Yannis Pappas: History and Comedy | Lex Fridman Podcast #175

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Giannis Papas,

00:00:02.880 | a comedian who co-hosted the podcast, History Hyenas,

00:00:07.240 | that I came across when I was researching

00:00:09.200 | the Battle of Crete from World War II.

00:00:12.000 | He and his co-host were hilarious in their rants

00:00:15.920 | about history and about life.

00:00:18.720 | The chemistry they have is probably the best

00:00:20.880 | of any co-hosted comedy podcast,

00:00:22.880 | or even podcast in general, that I've ever heard.

00:00:26.280 | As of a few weeks ago, unfortunately,

00:00:29.200 | History Hyenas is no more, at least for now,

00:00:32.360 | because all good things must come to an end.

00:00:35.440 | But Giannis hosts a new podcast

00:00:37.960 | called Long Days with Giannis Papas,

00:00:40.320 | plus he has a comedy special on YouTube for free.

00:00:45.040 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:00:46.680 | Wine Access, Blinkist, Magic Spoon, and Indeed.

00:00:50.880 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

00:00:54.680 | As a side note, let me say that some of you

00:00:57.480 | have noticed that I have not spoken

00:00:59.480 | with too many computer scientists, physicists,

00:01:01.680 | biologists, or engineers recently.

00:01:03.880 | The reason has to do mostly with the risk aversion

00:01:06.800 | of many of these folks in the time of COVID,

00:01:09.560 | especially as they get closer to taking the vaccine.

00:01:12.600 | I'm tested several times a week,

00:01:14.520 | and still some people are just more willing than others

00:01:17.480 | to have an in-person conversation in these times.

00:01:20.960 | I only do these podcasts in person

00:01:22.840 | because I look for the possibility

00:01:25.080 | of a genuine human connection.

00:01:26.960 | I'm willing to sacrifice a lot for that.

00:01:30.080 | Maybe it's silly, but I look for the magic

00:01:32.760 | that Charles Bukowski writes about in his poem "Nirvana,"

00:01:36.760 | the magic that is somehow in the air on those rare occasions

00:01:40.480 | when two people meet, talk, and you notice

00:01:43.560 | that while on the surface you may be worlds apart,

00:01:47.120 | you're still somehow woven from the same fabric.

00:01:50.840 | I've had that with many guests.

00:01:52.460 | Jim Keller comes to mind, but many others as well.

00:01:55.840 | I'm an AI person.

00:01:57.520 | Machine learning, robotics, computer science is my passion.

00:02:01.160 | Trust me, I can't wait to be having

00:02:02.840 | more technical conversations again,

00:02:04.960 | but I will also continue to mix in comedians, musicians,

00:02:08.320 | historians, and of course, wise, all-seeing sages

00:02:12.000 | like Giannis Papas and Tim Dillon,

00:02:15.040 | just to keep it, as Tim likes to say, fun.

00:02:19.480 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:02:22.000 | and here is my conversation with Giannis Papas.

00:02:26.000 | You've co-hosted, until recently,

00:02:28.320 | an amazing history comedy podcast

00:02:31.400 | called "The History Hyenas."

00:02:33.680 | So you're a bit of a student of history?

00:02:36.240 | - Yeah, an F student of history.

00:02:38.320 | - F student, okay, I thought it was more like a D minus.

00:02:40.840 | - D minus, yeah.

00:02:42.160 | Still gotta repeat the grade if you get all D minuses.

00:02:44.560 | I actually had a .67 GPA average my freshman year,

00:02:47.960 | and I had to do it again.

00:02:49.000 | This podcast is gonna be the spectrum of human intelligence.

00:02:53.120 | It runs the gamut from there to here.

00:02:54.920 | So this is gonna set the low bar for anything.

00:02:57.080 | - I'm barely sliding into human.

00:02:59.000 | I'm closer to chimp.

00:03:00.440 | - And I bring that up that you're also friends

00:03:04.080 | with the great, the powerful Tim Dillon.

00:03:08.400 | So let's talk about power

00:03:11.320 | and the corrupting effects of power.

00:03:13.160 | Sometimes I look at Tim Dillon as he grows in power.

00:03:17.440 | - I thought you meant in size.

00:03:19.000 | - Size, I think they're correlated.

00:03:21.800 | - Yeah, I saw him, I've been in Austin a couple days.

00:03:24.600 | I saw him once, we had eight meals in one day.

00:03:27.040 | - Eight meals.

00:03:27.880 | - Yeah, so I feel like I've been here longer than I have

00:03:29.920 | just because of the meals with Dillon.

00:03:32.200 | Kid likes biscuits and barbecue.

00:03:34.480 | - Okay, so he's more like, see,

00:03:36.080 | I was imagining Putin or somebody like that.

00:03:38.120 | He's more like the North Korean dictator.

00:03:40.200 | - Yeah.

00:03:41.040 | They get along great, those two.

00:03:43.960 | - Yeah.

00:03:44.800 | - They would get, I mean, Tim Dillon and King John Un

00:03:46.440 | would be like, they could make like a buddy cop movie.

00:03:48.640 | They would get along like "Lethal Weapon."

00:03:50.360 | That would be a good pitch movie.

00:03:52.000 | - Great podcast.

00:03:52.840 | - Yeah, that would be a great podcast.

00:03:54.160 | - Yeah.

00:03:55.000 | (laughing)

00:03:55.840 | - So much to talk about.

00:03:56.920 | So many similar ideas about the world.

00:03:59.240 | So what do you think the world would look like

00:04:02.840 | if Tim Dillon was given absolute power?

00:04:05.120 | He seems like a person that's an interesting study

00:04:09.000 | of the corrupting effects of power.

00:04:10.880 | - Yeah, you don't wanna give him power.

00:04:13.360 | I don't even want him wearing a suit.

00:04:15.440 | Like I want a guy who's as thoughtful and educated

00:04:18.040 | as you wearing a suit.

00:04:19.360 | Like 'cause, you know, suits corrupt you.

00:04:21.160 | You put that suit on, you start feeling that power.

00:04:22.920 | - Definitely.

00:04:23.760 | - It's like, you know, yeah,

00:04:24.800 | I don't even want Tim Dillon in a suit.

00:04:26.200 | Power would, he would kill people.

00:04:28.000 | He'd get rid of anything that he deemed.

00:04:31.000 | I mean, if you made a lobster roll

00:04:32.480 | and it wasn't up to Tim Dillon's standard,

00:04:34.080 | he would have you executed.

00:04:35.520 | - The entire restaurant staff is just gone.

00:04:38.360 | - He would have people below his food standard executed.

00:04:41.480 | There'd be programs,

00:04:42.640 | not of people who are political dissidents,

00:04:44.840 | but of people who don't meet his food standard.

00:04:47.280 | His cuisine standard is high and he's usually right.

00:04:50.480 | - Do you think power does corrupt people?

00:04:52.560 | - Yes.

00:04:53.400 | - One of the reasons we mentioned offline Joe Rogan,

00:04:55.680 | he's been an inspiration to me 'cause he gets,

00:04:58.440 | he gets, forget power, just more famous and famous.

00:05:01.600 | And yes, probably a bit of power in terms of influence.

00:05:04.480 | And he's still pretty much the same guy.

00:05:07.400 | I'm not sure that's going to be true for everybody.

00:05:09.560 | Do you ever think, ask yourself that question?

00:05:11.560 | - Yeah, he's a rare breed.

00:05:13.160 | He's like a benign king.

00:05:15.200 | Most people I meet who are like really powerful

00:05:17.120 | are like douchebags and that's how they got there.

00:05:19.740 | I think that's, psychopaths have the advantage

00:05:21.760 | 'cause they don't have feelings.

00:05:23.360 | And Joe's a rare example.

00:05:24.760 | He's just a powerhouse of will.

00:05:26.880 | And I do think about that.

00:05:29.520 | Yeah, I think I should be stopped right now.

00:05:32.720 | Just stop me right now because yeah, power for me,

00:05:35.040 | I would, when people get power, they indulge.

00:05:37.720 | I don't think it changes anyone.

00:05:38.960 | It just reveals your darkest.

00:05:41.080 | You know, people aren't supposed to have anything they want.

00:05:44.040 | You gotta be able to struggle for everything.

00:05:45.520 | So I would have a harem.

00:05:46.980 | I'd be like a Roman dictator.

00:05:48.520 | Yeah, I'd be like a Roman emperor.

00:05:49.800 | I mean, people call them emperors, they were dictators.

00:05:51.520 | The most effective leaders are dictators.

00:05:53.360 | I hope we get back to that.

00:05:54.720 | Democracy hasn't worked.

00:05:56.200 | I'm ready for a succession of Caesars

00:05:58.240 | and I wanna start with AOC.

00:05:59.680 | (laughing)

00:06:02.040 | - It's true, dictators get the job done.

00:06:03.560 | - They do, they do.

00:06:04.480 | At certain point, you got,

00:06:05.400 | that's why social workers can only get you so far.

00:06:07.240 | You need action.

00:06:08.600 | I was a social worker for five years

00:06:10.440 | and all you do is ask about medications

00:06:13.180 | and you don't solve anything.

00:06:15.660 | - I do ask myself of that like,

00:06:17.320 | 'cause I'm more in the tech space

00:06:19.320 | of constructing systems that prevent me from being corrupt.

00:06:24.080 | 'Cause right now I'm all about love

00:06:25.800 | and all about those kinds of things.

00:06:27.720 | But I wonder, you said like, it just reveals the darkness.

00:06:31.920 | The problem is we might not be aware of our own darkness.

00:06:35.560 | I have the same feeling about money actually.

00:06:37.640 | I've been avoiding thinking about money,

00:06:41.140 | like basically constructing my moral system,

00:06:44.480 | my moral compass around money.

00:06:46.300 | So like the moment I feel a little too happy,

00:06:49.980 | but about the idea of owning some cool shiny thing,

00:06:53.740 | I started to think, okay,

00:06:55.920 | I'm not gonna own that shiny thing

00:06:57.700 | 'cause I'm afraid of the slippery slope of it.

00:07:00.060 | - Yeah.

00:07:00.900 | - You ever think about that kind of stuff?

00:07:01.820 | - Yeah.

00:07:02.660 | The funny thing about the capitalist system is it's,

00:07:05.380 | it puts sort of a profit motive above beauty.

00:07:11.020 | And you notice when you see certain cities,

00:07:13.940 | especially in the old days where like buildings

00:07:15.940 | used to be beautiful.

00:07:17.260 | - Yeah.

00:07:18.100 | - And now they're just like boxes,

00:07:19.500 | they throw a kid up and it's just for all profit margin.

00:07:22.540 | It's the illusion of permanence that,

00:07:25.860 | it's like, oh, let me get as much money as I can.

00:07:28.260 | You're like, yeah.

00:07:29.760 | My dad used to say, everyone, it's a cliche,

00:07:31.700 | but you can't take it with you.

00:07:32.780 | So it's kind of, it's comical to me

00:07:35.500 | that we're here trying to get this infinite amount,

00:07:37.540 | like that we're climbing, it's like Sisyphus.

00:07:39.420 | We're all trying to climb this hill,

00:07:40.540 | but I mean, the rock's gonna fall on us.

00:07:42.420 | So I think that's a healthy outlook, yeah.

00:07:44.380 | - My dad always used to say before he passed,

00:07:47.020 | he would say, you can't, you have to survive

00:07:48.980 | not only physically, but you have to survive emotionally.

00:07:51.860 | I think a lot of people forget about the emotional part

00:07:54.840 | of survival.

00:07:56.060 | You have to survive emotionally and humor

00:07:58.220 | and understanding reality in its objective context

00:08:03.020 | helps with that.

00:08:03.860 | Accepting reality as this ephemeral thing

00:08:07.980 | that you're in really just a part of,

00:08:10.620 | but not as significant as your ego wants you to believe

00:08:13.860 | is a start.

00:08:14.980 | That's a good foundation for surviving emotionally.

00:08:17.740 | - What's that mean, surviving emotionally?

00:08:19.780 | Like what's an ideal life look like

00:08:22.100 | while you're thriving?

00:08:23.340 | - You can't take things too seriously

00:08:25.860 | because they're ephemeral.

00:08:27.260 | They're not permanent, nothing's permanent.

00:08:29.100 | Your bank account's not permanent.

00:08:30.140 | Your proms aren't permanent.

00:08:32.300 | Nothing's permanent.

00:08:33.220 | Your abilities aren't permanent.

00:08:35.020 | Your memory's not permanent.

00:08:36.220 | Your dick getting hard's not permanent.

00:08:38.060 | Can I curse on this or does this go out the door?

00:08:39.620 | (laughing)

00:08:40.900 | - Yeah. - You can curse

00:08:42.180 | to your heart's content.

00:08:43.140 | - Okay, yeah.

00:08:43.980 | I mean, gender's not even permanent anymore.

00:08:45.580 | I think I'm gonna change maybe

00:08:47.180 | and live my second half as another gender

00:08:48.860 | just to have, I'm bored with this gender.

00:08:51.140 | So it's like nothing is permanent.

00:08:53.340 | And so accepting that emotionally

00:08:56.180 | is a good start to being more flexible.

00:08:59.500 | You gotta be flexible.

00:09:00.580 | Like my dad used to say, "Anything too stiff snaps."

00:09:03.220 | You gotta, you know, it's a cliche

00:09:05.740 | and people have said it a bunch of different ways,

00:09:06.980 | but Bruce Lee's right, man.

00:09:07.900 | Be water, be water.

00:09:09.940 | (laughing)

00:09:11.220 | - Yeah, Bukowski has this quote about love

00:09:15.340 | that love is a fog that fades

00:09:17.100 | with the first light of reality.

00:09:19.180 | So he's a romantic, that guy.

00:09:21.660 | But that even love is a thing

00:09:23.260 | that just doesn't last very long.

00:09:25.060 | You know, some people would disagree with that.

00:09:28.420 | Maybe it morphs, like water.

00:09:31.180 | It changes, right?

00:09:32.220 | It might not be, 'cause he's mostly

00:09:34.860 | just loved like prostitutes, I think.

00:09:38.060 | So-- - The best kind of love, yeah.

00:09:39.860 | - No demand, no responsibilities.

00:09:42.300 | - Yeah, it's a financial transaction.

00:09:44.140 | - Yeah.

00:09:44.980 | - Ephemeral as ever.

00:09:47.940 | You mentioned your dad.

00:09:49.860 | He passed away a year and a half ago.

00:09:54.260 | What did you learn from him?

00:09:56.340 | - I love my dad.

00:09:57.660 | My dad, I would say my dad was my hero.

00:10:00.700 | He was just, my dad really embodied those values.

00:10:03.860 | And I think for better or worse, it's made me who I am.

00:10:07.540 | He, my dad was a painter, he was a lawyer,

00:10:10.940 | he was a lieutenant in the military.

00:10:15.180 | - New Yorker?

00:10:16.340 | - New Yorker, born and bred Brooklyn.

00:10:17.980 | His dad, surprise, owned a diner.

00:10:21.020 | So that's sort of the Greek passport.

00:10:24.140 | That's the immigration passport for Greeks in New America.

00:10:27.140 | And yeah, my dad played football.

00:10:29.460 | He just, my dad did what he wanted.

00:10:31.380 | He lived as he wanted at all costs.

00:10:33.220 | And I think I got that from him, for better or worse.

00:10:35.380 | I think it's hurt me in my pursuits.

00:10:38.580 | If you consider money and fame to be paramount,

00:10:43.580 | I've always done what I wanted.

00:10:45.580 | If I stopped wanting to do it, I just stopped doing it.

00:10:47.780 | And I think I got that from my dad.

00:10:48.860 | So maybe for better or worse, that's what I learned from him.

00:10:52.060 | But that's a real currency.

00:10:53.540 | Feeling like you're in love with what you're doing

00:10:56.060 | when you're doing it,

00:10:57.300 | maybe perhaps that's worth more than money.

00:10:59.500 | I don't know.

00:11:01.100 | - You miss him?

00:11:02.340 | - Yeah, every day, every day.

00:11:03.820 | But I'm happy that he got 91 years.

00:11:08.820 | It's very rare.

00:11:09.700 | I mean, he smoked for 60 years.

00:11:11.980 | Talk about like a guy who was an outlier.

00:11:14.100 | I mean, he smoked like 60 years, like packs.

00:11:16.140 | I mean, and he didn't die from that.

00:11:18.300 | He died, he had a prostate cancer,

00:11:20.220 | which is the way men should go.

00:11:21.460 | Your dick should give out.

00:11:22.580 | It should start from the dick.

00:11:24.180 | I mean, we focus so much of our life on the dick

00:11:27.020 | that that's the way, that's a successful life.

00:11:29.780 | And that's why every man eventually gets prostate cancer

00:11:31.940 | 'cause that is the universe's way of saying like,

00:11:34.620 | the thing you focused on the most is,

00:11:36.740 | you put the most energy into is the thing that's spent.

00:11:39.700 | And it's gonna, your rotting is gonna start there.

00:11:42.140 | So that's a successful life.

00:11:43.580 | And it just spread all over his body and he slowly died.

00:11:47.300 | I was with him when he died and that meant a lot to me.

00:11:49.740 | 'Cause me and my brother weren't talking at the time

00:11:51.540 | 'cause we're Greeks.

00:11:53.140 | We're talking again, but that's how it is.

00:11:55.260 | - You got a few brothers, right?

00:11:56.500 | - I got two brothers.

00:11:57.700 | But I wanted to make sure I was with him when he died

00:12:00.660 | and I got lucky and I was in the room with him when he died.

00:12:03.820 | - You were in the room with your brother and you weren't?

00:12:06.540 | - No, my brother wasn't there.

00:12:07.500 | We were kind of doing shifts.

00:12:08.620 | I was there.

00:12:09.720 | I spent the night, the night my dad died.

00:12:12.700 | He died early in the morning

00:12:14.160 | and I heard the death rattle of the last breath.

00:12:16.180 | And it was just, I think it was, he knew I was there.

00:12:20.520 | And I think that just probably meant something to him.

00:12:23.920 | And I'm just glad I was there.

00:12:25.380 | - Does that make you sad that life is ephemeral,

00:12:28.340 | like you said?

00:12:29.180 | - Yeah. - That you die?

00:12:30.780 | - Yeah. - What do you think

00:12:31.620 | about your own death?

00:12:32.540 | You meditate on that?

00:12:33.980 | - I think the actual, if there is a point to life,

00:12:37.020 | it's to hopefully not fear death, to accept reality.

00:12:42.020 | I think that's important.

00:12:45.020 | I think so much goes awry in the human condition

00:12:47.340 | when we lose touch with reality.

00:12:49.960 | Every political system that's led to mass murder

00:12:53.540 | and everything, I think because it's,

00:12:56.100 | because the tenants of those political philosophies

00:13:01.020 | ended up being utopian.

00:13:02.460 | They were detached from reality, detached from nature.

00:13:05.740 | And so I think it's very important to accept

00:13:09.580 | and acknowledge your own mortality.

00:13:11.020 | I think it's the foundation for what makes a good person,

00:13:13.680 | a moral person, a contributing member of society,

00:13:16.900 | because it's true.

00:13:18.240 | True things should be the foundation of all things.

00:13:21.720 | If what you believe is based on illusion,

00:13:24.180 | you're gonna end up doing destruction.

00:13:25.960 | Whether that destruction's on a scale of one to 10,

00:13:28.260 | you are going to be destructed because it's not real.

00:13:31.660 | It's a fantasy, it doesn't exist.

00:13:33.060 | - See, the thing is, though, truth is about,

00:13:35.460 | I don't think you can ever reach truth.

00:13:36.740 | Truth is about constantly digging.

00:13:39.220 | And to push back in your idea that you should accept death,

00:13:41.900 | I think the more honest response to death,

00:13:44.480 | so the least honest is to run away from it,

00:13:46.820 | create illusions that help you imagine

00:13:49.860 | that there's not a death.

00:13:51.740 | The next is to accept it,

00:13:54.420 | but the real honest one is to fear it.

00:13:57.340 | Because I mean, I'm with Ernest Becker,

00:14:01.180 | he's a philosopher,

00:14:02.900 | who wrote a book called "The Null of Death."

00:14:04.820 | He says that much of the human condition

00:14:08.220 | is based in the fear of mortality.

00:14:10.200 | That's the creative force of the human energy.

00:14:15.020 | Like Freud said, "Do you wanna sleep with your mother?"

00:14:17.140 | He said, "No, that's not what motivates you."

00:14:20.140 | - Maybe his mom wasn't hot, though, I mean.

00:14:22.820 | - Or he wasn't Greek, 'cause apparently Oedipal,

00:14:25.060 | we found that all things good and bad, yeah.

00:14:28.100 | - Thanks, thanks for that.

00:14:29.940 | Thanks.

00:14:30.780 | - I just don't know if his mom was a looker or not.

00:14:31.980 | I mean, I'd have to Google it.

00:14:33.100 | - All right.

00:14:33.940 | I'll look up on Google Images.

00:14:37.900 | But I think the honest, as he says,

00:14:40.980 | the thing that we run away from is that there's a terror.

00:14:44.420 | He calls it like terror.

00:14:46.500 | There's something called terror management theory

00:14:48.380 | that some philosophers after him followed on

00:14:52.300 | that we're basically trying to run away from this fear.

00:14:55.740 | And acceptance is actually creating an illusion for yourself

00:14:59.940 | like you can actually accept something

00:15:01.900 | as terrifying as this.

00:15:03.460 | So he's more with the Stoics.

00:15:05.380 | The Stoic constantly meditate on their death.

00:15:07.380 | I mean, what does that mean?

00:15:09.620 | I mean, it's kind of,

00:15:10.740 | acceptance of death isn't a thing you do like on a Monday

00:15:15.900 | and then you're done.

00:15:17.100 | It's a thing you constantly have to meditate on,

00:15:20.180 | like reminding yourself.

00:15:22.340 | Like this ride is over.

00:15:23.820 | It could be over today.

00:15:25.220 | And that's something you're,

00:15:26.620 | if you think about every single day.

00:15:28.420 | - It gives you an appreciation of Woody Allen movies,

00:15:30.740 | at least.

00:15:32.140 | - It gives you appreciation of basically everything,

00:15:34.140 | including Woody Allen movies,

00:15:35.860 | which shows you how deep your appreciation for life could be.

00:15:40.100 | I've actually haven't been following much

00:15:41.620 | about what Woody Allen's,

00:15:43.180 | but apparently he's been a troublemaker

00:15:45.460 | for most of his life.

00:15:46.620 | - He's, yeah.

00:15:47.540 | I mean, he's caused a little bit of strife.

00:15:49.540 | He's left a little, yeah.

00:15:50.860 | He's left a little confusion in his wake, for sure.

00:15:54.220 | But I mean, you know, that's another one.

00:15:56.660 | Separate the art from the artist.

00:15:58.620 | He's got, I mean, the guys will go down in history

00:16:00.820 | as the greatest.

00:16:01.900 | He's made, I mean, a movie a year and they're all,

00:16:04.620 | you can always find something good about each movie,

00:16:06.740 | like the dialogue or whatever.

00:16:08.900 | I love what you're saying.

00:16:09.860 | It's interesting.

00:16:10.700 | But the only thing I would say to push back a little bit,

00:16:12.340 | since we're playing a little table tennis here,

00:16:14.300 | is I don't know if it's a choice to fear death.

00:16:17.500 | That's more of an, it seems more instinctual.

00:16:19.700 | It seems like something that nature wants you to do,

00:16:23.020 | because I've been in positions

00:16:24.420 | where I thought I was gonna die, like I've been shot.

00:16:26.300 | And I had those moments.

00:16:28.340 | And then nature also, you know, kicks in an instinct,

00:16:32.740 | which is acceptance, where you kind of,

00:16:35.380 | I don't know, it's a chemical release or whatever.

00:16:37.020 | I don't know, you know, we're robots, basically.

00:16:39.940 | So some sort of chemical is released that protects you.

00:16:42.320 | But there is an acceptance.

00:16:44.420 | I don't know how much of it was a conscious choice,

00:16:47.300 | probably very little.

00:16:49.500 | And that's the point I'm making, is it's instinctual.

00:16:51.540 | We don't really have a choice in fearing death.

00:16:53.560 | Otherwise, there would be no progression.

00:16:55.540 | We wouldn't, all life seems to want to survive,

00:16:59.860 | not by choice, but by instinct.

00:17:01.420 | - So he argues that the fear is not the instinctual of it.

00:17:06.100 | It's not the animalistic stuff.

00:17:07.260 | That's the thing that makes it special,

00:17:09.220 | is the, what humans are able to do

00:17:11.780 | is to have a knowledge that we're going to die one day.

00:17:13.860 | Animals don't have that.

00:17:15.020 | Animals' fear is instinctual.

00:17:17.140 | It's like, holy shit, what's that sound over there?

00:17:19.420 | He says we're actually able to contemplate

00:17:22.300 | the fact that this ride ends.

00:17:24.060 | And that kind of cognitive construct

00:17:27.860 | is difficult for us to deal with.

00:17:29.300 | Like, what the hell does that mean?

00:17:31.380 | Like, just to think about, it's going to be over

00:17:36.280 | at a certain point.

00:17:38.100 | It's just over, lights out.

00:17:40.140 | Like, it's very difficult to kind of load that into

00:17:44.260 | whatever this like little brain we got.

00:17:47.140 | Like, what does that actually mean?

00:17:48.920 | - Maybe that's what gives everything meaning.

00:17:51.500 | - Yeah.

00:17:52.340 | - Because if everything lasted forever,

00:17:54.220 | if this went on ad infinitum,

00:17:56.560 | there would be no meaning to it.

00:17:57.400 | It'd be like, hey, if I don't see you tomorrow,

00:17:58.820 | I'll see you in a million years.

00:18:00.320 | There would be no meaning, there'd be no urgency.

00:18:02.040 | There would be no feelings.

00:18:03.460 | There'd be nothing of magnitude or superficiality.

00:18:07.780 | It would all just be this kind of, it would be torture.

00:18:10.900 | It would actually, that would actually be torture

00:18:13.220 | to be here forever.

00:18:14.060 | I mean, I'm already sick of this place.

00:18:16.140 | And I'm just in my 40s, like I'm done.

00:18:18.940 | I'm sick of me, I'm sick of everything.

00:18:21.540 | - You know, a lot of people,

00:18:23.500 | when they talk about immortality,

00:18:24.800 | they consider mortality appealing

00:18:28.460 | because you get a chance to do basically

00:18:31.980 | all these things you might not get a chance to do otherwise.

00:18:35.700 | Like all the kinds of travel, broadly,

00:18:37.700 | explore, read every book, explore every idea,

00:18:40.700 | do every hobby, all those kinds of things.

00:18:42.940 | Somebody else I was talking to mentioned

00:18:45.020 | the reality of being immortal would be more likely,

00:18:50.740 | I like this idea, more likely would be

00:18:53.140 | you just sitting there doing nothing

00:18:56.460 | because, and putting off all that travel

00:19:00.140 | and exploration till later, because you'll always have time.

00:19:03.060 | And so what you're gonna have,

00:19:04.480 | what actual immortality would look like

00:19:06.620 | for a bunch of humans is people sitting there doing nothing.

00:19:09.940 | - It'd be like a Greek caffeineer,

00:19:11.580 | just sitting around drinking coffee, watching, I love it.

00:19:13.740 | - Yeah. (laughs)

00:19:14.580 | - I mean, it's a lazy man's paradise, yeah.

00:19:17.100 | - But it's so interesting 'cause that rings true to me

00:19:20.240 | for what humans are like is we'll basically

00:19:22.900 | just put off all those exciting adventures

00:19:25.780 | and just be lazy, become lazier and lazier and lazier

00:19:28.580 | 'cause you'll always have a chance

00:19:29.700 | to do all the exciting things.

00:19:31.420 | And we'll just get, we'll basically become Tim Dillon.

00:19:33.780 | We just sit there and have a podcast and that's it.

00:19:36.700 | - He works hard.

00:19:38.080 | Yeah, I mean, that sounds actually like heaven, dude.

00:19:40.340 | That's speaking of my heart, really.

00:19:41.660 | I mean, I'm at heart, I'm a very lazy person.

00:19:44.740 | I always try to find ways to lie down.

00:19:47.660 | Like if I'm sitting, I'll figure out a way

00:19:49.260 | to kind of contort myself till later.

00:19:51.220 | That's an interesting thing to like, yeah,

00:19:53.940 | if you can always push something off, yeah, I like that.

00:19:58.940 | I think that's heaven.

00:20:00.820 | - See, we just changed your mind.

00:20:03.540 | You kind of like the immortality.

00:20:04.940 | - Yeah, I kind of like it.

00:20:06.020 | No, so there'll be no thirsts, no,

00:20:08.220 | you can always put it off.

00:20:09.060 | Yeah, I wanna bang this girl.

00:20:12.020 | You're like, I'll put it off.

00:20:13.900 | But now I'm thinking about Muslim heaven

00:20:15.300 | and they may be offering the best deal.

00:20:16.780 | I mean, if it was an expo and they had a booth,

00:20:20.300 | I may go with them because they offer 62 or 72,

00:20:25.220 | but then I'd get sick of them.

00:20:26.300 | I'd wanna, I don't know.

00:20:28.180 | I always wondered like, are you given the 62 versions

00:20:31.660 | or you choose, can you create them like an avatar,

00:20:34.180 | like a video game, or are you just given?

00:20:36.660 | - I don't know what the number,

00:20:37.500 | why it's important to have that high number.

00:20:39.100 | First of all, I think it's a mistranslation

00:20:41.380 | about the versions, but outside of that,

00:20:43.460 | outside of that, I feel like the conversation

00:20:47.140 | is really important.

00:20:47.980 | I don't think they ever specify like what kind of books

00:20:50.540 | these girls read, like what are they into?

00:20:54.780 | Like the quality of the conversation,

00:20:57.100 | I think if you're talking about eternity,

00:20:58.620 | the quality of the intellect and the conversation

00:21:00.580 | and the personalities is way more important.

00:21:03.260 | - And the Greeks have an ancient expression,

00:21:05.540 | "Pan metro nariston," which my mother always used to say,

00:21:07.500 | which is everything in moderation, nothing in excess.

00:21:10.540 | So try and always get the status quo.

00:21:12.900 | And yeah, that many women,

00:21:16.060 | eventually it's like the Magic Johnson effect,

00:21:18.260 | Isaiah Thomas effect, it's just too much.

00:21:20.620 | And you're gonna end up banging a dude is what I'm saying.

00:21:23.100 | You're gonna get sick of it 'cause it's too much.

00:21:25.380 | And there's going to be a eunuch

00:21:27.860 | that finds its way into your harem.

00:21:29.420 | That's been proven throughout history, every empire,

00:21:32.860 | when you have all that power.

00:21:33.860 | And again, this goes back to power corrupting.

00:21:35.860 | If you have, if there's no struggle, there's no meaning,

00:21:39.420 | the value is from the journey,

00:21:41.300 | the working hard, the struggle.

00:21:43.020 | And if it's just given to you because you're a sultan

00:21:45.780 | or you're Alexander the Great or whatever,

00:21:48.220 | you're gonna get bored and you're gonna bang a dude.

00:21:51.500 | I think that's a scientific axiom, actually.

00:21:53.660 | Eventually you'll get bored and bang a dude.

00:21:55.620 | - Yeah, but I think it won't stop there.

00:21:57.380 | I think you'll go to animals, you'll go to robot.

00:21:59.300 | I mean, eventually it all ends up in robots

00:22:01.260 | and then the robots rebel

00:22:02.380 | and then the humans will be destroyed.

00:22:03.860 | - Yeah.

00:22:04.820 | - I'm sorry.

00:22:05.660 | If we're speaking truth, you said the value of life,

00:22:10.540 | one of the highest ideals is to seek truth.

00:22:13.280 | I think if we're being honest.

00:22:14.120 | - Can I ask you a quick question?

00:22:15.060 | If you live in a small, I come from small islands, right?

00:22:18.180 | And so there's a stereotype

00:22:19.220 | that that's where they bang animals.

00:22:20.300 | But if you come from a very small community,

00:22:23.220 | you know, an island or something,

00:22:24.060 | and you have the choice of banging a family member

00:22:26.100 | or an animal, which one is worse on the moral scale?

00:22:28.780 | 'Cause you're technically not related to the animal.

00:22:31.900 | - Right, this is interesting.

00:22:33.180 | I mean, all of these are human constructs, these ideas,

00:22:35.320 | but for me personally,

00:22:36.660 | taboo would be more taboo to have sex with a family member.

00:22:40.780 | - Yeah.

00:22:41.620 | - I mean, animal, I mean, okay.

00:22:42.460 | - It's good to know where you stand on that.

00:22:43.900 | I think your viewers, you know,

00:22:45.420 | if they didn't know they had that question,

00:22:48.380 | they just learned a little bit about you and now I know.

00:22:50.620 | - I look forward to the internet clipping that out.

00:22:52.580 | (both laughing)

00:22:55.240 | Yeah, I mean, there is, listen,

00:22:58.820 | outside of that, I do think about that a lot.

00:23:01.940 | It sounds ridiculous about morality connected to animals

00:23:06.500 | in terms of all the factory farming and so on.

00:23:09.940 | It seems like that's one of the things we'll look,

00:23:11.940 | 'cause I love meat, but I kind of feel bad about it.

00:23:15.540 | And bad in a way where I think if we look

00:23:20.060 | like 100 years from now, we'll look back at this time

00:23:23.620 | as like one of the great like tortures and injustices

00:23:28.420 | that we humans have committed.

00:23:30.340 | And I mean, all that has to do with the sex of the animal

00:23:33.020 | has to do with consent and about the experience

00:23:35.960 | of suffering of animals.

00:23:37.660 | The reason I think about that personally a lot,

00:23:39.700 | 'cause I think about robotics,

00:23:42.200 | I think about creating artificial consciousnesses,

00:23:46.260 | artificial like beings that have some elements

00:23:51.020 | of the human nature.

00:23:52.180 | And then you start to think like,

00:23:53.980 | well, what does it mean to suffer?

00:23:55.420 | What does it mean for entity to exist

00:23:58.580 | such that it deserves rights?

00:24:00.740 | This is something that the founding fathers

00:24:02.980 | were thinking about like, all men are created equal.

00:24:06.140 | What is it?

00:24:07.220 | Which, who is included in the men,

00:24:08.940 | who is not in that sentence?

00:24:11.680 | And are animals included in that, are robots?

00:24:14.500 | I honestly think that there will be a civil rights movement

00:24:16.860 | for robots in the future.

00:24:18.460 | - Holy shit. - I don't know.

00:24:19.900 | - Is that the Turing test, the way you try to,

00:24:21.940 | is that what they call it, where you're trying to,

00:24:25.140 | it's see if AI can think like a human or whatever,

00:24:27.500 | or feel like a human?

00:24:28.780 | - Well, the Turing test closely defined

00:24:31.820 | is more about talk like a human.

00:24:34.540 | So you can imagine systems that are able to,

00:24:38.760 | you can have a conversation like this,

00:24:40.180 | and I would be a robot, for example.

00:24:41.980 | But that doesn't mean I would,

00:24:43.580 | in society, that doesn't mean I deserve rights.

00:24:48.060 | Or that doesn't mean I would be conscious.

00:24:50.900 | It doesn't mean that I would be able to suffer

00:24:53.560 | and to experience pleasure and dream

00:24:55.740 | and all those kinds of human things.

00:24:57.700 | The question isn't whether you're able to talk,

00:24:59.660 | which is passed in the Turing test.

00:25:01.300 | The question is whether you're able to feel,

00:25:04.700 | to be, I mean, I go back to suffering.

00:25:08.580 | The thing that our documents protect us against

00:25:12.560 | is suffering.

00:25:14.500 | Like we don't want humans to suffer.

00:25:16.880 | And if a robot can suffer,

00:25:21.140 | that discussion starts being about,

00:25:23.880 | like, well, shouldn't we protect them?

00:25:26.260 | Currently, we don't protect animals.

00:25:28.960 | - We protect that, dogs.

00:25:30.280 | There's laws, there's actual legislation

00:25:32.160 | that protects dogs in certain places.

00:25:34.040 | Yeah.

00:25:34.880 | And you know what?

00:25:35.700 | Dogs is something I don't think people

00:25:37.320 | really understand enough about.

00:25:38.760 | It's one of my obsessions.

00:25:39.880 | So they, my dad always used to say,

00:25:44.240 | he'd go, "Those things are basically human."

00:25:47.000 | And I mean, they dream, they have anxiety.

00:25:50.840 | And what people often overlook about dogs

00:25:53.340 | is without dogs, we wouldn't be here.

00:25:55.120 | We would not have ever evolved

00:25:58.600 | from hunter-gatherer to agrarian to civilization.

00:26:02.920 | We wouldn't have cities, we wouldn't have anything.

00:26:05.860 | I mean, they are our partner in survival

00:26:08.940 | and they are a magical animal.

00:26:10.520 | There's no animal that was, it was like destiny almost.

00:26:14.320 | I mean, a malleable animal.

00:26:15.680 | There's no animal that's that malleable

00:26:17.500 | that in a few generations,

00:26:19.300 | you can tailor to a specific job that you need.

00:26:22.620 | And without that animal,

00:26:24.280 | without dogs doing that animal,

00:26:25.640 | protecting our crops from scavengers and stuff like that,

00:26:30.640 | the list goes on, we wouldn't be here.

00:26:33.980 | So we, that's an often overlooked fact

00:26:37.500 | that human evolution was not done in a vacuum

00:26:41.720 | just with humans.

00:26:42.560 | I mean, without dogs, we would have never evolved.

00:26:44.240 | I mean, we weren't the apex predator

00:26:45.580 | for most of our existence.

00:26:46.440 | We weren't even the apex predator.

00:26:47.920 | I mean, we're getting eaten by hyenas,

00:26:49.380 | which my favorite animal.

00:26:50.720 | And that's kind of an injustice to,

00:26:52.580 | I mean, I'm kind of mad at dogs.

00:26:54.380 | We deserve to get eaten by hyenas,

00:26:55.720 | but without dogs, we wouldn't be here.

00:26:58.060 | And dogs deserve the protection.

00:27:00.760 | So do horses.

00:27:01.600 | They fucking lugged us around for thousands of years.

00:27:04.260 | And now these fucking German psychopaths

00:27:06.300 | are eating them or whatever.

00:27:07.840 | We should not eat horse meat just on like,

00:27:10.740 | be a good dude, man.

00:27:11.780 | These things lugged us around for generations.

00:27:13.500 | They're beautiful.

00:27:14.940 | Ride them or I don't know.

00:27:16.460 | I don't know, but it rubs me the wrong way

00:27:18.860 | that we eat horses.

00:27:20.040 | - Yeah, the horse is one is interesting.

00:27:22.280 | And one of my favorite books is "Animal Farm" by Orwell.

00:27:24.920 | And the horses don't get a good ending in that.

00:27:28.120 | I kind of, my spirit animal, I suppose,

00:27:31.560 | is the horse from "Animal Farm" boxer,

00:27:34.200 | where he says, "I will work harder."

00:27:36.320 | That's his motto.

00:27:37.600 | I work really hard at stupid things.

00:27:41.160 | That's basically what I do.

00:27:42.640 | I just hit my head against the wall

00:27:43.940 | for no reason whatsoever.

00:27:45.120 | - But that probably fulfills,

00:27:46.180 | you have a big brain.

00:27:47.020 | You were probably born with a big brain

00:27:48.040 | that kind of fulfills--

00:27:48.880 | - It's killing neurons.

00:27:50.200 | - It's exercise for you.

00:27:51.520 | - Yes.

00:27:52.360 | - Don't you think some animals deserve to be eaten though?

00:27:54.760 | Kind of like--

00:27:55.760 | - Hyenas?

00:27:57.120 | - Come on, dude.

00:27:57.960 | I mean, you gotta respect the hyena.

00:28:00.160 | - Okay, so let's, first of all,

00:28:01.560 | let me just comment on the dog thing.

00:28:02.920 | There is conferences on dog cognition

00:28:05.940 | from a perspective of people that study psychology,

00:28:08.920 | cognitive science, neuroscience.

00:28:10.520 | Dogs are fascinating.

00:28:12.240 | The way they move their eyes, they're able to,

00:28:14.520 | they're the only other animal besides humans

00:28:16.900 | that are able to communicate with their eyes.

00:28:18.820 | They can look at a thing and look back at you

00:28:21.180 | and look back at the thing to communicate

00:28:23.380 | that we're all like, through our eyes,

00:28:25.540 | communicate that we're collaborating.

00:28:26.980 | So every other animal uses their eyes

00:28:29.540 | to actually look at things.

00:28:31.420 | The dogs use it to like communicate with us humans.

00:28:35.340 | It's fascinating.

00:28:36.160 | There's a lot of other elements of dogs that are amazing.

00:28:38.740 | - Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for them,

00:28:40.780 | they're the ones,

00:28:41.620 | they were our first alarm system for predators.

00:28:43.660 | They would defend us.

00:28:44.520 | I mean, the Basenji is one of the most ancient dogs.

00:28:46.440 | I mean, they're tiny, but they're fearless.

00:28:48.480 | And they would chase off lions.

00:28:49.720 | Like, you know, there'd be packs of them

00:28:50.920 | and they'd chase off lions and protect the tribes.

00:28:53.320 | I even get tingles like thinking about dogs

00:28:56.840 | 'cause I have a dog, I love my dog.

00:28:58.120 | It's just, and there's something about

00:28:59.920 | when you're walking with your dog off leash in the woods,

00:29:01.920 | it like, there's something about it

00:29:03.960 | that's like, that tugs at that

00:29:06.960 | millions of years of evolution, like that gut, you know?

00:29:10.080 | It's like, I had a Finnish friend of mine, he's a comic,

00:29:13.200 | Tommy Valamis once told me, he was like,

00:29:15.840 | he was like, the gut, he's like, I believe in it.

00:29:18.380 | Like that gut, you know, when you have that feeling,

00:29:20.240 | he's like, always trust that because that is million,

00:29:23.700 | those are all your ancestors.

00:29:25.520 | That's the survival instinct of all your ancestors

00:29:28.780 | at the beginning of time, you know, telling you like,

00:29:31.240 | hey, something's off here, something's, you know,

00:29:32.760 | so don't get in the car with Ted Bundy

00:29:34.480 | is what I'm saying, ladies.

00:29:35.320 | How fucking stupid, how can you fall for that?

00:29:38.240 | You know, he's got a fucking sling on, don't get in.

00:29:40.660 | - Yeah, follow the gut.

00:29:42.500 | My question to you, are psychopaths essentially robots?

00:29:46.200 | - So first of all, let's not, you're using the word robot

00:29:48.960 | in a derogatory way that I'm triggered by, okay?

00:29:52.960 | - Yeah, and you should be. - So I feel offended.

00:29:54.440 | - You should be because you know what?

00:29:56.040 | People are always scared of robots, but I actually,

00:29:59.440 | I have, I've made the sort of, I've made it the,

00:30:04.000 | hey, I've thought about it,

00:30:05.160 | I'm like, robots have been nothing but helpful.

00:30:07.480 | It's the people we should be scared of.

00:30:09.560 | Again, we're kind of missing the most destructive thing,

00:30:12.360 | is us, 'cause it's, but robots are helpful.

00:30:15.220 | I mean, this is a fucking robot.

00:30:16.960 | You know, I went on hotel tonight, I'm already booked up.

00:30:19.380 | You know, I got my, I can change my flight.

00:30:21.300 | If this barbecue with Rogan goes 16 hours,

00:30:23.340 | which whatever Rogan wants to do,

00:30:24.860 | I'll do if he wants to kick me in the chest,

00:30:26.140 | I'll let him kick me in the chest, whatever.

00:30:28.900 | Robots are helpful, no?

00:30:31.500 | - Yeah, tanks and autonomous weapon systems

00:30:34.060 | don't kill people, people kill people.

00:30:35.700 | - People kill people, yeah. - Yeah, that's.

00:30:38.180 | - Yeah, the NRA's about to click that for you.

00:30:40.420 | (laughing)

00:30:43.340 | A lot of love for dogs, I appreciate it very much.

00:30:45.660 | And at the same time, you have the other thing

00:30:47.740 | that people seem to have love for, which is cats.

00:30:50.340 | And on the flip side of everything you've said,

00:30:53.180 | I'm trying to understand what have cats ever done

00:30:56.620 | for human civilization?

00:30:58.000 | - They keep rodents away.

00:30:59.380 | The domesticated cat is very important,

00:31:01.220 | keeps rodents away.

00:31:02.160 | Yeah, that's what they were domesticated for.

00:31:03.900 | I mean, there's psychopathic killers

00:31:05.460 | who end up killing innocent neighborhood chipmunks

00:31:10.460 | and birds, they really affect the balance

00:31:15.900 | of the local ecosystem, but.

00:31:18.400 | - If you have love for cats too.

00:31:20.140 | - Not as much as dogs.

00:31:21.260 | I mean, dogs are, like you said, they look at humans.

00:31:23.580 | I actually read an article there,

00:31:24.980 | some people were theorizing they're smarter than chimps

00:31:27.100 | because of the way they can work with humans.

00:31:29.140 | And there was one border collie that spoke like 300 words,

00:31:32.340 | like a quarter, like almost part of the language.

00:31:35.300 | And their nose is like a, I mean, that's like magic, dude.

00:31:38.340 | If you can smell in my ass to what I had for breakfast

00:31:41.320 | from miles away.

00:31:42.540 | - That's intelligence.

00:31:43.380 | - That's intelligence.

00:31:44.540 | I mean, in some ways that their nose,

00:31:46.820 | if you were to put it on a scale,

00:31:47.980 | maybe their nose is more intelligent than our brain

00:31:50.580 | for what it does.

00:31:51.980 | You know, it's like, I mean, dude,

00:31:53.680 | they can smell you from miles away.

00:31:55.020 | You ever see a dog just like sniffing, catching?

00:31:57.380 | I mean, it's smelling like,

00:31:59.080 | I don't remember the date on it,

00:32:01.180 | but it's like they have like millions of receptors

00:32:03.500 | or something where we only, you know, thank God

00:32:06.100 | we don't have their nose.

00:32:07.140 | That would be, that would make sex weird.

00:32:09.260 | Be a little too intense.

00:32:12.500 | - I think you mentioned when you were talking

00:32:15.140 | about Woody Allen separating the art from the artist.

00:32:19.380 | So that brings to mind Vladimir Putin.

00:32:21.380 | How about that transition?

00:32:25.740 | I don't know.

00:32:26.580 | I'm so sorry.

00:32:28.980 | But if you look at just powerful leaders

00:32:32.820 | throughout history, Stalin, Hitler,

00:32:34.900 | but even model ones like Putin,

00:32:37.460 | and we're talking about power,

00:32:39.180 | how do you explain them?

00:32:42.220 | You said that power reveals, not corrupts.

00:32:47.140 | But do you think there's some element

00:32:50.340 | to which power corrupted Hitler,

00:32:52.180 | power corrupted Stalin after he gained power?

00:32:55.260 | And the same with Putin.

00:32:56.780 | When Putin gained power in 2000,

00:32:58.540 | do you think the amount of power

00:33:00.780 | that he was in possession with for many years,

00:33:03.140 | do you think that corrupted him?

00:33:04.740 | I mean, we're joking about dictators get the job done.

00:33:07.700 | There is some sense in certain countries

00:33:11.060 | where dictator is the only thing

00:33:15.740 | that can stabilize a nation.

00:33:17.500 | The counter argument to that for democracies is like,

00:33:22.580 | yeah, but that's a short-term solution

00:33:24.900 | for a long-term problem.

00:33:26.380 | So you want to embrace chaos of democracy.

00:33:28.940 | That might be violent.

00:33:30.380 | There might be a lot of just constant changing

00:33:34.620 | of leadership.

00:33:35.460 | There might be a lot of corruption in the short-term,

00:33:37.220 | but if you stay strong with the ideals of democracy,

00:33:42.220 | then you'll ultimately create something

00:33:45.940 | that as beautiful and stable as the United States.

00:33:48.980 | - The sad thing is, is I don't know

00:33:53.620 | if history tells that story.

00:33:55.980 | It's like I said, you look at Greece, you look at Rome,

00:33:57.900 | democracy kind of failed.

00:33:59.660 | The majority of Rome, the most successful empire

00:34:03.020 | that we've had was a dictatorship for most of its run.

00:34:09.020 | But I do believe in a republic,

00:34:12.620 | which is sort of a limited democracy.

00:34:14.460 | I do believe in what we have here.

00:34:17.100 | I believe in common law.

00:34:17.980 | I believe in individual rights.

00:34:21.740 | But yeah, I think you said it.

00:34:25.060 | Nobody could have said it better.

00:34:27.420 | Yeah, it's a short-term solution.

00:34:29.780 | You look at Saddam Hussein, he kind of,

00:34:32.740 | when we took him out, then there was a lot of infighting

00:34:35.940 | that happened that he was kind of keeping at bay

00:34:38.980 | because he was a strong man, dictator.

00:34:43.300 | - Well, he's an interesting one.

00:34:44.420 | Sorry to interrupt.

00:34:46.020 | From my understanding, I'm sure people will correct me,

00:34:48.300 | but when Saddam Hussein first came to power,

00:34:51.300 | he was quite progressive.

00:34:54.620 | So as far as I understand,

00:34:58.820 | the signs of an evil dictator weren't exactly there.

00:35:03.060 | So again, I don't know if power revealed or power corrupted.

00:35:07.300 | - Or that could have been the initial subterfuge

00:35:09.220 | to kind of get everybody.

00:35:11.060 | Hitler also is a champion of the people.

00:35:13.220 | Let's build some new roads.

00:35:14.500 | It's what psychopaths do.

00:35:15.660 | And that's why it's interesting to me.

00:35:17.100 | I'm not sure if power corrupts psychopaths.

00:35:20.380 | And now that we know that we can do these CAT scans

00:35:22.180 | and brain scans, again, we know that they're born that way.

00:35:25.620 | Power definitely corrupts people

00:35:28.020 | who have the capacity to feel and for empathy.

00:35:33.020 | Power, I'm not sure.

00:35:34.500 | I don't think power corrupts people

00:35:36.620 | who were born psychopathic with that condition

00:35:40.260 | or sociopaths who were closer to psychopaths

00:35:44.460 | and then had some traumatic life.

00:35:46.100 | I just think the best way to get away

00:35:50.100 | with whatever nefarious thing you wanna do to feel,

00:35:53.340 | I guess the only thing psychopaths can feel

00:35:54.860 | is that excitement,

00:35:56.220 | is to pretend to be the opposite of what you are.

00:35:58.860 | That's what killers do.

00:36:00.620 | That's what the worst people do.

00:36:01.580 | Look at Bill Cosby.

00:36:02.800 | I mean, he was, what better way to hide?

00:36:07.260 | It's like what wokeness is now.

00:36:08.700 | It's like, I'm such a great person.

00:36:09.980 | And you're like, are ya?

00:36:11.740 | It's a great, the best way to hide

00:36:14.300 | is to pretend to be the opposite of what you are.

00:36:16.020 | Just like Ted Bundy.

00:36:16.860 | I'm just an innocent, helpful guy.

00:36:18.820 | And then boom, next thing you know,

00:36:20.140 | you're getting your tit bit off.

00:36:21.460 | - That's really well said.

00:36:22.340 | It's actually kind of funny

00:36:23.420 | because I talk about love a lot.

00:36:25.740 | And I think the people that kind of look at me

00:36:28.820 | with squinty eyes, they wonder,

00:36:31.820 | like how many bodies are in that closet?

00:36:34.660 | You know what I mean?

00:36:35.780 | There's something about the duality of like,

00:36:38.460 | we're so skeptical as a culture.

00:36:40.300 | Like if somebody just seems to be kind of sort of,

00:36:44.980 | I don't know, positive

00:36:47.900 | and all that kind of, how do I put it?

00:36:50.820 | Just simple, simple-minded in the positivity they express.

00:36:55.300 | They think like, there's some demons in there.

00:36:58.060 | - Yeah, especially if you're a New Yorker,

00:36:59.340 | we don't trust any,

00:37:00.220 | the nicer you are, the more skeptical we are.

00:37:02.260 | I've struggled with that down here.

00:37:03.460 | I've been like, what's your angle?

00:37:04.580 | And they're like, nah, dude,

00:37:05.420 | just I wanted to show you the best tacos, man.

00:37:07.660 | And I'm like, did you really, what do you want?

00:37:09.980 | 'Cause in New York, it's like,

00:37:10.860 | if anyone's nice to you, they want something.

00:37:13.180 | And that's, the pro side to that

00:37:16.420 | is it makes you very street smart.

00:37:17.980 | The downside to that is it makes you way too cynical.

00:37:21.020 | - Yeah, I've definitely experienced that here in Texas,

00:37:23.420 | but people are super, super nice.

00:37:25.980 | And they're like, do all this cool shit for you.

00:37:27.780 | And you wonder, what's the angle?

00:37:32.420 | What are we doing here?

00:37:33.460 | You mentioned hyenas as your favorite animal.

00:37:35.820 | I forgot to ask you, what the hell were you thinking?

00:37:39.620 | Why is hyenas your favorite animal?

00:37:41.460 | - Yeah, it's a fascinating animal.

00:37:45.500 | Let's look at the whole animal kingdom.

00:37:46.940 | Like why, where do you put, so you like dogs.

00:37:50.420 | - Love, my favorite.

00:37:51.460 | - Your favorite is dogs.

00:37:52.900 | But they're kind of outside the animal kingdom

00:37:54.700 | 'cause you're thinking about wolves.

00:37:56.540 | So the animal kingdom is in nature.

00:37:59.100 | Dogs escaped nature.

00:38:01.260 | - They kind of did, yeah.

00:38:02.940 | - Together with humans, like in a collaborative way.

00:38:04.940 | Exactly.

00:38:05.980 | So within nature, within the animal kingdom,

00:38:08.980 | what, who's, why not lions?

00:38:11.900 | - 'Cause lions are predictable.

00:38:13.940 | Lions are just, they're regal and kind of, they bore me.

00:38:16.900 | It's like the hot chick.

00:38:18.140 | It's like, we get it.

00:38:19.620 | You were born the best.

00:38:22.780 | I like a scrappy, by any means necessary,

00:38:26.500 | intelligent and cunning.

00:38:28.380 | - But aren't they dishonest?

00:38:30.580 | - Yeah, and that's why I like 'em.

00:38:32.940 | Yes, they're dishonest.

00:38:34.860 | They employ chicanery.

00:38:37.100 | And that's just a sign of how intelligent they are

00:38:41.140 | and how self-reliant they are

00:38:43.060 | and how brutal they are.

00:38:45.220 | They're brutally honest in how much they lie.

00:38:49.020 | Because it's just, they're trying to get the job done.

00:38:52.300 | Lions are just like, they're too gifted.

00:38:55.260 | Everyone hates the fucking,

00:38:57.500 | if I went to school with you,

00:38:58.580 | I'd be like, of course Lex knows the fucking answer.

00:39:00.780 | Lex was born smarter than me.

00:39:02.740 | And you'd probably hate me

00:39:04.380 | because I was the kid always seeking attention

00:39:06.540 | and making people, it's like, that's not interesting.

00:39:09.300 | The guy that claws his way to the top,

00:39:11.140 | and those are hyenas.

00:39:12.500 | They're also fascinating just by merely who they are.

00:39:16.300 | I mean, they're not related to any other animal.

00:39:19.460 | They're more closely related to cats

00:39:21.940 | than they are dogs, even though they look more like a dog.

00:39:23.900 | Yeah, but they're very,

00:39:25.980 | like very tangentially related even to cats.

00:39:28.740 | So they're their own kind of thing,

00:39:30.780 | which is kind of mysterious.

00:39:31.880 | I don't think they've fully figured out.

00:39:33.700 | And the pseudopenis thing is the, I mean,

00:39:37.020 | it is the talk of-- - Can you explain

00:39:37.860 | the pseudopenis?

00:39:39.140 | - Yeah, so it's a matriarchal society, by the way.

00:39:42.020 | So that's the unique in and of itself.

00:39:44.140 | We're talking about an apex predator that is matriarchal,

00:39:48.060 | much like the praying mantis.

00:39:49.980 | It's very rare though.

00:39:51.100 | And they are fucking brutal and vicious.

00:39:53.500 | And the women are bigger and they let their cubs fight,

00:39:56.380 | a lot of fratricide.

00:39:57.540 | And they do that because they're like,

00:39:58.580 | "Hey, you're weaker.

00:39:59.820 | "I'd let your brother kill you."

00:40:01.380 | And the women have penises.

00:40:03.700 | The women have pseudopenises that they give birth out of.

00:40:06.220 | And the birth is violent,

00:40:07.540 | but they roll around with just huge pieces.

00:40:10.580 | They're glue guns who just fucking swinging.

00:40:13.100 | And the women are just run the show.

00:40:15.700 | And it's just cool that they have these pseudopenises.

00:40:19.020 | (laughing)

00:40:21.740 | - It's almost romantic the way you describe it.

00:40:23.460 | - They have the strongest bite force.

00:40:25.420 | They pulverize bone.

00:40:26.820 | Like when they eat an animal, the animal's gone.

00:40:29.420 | There's no bones.

00:40:30.660 | They eat everything.

00:40:31.820 | They can pulverize.

00:40:33.100 | Their bite is so powerful, they pulverize bone and eat it.

00:40:36.660 | So if they consume an animal,

00:40:38.460 | the animal was there and then the animal's gone.

00:40:40.300 | There's nothing for the vultures there to grab.

00:40:44.860 | - Yeah, I'm gonna have to revisit the hyenas

00:40:46.460 | because my experience with the hyenas was from,

00:40:50.220 | first of all, "History of the Hyenas," your show,

00:40:52.700 | has rebranded them for me.

00:40:55.140 | But "The Lion King," which is a cartoon, I guess,

00:41:00.140 | that I get emotional at every time.

00:41:03.900 | I probably have father issues.

00:41:06.460 | Every guy.

00:41:07.980 | - You probably just have feelings.

00:41:09.620 | You're a good guy.

00:41:10.460 | I mean, everyone gets that.

00:41:11.300 | - I have feelings? - Yeah, you have feelings.

00:41:12.140 | - That one gets everybody.

00:41:13.220 | I don't know.

00:41:14.260 | I get every father-son movie,

00:41:16.300 | like "Blow," "Wajani Depp," and "Ray Liotta."

00:41:20.820 | Damn, that's a good movie.

00:41:22.020 | And whenever there's the disappointment in the father

00:41:26.780 | that his son has become this incredibly successful drug lord

00:41:31.780 | that then ends up with nothing in prison,

00:41:35.860 | just the sadness of them communicating through letters,

00:41:38.960 | man, that gets me every time.

00:41:40.380 | But the hyenas are not presented that well in that.

00:41:47.020 | - No, they're usually portrayed as like,

00:41:49.740 | it's really sad that they're portrayed that way.

00:41:52.700 | The lions, like lions aren't dicks.

00:41:54.860 | Lions are dicks.

00:41:56.180 | The alpha lions will kill the cubs of another rival.

00:42:00.900 | They do all types of dick shit.

00:42:02.940 | And yeah, the hyenas are more interesting.

00:42:06.060 | Like they'll just roll in, like a hyena will,

00:42:08.340 | like you said, they'll lie.

00:42:09.840 | 'Cause when you watch the "Serengeti,"

00:42:12.480 | animals will hang out with each other, by water.

00:42:15.240 | So one hyena will just kind of roll in

00:42:17.040 | and pretend like it's not hungry, and then bang.

00:42:20.480 | They'll use any means necessary to take an animal down.

00:42:24.120 | Lions will just use brute strength.

00:42:26.200 | Hyenas use cunning.

00:42:28.120 | And you can even go on the internet and find memes of this

00:42:31.000 | where hyenas will grab the big animal by the balls

00:42:34.200 | and just like will sneak up behind it and bite its balls.

00:42:36.880 | And you'll watch an animal 10 times the size of the hyena

00:42:40.300 | just slowly go down.

00:42:41.940 | It's brutal, but it's fucking hilarious.

00:42:44.840 | (laughing)

00:42:47.260 | - I think that's, I don't know if you follow the channel,

00:42:51.260 | Nature's Metal.

00:42:52.720 | That one weighs heavy on me.

00:42:55.760 | With the hyenas and the balls.

00:42:58.400 | It's tough to intellectualize it.

00:43:03.600 | It's tough to think that the entirety of life on earth

00:43:07.600 | has this history of predators being violent.

00:43:12.600 | Just like just the murder that we come from.

00:43:17.080 | It's crazy.

00:43:18.180 | Just like we were talking about meditating on death.

00:43:22.480 | I actually, I keep following and unfollowing

00:43:24.680 | that Instagram channel because sometimes it's too much.

00:43:27.960 | Like I can't continue with the day

00:43:30.500 | after like seeing the brutality, the honest brutality of that.

00:43:34.920 | I don't know how to make sense of it.

00:43:36.400 | - It's important to acknowledge, I think,

00:43:37.800 | 'cause it's real.

00:43:38.960 | That we do come from that.

00:43:40.240 | We evolve from that.

00:43:42.640 | It's important.

00:43:43.480 | We still do that, we're just hidden from it.

00:43:45.240 | You know, when you go to the supermarket

00:43:46.480 | and get your slab of meat, you're so disconnected

00:43:49.900 | from where that meat came from.

00:43:51.680 | It came from that.

00:43:52.760 | And often that's uglier to watch

00:43:55.280 | than because there's some honesty.

00:43:58.120 | - The nature channels only show,

00:44:01.380 | that's why we have so much sympathy with the prey.

00:44:03.260 | And this is where I think,

00:44:04.380 | the same thing with mafia movies.

00:44:05.620 | They don't show what the mafia really does.

00:44:06.940 | They glorify the good parts.

00:44:08.300 | That's why I like "State of Grace"

00:44:09.420 | 'cause it's really just shaking down old people

00:44:11.380 | and fucking being dicks.

00:44:12.860 | It's not driving nice cars and being like, you know.

00:44:15.100 | So, and animal channels do the same thing.

00:44:16.940 | They only show when the cheetah gets it

00:44:19.860 | because that's the exciting part.

00:44:22.060 | But what most people don't know is that

00:44:23.820 | those predators strike out almost always.

00:44:27.220 | A majority of the time, the prey wins.

00:44:29.880 | And so if you saw that and put in context,

00:44:32.120 | you might not hate it as much

00:44:34.400 | when the predator actually gets the little fawn or whatever

00:44:37.720 | because it's so many fawns got away.

00:44:39.480 | It's so hard to capture your prey.

00:44:41.840 | And you know, we don't have the,

00:44:43.940 | they, no documentary is gonna sit around

00:44:47.040 | and show you the 99 times the cheetah didn't catch.

00:44:51.600 | - Thank you for this perspective.

00:44:52.800 | That's murder is difficult.

00:44:54.000 | So like, this is the,

00:44:55.520 | they never talk about for people who murder,

00:44:58.720 | how difficult that is.

00:45:00.000 | Like to trap somebody,

00:45:02.340 | to convince them to come back to your place.

00:45:04.160 | - Give it some respect,

00:45:05.000 | put some respect on Ted Bundy's name.

00:45:06.560 | Yeah, it's not easy to convince somebody

00:45:08.120 | to get in your Volkswagen Beagle and-

00:45:10.120 | - The cleanup.

00:45:11.420 | And then you have to kind of plan ahead

00:45:13.240 | 'cause you wanna keep doing the murder, mass murder.

00:45:15.280 | - You gotta learn how to saw 'em up,

00:45:16.640 | put 'em in duffel bags, bury.

00:45:18.440 | You gotta learn how to dig.

00:45:19.280 | You gotta learn how to hide.

00:45:20.280 | You gotta learn to lie.

00:45:21.280 | I mean, it's a lot that goes into it

00:45:23.600 | that we need to put a little respect on, yeah.

00:45:25.800 | - Yeah, and you have to figure out

00:45:26.800 | which tools work the best for the sawing

00:45:29.080 | and all those kinds of things.

00:45:30.640 | So thank you for the perspective.

00:45:33.320 | That's what I was hoping we would bring to this table.

00:45:36.860 | - That's what I'm here for, yeah.

00:45:38.320 | - So you got a little bit Greek in you.

00:45:42.380 | One of the episodes on "History of Hyenas,"

00:45:47.480 | you talked about the Battle of Crete,

00:45:50.560 | where the Greeks, your people,

00:45:52.920 | in 1941, in the early stages of World War II,

00:45:59.960 | is one of the most epic battles of the war.

00:46:03.160 | In fact, in 1941, in a speech made at the Reichstag,

00:46:07.540 | Hitler paid tribute to the bravery of the Greeks,

00:46:10.200 | saying, "It must be said,

00:46:12.920 | "for the sake of historical truth,

00:46:15.280 | "that amongst all our opponents,

00:46:17.680 | "only the Greeks fought with the endless courage

00:46:20.620 | "and defiance of death."

00:46:22.820 | So, okay, what do you make of this battle?

00:46:24.660 | What do you make of the spirit of the Greek people?

00:46:27.140 | - This is one of the closest things to me

00:46:28.860 | because my mother was actually on the island of Crete

00:46:33.260 | during this, the first aerial invasion in history.

00:46:36.380 | A lot of people don't know that.

00:46:37.360 | So this is a very significant battle.

00:46:39.920 | First time there was an invasion from the sky.

00:46:42.220 | And my mother was a little girl

00:46:45.120 | and she lived through four years of Nazi occupation there.

00:46:48.320 | So my mother was a human rights lawyer and everything,

00:46:50.120 | but she just always hated Germans.

00:46:51.880 | It's just what it is.

00:46:53.120 | She hated Germans and she never got over it.

00:46:55.400 | So the most progressive, open-minded woman

00:46:57.460 | just could not get over this.

00:46:58.920 | It's a monumental battle that a lot of historians,

00:47:02.880 | in retrospect, have now looked back on

00:47:05.360 | and said, "Because the Nazis,"

00:47:07.520 | first off, you gotta take it back

00:47:08.640 | to when Hitler instructed Mussolini,

00:47:10.920 | 'cause let's be honest, Mussolini was Hitler's bitch.

00:47:12.640 | You know what I mean?

00:47:13.480 | Like if it was Fantasy Island, Hitler was the fucking,

00:47:17.600 | and Mussolini was boss, the plane guy.

00:47:19.440 | - Mussolini ever say no to Hitler or even maybe,

00:47:22.240 | it's always like, "Yes."

00:47:23.600 | - Yes, yes, we will do it.

00:47:26.080 | And it's like, yeah, you have to take Greece.

00:47:29.240 | And so, yeah.

00:47:32.240 | So Italy being much bigger than Greece,

00:47:35.280 | Greece is a tiny country, nine, 10 million.

00:47:37.800 | So Italy invaded Greece,

00:47:42.800 | and Hockey Day's a big, it's a big holiday for Greeks.

00:47:45.720 | And this speaks to the spirit.

00:47:47.760 | Greeks infight until we have a common enemy,

00:47:51.000 | and then we unite.

00:47:52.880 | You see it throughout history, Sparta and Athens.

00:47:56.000 | You see it in Greek families,

00:47:58.360 | where the brothers will fight,

00:47:59.320 | but then as soon as we have a common enemy, we unite.

00:48:02.280 | And maybe it's an overactive brain,

00:48:03.920 | we think too much, our tradition's philosophy,

00:48:06.400 | and we overthink things, and we fight with each other

00:48:08.320 | and take things personally, we're ultra passionate.

00:48:10.640 | But when Italy said, "Hey, we're gonna move troops through,"

00:48:15.040 | a Greek said, "Oki," which means no.

00:48:18.240 | And that was, and then Italy attacked,

00:48:20.800 | and we beat the shit out of them.

00:48:24.080 | A much bigger country, much more well-equipped country.

00:48:28.480 | Greece beat the shit out of them,

00:48:29.480 | kicked them back into Albania,

00:48:31.120 | actually not only repelled them,

00:48:33.240 | actually conquered some ground in Albania, pushed them back.

00:48:36.360 | And then Hitler was like, "Fuck, you know,

00:48:38.640 | I was planning my march to Russia, but I have to go down."

00:48:42.280 | Because he basically said to Mussolini,

00:48:43.720 | like, "You know, you're fucking,

00:48:44.560 | you basically bitch slapped him, like,

00:48:45.960 | 'Fraid I gotta do this myself,

00:48:47.840 | 'cause you such a fucking bitch."

00:48:49.320 | So then the Nazis invaded Greece,

00:48:51.080 | obviously they took the mainland with fight,

00:48:53.200 | and shout out, the Greeks never give credit

00:48:55.120 | to the British and New Zealand and Australian troops

00:48:57.160 | that were there, you know, they were a large part of this,

00:49:00.120 | the majority of it, but the Greeks fight, dude, civilians.

00:49:03.680 | I mean, they fought, you know,

00:49:05.840 | the Ottomans were there 400 years,

00:49:07.640 | you go to Greece now, there's no evidence,

00:49:09.480 | there's virtually no evidence of them ever being there,

00:49:13.440 | that's the Greek spirit, kick 'em out,

00:49:15.400 | and we kicked out hummus too.

00:49:17.200 | So it's like, your culture's gone, you're gone.

00:49:19.600 | 'Cause Greeks are, it's philoptimo,

00:49:21.960 | it's called philoptimo, and it's a real thing.

00:49:23.800 | Philoptimo is a, there's very little,

00:49:26.440 | you can't translate it, but it's kind of like honor,

00:49:29.440 | loyalty, friendship, altruism,

00:49:32.840 | it's a, you can't define it, but Greeks know it,

00:49:35.280 | and we're taught it from our families, it's a vibe,

00:49:39.360 | and it's a Greek cultural thing, and we're an old culture,

00:49:42.400 | and philoptimo is what it's called, philoptimo,

00:49:44.840 | and it's love, it's passion, and it comes out,

00:49:49.720 | and it comes out, and so Hitler had to postpone

00:49:52.680 | his invasion of Russia, went down,

00:49:57.400 | the island of Crete took 10 days to conquer, it's an island.

00:50:02.320 | To put that in perspective, the country of France

00:50:06.280 | fell in three or four days, I can't even remember,

00:50:08.120 | 'cause they fucking just rolled over,

00:50:09.320 | so what does a couple hours matter

00:50:11.900 | when you're that much of a fucking pussy, okay?

00:50:14.400 | What is a couple hours, 12 hours, fucking three or four days

00:50:17.320 | the island of Crete took the Germans 10 days to conquer,

00:50:22.220 | and because of that, and because of the Greek resistance,

00:50:24.800 | Hitler had to postpone his invasion of Russia to winter,

00:50:29.680 | and of course that was his downfall,

00:50:32.640 | just as it was Napoleon's, and never, dude,

00:50:35.480 | never try to invade Russia, they got millions of people

00:50:38.000 | to throw at death, every time you read about Russians

00:50:40.280 | in history books, like, and a million died,

00:50:42.260 | I mean, you just guys throw millions of people

00:50:44.520 | at the problem, and don't fuck with that Russian winter,

00:50:47.220 | and don't fuck with Russian people, dude, they're tough.

00:50:49.900 | People in New York know that, you don't go to fucking

00:50:52.160 | Sheep's Hip Bay and start talking shit,

00:50:53.780 | you'll end up in a fucking car trunk,

00:50:55.400 | and they'll brutally murder you,

00:50:56.680 | I do not fuck with Russians.

00:50:58.320 | - Amen.

00:50:59.760 | - And there's a lot of people, a lot of historians argue

00:51:03.080 | that that battle was because of the Russian winter,

00:51:06.160 | because of delaying the Russian invasion,

00:51:07.660 | but also psychologically delaying the invasion.

00:51:10.280 | It was the first time, I think it was the first time

00:51:13.320 | the Germans failed, or didn't succeed like they wanted to

00:51:18.320 | early in the war, which is a little, psychologically,

00:51:23.040 | the impact of that, I think, is immeasurable.

00:51:26.440 | And also a lot of people argue from a military strategy

00:51:30.000 | perspective that, just like you said, it was an aerial

00:51:34.120 | attack, and that Hitler didn't think that that kind of attack

00:51:39.120 | would then be useful for the rest of the war.

00:51:42.180 | So that's a really, whereas it might have been very useful.

00:51:47.180 | So it's really interesting how these little battles

00:51:49.960 | can steer the directions of war.

00:51:51.720 | Of course, me growing up in the Soviet Union,

00:51:54.960 | we didn't hear much about this battle.

00:51:57.600 | Just like you said, millions of Soviets died.

00:51:59.920 | All those people in history that you read about dying,

00:52:02.480 | those are all civilians, but I mean, not all,

00:52:04.680 | but a very large number of them are civilians,

00:52:07.240 | and their stories, obviously, that's the rooted,

00:52:10.680 | the literature, the poetry, the music,

00:52:13.440 | just the way people talk, the way they drink vodka,

00:52:16.080 | the way they love, the way they hate, the way they fear,

00:52:20.140 | that's all like rooted in World War II and World War I.

00:52:24.120 | And so, but we never kind of think about Europe,

00:52:29.120 | and we certainly, growing up, didn't think about

00:52:32.320 | their role in the United States.

00:52:34.040 | All this, there's plenty of stories of heroism

00:52:36.120 | in the Soviet Union, enough for many lifetimes.

00:52:40.080 | So, but it was fascinating to read

00:52:41.760 | from a Greek perspective, 'cause I, you know,

00:52:45.360 | I don't have many Greek friends.

00:52:47.520 | I'm hoping to change that.

00:52:50.840 | - This is the beginning of a love affair of your people.

00:52:54.140 | Yeah, that- - Likewise,

00:52:56.560 | the Americans don't hear about the Soviet contribution

00:52:59.120 | to the end of World War II, because obviously,

00:53:00.840 | we became, you know, enemies after that,

00:53:03.520 | because of the two systems.

00:53:04.680 | But yeah, without the Russians, World War II

00:53:07.280 | wouldn't have been won either.

00:53:08.640 | - Yeah, the stories are written by the victors.

00:53:10.280 | That's really interesting.

00:53:11.760 | Just looking at history, you wonder what's missing.

00:53:16.440 | - I'll tell you what's missing that I know for a fact,

00:53:18.880 | 'cause my dad told me combat's hell,

00:53:21.880 | and he would tell me the reality of what it's really like.

00:53:23.600 | Guys pissing themselves, calling for their mother,

00:53:25.940 | the fog of war, obviously, fratricide happens all the time,

00:53:28.920 | it's pandemonium.

00:53:30.200 | I mean, there's skill involved, but I mean, there's no,

00:53:32.480 | like, a lot of it is just luck.

00:53:34.060 | My dad said, my dad won three, he got, you know,

00:53:37.080 | medals, Purple Hearts, all that shit.

00:53:39.600 | And he said the reason was is 'cause he can't,

00:53:41.240 | he always said, this is another thing he told me,

00:53:42.560 | you can't pin a medal on a dead guy.

00:53:44.840 | So it's like, those are the guys who deserve it,

00:53:46.880 | but you can't pin a medal.

00:53:47.900 | You can't do the pomp and,

00:53:50.400 | and I'll tell you one thing is that it is written

00:53:54.240 | by the victors, and all these leaders,

00:53:56.280 | they say we're in the front, we're not in the front.

00:53:58.800 | We're not, whenever the history books say,

00:54:00.640 | he led his troops into battle, it's like, did he really?

00:54:04.120 | Did he, so then how did he live?

00:54:06.020 | 'Cause they put, like, kids in the front, you know?

00:54:07.700 | It's like, nobody limps back from the front

00:54:09.760 | with, like, a injury, you know?

00:54:11.160 | That's army PR, you know, whenever you read,

00:54:16.800 | 27 soldiers died, 14 were injured,

00:54:20.100 | the word injured is PR.

00:54:21.780 | That's like, injured, was he?

00:54:23.260 | Did he sprain his ankle?

00:54:25.020 | Did he need, did he get carried off the court?

00:54:27.060 | Or, you know, he was maimed.

00:54:29.300 | I mean, he was like, his leg was blown off, you know?

00:54:31.620 | It's like, so I think that, you know,

00:54:34.460 | Alexander the Great was just kind of in the back

00:54:36.020 | on his horse and just kind of,

00:54:37.620 | he had his eunuch blown a few times,

00:54:39.020 | and he was like, is it bad up there?

00:54:40.820 | And then, like, after that, he was like,

00:54:42.300 | okay, my scribe, give me my scribe.

00:54:44.020 | Okay, when you write this down,

00:54:45.020 | can you put me in the front?

00:54:46.260 | Yeah, and I was just, make me a big hero,

00:54:48.800 | and I was in there, and then he, you know,

00:54:50.200 | he just blew his, you know, he had sex with his eunuch

00:54:52.680 | and rode off into the sunset,

00:54:54.000 | because there's just no way you survive in the front,

00:54:55.920 | especially warfare back then.

00:54:57.440 | I mean, it's, like, brutal.

00:54:59.080 | - Then again, you have, like, Genghis Khan.

00:55:01.580 | The sense I got that he was a little bit up on the front,

00:55:06.360 | at least at first.

00:55:07.400 | - Yeah.

00:55:08.240 | - Or is that also, is he a little bit Alexander the Great?

00:55:09.720 | - Give me my scribe, yeah, it's all lore.

00:55:11.520 | I mean, you ever play the game of telephone?

00:55:13.840 | You know, it's like, you know,

00:55:15.480 | there's no video cameras back then,

00:55:16.880 | so shit just turns into myth, you know?

00:55:19.960 | And there's no way he was in the front.

00:55:21.640 | There's no way, he wouldn't have lived.

00:55:23.620 | You know, he was probably good on horseback,

00:55:26.320 | 'cause those dudes were good on horseback.

00:55:29.080 | It was like "Game of Thrones" back then.

00:55:30.280 | You had all these different people, and they kinda,

00:55:32.080 | yeah, the Mongols were wild, dude.

00:55:34.480 | They actually said, like, they started, like,

00:55:37.420 | they were more adaptable to the horse,

00:55:39.160 | because they were so good on horseback

00:55:40.600 | that kids started to be born, like, kind of bow-legged,

00:55:43.480 | like, to fit the horse.

00:55:44.440 | It's wild, and they would stretch their heads

00:55:46.440 | and shit like that.

00:55:47.620 | They'd wrap 'em and stretch their heads

00:55:49.080 | so they'd find, like, Mongol skulls,

00:55:51.160 | and they looked like coneheads,

00:55:53.280 | and they were brutal and vicious.

00:55:56.040 | And they would maraud and rape and all the fun stuff that,

00:55:59.880 | you know, when you visit other places back then,

00:56:02.200 | there's no tchotchke stops and souvenir shops.

00:56:04.280 | What you do is you take women, and those are the tokens,

00:56:07.320 | you know, you burn a few huts.

00:56:09.540 | Different, tourism was different back then.

00:56:12.960 | - Yeah, that's another difficult thing.

00:56:15.760 | Just, we're talking about nature and predators.

00:56:17.840 | To think about the long stretch of history

00:56:21.160 | where it was just murder.

00:56:22.600 | - Yeah.

00:56:23.440 | - And we made so much progress, I guess,

00:56:27.060 | in the past couple of centuries.

00:56:28.760 | The United States is a shining example of that.

00:56:31.300 | - But do you think also that it's that effect

00:56:33.320 | that we were, a lot of good things had to happen, too,

00:56:36.640 | or else we wouldn't be here.

00:56:37.880 | So do we just focus, isn't it like a car crash effect?

00:56:41.260 | That like, you know, the rubber neck

00:56:43.060 | that everyone pulls over to see a car crash.

00:56:44.560 | Are we just only focusing on the negative things of history

00:56:46.900 | 'cause they're just more exciting to us?

00:56:48.600 | Like, it's just not, it's boring to be like,

00:56:50.100 | yeah, and then there was a bunch of villagers

00:56:51.540 | and they ate every day and danced and-

00:56:54.400 | - And loved, yeah.

00:56:55.880 | I wonder how different those people were, you know?

00:56:59.960 | Like, they might've had the same exact loves and fears.

00:57:04.280 | And like, they perhaps had the same kind

00:57:08.320 | of brilliant ideas in their head, if not more.

00:57:11.080 | - Brilliant.

00:57:11.920 | And we kind of think about like this moment in history

00:57:14.000 | as like the most special moment.

00:57:16.200 | Like, we're doing the coolest shit,

00:57:18.120 | but we're doing the most amazing,

00:57:19.520 | building the most amazing things.

00:57:20.760 | But maybe they were building amazing things

00:57:23.160 | in their different way with like less technological,

00:57:25.420 | but in the space of ideas,

00:57:26.800 | in the space of just all the different,

00:57:29.160 | the camaraderie, in the space of like concepts,

00:57:33.720 | mathematics, all those kinds of things.

00:57:35.480 | - Yeah, I mean, Greece, you look at the architecture,

00:57:37.100 | it still stands up.

00:57:37.940 | I mean, all the government, but it's still arguably,

00:57:40.920 | I mean, as far as objective beauty,

00:57:42.700 | it's hard to argue that Greco-Roman,

00:57:44.920 | it's just something about it with the columns.

00:57:48.100 | It's just, it's powerful.

00:57:50.280 | It's, I don't know, even Ayn Rand would probably appreciate

00:57:53.480 | it.

00:57:54.320 | - She doesn't, no, no, no.

00:57:56.460 | So in your history of hyenas,

00:58:01.400 | that unfortunately has come to an end.

00:58:03.440 | We were talking about empires coming to an end,

00:58:05.200 | all empires fall.

00:58:08.080 | That one, well, it may rise again.

00:58:11.240 | Empires might rise again, who knows, who knows?

00:58:13.800 | I'm obviously a fan, so I hope it does rise again,

00:58:18.000 | but you've seemed to develop your own language.

00:58:22.340 | Can you, you know, it's what it is.

00:58:26.440 | What is that?

00:58:28.200 | What the hell?

00:58:30.000 | Is this some kind of medical condition

00:58:31.640 | or can you explain like the linguistic essentials

00:58:35.560 | that catch us up to the linguistic essentials

00:58:39.440 | that people need to know to understand the way you speak?

00:58:42.960 | - You know Leopold and Loeb?

00:58:44.160 | You know the story of those two?

00:58:46.040 | They murdered that kid

00:58:47.120 | and they had this weird relationship.

00:58:49.920 | Anyway, it's an interesting thing to Google,

00:58:51.200 | Leopold and Loeb, these two guys

00:58:53.440 | who ended up murdering a kid

00:58:54.700 | because they developed their own language with each other

00:58:56.840 | and this own reality and this weird thing.

00:58:59.560 | And they wanted to know what it's like to murder a kid

00:59:01.120 | and they murder a kid.

00:59:01.960 | It's a famous story in American lore and history,

00:59:04.520 | whatever, famous case.

00:59:07.280 | But this phenomenon, yeah, me and Chris got together.

00:59:10.480 | It wasn't as dark as Leopold and Loeb.

00:59:12.000 | We didn't murder a kid, but we murdered a podcast.

00:59:14.940 | - Or at least stabbed it a few times.

00:59:18.400 | - Yeah, it was something in the organic chemistry

00:59:22.680 | of me and Chris that I think we'll both end up appreciating

00:59:27.240 | even probably more than we do now, that it's mysterious.

00:59:32.000 | I gotta be honest with you.

00:59:33.080 | It was the thing that it wasn't conscious,

00:59:37.720 | wasn't intentional.

00:59:39.840 | It was something that happened in the music of our energies

00:59:44.000 | that just went.

00:59:45.280 | - It's fascinating.

00:59:46.120 | - Like when you hear someone sing

00:59:47.040 | or when a jazz band hits a rhythm

00:59:49.280 | or even when I'm on stage and I just catch a rhythm,

00:59:52.280 | it's like, dude, I didn't make a choice there.

00:59:54.200 | I don't know what that is.

00:59:55.180 | I don't know how to explain it,

00:59:56.800 | but it comes from somewhere else

00:59:58.600 | and I don't know what it is.

01:00:00.520 | It's beyond my comprehension,

01:00:01.840 | but with Chris, there was this magical chemistry

01:00:06.120 | that I have chemistry with a lot of people

01:00:08.840 | and it can be funny and I enjoy talking.

01:00:10.240 | - I feel zero chemistry here, brother.

01:00:11.680 | - No, this is great.

01:00:12.520 | This is great, yeah.

01:00:13.340 | It's a little bit more intelligent

01:00:14.320 | than when me and Chris did, but me and Chris,

01:00:18.800 | I think we connected on the funny bone.

01:00:21.600 | I found him so funny and we found the same things funny.

01:00:26.720 | And from that, these organic expressions came

01:00:29.520 | from some part of our brains

01:00:32.440 | that was created from this chemistry.

01:00:34.400 | And yeah, we just developed this language

01:00:36.760 | and this cult following and people were really upset

01:00:39.440 | when we ended, but it was the right thing to end

01:00:41.880 | because like all things that end,

01:00:43.660 | it was kind of done a few episodes even before we finished.

01:00:46.440 | And I think we pulled the plug

01:00:48.120 | before it started rolling downhill.

01:00:50.280 | Like all great flings.

01:00:53.920 | There's your long relationship,

01:00:55.040 | long marriages are boring and comfortable.

01:00:59.000 | The one you really like fucking always ends abruptly

01:01:03.720 | and sadly, but you always look back and you jerk off to it.

01:01:07.060 | - So you guys made love.

01:01:09.760 | - We made, yeah.

01:01:10.600 | So it was like a hot fling with me and him

01:01:13.640 | and it was intense and we burned the candle at both ends.

01:01:17.640 | I think that podcast was meant to be three years

01:01:22.440 | and maybe people will go back and appreciate it

01:01:25.280 | and listen to it over and over again.

01:01:27.120 | And I think the new things we do, people will love.

01:01:29.720 | I'm doing long days now, that podcast

01:01:31.600 | and people seem to enjoy it.

01:01:32.440 | - I've been really enjoying the long days on YouTube.

01:01:35.280 | I just found myself just like staring at you,

01:01:39.720 | ranting for, same with Tim Dillon.

01:01:41.160 | I really enjoyed whatever those rants are,

01:01:43.200 | the genius of just one thing after the other,

01:01:45.640 | but definitely the chemistry almost as a study.

01:01:48.800 | I remember the reason I first started listening to it,

01:01:51.560 | I was trying to get a perspective

01:01:55.000 | on certain historical moments.

01:01:57.440 | Like it was interesting.

01:01:58.480 | I tuned in to learn history.

01:02:00.440 | Yeah, I came for the history and like stayed for the chaos.

01:02:05.600 | - Stayed for the crack open and clean out.

01:02:07.700 | - And yeah, it was almost,

01:02:10.680 | I listen to Rogan like this sometimes.

01:02:13.520 | I'll re-listen to an episode to try to understand

01:02:19.360 | why was this so fun to listen to?

01:02:23.640 | It's almost like trying to analyze humor

01:02:25.520 | or something like that,

01:02:26.360 | but it's nice from a conversational perspective,

01:02:29.240 | like why was this so easy to listen to?

01:02:32.240 | And with History of Hyenas,

01:02:34.520 | why is the chemistry so good?

01:02:36.680 | It's so, it's weird.

01:02:39.200 | It's weird.

01:02:40.120 | 'Cause there's not many podcasts like that.

01:02:41.920 | I don't know any with the chemistry like that.

01:02:44.520 | It's interesting.

01:02:45.360 | And it's kind of sad that the fling

01:02:50.200 | with a prostitute in Vegas has to end.

01:02:52.400 | (laughing)

01:02:54.240 | But that's what makes it special.

01:02:55.400 | It's the Bukowski thing with the fog.

01:02:57.520 | The British office, one of my favorite shows was that.

01:03:01.400 | It ended very quick.

01:03:03.080 | It's only a couple of seasons or something like that.

01:03:05.840 | And that was tragic, but that took guts to just end it.

01:03:09.560 | Given all the money you could have made,

01:03:11.040 | given all the, you just end it.

01:03:13.160 | And that's what makes it like truly special.

01:03:15.480 | - Yeah, and I'll tell you, man, I'll just emphasize it.

01:03:17.280 | 'Cause I marvel at it too.

01:03:19.880 | 'Cause as a guy who tries to always figure out

01:03:22.480 | what the causes of things, I gotta be honest, man,

01:03:25.640 | looking back on that, even with retrospective wisdom,

01:03:28.040 | you know, that 2020 hindsight,

01:03:29.500 | we've been done a couple months now.

01:03:31.880 | It's something that I can't explain.

01:03:35.480 | It's something that I don't know how you quantify it.

01:03:38.020 | I don't know how you describe it.

01:03:40.120 | It's musical.

01:03:41.440 | It's really kind of rhythmic.

01:03:43.440 | So.

01:03:44.440 | - Maybe like a Netflix show about history.

01:03:47.240 | That's in the future.

01:03:50.080 | - Maybe, yeah.

01:03:50.920 | - With the two of you.

01:03:51.740 | - Yeah, who knows?

01:03:52.580 | - You guys will meet like,

01:03:54.320 | with that, the way you meet with a fling,

01:03:56.400 | like a decade from now at a diner

01:03:59.320 | and you're both way fatter and uglier.

01:04:02.400 | And then you just reminisce over some cigarettes and coffee.

01:04:06.760 | - It could be, yeah, it could be.

01:04:08.520 | - Yeah.

01:04:09.360 | - But it's definitely a classic podcast

01:04:11.360 | that people can go back and appreciate.

01:04:13.120 | It's fast paced and it was unique.

01:04:15.960 | - What was it like to research for,

01:04:18.400 | I mean, it was really scholarly,

01:04:19.920 | the depth of research that you performed.

01:04:22.080 | It sometimes felt like you almost read

01:04:25.080 | an entire Wikipedia article beforehand.

01:04:27.320 | - That's exactly true.

01:04:31.640 | We were, one fan, we attracted such funny people

01:04:36.640 | to that podcast and the fans were so funny.

01:04:39.640 | And one fan called us, nicknamed us Wikipedia sluts.

01:04:43.160 | And so it just stuck.

01:04:44.440 | Yeah, we just would read Wikipedia.

01:04:46.120 | I would do a lot more research than Chris.

01:04:48.080 | - Yeah.

01:04:48.920 | - And so I would actually,

01:04:50.800 | once in a while he'd get into it too,

01:04:52.440 | but for very interesting episodes,

01:04:55.240 | I got some subject matter would just pull me in,

01:04:58.400 | like Bernie Madoff, just to think of one that was recent,

01:05:00.720 | it was one of our last ones.

01:05:01.560 | And I think one of our better episodes,

01:05:03.360 | and I'm glad that it kind of ended after that

01:05:06.360 | 'cause it was rare to,

01:05:07.440 | I think we started to slip a little bit.

01:05:09.920 | I got fascinated and I did a lot of research

01:05:12.160 | for Bernie Madoff, but usually, yeah,

01:05:13.960 | we'd pull up Wikipedia and we'd have fun.

01:05:15.600 | We were sort of the antithesis of Dan Carlin.

01:05:17.960 | I mean, you went to Dan Carlin for accuracy

01:05:21.200 | and thoughtfulness and you went to us for,

01:05:24.200 | it was a hang with histories.

01:05:26.120 | That's why history hyenas was such an appropriate name

01:05:28.680 | because it was a little bit of history.

01:05:31.320 | Some episodes were more hyena, more wild,

01:05:34.200 | and a little history,

01:05:35.040 | and some were a little more dense,

01:05:36.240 | like the Battle of Crete and less hyena.

01:05:38.160 | So you were always gonna get both.

01:05:40.680 | You're either gonna get a majority of one or the other.

01:05:42.440 | - Yeah, and Dan Carlin's the lion, I guess.

01:05:44.920 | - Yeah, you gotta get both.

01:05:45.760 | - You gotta get predictably good.

01:05:48.360 | I mean, what are your thoughts about,

01:05:52.000 | I mean, he's a storyteller too.

01:05:53.280 | He gets a lot of criticism from the historians,

01:05:56.320 | quote unquote.

01:05:57.160 | That's why he likes to not,

01:05:58.960 | he keeps saying he's not a historian,

01:06:00.680 | but what are your thoughts about hardcore history

01:06:05.440 | with Dan Carlin?

01:06:06.400 | Like, was he an inspiration to the podcast you were doing

01:06:13.520 | or like an account,

01:06:14.880 | like almost like a reverse psychology inspiration

01:06:17.640 | where you wanted to do some kind of opposing type of podcast

01:06:21.040 | in history?

01:06:22.040 | Or was history always just like a launching pad

01:06:27.040 | to just talk shit about human nature?

01:06:29.800 | - More of the latter.

01:06:31.080 | I wasn't even aware of his podcast when we started.

01:06:33.440 | - Oh, interesting.

01:06:34.280 | - Yeah, and so it was just very organic.

01:06:36.880 | Again, like the chemistry,

01:06:37.960 | me and Chris became very good friends.

01:06:40.160 | We started the podcast.

01:06:41.680 | First, we did a web series called Bay Ridge Boys,

01:06:43.840 | which has its sort of little cult following.

01:06:45.920 | We did like five episodes and ended it.

01:06:47.840 | And then we did the podcast.

01:06:49.560 | And hyenas were my favorite animal.

01:06:52.480 | And I talk about them passionately

01:06:53.840 | and I told Chris about them.

01:06:55.000 | And then he started appreciating them.

01:06:56.640 | And we both love history.

01:06:57.680 | I majored in history.

01:06:58.720 | It's one of the things I love.

01:06:59.680 | I go to museums all the time.

01:07:00.920 | I do history tours, so does he.

01:07:03.160 | And so it was just sort of a natural,

01:07:05.480 | let's do a history podcast.

01:07:06.720 | And it gave us something to talk about each episode

01:07:09.560 | to sort of lean our, you know,

01:07:11.080 | hang our hats on and riff off of.

01:07:13.720 | So it had nothing to do with Dan's.

01:07:15.440 | What I think about Dan's, I think it's great.

01:07:17.400 | I think even if he's inaccurate in the opinions

01:07:21.280 | of the historical community, it starts conversations,

01:07:24.620 | which is good.

01:07:25.660 | It's like this thing where people go,

01:07:27.160 | "Oh, it's dangerous rhetoric."

01:07:28.440 | It's like, no, rhetoric only becomes dangerous

01:07:31.040 | when education fails.

01:07:32.400 | What's going on in America is education has failed.

01:07:35.440 | So if you call someone online dangerous,

01:07:37.660 | it's not him that's dangerous.

01:07:39.320 | It's the fucking stupid people that's dangerous.

01:07:41.600 | And it's the fault of this country.

01:07:42.800 | We didn't listen to Aristotle.

01:07:44.280 | The future of a civilization depends on public education.

01:07:47.880 | And we failed.

01:07:49.520 | Education has failed.

01:07:50.840 | Kids are not interested in shit.

01:07:52.980 | And so-- - In some sense,

01:07:54.640 | those, like Dan's podcast,

01:07:56.760 | and podcasts can be incredibly educational.

01:07:59.840 | That's, he's, the storytelling that pulls you in

01:08:04.120 | ultimately leads to you internalizing these stories

01:08:08.640 | and remembering them and thinking through them

01:08:11.080 | and all those kinds of things that is much more powerful

01:08:13.280 | than you book on history that's accurate.

01:08:16.320 | - I think often it inspires you to go learn more.

01:08:18.680 | So it's like, I know we did that.

01:08:19.760 | I mean, people would go, "Hey, I went and learned about this."

01:08:22.880 | 'Cause they knew with us, there was no pretense,

01:08:24.720 | which was great, that we had no standard.

01:08:27.240 | So it's like, nobody came to us for historical accuracy.

01:08:30.360 | But I was kind of turned on by the fact

01:08:32.800 | that it inspired people to go learn about this stuff

01:08:36.320 | or to at least know, like Battle of Crete,

01:08:38.040 | like you said, a very underappreciated battle.

01:08:41.960 | Even Winston Churchill said, "From here on,

01:08:44.280 | "we will no longer say that Greeks fight like heroes,

01:08:48.220 | "but heroes fight like Greeks."

01:08:49.640 | I mean, it was a monumental battle

01:08:52.560 | and not talked about enough.

01:08:54.560 | And our podcast would inspire people

01:08:57.580 | to go actually learn more, to go listen to Dan Carlin

01:09:00.840 | or to go pick up a book or to do research on their own.

01:09:04.000 | And so I think podcasts,

01:09:06.800 | Dan Carlin's obviously much more accurate than us,

01:09:08.760 | but it's good that people are going to podcasts like yours

01:09:12.560 | to learn shit.

01:09:13.400 | Joe is really like the progenitor of that.

01:09:16.880 | I mean, having intellectuals on

01:09:19.160 | and getting the public interested with this new medium

01:09:23.440 | in people who are intelligent, it's nice.

01:09:28.080 | 'Cause what the mainstream press pushes out is horseshit,

01:09:31.520 | gorgeous horseshit.

01:09:33.680 | It's got a beautiful veneer, but no substance.

01:09:37.240 | And so this is a nice pushback.

01:09:39.840 | - Yeah, the authenticity of Joe's show.

01:09:41.880 | I mean, I started listening from the very beginning,

01:09:45.760 | doing my in grad school, like a technical person.

01:09:50.640 | And he just pulled me in and made me curious

01:09:53.080 | to learn about all kinds of things

01:09:55.000 | and use my own critical reasoning skills

01:09:58.600 | on some of the bullshit guess he's had

01:10:00.520 | and some of the most inspiring guess he's had.

01:10:03.320 | So I'll teach you to think.

01:10:04.960 | I don't know much about Bernie Madoff as a small tangent.

01:10:09.240 | Can you tell me who the hell is Bernie Madoff?

01:10:10.800 | - Oh, Bernie Madoff is the GOAT,

01:10:13.280 | the greatest thief of all time, dude.

01:10:15.840 | Hedge fund guy, ran a hedge fund

01:10:18.280 | and stole the most money in the history of America.

01:10:22.240 | I mean, a con artist.

01:10:23.600 | People obviously, he's become, he's a household name

01:10:28.960 | because of the magnitude of his crime.

01:10:30.680 | But you got to appreciate, again,

01:10:32.160 | you got to appreciate what went into this

01:10:34.720 | and how long he was able to pull it off

01:10:37.320 | by tricking the smartest and richest people in the world.

01:10:41.680 | And a brilliant scam.

01:10:43.200 | The con man, con man is short for confidence man.

01:10:47.320 | And it came from, yeah, a con man,

01:10:50.200 | basically they exude confidence and they trick people

01:10:53.320 | by playing on their ego and blind spots.

01:10:56.240 | And the word comes from a guy, I can't remember where,

01:10:58.720 | but what he used to do.

01:11:00.080 | I can't remember the guy's name, whatever.

01:11:02.000 | You can Google it, con man.

01:11:03.800 | But it's very interesting.

01:11:04.640 | The first con man that is on record,

01:11:06.800 | what he would do, he would go to very rich people

01:11:08.480 | and he'd be very well-dressed, right?

01:11:11.040 | And he'd go, I bet you don't have the confidence

01:11:14.600 | to give me your watch.

01:11:16.680 | And he would play on the egos

01:11:17.800 | of these very powerful and rich people

01:11:19.280 | and they would give him the watch for some reason,

01:11:21.360 | some sort of reverse psychology bullshit.

01:11:23.280 | And he'd take the watch and he would just steal it.

01:11:25.480 | 'Cause basically he's saying,

01:11:27.520 | you don't have the confidence to give me the watch

01:11:28.560 | 'cause you don't, I don't know,

01:11:29.480 | you don't think I'm gonna give it back.

01:11:30.480 | And he would just take it.

01:11:31.680 | So Bernie Madoff was a very sophisticated con man.

01:11:35.440 | And again, we were talking about people

01:11:36.640 | pretending to be the opposite of what they are.

01:11:38.840 | Bernie hid his thievery in how available

01:11:43.840 | he was to his clients,

01:11:45.720 | how he would show up at every bar mitzvah, every birthday.

01:11:47.840 | He was always available for their phone calls.

01:11:49.840 | And he played on their egos.

01:11:52.280 | He made it so people wanted to invest in him.

01:11:55.440 | Like they were competing.

01:11:56.600 | He made it very exclusive.

01:11:58.320 | He wouldn't just take anyone.

01:11:59.800 | And there was a method behind that madness

01:12:01.520 | because he wanted the whales that wouldn't notice

01:12:05.400 | that he had this pyramid scheme going.

01:12:07.960 | And so what he would do is he would just rob

01:12:09.640 | from the richer and he just kept,

01:12:11.400 | it was like he'd pay back the richer

01:12:12.920 | with the guy who was a little less,

01:12:14.000 | and it was a pyramid scheme.

01:12:15.600 | And he was able to do it for so long

01:12:18.240 | and steal so much money.

01:12:20.280 | And he would win people over with the scheme

01:12:22.760 | because with that scheme,

01:12:23.720 | he was the only guy who could provide,

01:12:25.840 | who could guarantee like a 1% return

01:12:28.480 | even during times of recession.

01:12:30.240 | And because he was such a good con man,

01:12:32.600 | he hijacked people's reasoning with his charm.

01:12:35.520 | And that's what con artists do.

01:12:36.800 | That's what psychopaths do.

01:12:37.760 | They're so fucking charming.

01:12:39.280 | They get you in that Volkswagen Beetle

01:12:41.120 | because if they use their reasoning for one second,

01:12:43.000 | they'd go, "Hey, nobody can provide 1% returns

01:12:45.840 | "during recessions.

01:12:46.720 | "How the fuck is this guy doing it?

01:12:48.200 | "I'll tell you how he's doing it.

01:12:49.360 | "He's stealing from another guy to pay you.

01:12:51.620 | "You fucking idiot."

01:12:52.880 | - So charisma is essential to that.

01:12:54.640 | Maybe you can help explain something to me,

01:12:57.400 | something I have been affected by.

01:13:00.440 | - I'm going way too loud for your listeners.

01:13:01.640 | There's gonna be comments like,

01:13:02.480 | "Tell this guy to calm down.

01:13:03.440 | "I'm sorry, I'm Greek Apostolate."

01:13:05.440 | (laughing)

01:13:07.700 | - No, that's beautiful.

01:13:09.680 | I love it.

01:13:10.520 | This is something that I have been thinking about

01:13:12.840 | and have encountered indirectly is Jeffrey Epstein.

01:13:16.420 | And I have a sense because of MIT,

01:13:19.800 | because of all the other people

01:13:22.120 | that have been touched, the wrong term,

01:13:25.040 | by Jeffrey Epstein in the sense that-

01:13:26.920 | - Literally touched.

01:13:27.840 | - Literally and figuratively.

01:13:30.240 | And it always felt to me like there's not a deep conspiracy.

01:13:34.960 | I don't know.

01:13:36.740 | But it felt to me like there's not

01:13:38.680 | some deeply rooted conspiracy where like Eric Weinstein

01:13:42.680 | thinks that there's some probability

01:13:45.400 | that Jeffrey Epstein is a front

01:13:48.960 | for like an intelligence agency,

01:13:50.720 | whether it's Israeli or the CIA, I don't know,

01:13:54.280 | but is a front for something much, much bigger.

01:13:57.560 | And then I always thought that he's just,

01:14:00.860 | maybe you can correct me,

01:14:01.720 | but more of the Bernie Madoff variety,

01:14:04.280 | where he's just a charismatic guy

01:14:06.840 | who may be a psychopathic in some sense,

01:14:10.080 | so also a pedophile, but just charismatic

01:14:14.600 | and is able to convince people of that 1% of any idea

01:14:18.160 | that in the case of scientists,

01:14:20.380 | is able to convince these people that their ideas matter.

01:14:25.280 | So one thing scientists don't really,

01:14:27.200 | despite what people say,

01:14:29.200 | I don't think they care about money as much as people think.

01:14:32.280 | - I mean, people are ridiculous when they think that.

01:14:33.760 | Yeah, that's why people get into science for the money.

01:14:36.240 | The person who has to get into science

01:14:37.440 | are obsessed with minutiae.

01:14:40.160 | They do the scientific method.

01:14:41.500 | You know how boring that is?

01:14:43.040 | Like you have to have a love for it in order to do it.

01:14:46.400 | - But the thing- - Love and truth.

01:14:48.120 | - What drives you is for your ideas to be then heard.

01:14:52.060 | And when a rich guy comes over, probably super charismatic,

01:14:56.140 | is going to tell you that your ideas,

01:14:58.900 | especially for some of these outsiders at MIT,

01:15:01.100 | at Harvard, at Caltech,

01:15:02.580 | at all these sort of big physics, biology,

01:15:07.580 | artificial intelligence, computing fields,

01:15:13.480 | to hear somebody say that your ideas are brilliant,

01:15:17.380 | that ideas matter, it's pretty powerful,

01:15:19.060 | especially when you've been an outsider.

01:15:21.320 | Like he's talked to a bunch of people

01:15:23.180 | who had outsider ideas.

01:15:26.580 | The big negative for me of modern academia

01:15:31.260 | is that most people, actually like most communities,

01:15:35.320 | most people think the same

01:15:36.540 | and there's just these brilliant outsiders.

01:15:38.660 | And the outsiders are just derided.

01:15:41.420 | And so when you have Jeffrey Epstein, like a hyena,

01:15:44.420 | sorry, sorry, sorry, going from on the outside

01:15:48.180 | and picking off these brilliant minds

01:15:49.580 | that are the outsiders,

01:15:50.900 | he can use charisma to convince them

01:15:52.980 | to collaborate with him, to take his funding.

01:15:57.660 | And then thereby he builds a reputation,

01:16:01.140 | like slowly accumulates these people

01:16:03.540 | that actually results in a network

01:16:07.620 | of like some of the most brilliant people in the world,

01:16:11.180 | and then pulls in people like Bill Gates

01:16:13.140 | and I don't know, political figures.

01:16:15.340 | I tend to believe one person can do that.

01:16:19.380 | - Yeah, I mean, look at Hitler, charisma is blinding.

01:16:22.860 | I think that's what con men, speaking of Bernie Madoff,

01:16:25.420 | that's one of their major tools is flattery,

01:16:29.700 | glib, superficial charm.

01:16:31.580 | It creates those blind spots.

01:16:33.100 | People wanna hear how great they are.

01:16:34.540 | They wanna be flattered.

01:16:35.980 | It takes your defenses down, plays to our ego,

01:16:39.780 | the how much we're all just pieces of garbage

01:16:42.620 | and wanna hear how great we are.

01:16:44.060 | We want that love from our mother and our father.

01:16:46.460 | It's Freudian and they know,

01:16:48.460 | because they're not burdened with that need,

01:16:51.540 | they're not burdened with that empathy or emotions

01:16:55.780 | and they just see things very calculatively.

01:16:58.180 | They play, they know that we're prey in their game

01:17:01.740 | and they use that against us.

01:17:03.620 | And that is why someone who is not that intelligent,

01:17:07.180 | like Hitler, can probably convince

01:17:09.300 | a lot more intelligent people, you know,

01:17:11.700 | and that's why we can't give Tim Dillon power

01:17:13.740 | because he already stands on a stage.

01:17:15.860 | I mean, if we let that guy,

01:17:17.060 | I mean, he will just take over a country

01:17:18.820 | and everyone who can't cook well will be eliminated.

01:17:21.580 | So it's like-

01:17:22.420 | - I wonder why he keeps complimenting me

01:17:23.980 | when we're in private.

01:17:24.820 | - Exactly, be careful.

01:17:26.140 | - He looks at me, just, I like your suit.

01:17:29.100 | I like the cut of your jib.

01:17:30.460 | Yeah, definitely.

01:17:31.300 | - You gotta be careful of that kid, he's Hitler.

01:17:33.020 | (laughing)

01:17:34.700 | But it's crazy to think about-

01:17:35.540 | - Clip that, please, internet.

01:17:36.940 | - I mean, Quentin Tarantino said it to bet,

01:17:38.980 | I mean, in his script, personality goes a long way, dude.

01:17:41.500 | - Yeah.

01:17:42.340 | - I mean, personality can usurp common sense

01:17:46.580 | and reason of the smartest people.

01:17:48.260 | These absolute smartest people can be hypnotized.

01:17:52.700 | It's sort of like a sexy woman.

01:17:54.780 | It's like, you can be tricked

01:17:57.380 | because we have such a blind spot for flattery.

01:18:02.120 | - Yeah, I wonder, I think there's a BBC documentary

01:18:05.540 | on, I think it's called something like charisma,

01:18:08.580 | Hitler's charisma or something like that.

01:18:10.540 | It does quite, I mean, that one focused more

01:18:12.860 | about the power of the speeches,

01:18:15.300 | but I wonder if most of the success

01:18:18.180 | or the rise of Hitler and the third Reich

01:18:21.540 | had to do with the charisma of Hitler

01:18:24.100 | when he's alone in a room with somebody,

01:18:26.060 | with the generals, just one-on-one.

01:18:29.300 | Like, I wonder if that's the essential element

01:18:32.620 | of just being able to just look into a person's eyes,

01:18:36.460 | like flatter them or whatever is needed

01:18:39.340 | to earn their trust and then convince them

01:18:42.060 | of anything you want.

01:18:43.820 | - Right, yeah, I mean, you're right

01:18:45.660 | 'cause that's the one piece of history we don't have.

01:18:49.100 | - We don't know.

01:18:49.940 | - We don't know.

01:18:50.760 | We do know that the kid crushed.

01:18:53.180 | I mean, he was a headliner.

01:18:54.980 | He got up there and his--

01:18:56.340 | - Oh, just speechless.

01:18:57.180 | - His hair would flop around.

01:18:58.340 | I mean, he crushed it.

01:19:00.900 | - Yeah, there's certain elements about nationalism

01:19:02.700 | and pride that are really powerful.

01:19:04.140 | Like a lot of us humans, I think, long for that,

01:19:08.900 | for the feeling of belonging.

01:19:10.820 | And when some charismatic leader makes us feel

01:19:13.300 | like we belong to a group,

01:19:14.960 | the amount of evil we can do to other humans

01:19:20.260 | because of that is endless.

01:19:21.100 | - Especially when you do people a scapegoat.

01:19:23.180 | Nobody wants to look in, nobody wants to do the work

01:19:25.540 | to be better or look at where they messed up.

01:19:27.300 | - Why does it always have to be the Jews

01:19:28.620 | that are the scapegoat?

01:19:29.460 | - You know, it's like, get over it, guys.

01:19:32.620 | I mean, it's like, they killed Jesus, you think,

01:19:34.980 | get over it, okay?

01:19:36.300 | It's a long time ago.

01:19:37.460 | I mean, move on.

01:19:38.340 | - Yeah, I'm Jewish.

01:19:39.180 | I understand because we do run the central banks.

01:19:41.700 | - And the weather.

01:19:42.660 | - And the weather.

01:19:43.500 | - Yeah.

01:19:44.580 | Don't forget about the weather, that's a big one.

01:19:46.060 | That's a funny one that people created.

01:19:47.340 | Like, who gives a shit?

01:19:48.180 | Well, what is the weather?

01:19:49.660 | What's the importance of the weather?

01:19:50.500 | All right, the Jews made it rain outside.

01:19:51.740 | Good, you gotta fuck, you know, they made it snow.

01:19:53.100 | Okay, you get a day off.

01:19:53.980 | Thank the Jews.

01:19:54.820 | - Yeah, it's like, there's certain conspiracies

01:19:56.740 | that make me, like flat earth.

01:19:58.620 | Like, what's the motivation for lying

01:20:03.260 | that the earth is round?

01:20:04.380 | Like, what's the conspiracy?

01:20:05.540 | - Yeah, what does anyone get out of that?

01:20:06.780 | Yeah, what is exactly the profit?

01:20:09.620 | What's the strategy?

01:20:11.900 | Do you have any, from a historical perspective

01:20:14.860 | or just a human perspective,

01:20:16.540 | conspiracy theories you connect with?

01:20:18.660 | Or you're not necessarily conspiratorial?

01:20:21.020 | - I'm not necessarily conspiratorial.

01:20:25.900 | Nobody cares that much.

01:20:27.700 | But there--

01:20:28.540 | (laughing)

01:20:30.500 | But then, you know, what happens is

01:20:32.580 | you find out this one or this two--

01:20:34.660 | - And you start questioning everything.

01:20:36.620 | - And then you start questioning everything, man.

01:20:38.020 | It's like, you know, the Vietnam War started,

01:20:39.820 | that was a lie.

01:20:40.860 | That was a false flag.

01:20:43.540 | And then next thing you know, everything's a false flag.

01:20:45.900 | There are some strange things on 9/11.

01:20:48.060 | You know, there's some strange things

01:20:50.980 | from a scientific perspective.

01:20:52.180 | I'm no scientist, but it's like, you know,

01:20:54.100 | yeah, three steel-framed skyscrapers falling

01:20:58.220 | on the same day in the same way.

01:21:00.660 | A lot of people say, oh, it was,

01:21:02.740 | they were hit by planes.

01:21:03.580 | It's like, yeah, but that's not why they fell.

01:21:04.780 | They fell because of fires.

01:21:06.500 | And usually, not usually, all the time,

01:21:11.100 | except for three times.

01:21:13.020 | And there was buildings that have burned

01:21:14.900 | for longer than that.

01:21:16.020 | - And there might be good explanations,

01:21:18.460 | but the lack of transparency, it's like,

01:21:21.020 | I feel like government--

01:21:22.220 | - And building seven's weird.

01:21:23.460 | I mean, the way it cut down.

01:21:24.300 | And just a neat, just a neat, the physical,

01:21:27.420 | I mean, you're a scientist, is that--

01:21:29.060 | - Well, I don't--

01:21:30.260 | - Is there resistance from the steel?

01:21:32.140 | - No, it's--

01:21:33.140 | - Free fall seems weird.

01:21:33.980 | - Not all scientists know everything.

01:21:35.020 | I'm just a computer guy.

01:21:36.220 | 'Cause I had some questions I wanted to ask you

01:21:38.460 | about my biology, by the way.

01:21:40.180 | - Yeah, so exactly.

01:21:41.020 | I don't understand biology.

01:21:41.900 | I don't understand the melting point of steel.

01:21:43.980 | I don't, but I'm just the common sense human

01:21:47.100 | that looks at government and institutions

01:21:49.660 | when they try to communicate.

01:21:51.380 | And there's a certain human element

01:21:53.580 | where you can sense that there's dishonesty going on.

01:21:56.820 | That dishonesty might not be deeply rooted

01:21:58.660 | in a conspiracy theory and something malevolent.

01:22:00.940 | It might just be rooted more likely to me

01:22:03.620 | in a basic fear of losing your job.

01:22:06.820 | So when you have a bunch of people

01:22:08.100 | that are afraid of losing their job,

01:22:10.300 | and they just don't want to,

01:22:12.460 | like the origins of the virus,

01:22:14.740 | whether it came from a lab or not.

01:22:16.660 | That's a pretty, I know a lot of biologists

01:22:19.420 | behind closed doors that say it's very likely

01:22:23.500 | it was leaked from the lab.

01:22:25.420 | But they don't wanna talk about it

01:22:27.420 | because there's not good evidence either way.

01:22:29.260 | It's mostly, you're just using common sense.

01:22:31.960 | So they're waiting for good evidence

01:22:33.280 | to come out in either direction.

01:22:35.500 | But just like nobody in positions of institutional,

01:22:38.740 | like centralized power wants to just honestly say,

01:22:41.420 | "We don't know."

01:22:42.540 | Or on the point of masks or all those kinds of things

01:22:44.940 | to say, "Here's the best evidence we have.

01:22:47.580 | "We're not sure, we're trying to figure it out.

01:22:49.060 | "We're desperately trying to figure that out."

01:22:50.700 | Or just like honesty, especially in the modern day.

01:22:53.960 | That's the hope I have for the 21st century

01:22:55.940 | is people seem to detect bullshit much, much better

01:22:59.140 | because the internet. - Yeah, internet, yeah.

01:23:00.900 | - Yeah, and we seem to-- - But they also believe

01:23:02.740 | crazy shit too.

01:23:03.900 | There's no Yang without a Yang, I guess.

01:23:05.500 | - But I think the conspiracy theories arise only

01:23:09.260 | when the people in positions of power in government

01:23:13.020 | and institutions are full of shit.

01:23:15.180 | Like the air will be taken out of the conspiracy theories

01:23:18.020 | if the people in elected power would be much more honest.

01:23:20.660 | Like just like real.

01:23:21.940 | You have people like Andrew Yang,

01:23:23.640 | whatever you think about him, just more honest.

01:23:26.220 | He just like says whatever the hell comes to mind.

01:23:29.500 | By the way, he's running for New York mayor.

01:23:32.700 | - Mayor, yeah.

01:23:33.540 | - Do you have opinions?

01:23:34.740 | - Yeah, it's no good.

01:23:35.900 | I like Andrew Yang and it's no good.

01:23:37.740 | I'd be honest with you, I'm a lifelong New Yorker.

01:23:40.500 | I mean, I'm a New Yorker.

01:23:41.820 | - Well, you're a New Yorker, so nothing's good.

01:23:44.340 | - Well, something is good.

01:23:45.740 | - Okay, America. - And let's be honest

01:23:47.860 | about New York.

01:23:48.900 | It's a very socially liberal place.

01:23:51.060 | It is the head of the snake.

01:23:52.900 | New York is the country.

01:23:54.380 | If New York, when New York's not doing good,

01:23:56.340 | country's not doing good.

01:23:58.420 | It's the most important city, DC, New York.

01:24:01.460 | It's really Rome, be honest.

01:24:03.180 | Maybe I'm biased, I don't know.

01:24:05.540 | - No.

01:24:06.380 | (laughing)

01:24:07.820 | - We just did, New Yorkers, we walk around everywhere

01:24:09.700 | and we go, this is just like New York, but not New York.

01:24:12.400 | But New York needs, and I'm a guy who leans left.

01:24:17.420 | I just, I lean left and that's just what it is.

01:24:20.300 | - A dictator, is that where you're going?

01:24:21.860 | - No, we need-- - Are we going back

01:24:22.700 | to Stalinism? - We need, it's a money town.

01:24:25.080 | Let's be, come on, man.

01:24:26.540 | I mean, New York is a money town.

01:24:29.500 | And Wall Street, and then when AOC and her cronies

01:24:33.460 | at the local level rejected that Amazon thing,

01:24:36.740 | you're going like, what do you think makes cities?

01:24:39.460 | What's gonna create jobs in the 21st century?

01:24:42.300 | What do we need, more nail salons?

01:24:44.100 | More pizza places?

01:24:45.500 | I mean, we're living in the tech revolution

01:24:47.340 | and whatever your opinions are about Jeff Bezos,

01:24:51.220 | that's the world, tech.

01:24:53.340 | And they want you to come here,

01:24:54.700 | of course you give 'em tax breaks.

01:24:56.080 | That's why companies go anywhere.

01:24:58.180 | She's so fucking utopian,

01:24:59.800 | and that progressive wing is so utopian,

01:25:02.220 | and that always ends in disaster

01:25:05.180 | because it's not rooted in reality.

01:25:06.660 | It doesn't accept the reality

01:25:08.220 | that people are self-interested.

01:25:09.500 | Now they're gonna do this 14%, 15% tax hike

01:25:12.380 | on people making a million dollars more.

01:25:13.900 | In New York City, a million dollars is not that much.

01:25:16.260 | So people are gonna flee New York.

01:25:18.100 | The tax base is gonna flee.

01:25:19.820 | New York's gonna fall to shit like it did before.

01:25:21.860 | - So you're saying it basically needs

01:25:23.320 | a more capitalist front,

01:25:24.840 | a more capitalistic type of thinker.

01:25:26.480 | - Bloomberg, Giuliani when he was still sane

01:25:28.860 | and his hair wasn't melting off his face.

01:25:31.160 | Prosecutor, you need a tough,

01:25:33.480 | I mean, I don't know what's happened.

01:25:34.360 | That guy's lost it, but it's fun.

01:25:36.480 | - Yeah, it's fun to watch.

01:25:37.400 | - Yeah, it's fun to watch him be just like Trump's lackey.

01:25:40.040 | Like, yeah, boy, whatever you want, boss.

01:25:41.600 | I'll just say whatever you want, boss.

01:25:43.500 | New York is a money town that needs a money guy

01:25:47.160 | and sort of more of a Republican.

01:25:49.360 | I have to say on the local level,

01:25:50.760 | as more of a guy who leans left, I'll just be honest.

01:25:53.200 | It's a tough city that needs a tough mayor,

01:25:56.540 | not some guy who's going like,

01:25:57.540 | "I understand, we all need free money."

01:25:59.580 | Andrew Yang, I think is right in the big picture

01:26:02.660 | 'cause all the real jobs are somewhere else.

01:26:04.580 | And you look at those Asian cities, you go like,

01:26:06.020 | "Oh, that's what our cities used to look like

01:26:07.940 | "at the Industrial Revolution."

01:26:09.540 | You know, there was jobs and people were making things here.

01:26:12.300 | And now you look at those cities in Asia

01:26:14.220 | and you're going like, "Wow."

01:26:15.100 | And then you go to Detroit and you're like,

01:26:16.380 | "Yeah, we're done."

01:26:17.620 | You go to Cleveland, you go, "We're done."

01:26:19.860 | - So I don't, actually, it's funny.

01:26:22.360 | The reason I really like Andrew Yang is

01:26:24.940 | I've learned a lot every time he talks.

01:26:27.140 | Like, it's not his opinions,

01:26:28.620 | he's just giving a lot of data, like information.

01:26:31.540 | Which I--

01:26:32.380 | - Just start a podcast, don't run for mayor.

01:26:34.140 | - Yeah, that's true.

01:26:34.980 | He already has a podcast, I think, Yang Speaks.

01:26:37.180 | - Who doesn't?

01:26:38.020 | - Who doesn't?

01:26:38.860 | - Fucking who doesn't now?

01:26:40.260 | That's the way we communicate.

01:26:41.460 | I don't even talk to people unless it's on a podcast.

01:26:44.180 | - Well, listen, man, I'm not gonna criticize that

01:26:46.860 | because there is something,

01:26:48.000 | like I talked to my dad on a podcast for four hours

01:26:52.400 | and I'm not sure I would ever talk to him

01:26:55.320 | in the way we talked without the podcast.

01:26:57.560 | - What does he do?

01:26:58.940 | - Physicist.

01:26:59.780 | - Oh shit.

01:27:00.600 | - But like--

01:27:01.440 | - I'm gonna check that episode out.

01:27:02.260 | - Yeah, it's episode 100 and,

01:27:05.440 | you know, the way I recorded that podcast

01:27:11.840 | is I tried to put my ego aside.

01:27:14.760 | It's actually really tough to talk to your dad,

01:27:17.000 | especially 'cause you're giving him a platform.

01:27:19.360 | Especially, so at that time,

01:27:21.700 | there's already a bit of a platform for this podcast.

01:27:24.620 | And so there's this, as a son,

01:27:27.620 | you think like, oh, here it goes with this bullshit again.

01:27:30.660 | Like that's the natural son thought you have.

01:27:34.340 | But at the same time, I wanted to,

01:27:36.940 | the way I thought about it is in 20 years,

01:27:38.940 | when I look back, like I wanna do a conversation

01:27:41.320 | where I'm happy with it, you know?

01:27:43.580 | So I wanna make him shine.

01:27:45.920 | But I also called him out on like,

01:27:47.760 | why were you so distant?

01:27:49.940 | - Wow.

01:27:50.780 | - Like all of that kind of stuff.

01:27:51.800 | Yeah, it was very difficult to do,

01:27:53.440 | but it was really important to do.

01:27:54.680 | And I don't think I'd be able to do it

01:27:55.920 | without a microphone.

01:27:57.800 | - Right.

01:27:58.880 | - Listen, how often do we sit there

01:28:00.480 | and just focus our attention,

01:28:01.960 | just look at the other person?

01:28:03.720 | I don't know, man.

01:28:05.640 | This is not even recording right now.

01:28:07.360 | (laughing)

01:28:08.200 | - No, really.

01:28:09.020 | - I just invited you over.

01:28:10.360 | - Just so we could actually, you're right.

01:28:11.920 | The podcast does make, like I've been listening

01:28:14.120 | to every word you've been saying.

01:28:15.800 | And if we weren't doing a podcast,

01:28:17.240 | I might be looking at my phone

01:28:18.400 | or being self-conscious about something else

01:28:20.600 | or nervous or anxious.

01:28:21.440 | - You're zoomed in, especially with people close to you.

01:28:23.640 | I mean, that was, I recommend that actually

01:28:25.800 | for people to talk to their family on a podcast.

01:28:29.520 | Or like fake or not, that's really powerful.

01:28:32.360 | It made me realize that there's a clear distinction

01:28:35.360 | between the conversations we usually have with humans

01:28:38.280 | and those we have when a podcast is being recorded.

01:28:41.580 | What the fuck were we talking on before that?

01:28:45.760 | I knew you were gonna lose your train of thought

01:28:47.520 | on that one because that's a big one.

01:28:49.160 | There's emotion behind that one.

01:28:50.760 | A podcast with dad, that's gonna take you to a place.

01:28:53.600 | It took you to a place.

01:28:55.160 | It took you outside of interviewer.

01:28:57.200 | - New York, it went to a place.

01:28:58.040 | - New York and Yang, yeah.

01:28:59.320 | - In New York and Yang.

01:29:00.800 | So the data, one of the things

01:29:02.200 | that really surprised me about.

01:29:03.680 | (laughing)

01:29:05.560 | I like the psychoanalysis you just threw in there.

01:29:07.440 | - Yeah, I knew that was gonna happen.

01:29:09.200 | Yeah, it took you to a place.

01:29:10.720 | - So Angie Yang mentioned--

01:29:12.840 | - Do you respect me now, dad?

01:29:14.520 | MIT, is it enough?

01:29:16.720 | A fucking million people listening to this?

01:29:18.720 | I've got 14 Rogans.

01:29:20.520 | Is it enough, dad?

01:29:21.800 | I'm creating robots.

01:29:22.760 | Is it enough for you?

01:29:24.120 | - It's never enough.

01:29:25.080 | - That's what drives you probably.

01:29:26.040 | - That's probably what drives me.

01:29:27.160 | That's what gives meaning to life is it's never enough.

01:29:30.200 | And I hope to pass that on to my kids one day,

01:29:33.280 | that nothing's ever enough.

01:29:34.680 | - Whether they're robot or human, right?

01:29:36.480 | Your kids.

01:29:37.320 | - Most likely, let's be honest, robot.

01:29:38.880 | - You might call one of your robot.

01:29:39.720 | Do you love your robot?

01:29:40.760 | Are you starting to love your,

01:29:41.680 | is it gonna be like that Pygmalion thing?

01:29:43.200 | You create them and then they kill you,

01:29:44.520 | but even while they're killing you,

01:29:45.520 | you got a tear rolling down your eye.

01:29:46.360 | - The tear, a slow one tear, one tear.

01:29:48.600 | And just--

01:29:49.440 | - Why are you doing this Frankenstein?

01:29:50.480 | And they're going, "Why, why?"

01:29:52.960 | - But I loved you.

01:29:53.880 | Those would be the last words out of my mouth.

01:29:56.520 | But Angie Yang mentioned something on the,

01:29:59.240 | that it cost $400,000,

01:30:03.720 | over $400,000 per year to support

01:30:07.240 | one person in prison in New York.

01:30:11.520 | When I heard that number, it was really confusing to me.

01:30:14.760 | It cost that much, 400K per person.

01:30:19.040 | And it was really refreshing to hear a politician

01:30:24.280 | describe a particular problem with data,

01:30:27.160 | that this is this prison industrial complex,

01:30:29.400 | whatever the hell it is.

01:30:30.880 | And whether the solution,

01:30:32.400 | it's unclear what the solution is.

01:30:33.960 | I think he has solutions,

01:30:35.200 | but just the honesty of presenting that information

01:30:38.400 | was refreshing.

01:30:39.280 | And I'm not sure a capitalistic person would solve that.

01:30:42.920 | Those kinds of problems he might make worse.

01:30:44.800 | And I'm not, you know, I'm a huge fan of capitalism.

01:30:48.800 | I think the free market is the way we make progress

01:30:53.720 | in this world, but it seems to go wrong

01:30:56.640 | in certain directions,

01:30:58.320 | like the military industrial complex, the prison,

01:31:00.640 | anything that ends with industrial complex.

01:31:03.160 | And so I'm not sure.

01:31:06.320 | I'm not sure if all of the problems,

01:31:09.440 | you're basically saying,

01:31:10.920 | let's put New York's problems aside.

01:31:15.160 | We need to have New York shine first

01:31:19.120 | to do what it does best.

01:31:20.560 | - Essentially, yeah.

01:31:21.600 | - And then the problems we'll fix them.

01:31:23.400 | Well, and then we can focus on the problems.

01:31:26.200 | But if you just say like, here's a problem,

01:31:27.720 | here's a problem, here's a problem,

01:31:29.240 | let's make sure we have the safety net

01:31:30.600 | that protects us against all of these kinds of problems.

01:31:32.640 | That's not going to, that's going to kill the city,

01:31:35.160 | the spirit of the city that is, in your biased opinion,

01:31:39.320 | the Rome of the world.

01:31:40.800 | That said, a lot of people are fleeing New York.

01:31:44.600 | - Yeah, that's why I say it.

01:31:46.520 | That's the reality of the situation is, you know,

01:31:48.960 | I'm all for the public good, but yeah,

01:31:51.680 | there needs to be, back to that Greek expression,

01:31:53.600 | pon metronariston.

01:31:54.520 | I also think the free market is responsible for progress.

01:31:58.800 | I think it's the most natural thing,

01:32:00.120 | the thing that's most aligned with human nature,

01:32:02.000 | which is self-interest,

01:32:03.480 | and which I believe, not to the extent that Ayn Rand would,

01:32:06.480 | but I do believe people are mostly self-interested,

01:32:08.880 | especially with one gun to the head.

01:32:11.440 | Morals are out the window.

01:32:12.880 | You know, it's about survival.

01:32:14.120 | So, you know, create a system that respects that

01:32:16.920 | and acknowledges that.

01:32:17.960 | But socialism works very well, at least right now,

01:32:21.160 | as a check, as to temper the excesses of capitalism.

01:32:25.640 | And in certain scenarios is the more appropriate system,

01:32:30.640 | you know, in a vacuum.

01:32:31.640 | So one being prisons or, you know, governance, you know,

01:32:36.640 | parks.

01:32:38.880 | - Maybe even, well, and this is a difficult one,

01:32:41.160 | but in healthcare.

01:32:42.520 | - Healthcare.

01:32:43.360 | - It's unclear what to write.

01:32:44.520 | There's a lot of debates there.

01:32:45.600 | - Yeah, doctors want votes.

01:32:47.040 | - So I guess you're voting for AOC, you're saying.

01:32:50.960 | - No, I'm not voting for AOC, but I do,

01:32:53.600 | it's just a tough one, that's a tough one,

01:32:55.640 | but ultimately the Hippocratic Oath,

01:32:59.040 | it's like, how do you turn people away, man?

01:33:01.760 | How do you do that to people?

01:33:02.840 | It's like, it's a tough thing to reconcile helping people,

01:33:07.840 | curing people with the marketplace.

01:33:13.520 | It's just, I can understand why that one's so tough.

01:33:16.400 | And then you got hypochondriacs, of course,

01:33:18.320 | who drain the system, you know,

01:33:19.600 | like people who have anxiety, like me,

01:33:21.960 | who had COVID and called 14, you know,

01:33:24.720 | I called 14 ambulances.

01:33:26.560 | So, and then of course we're fat

01:33:28.480 | and the free market made us fat because it played,

01:33:31.000 | the marketing made us want all this junk food

01:33:32.600 | and that's a burden on the healthcare system.

01:33:34.520 | So we gotta do something about that.

01:33:35.480 | We gotta get creative.

01:33:36.320 | We need new thinkers, I'll be one of them.

01:33:38.360 | When you go to a fast food restaurant, you stand on a scale.

01:33:40.960 | If you're over a certain thing, you can't be served.

01:33:43.960 | It's good for the healthcare system.

01:33:45.600 | You know, you just hand it a salad and say,

01:33:47.040 | "Sorry, this burger's illegal for right now."

01:33:49.600 | If you achieve these certain BMI goals,

01:33:53.240 | then you can have this burger, but right now you can't.

01:33:57.160 | That's where the state's important.

01:33:58.680 | - Yeah.

01:33:59.520 | - Okay, to regulate our freedoms.

01:34:00.440 | No slurpees, I'm with you, Bloomberg.

01:34:02.240 | (laughing)

01:34:03.560 | - Well, I'm with you to go along.

01:34:04.880 | I think the salads are too expensive.

01:34:06.320 | They should be subsidized.

01:34:07.400 | If you go to like a fast food joint,

01:34:10.500 | the burger's always gonna be cheaper than the salad.

01:34:12.720 | And this does not make sense.

01:34:13.840 | We should run on this platform.

01:34:15.200 | I'll be your vice president.

01:34:16.440 | We'll ban burgers for people over a certain weight

01:34:19.760 | and make salads cheap.

01:34:21.000 | - Three-day work weeks.

01:34:22.240 | Why has that been happening?

01:34:23.320 | - Okay, where are you going with this one?

01:34:24.720 | - Good, good for the economy.

01:34:26.360 | Stimulates the economy, right?

01:34:27.680 | More shifts, creates more jobs,

01:34:30.340 | more people spending 'cause they have more leisure time,

01:34:32.400 | boosts the leisure economy.

01:34:34.840 | Why are we still doing the five-day work week?

01:34:36.960 | That was tempered from the seven-day work week.

01:34:39.680 | It used to be seven-day work week.

01:34:42.040 | It used to be like,

01:34:43.280 | people who are just these libertarians,

01:34:44.640 | it's like, "Come on, dude.

01:34:45.480 | What is this?

01:34:46.720 | Are we freshmen in college?

01:34:49.080 | We're gonna talk about Ayn Rand next.

01:34:50.400 | Let's talk about reality, okay?

01:34:52.000 | And human nature.

01:34:52.840 | People are fucking greedy.

01:34:54.560 | They lie.

01:34:56.240 | There's no end to up,

01:34:57.200 | which is one of my favorite expressions.

01:34:59.520 | - No end to up?

01:35:00.360 | - No end to up.

01:35:01.200 | There's no end to up.

01:35:02.040 | - Can we dissect that from a Randian perspective?

01:35:04.800 | - There's no end to up, which is,

01:35:07.680 | you just keep going.

01:35:08.560 | It's never enough.

01:35:09.400 | The human flaw, it's never enough.

01:35:10.960 | No end to up.

01:35:11.840 | More, more, more.

01:35:13.400 | And you have to reconcile the fact that you're gonna die.

01:35:16.000 | So this no end to up thing is that balance

01:35:18.840 | is just as valuable as progress.

01:35:25.480 | So we have to reconcile those two things

01:35:27.440 | and put them on a seesaw

01:35:30.200 | and figure out how to get two people

01:35:31.600 | who have the equal weight to keep it like that.

01:35:34.280 | And that's the goal.

01:35:35.120 | And it constantly vacillates according to the time.

01:35:38.240 | Sometimes you need a little more socialism.

01:35:39.440 | Sometimes you need a little more capitalism.

01:35:40.840 | You gotta fly the plane, man.

01:35:43.320 | You gotta fly the plane, dude.

01:35:44.840 | - What's your, looking back at history,

01:35:48.160 | how you, is there a moment, time period in history,

01:35:52.360 | a person in history that's most fascinating to you?

01:35:54.920 | You mentioned Bernie Madoff.

01:35:56.160 | Maybe second to Bernie Madoff.

01:35:57.880 | Is there, in the Battle of Crete,

01:35:59.800 | is there something that you've always been curious about?

01:36:01.440 | Even if it's something

01:36:02.280 | you haven't actually researched that well yet,

01:36:04.240 | just something that pulled at your curiosity,

01:36:06.440 | that instructed the way you think about the world?

01:36:09.040 | - An individual or an event?

01:36:11.120 | - Event, individual,

01:36:12.920 | moment in history or a person in history.

01:36:17.920 | - There's a few, but Queen Elizabeth,

01:36:24.120 | the Elizabethan era, the sun never sets

01:36:26.840 | in the British Empire, very successful empire.

01:36:30.160 | What an absolute success story that is

01:36:35.040 | is for a leader and a woman.

01:36:37.780 | - Can you tell a little bit about her story?

01:36:40.920 | - Well, you know-- - I actually don't know

01:36:41.840 | much about the British Empire. - Yeah, she had a good run.

01:36:43.480 | I think it's like 70 years, there's a Shakespeare.

01:36:46.320 | Oh, I guess, what's the word, Pax Romana,

01:36:49.200 | the period of Rome that was at peace,

01:36:52.120 | and they flourish, a couple of emperors

01:36:54.640 | like Trajan or some good ones,

01:36:56.360 | and I think he was part of the Pax Romana,

01:36:58.200 | that sort of just a peace

01:36:59.760 | and a comfortable flourishing time.

01:37:01.320 | And England had sort of that in their empire under her.

01:37:05.880 | Successful reign, she murdered her cousin.

01:37:08.320 | You know the movies,

01:37:09.240 | Cate Blanchett plays her and does so,

01:37:13.360 | and she didn't win the Oscar

01:37:14.800 | because fucking Gwyneth Paltrow

01:37:16.720 | put a British accent on in Shakespeare in Love.

01:37:19.460 | It's a tragedy.

01:37:20.320 | Why do I know this?

01:37:21.320 | Because I'm not a full man.

01:37:22.600 | I'm a comedian, which means I do skits, I perform.

01:37:25.960 | Cate Blanchett's an incredible actress, great movies.

01:37:29.800 | She was just so, and here's the thing,

01:37:32.280 | she never got married.

01:37:34.120 | She was so astute at public relations.

01:37:39.120 | And imagine how strong you gotta be as a woman

01:37:43.760 | to lead the greatest empire maybe known to man at the time,

01:37:47.560 | and to do so so successfully.

01:37:50.000 | How Machiavellian you have to be,

01:37:51.920 | how idealist you have to be,

01:37:53.040 | how much of a good marketer you have to be.

01:37:54.800 | Propaganda machine was on point.

01:37:56.260 | She was married to England.

01:37:58.040 | She was adored the way she adorned herself.

01:38:01.320 | You walked in, you're like, holy man,

01:38:02.840 | God just walked in here.

01:38:04.340 | And of course she got fucked.

01:38:06.100 | I mean, who doesn't fuck?

01:38:07.480 | We all fuck.

01:38:08.600 | Even robots one day will fuck.

01:38:10.440 | But she did that propaganda thing.

01:38:13.400 | And historians, they haven't decided this,

01:38:17.920 | but I believe she fucked.

01:38:20.040 | And I believe she did that as a tool of propaganda.

01:38:24.920 | I'm married to England.

01:38:26.200 | - So you're directly referring to like using sex

01:38:29.520 | as a way to manipulate people.

01:38:31.040 | - Well, she was known as like the virgin queen.

01:38:35.560 | And her thing was like, I'm married to England.

01:38:37.840 | Like I can't be distracted by man or woman, blah, blah, blah.

01:38:40.800 | She never had any kids, nothing.

01:38:42.240 | I think she did that as a tool of manipulation.

01:38:47.120 | Which you need.

01:38:48.880 | Rulers need to, Obama made you feel good.

01:38:51.800 | And then he went and carpet bombed everywhere.

01:38:53.840 | You need to feel good about your guy,

01:38:56.700 | no matter how evil they are.

01:38:58.120 | And she was fucking a dictator.

01:39:00.920 | But when you look back at her,

01:39:01.800 | everyone's like, oh my God, she was so great.

01:39:03.660 | The horror and the shit that she had to do,

01:39:06.360 | she didn't put that in the history books,

01:39:08.160 | but that's what probably was part

01:39:09.740 | of what made her successful.

01:39:11.760 | And she's a fascinating character to ponder on

01:39:14.960 | 'cause she was so successful.

01:39:16.280 | And England flourished so much.

01:39:20.040 | And it's just fascinating to me

01:39:21.540 | because she was the great virgin queen.

01:39:23.440 | And can you think of, there's no other woman

01:39:26.660 | who was that, I mean, Angela Merkel, I mean, come on.

01:39:29.640 | I mean, there's nobody who comes close.

01:39:32.000 | And defeating the Spanish Armada,

01:39:33.640 | I think that happened under her.

01:39:34.760 | I mean, I'm no professional historian,

01:39:36.480 | but I mean, the woman crushed.

01:39:38.640 | - Do you think it's more effective to lead by love,

01:39:42.600 | which it sounds like what she did

01:39:44.320 | from the PR perspective or by fear?

01:39:46.800 | Where do you land on that?

01:39:48.080 | - Dude, I'm no leader, that's a great question.

01:39:50.640 | We gotta ask Joe.

01:39:52.080 | (laughing)

01:39:53.680 | - Well, yeah, this is interesting

01:39:55.080 | 'cause I think leading in the 21st century

01:39:57.120 | in whatever ways is different.

01:39:59.420 | I think it's very difficult to lead by fear.

01:40:02.020 | I mean, that's why I find Putin fascinating

01:40:05.680 | and like really fascinating.

01:40:08.800 | Like is he a relic of another era

01:40:11.920 | or is he something that will still be necessary

01:40:14.220 | in the coming decades for certain nations?

01:40:16.720 | - I think he's a, I don't think he's a relic

01:40:19.280 | from another era.

01:40:20.120 | I think his background, I think he is who you think he is

01:40:23.000 | because his background was in espionage.

01:40:25.360 | His background was in subterfuge and espionage.

01:40:28.360 | I think I've said the word subterfuge maybe 10 times now.

01:40:31.320 | But he-

01:40:32.160 | - You like big words, you're intellectuals.

01:40:34.240 | - I just, I'm sitting here with you, it's time to flex.

01:40:37.460 | But he's very good at that, right?

01:40:41.000 | Like controlling people with psychology

01:40:44.000 | and even if you look at the way he sort of used the internet

01:40:47.080 | and has sort of been, gotten into the citizens

01:40:51.760 | of other countries opinions and it's very KGB.

01:40:56.600 | He also looks great without a shirt on a pony.

01:40:59.480 | - On a horse.

01:41:00.320 | - On a horse, yeah, yeah.

01:41:01.640 | I thought he would choose a pony 'cause a pony's smaller.

01:41:05.120 | - Would you put Queen Elizabeth

01:41:07.520 | as the greatest leader of all time?

01:41:09.040 | - Probably, yeah.

01:41:10.940 | I think as a woman and you look at the length of the reign,

01:41:15.940 | I think it's like 70 something years or something like that

01:41:19.420 | that she reigned, success, man, success.

01:41:23.260 | She used the church, she used public psychology.

01:41:26.340 | Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of all time

01:41:29.420 | under her reign.

01:41:31.620 | People were going to plays and it was a success front

01:41:35.500 | and she was marauding everywhere else,

01:41:37.340 | marauding and culling resources for the empire.

01:41:41.660 | Just say a absolute successful.

01:41:44.380 | It's even a token of her success,

01:41:46.900 | we don't consider her a dictator.

01:41:48.940 | She's a dictator, you know, she was queen.

01:41:52.180 | This is my thing I love about the feudal system

01:41:54.140 | that these fucking countries still have feudal systems.

01:41:56.560 | They're celebrating a horrible thing,

01:41:58.940 | divine right of kings, oppression.

01:42:01.980 | Kings were dictators and now they have fucking ceremonial.

01:42:05.320 | Why don't we have a ceremonial Führer?

01:42:07.700 | What is in Germany?

01:42:08.660 | He doesn't do any of the bad stuff,

01:42:09.660 | he just rolls around and does this shit.

01:42:11.740 | I mean, it's like, what the fuck?

01:42:13.100 | There's no difference between a Hitler and a fucking king,

01:42:15.820 | they did the same horrible shit.

01:42:17.680 | Why not a fucking ceremonial conqueror?

01:42:19.940 | Alexander the Great walks in, rapes a little bit,

01:42:21.960 | but it's all fine, it's for ceremony.

01:42:23.580 | He represents the country, Macedonia.

01:42:25.500 | It's great.

01:42:26.700 | - It's interesting to see that some,

01:42:30.260 | you're starting to see a bit of that in Russia with Stalin,

01:42:33.860 | actually, the celebration of a man

01:42:36.760 | that helped win the Great Patriotic War.

01:42:39.900 | - Uh-oh, yeah.

01:42:40.880 | - Right, so you're already starting to see that.

01:42:43.160 | It's very possible in history books,

01:42:44.800 | he'll be seen as maybe like a Genghis Khan type of character

01:42:48.360 | and you forget the millions that he tortured.

01:42:51.760 | So you're one of the most successful and brilliant people

01:42:54.480 | the world has ever seen,

01:42:55.520 | so you're the good person to ask for advice.

01:42:59.840 | There's a lot of young people that look up to you.

01:43:03.020 | God bless their souls and hearts.

01:43:05.040 | - Made the right choice.

01:43:06.560 | - What advice would you give to a young person,

01:43:08.600 | maybe to yourself, to a young version of yourself?

01:43:12.320 | Just how to live a successful, a good life.

01:43:15.480 | - Be doggedly you.

01:43:18.220 | I think the magic happens when you are stubbornly,

01:43:23.080 | doggedly you and you meet other people

01:43:25.080 | who are doing the same.

01:43:26.120 | And the real magic of life,

01:43:28.520 | the real true currency in this ephemeral life

01:43:30.880 | is sort of the communication that happens between people.

01:43:35.880 | That's the real currency.

01:43:37.420 | Friendships, love, it's cliche,

01:43:39.660 | but I think the meaning of life is to experience love.

01:43:44.660 | And I think people often mistake,

01:43:47.860 | maybe it's because of Hollywood films and things like that,

01:43:50.560 | that love is a feeling, but it's not, it's an action.

01:43:54.700 | So that took me a while to learn

01:43:56.940 | and I think that's why I've made decisions since

01:43:59.500 | that I think have been good for me and healthy for me.

01:44:01.700 | Love is an action.

01:44:03.220 | People can say things, you can feel things.

01:44:06.780 | That doesn't mean they're necessarily real.

01:44:08.300 | It's all chemical reactions.

01:44:10.140 | It's all tied to our immaturity

01:44:13.220 | and psychological issues and survival.

01:44:17.060 | But action, when you do things, when you act out of love

01:44:22.060 | and that's what it's about.

01:44:25.240 | - Is there times when you were younger

01:44:27.400 | where you were kind of dishonest

01:44:30.940 | with who you are to yourself?

01:44:32.980 | - Yeah.

01:44:33.820 | - In terms of like, what kind of things did you have to do

01:44:35.820 | to shake yourself up and be like,

01:44:38.340 | okay, I thought I'm gonna be a scientist,

01:44:41.840 | but instead I realized I'm gonna do this.

01:44:44.400 | - Yeah, my parents were- - I'm gonna make funny.

01:44:45.780 | - Yeah, comedy is a hard thing to explain

01:44:48.700 | to an immigrant mother who came here

01:44:51.340 | and under Nazi occupied Crete

01:44:53.060 | and became a human rights lawyer and lawyer.

01:44:56.320 | My brother's a lawyer, my father's a lawyer,

01:44:58.720 | clawed his way up.

01:44:59.560 | His dad was a-

01:45:00.400 | - So you're a disappointment.

01:45:03.040 | - I'm the black sheep.

01:45:04.120 | Yeah, my brother went to Oxford, Georgetown Law at Brown.

01:45:07.680 | (laughing)

01:45:10.320 | Has a master's in law degrees.

01:45:13.000 | My mother has four law degrees.

01:45:15.140 | She was on the Human Rights Commission in New York

01:45:18.440 | up for a judgeship under Dinkins.

01:45:20.140 | She was the editor of Unitar.

01:45:24.280 | She wrote a seminal piece on the human rights of children

01:45:26.740 | for the United Nations.

01:45:27.900 | And yeah, I was a comedian.

01:45:30.300 | I was always a fuck up.

01:45:31.340 | And the thing that I was best at,

01:45:33.300 | the only thing I was ever decent at

01:45:34.940 | was just like making people laugh.

01:45:37.220 | I don't know why, I don't know where that comes from.

01:45:39.180 | But-

01:45:40.020 | - Was there ever a question or was there a moment

01:45:42.140 | where you decided this is what I'm gonna do?

01:45:43.940 | - There was a moment after I graduated college, yeah.

01:45:46.180 | But I was thinking about all types of stuff

01:45:48.740 | that other people imposed on me.

01:45:50.900 | And I was honest with myself.

01:45:52.540 | And once I figured out it was an actual career path,

01:45:55.200 | I wasn't even aware.

01:45:56.160 | Back then the internet wasn't huge.

01:45:57.600 | You know, late '99, 2000, it wasn't big yet.

01:46:00.680 | So I thought Robin Williams was just like an actor.

01:46:03.000 | I didn't know there was comedy clubs and all.

01:46:04.880 | So once I learned that, I was just like, I tried it.

01:46:07.840 | I suffered from massive anxiety.

01:46:09.900 | I remember the first time I did comedy, my arms went numb.

01:46:12.360 | I started having a massive panic attack.

01:46:14.220 | I have my first set, I can show it to you.

01:46:15.940 | It's like, I suggest, I just-

01:46:17.400 | - On video?

01:46:18.240 | - Yeah, on video.

01:46:19.060 | - Oh, nice.

01:46:19.900 | - I kept going, thank you, thank you, thank you.

01:46:20.740 | And the reason why I kept saying thank you

01:46:21.560 | is 'cause I forgot my whole joke 'cause I was so scared.

01:46:23.840 | And then they laughed

01:46:24.720 | because of the amount of times I said thank you.

01:46:26.560 | And then once they laughed, I remembered the whole thing.

01:46:29.880 | And I did the five minutes and I remember getting off.

01:46:32.440 | And for a person who never felt like he had a place anywhere,

01:46:35.300 | nothing ever felt right, that felt like, okay, I found it.

01:46:39.560 | This is what I'm supposed to do.

01:46:41.160 | This is it.

01:46:42.000 | It was the only time in my life I felt that.

01:46:44.000 | I haven't felt it since, never felt it before.

01:46:46.560 | So it's the only thing I can do.

01:46:48.420 | And-

01:46:49.360 | - Yeah, I had that.

01:46:50.200 | That's funny 'cause there's,

01:46:51.600 | I have a similar experience, like immigrant family.

01:46:54.800 | And the world tells you to do certain things

01:46:56.920 | and you think that's right.

01:46:58.440 | But then you put yourself in situations,

01:47:02.920 | by luck probably, where it's like, oh, this feels right.

01:47:07.920 | I don't know what this means, but this feels right.

01:47:11.280 | I think the biggest moment like that for me was,

01:47:15.040 | I don't know what to make of it exactly,

01:47:17.140 | but when I met Spot, the robot, the four-legged robot,

01:47:21.160 | it was like five years ago.

01:47:22.600 | It felt like the depth of fascinating ideas

01:47:28.600 | that are yet to be explored with this thing.

01:47:31.480 | This felt like a journey.

01:47:32.400 | It was like a door that opened.

01:47:33.920 | I was like, I don't wanna be a professor.

01:47:37.080 | At that point, I realized I don't want to-

01:47:40.280 | - Interesting.

01:47:41.120 | - Do sort of generic stuff.

01:47:43.320 | I want to do something crazy.

01:47:45.000 | I want to do something big.

01:47:46.720 | That's the reason I stepped away from MIT.

01:47:48.500 | That's the reason I have this burning desire

01:47:50.840 | to do a startup.

01:47:51.720 | That's the reason I came to Austin.

01:47:54.040 | Yeah, I don't know what the hell it all means,

01:47:56.040 | but you just kind of follow that.

01:47:57.560 | - That's awesome.

01:47:58.400 | That sounds like you're following what's doggedly you.

01:48:00.280 | And also I think, just to piggyback off it,

01:48:04.200 | I think that means no matter what it is,

01:48:07.200 | 'cause I think the American dream is sold like,

01:48:10.280 | hey, if you're not Beyonce or if you're not famous,

01:48:13.560 | you're not worth it.

01:48:14.380 | I hate that.

01:48:15.220 | And that's what I love so much about certain countries

01:48:16.960 | like Sweden, it's like where everyone has healthcare

01:48:20.260 | and stuff like that, 'cause everyone's a little,

01:48:21.620 | is valued more.

01:48:22.460 | It's like whatever, if you wanna be a doorman, do it.

01:48:25.300 | It's all the same.

01:48:26.500 | Prince was not happy.

01:48:28.140 | There's no, just because you're rich or famous,

01:48:30.240 | you're still the same guy.

01:48:31.980 | Whether your possessions are a lot, little.

01:48:34.780 | It's like, I have met some doormen.

01:48:37.460 | I have met some tax gabbers that,

01:48:39.660 | a lot of you not, are more fascinating.

01:48:43.060 | Comedians are horrible people.

01:48:44.900 | (laughing)

01:48:45.740 | Some, I wanna get away from all of them.

01:48:47.140 | I have very few friends, Paul Verzi, Tim Dillon,

01:48:50.500 | who are comedians 'cause they're awful, awful people.

01:48:52.840 | Some of the people who you know the most,

01:48:55.860 | who are the most famous, are not who they say they are.

01:48:58.740 | Usually that's the case.

01:49:00.240 | They're putting on that public facade

01:49:01.780 | 'cause they're fucking sociopaths.

01:49:04.020 | And they're horrible people.

01:49:05.260 | And some of the most beautiful people I've met

01:49:07.100 | and the most interesting people I've met have regular jobs.

01:49:09.920 | There's no shame in any fucking job.

01:49:13.300 | We don't all have to be rappers with like rims.

01:49:16.220 | It's just a weird thing.

01:49:17.400 | - Yeah, fame is a drug.

01:49:19.400 | And yeah, comedians, I agree with you.

01:49:22.160 | There's some part of me that knows

01:49:24.660 | that there'll be a moment in my life

01:49:26.880 | when I'm standing there with like a sword

01:49:30.000 | or a knife in my stomach

01:49:31.860 | and looking at Tim Dillon's smiling face,

01:49:35.520 | saying, "You shouldn't have trusted me.

01:49:39.680 | You stupid fuck."

01:49:41.720 | So on that note, (laughs)

01:49:43.720 | Giannis, I've been a huge fan of yours.

01:49:46.200 | I love what you're doing with "Long Days,"

01:49:47.840 | now your new podcast.

01:49:49.040 | And I obviously love all the stuff you've done before

01:49:52.680 | with "History of Hyenas."

01:49:53.560 | The chemistry you have with yourself is also fun to watch.

01:49:57.480 | So man, I'm a huge fan.

01:49:58.760 | It's a huge honor that you come down here.

01:50:00.720 | Thanks so much for talking to me.

01:50:01.560 | - It means so much to me to hear you say that.

01:50:03.400 | I really appreciate it.

01:50:04.220 | I'm a big fan of yours and "Have Me On" has been amazing.

01:50:06.440 | And just thank you, man.

01:50:07.280 | Thank you for "Have Me On."

01:50:08.640 | And people, if they wanna watch my special,

01:50:10.560 | it's called "Blowing the Light."

01:50:11.560 | It's on YouTube.

01:50:12.400 | And please come listen to "Long Days," the podcast.

01:50:14.400 | - And let's go eat some barbecue.

01:50:15.760 | - Let's do it.

01:50:17.240 | - Thanks for listening to this conversation

01:50:18.800 | with Giannis Papas.

01:50:19.920 | And thank you to Wine Access, Blinkist, Magic Spoon,

01:50:24.540 | and Indeed.

01:50:25.720 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

01:50:29.000 | And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.

01:50:32.840 | "Revolutions are the locomotives of history."

01:50:37.000 | Thank you for listening

01:50:38.160 | and hope to see you next time.

01:50:40.360 | (upbeat music)

01:50:42.940 | (upbeat music)

01:50:45.520 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Yannis Pappas: History and Comedy | Lex Fridman Podcast #175

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