Joe Rogan Experience #1504 - Alan Levinovitz

Hello, Alan.

Hello, Joe.

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.

(laughs)

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?

Yeah.

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

Yup.

Which is fool's gold, right?

Fool's gold.

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

I-

You would think somebody left this shit there.

I, I didn't believe it. It looks like, 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-

Dude, that-

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

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

Cool.

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-

Perfect.

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

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.

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

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

Yeah. That's what I-

That's crazy.

They're incredible, right?

What i- what causes it to take on these different completely unusual forms?

So I tried, 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. Um, it's very, it's, it's very surreal.