Yannis Pappas: History and Comedy | Lex Fridman Podcast #175
the following is a conversation with giannis pappas 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 podcasts 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 pappas 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 pappas 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 uh an f student of history f student yeah okay i thought it was more like a d minus d minus yeah okay still got to repeat the grade if you get all d minuses i actually had a point 67 gpa average my freshman year and i had to do it again this is this podcast is going to be the spectrum of human intelligence this it runs from there to here so this is going to set the low bar i'm barely sliding into human i'm closer to chimp and i uh bring that up that you're also friends with uh 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 it in size well 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 dylan kid likes biscuits and barbecue okay so he's more like see i was i was imagining putin or something like that he's more like the north korean dictator they'd get along great those two yeah they would get i mean tim dillon and king john um 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 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 want to give him power you don't want 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 because you know suits corrupt you you put that suit on you start feeling that power you see definitely it's like you know yeah i don't even want tim dylan to 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 restaurant staff is just gone he would have people below his food standard execute 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 like one of the reasons we mentioned offline joe rogan he's been an inspiration to me because 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 with that question yeah he's a rare breed he's like a benign king i've 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 because they don't have feelings and joe's a rare example he's just a powerhouse of will and uh he uh 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 yeah you know people aren't supposed to have anything they want you got to 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 secession of caesar's and i want to start with aoc that's true dictators get the job done they do they do at certain point you go 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 because i'm more in the tech space of constructing systems that prevent me from being corrupt because 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 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 it's 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 because i'm afraid of the slippery slope of it yeah you ever think about that kind of stuff yeah the the funny thing about our the capitalist system is it's uh it's um it puts sort of uh 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 uh now they're just like boxes they throw a kid up and it's just for all profit margin it's um it's the illusion of permanence that uh you know it's like oh let me get as much money as i can you're like yeah you know my dad used to say you know everyone it's a cliche but you can't take it with you so it's kind of it's 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 you know 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 uh survival you have to survive emotionally and humor and and and understanding reality in its objective context helps with that accepting reality as this ephemeral uh 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 what's that mean surviving emotionally like what what's an ideal life look like for you yeah you can't driving you can't take things too seriously you can't um because they're ephemeral they're they're not permanent nothing's permanent your bank account's not permanent your problems aren't permanent uh nothing's permanent your abilities aren't permanent um your memory is not permanent your your dick getting hard it's not permanent can i curse on this or is this go out yeah you can curse to your heart's content okay yeah i mean gender is not even permanent anymore i think i'm gonna 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 uh is a good start to being more flexible you got to 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 yeah bukowski has this quote about love that love is a fog that phase with the first light of reality so he's a romantic that guy yeah but that even love is a thing that just doesn't last very long no um you know some people disagree with that maybe it morphs it like like like water it changes right it might not be it might not be this because he's mostly just uh loved like prostitutes i think so that's kind of love yeah no demand no uh responsibilities yeah it's a financial transaction yeah uh ephemeral as ever you mentioned your dad he passed away uh two a year and a half ago yeah what did you learn from him i love my dad my dad i would say my dad was my my hero he was just uh my dad really embodied those values and i think um for better or worse it's made me who i am he's he uh my dad was was a painter he was a lawyer he was uh he was a you know a lieutenant in the military new yorker new yorker born and bred brooklyn his doubt his dad you know uh surprise owned a diner so that's that's sort of the greek passport that's the immigration passport for greeks in new america and um 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 uh if if you consider money and fame uh to be paramount you know i've always done what i wanted if i stopped wanting to do it i just stopped doing it i think i got that for my dad so maybe for better or worse that's what i learned from them but that's a real currency you know 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 uh he he got 91 years it's very rare i mean he smoked for 60 years talk about like a guy who was an outlier and he smoked like six years like packs i mean yeah 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 because 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 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 because me and my brother weren't talking at the time because we're greeks uh we're 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 uh 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 i was there i spent the night the dad my the night my dad died he died in the early in the morning and i heard the death rattle last breath and it was just i think it was uh i 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 uh 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 it 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 the tenets of those political philosophies ended up being utopian they were detached from reality detached from nature and so i think it's 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 um a contributing member of society because it's true true things should be the foundation of all things if if if what you believe is based on illusion you're gonna end up doing destruction whether that destruction is on a scale of one to ten you are going to be destructive because it's not real it's a fantasy it doesn't exist see the thing is the truth is about i don't think you can ever reach truth truth is about like 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 i i mean i'm with ernest becker as a philosopher uh he wrote a book called denial of death he says that the like much of the human condition is based in the fear of mortality that we like that's that's the creative force of the human energy like freud said you want to 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 because apparently edible we we found we found that all things good and bad yeah thanks thanks for that thanks i just don't know if his mom was look or not i mean i have to google it all right yeah i'll look up on google images yeah no but i think that 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's some philosophers after him followed on that were 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 they what does that mean that means kind of you know 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 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 for 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 throughout most of his life he's yeah i mean you know he's caused a little bit of strife he's left a little uh 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 i mean a movie a year and they're all you can always find something good about each movie like the dialogue or whatever um 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 yeah is um 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 uh 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 all 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 uh of it was a conscious choice probably very little um 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 uh not by choice but by instinct so he he argues that the fear is not the instinctual of it's not the animalistic stuff that's the thing that makes us special is the what humans are able to do is they 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 that kind of cognitive construct is difficult for us to deal with like what the hell does that mean like just just to think about it's going to be over at a certain point like 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 uh if this went on an infinite there would be no meaning to it i'd be like hey if i don't see you tomorrow i'll see in a million years there would be no meaning there'll be no urgency there would be no feelings there'd be no uh 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 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 going to have what actual immortality would look like for a bunch of humans is people sitting there doing nothing it'll be like a greek cafe just sitting around drinking coffee watching it i love it yeah it's a lazy man's paradise yeah but it's so interesting because that that's 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 because you'll always have a chance to do all the exciting things and we'll just get we'll basically become tim dill just sit there and have a podcast and that's it he works hard um 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 to later that's an interesting thing to like in yeah if you can always push something off yeah that i like that i i think that's heaven and um see we just changed your mind you kind of like del mortality yeah i kind of like it no so there'll be no thirsts no you can always put it off hey i wanna i wanna i wanna have 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 they offer 62 or 72 but then i'd get sick of them i'd want to i don't know i always wondered like are you given the 62 virgins or do you choose can you create them like an avatar like a video game or are you just giving i don't know what the num why it's important to have that high number first of all i think it's a mistranslation about the virgins but outside of that outside of that i feel like the conversation is really important i i don't think they ever specify like what kind of books these girls read like what are they 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 ancient expression pan metro narestone which my mother always used to say which is everything in moderation nothing in excess so trying to always get the status quo and uh 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 you're gonna end up banging a dude is what i'm saying you're gonna get sick of it because 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 there's the value is from the journey the 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 going to get bored and you're going to bang a dude that's it's i think that's a scientific axiom actually eventually you'll get bored and banger 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 if uh yeah we're speaking truth you said the value of life one of the highest ideals is to seek truth i think if we're gonna ask you a quick question if you uh 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 yes you know an island or something you have the choice of banging a family member or an animal which one is worse on the moral scale because you're technically not related to the animal right this is interesting i mean all of these are human constructs these ideas but yet for me personally taboo would be more taboo to uh to 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 that if they didn't have they didn't know they had that question i they just learned a little bit about you and now i know i look forward to the internet clipping that out yeah i mean there there is listen uh in some outside outside of that i do think about that a lot it sounds ridiculous uh about morality connected to animals in terms of all the the factory farming and so on it seems like that's one of the things we'll look because i love me but i kind of feel bad about it and and bad in a way where i think if we look like a hundred 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 with the animal has to do with consent and about the experience of suffering of animals the reason i think about that personally a lot because i think about robotics i think about creating artificial consciousnesses uh 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 you know all men are created equal what is it which who's included in the men who who's not in that in that sentence and our animals included in that are robots i honestly think that there will be a civil rights movement for robots in the future i don't know is that the turing test the way you try to is that they call it where you're trying to see if a ai can think like a human or whatever or feel like a human well it's uh the touring test closely defined as more about talk like a human so you can you can imagine systems they're 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 the 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 kind of human things the question isn't whether you're able to talk which is passing the turing test the question is whether you're able to feel to be uh i mean i go back to suffering the thing that that our documents protect us against is uh 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 dogs there's laws there's actually legislation that protects dogs for 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 um they they my dad always used to say though he go those things those things are basically human and i mean they dream they have anxiety uh 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 you know 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 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 from uh you know uh scavengers and stuff like that you know the list goes on we wouldn't be here so we that's an often overlooked fact that human evolution was not uh 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 is my favorite animal um and you know it's kind of an injustice to i mean i'm kind of mad at dogs die we deserve to get eaten by hyenas but without dogs we wouldn't be here and dogs 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 you know 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's 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 uh i kind of uh my spirit animal i suppose is the horse from animal farm boxer where he says uh i will work harder that's his motto i i work really hard uh at stupid things that's that's basically what i just hit my head against the wall for no reason whatsoever but that probably fulfills you have a big brain you're probably born with a big brain that kind of fulfills killing neurons it's exercise for you yes yes don't you think some animals deserve to be eaten though kind of like hyenas come on dude i mean they gotta respect the hyena okay so let's look first of all let me just comment on the dog thing there is like 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 they're 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 you 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 yeah 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 it's it's it's i even get tingles like thinking about dogs because 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 that tugs at that uh millions of years of evolution like that gut you know it's like i had a finished friend of mine he's a comic tommy valamis once told me he was like uh he was like the gut he's like i believe in that 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 feel i'm i'm triggered by okay you should be because you know what people are always scared of robots but i i actually uh i have i've made the sort of uh i i've made it to say hey i've i thought about it like robert robots have been nothing but helpful it's the people we should be scared of right again we're kind of missing the most destructive thing is us because 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 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 um robots are helpful no yeah tanks and autonomous weapon systems don't kill people people kill people yeah that's yeah yeah the nra's about to collect that for you 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 they're psychopathic killers who end up killing uh innocent um neighborhood chipmunks and yeah and birds uh they really affect the uh the balance of the local ecosystem but if you look 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 a lang almost part of the language and their nose is like a ma 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 intelligent 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 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 the art from the artist so that brings to mind vladimir putin [Laughter] 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 yeah even moderate ones like putin and we were talking about power how do you explain them you said uh 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 was 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 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 uh just constant changing of leadership there might be a lot of corruption in the short term but if you stay strong with um with the ideals of democracy then you'll be uh ultimately create something that as beautiful and stable as the united states the the sad thing is is i don't know if that 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 the most successful empire uh that we've had um was a dictatorship for most of its run so um but i do believe in a republic which is sort of a limited democracy i do believe in in what we have here i believe in common law i believe um you know in individual rights um but yeah i think you said it i think i couldn't nobody could have said it better yeah it's it's a short-term solution you look at saddam hussein he kind of you know when we took took him out then there was a lot of infighting that that happened that he was kind of keeping at bay um because uh he was a strong man dictator well he's an interesting one inside to interrupt no from my understanding i'm sure people correct me but when saddam hussein first came to power he was uh he's quite progressive so like the dick the as far as i understand the signs of an evil dictator weren't exactly there so again there's i don't know if power revealed the power corrupted or that could have been the initial subterfuge to kind of get everybody you know hitler also is a you know 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 stands again we know that they're born that way power definitely corrupts people who have the capacity uh to feel and for empathy power i'm not sure i don't think power corrupts people who were born uh psychopathic with that condition or sociopaths who had who you know who were closer to psychopath and then had some traumatic life you know i just think um you know the best way to get away with whatever nefarious thing you want to 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 yeah that's what that's what killers do that's what the worst people look at bill cosby i mean he was what better way to hide you know it's like what wokeness is now it's like i'm such a great person and you're like arya 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 i'm just an innocent helpful guy and then boom next thing you know you're getting your titbit 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 like there's something about the duality of like we're so skeptical as a culture like if somebody's just like seems to be kind of sort of uh i don't know positive and all that kind of you know how do i put it just simple uh simple minded in the positivity they express they think like okay 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 yeah 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 because in new york it's like if anyone's nice to you they want something yeah and that's uh that's the 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 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 what what's the angle yeah what are we doing here you mentioned hyenas is your favorite animal i forgot to ask you what the hell were you thinking why is hyena is your favorite animal yeah it's um it's a fascinating animal and let's look at the whole animal kingdom like why is that where do you put so you like dogs love my favorite your favorite is dogs but they're kind of outside the animal kingdom because you're thinking about wolves so the animal kingdom was 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 uh why not lions because their lions are predictable lions are just you know they're regal and kind of like boring it's like the hot chick it's like we get it you were born the best yeah you know i like a scrappy by any means necessary intelligent and cunning uh but aren't they dishonest yeah and that's why i like them yes they're dishonest they employ chicanery they uh they're and that's just a sign of how intelligent they are and how self-reliant they are and how brutal they are um they're brutally honest in how much they lie yeah you know because it's just they're trying to get the job done yeah you know lions are just like they're they're too gifted everyone hates the fucking you know if i went to school with you i'd like of course lex knows the fucking answer yeah lex was born smarter than me yeah you know 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 uh 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 like this dog yeah they're 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 fully figured out and uh they this pseudo penis thing is the is the i mean it is explain the pseudo penis yeah so the it's a matriarchal society by the way so that's unique in and of itself this we're talking about an apex predator that is uh matriarchal much like uh you know 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 fracture side and they do that because they're like hey you're weaker they let your brother kill you and uh the women have penises the women have pseudo penises that they give birth out of and the birth is violent but they they roll around with just huge pieces their glue guns are just fucking swinging you know and the women are just run the show and uh it's just cool that they have these pseudo penises [Laughter] uh it's almost romantic to eat this they have the strongest bite force they 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 it the animal was there and then the animal's gone there's no nothing for the vultures there to uh to to grab yeah i'm gonna have to revisit the hyenas because my experience with the heinous was from uh first of all history hanging as your show uh has rebranded them for me but uh the lion king which is uh a cartoon i guess that uh i get emotional at every time i have a i hope i probably have father issues everyone every guy probably just you just have feelings you're a good guy i mean everyone has that yeah yeah that one gets everybody i don't know i get i get every father-son movie like blow with johnny depp and uh ray liotta damn that's a good movie and whenever there's like um like the disappointment in the father that his son has become like this incredibly successful drug lord that then ends up with nothing in in in prison uh just the sadness of them communicating through letters man that gets me every time but but you know uh they're the hyenas are not presented that well in that um no they're usually portrayed as like uh it's really sad that they're portrayed that way and lions like lions aren't dicks lions are dicks they the the the the alpha lions will kill the cubs of another rival they do all types of dick shit yeah and um yeah it's the hyenas are more interesting like they'll just roll in like a hyena will like like you said the lie you know because when you watch the serengeti you know animals will hang out with each other they're like 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 necessarily take an animal down like lions will just use brute strength hyenas use cunning and you can even go on the internet and find uh memes of this where hyenas will grab the big animal by the balls and just like we'll sneak up behind it and bite its balls and you'll watch an animal ten size ten times the size of the hyena just slowly go down it's brutal but it's fucking hilarious so i i think that's uh i don't know if you uh followed the the the channel um nature's medal that that one weighs heavy on me um with the hyenas on the balls i it's tough to 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 yeah it's crazy it uh just like we're talking about meditating on death i actually i keep following and unfollowing that instagram channel because like sometimes it's too much like i can't 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 because that it's real we do come from that we are 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 know 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 you know the the the nature channels only show uh 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 because 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 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 we don't have the the they no no documentary is going to sit around and show you the 99 times the cheetah uh didn't catch thank you for this perspective this murder is difficult so like this is the they never talk about for people who murder how difficult it is like it's tough 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 clean up and then you have to kind of plan ahead because you want to keep doing the murder mass murder you got to learn how to saw them up put them in duffel bags bury you gotta learn a dig you gotta learn how to hide you gotta learn the line i mean there's a lot that goes into it yeah that we need to put a little respect on yeah yeah and you have to figure out which tools work the best for the song and all those kinds of things um um so thank you for the perspective that's that's what i was hoping will bring to this table uh before yeah so you uh uh you got a little bit greek in you uh one of the episodes on history hyenas you talked about the battle of crete where the greeks your people in uh in 19 i guess 41 in the early stages of the 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 greek 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 a lot of people don't know that so this is a very significant battle um first time there was an invasion from the sky um and my mother was a little girl and she lived through four years of uh 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 um 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 got to take it back to when hitler instructed mussolini because let's be honest mussolini was hitler's bitch you know what i mean it was like if it were you know if it was fantasy island hitler was the fucking and the and mussolini was boss to play mussolini ever say no to hitler or even maybe it's always like yes yes yes we will do it and uh it's like it takes you have to take greece and so um yeah so italy being much bigger than greek greece is a tiny country nine ten million so italy invaded greece um you know um and aki day is a big it's a big holiday for greeks and this speaks to the spirit greeks in fight 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 all so passionate but when italy said hey we're gonna move troops through you know uh greek said aki which means no and that was um and then italy attacked and uh we beat the shit out of them a much bigger country much uh more well-equipped country greece beat the shit of them kicked them back into albania actually not only repelled them actually like conquered some ground in albania and pushed them back and then hitler was like fuck you know i was planning my march to russia uh but i have to go down because he basically said to mussolini like you know you basically bitch laughed i'm like afraid i'm like i gotta do this myself because you're such a fucking bitch so then the nazis invaded greece obviously they took the mainland with fight and shot out the greeks never give credit to the british in 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 them out and we kicked out hummus too so it's like your culture's gone you're gone because greeks are uh it's philotimo it's called philiptim and it's a real thing filoptimo is uh there's very little trans you can't translate it but it's kind of like honor loyalty friendship uh altruism it's uh it's you can't define it but greeks know it and we're taught it from our from our uh families it's a vibe and it's a greek cultural thing and we're an old culture and philotimo is what it's called and it's it's love it's passion and it comes out and it comes out and so um so hitler had to postpone his invasion of um 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 because they fucking just rolled over so what is it what does a couple hours matter when you're that much of a fucking pussy yeah okay what is a couple hours 12 hour fucking three or four days the island of crete yeah 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 win her and of course that was you know that was his downfall just as it was napoleons 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 it's like you just guys throw millions of people at the problem and don't fuck with that russian winner and don't fuck with russian people dude they're tough people in new york know that you don't go to fucking sheeps that man 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 then there's i mean 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 not or didn't succeed like they wanted to early in the war which is a little like psychologically the impact of that i think is immeasurable and also a lot of people argue from a military strategy perspective that the just like you said it was an aerial attack and that hitler didn't think that that that kind of attack would then be useful for the rest of the war so that's that's a really part where whereas it might have been very useful so it's uh 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 uh 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 one and so but we never kind of think about europe and we certainly grown up didn't think about their role in the united states all this there's plenty of stories of heroism in uh in the soviet union enough enough for many lifetimes so but it was fascinating to read from a greek perspective um because i you know i don't have many greek friends i'm hoping to change that uh this is the beginning of a love affair of your people uh yeah 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 with world war ii wouldn't have been one either yeah the stories are written by the victors that's really interesting i i just looking at the at history you wonder what's missing i'll tell you what's missing that i know for a fact because my dad told my dad uh 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 the fog of war obviously fracture side happens all the time it's pandemonium i mean there's skill involved but i mean there's no like it's a lot of that it's just luck my dad said he my dad won three he got you know medals brea purple hearts all that shit and he said the reason was because he can't he always said there's 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 with and um i'll tell you one thing is that uh it is written by the victors and all these leaders they say were in the front were 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 then how did he live because 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 that's army pr you know whenever you read uh you know if uh 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 up you know it's like so uh 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 bloom a few times and he was like is it bad up there and then like after that he was like okay with my scribe give me my scribe okay when you write this down can you put me in the front yeah and i was just making me a big hero and i was in there and then 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 survived in the front especially warfare back then i mean it's like brutal then again you have like uh genghis khan the sense i got that he was a little bit up on the front at least the first yeah or is that also is he a little bit alex 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 get turns into myth you know and uh 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 because those those dudes were good on horseback but it was like game of thrones back then you had all these different people and they kind of yeah the the the mongols were wild dude they are actually said like um 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 them and stretch their head so they find like mongol skulls and they look like cone heads and they were brutal and vicious then they would maraude and rape and all the fun stuff that you know when 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 shiny example of that but do you think also that it's that effect that we would 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 we're you know and the the rubber neck who everyone pulls over to see a car crasher are we just only focusing on the negative things of history because 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 loved yeah i wonder i wonder how different those people were you know like they might have had the same exact loves and fears and like they were 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 is 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 and the space of um like concepts uh mathematics all those kinds of things yeah i mean greece you look at the architecture it still stands up i mean all the government played 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 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 [Laughter] so in your history hyenas that unfortunately has come to an end yeah we're talking about empires coming to an end all empires fall yeah um that one um oh it may rise again empires might rise who knows who knows i i'm obviously a fan so i hope it does rise again but you've uh seemed to develop your own language can you uh you know it's what it is what is what is that what the hell um is this some kind of medical condition or can you can you explain like the linguistic essentials that uh catch us up to the linguistic essentials that people need to know to understand the way you speak you ever you know leopold and loeb you know the story of those two uh they murdered that kid and they had this weird relationship uh anyway it's an interesting thing to google leopold and love these two guys who ended up murdering a kid because they developed their own language with each other and uh this whole reality and this weird thing and they wanted to know what it's like to murder a kid in a murder kid it's a famous story in american lore and history whatever famous case um but this phenomenon yeah me and chris got together it wasn't as dark as leopold though we didn't murder a kid but we murdered a podcast or at least stab it a few times yeah it's um 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 uh it's mysterious i gotta be honest with you it's um it was the thing that it wasn't conscious uh wasn't intentional it was something that happened in the music of our energies yeah 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 uh i don't know what it is it's beyond my comprehension but with chris uh there was this magical chemistry that uh you know i have chemistry with a lot of people and uh it can be funny and i feel zero chemistry here this is great yeah it's a little bit more intelligent than what me and chris did uh but you know uh me and chris uh i think we connected in on the funny bone like i he i found him so funny and we found the same things funny and from that these organic expressions came from the some part of our brains that was created from this chemistry and yeah we just developed this in language in 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 uh you know like all great flings you know there's a long relationship long marriages are boring and comfortable the one you really like fucking always ends abruptly and sadly and uh but you always look back and you jerk off to it and uh but so you guys made love we made yeah so it's like it was like a hot fling with me and him and it was intense and we burned the candle at both ends and it was me i think that podcast was meant to be three years and um 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 i'm doing long days now that podcast and people seem to enjoy it i'm really enjoying the long days yeah yeah on youtube i just found myself just like staring it at you uh ranting for same with tim dillon i really enjoyed the 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 an 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 the chaos and crack open and clean out and yeah this it was almost i listened to rogan like this sometimes i'll i'll re-listen to an episode uh to to try to understand why was this so fun to listen to it's it's almost like trying to analyze humor or something like that but it's nice from from a conversational perspective like why was this so easy to listen to and then and uh with history hyena is like why is the chemistry so good it's it's so it's weird it's weird uh because there's not many podcasts like i don't know any with chemistry like that yeah it's interesting and it's kind of sad that uh that that uh the the fling or the prostitute in vegas has to end you know like that but that's what makes it special it's the bokowski thing with the fog the the british office one of my favorite shows was was that it ended very quick you know it's only a couple 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 because i marvel at it too um because as a guy who tries to always figure out uh 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 um it's something that i can't explain yeah it's something that i don't know how you quantify it i don't know how you describe it it's it's musical it's really kind of rhythmic so maybe uh maybe like a netflix show about history that's that's another that that's in the future with the two of you yeah who knows you guys will meet like uh with that the way you meet with the fling like a decade from now at a diner and uh you're both way fatter and uglier and then you just reminisce over some cigarettes and coffee that 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 uh i mean it was really scholarly the the depth of research that you performed it sometimes felt like you almost read an entire wikipedia article beforehand or like exactly true uh we were we were one fan we attracted such funny people to that podcast and the fans were so funny and one fan called us nicknamed those wikipedia sluts and so it just stuck yeah we just would read wikipedia i would do a lot more research to chris yeah and uh so i would actually uh you know once in a while he'd get into it too but for very interesting episodes i got some some 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 uh it kind of ended after that because it was rare that i think we started to slip a little bit um i got fascinated and i got 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 uh accuracy and thoughtfulness and you went to us for it was a hang with history that's why history hyenas was such an appropriate name because it was it was a little bit of his some 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 you were always going to get both you're either going to get a majority of one or the other yeah and dan carl is the lion i guess yeah and uh you guys look pretty predictably good uh i mean what what are your thoughts about i mean he's a storyteller too he gets a lot of criticism for the from the historians quote-unquote that's why he likes to knock he keeps saying he's not a historian but what's your um what are your thoughts about uh hardcore history with dan carlin like was he an inspiration to the podcast you were doing uh or or like an account like uh almost like reverse psychology inspiration where you wanted to do some kind of opposing type of podcast in history or was history always just like a a launching pad to just talk shit about human nature more the latter i wasn't even aware of his podcast when we started oh interesting yeah and uh so we 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 he did like five episodes and ended it um and then we did the podcast and uh hyenas were my favorite animal and i talked about them passionately and i told chris about them and then he started appreciating him and we both loved history i majored in history it's one of the things i love i go to museums all the time i go to his 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 uh 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 yeah and we failed education has failed kids are kids are not interested in shit and um so in some sense those uh like dan's podcasts and podcasts can be incredibly educational that's he's uh the storytelling that pulls you in ultimately leads to you internalizing these stories and like remembering them and and thinking through them and all those kinds of things that is much more powerful than any 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 you know i people would go hey i went and learned about this because 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 um even winston churchill said uh from here on we will no longer say that uh greeks fight like heroes but heroes fight like greeks i mean it was a monumental battle and um you know not talked about enough and i i i 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 podcast like yours and to learn shit joe was is really like the progenitor of that i mean you know having intellectuals on and getting the public interested with this new medium um in in people who are intelligent it's nice because you know what the mainstream press pushes out is horseshit gorgeous horseshit it's got a beautiful veneer but no substance and so this this is a nice pushback yeah the authenticity of joe's show i mean i'm through i started listening from the very beginning you know doing my in grad school you know i 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 guests he's had and some of the most inspiring guests he's had so i'll teach you to think can you uh i don't know much about bernie madoff as a small tangent can you tell me who the hell is bernie man oh birdie madoff is the goat the greatest thief of all time dude um hedge fund guy ran a hedge fund and uh pulled uh stole the most money in the history of america i mean a con artist and um he just 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 uh by tricking the smartest and richest people in the world and a brilliant scam the con man uh con man is short for confidence man and it it came from yeah con men basically they they exude confidence and they trick people by playing on their ego and blind spots and uh the word comes from a guy i can't remember where but what he used to do i can't remember the guy's name and you know whatever you can google it con man but it's very interesting the the first con man that is on record what he would do it he would go to very rich people and he'd be very well dressed right and he'd go he's i bet you you don't have the confidence to give me your watch and he would plan the egos 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 because basically saying like i don't have the compass give him the watch because you don't i don't know you don't think i'm gonna give it back and he would just take it yeah so bernie madoff was a very sophistic sophisticated con man and again we were talking about people pretending to be the opposite of what they are bernie hid his uh 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 uh played on their egos he made it so people were wanted to invest in him like they were competing he made it very exclusive he 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 was he was had this pyramid scene going and so what he would do is he would just rob from the richer and he'd just get it was like he'd pay back the richer with the guy who was a little and it was a pyramid scheme and um 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 one percent 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 in that volkswagen beetle because if they use their reasoning for one second they'd go hey nobody can provide one percent 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 you maybe you can help explain something to me something i have been affected by way too loud for your listeners there's gonna be comments like tell this guy to calm down i'm sorry i'm greek a positive yeah no that's beautiful i love it 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 uh touched the wrong term by jeffrey epstein in the sense that literally literally and figuratively yeah and it always felt to me like there's not a deep conspiracy i don't know i don't know but it felt to me like it's not something deeply rooted conspiracy where like eric weinstein thinks that there's some probability that uh that uh jeffrey epstein is a front for like an intelligent agency whether it's israeli or uh 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 uh maybe a psychopathic in some sense so you know also a pedophile but just charismatic and is able to convince people of that one percent of any idea that uh in in the case of scientists is able to convince these people that their ideas matter uh so one thing scientists don't really you know 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 yeah right the personalized against science are obsessed with minutia and when they they do the scientific method you know how boring that is like you have to have a love for it yeah exactly in order to do it but the thing true what drives you is for your ideas to be then heard and when uh when a rich guy comes over probably super charismatic is going to tell you that your ideas especially so for some of these outsiders at mit at harvard and caltech all these like uh sort of uh big scien like physics biology artificial intelligence computing fields to hear somebody say that your ideas are brilliant and ideas matter it's pretty powerful especially when you've been an outsider like he's talked to a bunch of people who were who had outsider ideas you know the the the 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 uh derided and so when you have jeffrey epstein like a hyena sorry sorry sorry uh going from on the outside and picking off these brilliant minds that are the outsiders you can use charisma to convince them to uh to to collaborate with him to take his funding and then thereby he builds a reputation like uh slowly accumulates these people that actually results in a network of like some of the most brilliant people in the world you know and then pulls in people like bill gates and i don't know political figures i tend to believe that one one person can do that yeah i mean look at hitler charisma is blinding i think that's what con man speaking of bernie madoff that's one of their major tools is flattery glib superficial charm it creates those blind spots people want to hear how great they are they want to be flattered it it takes your defenses down plays to our ego the the how much we're all just pieces of garbage and want to hear how great we are we want that love from our mother and our father it's freudian and and they know because they're not burdened with that need they're not burdened with that uh empathy or emotions and they just see things very calculatively um 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 him dylan power because you know 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 yeah so it's like i wonder why he keeps complimenting me when we're in private exactly be careful he looks at me just your your i like your suit i like the cut of your jib yeah definitely i wouldn't be careful that kid he's hitler but it's crazy to me clip that please the internet i mean but i mean quentin tarantino said it to bed i mean in his grip personality goes a long way dude yeah i mean personality can 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 just it just you can be tricked because we have such a blind spot for uh you know for uh for flattery yeah i wonder i think there's a bbc documentary on uh i think it's called something like charisma hitler's charisma or something like that just 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 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 right to earn their trust and then convince them of anything you want right yeah i mean you're right because that's that's the one piece of history we don't have i don't know we don't know we do know that the kid crushed i mean he was a headliner he got up there and his phone 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 uh 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 uh the amount of evil we can do to other humans because of that especially nobody wants to look and 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 you know it's like get over it guys i mean it's like they killed jesus you get over it yeah okay it's a long time ago i mean move on i'm jewish i understand because we do run the central banks and 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 what is the weather like 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 you jews yeah it's like yeah there's certain conspiracies that make me like flat earth like what what's the motive like what who what's the motivation for lying that the earth is round like what's the conspiracy yeah what does anyone get out of it yeah what is exactly the profit what's what's the what's the strategy uh 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 uh i'm not necessarily conspiratorial um nobody cares that much um but they're but then you know what happens is you find out this one or this two uh and you start questioning everything and you start questioning everything man it's like you know the vietnam war started that was a lie um that was a false flag and then next thing you know everything's a false flag there are some strange things on 911 um 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 uh 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 where 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 um 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 kind of died just a neat just a neat the physical i mean you're a scientist is that well i don't i i has their resistance from the steel and so no is it in the free fall not all scientists know everything i'm just a computer guy okay because i had some questions i wanted to ask you about my biology but yeah so exactly i don't understand biology i don't understand the melting point of steel i don't but i'm just a 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 right so when you have a bunch of people that are afraid of losing their job you know and they just don't want to uh like the origins of the virus whether it came from a labyrinth or not you know that's a pretty i know a lot of biologists behind closed doors that that say it's very likely it was leaked from the lab right but like they don't want to 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 uh 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 you know 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 yeah internet internet yeah yeah and we also believe crazy shit too there's no yang without a yang i guess but the i think the conspiracy theories arise only when the people in positions of power and government and institutions are full of shit like the error 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 he just like says whatever the hell uh comes to mind by the way he's running for new york mayor there we go do you have opinions yeah it's no good i like andrew yang and it's no good i i'll be honest with you i'm i'm a lifelong new yorker i mean i'm a new yorker well you're in new york or so nothing's good well something is good okay and talking on let's be honest about new york yeah 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 countries not doing good um it's the most important city dc new york it's really rome be honest it's it's uh i maybe i'm biased i don't know no we just new yorkers we walk around everywhere we go this is just like new york but not new york it's um but and new york needs and i'm a guy who leans left i you know i just i lean left and that's just what it is a dictator is that where you're going no we don't like stalin we need it's a money town let's be come on man i mean new york is a money town and uh wall street and then when aoc and her cronies um at the local level rejected that amazon thing you're going like what do you think makes cities and what what's going to 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 you know whatever your opinions are about jeff bezos that's the world tech and they wants to come here of course you give them tax breaks that's why any companies go anywhere she's so fucking utopian and that 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 going to 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 follow shit like it did before so you're saying it basically needs a more capitalist front like capitalistic type of thinker that bloomberg giuliani when he was still sane and his hair wasn't melting off his face prosecutor you need to talk i mean i don't know what's happened that guy's lost it but it's fun yeah it's fun to watch yeah it's fun to watch him be just like uh trump's lacking like yeah boy whatever you want boss i'll just say whatever you want boys uh 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 it's a tough city that needs a tough mayor not some guy who's going like i understand we all need free money you know andrew yang i think is right in the big picture because all the real jobs are somewhere else 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 like 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 we're done so i i don't actually it's funny the 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 yeah like information which i just start a podcast don't run for mayor well yeah that's true he already has a podcast i think yang speaks who doesn't who doesn't fucking who does it now that's the way we communicate i don't even talk to people unless it's on a box what listen man i'm a i'm not going to criticize that because there is something like i talked to my dad on a podcast for four hours and i'm not sure i wouldn't i would ever talk to him in the way we talked without the podcast what does he do uh physicist oh shit but like yeah it's uh episode 100 and you know i uh 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 because you're giving him a platform uh especially so at that time this is already a bit of a platform for this podcast and so there's this as a sun you think like oh here it goes with this bullshit again like that's the natural sun 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 want to do a conversation where i'm happy with it you know so i want to make him shine but i also called him on like why were you so distant like like all 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 without a microphone right listen how often do we sit there and just focus our attention just look at the other person i i don't know man this is not even recording right now i just invited you over just so we could actually you're right the podcast does make like i listen 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 you're nervous or excited especially with people close to you i mean that was i recommend that actually for people to talk to their family on a podcast okay or like fake or not that's really powerful uh it made me realize that there's a clear distinction between the conversations we usually have with humans and those we have when the podcast is being recorded um what the fuck were we talking about before that uh i knew you were gonna lose your train of thought on that one because that's a big one there's a motion behind that one a podcast with dad is gonna take that's gonna take you to a place i took you to a place it took you outside of interviewer new york place yeah in new york and yang yeah so the data one of the things that really surprised me about [Laughter] i liked the psychoanalysis you just threw in there fucking million people listening to this 14 rogans isn't it enough dad i'm creating robots is that enough for you 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 uh i hope to pass that on to my kids one day uh that nothing's ever enough whether they're robot or human right your kids most likely let's be honest bro i call one of your robots if you love your are you starting to love your is it going to be like that pygmalion thing you create them and then they kill you but even while they're killing you you got a tear right here a slow one one tier one tear and just yeah why are you doing this frankenstein why but i loved you those would be the last words out of my mouth uh but andrew yang mentioned something on um that it cost uh four hundred thousand dollars over four hundred thousand dollars per year to support one person in prison in new york like when i heard that number it was really confusing to me like that 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 i think the free market is 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 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 will fix them well and then we can focus on the problems but if you just say like here's a problem here's the problem here's a problem let's make sure we have the safety net that protects against all these kinds of problems that's not going to that's going to kill the city the spirit of the uh 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 that's why i say it uh that's the reality of the situation is you know um i i'm all for the public good but yeah there needs to be back to that greek expression pon metro narstan i 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 um which i believe not to the extent that iran would but i do believe people are mostly self-interested especially with one gun to the head um 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 uh the excesses of capitalism and in certain scenarios is uh the more appropriate system you know in a vacuum so one being prisons or you know uh you know governance uh you know uh maybe even well and this is a difficult one but in health care health care it's unclear what's right there's a lot of debates there yeah doctors want boats so i guess you're voting for aoc you're saying but no i'm not vote for issue 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 it's a tough thing to uh to reconcile helping people curing people with the uh 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 are have anxiety like me who had coveted called 14 uh 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 health care system so we got to do something about that we got to 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 health care system you know you just hand it a salad and say sorry this burger's illegal for right now if you achieve these certain uh bmi goals then you can you can have this burger but right now you can that's where the state's important yeah okay to regulate our freedoms no slurpees i'm with you bloomberg well i'm with you to go along i think the salads are too expensive they should be subsidized if you if you go to like a fast food joint uh the burger is always going to be cheaper than the salad yeah and this does not make sense we should run this platform delicious i'll be your vice president we'll ban burgers for uh for people over a certain way and make salads cheap three-day work weeks why has that wait wait okay where are you going with this one good good for the economy stimulates the economy right more shifts it creates more jobs more people spending because they have more leisure time boosts the leisure economy you know why are we still doing the five-day work week that that was that was tempered from the seven-day work week that was so the seventh it used to be seven day work it used to be like and people who were just these libertarians like come on dude what is this fresh are we freshman in college yeah you're gonna you we're gonna talk about iron ran next like let's talk about reality okay and human nature people are fucking greedy they're they lie they you know there's no end to up which is one of my favorite expressions um no center up no end to up there's no in top but can we dissect that yeah from a randian perspective there's no end to up which is uh you just keep going it's never enough oh never enough no it's never enough no end to up more more more and you know you have to reconcile your fact that you're going to die so like there's no end up thing is that balance is 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 to keep it like that and that's the goal and it constantly vacillates uh according to the time you sometimes you need a little more socialism sometimes you need a little more capitalism you gotta you gotta you gotta fly the plane man you gotta fly the plane dude what's your um looking back at history hyenas is there a moment time period in history a person in history that's most fascinating to you you mentioned bernie madoff maybe he's second to birth made up is there in a 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 your curiosity that uh instructed the way you think about the world an individual or an event or an event individual uh you know yeah moment in history or person in history um there's a few but uh you know queen elizabeth uh the elizabethan era you know the sun never sets in the british empire very successful empire uh what an absolute success story that is for a leader and a woman um can you tell a little bit about her story well i actually don't know much about the bridge yeah she had a good run i think it's like 70 years you know there's a shakespeare the you know the oh i guess what's the word pax romana the the period of rome that was at peace and they flourished like a couple of emperors like trajan or some good ones and i think he was part of the pox romana that sort of just a peace and a comfortable flourishing time and england had sort of that in their empire under her successful range she murdered her cousin she you know the movies this is that you know um kate blanchett plays her and and does so and she didn't win the oscar because fucking gwyneth paltrow put a 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 and i perform um and i uh cate blanchett's incredible actress great movies she was just so and here's the thing she she never got married she was oh she was so um astute at public relations and and and imagine how strong you got to 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 yeah but she was she she did that propaganda thing and historians aren't uh haven't 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 oh you're directly referring to like using sex as a way to manipulate people well she her she was known as like the the virgin queen and uh and her thing was like i'm married to england like i can't be distracted by man a woman she never had any kids nothing i think she did that as a tool of manipulation yes which you need yeah rulers need to you know obama made you feel good and then he went 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 um she's a fascinating character to to ponder him because she was so successful and and and england flourished so much and uh it's just fascinating to me because she was the great virgin queen and can you think of a there's no other woman who was that say i mean angela merkel i mean come on yeah i mean there's nobody who comes close and defeating the spanish armada i think that happened under her i mean i'm no professionalist but i mean the woman crushed and uh do you think it's more effective to lead by love which just sounds like what she did from the pr perspective or by fear where where do you land on that would not give out peter that's a great question um i'm not we gotta ask joe well yeah this is interesting because i think leading in the 21st century in whatever ways is different i think it's very difficult to lead by fear i mean i'm that's why i 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 an espionage his background was in subterfuge and espionage i think i've said the word subdivision maybe 10 times now but he uh you like big words intellectuals i just i'm sitting here with you it's my it's time to flex um but he um he's very good at that right like uh controlling people with psychology and even if you look at the way he's sort of used the internet and um has sort of been you know gotten in to 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 because a pony's smaller would uh would you would you put queen elizabeth as the greatest leader of all time probably yeah i think as a woman and you look at uh you look at the the length of the rain i think it's like 70 something years or something like that with that she reigned success man success she used the church she used public psychology shakespeare the greatest playwright of all time uh under her reign you know people were going to plays and uh it was it was a successful run and she was marauding everywhere else marauding and and culling resources for the empire just say uh absolute successful it's even uh a token of her success we don't consider her a dictator yeah she's a dictator you know she was queen i this 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 fuhrer what is in germany he doesn't do any of the bad stuff he just rolls around and does legit 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 fun it's for ceremony he represents the country macedonia it's interesting to see that uh some you're starting to see a bit of that in russia with stalin actually the celebration of of a man that helped win the great patriotic war uh-oh yeah right so like you you're already starting to see that it's very possible in history books you'll be seen as maybe like a genghis khan type of character and you forget the millions that he tortured right so you're one of the most successful and brilliant people the world has ever seen so you're the good person to ask uh for advice you know there's a lot of young people that look up to you uh 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 you know 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 um the real magic of life the real true currency and this ephemeral life is sort of the communication that happens between people uh that's the real currency friendships love it's it's cliche but it's uh i think the meaning of life is to experience to experience love and uh i think uh people often mistake maybe it's because of hollywood films and things like that that love is uh feeling but it's not it's an action so uh 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 uh people can say things you can feel things um that doesn't mean they're necessarily real it's all chemical reactions it's all uh tied to our immaturity and uh psychological issues and uh survival but action when so when you do things when you act out of love and you that's that's what it's about is there uh times when you're younger where you were kind of this uh dishonest with who you are to yourself yeah in terms of like what what kind of things did you have to do to to shake yourself up and be like okay i thought um i thought i'm going to be a scientist but instead i i realized i'm going to do this yeah my parents make funny yeah my comedy is a hard thing to explain to uh you know an immigrant mother who came here and under nazi occupied crete and became a human rights lawyer and lawyer and my brother's a lawyer and my father was a lawyer you know clawed his way up his dad was a was a um to your disappointment i'm the black sheep yeah my brother went to oxford georgetown law brown you know has masters and you know good law degrees my mother has followed four law degrees uh you know uh she was on the human rights commission new york up for a judgeship under dinkins um wrote a you know uh she was the editor of unitard she she wrote a seminal piece on the human rights of children for the united nations um and yeah i was a comedian i was always a fuck up and uh 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 uh was there a question or did 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 um i was honest with myself and uh once i figured out it was an actual career path i wasn't even aware back then the internet wasn't huge you know in late 99 2000 it wasn't big yet so i didn't 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 i'm a video yeah i'm video oh thank you thank you thank you and the reason why i kept saying thank you because i forgot my old jokes i was so scared and then they laughed because of the amount of times i said thank you and then once they laughed i was 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 that's the only thing i can do and um yeah i had that you know it's funny because there's uh i've similar experience like immigrant family and the world tells you to do certain things and you think that's right but but then you put yourself in situations by luck probably where it's like oh this this this is this feels right i don't know what this means but this feels right i think the the the biggest moment like that for me was uh i don't know what to make of it exactly but when i met spot the robot the legged robot it was like five years ago it felt like this there 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 and i was like i don't want to be a professor at that point i realized i don't want to do sort of uh 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 and also i think uh just to just to piggyback off it i think that means no matter what it is because i think our uh 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 a it's like um where everyone has healthcare and stuff like that because everyone's a little is valued more it's like whatever if you want to be a doormat dude like 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 with your possessions are a lot little you know it's like i i i have met some doormen i have met some tax covers that i a lot of you not are more fascinating i have comedians are horrible people i want to get away from all that i have very few friends paul versi tim dillon who are comedians because 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 because they're fucking sociopaths yeah 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 famous 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 uh uh you shouldn't have trusted me you stupid fuck so on that note be honest i've been a huge fan of yours i love what you're doing with long days now your new podcast and um i obviously love all the stuff you've done before with history hyenas the chemistry the the chemistry you have with yourself it's 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 today it means so much to me to hear you say that i really appreciate i'm a big fan of yours and have meown's been amazing and just thank you man thank you for having me on and people if they want to watch my special it's called blowing the light it's on youtube and please come listen to long days of the podcast let's go eat some barbecue let's do it thanks for listening to this conversation with janice pappas 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