would be like one of the best solutions for community. Although one argument against it, it takes a lot more land because the yield is so much lower.

Yeah. Yeah. It takes more land, but I'm not talking about for the entire city. I'm saying like if we had blocks, right? Like say if there was a block of people, right? And in that block, there's one patch that everybody tended to do together. Right. And there was a community.

Nice. My parents actually, my parents were hippies. And when I was a kid in san francisco they actually were part of this co-op and we would go there and i thought it was interesting but i was seven i didn't know that that was unusual right and we would go there and as a part of this university project that my dad was involved in and they're growing all these crops and i'm like oh this is kind of cool like you just grow in and it was in san Francisco. It was in the city itself, had this area where we would go and it was all fenced in and people would grow tomatoes

and different vegetables and stuff and they'd learn how to grow and there was classes on composting and stuff like that. People were composting their organic waste and they would reuse it. And that is something that could be done inside communities.

It doesn't have to be that we have these giant swaths of land where nobody grows it. Just take Central Park, for example. What an amazing place. I'm not saying grow vegetables there. But take it as an example of everything doesn't have to be hardscaped, right? Central Park is this beautiful part of New York City because it's this lush green patch

in the middle of this urban sprawl. So you have this urban city around it, and then it's really cool to be able to go through that and to see the ducks and to sit by a tree and read a book. There's this one duck in Central Park now that got like a plastic bottle ring stuck around its beak. It's become a duck cause celeb. Have you ever eaten insects like cooked well? Yes. First of all, I hosted Fear Factor. Oh, yeah. I forgot about that. I've eaten roaches. uh have you eaten have you ever eaten insects like cooked well yeah what have you hosted fear factor oh yeah i forgot about that yeah i've eaten roaches yeah why do you think there's such a

roaches do gross people out more they carry diseases yeah but don't others not as is it because they're garbage eaters because they're because they live near humans that's the problem yes exactly that's the ones that we hate you do have everything you do have to appreciate their indestructibility though they're amazing unbelievable they're amazing yeah i mean if you were if i were an engineer i think the roach would be my like inspiration it's a special animal i mean it really is a special little creature it's figured out a way to live in every single urban environment yeah and to live inside your walls inside your house and exist in your garbage is the rat essentially the roach equivalent or are all rodents scarier because rats have technically carried things that have killed millions of people don't squirrels as well though no not really

because they're herbivores they're they're not involved in those tight-knit groups where they spread diseases and i mean they could technically get fleas that could carry plagues and i'm sure they have you know that's where a lot of people used to get diseases, right? They'd get a flea from a rat. And then that was the plague. Right. And they blamed it on the rats, but it was really the bugs. And I think that rats, I mean, have you ever seen the Netflix documentary?

No. Oh, dude. I got a long list from you. You got this list. Walking out of here with a lot of entertainment. This one is number one. This one's number one. What's it called?

Scratts? Scratts. All right. It's a netflix documentary it is amazing did they deal with uh this story i've read about years ago and i think this was in saigon probably years and years ago maybe that's that might not be right about when you know there's a rat infestation this has happened throughout history it's happened in many places i know it happened in in south africa not long ago either where the city will call for like a bounty they'll say you kill the rat you so people start breeding and growing extra rats is that in the film no it's not but i know that story because i love i love stories of incentives gone wrong because we do it you know you incentivize something yeah people

are so gross yeah would you eat a rat yeah Yeah, for sure. Yeah. Have you? Especially if I was hungry. No. Right. I mean, it's just meat. Yeah. You know, once you cook it and you put some seasoning on it, I bet, I have a friend who ate a coyote. And what's your meat situation right now?

You're eating, you're still eating mostly meat? Yes. Yeah. Mostly wild game. Yeah. So mostly what I eat is elk. It's stuff that you've hunted yourself? Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. But I eat beefsteak too. Right. But I've been on this diet for the last like couple months. Right. It's stuff that you've hunted yourself? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. But I eat beefsteak too. Right. But I've been on this diet for the last like couple months that's basically just meat. What else are you eating besides meat? That's it. Just meat.

No fruit, no veg. No fruit, no vegetables. Just meat. So what's that feel like? It's weird. This is what's weird about it. First of all, what's weird is your energy levels. That you have, like without the carbohydrate roller coaster ride of the spike

of the insulin and the sugar and the body processing it it's amazing it's just steadier you're saying yes you don't get the crash i did hear you talking about though feeling like you are more angry or aggressive in some ways you still feel partially joking around about that but i was saying that you almost like have to work out more i think it's just energy i think my body not having to process a large amount of carbohydrates particularly not vegetables vegetables seem pretty easy but they they do like if i eat a lot of vegetables i do get a lot of gas um thanks that i don't get but then everybody gets you not all vegetables some vegetables are super gassy the jerusalem artichoke is i believe the gassiest vegetable it's really dependent upon your personal digestion is that true yeah for sure

i mean for people that are your your gut biome sort of dictates what you're what's what happens since we're on the topic what happens to be your gaseous vegetable oh i don't know it's when i combine a bunch of them together i'm sure it's usually when you combine protein and vegetables together that you get the worst reaction. Yeah. But the point is there's none of that with just meat. It just stops. Do you eat breakfast or no?

Yeah. It depends on the day. Today I did. What did you have? Today I had six eggs and I had four pieces of bacon. Okay. That was breakfast. Lunch then?

I haven't eaten anything since. Okay. Gotcha. We should say we're talking at 6 p.m. local time. I had a workout and I hung out with my dog, went for a walk with him. Right. And then I came here and did two podcasts. Right.

And you're going to eat again today? Yeah. What do you have? I'll eat meat. Right. But just a plate of meat then? Yeah. Yeah.

Does it get boring? Because I love meat, but I can't imagine that it wouldn't get a little. It does not. It gets boring if you think it's boring, but it is delicious food. If you have it every day, you get bored because you have too much delicious food. So I think it's really a perspective issue. And it's also the health benefits that I've found, like just the way I feel, the energy level and mental clarity. It's very interesting.

is the way I feel, the energy level, and mental clarity. It's very interesting. Like there's something going on with the struggle that you have thinking about things right after you have a big meal. You know, that mashed potatoes and pasta. Oh, I'm so dumb. I'm like 30 IQ points dumber. For sure. That seems to not be an issue when you are on this steady diet of just eating animal foods, protein.

Because your body creates its own glucose through glucogenesis where it breaks down the protein and creates glucose. And as long as you get enough fat, that's what's really critical. You can get too lean where the meat is too lean. You don't have enough fats. Your body doesn't have fat to process, and that screws with you. Yeah. Now, what about the things that are in vegetables that are not in meat, nutritionally? That's a good question.

Are they significant enough to either take supplements or to worry about? What do you do? That's a good question. I take multivitamins. I take an athlete's pure pack. It's like a little baggie filled with multivitamins then i take glucosamine and chondroitin i take a bunch of other different things fish oil i take quite a few supplements and uh and again i'm not telling people to live this way don't do it what does an all meat diet do to your stool if you don't mind me asking um it reduces it it's considerably yeah

because mostly you're using like if you eat eggs and meat, you're breaking it down. Your body uses a lot of it. There's no fiber, right? And because there's no fiber, which is probably the biggest argument against the diet when you look at research for the benefits of fiber. The research is weird, right? Because it's epidemiological. It's all like how much vegetables do you eat? How many instances of colon cancer?

Let's put it all together. That's why all that stuff is very, very unreliable. Yeah, it's all like how much vegetables do you eat how many instances of colon cancer let's coral it was that's why all that stuff is very very very reliable yeah it's very weird so there's a bunch of doctors that are currently like and i use the term in air quotes that are promoting the carnivore diet okay and seeing positive results with it and getting a bunch of other people that achieve positive results the big one is autoimmune issues people that have severe skin issues right um eczema is a big one that seems to be cured with an elimination diet which is essentially what a carnivore diet is right if you eliminate all those plants and all those carbs yeah i mean maybe the plants are fine but maybe it's the sugar and maybe by just eating meat and your body has one thing to concentrate on, it can relax a certain amount of the inflammation that you're getting from those breads.

Has there ever been a population that's been studied at least quasi-scientifically that's had a mostly meat diet for a long time? Inuit, yeah. And what do we know? The Maasai, Inuit. What do we know about cancer, longevity, and so on? I don't know. It's a good question. Inuit apparently now suffer. And one of the reasons why

they suffer is the introduction of alcohol and tobacco and you know cigarettes yeah yeah and also you know just western life the foods change so you look at those communities it's not the same community as the ones that were just eating seal and whale blubber and eating whatever they can get a hold of um the masai lived for a long time on milk and meat and blood and um they they were very healthy milk from what animal from cows okay they're they're cattle herders let me ask you this let's say that we just let's say you and i run like america for just a couple days and uh and we decide you know what of all the things that people do that's not good for them um that we feel is a good idea to get rid of, right?

Especially if we're going to be having a little bit more socialized medicine, right? So you're paying my tax, my medical bill, and so on. Of all the things that we should maybe, you know, ban would be sugar, right? Because, like, there doesn't seem to be that much nutritional benefit to sugar. People like it but it's demonstrably bad on a lot of levels um how would you do that let me ask you this why the inclination always to ban things no i i'm not i always go to the extreme just to to show the hypothetical is always ban the word ban the food ban the the action it is the sport because we're

not very good at regulating honestly because we kind of vacillate between an all embrace and hey look i think the best example of how bad we are this is with vaping yeah so like vaping in this country was handled very poorly yes there were the deaths which were mostly as i understand it black market thc pods you're right adam curry just ran over this entire thing in the last okay e E-cigarettes are, they might get you addicted to nicotine, which may be a bad thing. Although nicotine per se, not a bad thing in moderation. In fact, it's used clinically. People have been using it historically.

It's a nootropic. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But the UK did something very different with e-cigarettes. When they saw people 10, 12 years ago starting to use them, they said, oh, people want this. We can either say, no, you can't have it. We'll make it illegal, in which case there will be a black market and they'll get stuff

that's probably not so well made. Or we can try to deal with it in a responsible, sensible way. And what they did is they allowed e-cigarettes with about 20% as much nicotine as are in the United States. So what you don't have in the UK is a bunch of teenagers who are now as much nicotine as are in the United States. So what you don't have in the UK is a bunch of teenagers who are now addicted to nicotine who never would have been smokers. You also don't have a whole bunch of counterfeit THC pods in the UK where people are dying. So to me, banning is almost never the solution.

You look at prohibition. I mean, prohibition did exactly the wrong. But do you you understand the hustle what happened behind the whole thc ban this is this is why it gets more complicated vaping ban excuse me the uh the the vaping ban after they the people died from the thc they knew that those things had nothing to do with it they started blaming cigarettes right they started blaming is because they were trying to introduce a tobacco-based e-cigarette right and it was all about the company that bought out the um jewel cigarette which was a very popular one right in order to kill it they were just trying to kill the business and then they passed this they're trying to pass this rather um legislation against flavored tobaccos right all they're trying to do was clear the room

for their business their business being and adam curry laid it out brilliantly it's it's shocking how well it worked and he said it's basically the tobacco version of who killed the electric car yeah it's a sneaky backroom deal and they they hoodwink people and next you know you're oh i don't want the kids to be smoking strawberry vapor right and really they're just clearing the way for this tobacco flavored bullshit because it's made with tobacco right this is the only stuff you can have this is the purest it's like doctors smoke camels it's really like those goddamn commercials they were yeah that's what's going on so it's really just a sneaky business move and we're all like i don't get it like how the fuck are they going to ban vaping with cigarettes

are still legal you're talking about something that kills 500,000 people every year in this country alone. They die of premature death due to tobacco use. And you're not going to ban that, but you're going to ban that flavored smoke that didn't even have anything to do with the 10 people that died from the nicotine or the THC with the vitamin E oil. You're also going to drive a lot of smokers who are trying to quit smoking back to cigarettes. That's right. That's the issue. Your stuff sucks. Yeah.

Yeah. People are mad. I can't even have strawberry anymore. I was enjoying the strawberry. Right. And a lot of smokers who take up vaping to stop smoking, they specifically don't want tobacco flavor because that's too reminiscent of the cigarettes. They just want that hit.

Were you a smoker ever? No. Yeah. Just pot. Never had any nicotine? Never. Oh. Because nicotine is an interesting drug.

Oh, I've had it. I've had cigarettes. I've had a cigarette with my friend Tony Hinchcliffe a couple of times before shows. And Dave Chappelle smokes. And when I do shows with him, I'll steal one of his cigarettes and smoke it. Now, if you don't smoke one cigarette, it'll get you pretty buzzed, right? You get high as fuck. Right.

You don't just get high. You get like racing. Jittery. No, no, no. It's like your brain's firing. right? You get high as fuck. Right. You don't just get high. You get like racing. Jittery. No, no, no. It's like your brain's firing. Like pow, pow, pow. It's one of the things that Stephen King said about quitting that really bothered him was it was great that he cleaned up the habit and stopped doing it, but the firing of the

synapses, like he misses that. When I wrote my first book, I was a smoker. Not a heavy smoker, but I smoked. And I was living in the middle of the catskill mountains beautiful place by myself middle of the woods it's great it's romantic total it's a romantic writer's story it was romantic if there had been someone else with no it's a romantic writer's story it was great i loved it catskills by yourself even better uh the house i bought even though i didn't know when i bought it it used to be owned by this guy

named anton otto fisher who was a painter and an illustrator. He was German, ran away from home, had an abusive father. This was in the 1910s or something. Ran away from home in Germany, became a sailor, talked his way onto a ship, got to America. I think fought for America in World War I on a ship. And then he became like the preeminent maritime painter in the U.S. in the decades maybe between the two wars and maybe after.

He then got married, lived in New York, and had a kid who was, had, what do you call it, not tuberculosis, not emphysema. What's the old one where you need to get the clean air, fresh air? You know, they'd send people away. No. It's something we know. It's a respiratory thing, right? And the Catskills had this clean air.

So they went there. He built this house and it had, because he was a painter, but also because he'd spent so much of his life on ships, he built this studio, his painting studio that looked like a little ship with this great window looking out over the Catskill Mountains. That's the house I bought to write my first book. It was unbelievably, I was so, I could focus for like 14 hours a day, 16 hours a day writing. But the reason I was able to focus so well was because of cigarettes. I'd write for about 28, 29 minutes, total focus, go outside, 29 minutes total focus go outside smoke the nicotine would just reset all the focus it was an unbelievable drug but it's a terrible delivery system i've heard someone recently say i i recently heard a kind of reluctant trump supporter say the same thing about trump that a lot of the things he's doing policy-wise especially foreign policy policy or economic policy, really, they like it. So they say he's like a cigarette.

Like the drug is good. The delivery system is absolutely terrible. That's interesting. Now, how is the vaping? Did you switch with vaping? I never – no, I quit smoking a long time ago. You just quit. Although I quit, you know, it's interesting.

I wrote in my first book, my family memoir about the Jewish Catholic family, I wrote in there, not that I was a smoker, but that this one instance where I stepped outside with my brother after this intense moment, and we had a cigarette. And a few years later, the book had been published. I was buying for the first, I was now newly married, and I know that you're supposed to buy life insurance. And so, I got this insurance broker, and he knew my name. He said, oh, I read your book. I said, oh, that's great. Glad to hear.

And then we started to price out the insurance, and he said, you know, what do you do? Are you a smoker? I said, no, not a smoker, because I'd quit a few years earlier. And then he called me back, and he said, you know, I read your book, where you stepped outside to have a cigarette with your brother. All of a sudden, I got the smoking rate for life insurance even though you quit yeah even though i quit because you used to smoke yeah oh yeah oh so have you smoked at all well that's not what i thought he asked me are you a smoker i said no because i'd quit but uh anyway isn't there like scientifically like there's there's a certain time window when your

lungs are fully recovered they also say so so this message I would say is really serious for anybody. Even if you've been smoking 40 years, they say if you quit, your lungs can actually recover greatly. So it's worth it. Yeah, I think smoking is, I hate to say it, I think smoking is a terrible idea. It's a terrible idea. There's no if, answer, but. On the other hand.

Does vaping replace the feeling? Like Adam Curry switched to vaping. He had this crazy contraption. One of those guys who's into really complicated garage remote control looking vaping things. He's into those things. He quit and that's how he quit. So the best science at the moment says that vaping is almost certainly much better than smoking. Yeah.

Because they don't know all the chemicals and all the damage, potential damage that vaping may or certainly much better than smoking yeah because they don't know all the chemicals and all the damage potential damage that vaping may or may not do but they do know the damage that cigarette combust combustible cigarettes and all the chemicals there are demonstrably pretty bad that way so even though like you said we were told uh doctors do it this is the best we were told the same thing about. Sugar gives you a great boost and so on. It's awful. But again, my take is if you want to smoke, go ahead. Well, but wait a minute.

You live in a finite life. But wait a minute. Let's say now we are talking about who pays, right? So this gets back to the externality thing. If you smoke and I'm paying for your health insurance as a taxpayer, don't I get to have a say? It's a very good question. And how far should we extend that? Because if you're fat, should I have to pay? pay right you you keep eating why do you keep eating right okay if you uh if you don't sleep well and you're prone to heart attacks so am i supposed to pay

right why don't you sleep more you know there's there's so many variables are you a guy who rock climbs well what if you fall and break your leg i have to fucking pay for that there's a lot of variables so you got to wonder about when you you start breaking down how much how much assistance people get based on their life choices but the way to do that is to is to price it and this is where economists are really useful you know even though they sit out for the individual and punish them for their behavior not punish them tax them charge them right if i want to be a rock climber and a smoker and and everything but i get free free health care then there should probably be a premium or i should probably pay into a little fund that is a free if there's a premium well it's never look health care is never free right

not in this country but no no no even in scandinavia it's not free it's free to the user at point of purchase right yes but no it's expensive and that's what scandinavia has done well we're talking about the user though we're talking about the user having to pay a premium but you're right you're already paying your taxes let's say you're paying 20 total tax whatever that goes into the health care but then additionally right you theoretically i think it's very hard to regulate behavior because again where do we draw the line what about bmx riding what about people who do this and that there's a lot of things that people basically everything you do you have to pay for yeah there's a but there's so many things that people do that we take for granted how about little girls do gymnastics what how much their parents have to pay how about driving in a car

yes one of the scariest right how about so many things we should just all sit inside with helmets and watch youtube how about crossfit how much you got to pay? You want to do CrossFit? You know? But then we got to measure the benefit too. CrossFit. Right. You're building up your body. You're going to live longer.

Well, that's possible. But then you're also probably hanging out with lunatics like you who are riding, you know, crazy vehicles, right? I'm a kind driver. But I think that CrossFit, the benefit, yeah, is you're getting in shape. So that balances itself out. As long as you do it intelligently is you're getting in shape. So that balances itself out. As long as you do it intelligently, you're involved in athletics. But should we reward people? Should they pay less?

So if someone does yoga three days a week, are we supposed to make them pay less? I mean, I think you get into some weird swampy area and people start to juke the system. The same way when people got paid for rats rats they let rats loose and then fucking killed them because people are gross yeah but uh we're improving again as a species let's not lose sight of that it's good news i'm an optimist yeah i'm a 100 glasses half full person yeah yeah um have you ever tried to turn other people into an optimist and been successful? No. I don't think, I think it's real hard to turn a battleship. And even if I've made an incremental push in the direction,

I've moved them one or two degrees to the right. Over time, maybe it'll change their direction. But the reality is you got to want to change yourself. And sometimes someone's inspirational words could be the thing that you needed. And that sets you off on a good path and then you do make change. But for the most part, when someone comes to you and tells you you have to change,

it's really hard for people to accept, just like you were talking about in your episode on changing your mind, which I really loved. But I'm sure that a lot of people who listen to this podcast or who watch this podcast um have you know drawn in the both the explicit and implicit optimism yes for sure but i haven't had a specific reaction with them right i haven't had a specific interaction where i got them to change they're changing because they're hearing me but they're also probably hearing a million other people

they're hearing david goggins and cameron and Cameron Haynes and fill in the blank. All these different people that do incredible things and they go, why? I got to fucking do something with my life. I got to get my shit. I got to stop drinking soda. I got to stop doing this. I got to just start eating healthy, taking vitamins. Maybe one workout class a week.

Just one. Start with one. There's also, though, I guess a danger. I don't mean to be a downer because i'm an optimist i'm an optimist too but the downer or the danger potentially is that and this relates to suicide so you know suicide is a little bit of a mystery because it's such a tragic thing if it affects someone that you you knew or uh even you know even people you don't know it just seems like such a drastic solution to a problem that is hard to imagine right right but if you look at suicide rates through history and around

the world there's a lot of variance but there's one trend that's pretty strong which is uh suicide rates tend to be higher in countries with more prosperity which would seem nuts right you would think that if your life is kind of very, very difficult on a kind of Maslow's hierarchy level, right? Not enough to eat, worried about paying rent or being safe, that you'd be more likely to be suicidal. But it turns out it's generally the opposite, not always. And what one suicid um deduced from that or the kind of theory that he came up with it's he calls it's the no one left to blame theory of suicide which is if you live in an environment where let's say you've got a a spouse that's cruel to you or you've got a terrible work

situation or you live somewhere where the government is repressive whatever you can always kind of see a light at the end of the tunnel. And you can say that, you know, when that problem is done, my life will get better. But if you live in a society like ours, where you've never had to worry about having enough to eat, you've never gone too cold or too hot, where you're surrounded by prosperity and you look around at everybody else and like, they're not depressed. And you think, what is it? It's me. The no one left to blame theory. And that's one argument for why there's like right now is a lot of teen and young people suicide in a country like America where the riches are, the prosperity is boundless. Have you read Jonathan Haidt's work?

Yeah. Yeah. So his take on that is that these kids are experiencing social media and they're experiencing this addiction to the internet and this cruelty that they experience, the bullying, the meanness, the coldness. And that when it's targeted on people and when they're losing their position in the social chain and they feel left out, they don't have the tools to cope with this. They're developing minds and this is the reason why you're experiencing this uptick that's directly correlated to the invention of the iphone and the invention of smartphones the invention of social media applications there's there's all sorts of correlations where you see the inventions of these particular things that have changed everything and then you see the uptick particularly with girls particularly with girls and suicide and you see them trying to keep up with the joneses and this this feeling

that they're inadequate or the judging themselves against girls that are you know supermodels that are photoshopped and they just feel inadequate i hear you on all that we have to be careful about correlations proving causation because it's really tough because i totally hear you on it it looks like they both travel together yeah right on the other hand history is full of correlations that looked good you know we were talking about polio the vaccine earlier polio for reasons that are still not understood by the way because they never really figured out the disease they just figured out a vaccine they never figured out what caused the disease but it turns out that polio would always spike in the summertime.

So there were a lot of theories. Maybe it had to do with being outdoors. So parents would keep their kids indoors. Maybe it had something to do with swimming pools. People keep out of swimming pools. But then there was one theory that what else happens in the summertime that doesn't happen in the wintertime? Ice cream consumption. So there was a theory for a while that polio was caused by ice cream on paper the correlation looks pretty good so i'm saying look internet and depression and suicide

are a little bit more complicated than ice cream and polio but it's hard to tease out effects for sure no you're right but it's also hard to ignore the effect of social media on people's self-esteems people are addicted to to phones. People are addicted to likes. It's a real occurrence. It's also been engineered in order to attract the most eyeballs. And the best, turns out, the best way is to get you outraged. I agree. But, again, just to bang the same drum again and again.

I'm in agreement with you. Where there's costs, you've got to look at the benefits. And this is what I hate about politicians, is they'll talk about a policy that they like, they ignore the costs. They talk about the opponent's policy, they ignore the benefits. So, with social media, for instance, I know a kid, a boy, who was a friend of the family, who if he were born 30 years earlier, and there were no way to connect with people other than in person, or phone, whatever, he would have had a very disconnected life. He just had some issues with doing that, with kind of in-person, kind of behavior that's a little bit on the spectrum, just would have been very difficult. As it turns out,

because of the digital revolution, he was able to build a community that is unbelievably good for him. Are there downsides to these things absolutely but you know you got to look at the benefits i do i do and i agree and i know i don't i think we're adapting i think human beings are adapting to a new normal and the new normal is uh constant connection with all the people around us all the time if we so choose to engage and look at our phone so choose the problem is when it becomes more invasive than that right now it's if we so choose to engage but if we get to some point where we're wearing something that transmits stuff into our brain or where someone's wearing us or if you don't if you don't do it then you can't be a part of this corporation because we're about succeeding

and this is the best way to succeed is to connect yourself to the network to uptick your bandwidth so that you can keep up with us come on steve what's up you know i mean it's team let's go team you know and then next thing you know you're wearing the fucking headband that are you optimistic about the future in a general way though people are awesome it's a great time to be alive i love it i love people i think a lot of people love people how old do you want to live to that's a good question it's not how old i want to live to i don't want to live 300 years in an agony and pain right i want to live to that's a good question it's not how old i want to live to i don't want to live 300 years in an agony and pain right i want to live a healthy life as long as i can i don't know when that when you know what given how old you are now your health now in the state of science and technology and medicine now and where it might be in 20 years uh would you like to be 120 and be

it'd be interesting if if i was functional right if worked, I don't want to be a prisoner to my shell. But I think that people like Aubrey de Grey, who I had on last week, who's a fascinating character, he believes we're three to five years away from a giant breakthrough. And that when that giant breakthrough has, this is my concern, the haves and the have-nots will never be more separate than once there's some sort of innovative technology that allows you to live forever, but it's $1,000 every week or something like that. Yeah, but history shows us that all technologies, most technologies start out very expensive and almost all of them get really cheap really fast. Like Michael Douglas with that greed with that big-ass Wall Street phone on the beach.

Right. And digital era even more so. Sure. The leverage is accelerated so my thing would be but here's the question yeah would there be too much of an insurmountable head start from the people that are using that technology fair enough right and so there'd be like transitional generation they have two two sets of the technology okay they have the life extension technology or the age reversal technology which is what it's really talking about right and

then on top of that they have the things like what elon musk wants to do with that uh neural link yeah or some more advanced version of it or the next competing version of it what what if both of those things are highly expensive the amount of head start that a wealthy family would have over a poor family that just has to go out natural fair enough but in the in the scheme of history we're just talking about the blink of a couple generations where there's a transition oh yeah if you want to be hard and cruel and just look at numbers to me the all right to me the harder question even is whether immortality is desirable or even if like 200 years because you know there's something about scarcity that produces euphoria or at least desire right so i sometimes think that like every day feels precious because you know there aren't

that many of them and if i know that there are 300 years worth yeah i wonder well that's all scale right 300 years if that was normal right fine yeah i'm gonna be so wise when i'm 250 and then i'm gonna settle down and live the last 50 years on a boat. I mean, people can really think like that, right? And I'll eat vegetables only for that one year between 250 and 251. Otherwise, it's all meat, baby. Yeah, that year it's just all squash. Yeah.

I think what we're used to is 100 years if you're lucky. That's what we're used to. So the idea of 120 is like, whoa, is that real? He thinks it is. And he thinks that we're probably looking at people that one day in the future will live to be 300, 400 years. I do think about this, though. Retirement is a relatively new concept. It's only for the last 80, 100 years.

You used to work yourself pretty much and then you die. And I do find that a lot of people get lost after they give up the thing they do um and it's a it's a you know it's an it's kind of a rich kid problem uh you know to be able to retire it's like a sadness problem people need a task i think when people are just waiting around for death to come knocking on their door they get really morose and they just don't feel good they don't feel productive they don't feel so one thing with old people they don't feel helpful yeah well that's the thing they say. The single best – if you're feeling down generally about yourself, the single best thing they say you could – they.

As though there's some quorum of they who all agree on everything. But a lot of people say the single best thing you can do, and this was in our loneliness episode as well, is service. Helping other people. So do you – have you run across anybody that you've interviewed who you thought had a great kind of prescription for how to help other people? Like, doable, sensible, you know, that if people really, like, let's say I say, you know, I work hard. I try to love the people around me, but I really want to have some kind of service component, but I don't know what to do. That's a good question. I think first start with the people around you, right? Start telling them

you love them, hug them, enhance the sense of community that you share with your friends and your loved ones. Do your best to sort of be the person who steps forward, starts it off, you know, like makes an action. Tell someone how much you care and appreciate them. I care about them and appreciate them when you maybe wouldn't have done that ordinarily. You can do that. We can all do that. And we've all had it done to us and it feels amazing when someone comes up to you out of nowhere and goes hey man i just want to tell you i really appreciate you i know i know sometimes we don't talk to each other that much but when i do i really enjoy it i just i love you give me a hug i just want you to know yeah i'm very fortunate that i have a lot of friends that do that kind

of stuff i have a real supportive group of friends and if you don't you long for that and i think that's a big thing like become that person reach out and try to try to start that i can't imagine anybody hearing you say that would disagree it's like such a obviously good way to be and yet and yet i find that so many people kind of go out of their way to not just be generous because they're scared there's scarcity they think that they have they have to make it and that if you make it like zero sum they're a loser yeah it's famine thinking it's real real real common yeah our hardware is the same and our software is not yeah and we can manipulate our hardware we just have to understand what the patterns are and also have been there you have to make mistakes you've been there you feel it you understand what it is and then you have that time to adjust that's why losing in life is so important whether it's getting dumped

getting fired losing a game loss those feelings where things didn't work out your way that's important because it lets you know this is the bad feeling that comes when it goes wrong and you improve and then it makes the good feelings of victory all the better and i mean that you know in a relative sense like even getting good at something forget about victory like making a terrible book that gets rejected by every publisher and then writing a really good one and people accept it and you're like fuck i got better yes like that's that feeling yeah those feelings of failure are really critical for your motivation that's interesting yeah those feelings of failure are really critical for your motivation that's interesting i've always thought of failure like or like uh like a yeah failure or just like a bad

event i've always thought that they were good because i'm like a scaredy cat in some ways right and then if the very bad thing happens the very thing you feared happens, you survive it. And then you learn to shed more fear in more directions. You know what I mean? Well, you could look at it that way. Look, there's a lot of ways you could look at bad events. You could say a bad event is just who you are and you just have bad events and you're a fucking loser and life hates you and God hates you. And look at that happening to Mike again.

Can't fucking believe it. There's a lot of guys who go through life like that. And they can say that they seek comfort in lowering the standards that they expect out of things. So when things go bad and they say, well, I fucking knew it. For them, it alleviates some concern about what's going to happen in the future

because the future is always dog shit. So by doing that, they've taken away the fear of succeeding, the fear of overcoming, the fear of improving, the fear of getting better as a human being yeah if you just exhibit the same patterns you fall into those patterns whether it's alcoholism or gambling addiction or sex addiction people fall into those because they're accustomed to it it becomes a normal part of your life i think that's a scary thing for people to recognize that they're on a bad pattern and to say okay i have to stop drinking. How do I do this?

What steps do I make? And what's the best way? Community. They've shown 12-step programs. You get together with some other guy and he goes, look, Mike, I used to drink too much too. We're just people. We can help each other. I'm your sponsor now.

And they work together. That's – I think that solution is a really good solution. You know, I have three brothers, all older. I'm the youngest of eight, and I don't mean to disparage them. And I also know you're younger than me, but I kind of wish you'd been my older brother. You'd have been really good. Maybe. I've been sucking up, pussy.

Come on, man. Stop crying. Yeah, that's okay. Yeah, no. A little bit of that would be. No, I'm short. I have a sister. I don't have a brother.

But having conversations with your brothers and sisters, sometimes they're the only people that really know you. Like I have conversations with my sister sometimes. She's the only person that really knows our childhood. Right. So we'll talk about what it was like when we were nine and ten. Do you have the same perception of events? Yeah, my sister's super honest.

Right. But I mean, you remember... Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She doesn't distort anything. Right. We both have real similar recollections of our past. But those people that have experienced those things with you, they're like the only ones who really know you deep at your core.

And the more things you can experience with people, the more you're going to share that sort of... The people that make me sad are the people that know friends and no confidants. They have no one they could talk to. They have no one that knows their secrets. They have no one that they could tell a terrible joke to, and that you would never say in mixed company.

Right. You have no one who, you know, there's especially comedians. We're the, we're famous for it. We say things to each other all the time that are the most horrible things and just to get a rise out of each other

you know like one of my friends will say something terrible to me I'm like bah like about me like horrible shit about me and I'll just think it's so funny I'm like dude that is what I look like we're so accustomed to it and there's also in our culture there's a currency

Of being able to joke around like that Of course Like if somebody Makes One of my friends makes fun of me It's hilarious It's fun Like we do it to each other all the time

There's actually like a currency In being able to take it too Like you can make fun of Andrew He doesn't give a fuck Like it's a good thing You know That's what people You know I mean

You're in the business Of making fun of things If you're mad That someone makes fun of you It's not good in our world yeah all right i gotta learn uh i got a lot to learn from you i have a list things i'm gonna look up and watch things i'm gonna read i think we should all be concerned about each other's sensitivities but we shouldn't coddle people yeah and that's the difference between compassion and just full-on nerf in the world you know you can't nerf the world and you and and when you stop humor

like you nerf humor there's a real problem with that because it's fun it's fun when people talk shit talking shit is fun it's interesting to me how comedy is like the last place in society where you can actually say stuff yeah you can say some come to the comedy store we still say some really ridiculous shit yeah no it can't happen in the media it can't happen in politics yeah that's the art form though it's like i was talking about quentin tarantino's new movie that um once upon a time in hollywood and how he's sort of grandfathered in because there's scenes of violence in that movie against women. Like if a new guy came out of nowhere and he was, didn't have a track record and he had some woman getting her brains bashed in

on a fireplace. You'd be like, what? Yeah. What the fuck is this? But when you go to see a Tarantino movie, you know exactly what you're getting into. You're getting,

it's madness and chaos and ultraviolence. You ever seen Porgy and Bess? What is that? Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin musical from the 1920s, I guess. Was it like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? No, not at all. But it's a couple of white guys writing about this African-American community in the coastal South Carolina or Georgia.

And it's this drama. So it was written as a Broadway show and as an opera, too. And I saw it at the Metropolitan Opera. I don't go see a lot of opera. I saw this recently. And it was written as a Broadway show and as an opera too and I saw it at the Metropolitan Opera I don't go see a lot of opera I saw this recently and it was very very good it was incredibly moving even though it was opera which wouldn't seem to be but it was so unbelievably against everything we think about now about how to talk about race everything against it and yet it was about 80 actors opera opera singers and actors on stage, all African American, right? So, first of all, you have to think it's great to have a vehicle for that. But written by these two white guys, if it were to happen now, and I was surprised the Metropolitan Opera allowed itself to put on this show because it feels, from the light of day day of 2020 way too dated or racial or whatever and yet what was really interesting is because it's a really good piece of art

it overcomes that i think we should be really careful even with bad pieces of art of shielding people from the reality of our own evolution so if you go back and watch some of the early like there's a disney film that splash mountains based on that you can't even get anymore. It is this really racist film about the South. What's Splash Mountain? Splash Mountain's a ride at Disneyland. All right. But it's based on a movie.

Okay. It's based on a movie you can't even get anymore. Because it's so problematic. They kicked it out of the archive? Yes. It's so problematic. Like I think stuff like that that it's important to know where we came from like i don't know if you've ever watched some of the old popeyes

i have yeah from the 1920s and 30s whatever it was bluto was a fucking rapist all he was trying to do was rape olive oil he was always grabbing olive oil and trying to rape her that was normal i've been watching cheers. You remember Cheers? I do remember Cheers. Even Cheers. But stop and think. I'm sure that was. But some of those old black and white cartoons were insanely racist.

Yeah. Their depictions of Japanese people, their depictions of African people, their depictions of all the Popeye ones. Fucking crazy rape stories. And your argument is people should be allowed to see it. We should be able to see evidence of our own evolution. We shouldn't pretend that we just figured this shit out. Right.

We shouldn't pretend. We shouldn't pretend. And look, the fucking, there's so many things that were on. Look, the Dukes of Hazzard, they took away the Confederate flag from the roof of the General Lee. You literally can't watch the Dukes of Hazzard anymore because they pulled it off television because people were so offended by that flag. Look, I'm not saying, I'm not promoting the Confederate flag, but I've got a Leonard Skinner poster from 1976 in my toilet.

I saw that with the Rolling Stones. Yeah. Rolling Stones got second bill. How did that happen? Because Leonard Skinner was a shit back then, son. And on top of it, while they're on stage, there was a Confederate flag in the background of the image of them on stage. And that was – look, I'm not a proponent or a supporter of the Confederate flag or the Confederate anything. But that is a part of history.

And I think whitewashing it, I think pretending that it didn't exist, eliminating it from the historical record of who we were in 1980 or who we were in 1930 that's not good it's good to see what it was like little rascals our gang right some of those things were ridiculous but what they were was an example of the way culture and art viewed those times now what about what's what about the argument you say well for the people who belong to the group that's being discriminated against is just too painful that's a good argument but i think that we should recognize that these people were wrong but they existed right don't hide it don't make it impossible to get to because then you're going to make it forbidden if you make it forbidden you're going to make it attractive right you know if nobody give a fuck about swastikas no

one would care you have them up everywhere. I'm not promoting a swastika, but it's the fact that if you have a swastika tattoo, it's so awful that makes morons want to get one. Because it makes them want to spark up the taboo. Right. You know, there's a thing that people do when you take stuff away, you know,

where you make it, like, you're deciding that they can't see this anymore and you shouldn't want to watch it but why the fuck is hogan's heroes okay it's a goddamn sitcom about nazis and a concentration camp and these guys were prisoners of war it's ridiculous and they're joking around with these fucking baby murderers you know that's it's a crazy concept for a show that you never could do today i'd love to see you pitch that to a studio here though hogan's heroes again right a new version of hogan's heroes yeah there's certain things you can't pitch anymore right and i i don't think you should do a new version of hogan's heroes but i don't think you should make the old one a banned product either i understand historical

record of our evolution is a good way to look i like that lens of looking at it. There's also the idea of how the line between what's repugnant and not shifts. Yes. And then once you get past it, how much access do you want to when it, you know? Yes. So- Just imagine if you had a cartoon today

where the main character is constantly fighting off the co-main character trying to rape his wife. Yeah. That's what Bluto and Popeye was. Yeah, I don't think you could sell that in the room and all violence they're always solving it with violence stay away from me girl she's my girl and then they're duking it out and there's cartoon exaggerated violence at every turn every episode his biceps are firing up and he's punching the shit out of somebody but it's a sign of the times

people that back then lived a hard hard life and that was what they didn't want some bullshit ass fucking modern day disney movie to calm them down that wouldn't work right if you put tried to put one of them modern disney movies like the lion's king try to put that shit on in 1920 they'd be like what are you talking about hard to say we don't know the counterfactual i mean you know the art that's produced as a part of its time if you import an art from a different time it'd be interesting to see yeah i mean look you can make the argument in reverse what happens if you take a bunch of aggressive violent people now and play for them classical music does it work i mean the evidence seems to show that not really no the answer.

No, well, it's way more complicated than that. You take someone whose life's already gone so fucking sideways that they're violent and they're reaching out and smashing people and they're getting arrested and they've got problems you're not going to fix with Beethoven. Yeah. Although Beethoven can go a long way, you know. A little bit.

It might make them angry you know it might lead to the no one left to blame theory oh i can't stand this i love how you pick apart everything though and that's one of the things that i really enjoy about your show you look at every single potential angle and today in this in this society there's uh there's certain subjects that people don't like to do that with because it interferes with the orthodoxy. It interferes with this accepted upon narration of reality that we're, for whatever reason or another, stuck with. I think we're stuck with it. I think a lot of people have shortcuts because life is busy and complicated. of people have shortcuts because life is busy and complicated. And if somebody's done the thinking for you and it seems okay on the surface, like I touch it and it's not too hot, not too cold,

then I'm going to go with it. And the fact is thinking for yourself and ferreting out the information and finding the data and then finding conflicting data and trying to measure one against the other takes forever. That's why, look, we barely, we put out one podcast a week and it almost kills us just to do one a week because there's a ton of like, I think of it as, you know, I mentioned I grew up in the country. We used to make maple syrup and you would have all these maple trees. You drive the tractor around banging in the taps, put the buckets and you'd empty them out into the big vat and then you'd boil it down and you get this much maple syrup and it was very frustrating because it was damn it's good it's really good but the roi like

it took a lot of effort a lot of time to make it and so the fact is is that that's what i do for a living and i enjoy i wouldn't i wouldn't trade it for anything but i totally get why people reach for the fastest piece of conventional wisdom we're seeing it with coronavirus there's just so much so it's i'm very thankful that there's someone like you who's not doing that i'm can i tell you i'm thankful that there's a market for it yes because that's not an easy that's there's no guarantee of that it would have never been the market if it wasn't for the internet because if you had to go through a network and do what you're doing 100 i had a i had a trick uh kind of fool my way into getting so when i started the the podcast uh i also wanted to have a radio component um but i knew that if i went to like npr or somebody like that serious whatever and said, listen, I want to make a radio show that's basically inspired by the Freakonomics way of thinking.

And we're basically going to interview a bunch of scientists and academics and philosophers. And we're going to try to wrestle with these big pieces of life. And there'd be no way that any executive would go for that. So thank God for technology. It had made it so cheap to make a podcast on my own that I just did it, put it out there, and then I could go to these partners, which happened to be WNYC and American Public Media. And they said, oh, okay, that works. There was already an audience for it. So that's another case where if people are able to use a technology that's in front of them and marry their ideas to it you know then but it's also but i agree with you but it's also

like what you were talking about before where there's so many ideas that like it's so much easier to let someone do the thinking for you right it's so much easier to just fall into place so the vast majority of people do that but there's so many of us there's so many of us there's always going to be a market so even though the vast majority of people might slot into a previously grooved little opening and and fit their thoughts to fit that little space yeah there's plenty of people that don't want to do that and the beautiful thing about your reach is you're getting a pure sample of people who enjoy what you're thinking because there's no reason to listen if you don't enjoy it yeah it's true and look i am very again just appreciative of being in a world where there's

people who are willing and able to have ideas that are prima facie unpopular. Like my co-author, Steve Levitt, when he wrote this paper, it's gosh, more than 20 years ago now, I think about abortion and crime. Man, there are all kinds of ways in which you could talk yourself out of even thinking about that, much less writing a paper. So it takes courage. But if you look through history, if you look at the people who've really changed the world, they have courage. Yeah, those are really, really controversial subjects that are uncomfortable fact of our reality and some some uncomfortable facts people would be happier with you if you left them alone yeah yeah um but you know the world doesn't

progress very much unless there's a guy like steve jobs or a copernicus or whatever you know sticking the needles poking people in the eye with a stick. And they, you know, very often they're discredited or hated for their whole lives. I love the stories where someone like gets pushed out and then finally toward the end, they're appreciated for what they did. There was this geologist in England named William Smith who kind of invented modern geology, but he was not of the gentrified class. And so, his work was kind of stolen. This is an amazing story told in a book called The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester. And basically, his ideas and his research were kind of hijacked. He was

discredited. He ended up getting thrown in debtor's prison. It's a a class it's like a horrible story but then at the end of his life he was able to persuade people that he had actually done this work and he was lauded at the very end but like many much more often you'll find the stories of the people who just get like stomped on for their ideas and don't get the credit but you look at the people who've died in disgrace who've had world-changing ideas it's you. But you look at the people who've died in disgrace, who've had world changing ideas. It's, you know, artists,

look at all the artists who were like not at all popular in their time. And only now do we appreciate. So, you know, got to take the long view. I agree. I just, I'm just happy that you do it.

I'm just happy that you're out there and that your podcast really does explore things in every nuanced corner and really objectively and honestly and i think it's uh it's a powerful thing appreciate my favorites hey thanks for having me hey thanks for being here man it was awesome we just did two hours and 45 minutes i believe that i really i i really enjoyed that conversation i really did too it was a lot of fun thank you so much thank you thank you very much and where can uh tell tell people everything what social media it's that stuff. It's easy. Yeah, we're on social media.

Just Freakonomics. As long as you spell it right, it's Freak, F-R-E-A-K-O-nomics, N-O-M-I-C-S. But, you know, the main thing is the podcast. We're also starting a little podcast channel with some new shows that are kind of related. So we're doing that in the next year. This is our 10th year of Freakonomics Radio. We might do another 10. Who knows 10 Keep going

Thank you so much