It makes an difference.
Do you want to know what's in your community? But don't you know how? Then you can go to GoFandMe.com and start your own spin-off. Your next spin-off is not in the school or in the kitchen. You can only start in less minutes a GoFandMe spin-off.
Some spin-offs for themselves, for friends, for me or for an organization.
The most important thing is that the people or projects are on their own.
GoFandMe is the four main platforms for the things that are important.
“Without a doubt, you have to be careful with the things you need.”
But with many help-wings, they are on their way and on their own. So you can be aware of the direct laws. If you are creative, local or even important, your own language is correct. Why do you have a reason to go-fandMe from millions and on their own? And you have a reason to go-fandMe from millions and on their own.
GoFandMe makes many people a different way. And to go-fandMe from people to people. Start in a hot-to-dine and go-fandMe spin-off-hoof.
So first of all, I just want to say it's really a pleasure to meet you.
I have consumed a fair amount of your work, much less than some more than others. And you strike me as maybe either the "sainest, crazy person" in the planet or the craziest, sane person. No, not only sane. I-I just want to hear you describe how you see the world. And I'll give you some leading questions.
And I want to talk about your books, especially your recent book about truth.
“But I don't know, do you feel like an unusual being?”
No. I miss Everich as it can get. That is Werner Herzog. The German-born filmmaker and writer and actor and a sort of citizen soldier. He is not average.
Herzog has made more than 70 films. All of them are spirited. Some are absurdist or pretentious. None of them are dull. There is family romance LLC about a Japanese entrepreneur who leases out humans to other humans,
who for some reason may need a stand-in family member or friend. There is grizzly man, a remarkable documentary about a man who loved bears a little too much. And there are the five films that Herzog made with the actor-close Kinsky.
“The Kinsky Herzog relationship was volatile, and sometimes violent.”
There are two best-known collaborations. Our Fitzcaroldo and Aguirre, the wrath of God. Both films are about an obsession that tips into madness. In Fitzcaroldo, the Kinsky character needs to haul a massive steam ship over steep hill in the Amazon in order to fund a new opera house.
Herzog says that 20th Century Fox wanted him to shoot the film in Botanical Gardens in San Diego and for the ship to use a plastic model. But Herzog got his way. He shot in the Prauvian jungle with a real 320 ton steam ship and a real hill. It was a mad adventure and all the madness of making the film is captured in the film.
Today, you could use AI to generate a decent facsimile of something like that for a tiny fraction of the cost. So, is Herzog worried about the competition? I saw a film which was scripted by artificial intelligence and the images made by artificial intelligence. How was it? Completely dead on arrival.
A stillborn baby. It's no spark of life in it. Only mimicry of invention. Only mimicry. So I'm not worried.
There's no artificial intelligence that really would challenge me. Herzog recently published a book called The Future of Truth. Here's one bit that captures the essence. He writes, "I don't think truth is some kind of pole star in the sky that we will one day get to.
It's more like an incestant striving." Today on Freakonomics radio, here's two incestant striving. And what it means, according to Werner Herzog, to be intelligent. This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.
Werner Herzog is smart enough to understand that a lot of people have a hard time understanding him and his worldview.
People are always puzzled by the scope of subjects of my films.
There's a well-champing of ski flyers and nine films on death row, and there'...
Fitzgeraldor, a steamship over a mountain end operator in the changliad on and on. They think it's a very separate sort of things now. It is not. There's a clearly discernible worldview in all of it.
You see it even clearer in my books, and I always considered myself a writer.
And you haven't even mentioned creating operas and acting yourself and doing voiceovers for documentaries and for the Simpsons and on and on. Just a few days ago, for a Korean animated film by the director who did Parasite, a wonderful, very creative man, very good writer, and he wrote a screenplay for an animated film, and invited me to be one of the characters.
So I did recordings for this character, and it is a deep sea creature. So I'm good as a deep sea creature. But of course, animated, and you see me as a person, for example, as a villain in Czech creature. But of course, it's all performance.
“We live in this age where I think more people are steered towards specialization.”
And you've done a lot of things within the arts, but very different within the arts. And I'm just curious where that comes from. You had this wild childhood where you did a lot of things that children today don't do. You had a traumatic and poor childhood after the war. No, not traumatic.
Of course, I was hungry, but it's okay for children. You get through it, and you may not play time. It's hard for the parents. In this case, hard for the mother who couldn't feed the three boys anymore. I don't like introspection, there's something not right, not in my life, not in my existence.
I try to avoid it.
“This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century.”
Of course, it started early in the 19th century, but basically a phenomenon of the 20th century.
I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It's good that we can forget, and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with the psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes. Psychoanalysis is only one, but because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century,
I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake. The entire 20th century, the entire, yes, good Lord, yes, and I have good reasons to argue. Let's hear some. I would speak of the demise of social utopias. It begins with communism. It had its demise, and of course fascism and the barbarism of the Nazis, which has been unprecedented,
postulating a master race, dominating the planet. So this socially utopia thinks God has come to an ignominious end, atomic bomb, for example. And maybe the most significant of all that in the 20th century, the population of the world,
grew from one and a half billion roughly to six billion.
And that's the greatest of all disasters.
“Both your parents, you said, were, I think enthusiastic was the word you used adherence of the Nazi party.”
In the early time, yeah, and my mother, more the socialist, the Nazi, the Nazi, the socialist, meaning what room represented whom Hitler had eliminated, executed fairly early on, because he was more in the mainstream of socialism and not so much nationalism. It's a long, complex debate, but that was more the sources of where my mother took her credo. But she was, shall I say, intelligent enough, and she was so much rooted in the real world with three boys to raise all alone.
That she came to very sobering conclusions fairly early on. You were born during World War II in Munich, yeah? I was born 1942. So by the time that you're thinking sentient human, I'm curious what kind of conversations you had with your mother about the beginning of the war in the Nazi party.
Well, only much later when I was grown up enough to ask the right questions.
Still mysterious to me in a way.
My father barely knew so I didn't have real serious conversations with him about it, but puzzling, disturbing, and giving me a sense of becoming vigilant. What do you mean by that? Just look out what is happening for example. You do have neo-Nazis in Germany, you have them in other countries as well. It's not Germany alone, but if it starts in Germany, it's alarming for me.
You've said you would pick up arms against them if they.
“Sure, I would instantly, that's what we have to do, I mean, as a German.”
It doesn't matter which age I am, you have to do something drastic, if necessary, militant. You now live in Los Angeles, yes? Yes, because I'm happily married there. No other big reason, end, of course. What's good weather?
No, I don't care about that, I could live near the North Pole over there, but it doesn't matter. No, I need a roof over my head and something good to read, and that's it, what I need. How do you feel about living in the U.S. during this rather odd time politically, socially, et cetera? Well, these times come and go. America has great resilience, it has a strange ability to rejuvenate itself, to start again,
to re-calibrate itself, so you don't have to complain about what is happening. It is a consequence of many things that people in particularly East Coast, West Coast have overlooked in that sort of heartland, the heartland of America, in their values, in the fact that they're underrepresented, under educated, underpaid, disenfranchised to some degree. This is serious, and I love the heartland of America much more than the fringes, the fringes,
Boston, New York. You've written about New York, you don't like it very much, do you? I like New York,
it's an incredible city, and I like that it forces you to a certain rhythm, speed, and energy.
I also am not completely against the hostility of New York, it's okay, it's challenging, who really are whipped into doing something. Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States. The most substance, yes, in what way? First and foremost, cultural substance, but don't forget that there's a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all this industrial, areas, flat roofs, gigantic
factories, reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don't have this factory in the Bronx, you don't have it near Wall Street, of course, people immediately
“think the superficial side, glitzing glamour of Hollywood, that's what I don't mean, but”
serious art, all the artists that made New York important, there were late 1940s early 1950s, the last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It's a place where you consume culture, New York. It's generated in Los Angeles, the painters are living there nowadays, not all but some very important ones, writers, mathematicians, also stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five-year-old. I mean, it's grotesque, great universities, luck-mise, going
to open very soon and all of a sudden, you will have one of the two three most important
museums in the United States, I mean, it has great museums already, and it's going to be big. You see, I'm the one who says it at a time when nobody believes it, nobody notices
“it, and it's wonderful to articulate it now. Nobody believes it about L.A. you're saying?”
No, if I did kind of funny when I say it, I see you face. So I've been to L.A. maybe 20 times in my life, never for more than a week, and I love L.A. it's just so different from New York that I feel like I need to orient myself a new, but being a New Yorker, I do want to ask you, let's say that I consider it tragic that New York is falling behind in the arts as
You say.
medieval Venice Italy has fallen behind. So what it keeps shifting and it was shifting within Italy, Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, Ferrarra sometimes, it doesn't matter, it doesn't matter, it's one country, it's one culture. So what I hear you saying when you mentioned that is that, you know, time is long, art can be long, but each of us moves through this space and a relatively short time. You've done a great deal in your life and I know you're still working on things,
but when you think about, you know, one person's life and what you're able to observe and accomplish
“in regard to the whole span of civilization, how do you process that? How do I process that?”
Probably because I have an output into things like films, books and other activities acting, operas, also things in between writing and filmmaking, it did an installation for the Whitney Museum, here, say, of the soul, which was partially music, partially images and it was a wonderful, wonderful task for me and very strange because I immediately refused the offer to do an installation for the Whitney Museum. They said to me on the phone, "Ah, yeah, but you're an artist,
aren't you an artist yourself?" And I said, "No, I'm not an artist, I'm a soldier and hung up." You're good at saying no to big official requests, it seems, was it the Prime Minister of Japan
“you wanted to meet with you? No, the Emperor, the Emperor, sorry, it's much much more embarrassing.”
It's so embarrassing that I have difficulties to even speak about it. I staged the world premiere of an opera of a contemporary Japanese composer who wanted me desperately to stage it
for the first time in the world and it was somehow known in the media that I was working in the
city and not the Emperor himself. It was from his office cautiously an official stretched out the feelers where I could meet the Emperor in a private audience. It was shortly before the premiere, and of course there was a lot of turmoil in the work and things didn't function yet, but I immediately said to the people of the opera who were on a long table for dinner together, I said, "No, I cannot do that in a matter of remark, I wouldn't even know what to say to the
Emperor because I should say something of importance, something of gravitas, something formalized, I wouldn't know how to handle it." And there was complete silence. Their silence is at our friendly, but it was a frozen silence. And then into the silence all of a sudden there's a voice asking, "Who else, then would you like to meet?" And without missing a beat, I said, "Hilo,
“or not are the last Japanese soldier." He'd been in the jungle for 40 years or something, yeah?”
He surrendered 29 years after the end of the Second World War, still believing that the war was on
a meeting, and I had quite a few meetings and we immediately had a very intense rapport, and ultimately ended up by me writing a novel, "The Twilight World," but I actually met the Emperor. I invited him very kindly to attend the World premiere of the opera in the Emperor showed up and I asked for a permission to shake his hand. So I came in the intermission, I shook his hand, and he said, "Stay for a moment, we should speak." And we spoke, and it was very pleasant, by the way,
a wonderful short conversation. And it was at the right moment, I think. It was when I had to offer something which was visible. You could see it in 15 minutes, the intermission was over, in the Second Act would come. So I didn't come with empty hands,
and it was much better than it. It's always, I guess, impressed me the way that Germany,
after the Second World War, assessed what had happened, and in its schools and its institutions tried to come to grips with why and how, and to educate its success of generations. Can you just talk
About that a bit?
they're apparently going to continue to be wars into the future? No, it shouldn't be a blueprint. It's a term, and you do not give a blueprint to the Americans, how to handle their educational system. You don't. And you don't tell the Japanese how to deal with education or the Italians.
“Or you just name it. You just don't do it. You have to come with your cultural, historical identity.”
You will come to your conclusions. But of course, Germany was consistent in it from the end of the
Second World War, until literally today, and it's not only education, it's translated into legislation.
For example, it is a criminal offense to be a denial of Holocaust. If you're a fervent, denier in Calta Public, as a denial of the Holocaust, you will end up in jail, in Germany, and I think it's good that it is like this. I've heard you speak about living in a culture of complaint. My wife has a phrase for certain kinds of people. She calls them injustice collectors. That's a good characterization, yeah. I'd love you to say whatever more you can about what you mean
by a culture of complaint, and especially what you think is the cost of that. I mean it
in a larger context. Of course, I mean what you're hinting at politically, and I try to encourage
all my friends who are not Trump's supporters. I tell them, don't complain. It is a majority. It's not lottery that brought Trump to the presidency. He won the popular vote by a very significant margin. Both House is Senate and Congress, and the Supreme Court is to some degree shaped by him. So it's significant. It doesn't come because he's a lucky man. No, there's a clear world view, a clear cultural war that he wants to wage, and it's evident. He really says what he means.
It's not that there's anything hidden. I'd say to everyone, if you do not agree, take America the heartland of America, take it seriously. That's where the heart beats. When you say take it seriously, do you mean that is a political direction and artistic direction? In every sense, in many of my friends who are working in Los Angeles, I say, don't you come from Kansas? Yes, come from Kansas. And I say, when were you in Kansas last time? That was 20 years ago.
“No, you should be every year. When did you meet your high school buddies? Oh, no, contact with”
them at all. You have to get in touch with them. Ask them how they are doing. Ask them about their visions. Ask them about their grievances. Keep them engaged. They are your buddies. Your high school friends do something, don't complain. I don't like the complaints. I mean it way beyond politics when I do a workshop for young filmmakers. They have to make a film within nine days, a short film, very short film, but it's a relentless push. And they learn a lot
because I'm behind them during casting, choosing some sort of a story, showing them locations. And within going around when they are shooting, look over their backs, when they're editing. And they have to come up on the 10th day with a finished short film. The mood in the beginning is
always, ah, the film industry is so stupid. And they do not finance in the house from where are
your South Korea and the Americans. They complain. They say the same thing. The Mexicans say the same thing everywhere. The Germans, they're immediately the mood of complaint. I say you idiots. If you are able-bodied and have the will in the vision to make a film earn a little bit money today, you can make a documentary that is cinema quality for under $10,000, a one-and-a-half hour film. Work is an Uber drive, a work in a lunatic asylum work is a bouncing a sex club.
“That's what I always recommend. Or is a German rodeo clown like you did, yes?”
In Mexico, yeah, yeah. I earned money because I had to survive. You're in money in a lot of interesting ways, yeah. Yes, but I made my money really old-fashioned way. I really earned it. Where do you think that culture of complaint? Where do you think that comes from? It probably has wide sources, broad sources.
In the West, I see an educational system that immediately rewards you for eve...
Our great job, and it can be a lousy sketch lousy, and then anyone in class
“and you have to be praised for it. There's no way to tell a kid. Well, this wasn't really”
good work, but I know you can do better and why don't you work on this, bring it to me tomorrow. All of a sudden you have a good one. It's a philosophy behind education, and the philosophies make the children happy instead of making them strong, just for God's sake, make them strong guys, strong young women, and they will like it. They will like it. In the world out there is complicated, not easy, and sometimes very harsh to you, get prepared, get yourself ready for it. And that's
what is missing. So, the reasons for it are quite diversified, but it's a very, very big trend. And I don't like it because when you are filmmaker, you are out for relentless, relentless judgment, you will start a storm of negative reviews. The audience will not like a movie. It may be financially a disaster, and on and on, you better prepare yourself. Hollywood is in the middle of one of its fairly regular existential crises. A lot of people say that
“this time it's really different, but of course that's what they always say, but it has become”
much harder over the past 10 years, especially, to make a living in film or TV. This would seem strange since people are consuming so much film in TV, but these industries have warped economics. They've been warped for decades. Maybe we should do a series on that someday. Anyway, Herzog doesn't let rejection get him down. There was a project once to do a film on Mike Tyson, which fell apart, but I like him. What attracted you to him in his story intelligence,
his knowledge. I immediately had a conversation about the Roman Republic. He triggered it about early Frankish Kings, Merrow Wingian Kings, peeping the short and Freddy Gunder and Clovis. And it comes from Mike Tyson. Man, this is a good guy. I like him as an independent thinker, and I say thinker,
“not just a one who has destroyed his opponents in the ring. What happened to the film?”
It never materialized. There was a project where I wanted to have him as an actor,
and the film was never financed. So what? It's okay. After the break, we'll hear what Herzog is working on now. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back. Werner Herzog is 83 years old and remains productive. Among his recent projects, a documentary about a wildlife researcher who's trying to find the giant ghost elephant
in the Highlands of Angola, and a feature film with a spoonerized title "Bucking Fastered," which stars sisters Kate and Rooney Marra as two sisters who speak in unison love the same man
and have the same dreams. I asked Herzog how he thinks about the critical and public response
to his work. When I make a few films in a row, four or five films, not much resonance, bad reviews. It's okay. I can survive it because I know the film is good, and it will eventually find its audience. I know that time, in a ways on my side, because I'm not in a trend. I've never been in any trend. A very good example is a Gary the Wrath of God, which was a very hard film to do and it was rejected by everyone. The festivals rejected it.
It got very bad reviews in Germany. I mean, really, really bad ones. It took five years until
first audiences in France started to see it and like it and they lined up in two theaters only,
but they lined up around the block for two and a half years. Ten years later, America caught up. I had three releases of that film. In today, it's not a household name, but those who know about
Cinema know about this film.
in your films? Nothing. It has not changed the shape of my films, the substance of my films, but people can discover older films easily. Yes, that's a great advantage because you can see a
film I did in the mid-1970s. You can find it on some platform. If it's nowhere, it's always somewhere
pirated. piracy is the most successful form of distribution nowadays. So be it, but films are accessible. And this is why very young people discovered today, the males that reach me are males by 15 years in Missula, Montana in South Korea, in Brazil, 15, 16, 17 years old. What is it about your work that moves them? I do not know something that comes across a great vision in something really authentic. Films like no one else ever has done. When I watch Fitzgerald,
“though, which I think we'd agree is your most famous film today, yes? I cannot really charge”
here, but people normally know about it. For anyone who's not seeing Fitzgerald, though, I would say you're diminishing yourself by not seeing it. It's so compelling and magnetic on so many levels, but then when this 320 ton whatever steamship is being manually moved over this mountain, it becomes when I watch it, a metaphor for anything and everything difficult in life. And not only are you hoping and praying that somehow catastrophe doesn't happen, but you're also wondering,
"I'm wondering about you." I'm wondering like, "Why did you feel compelled?" because in the real
story of Fitzgerald, the ship was taken apart. Well, there's no real story. It's basically all invented.
A real rubber barren, a billionaire at his time, 120 years ago, so uninteresting as it gets, but he moved once, a small ship 30 tons or so. I mean, ridiculously small for me, and Disassembled it and moved it over flat terrain into another river. But what you're doing in the film, and we see, and plus, can skiers, you can't stop watching him. Why were you willing to take on that challenge with all its physical, logistical? Because there's something deep in it that
I share with almost everyone that I know, something that is very human, a deep metaphor, like
the metaphor of Cicifus, who rolls up a big boulder, or flock up the mountain and it rolls back.
On him and he has to do it over and over again. Cicifus, of course, stayed spec to enter half thousand years at least into ancient Greek mythology. But I knew there was something of that nature, a very deep metaphor. A little bit like, let's say, the quest for morbidic, the white whale, something that we share. We have it in us. It's some sort of human knowledge, but undiscovered yet, unarticulated yet. The ancient Greek articulated with a myth of Cicifus,
melville articulated it in his book, "Moby Dick." And I articulated something in Fitscareldo. What exactly I uncovered, I can't tell you, but I know it's big. Who's articulating those
“kind of ideas now in your view? I do it besides you. I hardly see anyone. Visual artists?”
I don't see, well, I have to think hard. I don't see anyone, but I have to confess. I do not see many films for a five a year, much less in a average movie galer. I read. You live in LA when you go to the Broad or to Lakma. Do you see modern visual artists? No, I don't go to museums. Museum says a threshold. It's very hard for me to step over this threshold. Sometimes my wife manages to get me into a museum. I was, for example,
at the Prado in Madrid, but I walked through it. I hastened through it through the entire museum, not looking left and right, because I wanted to go to one single room with Goya's black
“nightmare images. I only saw that. What was it about those Goias that you wanted to see?”
I mean, he's particularly soulful. He's a very good technician. What is it about Goi and particular? It's somebody who touches me. It's one of the true artists that I know. There's
Very few I could name you only.
Newald. For example, late medieval, the easemime altar. It's something which is beyond belief,
“and I spent once a whole day in and around it. What did you feel during that day?”
Just knowing that there's somebody out there who is the truest of true artists, somebody who touches me to my core. Same thing with Goya, the black nightmare touches me to the core. How do you rate yourself? Compared to them? I do not compare myself, but I know I'm not alone anymore. It's this profound feeling that I have brothers out there and I don't care whether they are much
greater than I am. It doesn't matter, but there's a brotherhood out there. Somebody who reassures me
of everything and makes every toil, every labor, every disappointment, everything worthwhile.
“After the break, what makes a person an intelligent person? This is Freakonomics Radio.”
I'm Stephen Dubner speaking with Werner Herzog. We'll be right back. So your most recent book is called The Future of Truth. You write about the difference between what you call the accountants truth and the ecstatic truth. I'd love you to walk us through that. We do not know what truth is. Philosophers do not know. Two thousand philosophers in a survey couldn't give a clear answer. Nobody has it. But I know it's a quest that is human,
a voyage, an expedition, hardship, a search. But we must not abandon this search. Even though we never
will exactly know what truth is, it has to do with art, per se. I think every artist, sooner or later, is confronted with the quest of truth. It comes inevitably at you, filmmaker, painter, writer, poet. It doesn't matter. It will come at you. I've always seen the deepest insights, the deepest illumination. When it was not only carried by facts, I always use this as an example. Until recently you had the Manhattan phone directory half a foot thick with four and a half million entries. All of them
factually correct. But it doesn't illuminate you. So it's not the book of books. The phone
“directory is a countenance truth. But doing films or being a poet, you have to do something”
that illuminates you and very often you have to depart from the facts. You have to go into ecstases. You have to step outside of your own self. You have to exaggerate. You have to modify. You have to invent. And this puts me in immediate conflict with cinematography, which images it in its name, verity. Of course, they cannot claim being in possession of truth, nonsense. They are not. Nobody is. And I have my ongoing battle with them. Whenever I run into them, I do battle.
Because you feel they are adopting a mantle that they don't live up to? No, no, no, no. It's a concept that film is a truthful as it gets in their lingo. If you are factually correct, fact-based, fact-based, fact-based, very viable, fact-checked. This is silly. It's very shallow thinking, very shallow experience in the world. And not my way of making films. I mean, as a journalist, I like facts. Yes. But I understand that facts are not the whole story.
And as a journalist, you better do fact-checking. You better do that because there's a certain responsibility vis-a-vis your readers. You are not a poet who is just inventing the world. Same thing when I'm writing my memoirs. Fact-checking my memoirs took three times more time than just writing it. I gave the manuscript to my brothers, my older and my younger brothers. And I said, read this because you have been in many of these events. Tell me,
If I'm completely wrong.
by the time you published your memoirs. Sure. She couldn't fact-check. But I didn't want to ask you something
“because you did quote her. This is in your memoir every man for himself and got against all,”
which is a title of a film as well, correct? Yeah, yeah. But you quote your mother saying this about you,
all the time he was at school, Werner never learned anything. You have your mother saying about you.
He never read the books he was supposed to read. He never studied. But then in fact, Werner always knew everything. His senses were extraordinary. He could pick out some note or sound in 10 years later. Remember it exactly. He would talk about it and use it in some way. He's completely incapable of explaining anything. He knows he sees, he understands, but he can't explain. That's not his nature. With him, everything goes in. And if it comes out again, then it'll be in some altered form.
Well, I didn't invent it. She said it in an interview. So that is very viable. But I always had it in me to absorb things and things I embedded deep inside of me. All of a sudden 10 years later,
“it reemerges, but in form of a story, in form of a element of a vision. I think she's right”
in what she says. And I was not a happy kid in school. I hated school the last two and a half years. I was stoosing most of the time. Sometimes deep, fast asleep because I worked the night shift
in a steel factory as a welder. I needed to earn money for producing my first films.
And I didn't like the kind of education. It's complicated. There's such a thing like intelligence, but it's a bundle of mental qualities, memory, speech, combination of elements, logical thinking and musicality, a sense for poetry. Many, many things are whole bundle. The kind of bundle necessary for being a good pupil in the school that I attended was not congruent with what was in my existence. My bundle of intelligence was different. And because of
that, I was in constant conflict with my school. Some people argue that AI, even though many educators are scared of it, some people argue that AI will be a phenomenal teaching tool because if children know that they have the available facts that they're disposed of, then they can spend more time thinking about bigger, more interesting truths, maybe about creativity and so on. When do you think of that? Well, it's a complex subject. I would say I'm not afraid of what's going on,
however we have to be very, very vigilant when it comes to warfare and other things. It can be disinformation, fake news, perfect replicas of you appearing in a pornographic film. Can be done today. It almost credibly. You better go to the source directly and ask,
did you really do that? What I saw in the movie? The answer is no. Okay, the answer is no things
God. Do you believe in God? I can't answer that. I had a dramatic religious face when you were much young. When I was in adolescence. Yes, yeah. You converted Catholicism when you were 14 or something, yeah. That was a dramatic short time, but I left the church. Do you think about what happens when you die? I think everybody who is alive and has his or her wits together, things about it, because it's the only in evitability that we have. Everything else is up to God knows, faith,
“lottery, statistics, anomalies within the statistics, you'll just name it. But the only thing certain”
that we all share is that we are coming to die in debt, of course, dictates whether we are religious or whether we believe in enough to life or not. I've had a very jarring experience a couple of times in the last year where loved ones, members of my family, who were very religious, toward the end, they lost their faith. And it surprised me. Normally, it's the other way around, because it stabilizes, it gives hope, because dying is not easy. Being born is not easy.
I mean, it's a brutal event, painful and brutal, and normally dying is not an easy thing either.
You better face it, what's coming at you, and very often those who are religi...
can cope with it much better. I've always been transfixed by the notion of memory.
“It's so subjective, it's so individual, it's so odd. We take in so much information and remember”
so little. But when I watch your films, I feel like I'm planting things in my mind that will become memories. And I'm just curious how you think about that sense and what it was put there for. Well, memory is something necessity for a simple survival. Let's face it. Of course, memory is malleable and it is shifting and we start to organize a reframe our own memories. And it's good that we can do that. We can forget the real awful things and we can move on to
the better part. Many people can. Some people can't. Yeah, but it's a blessing if you can forget bad things or put them in a little corner. My memory functions like everyone else is. I shape my own memory like everyone does it. And you see it when you ask your own brothers about the same event. And I see somehow I must have shifted it slightly different from how they shifted it.
“That's what is deeply human. Thanks God, we have the quality to organize and shift and delete”
and modify our own memories. So it's not a solid thing like a heart drive in your laptop. Thanks God, we don't have that kind of memory. This conversation is going to stay in my memory for a while. I know that and for that I thank you very much. It's been good to talk to you. I hate to throw a piece of the accountants truth at Werner Herzog, but in the interest of fact
checking, I don't think there were ever four and a half million entries in the Manhattan
phone directory. Maybe two million, but I think you will agree that he gave us enough ecstatic truth to let the phone book thing slide. His latest book is called The Future of Truth, The One Before That. It's called Every Man For Himself And God Against All A Memoir.
“If you want to let us know what you thought of this episode, our email is [email protected].”
You can also leave a comment on your podcast app or at Freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. Coming up next time on the show, we look at the long arc of technology through the eyes of an economic historian. Every technology heads it down side, when early humans made their first hammers and axes that could bash each other's heads and then they did. Joel Mokir recently won a Nobel Prize. He was not expecting to get that famously early
in the morning phone call from the Nobel People. Oh, I was completely flabbergasted. You know, stupified. I mean, rundown this is Horace. But now he's got the mic and he's got a mission. It is my mission to tell people how good they have it. The good old days may have been old but they were good. We'll get some economic history and we'll get some advice. I have many tips. The Nobel Laureate Joel Mokir. That's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself.
And, if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. This episode was produced by Elina Coleman and Zach Lipinski, an edited by Gabriel Roth. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger, with help from Eleanor Osborn and Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abawaji, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Elaria Montenacore,
and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by the hitchhikers and our composer is Luis Garra.
As always, thanks for listening.
Now, I'm not a perfectionist. I accept my films with all the mistakes when I see a new film for the first time with an audience. I sink in my chair and I only see mistakes. The Freakonomics Radio Network, the hidden side of everything.
