Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1504 - Alan Levinovitz
Uploaded: 2020-07-08T19:00:04.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1504 - Alan Levinovitz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1504 - Alan Levinovitz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-07-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1504 - Alan Levinovitz

Hello, Alan.
Hello, Joe.
Good to see you.
First of all, thank you for this, this piece of pyrite that's embedded into
stone.
And we just started talking.
I said, just don't say another word.
Let's start talking about this on the podcast.
Because this, it kind of, it's interesting.
I started your book, which I very rarely read books.
I mostly do audio books, but I was forced to read yours.
But one of the things that I found interesting is the concept of what is
natural.
And I've gone over this many times myself.
I'm like, poison's natural.
Like, everything's natural.
Computers are natural, really, because they come from the ground.
They're made by people.
They're essentially like, you know, a human's version of anything like a bird
would create, right?
Birds create birds' nests.
Are those natural?
But this pyrite, this is pyrite, right?
Yep.
Which is fool's gold, right?
Fool's gold.
But it's naturally in these cubes, in this square form, these perfect angles,
which you
would never believe.
You would think somebody left this shit there.
I didn't believe it.
It looks like aliens left them.
Yeah.
And they're even in, like what that's called, is it's in the matrix.
Oh, wow.
So sometimes you can just get the cubes.
They're just the cube, but they call the rock that it's in the matrix, which I
think is
kind of appropriate.
That is going to have a permanent spot on this desk with all this other craziness
here.
Thank you so much.
That was really cool.
I did not know that it came like that.
I found pyrite when I was a kid in rocks, you know, when they call it fool's
gold.
Oh, Jamie's going to bring that up to you there.
Perfect.
Fool's gold.
But it's, you know, it's usually like specks and flecks and stuff.
There's another one called, I forget, they're called like Illinois miners'
dollars or something.
This is another form that pyrite takes.
I'm kind of obsessed with weird rocks, but they look just like sand dollars,
but they're
gold.
Oh, wow.
Like they look like they're golden.
And so these are, you know, I think one of the things, I actually changed my
mind over
writing, like over the course of writing this book.
Oh, there they are.
Jamie pull-ups.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
They're incredible, right?
What causes it to take on these different, completely unusual forms?
So I tried to find out, there's like a local rock store where I live and I
asked the guy
and apparently, I don't understand how it works at all, but the way all
crystals work is they
have different kinds of structures and the way those structures come together
determines
whether, you know, it makes like a quartz crystal or what shape it takes.
It's very, it's very surreal.
Yeah, it's very surreal.
This is very bizarre.
I did not know until you gave this to me that that existed.
Yeah.
And this is so like, for me, I went into this book, like you said, right, with
this question
of what's natural.
There's some people like, often scientists who will sort of scoff at the idea
of naturalness,
right?
They're like, everything's natural, right?
Humans are natural.
We're animals.
We made all this stuff.
We made the microphones.
We're all made out of space dust.
Everything's natural.
It's stupid to distinguish between natural and unnatural.
And honestly, that's where I was when I started writing the book.
I was like, I'm going to make, I'm going to show this as a stupid idea.
I'm going to, I'm going to be Richard Dawkins, but for naturalness.
Right.
But I was wrong.
I don't know.
What shifted it for you?
Well, so one of the things like with that pyrite, right, people ask, is it
natural?
That's the first thing they ask.
Does this occur naturally?
Right.
And it's an important question because there's a difference, like a sort of
profound difference
between knowing that that was just spewed up by the earth forces that are not
human,
right?
Versus humans sitting down and deciding to make a cube, right?
It's like a diamond that has been shaped by millions of years of natural forces.
And what I realized is that it really does make sense to distinguish between
naturalness
and unnaturalness.
You have to.
Maybe it's a spectrum, obviously, right?
So it's not an easy binary.
But New York City is not as natural as Yellowstone.
Right.
And what I realized was I wasn't really against the idea of naturalness or even
valuing nature,
right?
I mean, hopefully we'll talk about I went backcountry in Yellowstone.
It was unbelievable.
You know, I mean, everyone values naturalness in certain ways.
It was worshiping nature that I had a problem with.
This idea that the more natural something is, the better it is or that what we
need to do,
like if you want to raise your kid, right, you got to raise your kid naturally.
You like, you know, let them piss in the corner or like elimination
communication.
Do you know about this?
No.
I swear.
So I think some celebrities have been into it, like Alicia Silverstone's did it
with her
son, Bear.
Isn't it funny that that automatically dismisses it?
You mean the fact that his name is Bear?
No, no, no.
Just the fact that it's a celebrity thing.
Like celebrities do it.
It's like I dismiss it.
Interesting.
That's a different.
I actually thought it was the name Bear that dismissed it.
No, I have a good friend who has a son named Bear.
I mean, I guess it makes sense if you're really obsessed with naturalness,
right, and you're
toilet training your kid, then you don't want to like be using diapers and you
don't want
to be using a toilet.
You want it to be like nature, right?
Like, so when I talked with, uh, with anthropologists who work with hunter
gatherers, you know, I asked
them like, how does, you know, how does potty training work?
And they were like, what do you mean?
Like people just piss in the forest.
And you know, if you, if you take a shit in someone's lap, they're going to be
really upset
at you and it doesn't, you know, and then you figure it out and then you figure
it out in
daddy's lap.
Exactly.
Um, but there's this idea, right.
That, that, and so that's how, that's what we should be doing with our children.
And, and I don't know about you, but like when I, you know, when we had our
daughter, I was
online and I'm like, okay, well, how do I parent my child?
What are the right things to do?
Like, should she be in my bed?
Should she be in the crib?
And time and time again, I always read about how hunter gatherers parented
their babies.
Right.
And it was always like, this is the natural way to parent your kid.
So it must be better.
And, and I realized that was, that was where I had my problem that, that it's
fine to love
nature, but you shouldn't worship it.
Well, human beings have done horrible things to their children from the
beginning of time
without anybody telling them to do it or not to do it.
And I don't know if that's natural, but yeah, I mean, if it occurs enough, it's
kind of
natural, like pedophilia occurs a lot, is that natural?
So, so there was a, there's a, there was, yeah.
I mean, you know, if it essentially, again, right, if natural is defined as
whatever sort
of emerges spontaneously out of forces that weren't willed by human beings,
which is what
I think natural is, right?
So we say we have natural instincts.
In other words, it's whatever we didn't will, it just comes out of us.
There's a, there's a woman who's an expert on captivity.
So kidnapping, slavery, named Catherine Cameron.
And I was interviewing her and she said, you know, it is as natural as the
nuclear family
to have slaves, right?
So slavery is a thing that has been done forever and ever.
I mean, you imagine, right?
So you're pre-agricultural, your tribe, your group requires certain population.
Can't get too high, can't get too low.
And so kidnapping other people's children, it's often a common thing.
So is that good?
Well, clearly not, right?
Or, you know, dying in childbirth.
Um, these, these are all things that are natural, but are obviously not good.
And so I start, I started to see the way in which this word was being abused.
Basically people would use natural to describe whatever they favored and
unnatural to describe
whatever they didn't like, right?
People do it with sex.
People do it with child rearing.
People do it with economic theories, right?
You want a natural market with no interference.
And that's how people would justify a free market.
You've got other people who are like, actually money is unnatural.
You really want a barter system.
That was what emerged naturally out of humans.
And I'm sitting here looking at both of these arguments.
I'm like, no, you want an economy that works.
Right.
It doesn't matter whether it's natural or not.
Yeah.
That's a really good point.
You know, one of the things that I saw in your book, uh, was you were talking
to Joel
Salatin, who I love.
And, um, he's a strange man, um, but a beautiful person.
I re I really love what he's doing with polyface farms, but he drinks the water
that the cows
drink out of so that he gets that in his biome.
You know, he's, he's a real freak.
But when you were talking about New York city and, uh, you know, would his
method of farming
work to feed a city as big as New York?
He's like, do you need a city as big as New York?
Then I'm like, okay, hit the brakes right now.
We're in the weeds because I love New York.
It's a great place to visit.
I don't want to live there, but it's awesome.
I mean, when you go to New York, if you, you're, if you're in a hotel that has
like a 30th
floor and you look out and you see the skiddy, the city's skyscrape, you know,
you see all
the, the, you know, the skyline, all the different beautiful buildings lit up
at night.
I mean, that is an amazing, spectacular site that I am very thankful exists.
I love it there.
Yeah.
I'm great.
I mean, grateful for all that.
I mean, there's so many, it's, it's, it's insane really to be right now.
If someone's listening to this podcast, here we are, we've got microphones.
We're beaming this conversation to millions of people.
And to think that, that simultaneously people would be thinking to themselves,
the criteria
I'm going to use to judge whether something is good or bad with a capital G or
a capital
B is how natural it is.
Right.
This is totally unnatural.
As unnatural, as unnatural as it gets.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus, right.
Which is, you know, natural, of course, people will say, well, actually we
wouldn't have been
infected if only we lived more naturally.
Right.
So the problem is urban density or the problem is that you shouldn't be going
into the jungle
and getting things.
But like, this is, you know, there's actually an argument against that though,
the, the,
the virus itself, more evidence is coming out daily that it's been manipulated,
that it most
likely did come out of that lab.
I had Brett Weinstein on the podcast, who's a biologist, and he was talking
about all the
various aspects of the virus that really don't exist naturally in, in, in, in
this form without
having evolved for a long period of time.
The fact that it just emerged and made this leap from bats to the form that it
is now in
people, he's like, it's far too contagious.
It's far too prolific.
It's, there's so many different, I'm going to fuck it up if I talk about the
technical
details of it.
And when he was describing it, he was saying more evidence points to the fact
that it was
actually something that had been manipulated by people than that it was a
natural virus.
So, I mean, I don't, I'm not a biologist.
I have no idea, but I think what, I think what's weird or what I would want to
push back
on, and this is a religious studies scholar, right?
Because this is, this is where I came to all the natural, natural stuff to
begin
with is if something's bad, I think people are immediately going to think, oh,
it makes
sense that it was unnatural.
It makes sense that this bad thing that's hurting us couldn't be natural.
But, but the truth is some things that hurt us are natural.
There you go, or, you know, again, I mean, I