March 5, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:46:09
Participants
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Ready, young Jamie. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| How are you, sir? | ||
| I'm great, thanks. | ||
| Nice to meet you. | ||
| Nice to meet you. | ||
| We were talking before about Adam Curry, who's just here, who has these crazy ear enhancements that are these software-based so he can tweak it and change levels and stuff like that. | ||
| And you were saying that you also have hearing, but you get it from rock and roll. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, honestly, I've never been tested. | ||
| I just know that when I'm out eating with my family or friends, that everybody can hear everything and I can't hear anything. | ||
| But no, I played loud rock music for six, seven, eight, nine years. | ||
| And yeah, it does what they say it does. | ||
| Yeah, they know what they're doing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Those people that tell you not to do that. | ||
| But look, I like the technology. | ||
| 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, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I figure if I can hold out a couple more years, mine are going to be so good, they'll take out the garbage, too. | ||
| Well, the ones that Adam has sound pretty fucking amazing. | ||
| He said it just sounds incredible, and he can actually tune into people that are 50 feet away, having a conversation, he can hear them. | ||
| And can you tune out people you don't like? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I bet there is a way. | ||
| He has various settings, but I bet there's like a tone the world out setting. | ||
| I don't need to tone the world. | ||
| There are just some people. | ||
| Have you used any of those AirPods that have the noise cancelling technology? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, some people need it though, right? | ||
| They need that sound like at a coffee shop. | ||
| Like they love to go to coffee shops and all the milling around actually helps their creativity. | ||
| You know, we're doing an episode right now for Economics Radio on noise basically as, you know, kind of we got into it thinking about noise pollution, right? | ||
| Because noise is a funny thing. | ||
| It's what economists call an externality, a negative externality, meaning you can produce it and it affects me, but I can't charge you for it, right? | ||
| It's like pollution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If you have a big factory, your pollution goes up, it blows over to someone else. | ||
| That's an externality on them. | ||
| So noise is that. | ||
| But what's really interesting is that there's a huge variance in how different people receive and perceive noise, as you just said. | ||
| So some people really need it and want it. | ||
| For some, it's a burden. | ||
| And then there's all these rather weird intricacies of noise. | ||
| Like, have you heard of misophonia? | ||
| You know what that is? | ||
| I have heard of it, but I don't remember what it means. | ||
| It is an intensely negative reaction when you hear other people chewing or their mouths making any sound. | ||
| And it can be debilitating for people who have it. | ||
| But then there's something called, I'm going to get it wrong, AMSR, ASMR, you know that? | ||
| Yeah, there's all these videos online with that. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| What does that stand for, though? | ||
| I'd have to look it up. | ||
| Automated sense something. | ||
| Or someone would have to look it up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| You can do that with sound. | ||
| What about when airports play CNN at blast volume? | ||
| Yeah, that's annoying. | ||
| I mean, is that a form of assault? | ||
| Borderline? | ||
| What kind of sweet deal does CNN have with airports? | ||
| I think it kind of made everybody hate CNN, blasting when you don't want to hear it. | ||
| That's right, right? | ||
| It shows that it's a little bit annoying. | ||
| But it's also, it's like, you don't want to be looking at all the world's problems when you're about to get on the most stressful thing that a person does. | ||
| You have to self-medicate pretty heavily before flying, I understand? | ||
| No, I don't have to. | ||
| You enjoy it. | ||
| I enjoy it. | ||
| You enjoy it more. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, this is the way I think of it. | ||
| On a plane, one of two things, 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. | ||
| Wait, when you get high, you have a worse experience on the plane than you're saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| It's not worse. | ||
| It's just scary. | ||
| It's not worse. | ||
| And scary is not worse. | ||
| No, because there's benefits to it. | ||
| There's benefits in terms of creativity and then insight. | ||
| I have a whole bit about it, but it is based on the truth. | ||
| I oftentimes take a heavy dose of edibles and then get on a plane. | ||
| In order to intentionally put yourself in a state that can be somewhat negative but also creativity? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't. | |
| See, I don't use that word, negative. | ||
| I don't think it is negative. | ||
| Even when I'm freaking out. | ||
| Like, if I'm sitting in the chair and I'm like, whoo! | ||
| And, you know, I'm looking out the window, we're flying, and I'm realizing we're 30,000 feet in the air, and I'm, you know, really fucking high. | ||
| Is this... | ||
| So I'm not, like, a rollercoaster person? | ||
| I don't like rollercoasters. | ||
| But is this a similar kind of... | ||
| Like, you intentionally put yourself in a scenario where you're going to heighten some senses? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| No, because I think a rollercoaster is just... | ||
| Fun, right? | ||
| It's just goofs. | ||
| This is 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. | ||
| How predictable, though, is the experience? | ||
| Unpredictable. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So is that not a little frightening? | ||
| Yes, that's the fun part. | ||
| You're the lunatic. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| But nobody gets hurt. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| It's not like a real fear. | ||
| And in the back of your mind, you know this is just a physiological, chemical response and I'm going to... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you put yourself back into caveman mode. | ||
| Like, every rustle of grass is the lion who's coming to eat. | ||
| All right, let me ask you a question. | ||
| Sorry, I realize I'm not supposed to be asking you questions, but I'm going to ask you. | ||
| No, we're talking, man. | ||
| Let's do this. | ||
| Here's a question. | ||
| Let's say for people who don't use drugs, right? | ||
| 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've yet to experience it. | ||
| You've tried it? | ||
| No, yet. | ||
| I've yet to experience it. | ||
| But I've had various friends who've done it who have had spectacular experiences, like full-blown mushroom experiences for several minutes. | ||
| And is it guaranteed, like if you do the breathing, is it guaranteed to get you to that state or no? | ||
| No, I think you have to learn how to get there. | ||
| Not as reliable as drugs then. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And also physically demanding. | ||
| Like I think it takes a long time. | ||
| I think you have to work yourself up into this state where this stuff starts to happen. | ||
| And you also have to probably follow some routine that's tried and true. | ||
| I don't know what that routine is. | ||
| But I do know that people that I trust, including people like Adam, super smart guys, We'll tell you that for them, it gave them the same experience as like taking a drug. | ||
| All right, I'm going to look it up. | ||
| Because I'm not big on drugs. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Just not. | ||
| Because you're smart. | ||
| No, I'm also not judgmental about it. | ||
| I have no issue. | ||
| I'm not saying that you would be dumb to do them, but I see you're a smart guy. | ||
| So if you're a smart guy and you see drugs, you see a lot of people have problems with drugs and you're fine with reality. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I smoked dope in college, and it just, I mean, also the dope was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Believe me, son, I smoke dope. | |
| But also, the dope was a different caliber then. | ||
| It wasn't very good. | ||
| It wasn't very predictable, and I just had bad experiences, so whatever. | ||
| I like whiskey. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| And I like the predictability of, like, even, like, the difference between if I drink my Laphroaig as my favorite scotch, like, and if there's not that and there's another... | ||
| That's the stuff we had the other day, no? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We had Lagvulin. | |
| Lagvulin. | ||
| Lagvulin's good. | ||
| Lagvulin's good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're very close. | |
| It's the Petey family. | ||
| Some people don't like the Petey stuff. | ||
| Oh, Petey. | ||
| Yeah, that was the first time I think I've ever had anything like that. | ||
| Oh, you've never had a... | ||
| The bottle was half empty, though, so I don't know what the fuck happened. | ||
| I was probably so drunk that I was drinking it and not even realizing it was Petey. | ||
| It's a nice thing about Scotch, though. | ||
| You can sip it kind of forever if you're, you know... | ||
| That stuff, too, I would imagine is even better when you're gently sipping it because you're dealing with this really exotic flavor. | ||
| It's also good for you. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| Well, let me rephrase. | ||
| It's not bad for you. | ||
| In terms of alcohol, I mean, beer... | ||
| Look, it depends how crazy you want to be about caloric... | ||
| Consumption and so on. | ||
| But beer has a lot of calories. | ||
| Wine has a lot of sugar. | ||
| And whiskey is actually pretty low-cal, low-sugar, just high alcohol content, so the sugar works a little bit differently. | ||
| But no, my doctor fully approves of a couple drinks a night. | ||
| Yeah, there's been research that shows that a couple of drinks a night for most people is actually... | ||
| In fact, my doctor, who's a researcher as well, she said that if you look at longevity, the people who have the shorter life expectancies are the people who drink a lot, not a surprise, and none. | ||
|
unidentified
|
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. | ||
| Yeah, there's got to be a benefit in relaxation. | ||
| There's got to be. | ||
| You know, I was listening to your podcast on loneliness and statistics. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| I love your podcast, by the way. | ||
| I'm a big fan. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You want to hug people. | ||
| You want to have smiles. | ||
|
unidentified
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Agree. | |
| It relaxes you. | ||
| Also, you know, this is a phrase that younger people will not remember, but actually I can't remember it either. | ||
| So I think it's the social lubricant. | ||
| That's what they used to call alcohol, right? | ||
| And so the fact is, is that a lot of people have a lot of trouble communicating with other people, period. | ||
| Whether it's loved ones, you either say you're too candid or you're not candid enough with strangers. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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 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. | ||
| Like, where'd that come from? | ||
| A gift from the heavens! | ||
| Yeah, no, the mystery is beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But walking, to me, I didn't really walk until really recently. | ||
| I didn't go on hikes or anything until really recently. | ||
| I usually would run. | ||
| And running, a lot of times, you know, you're just so tired, you're not having any good ideas. | ||
| You're just thinking like, I gotta get to the top of the hill. | ||
| How long you lived in LA? Since 94. And before that? | ||
| 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? | ||
| No, I was busy. | ||
| There's no time to be. | ||
| Well, I was 20, you know, my early 20s. | ||
| You were working in clubs in New York at that age, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, way more. | ||
| And I do wonder if you just get conditioned out of even thinking about that. | ||
| Like, my kids, who are teenagers, like, I don't see them ever having silence or solitude. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And, again, I don't want to be 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. | ||
| And I wonder what the loss is. | ||
| There's got to be something because there's a shift in attention and there's a shift in focus that's dramatic. | ||
| We've gone from just looking at the world around us to fixated on a device. | ||
| You 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like thinking to yourself. | ||
| And there's something about like a long hike. | ||
| You take a dog for a couple mile hike where you're just walking and you hear crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch. | ||
| And you're just thinking. | ||
| And no one's talking to you. | ||
| And you're not talking to anybody. | ||
| You're just walking and talking with your dog. | ||
| And then you're thinking about stuff in a way that is like... | ||
| A tangible sort of meditation on your life. | ||
| It's a real moment. | ||
| And we don't value that real moment. | ||
| We think of it almost as like wasted. | ||
| Not even listening to anything. | ||
| No good tunes. | ||
| But it's really like there's value in thinking. | ||
| And we haven't put a value judgment or a number judgment on that. | ||
| It's interesting, some of the people you hear these days talking the most about really limiting or even forbidding their kids' screen time is Silicon Valley executives. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| That's where, you know... | ||
| They're smart. | ||
| Yeah, so you have to say, like, you know, at a certain point, you have to say, okay, the writing is on the wall here. | ||
| But on the other hand, look, every technology that's ever been invented, people get scared of it, people embrace it, people trash it, and then, you know... | ||
| For sure, for sure. | ||
| There's always a thing where there's an example in history where people are wrong. | ||
| But then there's the reality of what it is. | ||
| What it is is an ever increasingly immersive experience that everyone is addicted to. | ||
| And when you're walking through a Starbucks and you see nothing but people on their phones. | ||
| Like people in line are on their phones. | ||
| People sitting down are on their phones. | ||
| You go through a mall, everyone's on their phone. | ||
| You go through a movie theater, people can't put their fucking phone down while a movie's on. | ||
| People are driving, they're on their phone. | ||
| On the other hand, but you've got to consider the upsides, too. | ||
| Oh, there's a lot of upsides. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So that's the tricky part. | ||
| I mean, that's why I like economists, because economists are ruthless, bloodless. | ||
| They almost don't know what humans are, but they're very good at measuring costs and benefits. | ||
| And that's what I feel that our kind of political, social media discourse is missing. | ||
| People are all, for the most part, Advocates or activists, they pick up the lane and they stay in it and they want to pave over the rest of everybody's lanes and make it theirs. | ||
| And it's not a good way to be. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| You know, that's another episode that I was listening to of yours recently about how hard it is to get people to change their mind on things. | ||
| And 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. | ||
| And I really enjoyed that episode. | ||
| It's funny. | ||
| Thanks. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, I mean, some religions, I mean, that's how they keep you, right? | ||
| You get ostracized. | ||
| There's religions that we know of where if you decide to leave, you don't just get ostracized. | ||
| You literally have a death sentence. | ||
| Like, now you've escaped our group. | ||
| You're an outsider now. | ||
| My father, both my parents converted from Judaism to Catholicism before they met each other. | ||
| Yeah, it was a very unusual story. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| It's a long story. | ||
| I'll tell you if you really want to know. | ||
| But anyway, I'll do the short what I'm getting to. | ||
| And this was during the Second World War. | ||
| They were both in New York, both first-generation American Jews. | ||
| That makes sense. | ||
| They converted for different reasons from each other, 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. | ||
| So, they did exactly what you're saying now. | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| Yeah, yeah, that was what I thought too when I... Holy shit! | ||
| And my mother's did the same thing, but it was less dramatic because her family was less religious, so they still didn't like at all that she had converted. | ||
| 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? | ||
| So, no chance. | ||
| No chance. | ||
| No chance, but... | ||
| It's so scary. | ||
| Yeah, it's scary. | ||
| It is. | ||
| But on the other hand, I mean, this is what Freakonomics is... | ||
| What I try to learn through doing Freakonomics is, you know, to measure the what... | ||
| And try to figure out the why, but then not be the judge who says, that was terrible, this is wonderful, because, you know, different people have, look, if Shepsel Dubner were here, we could ask him, What's your side of the story? | ||
| He could tell us a story that might convince us that, you know what, this son of his did a terrible thing to the family. | ||
| He did a terrible thing. | ||
| You know, he would say, how could it be that we Jews existed for generations and generations and generations when everywhere we lived, there was always someone trying to, you know, get rid of us. | ||
| And then we finally come to America You know, the land of freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom. | ||
| And here, after generations and generations of forefathers fought to stay Jewish, here my son decides to become Catholic. | ||
| What are you thinking? | ||
| So, you know, everybody's got a perspective. | ||
| Everybody's got an emotional experience. | ||
| So I try to respect that, but no, I would not do that to my children. | ||
| I understand the outrage. | ||
| I understand being upset. | ||
| But I can't understand choosing that over your son and over the relationship you have with your son. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| 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, a nephew of his who my father used to be very close with and who looked a lot like my dad, and this guy was maybe in his early 20s, late teens by now, he walked into the hospital room and Shepsel, you know, on his deathbed really thought that that was my father, his son, my 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, it was terrible. | ||
| So, look, this is why religion... | ||
| I've been long fascinated by religion and I think that, again, if you think about it the way that economists think about things, there are costs and there are benefits and it's complicated. | ||
| I think you're 100% right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| well 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. | ||
| Trevor Burrus: Sounds like a nice justification for one of them psychic houses. | ||
| They drive by, they get the neon sign. | ||
| They're helping people. | ||
| They're giving people a sense of what the future's going to be like. | ||
| Trevor Burrus: How do you know they're not? | ||
| Trevor Burrus: Giving them hope. | ||
| Maybe that's where God lives. | ||
| It could be. | ||
| I went to one of them in Brooklyn, by the way. | ||
| The only one I ever went to. | ||
| I was in Brooklyn for an audition in the early 90s. | ||
| And I'm like, why not? | ||
| Fuck it. | ||
| It was like 10 bucks or something. | ||
| I walked into this lady. | ||
| She's wrong about everything. | ||
| She thought I had a brother. | ||
| She thought I was trying to get into the family business. | ||
| You're really tight with your dad? | ||
| No, I don't even know him. | ||
| It was a disaster. | ||
| Alright, so maybe you didn't... | ||
| We need like a Yelp for psychics, and that one wouldn't have been the good one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you know what's funny? | ||
| I think he's a pretty strongly professed atheist, right? | ||
| But somehow I find his talking about the subject incredibly, like, embracing. | ||
| Like, he doesn't, right? | ||
| Because it's a smart way of doing it. | ||
| He understands. | ||
| He's a generous person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He is, yeah. | |
| He's a really, really nice person. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that's what people do. | ||
| It's like a natural... | ||
| But if someone's nice... | ||
| 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. | ||
| He goes, I'm done. | ||
| And from being this guy's friend. | ||
| Unreal. | ||
| And so then he meets a bunch of other ones. | ||
| And he starts talking to them. | ||
| And just nice as pie. | ||
| Just nice, friendly, intelligent, super articulate too. | ||
| So it's hard to describe him as dumb when he's way smarter than you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You're talking to him and he's so eloquent. | ||
| So... | ||
| He converts more and more and more. | ||
| He converted a guy who was a Nazi. | ||
| He's converted a bunch of people. | ||
| It's more than 200 now. | ||
| And he continues to do it. | ||
| And there's some pieces 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. | ||
| But when he came back, when he was 10, he was in an all-white Cub Scout pack in Massachusetts. | ||
| Yeah, so that's what it was. | ||
| So he was 10 years old. | ||
| Man, if you want to pick somewhere to experience kind of straight-up racism, Massachusetts is a good place to start, I would say. | ||
| There's definitely some spots. | ||
| I have some thoughts on that. | ||
| I feel like there's that heirloom... | ||
| Civilization that still, like, it 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hear you, but... | |
| There's also, so the thing that I like about New York, I don't mean to trash California. | ||
| I like California a lot. | ||
| Oh, I love New York. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| But man, when I'm in California, first of all, it feels much more like a foreign country to me than any other place in America. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What makes it seem like a foreign country? | |
| 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. | ||
| game so I don't like to be around environments where people are trying to win so that they can beat somebody else except in sports that's why sports are awesome sports are a good proxy for life people can be very competitive you win or lose you go home you come back and do it again yeah because you've lost it doesn't make you a bad person right sports are very valuable I think for people also for war you know I mean it's well that was football yeah reason why I invented it right you know about population densities right there's a lot of | ||
| 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. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| And when they do that, if they do that— I assume faster is denser. | ||
| Yes, faster is denser. | ||
| Also, how many syllables that they say per sentence, how quickly they say those syllables, that there's actually a cadence, a speed, an uptick— What are you talking about? | ||
| What are you talking about, John? | ||
| I don't believe what you're saying. | ||
| What the fuck are you saying, bro? | ||
| People get to the chase. | ||
| Cut to the chase. | ||
| And I think that that urge to walk faster, that urge to talk faster is an energy. | ||
| And that energy, you know, we're looking at it in terms of its results, right? | ||
| The results are you can actually detect. | ||
| If you know the formula, you look at a camera here and a camera there. | ||
| You know a timer. | ||
| So someone walked from here to there. | ||
| You add it all up. | ||
| And you can guess, like, really accurately, within a million people. | ||
| Pretty neat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's because there's energy that comes out of cities. | ||
| My friend Jeff lives in New York, my manager. | ||
| He's lived there forever. | ||
| And he loves it. | ||
| He goes, I never leave New York. | ||
| I love New York. | ||
| The fucking energy of this city. | ||
| Because it gives him juice. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Not for everybody, we should say. | ||
| Not for everybody. | ||
| Some people, I think, just get weirded out by it and they need to be alone. | ||
| And some people like a yard and some people like peace and quiet. | ||
| But some people live for that. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| They live for it. | ||
| They live for being stacked on top of a building with strangers below them and everyone's all together in this hive feeding off each other. | ||
| You know what's interesting is, you know... | ||
| How old are you? | ||
| 52. Okay, so I'm 56. You look great. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I remember that. | ||
| Exactly wrong! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| 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. | ||
| that is incredibly strong. | ||
| Undeniable. | ||
| That's why going to live, see live music and things like that. | ||
| It's a shared experience. | ||
| You're all seeing something live. | ||
| There's a benefit to that. | ||
| And I always tell people, like, if you watch a comedy special on television, that comedy special is, at the very best, 70% as good as seeing it live. | ||
| It's never 100% because you're not there. | ||
| So it might be great because it's a funny person, but you're missing, for sure, at least 30%. | ||
| And then, you know, when you're live, there's like this intangible quality. | ||
| You feel it in the air. | ||
| When you're all laughing, there's a buzz that everybody gets. | ||
| You're laughing together. | ||
| Yeah, like right now. | ||
| It reminds me of, I once watched somebody else's wedding video. | ||
| I can't remember the circumstances. | ||
| Did you get forced at gunpoint? | ||
| It was pretty close to that. | ||
| And they said it was somebody showing me their sibling's wedding video because they said it was such an amazing experience. | ||
| It was so warm. | ||
| And I was watching it. | ||
| And I felt like I was watching a detergent commercial. | ||
| Like, no emotional connection because... | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| I wasn't there. | ||
| That's the worst thing that people make you do. | ||
| They make you sit and watch their... | ||
| The only thing worse is someone who's in a really bad band and they want you to listen to their album in front of you. | ||
| And you have to sit there and go, dude, you're making me do this. | ||
| When I played music, my... | ||
| So I had... | ||
| I never... | ||
| So first of all, when I started in this band, we were in North Carolina and my family was mostly up in New York State and so on. | ||
| So they weren't close. | ||
| But then when we started to travel and tour and 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. | ||
| We weren't. | ||
| I wasn't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You had so much energy up there. | |
| So yeah, the difference between the experience from the inside and perceived experience was a massive gap. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, going to see something live like that where it's bad is actually extra super painful. | ||
| Like when you watch a comedian bomb on stage and you're in the audience, you're feeling agony. | ||
| Like you're mad at this person for putting you through this. | ||
| Like, oh my God, get off stage. | ||
| No, you can't be mad at him, though. | ||
| Isn't it more empathy than anger? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But sure, but there's a lot of anger, too. | ||
| Because you are being tortured. | ||
| Like imagine if, and it's not really physical pain, but there is a certain level of emotional pain you experience when someone's bombing. | ||
| When someone's in front of you 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. | ||
| It's almost like my guts are on fire. | ||
| The thing I always wondered about comics is why they don't cheat more. | ||
| Because laughter is plainly very contagious, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So every time I've seen someone bomb, I always felt like if one or two people had started going with it, laughing, responding. | ||
| You mean cheat more by packing the audience and people laughing? | ||
| Something. | ||
| Or just putting your iPhone in the audience and having it start laughing. | ||
| I don't know how to – there's a lot of ways to cheat. | ||
| Because I've always thought that it's such an obvious dynamic that laughter is very, very contagious. | ||
| But even like you see like kids in school when they're supposed to not be laughing and one kid laughs, they all can't stop. | ||
| It's this incredibly contagious behavior. | ||
| So – I think if you did pipe in laughter, first of all... | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I'm not saying... | |
| Well, maybe I am saying that. | ||
| You did kind of say it with a phone in the audience. | ||
| Okay, that's most drastic. | ||
| Let's say you plant people in the audience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You could probably swing things in a way from a really bad set to maybe an okay set, but you're never going to make it funny. | ||
| See, the best way to do that is to just make it funny. | ||
| Actually, to bother to be good. | ||
| That cheating thing's not helping you ever. | ||
| It's going to get in the way. | ||
| You make a good point. | ||
| You're not going to learn anything from it. | ||
| It's like people that steal other people's jokes. | ||
| They never learn how to write. | ||
| You have to figure out the language of 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 get real ones. | ||
| You're going to feel weird about it. | ||
| Also, you're going to know that you're doing it, and the audience is going to know that something's wrong. | ||
| Maybe I'm not talking about cheating per se. | ||
| You're making sense. | ||
| As having... | ||
| And I'm sure every comic does this already, so it's not like I'm telling anybody anything, but having something in your pocket that's going to get them on your side, even if for a little while, just to get the momentum going in your way. | ||
| We certainly do have some bits that you know work. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sometimes. | |
| Sometimes you're bombing because you get off on a bad start. | ||
| The real sketchy time is when you're writing new material. | ||
| That's touch and go. | ||
| The way I always like to describe it, it's like you have no weapons. | ||
| You're going into a fight, but everything's made out of rubber. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, fuck. | |
| Like, nothing's good yet, right? | ||
| Like when you have new material, you have a stack of notes and like four or five premises, one or two of them might be any good. | ||
| But I got to go through those other premises that suck multiple times to find out for sure that they're no good. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| When that's happening to you, do you learn over time to not let it hurt your ego to the point where you're going to get even worse? | ||
| In other words, if you're not doing well, what you need to do is you need to say, I've got this material. | ||
| I need to work on it because it's going to get better. | ||
| But I could imagine that if you start bombing, what happens is you just feel so hurt that you get worse and worse as you go. | ||
| How do you fight against that? | ||
| Yeah, it's a psychological mind game. | ||
| For sure, you definitely could. | ||
| Look, and I've seen it happen to comedians while they're writing a whole new hour. | ||
| It's almost like they lose their glow as a human because they're just eating shit all the time. | ||
| And we get away from them like they're diseased. | ||
| Like if someone bombs and they come off stage, you get away from them because we know what it's like. | ||
| Does it feel contagious? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to get out of the room. | ||
| One of the worst things that people do, and I don't know why they do it, but a lot of comedians like to bring terrible comedians with them on the road so that they look like a hero. | ||
| It's a really sneaky move. | ||
| And they literally hire people that don't work any other way. | ||
| Is that a bad idea ultimately? | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| Because you want everybody to have fun. | ||
| And if you make them sit through 20 minutes of someone who's terrible, you're torturing them. | ||
| Do you end up lowering your own standard because you're around shitty people? | ||
| You ruin the vibe of the show. | ||
| It just fucks it up. | ||
| Especially if you're doing it on purpose. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You're like, whee! | ||
| Mitch Hedberg's gonna take us on a ride! | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| That's what it's like. | ||
| You think the same thing happens when a politician is speaking? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| For sure, Trump has a lot of elements of stand-up comedy in his routines, for sure, 100%. | ||
| If you watch his most recent speech where he's making fun of Joe Biden saying 150 million people were killed with guns, and he's like, I looked at the First Lady, I mean, he's literally doing stand-up, who does a very good job, by the way. | ||
| I looked at the First Lady, I'm like, where are all these bodies? | ||
| Where are all these 150 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. | ||
| And it seems real. | ||
| It seems like he's a comic. | ||
| What about Bernie? | ||
| Bernie, for sure, is a powerful speaker, but I don't think he's that funny. | ||
| I mean, he'll say a funny thing every now and then, but he's more serious. | ||
| When you talk about going along for the ride, they're doing the thinking for you. | ||
| It's such an interesting idea. | ||
| Bernie is a trustworthy person. | ||
| People trust him. | ||
| They see him up there. | ||
| He's not polished, right? | ||
| The thing about Bernie... | ||
| It's like, when he's saying things, there's ums and there's uhs and there's, you know, his hair's all fucked up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, but Trump's not polished either. | |
| It's a different kind of polish. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What do you mean? | |
| Trump is a polished performer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, he's like a comic doing scat. | ||
| You know, it's da-da-da-da. | ||
| You know, it's like, I'm telling you, that's exactly what it is. | ||
| It's an amazing, it's an amazing thing. | ||
| He's like, filling in the blanks, loading up his weapons. | ||
| For the next line that he's going to throw and call crazy Hillary, lock her up. | ||
| It's stand-up. | ||
| It's basically like he's doing stand-up. | ||
| That's why Biden is so fucked. | ||
| He's so fucked because he can't talk. | ||
| He has a really hard time talking. | ||
| He keeps screwing things up. | ||
| And it's a real bad horse to bet on because he's an older guy. | ||
| You're still a Bernie guy at this moment? | ||
| I love Bernie. | ||
| I love the guy. | ||
| I love what he represents. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What's then the corollary? | ||
| What's the Trump idea and why did it succeed? | ||
| A bunch of pussies out there trying to ban free speech. | ||
| A bunch of pussies out there. | ||
| Come on! | ||
| America's number one! | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| Fuck yeah! | ||
| There's also, he doesn't talk like a politician. | ||
| You know, he talks about China. | ||
| You go to them listening motherfuckers when they charge you 25% and everybody's like, yeah! | ||
| More stand-up. | ||
| It's more stand-up, right? | ||
| It's way more entertaining. | ||
| He's the most entertaining. | ||
| Forget about value judgment of who he is as a person. | ||
| Without a doubt, the most entertaining president that's ever lived. | ||
| And not even close. | ||
| There's not even a close second. | ||
| He buries all of them. | ||
| And he drags them into his fight. | ||
| Even Hillary is now talking differently about other people. | ||
| She said about Bernie, nobody liked him. | ||
| She would have never said that. | ||
| Before Donald Trump, she would have never uttered those words. | ||
| His victory over her is deep in her DNA now. | ||
| And she's starting to exhibit some of his patterns. | ||
| By saying nobody ever liked him? | ||
| How could you say that? | ||
| What kind of crazy... | ||
| Of course, millions of people like him. | ||
| They're voting for him. | ||
| Millions. | ||
| Millions of people to say nobody liked him or nobody liked him. | ||
| Of course people like him. | ||
| And then they started writing, I like Bernie. | ||
| This hashtag I like Bernie start popping up. | ||
| That behavior is a direct reaction to her getting pounded on by Donald Trump through the entire campaign. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| You've talked to a lot of people from all different realms in here, right? | ||
| If we can agree, let's say, that being entertaining is not a great prerequisite or a qualification for being president, if we can agree on that, which seems pretty easy. | ||
| Yes, very easy to agree on. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, the entertainment force is, for whatever reason, is being portrayed through Trump only. | ||
| See, he's not a politician. | ||
| He's a guy who's a media star. | ||
| And he's been a media star for decades. | ||
| He knows how to manipulate the media. | ||
| He knows how to sit on the letterman couch and kill. | ||
| He's been doing it for a long time. | ||
| He's very comfortable being in front of cameras. | ||
| None of those people have those kind of skills. | ||
| And nobody thought of it as a skill. | ||
| They thought of a politician being able to do their politician stuff. | ||
| When this guy's calling you Crazy Ted or Lion Ted or Lion Hillary, he just makes up names for you. | ||
| Sleepy Joe. | ||
| And I'm smiling because it's funny because he's good at it. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| He's good at it. | ||
| Here's the problem. | ||
| You shouldn't have a goddamn popularity contest to see who controls thermonuclear weapons. | ||
| That's fucking stupid. | ||
| It's stupid. | ||
| They'll allow people to vote based on a popularity. | ||
| But it's a system we've got. | ||
| So that's what I'm asking you is what now? | ||
| Well, the system's only a couple of I know. | ||
| Or even this kind of... | ||
| I mean, the way that these elections are... | ||
| Because I don't think it was... | ||
| I mean, if you look at Lincoln-Douglas debates, those were actual debates with two people. | ||
| And they took for hours and hours and hours. | ||
| It has evolved a lot. | ||
| But I mean, let's say that you're not happy with the way it is. | ||
| And there's a lot of people... | ||
| Even there are people who like Trump quite a bit on some dimensions who are very troubled by other dimensions. | ||
| There's a lot of people out there who are open to like... | ||
| No, let's try to adjust to thinking. | ||
| Let's try to change our minds. | ||
| Let's try to not be influenced as much by what we're being influenced by. | ||
| Do you have any pointers? | ||
| The real problem that we're having is this tribal battle of left versus right. | ||
| And the strongest voices on the left, the loudest voices, and the most extreme oftentimes are the worst representations. | ||
| And the same with the right. | ||
| The loudest, most extreme team members. | ||
| They're the people at the front of the line. | ||
| Fuck yeah, we're gonna kick their ass. | ||
| I'm like, is that guy with me? | ||
| Am I on this team? | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Are we in a war now? | ||
| We're in a war with the left. | ||
| Like, that's what it is, you know? | ||
| And 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The thing that's amazing to me is this. | ||
| Trump won the presidency as the Republican that the RNC most wanted to get rid of. | ||
| Bernie, last time around, was the Democrat that the DNC wanted to get rid of. | ||
| They lost by getting their candidate, Hillary, in. | ||
| This time, Bernie, who may very well become the candidate, is again the party that the DNC is out to get. | ||
| So what does it say that you've got a duopoly, literally the machines running the system that we kind of let ourselves get manipulated into buying? | ||
| Like you said, I've never understood. | ||
| My mom, my mom and dad were Democrats for a long, long time. | ||
| Typical Catholic. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Maybe not so typical because they were former Jewish Catholic. | ||
| Typical Catholic, working class, big family, meat and potatoes issues. | ||
| No brainer that they're Democrats. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And then, but my mom is a devout Catholic. | ||
| She started the local right to life chapter in upstate New York where we lived. | ||
| New York state had legalized abortion before Roe v. Wade. | ||
| So she was fighting that fight early. | ||
| When that happened and the Democrats lined up against, in favor of legalized abortion, she switched parties. | ||
| Everything else about her was still mostly Democratic, but she had to become a Republican. | ||
| Because of life. | ||
| And that's another powerful one that gets integrated into the right. | ||
| And it happens to all of us, though. | ||
| There's one issue that kind of sets people off, and then they have to join the team that they may, you know. | ||
| With a lot of people I know, it's the Second Amendment. | ||
| People that are afraid of their house being broken into and they don't have anything to protect their family. | ||
| And they'd otherwise be kind of libertarian-ish Democrats. | ||
| And it's almost always guys who have kids. | ||
| 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. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Let me ask you a slightly different question. | ||
| It's actually a totally different question. | ||
| As I'm sure you know, if you look at any indicator of like prosperity, longevity, health, literacy, access to food, etc., humankind is way better off than it's ever been. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Without question. | ||
| On average. | ||
| There's still a lot of people with a lot of trouble. | ||
| There's still parts of the world that are still in bad shape and so on. | ||
| It's trending in an amazing direction. | ||
| Amazing direction. | ||
| Why are we so unhappy? | ||
| I don't think we know how to manage our life correctly and life doesn't come with a guidebook. | ||
| It doesn't come with, when you're in this condition, seek out these remedies. | ||
| Start exercising. | ||
| Get together with your friends. | ||
| Tell them you love them. | ||
| Meet up and have dinner and hug each other. | ||
| Sleep well. | ||
| Sleep well. | ||
| Drink water. | ||
| And whiskey. | ||
| A little bit of whiskey, too, right? | ||
| And also, so many of us have a bad head start. | ||
| You're starting off... | ||
| You know, like, how about your dad? | ||
| He'd been growing up getting kicked out of the family. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and then starts a family of his own where you don't even know your grandfather. | ||
| I mean, it's madness, right? | ||
| Madness. | ||
| So you're coming out of this stressful pocket, or maybe your dad goes to jail, or maybe your mom dies when you're young. | ||
| All these things that happen to people where they have this bad start. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And then they develop defense mechanisms to deal with 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. | ||
| Everybody there would be a massive shift. | ||
| So let me ask you this. | ||
| I feel like the list you just gave is basically my list too, right? | ||
| I try. | ||
| That's what I try to do, pretty much. | ||
| And they all sound attractive. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So why is it so hard for so many people to do it? | ||
| Because people are lazy. | ||
| And the reason why we're lazy is because it's very difficult for us to waste resources on something that we don't currently do. | ||
| And even though we know something to be true, that if you do this physical thing- Long-term benefits are- Yeah, we know that. | ||
| But short-term, it's like, I don't want to do it right now. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because your body craves relaxation because it used to be a very rare thing to achieve. | ||
| Alright, so if you could pick one thing, let's say I'm a person... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would never. | |
| Why would I pick one thing? | ||
| It's a comprehensive approach. | ||
| Let's say the first thing. | ||
| Let's say that I feel like, you know what, society says everything's great, I'm unhappy. | ||
| Exercise. | ||
| Okay, why is exercise the one... | ||
| Because you get your blood pumping. | ||
| You release natural endorphins and you legitimately feel better. | ||
| And I also think of this all the time. | ||
| I think of your body as almost like the energy in your body is like a battery. | ||
| And it requires a certain amount of use. | ||
| And when you don't use it, it overflows. | ||
| And then you get weird behavior and overreacting to things. | ||
| And you almost get antsy. | ||
| You've got to get up and move. | ||
| Cognitively, it's a big... | ||
| I find. | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Let's say you have to take two long flights. | ||
| Let's say you're unable to exercise for like, you know, 24, 36 hours. | ||
| Oh, you're fine. | ||
| You don't have to do it every day. | ||
| I don't do it every day. | ||
| You don't? | ||
| No, I take days off. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, it's fine. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| The whole key is just to develop regular habits. | ||
| If you have to take two or three days off, it doesn't matter. | ||
| The whole key is just regular habits. | ||
| What's your sleep regime? | ||
| Well, I have a whoop. | ||
| And my whoop tells me every night how much I sleep. | ||
| Has it improved? | ||
| Has the feedback improved your sleeping? | ||
| Yeah, because it made me accountable. | ||
| I was like, I get like seven, eight hours every night. | ||
| I was getting like four and five. | ||
| And I was like, oh, you lying bitch. | ||
| So it made me concentrate more on getting more sleep. | ||
| What do you do to sleep better or sleep well? | ||
| It's just a matter of the time. | ||
| It's a matter of when outside I have to get up. | ||
| Do you sleep with earplugs, eye mask, anything like that? | ||
| I don't have a problem sleeping. | ||
| I sleep well. | ||
| The problem is doing things and waking up early. | ||
| And I realize, if I'm going to wake up that early, I've got to go to bed early. | ||
| You're not a napper? | ||
| No, I don't nap. | ||
| How come? | ||
| I just never enjoy it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You never tried it? | ||
| No, I have. | ||
| No, but it doesn't work. | ||
| Like, when I'm done, I'm done. | ||
| Do you drink caffeine? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Have you ever tried the caffeine nap? | ||
| Do you know about that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I know what it is. | ||
| But that's not my problem. | ||
| All right. | ||
| My problem is when I shut down, I shut down. | ||
| So a 20-minute nap becomes eight hours of sleep. | ||
| I'm not interested. | ||
| I'll be laying down for hours. | ||
| I don't mean to criticize your productivity. | ||
| You're plenty productive, plainly. | ||
| But there's a balance. | ||
| 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. | ||
| got less of those numbers, but more of the numbers in terms of the amount of sleep you got, you would enjoy the whole overall experience more. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Can I just say, if you're selling placards, you're already starting behind me. | ||
| Okay, widgets. | ||
| You're selling the most widgets, and you have this goal in your mind of being number one, and you're obsessed, and everyone's going to tell your story. | ||
| Oh, Bob, he wouldn't let it go. | ||
| Every time I got there, he was in the office, and he left after everybody. | ||
| But look, now Bob's got a fucking yacht, and he's also got a pacemaker, right? | ||
| Bob's ready to tick over any minute now. | ||
| But also, I think the thing is, in pursuit of success, I think what often happens that I've seen in people I know and in people I don't know but I've read about is that your moral compass starts to shift. | ||
| But that's not necessarily true. | ||
| There's a lot of people that are successful. | ||
| And we're only talking about business, right? | ||
| We're not talking about athletics, are we? | ||
| I'm thinking of some people in academia who, you know, even though the average person may not consider the stakes in academia super high, but like if you get in a big university department and 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. | ||
| And I see that happening a lot. | ||
| I see it in media. | ||
| I see people cutting corners. | ||
| I see it in business. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You don't want to think of them as being a social climber. | ||
| How strange is this, though? | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| 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 like 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. | ||
| It's basically what you're doing. | ||
| You're just doing it for the Democrats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| 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. | ||
| And even if it's a bad call, as long as it's for your team, you're going to take it. | ||
| Yeah, we got it. | ||
| And once in a while, if it's such a bad call, you say, ooh, we got lucky there. | ||
| But almost never. | ||
| It's part of the fun in it, right? | ||
| The tribal fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| And that's why sports, again, it's like a low stakes, you know, replica of life and war and all that stuff relatively. | ||
| So I'm totally in favor of that. | ||
| I am too. | ||
| But I think it does show how kind of, you know, suggestible we all are. | ||
| Super suggestible. | ||
| And how strange it is that you could make this format like football, you know, a ball across the line represents a victory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And we've decided to make huge amounts of money attached to this game and then fill up the biggest arenas we have. | ||
| We have enormous 50,000 plus arenas of people cheering when a ball goes across the line. | ||
| There was this story I read about some rabbi in Europe 100, 200, 300 years ago, something. | ||
| And he wanted his students at this yeshiva to just study more. | ||
| And when they would have a break, they would always want to go outside and play football, soccer. | ||
| And they called it football. | ||
| And he would say to them, you know, I don't understand. | ||
| The treasures of Torah are so huge. | ||
| They're eternal. | ||
| Why do you want to go out and kick around a ball? | ||
| And they said, no, no, no, you don't understand, rabbi. | ||
| It is so much fun. | ||
| It's got a little competitive. | ||
| We get extra. | ||
| It's just great. | ||
| He said, they said, you know, just come outside and watch it once. | ||
| And we think you'll see how it works and how great it is. | ||
| So this old rabbi comes out once at lunchtime, and he's watching the two teams with the ball going back and forth. | ||
| They come back in after lunch, and he says, I think I've solved the problem for you. | ||
| If you get two balls instead of one, you won't have to be fighting each other all the time over the one ball, and everybody can be happy. | ||
| So, you know, different ways of looking at the world. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, if everyone could look at the world that way, the world would be a better place. | ||
| Sports are, for whatever reason, the best escape for a lot of people. | ||
| Because it's exciting and unpredictable. | ||
| And it's really happening. | ||
| Whereas a movie, even though it's an escape, you know it's not really happening. | ||
| You watch a sport, man. | ||
| If a guy can make a fucking three-pointer at the buzzer and it wins the game and everybody goes nuts, that shit's real. | ||
| Like, yes! | ||
|
unidentified
|
We fucking did it! | |
| You turn to your friends. | ||
| Everybody's so excited. | ||
| Hey, did you ever wonder? | ||
| So this is the universal symbol for yes, right? | ||
| But here's the one that also gets me. | ||
| The universal symbol for something great almost happened and then it didn't is this. | ||
| Hands on the forehead. | ||
| Everybody around the world, where does that come from in the human? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| Where in the code dictated that that's how we're going to express? | ||
| But everywhere around the world, that's what they do. | ||
| That's a really good question. | ||
| Yeah, I don't have an answer. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What is that? | |
| I don't know. | ||
| Is it like my brain? | ||
| Yeah, it must be like it's together. | ||
| My head's still here. | ||
| What's your favorite sport to watch? | ||
| I like fighting. | ||
| Because you do commentary for the UFC. I find the rest of the sports to be boring. | ||
| I don't really watch other sports. | ||
| Do you like fighting because of the tactics, because of the action, etc.? | ||
| Or is it because of the personality primarily? | ||
| 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. | ||
| And everybody's cheering. | ||
| And then, you know... | ||
| When it all plays out live, the rush of these guys, that these guys experience, and then the rush that the audience experiences, it's hard for me to watch 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. | ||
| I watch pool on YouTube every day. | ||
| So, let me ask you this. | ||
| UFC, let's say, is... | ||
| I mean, it's doing pretty well. | ||
| It's not the bonanza. | ||
| It looked like it might be a couple years ago, right? | ||
| Business-wise, the league, right? | ||
| It's doing better than ever. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, the athletes themselves, I know the superstars do great. | ||
| What about the rest of them? | ||
| Is it a steep pyramid, and is it bad news if you're in the middle? | ||
| It's a less steep pyramid than boxing. | ||
| In boxing, when you see the undercards of fights, if you see a fight like Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather's biggest boxing pay-per-view fight ever, huge fight, right? | ||
| Millions and millions and millions of dollars. | ||
| The guys further down the bottom of the chain, they're getting an awesome opportunity to fight in front of the crowd that's going to see Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather, 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. | ||
| And once you get beyond them, once you get to number 100, let's say. | ||
| Then you're trying to become number one. | ||
| It's not a thing that you're going to have any sort of security doing. | ||
| Do you like that? | ||
| So that's what economists call a tournament model, right? | ||
| Which is where a lot of people are willing to enter it because the winning is so high. | ||
| But you know that you're not going to make anything unless you advance a whole lot. | ||
| Would you rather see MMA like that? | ||
| Or would you rather see it more like the team sports where you're on a salary, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So NFL, if you're the 53rd guy on the roster, you're not making a ton of money, but you know you're going to make money, as long as you don't get hurt. | ||
| Would you rather see MMA a little bit more like that? | ||
| Would you rather see the fighters have more of a league and have more leverage, or do you like the way it's set up now? | ||
| Fighters are always going to be individuals. | ||
| It's very difficult to get a fighter in a union. | ||
| That's why it's never been done before. | ||
| Although the PGA Tour... | ||
| Is basically the union for the golfers. | ||
| They did that. | ||
| That's what the golfers did. | ||
| And tennis is a little bit different. | ||
| But anyway, I mean, couldn't they do it if... | ||
| Well, now UFC has too much leverage, I think, for that to happen, right? | ||
| 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 going to offer you... | ||
| Fight Conor McGregor for X amount of money, and you're like, I want more. | ||
| They're like, look, this guy's standing right 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 is 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. | ||
| On the other hand... | ||
| Twice a year at least. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Especially in the beginning you'd fight. | ||
| You'd probably fight as many times as you can in the beginning. | ||
| You'd fight three times a year if you could, four even. | ||
| And guys like Donald Cerrone, even at the top, still fights like four or five times a year just because he's a wild man. | ||
| So theoretically, like if you're looking at 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. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If you were to come in, let's say you or 10 other people were to come in with alternate leagues to UFC right now and take UFC as whatever. | ||
| Let's say there's 100 very good fighters right now, or 50. I have no idea. | ||
| But let's say you take the next 200 and make those other leagues. | ||
| Are you saying that would basically be what happened to boxing and then end up lowering- Well, people are doing that. | ||
| I don't know if you know, but there's multiple organizations that actually are doing that. | ||
| There's one called Bellator that's huge. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And do the athletes get a share? | ||
| Yes, they get a share. | ||
| I don't know how it's structured, but I know that the fighters prefer the Bellator model, which is they can find their own sponsors, and if they have a good management company, the management can get three or four sponsors on their shorts, and they might make more money from sponsors than they do from the fight itself, which is what was in the UFC, so a lot of fighters were really bummed out when they switched over to a different business model. | ||
| So that, I think, would probably be better for fighters. | ||
| But then, here's another thing. | ||
| Those fighters have to enforce that. | ||
| They have to chase those down, chase those sponsors down. | ||
| A lot of them go bad on you, and a lot of them don't pay. | ||
| And there was a real problem with that with fighters, where 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. | ||
| So, forgive my ignorance, but getting back to just the actual fighting, two fights a year sounds kind of like standard. | ||
| Three is kind of a lot. | ||
| Four is a whole lot. | ||
| Why? | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| But, I mean, like, I've seen fighting a little. | ||
| I've obviously, I mean, you look at me, you can tell I've never done it myself. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you go at it. | |
| You get busy. | ||
| But, I mean, like, the NFL is hard, right? | ||
| And they're playing 16 games a year plus preseason practice. | ||
| How can it be that hard that you can only do it a few times a year? | ||
| These are adorable questions. | ||
| Because it's this sport of hurting people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Football hurting people is an accidental occurrence. | ||
| No, that's not true. | ||
| Not if you're playing on the line. | ||
| Yeah, but they're colliding into each other, but they're not doing something specifically to knock you unconscious or to break your liver. | ||
| There's techniques that you're doing that are trying to fuck a guy's knee up. | ||
| I understand that, but is it that you need three, four, five, six months between to literally recuperate from the pain even if you win? | ||
| Is that what it's about? | ||
| It's not just pain. | ||
| It's punishment. | ||
| There's guys that their leg, it takes, Randy Couture, he fought this guy named Pedro Hizzo. | ||
| Pedro Hizzo was this Brazilian kickboxer that had the most devastating leg kicks maybe in the history of the sport. | ||
| He would slam his shin into people's legs and you could see them like visibly hobbled by it. | ||
| And Randy's leg was so fucked up from their first fight that he had to wait six months before he was fully recovered. | ||
| Six months. | ||
| Just from a guy kicking his leg, slamming his shin into the thigh. | ||
| His legs were just chopped meat. | ||
| They were just destroyed. | ||
| All the tissue was broken up. | ||
| There was blood inflamed. | ||
| His legs were swollen up. | ||
| I mean, it's horrific. | ||
| I have to say, you're reinforcing the validity of my decision to become a writer and not a fighter. | ||
| It's a long career. | ||
| It's exciting, but not too exciting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So I don't mean to sound even more naive than I've sounded now, but why do you choose the life of a fighter if it's that punishing? | ||
| Well, initially they do it for self-improvement. | ||
| They get involved for self-improvement. | ||
| 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 to be a professional athlete, it's attractive, especially to risk-seeking young males or females. | ||
| That totally makes sense, but let's say it's you. | ||
| Let's say you're 21 years old, you, and you have the ability to do that, right? | ||
| You're discovering that you have the ability to do that. | ||
| And then if you could project that decision forward, let's say 30 years, and say, okay, I'm going to go for this, and I'm going to factor in the probability that I'm actually going to make really good money or have an amazing life-changing or life-affirming experience for 10 years and then get out and do something else, versus do that insurance cubicle job. | ||
| In other words, you know, it's kind of the short, the high probability, high risk bet versus the longer steady one, where you might have more of a center of gravity to have a family, et cetera. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Which would you choose and why? - Well, first of all, why would I only have two choices? | |
| That seems ridiculous. | ||
| Because I'm only giving you two right now. | ||
| And I used to fight. | ||
| I stopped fighting when I was 21 because I was worried about head injuries. | ||
| It was too dangerous. | ||
| And when I was doing it, there was no money. | ||
| There wasn't a UFC there. | ||
| If you were making that decision now, though, with the money now... | ||
| do you think the decision would be different? | ||
| Well, there was no UFC then, so there was no choice. | ||
| But take 21-year-old Joe. | ||
| Yes, I would have fought, for sure, 100%. | ||
| I definitely would have. | ||
| I was excited by it. | ||
| It was scary. | ||
| I was terrified. | ||
| But I also knew that I could get good at it. | ||
| And then while I was getting good at it, it's a wild rush. | ||
| It's a wild, crazy rush because it's so dangerous to do. | ||
| And the risk-seeking, those kind of people that are risk-seekers, the ones that do rock climbing and BMX bike running and base jumping, that's a type of person For whatever reason, that's a type of person. | ||
| And they gravitate towards those fights, and they gravitate towards martial arts. | ||
| And some of them are the nicest people I've ever met in my life. | ||
| They are some of the nicest, kindest, most interesting, introspective people, deep-thinking people. | ||
| People that read a lot, they can talk to you about things, that can be honest and personal about things. | ||
| They have a really good control of their ego because they're getting trounced in training all the time. | ||
| Everyone's getting humbled all the time. | ||
| But you'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. | ||
| But for them, it's insanely attractive. | ||
| What's the long-term health complications from MMA? Do we know a lot about it yet? | ||
| I mean, we're learning a lot about football. | ||
| It's the same as any combat sport. | ||
| Football is like a car accident. | ||
| These two giant dudes are slamming into each other. | ||
| I tend to think that there's some impacts that I've seen in football that it's not recreatable in an MMA ring. | ||
| Because you don't have momentum. | ||
| Yeah, you're not running at each other. | ||
| But, that said... | ||
| There's plenty. | ||
| I mean, I've seen dudes get kicked into oblivion, and women get kicked unconscious multiple times in one event. | ||
| And I've worked, I don't know how many events, I've called more than, 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Similar to boxing? | ||
| Very similar. | ||
| Very similar. | ||
| I think maybe boxing has a little bit more damage because all you're doing is punching. | ||
| You're not kicking the legs. | ||
| You're not taking each other down. | ||
| You're not choking each other. | ||
| So the accumulation... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The accumulation of blows to your head. | ||
| You might be able to argue that they get more, but then there's a guy like Floyd Mayweather who doesn't get hit at all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's so good at not being hit. | ||
| He's probably been hit less in his entire boxing career of 50 victories and zero defeats than most MMA fighters in their entire life, like tenfold. | ||
| They get hit ten times more than him, easily. | ||
| So imagine that I came down from Mars and I look at human civilization and I think, you know, this makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense. | ||
| This one doesn't make any sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fights? | |
| Well, I was going to use fights as an example. | ||
| Yeah, what about the Coliseum? | ||
| I mean, it's always been a part of humans. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We've been interested in people beating the shit out of each other since the beginning of time. | ||
| Because it scares us. | ||
| So it's entertaining to watch other people do it. | ||
| That's why we want to watch a bar fight. | ||
| I don't want to be in a bar fight. | ||
| You don't want to be in a bar fight, right? | ||
| But if you saw a bar fight, you'd be like, what the fuck? | ||
| Is this really happening? | ||
| A lot of the people who have turned against football the last, let's say, five or ten years, fueled by CTE, which is obviously a legitimate thing. | ||
| We don't really know the magnitude and the scope yet. | ||
| But a lot of people who've turned against it do it for a kind of moral argument that I don't want to support an endeavor. | ||
| Where people are hurting each other, period. | ||
| Right? | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| I mean, there's a libertarian argument to say, what are you talking about? | ||
| People can do whatever they want. | ||
| They can do drugs. | ||
| They can go bungee jumping. | ||
| They can work stock trading, which is stressful. | ||
| You can do whatever you want. | ||
| So where do you lie on that? | ||
| Well, I think, first of all, they're right, and you are doing something that's definitely going to harm you. | ||
| However, I feel like if you want to do something that you enjoy doing, that's going to take some time out of your life that's finite anyway, who the fuck am I to tell you you can't do that? | ||
| Where am I going to draw the line? | ||
| Am I going to say no gymnastics? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where am I going to draw the line? | ||
| Do you know soccer causes a tremendous amount of CTE? Do you know that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Lacrosse. | ||
| Lacrosse is a lot of... | ||
| It's subconcussive trauma. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just heading the ball causes a lot of CTE. I know a lot of youth leagues now are starting to cut out heading, which I think is probably a pretty good idea. | ||
| It's a very good idea. | ||
| They should probably eliminate it totally. | ||
| Often it's not the ball. | ||
| It's the collision with the guy in here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Often. | ||
| But they think heading has a huge impact. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| What I'm saying, when you're going up for headers, you're often, you're knocking heads, you're knocking a shoulder into a head, an elbow into a head. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, you're running around on a field in full clip. | ||
| You're going to collide with each other. | ||
| Where do you stand on paying for organs? | ||
| But let's keep going with this, because we didn't even touch the surface of this. | ||
| I'm in favor of people doing what they want to do with their life. | ||
| If you choose to do something with your life, are we going to take away race car driving? | ||
| Because that's one of the scariest goddamn things a person can do. | ||
| Not as much anymore. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
| These guys are getting fucked up. | ||
| Did you see that recent crash? | ||
| I did, but the fact that we remember that so well, one reason is because there have been so few since Earnhardt died back in whatever that was, 2000... | ||
| I had Dale Earnhardt Jr. on this podcast and he went in depth about brain damage that he's gotten from multiple crashes. | ||
| He talked about the severe impact of the concussions. | ||
| He talked about the difficulty coming back and the different modalities, the different medical treatments that he's had to have. | ||
| That's Dale Earnhardt Jr. This is after his dad is gone, right? | ||
| This guy talked like really extensively on this podcast about his personal struggle with brain damage that he's received from car accidents. | ||
| It's a fucking scary way to make a living. | ||
| And arguably more scary than fighting. | ||
| Because there are guys like Demetrius Mighty Mouse Johnson, who's like this elite MMA fighter that barely gets touched. | ||
| There's guys like him that don't take any damage. | ||
| And then there's guys who are elite... | ||
| NASCAR drivers who wind up in these crazy collisions and go sent through the air and they wind up in the hospital all fucked up. | ||
| The impact, just the impact, even if you're in a cage, just your brain rattling around inside your head fucks you up. | ||
| And we're letting people do that. | ||
| And I don't think we should stop. | ||
| I think we should let people do whatever they want. | ||
| If they want to take a tightrope walk across the Grand Canyon and film it on YouTube, I'm not the guy. | ||
| Unless it's over private land or public land and there's a law against using it, who are we to tell people they can't rock climb? | ||
| Who are we to tell people they can't ski? | ||
| Where do we draw the line? | ||
| Where do you decide a person can't do a thing? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You make a good argument. | ||
| I don't think there's a bad argument with what you're saying, though, in saying that it causes damage to people. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| By the way, I love the NFL. I would cry if it went away. | ||
| On the other hand, and I know a few NFL, well now former NFL players, one of whom stopped playing in his fifth year way earlier than he had to because he was worried about CTE, but also he was getting a PhD in math from MIT at the same time. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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. | ||
| The whole world, if you had the ability to do it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then it goes straight back to the Colosseum. | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Right now, people find it repugnant to use a plastic shopping bag. | ||
| And that's a dangerous argument if it's not a good decision, right? | ||
| Because if you can feel like, oh, we stopped using plastic shopping bags, therefore, this is called moral licensing. | ||
| Because I've made one good moral decision, now I can license myself to do other stuff. | ||
| It's great on paper, right? | ||
| Every time you go to the supermarket, you have to bring a reusable bag. | ||
| It's great on paper until you don't have a reusable bag. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's... | ||
| It's interesting, too, that we just... | ||
| Accept an inevitable amount of litter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's really a garbage disposal issue. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| If we had a zero... | ||
| How hard is it? | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's interesting. | ||
| Because sometimes there's accidents, right? | ||
| Things fall off things. | ||
| Things blow down the street. | ||
| You can't get to them. | ||
| But there's a lot of it is just asshole-ishness. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I happen to play golf, which... | ||
| I'm a little embarrassed about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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How dare you? | |
| I know. | ||
| I grew up as the kind of person that looked at golfers like, that's not my club. | ||
| When did you start? | ||
| Like eight, ten years ago. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I absolutely love it. | ||
| It's also nice because you're outdoors for a long time. | ||
| You're often alone for a long time. | ||
| And another thing I really like about it is I get to be around other people, often men, in a way that you don't get to be around other men in that way. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| It's good for the soul, in a way. | ||
| And I just like the competition. | ||
| It's a really hard game, so I like trying to get better at it. | ||
| But the thing that amazes me is how much crap there is, how much garbage there is on a golf course. | ||
| I'm like thinking... | ||
| It'll blow out of your bag. | ||
| And I'm just like... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I like nature a lot. | ||
| I don't like the idea of candy wrappers all over. | ||
| So then I... Right. | ||
| I extrapolate and think bigger like you do. | ||
| Plastic bags, should it be that hard to take it home, use it maybe once or twice again, and then throw it away? | ||
| And I understand that they're less recyclable, but we have a lot of landfill space. | ||
| But even landfill space, that's where a lot of it goes. | ||
| You've seen landfill space where things are flying around the wind. | ||
| It's just like, goddammit, it's hard to contain all of our garbage. | ||
| We produce so much crap. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| We really do. | ||
| Although much less per person weight-wise than we did 50, 100 years ago. | ||
| But that's mostly because garbage used to be heavier. | ||
| It used to be wooden crates. | ||
| technological improvements that are difficult to see while you're in the moment. | ||
| Like, if you go back and look at photos of Los Angeles in the 60s, and you see the pollution, it was insane. | ||
| It was literally like there was a fire, right? | ||
| And now it's gotten a lot better. | ||
| It still sucks, but it's gotten a lot better. | ||
| Question, would it have gotten a lot better without, let's say... | ||
| Regulation? | ||
| Yeah, would industry have done it on its own? | ||
| No chance. | ||
| No, they would have accepted it. | ||
| Clean Air Act. | ||
| Which president? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you know that? | |
| I don't. | ||
| Nixon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| Go to Mexico. | ||
| Go to Mexico City. | ||
| Wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, when we were flying in, I was like, holy shit, that's real? | ||
| Like, crazy pollution. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I took photos of it and put it on Instagram. | ||
| I'm like, this is wild. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you been to China? | ||
| No, never been in China. | ||
| Bring your face, man. | ||
| I'm sure, yeah. | ||
| No, I've seen videos. | ||
| I'm hoping that technology catches up to our pollution. | ||
| At the same time, we're remedying our situation by trying to be better with recycling. | ||
| But I'm hoping that someone figures out some giant building-size filter. | ||
| Some huge thing they put in the middle of every city, and it sucks all the carbon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It just seems like in the particulates. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Global warming. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Anyway, global warming is a very complicated issue. | ||
| This is another example where when people reduce it to the headlines and then divide people into tribes, it's exactly the opposite of what you want. | ||
| Perfect example because it's clearly a right versus left thing, too, in some people's circles. | ||
| If you're on the right, you're supposed to say, it's exaggerated, it's a hoax, it's this, it's that, it's not my concern, my concern is jobs, my concern is that. | ||
| Like, you repeat the talking points, and if it's on the left, it's, how dare you! | ||
| It's Greta Thunberg. | ||
| I think the biggest, that was not the best Greta Thunberg. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How dare you! | |
| That was actually, now that I know it's her, it was not a bad imitation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not bad. | |
| I think one of Obama's biggest mistakes, he plainly wanted to address climate change, global warming, but he did it in a kind of standard left Democrat way by calling it global warming, by saying that there were bad actors, which is true. | ||
| The thing that astonishes me that Democrats haven't done is talk about it in a language that every Republican, every conservative, every Hunter Fisher would respond to, which is pollution, which is what it is, by the way. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We're fucking awesome. | ||
| We really are. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yes, there was. | ||
| So he's okay with money, but not good with giving people credit? | ||
| I haven't read this in a long time, so I can't speak to it. | ||
| But even like, I've been... | ||
| Do you like Richard Feynman? | ||
| You know Richard Feynman? | ||
| So, you know, when he talks about... | ||
| I love hearing him talk about when he was drafted to work on the Manhattan Project. | ||
| And you think about it. | ||
| America was... | ||
| It was an existential fear. | ||
| Legitimate, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| I mean, we wound up using it. | ||
| They could have used it on us. | ||
| We did indeed. | ||
| And... | ||
| And when you hear Feynman talk about all the complication of that, we have an enormous scientific challenge, we have an enormous competition against the Germans who are trying to do the same thing, and then even if we win, then we have another whole challenge, which is the moral challenge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, what is the lesser of two evils in that regard? | ||
| Is it drop the bombs and stop the war? | ||
| Or is the lesser of two evils never drop the bomb and stop the war later? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, there's a million books been written about this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I could make an argument in either case. | ||
| I mean, Japan, we were very, very scared of Japan. | ||
| Japan had shown a lot of ability to punish the United States. | ||
| Even though Germany was out, America still felt very fragile. | ||
| So I totally get the argument that it was meant to be I get it, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| On the other hand, you're picking some pretty big cities to drop it on, and you're picking two. | ||
| And you're killing mostly civilians. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's hard to imagine that decision would be made today. | ||
| But as you just said about 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. | ||
| It's very hard to project it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I suppose we all thought that one way or another. | ||
| Dude! | ||
| Imagine being that guy. | ||
| I mean, here's a guy, first of all, was quoting the Bhagavad Gita in 1945. A little ahead of his time. | ||
| It was pretty incredible. | ||
| Or 46? | ||
|
unidentified
|
When did they first detonate? | |
| The tests were, I think, 44 and Hiroshima and Nagasaki 45, correct? | ||
| Somewhere in that range. | ||
| Being this guy who, you know, he's just a brilliant scientist. | ||
| He's not supposed to be the guy who destroys a half a million people in one moment, one brief flash of light and vaporizes a half a million people. | ||
| He went to this school in New York City called the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which is where my kids went. | ||
| So Oppenheimer is kind of a patron saint for... | ||
| Having the brains to do something almost unimaginable and having the ethics and courage to know that what he'd done was... | ||
| Unacceptable on some levels. | ||
| You know, on the other hand, but look, if we're talking about costs and benefits, let's think about nuclear power, nuclear bombs as a deterrent against others down the road, right? | ||
| So you have to say, killed a lot of people. | ||
| How many lives did it save? | ||
| Impossible to say. | ||
| You sound like a Republican, sir. | ||
| I know, I know, but I mean, no. | ||
| That's the argument, right? | ||
| Then let's also talk about nuclear power, which was the byproduct of this, right? | ||
| And there are those who could argue, and I would probably aid this argument to say that if the U.S. had continued on the path of nuclear power in the 70s rather than totally flipping out after – well, after Three Mile Island and then later Chernobyl, which was a much worse and I would probably aid this argument to say that if the U.S. had continued If that had continued, 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. | ||
| I enjoy that. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| Well, I think we're so often married to our ideas, like our ideas are a part of us and we're losing if our ideas that we've been discussing are incorrect. | ||
| If our assumptions were incorrect, it's a value judgment against us. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, I think the nuclear thing is interesting because I think one of the problems with what happened was the shitty design of like Fukushima where they can't shut it off. | ||
| It's freaked people out, rightly so. | ||
| And it's built in a bad spot. | ||
| It's a terrible spot. | ||
| Yeah, and the backup plan sucked. | ||
| Everything's wrong. | ||
| And now they have this nuclear hotspot that they're, you know, it's going to be like that for 100,000 years. | ||
| Right. | ||
| there's a better way, and they never had a chance to find that better way, because they've had a better way for everything else. | ||
| In the later ones, the ones that are operational now are far better than the Fukushima one. | ||
| And they could have gotten way, way, way, way, way better. | ||
| And it's one of those things that doesn't seem like it makes sense. | ||
| Like, wait a minute, nuclear's clean? | ||
| It's fucking really clean. | ||
| It's really clean if it's done right. | ||
| And if they allowed them to innovate over those 40 years, we would have got to some place where it's super efficient, just like everything else. | ||
| If you look at a 1970 car, right? | ||
| And then you look at a car from 2020, how about a Tesla? | ||
| Zero emissions. | ||
| Maybe they would figure out how to really knock it down. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| Yeah, reasons to be cheerful. | ||
| Bunkers filled with shit that's eventually going to crack through the bunker and toxify everything around it. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Or you could also theoretically use that as literally as fuel. | ||
| Not only that, have you seen the thing where they've discovered bacteria in Fukushima that's adapting to eating nuclear waste? | ||
| No, that's interesting. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's Fukushima. | ||
| Pull that up. | ||
| Bacteria that eats nuclear waste. | ||
| Yeah, they're discovering bacteria that's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Life is so sneaky. | |
| Life just finds a way. | ||
| Like those vents, those volcanic vents at the bottom of the ocean. | ||
| You're like, what are you doing here? | ||
| This sounds like the way... | ||
| You know CRISPR? You know what CRISPR is? | ||
| This was discovered. | ||
| It was found. | ||
| The mechanism for that was basically these bacteria that were living in some deeply inhospitable place like this. | ||
| Radiation-eating bacteria could make nuclear waste safer. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where do we buy those? | ||
| Like a Walmart? | ||
| You get those bacteria? | ||
| What was the date you just highlighted there, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
2017. Oh. | |
| April 11th. | ||
| I think that's a different one. | ||
| But that's probably something they've been talking about. | ||
| But I think there was something recently where they discovered... | ||
| Some bacteria that was eating radiation. | ||
| Alright, I got a question for you, Joe Rogan. | ||
| Let's say that we collectively decide that protein is a really important intake for most humans, but that some people Either don't want to eat meat, or they find that meat is too resource-intensive, etc., etc., but they also don't want to eat the kind of processed fake meat, which is, 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. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you can have that argument. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But then there's the people that don't want to eat bugs. | ||
| Well, then don't eat bugs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| But hold on. | ||
| Here's the thing for the people that do want to eat bugs. | ||
| It's a good source of protein. | ||
| And ethically, we don't feel as bad about killing bugs as we do about killing cows. | ||
| I was at an ashram once, and I had a friend that was renting a place that the ashram had for rent. | ||
| So I'm hanging out with this lady who's a monk, I guess. | ||
| I don't know how you would call her. | ||
| But she ran the ashram. | ||
| Very nice lady. | ||
| But she had bug spray. | ||
| And I go, why a bug spray? | ||
| She goes, we have an ant problem. | ||
| They're getting into the garbage. | ||
| I go, whoa. | ||
| I go, do you understand what you're saying? | ||
| I go, we're at an ashram and you're fucking, you're spraying death from the sky on these little life forms. | ||
| Like imagine if she was running around killing kittens with a hammer, right? | ||
| We would go, no fucking way. | ||
| She's like, they shit everywhere. | ||
| They're pissing on my garbage. | ||
| I got to kill these fucking kittens. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Well, to a Buddhist, spraying ants with bug spray should be the same as killing a fucking kitten with a hammer. | ||
| What an arbitrary decision, right? | ||
| The kitten's okay. | ||
| It's a very arbitrary choice. | ||
| You see many vegans slap mosquitoes, right? | ||
| You don't just let them eat you. | ||
| There's a thing where we decide that an animal is not as valuable. | ||
| And big furry animals are the most valuable animals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Although one argument against it is it takes a lot more land because the yield is so much lower. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It takes more land, but I'm not talking about for the entire city. | ||
| I'm saying like if we had blocks, right? | ||
| Like say if there was a block of people, right? | ||
| And in that block, there's one patch that everybody tended to do together. | ||
| And there was a community. | ||
| My parents actually, my parents were hippies. | ||
| And when I was a kid in San Francisco, they actually were part of this co-op. | ||
| And we would go there. | ||
| And I thought it was interesting, but I was seven. | ||
| I didn't know that that was unusual. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| Just take Central Park, for example. | ||
| What an amazing place. | ||
| Somewhere near there. | ||
| I'm not saying grow vegetables there. | ||
| But take it as an example. | ||
| Everything doesn't have to be hardscaped. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's become a duck-caused syllab. | ||
| Have you ever eaten insects, like cooked well? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, first of all, I hosted Fear Factor. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I forgot about that. | ||
| I've eaten roaches and tomato hornworms. | ||
| Why do you think there's such a... | ||
| Roaches do gross people out more. | ||
| They carry diseases. | ||
| Yeah, but don't others? | ||
| Is it because they're garbage eaters because they live near humans? | ||
| That's the problem? | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| That's the ones that we hate. | ||
| We hate everything that lives near us. | ||
| You do have to appreciate their indestructibility, though. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah, they're amazing. | ||
| I mean, if I were an engineer, I think the roach would be my, like, inspiration. | ||
| It's a special animal. | ||
| I mean, it really is. | ||
| It's a special little creature. | ||
| It's figured out a way to live in every single urban environment. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And to live inside your walls, inside your house, and exist in your garbage. | ||
| Is the rat essentially the roach equivalent, or are all rodents pretty? | ||
| Scarier. | ||
| Because rats have technically carried things that have killed millions of people. | ||
| Don't squirrels as well, though? | ||
| Nah. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| How come? | ||
| Because they're herbivores. | ||
| They're not involved in those tight-knit groups where they spread diseases. | ||
| I mean, they could technically get fleas that could carry plagues, and I'm sure they have. | ||
| That's where a lot of people used to get diseases, right? | ||
| They'd get a flea from a rat, and that was the plague. | ||
| And they blamed it on the rats, but it was really the bugs. | ||
| And I think that rats, I mean, have you ever seen the Netflix documentary? | ||
| No. | ||
| I got a long list from you. | ||
| You got this list. | ||
| Walking out of here with a lot of entertainment. | ||
| This one's number one. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| It's called Rats. | ||
| It's a Netflix documentary. | ||
| It is amazing. | ||
| Did they deal with this story I've read about years ago, and I think this was in Saigon probably years and years ago. | ||
| Maybe that's, that might not be right. | ||
| About when, you know, there's a rat infestation. | ||
| This has happened throughout history. | ||
| It's happened in many places. | ||
| I know it happened in South Africa not long ago either, where the city will call for like a bounty. | ||
| They'll say, you kill the rat, so people start breeding and growing extra rats. | ||
| Is that in the film? | ||
| No, it's not, but I know that story. | ||
| I love stories of incentives gone wrong, because we do it. | ||
| You incentivize something. | ||
| People are so gross. | ||
| Would you eat a rat? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| Especially if I was hungry. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, it's just meat. | ||
| Once you cook it and you put some seasoning on it, I have a friend who ate a coyote. | ||
| And what's your meat situation right now? | ||
| You're still eating mostly meat? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Mostly wild game. | ||
| So mostly what I eat is elk. | ||
| It's stuff that you've hunted yourself? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But I eat beefsteak too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I've been on this diet for the last couple months that's basically just meat. | ||
| What else are you eating besides meat? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Just meat. | ||
| No fruit, no veg. | ||
| No fruit, no vegetables, just meat. | ||
| So what's that feel like? | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| This is what's weird about it. | ||
| First of all, what's weird is your energy levels. | ||
| Without the carbohydrate rollercoaster ride of the spike of the insulin and the sugar and the body processing it, it's amazing. | ||
| It's just steadier, you're saying? | ||
| Yes, you don't get the crash. | ||
| I did hear you talking about, though, feeling like you are more angry or aggressive in some ways. | ||
| Are you still feeling that? | ||
| I was partially joking around about that, but I was saying that you almost have to work out more. | ||
| I think it's just energy. | ||
| I think my body not having to process a large amount of carbohydrates, particularly, not vegetables. | ||
| Vegetables seem pretty easy, but they do, like if I eat a lot of vegetables, I do get a lot of gas. | ||
| Thanks for sharing. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| But that everybody gets. | ||
| Not all vegetables. | ||
| Some vegetables are super gassy. | ||
| The Jerusalem artichoke is, I believe, the gaseous vegetable. | ||
| Well, it's really dependent upon your personal digestion. | ||
| Is that true? | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But the point is, there's none of that with just meat. | ||
| Do you eat breakfast or no? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It depends on the day. | ||
| Today I did. | ||
| What did you have? | ||
| Today I had six eggs and I had four pieces of bacon. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That was breakfast. | ||
| Lunch then? | ||
| I haven't eaten anything since. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| We should say we're talking at 6 p.m. | ||
| local time. | ||
| I had a workout and I hung out with my dog, went for a walk with him, and then came here and did two podcasts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you're going to eat again today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What do you have? | ||
| I'll eat meat. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But just a plate of meat, then. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Does it get boring? | ||
| Because I love meat, but I can't imagine that it wouldn't get a little... | ||
| It does not. | ||
| It gets boring if you think it's boring. | ||
| But it is delicious food. | ||
| If you have it every day, you get bored because you have too much delicious food. | ||
| So I think it's really a perspective issue. | ||
| And it's also the health benefits that I've found, like just the way I feel, the energy level, and mental clarity. | ||
| It's very interesting. | ||
| Like there's something going on with the struggle that you have... | ||
| Thinking about things right after you have a big meal. | ||
| You know, that mashed potatoes and pasta. | ||
| I'm so dumb. | ||
| I'm like 30 IQ points dumber. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That seems to not be an issue when you are on this steady diet of just eating animal foods, protein. | ||
| Because your body creates its own glucose through glucogenesis where it breaks down the protein and creates glucose. | ||
| And as long as you get enough fat... | ||
| That's what's really critical. | ||
| You can get too lean, where the meat is too lean, you don't have enough fats, your body doesn't have fat to process, and that screws with you. | ||
| Yeah, now what about the things that are in vegetables that are not in meat, nutritionally? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| Are they significant enough to either take supplements or to worry about? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I take multivitamins. | ||
| I take an athlete's pure pack. | ||
| It's like a bag, a little baggy filled with multivitamins. | ||
| Then I take Glucosamine and chondroitin. | ||
| I take a bunch of other different things. | ||
| Fish oil. | ||
| I take quite a few supplements. | ||
| And again, I'm not telling people to live this way. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| What does an all-meat diet do to your stool, if you don't mind me asking? | ||
| It reduces it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's why all that stuff is very, very unreliable. | ||
| Yeah, it's very weird. | ||
| So there's a bunch of doctors that are currently like, and I use the term in air quotes, that are promoting the carnivore diet 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. | ||
| Has there ever been a population that's been studied, at least quasi-scientifically, that's had a mostly meat diet for a long time? | ||
| Inuit, yeah. | ||
| And? | ||
| What do we know? | ||
| The Maasai, Inuit. | ||
| What do we know about cancer, longevity, and so on? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| Inuit apparently now suffer. | ||
| And one of the reasons why they suffer is the introduction of alcohol and tobacco and, you know, cigarettes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And they were very healthy. | ||
| Milk from what animal? | ||
| From cows. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They're cattle herders. | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How would you do that? | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| Why the inclination always to ban things? | ||
| No, I'm not. | ||
| I always go to the extreme just to show. | ||
| The hypothetical is always ban the word, ban the food, ban the action, ban the sport. | ||
| It is because we're not very good at regulating, honestly. | ||
| Because we kind of vacillate between an all embrace and a hate. | ||
| Look, I think the best example of how bad we are at this is with vaping. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So like vaping in this country was handled very poorly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| There were the deaths, which were mostly, as I understand it, black market THC pods. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Adam Curry just ran over this entire thing in the last podcast. | ||
| E-cigarettes are, they might get you addicted to nicotine, which may be a bad thing, although nicotine per se, not a bad thing in moderation. | ||
| In fact, it's used clinically. | ||
| People have been using it historically. | ||
| It's a nootropic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, but the UK did something very different with e-cigarettes. | ||
| When they saw people 10, 12 years ago starting to use them, they said, oh, people want this. | ||
| We can either say, no, you can't have it. | ||
| We'll make it illegal, in which case there will be a black market and they'll get stuff that's probably not so well made. | ||
| Or we can try to deal with it in a responsible, sensible way. | ||
| And what they did is they allowed e-cigarettes with about 20% as much nicotine as are in the United States. | ||
| So what you don't have in the UK is a bunch of teenagers who are now addicted to nicotine who never would have been smokers. | ||
| You also don't have a whole bunch of counterfeit THC pods in the UK where people are dying. | ||
| So to me, banning is almost never the solution. | ||
| You look at prohibition, I mean, prohibition did exactly the wrong... | ||
| But do you understand the hustle, what happened behind the whole THC ban? | ||
| This is why it gets more complicated. | ||
| The THC vaping ban? | ||
| Excuse me, the vaping ban after they... | ||
| The people died from the THC. They knew that those things had nothing to do with it. | ||
| They started blaming... | ||
| With e-cigarettes, you mean? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They started blaming it because they were trying to introduce a tobacco-based e-cigarette. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it was all about the company that bought out the Juul cigarette, which was a very popular one, in order to kill it. | ||
| They were just trying to kill the business. | ||
| And then they passed this, they're trying to pass this, rather, legislation against flavored tobaccos. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| All they're trying to do was clear the room for their business. | ||
| And Adam Curry laid it out brilliantly. | ||
| It's shocking how well it worked. | ||
| He said it's basically the tobacco version of who killed the electric car. | ||
| It's a sneaky backroom deal and they hoodwink people. | ||
| And next thing you know, you're, oh, I don't want the kids to be smoking strawberry vapor. | ||
| And really, they're just clearing the way for this tobacco-flavored bullshit, because it's made with tobacco. | ||
| Like, this is the only stuff you can have. | ||
| This is the purest. | ||
| It's like doctors smoke camels. | ||
| It's really like those goddamn commercials. | ||
| They were, yeah. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| So it's really just a sneaky business move. | ||
| And we're all like, I don't get it. | ||
| Like, how the fuck are they going to ban vaping 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. | ||
| You're also going to drive a lot of smokers who are trying to quit smoking back to cigarettes. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's the issue. | ||
| Your stuff sucks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People are mad. | ||
| I can't even have strawberry anymore. | ||
| I was enjoying the strawberry. | ||
| And a lot of smokers who take up vaping to stop smoking, they specifically don't want tobacco flavor because that's too reminiscent of the cigarettes. | ||
| They just want that hit. | ||
| Were you a smoker ever? | ||
| No, never. | ||
| Just pot. | ||
| Never had any nicotine? | ||
| Because nicotine's an interesting drug. | ||
| Oh, I've had it. | ||
| I've had cigarettes. | ||
| I've had a cigarette with my friend Tony Hinchcliffe a couple of times before shows, and Dave Chappelle smokes, and when I do shows with him, I'll steal one of his cigarettes and smoke it. | ||
| If you don't smoke, one cigarette will get you pretty buzzed, right? | ||
| You get high as fuck. | ||
| You don't just get high, you get like racing. | ||
| Jittery. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| It's like your brain's firing. | ||
| It's one of the things that Stephen King said about quitting that really bothered him was it was great that he cleaned up the habit and stopped doing it, but the firing of the synapses, like he misses that. | ||
| When I wrote my first book, I Was a Smoker... | ||
| Not a heavy smoker, but I smoked, and I was living in the middle of the Catskill Mountains, beautiful place, by myself, middle of the woods. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| Dude, that's romantic. | ||
| That's a romantic writer's story. | ||
| It was romantic if there had been someone else with me. | ||
| No, it's a romantic writer's story, right? | ||
| It was great. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I loved it. | |
| The middle of the Catskills, by yourself, writing a book. | ||
| 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 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. | ||
| So they say he's like a cigarette. | ||
| Like the drug is good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The delivery system is absolutely terrible. | |
| That's interesting. | ||
| Now, how is the vaping? | ||
| Did you switch with vaping? | ||
| No, I quit smoking a long time ago. | ||
| Although I quit, you know, it's interesting. | ||
| I wrote in my first book, my family memoir about the Jewish Catholic family, I wrote in there not that I was a smoker, but that this one instance where I stepped outside with my brother after this intense moment and we had a cigarette. | ||
| And a few years later, the book had been published. | ||
| I was now newly married, and I know that you're supposed to buy life insurance. | ||
| And so I got this insurance broker, and he knew my name. | ||
| He said, oh, I read your book. | ||
| I said, oh, that's great. | ||
| Glad to hear. | ||
| And then we started to price out the insurance, and he said, you know, what do you do? | ||
| Are you a smoker? | ||
| I said, no, not a smoker, because I'd quit a few years earlier. | ||
| And then he called me back and he said, you know, I read your book where you stepped outside to have a cigarette with your brother. | ||
| All of a sudden I got the smoking rate for life insurance. | ||
| Even though you quit? | ||
| Yeah, even though I quit. | ||
| Because you used to smoke? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, so have you smoked at all? | ||
| No, that's not what I thought. | ||
| He asked me, are you a smoker? | ||
| I said no, because I'd quit. | ||
| 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 for anybody. | ||
| Even if you've been smoking 40 years, they say if you quit, your lungs can actually recover greatly. | ||
| So it's worth it. | ||
| Yeah, I think smoking is... | ||
| I hate to say it. | ||
| I think smoking is a terrible idea. | ||
| It's a terrible idea. | ||
| There's no if, answer, but... | ||
| On the other hand... | ||
| Does vaping replace the... | ||
| Like Adam Curry switched to vaping. | ||
| He had this crazy contraption. | ||
| One of those guys who's in a really complicated garage remote control looking vaping things with... | ||
| He's into those things. | ||
| He quit, and that's how he quit. | ||
| So the best science at the moment says that vaping is almost certainly much better than smoking. | ||
| Because they don't know all the chemicals and all the potential damage that vaping may or may not do, but they do know the damage. | ||
| Combustible cigarettes and all the chemicals there are demonstrably pretty bad. | ||
| Even though, like you said, we were told Doctors do it. | ||
| This is the best. | ||
| We're told the same thing about sugar. | ||
| Sugar gives you a great boost and so on. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| But again, my take is if you want to smoke, go ahead. | ||
| Well, but wait a minute. | ||
| I think you're living a finite life. | ||
| But wait a minute. | ||
| Let's say now we are talking about who pays, right? | ||
| So this gets back to the externality thing. | ||
| If you smoke and I'm paying for your health insurance as a taxpayer, don't I get to have a say? | ||
| It's a very good question. | ||
| And how far should we extend that? | ||
| Because if you're fat, should I have to pay? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You keep eating. | ||
| Why do you keep eating? | ||
| If you don't sleep well and you're prone to heart attacks, am I supposed to pay? | ||
| Why don't you sleep more? | ||
| There's so many variables. | ||
| Are you a guy who rock climbs? | ||
| Well, what if you fall and break your leg? | ||
| Do I have to fucking pay for that? | ||
| There's a lot of variables that you've got to wonder about when you start breaking down how much assistance people get based on their life choices. | ||
| But the way to do that is to price it. | ||
| And this is where economists are really useful. | ||
| Price it out for the individual and punish them for their behavior? | ||
| Not punish them, tax them, charge them, right? | ||
| If I want to be a rock climber and a smoker and 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. | ||
| Well, it's not free if there's a premium, right? | ||
| Look, healthcare is never free. | ||
| Right, not in this country. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Even in Scandinavia, it's free to the user at point of purchase. | ||
| Right, yes. | ||
| But no, it's expensive. | ||
| And that's what Scandinavia has done well. | ||
| We're talking about the user, though. | ||
| We're talking about the user having to pay a premium. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're already paying your taxes. | ||
| Let's say you're paying 20% total tax, whatever that goes into the healthcare. | ||
| But then additionally, theoretically... | ||
| I think it's very hard to regulate behavior because, again, where do we draw the line? | ||
| What about BMX riding? | ||
| What about people who do this and that? | ||
| There's a lot of things that people do. | ||
| Basically, everything you do, you have to pay for. | ||
| Yeah, but there's so many things that people do that we take for granted. | ||
| How about little girls do gymnastics? | ||
| How much do their parents have to pay? | ||
| How about driving in a car? | ||
| Yes, one of the scariest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How about so many things that people do that they think of nothing? | ||
| We should just all sit inside with helmets and watch YouTube. | ||
| How about CrossFit? | ||
| How much you gotta pay? | ||
| You wanna do CrossFit? | ||
| But then we've got to measure the benefit, too. | ||
| CrossFit, you're building up your body, you're going to live longer. | ||
| Well, that's possible. | ||
| But then you're also probably hanging out with lunatics like you who are riding crazy vehicles, right? | ||
| I'm a kind driver. | ||
| But I think that CrossFit, the benefit, yeah, is you're getting in shape. | ||
| So that balances itself out. | ||
| As long as you do it intelligently, 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because people are gross. | ||
| Yeah, but we're improving. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Again, as a species. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Let's not lose sight of that. | ||
| It's good news. | ||
| I'm an optimist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm a 100% glasses half full person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever tried to turn other people into an optimist and been successful? | ||
| No. | ||
| I think it's real hard to turn a battleship. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But I'm sure that a lot of people who listen to this podcast or who watch this podcast have drawn in Both the explicit and implicit optimism. | ||
| Yes, for sure. | ||
| But I haven't had any specific reaction with them. | ||
| I haven't had any specific interaction where I got them to change. | ||
| They're changing because they're hearing me. | ||
| But they're also probably hearing a million other people. | ||
| They're hearing David Goggins and Cameron Haynes and fill in the blank. | ||
| All these different people that do incredible things and they go, I gotta fucking do something with my life. | ||
| I gotta stop drinking soda. | ||
| I gotta stop doing this. | ||
| I gotta just start eating healthy. | ||
| Taking vitamins. | ||
| Maybe one workout class a week. | ||
| Just one. | ||
| Start with one. | ||
| There's also, though, I guess a danger. | ||
| I don't mean to be a downer because I'm an optimist. | ||
| I'm an optimist too. | ||
| But the downer or the danger potentially is that – and this relates to suicide. | ||
| So, you know, suicide is a little bit of a mystery because – It's such a tragic thing if it affects someone that you 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 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 | ||
| 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. | ||
| Have you read Jonathan Haidt's work? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so his take on that is that these kids are experiencing social media, and they're experiencing this addiction to the internet and this cruelty that they experience, the bullying, the meanness, the coldness, and that when it's targeted on people and when they're losing their position in the social chain and they feel left out, they don't have the tools to cope with this. | ||
| They're developing minds, and this is the reason why you're experiencing this uptick that's directly correlated to the invention of the iPhone. | ||
| And the invention of smartphones, the invention of social media applications. | ||
| There's 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. | ||
| I hear you on all that. | ||
| We have to be careful about correlations proving causation because it's really tough because I totally hear you on it. | ||
| It looks like they both travel together, 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. | ||
| No, you're right. | ||
| But it's also hard to ignore the effect of social media on people's self-esteems, people who are addicted to phones, people who are addicted to likes. | ||
| It's a real occurrence. | ||
| It's also been engineered in order to attract the most eyeballs, and the best, turns out, the best way is to get you outraged. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| But, again, just to bang the same drum again and again, 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. | ||
| Oh, I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| And I agree with you. | ||
| But I think we're adapting. | ||
| I think human beings are adapting to a new normal. | ||
| And the new normal is constant connection with all the people around us all the time if we so choose to engage and look at our phone. | ||
| If we so choose. | ||
| The problem is when it becomes more invasive than that. | ||
| Right now it's if we so choose to engage. | ||
| But if we get to some point where we're wearing something that... | ||
| We transmit stuff into our brain all the time. | ||
| Or someone's wearing us. | ||
| Or if you don't, if you don't do it, then you can't be a part of this corporation because we're about succeeding. | ||
| And this is the best way to succeed is to connect yourself to the network, to uptick your bandwidth so that you can keep up with us. | ||
| Come on, Steve. | ||
| What's up? | ||
| You know, I mean, it's team! | ||
| Let's go team! | ||
| You know, and then next thing you know, you're wearing the fucking headband. | ||
| Are you optimistic about the future in a general way, though? | ||
| People are awesome. | ||
| It's a great time to be alive. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love people. | ||
| I think a lot of people love people. | ||
| How old do you want to live, too? | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| It's not how old I want to live, too. | ||
| I don't want to live 300 years in agony and pain. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| I want to live a healthy life as long as I can. | ||
| I don't know when that... | ||
| But given how old you are now, your health now and 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... | ||
| It'd be interesting. | ||
| If I was functional, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but history shows us that all technologies... | ||
| Most technologies start out very expensive and almost all of them get really cheap really fast. | ||
| Like Michael Douglas with that greed with that big-ass Wall Street phone on the beach. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And digital era even more so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| The leverage is accelerated. | ||
| So my thing would be… But here's the question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Would there be too much of an insurmountable head start from the people that are using that technology? | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| So there'd be a transitional generation at least. | ||
| They have two sets of the technology. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Fair enough, but in the scheme of history, we're just talking about the blink of a couple generations where there's a transition, right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Oh yeah, if you want to be hard and cruel and just look at numbers. | ||
| To me, the – all right. | ||
| To me, the harder question, even, is whether immortality is desirable. | ||
| Or even if, like, 200 years... | ||
| Because, you know, there's something about scarcity that produces euphoria, or at least desire, right? | ||
| So I sometimes think that, like, every day feels precious because you know there aren't that many of them. | ||
| And if I know that there are 300 years worth, I wonder. | ||
| Well, that's all scale, right? | ||
| 300 years, if that was normal, you'd be fine with it. | ||
| You'd be like, I'm going to be so wise when I'm 250. Yeah. | ||
| And then I'm going to settle down and live the last 50 years on a boat. | ||
| I mean, people can really think like that, right? | ||
| And I'll eat vegetables only for that one year, between 250 and 251. Otherwise, it's all meat, baby. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think what we're used to is 100 years if you're lucky. | ||
| That's what we're used to. | ||
| So the idea of 120 is like, whoa, is that real? | ||
| He thinks it is. | ||
| And he thinks that we're probably looking at people that one day in the future will live to be 300, 400 years. | ||
| Yeah, I do think about this, though. | ||
| Retirement is a relatively new concept. | ||
| It's only for the last 80, 100 years. | ||
| You used to work yourself pretty much, and then you die. | ||
| And I do find that a lot of people get lost after they give up the thing. | ||
| Yes, they do. | ||
| And it's a, you know, it's kind of a rich kid problem, you know, to be able to retire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is and it's not. | |
| It's like a sadness problem. | ||
| People need a task. | ||
| And I think when people are just waiting around for death to come knocking on their door, they get really morose and they just don't feel good. | ||
| They don't feel productive. | ||
| It's one thing with old people. | ||
| They don't feel helpful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the thing they say. | ||
| The single best, if you're feeling down generally about yourself, the single best thing they say, they. | ||
| As though there's some quorum of they who all agree on everything. | ||
| But a lot of people say, the single best thing you can do, and this was in our loneliness episode as well, service. | ||
| Helping other people. | ||
| So, do you, have you run across anybody that you've interviewed who you thought had a great kind of prescription for how to help other people? | ||
| Like, doable, sensible, you know, that if people really, like, let's say I say, you know, I work hard. | ||
| I try to love the people around me, but I really want to have some kind of service component, but I don't know what to do. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I think first start with the people around you, right? | ||
| Start telling them you love them, hug them, enhance the sense of community that you share with your friends and your loved ones. | ||
| Do your best to sort of be the person who steps forward, starts it off, you know, like makes an action. | ||
| Tell someone how much you care and appreciate them and care about them and appreciate them when you maybe wouldn't have done that ordinarily. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| We can all do that. | ||
| And we've all had it done to us and it feels amazing. | ||
| When someone comes up to you out of nowhere and goes, hey man, I just want to tell you, I really appreciate you. | ||
| I know sometimes we don't talk to each other that much, but when I do, I really enjoy it. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Give me a hug. | ||
| I just want you to know. | ||
| I'm very fortunate that I have a lot of friends that do that kind of stuff. | ||
| I have a real supportive group of friends. | ||
| And if you don't, you long for that, and I think that's a big thing. | ||
| Become that person. | ||
| Reach out and try to start that. | ||
| I can't imagine anybody hearing you say that would disagree. | ||
| It's like such an obviously good way to be. | ||
| And yet, I find that so many people kind of go out of their way to not just be generous. | ||
| Because they're scared. | ||
| There's scarcity. | ||
| They think that they have to make it, and that if you make it first, they're a loser. | ||
| Yeah, it's famine thinking. | ||
| It's real, real, real common. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Our hardware is the same and our software is not. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And we can manipulate our hardware. | ||
| We just have to understand what the patterns are and also have been there. | ||
| You have to make mistakes. | ||
| You've been there, you feel it, you understand what it is, and then you have that time to adjust. | ||
| That's why losing in life is so important. | ||
| Whether it's getting dumped, getting fired, losing a game, loss. | ||
| Those feelings where things didn't work out your way, that's important. | ||
| Because it lets you know this is the bad feeling that comes when it goes wrong, and you improve, and then it makes the good feelings of victory all the better. | ||
| And I mean that 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. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Like, there's that feeling. | ||
| Those feelings of failure are really critical for your motivation. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I've always thought of failure like a bad event. | ||
| I've always thought that they were good... | ||
| Because I'm like a scaredy cat in some ways, right? | ||
| And then if the very bad thing happens, the very thing you feared happens, you survive it, and then you learn to shed more fear in more directions. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Well, you could look at it that way. | ||
| Look, there's a lot of ways you could look at bad events. | ||
| You could say a bad event is just who you are, and you just have bad events, and you're a fucking loser, and life hates you, and God hates you, and look at that. | ||
| Happening to Mike again. | ||
| Can't fucking believe it. | ||
| There's a lot of guys who go through life like that. | ||
| And, 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. | ||
| How do I do this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| What steps do I make? | ||
| And what's the best way? | ||
| Community. | ||
| They've shown 12-step programs. | ||
| You get together with some other guy, and he goes, look, Mike, I used to drink too much, too. | ||
| We're just people. | ||
| We can help each other. | ||
| I'm your sponsor now. | ||
| And they work together. | ||
| I think that solution is a really good solution. | ||
| You know, I have three brothers, all older. | ||
| I'm the youngest of eight, and I don't mean to disparage them. | ||
| And I also know you're younger than me, but I kind of wish you'd been my older brother. | ||
| You'd have been really good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Maybe. | ||
| I've been sucking up, pussy. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| Stop crying. | ||
| Yeah, that's okay. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| A little bit of that would end. | ||
| No, I'm sure. | ||
| I have a sister. | ||
| I don't have a brother. | ||
| But, you know, having conversations with your brothers and sisters, sometimes they're the only people that really know you. | ||
| Like, I have conversations with my sister sometimes. | ||
| She's the only person that really knows our childhood. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we'll talk about what it was like when we were nine and ten. | ||
| Do you have the same perception of events? | ||
| Yeah, my sister's super honest. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I mean, you remember... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| She doesn't distort anything. | ||
| We both have real similar recollections of our past. | ||
| But those people that have experienced those things with you, they're like the only ones who really know you deep at your core. | ||
| And the more things you can experience with people, the more you're going to share that sort of... | ||
| The people that make me sad are the people that know friends and know confidants. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You have no one who, you know, especially comedians, we're famous for it. | ||
| We say things to each other all the time that are the most horrible things. | ||
| And just to get a rise out of each other. | ||
| You know, like, one of my friends will say something terrible to me. | ||
| I'm like, bah! | ||
| Like, about me! | ||
| Like, horrible shit about me! | ||
| And I'll just think it's so funny. | ||
| I'm like, dude, that is what I look like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ha! | |
| We're so accustomed to it. | ||
| And there's also, in our culture, there's a currency of being able to joke around like that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| If somebody makes, one of my friends makes fun of me, it's hilarious. | ||
| It's fun. | ||
| Like, we do it to each other all the time. | ||
| There's actually, like, a currency in being able to take it, too. | ||
| Like, you can make fun of Andrew, he doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| It's a good thing, you know? | ||
| Because when people, you know, I mean, you're in the business of making fun of things. | ||
| If you're mad that someone makes fun of you, it's not good in our world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I got to learn. | ||
| I got a lot to learn from you. | ||
| I have a list, things I'm going to look up and watch, things I'm going to read. | ||
| I think we should all be concerned. | ||
| About each other's sensitivities, but we shouldn't coddle people. | ||
| And that's the difference between compassion and just full-on nerfing the world. | ||
| You know, you can't nerf the world. | ||
| And when you stop humor, like you nerf humor, there's a real problem with that. | ||
| Because it's fun. | ||
| It's fun when people talk shit. | ||
| Talking shit is fun. | ||
| It's interesting to me how comedy is like the last place in society where you can actually say stuff. | ||
| Yeah, you can say some... | ||
| Come to the Comedy Store. | ||
| We still say some really ridiculous shit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it can't happen in the media. | ||
| It can't happen in politics. | ||
| That's the art form, though. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What the fuck is this? | ||
| But when you go to see a Tarantino movie, you know exactly what you're getting into. | ||
| It's madness and chaos and ultraviolence. | ||
| You ever seen Porgy and Bess? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Porgy and Bess, George Gershwin musical from the 1920s, I guess. | ||
| Is it like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood? | ||
| No, not at all. | ||
| But it's a couple of white guys writing about this African-American community in 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, right? | ||
| So first of all, you have to think it's great to have a vehicle for that. | ||
| But written by these two white guys, if it were to happen now, and I was surprised the Metropolitan Opera allowed itself to put on this show because it feels, from the light of day of 2020, way too dated or racial or whatever. | ||
| And yet what was really interesting is because it's a really good piece of art, It overcomes that. | ||
| I think we should be really careful, even with bad pieces of art, of shielding people from the reality of our own evolution. | ||
| So if you go back and watch some of the early... | ||
| There's a Disney film that Splash Mountain's based on that you can't even get anymore. | ||
| It's this really racist film about the South. | ||
| What's Splash Mountain? | ||
| Splash Mountain's a ride at Disneyland, but it's based on a movie. | ||
| It's based on a movie you can't even get anymore. | ||
| Because it's so problematic. | ||
| They kicked it out of the archive? | ||
| Yes, it's so problematic. | ||
| I think stuff like that, it's important to know where we came from. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever watched some of the old Popeyes. | ||
| I have. | ||
| From the 1920s and 30s, whatever it was. | ||
| Bluto was a fucking rapist. | ||
| All he was trying to do was rape olive oil. | ||
| He was always grabbing olive oil and trying to rape her. | ||
| That was normal. | ||
| I've been watching Cheers lately. | ||
| You remember Cheers? | ||
| I do remember Cheers. | ||
| Even Cheers! | ||
| But stop and think. | ||
| I'm sure that was. | ||
| But some of those old black and white cartoons were insanely racist. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're depictions of Japanese people. | ||
| They're depictions of African people. | ||
| They're depictions of all the Popeye ones. | ||
| Fucking crazy rape stories. | ||
| And your argument is people should be allowed to see it. | ||
| We should be able to see evidence of our own evolution. | ||
| We shouldn't pretend that we just figured this shit out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We shouldn't pretend. | ||
| We shouldn't pretend. | ||
| And look, there's so many things that were on... | ||
| Look, the Dukes of Hazzard, they took away the Confederate flag from the roof of the General Lee. | ||
| You literally can't watch the Dukes of Hazzard anymore because they pulled it off television because people were so offended by that flag. | ||
| Look, I'm not saying... | ||
| I'm not promoting the Confederate flag, but I've got a Leonard Skinner poster from 1976 in my toilet. | ||
| I saw that with the Rolling Stones. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Rolling Stones got second bill. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| Because Leonard Skinner was a shit back then, son. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And on top of it, while they're on stage, there was a Confederate flag in the background of the image of them on stage. | ||
| And that was... | ||
| Look, I'm not a proponent or a supporter of the Confederate flag or the Confederate anything. | ||
| But that is a part of history. | ||
| And I think white... | ||
| Whitewashing it. | ||
| I think... | ||
| Pretending that it didn't exist. | ||
| Eliminating it from the historical record of who we were in 1980 or who we were in 1930. That's not good. | ||
| It's good to see what it was like. | ||
| Little Rascals, our gang, right? | ||
| Some of those things were ridiculous, but what they were was an example of the way culture and art viewed those times. | ||
| Now, what about the argument you say, well, for the people who belong to the group that's being discriminated against, it's just too painful? | ||
| That's a good argument. | ||
| But I think that we should recognize that these people were wrong, but they existed. | ||
| Don't hide it. | ||
| Don't make it impossible to get to, because then you're going to make it forbidden. | ||
| If you make it forbidden, you're going to make it attractive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If nobody give a fuck about swastikas, no one would care. | ||
| You have them up everywhere. | ||
| I'm not promoting a swastika, but it's the fact that if you have a swastika tattoo, it's so awful that makes morons want to get one. | ||
| It makes them want to spark up the taboo. | ||
| There's a thing that people do when you take stuff away. | ||
| You're deciding. | ||
| That they can't see this anymore. | ||
| And you shouldn't want to watch it, but why the fuck is Hogan's Heroes okay? | ||
| It's a goddamn sitcom about Nazis and a concentration camp and these guys who are prisoners of war. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| And they're joking around with these fucking baby murderers. | ||
| You know, it's a crazy concept for a show that you never could do today. | ||
| I'd love to see you pitch that to a studio here, though. | ||
| Hogan's Heroes again, right? | ||
| A new version of Hogan's Heroes. | ||
| Yeah, there's certain things you can't pitch anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I don't think you should do a new version of Hogan's Heroes, but I don't think you should make the old one a banned product either. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| I understand. | ||
| Historical record of our evolution is a good way to look at it. | ||
| I like that lens of looking at it. | ||
| There's also the idea of how the line between what's repugnant and not shifts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And then once you get past it, how much access do you want to when it, you know. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Just imagine if you had a cartoon today where the main character is constantly fighting off the co-main character trying to rape his wife. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what Bluto and Popeye was. | ||
| Yeah, I don't think you could sell that in the room, certainly. | ||
| And all violence. | ||
| They're always solving it with violence. | ||
| Stay away from me, girl. | ||
| She's my girl. | ||
| And then they're duking it out. | ||
| And there's cartoon exaggerated violence at every turn, every episode. | ||
| His biceps are firing up and he's punching the shit out of somebody. | ||
| But it's a sign of the times. | ||
| People 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? | ||
| Hard to say. | ||
| We don't know the counterfactual. | ||
| I mean, you know, the art that's produced is a part of its time. | ||
| If you import an art from a different time, it'd be interesting to see, yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, you can make the argument in reverse. | ||
| What happens if you take a bunch of aggressive, violent people now and play for them classical music? | ||
| Does it work? | ||
| I mean, the evidence seems to show that not really is the answer. | ||
| Well, it's way more complicated than that. | ||
| You take someone whose life's already gone so fucking sideways that they're violent and they're reaching out and smashing people and they're getting arrested and they've got problems you're not going to fix with Beethoven. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Although Beethoven can go a long way, you know. | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| It might make them angry. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It might lead to the no one left to blame theory. | ||
| Oh, I can't stand this. | ||
| I love how you pick apart everything, though. | ||
| And that's one of the things that I really enjoy about your show. | ||
| You look at every single potential angle. | ||
| And today in this society, there's certain subjects that people don't like to do that with because... | ||
| It interferes with the orthodoxy. | ||
| It interferes with this accepted-upon narration of reality that we are, for whatever reason or another, stuck with. | ||
| I think we're stuck with it. | ||
| I think a lot of people have shortcuts. | ||
| Because life is busy and complicated, 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... | ||
| Goddamn, it's good. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| But the ROI, like it took a lot of effort, a lot of time to make it. | ||
| And so the fact is, is that that's what I do for a living and I enjoy it. | ||
| I wouldn't trade it for anything, but I totally get why people reach for the fastest piece of conventional wisdom. | ||
| We're seeing it with coronavirus. | ||
| There's just so much. | ||
| But I'm very thankful that there's someone like you who's not doing that. | ||
| Can I tell you? | ||
| I'm thankful that there's a market for it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because that's not an easy... | ||
| There's no guarantee of it. | ||
| Well, there would have never been the market if it wasn't for the internet. | ||
| Because if you had to go through a network and do what you're doing... | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I had a trick... | ||
| I kind of fooled 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? | ||
| It's so much easier to just fall into place. | ||
| So the vast majority of people do that. | ||
| But there's so many of us. | ||
| There's so many of us. | ||
| There's always going to be a market. | ||
| So even though the vast majority of people might slot into a previously grooved little opening and 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. | ||
| Yeah, it's true. | ||
| And look, I am very, again, just appreciative of being in a world where there's people who are willing and able to have ideas that are prima facie unpopular. | ||
| Like my co-author, Steve Levitt, when he wrote this paper, it's gosh, more than 20 years ago now, I think about abortion and crime. | ||
| Man, there are all kinds of ways in which you could talk yourself out of even thinking about that, much less writing a paper. | ||
| So it takes courage. | ||
| But if you look through history, if you look at the people who've really changed the world, they have courage. | ||
| Yeah, those are really, really controversial subjects that are – That's an uncomfortable fact of our reality. | ||
| And some uncomfortable facts, people would be happier with you if you left them alone. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, you know, got to take the long view. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| I'm just happy that you do it. | ||
| I'm just happy that you're out there and that your podcast really does explore things in every nuanced corner and really objectively and honestly, and I think it's a powerful thing. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| It's one of my favorites. | ||
| Hey, thanks for having me. | ||
| Hey, thanks for being here, man. | ||
| It was awesome. | ||
| We just did two hours and 45 minutes. | ||
| Can you believe that? | ||
| I really enjoyed that conversation. | ||
| I really did, too. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thanks, man. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Tell people everything. | ||
| Social media, all that stuff. | ||
| It's easy. | ||
| Yeah, we're on social media. | ||
| Just Freakonomics, as long as you spell it right. | ||
| It's Freak, F-R-E-A-K-O-Nomics, N-O-M-I-C-S. But, you know, the main thing is the podcast. | ||
| We're also starting a little podcast channel with some new shows that are kind of related. | ||
| So we're doing that in the next year. | ||
| This is our 10th year of Freakonomics Radio. | ||
| We might do another 10. Who knows? | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Yeah, thanks, man. | ||
| Come on, baby. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you so much. |
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