#1504 - Alan Levinovitz

[0] Hello, Alan.

[1] Hello, Joe.

[2] Good to see you.

[3] First of all, thank you for this, this piece of pyrite that's embedded into stone.

[4] And we just started talking.

[5] I said, just don't say another word.

[6] Let's start talking about this on the podcast.

[7] Because it kind of, it's interesting, I started your book, which I very rarely read books.

[8] I mostly do audiobooks, but I was forced to read yours.

[9] But one of the things that I found interesting is the concept of, What is natural?

[10] And I've gone over this many times myself.

[11] I'm like, poison's natural.

[12] Like, everything's natural.

[13] Computers are natural, really, because they come from the ground.

[14] They're made by people.

[15] They're essentially like, you know, a human's version of anything like a bird would create.

[16] Right?

[17] Birds create birds nests.

[18] Are those natural?

[19] But this pyrite, this is pyrite, right?

[20] Yep.

[21] Which is fool's gold, right?

[22] Fools gold.

[23] But it's naturally in these cubes, in this square form.

[24] this perfect, these perfect angles, which you would never believe.

[25] You would think somebody left this shit there.

[26] I didn't believe it.

[27] It looks like aliens left them.

[28] And they're even in, like, what that's called is it's in the matrix.

[29] Oh, wow.

[30] So sometimes you can just get the cubes.

[31] They're just the cube, but they call the rock that it's in the matrix, which I think is kind of appropriate.

[32] That is going to have a permanent spot on this desk with all this other craziness here.

[33] Thank you so much.

[34] That's really cool.

[35] I did not know that it came like that.

[36] I found Pyrite when I was a kid in rocks, you know, when they call it Fool's Gold.

[37] Oh, Jamie's going to bring that up to you there.

[38] Perfect.

[39] Fools gold, but it's, you know, it's usually like specs and flex and stuff.

[40] There's another one called, I forget they're called like Illinois miners dollars or something.

[41] This is another form that Pyrite takes.

[42] I'm kind of obsessed with weird rocks, but they look just like sand dollars, but they're gold.

[43] Oh, wow.

[44] They look like they're golden.

[45] And so these are, you know, I think one of the things, I actually changed.

[46] my mind over writing, like over the course of writing this book.

[47] Oh, there they are.

[48] Jamie Pullups.

[49] Yeah.

[50] That's crazy.

[51] They're incredible, right?

[52] What, what causes it to take on these different completely unusual forms?

[53] So I tried to find out.

[54] There's like a local rock store where I live and I ask the guy and apparently I don't understand how it works at all, but the way all crystals work is they have different kinds of structures and the way those structures come together determines whether, you know, it makes like a quartz crystal or what shape it takes.

[55] It's very, it's very, it's surreal.

[56] Yeah, it's very surreal.

[57] This is very bizarre.

[58] I did not know until you gave this to me that that existed.

[59] Yeah.

[60] And this is, so like for me, I went into this book, like you said, right, with this question of what's natural.

[61] There's some people like, often scientists who will sort of scoff at the idea of naturalness, right?

[62] They're like, everything's natural, right?

[63] Humans are natural.

[64] We're animals.

[65] We made all this stuff.

[66] We made the microphones.

[67] We're all made out of space dust.

[68] Everything's natural.

[69] It's stupid to distinguish between natural and unnatural.

[70] And honestly, that's where I was when I started writing the book.

[71] I was like, I'm going to make, I'm going to show this as a stupid idea.

[72] I'm going to, I'm going to be Richard Dawkins, but for naturalness.

[73] Right.

[74] But I was wrong.

[75] I don't know.

[76] What shifted it for you?

[77] Well, so one of the things, like with that pyrite, right, people ask, is it natural?

[78] That's the first thing they ask.

[79] Does this occur naturally, right?

[80] And it's an important question because there's a difference, like a sort of profound difference, between knowing that that was just spewed up by the earth forces that are not human, right, versus humans sitting down and deciding to make a cube, right?

[81] It's like a diamond that has been shaped by millions of years of natural forces.

[82] And what I realized is that it really does make sense to distinguish between naturalness and unnaturalness.

[83] You have to.

[84] Maybe it's a spectrum, obviously, right?

[85] So it's not an easy binary, but New York City is not as natural as Yellowstone.

[86] Right.

[87] And what I realized was I wasn't really against the idea of naturalness or even valuing nature, right?

[88] I mean, hopefully we'll talk about I went backcountry in Yellowstone.

[89] It was unbelievable.

[90] You know, I mean, everyone values naturalness in certain ways.

[91] It was worshiping nature that I had a problem with.

[92] This idea that the more natural something is, the better it is, or that what we need to do, like, if you want to raise your kid, right, you got to raise your kid naturally, you like, you know, let them piss in the corner or like elimination communication.

[93] Do you know about this?

[94] No I swear So I think So some celebrity's been in it Like Alicia Silverstones Did it with her son Bear And Isn't it funny that that automatically Dismuses it I can't You mean the fact that his name is Bear No no no Just the fact that it's a celebrity thing Like celebrities do it It's like I dismiss it Interesting That's a different I actually thought it was the name Bear That dismissed it No I have a good friend Who has a son named Bear I mean I guess it makes sense if you're really obsessed with naturalness, right, and you're toilet training your kid, then you don't want to, like, be using diapers and you don't want to be using a toilet.

[95] You want it to be like nature, right?

[96] Like, so when I talked with anthropologists who work with hunter -gatherers, and I asked them, like, how does potty training work?

[97] And they were like, what do you mean?

[98] Like, people just piss in the forest.

[99] And, you know, if you take a shit in someone's lap, they're going to be really upset at you.

[100] And it doesn't, you know.

[101] And then you figure it out.

[102] Don't shit in daddy's lap.

[103] Exactly.

[104] But there's this idea, right, that, and so that's what we should be doing with our children.

[105] And I don't know about you, but like, when we had our daughter, I was online and I'm like, okay, well, how do I parent my child?

[106] What are the right things to do?

[107] Like, should she be in my bed?

[108] Should she be in the crib?

[109] And time and time again, I always read about how hunter gatherers parented their babies, right?

[110] And it was always like, this is the natural way to parent your kid.

[111] So it must be better.

[112] And I realized that was, that was where I had my problem, that it's fine.

[113] to love nature, but you shouldn't worship it.

[114] Well, human beings have done horrible things to their children from the beginning of time without anybody telling them to do it or not to do it.

[115] And I don't know if that's natural.

[116] But, yeah, I mean, if it occurs enough, it's kind of, like, pedophilia occurs a lot.

[117] Is that natural?

[118] So there was a, there was, yeah, I mean, you know, essentially, again, right, if natural is defined as whatever sort of emerges spontaneous.

[119] out of forces that weren't willed by human beings, which is what I think natural is, right?

[120] So we say we have natural instincts.

[121] In other words, it's whatever we didn't will.

[122] It just comes out of us.

[123] There's a woman who's an expert on captivity.

[124] So kidnapping, slavery, in Catherine Cameron.

[125] And I was interviewing her.

[126] She said, you know, it is as natural as the nuclear family to have slaves, right?

[127] So slavery is a thing that has been done forever and ever.

[128] I mean, you imagine, right?

[129] So you're pre -agricultural, your tribe.

[130] your group requires certain population.

[131] Can't get too high, can't get too low.

[132] And so kidnapping other people's children, it's often a common thing.

[133] So is that good?

[134] Well, clearly not, right?

[135] Or, you know, dying in childbirth.

[136] These are all things that are natural, but are obviously not good.

[137] And so I started to see the way in which this word was being abused, basically.

[138] People would use natural to describe whatever they favored and unnatural to describe.

[139] whatever they didn't like, right?

[140] People do it with sex.

[141] People do it with child rearing.

[142] People do it with economic theories, right?

[143] You want a natural market with no interference.

[144] And that's how people would justify a free market.

[145] You've got other people who are like, actually money is unnatural.

[146] You really want a barter system.

[147] That was what emerged naturally out of humans.

[148] And I'm sitting here looking at both these arguments.

[149] I'm like, you know, you want an economy that works.

[150] Right.

[151] It doesn't matter whether it's natural or not.

[152] Yeah, that's a really good point.

[153] You know, one of the things that I saw in your book was you were talking to Joel Salatin, who I love, and he's a strange man, but a beautiful person.

[154] I really love what he's doing with Polyface Farms, but he drinks the water that the cows drink out of so that he gets that in his biome, you know, he's a real freak.

[155] But when you were talking about New York City and, you know, would his method of farming work to feed a city as big as New York?

[156] He's like, do you need a city as big as New York?

[157] then I'm like okay hit the brakes right now we're in the weeds because I love New York it's a fucking great place to visit I don't want to live there but it's awesome I mean when you go to New York if you're in a hotel that has like a 30th floor and you look out you see the city skyscrap you know you see all the you know the skyline all the different beautiful buildings lit up at night I mean that is an amazing spectacular site that I am very thankful exists I love it there yeah I'm grateful for all I mean I'm grateful for all that I mean, there's so many.

[158] It's insane, really.

[159] To be right now, if someone's listening to this podcast, here we are.

[160] We've got microphones.

[161] We're beaming this conversation to millions of people.

[162] And to think that that simultaneously people would be thinking of themselves, the criteria I'm going to use to judge whether something is good or bad with a capital G or a capital B is how natural it is.

[163] Right.

[164] This is totally unnatural.

[165] As unnatural as unnatural as it gets.

[166] Meanwhile, the coronavirus rate, which is, you know, natural.

[167] Of course, people will say, well, actually, we wouldn't have been infected if only we lived more naturally, right?

[168] So the problem is urban density or the problem is that you shouldn't be going into the jungle and getting things.

[169] But like this is, you know.

[170] There's actually an argument against that, though.

[171] The virus itself, more evidence is coming out daily that it's been manipulated, that it most likely did come out of that lab.

[172] I had Brett Weinstein on the podcast, who's a biologist.

[173] And he was.

[174] was talking about all the various aspects of the virus that really don't exist naturally in this form without having evolved for a long period of time.

[175] The fact that it just emerged and made this leap from bats to the form that it is now in people, he's like, it's far too contagious, it's far too prolific, it's, there's so many different, I'm going to fuck it up if I talk about the technical details of it, but when he was describing it, he was saying more evidence points to the fact that it was actually something that had been manipulated by people than that it was a natural virus so I mean I don't I'm not a biologist I have no idea but I think what I think what's weird or what I would want to push back on and this is a religious study scholar right because this is this is where I came to all the natural natural stuff to begin with is if something's bad I think people are immediately going to think oh it makes sense that it was unnatural it makes sense that this bad thing that's hurting us couldn't be natural.

[176] But the truth is, some things that hurt us are natural.

[177] There you go.

[178] Or, you know, again, I mean, I keep going back to childbirth.

[179] I mean, I went to Peru.

[180] I got to tell you this story.

[181] So I went to Peru to research this book, because I wanted to talk with, like, as close as I could get to pre -agricultural hunter gatherers, right?

[182] And I can't get, you can't get too close.

[183] But there are people called the Matzegenka, the Matigenga, in the rainforest that I got to talk to and I got to ask them about you know their relationship with technology and all that stuff I'm never going to forget I go up to this this guy and I ask him they've just had solar lights installed like in the main sort of area of their village and I go up to this guy and I was like how do you feel about having these artificial lights installed and he and and I'm thinking to myself you know it's this pollution right isn't it better to just have you know the stars in the sky and the moon and he looks at me and he goes he goes this good we can see at night now he's just like he was talking to just a fucking idiot you know like of course I'm happy right or this and then there's this old lady I was like they had you know they had a they had a pump like running water installed basically clean water right so you could wash your dishes and and your clothes and I'm thinking oh my god this is ripping them away from the natural way of life and I asked this lady I'm like how do you feel about the water and she's like it's we don't we don't get bacterial infection.

[184] She was like, we don't get sick anymore from the water that we're drinking from the river.

[185] I was like, oh, and she's just looking at me like, why is he asking me this, right?

[186] And meanwhile, I'm coming from this place where everyone wants to get closer to nature, right?

[187] Because we have been alienated from it.

[188] And I'm asking from the perspective of someone who thinks it just must be paradise living so close to nature.

[189] And she's like, no, we want the, we want to be able to wash our clothes and have the fucking lights on at night.

[190] Yeah.

[191] You know?

[192] And I was like, hmm, right?

[193] There was a shaman.

[194] I'm talking the shaman in the village, Don Alberto, right?

[195] And he's talking, he's like, you know, it's true that technology is messing up the world.

[196] We've got climate change.

[197] We've got, you know, all these species are going extinct.

[198] And he goes on and on, right?

[199] He's very close to nature, very, very wise man. He's got a cell phone also, right?

[200] And I'm like, well, so is technology bad?

[201] And he's like, he's like, yes.

[202] Well, yes, yes and no. He's on tender.

[203] Yeah, right?

[204] Yeah, that's what he's really doing.

[205] He didn't.

[206] tell me. But that's, and that's, I want people, I just want people to understand that there just aren't any easy categories you can use to divide up the world into good and bad.

[207] And now that people, now that organized religion, sort of the sphere of authority is shrinking, right?

[208] You don't go to your priest to find out what to eat.

[209] You don't go to your priests to find out how to cure your disease.

[210] Now that that authority is shrinking, I think people are looking to other similar kinds of authority.

[211] And so they're like, okay, I can't go to my priest, but if I'm walking through the store, what sort of criteria can I use to divide the world up easily into good and evil, clean and unclean?

[212] Organic.

[213] Organic and inorganic, right?

[214] Yeah, artificial.

[215] And it's built into our language, Joe.

[216] Like, artifice.

[217] Artifish might be a thing someday.

[218] Artificial, right, is linked to artifice, which is deception, right?

[219] So you've got manipulated.

[220] which really just means humans got a hold of it and changed it with their hands also means something bad.

[221] So really built into our language, we have this idea that natural means good, artificial, manipulated, that's bad.

[222] I think maybe it's because we have this insane power to manipulate things.

[223] And we all collectively use the power to manipulate things.

[224] that was created by scientists that have a far greater understanding of what the implications and what the process of this manipulation is.

[225] And we just come along and use their technology.

[226] I think that's a problem with so much of what people do.

[227] Like we've earned this power just by virtue of being alive and being able to trade in goods and services for whatever that they've created.

[228] And then we don't think about the consequences of utilizing this stuff.

[229] for like what is there's got to be there's some sort of a balance right there's a balance between like if you want to have a fireplace in your house that's wonderful fireplaces are great it's a nice smell right you walk in the house you smell a fireplace if you're walking down the street and someone's got their fireplace on it smells good but if the whole fucking place is on fire it's terrible you're filled with smoke you can't breathe it's like there's a balance and clearly when you see polluted cities clearly when you see polluted rivers and we're destroying the environment, there's a lack of balance.

[230] We've utilized this power that we have to manipulate our environment, but we've done it completely irresponsibly, or we've done it without the awareness of the consequences of 8 million people doing the exact same thing.

[231] Yeah, well, I mean, the scale you can do stuff on with technology is really I mean, it's made us incredibly powerful, right?

[232] There's Stuart Brand, the guy who started the whole earth catalog, you know, said basically, we've become like gods, so we have to be able to wield this power responsibly, I think it's easy to see that and say, well, then the evil is in the form of the power itself, right?

[233] Obviously, then if we've got a nuclear bomb or we've got, you know, if we're polluting the world, then the problem is with the technology itself.

[234] So you locate the evil in that technology, whereas, you know, what you're saying, I mean, take burning wood, which is a great example.

[235] You know, we've got a lot of people on Earth now.

[236] We have them because kids aren't fucking dying all the time, right?

[237] I mean, the, so there's, there's some, are some things so I discovered while I was reading this.

[238] For example, if you seen that cartoon where there's two cavemen in a room, it's a New Yorker cartoon, and they're talking to, they're not in a room, they're cavemen.

[239] They're in a cave.

[240] Sorry.

[241] So they're in a cave and they're talking to each other.

[242] And one of them's like, you know, we eat organic, we exercise all the time and like, nobody's living past the age of 35.

[243] What's going on?

[244] Right.

[245] So there's this, that's, and that's the people that are like nature's bullshit, right?

[246] They're like, but actually it turns out that that cartoon is bullshit.

[247] So people didn't just die at age 35.

[248] That was average lifespan because tons of kids were dying between the age of zero and five.

[249] Truth is, if you made it past five, then you had a pretty good shot at like 60 or 70.

[250] So it wasn't so bad in the state of nature.

[251] At the same time, there's another vision of what's happening to us.

[252] Now, have you seen that evolution?

[253] There's like an evolution cartoon where it starts with, I don't know, like a Paleolithic man or a chimpanzee or something.

[254] and then it gets to like a big strong hunter with a spear and then technology comes in and they hunch over at the end and they get obese and they've got like a coke in one hand and there's this idea like well technology is now we were perfect when we were natural and then technology has made us worse and for me it's what you were saying it's a balance right yeah there are ways in which technology like my dad my dad is is 91 that I talked you know I talked to Anthrop apologists and like despite what you might you know you might think that there aren't a lot of 91 year old hunter gatherers they're just not out there so i'm like really grateful that my dad you know is super healthy 91 year old that is that's crazy that's an incredible thing we've done i'm glad that kids aren't dying all the time i'm dad you know i'm glad that mothers aren't dying in childbirth that's those are incredible things like new york city right at the same time it's we're destroying the world right so we got We've got to work out these problems without using simple binaries to figure out what's good and what's bad.

[255] It's better to have solar power than billions of humans burning wood.

[256] Right.

[257] But solar power is, obviously, to me, at least, less natural than light and a piss of wood on a piece of wood on a piece of wood fire.

[258] Solar power doesn't bother me at all.

[259] Yeah.

[260] I mean, I love solar power.

[261] But I'm totally on board with what you're saying.

[262] And there is some sort of a balance.

[263] And, you know, the nihilists, like I have friends that will say, you know, you should.

[264] shouldn't have children and there's too many people in the world and overpopulations are biggest problem i'm like yeah but i love people don't you love people like a world without people would suck for people like if you do you remember that cartoon there was a um excuse me uh not a cartoon it was an episode of um uh twilight zone where burgess meredith he uh is the last man on earth and he accidentally breaks his glasses and he can't read he's uh he's always just wanted alone time to read his books and he's always been bothered by all these people and then he's inside i forget what he's in a bank vault or something like that and there's a nuclear catastrophe something along those lines and he leaves this area to go outside and he realizes that he's literally the last person on earth but he has all these books to read and he's so excited and he starts picking up these books but then he breaks his glasses and he's fucked and um i mean the the the ideal of being the last person on earth is one of the that's that's probably one of the most terrifying ideas for a person to be completely isolated and alone forever with no one to talk to we love each other people love people we like being around each other we like we like we like we like we like the love of other people we want to talk and it's like a vitamin i mean really it's like how you get vitamin d from the sun you get vitamin l from people you really need it it's a legitimate need we don't want people to die right and one of the things about evolution is the you know I say this in the book the gears of evolution are greased with death right that's what it is it's people dying before they reach reproductive age we've decided we'd like to prevent that from happening you know as much as we can we don't want people dying all the time we love each other stepping in with our virtue and stopping natural selection that's exactly right yeah and you know it's a it's a weird argument I think to want to claim nature as this kind of benevolent deity that if only we follow what it tells us, right, just act naturally, which is a bizarre phrase if you think about it, because you've got to act that way.

[265] That is bizarre.

[266] It's like, no, no, no, just act naturally.

[267] You're like, well, but that's, it's hard for me. I'm going to have to sort of artificially do this.

[268] But, you know, that we don't want to be natural.

[269] We're unnatural animals.

[270] That's what we are.

[271] Not my phrase, H .G. Wells calls us unnatural animals.

[272] And I think that's okay.

[273] We want to embrace that paradox instead of.

[274] of trying as much as we can to figure out the ways in which naturalness is good.

[275] H .T. Wells is a fascinating character, right?

[276] Because he predicted so many things.

[277] As a science fiction author, you know, who was living in a time of very little technology in terms of, like, what we experience today.

[278] That guy had a fantastic vision of the future.

[279] He did.

[280] I mean, this is a totally, it's a totally separate thing, I guess, for me. But when it comes to, when it comes to the ability of science and scientists to predict the future.

[281] I think this is a place, I mean, we see it with macroeconomists, most obviously, but there's a way in which we've come to expect that science, because it has done such incredible things with manipulating reality, with telling us truths about where we are in the universe, that also it ought to be able to predict complex systems, like where are humans going to be in 30 years or what's going to happen with the coronavirus 10 years down the line or whatever it happens to be.

[282] But the truth is fiction writers.

[283] Science fiction writers who have thought very hard about constructing plausible worlds are just as good of authorities on predicting what's going to be happening with human systems 70 years, 100 years down the line, as scientists are.

[284] So there are clear limits to what science and a certain form of investigation can tell us about.

[285] And I think it's important if we stop trying to force scientists to tell us everything, right?

[286] Like, well, what's going to happen with the economy?

[287] What's going to happen 70 years down the line?

[288] What's going to happen 100 years down the line?

[289] At that point, we need a different set of tools to figure out what to do with ourselves and what's going to happen.

[290] Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of people that think that there's not enough babies being born in the Western world because people are more career -oriented and we're worried that someday we're going to have underpopulation problems like Japan has right now.

[291] Yeah, it's terrible.

[292] In Japan, it's a real crisis.

[293] And we got to that crisis.

[294] You know, how do we, all of these things are a result.

[295] of us, like you said, right?

[296] Stepping in with our virtue, which I don't mean in a bad way, but stepping in with our virtue trying to fix things.

[297] Like feed people, for example.

[298] Like we don't want kids to die.

[299] We want there to be enough calories to go around.

[300] And what ends up happening is we have a lot of people.

[301] So then we have to figure out new ways to house them and feed them and power the things that they do and entertain them and, you know, and so on and so forth.

[302] So then we get a lot of people.

[303] And then people are like, well, okay, let's have fewer humans because that's the problem.

[304] But then when you do that, now you've got a system that depends on having more humans, right?

[305] You need a younger generation coming in.

[306] So these systems are incredibly complicated.

[307] And I think, I think, again, the reason people are leaning on naturalness so hard is because when you're faced with complicated uncertain systems, it's scary.

[308] You know, it's really scary.

[309] And you want some kind of criteria, whether it's a holy book or a profit, or whatever it is, to tell you, no, I got this.

[310] Yeah, I think that's one of the weirdest things about today, right, is that we are faced with these unparalleled crises where we really, we don't have anything to go off of.

[311] We don't have a similar situation that happened, you know, in 1985.

[312] Where we are today with the coronavirus and then with the subsequent lockdown of the economy where everyone's terrified.

[313] And then you have the George Floyd murder.

[314] and then you have the looting and the riots and the chaos and the protests and then you have the coronavirus kicks in again and our leaders look impotent and we can't look to what I mean when you have a guy like Donald Trump in office already you have a situation like Jesus I hope the cabinet can keep this thing together I hope the Senate can hold this bad and this is madness we got a reality show host who's the fucking president but then all the mayors are fucking up all the governor no one it's not even the that they're fucking up is that no one is equipped to handle this.

[315] So you see unprecedented anger, particularly online, where you're dealing with people, and this is one of the things that drew me to you is one of the tweets that you made about processed information, that online information is essentially processed information when you're dealing with, like, social media, versus, like, actual communication like you and I are having right now, which is what resonates with people.

[316] I think it's one of the things that resonates with podcasts.

[317] It's one of the reasons why I prefer to do them in person.

[318] It's the closest thing to a real conversation with a real person.

[319] Whereas this viewing of text white on black, you know, white letters in my case, I use the night mode on a black screen.

[320] It's so weird.

[321] Like you have to interpret intent.

[322] You have to try to get.

[323] And then you're not getting any social cues from the person.

[324] There's not a back and forth.

[325] It's just you spit something out.

[326] spit something back and it's you're trying to approximate what it's like to actually talk to a person it's very processed I thought that what you described it was really the perfect definition of what ails us where so many people today are communicating in this way and it's very similar to people surviving off a processed food and becoming sick it's so if you think about if you think about how processed food was created.

[327] Basically, and I mean modern ultra -processed food, because these terms are all really slippery, right?

[328] Just like the term natural.

[329] So this is on a spectrum, right?

[330] The history of cooking is a history of processing food, right?

[331] You like to cook, I like to cook.

[332] That's processing food.

[333] Dessert is a kind of food that's been made to be highly palatable.

[334] You know, so it's not about processing being intrinsically evil, but with ultra -processed foods, what you've got is you got a bunch of companies that are like, all right, what can we exploit about human appetites?

[335] to make foods as compulsively eatable as possible, right?

[336] It's terrifying.

[337] You've got, I think Coca -Cola, I think it was, said something like, we have to conquer stomach share.

[338] This is a term they use.

[339] So, like, there's a, yeah, so you think, right?

[340] You have a hundred, think of a stomach, right?

[341] Like, okay, so we got 100 % of the stomach.

[342] Like, how can Coca -Cola fill the maximum amount of stomach share in, in the humans of the world?

[343] Wow, what a bizarre way of looking at people.

[344] It's terrifying, right?

[345] And so then, and they did it because they've got the smartest people, you know, they've got great chemists and biologists working, you know, day and night to figure out how to conquer stomach share.

[346] And they started with cocaine, which is even more weird.

[347] Did you know it's still?

[348] I was like, I could, I discovered that when I was, I was like, wait, there's a plant in New Jersey that's getting like.

[349] Yeah, and it's the number one supplier of medical cocaine.

[350] It's so crazy.

[351] It's Coca -Cola.

[352] We should tell people.

[353] Just tell people what the, what we're talking about for people don't know.

[354] Yeah.

[355] Well, so Coca -Cola.

[356] back in the day was made with with with cocaine for the for the cocaine kick john pemberton the guy who the guy who came up with coca cola had cocaine in it and to this day there is a plant that's been grandfathered in i guess legally i don't know how it works that is still importing enormous amounts of cocaine processing it so that it's no longer has an effect on you in the way cocaine would and putting it in coca cola yeah the flavor of coca cola is apparently a big part of the reason why, like, Pepsi, unfortunately, Pepsi, you don't taste as good as Coke.

[357] You just don't.

[358] There's no cocaine in it.

[359] Yeah, well, it's the flavonoids.

[360] There's some, I think that's the right word, there's some flavor that the coca leaf has.

[361] I've never had chewed coca leaf, but people who I've talked to that have had it said it's an amazing way to get energy.

[362] It's like a cup of coffee.

[363] they gave it to us when we when you arrived in um so like when i was in bolivia i had chewed cocoa leaves when i was it like it's not i mean it's not like i mean it's not like being on coke it's just like have um and it's nothing like that so it's it's because cocaine right is a ultra processed form right of what is in the cocoa leaves yeah exactly yeah that's how it's been described to me Unfortunately, I've never, or maybe fortunately, I've never done Coke.

[364] But I have had a matte de cocoa, the tea from that, which is really interesting because I couldn't shut the fuck up.

[365] When I was drinking it, I was like, this is terrible for me. I already can't shut the fuck up.

[366] You give me this stuff.

[367] This is awful.

[368] I want to get back to, so, this is how we got sidetrack.

[369] Cocaine, Coca -Cola, ultra -processed food, stomach share.

[370] All right, we're back.

[371] We should tell people that this Coca -Cola, when they do take the cocoa leave and they process it and use the flavor.

[372] for Coca -Cola, then they take the cocaine out of it, and then it's the number one medical supplier of cocaine are the people that do that.

[373] So literally medical cocaine, like lidocaine and all that shit, comes from a lot of it for Coca -Cola.

[374] I didn't know it was the same plant.

[375] That's crazy.

[376] Crazy.

[377] Yeah.

[378] That's medical cocaine.

[379] So these people are trying to conquer our stomachs, and they did it, right?

[380] And one of the ways they did it also was make it cheap and accessible.

[381] There's vending machines in every school.

[382] I mean, think for a second how crazy that is.

[383] that there are vending machines with just Coca -Cola and candy bars and stuff.

[384] In every single school we have, you know, it's that, but it happened, right?

[385] And so now we live in a world in which extremely cheap, highly palatable, and very accessible food is everywhere.

[386] No wonder we have a problem with our diets.

[387] And that's exactly what's happening with information right now.

[388] So as I understand it, the way in which two, Twitter was designed, for example, they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back, so like slot machines, right?

[389] They consulted with people who build slot machines to figure out, okay, what keeps people pulling the lever, right?

[390] So they could just have it refresh.

[391] You just have your tweets at the top.

[392] But instead, there's a little alert button, right?

[393] You pull down, there's a little noise, like, or whatever the noise is when you pull down on it, you know?

[394] And so they've made it compulsive.

[395] They've made it high.

[396] highly palatable, right?

[397] You want to keep coming back.

[398] And the thing is the difference between ultra -processed information and ultra -processed food is that I think we're the companies now.

[399] And that really freaks me out.

[400] We're the consumers.

[401] We're also the manufacturers and we're also the distributors.

[402] We make the meme.

[403] Someone is going to take some cut of this show and turn it into a sound bite that's highly palatable in the way that information becomes highly palatable.

[404] It's going to be oversimplified.

[405] It's going to have heroes and villains.

[406] It's going to have a, it's going to demonize someone, and it's going to be something that gives you a sense of belonging.

[407] Those are the three things I think that make information highly processed and highly palatable.

[408] We want a hit of information that's easy to understand that demonizes someone and that gives us a sense of belonging.

[409] And that's just like exploiting what humans want, right?

[410] You're saying, you know, we're creatures that want to love each other.

[411] We want to belong, right?

[412] It's just the same way we want to taste salt, sugar, and fat.

[413] We want to feel these things.

[414] And the information that we have around us now, it's the same thing as a Snickers bar, except the difference is we're Snickers, we're making it.

[415] And we're behaving like junkies, like rabid junkies.

[416] If you look at, I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other.

[417] But it seems like it's half, at least.

[418] I mean, it's just there's so much rabid discourse.

[419] There's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other.

[420] And it's so unlike anywhere else in the world, unless you're in a fucking war zone, like the way people talk to each other.

[421] People talked to each other in real life the way they talked in on Twitter.

[422] The emergency ward would be filled with people with broken and faces and shattered eye sockets, it'd be chaos.

[423] Well, it's like road rate.

[424] It's how you treat people, it's how you treat the person in the other car that's cut you off because they're not, they've been dehumanized, they're isolated, right?

[425] It's like Twitter just allows you to, and social media in certain ways, facilitates being angry in the way that you get angry at the other car.

[426] You're like, honk, and you're like, fuck you, man, I hate you.

[427] It's like, you know what also causes that, the reason why people do that in road rage?

[428] It's because your sensors are heightened because you're moving so fast.

[429] because you're aware that split -second decision -making is important to survival.

[430] So when you're going 65 miles an hour and you're looking around at everybody and this guy gets, you're already at seven or eight, and I think this is also a part of the problem today online because of the coronavirus and because of the lockdown and economic instability, and we were at unprecedented joblessness right now.

[431] I mean, people are really hopeless.

[432] There's a lot of people that we got one $1 ,200 check from the government, and then that's it.

[433] And then, you know, you hear that Kanye West got this giant loan and Judd Apatow got this giant loan.

[434] These are really wealthy people are getting all this money.

[435] But meanwhile, salon owners, small business owners didn't.

[436] A lot of people are just fucking furious at everything because it's like driving a car.

[437] You're already heightened.

[438] So this information that comes at you, maybe it wouldn't have pissed you off under normal circumstances.

[439] but now you're fucking furious.

[440] Right.

[441] It's like stress eating or something.

[442] So we have this.

[443] I hadn't really thought about that with road rage, but it does make sense, right?

[444] So when you're already at that level, then you're going to be even more likely to need that kind of information, want to participate in that kind of dialogue.

[445] It's not dialogue, but no, it's not.

[446] Yeah.

[447] Yeah, it's, and there's ways we can, we can stop it.

[448] I really think we can stop it by focusing on problems.

[449] with the system and problems with ourselves, right?

[450] It's both of us because we're the ones manufacturing it and we're the ones consuming it.

[451] So we can do things about it.

[452] And it ranges from, you know, I mean, I don't like, I don't have, I still don't have a smartphone.

[453] You don't?

[454] No. You have a flip phone guy?

[455] Wow.

[456] Yeah.

[457] I mean, in part, not because.

[458] But you tweet a lot.

[459] I do.

[460] That's not good.

[461] Well, it is.

[462] I know it's compulsive.

[463] I think the reason I don't have it is because if I had a smartphone, man, it'd be all over.

[464] I'd be on it all the time.

[465] I mean, when I'm at home, because I work from home sometimes, my wife has a smartphone.

[466] And so I'll always be like using her phone.

[467] She's like, what are you doing?

[468] Like if you don't have a phone, you can't just go use my phone, right?

[469] And then I'm installing things on my computer like Freedom, which is this app that blocks you from.

[470] I mean, it's literally like, you know, with food, right?

[471] People have those locks that only open.

[472] So I have an app that locks me out of these sites.

[473] I have a folder on my desktop or on my, I guess, yeah, my desktop of my phone that says, is junkie.

[474] And that's all of my Instagram and Twitter and all that stuff I was going to show to you.

[475] But it's important.

[476] That's that kind of things.

[477] So we need, I think we all need to collectively take steps in that way, but also we need to realize, and this is really important, right?

[478] It's not just about natural, unnatural.

[479] It's not just about technology.

[480] We've had this kind of junk food information around forever.

[481] And this is where, I think, for me, as a scholar of religious studies, right, if you look at myths and folk tales and fairy tales.

[482] And if you look at the structure of religions, there are ways to tell stories to get people heightened.

[483] There are ways to tell stories to make people feel belonging.

[484] There are ways to tell stories to demonize people, right?

[485] These tropes have been around forever, right?

[486] What do you do?

[487] You create a villain.

[488] You tell a story about redemption.

[489] You tell a story about a fall.

[490] You tell a story in which the people who are hearing the story, just by hearing it, become heroes, right?

[491] These are things that have been around for a long time in the same way that if you go back 2000 years, if you were super rich and had access to lots of delicious, salty, sugary, fatty food, you could get fat.

[492] It was just a lot harder back then.

[493] And in the same way, now we've facilitated the manufacturer of this kind of these junk narratives that in small doses, I think, are fine.

[494] But if it's all we're consuming, it's a disaster.

[495] And we're going to end up, I think, with some kind of, with some problems that are analogous to the health problems that we're seeing because of what we eat, except there are going to be problems in our soul, right?

[496] We're going to get mental diabetes.

[497] Yeah.

[498] Or, I mean, it's not, I feel like it's a, I mean, I'm not like a sort of organized religious religion person myself, but I would say it's not just mental.

[499] It's like our souls.

[500] There's something deeply corrupting of our humanity.

[501] And I catch myself doing it.

[502] So that tweet that you were talking about, I had written a piece a week before that about Trump visiting the church and holding up the Bible.

[503] It was this really angry piece.

[504] And I was like, I'm going to write about how terrible this is and put this out there, right, and do something.

[505] The way he set it up, too, like tear gassing all the protesters to clear the area.

[506] I was like, what a horrible thing, right?

[507] I'm going to tell everybody how horrible this is.

[508] I'm going to get my anger out.

[509] And then when the article came out, I just realized that.

[510] I was just sending it into the fucking machine, right?

[511] And it was going to get ground up.

[512] And the people who already agreed with it were going to read it and be like, yeah, it's terrible.

[513] And the people that disagreed with it are either never going to read it or they're going to see it.

[514] And they're going to be like, see people keep attacking Trump.

[515] Like they're all crazy.

[516] And it was sort of like a crisis.

[517] I was just like, I don't want to be doing.

[518] I don't want to be putting anything into this machine if it's just going to get processed into junk information so that we can.

[519] can feed our habit.

[520] And this is a habit that we really don't know how to navigate.

[521] We've only been dealing with this habit for when did Twitter get invented 2007?

[522] Very recent.

[523] Yeah, that's not enough time for us to figure out how to do it right.

[524] I mean, you remember, like, during the, I'm 52, so when I was a kid, watching television for kids all day was fairly new, right?

[525] It'd only been like a generation or two that that was even possible to just watch TV all the time and it was constantly thought of as the corrupting thing like get out get away from the TV you're all you do is watch TV get up get outside and that was sort of the first indication that there's a potential for an unhealthy relationship with technology and with distributed content right but I think Twitter is far more toxic than that because you're actually putting the content out yourself and then you're waiting to see how people respond and you shift the way you interact with people based on how they respond to your tweets right it's the belonging yes or your Facebook post or what it what have you it created I mean it's interesting you say that like thinking again about food because I'm obsessed with like the first book I wrote was about food and like how how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar and and thinking about it in this way right you need a technology to be able to process something to get it cheap enough so that it can be widely consumed right so information that allows you to belong, right?

[526] For a long time, only certain people, I mean, for a while, right, it's only people who could read and write, right?

[527] So that's all you've got.

[528] Those are the only people who can prove it.

[529] And then now, it's so cheap to produce information that makes you a part of a community.

[530] It's free, right?

[531] We do it all the time.

[532] And like you said, we haven't figured out how to navigate it.

[533] And that's another confusion, I think, that people have with natural versus unnatural, which is that we also just have problems with novelty as human beings.

[534] Right.

[535] Something new comes up.

[536] We still don't know how to navigate our food system.

[537] We still don't know how to stop people from eating too much.

[538] We don't know how to do it.

[539] Collectively, as a society, we clearly have not solved this problem.

[540] And yet, it's important to remember that for most of the world, the problem is still not having enough.

[541] Right.

[542] So there was a time when the problem was people had no information.

[543] You just didn't know anything.

[544] You knew nothing.

[545] And that sucked too, right?

[546] So it's great that we have the internet.

[547] That was far worse.

[548] Yeah.

[549] That was far worse.

[550] Or at least not.

[551] I mean, like, it was really bad and it was bad in a profoundly different way.

[552] I mean, this goes back to like the with the hunter -gatherer thing, right, whether it was better in a state of nature.

[553] I often hear people, there's a great book called Against the Grain written by a guy who is at Yale and he thinks that we need to be easier on the past and harder on the present in this book.

[554] And one of the things he points out is like, oh, people these days, like humans, modern humans, you and I, we go out and we don't know what a plant is or we don't know what an animal is.

[555] And he's right, right?

[556] We don't, most people don't have a, have the knowledge of the natural world that hunter gatherers do.

[557] But at the same time, they don't know about the germ theory of disease.

[558] They don't know about, you know, planetary cycles.

[559] And so it's always important for me, at least, as soon as I start to get sucked into one of these binaries, right?

[560] It was so bad, it's so bad now today to remember that it was also bad in different ways in the past.

[561] And we can't make the mistake of thinking that.

[562] the problem with information and our consuming of it today, we can't make the mistake of thinking that the evil is in the form.

[563] We can make it good.

[564] We can make it better.

[565] We can learn how to deal with this, I think, I hope, as long as we're conscious of the problem.

[566] I think we can the same way we learn how to deal with liquor stores.

[567] I mean, liquor stores are everywhere, but I'm not drunk, you're not drunk.

[568] We don't go there and drink all day.

[569] And I think it's the same thing as dealing with this kind of compulsion to, use social media, you don't have to do it all the time.

[570] It's there, but you've got to learn restraint and you've got to really be cognizant of the impact that it has on you.

[571] Absolutely.

[572] It should be, well, so one, I mean, you know, bringing up alcohol, right?

[573] I mean, one thing is, you know, taboos, cultural taboos are really important for controlling our relationship to things that we would otherwise be compulsive about, like eating too much or having sex with everybody.

[574] And so we institute these sort of taboos.

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

[576] I know what you're saying.

[577] Yeah, I don't know.

[578] Well, it's terrifying when you see...

[579] Like, here's an example.

[580] And I don't think this person was correct, but it was weird watching this.

[581] There was a girl who was on TikTok and she was talking about Black Lives Matter.

[582] And she said, basically, if you say to me, all lives matter, she goes, I'm going to stab you.

[583] And while you're bleeding out, you see this?

[584] While you're bleeding out, I'm going to show you my paper cut, and I'm going to go, look, you know, I'm cut too.

[585] You know, she goes, that's the difference between all lives matter.

[586] You know, like she was just screaming and yelling.

[587] I'm going to fucking stab you.

[588] But it's just a bad analogy from a person who's trying very hard to virtue signal.

[589] Cut to next video, she was crying that people had found the video and they were attacking her, and then she got fired.

[590] And she got fired from this job that she really loved.

[591] And there was, in the comments of this, there was all these laughing emojis with the laughing with the tears coming out where people were taking pleasure out of the fact this person made this misstep.

[592] She's a young, she looked like she was in her 20s.

[593] She made this, you know, she thought she was like putting something out in the world to stand up for people that are being maligned and mistreated and, you know, and wrong by society.

[594] and that there should be a balance and to understand the balance and she made a terrible analogy it wasn't good but the fact that people were taking pleasure in the fact that this person got fired from it was very disturbing why do we I mean I'm just sitting here thinking like why do I why have I seen this why have you seen this like you knew it's like why did we consume that I didn't know what it was why did that get part of my soul share right if their stomach share like why is that video even a part of my brain.

[595] It should not be in there.

[596] There's no reason for it.

[597] There's a million better things that could occupy that slot.

[598] But there's a fascination, the same way there's a fascination of people jumping off buildings to a pool and missing and hitting the concrete.

[599] You know, I mean, I've seen a lot of those.

[600] There's something about missteps because you know it could be you.

[601] Look, I'm a moron.

[602] If I was on a roof with one of my good friends and I had a couple of beers in me and they're like, you want to make the jump?

[603] I'm like, fuck, should we?

[604] like especially if I was 18 I probably would have jumped you know like there's a lot of people to do if I was her and I was 18 I probably would have made this a similar dumb video the thing is it's interesting okay so with the with the with the swimming pool right this is it's one thing I actually think it's one thing to mock someone for just doing some stupid shit it's another thing when the when the background and this again gets back to this idea of ultra processed information when the background when what makes it so exciting is not that they're stupid or they did something or that it could have been you, but that they're evil, right?

[605] Ah, I get to watch evil and I'm just good.

[606] I'm good just because I'm feeling that this person's evil.

[607] And that part, it's very different from, I mean, it's very different from what was it, like, America's Funniest Home Videos, right?

[608] Like, that's not, that was not a show where you were, like, tuning in to find out who the evil people were, right?

[609] And then being like, look at those people.

[610] If we just, like, they deserve what they got.

[611] That would be crazy.

[612] It's so, I mean, just thinking about our attitude.

[613] Dude, I don't know.

[614] It's really intense.

[615] Yeah, it's, I mean, it's not good.

[616] And meanwhile, I watch a lot of them.

[617] Yeah.

[618] I watch one today where a bus driver body slammed this guy.

[619] Apparently, there was some jerk who was bothering these bus drivers, and he was picking a fight with his other bus driver, and this second bus driver who he had apparently fucked with before comes up from behind him, picks him up, and body slams him on the concrete, knocks him unconscious.

[620] It's horrible, but I watched it three times.

[621] Yeah, it's compulsive, right?

[622] I mean, it's the same way you can't step away from, I mean, not you, but, like, you know, in general, like the same thing with the food.

[623] You know, you can't help it.

[624] Yeah, it's really is bad for your brain.

[625] And it's, but that one at least is like, here's a person who's physically fucking with people and assaulting people and they got theirs.

[626] But the girl with the paper cut analogy, it's like, she's just dumb, you know, she's just a dumb.

[627] dumb kid who did a dumb thing and she thought she was being cool or she was fitting in and she thought a bunch of people would be like yeah you go girl and instead it came back and and really fucked her right although you know it's funny so I've seen you know there's a and you know about this like you've had some people like this on your show like there's a there's the tendency again to divide the world up in the same way as natural and unnatural right now another dichotomy that's emerged is like woke people and then anti -woke people.

[628] Right.

[629] And so the anti -woke people, and I'm generalizing here, but they look at the woke people and they're like, look at these woke people.

[630] The woke people divide the world up into good and evil, right?

[631] The woke people are like, oh, look at all those unwoke sinners.

[632] We're woke, we're good.

[633] The unwoke are evil.

[634] But the anti -woke people are doing the same thing.

[635] They're like, look at those woke people tearing everybody down.

[636] Those are the bad people.

[637] And if we just get rid of all the woke, people, then everything will go back to the paradise of free thinking and rationality where we could all speak our minds.

[638] And I'm looking at these people.

[639] And I'm like, do you not understand the paradox, especially because these people are often like fairly smart, like philosophically minded people.

[640] And they're like, I hate people that create demons and try to cast them out of society.

[641] We need to get rid of those people and cast them out of society.

[642] And once we have that, we'll go back to paradise.

[643] And I'm like, no, there is no paradise.

[644] It's complicated.

[645] Right.

[646] Like, even with the social media, it's terrific.

[647] that lay people who didn't have power once can hold powerful people accountable.

[648] It is a good thing that we get videos of cops doing bad stuff that before would have been hidden.

[649] So again, it's more complicated.

[650] Like, I like that.

[651] I'm happy about that.

[652] And I'm happy about the way in which our technology has empowered people to find communities, right?

[653] Also just like loners, like people that had weird hobbies, people that felt alone in their small town.

[654] And get out news.

[655] I mean, especially if you're dealing in a place where, you know, reporters can't get to.

[656] People on the ground can get information out to people.

[657] Exactly.

[658] There's a lot of positive benefits to social media.

[659] Don't get me wrong.

[660] Right.

[661] If used correctly, I think it's very valuable.

[662] But I just think the power of it is very intoxicating to people and much like processed food, which is where I think you have that great analogy.

[663] I think it's just very, it's very dangerous to become completely.

[664] Like if you're eating processed Twinkies, nine hours.

[665] a day, you're going to be sick.

[666] Well, if you're on Twitter, nine hours a day arguing with people, you're going to be sick.

[667] Yep, you are.

[668] You really are.

[669] I know people that have had real problems where, you know, they get tremendous anxiety, they're sweating, and they're involved in these back and force with people all day, and they can't sleep.

[670] Yeah, there's that, there's a classic cartoon, right, where it says, like, honey, I can't come to bed, someone's wrong on the internet, right?

[671] I was just like, that's perfect.

[672] I've had that, right?

[673] I'm like, my wife's like, you know, like, what are you doing?

[674] And I'm like, hold on one second.

[675] Like, if I just tweet one more time, this person's going to have a, you know, conversion experience.

[676] I think with wokeness, and this is something that James Lindsay had pointed out, and Douglas Murray has a great book about it in a lot of the areas that we're talking about.

[677] What's going on is a religion.

[678] I mean, it really is.

[679] It's got all of the elements of a religion.

[680] You can get cast out.

[681] you can get attacked for non -compliance.

[682] It demands this very rigid ideology that you can't stray from, and it keeps getting more and more rigid as time goes on.

[683] Things that were acceptable just a few years ago can now get you, you can get canceled, you can get fired.

[684] You can lose your job.

[685] I mean, we're getting to this, like, you can lose your job and be attacked for saying all lives matter, which seems insane.

[686] just at a in just in terms of I mean it's understandable the people what where people are going from that this is like no you're you're in deniance you're in denial of this movement but just the term all lives matter should be universally acceptable but it's not anymore well there was wasn't there also a cop though that got I think there was a cop who got fired for sharing black lives matter this was very recently but but but and and and that's not to say that cop yeah this was in New York I mean I don't don't quote me on this well quote me on it I just got quoted on it but uh too late no i'm i'm pretty sure it happened but again that's this is another problem with social media right is like once it's said it's out there and the amount of energy someone has said the amount of energy it takes to like you know real back in misinformation is just disproportionate to the amount it takes to get the misinformation out there to begin with a lack of understanding of like what a person does when they're thinking and expressing themselves like think about what we're doing we you and i talked for three minutes before we sat down and did this.

[687] I gave you a little tour of the place.

[688] We shot the shit about Laird Hamilton's Superfood coffee, and we sat down and started talking.

[689] Yeah.

[690] You know what I mean?

[691] I mean, we don't know each other, right?

[692] So we're talking.

[693] We're just, there's no preparation here.

[694] We're just saying things out of the blue.

[695] This is, I want to push back on these anti -woke people, though, a little bit, because I think it's important, especially because they're very sharp, and so they make very good arguments.

[696] And I think that part of their problem is they do something called.

[697] nut picking.

[698] Have you heard about this?

[699] No. So this is a phrase that I think a guy at Mother Jones, Kevin Drum, I think he coined it.

[700] It's like cherry picking.

[701] And basically what you do is you trawl through any given group, university professors, some blog, whatever it is, and you pick the nuttiest things you can.

[702] And then you say, look what these, and this is actually what our whole information ecosystem does.

[703] It nutpicks for us.

[704] And so then what do you see?

[705] You see the craziest representations of any given group, right?

[706] So you see, you know, if you're thinking about academia, right, you see some professor get kicked out of a university or you see some professors say some kind of crazy thing about like, you know, I don't know, like biological sex not being real in animals or whatever, you know, whatever the crazy thing is.

[707] And then that becomes how you see that entire institution.

[708] You've nutpicked that institution, right?

[709] And it's easy to mock.

[710] It's fun.

[711] But like the truth is if you sat these people down even, right?

[712] Like if you sat down the nuts from both sides, right?

[713] And they had a conversation.

[714] They're complicated people, right?

[715] They have complicated thoughts.

[716] They want to be able to explain themselves better.

[717] And I'm frustrated because what I really want is for people to be able to have complicated conversations about touchy subjects.

[718] The most touchy subjects.

[719] This isn't part of the problem with what you're describing.

[720] know that these aren't conversations.

[721] They are not.

[722] Someone spit something out, and even if it's preposterous, like animals don't have biological sex, there's no one's talking to them.

[723] There's no one in the room with them, especially not a biologist of equal standing.

[724] You know, someone who can go, actually, that's ridiculous to say.

[725] And then you're having a conversation.

[726] Part of the problem is with just statements.

[727] Or even if someone's writing a blog, there's a problem with no one being able to talk while you're talking.

[728] it's that's absolutely true i mean for for for me i just i'm surprised by how much i don't know right i mean this is something i actually really i really appreciate about you like i like i don't know a lot of stuff so i'm out when i was researching natural right i have a chapter on economics i don't know anything about economics so i had to research that and talk to experts i got a chapter on sports i don't know anything about sports so i got to go talk to people who are experts on you know whether a whether a cheetah blade for your leg you know how do you figure out whether that's fair or not whatever right so i'm sitting down and i'm talking with these people and what I realized is that everything's very complicated, right?

[729] These are complicated issues.

[730] And when there's no one to push back on you and when there's no room for a dialogue, you just get the absolute stupidest, most extreme versions of whatever position it is that someone holds.

[731] And the more touchy the subject, the more that's true, right?

[732] Because the more people feel the need to say one kind of sloganized version of whatever it is that they're that they're talking about and the truth is I think you could actually if you've got these people in a room they weren't just angry at each other you could actually have really good conversations yeah I think what you're saying too is really important is that you're trying to this idea of a sloganized version of it you're trying to reinforce your argument without any pushback from the other side where a lot of these things are nuanced and complex and they're not black and white and it's not a one or a zero it's like there's a lot of pros and cons and a lot of these things, like one that I, you know, it's an uncomfortable one to get into is abortion.

[733] It's a very, what I call a human problem, not just that it's humans having abortions and you're aborting a human, but it's a human problem in that very few people are going to have a problem with it if it's like three cells.

[734] But then when it's three months old, people are going to have more of a problem.

[735] When it's six months old, most people are going to have a problem with it.

[736] So it becomes this very weird, like to say, no abortion should ever happen.

[737] Well, what about the morning after pill?

[738] You don't think that someone should be able to, if they get drunk and they make a mistake and they accidentally get pregnant from sex, you don't think they should be able to take a pill and end the pregnancy the day of, the day of conception?

[739] Some people will say, no, you have to carry it forever and raise that kid until it's 20.

[740] But other people will say, you should be able to have an abortion up until the day the baby's out of your body.

[741] And I think that's fucking crazy too.

[742] It's one of those things where it's a complicated, very nuanced subject.

[743] No, no, it's just pro -life or pro -choice.

[744] That's it.

[745] It's so stupid.

[746] Yeah, it's crazy.

[747] What an unproductive way to think about it.

[748] And again, I mean, you bring up abortion, right?

[749] But this is like what I said before.

[750] It's the touchy, complicated sex in general, right?

[751] Because God or the gods always care about sex, right?

[752] So it's sex in general has always been talked about in this way.

[753] People want to draw neat, bright lines, whether it has to do with age of consent, whether it has to do with who you should be having sex with, and why?

[754] Again, this is something that naturalness came into again, because people are like, okay, well, we got to figure out what kind of sex you should be having with who.

[755] Well, how do we do it?

[756] If it's not God, right, and that's who it was for a long time, telling people who to have sex with and how, we'll look to nature.

[757] We'll figure out, you've got people writing books about how, well, actually, the natural way to have, you know, to be sexual is polygamy.

[758] So clearly that's good and we should have, you know, monogamous, monogamous relationships are going to be terrible, right?

[759] And then there's other people like, well, no, obviously if you look at every culture, monogamous marriages have emerged naturally.

[760] So that's the natural thing.

[761] And then somebody like, well, heterosexuality is natural.

[762] So you should never have sex with people of the same sex.

[763] And then other people like, well, actually, we found these animals here that are gay.

[764] So being homosexual is actually okay.

[765] It's been proven by nature.

[766] I'm just looking at it's like it's obviously very complicated right who you should have sex with and how incidentally I there was a while researching contraception and naturalness I ran into a book called holy sex which is a Catholic's guide to and I'm paraphrasing the title here mind blowing mind blowing toe curling like got like like divinely sanctioned sex right and I'm reading through it and there was a section on Either or not, so Catholic theories, really intense Catholic philosophers will deny this, but they'll say natural means something else and they'll kind of like do all this complicated reasoning, but it's not really true.

[767] They're drawing on what's natural and what isn't in the sense of what's in nature.

[768] And the idea is that sex has to be natural.

[769] So for a long time, it was that sex has to be tailored to procreation, right?

[770] So you can't have anal sex, you can't have oral sex, you can't do coitus interruptis, which is pulling out, right?

[771] All of those are bad because what God wants, what he's designed naturally, is for a penis to go into a vagina and ejaculate into it to make a baby.

[772] So that was it.

[773] That was the criteria.

[774] But then we had too many people in the world.

[775] And Catholics were getting upset.

[776] They were like, well, I don't want to have any more kids.

[777] I don't want seven kids.

[778] I don't have a farm.

[779] There's all these reasons that people didn't want to have kids.

[780] So they came up with the rhythm method.

[781] So you got the rhythm method, right?

[782] And the rhythm method, this guy Lats, the author of The Rhythm Method, he spends most of the ethics section of that book, which was an enormous bestseller.

[783] Because they didn't, God didn't tell people about the Rhythm Method until like the 20th century.

[784] He could have told them earlier, but he didn't.

[785] So Latt spends this whole book talking about how natural it is.

[786] And he's like, look, this is natural.

[787] These are natural cycles.

[788] And there's a great quote, some guys, like, in the Catholic Church, you can use mathematics to prevent contraception, but not physics or chemistry, right?

[789] I was like, right, it doesn't make any sense.

[790] Like, how is this, how is it natural to sort of plan your sex around rhythms?

[791] And this all goes back to the book, the holy sex book, which is that so then if the rhythm method is natural, right, then it can't be that sex has to be directed to procreation, right?

[792] Because you've got a bunch of people who are having sex at exactly the times where it won't result in procreation.

[793] So they change their understanding of what natural sex is to just depositing, it ends with depositing semen in a vagina.

[794] And in this book, there's a whole section on like, well, what about like, you know, anal sex and dildos?

[795] And basically he's like, if you follow the one rule and it ends in the right way, then you can do everything else.

[796] And I'm reading this book.

[797] One rule.

[798] What rule is that?

[799] Deposit the semen in the vagina.

[800] So you can do all that stuff as long as when you ejaculate it's inside a vagina.

[801] That's exactly right.

[802] And I'm reading this.

[803] I'm like, how can you say this is natural?

[804] And through his whole book, he's saying it too.

[805] He's like, You know, if you don't ejaculate, if you don't end by ejaculating the vagina, all kinds of bad things happen to you biologically, right?

[806] Your serotonin levels go down or whatever.

[807] All the same kinds of rationalizations that people give whenever they're trying to show that something was designed by nature to be a certain way.

[808] And to me, again, it's like, no, with abortion or with contraception or whatever, we should be asking ourselves what works?

[809] What is it that we want?

[810] And what is it that works?

[811] And that's a complicated question.

[812] It's going to be different depending on your.

[813] culture depending on the needs that you have at any given time in history right it's also there's an inherent problem with religion is that a lot of what they're doing is just controlling they're controlling people and what people want is freedom they want the freedom to be able to do whatever they want if two people get together and they just want to use dildos on each other why was any why would anybody have a problem with that do you want to do it does she want to do it everybody's happy have a good time like that why does that God care if God invented Dildos, right?

[814] Well, that's, that goes back to the natural thing, right?

[815] So that's exactly right.

[816] So now they'll be like, no, God didn't invent dildos.

[817] People invented Dildos.

[818] God invented the idea of Dildos.

[819] Every idea that you have comes from God.

[820] Don't ask me to defend stuff.

[821] I think it's crazy.

[822] People invented strap -ons.

[823] God invented strap -ons.

[824] But here's the thing, right?

[825] Again, and this goes back to my changing my mind, is that there is some way in which you can use what's natural as a kind of criteria, there's actually this idea called the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, the EEA.

[826] And what this says is basically, you know, there's a vague time that sort of determines how humans evolved, right?

[827] So there are certain things that humans have evolved for, and they evolve for those things in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness.

[828] And so then when we depart from that environment, when we put vending machines in places, or when we give people books to read, one hypothesis you can have, is that maybe that will have negative consequences for us because we're not adapted for it, right?

[829] So that's a fine hypothesis generating heuristic, right?

[830] But what people do instead is they decide beforehand that it's necessarily bad.

[831] If it wasn't in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, if God, you know, if it wasn't there in the Garden of Eden, then it must be bad.

[832] Right.

[833] And that's and that's, so it's not, it's not necessarily bad to say, well, hey, is this is this thing?

[834] is it natural?

[835] Like, is it something that we are evolved to deal with?

[836] But that doesn't necessarily mean that, you know, if it's not natural, that it's bad.

[837] It just means maybe that we need a way to deal with.

[838] I mean, a good example is reading, reading things.

[839] I don't know.

[840] You don't have glasses on.

[841] I don't know if you have contact lenses.

[842] But no, but I need glasses to read.

[843] Yeah.

[844] So, like, reading is not natural.

[845] That's just not a natural thing.

[846] And there's a bad result, right?

[847] Which is that we have worse vision because we're squint at things.

[848] But we fixed it.

[849] We came up with glasses and we're good now so that's it so that's great now we get reading which is awesome you know and like looking at small things all the time and we fixed it with glasses so that's terrific now if the result had been that like our eyeballs melted and we couldn't figure out how to solve that problem reading would be bad reading would be bad right knowledge would be bad be the devil's work because it kills your eyeballs because god doesn't want you to know anything more than what he put in your head and that's exactly what people would say though they'd be like if reading melted your eyeballs People would be like, well, of course it does.

[850] It's unnatural.

[851] Well, wasn't that the argument that they used during the time of Martin Luther to keep people from reading his phonetic interpretation of the Bible?

[852] The anti -reading thing goes back to Socrates, which actually sounds a little bit like some of the stuff you were saying about dialogue where he says if you have, you know, I'm paraphrasing, not my area of expertise, if you have the written word, this is going to be a disaster because one of the things that happens with the written word is it can't respond to the.

[853] interlocutor.

[854] This is what he says.

[855] So when you write things down instead of saying them, people are going to take that and interpret it for themselves.

[856] It's going to be terrible.

[857] Of course, this is paradox because you're reading it.

[858] It's good and it can be bad.

[859] I mean, that's really what it is.

[860] But it is also incredibly valuable just for storing information, just for distributing information.

[861] It's unprecedented.

[862] It's changed the world.

[863] But it also can be bad because it can have a distorted version of the reality of what you're writing about right that's exactly it and that's you know i think that i think the reflexiveness of wanting so i'm sort of i think i'm slowly turning into an evangelical agnostic i think this is what i am because like the the baseline the baseline should be uncertainty i think i think the world is an uncertain and mysterious place and that's a wonderful thing right wonder wonder is a word that actually has built into it both loving the world right like this is wonderful, but it also means you don't know.

[864] I wonder.

[865] There's a way in which wonder is tied to doubt an uncertainty.

[866] And that, I wish that were our default position.

[867] Global uncertainty.

[868] I don't know what's going on.

[869] This is a mysterious place.

[870] I want to figure it out.

[871] And then local certainties, right?

[872] You have a decision you need to make at a given time.

[873] And you're like, you know what?

[874] Given what I know, looks like the right thing to do here or the right thing to believe here is this.

[875] But that certainty shouldn't be the default.

[876] It should be local certainty, global uncertainty.

[877] Well, there's things you're certain of and there's things that you aren't certain of and it's very important to be clear on the difference between those and not attach yourself to whether or not you're correct or incorrect because human beings with language and with dialogue we're playing a game.

[878] Like if you and I were in dispute about something and even if you were correct, if my ego got involved, I would want be correct.

[879] So I would try to manipulate my version of reality in order to trounce you.

[880] And people do that.

[881] Absolutely.

[882] It's a horrible thing to do.

[883] And it's a message that I try to get out as much as possible.

[884] You are not your ideas.

[885] And you cannot be married to them.

[886] If you're wrong, if something's, you're like, oh, I thought it was this.

[887] I am very quick to say that.

[888] And it's something that I've developed.

[889] It's something that I have worked very hard to cultivate to not be attached to any idea that I have or that I espoused.

[890] And that if I'm incorrect to say very, very quickly, as soon as I find out, I'm incorrect about this.

[891] And it's so messed up that with politicians, for example, people accuse a politician of flip -flopping as if it's like, no, you don't want to actually, if there's someone who has the sort of wherewithal to change their mind, why would we shame them for saying, whoa.

[892] Well, it's obvious because politics are a game.

[893] It's a game of victory.

[894] I mean, it's not just a game.

[895] It's a game with time periods, right?

[896] You have till November.

[897] You have X amount of weeks.

[898] You have your primaries are coming up.

[899] It really is a game.

[900] So there's very little room for nuance.

[901] You have a time period.

[902] I mean, buzzers up.

[903] You miss the three point.

[904] The game's over.

[905] It doesn't matter who's right or who's wrong.

[906] It's about winning.

[907] I just don't get the why people, I mean, I guess I do and I don't get it, right?

[908] But why would you demand that of your politicians, right?

[909] So if I'm looking at a politician, what I would want, and not just a politician, right, a teacher, a friend, I'm looking for someone who is able to change their mind, whose ego isn't wrapped up with sticking to their guns, whatever happens, right?

[910] Isn't the problem with their opponents, though, because their opponents are the ones who are going to call them out on it?

[911] Yeah, well, the opponents will call them out, but what if the general public was like, stop calling them out for changing them out for changing.

[912] his mind you moron it was awesome that he changed his mind well if you say it that way it's going to create more problems you're right oh see i just did it i just did it it's normal it's normal to lapse it oh it's those people who are bad right if we just get rid of those people joe we'll solve a reality you're just enthusiastically expressing yourself but you're doing so you know what okay so one of the things i do you know how you have like the junk the the junkie folder yes so to remind myself of how blind i might be and how i could like how I need to change my mind, right?

[913] I talk about this with my students, but I keep it with myself.

[914] I actually have a, I have a, this touch you, I have a Confederate monument in my wallet right here.

[915] So I keep, I don't know if you know, so the Confederate $2 bill.

[916] Oh, wow.

[917] That's a real Confederate $2 bill?

[918] That's a Confederate $2.

[919] And that guy on it right there, that's Judah Benjamin.

[920] That he's the only Jew who ever made it onto American currency if you want to call it and it's confederate money it's confederate money yeah go for it what years is this from let's see what does it say on there i don't remember the exact year on the bill this is weird man it's paper yes paper but it's like really flimsy paper i would think you would want to like keep this under glass or something no it's not i mean they're not like super valuable it's not no but it's historically i mean it's so touchy right even saying anything about confederate it's like of course it's not valuable you fucking idiot but they they won't do that I'll tell you why because here's why I keep that in my wallet people won't do that I mean maybe they'll take that sound bite and it'll get ultra processed and people be like he was arguing for Confederate monuments but that's stupid because I keep that in my wallet because that guy celebrated Passover that guy celebrated Passover which is a Jewish holiday all about how slavery was bad meanwhile looks like he's got a little Hitler mustache he had he had slaves whoa so here's this guy who's a Jew in America in the 1800s who's one of his most important holidays is a celebration of the Jews liberation from slavery who had most likely slaves in his house serving him the Passover dishes and certainly washing them.

[921] And what that means to me at least is like there's going to be something in my life that I'm as blind to as that guy was to the evils of slavery.

[922] And if you can have your most important holiday, be a holiday where you're celebrating the liberation of your people from slavery and still end up on a fucking Confederate bill, like, God knows what we're blind to right now, right?

[923] What is it that we're not seeing right now.

[924] What people can justify is very strange.

[925] Right.

[926] And it means that it means that no matter what, there's probably some kind of thing that 100 years from now is going to seem like how.

[927] How could Alan, how could this idiot, have not seen that, right?

[928] It was right in front of his eyes.

[929] Yeah.

[930] What do you think that thing would be?

[931] Have you ever tried to think about it?

[932] Yeah.

[933] I have tried to think about it.

[934] What do you think it would be?

[935] Well, so there's a couple of things I think it could be.

[936] One of them is the fact that we've essentially exported slave labor.

[937] So, you know, people are going to be like, all these people who were talking about how slavery is bad, right?

[938] And chattel slavery is a very, very different thing.

[939] from other kinds of slavery, but there are ways in which people are trapped in horrific situations who are manufacturing the goods that I have.

[940] Now, it gets complicated, right?

[941] Because people are like, well, you know, that's better that than no job at all.

[942] I'm not sure exactly how it all plays out.

[943] But I can imagine a future in which people look back at me and you and the things we are consuming and saying, how were they blind to the conditions in which those items were produced?

[944] Sure.

[945] Well, one of the best examples is someone tweeting about slavery on an iPhone that's made by someone who works at Foxcon who has these giant nets around the building to keep people from jumping off because they live such horrific lives that they leap to their death so often they have to protect the building with nets.

[946] And this is the exact point at which, if you wanted to ultra -process this conversation, you'd take that sound bite and you'd say, look at these two assholes.

[947] comparing working in a foxcon factory to chattel slavery yes which is precisely not explain chattel slavery people know so sometimes so for example when people are trying to justify the bible and the fact that like so why didn't jesus here's this guy who came down and he you know shocked everyone right why didn't he also say like you know also slaves need to be released asap slavery is bad he didn't say that so one of the things people will point out is that there are different forms of slavery so chattel slavery specifically where where people are turned into property and bought and sold and have no opportunity to earn their freedom is a specific kind of slavery that was the kind of slavery we had in the United States.

[948] It's uniquely horrifically bad.

[949] And so that kind of slavery is not the same thing as working in a Foxcon factory.

[950] But when I think about, you know, I'm thinking about this right here.

[951] I am on like, you know, what's going to happen when that parallel gets made?

[952] You know, I think it's actually an instructive parallel, right?

[953] Like, I'd like us to think about what, you know, how we're the goods that we're using and consuming and where they're made.

[954] I also don't want people to think that for a moment that chattel slavery is the same thing as working in a Foxcon factory.

[955] No, it most certainly isn't.

[956] But it is.

[957] But it's bad.

[958] It's bad.

[959] Working in a Foxcon factory is bad.

[960] Or you don't want your children to be there.

[961] Joel Salatin, I'll tell you.

[962] Another thing is eating is eating factory farmed animals.

[963] Yes.

[964] I mean, I, I, it's, it's messed up.

[965] I don't know.

[966] Like, I do it, you know, I go out, I eat, I eat meat that I know comes from a place, you know, where the animals are not treated, where they're in hell.

[967] It's animal hell, you know, and we have these animal hells.

[968] When do you do that?

[969] I mean, just yesterday when I went out and ate like baby back ribs down the street, I guarantee those baby back ribs didn't come from.

[970] from Joel Salton's Polly Faced Farm.

[971] And I think that, you know, that's something I think about, but I do it anyway.

[972] I can imagine a time when we look back on our current eating habits and we're like, why wasn't everyone arguing for ethically sourced meat?

[973] Like how was it that people didn't want to force everyone collectively to pay more for meat that was raised in a way, like the kind of way that Salatin pioneers, right?

[974] In this, I'm really on board with Salatin.

[975] I think he's right to say, look, there are contexts in which animals are happier and less happy, and they're happier on my farm, and they're fucking miserable.

[976] But I thought it was very interesting in your book where you talk about Michael Pollan pressing him on whether or not you could feed New York City that way.

[977] And he's like, do you really need New York City?

[978] Yeah.

[979] Well, so Salton's got to, right?

[980] Well, and Salton thinks, I mean, he thinks about this, right?

[981] Like you saw in the book in explicitly divine terms, right?

[982] God has designed the world, but I'll tell you, this is a story I tell it.

[983] the end of the book, I was eating Salton's delicious pork.

[984] It's an incredible place, Polyface Farms.

[985] And I was eating his pork and like the people there are awesome, he's awesome.

[986] And he announces to everyone.

[987] He says, look, we're going to be doing a bit of a change.

[988] We have a new thing that we're going to be doing.

[989] We are going to be producing chickens for a growing segment of our market that doesn't want soy fed to their chickens.

[990] So Salton's chickens get a lot of their calories, not from his farm, they get a significant portion of their calories, from non -GMO soy that's grown at another place outside of polyface, right?

[991] So it's not a self -contained system.

[992] He says, but there's some people that don't want soy fed to their chickens.

[993] They feel like they react to soy, they don't want it.

[994] So they're going to start feeding their chickens.

[995] There's a certain percentage of Salton's chickens.

[996] These are going to start feeding fish meal, ground fish meal.

[997] So afterward, I went up to him, I was like, you know, Joel, that doesn't seem very natural.

[998] Like, do chickens eat?

[999] They swim?

[1000] Like, yeah, right?

[1001] Like, how are they getting a whole of this fish?

[1002] And you know what?

[1003] He looked at me and he said, I'm a hypocrite, you know, I'm a hypocrite like anyone else, but at least I admit it.

[1004] And what I wanted to say to him was there's nothing wrong with feeding your chickens fish meal.

[1005] If some people want chickens that are fed fish meal and you're treating your chickens in a way you think is ethical, there's not some kind of purity test that you need to apply to your farm, even though it's on a road called Pure Meadows Lane, but it's like you don't need a purity test for your farm you're you're a good guy who cares I mean I really think he's a guy who really cares about his animals you know and and it just kind of made me sad that he thought of that as some sort of hypocrisy well the only hypocrisy that you could see in it is factory farmed fish is awful I mean it's it's really bad I mean it's bad for the environment it's bad for the fish it's there's not a lot of sustainable factory farm fish operations, it wouldn't make you wince if you actually saw how they processed all that fish meal.

[1006] So, it's a factory farm fish.

[1007] Another thing, I didn't know any of this stuff and still I started this research.

[1008] So I'll tell you a story, crazy story.

[1009] I was in the Netherlands researching the food chapter of this book, which is about vanilla, which I could talk to you about vanilla, which sounds very boring, right?

[1010] Which is why I picked it.

[1011] It's vanilla.

[1012] I'm researching vanilla, and people want natural vanilla.

[1013] And I don't know if you know, do you know where vanilla comes from?

[1014] Vanilla beans?

[1015] Yeah.

[1016] Do you know where those come from?

[1017] No. That was the end of the line for me, right?

[1018] So we've got vanilla beans in the house.

[1019] So they are actually on an orchid.

[1020] This beautiful white orchid vine is where vanilla beans grow.

[1021] That makes sense.

[1022] Vanilla ice cream has that orchid on the...

[1023] Yeah.

[1024] All of a sudden, I was like, oh, wait, that's why my yogurt looks like that.

[1025] Every single one of those is artificially inseminated.

[1026] So there's a person who goes, and you can watch YouTube videos of it's crazy.

[1027] Have they always been like that?

[1028] No. So vanilla used to be only in Mesoamerica.

[1029] that was the only place where it grew naturally, right?

[1030] So everyone thinks of Madagascar, right?

[1031] Madagascar vanilla.

[1032] Only place vanilla was growing was in Mesoamerica.

[1033] It was these Mayan silviculturists, which is like forest gardeners, who grew this.

[1034] And it was pollinated by its only known natural pollinator, which was this thing called a melapana bee.

[1035] I don't know if I pronounced that right, but whatever.

[1036] So that's the only place it was.

[1037] And when people came from Europe, they were like, this is incredible, vanilla, amazing.

[1038] And they wanted to grow it, but they couldn't because they didn't.

[1039] know how to pollinate it.

[1040] And then a 12 -year -old slave named Edmund Albius discovered how to artificially pollinate vanilla flowers.

[1041] And just like that, you now have the ability to grow vanilla orchids in non -natural habitats, right?

[1042] So it's still expensive because you can only grow them in Madagascar, Tahiti.

[1043] I don't know if you know this, like, you know, they're, vanilla beans are incredibly expensive.

[1044] Natural vanilla is just really expensive ingredient.

[1045] And that's because there's not a lot of places it can be grown.

[1046] So they're looking for ways to make natural vanilla cheaper.

[1047] And the Netherlands is where all of the best growing technology, a lot of the best growing technology is.

[1048] So I went to a university there where they have a greenhouse where they're growing vanilla orchids, pineapples, bell peppers, like coconuts.

[1049] I mean, you name it, everything they figured out how to grow all of these natural plants.

[1050] plants, right?

[1051] But I'm sitting in here and I'm like, you've got vanilla orchids growing out of these buckets in this highly technological environment.

[1052] You know, it's all temperature controlled, right?

[1053] And for what?

[1054] So that you can have cheap vanilla beans that can be labeled legally natural.

[1055] And that whole story comes back to the salmon and the fish that you were talking about before.

[1056] Because in that same place, there was a machine like out of Charlie and the chocolate factory with like pink sludge whooshing through it.

[1057] This was, you know, a couple of places down from the vanilla orchid house.

[1058] I was like, what's that?

[1059] The guy who's showing me around says, that's algae that we're growing here because people want their salmon, their farmed salmon, to be pink.

[1060] And it's not pink because it doesn't eat the diet that it gets in nature.

[1061] So it's naturally gray, but people won't pay for that.

[1062] So he's farming algae, which is natural.

[1063] So that's the stuff, the pink stuff.

[1064] And then they feed that to the farmed salmon just so it can be naturally pink.

[1065] So when you go into your whole foods or whatever and you see that your salmon is all natural and it's pink.

[1066] And I'm just looking.

[1067] I'm looking at this whole thing.

[1068] And I'm like, what is wrong with us human beings that we've gotten to this point where we like, we want stuff natural so bad that we're developing new technologies to figure out how to like have our cake needed to.

[1069] They die salmon.

[1070] It's really an orange, but they dye it.

[1071] They do.

[1072] Yeah, the orange, just orange pinkish color.

[1073] But there's also a way, so estaxathin, I think, is the chemical that, and you can have it artificially, but then people don't want artificial color.

[1074] Can't they just feed them the bugs that they eat that make them?

[1075] Way too expensive.

[1076] Really?

[1077] Yeah, for when you want it on that scale.

[1078] Oh.

[1079] So they feed them this algae.

[1080] And I'm just like, I get, I get what we're doing.

[1081] I get what we want, right?

[1082] We want stuff that's better for the planet.

[1083] We want natural.

[1084] And so then, yeah, so what do we do?

[1085] So what, but it's so complicated, right?

[1086] Like what you were saying?

[1087] Like, what do we do with factory farm fish?

[1088] You're like, what you were saying about Joel Salatin?

[1089] How do you get, how do you get Joel Salatin's meat to people that can't afford it?

[1090] Right.

[1091] How do you?

[1092] If I knew the, well, some people would say lab -grown meat, right?

[1093] So that's, but that's not the same as Joel Salatin's meat, at least.

[1094] Well, not for now.

[1095] Not for now.

[1096] I'm really curious about lab -grown meat.

[1097] I'm not curious about the, like, Impossible Burger type stuff because I just, it's not, it's neither First of all, I don't like the idea of pretending something's meat if you don't want to eat meat.

[1098] It just seems ridiculous.

[1099] And I get it as sort of like, you know, I mean, it's like a gateway drug, you know, like you're tricking people into becoming vegetarian by giving them a burger.

[1100] And like, look, you can have a burger and still be vegetarian.

[1101] Look, we've got you.

[1102] But that's not healthy.

[1103] Like, if you want to eat healthy vegetables, you should eat vegetables.

[1104] You should eat vegetable dishes that are actually made with vegetables.

[1105] Well, so what's meat?

[1106] What do you think counts as real meat?

[1107] Like, if you grow a steak and a vat?

[1108] Yeah, that's interesting.

[1109] I think that, well, they are probably going to be able to do that with alarming accuracy within the next 10 years, where they're going to make a rib eye.

[1110] Like, it's going to have marbling.

[1111] It's going to taste like a rib eye.

[1112] And I'm all 100 % down for that.

[1113] I'm 100 % down for that.

[1114] Do we get to call that steak?

[1115] Because the steak lobby, there's going to be a meat lobby that's like, you know, it's like the almond milk.

[1116] You can't call it milk.

[1117] There's going to be a bunch of people.

[1118] They're like, unless it came from a cow.

[1119] Yeah, well, the almond milk lobby, I mean, they're right for milk.

[1120] You mean it's not milk?

[1121] Because it's not milk.

[1122] Like, milk has to come from a breast.

[1123] Like, it's absolutely not milk.

[1124] Well, doesn't a steak have to come from a creature?

[1125] Well, it comes from a lab, but it essentially has the exact same properties as a steak.

[1126] That's the difference.

[1127] Ammon milk is in no way, shape, or form milk.

[1128] It's not milk.

[1129] It's weird water.

[1130] You've just done some weird shit to water to make it white.

[1131] you know it's not milk but if you can recreate steak if you can do like if you can 3D print steak it's still going to be steak now if you're the type of person that wants to eat the soul of the animal and you want you want to be there when the animal gets killed and you want to take slice the piece off and throw it on the fire and you want to know you want to be like boots to the ground and know well that's a different thing you're asking for a different thing but if you're asking for meat that has the same amount of essential fatty acids as a grass -fed rib -eye steak, you can do that, I think.

[1132] I think they're probably going to be able to do that.

[1133] It's interesting, though, like, the way, so talking about what counts as a steak, right?

[1134] This idea, I mean, naturalness again comes in here because the word nature, right?

[1135] It actually means birth, natura, origins.

[1136] So naturalness has to do with the origins of a thing.

[1137] And we think about origins a lot when we think about what a thing is, right?

[1138] We want to know where it came from, and that tells us what it is, right?

[1139] And so with a stake, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to say you can't call it a steak unless its origin is a cow.

[1140] There's going to be other people who are going to say, no, if it looks just like and is chemically composed identically to a steak that comes from an animal, then it's an animal.

[1141] But I'll give you an example.

[1142] to push back on what you were saying a little bit.

[1143] Take a lab -grown diamond.

[1144] I mean, I guess, well, actually, oh, no, I think I might have put my foot in my mouth.

[1145] Some girls don't like that.

[1146] I've had this conversation.

[1147] They get upset.

[1148] It's because it's not the same thing.

[1149] Well, it's cheaper.

[1150] That's the only reason why.

[1151] No, it's what's magical.

[1152] No, they want you to pay for something.

[1153] They want a slave to dig that thing out of the side of a fucking mountain.

[1154] There's something weird about that.

[1155] Don't you think there's also a romance to the idea of a mineral that was made by pressures under the earth over millions of years.

[1156] You think it's just about price.

[1157] I think there maybe is some romance to that.

[1158] But I think with women, there's something nonsensical that's been drilled.

[1159] Not all women, sorry, if you're one of the other.

[1160] Don't fucking generalize.

[1161] I'm not, I swear to God.

[1162] But I think some women have this idea that's been drilled in their head by marketing that you should spend three months of your fucking salary on a rock.

[1163] And it's complete nonsense.

[1164] First of all, if you understand the De Beers, like what they've done with the diamond market, you probably do.

[1165] You know, it's like ridiculously overinflated.

[1166] There's far more diamonds.

[1167] They're far more efficient at getting diamonds out of the ground than they ever were before.

[1168] So they have this insane backlog of diamonds.

[1169] I mean, diamonds aren't rare, but they're stupid expensive, and they really shouldn't be.

[1170] But they've done an amazing job of keeping them stupid expensive.

[1171] That said, if someone can artificially create something that's absolutely, indistinguishable from a diamond there's a part of some women that will think that because that was created by a machine it's not as valuable it doesn't mean as much and it's not worthy of the same sort of appreciation and and you know this this weird thing that women have with you I'm sure you've seen women look at each other's rings and like check out the rings it's it's a symbol of so many different things it's like how much does your man love you you.

[1172] How wealthy is he?

[1173] How well did you do in choosing a mate?

[1174] There's so many things involved with this ridiculous ritual of diamond rings that for whatever reason, those women that have fallen into this nonsense, they're not interested in some sort of a workaround, you know, some sort of a 3D printed diamond ring.

[1175] Even if it's perfect, they don't want it.

[1176] It's marketing.

[1177] I don't know.

[1178] I don't know, man. For me, I mean, maybe if I was being giving it if I was being given a diamond ring and the prices were identical I think and this is where I changed my mind right this is about where the naturalness stuff comes in again right that stone that pyrite even if making that gold cube were actually more expensive than getting it out of the ground there's something about where it came from that enchants it that sort of makes it magical that's what that's part of yellowstone right is that you know they talk about okay the genetics of our you know our bison are they don't come from outside if you're right even if it's indistinguishable to people looking in at the animals there's something about maintaining genealogical purity or something like that that something came from somewhere which I think drives I mean you're probably right I don't know it all goes back to economics right like the steak people like maybe the steak farmers don't actually care but I think Joel Salton would be like no don't call that a steak.

[1179] He would say don't call that a steak and he'd say it's not a steak because it doesn't come from a cow.

[1180] No, I'm sure he would.

[1181] But let me push back on the genealogical thing because Yellowstone in particular has some of the most domesticated elk that you'll ever be around.

[1182] It's so bizarre.

[1183] I was there with my children and we were taking selfies with the elk and they were like 30 or 40 feet away from us.

[1184] It was probably more like 20 yards.

[1185] But close enough that in nature that would fucking never happen, they would run like hell if they saw people or they saw any animal that looked like it was an eyes facing forward predator.

[1186] And in Yellowstone, they're so accustomed to people, and they've actually adapted their behavior to congregate around the parks because they're less likely to be killed by wolves there.

[1187] So they'll go around these, like, visitor areas, and there was a fucking vending machine, and then 30 yards away from the vending machine is an elk, and I have a photo of me standing in front of this Coca -Cola machine looking like this, and then behind me is elk.

[1188] Do you know they used to feed the bears there?

[1189] Oh, yeah.

[1190] I was there when they fed the bears.

[1191] When I was a kid, me and my parents went through Yellowstone when I was like seven or eight years old and there was cars in front of us that would put food out the windows and the bears would put their paw on the car and take food from them.

[1192] I think the elk example is a good one for, I mean, I might be wrong, but for what I was arguing, which is that you seeing the domesticated elk there, right, if Yellowstone, for me when I visited, right, it was like.

[1193] Look at this.

[1194] Look at these bears.

[1195] Yeah, it's incredible.

[1196] Hello.

[1197] Yeah, it's so strange.

[1198] Yeah, I witnessed this firsthand when I was a kid.

[1199] It's a, it's not, they would also congregate.

[1200] Look at that.

[1201] That's really crazy.

[1202] Look at this lady.

[1203] Out of her fucking mind.

[1204] She's going to climb out of the thing.

[1205] I'm sure a lot of people got killed that way, too, by the way.

[1206] This was, they were, the heads of the people that, like, headed up Yellowstone encouraged this stuff.

[1207] Yeah, they didn't know any better.

[1208] Right.

[1209] It took a while before they figured.

[1210] that out.

[1211] Also, you know, the bears, the problem is they, bears are uniquely, they have habits that they form in terms of where they get their food, which is why it's really a problem if a bear gets into your garbage, because they'll never stop going into your garbage.

[1212] You have to, they have to have to kidnap the bear and move it to a zoo or take it to another mountain really far, far away, or they have to kill it.

[1213] Like, there's no other way.

[1214] So this is the elk that you saw at that vending machine.

[1215] And you tell me, I'm curious how you felt about it.

[1216] To me, seeing that kind of thing in Yellowstone is a little disappointing.

[1217] And it's disappointing because I think of Yellowstone as like, you know, and it's advertised this way, right?

[1218] Come here to see, and it's on all the books and the tourist shops, but come here to see pure nature.

[1219] Okay.

[1220] First of all, there's no way.

[1221] There's no way you're going to have buildings and cars in pure nature.

[1222] It's not real.

[1223] I'm a hunter so I go into the woods I get most of my meat from mountains I bow hunt so and one of the reasons why I do this I started out in 2012 because I was either going to become a vegetarian I was going to become a hunter I was watching too many of these PETA videos and I was like this factory farming thing it's insane once you know once you see it you can't unsee it's something you you are also yeah I mean I had just I had tried to figure out a way to I had to morally I was coming to this point in the road where I was like I've got to do something I either have to figure out a way to acquire my own meat and be comfortable enough like I've never killed an animal I mean I need to be able to kill this animal and eat it and be comfortable with it or not like I don't know if I am and once I went hunting I realized like this is probably the most insanely connected way and it really hit some switches inside of your body inside of your DNA that I didn't even know we're there and these switches that like connect you to it's almost like a psychedelic experience it's very strange like being in the wilderness stalking an animal and locking eyes with it and hunting it and then wind up eating it over a fire it's it's all these switches go on it's very strange in a very positive way in a in a very reverential way like you revere this animal like you you you you appreciate it in this really intense way.

[1224] But these are wild, wild animals.

[1225] You're domesticating an animal if they're hanging out on a lawn.

[1226] Like I was looking at the house once in Colorado with my family and we went out into the backyard and there was a giant deer like a huge buck that was just standing there staring us.

[1227] And it was in Boulder, Colorado.

[1228] And I don't know if you ever been to Boulder, Colorado, but it's like a lot of hippies.

[1229] And obviously no one's hunting in Boulder, Colorado.

[1230] So these deer are completely relaxed.

[1231] They're just chilling.

[1232] And so this deer is, I mean, no more than 100 feet away from us, just staring at us, just looking at us, and then just moves around a little and eats some grass and looks at us again.

[1233] And my wife was like, I didn't even think that was real.

[1234] I thought it was a statue until it started moving.

[1235] I would never kill that deer.

[1236] Not in a fucking million years.

[1237] That's like killing someone's dog.

[1238] There's no way.

[1239] I mean, I would have to be starving to kill that deer.

[1240] But if I was in the woods and I saw a deer that big, I would be very excited.

[1241] I'd be like, wow, that's like hundreds of pounds of meat.

[1242] Look at the size of that deer.

[1243] It's an amazing specimen.

[1244] And it's a big, old, mature deer, which means that it's passed its jeans on for many, many years.

[1245] And a deer only has, if they're really lucky, they have nine, ten years, and then they get killed by wolves or mountain lions or whatever.

[1246] That would be the perfect animal to hunt.

[1247] but in this scenario there was none of those switches went off.

[1248] I'm like, that's a domesticated animal.

[1249] That might as well be a chihuahua.

[1250] Right, yeah.

[1251] And it feels, and that's part of the criteria you're using for whether it's okay to kill it.

[1252] I mean, that's one of the things with the bison hunt in Yellowstone that seems so weird, right?

[1253] It's like these bizarre.

[1254] You know, these animals that have no idea what's waiting for them cross this line and then all of a sudden they're magically available to be shot.

[1255] That's a complicated issue.

[1256] One of the reasons why it's a complicated issue is because buffalo contain brucellosis.

[1257] They have brucellosis, which can be very dangerous to domestic cattle.

[1258] And whether or not they transmit it to domestic cattle, the same argument could be said about elk.

[1259] They also occasionally have bruselosis, and there's a lot of ranchers who want to shoot elk that wind up eating their hay and eating their grass.

[1260] So when these bison drift off of Yellowstone and they go into public land or they go into private land, it's an issue of resources oftentimes.

[1261] Oh, you have to call them.

[1262] I'm just thinking of this, and I'm not a hunter, although interestingly, I went to Yellowstone again, right?

[1263] This is this whole, I'm not sure about stuff.

[1264] I didn't know anything about hunting.

[1265] I assumed hunting was, I don't know, bat.

[1266] Like people go out, they kill endangered species, right?

[1267] Like whatever I had seen, that was it.

[1268] And when I went to Yellowstone, you know, when I discovered that Doug Smith, who's the guy that reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, when he, he.

[1269] He was like, I hunt.

[1270] You know, and like my first reaction was, what, wait, what, I thought you loved animal?

[1271] Like, how could this man who cares about nature?

[1272] And, you know, and what became clear, as you know, and like many hunters know, is that it doesn't work like that.

[1273] Hunting doesn't mean you don't care about nature.

[1274] It doesn't mean you don't care about animals.

[1275] And that was a real, that was a wake -up call for me that I didn't understand, you know, how people relate to the natural world.

[1276] had been fed a kind of, I don't know, oversimplified, ultra -processed version of what it was to hunt.

[1277] At the same time with those bison, you got to cull them, right?

[1278] So you got to get rid of them.

[1279] And like you said, right, there's this resource.

[1280] You know, you don't want them wandering on a rancher's land.

[1281] And that's something that, you know, the people in Yellowstone will, you know, activists are happy to tell you, yes, these kinds of things are problems.

[1282] As a hunter, though, I imagine that you wouldn't be super excited to just like camp out and shoot a bison.

[1283] as it wandered into, like slowly into, I mean, I don't know, would you.

[1284] It would only be for meat.

[1285] You mean, it would be that you wanted organic meat and you wanted to be able to do it that way.

[1286] But not the excitement of what you were talking about.

[1287] It wouldn't be predator versus prey, and it wouldn't be what you would call fair chase.

[1288] Right.

[1289] You know, and that's, I mean, it would be technically fair chase because the animal does wander up, but you have to admit that those animals have been grossly domesticated.

[1290] I mean, when we were in Yellowstone, bison were everywhere.

[1291] You could just stand there and stare at them.

[1292] I brought binoculars.

[1293] I was handing them to my kids and they're standing like, look at this one over here.

[1294] And they're like, you know, they weren't even remotely concerned about us.

[1295] I mean, that's also why a 70 -year -old woman was gored just three days ago because this crazy lady decided she wanted to take a selfie with a fucking bison.

[1296] You know, there are wild animals.

[1297] I mean, they are wild, but they're not wild like a wild animal.

[1298] They're not wild like a wild animal that doesn't have a real relationship with people.

[1299] But bison, this is where it's tricky, when there was no Yellowstone and when there was no, you know, no place where they could be domesticated, they're still an easy animal to hunt.

[1300] Right.

[1301] They've always been easy because they're so big that they're not concerned about wolves, they're not concerned about anything.

[1302] In fact, one of the ways that Native Americans would hunt them is they would kill wolves and they would wear a wolf coat and they would crawl around like a wolf.

[1303] coyote cult.

[1304] So they would put it on their head and they would walk on all fours up close to it and then shoot it with a bow and arrow.

[1305] And there's actually a famous painting of this Wild West famous painting of these two Native American hunters that are wearing these coyote skins and they're crawling in this field up to these bison.

[1306] And a friend of mine who was my friend Remy Warren who's a host of a television show called Apex Predator actually use this method to hunt a bison.

[1307] You mean like I had a...

[1308] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1309] He actually put a coyote skin on and crawled up to a bison, to a free -range bison, and hunted it this way, just to see if it would work just like this famous painting.

[1310] So bison, one of the reasons why, you know, they were able to almost extirpate them from the United States was that they're really easy to hunt because they're not scared of anything.

[1311] Nothing can fuck with them in the real world, Because in the real wild world, wolves can't fuck with bison's.

[1312] They'll stomp up wolf.

[1313] The wolf doesn't even have a chance.

[1314] Like, grizzly bears can, and they have.

[1315] And there's actually a video really recently from about a month ago of a grizzly bear killing a bison in Yellowstone while all these people were watching.

[1316] There's cars parked.

[1317] And this fucking grizzly bear jumps on the back of a bison and is bringing it down.

[1318] It's a long, there it is right there.

[1319] It's a long, drawn out process too.

[1320] That's a small bison.

[1321] but you know big enough and this bear is fucking huge and look at this bear is like i mean it's like that's probably like a two -year -old bison or something like that it's not like a full -grown bison but i mean this is all this this this video is like seven minutes how what is it long or it's one 14 there it's edited yeah so i mean you see him in all these different scenes it's these cut scenes and here he's he finally gets them uh and he kills him in this river but he's attacking him on a bridge, he's attacking him on a road.

[1322] It's a long, drawn -out process for this grizzly bear to kill this bison.

[1323] Yeah.

[1324] So they don't really have that much to worry about.

[1325] Caves have to worry.

[1326] So this is the video, that's the, excuse me, the painting.

[1327] That's the famous painting.

[1328] And see, bison's have zero concern for wolves because they'll just stomp them.

[1329] I mean, they're enormous animals, and their hide can be like 12 inches thick of hair.

[1330] I mean, especially in the wintertime, Like the Native Americans that would wear the bison robes, like it was the most incredible protection for from cold because you're wearing this insane natural thing that has shielded bison to the point where they can just walk out in a blizzard.

[1331] They don't give a fuck.

[1332] They're not even a little concerned about it.

[1333] That painting, and I was like, that sounds familiar.

[1334] Like he's talking about that.

[1335] It was on the cover of a book called The Ecological Indian.

[1336] I think it's called by a guy named Shepard Kretsch, which is he was looking at the history.

[1337] I mean, for one, speaking of Native Americans in Yellowstone, how crazy is it that because we think of natural as not human involved, one of the things to make Yellowstone natural is he got rid of all of the humans that were living there naturally.

[1338] I mean, I remember I went, there was actually, when I was there, there was a hunting blind that was left over from when Native Americans were in Yellowstone.

[1339] And my guide, yeah, it was really cool.

[1340] My guide showed me, just like it's, you know, just a little hunting blind that they would use.

[1341] and it also yeah again right it made me realize right yellowstone is not pure nature that even our understanding of of nature and naturalness if you get rid of like getting rid of humans right is getting rid of a part of the naturalness of what this place was before or just having humans in cars in close proximity to these animals and getting them conditioned to it that becomes unnatural but even you know and or does it well yeah I think it does right I use I would have wanted to say a long time ago, oh, no, there's no such difference.

[1342] But yeah, no, man, a fucking road is less natural than no road.

[1343] I don't know.

[1344] And the same thing happened with sports, which was, I mean, with Yellowstone, right, there is more and less natural, right?

[1345] And it would be sad if Yellowstone became much more unnatural.

[1346] It would take away from, you know, if they put in like an amusement park or whatever is they're trying to do to figure out how to race funds it at these places.

[1347] And it's because part of what we value about Yellowstone, even though it's impure and even though it's imperfect is that we get we get to see something more natural than what we you yeah than a zoo exactly it's far superior to a zoo exactly because you can see that you can see a grizzly bear no one's feeding the grizzly bears the grizzly bear has to eat by killing that bison right that's far superior and that's the same thing with the same thing with sports so like i that was another one of the things that really convinced me that i needed to rethink my relationship with naturalness which is that you know so i went to a i went to a i went went to a natural bodybuilding competition.

[1348] I know you had Ronnie Coleman on, like, I'd never been to a bodybuilding competition before.

[1349] And so I went in, and it was a natural bodybuilding competition.

[1350] And these, you know, these people were, they had, you could smell the spray tan from, you know, I was in the, I was in the room with them backstage.

[1351] I was like, these are the most unnatural people I've ever seen, right?

[1352] They've been, what is it called, sodium cycling or something to, like, cut their subcutaneous fat so that they, I mean, they've done everything you could, possibly do to get their bodies into this form and I'm I'm like what this is a great example this was going to be my example that I used to show that naturalness in sports was stupid because all it really meant was that you weren't taking a certain list of drugs right that's it that's all it meant everything else about it was unnatural right from the tans but but the the truth is that sports are about naturalness that they are a celebration of naturalness talent there's no way you know people call it god -given talent right which is again the the connection between god and nature but you can't have sports as we understand them without thinking about them as a celebration of what the human body can do right when you see that guy Alex Honnold is that his name yet when you see him free climbing like that yeah a part of what you're thinking i think i mean it's not just that he's like he could die right but it's also like look up with the human body unaided by anything else.

[1353] Look what it can do.

[1354] And that's why we care when Elliot Kipchogi, you know, when he runs his marathon record, it makes sense to ask how much was in the shoes.

[1355] Not because I could run that fast, you know, with those shoes on.

[1356] Explain what you mean by that.

[1357] Yeah.

[1358] So when you're setting, you know, setting a marathon record, there's an incredible marathoner named Elliot Kipchogi.

[1359] And there are these, Nike had these new shoes called Vaporflies.

[1360] and he was using these shoes.

[1361] And after he broke the marathon record, just shattered it, people were like, wait a second, how much of that can be attributed to him and how much of it is just the technology in the shoes, right?

[1362] And this set off again, one of these like back in force that was totally useless online, where some people were like, I can't believe you're taking his accomplishment away from him.

[1363] And other people were like, it's obviously the shoes.

[1364] But for me, it's just a broader conversation about, well, so what is it?

[1365] we care about in sports, right?

[1366] If you put a pair of shoes on someone and all of a sudden they're 5 % 10 % faster, that matters, right?

[1367] Jamie, you actually know about this, right?

[1368] You're a runner.

[1369] What is...

[1370] Or I have a version of them.

[1371] How much...

[1372] They've made them...

[1373] The pair he has is very, very specific to what he was trying to do.

[1374] Is that the pair he has?

[1375] Yeah, they tailored the course to be specific for it also.

[1376] Yeah.

[1377] They brought in top -level pacers to cycle in every, like, I don't know, probably every mile.

[1378] I don't know exactly how they did it, but when they first started making these pair of shoes, they're called the 4%.

[1379] Because they made you 4 % faster.

[1380] Really?

[1381] There was a, I think, like a titanium plate placed in the middle of it.

[1382] So like normal, like even the shoe I have now, you can bend this and half and whatnot.

[1383] You can't do this with that shoe.

[1384] Because the plates, as you hit, it like launches you kind of forward.

[1385] Like a spring.

[1386] It's not a spring, so it's just a very minute.

[1387] assistance but the best runner in the world it helped them get 15940 they're actually selling these insoles that are made out of carbon fiber similar to that now that big ass heel on the back which is so prepot my wife has a pair of those and I'm like what the fuck is that heel at least seems so crazy to walk around with that they're really weird to walk around and I don't think I've ever worn them here I have a pair at home they're specifically for running on the road fast So on the street Not sprinting.

[1388] So that's why it's got all the cushion.

[1389] Right.

[1390] They're very specific for that.

[1391] Yeah.

[1392] So that's a real good question, right?

[1393] Is that how much of a factor?

[1394] I would think you would fucking, you'd have to wear a regular pair of shoes if you want to break a record.

[1395] That's right.

[1396] So this is, that's exactly.

[1397] Right.

[1398] So then with, right, and you would never do this with a mathematician, right?

[1399] If a mathematician had a new proof, right?

[1400] You'd never be like, now hold on a second.

[1401] Were you drinking coffee?

[1402] Wait, did you like, no one, no one cares.

[1403] like did you when you invented that new car what kind of substance new tropics yeah exactly no one cares because the way we evaluate mathematical but what we care about with a mathematical proof for a new invention isn't showcasing the natural talent you know whatever that means because it's a tough thing to you know the mathematician whereas with kip chogi's record what we're wondering at in part is what is he doing what is he doing in a way that is separate from what his shoes are doing and that means that in sports at least I have to admit that naturalness is an important factor it is an important factor but it's a weird one because it's not an even slate it's not like like it's not an even playing field like some people have just incredible genetic gifts and some people don't now if a person doesn't and they take some creatine in a bunch of different substances and they they get in a cryotank every day after training and then they're in a sauna every day and then they're doing all these different things where they're they have electronics strapped to them to try to monitor their heart rate and make sure that they're getting the exact right amount of training and no more and no less and that the recovery is perfect before they train harder how fucking natural is that not very natural that's the problem right is when you said the gift like isn't phil heath i mean i found out all this stuff about but i think his nickname is the gift and someone called Randy Coleman is that his name like freak of nature right we'll say this about people Ronnie Coleman sorry yeah he's like I mean people will say like oh could I get like could you get built like that Ronnie's the first to admit it yeah on the podcast he talked about it pretty openly even with what Jew and whatever right this is like when I talked to one of the natural bodybuilders backstage he was like man I don't if people want to juice they can juice there's no way you know these people are still Ronnie Coleman's still like an incredible athlete.

[1404] Well, Ronnie didn't choose for many, many years into his bodybuilding career.

[1405] And then once he started doing, he just, he did it because he got tired of losing to people that he didn't think he should lose to.

[1406] Right.

[1407] But, but, you know, going back to what you're saying, which is true, right, is how natural is it if you're doing all of these things?

[1408] So yes, sports is impure, right?

[1409] In the same way, like, how fucking natural is Yellowstone?

[1410] There's a road going through it.

[1411] You got these domesticated out.

[1412] At the same time, you can't take that criteria away entirely, right?

[1413] Or, I mean, to give you an example, right?

[1414] Let's take Marcus Rem or Oscar Pistorius, who people know about, right?

[1415] The guy with the murderer, the murderer with, with Blades.

[1416] South African runner.

[1417] Yeah, that's right.

[1418] South African runner.

[1419] So you can't, like, you can't just let him put on any kind of leg, right?

[1420] Right.

[1421] Right.

[1422] He can't have rocket launchers on his legs, right?

[1423] That would be unfair.

[1424] And he can't have, like, you know, I don't know.

[1425] Pistons and Pistons or whatever.

[1426] Exactly.

[1427] But even, let's imagine that like you could just invent a leg with no mechanics in it, right?

[1428] But it just made him incredibly fast, much faster than any human being.

[1429] You'd be like, nope, that's unfair.

[1430] We don't allow that.

[1431] That is the argument about those cheetah legs, right?

[1432] That's exactly right.

[1433] So then what do you have to do?

[1434] You have to test.

[1435] So a recent case happened.

[1436] They allowed Pistorius in, but there's a German guy, Marcus Rem, who also wanted to compete and was using one of these legs.

[1437] and they did all these tests, right?

[1438] And they ran tests on, you know, they do these pressure plates.

[1439] It's really incredible what they do to see whether his leg gives him an advantage over what?

[1440] A natural leg, right?

[1441] So the baseline comparison here is, does your artificial leg give you an advantage over a natural leg?

[1442] But then whose natural leg?

[1443] Is it your natural leg or is Hussein Bolt's natural leg?

[1444] Well, I think in his, yeah, exactly.

[1445] So in his case, it's that what they tried to do with these blades is they're like, Okay, let's figure out, because he's all, you know, all of these guys are world -class athletes, right?

[1446] So it's some weird hypothetical, right?

[1447] Where if Marcus Rem had a leg, would he be performing at about the same level as he does with his artificial leg?

[1448] And that, and as weird as it is, as paradoxical as it is, I think it makes sense, right?

[1449] It makes sense in the same.

[1450] And it depends on the sport, too.

[1451] Like UFC, I look this up.

[1452] So I was like, I wonder if there's anyone with an artificial limb.

[1453] in UFC and then I was thinking because I did judo and I was like wait a second that'd be crazy because like you couldn't like you couldn't allow someone to have like a prosthetic arm because you couldn't you couldn't like arm bar them like you could you could just yeah you wouldn't feel any pain so unlike running where I can imagine it being fair to allow someone to have an artificial limb and that's what I mean is like fair compared to a natural limb it would I can't imagine a scenario in which a prosthetic arm or even a hand yeah or even a hand because it would be metal that's exactly right you just just beat the crap out of you know you wouldn't break it no you would have to like if someone had their hand replaced you'd have to literally engineer bones that had a breaking point that were similar to organic bones exactly natural right so you'd have to engineer it to be like less good than carbon fiber bones right you'd have to make it worse yeah and then you'd have scientists right you'd have you would have USC fighters who are like no I still think the prosthetic hand is given this given this person an advantage right and then that person would be like well we got to call in the scientists and they're going to like do all these bone breaking tests, you know, which is what they did with with these two athletes, which is what, which is what they're doing also with transgender athletes who want to compete.

[1454] It's the same kind of logic, right?

[1455] Which is what is the, what's the comparison between, say, and in the case of a transgender woman who is competing, what's the baseline natural comparison?

[1456] In other words, does being a transgender woman?

[1457] In other words, does being transgender woman give you an advantage over being a biological woman.

[1458] The only difference is there's an inclination towards allowing them to compete because it makes you seem more progressive.

[1459] There's a motivation to allowing transgender women athletes to compete because if you look at the oppressive, you know, if you have an oppression scale, they are one level or two levels past being a biological woman.

[1460] Being a biological woman is more oppressed than being a biological.

[1461] When a woman kicks a man's ass, we're all happy.

[1462] When a man kicks a woman's ass, we're very upset, right?

[1463] Well, with it with, yeah, I mean, I think, I think there is right now in this cultural moment.

[1464] I think there's, in the same way that there was, you know, I mean, women didn't box in the Olympics until 2012, because for a long time, it was thought that women aren't, they're not naturally suited to boxing, right?

[1465] I think the first.

[1466] first sports they played in the Olympics where I don't think they did like sailing and gymnastics um even later like the very earliest Olympics there weren't any way the guy who founded the Olympics was like not women women will just you know women will stay out of this and right now I mean I think you're right that there is because sports are so symbolically important right I mean you see this with everything with Colin Kaepernick with whatever sports are really important to people sports you know sports stars are heroes and so I do think that a part of the transgender rights movement is going to be securing the ability for transgender athletes to compete under the gender that they identify as.

[1467] And I understand that.

[1468] I think it makes sense.

[1469] I think it makes sense to want that because you want cultural representation.

[1470] At the same time, I don't think you're going to find, maybe you'll nutpick them, right?

[1471] You can find them online.

[1472] You're not going to find a lot of athletes who think that there shouldn't be any regulations on how transgender athletes compete.

[1473] In other words, there are very few people who are actually involved in the Olympics, right?

[1474] Like setting up the rules or whatever.

[1475] I mean, I talked with a transgender scientist named Joanna Harper about this who studies the differences between transgender athletes and athletes who identifies their biological sex.

[1476] And there's no way she would say, it doesn't matter, let anyone compete without any regulations.

[1477] So the real question on the ground, I think that people are arguing about is not whether there should be regulations, but what regulations should there be?

[1478] And that question, I mean, I don't know how, I mean, you probably follow this a lot, but like, same question is like, what do you do with testosterone levels, right?

[1479] So duty chand, right?

[1480] Let's say you're hyperandrogenous, but you're XX chromosome.

[1481] Yeah, explain that woman who's, this is the issue with her.

[1482] Yeah, so one of the things that people try to do in sports, because it's important, to have, there's some philosophers will argue it's not, but I think it's crazy.

[1483] It's important to have men's sports and women's sports, right?

[1484] It's important because sports are symbolically important, and we want to have women competing at the very highest levels, and we want men competing at the very highest levels.

[1485] And there's a, you know...

[1486] There's a significant difference in strength.

[1487] Yeah, it's plus or minus 10%.

[1488] They've studied this, right?

[1489] Depending on the sport, right?

[1490] So, you know, power lifting.

[1491] It's a huge difference.

[1492] There's certain sports where it's not, like, ultramarathon.

[1493] That's why the IOC is banned transgender athletes from competing in power.

[1494] lifting so so so that's this this stuff is it's important have these categories right but then how do you distinguish so going back to dutichand right so if you make a testosterone rule for example so you can only have testosterone you know you can only compete as a woman if your testosterone is below a particular level that's the problem with that is they would have to test it every day and they would have to test it multiple times a day because it's not just how it is when you're competing it's what it's like when you're training so how much recovery how much muscle have you you retained, there's, there's a lot of factors.

[1495] Well, and the fact that there are women who are, who are X, who are X, X, who are hyperandrogenous, right?

[1496] And that's just like, I mean, we were talking about being a freak of nature, right, or having a gift.

[1497] There's people with high blood cell counts, right?

[1498] There's people with really long arms or, you know, webbed hands or whatever.

[1499] So it's like, well, and this woman actually made her argument.

[1500] And I totally, I mean, it's incredible.

[1501] It's really powerful when you read it.

[1502] She's like, here I am.

[1503] I have naturally high testosterone.

[1504] and they're going to tell me that I have to artificially lower my natural testosterone levels so that I can compete in the Olympics.

[1505] It's a particularly sexist argument, too, because they don't do that with men.

[1506] Right.

[1507] There's men that have competed in the Olympics that have naturally high testosterone, and, you know, they've dominated other men, and particularly in wrestling.

[1508] You know, like, if you see, like, do you know where Alexander Correllan is?

[1509] No. Alexander Corellan is a very famous Russian wrestler who they used to call the experiment because his parents are both like 5 -5 and 5 -7.

[1510] They're like smaller folks and he's fucking enormous and he's terrifying.

[1511] Go to go to that picture that I put on my Instagram.

[1512] I put up a picture on my Instagram that I look at this picture every couple of, you know, months or so just to remind myself what a tremendous pussy I am.

[1513] Oh my gosh.

[1514] That's Corellin.

[1515] Correllan used to take men.

[1516] I mean, we're talking about men that were 300 pounds and they would flatten themselves out on the ground to try to avoid being picked up by him and he would scoop his hands under their belly and hoist them up in the air like they were a pillow and throw them onto the ground literally look at that picture of him with the red shirt the one right there no right there look at the size of that motherfucker I mean just unstoppable for years and years in the Olympics and I mean I don't know whether that's science or nature but if it's just nature you can't tell me that this guy doesn't have some kind of crazy genetic advantage that the average man just does not.

[1517] And that's what we celebrate, right?

[1518] I mean, that's what we love seeing.

[1519] In some ways, yeah.

[1520] You know, when we watch sports, I mean, sure, Alex Honnold, like, he probably has some kind of genetic thing where he's just not scared of the same stuff where he loves being scared, whatever it is, right?

[1521] I don't think it's genetic at all with Alex.

[1522] I've had Alex on a couple of times.

[1523] Really?

[1524] Does he just love it?

[1525] He really loves climbing, and he, the way he says it, he's like, you're in control and it's pretty mellow.

[1526] He's like when, you know, that's how he talks.

[1527] He talks like really, you know, really calm and smooth.

[1528] And that's how he climbs.

[1529] He's like, if there's a thrill, something's really wrong.

[1530] Like if I feel like if there's an actual thrill, I'm kind of fucked.

[1531] He goes, everything is very mellow.

[1532] It's very slow and very mellow.

[1533] That's not, that is not built into me. I'd be absolutely.

[1534] I think it's a thing that his, his managing of that environment, and that sort of situation is part of the thrill of it for him.

[1535] It's trained.

[1536] It's trained or something.

[1537] Yes, for sure.

[1538] I mean, he's been climbing forever.

[1539] It's the ability to stay calm in where he's at least sub -con - well, he's consciously aware of the consequences of slipping and falling.

[1540] But he's figured out a way to stay in this zone and there's some sort of a tremendous reward in staying in this zone, so much so that he wants to do without any aid.

[1541] He wants to do it without any ropes.

[1542] Would you be disappointed if you, and I'm thinking about how I would feel, too, as I asked this question, if you found out that he took some kind of downer to, like, keep himself calm on the mountain?

[1543] Like if you found, this, like, the steroid version of, you know, yeah, like, exactly.

[1544] Yeah, I mean, beta blockers are real.

[1545] I mean, beta blockers are a real problem in the world of competitive archery.

[1546] Really?

[1547] Yeah, yeah, but they take beta blockers to, so that when, you know, the shit's on the line and this is like the final match and they're looking at a 60 meter target, they just stay.

[1548] calm and they can keep their arms steady and let that arrow fly.

[1549] I didn't know that, but that's another great example of what is it that you care about?

[1550] Well, a part of it is you're like, okay, under normal, right, what is this person's natural ability or what is their non -chemical or whatever it is, right?

[1551] Whatever you want to call it?

[1552] I've never taken beta blockers.

[1553] I actually got them prescribed to me once by a doctor because I wanted to try them and I wanted never trying them.

[1554] I just wanted to see what it was like to do something.

[1555] Just for my own curiosity, I want to see what it was like to do something nerve -wracking while it was on beta blockers.

[1556] Yeah, I was going to use them on a hunting trip, but I didn't because I felt like I would be disappointed in myself if I did that, which is really crazy because on a hunting trip, you'd think the most important thing is making an ethical shot.

[1557] But I was my thought process was I trained so hard to make an ethical shot and to be accurate and to practice my shot -making routine until it's something.

[1558] It's like drilled into my head.

[1559] I don't want to take a pill.

[1560] So I just, and I don't, I still have them somewhere.

[1561] I don't even know if they're any good because they're like six years old.

[1562] But I want to know what that feels like.

[1563] It would probably feel really weird to have no adrenaline when you know you should.

[1564] Right.

[1565] And like what you were saying too is it takes away.

[1566] There are certain experiences.

[1567] Yeah.

[1568] Where part of what you value about the experience is how, you know, how you manage it.

[1569] How you managed it and how you trained yourself.

[1570] Like you said, right?

[1571] You don't want it to be a pill that did it.

[1572] And sports is one of those things, whereas it would be crazy to, you know, to think to yourself, well, I'll give you an example.

[1573] Well, this is, it's funny, right, childbirth, right?

[1574] So it'd be crazy to go in the dentist office and be like, you know, I'd be really disappointed in myself if the way I manage this filling is by using, you know, Novacane.

[1575] Yeah, Novacane, right?

[1576] It's like, I'd just be, I'd be really sad about myself, you know, please don't give me anything.

[1577] I'm going to handle it myself.

[1578] That's insane.

[1579] insane, to me at least.

[1580] But people do that with childbirth.

[1581] Yeah.

[1582] Because childbirth like sports is one of those experiences where a part of what some people want is a sense of kind of primal connection.

[1583] And that was something I didn't understand.

[1584] I thought it was totally, I was like, why would anyone ever want to experience, like, you could just have an epidural.

[1585] Yeah.

[1586] You know?

[1587] Yeah, you could just have no pain.

[1588] Right.

[1589] Well, that would be bad.

[1590] Right.

[1591] That sounds like a great option.

[1592] right you know yeah um but but like you were saying right so with sports but back to duty chan right because i think it's really important because this is going to come up and in our fucking cultural environment it's going to be nuts right and i want people i hate the like i hate how bad the conversations are honestly about transgender athletes because they are so binary and so simplistic that i think that they're going to yeah on both sides that they're going to be there that that when there is actually an athlete competing in the Olympics who is transgender, it's going to happen soon.

[1593] It's going to rip everyone apart.

[1594] And instead, what I would like to see is people who understand the complexity of stuff like being an X, X, X, X, athlete with hyperandrogenism or alternatively, right?

[1595] So say you do it with chromosomes.

[1596] So now you're X, Y, if you're, you know, for the sake of sports, hypothetically, we're going to define you as a woman if you're X, X, X, and a man if you're X, but then you've got people who are X, Y, but androgen insensitive.

[1597] So these are people who biologically essentially grow up as women and they look like women.

[1598] They compete as women.

[1599] And then they have a chromosome.

[1600] They have a test, right?

[1601] And they find out that they're X, Y, but they're androgen insensitive.

[1602] And this has been, this was an issue in the Olympics.

[1603] Well, in 1985.

[1604] There was a woman who's now a physician who had been competing as a woman her whole life.

[1605] Then the test came back.

[1606] And she was like, well, that's crazy.

[1607] Was she hermaphrodite?

[1608] She was not, I mean, as I understand it, she was just androgen insensitive.

[1609] So she was not intersex.

[1610] This woman wasn't.

[1611] So did she have a penis?

[1612] She did not.

[1613] So she had a vagina.

[1614] That's correct.

[1615] But she had a Y chromosome.

[1616] That's right.

[1617] Wow.

[1618] Right?

[1619] So, but then what ends up happening, and again, I've read so many of these arguments, and I want people to have interesting discussions about this is people will say they'll look at this.

[1620] And on one side of the argument, people will be.

[1621] like, well, then she was just, you know, if it's X, you know, if it's X, X, Y, she's a man. That's it.

[1622] Like, she's just a man without a penis, right?

[1623] She's the outlier of all outliers, right?

[1624] So people use outliers to try to break down all of the category.

[1625] On the other side, people would be like, well, since there are outliers, clearly the categories themselves don't make sense.

[1626] But that's not true either, right?

[1627] Obviously, the categories for sports of biological males and biological females are very important categories that do make sense.

[1628] and there are also outliers that make it hard to decide.

[1629] Yeah.

[1630] That's it.

[1631] And then we have a conversation about the difficulties with the outliers, and we try to, at least for my part, we try to embrace the complexity of those situations.

[1632] Yeah, it's so weird with sports, because with sports, first of all, did you ever see the documentary, Icarus?

[1633] Yes, it did, right?

[1634] Well, it highlights, if you haven't seen it, folks, it highlights how prevalent cheating is.

[1635] It's really, and so when you're talking about sports, you're talking about people that are willing to, first of all, push their body literally to the brink of failure for success.

[1636] And then they're also willing to take exogenous drugs to succeed.

[1637] Then they're also, in this case, Russia was complicit in aiding them and perhaps even forcing them to do.

[1638] do this and they had this elaborate system set up at the Sochi Olympics to cheat.

[1639] And so when you're talking about sports, that's part of the thing.

[1640] It's like people are law, they're, everyone wants fair, right?

[1641] They're looking for fairness.

[1642] But what the fuck is fairness?

[1643] It's very, very difficult.

[1644] It's very weird.

[1645] And this is something that, you know, I've admitted openly with this, the transgender argument, the, there are outliers.

[1646] And there's outliers that are female athletes, like, first of all, African -Americans.

[1647] American females have the same bone density as a lot of Caucasian men.

[1648] The bone density argument's a weird one because men generally have thicker bone density, particularly men that lift weights, have denser bones than females.

[1649] But some women have dense bones.

[1650] You know, there's some women, like, there's some women fighters that have real knockout power.

[1651] And then there's some women fighters that just don't.

[1652] They just don't for whatever reason.

[1653] Structurally, they don't generate the same amount of force.

[1654] Like, what's fair?

[1655] What is fair?

[1656] Because there's some people that are just gifted.

[1657] They're just gifted physically.

[1658] This is why sports is so weird.

[1659] I don't know.

[1660] I have no idea how things break, I don't know how things break down along racial lines.

[1661] But with men and women, it's a particularly clear thing.

[1662] And it's also something that we have as a category.

[1663] Right.

[1664] So then that forces the question on us in a way that is difficult, right?

[1665] Like you were saying, what is fair?

[1666] Every single athlete at world class level, in a certain sense, is a freak of nature, right?

[1667] They are all, they all have certain kinds of gifts.

[1668] Many of them.

[1669] Many of them are freaks of just will and determination.

[1670] Right.

[1671] And that means that fairness is going to be a really, really hard thing to pin down.

[1672] And like you said, too, right, they're going to be have training regimens.

[1673] They're going to be taking all kinds of supplements.

[1674] They're going to be doing all of these things that are obviously, you know, not natural.

[1675] But at the same time, we want to have rules about what kind of shoes they can wear, right?

[1676] And what kind of drugs they can take.

[1677] And sports are so important to people, right?

[1678] They're so symbolically important that I just, I get scared.

[1679] Honestly, I get scared.

[1680] I mean, this brings us back sort of to the beginning of the conversation.

[1681] but I get really scared about the way in which people are going to be able to ultra -process whatever happens.

[1682] And this is on every side of the debate.

[1683] What's going to happen is people are going to take whatever they see and they're going to go nuts with it.

[1684] Right.

[1685] But that's sort of on them.

[1686] It sucks, but it is sort of on them.

[1687] We really should be embracing these nuanced discussions because this is what's critical for understanding the, the true.

[1688] true nature of things.

[1689] And these people that are willfully distorting people's messages and taking these ultra -processed versions, whether it's a clip or soundbite or even worse, in quotes, a segment with dot, dot, dot, dot at the end, the idea that you can do that and reframe what is really a really nuanced conversation where people are exploring the very nature of all things.

[1690] You know, whether it's farming or athletics or pollination or especially like your book, which is really, what I've read of it, is really fantastic.

[1691] The idea behind it is it's such an important thing to discuss because we do have this binary idea of natural and unnatural processed and this, you know, it's on them if they want to do that.

[1692] Like it sucks that people do do that and that they pretend that your argument is different than it really is.

[1693] But that's on you.

[1694] You're just being a fool.

[1695] like it's it sucks that so many people get sucked into these kind of debates in these conversations but you can't do that to someone face to face you can't have that conversation with someone in a real setting of sitting down talking looking at each other eye to eye because that's the only way people are really supposed to be talking you can't do it but it's not I mean even if it's on them sort of morally doesn't it I mean it worries me because it ends up changing society it ends up changing people's lives for sure some people get fired for deception, for the same reason, because people are deceptive about what they meant and what they were trying to portray.

[1696] Or also, that someone can just make a statement, and instead of there being a discussion about that statement, they're fired and their life is ruined and they're publicly shamed, and then we get to share it and laugh and mock them, whether it's through an article or a video like that girl with the finger cut, the Black Lives Matter girl.

[1697] Or we end up focused on stupid shit, right?

[1698] It's like right now, just to take that current example, like police reform, yes, right?

[1699] I think that what happens is we get distracted and divided by fringe issues that are fed by the ultra -processed information, so we end up focusing on them, which makes it very difficult to actually, and politicians, like you were saying, right, they're looking at this and they're like, okay, I'm going to have to weigh in on those issues.

[1700] And so that ends up dividing politicians when, in fact, people agree on a lot of things.

[1701] They agree on a lot of things.

[1702] People want, for example, with the police, right?

[1703] as I understand, the vast majority of Americans want police held accountable for using excessive violence.

[1704] Yes.

[1705] It may be, it maybe it is on people for eating the wrong information.

[1706] It's on me or whatever, becoming polarized.

[1707] But, but it ends up making us as a society incapable of getting together and making the changes that we actually all agree on if we only, if we were only able to sit down to talk.

[1708] I don't think it's on people.

[1709] that eat the wrong information, I think that's very unfortunate.

[1710] It's on the people who distribute the information deceptively.

[1711] The people that are distorting, willfully distorting, like someone like you were saying, if we have this conversation, look, we've talked about a bunch of hot button subjects that could get us canceled.

[1712] And you could take any segment of a conversation like that and likely find a few things that people could take out of context, and it would spur this whole debate on what a piece of shit you are.

[1713] And this is something that people like to do for whatever reason.

[1714] They like to willfully distort a nuanced discussion and take a segment out of context and change the narrative and turn it into something it's not.

[1715] That's on them.

[1716] That is on them.

[1717] It's not on the people that listen to it and get sucked into it.

[1718] I feel for them and I'm sorry and I don't enjoy it when it happens to me. the people who do that willfully, you are wasting your life, distorting reality because you wish things to be a different way, or because you're deceptive, or because you're bitter or spiteful or angrier, hateful, or you see in you, this other person that you're targeting, you see in them something that you don't like in yourself or something in a past lover or something in your father or whatever the fuck it is.

[1719] You know, that's on you.

[1720] That's on you.

[1721] I can't, I can't worry about that there's not enough time in this life yeah no it's it's i do agree with i think you're right to like focus on so i'm i'll tell you let me tell you a about about a terrible person um there's there's we should have some cue up some spooky music yeah right so this there's this guy i hope i like don't get sued by this guy well you don't just don't say his name yeah well i'm gonna say the place that he runs um this is a guy who tells people that he can cure their cancer uh yeah yeah uh you know cure their cancer naturally, right?

[1722] He's got the whole, you know, he gives them, he gives them a wheat, you know, gives them wheat grass smoothies, right?

[1723] And he tells them that if they just think positively and, and that, you know, that big pharma is, is corrupt and chemotherapy is a sham.

[1724] And if they just come to his place, which I went to in, in Florida, he did, I did, I went to interview him.

[1725] I did, I went to interview him because, and he looks like, I mean, he just looks like, he's like a caricature of a snake oil salesman.

[1726] He's got this, like, artificially tan skin and like a pointy go tea and and and the and and and and so I think you're totally right as it's on this guy this this fucked up guy who is who is getting people's hope up right it's not right because it's also he gets to the people and they could have seek sought out real treatment yeah could be cured and live and people die because they go there and the people that were there this was the crazy thing and this is this again gets back to how the ultra processed information is happening these were not idiots man these are were people who I mean I don't know what it's like because I've never had I've never had you know knock on wood I've never I've never had cancer a person very close to me has never had cancer like these are people who you know when that happens you're looking for anyone you're looking for anyone to tell you a story that gives you a sense that things are actually not chaotic right that things are simple that there's an answer that there's a community that that can help you and so and so they go right and he and he taps he taps into that and he gives them what they want right in a sense he gives them what they want which is which is a feeling of certainty and belonging and hope and and he's terrible terrible human being but but but it ends up it ends up being really bad for these people and it ends up being bad for you know society in certain ways and that and so I struggle right and the problem is if you attack that guy I don't know if you run into this at all but if you attack the charlatans, they've been turned into saints by the people that look up to them.

[1727] So when you attack them, you also end up attacking all of the people that believe them.

[1728] Yeah.

[1729] I've been there before with chiropractors.

[1730] Yeah.

[1731] Wait, say a little more?

[1732] Well, I don't know if you know the history of chiropractors.

[1733] I do.

[1734] I just want to, I have to figure out where you come down on this before.

[1735] I think it's nonsense.

[1736] Yeah, okay.

[1737] So 100 % nonsense.

[1738] It's this.

[1739] Ready?

[1740] Yeah.

[1741] Yeah, me cracking my fingers.

[1742] That's what they're doing your back.

[1743] It's not fixing anything Chiropractic medicine was created by a guy who was a magnetic healer who came about it through a seance, the idea that he was going to manipulate people's spines and cure them of tuberculosis and blindness.

[1744] He was murdered by his son who drove over him with a fucking car and then took over the practice.

[1745] And somehow or another, this has been grandfathered in.

[1746] Like, I told us to a friend of mine the other day was talking to me about chiropractors.

[1747] I go, do you know how much time a chiropractor spends in medical school, they go how much?

[1748] I go, zero.

[1749] Zero time.

[1750] They're a doctor of chiropractic medicine, but they're not a doctor.

[1751] There's people flipping out right now, though, who have been to their chiropractor, who feel like they've gotten relief, who respect their chiroids.

[1752] Yeah, well, there's some relief in someone manipulating your body, folks.

[1753] You should get a deep tissue massage, and you should get an MRI and find out what's really wrong.

[1754] I came through this because I used to go to a doctor, a chiropractor, excuse me, and I had a bulging disc, and it was fucking me up for a long time.

[1755] It was really bothering me. And this chiropractor was assuring me, it definitely was not a bulging disc, and there's probably a muscle tear, and we're going to fix it by manipulating this.

[1756] I'm going to change your that and crack and see, oh, I got it there.

[1757] Let me adjust this, boom, and your hip, this.

[1758] It was all horseshit.

[1759] But he was a saint compared to another one that I went to.

[1760] I'll tell you a story about a guy who was ripping people off.

[1761] This guy was really ripping people off.

[1762] He was doing this thing that he called Zone Healing.

[1763] Are you ready for this?

[1764] he would, I'm not bullshitting, he would touch your head and he would press your head here and press your head here and then press it really hard here.

[1765] And he goes, oh, you feel that?

[1766] And I go, yeah.

[1767] And he would, yeah, that's, that's, L4 is off.

[1768] And I'm like, no, you squeezed hard on my fucking head.

[1769] I'm not stupid.

[1770] And then he would adjust you and tell you that this is going to fix, you know, whatever autoimmune disease you have, whatever this.

[1771] And so I was going to him because all these other jiu -jitsu people We're going to him.

[1772] And they were all telling me, oh, this guy's great at cracking backs, and he's amazing, he fixed my neck, he fixed my neck.

[1773] Because people want someone to fix their thing, right?

[1774] If you have a neck injury and you just spend time off and it gets better and you get some treatment from a chiropractor, well, he'll heal.

[1775] Things heal.

[1776] Your body knows how to heal.

[1777] And he goes, oh, he fixed my neck.

[1778] No, your fucking neck healed, okay?

[1779] Things do heal.

[1780] But this person touching your back saying he's fixing your gallbladder is a scam artist.

[1781] Right.

[1782] So I had this guy, and I'm talking to him.

[1783] And so I said, well, how does this work?

[1784] He's explaining to me, he's got a chart, this is a zone.

[1785] It's how we're fixing this and that and that and this.

[1786] And I said, but all you're doing is pushing down on my back.

[1787] How are you fixing all these things?

[1788] And so he tries to give me this shenanigans, the little song and dance, hey, hey, and I keep going.

[1789] And I say, how are you fixing this?

[1790] You tell me what is going on here.

[1791] And so it goes down to the placebo method.

[1792] He literally tells me. Oh, he said it to you.

[1793] If you believe, if you believe in these things.

[1794] I go, so you're telling me I have to be so fucking dumb to think that if you push on my back, It's going to fix my liver, and then it will fix my liver.

[1795] Well, he goes, well, you do know the placebo method does work.

[1796] I go, so you're taking money from people to lie to them.

[1797] So we have this tense conversation in his office, and I'm looking at him, and I know this guy's got a nice house and he's got a nice car, and he's just fucking stealing money from people by giving them these false hopes.

[1798] It's creepy shit, man, and it's really creepy shit when you're alone with the guy and you're talking to him about it, and you get him to say it's the placebo method.

[1799] And meanwhile, other than that, nice guy, which is even more fucked up.

[1800] Like, I knew him.

[1801] Like, he seemed like a nice guy.

[1802] I didn't, I didn't know, I didn't even know chiropractor stuff was bullshit.

[1803] I mean, the history of it's, I mean, like you said, right, if you look into it, it's sort of hard to believe that people, like, it's still a thing.

[1804] It's hard to believe that insurance covers it.

[1805] Yeah, and it's, and it, you know, and this goes back to the religion stuff, too.

[1806] I mean, I got into all of this stuff.

[1807] So, like, my actual area of academic expertise is classical Chinese philosophy.

[1808] So, like, that's what I, that's what I did as an academic.

[1809] And, you know, I read all these ancient Taoist texts and stuff like that.

[1810] And there's all these promises in there about, you know, if you take my, you know, mercury mixed at night with this and you eat in this way.

[1811] And I'm looking at this stuff.

[1812] And I was like, my, you know, this seems very familiar, right?

[1813] There's a lot of that going on today.

[1814] And then you look at the history of chiropractic and it's there are these vital forces, right?

[1815] Homeopathy is a similar thing.

[1816] There's vital forces that are actually what's causing illness.

[1817] And if you look at the history of that, it's quasi -religious, Reiki, which is like the energy healing, right?

[1818] And it's like, they didn't even touch you, right?

[1819] Right.

[1820] And it's these words, I mean, it's really interesting.

[1821] These words, energy is one of these words that can easily slide from explicitly religious to seemingly secular, right?

[1822] it's like oh yeah energy that's in physics they have energy right but it's like no this is a thing they're not manipulating your energy there's not something scientific happening here this is a this is a religious ritual a healing ritual disguised as some kind of science right and and and yet as you know and this is what I discovered with my first book I used to joke with people like I got out of religion because I didn't want to talk about touchy stuff and then I started talking about food and medicine and that was when people really got pissed like when you when you when you They start to talk about what they eat.

[1823] So you got out of religion just because you didn't want these uncomfortable conversations?

[1824] I'm joking.

[1825] I actually got, I got, I stopped doing religion, like, or not stop doing, because I still do scholarship stuff.

[1826] But I wanted to talk about it in a way that was relevant to modern society.

[1827] So I didn't just want to do classical Chinese thought.

[1828] I wanted to look at how the stuff I learned about how religion works or about the history of religion and apply it to, you know, how are people choosing the foods they eat?

[1829] How are people choosing the medicines?

[1830] Like with Chinese medicine, right, people would say crazy stuff to me. They'd say things like, you know, acupuncture is natural, right?

[1831] Or whatever.

[1832] And that's part of why it works.

[1833] I'm like acupuncture, they got stainless steel phyloform needles.

[1834] You think those who were around when the yellow emperor was writing his classic?

[1835] Like, no, they don't.

[1836] And when people talk about Chinese medicine, they don't talk about, you know, exorcism.

[1837] Exorcism is not a thing.

[1838] It was very popular back in the day.

[1839] But that's not something people embrace.

[1840] And so I saw these weird uncritical embraces of dietary regimens and, you know, healing rituals that to me were just obviously right out of you know ancient china or you know any ancient context um where people would never believe them and yet today you know you're going in and you're having your your back cracked it's so weird that it's so prevalent but push back on it and oh i've experienced it i'm going to experience it now oh no is that what's going to happen a hundred percent well i don't read social media luckily so i'm not going to hear from it but and let me do say this.

[1841] There's a bunch of people that are chiropractors that do use some valid methods for rehabilitation.

[1842] Right.

[1843] There's a lot of them that use deep tissue massage, cold laser therapy, actual real methods.

[1844] A lot of them use ralphing.

[1845] There's a lot of them that use a bunch of different methods of stretching that are very beneficial.

[1846] But the practice of cracking backs to cure a disease is fucking nonsense.

[1847] Right, right.

[1848] And that's a problem.

[1849] And the practice of calling yourself a doctor, a that is also nonsense.

[1850] It really is.

[1851] Yeah.

[1852] And it's a problem.

[1853] Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[1854] Absolutely.

[1855] It's, but at the same time, again, and I don't know, you, I keep saying you know this, but like, it's, it's, it's, it must be difficult.

[1856] When, when people are in pain, right?

[1857] Or when people, when people, when people are in pain, when you're in pain, either, you know, psychic pain or physical pain, you really need someone to tell you, they have an answer for you and to explain it and fit it into a system they can say to you I know why you're sad I know why you feel empty I know why your fucking back hurts it's because of this simple thing and I have the answer I'm gonna fix it and actually just hearing that itself is therapeutic it really is and that's the problem with going to a healer because there's many people that have gone to people that have claimed to be a healer and just this process of embracing this new situation.

[1858] It's like, I am here.

[1859] I'm getting healed.

[1860] Oh, my God, it's happening.

[1861] And a lot of what makes people ill is anxiety, is stress, and the placebo effect of having some sort of a, in your mind, perceived solution, does have tangible physical benefits for some strange reason, which is really weird, like what goes on in the human mind.

[1862] There is an unbelievably crazy thing on, I think it's a Netflix special.

[1863] It's a guy who's a magician, a professional magician, but he also comes from like a religious background where he would go to these faith healing revivals.

[1864] And he does a show where he tells his audience this flat out.

[1865] He says, I'm a magician.

[1866] I specialize in manipulating your minds.

[1867] And I know that the way that faith healing works is bullshit.

[1868] it.

[1869] And I'm going to show you by faith healing people tonight in this audience.

[1870] I'm going to do it right now, but I want you to know that I'm just manipulating you, right?

[1871] Is it Darren Brown?

[1872] Is it?

[1873] Is that his name?

[1874] And then he like goes and heals people.

[1875] Is it, is it?

[1876] Darren's been on the pocket.

[1877] He's amazing.

[1878] I mean, this was, I'm watching them and they're going up and he's like, and was it your back?

[1879] And was it this?

[1880] And they're like, oh my God, how did you know?

[1881] I feel better.

[1882] I've never felt this good in my life and it and it's it's it's unbelievable really because you realize that certain forms of communication right are are just inherently powerful you're symbolically powerful and they can make people feel yeah it is Dan Brown yeah he's been oh my God Brown's amazing I mean it's just unbelievable yeah he's he's a really brilliant human being in in many ways and uh and talking to him about his process of how long he sets these things things up and some of the things that he, he's done several these Netflix specials.

[1883] Incredible.

[1884] He's amazing.

[1885] This is what people do with natural stuff, though.

[1886] This is what they do.

[1887] You go into a store.

[1888] You're stressed out.

[1889] You don't know what's going on.

[1890] You've got a chronic condition.

[1891] There is a way in which buying something natural and consuming it, the ritual of that says to you, you're going to be better.

[1892] You're a part of a system that is simple in which there are good things and bad things.

[1893] And there's a solution to your problems.

[1894] But there is also the reality of some natural foods being incredibly good for you that's true and there's also the reality of some diets being incredibly poor in nutrients and the really the the result of that of eating those diets is you get really sick and if you eat the nutrient rich diets your body turns around that's true too that's also true that's exactly this is i wish that that the that's true too yeah that's i'm nuance yeah that's exactly it and that's and that's where I mean, you know, what's weird is that most of the experts I talked with for my book, they were actually nuanced.

[1895] You know, I talked to environmental activists who were, you know, they are activists, right?

[1896] They really want to change the world for the better.

[1897] They care a lot about this stuff, but they're also very nuanced.

[1898] They're like, you know, nuclear energy is a complicated issue.

[1899] Like, here's why I think it's complicated or here's why genetically modified organics.

[1900] Like, they were always relentlessly stressing how nuanced things are and how complicated things are.

[1901] And I feel like if there's one thing, although now I'm making it simple, right?

[1902] But if there's one thing that's going to, look, the one thing that will fix everything is nuance.

[1903] It's sort of a stupid take.

[1904] That's a funny way of putting it, right?

[1905] Yeah.

[1906] But nuance and not being married to your ideas is very, very important.

[1907] Yeah, so let's not hold people accountable for it.

[1908] But that's a big part of why people are using the internet.

[1909] They're trying to score points and shoot people down and can't.

[1910] cancel people and expose people and get mad at people, and they're doing it to elevate themselves.

[1911] It's a big part of why they're doing it.

[1912] And really, it's just you're robbing yourself of time and focus and energy that you can be spending on important things.

[1913] And this is not, again, to say, like what you were talking about before about exposing police brutality or corruption, there's important things to expose that are really, that really, like, there's people are being victimized.

[1914] But that's not what we're talking about here.

[1915] What we're talking about is a general human tendency to tear people down.

[1916] And it's very negative.

[1917] And it feels like you should be doing it for some strange reason.

[1918] While you're doing it, there's like some satisfaction.

[1919] Like if you have a rock and you see a window and you just fucking chuck that rock at the window and it smashes.

[1920] And a bunch of people behind you go, yeah, it feels good.

[1921] You know, and I don't know why.

[1922] It's part of being a person.

[1923] It's the same reason I guess like eating, you know, eating junk food feels good, right?

[1924] It's like it's tapped into all of these things.

[1925] Yeah.

[1926] But it's right, just use the internet to find out about stuff.

[1927] Like you, like just even in this show, right?

[1928] How many times have we been able to bring up a video of something or a shot of something?

[1929] It was constructive.

[1930] I learned things.

[1931] You know what I mean?

[1932] Like, there are plenty of ways to use the internet well.

[1933] And I do think you're right.

[1934] We got to hold people.

[1935] Like, if people are fucking designing social media to make it compulsively addictive, I mean, that's like.

[1936] We didn't think there's anything wrong with that when I was first instituted.

[1937] That's the problem.

[1938] I mean, I remember, I was it, I was undergrad at Stanford when Facebook was first happening, like this guy, like smoked Bulls with him played guitars now like the, like developed the Facebook feed, you know.

[1939] And I remember back then, you know, yeah, well, and it's, he didn't know what he was doing.

[1940] I know, I'm sure.

[1941] You know, he was just like some kid that was like, this is incredible, right?

[1942] But then they didn't design it.

[1943] They didn't design it with everybody's best interests in mind.

[1944] They didn't design it to really make sure that people would use it the right way and not the wrong way.

[1945] They designed to be effective.

[1946] That's right.

[1947] Yeah.

[1948] Well, that's the thing about the YouTube algorithm.

[1949] My friend Ari had this experiment that he did.

[1950] People were talking about the YouTube algorithm that it sort of, there's one thing about Facebook and YouTube and a lot of these things.

[1951] People will make this argument that the algorithm favors arguments.

[1952] It favors, it pulls up things that you get upset with, particularly Facebook, and that it's trying to manipulate you into using it much more often because it turns out that people, much more in things they disagree with than things they agree with.

[1953] So what he decided to do was only YouTube puppies.

[1954] And so he just YouTube all these videos of puppies and all just so his feed was just filled with puppy stuff and all his suggestions were puppy stuff.

[1955] And he's like, no, it's not that it's trying to make you upset.

[1956] It's a you're trying to make yourself upset and it's taking advantage of that.

[1957] Well, you know, this goes to Salatin, something Salton talked about.

[1958] But here's another analogy, I think, for information that's really helpful, monocultures versus polycultures, right?

[1959] I think that our current information ecosystem is set up to give us all a monoculture of information.

[1960] It's like, okay, here's what this person wants.

[1961] I'm just going to feed them a lot of puppies and only puppies.

[1962] Here's the information this person wants.

[1963] I'm going to feed them more of that.

[1964] And what you end up is a homogenization of what it is that's coming into you when what you need is a kind of intellectual polyculture, right?

[1965] You want something resilient where there's people, you know, where there's different systems in place so that you don't just have one big system so that you can have other ideas.

[1966] I mean, intellectually, this is what comedians often did, right?

[1967] Or gestures.

[1968] I mean, this is something I work on academically is this idea like, you know, you have the king.

[1969] And the king is the authority.

[1970] But the king will have a jester who has the right to push back on the most fundamental things that the king believes in and puts out there.

[1971] They can like, you know, And in general, right, the fool or the jester is wise because they can challenge, you take off the pants in public, right, and piss.

[1972] Or they can do things that no one else gets to do.

[1973] That's important because it prevents monoculture, intellectual and moral monoculture.

[1974] And I honestly think, I mean, I think you were talking about South Park the other day.

[1975] But one thing that I have, I struggle with now is that I feel like the gestures these days, they're just confirming what it is that their viewers.

[1976] already believe.

[1977] So with South Park, I didn't know whether I was going to agree with what they were mocking or whether I was going to be shocked.

[1978] You never knew.

[1979] That's a gross generalization though in terms of gestures because there's so many different styles of comedians.

[1980] Well, you can access them in a way that makes it so that you don't have to hear anything you don't want.

[1981] But you don't know what they're going to say.

[1982] I kind of know what John Oliver is going to say.

[1983] Well, John Oliver is a different kind of an animal.

[1984] And his stand -up, what he's doing is not really stand -up, right?

[1985] What he's doing is he's got this show where he mocks things and it's got a very heavy left -wing bend to it.

[1986] Right.

[1987] Well, John Stewart, I felt like I knew what John Stewart was going to say.

[1988] And it's not to say I didn't like it.

[1989] He was funny and I agreed with him and I watched him.

[1990] I mean, a lot of, maybe this is just what people, you know, conservatives say this and I think they're right is that there's a bent to late night.

[1991] Like, I'm not going to tune into Stephen Colbert and be shocked that he's mocking something that I didn't expect him to mock.

[1992] Well, what's interesting, that's true.

[1993] But Colbert's a, he's a Catholic, like heavy -duty Catholic, which is really weird.

[1994] I wish he would talk about that more.

[1995] He has a few times.

[1996] Does he?

[1997] But it gets real weird.

[1998] It gets like, like, almost like he's holding a hot potato and he can't wait to drop it, you know?

[1999] I wonder if that's because it doesn't fit with the, I don't know.

[2000] I don't know, man. I mean, first of all, there was the character that he was doing, you know, in the Colbert report, which was this like really cocky Republican character.

[2001] And then he went over to do the Stephen Colbert show.

[2002] And now it's not that anymore.

[2003] Now it's like he's hosting a talk show.

[2004] But it's the guy that we knew who was like super ultra cocky and really funny from the daily show that was like a parody of a right wing guy.

[2005] It's very odd.

[2006] It's a weird progression.

[2007] I wonder that you think that there are gestures because I want to.

[2008] Although I think he's very funny.

[2009] Yeah, he's hilarious.

[2010] Well, that's the thing.

[2011] Being funny doesn't, you know, there are plenty of funny people who aren't jesters, right?

[2012] I mean, there's...

[2013] I like when he fucks with Trump, I think it's hilarious.

[2014] Then he gets Trump to reply, and he's like, you made a mistake.

[2015] You replied.

[2016] Like, you reacted to me. It was crazy to be in that.

[2017] So tell me a jester.

[2018] Because I want, what I want, I want to be able to, I want to be able to watch people who are going to, who are going to sometimes make me feel like I was, I was right.

[2019] And they're going to be mocking someone that I, that I disagree with.

[2020] And then I also want, and then two seconds later, I mean, this happens a little bit with Dave Chappelle.

[2021] I see, like, oh, Dave's the best at it.

[2022] But there's a guy named Andrew Schultz who's thriving during this lockdown because he can't do stand -up and he's doing on his Instagram.

[2023] He does these really well -produced videos where he'll take down a subject.

[2024] Like, I don't even want to give you an example, but he's got a bunch of them out there, but he's fantastic at it.

[2025] He's really good at it.

[2026] And he's also independent, and he's a wild, young, really funny comedian, and he doesn't have any affiliation, whether it's, he's not, like, stuck in this left -wing paradigm or he's not a right -wing person.

[2027] He's not in any way, shape, or form.

[2028] So he's just like, what's this bullshit?

[2029] Here's the problem with these motherfuckers.

[2030] And then he goes on these, that's him right there.

[2031] He's fantastic.

[2032] Oh, yeah, he's got a new one.

[2033] Fake, woke activism, no one asked for.

[2034] but they're great and they're like they're all like 10 15 minutes long and then he fucking nails it it's really really good stuff is there anyone out there who mocks the anti -woke people the anti -woke people you know what I mean the people that are like all you need is rationality and free thinking I'm sure yeah I'm sure there's I'm sure there's someone out there there's probably some like heavy duty left wing people that are mocking like you know oh you're right yeah I'm sure maybe it's on me Well, I mean, we've got a problem in ideology world, right?

[2035] We've got a problem with these very strict left versus right things.

[2036] You know, it's really weird.

[2037] And I've been acutely aware of it because I've been so often accused of being right -winged for the most bizarre reasons, mostly because of the way I look and because I'm a commentator for the UFC.

[2038] And, you know, I'm a meathead.

[2039] I look like a meathead.

[2040] I'm a hunter.

[2041] All these different things.

[2042] I get accused of being.

[2043] and then, you know, it turns out I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I'm, I lean way more towards progressive ideas, but I also support the Second Amendment.

[2044] It's like, people have this idea in their head that you have to be in these hard lines, and if you're not, you're not a part of a tribe, and you get ostracized by that tribe.

[2045] And there's a very real stigma attached to that, and you feel that stigma when people attack you for your ideas.

[2046] And so people lean in to what gets them love and lean away from what gets them chastised.

[2047] Yeah, well, I feel like I don't have a, I mean, one thing.

[2048] that I feel, I feel these days is I feel very politically homeless.

[2049] Yes.

[2050] And I think there's a deep because, and I don't like the moderates either, because I don't feel moderate, because there's some stuff I'm not moderate about.

[2051] It's like, no, there's some shit that's really bad and we need to change it right now.

[2052] And so the, you know, and like you were saying, right, I think it's just, well, we want labels and simplicity, right?

[2053] And so if you have, if we look at things on an issue by issue case by case basis, then we don't have a a category to fit ourselves into and that's obviously since the beginning of time right this is what religions often provide right it's like well here is what i believe in i am this kind of person and that word you know i'm a muslim or i'm christian or i'm protestant that word describes who i am it gives me an identity right but then that locks you into all kinds of stuff yes it does it does and people lean into that and oftentimes people don't even have their own opinions they have a established set of opinions they've adopted because they're this or they're that they're right or they're left if they're Christian or they're atheist.

[2054] And, you know, it's, I really think, like, as we're talking about, like, earlier, that being woke is very akin to being religious.

[2055] Being anti -woke is akin to being atheist.

[2056] There's a lot of people that are, like, rabidly atheist the same way someone is an evangelical Christian.

[2057] I mean, they have no room for religion being positive.

[2058] And if you say, there's some positive aspects of religion, I think it's a moral scaffolding for people.

[2059] I think it gives people hope.

[2060] It improves the quality of their life.

[2061] It establishes a community amongst other people that also share values.

[2062] And there's real positive benefits to that.

[2063] It's exactly how I was with the natural thing.

[2064] I went in like an atheist, right?

[2065] I was like, this is so stupid.

[2066] These people are all stupid.

[2067] Then I came out and I was like, no, no, there are some good things about it.

[2068] Right?

[2069] That's exactly it.

[2070] There's actually, it's funny.

[2071] Like one of the things, so a project I was working on way back in the day was a podcast about people who shift.

[2072] It's called shift.

[2073] And we were looking at people who fundamentally, who change their minds.

[2074] on really, really important things.

[2075] So we did one episode on this guy, Scott Shepard.

[2076] You actually had Daryl Davis on.

[2077] So this is a related thing.

[2078] So Scott Shepard was this guy.

[2079] It's an insane story who was, I don't want to give away too much about this.

[2080] But he started very much not a racist, ended up in the KKK, and then left the KKK.

[2081] And what I wanted to understand and what I think maybe this is something we just need to investigate right now is what is it that causes people to break out of.

[2082] of whatever ideological label it is that they have.

[2083] There was another guy that we did another episode on.

[2084] That was where it ended for now.

[2085] So he was like a Greenpeace activist.

[2086] Like he was one of those guys who would go in tear up GMO crops, right?

[2087] Now he's pro GMO.

[2088] I don't care about whether or not GMOs are good or bad.

[2089] That's not the point of the episode for me. For me, it's like, how does that happen?

[2090] What is it that changes you?

[2091] How is it interview Candace Owen?

[2092] yeah yeah because you know candace owen ran an anti -trump website and and then she became a hard line right ringer right and that's and i just want to know like how does that happen what are the things and it's obvious it's gonna be all kinds of stuff right because it's your yeah there's so many variables but it's also like what you choose to focus on like what you know sometimes there's a lot of gravity in in shifting to another perspective like and people start rewarding you for that and praising you for that and then the wrong people criticize you for that so So you feel like you're on the right track.

[2093] You know, you get morons that call you an asshole for having a different perspective.

[2094] Yeah.

[2095] And that one thing, right?

[2096] One thing, one moment of being hurt or one discovery of betrayal or whatever.

[2097] Yeah.

[2098] Yeah.

[2099] We're at an adolescent stage of interpretation of ideas.

[2100] That's what I think.

[2101] We really are.

[2102] And of communication.

[2103] And I think that what we're doing with social media and the Internet in general is, is we are far more connected than ever before, but in many ways, far more segregated and segmented and far more rigid in our ideas and the echo chambers have never been stronger.

[2104] It's very, and I think that the next leap of technology, and I've had Elon on, and he discussed his neural link, which is really fascinating stuff because it's going to require surgery.

[2105] Like, people are literally going to get holes.

[2106] Very unnatural.

[2107] Fucking super unnatural.

[2108] I mean, as unnatural is fillings, but they're going to drill holes in your head and they're going to put literal wires into your brain and you're going to have a device attached to your skull.

[2109] And he said it's like a, let me say like a quarter -sized device on your fucking head.

[2110] It's going to Bluetooth up to your phone.

[2111] And you're going to be able to access information and your bandwidth that you're going to be able to access information now is going to be radically increased.

[2112] and the way he describes it, it varies between the way he describes it when it seems like he's trying very hard to make it palatable versus when he sees the actual future potential of it, which is we're not going to be the same thing anymore.

[2113] Just like you're not the same thing.

[2114] It's like when I was a kid, people would lie about stuff.

[2115] And you really, there's no way to check.

[2116] You know, they could say like, I won the Olympics 16 times.

[2117] I was the fastest man ever, and you'd be like, whoa, who the fuck are you?

[2118] Like, there's no way to check.

[2119] Now you could go, what's your name?

[2120] And then you pull out your phone, and in five seconds, you know the person's full of shit.

[2121] So we've changed radically in our ability to assess whether things are accurate or inaccurate and whether someone's a liar or not.

[2122] I think much like that, the next leaps of technology are going to completely change our understanding of motivation, of emotions, of what is causing someone to, to have a deceptive narrative that they're trying to push forth.

[2123] And we're going to be able to see these things.

[2124] We're going to be able to access this information in a very different way.

[2125] And it's going to change what we are as human beings.

[2126] We're going to have some sort of cyborg capacity.

[2127] And it's going to radically elevate our ability to understand things and to communicate.

[2128] And that's weirdly enough, probably our only hope.

[2129] You think it'll be good?

[2130] I mean, here we are talking about ultra -processed information.

[2131] I mean, I wonder - But we're stuck with this.

[2132] I know.

[2133] Okay, we're stuck with this.

[2134] Ultra -process information is here.

[2135] And unless we can technology our way out of this, I don't think we're going to get better at this.

[2136] If someone said, okay, no more social media, the social media we have now, we keep forever, nothing but YouTube and Facebook and Twitter and Instagram.

[2137] That's it.

[2138] forever and you know they can randomly decide you violated their terms of service and ban you and there's no room for conservative thought and they'll they'll blackball people for the most ridiculous ideas because most of these people that are running these organizations are super woke so what what happens then well we're fucked and it's gonna it's like literally pushing us towards the point of at least an ideological civil war that's where we're at right now just solving it with a brain implant feels like solving the food system with bariatric surgery.

[2139] You know what I mean?

[2140] It's just like, okay, we've got this food system.

[2141] So what we're going to do is not necessarily thinking that a brain surgery is the only way to solve it.

[2142] I'm scared.

[2143] I do think that technology and more emergent technology is probably what's going to get us out of this.

[2144] What you were talking about earlier in the tweet that really resonated with me about ultra -processed information, I think we need something that's far.

[2145] more that has far more depth to it that something that works and distributes information in a far more nuanced and a far more transparent way and I think we're going to move in that direction and we're going to move in that direction because it seems like technology is moving everything towards greater and more prevalent connectivity right you can get better internet access everywhere everything is in We're live streaming and tweeting and all this different stuff.

[2146] It's moving us towards some ultimate moment of intense connectivity.

[2147] And I think we're going to be able to read each other's minds.

[2148] That's one of the things that Elon said.

[2149] He said, you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth.

[2150] And I think he's right.

[2151] And I think that's what's going to happen.

[2152] God, we're turning so bad, though.

[2153] I don't know if that's necessarily the future, though.

[2154] You're saying it could be better.

[2155] I think we're going to be able to read thoughts and emotions in a way where you'll know that someone's being a baby.

[2156] You know someone's being a child.

[2157] You'll know someone's being deceptive.

[2158] You'll be able to see these things.

[2159] What a terrifying world.

[2160] That's sort of like that, you know the radical honesty people?

[2161] Have you seen this group?

[2162] It's the people that are like, you never lie about anything.

[2163] So it's this weird social experiment where they're just like, you know, where they're with their loved ones or whatever.

[2164] And the loved ones are like, do you like my shirt?

[2165] And they're like, no, it looks bad and you've gained weight, right?

[2166] And like, there's, it's radical transparency about everything.

[2167] And that, that, I understand where they're coming from right it's like this thought that like we're all sort of laid bare to each other but also like it's great that we can keep things private like what we live in right now is this sort of grassroots i mean i call it a grassroots panopticon right we're all watching each other but it's not the government it's not big brother we're big brother right and that i want to keep stuff i like i like i know what you're saying i don't want you to look at my brain i know what you're saying and i i agree with you to a certain extent but however um i'm a stand -up comic and one of the things that I love about being a stand -up comic is my friends are all brutally honest and they fuck with me and we fuck with each other like if I said do you like this shirt and he'd be like no dummy it looks stupid on you they will say something like that we both be like ah they would say something like do you think I gained weight like you know you gain weight motherfucker get on the scale you fat fuck and they'll say that to you and they start laughing we there's no in the comedy world like in the world of my friends there's no room for dishonesty and if they think you're bullshitting.

[2168] They don't want to talk to you because it's no fun.

[2169] I think comedians are uniquely strong in that way though.

[2170] I, so as someone too, right, for me, like my thing was like rationale.

[2171] I liked rationality.

[2172] It's like, oh, we have a good argument.

[2173] Like, I'll just have a logical argument with you, right?

[2174] But like, one of the things I realized, and this one, you know, when I was there at that place in Florida where this fucking charlatan is killing people.

[2175] Yeah.

[2176] I can't just tell those people the truth.

[2177] That's crazy.

[2178] I wish I could, but they're dying.

[2179] And they're in pain.

[2180] And there's certain people who are constitutionally, They like honesty all the time.

[2181] They thrive on it, even when they're in pain, right?

[2182] But there's a lot of people where logic or honesty, that's just not the, that's not, they're going to suffer.

[2183] I agree.

[2184] They're going to suffer.

[2185] No, I agree.

[2186] I think you're right about that.

[2187] There's certain people that you really shouldn't like, you know, if you're talking to a delicate person and they ask you a question and there's nothing wrong with just being compliment.

[2188] You look great.

[2189] You look great.

[2190] I like doing that too.

[2191] I have a kid.

[2192] One of my things, my wife, so my kid would come to me with drawings, right?

[2193] You're like, you know, a kid comes with a drawing, right?

[2194] And she'd be like, Dad, look at this.

[2195] And I'd be like, oh.

[2196] That looks like, shit.

[2197] I was like, Hazel.

[2198] I was like, Hazel, that's not your best work.

[2199] And my wife is like, what do you fucking monster?

[2200] What is wrong with you?

[2201] I was like, well, I should just, I don't want her to like.

[2202] And she's like, no, it's a kid.

[2203] She just wants love from her dad.

[2204] Right.

[2205] You tell her, like, that's a great, you know, did a great job.

[2206] And I don't want to infantilize adults.

[2207] But, like, there are times when I am, when I just need, you know, love or, like, I need someone to keep their thoughts to themselves.

[2208] And, yeah, I don't know.

[2209] I know.

[2210] I know.

[2211] I haven't been in a lot of pain, Joe, is the truth.

[2212] I haven't.

[2213] I've led this charmed life.

[2214] I've let it on, someone said, like, I've let it on difficulty level, like, pretty easy setting, you know, my personally life.

[2215] And, like, I've been lucky.

[2216] I haven't been, like, super sick.

[2217] Like, who knows what kinds of crazy healing things?

[2218] therapies I would be into.

[2219] I mean, there was a guy, there's a guy at Duke who specializes in ALS, Rick Bedlack.

[2220] Photos of him are incredible because he dresses in wonky outfits like flashy like tuxedoes and crazy ties and stuff.

[2221] I was like, Rick, why do you, why do you dress in all these outfits?

[2222] And he's like, because it's the best, because it's the best thing I can offer my patients is these, is I don't, I can't tell them the scientific studies, they're not here for that, right?

[2223] I don't have anything to offer my ALS patients in terms of like science or rationality, but what I can do is just make them feel lighthearted for a moment.

[2224] And I was like, do you tell them, like, when they come into the office, do you tell them like the truth, you know, which is like basically like you're, you're done for, you know?

[2225] And he's like, you know, obviously not, right?

[2226] You don't just tell people who are in pain the truth, or at least you don't, there's, I don't know.

[2227] For me, I've really pulled back from, I've really pulled back really recently from from the idea that truth -telling is the way to engage with people who are in pain, right?

[2228] I think a lot of what we're seeing right now with Black Lives Matter, a lot of what we see with transgender activism, all of the hot -button political issues often, right?

[2229] Change is there are groups of people who have been in pain for very long time and individuals within those groups who have been in pain.

[2230] And I don't know.

[2231] I think it's just important to sort of acknowledge that and I had a lot of trouble doing that.

[2232] I would be like, well, here's the truth.

[2233] Like, here's your situation and here's how you need to fix it.

[2234] I'm like, but that's not, I don't know, that's, that's not necessarily, it doesn't work and it's not necessarily what people want.

[2235] Yeah, well, in those two particular subjects, too, you're dealing with people that are, that will get very upset if you do offer anything that, anything that contradicts their narrative.

[2236] Well, and if, you know, if someone's in, if someone's in pain or if someone's like literally trying, I mean, if they're, if you're trying to change a situation for the better.

[2237] Yeah.

[2238] Right?

[2239] You can always throw nuance in.

[2240] You can always have a logical argument about something, but I've become, and I'm not saying, like, don't say stuff.

[2241] I'm very on board with like, you want freedom, right?

[2242] Like, I want to be able to say chiropractors are bullshit.

[2243] I want to do that.

[2244] But, like, if there's someone who was struggling with chronic back pain forever and found a chiropractor, and they come back from that chiropractor.

[2245] And they say to me, Alan, for the first time in my life, I feel like there's some hope.

[2246] This chiropractor helped me. if I have that thing in my brain I don't say it yeah I'm with you I'm with you I'd be like that's great I'd be like that's great but Alan that's just being kind yeah so you value kindness and I think that's an awesome thing to value and I value that as well and I think that's something that I've learned as I've gotten older is that you don't always have to say what you think you could just be nice and I've seen I saw you do this like I love this moment I don't know I forget which podcast it was on you were like you were talking about something and then you were like you look down and you were like wait I think I think we're making fun of this person, is what you said.

[2247] And I feel like, and that was a moment, right?

[2248] We was like, you want to be kind, right?

[2249] And honesty, that's the difficult, the sometimes ridiculous things or illogical things are the kind thing.

[2250] And I'm really struggling now, and I hope, I just wish everyone were struggling to realize that those are sometimes incommasurable values.

[2251] You can't sometimes be honest or tell the truth and also be kind at the same time.

[2252] Right?

[2253] There's this book, God, what is it about a kid who's, I can't believe I'm blanking on the book now, but it's a kid who's severely disfigured.

[2254] And it was a book for young adults.

[2255] And there's this moment in that book where one of the teacher puts on the board, when you're given the choice between being right and being kind, always choose being kind.

[2256] Yeah.

[2257] And I was like, when I first read that, I was like, that's so stupid, man. You can be, the way to be kind is by helping someone be right and like, tell them the truth, right?

[2258] I used to share that thought, but I'm now in the group of Be Kind, yeah.

[2259] And as I've gotten older, first of all, I never sat at, I never, I never, I never went out with the idea that I would create something that millions of people would see.

[2260] Never.

[2261] This was not, this is just something that happened along the way.

[2262] And as it was happening, I became more and more aware of the impact and then the responsibility that comes with that.

[2263] impact and just through that process has made me a far nicer person because I'm well I'm really aware of you know mean shit like I never I don't I don't attack people I don't like it I don't I'd rather just not you know and I don't I don't even want like if someone says to me before the podcast and they have before it hey would you do me a favor and not talk about this weird thing that happened to me I'm like I don't want to make you uncomfortable I don't we could talk about a million things you're a human being I'm a human being there's not like a specific I don't want gotcha moments.

[2264] If you want to talk about something that's in your heart that you want to get out, I'll talk to you about it.

[2265] But I'm not a mean person, you know?

[2266] And when I was younger, I was.

[2267] And when I was younger, I was in the group of fuck that, tell them the truth.

[2268] They need to face reality.

[2269] Get your fucking shit together.

[2270] And then as I've gotten older, I've realized like there's not, that's me worried about my self.

[2271] falling short.

[2272] That's me worry about, worrying about my own failures and then wanting to sort of reinforce my own philosophies and other people because it was insecure.

[2273] Well, this, I mean, it's interesting, you know, you're saying, right, like talking to millions of people.

[2274] And this goes back to the stuff you were saying about written language and the fact that you can't respond to stuff.

[2275] The difference between a conversation is, you know, such and such.

[2276] So here we are.

[2277] We can talk to each other.

[2278] I can have an argument with you about whether like turmeric coffee works or whatever it happens to be right or supplements or whatever it is we can talk about chiropractic right but there's someone else out there who really did just go to a chiropractor and so it puts you especially not me right i'm not i don't have like a podcast reaching millions of people you got a twitter dude they're coming at you too don't worry about it i'm sure i'm sure they are but you know yeah twitter i think i mean twitter i see as a spiritual exercise i've said this before i go on twitter to force myself to be kind like how can i balance How can I be on Twitter and communicate with people, like QAnon, right?

[2279] Instead of just mocking QAnon, like, can I engage with a Q &N person?

[2280] Like, you know, but anyway, I do that?

[2281] I do.

[2282] What do they say back?

[2283] They really want to talk to you about QAnon, and then I ask them questions about it, and I try to be.

[2284] Have you had, like, meaningful dialogue?

[2285] You know, I have had meaningful dialogue.

[2286] I've even had meaningful dialogue on Twitter with people who were, I mean, honestly, my favorite moments on Twitter are where I engage with someone and it starts angry.

[2287] And then I'm like, okay, Alan, can we get this to a place where we're being kind to each other?

[2288] If I can do it on Twitter, I mean, that's like that's like the gymnasium of the soul, right?

[2289] If you can be kind to someone on Twitter.

[2290] But I was saying like you're in a, you're in a shitty situation in part because when it comes to this kind of thing, because you're communicating to 5 ,000 different types of audiences all at the same time.

[2291] You're talking with me. You're talking with the people who are watching this right now, all of whom range from people who are not in pain to people who are in pain.

[2292] Some of those people need honesty to help with their pain.

[2293] And so, you know what I mean?

[2294] And I don't even know how you handle.

[2295] And then you don't want to be lying.

[2296] You want to be telling the truth.

[2297] You have to evolve as a human and get better at your own, your own bullshit and your own, like, what are you trying to get out?

[2298] What is your message?

[2299] Like, what are you saying?

[2300] Like, what is in your head?

[2301] And are you using words to accurately relay what's in your head or have you fucked that up?

[2302] You get better at that.

[2303] But there's some benefit, no doubt, to engaging with people online.

[2304] I mean, it's just untenable for me. There's too many people.

[2305] But you know what Megan Phelps is?

[2306] Yes, yeah.

[2307] It was a great example.

[2308] Yeah, she's an amazing person.

[2309] I've had her on the show, too.

[2310] Megan Phelps is the granddaughter of Fred Phelps, who is the leader of the Westboro Baptist Church, one of the most vicious, nastiest, evil religious groups ever that would have these God -hates -Fag signs and hold it up in front of when soldiers would die.

[2311] They would go to their funerals.

[2312] The craziest shit.

[2313] And she grew up in this horrible environment.

[2314] And then through Twitter, interacting with her husband on Twitter, that fucking dude, that angel, whoever he is, that dude converted her.

[2315] And he just talked to her back and forth and they became friends.

[2316] And then eventually they became married.

[2317] And then they have a child together and they're happy.

[2318] It's a cliche.

[2319] I mean, it's interesting when you said that's being kind, right?

[2320] I mean, there are these cliches.

[2321] And I hate how we also live in this like.

[2322] ultra ironic time now where like every you know oh it's a cliche it was like no kindness and love yeah and it sounds valuable they work it sounds corny but it's valuable it's what every saint and sage whatever they've said it since the beginning of time and you can be like oh that's a cliche or it's more complicated and it it is it is more complicated always right but like I don't know the the kindness I don't know it's hard too because I don't want to even be I keep thinking right It's like you get in this like inception of nuance, right?

[2323] But like you and I can say, hey, we need to be kind or I, you know, I need to be kind.

[2324] I can speak for myself.

[2325] But like there are some people who actually they're going to say back, no, I'm being fucking hurt, right?

[2326] Like the time, like for me, I need to fight back.

[2327] I need to not be kind.

[2328] If you're in an abusive relationship, right?

[2329] Or whatever.

[2330] Like, or if you're in a position where you're fighting for something you believe in.

[2331] So I don't even want to be telling other people they, all I feel comfortable with right now.

[2332] And this is sort of where I landed after, you know, I mean, people were pushing me. Like this subtitle on this book, man, that was pushed on me. I'm going to be honest.

[2333] How faith in nature's goodness leads to harmful fads, unjust laws, and flawed science.

[2334] It makes it sound like it's a fucking takedown.

[2335] You know, they were like, we need you.

[2336] You know, this is how a subtitle needs to work.

[2337] It needs to tell people like this simple truth where there's like sides.

[2338] So it's just as a marketing ploy.

[2339] That was just their idea.

[2340] The British book has a different subtitle, just the seductive myth of natural goodness.

[2341] Ooh, that's better.

[2342] I mean, I understand where they were coming from, though, right?

[2343] Because my publishers, like, look.

[2344] They want to sell a lot of books.

[2345] Yeah, and people want this.

[2346] They don't, you know, people don't want kindness.

[2347] Kindness doesn't sell, right?

[2348] Like controversy sells.

[2349] And so I, it's hard, you know, again, you know, I think about this a lot because, you know, I want people to read my book.

[2350] I want people to listen to me. I would love to have, you know, I'd love to be able to talk about, you know, I'm going to be talking about quantification in my next book.

[2351] Right.

[2352] So I want people to hear what I have to say about how quantification.

[2353] gets abused, but I'm also like, well, the best way to get people to hear me, right, might be to like ratchet up the controversy or the, you know, you don't think so.

[2354] No, I don't think so.

[2355] I think the, I really think like what you're talking about, like don't tell people what to do.

[2356] You're like, I want to be kind, but I don't feel like I should be telling people.

[2357] Well, here's the thing, man, you don't have to.

[2358] You don't have to tell people.

[2359] Just leave by example.

[2360] Just do what you're doing and do it at your best.

[2361] And if you can be kind, that will have a greater impact than anything.

[2362] I mean, it's like being a parent, right?

[2363] You can tell your kids what to do, but one of the best things that I've found is to just live life in a way that your kids see the right way to do things and the wrong way to do things.

[2364] And one of the things I always do, whenever I correct my kids, I always say, hey, let me tell you something.

[2365] I did way worse than that.

[2366] I'm way dumber than you.

[2367] And this problem that you created or this thing that you did wrong, I've done way worse.

[2368] I've definitely done that.

[2369] I'll tell you the things I've done.

[2370] I always tell my kids all the things I screwed up on.

[2371] I love telling them that.

[2372] I love telling them.

[2373] Like, let me tell you what I used to lie about.

[2374] And I'll tell that my kids, like, lies that I used to tell.

[2375] I'll tell my kids all the screw ups that I used to tell.

[2376] And I tell them that just so that they know first, I'm not picking on them.

[2377] Like, I'm a grown man with, I pay taxes.

[2378] You know, I'm talking to a 10 -year -olds.

[2379] There's no way.

[2380] This is fair.

[2381] So I always criticize myself first.

[2382] and whenever they do something wrong I always say listen before you know just so you know rather I fucked this up already too I don't know man you're in a nom I guess like what I would say is it does work it does work for you like for example to take one thing that I've talked about something you do on your show that I encourage my students to do is I say look if you don't know something say I don't know say I don't know if I've used a word in class or if you don't know the answer say you don't know and that and you doing that makes people feel comfortable with admitting they don't know things.

[2383] It's a kind thing to do for a person, especially a person in position of power to say, I don't know.

[2384] But the problem is there's also a lot of authority and cultural currency in pretending to know shit.

[2385] And there are far more people out there.

[2386] There are far more people out there who have risen to positions of power pretending they know everything than admitting that they don't know things.

[2387] It's so dumb.

[2388] There's zero No benefit.

[2389] Zero benefit in pretending you have information that you don't have.

[2390] Zero.

[2391] There's zero benefit.

[2392] Because first of all, you'll get exposed.

[2393] People will find out.

[2394] They'll, they'll, and then also it doesn't make you look any better if you pretend you know something.

[2395] Like, there's actual strength in saying, what does that mean?

[2396] I don't know that.

[2397] Oh, okay.

[2398] Or, oh, I thought it was the other way.

[2399] Oh, my God, I'm an idiot.

[2400] There's power in that.

[2401] I totally disagree.

[2402] There's power in admitting you don't know, but I think there's a lot of benefit in pretending you know stuff that you don't.

[2403] Not ultimately.

[2404] Ultimately, no, because you get exposed and then they'll never listen to you again.

[2405] People will never trust you.

[2406] It's very valuable to tell the truth.

[2407] Very valuable.

[2408] Didn't you just tell me about a guy with a nice house and a car who was doing placebo fucking magic?

[2409] Yeah, I mean, he had an okay house.

[2410] I don't want to live in that shit hole.

[2411] I'm just saying, you know what I'm saying?

[2412] Like, there's a lot of liars out there.

[2413] People know that guy's full of shit now.

[2414] And I think his business is eroded radically.

[2415] you know it got through the community that he's full of shit i mean but yeah i know what you're saying like he was he was scamming people but he knows he's scamming people that that that that the what you carry in your heart being a con artist and robbing people out of their hard word hard earned dollars by tricking them and the thinking that you're healing them that in in itself is a great punishment yeah when you say ultimately you mean sort of like ultimately in like the big game well not just yeah in the big game but just in day -to -day life you know know you're a fucking con artist like the way you're paying for your food is through lies god i hope you're right i just i've seen i've met these people that guy in florida these people i mean fucking come on dr oz jesus christ you think dr oz i mean i don't know man i i i i mean it's interesting talking to you about it but like you think he's going home at night and like geez i really shouldn't have that rakey healer on like it's eating me up inside does he have rakey healers on he's got how many every time i go to the supermarket there's his smiling fucking face on some magazine with Dr. Oz's easy way to lose weight with these, you know what I mean?

[2416] And like, it's fucking hard to be Oprah.

[2417] She lets a lot of these motherfuckers through the net.

[2418] There's something on Wondry, which is one of my favorite podcasts.

[2419] I don't know if you ever listen to Wondry.

[2420] It's amazing.

[2421] They're really good.

[2422] And they had a fantastic one on Aaron Hernandez, who's that football player, wound up being a murderer.

[2423] But they have one now on some con artist, who's some healer person, who Oprah has.

[2424] on and Oprah elevated this guy and now and I saw it on my feed today I was very excited to read it after or to listen to it rather after this podcast after we're done with our podcast but it was essentially another one of those things where some person who Oprah had on snuck through the net and became a bullshit artist she's had a bunch of those on you remember there's that one guy wrote a book it turned out he made up everything that was in the book and dr. Oz is he they brought him before Congress because he was he had some miracle cure that literally like melt fat off your body and they're like is this a miracle cure he's like no it's not like what the how the fuck are you still on tv well because what's he do it you know what he is you know he's a he's a religious figure right he is he's Oprah's out there no no no no no my ho's out there working you're gonna keep him out there making that money well this maybe it's and this is the flip side of kindness though right I mean we keep going to this inception circle right but like there's this Carl Sagan I think it's Carl Sagan line where he says you want to be open minded but not so open minded your brain falls out right and it's like you You also want to be kind, but not so kind that you become a kind of laundering factory for people like Dr. Us.

[2425] Right, right.

[2426] And that, you know, and that's, I don't know, Oprah just wants people to be happy, right?

[2427] You know, so.

[2428] I've encountered a few of those people, too, man. Over the years of doing this podcast, it's a few people that I've had on that turned out to be full of shit.

[2429] It's hard because you, particularly in the beginning, I really didn't vet them at all.

[2430] Like someone would tell me, oh, this guy's great.

[2431] She talked to him.

[2432] and then I talked to him, then in the conversation, like, hey, is what you're saying true?

[2433] And then, you know, it just took a while for me to understand.

[2434] You got something there?

[2435] He was on The Secret.

[2436] Oh, one of those motherfuckers.

[2437] One of the narrators.

[2438] The secret.

[2439] One of those motherfuckers.

[2440] That's the ultimate of horseshit, bullshit.

[2441] I mean, you talk to.

[2442] They don't want you to know.

[2443] You talk to actual physicists about that, and they just go, people actually study quantum mechanics, and, you know, like the really complicated.

[2444] underlying mechanism of the fucking universe itself, and then you see these quacks out there selling horseshit.

[2445] And then when you find out that the secret was actually, well, not the secret, that's what the bleep, what the bleep was actually run by that person who claimed to be channeling some fucking thousand -year -old alien or some shit.

[2446] You know that lady?

[2447] Do you know that?

[2448] Do you remember what the bleep?

[2449] What was it?

[2450] I want to write it down.

[2451] Yeah.

[2452] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2453] It's like, there's a name to, she goes on and talks.

[2454] She's just like this middle -aged woman who's kind of heavy, and she's talking in this weird, but she has this crazy name.

[2455] Like, what is this lady's name?

[2456] Like, what kind of name is that?

[2457] And it turns out that's not her name.

[2458] That is who she's channeling.

[2459] And they don't tell you this on the, when you're watching what the bleep, but she's channeling some fucking thousand -year -old entity.

[2460] But here I am.

[2461] Look, now I'm just like, I just need you to like make me feel hopefully.

[2462] I feel like this is what I, like, came here to talk to you about or something.

[2463] Like, I just, you really think in the end, like, it comes back to bite you in the ass?

[2464] That feels like a very sort of redemptive vision, but it's like, here we have a laundry list.

[2465] I mean, we could go on and on and on and on about charlatans who have risen to the very highest levels of power.

[2466] Yeah.

[2467] And I feel like I'd like to believe that every day they, like, cry into their pillows at night and their, like, soul husks are going to be, you know, shown what they truly.

[2468] are, but...

[2469] I would rather concentrate on good people.

[2470] Concentrate on the bad people that succeed financially.

[2471] I'd rather concentrate on good people, because I think there's plenty of them.

[2472] There's plenty of really interesting, fascinating people that have a great message.

[2473] You're saying it works, too.

[2474] You don't have...

[2475] You're saying you can be kind and that'll work.

[2476] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2477] There's a lot of them out there, man. There's a lot of, like, really motivating, fascinating people that are, they've lived a life of value, and they can relay that information to you.

[2478] And there's, there's like, real lessons that you can take out of that that can enhance your own life.

[2479] I think those people are real.

[2480] They're out there.

[2481] You can concentrate on the bullshit artist that asshole down in Florida selling people wheatgrass that you don't have to though.

[2482] I mean, I hate that they're real.

[2483] I hate that they exist.

[2484] But in some ways, what they do is like they make it so that you really appreciate kind people and you really appreciate real people.

[2485] You know, the assholes and the deceptive people that you run into in this life, they're just going to make you appreciate the exceptional people.

[2486] God, I mean, I have rainy days, bro.

[2487] Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[2488] Rainy days make you appreciate the sun.

[2489] You do get the shut out of the like crazy.

[2490] Dr. Oz makes you appreciate real doctors.

[2491] Dr. Oz makes you appreciate real, real, real doctors, real physicians, real, real people who are actually trying to help people.

[2492] It's just crazy.

[2493] And maybe he's trying to help people.

[2494] He is, that's the thing.

[2495] Like there was a, so we were in, I was in div school.

[2496] So I went to like, so in divinity school, although it's, it sounds like I'm going to be priest.

[2497] But I was like, it's a secular.

[2498] It was the University of Chicago.

[2499] So it's a secular university.

[2500] We were early, early students in div school.

[2501] And we were mocking this guy, Joel Austin.

[2502] I don't know if you know.

[2503] Yeah.

[2504] Sure.

[2505] We're like, Joe.

[2506] That's the guy with the gigantic arena.

[2507] Yes.

[2508] He fills up.

[2509] Yes.

[2510] His own jet in a mansion.

[2511] Oh, my God.

[2512] You know, this guy, right?

[2513] And we're just like, oh, Joel Austin, like, can't believe that that, like, people think that's Christianity.

[2514] You know, we're going off, right?

[2515] And one of my friends sitting there, and usually he'd be talking, he was quiet the whole time.

[2516] He says, he finally speaks up.

[2517] He says, you know what?

[2518] I get what you all are saying.

[2519] I get what you all are saying about Joel Austin.

[2520] But when I was in high school, my parents neglected me. Like he had a terrible, terrible childhood.

[2521] They didn't care about his education.

[2522] He was dirt poor.

[2523] And he was like, I watched Joel Austin.

[2524] And Joel Austin told me that God wanted me to make more of myself.

[2525] And it helped me. And we're all sitting there.

[2526] And we're all they're looking at each other and we and I didn't even know my brain exploded right because here's this guy who's just obviously a charlatan like like for me a terrible person and here's my friend being like hey you're you're laying into a guy who you know and he realizes right in retrospect what was going on but he was also like you know he gave me something important and and and I don't even I didn't even know what I didn't know what to do with that it's happened with diet gurus I've laid into this guy David Perlmuter, who wrote this book, Grain Brain and stuff like that.

[2527] Like, I went back through his history, and I found out that he used to promise everything was a miracle cure.

[2528] He started with his self -published book called, like, I don't know, like, brain -saving .com or something.

[2529] And back then, he had a totally different line on it.

[2530] He was like, you need to eat only lean meat, and I've cured all these people of ALS.

[2531] And then it became, you need to eat saturated fat, and I've cured these people of ALS.

[2532] And I wrote this hit piece on him.

[2533] I was like, this guy is a horrible human being.

[2534] And I'm going to show you who he is.

[2535] I'm going to trace his charlatanry all the way back to that.

[2536] the beginning and there were all these people that were like i read david perlmutter's books and they got me eating healthy again because he does advocate you know like an alternative to junk food that's so he his charisma right these people have charisma and that charisma can give people hope and meaning even if it's like fake energy healing mm -hmm people are so weird we're so complicated we're so we're so we're so complicated natural we're unnatural animals right we're unnatural Listen, man, we've been talking for three and a half hours.

[2537] What?

[2538] Yeah, it's 3 .30.

[2539] Can you believe it?

[2540] I can't believe it.

[2541] There's a fucking time warp in this room, man. It's very strange.

[2542] It happens all the time.

[2543] Yeah.

[2544] Humans are weird.

[2545] I mean, I don't know.

[2546] I think that last, I think that's maybe what I really care about is just.

[2547] Just there's so much, right?

[2548] There's so much to pay attention to.

[2549] There's so many people.

[2550] just in this country alone there's 320 million people and a lot of them are talking publicly you know there's a lot there's a lot out there but there's a lot of good out there too the key is to just concentrate on the good you know and just be the best that you could be that's the key just be the nicest you could be the kindness you could be be the most honest you could be and you're going to fuck up there's no way around it you're just you're a person and if you fuck up you can't be too hard on yourself you can't judge yourself on failures you've got to recognize that you are the person who's learned from those failures.

[2551] You're not defined by mistakes, you know, and that's a lot of what people do.

[2552] They define themselves by mistakes.

[2553] And then they also judge other people by their mistakes.

[2554] And they decide that this one moment in time that this person said the wrong thing or did the wrong thing or made a mistake or was incorrect about something, that defines them forever.

[2555] you know and all these people that you could find good things in whether it's Joel Olstein or Dr. Oz or what are these people like it just there's just there's a lesson in data that comes from them about just how weirdly complicated human beings are and how wildly we we vary that's it that's I just it's funny because you know I think we're we're comfortable with that but a lot of times people aren't comfortable with complexity no they like to define people yeah they want to make things very binary they want to make people good or bad right or left one or zero right and that's not the world's messy it's like it's a human problem it's like we were talking about with abortion or there's a lot of human problems that's a human problem and uh i think it's hard to be comfortable with yourself so it's very hard to be comfortable with other people that's why i always stress with people like you've got to accept yourself for what you've done wrong do your best and also find some difficult shit to do because that gets away a lot of the anxiety that you carry around in your body a lot of like difficult things make regular life less difficult and that sounds so simplistic but particularly physically difficult because when you do things that are physically difficult the strain of making yourself do those things it's very valuable it's not just valid like exercise and fitness and martial arts and running and whatever you're doing that's really difficult.

[2556] It's not just valuable in terms of like health and the way you look, but it's also valuable for your mind, maybe even more so, because regular life can be confusing and little things that go wrong and little problems that arise are exacerbated by the fact that you're not accustomed to dealing with hardship.

[2557] So creating your own bullshit, whether it's through some brutal kettlebell exercise or running up hills or something, is extremely.

[2558] extremely valuable for you also, not just accepting the nuanced perspectives of other people, but also being able to navigate through this world with some sort of an understanding of just how complex it all is and how weird it all is and not be overly thrown off by every little dip in the road and pothole that you encounter.

[2559] Focus on the good.

[2560] focus on the good people and hope that and have faith I guess that that that'll work know that there are bad people but you know just do your best do your best and you know and don't get suckered there's a lot of suckers and tell the truth even if you feel like it's going to sell more books to lie yes yes or you know not if it's an old lady and you look great say that say that to her I don't know be nice right choose kindness over truth if you have to tell your book one more time.

[2561] Natural.

[2562] Hold it up so people can see it.

[2563] Where am I holding it towards?

[2564] This camera right here.

[2565] Yeah.

[2566] It's natural how faith in nature's goodness leads to harmful fads, unjust laws and flawed signs.

[2567] But you know now that that's just a publicity play and it's really very nuanced.

[2568] These motherfuckers with their titles.

[2569] And your Instagram or your Twitter.

[2570] I have Twitter at Alan Levinovitz.

[2571] And also there's I mean we got an episode of the Shift podcast up on on Apple iTunes and if you search like Shift Allen on Spotify.

[2572] We've got like the first episode up there.

[2573] Beautiful.

[2574] Which would be cool.

[2575] All right, Alan.

[2576] Thank you.

[2577] I really enjoyed this.

[2578] I did too.

[2579] Thank you.

[2580] Thank you.

[2581] Thanks.

[2582] Bye, everybody.

[2583] Yay.

[2584] Between a half hours.

[2585] That is great.