#904 - Gary Taubes

Joe Rogan (0:03)

Three, two, one.

Boom, and we're live. Hello, Gary.

Gary Taubes (0:09)

Hi, Joe.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Thanks for coming, man. Appreciate it.

Gary Taubes (0:11)

Hey, my pleasure.

Joe Rogan (0:12)

The Case Against Sugar.

Gary Taubes (0:14)

Yeah.

Joe Rogan (0:14)

This is, for me, this is a, I don't know how to put this any other way, I've kind of consumed sugar most of my life until the last couple of years. And I slowly sort of tapered off in about a year ago. So, maybe last February or so, I just pretty much cut it all out, except for the occasional, you know, occasional dessert here or there, infinitely better quality of life. I feel much better, I have more energy, and then I started really getting into it, and then I came across your work.

And what I want to know is, first of all, how did you get involved in this, and how much resistance have you faced?

Gary Taubes (0:52)

Okay, this being the sugar case?

Joe Rogan (0:54)

Yes.

Gary Taubes (0:54)

This being the whole obesity diet, nutrition?

Joe Rogan (0:57)

We can get into all of it, but the sugar one, to me, is absolutely fascinating when you go down. I mean, have you seen that sugar movie?

Gary Taubes (1:05)

Yeah, yeah, and I'm probably in it, I think.

Joe Rogan (1:07)

I think you are.

Gary Taubes (1:08)

I think I'm one of the talking cereal boxes.

Joe Rogan (1:10)

Oh, okay, right.

Gary Taubes (1:11)

You know.

Joe Rogan (1:12)

I watched it with my kids. I made my kids watch it, and it's amazing when, you know, a six-year-old watches something like that, and then they go, why is sugar in everything?

Gary Taubes (1:23)

You know, it's funny, because my kids live with this all the time, right? So we had just come back from spending the holidays with my grandmother, who pumps them up with sugar while we're there, and there's nothing I could do with it. Then we get back, and I'm making my boys dinner. They're 8 and 11, and my wife's out. And after the dinner, my eight-year-old says, are we getting dessert? And my 11-year-old goes, Nick, it's dad, man. Are you crazy? Like, wake up, son.

Anyway, I got into this, you know, I...

Okay, I was a physics major in college. I was, like, hard science, and then I wasn't any good at it. Got a C-minus in quantum physics, and my advisor suggested I find another career. So I went into journalism, started doing science writing in the early 80s, because it was the only work I could get. And then my first book, I went to live at CERN, the big particle accelerator lab outside of Geneva, and I was what we would call today embedded with the physicists. And I thought I was going to be following and making this great discovery, which is what the Nobel laureate who ran the experiment was predicting. And instead, I spent 10 months watching them figure out how they had screwed up.

And it was a learning experience in how to do science writing. I was obsessed with how hard it is to do good science. And I had a lot of the physicists in the world really didn't like this Nobel laureate, so they were happy to point out to me how he was screwing up and how he had screwed up in the past and how he had even screwed up the work that he won the Nobel Prize for.

After I came back, I thought that was actually page six in the New York Post when my book came out. The headline was, Egghead Squabble Over Nobel Prize. And this Nobel laureate was quoted calling me an asshole in the newspaper. And I'm 29 years old, and I assume my career is over.

Joe Rogan (3:08)

What was he calling you an asshole over?

Gary Taubes (3:09)

Well, because I ended up writing an expose about what a bad scientist he was and about the politics of science. I went to Stockholm with this guy when he won the Nobel Prize. I mean, we got our tuxes fitted together. I was his guest at the Nobel dinner and the Nobel banquet and the party that follows, which is the most fun I've ever had in my life. Students of Stockholm throw a party for the laureates. Back then, it was crazy.

Anyway, so he was justifiably pissed off that I just wrote what I saw instead of what a great man he thought he was. And I thought my career was going to be over, right? You're called an asshole in the papers when you're a 29-year-old journalist by a Nobel laureate. But instead, everybody I would interview in science would say, Oh, you think that guy was bad. You should write about this guy. And I just started covering different aspects. And it turns out you could get a long way in science if you're willing to sort of cut corners. And it's not actually cheating. It's just you could discover a lot of stuff if you're not willing to do the rigorous, hard, critical, skeptical work to demonstrate that what you say you've discovered is wrong.