Elliot Razman:	Good afternoon everyone. Can you hear me back there? Thanks you so much for coming out on a Friday afternoon, we have a very special guest, A.J. Jacobs. I'm Elliot Ratzman, I'm a visiting assistant professor in the religion department. A number of years ago I decided I was going to investigate a genre of literature, which is known by a number of names, emersion journalism or stunt journalism, a sort of post gonzo, post new journalism in which journalist experiment with practices. You are familiar, I'm sure, with some of the classic text of journalist who try something out for a period of time in order to tell you something about it.
	For example, Black Like Me or Barbra Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, a subset of this genre that dealt with the political concerns of the suffering other. In my course of reviewing this literature, I discovered an amazing author, A.J. Jacobs. As I said in the flyer, A.J. is what you get when you combine Morgan Spurlock, Malcolm Gladwell, and Mark Twain, 'cause A.J. is certainly the funniest, cleverist, wisest of these experiments. I just want to show you a few of them to give you a sense of where the medium is going.
	So for example, how to be perfect, somebody investigates living all the laws of Leviticus for a year. Living Oprah, my one year experiment, walking the walk with the queen of talk. A year without made in China, a year of living black, just buying from black businesses, and there have been others, I'm sure the book stores are littered with them. But A.J. is sort of the original spur that resulted in this flood of very interesting writings. A.J.'s writings are the best of the bunch and we're really honored to have him here today. A.J. went to Brown, he was a philosophy major. Right?
A.J. Jacobs:	That's true.
Elliot Razman:	Otto, the bus driver from The Simpsons also went to Brown. And from there, he entered the journalist world, he is a contributing Esquire, and as I recently found out, since few of us watch TV anymore, he is a consultant on the Dr. Oz show. So I'm gonna turn it over to A.J., please give him a big Swarthmore welcome.
A.J. Jacobs:	Thank you. Thank you, Elliot. It's great to be here and I'm honored to be introduced by Elliot, who I've got to know a little bit, and who is brilliant, and who understands my project better than I do. So thank you for that. I'm gonna have to ask you, while I'm writing my next book to explain it to me, but yeah, this is interesting to see these other examples of doing something for a year. I actually often get asked to blurb, someone says, "I'm doing a year trying to learn the French horn, will you write a little thing on the back of my book?" And I usually do, sometimes I don't. There was one book that game out about a year ago where the guy spent a year trying to make his penis longer. I was like, "I don't know if I can really get behind that one." Anyway-
Elliot Razman:	Takes more than a minute?
A.J. Jacobs:	Good point, I'll leave it there. I thought I'll just talk for a little bit and then Elliot is gonna ask me some questions and then you guys can ask me some questions. I'll just give you a very quick overview of what I've written. For those who haven't read my stuff or did not listen to Elliot two minutes ago, I like to dive in and just emerse myself in my topics, like become a human guinea pig.
	I work at Esquire magazine, a few years ago I wrote an article called My Outsource Life, and for this one I hired a team of people in Bangalore, India to do everything for me. So they answered my phones for me, they answered my emails for me, they argued with my wife for me, it was fantastic, it was the best month of my life, 'cause I just got to sit back and watch TV and read books. Then, right after that I did an article for Esquire on a movement called irradical honesty, and this is a movement where they believe you should never lie, but then they go further than that and they say, "Whatever's on your brain, should come out of your mouth," like no filter. So I tried that for a month and that was the worst month of my life. That is just a horrible way to live, but interesting nonetheless.
	Then, I wrote ... this was actually my second book was the Year of Living Biblically and this was my attempt to dive into religion, emerse myself into religion. This came about because I grew up with no religion at all. I grew up in New York city, as I say in the book, I'm Jewish, but I'm Jewish in the same way the Olive Garden is Italian, so not very. No offense to the Olive Garden, wonderful restaurant. But I wanted to learn about, so I thought one way to learn about this would be to do it by living it, to learn it from the inside out, to follow in the footsteps of our forefathers and foremothers.
	So I did, I bought a stack of bibles and I assembled a board of spiritual advisors. So I had rabbis and ministers and priests, and then I wrote down every rule that I could find in the bible, and as you might know, this is a very long list, hundreds of rules, over 600 by many counts here. That's the stack of bibles. So I wanted to follow all of them without picking and choosing and to see how that affected my life. Which rules made my life better, which made my life more complicated.
	So I wanted to follow the famous ones like the 10 commandments, right there. Love your neighbor, of course, be fruitful and multiply, and by the way, I was, I was fruitful. I have twin boys, so I take my projects very seriously is my point, but I also wanted to follow the less famous rules like the bible says in Leviticus that you cannot shave the corners of your beard. I didn't know where the corners were, so I just let the whole thing grow and by the end I had this huge topiary hanging from my chin. I'll just give you a sense of ... that's the beginning, that's the middle, and there's the end.
	As you might guess, I spent a lot of time in airport security with that thing. Here's a side shot. The bible says you cannot wear clothes made of mixed fibers and this seems so strange to me, I was like, "Why would God care if I wore a poly cotton blend? Seems like micromanaging on God's part," but I said, "There's no way for me to know if this has any meaning unless I try it," so I did. 
	I got rid of all my mixed fiber clothing, and weirdly, some of the rules that did seem the strangest at the beginning did take on meaning for me by the end. Not that one in particular, but many of the other. The bible has a rule in Leviticus as well that says, "If two men are in a fight, and the wife of one of those men grabs the private parts of the other man, then her hand shall be cut off." So I wanted to follow that one. That one I followed by default, by not getting in a fight with another man whose wife was standing nearby, looking like she [inaudible 00:08:10].
	So I was able to do some easily, but there are many more of these rules that were incredibly challenging, and the challenging types came in two parts. First there were the parts that were just hard because they were about the everyday sins that we all commit. You know the bible says that you cannot lie, you can't gossip, you cannot covet, and I live in New York and I work as a journalist, so that's 80% of my day. So I was faced with this question, how do I do a moral makeover?
	One of the secrets I learned from this project was how important it is ... how the exterior affects the interior. How much your behavior affects your thoughts and the importance of, even of pretending to be a better person, and when you pretend to be a better person, eventually you become a better person. They say in business, "Fake it 'til you make it," and I really believe this is a powerful way to be and a powerful way to change, and it's the theme throughout all of my books. And they talk a lot about this in cognitive behavioral psychology, that when you act in a certain way, then you become that way.
	So for instance, during this year, I would force myself to do things like visit a friend in the hospital, even though I really did not feel like it, but I would trick my mind. I would get into the hospital, I would see him there, and I'd say, "Oh, I must be a compassionate person," and you become more compassionate. It's even on the simplest things. The studies show that if you force yourself to smile, it tricks your mind and you become a little bit happier. I really believe in the power of acting good even if you don't feel it, and then the mind catches up. 
	It's actually a very Jewish notion. There's a phrase in Judaism, "Deed before creed," so you do the deeds, you follow the rules, and you do the good stuff, and then the creed follows, but it was challenging. I'll tell you, one of the hardest for me was gossip, and luckily I discovered that there's an Orthodox Jewish rabbis, a group of them in Brooklyn who run a gossip hotline. It's like a suicide line, but for gossip. So if you have the urge to gossip, you can call 'em up and they'll talk you down from the ledge. So I did that, I spent some time on that, and I think I include the number in the book, so I recommend it.
	There's also the other type of rule that was very difficult to follow was ... Oh, thank you very much, it was so hard to reach down and press there. The other type of rule was rules that don't really jibe with modern American customs. There were quite a few of these examples, but one of them that comes to mind is stoning adulterers, that was kind of hard to pull off, but I was able to stone one adulterer. I'll just very briefly tell you how it happened.
	It was later in the year and I was really getting into the project, so I was wearing my robes and my sandals and I had my beard, and this guy came up to me in Central Park and he said ... I'll give you a visual, that's sort of what I looked like, but without the sheep. The sheep was more for the cover shoot, that was a rental sheep, but I did sometimes walk around looking like this. And a guy came up to me and he said, "Why are you dressed like that?"
	And I said, "I'm following all the rules of the bible, from the 10 Commandments to stoning adulterers," and he said, "Well I'm an adulterer, are you gonna stone me?" And I said, "Well yeah, that'll be great." It's like, "This is a wonderful opportunity." So I took out a handful of stones, because I had been carrying around these stones, hoping to run into a self proclaimed adulterer, anyway. He was very aggressive, he grabbed the stones out of my hands and threw them at my face.
	So I thought ... Thank you for the gasp. So I thought, "An eye for an eye," also [inaudible 00:12:18] Hebrew scriptures, I could toss one back at him, so that's how I did that. Another type of rule in that genre was if you take Leviticus very literally, you cannot touch women in their time of month. And if you take it very, very literally, you cannot sit on a seat where a menstruating woman has sat, because then the seat is impure and you become impure if you sit on it. My wife found this offensive, so she sat in every seat in our apartment, and so I had to stand for most of the year, which I'll talk about my Health book very briefly in a second, but standing is actually very good for you. Sitting is terrible for your health, so she was doing me a favor, so I thank her for that.
	After the year ended, I did shave off my beard, I went back to wearing mixed fibers, but there is much that I have kept from that year. I mentioned it briefly to Elliot's class that I was talking to earlier, and they're many things, I'll just give you two examples. One is the idea of gratitude, because the bible says that you have to give thanks. So I was taking that literally and giving thanks for everything, so even the smallest things.
	I'd press an elevator button, and I'd be thankful the elevator came, and then I'd get in the elevator and I'd be thankful it didn't plummet to the basement and break my collarbone. And it was a weird way to live, but it was also wonderful, because I got to realize, there are hundreds of things that go right every day that we completely take for granted, and we focus on the three or four that go wrong. It was a radical change in perspective that I really tried to keep. Another change is that I did, at the end, decide to join a synagogue, as I mentioned to the class, I don't really go, but no, we go sometimes, but not as much as we should.
	I wanted to be a part of the community, I wanted to give my kids just a little sense of my heritage, just a taste of Judaism, so they could decide later whether they wanted to be observant or not. But I also like the idea of a community, because in biblical times, there wasn't this sense of the individual, the smallest unit of society really was the family or the tribe. We often see the world as a series of rights, we have the right to this, the right to that, but I think a more biblical point of view is that life is a series of responsibilities. That we have a responsibility to our family, to our neighbors, to the elderly, and I think that that this a wonderful way to look at the world.
	I think you need a mix, I think we want to have som individualism, but I think we've gone too far in that direction, so I like bringing in some biblical perspective. After that year, I felt I had worked on my body, I mean, I'd worked on my spirit so I decided I was gonna work on my body. That was the origin of my next book, which was Drop Dead Healthy, so I'll just briefly talk about that before Elliot comes in to grill me. I needed to work on my body because I was in terrible shape, I wasn't traditionally fat, but I was sort of skinny fat, which is when your body looks like a snake that swallowed a goat.
	So I felt I needed some work in that area, and I also got sick. I was in the hospital with pneumonia and my wife said, "I don't want to be a widow. You've gotta get in shape," so I said, "If I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do it the same way I did the bible book and just go all in." So I got a board of medical advisors, so doctors, and trainers, and nutritionists, and I wrote down every health rule that I could follow, that I could find. Again, there's hundreds, hundreds of rules and pieces of advice and it was overwhelming.
	So actually in the beginning, I sort of went in very slowly, so I tried to rationalize all of my vices, because there are a lot of studies that say for instance, coffee is good for you, 'cause it saves off Alzheimer's and it prevents certain types of cancers. Lots of research that chocolate, dark chocolate good for you with preventing heart disease, a lot of research that alcohol, in moderation, just one drink a day, is good for you, that it's really good for preventing heart disease. A lot of research that heroin is good for you, that's not true. I don't recommend that at all, but I was for a while trying the alcohol, chocolate, and coffee diet, but I realized that has its limitations.
	So I went and I decided to dive in and try to follow all of the other health advice as much as I could, and that turned out to be like a 24/7 occupation, because there's so much to do. You gotta exercise, you've gotta meditate, a lot of proven benefits to meditation, you've gotta put on sunscreen. If you take the dermatologist at their word, they say to put on a shot glass full of sunscreen every 2-4 hours, that's like half your day is spent putting on sunscreen. You have to pet dogs, because there's a lot of research that dogs are very good for your health, they lower your blood pressure. I didn't have a dog so I would go to the dog park near my house and pet other peoples dogs, which got a mixed reaction, but I was on a mission.
	You've gotta make your own food, because as you know, processed food is pretty terrible for you, and then you've gotta eat that food. And if you are eating in a properly healthy way, that takes awhile, because our mothers were right, we do not chew our food. We're a nation of under chewers, chewing will give you more nutrition, and it'll also slow down your eating, which is very important. The slower you eat, the less you eat, and portion control is a very big part of being healthy.
	I actually ran across this group on the internet who are very pro mastication, and they call their movement Chewdisim, so that's them, not me, I don't want to take credit, I'm not a big fan of the puns. But they say you gotta chew your food a hundred times per mouthful, which is insane, 'cause then you're spending two days eating a sandwich, but they're generally right, we do need to chew our food. So that was just one little takeaway out of many. I tried, as Elliot mentioned, I'm an emersion journalist, so I tried to emerse myself in all of these different diets. I tried the raw food diet, the paleo diet, I tried all different workouts, I tried all different tests to see ... Here's one, by the way, that's me hailing a cab during my biblical year, very effective.
	I tested my brain, I tested sleep, by the way, did not get a great night sleep that night, still trying to figure out why. Then I did the stroller size workout where you push your kid around, you turn your kid into a piece of exercise equipment. The caveman workout, where you crawl around in the forest and throw boulders and climb trees, and I tried all sorts of products. The strangest product, I don't have a picture, which you'll see why that's a good thing, but the strangest product was something called Nature's Platform.
	I don't know if anyone's heard of that, but one of the surprises of the year was I realized, I had been going to the bathroom incorrectly for 40 years. That we go to the bathroom in an unhealthy way, because we are not built to sit, we are built to squat, that's the way our ... So this is a platform you can order on the internet that will go over your toilet and you climb on top, and it basically turns your bathroom from a first world toilet into a developing world's toilet. So I tried that and I had it in the bathroom for about two days before my wife was like, "Get this out of here. This is disgusting." So that, I don't do anymore, but if you really want to be optimally healthy, buy the Nature's Platform.
	At the end of the year, the same as with my biblical year, I can't keep everything from what I was doing, but I've kept a lot, and I'll just end with three or four examples of things that I've kept. One is that I've really tried to, as I mentioned before, not sit down as much. I feel a little guilty 'cause you're all sitting down, but you'll get up soon, but the research on sitting really is quite alarming. It messes with your metabolism, your blood sugar, your weight, everything, so if you can just get up every 20 minutes and walk around for a couple of minutes, that makes a huge difference.
	I joined the whole treadmill desk movement where you have a treadmill and you put your computer on top of it, so I wrote the book while walking on my treadmill. It took me about a thousand miles. Here's one setup I had, which was not that successful, 'cause [inaudible 00:22:26], but I have a more professional one now. So walking as much as possible, and to get myself motivated to walk, I find that just having a pedometer makes a huge difference. This is all part of a movement called the Quantified Self, I don't know if you guys have heard of that, but the idea there is the more you measure yourself, the healthier you act.
	So something as simple as a pedometer, just having it and trying to get to the goal of 10,000 steps makes a big difference, because it changes the way you think about moving. Before, if I lost my keys I'd be all annoyed that I'm walking around my apartment looking for them, but now I'm like, "This is great. I'm racking up the steps," and I found a website that I really recommend, I'm trying to promote it, it's called earnedit.com. This is a website that you get points for walking, you sort of sink your pedometer with it and you can use those points to buy things or you can use them for charity, so I use them for charity.
	I get free water for Haiti, clean water. If I'm not walking, I feel like I'm killing Haitian people, it's very motivating. So I really recommend that, earnedit.com. In terms of food, there are two things you've gotta remember of course, which is quantity and quality. The quantity, I talk a little about, you want to eat less, so Chewdisim is one way to do it. There's other techniques like you want to have smaller plates, you want to set up your house or apartment so that the good food is at eye level, because we are incredibly lazy, so we just take what's at eye level.
	Then in terms of the quality of food, I think that the secret is, it's not a big secret. I don't know if you guys have read Michael Palin's books, but he's a food writer and after all this research he said, "It boils down to three things," which is ... now I can't remember the three things. Eat whole foods, eat real food, not too much, and mostly plants, which I think is right. I think that's the basic ... The research out there does support a mostly plant based diet.
	You have some people who disagree with that, the low carb folks, the paleo folks, but at this point, most of the science is on that side. So that's what I've settled on, and both sides, the low carb side and the mostly plants side, they both agree on one thing, which is that white flour the least processed carbs is simple sugars, those are the worst, so if you can avoid those, you're halfway there. Finally, I learned that you shouldn't really stress too much about your health. I think that I was so obsessed with health that it was not good for me.
	I interviewed a doctor, in fact, who has come up with a new type of eating disorder called Orthorexia, which is an unhealthy obsession with healthy food, because if you're so obsessed with eating just the right food, then you can't go out with your friends. You're isolating yourself, and going out to dinner with friends is a huge part of health, being part of a community, social connections is as important as food, exercise, and sleep. So don't get too wound up about this stuff. So those are my two books that I wanted to talk about, I will end, since Elliot brought up this whole idea of emersion journalism, I'll end with a story that a rabbi told me right before I wrote this book, The Year of Living Biblically.
	It kind of relates to this idea of emersion and action. I was very nervous before I embarked on this, 'cause I was worried that people would misinterpret it, that I would be seen as flippant, that I would get a lot of slack, and I was in over my head. But he said, "Let me tell you a story of," it's not actually from the bible, it's a story about biblical events, but it's from something called the midrash, which are legends about the bible. He said, "When the Hebrews were fleeing the Egyptians, they got to the Red Sea, and Moses opened his arms and tried to part the Red Sea, but nothing happened. It just stayed flat, and the Hebrews were understandably freaking out, because the Egyptians were right behind them and were gonna come and slay them, and they didn't know what to do.
	"Finally, one of the Hebrews, whose name was Nahshon, decided just to walk in. So he walked into the water and he wadded up to ... the water went up to his knees, and then his waist, his stomach, his chest, his neck, and then right before it was gonna get to his nostrils, the sea's parted." So the rabbi told me that the idea, the moral is, sometimes you just have to wade in, you don't have to dive in to make miracles happen. So that's been one of the guiding forces of my experiments. You just have to dive in sometimes and make things happen. So thank you for coming and listening to my little talk, and I'd be happy to answer, well first Elliot's questions, and then any questions you guys have. Thank you.
Elliot Razman:	Just want to also mention, there is a Swarthmore connection. Professor Nathaniel Deutsch, who used to teach here, was one of the consultants on ... would you say he's one of your spiritual advisors on or something?
A.J. Jacobs:	Totally. He was right on the board. Did any of you ever have him as a teacher? Or was he before your time? No. He's a great guy.
Elliot Razman:	A few things. One of your first emersion experiments was a book called The Know-It-All, which it totally recommend, it's hilarious. It's a book about reading the entire Encyclopedia Britannica, which is one of the requirements, actually, for getting into this college.
A.J. Jacobs:	As well it should be.
Elliot Razman:	But could you maybe say a little bit about that book. How that was received and-
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah, well that one-
Elliot Razman:	How did the pitch go to the publisher for that?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well I initially pitched that as an article to Esquire. Thank God they turned it down, 'cause imagine spending a year and a half on an article, that's horrible. I got the idea because my dad started to read the encyclopedia when I was a kid, when I was in high school, but he didn't quite finish. He made it up to middle of the letter B, so I thought I could try to remove that black mark from our family history and finish the encyclopedia, so that's what I did.
	I wrote the book in chapters, so chapter A, chapter B, and it was all about my reading, what I learned, the strangest, most interesting things I learned. But also how I joined Mensa, which I got in by a little sideways, so I don't consider myself a genius, but I am a member of Mensa, there's some loopholes. I can tell you about them if you want. They basically just want your money, like every other organization, so you can get in, but anyway.
	I went on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? So that's what the book is about, and it was great, I loved the experience. I learned a lot of strange stuff, but also uplifting stuff, and it was uplifting overall, because I do think it made me realize progress is real. We tend to glorify the good ole days, but the good ole days were not good.
Elliot Razman:	Well I sent around to my students several articles. One, your outsource life, which did you say it was optioned to be a TV show?
A.J. Jacobs:	That was optioned to be a movie, it never got made. The rights, I think, are back being available, if you guys want to ...
Elliot Razman:	And I sent them around the Rationality Project, as well. Was that when you were doing the radical honesty? You were trying [crosstalk 00:31:27].
A.J. Jacobs:	No, that was a separate article, but that was trying to eliminate all of these built in biases we have. One of the most famous is that we're so afraid of car crashes ... I mean so afraid of airplane crashes, even though car crashes are much, much more common, because we see on the news an airplane crash and it makes this big impression. It's called the availability fallacy, so I tried to live the perfectly rational life, to only be afraid of those things that I should be afraid of. 
Elliot Razman:	So you were afraid of driving?
A.J. Jacobs:	Driving, absolutely. Terrified of it, and heart disease, that's it. Driving, heart disease, and cancer. Everything else is fine.
Elliot Razman:	Why don't we open up some questions then. I'm sure people have some curiosities before we move along.
A.J. Jacobs:	Yes.
Speaker 3:	So did you start in normal journalism? How did you make the transition? And speaking of pitches, what is your pitch for your Living Biblically look like? How many people did you have to pitch it for someone paid you to do that?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well I did start in normal journalism, and I still do some of it. I started at a tiny newspaper in California, circulation like 20,000, which does not exist anymore, of course. And I was writing about the tiniest things like sewage meetings, and taxes, and PTA meetings, which I actually think was good, 'cause it gave me a real foundation in reporting, which I think is the basis of all good writing is just research and details. But then one of my first experiments was when I was working at Entertainment Weekly and I looked exactly like this B list actor, whose name was Noah Taylor, and he actually been in a claimed movie called Shine. They sent me to the Academy Awards to see what it would be like to be an actor at the Academy Awards, and it was awesome. I mean everyone loved me.
Elliot Razman:	I'll pass around the picture.
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah, I signed autographs and my ego got huge even though it wasn't exactly me they were complimenting, but still, all that positive feedback, it's hard not to be affected. But anyway, oh and then the pitch for the Year of Living Biblically, it was about 20 pages, I just wrote what I was gonna do, and luckily, my first book about The Know-It-All had done well enough that they had trusted me, so I just pitched to the same publisher. Yeah.
Speaker 4:	In your Living Biblically expendage, did you find any contradictions in the rules that were provided to you either in practice or with the advisors? And if so, how did you resolve it?
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah, well it is ... There certainly are a lot ... I mean, as they said on The Simpsons, Ned Flanders says, "But I'm obeying all the rules of the bible, even the ones that contradict the other ones." So I thought that was a good theological statement. My feeling about the bible is that it was written by many different people over thousands of years, and so there are gonna be parts ...
	I actually, at one point, and I don't mean disrespect, 'cause I love Wikipedia, but I compare it to Wikipedia, because it is the same idea of there's not one editor. There's lots of different editors, lots of different writers, so you are gonna get contradictions, and there's an eye for an eye and turn the other cheek is just the most simple. But part of the conclusion I had in my book was that you do have to pick and choose, and you can't follow everything, and there are fundamentalists who say this is a bad thing.
	They say, "That's cafeteria religion," which is a very derogatory phrase. You're just picking and choosing parts of the bible, but my argument is, "What's wrong with cafeterias? I've had some delicious meals in cafeterias." I don't know what the Swarthmore cafeteria's like.
Elliot Razman:	I like going there. I go there once in a while, every day for these guys.
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah, well maybe it doesn't ring true to you guys, but to me, the idea is that yeah, there's wonderful parts to the bible about compassion and loving your neighbor, but there's also incredibly sexist parts, there's homophobic parts. So I think it's okay to pick and choose. I think that that's our responsibility. Yeah.
Speaker 5:	Could you comment a little bit about the future of the print books, magazines and how's that affecting your work?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well yeah, it's a great questions, and I wish I had the answer, and I think no one has the answer, 'cause things are so influx, it's changing so fast, that anyone who pretends to know what's gonna be in five years is absolutely wrong. No one knows. I will say, creatively, I think it's one of the most exciting times for writing and for all arts, because the opportunities are so massive and you can combine different, you combine video and text, and you can also publish. We are all publishers now.
	So creatively, it's awesome, financially, not so much, because it is getting increasingly difficult to make a living as a creative person, because people expect free stuff. So yeah, I don't know. I think that there are still going to be brands that we go to. So I think that I don't know which ones they'll be, but the New York Times will exist in some form, hopefully Esquire, where I work, will exist, but it will definitely be harder to make a living as a creative person.
Elliot Razman:	Does Esquire actually exist in a physical space? Or do you ... Do you have an office, for example? Or do they just meet by conference call?
A.J. Jacobs:	Right. Well no, as of today, they still have a physical space. So yeah, I'm thinking in about 10 years, they might not, but right now, there's an office and the whole thing. 
Elliot Razman:	Some more hands up. Yup.
Speaker 6:	So are you panning to continue with emersion journalism? Are you in the midst of a emersion experience right now?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well I was just telling Elliot's class that I just finished one, which was I emersed myself in a movement called Life Logging, and this is a movement where you record every part of your life. I bought a tiny video camera that was like the size of a cigarette and it was in my ear, and it recorded my entire day, from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep. The idea is, our memories are terrible, and 70% of my fights with my wife are, "You never told me that. That's not what you said."
	So here I could be like, "Well, let's go to the video tape. Let's see what happened," which turned out to be horrible, because it was a lose lose. If I was wrong, I lost and then if I was right then she just got more angry, but I do believe that this is the future. I do believe that we all eventually will be recording every moment, and it'll have its good parts and it'll have its terrible parts, but I do believe that that'll happen.
Elliot Razman:	Where on the web is the stream of your life?
A.J. Jacobs:	I didn't stream it, because you definitely don't want to see some of it, but it's all in my hard drive, and hopefully will never reach the cloud, but maybe it will. You do realize that 90% of your life is incredibly dull, but then there's that 10% that's pretty interesting, and to have these moments on tape with my kids, I love the fact that I've got these moments I normally wouldn't have. So yeah.
Elliot Razman:	This guy back there.
Speaker 7:	Yeah. Where do you find the motivation to keep doing this throughout a whole year? And has there been any point where you come really close to giving up on a certain project?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well yeah, I mean I definitely always am tempted to quit, but I think part of it is that I have obsessive compulsive disorder, so I'm able to channel that into these projects so that instead of washing my hands 400 times a day or whatever, I'm able to focus on doing something like this. When I'm not doing it, I kind of feel antsy, it's a little disturbing. I feel like I'm unanchored when I don't have ...
	So it's almost like a religion, we were talking earlier about how religion has these very set structures and that one of the advantage is it provides a freedom from choice, which I think is a very appealing thing. So I like having these structures, but there are times I definitely want to quit, like reading the encyclopedia. No offense against Portuguese literature, but like 40 pages of that Portuguese, after like 38 I was like, "I think I've got enough Portuguese literature to last me a lifetime."
Elliot Razman:	You had a piece last year in the, maybe it was over the summer, about your other compulsive habit, which is blurbing books.
A.J. Jacobs:	That is true.
Elliot Razman:	Right, so you published a piece in the New York Times about your compulsive blurbing life.
A.J. Jacobs:	Right.
Elliot Razman:	Could you tell us some of your greatest hits?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well I defini-
Elliot Razman:	Books you regretted, for example.
A.J. Jacobs:	Well I mentioned the one where the guy tried to get a bigger penis for a year, that one I did not blurb and I'm very proud, but most of the others I do blurb, and I get in a little trouble, 'cause I'm a little too free with my blurbs. I'm a promiscuous blurber. I have books sent to me by a guy who was gonna live off the land for a year, so I gave the blurb.
	I said, "By this book, read it, then compost it," and I was so proud of myself, I was like, "That's pretty good," and then I submitted it and they print. Right before it came out, I looked back at my other list of blurbs and I had used the exact same joke on another book about recycling, and so I was terrified someone was gonna bust me, but I had a plan. I said, "If someone said, 'You're recycling,' well you know, I'm just trying to be environmental, recycle my jokes, a precious resource," but luckily no one ever busted me.
Elliot Razman:	Okay, one here is, "Thou shall read this book."
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah that, I recycled like seven times.
Elliot Razman:	One of the trends in emersion journalism is that people have sort of experimented with being differently religious. Your intern, Kevin Roose wrote, I think one of the best books, I can't believe he actually wrote that whole book when he was 24. He-
A.J. Jacobs:	He was younger than that.
Elliot Razman:	Was he?
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah.
Elliot Razman:	Wow.
A.J. Jacobs:	I know.
Elliot Razman:	So he's a Brown junior. He takes a semester off to go to Liberty University. He was the last person to interview Jerry Falwell alive, before he died, and it's an incredibly sensitive portrayal of Evangelical culture. Gwen Kessler, here, uses it in her spiritual journeys class.
A.J. Jacobs:	Really?
Elliot Razman:	Yeah.
A.J. Jacobs:	That's wonderful. I'm gonna tell him, he'll be so excited. Yeah, the premise was he went from the most liberal university, Brown, to the most conservative, Liberty, but as Elliot said, I was so impressed, because it was a sensitive ... it was a very nuance portrayal, it wasn't making fun of Evangelical culture. But it was a fascinating booking and you got to see this ... you're not supposed to have physical contact with the opposite sex, so they do something called gazing, where you look deep into the other person's eyes, that's sort of the equivalent of ... Yeah, I just saw some gazing going on right now. I feel dirty watching it. [inaudible 00:44:41]. But yeah, so it was a great book, and by the way, can we talk a little about your project? 'Cause-
Elliot Razman:	Let's talk a little bit about some of the things I might be writing about. Let me just warn you guys, there's also some really bad emersion journalism projects, and let me just say, who here's read Nickel and Dime? By Barbra Ehrenreich, you know the premise, she lives as a low wage worker for like six months in different areas, came out in 2000. It was an assigned reading for the incoming freshman class of the University of North Carolina in 2004.
	Well, one of the dudes of that class decided he was gonna reproduce the experiment, this wealthy white guy was going to see if he could make it on $25 living in South Carolina. So he wrote what, I call, the douche bag's nickel and dime. It was like the most terribly offensive emersion journalism project where he goes and decides he's gonna live in a homeless shelter in Charleston, South Carolina, and take low wage work until he bought a car and made it, and it's really a terrible experiment. So there's no inevitable sensitizing to suffering through these projects. There was another one called My Year In Radical Islam where-
A.J. Jacobs:	I hadn't heard of that.
Elliot Razman:	Oh, yeah. He's a neocon pundit now and he converted to Islam and lived in a moderately radical, not even very radical, community for a year. There's some really terrible ones, Among the Believers, is a version of Kevin Roose's book, it's not very ... maybe I shouldn't be saying this live, but there are a number of very excellent, very sensitive emersion projects, but there are questions about the ethics of it, which is some of the things that I'm writing about. Like what are we to think about people that, say, put on black face, like the Congressman from Brooklyn? Was it Dove Hankin? Is he a state senator?
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah.
Elliot Razman:	Yeah.
A.J. Jacobs:	I forget what he is, but he's a ... yeah.
Elliot Razman:	A Orthodox Jewish state senator put on black face for reporum last week and said, "Hey, what's the problem?" He's wearing this really terrible wig and black face on and John Stewart points out that this is the guy who's been complaining about anti Semitism for years when it's not there. So what are the ethics of when one can actually pretend to be, let's say, another color, or another gender, or another religion, or another race? What are we supposed to think about this?
	Some of my research is, how extreme the reactions are. Either somebody like Barbra Ehrenreich becomes incredibly admired and is seen as an authority, like I suppose you were sometimes seen as an authority on the bible. But then people react terribly like who are they to do this? They could always jump out of their identity.
	I'm gonna bring this back to your life, there was a book that came out just a few months called The Cross in the Closet, has anyone read this book? The Cross in the Closet? Have you heard about this book. Fascinating, a formerly conservative Evangelical man in the south decides he's gonna tell everybody he's gay for a year, and so come out to his friends, his family, his church and see what their reaction is.
	He works in a gay coffee house in a neighborhood in Nashville and he crowd sourced the PR funding for it online and did a sweep of talk shows and news programs. It's actually a go to book now for young Evangelicals who are trying to come up with a language to talk about how they can be both Christina, Evangelical, and either an ally or LGBT friendly part of the community. Now, if you read the book, it's okay, but there are some ouchy moments, but it is about a straight person who has no idea about gay culture discovering what gay culture is like.
A.J. Jacobs:	Right.
Elliot Razman:	And also that there are more Christian gay men than he ever imagined, who are more Christian than him, he said.
A.J. Jacobs:	Interesting.
Elliot Razman:	But I think he contacted you at some point.
A.J. Jacobs:	Yes, yes he did, and yeah I actually ... he was one of the few I did not end up blurbing. I actually, I admire him and I think it was a very interesting project. My only problem is as a parent, he told his parents he was gay and put them through a lot of psychic pain for the project. In the end, it might have been the moral thing to do, because he did make the community more tolerant towards gay people, which I think is a totally great goal, but then there's this ethics questions of did the end justify the means? You know?
Elliot Razman:	Anybody here see Dick Gregory at Bryn Mawr last night? Dick Gregory is a comedian and an activist from the 60s, an African American writer, activist, and comedian and one of his best friends was John Howard Griffin, who was the white Texan who lives as a black man for six months. Of course, maybe the difference between what you're doing and what say Griffin, or Ehrenreich, or even people like Jack London, is that they pretended and went undercover as these identities. It doesn't seem that you're going undercover.
A.J. Jacobs:	No, that's true.
Elliot Razman:	Like you're saying, "Hey, I'm [crosstalk 00:50:37]."
A.J. Jacobs:	The only time I went undercover was when I went undercover as an Academy Award-winning actor, but the rest of the time, I'm completely open about what I'm doing. Sometimes people are taken aback in the beginning, 'cause they don't know people ... like why are you dressed like that guy? But yeah, I try to be open. Even about the radical honesty, as part of the radial honesty I had to explain, I'm trying to be radically honest, but sometimes it didn't get to that, it was very ...
	The worst moment, I think, was when I was in a restaurant with my wife and some friends of hers from college came over and was like, "Oh, this is great. Great to see you after all these years. We should get together," and I had to say what was on my mind, which was that you guys seem nice, but I really don't ever want to see you again, 'cause I have all these friends I don't ever get to see. So they didn't appreciate that and neither did my wife. So yeah, that was not a pleasant moment, and I was gonna explain to them, "You know, I'm sorry, I'm just being radically honest for this project," but they were long gone by that time.
Elliot Razman:	Your wife is an excellent character in all your books. What does she think about the way that you portray her? Because she's portrayed as long suffering, eye rolling-
A.J. Jacobs:	Right.
Elliot Razman:	Mildly tolerant of what you're doing.
A.J. Jacobs:	She does, she likes. I think she likes it. She protests, and then she gets back at me with the sitting on the seats when she was menstruating, but she definitely has veto power. She puts the kibosh on things, not in the book so much, but on which projects I choose. A lot of readers have suggested that I do one where I try to become the greatest lover in the world, like do all the positions in the Karma Sutra, and my wife was like, "That sounds exhausting. No way that's happens." I actually, I'm okay with that. I don't have the back strength anymore for some of that stuff, so yeah. She has veto power.
Elliot Razman:	Let me open up some more questions. People are curious about the writing process. As part of my project, I will too, be undergoing an emersion experiment. I'm taking suggestions, but I think right now, I think I will live with as a tall man with lots of hair, but other comments or questions?
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah.
Speaker 8:	Are you trying to make a social point in your book? It seems, without having read your book, that you are jesting at social norms by taking it to the extreme. Is that part of what's going on?
A.J. Jacobs:	That is part of what's going on. I mean certainly for The Year of Living Biblically, I wanted to show there are millions of people who say they take the bible literally and that informs their views on homosexuality and the creation that the world is 5,000 years old. One of the motivations was I said, "Well what if we really do take the bible completely literally," 'cause I got the sense they were taking parts of it literally, but not everything.
	So I took it to the extreme to sort of show that this approach to the bible is a flawed one, that you don't have to take the bible literally to take it seriously. You can see it as a metaphor, and you can see it as stories, and it can be very meaningful, but you don't have to take it literally. So yeah, I think that's the taking the argument to the extreme to show it's absurd. I think reductio ad absurdum, I think is the official word. So yeah, that's true. Yeah.
Speaker 9:	When you were doing the health book, how did you decide which health addicted to follow, because, like the bible, there are often contradictory directives. One study comes out says, "Do this," and then a few years later another study comes out and says, "Ehh, it was all bs [inaudible 00:54:48] don't do that."
A.J. Jacobs:	Right.
Speaker 9:	So as a journalist, how did you evaluate which ones you would take seriously enough to try to live by? Or did you decide to just sort of wonder over the map without too much regard to how validated they might [crosstalk 00:55:02]?
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah. Well some, I tried to do mostly evidenced based stuff, but then not all, 'cause I wanted to do some of the really bizarre stuff, 'cause I think that makes for good reading. Like there's this movement called calorie restriction, where you only eat 70% of what normal people eat and you're on the verge of starvation, 'cause there are some studies in animals that say if you do this, you'll live longer, so they believe they're gonna live to like 150. My reaction, which I think is most peoples reaction is, "Yeah, you may live longer, but why would you want to?"
	It's like, "If you can't have a waffle, what's the point of living?" But I went to their house, the founders of this movement, and they served me dinner, which consisted of a blueberry for the appetizer and a walnut as the main course. I should clarify that we each got our own blueberry, we didn't have to share the blueberry, so it was crazy. But anyway, I did try to do some of the wack stuff, but then I tried to do mostly the evidence based stuff, and one thing that I'll just mention very quickly is that if you ... you know it can be very frustrating, because there are all these competing health claims.
	But really, 90% of health advice is the same and is what 99% of scientists agree on which is, get a lot of sleep, exercise as much as possible, eat whole foods, and don't stress out. And then the rest of it is all on the margins, it's all [inaudible 00:56:44]. Is turmeric good for you or is it not? Those are pretty minor, if you follow the really basic stuff, then you're 90% there. Yeah.
Speaker 10:	With The Year of Living Biblically, I could see a reconstructionist or a former conservative rabbi working along with you, but what about an Orthodox rabbi. Did you have any of those as a consultant? Because they take this so seriously, I would think they would be really offended.
A.J. Jacobs:	I was surprised. I was very nervous going in thinking I would offend people, but I've got very good ... I had several of my advisors were Orthodox Jews. Partly it was the [Lebovitures 00:57:30], I don't know if you know.
Speaker 10:	No.
A.J. Jacobs:	They're the Hasidic Jews, but they're the ones, they see the secular Jews as sort of like they can bring them over. If you show any interest at all in religion, they're like so excited. So they were just delighted to help me. I think they were disappointed in the end when I didn't become a Hasidic Jew, but for a while they were very happy. I did actually find, this would be a good marketing of publishing is like three different endings. One where I would become a Hasidic Jew, another where I'd become an Evangelical Christian, another become like a Richard Dawkins atheist and then I could sell them in different parts of the country, and then I would really make a lot of money.
Elliot Razman:	You wrote the introduction to Ed Dobson's book The Year of Living Like Jesus, which is actually really interesting book. I don't know if you guys know Ed Dobson, he started the Moral Majority with Jerry Falwell back in the 70s and he moved to the left. I think he was one of the Evangelicals working for Obama in 2008, and in the book, he also ... it's interesting what you remember of the book, I remember he tries to live like an Orthodox Jew for a year, so he wears the outfits, he goes to synagogue, he's never been to a synagogue before and he writes how terrible the singing was, which is something that if you've grown up in the Jewish world you just take for granted.
	But it was a very interesting experiment where he was trying to live the laws of the Hebrew bible, but in the way that the Orthodox Rabbinic Judaism understands them, not the way that you would just read them in the bible. It's a very interesting nuance, what he did. There was also a book that just came out over the summer, The Year of Biblical ... Living Biblically ... Biblical Womanhood? Which was A.J.'s experiment from the perspective of a woman, which was much more difficult. I haven't read that one yet.
A.J. Jacobs:	I haven't either. But what would you say is interesting? 'Cause the way the Orthodox ... There's the bible and what it literally says and then there's what Judaism follows, and they are very different, because it's called the written law, which is what the bible says, and then the oral law, which is what the rabbis teach. For instance, just to give you one example, in the bible, there are very few food rules.
	All it says is you can't eat shrimp, and you can't eat pork, and you cannot boil a baby goat in its mothers milk, so I had to spend a year not boiling a baby goat in its mothers milk. I could've boiled it in its aunts milk or its grandmothers milk if I really needed to, but I didn't. But the rabbis have taken that one line, "You shall not boil a baby goat in its mothers milk," and really interpreted it in a much broader way, which is why you're not allowed to eat milk and meat at the same meal, you can't have a cheeseburger. And there are all these elaborate rules about separating milk and meat, and it's all from that one thing about-
Elliot Razman:	Right, right.
A.J. Jacobs:	A baby goat and its mothers milk.
Elliot Razman:	And of course, the laws of the Sabbath, so one of the 10 Commandments that nobody here is probably following is to obverse the Sabbath. So the question is, how do you observe it, how do you remember it, how do you sanctify it? So Rabbinic Judaism elaborates a very complex list of what you can and cannot do on the Sabbath based on an interpretation on parts of the bible, and people find this is very strange, but it's not strange at all. It's what Judaism and Christianity does, the bible is ... you weave the bible into the religious culture that comes after it.
A.J. Jacobs:	Right.
Elliot Razman:	[crosstalk 01:01:25].
A.J. Jacobs:	Well yeah, 'cause if you do follow exactly what the bible says, you'll be throwing stones at adulterers.
Elliot Razman:	Right.
A.J. Jacobs:	We can't do it, you can't do it. You have to evolve the meaning.
Elliot Razman:	Let's take a few more questions, there are books on sale at the book store, I'm sure ... did anyone here bring books to get signed? No. One.
A.J. Jacobs:	Thank you.
Elliot Razman:	Or Kindles to get signed. So a few more questions. Any students ... lifelong student.
Speaker 11:	Yeah, lifelong student. Class of '79. When you were researching the biblical prohibitions, I wonder, did you get any exposure to potentially modern day explanations for why they may have made sense out of the context from which they came? For example, I'm thinking, don't eat pork, well trichinosis, if it isn't well cooked and cooking technology wasn't very good-
A.J. Jacobs:	Right, right.
Speaker 11:	And so if you don't eat pork, you're not gonna cook it badly, and you're not gonna trichinosis. So did you get into any layering like that?
A.J. Jacobs:	Yeah, yeah. I definitely-
Speaker 11:	What sort of insights did you gleam?
A.J. Jacobs:	Well it's interesting, the archeology actually, in science, do not back up the trichinosis theory, which I thought was interesting, 'cause it would seem to make sense. But that was more about separating the Hebrews from the Philistines, so from the Pagans, because the Pagans ate pork, we're not gonna eat pork. God thinks it's an abomination. So a lot of it is about tribalism, separating your own tribe, but it is interesting trying to figure out ... there are a lot of people who try to figure out, "Why would God ban mixed fibers?" And there are all these theories like that it's more flammable, I saw that. That it's not that Cane was a herder, Cane was a cattle herder.
Elliot Razman:	A Sheppard.
A.J. Jacobs:	A Sheppard, oh yeah. So-
Elliot Razman:	[crosstalk 01:03:37].
A.J. Jacobs:	Sheppard and farmer, that's what it was, Sheppard and farmer, so you don't want to mix wool and linen, but in the end, I think that a lot of these things are inexplicable, that we don't have the knowledge, I mean there was a reason at the time, but we just don't know what it is. What I found so interesting is some of the really religious Jews say that that is the beauty of it, is that if you followed the rule like, "Thou shall not kill," or, "Love your neighbor," that's good, because that makes sense, that's fine, but if you follow the crazy ones that make no sense, that really shows your faith. So it's almost better to follow these crazy ones. So I thought that was an interesting point of view. They're called [inaudible 01:04:29], is the official name.
Elliot Razman:	You mentioned before, some of the crazy laws that we have in secular society, so you want to tell them some of the [crosstalk 01:04:40].
A.J. Jacobs:	Oh, well yeah. I mean I was saying that in the beginning I was very skeptical of all rituals, because they seem ... I was very skeptical of religious rituals, 'cause they seemed so crazy, but one of my advisors made the point that it's not all rituals are crazy, even secular rituals. So if a Martian came down and looked at one community that was not wearing clothes made of mixed fiber and then looking at another community where you put fire on top of a sweet cake every year and then blow it out, neither of those is rational. They wouldn't say, "Oh yeah, that one makes sense, but that one doesn't," so I became much more pro ritual, I think the rituals can be beautiful as long as they're life affirming rituals, there's horrible rituals, too. So I became much more open to ritual.
Elliot Razman:	Would bachelor party fall under not good?
A.J. Jacobs:	I'm too old, I don't have any bachelor parties anymore.
Elliot Razman:	Other questions? Well let's thank A.J. for coming.
A.J. Jacobs:	Thank you guys.
Elliot Razman:	And we'll stick around for like 20 minutes and sign books and talk informally.