In this episode of Economics Radio, we talk about the impact of noise on our hearing and how it affects our productivity and productivity. We also talk about noise pollution and the impact it can have on our productivity. And we have a guest on the show to talk about how to deal with it. Thanks to our sponsor, Bose! Bose is a company that specializes in noise-canceling headphones and ear enhancement products. They've been around for a long time and are a great addition to the AirPods and the Bose noise canceling headphones, but they're not the only ones out there that can do the job. We talk about some of the other products available, like noise cancelers, earphones, and ear muffs, and how they can help you block out the noise that disrupts your productivity and your productivity. We also discuss misophonia, which is a negative externality of noise, and what it can do to your hearing and productivity, and why it's important to have a good sense of hearing. And how it can affect your productivity and how we think about how we're all affected by noise and the things we do in the workplace. This episode is sponsored by Bose Noise Censys, a headphone company that makes noise cancelling headphones and other noise-isolating headphones. You can find more information about the headphones you can get from Bose here. You can also get a discount on the Airpods and more by using the discount code: PODCAST at checkout at checkout, and get 20% off your first purchase when you place an ad-free version of the podcast, and you get 10% off the entire service, plus free shipping, plus a free shipping discount when you buy a pair of headphones and an extra pair of earphone, and it gets you an extra $10,000 in the first month, plus an additional $5,000 gets you a copy of the second place promo code, plus they'll get $5 more, plus you'll get a $10th place discount, and they'll also get an ad discount, plus I'll get two months' worth of free shipping and a $15, plus the discount gets you get an extra place at the first place gets an ad, and I'll receive $5 gets a $5th place gets you gets $5 choice, and a mentor gets a VIP membership gets $4,000, and she gets a discount, too!
00:00:07.000We were talking before about Adam Curry, who's just here, who has these crazy ear enhancements that are these software-based so he can tweak it and change levels and stuff like that.
00:00:18.000And you were saying that you also have hearing, but you get it from rock and roll.
00:00:22.000Yeah, I mean, honestly, I've never been tested.
00:00:24.000I just know that when I'm out eating with my family or friends, that everybody can hear everything and I can't hear anything.
00:00:31.000But no, I played loud rock music for six, seven, eight, nine years.
00:00:38.000And yeah, it does what they say it does.
00:00:47.000I have older relatives who have a hearing aid, or whatever they're called now, hearing enhancement devices, that are light years better than they used to be.
00:01:34.000You know, when I started as a journalist in newsrooms, this was late 80s, early 90s, a newsroom is an open place, and a lot of people back then were on the phone doing your reporting.
00:01:58.000So I started wearing just the good foam earplugs.
00:02:01.000They're made by Flint's, I think, is the brand that I use.
00:02:03.000They're kind of non-tapered, and they're very thick.
00:02:06.000And if you compress them and put them in, it'll block out like 70%, 80%.
00:02:10.000So I've been shutting out the world for like 25 years now.
00:02:13.000So when the noise cancelers got good, I've embraced them, yeah.
00:02:18.000Yeah, some people need it though, right?
00:02:19.000They need that sound like at a coffee shop.
00:02:22.000Like they love to go to coffee shops and all the milling around actually helps their creativity.
00:02:25.000You know, we're doing an episode right now for Economics Radio on noise basically as, you know, kind of we got into it thinking about noise pollution, right?
00:02:36.000It's what economists call an externality, a negative externality, meaning you can produce it and it affects me, but I can't charge you for it, right?
00:03:44.000Yeah, but if someone screams in your ear unexpectedly and hurts your ear, that is a form of assault, right?
00:03:52.000You don't think of it that way, but if you saw a girl, she was standing there, and a guy ran up to her and just, in her ear, and she's like, and she falls down because your ear hurts.
00:04:19.000It shows that it's a little bit annoying.
00:04:21.000But it's also, it's like, you don't want to be looking at all the world's problems when you're about to get on the most stressful thing that a person does.
00:04:29.000You have to self-medicate pretty heavily before flying, I understand?
00:04:49.000I can get really, really high and then get on that and just freak the fuck out and make it, but go through a rollercoaster ride of thoughts and a lot of times I wind up riding too.
00:05:02.000Wait, when you get high, you have a worse experience on the plane than you're saying?
00:05:34.000Like, if I'm sitting in the chair and I'm like, whoo!
00:05:37.000And, you know, I'm looking out the window, we're flying, and I'm realizing we're 30,000 feet in the air, and I'm, you know, really fucking high.
00:06:43.000That creates creativity, for me, whatever the source of it, for me, for some reason it gets enhanced oftentimes by being on a plane on edibles.
00:06:51.000How predictable, though, is the experience?
00:07:15.000I mean, that's what paranoia really is, marijuana-based paranoia, if I had to guess.
00:07:19.000It's a hyper-awareness that you're not comfortable with.
00:07:22.000And so in taking in all these things, it's like, if you just can't settle in, you're recognizing every threat that's around you all the time.
00:07:29.000The fact that a rock could come out of the sky, the fact that the tsunami could hit at any moment, the earth could shake, what if a super volcano blows up?
00:07:37.000All those things that you know to be real all of a sudden get dragged into the sky.
00:07:40.000And you put yourself back into caveman mode.
00:07:43.000Like, every rustle of grass is the lion who's coming to eat.
00:07:52.000Let's say for people who don't use drugs, right?
00:07:55.000But they hear you say this, and they say, wow, that is...
00:07:59.000I recognize the value of putting yourself...
00:08:03.000In a place, emotionally, cognitively, kind of unleashing yourself or maybe putting yourself in a new place where you're going to have thoughts, big thoughts, maybe scary thoughts, is there a way to do that that you know of without drugs?
00:08:15.000Yeah, we were just talking about that, with Adam, in fact.
00:08:18.000We were talking about holotropic breathing, and he has had some experiences with holotropic breathing.
00:08:23.000It's like a meditation-based breathing routine that, for whatever reason, it activates psychedelic chemicals in your brain, and you can really trip out.
00:08:32.000And he was talking about how he was flying for like a half an hour, and I've had various friends do it.
00:08:40.000But I've had various friends who've done it who have had spectacular experiences, like full-blown mushroom experiences for several minutes.
00:08:48.000And is it guaranteed, like if you do the breathing, is it guaranteed to get you to that state or no?
00:08:52.000No, I think you have to learn how to get there.
00:09:09.000But I do know that people that I trust, including people like Adam, super smart guys, We'll tell you that for them, it gave them the same experience as like taking a drug.
00:09:58.000And I like the predictability of, like, even, like, the difference between if I drink my Laphroaig as my favorite scotch, like, and if there's not that and there's another...
00:10:06.000That's the stuff we had the other day, no?
00:10:54.000And whiskey is actually pretty low-cal, low-sugar, just high alcohol content, so the sugar works a little bit differently.
00:11:02.000But no, my doctor fully approves of a couple drinks a night.
00:11:06.000Yeah, there's been research that shows that a couple of drinks a night for most people is actually...
00:11:10.000In fact, my doctor, who's a researcher as well, she said that if you look at longevity, the people who have the shorter life expectancies are the people who drink a lot, not a surprise, and none.
00:11:25.000So it's the people who drink from like one and a half to maybe two and a half, maybe a little bit more drinks a day, have the longest life expectancy.
00:11:32.000She doesn't know, though, whether it's the teetotalers.
00:12:01.000And that one, you know, talking about loneliness and, you know, that whole correlation, how they came to the conclusion that it's like 15 cigarettes a day.
00:12:10.000But that a bad feeling, that a bad feeling is bad for you.
00:12:13.000And a good feeling is probably good for you.
00:12:15.000And the little trade-off health-wise, I kind of feel like you can make that up in the gym.
00:13:03.000I'm always trying to isolate the places or the circumstances where I get good ideas.
00:13:10.000And the problem is it's very – it's unpredictable.
00:13:13.000Walking is the one thing that I've found.
00:13:16.000And the fact is that writers throughout history – A lot of creative people throughout history have embraced walking.
00:13:22.000Now, in the old days, it was one of the few things that you kind of could do.
00:13:26.000You weren't going to go out and, well, I guess you could have played golf or whatever, but people have been walking for a long time and they say that there's something about what the brain and body do in...
00:13:37.000Concert with each other on a walk, which is you're kind of mapping, you're kind of decoding, you're kind of figuring, but you're also getting some physiological stimulation.
00:13:45.000And I find that's one that's pretty good, but I wish there was a thing I could do to make the good ideas flow, because that's the hard part.
00:13:53.000I think if there was a thing other than show up and start writing, if there really was a thing, it would cheapen whatever the fuck it is that makes you have those weird thoughts that come across.
00:14:17.000And running, a lot of times, you know, you're just so tired, you're not having any good ideas.
00:14:21.000You're just thinking like, I gotta get to the top of the hill.
00:14:23.000How long you lived in LA? Since 94. And before that?
00:14:27.000I lived in, this is my whole thing, New Jersey until I was 7, San Francisco from 7 to 11, Florida from 11 to 13, Boston from 13 to 24, New York from 24 to 26-ish, 27 maybe,
00:14:46.000Okay, so did you find that in Boston and New York, which are easily the best walking places of all those places you just said, did you walk a lot more there and did it change anything for you?
00:15:02.000I was working in clubs in New York, and I was doing a lot of road gigs, and I was playing a lot of pool, and I was hanging around with a bunch of comedians, and I wasn't going on any hikes.
00:15:11.000I would go to the gym occasionally and work out, but we were doing comedy.
00:15:16.000But as a grown-up, and I usually run with my dog, he loves to run, and I haven't been able to run recently because of a little injury.
00:15:24.000So for the last two months, I've just been walking with him and then hiking on the trails and he runs around.
00:15:30.000When I was doing it, I was realizing I can listen to podcasts, or I can listen to music, or I can just do it silent.
00:15:36.000And when I do it silent, it's really interesting.
00:15:40.000There's inner dialogue that starts playing out, and it's like you're having a conversation with yourself that's a little therapeutic.
00:15:46.000So I go on these hour walks with my dog, and at the end of it, I feel like I've got a better handle on stuff.
00:15:54.000I wonder, what you're saying makes me think, and I hope it's not too late for our episode on noise, because this is actually a component that'd be good to get at, is, like, the way you just described quiet, or solitude, whatever it is, right?
00:16:09.000I think almost everybody who hears that would say, oh yeah, I definitely see the value of that, because, you know, you need time to process your thoughts, to feel things, whatever.
00:16:19.000But it does make me wonder, the world is obviously more noisy now than it used to be.
00:16:37.000And, again, I don't want to be the generation, because every generation thinks that what the next generation does is horrible.
00:16:44.000Like, the people, you know, the Rolling Stones came, the people who, like, Perry Como said, this is the worst music ever, and then the people after that said the Rolling Stones, you know, etc., But I do wonder how much we're losing by not having availability of that quiet.
00:16:59.000Unless you build your life to have a lot of silence, which I do because I'm a writer and I sit alone all day, not many people get to have that.
00:17:10.000There's got to be something because there's a shift in attention and there's a shift in focus that's dramatic.
00:17:18.000We've gone from just looking at the world around us to fixated on a device.
00:17:22.000You know, you look at people's phone time, a lot of times it's six hours in a day.
00:17:26.000Just constantly on their phone on the toilet, constantly on their phone when they go to get a coffee, on their phone at their desk, texting people while they're walking to the other office, they're texting and walking down the hallway.
00:17:37.000I mean, most people are on those goddamn things all day long.
00:17:40.000And there's, for sure, you're putting energy into that little device, which means you're not putting energy into thinking without that device.
00:17:49.000And though you might think of it as a, well, I'm still paying attention, I'm just doing this.
00:18:30.000But it's really like there's value in thinking.
00:18:33.000And we haven't put a value judgment or a number judgment on that.
00:18:38.000It's interesting, some of the people you hear these days talking the most about really limiting or even forbidding their kids' screen time is Silicon Valley executives.
00:18:51.000Yeah, so you have to say, like, you know, at a certain point, you have to say, okay, the writing is on the wall here.
00:18:56.000But on the other hand, look, every technology that's ever been invented, people get scared of it, people embrace it, people trash it, and then, you know...
00:19:41.000I mean, even in the environment you're describing that sounds like, let's say Starbucks, everybody's on the phone, you've got to think, well, wait a minute.
00:19:49.000Maybe that person over there who looks like they're a slave to it, maybe they are, maybe they're sending a text to their grandma that they wouldn't have done, they wouldn't have been able to do 10 years ago.
00:20:02.000I mean, that's why I like economists, because economists are ruthless, bloodless.
00:20:08.000They almost don't know what humans are, but they're very good at measuring costs and benefits.
00:20:14.000And that's what I feel that our kind of political, social media discourse is missing.
00:20:20.000People are all, for the most part, Advocates or activists, they pick up the lane and they stay in it and they want to pave over the rest of everybody's lanes and make it theirs.
00:20:34.000You know, that's another episode that I was listening to of yours recently about how hard it is to get people to change their mind on things.
00:20:42.000And I forget who the expert was who was talking, but it was a really interesting point that he had about the mind of Like people say, change your mind.
00:21:02.000It's a paradox, though, because the way you just said it, like, if you are in your tribe… Yes.
00:21:07.000Then, even though it can be healthier for you and for presumably many other people for you to change your mind or at least think differently about things, you risk losing credibility or whatever.
00:21:19.000Well, I mean, some religions, I mean, that's how they keep you, right?
00:22:07.000And his father, a guy named Shepsel Dubner, who'd come here when he was in his maybe late 20s from Poland, he still lived his everyday in Brooklyn as if he were still in Poland.
00:22:17.000When my father converted and his father found out, my father was in the war, he was overseas, he was home on leave, and I think we're good to go.
00:22:44.000The sit shiva forum, the Jewish mourning ritual, where for seven days you mourn the dead.
00:22:50.000He declared that he would never again speak to his son, and he forbade everyone in his family from speaking to his son.
00:22:58.000So, by the time I was born, I was the youngest of eight kids in this family because they'd become very Catholic.
00:23:04.000I didn't know this whole family of my father's was unknown to me entirely.
00:23:10.000So, they did exactly what you're saying now.
00:23:15.000Yeah, yeah, that was what I thought too when I... Holy shit!
00:23:19.000And my mother's did the same thing, but it was less dramatic because her family was less religious, so they still didn't like at all that she had converted.
00:23:35.000The first book I wrote, long before Freakonomics, was called Turbulent Souls, although it got then republished under a different title called Choosing My Religion, and it tells this story of my two parents and then me.
00:23:47.000I would love to hear that, but I just want to put in your head that what I was going to ask you is like, how could you imagine a scenario where you would be capable of doing that to your children?
00:24:05.000But on the other hand, I mean, this is what Freakonomics is...
00:24:09.000What I try to learn through doing Freakonomics is, you know, to measure the what...
00:24:17.000And try to figure out the why, but then not be the judge who says, that was terrible, this is wonderful, because, you know, different people have, look, if Shepsel Dubner were here, we could ask him, What's your side of the story?
00:24:32.000He could tell us a story that might convince us that, you know what, this son of his did a terrible thing to the family.
00:24:40.000You know, he would say, how could it be that we Jews existed for generations and generations and generations when everywhere we lived, there was always someone trying to, you know, get rid of us.
00:24:51.000And then we finally come to America You know, the land of freedom, religious freedom, economic freedom.
00:24:57.000And here, after generations and generations of forefathers fought to stay Jewish, here my son decides to become Catholic.
00:26:34.000I've been long fascinated by religion and I think that, again, if you think about it the way that economists think about things, there are costs and there are benefits and it's complicated.
00:26:47.000I think that's hard for people to handle when people are hardcore atheists.
00:26:53.000Where they don't see any value in it whatsoever, even though people are getting some sort of ethical value, moral value.
00:27:02.000And the way I always put it is it's like a scaffolding to live your life by.
00:27:07.000You can live within these confines and it really kind of makes sense if you follow it loosely that we're doing it for the benefit of community.
00:27:15.000And it's also like a real community sense that comes from meeting in Sunday.
00:27:20.000Or whatever day it is with your religion, and you meet in a group of other people that are also in the community, and you all basically are saying together that we should do good things and be good to people and treat each other the way God would want us to.
00:27:37.000Like, all that has undeniable benefits.
00:27:39.000And anybody that says differently is like you're deluding yourself.
00:27:42.000Like, your points… The atheists who are hardcore, who make points about the preposterous nature of a lot of religious texts, they're on the money.
00:27:49.000But it doesn't mean that it doesn't give people a benefit and that I couldn't even disagree with them continuing it.
00:27:57.000Because there's a lot of people that benefit greatly from religion.
00:28:00.000Someone wrote to us after that loneliness episode came out.
00:28:05.000And said, how did you fail to write about this supposed epidemic of loneliness without addressing the huge decline in organized religion in America?
00:28:17.000Which I thought was a very good piece of criticism.
00:28:19.000Because you're right, it's a community.
00:28:22.000One other thing I would add to the list that you provided of what it can give is humility, right?
00:28:27.000Because, you know, if you have an image of some superior being, God, deity, whatever you want to call it, You kind of understand that one mortal is, you know, the world does not revolve around me.
00:28:39.000The other thing I would say, and look, it's hard for me to scientifically, logically embrace a lot of the arguments that a lot of religions make, especially about things like the afterlife, right?
00:28:49.000That said, even to an atheist, I would suggest one way to think about it is, if someone does believe in those rewards, or if in economic terms we're talking about them as incentives, Yeah.
00:30:06.000And someone like Penn Jillette, who will be able to...
00:30:08.000Because he understands all those carny tricks where they do where they can pretend that they're psychic just by leading you into questions.
00:31:06.000Daryl Davis is a gentleman who's been on this podcast before, and he is a musician by trade, but he has converted over 200 different guys to leave the KKK and Nazi organizations.
00:31:19.000And he's converted it by becoming their friend.
00:31:22.000Because he was doing a show, and this guy came—I'm butchering it, and I'm sorry, Daryl, but this is what he said on the podcast.
00:31:29.000I'm sure you'd do a better job of telling the story.
00:31:31.000But he was at a show, and he was playing in this band, and this guy said, you were really good, you know, and he sat down with the guy, and the guy said, I've never had a drink with a black guy before.
00:31:42.000He's in the KKK. And so he goes, you're having a rational conversation with me, a normal conversation with me.
00:31:49.000Do you really think that black men are evil or black men are dumb?
00:31:53.000And they have this conversation, this civil conversation.
00:31:55.000And then he gives the guy his, I think he gave him his phone number and said, I'll call you when I'm back in town if you want to have this conversation again.
00:33:00.000That's where he was from before that, up until then, I think.
00:33:04.000Somewhere where he just didn't experience it and then when he was a little boy People were throwing things at him in a parade and he had no idea.
00:33:12.000He couldn't understand it He'd never he didn't know and they had to pull him aside and say it's because you're black He's like what like he couldn't believe it so because the fact that he didn't have it in his early childhood and then he had it when he was a Young boy and realized how crazy it was that he didn't experience this before this one moment and became obsessed with it was Italy His Wikipedia says he grew up all over the world.
00:33:33.000But when he came back, when he was 10, he was in an all-white Cub Scout pack in Massachusetts.
00:34:14.000But it's The families of those people were risk-taking savages.
00:34:20.000They didn't even have a video to watch, right?
00:34:23.000They just jumped in a fucking boat and hoped America was better.
00:34:26.000And then when they got there, they got checked in at Ellis Island.
00:34:29.000And then they started working in factories and scratching and clawing.
00:34:33.000And there's just a lot of struggle that's still in that part of the world.
00:34:38.000When you come to California, one of the first things you feel is like a lighter...
00:34:42.000A lighter sense of discourse than the East Coast.
00:34:46.000The East Coast, I always felt like people had their guard up a little bit more, a little bit more tense, a little bit more like, what the fuck did you say?
00:34:52.000There was a little bit more of that, a little bit more sketchy people.
00:34:55.000Just the echoes of the savage past is still in the soil.
00:36:04.000And then I caught the bug, and now I love cities.
00:36:07.000So I love California, but when I come here, I feel like it's running on a different voltage, you know?
00:36:14.000And I am envious of people's ability to run like that.
00:36:20.000Like, they seem, right, like their shoulders, like you, look at me, I'm sitting here, my shoulders are always up to my ears, like, kind of just a built-in tension.
00:36:41.000On the other hand, I think that that intensity produces some things that I like a lot.
00:36:47.000I also like the environment of a university campus.
00:36:52.000To me, the tricky part is there's that fine line between intensity and competition that treats it like a zero-sum game.
00:37:01.000So I don't like to be around environments where people are trying to Yeah.
00:37:28.000You know about population densities, right?
00:37:30.000That you can accurately depict or detect how many people live in a given area by putting a camera on one red light and then a camera on another red light and then as the people walk by, measure how fast they walk.
00:37:50.000Also, how many syllables that they say per sentence, how quickly they say those syllables, that there's actually a cadence, a speed, an uptick— What are you talking about?
00:38:54.000They live for being stacked on top of a building with strangers below them and everyone's all together in this hive feeding off each other.
00:39:01.000You know what's interesting is, you know...
00:39:09.000So we're the same, roughly, generation, and we remember that back when, you know, computerization was starting and the internet was starting, that all the predictions were that, you know, now anybody can do anything from everywhere, so nobody's going to have any reason to have to live anywhere,
00:39:25.000and cities are just going to empty out.
00:39:29.000Around the world, the more digital we've gotten, in fact, the urban population now, the share of the human population that's urban is higher now than it's ever been in the history of the world.
00:39:40.000So what that says to me is, and this is not about New York versus California anymore, what that says to me is, even when you can engage with people remotely or have a lot of space, whatever, there's something about humans wanting to rub up against each other physically,
00:40:06.000And I always tell people, like, if you watch a comedy special on television, that comedy special is, at the very best, 70% as good as seeing it live.
00:40:15.000It's never 100% because you're not there.
00:40:17.000So it might be great because it's a funny person, but you're missing, for sure, at least 30%.
00:40:23.000And then, you know, when you're live, there's like this intangible quality.
00:42:39.000Like imagine if, and it's not really physical pain, but there is a certain level of emotional pain you experience when someone's bombing.
00:42:46.000When someone's in front of you like, oh god, especially me, because I've done stand-up for so many years, like I know what it's like to bomb, I've bombed, so I see someone bombing, I'm like, yikes, I gotta get out of here, I can't take it.
00:44:45.000And I'm sure every comic does this already, so it's not like I'm telling anybody anything, but having something in your pocket that's going to get them on your side, even if for a little while, just to get the momentum going in your way.
00:44:59.000We certainly do have some bits that you know work.
00:45:02.000Because if you bomb or somebody else bombs, you could give exactly the same set an hour later to a slightly different crowd, and it would go great, right?
00:46:36.000Yeah, you've got to get out of the room.
00:46:38.000One of the worst things that people do, and I don't know why they do it, but a lot of comedians like to bring terrible comedians with them on the road so that they look like a hero.
00:47:07.000Especially if you're doing it on purpose.
00:47:10.000There's a thing that's going on on stage that's not quantified.
00:47:13.000And there's a mass hypnosis that's happening.
00:47:16.000When someone is killing, for me, as an audience member, my recognition of this is, as a person who performs it and also as an audience member, when I'm an audience member and someone's killing, I'm letting them think for me.
00:48:26.000For sure, Trump has a lot of elements of stand-up comedy in his routines, for sure, 100%.
00:48:31.000If you watch his most recent speech where he's making fun of Joe Biden saying 150 million people were killed with guns, and he's like, I looked at the First Lady, I mean, he's literally doing stand-up, who does a very good job, by the way.
00:48:41.000I looked at the First Lady, I'm like, where are all these bodies?
00:48:43.000Where are all these 150 million people?
00:50:17.000I don't know if he's going to be able to get anything implemented, but I love what he represents is a man who wants to do good for people that don't have much.
00:52:40.000You've talked to a lot of people from all different realms in here, right?
00:52:44.000If we can agree, let's say, that being entertaining is not a great prerequisite or a qualification for being president, if we can agree on that, which seems pretty easy.
00:52:56.000What can be done, whether it's in the political sphere, the media sphere, putting something in the drinking water, to let people – to encourage people to have – A little bit more of what you're after, whether it's compassion,
00:55:22.000And there's also these ideas that we have that are cemented in stone, that, you know, if you're a left-wing person, you believe in X, Y, and Z. This is your doctrine.
00:55:31.000But most of us have, like, a little bit of this.
00:55:33.000Maybe you believe in the Second Amendment.
00:55:35.000Maybe you believe in the First Amendment.
00:55:37.000Maybe you think that maybe, you know, maybe we should incorporate a lot of things we do with the fire department and Do that to schools and do that to housing.
00:55:47.000Make sure that all the stuff's covered.
00:55:49.000Make housing an important part of a civilization, like for everybody.
00:55:54.000We did a piece, a Freakonomics Radio piece a year or two ago called America's Hidden Duopoly, and it was about the Democratic and Republican Party basically acting like Pepsi and Coke, right?
00:56:05.000They kind of divide and conquer the market, and they've built an industry that is incredibly valuable.
00:56:10.000The thing that's amazing to me is this.
00:56:13.000Trump won the presidency as the Republican that the RNC most wanted to get rid of.
00:56:20.000Bernie, last time around, was the Democrat that the DNC wanted to get rid of.
00:56:26.000They lost by getting their candidate, Hillary, in.
00:56:29.000This time, Bernie, who may very well become the candidate, is again the party that the DNC is out to get.
00:56:36.000So what does it say that you've got a duopoly, literally the machines running the system that we kind of let ourselves get manipulated into buying?
00:57:34.000There's one issue that kind of sets people off, and then they have to join the team that they may, you know.
00:57:41.000With a lot of people I know, it's the Second Amendment.
00:57:43.000People that are afraid of their house being broken into and they don't have anything to protect their family.
00:57:47.000And they'd otherwise be kind of libertarian-ish Democrats.
00:57:49.000And it's almost always guys who have kids.
00:57:52.000Once you have kids and you think about someone breaking into your house and doing something to your family, you get real scared and then you want to get guns.
00:59:21.000And then they develop defense mechanisms to deal with all their insecurities and they get around similar minded people and you curse the world and fuck everybody and fuck the police and fuck the this and then you get in these communities of people that think the same way.
00:59:35.000And then maybe there's gangs and maybe there's drugs and maybe there's crime and despair and sadness and maybe just negative people.
00:59:45.000Everyday people complaining about shit.
00:59:48.000And you're stuck in the mud of humanity with people.
00:59:51.000It's real hard to engineer 350 million people out of that.
00:59:55.000But for yourself, you can take actions to make your life better.
00:59:59.000And if everybody did that, if everybody took actions to make their life a happier experience by doing those things, by exercising, eating well, hugging friends, enhancing community, just trying to be nicer to people.
01:00:12.000Everybody there would be a massive shift.
01:03:00.000There's a balance between being productive and being happy.
01:03:02.000And I think it's hard to find that balance because we look at the numbers that come in, whether it's money or productivity or the number of things you've been able to create, and you think of that as being like, but look, I can get so much done.
01:03:58.000I find that success often is driven by a sort of ambition that's a little bit unseemly.
01:04:03.000And I'd like to know how to deal with that a little bit better.
01:04:07.000Well, it doesn't have to be, but it seems like it would be if it's a number game, right?
01:04:13.000If success meaning like you're in a business, you're trying to sell the most placards or whatever, like whatever it is, you know, you have this thing in your head and like you're really driven.
01:04:22.000Can I just say, if you're selling placards, you're already starting behind me.
01:04:27.000You're selling the most widgets, and you have this goal in your mind of being number one, and you're obsessed, and everyone's going to tell your story.
01:04:35.000Every time I got there, he was in the office, and he left after everybody.
01:04:38.000But look, now Bob's got a fucking yacht, and he's also got a pacemaker, right?
01:04:42.000Bob's ready to tick over any minute now.
01:04:44.000But also, I think the thing is, in pursuit of success, I think what often happens that I've seen in people I know and in people I don't know but I've read about is that your moral compass starts to shift.
01:04:59.000There's a lot of people that are successful.
01:05:01.000And we're only talking about business, right?
01:05:02.000We're not talking about athletics, are we?
01:05:04.000I'm thinking of some people in academia who, you know, even though the average person may not consider the stakes in academia super high, but like if you get in a big university department and And you start to write papers and get published and then get grants and accolades and so on.
01:05:22.000You're on a trajectory that's very intoxicating.
01:05:24.000And then all of a sudden, I think it's tempting.
01:05:30.000I don't think it's even a conscious decision.
01:05:32.000You start to make decisions that are not as sound, not as morally acceptable as you would have made five years ago when you were starting out.
01:05:48.000The academia I don't have any experience with, but I would imagine that would be particularly frustrating because those are the people that you call upon to be the objective purveyors of knowledge.
01:05:58.000These are the people that are talking to you about this because they're dedicated to being intellectual.
01:06:06.000How strange is it that we talk about economists, just for one example, but it's a good example because they're the most involved in policy and so on.
01:06:14.000There are Democratic economists and there are Republican economists.
01:06:59.000People didn't really seem to budge on with Obama, like drone attacks.
01:07:03.000Like a lot of people killed in drones attacks that were innocent.
01:07:07.000And that happened during the Bush administration and happened during Obama.
01:07:10.000But people, particularly on the left, treated the Bush administration's drone attacks very differently than they treated it when Obama was doing it.
01:07:19.000They seem to let it go because it didn't fit with their narrative of the evil military-industrial complex-influenced president who only gives a fuck about money.
01:07:28.000It didn't seem to jive with that, so they let it go.
01:07:34.000They were rooting for their team to be good, so they, listen, my team's made some fucking slips up this year, but I'm with the Yankees all the way.
01:07:44.000Yeah, if you're watching a football game, Let's say you're watching a football game in a bar and you're with, let's say I'm a Steelers fan, so let's say I'm watching with a Steelers fan, we're playing whoever, Ravens.
01:07:54.000The minute there's a call, let's say a pass interference call, The room divides equally because one side knows that it's a bad call and the other side knows.
01:08:03.000And these are people who, if you took them out, out of a football context, they're totally going to have different feel.
01:08:08.000They're not going to experience everything the same way.
01:08:11.000And even if it's a bad call, as long as it's for your team, you're going to take it.
01:11:14.000Do you like fighting because of the tactics, because of the action, etc.?
01:11:18.000Or is it because of the personality primarily?
01:11:22.000The excitement that comes from it being insanely difficult, the way I describe it, sorry if everybody's heard this a million times, it's high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
01:11:34.000So you know that they're on this crazy path where one guy's trying to slam his shin into the other guy's face, and the other guy's trying to do the same.
01:11:43.000They're trying to take each other down, choke each other, and to lose is horrible, and to win is glorious.
01:11:50.000When it all plays out live, the rush of these guys, that these guys experience, and then the rush that the audience experiences, it's hard for me to watch tennis.
01:12:33.000Is it a steep pyramid, and is it bad news if you're in the middle?
01:12:36.000It's a less steep pyramid than boxing.
01:12:38.000In boxing, when you see the undercards of fights, if you see a fight like Manny Pacquiao, Floyd Mayweather's biggest boxing pay-per-view fight ever, huge fight, right?
01:12:48.000Millions and millions and millions of dollars.
01:12:49.000The guys further down the bottom of the chain, they're getting an awesome opportunity to fight in front of the crowd that's going to see Manny Pacquiao versus Floyd Mayweather, and they don't make much money.
01:12:58.000And that's the case in boxing overwhelmingly in the early stages of a person's career.
01:13:03.000It's the same as MMA. And then as they become famous, they start making more.
01:13:07.000The difference is there's a Floyd Mayweather, and the closest thing we have to that is a Conor McGregor and maybe Ronda Rousey.
01:13:13.000Floyd Mayweather, when people talk about money in boxing, you're talking about Floyd Mayweather.
01:13:18.000I mean, maybe you were talking about Tyson at one point in time and Ali before him and Sugar Ray Leonard, the guys who made the big money, Roy Jones Jr. But there's only...
01:14:08.000So NFL, if you're the 53rd guy on the roster, you're not making a ton of money, but you know you're going to make money, as long as you don't get hurt.
01:14:14.000Would you rather see MMA a little bit more like that?
01:14:16.000Would you rather see the fighters have more of a league and have more leverage, or do you like the way it's set up now?
01:14:22.000Fighters are always going to be individuals.
01:14:24.000It's very difficult to get a fighter in a union.
01:14:27.000That's why it's never been done before.
01:15:36.000Because I think it's a very, very, very difficult thing, and I think we should be trying to give them enough money so that they can do their best and we can see the best fighters come up.
01:15:44.000I think one of the impediments of guys coming up is that in the beginning you have to work a full-time job as well as fight, and it's really hard to train.
01:15:52.000And if we get someone we can sign it, I agree with you, there should be some sort of a minimum, and that minimum we would agree upon something that would be sustainable if you're fighting, say, once or twice a year.
01:16:06.000Especially in the beginning you'd fight.
01:16:07.000You'd probably fight as many times as you can in the beginning.
01:16:09.000You'd fight three times a year if you could, four even.
01:16:12.000And guys like Donald Cerrone, even at the top, still fights like four or five times a year just because he's a wild man.
01:16:17.000So theoretically, like if you're looking at it as supply and demand, it seems that there's a lot of supply of fighters, right?
01:16:23.000It seems like there's a lot of audience demand, but what UFC is doing is, according to you, kind of smartly constraining the supply so that the quality is high.
01:17:03.000And it's the biggest rival to the UFC in America, but still pales in comparison.
01:17:08.000But there's world-class fighters there, and they're starting to get people from the UFC that they get their contract up, and they're still in their prime, and then Bellator comes with a better, more attractive offer, and they take that offer.
01:17:17.000Also, in Bellator, they're allowed to have sponsors.
01:17:20.000The UFC is solely sponsored by Reebok, so the fighters all have one sponsor, that they wear Reebok gear.
01:17:29.000I don't know how it's structured, but I know that the fighters prefer the Bellator model, which is they can find their own sponsors, and if they have a good management company, the management can get three or four sponsors on their shorts, and they might make more money from sponsors than they do from the fight itself, which is what was in the UFC,
01:17:45.000so a lot of fighters were really bummed out when they switched over to a different business model.
01:17:49.000So that, I think, would probably be better for fighters.
01:17:56.000They have to chase those down, chase those sponsors down.
01:17:59.000A lot of them go bad on you, and a lot of them don't pay.
01:18:01.000And there was a real problem with that with fighters, where they had gotten fucked over by a couple different sponsors, and it created a hassle.
01:18:08.000And so then you have fighters who didn't get paid, but the sponsor did get put on UFC. Oh, boy.
01:18:18.000It turns out it's the fighters that are responsible, but that's a fucking giant burden on them while they're in the middle of training to try to go sue some fight gear company that didn't pay them their money.
01:18:28.000I don't think it's a justification for not giving them the freedom to choose their own sponsors.
01:18:33.000I think a better scenario would probably be have one sponsor available that everyone could choose this sponsor or a competing sponsor.
01:20:43.000So I don't mean to sound even more naive than I've sounded now, but why do you choose the life of a fighter if it's that punishing?
01:20:53.000Well, initially they do it for self-improvement.
01:20:57.000They get involved for self-improvement.
01:20:59.000Maybe they want to learn how to defend themselves.
01:21:01.000Maybe they want to learn some self-confidence.
01:21:03.000Then they get excited about improving and they get better at it and then they achieve a level of expertise that makes them the person in the gym that is above the other new people that come in and then you get to experience what it's like to be an assassin.
01:21:16.000You get to strangle people all the time.
01:21:18.000And then you get to a point where you're like, I want to test myself.
01:21:21.000And then you say, I'm just going to take an amateur fight.
01:21:23.000So then you take an amateur fight, and then you go, you know what?
01:21:43.000I can talk shit, and I can go out there and just do something that I really enjoy doing, martial arts, and just continue to be...
01:21:50.000As good as I can to be a professional athlete, it's attractive, especially to risk-seeking young males or females.
01:21:56.000That totally makes sense, but let's say it's you.
01:21:58.000Let's say you're 21 years old, you, and you have the ability to do that, right?
01:22:02.000You're discovering that you have the ability to do that.
01:22:05.000And then if you could project that decision forward, let's say 30 years, and say, okay, I'm going to go for this, and I'm going to factor in the probability that I'm actually going to make really good money or have an amazing life-changing or life-affirming experience for 10 years and then get out and do something else,
01:22:52.000If you were making that decision now, though, with the money now...
01:22:55.000Do you think the decision would be different?
01:23:16.000And the risk-seeking, those kind of people that are risk-seekers, the ones that do rock climbing and BMX bike running and base jumping, that's a type of person.
01:23:26.000For whatever reason, that's a type of person.
01:23:28.000And they gravitate towards those fights, and they gravitate towards martial arts.
01:23:32.000And some of them are the nicest people I've ever met in my life.
01:23:35.000They are some of the nicest, kindest, most interesting, introspective people, deep-thinking people.
01:23:58.000And it's a very dangerous path, and so there's an incredible camaraderie between the people that do it.
01:24:03.000So they understand that very few people have the stones to do something like this, or the nuts, or the chaos in your brain, or the insanity that lets you risk your life like this versus take that cubicle job.
01:24:17.000But for them, it's insanely attractive.
01:24:20.000What's the long-term health complications from MMA? Do we know a lot about it yet?
01:24:25.000I mean, we're learning a lot about football.
01:25:13.000Yeah, they know going in there that there's going to be a risk and they got to know when to get out and sometimes they don't and sometimes friends and family have to intervene and it's a scary thing to watch someone slide down that road when you know, oh my god, he's chinny, which means you can't take a punch anymore, which means you're starting to develop some severe damage from all the sparring and the fighting and you got to know when to stop and some people can stop and they're fine and they can live a long healthy life as long as they stop in time.
01:26:21.000They get hit ten times more than him, easily.
01:26:23.000So imagine that I came down from Mars and I look at human civilization and I think, you know, this makes sense, this makes sense, this makes sense.
01:26:54.000A lot of the people who have turned against football the last, let's say, five or ten years, fueled by CTE, which is obviously a legitimate thing.
01:27:02.000We don't really know the magnitude and the scope yet.
01:27:04.000But a lot of people who've turned against it do it for a kind of moral argument that I don't want to support an endeavor.
01:27:12.000Where people are hurting each other, period.
01:27:30.000Well, I think, first of all, they're right, and you are doing something that's definitely going to harm you.
01:27:36.000However, I feel like if you want to do something that you enjoy doing, that's going to take some time out of your life that's finite anyway, who the fuck am I to tell you you can't do that?
01:27:57.000Just heading the ball causes a lot of CTE. I know a lot of youth leagues now are starting to cut out heading, which I think is probably a pretty good idea.
01:28:11.000What I'm saying, when you're going up for headers, you're often, you're knocking heads, you're knocking a shoulder into a head, an elbow into a head.
01:28:16.000Yeah, I mean, you're running around on a field in full clip.
01:28:18.000You're going to collide with each other.
01:28:19.000Where do you stand on paying for organs?
01:28:23.000But let's keep going with this, because we didn't even touch the surface of this.
01:28:27.000I'm in favor of people doing what they want to do with their life.
01:28:30.000If you choose to do something with your life, are we going to take away race car driving?
01:28:34.000Because that's one of the scariest goddamn things a person can do.
01:28:45.000I did, but the fact that we remember that so well, one reason is because there have been so few since Earnhardt died back in whatever that was, 2000...
01:28:55.000I had Dale Earnhardt Jr. on this podcast and he went in depth about brain damage that he's gotten from multiple crashes.
01:29:02.000He talked about the severe impact of the concussions.
01:29:05.000He talked about the difficulty coming back and the different modalities, the different medical treatments that he's had to have.
01:29:11.000That's Dale Earnhardt Jr. This is after his dad is gone, right?
01:29:14.000This guy talked like really extensively on this podcast about his personal struggle Yeah.
01:30:27.000By the way, I love the NFL. I would cry if it went away.
01:30:32.000On the other hand, and I know a few NFL, well now former NFL players, one of whom stopped playing in his fifth year way earlier than he had to because he was worried about CTE, but also he was getting a PhD in math from MIT at the same time.
01:31:50.000Like, if we had the Colosseum today per se, like what we have is a modern version of the Colosseum, if we had the Colosseum per se, fighting the Tigers, slaves getting thrown in to fight the Tigers, we don't like that.
01:32:00.000It's like, the line, things are repugnant until they're not.
01:32:03.000And it's hard to predict where that line is.
01:32:05.000A lot of things that used to be not repugnant, slavery, fine.
01:32:09.000The whole world, if you had the ability to do it.
01:32:15.000It's like we have a line, and whatever the cultural line is, especially depending upon how many people die around us, how much plague and murder, and how much you're dealing with war, that line moves.
01:33:58.000And another thing I really like about it is I get to be around other people, often men, in a way that you don't get to be around other men in that way.
01:36:11.000It just seems like in the particulates.
01:36:14.000So, particulate pollution has gotten so much better.
01:36:17.000In fact, one wrinkle of climate change and global warming is that the particulates, the soot in the atmosphere in the 50s, 60s, and 70s was apparently what kept things a little bit cooler because it refracted sunlight and heat,
01:36:40.000Anyway, global warming is a very complicated issue.
01:36:43.000This is another example where when people reduce it to the headlines and then divide people into tribes, it's exactly the opposite of what you want.
01:36:50.000Perfect example because it's clearly a right versus left thing, too, in some people's circles.
01:36:55.000If you're on the right, you're supposed to say, it's exaggerated, it's a hoax, it's this, it's that, it's not my concern, my concern is jobs, my concern is that.
01:37:03.000Like, you repeat the talking points, and if it's on the left, it's, how dare you!
01:37:17.000I think one of Obama's biggest mistakes, he plainly wanted to address climate change, global warming, but he did it in a kind of standard left Democrat way by calling it global warming, by saying that there were bad actors,
01:37:35.000The thing that astonishes me that Democrats haven't done is talk about it in a language that Every Republican, every conservative, every Hunter Fisher would respond to, which is pollution, which is what it is, by the way.
01:39:13.000Yeah, and I think it's interesting, but Jonas Salk, when he did create that vaccine, the world was a different place.
01:39:18.000And there wasn't this pharmaceutical industry that we have today that's It has such a strong ability to influence the way people look at things through advertisements and just through the way they influence politicians.
01:40:13.000And when you hear Feynman talk about all the complication of that, we have an enormous scientific challenge, we have an enormous competition against the Germans who are trying to do the same thing, and then even if we win, then we have another whole challenge, which is the moral challenge.
01:40:29.000But there's a way of thinking about those things, and again, measuring the costs and benefits that people who might disagree aggressively, and they did about the Manhattan Project, can sit down and say, okay, here's what we're going to do.
01:40:42.000And I feel like right now, I don't know, as much progress as we've had, I feel we've gotten worse at looking at the lesser of two evil paths, at weighing costs and benefits.
01:40:54.000Well, what is the lesser of two evils in that regard?
01:40:57.000Is it drop the bombs and stop the war?
01:41:00.000Or is the lesser of two evils never drop the bomb and stop the war later?
01:41:05.000Yeah, I mean, look, there's a million books been written about this.
01:41:42.000So it's hard to imagine that decision would be made today.
01:41:44.000But as you just said about polio vaccine, different case, but roughly same time era, it's very hard to project your morals onto – 50 years from now, we may have a very different view about MMA, for instance.
01:41:58.000Well, I think that's far more intense and extreme than MMA. I mean, we're talking about nuking people literally out of existence.
01:42:06.000But I think that just the fact that these brilliant scientists were forced into that moral dilemma.
01:42:12.000Like, one of my favorite videos online is Oppenheimer, when he's discussing what he said when the first atomic bomb was detonated, and he quoted the Bhagavad Gita, and he said, I am become death, destroyer of worlds.
01:44:14.000Being this guy who, you know, he's just a brilliant scientist.
01:44:18.000He's not supposed to be the guy who destroys a half a million people in one moment, one brief flash of light and vaporizes a half a million people.
01:44:28.000He went to this school in New York City called the Ethical Culture Fieldston School, which is where my kids went.
01:44:35.000So Oppenheimer is kind of a patron saint for...
01:44:41.000Having the brains to do something almost unimaginable and having the ethics and courage to know that what he'd done was...
01:44:55.000You know, on the other hand, but look, if we're talking about costs and benefits, let's think about nuclear power, nuclear bombs as a deterrent against others down the road, right?
01:45:06.000So you have to say, killed a lot of people.
01:45:16.000Then let's also talk about nuclear power, which was the byproduct of this, right?
01:45:23.000And there are those who could argue, and I would probably aid this argument to say that if the U.S. I think?
01:46:00.000That's been terrible for the environment, for lives.
01:46:03.000A lot of lives lost in mining coal, but then the pollution and so on.
01:46:06.000So, you know, actions have consequences.
01:46:08.000What seems to be all benefit often has a lot of costs.
01:46:12.000And life is complicated, but I think the more that we can measure and weigh things sensibly, the less screaming there is.
01:46:21.000I just, you know, I love changing my mind.
01:46:24.000I love hearing somebody make an argument That makes me say, oh, you know, the way I thought about that before, I see why I thought it.
01:46:31.000I don't feel like a fool for having thought it, but wow, now that you've laid out some facts and laid out some counterfactuals, I appreciate the opportunity to change my mind.
01:46:42.000Well, I think we're so often married to our ideas, like our ideas are a part of us and we're losing if our ideas that we've been discussing are incorrect.
01:46:51.000If our assumptions were incorrect, it's a value judgment against us.
01:46:55.000You know, I think the nuclear thing is interesting because I think one of the problems with what happened was the shitty design of like Fukushima where they can't shut it off.
01:47:51.000Maybe they would figure out how to really knock it down.
01:47:55.000I mean, there are still a lot of people working on next, next, next, next generation nuclear power, including Bill Gates is involved, and including some that are working with using as fuel what's called spent fuel in a traditional nuclear act, which takes care of two big problems at once.
01:49:11.000But that's probably something they've been talking about.
01:49:13.000But I think there was something recently where they discovered...
01:49:17.000Some bacteria that was eating radiation.
01:49:20.000Alright, I got a question for you, Joe Rogan.
01:49:23.000Let's say that we collectively decide that protein is a really important intake for most humans, but that some people Either don't want to eat meat, or they find that meat is too resource-intensive, etc., etc., but they also don't want to eat the kind of processed fake meat,
01:49:41.000which is, you know, processed food, etc.
01:49:43.000And let's say that we decide that one of the best, most available sources of protein, if you develop it well, is insects, okay?
01:49:52.000But that most people find that disgusting.
01:49:56.000What do you do to make people less disgusted by something they find disgusting?
01:50:01.000Well, with all these things, I think it's very important to give people the opportunity to choose for themselves, especially with things they've been doing forever, like eating meat.
01:50:08.000People are terrified of someone coming along and legislating that they can't Right.
01:51:36.000There's a thing where we decide that an animal is not as valuable.
01:51:41.000And big furry animals are the most valuable animals.
01:51:46.000One of the horrible truths about monocrop agriculture, and there's a video that a friend of mine put up on his Instagram page the other day about farmers.
01:51:56.000This farmer was talking about, like, when I grow avocados, you have to understand, like, you think you're getting this organic avocado and nothing else to die.
01:52:02.000He goes, I have to kill thousands of gophers.
01:52:25.000And, like, that's an uncomfortable truth, that if you even want to buy lettuce, which is the most harmless thing, like, oh, I just plucked that head and, you know, I'll be fine.
01:52:33.000No one's getting hurt, no one's dying.
01:52:35.000But they are, because monocrop agriculture is devastating.
01:52:38.000And unless you are growing an organic garden, which I firmly encourage people to do, and I think that would be, like, one of the best solutions for community.
01:52:47.000Although one argument against it is it takes a lot more land because the yield is so much lower.
01:53:24.000It had this area where we would go, and it was all fenced in, and people would grow tomatoes and different vegetables and stuff, and they'd learn how to grow, and there was classes on composting and stuff like that.
01:53:34.000People were composting their organic waste, and they would reuse it.
01:53:38.000And that is something that could be done inside communities.
01:53:43.000It doesn't have to be that we have these giant swaths of land where nobody grows it.
01:53:54.000Everything doesn't have to be hardscaped.
01:53:57.000Central Park is this beautiful part of New York City because it's this lush green patch in the middle of this urban sprawl.
01:54:04.000So you have this urban city around it, and then it's really cool to be able to go through that and to see the ducks and to sit by a tree and Although there's this one duck in Central Park now that got like a plastic bottle ring stuck around its beak.
01:57:51.000I mean, for people that are, your gut biome sort of dictates what you're- What happens, since we're on the topic, what happens to be your gaseous vegetable?
01:59:40.000You can get too lean, where the meat is too lean, you don't have enough fats, your body doesn't have fat to process, and that screws with you.
01:59:47.000Yeah, now what about the things that are in vegetables that are not in meat, nutritionally?
02:00:22.000Yeah, because mostly you're using, like if you eat eggs and meat, you're breaking it down, your body uses a lot of it, there's no fiber, right?
02:00:31.000And because there's no fiber, which is probably the biggest argument against the diet, when you look at research for the benefits of fiber, the research is weird, right?
02:00:39.000Because it's epidemiological, it's all like how much vegetables do you eat, how many instances of colon cancer, let's quarrel, let's put it all together.
02:00:45.000That's why all that stuff is very, very unreliable.
02:00:49.000So there's a bunch of doctors that are currently like, and I use the term in air quotes, that are promoting the carnivore diet and seeing positive results with it and getting a bunch of other people that achieve positive results.
02:01:02.000The big one is autoimmune issues, people that have severe skin issues.
02:01:08.000Eczema is a big one that seems to be cured with an elimination diet, which is essentially what a carnivore diet is, right?
02:01:14.000If you eliminate all those plants and all those carbs...
02:01:16.000I mean, maybe the plants are fine, but maybe it's the sugar, and maybe by just eating meat and your body has one thing to concentrate on, it can relax a certain amount of the inflammation that you're getting.
02:01:26.000Has there ever been a population that's been studied, at least quasi-scientifically, that's had a mostly meat diet for a long time?
02:01:54.000So you look at those communities, it's not the same community as the ones that were just eating seal and whale blubber and eating whatever they can get a hold of.
02:02:02.000The Maasai lived for a long time on milk and meat and blood.
02:02:15.000Let's say you and I run Lake America for just a couple days, and we decide, you know what, of all the things that people do that's not good for them, that we feel...
02:03:20.000Adam Curry just ran over this entire thing in the last podcast.
02:03:24.000E-cigarettes are, they might get you addicted to nicotine, which may be a bad thing, although nicotine per se, not a bad thing in moderation.
02:06:10.000And a lot of smokers who take up vaping to stop smoking, they specifically don't want tobacco flavor because that's too reminiscent of the cigarettes.
02:06:29.000I've had a cigarette with my friend Tony Hinchcliffe a couple of times before shows, and Dave Chappelle smokes, and when I do shows with him, I'll steal one of his cigarettes and smoke it.
02:06:38.000If you don't smoke, one cigarette will get you pretty buzzed, right?
02:06:48.000It's one of the things that Stephen King said about quitting that really bothered him was it was great that he cleaned up the habit and stopped doing it, but the firing of the synapses, like he misses that.
02:06:59.000When I wrote my first book, I Was a Smoker...
02:07:02.000Not a heavy smoker, but I smoked, and I was living in the middle of the Catskill Mountains, beautiful place, by myself, middle of the woods.
02:07:15.000The middle of the Catskills, by yourself, writing a book.
02:07:17.000Even better, the house I bought, even though I didn't know when I bought it, it used to be owned by this guy named Anton Otto Fischer, who was a painter and an illustrator.
02:07:25.000He was German, ran away from home, had an abusive father.
02:07:30.000Ran away from home in Germany, Became a sailor, talked his way onto a ship, got to America, I think fought for America in World War I on a ship, and then he became like the preeminent maritime painter in the U.S. in the decades maybe between the two wars and maybe after.
02:07:49.000He then got married, lived in New York, and had a kid who had, what do you call it?
02:08:11.000He built this house, and because he was a painter, but also because he'd spent so much of his life on ships, he built this studio, his painting studio, that looked like a little ship with this great window looking out over the Catskill Mountains.
02:08:25.000That's the house I bought to write my first book.
02:09:17.000Although I quit, you know, it's interesting.
02:09:19.000I wrote in my first book, my family memoir about the Jewish Catholic family, I wrote in there not that I was a smoker, but that this one instance where I stepped outside with my brother after this intense moment and we had a cigarette.
02:09:34.000And a few years later, the book had been published.
02:09:37.000I was now newly married, and I know that you're supposed to buy life insurance.
02:09:42.000And so I got this insurance broker, and he knew my name.
02:12:02.000There's a lot of variables that you've got to wonder about when you start breaking down how much assistance people get based on their life choices.
02:12:11.000But the way to do that is to price it.
02:12:13.000And this is where economists are really useful.
02:12:16.000Price it out for the individual and punish them for their behavior?
02:12:20.000If I want to be a rock climber and a smoker and an everything, but I get free healthcare, then there should probably be a premium, or I should probably pay into a little fund that is a pool.
02:12:32.000Well, it's not free if there's a premium, right?
02:13:51.000So if someone does yoga three days a week, are we supposed to make them pay less?
02:13:55.000I mean, I think you get into some weird swampy area and people start to juke the system the same way when, you know, people got paid for rats, they let rats loose and then fucking killed them.
02:14:25.000I think it's real hard to turn a battleship.
02:14:28.000Even if I've made an incremental push in the direction, I've moved in one or two degrees to the right, over time maybe it'll change their direction.
02:14:37.000But the reality is you've got to want to change yourself.
02:14:40.000And sometimes someone's inspirational words could be the thing that you needed, and that sets you off on a good path, and then you do make change.
02:14:47.000But for the most part, when someone comes to you and tells you you have to change, it's really hard for people to accept, just like you were talking about in your episode on changing your mind, which I really loved.
02:14:57.000But I'm sure that a lot of people who listen to this podcast or who watch this podcast have drawn in Both the explicit and implicit optimism.
02:15:46.000But the downer or the danger potentially is that – and this relates to suicide.
02:15:52.000So, you know, suicide is a little bit of a mystery because – It's such a tragic thing if it affects someone that you knew or even people you don't know.
02:16:03.000It just seems like such a drastic solution to a problem that is hard to imagine, right?
02:16:09.000But if you look at suicide rates through history and around the world, there's a lot of variance, but there's one trend that's pretty strong, which is suicide rates tend to be higher in countries with more prosperity, which would seem nuts, right?
02:17:30.000And that's one argument for why there's like right now is a lot of teen and young people suicide in a country like America where the riches are, the prosperity is boundless.
02:17:42.000Yeah, so his take on that is that these kids are experiencing social media, and they're experiencing this addiction to the internet and this cruelty that they experience, the bullying, the meanness, the coldness, and that when it's targeted on people and when they're losing their position in the social chain and they feel left out,
02:18:02.000they don't have the tools to cope with this.
02:18:04.000They're developing minds, and this is the reason why you're experiencing this uptick that's directly correlated to the invention of the iPhone.
02:18:11.000And the invention of smartphones, the invention of social media applications.
02:18:15.000There's all sorts of correlations where you see the inventions of these particular things that have changed everything, and then you see the uptick, particularly with girls, particularly with girls in suicide.
02:18:25.000And you see them trying to keep up with the Joneses and this feeling that they're inadequate or judging themselves against girls that are supermodels, that are photoshopped, and they just feel inadequate.
02:19:22.000So there was a theory for a while that polio was caused by ice cream.
02:19:25.000On paper, the correlation looks pretty good.
02:19:28.000So I'm saying, look, internet and depression and suicide are a little bit more complicated than ice cream and polio, but it's hard to tease out effects, for sure.
02:19:39.000But it's also hard to ignore the effect of social media on people's self-esteems, people who are addicted to phones, people who are addicted to likes.
02:19:54.000But, again, just to bang the same drum again and again, where there's costs, you've got to look at the benefits.
02:20:01.000And this is what I hate about politicians, is they'll talk about a policy that they like, they ignore the costs, they talk about the opponent's policy, they ignore the benefits.
02:20:10.000So with social media, for instance, I know a kid, a boy, Who is a friend of the family who, if he were born 30 years earlier and there were no way to connect with people other than in person or phone, whatever, he would have had a very disconnected life.
02:20:26.000He just had some issues with doing that, with kind of in person, kind of behavior that's a little bit on the spectrum, just would have been very difficult.
02:20:35.000As it turns out, because of the digital revolution, he was able to build a community that is unbelievably good for him.
02:21:50.000But given how old you are now, your health now and the state of science and technology and medicine now and where it might be in 20 years, would you like to be 120 and be...
02:22:18.000The haves and the have-nots will never be more separate than once there's some sort of innovative technology that allows you to live forever, but it's $1,000 every week or something like that.
02:22:28.000Yeah, but history shows us that all technologies...
02:22:32.000Most technologies start out very expensive and almost all of them get really cheap really fast.
02:22:37.000Like Michael Douglas with that greed with that big-ass Wall Street phone on the beach.
02:22:58.000They have the life extension technology or the age reversal technology, which is what it's really talking about.
02:23:05.000And then on top of that, they have the things like what Elon Musk wants to do with that Neuralink, or some more advanced version of it, or the next competing version of it.
02:23:13.000What if both of those things are highly expensive?
02:23:17.000The amount of head start that a wealthy family would have over a poor family that just has to go au naturel.
02:23:23.000Fair enough, but in the scheme of history, we're just talking about the blink of a couple generations where there's a transition, right?
02:24:54.000And I think when people are just waiting around for death to come knocking on their door, they get really morose and they just don't feel good.
02:25:20.000So, do you, have you run across anybody that you've interviewed who you thought had a great kind of prescription for how to help other people?
02:25:27.000Like, doable, sensible, you know, that if people really, like, let's say I say, you know, I work hard.
02:25:34.000I try to love the people around me, but I really want to have some kind of service component, but I don't know what to do.
02:25:41.000I think first start with the people around you, right?
02:25:44.000Start telling them you love them, hug them, enhance the sense of community that you share with your friends and your loved ones.
02:25:50.000Do your best to sort of be the person who steps forward, starts it off, you know, like makes an action.
02:25:56.000Tell someone how much you care and appreciate them and care about them and appreciate them when you maybe wouldn't have done that ordinarily.
02:27:01.000You've been there, you feel it, you understand what it is, and then you have that time to adjust.
02:27:06.000That's why losing in life is so important.
02:27:09.000Whether it's getting dumped, getting fired, losing a game, loss.
02:27:14.000Those feelings where things didn't work out your way, that's important.
02:27:17.000Because it lets you know this is the bad feeling that comes when it goes wrong, and you improve, and then it makes the good feelings of victory all the better.
02:27:26.000And I mean that in a relative sense, like even getting good at something.
02:27:31.000Making a terrible book that gets rejected by every publisher, and then writing a really good one, and people accept it, and you're like, fuck, I got better.
02:27:45.000I've always thought of failure like a bad event.
02:27:52.000I've always thought that they were good...
02:27:56.000Because I'm like a scaredy cat in some ways, right?
02:27:59.000And then if the very bad thing happens, the very thing you feared happens, you survive it, and then you learn to shed more fear in more directions.
02:28:12.000Look, there's a lot of ways you could look at bad events.
02:28:15.000You could say a bad event is just who you are, and you just have bad events, and you're a fucking loser, and life hates you, and God hates you, and look at that.
02:28:25.000There's a lot of guys who go through life like that.
02:28:27.000And, you know, they could say that they seek comfort in lowering the standards that they expect out of things.
02:28:32.000So when things go bad, and they say, look, I fucking knew it.
02:28:35.000For them, it alleviates some concern about what's going to happen in the future, because the future is always dog shit.
02:28:41.000So by doing that, they've taken away the fear of succeeding, the fear of overcoming, the fear of improving, the fear of getting better as a human being.
02:28:49.000If you just exhibit the same patterns, you fall into those patterns, whether it's alcoholism or gambling addiction or sex addiction.
02:28:56.000People fall into those because they're accustomed to it.
02:28:58.000It becomes a normal part of your life.
02:28:59.000I think that's a scary thing for people is to recognize that they're on a bad pattern and to say, okay, I have to stop drinking.
02:32:14.000I was talking about Quentin Tarantino's new movie, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and how he's sort of grandfathered in.
02:32:21.000Because there's scenes of violence in that movie against women.
02:32:24.000If a new guy came out of nowhere, and he didn't have a track record, and he had some woman getting her brains bashed in on a fireplace, you'd be like, what?
02:33:22.000It was about 80 actors, opera singers and actors on stage, all African-American, right?
02:33:28.000So first of all, you have to think it's great to have a vehicle for that.
02:33:32.000But written by these two white guys, if it were to happen now, and I was surprised the Metropolitan Opera allowed itself to put on this show because it feels, from the light of day of 2020, way too dated or racial or whatever.
02:33:48.000And yet what was really interesting is because it's a really good piece of art, It overcomes that.
02:33:53.000I think we should be really careful, even with bad pieces of art, of shielding people from the reality of our own evolution.
02:33:59.000So if you go back and watch some of the early...
02:34:02.000There's a Disney film that Splash Mountain's based on that you can't even get anymore.
02:34:07.000It's this really racist film about the South.
02:36:13.000Some of those things were ridiculous, but what they were was an example of the way culture and art viewed those times.
02:36:20.000Now, what about the argument you say, well, for the people who belong to the group that's being discriminated against, it's just too painful?
02:38:37.000If you tried to put one of them modern Disney movies, like The Lion's King, try to put that shit on in 1920, they'd be like, what are you talking about?
02:39:03.000I mean, the evidence seems to show that not really is the answer.
02:39:06.000Well, it's way more complicated than that.
02:39:08.000You take someone whose life's already gone so fucking sideways that they're violent and they're reaching out and smashing people and they're getting arrested and they've got problems you're not going to fix with Beethoven.
02:39:58.000I think a lot of people have shortcuts.
02:40:02.000Because life is busy and complicated, and if somebody's done the thinking for you and it seems okay on the surface, like I touch it and it's not too hot, not too cold, then I'm going to go with it.
02:40:13.000And the fact is, thinking for yourself and ferreting out the information and finding the data and then finding conflicting data and trying to measure one against the other takes forever.
02:40:24.000Look, we put out one podcast a week and it almost kills us just to do one a week.
02:40:32.000Because there's a ton of, like, I think of it as, you know, I mentioned I grew up in the country.
02:41:33.000I kind of fooled my way into getting...
02:41:35.000So when I started the podcast, I also wanted to have a radio component.
02:41:40.000But I knew that if I went to NPR or somebody like that, Sirius, whatever, and said, listen, I want to make a radio show that's basically inspired by the Freakonomics way of thinking, and we're basically going to interview a bunch of scientists and academics and philosophers,
02:41:55.000and we're going to try to wrestle with these big pieces of life and There'd be no way that any executive would go for that.
02:42:05.000It made it so cheap to make a podcast on my own that I just did it, put it out there, and then I could go to these partners, which happened to be WNYC and American Public Media, and they said, oh, okay, that works.
02:42:20.000So, that's another case where… If people are able to use a technology that's in front of them and marry their ideas to it, you know, then… But it's also, I agree with you, but it's also like what you were talking about before where there's so many ideas that, like, it's so much easier to let someone do the thinking for you,
02:42:44.000So even though the vast majority of people might slot into a previously grooved little opening and fit their thoughts to fit that little space, there's plenty of people that don't want to do that.
02:42:54.000And the beautiful thing about your reach is you're getting a pure sample of people who enjoy what you're thinking because there's no reason to listen if you don't enjoy it.
02:43:05.000And look, I am very, again, just appreciative of being in a world where there's people who are willing and able to have ideas that are prima facie unpopular.
02:43:16.000Like my co-author, Steve Levitt, when he wrote this paper, it's gosh, more than 20 years ago now, I think about abortion and crime.
02:43:25.000Man, there are all kinds of ways in which you could talk yourself out of even thinking about that, much less writing a paper.
02:43:52.000But, you know, the world doesn't progress very much unless there's a guy like Steve Jobs or a Copernicus or whatever, you know, sticking the needle, poking people in the eye with a stick.
02:44:03.000And they, you know, very often, they're discredited or hated for their whole lives.
02:44:08.000I love the stories where someone, like, gets pushed out, and then finally, toward the end, they're appreciated for what they did.
02:44:16.000There was this geologist in England named William Smith who kind of invented modern geology, but he was not of the gentrified class.
02:45:19.000I'm just happy that you're out there and that your podcast really does explore things in every nuanced corner and really objectively and honestly, and I think it's a powerful thing.