Stephen Dubner joins Joe Rogan to dissect hearing damage from loud music, comparing noise-canceling tech and altered states like edibles or holotropic breathing for creativity. They debate political tribalism—Trump’s media savvy vs. Sanders’ earnestness—and question why prosperity fails to curb societal unhappiness, linking it to poor habits and misplaced priorities. Dubner’s hypothetical on insect protein sparks discussion about ethics, regulation, and personal freedom, contrasting modern caution with historical dilemmas like the Manhattan Project or monocrop farming’s ecological toll. Rogan defends unpopular truths in science and art, citing Levitt’s abortion research and Smith’s stolen geology work, while both celebrate Freakonomics Radio’s 10th anniversary as a beacon for uncomfortable but necessary conversations. [Automatically generated summary]
We were talking before about Adam Curry, who's just here, who has these crazy ear enhancements that are these software-based so he can tweak it and change levels and stuff like that.
And you were saying that you also have hearing, but you get it from rock and roll.
I have older relatives who have a hearing aid, or whatever they're called now, hearing enhancement devices, that are light years better than they used to be.
Oh, not AirPods, but I wear Bose noise cancelers almost every day.
I wear them a lot.
You know, when I started as a journalist in newsrooms, this was late 80s, early 90s, a newsroom is an open place, and a lot of people back then were on the phone doing your reporting.
It was pre-internet reporting, right?
And you're a writer.
You're writing and you're editing.
And I didn't understand how people could think with all this din going on.
I couldn't do it.
So I started wearing just the good foam earplugs.
They're made by Flint's, I think, is the brand that I use.
They're kind of non-tapered, and they're very thick.
And if you compress them and put them in, it'll block out like 70%, 80%.
So I've been shutting out the world for like 25 years now.
So when the noise cancelers got good, I've embraced them, yeah.
You know, we're doing an episode right now for Economics Radio on noise basically as, you know, kind of we got into it thinking about noise pollution, right?
Because noise is a funny thing.
It's what economists call an externality, a negative externality, meaning you can produce it and it affects me, but I can't charge you for it, right?
Yeah, but if someone screams in your ear unexpectedly and hurts your ear, that is a form of assault, right?
You don't think of it that way, but if you saw a girl, she was standing there, and a guy ran up to her and just, in her ear, and she's like, and she falls down because your ear hurts.
But it's also, it's like, you don't want to be looking at all the world's problems when you're about to get on the most stressful thing that a person does.
On a plane, one of two things, either I get some work done or I get some entertainment.
I watch a movie on the laptop or I'll get some writing in.
Right.
I can get really, really high and then get on that and just freak the fuck out and make it, but go through a rollercoaster ride of thoughts and a lot of times I wind up riding too.
No, because I think a roller coaster is just fun, right?
It's just goofs.
This is an essential thing you're doing.
You're traveling to a place where you're going to.
And as you're doing it, you're incredibly vulnerable, right?
You're immobilized in a chair while you're going 500 miles an hour in the sky, right?
And you're like, whoa, already you're like a little weirded out if you look out the window.
But now when you're really, really, really high, it puts you in this very strange state.
And you start thinking about your life and you start thinking about how you talk to people.
You start thinking about things that you've learned and Documentaries that you find fascinating.
You start dwelling on weird things.
And then, you know, oftentimes I'll either watch something or I'll start writing.
So I get something very productive out of what would be dead time.
It makes me, it fires up my, whatever it is that creates creativity for me, whatever the source of it for me, for some reason it gets enhanced oftentimes by being on a plane on edibles.
And I mean, that's what paranoia really is, marijuana-based paranoia, if I had to guess.
It's a hyper-awareness that you're not comfortable with.
And so in taking in all these things, it's like, if you just can't settle in, you're recognizing every threat that's around you all the time.
The fact that a rock could come out of the sky, the fact that the tsunami could hit at any moment, the earth could shake, what if a super volcano blows up?
All those things that you know to be real all of a sudden get dragged into the sky.
But they hear you say this and they say, wow, that is, I recognize the value of putting yourself in a place emotionally, cognitively, kind of unleashing yourself or maybe putting yourself in a new place where you're going to have thoughts, big thoughts, maybe scary thoughts.
Is there a way to do that that you know of without drugs?
Yeah, we were just talking about that, with Adam, in fact.
We were talking about holotropic breathing, and he has had some experiences with holotropic breathing.
It's like a meditation-based breathing routine that, for whatever reason, it activates psychedelic chemicals in your brain, and you can really trip out.
And he was talking about how he was flying for like a half an hour, and I've had various friends do it.
I think you have to work yourself up into this state where this stuff starts to happen.
And you also have to probably follow some routine that's tried and true.
I don't know what that routine is.
But I do know that people that I trust, including people like Adam, super smart guys, We'll tell you that for them, it gave them the same experience as like taking a drug.
And I like the predictability of, like, even, like, the difference between if I drink my Lafroig is my favorite scotch, like, and if there's not that and there's another.
In terms of alcohol, I mean, beer, look, it depends how crazy you want to be about caloric consumption and so on.
But beer has a lot of calories.
Wine has a lot of sugar.
And whiskey is actually pretty low-cal, low-sugar, just high alcohol content, so the sugar works a little bit differently.
But no, my doctor fully approves of a couple drinks a night.
Yeah, there's been research that shows that a couple drinks a night for most people is actually probably – In fact, my doctor, who's a researcher as well, she said that if you look at longevity, the people who have the shorter life expectancies are the people who drink a lot, not a surprise, and none – Ooh.
So it's the people who drink from like one and a half to maybe two and a half, maybe a little bit more drinks a day, have the longest life expectancy.
She doesn't know, though, whether it's the teetotalers.
Why do they live shorter?
It may be because they can't alleviate the stress, maybe.
You know, it could be that alcohol does have physiological benefits.
We don't know.
But the message seems to me that everybody should drink a little bit.
And that one, you know, talking about loneliness and, you know, that whole correlation, how they came to the conclusion that it's like 15 cigarettes a day.
But that a bad feeling, that a bad feeling is bad for you.
And a good feeling is probably good for you.
And the little trade-off health-wise, I kind of feel like you can make that up in the gym.
And you can achieve a good balance.
There's something about having a drink every now and then.
So a lot of people have a hard time being with other people kind of in the way they want to.
And if alcohol can act, does that kind of take the edge off, as they say?
It's interesting.
But I'm always looking for ways.
I'm always trying to isolate the places or the circumstances where I get good ideas.
And the problem is it's very – it's unpredictable.
Walking is the one thing that I've found.
And the fact is that writers throughout history – A lot of creative people throughout history have embraced walking.
Now, in the old days, it was one of the few things that you kind of could do.
You know, you weren't going to go out and, well, I guess you could have played golf or whatever.
But people have been walking for a long time.
And they say that there's something about what the brain and body do in concert with each other on a walk, which is you're kind of mapping, you're kind of decoding, you're kind of figuring, but you're also getting some physiological stimulation.
And I find that's one that's pretty good, but I wish there was a thing I could do to make the good ideas flow, because that's the hard part.
I think if there was a thing other than show up and start writing, if there really was a thing, it would cheapen whatever the fuck it is that makes you have those weird thoughts that come across.
I lived in, this is my whole thing, New Jersey until I was 7, San Francisco from 7 to 11, Florida from 11 to 13, Boston from 13 to 24, New York from 24 to 26-ish, 27 maybe, before 27, I'm on the West Coast.
Okay, so did you find that in Boston and New York, which are easily the best walking places of all those places you just said, did you walk a lot more there and did it change anything for you?
I was working in clubs in New York, and I was doing a lot of road gigs, and I was playing a lot of pool, and I was hanging around with a bunch of comedians, and I wasn't going on any hikes.
I would go to the gym occasionally and work out, but we were doing comedy.
But as a grown-up, and I usually run with my dog, he loves to run, and I haven't been able to run recently because of a little injury.
So for the last two months, I've just been walking with him and then hiking on the trails and he runs around.
When I was doing it, I was realizing I can listen to podcasts, or I can listen to music, or I can just do it silent.
And when I do it silent, it's really interesting.
There's inner dialogue that starts playing out, and it's like you're having a conversation with yourself that's a little therapeutic.
So I go on these hour walks with my dog, and at the end of it, I feel like I've got a better handle on stuff.
I wonder, what you're saying makes me think, and I hope it's not too late for our episode on noise, because this is actually a component that'd be good to get at, is, like, the way you just described quiet, or solitude, whatever it is, right?
I think almost everybody who hears that would say, oh yeah, I definitely see the value of that, because, you know, you need time to process your thoughts, to feel things, whatever.
But it does make me wonder, the world is obviously more noisy now than it used to be.
And, again, I don't want to be the generation, because every generation thinks that what the next generation does is horrible.
Like, the people, you know, the Rolling Stones came, the people who, like, Perry Como said, this is the worst music ever, and then the people after that said the Rolling Stones, you know, etc., But I do wonder how much we're losing by not having availability of that quiet.
Unless you build your life to have a lot of silence, which I do because I'm a writer and I sit alone all day, not many people get to have that.
There's got to be something because there's a shift in attention and there's a shift in focus that's dramatic.
We've gone from just looking at the world around us to fixated on a device.
You know, you look at people's phone time, a lot of times it's six hours in a day.
Just constantly on their phone on the toilet, constantly on their phone when they go to get a coffee, on their phone at their desk, texting people while they're walking to the other office, they're texting and walking down the hallway.
I mean, most people are on those goddamn things all day long.
And there's, for sure, you're putting energy into that little device, which means you're not putting energy into thinking without that device.
And though you might think of it as a, well, I'm still paying attention, I'm just doing this.
But you're not.
You're not dedicating any resource to being bored and to thinking about shit and to just walking and talking to yourself.
It's interesting, some of the people you hear these days talking the most about really limiting or even forbidding their kids' screen time is Silicon Valley executives.
I mean, even in the environment you're describing that sounds like, let's say Starbucks, everybody's on the phone, you've got to think, well, wait a minute.
Maybe that person over there who looks like they're a slave to it, maybe they are, maybe they're sending a text to their grandma that they wouldn't have done, they wouldn't have been able to do 10 years ago.
I mean, that's why I like economists, because economists are ruthless, bloodless.
They almost don't know what humans are, but they're very good at measuring costs and benefits.
And that's what I feel that our kind of political, social media discourse is missing.
People are all, for the most part, Advocates or activists, they pick up the lane and they stay in it and they want to pave over the rest of everybody's lanes and make it theirs.
You know, that's another episode that I was listening to of yours recently about how hard it is to get people to change their mind on things.
And I forget who the expert was who was talking, but it was a really interesting point that he had about the mind of Like people say, change your mind.
You don't really have a mind.
You have the mind of the community.
And if you step outside the beliefs of the community, it can be very bad for you in terms of, like, your personal connections with people.
It's a paradox, though, because the way you just said it, like, if you are in your tribe… Yes.
Then, even though it can be healthier for you and for presumably many other people for you to change your mind or at least think differently about things, you risk losing credibility or whatever.
They converted for different reasons from each other, and then they met.
My father's family was Orthodox.
And his father, a guy named Shepsel Dubner, who'd come here when he was in his maybe late 20s from Poland, he still lived his everyday in Brooklyn as if he were still in Poland.
He didn't change at all.
When my father converted and his father found out, my father was in the war, he was overseas, he was home on leave, and I think we're good to go.
The sit shiva forum, the Jewish mourning ritual, where for seven days you mourn the dead.
He declared that he would never again speak to his son, and he forbade everyone in his family from speaking to his son.
So, by the time I was born, I was the youngest of eight kids in this family because they'd become very Catholic.
I didn't know this whole family of my father's was unknown to me entirely.
And my mother's did the same thing, but it was less dramatic because her family was less religious, so they still didn't like at all that she had converted.
Do you have any children?
Yeah, I got a couple.
I'm Jewish again, though.
The first book I wrote, long before Freakonomics, was called Turbulent Souls, although it got then republished under a different title called Choosing My Religion, and it tells this story of my two parents and then me.
I would love to hear that, but I just want to put in your head that what I was going to ask you is like, how could you imagine a scenario where you would be capable of doing that to your children?
But on the other hand, I mean, this is what Freakonomics is, what I try to learn through doing Freakonomics is, you know, to measure the what and try to figure out the why, but then not be the judge who says that was terrible.
This is wonderful because, you know, different people have, look, if Shepsel Dubner were here, we could ask him, what's your side of the story?
He could tell us a story that might convince us that, you know what, this son of his did a terrible thing to the family.
He did a terrible thing.
You know, he would say, how could it be that we Jews existed for generations and generations and generations when everywhere we lived, there was always someone trying to, you know, get rid of us.
And then we finally come to America You know, the land of freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom.
And here, after generations and generations of forefathers fought to stay Jewish, here my son decides to become Catholic.
What are you thinking?
So, you know, everybody's got a perspective.
Everybody's got an emotional experience.
So I try to respect that, but no, I would not do that to my children.
The saddest end of the story is when my grandfather, who I never met, this was a long time ago, my father's father.
My father died when I was very young, so I didn't know the story either.
That was why I wrote this first book, was to try to figure out this.
All the stuff I'm telling you now, none of this I knew until I was in my 20s when I was writing this book.
But when Shepsel Dubner was dying of cancer in the maybe late 50s or so, I think?
into the hospital room and Shepsel, on his deathbed really, thought that that was my father, My dad's name was Solomon.
He called him Shloyma.
And he was calling out to him, Shloyma, Shloyma, as if he was, you know, happy to see him.
It wasn't him, though.
And my father didn't go visit his own father dying in the hospital because he'd been forbidden to go anywhere near.
So is terrible.
So look, this is why religion, I've been long fascinated by religion.
And I think that again, if you think about it, the way that economists think about things, there are costs and there are benefits and it's complicated.
I think that's hard for people to handle when people are hardcore atheists.
Where they don't see any value in it whatsoever, even though people are getting some sort of ethical value, moral value.
And the way I always put it is it's like a scaffolding to live your life by.
You can live within these confines and it really kind of makes sense if you follow it loosely that we're doing it for the benefit of community.
And it's also like a real community sense that comes from meeting in Sunday.
Or whatever day it is with your religion, and you meet in a group of other people that are also in the community, and you all basically are saying together that we should do good things and be good to people and treat each other the way God would want us to.
Like, all that has undeniable benefits.
And anybody that says differently is like you're deluding yourself.
Like, your points… The atheists who are hardcore, who make points about the preposterous nature of a lot of religious texts, they're on the money.
But it doesn't mean that it doesn't give people a benefit and that I couldn't even disagree with them continuing it.
Because there's a lot of people that benefit greatly from religion.
Someone wrote to us after that loneliness episode came out.
And said, how did you fail to write about this supposed epidemic of loneliness without addressing the huge decline in organized religion in America?
Which I thought was a very good piece of criticism.
Because you're right, it's a community.
One other thing I would add to the list that you provided of what it can give is humility, right?
Because, you know, if you have an image of some superior being, God, deity, whatever you want to call it, You kind of understand that one mortal is, you know, the world does not revolve around me.
The other thing I would say, and look, it's hard for me to scientifically, logically embrace a lot of the arguments that a lot of religions make, especially about things like the afterlife, right?
That said, even to an atheist, I would suggest one way to think about it is, if someone does believe in those rewards, or if in economic terms we're talking about them as incentives, Yeah.
on the chance that if I do so, I have a reward, an internal reward, hey, that's not a bad reason to incentivize people to do well.
Yeah, I think if we're going to do something like that, we bring in James Randi.
We have him go by the rules and someone like Penn Jillette who will be able to because he understands all those carny tricks where they do where they can pretend that they're psychic just by leading you into questions.
And that's, even if he disagrees with you on something, he'll laugh and joke around, but he's a nice person.
He'll let you have these conversations.
Some people try to shove their atheism down your throat and mock you.
All you're doing is reinforcing the ideas of these people because you're acting like an asshole.
So they're like, well, I'm now connecting atheism with assholes, so fuck atheists, fucking assholes.
You know, then that's what people do.
It's like a natural, but if someone's nice, you know, did you ever, do you know the story of Daryl Davis?
Daryl Davis is a gentleman who's been on this podcast before, and he is a musician by trade, but he has converted over 200 different guys to leave the KKK and Nazi organizations.
And he's converted it by becoming their friend.
Because he was doing a show, and this guy came—I'm butchering it, and I'm sorry, Daryl, but this is what he said on the podcast.
I'm sure you'd do a better job of telling the story.
But he was at a show, and he was playing in this band, and this guy said, you were really good, you know, and he sat down with the guy, and the guy said, I've never had a drink with a black guy before.
He's like, how is that possible?
And he shows him his card.
He's in the KKK. And so he goes, you're having a rational conversation with me, a normal conversation with me.
Do you really think that black men are evil or black men are dumb?
And they have this conversation, this civil conversation.
And then he gives the guy his, I think he gave him his phone number and said, I'll call you when I'm back in town if you want to have this conversation again.
And so then they become friends.
And so they go back and forth for like months.
Hanging out.
And then three months or so into the friendship, the guy brings his KKK outfit.
And he goes, I want to give this to you because I'm never wearing it again.
Just nice, friendly, intelligent, super articulate too.
So it's hard to describe him as dumb when he's way smarter than you.
Right?
You're talking to him and he's so eloquent.
So he converts more and more and more.
He converted a guy who was a Nazi.
He's converted a bunch of people.
It's more than 200 now.
And he continues to do it.
And there's some pieces about it online.
But hearing him say it, hearing him talk about it is the most amazing.
He grew up in a way that he didn't really experience racism until he came to America.
I think he said he was like six years old.
He's from Italy, right?
That's where he was from before that, up until then, I think.
Somewhere where he just didn't experience it and then when he was a little boy People were throwing things at him in a parade and he had no idea.
He couldn't understand it He'd never he didn't know and they had to pull him aside and say it's because you're black He's like what like he couldn't believe it so because the fact that he didn't have it in his early childhood and then he had it when he was a Young boy and realized how crazy it was that he didn't experience this before this one moment and became obsessed with it was Italy His Wikipedia says he grew up all over the world.
unidentified
But when he came back, when he was 10, he was in an all-white Cub Scout pack in Massachusetts.
I feel like there's that heirloom civilization that still landed there from boats just a couple of decades ago.
I mean, my grandparents came over in the, I think they were here in the 20s or the 30s, from Italy and Ireland.
Everybody came from somewhere, right?
There was mostly, most of them, three of them came from Italy, one of them came from Ireland.
So I'm three-quarters Italian.
But it's The families of those people were risk-taking savages.
They didn't even have a video to watch, right?
They just jumped in a fucking boat and hoped America was better.
And then when they got there, they got checked in at Ellis Island.
And then they started working in factories and scratching and clawing.
And there's just a lot of struggle that's still in that part of the world that you, when you come to California, one of the first things you feel is like a lighter, a lighter sense of discourse than the East Coast.
The East Coast, I always felt like people had their guard up a little bit more, a little bit more tense, a little bit more like, what the fuck did you say?
There was a little bit more of that, a little bit more sketchy people.
Just the echoes of the savage past is still in the soil, you know?
It feels because I feel people have a manner and a style that is totally divorced from this intensity that I'm used to, right?
In New York.
Now, I grew up on a farm in upstate New York.
So I grew up not in the hurly-burly New York City was scared because my parents, once they converted and they became Catholic, they needed to have someplace where you could have tons of kids.
So we grew up in the middle of nowhere.
So I grew up – I was a farm kid.
And so the intensity of a city scared me until ultimately I moved to New York for a variety of reasons.
And then I caught the bug, and now I love cities.
So I love California, but when I come here, I feel like it's running on a different voltage, you know?
And I am envious of people's ability to run like that.
Like, they seem, right, like their shoulders, like you, look at me, I'm sitting here, my shoulders are always up to my ears, like, kind of just a built-in tension.
And I feel like I thrive on it.
Maybe I do.
I mean, things have worked out okay.
But like I said, when I look at the way people are sort of congenitally relaxed, I envy it.
On the other hand, I think that that intensity produces some things that I like a lot.
I also like the environment of a university campus.
To me, the tricky part is there's that fine line between intensity and competition that treats it like a zero-sum game.
So I don't like to be around environments where people are trying to Yeah.
you come back and do it again.
Because you've lost, it doesn't make you a bad person.
That you can accurately depict or detect how many people live in a given area by putting a camera on one red light and then a camera on another red light and then as the people walk by, measure how fast they walk.
And when they do that, if they do that— I assume faster is denser.
Yes, faster is denser.
Also, how many syllables that they say per sentence, how quickly they say those syllables, that there's actually a cadence, a speed, an uptick— What are you talking about?
You know what's interesting is, you know, how old are you?
52. Okay, so I'm 56. You look great.
Ditto.
So we're the same, roughly, generation, and we remember that back when, you know, computerization was starting and the internet was starting, that all the predictions were that, you know, now anybody can do anything from everywhere, so nobody's going to have any reason to have to live anywhere, and cities are just going to empty out.
Around the world, the more digital we've gotten, in fact, the urban population now, the share of the human population that's urban is higher now than it's ever been in the history of the world.
It's unbelievable.
So what that says to me is, and this is not about New York versus California anymore, what that says to me is, even when you can engage with people remotely or have a lot of space, whatever, there's something about humans wanting to rub up against each other physically, intellectually, etc.
When I played music, my, so I had, I never, so first of all, when I started in this band, I was in, we were in North Carolina and my family was mostly up in New York state and so on.
they weren't close, but then when we started to travel and tour and whatnot, we would get within their range and they'd come to see us.
These are like my older siblings who I love.
They're great people.
But I would say to them, I don't think this really is going to be for you.
It's going to be pretty loud, raucous, rock and roll, a little bit punky, a little bit whatever.
And they're like, no, no, no.
I want to come see little brother.
So then they'd see a show.
I remember this one show we played at the old Ritz in New York.
And I remember my brother, who's a musician, by the way, and a very good musician, but much more refined than I was.
He came up and he said, you guys really looked like you were having fun up there.
Like imagine if, and it's not really physical pain, but there is a certain level of emotional pain you experience when someone's bombing.
When someone's in front of you like, oh god, especially me, because I've done stand-up for so many years, like I know what it's like to bomb, I've bombed, so I see someone bombing, I'm like, yikes, I gotta get out of here, I can't take it.
And when you're up there, if you're just doing fake laughs in the background to juice it up, you're not going to know how to You're going to feel weird about it.
Also, you're going to know that you're doing it, and the audience is going to know that something's wrong.
As having some, and I'm sure every comic does this already, so it's not like I'm telling anybody anything, but having something in your pocket that's going to get them on your side, even if for a little while, just to get the momentum going in your way.
Because if you bomb or somebody else bombs, you could give exactly the same set an hour later to a slightly different crowd, and it would go great, right?
One of the worst things that people do, and I don't know why they do it, but a lot of comedians like to bring terrible comedians with them on the road so that they look like a hero.
It's a really sneaky move.
And they literally hire people that don't work any other way.
There's a thing that's going on on stage that's not quantified.
And there's a mass hypnosis that's happening.
When someone is killing, for me, as an audience member, my recognition of this is, as a person who performs it and also as an audience member, when I'm an audience member and someone's killing, I'm letting them think for me.
I'm not even thinking.
I'm just letting them take me down a trail.
Say like Dave Attell.
Dave Attell was at the improv the other night.
We worked together and he was fucking amazing.
One of the best sets I've seen from him.
He's always been amazing, but God, he was on fire.
It was me, my friend Owen Smith, and Tony Hinchcliffe.
We were sitting in the back room and we were watching Dave and we were in a trance.
We were just laughing.
We were letting him think for us.
You know what I'm saying?
Like, he's doing all the thinking.
We're just on a little ride that Dave's taking us on this ride.
And as an audience member, I recognize that.
There's a mass hypnosis.
There's a thing that happens where we all get into this mindset.
And if someone has, like, really well-crafted material, like Dave Attell, and they take you on it, you let them.
For sure, Trump has a lot of elements of stand-up comedy in his routines, for sure, 100%.
If you watch his most recent speech where he's making fun of Joe Biden saying 150 million people were killed with guns, and he's like, I looked at the First Lady, I mean, he's literally doing stand-up, who does a very good job, by the way.
I looked at the First Lady, I'm like, where are all these bodies?
Where are all these 150 million people?
That's half the population.
Like, they just let him say, nobody talks to him.
He's like, Hello, Idaho!
And you're like, you're in Iowa.
Oh, he's doing stand-up!
So someone took it and they made a video saying Donald Trump at the Apollo.
And so they put him doing this speech with audience reaction from people watching stand-up comedy and laughing and a laugh track over it.
I don't know if he's going to be able to get anything implemented, but I love what he represents is a man who wants to do good for people that don't have much.
That's a sentiment.
There's a quality to that that I think helps us as a community, as a community of the United States.
If we have this agreement, hey, let's see what we can do.
Let's see what we can do to balance things out for the downtrodden, for the people that are hurting.
Concentrate on them.
And he's made that a huge priority of his life and always has.
And to deny that, it's like, look what he's trying to do.
I don't know if he can get any of this shit passed.
I don't think anybody knows until he gets in there.
But the idea is we're saying we want better for people who don't have much.
That's what he stands for.
And you can call it democratic socialism, but it's an idea.
The idea is like helping people.
Just helping people.
Helping people you don't even know.
Making the world a little bit better place for the working person.
You've talked to a lot of people from all different realms in here, right?
If we can agree, let's say, that being entertaining is not a great prerequisite or a qualification for being president, if we can agree on that, which seems pretty easy.
What can be done, whether it's in the political sphere, the media sphere, putting something in the drinking water, to let people – to encourage people to have – A little bit more of what you're after, whether it's compassion, whether it's understanding, whether it's balance, whether it's moderation.
In other words, why is the entertainment force winning right now?
And if you don't like that notion, what can be done about it?
And there's also these ideas that we have that are cemented in stone, that, you know, if you're a left-wing person, you believe in X, Y, and Z. This is your doctrine.
If you're a right-wing person.
But most of us have, like, a little bit of this.
Maybe you believe in the Second Amendment.
Maybe you believe in the First Amendment.
Maybe you think that maybe, you know, maybe we should incorporate a lot of things we do with the fire department and Do that to schools and do that to housing.
Make sure that all the stuff's covered.
Make housing an important part of a civilization, like for everybody.
We did a piece, a Freakonomics Radio piece a year or two ago called America's Hidden Duopoly, and it was about the Democratic and Republican Party basically acting like Pepsi and Coke, right?
They kind of divide and conquer the market, and they've built an industry that is incredibly valuable.
Once you have kids and you think about someone breaking into your house and doing something to your family, you get real scared and then you want to get guns.
As I'm sure you know, if you look at any indicator of prosperity, longevity, health, literacy, access to food, etc., humankind is way better off than it's ever been.
I mean, and then starts a family of his own where you don't even know your grandfather.
I mean, it's madness, right?
Madness.
So you're coming out of this stressful pocket, or maybe your dad goes to jail, or maybe your mom dies when you're young.
All these things that happen to people where they have this bad start.
Right?
And then they develop defense mechanisms to deal with all their insecurities and they get around similar minded people and you curse the world and fuck everybody and fuck the police and fuck the this and then you get in these communities of people that think the same way.
And then maybe there's gangs and maybe there's drugs and maybe there's crime and despair and sadness and maybe just negative people.
Maybe there's none of the above.
Maybe there's no danger.
It's just fucking annoying.
Everyday people complaining about shit.
And you're stuck in the mud of humanity with people.
It's real hard to engineer 350 million people out of that.
But for yourself, you can take actions to make your life better.
And if everybody did that, if everybody took actions to make their life a happier experience by doing those things, by exercising, eating well, hugging friends, enhancing community, just trying to be nicer to people.
There's a balance between being productive and being happy.
And I think it's hard to find that balance because we look at the numbers that come in, whether it's money or productivity or the number of things you've been able to create, and you think of that as being like, but look, I can get so much done.
less of those numbers, but more of the numbers in terms of the amount of sleep you got, you would enjoy the whole overall experience more.
I worry that, I think for a lot of people who are successful in different realms, could be sports, business, entertainment, whatever, success is intoxicating.
And then you want more of it.
And then it becomes very easy to see that as the main goal at the expense of loved ones, other people.
I'm looking for, I'd like to know how, and I know some people do manage that really well.
And I know some incredibly successful people are incredibly generous in spirit to people around them.
But I find that's pretty rare.
I find that success often is driven by a sort of ambition that's a little bit unseemly.
And I'd like to know how to deal with that a little bit better.
Well, it doesn't have to be, but it seems like it would be if it's a number game, right?
If success meaning like you're in a business, you're trying to sell the most placards or whatever, like whatever it is, you know, you have this thing in your head and like you're really driven.
You're selling the most widgets, and you have this goal in your mind of being number one, and you're obsessed, and everyone's going to tell your story.
Oh, Bob, he wouldn't let it go.
Every time I got there, he was in the office, and he left after everybody.
But look, now Bob's got a fucking yacht, and he's also got a pacemaker, right?
But also, I think the thing is, in pursuit of success, I think what often happens that I've seen in people I know and in people I don't know but I've read about is that your moral compass starts to shift.
I'm thinking of some people in academia who, you know, even though the average person may not consider the stakes in academia super high, but like if you get in a big university department and And you start to write papers and get published and then get grants and accolades and so on.
You're on a trajectory that's very intoxicating.
And then all of a sudden, I think it's tempting.
Or not even tempting.
I don't think it's even a conscious decision.
You start to make decisions that are not as sound, not as morally acceptable as you would have made five years ago when you were starting out.
The academia I don't have any experience with, but I would imagine that would be particularly frustrating because those are the people that you call upon to be the objective purveyors of knowledge.
These are the people that are talking to you about this because they're dedicated to being intellectual.
How strange is it that we talk about economists, just for one example, but it's a good example because they're the most involved in policy and so on.
There are Democratic economists and there are Republican economists.
That shouldn't make sense, right?
But it does.
There's a list that when you're – if you're a Republican and you win the White House and you start to assemble your Council of Economic Advisors, you get the list of the Republican or the conservative economists.
Now, I'm not saying that's a terrible thing per se, but the fact is, is that like we said before, if you're in the tribe – But it does.
If you're for one thing, you've got to be in for everything.
And that's not a good way to – So much of what goes on between the two parties ultimately, in a lot of the cases that we've experienced, have been about perception.
Like there's a difference between the perceived actions of Barack Obama versus the perceived actions of George Bush.
Like even though things that would freak people out about Bush, people didn't really seem to budge on with Obama, like drone attacks.
Like a lot of people killed in drones attacks that were innocent.
And that happened during the Bush administration and happened during Obama.
But people, particularly on the left, treated the Bush administration's drone attacks very differently than they treated it when Obama was doing it.
They seem to let it go because it didn't fit with their narrative of the evil military-industrial complex-influenced president who only gives a fuck about money.
It didn't seem to jive with that, so they let it go.
Because it's a team thing.
They were rooting for their team to be good, so they, listen, my team's made some fucking slips up this year, but I'm with the Yankees all the way.
Yeah, if you're watching a football game, Let's say you're watching a football game in a bar and you're with, let's say I'm a Steelers fan, so let's say I'm watching with a Steelers fan, we're playing whoever, Ravens.
The minute there's a call, let's say a pass interference call, The room divides equally because one side knows that it's a bad call and the other side knows.
And these are people who, if you took them out, out of a football context, they're totally going to have different feel.
They're not going to experience everything the same way.
The excitement that comes from it being insanely difficult, the way I describe it, sorry if everybody's heard this a million times, it's high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
So you know that they're on this crazy path where one guy's trying to slam his shin into the other guy's face, and the other guy's trying to do the same.
They're trying to take each other down, choke each other, and to lose is horrible, and to win is glorious.
everybody's cheering and then you know when it all plays out live the rush of of these guys that these guys experience and then the rush that the audience experiences it's hard for me to watch like tennis I don't care where that ball goes.
I get it.
I get it.
It's very athletic.
There's no knock on the athletes.
And again, I like playing pool, so I watch a lot of dumb shit.
In boxing, when you see the undercards of fights, if you see a fight like Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather's biggest boxing pay-per-view fight ever, huge fight, right?
Millions and millions and millions of dollars.
The guys further down the bottom of the chain, they're getting an awesome opportunity to fight in front of the crowd that's going to see Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather, and they don't make much money.
And that's the case in boxing overwhelmingly in the early stages of a person's career.
It's the same as MMA. And then as they become famous, they start making more.
The difference is there's a Floyd Mayweather, and the closest thing we have to that is a Conor McGregor and maybe Ronda Rousey.
Floyd Mayweather, when people talk about money in boxing, you're talking about Floyd Mayweather.
I mean, maybe you were talking about Tyson at one point in time and Ali before him and Sugar Ray Leonard, the guys who made the big money, Roy Jones Jr.
But there's only a couple of those guys ever, even in boxing.
It's the same thing with MMA.
There's a couple guys like Conor McGregor or a few superstars.
So NFL, if you're the 53rd guy on the roster, you're not making a ton of money, but you know you're going to make money, as long as you don't get hurt.
Would you rather see MMA a little bit more like that?
Would you rather see the fighters have more of a league and have more leverage, or do you like the way it's set up now?
Well, even if they didn't, it would be very difficult to get fighters to not jump in and take a fight.
because opportunities are rare and when a fight comes along if you say look I'm gonna offer you fight Conor McGregor for X amount of money and you're like I want more They're like, look, this guy's standing right by.
And that's always going to be that case until you're Conor McGregor.
And that's the business model.
That's always been the business model in boxing, but in UFC, it's different.
In UFC, it's controlled by one company so they can force big fights, whereas there's a lot of big fights in boxing.
So this is their justification for the structure that they have.
Those big fights in boxing didn't occur, and it frustrated the fans.
And the reason why it didn't occur was multiple promoters.
Well, under one banner, you have one promotion that has the most fighters.
And the ones who, and the best, presumably, and the ones who are the most popular make the most money.
The question is, should the guys at the bottom make more?
I think they should.
Because I think it's a very, very, very difficult thing, and I think we should be trying to give them enough money so that they can do their best and we can see the best fighters come up.
I think one of the impediments of guys coming up is that in the beginning you have to work a full-time job as well as fight, and it's really hard to train.
It's hard to make that leap.
And if we get someone, we can sign it.
I agree with you.
There should be some sort of a minimum.
And that minimum, we would agree upon something that would be sustainable if you're fighting, say, once or twice a year.
So theoretically, like if you're looking at it as supply and demand, it seems that there's a lot of supply of fighters, right?
It seems like there's a lot of audience demand, but what UFC is doing is, according to you, kind of smartly constraining the supply so that the quality is high.
I don't know if you know, but there's multiple organizations that actually are doing that.
There's one called Bellator that's huge.
It's on the Paramount Network.
It's enormous.
And it's the biggest rival to the UFC in America, but still pales in comparison.
But there's world-class fighters there, and they're starting to get people from the UFC that they get their contract up, and they're still in their prime, and then Bellator comes with a better, more attractive offer, and they take that offer.
Also, in Bellator, they're allowed to have sponsors.
The UFC is solely sponsored by Reebok, so the fighters all have one sponsor, that they wear Reebok gear.
I don't know how it's structured, but I know that the fighters prefer the Bellator model, which is they can find their own sponsors, and if they have a good management company, the management can get three or four sponsors on their shorts, and they might make more money from sponsors than they do from the fight itself, which is what was in the UFC, so a lot of fighters were really bummed out when they switched over to a different business model.
So that, I think, would probably be better for fighters.
But then, here's another thing.
Those fighters have to enforce that.
They have to chase those down, chase those sponsors down.
A lot of them go bad on you, and a lot of them don't pay.
And there was a real problem with that with fighters, where they had gotten fucked over by a couple different sponsors, and it created a hassle.
And so then you have fighters who didn't get paid, but the sponsor did get put on UFC. Oh, boy.
So is the UFC responsible?
Who's responsible for that?
It turns out it's the fighters that are responsible, but that's a fucking giant burden on them while they're in the middle of training to try to go sue some fight gear company that didn't pay them their money.
I don't think it's a justification for not giving them the freedom to choose their own sponsors.
I think a better scenario would probably be have one sponsor available that everyone could choose this sponsor or a competing sponsor.
You know, like, maybe something else.
So, like, you could have a Reebok guy that's fighting against a guy who's, like, some motor oil company sponsoring him.
It's, like, making it mandatory takes some of the power away from the fighters for negotiation.
Maybe they want to learn how to defend themselves.
Maybe they want to learn some self-confidence.
Then they get excited about improving and they get better at it and then they achieve a level of expertise that makes them the person in the gym that is above the other new people that come in and then you get to experience what it's like to be an assassin.
You get to strangle people all the time.
And then you get to a point where you're like, I want to test myself.
And then you say, I'm just going to take an amateur fight.
So then you take an amateur fight, and then you go, you know what?
I think I can do this for a living.
And then you think about being stuck in some fucking cubicle selling insurance, or maybe making Conor McGregor money.
Maybe I can get to the poor.
I know how to talk shit.
I think I can hurt people.
I think I can get in there and make some money.
And I don't have to fight three or four times a year, and I don't have a fucking boss.
No one tells me what to do.
I can talk shit and I can go out there and just do something that I really enjoy doing, martial arts, and just continue to be as good as I can and be a professional athlete.
It's attractive, especially to risk-seeking young males or females.
Let's say you're 21 years old, you, and you have the ability to do that, right?
You're discovering that you have the ability to do that.
And then if you could project that decision forward, let's say 30 years and say, okay, I'm going to go for this and I'm going to factor in the probability that I'm actually going to make really good money or have an amazing life-changing or life-affirming experience for 10 years and then get out and do something else versus do that insurance cubicle job.
In other words, you know, it's kind of the short, the high probability, high risk bet versus the longer steady one where you might have more of a center of gravity to have a family, etc.
And then while I was getting good at it, it's a wild rush.
It's a wild, crazy rush because it's so dangerous to do.
And the risk-seeking, those kind of people that are risk-seekers, the ones that do rock climbing and BMX bike running and base jumping, that's a type of person.
For whatever reason, that's a type of person.
And they gravitate towards those fights, and they gravitate towards martial arts.
And some of them are the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
They are some of the nicest, kindest, most interesting, introspective people, deep-thinking people, people that read a lot, they can talk to you about things, that can be honest and personal about things.
They have a really good control of their ego because they're getting trounced and training all the time.
Everyone's getting humbled all the time.
But you're on the path of a professional fighter, and it's a very dangerous path.
And so there's an incredible camaraderie between the people that do it.
So they understand that very few people have the stones to do something like this, or the nuts, or the chaos in your brain, or the insanity that lets you risk your life like this versus take that cubicle job.
I mean, I've seen dudes get kicked into oblivion, and women get kicked unconscious multiple times in one event.
And I've worked, I don't know how many events, I've called more than, I would have to say like 1,500 professional fights.
Like easily, somewhere in that neighborhood.
Definitely more than 1,000.
Definitely without question.
That's being real super conservative.
So out of those, how many people had legitimate brain damage because of fights?
A lot of them.
Yeah, they know going in there that there's going to be a risk and they got to know when to get out and sometimes they don't and sometimes friends and family have to intervene and it's a scary thing to watch someone slide down that road when you know, oh my god, he's chinny, which means you can't take a punch anymore, which means you're starting to develop some severe damage from all the sparring and the fighting and you got to know when to stop and some people can stop and they're fine and they can live a long healthy life as long as they stop in time.
Well, I think, first of all, they're right, and you are doing something that's definitely going to harm you.
However, I feel like if you want to do something that you enjoy doing, that's going to take some time out of your life that's finite anyway, who the fuck am I to tell you you can't do that?
Just heading the ball causes a lot of CTE. I know a lot of youth leagues now are starting to cut out heading, which I think is probably a pretty good idea.
By the way, I love the NFL. I would cry if it went away.
On the other hand, and I know a few NFL, well now former NFL players, one of whom stopped playing in his fifth year way earlier than he had to because he was worried about CTE, but also he was getting a PhD in math from MIT at the same time.
So he had a plan.
He had an alternative.
But then there's another guy- You should have him on your show.
John Urschel, his name is U-R-S-C-H-E-L. Okay, we'll talk about it after the podcast.
Fascinating guy.
There's another guy, Dominique Foxworth.
Both these guys happen to play for the Ravens, which happens to be the team I hate most, but I've gotten to be friendly with them.
Dominique Foxworth had a great money-making career because he kind of got his big contract in his, whatever, fourth, fifth year.
Well, took out insurance on it, then got hurt, and really never played again.
So he banked enough money.
After that, he went and got an MBA from Harvard because he's a bright and interesting and ambitious guy.
He will never let his son play football.
It's like you hear these stories about the guys who've done it, who've made a life, you know, out of it.
And it just really makes me think about, you're right.
Everybody should have the right to do anything for their own livelihood or for their own excitement, right?
Like, if we had the Colosseum today per se, like what we have is a modern version of the Colosseum, if we had the Colosseum per se, fighting the Tigers, slaves getting thrown in to fight the Tigers, we don't like that.
It's like, the line, things are repugnant until they're not.
And it's hard to predict where that line is.
A lot of things that used to be not repugnant, slavery, fine.
It's like we have a line, and whatever the cultural line is, especially depending upon how many people die around us, how much plague and murder, and how much you're dealing with war, that line moves.
And so then you have to buy-Then you can get a paper bag, and then it rains, then your groceries fall on the street.
I mean, that's the extreme.
No, but these are, I mean, the problem is plastic bags, if you look at the menace to the environment overall, plastic bags are a pretty, pretty small part.
The danger is when people feel that they've contributed by doing something small and then stop thinking about bigger, better things to do.
It's also nice because you're outdoors for a long time.
You're often alone for a long time.
And another thing I really like about it is I get to be around other people, often men, in a way that you don't get to be around other men in that way.
You know what I mean?
It's good for the soul, in a way.
And I just like the competition.
It's a really hard game, so I like trying to get better at it.
But the thing that amazes me is how much crap there is, how much garbage there is on a golf course.
it'll blow out of your bag and I'm just like I like nature a lot.
I don't like the idea of candy wrappers all over.
So then I extrapolate and think bigger like you do.
Plastic bags, should it be that hard to take it home, use it maybe once or twice again, and then throw it away?
And I understand that they're less recyclable, but we have a lot of landfill space.
So, particulate pollution has gotten so much better.
In fact, one wrinkle of climate change and global warming is that the particulates, the soot in the atmosphere in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was apparently what kept things a little bit cooler because it refracted sunlight and heat, right?
That's So the irony is you clean up the air and you allow more heating.
Perfect example because it's clearly a right versus left thing, too, in some people's circles.
If you're on the right, you're supposed to say, it's exaggerated, it's a hoax, it's this, it's that, it's not my concern, my concern is jobs, my concern is that.
Like, you repeat the talking points, and if it's on the left, it's, how dare you!
I think one of Obama's biggest mistakes, he plainly wanted to address climate change, global warming, but he did it in a kind of standard left Democrat way by calling it global warming, by saying that there were bad actors, which is true.
The thing that astonishes me that Democrats haven't done is talk about it in a language that Every Republican, every conservative, every Hunter Fisher would respond to, which is pollution, which is what it is, by the way.
Why it became a conversation about a much bigger, much more abstract, much more difficult to understand and act on problem is strange to me because, you know, humankind comes together.
We came to, look, polio vaccine.
It wasn't like everybody was working on it, but there were enough people concerned about it.
And then you had a president who said, hey, March of Dimes, let's have everybody raise money, come up with a vaccine.
And then, interestingly, you know, Salk with the vaccine, this is just interesting about the way medicine works today.
He basically said, no, no, no, I don't want to own this patent.
He could have become a billionaire.
You know, this is the way we have thought in our past as humans about solving big problems.
We seem to have gotten away from that a little bit.
And I think that's where, to me, the tribalism is the most dangerous.
It's not about the political charades.
I don't care about that.
I don't think that's particularly damaging.
Where I think it's damaging is by dividing yourself into these tribes that are so exclusive Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Groups of one and two people who are working on solutions that keep coming.
You know, humans are a cool species, is what I'm trying to say.
Yeah, and I think it's interesting, but Jonas Salk, when he did create that vaccine, the world was a different place.
And there wasn't this pharmaceutical industry that we have today that's It has such a strong ability to influence the way people look at things through advertisements and just through the way they influence politicians.
It's a different world.
So to compare the bounty that was awaiting Jonas Salk for coming up with the polio vaccine, it's just a different world.
The world's different.
Wasn't there some controversy that he didn't give credit to the other people that helped him with the vaccine?
But there's a way of thinking about those things, and again, measuring the costs and benefits that people who might disagree aggressively, and they did about the Manhattan Project, can sit down and say, okay, here's what we're going to do.
What's the lesser of the two evils?
And I feel like right now, I don't know, as much progress as we've had, I feel we've gotten worse at looking at the lesser of two evil paths, at weighing costs and benefits.
So it's hard to imagine that decision would be made today.
But as you just said about polio vaccine, different case, but roughly same time era, it's very hard to project your morals onto – 50 years from now, we may have a very different view about MMA, for instance.
Well, I think that's far more intense and extreme than MMA. I mean, we're talking about nuking people literally out of existence.
But I think that just the fact that these brilliant scientists were forced into that moral dilemma.
Like, one of my favorite videos online is Oppenheimer, when he's discussing what he said when the first atomic bomb was detonated, and he quoted the Bhagavad Gita, and he said, I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
Have you seen it?
The video?
Oh, please.
Let me play this for you.
Play Oppenheimer right after describing what it was like because it's so eerie.
Because here you have one of the most brilliant scientists ever who completed this fantastic project.
The Manhattan Project created bombs that literally were nuclear weapons.
Never happened before in all of human history, as far as we know.
And here, the guy that did it, that knew, that knew that that was going to be the death of untold amounts of people.
Listen to this.
Listen to what he says.
unidentified
We knew the world would not be the same.
Few people laughed.
Few people cried.
Most people were silent.
I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita.
Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty.
And to impress him takes on his multi-armed form.
And says, now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.
He went to this school in New York City called the Ethical Culture, Fieldston School, which is where my kids went.
So Oppenheimer is kind of a patron saint for having the brains to do something almost unimaginable and having the ethics and courage to know that what he'd done was unacceptable on some levels.
You know, on the other hand, but look, if we're talking about costs and benefits, let's think about nuclear power, nuclear bombs as a deterrent against others down the road, right?
Then let's also talk about nuclear power, which was the byproduct of this, right?
And there are those who could argue, and I would probably aid this argument to say that if the U.S. I think?
What we'd have now is probably much, much, much cleaner, cheaper, safer nuclear fuel.
And instead, what happened, because we basically stopped building nuclear plants, instead, for the next 40 years, we burnt a crap load of coal.
That's been terrible for the environment, for lives.
A lot of lives lost in mining coal, but then the pollution and so on.
So, you know, actions have consequences.
What seems to be all benefit often has a lot of costs.
And life is complicated, but I think the more that we can measure and weigh things sensibly, the less screaming there is.
I just, you know, I love changing my mind.
I love hearing somebody make an argument That makes me say, oh, you know, the way I thought about that before, I see why I thought it.
I don't feel like a fool for having thought it, but wow, now that you've laid out some facts and laid out some counterfactuals, I appreciate the opportunity to change my mind.
Well, I think we're so often married to our ideas, like our ideas are a part of us and we're losing if our ideas that we've been discussing are incorrect.
If our assumptions were incorrect, it's a value judgment against us.
You know, I think the nuclear thing is interesting because I think one of the problems with what happened was the shitty design of like Fukushima where they can't shut it off.
I mean, there are still a lot of people working on next, next, next, next generation nuclear power, including Bill Gates is involved, and including some that are working with using as fuel what's called spent fuel in a traditional nuclear act, which takes care of two big problems at once.
Let's say that we collectively decide that protein is a really important intake for most humans, but that some people Either don't want to eat meat, or they find that meat is too resource-intensive, etc., etc., but they also don't want to eat the kind of processed fake meat, which is, you know, processed food, etc.
And let's say that we decide that one of the best, most available sources of protein, if you develop it well, is insects, okay?
But that most people find that disgusting.
What do you do to make people less disgusted by something they find disgusting?
Well, with all these things, I think it's very important to give people the opportunity to choose for themselves, especially with things they've been doing forever, like eating meat.
People are terrified of someone coming along and legislating that they can't Right.
And that agriculture has allowed us to have these cities.
And yeah, it's cruel to these animals, but you know what?
You can do it ethically and you can do it morally and it's not like they're going to live forever anyway.
There's a thing where we decide that an animal is not as valuable.
And big furry animals are the most valuable animals.
One of the horrible truths about monocrop agriculture, and there's a video that a friend of mine put up on his Instagram page the other day about farmers.
This farmer was talking about, like, when I grow avocados, you have to understand, like, you think you're getting this organic avocado and nothing else to die.
He goes, I have to kill thousands of gophers.
Thousands of them.
He goes, I'm going to kill untold numbers of bugs.
He goes, I'm spraying all this organic pesticide down that's going to kill weeds.
He goes, I'm fucking up the ecosystem.
I'm churning up the land.
I'm displacing all these animals, all the places that I'm putting things on.
There should be wildlife.
I'm moving it.
I'm getting rid of it.
I'm fucking up this system.
And, like, that's an uncomfortable truth, that if you even want to buy lettuce, which is the most harmless thing, like, oh, I just plucked that head and, you know, I'll be fine.
No one's getting hurt, no one's dying.
But they are, because monocrop agriculture is devastating.
And unless you are growing an organic garden, which I firmly encourage people to do, and I think that would be, like, one of the best solutions for community.
And we would go there, and it was a part of this university project that my dad was involved in, and they were growing all these crops.
And I'm like, oh, this is kind of cool.
And it was in San Francisco.
It was in the city itself.
It had this area where we would go, and it was all fenced in, and people would grow tomatoes and different vegetables and stuff, and they'd learn how to grow, and there was classes on composting and stuff like that.
People were composting their organic waste, and they would reuse it.
And that is something that could be done inside communities.
It doesn't have to be that we have these giant swaths of land where nobody grows it.
Central Park is this beautiful part of New York City because it's this lush green patch in the middle of this urban sprawl.
So you have this urban city around it, and then it's really cool to be able to go through that and to see the ducks and to sit by a tree and Although there's this one duck in Central Park now that got like a plastic bottle ring stuck around its beak.
I mean, for people that are, your gut biome sort of dictates what you're- What happens, since we're on the topic, what happens to be your gaseous vegetable?
Oh, I don't know.
It's when I combine a bunch of them together, I'm sure.
It's usually when you combine protein and vegetables together that you get the worst reaction.
Yeah, because mostly you're using, like if you eat eggs and meat, you're breaking it down, your body uses a lot of it, there's no fiber, right?
And because there's no fiber, which is probably the biggest argument against the diet, when you look at research for the benefits of fiber, the research is weird, right?
Because it's epidemiological, it's all like how much vegetables do you eat, how many instances of colon cancer, let's quarrel, let's put it all together.
So there's a bunch of doctors that are currently like, and I use the term in air quotes, that are promoting the carnivore diet and seeing positive results with it and getting a bunch of other people that achieve positive results.
The big one is autoimmune issues, people that have severe skin issues.
Eczema is a big one that seems to be cured with an elimination diet, which is essentially what a carnivore diet is, right?
If you eliminate all those plants and all those carbs, I mean, maybe the plants are fine, but maybe it's the sugar.
And maybe by just eating meat and your body has one thing to concentrate on, it can relax a certain amount of the inflammation that you're getting.
And one of the reasons why they suffer is the introduction of alcohol and tobacco and, you know, cigarettes.
And also, you know, just Western life.
The foods change.
So you look at those communities, it's not the same community as the ones that were just eating seal and whale blubber and eating whatever they can get a hold of.
The Maasai lived for a long time on milk and meat and blood.
Let's say you and I run Lake America for just a couple days, and we decide, you know what, of all the things that people do that's not good for them that we feel is a good idea to get rid of, right?
Especially if we're going to be having a little bit more socialized medicine, right?
So you're paying my tax, my medical bill, and so on.
Of all the things that we should maybe, you know, ban would be sugar, right?
Because like, there doesn't seem to be that much nutritional benefit to sugar.
People like it, but it's demonstrably bad on a lot of levels.
Like, how the fuck are they going to ban vaping when cigarettes are still legal?
You're talking about something that kills 500,000 people every year in this country alone.
They die of premature death due to tobacco use.
And you're not going to ban that, but you're going to ban that flavored smoke that didn't even have anything to do with the 10 people that died from the nicotine or the THC with the vitamin E oil.
I've had a cigarette with my friend Tony Hinchcliffe a couple of times before shows, and Dave Chappelle smokes, and when I do shows with him, I'll steal one of his cigarettes and smoke it.
So one of the things that Stephen King said about quitting that really bothered him was it was great that he cleaned up the habit and stopped doing it, but the firing of the synapses, like he misses that.
When I wrote my first book, I was a smoker, not a heavy smoker, but I smoked and I was living in the middle of the Catskill Mountains, beautiful place by myself, middle of the woods, It was great.
Even better, the house I bought, even though I didn't know when I bought it, it used to be owned by this guy named Anton Otto Fischer, who was a painter and an illustrator.
He was German, ran away from home, had an abusive father.
This was in the 1910s or something.
Ran away from home in Germany, Became a sailor, talked his way onto a ship, got to America, I think fought for America in World War I on a ship, and then he became like the preeminent maritime painter in the U.S. in the decades maybe between the two wars and maybe after.
He then got married, lived in New York, and had a kid who had, what do you call it?
Not tuberculosis, not emphysema.
What's the old one where you need to get the clean air, fresh air?
You know, they'd send people away.
No, it's something we would know.
It's a respiratory thing, right?
And the Catskills had this clean air.
So they went there.
He built this house, and because he was a painter, but also because he'd spent so much of his life on ships, he built this studio, his painting studio, that looked like a little ship with this great window looking out over the Catskill Mountains.
That's the house I bought to write my first book.
It was unbelievably, I was so, I could focus for like 14 hours a day, 16 hours a day writing.
But the reason I was able to focus so well was because of cigarettes.
I'd write for about 28, 29 minutes, total focus, go outside, smoke, the nicotine would just reset all the focus.
It was an unbelievable drug, but it's a terrible delivery system.
I've heard someone recently say, I recently heard a kind of reluctant Trump supporter say the same thing about Trump.
That a lot of the things he's doing policy-wise, especially foreign policy or economic policy, really, they like it.
I wrote in my first book, my family memoir about the Jewish Catholic family, I wrote in there not that I was a smoker, but that this one instance where I stepped outside with my brother after this intense moment and we had a cigarette.
And a few years later, the book had been published.
I was now newly married, and I know that you're supposed to buy life insurance.
And so I got this insurance broker, and he knew my name.
He said, oh, I read your book.
I said, oh, that's great.
Glad to hear.
And then we started to price out the insurance, and he said, you know, what do you do?
Are you a smoker?
I said, no, not a smoker, because I'd quit a few years earlier.
And then he called me back and he said, you know, I read your book where you stepped outside to have a cigarette with your brother.
All of a sudden I got the smoking rate for life insurance.
isn't there like scientifically there's a certain time window where your lungs are fully recovered they also say so this message I would say is really serious Even if you've been smoking 40 years, they say if you quit, your lungs can actually recover greatly.
So it's worth it.
Yeah, I think smoking is, I hate to say it, I think smoking is a terrible idea.
It's a terrible idea There's no if ands or but On the other hand Does vaping replace the Like Adam Curry switched to vaping He had this crazy contraption.
One of those guys who's into really complicated garage remote control looking vaping things.
If I want to be a rock climber and a smoker and an everything, but I get free healthcare, then there should probably be a premium, or I should probably pay into a little fund that is a pool.
But I think that CrossFit, the benefit, yeah, is you're getting in shape.
So that balances itself out.
As long as you do it intelligently, you're involved in athletics.
But should we reward people?
Should they pay less?
So if someone does yoga three days a week, are we supposed to make them pay less?
I mean, I think you get into some weird swampy area and people start to juke the system the same way when, you know, people got paid for rats, they let rats loose and then fucking killed them.
Even if I've made an incremental push in the direction, I've moved in one or two degrees to the right, over time maybe it'll change their direction.
But the reality is you've got to want to change yourself.
And sometimes someone's inspirational words could be the thing that you needed, and that sets you off on a good path, and then you do make change.
But for the most part, when someone comes to you and tells you you have to change, it's really hard for people to accept, just like you were talking about in your episode on changing your mind, which I really loved.
I don't mean to be a downer because I'm an optimist.
I'm an optimist too.
But the downer or the danger potentially is that – and this relates to suicide.
So, you know, suicide is a little bit of a mystery because – It's such a tragic thing if it affects someone that you knew or even people you don't know.
It just seems like such a drastic solution to a problem that is hard to imagine, right?
But if you look at suicide rates through history and around the world, there's a lot of variants, but there's one trend that's pretty strong, which is suicide rates tend to be higher in countries with more prosperity, which would seem nuts, right?
You would think that if your life is kind of very, very difficult on a kind of Maslow's hierarchy level, right, not enough to eat, worried about paying rent or being safe, that you'd be more likely to be suicidal.
But it turns out it's generally the opposite, not always.
And what one suicidologist deduced from that or the kind of theory that he came up with, he calls it the no one left to blame theory of suicide, which is if you live in an environment where, let's say, you've got a spouse that's cruel to you or you've got a terrible work situation or you live somewhere where the government is repressive, whatever, you can always kind of see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Yeah.
You've never gone too cold or too hot.
Where you're surrounded by prosperity and you look around at everybody else and like, they're not depressed.
And you think, what is it?
It's me.
The no one left to blame theory.
And that's one argument for why there's like right now is a lot of teen and young people suicide in a country like America where the riches are, the prosperity is boundless.
Yeah, so his take on that is that these kids are experiencing social media, and they're experiencing this addiction to the internet and this cruelty that they experience, the bullying, the meanness, the coldness, and that when it's targeted on people and when they're losing their position in the social chain and they feel left out, they don't have the tools to cope with this.
They're developing minds, and this is the reason why you're experiencing this uptick that's directly correlated to the invention of the iPhone.
And the invention of smartphones, the invention of social media applications.
There's all sorts of correlations where you see the inventions of these particular things that have changed everything, and then you see the uptick, particularly with girls, particularly with girls in suicide.
And you see them trying to keep up with the Joneses and this feeling that they're inadequate or judging themselves against girls that are supermodels, that are photoshopped, and they just feel inadequate.
We have to be careful about correlations proving causation because it's really tough because I totally hear you on it.
It looks like they both travel together, right?
On the other hand, history is full of correlations that looked good.
We were talking about polio, the vaccine earlier.
Polio, for reasons that are still not understood, by the way, because they never really figured out the disease.
They just figured out a vaccine.
They never figured out what caused the disease.
But it turns out that polio would always spike in the summertime.
So there were a lot of theories, maybe had to do with being outdoors, so parents would keep their kids indoors.
Maybe it had something to do with swimming pools.
People keep it out of swimming pools.
But then there was one theory that what else happens in the summertime that doesn't happen in the wintertime?
Ice cream consumption.
So there was a theory for a while that polio was caused by ice cream.
On paper, the correlation looks pretty good.
So I'm saying, look, internet and depression and suicide are a little bit more complicated than ice cream and polio, but it's hard to tease out effects, for sure.
But, again, just to bang the same drum again and again, where there's costs, you've got to look at the benefits.
And this is what I hate about politicians, is they'll talk about a policy that they like, they ignore the costs, they talk about the opponent's policy, they ignore the benefits.
So with social media, for instance, I know a kid, a boy, Who is a friend of the family who, if he were born 30 years earlier and there were no way to connect with people other than in person or phone, whatever, he would have had a very disconnected life.
He just had some issues with doing that, with kind of in person, kind of behavior that's a little bit on the spectrum, just would have been very difficult.
As it turns out, because of the digital revolution, he was able to build a community that is unbelievably good for him.
Are there downsides to these things?
Absolutely.
But, you know, you've got to look at the benefits.
But given how old you are now, your health now in the state of science and technology and medicine now and where it might be in 20 years, would you like to be 120 and be.
if things worked, I don't want to be a prisoner to my shell.
But I think that people like Aubrey de Grey, who I had on last week, who's a fascinating character, he believes we're three to five years away from a giant breakthrough.
And that when that giant breakthrough has, this is my concern.
The haves and the have-nots will never be more separate than once there's some sort of innovative technology that allows you to live forever, but it's $1,000 every week or something like that.
They have the life extension technology or the age reversal technology, which is what it's really talking about.
And then on top of that, they have the things like what Elon Musk wants to do with that Neuralink, or some more advanced version of it, or the next competing version of it.
What if both of those things are highly expensive?
The amount of head start that a wealthy family would have over a poor family that just has to go au naturel.
We just have to understand what the patterns are and also have been there.
You have to make mistakes.
You've been there, you feel it, you understand what it is, and then you have that time to adjust.
That's why losing in life is so important.
Whether it's getting dumped, getting fired, losing a game, loss.
Those feelings where things didn't work out your way, that's important.
Because it lets you know this is the bad feeling that comes when it goes wrong, and you improve, and then it makes the good feelings of victory all the better.
And I mean that in a relative sense, like even getting good at something.
Forget about victory.
Making a terrible book that gets rejected by every publisher, and then writing a really good one, and people accept it, and you're like, fuck, I got better.
Look, there's a lot of ways you could look at bad events.
You could say a bad event is just who you are, and you just have bad events, and you're a fucking loser, and life hates you, and God hates you, and look at that.
Happening to Mike again.
Can't fucking believe it.
There's a lot of guys who go through life like that.
And, you know, they could say that they seek comfort in lowering the standards that they expect out of things.
So when things go bad, and they say, look, I fucking knew it.
For them, it alleviates some concern about what's going to happen in the future, because the future is always dog shit.
So by doing that, they've taken away the fear of succeeding, the fear of overcoming, the fear of improving, the fear of getting better as a human being.
If you just exhibit the same patterns, you fall into those patterns, whether it's alcoholism or gambling addiction or sex addiction.
People fall into those because they're accustomed to it.
It becomes a normal part of your life.
I think that's a scary thing for people is to recognize that they're on a bad pattern and to say, okay, I have to stop drinking.
We both have real similar recollections of our past.
But but but those people that have experienced those things with you they're like the only ones who really know you deep at your core and the more things you can experience with people the more you're gonna share that sort of but the people that make me sad are the people that know friends and no confidants and They have no one they can talk to.
They have no one that knows their secrets.
They have no one that they can tell a terrible joke to and that you would never say in mixed company.
I was talking about Quentin Tarantino's new movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and how he's sort of grandfathered in.
Because there's scenes of violence in that movie against women.
If a new guy came out of nowhere, and he didn't have a track record, and he had some woman getting her brains bashed in on a fireplace, you'd be like, what?
But it's a couple of white guys writing about this African-American community in coastal South Carolina or Georgia.
And it's this drama.
So it was written as a Broadway show and as an opera, too.
And I saw it at the Metropolitan Opera.
I don't go see a lot of opera.
I saw this recently.
And it was very, very good.
It was incredibly moving, even though it was opera, which wouldn't seem to be.
But it was so unbelievably against everything we think about now about how to talk about race.
everything against it, and yet it was about 80 actors, opera singers and actors on stage, all African American, So first of all, you have to think it's great to have a vehicle for that.
But written by these two white guys, if it were to happen now, and I was surprised the Metropolitan Opera allowed itself to put on this show because it feels, from the light of day of 2020, way too dated or racial or whatever.
And yet what was really interesting is because it's a really good piece of art, It overcomes that.
And look, the fucking, there's so many things that were on, look, the Dukes of Hazzard, they took away the Confederate flag from the roof of the General Lee.
You literally can't watch the Dukes of Hazzard anymore because they pulled it off television because people were so offended by that flag.
Look, I'm not saying, I'm not promoting the Confederate flag, but I've got a Leonard Skinner I saw that with the Rolling Stones.
And there's cartoon exaggerated violence at every turn, every episode.
His biceps are firing up and he's punching the shit out of somebody.
But it's a sign of the times.
People back then lived a hard, hard life.
And that was what – they didn't want some bullshit-ass fucking modern-day Disney movie to calm them down.
That wouldn't work, right?
If you tried to put one of them modern Disney movies, like The Lion's King, try to put that shit on in 1920, they'd be like, what are you talking about?
You take someone whose life's already gone so fucking sideways that they're violent and they're reaching out and smashing people and they're getting arrested and they've got problems you're not going to fix with Beethoven.
Because life is busy and complicated, and if somebody's done the thinking for you and it seems okay on the surface, like I touch it and it's not too hot, not too cold, then I'm going to go with it.
And the fact is, thinking for yourself and ferreting out the information and finding the data and then finding conflicting data and trying to measure one against the other takes forever.
Look, we put out one podcast a week and it almost kills us just to do one a week.
Because there's a ton of, like, I think of it as, you know, I mentioned I grew up in the country.
We used to make maple syrup.
And you would have all these maple trees.
You'd drive the tractor around, banging in the taps, put the buckets, and you'd empty them out into the big vat.
and then you'd boil it down and you'd get this much maple syrup.
And it was very frustrating because it was – It's really good.
But the ROI, like it took a lot of effort, a lot of time to make it.
And so the fact is, is that that's what I do for a living and I enjoy it.
I wouldn't trade it for anything, but I totally get why people reach for the fastest piece of conventional wisdom.
Because that's not an easy, there's no guarantee of that.
100%.
I had a trick kind of fool my way into getting – so when I started the podcast, I also wanted to have a radio component.
But I knew that if I went to NPR or somebody like that, Sirius, whatever, and said, listen, I want to make a radio show that's basically inspired by the Freakonomics way of thinking, and we're basically going to interview a bunch of scientists and academics and philosophers, and we're going to try to wrestle with these big pieces of life and There'd be no way that any executive would go for that.
So, thank God for technology.
It made it so cheap to make a podcast on my own that I just did it, put it out there, and then I could go to these partners, which happened to be WNYC and American Public Media, and they said, oh, okay, that works.
There was already an audience for it.
So, that's another case where… If people are able to use a technology that's in front of them and marry their ideas to it, you know, then… But it's also, I agree with you, but it's also like what you were talking about before where there's so many ideas that, like, it's so much easier to let someone do the thinking for you, right?
So even though the vast majority of people might slot into a previously grooved little opening and fit their thoughts to fit that little space, there's plenty of people that don't want to do that.
And the beautiful thing about your reach is you're getting a pure sample of people who enjoy what you're thinking because there's no reason to listen if you don't enjoy it.
And look, I am very, again, just appreciative of being in a world where there's people who are willing and able to have ideas that are prima facie unpopular.
Like my co-author, Steve Levitt, when he wrote this paper, it's gosh, more than 20 years ago now, I think about abortion and crime.
Man, there are all kinds of ways in which you could talk yourself out of even thinking about that, much less writing a paper.
So it takes courage.
But if you look through history, if you look at the people who've really changed the world, they have courage.
But, you know, the world doesn't progress very much unless there's a guy like Steve Jobs or a Copernicus or whatever, you know, sticking the needle, poking people in the eye with a stick.
And they, you know, very often, they're discredited or hated for their whole lives.
I love the stories where someone, like, gets pushed out, and then finally, toward the end, they're appreciated for what they did.
There was this geologist in England named William Smith who kind of invented modern geology, but he was not of the gentrified class.
And so his work was kind of stolen.
This is an amazing story told in a book called The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester.
And basically, his ideas and his research were kind of hijacked.
He was discredited.
He ended up getting thrown in debtor's prison.
It's like a horrible story.
But then, at the end of his life, he was able to persuade people that he had actually done this work, and he was lauded at the very end.
But much more often, you'll find the stories of the people who just get stomped on For their ideas and don't get the credit.
But you look at the people who've died in disgrace, who've had world-changing ideas.
It's, you know, artists.
Look at all the artists who were, like, not at all popular in their time and only now do we appreciate.
I'm just happy that you're out there and that your podcast really does explore things in every nuanced corner and really objectively and honestly, and I think it's a powerful thing.