In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, I talk to a guy who left California and now lives in New York City. We talk about what it's like living in a big city, what it s like to grow up in the big cities, and why he thinks Bill de Blasio is a douchebag. Also, we talk about rat population density and whether or not it's a good or bad thing when people become a nuisance in cities like LA and New York. Joe also talks about the dangers of living in big cities and why you should be grateful you don't have to deal with them. Joe is a comedian, writer, podcaster, and podcaster living in Los Angeles, California. He's been in the entertainment industry for a long time and is a regular at LA Live and has been to some of the most famous restaurants in LA. He also writes for the New York Times, the New Republic, and the Hollywood Reporter, and hosts his own podcast, Joe Rogans Experience, which is a podcast about his life in LA, New York, and his thoughts on the current events and culture in general. I hope you enjoy this episode, and if you do, please tweet me and tell a friend about it! if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how to live in LA or New York or any other big city you're tired of what's going on in LA and want to move there. I'll be looking out for you in the next episode of the show. Tim Ferraro! Timestamps: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. Intro Music: Intro & Outro: "I Don't Know What I'm Working From This Is" by Jeffree Starrett (feat. & Other Things (ft. ) Music: "Goodbye" by Haley & Sarah Silverman & "Good Morning by Jame McDade by Jeff Kaale ( ) Music by Jeff Ratechuck - "I'll See You Soon (featuring ) - "The Good Life" by The Good Morning Show by Squeals
00:01:27.000In LA, there's a thing you do where you walk down the street, if you're not driving, you walk down the street, you spot somebody who you don't know, you kind of lock eyes with them.
00:01:34.000The first thing you do is you look away, right?
00:01:36.000You don't catch eyes with somebody and have a conversation with them just in the normal course of business in LA or New York.
00:01:41.000You move outside LA or New York, you're walking down the street, you lock eyes with somebody, like, hey, how are you?
00:02:04.000They're really fascinating because what they do is they've taken rats and they take them and they have a certain number of these rats together.
00:02:30.000They become a factor and a negative factor instead of, you know, obviously rats aren't communicating like people do where it becomes a community and you look forward to seeing those people, but they have some sort of a communal relationship with each other.
00:02:44.000It feels like there's sort of a background level of threat that just exists when there are tons of people who you don't know who are around you all the time.
00:02:50.000And in small communities it's not replicated that way because you actually know your neighbors, you know the people you're dealing with on a regular basis, but if you're walking around a big city, It's crazy.
00:03:16.000If you were a real conspiracy theorist, if you're a real tinfoil hat, dyed in the wool conspiracy theorist, you would look at the LA district attorney and you would go, what the fuck is going on here?
00:03:26.000Like, is this a plot to ruin the city?
00:03:29.000I mean, is this like, has China hired this guy?
00:03:39.000And by the way, not doing anything good for the people who are actually mentally ill and drug addicted.
00:03:43.000Just leaving them out on the street and pretending that sleeping on a street corner is the highest form of freedom and definitely have to leave their shit just lying around on the streets while they poop on a corner.
00:04:44.000I said, right, but we're not getting anything back.
00:04:46.000And in five years, you think this place is going to be better or you think this place is going to be worse?
00:04:49.000And then you got the COVID lockdowns where LA just went out of its mind and they shut all the parks and they put the yellow tape on the turnoffs off Mulholland.
00:04:56.000Like people are going to gather on the turnoffs off Mulholland, just mack on each other and spread COVID like crazy in those three foot square turnoffs off Mulholland drive.
00:05:04.000And so she was already like, this is getting crazy.
00:05:08.000And then, during the riots, when they locked everybody in their house at 6pm, you remember this?
00:05:12.000They just curfewed the entire city at 6pm.
00:05:14.000And then, on Rodeo, they curfewed it at 1 so people could just run up and down Rodeo Drive, breaking shit.
00:05:24.000Like, they hit a footlocker half a mile this way and a Walgreens half a mile that way.
00:05:27.000She's like, okay, I guess we can check out Florida.
00:05:29.000Yeah, once the riots hit, that's when the mass exodus really started.
00:05:33.000Because when people started realizing that there's this weird idea that some politicians had, de Blasio was the worst example of it, to let the people just break the law and get it out of their system.
00:05:55.000I've heard there's some theory about, and it was a widely dismissed theory from the 60s, and the idea about, like, letting people rioted out of their system, almost like letting a child throw a temper tantrum.
00:06:08.000So when you saw people on Saks Fifth Avenue smashing windows and all that, the idea, and the cops were literally told to stand down.
00:06:27.000When I see him talking, when I see what's important to him, and when he was eating cheeseburgers, talking about the vaccine, I can get a free vaccine.
00:06:36.000I understand that fries are with this as well.
00:06:44.000There was a running gun battle for the last couple of years over who was the worst mayor.
00:06:47.000You had like Jenny Durkan in Seattle who was allowing Chaz Chop to happen, and then you had Garcetti in LA who was allowing riots to happen in de Blasio, New York.
00:08:12.000See if you can find where Suspects have been released without charges.
00:08:17.000Cook County State's Attorney's Office explained the prosecutors had determined that the evidence was insufficient to meet our burden of proof to approve felony charges for a fucking gunfight where 70 rounds were shot on a public street.
00:08:32.000The state's attorney spokeswoman said, adding that the police officials agreed with the decision.
00:08:36.000I think the cops just threw their fucking hands up in the air and they're like, we're done.
00:08:40.000But they used the term mutual combat in one of the articles that I read.
00:09:59.000What he's done is amazing because he's changed a lot of people's ideas about the way this should be handled.
00:10:06.000Because so many people, even people that came on my podcast today were talking about criminally incompetent, not today, but in the past rather, were saying how criminally incompetent he is and people are dying on the streets.
00:12:06.000I don't have to run that fast, but, you know, I can kind of, like, speed walk.
00:12:11.000It's a strange time because I don't know why people are behaving the way they are, why they are not just actively engaging in conflict but encouraging it, nonsensical conflict, why people have gotten so tribal that they branched off into these These groups that,
00:12:30.000you know, our group can do no wrong and that group can do no right.
00:12:34.000And we've abandoned this idea that we're supposed to be all in this together.
00:12:38.000I thought the pandemic was going to bring people together.
00:12:42.000I thought it was going to be like 9-11 and that people were going to recognize like, hey, this is a threat to all of us and let's all try to work together and figure this out.
00:12:51.000And I thought that if people got better, And if people took a certain medication and it helped them or they had certain lifestyle choices that were better, like things like vitamin supplementation and exercise, all these different things that I've always been talking about, that maybe we would look at that and go,
00:13:06.000hey, we should probably look into this because it seems like there's some people that get hit really hard by this and there's some people, like Aaron Rodgers, who just...
00:13:57.000Once everybody's had the opportunity to protect themselves, We're done.
00:14:00.000But I think this goes to something deeper, which is, I used to think there were two types of people with regard to what they thought of human nature.
00:14:08.000You know, some people think human nature is good.
00:14:09.000Some people think human nature is kind of sinful.
00:15:00.000There's a whole group of people in America who no longer want to take a risk and they've been sold a lie.
00:15:05.000I saw a really good piece by Scott Alexander who used to write for Slate Star Codex before they outed him and now he runs something called Astral Star Codex and he was reviewing a book.
00:15:13.000And the basic thesis of the book is that since the beginning of the 20th century, there's been a big promise made to Americans, and that is there are authorities, and they live in Washington, D.C., or in your city, and they have a big button right here that they can hit that solves all your problems.
00:15:27.000And if they just hit it hard enough, it's going to solve all your problems.
00:15:29.000And for a long time the media kind of went along with that because the media were part of an elite group that agreed with a lot of those ideas.
00:15:35.000And then the rise of the internet basically shattered that.
00:15:38.000People could get their own information, you could see through the screen that actually that button didn't exist.
00:15:42.000And so then the elites in the society had to make a choice.
00:15:45.000They could either admit that that button never existed and they couldn't smash that button and fix all your problems, which would destroy their power, or they could say it's actually your neighbor.
00:15:53.000If it weren't for your neighbor, I could hit this button.
00:15:55.000But your neighbor is in here making me not hit the button.
00:15:58.000And so you have to hate your neighbor.
00:16:00.000This is why it's been so bewildering to me.
00:17:48.000Like this is the only time ever in our life where you have to do one thing and you have to ignore all evidence that other things are effective.
00:17:57.000Monoclonal antibodies are radically effective.
00:18:20.000But if you take that and you're sick, then you don't need a vaccine.
00:18:25.000And that is driving people fucking crazy.
00:18:27.000Because they took it, they took the risk to take the vaccine, and they know that a certain percentage of people do have an adverse reaction.
00:18:35.000I don't know what the percentage is because I think VAERS underreports.
00:18:38.000I think there was a Harvard study that said it was between 1 and 10% underreported.
00:18:42.000I don't know what that number, I don't know if that's real.
00:18:43.000But the reality is that there's some sort of a risk and people took the risk and they're angry if other people don't take that risk.
00:18:52.000And then they want to point out that there's also a risk for COVID. And you're fucking up and you're making a poor choice.
00:18:58.000Because their choice is to take this approved vaccine.
00:19:01.000And your choice is to just take your chances with this virus because you're worried about the risk of the vaccine.
00:19:07.000So people like Keith Olbermann will call you a coward.
00:19:09.000Like, have you seen those unhinged rants from that fucking maniac?
00:19:12.000One of the things I think that really is important to note also is that when it comes to the risk calculation, most of the people who are really paranoid about COVID are people who live more like me than like you.
00:19:22.000What I mean by that is you're a guy who's kind of in the fight arena.
00:19:58.000We just tend to think of activities in one of those two binary categories.
00:20:01.000And so if COVID goes into the risk category, and then the media just keep pounding away every day that you are probably going to die if you get this thing.
00:20:34.000You can't control your own life, and so we are going to tell you what's best for you by scaring the hell out of you.
00:20:39.000And then, when it turns out people get the actual facts, when the fact shield that they've created is broken, when it turns out that it was not true, then people lose all faith in the institutions, and then the only way that they can try and reestablish the faith in the institutions is to keep doubling down.
00:20:52.000They have to keep doubling down and keep trying to control you.
00:20:54.000They can't let go and say, we made some mistakes here, we shouldn't have lied in the first place, we overestimated our ability to know what was going on.
00:21:49.000There was Chinese data, and the Chinese data was showing that, like, nobody in China had I don't trust shit that comes out of Chinese data.
00:22:53.000And that's how people are looking at it.
00:22:55.000And they're not taking into consideration all these other points of data that show that obesity is a factor, that diet and exercise are a factor, that vitamin supplementation is a factor.
00:23:06.000There's a lot of factors that are involved in keeping your body healthy.
00:23:10.000But it's not conducive to this brought to you by Pfizer.
00:24:00.000Whether it's five years from now or ten years from now, but if you look at the vast majority of FDA-approved drugs, if you look at all of them, who knows how many thousands of drugs have been approved, do you know how many have been pulled out once they found out there's adverse side effects after years and years of use?
00:24:32.000Withdrawn after finding adverse effects.
00:24:35.000I was reading an article about this because the article was a pro-vaccine article, but they were saying, you've got to understand how these things work.
00:24:44.000There's a reason why they do these trials over five, ten years.
00:25:26.000But that's why it was always, for me, about relative risk of COVID versus whatever you think the risks might be of the vaccine, which is why for people who are old, you really needed to get it.
00:25:34.000If you're 65 and up, it was you do whatever you have to do to get it.
00:25:37.000And then once it got to lower ages, it was like, use your own best judgment.
00:25:40.000And I encourage my parents to get vaccinated.
00:25:43.000I encourage people that are in high-risk groups to get vaccinated.
00:26:27.000When you see someone get injected and they just go like that right into his arm, that is an incorrect way of vaccinating the fucking leader of the free world.
00:26:36.000If you're going to do it to the leader of the free world, maybe you should pull it back to make sure you didn't hit a goddamn vein and then push it through because that's what you're supposed to do.
00:29:20.000They're probably doing something when it's important.
00:29:22.000I mean, he is just sometimes there, and he's mostly not, and he's losing his train of thought in the middle of press conferences, and he's getting very cranky and crotchety with people.
00:29:34.000Like, in the space of a week, he went from yelling at Peter Doocy on Fox News...
00:29:38.000For saying that he was paying illegal immigrants or thinking of paying illegal immigrants like almost half a million dollars per person for the family separation stuff.
00:29:45.000He's like, we would never consider that.
00:29:47.000How could you report that to his own administration having to walk it back and then yelling at another reporter for saying that it's bad to pay people.
00:29:56.000Did you see Ducey with the press secretary?
00:30:00.000He said, are you going to pay people that come over to this country legally?
00:30:05.000And she's like, this is the substitute press secretary.
00:30:10.000Yeah, because Jen Psaki got the COVID. So she's out, and this new lady is in, and she goes, why would we pay people who come over here illegally?
00:30:22.000Ducey goes, why would you pay people who come over here illegally?
00:32:48.000It's a layup for whoever's on the other side.
00:32:50.000The only thing that the Democrats are praying for, really, just on a political level, is they want Trump to come back because he has high-the-negatives.
00:32:55.000You know what I think it's going to be?
00:32:57.000I think it's going to be Kamala and Pete Buttigieg.
00:32:59.000I think that's who they're going to try to push.
00:33:27.000Would it be her as the president and him as the vice president?
00:33:29.000Because that's not going to fucking work.
00:33:31.000Yeah, I think it's hard to say that they're going to supplant her at the top of the ticket with Buttigieg because then what do you do with the whole intersectional coalition of all of it, right?
00:36:28.000I mean, I think that was the plan with Afghanistan.
00:36:29.000I think that's the plan with everything.
00:36:30.000I think everybody is under the misimpression that there is no long-term memory.
00:36:34.000And there isn't a long-term memory, but it's almost like T-cell memory, like it exists back there and when it gets activated, like the immune system spins up, you know?
00:36:42.000I think they're accustomed to having complete control over the media narrative, and they don't have that anymore.
00:37:22.000Something happened and there's this new wave of media like your show and like Breaking Points.
00:37:29.000There's so many shows out there now where people actually talk about the real facts in a nonpartisan way and explain what's going on and what moving pieces are in play and how these bills are getting passed and what are the special interest groups that are forcing this through and What's happening?
00:37:49.000But I think that, again, until people let go of the core notion that government is going to solve their problems, it's just going to keep bouncing back and forth.
00:37:57.000Because if you're on the right, you think the federal government's going to solve your problem if Trump is president again.
00:38:01.000And if you're on the left, you think that as long as Biden's in control, federal government's going to solve all your problems.
00:38:05.000And so we can be as dissatisfied with the system as we want to be on all sides of the aisle.
00:38:10.000But until we recognize that really we need to stop pretending that these people are capable of solving our problems and just they should leave us the hell alone in the main, it's just going to get worse.
00:38:23.000I mean this is what Benjamin, wasn't it Benjamin Franklin that had that quote about people who choose- Surrender liberty for a little temporary security deserve neither liberty nor security.
00:38:33.000I mean that's literally what you're saying.
00:38:47.000So you're walking around London, everybody's just acting like there's no COVID. Well, that's the other thing.
00:38:51.000I think that what people say to pollsters, and even how they vote, and then how they act in their daily lives are just not connected.
00:38:57.000I think you vote how you want to perceive yourself very often.
00:39:00.000It's like, I perceive myself as a good person, therefore I voted for X. Keep those masks forever.
00:39:05.000And then in your personal life, I mean, this is what you see from Democratic mayors.
00:39:08.000They're like, yeah, we're going to push mask mandates.
00:39:10.000And then if the spirit moves you and you're London breed, the mayor of San Francisco, and you're at a concert and the spirit moves you, then off comes the mask.
00:39:17.000Meanwhile, you're masking up my five-year-old in class.
00:39:46.000So we were having this kind of knock-down, drag-out fight in our local area about some institutions that had mask mandates.
00:39:52.000And my wife, who's very anti-mask mandates, particularly for kids, She is a doctor and she was talking to some people who are part of this institution and she wrote up this long document with all the links and all the data about how mask mandates for kids are ineffective, how they don't do anything, how they're really stupid,
00:40:07.000how they're counterproductive, how there's no data to back them.
00:40:09.000And I said to her, if you send that, they're going to get madder at you.
00:40:31.000I honestly think that's part of what's happening with big tech right now.
00:40:33.000I think that there's almost two battles with regard to big tech.
00:40:38.000One is just the size and scope and the social effect of big tech and all of that.
00:40:41.000But the other one is there's a group of people who really don't like alternative viewpoints being out there.
00:40:45.000And so they are going to stump as hard as they can to get people deplatformed and to use big tech as a way of siphoning off perspectives.
00:40:53.000Well, you see that in those Project Veritas videos where the people who work for these organizations are so nonchalant about the way they're discussing.
00:41:02.000Look, they're at dinner discussing how they suppress conservative voices.
00:41:06.000And if you're a person who has an understanding of the importance of free speech, which is one of the cornerstones of this country, You know that free speech works both ways.
00:41:17.000You have to hear an other person's perspective and then you argue your perspective and you see which perspective makes more logical sense.
00:41:27.000This is what free speech is all about.
00:41:30.000This is how we understand each other's Points of view and we learn about other other people's opinions and ideas and this is how you change your own opinions ideas You encounter some that enter into your mind that you go I never considered that that's actually a good point and then you shift your judgment you shift your perspective This is important for humans.
00:41:50.000It's always been important for humans echo chambers are fucking terrible They're terrible in every way shape and form and this idea that We're giving up these echo chambers.
00:41:59.000We're giving control of them to these fucking wokesters that work for corporations that can arbitrarily just decide, oh, this person talks about that.
00:42:46.000We spend a lot of time on places like Facebook, so we know what the numbers look like when you have high engagement.
00:42:52.000The number of people who are actually affected by so-called Russian disinformation over the course of the 2020 election, the number of people who access those posts is less than the number of people who access posts from my personal Facebook page over the course of maybe three weeks or a month.
00:43:16.000And then you saw there was this really interesting linguistic shift.
00:43:19.000They went from disinformation, which is an active thing, right?
00:43:21.000That's like the Russian government spreading things that are not true in order to subvert our politics, to misinformation.
00:43:27.000It's only one letter different, but it's completely different.
00:43:29.000Disinformation is a state actor or a terrorist group or some organized group pushing a perspective that is false in order to undermine the comedy and cohesiveness of a community.
00:43:38.000Misinformation is just, it can be true, but if it's missing context or if it's presented in a way I don't like, it's misinformation.
00:43:46.000And so now we have to target misinformation and that can be anything.
00:43:49.000And not only that, we will set up A group of fact checkers, fact checkers who all happen to align with one political point of view, and these fact checkers will determine whether or not you have violated the ban on misinformation, and then we'll downgrade you on that basis.
00:44:03.000And it doesn't matter if the fact checkers shift their own opinion on this sort of stuff, right?
00:44:08.000We'll ban you for six months from social media if you talk about the Chinese leak.
00:44:13.000But then, if everybody flips on a dime, then, well, you know, the fact checkers are okay with it so long as it's the right people who are saying it now.
00:44:20.000And the same monoclonal antibodies or hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, right?
00:44:25.000It's misinformation when it's deemed inconvenient for a particular narrative.
00:44:29.000And then as soon as something is convenient for the narrative, it's not misinformation.
00:44:32.000So that shift has been really dangerous and really ugly.
00:44:37.000And again, if they think that it's going to end well for them, that somehow this is going to reestablish social capital, that people are going to get back together because you force them to only listen to one point of view, good luck with that.
00:44:46.000I don't think they're thinking that, but I do think that intelligent people are waking up to the reality that being a part of these groups that are doing this, that are silencing opposing views, there's no long-term future in this.
00:45:01.000Because people recognize what is actually happening now.
00:45:15.000About all kinds of things, and they're pushing a very limited perspective, a very limited point of view, and they're demonizing anything that has an opposing perspective.
00:45:25.000You're seeing more and more courageous journalists step out, and then you're seeing things like Substack, and you're seeing podcasts, and shows like yours, where people have the ability to express themselves without any worry about editorial control from all these other companies.
00:45:40.000And this is where the legacy media, they try to jump in and they try to put boots on the throat, right?
00:45:45.000And the minute you signed over at Spotify, the legacy media went and tried to find a couple of malcontents over at Spotify to try and get them to say, oh, we're going to walk out.
00:45:52.000It's going to be blood in the streets over at Spotify.
00:45:54.000Now, in reality, it's like a couple of people who are bitching.
00:46:18.000This is part of the problem with journalism today, is that There's no money in print anymore.
00:46:24.000So people aren't just buying newspapers.
00:46:26.000You can't look for the New York Times to be this complete unbiased source of information with very clear and concise headlines.
00:46:33.000Now it's about what kind of engagement do you get online?
00:46:37.000Well, the way you get engagement online is things have to be outrageous.
00:46:40.000Do you know how many people write really good articles and then their fucking editor comes along and writes some bullshit headline for it?
00:46:46.000And so it gets submitted with something that has...
00:46:49.000It's completely different than the tone of the actual article itself because this is the way you can get people to click on it and they'll change things.
00:46:56.000I do think there's something else though and it's why I mentioned the legacy media and that is I do think that there are actors in the legacy media who want to see their sources of competition cut off at the knees.
00:47:06.000They started talking about regulating podcasts not all that long ago.
00:47:09.000People like Kara Swisher at the New York Times talking about, you know, why can't the same rules that apply to journalism apply to podcasts?
00:47:15.000Why doesn't Facebook crack down on the dissemination of podcasting information?
00:47:20.000Like, I don't think it's a coincidence that you have the Kevin Rooses.
00:47:23.000Every single day, Kevin Roos over at the New York Times puts out a list of what he says are the top traffic links at Facebook.
00:47:30.000Okay, and he does that specifically because it names like me or Dan Bongino or a few other people on the right, the idea being that Facebook is pushing really hard right-wing propaganda content.
00:47:40.000The only reason he's doing that every day is to try and pressure Facebook into not doing that anymore, right?
00:47:45.000I think there is a real concerted effort by legacy media to basically say the only approved sources should be us and anybody else who's out there is not an approved source.
00:47:58.000But I think that there are a growing number of people that are connected to legacy media that realize that you can get much further being independent.
00:48:10.000And you don't have to deal with editors that change the titles of your stories.
00:48:14.000You don't have to deal with these bullshit narratives that you're being forced to push.
00:48:18.000You don't have to be a cog in this machine.
00:48:22.000I don't know if it's maybe moving out of California that's made me more optimistic because I don't live kind of in the center of this anymore.
00:48:47.000But they're trying to provide an alternative to a sort of propagandistic worldview that's being taught in a lot of college campuses.
00:48:53.000Like, the possibilities for building alternatives have never been higher.
00:48:56.000And that is the thing that makes me optimistic.
00:48:58.000And again, I think part of that is just living around people who don't Think of themselves as reflections of the federal government every day.
00:49:05.000I was trying to explain this to people who are from Florida who think of themselves as Floridian.
00:49:10.000If you talk to Texans, they think of themselves as Texans.
00:49:12.000In California, you think yourself as a Californian kind of culturally, but it's not like the state of California stands against the federal government.
00:49:19.000The state of California has its own prerogatives.
00:49:21.000If you live in LA, LA and the federal government are kind of just the same.
00:49:25.000I mean, they just mirror reflections of one another.
00:49:27.000It would never occur to you that there's sort of a separate cultural identity that exists as California versus the federal government.
00:49:36.000And it's also that the involvement of government in your everyday life is so great in California, but minimal in other parts of the country.
00:49:47.000That your points of contact in Florida or Texas with the federal government, or at least federal government-like policy, are fairly minimal.
00:49:54.000So when the federal government starts actually exerting pressure, you start feeling it more than in California.
00:49:58.000But don't you think that before the pandemic, the way that you interacted with the government in California was minimal?
00:50:35.000I had seen it happening because, again, I'm conservative, so I feel that kind of stuff maybe more deeply, but as soon as the pandemic kicked in, and they started doing just crazy shit, right?
00:50:45.000Like, I could not take my kids to a public park.
00:50:47.000I couldn't take them to school, and I also could not take them to a public park.
00:50:52.000Right, they put sand all over the skate park, right?
00:50:56.000Like, I'm not going to skate there, but I'm just telling you, like, when you dump sand all over the skate park, because you think that people who are skating past each other at 15, 20 miles an hour are going to...
00:51:05.000When we went to Florida, and then we were visiting, and the first couple nights we just went to an outdoor restaurant, because they're eating outdoors at the restaurants, and you couldn't do that in LA. My wife and I looked at each other and we hadn't been out to dinner with each other for two months because of this.
00:51:17.000We're like, this is a different thing.
00:51:23.000And I think the more people realize that this is better thing, I think that there's going to be, like the great sort, the big sort is happening.
00:52:33.000I mean, it's also like a wheelchair access crisis because these poor people that are in wheelchairs, like they can't get through the fucking sidewalks because they're covered in tents.
00:52:42.000Like the ADA should deal with something like that, right?
00:52:46.000Well, I mean, for years in California, the rule has been that you weren't allowed to take people's shit off the street.
00:52:52.000Because there was a ruling from the federal courts, the ACLU was the one that did the case, there was an ordinance on the books in LA that the police were not allowed to move the quote-unquote personal property of people who were living on the streets.
00:53:04.000It was like garbage bags just filled with garbage and you weren't allowed to take them away because this was the personal property.
00:53:08.000of the people who are living on the streets.
00:53:11.000How in the world this is seen as some sort of empathetic move on behalf of the homeless is beyond me.
00:53:16.000And you saw, I mean, it was kind of incredible, like the power of human innovation.
00:53:19.000I mean, people have built like two-story buildings, like tents, and I was amazed sometimes at the creativity.
00:53:25.000I mean, you'd see like, I remember we drove past and there was a guy there with a turntable.
00:53:28.000He had somehow hooked it into one of the light posts, like he'd actually broken into the The light post on the street.
00:53:34.000He was using it for electricity, and he had a turntable.
00:53:36.000I was like, kudos to him for really liking his vinyl.
00:53:38.000But I just wonder if that's the best way that you want people to live in California, is on the street with an old turntable so they can play their authentic music without the perversion of digital.
00:53:48.000Well, my thought is, if he's that innovative, why doesn't he just figure out a way to apply it to an actual life?
00:53:53.000Like, get the fuck off the street, and you might be able to actually do something.
00:54:18.000Because what's incredible about that is that is one place where you would assume that people in a left-wing state like California would put all their focus, right?
00:54:25.000I mean, like, that's a place where I'm a super right-wing guy.
00:54:30.000The state does have a role in making sure that people who literally cannot take care of themselves have a place to go and get their medication.
00:54:37.000How in the world has that been the big failure in California?
00:54:41.000Why is it that we are not making it easier to involuntarily commit people who are actually a danger to themselves and or others living on the street?
00:55:10.000They have court hearings for this sort of thing.
00:55:12.000If you're going to be involuntarily committed, typically there's a court hearing.
00:55:14.000So we would have an insane amount of cases in front of these already bogged down courts where we try to figure out whether or not we should put people in some sort of a cage.
00:55:25.000So we'll spend tens of millions of dollars on random trains that go to nowhere in California, but you can't spend some money on the court system?
00:56:20.000Anyway, he was on this morning radio show that I was doing, and I asked him, this is when Jerry Brown was still the governor, and he was lieutenant governor, and I said, so, you know, this whole bullet train thing is really stupid and a waste of money, right?
00:57:37.000But it resonates with these boys, which is fascinating to me.
00:57:40.000Well, in a certain sense, Jordan Peterson and I are coming at it from very different angles.
00:57:46.000Jordan's coming at it from a kind of spiritual and psychological angle, and I'm coming from it from a very practical angle, like what's going to bring you success in life.
00:58:19.000As a society, we sort of have said to young men that you...
00:58:23.000We actually don't want you to be responsible.
00:58:26.000Responsibility is somehow connected with toxic masculinity and maybe you're assuming too much.
00:58:32.000It's part of the patriarchy and I think that's bullshit.
00:58:36.000I think that one of the chief obligations in life for a young man is to become a provider, is to become a protector of their family.
00:58:42.000The way that I judge masculinity And maybe it's self-serving, it's not by how many push-ups you can do, but by how you provide for your wife, how you provide for your children, what are you doing for your community, right?
00:58:52.000These should be pretty simple things, but people get like super pissed when you talk about that because you're speaking up against the notion that I guess the chief and core of all human aspiration ought to be your individual identity.
00:59:06.000If you just are solipsistically looking at how do I feel today and what do I feel about myself and my identity, that that's actually a really bad way to live your life.
00:59:15.000And I think that that's seen sometimes as, if I'm trying to kind of steel man my opponents, that's seen as unempathetic.
00:59:20.000It's unempathetic because what I really should be focused on is how do you make people feel the most authentically them that they can feel?
00:59:55.000What kind of obligations are you undergoing?
00:59:57.000And once you do that, then people see that as judgmental because we're in a society where the thing you're supposed to care most about is what you feel here and then if everybody else accepts that.
01:00:08.000We're supposed to be a society that's chiefly built on us all accepting our own internal self-definition and I'm saying there's an objective reality out there and it's unpretty.
01:00:18.000That objective reality is filled with things you're not going to like and then the question is how do you deal with that objective reality while acknowledging that no one has the utopian capacity to magically wave a wand and fix all those problems.
01:00:27.000Well, there's also the issue, look, I think your feelings are important, but I also think that people have a tendency towards self-indulgence.
01:00:34.000And if you deny that tendency, if you ignore that fact, you're going to create a bunch of people that think that the world does revolve around every single nuanced feeling that they have.
01:00:57.000Not just toxic masculinity, but cruelty.
01:01:01.000That, you know, you're cruel if you impose discipline or if you encourage discipline.
01:01:06.000And I say, you know, I follow Jocko Willink's advice.
01:01:23.000For a society that's so concerned with feelings, You should be looking at all the different ways that the life that you choose affects the way you feel about things.
01:01:35.000And if you have really accomplished goals and actually exerted discipline, done things that were difficult to do that you didn't necessarily want to do but you knew had long-term benefits, that is a part of being...
01:01:50.000Like an actualized human that's a part of being a man.
01:01:54.000It's a part of being a person who accomplishes things in life and People don't want to hear that sometimes because they want to hear that you've done enough.
01:02:33.000But it does mean that you probably You probably can do more.
01:02:37.000You can probably work harder or think harder.
01:02:39.000And if you do that, you will be rewarded with success.
01:02:44.000Not always, because there's a lot of complications to life and you've got to figure your way through these things and a lot of times you're going to try things and fail.
01:02:50.000And this is what we were talking about earlier when it comes to risk.
01:02:53.000No, I was just thinking the risk kind of throwback to the conversation because I was talking to some students recently and I was saying that most of the decisions that are important that you make in your life are big risks and the ones that you don't think about are really big risks.
01:03:05.000So people tend to think that, you know, when people say you lead a risky personal life, what they tend to mean is that you're, you know, having profligate sex with a lot of people.
01:03:13.000The actual riskiest decision you can make in your personal life, there's two.
01:03:18.000They're risky decisions because you are foregoing current benefits for future benefits.
01:03:24.000When you get married, you're saying, I'm foregoing all these other possibilities that are out there, and I'm putting all my chips in the center of the table with this one person, that this one person is the person I'm going to want to spend the rest of my life with.
01:03:34.000That's a very risky decision, and you have to make it on incomplete information because who the hell knows who you're going to be in 20 years or who this person is going to be in 20 years.
01:03:41.000But you're making that decision because in order to gain anything in life, you have to take that risk.
01:03:48.000I mean, I've said to folks before that, you know, as life progresses, you take on sort of broader risks emotionally.
01:03:54.000So when you start off and you're single, I would say that your emotional range is like a 10 to maybe a negative 10. Like, happy is like a 10. Bad is like a negative 10. Then you get married, and the emotions now are like 20 on the upside, like when you're very happy with your spouse, and then negative 20 when something bad happens to your spouse, right?
01:04:09.000And then you have kids and all limits are removed.
01:04:11.000The worst things that happen in your life are with your kids, and the best things that happen in your life are with your kids.
01:04:15.000That is broadening your scope of risk.
01:04:18.000Having a kid, not knowing what that kid is gonna turn out to be like in 18 years, It's a disaster.
01:04:23.000When you get pregnant with a kid, you have no idea what that kid is going to be like when they're born.
01:04:38.000I want there to be something without me taking.
01:04:40.000But it's the risk-taking, it's the choice that makes you a fulfilled human being, even if the risk fails.
01:04:44.000Even if the risk fails, if you took the shot, You still get credit on, I think, a certain moral and even on a subjective self level.
01:04:52.000I think you get credit for taking the risk and for taking the shot.
01:04:55.000And I think people sometimes resent that.
01:04:58.000And so that's why we speak about, to take it to economics for a second, when people, it drives me up a wall when people describe people who have made a lot of money as the privileged.
01:07:03.000You get it from right and left, actually.
01:07:05.000There's a philosopher named Michael Sandel who has a new book out called The Tyranny of the Meritocracy in which he basically argues that there's a cadre of people who, because they got wealthy, they believe that they get to rule the rest of society because they merited being wealthy.
01:07:56.000He wrote a book that was, I'm trying to remember the name of it.
01:07:59.000And the basic gist of the book is a sci-fi book.
01:08:01.000And it was that there would be a future in which people who considered themselves the most intelligent and most hardworking would rule society on behalf of everybody else.
01:08:10.000And I think that the mistake that we've made is that, and there's truth to this, there are people who believe that they are morally better because they are richer, for example.
01:08:40.000When it comes to, like, there's certain baseline things where if you're a hardworking person who happens to have been born of mid-IQ, You'll do better than the mid-IQ person who is not as hardworking, but you probably won't do as well as the guy who has two standard deviation IQ ahead of you who worked like mildly hard.
01:08:56.000And you didn't earn your intelligence, right?
01:08:57.000That's sort of the point of the critique of meritocracy.
01:09:00.000That's not necessarily the case either because there's a lot of people that do have a very high IQ, but they're not motivated.
01:09:51.000I think that when you have a community, you have needs for all these values of compassion and this connection with your neighbors and the idea that you're all in this together.
01:10:06.000And when you're just ruthlessly competitive, The problem is you abandon all of those in seeking a path for yourself, a selfish path.
01:10:16.000This is what people on the left are terrified of, about people that use the term meritocracy and people that are in this pursuit of business and of success and monetary gain.
01:10:28.000But I don't think that they're mutually exclusive in other words.
01:10:41.000Meritocracy undermines you getting along with your neighbors and makes you ruthlessly selfish and non-altruistic.
01:10:47.000I don't think those are the same thing.
01:10:48.000I mean, I think that you can be meritocratic, believe that intelligence, hard work, innovation should all be rewarded.
01:10:54.000And then on a moral level, Honestly, the way that we repay people on a moral level for doing what we think are moral things, it's typically not financial.
01:11:04.000It's typically how we treat people with honor and respect in your community.
01:11:08.000How many people go to somebody's funeral is a good way to sort of judge that.
01:11:13.000And so there are a lot of people in, I think, every community who are not the wealthiest, but the most people will show up at their funeral because those are people who were good people, who helped out their neighbors, who really worked hard at doing that.
01:11:24.000And I think that we have to work on both tracks.
01:11:26.000I think that there's a temptation right now in society to...
01:11:30.000Say that because there are people who are wildly successful and people who are less successful, that the entire system by which success is charted monetarily is wrong.
01:11:40.000And at the same time, I think we can't forget that the way that we actually measure human value is not only by how much Monetary success you have and the kind of transactional value you create in a society, which is a big thing, but also by how you treat other people.
01:11:54.000Don't you think that people do get obsessed with quantifiable things, though?
01:11:58.000When you look at numbers on a sheet and it shows, oh, you've made X amount.
01:12:04.000Next year you should try to make Y. And this is one of the problems with corporations, right?
01:12:08.000This diffusion of responsibility that happens of being a part of a gigantic group that's just set out for universal and continual growth.
01:12:16.000Like this idea that you're going to continue to make money and this is what you focus on and if you do that you're a winner and if you don't do that you're a loser.
01:12:22.000And when people obsess on something that's as simple and as singular as the amount of money that you make, That's the mark of excellence.
01:12:32.000It's very difficult to quantify how well you're doing for your community.
01:12:36.000It's very difficult to quantify whether or not your employees are loved and feel happy and you feel like you provide an environment where they feel like they're a part of something.
01:12:44.000I agree, but I think that the mistake that we're making very often Is we try and solve what...
01:12:51.000I think, honestly, what you're describing, there's a spiritual problem, and we try to fill it with economics or with monetary recompense or something like that.
01:13:00.000And this is the value of religion, in your opinion.
01:13:02.000Yeah, it's certainly a huge value of religion.
01:13:04.000I don't think it only has to be done through religion.
01:13:05.000I think traditionally it's been the largest driver of social cohesion, but it's certainly a major thing, right?
01:13:11.000But those decisions are made every single day, right?
01:13:13.000You decide on a given day whether you want to do a show or whether you want to stay home with your family.
01:13:18.000And sometimes you probably reject the show and you give up the money and you say, I'd rather be home with my family because it's more important for me to invest in the time with my family.
01:13:30.000So I give up gigs on Friday afternoons if I can't get back home in time for Sabbath or on Saturday nights if I can't get out after Sabbath in time.
01:13:37.000And it's just important to me to build the social capital at home with my kids and with my wife and with my parents who live in the same community and with the other members of my community.
01:14:00.000But the truth is that all of society is going to end up adopting this if we don't wish to get eaten by the metaverse.
01:14:05.000We're all going to have to have days where we just disconnect from all this stuff.
01:14:09.000Let's talk about the Metaverse because I'm really fascinated by this decision of Facebook to change the name of Facebook to Meta and to the Metaverse, which I think people are just going to...
01:14:24.000They're gonna realize that this is a crazy idea, that you're gonna give your life to some sort of augmented or virtual reality world that's created by a guy who's involved in this Company whose algorithms are sowing the seeds of distrust and hate although But now we're gonna fucking let him take over what you see and feel Because you're gonna have a new company and this new company is gonna be virtually reality based where
01:14:54.000he's literally he Reenacted a scene from black mirror Yeah.
01:15:07.000I think that you and I are of a different generation, dude.
01:15:09.000I think there are a lot of kids who are growing up in Fortnite world and spend a lot.
01:15:13.000And I think the pandemic really accelerated this.
01:15:15.000There are a lot of people who lived online for the entire pandemic.
01:15:17.000And so for people like me and for people like my parents, not seeing other humans for a long time was actually quite painful and terrible.
01:15:24.000Like we actually did want to get out and be with the community and see friends and do that sort of stuff.
01:15:28.000What if you spend your entire life from the time you're a little kid interacting with screens?
01:15:31.000What if those screens are getting increasingly sophisticated so that they are interacting with you in ways that humans would?
01:15:36.000What if you get to be whatever, like we're a society, we're just talking about this, where you get to be whatever you want to be.
01:15:41.000What if there's a world where you actually can be and everybody sees you the way you want to be seen?
01:15:46.000Would you rather live there where you're rich and good looking and everybody likes you, or would you rather live in the real world where you're disconnected from all that and you end up with Ready Player One world?
01:16:26.000But back then when I was a child, that was a big deal.
01:16:28.000If you extrapolate, if you just go in the future from now, what they're available, what they have available now with these insane video graphics, the Unreal Engine, and then move yourself 20 years in the future, yeah, it's going to be indistinguishable.
01:16:41.000And the AI is getting better and better in terms of being able to imitate human behavior, in terms of being able to innovate on its own.
01:16:46.000And haptic feedback suits and all these different things.
01:16:49.000And all these video games that they have that emulate sports, they're getting so close.
01:16:55.000When you watch these basketball games and the UFC has a game, when you watch the players, the fighters move around, like, God, it's so close.
01:17:03.000It's not quite there, but they're getting better and better with each iteration.
01:18:17.000And what I fear is that when you do that to a civilization, it's basically the equivalent of you bring in a wild animal and you put it in a cage for a long time, and now you can't release it back in the wild, right?
01:18:27.000What happens to you is a civilization.
01:18:29.000What happens if you've taken an entire generation of people, told them that their entire life exists online, they don't have to interact with other humans, they don't have to interact in human ways with other humans, and then there's like an entire other earth out there that isn't doing any of this.
01:18:45.000China's saying you're not allowed to go online certain days of the week if you're a kid.
01:18:49.000We're going to ban the kind of stuff that you can see.
01:18:51.000So, in the long run, which civilization is going to be more durable?
01:18:54.000The one that actually understands the vulnerabilities of human nature or the one that says, we're going to use those vulnerabilities to make you feel subjectively happier?
01:19:04.000I'm amazed at the level of conditioning.
01:19:06.000Here's what killed me about the pandemic, honestly.
01:19:16.000I was talking to my business partner, Jeremy Boring, about this, and early on in the pandemic, he was like, people aren't going to stand for this.
01:19:21.000Like, when they shut everything in, it's like, three months from now, people are going to be losing their minds.
01:19:25.000They're going to be out on the streets protesting to get rid of the masks, and they're going to be out at ballgames again.
01:19:55.000So if we change our social circumstances radically in a way that's unhealthy for us, and we are now interacting with technologies that were built to take advantage of our lizard brain, then what happens when there are people who are just not engaging in the same, they're not playing the same game that we are,
01:20:21.000And the experience machine is basically VR. He's writing this in the early 1960s.
01:20:25.000He says, what if there was a machine where you could plug into it, you'd feel the illusion of choice, you'd feel as though your choices had some sort of significance, and it would give you the dopamine hit that you get in regular life.
01:20:33.000Would you plug into it or would you not?
01:20:35.000And his theory was you wouldn't plug into it because you still want to feel like your life has real-world consequences.
01:20:39.000But what if everybody you know is in that experience machine?
01:20:44.000Then you're the one who gets left out if you're not in the experience machine.
01:21:07.000I don't think you're going to be able to stop people from doing it because I think it's going to be so overwhelmingly addictive.
01:21:14.000You look at how many people are just addicted to looking at their Instagram.
01:21:29.000And I think that what that's going to...
01:21:31.000I do wonder if there's going to be, and I wonder what you think about this, if there's going to be a bifurcation in the same way there's been a bifurcation about so many issues between the people at the top of sort of the elite spectrum and the rest of the population, where the people at the elite spectrum are making the metaverse, but their kids aren't actually in the metaverse.
01:21:47.000Right, like Steve Jobs didn't let his kid use an iPad.
01:23:25.000Again, all I can say is I think that a lot of the media, whether it is in the United States or whether it is abroad, works in cahoots with whatever government is in power.
01:23:32.000And if the government says, jump, a lot of the media say, how high?
01:23:39.000Because, you know, Italy has protests and they literally have like these cameras where you can see the area where the protests are.
01:23:46.000And either they're shutting these cameras off, or they're using old footage.
01:23:50.000Like, if you look at where these protests are taking place, see if you can find that, because some people have done, like, a deep dive on that, Jamie, where there was a large-scale protest in Europe, and then there were some cameras where you could watch it online, and they weren't showing any of it.
01:25:38.000Either I'm the most incompetent person alive or there's not really a fire at your house.
01:25:42.000So if you're going to promulgate an emergency temporary standard, you have to do it under emergency conditions.
01:25:48.000So if you say it's an emergency, you got to do it now.
01:25:50.000You can't wait two months and then wait another two months to put it in place.
01:25:53.000So that's one problem with it, legally speaking.
01:25:55.000And then there are a bunch of other problems, including the fact the federal government doesn't actually have the power under OSHA to do this.
01:26:01.000So how does the state government have the ability to say that children have to be vaccinated before they go to school?
01:26:10.000So states' localities have public policing power and public health power, and that is very much out of proportion with the federal government.
01:26:18.000The federal government has very little of that.
01:26:19.000They have to connect it with interstate commerce constitutionally.
01:26:39.000They could theoretically say that it's a violation of civil rights and then it would be reviewed probably under rational basis review, if I'm getting this correct, meaning that all the city or state would have to show is that there's a rational basis for what they're doing because they are given really broad power.
01:26:53.000Typically, courts don't like to step in.
01:26:55.000They like to say it's a political issue.
01:26:56.000What kind of rational basis could you give when you're looking at the incredibly low mortality rates when it's children?
01:27:03.000And not only that, the children that have died, I think- They're all unhealthy, virtually all.
01:27:09.000Yeah, according to Marty McCary, who's my guy on this over at Johns Hopkins University, the epidemiologist, he says, grand total, the entire pandemic, the number of kids who have died who are healthy is between 10 and 20. Over the course of the entire pandemic, 700,000 people have died in the United States.
01:28:22.000And because of that, if all your constituents are scared out of their minds and you say, we're going to do everything we can, that means vaccinating the kids, that means making sure everyone wears a mask, even post-vaccination, that everybody wears a mask everywhere...
01:28:50.000Like in the early days of the pandemic, when the media were trotting out Andrew Cuomo as the greatest governor in America and Ron DeSantis as Satan, The one who was actually making a ballsy call was DeSantis, not Cuomo.
01:31:09.000Some of them were trying to engage with the children, and they put forth a lot of effort.
01:31:12.000But, my God, there was a lot of lazy teachers that liked to teach in their pajamas.
01:31:16.000And they were worried about coming back.
01:31:19.000They did everything in their power to keep from coming back into class.
01:31:23.000I mean, the revolt over schools is like a very, very real revolt.
01:31:26.000But the point is that if you were going to do something rational without the vaccines, what you'd have to do is tranche the healthier percentages of the population back in.
01:31:34.000Even if you don't start with kids, you start 20-year-olds.
01:31:36.000You start 25-year-olds, under 30, right?
01:31:38.000And that's what Sweden did, essentially.
01:31:40.000Sweden was like, okay, if you're above 65, you should stay home.
01:31:50.000I mean, I got just ripped up on Twitter for suggesting that we ought to treat people differentially based on age with regard to COVID. Because I was saying, like, it's kind of absurd that we are treating 20-year-olds the same way that we're treating 80-year-olds.
01:32:04.000And to treat this as a disease that's supposed to shut down the entirety of human society because you refuse to treat people differentially based on age is totally crazy.
01:32:26.000By the way, when it came to age, like two, three months in, we knew.
01:32:29.000When it came to age, it was very early.
01:32:30.000We knew that if you were old, if you had diabetes, if you were fat, it was going to be a problem.
01:32:34.000We knew you were more vulnerable, but there was all these anecdotal stories about young people that got really sick and were hospitalized and died.
01:34:19.000It's just, you know, there's obviously the people that have a higher propensity.
01:34:23.000There's people that have a tendency to gain weight.
01:34:26.000There's people that have real issues with their immune systems, real issues with their endocrine systems, real issues with their thyroids, and it's easier for them to gain weight.
01:34:39.000And it also doesn't force you to seek medication to take care of yourself.
01:34:43.000So it is similar, because you're saying to people that, you know, you could have taken this medication, you could have avoided this problem, so we're not going to treat you.
01:34:50.000Well, same thing could be said for obesity.
01:34:54.000And even easier, because, like, exercise is free.
01:34:58.000Like, you can just walk around the block.
01:35:02.000You know, I'm not saying that you should not be treated because you're obese, but there are so many fucking problems that people have when it comes to risk-takers, when it comes to alcoholism.
01:35:14.000There's a lot of injuries that could be avoided if you just stayed home.
01:35:17.000If you're a BMX rider who's had 15 broken bones, why the fuck should that hospital take you into the emergency room?
01:35:33.000Once that logic applies, it applies all the way across.
01:35:35.000But it wasn't applied all the way across.
01:35:36.000It only applies to a certain type of disapproved activity.
01:35:39.000Well, it's because we're in the middle of this thing and the idea is that...
01:35:43.000Well, first of all, here's another part of the problem.
01:35:45.000The reality is the vaccines only work...
01:35:48.000They don't work exactly how they were advertised.
01:35:51.000The original take on the vaccine was this is going to be 95% effective and there's an extremely rare incidence of a breakthrough case and even in those cases you're going to be fine.
01:36:02.000I know 15 fucking people that have had breakthrough cases.
01:36:25.000More effective than not, but there's a lot of other things that people could be doing, too, that would make them even more effective, and those aren't even encouraged because they're easy and free, like exercise, losing weight, vitamin D. There's a lot of factors that aren't taken into consideration at all.
01:37:50.000The government, if they care about you, there's enough money in the world to provide food and shelter to every person on this country, if not the entire planet, and that's what we should do, and that's how we should redistribute wealth.
01:38:50.000And he just has got to wait until unemployment runs out, and then he can get his full-time bartender back.
01:38:55.000Well, you saw actually that the good economic stats from last month, that was not a coincidence, right?
01:39:00.000The federal unemployment ran, and then all of a sudden there were a bunch of people who wanted to get back in the workforce, because when you pay people to stay home, they will stay home.
01:39:19.000There's another factor when we talk about people with anxiety and depression and all these different things that haunt people today.
01:39:27.000I don't think it's a coincidence that this society has made it where we don't value Trying to work hard and solve things and do things that are difficult.
01:39:41.000Because I think in the pursuit of doing things that are difficult, your mind becomes engaged, you have a lot of commitment to these tasks, you have a lot of investment in it, and if you succeed, you feel great.
01:40:25.000If you willingly undertake a duty or obligation, or even if you don't, Even if there's just a duty or obligation that is put upon you by life, not by like some evil person out there who's trying to hurt you, but by actual life because life is filled with hardship and terrible things.
01:40:39.000You actually facing up to a problem and then defeating the problem or fighting the problem, it makes you stronger.
01:40:46.000It does make you a better person because very often you have to become a stronger and more capable human being in order to overcome those problems.
01:40:54.000Eliminating problems doesn't make people happier.
01:40:58.000Weird idea out there that if we just cared for everybody, we just gave everybody what they need, we'd all sit around and we'd just create art and we'd just like be poets in our free time.
01:41:19.000And I go, it doesn't always create douchebags.
01:41:22.000I go, it can, but if you're a good person and you develop good values in your child, and then that child inherits money and uses it to create a great business and actually creates value for the community and for people around you, that's possible too.
01:41:37.000And he's like, they should do it on their own.
01:41:39.000I go, well, what would you propose that that money go to?
01:42:11.000Remember that video that de Blasio made where he was talking about bringing arts back to New York City and had people doing this, like, expressive dance?
01:42:37.000But he's a lame duck mayor, so he's just going fucking...
01:42:40.000Well, the stuff that he's doing, that he was trying to do with the schools, that Adams is going to walk back, this is like case in point, where he's trying to get rid of the magnet schools because they're not racially proportionate.
01:42:50.000Adams, I think, is going to be good for that city because he's a Democrat, but he's also tough on crime.
01:44:35.000Yeah, so there's like a big kind of parents' revolt going on in California over this, because the idea was that There was too much racial disparity in math performance in California.
01:45:10.000You have to say, show me how to do this problem, and then the kid tries and you go, oh, that's not how you do it.
01:45:16.000By the way, I think the scam that is college is predicated on society trying to get around the basic truth that you just said, which is we can tell by test scores whether you know things and are good at things.
01:45:26.000Well, I mean, obviously there's some tests that favor people that have grown up in certain environments because you have more access to certain kinds of information.
01:45:34.000But once you teach people and then you test them, there's only one way to find out.
01:45:41.000Whether or not they know the information.
01:45:44.000The idea that you're going to eliminate tests and somehow make things more equitable or more even is kind of crazy.
01:45:50.000Actually what you're going to do is you're going to make people more racist is what you're going to do.
01:45:53.000And the reason for that is because Thomas Sowell talks about this.
01:45:56.000He talks about different types of discrimination.
01:45:58.000And he says there's group discrimination where you base your perception of an individual on the group data that is available.
01:46:05.000And then there's like discrimination, discrimination, which is you know that a person is smart and they're a group you don't like and so you just ignore the fact they're smart because they're from that group.
01:46:13.000So the two examples that he gives, right, is let's say that you're walking down the street at night and it's in an inner city neighborhood and there's a black guy walking down the street and he's wearing a hoodie and he's a young guy, 17 years old.
01:46:27.000Are you going to cross the street or not if the opposing example is an 80-year-old white woman?
01:46:33.000And he says, well, you know, based on the group statistics, you're probably going to cross the street more often if it's the 17-year-old black kid than if it's the 80-year-old white woman.
01:46:39.000Now, let's say that that 17-year-old black kid you know.
01:47:10.000Wouldn't it be better for black kids for you to have the test data because you know which black kids definitely deserve to get in as opposed to which ones don't deserve to get in?
01:47:17.000So you start using stupid generalizations.
01:47:19.000The whole point is more specific data is better.
01:47:22.000More specific data fights discrimination.
01:47:24.000And yet we have this whole weird idea that if we get rid of specific data, if we get rid of test data, objective data, this is going to end discrimination, precisely the reverse will occur.
01:47:31.000People will start using stupid stereotypes.
01:47:33.000Yeah, I think the real problem is the disproportionate amount of schools that are good that are in places where people have money.
01:47:42.000Schools where people don't have money aren't funded as well and a lot of them suck and that's a real issue.
01:47:50.000If you're terrified of going to your school because your school is riddled with gang violence and like something needs to be done about that because you have to create an environment where children feel safe enough to go to school and learn.
01:48:02.000And I think there is a disparity that needs to be adjusted and accepted and approached in a way where we're realistic about it.
01:48:12.000You and I have had this conversation before about what do you do with gang-ridden neighborhoods like what we talked about earlier with that fucking scene in Chicago, which is so insane.
01:48:26.000More police presence is actually better.
01:48:28.000More police presence actually lowers crime, makes things safer, and gives people an opportunity to do things that they don't have.
01:48:35.000And that point is very hard for people to grasp, but I talked to a cop about this, and he was explaining to me that statistically, when you look at it, more cops, and Michael Schellenberger talked about this as well, more cops actually make an environment where you have less police brutality.
01:48:54.000Less cops Make more stress on the cops, it's more difficult for them to do their job, and you actually wind up with more police brutality.
01:49:03.000So by having this idea that you're going to defund the police because of police brutality, you're actually increasing the opportunity or the possibility.
01:49:12.000It's totally counterintuitive, but this is what needs to be done.
01:49:16.000Like, we need to figure out a way to establish law and order in these communities where a lot of these folks, they don't want to be in a fucking gang.
01:49:24.000They're just hardworking families that are trying to get by and these kids are growing up in this environment where that seems to be the only realistic option.
01:49:34.000I mean, between the need for police officers in these communities and then this is a growing problem across all demographic groups, but it is not even by demographic groups.
01:49:42.000Single motherhood is a major problem in the United States.
01:49:44.000If you want kids to be better educated, if you want them to take school more seriously, if you want them to do better in school, what every study shows, every single one, so far as I'm aware, is that it's not even the presence of a father in the home.
01:49:56.000It's how many fathers are in the neighborhood.
01:50:00.000And what he found is that a father in the home makes a huge difference, obviously, but it's percentages of fathers in homes in the neighborhood that makes a huge difference for kids.
01:50:12.000I mean, and again, this is not a racial thing because there are parts, this is something Charles Murray talks about a lot when he talks about white Appalachia versus, for example, rich white areas.
01:50:19.000Like, there are huge cultural differences with regard to education between white Appalachia and rich white areas.
01:50:29.000There are a lot of poor Asian communities where kids are studying their ass off, and that's why they're doing amazing in school is because they're studying their ass off.
01:51:00.000Like, he was studying, and in the middle of studying, he would take all his books, throw them in his backpack, and he would run up the stairs of the school.
01:51:07.000And that's how he'd get his cardio in.
01:51:09.000I mean, the point- He was always tired.
01:52:16.000They took a big chance taking their family over to America and And then you're watching this sort of insane discipline and work ethic applied to life.
01:52:28.000And it's applied in such an effective manner that you see schools actively discriminating against Asian people.
01:52:53.000If we can't apply it to just scores, we'll have to like have some sort of a social thing.
01:52:58.000I also just have questions about the general way in which we determine what is now quote-unquote equitable in terms of how we break out groups.
01:53:07.000Too many Asians getting into college because they only comprise, what, 5-6% of the American population and therefore, and they comprise 20% of the degree holders or whatever it is.
01:54:23.000She took off a couple of years and worked, and then she went to medical school.
01:54:27.000And then she's taken a bunch of time off the workforce, take care of our kids, because she wanted to.
01:54:30.000I have a very good friend who's a very smart guy, but he made the mistake of making that argument.
01:54:36.000We were actually talking about divorce, and he was saying maybe the reason why women get more money in divorce, maybe the reason why it's fair is because of income inequality.
01:55:19.000Everybody in politics knows that it is not true.
01:55:22.000That if you just aggregate the stat...
01:55:24.000Just without regard to how many hours are worked, how many years in the workforce, what types of degree, what jobs have been chosen.
01:55:29.000Like, it turns out that engineers get paid more than teachers.
01:55:32.000Women tend to outnumber men when it comes to teaching degrees, but men vastly outnumber women when it comes to engineering degrees.
01:55:36.000One of my favorite conversations is Jordan Peterson having a conversation with a feminist where she brings up male privilege, and he's like, well, for God's sake, what privilege?
01:55:47.000And he just starts rattling off all these different things.
01:55:50.000And you see this woman not prepared for this conversation, and Well, again, this is one of those things where it's like, your ideas of what the world should be are not in any way reflective of what the world is.
01:56:00.000Like, one of my favorites along these lines is when you talk about, people will talk about, you know, women and men, and they really have exactly the same interests.
01:56:08.000Like, first of all, have you ever met a woman?
01:56:11.000So they'll say, the fact that there are not enough female engineers is evidence that there's discrimination in society against female engineers.
01:56:42.000But the stat that I love the most is that if you go to the much vaunted Nordic countries, right, where they have all sorts of great social welfare benefits and all of this, the gap in earnings between men and women is larger than the gap in earnings.
01:56:56.000In like a developing country like Latvia or Lithuania.
01:57:00.000And the reason is because when women work in countries where income is highly prized and you don't have a big social safety net, they choose the high income jobs.
01:57:09.000And when they are in a social safety net country, they get to choose what they actually want to do, which is not engineering, generally speaking.
01:57:15.000They tend to pick the stuff they like to do, which are more...
01:57:19.000Human connection oriented jobs women tend to like those men like machines women like people This is just a general for every woman true on average obviously this goes back to what we're talking about before that the we put so much value unfortunately in this country on success being quantifiable by bank accounts and Many people don't look at the world that way and when you force people to look at the world that way because you say this is our own only metric that we count and The metric that we count is how much money you're earning.
01:57:47.000Well, we're looking at men and women, and we're saying, well, men are making more, so we have an inequitable society.
01:57:56.000Like you were saying about these Nordic societies, if you give women the opportunity, when you have more equality, they tend to take more gender-specific roles.
01:59:43.000It's an uncomfortable reality for a person with no money and no success and no idea for a product that you're going to sell a billion units.
01:59:50.000It's also, it's not just reality, it's the only reality that provides positive externalities.
01:59:55.000So what other metric are we going to use for success?
01:59:57.000So the way that we measure success in terms of monetary exchange is the most goods, services, products that you provided to somebody else and they paid you for willingly.
02:00:06.000Which is why you can be an NBA star and you're really not producing anything except your own skill level on TV and we pay you lots and lots of money for this.
02:00:12.000You've created something that is non-replicable and we will pay you for that.
02:00:18.000You've created a good product or service that's not replicable and so we'll pay you money for that.
02:00:55.000On a moral level, maybe it's not fair.
02:00:56.000Maybe if you were God, you could figure out a different way that would make it more fair where it was based purely on how many hours of sweat labor you put into a thing.
02:01:03.000The problem is that if you actually try to create a system where you reward people based on the pure number of sweat hours they put into things, It's a wildly negative externality because now you're incentivizing people to just put in work at the thing that is the easiest for them to do without regard to pleasing anybody else,
02:01:20.000without regard to trying to create a product, good, or service that somebody else will willingly buy from you.
02:01:24.000This is why when people say that capitalism is selfish and it's non-altruistic, I've been ripped by the Ayn Rand crowd for saying this, but it actually is a form of forced altruism.
02:01:33.000If I create a product, a good, or a service, and nobody wants to buy it, but I really satisfied myself, That's selfish.
02:01:40.000What's not selfish is I now create a product or service.
02:01:43.000I now have to provide something to you that you want and you have to provide something to me that I want, right?
02:01:57.000There's a stock market like manipulation, hedge funds, people moving money around, moving numbers around, getting insanely wealthy by betting on companies failing, things being public.
02:02:07.000The ability to manipulate stocks and find a way to skirt the system and use computers to make these little quick transactions back and forth and back and forth and generate insane amounts of wealth, essentially doing nothing.
02:02:21.000But you've created massive amounts of fluidity and liquidity in the system, right?
02:02:32.000So you think that it's good that these companies get funded because they could, in turn, provide goods and services that people want and appreciate and we should tolerate all these fucksters.
02:02:44.000Who are figuring out how to get insanely wealthy and do blow off the assholes of Russian strippers because they've figured out a way to use this system to generate money.
02:03:17.000It was much harder to raise money for a company 50 or 100 years ago than it is now.
02:03:20.000By having these people around that will raise capital because of the stock market, because of the fact that there's an amazing opportunity for people that have no business being in that company.
02:03:30.000You have nothing to do with that company other than the fact that you're funding them and you're moving capital around.
02:03:37.000And in some cases, you are hedging against the possibility of loss in the company, which allows other people to read the signal and then allocate their capital elsewhere.
02:03:45.000You're saying this company is not worth as much as people are saying it's worth.
02:03:48.000People are going to draft off of you, presumably, and then they're going to sell their stock, and maybe they're going to put their money in a more successful company, which allows the company to raise more money, buy back its stock, reinvest, do all that sort of stuff.
02:03:58.000So it's an imperfect system, but it has a net positive effect.
02:04:07.000Right, there's no centralized allocative resource that is capable of doing that sort of work.
02:04:11.000So do I think that, like, on a pure level, this goes back to the whole difference that we were talking about earlier between meritocracy and skillsocracy that I was trying to make.
02:04:19.000We tend to think of, like, does that guy deserve it?
02:04:21.000I mean, he's just sitting in a room and he's playing with numbers.
02:04:41.000Now, what about Bernie Sanders' concept that you could take a very small amount of each of these transactions, these speculative transactions, like a fraction of a penny, and you could apply that To free college education,
02:04:59.000universal basic income, or universal healthcare at least, that you could use, like this is his concept of democratic socialism, that you would apply this in a way that's not punitive to these companies.
02:05:10.000It's a small amount in each transaction, but overall does a net good for the culture, for society, for the communities.
02:05:18.000So I think it really depends on how much grit you're adding to the grease in the engine, right?
02:05:22.000I mean, assume that the transaction costs he's adding are now the sand that you're adding to the grease that's in the engine.
02:05:27.000So all these things are just designed to grease it.
02:05:47.000I like how these, that's how these people, you were saying that's how these people, these fucking democratic socialists, that's how they slippery slope.
02:05:56.000I don't know how large the transactions that we're talking about are on average and what percentage of that transaction he's trying to grab.
02:06:03.000So until I know that, I don't know, are we talking about very marginal amounts or are we talking about not at all marginal amounts that are crucial to how that business operates?
02:06:45.000You take a child that's essentially, their brain is not fully formed yet, and you saddle them down with hundreds of thousands of dollars in student loan that they have to pay for the rest of their life.
02:06:55.000There's people today that are getting their Social Security docked because they owe student loans.
02:07:01.000You want to talk about being at the end of the game and realizing you're a fucking loser?
02:07:04.000When you get your social security docked, the money you're supposed to live on, and the country's like, no, fuckface, you owe us money because you have to pay for that school you didn't use.
02:07:39.000There was a study that came out recently and it said that something like 28% of all degree holders end up significantly financially worse off for having had the degree than for getting the degree.
02:08:08.000You major in ed, that's not going to do you a lot of good.
02:08:10.000You major in engineering, it's going to do you a hell of a lot of good.
02:08:12.000So one of the big problems is trying to treat all degrees as equivalent, which they are not.
02:08:17.000We also have a major credentialing problem in the society where a lot of people are now requiring a college degree where they shouldn't have to have a college degree.
02:08:25.000There are a lot of jobs in the United States that do not require a college degree, and we'll only take a college graduate.
02:08:30.000So at our company, we don't screen for a college degree.
02:08:32.000What's fascinating is the goodwill hunting approach, right?
02:08:35.000Is that you really can get an education without a college degree.
02:08:39.000You really can, but in order to be considered a person who's a serious thinker.
02:08:46.000This is what I was saying earlier about the testing, where I was saying that colleges are kind of a scam because we won't just use tests.
02:08:52.000So if you give me an 18-year-old kid's SAT score and his grade and his GPA, and you say he's going to major in a liberal art...
02:09:00.000I can tell you from his GPA and his SAT score whether he's probably going to be a good employee or not.
02:09:05.000I don't need four years of having him debted himself for 150 grand at Wellesley to figure that out.
02:09:10.000But isn't the idea that during those four years he's going to learn about life and have a more nuanced perspective of the world because he's going to be educated in all sorts of different things like history.
02:09:49.000Will something make high school better?
02:09:51.000How about we just have apprenticeship programs?
02:09:53.000You finish high school, you get an apprenticeship.
02:09:55.000Yeah, I think there's something to find if there's something that you're really actually interested in, you know, and then we start developing apprenticeship programs in all these different industries.
02:10:05.000I mean, if you want to talk about how other countries do it, there are a lot of countries that are tracking kids a lot earlier than 18. It's a stigma at 14, 15, saying what are you interested in, getting them sort of – are you into math?
02:10:16.000So, but what about – I mean, if these people do do that, don't you think there is some sort of a benefit to the education that colleges provide?
02:10:23.000Because they do provide – At the very least, they provide an environment where ideally your ideas are questioned and your concepts are- Yeah, no.
02:11:36.000There's a little bit of that, but we've lost the value of actually just being educated, of learning things, of expanding your understanding of the world itself.
02:11:48.000Like, that's not that valuable to people anymore for some strange reason.
02:11:52.000So for me, it was actually, listen, I went to UCLA and then I went to Harvard Law and I really enjoyed both of them, both very liberal colleges.
02:11:59.000But I think the reason I enjoy them is because I'm not liberal.
02:12:02.000So for me, it was learning about a lot of ideas that I didn't know anything about.
02:12:05.000So I got to like test out those ideas and think about them and read the countervailing point of view.
02:12:09.000But if I'd been on the other side of the aisle, I'm not sure I ever see much of the other point of view at all.
02:12:15.000Because you came into them as a conservative.
02:12:17.000Yeah, I was already conservative going to college.
02:12:18.000When did you decide you were conservative?
02:12:22.000I mean, I can't remember when I wasn't, probably, would be the fair answer there.
02:12:27.000So as soon as I realized I was political.
02:12:29.000This is just growing up in a religious household?
02:12:32.000Yeah, religious and then obviously very pro-Israel household.
02:12:34.000And so you go on campus, that's a big issue there.
02:12:36.000And so when you go up in a religious household, that comes along with certain values like hard work, reward and punishment.
02:12:43.000There are certain things that are sort of baked.
02:12:45.000The value of education is very big in the religious Jewish community.
02:12:48.000And then when it comes to foreign policy issues, when you get on campus, and campus is a lot more variable when it comes to Israel, for example, then you realize that you might not be in friendly territory on some of those issues.
02:12:59.000Well, it's shifted over the last few decades, right?
02:13:01.000And the percentage of people that are pro-Israel has probably shifted away, and the support of Palestine has become more favorable.
02:13:11.000Yeah, it's been linked in with the sort of broader dispossessed people's narrative.
02:13:22.000And you can tell because Israel's successful and its enemies are not.
02:13:24.000So therefore, Israel must be super bad.
02:13:26.000You saw a lot of this rhetoric, actually, during the last Gaza War, where people were saying things like, well, the Palestinians are just like Black Lives Matter.
02:13:33.000And it's like, well, they're not exactly like Black Lives Matter.
02:13:35.000Like, as much as I dislike Black Lives Matter and as much damage as they did, they weren't firing like 10,000 rockets into the middle of populated areas.
02:14:00.000The problem is that they haven't had an election since 2006 in Hamasistan, in the Gaza Strip.
02:14:05.000They haven't had an election in the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank since 2005, 2006. Mahmoud Abbas is in the 15th year of a four-year term in the West Bank.
02:14:17.000And Hamas took over the Gaza Strip after Israel completely pulled out in 2005. So Israel completely pulled out of the Gaza Strip.
02:14:24.000Israel has no military presence in the Gaza Strip, right?
02:14:44.000I did a fairly long, actually a 45-minute informational video about the history of Israel going all the way back to biblical times, all the way forward through the Roman period, through the Ottoman Empire, through the British Empire, etc., To the modern era as well.
02:14:58.000It's one of the sadder things in modern life is to see the rubble of those houses after they get missiled, you know, after they get smashed and, you know, you see the difference in the firepower that Israel has and the Iron Dome and all these things.
02:15:15.000By the way, thank God for the Iron Dome.
02:15:19.000If there were no Iron Dome, there'd probably be a lot less of the Gaza Strip left.
02:15:23.000Because the Iron Dome is the only thing that prevented mass casualties in Israel.
02:15:28.000If Mexico started firing 10,000 rockets into San Diego, the American flag would be flying in Mexico City within 24 hours.
02:15:35.000So no state worth of salt can allow that kind of assault, except if you have, apparently, Iron Dome shooting down 10,000 rockets above your cities.
02:15:43.000When AOC and all these people that didn't want the Iron Dome to be funded, when there was this sort of...
02:15:56.000I mean, you're actively arguing that you want the rockets to fall into the middle of Israeli cities at that point.
02:16:01.000That is a purely defensive technology.
02:16:02.000I think their argument was that there's a disproportionate amount of firepower in Israel's side.
02:16:09.000I would certainly hope so, considering that they're opposing an actual terrorist group.
02:16:12.000I hope there's a significant differential of firepower between the United States and Al-Qaeda as well.
02:16:15.000And what was the argument that they – because I've heard her discuss the whole Israel versus Palestine thing, and she seems about as educated about it as I am.
02:16:27.000Yeah, and I don't think she's particularly versed in it.
02:16:30.000Which is fascinating that she has an opinion about it that's so strong.
02:16:33.000It's turned into a bit of a wokeness issue.
02:16:36.000Well, again, I think it goes to there's this feeling broadly writ on the hard left that whenever there is an imbalance of power, that means that some deep injustice has been done.
02:16:46.000If somebody is powerful and somebody has less power, the person who's powerful must have victimized the person with less power.
02:16:52.000Again, Israel withdrew from the Gaza Strip in 2005 in its entirety.
02:16:56.000Well over 90% of the Palestinian population in the West Bank lives under complete Palestinian control in Area A of the West Bank, right?
02:17:03.000Under Oslo, there's Area A, there's Area B, there's Area C. Area C is the area that's still under total Israeli control, right?
02:17:08.000And if the Oslo Accords had proceeded with the Palestinians not pursuing terrorist attacks, then that would now presumably have been in the process of further negotiation.
02:17:19.000Area A has been under complete Palestinian control for a while, right?
02:17:23.000If you actually drive in Israel, there's signs on the roads in Israel and the West Bank where it says the Israeli government can no longer guarantee your safety if you drive off this road and into this Palestinian city.
02:17:33.000This is now Palestinian Authority-controlled territory.
02:17:34.000You're taking your life in your hands if you drive into this area.
02:17:41.000All I can say is that the number of Arabs living inside Israel, Israeli Arab citizens, who wish to be members of the Palestinian Authority-ruled areas or the Gaza Strip, is nearly zero.
02:18:24.000It would probably be fairly difficult.
02:18:27.000You'd have to demonstrate certain prereqs, like you would if you were immigrating to the United States, presumably stricter, because they have to have security concerns.
02:18:36.000Because Gaza is really riddled with terrorism problems.
02:18:39.000But what about people that move into Palestinian territory?
02:18:44.000What about settlers that take over people's homes?
02:18:48.000I've seen these videos where people are complaining or having these mass grievances that Israel— So if we're talking about Sheikh Jarrah, that was the one that came up most recently.
02:19:45.000The real reason for the Gaza war is because Mahmoud Abbas, who's the dictator slash president of the Palestinian Authority, who hasn't been up for election since 2006, Mahmoud Abbas He said that he was going to have an election in March, the first election they'd held in 15 years.
02:20:00.000It became very clear to him that if he held an election, he was going to lose.
02:20:04.000And he was going to lose to Hamas and Islamic Jihad, who are both terrorist groups.
02:20:07.000He was going to lose to that coalition.
02:20:11.000And then to misdirect from the fact that he had canceled the election, he decided to essentially gin up an enormous controversy over the Temple Mount.
02:20:19.000Now, I've been up to the Temple Mount.
02:20:21.000The Temple Mount is the site of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, okay, and the Dome of the Rock.
02:20:24.000It's also the holiest site in Judaism.
02:20:26.000The Western Wall is not the holiest site in Judaism.
02:20:27.000The actual Temple Mount is, because that's where Solomon's Temple used to be.
02:20:30.000And that area is essentially run by the Islamic waqf.
02:20:35.000So if you're a Jew, you're not allowed to pray up there.
02:20:55.000Sheikh Jarrah is a little outskirt of Jerusalem.
02:20:57.000And there's a big legal controversy over essentially two apartment buildings.
02:21:03.000Back in 1948, these had been Jewish-owned apartment buildings.
02:21:06.000And then in 1948, there's a big war between the Jews and the Arabs.
02:21:09.000The Jordanians end up in control of that area.
02:21:12.000These apartment buildings are then lived in by some of the Palestinians.
02:21:16.000No legal deed is ever granted to them by the Jordanian authorities.
02:21:19.000Okay, if the Jordanian authorities had given them legal deed, they would have retained that sort of deed after 67. So in 67, there's another war.
02:21:25.000There's like a war every 10 years in Israel.
02:21:30.000They unify the city of Jerusalem, right?
02:21:31.000That's why old and new Jerusalem are now in Israel.
02:21:33.000So Sheikh Jarrah, a lot of the people who had owned the apartment buildings prior to 48, they now come in.
02:21:39.000You have basically a legal dispute in which the Palestinians who have been living there for 15, 20 years because of the war, they say, we live here, we own it.
02:21:49.000And the Jews say, here's our deed of property, we own it.
02:21:51.000This goes through the Israeli court system.
02:21:53.000There was an agreement that was reached where the Palestinians would have to pay rent to the Jews because the Jews still had the legal deed.
02:21:59.000I know this is very complex, but this is how everything is over there.
02:22:01.000Okay, and so bottom line is that the Palestinians there stopped paying rent and there's a court ruling that comes down saying you haven't paid rent in 10-15 years and now you're going to be evicted.
02:22:28.000And then, again, all generated, at least in part by the Palestinian Authority, trying to distract from the fact they hadn't had an election.
02:22:35.000And then Hamas gets in on the act because they have to be kind of louder than the Palestinian Authority.
02:22:41.000They start firing rockets in the middle of Israel.
02:22:42.000So this is what you're saying is the real reason.
02:22:48.000So the public reason, what they said is Israel is attempting to evict Palestinians from Palestinian territory, and this is just the beginning of the Judaization of all of Israel.
02:22:56.000Now, again, if this were the Judaization of all of Israel, you'd have to explain why there are some...
02:23:02.000Four million Palestinians who are living in this area?
02:23:05.000Like, what you'll hear from critics of Israel is, Israel's engaged in some sort of genocide, Israel's trying to wipe out the...
02:23:09.000It's the worst genocide in human history.
02:23:10.000Like, the number of people who are living in the Palestinian areas is a multiple of what it was.
02:23:15.000The criticism is that it's like essentially an open-air prison.
02:23:18.000Well, then they should talk to the people who administer that prison, namely Hamas.
02:23:35.000They have to pass checkpoints because of security concerns.
02:23:38.000So these security concerns are the reason why the people are trapped, and then Hamas is the reason why they're controlled.
02:23:47.000Yes, because if Hamas wished to make peace with Israel, then Israel would be perfectly willing to have an open economic relationship with the Gaza Strip.
02:24:21.000And the reason why Hamas exists in the first place is because the people feel powerless and they need something to counter this regime of the Israeli government that's controlling them and keeping them in this spot.
02:24:34.000And they continue to encroach on Palestinian land and move their city and their people closer and closer to the point where they're going to eventually wipe out the Okay, it's crazy to think they're gonna wipe out the Palestinians.
02:24:46.000There's been no evidence of that whatsoever.
02:24:47.000And Israel made an offer in 2001 to give the Palestinians essentially all of the West Bank with some land swaps, because there's a lot of very populated areas in the West Bank, right?
02:24:56.000So right now, again, not to get technical, Area A is about...
02:25:18.000Everything is very like right on top of each other, territorially speaking.
02:25:22.000Israel in 2001 offered a full peace deal including shared control over the old city of Jerusalem, or at least parts of the, over East Jerusalem, I should say, not the old city, East Jerusalem.
02:25:32.000Israel offered in 2008 a similar deal under Ehud Olmert.
02:25:36.000Mahmoud Abbas got up and walked away from the table without a counteroffer.
02:25:39.000Israel has multiple times offered to settle the conflict with a separate Palestinian state.
02:25:44.000It has never materialized because the problem is that when you promise people what is promised in the actual Palestinian Authority original charter, which is the destruction of the state of Israel, havesies won't do it.
02:25:54.000The fact is that the Palestinian Authority, which is the governing authority in the West Bank...
02:26:22.000So the notion that what you have here is an intractable conflict in which if Israel put down all of its guns tomorrow, there would be no Jews.
02:26:29.000And if the Palestinians put down their guns tomorrow, there would be a Palestinian state.
02:26:33.000This has been the state on the ground since Oslo.
02:26:36.000So their position is that all of Israel is illegitimate because it used to be all Palestinian owned?
02:26:43.000And that's their position that it should go back to that?
02:26:46.000That is the position of the Palestinian, I mean, of the Palestinian Authority, that was Yasser Arafat's position, that's certainly Hamas' position.
02:26:51.000Like, the Palestinian Authority hides the ball a little bit, Hamas does not hide the ball.
02:26:54.000It's a fascinating conundrum because we spend so much time in America thinking about it and concerned about it, but very few people know the actual complicated details of it.
02:27:07.000There are civil and human rights inside of Israel.
02:27:10.000If you are living in the Palestinian authorities, there are not.
02:27:13.000And when it comes to the domestic rule, I'm not talking about the foreign policy, the travel, or the ability to deliver weapons in or something, which again, Israel keeps control of that because they're afraid of the terrorism.
02:27:22.000When you're talking about domestic law inside the Gaza Strip, you're talking about a place where gay people are literally dragged around the streets on the back of ropes.
02:27:30.000I mean, it operates more like the Islamic Republic of Iran than it does like a full functioning Western democracy.
02:27:35.000In Israel, one of the governing parties right now in the coalition is Arab.
02:27:39.000There are Arab judges who sit on the Israeli Supreme Court.
02:27:43.000Arabs comprise about 20% of the entire population of Israel.
02:27:45.000Arabic is one of the official languages of the state of Israel.
02:27:47.000So when people talk about discrimination, what they should note is that there are well over a million Arabs who live inside the state of Israel and are Israeli citizens.
02:27:55.000And in the Palestinian areas, where they would hope to be a Palestinian state, there are zero Jews, and there is a reason for that.
02:28:01.000I really want to see you debate someone about this because I would love to see the counterpoints that aren't available to me that I don't understand.