Pappas, Yannis

comedian, former co-host of the history-comedy podcast "History Hyenas," now hosts "Long Days"

Yannis Pappas: History and Comedy

Lex Fridman Podcast · Apr 12, 2021

• Yannis Pappas
• History Hyenas
• power and corruption
• charisma and con artists
• mortality and meaning
• Battle of Crete
• Greek history and philotimo
• capitalism versus socialism
• conspiracy theories
• comedy career origins
• authenticity

Core ideas

Much of the conversation is comedic riffing built around a few recurring philosophical anchors that Pappas returns to more seriously. On power, he argues (echoing a line he attributes partly to observing figures like Tim Dillon and Joe Rogan) that power doesn't corrupt so much as reveal what was already latent in a person — with Rogan offered as a rare counterexample of someone whose character stayed stable through rising fame and influence — and distinguishes this from psychopathy, arguing that power is far more dangerous in people capable of empathy losing their restraint than in those who, in his view, are simply born without empathy (psychopaths/sociopaths) and would behave destructively regardless of power. He extends this into a discussion of charismatic con men (using Bernie Madoff as an extended case study) and dictators (Hitler, and briefly Putin, Saddam Hussein, and Queen Elizabeth I), arguing that a common tool of manipulators — political and criminal alike — is to project the opposite of what they actually are (charm, availability, apparent selflessness) to disarm people's critical judgment, and that intelligence offers little protection against sufficiently skilled charisma.

On mortality, Pappas describes his father's death (from prostate cancer, with Pappas present at the end) as formative, and argues that accepting one's own mortality is foundational to being "a moral person" and staying grounded in reality, tying political catastrophes and mass killing historically to ideologies he sees as "utopian" and detached from human nature. He pushes back against a version of Ernest Becker's "Denial of Death" thesis raised by Lex — arguing that fearing death is not really a conscious choice but a mostly instinctual, chemical response — while agreeing that mortality's role in creating urgency and meaning is real, illustrated through a riff imagining that true human immortality would likely produce endless procrastination and laziness rather than heroic self-actualization.

Discussing history, Pappas gives an extended, personally-inflected account of the 1941 Battle of Crete — where his mother lived through the Nazi occupation as a child — describing it as an underappreciated turning point (citing the argument that Hitler's forced diversion to subdue Greek and Cretan resistance delayed the invasion of the Soviet Union into a harsher winter) and framing Greek resistance through the untranslatable concept of "philotimo" (honor, loyalty, altruism). He reflects on how official war narratives tend to sanitize the brutality experienced by ordinary soldiers and civilians (citing his father's own combat experience and Purple Hearts) and are typically "written by the victors," a point he extends to a broader riff on how the media glamorizes predators, mafia figures, and killers by omitting their far less "cinematic" and more mundane, repetitive real activity — using extended hyena-versus-lion comparisons (he identifies hyenas, not lions, as his favorite animal, admiring their cunning, matriarchal social structure, and adaptability) as a running metaphor for cleverness versus brute dominance.

On his own career, Pappas describes deliberately ending "History Hyenas" at what he felt was its natural peak rather than let it decline, attributing the show's chemistry with his former co-host to something he can't fully explain, and contrasts the show's informal, "hang with history" style — self-deprecatingly nicknamed "Wikipedia sluts" by fans — with Dan Carlin's more rigorously researched "Hardcore History," while defending unpolished, entertainment-driven history podcasting as still valuable insofar as it draws listeners toward deeper, more accurate research on their own. He credits his decision to pursue comedy over the more conventional legal/academic path followed by the rest of his family (both parents and his brother are lawyers) to a formative first open-mic experience where, despite a severe panic attack, he felt a sense of belonging he says he has never fully replicated since.

On politics, Pappas — describing himself as generally left-leaning but pragmatic — argues New York City specifically needs market-oriented, "money guy" leadership (citing Amazon's rejected HQ2 deal as an example of what he sees as counterproductive progressive policy) even as he supports more socialist-leaning policy in specific domains like healthcare and criminal justice (citing a low-confidence Andrew Yang statistic on prison costs as an example of valuable, if uncertain, honest data-driven communication from politicians), framing the underlying tension as one of constant, deliberate rebalancing between capitalism's dynamism and socialism's role tempering its excesses, rather than a fixed ideological commitment to either. Discussing conspiracy theories, he distinguishes cases he finds genuinely puzzling — citing (with explicit acknowledgment that he isn't a scientist and lacks technical expertise on the subject) the WTC Building 7 collapse and his sense, based on private conversations with unnamed biologists, that a COVID-19 lab-leak origin is plausible — from ones he considers absurd (flat earth), arguing that public trust erodes less because of malevolent conspiracies and more from institutional dishonesty driven by ordinary self-interest (fear of losing a job, reluctance to admit uncertainty).

He closes with reflections on authenticity and meaning: advice to be "doggedly you" and to recognize love as an action rather than a feeling, a critique of American culture's conflation of fame/wealth with worth (contrasting it favorably with what he describes as Scandinavian social models that afford dignity regardless of status), and a wry, self-aware acknowledgment that fame and celebrity — including within comedy circles — often mask deeply flawed people behind a curated public persona.

Excerpts