Yuval Harari Returns Again

[0] Welcome, welcome, welcome to armchair expert, experts on expert.

[1] I'm Nick Shepard.

[2] I'm joined by Monica Mouse.

[3] Hi.

[4] Hi.

[5] Our favorites here for a third time.

[6] Three Pete.

[7] Gosh, it's so wonderful to get to talk to this gentleman almost annually now.

[8] Yeah.

[9] Yvall Noah Harari.

[10] Yvall Noah Harari is a historian, a philosopher, and best -selling author.

[11] His book Sapiens is just the most ginormous book worldwide you can imagine on a topic that no one could of guests would have been interesting to the world at large.

[12] He made it interesting.

[13] He sure did.

[14] So Sapiens is fantastic.

[15] Homo Deus is my preferred of the two books.

[16] 21 Lessons for the 21st Century.

[17] And he has a new book that's based on Sapiens and it's for kids.

[18] It's called Unstoppable Us, Volume 1, How Humans Took Over the World.

[19] It is fantastic.

[20] Cannot wait to read this book to my girls.

[21] Yeah.

[22] It's just like selling out.

[23] It's already sold out?

[24] So get it now if you can.

[25] Get Unstoppable Us.

[26] If you know someone with kids in Christmas here, like this is an awesome book to get families.

[27] That's a great idea.

[28] Please enjoy Yvall Noah Harari.

[29] Wondry Plus subscribers can listen to Armchair Expert early and ad free right now.

[30] Join Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[31] Or you can listen for free wherever you get your podcasts.

[32] He's an armchair expert.

[33] Do we need the ear thing?

[34] You do not.

[35] You don't have to.

[36] It's easier to kind of hear myself.

[37] We're not here to control you, you all.

[38] So why do you put them on?

[39] It becomes a silo.

[40] Really?

[41] Let's try.

[42] Yeah, can I make my argument to you now that you have them on?

[43] Yes.

[44] Okay, so two things.

[45] I think our natural inclination would be to talk louder to each other than we need to, because we're 12 feet apart.

[46] That sounds crazy when you're listening in your car.

[47] there's no need to shout.

[48] Number two, it isolates all the other auditory distractions and puts me in a very tunnel vision connection to your brain.

[49] But don't you find that your own voice sounds funny?

[50] We're used to it, I think, unfortunately.

[51] I think an actor has to get over that pretty early.

[52] So yeah, maybe 20 years ago when I first heard myself, I was like, ooh, that's not what I was expecting.

[53] But I think it's now they've married.

[54] My internal voice that I think I have, and this one have now fused.

[55] Okay.

[56] But your voice still distracts you?

[57] It sounds a bit strange to me. I'm not used to it, I mean, you know, I mean, I give so many interviews, but I don't like to listen to myself afterwards.

[58] Yeah.

[59] Oh, because you're so healthy of you.

[60] I don't know if it's healthy, but I mean.

[61] Could you add some adjectives to, when you hear your own voice, what adjectives would we attach to how it sounds for you?

[62] It just sounds different than I'm used to kind of hearing myself.

[63] Yeah, yeah.

[64] So it kind of makes me much more self -conscious.

[65] about the way I talk.

[66] This is common.

[67] I don't want you to feel like you're an outlier.

[68] No one likes the sound of their voice for the most part.

[69] It's only that I don't like it.

[70] It's just, I don't sound like that.

[71] I mean, you know.

[72] Yeah, that's not me. Okay, so this may be a real comment on our different levels of egotomaniacleness, right?

[73] So I hear mine on this thing and I think, oh, I sound a little smarter than I'm afraid I am.

[74] Huh.

[75] Like, I feel like it ups my importance by hearing it amplified or in the way.

[76] this form.

[77] For me, really, it's just a kind of extra level of self -consciousness.

[78] Yes.

[79] It kind of a little distracts me from what I want to say, but it's fine.

[80] And what quality do you most appreciate from your meditation work?

[81] Is it the dissolving of the ego, the self -consciousness, the self -awareness?

[82] It's strange because somebody just asked me yesterday at dinner about dissolving of the ego.

[83] I never got my ego dissolved.

[84] Still healthy?

[85] People talk about it.

[86] Yeah.

[87] But Maybe they don't really understand, or maybe they have different experiences in meditation than me. But this is such a kind of extremely deep meditation.

[88] My purpose in meditation is basically just to get to know myself better, to understand how my mind works, how my body works.

[89] The more you understand yourself, it changes how you behave, how you think, but at least for me, doesn't just dissolve the ego or who I am.

[90] What if we rephrased it?

[91] Like, do you find when you're...

[92] in a kind of deep meditative state that the tethers by which you define your identity are severed a bit.

[93] Yes, I mean, what happens is that I become much more aware of the stories that my mind keeps generating about everything in the world, including or especially about myself.

[94] Yes.

[95] And most of the time, you just get caught up in the stories that the mind produces.

[96] We live our whole life trapped inside the stories that our mind creates.

[97] And in meditation, you get some kind of distance from it and you see the process of how you create these stories and then fall victim to them.

[98] And you can, in a way, just observe what's happening.

[99] This is not the truth.

[100] This is not the world.

[101] This is not me. This is just a story that my mind has created.

[102] And this kind of liberates you to some extent from these narratives.

[103] In my work as a historian, I basically try to do exactly the same thing.

[104] that just as individual humans get caught up in the stories they invent about themselves, this happens to entire nations, to entire religions, societies.

[105] They invent some fictional story, think it is the truth, and then start fighting all the other nations or whatever about this fantasy in their mind.

[106] Do you think it also frees up some capacity?

[107] Because I think the story in itself might not even be the problem.

[108] So I might say, I am a victim of X, Y, or Z. Or I always have bad luck when I go.

[109] I can't find a parking spot.

[110] Whatever my observation about myself is.

[111] That little moment, the colonels really doesn't take up much time.

[112] I never find good parking spots.

[113] Now, my day -to -day is spent confirming the story I created however many months ago or years ago.

[114] That's the actual time suck of it.

[115] It's confirming that the story I came up with a while ago is in fact true.

[116] so every time I pull up to a store and there's no spot I file it in my database of proof that the story is correct and of course I can't even see the open parking spots because it's in opposition to the story I want to believe in so I almost feel like the story is a little benign just thinking it once that's fine but when you think it again and again and again then this changes again how you think how you behave and you know you mentioned like feeling that you're a victim We see it on a global level that now in the world you have this kind of competition of victimhood when almost every group of people some with better justification some with much worse justification tell their story as a story of victimhood which I think is psychologically and also politically harmful and destructive one of the reasons that attract people to narratives of victimhood is that it relieves you of responsibility it relieves you with responsibility for the problems in your life or for the problem in the world like I didn't cause this I'm a victim of the system and also relieves you of the responsibility to do something about it you think even about climate change so if you think that we are victims of the system we didn't cause it and it's not our job to fix it and if everybody in the world thinks like that then nobody takes responsibility we're going to be wearing shorts in December yeah and some groups obviously have a good reason, but you see even the most powerful countries in the world tell themselves this story of victimhood, like you see Russia, telling itself that we are the victims, everybody is against us, everybody wants to invade us, so we must invade them.

[117] And this is just a fantasy in their minds or in the mind of just one person, just, you know, Putin.

[118] And you see how a fantasy, a fictional story that is generated in the mind of a person if it gets repeated again and again and again and spreads, it can eventually cause millions to lose their homes and to flee and, you know, terrible tragedy.

[119] It transfers from an idea to like a law of physics.

[120] It's got a permanence.

[121] It's the reality of the Russian experience.

[122] It's the reality of, you name it, the experience.

[123] Yeah.

[124] I also think the competition for victimhood is ego as well because it's all this bad stuff happened to me, but I'm still breathing or thriving or, Look how much I've accomplished despite all of this stuff.

[125] They want both things, like some heroism and some victim.

[126] Yeah, that's a great observation.

[127] I was going to correlate it with narcissism as I understand it.

[128] So I know a narcissist, a therapist helped me understand.

[129] This narcissist will never, ever, ever make an apology.

[130] You can know that right now that don't ever have that expectation.

[131] They're incapable of apologizing.

[132] And this person who I've seen create enormous wreckage, even in the face of the proof, right, there's another layer.

[133] But I had no choice but to create that wreckage because of X, Y, and Z. So I do think the victimhood is pretty tightly related to narcissism as well.

[134] Absolutely.

[135] Again, coming back to the Putin example, the whole world knows that he had made a terrible, terrible mistake.

[136] Not just, you know, ethically in terms of the suffering he inflicted the millions of people.

[137] Also just in cold political terms, he made one of the biggest errors of judgment in politics and in military affairs for generations.

[138] And he's incapable of saying, I made a mistake.

[139] He just blames it on others and demands even more power for himself.

[140] This is the basic danger with every dictatorship.

[141] You know, dictators, sometimes they make good decisions, so people follow them.

[142] But the problem is that nobody is perfect.

[143] Eventually they make a mistake.

[144] and they are inherently incapable of admitting that they made a mistake and there is nobody else in the country there is no free press there is no opposition parties there is nobody that can tell them hey you made a mistake you need to move aside and let somebody else try something else yeah you shit the bet on this one do you have that expression in Israel yeah well that's why my prediction for Putin is there'll be a suicide if he's not assassinated by an oligarch who cannot afford He never commits suicide.

[145] No, Hitler committed suicide.

[146] When the Russians were like five blocks away from his hiding place, I mean, they commit suicide only really when there is no other choice.

[147] I think there's a moment.

[148] I think this happened for Epstein.

[149] I think it's happened for a lot of these people.

[150] When the force field around them that fails to acknowledge that it's their fault, the moment it becomes obvious, oh, I'm out of moves, I'm out of stories.

[151] next step is I will be publicly recognized.

[152] Death is a better option than that for those people.

[153] But when that person has their finger on nuclear weapons, we don't want to be in that situation.

[154] I mean, because it can be not just suicide, it could be you kill everybody and commit suicide.

[155] Yeah, like the, yes, exactly, the horrible father who kills everybody.

[156] Exactly.

[157] I mean, like killing your children and then killing yourself.

[158] Yes.

[159] Okay, but let's give a ray a hope because I agree with, you that given the chance that is maybe a route he would pursue but my ray hope there is we've had some trial runs of this we had some guys on a nuclear submarine who basically didn't they had all the reasons and were given the orders to go ahead and launch a nuclear weapon i remain a little optimistic that people aren't going to follow that directive i hope so yeah because they themselves know that they when they hit the button they are killing themselves and they're not pootin they're not egomaniacal narcissists who can't, you know, I hope, can we maybe have some optimism that that is also on the table?

[160] Yeah, you know, I mean, so far we had nuclear weapons for like 70 years, and after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they were never used again in conflict.

[161] Despite a couple of real close calls.

[162] Yeah, the danger is always there.

[163] And the optimistic thing that I can say is that the last few decades have been more peaceful than almost any other period in Europe.

[164] human history.

[165] Now, I come from the Middle East, I know perfectly well there are still conflicts around, but this idea that some people have that there is a constant level of violence in the world, and no matter what we do, there is always the same amount of violence, this is just not true.

[166] And it's a dangerous thought, because it means that there is no point in making an effort.

[167] And as a historian, one of the most important lessons of history is that there is no constant level of violence in the world.

[168] You know, when you go back to the Stone Age, and the book I just published, is focused on the Stone Age, so this is one of the main themes there, that actually people have all these, again, fantasies about the Stone Age, that everybody were these, I know, big hunters and warriors and went around all the time, fighting.

[169] Actually, the first evidence we have, real evidence, not a fantasy in the mind, actual evidence for large -scale conflict between human beings, is just from 13 ,000 years ago, 1 -3, from a place in the Nile Valley, today in Sudan.

[170] We have evidence before that for hunting, of course, and also for individual people being killed by weapons, so maybe murder or something, but for actual conflict between groups, there is zero evidence.

[171] This is something that is very important to understand because lots of people have this idea that war is just part of human nature, and it isn't.

[172] It's a choice.

[173] So that sounds a little contradictory.

[174] I just think we should really point out what you're actually saying.

[175] So this pervasive notion that we're just a warring people and that there's a...

[176] is a given percentage of folks who will suffer on planet Earth and starve on planet Earth.

[177] All these things, that's bullshit as compared to 300 years ago, 200 years ago, 100 years.

[178] Yeah.

[179] But then predating that is even an example of almost zero warfare.

[180] We are not sure if there was or wasn't, we just don't have evidence.

[181] No evidence.

[182] It doesn't prove that there was no war like 50 ,000 years ago.

[183] Anthropologists believe there's like tribal to tribal, there's stealing of women, there's small 100 on hundred conflicts probably happening, no?

[184] have evidence from anthropology for this happening in the last few centuries or so, but we have no kind of smoking gun that somebody can point out here is an archaeological site from 40 ,000 years ago, you have an entire band of hunter -gatherers being massacred.

[185] We don't have anything like that.

[186] So it's important to realize it because all these people who talk about human nature, you can't put it on nature.

[187] If you think that war is part of human nature, then in a way this excuses people like Putin.

[188] Putin is not to blame for it.

[189] for this war, it's human nature.

[190] If it wasn't him, it would have been somebody else.

[191] And if it's human nature and it's inevitable, then one should just win.

[192] Exactly.

[193] Yeah, you're kind of a moral compass for that.

[194] And we employ it.

[195] Like, well, there's going to be some conflict, so we had better win.

[196] Exactly.

[197] You can only choose your only choice.

[198] Do you want to be the prey or the predator?

[199] Yes.

[200] And then everybody says, okay, if that's the choice, I'll be the predator.

[201] But it is a false moral choice.

[202] There are always more options.

[203] Almost always, especially in politics, when people tell you, You have only two choices.

[204] They are tricking you.

[205] They are placing you in a false dilemma.

[206] Like Putin's saying, well, there are just two choices.

[207] Either the Ukrainians do whatever I want, or I invade them.

[208] And then when he invades them, he has this kind of spiel that it wasn't my fault.

[209] I mean, they refused my demands.

[210] What do you want from me?

[211] They are to blame.

[212] Yes, yes.

[213] And this is just a wrong way of framing it.

[214] It's like the hostage situation with terrorists.

[215] You capture somebody and you say, okay, either you give me, I don't know, a billion dollars or I kill them.

[216] And then you don't give them the billion dollars.

[217] And now you're a murderer.

[218] And now you're at fault.

[219] Yes, yes, yes.

[220] And you forced me to pull the trigger.

[221] And it's not true.

[222] The fact that I did not give you a billion dollar did not force you to kill these people.

[223] It was still your choice.

[224] So we should never fall into this trap of allowing the terrorists or the warmonger or whatever to frame the situation in such a way that there are only two options.

[225] And you chose this.

[226] So you are to blame for everything that To transfer responsibility.

[227] Exactly.

[228] Yes, you don't watch TV, do you?

[229] I watch a lot of TV.

[230] Oh, wonderful.

[231] Have you watched the four -part documentary in HBO about the Iranian hostage crisis?

[232] Actually, we tend to watch kind of fiction.

[233] Oh, comedies.

[234] Rick and Morty, Game of Thrones, these kinds of things.

[235] Documentary, most of what I do all day is read history books.

[236] I hear you.

[237] So when I go in the evening with my husband to watch some TV, it probably won't be a documentary.

[238] I got you.

[239] You want an escape.

[240] You want total freedom from the day.

[241] I mean, in a way.

[242] Okay, it's a great one.

[243] But it is crazy.

[244] You know, they had those hostages for 444 days.

[245] And the way the narrative just evolves and evolves and evolves until a point where, yes, you're in a position where we're killing these people.

[246] The Americans are killing these 60 people.

[247] Not the captors of them, but us.

[248] Yeah, there's a judo that happens in the framing of that situation that transfers responsibility entirely to the victim.

[249] And that is so dangerous.

[250] We should always resist it when people are trying with this trick of kind of blaming somebody else for what is actually their choice.

[251] You have in philosophy these kinds of trolley problems, you know?

[252] Oh, yes, yes, yes.

[253] I mean, there is a trolley.

[254] It's about to run over this one person, but you can push the switch and it will instead kill these other five people or whatever.

[255] I think it's a reverse.

[256] It is the reverse.

[257] It's heading towards five people.

[258] Yes, it's redirect it to one person.

[259] And the most important thing to know about the trolley problems, they almost never happen in real life.

[260] That's the most important thing to realize about them.

[261] Philosophers had to work very, very hard to invent a trolley problems because there are no real trolley problems in real life.

[262] Whenever in real life, somebody puts you this kind of choice, know that they are pulling you into a trap.

[263] Oh, this is great.

[264] And this is actually part of your book.

[265] So don't you think that one of our great gifts as Homo sapiens is our...

[266] ability to create both models and analogies.

[267] Like analogies are enormously effective.

[268] And then also we're the victim of analogies.

[269] Absolutely.

[270] This superpower, this ability to impose a fantasy on reality.

[271] And then people just don't see the reality.

[272] They just see the fantasy.

[273] I look at the conflict in my country in Israel between Jews and Arabs.

[274] And people think that, you know, it's just human nature.

[275] Or not just human nature, it's just nature.

[276] I mean, you look at all these chimpanzees.

[277] and wolves and lions, they always at the time fight about territory.

[278] So we also fight about territory.

[279] And what people don't realize, they don't fight about territory.

[280] They fight about fantasies in their minds.

[281] Because, you know, the chimpanzees when they fight about land, this is really an objective problem they have.

[282] There is not enough food.

[283] So they need to fight over these fruit trees because whoever loses them dies from starvation.

[284] Now, you look at the Middle East, you look at my country, there is enough land for everybody.

[285] There is enough food for everybody.

[286] There is no objective shortage of food, but they have conflicting stories in their minds.

[287] You have one group of people saying, God gave this place to me. And the other says, no, no, no, God gave this place to us.

[288] And this is what they fight about.

[289] It's just in their mind.

[290] Biblical real estate claims are always hard to.

[291] Even when you get them in a corner of law, boy, they're hard to.

[292] I mean, we talk about this a fair amount because we talk about how we have been tribal for so long.

[293] so we're wired to be tribal and we're wired to say you over there and me over here and us them and forgetting we can decide for that to not be true.

[294] That choice has evolved.

[295] We have a lot of choice there.

[296] Again, it's people equate, for instance, modern nations with ancient tribes and this is a fundamental mistake because the thing about really ancient tribes, like you go back to the Stone Age, the group of people is made of a very small number of people who actually know it.

[297] other.

[298] The basis for the group is personal acquaintance.

[299] Like, I know you, I know your personality, we are maybe related, we went together to hunt a mammoth and you saved my life.

[300] The amazing thing about modern groups, like big nations, is that 99 % point 99 of the people, you never met them in your life.

[301] Yeah.

[302] They are not your relatives.

[303] You don't know their personality.

[304] Even in a small country like Israel, we have like 9 million citizens.

[305] I know like 200 people.

[306] Yeah.

[307] All these others, they are actually strangers to me. But the magic of nationalism and the good side of nationalism is that it makes me feel that these strangers that I never met in my life are nevertheless my friends and family in some way, so I care about them.

[308] So for instance, I pay my taxes so that some stranger on the other side of the country would get basic health care.

[309] Right.

[310] And this is the good side of nationalism.

[311] Sometimes, again, people twist it and think that nationalism is about hating other people.

[312] Right.

[313] I can avoid paying my taxes, but as long as I hate foreigners, I'm a great patriot.

[314] Yeah.

[315] And this is a complete misunderstanding.

[316] You got some options, yeah.

[317] Yes.

[318] So how do you define who are we and what does it mean to be part of us?

[319] This is not nature.

[320] This is our choice.

[321] So I would say, yes, nations are very important, provided we define them in terms of love.

[322] Like, I love the other people in my nation, so I pay my taxes, so they are not dying from illnesses.

[323] and not defining them in terms of hate, I'm a great American patriot because I hate all these other groups.

[324] To prevent it from steering into zero -sum, so I love these country men of mine, and I want the best for them.

[325] Everyone else is a threat to that because there's zero -sum resources.

[326] And it's not true because very often to take care of your countrymen and country women, you have to cooperate with foreigners.

[327] And benefit many other people who then in turn benefit you.

[328] about climate change, no country can solve climate change by itself.

[329] So if several countries cooperate on this, this is not being disloyal to your nation.

[330] This is not treason or something.

[331] You're actually trying to help the people in your nation by cooperating with these other nations.

[332] Similarly, if you have a pandemic, the best way to stop a pandemic is to cooperate in advance with other countries to share medical information, to share medical resources.

[333] If every country needs to do it by itself it's much much more difficult yeah near impossible okay your book is incredible i love it i'm going to immediately be rereading it with my kids so just say i'm so excited by this book but before that we had jared diamond on the other day oh he's great oh what a guy and of course you came up a lot i think it's flattering to him that you cite him because he really was my model i mean i read his book and this is what made me realize hey you can actually write like that like these big narratives about the whole of human history and still do it in a scientific and academic way.

[334] Yes, and also literary, like an appealing story story, not this discovery, then this discovery and so on.

[335] Okay, so your book, Unstoppable Us, Volume 1, How Humans Took Over the World, is for children.

[336] Yeah.

[337] And I think it would be fun to first find out why you decided that children need the message of sapiens.

[338] But I will say there's more in this book weirdly than just in sapiens.

[339] But in general, we could say, it's doing what Sapiens did, but for children.

[340] Yes.

[341] One of the great things I heard you say already is why it's easier to explain story, myth, money, nationalism to children than it is 50 -year -olds.

[342] Yeah, because they haven't heard the story so many times before, so they come kind of much more fresh to it.

[343] Like you want to explain money to a 50 -year -old, and, you know, your whole life sometimes revolves around money.

[344] It's very, very difficult to change what we already believe about it.

[345] and you come to 10 -year -olds and what is money?

[346] Money is basically a fairy tale for adults.

[347] It's not something objective in the world.

[348] You know, look at these pieces of paper and most of the money today in the world is not even paper.

[349] It's just electronic data moving between computers.

[350] Yeah, you can't eat it, you can't drink it, you can't have sex with it.

[351] Nothing.

[352] What intrinsic value, right?

[353] It has no intrinsic value whatsoever.

[354] It has value just because some people come and tell stories about it and everybody believes the stories and it works.

[355] You know, 50 ,000 years ago, you had the tribal shaman tell you stories about spirits and ghosts and everybody believed the story.

[356] Now we have these much more sophisticated storytellers.

[357] We have the lawyers and we have the bankers and they come and they tell us a story that this piece of paper is worth like 10 bananas.

[358] And if everybody believes the story, it works.

[359] I can actually go to the supermarket, give this colorful piece of paper to a stranger I never met before and they give me bananas in exchange.

[360] Well, and think about how much work.

[361] attention right now is being focused on this piece of paper is losing 6 % of its value this year.

[362] Inflation is literally when people told you an inflated story.

[363] They told you it was worth 10 bananas.

[364] It's actually worth just eight bananas.

[365] Yes.

[366] The story itself is under threat right now.

[367] Exactly.

[368] It's every headline.

[369] Because if we completely lose our faith in the story, the whole of society collapses.

[370] It happened several times in history.

[371] When people just lost their faith in the currency of their country.

[372] You know, like in Germany in the 1920s.

[373] Oh, sure, sure.

[374] You have all these images of people going with entire sex, wheelbarrows, with banknotes to buy a piece of bread.

[375] Yeah.

[376] This is what led eventually to the rise of Nazism, that a complete loss of faith.

[377] Those damn war reparations.

[378] Yeah?

[379] So explaining this to kids that money is just people believe in ghosts and spirits.

[380] So it's the same thing for adults.

[381] The amazing thing about it, that it actually works.

[382] That as long as everybody believes in the story, you have the money.

[383] modern economy functioning.

[384] You don't have children, to my knowledge.

[385] If you are a parent, you get to experience this real time, which is it's almost impossible to talk to an adult that money's not real.

[386] I've had this debate when it comes up.

[387] Well, but it's not, because it's blank X, Y, and Z. It's actually incredibly hard to explain to the kid that the piece of paper you hand the person at Target is worth all the merchandise they just handed you, right?

[388] Like, that's the hurdle.

[389] Yeah, exactly.

[390] It's almost impossible for a while.

[391] You're like, I know, I know.

[392] Well, this thing is worth all that stuff we just bought.

[393] Our stories are preposterous to kids, and you get to see it real time.

[394] Santa Claus, right?

[395] We went down that road.

[396] I had experienced Christmas.

[397] Seemed really fun.

[398] We started it.

[399] And then right out of the gates with my daughter.

[400] Well, hold on.

[401] He goes to everyone's place and he comes on the chimney.

[402] What if you don't have a chimney?

[403] I'm like, okay, fuck.

[404] Now I got to account for all the apartments in L .A. So then I got to spin a lie, right?

[405] And then that didn't feel right to them.

[406] And it just goes on and on and on.

[407] And you realize the story is insane.

[408] it takes so much effort to get them on board with the story.

[409] After, like, the fifth lie, I was like, okay, I can't do this, you're right.

[410] That's the good part of your brain.

[411] This whole thing doesn't make sense.

[412] There's no Santa Claus.

[413] I'm doing it, but it's fun to think about it.

[414] It was begatting too many other lies, right?

[415] But then you have the story that actually run the world.

[416] It's not Santa Claus.

[417] It's things like corporations.

[418] I mean, you have all these books to kids about animals, like elephants and lions and whales, which are very important.

[419] But, you know, kids don't go in the street and meet an elephant most of the day.

[420] But they meet corporations every day.

[421] Like every day they meet Google and Facebook and TikTok and they meet McDonald's and Disney and so forth.

[422] And they need to understand what are these things and how to beware of them, how to make friends with them sometimes, but how to be careful about them because these are dangerous things corporations could be.

[423] So this is part of the rationale of the book.

[424] It's not just about the Stone Age.

[425] It's also about things like explaining what is a corporation to kids, which again goes back to the issues that we talked about earlier for responsibility, like corporations are the way for adults sometimes to avoid responsibility.

[426] Who is polluting the atmosphere?

[427] It's not me, it's the corporation that is doing it.

[428] So don't talk to me, talk to the lawyers that represent the corporation.

[429] Now imagine a kid trying to do the same thing, like he or she walks into the living room with muddy shoes all over the floor.

[430] And when the parent comes and says, hey, who left all these muddy footprints on the floor?

[431] And the kid goes, it wasn't me, it was the corporation.

[432] Just talk with my lawyers.

[433] This is why I'm so excited to read to my kids, is you're doing the thing that I think is most important, which is it's really easy for us to just take what we're given, the burden we inherit, as intrinsic, as given, as unavoidable, as the way it is, period.

[434] And I think your book, and if I can just read something you said, the world in which we lived didn't have to be the way is.

[435] People made it what it is and people can change it.

[436] Like just starting the premise with, hey, this just happens to be where we find ourselves and there's a total explanation for it.

[437] And then in understanding it, we might also decide where we want to go.

[438] I know.

[439] I look at now what images coming from Iran.

[440] So you have these teenage girls that have been told all their life you must wear the hijab and you must do this and you must do that.

[441] And they come and say, why?

[442] Yeah.

[443] Like, okay, So this is how you behaved in the last 30 or 40 years, but I don't want to do it.

[444] That's the kind of magic.

[445] At that moment when you realize, yes, this is the world we now live in, but it doesn't have to be like that.

[446] We reached this point because of some previous events and choices that people made, but we can now make different choices.

[447] Yeah.

[448] So basically you start with saying, hey, check this out.

[449] We humans, this species, took over the entire world.

[450] So how did this?

[451] that happen?

[452] And then you start from the very beginning.

[453] We start six million years ago when the common relative existed and then we pick up at two and a half million years ago with the first hominid.

[454] And then you just start painting a picture for kids.

[455] Yeah.

[456] How it's like to live in the Stone Age, that you don't go to school.

[457] Instead, you go to the forest, you learn to climb trees, you learn how to find fruits and mushrooms and fish and so forth.

[458] If you're a kid today and you sometimes feel like, hey, I don't want to go to school.

[459] I want to go to the forest and climb trees.

[460] This is actually a memory.

[461] Part of your body, part of your mind kind of remembers how it was 100 ,000 years ago and misses it.

[462] So the same thing, like, when I was a kid, I would wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, afraid that there is a monster under the bed and I would call my mom.

[463] This is also actually a historical memory because when we lived in the forest, that were actually monsters in the night, that came to eat children.

[464] So a lion would come or a cheetah would come and if you go on sleeping, they eat you.

[465] And if you wake up frightened and call your mom, mom, there is a lion under the bed, then maybe you're saved.

[466] Yeah.

[467] And I think too, we're born into a world we have total mastery over so we sometimes forget how completely vulnerable we are in the real world.

[468] And you do a great job of laying it out for the little kids in the stone age, we can't run fast, we're not strong, we don't We have huge canines.

[469] We don't have claws.

[470] We have to run from everything.

[471] And if we want to enjoy any of the carcass of the giraffe that's been killed by the lion, what's going to have to happen?

[472] We're last ones in.

[473] We're in the last in the queue.

[474] The first humans, they were so weak, they couldn't kill a giraffe.

[475] It's such a huge animal.

[476] But maybe a lion kills a giraffe, and you wait on the sidelines, waiting for the lion to finish and go away.

[477] And he looks fall.

[478] I think we're almost like.

[479] But even then, you can't go.

[480] You can't come to the carcass because there are other animals in front of you in the line.

[481] Like you have the hyenas.

[482] And then you don't want to mess with the hyenas.

[483] If you ever seen in a hyena on television or in a zoo, this is not the kind of animal that as a human being you want to mess with.

[484] You always see them relative to lions.

[485] They don't do any shows about just hyenas, right?

[486] We only care about them in relation to the lion.

[487] Because they often hang together because, you know, the hyenas are smart.

[488] I mean, they say, why should we go to the effort of actually bringing down a giraffe?

[489] Dangerous and difficult.

[490] We let the lion do it, and then we come.

[491] Okay, so in real life, hyenas are fucking enormous.

[492] They're 180 pounds.

[493] We don't have dogs that big.

[494] A mastiff is 140.

[495] These things are like the most enormous mastiff you've ever seen.

[496] We see them in real life, you go, oh, my God, when they're not saying next to a lion, they're terrifying.

[497] Yeah.

[498] So again, if you go back 100 ,000 of thousands of years and you have a little bit of, lion killing a giraffe, you wait in line.

[499] And the aina's come ahead of you, and maybe the jackal has come ahead of you, and you come last.

[500] And when the first humans, they come to the carcass, nothing is left.

[501] All the meat has been eaten.

[502] So then comes the first big invention in human history, these stone knives.

[503] People imagine that they were used to hunt big animals.

[504] They weren't used to hunt big animals.

[505] The first stone tools, they are used to crack open bones.

[506] Basically, it's the only everything left after all the other animals had their feel.

[507] So you have these weak humans kind of sneaking to the carcass, looking around carefully, maybe Wanayina is still there, no, okay, it's safe.

[508] And then there is a bone and you take your stone knife and you crack open the bone and you eat the marrow.

[509] Wow.

[510] Boom, boom, marrow.

[511] And that's our kind of first claim to fame.

[512] Right.

[513] That sets us on a road a little bit.

[514] Yeah, this sets us on the road.

[515] eventually to the atom bomb.

[516] Yes.

[517] A couple steps later.

[518] A couple of steps later, boom.

[519] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[520] We've all been there.

[521] Turning to the internet to self -diagnose our inexplicable pains, debilitating body aches, sudden fevers, and strange rashes.

[522] Though our minds tend to spiral to worst -case scenarios, it's usually nothing, but for an unlucky few.

[523] these unsuspecting symptoms can start the clock ticking on a terrifying medical mystery.

[524] Like the unexplainable death of a retired firefighter, whose body was found at home by his son, except it looked like he had been cremated, or the time when an entire town started jumping from buildings and seeing tigers on their ceilings.

[525] Hey listeners, it's Mr. Ballin here, and I'm here to tell you about my podcast.

[526] It's called Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries.

[527] Each terrifying true story will be sure to keep you up at night.

[528] Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries wherever you get your podcasts.

[529] Prime members can listen early and add free on Amazon music.

[530] What's up, guys?

[531] This is your girl Kiki, and my podcast is back with a new season, and let me tell you, it's too good, and I'm diving into the brains of entertainment's best and brightest, okay?

[532] Every episode, I bring on a friend and have a real conversation, and I don't mean just friends.

[533] I mean the likes of Amy Poehler, Kell Mitchell, Vivica Fox, the list goes on.

[534] So follow, watch, and listen to Baby.

[535] This is Kikii Palmer on the Wondery app or wherever you get your podcast.

[536] The next big thing is fire.

[537] The power of every other animal depends on its body.

[538] How big you are, how fast you can run, your wings, whatever.

[539] And fire is the first time that an animal, a human being, managed to gain control of a source of power outside its body.

[540] Uh -huh.

[541] You know, if I'm a human being and I know how to control fire, Even though I'm not as big as a lion, I can't run like a cheetah, I don't have clothes, I don't have poison like a snake, whatever.

[542] I have this friend, fire, and a single human with a fire stick can burn down an entire forest with all the lions and hyenas and giraffes in it.

[543] And you point out all animals are terrified of fire.

[544] Such a powerful force.

[545] And again, humans, what was amazing about them, they learned how to befriend fire.

[546] So how did it happen?

[547] We don't know for sure.

[548] But again, something that still happens today, lots of people, lots of kids, they like watching fire.

[549] Yeah, I love it.

[550] We love it.

[551] He is a fire maniac.

[552] Yeah, I mean, you sit like you go outside, you light a fire with some wood and whatever, and you just sit there and you watch the fire.

[553] Talk about magic you can observe.

[554] I understand the chemical reaction.

[555] It doesn't fucking matter.

[556] I'm looking at flames.

[557] They're like, what are those things?

[558] Why are they dancing?

[559] Who's controlling?

[560] What is that thing?

[561] But the thing is you're not afraid of it.

[562] No. fascinated by it.

[563] No, I don't want to interact.

[564] Again, this is a memory from like hundreds of thousands of years ago.

[565] Then you have, I don't know, a lightning strikes a tree and there is a fire.

[566] All the other animals run away except humans.

[567] The hillbillies.

[568] We come in.

[569] We come in.

[570] We come in.

[571] Hey, look at it.

[572] Exactly.

[573] And we sit and watch this thing.

[574] And this is how we learn to befriend it.

[575] For instance, we learn, hey, you can take a stick, place it inside the kind of flaming tree.

[576] one side of the stick is burning but you can hold on to the other side and you take it away and you now have fire on the stick and you can now use this stick fire to drive away the lions and the ainas or to burn down forests think about it, it's a lightsaber like we take it for granted it is like the ultimate weapon if you're defenseless and then a couple steps later we have AK47s that's where that comes from and there is another connection there because one thing that fire did was transform our brain actually so we could invent things like AKA 47s because before fire, much of the energy of the human body it went to digesting food.

[577] Like you eat raw food and you have to spend...

[578] Yeah, the marrow and the fruits and whatever and you have to spend a lot of time chewing it and then a lot of time digesting it.

[579] The great thing he points out to the children reading the book is next time someone in your house is cutting up a potato to prepare in the oven ask for a little bite of it or a lick first it opened up an entirely different world of things we could even consume there's so many things we can't actually eat unless they're cooked absolutely and also again it takes much less time much less effort because it's like outsourcing like we today outsource I don't know production to another country so fire is like outsourcing the difficult job of digesting food from our stomach to an outside fireplace and then this saves so much energy and where does this energy go to the brain Boom.

[580] The stomach gets smaller.

[581] Who figured it out, though, if I put some food near the fire, this is crazy.

[582] I've heard theories.

[583] Go ahead, hit me with the theory.

[584] We don't know for sure, but it's probably trial and error.

[585] Like, you burn the forest and there is a charcoal giraffe there.

[586] And fuck, is it delicious.

[587] Yeah, and you come close and you say, well, you know, it's been burned, but maybe I can still find something there to eat and you try and it's good.

[588] It's nice.

[589] Huh.

[590] Oh.

[591] So what a revolution.

[592] By the way, these are such simple things and there's these beautiful illustrations throughout the book by Richard Ruiz.

[593] Oh, side note, total sidebar.

[594] Do you know Noah is the number one most popular name right now in America for children?

[595] We learned it two weeks ago.

[596] What do you think of that?

[597] I think it's scary because my connotation is the flood is coming.

[598] We need a lot of Noah's.

[599] We need a lot of Noah's.

[600] A lot of flood is coming.

[601] Yeah, but there's these beautiful illustrations.

[602] They're really reminiscent of the books I read when I was a kid.

[603] And in fact, your life was really, really altered by a book.

[604] You read when you were a little kid that is of this nature called The History of Mankind or Human Kind.

[605] What was it?

[606] Yeah, it was a big book with lots of pictures about the history of humankind for children.

[607] I still have it.

[608] It has my first kind of attempt to write because I try to copy some part of the book and it's all kind of messed up, but it's there.

[609] You encourage kids to write all over this book.

[610] If the book is yours, definitely write.

[611] write on it.

[612] Yeah, yeah.

[613] I love that.

[614] I mean, I think it's engagement.

[615] If it belongs to the libraries and don't.

[616] But if it's your book and you want to write on it, yes.

[617] Right.

[618] So what was the approach of that book?

[619] I mean, the amazing thing about it, it was scientific.

[620] I grew up again in Israel, and even though I come from a secular family, so still, religion is everywhere.

[621] And you go to school, or you go even to Cruden Garden, and you have all these stories about Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden and Noah's Flood, and this is what we came from.

[622] And then I got this book.

[623] There was no Adam and Eve and no gardener of Eden.

[624] Instead, there were Neanderthals, and there was the Stone Age, and there was human evolution, and it kind of blew my mind.

[625] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[626] Great.

[627] So what I think is cool about this book is it takes that, which I too received that.

[628] I had great National Geographic books.

[629] My grandma got me. But then there's no leaving of that scientific background of our evolution into the outcomes of these abilities we had or how they transformed and became our culture.

[630] That part to me was missing of those books.

[631] It didn't connect my present to the past.

[632] And I think that's what this book does a great job of.

[633] So we just blew Monica's mind with fire.

[634] That was 1 .5 million years ago, right?

[635] And then we go to you letting our children know, which is good.

[636] It's ego bursting.

[637] So, hey, just like there's a lot of different bears and there's bears all over the planet and they're all different species.

[638] Guess what?

[639] There were a bunch of different humans at one time all over the planet.

[640] This one that you're talking about discovering fire, obviously, isn't ultimately homo -sapien -sapien.

[641] Yeah, it's an earlier species.

[642] This is Austral Pythocene, aphorensis, or whatever.

[643] And then it evolves, and at one time we have a bunch of different hominids.

[644] Yeah, at least five or six.

[645] Okay, one blue...

[646] At the same time.

[647] Now we have different bears in the world.

[648] You have grizzly bears and polar bears and black bears and whatever.

[649] So one time, there were different human species, even in the same place.

[650] You can go to the same place.

[651] In one cave, there are homo sapiens.

[652] In another cave, you find remains of Neanderthals or homodonisova.

[653] That, to me, is a very exciting moment I paused the book.

[654] I would love to meet.

[655] Is it Floresians?

[656] It's the little people.

[657] Okay, tell Monica about the Flores.

[658] I want to hang out with these so bad.

[659] So there is an island in Indonesia called Flores, And humans managed to get there about a million years ago when the sea level was much lower than it is today so they could basically walk and then the sea rose again and they got stuck on the island.

[660] It was a small island, not much to eat.

[661] So what very often happens on islands, on small islands to many animals, not just humans, over time they become smaller and smaller and smaller.

[662] Foster's island principle.

[663] Birds get bigger, mammals get smaller.

[664] Exactly.

[665] Insects and birds, they become huge.

[666] And mammals, they become small.

[667] So on a florist, you had not just humans, also elephants becoming very small elephants.

[668] And the small humans would hunt the small elephants.

[669] Oh, adorable.

[670] And everyone's just this big?

[671] The people were three feet tall, you say, right?

[672] I don't know when you're American measurements, one meter tall, yeah, a meter tall, 25 kilos more or less.

[673] But they had two.

[674] 54 pounds and three feet tall with spears.

[675] With spears and fire and everything.

[676] Wow.

[677] And how big are the elephants?

[678] The elephant, I'm not sure.

[679] Oh, there's like, like cows.

[680] Yeah, like, well, the pygmy woolly mammoths on the Channel Islands, they're the size of like cows.

[681] Yeah.

[682] But with the tusks and the whole thing.

[683] That's so cool.

[684] So there were those.

[685] And then you had Neanderthals in much of Europe and West Asia.

[686] The small people from florists, we cannot need them any longer.

[687] Because it seems that Homo sapiens, when they reached the island, they decimated the whole of all of them.

[688] Big size advantage.

[689] Either directly killing them.

[690] taking away the food.

[691] And this is what happened to most of the other human species on the planet.

[692] Our species probably drove most of them to extinction.

[693] Did we just take up all the resources, or did we actively murder them, or some combination?

[694] Probably some combination.

[695] We are not sure, and we don't have enough evidence.

[696] But we do know that you see a very clear pattern.

[697] 100 ,000 years ago, you have something like five or six human species in different parts of the world.

[698] Our species, Homo sapiens, lives in Africa at that time.

[699] And then Homo sapiens comes out of Africa.

[700] and every time our ancestors reach a certain part of the world the local population of other humans disappears so you conclude whatever you want but that's the very clear pattern to some extent though they do not completely disappear there is some level of interbreeding with homo sapiens almost all of us are partly Neanderthal like between 1 % and 3 % of our genes I have a low percentage I really wanted a high And what's your percentage?

[701] It's minuscule.

[702] But they had bigger brains.

[703] From 23 and me. I was like, fingers crossed, I was hugely Neanderthal and I just wasn't.

[704] But just imagine the scene that, you know, 50 ,000 years ago, you have some kid whose mother is a homo sapiens and whose father is Neanderthal.

[705] Talk about mixed marriages.

[706] Oh, seriously.

[707] Black, white is nothing.

[708] Yeah, it's nothing.

[709] I mean, these are basically two animals from different species.

[710] It's like a bear and a donkey.

[711] Yeah.

[712] And we are all.

[713] the offspring, we are all the descendants of these kinds of unions.

[714] Wow.

[715] Oh, my God, it's incredible.

[716] The thing that blew my mind about the Flores thing and actually became encouraging the Flores dwarves of Indonesia, I graduated in 2000, we didn't know about that.

[717] Yeah, it's completely new.

[718] It's last 10 years.

[719] Wow.

[720] We found out 10 years ago that there were three foot tall, 55 -pound little spear -carrying, mini -elephant hunters.

[721] I think that's my ancestor.

[722] You might have a high percentage.

[723] These of flora's, you're fierce.

[724] Yeah.

[725] What's so exciting about that to me is, wow, 10 years ago, we thought we knew.

[726] Actually, they just two years ago probably discovered another new, old species of small humans we didn't know about in an island in the Philippines.

[727] Wow.

[728] And just like a month ago, they gave the Nobel Prize in medicine to Svante Paabo, who was the pioneer of this entire field.

[729] Because how do we know all that, not just from the bones, from being able to extract.

[730] extract DNA from the bones and learn that it's amazing.

[731] You can find out what was the DNA of somebody who lived 50 ,000 years ago.

[732] This is how you know that this is with this species and this is another species and so forth.

[733] So, you know, we started with taking marrow out of bones like a million years ago and now we can take DNA out of ancient bones and learn, you know, that there was a family with a Neanderthal father and a sapiens mother.

[734] You might find both bones in the same site and know that they were living at the same time in the same group.

[735] Yeah, but to know that they actually had a kid together, you need DNA.

[736] Right.

[737] I mean, if you don't find the skeletons in the right position, you probably don't know if they were like a couple, if they were enemies, if they just visited the same cave like a month apart from each other.

[738] But when you have the DNA, you know they actually had kids together.

[739] Yeah.

[740] And what can we attribute the human advantage?

[741] advancement to nutrition, for the most part.

[742] That's the thrust of his book.

[743] What is our superpower?

[744] Well, our superpower, nutrition is part of it because it allowed our brains to grow.

[745] But ultimately, our superpower is our ability to cooperate in very large numbers, because this is what really makes us more powerful than any other animal.

[746] And underlying this, it's the ability to invent and believe fictional stories, like about money.

[747] Today, we have 8 billion people cooperating in a trade network that we get our food, our clothes, whatever from the other side of the world thanks to money it's also the main incentive to not go to war with everyone else like it's such a powerful thing yeah it's really preventing russia thus far is the only one that doesn't seem to give a shit about that i mean it's very powerful but that's the great question and he teases it out like it's a mystery to the kids why did we displace all these other hominids why were we victorious and then now he introduces the central theme of sapiens which is that ability to share a fairy tale or a myth.

[748] Yeah, I mean, if you think about Neanderthals, they were a bit bigger than us, probably even had bigger brains than us.

[749] On the individual level, they are at least as smart as us, but Neanderthals can cooperate only in small groups of, say, 50 Neanderthals.

[750] Homo sapiens has this superpower ability to cooperate in hundreds and thousands.

[751] So if it's one sapiens versus one Neanderthal, you know, the Neanderthals are a very good chance.

[752] If it's 500 sapiens against 50 Neanderthals, the Neanderthals have no chance.

[753] We're the little people in Gulliver's travel.

[754] You remember that?

[755] I mean, the little rope down Gulliver?

[756] Yeah, that's true.

[757] Of course, I mean, cooperation is not just about conflict.

[758] I mean, if you cooperate with 500 other people, it means that if somebody in a different band discovers a new herb that helps to heal wounds, you also hear about it.

[759] If you have drought in your territory and there is nothing to eat, so you can move to the territory of a different band and because you all believe in the same guardian spirits or whatever, they will accept you as they're keen or as their friends.

[760] And Neanderthals don't have that.

[761] You can also compartmentalize labor.

[762] So there might be something you forage that actually requires so much time to process before you can consume it.

[763] That would otherwise be unconsumable unless you have a dedicated group that's just processing this thing that's getting collected.

[764] One band may be living next to a river and they fish salmon and they, I don't know, dry the salmon and then they exchange it with another group that lives in land.

[765] These are the kinds of things that made our species much more powerful than not only any other animal, but also any other human species.

[766] And this is still what makes us very powerful.

[767] If you think about any big human achievement, like flying to the moon, it's not the achievement of a single individual.

[768] Yeah, Neil Armstrong.

[769] Yeah, all by himself, go to the moon.

[770] No, you know, you have basically hundreds of thousands of people working to build the spaceship and to prepare the spacesuits and, you know, even the people who clean the lavatories.

[771] They are doing something very important, otherwise they all die of dysentery before they get to space.

[772] There's a whole industry that's going to create the fuel that it'll burn.

[773] It's separate from space exploration.

[774] All these different aggregates of technology and workforces coming together.

[775] I mean, it's basically community.

[776] That's the cheesy way of saying it, I guess.

[777] is like friendship and community is the reason.

[778] Absolutely.

[779] This is our superpower.

[780] And again, the question is, why are we able to build these huge, huge communities that nobody else can?

[781] And the answer, surprisingly, is fictional stories.

[782] And underlying every big community, you always have some fictional story.

[783] So it's very clear in the case of religion with mythology.

[784] But it's also clear in the case of modern economic systems with things like money and corporations, which are also just fictional stories invented by lawyers and bankers and again it's if everybody believes in it it works yeah okay another magic trick of the book is it now weaves in monica all these incredibly complex only to you because he i know i feel weird you don't like me in the audience no i love it okay it weaves in these other concepts that are almost impossible to explain to children or at least i think most parents are nervous to do so So as we're moving through the story of us starting two and a half million years ago, he uses Flores, as we kind of just touched on, to introduce what evolution is.

[785] So there's limited food on this island.

[786] The tinier members of the family are more likely to live because they need less food.

[787] The tinier members then have children.

[788] The tiniest members of those children will have the biggest chance of also having children.

[789] And he lays out evolution for you.

[790] Wow.

[791] And then in learning of how we know these other hominids were different species, he introduces DNA.

[792] So he explains DNA to your children, all in an incredibly digestible, simple, holistic view that I think is so thrilling.

[793] TBD, to be determined.

[794] I do believe after I read this book to my daughters tonight or begin it tonight, they're going to walk away with like.

[795] like 80 of the concepts that took me going to college to actually understand.

[796] That's the problem in school.

[797] It's so insular.

[798] It's like you learn biology here and then over there you're learning history.

[799] It's so hard to see the big picture and how this connects to that.

[800] Exactly.

[801] Which is what you're doing.

[802] You cannot make sense of history without biology.

[803] Right.

[804] Because humans are animals.

[805] The most basic thing to know about humans is that we are animals.

[806] And you know, it sounds so banal, but then you have so many people that they're just denied.

[807] No, we are not animals.

[808] We are something completely different.

[809] But you can't understand.

[810] our emotions, our urges, our politics, if you don't accept this, you know, very simple thing that we are animals.

[811] And he also compares it to the rest of the world, which I do think children are quite familiar with.

[812] As you said, kids know about animals.

[813] I mean, that's 80 % of the content is kids watching stuff on animals.

[814] And so you point out, not only is it unique that we can congregate in groups of hundreds and thousands, unique among hominids, no other animals on the whole planet can do it other than these social insects.

[815] Yeah, it's us and the ants.

[816] And the big difference between us and the ants, the ants are kind of stuck in just one way of cooperating, of building an ant colony with the queen and the division of labor within the ant population.

[817] They can't change their society overnight.

[818] It takes basically thousands of generations of evolution for ants to change their society.

[819] They can't have a democratic revolution.

[820] Hey, let's cut off the head of the queen.

[821] of the queen ant, and let's have a republic of ants.

[822] They just can't do it.

[823] Humans, we can not just cooperate in very large numbers, we can change the way we cooperate extremely quickly, just by changing the story in which we believe.

[824] So one moment we think, hey, we must have a king or a queen because God said that this person should rule over us and we live in a monarchy.

[825] And then you have the American Revolution, or you have the French Revolution, and people say, no, we don't want this story any longer.

[826] We now have a different story.

[827] that we the people will decide who is going to be president and we rebel against the king of England and we have a completely different system.

[828] And again, the amazing thing about the system that is created, that it takes into account the ability to keep changing it.

[829] So, you know, you have the US Constitution and today it's very common, I think, rightfully, to point out all the problems that were originally in the US Constitution that, for instance, endorsed slavery and that many of the people who wrote it, they had slaves.

[830] They talk about freedom, they have slaves.

[831] But the one really important thing that we should acknowledge is that into the Constitution, they built a mechanism to change it.

[832] And that's the amazing thing, because this was so rare before in human history.

[833] Previously in human history, people felt that, you know, you have the Ten Commandments, it came from God, you can't change it.

[834] There's an arrogance to think whatever discovery you've just made is the final world is that we got it yes we all want to like just clean our hand we did it our constitution has slowly transferred into the bible and it really frustrates me i think a lot of americans think because it was so revolutionary and it was so profound and it is so powerful and wonderful and has created a society that was unimaginable 300 years because of all those things it's perfect it shouldn't be meddled with and then they ignore the fact that it was designed to be meddled with exactly i I mean, that's the amazing thing about it, because the Ten Commandments have no way that the Constitution starts with the people.

[835] The Ten Commandments start with, I am the Lord, your God.

[836] It's not coming from the people, it's coming from God, and therefore you cannot change it.

[837] And, you know, the Ten Commandments, just like the U .S. Constitution, also endorse slavery.

[838] Look up commandment number 10.

[839] It says you should not covet your neighbor's field or house or slaves.

[840] Sure.

[841] Which implies that it's perfectly okay with God to have slaves.

[842] So long as you don't covet the slaves of somebody else.

[843] Get your own fucking slaves.

[844] God doesn't want you coveting or stealing other people's slaves.

[845] And the thing is, the U .S. Constitution has been amended less than a century after it was first written down.

[846] The Ten Commandments have never been amended.

[847] I mean, you don't have, okay, okay, now we got it.

[848] It's bad to have slaves.

[849] Okay, we will rewrite the Ten Commandments and change.

[850] No, you can't do that.

[851] Yeah, there's no Eleventh Commandment that said if two -thirds of you agree, the 10 sucks, you can get rid of it.

[852] Exactly.

[853] Did they set the bar a little too high, do you think, in our constitution?

[854] I'm sure you know enough about it to ask that question.

[855] You're too afraid of that question.

[856] No, I don't have the expertise.

[857] I'm not an expert on...

[858] Wait, you need to change it?

[859] Yeah, like, ours is really, really hard to change, which is in some way great and in some way against the nature of the document.

[860] You need to find a middle part.

[861] If it's too easy to change it, and whenever one party is in power, it immediately writes the whole constitution.

[862] You need something deeper than the kind of usual laws that you pass.

[863] If it becomes impossible to change it, then, okay, you need to stay away from that extreme also because the whole magic of the constitution is that it acknowledges its own limitations.

[864] You know, at the beginning of the conversation, we talked about narcissism and the inability of dictators to ever acknowledge a mistake.

[865] The amazing thing about the founding fathers is that they had this kind of understanding that, Okay, we think it should be like this, but we could be mistaken about it.

[866] So let's give our descendants a mechanism to do better than us.

[867] Yeah.

[868] The other irony is so much of this is just a kind of pervasive lack of humility.

[869] Because when people shed a story, the previous story now becomes absolutely absurd and preposterous, right?

[870] Like when I get into arguments with people about a belief in their one God, I don't try to defeat their opinion of that.

[871] But in helping them understand how I view their view of God, I simply ask, what do you think about Zeus in Mount Olympus?

[872] Like when you think about the Greeks believing in Zeus and Mount Olympus, it sounds really comical to you, right?

[873] Just know, they're the same to me because I'm outside of both of the stories.

[874] So when we leave one, when we transition and we discard a story, all of a sudden in the light of day, it's almost objective truth gets really clear.

[875] Similarly, monarchy was a given.

[876] Five minutes after we have a democracy, it seems insane.

[877] Wait, God appointed this family, only their kids, no matter how fucking ill -equipped they are.

[878] They should rule about the smartest folks on the land.

[879] It's insane.

[880] I think we should all have the humility to go.

[881] We're also in a story that will change that will seem absolutely preposterous.

[882] Yeah, we still need these kinds of stories, otherwise we don't have a society.

[883] but the good stories are the ones that acknowledge their own limitations and have, again, this mechanism to change the story later on.

[884] It's like we want the scientific method infused in our storytelling almost.

[885] It can be done.

[886] Again, the U .S. Constitution is a perfect example of how it's done, a story that acknowledges its own potential limitations and gives you the ability to rewrite it over time.

[887] Of course, you know, also the religious stories, They get reinterpreted over time, but it's much, much more difficult and more limited.

[888] So because you can't change the text, so the trick is to interpret the text in a new way, but you don't really acknowledge that.

[889] You say, no, this is what it always meant.

[890] Yeah.

[891] Right, right, right.

[892] They just misunderstood.

[893] Now, no religion would survive if it could not adapt.

[894] Christianity today is a completely different religion than Christianity a thousand years ago or 2 ,000 years ago.

[895] So it does change, but the change is much, much more slow and difficult and often violent because it doesn't have this built -in mechanism to acknowledge past mistakes and try something better.

[896] Okay, so can you identify the Achilles in our thinking?

[897] So the great gift is that we can buy into it.

[898] But then also we know that our stories tend to follow a very predictable pattern.

[899] There's only a few different stories.

[900] Absolutely.

[901] There's some vestigial Achilles tendon.

[902] I'm referencing one now.

[903] There's a segment of America that think the founding fathers were divine.

[904] Like the founding fathers.

[905] It's like, no, there are human dudes who had fucked up lives and they were pretty brilliant or they were good writers.

[906] They weren't elevated above any.

[907] So what's the backside of the coin that we need to at all times be really aware of?

[908] Oh, I bet we're steering into the trap.

[909] It happened the same thing as Christianity.

[910] I mean, we don't know much about Jesus as a person.

[911] But from the little we know, for instance, from the stories preserved in the New Testament, he never claimed to be God.

[912] He was basically this kind of hippie guru in this small province of the Roman Empire.

[913] Sexy carpenter.

[914] Who wanted to reform Judaism and basically tell people, be nicer to each other.

[915] After he died, his followers weaved this more and more elaborate stories about who, he really was, until eventually some of them began claiming that he was God.

[916] For Jesus himself and his first followers, this would have sounded utterly preposterous and blasphemous.

[917] Yes.

[918] To claim that I'm God?

[919] Because he was Jewish.

[920] He did not think he was Yahweh.

[921] Am I allowed to say that?

[922] I'm not.

[923] He did not think he was Yahweh.

[924] He never says it.

[925] In Lawn, you have a lot of, you know, previous prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah coming to the people, telling them you should behave better.

[926] And he's doing the same thing.

[927] During his time, we have evidence of a lot of other leaders in Judaism that try to reform Judaism in different ways.

[928] And this is basically what he's also saying, and the people around him, this is what they hear.

[929] But then decades and generations after he's dead and he's not there to be able to object, you have people say, no, this rabbi, this guru, went a small following and was eventually crucified by the hated Romans.

[930] He was actually the God that created the whole of the universe.

[931] That's so crazy.

[932] We just learned of this that really Paul wrote down all the stuff.

[933] And Paul had never met Jesus.

[934] He never met him.

[935] He wasn't even a contemporary of him.

[936] And that one human that surrounded Jesus was literate.

[937] So none of them wrote it down.

[938] Paul was the one who created the brand.

[939] Yes.

[940] You have Elvis and you have his manager.

[941] That was my exact same thing.

[942] I said the exact same thing.

[943] I'm like, oh, he was Colonel Parker.

[944] Exactly.

[945] And then you have to ask yourself, who's the real power?

[946] Is it Jesus the symbol or is it the story Paul created?

[947] I'd argue it's probably the story.

[948] Absolutely.

[949] So maybe Paul's the most significant.

[950] A lot of scholars who reach those Christianity, they would definitely agree with you that the person who created Christianity is not Jesus.

[951] It's Paul.

[952] Yes, exactly.

[953] And we don't know about Paul.

[954] I don't even know his last name.

[955] Saint.

[956] Stay tuned for more armchair expert, if you dare.

[957] How can Jesus have created the universe if he lived in the universe?

[958] Don't worry about it.

[959] No, I don't.

[960] What is the rationale behind that?

[961] Because Jesus is God.

[962] There's a holy trinity.

[963] They're all one thing.

[964] There's the Holy Spirit.

[965] There's God and his son.

[966] But they're all one thing.

[967] So God was here.

[968] And then he said, fuck, they're all.

[969] off kilter, I'm going to send my own son down there to leave them out of this quagmire and then I'm going to let him die for their sins but he just ascended back to heaven and I guess reconfigured with his one self.

[970] I mean in contemporary terms he's a binary.

[971] Okay.

[972] He always gender fluid.

[973] He's both.

[974] He's a human.

[975] He's a divine.

[976] No. He's human fluid.

[977] Wow.

[978] He can be both at the same time.

[979] I'd love to party with him and everything's on the table.

[980] Wow.

[981] Okay.

[982] All right.

[983] not a good explanation, but I'll take it.

[984] No, I mean, the Trinity is one of the most complex theological and philosophical ideas that humans ever came up with, and the vast majority of Christians don't really understand it either.

[985] This is why you have this profession of theologians who spend their entire life just trying to get it exactly right.

[986] What is the relation between God, the Father, and God's the Son, and the Holy Spirit and all that?

[987] Can I say my favorite meme I've ever seen?

[988] I've sent it to a million people.

[989] It's a drawing of Jesus, praying, and he said, God, it's me, you.

[990] It's crazy.

[991] Okay, this was incredible.

[992] I cannot speak highly enough about this book.

[993] I think it's the greatest way to get into a lot of really complicated topics, concepts, through picture, through really artful storytelling.

[994] It's fun.

[995] It's a page turner.

[996] It's a mystery.

[997] It's a great holistic explanation of how they got.

[998] to their bedroom where they're hearing this book.

[999] It's, I think, very empowering.

[1000] Like, okay, this is how it happened.

[1001] And for all these reasons, the sky's the limit on where it could go.

[1002] I'm grateful for it.

[1003] While I have you, you've already given us so much time.

[1004] Got it.

[1005] Every time I talk to you, it's a different experience with time.

[1006] It travels differently.

[1007] It's relative.

[1008] Okay, I just want to check in on this.

[1009] You have for, I don't know, 10 years now.

[1010] When did you write Homo Deus?

[1011] I wrote it in 2014, 15.

[1012] It was published in 2016.

[1013] Okay, so maybe for eight years.

[1014] you've been kind of sounding an alarm, a little bit of a whistleblower, like, hey, let's be cognizant of where this story is heading.

[1015] One aspect of it is we're going to start to integrate a lot of technology into ourselves as a species.

[1016] Biomechanically, we're going to engineer some embryos.

[1017] We're really going to start tinkering with ourselves as a species.

[1018] We're also going to be using AI to augment our own experience and intelligence.

[1019] And you've been great at giving us some theoretical outcomes of all that.

[1020] and why we need to be very cautious.

[1021] Yeah, it's extremely dangerous, these developments.

[1022] So what I'm curious about is, what has happened since you first started sounding that alarm?

[1023] I want to know some concrete things.

[1024] That's either confirmed kind of what your fear was and or redirected what your fear is.

[1025] What's happened recently that we could look at?

[1026] One of my biggest fears have always been from surveillance, from AI and the other digital technologies used in order to destroy human privacy and create these total surveillance, regimes in which somebody follows us all the time.

[1027] Somebody knows us better than we know ourselves.

[1028] And when I wrote it, this was kind of a futuristic fear.

[1029] Now it's a reality, at least in some parts of the world, like if you go to China, it's not longer science fiction, it's not longer futuristic, it's actually happening.

[1030] It's the first time in human history that you can technically follow everybody all the time.

[1031] And that's done through these apps?

[1032] Several things.

[1033] I mean, If you look back in history, so say you're Stalin and you want to follow all the people in the Soviet Union all the time, so you have two big problems.

[1034] Your first problem is you don't have enough KGB agents.

[1035] Right, you need one for one.

[1036] Yeah, one for one.

[1037] So 200 million Soviet citizens, you need at least 200 million KGB agents.

[1038] I don't know, they have shifts, they have time off.

[1039] Probably a couple hundred million to follow the KGB people.

[1040] So it's endless.

[1041] You don't have enough agents.

[1042] Secondly, even if you do have an agent following each person every day, at the end of the day, they write a paper report about you.

[1043] They send it to Moscow.

[1044] Somebody needs to read all these 200 million pieces of paper.

[1045] Nobody can do that.

[1046] So you cannot follow everybody all the time.

[1047] Some human privacy is secure even in the Soviet Union.

[1048] Now, with AI and smartphones and all that, it's a game changer.

[1049] Because you don't need millions of human agents to follow everybody around.

[1050] You have the smartphones.

[1051] People are paying for the agents from their own money and subsidizing.

[1052] agent and taking the agent everywhere.

[1053] And even if you don't have your own smartphone, there are other devices of other people.

[1054] And the second problem of how to analyze all this information, AI.

[1055] You don't need a human to actually read all the data being collected.

[1056] So you have things like social credit system, which is now being developed, which is basically taking all the data about you and giving you a score, a score of how good a person or a citizen you are, which sounds very nice.

[1057] nice until you think, right a minute.

[1058] Who is determining the score for different things?

[1059] You're a gay atheist.

[1060] You might have a low score somewhere.

[1061] You'd have the highest score in my book.

[1062] Exactly.

[1063] I mean, if you're in Iran and you're a gay atheist, then, you know, your score is minus million or something.

[1064] And if you're in China and you once told a joke about Xi Jinping, or you read a book by somebody who was later declared enemy of the people.

[1065] You preferred your vacation in Hong Kong than you did to Beijing.

[1066] Again, the problem is not the AI by itself, it's the usage that certain governments, certain corporations may be, certain people will make of it.

[1067] I mean, technology by itself is not bad.

[1068] It's basically like a knife.

[1069] You can use a knife to murder somebody.

[1070] You can use a knife to save their life in surgery.

[1071] So it's the same with the new technologies we are developing.

[1072] But AI is different from a knife in one important respect.

[1073] It's the first technology that can make decisions by itself.

[1074] A knife doesn't decide whether to murder or whether to save.

[1075] But AI, it's the first technology ever invented that can actually make decisions independently and it is increasingly making decisions about us.

[1076] So today, in the United States, forget about China or Iran.

[1077] In the US, you apply to a bank to get a loan.

[1078] Increasingly, it's an AI that decides whether to give you a loan or not.

[1079] You apply for a job.

[1080] Increasingly, it's an AI.

[1081] In the justice system, Increasingly, AI is being used to determine sentences for people.

[1082] Really?

[1083] And this is extremely dangerous and scary, partly because the AI becomes so complicated, nobody understands how it actually makes the decision.

[1084] Yes.

[1085] You can only set the AI off in a direction.

[1086] And at some point, we don't understand it, so we have to assume, well, the AI must be right.

[1087] Exactly.

[1088] And that's the danger.

[1089] Six years ago when it started, so people had this idea.

[1090] that, you know, this is just mathematics.

[1091] So AI cannot be racist.

[1092] AI cannot be misogynist because it's just numbers, it's just math, how can be racist?

[1093] Now we know.

[1094] We have so many studies that prove that AI can be extremely racist.

[1095] It picks up the racism from the data.

[1096] If you train AI on a racist database, it becomes racist.

[1097] I mean, if you had bankers refusing loans to black people and giving loans to white people in the same situation, and then you have an AI, you need to train the AI.

[1098] So you'd give the AI a database of previous decisions made by bankers and the outcome and the AI learns from that.

[1099] It learns don't give loans to black people.

[1100] It could discover that you have a 0 .01 % rate of defaulting on a loan if the customer's white and a 0 .02 % if the customer's black.

[1101] The AI doesn't at all think of the historical context that might lead to that number.

[1102] It doesn't think of the other factors.

[1103] that might inflate that number, it just sees the number.

[1104] It sounds great objectivity, but in fact, subjectivity is imperative in so many ways.

[1105] Exactly, and it's very difficult to get over it because, for instance, okay, okay, okay, the AI should not have any data about race.

[1106] But then, for instance, it finds out that people who live in a certain neighborhood, you shouldn't give them loans.

[1107] It doesn't know that, oh, it's a specific ethnic group that lives, so it becomes a proxy.

[1108] There was a very famous example that they give with the Boston Orwell, that years ago, when they wanted to test new people for the orchestra, a violinist or whatever, they discovered that if the people who decide who to hire, they see the musicians, they are biased because of something like gender.

[1109] They would prefer men are better violinists.

[1110] So they said, okay, we'll have a curtain.

[1111] You sit behind the curtain, you can't see the gender of the person, and then it's a fair decision.

[1112] But the interesting thing is they realize it's not enough to have a curtain because they are They are listening very, very carefully.

[1113] So if somebody comes with high heels, Ah.

[1114] There's some jewelry rattling around.

[1115] So then you rule, you have to come in your socks.

[1116] Oh, my God.

[1117] Also, all women have about 6 ,000 different pills in their purse.

[1118] Like Monica travels.

[1119] They don't need to bring their purse in.

[1120] So if you hear a ton of medication rattling around in Thailand.

[1121] Yeah, because all the men are like, can I have Advil?

[1122] And so the women have to provide it.

[1123] But there's a lot of giveaways.

[1124] Also, what's interesting is because.

[1125] Because it's, quote, blind, it's fun to figure out if it's a male or a female.

[1126] Your brain is like, oh, but I also want to know because I can't see.

[1127] So you're also looking extra hard for the clues.

[1128] Yeah.

[1129] You think that you took gender or race out of the equation, but it's actually very hard to know if you did it.

[1130] So the danger of kind of racist AI, it's not something that is easy to solve.

[1131] You could get rid of race as a metric the AI looks at, but then open up the rest of the world for the AI.

[1132] examine and you could find that borrowers who listen to this type of music defaulted.

[1133] You just find its way, hip -hop.

[1134] Then you could do shoes, you could do dietary.

[1135] Yes, so many things.

[1136] I mean, you can't escape that we have some expressions of our microcultures that generally are lined up by race.

[1137] Yeah.

[1138] Yeah, or if you wanted to get rid of hillbillies, you look at who's buying these country albums.

[1139] You know, like you could find a way to figure it out.

[1140] and the machine will.

[1141] Okay, so that's already happening.

[1142] It's happening with loans.

[1143] What's China doing with these scores?

[1144] If you have a low score, then you won't be admitted to university.

[1145] Oh, my gosh.

[1146] You can only go to the Laos universities.

[1147] You cannot buy an airplane ticket.

[1148] Oh.

[1149] You cannot get a ticket to the fastest trains.

[1150] You can only go on the slower trains.

[1151] I mean, there's so many things.

[1152] Really?

[1153] As a result of having a low social credit score.

[1154] And the thing is, it's everything you do.

[1155] If you think about money, so money is a system to give value to certain things you do in life.

[1156] Like you work, you get money for that.

[1157] But most of the things you do, they don't have a money value.

[1158] But this is a way to basically monetize the whole of life.

[1159] Everything you do, you tell a joke.

[1160] If it's the wrong joke, you lose some credit for it.

[1161] If you did something that they liked, you get a score.

[1162] So it also means that the whole of life becomes much, much more stressful.

[1163] This is not just China, this is also the US, other countries.

[1164] If you're being monitored all the time and the data is always there, whatever you do could influence, I mean, your job prospects in 20 years.

[1165] Like you are now a kid in school and you go to a party and you do something stupid, not illegal.

[1166] And this is recorded.

[1167] And 20 years later, you're running for being, I don't know, Supreme Court judge or politician or bank appointment and this data comes up.

[1168] it never goes away.

[1169] So the whole of life becomes one long job interview.

[1170] Yeah.

[1171] Anything you do, any moment of your life could meet you 20 years down the line when you're kind of interviewing for a job.

[1172] Okay, so I'm thinking about that right now, and of course the first thing I think of is history is absolutely populated with unlikable, uncooperative, outcast misfits who have brought us the biggest breakthroughs, the best movements, the finishing of the Panama Canal.

[1173] History's not made up of people with a high social score.

[1174] Not always.

[1175] I guess you'd have to immediately say, is, okay, if we're going to enact this policy, we're only going to give resources and fast trains and higher education to people who are fitting in the norm we want.

[1176] History would tell you you're going to miss out on the Picasso's and all these different people, right?

[1177] And so my question is, they must recognize that.

[1178] I'll miss out on Picasso, but I get more powerful control of every person in the country.

[1179] I'm not looking for Bezos.

[1180] I'm not looking for Elon Musk.

[1181] I have me. I have Putin.

[1182] I don't want.

[1183] That's all I need.

[1184] I don't want Picasso's and Bezos and so forth.

[1185] Yeah.

[1186] But countries is a governmental policy for China.

[1187] Don't they recognize they're going to be ill -equipped to compete?

[1188] It's the price that many of them are willing to pay.

[1189] You talk about Bezos.

[1190] So Jack Maher, the founder of Alibaba, he disappeared for a couple of months a year or two ago.

[1191] Nobody knows exactly where.

[1192] The Chinese government also took a lot of other steps against the kind of big high -tech companies which really undermined the business of these companies and you just look at the share prices of Tencent and Baidu and Alibaba and it really went down.

[1193] And now is there zero COVID policy?

[1194] It's really hurting the Chinese economy.

[1195] But for the CCP, for the Chinese Communist Party, I mean, this is a price we're willing to pay.

[1196] These powerful companies, they became too powerful.

[1197] They became a threat.

[1198] We need to put them down a little or much.

[1199] Before it gets completely out of control.

[1200] Yeah, if this means that the Chinese economy suffers to some extent, if this means that China is a little behind in the technology race, this is fine with us because political control is ultimately more important than anything else.

[1201] And again, this is the kind of strength of a democracy.

[1202] And this is why you do see that even though in the short term, Autocratic countries sometimes do better because they can take decisive fear, quick action or something.

[1203] You can build the Audubon.

[1204] Yeah.

[1205] In the long term, democracies tend to perform much better.

[1206] Wow.

[1207] You've all.

[1208] You've all Harari.

[1209] You've all know a Harari.

[1210] Most popular name in America.

[1211] Let's hope that Yuval makes it next year.

[1212] Yes, exactly.

[1213] Let's just go through your whole name.

[1214] Unstoppable Us, Volume 1, how humans took over the world.

[1215] Is it safe to assume there'll be more volumes and will you take us even closer to present day?

[1216] There should be four volumes altogether.

[1217] So the first volume it focuses on the Stone Age.

[1218] But again, it's not just about the Stone Age.

[1219] It's about how the Stone Age still shapes our life today, our emotions, our social system.

[1220] It's still based in the Stone Age.

[1221] And then the following volumes, they look at the Agricultural Revolution and how we domesticated, chickens and pigs and wheat and rice and builds kingdoms and empires.

[1222] Guns, germs and steel.

[1223] Yeah, and then it goes all the way, I mean, Volume 3 and Volume 4 to the present era, explaining to kids what democracies and capitalism and the scientific revolution and all these things.

[1224] Oh, my God.

[1225] Don't go to school.

[1226] I'm going to pull my kids out of school, just read these four books.

[1227] There'll only be one founding father in our house.

[1228] Very low on the China likeability scale, but just, And you said we could write in the book so we can amend them.

[1229] You can amend the book, definitely.

[1230] I mean, to be honest, I'm sure there are some mistakes there.

[1231] Every year they make new discoveries.

[1232] So like in five years or ten years, they'll discover some new human species.

[1233] So absolutely amend the book.

[1234] Amazing.

[1235] You said, so in writing this book, you're basically saying to children, do I want them to carry my ideas, my religions, my wars, my memories?

[1236] Here, kid, I carried these up to here.

[1237] Now you carry them.

[1238] or do I want to help liberate them from their fears, their illusions, their misery?

[1239] See these kids?

[1240] I got stuck with them for years.

[1241] Be careful.

[1242] You don't have to pick them up.

[1243] Boom.

[1244] It's good.

[1245] Biam!

[1246] You all, you rule.

[1247] It felt like 11 minutes.

[1248] I love when you visit.

[1249] I hope you'll keep writing.

[1250] Yeah, thanks for coming to the attic.

[1251] I will come back.

[1252] Please.

[1253] Last time you were lost, I don't know if you remember.

[1254] Maybe it's not last time was the first time.

[1255] Yeah, when you went to a friend's house that was 45 feet that way.

[1256] way.

[1257] But the route you took to get 45 feet this way, it ended up being about nine minutes.

[1258] It's complicated.

[1259] It's very memorable.

[1260] People should make guffaws when you introduce somebody because it's like a permanent memory.

[1261] Like, remember when you've all took 15 minutes to go 45 feet?

[1262] Thanks for coming.

[1263] Great to see you.

[1264] Please come back.

[1265] I will.

[1266] Thanks for having me. And now my favorite part of the show, the fact check with my soulmate Monica Padman.

[1267] What a good episode.

[1268] I love him.

[1269] Me too.

[1270] He's by far.

[1271] One of my favorite people to listen to, talk.

[1272] I know.

[1273] He's so well -spoken.

[1274] Even with his accent, he's speaking to English as a second language, maybe third.

[1275] He has to overcome a lot, but he does it.

[1276] We should catch up on something.

[1277] Okay.

[1278] I didn't finish it, so I can't say too much.

[1279] But you told me to watch a doc after our last back check about...

[1280] No. Falwell Jr.?

[1281] Yes.

[1282] Oh, my God.

[1283] Did you watch it?

[1284] I started it, so I haven't finished.

[1285] Oh, I loved it.

[1286] But it was so on topic of what we were just discussing in the previous fact check.

[1287] It was crazy because it was about a scandal, which I didn't know about.

[1288] I didn't either.

[1289] But the Liberty College director, I guess, owner, I don't know.

[1290] Yeah, chairman.

[1291] He was caught, like, watching his wife have sex.

[1292] With a young man. Yeah.

[1293] Yeah.

[1294] And it was like a seven -year -long thing.

[1295] Yes.

[1296] So just for people who aren't super abreast of the Falwells, Jerry Falwell, Sr., was the first person to politicize the evangelical movement and create a voting block called the moral majority and has shaped politics so dramatically.

[1297] The previous three Republican presidents for Reagan, the two Bushes and Trump, they basically got to go to Falwell and get his.

[1298] approval.

[1299] Kingmaker, they referred to him.

[1300] So then his son comes along and it is determined that the son isn't going to be the best preacher, that that's not really his lane.

[1301] But then he shows a lot of business aptitude.

[1302] They put him in charge of Liberty College, this biggest Christian university in the country, probably the world, I'd guess.

[1303] And he and his wife have this high -flying lifestyle.

[1304] And they party and they meet a boy who's a pool attendant at a Miami hotel.

[1305] and they invite him on a date and Jerry watches them make love.

[1306] Yeah.

[1307] Okay, so what was your impression?

[1308] Because I have such a specific takeaway from it, which is going to probably shock you.

[1309] Well, and then all to say he got like fired from the universe.

[1310] Like, it all came out.

[1311] It all came out and crashing for him.

[1312] Uh -huh.

[1313] And other allegations with other students that had visited their compound and whatnot.

[1314] Got it.

[1315] So just really embroiled in a lot.

[1316] lot of atypical sexual activities, not in line with the moral majority values.

[1317] I mean, my main takeaway was if you grow up in this extremist household, which he did, extreme religion, you're going to come out with some perversions.

[1318] Yeah, you just are.

[1319] And what we sort of said last time, I don't really care what you do.

[1320] Right, I don't care people have three ways.

[1321] Yeah, I don't care what you do as long as, you know, everyone's.

[1322] consenting, which in this case they were, it seems.

[1323] Oh, yeah.

[1324] My weird takeaway, like, if you scrap the hypocrisy just for a second, you take that off the table, that he's being a huge hypocrite.

[1325] Yes.

[1326] That the Liberty College has this code of conduct.

[1327] He's violating every single thing that he's encouraging people to follow.

[1328] So just if we can table that part of it, there was something oddly sweet about the notion that those two had this weird trust for one another, and that I guess that would have been grossed out if it was her watching him fuck young girls, gender -wise?

[1329] would have triggered me. But the fact that it was his older wife having sex with this younger man and he was there and he was really kind to the guy.

[1330] Yeah, he was.

[1331] There was something really weirdly sweet about it where I was like, this is like, let's just assume he's trusting his wife enough to, quote, allow her to have these experiences and he's there.

[1332] And what's interesting is he never got like psychotic jealous.

[1333] Like she was in love with this young guy.

[1334] Yeah.

[1335] And he would even say to him, like, well, you really broke Becky's heart when you started dating that girl.

[1336] Like, he would kind of be there for his way.

[1337] It's interesting.

[1338] It's, look, it's so abnormal the whole situation.

[1339] It is.

[1340] But within it, I was like, if they're just two humans that this is their vacations, there's something bizarrely trusting and sweet about it.

[1341] Yeah, I mean, I think you're right.

[1342] The problem comes from the forward -facing.

[1343] persona versus what's going on behind the scene.

[1344] And then in an escalate, you're probably not that part of the documentary, but once he gets obsessed with Trump, his rhetoric starts escalating dramatically.

[1345] He's also a tremendous alcoholic by that point.

[1346] Like, during, when his downfall happens, he's drunk in public everywhere.

[1347] I mean, he has a whole other thing.

[1348] So then the other great takeaway for me of the doc was people at their most dangerous when they get everything they wanted.

[1349] Because, and I speak as someone who got everything.

[1350] thing they wanted.

[1351] There's no accompanying elation.

[1352] And I think so many of these people who end up like billionaires or whatever they get, they're like, now what?

[1353] Yeah.

[1354] That's our whole show.

[1355] Yeah, now what?

[1356] And I think their thing was like, all of a sudden, they're now they've got to do something more extraordinary sexually.

[1357] They got to party harder.

[1358] Like, there's just no there there.

[1359] And then these people in search of that there end up in these bizarre.

[1360] Totally.

[1361] Yeah.

[1362] It's just an interesting take on.

[1363] what's after getting everything you're supposed to get.

[1364] Yeah.

[1365] Kind of some deplorable.

[1366] Did we say that word?

[1367] Deviant.

[1368] Deviant.

[1369] Okay, yeah.

[1370] She could get kinky to feel like now I'm doing something that's different.

[1371] That part's really curious to me. And then I introduced the term.

[1372] So we had been talking about this scenario, but the popular term for it is a cuck.

[1373] Cuckold, yeah.

[1374] Well, Cuck, for Cuckold.

[1375] Yeah.

[1376] Shakespearean.

[1377] Yeah.

[1378] Oh, hell.

[1379] It's kind of, I shouldn't say it's common, but I know of this also occurring in the gay community as like a fetish.

[1380] Thruple, just watching your partner get fucked?

[1381] Yeah.

[1382] Oh, okay.

[1383] Okay.

[1384] And when I heard about that, I was like, oh, wow.

[1385] It kind of goes to show, doesn't matter how liberal you are or how open you are, I think that we're programmed to believe that being gay is already outside of norms.

[1386] Right.

[1387] You're no longer, you're not playing by the rules.

[1388] anymore anyway.

[1389] So then you're allowed to do, or like anything that's happening over there is already like, oh, well, it's already a little different.

[1390] So no wonder all this other stuff is going on.

[1391] I've already been shamed to death over this orientation I have.

[1392] So what's a little more shame?

[1393] Yeah.

[1394] Yeah, you kind of get good at just going, well, fuck you in your shame, I think.

[1395] Right.

[1396] There's an ownership over it.

[1397] Uh -huh.

[1398] And I kind of hold that position, which is there isn't any morality in sex.

[1399] Yeah.

[1400] Again.

[1401] Yeah.

[1402] Assuming you're not hurting anyone.

[1403] or raping anyone.

[1404] Yeah.

[1405] There's no morality.

[1406] Yeah.

[1407] There's no right or wrong.

[1408] We lived as polygamists for the vast majority of time we humans have been on this planet.

[1409] So this monogamy experiment is quite relatively new.

[1410] Yeah.

[1411] That's not to say I'm not a proponent of it.

[1412] It's just there was no amorality about it.

[1413] Yeah.

[1414] You know, a thousand years ago.

[1415] I know.

[1416] I mean, all of Greece was bisexual.

[1417] You just got to go like, okay, everything can just flip on a dime.

[1418] Yeah.

[1419] It's just about culture, really.

[1420] Mm -hmm.

[1421] Great, Doc.

[1422] Yeah, I'm going to finish it.

[1423] Are you caught up on White Lotus?

[1424] So good.

[1425] I love how she talks.

[1426] Why are you leaving me now?

[1427] I'm going to be lonely.

[1428] You don't even like me. Jennifer Coolidge.

[1429] She's so good.

[1430] She's so good.

[1431] I imagine Mike White just lets the camera roll and let her say kind of whatever.

[1432] Yeah, was it you and I that were told the story that the first season didn't, that a lot of stuff wasn't scripted for her.

[1433] One was just like her in the ocean.

[1434] Oh, my buddy Peter was telling me. He's like, just, you know, there's nothing written, but we need you in the ocean.

[1435] And there's this long scene with her just, you know, getting crazy in the ocean.

[1436] And it's like, yeah, I imagine they build in a lot of space for her to be Jennifer Coolish.

[1437] The tension.

[1438] I think he does such a good job of building a war, like who's right?

[1439] Like nobody's right.

[1440] I love it.

[1441] Nobody is right.

[1442] Yeah, the two couples is great.

[1443] They are.

[1444] And I vacillate back.

[1445] forth.

[1446] I'm like, ugh, to one, and then ugh, to the other.

[1447] And you're just a constant.

[1448] It's so well done.

[1449] It's crazy.

[1450] Yeah.

[1451] Oh, God.

[1452] And the, like, really nice guy.

[1453] Oh, my God.

[1454] We were watching that last night.

[1455] I don't think we need to give anything away by saying that there's a super respectful boy on the show whose father and grandfather are with him and they are both very sexually aggressive.

[1456] Yeah.

[1457] So this boy is the antithesis of them.

[1458] Yeah.

[1459] And he meets a girl in And it's that.

[1460] We were watching last night and I said, fucking humans are so complex and they'll never be a solution.

[1461] I know.

[1462] You want the boy to be exactly that and you might be dry as the Sahara because of it.

[1463] What do we do about that?

[1464] Not attractive, but it is exactly what we need and want.

[1465] It's so crazy.

[1466] Oh, it is.

[1467] And it's so honest.

[1468] I'm so glad that's being shown because everyone would love to live in a fairy tale.

[1469] We're just acting like that.

[1470] would get you what you think it should.

[1471] I know.

[1472] But no, some dirt bag with tattoos jumps in the water and you're like, I want to be fucked by that guy.

[1473] I know.

[1474] And then the nice guy comes sauntering up and is like so sweet.

[1475] And it's cringy.

[1476] And then you're so mad at yourself for feeling that.

[1477] Yes, guilt.

[1478] Oof.

[1479] Well, it's that, um, the fake podcast by, so Kyle Dunnigan has a podcast called Pussies.

[1480] And it's a podcast about women for women by men.

[1481] Yeah.

[1482] And they're making this really impassioned speech about women's rights.

[1483] And then the first caller, she's like, hey, yeah, I'd love the show.

[1484] You guys are saying exactly what I want to hear, but I am fucking dry as hell.

[1485] Oh, my God.

[1486] Oh, it's so fucked up.

[1487] I don't think we can live in a world, though, where we don't admit that.

[1488] I agree.

[1489] I don't know, like, I don't know how we transcend it if we don't first admit it.

[1490] I agree.

[1491] It's so wild.

[1492] I agree.

[1493] But it's because we are all programmed in the exact same system.

[1494] And women aren't not in the patriarchy we are.

[1495] Yeah.

[1496] And culture is the most powerful force in our life.

[1497] But also we are animals on planet Earth to fucking procreate.

[1498] Yeah.

[1499] And we are subconsciously assessing fitness in the scientific term, fitness for a mate in a way that we're not aware of.

[1500] Totally.

[1501] But what I will say, what's great about the casting, is that boy?

[1502] is so beautiful.

[1503] Oh, he's gorgeous.

[1504] His body's beautiful.

[1505] His face is beautiful.

[1506] He's tall.

[1507] So I like that he didn't pick like some very stereotypical maybe nerdy.

[1508] Like he looks, he's hot.

[1509] Yes.

[1510] Which again is fascinating because it might say, that's why I say fitness in quotes, in the evolutionary term fitness doesn't mean physically fit.

[1511] So you might subconsciously let's just, this is a hypothetical.

[1512] I am not saying this is what it is.

[1513] But it is possible that as a social primate that understands that your offspring have the very best chance of surviving if their father is high status.

[1514] Right.

[1515] Let's start with, that's the baseline fact of social primate.

[1516] Yeah.

[1517] Which is true.

[1518] What you could subconsciously be knowing about that boy is that's not the personality type that will rise to high status in a position of authority within a social group.

[1519] Yeah, maybe.

[1520] Forget the, like, can he fight his weight of a time?

[1521] Right.

[1522] Which is what his body would lead you to believe.

[1523] Well, he is a physical specimen, but there might be something subconscious that says this person, this isn't the attributes of our species that end up being the highest status male in a group.

[1524] Well, though, then that transfers on to the couples because there's one of the men.

[1525] Alpha male.

[1526] There's an alpha male and then there's what seems to be sort of a beta male, but he's not.

[1527] He's rich.

[1528] And he just got super rich and it's like messing with this.

[1529] That too.

[1530] So juicy.

[1531] God, because that's such a part of our current society, too, is all these unconventional males have become alpha males.

[1532] Also, there's a character who's of what seems to be a vapid woman on the surface.

[1533] And the more we meet her, you realize she kind of just has it figured out.

[1534] Yeah, she seems clever.

[1535] It asks these great questions in life, which is like, what is the goal?

[1536] Exactly.

[1537] What is the goal?

[1538] Ah, that brings me to a great piece of housekeeping.

[1539] Okay.

[1540] I believe people who watch the race on Sunday who know I'm obsessed with Formula One and Max Verstappen will be really needing me to respond to something that happened.

[1541] Okay.

[1542] Were you ready for that transition?

[1543] Yeah.

[1544] Okay.

[1545] His teammate, Checo Perez, who absolutely laid down on his sword for Max last season.

[1546] He sacrificed one of his qualifying sessions just so he could give Max a toe so that Max could get him pull to beat Lewis.

[1547] He held Lewis up anytime he could so he couldn't get up to Max, like fought for his life.

[1548] He was his wingman.

[1549] In the most sacrificial way in my short time watching the sport that's ever been seen.

[1550] Okay.

[1551] Across the board last season, everyone was like, Checo is the soldier of all soldiers.

[1552] He's there to bring that team of victory and he is willing to sacrifice for it.

[1553] That's amazing.

[1554] Loyalty.

[1555] it's never been on such display.

[1556] Currently, Max has already won the championship.

[1557] Right.

[1558] So his season's over.

[1559] He won.

[1560] Yeah.

[1561] How many more races?

[1562] Sundays and then next week.

[1563] So Perez is almost identically tied with LeClerc for second place.

[1564] Oh.

[1565] The last three laps of the race, Max, who had been crashed into, worked his way back up from last place.

[1566] Oh, my God.

[1567] He is driving much faster.

[1568] than Checo, it's a fact.

[1569] He passes Checo.

[1570] He passes Checo and the team, now this came out today.

[1571] They did not play any of the radio communications on the broadcast, which they normally do.

[1572] They started telling Max let Checo buy so he can finish in fourth.

[1573] You'll finish in fifth.

[1574] He'll get more points in his race with Leclerc.

[1575] Max just doesn't acknowledge he's been asked this.

[1576] They keep saying it to him, Max, Max, Let him by, let him by.

[1577] He crosses the finish line and they said, Max, what happened?

[1578] And he finally comes on and he goes, I told you, I don't ever want to talk about this.

[1579] I told you last summer, this is my position.

[1580] I'll never do this and I stand by my decision.

[1581] Oh, my God.

[1582] Okay.

[1583] First of all, it's a total bummer.

[1584] Checo deserved it so much.

[1585] He deserved it so much.

[1586] That's first and foremost.

[1587] Secondly, I wish Max had a little bit of a 30 ,000 foot view because he just ruined the shine of his championship.

[1588] Like he was going to finish this season as a celebrated champion.

[1589] He did it in record fashion, won the most races, got the most points in the season.

[1590] He's already a hero of heroes.

[1591] Everyone's now completely disappointed in him making that decision.

[1592] So he took this great thing and he just put the shittiest fucking film over it for no reason.

[1593] So that's my verdict.

[1594] And yet I am not in the same.

[1595] the least bit surprised, I absolutely expect him to do that.

[1596] I think for him, his ethics are very clear.

[1597] He is a race car driver whose dedication at every moment is to get any points available to him.

[1598] Well, yeah, I don't think he has ethics.

[1599] I think he just has one goal.

[1600] Well, his ethics are, he's like a doctor, right, that is committed to, you know, he has an oath.

[1601] What is obvious to me is His oath is, my job as a race car driver is to get every point available to me at all times.

[1602] I never, ever not try to finish as high up as I can no matter what.

[1603] Yeah.

[1604] That's my commitment.

[1605] Yeah.

[1606] So his ethics aren't obscure to me. I disagree with them.

[1607] Right.

[1608] But they're not obscure to me. This is a freak of nature who'd kill himself to win.

[1609] I'm not so shocked that in this moment he was totally rude, bad.

[1610] teammate, not nice.

[1611] That's a bad person thing to do.

[1612] I mean, that just, wow.

[1613] It's a bar.

[1614] I'm still a Max fan, but it's a real bummer.

[1615] It's a real, it's a bummer.

[1616] Yeah.

[1617] But I agree.

[1618] It's like, what, really?

[1619] I'm not shocked.

[1620] No, I'm not shocked.

[1621] He's proven himself to be that.

[1622] Yeah, he almost killed himself like five times last season to be Lewis.

[1623] Do I, am I shocked that he was rude?

[1624] Just makes me sad that, like, nice guy, it's back to nice guys.

[1625] Well, it raises weirdly a similar point.

[1626] which is can you be the guy that wins back -to -back championships and not the best car and also be the guy that gives up a spot at the end of the race to be nice?

[1627] Does that person exist?

[1628] Yeah, but also I don't want to procreate with Max.

[1629] I'd much rather procreate with.

[1630] Daniel.

[1631] Well, obviously, Daniel.

[1632] But with this person who is, like, loyal and doing their best for the team and then...

[1633] Who do you want to be friends with?

[1634] You want to be friends with Checo?

[1635] Exactly.

[1636] That dude is there for you.

[1637] Like that person in life is taking racing out of it.

[1638] He's succeeding.

[1639] Long after racing ends, he has an integrity.

[1640] Exactly.

[1641] That will attract other people to him for life.

[1642] He's going to be the winner in all this.

[1643] Okay.

[1644] So a couple facts.

[1645] Obviously not very many.

[1646] He said Israel has about 9 million citizens, 9 .364 million.

[1647] So he got that completely wrong.

[1648] Yeah, he was wrong.

[1649] Good.

[1650] I thought it was interesting.

[1651] we were talking about hyenas hanging around lions because Lion King that's depicted in Lion King Oh sure sure yeah they're the great adversaries yeah they're mean guys baddies Hyenas yeah again it's so subjective like no they're bad guys in the movie oh in the movie yes yes yes yes they're the bad guys absolutely and his brother right he's got a shit brother well scar that's name scar yeah that got a prick yeah scar killed his own brother Fossa yeah so sad Cutthroat.

[1652] My mom cried in that, and that was the first time I saw her cry.

[1653] Did it scare you?

[1654] Yeah.

[1655] It did.

[1656] I didn't like it.

[1657] Did you tell her to stop?

[1658] Yeah.

[1659] Make you a milkshake?

[1660] Stop crying.

[1661] Stop doing that.

[1662] Stop doing that.

[1663] Oh, my gosh.

[1664] Oh, I missed one.

[1665] Oh, oh.

[1666] Hold on.

[1667] Okay.

[1668] Give me two seckeys.

[1669] I went to a wedding in Utah.

[1670] Tell me about the wedding in Utah.

[1671] My good buddy Tyler Laguzzo got married to Alexis.

[1672] Okay.

[1673] And it was a wedding out in Utah among these beautiful rock crops, you know, like big, huge rock formations in red, very dramatic, very beautiful.

[1674] I took the two little girls by myself, which was so fun.

[1675] In the bus?

[1676] No, in a car.

[1677] Oh, I don't know why I thought you took the bus.

[1678] I was in that white suburban I rented.

[1679] Oh, weird.

[1680] I imagined you in the bus.

[1681] No, too slow.

[1682] I wanted to get there.

[1683] Got it.

[1684] But they both little girls, which was so fun because I got like just, if Kristen's available, she's a better option.

[1685] They're going to talk to her.

[1686] They're going to ask her for things.

[1687] I just really can't compete with the appeal of it.

[1688] So just they were stuck with me. Lincoln was sitting up front and we were chatting and I was saying, like, do you ever fantasize about your life in the future?

[1689] I got to hear like things she fantasizes about being a good soccer player.

[1690] like she wants to be like she pitches herself scoring goals at school and the boys being really impressed oh wow then we talked about um do you ever at night laying in bed like go over some things you're embarrassed about and she's like oh yes and i said oh i do this all the time i told her this great story i probably have told you about it but i said here's one hun that i think about at least once a week before going to bed when I was in high school I was obsessed with party of five and mostly because of Neff Campbell I was just heartbroken in love with her and almost cry like oh my god I can't believe I'm not going to be with this human being this is no you know it well you felt it with Matt and Ben like this is wrong injustice injustice so I moved to LA my friend Nate Tuck produces a movie I come on to play vomiteer at a party I have no lines I throw up in the background but I'm there all night and it's a night shoot And so some of Nate's buddies are in town from college.

[1691] We're drinking on set.

[1692] We're drinking Jack and Cokes out of a normal Coke bottle.

[1693] Yeah.

[1694] And we go all through the night.

[1695] In the morning, they put out breakfast.

[1696] We're still shooting.

[1697] I saddle up next to her at the buffet line.

[1698] She's in the movie, Nev Campbell.

[1699] Nev Campbell is the star of this movie.

[1700] I'm so sorry.

[1701] That should have been said a minute ago.

[1702] Okay.

[1703] I've got to add a really fun element of this is during the day, Matthew Lillard, who was dating her at the time, visited her.

[1704] And I knew Matthew Lillard from Scream.

[1705] Right.

[1706] I have no idea I'm going to be in a movie with him in seven years.

[1707] How crazy.

[1708] But I was looking at him and I'm like, of course he's with him.

[1709] He's like so stylish and cool and he's so tall and real.

[1710] I remember thinking like he's a catch.

[1711] I am my work cut out for me. Oh, he's great.

[1712] Anywho, he's gone.

[1713] Fuck him.

[1714] I saddle up next to her at the buffet line where she's grabbing presumably a breakfast burrito or something and I go what are you going to have for breakfast might you have been drinking for I don't know 12 hours right what do you what are you fixing to have for breakfast and she's like oh I'm going to have blah blah blah what are you going to have and I go oh I'm going to drink my breakfast and I think I have this is the word in my little circle at 23 years old that's cool that would have been cool oh if I was in Michigan that would have been such a cool thing to say she looked at me like oh my god oh my god you know of course oh no this person's struggling yeah and what are they doing on set and are they in this person this person who is this person who's this person who's clearly you know been drinking all night and now into the morning and it just wasn't at all what i was expecting yeah and so i think about that from time to time just to keep myself humble but also it you know you're not that anymore i'm not yeah if she had nev if you're listening let's try this again Let's give this a shot.

[1715] It's good to have reminders of growth.

[1716] So most of I found that most of the things I think about while trying to go to sleep is it's times I thought I was cool.

[1717] That's pretty much the greatest source of embarrassment for me. And I even have one from when I was like seven years old and my mom picked me up from school.

[1718] And I sat on the floor instead of the seat.

[1719] Oh, you told me this, yeah.

[1720] And she was like trying to ask how my day was.

[1721] And I was just like over it.

[1722] I was like, yeah.

[1723] Kids do this.

[1724] But I remember feeling so cool.

[1725] Well, you felt fraudulent.

[1726] That's why you still think about it.

[1727] No, in the moment, I thought I was super cool and that what I was doing was cool.

[1728] And then as I got older, I looked back and realize, what were you doing?

[1729] Are you sure?

[1730] I think you must have in the moment felt, I know this is cool, but something's wrong.

[1731] Because your brain wouldn't have registered to remember it if that were the case.

[1732] I kind of disagree.

[1733] Really?

[1734] Even the Nev thing, I remember going back to the college buddies and bragging about what I just said to her.

[1735] I thought it was awesome.

[1736] I know consciously, but I think there's something subconscious.

[1737] That's why you're a good person.

[1738] Because there is a peace happening even when bad stuff's happening.

[1739] And then I'm now looking at my life through a totally different perspective, which I just didn't have.

[1740] I couldn't have.

[1741] Yes, but you don't remember every other day.

[1742] I don't know.

[1743] I just, I'm just giving you some credit.

[1744] I think, I think you knew somehow, like, uh -oh.

[1745] This something's wrong.

[1746] I don't feel good about making my mom feel dumb and I don't feel good about this drinking breakfast.

[1747] Whatever it is, that is the thing I'll replay as times I thought I was really cool.

[1748] Yeah.

[1749] And I wasn't.

[1750] What are yours?

[1751] Are they like mistakes you've made?

[1752] Are they moments?

[1753] Meanness.

[1754] Meanness.

[1755] Okay.

[1756] Rob, do you have a thing that you like?

[1757] You beat yourself up over?

[1758] Yeah.

[1759] Oh, okay.

[1760] What is it?

[1761] When I was younger, I broke this watch that my grandpa gave me. On accident?

[1762] On accident.

[1763] I was like a little basketball hoop.

[1764] Oh, but that sounds like very pure.

[1765] We're not to the, I don't think it to the regrettable part.

[1766] No, you don't regret a mistake.

[1767] Okay, yeah.

[1768] And then I hit it and pretended like I found it.

[1769] And then my brother broke it.

[1770] Oh, sure.

[1771] He got in trouble for it.

[1772] Oh, you blamed it on your brother.

[1773] Yeah.

[1774] He got like ADHD after that.

[1775] So for a while I was like, this is why I hit.

[1776] Oh, my God, Rob, it might have been.

[1777] He admitted to it eventually, which I don't.

[1778] Oh, my God, false confession.

[1779] Yeah, interrogation episode.

[1780] Holy shit.

[1781] Well, do you want me to keep that in about ADHD?

[1782] Oh, I mean, that's up to you.

[1783] He had behavioral issues.

[1784] Okay, I don't think that's any better, but I have that with my brother because I would be mean to him.

[1785] Yeah, you're eight years older.

[1786] Yeah, but I was mean.

[1787] And my mom would say, you're going to screw him up.

[1788] Like, she would be really clear about that.

[1789] Yeah, you're damaging him.

[1790] Yeah.

[1791] Look, man, this is life on plant earth.

[1792] When you have siblings, it alters the course of your life for sure.

[1793] Yeah.

[1794] I'm writing about it a ton right now.

[1795] Yeah.

[1796] Well, especially if you have older.

[1797] Yes.

[1798] You know, I always declare this.

[1799] I obviously have a lot of things I focus on, but certainly one of my primary focuses in life is not being deceived.

[1800] Yes.

[1801] Oh, yes.

[1802] Right?

[1803] I mean, it's brutal.

[1804] And so I'm kind of like charting when that started.

[1805] Obviously, I have some big clues like I was deceived by a molester, right?

[1806] So that's one.

[1807] But it really, when I think about it, it starts right out of the gates, which is this great family story about me that everyone loves to tell is that my brother would offer me a cup of water when I was like two years old.

[1808] You want a couple water, Dax?

[1809] He was seven.

[1810] I'd say yes, and he'd put scalding hot water on the cup.

[1811] And he'd give it to me. And everyone loves to tell the story because you get to do my, reaction, which is this.

[1812] Ooh, hot.

[1813] Oh.

[1814] Right?

[1815] It's like, first it's like, ooh, this is new.

[1816] And then the hot is like, I've labeled this.

[1817] This is hot.

[1818] No one else should drink out of this.

[1819] And then he would go, oh, my gosh, is that hot?

[1820] Let me get you another glass.

[1821] He'd go and he fell up with hot water again.

[1822] Oh, my God.

[1823] Oh, hot.

[1824] Okay.

[1825] I think that means you're just a smart kid.

[1826] Did I know what hot water is?

[1827] What?

[1828] Everyone knows what hot or cold water is, sure.

[1829] But, you know, it's mild and it's for a comedic end.

[1830] It's not nefarious.

[1831] I don't like it.

[1832] Okay.

[1833] But another thing is he told me to throw a rock through the auto parts window when I was three.

[1834] I threw a rock through this glass window.

[1835] We got chased.

[1836] We got brought back to the babysitter.

[1837] Again, this is a family story that gets told every time we're all together.

[1838] And so the babysitter called my mom at work.

[1839] And she said, put Dax on.

[1840] And then my mom said, what happened to Xer?

[1841] What did you do?

[1842] very encouraging like no matter what it was I'm going to accept you yes very soft landing and I looked at David and David nodded tell her and I said I threw a fucking rock through the auto parts window so my brother had told me when you tell mom what you did tell her you threw a fucking rock through the auto parts of it so my mother has to cover the phone and she starts laughing so hard and she's at work and then she calls her buddy for us she's working in the tool crib she calls him over to the phone and says I'm sorry to exit so loud in here When you tell me again what happened?

[1843] I threw a fucking rock through the auto parts.

[1844] And then she goes, okay, we'll talk about when you get on put your brother on.

[1845] Uh -huh.

[1846] So again, I don't know saying fucking rock is bad.

[1847] I didn't know throwing the rock to begin with, but then we were chased.

[1848] And now, and so, and then my brother gets on the phone.

[1849] And now he is clearly busted.

[1850] He's going, I know, okay, I'm sorry, right?

[1851] Yeah.

[1852] The whole situation is so confusing.

[1853] What has happened?

[1854] Right.

[1855] You don't know what's going on.

[1856] She didn't respond to fucking.

[1857] Now he's in trouble.

[1858] I'm the one who threw the rock.

[1859] What is going on?

[1860] So things, conspiracies were afoot from day one.

[1861] Sure.

[1862] So, you know, it served me well to find out like, what is someone really motivated by?

[1863] Yeah.

[1864] You know, they don't even have to be bad things.

[1865] They can just be innocuous, silly, fun, comical things from your childhood.

[1866] Speaking of writing, because you're writing these stories down, my gift guide's coming up.

[1867] Oh, my gosh.

[1868] Are you going to be a little more ahead of it this year?

[1869] Yeah, I stressed you out so much last year.

[1870] I did.

[1871] I kept canceling it, but then you did it.

[1872] I have a feeling the same thing is going to happen, but I did start this weekend with my first post.

[1873] Wait, you already dropped the post?

[1874] No, no. Oh, you formulated it.

[1875] Yeah, I was deciding what I was going to put.

[1876] Can you give it to me early?

[1877] Oh, you.

[1878] Because I don't like waiting and then there might be a run on the products because you're so popular.

[1879] You know, I buy everything you recommend.

[1880] I know.

[1881] Yeah, I'll send it to you beforehand.

[1882] Okay, thank you.

[1883] So keep your eyes pill for the gift guys.

[1884] You got to use it.

[1885] It'll save your ass, especially if you have in -laws.

[1886] Think social media currently.

[1887] And, yeah.

[1888] Also, we got to talk about the prompts.

[1889] Okay.

[1890] We put it out.

[1891] We got to announce it up.

[1892] Yeah.

[1893] Oh, okay.

[1894] It sounded like there was a big, big problem with the prompts.

[1895] No, no, no. You got to talk about the prompts.

[1896] Well, we just have to talk about them because we haven't talked about them.

[1897] We have December prompts up on the website.

[1898] If you haven't seen them, please submit.

[1899] And as I recall, those prompts are, tell me the, tell about the time you had Priapus?

[1900] Nope.

[1901] Tell us about your craziest snowday memory.

[1902] Okay, craziest snowday memory, great.

[1903] Tell us about a nightmare holiday experience.

[1904] Nightmare holiday experience.

[1905] There were some good examples, a menorah catching a house on fire, right?

[1906] We want to include Jewish folks, Christian folks, all celebrators of holidays.

[1907] Everyone.

[1908] There was a This American Life from a long time ago.

[1909] Okay.

[1910] That was so good, and it was about holiday stories, bad ones, kind of traumatic ones.

[1911] Mm -hmm.

[1912] And there was one about this family of now adults who basically have, like, a bunch of trauma around Christmas because their parents were so into it.

[1913] Okay.

[1914] And, like, Santa and reindeer, and they, like, hired reindeer to kind of...

[1915] To walk on the roof?

[1916] They just had now had these insane trust.

[1917] issues because they'd be like, is this real?

[1918] And they'd be like, yes.

[1919] And then they were deceived.

[1920] Ding, ding, ding.

[1921] Oh my gosh.

[1922] So anyway, if you guys have anything like that, please share.

[1923] Yeah, that would be tasty.

[1924] Yeah.

[1925] Okay, so I found my fact that I lost.

[1926] Oh, great.

[1927] Which is hyenas are 180 pounds and mastiffs are 140.

[1928] It says the spotted hyena, the female is 98 to 140, and it says the male is 89 to 120.

[1929] Oh, wow.

[1930] Okay, so I got that way wrong.

[1931] I thought for sure they were 180 pounds.

[1932] Maybe there's been some.

[1933] But it's a matriarchy.

[1934] That doesn't surprise me that the women are taller.

[1935] Yeah, it's all about size.

[1936] And they have that clitoris that mimics a penis.

[1937] They thought forever, biologists thought they were looking at males, and then they discovered that.

[1938] And then mastiffs, female, 120 to 170.

[1939] Oh, wow.

[1940] Male 160 to 230.

[1941] Oh, 230.

[1942] I want to see a tooth I'm I don't I'm scared of that Okay the hominin Who discovered fire Yeah hominid Well I put that And then it corrected to hominin I put hominid Yeah a hominid Is a bipedal Great ape That's us Right Maybe homininin is plural Of hominid Because I type that in And then My whole life could be based on a lie If it's not hominid I mean I feel like You would know No, but I should.

[1943] That's what I'm saying.

[1944] I got to turn in my degree.

[1945] No. I just felt weird because I put that in and then it seemed like I was wrong.

[1946] But maybe, who knows?

[1947] Google knows everything.

[1948] Rob, what are you seeing?

[1949] Hominid?

[1950] Yeah, hominid.

[1951] I'm seeing hominid as a word.

[1952] What's the definition?

[1953] I don't know why.

[1954] Hominin sounds like a literary term, like onomatopoeia, synonym.

[1955] H -O -M -I -N -D, right?

[1956] Yeah.

[1957] Yeah, a primate of a family that includes humans and their fossil ancestors.

[1958] Maybe it's both, because this also, if you type in hominid versus hominin, it says hominin is a term given to humans and all of our extinct bipedal ancestors.

[1959] Maybe it's both.

[1960] Wow, that's exciting.

[1961] As long as I'm not wrong, I don't mind co -oh.

[1962] This says, yeah, this says, hominin is a term given to humans and all of our extinct bipedal ancestors.

[1963] those ancestors who walked upright on two feet.

[1964] Hominid is the term given to all modern and extinct great apes, including humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, and all their immediate ancestors, which would include those people.

[1965] I wouldn't say chimpanzees, a hominid.

[1966] For sure, I wouldn't.

[1967] That's interesting.

[1968] Anyways, TBD.

[1969] Okay, well, it says Homo erectus.

[1970] Yeah, now we're talking erectus.

[1971] Homo erectus is what they think, likely invention.

[1972] a fire or got had control of fire they didn't i guess they didn't invent fire lightning did yeah they didn't invent it but they got control of it they sure did a meaningful and profound way yeah it's so cool we can control fire it is ever since we talk to yvall whenever i see fire i do think of that when how he said we're kind of programmed to be attracted to it yes instead of running from it yeah and it's true because i'm scared of everything but i'm i am i mean i am scared of things that catching on fire but I love a fireplace and a fire pit oh I just you you asked him to identify the Achilles in our thinking and that reminded me of Charlie oh yeah Charlie's Achilles yeah we already mentioned that we mentioned it on Lane maybe yeah I'm putting together this might excite you or not this this morning I spearheaded a group workout, Charlie, perfect and Charlie, Huberman, Lane Norton, and I at Charlie's gym.

[1973] Great.

[1974] Because Lane's going to be in town at the end of November.

[1975] Oh, that's so nice.

[1976] Is he going to be, is he going to be so upset because of his leg?

[1977] No, he'll just like, jerk off.

[1978] He'll just spray all over us.

[1979] Yeah, like a cuck, like we just talked about.

[1980] Oh, yeah, exactly.

[1981] It'll be sweet, too.

[1982] Oh, my God.

[1983] No, he'll lift, with, he'll bench press a million pounds.

[1984] It'll be even more impressive.

[1985] Yeah, I'll probably do some squats with no Achilles.

[1986] One -legged squats with crutches.

[1987] Oh, man. Well, that would be very fun.

[1988] Yeah.

[1989] Maybe you want to stand in the corner.

[1990] I don't know.

[1991] I'll think about it.

[1992] Okay.

[1993] I don't think I'd be standing.

[1994] Okay.

[1995] You'd be sitting?

[1996] Laying on the...

[1997] Like a stool or something.

[1998] Yeah, I can't...

[1999] Standing is an ideal.

[2000] To masturbate?

[2001] Yeah.

[2002] You're right.

[2003] As a man, you know, some men are very much into standing while masturbating.

[2004] I'm not.

[2005] But once in a while, I'll wheel it out like something special.

[2006] Huh.

[2007] Well, let's try something new today.

[2008] That is interesting because I feel like in movies and stuff, they do often depict it standing.

[2009] But there are men who in their bedroom, given the option of sitting on their bed or lying on their bed, will stand erect, homo erectus.

[2010] And it appears from the fall wheel doc that Jerry Jr. was in fact standing while pleasing himself.

[2011] Yeah.

[2012] Most people in movies that are masturbating Not supposed to be masturbating So they need like a quick getaway That's interesting thought Although in White Lotus, ding ding ding First episode Or second episode He's laying in the bed He is laying in the bed Sure And then and he's not supposed to So he jumps Yeah he's a wrecked And he's right I really liked that scene This podcast We could just make it about Going over White Lotus Yeah that would be great There are podcasts like that You like that scene Yeah because she comes in as She's not angry that he was masturbating.

[2013] She was like, what's this about?

[2014] Right.

[2015] She just annoyed he didn't wait for her, but she's not mad at him for watching porn.

[2016] Right.

[2017] I kind of, I liked that.

[2018] Yeah, yeah, yeah, that she wasn't threatened by it.

[2019] Or just, it wasn't this depiction of this woman who hates that when their husband watches porn or.

[2020] Well, what's funny, too, is like, I'm sure that Kristen would have no issue walking in and finding me jerking off, but I don't want anyone to walk in.

[2021] Well, of course.

[2022] I don't think anyone wants.

[2023] Like, it does elicit this kind of, um, just knee -jerk reaction of caught, embarrassed.

[2024] Yes, primal.

[2025] Yeah, it's very vulnerable.

[2026] Yes, and it's just you've been caught pleasing yourself.

[2027] It's very interesting.

[2028] Yeah, it is weird.

[2029] Yeah.

[2030] Now, if you sign up for it, that's a blast between two folks.

[2031] You know, let's do this in front of each other.

[2032] Let's get Jerry in here.

[2033] Let's get the whole congregation and let's all do this.

[2034] Yeah.

[2035] Okay.

[2036] Yeah, all right.

[2037] Well, I love you.

[2038] And I apologize to Yuval a little bit, you know.

[2039] Well.

[2040] He's a very high caliber thinker in our society, and he got really drug in the mud on whether or not you should lay down or stand up.

[2041] Well, this is what we do.

[2042] Yeah.

[2043] The interview itself was pretty professional.

[2044] Yeah.

[2045] We kept it on the rails when it counted.

[2046] I love you.

[2047] Love you.

[2048] Follow armchair expert on the Wondry app, Amazon music, or website.

[2049] wherever you get your podcasts.

[2050] You can listen to every episode of armchair expert early and ad free right now by joining Wondry Plus in the Wondry app or on Apple Podcasts.

[2051] Before you go, tell us about yourself by completing a short survey at Wondry .com slash survey.