On this episode of Thick & Thin, host Alex Blumberg sits down with writer and editor-in-chief of the New York Times op-ed column, Jonathan Zimmerman, to discuss his new book, "Why You Should Give a Damn: The Case for Free Speech." They discuss the importance of free speech and why we should all give a damn about it. They also discuss the dangers of online censorship and how we can all learn to be more civil online, and how to deal with people who disagree with us online. Alex and Jonathan also discuss why it s important to be kinder to each other online and what it means to be a good human being online, as well as what it really means to not be a bad human being in real life. We hope you enjoy this episode, and if you like it, please leave us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you re listening to podcasts. Please remember to leave us your thoughts and reactions in the comments section below. We ll see you next Monday with our next episode, where we'll be discussing a new episode. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the podcast! Timestamps: 5:00 - Why you should give a dang damn? 7:30 - Free speech? 8:15 - How do you feel about it? 9:20 - What do you think of the case? 10:40 - What are your thoughts? 11:00 12:00: What does it mean to you? 13: What would you like to hear from someone else? 14: What are you waiting for? 15:00 | How do I m going to do? 16:30 17:30 | Do you feel uncomfortable? 18:40 | What do I want to be comfortable? 19:10 | How would you want to hear me talk about it more? 21:20 | Should I be comfortable with someone else talk about something? 22:00 Do you have a good idea? 26:00 // 15:30 Do you think I m sorry? 27:40 27 | What s your thoughts on my thoughts on something I would like to say? 29:00 / 16:00 +16: Is it a good thing? 35:00 & 16:10 32:20 33:00 Is there a better way to be nice?
00:00:51.000There's a lot of very intelligent people that disagree with you in this current political climate, unfortunately.
00:00:56.000I think that was exacerbated by the Trump administration and this desire to stop a lot of the QAnon stuff and the Pizzagate stuff and a lot of these conspiracy theories that people were frustrated that they were taking hold and they were like, how do we stop this?
00:01:11.000We've got to stop these people from talking.
00:01:13.000So that's the argument for censorship.
00:01:38.000I think one of the problems that we're dealing with in today's climate is not just that everything is hyper-politicized and people are really very passionate in debating things online, but just the nature of online discourse is so limited.
00:01:51.000It lends itself to simple sentences, 140 or 280 symbols.
00:02:04.000Unless you're writing a book, it's hard to get all your thoughts out.
00:02:07.000And also, one of the things that people that study communications have taught us is that when we have exchanges online, they tend to be more uncivil.
00:02:15.000We will type things and text things about somebody or to somebody that we would never, ever say to their face.
00:02:51.000Well, yeah, I'm an op-ed columnist, and a couple years ago I stopped reading the commentary about the op-eds.
00:02:57.000You know, generally it's not that well informed.
00:03:01.000I mean, there are exceptions to that, but generally it's just people shooting from the hip, and often just in a really nasty and derogatory way.
00:03:51.000And that, you know, this idea of don't say something to someone online that you wouldn't say to them to their face, a lot of people don't like that.
00:04:00.000Like, no, because I don't want to be uncomfortable, but I want to express myself.
00:04:04.000So if I'm around you, If I said what I really felt, I would feel uncomfortable.
00:04:26.000There's some benefit in being cowardly, too, though.
00:04:29.000This is that there are people that, for whatever reasons, maybe they're socially awkward, they don't have the courage to say things to someone's face, but maybe that person needs to hear them.
00:04:39.000So this is the other perspective, like, in favor of talking shit.
00:04:44.000Yeah, well look, again, I'm not against social media.
00:04:47.000That would be like being against oxygen now, right?
00:04:54.000I think the question is, you know, how we can use it in ways that help us communicate and understand each other.
00:05:00.000That should be the question we're asking, right?
00:05:02.000You know, how can we put it to positive rather than negative uses?
00:05:07.000Well, free speech is not just being able to express yourself now.
00:05:14.000Now it's being able to express yourself through these private companies, which is very strange.
00:05:21.000So now the arbiter of free speech is YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, and it's like, wow, those are the town squares of our world now.
00:05:31.000Yeah, and you know, when I discuss the free speech question with my students, I often say, look, Anyone in this room is free to make a case for any kind of speech restriction they'd like, provided that they tell me who's going to do the restricting.
00:06:16.000And I think he, before Trump got cut off, which I didn't agree with, I think Dorsey generally had the right idea, which is when we see something posted on Twitter that we think is wrong or horrible, Instead of muzzling it, what we're going to do is we're going to add our two cents,
00:06:33.000And we're going to put a flag on it saying, by the way, we think this is bullshit, and here's why.
00:06:37.000And look, that's a form of free speech as well, right?
00:06:41.000Using your free speech to criticize speech that you think is abhorrent is an act of free speech.
00:06:46.000And I think that seemed to me to be Dorsey's impulse, rather than muzzling people, adding a voice that tries to inform people about what they've seen.
00:06:58.000Do you think that it's also a function of there's a limited amount of time when you're running an election, right?
00:07:05.000So like you only have a few months when elections rolling around and there's this person who is like getting all these people riled up and Saying a bunch of crazy shit that may not be true and They have a choice to make like you can let it play out its natural course like the the logical and informed Response to bad speech is always better speech.
00:07:33.000Like, how do you deal with bad speech?
00:07:36.000You combat it with debate and more articulate, more well-thought-out, more sensible speech.
00:07:45.000That's supposed to be so that if a person is on the sidelines and objectively looking into two arguments, they look at that one and go, well, that makes more sense.
00:07:52.000This guy's trying to rile people up, but he's incorrect, and this is why.
00:08:04.000And also, the other thing I'd add, though, is although I agree with the dynamic you just described, in order to pull that off, you need a certain sort of education.
00:08:50.000Teaching people how to think is not necessary.
00:08:52.000Critical thinking skills, it's not really highlighted in school, especially in high school.
00:08:58.000It's not something that you really spend a lot of time Well, unfortunately, I mean, we give rhetorical obeisance to it, but we don't do it nearly enough.
00:09:07.000And when you interview kids about their high school experience, and you ask them, you know, did you really engage in dialogue about substantive questions where there was real debate?
00:09:22.000Sometimes people are just very theatrical and very loud and dynamic, or they'll touch upon, like, certain things, like...
00:09:31.000You know, certain things that they think, like whether or not it's valid to the conversation, they'll add those things to it because there's certain social clout to those subjects.
00:09:41.000Look, the hardest thing to do as a young person is to figure out what you really think, right?
00:09:46.000Not what the people around you are saying, your peers or your parents or your teachers, what you really think.
00:09:52.000And the problem is we haven't actually created educational institutions that help people do that.
00:09:58.000I mean, what they do is they encourage people to mouth things they've heard from others rather than to come up with like, okay, what do I actually think about this?
00:10:27.000You know, it's who's cool, who's cute, who's going out with whom, you know?
00:10:31.000And so I think there's almost a developmental reason that you would try to sort of tailor your opinions to the people around you.
00:10:37.000But that's not good for you, and it's definitely not good for our democracy.
00:10:40.000I mean, one way of thinking about all this social media stuff is we're all teenagers now, and we're all doing precisely that, trying to figure out who's cool and who isn't, right?
00:10:50.000And trying to get on the right side, and as you were saying, to mouth the right things.
00:11:16.000It sucked at the time, because I moved to San Francisco when I was seven, from New Jersey to San Francisco, and then Florida when I was 11, and then when I was 13 we moved to Boston.
00:11:29.000And because of that I didn't develop this core group of friends that I grew up with.
00:11:35.000You know, it was a little chaotic, but it forced me to formulate my own opinions about things.
00:11:41.000You know, I had a very similar upbringing in different places.
00:11:44.000I actually grew up overseas because my parents were in the Peace Corps, as I was subsequently.
00:11:49.000And so as an elementary schooler, I lived in India and Iran, and then I lived in New York and in Washington.
00:11:57.000But like yourself, I mean, for me, except for meeting my wife, that was the formative experience of my life, I would say, living in all those different environments as a really little kid.
00:12:07.000Because also when you're little, you don't know how weird the shit you're doing is.
00:12:11.000You know, it's just because you just do it.
00:12:13.000It's so like in Bangalore, India, my parents sent me to a girl's school.
00:12:16.000Which took a couple boys in the younger grades because it was the angle of school that was near where we lived.
00:12:21.000And it was actually a fabulous experience, you know, to be, you know, like one of a couple boys in a whole room full of girls.
00:12:29.000But nobody told me that that was just bizarre.
00:13:16.000I mean, it's a crossroads and it has been for 10,000 years.
00:13:20.000And it's interesting you mention Iran because, you know, when the Pew does these like pro and anti-American surveys where they take like a sample of people in different countries and say, what do you think of America?
00:13:30.000Except for Israel, the Iranians like us more than any country in the Middle East.
00:14:00.000And let's also remember, it's a country of about 80 million people, and over half of them were born well after Khomeini.
00:14:06.000You know, so, you know, all they know is this corrupt regime that's governed them, and they don't like it.
00:14:13.000You know, there's a huge amount of dissent in Iran.
00:14:18.000It's just that I think, I mean, this is a whole other rap, but I think the United States and the rest of the world haven't really figured out how to really harness that dissent.
00:14:29.000You know, I think, you know, people pick up the newspaper and they imagine Iran as this place of kind of like Islamist ditto heads, and it is not that, not by any measure.
00:14:41.000That's got to be so strange to have grown up there and see this gigantic shift and have these memories of what it was like previously when it was this sort of cosmopolitan center.
00:15:07.000And, you know, in some ways I think my concerns about free speech in some ways stem from that experience as well because I can remember my parents, you know, when they would talk on the phone, they would often sort of say jokingly, hey, you know, we better not go there.
00:15:35.000You know, when Edward Snowden had to leave the country and Glenn Greenwald, they published that story about the NSA's, all the shit that he leaked where there was this widespread surveillance on the American public.
00:16:03.000It's a complicated question, but nobody's going to come in the night for my family or for yours because we're criticizing the NSA. Yeah, we can critique it, but it still exists.
00:16:32.000Well, I forget which comedian made a joke out of this.
00:16:35.000It all started during Obama, some of the leaks about this.
00:16:38.000And, you know, I forget who it was, but a comedian said, well, look, you know, I mean, Americans said that they wanted a president that listens to everyone.
00:16:55.000But that is, in a sense, it's encouraging self-censorship.
00:17:00.000And that's one of the things about privacy that makes privacy so critical, is because if you cannot express yourself without fear of other people listening, then there is a component of self-censorship, which is critical in North Koreans,
00:17:17.000the regime's way of keeping people in line, is they have a form of self-censorship.
00:18:22.000Well, look, I'll give you an example, and this came up in another book that I wrote.
00:18:26.000There was a survey done of full-time faculty about 10 years ago, and the question was, do you agree with the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions?
00:18:36.000And it turned out that 40% of the respondents said no.
00:18:40.000Now, for the sake of transparency, I should tell you that I'm in the 60%.
00:18:43.000I think affirmative action has been a net gain for the university.
00:18:46.000It's a complicated question, but I think it's been a net win.
00:18:50.000Nevertheless, I was upset by the 40% figure.
00:18:53.000Not that there were people that disagreed with me.
00:18:55.000I was upset that I hadn't heard from them.
00:19:56.000And, of course, there is no ergo, right?
00:19:58.000I mean, this is like a fallacy that a third grader could see through, but it's all around us.
00:20:04.000Yeah, that's a real problem with today, guilt by association.
00:20:09.000Yeah, there's so many complicated questions that you oftentimes feel like you have the answer to, or you have your opinion on it, and then you'll hear a very nuanced perspective from someone who takes a different stance.
00:20:21.000And if you're open-minded, you go, oh, maybe I haven't considered that point of view.
00:20:25.000And that's one of the real reasons why it's important that you have free speech and you have debate, because you don't want to get pigeonholed into an idea that maybe somewhere down the line you might find foolish.
00:20:36.000But you weren't allowed to be exposed to some really good arguments to the contrary.
00:21:28.000No, there's plenty to load and there are always new things to learn.
00:21:31.000But I think just the larger point for me is that I think I'm more likely to learn from a conversation with somebody who actually likes Trump precisely because I don't.
00:22:22.000That's one of the things that I've really gone out of my way to try to listen to people and try to look at things from their perspective, even if I don't agree with it.
00:22:33.000Try to just find where they're connecting the dots.
00:22:49.000Look, I think that's a great ambition, but I think that that's the exception because I think most of our media environment promotes the opposite, right?
00:22:57.000I mean, you know, just think of what a news feed is, right?
00:23:02.000A news feed is the events of the day curated according to your search history and your biases.
00:23:10.000And what an awful image, like time for your two o'clock feed, right, of all the stuff that we have...
00:23:19.000Curate it in order to reinforce your biases.
00:23:45.000When I'm looking at things that are interesting to me, I'm looking for distractions and things that are my hobbies.
00:23:55.000My news feed has professional billiards on it, so I'll get snooker scores or snooker from the UK. When something deep and meaningful, if I'm looking for something, if I'm researching something, then I go look for that.
00:24:12.000I don't like that stuff in my newsfeed.
00:24:15.000I figured out a year or two ago, I'm tired of getting freaked out.
00:24:19.000I don't want to just pick up, like, Jesus, what is he doing now?
00:24:22.000I don't want to do that every time I pick up my phone.
00:24:33.000So I, you know, subscribe to Washington Post, and I subscribe to Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and I'll go there, and I'll go on purpose to read.
00:26:00.000One of the most important journalists today because he's so honest and so open-minded and he's so well-informed.
00:26:07.000When he goes off on a subject like he has put in the work, like when he went off on savings and loan crisis or when he went on the subprime mortgage business.
00:26:19.000I actually interviewed him on the podcast about it.
00:26:25.000So he had to really understand what kind of fuckery these people were involved with and then put it in his beautiful prose so that it dances on the page as you get informed about this fucking criminal behavior that led to this gigantic financial crash that we endured.
00:26:42.000And yet, at the same time, I mean, look, I think it's great that Substack exists, and it's great that a fellow like that is on it, but the fact that he's on it and that he's not writing for one of our major media companies, that says something troubling about this configuration.
00:26:57.000I think he still writes for Rolling Stone.
00:29:20.000Well, it depends on whom you ask, but the people that study eye tracking say that for whatever reason, when you're reading print, your eye goes all the way across on each line.
00:29:32.000And on screens, it's less likely to do that.
00:29:37.000When the eye trackers look at what you do on a screen, the first line you go all the way across, but then the next one, as in an F, it's a little shorter.
00:30:28.000It's a tablet, but when you write on it, you write it in handwriting, and it can either save it in your handwriting or it puts it into print, and it looks like paper as you're writing on it, but you can have a gigabyte of information on this little tablet,
00:32:25.000And so much in the media environment is encouraging us both to multitask and also to believe in multitasking, right, as an article of faith.
00:35:45.000It's like you either execute correctly or you don't.
00:35:47.000And so if you do things like that, like martial arts in particular is a very humbling thing.
00:35:53.000And I think it's really good in that way that most of the people that I know that are martial artists that are at an elevated state, they're really good.
00:36:23.000You just accept the fact that someone got you, and you don't— Right.
00:36:27.000But when you see people that have never lost, I have a friend and we had this conversation and one of the things that we were talking about was the regret of him not doing sports when he was younger.
00:37:53.000But, you know, in general, the best thing, you know, when a student asks me, like, do you think I'm smart or do you think I'm good at history?
00:37:59.000I always say, I don't know and I don't care.
00:38:02.000All I care about is what you've written.
00:38:15.000Because it makes you think in somewhat static terms.
00:38:18.000And I remember when my kids were growing up, like, you would often hear, oh, so-and-so is good at this, and so-and-so is good at that, so-and-so is bad at this, so-and-so is bad at that.
00:38:27.000And they also, they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, right?
00:38:30.000And that's not good for anyone either.
00:39:36.000You know, experiencing whatever it is, your great billiards game, you know, and you're finally able to hit that incredibly complex shot that you couldn't hit before.
00:39:44.000Instead of, wow, I'm a great billiards player, like, or I'm not.
00:40:40.000So I'm curious, Joe, since you were describing kind of all these moves growing up, How would you say, if somebody were to ask you, what have been the most important changes in the way you see the world since you were a younger person?
00:40:53.000Either the political world, the social world, the environment, whatever it is.
00:40:57.000Like, what would you, if you think, if you compare yourself to your younger self, what would you say have been the most important changes in how you think and how you see the world?
00:41:07.000I think the single biggest change that I can remember, single biggest shift that I ever had, was having children.
00:41:15.000Because then I started thinking about everyone as grown-up babies.
00:41:19.000I used to think of people as being in a static state.
00:41:22.000Like if I met a guy and he was a 40-year-old guy, I'd be like, oh, there's Mike.
00:41:26.000He's 40. And then now I go, oh, Mike used to be a baby.
00:41:30.000And then all the weird shit that happened to Mike in his life and the pros and cons and the failures and successes and the lies and truths and here he is.
00:41:43.000I have a lot more sympathy and empathy for people because of that.
00:41:47.000Because a lot of the people that I see now that are, you know, assholes, if I met an asshole before I'd be like, that guy's just an asshole.
00:41:54.000And now I go, oh, you know, that's a baby that, like, came out a bad product.
00:42:30.000We are the culmination of our life's experiences and how we've absorbed them along with our genetics, along with our environment.
00:42:39.000And environment is a critical factor because it's not just the environment in terms of the city you live in, but the people that you hang around with.
00:46:32.000And I remember when the Vietnam War ended, I was living in San Francisco, and I remember really clearly, because I was a little kid, and I was scared of the war.
00:46:40.000I was really scared, because my stepfather had not got drafted.
00:49:13.000And it's good because it gave me a challenge to understand myself for who I actually am without being under the pressure of achieving an image that a father wanted me to live up to or that, you know, someone else's perspective of who I should be or how I should behave or how I should think about the world.
00:49:56.000So it's a confusing process that happens to you when you have children, when they're babies, and then you see them grow up, and you're like, wow, this is like...
00:50:58.000This is just a part of being a person.
00:51:01.000I go way out of my way to explain that.
00:51:04.000So every time something's wrong, every time something happens, I always go, I did all this.
00:51:09.000It's interesting you use the term mold because back to our earlier discussion, I think both with parenting and being a teacher, and I'm both, I think the other really hard thing is, you know, how do you also cultivate somebody's autonomy and let them be different from you?
00:51:25.000Yeah, mold's maybe not the best word, right?
00:51:27.000You know, but you have to do both, right?
00:51:29.000Because there are some things you have to indoctrinate.
00:51:32.000You just do, especially when they're younger.
00:51:34.000Like, we're not going to have a discussion about whether it's appropriate to take your turn.
00:51:38.000Or, to take a more pregnant example, to call somebody the N-word, right?
00:51:42.000We're not going to debate that, right?
00:51:44.000We're just going to tell you, like, this is right or wrong.
00:51:46.000But then things get more complicated, right?
00:51:49.000Because there's lots of gray in the world as well.
00:51:51.000And they've got to figure that out for themselves.
00:51:55.000Yeah, you got to leave room for conversations, too, because sometimes kids just really want to talk to you and try to figure things out with you.
00:52:51.000And, you know, it's like, it turns out Mrs. Wilson loves her job, right?
00:52:55.000So when you go there, Mrs. Wilson smiles at everybody and she's like, good job!
00:52:59.000And she high-fives kids and then everybody's like, I love that lady.
00:53:03.000And then there's some people that just want everybody to shut up and they just get mad at you if you didn't do your homework correctly or they, you know.
00:54:40.000You know, I think once I got really into martial arts, that's all I thought about.
00:54:45.000And then I sort of buried him with that in my head.
00:54:48.000But I didn't really even realize it until I started doing psychedelics and smoking pot, thinking how much of an effect it actually had on me.
00:54:57.000That's when I really thought about it, and I'm like, wow, that really fucked with me when I was a kid, and I was kind of in denial about it.
00:55:03.000Right, right, which isn't always the best way either.
00:55:06.000No, I mean, that's a giant problem with poor people, where sons grow up without father figures.
00:56:42.000Very, very, very fortunate that I ran into an amazing school and amazing teachers.
00:56:48.000But I think for young people, learning something and getting good at it is so critical because it teaches you that you used to suck at something, but you got better at it through hard work and dedication.
00:57:21.000Most people growing up in particular, when they're young, they have this, I mean, that's the one thing that young people struggle with, I think more than anything, is insecurity.
00:57:29.000I think that's also where bullying comes from.
00:58:10.000Something I love about teaching college students is that they're old enough to start understanding the world, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it.
00:58:22.000I think, like, 19- and 20-year-old human beings are the most interesting people on the planet.
00:58:27.000Because they can see things, and they're often very aware of how the world is working, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it.
00:58:36.000And so they're much more interesting than you or me, or at least than me.
00:58:40.000Because, you know, the game is sort of up for me.
00:58:43.000I've made my choices, I've done the things that I do, and that's kind of it.
00:59:17.000Because the United States, I mean, it had like a hegemonic role in the world that it does not have now.
00:59:24.000And, you know, it was just a time of much more national confidence, I think.
00:59:30.000And, you know, I have a lot of empathy for people in my daughter's generation and in my student's generation because they don't have that same kind of certitude, you know?
00:59:39.000So I do remember kind of wondering, but I guess I didn't feel the same sense of pressure or fear.
00:59:44.000Like, I think that because America still ruled the roost, it was easier to think, gee, it's going to work out.
00:59:53.000But weren't you worried about Russia when you were young and in college?
00:59:57.000Didn't you worry about the Cold War and all that jazz?
01:00:29.000Yeah, I mean, you know, look, by the time I get to a young adult, I mean, the Soviet Union is starting to implode.
01:00:34.000I mean, this is really the twilight of the Cold War, right, is the 1980s, you know.
01:00:40.000And, you know, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I remember listening to Radio Moscow.
01:00:46.000Because I was in Nepal, and I had a little shortwave radio, and only two things came in, Voice of America and Radio Moscow.
01:00:53.000And Voice of America had its issues and its own brand of propaganda, but just listening, even just the sound values of Radio Moscow, it was so hilariously poor.
01:01:03.000Like, I just remember thinking, you know, this is not, like, we're going to win this struggle.
01:01:13.000Because we had this distorted perception of the powers of the Soviet Union when I was in high school where we thought of them as being just like America, but over there, like in terms of their firepower and their financial means.
01:01:37.000And also, I mean, they just didn't do a good job getting things to people, right?
01:01:42.000I mean, David Reisman, who was one of my favorite authors ever, I mean, during the height of the Cold War, he wrote this great piece where he said, if we want to win this, all we have to do is just fly planes over Russia and just drop nylon.
01:03:45.000Reagan was famous for that one speech that he made in front of the United Nations where he was talking about how quickly we would come together if we were faced with a threat from an alien world.
01:03:55.000I remember that because I remember all the conspiracy theorists got so jazzed up.
01:04:02.000Finally, we're going to know the truth.
01:04:18.000Well, you know, H.L. Mencken, 100 years ago, he had this great quote where he said something like, you know, for every deep social and political problem, there's typically a solution that is simple, attractive, and wrong.
01:04:34.000And that's what conspiracy theories are, right?
01:04:37.000They're simple, attractive, and wrong.
01:04:40.000Many of them are simple, attractive, and wrong.
01:04:42.000Some of them are surprisingly accurate.
01:04:46.000Well, I think, unfortunately, and this is where the history piece comes in, one reason that Americans tend to believe in conspiracy theories is that the government is engaged in conspiracies.
01:04:55.000I mean, like, you know, if you're trying to put, like, LSD on Fidel Castro's Cigar, which the United States did, right?
01:05:05.000Then let's just say there's a crying wolf problem, and it becomes easier for people to believe that the government is engaged in perfidious conspiracies after the government is engaged in a perfidious conspiracy.
01:05:18.000There's a fantastic book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill, and it's all about the Manson trials.
01:05:27.000It's the craziest story because Tom was a neighbor to my friend Greg Fitzsimmons in Venice and he had been working on this book literally for two decades.
01:05:38.000What happened was he got hired to write a story for a magazine on the anniversary of the Manson murders.
01:05:44.000And so he's writing the story, and as he's doing research to write the story, he starts realizing like, holy shit, like there's a lot more to this than I thought.
01:05:51.000He gets deeper and deeper and deeper into it, and he finds out that the Manson thing was connected to these CIA mind control experiments that they were doing during the 1960s.
01:06:03.000And Manson had been, for sure, sheltered along the way, released from prison every time he got arrested for something.
01:06:11.000And they were all saying, this is above my pay grade.
01:06:25.000I mean, this is one of the most horrible chapters.
01:06:27.000I mean, speaking of conspiracy theories, I mean, you mentioned hallucinogens earlier.
01:06:31.000I mean, you know— The federal government was involved in, you know, developing and testing these substances during the Cold War.
01:06:37.000And it was very much about the Cold War.
01:06:39.000It's interesting you mentioned the Soviet Union because the history there is they first developed them because they thought it was going to be a truth serum.
01:06:46.000So you capture somebody from the other side and you feed them this.
01:06:50.000But then when they did these horrible experiments in jails and psychiatric institutes, They found out it was the opposite.
01:06:55.000And then they started to tout it as something that we would give our agents.
01:06:59.000So if you ever captured, you dose, and then you would just blabber and say, the eels are in my hovercraft.
01:07:04.000So, you know, they always had—that's one of the terrible logics about the Cold War, is you could shift on a dime, right?
01:07:12.000And you could basically make the same plea in the inverse way.
01:07:16.000So, okay, it's not a truth serum, but now it's something that we can just use so when our agents get caught, they won't tell the truth.
01:07:22.000Well, it was also these agents were given autonomy to run these tests and these studies and they did some wild shit.
01:07:29.000One of them was called Operation Midnight Climax and Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA ran brothels and they would watch through two-way mirrors and they would dose these Johns up and have these poor guys just like tripping on acid and not have any idea what happened and You know,
01:07:47.000they would listen to them talk to the prostitutes.
01:07:51.000And then, you know, people made pranks, too.
01:07:54.000You know, you might have read that, like, one day in the 50s, somebody spiked the punch at Langley, like the Christmas punch at a CIA party.
01:08:24.000Well, they had a Haight-Ashbury free clinic that the CIA operated for decades, and they closed it down just a couple months after this book came out.
01:08:34.000They're like, okay, time to close up shop, boys, because this book was so detailed and Tom had spent so much time poring over all of the documents and the data and he had dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's and at the end of it you read the book and you're like,
01:09:19.000When it comes to free speech, What we have now is just we have words that we express and these words convey intent and thought and the way we perceive the world and we each take in the other person's words and the way they're saying them and try to go,
01:09:39.000okay, I see where you're going with this.
01:09:42.000One of the things that weirds me out most about the future is all of these sort of symbiotic human electronic things, gadgets that are being proposed, like Neuralink, like Elon Musk's thing, where Elon told me,
01:09:57.000specifically said, you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth.
01:10:04.000But wasn't Joe then in the interview where you shared a blunt with him?
01:11:05.000So maybe that's how we bypass all of our monkey genetics.
01:11:10.000We get someone who's probably a fucking robot to figure out this thing where they cut a hole in your head and put this device in that has all these electrodes into your brain.
01:11:22.000And now this monkey's playing Pong with his brain.
01:15:15.000The rats that they found, they found them in New York City, in Philadelphia, and they show like what a complicated society these rats have.
01:16:29.000But he was criticizing how ridiculous this practice is of giving cow urine to these sick people and how ignorant it was.
01:16:40.000Well, you know, it's funny you say ignorant because for me, really, what was so important about that experience was just learning how weird I was.
01:16:47.000And that is, you know, how weird I was to them, you know, and how many different ways there are to be human, right?
01:16:55.000And so, you know, I participated in marrying off one of our sisters, right?
01:17:03.000Because I'm an older brother, a girl's 16, you know, time to get her married.
01:17:45.000And, you know, I would explain to them that in my country you actually chose your own spouse.
01:17:51.000And they would say, well, how do you do that?
01:17:53.000And I'd say, well, you find somebody that you love, and then they would say, well, then what if you don't love them?
01:18:00.000And then I'd say, well, there's this thing called divorce, you know?
01:18:04.000And what I realized was that the way I thought about how all this should work was just so radically different from theirs, and not necessarily better or worse, right?
01:18:52.000And by the way, I did some of that in Nepal.
01:18:54.000I mean, you know, one of my other really enduring memories is my best student was of the so-called Kami cast, which is metalworker, which is an untouchable.
01:21:04.000I mean, 20 years earlier in my own country, they had a caste system that went back to the 1600s.
01:21:10.000And that was the other formative experience of being in Nepal.
01:21:14.000That was actually the first place that I started to think about American history.
01:21:17.000When they were talking about the arranged marriage, and when you were saying that in your country people get to choose, what did you think about But what is their, like, how do they explain it to you in a way where it made sense?
01:22:22.000Because it's a reciprocal arrangement, right?
01:22:25.000And this is why in rural Nepal at the time, people wanted to have boys, not girls.
01:22:31.000They used to say, which means the sun stays and the girl goes.
01:22:37.000Because, of course, the system was also patrilocal, which means that, you know, you go and live in the house of the guy that you've married.
01:22:55.000Well, that, again, and it's ironic because, believe it or not, 20 years later, I went back to my village with my older daughter, who was a junior in high school at the time.
01:23:05.000And the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had cut a tractor road kind of up half into the mountains.
01:23:12.000And the first guy that I ran into, he just said, hey, where you been?
01:23:23.000Basically, somebody had died and somebody had gotten married and somebody had a kid.
01:23:29.000But the one thing that was really different, and this speaks to globalization, is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the United Arab Emirates to work.
01:23:40.000And that was ironic, too, because the old story was the son stays and the girl goes, right?
01:23:46.000A lot of the sons had gone, but they had gone outside of the country.
01:23:49.000And that's the way so many of these economies work in that part of the world.
01:23:53.000Did you see if the girl's marriage worked out?
01:23:57.000Well, again, you know, Joe, it all works out, right?
01:24:01.000I mean, it works out because it was designed for social reasons, not for personal ones.
01:24:08.000It's not about what she thinks or about what he thinks.
01:24:13.000It's about bringing together families, creating communities, bringing up kids.
01:24:22.000Although, as I got closer to people in the community, I found out that after a marriage was arranged, often you did develop feelings for the person.
01:24:45.000And in fact, I mean, that was when I started to read history because, of course, in most parts of the world, including where we are right now, historically marriage was arranged.
01:24:53.000But I would imagine that, like, if you have this conversation with a feminist, for instance, they would have a real issue with that.
01:25:27.000All of us have learned certain things.
01:25:29.000But Leonard Hand, who was, you know, a famous jurist and federal court judge, one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that the spirit of liberty, which is really what we're talking about, is the spirit that is not so sure of itself.
01:26:28.000And so these, you know, I mean, when we went back to Nepal, my village, it was in a remote place, so it was relatively static, but there had been many other changes.
01:26:36.000I mean, just think of all these guys going to the UAE to work on construction sites.
01:26:40.000Those are sad stories, because I know that some of the guys that go to that part of the world, they go with the expectation of getting paid a certain sum of money, and then they take their passport.
01:26:51.000And then they pay them a fraction of that and they live in squalor.
01:27:35.000It's fairly similar to North Indian, but it's very simple.
01:27:39.000It's rice and lentils and whatever vegetable is in season.
01:27:42.000So that's what I ate for two and a half years.
01:27:44.000Not literally, but, you know, it's, you know, let's just say that, you know, goat is for a very special occasion, like when somebody gets married.
01:27:58.000This is a subsistence community, and so what I ate for two and a half years was rice, dal, and whatever vegetable was in season.
01:28:12.000So anyway, in the UAE, I would eat at this Nepali place and the same guy would serve me every night.
01:28:19.000And I said, you know, I saw this thing in the newspaper saying that, you know, you have to get a bida that in Nepali that means a holiday, like one day a week or something like that.
01:28:29.000And he said to me in Nepali, he said, yeah, and if I bitched about that, they'd just send me home and hire some motherfucker.
01:29:11.000And so, you know, you can work for us, but you will not be us.
01:29:15.000Vice did a documentary on the guys who built Dubai, built this very specific area, and they showed how they lived, and it was really disturbing.
01:29:40.000But one of the students there told me this really disturbing story that's right on point, which is she's walking home at night, and she thinks that there's this South Asian guy that's kind of following her.
01:29:54.000He seemed a little sketchy, but you don't know.
01:29:56.000So you sort of turn a corner and see if he turns it.
01:29:59.000And, you know, she gets to where we had our campus, and she told the guard that she thought that this guy down the street had been following her.
01:30:08.000And he told me that, like, the police came in 10 minutes and they took him to the airport.
01:30:13.000It's just like, you fuck with us in any way?
01:31:05.000Living in other cultures and recognizing that there's just different styles of living, that human beings can live in different ways, is very eye-opening.
01:31:12.000Because we're so accustomed to the way people live here.
01:31:18.000It's like I had Josh Rogan, the journalist, was here the other day, and he was talking about living in Japan, because he was living in Japan at one time and teaching over there.
01:31:36.000Yeah, he taught English and he was working as a journalist there.
01:31:40.000And he was just talking about how different the culture is.
01:31:44.000The culture is so different than it is here.
01:31:47.000And I was saying that my experience is over there.
01:31:50.000It's almost like Japan seemed to me, Tokyo seemed to me, like if human beings evolved in a completely different dimension...
01:32:01.000They're human beings, but they evolved in a totally different style of life, but very similar, where they have streets and buildings and neon, but yet they're really polite and orderly and very disciplined.
01:33:12.000And the Greeks would hang out with mostly physicians, because that's what my wife is.
01:33:18.000And several of them have been to the United States, and they said the most barbaric thing about the United States, they thought, was how quickly people ate.
01:33:24.000And they said, you know, in the United States, we heard somebody say, grab a bite.
01:34:15.000Oh, I mean, you know, as I was saying earlier, except for meeting Susan, my wife, I mean, living as an elementary school kid in Asia, absolutely the central event of my life, you know?
01:34:26.000And, you know, just one minor example, but it kind of isn't.
01:34:32.000When we lived in Iran, you know, my dad was the director of the Peace Corps, so we lived in a very, like, nice place.
01:34:38.000We had servants and things like that because, you know, you're a Westerner living in an Asian place.
01:34:44.000And one night, the cook, we were watching clips about the Ali-Frazier fight because this was 1969. And the cook says to me in Farsi, in which I was fluent, of course, because when you're a kid,
01:34:59.000you can learn a language in three weeks.
01:35:01.000He says, so this guy Ali and this guy Frazier are like, they're from your country, but they don't look like you.
01:37:56.000I mean, Ford's genius was to make a car as quickly and as cheaply as you could, right?
01:38:01.000That lots and lots of people could drive, right?
01:38:04.000And that's not the goal of Lamborghini.
01:38:06.000I think, if I remember correctly, Lamborghini was created because somebody was working with Ferrari and they're like, you know what, I can do this better.
01:38:18.000I think they got annoyed at how hard it was to get a Ferrari, too.
01:38:22.000And so they're like, I'm just going to make my own one of these fucking things.
01:40:13.000And, you know, you shouldn't nostalgize poverty.
01:40:16.000I think sometimes there's this noble, savage idea that, you know, oh, the people in such and such a country, they're poor, but they're very happy.
01:40:57.000What's the sweet spot of being a young person and having no idea whether or not you're going to have your bills paid, whether you're going to be able to take care of yourself?
01:41:10.000Versus someone who knows they get a stipend from the government, you're always going to have your health care, there's plenty of food, maybe there's a middle ground.
01:41:38.000And I think this is really to your point.
01:41:39.000The fact that there's been so little what I would call real Republican pushback of a sort of, there's been a little, but of the sort that we saw with the Tea Party in 2008, right?
01:41:51.000Where you say, no, the state's too big.
01:41:53.000Like, no, we don't want to provide all those services.
01:41:56.000It seems to me that, you know, if we had what I would call a real Republican party, We would be having more of that debate.
01:42:04.000Instead, it seems to be focused mainly on, you know, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and something that's happening at the border, you know?
01:42:12.000Because I think that there is an interesting or there should be an interesting debate about that.
01:42:55.000Again, that's not my jam, but I think that we should hear that.
01:42:59.000Yeah, the problem with bigger government is government's not good at anything.
01:43:05.000So when they do it bigger, it's just more people being incompetent.
01:43:10.000I mean, I'm not a fan of hiring the private sector to take over important government jobs because I think they would cut corners too and make it the most profitable instead of the most efficient.
01:43:33.000They're still hanging their hopes on him winning again in 2024. Yes.
01:43:36.000And maybe someone will rise between now and then.
01:43:39.000And, you know, more nonsense about our cities being aflame and the border being a crisis, you know, and both of those are largely invented.
01:43:46.000We have lots of much more serious stuff to deal with.
01:43:50.000We do, but the border is kind of a bit of a crisis.
01:44:39.000But we're not going to have that debate if we're just, you know, focused on, you know, oh, you know, there's a caravan that's coming up from Honduras, and oy vey, and maybe George Soros is financing it.
01:44:51.000I mean, look, the question of, like, how many immigrants should come in, and also, like, what do we do with the people that came in here illegally?
01:45:07.000That's a real good question because there's a lot of poor people that they've been doing labor their whole life, but they want to do better for their family.
01:45:13.000But you have to be able to provide a service that makes it valuable for you to enter into America.
01:46:00.000It's unfortunate that the disparity between the United States and these, especially these Latin American countries, these people are coming up and literally walking.
01:46:19.000And, you know, I think it's fair to say that some of their woes, if you go back in time, also have to do with some terrible decision-making activity by the United States.
01:46:29.000That's not to say, like, we're to blame for it, right?
01:46:41.000And so, you know, it's worth—this is where the history piece becomes really important.
01:46:46.000You know, if you look especially at, you know, a country like Panama or a country like, you know, Nicaragua, right, or Guatemala, you know, you'll see in the past all sorts of American efforts to intervene in the politics of those countries in ways that were fundamentally disruptive to those countries,
01:48:38.000But meanwhile, he was getting all that coke and selling all it because they were using him to make money so they could fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas.
01:49:01.000I was a basketball player in my youth, but there's a reason that you see people that look like me on tennis courts and not basketball courts.
01:50:11.000I think actually based on what I've read about you, you would like it.
01:50:14.000Because it turns out with tennis that unless you're very good, which I'm not and never will be, that almost every point is decided based on who concentrates more.
01:50:26.000And that's why, I mean, if you've ever gone to watch somebody like Nadal of Federer play, but what's amazing about it is not just their athleticism, because you can see that in any sport.
01:50:37.000What's amazing is that there are 19,000 people around them, and they are so locked in.
01:51:08.000But, you know, it's really taught me a lot about how important focus is.
01:51:14.000You know, I often say to my students, like, for me, that's the only really necessary condition for doing anything.
01:51:21.000You know, like, I'm not a rocket scientist.
01:51:24.000You know, I know what my limits are in that realm.
01:51:28.000What I can do, what I am able to do, is focus.
01:51:31.000And for me, that is just the absolute necessary condition for anything.
01:51:35.000And tennis really teaches you that because, you know, if I start thinking about my grocery list or a newspaper column that I'm writing, I'm fucked, you know?
01:51:45.000And I, you know, I'm not in the point anymore.
01:52:21.000And yet, though, it can also be a source of them because I've also discovered since I've taken up tennis that good begets good and bad begets bad.
01:52:32.000So, you know, if you're really hitting it well, you can just keep going.
01:52:35.000But sometimes you're just in a rut and you can't get out.
01:52:40.000You know exactly what you're doing wrong and you can't stop yourself.
01:52:59.000What you have to do is just keep fucking up your backhand, which is super frustrating.
01:53:05.000And you know what you're doing and you can't stop it.
01:53:10.000And I guess that's just the nature of competition because I think there are many things like that, like writing.
01:53:15.000But again, I've discovered that it's actually quite simple.
01:53:18.000Like sometimes you'll just be writing and every word looks terrible and you just don't have it going on.
01:53:23.000And if you just go outside or do something else and you come back to it, you will be able to do it better.
01:53:29.000But if you just sit there and keep trying to mull over it, everything will look like shit because you're just in that rut.
01:53:36.000Well, there's some people that think that to concentrate on things, you're supposed to do things for a certain amount of time and take five minutes off on a regular basis that you should never just go all the way through.
01:53:47.000But then there's other schools of thought where you just keep drinking coffee and keep pounding on those keys.
01:53:56.000I mean, the thing about writing is you sort of, you kind of start to understand, if you've done it for a while, why the ancients all talked about, like, muses coming to them, right?
01:54:05.000You know, if you read, you know, Homer or anybody after that, and they talk about, you know, people who are creating anything, a muse came to them.
01:54:14.000It does feel that way sometimes, you know?
01:54:16.000It's just, you know, suddenly you're really inspired, you have a lot to say, you can say it, and then at other times you're You're just pulling teeth.
01:54:25.000You have an idea, but you just can't find.
01:55:02.000That book, War of Art, I bought a stack of them and I would hand them out to people.
01:55:06.000Like when they would come on the podcast, just because it was so...
01:55:08.000And it's a small, easy read, but it's all about being a professional and this idea that if you just summon the muse and then show up at the same time every day with the intent to be creative and you're going to put in the work and you're not going to...
01:55:23.000You know, go watch YouTube videos or Google anything.
01:55:27.000You're going to really concentrate only on the writing itself.
01:55:30.000And that the muse will, whether or not it's a real thing.
01:55:34.000You know, this idea that there's some angelic, creative thing out there that bestows upon you creative gifts.
01:55:49.000Well, that's a lot of people's perspective on religion.
01:55:53.000That's Jordan Peterson's perspective on God, is that whether or not God exists or not, if you behave like God exists, you'll live a better life.
01:56:03.000And I'm like, there's some real wisdom in that, because there's something to it.
01:56:08.000If you really did behave as if some higher power laid out the rules for a better, more...
01:56:28.000And yet, I know Peterson's Canadian, but in the United States, I think one of the most important social phenomena of the past 20 years is actually the decline in both, you know, church, synagogue, mosque attendance, and also in the number of people that say they're affiliated with, you know,
01:58:01.000Pretty much flat out and extremely tribal.
01:58:05.000And when you think about, if you just analyze the behavior of people on both extremes, whether it's the far left or the far right, They exhibit remarkably similar traits, like pure hatred for the other side,
01:58:21.000inability to look at the virtues of this opposing ideology, and almost treating it as if the very nature of reality is at stake.
01:58:57.000I don't go to church, but I would not be surprised if there's a lot more to this existence than we're experiencing in a way that you can measure.
01:59:52.000First of all, I understand what the Bible actually is now, and it's way more complicated.
01:59:58.000You know, it's some people trying to make sense of the world thousands and thousands of years ago as interpreted through multiple languages back to England, back to English rather.
02:00:10.000And in a way that, you know, there's a lot of these ancient languages, like if you go back to ancient Hebrew, Letters doubled as numbers.
02:00:21.000Somebody told me once that the word love and the word God have the same numerical value.
02:00:27.000So if you combine the numbers and the letters and it's like...
02:00:31.000It wasn't as simple as when you get the interpretation to Latin or to Greek or to English, ultimately.
02:00:39.000You're not interpreting the full meaning in these sentences, that there's some intrinsic value that's lost because the ancient Hebrew version of it was like, it just meant a different thing.
02:00:51.000Right, and it's been transmuted through a million different histories, right?
02:01:01.000You know, when my students tell me they don't like religion or they don't want to mix religion and politics, I'm always like, so we shouldn't have a Martin Luther King Day, right?
02:01:08.000I mean, what do we think he was, right?
02:01:10.000What do we think the whole civil rights movement?
02:01:14.000I once asked a group of students what King's profession was, and I got hilarious answers.
02:01:19.000Like, a lot of people thought he was a lawyer, but my favorite one of all was policy experts.
02:01:24.000It's like, I have a dream that one day, thanks to the earned income tax credit, you know, the poverty rate will decline 2%.
02:01:32.000But again, I think that speaks to the kind of stigmatization of religion in certain circles in our country, especially elite circles, and this idea that it's this conservative principle or this backwards thing.
02:01:44.000And obviously, it's been used in those ways.
02:01:46.000But, you know, I mean, if you think about, like, movements for justice in this country, starting with abolitionism, right, going right straight through civil rights, they were all powered by religion.
02:01:55.000Yeah, and it's empowering for so many communities to have this place where people go to worship because they've agreed upon certain kind of behavior when they go to these places and in agreeing to work hard to be a better person and to tithe some of your earnings.
02:02:14.000There's all these different aspects of religion that I think really lends itself to empowering the bond that these people have with each other.
02:02:24.000And what I find fascinating about it is that bond, that empowering, and also that identity.
02:02:28.000They can work even if you don't believe in God or even think about them.
02:03:22.000And so that experience, that experience of being a pariah, which has been so central to the Jewish experience, what that does is that enjoins you to ask, okay, who's the pariah now?
02:04:34.000Like, I mean, you know, You have to look at shards of pottery and you have to look at other things.
02:04:38.000And apparently they found there was some trade, as you might guess, because there were so many different populations that are both in conflict and in movement and all that, right?
02:04:48.000But, like, I remember somebody told me that Jews, like, built the pyramids.
02:04:59.000You know, there's still, even if that quote didn't happen and the Red Sea didn't part, to me, you know, just the historic experience that Jews have had, you know, and especially their experience as being the pariah, as being the outgroom and fighting back against that.
02:05:55.000We need those organizing principles as human beings.
02:05:57.000I think we definitely do, and I think we definitely do benefit from that community gathering place where people agree to worship together.
02:06:06.000Because even, again, like Pressfield called upon the muse, even if you don't, even if the muse isn't real, if you treat it like it's real, and if you have a place where everybody gets together and they all agree, like, we're going to be better people because of the Lord, and the Lord watches us, and the Lord giveth,
02:06:21.000and the Lord taketh away, and just think about...
02:06:23.000All the real positive aspects of some of the religious tenets.
02:07:52.000But at the same time, I mean, the historic ironies are so great because, you know, Republican Mormons in Utah, they're like the most Republican people on earth.
02:08:01.000And yet, of course, the Republican Party pursued Brigham Young all the way into the Great Salt Basin.
02:08:07.000I mean, you think that's really where they wanted to go?
02:08:09.000You think they're like, oh, this seems like a really habitable place.
02:08:12.000Like, let's live in the Great Salt Basin.
02:08:16.000That was as far as the army, which was led by the Republican Party, was willing to pursue them.
02:08:24.000You know, the line was that the Mormons, it wasn't just, of course, that they were, you know, they were bigamists or Satanists or whatever, you know, they oppressed women.
02:08:34.000I like slavery oppressed African-Americans.
02:08:37.000I mean, that was one of the arguments.
02:08:38.000You know, and the Mormons aren't dumb.
02:08:40.000Once they create a territory, of course, they enfranchise women before anybody.
02:08:43.000And they're like, oh, we're the people?
02:08:45.000Like, we're the people that oppress women?
02:08:47.000Like, do they vote back in Massachusetts?
02:08:51.000You know, I mean, back to the Book of the Mormon.
02:08:53.000I mean, what I think is fascinating how the LDS, you know, establishment handled that.
02:08:57.000What they did, which I thought was super smart, was they were like, let's not beat them, let's join them.
02:09:02.000So you go to Broadway and you get your little playbill, and I'm sure you've seen this, like on the second page, there's an ad from the Mormon Church, from LDS, and they're like, okay, you've seen the play, now look at the real thing.
02:09:15.000I bet they got a lot of people to join too because of that.
02:09:17.000Didn't Glenn Beck join the Mormons like deep into his 40s?
02:09:53.000I mean, I have an old friend and colleague who's a Mormon, and he's not a believer anymore, but he served in Italy.
02:10:00.000And he told me that doing that was the key to everything he's done ever since because he said, John, if you can sell that, you can do anything, man.
02:11:22.000Like back when it didn't matter if you lived in Mexico or the United States because everybody was on horseback, they were like, listen, we'll just go down here and we can have 50 wives.
02:11:32.000I mean, the other thing for those of us- Let's party.
02:11:34.000For those of us who are Jews, another sort of interesting aspect of the whole Mormon story is the Mormons tend to be Philo-Semites.
02:11:43.000So the first Jewish governor in the United States- His name is Bamberger, and he's the governor of Utah.
02:11:50.000And he was, you know, the inheritor of kind of the Bamberger, I think it was department stores.
02:11:55.000You know about the guy who spent all the money to sequence the genome of Native Americans because he wanted to find out if they were the lost tribe of Israel, because that's in the Book of Mormon?
02:12:07.000And look, you know, a lot of it is bizarre, but it's also fascinating, right?
02:12:12.000And it's funny, on the Jewish-Mormon thing, I mean, the other controversy that's come up in the past couple years, you know how the Mormons can sort of make anybody Mormon, like including well after they're dead.
02:12:56.000Listen, it works for a lot of them, and they're very nice people, but it does leave them vulnerable.
02:13:01.000I have a friend, and she left the Mormon church as an adult, and she found herself very susceptible to sort of like...
02:13:09.000Healers and yogi type people and she goes, I think what it is is I was so accustomed to just believing in things that didn't necessarily make sense but allowing them to like, oh, okay.
02:13:26.000But it was interesting seeing her as an adult trying to make sense of it as to what it was that was leading her to be so susceptible.
02:13:36.000Yes, and I think for the Mormons, especially, as you were saying, because it's so American and so new, I think there are a lot of tensions between, let's just say, the believers and the historians, right?
02:13:47.000Because, you know, once you start studying history of anything, it gets complicated, and it's not like what you thought.
02:13:53.000And, you know, the Mormons were involved in, we think, several massacres of other human beings, including this place called Mountain Meadows.
02:14:00.000And it's been very hard for people in the Mormon church, for some of the believers, to accept that.
02:14:05.000So there's always going to be a tension between faith and history.
02:14:29.000I mean, we went to Iceland a couple years ago, our family, and somebody there told us that as best we can tell, Iceland is the only place that was never colonized, in the sense that when the Vikings got there, There was literally no one there.
02:14:44.000And then, by the way, after that, it became like a whole Game of Thrones shit, which is why Game of Thrones is filmed there.
02:14:49.000I mean, there was a million conquerors after that, you know.
02:14:53.000But when the first Vikings came there, there was nobody there.
02:15:33.000So, you know, one of the things that we now do in many elite campuses is, at the beginning of any event, we'll say, now let's remember that we're on Lenape land, right?
02:15:50.000I think it's great that people learn more about the Lenape's or the Choctaws.
02:15:53.000But I'm also a little bit troubled by this ritual because it does seem to imply that, like, the Lenapees were just there from time immemorial living in some Edenic place instead of, like, conquering whoever it was that was there before the Lenapees.
02:16:07.000And, of course, that's the native story.
02:16:14.000One team ruled, sometimes killed the other.
02:16:17.000And again, I think there should be much more awareness of Native American history, and I think those affirmations are fine, but it would also be useful for us to think about, again, who was there before that team.
02:17:30.000I'm fascinated by Native American history and I'm fascinated by how long they must have been living here in that manner before white people showed up and then white people show up and within a few years everyone's dead.
02:18:01.000I'm listening to this book on tape about Cortez and a lot of the Spanish explorers making it to Native America, or North America, rather, and one of the things they talk about is the Mayan Empire.
02:18:14.000They have this detailed account of Mayans, and I was thinking, oh, they probably died off from disease, too.
02:18:21.000I mean, that's probably what killed off the Mayan Empire, because they don't really know.
02:18:24.000They're really not sure what happened to the Mayans.
02:18:28.000If the Spaniards are describing their encounters with the Maya, for sure they gave them diseases, right?
02:18:38.000I mean, their disease just swept through the Native Americans and there was millions and millions and millions of them all across the country.
02:18:48.000Imagine this one small area with this incredible civilization that had We evolved over who knows how long, built these amazing structures, and then gone.
02:19:09.000To the earlier point, the conquistadors did horrific things in that part of the world.
02:19:15.000But of course, you know, the people in that part of the world did not horrific things to other people well before the conquistadors got there.
02:19:21.000You know, I mean, you know, there were forms of human sacrifice in that part of the world.
02:19:25.000Well, how about, what was the temple that they built?
02:19:27.000I never can pronounce this correctly, but there was a temple that they, an Aztec temple that they built where at the completion of it, they had a ritual sacrifice where they killed something like 80,000 slaves.
02:20:43.000And it's, you know, I mean, this is where things get interesting and complicated and political, right?
02:20:50.000I mean, look, you know, the story that we told for most of our history in this country was that colonialism was a beneficent thing, right?
02:20:57.000That was developed to basically civilized savages, right?
02:21:00.000And that was flawed in a million different ways, and it's great that we've corrected it.
02:21:04.000But, right, again, we shouldn't congratulate ourselves too quickly or imagine that we've got it right when we just reverse things and say, oh, you know, Columbus and everybody who came after them were just, you know, horrible, evil enslavers, and everybody that they encountered was some sort of innocent victim.
02:21:22.000You know, that actually patronizes the people they encountered, I think, you know, who had their own complex societies with their own divisions, and yes, often their own brutalities.
02:21:33.000But there's a politics to all of this.
02:21:35.000There seems to be no historically utopian civilization that we can call upon to say, this group got it right.
02:22:29.000And so we should be able to find a way to critique what the conquistadors did and the way they overran these societies without nostalgizing or romanticizing what their societies were.
02:22:44.000Here it says, defeated soldiers were not killed on the battlefield, but captured and returned to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice.
02:22:50.000The Aztec raiders were convinced that the end of the world was nigh and butchered thousands to appease the gods.
02:22:57.000This was a culture obsessed with death.
02:22:59.000They believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing.
02:23:02.000When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated, and I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong, because I probably am, It was consecrated in 1487. The Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.
02:25:45.000They had these rituals, these ancient rituals in Greece that all of these scholars would go and participate in, and they wrote about them in these very romantic ways, and people were trying to figure out what the hell was...
02:26:27.000So different forms, which is very similar to LSD. So they would add this stuff to their wine, and then they would have these incredible...
02:26:38.000Ceremonial rituals and during these ceremonies they would learn things and then they were Discouraged from doing these things by the Roman Emperor and so they would they would then move their ceremonies he found them was in Spain I think,
02:26:55.000I forget, but he tracked the exact same ritualistic and the same depictions of gods and the same pottery with the same psychedelic laced compounds that you could get.
02:27:10.000They could get evidence of it and the molecules are still intact.
02:27:24.000But just the fact that ancient Greece was, I mean, it was the original source of democracy, right?
02:27:31.000The original source of so much information that if you go to all the ancient wise people that we respect and revere, how many of them participated in this ritual in ancient Greece?
02:27:46.000And it's really interesting because it was such a hub of thought.
02:27:51.000And such a hub of innovation in terms of societal structure and the way we treated people.
02:27:57.000Oh, and I mean, obviously, one of the ways that they maintained democracy was by enslaving certain people to do the shit work, which was a model, actually, that people like Jefferson invoked quite literally.
02:28:09.000They said, this is how the Greeks were able to make democracy, is they solve the problem of who's going to do the shit work.
02:29:42.000I'm like a cartoon of a liberal Democrat.
02:29:44.000And if you went on to like, you know, Americans for Democratic Action, you took their little tests about what's a Democrat.
02:29:49.000I mean, you know, pro-gun control, you know, anti-capital punishment, you know, right?
02:29:53.000Right down the line, each and every one, except I'm a zealot about free speech.
02:29:57.000And for a whole variety of unfortunate political reasons, that's now been coded as conservative.
02:30:02.000So at the place I work, there are a lot of people, generally people that don't know me, they've just read things by me, that think I'm a Republican.
02:30:29.000Well, that's the reason that Cigney Wilkinson, the cartoonist, and I wrote the book, is we wanted to look backwards to remind, really, our younger readers that, you know, Frederick Douglass and Suthi B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, they were all free speech zealots.
02:30:45.000Do you think it's what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, that it's more convenient and there's such a temptation to just silence people that you disagree with?
02:30:57.000That they've ignored the reality of discourse and that it's so important to work out who's right and it actually strengthens your position on things.
02:31:08.000It doesn't harm your position and it actually brings more people to your side than it does push them away.
02:31:31.000You mentioned discourse, and we want to stamp out things that we think are harmful.
02:31:37.000I mean, I think that that's something else really important that's changed, I think, maybe in the past two decades, is...
02:31:43.000You know, what I call a kind of psychologizing of politics, whereby if you say something I disagree with, it's not just that I disagree with it or I think it's wrong for the following reasons.
02:34:14.000Lenny Bruce did a bit about that in the 1960s, remember?
02:34:18.000And he'd go like, N-word, N-word, N-word, and then he'd say the S-word, and he'd say all these other things.
02:34:21.000And he'd say, look, you know, if we just keep doing that enough, then the end of the riff was he said, like, no little black kid will come home crying from school because a white boy called him the N-word.
02:35:54.000Maybe that's what's going to get us out of this little game we're playing with language.
02:35:58.000Because if people are doing that, they're looking to be offended, they're trying hard to be offended, trying to play a game.
02:36:05.000Instead of trying to just rationally communicate with you, instead of trying to find out how you think and expressing themselves in a...
02:36:12.000A very polite and maybe even a gentle way, right?
02:36:17.000Instead of doing that, you're playing a game where you're trying to be offended, looking to be offended, looking to keep someone on the defensive.
02:36:34.000And a cul-de-sac is really what it is, I think, in the sense that it interrupts discussion.
02:36:39.000You know, when I give this rap to my students about how problematic this whole, like, psychological frame is, they'll often say, like, you're denying our feelings.
02:37:16.000And, you know, I don't go out of my way to offend people, but I know that because I'm a journalist and a historian, right, that sometimes I'm going to write or say things that will offend people.
02:37:27.000I think that comes with the territory, you know?
02:37:31.000And I think if what we decide is that we're never going to offend each other, we're actually never going to learn from each other.
02:37:38.000Well, especially when you're dealing with people that have this broad range of sensitivities.
02:37:42.000Like what would offend one person would never offend you.
02:37:45.000And what would offend me would probably be like horrendous to someone else.
02:37:51.000And look, you know, I mean, there's a story that begins our little book that is right on point involving Mary Beth Tinker, who was the 13-year-old who wore the armband to Warren Harding Middle School in Des Moines in 1965. Armband?
02:38:07.000Yeah, a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.
02:39:10.000I mean, it's a great teaching tool, and Mary Beth is absolutely fabulous.
02:39:13.000So she tells her story about getting sent home and, you know, eventually getting the ACLU to represent her and You know, becoming what she is, which is this kind of great symbol and also voice for free speech.
02:39:26.000And the students take it in and they say, look, you know, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight, right?
02:41:12.000And that's really our point here, right?
02:41:14.000Is that, you know, when you start to restrict it in whatever way, formally and informally, right, even with the best of intentions, It's people without power, ultimately, that are going to suffer.
02:41:27.000You know, it's people at the bottom that are going to get hurt, right?
02:41:32.000Because they need speech more than anybody else.
02:41:36.000Before the 1960s, students had no speech rights that the courts or the Constitution was willing to recognize.
02:41:42.000So, you know, if a student said something in school that the teacher didn't like, they could just send them home.
02:41:50.000And it's because of Mary Beth Tinker and the other kids who protested that now it's not like that, right?
02:41:56.000And of course, we can debate the degree to which this should be allowed and should you be able to wear a Confederate flag on your t-shirt or, you know, an anti-abortion symbol.
02:42:05.000And these are all important things to talk about.
02:42:07.000But even the reason we're talking about them is because Mary Beth Tinker, who was 13, I think we need to hold on to free speech is...
02:42:33.000We live in an unequal society like all societies are.
02:42:38.000And we live in a society with all sorts of unfairness, all sorts of injustice like all societies have.
02:44:04.000And D, even if it is offensive to them, how do you know they'll benefit by being insulated from it?
02:44:10.000Like, can we find, like, a cognitive psychologist or, you know, anybody who does, like...
02:44:15.000Behavior therapy, to tell us that the way to help somebody who is afraid or threatened by something is to insulate them from it, that's not how it works.
02:44:39.000When I was in high school, Barney Frank came to our school and debated some conservative guy with an American flag on his lapel and I think I was probably like 14 or 15 years old and they brought us into this auditorium and Barney Frank just demolished this guy.
02:44:57.000He was so, so much more clever and interesting and, you know, just made really good points.
02:45:04.000And it was cool to watch because I got to see one guy's perspective that seemed to me to be...
02:45:20.000But he was bullshitting in a weird, like, he was pretending the world is different than it is, and he was going to trick us kids in this way of saying it that was very, like, almost Hollywood movie-esque.
02:46:12.000So you don't need to take a guy like Milo out of the ecosphere.
02:46:16.000You need to have someone debate him who's fucking good.
02:46:20.000And you gotta go, hey man, we got a heavy hitter on this side.
02:46:23.000We gotta bring somebody in that really knows their shit.
02:46:27.000Ben Shapiro has made a career of trouncing people that were not as verbally skilled as him.
02:46:34.000If you go and look at his YouTube page, He's fantastic at pointing out logical fallacies and a lot of these, like, really simple, utopian ideas that a lot of these kids bring to him.
02:46:48.000And he points it out, and he's got a very fast way of talking, and you can't compete with him.
02:46:53.000And when he does that, these kids just get battered.
02:46:56.000I mean, there's, like, dozens and dozens of videos of him doing that.
02:46:59.000And look, back to Milo and even Ben Shapiro, I mean, you also give these people a lot more power and oxygen when you try to shut them down.
02:47:06.000And that's, I think, another theme in the history of free speech and censorship, right?
02:47:10.000One of the great ways to give somebody a bigger microphone is to try to take it away.
02:47:14.000And we've seen this over and over again.
02:47:16.000I mean, the anti-slavery movement is a great example of that.
02:47:19.000I mean, there were gag rules in Congress, like trying to prevent people from bringing in petitions that were anti-slavery petitions.
02:47:25.000And John Quincy Adams became this huge national hero, by the way, after he was president, right?
02:47:30.000When he was in Congress, and he was like our most distinguished ex-president ever.
02:47:34.000He was sort of a leading abolitionist in Congress.
02:47:36.000Precisely because he violated the gag rule, right?
02:47:39.000You know, because the gag rule actually gave him more oxygen.
02:47:42.000The point, the goal of the gag rule, as per the name, was to gag Adams.
02:48:06.000He just happens to be a conservative Jew.
02:48:08.000And if you find out, if you look into it, he was one of the years when he was becoming famous, he was the biggest target for anti-Semitic hate online.
02:49:36.000Yeah, he could have been elsewhere in the Boston area.
02:49:39.000Anyway, Frank's a fascinating figure, important figure in the history of the Democratic Party, but also in the history of gay rights, right?
02:49:45.000Because one of the first out national figures.
02:49:48.000Well, I think the gay rights story is really important to this discussion, and here's why.
02:49:53.000It won't surprise you that because being gay and gay activity was illegal, gay publications were illegal, too.
02:49:59.000And they were widely censored across this country.
02:50:01.000And the Supreme Court actually intervened in the 1950s and said that, like, some of these bodybuilding magazines that were popular among especially gay men were protected.
02:50:40.000And so that's a really good example, it seems to me, right, of why speech is so important because, you know, you take it away and then people who are stigmatized and people who are oppressed, right, they won't be able to connect.
02:50:53.000They won't be able to do the things that they need to do to change this world.
02:52:08.000Yeah, I think kids and all of us would be way better off if there was open and free debate and if they didn't pull fire alarms when people that they don't agree with started talking.
02:52:19.000And it just seems so strange to me that that's controversial to say.
02:52:24.000In 2021, it seems like there's a missing chunk of progress.
02:52:31.000With this adoption of safe spaces and trigger warnings and all this shit that everybody thinks is just a part of the program now.
02:52:41.000And, you know, I would say, actually, I think the worst outcome is the one that we can't really measure, which is just kind of the sort of the spirit of self-censorship that attaches to all this.
02:52:52.000I mean, when you actually try to look at it and you see how many trigger warnings literally there have been, there haven't been that many.
02:52:58.000It's just that what you're creating is, again, a spirit of censorship.
02:53:03.000Like what you were talking about before with people being afraid to talk about affirmative action.
02:53:08.000But, you know, to the point of trigger warnings, I mean, when I taught at NYU, I taught a very big, big lecture, big sweaty lecture class about the culture wars in American history, including many things we're talking about.
02:53:19.000And we did a unit about pornography and pornography censorship and regulation and all that.
02:53:24.000And as part of that unit, I showed a film actually by an NYU colleague called The Price of Pleasure, which is an anti-porn movie.
02:53:31.000And one of the ways it tries to make its argument is like by including some awful, violent, misogynist clips.
02:53:38.000And what I would do before I showed that movie is I would just describe in clinical detail what these clips were.
02:53:55.000And look, for all – and I would say to the students – Was that unusual back then, though, to have that kind of – like when did that kind of porn become normal?
02:54:04.000Well, I think after the internet revolution.
02:54:08.000Yeah, yeah, or maybe even later than that because not everyone had, people didn't have as much access to the internet.
02:54:14.000I mean, anyway, to the point of triggers, I mean, I would tell the students what it was in and I would say, like, I'm going to show the movie during these times, like, if you don't want to see that, you don't have to come to that, right?
02:54:25.000And for all practical purposes, that was a trigger warning, right?
02:54:28.000And I think in some instances that's legitimate.
02:54:31.000The problem is, of course, is we get this concept creep where we now drag it over everything.
02:54:36.000So people, I mean, there was an incident a few years ago where, like, kids demanded trigger warnings for bloody movie scenes in a course about horror movies.
02:55:20.000But trigger warnings for those violent porn movies, that kind of makes sense because you're talking about something that's insanely disturbing.
02:55:26.000And also, I wonder what happened there.
02:55:31.000How did we go from, if you go to the ancient nudie films, it was all pretty straightforward.
02:55:37.000There's men and women kissing and then eventually having sex, right?
02:55:41.000And then you go into the 1980s, kind of the same thing.
02:55:44.000When did the whole violent thing happen?
02:56:49.000There are going to be people with all kinds of fetishes and all kinds of awful things and you can tailor your product to them.
02:56:58.000Now, where does that fit in your opinion of free speech?
02:57:02.000Well, look, I mean, you know, as an educator and as a parent, I'm troubled by the fact that lots of young men in this country are getting their sexual education from porn.
02:57:14.000I'm troubled by that, and I'm glad it didn't exist when I was a kid.
02:57:19.000I mean, to me, the interesting question isn't why 16-year-old boys watch porn.
02:57:24.000It's why they don't do it, like, 24-7.
02:57:27.000I mean, I think if it existed when I was a 16-year-old boy, I think I would have been very tempted to do that.
02:57:32.000And I think it would have fucked me up in a whole number of ways.
02:57:35.000But that's not a good argument for getting rid of it.
02:57:40.000That's an argument for trying to promote a different kind of sexual education.
02:59:29.000And I guess my plea would be, let's have that discussion, right?
02:59:34.000Let's have a free speech discussion about free speech, right?
02:59:39.000That is free and unbridled, where the person who's making the plea for having all the porn be allowed is automatically vilified as a misogynist or a woman hater.
02:59:50.000Although surely some of the consumers of that product are exactly that.
02:59:56.000So, I mean, in some ways this goes back to Mary Beth Tinker because, you know, when the court ruled that she could wear this armband, the court did not say, you can say whatever the fuck you want in school at any time.
03:00:10.000What they said is, if the school wants to restrict the speech, It has to show that there was a threat of material and substantial disruption to learning.
03:00:25.000And by the way, in that particular case, in a school district of 18,000, seven kids wore armbands to school.
03:01:10.000And the point is, if the school wants to restrict it, the onus has to be on the school, it has to be on the institution to show why this is necessary.
03:01:20.000The kid doesn't have to make that plea.
03:01:23.000The default position should be the kid is a citizen and, by the way, a future voter.
03:01:29.000And like the court said, your rights don't disappear at the schoolhouse gate.
03:01:34.000In fact, the school is where you're supposed to learn about those rights.
03:02:36.000And she shows it to the mom and takes a screenshot of it.
03:02:39.000And the school, like, suspended her and said she could never be in cheerleading.
03:02:45.000And there were other disciplinary things, too.
03:02:48.000And this case has worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and it was heard just yesterday.
03:02:52.000And, you know, the questions from the justices—I listened to some of them because you can do that now—they were exactly on this question.
03:02:59.000They were now—remind me again, like, how this 15-year-old saying, fuck cheer, how is that going to disrupt what you do at school?
03:03:08.000Oh, and by the way, do you really want to be monitoring all the chats of all the kids?
03:04:16.000And actually, you know, the school organizations, like the principal's organizations and the superintendent's organization, also the Biden's Department of Education, they rallied around the school.
03:04:26.000They submitted briefs to allow the school to do this, and their argument is, look, there's all this terrible bullying going on on the net, which is true.