Is Modern Life "Natural" w/Alan Levinovitz | Joe Rogan

But one of the things that I found interesting is the concept of what is natural. I've gone over this many times myself. I'm like, poison's natural. Everything's natural. Computers are natural, really, because they come from the ground. They're made by people. They're essentially like a human's version of anything like a bird would create. Birds create bird's nests. Are those natural? But this pyrite, this is pyrite, right? 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, when they call it fool's gold. Oh, Jamie's going to bring that up to you there. Fool's gold. But 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. They look like they're golden. And so these are, I think one of the things, I actually changed my mind over the course of writing this book. Oh, there they are. Jamie Pullup's. 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 it makes like a quartz crystal or what shape it takes. It's very surreal, I think, honestly. This is very bizarre. I did not know until you gave this to me that that existed. 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? It'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 be Richard Dawkins, but for naturalness. 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 did it with her son, Bear. And doesn't it funny that that automatically dismisses it? I call you mean the fact that his name is Bear? No, no, no. It's 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 your 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? So when I talked with anthropologists who work with hunter-gatherers and asked them like how does potty training work? And they were like, what do you mean? People just piss in the forest and 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. Don't shit in daddy's lap. Exactly. But there's this idea, right, that and so that's what we should be doing with our children. And I don't know about you, but like 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 I realized that was where I had my problem, 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. Yeah. I mean, if it occurs enough, it's kind of like pedophilia occurs a lot. Is that natural? So there was a, there was, yeah, I mean, you know, 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 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 preagricultural, your tribe, your group requires certain population, can't get too high, can't get too low. And so kidnapping other people's children, often a common thing. So is that good? Well, clearly not, right? Or, you know, dying in childbirth. These are all things that are natural, but obviously not good. And so 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 doing 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 justify 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 these arguments. I'm like, you want an economy that works. Right. Doesn't matter whether it's natural or not. That's a really good point. You know, one of the things that I saw in your book was you were talking to Joel Salatin, who I love, and he's a strange man, but a beautiful person. I really love what he's doing with poly-faced farms. But he drinks the water that the cows drink out of so that he gets that in his biome. You know, he's a real freak. But when you were talking about New York City and, 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, OK, hit the brakes. Now we're in the weeds. Yes, I love New York. It's a fucking 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're in a hotel that has like a 30th floor and you look out, you see the city skyscrapes, you know, you see all 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 grateful for all that. I mean, there's so many. 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 simultaneously people would be thinking of 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 it gets. Meanwhile, the coronavirus rate, 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 like this is, you know, there's actually an argument against that, though. 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 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. There's so many different, I'm going to fuck it up if I talk about the technical details of it, but when he was describing it and 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. No, I'm not. I have no idea. But I think what's weird or what I would want to push back on, and this is a religious study scholar, right? Because this is where I came to all the 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 the truth is some things that hurt us are natural. Cyanide. There you go. Or, you know, I mean, I keep going back to childbirth. I mean, I went to Peru. I got to tell you the story. So I went to Peru to research this book because I wanted to talk with, like, as close as I could get to pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers, right? And I can't get, you can't get too close, but there are people called the Matsugenka, the Matsugenga, in the rainforest that I got to talk to. And I got to ask them about, you know, their relationship with technology and all that stuff. I'm never going to forget. I go up to this guy and I ask him, they've just had solar lights installed, like, in the main sort of area of their village. And I go up to this guy and I was like, how do you feel about having these artificial lights installed? And he, and I'm thinking to myself, you know, it's this pollution, right? Isn't it better to just have, you know, the stars in the sky and the moon? And he looks at me and he goes, he goes, this is good. We can see at night now. He's just like, like he was talking to just a fucking idiot, you know, like, of course I'm happy. Right. Or this, and then there was this old lady. I was like, they'd had, you know, they had a, they had a pump like running water installed, basically clean water, right? So you could wash your dishes and your clothes. And I'm thinking, oh my God, this is ripping them away from the natural way of life. And I asked this lady, I'm like, how do you feel about the water? And she's like, it's, we don't, we don't get bacterial, I mean, she didn't say bacterial infection. She was like, we don't get sick anymore from the water that we're drinking, from the river. I was like, oh, and she's just looking at me like, who, like, why, why is he asking me this? Right. And meanwhile, I'm coming from this place where everyone wants to get closer to nature, right? Because we have been alienated from it. And I'm asking from the perspective of someone who thinks it just must be paradise living so close to nature. And she's like, no, we want the, we want to be able to wash our clothes and have the fucking lights on at night. Yeah. You know, and I was like, right. There was a shaman. I'm talking to the shaman in the village, Don Alberto, right? And he's talking, he's like, you know, it's true that technology is messing up the world. We've got climate change. We've got, you know, all these species are going extinct. And he goes on and on, right? He's very close to nature. Very, very wise man. He's got a cell phone also. Right. And I'm like, well, so is technology bad? And he's like, he's like, yes. Well, yes. Yes. And no, he's on Tinder. Yeah. Right. Yeah. That's what he's really doing. He didn't tell me. But that's, and that's, I want people, I just want people to understand that there just aren't any easy categories you can use to divide up the world into good and bad. And now that people, now that organized religion, sort of the sphere of authority is shrinking, right? You don't go to your priest to find out what to eat. You don't go to your priest to find out how to cure your disease. Now that that authority is shrinking, I think people are looking to other similar kinds of authority. And so they're like, okay, I can't go to my priest, but if I'm walking through the store, what sort of criteria can I use to divide the world up easily into good and evil, clean and unclean, organic, organic and inorganic, right? Yeah. Artifice. And it's built into our language, Joe, like artifice or art, artifice, artifice might be a thing someday, uh, artificial, right? Is, is linked to artifice, which is deception, right? So you've got manipulated, which really just means humans got ahold of it and changed it with their hands also means something bad. So really built into our language, we have this idea that natural means good, artificial, manipulated. That's bad. I think maybe it's because we have this insane power to manipulate things. And we, we all collectively use the power to manipulate things that was created by scientists that have a far greater understanding of what the implications and like what the process of this manipulation is. And we just come along and use their technology. And that's, I think that's, that's a problem with so much of what people do. Like we've, we've earned this power just by virtue of being alive and being able to trade in goods and services for whatever 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, 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 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, without the awareness of the consequences of 8 million people doing the exact same thing. Yeah. Well, I mean the scale you can do stuff on with technology is really increased. I mean, it's made us incredibly powerful, right? There's Stuart 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 the technology itself. So you locate the evil in that technology. Whereas, you know, what you're saying, I mean, 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, so there are some things that I discovered while I was reading this. For example, have you seen that cartoon where there's two cavemen in a room? It's a New Yorker cartoon and they're talking to, they're not in a room, they're cavemen. They're in a cave. Sorry. 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? Right? So there's this, that's, and that's the people that are like nature's bullshit take, right? They're like, 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. 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, a 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? There are ways in which technology, like my dad, my dad is 91. I talked to anthropologists and like, despite what you might, you know, what you might think that there aren't a lot of 91 year old hunter gatherers. They're just not out there. So I'm like really grateful that my dad, you know, is 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. I'm 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. Right. So we got to, we got to 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. Right. But solar power is obviously to me at least less natural than light and a piece of wood. Solar power doesn't bother me at all. Yeah. I mean, I love solar power, but I'm totally on board with what you're saying. And there is some sort of a balance and