665. Werner Herzog Isn’t Afraid ... | Freakonomics Radio

... of bad reviews, meager financing, or artificial intelligence. But he is worried that the world is full of sloppy thinkers who mistake facts for the truth. You can find the transcript and show notes for this episode on our website here: https://freakonomics.com/podcast/werner-herzog-isnt-afraid/ FOLLOW FREAKONOMICS RADIO: YouTube: https://freak.ws/3yIl6dl Apple Podcasts: https://freak.ws/3yAvQh0 Spotify: https://freak.ws/3TsdCmV ABOUT FREAKONOMICS RADIO: Discover the hidden side of everything with host Stephen J. Dubner, co-author of the Freakonomics books. Each week, Dubner speaks with Nobel laureates and provocateurs, intellectuals and entrepreneurs, and various other underachievers to uncover things you always thought you knew (but didn’t) and things you never thought you wanted to know (but do) — from the economics of sleep to the future of education, from markets for marriage to the surprising utility of wolves. ABOUT THE FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK: Freakonomics began as a book, which led to a blog, a documentary film, more books, a pair of pants, and in 2010, a podcast called Freakonomics Radio. Hosted by Stephen J. Dubner, it’s one of the most popular podcasts in the world, with a reputation for storytelling that is both rigorous and entertaining. Its archive of more than 500 episodes is available, for free, on any podcast app, and the show airs weekly on NPR stations. Freakonomics Radio is now the flagship show of the Freakonomics Radio Network, which includes the podcasts No Stupid Questions, People I (Mostly) Admire, and The Economics of Everyday Things. FREAKONOMICS RADIO NETWORK PODCASTS: Freakonomics Radio: https://freakonomics.com/series/freakonomics-radio/ No Stupid Questions: https://freakonomics.com/series/nsq/ People I (Mostly) Admire: https://freakonomics.com/series/people-i-mostly-admire/ The Economics of Everyday Things: https://freakonomics.com/series/everyday-things/ Special series: https://freakonomics.com/topics/ CONNECT WITH US: [email protected] https://twitter.com/freakonomics https://www.instagram.com/freakonomics/ https://www.facebook.com/freakonomics/ https://www.tiktok.com/@freakonomicsradio https://www.linkedin.com/company/freakonomics-media Subscribe to our newsletter: https://stephendubner.substack.com/subscribe

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  So first of all, I just want to say it's really a pleasure to meet you. I've consumed a fair amount of your work, much less than some, more than others. And you strike me as maybe either the sanest crazy person on the planet or the craziest sane person. No, I'm only sane. I, I just want to hear you describe how you see the world. And I'll give you some leading questions and I want to talk about your books, especially your recent book about truth. But I don't know, do you feel like an unusual being? No, I'm as average as it can get.

• 0:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  That is Werner Herzog, the German-born filmmaker and writer and actor and a sort of citizen soldier. He is not average. Herzog has made more than 70 films. All of them are spirited. Some are absurdist or pretentious. None of them are dull. There is Family Romance LLC about a Japanese entrepreneur who leases out humans to other humans, who for some reason may need a stand-in family member or friend. There's Grizzly Man, a remarkable documentary about a man who loved bears a little too much. And there are the five films that Herzog made with the actor Klaus Kinski.

• 1:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Kinski-Herzog relationship was volatile and sometimes violent. Their two best-known collaborations are Fitzcarraldo and Aguirre: The Wrath of God. Both films are about an obsession that tips into madness. In Fitzcarraldo, the Kinski character needs to haul a massive steamship over a steep hill in the Amazon in order to fund a new opera house. Herzog says that 20th Century Fox wanted him to shoot the film in botanical gardens in San Diego and for the ship to use a plastic model. But Herzog got his way. He shot in the Peruvian jungle with a real 320-ton steamship and a real hill.

• 2:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  It was a mad adventure and all the madness of making the film is captured in the film. Today, you could use AI to generate a decent facsimile of something like that for a tiny fraction of the cost. So is Herzog worried about the competition?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  I saw a film which was scripted by artificial intelligence and the images made by artificial intelligence.

• 2:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  How was it?

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Completely dead on arrival, a stillborn baby. There's no spark of life in it, only mimicry of invention, only mimicry. So I'm not worried. There's no artificial intelligence that really would challenge me.

• 2:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Herzog recently published a book called The Future of Truth. Here's one bit that captures the essence. He writes, "I don't think truth is some kind of pole star in the sky that we will one day get to. It's more like an incessant striving." Today on Freakonomics Radio, here's to incessant striving and what it means, according to Werner Herzog, to be intelligent.

• 3:33Speaker 02

  This is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything with your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 3:50Stephen J. Dubner?

  Werner Herzog is smart enough to understand that a lot of people have a hard time understanding him and his worldview.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  People are always puzzled by the scope of subjects of my films. There is a world champion of ski flyers and nine films on death row. And there's a film Fitzcarraldo, A Steamship Over a Mountain and Opera in the Jungle and on and on. They think it's a very separate sort of things. No, it is not. There's a clearly discernible worldview in all of it. You see it even clearer in my books, and I always considered myself a writer.

• 4:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  And you haven't even mentioned, you know, creating operas and acting yourself and doing voiceovers for documentaries and for The Simpsons and on and on.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Just a few days ago, for a Korean animated film by the director who did Parasite, a wonderful, very creative man, very good writer, and he wrote a screenplay for an animated film and invited me to be one of the characters. So I did recordings for this character, and it is a deep sea creature. So I'm good as a deep sea creature. But of course, animated, and you see me as a person, for example, as a villain in Jack Reacher. But of course, it's all performance.

• 5:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  We live in this age where I think more people are steered towards specialization. And you've done a lot of things within the arts, but very different within the arts. And I'm just curious where that comes from. You had this wild childhood where you did a lot of things that children today don't do. You had a traumatic and poor childhood after the war.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  No, not traumatic. Of course, I was hungry. But it's okay for children. You get through it, and you man up later. And it's hard for the parents, in this case, hard for the mother who couldn't feed the three boys anymore. And I don't like introspection. There's something not right, not in my life, not in my existence. I try to avoid it. This is why I believe that psychoanalysis is one of the great mistakes of the 20th century. Of course, it started earlier in the 19th century, but basically a phenomenon of the

• 6:18Speaker 01

  20th century. I think it is not good if you illuminate all the dark recesses of the human soul. It's good that we can forget and that we forget traumas. We do not have to unearth them and articulate them in endless sessions with a psychiatrist. And the 20th century is full of very, very deep mistakes.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  Psychoanalysis is only one, but because of all these monstrous mistakes of this century, I do believe that the 20th century in its entirety was a mistake.

• 7:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  The entire 20th century?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  The entire, yes.

• 7:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Good lord.

• 7:07Speaker 01

  Yes, and I have good reasons to argue.

• 7:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  Let's hear some.

• 7:11Speaker 01

  I would speak of the demise of social utopias. It begins with communism. It had its demise and of course fascism and the barbarism of the Nazis, which has been unprecedented, postulating a master race dominating the planet. So this social utopia, thanks God, has come to an ignominious end. Atomic bomb, for example, and maybe the most significant of all that in the 20th century, the population of the world grew from one and a half billion roughly

• 7:53Speaker 01

  to six billion, and that's the greatest of all disasters.

• 7:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  Both your parents, you said, were, I think enthusiastic was the word you used, adherents of the Nazi party.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  In the early time, yeah, and my mother more the socialist, the National Sozialismus, meaning what Röhm represented, whom Hitler had eliminated, executed fairly early on, because he was more in the mainstream of socialism and not so much nationalism. It's a long, complex debate, but that was more the sources of where my mother took her credo. But she was, shall I say, intelligent enough and she was so much rooted in the real world with three boys to raise all alone. That she came to very sobering conclusions fairly early on.

• 8:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  You were born during World War Two in Munich, yeah?

• 8:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was born in nineteen forty-two.

• 8:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  So by the time that you're a thinking sentient human, I'm curious what kind of conversations you had with your mother about the beginning of the war in the Nazi Party?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  Well, only much later, when I was grown up enough to ask the right questions. Still mysterious to me in a way. My father, I barely knew, so I didn't have real serious conversations with him about it. But puzzling, disturbing, and giving me a sense of becoming vigilant.

• 9:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  What do you mean by that?

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Just look out what is happening. For example, you do have neo-Nazis in Germany. You have them in other countries as well. It's not Germany alone, but if it starts in Germany, it's alarming for me.

• 9:48Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've said you would pick up arms against them if they...

• 9:50Speaker 01

  Sure, I would instantly. That's what we have to do, I mean, as a German. It doesn't matter which age I am. You have to do something drastic, if necessary militant.

• 10:03Stephen J. Dubner?

  You now live in Los Angeles, yes?

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, because I'm happily married there. No other big reason. And of course...

• 10:11Stephen J. Dubner?

  What's good weather?

• 10:12Speaker 01

  No, I don't care about that. I could live near the North Pole or whatever, doesn't matter.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  Now I need a roof over my head and something good to read. And that's it, what I need.

• 10:26Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you feel about living in the US during this rather odd time, politically, socially, etc.?

• 10:32Speaker 01

  Well, these times come and go. America has a great resilience. It has a strange ability to rejuvenate itself, to start again, to recalibrate itself. So you don't have to complain about what is happening. It is a consequence of many things that people, in particular East Coast, West Coast, have overlooked, and that's the heartland. The heartland of America. And their values and the fact that they're underrepresented, undereducated, underpaid, disenfranchised to some degree.

• 11:17Speaker 01

  This is serious and I love the heartland of America much more than the fringes. The fringes are Boston, New York.

• 11:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  You've written about New York. You don't like it very much, do you?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  I like New York. It's an incredible city and I like that it forces you to a certain rhythm, speed and energy. I also am not completely against the hostility of New York. It's okay. It's challenging. You really are whipped into doing something. Los Angeles is the city with the most substance in the United States.

• 11:58Stephen J. Dubner?

  The most substance, you said? In what way?

• 12:00Speaker 01

  First and foremost, cultural substance, but don't forget that there is a huge amount of industry there. When you fly into Los Angeles, you see all these industrial areas, flat roofs, gigantic factories. Reusable rockets are being built within the perimeter of the city. You don't have this factory in the Bronx. You don't have it near Wall Street. Of course, people immediately think the superficial side, glitz and glamour of Hollywood. That's what I don't mean. But serious art, all the artists that made New York important, they were late 1940s,

• 12:43Speaker 01

  early 1950s. The last straggler in a way was Andy Warhol. It's a place where you consume culture, New York. It's generated in Los Angeles. The painters are living there nowadays. Not all, but some very important ones. Writers, mathematicians.

• 13:06Speaker 01

  All those stupidities, like crazy sects, yoga classes for five year old. I mean, it's grotesque. Great universities. LACMA is going to open very soon and all of a sudden you will have one of the two, three most important museums in the United States. I mean, it has great museums already and it's gonna be big. You see, I'm the one who says it at a time where nobody believes it. Nobody notices it and it's wonderful to articulate it now.

• 13:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Nobody believes it about LA, you're saying?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  No, you find it kind of funny when I say it. I see your face.

• 13:49Stephen J. Dubner?

  So I've been to LA maybe 20 times in my life, never for more than a week. And I love LA. It's just so different from New York that I feel like I need to orient myself anew. But being a New Yorker, I do want to ask you, let's say that I consider it tragic that New York has fallen behind in the arts, as you said.

• 14:08Speaker 01

  No, no, come on. It's not tragic that Florence has fallen behind. It's not tragic that medieval Venice, Italy has fallen behind. So what? It keeps shifting and it was shifting within Italy. Florence, Rome, Milan, Venice, Ferrara sometimes. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It's one country. It's one culture.

• 14:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  So what I hear you saying when you mention that is that, you know, time is long. Art can be long, but each of us moves through this space in a relatively short time. You've done a great deal in your life and I know you're still working on things. But when you think about, you know, one person's life and what you're able to observe and accomplish. In regard to the whole span of civilization, how do you process that?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  How do I process that? Probably because I have an output in doing things like films or books and other activities, acting, operas. Also, things in between writing and filmmaking did an installation for the Whitney Museum, Hearsay of the Soul, which was partially music, partially images. And it was a wonderful, wonderful task for me. And very strange, because I immediately refused the offer to do an installation for the Whitney Biennale. They said to me on the phone, ah, yeah, but you're an artist. Aren't you an artist yourself? And I said, no, I'm not an artist.

• 15:48Speaker 01

  I'm a soldier and hung up.

• 15:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  You're good at saying no to big official requests, it seems. Was it the Prime Minister of Japan you wanted to meet with you?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  No, the emperor.

• 15:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  The emperor.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Sorry, it's much, much more embarrassing. It's so embarrassing that I have difficulties to even speak about it. I staged the world premiere of an opera of a contemporary Japanese composer, who wanted me desperately to stage it for the first time in the world. And it was somehow known in the media that I was working in the city and not the emperor himself. It was from his office cautiously. An official stretched out the feelers, where I could meet the emperor in a private audience. It was shortly before the premiere. And of course, there was a lot of turmoil and work

• 16:45Speaker 01

  and things didn't function yet. But I immediately said to the people of the opera, who were on a long table for dinner together. I said, no, I cannot do that. And I made a remark. I wouldn't even know what to say to the emperor, because I should say something of importance, something of gravitas, something formalized. I wouldn't know how to handle it. And there was complete silence. There are silences that are friendly, but it was a frozen silence. And then into the silence, all of a sudden, there's a voice asking, whom else then would you like to meet?

• 17:28Speaker 01

  And without missing a beat, I said, Hiro Onoda, the last Japanese soldier.

• 17:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  He'd been in the jungle for forty years or something, yeah?

• 17:38Speaker 01

  He surrendered twenty-nine years after the end of the Second World War, still believing that the war was on. I met him and I had quite a few meetings and we immediately had a very intense rapport. And ultimately ended up by me writing a novel, The Twilight World. But I actually met the Emperor. I invited him very kindly to attend the world premiere of the opera. And the Emperor showed up and I asked for permission to shake his hand. So I came in the intermission, I shook his hand and he said, stay for a moment, we should speak.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  And we spoke and it was very pleasant, by the way. A wonderful short conversation and it was at the right moment, I think. It was when I had to offer something which was visible, you could see it. And in fifteen minutes, the intermission was over and the second act would come. So I didn't come with empty hands and it was much better then.

• 18:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  It's always, I guess, impressed me the way that Germany, after the Second World War, assessed what had happened and in its schools and its institutions, tried to come to grips with why and how and to educate its successive generations. Can you just talk about that a bit? Did you see that as unusual among nations? Should it be a blueprint? Because there apparently are going to continue to be wars into the future.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  No, it shouldn't be a blueprint. As a German, you do not give a blueprint to the Americans, how to handle their educational system. You don't. And you don't tell the Japanese how to deal with their education or the Italians or the, you just name it. You just don't do it. You have to come with your cultural historical identity. You will come to your conclusions. But of course, Germany was consistent in it from the end of the Second World War until literally today. And it's not only education, it's translated into legislation.

• 20:02Speaker 01

  For example, it is a criminal offence to be a denier of Holocaust. If you are a fervent denier and go to public as a denier of the Holocaust, you will end up in jail in Germany. And I think it's good that it is like this.

• 20:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've heard you speak about living in a culture of complaint. My wife has a phrase for certain kinds of people. She calls them injustice collectors.

• 20:28Speaker 01

  That's a good characterization, yeah.

• 20:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  I'd love you to say whatever more you can about what you mean by a culture of complaint and especially what you think is the cost of that.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  I mean it in a larger context, of course. I mean what you're hinting at politically. And I try to encourage all my friends who are not Trump supporters. I tell them, don't complain. It is the majority. It's not lottery that brought Trump to the presidency. He won the popular vote by a very significant margin. Both Houses, Senate and Congress. And the Supreme Court is to some degree shaped by him. So it's significant. It doesn't come because he's a lucky man.

• 21:18Speaker 01

  No, there's a clear worldview, a clear cultural war that he wants to wage. And it's evident. He really says what he means. It's not that there is anything hidden. And I say to everyone, if you do not agree, take America, the heartland of America, take it seriously. That's where the heart beats.

• 21:44Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you say, take it seriously, do you mean that is a political direction? An artistic direction?

• 21:49Speaker 01

  In every sense. And many of my friends who are working in Los Angeles, I say, don't you come from Kansas? Yes, I come from Kansas. And I say, when were you? In Kansas last time, ah, that was twenty years ago. Now you should be every year. When did you meet your high school buddies? Oh, no contact with them at all. You have to get in touch with them. Ask them how they are doing. Ask them about their visions. Ask them about their grievances. Keep them engaged. They are your buddies, your high school friends. Do something. Don't complain. I don't like the complaints.

• 22:32Speaker 01

  I mean it way beyond politics. When I do a workshop for young filmmakers, they have to make a film within nine days, a short film, very short film, but it's a relentless push. And they learn a lot because I'm behind them during casting, choosing some sort of a story, showing them locations. I'm with them going around when they are shooting. Look over their backs when they are editing. And they have to come up on the tenth day with a finished short film. The mood in the beginning is always, ah, the film industry is so stupid and they do not finance. And I ask from where are you? South Korea.

• 23:15Speaker 01

  And the Americans, they complain, they say the same thing. The Mexicans say the same thing everywhere. The Germans. There's immediately the mood of complaint. I say, you idiots, if you are able bodied and have the will and the vision to make a film, earn a little bit money today. You can make a documentary that is cinema quality for under ten thousand dollars, a one and a half hour film. Work as an Uber driver, work in a lunatic asylum, work as a bouncer in a sex club. That's what I always recommend.

• 23:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  Or as a German rodeo clown like you did, yes?

• 23:54Speaker 01

  In Mexico, yeah, yeah. Well, I earned money because I had to survive.

• 23:59Stephen J. Dubner?

  You earn money in a lot of interesting ways, yeah.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  Yes, but I made my money really old fashioned way. I really earned it.

• 24:06Stephen J. Dubner?

  Where do you think that culture of complaint, where do you think that comes from?

• 24:10Speaker 01

  It probably has wide sources, broad sources. In the West, I see an educational system that immediately rewards you for everything. Ah, great job. And it can be a lousy sketch, lousier than anyone in class, and you have to be praised for it. There's no way to tell a kid, well, this wasn't really good work, but I know you can do better. And why don't you work on this? Bring it to me tomorrow. All of a sudden, you have a good one. It's the philosophy behind education. And the philosophies make the children happy, instead of making them strong, just for God's sake, make them

• 24:53Speaker 01

  strong guys, strong young women. And they will like it. They will like it. And the world out there is complicated, it's not easy, and sometimes very harsh to you. Get prepared. Get yourself ready for it. And that's what is missing. So the reasons for it are quite diversified. But it's a very, very big trend. And I don't like it, because when you're a filmmaker, you're out for relentless, relentless judgment. You will start a storm of negative reviews. The audience will not like your movie. It may be financially

• 25:38Speaker 01

  a disaster, and on and on. You better prepare yourself.

• 25:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  Hollywood is in the middle of one of its fairly regular existential crises. A lot of people say that this time it's really different, but of course, that's what they always say. But it has become much harder, over the past 10 years especially, to make a living in film or TV. This would seem strange, since people are consuming so much film and TV. But these industries have warped economics. They've been warped for decades. Maybe we should do a series on that someday. Anyway, Herzog doesn't let rejection get him down.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  There was a project once to do a film on Mike Tyson, which fell apart. But I like him.

• 26:25Stephen J. Dubner?

  What attracted you to him and his story?

• 26:27Speaker 01

  His intelligence, his knowledge. I immediately had a conversation about the Roman Republic. He triggered it about early Frankish kings, Merovingian kings, Pippi the Short and Frede Gunde and Clovis. And it comes from Mike Tyson. Man, this is a good guy. I like him as an independent thinker. And I say thinker, not just the one who has destroyed his opponents in the ring.

• 27:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  What happened to the film?

• 27:03Speaker 01

  It never materialized. There was a project where I wanted to have him as an actor, and the film was never financed. So what? It's OK.

• 27:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, we'll hear what Herzog is working on now. I'm Stephen Dubner. This is Freakonomics Radio. We'll be right back.

• 27:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  Werner Herzog is 83 years old and remains productive. Among his recent projects, a documentary about a wildlife researcher who's trying to find the giant ghost elephant in the Highlands of Angola, and a feature film with a spoonerized title, Bucking Fasterd, which stars sisters Kate and Rooney Mara as two sisters who speak in unison, love the same man, and have the same dreams. I asked Herzog how he thinks about the critical and public response to his work.

• 28:05Speaker 01

  When I make a few films in a row, four or five films, not much resonance, bad reviews, it's OK. I can survive it because I know the film is good, and it will eventually find its audience. I know that time, in a way, is on my side because I'm not in a trend. I've never been in any trend. A very good example is Aguirre, The Wrath of God, which was a very hard film to do. And it was rejected by everyone. The festivals rejected it. It got very bad reviews in Germany. I mean, really, really bad ones. It took...

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Five years until first audiences in France started to see it and like it. And they lined up in two theaters only, but they lined up around the block for two and a half years. Ten years later, America caught up. I had three re-releases of that film. And today, it's not a household name, but those who know about cinema know about this film. So time was on its side.

• 29:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  What has the streaming revolution done for you and your films?

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Nothing. It has not changed the shape of my films, the substance of my films.

• 29:31Stephen J. Dubner?

  But people can discover older films easily.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  Yes, that's a great advantage because you can see a film I did in the mid 1970s. You can find it on some platform. If it's nowhere, it's always somewhere pirated. Piracy is the most successful form of distribution nowadays, so be it. But films are accessible and this is why very young people discover it. Today, the males that reach me are males by 15-year-olds in Missoula, Montana, in South Korea, in Brazil, 15, 16, 17 years old.

• 30:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  What is it about your work that moves them?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  I do not know. Something that comes across, a great vision and something really authentic. Films like no one else ever has done.

• 30:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I watch Fitzgeraldo, which I think we'd agree is your most famous film to date, yes?

• 30:28Speaker 01

  I cannot really judge here, but people normally know about it.

• 30:33Stephen J. Dubner?

  For anyone who's not seen Fitzgeraldo, I would say you're diminishing yourself by not seeing it. It's so compelling and magnetic on so many levels, but then when this 320-ton, whatever, steamship is being manually moved over this mountain, it becomes, when I watch it, a metaphor for anything and everything difficult in life. And not only are you hoping and praying that somehow catastrophe doesn't happen, but you're also wondering, or I'm wondering about you. I'm wondering like, why? Why did you feel compelled? Because in the real story of Fitzcarraldo, the ship was taken apart.

• 31:12Speaker 01

  Well, there is no real story. It's basically all invented. A real rubber baron, a billionaire at his time, 120 years ago or so. Uninteresting as it gets, but he moved once a small ship, 30 tons or so. I mean ridiculously small for me and disassembled it and moved it over flat terrain into another river.

• 31:37Stephen J. Dubner?

  But what you're doing in the film and we see, and Klaus Kinski is, you can't stop watching him. Why were you willing to take on that challenge with all its physical, logistical?

• 31:48Speaker 01

  Because there's something deep in it that I share with almost everyone that I know. Something that is very human, a deep metaphor, like the metaphor of Sisyphus, who rolls up a big boulder of rock up the mountain and it rolls back on him. And he has to do it over and over again. Sisyphus, of course, dates back two and a half thousand years at least into ancient Greek mythology. But I knew there was something of that nature, a very deep metaphor. A little bit like, let's say, the quest for Moby Dick, the white whale. Something that we share, we have it in us.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  It's some sort of human knowledge, but undiscovered yet, unarticulated yet. The ancient Greek articulated with a myth of Sisyphus. Melville articulated it in his book, Moby Dick. And I articulated something in Fitzcarraldo. What exactly I uncovered, I can't tell you, but I know it's big.

• 32:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who's articulating those kind of ideas now, in your view?

• 33:00Speaker 01

  I do it.

• 33:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Besides you?

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I hardly see anyone.

• 33:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Visual artists?

• 33:06Speaker 01

  I don't see, well, I have to think hard. I don't see anyone, but I have to confess, I do not see many films, four or five a year, much less than a average moviegoer. I read.

• 33:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  You live in L.A. When you go to the Broad or to LACMA, do you see modern visual artists?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  No, I don't go to museums. Museums has a threshold. It's very hard for me to step over this threshold. Sometimes my wife manages to get me into a museum. I was, for example, at the Prado in Madrid, but I walked through it, I hastened through it, through the entire museum, not looking left and right, because I wanted to go to one single room with Goya's black nightmare images. I only saw that.

• 34:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  What was it about those Goya's that you wanted to see? I mean, he's particularly soulful, he's a very good technician. What is it about Goya in particular?

• 34:12Speaker 01

  It's somebody who touches me. It's one of the true artists that I know. There's very few, I could name you only two or three, and that's about it.

• 34:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  Who are they?

• 34:24Speaker 01

  Matthias Grünewald, for example, late medieval, the Eisenheim Altar. It's something which is beyond belief, and I spent once a whole day in and around it.

• 34:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  What did you feel during that day?

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Just knowing that there's somebody out there who is the truest of true artists, somebody who touches me to my core. Same thing with Goya, the black nightmares touches me to the core.

• 34:56Stephen J. Dubner?

  How do you rate yourself compared to them?

• 34:59Speaker 01

  I do not compare myself, but I know I'm not alone anymore. It's this profound feeling that I have brothers out there, and I don't care whether they are much greater than I am, it doesn't matter. But there's a brotherhood out there, somebody who reassures me of everything and makes every toil, every labor, every disappointment, everything worthwhile.

• 35:29Stephen J. Dubner?

  After the break, what makes a person an intelligent person? This is Freakonomics Radio. I'm Stephen Dubner, speaking with Werner Herzog. We'll be right back.

• 35:54Stephen J. Dubner?

  So your most recent book is called The Future of Truth. You write about the difference between what you call the accountant's truth and the ecstatic truth. I'd love you to walk us through that.

• 36:05Speaker 01

  We do not know what truth is. Philosophers do not know. 2,000 philosophers in a survey couldn't give a clear answer. Nobody has it. But I know it's a quest that is human, a voyage, an expedition, hardship, a search. But we must not abandon this search, even though we never will exactly know what truth is. It has to do with art, per se. I think every artist, sooner or later, is confronted with a question of truth. It comes inevitably at you. Filmmaker, painter, writer, poet,

• 36:45Speaker 01

  it doesn't matter. It will come at you. I have always seen the deepest insights, the deepest illumination, when it was not only carried by facts. I always use this as an example. Until recently, you had the Manhattan Phone Directory, half a foot thick with four and a half million entries, all of them factually correct, but it doesn't illuminate you. So it's not the book of books. The phone directory is the accountant's truth. But doing films

• 37:28Speaker 01

  or being a poet, you have to do something that illuminates you. And very often, you have to depart from the facts. You have to go into ecstasies. You have to step outside of your own self. You have to exaggerate. You have to modify. You have to invent.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  And this puts me in immediate conflict with cinema verity, which even has it in its name, verity. Of course, they cannot claim being in possession of truth. Nonsense, they are not. Nobody is. And I have my ongoing battle with them. Whenever I run into them, I do battle.

• 38:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Because you feel they are adopting a mantle that they don't live up to?

• 38:16Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no. It's a concept that film is as truthful as it gets in their lingo. If you are factually correct, fact-based, fact-based, fact-based, verifiable, fact-checked. This is silly. It's very shallow thinking, very shallow experience in the world. And not my way of making films.

• 38:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  I mean, as a journalist, I like facts.

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 38:45Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I understand that facts are not the whole story.

• 38:48Speaker 01

  And as a journalist, you better do fact-checking. You better do that because there's a certain responsibility vis-à-vis your readers. You're not a poet who is just inventing the world. Same thing when I'm writing my memoirs. Fact-checking my memoirs took three times more time than just writing it. I gave the manuscript to my brothers, my older and my younger brothers. And I said, read this because you have been in many of these events. Tell me if I'm completely wrong. And of course, I made a few modifications.

• 39:27Stephen J. Dubner?

  Your mother was long dead by the time you published your memoir.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Yes, sure. She couldn't fact-check, yeah.

• 39:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  But I did want to ask you something because you did quote her. This is in your memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is a title of a film as well, correct?

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  But you quote your mother saying this about you. All the time he was at school, Werner never learned anything you have your mother saying about you. He never read the books he was supposed to read, he never studied. But then, in fact, Werner always knew everything. His senses were extraordinary. He could pick out some note or sound and 10 years later, remember it exactly. He would talk about it and use it in some way. He's completely incapable of explaining anything. He knows, he sees, he understands, but he can't explain. That's not his nature. With him, everything goes in, and if it comes out again, then it'll be in some altered form.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't invent it. She said it in an interview, so that is verifiable. But I always had it in me to absorb things, and things are embedded deep inside of me. All of a sudden, 10 years later, it reemerges, but in form of a story, in form of an element of a vision. I think she's right in what she says. And I was not a happy kid in school. I hated school. The last two and a half years, I was dozing most of the time, sometimes

• 41:03Speaker 01

  deep, fast asleep, because I worked the night shift in a steel factory as a welder. I needed to earn money for producing my first films. And I didn't like the kind of education. It's complicated. There's such a thing like intelligence, but it's a bundle of mental qualities, memory, speech, combination of elements, logical thinking, and musicality, a sense for poetry.

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Many, many things, a whole bundle. The kind of bundle necessary for being a good pupil in the school that I attended was not congruent with what was in my existence. My bundle of intelligence was different. And because of that, I was in constant conflict with my school.

• 42:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Some people argue that AI, even though many educators are scared of it, some people argue that AI will be a phenomenal teaching tool because if children know that they have the available facts at their disposal, then they can spend more time thinking about bigger, more interesting truths, maybe about creativity and so on. What do you think of that?

• 42:22Speaker 01

  Well, it's a complex subject. AI, I would say I'm not afraid of what's going on. However, we have to be very, very vigilant when it comes to warfare and other things. It can be disinformation, fake news, perfect replicas of you appearing in a pornographic film can be done today and almost credibly. You better go to the source directly and ask, did you really do that, what I saw in the movie?

• 42:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  The answer is no.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Okay, the answer is no, thanks God.

• 42:55Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you believe in God?

• 42:56Speaker 01

  I can't answer that. I had a dramatic religious phase.

• 43:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  When you were much younger?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  When I was in adolescence, yes, yeah.

• 43:04Stephen J. Dubner?

  You converted Catholicism when you were 14 or something, yeah?

• 43:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a dramatic short time, but I left the church.

• 43:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Do you think about what happens when you die?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I think everybody who is alive and has his or her wits together thinks about it because it's the only inevitability that we have. Everything else is up to, God knows, fate, lottery, statistics, anomalies within the statistics, you just name it. But the only thing certain that we all share is that we are gonna die and that, of course, dictates whether we are religious or whether we believe in an afterlife or not.

• 43:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've had a very jarring experience a couple of times in the last year where loved ones, members of my family, who were very religious, toward the end, they lost their faith. And it surprised me.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Normally, it's the other way around because it stabilizes. It gives hope because dying is not easy. Being born is not easy. I mean, it's a brutal event, painful and brutal. And normally dying is not an easy thing either. So you better face it, what's coming at you. And very often, those who are religious can cope with it much better.

• 44:32Stephen J. Dubner?

  I've always been transfixed by the notion of memory. It's so subjective. It's so individual. It's so odd. We take in so much information and remember so little. But when I watch your films, I feel like I'm planting things in my mind that will become memories. And I'm just curious how you think about that sense and what it was put there for.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  Well, memory is something necessary for simple survival. Let's face it, of course, memory is malleable and it is shifting. And we start to organize or reframe our own memories. And it's good that we can do that. We can forget the real awful things and we can move on to the better part.

• 45:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Many people can, some people can't.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's a blessing if you can forget bad things or put them in a little corner. My memory functions like everyone else's. I shape my own memory like everyone does it. And you see it when you ask your own brothers about the same event. And I see somehow I must have shifted it slightly different from how they shifted it. That's what is deeply human. Thanks God, we have the quality to organize and shift and delete and modify our own memories. So it's not a solid thing like a hard drive in your laptop.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Thanks God, we don't have that kind of memory.

• 46:10Stephen J. Dubner?

  This conversation is going to stay in my memory for a while. I know that, and for that, I thank you very much.

• 46:17Speaker 01

  It's been good to talk to you.

• 46:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  I hate to throw a piece of the accountant's truth at Werner Herzog, but in the interest of fact checking, I don't think there were ever four and a half million entries in the Manhattan phone directory, maybe two million. But I think you will agree that he gave us enough ecstatic truth to let the phone book thing slide. His latest book is called The Future of Truth. The one before that is called Every Man for Himself and God Against All, a memoir. If you want to let us know what you thought of this episode, our email is [email protected]. You can also leave a comment on your podcast app or at freakonomics.com, where we also publish transcripts and show notes. Coming up next time on the show,

• 47:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  we look at the long arc of technology through the eyes of an economic historian.

• 47:10Speaker 03

  Every technology has a downside. When early humans made their first hammers and axes, they could bash each other's heads in, and they did.

• 47:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Joel Mokir recently won a Nobel Prize. He was not expecting to get that famously early in the morning phone call from the Nobel people.

• 47:28Speaker 03

  Oh, I was completely flabbergasted, you know, stupefied. I mean, run down the Cisaurus.

• 47:34Stephen J. Dubner?

  But now he's got the mic and he's got a mission.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  It is my mission to tell people how good they have it. The good old days may have been old, but they weren't good.

• 47:46Stephen J. Dubner?

  We'll get some economic history and we'll get some advice.

• 47:50Speaker 03

  I have many tips.

• 47:51Stephen J. Dubner?

  The Nobel laureate Joel Mokir, that's next time on the show. Until then, take care of yourself. And if you can, someone else, too. Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Renbud Radio. You can find our entire archive on any podcast app. This episode was produced by Alina Coleman and Zach Lipinski and edited by Gabriel Roth. It was mixed by Jasmine Klinger with help from Eleanor Osborne and Jeremy Johnston. The Freakonomics Radio Network staff also includes Augusta Chapman, Dalvin Abouajji, Ellen Frankman, Elsa Hernandez, Ilaria Matenecor, and Teo Jacobs. Our theme song is Mr. Fortune by The Hitchhikers, and our composer is Luis Guerra. As always, thanks for listening.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  No, I'm not a perfectionist. I accept my films with all their mistakes. When I see a new film for the first time with an audience, I sink in my chair and I only see mistakes.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  The Freakonomics Radio Network. The Hidden Side of Everything.

• 49:03Speaker 01

  Stitcher.