In this episode, we talk about a piece of pyrite that's embedded into a stone, and how it can change shape and form into something completely out of this world. We also talk about the idea of "naturalness," and how the concept of "unnaturalness" came about, and why it's important to have a sense of what's natural and what's not. This episode was produced and edited by Alex Blumberg. Additional audio mixing and mastering by Patrick Muldowney. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. The show was mixed and produced by Matthew Boll. Additional engineering and production by Patrick Boll. Special thanks to Rachel Ward and Jamie Pullebs. Thanks to our sponsor Porphyrite Inc. for sponsoring this episode and for being kind enough to allow us to use their amazing art and equipment. We'd like to thank you for all the support we've gotten so far, and we hope you enjoy listening to this episode of the podcast. Please remember to rate, review, and subscribe, and share, and tell a friend about what you think of it! it helps us spread the word about what we're doing! about this podcast and the amazing stuff we're putting out. Thank you to our amazing sponsor, Pyrite. Inc. and our amazing sponsors, PYPyrite! for sponsoring the podcast! and PYPRYTER! Thanks also to PYTERITE. for making this podcast. and for supporting the podcast, and for sponsoring our new episodes of the show! - we'll be giving you a discount code: PYERITEARTS. PYORTHODAY! at the end of the episode! to help us raise awareness about the podcast and we're giving you all a chance to win a prize or get your chance to be featured on the next episode of our next episode. PYDERITE at PYTHORTHORTEER! we'll see you get a discount on our new ad, too! on the podcast next week! -- Thank you! P&PYOLLY. -- PYRRY! (Thank you, Joe, Joe and Joe, for sponsoring us at the podcast and we'll send you an ad on the show next week, and all the best of your feedback!
00:02:03.000What causes it to take on these different completely unusual forms?
00:02:09.000So I tried to find – there's like a local rock store where I live and I asked the guy and apparently – I don't understand how it works at all – but the way all crystals work is they have – Different kinds of structures and the way those structures come together determines whether it makes a quartz crystal or what shape it takes.
00:03:22.000And 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?
00:03:34.000Versus humans sitting down and deciding to make a cube, right?
00:03:38.000It's like a diamond that has been shaped by millions of years of natural forces.
00:03:42.000And what I realized is that it really does make sense To distinguish between naturalness and unnaturalness.
00:05:39.000And time and time again, I always read about how hunter-gatherers parented their babies, right?
00:05:44.000And it was always like, this is the natural way to parent your kid, so it must be better.
00:05:49.000And I realized that was where I had my problem, that it's fine to love nature, but you shouldn't worship it.
00:05:56.000Well, 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.
00:06:17.000Yeah, I mean, essentially, again, right?
00:06:20.000If natural is defined as whatever sort of emerges spontaneously out of forces that weren't willed by human beings, which is what I think natural is, right?
00:07:50.000You 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.
00:07:59.000I really love what he's doing with Polyphase Farms, but he drinks the water that the cows drink out of so that he gets that in his biome.
00:08:28.000I don't want to live there, but it's awesome.
00:08:30.000I mean, when you go to New York, if you're in a hotel that has like a 30th floor and you look out and you see the city skyscraper, you see all the skyline, all the different beautiful buildings lit up at night, I mean, that is an amazing, spectacular sight that I am very thankful exists.
00:09:06.000Simultaneously, people would be thinking to themselves, the criteria I'm going to use to judge whether something is good or bad with a capital G or a capital B is how natural it is.
00:09:19.000Meanwhile, the coronavirus rate, which is, you know.
00:09:22.000Natural, of course, people will say, well, actually, we wouldn't have been infected if only we lived more naturally, right?
00:09:26.000So the problem is urban density or the problem is that you shouldn't be going into the jungle and getting things like this.
00:09:32.000There's actually an argument against that, though.
00:09:34.000The virus itself, more evidence is coming out daily that it's been manipulated, that it most likely did come out of that lab.
00:09:43.000I had Brett Weinstein on the podcast, who's a biologist.
00:09:46.000And he was talking about all the various aspects of the virus that really don't exist naturally in this form without having evolved for a long period of time.
00:09:57.000The fact that it just emerged and made this leap from bats to the form that it is now in people.
00:10:06.000I'm going to fuck it up if I talk about the technical details of it, but...
00:10:10.000When 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.
00:13:13.000I 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.
00:13:22.000And now that people, now that organized religion, sort of the sphere of authority is shrinking, right?
00:13:26.000You don't go to your priest to find out what to eat.
00:13:28.000You don't go to your priest to find out how to cure your disease.
00:13:33.000Now that that authority is shrinking, I think people are looking to other similar kinds of authority.
00:13:39.000And 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?
00:14:30.000This insane power to manipulate things and we we all collectively use the power to manipulate things that was created by scientists that have a far greater understanding of what The implications and like what the process of this manipulation is and we just come along and use their technology I mean that's I think that's that's a problem with so much of what people do like we've we've earned this power Just by virtue of being alive and
00:15:00.000being able to trade in goods and services for whatever that they've created And then we don't think about the consequences of utilizing this stuff like what is there's got to be there's some sort of a balance right there's a balance between If you want to have a fireplace in your house,
00:15:34.000And clearly when you see polluted cities, clearly when you see polluted rivers, and we're destroying the environment, there's a lack of balance.
00:15:42.000We've utilized this power that we have to manipulate our environment, but we've done it completely irresponsibly, or we've done it without the Without the awareness of the consequences of 8 million people doing the exact same thing.
00:15:56.000Well, I mean, the scale you can do stuff on with technology is really increased.
00:16:00.000I mean, it's made us incredibly powerful, right?
00:16:02.000There's Stuart Brand, the guy who started the whole Earth Catalog, you know, so basically we've become like gods.
00:16:06.000So we have to be able to wield this power responsibly.
00:16:10.000I think it's easy to see that and say, well, then the evil is in the form of the power itself, right?
00:16:17.000Obviously, 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.
00:16:24.000So you locate the evil in that technology.
00:16:26.000Whereas, you know, what you're saying, I mean, take burning wood, which is a great example.
00:16:31.000You know, we've got a lot of people on Earth now.
00:16:33.000We have them because kids aren't fucking dying all the time, right?
00:16:36.000I mean, so there are some things that I discovered while I was reading this.
00:16:39.000For example, have you seen that cartoon where there's two cavemen in a room?
00:16:44.000It's a New Yorker cartoon, and they're talking to—they're not in a room.
00:16:50.000So they're in a cave, and they're talking to each other, and one of them's like, you know, we eat organic, we exercise all the time, and like— Nobody's living past the age of 35. What's going on?
00:17:00.000And that's the people that are like, nature's bullshit take.
00:17:04.000But actually, it turns out that that cartoon is bullshit.
00:17:07.000So people didn't just die at age 35. That was average lifespan because tons of kids were dying between the age of zero and five.
00:17:14.000Truth is, if you made it past five, then you had a pretty good shot at like 60 or 70. So it wasn't so bad in the state of nature.
00:17:24.000At the same time, there's another vision of what's happening to us now.
00:17:56.000There are ways in which technology—like my dad is 91. I talked to anthropologists, and despite what you might think, there aren't a lot of 91-year-old hunter-gatherers.
00:18:50.000I mean, I love solar power, but I'm totally on board with what you're saying, and there is some sort of a balance.
00:18:56.000And, you know, the nihilists, like, I have friends that will say, you know, we shouldn't have children, and there's too many people in the world, and overpopulation's our biggest problem.
00:19:15.000There was an episode of Twilight Zone where Burgess Meredith, he is the last man on earth and he accidentally breaks his glasses and he can't read.
00:19:28.000He's always just wanted alone time to read his books and he's always been bothered by all these people and then he's inside I forget what he's in a bank vault or something like that and there's a nuclear catastrophe something along those lines and he leaves this area to go outside and he realizes that he's literally the last person on earth but he has all these books to read and he's so excited and he starts picking up these books but then he breaks his glasses and he fucked and I
00:19:59.000mean, the ideal of being the last person on Earth, that's probably one of the most terrifying ideas for a person, to be completely isolated and alone forever with no one to talk to.
00:20:52.000And, you know, it's a weird argument, I think, to want to claim nature as this kind of benevolent deity that if only we follow what it tells us, right, just act naturally, which is a bizarre phrase if you think about it because you've got to act that way.
00:21:51.000I mean, this is a totally separate thing, I guess, for me.
00:21:56.000But when it comes to the ability of science and scientists to predict the future, I think this is a place – I mean, we see it with macroeconomists, most obviously.
00:22:06.000But there's a way in which – We've come to expect that science, because it has done such incredible things with manipulating reality, with telling us truths about where we are in the universe, that also it ought to be able to predict complex systems, like where humans going to be in 30 years or what's going to happen with the coronavirus 10 years down the line or whatever it happens to be.
00:22:26.000But the truth is fiction writers, science fiction writers who have thought very hard about constructing plausible worlds Are just as good of authorities on predicting what's going to be happening with human systems 70 years,
00:22:42.000100 years down the line as scientists are.
00:22:44.000So there are clear limits to what science and a certain form of investigation can tell us about.
00:22:51.000And I think it's important if we stop trying to force scientists To tell us everything, right?
00:22:57.000Like, what's going to happen with the economy?
00:22:58.000What's going to happen 70 years down the line?
00:23:00.000What's going to happen 100 years down the line?
00:23:01.000At that point, we need a different set of tools to figure out what to do with ourselves and what's going to happen.
00:23:07.000Yeah, 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.
00:23:26.000All of these things are a result of us, like you said, stepping in with our virtue, which I don't mean in a bad way, but stepping in with our virtue, trying to fix things, like feed people, for example.
00:23:36.000We want there to be enough calories to go around.
00:23:39.000And what ends up happening is we have a lot of people.
00:23:42.000So then we have to figure out new ways to house them and feed them and power the things that they do and entertain them and so on and so forth.
00:23:50.000So we get a lot of people and then people are like, well, okay, let's have fewer humans because that's the problem.
00:23:57.000But then when you do that, now you've got a system that depends on having more humans, right?
00:24:02.000You need a younger generation coming in.
00:24:04.000So these systems are incredibly complicated.
00:24:07.000I think, again, the reason people are leaning on naturalness so hard is because when you're faced with complicated, uncertain systems, it's scary.
00:24:18.000And you want some kind of criteria, whether it's a holy book or a prophet or whatever it is, to tell you, no, I got this.
00:24:26.000Yeah, I think that's one of the weirdest things about today, right, is that we are faced with these unparalleled crises.
00:24:35.000Where we really, we don't have anything to go off of.
00:24:38.000We don't have a similar situation that happened, you know, in 1985. Where we are today with the coronavirus, and then with the subsequent lockdown of the economy, where everyone's terrified, and then you have the George Floyd murder, and then you have the looting,
00:24:54.000and the riots, and the chaos, and the protests, and then you have the coronavirus kicks in again, and our leaders Look impotent.
00:25:03.000When 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.
00:25:14.000We've got a reality show host who's the fucking president.
00:25:19.000All the mayors are fucking up, all the governor, no one, it's not even that they're fucking up, is that no one is equipped to handle this.
00:25:26.000So 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.
00:25:40.000That online information is essentially processed information when you're dealing with social media versus actual communication like you and I are having right now, which is what resonates with people.
00:25:50.000I think it's one of the things that resonates with podcasts.
00:25:52.000It's one of the reasons why I prefer to do them in person.
00:25:55.000It's the closest thing to a real conversation with a real person.
00:25:58.000Whereas this viewing of text, white on black, you know, white letters in my case, I used the night mode, on a black screen, it's so weird.
00:26:30.000I thought that the way you described it was really the perfect definition of what ails us, where so many people today are communicating in this way.
00:26:39.000And it's very similar to people surviving off of processed food and becoming sick.
00:26:47.000So if you think about how processed food was created, basically, and I mean modern ultra-processed food, because these terms are all really slippery, right?
00:27:05.000Dessert is a kind of food that's been made to be highly palatable.
00:27:08.000So it's not about processing being intrinsically evil.
00:27:11.000But with ultra-processed foods, what you've got is you've got a bunch of companies that That are like, all right, what can we exploit about human appetites to make foods as compulsively eatable as possible, right?
00:28:13.000Just tell people what we're talking about for people who don't know.
00:28:16.000Yeah, well, so Coca-Cola, back in the day, was made with cocaine for the cocaine kick.
00:28:23.000John Pemberton, the guy who came up with Coca-Cola, had cocaine in it.
00:28:27.000And to this day, there is a plant that's been grandfathered in, I guess legally, I don't know how it works, that is still importing enormous amounts of cocaine, processing it so that it no longer has an effect on you in the way that cocaine would,
00:30:04.000We should tell people that this Coca-Cola, when they do take the Coca-Leave and they process it and use the flavor for Coca-Cola, then they take the cocaine out of it, and then it's the number one medical supplier of cocaine are the people that do that.
00:30:20.000So, literally, medical cocaine, like lidocaine and all that shit, comes from...
00:30:50.000And so now we live in a world in which extremely cheap, highly palatable and very accessible food is everywhere.
00:30:59.000No wonder we have a problem with our diets and that's exactly what's happening With information right now.
00:31:07.000So as I understand it, the way in which Twitter was designed, for example, they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back.
00:32:02.000Someone is going to take some cut of this show and turn it into a soundbite that's highly palatable in the way that information becomes highly palatable.
00:32:57.000And we're behaving like junkies, like rabid junkies.
00:33:01.000If you look at, I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other, but it seems like it's half at least.
00:33:10.000I mean, it's just there's so much rabid discourse.
00:33:14.000There's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other and it's so unlike anywhere else in the world, unless you're in a fucking war zone, like the way people talk to each other.
00:33:24.000If people talked to each other in real life the way they talked on Twitter, the emergency ward would be filled with people with broken faces and shattered eye sockets.
00:34:02.000Because you're aware that split-second decision-making is important to survival.
00:34:08.000So when you're going 65 miles an hour and you're looking around at everybody and this guy gets a free motherfucker!
00:34:12.000Like you're already at 7 or 8. And I think this is also a part of the problem today online because of the coronavirus and because of the lockdown and economic instability.
00:34:23.000And we're at unprecedented joblessness right now.
00:35:02.000I hadn't really thought about that with Road Rage, but it does make sense, right?
00:35:05.000So 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.
00:35:15.000It's not dialogue, but whatever it is.
00:36:53.000If you look at myths and folk tales and fairy tales and if you look at the structure of religions, there are ways To tell stories to get people heightened.
00:37:05.000There are ways to tell stories to make people feel belonging.
00:37:09.000There are ways to tell stories to demonize people, right?
00:37:11.000These tropes have been around forever, right?
00:37:23.000You tell a story in which the people who are hearing the story, just by hearing it, become heroes.
00:37:30.000These are things that have been around for a long time in the same way that if you go back 2,000 years, if you were super rich and had access to lots of delicious, salty, sugary, fatty food, you could get fat.
00:37:45.000And in the same way, Now we've facilitated the manufacture of this kind of – these junk narratives that in small doses I think are fine.
00:37:54.000But if it's all we're consuming, it's a disaster.
00:37:59.000And 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.
00:38:06.000Except there are going to be problems in our soul, right?
00:38:10.000I mean it's not – I feel like it's a – I mean, I'm not like a sort of organized religion person myself, but I would say it's not just mental, it's like our souls.
00:38:19.000There's something deeply Corrupting of our humanity.
00:38:27.000So 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.
00:38:52.000And then when the article came out, I just realized that I was just sending it into the fucking machine, right?
00:38:57.000And it was going to get ground up and the people who already agreed with it were going to read it and be like, yeah, it's terrible.
00:39:03.000And the people that disagreed with it are either never going to read it or they're going to see it and they're going to be like, see people keep attacking Trump, like they're all crazy.
00:40:03.000And that was sort of the first indication that there's a potential for an unhealthy relationship with technology and with distributed content, right?
00:40:14.000I 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.
00:40:31.000Yes, or your Facebook post or what have you.
00:40:34.000It 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.
00:40:40.000And like how we came to fear certain foods like fat or salt or sugar.
00:40:44.000And thinking about it in this way, right?
00:40:46.000You need a technology to be able to process something to get it cheap enough so that it can be widely consumed, right?
00:40:53.000So information that allows you to belong, right?
00:40:56.000For a long time, only certain people, I mean, for a while, right?
00:40:59.000It's only people who could read and write, right?
00:41:14.000And like you said, We haven't figured out how to navigate it.
00:41:17.000And that's another confusion I think that people have with natural versus unnatural, which is that we also just have problems with novelty as human beings, right?
00:42:06.000There's a great book called Against the Grain written by a guy who...
00:42:11.000He's at Yale and he thinks that we need to be easier on the past and harder on the present in this book.
00:42:16.000And 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.
00:43:34.000Well, so what I mean, you know, bringing up alcohol, right?
00:43:37.000I 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.
00:43:48.000And so we institute these sort of taboos.
00:43:50.000I don't understand why it's not more of a taboo.
00:43:54.000Why it's not taboo when you're on social media.
00:43:56.000If you're an asshole, everyone should pile on to you for being an asshole on social media.
00:44:02.000I mean, personally, and I don't know, you may feel differently about this, but I'm just grossed out by people sharing videos of random people and mocking these people.
00:45:10.000That people had found the video and they were attacking her and then she got fired and she got fired from this job that she really loved and there was in the comments of this there was all these laughing emojis with the laughing with the tears coming out where people were taking pleasure out of the fact this person made this misstep she's a young she looked like she was in her 20s she made this She thought she was like putting something out in the world to stand up for people that are being maligned and mistreated
00:45:41.000and wronged by society and that there should be a balance and to understand the balance.
00:46:18.000There's a million better things that could occupy that slot.
00:46:23.000But 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.
00:46:56.000I actually think it's one thing to mock someone for just doing some stupid shit.
00:47:00.000It's another thing when the background, and this again gets back to this idea of ultra-processed information, when the background, when what makes it so exciting is not that they're stupid or they did something or it could have been you, but that they're evil, right?
00:47:14.000Ah, I get to watch evil and I'm just good.
00:47:18.000I'm good just because I'm feeling evil.
00:47:48.000And meanwhile, I've watched a lot of them.
00:47:50.000I watched one today where a bus driver body slammed this guy.
00:47:54.000Apparently there was some jerk who was bothering these bus drivers and he was picking a fight with his other bus driver and this second bus driver who he had apparently fucked with before comes up from behind him, picks him up and body slams him on the concrete and knocks him unconscious.
00:48:21.000Yeah, it really is bad for your brain.
00:48:25.000But that one at least is like, here's a person who's physically fucking with people and assaulting people and they got theirs.
00:48:32.000But the girl with the paper cut analogy, it's like, she's just dumb.
00:48:37.000You know, she's just a dumb kid who did a dumb thing and she thought she was being cool or she was fitting in and she thought a bunch of people would be like, yeah, you go, girl.
00:48:46.000And instead it came back and really fucked her.
00:49:36.000And 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.
00:49:44.000And I'm looking at these people and I'm like, do you not understand?
00:49:48.000The paradox, especially because these people are often like fairly smart, like philosophically minded people and they're like, I hate people that create demons and try to cast them out of society.
00:49:57.000We need to get rid of those people and cast them out of society.
00:50:00.000And once we have that, we'll go back to paradise.
00:50:02.000And I'm like, no, there is no paradise.
00:51:14.000I know people that have had real problems where they get tremendous anxiety, they're sweating, and they're involved in these back and forth with people all day and they can't sleep.
00:51:25.000Yeah, there's a classic cartoon, right?
00:51:27.000Where it says, like, honey, I can't come to bed, someone's wrong on the internet.
00:51:37.000If I just tweet one more time, this person's going to have a conversion experience.
00:51:41.000I 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.
00:52:27.000I mean, we're getting to this, like, you can lose your job and be attacked for saying all lives matter, which seems insane, just in terms of, I mean, it's understandable where people are going from, that this is like, no, you're in denial of this movement,
00:52:45.000but just the term all lives matter should be universally acceptable, but it's not anymore.
00:52:50.000Wasn't there also a cop, though, that got...
00:52:52.000I think there was a cop who got fired for sharing Black Lives Matter.
00:53:43.000I mean, we don't know each other, right?
00:53:45.000So we're talking We're just—there's no preparation here.
00:53:50.000We're just saying things out of the blue.
00:53:52.000I 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.
00:54:00.000And I think that part of their problem is they do something called nutpicking.
00:54:12.000And 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.
00:54:21.000And then you say, look what these – and this is actually what our whole information ecosystem does.
00:54:30.000You see the craziest representations of any given group, right?
00:54:34.000So you see – if you're thinking about academia, right?
00:54:38.000You 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.
00:54:51.000And then that becomes how you see that entire institution.
00:56:18.000So I gotta go talk to people who are experts on, you know, whether a cheetah blade for your leg, you know, how do you figure out whether that's fair or not or whatever, right?
00:56:26.000So I'm sitting down and I'm talking with these people.
00:56:28.000And what I realized is that Everything's very complicated, right?
00:56:34.000And 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.
00:57:07.000Yeah, 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.
00:57:23.000It's like there's a lot of pros and cons, and a lot of these things, like...
00:57:28.000One that I, you know, it's an uncomfortable one to get into is abortion.
00:57:32.000It'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.
00:57:45.000But then when it's three months old, people are going to have more of a problem.
00:57:49.000When it's six months old, most people are going to have a problem with it.
00:57:53.000So it becomes this very weird, like, to say, no abortion should ever happen.
00:57:58.000Well, what about the morning after pill?
00:58:02.000You 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?
00:58:12.000The day of conception, some people will say, no, you have to carry it forever and raise that kid until it's 20. But other people will say, you should be able to have an abortion up until the day the baby's out of your body.
00:58:22.000And I think that's fucking crazy, too.
00:58:24.000It's one of those things where it's...
00:58:29.000It's a complicated, very nuanced subject.
00:58:49.000Sex in general has always been talked about in this way.
00:58:54.000People want to draw neat, bright lines, whether it has to do with age of consent, whether it has to do with who you should be having sex with and why, right?
00:59:03.000Again, this is something that naturalness came into again, right?
00:59:05.000Because people are like, okay, well, we got to figure out what kind of sex you should be having with who.
00:59:11.000If 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.
00:59:17.000We'll figure out, you know, you got people writing books about how, well, actually the natural way to have, you know, to be sexual is polygamy.
00:59:24.000So clearly that's good and we should have, you know, monogamous relationships are going to be terrible, right?
00:59:29.000And then there's other people like, well, no, obviously if you look at every culture, monogamous marriages have emerged naturally.
00:59:57.000Incidentally, while researching contraception and naturalness, I ran into a book called Holy Sex, which is a Catholic's guide to—and I'm paraphrasing the title here—mind-blowing, toe-curling,
01:00:17.000And I'm reading through it, and there was a section on whether or not—so Catholic theories— Really intense Catholic philosophers will deny this, but they'll say natural means something else and they'll kind of like do all this complicated reasoning, but it's not really true.
01:00:30.000They're drawing on what's natural and what isn't in the sense of what's in nature.
01:00:34.000And the idea is that sex has to be natural.
01:00:48.000You can't do coitus interruptus, which is pulling out, right?
01:00:52.000All 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.
01:01:15.000And the Rhythm Method, this guy Latz, the author of the Rhythm Method, he spends most of the ethics section of that book, which was an enormous bestseller.
01:01:25.000Because God didn't tell people about the Rhythm Method until, like, the 20th century.
01:01:30.000He could have told them earlier, but he didn't.
01:01:32.000So Lat spends this whole book talking about how natural it is.
01:01:39.000And 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?
01:01:50.000How is it natural to sort of plan your sex around rhythms?
01:01:54.000And 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?
01:02:05.000Because you got a bunch of people who are having sex at exactly the times where it won't result in procreation.
01:02:11.000So they change their understanding of what natural sex is to just depositing.
01:02:14.000It ends with depositing semen in a vagina.
01:02:18.000And in this book, there's a whole section on like, well, what about like, you know, anal sex and dildos?
01:02:23.000And basically he's like, if you follow the one rule...
01:02:27.000And it ends in the right way, then you can do everything else.
01:02:40.000And I'm reading this and I'm like, how can you say this is natural?
01:02:43.000And through his whole book, he's saying it too.
01:02:44.000He'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?
01:02:49.000Your serotonin levels go down or whatever.
01:02:51.000All the same kinds of rationalizations that people give whenever they're trying to show that something...
01:02:56.000Was designed by nature to be a certain way.
01:03:02.000And to me again, it's like, no, with abortion or with contraception or whatever, we should be asking ourselves, What works?
01:04:06.000Again, 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.
01:04:15.000There's actually this idea called the environment of evolutionary adaptedness, the EEA. And what this says is basically, you know, there's a vague time that sort of determines how humans evolved, right?
01:04:27.000So there are certain things that humans have evolved for, and they evolve for those things in the environment of evolutionary adaptedness.
01:04:34.000And so then when we depart from that environment, when we put vending machines in places, or when we give people books to read, We're good to go.
01:04:40.000One hypothesis you can have is that maybe that will have negative consequences for us because we're not adapted for it, right?
01:04:49.000So that's a fine hypothesis generating heuristic, right?
01:04:53.000But what people do instead is they decide beforehand that it's necessarily bad.
01:04:57.000If it wasn't in the environment of evolutionary adaptiveness, if it wasn't there in the Garden of Eden, then it must be bad.
01:06:11.000Well, 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?
01:06:19.000The 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.
01:06:30.000If you have the written word, this is going to be a disaster because one of the things that happens with the written word is it can't respond to the interlocutor.
01:08:05.000It should be local certainty, global uncertainty.
01:08:07.000Well, 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,
01:09:14.000It'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 log.
01:09:21.000Actually, if there's someone who has the sort of Wherewithal to change their mind?
01:09:26.000Why would we shame them for saying, whoa?
01:09:29.000Well, it's obvious because politics are a game.
01:11:59.000I mean, maybe they'll take that soundbite and it'll get ultra-processed and people will be like, he was arguing for Confederate monuments, but that's stupid because I keep that in my wallet because that guy celebrated Passover.
01:12:08.000That guy celebrated Passover, which is a Jewish holiday, all about how slavery was bad.
01:12:15.000Meanwhile, it looks like he's got a little Hitler mustache.
01:12:20.000So 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.
01:12:43.000And 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.
01:12:52.000And 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.
01:13:11.000And it means that no matter what, there's probably some kind of thing that a hundred years from now is going to seem like, how could Alan, how could this idiot have not seen that,
01:14:04.000Because people are like, well, you know, that's better that than no job at all.
01:14:06.000I'm not sure exactly how it all plays out, but I can imagine a future in which people look back at me and you and the things we are consuming and saying, how were they blind to the conditions?
01:14:21.000Well, one of the best examples is someone tweeting about slavery on an iPhone that's made by someone who works at Foxconn who has these giant nets around the building to keep people from jumping off because they live such horrific lives that they leap to their deaths so often they have to protect the building with nets.
01:14:40.000And this is the exact point at which, if you wanted to ultra-process this conversation, You'd take that sound bite and you'd say, look at these two assholes comparing working in a Foxconn factory to chattel slavery.
01:15:13.000So one of the things people will point out is that there are different forms of slavery.
01:15:16.000So chattel slavery specifically where people are turned into property and bought and sold and have no opportunity to earn their freedom is a specific kind of slavery that was the kind of slavery we had in the United States.
01:15:33.000And so that kind of slavery is not the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory.
01:15:40.000But, you know, when I think about, you know, I'm thinking about this right here, I am on like, you know, what's going to happen when that parallel gets made?
01:15:47.000I think it's actually an instructive parallel, right?
01:15:49.000I'd like us to think about the goods that we're using and consuming and where they're made.
01:15:55.000I also don't want people to think that, for a moment, that chattel slavery is the same thing as working in a Foxconn factory.
01:16:52.000You know, that's something I think about, but I do it anyway.
01:16:55.000I 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?
01:17:04.000Like, how was it that people didn't want to, you know, force everyone collectively to pay more for meat that was raised in a way like the kind of way that Salatin pioneers, right?
01:17:14.000In this, I'm really on board with Salatin.
01:17:17.000I think he's right to say, look, there are contexts in which animals are happier and less happy.
01:17:24.000They're happier on my farm and they're fucking miserable.
01:17:27.000But I thought it was very interesting in your book when you talk about Michael Pollan pressing him on whether or not you could feed New York City that way.
01:17:33.000And he's like, do you really need New York City?
01:18:53.000There's nothing wrong with feeding your chickens fish meal.
01:18:57.000If some people want chickens that are fed fish meal and you're treating your chickens in a way you think is ethical, there's not some kind of purity test that you need to apply to your farm, even though it's on a road called Pure Meadows Lane, right?
01:19:08.000But it's like you don't need a purity test for your farm.
01:19:44.000Another thing, I didn't know any of this stuff until I started this research.
01:19:46.000So I'll tell you a story, crazy story.
01:19:48.000I 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?
01:22:37.000The 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.
01:22:47.000And it's not pink because it doesn't eat the diet that it gets in nature.
01:22:51.000So it's naturally gray, but people won't pay for that.
01:22:59.000And then they feed that to the farmed salmon just so it can be naturally pink.
01:23:04.000So when you go into your Whole Foods or whatever and you see that your salmon is all natural and it's pink...
01:23:09.000And I'm just looking at this whole thing and I'm like, what is wrong with us human beings that we've gotten to this point where we want stuff natural so bad that we're developing new technologies to figure out how to...
01:25:54.000But if you can recreate steak, if you can 3D print steak, it's still going to be steak.
01:26:02.000Now, if you're the type of person that wants to eat the soul of the animal, and you want to be there when the animal gets killed, and you want to slice the piece off and throw it on the fire, and you want to know, you want to be like boots to the ground and know, well, that's a different thing.
01:26:55.000And so with a steak, there's going to be a lot of people who are going to say, you can't call it a steak unless its origin is a cow.
01:27:05.000There'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.
01:27:15.000But I'll give you an example to push back on what you were saying a little bit.
01:28:01.000But 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.
01:28:35.000But they've done an amazing job of keeping them stupid expensive.
01:28:39.000That 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,
01:28:55.000it doesn't mean as much, and it's not worthy of the same sort of appreciation and I'm sure you've seen women look at each other's rings and check out the rings.
01:29:09.000It's a symbol of so many different things.
01:29:12.000It's like, how much does your man love you?
01:29:16.000How well did you do in choosing a mate?
01:29:19.000There's so many things involved with this ridiculous ritual of diamond rings.
01:29:24.000That 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.
01:29:35.000Even if it's perfect, they don't want it.
01:29:42.000For me, I mean, maybe if I was being given a diamond ring and the prices were identical, I think, and this is where I changed my mind, right?
01:29:49.000This is about where the naturalness stuff comes in again, right?
01:29:53.000That pyrite Even if making that gold cube were actually more expensive than getting it out of the ground, there's something about where it came from that enchants it, right?
01:30:17.000Even if it's indistinguishable to people looking in at the animals, there's something about I think?
01:30:45.000No, I'm sure he would, 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.
01:30:55.000I was there with my children, and we were taking selfies with the elk, and they were like 30 or 40 feet away from us.
01:31:02.000It was probably more like 20 yards, but close enough that in nature, that would fucking never happen.
01:31:07.000They would run like hell if they saw people, or they saw any animal that looked like it was an eyes-facing-forward predator.
01:31:15.000And 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.
01:31:26.000So they'll go around these like visitor areas and there was a fucking vending machine and then 30 yards away from the vending machine is an elk and I have a photo of me standing in front of this Coca-Cola machine looking like this and then behind me is an elk.
01:31:41.000You know they used to feed the bears there?
01:31:47.000When 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.
01:32:01.000I think the elk example is a good one for...
01:32:03.000I mean, I might be wrong, but for what I was arguing, which is that you seeing the domesticated elk there, right?
01:32:08.000If Yellowstone, for me, when I visited, right?
01:32:39.000It took a while before they figured that out.
01:32:42.000Also, the bears, the problem is bears are uniquely...
01:32:49.000They 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.
01:32:58.000They 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.
01:33:47.000And one of the reasons why I do this, I started out in 2012 because I was either going to become a vegetarian or I was going to become a hunter.
01:33:54.000I was watching too many of these PETA videos, and I was like, this factory farming thing, it's insane.
01:34:00.000Once you know, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
01:35:14.000You're domesticating an animal if they're hanging out on a lawn.
01:35:18.000Like, I was looking at a house once in Colorado.
01:35:21.000With 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 at us.
01:35:30.000And I don't know if you've ever been to Boulder, Colorado, but it's like a lot of hippies, and obviously no one's hunting in Boulder, Colorado.
01:37:03.000One of the reasons why it's a complicated issue is because buffalo contain brucellosis.
01:37:07.000They have brucellosis, which can be very dangerous to domestic cattle.
01:37:11.000And whether or not they transmit it to domestic cattle, the same argument could be said about elk.
01:37:16.000They also occasionally have brucellosis and there's a lot of ranchers who want to shoot elk That wind up eating their hay and eating their grass.
01:37:23.000So 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.
01:37:46.000I don't know, bat, like people go out, they kill endangered species, right?
01:37:49.000Like whatever I had seen, that was it.
01:37:50.000And when I went to Yellowstone, you know, when I discovered that Doug Smith, who's the guy that reintroduced wolves to Yellowstone, when he was like, I hunt.
01:38:01.000And my first reaction was, wait, what?
01:38:05.000How could this man who cares about nature?
01:38:07.000And what became clear, as you know and many hunters know, is that it doesn't work like that.
01:38:13.000Hunting doesn't mean you don't care about nature.
01:38:16.000It doesn't mean you don't care about animals.
01:38:19.000And that was a wake-up call for me that I didn't understand how people relate to the natural world and that I had been fed a kind of I don't know, oversimplified, ultra-processed version of what it was to hunt.
01:38:36.000At the same time with those bison, you got to cull them, right?
01:38:40.000And like you said, right, there's this resource, you know, you don't want them wandering on a rancher's land.
01:38:43.000And 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.
01:38:51.000As a hunter, though, I imagine that you wouldn't be super excited to just like camp out and shoot a bison It would only be for meat.
01:39:05.000It would be that you wanted organic meat and you wanted to be able to do it that way.
01:39:08.000But not the excitement of what you were talking about.
01:39:10.000No, it wouldn't be predator versus prey and it wouldn't be what you would call fair chase.
01:39:15.000I mean, it would be technically fair chase because the animal does wander out, but you have to admit that those animals have been grossly domesticated.
01:39:24.000I mean, when we were in Yellowstone, bison were everywhere.
01:39:27.000You could just stand there and stare at them.
01:39:31.000I was handing them to my kids, and they're standing like, look at this one over here.
01:39:34.000They weren't even remotely concerned about us.
01:39:36.000I 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.
01:40:17.000In fact, one of the ways that Native Americans would hunt them is they would kill wolves.
01:40:22.000And they would wear a wolf coat and they would crawl around like a wolf or a coyote coat.
01:40:26.000So 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.
01:40:32.000And 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.
01:40:45.000And a friend of mine, my friend Remy Warren, who's a host of a television show called Apex Predator, actually used this method to hunt a bison.
01:41:00.000He 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.
01:41:10.000So bison, one of the reasons why they were able to almost extirpate them from the United States was that they're really easy to hunt because they're not scared of anything.
01:41:22.000Nothing can fuck with them in the real world because in the real wild world, wolves can't fuck with bisons.
01:41:31.000Like, grizzly bears can, and they have.
01:41:33.000And 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.
01:41:43.000There's cars parked, and this fucking grizzly bear jumps on the back of a bison and is bringing it down.
01:41:55.000But you know big enough and this bear is fucking huge and look at this bear is like I mean it's like that's probably like a two-year-old bison or something like that It's not a full-grown bison, but I mean this is all This this video is like seven minutes.
01:42:41.000And see, bisons have zero concern for wolves because they'll just stomp them.
01:42:46.000I mean, they're enormous animals and their hide can be like 12 inches thick of hair.
01:42:52.000I mean, especially in the wintertime, like, the Native Americans that would wear the bison robes, like, it was the most incredible protection from cold, because you're wearing this insane natural thing that has shielded bison to the point where they can just walk out in a blizzard.
01:43:10.000They're not even a little concerned about it.
01:43:13.000That painting, and I was like, that sounds familiar, like he's talking about that.
01:43:17.000It was on the cover of a book called The Ecological Indian.
01:43:21.000I think it's called by a guy named Shepard Kretsch, which is, he was looking at the history.
01:43:25.000I mean, for one, speaking of Native Americans and Yellowstone, how crazy is it that because we think of natural as not human involved, one of the things to make Yellowstone natural is he got rid of all of the...
01:43:40.000I 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.
01:43:49.000My guide showed me, just like, it's, you know, just a little hunting blind that they would use.
01:43:53.000And it also, yeah, again, right, it made me realize, right, Yellowstone is not pure nature, that even our understanding of nature and naturalness, if you get rid of, like, getting rid of humans.
01:44:32.000And the same thing happened with sports, which was, I mean, with Yellowstone, right?
01:44:36.000There is more and less natural, right?
01:44:38.000And it would be sad if Yellowstone became much more unnatural.
01:44:42.000It would take away from, you know, if they put in like an amusement park or whatever it is they're trying to do to like figure out how to raise funds at these places.
01:44:49.000And it's because part of what we value about Yellowstone, even though it's impure and even though it's imperfect...
01:44:56.000Is that we get to see something more natural than a zoo.
01:45:47.000Sodium 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.
01:46:00.000This 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.
01:47:21.000And 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?
01:47:36.000And this set off again, one of these like back and forth.
01:47:38.000It was totally useless online where some people were like, I can't believe you're taking his accomplishment away from him.
01:47:42.000And other people were like, it's all, you know, it's obviously the shoes.
01:47:45.000But for me, it's just a broader conversation about, well, so what is it that we care about in sports, right?
01:47:50.000If you put a pair of shoes on someone and all of a sudden they're 5%, 10% faster...
01:50:35.000Like some people have just incredible genetic gifts and some people don't.
01:50:40.000Now if a person doesn't and they take some creatine and a bunch of different substances and they They get in a cryo tank every day after training and then they're in a sauna every day and then they're doing all these different things where they have electronics strapped to them to try to monitor their heart rate and make sure that they're getting the exact right amount of training and no more and no less and that the recovery is perfect before they train harder.
01:52:55.000They allowed Pistorius in, but there's a German guy, Marcus Rem, who also wanted to compete and was using one of these legs and they did all these tests, right?
01:53:05.000And they ran tests on, you know, they do these pressure plates.
01:53:08.000It's really incredible what they do to see whether his leg gives him an advantage over what?
01:53:59.000So I was like, I wonder if there's anyone with an artificial limb in UFC. And then I was thinking, because I did judo, and I was like, wait a second, that'd be crazy.
01:54:06.000Because you couldn't allow someone to have...
01:54:36.000You 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.
01:54:54.000And then you'd have scientists, right?
01:54:55.000You would have USC fighters who are like, no, I still think the prosthetic hand is giving this person an advantage, right?
01:55:00.000And then that person would be like, well, we got to call in the scientists and they're going to like do all these bone breaking tests, you know, which is what they did with these two athletes, which is what they're doing also with transgender athletes who want to compete.
01:55:19.000What's the comparison between, say, in the case of a transgender woman who is competing?
01:55:26.000What's the baseline natural comparison?
01:55:30.000In other words, does being a transgender woman give you an advantage of Over being a biological woman.
01:55:39.000The only difference is there's an inclination towards allowing them to compete because it makes you seem more progressive There's a there's a motivation to allowing transgender women athletes to compete because if you look at the oppressive You know,
01:55:54.000if you have an oppression scale, they are one level or two levels past being a biological woman.
01:56:02.000Being a biological woman is more oppressed than being a biological woman.
01:56:06.000When a woman kicks a man's ass, we're all happy.
01:56:08.000When a man kicks a woman's ass, we're very upset, right?
01:56:12.000Yeah, I mean, I think there is right now, in this cultural moment, I think there's...
01:56:17.000I mean, women didn't box in the Olympics until 2012?
01:56:23.000Because for a long time it was thought that women aren't, they're not naturally suited to boxing, right?
01:56:29.000I think the first sports they played in the Olympics were, I don't know, they did like sailing and gymnastics.
01:56:34.000Even later, like the very earliest Olympics, there weren't any, the guy who founded the Olympics was like, not women, women will just, you know, women will stay out of this.
01:56:41.000And right now, I mean, I think you're right that there is...
01:56:43.000Because sports are so symbolically important, right?
01:56:45.000I mean, you see this with everything, with Colin Kaepernick, with whatever.
01:56:48.000Sports are really important to people.
01:56:52.000And 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.
01:57:50.000Let anyone compete without any regulations.
01:57:53.000So 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?
01:58:03.000And 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?
01:58:19.000Yeah, so one of the things that people try to do in sports, because it's important to have...
01:58:23.000There's some philosophers who argue it's not, but I think it's crazy.
01:58:26.000It's important to have men's sports and women's sports, right?
01:58:28.000It'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.
01:59:04.000For example, so you can only have testosterone, you know, you can only compete as a woman if your testosterone is below a particular level.
01:59:11.000That'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.
01:59:19.000It's what it's like when you're training.
01:59:20.000So how much recovery, how much muscle have you retained?
01:59:51.000And they're going to tell me that I have to artificially lower my natural testosterone levels so that I can compete in the Olympics.
02:00:01.000It's a particularly sexist argument, too, because they don't do that with men.
02:00:07.000There's men that have competed in the Olympics that have naturally high testosterone, and they've dominated other men, particularly in wrestling.
02:00:17.000Do you know where Alexander Carellin is?
02:00:20.000Alexander Karelin is a very famous Russian wrestler who they used to call the experiment because his parents are both like 5'5 and 5'7.
02:00:27.000They're like smaller folks and he's fucking enormous and he's terrifying.
02:00:31.000Go to that picture that I put on my Instagram.
02:00:33.000I put up a picture on my Instagram that I look at this picture every couple months or so just to remind myself what a tremendous pussy I am.
02:00:41.000That's Corellin Corellin used to take men.
02:00:44.000I 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.
02:01:03.000No right there Look at the size of that motherfucker I mean, just unstoppable for years and years in the Olympics.
02:01:12.000And, 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.
02:01:29.000You know, when we watch sports, I mean, sure, Alex Honnold, like, he probably has some kind of genetic thing where he's just not scared of the same stuff, or he loves being scared, whatever it is, right?
02:01:38.000I don't think it's genetic at all with Alex.
02:02:10.000I'd be absolutely I think it's a thing that his his His managing of that environment and that sort of situation is part of the thrill of it for him.
02:03:08.000Yeah, but they take beta blockers so that when the shit's on the line and this is like the final match and they're looking at a 60-meter target...
02:03:18.000They just stay calm and they can keep their arms steady and let that arrow fly.
02:03:23.000I didn't know that, but that's another great example of what is it that you care about?
02:03:27.000Well, a part of it is you're like, okay, under normal, right?
02:03:30.000What is this person's natural ability or what is their non-chemical or whatever it is, right?
02:03:38.000I got them prescribed to me once by a doctor because I wanted to try them, and I wound up never trying them.
02:03:44.000I just wanted to see what it was like to do something...
02:03:46.000Just for my own curiosity, I wanted to see what it was like to do something nerve-wracking while I was on beta blockers.
02:03:53.000Yeah, I was going to use them on a hunting trip, but I didn't because I felt like I would be disappointed in myself if I did that, which is really crazy because on a hunting trip you'd think the most important thing is making an ethical shot, but I was...
02:04:06.000My thought process was I trained so hard to make an ethical shot and to be accurate and to practice my shot-making routine until it's like drilled into my head.
02:04:58.000So it'd be crazy to go in the dentist's office and be like, you know, I'd be really disappointed in myself if the way I manage this filling is by using, you know...
02:05:18.000But people do that with childbirth because childbirth, like sports, Is one of those experiences where a part of what some people want is a sense of kind of primal connection.
02:05:31.000And that was something I didn't understand.
02:05:32.000I thought it was totally I was like, why would anyone ever?
02:05:36.000Want to experience, like, you could just have an epidural.
02:05:49.000But like you were saying, right, so with sports, but back to Judy Chan, right?
02:05:52.000Because 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?
02:06:00.000I 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...
02:06:57.000And they find out that they're XY, but they're androgen insensitive.
02:07:00.000And this was an issue in the Olympics as well in 1985. There was a woman who's now a physician who had been competing as a woman her whole life.
02:07:08.000Then the test came back, and she was like, well, that's crazy.
02:07:28.000But 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...
02:07:37.000They'll look at this, and on one side of the argument, people will be like, well, then she was just, you know, if it's XY, she's a man.
02:08:14.000And 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.
02:08:26.000Yeah, it's so weird with sports, because with sports, first of all, did you ever see the documentary Icarus?
02:08:35.000Well, it highlights, if you haven't seen it folks, it highlights how prevalent cheating is.
02:08:43.000And 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.
02:08:54.000And then they're also willing to take exogenous drugs to succeed.
02:08:59.000Then they're also, in this case, Russia was complicit in aiding them and perhaps even forcing them to do this.
02:09:06.000And they had this elaborate system set up at the Sochi Olympics to cheat.
02:09:10.000And so when you're talking about sports, that's part of the thing.
02:09:23.000And this is something that I've admitted openly with the transgender argument.
02:09:29.000There are outliers, and there's outliers that are female athletes.
02:09:34.000Like, first of all, African American females have the same bone density as a lot of Caucasian men.
02:09:43.000The bone density argument's a weird one, because men generally have thicker bone density, particularly men that lift weights have denser bones than females.
02:10:19.000I have no idea how things break down along racial lines, but with Men and women, it's a particularly clear thing and it's also something that we have as a category, right?
02:10:31.000So then that forces the question on us in a way that That is difficult, right?
02:11:55.000We really should be embracing these nuanced discussions because this is what's critical for understanding the true nature of things.
02:12:03.000And these people that are willfully distorting people's messages and taking these ultra-processed versions, whether it's a clip or a soundbite or even worse, in quotes, a segment with dot, dot, dot at the end, The idea that you can do that and reframe what is really a really nuanced conversation where people are exploring the very nature of Yeah.
02:13:01.000It sucks that so many people get sucked into these kind of debates and these conversations, but you can't do that to someone face-to-face.
02:13:08.000You 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.
02:13:20.000I mean, even if it's on them sort of morally, doesn't it...
02:13:23.000I mean, it worries me because it ends up changing society.
02:13:26.000It ends up changing people's lives, for sure.
02:13:29.000Some people get fired for deception for the same reason, because people are deceptive about what they meant and what they were trying to portray.
02:13:38.000That someone could just make a statement, and instead of there being a discussion about that statement, they're fired, and their life is ruined, and they're publicly shamed, and then we get to share it and laugh and mock them, whether it's through an article or a video like that girl with the finger cut, the Black Lives Matter girl.
02:13:53.000Or we end up focused on stupid shit, right?
02:13:55.000It's like right now, just to take the current example, like police reform, right?
02:14:00.000I think that what happens is we get distracted and divided by fringe issues that are fed by the ultra-processed information.
02:14:08.000So we end up focusing on them, which makes it very difficult to actually...
02:14:12.000And politicians, like you were saying, right?
02:14:13.000They're looking at this and they're like, okay, I'm going to have to weigh in on those issues.
02:14:17.000And so that ends up dividing politicians when, in fact, people agree...
02:15:00.000It's on the people who distribute the information deceptively.
02:15:05.000The 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.
02:15:14.000And 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.
02:15:27.000And this is something that people like to do for whatever reason.
02:15:32.000They 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.
02:15:44.000It's not on the people that listen to it and get sucked into it.
02:15:48.000I feel for them and I'm sorry and I don't enjoy it when it happens to me.
02:15:53.000But the people who do that willfully, you are wasting your life distorting reality because you wish things to be a different way or because you're deceptive or because you're bitter or spiteful or angry or hateful or You see in you this other person that you're targeting.
02:16:11.000You 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.
02:16:24.000Yeah, no, it's it's I do agree with I think you're right to like focus on so I'm gonna tell you Let me tell you a story about a terrible person.
02:16:34.000I feel like we should cue up some spooky music.
02:16:51.000You know, cure their cancer naturally, right?
02:16:52.000He's got the whole, you know, he gives them wheatgrass smoothies, right?
02:16:57.000And he tells them that if they just think positively and, you know, that big pharma is corrupt and chemotherapy is a sham, and if they just come to his place, which I went to in Florida, Did you go to interview him?
02:17:28.000This this fucked up guy who is who is getting people's hope up, right?
02:17:32.000It's not right because it's also he gets to the people and they could have Seeked sought out real big treatment.
02:17:40.000Yeah could be cured and live and people die people die because they go there and the people that were there This was the crazy thing and this is this again gets back to how the ultra processed information is happening These were not idiots man.
02:17:51.000These were people who I I don't know what it's like because I've never had, knock on wood, I've never had cancer.
02:18:00.000A person very close to me has never had cancer.
02:18:03.000Like, these are people who, you know, when that happens, you're looking for anyone.
02:18:08.000You're looking for anyone to tell you a story that gives you a sense that things are actually not chaotic, right?
02:18:13.000That things are simple, that there's an answer, that there's a community that can help you.
02:18:48.000And the problem is if you attack that guy, I don't know if you've run into this at all, but if you attack the charlatans, They've been turned into saints by the people that look up to them.
02:18:57.000So when you attack them, you also end up attacking all of the people...
02:19:56.000They're a doctor of chiropractic medicine, but they're not a doctor.
02:20:00.000There's people flipping out right now, though, who have been to their chiropractor, who feel like they've gotten relief, who respect their chiropractor.
02:20:05.000Well, there's some relief in someone manipulating your body, folks.
02:20:08.000You should get a deep tissue massage, and you should get an MRI and find out what's really wrong.
02:20:12.000I 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.
02:20:20.000And 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.
02:20:28.000I'm going to change that and crack and see, oh, I got it there.
02:20:31.000Let me adjust this, boom, in your hip, this.
02:20:49.000He would touch your head and he would press your head here and press your head here, press your head here, and then press it really hard here.
02:21:24.000Someone to fix their thing right if you have a neck injury and you just spend time off and it gets better and you get some treatment from a Chiropractor will heal things heal your body knows how to heal and he goes all he fixed my neck no your fucking neck healed okay things do heal but this person touching your back saying he's fixing your gallbladder is a scam artist right so I had this guy and I'm talking to him and And so I said,
02:22:21.000He goes, well, you do know the placebo method does work.
02:22:24.000I go, so you're taking money from people to lie to them.
02:22:28.000So we have this tense conversation in his office.
02:22:32.000And 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.
02:22:41.000It's creepy shit, man, and it's really creepy shit when you're alone with a guy and you're talking to him about it, and you get him to say it's the placebo method.
02:22:49.000And meanwhile, other than that, nice guy, which is even more fucked up.
02:22:57.000I didn't even know chiropractor I mean, the history of it, I mean, like you said, right, if you look into it, it's sort of hard to believe that people, like, it's still a thing.
02:23:08.000It's hard to believe that insurance covers it.
02:23:09.000Yeah, and this goes back to the religion stuff, too.
02:23:25.000And I read all these ancient Taoist texts and stuff like that.
02:23:28.000And 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.
02:24:18.000There's not something scientific happening here.
02:24:20.000This is a religious ritual, a healing ritual disguised as some kind of science.
02:24:27.000And 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.
02:24:34.000And then I started talking about food and medicine.
02:24:37.000And that was when people really got pissed.
02:24:40.000When you start to talk about what they eat.
02:24:43.000So you got out of religion just because you didn't want these uncomfortable conversations?
02:25:31.000It was very popular back in the day, but that's not something people embrace.
02:25:34.000And so I saw these weird uncritical embraces of of dietary regimens and healing rituals.
02:25:42.000That to me were just obviously right out of, you know, ancient China or, you know, any ancient context where people would never believe them.
02:25:50.000And yet today, you know, you're going in and you're having your back cracked.
02:26:55.000When people are in pain, when you're in pain, either psychic pain or physical pain, you really need someone to tell you they have an answer for you and to explain it and fit it into a system.
02:27:09.000They can say to you, I know why you're sad.
02:27:45.000Oh my god, it's happening and you're a lot of what makes people ill is Anxiety is stress and the placebo effect of having some sort of a in your mind Perceived solution does have tangible physical benefits for some strange reason which is really weird like what what goes on the human mind there is an unbelievably crazy I think it's a Netflix special.
02:28:12.000It'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.
02:28:20.000And he does a show where he tells his audience this flat out.
02:30:00.000And there's also the reality of some diets being incredibly poor in nutrients, and really the result of that, of eating those diets, is you get really sick, and if you eat the nutrient-rich diets, your body turns around.
02:30:24.000And 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.
02:30:33.000You know, I talked to environmental activists who were there.
02:31:56.000And it feels like you should be doing it for some strange reason.
02:31:59.000While you're doing it, there's like some satisfaction.
02:32:00.000Like if you have a rock and you see a window, and you just fucking chuck that rock at the window and it smashes, and a bunch of people behind you go, yeah!
02:32:36.000If people are fucking designing social media to make it compulsively addictive, We didn't think there's anything wrong with that when it was first instituted.
02:33:08.000They didn't design it with everybody's best interests in mind.
02:33:11.000They didn't design it to really make sure that people would use it the right way and not the wrong way.
02:33:18.000Well, that's the thing about the YouTube algorithm.
02:33:20.000My friend Ari had this experiment that he did.
02:33:23.000People were talking about the YouTube algorithm that it sort of – there's one thing about Facebook and YouTube and a lot of these things.
02:33:30.000People will make this argument that the algorithm favors arguments.
02:33:35.000It favors – it pulls up things that you get upset with, particularly Facebook.
02:33:40.000And that it's trying to manipulate you into using it much more often because it turns out that people engage much more in things they disagree with than things they agree with.
02:33:51.000So what he decided to do was only YouTube puppies.
02:33:55.000And so he just YouTubed all these videos of puppies.
02:33:59.000So his feed was just filled with puppy stuff.
02:34:02.000And all his suggestions were puppy stuff.
02:34:04.000And he's like, no, it's not that it's trying to make you upset.
02:34:08.000It's that you're trying to make yourself upset.
02:34:41.000A homogenization of what it is that's coming into you when what you need is a kind of intellectual polyculture, right?
02:34:47.000You 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.
02:34:56.000I mean, intellectually, this is what comedians often did, right?
02:35:00.000I mean, this is something I work on academically is this idea like, you know, you have the king and the king is the authority, but the king will have a jester.
02:35:30.000And I honestly think, I mean, I think you were talking about South Park the other day, but one thing that I struggle with now is that I feel like the jesters these days They're just confirming what it is that their viewers already believe.
02:35:46.000So 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.
02:37:06.000I mean, first of all, there was the character that he was doing, you know, when he was doing the Colbert Report, which was this, like, really cocky Republican character.
02:37:14.000And then he went over to do the Stephen Colbert show, and now it's not that anymore.
02:37:20.000Now it's like he's hosting a talk show.
02:37:23.000But it's the guy that we knew who was, like, super ultra-cocky and really funny from The Daily Show that was like a parody of a right-wing guy It's very odd.
02:37:56.000So tell me a gesture, because I want, what I want, I want to be able to, I want to be able to watch people who are going to sometimes make me feel like I was I was right and they're gonna be mocking someone that I that I disagree with and then I also want and then two seconds later I mean this happens a little bit with Dave Chappelle I see like oh Dave's the best at it But there's a guy named Andrew Schultz who's thriving during this lockdown because he can't do stand-up and he's doing on his Instagram
02:38:27.000He does these really well-produced videos where he'll take down a subject I don't even want to give you an example, but he's got a bunch of them out there, but he's fantastic at it.
02:40:08.000And then, you know, it turns out I'm a Bernie Sanders supporter, and I lean way more towards progressive ideas, but I also support the Second Amendment.
02:40:16.000It'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.
02:40:25.000And there's a very real stigma attached to that, and you feel that stigma when people attack you for your ideas.
02:40:31.000And so people lean in to what gets them love and lean away from what gets them chastised.
02:40:36.000Yeah, well, I feel like I don't have a...
02:40:37.000I mean, one thing that I feel these days is I feel very politically homeless.
02:42:24.000There's actually, it's funny, like one of the things, so a project I was working on way back in the day was a podcast about people who shift.
02:42:44.000It's an insane story who was, and I don't want to give away too much about this, but like he started very much not a racist.
02:42:52.000Ended up in the KKK and then left the KKK. And what I wanted to understand, and what I think maybe this is something we just need to investigate right now, is what is it that causes people to break out of whatever ideological label it is that they have?
02:43:11.000There was another guy that we did another episode on.
02:44:29.000And I think that what we're doing with social media and the internet in general is we are far more connected than ever before, but in many ways far more segregated and segmented and far more rigid in our ideas and the echo chambers have never been stronger.
02:44:48.000And I think that The next leap of technology, and I've had Elon on, and he discussed his Neuralink, which is really fascinating stuff because it's going to require surgery.
02:45:00.000Like, people are literally going to get holes drilled.
02:45:06.000But 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.
02:45:16.000And he said it's like a quarter-sized device.
02:45:22.000It's gonna Bluetooth up to your phone and you're gonna be able to access information and your bandwidth that you're gonna be able to access information now is gonna be radically increased and The way he describes it It varies between the way he describes it when it seems like he's trying very hard to make it palatable versus when he sees the actual future potential of it,
02:45:48.000which is we're not going to be the same thing anymore.
02:46:09.000And then you pull out your phone and in five seconds, you know the person's full of shit.
02:46:13.000So we've changed radically in our ability to assess whether things are accurate or inaccurate and whether someone's a liar or not.
02:46:20.000I think much like that, the next leaps of technology are going to completely change Our understanding of motivation, of emotions, of what is causing someone to have a deceptive narrative that they're trying to push forth,
02:46:37.000and we're going to be able to see these things.
02:46:38.000We're going to be able to access this information in a very different way, and it's going to change what we are as human beings.
02:46:45.000We're going to have some sort of cyborg capacity, and it's going to radically elevate our ability to understand things and to communicate, and that's Weirdly enough, probably our only hope.
02:47:29.000And, you know, they can randomly decide you violated their terms of service and ban you.
02:47:34.000And there's no room for conservative thought.
02:47:37.000And they'll blackball people for the most ridiculous ideas because most of these people that are running these organizations are super woke.
02:48:00.000It's just like, okay, we've got this food system, so what we're going to do...
02:48:03.000I'm not necessarily thinking that a brain surgery is the only way to solve it, but I do think that technology and more emergent technology is probably what's going to get us out of this.
02:48:15.000What you were talking about earlier in the tweet that really resonated with me about ultra-processed information, I think we need something that has far more depth to it.
02:48:31.000Something that works and distributes information in a far more nuanced and a far more transparent way and I think we're going to move in that direction and we're gonna move in that direction because it seems like technology is moving everything Towards greater and more prevalent connectivity,
02:50:17.000I know what you're saying, and I agree with you to a certain extent.
02:50:20.000However, 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.
02:50:32.000Like if I said, do you like this shirt?
02:50:33.000And he'd be like, no, dummy, it looks stupid on you.
02:50:36.000They would say something like that, and we'd both be like, ah!
02:50:38.000They would say to them, like, do you think I gained weight?
02:50:40.000Like, you know you gain weight, motherfucker?
02:51:03.000I was like, oh, we have a good argument.
02:51:04.000I'll just have a logical argument with you, right?
02:51:06.000But one of the things I realized, and this one, when I was there at that place in Florida where this fucking charlatan is killing people, We're good to go.
02:51:33.000That's just not the, that's not, they're gonna suffer.
02:51:39.000I think you're right about that, that there's certain people that you really shouldn't like, you know, if you're talking to a delicate person, and they ask you a question, and there's nothing wrong with just being complimentary.
02:52:14.000You tell her like, that's a great, you know, did a great job.
02:52:16.000And I don't want to infantilize adults, but like, there are times when I am, when I just need, You know, love or like I need someone to keep their thoughts to themselves.
02:53:15.000I don't have anything to offer my ALS patients in terms of like science or rationality.
02:53:19.000But what I can do is just make them feel lighthearted for a moment.
02:53:24.000And I was like, do you tell them like when they come into the office, do you tell them like the truth?
02:53:27.000You know, which is like basically like you're you're done for, you know, and he's like, you know, obviously not right.
02:53:32.000You don't just tell people who are in pain.
02:53:37.000The truth or at least you don't there's there's I don't know for me.
02:53:40.000I've really pulled back from I've really pulled back really recently from the idea that truth-telling is the way to engage with people who are in pain, right?
02:53:53.000I 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?
02:54:01.000Change is there are groups of people who have been in pain for a very long time and individuals within those groups have been in pain.
02:54:11.000I think it's just important to sort of acknowledge that.
02:54:13.000And I had a lot of trouble doing that.
02:54:14.000I would be like, well, here's the truth.
02:54:16.000Like, here's your situation and here's how you need to fix it.
02:54:17.000And like, but that's not, I don't know.
02:54:19.000That's not necessarily, it doesn't work and it's not necessarily what people want.
02:54:23.000Yeah, 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.
02:54:41.000If someone's in pain or if someone's like literally trying, I mean if you're trying to change a situation for the better, You can always throw nuance in.
02:54:49.000You can always have a logical argument about something.
02:55:01.000But, like, if there's someone who was struggling with chronic back pain forever and found a chiropractor and they come back from that chiropractor and they say to me, Alan, for the first time in my life, I feel like there's some hope.
02:56:27.000And there's this moment in that book where the teacher puts on the board, when you're given the choice between being right and being kind, always choose being kind.
02:57:29.000If someone says to me before the podcast, and they have before, hey, would you do me a favor and not talk about this weird thing that happened to me?
02:57:36.000I'm like, I don't want to make you uncomfortable.
02:59:23.000Have you had like meaningful dialogue?
02:59:25.000You know, I have had meaningful dialogue.
02:59:27.000I've even had meaningful dialogue on Twitter with people who were...
02:59:31.000I mean, honestly, my favorite moments on Twitter are where I engage with someone and it starts angry.
02:59:37.000And then I'm like, okay, Alan, can we get this to a place where we're being kind to each other?
02:59:43.000If I can do it on Twitter, I mean, that's like the gymnasium of the soul, right?
02:59:46.000If you can be kind to someone on Twitter.
02:59:48.000But I was saying, like, you're in a shitty situation in part because when it comes to this kind of thing, because you're communicating to friends.
02:59:55.0005,000 different types of audiences all at the same time.
02:59:59.000You'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.
03:00:05.000Some of those people need honesty to help with their pain.
03:00:51.000Megan 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.
03:01:11.000And she grew up in this horrible environment and then through Twitter, Interacting with her husband on Twitter, that fucking dude, that angel, whoever he is, that dude converted her.
03:01:22.000And he just talked to her back and forth and they became friends and then eventually they became married and then they have a child together and they're happy.
03:01:30.000I mean, it's interesting when you said that's being kind, right?
03:01:32.000I mean, there are these cliches and I hate how we also live in this like ultra ironic time now where like every, you know, oh, it's a cliche.
03:01:44.000It's what every saint and sage They've said it since the beginning of time and you can be like, oh, that's a cliche or it's more complicated than that.
03:01:50.000And it is more complicated always, right?
03:01:53.000But like, I don't know, the kindness I don't know.
03:01:59.000It's hard, too, because I don't want to even be...
03:03:22.000I would love to have, you know, I'd love to be able to talk about, you know, my, you know, I'm going to be talking about quantification in my next book, right?
03:03:27.000So I, I want people to hear what I have to say about how quantification gets abused, right?
03:03:33.000But I'm also like, well, the best way to get people to hear me might be to ratchet up the controversy.
03:03:54.000Just do what you're doing and do it at your best.
03:03:56.000And if you can be kind, that will have a greater impact than anything.
03:04:01.000I mean, it's like being a parent, right?
03:04:02.000You 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.
03:04:12.000And one of the things I always do, whenever I correct my kids, I always say, hey, let me tell you something.
03:05:07.000I guess what I would say is it does work for you.
03:05:10.000For 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.
03:05:32.000For a person, especially a person in position of power, to say, I don't know.
03:05:35.000But the problem is there's also a lot of authority and cultural currency in pretending to know shit.
03:05:42.000And 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.
03:06:48.000People know that guy's full of shit now, and I think his business has eroded radically.
03:06:53.000It got through the community that he's full of shit.
03:06:56.000I mean, but yeah, I know what you're saying.
03:06:58.000He was scamming people, but he knows he's scamming people.
03:07:01.000What you carry in your heart being a con artist and robbing people out of their hard-earned dollars by tricking them into thinking that you're healing them, that in itself is a great punishment.
03:07:15.000When you say ultimately, you mean sort of like ultimately in like the big game.
03:07:18.000Well, not just, yeah, in the big game, but just in day-to-day life.
03:08:10.000And they had a fantastic one on Aaron Hernandez, who's that football player who wound up being a murderer.
03:08:15.000But they have one now on some con artist, who's some healer person, who Oprah had on.
03:08:23.000And 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.
03:08:33.000But it was essentially another one of those things where some person who Oprah had on snuck through the net and became a bullshit artist.
03:09:05.000Oprah's out there, no, no, no, no, no, my hoe's out there working.
03:09:09.000I'm going to keep him out there making that money.
03:09:11.000Well, maybe it's, and this is the flip side of kindness, though, right?
03:09:14.000I mean, we keep going in this Inception circle, right?
03:09:15.000But 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?
03:09:21.000And it's like, you also want to be kind.
03:09:24.000But not so kind that you become a kind of laundering factory for people like Dr. Us.
03:10:13.000You talk to actual physicists about that, and they just go...
03:10:16.000People actually study quantum mechanics and you know like the really complicated underlying mechanism of the fucking universe itself and then you see these quacks out there selling horseshit and then when you find out that the secret was actually Well,
03:11:18.000Look, now I just need you to make me feel hopeful.
03:11:20.000I feel like this is what I came here to talk to you about or something.
03:11:25.000I just, you really think in the end, like it comes back to bite you in the ass?
03:11:29.000That feels like a very sort of redemptive vision, but it's like, here we have a laundry list.
03:11:34.000I mean, we could go on and on and on and on and on about charlatans who have risen to the very highest levels of power.
03:11:41.000And 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...
03:11:51.000I would rather concentrate on good people than concentrate on the bad people that succeed financially.
03:11:58.000I'd rather concentrate on good people because I think there's plenty of them.
03:12:01.000There's plenty of really interesting, fascinating people that have a great message.
03:12:05.000You're saying you can be kind and that'll work.
03:12:08.000Yeah, there's a lot of them out there, man.
03:12:09.000There's a lot of really motivating, fascinating people that have lived a life Of value, and they can relay that information to you, and there's like real lessons that you can take out of that that can enhance your own life.
03:12:36.000But in some ways, what they do is like, they make it so that you really appreciate kind people and you really appreciate real people.
03:12:46.000You 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.
03:14:43.000I didn't even know what to do with that.
03:14:45.000It's happened with diet gurus I've laid into.
03:14:47.000This guy, David Perlmutter, who wrote this book, Grain Brain, and stuff like that.
03:14:50.000I went back through his history, and I found out that he used to promise everything was a miracle cure.
03:14:55.000He started with his self-published book called, I don't know, Brainsaving.com or something.
03:15:01.000And back then, he had a totally different line on it.
03:15:04.000He was like, you need to eat only lean meat and I've cured all these people of ALS. And then it became, you need to eat saturated fat and I've cured these people of ALS. And I wrote this hit piece on him.
03:15:13.000I was like, this guy is a horrible human being and I'm going to show you who he is.
03:15:15.000I'm going to trace his charlatanry all the way back to the beginning.
03:15:18.000And there were all these people that were like, I read David Perlmutter's books and they got me eating healthy again.
03:15:24.000Because he does advocate, you know, like an alternative to junk food.
03:17:00.000And then they also judge other people by their mistakes.
03:17:03.000And 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.
03:17:15.000All these people that you could find good things in, whether it's Joel Osteen or Dr. Oz or what are these people?
03:17:21.000There's a lesson in data that comes from them about just how weirdly complicated human beings are and how wildly we vary.
03:18:00.000And I think it's hard to be comfortable with yourself.
03:18:04.000So it's very hard to be comfortable with other people.
03:18:06.000That's why I always stress with people like you've got to accept yourself for what you've done wrong.
03:18:13.000Do 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.
03:18:21.000A lot of like difficult things make regular life less difficult.
03:18:26.000And that sounds so simplistic, but particularly physically difficult things.
03:18:30.000Because when you do things that are physically difficult, the strain of making yourself do those things, it's very valuable.
03:18:38.000It's not just valuable like exercise and fitness and martial arts and running and whatever you're doing that's really difficult.
03:18:44.000It'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.
03:18:50.000Because 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.
03:19:01.000So creating your own bullshit, whether it's through some brutal kettlebell exercise or running up hills or something, is extremely valuable for you also, not just accepting the nuanced perspectives of other people,
03:19:18.000Being 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.