On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster chats with Jesse Van Der Meerth about his experiences with social media and how it's made him a better person. They talk about what it's like to be on social media, how to deal with bullies, and how to stay out of the "swamp" that is social media. It's a good one, and it's a really good one. Thanks to Jesse for being on the pod, and we hope you enjoy this one as much as we enjoyed making it! -Joe Rogan is a standup comedian, podcaster, and writer. His work has been featured on Comedy Central, The Daily Show with Bill Maher, and many other media outlets. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, NPR, and The Huffington Post, and is one of the funniest people I've ever met. He's also a good friend of mine, and I really enjoyed getting to know him a lot. I hope you do too! -Jesse Van DerMeerth is a good dude and I hope that you enjoy listening to this episode, because I know you will too. -JOE J. ROGAN PODCAST! Thank you for listening, Jesse Van der Meerath . I appreciate you, I really do. --Jon Sorrentino and I'm looking forward to hearing from you in the next episode of the pod. Thank you so much for being out there! --Timestamps: Joe Rogans Podcast by Night, by Night Train by Day, All Day, By Night, By Day, by Day All Day by Night by Night All Day by Night By Day by By Night by Day by Day - by Night. Thank You for listening to Meerat the Swamp by Night? -- -- by Night by Day By Day By Night By Night (by Night, All By Day ) All Day All By Night (By Night, Every Day, , All Day By Morning, By Evening, By Morning & All Day (By Day, Morning, by Morning, ) by Day by Evening, by After Night, Bye Bye bye Bye Bye, Bye, bye Bye, Good Night, bye, Bye Love, Bye? -- By Bye, Bye, Bye! by Bye, Love, bye!
00:00:39.000It's great for getting your ideas out there, but...
00:00:42.000It's not great for rational, kind discourse between other, you know, compassionate human beings.
00:00:48.000There's very little of that going on there.
00:00:50.000It's a lot of like, it's like being in a mental health institute.
00:00:53.000Well, I was going to say, I think it, I know people from real life who, I don't know for sure, but I think like being on Twitter is exacerbating their mental illness.
00:01:35.000Because then you go down the spiral and you pretend that this angry 15-year-old in Ohio who's talking shit about you, that you can convince him you're a good guy.
00:01:44.000And that's crazy because he's not trying to have a conversation.
00:01:47.000But I find I can't stay away from those fights with the angry 15-year-old in Ohio.
00:01:56.000It's a bad way for humans to communicate.
00:01:59.000And I think one of the things that happens on Twitter that's really kind of strange is that the bullied become the bullies.
00:02:07.000It's like you get a lot of people that had a really rough time in high school and socially, and now they found this circle of people that agree with them, and they're all...
00:02:18.000For lack of a better term, they have mental health problems because there's no doubt they're filled with anxiety and chaos and they're on there all day long and they're just arguing and attacking people.
00:02:30.000There's some people that I follow and I don't follow them.
00:02:33.000What I do is I bookmark their page and I go back to it because I just don't...
00:02:37.000I don't want to get into it, but occasionally I'll go and see, like, okay, let's look at this science project.
00:02:45.000And I'll just see, oh, look at this, we have 10 hours of tweeting today.
00:02:49.000And it's 10 hours of slinging mud and being shitty and calling for people to be deplatformed.
00:02:57.000It's a terrible way to live your life.
00:03:00.000Well, and what's weird is during those 10 hours, all they've received was approval for that behavior.
00:03:04.000So it gives you a completely warped view of...
00:03:34.000She's just a loony progressive who thinks that the only way to make change in this world is to attack people.
00:03:40.000And to, you know, vehemently dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as either a racist or a Nazi or alt-right or including people that are clearly none of those things.
00:03:53.000What I'm fascinated by is these communities where You constantly have to look over your shoulders because if you say the wrong thing once, you're basically out of the community.
00:05:04.000But like every, basically every mainstream journalist and a significant proportion of like big name academics, they're on Twitter every day.
00:05:13.000And they're looking around to see who responds to what.
00:05:16.000Any journalist right now who says that Twitter is not setting the terms of the agenda and what we cover and how we cover it, I think is diluted or lying.
00:06:09.000I mean, and I have disagreements with her, too, but it's just I've never understood the...
00:06:13.000Of all the people to focus that much anger on, I've never quite gotten it to be honest.
00:06:19.000You were saying, we were talking about this before and we agreed to stop talking about it until we got on the podcast, that there was, I guess there's a clip going around from my podcast from years back where it was Charles Johnson on the podcast where he was saying something about a gene.
00:07:08.000The idea is if you have this gene or some variant of it, you're more aggressive.
00:07:11.000And he basically explained there's this interesting recent history of genetics where people thought there was like a gay gene and a liberal gene and a warrior gene.
00:07:19.000These are called candidate gene studies.
00:07:22.000Like what happens if you have this gene versus not have this gene?
00:07:25.000At the time Johnson made this claim, there had been this like Pretty shitty media coverage about the idea of a warrior gene.
00:07:34.000Do you know that guy John Horgan, the science writer?
00:10:38.000I think this is a legitimate modern-day free speech issue to the point where there's a real argument to be made that if you're not on these platforms, you're not just diminished.
00:10:52.000They've silenced you in a way that changes the narrative.
00:10:58.000You don't get to see the other person's point of view.
00:11:01.000Even people that are incredibly polarizing, like Trump, it's fucking amazing that they can just remove the 45th President of the United States from everything.
00:11:10.000And he can't even communicate anymore.
00:11:13.000I mean, you could say it's because of the Capitol attack, you could say it's because of a lot of things, and I get your perspective, but I do not agree with silencing him.
00:12:02.000And it's like, if you pay attention to online forums, when they're left alone, like Reddit's a great example, they had to close down the Donald, right?
00:12:21.000And people love saying things they're not supposed to say, and they love riling people up.
00:12:25.000Now, when you're a person, whether it's Charles Johnson or someone else, that finds this avenue where you can get a lot of attention, By stirring shit and saying things and maybe you don't even agree with but saying things that are gonna rile up people on the left and get a bunch of shit posters and Hardcore right-wing people online to love you people lean in towards that and there was a lot of that going on I think that's where Gavin McGinnis went south.
00:12:53.000That's where Milo went south a lot of these guys and then once the wave of Censorship came in and those guys started getting deplatformed.
00:13:02.000You see, it really did have a massive impact on the culture.
00:13:13.000I actually want to press you on one thing because my impulse as a journalist is to ask you questions.
00:13:17.000So most of your critics, the shit they say about who you platform, I find ridiculous because often you're platforming people who are already popular.
00:13:25.000And I'm with you in that if someone is already a big figure, they're a big figure.
00:13:30.000All the best we can do is interrogate their beliefs.
00:13:32.000A couple times where I'm more sympathetic to your critics, one was like Johnson, although then I saw you go back and forth with him on Twitter about this black gene violence bullshit.
00:14:10.000To me, that's like one subset of conversation where I'm like, you have to have those conversations.
00:14:14.000The one area where I sort of agree with your critics is I know you might not want to talk about this guy, but when you had Alex Jones on, and there's this conspiracy theory about the governor of Virginia harvesting organs from fetuses.
00:15:10.000And he's right about many things, and he's wrong about many things.
00:15:13.000What percentage of his craziest sounding beliefs do you think he himself believes in?
00:15:17.000Well, the crazy sounding ones, the problem with some of the crazy sounding ones, they turned out to be true.
00:15:23.000Because he was telling me about Epstein fucking a decade ago.
00:15:26.000Well, let me tell you, this is nuts, man.
00:15:29.000Like a decade ago, he's like, well, what they do is they compromise all these elites, they take them, they bring them to this island, they have them fuck these underage girls and they film it.
00:15:45.000There's a lot of evidence that it's true.
00:15:48.000There's a lot of testimony from a lot of different people.
00:15:51.000Whether or not they fucked them, they were there.
00:15:53.000And whether or not they really have film of them fucking them, it is very bizarre that you have these high-level people in both science, celebrities, politicians, and they fly to this fucking island where this convicted pedophile has this weird spot where he takes people.
00:19:48.000Yeah, I think a lot of what he does is he takes some little sliver of truth and he, either because he may get up or has an overactive imagination, that becomes a grand conspiracy theory where the state of Virginia...
00:20:47.000And she was pressed by a Republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion, even as a woman is essentially dilating, ready to give birth.
00:20:56.000And she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labor.
00:21:02.000Do you support her measure and explain her answer?
00:21:06.000Yeah, you know, I wasn't there, Julie, and I certainly can't speak for Delegate Tran, but I will tell you, one, first thing I would say, this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians,
00:21:22.000and the mothers and fathers that are involved.
00:21:36.000Mothers and fathers that are involved.
00:21:39.000There are, you know, when we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way.
00:21:52.000And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities.
00:21:56.000There may be a fetus that's non-viable.
00:21:59.000So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen.
00:22:10.000The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired.
00:22:15.000And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother.
00:22:19.000So I think this was really blown out of proportion.
00:22:22.000But again, we want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions.
00:22:27.000We want the decision to be made by the The mothers and their providers.
00:22:32.000And this is why, Julie, that legislators, most of whom are men by the way, shouldn't be telling a woman what she should and shouldn't be doing with her body.
00:22:41.000And do you think multiple physicians should have to weigh in as is currently required?
00:22:46.000She's trying to lift that requirement.
00:22:47.000Well, I think it's always good to get a second opinion and for at least two providers to be involved in that decision because these decisions shouldn't be taken lightly.
00:22:56.000And so, you know, I would certainly support more than one provider.
00:23:11.000What are you saying is the deformities and non-viable fetuses?
00:23:15.000But the thing about deformities is there's a lot of human beings with deformities.
00:23:19.000We have to decide whether or not it's okay if you give birth.
00:23:23.000The way he phrased it was very concerning, wasn't it to you?
00:23:29.000No, because I think he phrased it poorly, but I think he's talking about you would only have an abortion that late in the case of the fetus not being viable in the first place.
00:23:36.000And then he did not answer the question.
00:23:39.000Well, he's talking about a weird situation where then the fetus was surviving outside the womb.
00:23:45.000Think about Jones's idea that this is part of a conspiracy to harvest baby organs.
00:23:51.000How far that is from what he's talking about.
00:23:53.000No, listen, I completely agree with that.
00:23:55.000I think what this is, is it's an abortion rights discussion.
00:23:58.000And I think abortion is, it's one of those conversations that are, it's an incredibly human conversation in that there's There's clearly, there's times when abortion disturbs almost everybody.
00:24:35.000That's when people get super uncomfortable with it and that's when you run into people that take this whole discussion and turn it into what you're saying, which is like you're making this loony conspiracy about harvesting organs.
00:24:50.000And I think if you're Alex Jones or if you're, like, an anti-abortion figure, like, you want to pull the conversation in that direction.
00:24:56.000You want people debating, like, basically babies being aborted, even though most abortions take place in different contexts.
00:25:01.000But if you're a guy who's looking for—see, the thing about Alex is he's balls deep in this stuff all day long.
00:25:50.000But unfortunately, a lot of it was true.
00:25:53.000One of them was the Associated Press report on children catching polio from the polio vaccine that they were giving these kids in Africa.
00:26:03.000It was like this cover of, and I was like, that's not real.
00:26:07.000And then he brings out this article, and you're reading this article about children getting vaccines in Africa and these vaccines giving them polio.
00:26:23.000And then it turns out to actually be real.
00:26:24.000So I want to talk about my book, and this is a good segue, because one of the main things I write about is how to know whether to trust experts.
00:26:31.000And so to me, with someone like Jones, The Sandy Hook thing is such a fuck-up that from then on I'm going to be very skeptical.
00:27:29.000Look, Alex is a polarizing figure, but the people that know him, like how I know him, they think he's an entertaining, fun guy to be around who knows a lot of crazy shit.
00:27:42.000The problem is he's so polarizing that saying that opens you up to so much criticism that everybody immediately wants to push back.
00:28:14.000But he needs someone who's like, hold on, let's see if that's true.
00:28:18.000And if you just leave him on his show and he's ranting and raving and he's there all day and he's drinking two bottles of tequila, it's going to be a wild-ass crazy show and he's not even going to remember half the shit he said.
00:28:29.000But if you can rein him in, he has a lot of fucking information about false flag events, a lot of information about, like, people think he's a right-wing guy.
00:28:39.000When I met him, he got arrested for going after George W. Bush and saying he was perpetrating crimes against humanity.
00:28:53.000I mean, he has some right-wing views, but he has a lot of left-wing views, particularly on gay people, on racial issues, on things along those lines.
00:29:24.000You know, people worry about people influencing folks.
00:29:29.000And for most people that see Alex on, like, the Andrew Schultz show or Michael Malice's show, they just think he's a really entertaining, crazy guy to listen to, and they enjoy it.
00:30:38.000Dr. Shanna H. Swan, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Impairing the Future of the Human Race.
00:30:47.000This is a terrifying conversation that I had with her.
00:30:49.000I don't know if you listened to that one, but it's really good.
00:30:53.000She's a scientist, and it's all just about phthalates and pesticides and the effect they have on human reproductive systems, but also on frogs.
00:31:01.000Pesticides really do have a radical impact on frogs and amphibians.
00:32:16.000But you're in a unique situation because you have so many listeners and 1% of your listeners is fucking 30,000 people.
00:32:23.000And if they now think the governor of Virginia is harvesting baby organs that I'm using causing harm, which is what people say about my work.
00:32:34.000That particular clip is a real problem because it's, you know, to draw the conclusion that he drew, my conclusion that I drew from that is like, Jesus Christ, that is such a weird area of discussion,
00:32:50.000like whether or not you should revive a fetus once it's been born and to decide to revive or not revive based on whether or not it's Deformed or whatever the issue is that it has physically, whatever ailment or...
00:33:06.000It's like I took in college a course on bioethics and that shit is really heavy and doctors have to make really difficult decisions.
00:33:14.000I think the real problem was him having that conversation on the radio and probably unprepared.
00:33:22.000He probably didn't know that that was going to be one of the things he talked about.
00:33:24.000And the way he discussed it I think an issue like that is something that you really should sit down and write out your actual thoughts and think about those, solidify them.
00:33:35.000Well, so I felt a little bad for Jamie because I was trying to imagine if I had to fact check him in real time.
00:34:33.000I wasn't aware of that the government has an actual strategy that they use to break up peaceful protests by bringing in people who cause violence.
00:35:08.000And how they were all wearing government-issued boots and...
00:35:10.000The cops never arrested them or they allowed them to hide out in a building together and then they all made some sort of a negotiation and released them.
00:35:19.000But I think that fuels conspiracy theorists is that the shit even just our government has done over the years has been so weird that I don't blame people.
00:37:25.000And every day we get press releases from Harvard, from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania that psychologists are figuring out amazing stuff about how to fix the world.
00:37:35.000How to fix racism, how to fix the educational system.
00:37:38.000And a lot of these, when I looked into them more, there's like nothing there.
00:38:25.000So I'm really interested in those instances where like the most, and maybe this is why I should drink with Alex Jones, where the most important experts in the world tell us shit and it's just, it's not true.
00:38:37.000How much has to do, when the spreading of this kind of information, how much of it has to do with clickbait?
00:38:44.000One of the things that's disturbed me over the last decade or so is that journalism, even journalism at its highest levels, without naming any names, but like fabled institutions, are resorting to clickbait.
00:38:59.000You know, my friend Kurt Metzger said something about the New York Times once.
00:39:02.000He said it's like a fat girl's Tumblr blog now.
00:39:05.000And I'm like, that is such a fucked up thing to say.
00:39:08.000But what he was saying was that there's stories that are written in there that are not what you associate with the New York Times of old.
00:41:14.000They don't quite lie, but they leave out a lot of details.
00:41:17.000And so 2010 was sort of the peak when the stuff in my book in psychology, like the worst psychology, was being published.
00:41:24.0002010 was also when things got really, really click-baity, I think.
00:41:27.000What happened in 2010 that the worst psychology got published?
00:41:31.000This is where it gets complicated, but certain areas of research, so one of them is called social priming, and that's the idea that if I flash an American flag before your eyes for 300 milliseconds, you'll get way more patriotic.
00:41:44.000It sounds like voodoo magic, but for a while people really believed these results, and the reason they believed them is because there's all these ways you can fuck up statistically, and you publish stuff that appears to be true but isn't false.
00:41:58.000Let's say I asked you off the bat, take the top psychology journals around.
00:42:02.000What percentage of the findings in them would you say could be replicated later on if you run it back?
00:44:10.000One of my favorite stories was a guy who was involved in a test where they were doing a study where they gave one group an SSRI and the other group they gave a placebo.
00:44:29.000This guy, for whatever reason, took a shitload of pills and ran to the hospital with an elevated pulse, high blood pressure, holding this pill bottle, freaking out, thinking he's dying, telling them that he fucked up and he took the whole bottle of pills and he's going to die.
00:45:10.000And far exceeding the dose you're supposed to take.
00:45:13.000I remember being 19 and smoking weed with my roommate out of a Gatorade bottle that you poke the hole in and I'd be like, oh man, I'm so fucked up.
00:46:41.000It's always been in a weird place, but it's in an exceptionally weird place today with the climate of our culture because these people, a lot of them that are teaching these courses, a lot of them that are professors, they went from being a student and living in this world to then getting a job at the university to becoming a professor.
00:47:02.000So they've never been out there in the regular world outside of this insulated bubble of academia.
00:47:10.000The same thing is happening in journalism because especially as like more and more of us come from upper middle class, like good college settings, we all have the same beliefs.
00:47:20.000We're all not really tolerant of people with different beliefs and it's turning journalism into a shit show actually.
00:47:26.000It's really depressing because like what's the point of being a journalist or an academic if you're not going to be open minded and actually interrogate the world a little bit?
00:47:32.000It's just so important to have objective, unbiased versions of the truth.
00:47:37.000And to not have that in a reliable source, I mean, like I said, I think the New York Times is the best.
00:47:45.000I think Washington Post is excellent, too.
00:47:48.000There's a lot of good newspapers still that I think do the best job that we currently have available.
00:47:54.000But I would like something that's bulletproof.
00:47:56.000I would like something that doesn't have any opinion pieces that are preposterous.
00:49:24.000I left under good terms just to write the book.
00:49:26.000But once we got in our own bubble and we realized that no one who mattered could get pissed off at us and we didn't have to answer to editors, I don't know.
00:49:35.000It just made the conversation much more free-flowing.
00:49:37.000We could talk about what we want to talk about.
00:49:39.000It's the biggest difference in the world when you're not...
00:49:42.000Looking over your shoulder, or it's not just the bosses who are the problem.
00:49:45.000It's like, is your 25-year-old colleague going to be very sensitive about what you said and report you to HR? And go to human resources.
00:49:52.000Yeah, which is, I think, have you had Jonathan Haidt on before?
00:50:18.000If he didn't see it, John, I apologize.
00:50:23.000We disagree on this or that, but it's absolutely the case that in journalism, that shit has infiltrated some newsrooms.
00:50:29.000It makes it very hard to do journalism.
00:50:32.000Well, it's also infiltrated corporations in a massively disingenuous way because they've recognized that the wind is blowing in that direction, so they'll put up a rainbow flag.
00:50:42.000Wait, are you saying Halliburton isn't committed to social justice?
00:53:38.000You might have talked about this on the show.
00:53:39.000There was a moment last year when all the public health researchers were like, those far-right protesters getting together to protest mass and lockdown, that's so dangerous.
00:54:05.000Well, again, we're going back to confirmation bias.
00:54:08.000This was a conversation that I was having with a friend of mine who was pro the George Floyd protests, and I said, listen, I'm 100% pro people protesting.
00:54:19.000I go, if they're just protesting, as soon as it gets violent and the chaos, that bothers me.
00:54:25.000But it is kind of crazy that all of a sudden we're okay with people screaming shoulder to shoulder with each other.
00:54:31.000The whole idea is that this stuff is airborne.
00:54:34.000And, you know, his take on it was, like, there's no significant evidence that proves that it's spreading.
00:55:49.000It's like if you're not on my side, you're on the wrong side now.
00:55:54.000I always thought that because of the internet, we're going to get more access to information, so we're going to have more access to the truth, and people are going to be able to debate things and find out exactly what's up.
00:56:04.000In the 90s, the tech bros, they wrote these utopian essays about the end of ignorance or whatever.
00:56:44.000There's a lot of shit that people have to deal with.
00:56:46.000They don't have the time to develop a very nuanced, objective, purely...
00:56:54.000It's a purely honest view of what they're looking at.
00:56:59.000So they find these conglomerations of people that have adopted these predetermined patterns of behavior and these opinions, this conglomeration of opinions, and they just adopt those.
00:57:10.000And then they repeat the things that they think they need to say in order to be in the good graces of that group.
00:57:16.000Do you know the concept of the exhausted majority?
00:57:32.000Most of the country is just exhausted and hates talking about politics because things have gotten so heated.
00:57:36.000They don't want to say the wrong thing on Facebook.
00:57:38.000So it's sort of like the sort of controversial concept of like the silent majority.
00:57:43.000But I think there is a silent majority of people who want nothing to do with the present political discourse.
00:57:47.000And to me, that sort of explains how like...
00:57:50.000People like me from Brooklyn were all Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders and I was sort of divided between the two and then Joe Biden just runs away with it because most people are not online.
00:58:00.000Liz Warren didn't drive you nuts, the Native American stuff?
00:58:05.000No, I just think all politicians are flawed one way or another.
01:00:17.000It just says rights to results or strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual's pedigree, likely in the range of six to ten generations ago.
01:00:29.000There was an actual paper that got published or an article.
01:02:25.000And my friend was talking to me about this and he was saying it's kind of crazy that this guy got his eyes done to look more Korean where Koreans get their eyes done to look more European at a really frightening rate.
01:02:40.000Like it's one of the most popular plastic surgeries in all of Korea is to get your eyes done.
01:02:47.000It seems like every culture has some exotic other...
01:02:50.000Like in India, they have skin whitening cream.
01:02:52.000Everyone wants to be a little bit different.
01:03:18.000There's a reason why these folks have so much melanin in their skin.
01:03:22.000They have this beautiful climate, and your body's protecting itself from the sun.
01:03:27.000I was just thinking about what you said about everything being ultra-polarized, no one could get along.
01:03:32.000The guy to me that did the best job of bridging that stuff, and I listened to your interview with him when I was prepping for this, was Anthony Bourdain.
01:03:39.000He went to these cultures that really did have views that he would view as horrible, about women or gay people or whatever, and he intentionally didn't focus on that.
01:03:48.000He focused on food and where you live.
01:03:53.000I obviously didn't know him at all, but his death really hit me hard because I just think that's really hard to do and we need way more people like that and we don't have any.
01:04:57.000And then I get this phone call or this text message when I was in Chicago from Maynard saying, I guess we won't be having that celebrity jiu-jitsu match.
01:05:31.000Well, I mean, that's the thing a lot of people don't realize about suicide, because I've written a little bit about this, is it's a much more impulsive thing than people often realize.
01:07:31.000I mean, I partied with him a few times, but the hardest I ever partied with him, we were in Montana, and we were, for his show, we went pheasant hunting.
01:10:23.000Because I moved from New Jersey to San Francisco when I was 7. We stayed in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. And then we moved to Florida from 11 to 13. 13 to 24, I lived in Boston, then New York,
01:10:41.000Do you think that makes it like contributed to your, I don't know, you jump between a lot of different subjects, like your different interests?
01:10:48.000I think what it did do is it forced me to form my own opinions about things.
01:11:09.000And that's also how I got into martial arts because I was like, God damn, I'm so tired of people picking on me.
01:11:14.000It was very scary to not have friends and to be in the school.
01:11:20.000And also I was a short kid, so I was worried these guys were going to beat me up.
01:11:24.000So I got involved in martial arts, which also tremendously helped my ability to see and think of things for myself because I had gone through some very...
01:11:34.000You know, competitions are dangerous and scary, and the stress level's so high, and if you can get through them on the other end, you have this incredible feeling of accomplishment.
01:13:11.000Now, if they fucking dox you, and they start harassing your kids, or harassing your wife, or harassing your boss, that's where it gets gross when people don't like someone's opinion, and then they contact someone's boss, and then they...
01:13:25.000Dude, trying to get people fired is now the first thing you do when you disagree with someone.
01:13:52.000These people that go after people, when the mob comes for them, man, it's wild.
01:13:56.000It's wild to see them panic and flail.
01:13:59.000It's like, what do you think you've been doing to all these other people you've been attacking?
01:14:04.000Katie had like, after she left the stranger, I mean she got laid off because they laid off everyone, but she had like co-workers just openly talking shit about her online just to raise their own social capital.
01:14:46.000And also, even if they like it because they're worried about you coming after them or they want to make sure that they're on the right side of the mob, they're going to know that that's who you are.
01:15:05.000Moving forward as a culture, in order to figure out The right way to have discussions about things where they actually get productive, where you actually have real conversations where maybe you might learn something about the way other people view things.
01:15:26.000A lot of people have developed all these derailing tactics where they'll be like...
01:17:39.000Yes, it's been insanely important, continues to be, but it's more dismissed now than at any other time in my life.
01:17:48.000Like, this whole fake news shit, like saying fake...
01:17:51.000Like, Jesus Christ, if someone sends me an article, then I go, ah, it's on CNN. Like...
01:17:58.000I have a hesitancy to retweet something that's on CNN. No, it's the exact same thing with me where it's like five years ago, I would say controversy blows up.
01:18:09.000Washington Post writes an article about it.
01:18:10.000I'm like, I can trust the Washington Post to get the basic details right.
01:18:14.000And I'm not saying like every journalist at the Washington Post is bad.
01:18:18.000I still enjoy their coverage, but I need to now double check to make sure the Washington Post isn't passing along misinformation.
01:19:09.000It's dangerous to – I know people that don't talk to their friends anymore because their friends had different political perspectives than they do.
01:19:17.000And it's just – it's a weird time for that.
01:19:19.000And the window of what's considered mainstream is getting narrower and narrower.
01:19:24.000We should talk about the trans kids stuff.
01:19:52.000The response when Bernie came on here was like one of those moments where I... My gradual loss of faith in mainstream journalism, there's been a step process.
01:20:20.000They did it because they didn't want Bernie to win.
01:20:23.000If I had done the exact same conversation with the exact same endorsement of Biden or whoever they wanted at the time, they would have applauded it and they would have amplified it.
01:21:35.000The way they distorted your views and distorted your positions on things, because I had to go back and read what you originally said, and then go back and read the article again, and it was...
01:22:16.000And many parts of this are good, where trans people are accepted, and not just accepted, they're applauded in a way that's never happened before in the history of our culture.
01:22:30.000So anything that goes against that narrative is immediately attacked, even if you're talking about children making life-changing decisions.
01:23:05.000And then after you've been on blockers, you can go on cross-sex hormones.
01:23:08.000That means if you're a natal male, you'll develop some female features and vice versa, blah, blah, blah.
01:23:14.000There's a Dutch clinic in Amsterdam that pioneered this idea of using puberty blockers for this.
01:23:20.000We'd always had puberty blockers because if a girl goes through puberty at seven, That's not good.
01:23:25.000We want to delay that at least a few years.
01:23:27.000And they figured out a protocol and they did some research.
01:23:31.000This is one of the only gender clinics in the world that does good, rich, long-term data.
01:23:34.000And we desperately need long-term data.
01:23:37.000They found that for kids who were gender dysphoric from a very young age, four or five, and Abigail Schreier has talked about some of this, Their view was that gender dysphoria usually goes away in time.
01:23:48.000Usually, it often means you're going to be gay.
01:23:51.000So if it's a boy who likes to wear girls' clothing and say I'm a girl, oftentimes it'll grow up to be a gay male, sometimes it'll grow up to be a trans woman.
01:23:59.000In this clinic's view, if you get to the edge of puberty, puberty starts, and your gender dysphoria has not gone away, It's probably not going to go away ever.
01:24:08.000And you should go on puberty blockers and you should go on hormones.
01:24:11.000So this clinic, the Dutch clinic as it's called, they have a lot of research showing that among their kids, the kids who go through this protocol, they end up well.
01:24:22.000And that tells us something, which is that in some cases we might want kids to go through this.
01:24:28.000This does not tell us that like any kid who feels gender dysphoric or says they want blockers and hormones should go on them.
01:24:35.000And what's happening now is it—and this is not just something Abigail Schreier says.
01:24:39.000This is something clinicians themselves say, is kids are coming out as trans at 13 or 14, much later than they used to.
01:24:46.000And we don't know if the same logic applies or the same research applies to a kid who comes out at 12 and 13 versus a kid who comes out at 5 and has been gender dysphoric for 7 years.
01:24:57.000So what I find incredibly disturbing right now is— These treatments, I'm really in favor of kids who need them getting them.
01:25:06.000I'm opposed to all the Republican laws attempting to ban them.
01:25:09.000I don't want a fucking Tennessee state legislator getting between a doctor and a patient.
01:25:51.000How could you know or how could you get it back?
01:25:53.000If you're going through a developmental process that depends upon your body having testosterone and you deny your body testosterone at a normal level for multiple years while you're in puberty and while you're growing, you're not getting that back.
01:26:07.000Well, the theory is you get something similar back by going on estrogen.
01:26:19.000When you are a natal male, and then you go on hormone blockers, and you go through puberty on hormone blockers, and then you decide that you're going to detransition, for sure your developmental cycle is going to be altered forever.
01:26:36.000If you decide to go back to being a male, you're not going to be the same person who you would have been if you had testosterone through the whole process.
01:26:43.000The theory is if the kids are well assessed and they go through the Dutch protocol where they felt that way since they were three, they're probably not going to change their mind.
01:26:51.000We don't see the thing is like it's it's changing the mind is like what does that mean?
01:26:56.000You know, it's it's like you can't have There's not a set.
01:27:03.000No, you're not on fire You know I'm saying like it's not a one or a zero.
01:27:06.000It's not you you This is it's such a giant deal Like when you say that someone's changing their mind you have to say okay, what are the influences and Like, what is around this child that's making this child?
01:27:23.000Is this just coming from the child's being?
01:29:41.000They would view it, they would use the term genocide.
01:29:44.000It's sort of similar like if you said there was like a cure for autism or something.
01:29:48.000I think it's very sensitive and it's viewed as an identity rather than like a...
01:29:52.000Do you think that if there's a cure for autism that people wouldn't embrace that cure?
01:29:56.000No, I think some people would, but I think other people would say that you're sort of, in an ableist way, destroying an element of humanity that would otherwise produce amazing things, even if they're neuroatypical.
01:30:14.000No, and I think there's- I mean, the idea that, like, look, obviously some things- I mean, Elon has said that he is on the spectrum, right?
01:30:35.000So are you opposed to kids, and I ask this as someone who thinks this needs to be an open discussion, but do you basically think kids should never go on blockers?
01:30:47.000Are there cases where you'd be comfortable with it?
01:31:10.000I think they were saying that as early as 10 years old, if the parents disagree with the child affirming its gender identity, that the parents will no longer have custody of the children.
01:31:28.000There's so much legal shit that's attached to all this stuff.
01:31:32.000And then there's parents that were, you know, there's a guy who went to jail in Canada because he refused to call his biological daughter a he.
01:31:39.000He kept calling her a she and they arrested him.
01:32:21.000BC father arrested held in jail for repeatedly violating court orders over child's gender transition therapy.
01:32:27.000He's alleged to have revealed information about his child's mental health, medical status, and treatments and gave information that could reveal the family's identity.
01:32:36.000Canada, I think, has more weird laws about what you can disclose and stuff like that.
01:33:10.000Two-year-olds, they don't have any idea what's going on.
01:33:12.000But I'm not saying a two-year-old who says that once.
01:33:14.000I'm saying a two-year-old who, from the time they could talk, has insisted this about themselves, and then you get to 10 or 11 in the onset of puberty, and they've consistently identified the other way that whole span.
01:33:48.000We could be assured that this was never going to change and that this is just how that child is and that they're never going to vary.
01:33:55.000But what if what you were saying before, if they go through puberty and they just become a gay man?
01:34:00.000Yeah, but I'm saying, so the research the Dutch clinic has and this Canadian clinic has, and this is all controversial, people will disagree with it, suggests that the longer a kid is dysphoric as a child.
01:34:12.000But isn't this a gender transition clinic?
01:34:15.000No, but these are clinics that, in my view, took a careful approach, and they were conservative about it, and they did not go willy-nilly into this.
01:35:17.000The thing is, like, to make that decision that's going to affect them for the rest of their life while they're two is like, man, are you sure?
01:35:24.000Well, but, okay, so you're not making that decision at two.
01:35:28.000You're not making any medical decisions.
01:36:10.000I think guys like you and I having this discussion is insane.
01:36:14.000The amount of data that there's available that people like you and I are trying to figure out whether it's right or wrong, whether you agree with this or not agree with this, there's not enough information.
01:37:52.000This is the kind of thing we're talking about, like how journalism is dysfunctional right now.
01:37:56.000If you even suggest this ever happen, I got put on a list of A sensible anti-LGBT bigots by GLAAD. I'm on a list, like an enemies list, because I've written about this in a way that doesn't entirely discount that possibility because I've talked to kids who've said it happened to them.
01:38:42.000There's a website called Science-Based Medicine.
01:38:45.000And it's like you talked with Colin Wright about how skeptic communities and atheist communities have gotten a little bit corrupted by ideology.
01:38:54.000These guys ran this really bad article basically telling everyone.
01:38:58.000And what pisses me off the most is parents reading this.
01:39:00.000They're saying the evidence we have on blockers is good.
01:39:03.000The evidence we have on hormones for kids is good.
01:39:06.000We don't have good evidence on any of this.
01:39:08.000And I feel badly for parents of kids trying to work through this issue in the absence of any good evidence because they are basically, in some cases, effectively being lied to.
01:39:18.000If you're a journalist and you say, we have really solid evidence on this, that's not true.
01:39:22.000And Multiple governments in Europe have looked into the evidence and they've all come away saying we don't have enough here.
01:39:28.000So I just think we need to be pretty conservative about this issue until we know more, which we don't yet.
01:39:33.000What do you think the motivation for people to write articles where they pretend that there's a lot of evidence?
01:39:40.000I'm not prepared to make the direct comparison to like the satanic sex abuse panic, but people want to protect kids.
01:39:46.000And occasionally we have these like moral panics of like all these parents are hurting their kids.
01:39:51.000All these day care providers are hurting their kids.
01:39:54.000You know, for understandable reasons, humans go crazy about kids sometimes.
01:39:58.000And I think there's a subset of kids who are really trans and need access to these hormones.
01:40:03.000There's a subset of kids where there's other mental health stuff going on.
01:40:06.000And I've quoted some of the top clinicians in the country, including the head of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, Erica Anderson.
01:40:19.000She herself has seen situations that really worry her because the clinicians themselves are not following the rules they're supposed to follow before they give kids blockers or hormones.
01:40:29.000And that could have really dire consequences.
01:40:34.000Because this is essentially over the last couple decades, and more so over the last decade, this is coming to the forefront of the public consciousness.
01:40:45.000This is a topic that is discussed constantly.
01:40:49.000And now with the introduction of Olympic athletes, now we have the first female weightlifter from New Zealand who was on the team that was a male.
01:40:59.000And we have all these questions about this kind of stuff.
01:41:12.000I mean, we've had trans people for a long time, but it hasn't been, like, a primary discussion.
01:41:18.000I mean, a primary subject of conversation when it comes to, like, the use of bathrooms, you know, sports.
01:41:24.000Like, the things, the discussions that we're having today on them, it's like everything's escalated.
01:41:29.000I think the first thing to realize is that A, trans people have been treated horribly over the years, and B, in 99% of incidents, like, situations, there's not much to discuss.
01:41:40.000People should be treated the way they want to be treated.
01:41:42.000There's a small subset of issues that you've talked about on the show, and one of them is kids.
01:42:10.000Not just the treatment I've received, but the treatment other people have received just for trying to say this is actually a complicated issue.
01:42:16.000It needs to be treated, it needs to be reported on the way science reporters report on other issues.
01:42:22.000So, you know, this piece I wrote about...
01:42:26.000A website like Science Based Medicine, in most other contexts, they're the go-to for the skeptical, careful, rigorous look at this issue.
01:42:34.000Watching websites like that just sort of blow in the breeze and take the right position so that people don't get mad at them disturbs me.
01:42:42.000And I'm worried about what we're going to say 10 or 20 years from now about what we're doing now.
01:42:48.000Things like this, if you're a generalist, like I'm not sure what the background of the people from science-based medicine is, but I would imagine that anything like this, that you're going to cover a complex, nuanced, multifaceted subject that has broad implications for our society,
01:43:09.000for children, for adults, for fucking corporations, for everybody.
01:43:17.000This is not something you can have a cursory examination of, and I think that there's a real motivation that a lot of people online have, is to give in to the crowd.
01:43:32.000Like, whatever the crowd wants, placate them, say what they want you to say, express yourself in a way that you think is going to be well received by the orthodoxy.
01:43:43.000I think what makes it more complicated is that if a journalist came to me and was like, I want to write about youth transition, I could give them a list of sources to get quotes from.
01:43:54.000Some of them would say there's no issues here, the data's great.
01:43:57.000Some of them would say kids should never transition.
01:44:50.000Now, if you could get one person and that one person, you could talk to that one person and get a real clear understanding of who they are, you'd have less nuance.
01:44:58.000You'd have an understanding of who they are, and you have an understanding of why this is so important to them, and then you can make a clear-cut distinction.
01:45:05.000But I think that has to be done in an objective way across the board.
01:45:09.000I mean, with examining this kind of an issue, it's very complex.
01:45:17.000And if you're not a trans person and you're talking to someone or talking about things like trans people, I think we all have to recognize that we don't even understand what that feels like.
01:45:30.000And that's why I think anyone who writes about this issue, like I've interviewed trans people, and if you do, you come away feeling like this wasn't a choice for them.
01:45:41.000This wasn't some flippant thing like, oh, I'm going to try being a chick for a while.
01:45:44.000It's like, to me, when it comes to adults, you'd sort of have to be an asshole to be like, I don't think this person should be able to transition.
01:47:04.000I think it would be incredible just to be a woman for a couple days would be incredible just to get a perspective of what it feels like to have those hormones rushing through your body.
01:47:14.000Just to feel like to want to wear those weird shoes and to be into purses and just to look at things, you know, like serious issues from a woman's perspective versus a male's perspective because...
01:47:26.000You know, we try to be understanding and try to, like, have open communication, have conversations with each other and figure out how you feel, how I feel, but there is no way a man understands what it's like.
01:47:42.000You had Carol Hoeven on, and she talked about hormones, and I think there's been really interesting stuff written about trans people who transition, who are like, I live my whole life as a man, here's what it's like to be a woman, here's what it's like to be a man.
01:47:56.000If there was a totally reversible way to experience that, I would totally do it.
01:47:59.000I have spoken to quite a few female to male trans people, and one of the things that you come out of that with is that there's an understanding of the impact of testosterone that they just really did not know.
01:48:17.000They thought that men were just dicks because it's easy to be a dick, and then they go, oh, this is just- No, we're literally poisoned by a hormone in our brains.
01:48:26.000That's forced people to go to war and forced people to try to conquer resources.
01:48:32.000Dude, I want to conquer resources so badly.
01:48:50.000It's a wide range of humans because there's a wide range of guests.
01:48:54.000So I think there's some people that, like, when I have on an MMA fighter, their eyes glaze over and they just fast forward through that one, skip it, and go to the next one.
01:49:03.000My eyes would glaze over, but in the Carol Hoeven interview, you talked about that in a way that made me want to, like, fucking...
01:51:17.000She has that thing that makes her want that thrill, and some people want to do rock climbing, and they want to do hang gliding, and they want to do all that kind of wild shit.
01:51:45.000One of the most brilliant people I've ever spoken to ever in my life who is the greatest jiu-jitsu coach alive who was a professor at Columbia.
01:53:37.000It's just good for you because I think a lot of the anxiety that people have is...
01:53:45.000There's tension and anxiety that exists in the human body that is a remnant of the past and it's a part of the fact that whenever you face stress thousands and thousands of years ago, that stress most likely came in the form of violence.
01:54:01.000It came in the form of a predator trying to eat you or a neighboring tribe that was trying to attack your village and so our sense of stress Is directly connected to physical exercise and adrenaline and anxiety.
01:54:18.000If you could just burn that off, you have a much healthier perspective on what the actual problem is, and it allows you to look at things with a clear view.
01:54:28.000But what makes us such an interesting species is, like, we can accommodate both, like, the big burly guy who could, like, take down the mammoth, but then there's, like, the dealmaker who could, like, convincingly be like, oh, you should give me some of the meat, we'll give them some of the meat.
01:54:41.000There's, like, these sort of schemers, and we have room for all these different types of people.
01:55:21.000People creating things, it's really fascinating what the human animal is, right?
01:55:28.000Because we are, we share the same space as all the other creatures, but we're the only ones that alter our environment in this radical, significant way.
01:55:37.000And we can balance out any perceived or all differences in physical strength, in status, and we can do it with a tool, like a gun.
01:55:51.000That's one of the scariest things about gun violence.
01:55:53.000You could just, this person, I don't like them anymore, bang, now they go away.
01:55:57.000I mean, you basically, with a finger, like the easiest thing, like I took my kids to the gun range, because we're in Texas.
01:57:27.000Do you think if you had to gun to head and you had to choose either humans are going to destroy the planet or we're going to find some technological fix and clean up the mess, which do you think is more likely?
01:57:42.000Because I think if you look at the trends over time, right, if you read any of Pinker's work or if you look at just the charts and statistics about violence and murder and rape and all the horrible things that people are capable of, it's way less prevalent now than it was thousands of years ago.
01:58:24.000Or what really scares me more than anything is natural disasters.
01:58:27.000I was going to say, I think there's these runaway climate change scenarios where it's supposed to be 2 degrees, but our models aren't accurate, and then it's 7 degrees, and that just destroys everything.
01:58:38.000I was in Vegas yesterday, and it was 117 degrees.
02:00:21.000I get upset when I can't find something on Google, and then I go to DuckDuckGo and I find it like that, and I'm like, what are you doing?
02:00:28.000Are you guys curating data in a way where you're hiding shit?
02:00:33.000I'm enamored with this idea that the kind of features a species needs to take over a whole planet and tame it the way we do...
02:00:42.000You also, like, you have the seeds of your own destruction and that everyone wants to think that, like, species get to a certain point and they send spaceships out and they colonize other planets.
02:00:52.000But, like, what if the entire universe is just littered with, like, dead civilizations that destroyed themselves?
02:00:56.000Because I think I'm less optimistic than you and I sort of, I worry we're headed in that direction.
02:01:01.000Well, one thing that we can look at, and there's nothing to do with self-destruction, we can look at the history of species on this planet, and 90-whatever percent of them that ever existed are gone.
02:04:20.000This was not good weed, so I felt like I had to smoke a lot of it.
02:04:22.000Oh, well, never smoke a lot of it if you don't smoke a lot.
02:04:25.000The thing about weed is you develop a tolerance, but if you don't develop a tolerance, if you don't have a tolerance and you try to smoke a half a joint with somebody, you're going to go into the grave.
02:05:35.000Because people have to change their perceptions on every aspect of the way they think about each other and look at each other and treat each other.
02:06:08.000I don't know if it's accurate, but John Marco Allegro was a biblical scholar and a linguist And he also was an ordained minister, and he was the only one on the Dead Sea Scrolls translation group.
02:06:24.000There was a bunch of scholars that were translating the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he was the only one that was agnostic.
02:06:29.000Because as a theologian, as he was studying religions and looking at the histories of these things, He started realizing that so many of these were connected by more and more ancient stories, and he started becoming very skeptical and became agnostic.
02:06:45.000But all the other people in the group were very religious.
02:06:48.000But he was still an ordained minister.
02:06:51.000And he got to a point where he studied it for 14 years and he wrote a book.
02:06:56.000And this book was The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.
02:06:59.000And I believe the book was bought up by the Catholic Church.
02:07:02.000And then I bought some copies of it that were used online.
02:07:07.000But then a guy named Jan Ervin released it.
02:07:16.000And in this book, he said basically all of Christianity was most likely about psychedelic mushroom rituals and fertility rituals.
02:07:29.000That fertility rituals were a gigantic part because, you know, infant mortality was very high.
02:07:37.000I mean, you got an infection, you died, you broke your leg, you died, you're likely to die.
02:07:42.000Most people didn't live very long, just because of injuries and sickness.
02:07:46.000And he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom coated in God's semen.
02:07:57.000So this is when they thought, we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, right?
02:08:03.000So when it rained, these mushrooms would just appear out of the ground and then they would eat them and trip balls.
02:08:09.000And they would think that God literally came out of the sky and that this is how you would get in touch with God by eating these things.
02:08:19.000Imagine if you're a primitive person with no science, no written language, I mean, they told these stories just through oral tradition for over a thousand years before anybody wrote them down, right?
02:08:30.000And you're eating these things and tripping balls.
02:08:33.000It gets deep because there's so many things connected to this theory that John Marco Allegro had.
02:09:34.000When you take the mushrooms, the way you dry them out is you hang them from the leaves of the tree so they dry in the sun, which is literally the decorations on Christmas trees.
02:09:46.000There's many, many articles written about the connection between...
02:09:50.000Also, Santa Claus came down the chimney.
02:09:52.000Well, the shamans in Siberia, once they tried to outlaw these shamanic rituals and outlaw these psychedelic practices, the way they would come into people's houses, on snowdrifts, they would hop down through the chimney.
02:10:05.000They would drop the mushrooms down and hop down through the chimney because they were trying to avoid the local law instead of going in through the door.
02:10:12.000I mean, this is even more basic than what you're saying, but so much of the Bible is just fucking trippy.
02:10:19.000How about the, well, we could tell you more about that, but how about the reindeer, right?
02:10:24.000Santa has these reindeer and they're flying, right?
02:10:26.000Well, reindeer are incredibly attracted to the Amanita muscaria mushroom, so much so that shamans who have these psychedelic rituals have pointed out that when they go outside of their tent or outside of their hut to take a piss, That the reindeer will knock them over to get to the piss because the piss has the smell of these psychedelic mushrooms in them.
02:10:48.000And the way people extra trip, one of the things they do is they piss into a glass while they're tripping because some of the psychedelics get filtered through the body and it winds up in the urine and then they drink the urine and blast off into orbit.
02:11:02.000They get even higher than they were before.
02:11:07.000So this is like an ancient practice of drinking your own piss while you're tripping balls on mushrooms, and it's connected to these fucking reindeer, which are caribou.
02:11:15.000And caribou are always eating these Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
02:12:44.000Like, why are there elves associated with Christmas?
02:12:48.000Well, elves are associated with mushroom use.
02:12:50.000But the thing is, and this is me being honest, most people that have taken Amanita muscaria, the only person I know that's had a real legitimate trip in it was Paul Stamets.
02:13:25.000Well, the burning bush, you know, with Moses in the burning bush, they now think, scholars out of Israel think, thanks to University of Tel Aviv, I forget which school it was, there's a working hypothesis that this was a story about someone with the acacia bush.
02:13:45.000The acacia tree is rich in dimethyltryptamine.
02:13:49.000You smoke dimethyltryptamine, you experience some higher power.
02:13:55.000It's the most potent of all psychedelics.
02:15:33.000And the idea was that they wrote all these things down in parables and in these stories with this cryptic meaning to it to hide it from the Romans when they were being conquered.
02:16:02.000Well, so the thing I feel like I'm missing out on by being, I think, too neurotic and fucked up to do these drugs is like you achieve these states where you've done a lot of stuff.
02:16:14.000You can't explain that state to other people.
02:18:00.000You get caught up in these things, and I'm trying to do my best at all these things, so it requires work.
02:18:06.000I have to think, so I'm constantly involved in what I'm doing, and you can get caught up in stuff, you know, to the point where you forget that you are You literally are not even you.
02:18:21.000There's more bacteria cells in your body than there are human cells.
02:18:25.000You are a part of this gigantic super organism known as the human race, and each individual, it benefits them to think of themselves as being unique and alone, and looking out for themselves.
02:18:39.000But in the reality, that couldn't be further from the truth.
02:18:42.000So there's so many things that you just get lost with.
02:18:46.000Where you just get caught up in the trappings of everyday life and what psychedelics do, it just resets that whole thing and you get a chance to see things from a completely different perspective.
02:18:58.000Here's like the fundamental truth about stuff even if you can't express it with words.
02:19:02.000Well, you also recognize that no matter what is happening in your life, no matter what good stuff, like with your career, if you don't have love And friendship.
02:19:12.000If you don't have friendship and love and people around you aren't happy as well, then your life is not going to be good.
02:19:23.000What sort of fucked me up a little bit is between September of last year and April of this year, I was just dealing with some heavy family shit.
02:20:59.000Yeah, but I think the positive qualities that you have and the positive aspects of who you are, I don't think they're going to be negatively affected by an alleviation of anxiety.
02:21:10.000I think it's going to be an enhancement of your perspective.
02:21:13.000But that requires a certain level of trust because I'd like to...
02:21:19.000Yeah, just working through that and looking and trying to shift your perspective on things.
02:21:25.000Even if you never did with a psychedelic for the rest of your life, I think for you, really, what I would recommend to you, and I'm obviously not a doctor or a counselor, I would say exercise, like regular routine exercise.
02:21:38.000I do, because I run and play basketball.
02:22:21.000I guess my worry is if I did that, I would just, instead of like having this luminous experience where I put all this shit in perspective and put the puzzle pieces together, it would just like be a meteor hitting the whole board and the pieces fly everywhere and it would get worse because I just don't trust my ability to like work through these issues maybe.
02:22:37.000Yeah, I think you're saying that based on not having that experience, though.
02:23:01.000Most of the time what's going on, and this is obviously debatable and there's a lot of nuance involved in this as well, but what bad trips are for the most part, most people think is your ego trying to control the experience.
02:23:12.000Because when you're on a psychedelic, it's like trying to grab the rail to stop the rollercoaster.
02:23:19.000But Michael Pollan, in his book, he's like, the whole point is you can't do that.
02:23:23.000You need to let the experience guide you.
02:24:26.000I think it's a very valuable tool, but I think we are left without an operating manual because of the prohibition, because of the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970. We could have had such good data on this if they hadn't passed those shitty fucking laws.
02:24:50.0001970, everything became illegal, which is nuts.
02:24:53.000I mean, they made illegal what Brian Murorescu, his work on this book, The Immortality Key, which I brought up with Michael Pollan and some other people.
02:25:06.000It's this amazing book on ancient Greece and how these scholars...
02:25:12.000That were responsible for the birth of democracy and the structure of modern society.
02:25:30.000And people would travel from all over the world to attend these rituals and come back with these amazing stories of enlightenment and of the way they thought about everything adjusting and changing and the connection with the gods and the spirit world.
02:25:47.000This is all a part of human history and these fucking stiff cunts wearing stupid shiny shoes and ties, they took it away from us in the Nixon administration.
02:27:25.000We're consciousness that's going through a different biological vehicle with different life experiences, and we are trying to navigate our way while trying to be happy and trying not to get hurt.
02:27:36.000We're trying not to get hurt by life or get hurt by other people.
02:27:39.000And it's all fundamentally weird and terrifying.
02:28:00.000I never feel like everything's great now.
02:28:02.000There's like this idea that we have you're gonna like hit this retirement point or this I've made it point you're gonna sail off in the sunset.
02:28:09.000That's I'm telling you right now that place is not real.
02:28:12.000No, I mean we're in different situations, but I've I've been lucky I've had like a really good year and I'm like I don't know.
02:29:03.000Because before then, I was fucking poor, not knowing exactly how I was going to eat poor.
02:29:08.000And to have that lifted off my shoulders like that, I remember thinking very clearly, like, oh, this is extremely valuable.
02:29:17.000This is extremely valuable because as long as you can maintain this state where you're not worried about your bills, it allows you clarity.
02:29:42.000Like, if you don't have to concentrate on money anymore, your bills are paid, you know, your rent is paid, you're okay, you don't have to think about that.
02:29:48.000It doesn't make the universe less weird.
02:31:15.000I still don't understand how airplanes work, like how they're safe, so I'm not fucking getting on this issue.
02:31:20.000Well, Elon was explaining to me that the blow-ups and the failure was actually built in into the equation of the way they're designing these things.
02:31:32.000There's going to be failure because they're trying to test the tolerances and figure things out.
02:32:59.000Some Russian satellite from 1965. Some random Chinese bolt hits you in the forehead going 500,000 miles an hour or whatever the fuck it's going on.
02:33:08.000I think there's not, but is there a chance they accidentally go too far?
02:33:11.000I'm like, oh, we've got to go around twice before we can come back.
02:34:18.000I kind of think it's the same thing, but instead of going like a roller coaster on a plane, they're going up in a balloon and then come back down.
02:35:31.000What other psychological fads are in this that we should discuss before we wrap this up?
02:35:37.000There's a really fucked up story basically about the army adopting this anti-PTSD program that didn't work, that they spent like half a billion dollars on.
02:35:46.000There's stuff about grit, making kids more gritty.
02:37:28.000I tried to read through it to see exactly what he says, because this guy is a linguist, and he went and studied ayahuasca and stuff in ancient...
02:37:36.000He says, words such as trip and high misrepresent my work on psychoactive plants.
02:38:18.000There's two bushes they think it is, and one maybe can be found in Saudi Arabia.
02:38:24.000The other one, which would be the one that would lead to that, is in the area.
02:38:29.000Was that where it was in Saudi Arabia?
02:38:31.000That's what I'm digging through this article, which is from, you know, it's a little more recent.
02:38:36.000There are different interpretations as to why God chose a burning bush as a way to get Moses' attention.
02:38:42.000One theory says that Moses was worried that Egypt was going to completely destroy the Jews.
02:38:47.000God showed him the magical bush to say that just as the bush is burning but isn't consumed, Egypt may cause the Jews to suffer, but they won't be destroyed.
02:39:00.000The thing right up here is where it started.
02:39:02.000This word that they got it from is used twice in the Torah.
02:39:06.000Once they think it's a pun, the other time they think it meant bush.
02:39:09.000It says Sneh, S-N-E-H, is a Hebrew pun on Sinai, the place where the bush was burning.
02:39:20.000Most commentators say that S-N-E-H, Sneh, is a very lowly thorn bush.
02:39:26.000The Catholics in St. Catherine's Monaster at the base of Mount Sinai...
02:39:30.000Claim to have the actual bush growing in their courtyard.
02:39:40.000Just as Moses had to remove his sandals in the presence of the bush, the monks at the monastery require visitors to remove their shoes before coming into the presence of the bush.
02:39:59.000Wait, do they know the actual species of bushes?
02:40:02.000No, apparently there's a lot of questions.
02:40:05.000They think that even the burning bush might have represented the idea that they were...
02:40:13.000That Egypt was trying to kill the Jews, but they wouldn't be able to.
02:40:16.000I feel like he was even saying that they may have done some sort of ceremony.
02:40:19.000It's just the way that they're interpreting it, maybe not that way.
02:40:23.000Well, it's also you have to recognize that you're talking about something that was translated...
02:40:29.000In multiple different languages, and you lose a lot of the meaning, right?
02:40:32.000Like, one of the things about Marco Allegro's work was the Dead Sea Scrolls were the only version of the Bible that was in Aramaic, and it's so old that it's written on animal skins, and the way they did the deciphering, they had to use DNA tests to match up the animal skins to make sure that they had the skins from the same animal,
02:40:52.000so that they knew that the piece of skin was See all these broken pieces?
02:40:59.000So in order to figure out which piece goes in which pile, you have to do DNA tests on the pieces.
02:41:44.000Like, some of the stories in there are really, like, supernatural.
02:41:49.000I went through the same sort of angry atheist phase as a lot of people.
02:41:54.000And it is true that the idea that we're supposed to extract moral meaning from these stories that are honestly mostly just about God smiting this or that tribe.
02:42:03.000They're cool stories, but the idea that we're supposed to take them to inspire the way we live is a little bit silly.
02:42:09.000Well, especially when you think of the ruthlessness of God's approach.
02:42:24.000Well, I mean, I think a lot of that stuff, including pork, like eating an animal that chews its cud that has a cloven hoof, you're not supposed to eat that, is, I think it had to do with diseases.
02:42:46.000Yeah, and I bet a lot of the ancient laws of how to behave and what to do and rituals were related to, like, how about the ritual that a lot of the Muslim world has of, you know, you wash your hand, you wash your ass with your left hand.
02:43:47.000This came out maybe around 2000. I think it was a book called The Bible Code.
02:43:51.000And it claimed that if you use that thing where letters can be letters or numbers, it like foretold the future of predicted events.
02:43:58.000And it was completely off because it was this thing where like, of course, if you can interpret letters as letters or numbers, you can construct some story.
02:44:05.000But people were very convinced that the Torah, which had been, of course, translated Numerous times if I could tell the future.
02:44:16.000It's so wild though that ancient Hebrew had that distinction where it was part numbers and part letters and that there was numerical value to the words.
02:44:30.000That's the coolest idea for a language ever, that your language is encoded with numerical value in the words and the letters double as numbers.
02:44:38.000Yeah, and I don't, I don't, I'm not religious, I don't really identify with being Jewish, but this idea that you're saying the same prayers that your family, your ancestors were saying 1,500 years ago is kind of amazing and not a lot of people can say that.
02:44:52.000What I've always admired about Jews is that it's a tribe.
02:45:46.000And I'm overgeneralizing a little bit, but it's just weird.
02:45:49.000We have this secular Jews have a complicated relationship with them because we, frankly, we look down a little bit on how traditional they are and how insular.
02:45:57.000I'm sure they look down on us because we're, you know, corrupted and fallen, but they're the ones sort of keeping the numbers up because a lot of us are intermarrying or not having a lot of kids.
02:46:06.000It's just, it's weird being a member of a group that could literally go extinct.
02:46:10.000Well, there's a big population of them in Los Angeles, too.
02:46:12.000I know New York has the biggest population, right?
02:46:15.000And it was weird during the pandemic that they were getting attacked for having group gatherings and, you know, that they were trying to force them to comply with these pandemic rules.
02:46:26.000And they're like, we're not even in your fucking world.
02:46:55.000Some other sects, including Mormons and even more so the Amish, the whole point is to make your kids dependent on the tribe so they can't leave.
02:47:04.000So if you only speak Yiddish and broken English, and again, I'm going to generalize it a little bit.
02:47:08.000Some of them do speak English, but it's just like a very interesting, not modern way of going about life.
02:47:15.000Yeah, very interesting and very not modern.
02:47:17.000And it's kind of wild to think how long they can keep that up.
02:47:21.000You know, I've been reading this book.
02:47:24.000I started reading it again, Empire of the Summer Moon.
02:47:28.000It's about the Comanche Indians and the settlers that tried to make it across the plains and that they encountered these Comanches and it was like a massive deterrent for so long.
02:47:39.000But one of the things the book focuses on is how up until the 1600s, until the Europeans came here, they didn't even have horses.
02:48:03.000Yeah, but they had this very tight way of living that never varied.
02:48:10.000But one of the fascinating things was oftentimes, whether it was prospectors or sometimes children were kidnapped and they became a part of the tribe, and then they would get re-kidnapped decades later, and they never wanted to go back to society.
02:48:26.000They always wanted to go back to the tribe.
02:48:34.000They were so in tuned with chasing the buffalo down on the plains and sleeping in tents.
02:48:41.000Well, and it's that whole question of, so evolution carved us a certain way.
02:48:45.000And, you know, we're very thankful we have antibiotics and phones to keep in touch with our loved ones.
02:48:51.000But at a certain point, you get so far from our Ancestral past that it introduces, I mean, even just like the social media thing.
02:48:58.000It used to be the feedback you got from your tribe mattered because they're your tribe.
02:49:02.000If your tribe is fucking random people thousands of miles from you, it feels like it matters because of these deep-seated tendencies we have, but it doesn't, and it hurts you.
02:49:11.000Or in someone like my case, my tribe, like on Twitter, I think I have 7 million people.
02:49:43.000Because your body wants to be around these bountiful, natural environments where you're around a lake and mountains and you see birds fly overhead and deer bouncing by.
02:49:57.000Your body has a connection to that that's very, very primal.
02:50:01.000When you get on the plane in JFK and you get off in like, well, LA's really urban, but LA or like Tucson or Phoenix, any place where it's just a totally different landscape and the fucking mountains ringing everything, it does something to you.
02:50:16.000Like, we're supposed to be in these more wild places.
02:51:29.000People are so much friendlier than in L.A. The thing that got me is there's a real tangible feeling of not being bothered by people.
02:51:40.000In the sense that there's too many of them.
02:51:42.000When you're on the 405 in LA and it's 3 in the afternoon and you just see a fucking sea of red brake lights in front of you that goes on for hours, you're like, shit.
02:51:52.000I used to do gigs in San Diego and I would have to leave my house at noon.
02:52:31.000I hate that thing of if you live in New York and you're like, I'm driving somewhere, you just have no idea if it's going to take you three hours or six hours.
02:52:44.000If anything goes sideways and you've got to get out of town, you're fucked.
02:52:46.000I literally bought an apocalypse vehicle when I lived in L.A. Because I kept having this reoccurring anxiety of earthquakes or of shit going down.
02:52:57.000I was thinking about things because I started collecting freeze-dried food because I was like, no one's got a handle on these earthquakes.
02:53:05.000No one's got a handle on things going south.
02:53:07.000And I had been evacuated from my house three times over the last 10 years just from fires.
02:53:14.000That's the other thing about California, and I know this from my friends who live there, it seems like at any given moment half the state is on fire.
02:54:46.000I think if I lived in a country with like, I'm going to sound very douchey in Brooklyn here, but if I lived in a country that had a different approach to eating meat, like the kill your own food type thing, I don't have an inherent moral problem with it, but I think the way we do it in the States is fairly fucked up.
02:55:12.000Those are a horrific, moral, disgusting outrage.
02:55:18.000The idea that if you're working somewhere and you see what everyone would think of as a horrific act against animals, you can't film that.
02:55:28.000But that's why, like, the whole, again, not to go back to the endless topic of cancel culture, but I do think liberals are becoming more liberal, but conservatives are always fucking trying to ban something, trying to ban filming the factory farm, trying to ban, you know, not standing for the place.
02:55:44.000We're assuming that it's conservatives that did that, but I think it's capitalists.
02:55:49.000I don't really buy whether or not liberals are more or less conservative when it comes to fiscally.
02:55:58.000I think there's a lot of social dynamics and posturing that a lot of corporations take up, but when you look at what Google does...
02:56:05.000Well, I was going to say liberals want to give more power to Google and YouTube.
02:56:33.000There's a materialist or heterodox leftist.
02:56:35.000There's a guy, Benjamin Burgess, Freddie DeBoer.
02:56:38.000Their whole point is like what this comes down to is money.
02:56:40.000When we talk about racism, we're not talking about like some mystical force in the air or some feeling people have.
02:56:47.000We're talking about like pockets of people who are cut off from opportunity and what matters is fucking money.
02:56:51.000And I think that's been lost because so much of liberal discourse is like talking about people in the right way or expressing the right feelings.
02:57:00.000And I think we've sort of lost sight of that.
02:57:03.000Well, we lost an opportunity to address, during the pandemic, there was this massive push to address the fact that businesses were losing money, and so the government had to stimulate these businesses to maintain the quality of life, right?
02:57:18.000My position on that was, why didn't the government also address the fact that you have these disproportionately fucked up communities that have stayed this way for decades?
02:57:49.000And we went way out of our way to make sure the corporations stayed healthy, but we didn't ever address the fact that there's people in this life that, without a doubt, people in this country, there's certain people that are born into a situation that is not fair.
02:58:06.000This is why, like, if you write about cancel culture, you've, like, been canceled, fucking big air quotes, people are like, no, you should be a conservative now.
02:58:13.000Conservatives are against cancellation.
02:58:14.000What motivates me more than anything is that we're the richest country on earth, but a huge number of people are just fucking, have no chance whatsoever.
02:58:22.000They don't have a chance to go to, like, a Newton public school.
03:00:48.000And that's part of what the media focuses on.
03:00:51.000The conservative media is just as guilty.
03:00:53.000If the conservative media has an opportunity with Biden to really take the high road and to show that what the liberal media did with Trump, they're not going to do with Biden, and just judge him on policy.