41: Josh Berson
“He called me and said, ‘can you be in Midtown at 7 am tomorrow? And bring $500 in cash.’”
From the Episode
On the beach at Challaborough with friend Asher Levin a week before the wedding
About Josh
Josh Berson is a tinkerer, mystic, scryer of long horizons, and fashioner of exploratory fictions. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of science, he has held appointments at the likes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Berggruen Institute, where he was the inaugural USC Berggruen Fellow in the Transformations of the Human.
Over the past ten years Josh has pioneered an approach to reasoning about the dynamics of human behavior over time horizons of 10–100,000 years that integrates insights from linguistic and evolutionary anthropology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of biology with compositional strategies drawn from fiction and generative sound art.
Between 2013 and 2017, concurrent with his time at the Berggruen Institute, Josh served as an advisor to the Dutch design studio LUST, and from 2020 to 2021 he was the Chief Scientist of the early-stage startup Candle, whose mission was to address disinformation by providing information credibility metrics at the point of search. Since then Josh has served as an advisor to a range of organizations in the futures, health analytics, and venture capital spaces.
Not to be outdone with the pen, Josh is the author of multiple book-length monographs, including the Meat Question, released in 2019, which investigates the full sweep of human economic relationships with other gregarious vertebrates, from the Great Rift Valley three million years ago to the wet markets of China and Southeast Asia just prior to the pandemic.
Josh is pretty sure he’s alone in publishing regularly in peer-reviewed venues such as PLoS ONE and Comparative Studies in Society and History and in fashion and lifestyle magazines, including 032c and Jane by the Grey Attic. In his spare time you’ll find him swimming in the cold sea off the Hebrides or geeking out about Casio F-91W mods and 32-bit audio recorders.
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Max Chopovsky: 0:02
This is Moral of the Story Interesting people telling their favorite short stories and then breaking them down to understand what makes them so good. I'm your host, max Jepofsky. Today's guest is Josh Berson, a tinkerer, mystic scryer of long horizons and fashioner of exploratory fictions. Trained as an anthropologist and historian of science, he has held appointments at the likes of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the Berggruen Institute, where he was the inaugural USC Berggruen Fellow in the transformations of the human Over the past 10 years, josh has pioneered an approach to reasoning about the dynamics of human behavior over time horizons of 10 to 100,000 years that integrates insights from linguistic and evolutionary anthropology, philosophy of mind and philosophy of biology, with compositional strategies drawn from fiction and generative sound art. In 2013 and 2017, concurrent with his time at the Berggruen Institute, josh served as an advisor to the Dutch design studio Lust, and from 2020 to 2021, he was the chief scientist of the early stage startup Kandel, whose mission was to address disinformation by providing information credibility metrics at the point of search. Since then, josh has served as an advisor to a range of organizations in the future's health, analytics and venture capital spaces. Not to be outdone with the pen. Josh is the author of multiple book-length monographs, including the Meat Question, released in 2019, which investigates the full sweep of human economic relationships with other gregarious vertebrates, from the Great Rift Valley 3 million years ago to the wet markets of China and Southeast Asia just prior to the pandemic. Josh is pretty sure he's alone in publishing regularly in peer-reviewed venues such as Plus One and comparative studies in society and history, and then fashion and lifestyle magazines, including O3-2C and Jane by the Grey Attic. In a spare time, you'll find him swimming in the cold sea off the Heberties or geeking out about Casio F91W mods and 32-bit audio recorders, something I can personally attest to from one of our first phone calls when we went off on the long tangent about the pros, cons, frequency responses and polar patterns of various recording devices. Josh, welcome to the show.
Josh Berson: 2:26
It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you, Max.
Max Chopovsky: 2:28
So you are here to tell us a story, so set the stage. Is there anything that we should know before we get into the story itself?
Josh Berson: 2:37
One thing I would say before we get into the story proper is that, as we were discussing just prior to coming on, I'm standing now in an apartment that has been the home of my partner, jesse, for the better part of 20 years, and I did not come on the scene until a little bit more than nine years ago. That's enough to set the stage, because the story I'm going to tell is a pandemic marriage story.
Max Chopovsky: 3:04
I love. It All right, let's get into it. Tell me a story.
Josh Berson: 3:08
Okay, so you mentioned my 2019 book, the Mead Question, and when that book came out, I had just sent in the final draft of what became my 2021 book, the Human Scathode, and I went to the States to promote the book in late 2019. And then I was in the States doing various book promotion related things into early 2020, just as the pandemic was getting underway. My partner, jesse, has permanent residence in Germany. I do not, and at the time I was between visas because I had just spent a year, as you mentioned, in Los Angeles at the Berggruen Institute preparing my third book and we weren't sure exactly what was going to happen if I was going to stay on in LA, so I deferred renewing my visa. So when European Union closed its frontiers, I was in New York and Jesse had just returned to Germany and we said well, we'll see what happens. It's probably not going to last longer than a few weeks the closure, and so I dug down in New York and meanwhile Jesse was having really a lovely early pandemic in Germany. They did a very good job in the first wave and it was a very different experience in Berlin to New York. But then, after the first month, the EU and the German Interior Ministry announced they were renewing the 30-day ban on entries of non-EU nationals. This went on and on into June and finally, at the end of June, when the guidance from the Bundespolizei had not changed, we consulted an immigration lawyer and he said you're just going to have to get married outside the European Union. That's the only way I can see to make this happen. Now Jesse and I at this point had been together for six years and we had discussed getting married in the past. We discussed getting married before going to California so that it would be easier to put her on my American health insurance, because it's always just a pain in the ass trying to arrange health insurance. Even though Jesse is a US citizen, she doesn't maintain cover in the US because she spends most of her time elsewhere and in Germany in particular. She's a member of what's called the KASCO, which is a state-sponsored artist union which provides a very good deal on a group plan for health coverage. So this is not something she has to consider, except when she's going to spend an extended period in the States. So we had discussed it then. In Germany it takes forever to get married. It really takes about nine months to provide all the documentation, whereas in Copenhagen, you can go up and do it in a couple of days. We had considered this previously, but, for one reason or another, had decided to forgo the opportunity, and now we were faced with the challenge of finding a suitable venue to get married in the middle of the pandemic. So that's now July the first week of July 2020, when I started looking into this and we considered our options. Jesse could fly to New York and we conclude things in about two days, but I really didn't want her to have to return to the States if we could avoid that for a number of reasons for the health-related reasons, for the long-haul travel reasons and various family dramas with who would be invited at this emergency wedding. So we decided, okay, we'll find some neutral venue, some place that's in Europe, but outside the EU. Well, where could that be? The clear choice was the UK, but this presented a number of obstacles. The UK had implemented a system of special-purpose marriage visas that we would need. To get these visas, you have to furnish biometrics with the home office. In practice, this turned out to be kind of a joke, but it's one of the obligatory points of passage in the process of getting this special-purpose visa. The only problem was all the visa processing centers were closed in New York for the pandemic, and this was just the first in a series of steps which I'll get to. But very briefly, by chance I knew the single best visa expediter in the United States because he had helped me get a visa to teach in China on two days' notice a couple of years before. I was in New York just for five days. And in China you have to get the visa in the place in the US where you have Hukou right. And since I'm registered, so I called him up and he said I don't know, things are kind of crazy right now, but put in your application with the Foreign and Commonwealth Office and send me the details about the application number and we'll see what we can do. So I did as he asked and he called me a few days later and he says can you be in midtown at 7.30 tomorrow morning? And I said yes, I can. He said okay, bring, you're going to have to pay this many hundreds of dollars for the, for the visa processor, and then bring 500 in cash for the expediter's fee. So I went down and did that and put it in, and we didn't know if it would work. They could have rejected the application, and so that was another couple of weeks wait, and then, finally, the news came that they'd approved my visa, and then I said, okay, jesse, now you have to do the same thing in Berlin, where it was significantly easier, like even so. She said you know, if I'd known it would be this much hassle, I would have simply come to New York. I said you know what I've already been through, and we're just getting started. So then there was the question of well, where are we going to do the ceremony? In London, because of the lockdown in London in the early part of 2020, all the register offices, all the borough halls had a large backlog of people who had been planning to get married, and now we're waiting right, and we didn't want to spend hundreds of pounds for you know the stately room at some random register office when we were only going to be allowed two witnesses. Anyway, we wanted a basic statutory marriage ceremony, so finding one within a day's train journey of London took two weeks of calling around on my part and on the part of my friend Lynn, who lives in Holloway, in the bar of Islington, and had agreed to put us up in London. Because the other part of this is that in the UK there's a 28 day waiting period between when you give notice of your intent to marry and when you can actually do the ceremony, and you cannot give notice until you've been in the country seven days. You have to establish this kind of fictive residency if you're coming with a marriage visa from outside the country. So I arranged to fly and then, of course, I had to find a place to quarantine in London for two weeks. So I found a place in Islington to quarantine, a place I'd stayed previously. So I was going to be there, essentially in a 120 square foot flat for 23 and a half hours a day for 15 days. Then, as soon as I was done, jesse would fly in from Berlin and then I had arranged a date with the Islington Register Office to give notice and then we had found a ceremony at a different register office for a month later. I knew that something was going to go wrong and that the weak point I had an intuition was going to be this date with Islington Register Office. The day before we were to give notice I called them and I said we're coming in tomorrow to give notice. They said, but you can't, possibly because your partner hasn't been in the country for seven days. I said, well, I have it in writing from you from four weeks ago that this would be okay. They said, well, there's nothing we can do. I said, well, there better be something you can do because we have this date for the ceremony. And they said you'll have to get another one. We said we can't, we're not staying another two months in the country. They said, well, come in, you can have a new date in 10 days time to give notice and then you'll have to submit a petition for a waiver of the 28-day notification period. I said, okay, you're on, we go into the following week to give notice and by this time Lynn has returned from a trip to Scotland where she'd been up wild swimming with an old friend of hers and she's enrolled Jesse in her wild swimming program. Jesse is going up to Blackfire Heath every morning to swim in the pond, at which was about 60 degrees. At the moment, I'm buckled down in Holloway trying to do investor calls for the startup you mentioned, candle, which was also trying to get off the ground. At the moment I'm meeting with a prospective CTO trying to recruit someone and in the middle of all this we're preparing this letter to the head office of the Register offices of England and Wales explaining why they had better give us this waiver. We go in to give notice and it was fascinating the kinds of questions they asked to make sure that this was a legitimate marriage, that if we knew one another's places of birth. And of course we're sitting there doing it next to one another. It's really just a protocol, because if you listened to the first person you could have got anyway. Then Lynn had formed a bubble with her neighbors. There were children running in and out much of the day because she was conducting a direct action urban rewilding project in the middle of this, which I was supposed to be helping with, where we were trying to push the borough of Islington. We were trying to use the crisis to get the borough of Islington to license the conversion of street parking into gardening allotments, because which Lynn had already done in Gorilla fashion, and the council had tried on a number of occasions to remove the skips she had placed in the parking spot in front of her home. Eventually she'd posted guard. It turned into this drawn out direct action program. I was advising her on strategy. We needed to get away. We went to a friend of Jesse's who lives in Devon, on the South Coast Jesse's friend Asher. She knows him from the performance scene in Berlin. He's an old circus arts guy and he's a bit nuts. We take the train out to Totnes and Asher greets us on the platform with a big hug and I freak out Because this was just when the so-called Kent variety, the beta variety, was in circulation right in that area. We spend the week at Asher's and Asher says are you guys coming to the sauna we're doing tonight? Because he lives out on a farm and he was a sauna. I said no, I'm not going to the sauna. But Jesse went and I said, okay, you can go to the sauna. Things continue to be a little tense. And then Asher said would you like to go to the coast? We drove down to the coast and stripped off and got in the water, which was about 11 degrees Celsius, so say 55 degrees. It was the most cathartic thing imaginable. Then we went back to London to prepare to get married, just as the government announced London is locking down again. I said I do not have it in me to call the Barnett Register Office to find out if we're still on for next Monday. You have to do it. Jesse calls the Register Office where we had agreed the ceremony. They said oh yes, come in with your witnesses. We went there the following Monday, the 19th of October 2020. It was just the strangest thing. The person who conducted the ceremony just created this remarkably I hesitate to say sacred, but let's say sacred atmosphere in the middle of this very prosaic setting, with Lynn and our friend Virginia serving as the witnesses. Jesse and I were both because we had both been viscerally opposed to the very principle of getting married. This was purely an instrumental ploy on our part so that I could reenter Germany with no trouble. Then it happened and we thought wow, actually this is interesting. Then we go outside and Virginia says oh, didn't you know that Belgium has just been put on the Koch Institute's red list? You were like the German CDCs If you were planning to take a train back to Berlin and pass through Brussels change at Brussels you would have to quarantine when you got back to Berlin. We celebrated our marriage by canceling our train and booking a flight back to Berlin for two days then and arrived just hours before the Koch Institute placed the UK on its level three list or whatever. Then I believe, I did not leave the city limits of Berlin for 370 days. Probably that was in 10 years I had not been quite so. I think it was four times in the year that followed did I travel more than a half hours walk from home. That's the story and I'm happy to discuss more. What makes it so compelling. I mean, of course there's this sort of comic element. It became an exercise in change management with the register offices of England and Wales, so they might not have seen it quite that way. But really what was so unexpected for both of us was how fun it was Not getting married but being married Like we felt it. Right after that we went out for a walk and it was unseasonably warm the following day and we were staying not far from the cold drop yards and we went out to this posh mall just to have a look around and we thought, oh, this is kind of great. And then of course I had to take the train back up to Barnett Register Office to pick up the certificate, the piece of paper saying we'd got married, to show the passport control officials in Berlin, because nothing is so important as your papers here. So there you have it, my pandemic wild swimming marriage that is crazy.
Max Chopovsky: 16:23
I probably would have just tried to forge the document. It's not the best approach, but if I knew, if you knew? So let's look at it like this If you knew at the beginning what it was going to take and all of the twists and turns, would you have done anything differently? Would you have taken that approach at all?
Josh Berson: 16:46
I probably would have said to Jesse, fly to New York and let's drive up to Woodstock and do it there. But I'm glad we didn't do that, because I'm glad we did it where we did it and how we did it. I'd have to think a bit about why exact. I'm sure it would have been great no matter what. But yeah, it's funny you say you would have simply forged the documents, because then the following week when I went to re-register my address in register at this address in Berlin, we went up to the borough hall here in the borough of Pankow and the first thing the civil servant who interviewed us said when she looked at our marriage certificate, is there's no stamp. It doesn't feel official. And we said but they don't give us, it's on counterfeit proof paper. It's on the special paper that with the green message all over that lights up under UV. So we might as well have tried to forge it, because without the stamp, what good is it?
Max Chopovsky: 17:41
Yeah, by the way, speaking of the lighting up under UV, we were recently on a flight and as we're going through the airport the agent, the TSA agent we ran into one who was A in a good mood and B had some extra time I guess it wasn't a big line and he was like, hey, do you wanna see why scan your license? I was like, yeah, I'm so curious about all that stuff. He's like, check this out, and he gets out of black light and he shines it on the license and you see an entirely new pattern light up in UV. And I was like, oh my God, that's insane. So, yeah, counterfeiting might seem sort of the easy way out, but yeah, I'm glad that you didn't do it. You know it's interesting. This is a common refrain that I see from people when they do something, embark on a journey which seems like it'll probably have some hiccups but should arrive at its conclusion relatively normally, and then hilarity and chaos ensues. Right, they achieve their objective and at the end of it, when I would ask them if this is a story they share on the podcast, if you would do it all over again, knowing what you knew and all the shit that was gonna go down. Would you do it? They say two things which are really interesting. The first is no, I probably wouldn't have done it, and the second is but I'm still so glad that I did it and I would not change a thing right. So the naivete that people have when they embark on certain quests is actually a good thing. It's actually a good thing.
Josh Berson: 19:30
There are two coders I would add to this. One is that halfway through not even halfway early on in this process, you know, I'd got the marriage visa, and then Jesse was in the process of getting it, and then suddenly, in August of 2020, the German Interior Ministry reversed itself and said oh yes, we will allow partners who do not have a statutory marriage to enter the country, but we decided we need to go ahead because this is gonna keep coming up. It's just gonna make things easier if we have it, and it's gonna be so much easier to do it in the UK than in Germany. We're gonna have to do this eventually, you know, if we keep living this high mileage, ready for action lifestyle. So we should just go ahead. And then the second part is after all this, when we got to Berlin, I was incredibly nervous that there'd be a problem at passport control, and I should add that this wasn't my only. I'd written the Bundespolizei in advance to say this is what we're doing and this is the date we're re-entering Germany. And they said yeah, that's great, just have the following documentation. Even so, I was, we get to the line and I had. In addition to the marriage certificate, I had a letter of invitation from a research institute here which had it was bringing me on as a courtesy. So I got to the window first and they looked at my information and before the visa agent realized that Jesse has a niederlagungsalabnis, you know, and Jesse has has leave to remain in Germany. He assumed that the marriage certificate was so that she could enter with me by virtue of my having this, the writ from this Posh Research Institute. So it's possible we didn't need to do any of this exactly, but I'm glad we did it and we ended up we both became. Prior to that I grew up on the Atlantic coast and swam all the time and Jesse grew up in Salt Lake City and you know, when hiking in the mountains quite a bit and early on in our relationship we would go up to Denmark or Scotland and I'd get in the water and she'd be shocked right that I could swim in water like that. And after this adventure she was a better cold water swimmer. She had greater tolerance for, you know, the 60 degree water than I did. So we we got locked into a dare about cold swimming. So now we take cold swimming holidays. We went swimming in the Hebrides in September last year. So it's had that added benefit. If nothing else good came of it, you know, we both we could say that we so this water, so you know, call it 55 degrees.
Max Chopovsky: 22:07
you do this without a wetsuit, right?
Josh Berson: 22:09
Well, I wouldn't call it swimming. The interesting thing in Devon and more generally in the UK with the exception of, possibly, of Cornwall is that the tides are really shallow, the break is really mild. It's very difficult to do anything you would you would call swimming or body surfing. You can certainly immerse yourself, right, and we do that, but there's very little opportunity to stay in for an extended period of time. Certainly in Devon, in South Devon, where we were in October 2020, and again in August of last year, the shelf is very stony, you know. So it's not, it's not comfortable for walking on the way the way a sand beach break would. There's practically no break. So you really you almost have to lie down to get yourself completely covered. In the Hebrides it's a little better and you can. You can swim. I wouldn't say we're staying in for an extended period of time. I was swimming off the Jersey shore last month, just briefly, and the water must have been 74 and it felt soupy to me. You know that felt way too warm. Now.
Max Chopovsky: 23:16
So like how long would you stay in the Hebrides? That was sub-60 degree water, right.
Josh Berson: 23:22
When we were on the Isle of Egg in 2018, in July, and on the Isle of Mull in 2022, in September. The interesting thing is that you get, because of the Gulf Stream and because of the hysteresis in the solar warming of the water actually, september is probably the mildest time of year to go up there it's still challenging, especially when it's pissing rain. We were staying last year on what's called the Ross of Mull, which is a little peninsula on the southwest corner of the Isle of Mull. It's not very big, but even so, you were staying on one side and we had to cross over to the other side to swim. So it was about an hour, a 75-minute walk. Some days it was raining, so we'd get tugged up in our rain gear and just trudge across the island and then get to the beach and strip down and get in the water. So on this occasion, I must admit we didn't really stay in. We got in. Our bodies expressed suitable displeasure at our having put them in this situation. Then we got out and ate oat cakes and walked home. Even so. That's a four-hour adventure in the cold rain. It was like a cold plunge. That was more like a cold plunge, but I would really love to get back to the Isle of Egg in the small isles, which is a bit north of Mull. There's enough of a break that you can actually get out and swim and you don't really have to worry about a rip because you're still in the lee of the next isle, out of the Isle of Ross. So I would love to get out there again and spend a month there and get, because at the end of a month, if you do it every day, you'll be getting in and staying in for 20 minutes.
Max Chopovsky: 25:06
I mean you certainly get used to it, but at some point there is just human physiology that dictates that water temperature of a certain level starts to cause hypothermia in an increasingly shorter amount of time. The reason I ask you about the swimming piece of it is because I just did my first Olympic triathlon at the end of July. It's about a mile swim. I started training for it by swimming in the pool in February and then March and April. Then, as Lake Michigan started to warm up a little bit, I got a wetsuit and I thought, hey, since I'll be swimming outside outdoors, at least I need to get a few swims in Lake Michigan. Then I started fanatically monitoring the temperatures in Lake Michigan and doing all this research because I'd never done a triathlon before but I wasn't much of a swimmer before this. I remember looking at whether it was 62 or 63 degrees, 63 or 64. Every degree makes a difference. Nevertheless, the first time that I got in to the water with my wetsuit on, I do remember it was a little bit of a shock, because with a wetsuit, as you know, the water has to come in to the wetsuit and then it stays between your skin and the neoprene and it warms up and that serves as a buffer between you and the water that first swim. Even so, I started to get a little warmer, but every degree matters. From everything that I read, people still don't go if it's under 60 and they have a wetsuit. I've done the cold plunges before in 40-some-odd degree water for a minute, maybe two minutes, but swimming in anything under 60 without a wetsuit, I just have mad respect for that. Maybe that's crazy. Maybe the listeners are going to say, well, I can swim with a wetsuit in water that's in the mid-50s. That's just not me. That's crazy.
Josh Berson: 27:15
I wouldn't put myself in this category, at least not yet. I've realized over the past half-year that open water swimming is really important to me and I'm determined to do quite a lot of it over the next 10 years. I have a friend who lives in London and they have a place out in Wales. He went through an episode of cancer around 10 years ago when he was 50. When he recovered he decided okay, one of the ways I'm going to mark my recoveries by becoming a very strong open water swimmer, at least then he has swum a channel relay. How long is that? I don't know how long his link was, but for that people coat themselves in petroleum products to stay warm. I don't know if I'll ever get to that stage. Joan Didion writes in Quiet Days in Malibu, the final essay in her 1978 collection, the White Album, about. She's describing the career lifeguards on the coast of Malibu and how they were required at that time to take a one-hour swim in the ocean every day. If the water was below, I think, 57 degrees they were allowed to use a wetsuit. There was one day where her principal informant the person she's profiling she says the water on this day was 58 degrees and he swam in his regulation trunks. The most interesting thing is you feel the metabolic change. You feel this incredible, this inner fire. For a day afterward, when I just arrived at Lynn Friedley's house in Holloway, just waiting for Jesse to arrive, and Lynn was about to go up to Scotland to do this wild swimming holiday, she was doing a lot of baking to take up to her friend there. One of the things she baked was essentially this babka or a yeast cake, but she enhanced it with a layer of marzipan at the center. She said, yes, there's a very good high energy food for when you're swimming in the locks, because the locks are even colder than the ocean up there. And I said, yeah, I bet this incredibly dense cake with almond meal at the end you got to eat a lot, but not too close to the swim.
Max Chopovsky: 29:28
So I just looked it up. So between the water temperatures between 50 and 60, to reach exhaustion or unconsciousness is one to two hours and the expected time of survival is one to six hours. Pretty wide range because we're talking about 10 degrees and you know the physiology and fitness level of the swimmer. But that is crazy to me, although I will say it does say that between 60 and 70 degrees it's two to seven hours exhaustion or unconsciousness and two to 40 hours expect the time of survival. So that's a pretty wide range.
Josh Berson: 30:01
The other thing that makes a big difference is how much you're getting in and out. In my third book, the Human Scaffold, there's a passage and it started almost as a it grew out of something I wrote one morning in late in 2018, in a fit of absent mindedness but it's become kind of the key set piece in the book about the physiology of cold water apnea diving and this is something that you know as practice in Japan and Korea. It's mainly a woman's subsistence practice and I got into it because there's a controversy in the anthropology of Tasmania where it's about why Tasmanians included or excluded certain things from their tool kit and so on, and one prominent investigator in this in this debate makes disparaging remarks about about the, about abalone diving as it was practiced by women in Tasmania at the time of the European invasion, about how the fact that this was a major subsistence practice clearly demonstrates that something had gone wrong, that there had been some kind of maladaptive devolution in Tasmanian subsistence culture, and disavows the knowledge of of comparable traditions in other parts of the world that might be used as basis for for comparative ethnography. But of course, there are comparable traditions the, the Amasan of Japan and the Henyo of Jeju Island and and Ipoh, gyeonggi and Busan and Korea. And I started looking into this when I was finishing the second chapter of the human scaffold and it turns out there's quite a lot of research that's been done on the the physiology of of the Amasan and Henyo from before they started using wet suits and modern equipment, because the US Navy was interested and commissioned a a conference in 1965 on this theme. So, for example, you can read all sorts of interesting things about the cutaneous cold tolerance of and subcutaneous adiposity of of Korean women who were diving for abalone off Jeju Island in the 1960s, their median age and so. But it's it's quite remarkable.
Max Chopovsky: 32:08
So you can train it then.
Josh Berson: 32:10
You can train it. You have to start early. You have to start early for the emotional training as much as anything else. I mean, traditionally, girls would start diving in two to three meters of water at the age of 10, so that by the time they were 18 or so they could be diving in in 10 meters of water. And then there are certain traditions in Japan where they, where you, you go out with a dive boat and you wear a weighted belt so you can get down to 20 meters. Right, but the most traditional method in Korea, practice among the Henyo, say, of Jeju Island you're not diving very deep, you're diving maybe five meters and then surfacing repeatedly. And that repeated surfacing and diving exerts a, a barret trauma in and of itself and also a, a vascular trauma. Right, it would be this repeated tachycardia speed, speeded up heartbeat, followed by Bradycardia, lowered heartbeat. So it takes a toll on the body over years and decades that you practice it, but it is, at the same time, it there's. There is something very, very particular about this sensation of relief, the clarity that comes from from getting in in water, that your body is telling you is really, really too cold to be.
Max Chopovsky: 33:17
Have you seen the deepest breath documentary on Netflix?
Josh Berson: 33:21
I have not, I have not it is.
Max Chopovsky: 33:24
So it's a free diving documentary about how people pursue world records. They do it in warmer waters, so my wife was watching and I was kind of coming in and out of the room. That thing really messed with me, because when you watch how far down they go and what's crazy is, past a certain point, the pressure starts pulling you down. So you don't actually have to try very hard. But the flip side of that coin is when you reach the bottom you have to go extra hard and you have to sort of leave the this really sort of hellish gravity field of the depth of the water and you have to kick with all your might, by which point your oxygen stores are depleted, the CO2 is filling up your lungs and when people start having convulsions as they reach the final 10, 20 meters and the safety divers have to grab them, and then they surface and there's cameras at the surface and you just watch this person who is unconscious and just these empty facial expressions. Dude, I couldn't watch that Like that. To me they look like they're dying right, and so to me I have so much respect for that sport, for the people that do that, because it's not like you're running on a treadmill and you can get off at any time and be fine. It's not like you're doing a lap around the block, you can always stop. It's like you're going to a foreign environment, an alien ecosystem, and the only way back to survive is to fight your way back once your energy is already depleted. I can't get my mind around that Like that just. And then to add to that the temperature of the water, which, to your point, obviously there is this reflex like if we're under the shower and water gets cold, the reflex is to inhale, right, and what it does to your body, to your point, with a faster heartbeat than a slower, the slowing of the heartbeat. It's actually both terrifying and incredible. The human body is capable of that. Just both of those feelings, oh for sure. For sure?
Josh Berson: 35:46
Yeah, I would be a terrible free diver, in part because I only have an inner ear on one side, so I would be subject to really, really terrible disorientate alternate barrow vertigo. Why do you only have inner?
Max Chopovsky: 35:59
ear on one side. Oh, it's just congenital.
Josh Berson: 36:03
The ear on the side you can see is only partly formed on the outside and there's no inner ear. The semicircular canals are rudimentary, there are no auto-liths. So my sense of balance depends on visual cues and proprioceptive cues from the shoulders and arms, but also on what I can derive from the vestibular apparatus on this side so you can get when you're coming up. If the pressure changes in one ear before the other, it can be very disorienting. So I would grant that I'm off the hook for free diving, but I'm determined to be able to swim in the 60-degree water with something approaching pleasure. I mean, I will say this.
Max Chopovsky: 36:39
My dad had years ago what we believe was a localized stroke in one of his ears, and so he lost the hearing in that ear. The hearing in his other ear got a lot better. The senses made up for it, as physicians and scientists have known for years, or other senses just make up for it. Somebody who's born blind just has incredibly accurate, much more than the average person hearing and a sense of smell and touch. So for what it's worth, there's obviously some benefit there. I want to go back to the story for a bit. That was a really sort of freewheeling and unexpectedly complex narrative, so the question I have for you is looking back on it now. What is the moral of that story?
Josh Berson: 37:25
There are a bunch of morals one could take away. One is that the sweetest moral, the most generous moral I'll offer is to temper one's cynicism, because we both were, and we remain in cynics about the institution of marriage. I'm still of the opinion that marriage ought to be disestablished, that you should be able to register a domestic household with whomever you please and that the state should not be in the business of consecrating intimate unions in particular. And Jesse was getting on her end before she left Berlin from her, you know, from a circle of friends, all of whom come out of the avant-garde Berlin conceptual dance scene, and you'd think they'd be archetypally anti-capitalist, anti-everything. For them this was an incredible sex in the city type storyline that they were determined to write Jesse into, and by the time she got to London she was already ready not to be done with the whole thing. So we were aligned on nothing else. This was 100% an instrumental gesture. You know we were pandering to the requirements of the German Interior Ministry and yet the moment it happened we thought this is kind of cool, it's something felt different, and I give credit to the ceremonialist at Barnett Registry Office, whose illocutionary act consecrated our relationship in the eyes of the state for creating this scene. So the one moral is temper your cynicism, because even the most instrumental gesture can end up evoking something of sentimental value. Another moral is think carefully before you undertake some complex diplomatic maneuver for the thinking that it's going to make a good story. I mean, we saw certainly I don't know about Jesse because she didn't see all the complexities that I've seen on the New York end, but I saw going in okay, this is going to be a pain in the ass, but boy will it be a great story. But the value of the story is rarely worth the pain, especially given the level of uncertainty we were dealing with, where three days before we were to get married, we wondered if the register offices were about to shut down again. But I would say to the listeners what I would ask them to take away is temper your cynicism. That's all. I'll put the sweetest spin on it.
Max Chopovsky: 39:40
Well, look, if you're leading and aspiring to continue to lead this sort of nomadic lifestyle, the longer stints in some cities. Notwithstanding, that just comes with adventure right, and I think one of the signature traits of any adventure is uncertainty. Otherwise it wouldn't be an adventure, right? If it's predictable, it's not really an adventure. And so, to me, this created the uncertainty of it all, and the twists and turns are what created its essence, when distilled, resulted in the essence of adventure. And the thing about uncertainty is it can make us uncomfortable. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, and I love adventure. Sometimes it makes me uncomfortable, but at the same time, that's what makes a good story right. Like yesterday, I took my family and another family on a boat to a group called the Chain of Lakes and we got a pontoon boat and it's been a very long time since I drove a boat. But I was like, yeah, I can drive this boat and everything was fine, everything was good. We had 10 people on the boat, five adults, five kids and then we had to dock for lunch and the place was pretty packed because it was Labor Day and I had to find a way to dock this boat and I came close to a couple of other boats. A couple of times it got a little shaky. I was nervous, but at the same time I'll look back on that day and think nothing but what a hell of an adventure. Everybody had fun, everybody sort of enjoyed themselves, and we did have some moments of uncertainty, but it turned out OK. So let's talk about storytelling for a minute. What, in your mind, do good stories have in common?
Josh Berson: 41:33
Most good stories, like most good works of organized sound, entail the creation of tension and then its resolution or its partial resolution. I was having a very similar conversation with an editor not long ago who chided me, in their view, for being a bit too effulgent with the ending of a work and said you want the readers to come away feeling that their questions have been answered. And I said well. To my way of thinking, framing the quality of the reading experience in those terms forecloses on a broader field of possibility of what reading or what storytelling should be for. Is it for the asking of questions which are then resolved in some kind of satisfactory way, or is it? Are there more exploratory options? I lean toward those more exploratory options, that storytelling should be a way of allowing us to practice resisting closure, to practice sitting with an abiding uncertainty for longer. At the same time, if you never have any release, if you keep introducing tension into the story and you don't at least have partial cadences, moments where it resolves or where the listener or reader can release the tension that they've taken into their own bodies, then it just becomes an endurance exercise. Now I listened since we've been talking about audiophily, I've been listening lately to some of Toshimaru Nakamura's no input mixing board stuff, and so essentially he just has a line plugged from the line out to the line in of his mixing board and he's learned over a period of 20 years or more to manipulate the feedback to create all kinds of effects. So he's creating something out of nothing and some of it is very musical and some of it is very noisy. Of course the real connoisseurs of this stuff prefer the noisier stuff. They don't want the ear candy, they don't want the stuff that appears to be cleaving too closely to establish conventions of musicality. There's a fine line when you can learn to cultivate your tolerance for unresolved tension, and maybe that's a form of opening up. But to my way of thinking, a good story will always have, will create tension but at least partly and ongoingly resolve some of that tension, but not all of it.
Max Chopovsky: 43:56
That makes perfect sense, I agree. Otherwise, if you leave it too unresolved, the audience might get a little angry with you. Maybe it's their discomfort, who knows? But that's a really good point. So last question, josh If you could say one thing to your 20 year old self, what would it be?
Josh Berson: 44:17
We're here at such a brief time. We'd be too concerned about creating a secure context for yourself or others, about establishing something and getting there and just holding very still and not disturbing something. We're here at such a brief time. Whatever uncertainty you feel now is nothing compared to the uncertainty you're going to feel later. So you might as well do something interesting. You might as well try to leave some kind of trace that will be meaningful to people, or some other things that we don't think of as people, but meaning makers, but to interpreters of traces, long after we're gone. Because we're here at a brief time.
Max Chopovsky: 44:55
What a great way to look at it, because you're right, we are here for a very short time and most of the things we think matter do not Not in the grand scheme of things, not even in our own life. So very sage advice. Well, that does it. Josh Burson, polly Math Ward Smith, philosopher, writer, cold-wall water swimmer, nomad. Thank you for being on the show, max, it's been a pleasure. Thank you, of course, for show notes and more. Head over to MossPodorg. Find us on Apple Podcasts, spotify, wherever you get your podcast on. This was Moral of the Story. I'm Max Jropowski. Thank you for listening. Talk to you next time.