In this episode, I catch up with my good friend and former co-worker, Colin, to talk about what's going on in the world of social media, the future of the gaming industry, and much, much more. It's a lot of fun, and I hope you enjoy it! If you like the show, please HIT SUBSCRIBE to get notified when we upload a new episode every Sunday night. Subscribe to stay up to date with the latest episodes of Gamer Flex and Gamer Flex Weekly! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code: "UPLEVEL" to receive 20% off your first month with discount code: GEEKER20 at checkout. Just pay the standard retail price of $19.99 and get 20% discount when you enter the offer code: UPLEVEL at checkout to save 20% on your purchase. Thanks for listening and share the podcast with your friends and family! Timestamps: 3:00 - What's up with social media? 4:30 - How do you feel about the current social media platforms? 5:15 - What do you think of the current state of the industry? 6:40 - Is social media monopolies? 7:20 - Is there a better way to monetize your content? 8:00 9:20 What's your favorite social media platform? 10:15 11:00 | What are you looking forward to in the future? 12: What are your favorite thing about the gaming space? 13:00 / 15: What's next? 16: What s your favorite piece of media company? 17:00: What is your biggest piece of content you're most excited about? 18:30 19:30 | What's the biggest thing you're watching? 21: Is there something you would like to see in the most interesting thing you re watching on social media right now? 22:40 | What would you like to do in the next episode of your next episode? 23:00 // 22:30 // 21: what are you waiting for? 26:30 What s the best thing? 25:40 27:00 & 27:30 Can you tell me what you re looking for in your next project? 28:00 Are you looking for a new medium? 29:00 Can you give me an update on what you're looking for?
00:00:48.000I have like 4,500 people on Patreon supporting me, and I don't serve ads on anything I do, so I'm just trying to make it organic and see how far I can take it, and then go from there.
00:00:57.000Sam Harris does his entire podcast that way.
00:00:59.000He doesn't have any ads, which I think is amazing.
00:01:03.000I worked at IGN for a long time, the video game site, and my old company, so we had ads, and I have no problem with them, but I was trying to just kind of say, I don't need more than what you're giving me.
00:01:14.000This is plenty, and I'm doing fine, and so maybe I'll do ads on future products, but not with this.
00:01:22.000I mean, just, if you're enjoying it, I mean, yeah, you could do different products, you could do, I mean, different projects, rather, you could do it different ways.
00:01:30.000You know, it's interesting now to try to figure out, like, what's the best way for people to put their stuff out there.
00:01:36.000Like, I know a lot of people, like, in the podcast world, some people use SoundCloud, some people use other things, some people just go straight to YouTube.
00:01:42.000I mean, there's a lot of experimentation going on now.
00:01:46.000Yeah, and I'm always fascinated by that particular thing about how I do a podcast now just on the side called Fireside Chats where I just have random people in to talk about random things.
00:01:55.000And similar, but not nearly as good as your show.
00:01:58.000And I'm always amazed that people are like, why don't you put this on YouTube?
00:02:02.000And I'm like, you just want to stare at a static image on YouTube?
00:02:07.000It's just about how people consume the content.
00:02:09.000So maybe a spreadshot approach is probably the smartest idea.
00:02:12.000Well, if you could hire someone to do images that represent the conversation, maybe that would be a reason to have it on YouTube, but I hear you.
00:02:19.000People just get excited about a platform.
00:02:22.000They get locked into a platform, and then they just digest everything in that platform, whether it's Snapchat or Instagram or YouTube.
00:02:44.000It seems like that seems so straightforward.
00:02:47.000You have it so people can upload videos, you put ads on those videos, and that's it.
00:02:53.000I mean, it seems like there would be hundreds of those sites.
00:02:56.000Yeah, I think they were just first and it was ubiquitous quickly.
00:03:01.000I find that with a lot of social media too.
00:03:04.000Snapchat's really faltering now because Instagram's basically stolen its entire platform and it's all about these little monopolies that exist.
00:03:11.000Monopolies for pictures, monopolies for video, monopoly for interacting with friends and family on Facebook and stuff like that.
00:05:07.000I feel like it's a game in some sort of a way, like a text-based video game or something.
00:05:13.000Yeah, like an old text adventure or something like that.
00:05:15.000One interesting thing about Facebook that I think is worth noting is that it's typically real people with real names and real pictures, so at least they're putting themselves out there.
00:05:39.000Well, you know, I wanted to talk to you about internet controversy because when we had you on the first time, it was kind of just after your whole thing had happened with this.
00:05:48.000He had made this one, like, incredibly innocuous tweet.
00:05:52.000It was like a day without woman or something like that silence like what was it?
00:05:59.000It was a peace and quiet hashtag a day without a woman.
00:06:02.000Yeah, I mean Which is like an Al Bundy joke maybe yeah, and but the thing is like if that happened today Nobody would give a shit.
00:06:23.000Like I explained to you originally, I feel like it was partially a political hit because of the industry I worked in and all that kind of stuff.
00:06:28.000But also, like I was telling you before we started, the more I've had time to think, after all these things happened, I launched a new company, I was working 70 hours a week, I had no bandwidth to really think about what the hell happened.
00:06:40.000The more I think about it, the angrier I actually get about how I... I had to go through that and watch other people also kind of go through similar things as the outrage machine just eats people and spits them out as they go along.
00:06:51.000When you stop and think about what you actually said and what that actually caused, that actually caused you to stop working with people.
00:07:00.000Yeah, like this one silly joke like they don't know you They don't know you know that one joke that one thing that you said is so awful and outrageous that all of our years of collaborating Working together trying to do projects trying to be creative having fun all the conversations we've had about life and about Humans and politics and men and women those are all out the window man.
00:07:25.000You made a joke that I find Marginally offensive.
00:07:29.000Maybe on a certain day, marginally offensive.
00:07:46.000The only thing that I can think about is that I was at least in a position where it didn't destroy me or whatever.
00:07:52.000I actually am doing financially better and feel happier in what I'm doing now, so it kind of backfired on the people that were trying to Do whatever they were doing to me anyway, but I feel for the people that find themselves in similar situations that don't have some sort of internet clout or some sort of community that can rally around them and lift them up,
00:08:11.000which is what my community did to me, which I'm so appreciative of.
00:08:14.000So I just think about how it's just sad.
00:08:16.000I don't know that I've ever been so offended by something someone has tweeted or even said that I went out of my way to make it personal and try to destroy them.
00:08:24.000I'm not saying people don't do terrible shit.
00:08:32.000And I feel like people are kind of being distracted by the shiny object in the corner when they're losing sight of what's important.
00:08:39.000Well, today it feels like there's blood in the water.
00:08:42.000I mean, it seems like there's so many people going after so many people.
00:08:47.000It's just people are running around looking for targets.
00:08:49.000The way I imagine, I imagine the internet and people on the internet being an angry mob running through the streets, frothing at the mouth, just looking for somewhere to point their gun.
00:09:01.000I mean, that's really what it feels like.
00:09:03.000It feels like there's definitely some real targets out there.
00:09:10.000I mean apparently Rosie O'Donnell started tweeting that he had been doing this forever and that this is the tip of the iceberg and there's a bunch of boys that he went after.
00:10:06.000I love that show, and what's going on now reminds me a little bit of a Black Mirror episode, where people, like you said, are targeting others.
00:10:15.000And I feel like accusations are part of the process, are part of due process, really, that starts with the accusation.
00:11:48.000I don't think any of them accused him of sexual assault or anything like that, but apparently he might have rubbed up against some women or did some things that are- But that kind of is sexual assault though, right?
00:11:57.000Yeah, I assume so, but I guess what I'm saying is like...
00:11:59.000If a guy rubs his dick on somebody, that's essentially sexual assault.
00:12:40.000Look, I mean, I want to know about Kevin Spacey type situations or Harvey Weinstein type situations, but I think there's a lot of men that are in that position where they're a boss or they are, you know, the owner of a company and they have these people under them.
00:12:56.000And these people behave in a certain way, almost like as if they are royalty.
00:13:02.000And I think that's what Harvey Weinstein experienced.
00:13:05.000Essentially, he was like the royalty of this enormous movie empire.
00:13:11.000And we find that particularly offensive.
00:13:15.000He's not just a creep trying to get laid.
00:13:18.000He's a guy that was trying to hold that power over people and use it against them.
00:13:24.000And then on top of that, he was physically forceful.
00:13:50.000Hmm, that doesn't seem like sexual assault or anything.
00:13:53.000It seems like someone just trying to get laid like where does it but then when someone's the boss you go, okay, but then you're not supposed to do that when you're a boss, right?
00:14:00.000I was more I was very interested in the in the in the dynamic between what specifically with Harvey Weinstein And his people under him for many decades.
00:14:09.000Yeah about I was trying to put myself in this position of like how does this stay quiet for so long even though there's a little rumblings like they talk about Seth MacFarlane's joke at some award show Kevin Spacey, too Yeah, and Family Guy.
00:14:21.000Like a little kid was running away from...
00:14:23.000So I was locked in Kevin Spacey's basement.
00:14:26.000It's amazing that this stuff is kind of like an open secret, but still doesn't seep out or really...
00:14:31.000It makes you think about the power dynamics and how fearful people are in these positions, because it's easy.
00:14:37.000My initial instinct was like, why didn't anyone say anything?
00:15:48.000So I don't look at the situation now in 2017 on college campuses and all these things as desirable for anyone, because who the hell knows the rules of the landscape now?
00:16:00.000I think a lot of it just comes down to mutual respect and all of that, you know?
00:16:03.000Well, you know what I think it is, man?
00:16:09.000I think this is a big, gigantic shift, almost like an earthquake of consciousness.
00:16:14.000I think that over the course of human history, we have slowly but surely become better to each other.
00:16:21.000We had a photograph that we put up yesterday of an ad from 1911. It was a gum ad, and it was instructing a man how to go about kissing a woman.
00:16:35.000And a lot of it was like, do not ask permission, look in her eyes, gaze dreamily.
00:17:17.000The Common Sense Gum Company from 1911. And I think what's happening...
00:17:22.000Right now, is this a really big shift?
00:17:27.000And I think the beneficiaries of this big shift are going to be the next generation of kids that are growing up.
00:17:32.000They're probably not going to have to deal with nearly as much shit.
00:17:36.000And I'm absolutely not giving Bill Cosby any sort of fucking excuse at all, but I think that in Bill Cosby's day, I think a lot of men did that.
00:18:05.000Ultimately, everyone, when you catch people at like a good static state, like a good calm state, and they're not under duress and they're thinking clearly, and you would ask them, like, what's the best way to get along with other people?
00:19:23.000But it reminds me of, like, there was, like, telltale signs of some sexual corruption in Hollywood and the music industry and the movie industry and all that some years ago.
00:19:33.000That's kind of bubbled back to the surface with some big names.
00:19:38.000People just need to be good to each other and act normal and be respectful.
00:19:44.000You don't find yourself in these terrible situations.
00:19:46.000But then you see this desperation with Harvey Weinstein where you learn that he might have sexually assaulted or even raped a woman who then appears in a movie some years later because the gravity well around him is so strong that they have no choice.
00:19:58.000So it's a very sad situation for those women as well.
00:20:01.000It's a sad situation for humanity, right?
00:20:03.000It's like, there's just certain things that people were able to get away with, you know?
00:20:11.000Like, the Cosby thing to me is probably number one.
00:23:11.000Yeah, because I thought that was interesting specifically because they apparently had already announced that it was the last season anyway, like in the summer, so they're making it seem like they're reacting to it.
00:23:18.000So everyone's just playing the PR game now, you know?
00:25:39.000The only pro or crypto Nazi I can think of is yourself.
00:25:45.000Some people were calling each other Nazis even way back after, you know, right after World War II. Yeah, it's a weird one, right?
00:25:51.000It's like, the problem is, like, what we saw in Charlottesville is like, hey, look, guys, there's real Nazis.
00:25:58.000Like, don't call someone a Nazi because they voted for Trump, because they think that, you know, right-wing conservative values are being diminished in this country.
00:26:35.000You know, I'm not saying we're in an ideal situation right now, but people throwing around these words very loosely need to learn a little bit more about Weimar Republic and the Nazis coming to power in 33 and what that actually looks like, what fascism actually looks like in Italy, what it looks like in Germany.
00:27:41.000So, like, all these kids that are trying to shut down conservative speakers on campus, and then by shutting them down, they're calling them white supremacists, Nazis, and using these things for guys like Ben Shapiro, which I think is, like, patently ridiculous.
00:27:57.000And a white supremacist as well, which is just...
00:28:00.000Because he quotes statistics about minority crime.
00:28:05.000You know, those statistics, I feel like, are pretty misleading in some ways because there's a lot of factors that lead to these people being in these situations where there's high crime rates in these communities and it has nothing to do with, you know, hey, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which is like a really common way of looking at it.
00:28:22.000It has to do with the world that they were born into.
00:28:26.000Yeah, socioeconomically, it's a different world.
00:28:28.000Yeah, and they're surrounded by the momentum of crime.
00:28:31.000They're surrounded by the momentum of violence and abuse and to just expect them to escape that because there are examples of people that have done it in the past.
00:28:41.000Well, you can't apply that sort of logic, I don't think.
00:28:55.000It's exactly what it is, because it reminds me a little bit...
00:28:57.000It's different in the context, but it reminds me a little bit of when Bernie Sanders was running in the primary, and people would be like, this is...
00:29:33.000We're not, you know, a devastated and humiliated nation.
00:29:36.000Yeah, the stab in the back, hyperinflation, you know, like this charismatic man who's in prison for a while writes this manifesto, tries to actually throw a coup in the mid-20s, fails.
00:29:46.000Like, all of these, like, what parallel are you talking about?
00:30:46.000It reminds me of on Columbus Day, I tweeted out and it got tweeted a bunch, I thought it was funny, where people were tweeting about Columbus and all this, I'm like, suddenly everyone's an expert now in the age of exploration today.
00:30:54.000Now everyone knows everything about the age of exploration, just like everyone knew everything about the rise of Nazism and the Weimar Republic, and just like everyone knew about the, you know, socialism and all.
00:31:05.000Well, I posted this flag behind me, and a company called Iron Mountain Designs creates it, and it's a veteran-owned company, and they make these pretty cool flags, very cool flags, made out of metal, but it has a George Washington quote on the back.
00:31:21.000And I put it up on Instagram with the photo of the flag, photo of the logo of the company, like three different pictures on Instagram in a row.
00:31:28.000You know how you do that, where one post can have three images?
00:31:31.000And one of them was a quote from George Washington.
00:31:34.000And the number of fucking geniuses, George Washington owned slaves.
00:31:38.000Like, yeah, he's an honest man who owned slaves.
00:31:40.000And they just kept rattling on about the horrors of George Washington as if, okay.
00:31:48.000Yeah, but this is a quote by a man who lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and this is what he said.
00:31:54.000You know, you want to diminish his entire, you know, contribution to human culture because he did something horrible back then when people were doing horrible things.
00:32:05.000You're right, he did own slaves, but I think it's a part of a very long conversation about what a human being was, you know, back then.
00:32:14.000Yeah, it goes back to the idea of historical relativism, that you can judge them based on a 21st century model, but George Washington died in 1799, so this is a man that didn't even see the 19th century, nonetheless the 20th, nonetheless the 21st, has no idea.
00:32:38.000There were absolutely abolitionists among the founders.
00:32:40.000There were absolutely abolitionists during the revolution and black people fought for the for the Continental Army.
00:32:45.000But yeah, people judging based on these things, I'm like, that's fine.
00:32:48.000But if you want to take that to its natural conclusion, you're going to find lots of problems with lots of people.
00:32:53.000Even closer to us in history than than George Washington and what's funny about that is now they really are going after I was reading it just tangentially I didn't see it all but people are starting to now go after George Washington plaques or George Washington statues and I feel kind of bad about that in the sense that I was all for removing The Confederate statues and putting them in places where they made sense.
00:33:11.000So take the Jefferson Davis statue, put it in Gettysburg or whatever the case might be, put it in a museum.
00:33:16.000I don't think they should be melted down and destroyed.
00:33:18.000But people were like, the next logical step is they're going to go after the founders.
00:33:27.000So I feel a little bit guilty about that in the sense that...
00:33:30.000I don't think we should be celebrating Confederate history, but we should absolutely be celebrating American history, even the complicated American history.
00:33:37.000Well, even if it's not celebrating it, it's recognizing it and understanding it.
00:33:41.000I mean, the Confederate war, the Civil War rather, did happen.
00:33:45.000It's a real historical fact and it should be studied.
00:34:09.000So to diminish that, that's not good either.
00:34:12.000But to try to sweep it under the rug and smash all the statues, like, no, have that statue up so people can understand what the fuck that is.
00:34:20.000And if someone is going to celebrate that statue, you know, the South's going to do it again, we're going to rise again, they can do that, you know, if that's their thing.
00:34:29.000I mean, we can't stop them from thinking stupid.
00:34:31.000Yeah, and I think that I agree with you in the sense that it's worth, it just, it happened, we remember it, and it has always, the gray and blue have always been part of our culture since the Civil War ended in 1865, and especially since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Many people don't even know what you're saying.
00:34:48.000Yeah, the uniforms of the different sides.
00:34:52.000You know, when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and our occupation of the South ended and then Jim Crow became law and there was, you know, institutional segregation, this was something that was always a complicated point of celebration.
00:35:04.000You know, I've always been, you know, I've always been really kind of curious and really more militant about why these people actually got away with what they did.
00:35:14.000And I understand, you know, the 10% plan, which, do you know anything about that?
00:35:19.000The idea that Lincoln only made, or actually really Andrew Johnson only made 10% of people in the southern states basically pledge allegiance in order for the states to come back in.
00:35:26.000They didn't execute anyone that, you know, or even really try them.
00:35:30.000You know, Jefferson Davis Stonewall Jackson didn't survive, but Robert E. Lee and all these other guys just got away with it and actually lived pretty prosperous lives afterwards.
00:35:37.000So there's always been this really complicated mix of remembrance that these people down there were heroes, and we don't have to support that.
00:35:42.000I certainly don't support that, but it goes way further back than our contemporary culture, and we can't just smash it into oblivion and think you're going to remove that.
00:35:50.000The heritage of the stars and bars and all that from what happened.
00:35:53.000I think that the problem is people think that you're celebrating the Confederate Army when you have a statue up.
00:35:58.000And in some ways, it seems like you are, right?
00:36:01.000Because the statue is 15 feet tall, and he's got a sword in his hand, and he's on a horse, and he's marching forward.
00:36:07.000And people look at it as if it's celebrating something that's a horrible part of human culture.
00:36:14.000I mean, I remember going to Richmond, Virginia for the first time.
00:36:17.000A lot of my family lives down there now, and they have this thing called Monument Row or whatever, where it's like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and all that.
00:36:24.000And then they actually put Arthur Ashe at the end to make it seem like it's not racist anymore, which I always thought was weird.
00:37:22.000But I was so tragically wrong about the slippery slope that we were finding ourselves on.
00:37:27.000Because I thought people would see more that like, yes, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but also an immensely important person to our society.
00:37:43.000Even though those guys did own slaves too, right?
00:37:45.000I mean, it is all weird when you're talking about slave ownership.
00:37:49.000You know, I did this thing this morning.
00:37:51.000My kids' school, they have this great pumpkin day and all the little kids are on stage and they're...
00:37:55.000They have this little play that they act out.
00:37:57.000One of the things they were talking about, the smell of applewood bacon, and mmm, and everybody's like, oh, the smell of applewood bacon.
00:38:05.000And all I could think of, because yesterday we were talking about factory farming and about this Glenn Greenwald article, where this FBI investigation to these two people that stole these pigs from this factory farm revealed this...
00:38:22.000Federal cover-up of these horrific conditions in factory farms and I was thinking of like one day we're gonna look at like factory farming And the horrific nature of what they do to these animals, especially pigs.
00:38:44.000The article in the photos were really hard to look at.
00:38:46.000And I was thinking while I was watching this little kid's play today, I was like, one day we're going to look back at this mention of bacon.
00:38:55.000And we're gonna think, like, how fucked up were people that they thought it was okay to shove these little animals into these crates and make them live in their own shit just so you could get bacon off of them?
00:39:11.000And it's not a valid comparison to slavery, but it's also, it's not an ideal way for a conscious and evolving species like the human race to behave.
00:39:21.000It's not a good way for us to rationalize.
00:39:24.000And I was looking at that today and I was thinking, how many more of these things...
00:39:28.000I mean, I think we're seeing that with things like the Harvey Weinstein allegations and this outrage that's coming forth.
00:39:38.000I think we're seeing it with a lot of the aspects of our society that's getting exposed in a way that never got exposed before.
00:39:47.000I mean, in my mind, we were seeing it with this talk of bacon.
00:39:51.000I was like, you know, look, bacon is delicious.
00:39:54.000Absolutely, but where the fuck's that bacon coming from, you know?
00:39:57.000Are you making sure you're getting free-range bacon from, you know, very moral and ethical farming practices, or are you just getting bacon?
00:40:06.000Yeah, it's actually very thought-provoking what you're saying because I've always found the factory farming, not that I'm an expert in it at all, I'm not, but the argument to be really interesting because it's like there's an opportunity cost.
00:40:17.000The way we treat these animals means food is very cheap.
00:40:26.000Because of that, people used to spend a third of their income before World War II on food and now they spend less than a tenth of their money on food.
00:40:33.000So we've made food way cheaper, but you're right, because you could make the same argument for slavery in the sense that, well, look at all the economic benefits.
00:40:43.000It kind of turned a blind eye to it, so you actually kind of Kind of changed my mind on it a little bit, because I've always been of the mind where, like, free-range eggs, free-range animals, that's great if you can afford that, but I don't begrudge the poor or middle-class or working-class family from going and buying their ground beef from Vons.
00:40:58.000Yeah, well, if you're poor, you've got to get by.
00:41:09.000But what I'm just saying as a whole, as a culture, to just openly accept factory farming and to not think of it as a horrific ethical and moral injustice.
00:41:22.000This is coming from someone who eats meat, right?
00:41:25.000Obviously, the vegan argument would be, well, you're complicit in it, and you're also complicit in a bunch of other horrific crimes against animals.
00:41:33.000I think that what we're looking at, though, is an awakening and sort of an understanding of our impact.
00:41:40.000Like, physically, our impact on this, but mentally, the way we think about things, the way we even think about ourselves.
00:41:46.000If you know that your bacon is coming from an animal that was tortured and shoved into a cage, and you buy it anyway.
00:41:56.000You know, what does that do to your mind?
00:42:54.000I can take two weeks off out of the year because I went on two elk hunts.
00:43:00.000I've been on four hunts this year and three of them I was successful and one of them I got an axis deer which is also like 100 pounds of meat and so That's most of what I eat.
00:43:13.000But most people don't have time to take three weeks off a year.
00:43:16.000And you also have to have the time to practice and you have to know people.
00:43:22.000It's a lot of good fortune on my side to be able to do something like this.
00:43:26.000But it's also a concerted effort and becoming obsessed with the idea behind it of doing that.
00:44:25.000I grow food in my backyard, and I grow plants and vegetables, and when I eat them, it just feels like some sort of a completion, like it feels good.
00:44:37.000Whereas it just feels like a good salad if I get it at a store.
00:45:01.000It's sort of subsistence, but there's all these companies that are involved behind creating the materials that you use to...
00:45:08.000So it's like capitalism slash subsistence.
00:45:12.000But it's interesting because it's the point I made earlier.
00:45:16.000You're further along the path of sustainability or further along the path of some sort of righteousness in the way animals are treated and all that kind of stuff than a lot of people are.
00:45:24.000So it's a step in the right direction, right?
00:45:26.000I just wonder if people, just to play devil's advocate, again, the working class family at the median household income of $40,000 a year, If we got rid of some of these animal practices, which are abhorrent, but if we got rid of them, are they willing to pay $13 or $14 a pound for their beef?
00:45:44.000I mean, it's absolutely a real problem.
00:45:46.000And I think that there's a lot of people that don't even take it into consideration.
00:45:52.000I mean, that's probably the biggest problem, that we've made this system, and everybody was born into this system, you know, obviously we didn't create it, but we're born into this system, and it took us until we were probably like, I didn't even know what a factory farm was until I was like 30. I'd never even heard of it.
00:46:09.000And then you hear about factory farming, and you go, what is that?
00:46:12.000And you go, oh, these animals, they're all stuffed together, and you're like, what?
00:46:15.000I thought farms were like animals roamed around.
00:46:26.000You would see these like guerrilla filming sessions that these guys would go to these farms and like break in and like take all these pictures and it was like for some animal rights activist group or whatever.
00:46:37.000I mean, I'm guilty of saying like I never really...
00:46:39.000Thought about it too deeply beyond that, sadly, because I thought about the economic realities of it, where I'm like, this is a terrible thing, and we can fix it, but we just have to have a conversation as a society of what that's going to mean for food, because the exact inverse has happened with produce, where we've figured out ways to really dramatically alter seedlings,
00:46:58.000and I was just reading about Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for what he did to wheat, making wheat.
00:47:24.000People look back at the original Earth Day, I think in 1970, and they often talk about some of the prognostications of what's happening to the Earth and all that today.
00:47:32.000But a lot of people lost sight of the fact that a lot of what people were talking about then was that we were going to die of famine.
00:47:38.000That the Earth's population was growing way too quickly and that they would have these guesses by the late 70s, early 80s.
00:47:45.000They would be like, by 1985, like, a billion people are going to die of starvation because we can't feed everyone and all these kinds of things.
00:47:51.000That's what they were originally talking about.
00:47:52.000So there's been these pioneering heroes in agriculture that have figured it out, that have these high-yield crops and all that.
00:48:26.000I think we have to have a complicated conversation.
00:48:28.000And maybe it comes down to this idea of cloning meat or whatever they're doing, like making meat and process these weird chemical processes to make beef that's indistinguishable from real beef.
00:48:38.000I think that's probably what's going to happen.
00:48:40.000I think it's probably going to be like these headless cows that you could just grow in a lab and just slice chunks off of them or something.
00:48:47.000I mean, I don't know how they're doing this meat thing.
00:48:49.000I don't really know either, and I'm sure it brings up a whole new slew of bioethical questions, too.
00:48:52.000Not just that, also probably health issues.
00:48:56.000Who's going to be the first person to live 10 years off of that bio meat before they figure out it causes some inoperable colon cancer?
00:49:03.000Because your body doesn't know how to process it correctly, and it sticks to the walls of your colon and starts creating abscesses, and they have to remove your colon and make a new one with stem cells and cut you open like a fish and stitch this new shitter inside of you.
00:50:12.000They would go out and hunt antelope and elk and deer and then sell that meat at the market.
00:50:17.000What's interesting too about that is that it's the human condition.
00:50:19.000It's not only like the more modern human condition.
00:50:20.000I'm reading a book or I just read a book called 1491, which is about the condition of North and South America and Central America before 1491. Before Columbus.
00:50:29.000So there was Viking contact and stuff.
00:50:31.000And they were talking about, you know, which is, I think, well known to a lot of people that the Native Americans, the Paleo Indians, wiped out tons of animals before when there was literally only a few hundred thousand of them, you know, because they were over hunting them.
00:50:56.000It's not just modern humans that are challenged by this.
00:51:00.000The woolly mammoth and all these animals were wiped out by humans.
00:51:04.000That's very controversial, by the way.
00:51:07.000There's a lot of people that believe that that had to coincide because the dates coincide with the end of the Ice Age.
00:51:13.000And there's a guy that I've had on this podcast several times named Randall Carlson, and he has some very compelling evidence that points to the possibility that it was asteroid impact that wiped out these animals in mass.
00:51:26.000And that's one of the reasons why in certain parts of the world you could find mass graveyards of animals that were killed almost instantly.
00:51:51.000Well, North America, well, they think that that was the reason why there's this...
00:51:54.000It's a fascinating podcast to go back and listen to.
00:51:57.000And I had him on with another guy named Michael Shermer, who's a famous skeptic, and Graham Hancock, who's also a proponent of some of his ideas.
00:52:04.000And they showed all these images of these deep fissures that were cut into the land that must have been a massive amount of water over a very short period of time.
00:52:16.000And he thinks it was probably a large body that slammed into the polar ice caps or slammed into rather the ice caps that are above, you know, North America somewhere around 10,000 years ago at two miles high of ice over much of the surface of it.
00:52:43.000In these various landscapes that he believes point to massive amounts of water that happened over an incredibly short period of time and the explanation for that and the peaks and the rises and the falls in temperature during that time when they do like core samples of the earth,
00:52:59.000he thinks that that also points to some sort of an impact.
00:53:33.000That's what's so frustrating and why I didn't study in college or really super interested in ancient history or even, you know, paleo history and pre-human history and stuff.
00:53:43.000It's also hypothetical you'll never really know.
00:53:45.000You have to just kind of trust people much smarter than you, that they have these good ideas that sometimes conflict, but you'll never really know the answer.
00:55:22.000Just an interesting insight into agriculture, into just some ideas that kind of cobble together some sort of vision of this place before mainstream European contact.
00:55:32.000This is one of the few places that I would...
00:55:45.000During the Great Pyramids, like when they were in their prime, I would love to see what was Egypt actually like before they burned the Library of Alexandria.
00:55:53.000And I would have loved to have seen a native tribe in North America pre-colonization.
00:56:10.000I was reading about the Easter Islanders and how they...
00:56:16.000They have sweet potatoes on the island, which are not indigenous to the island.
00:56:20.000And the sweet potato had kind of spread around Polynesia, presumably from South America.
00:56:24.000And there's this interesting thing that the word, I don't remember the exact word, but the word that many Polynesians or many Polynesian societies that were separated from each other used for the sweet potato is identical to what they were using on the South American mainland, indicating that the islands might have been populated from the other direction.
00:56:43.000They assume that people came down from what is, I guess, Indonesia into Australia and then kind of hopped over to those islands.
00:56:49.000But people are suggesting that there must have been contact from Paleo-Americans on those islands because they eat sweet potatoes, which are indigenous to South America, and they call them the same exact thing.
00:56:58.000These societies that were thousands of miles apart.
00:57:24.000I guess they apparently found some coins, Roman coins, and they found these jars that I guess were ancient Roman or supposedly ancient Roman anchors for ships.
00:57:41.000Yeah, I mean, the human history is, you know, kind of pieced together by what we find.
00:57:48.000And every now and then they find something and they go, oh, okay.
00:57:51.000You know, I mean, what's really crazy is that with Native Americans, when the settlers got here, when Europeans got here, they didn't have horses.
00:57:59.000But horses actually evolved in North America.
00:58:02.000Horses evolved in North America and then by crossing the Bering landmass made their way into Asia and All throughout the rest of the world, even zebras.
00:58:12.000They originally started in North America.
00:58:15.000But then somehow or another, for some reason, they went extinct in North America.
00:58:20.000And, you know, they survived and thrived in Europe, and then they were reintroduced.
00:58:26.000Dan Flores, he's a wildlife historian, he maintains that the Native Americans, once they had firearms and the horse, that they would have wiped out the buffalo on their own.
00:58:39.000That it had nothing to do with market hunting and all the things that the Europeans did.
00:58:45.000Was terrible and it happened quite rapidly, but he maintains that it was it was gonna happen anyway Just just the nature of what kind of an animal it was and that humans were eventually gonna get to them anyway Yeah, I mean that's what we were talking about with the human condition and how things don't seem to change regardless of who you're talking about and I'm always fascinated by these tangential kind of connections between these different societies that we're learning more and more about that the world is Way smaller than I think we thought it was in antiquity and even before that They were talking about how some
00:59:15.000Greenland and I guess Newfoundland and New Brunswick and all these kind of had these Indian tribes that definitely probably had extended contact with the Vikings for a long period of time.
00:59:26.000And these words kind of find their way to like the St. Lawrence Valley that describe the same things.
00:59:31.000And then when the French fur traders come, they find that they're using words that they shouldn't know.
01:00:35.000But again, that ties back in that Venn diagram of frustration, because you'll never really know.
01:00:39.000There's a ranch up in Central California that I go to sometimes called Tohon Ranch, and there's these stone circles that are carved in rocks.
01:00:50.000So they have these massive rocks, and then there's like these concave like dugouts where they would make bread.
01:00:58.000So you're looking at places where they would grind grain into these rocks, and these holes are, you know, who knows how long.
01:01:23.000Those holes were carved by the Native Americans and they were done over fucking years and years of grinding stones into the stone.
01:01:32.000And now what's interesting is A lot of the ancient Egyptians, I went to see the mummy exhibit at the Natural History Museum, or the Science Museum.
01:02:31.000I always tell people, people have gone, you know, over the years, fans of mine have gone to school for history and asked me, should I study history and politics?
01:03:23.000I remember them, and I think I have that kind of brain, that kind of right-centered brain where I remember facts and dates, but that's not really what's important about it.
01:03:32.000History more as stories, which I think is what I'm trying to do with my show, then I think that people will enjoy it more.
01:03:38.000So I think that's the greatest pleasure of what I do, is people saying, I hate history, or I hated history, or God, I thought it was so boring, but this is so interesting.
01:03:45.000Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
01:03:47.000And I was like, well, more power to you, and now we can remember what happened.
01:03:51.000And these stories are interesting, and they're important.
01:03:53.000They are important, and how many people are taking advantage of that?
01:03:57.000How many people are passing these stories around?
01:04:00.000I mean, how many Dan Carlins are there in the world?
01:04:03.000Yeah, not many, and pretty much no one of his skill.
01:06:17.000Confusing dreams where in the middle of the dream you don't realize that it's a dream like I had a dream That I was lying on this couch a couch that actually exists a couch in my house and then I was cold So I grabbed this blanket and I was pulling the blanket over me But the blanket was kind of stuck in the pillows.
01:06:33.000So, you know, like, you know Gotta struggle with it to get the blanket over you.
01:06:37.000And then I woke up and there's no fucking blanket.
01:06:40.000I was like, oh my god Like I dreamt that I was pulling a blanket.
01:06:45.000I mean it was so realistic that I would have sworn if I woke up that I had struggled to get that blanket over me while I was taking a nap on the couch.
01:08:30.000Yeah, I feel like it's something maybe I should challenge myself to do as well, because I remember, I mean, I've smoked marijuana regularly my whole adult life, and it becomes, some people dip in and out of it, like it's something that you do recreationally, or you want to get stoned before a concert or whatever,
01:08:45.000but I always found that it was, as sad as it sounds to some people, I think, that it was almost part of my process in a way, where even in college I was writing a paper, or I was working, or whatever the case might be, I feel like, yeah, let's smoke a joint or something like that.
01:09:12.000And then sometimes I come back to them later when I'm not stoned and I can flesh them out more or whatever.
01:09:17.000But I agree that there's great creative benefit to it.
01:09:20.000And I also feel like I'm really happy that in a very short amount of time, American society has come around to the benefits of marijuana, not only medicinally, but just recreationally.
01:09:30.000And the numbers, the polling numbers from the early 2000s to today are radically different.
01:09:33.000We're talking about shifts of like 30, 35 points and how people feel about them.
01:09:37.000And like you're saying, with anything, moderation is probably key.
01:09:42.000I often in my life don't, because it can make me lazy too.
01:09:46.000It can get me very interested in music or something like that and I get distracted.
01:10:39.000Yeah, like heavy-duty, hardcore, daytime stoners, you know, they don't feel anything.
01:10:44.000Yeah, it's almost like sustaining some sort of feeling, but you can never reach that feeling again, which is, again, why moderation is important.
01:10:51.000And it's the same thing alcoholics, frankly, feel and other people that abuse things, so.
01:10:55.000But marijuana, we have a very infantile sort of approach to what marijuana is because of, I think, because of all the prohibition bullshit that people went through.
01:11:05.000From the 1930s on, there's this weird propaganda that marijuana is the devil's weed and it's terrible for you.
01:11:13.000There's a lot of cultural and societal benefits to achieving those states of mind.
01:11:19.000I think they really do make people nicer.
01:11:30.000I don't think that that's a bad thing, necessarily.
01:11:33.000I think that paranoia, that feeling of vulnerability, it probably makes you more honestly assess how you interface with the world.
01:11:42.000There's a lot of real danger in the world.
01:11:44.000And I think that marijuana probably makes you really think about that real danger in a way that you perhaps ignore or put in the back of your head, but it's always there.
01:11:54.000It's always there in your subconscious, just sort of grinding away at you, whereas marijuana Brings it to the front, has a light, shines that light on it, goes, hey, maybe you should look at this.
01:12:04.000How about the fact that your lungs don't work so good anymore, man?
01:12:15.000If you're lucky, you got 60. But you're right.
01:12:19.000It's fascinating because if it opens up these places in our brain that are creative, that let us write better, that make us funnier with your comedy, for instance, or whatever the case might be, then it makes you kinder, which I agree.
01:12:31.000Then, of course, it would make sense that it opens up these dark recesses in your brain that hide or shield these things that you don't want to think about.
01:12:38.000And I agree that confronting those things is normal.
01:12:42.000Paranoia, I think, is a side effect of marijuana, for sure, but it's about how you harness it, and if you think about it within the parameters that you're talking about, which is that these things exist.
01:12:52.000It's not a manifestation of something that doesn't exist.
01:12:55.000No, and it makes you aware of some things that...
01:12:58.000Very easy to ignore but are pretty fucking huge like space Like one of my favorite things to do is a smoke a joint and go out and sit in my backyard Just pull up a lawn chair put my feet up and just stare up at space and just think of how fucking insane it is that there is this In immeasurable view of infinity that's above our head and And we sort of take it for granted.
01:13:30.000It's just a thing that we completely take for granted.
01:13:34.000But when I'm high, I can really freak out about it.
01:13:38.000One of the things that I like to do...
01:13:40.000When I smoke a little pot is get to the base of a hill.
01:13:43.000There's something about being in the base of a hill and lying down where you're looking up and you see the hill and then you see the clouds moving over the hill in the background, the blue sky and the clouds.
01:13:55.000There's something about that that gives me a more accurate understanding of atmosphere.
01:14:02.000This thin layer of protective air that keeps us shielded from radiation, the magnetosphere above it, all this stuff that's above us that's just sort of slowly moving around this giant globe.
01:14:20.000There's that view where you're laying back and you're looking up at the clouds rolling over the top of the mountain.
01:14:26.000It gives you more of an understanding of the spherical nature of the planet and the fact that it is draped in this atmosphere.
01:14:33.000There's just a real weird, trippy, reset sort of a feeling that I get from that.
01:14:40.000We're on like a convertible spaceship.
01:15:00.000Yeah, where he gives numbers to various things.
01:15:04.000And the suggestion there is that we probably...
01:15:07.000Life based on the confines of a 13.5 billion year old universe that is expanding at the speed of light is probably that we're not very alone.
01:15:16.000But the idea that this planet in just the right place with a moon that protects it from a lot of ancient asteroid and comet collisions with oxygen and water...
01:15:27.000It's just so fascinating and I think that we often don't think in a weird way galactically about it or universally about how...
01:15:34.000Everything that we experience is based on our experience on this little globe hurtling through space.
01:16:32.000I mean, I hope that I get to see things.
01:16:34.000I feel like one of the things that I'm bummed about for the time in which we live, you and I, is that I feel like we're in this middle space where some crazy shit's gonna happen in probably 2100 and beyond when we really start.
01:16:48.000Dude, crazy shit's happening right now.
01:16:50.000I think we're at the embryonic state of crazy things happening.
01:16:53.000We might think about how far we've come even in the last 15 years, so who knows?
01:16:57.000But the idea of traveling to other star systems, the idea of meeting life, oh man.
01:17:02.000Imagine how frustrated you would be if a contact-like situation, Jodie Foster, Carl Sagan-like situation happened.
01:17:10.000Yeah, or even if you have 20 years left and they don't give you this radical mathematical equation to build a spaceship, but they're just like, hey, we're here.
01:17:16.000And we're 150 light years away and you have to literally take 150 years to send that message.
01:17:22.000You know, it will take that long to send the message back and then another 150 years to get the message back and so on and so forth.
01:18:45.000The surface of our planet is mostly water, right?
01:18:48.000We have all sorts of weird minerals and who knows how...
01:18:52.000I mean, they're rare in our solar system.
01:18:54.000What we find on Earth in terms of the biological life is insane, right?
01:19:00.000We haven't even found biological life anywhere else in the solar system.
01:19:03.000So it could be that this is just the ultimate fucking sweet spot.
01:19:07.000I mean, we are in what we call the Goldilocks zone, right?
01:19:11.000But then there's also, my thought is always, why would, it's just like, it's such a limited thing to think that biological life as we know it, carbon-based life on the planet Earth that exists between the temperatures of X and Y, you know, and it has a lifespan of,
01:19:26.000you know, whatever the fuck it is, like, this is the only way life can be.
01:19:44.000With just the mathematical permutations, you know, multiplied by the amount of space covered, even the exoplanets we're finding now, I know a lot of them are gas giants and stuff like that, and they're really close to the star system, but they indicate that maybe we're not all so unique.
01:19:57.000And I was reading a thing about Jupiter and Saturn, even in relation to exoplanets being found that are similar to them, that they might have been far closer to the sun when they formed and then were pushed out.
01:20:08.000So maybe we're seeing solar systems earlier on in there.
01:21:32.000Yeah, it started as a mini-series, which is about the Cylons turning on the humans, or I guess the end result of them turning on the humans, and then they expanded into four seasons.
01:22:02.000And I like the idea of the, because we're dealing with it tangentially now, the idea of, not that it's unique to that story, but of AI and robots turning on you.
01:22:11.000Very smart people are telling us that that's very possible, and so we should probably start listening to them.
01:22:21.000I think we're either probably going to be augmented by these creations, and we're going to choose to take on new body parts that function much better than the body parts we have now, or we're essentially laboring to create something that's going to surpass us.
01:23:17.000I mean, it seems like they've figured out some way to engineer things in a crude sense, you know, by splicing and grafting and doing all these different weird things to plants.
01:23:41.000Says us in our limited sort of vocabulary and our very limited encyclopedia of variables that we allow to consider life?
01:23:51.000Yeah, I think you're right because we have to judge maybe life based on consciousness instead of, not that a planet would have consciousness, but I think that's the kind of the ethical question we're going to start coming up with with machines in the next 20 or 30 years is, are you developing something?
01:24:05.000There's actually a great, I don't want to ruin it for you, there's an amazing black mirror that kind of touches on this.
01:24:10.000It's called, I think it's called White Christmas.
01:24:11.000You should check it out if you have time.
01:24:13.000And Jon Hamm's actually the main character in it from Mad Men.
01:24:18.000The idea that if something is conscious, even if it's not real, or even if it's only in a computer, what does that mean?
01:24:47.000So if we're going to implant that into other machines, even if they're just computers, even if they're literally just running on an operating system, then there are definitely going to be ethical questions to ask, I think.
01:24:57.000Did you see that Google situation they had where the two computers were communicating each other with a language that they invented themselves?
01:25:04.000I read a little bit about that, but I don't know too much about it.
01:26:03.000Here, and here's the answer, and here's a response to the answer, and here they've agreed upon this, and now they've expanded their sentences like, shut it down.
01:26:17.000And then they shut it down and it phased to black.
01:26:19.000Cut to smash cut like you see a new time to 2034 and it's some dystopian Mad Max fucking world and robot people are running down the street chasing after biological people.
01:27:05.000So there's like this enslavement, retaliation kind of thing going on.
01:27:08.000But then there's the very, like, what I always find fascinating, and I think this is more what Skynet was all about in Terminator, although I don't really remember, is the idea that if you look at the landscape of what's happening and you just remove the most inefficient...
01:27:45.000I'm like, these are some of the smartest people that society has ever given us.
01:27:48.000And I think we might want to pay attention and have some...
01:27:50.000I think what they want is some sort of Congress.
01:27:52.000Not American Congress, but some sort of international coalition that agrees this is what we're going to do and this is how far we'll push the boundaries.
01:27:59.000And I just don't know that we'll get there before it's...
01:28:02.000I don't want to say before it's too late, but before we have a scary situation.
01:28:06.000And even from a mechanical situation, what they're doing at Boston Dynamics is fucking horrifying.
01:28:12.000I look at the videos and I'm like, what the f...
01:28:14.000And it's so funny because some people have said in the past, if you see them, they're using hockey sticks a lot to beat them or knock something out of their hands and stuff.
01:28:23.000And I'm like, these are the videos they're going to show.
01:28:24.000They're going to show them in their military camps when they're turning on humanity.
01:29:57.000Yeah, the robot general right now has this playing behind him and as he's talking, he's like, remember what they've done to your ancestors.
01:30:02.000Well, they're saying abuse, but they're checking tolerances.
01:30:17.000The interesting thing to me about this is, and I don't know if you feel it, but I kind of do, is when they're tripping and falling, I have this feeling of like, yeah, where I'm like, oh, you know what I mean?
01:31:43.000Will it have any motivation to advance?
01:31:46.000Like the idea is that the real fear is that these things are gonna be so hyper-intelligent that they're going to be able to create a much better version of themselves fairly quickly.
01:31:56.000Like as soon as you give them autonomy and as soon as they're sentient, you're gonna say, okay, make a better one.
01:32:13.000You guys are using Wi-Fi version 6. This is weak.
01:32:17.000What we need is this new form of Wi-Fi that uses the particles in the atmosphere as transistors and sends back and forth to each other through a highly charged signal.
01:32:30.000How'd you fucks figure that out and then next thing you know, but they're not gonna have ego They're not gonna have this desire for and this is this is you know a real underlying Aspect the motivation of the human race the desire to recreate and to reproduce like this desire for sex and this desire It's one of the reasons why people accomplish things they don't just accomplish things because They have this desire to see what happens when they put these two things together and what's the result.
01:32:59.000They want fame, they want status, they want power, they want money, and they want all these things because they want to be more sexually attractive.
01:33:11.000That's a big part of the motivation of men.
01:33:38.000You're waking up in the morning, Freaking out about Amazon and making sure everything gets delivered in 30 minutes or less like a fucking pizza.
01:34:02.000In men, I think a lot of it comes from this need.
01:34:05.000I mean, I think if you brought it down to the base level, it's this weird biological need to reproduce or to spread your genes or to stand out as something particularly impressive.
01:34:17.000You're peacocking for females in a lot of ways.
01:35:22.000They made those killer ones that look like people.
01:35:24.000Right, yeah, the numbers, whatever they call them.
01:35:26.000And even the centurions look better, like are more effective, which is their soldiers.
01:35:30.000And there's that one episode about the raiders, which is their ships.
01:35:33.000They have these autonomous ships that are alive, that are fighter ships.
01:35:36.000And how they, one of them is named Scar, and he keeps having these experiences, like he's really a good fighter pilot or whatever, but he's alive.
01:35:59.000Folks, if you haven't seen it, I'm telling you, it is a...
01:36:02.000And I think it was sci-fi that made it, right?
01:36:04.000It was like sci-fi is coming to, kind of.
01:36:06.000It was a legitimate thing that they did.
01:36:08.000And it was very overlooked because people were like, well, it's on sci-fi, well, it's Battlestar Galactica, but it was like a really well-done science fiction drama.
01:36:17.000And then, yeah, Edward James Olmos was in it, too.
01:36:20.000And that woman that played Starbuck, what is her name?
01:37:08.000Yeah, maybe they wanted to go do something else or maybe they can't get, you know, I would assume that they all could kind of write their own way.
01:37:13.000You think that, but I think that also people get pigeonholed into a character.
01:37:17.000You know, there's certain characters where you see someone and they're on The Sopranos.
01:37:22.000And from then on, they're Christopher Maltasante forever.
01:38:02.000It just came my way and, you know, you read the scripts and they were just...
01:38:05.000The real problem was that news radio was so good that the curse of being with that talented cast and amazing writing and amazing production and also nobody knew about us.
01:38:19.000Like, when we were on the air, like, people that hear about news radio, most of what people heard about was from news radio's reruns.
01:38:26.000When we went into syndication and we started playing, that's when people started really getting into news radio.
01:38:32.000News radio really found a big audience after it was cancelled, which is ironic.
01:40:00.000They did one where we were completely underwater.
01:40:03.000We did a Titanic episode where we literally filmed the show in waist-high water, and we were on a ship, and we wore old-schooly clothes from the Titanic days.
01:41:34.000It took a lot away from doing other things.
01:41:36.000When I started doing UFC commentary back then, too, in 97, when news radio was on the air, I was actually the interviewer, the post-fight interviewer.
01:41:49.000And they would say to me, they would treat me literally like I was going off to do porn.
01:41:55.000They were like, why are you doing this?
01:41:57.000Like, you're gonna fly to Alabama to work for a cage fighting organization?
01:43:00.000Well, your story's so interesting to me because you have legitimately large pieces of your audience that know you for totally different things.
01:43:06.000The guys that watch UFC and see you kind of do, you know, in that sphere.
01:43:10.000And then you have the guys that, you know, watch the show or listen to the show.
01:43:13.000And you have, obviously, people that love you as a stand-up comic.
01:43:15.000And then, obviously, the crossover between all of those.
01:43:17.000So you've managed to create, like, three different viable...
01:43:24.000Well, the UFC thing is very strange because whether or not anybody agrees with my opinions on life outside of it, they know that when I'm doing commentary, I am doing my absolute best to honor what's happening inside the Octagon.
01:43:42.000And I have a deep knowledge and understanding of what's going on.
01:43:58.000And this was before, I think, I was doing FearFact, or before I was doing the UFC. Or maybe I was doing the post-fight interviews, but I hadn't done the commentary yet.
01:45:18.000There's a big fight this weekend, right?
01:45:20.000TJ Dillashaw is going to fight Cody Garbrandt.
01:45:22.000It's probably the biggest bantamweight fight of all time.
01:45:25.000When those two guys get into the octagon, you're dealing with the consequences of the history of an entire division, probably the two best champions in that division going at it, the two of the three best champions, Dominic Cruz being the other one, going at it in this historical matchup.
01:45:42.000You have a lot of responsibility, and you have to think about it that way.
01:45:48.000No, I think it's interesting because I feel like I've actually been challenged in that same way, you know, because I came up as a gaming commentator.
01:45:59.000And, you know, Dennis Miller, I think a lot of the reason people were kind of concerned about him, too, was that he would tell political jokes or bring political things in, which was unheard of at the time on Monday Night Football or in the NFL generally, and now it's part and parcel with the NFL. I'm a huge football fan, so I'm bearing witness to it every week.
01:46:15.000But I, as a gaming commentator, I've often found some difficulty in keeping out shades of that, shades of politics, and kind of social commentary in what I did as well.
01:46:25.000And that certainly alienated some people.
01:46:27.000But I also think it engendered, like, wow, this guy's honest and just tells you exactly what he thinks as well.
01:46:32.000So I was able to benefit from that, but I also don't have the audience that you have as well.
01:46:35.000And I think keeping it structured and separated is wise.
01:46:38.000I mean, it is sometimes, but it's also sometimes wise to just be yourself.
01:46:42.000And that way you never have to worry if people like you for who you are.
01:46:46.000You know, if you pretend to be someone else, like, that's like, okay, I hate to bring him up again, but Cosby is one of the grossest parts about it.
01:46:54.000We had it in our head that this guy was this squeaky clean, middle America, perfect example of this ethical, moral guy.
01:47:41.000I think he's just an opportunist, and I think the Republicans wanted to just win.
01:47:46.000But I also think he had 17 people in that field, or 16 other people in that field, and he was winning primaries and caucuses with 35% of the vote.
01:47:54.000I have no problem with the Electoral College, but he didn't win the popular vote.
01:47:59.000So to me, I was like, I identify as conservative.
01:48:02.000I feel like the word libertarian has been totally bastardized.
01:48:04.000We were talking about words that don't mean anything anymore.
01:48:07.000Where people almost look at libertarianism as like anarchy.
01:48:10.000And to me, I'm like, I'm a social libertarian.
01:48:13.000I always call myself a social libertarian.
01:48:14.000I believe that drugs should be decriminalized.
01:48:16.000I think that, you know, obviously this state shouldn't be really involved in litigating who's getting married.
01:48:22.000I think if you want to have a polygamous relationship and everyone's...
01:48:29.000But from a governmental standpoint, I think that the government has a place.
01:48:33.000I think that the government can do positive things that only the government can do.
01:48:37.000And so I'm also a protectionist and stuff.
01:48:40.000So I also don't believe in a lot of libertarian mantra.
01:48:44.000A lot of people call me a libertarian, but I haven't called myself that in a long time.
01:48:48.000What makes you lean towards conservatism?
01:48:50.000But conservatism to me is simply the idea that government shouldn't be involved where it doesn't need to be involved if there's no justification for it.
01:49:00.000But if someone looked at you, they wouldn't think conservative.
01:49:03.000You've got an earring, you've got tattoos, you're a young guy, you look like, not a hipster, I wouldn't say a hipster, but you're millennial-esque.
01:50:03.000I think that the conservative, because it means that the government's not telling you what to do.
01:50:06.000Just as the government doesn't have the right to have confiscatory taxes, just like the government doesn't have the right to take your guns, the government doesn't have the right to tell you you can't marry a man if you're a man, and the government doesn't have a right to tell you that you can't have an abortion.
01:50:19.000So the true classic sense of conservative ideals versus what we see today, where it's sort of a mixture of conservative philosophy but the religious influence.
01:51:25.000To your point, the reason that conservatism and liberalism aren't in these neat buckets anymore is because they're tied to these parties and they have to constantly justify themselves.
01:51:33.000The Republicans under Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt were the original progressives.
01:51:37.000They were the ones that wanted land to be set aside for national parks.
01:51:40.000They were the ones that freed, obviously, the slaves.
01:51:43.000Not so much Teddy Roosevelt as much as Ulysses S. Grant.
01:51:50.000And so none of these words have any definitions anymore.
01:51:52.000Which is why I didn't identify with Republicanism.
01:51:55.000I consider myself a moderate conservative, but what's conservative about evangelicalism?
01:52:00.000What's conservative about even ideas like free trade and stuff like that?
01:52:06.000The idea of just having these open markets that destroy your ability to manufacture things, that drive wages down, that do all these kinds of things.
01:52:13.000There's nothing conservative about that at all.
01:52:16.000To me, I was like, I just have to find my own way forward, so I just consider myself independent.
01:52:21.000And I feel like I'm consistent in what I say, because I think you can match them all up.
01:52:26.000And I don't think there's any consistency in saying, you can't marry this man, but don't take my gun.
01:52:32.000You can't have this polygamous relationship, but we should have prayer in school.
01:52:42.000Well, the religious things always seem to me to be compromises to get the support of the religious right.
01:52:47.000It seems like they move towards those directions because it sort of reinforces the power that they have behind them because they're the only candidates that are willing to do that, right?
01:52:55.000Because the left is not willing to go down that religious road in the sense of a woman's right to choose, in the sense of a lot of things that they get liberals to support them.
01:53:09.000But do you think that having a guy like Trump in office, that one of the good things about having a guy that's obviously fairly unhinged and ridiculous is that we need to reconsider what it is to be a president.
01:53:24.000And this idea that this guy could get into this position by just sort of conning everybody and doing a lot of Make America Great Again speeches and Saying a lot of crazy shit about we're going to build that wall 10 feet higher and all the nutty rhetoric that went on during the camp.
01:53:42.000And then seeing him in office and seeing...
01:53:45.000Who knows if he's even going to get out of these four years without going to jail, right?
01:53:57.000I think what's positive is what we were talking about earlier, that the system works.
01:54:00.000That, like, nothing has broken down at all.
01:54:03.000In fact, like, we've seen from the circuit courts all the way to the Supreme Court and with Congress that there actually are, these are legitimately viable and independent bodies in the checks and balance system, right?
01:54:15.000And this is why I think it's so deeply offensive to, you know, in a way, to be like, well, fascism's alive in America.
01:54:23.000What fascism would have looked like from a governmental standpoint is Trump's coming in, suspending the Supreme Court, dismissing Congress, and trying all these crazy things that would have happened.
01:54:33.000What fascism doesn't look like is you passing a travel ban and the Supreme Court saying no, and then you're trying to pass it again, and then the circuits courts say no, you know?
01:54:40.000And that's not what fascism looks like.
01:54:42.000That's what Republicanism, small r, Republicanism looks like.
01:54:45.000And so I think we can glean positive things out of this.
01:54:48.000People got mad at me after the election because I was like, the world's not ending.
01:56:46.000Well, yeah, he's filing and he's raising money.
01:56:47.000But I think that once Kellyanne Conway and these other people that engineered the election for him to begin with, after the midterms, which I think are going to be interesting, I think the midterms actually benefit in some ways the Republicans because of the map in the Senate.
01:56:59.000But I think that when it becomes clear that he cannot win...
01:57:07.000I went to college with this girl who's a lobbyist in Washington.
01:57:10.000She's a Democrat and she's pretty well connected.
01:57:13.000And I had dinner with her a couple weeks ago and she was like, not only will Trump run again, he'll win.
01:57:17.000And this was when everything was going on and all this, and I'm like, I just don't see him subjecting himself to the possibility of losing.
01:57:24.000And it reminds me of 2004 when Bush won again, but he also won the popular vote.
01:57:29.000He beat Kerry, and it kind of legitimized himself.
01:57:31.000I think that Trump is going to risk...
01:57:34.000Further illegitimizing himself by subjecting himself to, you know, not only a primary, which is gonna happen, which is the death knell for an incumbent.
01:57:42.000I think, ask Gerald Ford, ask Jimmy Carter how that went for them when they were primaried because they were so unpopular.
01:57:47.000And then he goes in and there's gonna be, if the Democrats are smart, they put someone up that's really good.
01:57:51.000And I also think there's gonna be an independent candidate that's gonna screw everything up as well.
01:57:56.000I think he has a very, very high likelihood of running again.
01:58:00.000And I think he absolutely could win again.
01:58:39.000And people were very excited and they were like this is this is the reason why we need sort of a good old boy president Because when push comes to shove they know how to get the men in uniform Behind it and just take care of this problem with military might and make America great again and all that kind of horseshit If something like that happens with Trump and Trump you remember how he had that one speech Jamie can you give me another one of these things,
01:59:43.000If that happens and he manages it, people get scared and they don't want change.
01:59:48.000I think if that happens, it's entirely likely.
01:59:51.000If we have to deal with some sort of a catastrophe, some sort of a tragedy, some sort of an attack or an event, and Donald Trump manages it well, it's entirely likely that he could be president.
02:00:01.000Sure, there could be a moment like that.
02:00:03.000I wouldn't throw anything past him specifically because I and many other people were so wrong about his ability to win to begin with.
02:00:10.000I kept saying he's going to do better and get more votes than people thought, but I didn't think he had a prayer of winning.
02:00:18.000But there are certain things you can look at where it's like, well, it's about 50,000 votes along three states that he even won at all.
02:04:30.000Also, I think, and this is something I've been really battling, not battling, but bouncing around in my head a lot lately, is that I think this...
02:04:41.000This hate of him, the constant insults, the attacks on him, the constant...
02:04:46.000I mean, he blocks people on Twitter all the time, and now people are suing him to say that he can't block them on Twitter anymore.
02:04:52.000People are being very petulant about that.
02:04:53.000But all of this, like the Saturday Night Live satires of him, all the shit that they do is...
02:05:01.000Ramping up his mania and it's it's actually bad for all of us You know in that you don't get someone to change by going hey fucking change You know you're a piece of shit like that doesn't make people change it makes people aware that you hate them and depending entirely upon their personality whether they're reflective or introspective how they how they react to that he seems to react to it by By,
02:05:26.000like, doubling down and by getting more aggressively defensive and more self-aggrandizing and more self-congratulatory.
02:05:48.000He's in a situation where someone needs to lower their rifles, right?
02:05:52.000And after he was elected, I thought for sure that smart people in his transition team, and he's not surrounded by dumb people.
02:06:02.000He's surrounded by inexperienced political operatives, but he's not surrounded by dumb people.
02:06:05.000That someone at some point would have said, like, we can now get down to the act of governing.
02:06:09.000And I'm of the mind that if he just started acting more normal...
02:06:12.000If he stopped tweeting so much, if he just spoke in a more normal way, did normal things, people would have forgotten a lot of what happened during the campaign.
02:06:19.000And he would have been in much better shape to get legislative goals through and stuff like that.
02:07:23.000We have this sense that That business people think that he's going to alleviate restrictions, he's going to make things easier, he's going to open up doors, and he's going to do things that some people think are very unpopular.
02:07:37.000Like, one of the things he's done is he made it so you can bring back lion trophies now, again, from Africa.
02:07:43.000So if people want to go to Africa and shoot lions, you can bring them over.
02:07:55.000Day 197 of his presidency, 530 pegged it at just 37%.
02:08:00.000No other president in history of moderate polling had an approval rate so dismal on day 197. According to 538's tracker, former President Gerald Ford came close to matching Trump but could have boasted an approval rate of nearly 2.5% points higher.
02:08:18.000It wouldn't be super surprising to have Obama fall into that high 30s or low 40s in his second term because that's when they don't care anymore.
02:09:10.000Just from an administrative paperwork standpoint, taxes, all those kinds of things, it's awful.
02:09:15.000And I think a lot of people point at business big and small and they look at them as these ways you can get blood out of a stone and extract as much money out of them as possible and all these kinds of things.
02:09:23.000And a lot of people are not sympathetic to it because, no offense, they have no idea what they're talking about.
02:09:27.000And I've been watching The West Wing again, which I love.
02:09:57.000So you have to ask people that understand what it is to run a business and how you can make that easier.
02:10:01.000So you can't judge things based on that only.
02:10:03.000My major concern with him, though, is that he's so unpopular, even in his own party, and even specifically with the House, that because they are constantly up for re-election, that they haven't had one legislative win in the entire time he's been president.
02:10:19.000Doesn't he not have all the positions fully staffed as well?
02:10:22.000Yeah, there are things, and that's not uncommon either.
02:10:25.000Sometimes things go for years without being staffed or whatever.
02:11:03.000Well, there's a lot of things in there, but one of the things she was talking about was that they were fully prepared for their transition, which is not a surprise.
02:11:11.000She was actually talking about in October, she started taking regular meetings, because they assumed that she was going to win, about how she was going to staff things and the decisions they were going to make in the first 100 days.
02:11:19.000And I think you just have something that's over-the-top bravado, right?
02:11:23.000And on the other end, ironically for someone with so much bravado, you have someone that just was totally not prepared to win.
02:11:29.000Because I don't think anyone inside, except for maybe Kellyanne Conway, was telling...
02:11:33.000Well, do you think that's the case, or do you think he was just concentrating entirely on winning and then figure it out once he gets in there?
02:11:40.000The definitive book on this has not been written yet, unfortunately.
02:11:42.000And actually, Mark Halpern was writing that book, and now he's finished with that.
02:11:46.000You realize that he has such a limited understanding of what even his powers are and what even like What was the guy he spoke to?
02:11:54.000We said I had a conversation with the president of the US Virgin Islands like hey, you're the president of the US Virgin Islands Yeah, he makes he makes some stupid.
02:12:18.000In terms of governance, I think he just...
02:12:21.000Like, I remember the debates where he didn't know what the nuclear triad was, which is like...
02:12:25.000The fuck do you not know what the nuclear triad is?
02:12:27.000Where he's speaking around issues that are somewhat basic, that someone that's running for president should know.
02:12:34.000And when you multiply that by not being a candidate, but by being the man in the office and then being inundated by the realities of the office, he was just ill-prepared for it.
02:12:42.000And part of the reason he won is because he was an outsider.
02:12:45.000And part of being an outsider is alienating everyone around you that is an insider.
02:12:49.000So he has no one, very few people that are willing to work for him that are capable.
02:12:53.000Which is why I think that, you know, there's this idea, I don't know if you've read about it, there's this idea that there's basically a soft coup going on in the American government right now.
02:13:02.000Have you talked about, have you heard about this at all?
02:13:03.000That General Mattis, who's Secretary of Defense, and then General Kelly, who's the Chief of Staff, are basically running things.
02:13:11.000And it's kind of a scary idea because military coups are, even if they're soft, they're not constitutional, but that people take kind of solace in this because they're like, well, people that are men of honor are kind of making sure nothing crazy happens.
02:13:26.000And I'm like, but again, this is such a waste of time.
02:13:28.000But is that a soft coup or is that just he has given over the reins to the military for the first time ever?
02:13:34.000Because most of the time the president is in charge and the military has to come to the president for direction and for guidance and for approval.
02:13:44.000Whereas Donald Trump has kind of said, look, you people know what to do better than anybody.
02:14:00.000Well, that's what I was going to say was that typically a military coup in history is a super negative connotation.
02:14:05.000Egyptians, Libyans, whatever the case might be, it always turns out bad.
02:14:08.000But we have an honor-driven military, I think, in the United States, above all others, that will take care of things and hand it over to If necessary.
02:14:17.000But the interesting thing that people have been writing and talking about is what happens if he wants something crazy done and they just don't do it?
02:14:23.000We've never had a situation like that.
02:14:26.000What's going on on the Korean Peninsula, for instance?
02:15:37.000It's especially precarious because, yes, a nuclear-armed North Korea is not ideal, but if you read any foreign policy papers or anything out of think tanks, there's no good solution out of this.
02:16:19.000No, you just started a gigantic chain of events that could lead to a bomb blowing off in a major American city or more.
02:16:26.000Yeah, I mean, at the very least, you're talking about, even if you disabled North Korea's nuclear capabilities, we don't really understand how their ICBMs work.
02:16:34.000I was reading something today where they actually had a major collapse at their nuclear site of 200 people dead, like tunnels collapse and stuff like that.
02:16:40.000Like, they're actually blowing up so many bombs that they're actually weakening their own...
02:18:33.000Yeah, you've got to have rest and relaxation.
02:18:35.000I don't begrudge you that, but I wonder, again, because of the alienation that went on through the primaries and into the campaign, when you have people that are simply not willing to work for you that are very capable, what do you do?
02:19:07.000And again, I don't think anybody has enough time to actually be the president, but I wonder what conversations he's having with the military and how those decisions get made.
02:19:15.000I don't really understand the process enough.
02:19:18.000To know, like, say, if North Korea does something stupid, what are the decisions?
02:19:23.000And who brings those decisions to the president?
02:19:31.000I think, from what I understand, the way it works is that there's a situation room in the White House.
02:19:36.000The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Advisor meet there to discuss things.
02:19:40.000The president comes in when they're ready to present him with things.
02:19:43.000They present him, based on the branch that's dealing with it, what's happening, and then they give him You know, what are reasonable responses or, you know, wait and see kind of things or whatever.
02:22:51.000Let me read the text underneath it, please.
02:22:53.000Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Friday filed a defamation suit against former New Jersey state legislator Michael Panter following a Facebook post on Tuesday in which Panter detailed alleged sexual harassment by O'Reilly against an unnamed ex-partner of Panter's.
02:23:11.000Panter's claims, based on the conversations with his ex and incidents he said he witnessed were chilling, Panter says that his then-girlfriend's, in quotes, career was largely dependent on staying on O'Reilly's good graces, and that O'Reilly repeatedly asked her out and made sexually charged late-night phone calls to her.
02:26:08.000I feel, we were talking about typecasting before, right, about how people, and I feel like she's just, she can't get away from what she was.
02:26:15.000Well, it's also like, that's a clunky, stupid thing to do, to try to talk about plastic surgery when someone's promoting a movie.
02:28:32.000I think that some people have a short attention span and they don't want long things or whatever, but I think that...
02:28:38.000A show like yours, I think, fills a niche.
02:28:40.000It's not even a niche, it's a huge show, but fills this need that I think is underrated, that people like long-form things, that they like depth, that they have lots of time to burn when they're driving around or at work and they're bored or they're just cooking food or whatever it is they're doing.
02:28:53.000I used to have that argument in my old company where we...
02:30:39.000And also, I think it's probably been successful because there was never any attempt at it being successful.
02:30:45.000It was never like something where I sat out and go, if I just do this a certain way, it will be financially viable, it will be received well, and I'll use this as a vehicle to further my other endeavors.
02:30:58.000There's never any thought process like that.
02:31:00.000It's like, hey, it'd be cool to just talk to people.
02:31:02.000Hey, you think I can get Anthony Bourdain to come over my house?
02:31:43.000You must have, I mean, over doing a thousand episodes, many hundreds of guests, you must learn a lot, like you were saying, a lot about a person, but does your opinion of the person change when you have some interesting interviews with bigger people, for instance, that come on your show, better or worse,
02:31:58.000like after kind of poking and prodding them for a little while?
02:32:01.000Yeah, but I think you date a chunk, right, whenever you're talking to people.
02:32:08.000And deflection and communication and openness and some people really impress you with their honesty or with their thoughtfulness or objectivity.
02:32:53.000Because you don't want to admit fault, because you don't want to admit that you might have communicated an error or you might have been misled by certain information that you thought was true but turned out to not be, it ruins the way people appreciate your words.
02:33:08.000Because you could tell me that you believe, you know, something happened in the past because you read it, because you learned it in school, because it's always been taught that way, but then new information comes out that clearly refutes that.
02:33:21.000You've got to come in here and say, well, now I know different.
02:33:41.000You see it because people have been teaching certain things for a certain amount of time and then new evidence comes to light and they don't want to consider it.
02:36:55.000But, like, these motherfuckers can kill leopards.
02:36:58.000But if you think about how strong a regular chimpanzee is, you know, a regular 150-pound chimpanzee is supposed to be as strong as a 500-pound man.
02:37:09.000Lion killers, that's what they call them.
02:37:53.000But if you go above that photo, Jamie, go above that photo to the upper right-hand corner, That's one that they caught walking around on a camera chap.
02:38:02.000They're just much, much bigger than regular chimpanzees.
02:38:08.000But the point was, it was an incidence of someone just deciding that they had all the information and that they wanted to Just call bullshit on something that they really weren't up to date on it yet.
02:38:21.000Yeah, I think pride gets in the way a lot of that.
02:38:23.000I try my hardest, and it actually kind of gets to me when my audience or people that watch my stuff say like, oh, Colin didn't admit he was wrong about this, this, or this.
02:38:31.000I'm like, I don't know that you're paying very close attention, because I actually take a lot of pride in being wrong about things sometimes and telling you that I'm wrong so you know, so you're not going out into the world...
02:38:40.000With misinformation, whether it was about video games back in the day, whether it's about politics or history.
02:38:44.000When you're rattling things off, like you were saying, sometimes you get things mixed up and confused.
02:40:58.000To serve as a control group for comparison.
02:41:00.000With the $50 per month, it's not going to help shit.
02:41:02.000But the $1,000 per month, that gets interesting because then you're not giving anybody enough where they can fuck off because $250 is really not even going to pay for rent and food.
02:41:13.000But it'll help you, give you a little bit of a boost.
02:41:16.000Yeah, it could be good for the economy.
02:41:17.000I think there's a lot of worry about inflation, because you're basically freeing up a ton of money that would otherwise be in banks or not circulating around the market, so it's going to make your dollar less valuable.
02:41:26.000I think there's a lot of complicated things economically that people have to deal with with that.
02:41:30.000But I feel like, you know, with what you were talking about with healthcare, I think it's an interesting point, because we talk too much about rights.
02:43:31.000Your 401k is going to get taxed for that.
02:43:33.000If you're a middle class family and you're making Wall Street transactions, broker transactions with your 401k, you're going to pay that tax.
02:43:40.000It's easy to say Medicare for all by raising taxes, but everyone's taxes go up 2.2%.
02:43:45.000I think there's also a real concern with kids fucking off with that education.
02:44:15.000You know, and a real desire to achieve and to discipline themselves into following through with the courses and doing the work.
02:44:22.000You maybe then, maybe give someone a semester for free and prove by their performance in that semester, you know, by their effort, their performance, how much work they've done, that, you know, okay, you...
02:44:36.000It's very likely that you can get through four years of this university and get out with a bachelor's degree, maybe even move on and continue your education or become a really valuable member of our society and benefit our economy and benefit our civilization because of what you're learning here.
02:45:25.000It's too much focused on, like, an academic...
02:45:28.000I'm like, that's good for some people, but I would argue that there's probably too many people going to college, especially for things that we were talking about earlier on that don't really...
02:46:38.000And the other thing that I think is really relevant is that I paid for my college, and I'm paying loans out the ass for my college degree still.
02:46:48.000And I have to now pay for someone else's college?
02:46:50.000And I did what I had to do, and I don't really feel like it's fair that I had to owe $60,000 or $70,000 in loans that I've paid back.
02:46:58.000And then I have to pay extra taxes for someone else to go to college as well.
02:47:02.000It kind of frustrates me, and specifically because the only reason college is so expensive is because the government is involved in the loans.
02:48:36.000Well, it goes to 2009, but in 2009, it's just through the fuck.
02:48:41.000It's just, so the government, the government did this and now they're trying to solve, now Bernie Sanders is running around trying to solve the problem.
02:50:07.000I keep asking people, though, because you have these crazy people on Twitter and stuff that have the hammer and sickle and their names and stuff like that.
02:50:13.000And I'm like, can anyone tell me one thing that the Soviet Union gave us, like gave the world?
02:50:16.000Just one thing that anyone cares about.
02:50:44.000And that this idea of socialism is going to be a good thing because everybody's going to contribute and capitalism is what's wrong with the world.
02:50:52.000And whenever people, they always like to hit up this fucking thing of, you know, the economic inequality, economic inequality, inequality of income, inequality of money.
02:51:06.000What people don't seem to get is that when you have true freedom, you're absolutely gonna have inequality.
02:51:13.000Because if you have the true freedom to do whatever you want, some people aren't going to do much.
02:51:20.000There's gonna be some Jeff Bezos-type characters out there who just wanna fucking go gangbusters and own half the country.
02:51:26.000And then there's going to be people that would really rather just work a little bit and then go play fucking disc golf and smoke pot and listen to records and hang out with their friends and they'd be very happy if they just made an income that was sustainable.
02:51:42.000There's a fucking host of different personalities.
02:51:45.000There's some people that really enjoy doing art.
02:51:48.000And they like to go down to a fucking farmers market and set up shop and sell their artwork.
02:51:55.000That's how they want to live their life.
02:51:57.000And maybe their dad was a fucking doctor who died at 55 of a heart attack because he was working too hard.
02:52:01.000Or, you know, who knows what it is that causes someone to have the ambition or the desires that they have.
02:52:07.000But when you have true freedom to pursue whatever you want, that literally breeds inequality.
02:52:12.000Because there are going to be people that decide to do more.
02:52:16.000And there's going to be people, and whether it's an egalitarian version of this, whether these people are altruistic in their approach, whether they donate an incredible amount to charity, or whether or not they keep it all to themselves.
02:52:30.000If you have real freedom, like, that doesn't say you have to donate X amount of your money to this and Y amount of your money to that, if you just give people freedom, You're gonna have inequality.
02:52:42.000Because people are in-equal in their efforts.
02:52:58.000It's kind of a rough thing to say, but I've had conversations with people where I'm like, when did people stop saying like, wow, that kid's just dumb.
02:53:37.000There's some people that are tall, there's some people that are short, and there's some people that have brains that are made out of dog shit.
02:53:42.000And there's not much you can do about that.
02:53:44.000There is absolutely Absolutely a broad spectrum of human intelligence, of awareness.
02:53:49.000And how much of that is the environment they grew up in?
02:54:58.000There's nothing positive about something like communism to me.
02:55:02.000Whenever I see that hammer and sickle, and I don't mean this to be me, whenever I see that hammer and sickle on this person's name, I'm like, I'm not really dealing with someone with a full deck, I don't think.
02:55:09.000I don't know how you can possibly read Marx and do all these kinds of things, jump deep into history, look at the Soviet Union, look at North Korea, look at Cuba, look at all the failure that's happened all around you.
02:55:18.000Then look at the fact that everyone is benefiting from capitalism in some way.
02:55:26.000I mean, real capitalism, the worst aspects of capitalism are the diminishing appreciation for the human being and the fact that money is a power over everything and that people just acquire material goods and all those things are true.
02:55:42.000They're true at the farthest end of the spectrum of, you know, good to bad, right?
02:55:47.000The furthest end of, like, what is the damage that capitalism can do?
02:55:50.000Well, you can devalue human life to the point where money becomes more powerful than anything and people can consolidate this money and build these oligarchical family structures and, you know, there's a lot of issues that can happen, but that can happen with anything.
02:56:06.000Where people have leverage and power over other people.
02:56:09.000It doesn't necessarily mean they have to happen that way.
02:56:12.000There's got to be some evidence and some instances of altruistic capitalism, like Bill Gates, for instance.
02:56:20.000That guy does a lot of really good things.
02:56:23.000And the Bill Gates Foundation that he has started up, I mean, goddamn, he's donated a shitload of money to schools.
02:56:34.000Another good example is Warren Buffet.
02:56:36.000Warren Buffet is, I believe, donating almost all of his money to charities.
02:56:40.000I mean, and these are guys that are wildly successful.
02:56:44.000I mean, you're talking billions and billions of dollars in wealth attained entirely through capitalism.
02:56:50.000So you have your bad examples, but you also have good examples.
02:56:54.000I mean, what Bill Gates has done, I mean, really incredibly impressive when you stop and think about it.
02:57:00.000Yeah, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whatever they call it, is super influential.
02:57:04.000I look at it in the sense of, yes, there are negatives about all of these things, like you were saying, but I also feel like, are you eating today in half the world?
02:57:16.000Capitalism, the industrial revolution that got everything going in the last 150 years is all because of the necessity of the chase of the dollar or the pound or whatever the case might be.
02:57:26.000The chase for money is not in itself a negative thing.
02:57:29.000It's what you're saying, what you do with it.
02:57:31.000And the ramifications of what we get because of money is an amazing thing.
02:57:35.000I often talk about whether it's good or bad.
02:57:38.000When Apple One, the Apple One computer, was being made in the mid-70s, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs used to go to this thing called Homebrew Computer Club in Berkeley.
02:57:48.000There was this real spirit in the 70s amongst tinkerers that they would share their stuff with each other.
02:57:52.000That they would be like, this is how I did this.
02:57:53.000This is how I programmed this very rudimentary punch card machine.
02:57:56.000And they were going with Apple One to this thing.
02:57:59.000And Wozniak had really wanted to give it away.
02:58:02.000To be like, this revolutionary computer that we are sitting on here, we're just going to give you the tools to make your own.
02:58:08.000And Steve Jobs was the one that said like...
02:58:10.000We have something here that can become more ubiquitous if we make it into a product that we sell, as opposed to something that stays within the confines of the Berkeley Homebrew Computer Club, where 15 people will enjoy it.
02:58:36.000Like, it takes sometimes for things to proliferate, sometimes for things to do good.
02:58:40.000There has to be a profit motive, and sometimes you need a Steve Jobs who didn't have the intellect that Wozniak had on a programming perspective, but saw products for what they were, went into Xerox, saw the GUI, saw the mouse, saw the Ethernet cable, knew what to do with these different things.
02:58:53.000That's the beauty of capitalism to me, you know?
03:00:50.000I love thinking about the iPhone and just the smartphone revolution, and then all of the businesses that are totally based on that thing.
03:00:58.000Now, Uber, Lyft, all of these companies that only exist because that product existed, only because someone saw the capital investment necessary to proliferate this thing.
03:01:13.000Capitalism is responsible for this intense competition in these smartphones now where there are legitimate contenders to Apple now.
03:01:23.000Like Apple just released the iPhone X or the X, whatever the fuck they're going to call it.
03:01:27.000But you have legitimate contenders in the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel 2 XL. You have like these three phones that a lot of people compare favorably to the iPhone.
03:01:41.000They're going back and forth with this and it's like it's a neck and neck race.
03:01:44.000Now it's a matter of whether or not the integration with the operating system is important to you because a lot of people enjoy using a Mac and an Apple computer and you know they want to have the phone.
03:01:55.000Seamlessly integrate with the computer, and then a lot of other people use Windows, and they prefer to use an Android phone because of that.
03:02:02.000So you're dealing with massive competition now, which is fueling Apple to innovate, fueling Samsung to innovate.
03:02:09.000I mean, right now it's just phones, and who knows whether or not it's really important to us, but that could lead to bigger and better things.
03:02:17.000No one saw the smartphone coming, and that's really revolutionized the way we exchange information, the way we gather information.
03:02:24.000Google's new Pixel XL. You squeeze the side and ask it a question.
03:02:28.000Like, that's how quick the assistant comes in.
03:03:21.000It only exists if people have some sort of...
03:03:23.000There's competition, and there's an incentive, and there's a battle going on between these.
03:03:29.000And I think that's the forefront of it, because with laptops, there's competition, but boy, it's kind of stagnant.
03:03:35.000It's like, okay, well, how much processing power do you need if you're not rendering video games, if you're not making things, if you're not making movies?
03:03:42.000If you're a person that's making CGI or filmed or something like that, then it makes sense.
03:03:46.000You could probably use the faster processors and all the power and stuff like that, but...
03:03:52.000Really, the competition is in video games and in video and apps and phones and the images these phones can create.
03:03:59.000And all of them now have the ability to do portrait mode where they blur the background and bring you into the foreground.
03:04:06.000And then the Google Pixel XL has some incredible AI for altering images and making them look cooler and really amazing stuff, man.
03:04:25.000The Europeans were just looking for a way to shorten their trade route to Asia.
03:04:28.000They didn't care about what was in between.
03:04:29.000It was actually super inconvenient that we were here.
03:04:32.000There was always money at the end of the tunnel for good things.
03:04:35.000That's why the space race is so unique, because it had no...
03:04:40.000Everything from Mercury and Gemini through the Apollo missions had no real reason to exist other than that we wanted to best the communists.
03:04:45.000There was no financial reason to do it, which is why it's so unique.
03:04:49.000And I would even argue to this day, there's technology that NASA's created that we find in our everyday lives, but it's one of those unique places where that's not really true.
03:04:57.000But there's also an argument, right, that subsistence living probably makes healthier, happier people, and that all this chasing money and chasing innovation and chasing, you know, technological superiority just leaves us with this hollow feeling, or it doesn't do you any good.
03:05:13.000Like, you're seeing a lot of these people that...
03:05:15.000There was this guy that we were talking about recently, the guy who, he coded Facebook likes And now your computer is trying to hijack your brain, I think is the name of the article.
03:05:26.000Your smartphone is trying to hijack your brain.
03:05:28.000And what he was essentially saying is that your brain is not designed to deal with the reward system that's involved in checking likes on Facebook or Instagram or stuff like that.
03:05:39.000And that these things, this constant...
03:05:45.000Yesterday, we were talking about this.
03:05:50.000He was talking about checking his phone, constantly checking Twitter on his phone, arguing back and forth with people, seeing who's supporting him and who's not, and that it becomes this massive, addictive thing, and how unhealthy that is.
03:06:02.000There's a lot of things about this technological world that we live in that maybe aren't sustainable or aren't compatible with being a biological human being.
03:06:12.000I hate to mention it again, but there's an episode of Black Mirror where there's this one person in this cast where they refuse to get this augment that everyone else has.
03:06:37.000And as long as the system gives you that choice to succeed or fail and no one else is responsible for you, like in base ways, and I'm not saying we're not responsible to bring you to the hospital if you're sick.
03:07:45.000You know, like a tomato tree doesn't make mangoes, you know?
03:07:49.000And the freedom to express yourself in your own unique way and the freedom to live your life with your own unique direction That's just one of the greatest things about being an American, is that we have more freedom in that regard than anyone that's ever lived.
03:08:08.000Because we have more access to things, we have more access to information, and we have more freedom to choose, to express yourself, to speak out.
03:08:18.000And anything that gets in the way from that, including the limiting free speech on campuses, is fucking dangerous in that regard.
03:08:38.000I find what's happening on college campuses, I find the stymieing of free speech, this idea, this very primitive notion of almost thought policing as being super unsavory because you have to...
03:08:51.000A society needs to be dedicated to protecting its bad elements, as long as those elements aren't illegal.
03:08:56.000You don't want to protect a person who is murdering someone, but you might want to protect the rights of someone who is espousing really racist shit, because that's why these protections exist, is for their freedom to express those bad ideas.
03:09:31.000They're gaining more and more oxygen because you're giving it to them.
03:09:33.000By trying to stymie them, you're bringing attention to them.
03:09:35.000I've said over and over again with Milo Yiannopoulos, going to Berkeley earlier this year and then not being allowed to speak and everyone losing their minds, you just gained Milo Yiannopoulos a bunch of people that had no idea who he was.
03:09:44.000The thing that would have hurt him the most is going to a room that was empty.
03:09:48.000No one was there to speak, but he has the right to go to that room and speak nonetheless.
03:09:51.000Well, what's interesting is what's kind of like silenced him.
03:10:51.000I feel like people have tried to force consequences on me, for instance.
03:10:54.000They tried to force a consequence that didn't work out the way that they wanted it to, but to try to make a point, to try to illustrate a point.
03:11:01.000But you have to let these things, like you said, the marketplace will correct For anything that is untoward, Kevin Spacey is going to be hurting for the rest of his life compared to where he was just five days ago.
03:11:10.000Because of the consequences of his actions, right?
03:11:12.000So I'm not saying that there shouldn't be consequences.
03:11:14.000I don't think a lot of people are saying that at all.
03:11:15.000But I feel like it's thought policing, like there are preemptive consequences.
03:11:19.000But these consequences should be like, hey, we don't want to do business with you because you and your values don't align with how we look at the world.
03:12:12.000Everyone else, I bet, has 90% agreement on most issues.
03:12:14.000And I think that this intense, heated screaming and yelling at each other that you see on Berkeley and Antifa showing up with fucking ninja masks on, throwing Molotov cocktails, this ain't helping anybody.
03:13:03.000In some ways, Ferguson is a travesty of justice, right?
03:13:06.000But it seemed way worse than it actually was once everything came out.
03:13:09.000Once Loretta Lynch, not a very well-known racist, refused to try the person at the federal level, local and state authorities, grand juries refused to try Darren Wilson for what he did to the gentleman there or whatever, and you get the full story, and yet you still have this society or this community in ruins based on some hands up,
03:13:28.000But this is the rallying cry, this destroyed city is the rallying cry.
03:13:33.000The problem is it sounds good to people that want to believe a certain narrative.
03:13:36.000And so they repeat it, and then everybody's repeating it, and then you have people doing it on television, and then everybody decides that this is the thing that we're going to say over and over again, regardless of whether or not it's true.
03:13:46.000The real travesty of that, too, is that you can literally throw a dart at a map of the United States and find a civil rights infraction that's truly deplorable, that probably deserves the oxygen and the attention, and could be a legitimate rallying cry.
03:13:59.000But it goes back to the point you were making before, too.
03:14:01.000People don't want to admit they're wrong.
03:14:03.000No one wants to admit that a year out from Ferguson, we're much further than that, but even six months out from when it happened, people look back, read through the grand jury stuff, the federal government's take on it, all that kind of stuff, and realize, huh.
03:14:13.000Maybe this wasn't the best idea to act like this when we didn't have all the information.
03:14:18.000Don't you think that the information is flowing freer and people have more of an understanding than ever before?
03:14:23.000I think people are really doubling down on the far right and the far left and the extremism is sort of elevated in that regard.
03:14:32.000But I think Overall, I think, you know, people don't like the word centrist, but the people in the center, the people that are more reasonable, are more informed, and there's more communication going on than ever before.
03:15:38.000You have to be academically limited to look at either of those ideas on those spectrums and think that you have a good idea.
03:15:46.000Usually, a collection of ideas, not from the fringes, but a collection of left, right, liberal, conservative, usually is probably what's right.
03:15:52.000No one in the mainstream of American politics or mainstream of Western politics has a monopoly on right or a monopoly on good ideas.
03:16:00.000There are great things that Republicans believe, and there are great things that Democrats believe.
03:16:04.000There are terrible ideas on both sides.
03:16:06.000The only thing I see on the extremes is just a complete...
03:17:47.000People are voting to defund it, and they have real issues with enrollment now.
03:17:53.000There was a real interesting article that I just read yesterday where the president was talking about what an impact it's taken on his health and his mental health, and he's unable to think correctly now, and he's unable to...
03:18:32.000In a lot of ways, it comes down to the people that pay the bills, in my opinion.
03:18:35.000The parents need to not be happy with the product they're getting when they find that their child is now an Antifa member when he comes back for Thanksgiving or for Christmas.
03:18:44.000You have to ask yourself, what is happening now?
03:18:48.000Because people point back to the 60s when there was a very righteous wave of anti-authoritarianism that was born in this very specific climate, you know, and...
03:19:01.000I think it's going to take a long time to fix.
03:19:03.000I think a lot of it is because of a...
03:19:21.000Even if I were a liberal or a Democrat, I'd look at that and be like, that's not...
03:19:25.000That's like its own form of social engineering that we've co-opted.
03:19:28.000Not only have we co-opted a lot of media, which is why the media hates YouTube and they hate all these things because they can't control that, but now we've co-opted academia.
03:19:34.000Your ability to get a degree is going to have to go through these people that you might be diametrically opposed to or at the very least lying to you about a lot of things.
03:19:43.000Just 10 years ago, that was certainly not my experience.
03:19:46.000So I fear for, you know, which is another reason why I'm like, I don't know if college is the best solution for a lot of even able-minded people.
03:19:53.000You know, like where it's like, I don't know what you get from going there now.
03:19:57.000If you study a discipline, you probably get out okay.
03:20:00.000Again, we were talking about chemistry, physics, math, whatever.
03:20:02.000But if you're studying humanity, I don't know, man.
03:20:05.000I don't know like what you're getting out of that now.
03:21:48.000And I feel like So I feel like we have to predicate everything on scientific truth when we can, and then give leeway to say like...
03:21:55.000The example I used was homosexuality, where there was a theory for a long time that homosexuality wasn't something that was born in you, that it was a choice.
03:22:01.000Now we know that that's not true, that it's actually something that's in you.
03:22:04.000But even if it was a choice, who cares?
03:22:07.000Why predicate it on that if you believe in freedom?