Lex Fridman: belief

Transcript context

…I think about this a lot. If you go back and you watch videos, The Beatles, any of their movies, they’re smoking all the time. The Get Back documentary, they’re smoking constantly. Go watch any of the MTV Unpluggeds, Nirvana, Kurt Cobain is smoking every second that he’s not playing, he’s smoking. Every singer smoked. Every musician smoked. Nowadays, I asked my son, Dylan, “Dylan, does anybody smoke?” at his high school. He’s like- …”Smoke? Nobody smokes.” The- it was an absurd question. And that was part of culture. It was for everybody. I mean, that was, that was a big transformation over the past 20 years and just everybody stopped smoking. But I don’t think smoking has the kind of hard negative effect that we’re talking about. I mean, I almost would rather have them smoke than some of the other hard drugs. Maybe smoking distracts them from the hard… I mean, heroin and coke, I mean, those, those things really, and alcohol, unfortunately- … can be easily abused, I think. It seems like it’s a… The life of a musician, this dopamine thing of getting on stage and being adored by tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people, the high of that, and then the comedown after is really hard life, for just even neurobiologically, of like, how do you deal with that? You have to be able to control the rollercoaster of your mind, and of course drugs will be a part of that. And you think everything is allowed and everything is possible. And then there’s also culture, depending on who you hang out with, that certain kinds of categories of drugs are good for your creativity. And so, naturally, you start to abuse those drugs. I don’t know. I think it’s really interesting the role that drugs have played in the history of music. They have certainly been extremely destructive, but they have also certainly been productive muses, inspirations for some of these folks. Oh, absolutely. Now, would we want to, you know, advocate people doing things like that to boost their creativity?…

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