Singapore is a country that has a zero tolerance policy on drugs. They hang people who are caught with even a tiny amount of drugs. It's a strange place to grow up, but it's a place that has done a lot in terms of nation building and has a lot of great things going on in it's history. I talk about it with my friend Joe, who grew up in the city-state, and we talk about what it's like growing up there and what it means to be a Singaporean. We also talk about how it went from being a third world country to being a first world country in a blink of an eye, and how it's one of the most beautiful places I've ever lived. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE and tell a friend about what you think of the podcast! I'll be looking out for the next episode next week. Timestamps: 3:00 - What do you think about Singapore? 4:20 - How did it go from Third World to First World? 5:30 - What does it mean to be Singaporean? 6:40 - How does it feel like to live there? 7:00 What is it like to be an Asian? 8:15 - How do you feel about it? 9:00- What is the culture here? 10:30- How does the country look like in general? 11: Is it a strange country? 12:00 What are the culture? 13:00: What do they do to me? 14:00 Caning? 15: How do I feel about the culture in my generation? 16:00 Is it weird? 17:00 Do you think it s a weird place? 18:00 Does it seem like it s expensive? 19:00 How did I feel like it's better than China? 21:00 Are they have a good place to live in my lifetime? 22:00 Why do I like it better? 23:00 Should I go to Singapore now? 24:00 Would you like to go back to my hometown? 25:00 More? 26:00 Have a question or suggestion? 27:00 Will you like the country I'm going to come back to Singapore again?
00:02:44.000There's almost no welfare, at least in the sense of how we understand welfare.
00:02:50.000But it's a hybrid system, so there's a lot of zero capital gains taxes, zero state taxes, very easy to set up a business.
00:03:00.000So he managed to attract a lot of foreign businesses to set up their multinational corporation headquarters in Asia, because the other alternative would be maybe China.
00:03:10.000But China would probably end up stealing all your corporate secrets, your intellectual property.
00:03:16.000But Singapore was billed as this is the country that protects rule of law.
00:04:47.000It's both insightful but also very funny.
00:04:50.000Yeah, I try to play both sides, but the problem is like, you know, I think today there's a bit of a, if you're a girl and you're kind of funny, there's a bit of a sense that people really take you that seriously.
00:05:03.000So I've been told to tone down on jokes.
00:05:06.000Well, I'm also, you know, I run a major non-profit organization.
00:05:11.000Do you want to tell everybody what it is or keep it on the down low?
00:05:15.000No, it's a really, well, it's kind of right up your alley.
00:05:18.000You know, it's an organization that really tries to promote pluralistic thinking and, you know, basically exporting ideas to part of the world that it's often censored.
00:05:30.000And you have narratives that are just not, you know, not exposed to, people are not exposed to the Middle East.
00:05:37.000So, you know, we thought, you know, we spent like, what, $8 trillion on the war on terror?
00:05:44.000We marched in and said, okay, we're going to bring freedom and democracy to people.
00:05:48.000But if there were no cultural institutions to kind of nudge people to understand why they should value freedom and democracy, is it really a surprise that it failed to take root there?
00:06:00.000So that's what we basically, the organizations call Ideas Beyond Borders.
00:06:08.000We basically acquire the rights to books that are not available there, translate them into Arabic for free, and then we just load it up on the library site.
00:06:21.000Anyone can basically access that, download it.
00:09:36.000Some people are immune to THC. Some people get withdrawals too.
00:09:41.000I've talked to people that get actual physical withdrawals from marijuana.
00:09:45.000I used to be really skeptical about that, but these are people that I actually trust.
00:09:49.000And they're like, wow, I would, you know, when they would go on tour, like if they have to go places and they didn't have pot, they'd get, literally, they'd get shaky, they'd feel weird, and then they realize, like, oh, this is, my body's withdrawing from THC. Apparently it's very rare,
00:10:04.000but common enough so that it's in the literature.
00:10:08.000They really, they've documented people that have, like, a physical response to withdrawing from marijuana.
00:10:13.000Yeah, I mean, I'm looking forward to more research being done on this stuff anyway.
00:10:43.000You see it in the Philippines as well.
00:10:45.000Duterte has this extrajudicial drug war that he's been launching.
00:10:51.000I understand the concern with the plight I understand that people are really worried that people getting addicted to drugs ruin their lives.
00:11:03.000It devastates families, people dying of overdoses from fentanyl and all these different hazards that are associated with drug use and drug dealing.
00:12:50.000So illegal sales went through the roof and the people that were selling it were criminals.
00:12:55.000I just think it's part of the human spirit, you know, that if you say you can't have something, there's an old Arabic proverb, that which is prohibited is always wanted.
00:13:05.000And whatever you kind of like, you just drive it underground if you try to ban it.
00:13:10.000It's the whole spirit of punk rock, of like, F you to the system.
00:13:14.000And that just lies in almost every human heart.
00:13:17.000We actually see that with our books, for example.
00:13:21.000A lot of books are actually transmitted on these telegram groups in Arabic.
00:13:27.000Books that Sam Harris writes, Richard Dawkins, these kinds of ideas that are really super censored in the Middle East.
00:13:36.000So that's kind of the gap that we're trying to plug right now.
00:13:42.000It's that since books are not available in that language, I think there's this crazy statistic.
00:13:48.000More books are translated between English and Spanish in one year than English and Arabic in a thousand years.
00:14:14.000You've got to meet people where they are, right?
00:14:16.000So I think the statistic when we first started, 10% of English Wikipedia was actually in Arabic, which means that every time, like, for example, let's say you're like, oh, Jamie, go Google this, right?
00:16:42.000But they really mean just read this one thing.
00:16:45.000And, you know, just the sort of like habits of a free mind are not really cultivated.
00:16:52.000And also when you're taught, I mean, growing up, not to question things.
00:16:55.000And in part, I understand because I think when you grow up in an Asian household with, like, you know, tiger parents, there's this sense of, like, you don't question my authority, you know.
00:17:06.000So it permeates culture from a very, very young age.
00:17:08.000And imagine, like, if you kind of grow up in that environment, you're going to internalize all those things.
00:17:15.000And that's why it kind of, you know, It follows you over time.
00:17:20.000So when you were in school, you're taught no questions.
00:17:23.000It's not like here where it is like, there's no such thing as a stupid question, Chad.
00:17:35.000But I understand what you're saying and that must be really interesting for you to go from this one fairly restrictive environment to a fairly open environment.
00:17:45.000And did that shift that happened in you and being exposed to all these different ideas, did that spark this desire to help other people sort of expand their ideas and what they're exposed to?
00:17:58.000Yeah, because, well, I felt like a fish out of water growing up in Singapore.
00:18:01.000I was always the person that, like, the teachers had a call.
00:18:03.000Like, you know, your daughter's asking too many questions, she's disrupting the class.
00:18:10.000I was that kid who was just like, you know, excuse me, but why do the dinosaurs, why is it in the Bible that the dinosaurs and human beings walked, you know, basically like days apart when like we know from science that, you know, it was millions of years and fossils.
00:19:08.000And if you, say, grow up in the Middle East, asking a question could be death, right?
00:19:12.000If you even remotely, like, say in Saudi Arabia especially, remotely reveal that you might be having atheistic thoughts, that's death.
00:19:19.000So it's like we're talking about different scales and degrees of censorship and consequences for that.
00:19:24.000And I think when I met my co-founder, Faisal, I was like, okay, I guess I had issues with the country I grew up in.
00:19:31.000But for him, it was – he ended up almost being killed by al-Qaeda for just like starting a blog talking about the importance of secularism and countering violent extremism.
00:19:43.000Yeah, that's how he came here as a refugee.
00:19:45.000So I'm like, oh shit, maybe they are – How did he almost get killed by al-Qaeda?
00:19:50.000Well, because when the US invaded Baghdad, and he was living in Baghdad at the time, and Al-Qaeda took over his neighborhood, once there was a void, Saddam was ousted, right?
00:20:31.000Bridget actually recently interviewed him on her podcast.
00:20:34.000And I get the sense that like, oh shit, like the consequence of saying what you think there is like, at least in my case, it was just like, hey, maybe I might go to jail in Singapore.
00:20:49.000I think it's hard for people in America to really grasp what that environment must be like because we're so accustomed to this idea of freedom of speech and it's so ingrained.
00:21:10.000I think, you know, as long as America still can celebrate Mavericks and not just tolerate them, but actually celebrate them, we're going to be fine, right?
00:21:31.000Of human behavior when you see, you know, any form of dictatorship or control or propaganda or controlled by the state or by industry, that stuff that you see in other countries is human beings in 2020. I mean,
00:21:48.000we would like to think that our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and all of our ideals and what this country was founded on is going to keep it from deteriorating like that, and most likely it will.
00:21:58.000But the reality is, those people in Iraq are human beings in 2020, and they are living in a completely different way than we're living right now, on the same timeline, because things did not go well there, and they're stuck in this horrible situation.
00:22:15.000Where they are controlled by these religious fanatics and they are stuck and there's not a lot that they can do other than escape.
00:22:25.000And, you know, right now also like with the rise of China, they're also, you know, starting to use like basically some form of like electronic tyranny, right?
00:22:35.000They're able to just really censor the internet in a way that's been unprecedented.
00:22:44.000None of these things that you and I can just open on our apps can be accessed in China.
00:22:49.000So the way they just control information and now exporting those same tools to other authoritarian countries around the world, that part to me is dangerous because I think both Faisal and I came to America with this like, all right, this is the place that we can finally be ourselves and think for ourselves,
00:23:05.000And we're starting to see that the whole world seems to be kind of going in the other direction.
00:23:11.000So there was a shift in China and the shift was it was initially a completely communist society and now capitalism, at least in a monetary sense, is embraced.
00:23:26.000So there's this giant shift in what China actually is, which corresponds to this huge growth.
00:23:35.000Is it possible that in the future this shift could move on to other aspects of Chinese culture like discourse or the way they view the government or even some form of democracy?
00:23:52.000But the way China has behaved now, you know, they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics.
00:23:58.000That's the official name of this long-drawn game to, you know, institute market reforms, usher in riches for the middle class, lift a lot of people out of poverty.
00:24:10.000But in a very controlled way, in a way that's like...
00:24:14.000See, that's the thing about Asian culture that people don't understand.
00:24:34.000And basically what they're trying to say is that, okay, we're going to lift a lot of people out of poverty, but your generation has to make sacrifices.
00:24:43.000It's about building a strong China and implicitly also about, you know, ensuring that the CCP stays in power, the Chinese Communist Party stays in power.
00:24:52.000But it's that you might have to give up, you know, personal sacrifices for the sake of China versus the American dream is bottom up.
00:25:06.000And if you do that, that's the American dream.
00:25:08.000And if you achieve a certain level of happiness, if you achieve, you know, it's all like, it's bottom up.
00:25:12.000It's not centralized and it's not something that the Chinese government is kind of trying to stuff down your throat.
00:25:18.000And China's willing to play the long game.
00:25:22.000It is still a Leninist Marxist government.
00:25:27.000Xi Jinping still believes in all of that.
00:25:29.000That's why it's still so totalitarian.
00:25:31.000But they know that the way to gain power in the world is to get rich.
00:25:38.000And they did it on the back of trade with other countries through very unfair practices, actually, in many cases.
00:25:47.000I think there are a lot of estimates of how much they've actually stolen from the United States in terms of intellectual property, corporate espionage, now even academia is being infected.
00:28:13.000We should be doing everything we can to not allow Huawei to have this big market share.
00:28:22.000And the person who started it was somebody that had a lot of party connections to the general or something.
00:28:30.000And they really operate in a way that's very opaque.
00:28:35.000And anyone doing business in China will have to have connections to the government, especially when you're that big.
00:28:43.000And because it's a government that has such totalitarian control over everything, You can expect that whatever information or that they would have to answer to the government, whatever the government wants.
00:28:56.000If you're willing to put your privacy in the hands of an entity like that, you know, go ahead.
00:29:02.000But know also that the Chinese government has enacted all these mass surveillance policies.
00:29:34.000And just a lot of party connections and...
00:29:39.000It's also heavily subsidized by the government, which is one of the ways that China has been competing unfairly in global markets.
00:29:48.000You can drive out innovation in the United States by making sure that Your local version is so competitive on prices that they can't match you.
00:29:58.000So in a way, it's like a form of economic warfare, which is one of the issues that Trump has really pushed back on.
00:30:30.000It was the whole Thomas Friedman position when he wrote about it in Lexus and the Olive Tree, that if we globalize the world, that you lift a lot of people out of poverty, your economic pie grows, but your politics shrink.
00:31:08.000And if you think about what happened with the NBA, you know, the whole Daryl Morey tweet.
00:31:15.000Yeah, explain that because that was shocking to me because the way they were capitulating to China, I was, you know, I was a little stunned because it was so open.
00:31:25.000So, Daryl Morey, who is the GM of the Houston Rockets, he tweeted out basically a little picture that showed that he supported the Hong Kong protesters.
00:31:38.000And the Hong Kong protesters have been at it since July of last year, 2019. They have been protesting the incursion of Chinese control into their supposedly autonomous region.
00:31:51.000China promised them that there would be two systems, one country, two systems after the handover in 1997 from the British to China.
00:32:00.000They've slowly kind of eroded that in many ways.
00:32:05.000And their freedoms have been kind of, you know, diminishing over time.
00:32:09.000The straw that broke the camel's back was actually this policy that they passed, this law they passed that said that anyone can be extradited to China for trials, basically.
00:32:19.000It was after a case that happened, a criminal case.
00:32:22.000And the Hong Kong people knew that this law, if it goes in effect, basically gives the Chinese government legal right to Disappear or kidnap anyone and bring them for trial in some sort of kangaroo or show trial in China.
00:32:35.000So booksellers, it's always the booksellers in Hong Kong have been kidnapped because they were publishing these insider accounts like Dirty Secrets of the CCP whenever there was a leak.
00:32:47.000Because the Chinese Communist Party is huge.
00:33:18.000Basically, it would just have allowed China to do that legally this time.
00:33:22.000So the Hong Kong youth were up in arms.
00:33:24.000They were tired of all the ways that their way of life had changed since the British handed it over.
00:33:32.000And in a way, they were kind of pining for the good old times, the good old times when they were under an English colonial master, which was one of those moments for anyone on the left.
00:33:47.000And of course, you know how big the China market is for the NBA, right?
00:33:52.000Like all these players have contracts with them.
00:33:54.000In fact, the Houston Rockets had a lot of contracts with the Chinese CCTV for broadcasts.
00:34:00.000They also had like merchandising opportunities, sneakers that were made there.
00:34:06.000And that caused a huge, huge outcry in China.
00:34:10.000They were just like, oh, he's disrespecting us.
00:34:13.000And they were able to force him to basically make a groveling tweet that said, oh, I'm sorry for hurting the feelings of The Chinese people.
00:34:22.000And then like all the other, some NBA players actually came out and, you know, kind of took the side of the Chinese government.
00:34:30.000Like, oh wait, who are we to, you know, they kind of like did this backpedal thing when they're so strong on other forms of activism here.
00:34:38.000Like the NBA when it came to the North Carolina, the bathroom bill, you remember?
00:37:31.000And then I think the recent, the Top Gun, the movie that's coming out with Tom Cruise too, partially financed by China, and they have these, like his jacket, people noticed that there was a patch that was like missing, and it turns out like that patch, it was like a,
00:37:47.000for some reason China was just triggered by it, and it was gone.
00:39:32.000I mean, Google was developing a search engine for China.
00:39:37.000Well, I knew some people at Google while that was going on, and their position was, if we don't do this, they're going to copy our search engine and just steal all the intellectual property.
00:39:49.000Or we can work with them and provide a censored version of Google.
00:39:54.000And I remember sitting there going, this is almost like legalizing drugs.
00:40:16.000And provides them with, you know, the ability to filter out information.
00:40:20.000But I think also that if there's also an argument that if it was Google, at least maybe they have one tentacle in China, and so therefore it might be able to change things or keep a pulse, you know, have their pulse on something.
00:40:34.000Well, at least they blocked Huawei, or I shouldn't say at least, but it's interesting that they blocked Huawei from using all of their apps.
00:41:25.000If you don't have Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and whatever the equivalents are in different countries, you're kind of shit out of luck.
00:41:36.000I think reciprocity is a good policy to abide by, right?
00:41:39.000So if China can influence us, if you want, because the Chinese, they always use their market as like, we'll shut you out of our market if you don't do this.
00:41:47.000Well, we should be doing the same, which I think is what Trump had tried to do with the tariffs.
00:41:51.000We're going to shut you out of our market.
00:41:52.000We're going to penalize you unless you open up some things.
00:41:56.000There have been unfair trade practices for a while.
00:42:00.000It's hard for us to understand what's really going on because the news will show this anecdotal story of a farmer who's upset because he's losing money because of Trump's tariffs, and then people go, oh, tariffs bad.
00:42:13.000I think to have a really comprehensive view of it, it's going to take a lot of studying.
00:42:18.000You're going to have to dive deep and really try to understand the economics behind it all, and I think most people aren't willing to do that.
00:42:24.000So we get sort of sold a narrative on the news.
00:42:28.000I think the same thing happened with so-called industries that were important to our national security, like steel.
00:42:36.000Those are things that we want to be careful how much we actually do outsource to overseas because there might come a time when we'll need those.
00:42:45.000I mean, what happens if you globalize to the point that China's producing all your steel and then we have a war?
00:42:51.000And where's all steel going to come from?
00:43:47.000And there's no hope in your eyes of China eventually becoming what they hoped it would be once capitalism was sort of introduced?
00:43:56.000If people got information, if there were ways to resist the encroaching tyranny, especially digital tyranny, in all forms, so it's not just mass surveillance, all this AI stuff, they're sort of collecting people's facial scans.
00:44:17.000It feels like it's a science fiction film, frankly.
00:44:22.000If, I don't know, unless the revolution kind of comes from within and enough people woke up, maybe it can be averted.
00:44:30.000But otherwise, we're just going to, you know, it's going to be headed towards this weird bipolar world where there's a new axis and a new allies.
00:44:47.000You've seen like Russia has taken the side of China.
00:44:50.000Pakistan has taken the side of China now.
00:44:52.000So there is an alliance kind of forming.
00:44:57.000You can see it in – you know what happened with the UN passed this resolution condemning China's treatment of the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang.
00:45:05.000And the signatories to that bill, that UN bill was basically the United States, New Zealand, a lot of European powers.
00:45:16.000These are countries that are often accused of being Islamophobes because they won't accept Muslim refugees or that many Muslim refugees.
00:45:24.000But you have Pakistan and even some majority of the Gulf countries siding with China, defending China on their treatment with Islam.
00:50:17.000The United States practices what you call efficiency wages, which is, you know, they kind of pay people a little bit more to extract a better performance, right?
00:50:28.000But in Singapore, that's not the case.
00:50:30.000But in Singapore, the streets are taken care of better, the bridges, all that stuff, infrastructure.
00:50:36.000You know, I tweeted maybe like last week saying something like, especially now we're in like political debate season.
00:50:43.000I'm so tired of this whole left-right argument, like small government, no, big government, government's a problem, government's a solution.
00:51:28.000Social cohesion is engineered in Singapore.
00:51:31.000So it's a very, very multicultural, multi-ethnic society.
00:51:36.000You have Malay Muslims, Indians, Hindus, Chinese who are Buddhists, Christians, and, you know, Caucasians all living on an island city-state that's about 5 million in terms of population.
00:51:50.000And how the government manages this multicultural project is that 80% of people actually live in public housing.
00:52:10.000So you imagine like a housing state that basically mirrors like, okay, if the total makeup of the country is 60% Chinese, 20% Malay Muslims, it has to follow.
00:52:22.000So you can't have basically an area like Birmingham in the UK where all the Muslim immigrants or something like Dearborn, Michigan or Minnesota with all the Somali immigrants.
00:52:58.000It's like everybody would love if the country, if all of our neighborhoods were integrated and everybody just got along with everybody.
00:53:04.000I think I've always felt like that's one of the things that New York has a large advantage over Los Angeles is interaction.
00:53:10.000People are constantly on the subway and walking on the streets with everybody of all different classes, all different backgrounds and I think that's really good.
00:54:12.000Let me explain to people who he is if you didn't listen to the podcast that I did with him.
00:54:16.000Daryl Davis is a musician and he was doing some shows at this country western bar and met some people from the Klan and through just communicating with them and being friendly with them over a period of many months he got them to quit.
00:54:33.000He didn't even request it and then over the course of several years he's gotten more than 200 people to leave the Klan Leave neo-Nazi organizations and they give him their robes and their flags and he brought them all in here.
00:55:24.000And he quit just from Daryl being this really friendly, articulate, brilliant guy who clearly didn't fit their narrative of what they thought, their racist depiction of what a black man is.
00:55:52.000But they were kind of like a secular, so the mythicists believed that Jesus Christ was, like, he didn't really exist as a historical figure.
00:56:36.000Basically because, you know, when the conference was happening and Tifa kind of found out about it, they started protesting the conference.
00:56:45.000They called the venue to basically, you know, get it canceled.
00:56:50.000They said it was a neo-Nazi rally, Klan rally.
00:56:54.000Ironically, you know, the greatest irony was that Daryl Davis was there, and he got tainted as well.
00:57:01.000So I started calling this the political one-drop rule, where it's like kind of what happened to you.
00:57:07.000If you are associating or talking to somebody that—or just a whole range of people, like normal distribution of people— You will be tainted by the most right-wing person that you're in orbit with.
00:57:22.000So when we had the after-party to the conference, and Tifa was gathered outside the bar, the Pittman, New Jersey people, because Tim Pool was there too, the Pittman, New Jersey police had to station themselves outside of the bar, and they were kind of protecting this event.
00:57:39.000It's ridiculous because You know, yes, you might find Sargon's politics objectionable, but why is everybody who's associated, you know, with the conference also lumped in with this?
00:57:52.000And why is the response that this needs police protection?
00:57:56.000It's just we're just talking about it.
00:58:00.000No, this desire to shut down speech is very dangerous, and it's very stupid.
00:58:04.000It's childish, and it's this thing that it gets...
00:58:09.000It just gets reinforced in that culture, the culture of either Antifa or people that support Antifa.
00:58:15.000They don't understand the consequences of shutting down speech.
00:58:17.000You think you're just going to shut down speech and de-platform people that have marginally offensive views?
00:58:23.000And the problem with that is, first of all, you close the door for them to be influenced in a positive way or for other people to learn from them being influenced in a positive way.
00:58:33.000And second of all, the way to shut down ideas is not Stop the person from talking.
00:58:39.000It's to combat those ideas with better ideas.
00:58:42.000And then everyone around them gets to see the discourse.
00:58:45.000When you have these debates online and people discuss these things online, it benefits millions of people.
00:58:51.000When you shut that down, it benefits nobody but your cause.
00:59:02.000So if you're shutting that down and saying these people are Nazis, well, you're wrong and you're censoring people that are trying to get to the bottom of things.
00:59:11.000And getting to the bottom of things means discussing things and trying to figure out tenable solutions or comfortable middle ground.
01:00:05.000It was that she tried to— It's that, okay, if you're a good Christian, you might get corrupted by bad ideas, so we have to ban, I don't know, like Harry Potter books are banned in my household.
01:00:16.000It's like we had to ban all these because it encouraged witchcraft.
01:00:20.000So I wasn't allowed to celebrate Halloween.
01:00:28.000It's like, this is satanic, this is evil, and it has taken on this religious dimension, this liturgical dimension, because they're always so concerned that the corruption is just going, like, they're going to drift to the right.
01:01:18.000I think they have an infantile perspective on ideas, and they're worried about people being indoctrinated.
01:01:23.000They're worried about, but they're not worried.
01:01:25.000Look, if you have someone talking And this person is preaching some ridiculous thing and someone starts becoming indoctrinated and gravitates towards that.
01:01:36.000The real problem is that these people that are being indoctrinated are gullible and they're foolish.
01:02:09.000Make this conversation about other intelligent people that disagree with them, like Ben Shapiro.
01:02:13.000Ben Shapiro should be deplatformed because Ben Shapiro is indoctrinating people towards right-wing ideology by having these salient points.
01:02:24.000And articulate sentences and these rants that he goes on.
01:04:22.000I think that's different, because you don't want to murder people all day, every day.
01:04:25.000I know a lot of gay dudes who want to fuck dudes all the time.
01:04:28.000It's like God did a crazy thing to their system.
01:04:31.000And for you to believe in God, but have a problem with that, to me, is ridiculous.
01:04:37.000So now we're banking on these really ancient words that were written by people with no grasp of science, no understanding of biology, no understanding of the culture of the world, no understanding of the sheer number of these people and taking into perspective that you're literally dealing with I don't know what percentage of the population is gay,
01:08:35.000I feel like at this stage of civilization, we have to figure out what stuff we're going to abandon from the old days and what stuff we're going to keep.
01:08:46.000And we've already abandoned a lot of things, right?
01:08:50.000In Christianity, if you leave, they don't kill you anymore.
01:08:54.000They got rid of some of the things during the Enlightenment.
01:08:57.000They changed a lot of the aspects of Christianity that we associate today with more repressive religions.
01:09:25.000The person who was coordinating some of the protests that was telling us, we want to give this book out to the people, because a lot of these youth, they're really...
01:09:33.000Jaded by theocrats in the region, by authoritarianism.
01:09:51.000One of the greatest intellectual achievements of Europe came out of there, right?
01:09:56.000This idea of the social contract, of, you know, eroding monarchy, absolute monarchy, separating church and state, all these wonderful innovations and ideas came out of the Enlightenment.
01:10:10.000And it was, you know, promoted this idea of, like, maybe people should be free to have their own conscience and think differently.
01:10:18.000And that's something that really, really is needed in the Middle East.
01:10:23.000Well, I think the way that your organization is going about it is probably the best way to get books translated, get ideas translated to people that maybe weren't ever exposed to these concepts before.
01:10:42.000So, you know, pluralism, I see that as, you know, that's what we're doing, promoting pluralism, this idea that you can have all these competing narratives.
01:10:51.000And so you asked me what my culture, you know, like when I came to America, like how, what was my experience just moving here?
01:10:58.000Yes, it was very freeing and liberating because I felt like I went to a place that was pluralistic, that tolerated all the weirdos.
01:11:05.000And then, maybe in like 2014, you know, things started to change, at least on campus.
01:11:11.000When pluralism wasn't tolerated, you started to see the rise of this sort of more intolerant, you have to kind of kowtow to this intersectionality and critical race theory.
01:11:28.000So that was an interesting experience and I think was ultimately very detrimental to the actual project of liberalism.
01:11:41.000That's the really frustrating part of it.
01:11:43.000What you're claiming to be preaching, your ideology is actually working against it ultimately behind the scenes and you just can't seem to see the pattern where it's going.
01:11:54.000You can't stop people from discussing things and say that you support free speech.
01:12:33.000He's great at it because he's logical and very intelligent.
01:12:38.000So when these kids are saying these things that they just learned last month in their gender studies class and they're yelling it at him and he breaks it down.
01:12:49.000But those kind of discussions are important, first of all, so that these kids realize that, hey, there is this brilliant right-wing guy that can decimate your argument really quickly.
01:13:25.000That's one of the culture shock things for me when I first moved to America.
01:13:28.000It was that, you know, I think a lot of American kids were told, like, participation trophy culture, a lot of them were told that they were the best, like, you know, like, Tommy, like, you know, there's nothing you can do.
01:13:53.000And nobody told them, like, are you telling me that, like, they've been telling their friends, oh, I'm practicing, I'm going on American Idol.
01:13:59.000Did nobody tell them that, bro, like, you should just be singing in the shower?
01:14:05.000Well, there's a couple things going on.
01:14:06.000First of all, some of those people are trolls.
01:14:09.000They're going on that they know they suck, and they're going on because they're going to get on TV, and the best way to get on TV is actually to suck.
01:14:15.000American Idolists, you don't have any talent?
01:15:08.000See, the thing is, you know, if you grow up in Asia, you're told that you're just a dumbass all the time and you're kind of constantly beat down.
01:15:15.000You know, if you come home with like 99 over 100 for your math exam, your parents are not going to say, pat, pat, well done.
01:15:20.000They're going to say, where was that one point?
01:17:30.000The harder you work, the more likely you're going to achieve something.
01:17:33.000That's why there's just such a natural ally in terms of to rely on this group block as a political group.
01:17:42.000That's the undiscussed racism in academics, is the way Asian people are treated when they're applying for major universities, particularly for Harvard.
01:17:52.000Like, they literally, you have to score higher if you're Asian, because there's so many Asian people that get in, they made it more difficult.
01:18:58.000Ultimately, this is about what Aristotle called the telos, right?
01:19:02.000What is the telos of higher education?
01:19:04.000What's the ultimate goal or essence of higher education?
01:19:07.000Is it to just produce perfect cogs in the machine of the global economy?
01:19:12.000Or is it, you know, to produce engaged citizens or whatever it is, right?
01:19:16.000So however you define that question, what's the purpose of higher education?
01:19:20.000You could tailor your entrance methods to meet that.
01:19:24.000And in Harvard's case, they decided, well, you know, we're going to, instead of just looking at your GPA, your We want to interview the person.
01:19:36.000We want to see what your personality is like.
01:20:16.000Um, you know, I don't know if it was done specifically for that, but I think Harvard has a, again, monocultures suck in general.
01:20:27.000So, you know, if you're gonna, even for me, like, I was coming to study in America, like, you know, 10,000 miles away, right, from the place I grew up.
01:20:35.000I don't really want to go to school without a lot of Asians.
01:20:38.000Because I could have just stayed there, frankly.
01:20:40.000But I was looking for something that wasn't a monoculture.
01:20:45.000You have to just expand your mind, right?
01:20:47.000So at the end of the day, the issue with Harvard is that it was taking federal money.
01:20:52.000And if you see Harvard as a stepping stone to a career, to a future...
01:21:12.000So is it possible that they were just trying to enhance the way people communicate on campus, and so they sort of emphasized personality and emphasized social interactions, and in doing so, they penalized Asians without being aware of it?
01:23:24.000They're more dedicated, more disciplined?
01:23:26.000People are very uncomfortable to talk about differences in group outcome because we have to kind of make everybody the same or else there must be some sort of systematic thing.
01:23:35.000But I think that Asians, because they're so hardworking and because they don't complain, people get away with this stuff, where they get away with discrimination against them.
01:25:16.000It looks like they're trying to fuck Bernie over again, just like they did in 2016. We watched that coin flip over and over again yesterday from Iowa.
01:26:22.000Did he clean up all the problems of that city?
01:26:25.000He's done enough to make people notice, but I think the African-American community is not happy about some issues that He talks really well, and he's handsome, and he's a veteran.
01:28:29.000Well, I mean, he also aligns himself with people at Cornel West, who is brilliant and has some amazing ideas about that and looks at it from an accurate and educated perspective.
01:28:42.000I think a lot of the wokeness is a sign of a cultural shift in the right direction.
01:29:01.000All these things that trouble us about the influence that money has on politics.
01:29:06.000And Bernie clearly stands against all that stuff.
01:29:09.000And I think that when you see this woke stuff, even though it goes amok, you have to look at it on a spectrum.
01:29:16.000It's like the crazy Antifa people who demand 100% compliance with woke ideology or they'll hit you in the head with a bike lock versus people who want single mothers to be able to have free education and free healthcare and give them the economic support that they have to raise their family.
01:29:36.000And hopefully give their children a chance at achieving a successful, comfortable life in this world, versus suppress them, versus keep them in this fucked up system that just throws them in the meat grinder with everybody else.
01:30:25.000There's nothing wrong with being conservative fiscally.
01:30:28.000There's nothing wrong with being conservative in the way you dress or the way you behave.
01:30:33.000It's like when you go far right, then things get ugly.
01:30:38.000The outside edges on both parties are the mess.
01:30:42.000Most people, reasonable people, if they could have conversations with folks, Even if they disagreed on certain things, they'd find themselves somewhere in a comfortable Discussion where you could at least sort through the ideas and try to figure out why you think the way you think and why I think the way I think,
01:31:04.000how we disagree, and are you right or am I wrong?
01:31:09.000Like, I want to know, you know, and most people don't.
01:31:12.000These kind of conversations, like trying to figure out if the person who opposes your philosophy or your perspective is right and you're wrong, it's very uncomfortable for people.
01:31:47.000And it's so rare nowadays, this dividing line between Ryan and Lev.
01:31:51.000Things are just so hyper, hyper-polarized.
01:31:55.000Guys will go on a Fox News show and people scream at them, how dare you use that?
01:32:02.000Like Jimmy Dore just did Tucker Carlson's show and people were just shitting on him all over the place for doing that and using his platform.
01:35:34.000We shouldn't be going down this route.
01:35:37.000It's been very comforting for me to see how many left-wing, intelligent, well-read, educated people actually enjoy watching the UFC. I've talked to so many of them, like, you're a fan!
01:45:04.000The reason is, what happened is, in the 1950s, when American GIs were in the Philippines, they introduced pool to the Philippines, and they started playing under really bad conditions, because it's very moist outside, humidity, the tables roll really slowly,
01:45:20.000and so they developed a lot of really good skills under bad conditions, and then they would go to good conditions.
01:45:27.000And they also have a gambling culture.
01:45:29.000So there's a lot of gambling involved in pool.
01:46:25.000That's why I have a, you know, one of the solutions I have for, you know, one of the questions of our time is how we fix journalism, right?
01:46:36.000One of the things I really think we need to do, because I'm not one of those people that thinks like the MSM or like the media is the problem.
01:46:41.000I mean, I'm kind of part of the media now.
01:46:44.000I write for Spectator USA, which is, so does Bridget and some of the other people that you've had on your show as well.
01:46:59.000I wanted to get back to that because you were talking about, well, we'll go ahead with this thing about how to fix journalism and get back to that.
01:47:04.000Some of the best reporting that the New York Times really does is on the international stuff.
01:47:10.000They've sent journalists into these areas in Xinjiang to see what's up.
01:47:16.000They will be surveilled by government officials and things like that.
01:47:21.000Or even the ISIS files where this reporter, New York Times reporter, Rukmini, had gone into Baghdad and she just went in and collected all these documents by herself.
01:47:31.000And then they came back and they analyzed it and they reverse engineered how ISIS was running their entire operation.
01:47:40.000And when you kind of focus on the shit that's going on in other parts of the world, it gives you a lot of perspective.
01:47:47.000You realize that a lot of woke stuff is actually very America-centric.
01:47:53.000And if you had zoomed out, you would see that this wasn't a problem.
01:47:58.000The thermostat issue of thermostats, office temperatures being sexist, for example, because they're too cold for women, that's not a problem when you have seen how the women in Iran, what they have to deal with.
01:48:12.000And if we just did a rotation in the newspapers where everybody from the lifestyle or culture desk has to do a stint in Saudi Arabia, something reporting from the – like maybe they'll just – maybe they'll have some perspective on this.
01:49:26.000Why do you think that you can't joke around about things and why do you think that that in some way is going to make people take you less seriously?
01:49:32.000I think people put you in bins, right?
01:49:35.000So professionally, there's just, like you said, it's this signal of how you're going to act, how you dress, how you come across.
01:49:45.000And in professional settings, there's an expectation of you behaving a certain way.
01:49:52.000Now, when you're funny, the problem is that people don't know.
01:51:00.000When you're handling those things and going into offices and sometimes you go to Penguin Random House, it's a certain expectation set of you.
01:51:10.000I don't know if it's even more true of women, though, that They don't expect you to be funny.
01:51:19.000Or like, the funnier you are, the more they take you less seriously.
01:51:34.000So whenever someone says they're discouraged from being funny, and that's one of the things that I like about your Twitter page, is that it's funny.
01:53:15.000I don't know if you have to be an insider or an outsider.
01:53:18.000I think you have to have financial freedom so that you don't worry about someone taking away your ability to make a living so you suppress your own thoughts.
01:53:29.000A lot of things have to be aligned circumstantially to have financial freedom in the first place.
01:53:33.000But a lot of that does come from even working within the institution.
01:53:36.000A lot of people who have, you know, huge financial back.
01:53:39.000And that's why somebody, I think it was Sarah Hader, who tweeted something like, the one thing that's not really talked about is the classist implications of cancel culture.
01:53:48.000Because it's going to affect the lower class more drastically.
01:53:53.000If you don't have the money, if they're cancelled, there's a huge class implication to this.
01:57:23.000I think we should not give the right legitimate reasons to be complaining about disparate coverage, right?
01:57:30.000So one of the things that Eric Trump tweeted yesterday was, which I didn't even know happened, like apparently a van was driven into a GOP tent or something at one of the primaries.
01:58:46.000I'm so wary of sort of dogpiling on this stuff now.
01:58:50.000I think when I first started on Twitter, too, I was always inflaming or retweeting something that was like, oh, look at this super woke person that's on the fringe.
01:59:00.000And I'm like, no, no, maybe I shouldn't.
01:59:04.000Maybe this really is a French in that, you know, I'm just kind of making it seem like it's a bigger issue.
01:59:11.000Because I notice I fall into that trap sometimes.
01:59:14.000Like, there was this one story that came out, I think, when Apple released the new iPhone, there was like, New York Post was like, you know, iPhone 10X or something was cited as, was criticized as being sexist.
01:59:30.000And apparently because the phone was kind of big, they expanded the dimensions, and so it doesn't fit into women's hands as neatly as the old version did.
01:59:39.000And then I was like, so I tweeted that angrily, like, yeah, of course, everything's sexist again, like checks, notes, iPhone's sexist.
01:59:46.000And then I realized I was kind of part of the problem, because when I looked into this whole issue, it was literally just like two Twitter egg accounts.
01:59:55.000And so an article was written based on what somebody who's anonymous said on Twitter that it was sexist.
02:00:00.000And it could have been the Internet Research Agency in Russia just fucking with everybody.
02:00:58.000Yeah, but they don't like that mirror of mockery.
02:01:02.000They don't like the spotlight being on them to realize how ridiculous.
02:01:07.000You guys are supposed to be some higher institute of higher education.
02:01:13.000But that's what, you know, this is mirroring what happened when, like, the atheists, the new atheists started debating the religious Christians.
02:01:22.000It's like the new atheists were kind of mocking, right?
02:01:26.000Like, people like Christopher Hitchens.
02:01:27.000That was a bit of a mocking tone, like, what you'll believe is kind of silly.
02:02:25.000It's like you've got to kind of let it die down a little, figure out how much of this is real and how much of it is that kid screaming, slamming.
02:02:36.000So I used to say the same thing, because, you know, you would see medical journals reporting cancer rates are going up, and it's like, cancer rate, is that really the case?
02:02:45.000Are we having more and more, you know, incidences of cancer?
02:02:48.000Or is it that our detection methods have gotten better?
02:02:51.000Like, diagnostics have gotten better, and we're just able to catch it at a much earlier stage, so it's kind of inflating the case number.
02:03:00.000And, you know, it seems, it seems, I'm so, you know, buoyed by the fact that in the last few months, it seems like mainstream culture, even comedy is starting to push back.
02:03:10.000You have more and more people who are saying, okay, okay, enough of this stuff.
02:04:11.000It was a bit about those television late-night commercials where you're sitting at home, cooking, eating your dinner, and Sam Kinison's bit is a real classic.
02:04:27.000And he goes, why don't you, instead of sending him money or sending him food, he goes, send him something like me.
02:04:31.000Send him someone who's going to go down there and go, hey, we just drove 5,000 miles with your food and we realized we wouldn't have world hunger if you people would move where the food is!
02:05:40.000Theories are like – theories are – you probably could – You could do a post-mortem on a joke, and you could accurately dissect why it worked.
02:05:55.000I don't think you could predict how a joke will work, because too many jokes are dependent upon the personality, the irreverence of the perspective, cultural context, time, yes, timing.
02:06:08.000The personality of the person doing it is giant.
02:06:10.000Kennison always had this little smile and this devious smirk and he could get away with more fucked up shit because that was his brand.
02:06:20.000That wouldn't work with Stephen Wright.
02:06:22.000Stephen Wright who has this sort of absurdist perspective and non sequitur one-liners.
02:06:27.000If he had a joke like that, it wouldn't work.
02:06:30.000But with Kinison, with the yelling and the anger, and he was fat and ugly, and he's always angry.
02:06:36.000That's like, you know, we talk about marriage and getting divorced.
02:12:11.000He's the best version of it because all he is is a musician who is a very eloquent and articulate person who had the patience to sit down with people that believe in a really fucking stupid thing.
02:12:24.000And just through his mere existence and who he is as a person, he changed the way they thought.
02:12:56.000When you say punch a Nazi, you might be talking about your granny who's a Republican because she likes Trump because Trump believes in God.
02:13:23.000Are there to make it seem like the enemy is really that big.
02:13:28.000Because then you can implement all the solutions you want.
02:13:32.000The population gets cowered into fear, basically.
02:13:36.000Again, it's another totalitarian tool.
02:13:38.000Yeah, it's almost like you're creating intellectual false flags.
02:13:41.000You're propping up any divergence from this rigid ideology, some horrible fucking thing that needs to be attacked and squashed and poisoned and lit on fire.
02:13:54.000But ultimately, at the end of the day, what we really need to do is just be nicer to each other.
02:13:58.000And part of our problem is lack of communication.
02:14:01.000And if you go to these things, like when you see someone trying to close down a Christina Hoff Summer's speech, what you're seeing is them yelling.
02:15:37.000And particularly if we can keep it in a narrow scope, we're both educated about what we're talking about and we're not talking about something when the other person has really no data to draw from.
02:15:53.000The problem is we're so accustomed over the last 10 years to communicating digitally.
02:15:58.000We're so accustomed to blaring our ideas out and then checking to see who agrees every five seconds, checking our likes and checking our comments.
02:16:07.000This is a non-social way of interacting through social media.
02:17:38.000One of my favorite quotes of all time was in this manifesto written...
02:17:43.000I can't remember the name now, but it was about a free internet.
02:17:46.000And he said, the problem is that we cannot separate the air that makes wings beat from the air that chokes.
02:17:53.000I was like, it's so poetic because you remember these cases of these girls that were escaping Saudi Arabia and then she got locked up in Thailand and she was saying, I'm trying to escape from my father.
02:18:05.000I don't want to wear the hijab anymore.
02:18:09.000My family would kill me if they find out I'm, you know...
02:18:12.000I don't want this arranged marriage or whatever.
02:18:14.000And the only reason she can reach the outside world and that activists, you know, lawyers heard her story and could help her and she got asylum in Canada is because of social media.
02:18:23.000So it's like the more we want to regulate these things, the more we're making it hard for a lot of these people who live in still close societies because the only way to get in is through the internet.
02:18:36.000I think the internet in general is like most things.
02:21:52.000And especially if you only highlight those flaws outside of the context of whatever the fuck they were talking about and the conversations they were having and what was going on.
02:22:03.000You could make a very distorted perception of someone by just snipping and piecing together.
02:23:00.000I mean, you talk to people that are actual journalists now and the pressure that's on them to get a bunch of clicks for each article.
02:23:05.000And, you know, they'll have editors that change the title of their articles to make it more salacious.
02:23:10.000But that's why they did the whole paywall thing, right?
02:23:12.000So the New York Times transitioned to subscription completely for that purpose.
02:23:17.000It's that they won't be subject to the whims of- But they still are.
02:23:21.000They still are, because a lot of those things, you get through your Google News feed, and you have to click through to the paywall if you want to read it, but the initial titles, which gets you to click the link, and then you realize it's paywall.
02:23:33.000You don't just sign up without reading anything.
02:23:36.000You go there because there's an article that's interesting to you.
02:23:57.000Listen, I gotta wrap this up, but I appreciate what you're doing.
02:24:00.000I think it's wonderful, this idea that you're getting these books to these people and converting it, converting the languages so that they can understand some of these great works.