Jack Dorsey is the CEO of Square, a company that helps people communicate and distribute information worldwide. He s also the co-founder of the Cash App and the founder of the Covington Catholic High School Catholic School. In this episode, Jack talks about the fallout from his controversial interview with Jack, and how he handled the backlash he received from it. He also talks about how he dealt with the criticism he received, and why he didn t respond to it in the way you would have expected. And he talks about what it s like to be a CEO of a company as big as Square, and what it takes to keep up with the demands of a growing company like Square. And he explains how he s managed to keep it all going, even in the midst of all the headaches that come with running a company of his size and the pressure to be the face and voice of something as large as Square. And, of course, there s a lot more to come in the future episodes of this podcast. If you like the show, please consider becoming a patron patron and leaving us a five star rating and a review on Apple Podcasts! Subscribe, review, and subscribe to the podcast! and tell a friend about what you think of the show and what a great podcast you think about it! Timestamps: 5:00 - Jack Dorsey's interview on Jack's podcast 6:30 - How to deal with the backlash 7:15 - Who gets censored? 8:40 - How does he deal with it? 9: How does Jack deal with criticism? 10:00 11:00 | What do I do? 13: What can I do better? 15:30 | How do I deal with censorship? 16:30 17:40 | How can I cut him slack? 18:10 | What does he cut me slack in my job? 19:20 | How should I cut myself? 21:10 22:40 23:30 Is he a good guy? 25:00 How do you deal with these questions? 26:00 What do you feel about the media? 27:00 Is he cut himself? 29:00 Do you have a problem? 30: What are you looking for? 32:00 Does he have a good answer? 35:00 Can he have it better than me cut me some slack?
00:00:25.000What I thought was, I was just going to have a conversation with this guy, be fun, see what it's like to run this gigantic network that helps people communicate.
00:02:53.000You couldn't ask all those great questions that were queued up.
00:02:55.000The reality is, those are the questions I would have asked.
00:02:59.000Now, that's hard to say, because no one's going to believe it.
00:03:01.000But those are the questions I would have asked.
00:03:03.000And I tried not to be too confrontational with a guest.
00:03:08.000But in hindsight, I probably could have pressed more, particularly on people like Kathy Griffin, calling for doxing for the kid with the MAGA hat on with the Native American.
00:03:18.000There's quite a few, but I noticed that...
00:03:22.000Well, what was your experience like with it?
00:03:24.000Yeah, so it's interesting because you and I have...
00:03:27.000We had different interviews because they were timed differently.
00:05:19.000And it seems to skew politically in one direction all the time, right?
00:05:25.000But, you know, I think you also, you know, I did, and I think you did, naturally, we cut him some slack in that he's the CEO of these two corporations.
00:05:35.000He can't be expected to actually know what happened in every one of these micro cases.
00:05:40.000Like, I think I brought up the case of I think her name is Megan Murphy.
00:05:44.000I mean, I hadn't even heard of her before.
00:07:05.000And he asked for no—so in my case, I tell all my guests—and this is the difference between you streaming live and me not— I tell all my guests, listen, if at any point in this interview you put your foot in your mouth or I put my foot in there, we can edit it.
00:07:18.000I want you to be totally happy with what you say over the next two or three hours.
00:07:25.000So if you have to take something again, take it again, and we'll just hide the seams as we go.
00:07:33.000And in Jack's case, there wasn't even a wrinkle like that.
00:07:37.000But I recognize it's a high wire act for a lot of these people, especially for someone who's running two publicly traded companies, right?
00:07:47.000So when I invited him on, I said, Jack, we were DMing on Twitter, and I said, listen, I promise I'm not going to make you smoke a blunt on video.
00:08:22.000And when I sometimes do too many podcasts, I think I run low on juice.
00:08:27.000And I'm not as, I don't know, I'm not as engaged or I'm not as fired up about it.
00:08:33.000And maybe I definitely should have prepared more for him.
00:08:37.000But I really thought it was just going to be a conversation about what it's like and I thought that would be really easy to do.
00:08:42.000Because it's such a unique position to be running something like Twitter.
00:08:46.000But I don't know if he was evasive because he didn't know the things or because he didn't want to talk about the things.
00:08:53.000But there was things like he didn't know exactly why Alex Jones was ultimately banned.
00:09:03.000I mean, you'd have to be inside his head to get that answer.
00:09:29.000Fairly pointed questions about where Twitter's going.
00:09:34.000I don't think this is dishonest, but it has this amazing ability to close the door to further inquiry because he gives you the full mea culpa right up front.
00:09:46.000You ask, what's the situation with the seemingly asymmetrical banning of people?
00:09:52.000And he'll say, you know, yeah, we really, I mean, we've got to get much better at communicating our process.
00:10:53.000I mean, the difference between the business models under which we run our podcasts and just every choice you make in how to produce a podcast— I essentially have made the opposite one, you know, like streaming live like this.
00:11:10.000So this is just all very interesting to me because I'm kind of a reluctant student of digital media now because I've just kind of stumbled into this Wild West that, you know, you in large part have invented, right?
00:11:21.000I mean, this podcasting space was nothing.
00:11:24.000And now we've got Spotify, you know, buying up, you know, it's like a land grab for audio.
00:11:28.000Yeah, we were talking about that before the podcast.
00:13:14.000But then you realize, ultimately, that YouTube becomes a viable source of revenue, and then it's also the way a lot of people like to watch it.
00:13:23.000And they also like to watch it because they can comment under it.
00:13:26.000So that was the other thing that came out of the Jack podcast.
00:13:28.000We got into a controversy about comments and about how comments are deleted or how they're shown and hidden and what happens.
00:13:37.000Because people were accusing Jamie of deleting all the derogatory comments.
00:13:47.000We just leave them up there, and it's mostly a cesspool.
00:13:51.000Even on a good podcast, there's a lot of crazy shit that happens on these things.
00:13:55.000But from what we think, and Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong, you think that what's going on is that people are marking other people's posts as spam, There's that.
00:14:04.000And then Brandon also has the theory that a lot of alt-right people are targeted by the algorithm that YouTube uses.
00:14:12.000Like in one case, there was a guy who had a Pepe the Frog avatar, and he said his comment immediately went to spam.
00:14:19.000And the other thing is that the comments are curated depending upon who is watching it and what account.
00:16:10.000Well, yeah, but it's got to be younger than most of where...
00:16:13.000Well, first of all, I'm not even seeing most comment threads that could possibly respond to anything I put out there now.
00:16:19.000So I don't even look at my ad mentions for the most part.
00:16:22.000I spend maybe five minutes a day looking at what's coming back to me.
00:16:26.000And you were actually helpful in reformatting my brain on that topic.
00:16:31.000So because I don't see any of that stuff...
00:16:35.000I mean, maybe I'm getting a lot of pain for my Dorsey interview, but I don't even know about it, right?
00:16:39.000And so I'm not having – I don't feel like I have to course correct in response to anything now.
00:16:45.000And in large measure, it is a consequence of just this decision that I inadvertently made that I'm just – I don't have a video component to my podcast at the moment.
00:16:54.000And so I'm not – I'm not spectating on the feedback on YouTube.
00:16:58.000Well, the feedback thing is interesting because we were just talking about this before the show, that with feedback and comments on YouTube, essentially anyone can comment, and if you don't go banning people from the channel, which we don't do, it's not what we wouldn't do if someone was Totally a piece of shit,
00:17:55.000With the audio people, it's very obvious that the Cash App is a sponsor because we say it.
00:18:00.000This podcast is brought to you by the Cash App.
00:18:02.000Whereas in YouTube, they're hiding the fact that the Cash App is a sponsor.
00:18:06.000We talked about it during the podcast itself, but we don't put the ads on YouTube.
00:18:13.000There's ads that YouTube puts on, but we put the ads on, like after the show is over, I'll read the ads and we'll insert those into the audio and that will go up to iTunes and RSS feeds and all that stuff.
00:18:24.000So the stuff that's on YouTube, it's abbreviated in the sense that, especially the live one doesn't have anything.
00:18:37.000So there's a couple of conspiracy theories in that regard.
00:18:40.000There's also apparently an emerging conspiracy theory about that Jack was trying to pump up Bitcoin because they have some sort of a Bitcoin deal.
00:19:41.000And as, you know, we were talking about earlier, with the way you do yours, you used to use Patreon, and now you use your own website after the Sargon of Akkad incident, which you nobly stepped back away from Patreon.
00:19:55.000Or not so nobly, depending on what you think of Sargon of Akkad.
00:20:02.000There's so many misconceptions about what happened there, and I tried to clear them up on my podcast, but yeah, there's an interesting implication to not taking ads.
00:20:14.000I think what's happening, and this is much bigger than even podcasting, I think I'd be interested to know what you feel about this.
00:20:21.000You are the quintessence of the successful ad model in podcasting.
00:20:30.000It's working fantastically well for you and for people like Tim Ferriss and probably Marc Maron.
00:20:38.000It's kind of like a winner-take-all thing happening in this space where ads are working great.
00:20:42.000And I am also a highly successful example of the support model.
00:20:51.000It's like the PBS model or the NPR model.
00:20:54.000And what's weird is that you and I are both surrounded by people who have podcasts, want to have podcasts, and are asking us for advice about how to succeed and how to monetize.
00:21:06.000I'm not even in a place where I can recommend my model to anyone else, right?
00:22:49.000So you have Facebook, on the one hand, which is just a totally free platform where the users don't even realize that they're not the customers.
00:24:35.000People have been anchored to the ad-subsidized model more or less everywhere, and they expect everything for free.
00:24:41.000And in my world, I'm trying to just continually brook that expectation and push people into a different sense of you get what you pay for.
00:24:54.000So the hybrid model I've created for myself is I'm putting more stuff behind a paywall, right?
00:25:01.000So this is not just pure sponsorship of otherwise free content.
00:25:06.000But personally, I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that if someone actually can't afford it, they can't get access to my content.
00:25:14.000So I just tell people, if you really can't afford the stuff behind my paywall, or you really can't afford my meditation app, just send us an email and we'll give it to you for free.
00:25:48.000I mean, there are people who will spend $5 a day on a cup of coffee every day for the rest of their lives.
00:25:55.000And yet, if you told them this podcast or this app that they say is incredibly valuable to them is going to cost them $5 a month, They feel raped, right?
00:26:07.000And I completely understand it because I know what it's like to hit a paywall and think, I can't get my credit card out again.
00:27:02.000And that's an easy thing in terms of, like, bang for their buck, what Netflix will get out of it.
00:27:08.000If you do a television show, I mean, my God, you need to hire hundreds of people.
00:27:13.000There's wardrobe and makeup and set and there's writers and producers and executives and everybody has to go over the script with a fine-tooth comb.
00:27:48.000If you want to build something, if you want to build a media company, like let's say you were asking for support for this otherwise free podcast, people don't know what your aspirations are.
00:28:00.000I mean, maybe you want to start a podcast network, right?
00:28:02.000Maybe you're trying to build a business.
00:28:05.000Maybe you have massive payroll expenses.
00:28:10.000So the expectation that the product should always be free closes the door to any of those aspirations if, in fact, you have them.
00:28:22.000It's very interesting psychologically because I've created this network of support for my podcast.
00:28:28.000But I see people do calculations that they would never do in a more transactional space if they were just, let's say, buying my next book.
00:28:37.000For me, offering a free podcast and then saying, if you find this valuable, you can support it.
00:28:47.000From the side of being a creator of that content, it feels like the most transparent interaction possible because A person can listen for free for as long as they want to just discover how valuable it is and then they can support it to the degree that they find it valuable.
00:29:02.000Whereas if I'm selling you a book, you can't even read the book before you buy it.
00:29:07.000You have to make the decision to buy it and I'm trying to convince you to buy it because it took me all this time to write it and it's transactional.
00:31:18.000I like how you're thinking and I like the ethics involved in it and I think it's a great thing and when you said it on your podcast I was shocked but it makes sense coming from you.
00:31:27.000My thought is I'm in negotiation or in discussions right now and I talked to you about this too about building an app and what I want to do with the app is have a set amount of money that you pay per month if you want to sign up for the app and you get the podcast with no ads.
00:32:13.000But I was doing it for fun, and I didn't care.
00:32:15.000My revenue was coming from other sources.
00:32:17.000A few years ago, I decided what I was going to do was, because I was getting ad, well, the first ad request was Facebook, was the fleshlight, rather, and you were the first person to request to not have the fleshlight on your podcast.
00:32:45.000Just knowing that the mic would go hot and then 15 seconds before it would still be ringing in their ears, you know, if you want to jack off with this fantastic device.
00:32:53.000And here's Sam Harris, neuroscientist and moral philosopher.
00:32:57.000But the fleshlight experienced some pretty significant positive impact from that.
00:33:03.000I mean, their business went through the roof because of the podcast.
00:33:06.000I mean, they really sold a shitload of fleshlights, where they told me, like, some ungodly number, like 50% of the fleshlights they were selling was code word Rogan.
00:33:44.000It started basically at the end of 2009. You were probably on around 2010 or 2011. There was no other ads other than The Fleshlight, though, with you.
00:33:54.000And then the flashlight dropped off when we started asking for more money.
00:33:57.000They're like, eh, I think we hit the point of no return.
00:33:59.000But my philosophy getting into advertisement was, I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.
00:34:06.000100% and have no impact whatsoever on the content of my podcast.
00:34:13.000Like, whatever advertisers that I choose, whatever advertisers that I choose, Yeah.
00:35:52.000I'm going to take that money and I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want.
00:35:55.000And if these guys decide, oh, you smoke pot or you're too controversial or you talk about this or talk about that, we're going to drop you.
00:36:09.000But if I lost the cash app because I was too hard on Jack Dorsey, or if Jack Dorsey comes back and I'm too hard on him and grilling him about these people that have been censored, I hope he doesn't, but I like him.
00:36:38.000But with who is censored and why, who is removed, who's been deplatformed, why they've been deplatformed, and where are the inconsistencies, and why is it skewing so heavily right, where the people on the right are the ones who are getting banned, the people on the left are getting away with a lot of crazy shit.
00:36:55.000So we're going to get into the weeds with that.
00:36:57.000And if the Cash App hears that and they decide to drop me as a sponsor, I don't care.
00:37:03.000This is a major source of income for me, but it's only one source.
00:37:07.000It's one of the things of being a stand-up comedian, working for the UFC, and having a podcast, and I have a podcast with ads on YouTube, and having ads that are on the regular podcast itself.
00:37:28.000I don't think, because this can sound totally sanctimonious and it's not intended that way, I don't think my scruples around reading ads on my podcast apply to you or Tim Ferriss or many other people.
00:37:44.000Tim is somebody whose brand on some level is...
00:37:49.000What I'm going to do is I'm going to go out there and find the best shit in the world, the best shirts, the best workout equipment, and I'm going to tell you about it.
00:39:25.000I can, and there's certain circumstances where I should, but I should avoid those circumstances.
00:39:32.000I have to prepare more for podcasts, and I feel like I personally...
00:39:41.000It's as much out of concern for my guests as well.
00:39:45.000This is a high-wire act, but I want a net normally so that people feel free...
00:39:52.000To be totally unguarded, because they know that if we have a spaz attack, we can, you know, even uttering spaz attack will screw some people's careers, right?
00:40:00.000Well, we actually had a conversation about a podcast that I talked to you about, one of your podcasts, where you said that you actually started it over.
00:40:06.000You started it, and you're like, let's try this again.
00:40:45.000But people didn't understand that we were like, you know, we had a, you know, we had, I had seen the pit of alligators and didn't want to fall in, right, you know?
00:40:54.000Well, it made more sense, though, when you told me that, because I'm like, okay, it was heated before you even got to go, because you'd already gone through a half an hour of back and forth.
00:41:03.000I think people need to understand what it's like to do one of these things, too, because, you know, you do it so often, it becomes pretty, and you're so good at talking.
00:41:14.000You're such a good orator and you're so articulate that it comes off smooth and easy just having a conversation with someone, but you're always considering the fact that people are listening to this.
00:41:23.000You're always saying, how do I get more out of him or her?
00:41:27.000How do I take this and how do I get this person to expand upon this?
00:41:32.000How do I make this something, make something out of this?
00:41:36.000This is one of the things that I felt with Jack.
00:41:38.000Because he was talking in this way, and we're really working hard on fixing all these issues.
00:43:27.000I mean, the problem for me there with that podcast, frankly, was that I feel like you both got unlucky with just where he was in his life at that moment.
00:43:37.000So what that podcast showcased, at least for the first...
00:44:07.000But it was still – it's like he was just in a space that he was so massively stressed and so overworked and just – I mean, he had fires everywhere that had to be put out.
00:44:21.000So I just felt, you know, as a friend, I just felt like, okay, this is sort of the wrong time to be doing this.
00:44:26.000And so I just felt, you know, it just felt unlucky to me.
00:44:29.000So because he's, again, I see him in many other moments and he can be...
00:44:39.000That was actually a circumstance where I was looking at the comments, right?
00:44:43.000And I was saying, okay, these are people who are basically reading him as somebody who is much stranger than, in fact, he ever is.
00:44:52.000And I could see why they were doing that, because he just seemed in a very stressed space in his life.
00:44:57.000What was interesting, he was very different when he first got here versus when the mic came on.
00:45:02.000When he first got here, he pulls out the fucking blowtorch and starts shooting this flamethrower in the middle of the hallway, and we're laughing.
00:45:13.000And then we sat down and then stiff right off the bat.
00:45:17.000And I'm just trying to massage it and get him going.
00:45:22.000Honestly, I think that is another consequence of live.
00:45:26.000I'm not arguing that you shouldn't be live because it has a massive advantage for you as well.
00:45:33.000It is—there's just a different feeling.
00:45:35.000Like, you know, if I knew that this was being taped and I could rethink the thing we're about to say about Liam Neeson or whatever it is, you know, it's different.
00:45:43.000And so— Well, the Liam Neeson story is a perfect example.
00:47:08.000Things are not disappearing online anymore.
00:47:10.000At a certain point, there's just going to be a 360 panopticon view of everyone's life.
00:47:18.000There are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there.
00:47:24.000I mean, the irony here for me is that you have progressives and people on the far left who receive a disclosure like Liam Neeson, let's take his, and they just want to see him burned alive,
00:48:28.000I think Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend, calls these the Hilbert problems for social justice warriors.
00:48:36.000David Hilbert was a very famous mathematician who, at the turn of the 19th century, posed a set of problems in mathematics that were just the...
00:50:08.000Like I, you know, Liam Neeson, an actor, I have everything to lose, although I don't remember at what point in his life he said this happened.
00:50:16.000Can you imagine that I was in this state of mind, right?
00:50:38.000It seems just wrong, given how he described her, at least how I've heard this, because he's saying, listen, if this had been an Armenian guy or an Italian or a Japanese guy, I'd be looking for one of them, right?
00:53:39.000But I was so off Twitter that there was no temptation for a hot take from me, right?
00:53:46.000And I saw these people just torching their reputations by taking these, like Kathy Griffin, basically calling for the doxing of these kids, you know, given all that she has suffered, you know, from mob behavior online, and she's, you know, whipping up her own mob.
00:54:04.000It's what the platform is calling out of people.
00:54:06.000But it's also when people have been shamed and they've done something awful, then they reinforce their base.
00:54:13.000Now she's so heavily hard left because the right wing ran after her.
00:54:19.000Anyone on the right that does anything, she's calling for her side to go after this person, reinforcing that she's a part of that tribe, that she's a part of that left wing tribe.
00:54:30.000Well, it's – so, obviously, everyone has a lot to lose doing this, especially in a case where all the facts aren't in, and if you just wait at a beat – I mean, even the New York Times got this wrong.
00:54:42.000The New York Times writes an article about the kids in the MAGA hat that they have to rescind.
00:54:46.000And the – so then, as the dust is settling – And I see these people.
00:54:54.000Some people are issuing public apologies.
00:54:57.000I see somebody who's actually kind of, you know, branded herself as, you know, one of my enemies for a reason I can't fathom.
00:55:04.000But this journalist, Kara Swisher, who, you know, she works for Recode and Vox now.
00:55:13.000But she's got a big podcast and she actually writes for The New York Times now.
00:55:16.000She's got an opinion piece, a regular column for The New York Times.
00:55:19.000She's a tech journalist and I happen to know she doesn't like me because she's tweeted against – she's said some disparaging things about me on Twitter and we had an offline conversation about it.
00:55:32.000But I saw her – she said one of the most vituperative and fairly crazy things in response to the kids initially.
00:55:57.000For someone who I know really doesn't like me.
00:55:59.000Like, I mean, that was an added bonus for me because that's another norm that I think we should support.
00:56:04.000It's like, we should play fair even with our enemies, right?
00:56:08.000And, yeah, I mean, honestly, you know, I try to play fair even with people who never play fair with me.
00:56:13.000Even someone like, you know, Glenn Greenwald or Ray Zaslan.
00:56:16.000I mean, people who have just, you know, lied about me endlessly.
00:56:19.000If I get something wrong about them, I publicly apologize for it.
00:56:24.000So I did this, and this was at the absolute 11th hour with respect to this scandal online.
00:56:33.000When I saw the kind of pain I was getting just for supporting Kara in her walk back of this thing, at a moment when it was obvious she should have walked this back, I got people saying, unsubscribing from your podcast, now I know you're a fucking racist.
00:56:52.000And I just thought, wow, man, that's, you know, it's like, you just touch this thing at its very end, and you're, you know, it's, the slime gets on you.
00:57:02.000So, yeah, it is, it's the medium, you know.
00:58:41.000Whatever comes after Twitter, and this is one of the things that I... Before the podcast, I wanted to really talk to Jack about to get his take on what he thinks is next down the line.
00:58:50.000Because there's going to be something that's more invasive.
00:58:52.000There's going to be something that is more, whether it's, I think, probably something in the line of augmented reality.
00:58:57.000There were probably a decade away from something that makes this look like books.
00:59:03.000Look like, you know, a fucking corkboard at a bookstore, you know?
00:59:07.000Although, strangely, we're living through the golden age of audio here.
00:59:11.000We went full into video and were poised to go 3D and VR, and then all of a sudden, audio is king.
00:59:21.000Well, how about phone calls and texts?
00:59:23.000I called you out of the blue once, and it was like, what the fuck?
00:59:44.000She was angry that somebody FaceTimed her.
00:59:46.000No, it always feels like an old school move to, like my book agent calls me, you know, out of the blue, and it's just, it seems so old school.
01:00:07.000I've got to tell you, having released this meditation app has given me a sanity check on everything else I'm doing, which is very interesting.
01:00:17.000In releasing the app, it's firewalled from all the other controversial stuff I'm doing.
01:00:23.000In the app, I'm not whinging about Trump or talking about any of the stuff I talk about on my podcast.
01:00:29.000It's just me trying to teach meditation largely as an antidote to all of the stuff we're talking about.
01:00:37.000We've got this, as Tristan Harris says, we've got this slot machine in our pocket that is continually gaming our attention all day long.
01:00:44.000And, you know, in my view, a meditation app is like the one thing you can have on your smartphone that completely subverts the technology and can get you to actually live a more examined life using the technology, right?
01:00:59.000But what's been amazing for me personally is that I put it out and it is the only thing that I have put out maybe ever, right, where it's been received and Exactly
01:01:36.000I have to do both because there's a lot of important things to talk about that are going to be endlessly spun and maliciously misunderstood.
01:01:44.000But it's been so refreshing to have one thing.
01:01:48.000You must get this with doing your stand-up.
01:02:00.000Well, psychologically, it's been a revelation to have one thing that I can put out that is just received, appreciated, and they got what I intended, and it's just, you know, thank you.
01:02:16.000It's just like, oh, fuck, that's possible.
01:03:06.000The positive that came out of it is me forced to re-examine how I do podcasts, re-examine the significance of each individual guest, and especially someone that comes with as much baggage, without lack of a better term, as Jack.
01:03:21.000That you're, you know, you've got to think that there's people listening.
01:03:25.000And there's some questions that you really have to work at.
01:07:18.000And, you know, one of the things that I liked about Tulsi is that she's a veteran.
01:07:22.000And, you know, I mean, like, she seems very reasonable to me, but...
01:07:26.000Except I haven't followed her career closely, but it just seems like she's not making the right noises on things like Syria and Assad and...
01:07:36.000Yeah, I don't know enough about that to comment.
01:07:38.000I don't know enough about Assad and the controversy of whether or not he gassed his...
01:07:42.000Well, that is, I think, uncontroversial.
01:07:58.000Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not close enough to it, but I would, you know, be very circumspect about endorsing her going forward and do a little homework because I think her candidacy is not going to age well.
01:09:24.000You know, it would be, in my view, it would be somebody like a younger Bloomberg, right?
01:09:29.000I mean, I don't think it's Bloomberg, but like somebody, like a legit businessman who could call bullshit on all of Trump's fake business acumen and who's not ethically compromised, right?
01:09:45.000And definitely not someone who feels the need to pander to the far left on these identity politics issues.
01:09:53.000I think identity politics is really going to be bad for us against Trump because so much of the country, the crucial sliver of the country, you just have to ask yourself, who was it who voted for Obama in We're good to go.
01:10:34.000In a nationwide election against someone like Trump, I just think that's an absolute recipe for disaster.
01:10:42.000Yeah, because the people that subscribe to that ideology don't realize how many people think it's silly.
01:10:47.000You know, when you're in the oppression Olympics and you're trying to win the gold.
01:10:51.000And for how many people it's actually misapplied, right?
01:10:54.000It's like there are many more explanations for voting for Trump in addition to racism.
01:11:03.000Yes, every racist voted for Trump, you know, virtually.
01:11:24.000...are not thriving in the current economy.
01:11:27.000You know, I mean, it's just like you got automation...
01:11:29.000Displacing manufacturing jobs, you've got the consequences of trade and immigration, and you have legitimate concerns about immigration that have nothing to do with racism.
01:11:43.000And so if you're going to score any hesitation over something like open borders as a sign of your xenophobia and racism, You're going to lose virtually everyone who has a sane concern about how you admit the right people into a country.
01:12:02.000There are economic concerns and there are social concerns.
01:12:08.000You don't have to be Ben Shapiro to share some of those concerns.
01:12:12.000I'm not saying Ben Shapiro is a racist.
01:12:13.000Obviously, I'm saying he's a conservative.
01:12:15.000And, you know, takes a more conservative line on many of these questions than I do.
01:12:20.000But, you know, it's like, you either think, let me just take immigration as the narrow case, you either think you should be able to know who's coming into the country, or you don't, right?
01:12:33.000Now, if you think you should just have open borders, there are two problems with that.
01:12:39.000One is there are many good arguments against that.
01:13:10.000What do you think is, what's the primary factor?
01:13:14.000Like what caused identity politics to reach this boiling point that it's at right now?
01:13:21.000Well, it is, I think, in large measure what the internet is doing to us.
01:13:26.000It's not that identity politics hasn't been a feature of politics forever, but there's this siloing effect.
01:13:34.000There's the effect that groups become more radicalized as groups because the most extreme voices exist.
01:13:46.000And everyone who's silent, there's kind of a diffusion of responsibility around countering these extreme voices.
01:13:55.000It only takes a small percentage of extreme voices to cow the rest of a group and make the group seem like the extreme voices are speaking for the group.
01:14:09.000You know, and so I think what we have on both the left and the right, we have a small percentage.
01:14:15.000I mean, you know, the last poll I saw that tried to get at this question was something like, you know, six or eight percent on the tails that are making it seem like these are – and I think it's more of a problem on the left than on the right because, I mean, the extreme right – We're good to go.
01:14:55.000Have massive sway in major companies, in tech companies, in journalism, in academia.
01:15:02.000The silencing effect and the reputational cost that's being paid by even very powerful people in all these mainstream forums on the left is just...
01:15:22.000I certainly didn't say it on a previous podcast with you, but I was at dinner with a bunch of Silicon Valley people and we were talking about it.
01:15:30.000It was at the moment when that Netflix story happened where Jonathan Friedland got fired over using the N-word in a closed-door meeting and it was a Using the N-word in response to my friend Tom Segura, who you met earlier.
01:15:55.000And didn't even, wasn't using it in a joke, like calling someone retarded or saying something's retarded, but they were, and he was saying that that's like using the N-word around black people.
01:16:04.000Yeah, but he used the N-word in this meeting, right?
01:16:53.000Actually, now I realize why I'm confused about why I think I've talked about this because I did a podcast with Chelsea Handler, which hasn't aired.
01:17:00.000I did it months ago because she was doing a documentary on white privilege, I think, and I think I'm actually cast as the guy with white privilege in this documentary.
01:17:24.000Well, she was basically – I mean she was playing the other side of the net for this and not – I mean, we'll have to see.
01:17:33.000I mean, I think I, at least in my own mind, I certainly made sense there, and she didn't have a lot of response to what I was saying, but I haven't heard the audio or seen the video.
01:20:17.000Unless we resolve that or just cut through it, we don't stand a chance against Trump in 2020. I was reading a story about a woman who's on some sort of an LBGT panel, and she's a part of some group,
01:20:33.000and she was kicked out of it by a man who identifies as a lesbian, and he has a penis.
01:20:53.000He definitely identifies as a lesbian.
01:20:55.000I might have read a Twitter comment about how preposterous that was and said the penis part.
01:20:59.000Well, this is something that Andrew Sullivan wrote in a recent article on this, is that The transgender thing is at odds with gay rights in a fundamental sense.
01:21:11.000I mean, you can't balance these equations because gay identity absolutely focuses on the legitimate differences between men and women.
01:21:45.000Sort of, but I can only imagine what Andrew Sullivan's Twitter feed looks like now, because when he writes these articles, I'm sure he just gets eviscerated.
01:24:46.000Yes, as a fellow comic, saying that it's, you know, like, and I was like, well, she's a heckler.
01:24:51.000The woman heckled, like, while he was trying to do stand-up.
01:24:54.000And he's like, I'm not going to support rape culture.
01:24:57.000And he's like, how the fuck is that rape culture?
01:24:59.000He's clearly making a joke about something she said that was very patronizing.
01:25:06.000Obviously, he doesn't think there's something funny about rape.
01:25:08.000He's just trying to work through this ad-lib set that he's doing with some guy who yelled out something that this whole crowd has to respond to.
01:25:17.000He can't just ignore the fact that it happened and go, how about fire trucks, folks?
01:26:56.000You're in a metal machine with a bunch of assholes that are probably looking at their phone and everybody's going fast and you could die at any moment if someone goes wrong.
01:27:04.000If you're on a highway like the 405 and you have five lanes going 70 miles an hour, it is a fucking miracle that no one dies.
01:27:15.000Well, so, let's go back to this idea of what the actual normative response would be when somebody puts their foot in their mouth or something from their past gets disclosed.
01:27:50.000That one politician said he's not even in the photo, but the photo was on his yearbook page or like whatever you put on your yearbook page in high school, right?
01:28:00.000You find out this thing that no adult is going to defend, right?
01:29:52.000Yeah, I mean, and also people have to recognize that there's some things, but you can't retroactively instill today's ideas of what constitutes racism on 1985. So if you were in high school in 1985 and you dressed up as Mr. T... Right.
01:30:09.000You know, I don't know if that was racist back then.
01:30:12.000I never did it, but I don't know if that's racist.
01:30:14.000Like, if you had a bunch of gold chains and you made your hair black, or you made your face black and gave yourself a mohawk and you said, I'm Mr. T for Halloween.
01:30:24.000What you did when you went door to door when you were 15 or 12 or whatever you were, knocking on people's doors and everybody was laughing, oh, you're Mr. T. Nobody thought it was racist.
01:31:25.000You take someone like any of these politicians who have...
01:31:30.000Something in their backstory that is ugly.
01:31:34.000My feeling is, all there has to be is a transparent and intelligible account of how you are now different, of how you can actually honestly look back on this thing and say, yeah, I am as embarrassed by that as you think I should be,
01:32:00.000The spirit of the time on social media, again, especially on the left and to our total dysfunction politically, is to never accept any of that.
01:32:11.000I mean, there is no apology good enough.
01:32:17.000Or there's the most cynical possible interpretation of your apology.
01:32:23.000It's like you're just trying to – the only reason why you're apologizing is because you want to save your job, right?
01:32:29.000And that – we have to figure out how to – I mean, we just need some – Recovery disk that we can reboot from here because it's just not – this is going someplace terrible.
01:32:42.000And again, to look at it through the lens narrowly politically over the next two years, it's to the massive disadvantage of the left.
01:32:51.000It certainly is, but I don't see any way to fix that.
01:32:55.000Like with the current climate and this current attitude where people are engaging in this recreational outrage, it fits the climate.
01:33:02.000I mean, I don't know what would have to happen for people to come to some sort of a realization.
01:33:07.000I mean, it would have to happen to them, like it did to Jamie.
01:33:10.000Like, what happened with Jamie Kilstein is that they turned on him, and he's like, oh my god, this is awful.
01:34:43.000And I think modeling that more and more, I mean, I think we have to take those risks and people like us have to take those risks and hope to break this spell by having those conversations in public.
01:34:58.000I would hope that we're having some kind of an impact on it, but I feel like we're...
01:35:03.000We're throwing buckets of cold water into a volcano.
01:35:54.000And I think anonymity is good in a lot of ways, like for whistleblowers, people that work in a certain environment where they want to be honest, but they would get fired, you know, with a very restricted environment, but they have maybe a controversial opinion.
01:36:08.000They want to be able to express free speech.
01:36:19.000I remember there was a guy on 4chan who would say a bunch of fucked up things like a lot of people do.
01:36:25.000And people tracked him down and found out who he was and then sent all of these anonymously authored posts to his employer and he got fired.
01:36:35.000And this guy was a father and he had children and he was supporting his family and now he's struggling to make a living.
01:36:42.000because he wrote some things anonymously online on a message board.
01:36:46.000And he found recreation in saying fucked up things.
01:36:49.000You know, I don't know what the solution is, but I feel like anonymity, it encourages less hospitable behavior.
01:37:01.000Did you hear about the professor at an academic conference getting into an elevator and making just a dad joke?
01:37:09.000So he gets into a crowded elevator in an academic conference, and someone asks what floor, and he says, women's lingerie, please.
01:37:16.000It's like a Dean Martin joke or whatever, right?
01:37:19.000Someone in the elevator was so offended by that that they lodged a complaint, and it's been now at least a month or so since I heard the story, so I don't know if he was fired, but he was fighting for his academic life over this complaint process.
01:37:39.000I mean, just like that, in the fullness of time, that is going to seem like some insane witch panic, right?
01:37:48.000Like, there's no such thing as witches, and yet people are getting burned alive because of allegations of witchcraft.
01:37:55.000We're in that kind of situation and we just have to wake up.
01:38:02.000Well, you and I don't teach and we're not in a university and we're not in that bubble.
01:38:08.000I think the people that are in that bubble and then they escape that bubble and then go to whatever tech company or whatever business, they continue that same bubble-like behavior and they want everybody to acquiesce.
01:38:19.000They want everybody around them to behave the way That they've been programmed to think that everybody is supposed to behave.
01:38:25.000And you see that now from a lot of young people.
01:38:28.000You see a lot of young people who are entering into the workforce think that the standards and the norms that they got enforced upon them at Yale or Columbia or wherever they went to school, that this is how you're supposed to behave.
01:38:42.000Social justice is important and this is real and you have to recognize your privilege.
01:38:47.000You have to check your privilege and you have to do this and you have to do that and you have to support trans rights and you have to call out Call-out culture is a big one.
01:39:03.000The way things change is you have to reinforce the fact that there's these new standards and there has to be severe repercussions for deviating.
01:41:33.000That he cared more about what Louis C.K. was going through than the women who felt victimized by Louis C.K. And that was not his intention at all, apparently.
01:41:43.000And so when he went to clarify this, he was about to say, you'd have to be retarded to think that I cared more about Louis C.K.'s ordeal than the ordeal of these women who felt like their careers got derailed, right?
01:41:57.000But as the word retarded was coming out of his mouth...
01:46:21.000So I think we have to hold the line here, you know?
01:46:26.000And very few people are in a position to be able to do it.
01:46:30.000I mean, you know, like, you know, Netflix doesn't feel they can do it.
01:46:34.000Well, Netflix is just so terrified of a continual blowback.
01:46:39.000And they just thought, like, if we're going to save this show, the way to save it is to get them to stop talking.
01:46:43.000Because he's just going to take his other foot and take other people's feet and stuff them in his mouth as well.
01:46:47.000I think one thing that might help to illuminate our understanding of how people behave is what you really enjoy talking about, and you really definitely changed my way of looking at things.
01:46:59.000That they're really essentially, the concept of free will is a very flawed thing and that you have to really take into consideration who a person is right now and what has caused them to be this person right now and that a lot of us are operating on this really bizarre momentum of our past and our behavior and our genetics and life experiences and all these different variables.
01:47:21.000That really need to be taken into account.
01:47:22.000This idea that you are autonomous and you are the director of your own life is true to a certain extent, but it's also very complicated, much more complicated than we would like to admit.
01:47:33.000And when you're talking about something that happened when you were 17, like Brett Kavanaugh or something like that, Jesus Christ, you're going to hold a 55-year-old man accountable to something that he did when he was 17 that wasn't a crime?
01:48:24.000I mean, the universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time, and the only thing you've got is your brain and its states, and that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you as a system have had working on you up until this moment.
01:48:45.000And so the next words that come out of your mouth are part of that process.
01:48:50.000Now, some people find this to be a frankly...
01:48:59.000They think, well, okay, well, you're telling me I'm just a robot, but you're a robot that is open, continuously open to influence, to influence of, you know, kind of internally based on its own processes.
01:49:10.000I mean, there's like, there's top-down control of, you know, executive function in the brain to your, you know, your emotional life, say, and you're continually open to the influences of culture, right?
01:49:23.000The culture is this operating system that you're interacting with in each moment, and whatever's getting in can change you in radical ways very quickly.
01:49:32.000I mean, there's no telling how much you can change on the basis of one new idea coming your way, right?
01:49:38.000Now, I would argue that that process of change— That's not evidence of free will.
01:49:47.000That is evidence of just yet more causality.
01:49:50.000I mean, you don't pick the changes that come your way.
01:49:52.000If I get you to see something that you didn't see a moment before, you're not responsible for the fact that you didn't see it a moment before and you're not responsible for the fact that you now see it.
01:50:01.000It's just like the dominoes just kept falling, right?
01:50:05.000But it does give you this far more patient sense of...
01:50:14.000One, just, you know, all the causes and conditions that have created this odious behavior you're now disposed to react to in the world, right?
01:50:27.000Everything on some level is more of a force of nature, right?
01:51:12.000But the feeling we have in both cases is very different.
01:51:16.000The feeling you have attributing ultimate authorship to a person's behavior is super narrow psychologically and ethically, and it's the feeling of vengeance.
01:51:33.000This feeling of vengeance is so natural to get triggered in response to a person It's not natural in response to a wild animal who may have done something terrible, right?
01:52:32.000So, we have a very different set of books we keep ethically for humans, and Some of it's understandable, some of it's inevitable, but a lot of it gives us moral illusions that we don't need to have, and it gives us a kind of just an inability to take stock of all the variables that are actually guiding human behavior and react to them and mitigate them and disincentivize them intelligently.
01:53:44.000It's the only tool to do the job, and the moment you had, I mean, I may have brought this up last time we spoke about free will, but this is really the sort of reductio ad absurdum of where most people are on this topic.
01:53:58.000The moment we really understand human evil at the level of the brain, the moment we understand psychopathy, say, which is, I mean, maybe that's not the totality of evil, but that's, you know, certainly center of the bullseye.
01:54:10.000Once we understand psychopathy as a neurological condition that's governed by genes and environment, and we can actually intrude at the level of the brain to mitigate it.
01:55:01.000So, psychopathy in the presence of a cure for it would look much more like diabetes than it looks like evil in the present case.
01:55:07.000And people aren't imagining what it would be like to be there, what it would be like to actually fully understand the underlying neurophysiology here and actually have something.
01:55:18.000I mean, there's no guarantee we'll be able to deal with it in a simple way, but it's certainly possible.
01:55:26.000And, I mean, the classic example is just like the Charles Whitman example where, you know, you have a brain tumor that's causing this aberrant behavior.
01:55:33.000In that case, everyone sees, okay, this is not evil.
01:55:47.000But in the same way that a brain tumor is exculpatory there, I think a full understanding of the underlying neurology would be exculpatory.
01:57:09.000And, you know, adding randomness to the picture doesn't help, right?
01:57:13.000Randomness is just, you know, somebody's in your brain rolling dice, you know, influencing your behavior that way.
01:57:17.000Well, that doesn't give you the free will people think they have.
01:57:20.000So, ironically, there is what seems...
01:57:28.000On some level, deflationary of the gravitas of the human spirit for people opens the door to, at least in my view, a far more ethical and tolerant and patient and understanding view of human beings.
01:58:33.000Thank you for expressing yourself in a way that maybe other people who have also committed really Just unsavory or just unfortunate things in the past, unfortunate acts in the past, they can feel relieved by the fact that you've grown and evolved to become a better person and that you're a different thing now and you are the product of all of your experiences.
01:59:07.000Yeah, I mean, the thing about the Liam Neeson incident, which I find so interesting, is that there's a case where I mean, what he's revealing about himself is pretty amazing, right?
01:59:22.000It's like he just decided, okay, we need a truth and reconciliation commission for who I used to be, right?
02:02:23.000I think it's an amazing conversation to start, and the fact that the result is just, you know, an auto-defe is the problem we're trying to fight our way through at this point.
02:02:37.000Isn't it because there's too many voices?
02:02:39.000I mean, there's just so many people that are reacting to it.
02:02:42.000If he's dealing with, he's not dealing with three or four or five voices, he's dealing with millions of people that get to chime in on this.
02:02:50.000And you get a few thousand of those people that are furious at you.
02:02:54.000You know, like you were saying, that doesn't work.
02:02:59.000I was just about to say, I was going to make a comparison to your podcast with Jack, that you're not reading the comments.
02:03:05.000But he's getting this gigantic signal from a huge number of people.
02:03:12.000So this is all over my Google News feed.
02:03:29.000And the people that think he's secretly still racist and doesn't want to admit it is very high.
02:03:33.000And then there's also the fact that he's a man of wealth and privilege and he's successful and famous.
02:03:37.000And there's got to be a bunch of jealousy that's attached to that and a bunch of people that want to knock him down because he's at a very high hill.
02:03:50.000Again, I don't know him, but I remember, again, forgive me if I get this slightly wrong, but isn't it true that his wife, Natasha Richardson, just died in this freak accident?
02:04:36.000And obviously, there's many people out there that experience far greater tragedies.
02:04:39.000I'm not trying to quantify it, but yeah, he tried to talk about a real thing.
02:04:46.000He tried to talk about a real thing, and he's given some interviews since then where he said, look, I'm not a racist.
02:04:53.000I'm just telling you, I was in such a fucked up state of mind because of this rape that I was willing to do something irrational and horrible.
02:05:07.000These same people who are calling for his head are prepared to forgive other people who did do that thing.
02:05:14.000It's all it's so dependent like I had Mike Tyson on the podcast and one of the things that I got when I said it was so many people like fuck that Rapist fuck this guy fuck that all these different things about him what I wanted to get into him with him was Who he was when he was 12 years old when he was a little boy when he met custom motto and was taught out a box and was fucking hypnotized and And this is one of the really important things that came out of that podcast was Custom Otto,
02:05:42.000who was not just this boxing legend who took in this young kid from the ghetto that didn't have a family, but also hypnotized him.
02:06:41.000If you're getting kicked in the face and punched in the face a lot, and you're doing it through your developmental period from the time you're 15...
02:06:48.000For me, it was 15. From him, it was like 12 or 13. You have a different way of looking at the world.
02:07:10.000The positive that comes from that when you're a 12-year-old boy and you're hypnotized by this great man who's teaching you how to fight and you're getting so much love.
02:07:19.000You've never gotten love in your life.
02:07:20.000You've never gotten positive feedback.
02:07:22.000And you're getting so much of it from this.
02:07:24.000And then no one's teaching you how to turn it off.
02:07:26.000And you're wondering why this guy grows up to become a fucking maniac and is punching people in the street.
02:07:31.000He's just crazy and yelling at reporters, I'll fuck you in the ass, white boy, all that crazy shit that he did.
02:08:22.000I mean, the only guy lifting a dumbbell was that guy with the handlebar mustache in the leopard, you know, bikini or whatever he was wearing at the freak show, right?
02:08:47.000It's gotten far more complicated and nuanced.
02:08:50.000It's continually evolving, but the framework, the paradigm, the fact that there's something to do to get better physically, and that those changes matter, you can engage your body intelligently so as to improve it across many different variables,
02:09:10.000That's all totally understood and now we're just refining the protocol.
02:09:14.000With mental training, and specifically the training of attention and how you respond to the uprising of your own negative emotion, That is something that has been going on for thousands of years in contemplative,
02:10:07.000The ability to react in a—so there's just no reason to hesitate to condemn this thing that you're seeing.
02:10:16.000This upwelling of negative emotion you see, the outrage you feel when you see something on Twitter, right, is— It's shortening everybody's fuse.
02:10:28.000It's making road rage more of a general feature of our lives.
02:10:36.000You can actually learn that when you suddenly feel anger in response to something that seems to have happened in the world, if you just pay attention to the experience of anger, if you just feel the mere physiology of it,
02:11:14.000It's impossible to stay angry for very long if you get out of the story you're telling yourself about why you should be angry.
02:11:20.000Now, there are certain situations where anger is appropriate and it's good to have access to that energy.
02:11:27.000I'm not advocating that everyone just get lobotomized and not react to anything, but...
02:11:33.000Until you can actually be mindful—I mean, mindful is the technical word for what this is—until you can actually get out of the thoughts and just pay attention to, in this case, a negative emotion— We're good to go.
02:13:10.000What they're learning is just basic awareness of their inner lives.
02:13:14.000Just being able to name the emotion they're feeling is an amazing capacity in a six-year-old.
02:13:21.000A six-year-old is just acting out something, and you're now teaching them to know in that moment that what's pushing them from behind is sadness or anger or embarrassment.
02:13:34.000Just to have that recursive ability to reflect...
02:13:40.000That's already a major gain in kids that age.
02:13:44.000But yeah, you can learn it very early.
02:13:46.000Actually, this was something I was talking about with Stephen Fry on my podcast.
02:13:51.000Stephen was very – he's actually – he's adorable.
02:13:56.000He's like the nicest guy in the world.
02:14:07.000But he was fairly skeptical of just like, why would you ever have to train mindfulness or meditation?
02:14:12.000I mean, the analogy that came up to me, came up for me on the fly there, was that it is actually a lot like learning to read in the sense that None of us remember having gone through the ordeal of learning to read.
02:14:40.000And so these kinds of emotional tools and cognitive tools, just the ability to self-regulate emotion by becoming aware of it as a process, That is something that I think we could teach kids much earlier,
02:14:56.000and then we would be in the presence of young adults who would naturally have a facility for it where they wouldn't even remember how hard it was to acquire it.
02:15:08.000Yeah, what I was talking about earlier with Mike Tyson and his coaching.
02:15:14.000He essentially got mental coaching on how to accomplish one thing.
02:15:19.000Mental coaching on how to have the perfect mindset for one thing.
02:15:41.000To ask this kid to manage this state when you're talking about someone who just six years prior was virtually homeless and had no love in his life at all and was being hypnotized by some madman who's a boxing wizard who lives in the Catskills.
02:16:00.000And what we were talking about earlier about who you are now versus who you were 20, 30 years ago, when you meet Mike Tyson now, Mike Tyson is the sweetest, nicest, friendliest guy.
02:16:18.000And at one point in time, he was the scariest motherfucker on the planet Earth.
02:16:23.000Yeah, there's actually another sort of uncanny valley here in martial arts training that I spent a lot of time in.
02:16:29.000When you're training in martial arts and seeing the world through this lens of violence and potential violence, but you're training in a way that's never really putting your skills to the test.
02:16:42.000So you're basically, as a young man...
02:16:45.000You're living with this fundamental uncertainty as to whether or not you actually are capable of anything.
02:16:50.000So you're training in like fake martial arts, right?
02:17:25.000You're in this fairly toxic state of always preparing for violence that still is, in most people's lives, a pretty low order of probability that it's going to occur, and yet it's also backed by this fear of,
02:17:42.000you know, the ego fear of maybe you're just full of shit, and you're just going to get your ass kicked if this ever happens.
02:17:50.000With someone like Mike Tyson, there shouldn't be any uncertainty.
02:17:59.000If he's in a bar and somebody says, what are you looking at?
02:18:02.000At minimum, he doesn't have this fear of, if he walks away from that challenge, he knows he's walking away, not because he was scared maybe he's going to lose a fistfight with this guy.
02:18:14.000He's the best boxer on earth at that moment.
02:18:16.000It's that he's got way more to lose than the other guy.
02:18:20.000Why does he want to be rolling around in a parking lot with some stranger?
02:18:24.000So there's this very unhappy place that a lot of martial artists are in, which is they don't actually know what they're capable of, and they're living all the time with this kind of training software running in their heads,
02:18:46.000Well, it's one of the things that's so great about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.
02:19:02.000You are pressure testing it and you know that it works.
02:19:04.000I would argue there people still lose sight of the fact that in reality people are punching and they're not training a lot of punching or defense and then there are weapons and then there's a guy's friend who can come up and start kicking you in your head.
02:19:18.000It's like how good an idea was it to pull guard when someone else can walk up.
02:19:24.000But, you know, yeah, it's within its purview, yeah, you're working out all of your illusions, and that's one reason why so many of us find it addictive.
02:19:36.000Yeah, there's that, and there's also, they're so nice.
02:19:40.000And I think that's one of the reasons why they're so friendly is they're not carrying around all that bullshit that a lot of people carry around, including, you know, there's some grown men that have never been in a fight in their life and they get a couple of beers in them and they start talking crazy shit.
02:19:52.000I'm like, hey man, you don't even know how to fight.
02:19:55.000It's like someone who wants to jump into a NASCAR race who's never driven a car.
02:20:06.000I mean, to be a human being is complicated.
02:20:09.000To be a man in the face of altercations with other men is uniquely complicated.
02:20:15.000You know, the kind of altercations that men get into, the kind of bravado and chest puffing and shit talking and the consequences of those things.
02:20:23.000Like you were talking about Liam Neeson, his wife falling down and hitting her head.
02:20:27.000A friend of mine was working in a bar in Long Island and one of the bouncers got in a fight with some guy and punched the guy and knocked him out.
02:20:35.000The guy fell back, hit his head off the curb and died.
02:20:43.000Actually, before I had a podcast, my midlife crisis took the form of me getting really back into martial arts again after a hiatus of maybe 25 years.
02:20:55.000I had a lawyer who focused on self-defense law.
02:21:02.000He was constantly dealing with cases where someone is either claiming self-defense or is a legit self-defense claim.
02:21:10.000I mean, they punched someone and that person fell down and hit a fire hydrant and died, right?
02:21:14.000So they're trying to beat a murder rap, you know?
02:21:18.000And so I just had him in a blog post, had him walk me and I had a bunch of...
02:21:24.000I had two people comment, ask questions as well.
02:21:27.000I had Matt Thornton, who's John Cavanaugh's jujitsu coach, Yeah.
02:21:50.000Is at all preparing for the possible eventuality of violence?
02:21:55.000Because people who train with guns or own guns or carry knives or do martial arts don't actually understand what happens when they agree to fight somebody.
02:22:12.000Unless your M.O. is, and this should be your M.O., To avoid violence at virtually any cost, right?
02:22:19.000You're always just trying to leave the premises if there's some sort of challenge that could become violence.
02:22:25.000If that's not your MO, you're just wandering into potential situations where you can find yourself in court for having shoved a guy and he fell into the street and got run over, right?
02:22:37.000And then now you're the guy who's looking at the prospect of going to prison for a...
02:22:43.000Murder or, you know, second-degree murder.
02:22:48.000And so anyway, I had him walk me through all of the ins and outs of all that.
02:22:53.000It was a fascinating conversation because, yeah, there are people who, you know, I mean, there are extreme cases.
02:22:58.000There are women who have shot their totally crazy husband who's like waving a baseball bat at their heads.
02:23:05.000And they're in prison for years for this.
02:23:09.000Just real miscarriages of justice where you would think that it would be very easy to prove that she was in fear for her life in this case and this was a legitimate use of lethal force.
02:23:22.000It's just so hard when no one's there.
02:23:25.000I mean, if you have eyewitnesses or if it's a public thing that happens and there's video of it, but, you know, Someone does something to someone and no one's around and you punch someone and they get knocked out and they die and you say, no, this guy was threatening to kill me.
02:24:04.000So it's like, in the curriculum of learning how to fight, training in whatever martial art or arts...
02:24:12.000There's, in most cases, very little time spent training avoidance, right?
02:24:18.000And that's a real missing piece, because that is the most important thing to train.
02:24:24.000I mean, it's like you, you know, especially if you have real skills, right?
02:24:29.000Especially if you're walking around armed, right?
02:24:31.000I mean, the one interesting psychological corrective that Conceal Carry does for many people is that Once you're walking around with a gun, you realize the problem of what any altercation can become.
02:24:48.000You're not going to get into a shoving match with somebody if you're wearing a gun in your belt because if that escalates, you're pulling out your gun and then it's a decision of whether to kill somebody.
02:25:00.000I don't have a ton of experience in this area, but for all the firearm training I've done with people, I just get, you know, I know like former SWAT operators who are, you know, just out, they're constantly armed and These are like the last guys who are going to get involved in anything.
02:25:23.000I mean, they used to be cops, but now they don't even feel any burden to police anything.
02:25:56.000Things can turn to violence so quickly, especially with irrational people or untrained people or people that aren't aware of consequences or maybe can't process it well.
02:26:05.000And the crucial piece, which many seasoned fighters and professionals don't have, or I would think many don't have, is this valley where your ego concerns are not worked out.
02:26:25.000It's like when you feel the emotional burden of a loss of face...
02:26:30.000So if Jocko Willink is in a bar and someone says something nasty to him or to his wife, Jocko doesn't have anything to prove.
02:26:42.000So Jocko knows that it's time to get out of the bar because he doesn't want to deal with this psychopath who doesn't know who he's dealing with.
02:26:50.000But someone who's not trained like Jocko...
02:27:51.000Your genes are never going to make it to the next stage.
02:27:54.000This is a controversial thing to say, and I got in trouble, or one of my podcast guests, Gavin DeBecker, the security guru, got in trouble on my podcast, talking about the primacy of intuition here.
02:28:49.000We have terrible intuitions for statistics and probability theory.
02:28:55.000Whole careers and Nobel Prizes have been won on people like Danny Kahneman have shown us how it's not only that our intuitions are bad for these judgments, but they're reliably bad.
02:29:10.000And we can understand there's a structure to how bad they are.
02:29:14.000But for judging people who are dangerous, who make the hair stand up on the back of our neck for reasons we can't understand, where the eye contact was wrong or just the way they were—I mean,
02:29:31.000just like a— What's called a witness check, you know?
02:32:27.000I mean, just, you know, they're tells, like, you know, too much information.
02:32:31.000You know, like the people who are giving you superfluous information as a kind of overcorrection.
02:32:39.000They're anticipating that you're going to doubt their story, and so they're filling in, like, blanks that you don't even need filled in, right?
02:32:45.000And there are sort of patterns to that, but...
02:32:51.000And again, we pick up on a lot of this stuff without consciously being aware of what's going on.
02:32:57.000We just know that that's, like, not a person I want to spend any more time with, right?
02:33:02.000But, you know, there may be more of a literature on this than I know about, but a lot of this is not well understood.
02:33:10.000And, I mean, people like Paul Ekman have done a lot of stuff on micro-expressions.
02:33:17.000That goes back probably 30 years at this point.
02:33:21.000And there are people who are outliers who are great at detecting micro-expressions where they really just understand what's going on.
02:33:30.000And AI eventually will be, if it isn't there already, will be much better than we are at doing this.
02:33:37.000I'm sort of scared of them getting that wrong.
02:33:41.000Microexpressions are funny because they remind me of microaggressions, which is one of the weirder social justice warrior things, like things that used to be just slights where someone was just like slightly rooted.
02:34:01.000How dare you question my authenticity.
02:34:04.000Yeah, microaggressions, it's weird that that's actually accepted, that this is something they're actually pushing in certain schools, that microaggressions are a real thing.
02:34:14.000Christina Hoff Summers just wrote something about, or she put something on her Twitter today about a Yale article that was written today.
02:34:23.000That was put out today about documenting politically incorrect behavior so that someday in the future when someone is running for Congress or is up for Supreme Court or something like that, you could go back to their college days and remember when they said something.
02:34:38.000I mean, one of the examples this woman uses in this post was compared a woman to a large animal, a woman's body to a large animal in a private text message that she should have, oh, I should have screenshot.
02:35:41.000Maybe that will just be a cure for the problem, because at a certain point, we'll be dealing with people who were basically born on Facebook.
02:36:22.000Yeah, what I think is really important that what you were saying earlier was that there has to be some sort of path to redeeming themselves.
02:36:30.000That there has to be some accepted way that someone can go about redeeming themselves and we can allow them to re-enter society without constantly bringing it up or judging them by it or always attributing their past behavior to who they are right now.
02:36:45.000I mean, this should be so simple, but look at my collaboration with Majid Nawaz, right?
02:37:34.000All I need is a clear path that he took out of the darkness to understand why he's a valid collaborator now.
02:37:41.000Actually, on that point, I've got people breathing down my neck to tell you or tell your audience, this is how powerful you are, Joe Rogan, that a documentary is coming out on our collaboration, and it's out now.
02:40:48.000The thing that was kind of dishonest about the re-scandalizing of it was that in the context of that conversation, it was framed by the fact that they really were referencing one of the more famous pieces of comedy in history.
02:41:06.000They were referencing Chris Rock's act Yeah,
02:41:27.000that's one of those things, though, where they're just looking for more things to be mad at Louis for.