Yannis Pappas on Power, Death, and Why Love Is an Action

After a brief introduction, Fridman frames Pappas as a student of history through *History Hyenas*, the comedy podcast he co-hosted until a few weeks earlier. Pappas corrects the grade: an F student, maybe a D-minus, with a 0.67 GPA his freshman year and a repeat of the year to show for it. The conversation then turns to their mutual friend Tim Dillon, whose growing fame Fridman treats as a live study of power. Pappas does not want Dillon anywhere near it. He does not even want him in a suit. Clothes like that, he says, make you start to feel the power.

Asked what the world would look like if Dillon were given absolute power, Pappas does not reach for political prisoners. The executions would be culinary. A lobster roll below Dillon’s standard would get the cook killed; the whole restaurant staff would go with him. The joke is doing real work. Pappas thinks power corrupts, then adds the line he keeps returning to: it does not change anyone, it reveals the darkest material already there. People are not supposed to have everything they want. Struggle, in his view, is what keeps a person from becoming a Roman dictator with a harem.

Joe Rogan is the exception he will grant, a “benign king” who has grown more famous without becoming a different man. Most powerful people Pappas meets are, in his word, douchebags, and psychopaths have an advantage because they do not have feelings. Fridman, working in tech, says he designs systems to keep himself from sliding, including a habit of killing the thought whenever a shiny possession starts to feel too good. Pappas answers with his father’s capitalism critique: profit got ranked above beauty, old cities had buildings that were beautiful, and the new ones are boxes thrown up for margin. It is the illusion of permanence. His father used to say you cannot take it with you. Climbing toward an infinite pile of money is Sisyphus, except the rock falls on you.

The same father used to say you have to survive not only physically but emotionally, and that humor plus an objective look at reality helps. Pappas’s version of emotional survival is accepting that everything is ephemeral: bank accounts, problems, abilities, memory, even the body. Nothing is permanent, so the useful posture is flexibility. Anything too stiff snaps. Bruce Lee, he says, was right: be water. Fridman quotes Bukowski on love as a fog that fades with the first light of reality. Pappas allows that love might morph the way water does, then notes that Bukowski’s version of love often came with a price tag and no responsibilities.

Pappas’s father had died a year and a half earlier, at 91. He had smoked for sixty years, packs a day, and still did not die of the lungs. Prostate cancer took him, which Pappas, in the black-comic register he cannot quite leave, calls the way men should go: the organ you spent a life thinking about is where the universe starts the recycling. The father had been a painter, a lawyer, a military lieutenant, a Brooklyn New Yorker whose own father owned a diner, the Greek immigrant passport. He lived as he wanted at all costs. Pappas inherited that, for better and worse. If money and fame are the scoreboard, it has hurt him: when he stops wanting to do a thing, he stops. Feeling in love with the work while you are doing it is, he thinks, a real currency, maybe worth more than money.

He was in the room when his father died. He and his brother were not speaking at the time, a familiar Greek-family pattern they later repaired, so they took shifts. Pappas spent the night, heard the death rattle in the early morning, and believes his father knew he was there. That mattered to him. Asked whether the ephemerality of life makes him sad, he says the point of life, if there is one, is not to fear death. Every political system that has led to mass murder, in his account, did so because its tenets turned utopian, detached from reality and from nature. Illusion as a foundation produces destruction at every scale. Acknowledging mortality is the start of being a good person, a moral person, a contributing member of society, because true things should be the foundation of all things.

Fridman pushes back. The least honest response to death is to run from it; the next is to “accept” it; the more honest one may be to fear it. He cites Ernest Becker’s *The Denial of Death* and the later terror-management theorists: much of the human condition is a flight from the terror of mortality, and acceptance is itself an illusion you build because the thing is too large to take in. Stoics meditate on death daily, not once. Pappas’s counter is that fear is not a choice. He has been shot. In that moment a chemical released and brought acceptance; humans are robots in that sense. Fear is instinctual, and so is the later calm. If we could choose not to fear death, he says, there would be no progression, because all life wants to survive by instinct rather than by decision.

Fridman grants the animal fear, then draws Becker’s distinction. An animal hears a sound and startles. A human can load the concept that the ride ends, lights out, into a small brain, and that cognitive construct is the hard part. Maybe it is also what gives everything meaning. If the conversation lasted forever, missing someone tomorrow would not matter; you could see them in a million years. There would be no urgency, no magnitude, no superficiality. That, Fridman says, would actually be torture. Pappas, already in his forties, is happy to agree he is sick of the place.

People who defend immortality usually advertise the extra time: travel, every book, every hobby. Someone Fridman had spoken with offered a bleaker picture that he likes better. If you can always do the exciting thing later, you put it off. Actual immortality, for a bunch of humans, would be people sitting around doing nothing, like a Greek café, drinking coffee. Pappas lights up. That is a lazy man’s paradise, and it speaks to his heart. He is, at heart, a very lazy person, always finding a way to lie down, even contorting a sitting posture into something closer to collapse. If you can always push a thing off, he will take that deal. The thirst disappears because the deadline disappeared.

The joke then runs through Muslim heaven and a mistranslated census of virgins, which Pappas treats as an expo booth he might visit and then get sick of. His mother used to recite an ancient Greek line, *pan metron ariston*: everything in moderation, nothing in excess. Too much of anything, including a harem, produces the opposite of what you wanted. Empires prove it. When there is no struggle, there is no meaning; value comes from the journey. Give a sultan or Alexander everything and he gets bored. Power without friction, he says, circling back to the opening, is the same corrupting surplus they had already named.

Fridman uses the animal-welfare tangent to talk about factory farming, consent, and whether a future of artificial minds will force a civil-rights argument for robots. The Turing test, as he defines it, is about talking like a human, not feeling like one. The documents we live under protect us against suffering; if a robot can suffer, the conversation changes. Dogs already get legal protection in some places. That is the hinge Pappas has been waiting for. Dogs, he says, are one of his obsessions, and people do not understand them well enough.

Pappas’s father used to say dogs are basically human: they dream, they have anxiety. The overlooked fact is that without them we would not be here. Humans would not have moved from hunter-gatherer to agrarian life to cities. Dogs are partners in survival, a malleable animal you can tailor in a few generations to a job, guarding crops from scavengers and serving as a first alarm against predators. Human evolution did not happen in a vacuum of humans. For most of our existence we were not even the apex predator. We were getting eaten by hyenas, Pappas’s favorite animal, which he treats as a personal injustice. Horses, too, lugged people around for thousands of years; eating them rubs him the wrong way.

Fridman adds the cognitive-science case. There are conferences on dog cognition. Dogs are the only other animal besides humans that communicate with their eyes, looking at a thing, back at you, then back at the thing to mark a collaboration. Other animals use eyes to look; dogs use them to talk. A border collie has been reported to know around 300 words, approaching a toddler’s language, and a dog’s nose, with millions of receptors, is a kind of intelligence of its own. Walking a dog off-leash in the woods, Pappas says, tugs at millions of years of evolution. A Finnish comic friend named Tommy told him to trust the gut, because that feeling is the survival instinct of all your ancestors. The applied version: do not get in the car with Ted Bundy.

Fridman asks whether psychopaths are essentially robots, then gets mock-offended on behalf of robots. Robots have been helpful; people are the destructive ones. Guns and autonomous weapons do not kill people, people kill people, a line the NRA would be happy to collect. The conversation returns to dictators. Pappas thinks democracy failed in Greece and Rome and that the most successful stretch of Rome was a dictatorship, though he still believes in a republic, common law, and individual rights. Strongmen are a short-term fix. Saddam Hussein, Fridman notes, looked progressive at first. Hitler built roads and played champion of the people. That, Pappas says, is what psychopaths do.

He is not sure power corrupts people born psychopathic. Brain scans suggest they arrive that way. Power definitely corrupts people who can feel and have empathy. The only thing psychopaths can feel, in his sketch, is excitement, and the method is always the same: pretend to be the opposite of what you are. That is what killers do. Bill Cosby hid inside a moral exemplar. Ted Bundy hid inside a helpful innocent. Pappas sees the same structure in certain public displays of goodness. Fridman admits the rule applies to him: he talks about love, and people squint, wondering how many bodies are in the closet. New Yorkers, Pappas says, distrust niceness. If anyone is kind, they want something. The upside is street smarts. The downside is cynicism, which he has been bumping into in Texas, where people really do want to show you the tacos.

Why hyenas? Lions, Pappas says, are predictable, regal, and boring, the kid in class who was born knowing the answer. He likes a scrappy, by-any-means-necessary intelligence. Hyenas are dishonest, they employ chicanery, and the dishonesty is a sign of how intelligent and self-reliant they are. They are brutally honest in how much they lie. They are also taxonomically lonely: more closely related to cats than to dogs, and only tangentially even to cats, their own mysterious branch. They are a matriarchal apex predator, which is rare. The females are larger, they let cubs fight, and a weaker cub can be killed by a sibling while the mother declines to intervene. Females have a pseudo-penis they give birth through. The birth is violent. They also have, he says, the strongest bite force among mammals: they pulverize bone, eat the whole animal, and leave nothing for the vultures.

Fridman’s hyena education came from *The Lion King*, which made him cry on a father-son frequency and also made the hyenas into villains. Pappas says the portrayal is sad and backwards. Lions are the ones who do “dick shit”: an incoming male kills the cubs of a rival. Hyenas will roll up to a watering hole, pretend they are not hungry, and take an animal down by cunning rather than brute strength. Internet clips show a hyena sneaking behind a much larger animal, biting it in the testicles, and waiting while the animal slowly goes down. Brutal, and, to Pappas, hilarious.

Fridman keeps following and unfollowing an Instagram account of nature’s most metal footage because some days the honest brutality is too much to carry into the afternoon. Pappas thinks acknowledging it matters: we come from that, and we still do it, we are just hidden from it by the supermarket slab. Nature channels, like mafia movies, only show the glamorous kill. Most of the time the prey wins. Predators strike out again and again; no documentary sits through the 99 times the cheetah misses. Put the misses in the frame and the one successful hunt hurts less. The same edit, he says, is why people misunderstand both wildlife and organized crime.

The Battle of Crete is the closest history gets to Pappas personally. His mother was a little girl on the island during the first aerial invasion in history, and she lived through four years of Nazi occupation. She became a human rights lawyer, as open-minded as they come, and she never got over her hatred of Germans. Fridman quotes Hitler’s 1941 Reichstag tribute: among all opponents, only the Greeks fought with endless courage and defiance of death. Pappas walks the sequence. Mussolini, in his telling Hitler’s subordinate, was told to take Greece. Italy, a much larger and better-equipped country, invaded. Greece answered with *Oxi*, no, a word that became a national holiday. The Greeks not only repelled the Italians, they pushed them back into Albania and took ground.

Hitler had been planning a march on Russia and had to come south himself. The mainland fell with a fight. British, New Zealand, and Australian troops were a large part of the defense and, Pappas says, never get enough credit. Civilians fought. The island of Crete then took the Germans ten days. France, he says, fell in three or four. Because of the delay, Hitler postponed the invasion of Russia into winter, the same trap that caught Napoleon. Do not try to invade Russia, Pappas says, and do not fight the Russian winter. Historians looking back have treated Crete as more than a local epic: the first skyborne invasion, the first time early in the war the Germans failed to succeed as they wanted, and a psychological dent whose size is hard to measure. Some also argue Hitler soured on airborne attack for the rest of the war, even where it might still have been useful.

He reaches for a Greek word, *philotimo*, which he says barely translates: honor, loyalty, friendship, altruism, a vibe taught in families. Greeks fight among themselves, Sparta and Athens, brothers in a house, until a common enemy appears, and then they unite. The Ottomans were there four hundred years; you can go to Greece now and find almost no evidence. That erasure is, for him, the same spirit. Winston Churchill’s line is the one he wants remembered: from here on we will no longer say that Greeks fight like heroes, but that heroes fight like Greeks. Fridman, who grew up in the Soviet Union, says they never heard much about Crete. The literature, the drinking, the love and hate of that culture were rooted in the world wars, and still the Greek chapter was missing, just as Americans often miss the Soviet contribution. The stories, both men agree, are written by the victors.

Pappas knows what is missing from the books because his father told him. Combat is hell: men pissing themselves, calling for their mother, pandemonium, friendly fire all the time. Skill is involved; a lot of it is luck. His father came home with medals and Purple Hearts and had a line for that: you cannot pin a medal on a dead guy. Those are the men who deserve it, but you cannot do the pomp with a corpse. Whenever a history book says a leader “led his troops into battle,” Pappas wants the follow-up: then how did he live? They put kids in the front. Nobody limps back from the real front with a tidy injury. “Injured,” in after-action language, is public relations. It might mean a sprained ankle on the page. In the field it often meant maimed, a leg blown off.

Alexander the Great, in this telling, was in the back on a horse, asking a eunuch how bad it was up there, then dictating a version in which he rode at the head. Genghis Khan gets the same skepticism. There were no cameras; the game of telephone turns events into myth. The Mongols were adaptable on horseback to the point that children were said to be born bow-legged to fit the horse, wrapped infant skulls into cones, and treated other people’s women as the souvenir of a raid. Fridman notes how much of the long stretch of history is murder, and how much progress the last couple of centuries represent, then wonders about the car-crash effect: maybe we rubberneck the atrocities because they are exciting, and skip the villagers who ate, danced, and loved. Those people may have had the same fears and brilliant ideas. Greco-Roman architecture still stands up as objective beauty. Empires fall. *History Hyenas* had just fallen too.

All empires fall, Fridman says, and this one may rise again. What he cannot get over is the private language Pappas and his co-host Chris built on the air. Pappas reaches for Leopold and Loeb, the Chicago pair who invented a shared reality and murdered a child to know what it felt like. His version with Chris was not that dark. They did not murder a kid. They murdered a podcast, or at least stabbed it a few times. The chemistry was not conscious. It happened in the music of their energies, the way a jazz band hits a rhythm or a set on stage catches a gear you did not choose. They connected on the funny bone, found the same things funny, and grew a cult following that was furious when they stopped.

He still thinks ending it was right. The show was already done a few episodes before they finished. They pulled the plug before it rolled downhill. Long marriages are boring and comfortable; the fling you actually replay in your head always ends abruptly. *History Hyenas*, in his metaphor, was a hot three-year affair, candle burned at both ends. He points to the British *Office*, which stopped after a couple of seasons despite the money still on the table. That took guts, and that is what made it special. Fridman had come for the history and stayed for the chaos. He still cannot name another podcast with chemistry like that. Pappas, months later, still cannot quantify it. Maybe they meet in a decade, fatter, over coffee, and reminisce.

The research method, a fan named: they were Wikipedia sluts, and the nickname stuck. Pappas did more of the reading than Chris. Some subjects pulled him in; Bernie Madoff, one of their last episodes, was one of the better ones, and he is glad they ended after it because they had started to slip. They were the antithesis of Dan Carlin. You went to Carlin for accuracy and thoughtfulness. You went to them for a hang with history, sometimes more hyena than history, sometimes dense like the Crete episode. Pappas was not even aware of *Hardcore History* when they started. He had majored in history, went to museums and tours, and needed a hat to hang a riff on. Even if Carlin is inaccurate by the historical guild’s lights, Pappas thinks starting conversations is good. People call that dangerous rhetoric. Rhetoric, he says, only becomes dangerous when education fails. What is going on in America is that education has failed. The dangerous party is not the podcaster. It is the people who lost the ability to judge. Aristotle already said the future of a civilization depends on public education.

Fridman asks who Bernie Madoff is. Pappas calls him the GOAT, the greatest thief of all time, a hedge-fund man who stole the most money in the history of America. The technical trick was a pyramid: pay the old money with the new. The hard part was how long he lasted, and against whom. He tricked the smartest and richest people in the world. *Con man* is short for confidence man. The first one on record, in Pappas’s telling, dressed well, walked up to rich people, and bet they did not have the confidence to hand over a watch. Ego did the rest; the watch left with him. Madoff hid the theft in availability. He showed up at every bar mitzvah and birthday, took every call, and made investing with him feel like a competition. He would not take just anyone. The exclusivity had a method: he wanted whales who would not notice the scheme. He could guarantee something like a one percent return even in a recession, which should have been the tell. Charm hijacked their reasoning. If they had used it for one second, they would have asked how anyone guarantees one percent in a downturn. The answer was that he was stealing from the next guy to pay you.

Fridman has been circling Jeffrey Epstein through MIT’s orbit and does not buy the deepest conspiracy version, the one in which Epstein is a front for an intelligence agency. He prefers a Madoff-shaped story: a charismatic man, psychopathic in some sense, also a pedophile, who could sell people on the brilliance of their own ideas. Scientists, he says, do not go into the work for money. The scientific method is boring minutiae; you have to love it. What they want is to be heard. A rich man who tells an outsider at MIT, Harvard, or Caltech that their ideas matter is hard to resist, especially in an academy where most people think the same and the actual originals get derided. Epstein, in this sketch, moved along the outside like a hyena, picking off brilliant outliers, accumulating a network that eventually reached people like Bill Gates and political figures. One person, Fridman tends to believe, can do that.

Pappas closes the loop with Hitler. Charisma is blinding. Flattery, glibness, and superficial charm are a con man’s main tools. They create blind spots. People want to hear how great they are; they want the love they did not get from a parent. The predator is not burdened with that need, or with empathy, so he sees the prey clearly. That is how someone who is not that intelligent can convince people who are much smarter. Personality, Pappas says, quoting a thought he associates with Quentin Tarantino, can usurp common sense. Fridman wonders how much of the Third Reich was the public speeches and how much was Hitler alone in a room, looking someone in the eye. Nationalism and belonging do the rest. Give people a group to belong to and the amount of evil they will do to outsiders is large, especially if nobody wants to do the work of looking at where they themselves messed up.

Pappas is not especially conspiratorial. “Nobody cares that much,” he says, until one lie, then another, and you start questioning everything. Vietnam as a false flag. Strange things about 9/11, three steel-framed skyscrapers on one day, Building 7’s neat collapse, a lack of transparency that may be less a grand plot than people afraid of losing their jobs. Fridman has heard biologists, behind closed doors, say a lab leak for the virus is very likely, and still watch institutions refuse to say “we do not know.” His hope for the century is that people detect bullshit better, even though the internet also makes them believe crazy things. Conspiracy theories, in this telling, flourish when people in power are full of it. Honesty from elected officials would drain a lot of the air out. Andrew Yang, whatever you think of him, at least talks like a person, and he was running for mayor of New York.

Pappas is a lifelong New Yorker who leans left and still wants a mayor who can count. New York is a money town, Wall Street’s town, the head of the snake; when it is not doing well, the country is not doing well. When Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and local allies rejected the Amazon project, his question was what they thought would create jobs in a tech century. More nail salons? More pizza places? Of course you give a company like that tax breaks; that is why companies go anywhere. The progressive wing, he says, is so utopian that it ends in disaster, because it will not accept that people are self-interested. A 14 or 15 percent hike on people making a million dollars in New York City, where a million is not that much, will send the tax base fleeing and the city back toward the hole it crawled out of. At the local level he wants a money guy, a Bloomberg or a still-sane Giuliani, a tough mayor for a tough city, not someone whose first move is free money.

The reason he likes Yang is not the opinions. It is the data. Yang had said it costs more than $400,000 a year to support one person in a New York prison. The number redefines the problem. Anything that ends in “industrial complex,” prison or military, is a market that has gone wrong. Pappas still thinks the free market is the system most aligned with human nature, which is self-interest, especially with a gun to the head. Socialism, as a check, can temper capitalism’s excesses, and in a vacuum it may be the better system for prisons, parks, governance, maybe even health care, where the Hippocratic oath and the marketplace are hard to reconcile. His half-joking platform: a scale at the fast-food counter so people over a BMI line get a salad; subsidize the salad so it is not always more expensive than the burger; a three-day work week, which he thinks would add shifts, jobs, and leisure spending. The five-day week was already a cut from seven. Balance, he says, is as valuable as progress. You fly the plane: sometimes more socialism, sometimes more capitalism, according to the time.

In the middle of the New York argument Fridman describes recording a four-hour podcast with his father, a physicist, for episode 100. He tried to put his ego aside, to make his father shine and still ask why he had been so distant. He does not think he could have done it without a microphone. Pappas agrees that a recorder changes the quality of attention. How often do you sit and just look at the other person? He recommends that people talk to their families on a podcast, fake or real. The usual conversation and the recorded one are different animals, and the second one is where you finally stay.

Asked for a person in history who has most pulled his curiosity, Pappas names Queen Elizabeth and the Elizabethan era, the sun-never-sets stretch of the British Empire. He describes her run as something like seventy years, a leader and a woman who delivered a Pax Romana of peace and flourishing, with Shakespeare writing and people going to plays, while the empire marauded and culled resources abroad. She murdered a cousin. Cate Blanchett played her and, in Pappas’s awards-show grievance, lost an Oscar because Gwyneth Paltrow put on a British accent in *Shakespeare in Love*. The part that fascinates him is the public relations. She never married. She was the Virgin Queen, married to England, un-distractible by men, no children. He believes she used that story as a tool. To lead the greatest empire of the time as a woman, he says, you had to be Machiavellian, idealistic, and a marketer. The propaganda machine was on point. You walked into a room and felt as if God had walked in.

Rulers need you to feel good about them no matter how much evil they do. Obama, in his one-line version, made you feel good and then carpet-bombed. Elizabeth was a dictator, and when we look back we say she was great. The horror she had to do did not make the history books, and that horror was probably part of what made her successful. He cannot think of another woman who comes close, Angela Merkel included, and he credits her with defeating the Spanish Armada. A token of the success is that we do not even file her as a dictator. That is his complaint about the feudal hangover in modern states: countries still celebrate kings, who were dictators by divine right, now reduced to ceremony. Why not a ceremonial Führer who just rolls around and does the pageant? There is no moral difference, in this provocation, between a Hitler and a king. They did the same horrible work. In Russia he already sees a rehabilitation of Stalin as the man who helped win the Great Patriotic War, the Genghis Khan move of remembering the victory and forgetting the millions tortured.

Fridman asks whether it is more effective to lead by love, which is how her PR sounded, or by fear, and whether Vladimir Putin is a relic. Pappas does not think Putin is a relic. His background was espionage and subterfuge; he is who you think he is. He is good at controlling people with psychology, including through the internet, in a very KGB way, and he looks great without a shirt on a horse. As a woman and for the length of a successful reign, Pappas would still put Elizabeth among the greatest. She used the church, public psychology, and Shakespeare. It was an absolute success, and the ceremonial costume we wrap around monarchy is part of how success launders itself.

Fridman asks what advice Pappas would give a young person, or a younger version of himself, about a good life. Be doggedly you, he says. The magic happens when you are stubbornly yourself and you meet other people doing the same. The real currency in an ephemeral life is the communication that happens between people: friendship, love, the cliché that is still the point. Then the late lesson. People mistake love for a feeling because Hollywood taught them that. It is not a feeling. It is an action. You can say things and feel things that are not necessarily real: chemical reactions, immaturity, psychological issues, survival. Action is what counts. When you act out of love, that is the thing.

He had been dishonest with himself when he was younger, carrying expectations other people had imposed. Comedy is a hard thing to explain to an immigrant mother who came from Nazi-occupied Crete and became a human rights lawyer, to a father who was a lawyer, to a brother with Oxford, Georgetown Law, Brown, and a pile of master’s degrees. His mother had four law degrees, sat on New York’s human rights commission, was up for a judgeship under Mayor Dinkins, and wrote that seminal UN piece on the human rights of children. He was the black sheep, always a screw-up, and the only thing he was ever decent at was making people laugh. After college, around 1999 and 2000, the internet was not yet huge. He thought Robin Williams was just an actor. He did not know comedy clubs were a career path. Once he learned, he tried.

He has massive anxiety. The first time on stage his arms went numb and a panic attack arrived. He still has the tape. He kept saying thank you because he had forgotten the jokes. The audience laughed at the number of thank-yous, and once they laughed the set came back. He did the five minutes, got off, and for a person who had never felt he belonged anywhere, that was the first time anything felt right. He has not felt it since, and had not felt it before. Fridman describes a structurally similar jolt: immigrant family, the world telling you what to do, then a chance encounter with Spot, the four-legged robot, about five years earlier. The depth of unexplored ideas felt like a door. He did not want to be a professor doing generic work. He wanted something crazy and large. That is why he stepped away from MIT, why he wanted a startup, why he came to Austin. Pappas tells him that is what doggedly you looks like.

He hates the American dream as it is sold: if you are not Beyoncé, if you are not famous, you are not worth it. He likes places like Sweden, where everyone has health care and an ordinary life is valued, where being a doorman is allowed to count. He has met doormen and taxi drivers more fascinating than a lot of famous people. Famous people are often not who they say they are; the public face is a sociopath’s costume. Comedians, as a class, he finds awful. He has very few friends in the trade, Paul Virzi and Tim Dillon among them, and he wants distance from the rest. Fame is a drug. Fridman jokes that someday he will be standing there with a knife in his stomach, looking at Dillon’s smiling face, hearing that he should not have trusted him. On that note they close. Pappas plugs a YouTube special, *Blowing the Light*, and the new podcast *Long Days*, and they go to eat barbecue.