Joe Rogan Experience #1504 - Alan Levinovitz

1. 0:00 – 15:00

   Hello, Alan. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan0:01

      Hello, Alan.

   2. ALAlan Levinovitz0:02

      Hello, Joe.

   3. JRJoe Rogan0:02

      Good to see you. Um, first of all, thank you for this. This, uh, piece of pyrite that's embedded into stone. And, um, we, 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, um, I very rarely read books.

   4. ALAlan Levinovitz0:22

      (laughs)

   5. JRJoe Rogan0:22

      I mostly do audiobooks. Uh, but, uh, I was forced to read yours. But, uh, one of the things, uh, that I, I found interesting is the concept of what is natural. And I've, 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, uh, anything, like, a bird would create, right?

   6. ALAlan Levinovitz0:46

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan0:46

      Birds create birds nests. Are those natural? But this pyrite, this is pyrite, right?

   8. ALAlan Levinovitz0:52

      Yup.

   9. JRJoe Rogan0:52

      Which is fool's gold, right?

   10. ALAlan Levinovitz0:54

       Fool's gold.

   11. JRJoe Rogan0:55

       But it's naturally in these cubes, in these, this, this square form, this perfect, these perfect angles, which you would never believe.

   12. ALAlan Levinovitz1:05

       I-

   13. JRJoe Rogan1:05

       You would think somebody left this shit there.

   14. ALAlan Levinovitz1:06

       I, I didn't believe it. It looks like, it looks like aliens left them.

   15. JRJoe Rogan1:09

       Yeah.

   16. ALAlan Levinovitz1:09

       And they're even in, like, what that's called is it's in the matrix.

   17. JRJoe Rogan1:13

       Oh, wow.

   18. ALAlan Levinovitz1:13

       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-

   19. JRJoe Rogan1:19

       Dude, that-

   20. ALAlan Levinovitz1:19

       ... kind of a- kind of appropriate. (laughs)

   21. JRJoe Rogan1:21

       That is going to have a permanent spot on this desk with all this other craziness here.

   22. ALAlan Levinovitz1:24

       Cool.

   23. JRJoe Rogan1:24

       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 gonna bring that up to you there. Um-

   24. ALAlan Levinovitz1:35

       Perfect.

   25. JRJoe Rogan1:36

       Fool's gold, but it's, you, you know, it's usually like specks and flecks and stuff.

   26. ALAlan Levinovitz1:40

       There's another one called, I for- I forget, they're called, like, Illinois miner's dollars or something. This is another form that pyrite takes. Uh, I- I'm kind of obsessed with weird rocks. Um, but they look just like sand dollars, but they're gold.

   27. JRJoe Rogan1:53

       Oh, wow.

   28. ALAlan Levinovitz1:53

       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, uh, like, over the course of writing this book.

   29. JRJoe Rogan2:00

       Oh, there they are. Jamie, pull up some full size.

   30. ALAlan Levinovitz2:01

       Yeah. That's what I-
2. 15:00 – 30:00

   Yeah, well, that, I…

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:00

      alive and being able to trade in goods and services for whatever that, they've created, and then we don't think about the consequences of utilizing this stuff. Like, what is, there's gotta be, there's some sort of a balance, right? There's a balance between ... Like, if you want to have a fireplace in your house, that's wonderful. Fireplaces are great. It's a nice smell, right? You w- you walk in the house, you smell the fireplace. If you're walking down the street and someone's got their fireplace on, it smells good. But if the whole fucking place is on fire, it's terrible. You're filled with smoke, you can't breathe. It's like, there's a balance. And clearly when you see polluted cities, clearly when you see polluted rivers and we're destroying the environment, there's a, a lack of balance. We've utilized this power that we have to manipulate our environment, but we've done it completely irresponsibly or we've done it without the abou- without the awareness of the consequences of eight million people doing the exact same thing.

   2. ALAlan Levinovitz15:56

      Yeah, well, that, I mean, the scale you can do stuff on with-

   3. JRJoe Rogan15:59

      Yeah.

   4. ALAlan Levinovitz15:59

      ... tech- technology's really increa- I mean, it's, it's made us incredibly powerful, right? There's Stewart Brand, the guy who started The Whole Earth Catalog, you know, said basically we've become like gods, so we have to be able to wield this power responsibly. I think it's easy to see that and say, "Well, then the evil is in the form of the power itself." Right? Obviously then if we've got a nuclear bomb or we've got, you know, if we're polluting the world, then the problem is with, with the technology itself, so you locate the evil in that technology. Whereas, you know, what you're saying, I mean, take, take burning wood, which is a great example. You know, we've got a lot of people on Earth now. We have them because kids aren't fucking dying all the time, right? I mean, the, so there's, there's some, there are some things that I discovered while I was reading this. For example, have you seen that cartoon, um, where there's two cavemen in a room. It's a New Yorker cartoon, and they're talking to ... Or they're not in a room. They're cavemen. They're in a cave. Sorry. (laughs)

   5. JRJoe Rogan16:51

      In a cave. (laughs)

   6. ALAlan Levinovitz16:51

      So they're in a cave and they're talking to each other and one of them's like, "You know, we eat organic, we exercise all the time, and, like, nobody's living past the age of 35. What's going on?" (laughs) Right?

   7. JRJoe Rogan17:00

      (laughs)

   8. ALAlan Levinovitz17:00

      So there's, there's this, that's, and that's the people that are like, "Nature's bullshit" take, right?

   9. JRJoe Rogan17:03

      Yeah.

   10. ALAlan Levinovitz17:03

       They're like ... But it, but actually it turns out that that cartoon is bullshit, so people didn't just die at age 35. That was average lifespan because tons of kids were dying between the age of zero and five. Truth is, if you made it past five, then you had a pretty good shot at, like, 60 or 70, um, so, so it wasn't so bad in the state of nature. At the same time, there's another vision of what's happening to us now. Have you seen that evolution, there's like an evolution cartoon where it starts with, I don't know, like, Paleolithic man or a chimpanzee or something, and then it gets to, like, a big strong hunter with a spear? And then technology comes in and they hunch over at the end and they get obese and they've got, like, a Coke in one hand, and there's this idea, like, well, technology is now ... We were perfect when we were natural, and then technology has made us worse. And for me, it's what you were saying. It's a balance, right?

   11. JRJoe Rogan17:56

       Yeah.

   12. ALAlan Levinovitz17:56

       There are ways in which technology ... Like, my dad, my dad is, is 91. The ... I talk to, you know, I talk to anthropologists, and, like, despite what you might, you know, m- what you might think, th- there aren't a lot of 91-year-old hunter-gatherers.They're just not out there.

   13. JRJoe Rogan18:12

       No.

   14. ALAlan Levinovitz18:12

       So I'm like really grateful that my dad, (laughs) you know, a super healthy 91-year-old. That is, that's crazy. That's an incredible thing we've done. I'm glad that kids aren't dying all the time. And Dad ... You know, I'm glad that mothers aren't dying in childbirth. That's, those are incredible things, like New York City, right? At the same time, it's, we're destroying the world.

   15. JRJoe Rogan18:29

       Right.

   16. ALAlan Levinovitz18:30

       So we gotta, we gotta work out these problems without using simple binaries to figure out what's good and what's bad. It's better to have solar power than billions of humans burning wood.

   17. JRJoe Rogan18:42

       Right.

   18. ALAlan Levinovitz18:43

       But solar power's, obviously, to me at least, less natural than lighting a piece of wood on, a piece of wood on fire.

   19. JRJoe Rogan18:47

       Solar power doesn't bother me at all.

   20. ALAlan Levinovitz18:49

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan18:50

       It ... I mean, I, I love solar power. But I, I, I, I'm totally on board with what you're saying, and there is some sort of a balance. And, uh, you know, the, the nihilists, like I have f- friends that will say, you know, "We shou- we shouldn't have children" and, "There's too many people in the world" and, uh, "Overpopulation's our biggest problem." I'm like, "Yeah. But I love people." Don't you love people?

   22. ALAlan Levinovitz19:10

       (laughs)

   23. JRJoe Rogan19:10

       Like w- a world without people would suck for people. Like if y- do you, do you remember that cartoon? There was a, um, an, um ... excuse me, uh, not a cartoon. It was an episode of, um, (smacks lips) uh, Twilight Zone, where Burgess Meredith, he, uh, is the last man on Earth and he accidentally breaks his glasses and he can't read. He's, uh, he's always just wanted alone time to read his books and he's always been bothered by all these people, and then he's inside... I forget what he's in, a bank vault or something like that, and there's a nuclear catastrophe, uh, something along those lines. And he leaves this area to go outside and he realizes that he's th- literally the last person on Earth, but he has all these books to read and he's so excited and he starts b- picking up these books, but then he breaks his glasses-

   24. ALAlan Levinovitz19:55

       (laughs)

   25. JRJoe Rogan19:55

       ... and he's fucked. And, um, I mean, the, the ideal of being the last person on Earth is one of the ... That's, that's probably one of the most terrifying ideas for a person, to be completely isolated and alone forever with no one to talk to. We love each other. People love people. We like being around each other. We like, we like commu- we like the love of other people. We, we, we, we wanna talk. And w- and, i- it's like a vitamin. I mean, really, it's like how you get vitamin D from the sun, you get vitamin L from people. You really need it. It was-

   26. ALAlan Levinovitz20:26

       We, we don't-

   27. JRJoe Rogan20:26

       It's, it's a legitimate need.

   28. ALAlan Levinovitz20:27

       And we don't want people to die.

   29. JRJoe Rogan20:29

       Right.

   30. ALAlan Levinovitz20:29

       And one of the things about evolution is the, you know, I say this in the book, the, the gears of evolution are greased with death. Right? That's what it is.
3. 30:00 – 45:00

   Cocaine, Coca-Cola. …

   1. JRJoe Rogan30:00

   2. ALAlan Levinovitz30:00

      Cocaine, Coca-Cola.

   3. JRJoe Rogan30:00

      Yeah.

   4. ALAlan Levinovitz30:01

      Ultra-processed foods, stomach share. All right, we're back, uh, we're back where we were.

   5. JRJoe Rogan30:04

      We should tell people that this coca, this Coca-Cola, when they do take the coca leaf and they process it and use the flavor for Coca-Cola, then they take the cocaine out of it-

   6. ALAlan Levinovitz30:14

      (laughs) Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan30:14

      ... and then it's the number one medical supplier of cocaine, is the, are the people that do that. So literally medical cocaine, like lidocaine and all that shit comes from a lot of it from Coca-Cola.

   8. ALAlan Levinovitz30:25

      I didn't know, I didn't know it was the same plant. That's crazy.

   9. JRJoe Rogan30:27

      It's crazy, yeah. That's medical cocaine.

   10. ALAlan Levinovitz30:31

       So, these people are trying to conquer our stomachs. And they did it. Right? And one of the ways they did it also was make it cheap and accessible. There's vending machines in every school. I mean, think for a second how crazy that is, that there are vending machines with just Coca-Cola and candy bars-

   11. JRJoe Rogan30:45

       Yeah.

   12. ALAlan Levinovitz30:45

       ... and stuff in every single school we have. You know, it's... That... But- but it happened, right? And so now we live in a world in which extremely cheap, highly palatable, and very accessible food is everywhere. No wonder we have a problem with our diets. And that's exactly what's happening with information right now. So, I... As- as I understand it, the way in which Twitter was designed, for example, they consulted with people who wanted to figure out how to keep you compulsively coming back. So, like slot machines, right? They consulted with people who build slot machines to figure out, "Okay, what p- what keeps people pulling the lever," right? So they could just have it refresh. You just have your tweets at the top. But instead there's a little alert button, right? You pull down, there's a little noise like (beep) or whatever the noise is when you-

   13. JRJoe Rogan31:33

       Mm-hmm.

   14. ALAlan Levinovitz31:33

       ... when you pull down on it, you know? And so they've made it compulsive. They've made it highly palatable. Right? You wanna- you wanna keep coming back. And the thing is, the difference between ultra-processed information and ultra-processed food is that I think we're- we're- we're the companies now. And that really freaks me out.

   15. JRJoe Rogan31:54

       Mm-hmm.

   16. ALAlan Levinovitz31:54

       We're the consumers. We're also the manufacturers, and we're also the distributors. We make the memes. Someone is gonna take some cut of this show and turn it into a soundbite that's highly palatable in the way that y- that information becomes highly palatable. It's gonna be oversimplified.

   17. JRJoe Rogan32:14

       Right.

   18. ALAlan Levinovitz32:15

       It's gonna have heroes and villains. It's gonna have a- it's gonna demonize someone, and it's going to be something that gives you a sense of belonging. Those are the three things I think that make information highly processed and highly palatable. We want a hit of information that's easy to understand, that demonizes someone, and that gives us a sense of belonging. And that's just like exploiting what humans want, right? You're saying, you know, we're creatures that wanna love each other. We wanna belong, right? It's the s- just the same way we wanna taste salt, sugar, and fat, we wanna feel these things. And the information that we have around us now, it's the- it's the same thing as a Snickers bar, except the difference is w- we're Snickers. We're making it.

   19. JRJoe Rogan32:57

       And we're behaving like junkies.

   20. ALAlan Levinovitz32:59

       Yeah.

   21. JRJoe Rogan33:00

       Like rabid junkies. If you look at, I don't know what percentage of Twitter discourse ends in people being angry with each other, but it seems like it's half, at least. I mean, it's just there's so much rabid discourse. There's just people pissed at each other and insulting each other. And it's so unlike anywhere else in the world in t- un- unless you're in a fucking war zone. Like the way people talk to each other. If people talked to each other in real life the way they talked in- on Twitter, the emergency ward would be filled with people with broken faces and- and- and- and shattered eye sockets. It'd be chaos.

   22. ALAlan Levinovitz33:37

       Well, it's like road- it's road rage.

   23. JRJoe Rogan33:38

       Yeah.

   24. ALAlan Levinovitz33:38

       It's how you treat people. It's how you treat the person in the other car that's cut you off, because they're not- they've been dehumanized.

   25. JRJoe Rogan33:43

       Mm-hmm.

   26. ALAlan Levinovitz33:43

       They're isolated, right? It's like Twitter just allows you to... And social media, in c- in certain ways, facilitates being angry in the way that you get angry at other car- You like honk and you're like, "Fuck you, man. I hate you." It's like- it... Like

   27. JRJoe Rogan33:55

       But do you know what also-

   28. ALAlan Levinovitz33:56

       (laughs)

   29. JRJoe Rogan33:56

       ... causes that?

   30. ALAlan Levinovitz33:57

       Yeah.
4. 45:00 – 1:00:00

   Why do we... I…

   1. JRJoe Rogan45:00

      just screaming and yelling, "I'm gonna fucking stab you." But it's just a bad analogy from a person who's trying very hard to virtue signal. Cut to next video, she was crying that people had found the video, and they were attacking her, and then she got fired. And she got fired from this job that she really loved. And there was, in the comments of this, there was all these laughing emojis with the laughing with the tears coming out, where people were taking pleasure out of the fact this person made this misstep. She's a young... She looked like she was in her 20s. She made this, y- you know, she thought she was like putting something out in the world to stand up for people that are being maligned and mistreated and, you know, and, and wronged by society and that there's a, there should be a balance and to understand the balance. And she made a terrible analogy. It just d- It wasn't good. But the fact that people were taking pleasure in the fact that this person got fired from it was very disturbing.

   2. ALAlan Levinovitz45:58

      Why do we... I mean, I'm just sitting here thinking, like, wh- why do I, why have I seen this? Why have you seen this? Like you knew-

   3. JRJoe Rogan46:04

      Yeah.

   4. ALAlan Levinovitz46:04

      You're basically, it's like, why did we consume that?

   5. JRJoe Rogan46:06

      I didn't know what it was until I started watching it.

   6. ALAlan Levinovitz46:07

      Why did that get part of my, my soul share, right?

   7. JRJoe Rogan46:09

      Yeah.

   8. ALAlan Levinovitz46:09

      Of their stomach share. Like, why is that video even a part of my brain? It should not be in there. There's no reason for it. It could be, there's a million better things that could occupy that slot.

   9. JRJoe Rogan46:23

      But there's a fascination the same way there's a fascination of people jumping off buildings into a pool and missing and hitting the concrete.

   10. ALAlan Levinovitz46:28

       Right. Yeah.

   11. JRJoe Rogan46:29

       You know? I mean, I've seen a lot of those.

   12. ALAlan Levinovitz46:31

       (laughs)

   13. JRJoe Rogan46:31

       There's something, just something about missteps because you know it could be you. Look, I'm a moron. If I was on a roof with one of my good friends and I had a couple of beers in me and they're like, "Do you wanna make the jump?" I'm like, "Fuck, should we?" Like especially if I was 18, I probably would have jumped. You know? Like there's a lot of people that do... If I was her and I was 18, I probably would have made a s- a similar dumb video.

   14. ALAlan Levinovitz46:51

       I- if the thing is though, it's inter- Okay, so with the, with the, with the swimming pool, right?

   15. JRJoe Rogan46:54

       Mm-hmm.

   16. ALAlan Levinovitz46:54

       This is, it's one thing, actually think it's one thing to mock someone for just doing some stupid shit. It's another thing when the, when the background, and this again gets back to this idea of ultra-processed information. When the background, w- when what makes it so exciting is not that they're stupid or they did something or that could have been you, but that they're evil, right? Ah, I get to watch evil.

   17. JRJoe Rogan47:17

       Right.

   18. ALAlan Levinovitz47:17

       And I'm just good, I'm good just because I'm feeling that this person's evil.

   19. JRJoe Rogan47:22

       Right. Right.

   20. ALAlan Levinovitz47:22

       And that part, it's very different from, I, I mean, it's very different from, what was it, like America's Funniest Home Videos, right? Like that's not-

   21. JRJoe Rogan47:28

       (laughs)

   22. ALAlan Levinovitz47:28

       That was not a show where you were like-

   23. JRJoe Rogan47:30

       Right.

   24. ALAlan Levinovitz47:30

       ... tuning in to find out who the evil people were, right?

   25. JRJoe Rogan47:33

       Right.

   26. ALAlan Levinovitz47:33

       And then being like, "Look at those people. If we j- Like, they deserve what they got." That would be crazy. It's so-

   27. JRJoe Rogan47:38

       Yeah.

   28. ALAlan Levinovitz47:38

       I mean, just thinking about our attitude, oof.

   29. JRJoe Rogan47:42

       Yeah.

   30. ALAlan Levinovitz47:42

       I, I don't know. It's, it's really intense.
5. 1:00:00 – 1:09:56

   (laughs) …

   1. ALAlan Levinovitz1:00:00

      While researching contraception and naturalness, I ran into a book called Holy Sex, which is like a Catholic's guide to, and I'm, I'm paraphrasing the title here, mind-blowing, mind-blowing, toe-curling, like-

   2. JRJoe Rogan1:00:14

      (laughs)

   3. ALAlan Levinovitz1:00:14

      ... Go- Go- Like, like divinely sanctioned sex, right? And I'm reading through it, and there was a section on w- whether or not... So, so, so Catholic theories, uh, really intense Catholic philosophers will deny this, but they'll say natural means something else and they'll kinda like do all this complicated reasoning, but it's not really true. They're drawing on what's natural and what isn't in the sense of what's in nature. And the idea is that sex has to be natural. So for a long time it was that sex has to be tailored to procreation, right? So you can't have anal sex, you can't have oral sex, you can't do coitus interruptus, which is pulling out, right? All of those are bad because what God wants, what he's designed naturally is for a penis to go into a vagina and ejaculate into it to make a baby. So that was it. That was the criteria. But then we had too many people in the world.... and, and Catholics were getting upset. They were like, "Well, (laughs) I don't wanna have any more kids. I don't want seven kids. I don't have a farm." Like, there's all these reasons that people didn't wanna have kids.

   4. JRJoe Rogan1:01:12

      So they came up with the rhythm method.

   5. ALAlan Levinovitz1:01:13

      So you got the rhythm method, right. And The Rhythm Method, this guy Latz, um, the author of The Rhythm Method, he spends most of the ethics section of that book, which was an enormous bestseller, 'cause they, they didn't disc- God didn't tell people about The Rhythm Method (laughs) until, until like the 20th century. He could've told them earlier, but he didn't. So Latz spends this whole book talking about how natural it is, and he's like, "Look, this is natural. These are natural cycles." Um, and there's a, there's a great, great quote. Some guy's like, "In the Catholic Church, you can use mathematics to prevent contraception but not physics or chemistry," right?

   6. JRJoe Rogan1:01:47

      (laughs)

   7. ALAlan Levinovitz1:01:47

      So (laughs) I was like, right? It doesn't make any sense.

   8. JRJoe Rogan1:01:49

      (laughs)

   9. ALAlan Levinovitz1:01:49

      Like, how is this, how is it natural to sort of plan your sex around rhythms? And this all goes back to the book, the holy sex book, which is that, so then if the rhythm method is natural, right, then it can't be that sex has to be directed to procreation, right? Because you got a bunch of people who are having sex at, at exactly the times where it won't result in procreation. So they changed their understanding of what natural sex is to just depositing ... it ends with depositing semen in a vagina. And in this book, there's a whole section on, like, well, what about, like, you know, anal sex (laughs) and dildos? And basically, he's like, "If you follow the one rule, and it ends in the right way, then you can do everything else." And I'm reading this book-

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:02:32

       One rule. What rule is that?

   11. ALAlan Levinovitz1:02:33

       Deposit the semen in the vagina.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:02:35

       So you could do all that stuff as long as when you ejaculate, it's inside a vagina.

   13. ALAlan Levinovitz1:02:40

       That's exactly right. And I'm reading this-

   14. JRJoe Rogan1:02:41

       What?

   15. ALAlan Levinovitz1:02:41

       ... and I'm like, th- how can you say this is natural?

   16. JRJoe Rogan1:02:43

       (laughs)

   17. ALAlan Levinovitz1:02:43

       And through his whole book, he's saying it too. He's like, "You know if you don't ejaculate, if you don't end by ejaculating in the vagina, all kinds of bad things happen to you biologically," right? Your serotonin levels go down or whatever, all the same kinds of rationalizations that people give whenever they're trying to show that something was designed by nature-

   18. JRJoe Rogan1:02:58

       Yeah.

   19. ALAlan Levinovitz1:02:59

       ... to be a certain way. Um, I, I, it was ... And to me, again, it's like, no, with abortion or with contraception or whatever, we should be asking ourselves, "What, what works? What is it that we want? And what is it that works?" And that's a complicated question. It's gonna be different depending on your culture, depending on the needs that you have at any given time in history, right?

   20. JRJoe Rogan1:03:19

       It's also, there's an inherent problem with religion is that a lot of what they're doing is just controlling. They're controlling people. And what people want is freedom. They want the freedom to be able to do whatever they want. If two people get together and they just wanna use dildos on each other, why did, w- why was any- w- why would anybody have a problem with that? Do, d- do you wanna do it? Does she wanna do it? Everybody's happy. Have a good time. Like-

   21. ALAlan Levinovitz1:03:44

       (laughs)

   22. JRJoe Rogan1:03:44

       ... th- why does God care if God invented dildos, right?

   23. ALAlan Levinovitz1:03:48

       (laughs) If God did- ... Well, that's, that goes back to the natural thing, right?

   24. JRJoe Rogan1:03:50

       Yes.

   25. ALAlan Levinovitz1:03:50

       So that's exactly right. So now God ... They'll be like, "No, God didn't invent dildos. People invented dildos." (laughs)

   26. JRJoe Rogan1:03:55

       God invented the idea of dildos.

   27. ALAlan Levinovitz1:03:57

       (laughs)

   28. JRJoe Rogan1:03:57

       Every idea that you have comes from God.

   29. ALAlan Levinovitz1:03:59

       Don't, don't ask me (laughs) to defend stuff I think is crazy. (laughs)

   30. JRJoe Rogan1:04:02

       God invented people. People invented strapons.

Episode duration: 3:21:02