Yannis Pappas: History and Comedy
Guests: Yannis Pappas
Full transcript · Read the full conversation in order, with its original context.
Contents15 chapters
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The following is a conversation with Giannis Papas,
a comedian who co-hosted the podcast, History Hyenas,
that I came across when I was researching
the Battle of Crete from World War II.
He and his co-host were hilarious in their rants
about history and about life.
The chemistry they have is probably the best
of any co-hosted comedy podcast,
or even podcast in general, that I've ever heard.
As of a few weeks ago, unfortunately,
History Hyenas is no more, at least for now,
because all good things must come to an end.
But Giannis hosts a new podcast
called Long Days with Giannis Papas,
plus he has a comedy special on YouTube for free.
Quick mention of our sponsors,
Wine Access, Blinkist, Magic Spoon, and Indeed.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
As a side note, let me say that some of you
have noticed that I have not spoken
with too many computer scientists, physicists,
biologists, or engineers recently.
The reason has to do mostly with the risk aversion
of many of these folks in the time of COVID,
especially as they get closer to taking the vaccine.
I'm tested several times a week,
and still some people are just more willing than others
to have an in-person conversation in these times.
I only do these podcasts in person
because I look for the possibility
of a genuine human connection.
I'm willing to sacrifice a lot for that.
Maybe it's silly, but I look for the magic
that Charles Bukowski writes about in his poem "Nirvana,"
the magic that is somehow in the air on those rare occasions
when two people meet, talk, and you notice
that while on the surface you may be worlds apart,
you're still somehow woven from the same fabric.
I've had that with many guests.
Jim Keller comes to mind, but many others as well.
I'm an AI person.
Machine learning, robotics, computer science is my passion.
Trust me, I can't wait to be having
more technical conversations again,
but I will also continue to mix in comedians, musicians,
historians, and of course, wise, all-seeing sages
like Giannis Papas and Tim Dillon,
just to keep it, as Tim likes to say, fun.
This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
and here is my conversation with Giannis Papas.
You've co-hosted, until recently,
an amazing history comedy podcast
called "The History Hyenas."
So you're a bit of a student of history?
- Yeah, an F student of history.
- F student, okay, I thought it was more like a D minus.
- D minus, yeah.
Still gotta repeat the grade if you get all D minuses.
I actually had a .67 GPA average my freshman year,
and I had to do it again.
This podcast is gonna be the spectrum of human intelligence.
It runs the gamut from there to here.
So this is gonna set the low bar for anything.
- I'm barely sliding into human.
I'm closer to chimp.
- And I bring that up that you're also friends
with the great, the powerful Tim Dillon.
So let's talk about power
and the corrupting effects of power.
Sometimes I look at Tim Dillon as he grows in power.
- I thought you meant in size.
- Size, I think they're correlated.
- Yeah, I saw him, I've been in Austin a couple days.
I saw him once, we had eight meals in one day.
- Eight meals.
- Yeah, so I feel like I've been here longer than I have
just because of the meals with Dillon.
Kid likes biscuits and barbecue.
- Okay, so he's more like, see,
I was imagining Putin or somebody like that.
He's more like the North Korean dictator.
- Yeah.
They get along great, those two.
- Yeah.
- They would get, I mean, Tim Dillon and King John Un
would be like, they could make like a buddy cop movie.
They would get along like "Lethal Weapon."
That would be a good pitch movie.
- Great podcast.
- Yeah, that would be a great podcast.
- Yeah.
(laughing)
- So much to talk about.
So many similar ideas about the world.
So what do you think the world would look like
if Tim Dillon was given absolute power?
He seems like a person that's an interesting study
of the corrupting effects of power.
- Yeah, you don't wanna give him power.
I don't even want him wearing a suit.
Like I want a guy who's as thoughtful and educated
as you wearing a suit.
Like 'cause, you know, suits corrupt you.
You put that suit on, you start feeling that power.
- Definitely.
- It's like, you know, yeah,
I don't even want Tim Dillon in a suit.
Power would, he would kill people.
He'd get rid of anything that he deemed.
I mean, if you made a lobster roll
and it wasn't up to Tim Dillon's standard,
he would have you executed.
- The entire restaurant staff is just gone.
- He would have people below his food standard executed.
There'd be programs,
not of people who are political dissidents,
but of people who don't meet his food standard.
His cuisine standard is high and he's usually right.
- Do you think power does corrupt people?
- Yes.
- One of the reasons we mentioned offline Joe Rogan,
he's been an inspiration to me 'cause he gets,
he gets, forget power, just more famous and famous.
And yes, probably a bit of power in terms of influence.
And he's still pretty much the same guy.
I'm not sure that's going to be true for everybody.
Do you ever think, ask yourself that question?
- Yeah, he's a rare breed.
He's like a benign king.
Most people I meet who are like really powerful
are like douchebags and that's how they got there.
I think that's, psychopaths have the advantage
'cause they don't have feelings.
And Joe's a rare example.
He's just a powerhouse of will.
And I do think about that.
Yeah, I think I should be stopped right now.
Just stop me right now because yeah, power for me,
I would, when people get power, they indulge.
I don't think it changes anyone.
It just reveals your darkest.
You know, people aren't supposed to have anything they want.
You gotta be able to struggle for everything.
So I would have a harem.
I'd be like a Roman dictator.
Yeah, I'd be like a Roman emperor.
I mean, people call them emperors, they were dictators.
The most effective leaders are dictators.
I hope we get back to that.
Democracy hasn't worked.
I'm ready for a succession of Caesars
and I wanna start with AOC.
(laughing)
- It's true, dictators get the job done.
- They do, they do.
At certain point, you got,
that's why social workers can only get you so far.
You need action.
I was a social worker for five years
and all you do is ask about medications
and you don't solve anything.
- I do ask myself of that like,
'cause I'm more in the tech space
of constructing systems that prevent me from being corrupt.
'Cause right now I'm all about love
and all about those kinds of things.
But I wonder, you said like, it just reveals the darkness.
The problem is we might not be aware of our own darkness.
I have the same feeling about money actually.
I've been avoiding thinking about money,
like basically constructing my moral system,
my moral compass around money.
So like the moment I feel a little too happy,
but about the idea of owning some cool shiny thing,
I started to think, okay,
I'm not gonna own that shiny thing
'cause I'm afraid of the slippery slope of it.
- Yeah.
- You ever think about that kind of stuff?
- Yeah.
The funny thing about the capitalist system is it's,
it puts sort of a profit motive above beauty.
And you notice when you see certain cities,
especially in the old days where like buildings
used to be beautiful.
- Yeah.
- And now they're just like boxes,
they throw a kid up and it's just for all profit margin.
It's the illusion of permanence that,
it's like, oh, let me get as much money as I can.
You're like, yeah.
My dad used to say, everyone, it's a cliche,
but you can't take it with you.
So it's kind of, it's comical to me
that we're here trying to get this infinite amount,
like that we're climbing, it's like Sisyphus.
We're all trying to climb this hill,
but I mean, the rock's gonna fall on us.
So I think that's a healthy outlook, yeah.
- My dad always used to say before he passed,
§02Transcript · 07:47–15:23
he would say, you can't, you have to survive
not only physically, but you have to survive emotionally.
I think a lot of people forget about the emotional part
of survival.
You have to survive emotionally and humor
and understanding reality in its objective context
helps with that.
Accepting reality as this ephemeral thing
that you're in really just a part of,
but not as significant as your ego wants you to believe
is a start.
That's a good foundation for surviving emotionally.
- What's that mean, surviving emotionally?
Like what's an ideal life look like
while you're thriving?
- You can't take things too seriously
because they're ephemeral.
They're not permanent, nothing's permanent.
Your bank account's not permanent.
Your proms aren't permanent.
Nothing's permanent.
Your abilities aren't permanent.
Your memory's not permanent.
Your dick getting hard's not permanent.
Can I curse on this or does this go out the door?
(laughing)
- Yeah. - You can curse
to your heart's content.
- Okay, yeah.
I mean, gender's not even permanent anymore.
I think I'm gonna change maybe
and live my second half as another gender
just to have, I'm bored with this gender.
So it's like nothing is permanent.
And so accepting that emotionally
is a good start to being more flexible.
You gotta be flexible.
Like my dad used to say, "Anything too stiff snaps."
You gotta, you know, it's a cliche
and people have said it a bunch of different ways,
but Bruce Lee's right, man.
Be water, be water.
(laughing)
- Yeah, Bukowski has this quote about love
that love is a fog that fades
with the first light of reality.
So he's a romantic, that guy.
But that even love is a thing
that just doesn't last very long.
You know, some people would disagree with that.
Maybe it morphs, like water.
It changes, right?
It might not be, 'cause he's mostly
just loved like prostitutes, I think.
So-- - The best kind of love, yeah.
- No demand, no responsibilities.
- Yeah, it's a financial transaction.
- Yeah.
- Ephemeral as ever.
You mentioned your dad.
He passed away a year and a half ago.
What did you learn from him?
- I love my dad.
My dad, I would say my dad was my hero.
He was just, my dad really embodied those values.
And I think for better or worse, it's made me who I am.
He, my dad was a painter, he was a lawyer,
he was a lieutenant in the military.
- New Yorker?
- New Yorker, born and bred Brooklyn.
His dad, surprise, owned a diner.
So that's sort of the Greek passport.
That's the immigration passport for Greeks in New America.
And yeah, my dad played football.
He just, my dad did what he wanted.
He lived as he wanted at all costs.
And I think I got that from him, for better or worse.
I think it's hurt me in my pursuits.
If you consider money and fame to be paramount,
I've always done what I wanted.
If I stopped wanting to do it, I just stopped doing it.
And I think I got that from my dad.
So maybe for better or worse, that's what I learned from him.
But that's a real currency.
Feeling like you're in love with what you're doing
when you're doing it,
maybe perhaps that's worth more than money.
I don't know.
- You miss him?
- Yeah, every day, every day.
But I'm happy that he got 91 years.
It's very rare.
I mean, he smoked for 60 years.
Talk about like a guy who was an outlier.
I mean, he smoked like 60 years, like packs.
I mean, and he didn't die from that.
He died, he had a prostate cancer,
which is the way men should go.
Your dick should give out.
It should start from the dick.
I mean, we focus so much of our life on the dick
that that's the way, that's a successful life.
And that's why every man eventually gets prostate cancer
'cause that is the universe's way of saying like,
the thing you focused on the most is,
you put the most energy into is the thing that's spent.
And it's gonna, your rotting is gonna start there.
So that's a successful life.
And it just spread all over his body and he slowly died.
I was with him when he died and that meant a lot to me.
'Cause me and my brother weren't talking at the time
'cause we're Greeks.
We're talking again, but that's how it is.
- You got a few brothers, right?
- I got two brothers.
But I wanted to make sure I was with him when he died
and I got lucky and I was in the room with him when he died.
- You were in the room with your brother and you weren't?
- No, my brother wasn't there.
We were kind of doing shifts.
I was there.
I spent the night, the night my dad died.
He died early in the morning
and I heard the death rattle of the last breath.
And it was just, I think it was, he knew I was there.
And I think that just probably meant something to him.
And I'm just glad I was there.
- Does that make you sad that life is ephemeral,
like you said?
- Yeah. - That you die?
- Yeah. - What do you think
about your own death?
You meditate on that?
- I think the actual, if there is a point to life,
it's to hopefully not fear death, to accept reality.
I think that's important.
I think so much goes awry in the human condition
when we lose touch with reality.
Every political system that's led to mass murder
and everything, I think because it's,
because the tenants of those political philosophies
ended up being utopian.
They were detached from reality, detached from nature.
And so I think it's very important to accept
and acknowledge your own mortality.
I think it's the foundation for what makes a good person,
a moral person, a contributing member of society,
because it's true.
True things should be the foundation of all things.
If what you believe is based on illusion,
you're gonna end up doing destruction.
Whether that destruction's on a scale of one to 10,
you are going to be destructed because it's not real.
It's a fantasy, it doesn't exist.
- See, the thing is, though, truth is about,
I don't think you can ever reach truth.
Truth is about constantly digging.
And to push back in your idea that you should accept death,
I think the more honest response to death,
so the least honest is to run away from it,
create illusions that help you imagine
that there's not a death.
The next is to accept it,
but the real honest one is to fear it.
Because I mean, I'm with Ernest Becker,
he's a philosopher,
who wrote a book called "The Null of Death."
He says that much of the human condition
is based in the fear of mortality.
That's the creative force of the human energy.
Like Freud said, "Do you wanna sleep with your mother?"
He said, "No, that's not what motivates you."
- Maybe his mom wasn't hot, though, I mean.
- Or he wasn't Greek, 'cause apparently Oedipal,
we found that all things good and bad, yeah.
- Thanks, thanks for that.
Thanks.
- I just don't know if his mom was a looker or not.
I mean, I'd have to Google it.
- All right.
I'll look up on Google Images.
But I think the honest, as he says,
the thing that we run away from is that there's a terror.
He calls it like terror.
There's something called terror management theory
that some philosophers after him followed on
that we're basically trying to run away from this fear.
And acceptance is actually creating an illusion for yourself
like you can actually accept something
as terrifying as this.
So he's more with the Stoics.
The Stoic constantly meditate on their death.
I mean, what does that mean?
I mean, it's kind of,
acceptance of death isn't a thing you do like on a Monday
and then you're done.
It's a thing you constantly have to meditate on,
like reminding yourself.
Like this ride is over.
It could be over today.
§03Transcript · 15:25–22:52
And that's something you're,
if you think about every single day.
- It gives you an appreciation of Woody Allen movies,
at least.
- It gives you appreciation of basically everything,
including Woody Allen movies,
which shows you how deep your appreciation for life could be.
I've actually haven't been following much
about what Woody Allen's,
but apparently he's been a troublemaker
for most of his life.
- He's, yeah.
I mean, he's caused a little bit of strife.
He's left a little, yeah.
He's left a little confusion in his wake, for sure.
But I mean, you know, that's another one.
Separate the art from the artist.
He's got, I mean, the guys will go down in history
as the greatest.
He's made, I mean, a movie a year and they're all,
you can always find something good about each movie,
like the dialogue or whatever.
I love what you're saying.
It's interesting.
But the only thing I would say to push back a little bit,
since we're playing a little table tennis here,
is I don't know if it's a choice to fear death.
That's more of an, it seems more instinctual.
It seems like something that nature wants you to do,
because I've been in positions
where I thought I was gonna die, like I've been shot.
And I had those moments.
And then nature also, you know, kicks in an instinct,
which is acceptance, where you kind of,
I don't know, it's a chemical release or whatever.
I don't know, you know, we're robots, basically.
So some sort of chemical is released that protects you.
But there is an acceptance.
I don't know how much of it was a conscious choice,
probably very little.
And that's the point I'm making, is it's instinctual.
We don't really have a choice in fearing death.
Otherwise, there would be no progression.
We wouldn't, all life seems to want to survive,
not by choice, but by instinct.
- So he argues that the fear is not the instinctual of it.
It's not the animalistic stuff.
That's the thing that makes it special,
is the, what humans are able to do
is to have a knowledge that we're going to die one day.
Animals don't have that.
Animals' fear is instinctual.
It's like, holy shit, what's that sound over there?
He says we're actually able to contemplate
the fact that this ride ends.
And that kind of cognitive construct
is difficult for us to deal with.
Like, what the hell does that mean?
Like, just to think about, it's going to be over
at a certain point.
It's just over, lights out.
Like, it's very difficult to kind of load that into
whatever this like little brain we got.
Like, what does that actually mean?
- Maybe that's what gives everything meaning.
- Yeah.
- Because if everything lasted forever,
if this went on ad infinitum,
there would be no meaning to it.
It'd be like, hey, if I don't see you tomorrow,
I'll see you in a million years.
There would be no meaning, there'd be no urgency.
There would be no feelings.
There'd be nothing of magnitude or superficiality.
It would all just be this kind of, it would be torture.
It would actually, that would actually be torture
to be here forever.
I mean, I'm already sick of this place.
And I'm just in my 40s, like I'm done.
I'm sick of me, I'm sick of everything.
- You know, a lot of people,
when they talk about immortality,
they consider mortality appealing
because you get a chance to do basically
all these things you might not get a chance to do otherwise.
Like all the kinds of travel, broadly,
explore, read every book, explore every idea,
do every hobby, all those kinds of things.
Somebody else I was talking to mentioned
the reality of being immortal would be more likely,
I like this idea, more likely would be
you just sitting there doing nothing
because, and putting off all that travel
and exploration till later, because you'll always have time.
And so what you're gonna have,
what actual immortality would look like
for a bunch of humans is people sitting there doing nothing.
- It'd be like a Greek caffeineer,
just sitting around drinking coffee, watching, I love it.
- Yeah. (laughs)
- I mean, it's a lazy man's paradise, yeah.
- But it's so interesting 'cause that rings true to me
for what humans are like is we'll basically
just put off all those exciting adventures
and just be lazy, become lazier and lazier and lazier
'cause you'll always have a chance
to do all the exciting things.
And we'll just get, we'll basically become Tim Dillon.
We just sit there and have a podcast and that's it.
- He works hard.
Yeah, I mean, that sounds actually like heaven, dude.
That's speaking of my heart, really.
I mean, I'm at heart, I'm a very lazy person.
I always try to find ways to lie down.
Like if I'm sitting, I'll figure out a way
to kind of contort myself till later.
That's an interesting thing to like, yeah,
if you can always push something off, yeah, I like that.
I think that's heaven.
- See, we just changed your mind.
You kind of like the immortality.
- Yeah, I kind of like it.
No, so there'll be no thirsts, no,
you can always put it off.
Yeah, I wanna bang this girl.
You're like, I'll put it off.
But now I'm thinking about Muslim heaven
and they may be offering the best deal.
I mean, if it was an expo and they had a booth,
I may go with them because they offer 62 or 72,
but then I'd get sick of them.
I'd wanna, I don't know.
I always wondered like, are you given the 62 versions
or you choose, can you create them like an avatar,
like a video game, or are you just given?
- I don't know what the number,
why it's important to have that high number.
First of all, I think it's a mistranslation
about the versions, but outside of that,
outside of that, I feel like the conversation
is really important.
I don't think they ever specify like what kind of books
these girls read, like what are they into?
Like the quality of the conversation,
I think if you're talking about eternity,
the quality of the intellect and the conversation
and the personalities is way more important.
- And the Greeks have an ancient expression,
"Pan metro nariston," which my mother always used to say,
which is everything in moderation, nothing in excess.
So try and always get the status quo.
And yeah, that many women,
eventually it's like the Magic Johnson effect,
Isaiah Thomas effect, it's just too much.
And you're gonna end up banging a dude is what I'm saying.
You're gonna get sick of it 'cause it's too much.
And there's going to be a eunuch
that finds its way into your harem.
That's been proven throughout history, every empire,
when you have all that power.
And again, this goes back to power corrupting.
If you have, if there's no struggle, there's no meaning,
the value is from the journey,
the working hard, the struggle.
And if it's just given to you because you're a sultan
or you're Alexander the Great or whatever,
you're gonna get bored and you're gonna bang a dude.
I think that's a scientific axiom, actually.
Eventually you'll get bored and bang a dude.
- Yeah, but I think it won't stop there.
I think you'll go to animals, you'll go to robot.
I mean, eventually it all ends up in robots
and then the robots rebel
and then the humans will be destroyed.
- Yeah.
- I'm sorry.
If we're speaking truth, you said the value of life,
one of the highest ideals is to seek truth.
I think if we're being honest.
- Can I ask you a quick question?
If you live in a small, I come from small islands, right?
And so there's a stereotype
that that's where they bang animals.
But if you come from a very small community,
you know, an island or something,
and you have the choice of banging a family member
or an animal, which one is worse on the moral scale?
'Cause you're technically not related to the animal.
- Right, this is interesting.
I mean, all of these are human constructs, these ideas,
but for me personally,
taboo would be more taboo to have sex with a family member.
- Yeah.
- I mean, animal, I mean, okay.
- It's good to know where you stand on that.
I think your viewers, you know,
if they didn't know they had that question,
they just learned a little bit about you and now I know.
- I look forward to the internet clipping that out.
(both laughing)
§04Transcript · 22:55–30:28
Yeah, I mean, there is, listen,
outside of that, I do think about that a lot.
It sounds ridiculous about morality connected to animals
in terms of all the factory farming and so on.
It seems like that's one of the things we'll look,
'cause I love meat, but I kind of feel bad about it.
And bad in a way where I think if we look
like 100 years from now, we'll look back at this time
as like one of the great like tortures and injustices
that we humans have committed.
And I mean, all that has to do with the sex of the animal
has to do with consent and about the experience
of suffering of animals.
The reason I think about that personally a lot,
'cause I think about robotics,
I think about creating artificial consciousnesses,
artificial like beings that have some elements
of the human nature.
And then you start to think like,
well, what does it mean to suffer?
What does it mean for entity to exist
such that it deserves rights?
This is something that the founding fathers
were thinking about like, all men are created equal.
What is it?
Which, who is included in the men,
who is not in that sentence?
And are animals included in that, are robots?
I honestly think that there will be a civil rights movement
for robots in the future.
- Holy shit. - I don't know.
- Is that the Turing test, the way you try to,
is that what they call it, where you're trying to,
it's see if AI can think like a human or whatever,
or feel like a human?
- Well, the Turing test closely defined
is more about talk like a human.
So you can imagine systems that are able to,
you can have a conversation like this,
and I would be a robot, for example.
But that doesn't mean I would,
in society, that doesn't mean I deserve rights.
Or that doesn't mean I would be conscious.
It doesn't mean that I would be able to suffer
and to experience pleasure and dream
and all those kinds of human things.
The question isn't whether you're able to talk,
which is passed in the Turing test.
The question is whether you're able to feel,
to be, I mean, I go back to suffering.
The thing that our documents protect us against
is suffering.
Like we don't want humans to suffer.
And if a robot can suffer,
that discussion starts being about,
like, well, shouldn't we protect them?
Currently, we don't protect animals.
- We protect that, dogs.
There's laws, there's actual legislation
that protects dogs in certain places.
Yeah.
And you know what?
Dogs is something I don't think people
really understand enough about.
It's one of my obsessions.
So they, my dad always used to say,
he'd go, "Those things are basically human."
And I mean, they dream, they have anxiety.
And what people often overlook about dogs
is without dogs, we wouldn't be here.
We would not have ever evolved
from hunter-gatherer to agrarian to civilization.
We wouldn't have cities, we wouldn't have anything.
I mean, they are our partner in survival
and they are a magical animal.
There's no animal that was, it was like destiny almost.
I mean, a malleable animal.
There's no animal that's that malleable
that in a few generations,
you can tailor to a specific job that you need.
And without that animal,
without dogs doing that animal,
protecting our crops from scavengers and stuff like that,
the list goes on, we wouldn't be here.
So we, that's an often overlooked fact
that human evolution was not done in a vacuum
just with humans.
I mean, without dogs, we would have never evolved.
I mean, we weren't the apex predator
for most of our existence.
We weren't even the apex predator.
I mean, we're getting eaten by hyenas,
which my favorite animal.
And that's kind of an injustice to,
I mean, I'm kind of mad at dogs.
We deserve to get eaten by hyenas,
but without dogs, we wouldn't be here.
And dogs deserve the protection.
So do horses.
They fucking lugged us around for thousands of years.
And now these fucking German psychopaths
are eating them or whatever.
We should not eat horse meat just on like,
be a good dude, man.
These things lugged us around for generations.
They're beautiful.
Ride them or I don't know.
I don't know, but it rubs me the wrong way
that we eat horses.
- Yeah, the horse is one is interesting.
And one of my favorite books is "Animal Farm" by Orwell.
And the horses don't get a good ending in that.
I kind of, my spirit animal, I suppose,
is the horse from "Animal Farm" boxer,
where he says, "I will work harder."
That's his motto.
I work really hard at stupid things.
That's basically what I do.
I just hit my head against the wall
for no reason whatsoever.
- But that probably fulfills,
you have a big brain.
You were probably born with a big brain
that kind of fulfills--
- It's killing neurons.
- It's exercise for you.
- Yes.
- Don't you think some animals deserve to be eaten though?
Kind of like--
- Hyenas?
- Come on, dude.
I mean, you gotta respect the hyena.
- Okay, so let's, first of all,
let me just comment on the dog thing.
There is conferences on dog cognition
from a perspective of people that study psychology,
cognitive science, neuroscience.
Dogs are fascinating.
The way they move their eyes, they're able to,
they're the only other animal besides humans
that are able to communicate with their eyes.
They can look at a thing and look back at you
and look back at the thing to communicate
that we're all like, through our eyes,
communicate that we're collaborating.
So every other animal uses their eyes
to actually look at things.
The dogs use it to like communicate with us humans.
It's fascinating.
There's a lot of other elements of dogs that are amazing.
- Yeah, I mean, if it wasn't for them,
they're the ones,
they were our first alarm system for predators.
They would defend us.
I mean, the Basenji is one of the most ancient dogs.
I mean, they're tiny, but they're fearless.
And they would chase off lions.
Like, you know, there'd be packs of them
and they'd chase off lions and protect the tribes.
I even get tingles like thinking about dogs
'cause I have a dog, I love my dog.
It's just, and there's something about
when you're walking with your dog off leash in the woods,
it like, there's something about it
that's like, that tugs at that
millions of years of evolution, like that gut, you know?
It's like, I had a Finnish friend of mine, he's a comic,
Tommy Valamis once told me, he was like,
he was like, the gut, he's like, I believe in it.
Like that gut, you know, when you have that feeling,
he's like, always trust that because that is million,
those are all your ancestors.
That's the survival instinct of all your ancestors
at the beginning of time, you know, telling you like,
hey, something's off here, something's, you know,
so don't get in the car with Ted Bundy
is what I'm saying, ladies.
How fucking stupid, how can you fall for that?
You know, he's got a fucking sling on, don't get in.
- Yeah, follow the gut.
My question to you, are psychopaths essentially robots?
- So first of all, let's not, you're using the word robot
in a derogatory way that I'm triggered by, okay?
- Yeah, and you should be. - So I feel offended.
- You should be because you know what?
People are always scared of robots, but I actually,
I have, I've made the sort of, I've made it the,
hey, I've thought about it,
I'm like, robots have been nothing but helpful.
It's the people we should be scared of.
Again, we're kind of missing the most destructive thing,
is us, 'cause it's, but robots are helpful.
I mean, this is a fucking robot.
You know, I went on hotel tonight, I'm already booked up.
You know, I got my, I can change my flight.
If this barbecue with Rogan goes 16 hours,
which whatever Rogan wants to do,
I'll do if he wants to kick me in the chest,
I'll let him kick me in the chest, whatever.
Robots are helpful, no?
§05Transcript · 30:31–38:32
- Yeah, tanks and autonomous weapon systems
don't kill people, people kill people.
- People kill people, yeah. - Yeah, that's.
- Yeah, the NRA's about to click that for you.
(laughing)
A lot of love for dogs, I appreciate it very much.
And at the same time, you have the other thing
that people seem to have love for, which is cats.
And on the flip side of everything you've said,
I'm trying to understand what have cats ever done
for human civilization?
- They keep rodents away.
The domesticated cat is very important,
keeps rodents away.
Yeah, that's what they were domesticated for.
I mean, there's psychopathic killers
who end up killing innocent neighborhood chipmunks
and birds, they really affect the balance
of the local ecosystem, but.
- If you have love for cats too.
- Not as much as dogs.
I mean, dogs are, like you said, they look at humans.
I actually read an article there,
some people were theorizing they're smarter than chimps
because of the way they can work with humans.
And there was one border collie that spoke like 300 words,
like a quarter, like almost part of the language.
And their nose is like a, I mean, that's like magic, dude.
If you can smell in my ass to what I had for breakfast
from miles away.
- That's intelligence.
- That's intelligence.
I mean, in some ways that their nose,
if you were to put it on a scale,
maybe their nose is more intelligent than our brain
for what it does.
You know, it's like, I mean, dude,
they can smell you from miles away.
You ever see a dog just like sniffing, catching?
I mean, it's smelling like,
I don't remember the date on it,
but it's like they have like millions of receptors
or something where we only, you know, thank God
we don't have their nose.
That would be, that would make sex weird.
Be a little too intense.
- I think you mentioned when you were talking
about Woody Allen separating the art from the artist.
So that brings to mind Vladimir Putin.
How about that transition?
I don't know.
I'm so sorry.
But if you look at just powerful leaders
throughout history, Stalin, Hitler,
but even model ones like Putin,
and we're talking about power,
how do you explain them?
You said that power reveals, not corrupts.
But do you think there's some element
to which power corrupted Hitler,
power corrupted Stalin after he gained power?
And the same with Putin.
When Putin gained power in 2000,
do you think the amount of power
that he was in possession with for many years,
do you think that corrupted him?
I mean, we're joking about dictators get the job done.
There is some sense in certain countries
where dictator is the only thing
that can stabilize a nation.
The counter argument to that for democracies is like,
yeah, but that's a short-term solution
for a long-term problem.
So you want to embrace chaos of democracy.
That might be violent.
There might be a lot of just constant changing
of leadership.
There might be a lot of corruption in the short-term,
but if you stay strong with the ideals of democracy,
then you'll ultimately create something
that as beautiful and stable as the United States.
- The sad thing is, is I don't know
if history tells that story.
It's like I said, you look at Greece, you look at Rome,
democracy kind of failed.
The majority of Rome, the most successful empire
that we've had was a dictatorship for most of its run.
But I do believe in a republic,
which is sort of a limited democracy.
I do believe in what we have here.
I believe in common law.
I believe in individual rights.
But yeah, I think you said it.
Nobody could have said it better.
Yeah, it's a short-term solution.
You look at Saddam Hussein, he kind of,
when we took him out, then there was a lot of infighting
that happened that he was kind of keeping at bay
because he was a strong man, dictator.
- Well, he's an interesting one.
Sorry to interrupt.
From my understanding, I'm sure people will correct me,
but when Saddam Hussein first came to power,
he was quite progressive.
So as far as I understand,
the signs of an evil dictator weren't exactly there.
So again, I don't know if power revealed or power corrupted.
- Or that could have been the initial subterfuge
to kind of get everybody.
Hitler also is a champion of the people.
Let's build some new roads.
It's what psychopaths do.
And that's why it's interesting to me.
I'm not sure if power corrupts psychopaths.
And now that we know that we can do these CAT scans
and brain scans, again, we know that they're born that way.
Power definitely corrupts people
who have the capacity to feel and for empathy.
Power, I'm not sure.
I don't think power corrupts people
who were born psychopathic with that condition
or sociopaths who were closer to psychopaths
and then had some traumatic life.
I just think the best way to get away
with whatever nefarious thing you wanna do to feel,
I guess the only thing psychopaths can feel
is that excitement,
is to pretend to be the opposite of what you are.
That's what killers do.
That's what the worst people do.
Look at Bill Cosby.
I mean, he was, what better way to hide?
It's like what wokeness is now.
It's like, I'm such a great person.
And you're like, are ya?
It's a great, the best way to hide
is to pretend to be the opposite of what you are.
Just like Ted Bundy.
I'm just an innocent, helpful guy.
And then boom, next thing you know,
you're getting your tit bit off.
- That's really well said.
It's actually kind of funny
because I talk about love a lot.
And I think the people that kind of look at me
with squinty eyes, they wonder,
like how many bodies are in that closet?
You know what I mean?
There's something about the duality of like,
we're so skeptical as a culture.
Like if somebody just seems to be kind of sort of,
I don't know, positive
and all that kind of, how do I put it?
Just simple, simple-minded in the positivity they express.
They think like, there's some demons in there.
- Yeah, especially if you're a New Yorker,
we don't trust any,
the nicer you are, the more skeptical we are.
I've struggled with that down here.
I've been like, what's your angle?
And they're like, nah, dude,
just I wanted to show you the best tacos, man.
And I'm like, did you really, what do you want?
'Cause in New York, it's like,
if anyone's nice to you, they want something.
And that's, the pro side to that
is it makes you very street smart.
The downside to that is it makes you way too cynical.
- Yeah, I've definitely experienced that here in Texas,
but people are super, super nice.
And they're like, do all this cool shit for you.
And you wonder, what's the angle?
What are we doing here?
You mentioned hyenas as your favorite animal.
I forgot to ask you, what the hell were you thinking?
Why is hyenas your favorite animal?
- Yeah, it's a fascinating animal.
Let's look at the whole animal kingdom.
Like why, where do you put, so you like dogs.
- Love, my favorite.
- Your favorite is dogs.
But they're kind of outside the animal kingdom
'cause you're thinking about wolves.
So the animal kingdom is in nature.
Dogs escaped nature.
- They kind of did, yeah.
- Together with humans, like in a collaborative way.
Exactly.
So within nature, within the animal kingdom,
what, who's, why not lions?
- 'Cause lions are predictable.
Lions are just, they're regal and kind of, they bore me.
It's like the hot chick.
It's like, we get it.
You were born the best.
I like a scrappy, by any means necessary,
intelligent and cunning.
- But aren't they dishonest?
- Yeah, and that's why I like 'em.
Yes, they're dishonest.
§06Transcript · 38:34–46:33
They employ chicanery.
And that's just a sign of how intelligent they are
and how self-reliant they are
and how brutal they are.
They're brutally honest in how much they lie.
Because it's just, they're trying to get the job done.
Lions are just like, they're too gifted.
Everyone hates the fucking,
if I went to school with you,
I'd be like, of course Lex knows the fucking answer.
Lex was born smarter than me.
And you'd probably hate me
because I was the kid always seeking attention
and making people, it's like, that's not interesting.
The guy that claws his way to the top,
and those are hyenas.
They're also fascinating just by merely who they are.
I mean, they're not related to any other animal.
They're more closely related to cats
than they are dogs, even though they look more like a dog.
Yeah, but they're very,
like very tangentially related even to cats.
So they're their own kind of thing,
which is kind of mysterious.
I don't think they've fully figured out.
And the pseudopenis thing is the, I mean,
it is the talk of-- - Can you explain
the pseudopenis?
- Yeah, so it's a matriarchal society, by the way.
So that's the unique in and of itself.
We're talking about an apex predator that is matriarchal,
much like the praying mantis.
It's very rare though.
And they are fucking brutal and vicious.
And the women are bigger and they let their cubs fight,
a lot of fratricide.
And they do that because they're like,
"Hey, you're weaker.
"I'd let your brother kill you."
And the women have penises.
The women have pseudopenises that they give birth out of.
And the birth is violent,
but they roll around with just huge pieces.
They're glue guns who just fucking swinging.
And the women are just run the show.
And it's just cool that they have these pseudopenises.
(laughing)
- It's almost romantic the way you describe it.
- They have the strongest bite force.
They pulverize bone.
Like when they eat an animal, the animal's gone.
There's no bones.
They eat everything.
They can pulverize.
Their bite is so powerful, they pulverize bone and eat it.
So if they consume an animal,
the animal was there and then the animal's gone.
There's nothing for the vultures there to grab.
- Yeah, I'm gonna have to revisit the hyenas
because my experience with the hyenas was from,
first of all, "History of the Hyenas," your show,
has rebranded them for me.
But "The Lion King," which is a cartoon, I guess,
that I get emotional at every time.
I probably have father issues.
Every guy.
- You probably just have feelings.
You're a good guy.
I mean, everyone gets that.
- I have feelings? - Yeah, you have feelings.
- That one gets everybody.
I don't know.
I get every father-son movie,
like "Blow," "Wajani Depp," and "Ray Liotta."
Damn, that's a good movie.
And whenever there's the disappointment in the father
that his son has become this incredibly successful drug lord
that then ends up with nothing in prison,
just the sadness of them communicating through letters,
man, that gets me every time.
But the hyenas are not presented that well in that.
- No, they're usually portrayed as like,
it's really sad that they're portrayed that way.
The lions, like lions aren't dicks.
Lions are dicks.
The alpha lions will kill the cubs of another rival.
They do all types of dick shit.
And yeah, the hyenas are more interesting.
Like they'll just roll in, like a hyena will,
like you said, they'll lie.
'Cause when you watch the "Serengeti,"
animals will hang out with each other, by water.
So one hyena will just kind of roll in
and pretend like it's not hungry, and then bang.
They'll use any means necessary to take an animal down.
Lions will just use brute strength.
Hyenas use cunning.
And you can even go on the internet and find memes of this
where hyenas will grab the big animal by the balls
and just like will sneak up behind it and bite its balls.
And you'll watch an animal 10 times the size of the hyena
just slowly go down.
It's brutal, but it's fucking hilarious.
(laughing)
- I think that's, I don't know if you follow the channel,
Nature's Metal.
That one weighs heavy on me.
With the hyenas and the balls.
It's tough to intellectualize it.
It's tough to think that the entirety of life on earth
has this history of predators being violent.
Just like just the murder that we come from.
It's crazy.
Just like we were talking about meditating on death.
I actually, I keep following and unfollowing
that Instagram channel because sometimes it's too much.
Like I can't continue with the day
after like seeing the brutality, the honest brutality of that.
I don't know how to make sense of it.
- It's important to acknowledge, I think,
'cause it's real.
That we do come from that.
We evolve from that.
It's important.
We still do that, we're just hidden from it.
You know, when you go to the supermarket
and get your slab of meat, you're so disconnected
from where that meat came from.
It came from that.
And often that's uglier to watch
than because there's some honesty.
- The nature channels only show,
that's why we have so much sympathy with the prey.
And this is where I think,
the same thing with mafia movies.
They don't show what the mafia really does.
They glorify the good parts.
That's why I like "State of Grace"
'cause it's really just shaking down old people
and fucking being dicks.
It's not driving nice cars and being like, you know.
So, and animal channels do the same thing.
They only show when the cheetah gets it
because that's the exciting part.
But what most people don't know is that
those predators strike out almost always.
A majority of the time, the prey wins.
And so if you saw that and put in context,
you might not hate it as much
when the predator actually gets the little fawn or whatever
because it's so many fawns got away.
It's so hard to capture your prey.
And you know, we don't have the,
they, no documentary is gonna sit around
and show you the 99 times the cheetah didn't catch.
- Thank you for this perspective.
That's murder is difficult.
So like, this is the,
they never talk about for people who murder,
how difficult that is.
Like to trap somebody,
to convince them to come back to your place.
- Give it some respect,
put some respect on Ted Bundy's name.
Yeah, it's not easy to convince somebody
to get in your Volkswagen Beagle and-
- The cleanup.
And then you have to kind of plan ahead
'cause you wanna keep doing the murder, mass murder.
- You gotta learn how to saw 'em up,
put 'em in duffel bags, bury.
You gotta learn how to dig.
You gotta learn how to hide.
You gotta learn to lie.
I mean, it's a lot that goes into it
that we need to put a little respect on, yeah.
- Yeah, and you have to figure out
which tools work the best for the sawing
and all those kinds of things.
So thank you for the perspective.
That's what I was hoping we would bring to this table.
- That's what I'm here for, yeah.
- So you got a little bit Greek in you.
One of the episodes on "History of Hyenas,"
you talked about the Battle of Crete,
where the Greeks, your people,
in 1941, in the early stages of World War II,
is one of the most epic battles of the war.
In fact, in 1941, in a speech made at the Reichstag,
Hitler paid tribute to the bravery of the Greeks,
saying, "It must be said,
"for the sake of historical truth,
"that amongst all our opponents,
"only the Greeks fought with the endless courage
"and defiance of death."
So, okay, what do you make of this battle?
What do you make of the spirit of the Greek people?
- This is one of the closest things to me
because my mother was actually on the island of Crete
during this, the first aerial invasion in history.
§07Transcript · 46:36–54:57
A lot of people don't know that.
So this is a very significant battle.
First time there was an invasion from the sky.
And my mother was a little girl
and she lived through four years of Nazi occupation there.
So my mother was a human rights lawyer and everything,
but she just always hated Germans.
It's just what it is.
She hated Germans and she never got over it.
So the most progressive, open-minded woman
just could not get over this.
It's a monumental battle that a lot of historians,
in retrospect, have now looked back on
and said, "Because the Nazis,"
first off, you gotta take it back
to when Hitler instructed Mussolini,
'cause let's be honest, Mussolini was Hitler's bitch.
You know what I mean?
Like if it was Fantasy Island, Hitler was the fucking,
and Mussolini was boss, the plane guy.
- Mussolini ever say no to Hitler or even maybe,
it's always like, "Yes."
- Yes, yes, we will do it.
And it's like, yeah, you have to take Greece.
And so, yeah.
So Italy being much bigger than Greece,
Greece is a tiny country, nine, 10 million.
So Italy invaded Greece,
and Hockey Day's a big, it's a big holiday for Greeks.
And this speaks to the spirit.
Greeks infight until we have a common enemy,
and then we unite.
You see it throughout history, Sparta and Athens.
You see it in Greek families,
where the brothers will fight,
but then as soon as we have a common enemy, we unite.
And maybe it's an overactive brain,
we think too much, our tradition's philosophy,
and we overthink things, and we fight with each other
and take things personally, we're ultra passionate.
But when Italy said, "Hey, we're gonna move troops through,"
a Greek said, "Oki," which means no.
And that was, and then Italy attacked,
and we beat the shit out of them.
A much bigger country, much more well-equipped country.
Greece beat the shit out of them,
kicked them back into Albania,
actually not only repelled them,
actually conquered some ground in Albania, pushed them back.
And then Hitler was like, "Fuck, you know,
I was planning my march to Russia, but I have to go down."
Because he basically said to Mussolini,
like, "You know, you're fucking,
you basically bitch slapped him, like,
'Fraid I gotta do this myself,
'cause you such a fucking bitch."
So then the Nazis invaded Greece,
obviously they took the mainland with fight,
and shout out, the Greeks never give credit
to the British and New Zealand and Australian troops
that were there, you know, they were a large part of this,
the majority of it, but the Greeks fight, dude, civilians.
I mean, they fought, you know,
the Ottomans were there 400 years,
you go to Greece now, there's no evidence,
there's virtually no evidence of them ever being there,
that's the Greek spirit, kick 'em out,
and we kicked out hummus too.
So it's like, your culture's gone, you're gone.
'Cause Greeks are, it's philoptimo,
it's called philoptimo, and it's a real thing.
Philoptimo is a, there's very little,
you can't translate it, but it's kind of like honor,
loyalty, friendship, altruism,
it's a, you can't define it, but Greeks know it,
and we're taught it from our families, it's a vibe,
and it's a Greek cultural thing, and we're an old culture,
and philoptimo is what it's called, philoptimo,
and it's love, it's passion, and it comes out,
and it comes out, and so Hitler had to postpone
his invasion of Russia, went down,
the island of Crete took 10 days to conquer, it's an island.
To put that in perspective, the country of France
fell in three or four days, I can't even remember,
'cause they fucking just rolled over,
so what does a couple hours matter
when you're that much of a fucking pussy, okay?
What is a couple hours, 12 hours, fucking three or four days
the island of Crete took the Germans 10 days to conquer,
and because of that, and because of the Greek resistance,
Hitler had to postpone his invasion of Russia to winter,
and of course that was his downfall,
just as it was Napoleon's, and never, dude,
never try to invade Russia, they got millions of people
to throw at death, every time you read about Russians
in history books, like, and a million died,
I mean, you just guys throw millions of people
at the problem, and don't fuck with that Russian winter,
and don't fuck with Russian people, dude, they're tough.
People in New York know that, you don't go to fucking
Sheep's Hip Bay and start talking shit,
you'll end up in a fucking car trunk,
and they'll brutally murder you,
I do not fuck with Russians.
- Amen.
- And there's a lot of people, a lot of historians argue
that that battle was because of the Russian winter,
because of delaying the Russian invasion,
but also psychologically delaying the invasion.
It was the first time, I think it was the first time
the Germans failed, or didn't succeed like they wanted to
early in the war, which is a little, psychologically,
the impact of that, I think, is immeasurable.
And also a lot of people argue from a military strategy
perspective that, just like you said, it was an aerial
attack, and that Hitler didn't think that that kind of attack
would then be useful for the rest of the war.
So that's a really, whereas it might have been very useful.
So it's really interesting how these little battles
can steer the directions of war.
Of course, me growing up in the Soviet Union,
we didn't hear much about this battle.
Just like you said, millions of Soviets died.
All those people in history that you read about dying,
those are all civilians, but I mean, not all,
but a very large number of them are civilians,
and their stories, obviously, that's the rooted,
the literature, the poetry, the music,
just the way people talk, the way they drink vodka,
the way they love, the way they hate, the way they fear,
that's all like rooted in World War II and World War I.
And so, but we never kind of think about Europe,
and we certainly, growing up, didn't think about
their role in the United States.
All this, there's plenty of stories of heroism
in the Soviet Union, enough for many lifetimes.
So, but it was fascinating to read
from a Greek perspective, 'cause I, you know,
I don't have many Greek friends.
I'm hoping to change that.
- This is the beginning of a love affair of your people.
Yeah, that- - Likewise,
the Americans don't hear about the Soviet contribution
to the end of World War II, because obviously,
we became, you know, enemies after that,
because of the two systems.
But yeah, without the Russians, World War II
wouldn't have been won either.
- Yeah, the stories are written by the victors.
That's really interesting.
Just looking at history, you wonder what's missing.
- I'll tell you what's missing that I know for a fact,
'cause my dad told me combat's hell,
and he would tell me the reality of what it's really like.
Guys pissing themselves, calling for their mother,
the fog of war, obviously, fratricide happens all the time,
it's pandemonium.
I mean, there's skill involved, but I mean, there's no,
like, a lot of it is just luck.
My dad said, my dad won three, he got, you know,
medals, Purple Hearts, all that shit.
And he said the reason was is 'cause he can't,
he always said, this is another thing he told me,
you can't pin a medal on a dead guy.
So it's like, those are the guys who deserve it,
but you can't pin a medal.
You can't do the pomp and,
and I'll tell you one thing is that it is written
by the victors, and all these leaders,
they say we're in the front, we're not in the front.
We're not, whenever the history books say,
he led his troops into battle, it's like, did he really?
Did he, so then how did he live?
'Cause they put, like, kids in the front, you know?
It's like, nobody limps back from the front
with, like, a injury, you know?
That's army PR, you know, whenever you read,
27 soldiers died, 14 were injured,
the word injured is PR.
That's like, injured, was he?
Did he sprain his ankle?
Did he need, did he get carried off the court?
Or, you know, he was maimed.
I mean, he was like, his leg was blown off, you know?
It's like, so I think that, you know,
Alexander the Great was just kind of in the back
on his horse and just kind of,
he had his eunuch blown a few times,
and he was like, is it bad up there?
And then, like, after that, he was like,
okay, my scribe, give me my scribe.
Okay, when you write this down,
can you put me in the front?
Yeah, and I was just, make me a big hero,
and I was in there, and then he, you know,
he just blew his, you know, he had sex with his eunuch
and rode off into the sunset,
because there's just no way you survive in the front,
especially warfare back then.
I mean, it's, like, brutal.
§08Transcript · 54:59–1:03:01
- Then again, you have, like, Genghis Khan.
The sense I got that he was a little bit up on the front,
at least at first.
- Yeah.
- Or is that also, is he a little bit Alexander the Great?
- Give me my scribe, yeah, it's all lore.
I mean, you ever play the game of telephone?
You know, it's like, you know,
there's no video cameras back then,
so shit just turns into myth, you know?
And there's no way he was in the front.
There's no way, he wouldn't have lived.
You know, he was probably good on horseback,
'cause those dudes were good on horseback.
It was like "Game of Thrones" back then.
You had all these different people, and they kinda,
yeah, the Mongols were wild, dude.
They actually said, like, they started, like,
they were more adaptable to the horse,
because they were so good on horseback
that kids started to be born, like, kind of bow-legged,
like, to fit the horse.
It's wild, and they would stretch their heads
and shit like that.
They'd wrap 'em and stretch their heads
so they'd find, like, Mongol skulls,
and they looked like coneheads,
and they were brutal and vicious.
And they would maraud and rape and all the fun stuff that,
you know, when you visit other places back then,
there's no tchotchke stops and souvenir shops.
What you do is you take women, and those are the tokens,
you know, you burn a few huts.
Different, tourism was different back then.
- Yeah, that's another difficult thing.
Just, we're talking about nature and predators.
To think about the long stretch of history
where it was just murder.
- Yeah.
- And we made so much progress, I guess,
in the past couple of centuries.
The United States is a shining example of that.
- But do you think also that it's that effect
that we were, a lot of good things had to happen, too,
or else we wouldn't be here.
So do we just focus, isn't it like a car crash effect?
That like, you know, the rubber neck
that everyone pulls over to see a car crash.
Are we just only focusing on the negative things of history
'cause they're just more exciting to us?
Like, it's just not, it's boring to be like,
yeah, and then there was a bunch of villagers
and they ate every day and danced and-
- And loved, yeah.
I wonder how different those people were, you know?
Like, they might've had the same exact loves and fears.
And like, they perhaps had the same kind
of brilliant ideas in their head, if not more.
- Brilliant.
And we kind of think about like this moment in history
as like the most special moment.
Like, we're doing the coolest shit,
but we're doing the most amazing,
building the most amazing things.
But maybe they were building amazing things
in their different way with like less technological,
but in the space of ideas,
in the space of just all the different,
the camaraderie, in the space of like concepts,
mathematics, all those kinds of things.
- Yeah, I mean, Greece, you look at the architecture,
it still stands up.
I mean, all the government, but it's still arguably,
I mean, as far as objective beauty,
it's hard to argue that Greco-Roman,
it's just something about it with the columns.
It's just, it's powerful.
It's, I don't know, even Ayn Rand would probably appreciate
it.
- She doesn't, no, no, no.
So in your history of hyenas,
that unfortunately has come to an end.
We were talking about empires coming to an end,
all empires fall.
That one, well, it may rise again.
Empires might rise again, who knows, who knows?
I'm obviously a fan, so I hope it does rise again,
but you've seemed to develop your own language.
Can you, you know, it's what it is.
What is that?
What the hell?
Is this some kind of medical condition
or can you explain like the linguistic essentials
that catch us up to the linguistic essentials
that people need to know to understand the way you speak?
- You know Leopold and Loeb?
You know the story of those two?
They murdered that kid
and they had this weird relationship.
Anyway, it's an interesting thing to Google,
Leopold and Loeb, these two guys
who ended up murdering a kid
because they developed their own language with each other
and this own reality and this weird thing.
And they wanted to know what it's like to murder a kid
and they murder a kid.
It's a famous story in American lore and history,
whatever, famous case.
But this phenomenon, yeah, me and Chris got together.
It wasn't as dark as Leopold and Loeb.
We didn't murder a kid, but we murdered a podcast.
- Or at least stabbed it a few times.
- Yeah, it was something in the organic chemistry
of me and Chris that I think we'll both end up appreciating
even probably more than we do now, that it's mysterious.
I gotta be honest with you.
It was the thing that it wasn't conscious,
wasn't intentional.
It was something that happened in the music of our energies
that just went.
- It's fascinating.
- Like when you hear someone sing
or when a jazz band hits a rhythm
or even when I'm on stage and I just catch a rhythm,
it's like, dude, I didn't make a choice there.
I don't know what that is.
I don't know how to explain it,
but it comes from somewhere else
and I don't know what it is.
It's beyond my comprehension,
but with Chris, there was this magical chemistry
that I have chemistry with a lot of people
and it can be funny and I enjoy talking.
- I feel zero chemistry here, brother.
- No, this is great.
This is great, yeah.
It's a little bit more intelligent
than when me and Chris did, but me and Chris,
I think we connected on the funny bone.
I found him so funny and we found the same things funny.
And from that, these organic expressions came
from some part of our brains
that was created from this chemistry.
And yeah, we just developed this language
and this cult following and people were really upset
when we ended, but it was the right thing to end
because like all things that end,
it was kind of done a few episodes even before we finished.
And I think we pulled the plug
before it started rolling downhill.
Like all great flings.
There's your long relationship,
long marriages are boring and comfortable.
The one you really like fucking always ends abruptly
and sadly, but you always look back and you jerk off to it.
- So you guys made love.
- We made, yeah.
So it was like a hot fling with me and him
and it was intense and we burned the candle at both ends.
I think that podcast was meant to be three years
and maybe people will go back and appreciate it
and listen to it over and over again.
And I think the new things we do, people will love.
I'm doing long days now, that podcast
and people seem to enjoy it.
- I've been really enjoying the long days on YouTube.
I just found myself just like staring at you,
ranting for, same with Tim Dillon.
I really enjoyed whatever those rants are,
the genius of just one thing after the other,
but definitely the chemistry almost as a study.
I remember the reason I first started listening to it,
I was trying to get a perspective
on certain historical moments.
Like it was interesting.
I tuned in to learn history.
Yeah, I came for the history and like stayed for the chaos.
- Stayed for the crack open and clean out.
- And yeah, it was almost,
I listen to Rogan like this sometimes.
I'll re-listen to an episode to try to understand
why was this so fun to listen to?
It's almost like trying to analyze humor
or something like that,
but it's nice from a conversational perspective,
like why was this so easy to listen to?
And with History of Hyenas,
why is the chemistry so good?
It's so, it's weird.
It's weird.
'Cause there's not many podcasts like that.
I don't know any with the chemistry like that.
It's interesting.
And it's kind of sad that the fling
with a prostitute in Vegas has to end.
(laughing)
But that's what makes it special.
It's the Bukowski thing with the fog.
The British office, one of my favorite shows was that.
It ended very quick.
§09Transcript · 1:03:03–1:10:58
It's only a couple of seasons or something like that.
And that was tragic, but that took guts to just end it.
Given all the money you could have made,
given all the, you just end it.
And that's what makes it like truly special.
- Yeah, and I'll tell you, man, I'll just emphasize it.
'Cause I marvel at it too.
'Cause as a guy who tries to always figure out
what the causes of things, I gotta be honest, man,
looking back on that, even with retrospective wisdom,
you know, that 2020 hindsight,
we've been done a couple months now.
It's something that I can't explain.
It's something that I don't know how you quantify it.
I don't know how you describe it.
It's musical.
It's really kind of rhythmic.
So.
- Maybe like a Netflix show about history.
That's in the future.
- Maybe, yeah.
- With the two of you.
- Yeah, who knows?
- You guys will meet like,
with that, the way you meet with a fling,
like a decade from now at a diner
and you're both way fatter and uglier.
And then you just reminisce over some cigarettes and coffee.
- It could be, yeah, it could be.
- Yeah.
- But it's definitely a classic podcast
that people can go back and appreciate.
It's fast paced and it was unique.
- What was it like to research for,
I mean, it was really scholarly,
the depth of research that you performed.
It sometimes felt like you almost read
an entire Wikipedia article beforehand.
- That's exactly true.
We were, one fan, we attracted such funny people
to that podcast and the fans were so funny.
And one fan called us, nicknamed us Wikipedia sluts.
And so it just stuck.
Yeah, we just would read Wikipedia.
I would do a lot more research than Chris.
- Yeah.
- And so I would actually,
once in a while he'd get into it too,
but for very interesting episodes,
I got some subject matter would just pull me in,
like Bernie Madoff, just to think of one that was recent,
it was one of our last ones.
And I think one of our better episodes,
and I'm glad that it kind of ended after that
'cause it was rare to,
I think we started to slip a little bit.
I got fascinated and I did a lot of research
for Bernie Madoff, but usually, yeah,
we'd pull up Wikipedia and we'd have fun.
We were sort of the antithesis of Dan Carlin.
I mean, you went to Dan Carlin for accuracy
and thoughtfulness and you went to us for,
it was a hang with histories.
That's why history hyenas was such an appropriate name
because it was a little bit of history.
Some episodes were more hyena, more wild,
and a little history,
and some were a little more dense,
like the Battle of Crete and less hyena.
So you were always gonna get both.
You're either gonna get a majority of one or the other.
- Yeah, and Dan Carlin's the lion, I guess.
- Yeah, you gotta get both.
- You gotta get predictably good.
I mean, what are your thoughts about,
I mean, he's a storyteller too.
He gets a lot of criticism from the historians,
quote unquote.
That's why he likes to not,
he keeps saying he's not a historian,
but what are your thoughts about hardcore history
with Dan Carlin?
Like, was he an inspiration to the podcast you were doing
or like an account,
like almost like a reverse psychology inspiration
where you wanted to do some kind of opposing type of podcast
in history?
Or was history always just like a launching pad
to just talk shit about human nature?
- More of the latter.
I wasn't even aware of his podcast when we started.
- Oh, interesting.
- Yeah, and so it was just very organic.
Again, like the chemistry,
me and Chris became very good friends.
We started the podcast.
First, we did a web series called Bay Ridge Boys,
which has its sort of little cult following.
We did like five episodes and ended it.
And then we did the podcast.
And hyenas were my favorite animal.
And I talk about them passionately
and I told Chris about them.
And then he started appreciating them.
And we both love history.
I majored in history.
It's one of the things I love.
I go to museums all the time.
I do history tours, so does he.
And so it was just sort of a natural,
let's do a history podcast.
And it gave us something to talk about each episode
to sort of lean our, you know,
hang our hats on and riff off of.
So it had nothing to do with Dan's.
What I think about Dan's, I think it's great.
I think even if he's inaccurate in the opinions
of the historical community, it starts conversations,
which is good.
It's like this thing where people go,
"Oh, it's dangerous rhetoric."
It's like, no, rhetoric only becomes dangerous
when education fails.
What's going on in America is education has failed.
So if you call someone online dangerous,
it's not him that's dangerous.
It's the fucking stupid people that's dangerous.
And it's the fault of this country.
We didn't listen to Aristotle.
The future of a civilization depends on public education.
And we failed.
Education has failed.
Kids are not interested in shit.
And so-- - In some sense,
those, like Dan's podcast,
and podcasts can be incredibly educational.
That's, he's, the storytelling that pulls you in
ultimately leads to you internalizing these stories
and remembering them and thinking through them
and all those kinds of things that is much more powerful
than you book on history that's accurate.
- I think often it inspires you to go learn more.
So it's like, I know we did that.
I mean, people would go, "Hey, I went and learned about this."
'Cause they knew with us, there was no pretense,
which was great, that we had no standard.
So it's like, nobody came to us for historical accuracy.
But I was kind of turned on by the fact
that it inspired people to go learn about this stuff
or to at least know, like Battle of Crete,
like you said, a very underappreciated battle.
Even Winston Churchill said, "From here on,
"we will no longer say that Greeks fight like heroes,
"but heroes fight like Greeks."
I mean, it was a monumental battle
and not talked about enough.
And our podcast would inspire people
to go actually learn more, to go listen to Dan Carlin
or to go pick up a book or to do research on their own.
And so I think podcasts,
Dan Carlin's obviously much more accurate than us,
but it's good that people are going to podcasts like yours
to learn shit.
Joe is really like the progenitor of that.
I mean, having intellectuals on
and getting the public interested with this new medium
in people who are intelligent, it's nice.
'Cause what the mainstream press pushes out is horseshit,
gorgeous horseshit.
It's got a beautiful veneer, but no substance.
And so this is a nice pushback.
- Yeah, the authenticity of Joe's show.
I mean, I started listening from the very beginning,
doing my in grad school, like a technical person.
And he just pulled me in and made me curious
to learn about all kinds of things
and use my own critical reasoning skills
on some of the bullshit guess he's had
and some of the most inspiring guess he's had.
So I'll teach you to think.
I don't know much about Bernie Madoff as a small tangent.
Can you tell me who the hell is Bernie Madoff?
- Oh, Bernie Madoff is the GOAT,
the greatest thief of all time, dude.
Hedge fund guy, ran a hedge fund
and stole the most money in the history of America.
I mean, a con artist.
People obviously, he's become, he's a household name
because of the magnitude of his crime.
But you got to appreciate, again,
you got to appreciate what went into this
and how long he was able to pull it off
by tricking the smartest and richest people in the world.
And a brilliant scam.
The con man, con man is short for confidence man.
And it came from, yeah, a con man,
basically they exude confidence and they trick people
by playing on their ego and blind spots.
And the word comes from a guy, I can't remember where,
but what he used to do.
§10Transcript · 1:11:00–1:18:50
I can't remember the guy's name, whatever.
You can Google it, con man.
But it's very interesting.
The first con man that is on record,
what he would do, he would go to very rich people
and he'd be very well-dressed, right?
And he'd go, I bet you don't have the confidence
to give me your watch.
And he would play on the egos
of these very powerful and rich people
and they would give him the watch for some reason,
some sort of reverse psychology bullshit.
And he'd take the watch and he would just steal it.
'Cause basically he's saying,
you don't have the confidence to give me the watch
'cause you don't, I don't know,
you don't think I'm gonna give it back.
And he would just take it.
So Bernie Madoff was a very sophisticated con man.
And again, we were talking about people
pretending to be the opposite of what they are.
Bernie hid his thievery in how available
he was to his clients,
how he would show up at every bar mitzvah, every birthday.
He was always available for their phone calls.
And he played on their egos.
He made it so people wanted to invest in him.
Like they were competing.
He made it very exclusive.
He wouldn't just take anyone.
And there was a method behind that madness
because he wanted the whales that wouldn't notice
that he had this pyramid scheme going.
And so what he would do is he would just rob
from the richer and he just kept,
it was like he'd pay back the richer
with the guy who was a little less,
and it was a pyramid scheme.
And he was able to do it for so long
and steal so much money.
And he would win people over with the scheme
because with that scheme,
he was the only guy who could provide,
who could guarantee like a 1% return
even during times of recession.
And because he was such a good con man,
he hijacked people's reasoning with his charm.
And that's what con artists do.
That's what psychopaths do.
They're so fucking charming.
They get you in that Volkswagen Beetle
because if they use their reasoning for one second,
they'd go, "Hey, nobody can provide 1% returns
"during recessions.
"How the fuck is this guy doing it?
"I'll tell you how he's doing it.
"He's stealing from another guy to pay you.
"You fucking idiot."
- So charisma is essential to that.
Maybe you can help explain something to me,
something I have been affected by.
- I'm going way too loud for your listeners.
There's gonna be comments like,
"Tell this guy to calm down.
"I'm sorry, I'm Greek Apostolate."
(laughing)
- No, that's beautiful.
I love it.
This is something that I have been thinking about
and have encountered indirectly is Jeffrey Epstein.
And I have a sense because of MIT,
because of all the other people
that have been touched, the wrong term,
by Jeffrey Epstein in the sense that-
- Literally touched.
- Literally and figuratively.
And it always felt to me like there's not a deep conspiracy.
I don't know.
But it felt to me like there's not
some deeply rooted conspiracy where like Eric Weinstein
thinks that there's some probability
that Jeffrey Epstein is a front
for like an intelligence agency,
whether it's Israeli or the CIA, I don't know,
but is a front for something much, much bigger.
And then I always thought that he's just,
maybe you can correct me,
but more of the Bernie Madoff variety,
where he's just a charismatic guy
who may be a psychopathic in some sense,
so also a pedophile, but just charismatic
and is able to convince people of that 1% of any idea
that in the case of scientists,
is able to convince these people that their ideas matter.
So one thing scientists don't really,
despite what people say,
I don't think they care about money as much as people think.
- I mean, people are ridiculous when they think that.
Yeah, that's why people get into science for the money.
The person who has to get into science
are obsessed with minutiae.
They do the scientific method.
You know how boring that is?
Like you have to have a love for it in order to do it.
- But the thing- - Love and truth.
- What drives you is for your ideas to be then heard.
And when a rich guy comes over, probably super charismatic,
is going to tell you that your ideas,
especially for some of these outsiders at MIT,
at Harvard, at Caltech,
at all these sort of big physics, biology,
artificial intelligence, computing fields,
to hear somebody say that your ideas are brilliant,
that ideas matter, it's pretty powerful,
especially when you've been an outsider.
Like he's talked to a bunch of people
who had outsider ideas.
The big negative for me of modern academia
is that most people, actually like most communities,
most people think the same
and there's just these brilliant outsiders.
And the outsiders are just derided.
And so when you have Jeffrey Epstein, like a hyena,
sorry, sorry, sorry, going from on the outside
and picking off these brilliant minds
that are the outsiders,
he can use charisma to convince them
to collaborate with him, to take his funding.
And then thereby he builds a reputation,
like slowly accumulates these people
that actually results in a network
of like some of the most brilliant people in the world,
and then pulls in people like Bill Gates
and I don't know, political figures.
I tend to believe one person can do that.
- Yeah, I mean, look at Hitler, charisma is blinding.
I think that's what con men, speaking of Bernie Madoff,
that's one of their major tools is flattery,
glib, superficial charm.
It creates those blind spots.
People wanna hear how great they are.
They wanna be flattered.
It takes your defenses down, plays to our ego,
the how much we're all just pieces of garbage
and wanna hear how great we are.
We want that love from our mother and our father.
It's Freudian and they know,
because they're not burdened with that need,
they're not burdened with that empathy or emotions
and they just see things very calculatively.
They play, they know that we're prey in their game
and they use that against us.
And that is why someone who is not that intelligent,
like Hitler, can probably convince
a lot more intelligent people, you know,
and that's why we can't give Tim Dillon power
because he already stands on a stage.
I mean, if we let that guy,
I mean, he will just take over a country
and everyone who can't cook well will be eliminated.
So it's like-
- I wonder why he keeps complimenting me
when we're in private.
- Exactly, be careful.
- He looks at me, just, I like your suit.
I like the cut of your jib.
Yeah, definitely.
- You gotta be careful of that kid, he's Hitler.
(laughing)
But it's crazy to think about-
- Clip that, please, internet.
- I mean, Quentin Tarantino said it to bet,
I mean, in his script, personality goes a long way, dude.
- Yeah.
- I mean, personality can usurp common sense
and reason of the smartest people.
These absolute smartest people can be hypnotized.
It's sort of like a sexy woman.
It's like, you can be tricked
because we have such a blind spot for flattery.
- Yeah, I wonder, I think there's a BBC documentary
on, I think it's called something like charisma,
Hitler's charisma or something like that.
It does quite, I mean, that one focused more
about the power of the speeches,
but I wonder if most of the success
or the rise of Hitler and the third Reich
had to do with the charisma of Hitler
when he's alone in a room with somebody,
with the generals, just one-on-one.
Like, I wonder if that's the essential element
of just being able to just look into a person's eyes,
like flatter them or whatever is needed
to earn their trust and then convince them
of anything you want.
- Right, yeah, I mean, you're right
'cause that's the one piece of history we don't have.
- We don't know.
- We don't know.
We do know that the kid crushed.
§11Transcript · 1:18:53–1:25:34
I mean, he was a headliner.
He got up there and his--
- Oh, just speechless.
- His hair would flop around.
I mean, he crushed it.
- Yeah, there's certain elements about nationalism
and pride that are really powerful.
Like a lot of us humans, I think, long for that,
for the feeling of belonging.
And when some charismatic leader makes us feel
like we belong to a group,
the amount of evil we can do to other humans
because of that is endless.
- Especially when you do people a scapegoat.
Nobody wants to look in, nobody wants to do the work
to be better or look at where they messed up.
- Why does it always have to be the Jews
that are the scapegoat?
- You know, it's like, get over it, guys.
I mean, it's like, they killed Jesus, you think,
get over it, okay?
It's a long time ago.
I mean, move on.
- Yeah, I'm Jewish.
I understand because we do run the central banks.
- And the weather.
- And the weather.
- Yeah.
Don't forget about the weather, that's a big one.
That's a funny one that people created.
Like, who gives a shit?
Well, what is the weather?
What's the importance of the weather?
All right, the Jews made it rain outside.
Good, you gotta fuck, you know, they made it snow.
Okay, you get a day off.
Thank the Jews.
- Yeah, it's like, there's certain conspiracies
that make me, like flat earth.
Like, what's the motivation for lying
that the earth is round?
Like, what's the conspiracy?
- Yeah, what does anyone get out of that?
Yeah, what is exactly the profit?
What's the strategy?
Do you have any, from a historical perspective
or just a human perspective,
conspiracy theories you connect with?
Or you're not necessarily conspiratorial?
- I'm not necessarily conspiratorial.
Nobody cares that much.
But there--
(laughing)
But then, you know, what happens is
you find out this one or this two--
- And you start questioning everything.
- And then you start questioning everything, man.
It's like, you know, the Vietnam War started,
that was a lie.
That was a false flag.
And then next thing you know, everything's a false flag.
There are some strange things on 9/11.
You know, there's some strange things
from a scientific perspective.
I'm no scientist, but it's like, you know,
yeah, three steel-framed skyscrapers falling
on the same day in the same way.
A lot of people say, oh, it was,
they were hit by planes.
It's like, yeah, but that's not why they fell.
They fell because of fires.
And usually, not usually, all the time,
except for three times.
And there was buildings that have burned
for longer than that.
- And there might be good explanations,
but the lack of transparency, it's like,
I feel like government--
- And building seven's weird.
I mean, the way it cut down.
And just a neat, just a neat, the physical,
I mean, you're a scientist, is that--
- Well, I don't--
- Is there resistance from the steel?
- No, it's--
- Free fall seems weird.
- Not all scientists know everything.
I'm just a computer guy.
'Cause I had some questions I wanted to ask you
about my biology, by the way.
- Yeah, so exactly.
I don't understand biology.
I don't understand the melting point of steel.
I don't, but I'm just the common sense human
that looks at government and institutions
when they try to communicate.
And there's a certain human element
where you can sense that there's dishonesty going on.
That dishonesty might not be deeply rooted
in a conspiracy theory and something malevolent.
It might just be rooted more likely to me
in a basic fear of losing your job.
So when you have a bunch of people
that are afraid of losing their job,
and they just don't want to,
like the origins of the virus,
whether it came from a lab or not.
That's a pretty, I know a lot of biologists
behind closed doors that say it's very likely
it was leaked from the lab.
But they don't wanna talk about it
because there's not good evidence either way.
It's mostly, you're just using common sense.
So they're waiting for good evidence
to come out in either direction.
But just like nobody in positions of institutional,
like centralized power wants to just honestly say,
"We don't know."
Or on the point of masks or all those kinds of things
to say, "Here's the best evidence we have.
"We're not sure, we're trying to figure it out.
"We're desperately trying to figure that out."
Or just like honesty, especially in the modern day.
That's the hope I have for the 21st century
is people seem to detect bullshit much, much better
because the internet. - Yeah, internet, yeah.
- Yeah, and we seem to-- - But they also believe
crazy shit too.
There's no Yang without a Yang, I guess.
- But I think the conspiracy theories arise only
when the people in positions of power in government
and institutions are full of shit.
Like the air will be taken out of the conspiracy theories
if the people in elected power would be much more honest.
Like just like real.
You have people like Andrew Yang,
whatever you think about him, just more honest.
He just like says whatever the hell comes to mind.
By the way, he's running for New York mayor.
- Mayor, yeah.
- Do you have opinions?
- Yeah, it's no good.
I like Andrew Yang and it's no good.
I'd be honest with you, I'm a lifelong New Yorker.
I mean, I'm a New Yorker.
- Well, you're a New Yorker, so nothing's good.
- Well, something is good.
- Okay, America. - And let's be honest
about New York.
It's a very socially liberal place.
It is the head of the snake.
New York is the country.
If New York, when New York's not doing good,
country's not doing good.
It's the most important city, DC, New York.
It's really Rome, be honest.
Maybe I'm biased, I don't know.
- No.
(laughing)
- We just did, New Yorkers, we walk around everywhere
and we go, this is just like New York, but not New York.
But New York needs, and I'm a guy who leans left.
I just, I lean left and that's just what it is.
- A dictator, is that where you're going?
- No, we need-- - Are we going back
to Stalinism? - We need, it's a money town.
Let's be, come on, man.
I mean, New York is a money town.
And Wall Street, and then when AOC and her cronies
at the local level rejected that Amazon thing,
you're going like, what do you think makes cities?
What's gonna create jobs in the 21st century?
What do we need, more nail salons?
More pizza places?
I mean, we're living in the tech revolution
and whatever your opinions are about Jeff Bezos,
that's the world, tech.
And they want you to come here,
of course you give 'em tax breaks.
That's why companies go anywhere.
She's so fucking utopian,
and that progressive wing is so utopian,
and that always ends in disaster
because it's not rooted in reality.
It doesn't accept the reality
that people are self-interested.
Now they're gonna do this 14%, 15% tax hike
on people making a million dollars more.
In New York City, a million dollars is not that much.
So people are gonna flee New York.
The tax base is gonna flee.
New York's gonna fall to shit like it did before.
- So you're saying it basically needs
a more capitalist front,
a more capitalistic type of thinker.
- Bloomberg, Giuliani when he was still sane
and his hair wasn't melting off his face.
Prosecutor, you need a tough,
I mean, I don't know what's happened.
That guy's lost it, but it's fun.
§12Transcript · 1:25:36–1:32:36
- Yeah, it's fun to watch.
- Yeah, it's fun to watch him be just like Trump's lackey.
Like, yeah, boy, whatever you want, boss.
I'll just say whatever you want, boss.
New York is a money town that needs a money guy
and sort of more of a Republican.
I have to say on the local level,
as more of a guy who leans left, I'll just be honest.
It's a tough city that needs a tough mayor,
not some guy who's going like,
"I understand, we all need free money."
Andrew Yang, I think is right in the big picture
'cause all the real jobs are somewhere else.
And you look at those Asian cities, you go like,
"Oh, that's what our cities used to look like
"at the Industrial Revolution."
You know, there was jobs and people were making things here.
And now you look at those cities in Asia
and you're going like, "Wow."
And then you go to Detroit and you're like,
"Yeah, we're done."
You go to Cleveland, you go, "We're done."
- So I don't, actually, it's funny.
The reason I really like Andrew Yang is
I've learned a lot every time he talks.
Like, it's not his opinions,
he's just giving a lot of data, like information.
Which I--
- Just start a podcast, don't run for mayor.
- Yeah, that's true.
He already has a podcast, I think, Yang Speaks.
- Who doesn't?
- Who doesn't?
- Fucking who doesn't now?
That's the way we communicate.
I don't even talk to people unless it's on a podcast.
- Well, listen, man, I'm not gonna criticize that
because there is something,
like I talked to my dad on a podcast for four hours
and I'm not sure I would ever talk to him
in the way we talked without the podcast.
- What does he do?
- Physicist.
- Oh shit.
- But like--
- I'm gonna check that episode out.
- Yeah, it's episode 100 and,
you know, the way I recorded that podcast
is I tried to put my ego aside.
It's actually really tough to talk to your dad,
especially 'cause you're giving him a platform.
Especially, so at that time,
there's already a bit of a platform for this podcast.
And so there's this, as a son,
you think like, oh, here it goes with this bullshit again.
Like that's the natural son thought you have.
But at the same time, I wanted to,
the way I thought about it is in 20 years,
when I look back, like I wanna do a conversation
where I'm happy with it, you know?
So I wanna make him shine.
But I also called him out on like,
why were you so distant?
- Wow.
- Like all of that kind of stuff.
Yeah, it was very difficult to do,
but it was really important to do.
And I don't think I'd be able to do it
without a microphone.
- Right.
- Listen, how often do we sit there
and just focus our attention,
just look at the other person?
I don't know, man.
This is not even recording right now.
(laughing)
- No, really.
- I just invited you over.
- Just so we could actually, you're right.
The podcast does make, like I've been listening
to every word you've been saying.
And if we weren't doing a podcast,
I might be looking at my phone
or being self-conscious about something else
or nervous or anxious.
- You're zoomed in, especially with people close to you.
I mean, that was, I recommend that actually
for people to talk to their family on a podcast.
Or like fake or not, that's really powerful.
It made me realize that there's a clear distinction
between the conversations we usually have with humans
and those we have when a podcast is being recorded.
What the fuck were we talking on before that?
I knew you were gonna lose your train of thought
on that one because that's a big one.
There's emotion behind that one.
A podcast with dad, that's gonna take you to a place.
It took you to a place.
It took you outside of interviewer.
- New York, it went to a place.
- New York and Yang, yeah.
- In New York and Yang.
So the data, one of the things
that really surprised me about.
(laughing)
I like the psychoanalysis you just threw in there.
- Yeah, I knew that was gonna happen.
Yeah, it took you to a place.
- So Angie Yang mentioned--
- Do you respect me now, dad?
MIT, is it enough?
A fucking million people listening to this?
I've got 14 Rogans.
Is it enough, dad?
I'm creating robots.
Is it enough for you?
- It's never enough.
- That's what drives you probably.
- That's probably what drives me.
That's what gives meaning to life is it's never enough.
And I hope to pass that on to my kids one day,
that nothing's ever enough.
- Whether they're robot or human, right?
Your kids.
- Most likely, let's be honest, robot.
- You might call one of your robot.
Do you love your robot?
Are you starting to love your,
is it gonna be like that Pygmalion thing?
You create them and then they kill you,
but even while they're killing you,
you got a tear rolling down your eye.
- The tear, a slow one tear, one tear.
And just--
- Why are you doing this Frankenstein?
And they're going, "Why, why?"
- But I loved you.
Those would be the last words out of my mouth.
But Angie Yang mentioned something on the,
that it cost $400,000,
over $400,000 per year to support
one person in prison in New York.
When I heard that number, it was really confusing to me.
It cost that much, 400K per person.
And it was really refreshing to hear a politician
describe a particular problem with data,
that this is this prison industrial complex,
whatever the hell it is.
And whether the solution,
it's unclear what the solution is.
I think he has solutions,
but just the honesty of presenting that information
was refreshing.
And I'm not sure a capitalistic person would solve that.
Those kinds of problems he might make worse.
And I'm not, you know, I'm a huge fan of capitalism.
I think the free market is the way we make progress
in this world, but it seems to go wrong
in certain directions,
like the military industrial complex, the prison,
anything that ends with industrial complex.
And so I'm not sure.
I'm not sure if all of the problems,
you're basically saying,
let's put New York's problems aside.
We need to have New York shine first
to do what it does best.
- Essentially, yeah.
- And then the problems we'll fix them.
Well, and then we can focus on the problems.
But if you just say like, here's a problem,
here's a problem, here's a problem,
let's make sure we have the safety net
that protects us against all of these kinds of problems.
That's not going to, that's going to kill the city,
the spirit of the city that is, in your biased opinion,
the Rome of the world.
That said, a lot of people are fleeing New York.
- Yeah, that's why I say it.
That's the reality of the situation is, you know,
I'm all for the public good, but yeah,
there needs to be, back to that Greek expression,
pon metronariston.
I also think the free market is responsible for progress.
I think it's the most natural thing,
the thing that's most aligned with human nature,
which is self-interest,
and which I believe, not to the extent that Ayn Rand would,
but I do believe people are mostly self-interested,
especially with one gun to the head.
Morals are out the window.
You know, it's about survival.
So, you know, create a system that respects that
and acknowledges that.
But socialism works very well, at least right now,
as a check, as to temper the excesses of capitalism.
And in certain scenarios is the more appropriate system,
you know, in a vacuum.
So one being prisons or, you know, governance, you know,
parks.
§13Transcript · 1:32:38–1:39:55
- Maybe even, well, and this is a difficult one,
but in healthcare.
- Healthcare.
- It's unclear what to write.
There's a lot of debates there.
- Yeah, doctors want votes.
- So I guess you're voting for AOC, you're saying.
- No, I'm not voting for AOC, but I do,
it's just a tough one, that's a tough one,
but ultimately the Hippocratic Oath,
it's like, how do you turn people away, man?
How do you do that to people?
It's like, it's a tough thing to reconcile helping people,
curing people with the marketplace.
It's just, I can understand why that one's so tough.
And then you got hypochondriacs, of course,
who drain the system, you know,
like people who have anxiety, like me,
who had COVID and called 14, you know,
I called 14 ambulances.
So, and then of course we're fat
and the free market made us fat because it played,
the marketing made us want all this junk food
and that's a burden on the healthcare system.
So we gotta do something about that.
We gotta get creative.
We need new thinkers, I'll be one of them.
When you go to a fast food restaurant, you stand on a scale.
If you're over a certain thing, you can't be served.
It's good for the healthcare system.
You know, you just hand it a salad and say,
"Sorry, this burger's illegal for right now."
If you achieve these certain BMI goals,
then you can have this burger, but right now you can't.
That's where the state's important.
- Yeah.
- Okay, to regulate our freedoms.
No slurpees, I'm with you, Bloomberg.
(laughing)
- Well, I'm with you to go along.
I think the salads are too expensive.
They should be subsidized.
If you go to like a fast food joint,
the burger's always gonna be cheaper than the salad.
And this does not make sense.
We should run on this platform.
I'll be your vice president.
We'll ban burgers for people over a certain weight
and make salads cheap.
- Three-day work weeks.
Why has that been happening?
- Okay, where are you going with this one?
- Good, good for the economy.
Stimulates the economy, right?
More shifts, creates more jobs,
more people spending 'cause they have more leisure time,
boosts the leisure economy.
Why are we still doing the five-day work week?
That was tempered from the seven-day work week.
It used to be seven-day work week.
It used to be like,
people who are just these libertarians,
it's like, "Come on, dude.
What is this?
Are we freshmen in college?
We're gonna talk about Ayn Rand next.
Let's talk about reality, okay?
And human nature.
People are fucking greedy.
They lie.
There's no end to up,
which is one of my favorite expressions.
- No end to up?
- No end to up.
There's no end to up.
- Can we dissect that from a Randian perspective?
- There's no end to up, which is,
you just keep going.
It's never enough.
The human flaw, it's never enough.
No end to up.
More, more, more.
And you have to reconcile the fact that you're gonna die.
So this no end to up thing is that balance
is just as valuable as progress.
So we have to reconcile those two things
and put them on a seesaw
and figure out how to get two people
who have the equal weight to keep it like that.
And that's the goal.
And it constantly vacillates according to the time.
Sometimes you need a little more socialism.
Sometimes you need a little more capitalism.
You gotta fly the plane, man.
You gotta fly the plane, dude.
- What's your, looking back at history,
how you, is there a moment, time period in history,
a person in history that's most fascinating to you?
You mentioned Bernie Madoff.
Maybe second to Bernie Madoff.
Is there, in the Battle of Crete,
is there something that you've always been curious about?
Even if it's something
you haven't actually researched that well yet,
just something that pulled at your curiosity,
that instructed the way you think about the world?
- An individual or an event?
- Event, individual,
moment in history or a person in history.
- There's a few, but Queen Elizabeth,
the Elizabethan era, the sun never sets
in the British Empire, very successful empire.
What an absolute success story that is
is for a leader and a woman.
- Can you tell a little bit about her story?
- Well, you know-- - I actually don't know
much about the British Empire. - Yeah, she had a good run.
I think it's like 70 years, there's a Shakespeare.
Oh, I guess, what's the word, Pax Romana,
the period of Rome that was at peace,
and they flourish, a couple of emperors
like Trajan or some good ones,
and I think he was part of the Pax Romana,
that sort of just a peace
and a comfortable flourishing time.
And England had sort of that in their empire under her.
Successful reign, she murdered her cousin.
You know the movies,
Cate Blanchett plays her and does so,
and she didn't win the Oscar
because fucking Gwyneth Paltrow
put a British accent on in Shakespeare in Love.
It's a tragedy.
Why do I know this?
Because I'm not a full man.
I'm a comedian, which means I do skits, I perform.
Cate Blanchett's an incredible actress, great movies.
She was just so, and here's the thing,
she never got married.
She was so astute at public relations.
And imagine how strong you gotta be as a woman
to lead the greatest empire maybe known to man at the time,
and to do so so successfully.
How Machiavellian you have to be,
how idealist you have to be,
how much of a good marketer you have to be.
Propaganda machine was on point.
She was married to England.
She was adored the way she adorned herself.
You walked in, you're like, holy man,
God just walked in here.
And of course she got fucked.
I mean, who doesn't fuck?
We all fuck.
Even robots one day will fuck.
But she did that propaganda thing.
And historians, they haven't decided this,
but I believe she fucked.
And I believe she did that as a tool of propaganda.
I'm married to England.
- So you're directly referring to like using sex
as a way to manipulate people.
- Well, she was known as like the virgin queen.
And her thing was like, I'm married to England.
Like I can't be distracted by man or woman, blah, blah, blah.
She never had any kids, nothing.
I think she did that as a tool of manipulation.
Which you need.
Rulers need to, Obama made you feel good.
And then he went and carpet bombed everywhere.
You need to feel good about your guy,
no matter how evil they are.
And she was fucking a dictator.
But when you look back at her,
everyone's like, oh my God, she was so great.
The horror and the shit that she had to do,
she didn't put that in the history books,
but that's what probably was part
of what made her successful.
And she's a fascinating character to ponder on
'cause she was so successful.
And England flourished so much.
And it's just fascinating to me
because she was the great virgin queen.
And can you think of, there's no other woman
who was that, I mean, Angela Merkel, I mean, come on.
I mean, there's nobody who comes close.
And defeating the Spanish Armada,
I think that happened under her.
I mean, I'm no professional historian,
but I mean, the woman crushed.
- Do you think it's more effective to lead by love,
which it sounds like what she did
from the PR perspective or by fear?
Where do you land on that?
- Dude, I'm no leader, that's a great question.
We gotta ask Joe.
(laughing)
- Well, yeah, this is interesting
'cause I think leading in the 21st century
§14Transcript · 1:39:57–1:47:58
in whatever ways is different.
I think it's very difficult to lead by fear.
I mean, that's why I find Putin fascinating
and like really fascinating.
Like is he a relic of another era
or is he something that will still be necessary
in the coming decades for certain nations?
- I think he's a, I don't think he's a relic
from another era.
I think his background, I think he is who you think he is
because his background was in espionage.
His background was in subterfuge and espionage.
I think I've said the word subterfuge maybe 10 times now.
But he-
- You like big words, you're intellectuals.
- I just, I'm sitting here with you, it's time to flex.
But he's very good at that, right?
Like controlling people with psychology
and even if you look at the way he sort of used the internet
and has sort of been, gotten into the citizens
of other countries opinions and it's very KGB.
He also looks great without a shirt on a pony.
- On a horse.
- On a horse, yeah, yeah.
I thought he would choose a pony 'cause a pony's smaller.
- Would you put Queen Elizabeth
as the greatest leader of all time?
- Probably, yeah.
I think as a woman and you look at the length of the reign,
I think it's like 70 something years or something like that
that she reigned, success, man, success.
She used the church, she used public psychology.
Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of all time
under her reign.
People were going to plays and it was a success front
and she was marauding everywhere else,
marauding and culling resources for the empire.
Just say a absolute successful.
It's even a token of her success,
we don't consider her a dictator.
She's a dictator, you know, she was queen.
This is my thing I love about the feudal system
that these fucking countries still have feudal systems.
They're celebrating a horrible thing,
divine right of kings, oppression.
Kings were dictators and now they have fucking ceremonial.
Why don't we have a ceremonial Führer?
What is in Germany?
He doesn't do any of the bad stuff,
he just rolls around and does this shit.
I mean, it's like, what the fuck?
There's no difference between a Hitler and a fucking king,
they did the same horrible shit.
Why not a fucking ceremonial conqueror?
Alexander the Great walks in, rapes a little bit,
but it's all fine, it's for ceremony.
He represents the country, Macedonia.
It's great.
- It's interesting to see that some,
you're starting to see a bit of that in Russia with Stalin,
actually, the celebration of a man
that helped win the Great Patriotic War.
- Uh-oh, yeah.
- Right, so you're already starting to see that.
It's very possible in history books,
he'll be seen as maybe like a Genghis Khan type of character
and you forget the millions that he tortured.
So you're one of the most successful and brilliant people
the world has ever seen,
so you're the good person to ask for advice.
There's a lot of young people that look up to you.
God bless their souls and hearts.
- Made the right choice.
- What advice would you give to a young person,
maybe to yourself, to a young version of yourself?
Just how to live a successful, a good life.
- Be doggedly you.
I think the magic happens when you are stubbornly,
doggedly you and you meet other people
who are doing the same.
And the real magic of life,
the real true currency in this ephemeral life
is sort of the communication that happens between people.
That's the real currency.
Friendships, love, it's cliche,
but I think the meaning of life is to experience love.
And I think people often mistake,
maybe it's because of Hollywood films and things like that,
that love is a feeling, but it's not, it's an action.
So that took me a while to learn
and I think that's why I've made decisions since
that I think have been good for me and healthy for me.
Love is an action.
People can say things, you can feel things.
That doesn't mean they're necessarily real.
It's all chemical reactions.
It's all tied to our immaturity
and psychological issues and survival.
But action, when you do things, when you act out of love
and that's what it's about.
- Is there times when you were younger
where you were kind of dishonest
with who you are to yourself?
- Yeah.
- In terms of like, what kind of things did you have to do
to shake yourself up and be like,
okay, I thought I'm gonna be a scientist,
but instead I realized I'm gonna do this.
- Yeah, my parents were- - I'm gonna make funny.
- Yeah, comedy is a hard thing to explain
to an immigrant mother who came here
and under Nazi occupied Crete
and became a human rights lawyer and lawyer.
My brother's a lawyer, my father's a lawyer,
clawed his way up.
His dad was a-
- So you're a disappointment.
- I'm the black sheep.
Yeah, my brother went to Oxford, Georgetown Law at Brown.
(laughing)
Has a master's in law degrees.
My mother has four law degrees.
She was on the Human Rights Commission in New York
up for a judgeship under Dinkins.
She was the editor of Unitar.
She wrote a seminal piece on the human rights of children
for the United Nations.
And yeah, I was a comedian.
I was always a fuck up.
And the thing that I was best at,
the only thing I was ever decent at
was just like making people laugh.
I don't know why, I don't know where that comes from.
But-
- Was there ever a question or was there a moment
where you decided this is what I'm gonna do?
- There was a moment after I graduated college, yeah.
But I was thinking about all types of stuff
that other people imposed on me.
And I was honest with myself.
And once I figured out it was an actual career path,
I wasn't even aware.
Back then the internet wasn't huge.
You know, late '99, 2000, it wasn't big yet.
So I thought Robin Williams was just like an actor.
I didn't know there was comedy clubs and all.
So once I learned that, I was just like, I tried it.
I suffered from massive anxiety.
I remember the first time I did comedy, my arms went numb.
I started having a massive panic attack.
I have my first set, I can show it to you.
It's like, I suggest, I just-
- On video?
- Yeah, on video.
- Oh, nice.
- I kept going, thank you, thank you, thank you.
And the reason why I kept saying thank you
is 'cause I forgot my whole joke 'cause I was so scared.
And then they laughed
because of the amount of times I said thank you.
And then once they laughed, I remembered the whole thing.
And I did the five minutes and I remember getting off.
And for a person who never felt like he had a place anywhere,
nothing ever felt right, that felt like, okay, I found it.
This is what I'm supposed to do.
This is it.
It was the only time in my life I felt that.
I haven't felt it since, never felt it before.
So it's the only thing I can do.
And-
- Yeah, I had that.
That's funny 'cause there's,
I have a similar experience, like immigrant family.
And the world tells you to do certain things
and you think that's right.
But then you put yourself in situations,
by luck probably, where it's like, oh, this feels right.
I don't know what this means, but this feels right.
I think the biggest moment like that for me was,
I don't know what to make of it exactly,
but when I met Spot, the robot, the four-legged robot,
it was like five years ago.
It felt like the depth of fascinating ideas
that are yet to be explored with this thing.
This felt like a journey.
It was like a door that opened.
I was like, I don't wanna be a professor.
At that point, I realized I don't want to-
- Interesting.
- Do sort of generic stuff.
I want to do something crazy.
I want to do something big.
That's the reason I stepped away from MIT.
That's the reason I have this burning desire
to do a startup.
That's the reason I came to Austin.
Yeah, I don't know what the hell it all means,
but you just kind of follow that.
- That's awesome.
That sounds like you're following what's doggedly you.
§15Transcript · 1:48:00–1:50:42
And also I think, just to piggyback off it,
I think that means no matter what it is,
'cause I think the American dream is sold like,
hey, if you're not Beyonce or if you're not famous,
you're not worth it.
I hate that.
And that's what I love so much about certain countries
like Sweden, it's like where everyone has healthcare
and stuff like that, 'cause everyone's a little,
is valued more.
It's like whatever, if you wanna be a doorman, do it.
It's all the same.
Prince was not happy.
There's no, just because you're rich or famous,
you're still the same guy.
Whether your possessions are a lot, little.
It's like, I have met some doormen.
I have met some tax gabbers that,
a lot of you not, are more fascinating.
Comedians are horrible people.
(laughing)
Some, I wanna get away from all of them.
I have very few friends, Paul Verzi, Tim Dillon,
who are comedians 'cause they're awful, awful people.
Some of the people who you know the most,
who are the most famous, are not who they say they are.
Usually that's the case.
They're putting on that public facade
'cause they're fucking sociopaths.
And they're horrible people.
And some of the most beautiful people I've met
and the most interesting people I've met have regular jobs.
There's no shame in any fucking job.
We don't all have to be rappers with like rims.
It's just a weird thing.
- Yeah, fame is a drug.
And yeah, comedians, I agree with you.
There's some part of me that knows
that there'll be a moment in my life
when I'm standing there with like a sword
or a knife in my stomach
and looking at Tim Dillon's smiling face,
saying, "You shouldn't have trusted me.
You stupid fuck."
So on that note, (laughs)
Giannis, I've been a huge fan of yours.
I love what you're doing with "Long Days,"
now your new podcast.
And I obviously love all the stuff you've done before
with "History of Hyenas."
The chemistry you have with yourself is also fun to watch.
So man, I'm a huge fan.
It's a huge honor that you come down here.
Thanks so much for talking to me.
- It means so much to me to hear you say that.
I really appreciate it.
I'm a big fan of yours and "Have Me On" has been amazing.
And just thank you, man.
Thank you for "Have Me On."
And people, if they wanna watch my special,
it's called "Blowing the Light."
It's on YouTube.
And please come listen to "Long Days," the podcast.
- And let's go eat some barbecue.
- Let's do it.
- Thanks for listening to this conversation
with Giannis Papas.
And thank you to Wine Access, Blinkist, Magic Spoon,
and Indeed.
Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
And now let me leave you with some words from Karl Marx.
"Revolutions are the locomotives of history."
Thank you for listening
and hope to see you next time.
(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)