Alan Levinovitz and Joe Rogan challenge the rigid binary of "natural" versus "unnatural," from pyrite’s geometric perfection to lab-grown meat and factory-farmed salmon, exposing how arbitrary moral lines—like abortion or sports fairness—become when framed by evolutionary adaptedness or symbolic purity. They critique ultra-processed information (e.g., social media echo chambers) and charlatans (like Osteen or chiropractors) exploiting desperation, while debating whether kindness should sometimes override blunt honesty, especially with vulnerable groups like ALS patients or QAnon believers. Ultimately, the conversation urges adaptability in ethics, rejecting ideological monocultures for nuanced growth. [Automatically generated summary]
So I tried to find – there's like a local rock store where I live and I asked the guy and apparently – I don't understand how it works at all – but the way all crystals work is they have – Different kinds of structures and the way those structures come together determines whether it makes a quartz crystal or what shape it takes.
Well, so one of the things, like with that pyrite, right?
People ask, is it natural?
That's the first thing they ask.
Does this occur naturally, right?
And it's an important question because there's a difference, like a sort of profound difference between knowing that that was just spewed up by the Earth forces that are not human, right?
Versus humans sitting down and deciding to make a cube, right?
It's like a diamond that has been shaped by millions of years of natural forces.
And what I realized is that it really does make sense To distinguish between naturalness and unnaturalness.
You have to.
Maybe it's a spectrum, obviously, right?
So it's not an easy binary.
But New York City is not as natural as Yellowstone.
And what I realized was...
I wasn't really against the idea of naturalness or even valuing nature, right?
I mean, hopefully we'll talk about, I went backcountry in Yellowstone.
It was unbelievable.
You know, I mean, everyone values naturalness in certain ways.
It was worshiping nature that I had a problem with.
This idea that the more natural something is, the better it is.
Or that what we need to do, like if you want to raise your kid, right?
You got to raise your kid naturally.
You like, you know, let them piss in the corner or like elimination communication.
If natural is defined as whatever sort of emerges spontaneously out of forces that weren't willed by human beings, which is what I think natural is, right?
You know, one of the things that I saw in your book was you were talking to Joel Salatin, who I love, and he's a strange man, but a beautiful person.
I really love what he's doing with Polyphase Farms, but he drinks the water that the cows drink out of so that he gets that in his biome.
You know, he's a real freak.
But when you were talking about New York City and, you know, would his method of farming work to feed a city as big as New York?
He's like, do you need a city as big as New York?
Then I'm like, okay, hit the brakes.
Now we're in the weeds.
Because I love New York.
It's a fucking great place to visit.
I don't want to live there, but it's awesome.
I mean, when you go to New York, if you're in a hotel that has like a 30th floor and you look out and you see the city skyscraper, you see all the skyline, all the different beautiful buildings lit up at night, I mean, that is an amazing, spectacular sight that I am very thankful exists.
If someone's listening to this podcast, here we are.
We've got microphones.
We're beaming this conversation to millions of people.
And to think that...
Simultaneously, people would be thinking to themselves, the criteria I'm going to use to judge whether something is good or bad with a capital G or a capital B is how natural it is.
There's actually an argument against that, though.
The virus itself, more evidence is coming out daily that it's been manipulated, that it most likely did come out of that lab.
I had Brett Weinstein on the podcast, who's a biologist.
And he was talking about all the various aspects of the virus that really don't exist naturally in this form without having evolved for a long period of time.
The fact that it just emerged and made this leap from bats to the form that it is now in people.
He's like, it's far too contagious.
It's far too prolific.
There's so many different...
I'm going to fuck it up if I talk about the technical details of it, but...
When he was describing it, he was saying more evidence points to the fact that it was actually something that had been manipulated by people than that it was a natural virus.
I just want people to understand that there just aren't any easy categories you can use to divide up the world into good and bad.
And now that people, now that organized religion, sort of the sphere of authority is shrinking, right?
You don't go to your priest to find out what to eat.
You don't go to your priest to find out how to cure your disease.
Now that that authority is shrinking, I think people are looking to other similar kinds of authority.
And so they're like, okay, I can't go to my priest, but if I'm walking through the store, What sort of criteria can I use to divide the world up easily into good and evil, clean and unclean?
Organic.
Organic and inorganic, right?
Yeah, artificial.
And it's built into our language, Joe.
Like, artificial might be a thing someday.
Artificial, right, is linked to artifice, which is deception, right?
So you've got manipulated, which really just means...
Humans got a hold of it and changed it with their hands also means something bad.
So really built into our language, we have this idea that natural means good.
This insane power to manipulate things and we we all collectively use the power to manipulate things that was created by scientists that have a far greater understanding of what The implications and like what the process of this manipulation is and we just come along and use their technology I mean that's I think that's that's a problem with so much of what people do like we've we've earned this power Just by virtue of being alive and
being able to trade in goods and services for whatever that they've created And then we don't think about the consequences of utilizing this stuff like what is there's got to be there's some sort of a balance right there's a balance between If you want to have a fireplace in your house, that's wonderful.
Fireplaces are great.
It's a nice smell, right?
You walk in the house, you smell the fireplace.
If you're walking down the street and someone's got their fireplace on, it smells good.
But if the whole fucking place is on fire, it's terrible.
You're filled with smoke, you can't breathe.
It's like there's a balance.
And clearly when you see polluted cities, clearly when you see polluted rivers, and we're destroying the environment, there's a lack of balance.
We've utilized this power that we have to manipulate our environment, but we've done it completely irresponsibly, or we've done it without the Without the awareness of the consequences of 8 million people doing the exact same thing.
Well, I mean, the scale you can do stuff on with technology is really increased.
I mean, it's made us incredibly powerful, right?
There's Stuart Brand, the guy who started the whole Earth Catalog, you know, so basically we've become like gods.
So we have to be able to wield this power responsibly.
I think it's easy to see that and say, well, then the evil is in the form of the power itself, right?
Obviously, then, if we've got a nuclear bomb or we've got, you know, if we're polluting the world, then the problem is with the technology itself.
So you locate the evil in that technology.
Whereas, you know, what you're saying, I mean, take burning wood, which is a great example.
You know, we've got a lot of people on Earth now.
We have them because kids aren't fucking dying all the time, right?
I mean, so there are some things that I discovered while I was reading this.
For example, have you seen that cartoon where there's two cavemen in a room?
It's a New Yorker cartoon, and they're talking to—they're not in a room.
They're cavemen.
They're in a cave.
Sorry.
So they're in a cave, and they're talking to each other, and one of them's like, you know, we eat organic, we exercise all the time, and like— Nobody's living past the age of 35. What's going on?
And that's the people that are like, nature's bullshit take.
But actually, it turns out that that cartoon is bullshit.
So people didn't just die at age 35. That was average lifespan because tons of kids were dying between the age of zero and five.
Truth is, if you made it past five, then you had a pretty good shot at like 60 or 70. So it wasn't so bad in the state of nature.
At the same time, there's another vision of what's happening to us now.
Have you seen that evolution?
There's like an evolution cartoon where it starts with, I don't know, like Paleolithic man or a chimpanzee or something.
And then it gets to like a big strong hunter with a spear.
And then technology comes in and they hunch over at the end and they get obese and they've got like a coke in one hand.
And there's this idea like...
Well, technology is now—we were perfect when we were natural, and then technology has made us worse.
And for me, it's what you were saying.
It's a balance, right?
There are ways in which technology—like my dad is 91. I talked to anthropologists, and despite what you might think, there aren't a lot of 91-year-old hunter-gatherers.
They're just not out there.
So I'm really grateful that my dad is a super healthy 91-year-old.
I mean, I love solar power, but I'm totally on board with what you're saying, and there is some sort of a balance.
And, you know, the nihilists, like, I have friends that will say, you know, we shouldn't have children, and there's too many people in the world, and overpopulation's our biggest problem.
I'm like, yeah, but...
I love people.
Don't you love people?
A world without people would suck for people.
Do you remember that cartoon?
There was an episode of Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith, he is the last man on earth and he accidentally breaks his glasses and he can't read.
He's always just wanted alone time to read his books and he's always been bothered by all these people and then he's inside I forget what he's in a bank vault or something like that and there's a nuclear catastrophe something along those lines and he leaves this area to go outside and he realizes that he's literally the last person on earth but he has all these books to read and he's so excited and he starts picking up these books but then he breaks his glasses and he fucked and I
mean, the ideal of being the last person on Earth, that's probably one of the most terrifying ideas for a person, to be completely isolated and alone forever with no one to talk to.
We love each other.
People love people.
We like being around each other.
We like the love of other people.
It's like a vitamin.
I mean, really, it's like how you get vitamin D from the sun.
And, you know, it's a weird argument, I think, to want to claim nature as this kind of benevolent deity that if only we follow what it tells us, right, just act naturally, which is a bizarre phrase if you think about it because you've got to act that way.
H.G. Wells is a fascinating character, right, because he predicted so many things as a science fiction author, you know, who was living in a time of very little technology in terms of like what we experience today.
I mean, this is a totally separate thing, I guess, for me.
But when it comes to the ability of science and scientists to predict the future, I think this is a place – I mean, we see it with macroeconomists, most obviously.
But there's a way in which – We've come to expect that science, because it has done such incredible things with manipulating reality, with telling us truths about where we are in the universe, that also it ought to be able to predict complex systems, like where humans going to be in 30 years or what's going to happen with the coronavirus 10 years down the line or whatever it happens to be.
But the truth is fiction writers, science fiction writers who have thought very hard about constructing plausible worlds Are just as good of authorities on predicting what's going to be happening with human systems 70 years, 100 years down the line as scientists are.
So there are clear limits to what science and a certain form of investigation can tell us about.
And I think it's important if we stop trying to force scientists To tell us everything, right?
Like, what's going to happen with the economy?
What's going to happen 70 years down the line?
What's going to happen 100 years down the line?
At that point, we need a different set of tools to figure out what to do with ourselves and what's going to happen.
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that think that there's not enough babies being born in the Western world because people are more career oriented and we're worried that someday we're going to have underpopulation problems like Japan has right now.
All of these things are a result of us, like you said, stepping in with our virtue, which I don't mean in a bad way, but stepping in with our virtue, trying to fix things, like feed people, for example.
We don't want kids to die.
We want there to be enough calories to go around.
And what ends up happening is we have a lot of people.
So then we have to figure out new ways to house them and feed them and power the things that they do and entertain them and so on and so forth.
So we get a lot of people and then people are like, well, okay, let's have fewer humans because that's the problem.
But then when you do that, now you've got a system that depends on having more humans, right?
You need a younger generation coming in.
So these systems are incredibly complicated.
And I think...
I think, again, the reason people are leaning on naturalness so hard is because when you're faced with complicated, uncertain systems, it's scary.
You know, it's really scary.
And you want some kind of criteria, whether it's a holy book or a prophet or whatever it is, to tell you, no, I got this.
Yeah, I think that's one of the weirdest things about today, right, is that we are faced with these unparalleled crises.
Where we really, we don't have anything to go off of.
We don't have a similar situation that happened, you know, in 1985. Where we are today with the coronavirus, and then with the subsequent lockdown of the economy, where everyone's terrified, and then you have the George Floyd murder, and then you have the looting, and the riots, and the chaos, and the protests, and then you have the coronavirus kicks in again, and our leaders Look impotent.
When you have a guy like Donald Trump in office, already you have a situation like, Jesus, I hope the cabinet can keep this thing together.
I hope the Senate can hold this.
This is madness.
We've got a reality show host who's the fucking president.
All the mayors are fucking up, all the governor, no one, it's not even that they're fucking up, is that no one is equipped to handle this.
So you see unprecedented anger, particularly online, where you're dealing with people, and this is one of the things that drew me to you, is one of the tweets that you made about processed information.
That online information is essentially processed information when you're dealing with social media versus actual communication like you and I are having right now, which is what resonates with people.
I think it's one of the things that resonates with podcasts.
It's one of the reasons why I prefer to do them in person.
It's the closest thing to a real conversation with a real person.
Whereas this viewing of text, white on black, you know, white letters in my case, I used the night mode, on a black screen, it's so weird.
Like, you have to interpret intent.
You have to try to get...
And then you're not getting any social cues from the person.
You're not...
There's not a back and forth.
It's just you spit something out, they spit something back, and it's...
You're trying to...
Approximate what it's like to actually talk to a person.
It's very processed.
I thought that the way you described it was really the perfect definition of what ails us, where so many people today are communicating in this way.
And it's very similar to people surviving off of processed food and becoming sick.
So if you think about how processed food was created, basically, and I mean modern ultra-processed food, because these terms are all really slippery, right?
Just like the term natural.
So this is on a spectrum, right?
The history of cooking is a history of processing food, right?
You like to cook.
I like to cook.
That's processing food.
Dessert is a kind of food that's been made to be highly palatable.
So it's not about processing being intrinsically evil.
But with ultra-processed foods, what you've got is you've got a bunch of companies that That are like, all right, what can we exploit about human appetites to make foods as compulsively eatable as possible, right?
It's terrifying.
You've got, I think Coca-Cola, I think it was, said something like, we have to conquer stomach share.
This is a term they use.
Yeah.
So like, there's a, yeah, so you think, right, you have a hundred, think of the stomach, right?
Like, okay, so we got a hundred percent of the stomach.
Like, how can Coca-Cola fill the stomach?
The maximum amount of stomach share in the humans of the world.
Yeah, well, so Coca-Cola, back in the day, was made with cocaine for the cocaine kick.
John Pemberton, the guy who came up with Coca-Cola, had cocaine in it.
And to this day, there is a plant that's been grandfathered in, I guess legally, I don't know how it works, that is still importing enormous amounts of cocaine, processing it so that it no longer has an effect on you in the way that cocaine would, and putting it in Coca-Cola.
We should tell people that this Coca-Cola, when they do take the Coca-Leave and they process it and use the flavor for Coca-Cola, then they take the cocaine out of it, and then it's the number one medical supplier of cocaine are the people that do that.
So, literally, medical cocaine, like lidocaine and all that shit, comes from...
So these people are trying to conquer our stomachs.
And they did it, right?
And one of the ways they did it also was make it cheap and accessible.
There's vending machines in every school.
I mean, think for a second how crazy that is.
That there are vending machines with just Coca-Cola and candy bars and stuff.
In every single school we have.
You know, it's...
But it happened, right?
And so now we live in a world in which extremely cheap, highly palatable and very accessible food is everywhere.
No wonder we have a problem with our diets and that's exactly what's happening With information right now.
So as I understand it, the way in which Twitter was designed, for example, they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back.
So like slot machines, right?
They consulted with people who build slot machines to figure out, okay, what keeps people pulling the lever, right?
So they could just have it refresh.
You just have your tweets at the top, but instead there's a little alert button, right?
You pull down, there's a little noise like Or whatever the noise is when you pull down on it, you know?
And so they've made it compulsive.
They've made it highly palatable, right?
You want to keep coming back.
And the thing is, the difference between ultra-processed information and ultra-processed food is that I think we're the companies now.
And that really freaks me out.
We're the consumers now.
We're also the manufacturers and we're also the distributors.
We make the meme.
Someone is going to take some cut of this show and turn it into a soundbite that's highly palatable in the way that information becomes highly palatable.
It's going to be oversimplified.
It's going to have heroes and villains.
It's going to demonize someone and it's going to be something that gives you a sense of belonging.
Those are the three things I think that make information highly processed and highly palatable.
We want a hit of information that's easy to understand, that demonizes someone, and that gives us a sense of belonging.
And that's just like exploiting what humans want, right?
You're saying, you know, we're creatures that want to love each other.
We want to belong, right?
It's just the same way we want to taste salt, sugar, and fat.
We want to feel these things and the information that we have around us now.
It's the same thing as a Snickers bar, except the difference is we're Snickers.
And we're behaving like junkies, like rabid junkies.
If you look at, I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other, but it seems like it's half at least.
I mean, it's just there's so much rabid discourse.
There's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other and it's so unlike anywhere else in the world, unless you're in a fucking war zone, like the way people talk to each other.
If people talked to each other in real life the way they talked on Twitter, the emergency ward would be filled with people with broken faces and shattered eye sockets.
Because you're aware that split-second decision-making is important to survival.
So when you're going 65 miles an hour and you're looking around at everybody and this guy gets a free motherfucker!
Like you're already at 7 or 8. And I think this is also a part of the problem today online because of the coronavirus and because of the lockdown and economic instability.
And we're at unprecedented joblessness right now.
I mean, people are really hopeless.
There's a lot of people that we got one $1,200 check from the government and then that's it.
And then, you know, you hear that Kanye West got this giant loan and Judd Apatow got this giant loan.
These really wealthy people are getting all this money but meanwhile salon owners, small business owners didn't.
A lot of people are just fucking furious at everything because it's like driving a car.
You're already heightened.
So this information that comes at you Maybe it wouldn't have pissed you off under normal circumstances, but now you're fucking furious.
I hadn't really thought about that with Road Rage, but it does make sense, right?
So when you're already at that level, then you're going to be even more likely to need that kind of information, want to participate in that kind of dialogue.
So we need I think we all need to collectively take steps in that way.
But also we need to realize and this is really important, right?
It's not just about natural, unnatural.
It's not just about technology.
We've had this kind of junk food information around forever.
And this is where I think for me is a as a scholar of religious studies.
Right.
If you look at myths and folk tales and fairy tales and if you look at the structure of religions, there are ways To tell stories to get people heightened.
There are ways to tell stories to make people feel belonging.
There are ways to tell stories to demonize people, right?
These tropes have been around forever, right?
What do you do?
You create a villain.
You tell a story about redemption.
You tell a story about a fall.
You tell a story in which the people who are hearing the story, just by hearing it, become heroes.
These are things that have been around for a long time in the same way that if you go back 2,000 years, if you were super rich and had access to lots of delicious, salty, sugary, fatty food, you could get fat.
It was just a lot harder back then.
And in the same way, Now we've facilitated the manufacture of this kind of – these junk narratives that in small doses I think are fine.
But if it's all we're consuming, it's a disaster.
And we're going to end up I think with some kind of – with some problems that are analogous to the health problems that we're seeing because of what we eat.
Except there are going to be problems in our soul, right?
I mean it's not – I feel like it's a – I mean, I'm not like a sort of organized religion person myself, but I would say it's not just mental, it's like our souls.
There's something deeply Corrupting of our humanity.
And I catch myself doing it.
So that tweet that you were talking about, I had written a piece a week before that about Trump visiting the church and holding up the Bible.
It was this really angry piece.
And I was like, I'm going to write about how terrible this is and put this out there and do something.
And then when the article came out, I just realized that I was just sending it into the fucking machine, right?
And it was going to get ground up and the people who already agreed with it were going to read it and be like, yeah, it's terrible.
And the people that disagreed with it are either never going to read it or they're going to see it and they're going to be like, see people keep attacking Trump, like they're all crazy.
And it was sort of like a crisis.
I was just like, I don't want to be doing, I don't want to be putting anything into this machine.
If it's just gonna get processed into junk information so that we can feed our habit.
Yeah, that's not enough time for us to figure out how to do it right.
I mean, remember like during the...
I'm 52, so when I was a kid...
Watching television for kids all day was fairly new, right?
It had only been like a generation or two that that was even possible to just watch TV all the time.
And it was constantly thought of as the corrupting thing.
Like, get away from the TV. All you do is watch TV. Get up.
Get outside.
And that was sort of the first indication that there's a potential for an unhealthy relationship with technology and with distributed content, right?
I think Twitter is far more toxic than that because you're actually putting the content out yourself and then you're waiting to see how people respond and you shift the way you interact with people based on how they respond to your tweets.
It created, I mean it's interesting you say that like thinking again about food because I'm obsessed with like the first book I wrote was about food.
And like how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar.
And thinking about it in this way, right?
You need a technology to be able to process something to get it cheap enough so that it can be widely consumed, right?
So information that allows you to belong, right?
For a long time, only certain people, I mean, for a while, right?
It's only people who could read and write, right?
So that's all you've got.
Those are the only people who could produce it.
And then now, it's so cheap.
To produce information that makes you a part of a community.
It's free, right?
We do it all the time.
And like you said, We haven't figured out how to navigate it.
And that's another confusion I think that people have with natural versus unnatural, which is that we also just have problems with novelty as human beings, right?
Something new comes up.
We still don't know how to navigate our food system.
We still don't know how to stop people from eating too much.
We don't know how to do it.
Collectively as a society, we clearly have not solved this problem.
And yet it's important to remember that for most of the world, the problem is still not having enough.
So there was a time when the problem was people had no information.
It was really bad and it was bad in a profoundly different way.
I mean, this goes back to with the hunter-gatherer thing, right?
Whether it was better in a state of nature.
I often hear people...
There's a great book called Against the Grain written by a guy who...
He's at Yale and he thinks that we need to be easier on the past and harder on the present in this book.
And one of the things he points out is like, oh, people these days, like humans, modern humans, you and I, we go out and we don't know what a plant is or we don't know what an animal is.
And he's right, right?
Most people don't have the knowledge of the natural world that hunter-gatherers do.
But at the same time, they don't know about the germ theory of disease.
They don't know about, you know, planetary cycles.
And so...
It's always important for me, at least, as soon as I start to get sucked into one of these binaries.
It's so bad now today to remember that it was also bad in different ways in the past.
And we can't make the mistake of thinking that the problem with information and our consuming of it today...
We can't make the mistake of thinking that the evil is in the form.
Well, so what I mean, you know, bringing up alcohol, right?
I mean, one thing is, you know, taboos, cultural taboos are really important for controlling our relationship to things that we would otherwise be compulsive about, like eating too much or having sex with everybody.
And so we institute these sort of taboos.
I don't understand why it's not more of a taboo.
Why it's not taboo when you're on social media.
If you're an asshole, everyone should pile on to you for being an asshole on social media.
I mean, personally, and I don't know, you may feel differently about this, but I'm just grossed out by people sharing videos of random people and mocking these people.
I think it's just kind of creepy.
I'm not saying sharing videos of police or people in positions of authority I just mean...
While you're bleeding out, I'm going to show you my paper cut.
And I'm going to go, look, you know, I'm cut too.
You know, she goes, that's the difference between all lives matter.
You know, like she was just screaming and yelling, I'm going to fucking stab you.
But it's just a bad analogy from a person who's trying very hard to virtue signal.
Cut to next video.
She was crying.
That people had found the video and they were attacking her and then she got fired and she got fired from this job that she really loved and there was in the comments of this there was all these laughing emojis with the laughing with the tears coming out where people were taking pleasure out of the fact this person made this misstep she's a young she looked like she was in her 20s she made this She thought she was like putting something out in the world to stand up for people that are being maligned and mistreated
and wronged by society and that there should be a balance and to understand the balance.
And she made a terrible analogy.
It wasn't good.
But the fact that people were taking pleasure in the fact that this person got fired from it was very disturbing.
I actually think it's one thing to mock someone for just doing some stupid shit.
It's another thing when the background, and this again gets back to this idea of ultra-processed information, when the background, when what makes it so exciting is not that they're stupid or they did something or it could have been you, but that they're evil, right?
Ah, I get to watch evil and I'm just good.
I'm good just because I'm feeling evil.
That this person's evil.
And that part, it's very different from America's Funniest Home Videos.
That was not a show where you were tuning in to find out who the evil people were.
I watched one today where a bus driver body slammed this guy.
Apparently there was some jerk who was bothering these bus drivers and he was picking a fight with his other bus driver and this second bus driver who he had apparently fucked with before comes up from behind him, picks him up and body slams him on the concrete and knocks him unconscious.
But that one at least is like, here's a person who's physically fucking with people and assaulting people and they got theirs.
But the girl with the paper cut analogy, it's like, she's just dumb.
You know, she's just a dumb kid who did a dumb thing and she thought she was being cool or she was fitting in and she thought a bunch of people would be like, yeah, you go, girl.
And so the anti-woke people, and I'm generalizing here, but they look at the woke people and they're like, look at these woke people.
The woke people divide the world up into good and evil, right?
The woke people are like, oh, look at all those unwoke sinners.
We're woke.
We're good.
The unwoke are evil.
But the anti-woke people are doing the same thing.
They're like, look at those woke people tearing everybody down.
Those are the bad people.
And if we just get rid of all the woke people, then everything will go back to the paradise of free thinking and rationality where we could all speak our minds.
And I'm looking at these people and I'm like, do you not understand?
The paradox, especially because these people are often like fairly smart, like philosophically minded people and they're like, I hate people that create demons and try to cast them out of society.
We need to get rid of those people and cast them out of society.
And once we have that, we'll go back to paradise.
And I'm like, no, there is no paradise.
It's complicated, right?
Like even with the social media, it's terrific.
That lay people who didn't have power once can hold powerful people accountable.
It is a good thing that we get videos of cops Doing bad stuff that before would have been hidden, right?
So again, it's more complicated.
Like, I like that.
I'm happy about that.
And I'm happy about the way in which our technology has empowered people to find communities, right?
Also, just like loners, like people that had weird hobbies, people that felt alone in their small town.
I know people that have had real problems where they get tremendous anxiety, they're sweating, and they're involved in these back and forth with people all day and they can't sleep.
I think with wokeness, and this is something that James Lindsay had pointed out, and Douglas Murray has a great book about it in a lot of the areas that we're talking about.
What's going on is a religion.
I mean, it really is.
It's got all of the elements of a religion.
You can get cast out.
You can get attacked for non-compliance.
It demands this very rigid ideology that you can't stray from.
And it keeps getting more and more rigid as time goes on.
Things that were acceptable just a few years ago can now get you...
You can get cancelled.
You can get fired.
You can lose your job.
I mean, we're getting to this, like, you can lose your job and be attacked for saying all lives matter, which seems insane, just in terms of, I mean, it's understandable where people are going from, that this is like, no, you're in denial of this movement, but just the term all lives matter should be universally acceptable, but it's not anymore.
I want to push back on these anti-woke people, though, a little bit, because I think it's important, especially because they're very sharp, and so they make very good arguments.
And I think that part of their problem is they do something called nutpicking.
So this is a phrase that— I think a guy at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum, I think he coined it.
It's like cherry picking.
And basically what you do is you trawl through any given group, university professors, some blog, whatever it is, and you pick the nuttiest things you can.
And then you say, look what these – and this is actually what our whole information ecosystem does.
It nutpicks for us.
And so then what do you see?
You see the craziest representations of any given group, right?
So you see – if you're thinking about academia, right?
You see some professor get kicked out of a university or you see – Some professors say some kind of crazy thing about like, you know, I don't know, like biological sex not being real in animals or whatever, you know, whatever the crazy thing is.
And then that becomes how you see that entire institution.
You've nut picked that institution.
Right.
And it's easy to mock.
It's fun.
But like the truth is, if you sat these people down even.
I just, I'm surprised by how much I don't know, right?
I mean, this is something I actually really appreciate about you.
Like, I don't know a lot of stuff.
So I'm out, when I was researching natural, right?
I have a chapter on economics.
I don't know anything about economic theory.
So I had to research that and talk to experts.
I got a chapter on sports.
I don't know anything about sports.
So I gotta go talk to people who are experts on, you know, whether a cheetah blade for your leg, you know, how do you figure out whether that's fair or not or whatever, right?
So I'm sitting down and I'm talking with these people.
And what I realized is that Everything's very complicated, right?
These are complicated issues.
And when there's no one to push back on you, and when there's no room for a dialogue, you just get the absolute stupidest, most extreme versions of whatever position it is that someone holds.
And the more touchy the subject.
the more that's true, right?
Because the more people feel the need to say one kind of sloganized version of whatever it is that they're talking about.
And the truth is, I think you could actually, if you've got these people in a room, they weren't just angry at each other, you could actually have really good conversations.
Yeah, I think what you're saying too is really important is that you're trying to, this idea of a sloganized version of it, you're trying to reinforce your argument without any pushback from the other side, where a lot of these things are nuanced and complex, and they're not black and white, and it's not a one or a zero.
It's like there's a lot of pros and cons, and a lot of these things, like...
One that I, you know, it's an uncomfortable one to get into is abortion.
It's a very, what I call a human problem, not just that it's humans having abortions and you're aborting a human, but it's a human problem in that very few people are going to have a problem with it if it's like three cells.
But then when it's three months old, people are going to have more of a problem.
When it's six months old, most people are going to have a problem with it.
So it becomes this very weird, like, to say, no abortion should ever happen.
Well, what about the morning after pill?
You don't think that someone should be able to, if they get drunk and they make a mistake and they accidentally get pregnant from sex, you don't think they should be able to take a pill and end the pregnancy the day of?
The day of conception, some people will say, no, you have to carry it forever and raise that kid until it's 20. But other people will say, you should be able to have an abortion up until the day the baby's out of your body.
Because God or the gods always care about sex, right?
So it's...
Sex in general has always been talked about in this way.
People want to draw neat, bright lines, whether it has to do with age of consent, whether it has to do with who you should be having sex with and why, right?
Again, this is something that naturalness came into again, right?
Because people are like, okay, well, we got to figure out what kind of sex you should be having with who.
Well, how do we do it?
If it's not God, right, and that's who it was for a long time telling people who to have sex with and how, we'll look to nature.
We'll figure out, you know, you got people writing books about how, well, actually the natural way to have, you know, to be sexual is polygamy.
So clearly that's good and we should have, you know, monogamous relationships are going to be terrible, right?
And then there's other people like, well, no, obviously if you look at every culture, monogamous marriages have emerged naturally.
So that's the natural thing.
And then some people are like, well, heterosexuality is natural.
So you should never have sex with people of the same sex.
And then other people like, well, actually, we found these animals here that are gay.
So being homosexual is actually OK. It's been proven by nature.
I'm just looking at this like.
It's obviously very complicated, right?
Who you should have sex with and how.
Incidentally, while researching contraception and naturalness, I ran into a book called Holy Sex, which is a Catholic's guide to—and I'm paraphrasing the title here—mind-blowing, toe-curling, divinely sanctioned sex, right?
And I'm reading through it, and there was a section on whether or not—so Catholic theories— Really intense Catholic philosophers will deny this, but they'll say natural means something else and they'll kind of like do all this complicated reasoning, but it's not really true.
They're drawing on what's natural and what isn't in the sense of what's in nature.
And the idea is that sex has to be natural.
So for a long time, it was that...
Sex has to be tailored to procreation, right?
So you can't have anal sex.
You can't have oral sex.
You can't do coitus interruptus, which is pulling out, right?
All of those are bad because what God wants, what he's designed naturally, is for a penis to go into a vagina and ejaculate into it to make a baby.
So that was it.
That was the criteria.
But then we had too many people in the world.
And Catholics were getting upset.
They were like, well, I don't want to have any more kids.
I don't want seven kids.
I don't have a farm.
Like, there's all these reasons that people didn't want to have kids.
And the Rhythm Method, this guy Latz, the author of the Rhythm Method, he spends most of the ethics section of that book, which was an enormous bestseller.
Because God didn't tell people about the Rhythm Method until, like, the 20th century.
He could have told them earlier, but he didn't.
So Lat spends this whole book talking about how natural it is.
And he's like, look, this is natural.
These are natural cycles.
And there's a great quote, some guys, like, in the Catholic Church, you can use mathematics to prevent contraception, but not physics or chemistry, right?
How is it natural to sort of plan your sex around rhythms?
And this all goes back to the book, the holy sex book, which is that so then if the rhythm method is natural, right, then it can't be that sex has to be directed to procreation, right?
Because you got a bunch of people who are having sex at exactly the times where it won't result in procreation.
So they change their understanding of what natural sex is to just depositing.
It ends with depositing semen in a vagina.
And in this book, there's a whole section on like, well, what about like, you know, anal sex and dildos?
And basically he's like, if you follow the one rule...
And it ends in the right way, then you can do everything else.
Again, and this goes back to my changing my mind, is that There is some way in which you can use what's natural as a kind of criteria.
There's actually this idea called the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the EEA. And what this says is basically, you know, there's a vague time that sort of determines how humans evolved, right?
So there are certain things that humans have evolved for, and they evolve for those things in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
And so then when we depart from that environment, when we put vending machines in places, or when we give people books to read, We're good to go.
One hypothesis you can have is that maybe that will have negative consequences for us because we're not adapted for it, right?
So that's a fine hypothesis generating heuristic, right?
But what people do instead is they decide beforehand that it's necessarily bad.
If it wasn't in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, if it wasn't there in the Garden of Eden, then it must be bad.
And that's...
So it's not necessarily bad to say, well, hey...
Is this thing, is it natural?
Like, is it something that we are evolved to deal with?
But that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, if it's not natural, that it's bad.
It just means maybe that we need a way to deal with it.
The anti-reading thing goes back to Socrates, which actually sounds a little bit like some of the stuff you were saying about dialogue, where he says, if you have, you know, I'm paraphrasing, not my area of expertise.
If you have the written word, this is going to be a disaster because one of the things that happens with the written word is it can't respond to the interlocutor.
This is what he says.
So when you write things down, instead of saying them, people are going to take that and interpret it for themselves.
It's going to be terrible.
You know, of course, this is paradox because you're reading it.
Well, there's things you're certain of and there's things that you aren't certain of and it's very important to be clear on the difference between those and not attach yourself to whether or not you're correct or incorrect because Human beings with language and with dialogue, we're playing a game.
Like if you and I were in dispute about something, and even if you were correct, if my ego got involved, I would want to be correct.
So I would try to manipulate my version of reality in order to trounce you.
I mean, maybe they'll take that soundbite and it'll get ultra-processed and people will be like, he was arguing for Confederate monuments, but that's stupid because I keep that in my wallet because that guy celebrated Passover.
That guy celebrated Passover, which is a Jewish holiday, all about how slavery was bad.
So here's this guy who's a Jew in America in the 1800s, who's one of his most important holidays, is a celebration of the Jews' liberation from slavery, who had, most likely, slaves in his house Serving him the Passover dishes and certainly washing them.
And what that means to me, at least, is like there's going to be something in my life that I'm as blind to as that guy was to the evils of slavery.
And if you can have your most important holiday, be a holiday where you're celebrating the liberation of your people from slavery and still end up on a fucking Confederate bill.
And it means that no matter what, there's probably some kind of thing that a hundred years from now is going to seem like, how could Alan, how could this idiot have not seen that, right?
Well, so there's a couple of things I think it could be.
One of them is the fact that we've essentially exported slave labor.
So, you know, people are going to be like, all these people who were talking about how slavery is bad, right?
And chattel slavery is a very, very different thing from other kinds of slavery.
But there are ways in which people are trapped in horrific situations who are manufacturing the goods that I have.
Now it gets complicated, right?
Because people are like, well, you know, that's better that than no job at all.
I'm not sure exactly how it all plays out, but I can imagine a future in which people look back at me and you and the things we are consuming and saying, how were they blind to the conditions?
Well, one of the best examples is someone tweeting about slavery on an iPhone that's made by someone who works at Foxconn who has these giant nets around the building to keep people from jumping off because they live such horrific lives that they leap to their deaths so often they have to protect the building with nets.
And this is the exact point at which, if you wanted to ultra-process this conversation, You'd take that sound bite and you'd say, look at these two assholes comparing working in a Foxconn factory to chattel slavery.
So, for example, when people are trying to justify the Bible and the fact that...
So, why didn't Jesus...
Here's this guy who came down and he shocked everyone, right?
Why didn't he also say, like...
You know, also slaves need to be released ASAP. Slavery is bad.
He didn't say that.
So one of the things people will point out is that there are different forms of slavery.
So chattel slavery specifically where people are turned into property and bought and sold and have no opportunity to earn their freedom is a specific kind of slavery that was the kind of slavery we had in the United States.
It's uniquely, horrifically bad.
And so that kind of slavery is not the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory.
But, you know, when I think about, you know, I'm thinking about this right here, I am on like, you know, what's going to happen when that parallel gets made?
I think it's actually an instructive parallel, right?
I'd like us to think about the goods that we're using and consuming and where they're made.
I also don't want people to think that, for a moment, that chattel slavery is the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory.
I mean, just yesterday when I went out and ate, like, baby back ribs down the street.
I guarantee those baby back ribs didn't come from Joel Salton's poly-faced farm.
And I think that...
You know, that's something I think about, but I do it anyway.
I can imagine a time when we look back on our current eating habits and we're like, why wasn't everyone arguing for ethically sourced meat?
Like, how was it that people didn't want to, you know, force everyone collectively to pay more for meat that was raised in a way like the kind of way that Salatin pioneers, right?
In this, I'm really on board with Salatin.
I think he's...
I think he's right to say, look, there are contexts in which animals are happier and less happy.
They're happier on my farm and they're fucking miserable.
But I thought it was very interesting in your book when you talk about Michael Pollan pressing him on whether or not you could feed New York City that way.
You know, I'm a hypocrite like anyone else, but at least I admit it.
And what I wanted to say to him was there's nothing wrong with feeding your chickens fish If some people want chickens that are fed fish meal and you're treating your chickens in a way you think is ethical, there's not some kind of purity test that you need to apply to your farm, even though it's on a road called Pure Meadows Lane, right?
But it's like you don't need a purity test for your farm.
You're a good guy who cares.
I mean, I really think he's a guy who really cares about his animals.
Another thing, I didn't know any of this stuff until I started this research.
So I'll tell you a story, crazy story.
I was in the Netherlands researching the food chapter of this book, which is about vanilla, which I could talk to you about vanilla, which sounds very boring, right?
Which is why I picked it.
It's vanilla.
I'm researching vanilla and people want natural vanilla.
And I don't know if you know, do you know where vanilla comes from?
And that whole story comes back to the salmon and the fish that you were talking about before.
Because in that same place, there was a machine like at a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with like pink sludge whooshing through it.
This was, you know, a couple of places down from the vanilla orchid house.
I was like, what's that?
The guy who's showing me around says, that's algae that we're growing here because people want their salmon, their farmed salmon, to be pink.
And it's not pink because it doesn't eat the diet that it gets in nature.
So it's naturally gray, but people won't pay for that.
So he's farming algae.
Which is natural.
So that's the stuff, the pink stuff.
And then they feed that to the farmed salmon just so it can be naturally pink.
So when you go into your Whole Foods or whatever and you see that your salmon is all natural and it's pink...
And I'm just looking at this whole thing and I'm like, what is wrong with us human beings that we've gotten to this point where we want stuff natural so bad that we're developing new technologies to figure out how to...
You've just done some weird shit to water to make it white.
You know, it's not milk.
But if you can recreate steak, if you can 3D print steak, it's still going to be steak.
Now, if you're the type of person that wants to eat the soul of the animal, and you want to be there when the animal gets killed, and you want to slice the piece off and throw it on the fire, and you want to know, you want to be like boots to the ground and know, well, that's a different thing.
You're asking for a different thing.
But if you're asking for meat that has the same amount of essential fatty acids as a grass-fed ribeye steak, you can do that, I think.
I think they're probably going to be able to do that.
This idea, I mean, naturalness again comes in here because the word nature, right?
It actually means birth, natura, origins.
So naturalness has to do with the origins of a thing.
And we think about origins a lot when we think about what a thing is, right?
We want to know where it came from.
And that tells us What it is, right?
And so with a steak, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to say, you can't call it a steak unless its origin is a cow.
There's going to be other people who are going to say, no, if it looks just like and is chemically composed identically to a steak that comes from an animal, then it's an animal.
But I'll give you an example to push back on what you were saying a little bit.
But I think with women, there's something nonsensical that's been drilled.
Not all women, sorry.
Don't fucking generalize!
I'm not, I swear to God.
But I think some women have this idea that's been drilled in their head by marketing that you should spend three months of your fucking salary on a rock.
And it's complete nonsense.
First of all, if you understand the De Beers, what they've done with the diamond market, you probably do.
You know, it's like ridiculously overinflated.
There's far more diamonds.
They're far more efficient at getting diamonds out of the ground than they ever were before.
So they have this insane backlog of diamonds.
I mean, diamonds aren't rare, but they're stupid expensive.
And they really shouldn't be.
But they've done an amazing job of keeping them stupid expensive.
That said, if someone can artificially create something that's absolutely indistinguishable from a diamond, there's a part of some women that will think that because that was created by a machine, it's not as valuable,
it doesn't mean as much, and it's not worthy of the same sort of appreciation and I'm sure you've seen women look at each other's rings and check out the rings.
It's a symbol of so many different things.
It's like, how much does your man love you?
How wealthy is he?
How well did you do in choosing a mate?
There's so many things involved with this ridiculous ritual of diamond rings.
That for whatever reason, those women that have fallen into this nonsense, they're not interested in some sort of a workaround, you know, some sort of a 3D printed diamond ring.
For me, I mean, maybe if I was being given a diamond ring and the prices were identical, I think, and this is where I changed my mind, right?
This is about where the naturalness stuff comes in again, right?
That stone...
That pyrite Even if making that gold cube were actually more expensive than getting it out of the ground, there's something about where it came from that enchants it, right?
That sort of makes it magical.
That's part of Yellowstone, right?
Is that, you know, they talk about, okay, the genetics of our, you know, our bison.
They don't come from outside.
Even if it's indistinguishable to people looking in at the animals, there's something about maintaining genealogical purity or something like that, that something came from somewhere, which I think drives – I mean, you're probably right.
I don't know.
It all goes back to economics, right?
Like the steak people, like maybe the steak farmers don't actually care.
But I think Joel Salton would be like, no, don't call that a steak.
He would say don't call that a steak and he'd say it's not a steak because it doesn't come from a cow.
But let me push back on the genealogical thing because Yellowstone in particular has some of the most domesticated elk that you'll ever be around.
It's so bizarre.
I was there with my children, and we were taking selfies with the elk, and they were like 30 or 40 feet away from us.
It was probably more like 20 yards, but close enough that in nature, that would fucking never happen.
They would run like hell if they saw people, or they saw any animal that looked like it was an eyes-facing-forward predator.
And in Yellowstone they're so accustomed to people and they've actually adapted their behavior to congregate around the parks because they're less likely to be killed by wolves there.
So they'll go around these like visitor areas and there was a fucking vending machine and then 30 yards away from the vending machine is an elk and I have a photo of me standing in front of this Coca-Cola machine looking like this and then behind me is an elk.
When I was a kid, me and my parents went through Yellowstone when I was like seven or eight years old and there was cars in front of us that would put food out the windows and the bears would put their paw on the car and take food from them.
Also, the bears, the problem is bears are uniquely...
They have habits that they form in terms of where they get their food, which is why it's really a problem if a bear gets into your garbage, because they'll never stop going into your garbage.
They have to kidnap the bear and move it to a zoo or take it to another mountain really far, far away, or they have to kill it.
Again, this is this whole I'm not sure about stuff.
I didn't know anything about hunting.
I assumed hunting was...
I don't know, bat, like people go out, they kill endangered species, right?
Like whatever I had seen, that was it.
And when I went to Yellowstone, you know, when I discovered that Doug Smith, who's the guy that reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, when he was like, I hunt.
And my first reaction was, wait, what?
I thought you loved animals.
How could this man who cares about nature?
And what became clear, as you know and many hunters know, is that it doesn't work like that.
Hunting doesn't mean you don't care about nature.
It doesn't mean you don't care about animals.
And that was a wake-up call for me that I didn't understand how people relate to the natural world and that I had been fed a kind of I don't know, oversimplified, ultra-processed version of what it was to hunt.
At the same time with those bison, you got to cull them, right?
So you got to get rid of them.
And like you said, right, there's this resource, you know, you don't want them wandering on a rancher's land.
And that's something that, you know, the people in Yellowstone will, you know, activists are happy to tell you, yes, these kinds of things are problems.
As a hunter, though, I imagine that you wouldn't be super excited to just like camp out and shoot a bison It would only be for meat.
No, it wouldn't be predator versus prey and it wouldn't be what you would call fair chase.
I mean, it would be technically fair chase because the animal does wander out, but you have to admit that those animals have been grossly domesticated.
I mean, when we were in Yellowstone, bison were everywhere.
You could just stand there and stare at them.
I brought binoculars.
I was handing them to my kids, and they're standing like, look at this one over here.
They weren't even remotely concerned about us.
I mean, that's also why a 70-year-old woman was gored just three days ago, because this crazy lady decided she wanted to take a selfie with a fucking bison.
You know, there are wild animals.
I mean, they are wild, but they're not wild like a wild animal.
They're not wild like a wild animal that doesn't have a real relationship with people.
But bison, this is where it's tricky.
When there was no Yellowstone and when there was no place where they could be domesticated, they were still an easy animal to hunt.
They've always been easy because they're so big that they're not concerned about wolves.
They're not concerned about anything.
In fact, one of the ways that Native Americans would hunt them is they would kill wolves.
And they would wear a wolf coat and they would crawl around like a wolf or a coyote coat.
So they would put it on their head and they would walk on all fours up close to it and then shoot it with a bow and arrow.
And there's actually a famous painting of this Wild West famous painting of these two Native American hunters that are wearing these coyote skins and they're crawling in this field up to these bison.
And a friend of mine, my friend Remy Warren, who's a host of a television show called Apex Predator, actually used this method to hunt a bison.
He actually put a coyote skin on and crawled up to a bison, to a free-range bison, and hunted it this way, just to see if it would work just like this famous painting.
So bison, one of the reasons why they were able to almost extirpate them from the United States was that they're really easy to hunt because they're not scared of anything.
Nothing can fuck with them in the real world because in the real wild world, wolves can't fuck with bisons.
They'll stomp a wolf.
The wolf doesn't even have a chance.
Like, grizzly bears can, and they have.
And there's actually a video, really recently, from about a month ago, of a grizzly bear killing a bison in Yellowstone while all these people were watching.
There's cars parked, and this fucking grizzly bear jumps on the back of a bison and is bringing it down.
It's a long...
There it is right there.
It's a long, drawn-out process, too.
That's a small bison.
But you know big enough and this bear is fucking huge and look at this bear is like I mean it's like that's probably like a two-year-old bison or something like that It's not a full-grown bison, but I mean this is all This this video is like seven minutes.
What is it long?
It's 114 there It's edited, yeah.
So, I mean, you see him in all these different scenes, these cutscenes, and here he finally gets them, and he kills them in this river.
But he's attacking them on a bridge, he's attacking them on a road.
It's a long, drawn-out process for this grizzly bear to kill this bison.
Yeah.
So they don't really have that much to worry about.
Calves have to worry.
So this is the video.
That's the famous painting.
And see, bisons have zero concern for wolves because they'll just stomp them.
I mean, they're enormous animals and their hide can be like 12 inches thick of hair.
I mean, especially in the wintertime, like, the Native Americans that would wear the bison robes, like, it was the most incredible protection from cold, because you're wearing this insane natural thing that has shielded bison to the point where they can just walk out in a blizzard.
That painting, and I was like, that sounds familiar, like he's talking about that.
It was on the cover of a book called The Ecological Indian.
I think it's called by a guy named Shepard Kretsch, which is, he was looking at the history.
I mean, for one, speaking of Native Americans and Yellowstone, how crazy is it that because we think of natural as not human involved, one of the things to make Yellowstone natural is he got rid of all of the...
I mean, I remember I went, there was actually, when I was there, there was a hunting blind that was left over from when Native Americans were in Yellowstone.
My guide showed me, just like, it's, you know, just a little hunting blind that they would use.
And it also, yeah, again, right, it made me realize, right, Yellowstone is not pure nature, that even our understanding of nature and naturalness, if you get rid of, like, getting rid of humans.
I would have wanted to say a long time ago, oh no, there's no such difference.
But yeah, no man, a fucking road is less natural than...
No road.
I don't know.
And the same thing happened with sports, which was, I mean, with Yellowstone, right?
There is more and less natural, right?
And it would be sad if Yellowstone became much more unnatural.
It would take away from, you know, if they put in like an amusement park or whatever it is they're trying to do to like figure out how to raise funds at these places.
And it's because part of what we value about Yellowstone, even though it's impure and even though it's imperfect...
Is that we get to see something more natural than a zoo.
So that was another one of the things that really convinced me that I needed to rethink my relationship with naturalness, which is that...
So I went to a...
Natural bodybuilding competition.
I know you had Ronnie Coleman on, like I'd never been to a bodybuilding competition before.
And so I went in and it was a natural bodybuilding competition.
And these, you know, these people were, they had, you could smell the spray tan from, you know, I was in the room with them backstage.
I was like, these are the most unnatural people I've ever seen, right?
They've been, what is it called?
Sodium cycling or something to like cut their subcutaneous fat so that they, I mean, they've done everything you could possibly do to get their bodies into this form.
And I'm like, what?
This is a great example.
This was going to be my example that I used to show that naturalness in sports was stupid because all it really meant was that you weren't taking a certain list of drugs.
That's it.
That's all it meant.
Everything else about it was unnatural, right from the tans.
So when you're setting a marathon record, there's an incredible marathoner named Elliot Kipchoge.
And Nike had these new shoes called Vaporflies.
And he was using these shoes.
And after he broke the marathon record, just shattered it, people were like, wait a second, how much of that can be attributed to him and how much of it is just the technology in the shoes, right?
And this set off again, one of these like back and forth.
It was totally useless online where some people were like, I can't believe you're taking his accomplishment away from him.
And other people were like, it's all, you know, it's obviously the shoes.
But for me, it's just a broader conversation about, well, so what is it that we care about in sports, right?
If you put a pair of shoes on someone and all of a sudden they're 5%, 10% faster...
Like some people have just incredible genetic gifts and some people don't.
Now if a person doesn't and they take some creatine and a bunch of different substances and they They get in a cryo tank every day after training and then they're in a sauna every day and then they're doing all these different things where they have electronics strapped to them to try to monitor their heart rate and make sure that they're getting the exact right amount of training and no more and no less and that the recovery is perfect before they train harder.
They allowed Pistorius in, but there's a German guy, Marcus Rem, who also wanted to compete and was using one of these legs and they did all these tests, right?
And they ran tests on, you know, they do these pressure plates.
It's really incredible what they do to see whether his leg gives him an advantage over what?
A natural leg, right?
So the baseline comparison here is, does your artificial leg give you an advantage over a natural leg?
So in his case, it's that what they tried to do with these blades is they're like, okay, let's figure out...
Because he's, you know, all of these guys are world-class athletes, right?
So it's some weird hypothetical, right?
Where if Marcus Rem had a leg...
Would he be performing at about the same level as he does with his artificial leg?
And as weird as it is, as paradoxical as it is, I think it makes sense, right?
It makes sense.
And it depends on the sport, too.
Like UFC, I looked this up.
So I was like, I wonder if there's anyone with an artificial limb in UFC. And then I was thinking, because I did judo, and I was like, wait a second, that'd be crazy.
Because you couldn't allow someone to have...
Like a prosthetic arm because you couldn't you couldn't like arm bar like you could you could just any pain.
Yeah, you wouldn't feel any pain.
So unlike running where I can imagine it being fair to allow someone to have an artificial limb.
And that's what I mean.
It's like fair compared to a natural limb.
It would I can't imagine a scenario in which a prosthetic arm.
You would have to, like, if someone had their hand replaced, you'd have to literally engineer bones that had a breaking point that were similar to organic bones.
You would have USC fighters who are like, no, I still think the prosthetic hand is giving this person an advantage, right?
And then that person would be like, well, we got to call in the scientists and they're going to like do all these bone breaking tests, you know, which is what they did with these two athletes, which is what they're doing also with transgender athletes who want to compete.
It's the same kind of logic, right?
Which is...
What's the comparison between, say, in the case of a transgender woman who is competing?
What's the baseline natural comparison?
In other words, does being a transgender woman give you an advantage of Over being a biological woman.
The only difference is there's an inclination towards allowing them to compete because it makes you seem more progressive There's a there's a motivation to allowing transgender women athletes to compete because if you look at the oppressive You know, if you have an oppression scale, they are one level or two levels past being a biological woman.
Being a biological woman is more oppressed than being a biological woman.
When a woman kicks a man's ass, we're all happy.
When a man kicks a woman's ass, we're very upset, right?
Yeah, I mean, I think there is right now, in this cultural moment, I think there's...
In the same way that there was...
I mean, women didn't box in the Olympics until 2012?
Because for a long time it was thought that women aren't, they're not naturally suited to boxing, right?
I think the first sports they played in the Olympics were, I don't know, they did like sailing and gymnastics.
Even later, like the very earliest Olympics, there weren't any, the guy who founded the Olympics was like, not women, women will just, you know, women will stay out of this.
And right now, I mean, I think you're right that there is...
Because sports are so symbolically important, right?
I mean, you see this with everything, with Colin Kaepernick, with whatever.
Sports are really important to people.
Sports stars are heroes.
And so I do think that a part of the transgender rights movement is going to be securing the ability for transgender athletes to compete under the gender that they identify as.
And...
I understand that.
I think it makes sense.
I think it makes sense to want that because you want cultural representation.
At the same time, I don't think you're going to find maybe you'll nutpick them, right?
You can find them online.
You're not going to find a lot of athletes who think that there shouldn't be any regulations on how transgender athletes compete.
In other words, there are very few people who are actually involved in the Olympics, right?
Like setting up the rules or whatever.
I mean, I talked with a transgender scientist named Joanna Harper about this who studies the differences between transgender athletes and athletes who identify as their biological sex.
And there's no way she would say, "It doesn't matter.
Let anyone compete without any regulations.
So the real question on the ground, I think, that people are arguing about is not whether there should be regulations, but what regulations should there be?
And that question, I mean, I don't know how, I mean, you probably follow this a lot, but like, same question is like, what do you do with testosterone levels, right?
So Dutichand, right?
Let's say you're hyperandrogenous, but you're XX chromosome.
Yeah, so one of the things that people try to do in sports, because it's important to have...
There's some philosophers who argue it's not, but I think it's crazy.
It's important to have men's sports and women's sports, right?
It's important because sports are symbolically important, and we want to have women competing at the very highest levels, and we want men competing at the very highest levels.
That's the problem with that is they would have to test it every day and they would have to test it multiple times a day because it's not just how it is when you're competing.
It's what it's like when you're training.
So how much recovery, how much muscle have you retained?
Alexander Karelin is a very famous Russian wrestler who they used to call the experiment because his parents are both like 5'5 and 5'7.
They're like smaller folks and he's fucking enormous and he's terrifying.
Go to that picture that I put on my Instagram.
I put up a picture on my Instagram that I look at this picture every couple months or so just to remind myself what a tremendous pussy I am.
That's Corellin Corellin used to take men.
I mean we're talking about men that were 300 pounds and They would flatten themselves out on the ground to try to avoid being picked up by him and he would scoop his hands under their belly and Hoist them up in the air like they were a pillow and throw them onto the ground Literally look at that picture of him with the red shirt the one right there.
No right there Look at the size of that motherfucker I mean, just unstoppable for years and years in the Olympics.
And, I mean, I don't know whether that's science or nature, but if it's just nature, you can't tell me that this guy doesn't have some kind of crazy genetic advantage that the average man just does not.
You know, when we watch sports, I mean, sure, Alex Honnold, like, he probably has some kind of genetic thing where he's just not scared of the same stuff, or he loves being scared, whatever it is, right?
I got them prescribed to me once by a doctor because I wanted to try them, and I wound up never trying them.
I just wanted to see what it was like to do something...
Just for my own curiosity, I wanted to see what it was like to do something nerve-wracking while I was on beta blockers.
Yeah, I was going to use them on a hunting trip, but I didn't because I felt like I would be disappointed in myself if I did that, which is really crazy because on a hunting trip you'd think the most important thing is making an ethical shot, but I was...
My thought process was I trained so hard to make an ethical shot and to be accurate and to practice my shot-making routine until it's like drilled into my head.
I don't want to take a pill.
I still have them somewhere.
I don't even know if they're any good because they're like six years old, but I want to know what that feels like.
It would probably feel really weird to have no adrenaline when you know you should.
And like what you were saying, too, is it takes away...
There are certain experiences where part of what you value about the experience is how you manage it and how you train yourself.
Like you said, you don't want it to be a pill that did it.
And sports is one of those things, whereas it would be crazy...
To, you know, to think to yourself, well, I'll give you an example.
Well, this is, it's funny, right?
Childbirth, right?
So it'd be crazy to go in the dentist's office and be like, you know, I'd be really disappointed in myself if the way I manage this filling is by using, you know...
It's like, I'd just be, I'd be really sad about myself.
You know, please don't give me anything.
I'm going to handle it myself.
That's insane, to me at least.
But people do that with childbirth because childbirth, like sports, Is one of those experiences where a part of what some people want is a sense of kind of primal connection.
And that was something I didn't understand.
I thought it was totally I was like, why would anyone ever?
Want to experience, like, you could just have an epidural.
But like you were saying, right, so with sports, but back to Judy Chan, right?
Because I think it's really important because this is going to come up and in our fucking cultural environment, it's going to be nuts, right?
And I want people...
I hate the, like...
I hate how bad the conversations are, honestly, about transgender athletes because they are so binary and so simplistic that I think that they're going to...
That when there is actually an athlete competing in the Olympics who is transgender, it's going to happen soon.
It's going to rip everyone apart.
And instead, what I would like to see is people who understand the complexity of stuff like being an XX athlete with hyperandrogenism or alternatively.
Right.
So say you do it with chromosomes.
So now you're XY.
If you're, you know, for the sake of sports, hypothetically, we're going to define you as a woman if you're XX and a man if you're XY.
But then you've got people who are XY but androgen insensitive.
So these are people who biologically essentially grow up as as women and they look like women.
They compete as women and then they have a chromosome.
They have a test, right?
And they find out that they're XY, but they're androgen insensitive.
And this was an issue in the Olympics as well in 1985. There was a woman who's now a physician who had been competing as a woman her whole life.
Then the test came back, and she was like, well, that's crazy.
But then what ends up happening, and again, I've read so many of these arguments, and I want people to have interesting discussions about this, is people will say...
They'll look at this, and on one side of the argument, people will be like, well, then she was just, you know, if it's XY, she's a man.
So people use outliers to try to break down all of the category.
On the other side, people will be like, well, since there are outliers, clearly the categories themselves don't make sense.
But that's not true either, right?
Obviously the categories for sports of biological males and biological females are very important categories that do make sense.
And there are also outliers that make it hard to decide.
That's it.
And then we have a conversation about the difficulties with the outliers and we try to, at least for my part, we try to embrace the complexity of those situations.
Well, it highlights, if you haven't seen it folks, it highlights how prevalent cheating is.
And so, when you're talking about sports, you're talking about people that are willing to, first of all, push their body, literally, to the brink of failure for success.
And then they're also willing to take exogenous drugs to succeed.
Then they're also, in this case, Russia was complicit in aiding them and perhaps even forcing them to do this.
And they had this elaborate system set up at the Sochi Olympics to cheat.
And so when you're talking about sports, that's part of the thing.
And this is something that I've admitted openly with the transgender argument.
There are outliers, and there's outliers that are female athletes.
Like, first of all, African American females have the same bone density as a lot of Caucasian men.
The bone density argument's a weird one, because men generally have thicker bone density, particularly men that lift weights have denser bones than females.
But some women have dense bones.
You know, there's some women, like...
There's some women fighters that have real knockout power, and then there's some women fighters that just don't.
They just don't, for whatever reason.
Structurally, they don't generate the same amount of force.
I have no idea how things break down along racial lines, but with Men and women, it's a particularly clear thing and it's also something that we have as a category, right?
So then that forces the question on us in a way that That is difficult, right?
Like you were saying, what is fair?
Every single athlete at a world-class level, in a certain sense, is a freak of nature, right?
We really should be embracing these nuanced discussions because this is what's critical for understanding the true nature of things.
And these people that are willfully distorting people's messages and taking these ultra-processed versions, whether it's a clip or a soundbite or even worse, in quotes, a segment with dot, dot, dot at the end, The idea that you can do that and reframe what is really a really nuanced conversation where people are exploring the very nature of Yeah.
Yeah.
Especially your book, which is really – what I've read of it is really fantastic.
The idea behind it is it's such an important thing to discuss because we do have this binary idea of natural and unnatural, processed.
And this – it's on them if they want to do that.
It sucks that people do do that and that they pretend that your argument is different than it really is, but that's on you.
You're just being a fool.
It sucks that so many people get sucked into these kind of debates and these conversations, but you can't do that to someone face-to-face.
You can't have that conversation with someone in a real setting of sitting down, talking, looking at each other eye-to-eye, because that's the only way people are really supposed to be talking.
Some people get fired for deception for the same reason, because people are deceptive about what they meant and what they were trying to portray.
Or also...
That someone could just make a statement, and instead of there being a discussion about that statement, they're fired, and their life is ruined, and they're publicly shamed, and then we get to share it and laugh and mock them, whether it's through an article or a video like that girl with the finger cut, the Black Lives Matter girl.
I don't think it's on people that eat the wrong information.
I think that's very unfortunate.
It's on the people who distribute the information deceptively.
The people that are distorting, willfully distorting, like someone like you were saying, if we have this conversation, look, we've talked about a bunch of hot-button subjects that could get us canceled.
And you could take any segment of a conversation like that and likely find a few things that people could take out of context and it would spur this whole debate on what a piece of shit you are.
And this is something that people like to do for whatever reason.
They like to willfully distort a nuanced discussion and take a segment out of context and change the narrative and turn it into something it's not.
That's on them.
That is on them.
It's not on the people that listen to it and get sucked into it.
I feel for them and I'm sorry and I don't enjoy it when it happens to me.
But the people who do that willfully, you are wasting your life distorting reality because you wish things to be a different way or because you're deceptive or because you're bitter or spiteful or angry or hateful or You see in you this other person that you're targeting.
You see in them something that you don't like in yourself or something in a past lover or something in your father or whatever the fuck it is.
This is a guy who tells people that he can cure their cancer.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, cure their cancer naturally, right?
He's got the whole, you know, he gives them wheatgrass smoothies, right?
And he tells them that if they just think positively and, you know, that big pharma is corrupt and chemotherapy is a sham, and if they just come to his place, which I went to in Florida, Did you go to interview him?
I did.
I did.
I went to interview him because – and he looks like – I mean he just looks like – he's like a caricature of a snake oil salesman.
He's got this like artificially tanned skin and like a pointy goatee.
And so I think you're totally right.
It's on this guy.
This this fucked up guy who is who is getting people's hope up, right?
Yeah could be cured and live and people die people die because they go there and the people that were there This was the crazy thing and this is this again gets back to how the ultra processed information is happening These were not idiots man.
These were people who I I don't know what it's like because I've never had, knock on wood, I've never had cancer.
A person very close to me has never had cancer.
Like, these are people who, you know, when that happens, you're looking for anyone.
You're looking for anyone to tell you a story that gives you a sense that things are actually not chaotic, right?
That things are simple, that there's an answer, that there's a community that can help you.
And so they go, right?
And he taps into that and he gives them what they want, right?
In a sense, he gives them what they want, which is a feeling of certainty and belonging and hope.
And he's a terrible, terrible human being.
But it ends up being really bad for these people.
And it ends up being bad for society in certain ways.
And so I struggle, right?
And the problem is if you attack that guy, I don't know if you've run into this at all, but if you attack the charlatans, They've been turned into saints by the people that look up to them.
So when you attack them, you also end up attacking all of the people...
There's people flipping out right now, though, who have been to their chiropractor, who feel like they've gotten relief, who respect their chiropractor.
Well, there's some relief in someone manipulating your body, folks.
You should get a deep tissue massage, and you should get an MRI and find out what's really wrong.
I came through this because I used to go to a doctor, a chiropractor, excuse me, and I had a bulging disc, and it was fucking me up for a long time.
It was really bothering me.
And this chiropractor was assuring me it definitely was not a bulging disc, and there's probably a muscle tear, and we're going to fix it by manipulating this.
I'm going to change that and crack and see, oh, I got it there.
Let me adjust this, boom, in your hip, this.
It was all horse shit.
But he was a saint compared to another one that I went to.
I'll tell you a story about a guy who was ripping people off.
This guy was really ripping people off.
He was doing this thing that he called zone healing.
Are you ready for this?
He would...
I'm not bullshitting.
He would touch your head and he would press your head here and press your head here, press your head here, and then press it really hard here.
And he goes, oh, you feel that?
And I go, yeah.
And he'd be like, yeah, that's L4 is off.
And I'm like, no, you squeezed hard on my fucking head.
I'm not stupid.
And then he would adjust you and tell you that this is going to fix whatever autoimmune disease you have, whatever this.
And so I was going to him because all these other jujitsu people were going to him.
And they were all telling me, oh, this guy's great at cracking backs.
And he's amazing.
He fixed my neck.
He fixed my this.
Because people want...
Someone to fix their thing right if you have a neck injury and you just spend time off and it gets better and you get some treatment from a Chiropractor will heal things heal your body knows how to heal and he goes all he fixed my neck no your fucking neck healed okay things do heal but this person touching your back saying he's fixing your gallbladder is a scam artist right so I had this guy and I'm talking to him and And so I said, well, how does this work?
And he's explaining to me, he's got a chart, this is a zone here, this is how we're fixing this and that and that and this.
And I said, but all you're doing is pushing down on my back.
How are you fixing all these things?
And so he tries to give me the shenanigans and a little song and dance.
I go, so you're telling me I have to be so fucking dumb To think that if you push on my back, it's going to fix my liver.
And then it will fix my liver.
He goes, well, you do know the placebo method does work.
I go, so you're taking money from people to lie to them.
So we have this tense conversation in his office.
And I'm looking at him, and I know this guy's got a nice house, and he's got a nice car, and he's just fucking stealing money from people by giving them these false hopes.
It's creepy shit, man, and it's really creepy shit when you're alone with a guy and you're talking to him about it, and you get him to say it's the placebo method.
And meanwhile, other than that, nice guy, which is even more fucked up.
I didn't even know chiropractor I mean, the history of it, I mean, like you said, right, if you look into it, it's sort of hard to believe that people, like, it's still a thing.
Is one of these words that can easily slide from explicitly religious to seemingly secular, right?
It's like, oh yeah, energy.
That's in physics.
They have energy, right?
But it's like...
No, this is a thing.
They're not manipulating your energy.
There's not something scientific happening here.
This is a religious ritual, a healing ritual disguised as some kind of science.
And yet, as you know, and this is what I discovered with my first book, I used to joke with people like, I got out of religion because I didn't want to talk about touchy stuff.
And then I started talking about food and medicine.
Not stopped doing, because I still do scholarship stuff.
But I wanted to talk about it in a way that was relevant to modern society.
So I didn't just want to do classical Chinese thought.
I wanted to look at how the stuff I learned about how religion works or about the history of religion and apply it to, you know, how are people choosing the foods they eat?
How are people choosing the medicines like with Chinese medicine?
Right.
People would say crazy stuff to me.
They'd say things like, you know, acupuncture is natural.
Or whatever.
And that's and that's part of why it works.
Like acupuncture, they got stainless steel phyloform needles.
You think those who were around when the Yellow Emperor was writing his classic?
Like, no, they don't.
And when people talk about Chinese medicine, they don't talk about, you know, exorcism.
Exorcism is not a thing.
It was very popular back in the day, but that's not something people embrace.
And so I saw these weird uncritical embraces of of dietary regimens and healing rituals.
That to me were just obviously right out of, you know, ancient China or, you know, any ancient context where people would never believe them.
And yet today, you know, you're going in and you're having your back cracked.
But at the same time, again, and I don't know, I keep saying you know this, but it must be...
Difficult.
When people are in pain, right?
When people are in pain, when you're in pain, either psychic pain or physical pain, you really need someone to tell you they have an answer for you and to explain it and fit it into a system.
Because there's many people that have gone to people that have claimed to be a healer.
And just this process of embracing this new...
New situation there's like I am here.
I'm getting healed.
Oh my god, it's happening and you're a lot of what makes people ill is Anxiety is stress and the placebo effect of having some sort of a in your mind Perceived solution does have tangible physical benefits for some strange reason which is really weird like what what goes on the human mind there is an unbelievably crazy I think it's a Netflix special.
It's a guy who's a magician, a professional magician, but he also comes from like a religious background where he would go to these faith healing revivals.
And he does a show where he tells his audience this flat out.
He says, I'm a magician.
I specialize in manipulating your minds.
And I know that the way that faith healing works is bullshit.
And I'm going to show you by faith-healing people tonight in this audience.
I'm going to do it right now, but I want you to know that I'm just manipulating you, right?
And there's also the reality of some diets being incredibly poor in nutrients, and really the result of that, of eating those diets, is you get really sick, and if you eat the nutrient-rich diets, your body turns around.
But that's a big part of why people are using the internet.
They're trying to score points and shoot people down and cancel people and expose people and get mad at people.
And they're doing it to elevate themselves.
It's a big part of why they're doing it.
Really, it's just you're robbing yourself of time and focus and energy that you could be spending on important things.
And this is not, again, to say like what you were talking about before about exposing police brutality or corruption.
There's important things to expose that are really, like, there's people who are being victimized.
But that's not what we're talking about here.
What we're talking about is a general human tendency to tear people down.
And it's very negative.
And it feels like you should be doing it for some strange reason.
While you're doing it, there's like some satisfaction.
Like if you have a rock and you see a window, and you just fucking chuck that rock at the window and it smashes, and a bunch of people behind you go, yeah!
It's the same reason, I guess, eating junk food feels good.
It's tapped into all of these things.
Just use the internet to find out about stuff.
Just even in this show, how many times have we been able to bring up a video of something or a shot of something?
It was constructive.
I learned things.
There are plenty of ways...
To use the internet well, and I do think you're right.
We've got to hold people.
If people are fucking designing social media to make it compulsively addictive, We didn't think there's anything wrong with that when it was first instituted.
Well, that's the thing about the YouTube algorithm.
My friend Ari had this experiment that he did.
People were talking about the YouTube algorithm that it sort of – there's one thing about Facebook and YouTube and a lot of these things.
People will make this argument that the algorithm favors arguments.
It favors – it pulls up things that you get upset with, particularly Facebook.
And that it's trying to manipulate you into using it much more often because it turns out that people engage much more in things they disagree with than things they agree with.
So what he decided to do was only YouTube puppies.
And so he just YouTubed all these videos of puppies.
So his feed was just filled with puppy stuff.
And all his suggestions were puppy stuff.
And he's like, no, it's not that it's trying to make you upset.
This goes to Salatin, something Salatin talked about.
Here's another analogy, I think, for information that's really helpful.
Monocultures versus polycultures, right?
I think that our current information ecosystem is set up to give us all a monoculture of information.
It's like, okay, here's what this person wants.
I'm just going to feed them a lot of puppies and only puppies.
Here's the information this person wants.
I'm going to feed them more of that.
And what you end up is...
A homogenization of what it is that's coming into you when what you need is a kind of intellectual polyculture, right?
You want something resilient where there's people, you know, where there's different systems in place so that you don't just have one big system so that you can have other ideas.
I mean, intellectually, this is what comedians often did, right?
Or jesters.
I mean, this is something I work on academically is this idea like, you know, you have the king and the king is the authority, but the king will have a jester who has the right to push back on the most fundamental things that the king believes in and puts out there.
They can like, you know, and in general, right, the fool or the jester is wise because they can challenge and they take off their pants in public, right, and piss or they can do things that no one else gets to do.
That's important because it prevents monoculture, intellect.
Intellectual and moral monoculture.
And I honestly think, I mean, I think you were talking about South Park the other day, but one thing that I struggle with now is that I feel like the jesters these days They're just confirming what it is that their viewers already believe.
So with South Park, I didn't know whether I was going to agree with what they were mocking or whether I was going to be shocked.
I mean, first of all, there was the character that he was doing, you know, when he was doing the Colbert Report, which was this, like, really cocky Republican character.
And then he went over to do the Stephen Colbert show, and now it's not that anymore.
Now it's like he's hosting a talk show.
But it's the guy that we knew who was, like, super ultra-cocky and really funny from The Daily Show that was like a parody of a right-wing guy It's very odd.
So tell me a gesture, because I want, what I want, I want to be able to, I want to be able to watch people who are going to sometimes make me feel like I was I was right and they're gonna be mocking someone that I that I disagree with and then I also want and then two seconds later I mean this happens a little bit with Dave Chappelle I see like oh Dave's the best at it But there's a guy named Andrew Schultz who's thriving during this lockdown because he can't do stand-up and he's doing on his Instagram
He does these really well-produced videos where he'll take down a subject I don't even want to give you an example, but he's got a bunch of them out there, but he's fantastic at it.
He's really good at it.
And he's also independent, and he's a wild, young, really funny comedian, and he doesn't have any affiliation.
He's not stuck in this left-wing paradigm, or he's not a right-wing person.
Well, I mean, we got a problem in ideology world, right?
We've got a problem with these very strict left versus right things.
You know, it's really weird.
And I've been acutely aware of it because I've been so often accused of being right-wing for the most bizarre reasons.
Mostly because of the way I look and because I'm a commentator for the UFC. And, you know, I'm a meathead.
I look like a meathead.
I'm a hunter.
All these different things.
I get accused of being...
And then, you know, it turns out I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I lean way more towards progressive ideas, but I also support the Second Amendment.
It's like people have this idea in their head that you have to be in these hard lines, and if you're not, you're not a part of a tribe, and you get ostracized by that tribe.
And there's a very real stigma attached to that, and you feel that stigma when people attack you for your ideas.
And so people lean in to what gets them love and lean away from what gets them chastised.
And then I came out and I was like, no, there are some good things about it.
That's exactly it.
There's actually, it's funny, like one of the things, so a project I was working on way back in the day was a podcast about people who shift.
It's called Shift.
And we were looking at people who fundamentally, who changed their minds on really, really important things.
So we did one episode on this guy, Scott Shepard.
You actually had Daryl Davis on.
So this is a related thing.
So Scott Shepard was this guy.
It's an insane story who was, and I don't want to give away too much about this, but like he started very much not a racist.
Ended up in the KKK and then left the KKK. And what I wanted to understand, and what I think maybe this is something we just need to investigate right now, is what is it that causes people to break out of whatever ideological label it is that they have?
There was another guy that we did another episode on.
That was where it ended for now.
So he was like a Greenpeace activist.
Like, he was one of those guys who would go in, tear up GMO crops, right?
Now he's pro-GMO. I don't care about whether or not GMOs are good or bad.
Yeah, we're at an adolescent stage of interpretation of ideas.
That's what I think.
We really are.
And of communication.
And I think that what we're doing with social media and the internet in general is we are far more connected than ever before, but in many ways far more segregated and segmented and far more rigid in our ideas and the echo chambers have never been stronger.
And I think that The next leap of technology, and I've had Elon on, and he discussed his Neuralink, which is really fascinating stuff because it's going to require surgery.
Like, people are literally going to get holes drilled.
But they're going to drill holes in your head, and they're going to put literal wires into your brain, and you're going to have a device attached to your skull.
And he said it's like a quarter-sized device.
Device on your fucking head.
It's gonna Bluetooth up to your phone and you're gonna be able to access information and your bandwidth that you're gonna be able to access information now is gonna be radically increased and The way he describes it It varies between the way he describes it when it seems like he's trying very hard to make it palatable versus when he sees the actual future potential of it, which is we're not going to be the same thing anymore.
Just like, you're not the same thing.
It's like when I was a kid, people would lie about stuff.
And you really, there's no way to check.
You know, they could say, like, I won the Olympics 16 times and I was the fastest man ever.
And you'd be like, whoa, who the fuck are you?
Like, there's no way to check.
Now you could go, what's your name?
And then you pull out your phone and in five seconds, you know the person's full of shit.
So we've changed radically in our ability to assess whether things are accurate or inaccurate and whether someone's a liar or not.
I think much like that, the next leaps of technology are going to completely change Our understanding of motivation, of emotions, of what is causing someone to have a deceptive narrative that they're trying to push forth, and we're going to be able to see these things.
We're going to be able to access this information in a very different way, and it's going to change what we are as human beings.
We're going to have some sort of cyborg capacity, and it's going to radically elevate our ability to understand things and to communicate, and that's Weirdly enough, probably our only hope.
I'm not necessarily thinking that a brain surgery is the only way to solve it, but I do think that technology and more emergent technology is probably what's going to get us out of this.
What you were talking about earlier in the tweet that really resonated with me about ultra-processed information, I think we need something that has far more depth to it.
Something that works and distributes information in a far more nuanced and a far more transparent way and I think we're going to move in that direction and we're gonna move in that direction because it seems like technology is moving everything Towards greater and more prevalent connectivity, right?
You can get better internet access everywhere.
Everything is instant.
We're live streaming and tweeting and all this different stuff.
It's moving us towards some ultimate moment of intense connectivity.
And I think we're going to be able to read each other's minds.
That's one of the things that Elon said.
He said, you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth.
I know what you're saying, and I agree with you to a certain extent.
However, I'm a stand-up comic, and one of the things that I love about being a stand-up comic is my friends are all brutally honest, and they fuck with me, and we fuck with each other.
Like if I said, do you like this shirt?
And he'd be like, no, dummy, it looks stupid on you.
They would say something like that, and we'd both be like, ah!
They would say to them, like, do you think I gained weight?
Like, you know you gain weight, motherfucker?
Get on the scale, you fat fuck.
And they'll say that to you, and they start laughing.
There's no, in the comedy world, like in the world of my friends, there's no room for dishonesty.
And if they think you're bullshitting, they don't want to talk to you, because it's no fun.
I think comedians are uniquely strong in that way, though.
So as someone, too, right?
For me, my thing was rationality.
I liked rationality.
I was like, oh, we have a good argument.
I'll just have a logical argument with you, right?
Right.
But like one of the things I realized and this one, you know, when I was there at that place in Florida where this fucking charlatan is killing people.
I think you're right about that, that there's certain people that you really shouldn't like, you know, if you're talking to a delicate person, and they ask you a question, and there's nothing wrong with just being complimentary.
And my wife is like, what the, you fucking monster?
What is wrong with you?
And I was like, well, I should just, I don't want her to like, and she's like, no, it's a kid.
She just wants love from her dad.
You tell her like, that's a great, you know, did a great job.
And I don't want to infantilize adults, but like, there are times when I am, when I just need, You know, love or like I need someone to keep their thoughts to themselves.
I haven't been in a lot of pain, Joe, is the truth.
I haven't.
I've been.
I've led this charmed life.
I've led it on.
Someone said like I've led it on difficulty level, like pretty easy setting, you know, my personally life.
And like I've been lucky.
I haven't been, like, super sick.
Like, who knows what kinds of crazy healing therapies I would be into.
I mean, there's a guy at Duke who specializes in ALS, Rick Bedlack.
Photos of him are incredible because he dresses in wonky outfits, like flashy, like tuxedos and crazy ties and stuff.
And I was like, Rick, why do you dress in all these outfits?
And he's like, because it's the best thing I can offer ever.
My patients is these is I don't I can't tell them the scientific studies.
They're not here for that, right?
I don't have anything to offer my ALS patients in terms of like science or rationality.
But what I can do is just make them feel lighthearted for a moment.
And I was like, do you tell them like when they come into the office, do you tell them like the truth?
You know, which is like basically like you're you're done for, you know, and he's like, you know, obviously not right.
You don't just tell people who are in pain.
The truth or at least you don't there's there's I don't know for me.
I've really pulled back from I've really pulled back really recently from the idea that truth-telling is the way to engage with people who are in pain, right?
I think a lot of what we're seeing right now with Black Lives Matter, a lot of what we see with transgender activism, all of the hot-button political issues often, right?
Change is there are groups of people who have been in pain for a very long time and individuals within those groups have been in pain.
And I don't know.
I think it's just important to sort of acknowledge that.
And I had a lot of trouble doing that.
I would be like, well, here's the truth.
Like, here's your situation and here's how you need to fix it.
And like, but that's not, I don't know.
That's not necessarily, it doesn't work and it's not necessarily what people want.
Yeah, well, in those two particular subjects too, you're dealing with people that are, that will get very upset if you do offer anything that, anything that contradicts their narrative.
If someone's in pain or if someone's like literally trying, I mean if you're trying to change a situation for the better, You can always throw nuance in.
You can always have a logical argument about something.
But I've become...
And I'm not saying, like, don't say stuff.
I'm very on board with, like, you want freedom, right?
Like, I want to be able to say chiropractors are bullshit.
I want to do that.
But, like, if there's someone who was struggling with chronic back pain forever and found a chiropractor and they come back from that chiropractor and they say to me, Alan, for the first time in my life, I feel like there's some hope.
And then you were like, you looked down and you were like, wait, I think we're making fun of this person, is what you said.
And I feel like, and that was a moment, right?
It was like, you want to be kind, right?
And honesty, that's the difficult, the sometimes ridiculous things or illogical things are the kind thing.
And I'm really struggling now, and I just wish everyone were struggling to realize that those are sometimes incommensurable values.
You can't sometimes be honest or tell the truth and also be kind at the same time, right?
There's this book...
God, what is it about a kid who's...
I can't believe I'm blanking on the book now, but it's a kid who's severely disfigured.
And it was a book for young adults.
And there's this moment in that book where the teacher puts on the board, when you're given the choice between being right and being kind, always choose being kind.
Megan Phelps is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps, who is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, one of the most vicious, nastiest, evil religious groups ever that would have these God hates fag signs and hold it up in front of when soldiers would die.
They would go to their funerals.
The craziest shit!
And she grew up in this horrible environment and then through Twitter, Interacting with her husband on Twitter, that fucking dude, that angel, whoever he is, that dude converted her.
And he just talked to her back and forth and they became friends and then eventually they became married and then they have a child together and they're happy.
It's what every saint and sage They've said it since the beginning of time and you can be like, oh, that's a cliche or it's more complicated than that.
And it is more complicated always, right?
But like, I don't know, the kindness I don't know.
It's hard, too, because I don't want to even be...
I keep thinking, right?
It's like you get in this, like, inception of nuance, right?
But, like, you and I can say, hey, we need to be kind.
Or, you know, I need to be kind.
I can speak for myself.
But, like, there are some people who actually...
They're going to say back, no, I'm being fucking hurt, right?
Like, for me, I need to fight back.
I need to not be kind.
If you're in an abusive relationship, right?
Or whatever.
Or if you're in a position where you're fighting for something you believe in.
So I don't even want to be telling...
Other people, all I feel comfortable with right now, and this is sort of where I landed after, you know, I mean, people were pushing me.
Like, this subtitle on this book, man, that was pushed on me.
I'm going to be honest.
How faith in nature's goodness leads to harmful fads, unjust laws, and flawed science, it makes it sound like it's a fucking takedown.
You know, they were like, we need you.
You know, this is how a subtitle needs to work.
It needs to tell people like this simple truth where there's like- So just as a marketing ploy, that was just their idea.
The British book has a different subtitle, just the seductive myth of natural goodness.
I mean, I understand where they were coming from though, right?
Because my publisher's like, look- They want to sell a lot of books.
Yeah, and people want this.
They don't, you know, people don't want kindness.
Kindness doesn't sell, right?
Like controversy sells.
And so- I, it's hard, you know, again, you know, I think about this a lot because, you know, I want people to read my book.
I want people to listen to me.
I would love to have, you know, I'd love to be able to talk about, you know, my, you know, I'm going to be talking about quantification in my next book, right?
So I, I want people to hear what I have to say about how quantification gets abused, right?
But I'm also like, well, the best way to get people to hear me might be to ratchet up the controversy.
I really think what you're talking about, don't tell people what to do.
You're like, I want to be kind, but I don't feel like I should be telling people.
But here's the thing, man, you don't have to.
You don't have to tell people.
Just lead by example.
Just do what you're doing and do it at your best.
And if you can be kind, that will have a greater impact than anything.
I mean, it's like being a parent, right?
You can tell your kids what to do, but one of the best things that I've found is to just live life in a way that your kids see the right way to do things and the wrong way to do things.
And one of the things I always do, whenever I correct my kids, I always say, hey, let me tell you something.
I did way worse than that.
I'm way dumber than you.
And this problem that you created or this thing that you did wrong, I've done way worse.
I've definitely done that.
I'll tell you the things I've done.
I always tell my kids all the things I screwed up on.
I love telling them that.
I love telling them, like, let me tell you what I used to lie about.
And I'll tell my kids lies that I used to tell.
I'll tell my kids all the screw-ups that I used to tell.
And I tell them that just so that they know first I'm not picking on them.
I'm a grown man.
I pay taxes.
I'm talking to a 10-year-old.
There's no way this is fair.
So I always criticize myself first.
And whenever they do something wrong, I always say, listen, before you know, just so you know, brother, I fucked this up already, too.
For example, to take one thing that I've talked about, something you do on your show that I encourage my students to do is I say, look, if you don't know something, say, I don't know.
Say, I don't know.
If I've used a word in class or if you don't know the answer, say you don't know.
And you doing that makes people feel comfortable with admitting they don't know things.
It's a kind thing to do.
For a person, especially a person in position of power, to say, I don't know.
But the problem is there's also a lot of authority and cultural currency in pretending to know shit.
And there are far more people out there who have risen to positions of power pretending they know everything than admitting that they don't know things.
People know that guy's full of shit now, and I think his business has eroded radically.
It got through the community that he's full of shit.
I mean, but yeah, I know what you're saying.
He was scamming people, but he knows he's scamming people.
What you carry in your heart being a con artist and robbing people out of their hard-earned dollars by tricking them into thinking that you're healing them, that in itself is a great punishment.
She lets a lot of these motherfuckers through the net.
There's something on Wondery, which is one of my favorite podcasts.
I don't know if you've ever listened to Wondery.
It's amazing.
They're really good.
And they had a fantastic one on Aaron Hernandez, who's that football player who wound up being a murderer.
But they have one now on some con artist, who's some healer person, who Oprah had on.
And Oprah elevated this guy and now, and I saw it on my feed today, I was very excited to read it after, or to listen to it, rather, after this podcast, after we're done with our podcast.
But it was essentially another one of those things where some person who Oprah had on snuck through the net and became a bullshit artist.
She's had a bunch of those on.
Remember, there's that one guy who wrote a book.
It turned out he made up everything that was in the book.
And Dr. Oz, they brought him before Congress because he had some miracle cure that literally melts fat off your body.
Well, maybe it's, and this is the flip side of kindness, though, right?
I mean, we keep going in this Inception circle, right?
But like, there's this Carl Sagan, I think it's Carl Sagan line where he says, you want to be open-minded, but not so open-minded your brain falls out, right?
And it's like, you also want to be kind.
But not so kind that you become a kind of laundering factory for people like Dr. Us.
Right, right.
And that, you know, and that's, I don't know, Oprah just wants people to be happy, right?
You talk to actual physicists about that, and they just go...
People actually study quantum mechanics and you know like the really complicated underlying mechanism of the fucking universe itself and then you see these quacks out there selling horseshit and then when you find out that the secret was actually Well, not the secret.
That's What the Bleep.
What the Bleep was actually run by that person who claimed to be channeling some fucking thousand-year-old alien or some shit.
There's a lot of really motivating, fascinating people that have lived a life Of value, and they can relay that information to you, and there's like real lessons that you can take out of that that can enhance your own life.
I think those people are real.
They're out there.
You can concentrate on the bullshit artist, that asshole down in Florida selling people wheatgrass.
You don't have to though.
I mean, I hate that they're real.
I hate that they exist.
But in some ways, what they do is like, they make it so that you really appreciate kind people and you really appreciate real people.
You know, the assholes and the deceptive people that you run into in this life, they're just going to make you appreciate the exceptional people.
And we're just like, oh, Joel Osteen, like, can't believe that that, like, people think that's Christianity.
You know, we're going off, right?
And one of my friends sitting there, and usually he'd be talking, he was quiet the whole time.
He finally speaks up.
He says, you know what?
I get what you all are saying.
I get what you all are saying about Joel Osteen.
But when I was in high school, my parents neglected me.
He had a terrible, terrible childhood.
They didn't care about his education.
He was dirt poor.
And he was like, I watched Joel Osteen.
And Joel Osteen told me that God wanted me to make more of myself.
And it helped me.
And we're all sitting there looking at each other.
And I didn't even know.
My brain exploded, right?
Because here's this guy who's just obviously a charlatan.
Like, for me, a terrible person.
And here's my friend being like, hey, you're laying into a guy who...
And he realizes, right, in retrospect what was going on.
But he was also like, you know, he gave me something important.
And...
I didn't even know what to do with that.
It's happened with diet gurus I've laid into.
This guy, David Perlmutter, who wrote this book, Grain Brain, and stuff like that.
I went back through his history, and I found out that he used to promise everything was a miracle cure.
He started with his self-published book called, I don't know, Brainsaving.com or something.
And back then, he had a totally different line on it.
He was like, you need to eat only lean meat and I've cured all these people of ALS. And then it became, you need to eat saturated fat and I've cured these people of ALS. And I wrote this hit piece on him.
I was like, this guy is a horrible human being and I'm going to show you who he is.
I'm going to trace his charlatanry all the way back to the beginning.
And there were all these people that were like, I read David Perlmutter's books and they got me eating healthy again.
Because he does advocate, you know, like an alternative to junk food.
So his charisma, right?
These people have charisma.
And that charisma can give people hope and meaning, even if it's like fake energy healing.
The key is to just concentrate on the good and just be the best that you can be.
That's the key.
Just be the nicest you can be, be the kindest you can be, be the most honest you can be.
And you're gonna fuck up.
There's no way around it.
You're a person.
And if you fuck up, you can't be too hard on yourself.
You can't judge yourself on failures.
You gotta recognize that you are the person who's learned from those failures.
You're not defined by mistakes.
And that's a lot of what people do.
They define themselves by mistakes.
And then they also judge other people by their mistakes.
And they decide that this one moment in time that this person said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing or made a mistake or was incorrect about something, that defines them forever.
All these people that you could find good things in, whether it's Joel Osteen or Dr. Oz or what are these people?
There's a lesson in data that comes from them about just how weirdly complicated human beings are and how wildly we vary.
They want to make people good or bad, right or left, one or zero.
And that's not...
The world's messy.
It's a human problem.
It's like we were talking about with abortion.
There's a lot of human problems.
That's a human problem.
And I think it's hard to be comfortable with yourself.
So it's very hard to be comfortable with other people.
That's why I always stress with people like you've got to accept yourself for what you've done wrong.
Do your best and also find some difficult shit to do because that gets away a lot of the anxiety that you carry around in your body.
A lot of like difficult things make regular life less difficult.
And that sounds so simplistic, but particularly physically difficult things.
Because when you do things that are physically difficult, the strain of making yourself do those things, it's very valuable.
It's not just valuable like exercise and fitness and martial arts and running and whatever you're doing that's really difficult.
It's not just valuable in terms of like health and the way you look, but it's also valuable for your mind, maybe even more so.
Because regular life can be confusing and little things that go wrong and little problems that arise are exacerbated by the fact that you're not accustomed to dealing with hardship.
So creating your own bullshit, whether it's through some brutal kettlebell exercise or running up hills or something, is extremely valuable for you also, not just accepting the nuanced perspectives of other people, but also...
Being able to navigate through this world with some sort of an understanding of just how complex it all is and how weird it all is and not be overly thrown off by every little dip in the road and pothole that you encounter.