The Joe Rogan Experience - #1504 - Alan Levinovitz

Episode Date: July 8, 2020

Dr. Alan Levinovitz is an author and Associate Professor of Religion at James Madison University. His latest book Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science is available now. Also look for his podcast SHIFT available on Spotify.

Hello, Alan. Hello, Joe. Good to see you. First of all, thank you for this, this piece of pyrite that's embedded into stone. And we just started talking. I said, just don't say another word. Let's start talking about this on the podcast because this, it kind of, it's interesting. I started your book, which I very rarely read books.

I mostly do audio books, but I was forced to read yours. But one of the things that I found interesting is the concept of what is natural. And I've gone over this many times myself. I'm like, poison's natural. Like, everything's natural. Computers are natural, really, because they come from the ground. They're made by people. They're essentially like a human's version of Anything like a bird would create right birds create

Birds nests are those natural but this pyrite this is pyrite right yep, which is fool's gold right fool's gold But it's naturally in these cubes in these this this square form this perfect These perfect angles which you would never believe. You would think somebody left this shit there. I didn't believe it. It looks like, it looks like aliens left them. Yeah. And they're even in like what that's called is it's in the matrix.

Oh wow. So sometimes you can just get the cubes. They're just the cube, but they call the rock that it's in the matrix, which I think is kind of appropriate. That is going to have a permanent spot on this desk with all this other craziness here. Thank you so much. That was really cool. I did not know that it came like that. I found pyrite when I was a kid in rocks, you know, when they call it fool's gold.

Jamie's going to bring that up to you there. Perfect. Fool's gold, but it's usually like specks and flecks and stuff. There's another one called, I forget, they're called like Illinois miners dollars or something. This is another form that Pyrite takes. I'm kind of obsessed with weird rocks, but they look just like sand dollars, but they're gold. They look like they're golden. And so these are, you know, I think one of the things I actually changed my mind over writing, like over the course of writing this book.

Oh, there they are. Jamie pull-ups. Yeah. That's crazy. They're incredible, right? What causes it to take on these different, completely unusual forms? So I tried to find it. There's like a local rock store where I live and I asked the guy and apparently, I don't understand how it works at all. But the way all crystals work is they have different kinds of structures and the way those structures come together determines whether it makes like a quartz crystal or what shape it takes.

It's very surreal, I think, honestly. This is very bizarre. I did not know until you gave this to me that that existed. Yeah. So for me, I went into this book, like you said, with this question of what's natural. There's some people, often scientists, who will sort of scoff at the idea of naturalness, right? They're like, everything's natural, right? Humans are natural.

We're animals. We made all this stuff. We made the microphones. We're all made out of space dust. Everything's natural. It's stupid to distinguish between natural and unnatural. And honestly, that's where I was when I started writing the book. I was like, I'm going to make, I'm going to show this as a stupid idea.

I'm going to be Richard Daw'm going to show this as a stupid idea. I'm going to, I'm going to be Richard Dawkins, but for naturalness. Right. But I was wrong. I don't know. What shifted it for you? Well, so one of the things like with that pyrite, right? People ask, is it natural?

That's the first thing they ask. Does this occur naturally? Right. first thing they ask, does this occur naturally, right? And it's an important question because there's a difference, like a sort of profound difference between knowing that that was just spewed up by the earth forces that are not human, right? Versus humans sitting down and deciding to make a cube, right? It's like a diamond that has been shaped by millions of years of natural forces. And what I realized is that it really does make sense to distinguish between naturalness and unnaturalness. You have to, maybe it's a spectrum, obviously, right? So it's not an easy binary, but New York City is not as natural as Yellowstone. And what I realized was I wasn't really against the idea of naturalness or even valuing nature, right? I mean, hopefully we'll talk about,

I went back country in Yellowstone. It was unbelievable. You know, I mean, everyone values naturalness in certain ways. It was worshiping nature that I had a problem with. This idea that the more natural something is, the better it is. Or that what we need to do, like if you want to raise your kid, right? You got to raise your kid naturally. You like, you know, let them piss in the corner or like elimination communication. Do you know about this? No. I swear. So some celebrity has been in it.

Alicia Silverstone did it with her son Bear. Isn't it funny that that automatically dismisses it? You mean the fact that his name is Bear? No, no, no. Just the fact that it's a celebrity thing. Celebrities do it. It's like I dismiss it. Interesting. That's a celebrity thing. Like celebrities do it. It's like I dismiss it. Interesting.

That's a different. I actually thought it was the name Bear that dismissed it. No, I have a good friend who has a son named Bear. I mean, I guess it makes sense if you're really obsessed with naturalness, right? And you're toilet training your kid. Then you don't want to like be using diapers. And you don't want to be using a toilet. You want it to be like nature, right? Like, so when I talked with, with anthropologists who work with hunter gatherers and asked them like, how does, you know, how does

potty training work? And they were like, what do you mean? Like people just piss in the forest. And, you know, if you, if you take a shit in someone's lap, they're going to be really upset at you. And it doesn't, you know, and then you figure it out. Don't shit in daddy's lap. Exactly. But there's this idea, right, that, and so that's what we should be doing with our children. And I don't know about you, but like when I, you know, when we had our daughter, I was online and I'm like, okay, well, how do I parent my child? What are the right things to do? Like, should she be in my bed?

Should she be in the crib? And time and time again, I always read about how hunter gatherers parented their babies, right? And it was always like, this is the natural way to parent your kid. So it must be better. And I realized that was where I had my problem, that it's fine to love nature, but you shouldn't worship it. Well, human beings have done horrible things to their children from the beginning of time without anybody telling them to do it or not to do it. And I don't know if that's natural, but yeah, I mean, if it occurs enough, it's kind of like pedophilia occurs a lot.

Is that natural? So, so there was a, there's a, there was, yeah. I mean, you know, essentially again, right. If natural is defined as whatever sort of emerges spontaneously out of forces that weren't willed by human beings, which is what I think natural is. Right. So we say we have natural instincts. In other words, it's whatever we didn't will. It just comes out of us. There's a there's a woman who's an expert on captivity. So kidnapping, slavery named Catherine Cameron. And I was interviewing her. She said, you know, it is as natural as the nuclear family to have slaves. I was interviewing her.

She said, you know, it is as natural as the nuclear family to have slaves, right? So slavery is a thing that has been done forever and ever. I mean, you imagine, right? So you're pre-agricultural. Your tribe, your group requires certain population. Can't get too high. Can't get too low. And so kidnapping other people's children is often a common thing. So is that good? Well, clearly not,

right? Or, you know, dying in childbirth. These are all things that are natural, but are obviously not good. And so I started to see the way in which this word was being abused. Basically, people would use natural to describe whatever they favored and unnatural to describe whatever they didn't like, right? People do it with sex. People do it with child rearing. People do it with economic theories, right? You want a natural market with no interference. And that's how people would justify a free market.

You've got other people who are like, actually, money is unnatural. You really want a barter system. That was what emerged naturally out of humans. And I'm sitting here looking at both these arguments. I'm like, no, you want an economy that works. It doesn't matter whether it's natural or not. That's a really good point. One of the things that I saw in your book was, you were talking to Joel Salatin, who I love, and he's a strange man, but a beautiful person. I really love what he's doing with Polyface Farms, but he drinks the water that the cows drink out of so that he gets that in his biome.

You know, he's a real freak. But when you were talking about New York City and, you know, would his method of farming work to feed a city as big as New York? He's like, do you need a city as big as New York? Then I'm like, OK, hit the brakes. Right now we're in the weeds. Yes. I love New York then I'm like okay hit the brakes right now We're in the weeds yes. I love New York. It's fucking great place to visit I don't want to live there, but it's awesome I mean when you go to New York if you you're if you're in a hotel that has like a

30th floor and you look out you see the skitty the city's Skyscraper you know you see all the this you know the skyline all the different beautiful buildings lit up at night I mean that is an amazing Spectacular site that i am very thankful exists i love it there yeah i'm great i'm grateful for all that i mean there's so many it's it's it's insane really to be right now if someone's listening to this podcast here we are we've got microphones we're beaming this conversation to millions of people and to think that simultaneously people would be thinking to themselves, the criteria I'm going to use to judge whether something is good or bad with a capital G or a capital B is how natural it is. Right. This is totally unnatural.

As unnatural as it gets. Meanwhile, the coronavirus, right, which is, you know, natural, of course, people will say, well, actually, we wouldn't have been infected if only we lived more naturally. Right. So the problem is know, natural. Of course, people will say, well, actually, we wouldn't have been infected if only we lived more naturally. Right. So the problem is urban density or the problem is that you shouldn't be going into the jungle and getting things like this. You know, there's actually an argument against that, though. The the the virus itself, more evidence is coming out daily that it's been manipulated, that it most likely did come out of that lab. I had Brett Weinstein on the podcast, who's a biologist, and he was talking about all the various aspects of the virus that really don't exist naturally in this. He's like, it's far too contagious. It's far too prolific. There's so many different, I'm going to fuck it up if I talk about the technical details of it. But when he was describing it, he was saying more evidence points to the fact that it was actually something that had been manipulated by people than that it was a natural virus.

So, I mean, I don't, I'm not a biologist. I have no idea. But I think what, I think what's weird or what I would want to push back on, and this is a religious study scholar, right? Because this is, this is where I came to all the natural, natural stuff to begin with is if something's bad, I think people are immediately going to think, oh, it makes sense that it was unnatural. It makes sense that this bad thing that's hurting us couldn't be natural. But, but the truth is some things that hurt us are natural. Cyanide.

There you go. Or, you know, again, I mean, I keep going back to childbirth. I mean, I went to Peru. I got to tell you this story. So I went to Peru to research this book because I wanted to talk with, like, as close as I could get to pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, right? And I can't get – you can't get too close. But there are people called the Matsigenka, the Matsigenka in the rainforest that I got to talk to. And I got to ask them about their relationship with technology and all that stuff.

I'm never going to forget. I go up to this guy and I ask him. They've just had solar lights installed like in the main sort of area of their village. And I go up to this guy and I was like, how do you feel about having these artificial lights installed? And he, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, it's this pollution, right? Isn't it better to just have, you know, the stars in the sky and the moon? And he looks at me and he goes, he goes, this is good. We can see at night now. He's just like, like he was talking to just a fucking idiot, you know, like, of course

I'm happy. Right. Or this, and then there was this old lady. I was like, they had, you know, they had a, they had a pump, like running water installed, basically clean water. Right. So you could wash your dishes and your clothes. And I'm thinking, oh my God, this is ripping them away from the natural way of life.

And I asked this lady, I'm like, how do you feel about the water? And she's like, it's we don't we don't get bacterial. I mean, she didn't say bacterial infection. She was like, we don't get sick anymore from the water that we're drinking from the river. I was like, oh, and she's just looking at me like, like, why? Why is he asking me this? Right. And meanwhile, I'm coming from this place where everyone wants to get closer to nature, right? Because we have been alienated from it.

And I'm asking from the perspective of someone who thinks it just must be paradise living so close to nature. And she's like, no, we want to be able to wash our clothes and have the fucking lights on at night. Yeah. You know, and I was like, hmm. Right, there was a shaman.

I'm talking to the shaman in the village, Don Alberto, right? And he's talking, he's like, you know, it's true that technology is messing up the hmm. There was a shaman. I'm talking to the shaman in the village, Don Alberto, right? And he's talking. He's like, you know, it's true that technology is messing up the world. We've got climate change. We've got, you know, all these species are going extinct. And he goes on and on, right? He's very close to nature, very wise man. He's got a cell phone also, right?

And I'm like, well, so is technology bad? And he's like, yes. Well, yes, yes and no. He's on Tinder. Yeah, right. Yeah, that's what he's really doing. He didn't tell me. But that's – and that's – I want people – I just want people to understand that there just aren't any easy categories you can use to divide up the world into good and bad.

And now that people – now that organized religion, sort of the sphere of authority is shrinking, right? You don't go to your priest to find out what to eat. You don't go to your priest to find out how to cure your disease. Now that that authority is shrinking, I think people are looking to other similar kinds of authority. And so they're like, okay, I can't go to my priest, but if I'm walking through the store, what sort of criteria can I use to divide the world up easily into good and evil, clean and unclean? Organic. Organic and inorganic, right? Yeah, artificial.

And it's built into our language, Joe. Artificial is linked to artifice, which is deception, right? So you've got manipulated, which really just means humans got a hold of it and changed it with their hands also means something bad. So really built into our language, we have this idea that natural means good, artificial, manipulated manipulated that's bad i think maybe it's because we have this insane power to manipulate things and we we all collectively use the power to manipulate things that was created by scientists that have a far greater understanding of what the implications and like what the process of this manipulation is. And we just come along and use their technology.

I mean, that's, I think that's, that's a problem with so much of what people do. Like we've, we've earned this power just by virtue of being alive and being able to trade in goods and services for whatever that they've created. And then we don't think about the consequences of utilizing this stuff. Like what is, there's gotta be, there's some sort of a balance, right? There's a balance between, like if you want to have a fireplace in your house, that's wonderful. Fireplaces are great.

It's a nice smell, right? You walk in the house, you smell a fireplace. If you're walking down the street and someone's got their fireplace on smells good but if the whole fucking place is on fire it's terrible you're filled with smoke you can't breathe it's like there's a balance and clearly when you see polluted cities clearly when you see polluted rivers and we're destroying the environment there's a lack of balance we've utilized this power that we have to manipulate

our environment, but we've done it completely irresponsibly, or we've done it without the awareness of the consequences of 8 million people doing the exact same thing. Yeah. Well, I mean, the scale you can do stuff on with technology is really, I mean, it's made us incredibly powerful, right? There's Stuart Brand, the guy who started the Whole Earth Catalog, you know, said basically, we've become like gods, so we have to be able to wield this power responsibly. I think it's easy to see that and say, well, then the evil is in the form of the power itself, right? Obviously, then, if we've got a nuclear bomb or we've got, you know, if we're polluting the world, then the problem is with the technology itself. So you locate the evil in that technology.

Whereas, you know, what you're saying, I mean, take burning wood, which is a great example. You know, we've got a lot of people on Earth now. We have them because kids aren't fucking dying all the time, right? I mean, so there are some things that I discovered while I was reading this. For example, have you seen that cartoon where there's two cavemen in a room? It's a New Yorker cartoon. And they're talking. They're not in a room.

They're cavemen. They're in a cave. Sorry. So they're in a cave and they're talking to each other. And one of them's like, you know, we eat organic. We exercise all the time. And like nobody's living past the age of 35. What's going on?

Right. So there's this. And that's the people that are like nature's bullshit take. Right. They're like. But actually it turns out that that cartoon is bullshit. So people didn't just die at age 35. That was average lifespan because tons of kids were dying between the age of zero and five.

Truth is if you made it past five, then you had a pretty good shot at like 60 or 70. So it wasn't so bad in the state of nature. At the same time, there's another vision of what's happening to us now. Have you seen that evolution? There's like an evolution cartoon where it starts with, I don't know, like Paleolithic man or a chimpanzee or something. And then it gets to like a big, strong hunter with a spear. And then technology comes in and they hunch over at the end and they get obese and they've got like a Coke in one hand. And there's this idea like, well, technology is now we were perfect when we were natural. And then technology has made us worse.

And for me, it's what you were saying. It's a balance, right? There are ways in which technology like my dad. My dad is is 91. I talked, you know, I talked to anthropologists and like despite what you might you know you might think that there aren't a lot of 91 year old hunter gatherers they're just not out there so I'm like really grateful that my dad you know is super healthy 91 year old that is that's crazy that's an incredible

thing we've done I'm glad that kids aren't dying all the time I'm dad you know I'm glad that mothers aren't dying in childbirth that's those are incredible things like New York City right at the same time it's we're aren't dying all the time. I'm glad that mothers aren't dying in childbirth. Those are incredible things, like New York City, right? At the same time, we're destroying the world. So we got to work out these problems without using simple binaries to figure out what's good and what's bad. It's better to have solar power than billions of humans burning wood. But solar power is obviously, to me at least, less natural than lighting a piece of wood on fire. solar power is obviously to me at least less natural than lighting up this wood solar power doesn't bother me at all yeah i mean i love solar

power but i i i'm totally on board with what you're saying and there is some sort of a balance and you know the the nihilists like i have friends that will say you know we shouldn't have children and there's too many people in the world and uh overpopulation is our biggest problem I'm like yeah but I love people don't you love people like a world without people would suck for people like if you do you remember that cartoon there was a excuse me not a cartoon it was an episode of Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith he is the last man on Earth, and he accidentally breaks his glasses, and he can't read. He's always just wanted alone time to read his books, and he's always been bothered by all these people.

And then he's inside, I forget what he's in, a bank vault or something like that, and there's a nuclear catastrophe, something along those lines. And he leaves this area to go outside, and he realizes that he to go outside and he realizes that he's literally the last person on earth but he has all these books to read and he's so excited and he starts picking up these books but then he breaks his glasses and he's fucked and I mean the the ideal of being the last person on earth is one of the that's that's probably one of the most

terrifying ideas for a person to be completely isolated and alone forever with no one to talk to we love each other people love people we like being around each other we like we like community we like the love of other people we want to talk and it's like a vitamin I mean really it's like how you get vitamin D from the Sun you get vitamin L from people you really need it Well, it's a legitimate need we don't want people to die Right and one of the things about evolution is the you know, I say this in the book The gears of evolution are greased with death, right? That's what it is. It's people dying before they reach reproductive age

We've decided we'd like to prevent that from happening as much as we can. We don't want people dying all the time. We love each other. We're stepping in with our virtue and stopping natural selection. That's exactly right. And it's a weird argument, I think, to want to claim nature as this kind of benevolent deity that if only we follow what it tells us, right? Just act naturally, which is a bizarre phrase if you think about it, because you've got to act that way. That is bizarre. Right? It's like, no, no, no, just act naturally. You're like, well, but that's, it's hard for me. I'm going to have to sort of artificially do this. But, you know,

that, we don't want to be natural. We're unnatural animals. That's what we are. Not my phrase, H.G. Wells calls us unnatural animals. And I think that's okay. what we are not my phrase HG Wells calls calls us unnatural animals and I think that's okay we want to embrace that paradox instead of trying as much as we can to figure out the ways in which naturalness is good HG Wells is a fascinating character right because he predicted so many things as a science fiction author you know who was living in a time of very little technology in terms of like what we experienced today, that guy had a fantastic vision of the future. He did. I mean, it's

interesting. This is a totally, it's a totally separate thing, I guess, for me. But when it comes to when it comes to the ability of science and scientists to predict the future, I think this is a place I mean, we see it with macroconomists most obviously, but there's a way in which we've come to expect that science, because it has done such incredible things with manipulating reality, with telling us truths about where we are in the universe, that also it ought to be able to predict complex systems, like where are humans going to be in 30 years or what's going to happen with the coronavirus 10 years down the line or whatever it happens to be. But the truth is, fiction writers, science fiction writers who have thought very hard about constructing plausible worlds are just as good of authorities on predicting what's going to be happening with human systems 70 years, 100 years down the line as scientists are. So there are clear limits to what

science and a certain form of investigation can tell us about. And I think it's important if we stop trying to force scientists to tell us everything, right? Like, well, what's going to happen with the economy? What's going to happen 70 years down the line? What's going to happen 100 years down the line? At that point, we need a different set of tools to figure out what to do with ourselves and what's going to happen. Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that think that there's not enough babies being born in the Western world because people are more career oriented. And we're worried that someday we're going to have underpopulation problems like Japan has right now. Yeah, it's terrible. In Japan, it's a real crisis. And we got to that crisis. All of these things are a result of us, like you said, stepping in with

our virtue, which I don't mean in a bad way, but stepping in with our virtue, trying to fix things like feed people, for example. We don't want kids to die. We want there to be enough calories to go around. And what ends up happening is we have a lot of people. So then we have to figure out new ways to house them and feed them and power the things that they do and entertain them and so on and so forth. So we get a lot of people and then people like, well, OK, let's have fewer humans because that's the problem. But then when you do that, now you've got a system that depends on having more humans. Right. You need a younger generation coming in. So these systems are

incredibly complicated. And I think, again, the reason people are leaning on naturalness so hard is because when you're faced with complicated, uncertain systems, it's scary. It's really scary. And you want some kind of criteria, whether it's a holy book or a prophet or whatever it is, to tell you, no, I got this. Yeah, I think that's one of the weirdest things about today, right 1985, where we are today with the coronavirus, and then with the subsequent lockdown of the economy, where everyone's terrified. And then you have the George Floyd murder, and then you have the looting and the riots and the chaos and the protests, and then you have the coronavirus kicks in again, and our leaders look impotent.

And we can't look to what, what I mean when you have a guy like Donald Trump in office already you have a situation like Jesus I hope the cabinet can keep this thing together I hope the Senate can hold this but this is madness we got a reality show host who's the fucking president but then all the mayors

are fucking up all the governor no one it's not even that they're fucking up is that no one is equipped to handle this. So you see unprecedented anger, particularly online, where you're dealing with people. And this is one of the things that drew me to you is one of the tweets that you made about processed information, that online information is essentially processed information when you're dealing with social media versus actual communication like you and I are having right now, which is what resonates with people. I think it's one of the things that resonates with podcasts. It's one of the reasons why I prefer to do them in person.

It's the closest thing to a real conversation with a real person. Whereas this viewing of text, white on black, white letters in in my case i use the night mode on a black screen it's so weird like you you have to interpret intent you have to try to get and then you're not getting any social cues from the person you're not there's not a back and forth it's just you spit something out they spit something back and it, you're trying to approximate what it's like to actually talk to a person. It's very processed. I thought, I thought that what you, the way you described it was really the perfect definition

of what ails us. We're so many people today are communicating in this way and it's very similar to people surviving off of processed food and becoming sick. So if you think about how processed food was created, basically, and I mean modern ultra processed food, because these terms are all really slippery, right? Just like the term natural. So this is on a spectrum, right? The history of cooking is a history of processing food, right? You like to cook. I like to cook. That's processing food. Dessert is a kind of food that's been made to be highly palatable.

You know, so it's not about processing being intrinsically evil, but with ultra processed foods, what you've got is you got a bunch of companies that are like, all right, what can we exploit about human appetites to make foods as compulsively eatable as possible? Right, it's terrifying.

You've got, I think Coca-Cola, I think it was, said something like, we have to conquer stomach share. This is a term they use. Yeah. So like there's a – yeah. So you think, right? You have 100 – think of the stomach, right? Like, okay, so we got 100% of the stomach. Like how can Coca-Cola fill the maximum amount of stomach share in the humans of the world? Wow, what a bizarre way of looking at people.

It's terrifying, right? And they did it because they've got the smartest people. They've got great chemists and biologists working day and night to figure out how to conquer stomach share. And they started with cocaine, which is even more weird. Did you know it's still? Yeah. Okay. I discovered that when I was like, wait, there's a plant in New Jersey that's

getting. Yeah. And it's the number one supplier of medical cocaine. It's so crazy. It's Coca-Cola. We should tell people, just tell people what the, what we're talking about for people don't know. Yeah.

Well, so, so Coca-Cola back in the day was made with, with, with cocaine for the, for the cocaine kick. John Pemberton, the guy who, the guy who came up with Coca-Cola, had cocaine in it. And to this day, there is a plant that's been grandfathered in, I guess legally, I don't know how it works, that is still importing enormous amounts of cocaine, processing it so that it no longer has an effect on you in the way that cocaine would and putting it in Coca-Cola. Yeah, the flavor of Coca-Cola is apparently a big part of the reason why like Pepsi. Unfortunately, Pepsi, you don't taste as good as Coke. You just don't. There's no cocaine in it.

Yeah, well, it's the flavonoids. I think that's the right word. There's some flavor that the coca leaf has. There's some flavor that the coca leaf has. I've never had chewed coca leaf, but people who I've talked to that have had it said it's an amazing way to get energy. It's like a cup of coffee. They gave it to us when we arrived in – it's like when I was in Bolivia, I had chewed coca leaves. What is it like?

It's not – I mean, it's not like, I mean, it's not like being on Coke. It's just like. Have you been on Coke before? I have. And it's nothing like that. So it's, it's a, it's because cocaine, right, is a ultra processed form. Right. Of what is in the Coca leaves. Yeah.

Exactly. Yeah. That's how it's been described to me. Unfortunately, I've never, or maybe fortunately, I've never done Coke, but I have had a mate de Coca, the, the tea from that, which is really interesting because I couldn't shut the fuck up when I was drinking. And I was like, well, this is terrible for me. I already can't shut the fuck up.

You give me this stuff. This is awful. We've got to, I want to, I want to get back to, so it, okay. So this is how we got sidetracked. Cocaine, Coca-Cola, ultra processed food, stomach share. All right. We're back. We're back where we were.

We should tell people that this Coca, this Coca-Cola, when-processed food, stomach share. All right, we're back where we were. We should tell people that this Coca-Cola, when they do take the coca leaf and they process it and use the flavor for Coca-Cola, then they take the cocaine out of it, and then it's the number one medical supplier of cocaine are the people that do that. So literally medical cocaine, like lidocaine and all that shit comes from a lot of it. I didn't know it was the same plant. That's crazy. Crazy. Yeah. That's medical cocaine.

So these people are trying to conquer our stomachs. And they did it. Right? And one of the ways they did it also was make it cheap and accessible. There's vending machines in every school. I mean think for a second how crazy that is. That there are vending machines with just Coca-Cola and candy bars and stuff in every single school we have. But it happened, right? And so now we live in a world in which

extremely cheap, highly palatable, and very accessible food is everywhere. No wonder we have a problem with our diets. And that's exactly what's happening with information right now. So as I understand it, the way in which Twitter was designed, for example, they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back. So like slot machines, right? They consulted with people who build slot machines to figure out, okay, what keeps people pulling the lever, right? So they could just have it refresh. You just have your tweets at the top, but instead there's a little alert button, right? You pull down, there's a little noise, like, or whatever the noise is when you pull down

on it, you know? And so they've made it compulsive. They've made it highly palatable, right? You want to keep coming back. highly palatable, right? You want to keep coming back. And the thing is the difference between ultra-processed information and ultra-processed food is that I think we're the companies now. And that really freaks me out. We're the consumers. We're also the manufacturers. And we're also the distributors. We make the memes. Someone is going to take some cut of this show and turn it into a soundbite that's highly palatable in the way that information becomes highly palatable.

It's going to be oversimplified. It's going to have heroes and villains. It's going to demonize someone. And it's going to be something that gives you a sense of belonging. Those are the three things I think that make information highly processed and highly palatable. We want a hit of information that's easy to understand, that demonizes someone, and that gives us a sense of belonging. And that's just like exploiting what humans want, right? You're saying, you know, we're creatures that want to love each other. We want to belong, right? It's just the same way we want to taste salt, sugar, and fat.

We want to feel these things. And the information that we have around us now, it's the same thing as a Snickers bar, except the difference is we're Snickers. We're making it. like rabid junkies. If you look at, I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other, but it seems like it's half at least. I mean, it's just, there's so much rabid discourse. There's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other. And it's so unlike anywhere else in the world, unless you're in a fucking war zone, like the way people talk to each other. anywhere else in the world,

unless you're in a fucking war zone, like the way people talk to each other. If people talked to each other in real life the way they talked on Twitter, the emergency ward would be filled with people with broken faces and shattered eye sockets. It'd be chaos. Well, it's like road, it's road rage.

It's how you treat people. It's how you treat the person in the other car that's cut you off because they're not, they've been dehumanized. They're isolated, right? It's like Twitter just allows you you to and social media in certain ways facilitates being angry in the way that you get angry at other car you like honking you're like fuck you man i hate you it's like it like you know what also causes that the reason why people do

that in road rage it's because your sensors are heightened because you're moving so fast because you're you're aware that split-second decision-making is important to survival. So when you're going 65 miles an hour and you're looking around at everybody and this guy gets in front of you, motherfucker, like you're already at seven or eight. And I think this is also a part of the problem today online. Because of the coronavirus and because of the lockdown and economic instability And we're at unprecedented joblessness right now. I mean, people are really hopeless. There's a lot of people that we got one $1,200 check from the government, and then that's it.

And then you hear that Kanye West got this giant loan and Judd Apatow got this giant loan. These really wealthy people are getting all this money. But meanwhile, salon owners, small business owners didn't. A lot of people are just fucking furious at everything because it's like driving a car. You're already heightened. So this information that comes at you, maybe it wouldn't have pissed you off under normal circumstances, but now you're fucking furious. Right. It's like stress eating or something. So we have this, I hadn't really thought about that with Road Rage, but it does make sense, right. So when you're already at that level, then you're going to be even more likely to need that kind of information, want to participate in that kind of dialogue.

It's not dialogue. No, it's not. Yeah. ways we can we can stop it i really think we can stop it by focusing on problems with the system and problems with ourselves right it's both of us because we're the ones manufacturing it and we're the ones consuming it so we can do things about it and it ranges from you know i mean i don't like i don't have i still don't have a smartphone you don't no? No. You're a flip phone guy? I have a flip phone. Wow. On purpose? Yeah. I mean, in part, not because- But you tweet a lot. I do. That's not good. Well, it is. I know it's compulsive. I think the reason I don't have it is because if I had a smartphone, man, it'd be all over. I'd be on it all the time. I mean, when I'm at home, because

I work from home sometimes, my wife has a smartphone. And so I'll always be using her phone. She's like, what are you doing? Like, if you don't have a phone, you can't just go use my phone, right? And then I'm installing things on my computer, like Freedom, which is this app that blocks you from. I mean, it's literally like, you know, with food, right? People have those locks that only open. So I have an app that like locks me out of these sites. I have a folder on my desktop or on my, I guess, yeah, my desktop of my phone that says junkie.

And that's all of my Instagram and Twitter and all that stuff I was going to show to you. It's important. That kind of thing. So we need, I think we all need to collectively take steps in that way. But also we need to realize, and this is really important, right? It's not just about natural, unnatural. It's not just about technology. We've had this kind of junk food information around forever. And this is where

I think for me as a scholar of religious studies, right? If you look at myths and folk tales and fairy tales, and if you look at the structure of religions, there are ways to tell stories to get people heightened. There are ways to tell stories to get people heightened. There are ways to tell stories to make people feel belonging. There are ways to tell stories to demonize people, right? These tropes have been around forever, right? What do you do? You create a villain. You tell a story about redemption. You tell a story about a fall. You tell a story in which the people who are hearing the story, just by hearing it, become heroes. These are things that have been around for a long time in the same way that if you go back 2,000 years, if you were super rich and had access

to lots of delicious, salty, sugary, fatty food, you could get fat. It was just a lot harder back then. And in the same way, now we've facilitated the manufacture of these junk narratives that in small doses, I think, are fine. But if it's all we're consuming, it's a disaster. And we're going to end up, I think, with some problems that are analogous to the health problems that we're seeing because of what we eat, except they're going to be problems in our soul, right? I mean, we're going to get mental diabetes. Yeah, yeah.

Or I mean, it's not, I feel like it's a, I mean, I'm not, I'm not like a sort of organized religious, religion person myself, but I would say it's not just mental. It's like our souls. There's something deeply corrupting of our humanity. And I, and I catch myself doing it so like so that tweet that you're talking about I had I had written a

piece a week before that about Trump visiting um what's that you know visiting the church and holding up the Bible it was this really angry piece and I was like you know I'm gonna write about how terrible this is and and put this out there right and do something the way he set it up, like tear gassing all the protesters to clear the area. I was like, what a horrible thing. I'm going to tell everybody how horrible this is. I'm going to get my anger out. And then when the article came out, I just realized that I was just sending it into the fucking machine.

And it was going to get ground up. And the people who already agreed with it were going to read it and be like, yeah, it's terrible. And the people that disagreed with it are either never going to read it or they're going to see it and they're going to be like, see people keep attacking Trump. Like they're all crazy. And it was sort of like a crisis. I was just like, I don't want to, I don't want to be doing, I don't want to be putting anything into this machine if it's just going to get processed into junk information so that we can feed our habit. And this is a habit that we really don't know how to navigate. We've only been dealing with this habit for, when did Twitter get invented?

2007? It was very recent. Yeah. That's not enough time for us to figure out how to do it right. I mean, you remember like during the, I'm 52. During the, I'm 52, so when I was a kid, watching television for kids all day was fairly new, right? It had only been like a generation or two that that was even possible, to just watch TV all the time. And it was constantly thought of as the corrupting thing, like get away from the TV.

All you do is watch TV. Get up. Get outside. And that was sort of the first indication that there's a potential for an unhealthy relationship with technology and with distributed content, right? But I think Twitter is far more toxic than that because you're actually putting the content out yourself and then you're waiting to see how people respond and you shift the way you interact with people based on how they respond to your tweets. Right. It's the belonging thing. Yes.

Or your Facebook posts or what have you. It created – I mean it's interesting you say that like thinking again about food because I'm obsessed with – like the first book I wrote was about food and like how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar. And like how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar. And thinking about it in this way, right, you need a technology to be able to process something to get it cheap enough so that it can be widely consumed, right? So information that allows you to belong, right? For a long time, only certain people, I mean, for a while, right, it's only people who could read and write, right? So that's all you've got. Those are the only people who could produce it. And then now, it's so cheap to produce information that makes you a part of a community. It's free,

right? We do it all the time. And like you said, we haven't figured out how to navigate it. And that's another confusion I think that people have with natural versus unnatural, which is that we also just have problems with novelty as human beings, right? Something new comes up. We still don't know how to navigate our food system. We still don't know how to stop people from eating too much. We don't know how to do it. Collectively, as a society, we clearly have not solved this problem. And yet, it's important to remember that for most of the world, the problem is still not having enough, right?

So there was a time when the problem was people had no information. You just didn't know anything. You knew nothing. That sucked, too. Right. So it's great that we have the Internet. That was far worse. Yeah, that was far worse.

Or at least not. I mean, like it was it was it was really bad and it was bad in a profoundly different way. I mean, this goes back to like the with the hunter gatherer thing. Right. Whether it was better in a state of nature. I often hear people, there's a great book called Against the Grain written by a guy who is at Yale and he thinks that we need to be easier on the past and harder on the present in this book. And one of the things he points out is like, oh, people these days, like humans, modern humans, you and I, we go out and we don't know what a plant

is or we don't know what an animal is. And he's right. Right. We don't. Most people don't have a have the knowledge of the natural world that hunter gatherers do. But at the same time, they don't know about the germ theory of disease. They don't know about, you know, planetary cycles. And so it's always important for me, at least as soon as I start to get sucked into one of these binaries, right? It's so bad now today to remember that it was also bad in different ways in the past. And we can't make the mistake of thinking that the problem with information and our consuming of it today, we can't make the mistake of thinking that the evil is in the form. We can make it good. We can make it better. We can learn how to deal with this, I think, I hope, as long as we're conscious of the problem. I think we can the same way we learned how to deal with liquor stores. I mean,

liquor stores are everywhere, but I'm not drunk. You're not drunk. We don't go there and drink all day. And I think it's the same thing as dealing with this kind of compulsion to use social media. You don't have to do it all the time. It's there, but you've got to learn restraint and you've got to really be cognizant of the impact that it has on you. Absolutely. Well, so one, I mean, you know, bringing up alcohol, right? I mean, one thing is, you know, taboos, cultural taboos are really important for controlling our relationship to things that we would otherwise be compulsive about, like eating too much or having sex with everybody. And so we institute these sort of taboos are really important for controlling our relationship to things that we would otherwise be compulsive about like eating too much or having sex with everybody. And so we institute these sort of taboos.

I don't understand why it's not more of a taboo to, you know why it's not taboo when you're on social media. If you're, if you're an asshole, everyone should pile on to you for being an asshole on social media. I mean, I personally, and I don't know, you, you may feel differently about this, but like I'm just grossed out by people sharing videos of random people and mocking these people. Like I think it's just kind of creepy.

I'm not saying sharing videos of police or people in positions of authority. I just mean- I know what you're saying. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Well, it's terrifying when you see... Like, here's an example. And I don't think this person was correct, but it was weird watching this.

There was a girl who was on TikTok and she was talking about Black Lives Matter. And she said, basically, if you say to me, all lives matter, she goes, I'm going to stab all lives matter she goes i'm going to stab you and while you're bleeding out you see this yeah while you're bleeding out i'm going to show you my paper cut and i'm going to go look you know i'm cut too you know she goes that's the difference between all lives matter you know like she was just screaming and yelling i'm gonna fucking stab you but it's just a bad analogy from a person who's trying very hard to virtue signal cut to next video she was crying that people had found the video and they were attacking her and then she got fired and she got fired from this job that she really loved and there was in the comments of this there was all these laughing emojis with the

laughing with the tears coming out where people were taking pleasure out of the fact this person made this misstep. She's a young – she looked like she was in her 20s. She made this – she thought she was like putting something out in the world to stand up for people that are being maligned and mistreated and wronged by society and that there should be a balance and to understand the balance. And she made a terrible analogy. It wasn't good. But the fact that people were taking pleasure in the fact that this person got fired from it

was very disturbing. Why do we? I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking like, why have I seen this? Why have you seen this? Like you knew. It's like, why did we consume that? I didn't know what it was.

Why did that get part of my soul share, right? If their stomach share, like, why is that video even a part of my brain? It should not be in there. There's no reason for it. It could be, there's a million better things that could occupy that slot. But there's a fascination, the same way there's a fascination of people jumping off buildings do a pool and missing and hitting the concrete yeah you know I mean I've seen a lot of those there's something just something about missteps because you know it could be you look I'm a moron if I was on a roof with one of my good friends and I had a couple of

beers in me and like you want to make the jump I'm like fuck should we like especially if I was 18 I probably would have jumped you know like there's a lot of people that do if i was her and i was 18 i probably would have made this a similar dumb video the thing is essentially okay so with the with the with the swimming pool right this is it's one thing i actually think it's one thing to mock someone for just doing some stupid shit it's another thing when the when the background and this again gets back to this idea of ultra processed information when the background, when, what makes it so exciting is not that they're stupid or they did something or that could have been you, but that they're evil, right? Ah, I get to watch evil and I'm just good. I'm good just because I'm feeling

that this person's evil. And that part, it's very different from, I mean, it's very different from what was it like America's funniest home videos, right? Like that's not, that was not a show where you were like tuning in to find out who the evil people were. Right. And then being like, look at those people. If we just like, they deserve what they got. That would be crazy.

It's so, I mean, just thinking about our attitude, I don't know. It's, it's really intense. Yeah. It's, I mean, it's not good. And meanwhile, I watch a lot of them. Yeah. I watched one today where a bus driver body slammed this guy. Apparently there was some jerk who was bothering these bus drivers, and he was picking a fight with this other bus driver,

and this second bus driver who he had apparently fucked with before comes up from behind and picks him up and body slams him on the concrete, knocks him unconscious. It's horrible. But I watched it three times. It's compulsive, right? I mean, it's the same way you can't step away from, I mean, not you, but like, you know, in general, like the same thing with the food.

You know, you can't help it. Yeah, it really is bad for your brain. You can't help it. Yeah, it really is bad for your brain. But that one at least is like, here's a person who's physically fucking with people and assaulting people and they got theirs. But the girl with the paper cut analogy, it's like, she's just dumb. She's just a dumb kid who did a dumb thing and she thought she was being cool or she was fitting in. And she thought a bunch of people would be like yeah you go girl and instead it came back and and really fucked her right

although you know it's funny so i've seen you know there's a and you know about this like you've had some people like this on your show like there's a there's a the tendency again to divide the world up in the same way as natural and unnatural right now another dichotomy that's emerged is like woke people and then anti-woke people right and so the anti-woke people and i'm i'm generalizing here but they look at the woke people and they're like look at these woke people the woke people divide the world up into good and evil right the woke people are like oh look at all those unwoke sinners we're woke we're like, oh, look at all those un-woke sinners. We're woke, we're good. The un-woke are evil. But the anti-woke people

are doing the same thing. They're like, look at those woke people tearing everybody down. Those are the bad people. And if we just get rid of all the woke people, then everything will go back

to the paradise of free thinking and rationality where we could all speak our minds. And I'm looking at these people and I'm like, do you not understand the paradox? Especially because these people are often like fairly smart, like philosophically minded people. And they're like, I hate people that create demons and try to cast them out of society.

We need to get rid of those people and cast them out of society. And once we have that, we'll go back to paradise. And I'm like, no, there is no paradise. It's complicated, right? Like even with the social media, it's terrific that lay people who didn't have power once can hold powerful people accountable. It is a good thing that we get videos of cops doing bad stuff that before would have been hidden. Right. So, again, it's more complicated. Like, I like that. I'm happy about that. And I'm happy about the way in which our technology has empowered people to find communities.

Also, just like loners, like people that had weird hobbies, people that felt alone in their small town. And get out news. I mean, especially if you're dealing in a place where, you know, the reporters can't get to people on the ground can get information out to people. Exactly. There's a lot of positive benefits to social media. Don't get me wrong.

If used correctly, I think it's very valuable. But I just think the power of it is very intoxicating to people and much like processed food, which is where I think you had that great analogy. I think it's very dangerous to become completely, like if you're eating processed Twinkies nine hours a day, you're going to be sick. Well, if you're on Twitter nine hours a day arguing with people, you're going to be sick. Yep, you are. And you really are. I know people that have had real problems where, you know, they get tremendous anxiety, they're sweating, and they're involved in these back and forths with people all

day and they can't sleep. Yeah, there's a classic cartoon, right? Where it says, like, honey, and they're involved in these back and forths with people all day and they can't sleep. Yeah. There's that, there's a classic cartoon, right? Where it says like, honey, I can't come to bed. Someone's wrong on the internet. Right. I was just like, that's perfect. I've had that.

Right. I'm like, my wife's like, what are you doing? I'm like, hold on one second. Like if I just tweet one more time, this person's going to have a, you know, conversion experience. I think what you're, with, with wokeness, and this is something that James Lindsay had pointed out, and Douglas Murray has a great book about it in a lot of the areas that we're talking about. What's going on is a religion. I mean, it really is. It's got all of the elements of a religion.

You can get cast out. You can get cast out. You can get attacked for noncompliance. It demands this very rigid ideology that you can't stray from. And it keeps getting more and more rigid as time goes on. Things that were acceptable just a few years ago can now get you, you can get canceled. You can get fired. you can get fired, you can lose your job. I mean, we're getting to this, like, you can lose your job and be attacked for saying all lives matter, which seems insane, just in terms of, I mean, it's understandable

where people are going from, that this is like, no, you're in denial of this movement. But just the term All Lives Matter should be universally acceptable. But it's not anymore. Well, wasn't there also a cop, though, that got, I think there was a cop who got fired for sharing Black Lives Matter. This was very recently. Really? And that's not to say that-

A cop? Yeah. This was in New York. I mean, don't quote me on this. Well, quote me on it. I just got quoted on it, but No, I'm pretty sure it happened. But again, that's This is another problem with social media

Right is like once it's said it's out there and the amount of energy someone has said the amount of energy it takes to like You know real back in misinformation is just disproportionate to the amount it takes to get the Misinformation out there to begin with. Or a lack of understanding of what a person does when they're thinking and expressing themselves. Think about what we're doing. You and I talked for three minutes before we sat down and did this. I gave you a little tour of the place.

We shot the shit about Laird Hamilton's superfood coffee, and we sat down and started talking. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, we don't know each other right but so we're talking We're just there's no preparation here. We're just saying things out of the blue This is I want to push back on these anti woke people though a little bit because I think it's important especially because they're very sharp and so they make very good arguments and and I Think that part of their problem is they do something called nut picking. Have you heard about this? No. So this is a phrase that I think a guy at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum, I think

he coined it. It's like cherry picking. And basically what you do is you trawl through any given group, university professors, some blog, whatever it is, and you pick the nuttiest things you can. And then you say, look what these, and this is actually what our whole information ecosystem does. It nut picks for us. And so then what do you see? You see the craziest representations of any given group, right? So you see, you know, if you're thinking about academia, right? You see some professor get kicked out of a university, or you see some professors say some kind of crazy thing about like, you know, I don't know, like biological sex, not being real in animals or whatever, you know, whatever the crazy

thing is. And then that becomes how you see that entire institution. You've not picked that institution. Right. And it's easy to mock. It's fun. But like the truth is if you sat these people down even, right? Like if you sat down the nuts from both sides, right? And they had a conversation, they're complicated people, right? They have complicated thoughts. They want to be able to explain themselves better. And I'm frustrated because what I really want is for people to be able to have complicated conversations about touchy subjects. The most touchy subjects.

Isn't part of the problem with what you're describing, though, that these aren't conversations? They are not. Someone spit something out, and even if it's preposterous, like animals don't have biological sex, there's no one's talking to them. There's no one in the room with them, especially not a biologist of equal standing, you know, someone who can go, actually, that's ridiculous to say. And then you're having a conversation. Part of the problem is with just statements, or even if someone's writing a blog, there's a problem with no one being able to talk while you're talking.

It's, that's absolutely true. I mean, for me, I just, I'm surprised by how much I don't know, right? I mean, this is something I actually really appreciate about you. Like, I don't know a lot of stuff. So I'm out, when I was researching natural, right, I have a chapter on economics. I don't know anything about economic theory. So I had to research that and talk to experts. I got a chapter on sports. I don't know anything about sports. So I got to go talk to people who are experts on, you know, whether a cheetah blade for your leg, you know, how do you figure out whether that's fair or not or whatever, right? So I'm sitting down and I'm talking with these people. And what I realized is that everything's very complicated, right? These are complicated issues. And when there's no one to push back on you, and when there's no room for a dialogue, you just get the absolute stupidest, most extreme versions of whatever position it is that someone holds. And the more touchy the subject, the more that's true. Right. Because the more people feel the need to say one kind of sloganized version of whatever it is that they're that they're talking about. And the truth is, I think you could actually if you got these people in a room, they weren't just angry at each other.

You could actually have really good conversations. complex and they're not black and white and it's not a one or a zero. It's like, there's a lot of pros and cons. And a lot of these things, like one that I, you know, it's an uncomfortable one to get into is abortion. It's a very, what I call a human problem, not just that it's humans having abortions and you're aborting a human, but it's a human problem in that very few people are going to have a problem with it if it's like three cells but then when it's three months old people are going to have more of a problem when it's six months old most people are going to have a problem with it so it becomes this very weird like to say no abortion should ever happen well what about the the morning after pill you don't think that

someone should be able to if they get drunk and they make a mistake and they accidentally get pregnant from sex, you don't think they should be able to take a pill and end the pregnancy the day of, the day of conception? Some people will say, no, you have to carry it forever and raise that kid till it's 20. But other people will say,

you should be able to have an abortion up until the day the baby's out of your body. And I think that's fucking crazy too. It's one of those things where it's a complicated, very nuanced subject. No, no. It's just pro-life or pro-choice. That's it, right? It's so stupid. I mean, what an unproductive way to think about it. And again, I mean, you bring up abortion, right? But this is like what I said before. It's the touchy, complicated issue. Sex in general, right? Because God or the gods always

care about sex, right? So it's sex in general has always been talked about in this way. People want to draw neat, bright lines, whether it has to do with age of consent, whether it has to do with who you should be having sex with and why, right? Again, this is something that naturalness came into again, because people like, OK, well, we got to figure out what kind of sex you should be having with who. Well, how do we do it if it's not God? Right. And that's who it was for a long time, telling people who to have sex with and how we'll look to nature. We'll figure out. And so you got got, you know, you got people writing books about how, well, actually, the natural way to have, you know, to be sexual is polygamy.

So clearly that's good. And we should have, you know, to be sexual is polygamy. So clearly that's good. And we should have, you know, monogamous, monogamous relationships are going to be terrible. Right. And then there's other people like, well, no, obviously if you look at every culture, monogamous marriages have emerged naturally. So that's the natural thing. And then somebody like, well, heterosexuality is natural. So you should never have sex with people of the same sex. And then other people like well actually we found these animals here uh that are gay so being homosexual is actually okay it's been proven by nature i'm just looking at this like it's obviously very complicated right who you should

have sex with and how incidentally i there was a while researching contraception and naturalness i ran into a book called holy sex which is a Catholic's guide to, and I'm paraphrasing the title here, mind-blowing, toe-curling, like, divinely sanctioned sex, right? And I'm reading through it, and there was a section on whether or not – so Catholic theories – really intense Catholic philosophers will deny this, but they'll say natural means something else and they'll kind of like do all this complicated reasoning. But it's not really true. They're drawing on what's natural and what isn't in the sense of what's in nature. And the idea is that sex has to be natural. So for a long time, it was that sex has to be tailored to procreation, right? So you can't have anal sex.

You can't have oral sex. You can't do coitus interruptus, which is pulling out, right? All of those are bad because what God wants, what he's designed naturally, is for a penis to go into a vagina and ejaculate into it to make a baby. So that was it.

That was the criteria. But then we had too many people in the world. And Catholics were getting upset. They were like, well, I don't want to have any more kids. I don't want seven kids. I don't have a farm. There's all these reasons that people didn't want to have kids. So they came up with the rhythm method. He spends most of the ethics section of that book, which was an enormous bestseller because they didn't. God didn't tell people about the method until until like the 20th century. He could have told them earlier, but he didn't. So Latt spends his whole book talking about how natural it is. And he's like, look, this is natural.

These are natural cycles. And there's a great, great quote. Some guys like in the Catholic Church, you can use mathematics to prevent contraception, but not physics or chemistry. Right. I was like, right. It doesn't make any sense. Like, how is this? How is it natural to sort of plan your sex around rhythms? And this all goes back to the book, the holy sex book, which is that.

So then if the rhythm method is natural, right, then it can't be that sex has to be directed to procreation. Right. right, then it can't be that sex has to be directed to procreation, right? Because you've got a bunch of people who are having sex at exactly the times where it won't result in procreation. So they change their understanding of what natural sex is to just depositing, it ends with depositing semen in a vagina. And in this book, there's a whole section on like, well, what about like, you know, anal sex and dildos? And basically he's like, if you follow the one rule and it ends in the right way, then you can do everything else. And I'm reading this book. One rule. What rule is that? Deposit the semen in the vagina. So you can do all that stuff as long as when you

ejaculate it's inside a vagina. That's exactly right. And I'm reading this and I'm like, how can you say this is natural? And through his whole book, he's saying it too. He's like, you know, if you don't ejaculate, if you don't end by ejaculating the vagina, all kinds of bad things happen to you biologically, right? Your serotonin levels go down or whatever. All the same kinds of rationalizations that people give whenever they're trying to show that something was designed by nature to be a certain way. And to me, again, it's like, no, with abortion or with contraception or whatever, we should be asking ourselves, what works? What is it that we want? And what is it that works? And that's a complicated question. It's going to be different depending on your culture, depending on the needs that you have at any given time in history, right? It's also, there's an inherent problem with religion is that a lot of what they're doing is just controlling.

They're controlling people. And what people want is freedom. They want the freedom to be able to do whatever they want. If two people get together and they just want to use dildos on each other, why would anybody have a problem with that? Do you want to do it? Does she want to do it? Everybody's happy? Have a good time.

Why does God care if God invented dildos? Right? Well, that's that goes back to the natural thing, right? So that's exactly right. So now God, they'll be like, No, God didn't invent dildos. People invented dildos. God invented the idea of dildos. Every idea that you have comes from God. Don't ask me to defend stuff. God invented people. People invented strap-ons. God invented strap-ons. But here's the thing, right? Again, and this goes back to my changing my mind, is that there is some way in which you can use what's natural as a kind of criteria. There's actually this idea called the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the EEA. And what this says is basically, you know, there's a vague time that sort of determines how humans evolved, right? So there are certain things that humans have evolved for, and they evolve for those things in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.

And so then when we depart from that environment, when we put vending machines in places or when we give people books to read, one hypothesis you can have is that maybe that will have negative consequences for us because we're not adapted for it. Right. So that that's a fine hypothesis generating heuristic. Right. But what people do instead is they decide beforehand that it's necessarily bad if it wasn't in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness. If God, you know, if it wasn't there in the Garden of Eden, then it must be bad. And that's and that's so it's not it's not necessarily bad to say, well, hey. Is this is this thing? Is it natural? Like, is it is it something that we are evolved to deal with?

But that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, if it's not natural, that it's bad. It just means maybe that we need a way to deal with. I mean, a good example is reading, reading things. I don't know. You don't have glasses on. I don't know if you have contact lenses, but no, but I need glasses to read. Yeah. So like reading is not natural. That's just not a natural thing. And there's, there's a bad result, right? Which is that we have worse vision because we're squinting at things, but we fixed it. We came up with glasses and we're good now. So that's it. So that's great. great now we get reading which is awesome you know and like looking at small things all the time and we fixed it with glasses so that's terrific now if

the result had been that like our eyeballs melted and we couldn't figure out how to solve that problem reading would be bad reading would be bad right knowledge would be bad to be the devil's work because it kills your eyeballs because god doesn't want you to know anything more than what he put in your head and that's exactly what people would say, though. They'd be like, if reading melted your eyeballs, people would be like, well, of course it does. It's unnatural. Well, wasn't that the argument that they used during the time of Martin Luther to keep people from reading his phonetic interpretation of the Bible? The anti-reading thing goes back to Socrates, which actually sounds a little bit like some of

the stuff you were saying about dialogue, where he says, if you have, I'm paraphrasing, not my area of expertise. If you have the written word, this is going to be a disaster because one of the things that happens with the written word is it can't respond to the interlocutor. This is what he says. So when you write things down, instead of saying them, people are going to take that and interpret it for themselves. It's going to be terrible. You know, of course, there's this paradox because you're reading it. It's good and it can be bad. I mean, that's really what it is. But it is also incredibly valuable just for storing information, just for distributing

information. It's unprecedented. It's changed the world. But it also can be bad because it can have a distorted version of the reality of what you're writing about. Right. That's exactly it. And that's, you know, I think that I think the reflexiveness of wanting. So I'm sort of I think I'm slowly turning into an evangelical agnostic.

I think this is what I am. Because like the baseline, the baseline should be uncertainty. I think. I think the world is an uncertain and mysterious place. And that's a wonderful thing, right? I couldn't agree more. Wonder is a word that actually has built into it both loving the world, right? Like this is wonderful.

But it also means you don't know. I wonder, right? There's a way in which wonder is tied to doubt and uncertainty. And that, I wish that were our default position, global uncertainty. I don't know what's going on. This is a mysterious place. I want to figure it out.

And then local certainties, right? You have a decision you need to make at a given time. And you're like, you know what? Given what I know, looks like the right thing to do here or the right thing to believe here is this. But that certainty shouldn't be the default it should be local certainty global uncertain well there's things you're

certain of and there's things that you aren't certain of and it's very important to be clear on the difference between those and not attach yourself to whether or not you're you're correct or incorrect because human beings with with language and with dialogue we we're playing a game. Like if you and I were in dispute about something, and even if you were correct, if my ego got involved, I would want to be correct. So I would try to manipulate my version of reality in order to trounce you. And people do that. Absolutely.

It's a horrible thing to do. And it's a message that I try to get out as much as possible. You are not your ideas and you cannot be married to them. You have to, if you're wrong, if something's you're like, Oh, I thought it was this. I am very quick to say that. And it's something that I've developed. It's something that I have worked very hard to cultivate, to not be attached to any idea that I have or that I espouse. And that if I'm incorrect to say very, very quickly, as soon as I find out I'm incorrect about this, let me correct this.

It's so messed up that with politicians, for example, people accuse a politician of flip flopping as if it's like, no, you don't want to log. Actually, if there's someone who has the sort of wherewithal to change their mind, why would we shame them for saying, whoa? Well, it's obvious. I was wrong. Politics are a game. It's a game of victory. I mean, it's not just a game.

It's a game with time periods, right? You have till November. You have X amount of weeks. You have your primaries are coming up. It really is a game. So there's very little room for nuance. You have your primaries are coming up. It really is a game. So there's very little room for nuance. You have a time period. I mean, buzzers up, you missed the three point, the game's over. It doesn't matter who's right or who's wrong. It's about winning.

I just don't get the why people... I mean, I guess I do and I don't get it, right? But why would you demand that of your politicians, right? So if I'm looking at a politician, what I would want, and not just a politician, right? A teacher, a friend, I'm looking for someone who is able to change their mind, whose ego isn't wrapped up with sticking to their guns, whatever happens. Isn't the problem with their opponents, though? Because their opponents are the ones who are going to call them out on it. Yeah, well, their opponents will call them out. But what if the general public was like, stop calling him out for changing his mind, you moron. It was awesome that he changed his mind.

Well, if you say it that way, it's going to create more problems. You're right. See, I just did it. I just did it. It's normal. It's normal to lapse it. Oh, it's those people who are bad, right? If we just get rid of those people, Joe, we'll solve a reality. You're just enthusiastically expressing yourself, but you're doing so

with an insult. You know what? Okay, so one of the things I do, you know how you have like the junk, the junkie folder? Yes. So to remind myself of how blind I might be and how I could, like how I need to change my mind, right? I talk about this with my students, but I keep it with myself. I actually have a, this is touchy, I have a Confederate monument in my wallet right here. So I keep, I don't know if you know, so the Confederate $2 bill. Oh, wow. That's a real Confederate $2 bill? That's a Confederate $2 bill. And that guy on it right there, that's Judah Benjamin. He's the only Jew who ever made it onto American currency, if you want to call it. And it's Confederate money?

It's Confederate money. Can I see that? Yeah. Go for it. What year is this from? Let's see. What does it say on there? I don't remember the exact year on the bill.

This is weird, man. It's paper. Yeah, it's paper. But it's like really flimsy paper. I would think you would want to keep this under glass or something. No, it's not. I mean, they're not like super valuable. It's not? No. But historically,

I mean, it's so touchy, right? Even saying anything about confederates like of course it's not valuable, you fucking idiot. But they won't do that. I'll tell you why. Because here's why I keep that in my wallet. People won't do that. I mean, maybe they'll take that sound bite and it'll get ultra processed and people will be like, he was arguing for confederate monuments, but that's stupid because

I keep that in my wallet because that guy celebrated Passover. That guy celebrated Passover, which is a Jewish holiday all about how slavery was bad. Meanwhile, it looks like he's got a little Hitler mustache. He had slaves. Whoa. So here's this guy who's a Jew in America in the 1800s, who's one of his most important holidays is a celebration of the Jews liberation from slavery, who had most likely slaves in his house, serving him the Passover dishes and certainly washing them. And what that means to me, at least, is like, there's going to be something in my life that I'm as blind to as that guy was to the evils of slavery. And if you can have your most important holiday be a holiday where you're celebrating the liberation of your people from slavery and still end up on a fucking Confederate bill, like, God knows what we're blind to right now. Right.

Like, what is it that we're not seeing right now? What people can justify is very strange. Right. And it means that no matter what, there's probably some kind of thing that 100 years from now is going to seem like, how could Alan, how could this idiot have not seen that? Right. It was right in front of his eyes. Yeah. What do you think that thing would be?

Have you ever tried to think about it? Yeah, I have tried to think about it. What do you think it would be? Well, so there's a couple of things I think it could be. One of them is the fact that we've essentially exported slave labor. So, you know, people are going to be like, all these people who were talking about how slavery is bad, right?

And chattel slavery is a very, very different thing from other kinds of slavery. But there are ways in which people are trapped in horrific situations who are manufacturing the goods that I have. Now it gets complicated, right? Because people are like, well, you know, that's better that than no job at all. I'm not sure exactly how it all plays out.

But I can imagine a future in which people look back at me and you and the things we are consuming and saying, how were they blind to the conditions in which those items were produced? Sure. Well, one of the best examples is someone tweeting about slavery on an iPhone that's made by someone who works at Foxconn factory to chattel slavery. Yes. Which is precisely not. Explain chattel slavery. Chattel slavery.

Well, so sometimes. So, for example, when people are trying to justify the Bible and the fact that like, so why didn't Jesus, here's this guy who came down and he shocked everyone, right? Why didn't he also say like, you know, also slaves need to be released ASAP. Slavery is bad. He didn't say that. So one of the things people will point earn their freedom is a specific kind of slavery that was the kind of slavery we had in the United States. It's uniquely, horrifically bad. And so that kind of slavery is not the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory. But when I think

about, I'm thinking about this right here, I am on like, you know, what's going to happen when that parallel gets made? You know, I think it's actually an instructive parallel, right? Like, I'd like us to think about what, you know, how the goods that we're using and consuming and where they're made. I also don't want people to think that for a moment that chattel slavery is the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory. No, it most certainly isn't. But it is. But it's bad. It's bad. Working in a Foxconn factory. No, it most certainly isn't. But it is. But it's bad. It's bad.

Working in a Foxconn factory is bad. You don't want your children to be there. Joel Salatin will tell you. Another thing is eating factory farmed animals. Yes. I mean, it's messed up. I don't know. Like, I do it.

You know, i go out i eat i eat meat that i know comes from a place you know where the animals are not treated where they're in hell it's animal hell you know and we have these animal hells um when do you do that i mean just yesterday when i went out and ate like baby back ribs down the street, I guarantee those baby back ribs didn't come from Joel Salton's polyface farm. And I think that, you know, that's something I think about, but I do it anyway. I can imagine a time when we look back on our current eating habits and we're like, why wasn't everyone arguing for ethically sourced meat? Like, how was it that people didn't want to, you know, force everyone collectively to pay more for meat that was raised in a way, like the kind of way that Salatin pioneers, right? In this, I'm really on board with Salatin.

I think he's right to say, look, there are contexts in which animals are happier and less happy. They're happier on my farm and they're fucking miserable. But I thought it was very interesting in your book where you talk about Michael Pollan pressing him on whether or not you could feed New York City that way. And he's like, do you really need New York City? Yeah. Well, so Salatin's got it right. Well, and Salatin thinks, I mean, he thinks about this, right? Like you saw in the book in explicitly divine terms, right?

God has designed the world. But I'll tell you, this is a story I tell at the end of the book. I was eating Salton's delicious pork. It's an incredible place, Polyface Farms. And I was eating his pork and like the people there are awesome. He's awesome. And he announces to everyone, he says, look, we're going to be doing a bit of a change. We have a new thing that we're going to be doing.

We are going to be producing chickens for a growing segment of our market that doesn't want soy fed to their chickens. So Salatin's chickens get a lot of their calories not from his farm. They get a significant portion of their calories from non-GMO soy that's grown at another place outside of Polyface. So it's not a self-contained system. He says, but there's some people that don't want soy fed to their chickens. They feel like they react to soy. They don't want it. So they're going to start feeding their chickens. There's a certain percentage of Salton's chickens. He's going to start feeding fish meal, ground fish meal.

So afterward, I went up to him. I was like, you know, Joel, that doesn't seem very natural. Like do chickens eat? They swim. Like, yeah, right? Like how are they getting a hold of this fish? And you know what? He looked at me and he said, I'm a hypocrite. You know, I'm a hypocrite like anyone else, but at least I admit it. And what I wanted to say to him was there's nothing wrong with feeding your chickens fish meal. If some people want chickens that are fed fish meal and you're treating your chickens in a way you think is ethical, there's not some kind of purity test that you need to apply to your farm, even though it's on a road called Pure

Meadows Lane, right? But it's like, you don't need a purity test for your farm. You're a good guy who cares. I mean, I really think he's a guy who really cares about his animals. I do too. You know? And it just kind of made me sad that he thought of that as some sort of hypocrisy. Well, the only hypocrisy that you could see in it is factory farmed fish is awful. I mean, it's really bad. I mean, it's bad for the environment. It's bad for the fish. There's not a lot of sustainable factory farmed fish operations. It wouldn't make you wince if you actually saw how they process all that fish meal. Factory farmed fish. Another

thing, I didn't know any of this stuff until I started this research. So I'll tell you a story, crazy story. I was in the Netherlands researching the food chapter of this book, which is about vanilla, which I could talk to you about vanilla, which sounds very boring, right? Which is why I picked it.

It's vanilla. I'm researching vanilla and people want natural vanilla. And I don't know if you know, do you know where vanilla comes from? Vanilla beans? Yeah. Do you know where vanilla comes from? Vanilla beans? Yeah. Do you know where those come from? No.

That was the end of the line for me, right? So we've got vanilla beans in the house. So they are actually on an orchid. This beautiful white orchid vine is where vanilla beans grow. That makes sense. Vanilla ice cream has that orchid on the... Yeah.

All of a sudden I was like, oh wait, that's why my yogurt looks like that. Every single one of those is artificially inseminated. So there's a person who goes and you can watch YouTube videos of it. It's crazy. Have they always been like that? No. So vanilla used to be only in Mesoamerica. That was the only place where it grew naturally.

So everyone thinks of Madagascar, right? Madagascar vanilla. Only place vanilla was growing was in Mesoamerica. It was these Mayan silviculturists, which is like forest gardeners who grew this. And it was pollinated by its only known natural pollinator, which was this thing called a melapona bee. I don't know if I pronounced that right, but whatever. And when people came from Europe, they were like, this is incredible, vanilla, amazing. And they wanted to grow it, but they couldn't because they didn't know how to pollinate it. And then a 12-year-old slave named Edmund Albius discovered how to artificially pollinate vanilla flowers. And just like that, you now have the ability to grow vanilla orchids in non-natural habitats, right? So it's still expensive because you can only grow them in Madagascar Tahiti.

I don't know if you know this, but like, you know, vanilla beans are incredibly expensive. Natural vanilla is just really expensive ingredient. And that's because there's not a lot of places it can be grown. So they're looking for ways to make natural vanilla cheaper. And the Netherlands is where all of the best growing technology, a lot of the best growing technology is.

So I went to a university there where they have a greenhouse where they're growing vanilla orchids, pineapples, bell peppers, like coconuts. I mean, you name it, everything they figured out how to grow all of these natural plants. But I'm sitting in here and I'm like, you've got vanilla orchids growing out of these buckets in this highly technological environment. You know, it's all temperature controlled, right? And for what? So that you can have cheap vanilla beans that can be labeled legally natural.

And that whole story comes back to the salmon and the fish that you were talking about before. Because in that same place, there was a machine like at a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with like pink sludge whooshing through it. This was, you know, a couple of places down from the vanilla orchid house. I was like, what's that? The guy who's showing me around says that's algae that we're growing here because people want their salmon, their farmed salmon to be pink. And it's not pink because it doesn't eat the diet that it gets in nature. So it's naturally gray, but people won't pay for that. So he's farming algae, which is natural. So that's the stuff, the pink stuff. And then they feed that to the farmed salmon just so it can be naturally pink.

So when you go into your Whole Foods or whatever and you see that your salmon is all natural and it's pink, and I'm just looking, I'm looking at this whole thing and I'm like, what is wrong with us human beings that we've gotten to this point where we like, we want stuff natural so bad that we're developing new technologies to figure out how to like have our cake kneaded too.

They dye salmon. It's really an orange, but they dye it. They they got the orange just orange pinkish color but the there's also a weight so as taxa thin I think is is the chemical that and then you can have it artificially but then people don't want artificial can't they just feed them bugs that they eat they make them way too expensive really yeah for when you want it on that scale so they they feed him this algae. And I was like, I get what we're doing. I get what we want, right? We want stuff that's better for the planet.

We want natural. And so then, yeah, so what do we do? But it's so complicated, right? Like what you're saying, like what do we do with factory farm fish? You're like, what you were saying about Joel Salatin. How do you get Joel Salatin's meat to people that can't afford it? Right. How do you?

If I knew the answer, well, some people would say lab-grown meat, right? But that's not the same as Joel Salatin's meat, at least. No, well, not for now. Not for now. I'm really curious about lab-grown meat. I'm not curious about the Impossible Burger type stuff because I just, it's not, it's neither. First of all, I don't like the idea of pretending something's meat if you don't want to eat meat it just seems ridiculous and I get it as sort of like you know I mean it's like a gateway

drug you know like you're tricking people into becoming vegetarian by giving them a burger and like look you can have a burger and still be vegetarian look we've got you. But that's not healthy. Like, if you want to eat healthy vegetables, you should eat vegetables. You should eat vegetable dishes that are actually made with vegetables. Well, so what's meat? What do you think counts as real meat? Like, if you grow a steak in a vat?

Yeah, that's interesting. I think that, well, they are probably going to be able to do that with alarming accuracy within the next 10 years, where they're going to make a ribeye. Like, it's going to have marbling. It's going to taste like a ribeye. And I'm all 100% down for that. I'm 100% down for that. Do we get to call that steak?

Because the steak lobby, there's going to be a meat lobby that's like, you know, it's like the almond milk. You can't call it milk. There's going to be a bunch of people that are like, unless it came from a cow. Yeah, well, the almond milk lobby, I mean, they're right for milk. You mean it's not milk? Because it's not milk. Like, milk has to come from a breast.

Like, it's absolutely not milk. Well, doesn't a steak have to come from a creature? Well, it comes from a lab, but it essentially has the exact same properties as a steak. That's the difference. Almond milk is in no way, shape, or form milk. It's not milk. It's weird water. You've just done some weird shit to water to make it white.

You know, it's not milk. But if you can recreate steak, if you can 3D print steak, it's still going to be steak. Now, if you're the type of person that wants to eat the soul of the animal and you want to be there when the animal gets killed and you want to slice the piece off and throw it on the fire and you want to know, you want to be like boots to the ground and know, well, that's a different thing. You're asking for a different thing.

But if you're asking for meat that has the same amount of essential fatty acids as a grass-fed ribeye steak. You can do that, I think. I think they're probably going to be able to do that. It's interesting, though, like the way – so talking about what counts as a steak, right? Yeah. This idea – I mean, naturalness, again, comes in here because the word nature, right? It actually means birth, natura, origins.

So naturalness has to do with the origins of a thing. And we think about origins a lot when we think about what a thing is. We want to know where it came from. And that tells us what it is. And so with a steak, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to say you can't call it a steak unless its origin is a cow. a steak, unless its origin is a cow. There's going to be other people who are going to say, no, if it looks just like and is chemically composed identically to a steak that comes from an animal, then it's an animal. But I'll give you an example to push back on what you were saying a little bit.

Take a lab-grown diamond. I mean, I guess, well, actually, oh, no, I think I might have put my foot in my mouth. Some girls don't like that. I've had this conversation. They get upset. It's because it's not the same thing. Well, it's cheaper. That's the only reason why.

No, it's magical. No, they want you to pay for something. They want a slave to dig that thing out of the side of a fucking mountain. There's something weird about that. Don't you think there's also a romance to the idea of a mineral that was made by pressures under the earth over millions of years? You think it's just about price? I think there maybe is some romance to that.

But I think with women, there's something nonsensical that's been drilled. Not all women, sorry. Don't fucking generalize. I'm not. I swear to God. But I think some women have this idea that's been drilled in their head by marketing that you should spend three months of your fucking salary on a rock and it's complete nonsense first of all if you

understand the De Beers like what they've done with the diamond market and you probably do you know it's like ridiculously overinflated there's far more diamonds they're far more efficient at getting diamonds out of the ground than they ever were before. So they have this insane backlog of diamonds. I mean, diamonds aren't rare, but they're stupid expensive. And they really shouldn't be. But they've done an amazing job of keeping them stupid expensive. If someone can artificially create something that's absolutely indistinguishable from a diamond,

there's a part of some women that will think that because that was created by a machine, it's not as valuable. It doesn't mean as much. And it's not worthy of the same sort of appreciation and, you know, this weird thing that women have with you. I'm sure you've seen women look at each other's rings and like check out the rings. It's a symbol of so many different things. It's like, how much does your man love you? How wealthy is he? How well did you do in choosing a mate?

There's so many things involved with this ridiculous ritual of diamond rings that for whatever reason, those women that have fallen into this nonsense, they're not interested in some sort of a work around, you know, some sort of a 3d printed diamond ring, even if it's perfect, they don't want it. It's marketing. I don't know. I don't know, man, for me, I mean, maybe if I was being given a, if I was being given a if I was being given a diamond ring and the prices were identical I think and this is where I changed my mind right this is about where the naturalness stuff comes in again right that stone that pyrite even if making that gold cube were actually more expensive than getting it out of the ground there's something about where it came from that enchants

it right that sort of makes it magical that's what that's part of yellowstone right is that you know they talk about okay the genetics of our you know our bison are they don't come from outside of here even if it's indistinguishable to people looking in at the animals. There's something about maintaining genealogical purity or something like that, that something came from somewhere, which I think drives, I mean, you're probably right. I don't know. It all goes back to economics, right? Like the steak people,

like maybe the steak farmers don't actually care about it. But I think Joel Salatin would be like, no, don't call that a steak. He would say, don't call that a steak. And he'd say, it's not a steak because it doesn't come from a cow. No, I'm sure he would. But let me push back on the genealogical thing because Yellowstone in particular has some of the most domesticated elk that you'll ever be around.

It's so bizarre. I was there with my children and we were taking selfies with the elk and they were like 30 or 40 feet away from us. Or it was probably more like 20 yards but close enough that in nature that would fucking never happen they would run like hell if they saw people or they saw any animal that looked like it was a an eyes facing forward predator and in yellowstone they're so accustomed to people and they've actually adapted their behavior to congregate around the parks because they're less likely to be killed by

wolves there. So they'll go around these visitor areas, and there was a fucking vending machine, and then 30 yards away from the vending machine is an elk. And I have a photo of me standing in front of this Coca-Cola machine looking like this, and then behind me is an elk. Did you know they used to feed the bears there? Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was there when to feed the bears there? Oh, yeah. Yeah.

I was there when they fed the bears. Yes. When I was a kid, me and my parents went through Yellowstone when I was like seven or eight years old and there was cars in front of us that would put food out the windows and the bears would put their paw on the car and take food from them. I think the elk example is a good one for, I mean, I might be wrong, but for what I was arguing, which is that you seeing the domesticated elk there, right? If Yellowstone, for me, when I visited,

right? It was like... Look at this. Look at these bears. It's incredible. Hello? Hello? Yeah, it's so strange. Yeah, I witnessed this firsthand when I was a kid. They would also congregate Look at that. That's really crazy. Look at this lady. Out of her fucking mind. That's really crazy. Look at this lady.

Out of her fucking mind. She's going to climb out of the thing. I'm sure a lot of people got killed that way too, by the way. The people that headed up Yellowstone encouraged this stuff. Yeah. They didn't know any better. It took a while before they figured that out. before they figured that out.

Also, you know, the bears, the problem is they, bears are uniquely, they have habits that they form in terms of where they get their food, which is why it's really a problem if a bear gets into your garbage because they'll never stop going into your garbage. You have to, they have to kidnap the bear and move it to a zoo or take it to another mountain really far, far away, or they have

to kill it. Like there's no other way. So this is the elk that you saw at that vending machine. And you tell me, I'm curious how you felt about it. To me, seeing that kind of thing in Yellowstone is a little disappointing. And it's disappointing because I think of Yellowstone as like, you know, and it's advertised this way, right? Come here to see, and it's all the books and the tourist shops, but come here to see pure

nature. Okay. First of all, there's no way. There's no way you're going to have buildings and cars in pure nature. It's not real. I'm a hunter. So I go into the woods. I get most of my meat from mountains.

I bow hunt. And one of the reasons why I do this, I started out in 2012 because I was either going to become a vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter. I was watching too many of these PETA videos, and I was like, this factory farming thing, it's insane. Once you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. This is something you are also. Yeah. Once you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it. This is something you are also. Yeah.

I mean, I had tried to figure out a way to – I had to – morally, I was coming to this point in the road where I was like, I've got to do something. I either have to figure out a way to acquire my own meat and be comfortable enough. Like, I've never killed an animal. I mean, I need to be able to kill this animal and eat it and be comfortable with it or not like i don't know if i am um and once i went hunting i realized okay this is probably the most insanely connected way and it really hits some switches inside of your body inside of your your dna that i didn't even know were there and these switches that like connect you it's almost like a psychedelic experience it's very strange like inside of your your DNA that I didn't even know were there and these switches that like connect you it's almost like a psychedelic experience it's very strange

like being in the wilderness stalking an animal and locking eyes with it and hunting it and then wind up eating it over a fire it's it's all these switches go it's very strange in a very positive way in a in a very reverential way. Like you revere this animal. Like you appreciate it in this really intense way. But these are wild, wild animals. You're domesticating an animal if they're hanging out on a lawn. Like I was looking at a house once in Colorado with my family, and we went out into the backyard backyard and there was a giant deer,

like a huge buck that was just standing there staring at us. And it was in Boulder, Colorado. And I don't know if you've ever been to Boulder, Colorado, but it's like a lot of hippies. And obviously no one's hunting in Boulder, Colorado. So these deer are completely relaxed. They're just chilling. And so this deer is, I mean, no more than a hundred feet away from us, just at us, just looking at us, and then just moves around a little and eats some grass and looks at us again. And my wife was like, I didn't even think that was real. I thought it was a statue until it started moving. I would never kill that deer, not in a fucking million years. That's like killing someone's dog.

There's no way. I mean, I would have to be starving to kill that deer. But if I was in the woods and I saw a deer that big, I would be very excited. I'd be like, wow, that's like hundreds of pounds of meat. Look at the size of that deer. It's an amazing specimen. And it's a big, old, mature deer,

which means that it's passed its genes on for many, many years. And a deer only has, if they're really lucky, they have nine, 10 years, and then they get killed by wolves or mountain lions or whatever. That would be the perfect animal to hunt. But in this scenario, none of those switches went off. I'm like, that's a domesticated animal. That might as well be a chihuahua. Right.

Yeah. And that's part of the criteria you're using for whether it's okay to kill it i mean that's one of the things with the bison hunt in in yellowstone that seems so weird right it's like this is bizarre it's you know these animals yeah that have no idea what's waiting for them cross this line and then all of a sudden they're magically available to be shot that's a complicated issue one of the reasons why it's a complicated issue is because buffalo contain brucellosis. They have brucellosis, which can be very dangerous to domestic cattle.

And whether or not they transmit it to domestic cattle, the same argument could be said about elk. They also occasionally have brucellosis, and there's a lot of ranchers who want to shoot elk that wind up eating their hay and eating their grass. ranchers who want to shoot elk that wind up eating their hay and eating their grass. So when these bison drift off of Yellowstone and they go into public land or they go into private land, it's an issue of resources oftentimes. Oh, you got to cull them. You have to cull them.

I'm just thinking of this and I'm not a hunter. Although interestingly, I went to Yellowstone again, right? This is this whole, I'm not sure about stuff. I didn't know anything about hunting. I assumed hunting was, I don't know, bad. Like people go out, they kill endangered species, right? Like whatever I had seen, that was it. And when I went to Yellowstone, you know,

when I discovered that Doug Smith, who's the guy that reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, when he was like, I hunt, you know, and like my first reaction was, wait, what, I thought you loved animals. Like, how could this man who cares about nature? And, you know, and like my first reaction was, wait, what? I thought you loved animals. Like, how could this man who cares about nature? And, you know, and what became clear, as you know, and like many hunters know, is that it doesn't work like that. Hunting doesn't mean you don't care about nature.

It doesn't mean you don't care about animals. That was a real, that was a wake up call for me that I didn't understand, you know, how people relate to the natural world and that I had been fed a kind of, I don't know, oversimplified, ultra processed version of what it was to hunt. At the same time with those bison, you got to cull them, right? So you got to get rid of them. And like you said, right, there's this resource, you know, you don't want them wandering on a rancher's land. of them. And like you said, right, there's this resource, you know, you don't want them wandering on a rancher's land. And that's something that, you know, the people in Yellowstone will, you know, activists are happy to tell you, yes, these kinds of things are problems. As a hunter, though, I imagine that you wouldn't be super excited to just like camp out and shoot a bison as it wandered into like slowly into, I mean, I don't know, would you?

It would only be for me. I mean, it would be that you wanted organic meat. Right. You wanted to be able to do it that way. But not the excitement of what you were talking about. It wouldn't be predator versus prey. And it wouldn't be what you would call fair chase. Right. You know, and that's, I mean, it would be technically fair chase because the animal

does wander out, but you have to admit that those animals have been grossly domesticated. I mean, when we were in Yellowstone, bison were everywhere. You could just stand there and stare at them. I brought binoculars. I was handing them to my kids and they're standing like, look at this one over here. And they're like, you know, they weren't even remotely concerned about us. I mean, that's also why a 70-year-old woman was gored just three days ago because this crazy lady decided she wanted to take a selfie with a fucking bison.

You know, there are wild animals. I mean, they are wild, but they're not wild like a wild animal. They're not wild like a wild animal that doesn't have a real relationship with people. But bison, this is where it's tricky. When there was no Yellowstone and when there was no place where they could be domesticated, they were still an easy animal to hunt. Right. They've always been easy because they're so big that they're not concerned about wolves.

They're not concerned about anything. In fact, one of the ways that Native Americans would hunt them is they would kill wolves and they would wear a wolf coat and they would crawl around like a wolf or coyote cult. So they would put it on their head and they would walk on all fours up close to it and shoot it with a bow and arrow. And there's actually a famous painting of this wild west famous painting of these two native American hunters that are wearing these coyote skins and they're crawling in this field up to these bison. And a friend of mine, my friend Remy Warren, who's a host of a television show called Apex

Predator, actually used this method to hunt a bison. You mean like I had to put on? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He actually put a coyote skin on and crawled up to a bison, to a free range bison and hunted it this way just to see if it would work just like this famous painting. So bison, one of the reasons why they were able to almost extirpate them from the United States was that they're really easy to hunt because they're not scared of anything. Nothing can fuck with them in the real world because in the real wild world wolves can't fuck with bisons they'll stomp a wolf the wolf doesn't even have a chance like grizzly bears can and they have and there's actually a video really recently from about a month ago of a grizzly bear killing a bison in yellowstone

while all these people were watching there's cars parked and this fucking grizzly bear jumps on the back of a bison and is bringing it down. It's a long, there it is right there. It's a long, drawn-out process, too. That's a small bison, but, you know, big enough. And this bear is fucking huge. And look at this bear is like, I mean, it's like, that's probably like a two-year-old bison or something like that it's not like full-grown bison but i mean this is all this this video

is like seven minutes how what is it long or it's 114 there it's edited yeah so i mean you see him in all these different scenes it's these cut scenes and here he finally gets him uh and he kills him in this river but he's attacking him river. But he's attacking them on a bridge. He's attacking them on a road. It's a long, drawn-out process for this grizzly bear to kill this bison. Yeah. So they don't really have that much to worry about. Calves have to worry.

So this is the video. That's the painting. That's the famous painting. And see, bisons have zero concern for wolves because they'll just stomp them. I mean, they're enormous animals. And their hide can be like 12 inches thick of hair. I mean, especially in the wintertime, like the Native Americans that would wear the bison robes, like it was the most incredible protection from cold because you're wearing this insane natural thing that has shielded bison to the

point where they can just walk out in a blizzard. They don't give a fuck. They're not even a little concerned about it. That painting, I was like, that sounds familiar. He's talking about that. It was on the cover of a book called The Ecological Indian, I think it's called, by a guy named Shepard Kretsch, which is, he was looking at the history. I mean, for one, speaking of Native Americans and Yellowstone, how crazy is it that because we think of natural as not human involved, one of the things to make Yellowstone natural is you got rid of all of the humans that were living there naturally. I mean, I remember I went, there was actually, when I was there, there was a hunting blind that was left over from when Native Americans were in Yellowstone. Really? Yeah, it was really cool.

My guide showed me, just like, it's, you know, just a little hunting blind that they would use. And it also, yeah, again, right, it made me realize, right, Yellowstone is not pure nature, that even our understanding of nature and naturalness, if you get rid of, like, getting rid of humans. Right. of nature and naturalness, if you get rid of like getting rid of humans, right. Is getting rid of a part of the naturalness of what this place was before, or just having humans in cars in close proximity to these animals and getting them conditioned to it,

that becomes unnatural. But even, you know, or does it? Well, I think, yeah, I think it does.

Right. I used to, I, I, I, I would have wanted to say a long time ago, Oh no, there's no such difference, but yeah, no man, Or does it? much more unnatural. It would take away from, if they put in an amusement park or whatever it is they're trying to do to figure out how to raise funds at these places.

And it's because part of what we value about Yellowstone, even though it's impure and even though it's imperfect, is that we get to see something more natural than what we use. Yeah, than a zoo. Exactly. It's far superior to a zoo.

Exactly. Because you can see that. You can see a grizzly bear. No one's feeding the grizzly bears. The grizzly bear has to eat by killing that bison. Right. That's far superior. And that's the same thing with sports.

So that was another one of the things that really convinced me that I needed to rethink my relationship with naturalness, which is that, you know, so I went to a natural bodybuilding competition. I know you had Ronnie Coleman on, like I I'd never been to a body building competition before. And so I went in and it was a natural bodybuilding competition. And these, you know, these people were, they had, you could smell the spray tan from, you know, you know, I was, I was in the, I was in the room with them backstage. I was like, these are the

most unnatural people I've ever seen. They've been, what is it called? Sodium cycling or something to cut their subcutaneous fat. They've done everything you could possibly do to get their bodies into this form. And I'm like, this is a great example. This was going to be my example that I used to show that naturalness in sports was stupid. Because all it really meant was that you weren't taking a certain list of drugs. Right.

That's it. That's all it meant. Everything else about it was unnatural, right, from the tans. But the truth is that sports are about naturalness, that they are a celebration of natural talent. There's no way – you know, people call it God-given talent, right? Which is, again, the connection between God and nature. But you can't have sports as we understand them without thinking about them as a celebration of what the human body can do. Like when you see that guy, Alex Honnold, is that his name?

When you see him free climbing like that, a part of what you're thinking, I think, I mean, it's not just that he's like he could die. Right. But it's also like look at what the human body, you know, unaided by anything else. Yeah. Look what it can do. And that's why we care when Elliot Kipchoge, you know, when he runs his marathon record, it makes sense to ask how much was in the shoes. Right. Not because I could run that fast, you know, with those shoes on.

Explain what you mean by that. Yeah. So when you're setting a marathon record, there's an incredible marathoner named Elliot Kipchoge. And Nike had these new shoes called Vaporflies. And he was using these shoes. And after he broke the marathon record, just shattered it, people were like, wait a second, how much of that can be attributed to him? And how much of it is just the technology in the shoes, right? And this set off again, one of these like, back and forth,

it was totally useless online, where some people were like, I can't believe you're taking his accomplishment away from him. And other people were like, it's all, you know, it's obviously the shoes. But But for me, it's just a, it's all, you know, it's obviously the shoes. But for me, it's just a broader conversation about, well, so what is it that we care about in sports, right? If you put a pair of shoes on someone and all of a sudden they're 5%, 10% faster, that matters, right? Jamie, you actually know about this, right? You're a runner. I have them. Or I have a version of them.

How much? They've made them. The pair he has is very, very specific to what he was trying to do. Is that the pair he has? Yeah, they tailored the course to be specific for it also. Yeah. They brought in top-level pacers to cycle in every, like, probably every mile.

I don't know exactly how they did it. But when they first started making these pairs of shoes, they're called the 4% because they made it made you 4% faster really there's like there was a think like a titanium plate placed in the middle of it so like normal like even the shoe I have now you can you can bend this in half and whatnot you can't do this with that shoe mmm as the plates as you hit it like launches you kind of forward. Like a spring. It's not a spring, so it's just a very minute assistance,

but since it's the best runner in the world, it helped him get 159.40. They're actually selling these insoles that are made out of carbon fiber. Similar to that. Now that big-ass heel on the back, which is so preposterous. My wife has a pair of those, and I'm like, what the fuck is that heel? It seems so crazy to walk around with that. They're really weird to walk around in. I don't think I've ever worn them here. I have a pair at home. They're specifically for running on the road fast. So on the street. Not sprinting. Yeah. So that's why it's got all the cushion. Right. They're very specific for that. To protect your knees.

Yeah. So that's a it's got all the cushion. Right. They're very specific for that. To protect your knees. Yeah. Yeah. So that's a real good question, right? Is that how much of a factor? I would think you would fucking, you'd have to wear a regular pair of shoes if you want to break a record. That's right. So this is, that's exactly right. So then was right. And you would never do this with a mathematician, right?

You know, if a mathematician had a new proof, right? You'd never be like, now, hold on a second. Were you drinking coffee? Yeah. Wait, did you like, no one, no one cares. Like, did you, when you invented that new car, what kind of substance? Neutropics. Yeah, exactly. No one cares because the way we evaluate mathematical, what we care about with a mathematical proof or a new invention isn't showcasing the natural talent, you know, whatever that means, because it's a tough thing

to, you know of the mathematician. Whereas with Kipchoge's record, what we're wondering in part is what is he doing in a way that is separate from what his shoes are doing? And that means that in sports, at least, I have to admit that naturalness is an important factor. to admit that naturalness is an important factor. It is an important factor, but it's a weird one because it's not an even slate. It's not an even playing field. Some people have just incredible genetic gifts and some people don't. Now, if a person doesn't and they take some creatine and a bunch of different substances and they they get in a cryo tank every day after training and then they're in a sauna every day and then they're doing all these

different things where they're they have electronics strapped to them to try to monitor their heart rate and make sure that they're getting the exact right amount of training and no more and no less and that the recovery is perfect before they train harder how fucking natural is that not very natural that's the problem right it's funny you said the gift like isn't phil heath i mean i found out all this stuff about but i think his nickname is the gift um and someone called uh randy coleman is that his name um uh like like freak of nature right we'll say this about people you mean ronnie coleman sorry yeah he's like i mean people will say like oh could i get like could you get built like that ronnie's the first to admit it yeah on the podcast

he talked about it pretty openly even with what jew and whatever right this is like when i talked to one of the natural bodybuilders backstage he was like man i don't if people want to juice they can juice there's no way you know these people are still there you know ronnie coleman's still like an incredible athlete well ronnie didn't choose for the many many years into his bodybuilding career and then once he started doing he just he did it because he got tired of losing to people that he didn't think he should lose to right and that but but you know going back to what you're saying which is true right is how natural is it if you're doing all of these things so yes sports is impure right in the same way like

how fucking natural is yellowstone there's a road going through it. You got these domesticated, like the same time you can't take that criteria away entirely, right? Or, I mean, to give you an example, right? Let's take Marcus Rem, or Oscar Pistorius, who people know about, right?

The guy with the no legs. The murderer, the murderer with blades. South African runner. Yeah, that's right. South African runner. So you can't, like you can't just let him put on

any kind of leg right like right he can't have rocket launchers on his legs right that would be unfair yeah and he can't have like you know i don't know pistons and pistons or whatever exactly but in and even let's imagine that like you could just invent uh a leg with no mechanics in it right but it just made him incredibly fast, much faster than any human being. You'd be like, nope, that's unfair. We don't allow that. That is the argument about those cheetah legs, right? That's exactly right.

So then what do you have to do? You have to test. So a recent case happened. They allowed Pistorius in, but there's a German guy, Marcus Rem, who also wanted to compete and was using one of these legs. And they did all these tests, right?

And they ran tests on, you know, they do these pressure plates. It's really incredible what they do to see whether his leg gives him an advantage over what? A natural leg, right? So the baseline comparison here is, does your artificial leg give you an advantage over a natural leg? But then whose natural leg? Is it your natural leg or is Usain over a natural leg. But then whose natural leg? Is it your natural leg or is it Usain Bolt's natural leg? Well, I think in his, yeah, exactly. So in his case, it's that what they tried to do with these blades is they're like,

okay, let's figure out, because he's, you know, all of these guys are world-class athletes, right? So it's some weird hypothetical, right? Where if Marcus Rem had a leg, would he be performing at about the same level as he does with his artificial leg and that and and as weird as it is as paradoxical as it is I think it makes sense right it makes sense in the same and it depends on the sport too like UFC I looked this up so I was like I wonder if there's anyone with an artificial limb in UFC and then I was thinking because, because I did judo, and I was like, wait a second, that'd be crazy. Because you couldn't allow someone to have a prosthetic arm. Because you couldn't arm bar them.

You wouldn't feel any pain. Yeah, you wouldn't feel any pain. So unlike running, where I can imagine it being fair to allow someone to have an artificial limb. And that's what I mean. It's like fair compared to a natural limb it would i can't imagine a scenario in which a prosthetic arm or even a hand yeah or even a hand because it would be metal that's exactly right you just beat the crap out of you wouldn't break it no you would have to like if someone had their hand replaced you'd have to literally engineer bones that had a breaking point that were similar to organic bones exactly

natural right so you have to engineer it to be like less good than carbon fiber bones right you'd have to make it worse yeah and then you'd have scientists right you'd have you would have usc fighters who are like no i still think the prosthetic hand is giving this giving this person an advantage right and then that person would be like well we got to call in the scientists and they're gonna like do all these bone breaking tests, you know, which is what they did with, with these two athletes, which is what, which is what they're doing also with transgender athletes who want to compete. It's the same kind of logic, right? Which is what, what is the, what's the comparison between say, and in the case of a transgender woman who is competing?

What's the baseline natural comparison? In other words, does being a transgender woman give you an advantage over being a biological woman? The only difference is there's an inclination towards allowing them to compete because it makes you seem more progressive there's a there's a motivation to allowing transgender women athletes to compete because if you look at the oppressive you know if you if you have an oppression scale they are one level or two levels past being a biological woman being a biological woman is more oppressed than being a biological. When a woman kicks a man's ass, we're all happy. When a man kicks a woman's ass, we're very upset.

Right? Well, with, with, yeah, I mean, I think, I think there is right now in this cultural moment, I think there's, in the same way that there was, you know, I mean, women didn't box in the Olympics until 2012, because for a long time, it was thought that women aren't, that they're not naturally suited to boxing, right? I think the first sports they played in the Olympics were, I don't know, they did like sailing and- Gymnastics. Even later, like the very earliest Olympics,

there weren't any, the guy who founded the Olympics was like, not women, women will just, you know, women will stay out of this. And right now, I mean, I think you're right that there is, because sports are so symbolically important, right? I mean, you see this with everything, with Colin Ka And right now, I mean, I think you're right that there is because sports are so symbolically important. Right. I mean, you see this with everything, with Colin Kaepernick, with whatever. Sports are really important to people. Sports, you know, sports stars are heroes.

And so I do think that a part of the transgender rights movement is going to be securing the ability for transgender athletes to compete under the gender that they identify as. And I understand that. I think it makes sense. I think it makes sense to want that because you want cultural representation. At the same time, I don't think you're going to find, maybe you'll nutpick them, right? You can find them online. You're not going to find a lot of athletes who think that there shouldn't be any regulations on how transgender athletes compete. In other words, there are very few people who are actually involved in the Olympics, right?

Like setting up the rules or whatever. I mean, I talked with a transgender scientist named Joanna Harper about this, who studies the differences between transgender athletes and athletes who identify as their biological sex. And there's no way she would say, it doesn't matter, let anyone compete without any regulations. So the real question on the ground, I think that people are arguing about is not whether there should be regulations, but what regulations should there be? And that question, I mean, I don't know how, I mean, you probably follow this a lot, but like same question is like, what do you do with testosterone levels, right?

So dootie chand, right? Let's say you're hyperandrogenous, but you're XX chromosome. Yeah, explain that woman who's, this is the issue with her. Yeah, so one of the things that people try to do in sports, because it's important to have, there's some philosophers will argue it's not, but I think it's crazy.

It's important to have men's sports and women's sports, right? It's important because sports are symbolically important and we want to have women competing at the very highest levels and we want men competing at the very highest levels. And there's a, you know. There's a significant. There's a significant. Yeah, it's plus or minus 10%. They've studied this, right? Depending on the sport, right?

So, you know, power lifting, it's a huge difference. There's certain sports where it's not like ultra-marathoning. That's why the IOC has banned transgender athletes from competing in powerlifting. So this stuff is – it's important to have these categories, right? But then how do you distinguish? So going back to Du Ti Chan, right? So if you make a testosterone rule, for example, so you can only have testosterone, you know, you can only compete as a woman if your testosterone is below a particular level. That's the problem with that is they would have to test it every day and they would have to test it multiple times a day because it's not just how it is when you're competing.

It's what it's like when you're training. So how much recovery, how much muscle have you retained? There's a lot of factors. Well, and the fact that there are women who are XX, who are hyper androgynous, right? And that's just like, I mean, we were talking about being a freak of nature, right? Or having a gift. There's people with high blood cell counts, right? There's people with really long arms or wet hands or whatever. So it's like, well, and this woman actually made her argument. And I totally, I mean, it's incredible. It's really powerful when you read it. She's like, well, and this woman actually made her argument. And I totally, I mean, it's incredible. It's really powerful when you read it. She's like, here I am.

I have naturally high testosterone. And they're going to tell me that I have to artificially lower my natural testosterone levels so that I can compete in the Olympics. It's a particularly sexist argument, too too because they don't do that with men right there's men that have competed in the Olympics that have naturally high testosterone and you know they've dominated dominated other men and particularly in wrestling you know like if you see like do you know what Alexander Karelin is no Alexander Karelin is a very famous Russian wrestler who they used to call the experiment because his parents are both like 5'5 and 5'7. They're like smaller folks.

And he's fucking enormous. And he's terrifying. Go to that picture that I put on my Instagram. I put up a picture on my Instagram that I look at this picture every couple of months or so just to remind myself what a tremendous pussy I am. Oh my God. That's Karelin. Karelin used to take men.

I mean, we're talking about men that were 300 pounds and they would flatten themselves out on the ground to try to avoid being picked up by him. And he would scoop his hands under their belly and hoist them up in the air like they were a pillow and throw them onto the ground. Literally look at that picture of him with the red shirt. The one right there. No, right there. Look at the size of that motherfucker. I mean, just unstoppable for years and years in the Olympics. And I mean, I don't know whether that's science or nature, but if it's just nature, you can't tell me that this guy doesn't have some kind of crazy genetic advantage that the average man just does not. And that's what we celebrate, right?

I mean, that's what we love seeing. In some ways, yeah. You know, when we watch sports. I mean, sure, Alex Honnold, like, he probably has some kind of genetic thing where he's just not scared of the same stuff. Or he loves being scared of whatever it is, right? I don't think it's genetic at all with Alex. I've had Alex on a couple of times. Really?

Does he just love it? He really loves climbing. And the way he says it, he's like, you're in control and it's pretty mellow. He's like when, you know, that's how he talks. He talks like really, you know, really calm and smooth. And that's how he climbs. He's like, if there's a thrill, something's really wrong. Like if I feel like if there's an actual thrill, I'm kind of fucked.

He goes, everything is very mellow. it's very slow and very mellow that's not that is not built into me I'd be absolutely I think it's a thing that his his his managing of that environment and that sort of situation is part of the thrill of it for him it's's trained. It's trained or something. Yes, for sure. I mean, he's been climbing forever. It's the ability to stay calm in where he's at least subconsciously aware of the consequences of slipping and falling, but he's figured out a way to stay in this zone. And there's some sort of a tremendous reward in staying in this zone, so much so that he wants to do it without any aid. He wants to do it without any ropes.

Would you be disappointed, and I'm thinking about how I would feel too as I ask this question, if you found out that he took some kind of downer to keep himself calm on the mountain? Like a beta blocker? Like if you found this, like the steroid version of, you know? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, beta blockers are real.

I mean, beta blockers are a real problem in the world of competitive archery. Really? Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, beta blockers are real. I mean, beta blockers are a real problem in the world of competitive archery. Really? Yeah. Yeah. But they take beta blockers so that when, you know, the shit's on the line and this is like the final match and they're looking at a 60 meter target, they just stay calm and they can keep their arms steady and let that arrow fly. I didn't know that, but that's another great example of what is it that you care about? Well, a part of it is you're like, okay, under normal, right? What is this person's natural ability or what is their non-chemical or whatever it is, right?

Whatever you want to call it. I've never taken beta blockers. I actually, I got them prescribed to me once by a doctor because I wanted to try them and I wound up never trying them. I just wanted to see what it was like to do something. I just, for my own curiosity, I want to see what it was like to do something nerve wracking while I was on beta blockers. Yeah. I was going to use them on a hunting trip, but I didn't because I felt like I would be disappointed in myself if I did that, which is really crazy because on a hunting trip,

you would think the most important thing is making an ethical shot. But I was, my thought process was I trained so hard to make an ethical shot and to be accurate and to practice my shot making routine until it's like drilled into my head. I don't want to take a pill. So I just, I don't, I still have them somewhere. I don't even know if they're any good because they're like six years old. But I want to know what that feels like. It would probably feel really weird to have no adrenaline when you know you should. Right.

And like what you were saying, too, is it takes away. There are certain experiences. Yeah. Where part of what you value about the experience is how, you know. How you manage it. How you manage it and how you trained yourself. Like you said, right. You don't want it to be a pill that did it. And that's, and sports is one of those things. Whereas it would be crazy to, you know, to think to yourself, well, I'll

give you an example. Well, this is, it's funny, right? Childbirth, right? So it'd be crazy to go in the dentist's office and be like, you know, I'd be really disappointed in myself if the way I manage this filling is by using, you know, Novocaine, right? It's like, I'd just be, I'd be really sad about myself. You know, please don't give me anything. I'm going to handle it myself. That's insane to me at least. But people do that with childbirth because childbirth, like sports, is one of those experiences where a part of what some people want is a sense of kind of primal connection. And that was something I didn't understand. I thought it was totally – I was like, why would anyone ever want to experience – like you could just have an epidural. Yeah. You know?

Yeah, you could just have no pain. Right. Well, that would be better. That sounds like a great option, you know yeah um but but like you were saying right so with sports but back to judy chan right because i think it's really important because this is going to come up and in our fucking cultural environment it's going to be nuts right and i want people i hate the like i hate how bad the conversations are, honestly, about transgender athletes because they are so binary and so simplistic that I think that they're going to sides. Yeah, on both sides, that they're going to be there, that when there is actually an athlete competing in the Olympics who is transgender, it's going to happen soon.

And instead, what I would like to see is people who understand the complexity of stuff like being an XX athlete with hyperandrogenism or alternatively. Right. So say you do it with chromosomes. So now you're XY if you're, you know, for the sake of sports, hypothetically, we're going to define you as a woman if you're XX and a man if you're XY. But then you've got people who are XY, but androgen insensitive. So these are people who biologically essentially grow up as women and they look like women, they compete as women, and then they have a chromosome, they have a test, right? And they find out that they're XY, but they're androgen insensitive. And this was an issue in the Olympics as well in 1985. There was a woman who's now a physician who had been competing as a woman her whole life.

Then the test came back and she was like, well, that's crazy. Was she hermaphrodite? She was not. I mean, as I understand it, she was just androgen insensitive. So she was not intersex. This woman wasn't. So did she have a penis? She did not.

So she had a vagina. That's correct. But she had a Y chromosome. That's right. Wow. Right? So, but then what ends up happening, and again, I've read so many of these arguments and I want people to have interesting discussions about this, is people will say, they'll look

at this and on one side of the argument, people will be like, well, then she was just, you know, if it's X, you know, if it's X, X, Y, she's a man. That's it. Like, she's just a man without a penis, right? She's the outlier of all outliers, right? So people use outliers to try to break down all of the category. On the other side, people will be like, well, since there are outliers, clearly the categories themselves don't make sense. But that's not true either, right? Obviously the categories for sports of biological males and biological females are very important categories that do make sense. And there are also outliers that make it hard to decide.

That's it. And then we have a conversation about the difficulties with the outliers. And we try to, at least for my part, we try to embrace the complexity of those situations. Yeah. It's so weird with sports because with sports, first of all, did you ever see the documentary Icarus? Yes. Amazing. Yes. Well, it highlights, if you haven't seen it, folks, it highlights how prevalent cheating is. And so when you're talking about sports, you're talking about people that are willing to, first of all, push their body literally to the brink of failure for success.

And then they're also willing to take exogenous drugs to succeed. Then they're also, in this case, Russia, was complicit in aiding them and perhaps even forcing them to do this and they had this elaborate system set up at the Sochi Olympics to cheat and so when you're talking about sports that's part of the thing it's like people are law they're everyone wants fair right they're looking for fairness but what the fuck is fairness it's it's very very difficult it's very weird yeah and this is something that you that I've admitted openly with the transgender argument. There are outliers.

And there's outliers that are female athletes. Like, first of all, African-American females have the same bone density as a lot of Caucasian men. The bone density argument's a weird one because men generally have thicker bone density, particularly men that lift weights have denser bones than females, but some women have dense bones. You know, there's some women, like, there's some women fighters that have real knockout power and then there's some women fighters that just don't, they just don't for whatever reason,

structurally, they don't generate the same amount of force. Like what's fair. What is fair? Cause there's, there's some people that are just gifted. They're just gifted physically. This is why sports is so weird.

And I don't know. I have no idea how things break. I don't know how things break down along racial lines, but with, with men and women, it women, it's a particularly clear thing. And it's also something that we have as a category. So then that forces the question on us in a way that is difficult. Like you were saying, what is fair? Every single athlete at a world class level in a certain sense is a freak of nature.

They all have certain kinds of gifts. Many of them. Many, many of them. Some of them are freaks of just will and determination. Right. And that means that fairness is going to be a really, really hard thing to pin down. And like you said too, right,

they're going to have training regimens. They're going to be taking all kinds of supplements. They're going to be doing all of these things that are obviously, you know, not natural. But at the same time, we want to have rules about what kind of shoes they can wear, right? And and what kind of drugs they can take. And, and sports are so important to people, right? They're so, they're so, so symbolically important that I just, I get scared. Honestly, I get scared. I mean, this brings us back sort of to the beginning of the conversation, but I get really scared about the way in which people are going to be able to ultra process whatever happens. And this is on

every side of the debate. What's going to happen is people are going to take whatever they see and they're going to go nuts with it. Right. But that's sort of on them. It sucks, but it is sort of on them. We really should be embracing these nuanced discussions because this is what's critical for understanding the true nature of things. And these people that are willfully distorting people's messages and taking these ultra processed versions, whether it's a clip

or soundbite, or even worse, in quotes, a segment with dot dot dot at the end, the idea that you can do that and reframe what is really a really nuanced conversation where people are exploring the very nature of all things, you know, whether it's farming or athletics or pollination or especially like your book, which is really what I've read of. It's really fantastic. The idea behind it is it's such an important thing to discuss because we do have this binary idea of natural and unnatural, processed. And this, you know, it's on them if they want to do that. It sucks that people do do that and that they pretend that your argument is different than it really is. But that's on you. You're just being a fool.

Like it sucks that so many people get sucked into these kind of debates in these conversations, but you can't do that to someone face to face. You can't have that conversation with someone in a real setting of sitting down, talking, looking at each other eye to eye, because that's the only way people are really supposed to be talking. You can't do it, but it's not, I mean, even if it's on them sort of morally, doesn't it? I mean, it worries me because it ends up changing society. It ends up changing people's lives for sure. Some people get fired for deception for the same reason because people are deceptive about what they meant and what they were trying to portray. Or also that someone could just make a statement and instead of there being a discussion about that statement, they're fired and their life is ruined and they're publicly shamed.

And then we get to share it and laugh and mock them, whether it's through an article or a video like that girl with the finger cut, the Black Lives Matter girl. Or we end up focused on stupid shit. Right. It's like right now, like just to take that current example, like police reform. Yes. Right. I think that what happens is we get distracted and divided by fringe issues that are fed by the ultra processed information. So we end up focusing on them, which makes it very difficult to actually. And politicians, like you were saying, right, they're looking at this and they're like, OK, I'm going to have to weigh in on those issues. And so that ends up dividing politicians when, in fact, people agree on a lot of things. They agree on a lot of things. People want, for example,

with the police, right? As I understand, the vast majority of Americans want police held accountable for using excessive violence. Yes. It may be, maybe it is on people for eating the wrong information. It's on me or whatever, becoming polarized, but it ends up making us as a society incapable of getting together and making the changes that we actually all agree on if we were only able to sit down and talk. I don't think it's on people that eat the wrong information. I think that's very unfortunate.

It's on the people who distribute the information deceptively. The people that are distorting, willfully distorting. Like someone like you were saying, if we have this conversation, look, we've talked about a bunch of hot button subjects that could get us canceled. And you could take any segment of a conversation like that and likely find a few things that people could take out of context. And it would spur this whole debate on what a piece of shit you are. And this is something that people like to do for whatever reason. They like to willfully distort a nuanced discussion and take a segment out of context and change the narrative and turn it into something it's not. That's on them. That is on

them. It's not on the people that listen to it and get sucked into not. That's on them. That is on them. It's not on the people that listen to it and get sucked into it. I feel for them and I'm sorry, and I don't enjoy it when it happens to me. But the people who do that willfully, you are wasting your life, distorting reality because you wish things to be a different way, or because you're deceptive, or because you're bitter or spiteful or angry or hateful, or you see in you, this other person that you're, you're targeting, you see in them something that you don't like in yourself or something in a past lover or something in your father or whatever the fuck it is, you know, that's on you. That's on you. I can't, I can't worry about that. There's not enough time in this life.

Yeah, no, it's, it's, I do agree with, i think you're right to like focus on so i'm gonna tell you let me tell you a story about about a about a terrible person um there's there's we should have some cue up some spooky music yeah right so this there's this guy i hope i like don't get sued by this guy well you don't just don't say his name. Yeah. Well, I'm going to, I'm about to say the place that he runs. Um, this is a guy who tells people that he can cure their cancer. Uh, yeah, yeah. Uh, you know, cure their cancer naturally, right? He's got the whole, you know, he gives them, he gives them a week, you know, gives them wheatgrass smoothies, right? And he tells them that if they just think positively and, and they, you know, the, that big pharma is, is corrupt and chemotherapy is a sham.

And if they just come to his place, which I went to in Florida. Did you go to interview him? I did. I went to interview him. And he looks like, I mean, he just looks like, he's like a caricature of a snake oil salesman. He's got this like artificially tanned skin and like a pointy goatee. tan skin and like a pointy goatee and and and and and and so i think you're totally right it's on this guy this this fucked up guy who is who is getting people's hope up but it's not right because it's also he gets to the people and they could have seeked sought out real big treatment

yeah it could be cured and live and people die people die because they go there and the people that were there this was the crazy thing. And this, again, gets back to how the ultra-processed information is happening. These were not idiots, man. These were people who, I mean, I don't know what it's like because I've never had, you know, knock on wood, I've never had cancer. A person very close to me has never had cancer. But, like, these are people who, you know, when that happens, you're looking for anyone. You're looking for anyone to tell you a story that gives you a sense that things are actually not chaotic, right?

That things are simple, that there's an answer, that there's a community that can help you. And so they go, right? And he taps into that and he gives them what they want. Right. In a sense, he gives them what they want, which is which is a feeling of certainty and belonging and hope. And he's terrible, terrible human being. But but but it ends up it ends up being really bad for these people and it ends up being bad for, you know, society in certain ways and that. And so I struggle, right? And the problem is if you attack that guy, I don't know if you've run into this at all, but if you attack the charlatans, they've been turned into saints by the people that look up to them. So when you attack them, you also end up attacking all of the people that believe

them. Yeah. I've been there before with chiropractors. Yeah. Wait, say a little more. Well, I don't know if you know the history of chiropractors. I do. I just wanted, I have to figure out where you come down on this before I. I think it's nonsense. Yeah.

Okay. It's 100% nonsense. It's this. Ready? Yeah. Me cracking my fingers. That's what they're doing to your back. It's not fixing anything.

Ready? Yeah. Me cracking my fingers? That's what they're doing to your back. It's not fixing anything. Chiropractic medicine was created by a guy who was a magnetic healer who came about it through a seance. The idea that he was going to manipulate people's spines and cure them of tuberculosis and blindness. He was murdered by his son who drove over him with a fucking car and then took over the practice.

And somehow or another, this has been grandfathered in. Like I told this to a friend of mine the other day who was talking to me about chiropractors. I go, do you know how much time a chiropractor spends in medical school? They go, how much? I go, zero, zero time. They're a doctor of chiropractic medicine, but they're not a doctor.

There's people flipping out right now though who have been to their chiropractor, who feel like they've gotten relief, who respect their chiropractor. Yeah, well, there's some relief in someone manipulating your body, folks. You should get a deep tissue massage, and you should get an MRI and find out what's really wrong. I came through this because I used to go to a doctor, a chiropractor, excuse me, and I had a bulging disc, and it was fucking me up for a long time. It was really bothering me.

And this chiropractor was assuring me it definitely was not a bulging disc and there's probably a muscle tear and we're going to fix it by manipulating this. I'm going to change your that and crack and see, oh, I got it there. Let me adjust this, boom, in your hip, this. It was all horseshit. But he was a saint compared to another one that I went to. I'll tell you a story about a guy who was ripping people off. This guy was really ripping people off. He was doing this thing that he called zone healing. Are you ready for this? He would, I'm not bullshitting. He would touch your head and he would press your head here and press your head here, press your head here, and then press it really hard here.

And he goes, oh, you feel that? And I go, yeah. And he'd be like, yeah, that's L4 is off. And I'm like, no, you squeezed hard on my fucking head. I'm not stupid. And then he would adjust you and tell you that this is going to fix, you know, whatever autoimmune disease you have, whatever this. And so I was going to him because all these other jujitsu people were going to him and they were all telling me, oh, this guy's great at cracking backs. And he's he's amazing. He fixed my neck, he fixed my this, because people want someone to fix their thing.

Right? If you have a neck injury and you just spend time off and it gets better and you get some treatment from a chiropractor, well heal, things heal. Your body knows how to heal. And he goes, oh, he fixed my neck. No, your fucking neck healed. Okay? Things do heal.

But this person touching your back saying he's fixing your gallbladder is a scam artist. Right. So I had this guy and I'm talking to him. And so I said, well, how does this work? And he's explaining to me. He's got a chart. This is zone. He is how we're fixing this and that and that and this.

And I said, but all you're doing is pushing down on my back. How are you fixing all these things? And so he tries to give me the shenanigans, the little song and dance. Hey, hey. And I keep going. And I say, how are you fixing this? You tell me what is going on here. And so it goes down to the placebo method. He literally tells me.

Oh, he said it to you. If you believe, if you believe in these things. I go, so you're telling me I have to be so fucking dumb to think that if you push on my back, it's going to fix my liver. And then it will fix my liver. Well, he goes, well, you do know the placebo method does work. I go, so you're taking money from people to lie to them. So we have this tense conversation in his office

and I'm looking at him and I know this guy's got a nice house and he's got a nice car and he's just fucking stealing money from people by giving them these false hopes. It's, it's creepy shit, man. And it's really creepy shit when you're alone with the guy and you're talking to him about it and you get him to say it's the placebo method and meanwhile other than that nice guy which is even more fucked up like i knew him like he seemed like a nice guy i didn't i didn't know i didn't even know chiropractor stuff was bullshit i mean the history of it's i mean like you said right if look into it, it's sort of hard to believe that people, like it's still a thing.

It's hard to believe the insurance covers it. Yeah. And it's, you know, and this goes back to the religion stuff too. I mean, I got into all of this stuff. So I, like my actual area of academic expertise is classical Chinese philosophy. So like, that's what I,

that's what I did as an, do, did, do as an academic. And I, you know, I read all these ancient Taoist texts and stuff like that. And there's all these promises in there about, you know, if you take my, you know, mercury mixed at night with this and you eat in this way and I'm looking at this stuff and I was like, you know, this seems very familiar, right? There's a lot of that going on today. And then you look at the history of

chiropractic and it's there are these vital forces right homeopathy is a similar thing there's vital forces that are actually what's causing illness and if you look at the history of that it's quasi-religious reiki which is like the oh my god energy healing right and it's like they didn't even touch you right right and it's these words. I mean, it's really interesting. These words, energy is one of these words that can easily slide from explicitly religious to seemingly secular, right? It's like, oh yeah, energy. That's in physics. They have energy, right? But it's like, no, this is a thing. They're not manipulating your energy. There's not something scientific happening here. This is a religious ritual, a healing ritual disguised as some kind of science. And yet, as you know, and this is what I discovered with my first book, I used to joke with people. Like I got out of religion because I didn't want to talk about touchy stuff. And then I started talking about food and medicine. And that was when people really got pissed.

Like when you start to talk about what they eat. So you got out of religion just because you didn't want these uncomfortable conversations? I'm joking. I stopped doing religion, or not stopped doing because I still do scholarship stuff. But I wanted to talk about it in a way that was relevant to modern society. So I didn't just want to do classical Chinese thought. I wanted to look at how the stuff I learned about how religion works or about the history of religion and apply it to, you know, how are people choosing the foods they eat? How are

people choosing the medicines? Like with Chinese medicine, right? People would say crazy stuff to me. They'd say things like, you know, acupuncture is natural, right? Or whatever. And that's part of why it works. I'm like, acupuncture, they got stainless steel phylloform needles. You think those were around when the yellow emperor was writing his classic? Like, no, they don't. And when people talk about Chinese medicine, they don't talk about, you know, exorcism. Exorcism is not a thing. It was very popular back in the day, but that's not something people embrace. And so I saw these weird uncritical embraces of, of dietary regimens and healing rituals that to me were just obviously right out of ancient China or any ancient context where people would never believe them. And yet today, you're going in and you're having your

back cracked. It's so weird that it's so prevalent. But push back on it. Oh, I've experienced it. I'm going to experience it now. Oh, no. It's not what's going to happen. 100%. Well, I don't read social media, luckily, so I'm not going to hear from it. And let me do say this. There's a bunch of people that are chiropractors that do use some valid methods for rehabilitation. There's a lot of them that use deep tissue massage, cold laser therapy, actual real methods. A lot of them use rolfing. There's a lot of them that use a bunch of different methods of stretching that are very beneficial. But the practice of cracking backs to cure a disease is fucking nonsense.

Right, right, right. And that's a problem. And the practice of calling yourself a doctor of that is also nonsense. It really is. Yeah. And it's a problem. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

But at the same time, again, and I don't know, I keep saying you know this, but it must be difficult. When people are in pain, right? Or when people are in pain, when you're in pain, either psychic pain or physical pain, you really need someone to tell you they have an answer for you and to explain it and fit it into a system. They can say to you, I know why you're sad. I know why you feel empty. I know why your fucking back hurts. It's because of this simple thing. And I have the answer. I'm going to fix it. I'm going to fix it. And actually just hearing that itself is therapeutic. It really is. And that's the problem with going to a healer, because there's many people that

have gone to people that have claimed to be a healer. And just this process of embracing this new situation, this like, I am here. I'm getting healed. Oh my God, it's happening. And a lot of what makes people ill is anxiety, is stress, and the placebo effect of having some sort of a, in your mind, perceived solution does have tangible physical benefits for some strange reason, which is really weird. Like what goes on in the human mind. There is an unbelievably crazy thing on, I think it's a Netflix special.

It's a guy who's a magician, a professional magician, but he also comes from like a religious background where he would go to these faith healing revivals. And he does a show where he tells his audience this flat out. He says, I'm a magician. I specialize in manipulating your minds. And he does a show where he tells his audience this flat out. He says, I'm a magician. I specialize in manipulating your minds. And I know that the way that faith healing works is bullshit. And I'm going to show you by faith healing people tonight in this audience. I'm going to do it right now.

But I want you to know that I'm just manipulating you. Right. Is it Darren Brown? Is it? Is that his name? And then he like goes and heals people. Is it, is it Darren on the podcast?

He's amazing. I mean, this was, I'm watching them and they're going up and he's like, and was it your back? And was it this? And they're like, Oh my God,

how did you know? I feel better. I've never felt this good in my life. And it, and it's, it's, it's unbelievable really, because you realize that certain forms of communication,

right. Are, are just inherently powerful powerful they're symbolically powerful and they can make people feel yeah it is Dan Brown yeah he's been oh my god Brown's amazing I mean it's just unbelievable yeah he's he's a really brilliant human being in in many ways and and talking to him about his process of how long he sets these things up and some of the things that he's done several of these Netflix specials. Incredible. He's amazing. This is what people do with natural stuff though. This is what they do. You go into a store, you're stressed out. You don't know what's going on. You've got a chronic condition.

There is a way in which buying something natural and consuming it, the ritual of that says to you, you're going to be better. You're a part of a system that is simple in which there are good things and bad things, and there's a solution to your problems. But there is also the reality of some natural foods being incredibly good for you. That's true. And there's also the reality of some diets being incredibly poor in nutrients. And really the result of that, of eating those diets, is you get really sick. And if you eat the nutrient-rich diets, your body turns around.

That's true, too. That's also true. That's exactly. I wish that the that's true, too. Yeah. Nuance. Yeah. That's exactly it. And that's where, I mean, you know, what's weird is that most of the experts I talked with for my book, they were actually nuanced.

You know, I talked to environmental activists who were, you know, they are activists, right? They really want to change the world for the better. They care a lot about this stuff, but they're also very nuanced. They're like, you know, nuclear energy is a complicated issue. Like, here's why I think it's complicated. Or here's why genetically modified organisms. Like, they were always relentlessly stressing how nuanced things are and how complicated things are. And I feel like if there's one thing, although now I'm making it simple, right? But if there's one thing that's going to, look, the one thing that will fix everything is nuance. It's sort of a stupid take.

That's a funny way of putting it, right? Yeah. But nuance and not being married to your ideas is very, very important. Yeah, so let's not hold people accountable for it. But that's a big part of why people are using the internet. They're trying to score points and shoot people down and cancel people and expose people and get mad at people. And they're doing it to elevate themselves.

That's a big part of why they're doing it. And really, it's just you're robbing yourself of time and focus and energy that you could be spending on important things. And this is not, again, to say like what you were talking about before about exposing police brutality or corruption. There's important things to expose that are really like there's people are being victimized but that's not what we're talking about here what we're talking about this is a general human tendency to tear people down and it's it's very negative and it's and it feels like you should

be doing it for some strange reason why you're doing it there's like some satisfaction like if you have a rock you see a window and you just fucking chuck that rock at the window and it smashes and a bunch of people behind you go, yeah, it feels good. You know? And I don't know why it's part of being a person. It's the same. It's the,

it's the same reason. I guess like eating, you know, eating junk food feels good, right? It's like they've, it's tapped into all of these things and, you know,

but it's right. Just use the internet to find out about stuff like you, like just even in this show, right? How many times have we been able to bring up a video of something or a shot of something it was constructive i learned things you know what i mean like there are plenty of ways to use the internet well and i do think you're right we got to hold people okay if people are fucking designing social media to make it compulsively addictive i mean that's like we didn't think there's anything wrong with that

when it was first instituted. That's the problem. I mean, I was at, I remember, I was undergrad at Stanford when Facebook was first happening. Like this guy, like smoked bowls with him, played guitars. Now like developed the Facebook feed, you know?

Oh my God. And I remember back then- He's the devil. You know, yeah, well, and it's, he didn't know what he was doing. I know, I'm sure. You know, he was just like some kid that was like, this is incredible, right? But then they didn't know what he was doing. I know, I'm sure. He was just like some kid that was like, this is incredible, right?

But then they didn't design it. They didn't design it with everybody's best interests in mind. They didn't design it to really make sure that people would use it the right way and not the wrong way. They designed it to be effective. That's right. Yeah. Well, that's the thing about the YouTube algorithm. My friend Ari had this experiment that he did. People were talking about the YouTube algorithm that it sort of – there's one thing about Facebook and YouTube and a lot of these things.

People will make this argument that the algorithm favors arguments. It favors – it pulls up things that you get upset with, particularly Facebook, and that it's trying to manipulate you into using it much more often because it turns out that people engage much more in things they disagree with than things they agree with. So what he decided to do was only YouTube puppies. And so he just YouTubed all these videos of puppies. So his feed was just filled with puppy stuff and all his suggestions were puppy stuff. And he's like, no, it's not that it's trying to make you upset. It's that you're trying to make yourself upset and it's taking advantage of that. This goes to Salatin, something Salatin talked about.

Here's another analogy, I think, for information that's really helpful. Monocultures versus polycultures, right? I think that our current information ecosystem is set up to give us all a monoculture of information. It's like, okay, here's what this person wants. I'm just going to feed them a lot of puppies and only puppies. Here's the information this person wants. I'm going to feed them more of that. And what you end up is a homogenization of what it is that's coming into you when what you need is a kind of intellectual polyculture. You want something resilient where there's people, where there's different systems in place

so that you don't just have one big system so that you can have other ideas. I mean, intellectually, this is what comedians often did, right? Or jesters. I mean, this is something I work on academically is this idea like, you have the king and the king is the authority.

But the king will have a jester who has the right to push back on the most fundamental things that the king believes in and puts out there. They can like, you know, and in general, right, the fool or the jester is wise because they can challenge. They take off their pants in public, right, and piss or they can do things that no one else gets to do. That's important because it prevents monoculture, intellectual and moral monoculture. And I honestly think, I mean, I think you were talking about South Park the other day. But one thing that I have, I struggle with now is that I feel like the jesters these days, they're just confirming what it is that their viewers already believe. So with South Park, I didn't know whether I was going to agree with what they were mocking or whether I was going to be shocked.

You never knew. That's a gross generalization, though, in terms of gestures, because there's so many different styles of comedians. Well, you can access them in a way that makes it so that you don't have to hear anything you don't want. But you don't know what they're going to say. I kind of know what John Oliver is going to say. Well, John Oliver is a different kind of an animal and his stand up, what he's doing is not really stand up, right?

What he's doing is he's got this show where he mocks things and it's got a very heavy left wing bend to it. Right. Well, John Stewart, I felt like I knew what Jon Stewart was going to say. And it's not to say I didn't like it. He was funny and I agreed with him and I watched him. I mean, a lot of,

maybe this is just what people, you know, conservatives say this. And I think they're right is that there's a bent to late night. Like I'm not going to tune into Stephen Colbert and be shocked that, that he's mocking something that I didn't expect him to mock. Well, what's interesting.

That's true. But Colbert is a, he's a Catholic, heavy duty Catholic, which is really weird. I wish he would talk about that more. He has a few times. Does he?

It gets real weird. It gets like, like almost like he's holding a hot potato and he can't wait to drop it. You know, I wonder if, I wonder if that's because it doesn't fit with the, I don't know. I don't know, man. I mean, first of all, there was the character that he was doing, you know, I wonder if, I wonder if that's because it doesn't fit with the, I don't know. I don't know,

man. I mean, first of all, there was the character that he was doing, you know, when he was doing the Colbert report, which was just like really cocky Republican character. And then he went over to do the Stephen Colbert show. And now it's not that anymore.

Now it's like, he's hosting a talk show, but it's the guy that we knew who was like super ultra cocky and really funny from the daily show that was like a parody of a right-wing guy it's it's very odd it's a weird it's a weird progression i wonder that you think that there are jesters because i want to although i think he's very funny yeah he's hilarious well that's the thing being being funny doesn't you know there are plenty of funny people who aren't jesters right i mean there's i like when he fucks with trump i think he's hilarious. Well, that's the thing being being funny doesn't you know, there are plenty of funny people who aren't jesters, right? I mean, there's I like when he fucks with Trump. I think it's hilarious that he gets Trump to reply and he's like, you made a mistake. You replied like you reacted to me like it was want to be able to watch people who are going to sometimes make me feel like I was right.

And they're going to be mocking someone that I disagree with. And then I also want, and then two seconds later, I mean, this happens a little bit with Dave Chappelle. I've seen like. Oh, Dave's the best at it. But there's a guy named Andrew Schultz who's thriving during this lockdown because he can't do stand-up and he's doing on his Instagram. He does these really well-produced videos where he'll take down a subject. Like, I don't even want to give you an example, but he's got a bunch of them out there. But he's fantastic at it.

He's really good at it. And he's also independent and he's a wild young really funny comedian And he doesn't have any affiliation whether it's he's not like stuck in this left-wing paradigm Or he's not a right-wing person. He's not in any way shape or form so he's just like what's this bullshit? Here's here's the problem with these motherfuckers, and then he goes on these. That's him right there. He's fantastic. Oh, yeah. He's got a new one. Fake woke activism no one asked for. But they're great.

And they're like, they're all like 10, 15 minutes long. And then he fucking nails it. It's really, really good stuff. Is there anyone out there who mocks the anti-woke people? The anti-woke people. You know what I mean? The people that are like, all you need is rationality and free thinking.

I'm sure. I'm sure there's someone out there. There's probably some heavy-duty left-wing people that are mocking. Oh, you're right. Yeah, I'm sure. Maybe it's on me. Well, I mean, we've got a problem in ideology world.

We've got a problem with these very strict left versus right things. You know, it's really weird. And I've been acutely aware of it because I've been so often accused of being right-wing for the most bizarre reasons, mostly because of the way I look and because I'm a commentator for the UFC. And, you know, I'm a meathead. I look like a meathead. I'm a hunter. All these different know, I'm a meathead. I look like a meathead. I'm a hunter. All these different things.

I get accused of being. And then, you know, it turns out I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter. And I lean way more towards progressive ideas. But I also support the Second Amendment. It's like people have this idea in their head that you have to be in these hard lines. And if you're not, you're not a part of a tribe. And you get ostracized by that tribe. And there's a very real stigma attached to that. And you feel that stigma when people attack you for your ideas. And so people lean into what gets them love and lean away from what gets

them chastised. Yeah. Well, I feel like I don't have a, I mean, one thing that I feel, I feel these days is I feel very politically homeless. Yes. And I think there's a deep, because, and I don't like the moderates either, because I don't feel moderate, because there's some stuff I'm not moderate about. It's like, no, there's some shit that's really bad and we need to change it right now. Yeah.

And so the, you know, and like you were saying, right, I think it's just that we want labels and simplicity, right? And so if you have, if we look at things on an issue by issue, case by case basis, then we don't have a category to fit ourselves into. And that's obviously since the beginning of time, right? This is what religions often provide, right? It's like, well, here is what I believe in.

I am this kind of person. And that word, you know, I'm Muslim or I'm Christian or I'm Protestant. That word describes who I am. It gives me an identity. Right. But then that locks you into all kinds of stuff. Yes, it does. It does. And people lean into that. And oftentimes people don't even have their own opinions. They have a established set of opinions they've adopted because they're this or they're that. They're right or they're left. They're Christian or

they're atheist. And I really think, as we were talking about earlier, that being woke is very akin to being religious. Being anti- woke is very akin to being religious. Being anti-woke is akin to being atheist. There's a lot of people that are rabidly atheist the same way someone is an evangelical Christian. I mean, they have no room for religion being positive. And if you say there's some positive aspects of religion, I think it's a moral scaffolding for people. I think it gives people hope. It improves the quality of their life. It establishes a community amongst other people that

also share values. And there's real positive benefits to that. It's exactly how I was with the natural thing. I went in like an atheist, right? I was like, this is so stupid. These people are all stupid. And then I came out and I was like, no, no, no, there are some good things about it, right? That's exactly it. There's actually, it's funny, like one of the things, so a project I was working on way back in the day was a podcast about people who shift. It's called Shift. And we were looking at people who fundamentally, who changed their minds on really, really important things. So we did one episode on this guy, Scott Shepard. You actually had Daryl Davis on.

So this is a related thing. So Scott Shepard was this guy. It's an insane story who was, I don't want to give away too much about this, but like he started very much not a racist, ended up in the KKK and then left the KKK. And what I wanted to understand and what I think maybe this is something

we just need to investigate right now is what is it that causes people to break out of whatever ideological label it is that they have? There was another guy that we that we did another episode on. That was where it ended for now about. So he was like a Greenpeace activist. Like he was one of those guys who would go in, tear up GMO crops. Right now he's pro GMO. I don't care about whether or not GMOs are good or bad.

That's not the point of the episode for me. For me, it's like, how does that happen? What is it that changes you? How is it? You should interview Candace Owen. Yeah. Yeah, because Candace Owen ran an anti-Trump website, and then she became a hardline right-winger. Right, and I just want to know, like, how does that happen?

What are the things? And it's obvious it's going to be all kinds of stuff, right? Because it's your people around you. There's so many variables, but it's also like what you choose to focus on. Like what, you know, sometimes there's a lot of gravity in shifting to another perspective. Like, and people start rewarding you for that and praising you for that. And then the wrong people criticize you for that. So you feel like you're on the right track.

You know, you get morons that, that call you an asshole for having a different perspective. Yeah. And that one thing, right? One thing, one, one, one moment of being hurt or one discovery of being a betrayal or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's, um, we're at an adolescent stage of interpretation of ideas.

That's what I think. We really are. And of communication. And I think that what we're doing with social media and the Internet in general is we are far more connected than ever before, but in many ways far more segregated and segmented and far more rigid in our ideas. And the echo chambers have never been stronger. And I think that the next leap of technology, and I've had Elon on, and he discussed his neural link, which is really fascinating stuff because it's going to require surgery.

Like people are literally going to get holes drilled. Very unnatural. Fucking super unnatural. I mean, as unnatural as fillings. But they're going to drill holes in your head and they're going to put literal wires into your brain. And you're going to have a device attached to your skull. And he said it's like a quarter sized device on your fucking head. It's going to Bluetooth up to your phone, and you're going

to be able to access information, and your bandwidth that you're going to be able to access information at is going to be radically increased. And the way he describes it, it varies between the way he describes it when it seems like he's trying very hard to make it palatable versus when he sees the actual future potential of it, which is we're not going to be the same thing anymore. Just like you're not the same thing as like when I was a kid, uh, people would lie about stuff and you really, there's no way to check. You know, they could say like, I won the Olympics 16 times and I was the fastest man ever. And you'd be like, Whoa, who the fuck are you? Like, there's no way to check. Now you could say, like, I won the Olympics 16 times and I was the fastest man ever. And you'd be like, whoa, who the fuck are you?

Like, there's no way to check. Now you could go, what's your name? And then you pull out your phone and in five seconds, you know the person's full of shit. So we've changed radically in our ability to assess whether things emotions, of what is causing someone to have a deceptive narrative that they're trying to push forth. And we're going to be able to see these things. We're going to be able to access this information in a very different way. And it's going to change what we are as human beings. We're going to have some sort of cyborg capacity, and it's going to radically

elevate our ability to understand things and to communicate. And that's, weirdly enough, probably our only hope. You think it'll be good? I mean, here we are talking about ultra-processed information. I mean, I wonder- But we're stuck with ultra-processed information. But we're stuck with this. I know. We're stuck with this. Ultra-processed information is here. And unless we can technology our way out of this, I don't think we're going to get better at this. If someone said, okay, no more social media, the social media we have now, we keep forever.

Nothing but YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. That's it. Forever. And they can randomly decide you violated their terms of service and ban you. And there's no room for conservative thought. And they'll blackball people for the most ridiculous ideas because most of these people that are running these organizations are super woke. So what happens then? Well, we're fucked. And it's literally pushing us towards the point of at least an ideological civil war. That's where we're at right now.

Just solving it with a brain implant feels like solving the food system with bariatric surgery. You know what I mean? It's just like, okay, we've got this food system. So what we're going to do- I'm not necessarily thinking that a brain surgery is the only way to solve it. I'm scared. I do think that technology and more emerging technology is probably what's going to get us out of this. What you were talking about earlier in the tweet that really resonated with me about ultra-processed information. I think we need something that's far more, that has far more depth to it, that something that works and distributes information in a far more nuanced and a far more transparent way.

And I think we're going to move in that direction. And we're going to move in that direction. And we're going to move in that direction because it seems like technology is moving everything towards greater and more prevalent connectivity, right? You can get better internet access everywhere. Everything is instant. We're live streaming and tweeting and all this different stuff. It's moving us towards some ultimate moment of intense connectivity. And I think we're going to be able to read each other's minds. That's one of the things that Elon said.

He said, you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth. And I think he's right. And I think that's what's going to happen. God, we're turning so bad, though. I don't know if that's necessarily the future, though. You could be saying it could be better. I think we're going to be able to read thoughts and emotions in a way where you'll know that someone's being a baby. You know someone's being a child. You'll know someone's being deceptive.

You'll be able to see these things. What a terrifying world. That's sort of like, you know the radical honesty people? Have you seen this group? It's the people that are like, you never lie about anything. So it's this weird social experiment where they're with their loved ones or whatever. And the loved ones are like, do you like my shirt? And they're like, no, it looks bad. And you've gained weight.

Right. And like there's it's radical transparency about everything. And that that I understand where they're coming from. Right. It's like this thought that like we're all sort of laid bare to each other. But also, like, it's great that we can keep things private. Like what we live in right now is the sort of grassroots. I mean, I call it a grassroots panopticon. we're all watching each other but it's not the government

it's not big brother we're big brother right and that i want to keep stuff i like i like like i i know what you're saying i don't want you to look at my brain i know what you're saying and i i agree with you to a certain extent but however um i'm a stand-up comic and one of the things that i love about being a stand-up comic is my friends are all brutally honest and they fuck with me and we fuck with each other like if i said do you like this shirt and he'd be like no dummy it looks stupid on you they will say something like that we both be like ah they would say something like uh do you think i gained weight like you know you gain weight, get on the scale, you fat fuck. And they'll say that to you. And then you start laughing. We, there's no, in the comedy world, like in the world of my friends, there's no room for dishonesty. And if they think you're

bullshitting, they don't want to talk to you because it's no fun. I think comedians are uniquely strong in that way though. I, I, so as someone too, right. For me, like my thing was like rationale, like I liked rationality. I was like, Oh, we have a good argument. Like I'll just have a logical argument with you, right? But like one of the things I realized, and this one, you know, when I was there at that place in Florida where this fucking charlatan is killing people. I can't just tell those people the truth. That's crazy. I wish I could, but they're dying.

And they're in pain. And there's certain people who are constitutionally, they like honesty all the time. They thrive on it even when they're in pain. Right. But there's a lot of people where logic or honesty, that's just not the, that's not, they're going to suffer. They're going to, they're going to suffer. No, I agree. I think you're right about that, that there's, there's certain people that you really shouldn't like, you know, if you're talking to a delicate person and they ask you a question and it's there's nothing wrong with just being complimentary you look you look great you look great i like doing that too i have a kid i one of my things my wife so my kid would come to me with drawings right you're like you

know kid comes with a drawing right and she'd be like dad look at this and i'd be like oh that looks like shit i was like hazel i was like hazel that's not your best work. And my wife is like, what the fucking monster? What is wrong with you? And I was like, well, I don't want her to like. And she's like, no, it's a kid. She just wants love from her dad. You tell her that's a great, did a great job. And I don't want to infantilize adults.

But there are times when I am, when I just need love or I need someone to keep their thoughts to themselves. And yeah, I don't know. I know what you mean. I don't know. I haven't been in a lot of pain, Joe, is the truth. I haven't, I've led this charmed life. I've led it on, someone said, like, I've led it on difficulty level, like pretty easy setting,

you know, my personally life. And like, I've been lucky. I haven't been like super sick. Like who knows what kinds of crazy healing therapies I've been lucky. I haven't been super sick. Who knows what kinds of crazy healing therapies I would be into. I mean, there's a guy at Duke who specializes in ALS, Rick Bedlack. Photos of him are incredible because he dresses in wonky outfits, like flashy tuxedos and crazy ties and stuff. And I was like, Rick, why do you dress in all these outfits? And he's like, because it's the best thing

I can offer my patients is these, is I can't tell them the scientific studies, they're not here for that, right? I don't have anything to offer my ALS patients in terms of like science or rationality, but what I can do is just make them feel lighthearted for a moment. And I was like, do you tell them,

like when they come into the office, do you tell them like the truth, you know, which is like, basically like you're, you're done for, you know? And he's like, you know, obviously not right. You don't just tell people who are in pain, the truth, or at least you don't there's, there's, I don't know, for me, I've really pulled back from – I've really pulled back really recently from the idea that truth-telling is the way to engage with people who are in pain. I think a lot of what we're seeing right now with Black Lives Matter, a lot of what we see with transgender activism, all of the hot-button political issues often, right? Change is – there are groups of people who have been in pain for a very long time. Um, and individuals within those groups have been in pain and, and that, I don't know. I think it's just important to sort of acknowledge that. And I had a lot of trouble doing that. I would be like, well, here's the truth. Like,

here's your situation and here's how you need to fix it. And like, but that's not, I don't know. That's, that's not necessarily, it doesn't work and it's not necessarily what people want. Yeah. Well, in those two particular particular subjects too you're dealing with people that are that will get very upset if you do offer anything that anything that contradicts their narrative well and if you know if someone's in if someone's in pain or if someone's like literally trying i mean if they're if you're trying to change a situation for the better, right? You can always throw nuance in. You can always have a logical argument about something.

But I've become, and I'm not saying don't say stuff. I'm very on board with you want freedom, right? I want to be able to say chiropractors are bullshit. I want to do that. But like if there's someone who was struggling with chronic back pain forever and found a chiropractor and they come back from that chiropractor and they say to me, Alan, for the first time in my life, I feel like there's some hope. This chiropractor helped me. If I have that thing in my brain. I don't say it. Yeah, I'm with you.

I'm with you. I'd be like, that's great. I'd be like, that's great. But Alan, that's just being kind. Yeah. You value kindness. And I think that's an awesome thing to value. be like, that's great. I'd be like, that's great. But Alan, that's just being kind. Yeah. You value kindness. And I think that's an awesome thing to value. And I value that as well.

And I think that's something that I've learned as I've gotten older is that you don't always have to say what you think. You could just be nice. And I've seen, I've saw, I saw you do this. Like, I love this moment. I don't know. I forget which podcast it was on. You were like, you were talking about something and then you were like, you look down and

you were like, wait, I think, I think we're making fun of this person is what you said. And I feel like, and that was a moment, right? It was like, you want to like, you want to be kind, right? And, and honesty, that's the difficult, the sometimes ridiculous things or illogical things are the kind thing. And I'm really struggling now. And I hope, I just wish everyone were struggling to realize that those are sometimes incommensurable values. You can't sometimes be honest or tell the truth and also be kind at the same time, right? There's this book, God, what is it about a kid who's, I can't believe I'm blanking on the book now, but it's a kid who's severely disfigured. And it was a book for young adults can't believe I'm blanking on the book now, but it's a kid who's severely disfigured.

And it was a book for young adults. And there's this moment in that book where one of the teacher puts on the board when you're given the choice between being right and being kind, always choose being kind. And I was like, when I first read that, I was like, that's so stupid, man. You can be the way to be kind is by helping someone be right and like tell them the truth. Right. But I used to share that thought. But I'm now in the group of be kind yeah and as I've gotten older first of all I never sat I never I never I never went out with the idea that I

would create something that millions of people would say never this was not this is just something that happened along the way. And as it was happening, I became more and more aware of the impact and then the responsibility that comes with that impact. And just through that process has made me a far nicer person because I'm really aware of, you mean shit like i never i don't i don't attack people i don't like it i don't i'd rather just not you know and i don't i don't even want like if someone says to me before the podcast and they have before hey would you do me a favor and not talk about this weird thing that happened to me i'm like i don't want to make you uncomfortable i don't we could talk about a million things you're a human being i'm a human being there's not like a specific i don't want i don't want gotcha moments if you want to talk about something that's in your heart that you want to get out, I'll talk to you about it.

But I'm not a mean person. When I was younger, I was. And when I was younger, I was in the group of fuck that, tell them the truth. They need to face reality, Get your fucking shit together. And then as I've gotten older, I've realized like there's not – that's me worried about myself falling short. That's me worrying about my own failures and then wanting to sort of reinforce my own philosophies in other people because I was insecure. Well, this – I mean it's interesting. You're saying, right, like talking to millions of people.

And this goes back to the stuff you were saying about written language and the fact that you can't respond to stuff. The difference between a conversation is, you know, such and such. So here we are, we can talk to each other. I can have an argument with you about, you know, whether like turmeric coffee works or whatever it happens to be, right? Or supplements or whatever it is. We can talk about chiropractic, right. But there's someone else out there who really did just go to a chiropractor. And so it puts you, especially not me, right. I'm not,

I don't have like a podcast reaching millions of people. Oh, you got a Twitter dude. They're coming at you too. Don't worry about it. I'm sure they are. But you know, yeah, Twitter, I think, I mean, Twitter, I see as a spiritual exercise. I've said this before. I go on Twitter to force myself to be kind. Like, how can I balance? How can I be on Twitter and communicate with people like QAnon, right? Instead of just mocking QAnon, like, can I engage with a QAnon person? Like, you know, but anyway. Do you do that?

I do. What do they say back? They really want to talk to you about QAnon. And then I ask them questions about it. And I try to be. Have you had like meaningful dialogue? You know, I have had meaningful dialogue. I've even had meaningful dialogue on Twitter with people who were.

I mean, honestly, my favorite moments on Twitter are where I engage with someone and it starts angry. And then I'm like, OK, Alan, can we get this to a place where we're being kind to each other? If I can do it on Twitter. I mean, that's like that's like the gymnasium of the soul, right? If you can be kind to someone on Twitter. But I was saying like, you're in a shitty situation in part because when it comes to this kind of thing,

because you're communicating to 5,000 different types of audiences all at the same time. You're talking with me, you're talking with the people who are watching this right now, all of whom range from people who are not in pain to people who are in pain. now, all of whom range from people who are not in pain to people who are in pain.

Some of those people need honesty to help with their pain. And so, you know what I mean? It's like this, and I don't even know how you handle, and then you don't wanna be lying. You wanna be telling the truth. I don't know. You have to evolve as a human and get better at your own,

your own bullshit and your own, like, what are you trying to get out? What is your message? Like, what are you saying? Like, what is in your head? And are you using words to accurately relay what's in your head? Or have you fucked that up?

You get better at that. But there's some benefit, no doubt, to engaging with people online. I mean, it's just untenable for me. There's too many people. But do you know who Megan Phelps is? Yes, yeah. It was a great me. There's too many people. But you know who Megan Phelps is? Yes. Yeah. It was a great example. Yeah. She's an amazing person. I've had her on the show too. Megan Phelps is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps, who is the leader of the Westboro

Baptist Church, one of the most vicious, nastiest, evil religious groups ever that would have these God hates fag signs and hold it up in front of when soldiers would die. They would go to their funerals. The worst. The craziest shit. And she grew up in this horrible environment and then through Twitter interacting with her husband on

Twitter, that fucking dude, that angel whoever he is, that dude converted her. And he just talked to her back and forth and they became friends. And then eventually they became married and then they have a child together and they're happy. It's a cliche. I mean, you said it's interesting when you said that's being kind, right? I mean, there are these cliches and I hate how we also live in this like ultra ironic time now where like every, you know, oh, it's a cliche. It was like, no kindness and love.

Yeah. I mean, it sounds valuable. They work. It sounds corny, but it's valuable. It's what every saint and sage, whatever they've said, it's, it's the beginning of work. It sounds corny, but it's valuable. It's what every saint and sage, whatever, they've said it since the beginning of time. And you can be like, oh, that's a cliche or it's more complicated than that. And it is. It is more complicated always. Right. But like, I don't know, the kindness. I don't know.

It's hard, too, because I don't want to even be. I keep thinking. Right. It's like you get in this like inception of nuance. Right. because I don't want to even be, I keep thinking, right? It's like you get in this like inception of nuance, right? But like you and I can say, hey, we need to be kind or I need to be kind, I can speak for myself. But like there are some people who actually, they're going to say back, no, I'm being fucking hurt, right?

Like for me, I need to fight back. I need to not be kind. If you're in an abusive relationship, right? Or whatever, like, or if you're in a position where you're fighting for something you believe in. So I don't even want to be telling other people, they, all I feel comfortable with right now, and this is sort of where I landed after, you know, I mean, people were pushing me like this subtitle on this book, man, that was pushed on me. I'm going to be honest, how faith in nature's goodness leads to harmful fads unjust laws and flawed science it makes it sound like

it's a fucking takedown you know they were like we need you you know this is this is how a subtitle needs to work it needs to tell people like this simple truth where there's like just as a marketing ploy that was their just their idea the british the british book has a different subtitle just the seductive myth of natural goodness oh that's better i mean i understand where they were coming from though right because my publisher's like look They want to sell a lot of books. Yeah. And people want this, they don't, you know, people don't want kindness. Kindness doesn't sell, right? Like controversy sells. And so I, it's hard, you know, again, you know, I think about this a lot because, you know, I want people to read my book. I want people to listen to me. I would love to

have, you know, I'd love to be able to talk about, you know, my, you know, I'm going to be talking about quantification in my next book. Right. So I, I want people to hear what I have to say about how quantification gets abused, but I'm, I'm also like, well, the best way to get people to hear me right. Might be to like ratchet up the controversy or the, you know, you don't think so. I don't think so. I think the, I really think, like, what you're talking about, like, don't tell people what to do. You're like, I want to be kind, but I don't feel like I should be telling people. Well, here's the thing, man. You don't have to.

You don't have to tell people. Just lead by example. Just do what you're doing and do it at your best. And if you can be kind, that will have a greater impact than anything. I mean, it's like being a parent, right? You can tell your kids what to do, but one of the best things that I've found is to just live life in a way that your kids see the right way to do things and the wrong way to do things. And one of the things I always do whenever,

whenever I correct my kids, I always say, Hey, let me tell you something. I did way worse than that. I'm way dumber than you. And this problem that you, you created, or this thing that you did wrong, I've done way worse. I've definitely done created or this thing that you did wrong i've done way worse i've definitely done that i'll tell you the things i've done i always tell my kids all the things i screwed up on i love telling them that i love telling them like let me tell you what i used to lie about and i'll tell that my kids like lies that i used to tell i'll tell my kids all the screw-ups that i used to and i i tell them that just so that they know first. I'm not picking on them.

Like, I'm a grown man. I pay taxes. I'm talking to a 10-year-old. There's no way this is fair. So I always criticize myself first. And whenever they do something wrong, I always say, listen, before you know, just so you know, rather, I fucked this up already too. I don't know, man. You're in a – I guess like what I would say is it does work for you.

Like, for example, to take one thing that I've talked about, something you do on your show that I encourage my students to do is I say, look, if you don't know something, say I don't know. Say I don't know. If I've used a word in class or if you don't know the answer, say you don't know if i've used a word in class or if you don't know the answer say you don't know right and and that and you doing that makes people feel comfortable with admitting they don't know things it's a kind thing to do for a person especially person position of power to say i don't know but the problem is there's also a lot of authority and cultural currency in pretending to know shit and there are far more people out there there are far more people out there who have risen to positions of power pretending they know everything then admitting that they don't know things

it's so dumb there's zero benefit zero benefit in pretending you have information that you don't have zero there's zero benefit though because first of all you'll get exposed. People will find out. And then also it doesn't make you look any better if you pretend you know something. Like there's actual strength in saying, what does that mean? I don't know that. Oh, okay. Or, oh, I thought it was the other way.

Oh, my God, I'm an idiot. There's power in that. I totally disagree. There's power in admitting you don't know, but I think there's a lot of benefit in pretending you know stuff that you don't. Not ultimately. Ultimately, no, because you get exposed and then they'll never listen to you again. People will never trust you. It's very valuable to tell the truth.

Very valuable. Didn't you just tell me about a guy with a nice house and a car who was doing placebo fucking magic? Yeah, I mean, he had an okay house. I don't want to live in that shithole. I'm just saying, you know what I'm saying? There's a lot of liars out there. People know that guy's full of shit now. And I think his business has eroded

radically. It got through the community that he's full of shit. But yeah, I know what you're saying. He was scamming people, but he knows he's scamming people. What you carry in your heart, being a con artist and robbing people out of their hard work hard-earned dollars by tricking them and thinking

that you're healing them that in in itself is a great punishment yeah when you say ultimately you mean sort of like ultimately in like the big game well not just yeah in the big game but just in day-to-day life you know you're a con artist. Like the way you're paying for your food is through lies. God, I hope you're right. I just, I've seen, I've met these people, that guy in Florida, these people, I mean, fucking come on, Dr. Oz, Jesus Christ. You think Dr. Oz, I mean, I don't know, man. This is why, I mean, it's interesting talking to you about it, but like, you think he's

going home at night and like, geez, I really shouldn't have had that Reiki healer on. Like it's eaten me up inside. Does he have Reiki healers on? He's got how many, every time I go to the supermarket, there's his smiling fucking face on some magazine with Dr. Oz's easy way to lose weight with these. You know what I mean?

And like, it's fucking hard to be Oprah. She lets a lot of these motherfuckers through the net. There's a something on Wondery, which is one of my favorite podcasts. I don't know if you ever listened to Wondery it's amazing it's they were they're really good and they had a fantastic one on Aaron Hernandez who's that football player one of being a murderer but they have one now on some con artist who's some some healer person who Oprah had on. And Oprah elevated this guy.

And now, and I saw it on my feed today. I was very excited to read it after, or to listen to it rather after this podcast, after we're done with our podcast. But it was essentially another one of those things where some person who Oprah had on snuck through the net and became a bullshit artist. She's had a bunch of those on.

You remember there's that one guy who wrote a book. It turned out he made up everything that was in the book. And Dr. Oz, they brought him before Congress because he had some miracle cure that literally melts fat off your body. And they're like, is this a miracle cure? He's like, no, it's not. How the fuck are you still on TV?

Well, because what's he doing? You know what he is? He's a religious figure, right? You know what he is? He's Oprah's hoe. Oprah's out there. No, no, no, no, no. My hoe's out there working.

I'm going to keep him out there making that money. Well, this, maybe it's, and this is the flip side of kindness though, right? I mean, we keep going in this inception circle, right? But like there's this Carl Sagan, I think it's Carl Sagan line where he says, you want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded your brain falls out, right? And it's like, you also want to to be kind but not so kind that you become a kind of laundering factory for people like dr us right right um and that you know and that's i don't know oprah just wants people to be happy right you know so so i've encountered a few

of those people too man over the years of doing this podcast is a few people that i've had on that turned out to be full of shit it's hard because you you've i and particularly in the beginning i really didn't vet them at all like someone would tell me oh this guy's great you should talk to him let her talk to him then in the conversation be like hey is what you're saying true like and then i you know it just took a while for me to understand you got something there he was on the secret oh one of those motherfuckers one of. Oh, one of those motherfuckers. One of the narrators. The Secret. One of those motherfuckers. That's the ultimate of horse shit,

bullshit. What they don't want you to know. You talk to actual physicists about that and they just go, people actually study quantum mechanics and, you know, like the really complicated underlying mechanism of the fucking universe itself.

And then you see these quacks out there selling horseshit. And then when you find out that the secret was actually, well, not the secret. That's what the bleep, what the bleep was actually run by that person who claimed to be channeling some fucking thousand year old alien or some shit. You know that lady?

You know that? Do you know that? I don't. Do you remember what the bleep? What was it? I like want to write it down. Yeah. this really there's yeah yeah yeah it's like there's a name to she oh my god she goes on and talks she's like this uh middle-aged woman who's kind of heavy and she's uh talking in this weird way she has this crazy name like what is this

lady's name like what kind of name is that it turns out that's not her name that is this lady's name? Like, what kind of name is that? And it turns out that's not her name. That is who she's channeling. And they don't tell you this on the, when you're watching What the Bleep, but she's channeling some fucking thousand-year-old entity. But here I am. Look, look, now I'm just like, I just need you to, like, make me feel hopeful. I feel like this is what I, like, came here to talk to you about or something. Like I just, you really think in the end, like it comes back to bite you in the ass. That feels like a very sort of redemptive vision, but it's like here we have a laundry list. I mean, we could go on and on and on and on and on about charlatans who have risen to the very highest

levels of power. And I feel like I'd like to believe that every day they like cry into their pillows at night and their like soul husks are going to be, you know, shown what they truly are. I would rather concentrate on good people than concentrate on the bad people that succeed financially. I'd rather concentrate on good people

because I think there's plenty of them. There's plenty of really interesting, fascinating people that have a great message. You're saying it works, too. You're saying you can be kind, and that'll work. Yeah, there's a lot of them out there, man. There's a lot of really motivating, fascinating people that have lived a life of value, and they can relay that information to you. And there's real lessons that you can take out of that that can enhance your own life.

I think those people are real They're out there. Yeah, you can concentrate on the bullshit artists that asshole down in Florida selling people wheatgrass and The that you don't have to though. I mean, I hate that they're real I hate that they exist but in some ways what they do is like They they make it so that you really appreciate Kind people and you really appreciate real people. You know, the assholes and the deceptive people that you run into in this life, they're just going to make you appreciate the exceptional people. God, I mean, I have rainy days, bro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Rainy days make you appreciate the sun. You do. You have the shadow of the light. Crazy. Dr. Oz makes you appreciate real doctors. Dr. Oz makes you appreciate real doctors, real physicians, real people who are actually trying to help people. It's just crazy.

And maybe he's trying to help people. He is. That's the thing. So I was in div school. So I went to like – so in divinity school, although it sounds like I'm going to be a priest. But I was like – it's a secular. It was the University of Chicago. So it's a secular university. We were early, early students in div school and we were mocking this guy, Joel Osteen.

I don't know if you know him. Oh yeah, sure. That's the guy with the gigantic arena. Yes. He fills up. Yes. He's got his own jet and a mansion. Oh my God.

You know, this guy, right? And we're just like, oh, Joel Osteen, like can't believe that that, like people think that's Christianity. You know, we're going off, right? And we're just like, oh, Joel Osteen, like, can't believe that that, like, people think that's Christianity. You know, we're going off, right? And one of my friends sitting there, and usually he'd be talking, he was quiet the whole time. He says, he finally speaks up. He says, you know what? I get what you all are saying. I get what you all are saying about Joel Osteen. But when I was in high school, my parents neglected me. Like he was, he had like terrible, terrible childhood. They didn't care about his education. He was dirt poor. And he was like, I watched Joel Osteen and Joel Osteen told me that God wanted me to make more of myself and it, and it helped me. And we're all sitting there

looking at each other and we, and I didn't even know my brain exploded. Right. Cause here's this guy who's just obviously a charlatan, like, like for me, a terrible person. And here's my friend being like, Hey, you're, you're laying into a guy who, you know, and he realizes right in retrospect what was going on, but he was also like, you know, he gave me something important. And, and, and I, I didn't even, I didn't even know what, I didn't know what to do with that. It's happened with diet gurus I've laid into, this guy David Perlmutter, who wrote this book, Grain Brain and stuff like that. I went back through his history and I found out that he used to promise everything was a miracle

cure. He started with his self-published book called, I don't know, brainsaving.com or something. And back then he had a totally different line on it. He was like, you need to eat only lean meat. And I've cured all these people of ALS. And then it became, you need to eat saturated fat. And I've cured these people of ALS. And I wrote this hit piece on him. I was like, this guy is a horrible human being. And I'm going to show you who he is. I'm going to trace his charlatanry all the way back to the beginning. And there were all these people that were like, I read David Perlmutter's books and they got me eating healthy again. Because he does advocate, you know, like an alternative to junk food. So he, his charisma, right?

These people have charisma. And that charisma can give people hope and meaning, even if it's like fake energy healing. People are so weird. We're so complicated. We are so, we're so, we're so complicated. Natural, we're unnatural animals, right? We're so complicated. We're so complicated. We're unnatural animals, right? We're unnatural animals.

Listen, man, we've been talking for three and a half hours. What? Yeah, it's 3.30. Can you believe it? I can't believe it. Really? There's a fucking time warp in this room, man. It's very strange.

It happens all the time. Yeah. Humans are weird. I mean, I don't know. I think that, I don't know. I think that last, I think that's maybe what I really care about is just. Just there's so much, right? There's so much to pay attention to. There's so many people just in this country alone, there's 320 million people. Yeah. And a lot of them are talking

publicly. You know, there's a lot, there's a lot out there, but there's a lot of them are talking publicly, you know, there's a lot there's a lot out there But there's a lot of good out there too. The key is to just concentrate on the good, you know And and just be the best that you could be That's the key just be the nicest you could be be the kindest you could be be the most honest you could be And you're gonna fuck up. There's no way around it You're just you're a person and if you fuck up you can't be too hard on yourself You can't judge yourself on failures. You gotta, you gotta recognize that you are the person who's learned from those failures. You're, you're, you're, you're not defined by mistakes, you know, and that's a lot of the, a lot of what people do. They get, they define themselves by mistakes and then they also judge other people by their mistakes. by mistakes, and then they also judge other people by their mistakes. And they decide that this one moment in time that this person said the wrong thing or did

the wrong thing or made a mistake or was incorrect about something, that defines them forever. You know, and all these people that you could find good things in, whether it's Joel Osteen or Dr. Oz or one of these people, like, it just, there's just, there's a lesson in data that comes from them about just how weirdly complicated human beings are and how wildly we vary. That's it. That's – I just – it's funny because, you know, I think we're comfortable with that. But a lot of times people aren't comfortable with complexity. No.

They like to define people. They want to make things very binary. They want to make people good or bad, right or left, one or zero. Right. And that's not – the world's messy. It's like it's a human problem. It's like we were talking about with abortion. There's a lot of human problems.

That's a human problem. And I think it's hard to be comfortable with yourself. So it's very hard to be comfortable with other people. That's why I always stress with people like you've got to accept yourself for what you've done wrong. Do your best and also find some difficult shit to do

because that gets away a lot of the anxiety that you carry around in your body. A lot of like difficult things make regular life less difficult. And that sounds so simplistic, but particularly physically difficult things, because when you do things that are physically difficult, the strain of making yourself do those things, it's very valuable. It's not just valuable, like exercise and fitness and martial arts and running and whatever you're doing, that's really difficult, it's not just valuable in terms of health and the way you look, but it's also valuable

for your mind, maybe even more so. Because regular life can be confusing and little things that go wrong and little problems that arise are exacerbated by the fact that you're not accustomed to dealing with hardship. So creating your own bullshit, whether it's through some brutal kettlebell exercise or running up hills or something, is extremely valuable for you also, not just accepting the nuanced perspectives of other people, but also being able to navigate through this world

with some sort of an understanding of just how complex it all is and how weird it all is and not be overly thrown off by every little dip in the road and pothole that you encounter. Focus on the good. Focus on the good. Focus on the good people and hope that and have faith, I guess, that that'll work. Know that there are bad people.

But just do your best. Do your best and don't get suckered. There's a lot of suckers out there. And tell the truth even if you feel like it's going to sell more books to life. Yes. Yes. Or not if it's an old lady and you look great. Say that.

Say that to her. I don't know. Be nice, right? Choose kindness over truth if you have to. Tell your book one more time, Natural. Hold it up so people can see it. Where am I holding it towards? This camera right here.

Yeah. It's Natural, How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science. But you know now that that's just a publicity ploy. It's really very nuanced. These motherfuckers with their titles. And your Instagram or your... Twitter.

I have Twitter at Alan Levinowitz. And also there's, I mean, we got an episode of the Shift podcast up on Apple iTunes. And if you search like Shift Alan on Spotify, we've got the first episode up there. Beautiful. Which will be cool. All right, Alan. Thank you. I really enjoyed this.

I did too. Thank you. I really enjoyed this. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Bye everybody. Yay. Between half hours. Jesus. That is great.