Golf is a weird thing. It's hard to hit a golf club, and it's even harder to hit it the right way. But that doesn't mean it can't be taught. And it's not hard to teach someone how to swing a good golf club. It just takes a long time and a lot of practice. And that's what we're talking about in this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, hosted by the late, great comedian and podcaster, JOE JORRAN. Featuring special guest Coleman Hill ( ) and special guest JOSH MILLER ( ) of the X Factor podcast, where they talk about all things golf and everything else that goes on in the world of sports and pop culture, including Tiger Woods and Tiger Woods' golf swing and how he's probably the worst golfer in the history of golf, but we're not talking about that right now. We're talking more about how to hit the golf club right, and why it's a problem, and how to fix it, and what to do about it. And how to make it better. And we talk about how you can be a better golfer. And we also talk about the worst thing you can do with a golf swing, which is hit the ball in the right place. We hope you enjoy this episode, and that you enjoy it! -Joe Rogan and Colemans X Factor Thanks for listening, and for supporting the show, and good night, and Good Luck Out There's a new episode next week! -Jon and Coleman X Factor. - X Factor X Factor, Jon and Jon and J. Rogan Check it out! X Factor x Jon and Cole and Jon are working on a new podcast, and we love you, Jon is a good friend of the show and we're looking forward to seeing you back in the next episode, so much, Jon, so we hope you're having a good time! Thank you Jon is great, Jon & Jon is good, Jon and we'll see you soon. Jon is awesome, Jon has a good day. -- -Jon is a great guy, and he's a great friend of mine, too, and I hope you like it, Jon's a good guy, so thank you, bye, bye Jon! --Jon and Jon is very good, good night Jon, bye. Cheers, bye! Jon
00:01:13.000With golf, it seems like there's very little correlation between general athleticism and whether you can do this swing.
00:01:19.000So here's a slow-mo of Tiger Woods and you know what it is is like I was looking at the way his body moves and then I remember hearing about all the different surgeries he's had on his back and I'm like it kind of makes sense if you look at the amount of torque right here is where the torque starts let it drive through like this amount of fucking power It is such a weird movement of the body.
00:01:46.000And you have to be loose and strong at the same time, right?
00:01:52.000Yeah, you gotta keep your arms stiff, but your wrists loose, and your hips loose, but your legs stiff.
00:02:00.000A baseball swing is so much more intuitive to me.
00:02:04.000Maybe that's because I played more baseball growing up, but I think it is more naturally with the grain of how the body would just, like if a caveman just picked something up at a club, he would swing it more like a baseball bat than like a golf club, certainly.
00:02:16.000It makes sense because the golf thing is down low, right?
00:02:19.000And so you have to stand sideways and it has to go past your legs and up.
00:03:32.000The other part, which I've been figuring out as I've learned, swinging as hard as you can doesn't make the ball go as far as it will if you swing nice and soft and hit it in the right spot on the club.
00:04:47.000He was very fat at one point in time and then he got pretty thin, but he's still in between fights and particularly carries a lot of back fat.
00:04:53.000He does not look quick or particularly strong.
00:06:24.000There's a thought that they were punching like that because they wanted to hit only with these two knuckles in the front because it's less likely to break your hands.
00:06:33.000And, you know, there's also, it's probably they just didn't know any better.
00:06:36.000Like, they didn't, you know, no one had come along that could punch, like, Mike Tyson.
00:06:41.000It had, like, perfect technique, and so they thought that this is probably the way to do it, to, like, hit each other, but...
00:06:47.000Have you seen this documentary, One Punch?
00:09:02.000I don't mean to brag, I don't care, but I want you to know, double vaxxed, booster, flu shot, and I'm going to be honest, I have the shingle shot too.
00:09:52.000I mean, but that's just a coincidence she was talking about the vaccine while that happened.
00:09:55.000Yeah, they call it instant pharma, which is horrible, but that's the phrase that I keep hearing online.
00:10:02.000There was a woman on German television that the same thing happened to her recently.
00:10:07.000She was talking about vaccine mandates and talking about how important it is to mandate the vaccines, and she blacked out on television while talking about it.
00:11:44.000There's someone in the world where the first time they texted and drove, they ran over like a five-year-old.
00:11:49.000Law of averages says that must have happened.
00:11:52.000And on the one hand, we want to punish those things.
00:11:56.000On the other hand, you can't really call that person a moral monster when they're doing something a lot of people are doing and just getting much luckier with.
00:12:08.000Yeah, there's an interesting distinction between someone choosing to do something evil versus an evil result.
00:12:15.000Like if your son dies because someone was texting and driving, it's the most horrible feeling.
00:12:21.000You'd probably be so furious and you'd want revenge, you'd want to punish that person.
00:12:53.000And I think the reason we recognize intention in the law is because clearly all human beings, we have this intuition that it's a different type of person who does a thing on purpose than does it by accident.
00:13:07.000One kind of person wishes you harm and probably will keep wishing you harm.
00:13:10.000The other kind of person, at worst, was negligent.
00:13:14.000And I think that's a very important observation to hold steady throughout our legal and non-legal judgments of people just in the culture, right?
00:14:14.000You know, you'd have to throw out our whole legal system, if that were true, or at least overhaul it.
00:14:19.000And I think that's an important principle to recognize.
00:14:22.000I think the conversations haven't been had enough, whether it is with someone doing something accidentally and having a horrible result versus doing it intentionally, or someone using words versus someone that is actually trying to be racist.
00:14:43.000There's definitely a difference in those things, and I think We as a society we have rules that we have decided upon and then when someone violates those rules that person is a violator and that person needs to be judged and dealt with because of that.
00:15:00.000I think we have this sort of moral righteousness when it comes to uttering certain words or doing certain things and The good thing about the judgment that comes out of that is conversations.
00:15:17.000People start having conversations like, what is the difference?
00:15:26.000You know, it's interesting, with the N-word controversy that happened here, right when that was happening, I was watching for the first time ever, I'm ashamed to admit, the five-part OJ documentary from ESPN from a while back.
00:15:41.000It's been on my list to watch for a long time.
00:15:47.000And you'll remember there's this moment in the trial where, you know, it's now known that there's probably a Mark Furman N-word tape, you know, like this cop that collected the glove at the scene has a history of using the N-word as a racial slur,
00:16:07.000And Chris Darden for the prosecution With the jury out of the room, he looks at the judge, he says, we cannot allow the jury to hear this tape, and here's why.
00:16:19.000Black people cannot hear the N-word and remain objective.
00:16:23.000And the jurors, they have to remain objective.
00:16:30.000That's fascinating that he's the prosecuting attorney.
00:16:33.000Prosecuting attorney made that argument.
00:16:35.000And then the defense, Johnny Cochran came back on the defense, and he said, What the hell are you talking about?
00:16:41.000The idea that a black person can't hear the N-word in any context and remain rational, remain objective, understand the context of it, is patronizing, it's condescending, it's racist.
00:16:53.000I'm ashamed that you made this argument, right?
00:16:56.000And, you know, regardless of the merits of it, Johnny Cochran's view was seen to have sort of won the day among people.
00:17:05.000And they did admit much of, or at least parts of the tape, and the jury heard the word.
00:17:11.000And basically the argument was, among progressive people at that time in the 90s, was it's condescending and patronizing to say that any example of that word being spoken just like scrambles black people's minds or something.
00:17:27.000And I think there's been a huge sea change in what the progressive argument now is.
00:17:32.000The progressive argument now is much closer to Chris Darden's point of view that any example of this word being used, whether it's in quotation marks, whether you're talking about the word itself, or whether it's being hurled as an insult,
00:17:59.000So I just, I think we, at minimum, we should mark how much has changed there and who was making these arguments back then and who's making them now.
00:18:07.000And I worry that people are basically circling the wagon on an idea that they haven't really thought through.
00:18:20.000I get it from a prosecutor's perspective because he doesn't want them to dismiss this character in his case, which is Mark Furman, who, on top of that, also has been accused of planting evidence.
00:18:35.000So there's like a two thing going on with Mark Furman.
00:18:38.000You're dismissing his validity, first of all, because he's doing something illegal.
00:18:52.000And then on top of that, he might have racist perspectives.
00:18:57.000So you've got two things going on simultaneously.
00:19:00.000And then also, it's like everybody had seen the Rodney King video.
00:19:04.000This was a big part of the OJ case that a lot of people maybe have forgotten.
00:19:11.000When people saw that Rodney King video, which is really one of the first viral videos, and you see Rodney King on the ground and these multiple white cops beating him with sticks, And the fact that those cops got off.
00:19:36.000I don't remember the details, but as it dragged on and they keep beating him more and more senseless, it just becomes more and more obvious that there's no reason that they had to beat him that much, right?
00:20:16.000And the notion that because the cops did something completely unforgivable, horrible to Rodney King and got off for it, and that did prove all of the wider points about the systemic practices of the LAPD,
00:20:38.000The fact that people couldn't separate those true and important points from this other trial About this, you know, this wealthy former football player that quite clearly killed his wife.
00:20:52.000You know, I think that we have to insist that people be able to think two things at once.
00:20:58.000I mean, that's just one example of it.
00:21:01.000But, you know, it's possible to acknowledge everything true and valid about the Rodney King case and still say, I'm sorry, OJ is guilty.
00:21:11.000And there weren't that many people Certainly weren't that many black people at the time, it seems, that were really emphasizing that bright line, that we can think two things at once here, folks.
00:21:22.000And it doesn't make us look good to conflate the two.
00:21:40.000And there was allegations that cops that were involved in that were also involved in the killing of Biggie.
00:21:47.000So there was a lot of shit going on with LA cops where...
00:21:53.000There was no internet back then so we have to remember back in the day like these discussions were had with people just talking about it at a bar or over the dinner table and no one had like real data to pull from and there was no like real investigative journalism that was being done where you could show it.
00:22:10.000I remember the Rolling Stone article on Biggie's murder.
00:22:18.000I think they were saying it was Rampart cops.
00:22:22.000I think they even narrowed it down to the specific cops they think had something to do with the murder, where there was a bunch of, and they know this was a fact, there was a bunch of rogue cops that were doing murders for hire.
00:22:35.000They were basically organized criminals that were operating under the gang of the Los Angeles Police Department.
00:23:03.000But when people saw the Rodney King beating and then they saw that those guys got off, that was one of the very first sort of, like, public acknowledgements.
00:23:13.000Like, there's a real fucking problem with this police department.
00:23:16.000Imagine how many Rodney Kings there were that just didn't get filmed.
00:23:22.000We now live in an age, just in the past 10 years really, where everyone in America, virtually, has a fairly high definition camera in their pockets at all times.
00:23:33.000And some police departments have moved to universal body cams and so forth.
00:23:39.000And that's been, I think that's changed incentives, you know, almost more than any law.
00:23:48.000The understanding every cop has that when he or she is policing the public, the public can simply whip out their phones at any time.
00:23:57.000That has to seep into the consciousness of police officers knowing that they're being watched.
00:24:05.000That's a double-edged sword, though, because on the one hand, it's way harder for a cop to abuse someone now that everyone can film.
00:24:18.000On the other hand, because everyone has a phone in their pocket...
00:24:24.000The availability of bad things happening has just skyrocketed, right?
00:24:30.000And in a country with over 300 million people, it gives us the impression that horrible things that are actually extremely rare are in fact happening all the time.
00:24:54.000If America were exactly the same, but the size of Canada, like one-ninth the population, it would mean that we would have roughly one-ninth the interactions between cops and citizens,
00:25:10.000and one-ninth of the opportunities for things to go left, and one-ninth of the videos of cops killing people, Unarmed.
00:25:23.000And it would seem like it were happening a lot less.
00:25:26.000But in fact, the state of the country would be the same, right?
00:25:31.000So just the fact that we have such a large population makes it feel like lightning strike rarity events are happening all the time.
00:25:38.000And the media obviously thrives on that.
00:25:41.000Well, those are the ones that are very popular, and those are the ones that people want to share.
00:25:47.000But there's a lot of ones with cops getting attacked, too, and people don't seem to care about those.
00:25:51.000There's a website that I follow, an Instagram page, rather, called Police Posts.
00:26:01.000About this guy responding to a call, and this man is at the door, and the cop is walking towards the door, and the guy's saying, hurry up, she's choking on her own blood, something to that extent.
00:26:30.000So the guy's walking towards the door.
00:26:37.000So as the guy's walking towards the house...
00:26:49.000As the guy's walking towards the house, the guy's standing in the middle of the door, and he's got no shirt on, and he's saying, come on, she's choking on her own blood.
00:27:00.000And as he comes close, the guy just pulls out a gun and just opens fire at point-blank range and lights this cop up.
00:27:09.000This is a thing that, you know, when you see horrible interactions between cops and civilians, you don't see too many of those.
00:27:40.000This is a point I tried to make during the year of the George Floyd protests and riots.
00:27:46.000People would often say, well, look at Western Europe, look at Canada, look at all of these places where they have cops and in certain of these places the cops don't have guns.
00:28:07.000And, I mean, I think there's a serious conversation to be had about the culture of the American police being seriously flawed.
00:28:17.000At the same time, the fact that this happens in America means that policing in America is not the same as policing in the UK and other countries, right?
00:28:49.000The thing he's reaching into his pocket for could be a gun.
00:28:52.000Could be a wallet, but it could be a gun.
00:28:54.000In other countries, cops don't really have to have that thought because it's always a wallet.
00:29:00.000And that's a systematic difference between policing in America and policing in other nations that makes it harder and makes it a facile comparison to simply say, why isn't this stuff happening in Western Europe?
00:29:16.000There's that, but then there's also the history of police violence and abusive police officers in America that's different than the history of cops in any other place.
00:29:28.000And I think that that has to be taken into account, too, that there's an enemy perspective that a lot of people have.
00:29:36.000When they look at the cops, they think of the cops as the enemy.
00:29:38.000I don't necessarily know what it's like in Europe, but I've got to think that the polarization between cops and citizens and a lot of it is broadcast via these cell phone videos.
00:29:54.000Like the George Floyd incident, it was a girl, a 17-year-old girl, filmed it on her cell phone.
00:29:59.000Changed the whole world because of that video.
00:30:02.000Literally changed the landscape of the way people think about racial interactions in America because of one video.
00:30:10.000There's so many people that think of cops as the enemy because of these videos.
00:30:20.000The perspective that people had, you know, my parents were hippies in the sixties and, you know, they grew up during the civil rights movement and they were around during, you know, marches and protests.
00:30:33.000And when Muhammad Ali refused to go to fight in Vietnam, they stripped him of his title.
00:30:38.000And there was this understanding of the difference between the way cops treated black people versus cops treated white people.
00:31:19.000And so when you see videos like this where this guy who's a cop gets shot at and you see these other interactions, we're not getting necessarily a balanced perspective.
00:31:32.000There's clearly a problem in the way cops deal with all citizens.
00:31:39.000There's clearly a culture of abusive police officers in some precincts, in some place.
00:31:46.000I remember, it's fresh in my mind because I saw the OJ documentary, but there was some tape that was released of cops Like privately talking about black people and they had some horrible name.
00:32:02.000I can't remember what it was, but that they thought was hilarious.
00:32:06.000And it just it was this this moment where it was perfectly clear that they saw themselves as one kind of people and they saw the cells that they were the people they were policing as a totally different set of people unlike them.
00:32:21.000And that was almost psychologically akin to the relationship of colonialism in some way.
00:32:30.000I mean, the way the media has portrayed this issue in recent years...
00:32:37.000Has been to skew the discussion of shootings so as to only show the black victims of these kinds of killings, right?
00:32:47.000I wrote a long essay in 2020, and one of the points I was trying to make in that essay was, you know, unarmed white people get killed by the cops every year in circumstances identical to the ones that we see We're good to go.
00:33:24.000You know, I took, just as an experiment to show how often this happens, I took a single year.
00:33:30.000I closed my eyes and picked it at random.
00:33:32.000And I picked 2015 and just listed 10 different unarmed white people that got shot by the cops and killed that year.
00:33:43.000And, you know, these are, you know, like nobody knows these names.
00:33:48.000Because it only gets pumped into the national media when it's a black person, which gives the false impression that it only happens to black people.
00:33:56.000Everyone knows the name George Floyd as they should, but very few people know the name Tony Timpa, I found, which is this guy from Dallas in 2017 that was killed on camera with a knee on the top of his neck for 13 minutes, and the cops joking the whole time.
00:34:12.000It was the closest example to a George Floyd that I'm aware of in recent American history.
00:34:45.000Blah, blah, blah, as he's passing out.
00:34:47.000They're making jokes about how he's, and he died.
00:34:50.000And that was 2017 and he was a white guy.
00:34:53.000And, you know, nobody, very few people are aware that this even happened because of the color of his skin, right?
00:35:00.000He wasn't, he didn't fit the narrative that this only ever happens to black people.
00:35:05.000And I think that narrative has a cost, which is that we misperceive the problem with these shootings as being only about racist cops.
00:35:15.000I have no doubt some of these examples, it's like the cop wouldn't have shot if it was a white guy.
00:35:20.000You know, a white guy reaching into his pants for what looked like a gun, it wouldn't have scared the cop so much if he was white.
00:35:29.000I have no doubt that that has happened.
00:35:31.000But in this day and age, I think pretty much no cop wants to be the next Derek Chauvin.
00:35:38.000When it comes to shootings, at least, they have to be exercising a pretty unique amount of restraint, at least in the past few years.
00:35:51.000And I think it's, you know, we have minimized unfairly the role of bad training, the role of bad incentives, how cops almost never get punished for these kinds of things.
00:36:29.000She says she thought she was using her taser, which is...
00:36:32.000I don't know the details of it to judge the plausibility of that excuse, but at the very minimum, it seems like horrible training.
00:36:40.000It seems like horrible training, but I can attest to the fact that people under pressure completely fall apart.
00:36:48.000And some people under pressure fall apart way worse than others.
00:36:53.000There's something about adrenaline and fear and physical violence that Narrows people's windows of perception and their ability to make rational decisions.
00:37:16.000We were like in the front bar area and across the street on the other side it was the House of Blues and there was these guys that were arguing and they started fighting and one guy Literally, his face was like this and he had instigated this and he didn't know how to de-escalate and he was arguing with this guy and like,
00:37:40.000And then all of a sudden he's in a physical confrontation with this guy and you see him literally like in full-blown panic fear and he's doing this.
00:37:52.000Flailing with his hands like he has no idea how to hit someone.
00:37:58.000And I could just see the constriction of his thinking, the full panic in his movement, full on just locked in, doesn't know what's happening.
00:38:11.000And a car, like a bus, pulls in front, where I see these guys swinging, and a car pulls in front, and as the car passes, I see the guy laid out, just completely flatlined, and the other guy runs off.
00:39:11.000It's people fucking lock up under panic, man.
00:39:15.000I had this guy, Anthony Barksdale, on my podcast.
00:39:19.000Anthony Barksdale was the Deputy Commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department for years in like, I don't know, something like starting in 2007 or something like that.
00:39:28.000And he was, fun fact is that he was the namesake of the character Avon Barksdale on the show The Wire.
00:39:36.000Whoever the writers were studying the BPD at that time or studying Baltimore, they took his name, made it into one of the main characters.
00:39:46.000Anyway, Anthony Barksdale is this guy from Baltimore.
00:39:49.000He grew up in an area of great violence.
00:39:53.000He told a story about being a kid on a sports team and a shooting broke out and the coach would hide them in a dumpster to hide them from the bullets.
00:40:06.000So he grew up from the city and he grows up determined to make a change by becoming a cop.
00:40:15.000And he eventually rises through the ranks, becomes the commissioner, deputy commissioner.
00:40:22.000And he just told all these stories about...
00:40:28.000These tense situations he had got into with subjects that were violent, subjects that were mentally ill.
00:40:35.000And one of the biggest assets that he had was that he was very comfortable in physical altercations.
00:40:47.000And he was able to deescalate so many situations without going for his gun because he had a kind of confidence and knowledge that he could use his body to subdue and arrest a suspect without hurting them, without hurting himself.
00:41:04.000I mean, he couldn't formally through the department require BJJ training.
00:41:11.000But he would take his people and do and incentivize them to train in BJJ outside of the official training.
00:41:20.000The thing about jujitsu that's different than other martial arts is that you do it full blast.
00:41:24.000A lot of martial arts, like sparring, is very muted.
00:41:32.000You're not really supposed to spar full blast in karate class.
00:41:36.000You're supposed to control your strikes.
00:41:39.000Because of that, you don't get to experience the chaos of Of a real human being trying to take you out.
00:41:46.000And in jujitsu, because of the fact that it's grappling, it's unique in that you can go full blast and instead of getting hurt when you get caught in something, you could just tap out and keep going.
00:41:58.000So if someone catches you in an arm bar, you just tap, you keep going, and then you get accustomed to a human being resisting with all of their might.
00:42:08.000So if you're in a situation with a person and all of a sudden it escalates into a street fight, you're so comfortable with this kind of confrontation.
00:42:18.000You're so comfortable with the kind of physical chaos that's involved in a human being resisting.
00:42:24.000Also, there's like a language of the way a body moves that you become very fluid with.
00:42:32.000You understand how to control a person.
00:42:35.000People who don't have any experience in martial arts and they wind up being police officers are fucking dangerous because they're relegated to weapons.
00:42:48.000They can scare you or they can shoot you.
00:42:50.000They can tase you or they can beat you with a club.
00:42:53.000They don't have the ability to control you.
00:42:56.000If I'm around a person who is my size and they have no martial arts training and all of a sudden this person starts getting threatening with me and they start saying they're going to kick my ass or something like that, My thought is,
00:43:16.000If I know this person doesn't really know how to fight and they're saying crazy or they don't have like real experience and they're saying crazy things, my thought is not, oh my God, I'm in trouble.
00:44:51.000You have a comfort level with physical movement and you have this just innate understanding of how to balance yourself and the strength that's involved in that.
00:45:03.000If you come from a background of gymnastics or you come from a background of dance or acrobatics or anything like that, you have a giant advantage.
00:45:13.000I would argue if we lived in a rational and wise society, one of the things that would have come out of the racial reckoning in 2020 was some billionaire or groups of very wealthy people creating some kind of Fully funded jujitsu training for police officers.
00:45:56.000I don't know if he still is, but when I had him on, he was a commentator on CNN now, and he's retired, so now he feels he can really speak freely about issues in a way that people who are still police often feel they can't.
00:46:10.000Carlson Gracie was one of the first guys I'd ever trained with.
00:46:14.000I trained with Luis Herrera at Hicks and Gracie's place.
00:46:19.000But Carlson Gracie was the second place I ever trained at.
00:46:36.000When Elio Gracie lost to certain people, they would send in, I think, Valdemar Santana was the guy, and they'd send in Carlson Gracie to clean up because he was the badass of the family.
00:46:47.000They come in and fuck people up like Elio couldn't.
00:46:50.000Me and my girlfriend, a couple weeks ago, we watched the Ricks and Gracie documentary on YouTube.
00:47:03.000He was so good and still is very unique very unique it's an honor to know him and but Hickson was very unique because he had all the things he had first of all his father was Elio Gracie who was the one of the most important figures in the history of martial arts he was the guy who was a small man he only weighed like 147 pounds and And he was out there having these no-rules fights
00:47:34.000with these big giant guys and he relied completely on technique and leverage and developed this system of technique and leverage as applied to the ground game with Carlos Gracie and with a bunch of the other people like Carlson and a few of these other like early jujitsu practitioners.
00:47:52.000So he gave birth, or he fathered, rather, Hickson.
00:47:57.000And Hickson was unique in that he grew up with it, and also that he was very physically powerful.
00:48:06.000He was unusual in that he got really obsessed with yoga.
00:48:14.000So he had this incredible control of his breath and control of his mind because of that.
00:48:19.000And he would do like cold water immersion where he would get into like that scene in the film where he gets into this freezing glacial river in Japan and, you know, up to his neck and he's breathing this water.
00:48:32.000And he was a completely different type of person that changed jujitsu.
00:48:41.000I remember my mom was super into Iyengar yoga.
00:48:46.000She would take me to yoga when I was like three and I would play with my little action figures while they were doing her thing or whatever.
00:48:51.000And I would watch videos of Iyengar What is Iyongar yoga?
00:48:58.000There's just different strands of yoga from different, I don't know what you'd call them, like grandmasters, whatever's Iyongar and vinyasa.
00:49:06.000I'm probably sounding very ignorant to someone who knows about it, but Iyongar yoga was the one that my mom did, and it's from this guy, Iyongar.
00:49:16.000And there's a video of him on YouTube, reciting this little poem about the breath, and then he does a demonstration, and he exhales for about 60 seconds.
00:49:35.000Obviously, if you're letting that much air through, you can do it for a while, but there's no pace slow enough that I could exhale consistently for a full minute.
00:49:44.000It doesn't even seem real, and there's a little part of me that still somehow thinks it's doctored.
00:53:04.000And the whole thing I'm doing, I'm just doing this breathing exercise where I'm just...
00:53:13.000So by breathing hard like that, one of the things you're doing too is you're tightening up your core so you're kind of heating yourself up a little bit.
00:53:20.000You're heating up your muscles by straining and resisting and you're resisting the cold plunge.
00:53:25.000Yeah, this is the video I was talking about.
00:56:41.000It begs the question, what do you do with your time?
00:56:44.000Do you immerse yourself in positive people that are thinking about all aspects of humanity and trying to advance the way they view the world and advance their own perspectives?
00:56:59.000And enhance their education and fill their mind up with new ideas, or do you just complain?
00:57:10.000We were talking before about the Brazilian version of me today, before the show, where Glenn Greenwald had set me hip to this guy.
00:57:21.000I don't know his name, but he is a Brazilian podcaster who is very popular.
00:57:28.000And he likes to do his shows intoxicated, like I do.
00:57:32.000And apparently, Glenn said that what he said was he doesn't believe anybody should be deplatformed.
00:57:38.000And he said, and someone said, like, including Nazis.
00:57:41.000And he said, yeah, I don't think you should deplatform Nazis.
00:57:44.000Which, as we were saying before, was like the original position of the ACLU. The ACLU, which a lot of are like Jewish attorneys, they were saying, no, we shouldn't deplatform Nazis.
00:59:27.000February 7th conversation, the two members of the Brazilian Congress, Ayub, I hope I'm not saying his name wrong, argued that Brazil should embrace free speech absolutism, including legalizing the currently illegal Nazi party.
01:00:28.000Every one of the major ideas that rule our world right now, let's say the right loves Christianity, the left is largely secular, both of those ideas have at different points in history been highly censored.
01:00:44.000Christianity was highly censored at one point, later it became the law of the Roman Empire.
01:00:51.000Atheism has been heavily censored on pain of death for hundreds and hundreds of years, and now it's rather mainstream.
01:01:00.000I mean, those are big examples of censorship not working in the grand arc of history.
01:01:05.000But we also have just very recent examples, you know.
01:01:11.000You know, regardless of what you think about it, and I think it's probably true, but regardless of what you think about it, what's clear is that the attempts to brand it as misinformation did not work in terms of getting people not to believe it.
01:01:25.000It worked for a small amount of time to get people off social media.
01:02:21.000And there's this attempt now from the right to get books banned from public school libraries.
01:02:26.000You know, certain books like, you know, uh, Ibram Kendi sort of woke racist books like anti-racist baby and like all these ridiculous books that I think are crazy too.
01:02:38.000But I would never say ban them from the public school libraries if that's going to do anything.
01:02:42.000All it does is it hands that author a PR victory Where they get to say, look, they're trying to censor me.
01:02:49.000I must be right about something, right?
01:02:51.000And in the age of the internet, your kids are going to be exposed to all kinds of ideas, no matter what.
01:02:57.000I think as a culture that we need to have this conversation when it comes to ideas, I think it's a very, very important stand to take that we have to engage with almost all ideas.
01:03:52.000And then from there you build up a worldview.
01:03:55.000Okay, well, if that's the reason why something is wrong, if it's that suffering, the human suffering is inherently wrong, now let's apply that principle, now that we've worked backwards, build up an idea of what other things are wrong and why, rather than simply taking for granted that certain things are wrong.
01:04:13.000I think there's also a thing that's going on in this culture today where people want things now and when you have a complex idea that has to be debated like here's one why do we still have deeply impoverished neighborhoods that have been in the same state of crime and of gang violence and have been going on was that a photograph what was that Did not know I had Mutom.
01:04:57.000It's a complex issue that if you wanted to discuss it and you wanted to develop solutions and you wanted to work out, it's going to take a long time and a lot of people are going to have to contribute and it's going to have to be...
01:05:10.000And because of that, It's too complicated.
01:05:46.000But it's a quick way to solve something.
01:05:48.000And I think something like a thought experiment of why you shouldn't eat babies and if human suffering is the problem, now let's expand what other forms of human suffering can we find solutions to that we've ignored.
01:06:01.000And why are we accepting certain forms of human suffering?
01:06:05.000Like, why are we accepting the death penalty when we know that X amount of people who are in jail or unjustly...
01:07:24.000Whenever we do one of those podcasts, we generally spend time talking about general issues with wrongful convictions and then we'll find one or two cases and go over those one or two cases.
01:07:36.000Just this cursory examination of one or two cases takes so much time and so much heartache is involved in these people's lives and a lot of them, like, they're poor or some of them don't speak English well and they become patsies and they use them,
01:07:53.000you know, because a prosecuting attorney needs to have someone, you know, a DA needs to have someone that they pin the crime on.
01:08:01.000And once they decide, okay, let's go with Jorge over here, And then, boom, they just throw everything they can to try to win the case.
01:08:08.000And it's a giant problem with our legal system, and it's a complex problem.
01:08:12.000It's not a problem that's easily solved.
01:08:14.000If you have thousands and thousands of people that are wrongly convicted, which we probably do, there's probably thousands and thousands of people right now that are in penitentiaries, and they're in there for something they did not do, that's a big fucking problem.
01:08:28.000I mean, that's a giant problem, and it's not an easy one.
01:08:30.000It's not like, kick this guy off of Twitter.
01:08:33.000He said that Nazis should be able to talk.
01:08:38.000So that kind of censorship, that kind of short-term solution to a much larger problem is Fool-hardy, but I think it's an artifact of the kind of culture that we live in where people want quick, easy solutions to things.
01:08:52.000And they want to make a thing into a much bigger problem than it really is.
01:09:12.000His idea is he shouldn't de-platform people.
01:09:15.000We were talking about Daryl Davis before this podcast as well.
01:09:18.000And Daryl Davis, who is a guy who is a blues musician, who has personally, through his own conversations with people, he's gotten more than 200 KKK people and neo-Nazis to turn over a completely new life and to give him their outfits.
01:09:36.000Give him their wizard costume, or whatever the fuck it is, and their Nazi outfit.
01:09:40.000And this one man, just through having conversations with people and just being this undeniable, amazing human, has changed the way people think about these racist ideas that they have.
01:10:00.000Daryl Davis is amazing and exceptional in many ways, but I think that those kinds of changes of heart are actually far more common than you might suppose just kind of observing the tenor of the media in our times.
01:10:17.000Like, I was just talking to my friend Noam Dorman, who owns a comedy cellar, and he's Jewish, and he said over the years he's had a lot of Arab people working for him coming from Arab countries where they've never met a Jew and have crazy ideas about Jews.
01:10:43.000But they become friends, and their ideas about Jews change over time as a result of interactions.
01:10:51.000It's not, like, again, as exceptional as Daryl Davis is, it's not, you know, that kind of thing is happening by the millions in people's lives in ways that will never make it into the media.
01:11:13.000I've heard people argue that persuasion is actually not a good strategy.
01:11:25.000What is true is that people very rarely change their opinions in real time, on camera, on the shows that you're watching.
01:11:34.000Because people, myself included, have a vested interest in showing that we know what the fuck we're talking about.
01:11:41.000And you're actually very unique in this way of You know, if a guest shows you something and it's a fact you haven't seen and it contradicts your belief, you will often change your belief in real time, right?
01:11:53.000So people watching the media get this perception that, well, no one's ever changing their mind, everyone's just set in their ways.
01:12:01.000But I think the truth is people are changing their minds all the time, in private, By listening to podcasts by themselves, by watching stuff by themselves, where they don't pay a reputational price for changing their mind.
01:12:14.000So just because we rarely see evidence of people changing their minds through persuasion doesn't mean it's not happening all the time.
01:13:38.000I think you are this thinking entity that is trying to solve as many problems as you can that are around you and that are involved in your life.
01:13:49.000And as soon as you are willing to commit to an idea that you know is incorrect, you've done yourself a massive disservice.
01:13:59.000In service of your ego, which is the worst fucking thing that you could ever fuel.
01:14:08.000You should try to control it and humble it and to try to keep it to be keep it Have it the least intrusive factor in your thought process.
01:14:18.000So the moment the ego gets challenged You have to be able to accurately assess whether or not the information that you've clung to is valid.
01:14:30.000And if it is not valid, you have to discard it.
01:14:36.000And I was reading the coverage of your cancellation like a week ago in the New York Times.
01:14:46.000And there's one article where they had a little box graphic in between the text, sort of providing one of these short summary explainers of the whole situation.
01:14:58.000And they said, That has been part of his appeal as a podcaster.
01:15:08.000And I haven't seen or heard the word brash in long enough that I looked it up.
01:15:14.000And it was self-assertive in a rude or overbearing way.
01:15:21.000And I thought to myself, is Joe Rogan brash?
01:15:26.000It's like, you just gave a spiel about how important it is to say when you're wrong, to admit you have an ego.
01:15:36.000Have you ever heard a brash or overbearing person?
01:15:39.000I mean, like, the definition of overbearing is the guy that never fucking admits he's wrong.
01:15:44.000It doesn't listen and blah, blah, blah.
01:15:47.000It's like, the notion that you could be described as brash...
01:17:16.000Fully fully support that and I am way more left-wing than I the only things that I think of that I think people could point to that are right-wing with me are gun control Like I believe in the Second Amendment because I believe there's times where you're going to have to if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time if the wrong thing happens the wrong person invades your property tries to harm your family you want to be able to defend yourself and We don't live in a world where there's no guns.
01:17:46.000We don't live in a world where it's even and equal and people are unanimously generous and kind and no one's violent.
01:17:54.000That's not the reality of the world we live in.
01:17:56.000And so because the Second Amendment does exist and because we do have gun rights, I don't agree with stripping those rights from people.
01:18:05.000I don't agree with this idea that the problem is guns.
01:18:11.000I think the problem is human beings and human behavior, and I think it's exacerbated by social issues.
01:18:18.000And I think that really one of the better ways to stop violence in this country is to alleviate it at the bottom floor, which is poverty.
01:18:29.000Poverty and crime-rending communities.
01:18:31.000And I think it's like one of the most frustrating things to me when I look at our culture is like what we were talking about earlier, that there are these communities that have been largely ignored by charitable ventures.
01:18:41.000They just don't put enough time or effort into it.
01:18:43.000The government will spend trillions of dollars in Iraq They'll give no-bid contracts to Halliburton to rebuild shit we blew up.
01:18:50.000But they don't do anything with these impoverished communities.
01:18:58.000So when it comes to these places that have just had intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, intergenerational single-parent homes...
01:19:13.000I mean, the equilibrium we're at in the country right now seems really dysfunctional to me because basically what you have is...
01:19:27.000You know, you have a right-wing media that will, they will talk about things like, you know, the constant drive-by shootings and kids getting caught, you know, usually black kids getting caught in the crossfire.
01:19:44.000And they'll talk about the insane homicide rate for young black men, which is the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s.
01:19:53.000But they'll do it in a way where you know it's about political point scoring, right?
01:19:59.000It's like when Tucker Carlson talks about, you know, black on black crime and the problem of homicide, you don't get the sense that he's deeply motivated to actually focus on this and rebuild these communities.
01:20:13.000And, you know, maybe I'm slandering his motives, but I think, you know, one gets a sense that the first purpose of raising those points is to point the finger at Democrats, Democrat-controlled cities.
01:20:54.000And you try to tug at people's heartstrings for these stories of, you know, little girls dressed up in bumblebee costumes for Halloween getting caught in the crossfire.
01:21:05.000And the wider consequences of growing up in such environments, how it dooms kids to failure and so forth.
01:21:17.000You know, it's made difficult to acknowledge the reality of the issues and to talk about it in a common sense way without being accused of being a racist.
01:21:34.000And basically, we don't want to talk about it unless the cops did it, right?
01:21:37.000If the cops kill a black person, we will shut down everything.
01:21:43.000It's a good example is that guy who drove over that crowd of people at the Christmas Parade in Wisconsin, and they were saying the accident caused by an SUV. They kept saying that because the perpetrator was a black guy, and the black guy who had just gotten out of jail, who had just gotten out of jail for trying to kill his,
01:22:00.000I think his kid's mom, his girlfriend, trying to kill her with a car.
01:22:07.000So he gets arrested, goes to jail, gets out on very low bail.
01:22:10.000I think it was like I don't remember how much it was, but thousands of dollars.
01:22:15.000And then plows over a whole group of people.
01:22:19.000And the coverage was bizarre because they were bending over backwards.
01:22:24.000They were doing mental gymnastics to try to not say this black man drove over all these people, this random crowd of people.
01:22:32.000Because they didn't want to be accused of being racist, or they were woke.
01:22:36.000For whatever their reason was, for whatever their ideology was for portraying the story in the way they did, that's how they decided to portray it.
01:22:45.000To me, the most egregious example of this, and it was a total indictment of the state of our nation on the topic of race, and how much race thinking just warps people's morality.
01:23:00.000It was the Jasmine Barnes case from maybe three or four years ago.
01:23:04.000She was a little girl in Houston that was killed.
01:23:10.000She was shot while in her mother's car, tragically.
01:23:15.000And at first they saw a guy in a pickup truck seeming to flee the scene, and it looked like a white guy.
01:23:25.000So basically, this became, it was right around New Year's, maybe 2019, I think, and it became a national manhunt.
01:23:32.000You had, you know, Sean King raised $100,000 for any tips on who this guy was.
01:23:39.000They had a police sketch of a guy that kind of looked like you.
01:23:44.000And you had politicians all across the nation talking about this case, New York Times covering it every day.
01:23:55.000And then it turned out, about a week later, they got a tip.
01:24:25.000And so they got the two guys that did it.
01:24:29.000And there was this, you know, moment of embarrassment, I think, among people because what had happened is everyone thought a white guy was...
01:24:42.000Who looked, you know, like, who looked the part, killed this black girl.
01:24:47.000And the reason it got any attention was because people thought it was a racist killing.
01:24:52.000That's what all the politicians were saying.
01:24:59.000And then at the end of it, there was this embarrassing moment of acknowledging that actually, in this particular case, the human beings that killed this girl happened to be black.
01:25:08.000And the case would have gotten Zero national attention had people known that from the start.
01:25:13.000Did the national attention continue after they found out that it wasn't a black guy that killed him, or did it fizzle out?
01:25:21.000And so, you know, like, if a Martian came to our society and was studying it and saw this episode, the conclusion that Martian would come to is, okay, interesting, the American Homo sapiens...
01:25:36.000They seem to care a lot when one of the lighter-skinned ones kills one of the darker-skinned ones.
01:25:41.000But when one of the darker-skinned ones kills one of the darker-skinned ones, it seems they don't care as much.
01:25:51.000And, you know, viewed from the outside, that's a crazy ethics to have.
01:25:56.000Like, no philosopher would argue for that as...
01:26:00.000I mean, well, some have historically, but, like...
01:26:03.000No person would argue for that as an orientation towards the importance of skin color, and yet that is the status quo on that subject, and the equilibrium we're at is that people on the left don't want to talk about this and therefore can't really solve it.
01:26:19.000And people on the right seem to only want to talk about it when it's a point to score against the left in a philosophy that is otherwise usually opposed to any kind of social safety net increases and so forth.
01:26:34.000So it's a very dysfunctional state we're in as a country, which is one of the reasons it's so hard for us to solve this problem.
01:26:44.000The problem of having two very distinct ideologies is a huge issue, too, because most people, they're kind of in the center of a lot of ideas.
01:26:52.000Most people, they'll say, well, you have to be disciplined.
01:26:56.000And that's part of the problem with a lot of people in this life is that a lot of people are lazy and a lot of people fall victim to a lot of psychological traps and They don't follow through on their life.
01:27:53.000Like, if there was a Wild West-type neighborhood for white people, White people are shooting people the same way people are getting shot in the south side of Chicago.
01:28:18.000Yeah, there can be like 50 people shot in a weekend at its worst.
01:28:22.000Imagine if that same scenario was playing out in right-wing neighborhoods, in right-wing, all-white neighborhoods, if they were basically like fucking Jesse James in it, and just out there shooting each other.
01:28:34.000It would be a very different discussion.
01:29:18.000But one of the things that he has said, Dr. Hart said, it's the same physiological effect as cocaine, but if you get arrested, completely different sentencing structure.
01:29:30.000If you get arrested with crack, there's minimum sentences that they have to put you away for.
01:29:36.000If you get arrested for coke, it's fucking nothing.
01:29:38.000Yeah, that's probably the most galling example I know of of an allegedly colorblind law that ends up having a massive disparate impact on people of color.
01:29:54.000But the difference is that has infested and destroyed black communities, and they know that.
01:30:02.000And so to handle the overwhelming amount of crime, instead of addressing it at a root level, they just decide to just put everybody in a cage, which is crazy.
01:30:12.000So one difficulty with addressing it is...
01:30:16.000In a way, you made this analogy before of we spend all this money overseas trying to reshape and rebuild other countries, but we don't spend it at home.
01:30:25.000I think that analogy, it works in more ways than one.
01:30:29.000The other way it's useful is that Often when we try to spend money and reshape these countries, you know, in the Middle East, for instance, no matter how much money we spend, it doesn't seem to make a lasting impact.
01:30:44.000Like, we can't just rebuild the culture of the country by throwing money at it, because it's not that simple.
01:30:53.000I think that same lesson is another one of the difficulties with creating healthy, vibrant communities out of communities that are intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, which is that, okay,
01:31:08.000we can get a bunch of government bureaucrats and people outside the community that want to do good and throw a bunch of money at community programs and so forth.
01:31:23.000But if it doesn't feel like it's coming from credible people in the community, it may have very little impact.
01:31:31.000Role models in general are very important, but they usually have to come from the place you're from in order to matter to you.
01:31:39.000Me, as a black guy who grew up privileged in the suburbs in New Jersey, The average inner city kid looking for a role model to have a better life is not really going to be able to look to me just because we're the same skin color and say,
01:31:56.000well, if he could do it, I could do it.
01:31:58.000It's not going to work because I'm not from where he's from.
01:32:00.000In order to feel like you can actually do something, most people need a person that is from where they're from Has a similar background to them and nevertheless went on to go to college, went on to, you know, make six figures or something.
01:32:14.000He's like, when you see that, then it actually can change you for the most part.
01:32:19.000And, you know, I know this guy, Bob Woodson, who runs the Woodson Center.
01:32:25.000And the kind of outreach work that he does...
01:32:30.000It really acknowledges that principle, which is he will find people in the community, you know, former gang members, pastors at churches, and work with them in a way that, you know, they know the community, they feel,
01:32:48.000It actually has a much bigger chance of making a difference.
01:32:51.000And this is one challenge with getting, you know, government to sort of throw money at the problem is if they don't understand that principle, I'm often skeptical that interventions are going to work as well as they could.
01:33:41.000But if I keep making you bet the same way, it's going to take you hours to win your money back.
01:33:47.000Like, if I've been beating you for five hours, and we're playing, you know, $100 a set, and I've got you down six, seven, eight, nine sets, and you say, all right, $900?
01:33:57.000How about $900 on this game right now?
01:34:36.000By making it so that they don't feel like, from the beginning, they're saddled down with massive amounts of problems.
01:34:45.000Massive amounts of unsurmountable issues in their community, in their life, in their personal life.
01:34:50.000And the people that they surround themselves with, their friends, you've got to invest a lot of time and a lot of money and do it with the goal of transforming these places eventually.
01:36:29.000And what happens is, in the best of cases, you get people that start good programs.
01:36:37.000Let's say you get past every hurdle of government incompetence and bad luck and lack of funding, and you actually manage to establish a really good program in an inner-city neighborhood for poor kids, an after-school program that's tutoring them,
01:36:52.000and they're having fun, and it's pro-social, and it's using key leaders in the community, and blah, blah, blah.
01:36:59.000Well then, the guy who started that gets beat at some point, or the thing just disappears, the program disappears, and you've made promises to these people that the program will be around.
01:37:24.000That's another one of the challenges that makes it tough to actually make these things work.
01:37:30.000The solution to that is perhaps even grosser.
01:37:33.000The solution to that is long terms as president, long terms as mayor, long terms as governor.
01:37:42.000Yeah, I mean, it's not a good solution because there's a reason why we only allow them to have four-year terms and you have to get re-elected.
01:38:09.000And they also can commit to business projects.
01:38:12.000They're so interconnected with corporations that the corporations can't do anything unless it has the best interests of the Chinese people or the Chinese government, the CCP as a whole.
01:38:33.000But if you had, like, a 20-year presidential term or a 10-year presidential term where someone had a long time to get good at the job, like...
01:38:43.000It's the weirdest job ever because it's the most important job in the world and we have new people do it all the time.
01:38:47.000It's like you don't know what the fuck you're doing.
01:38:54.000All of a sudden he's at the helm of...
01:38:56.000He's the commander-in-chief of the greatest army the world's ever known because he won a popularity contest and he gets to do this job for four years.
01:39:17.000But like any other person, like if you had a person who is a CEO of a corporation, you would want that person to know the ins and the outs of that business.
01:40:10.000And the fact that that took a long time for people to admit...
01:40:13.000That was one of the things that people were saying that I was a Trump supporter during the election because I said I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.
01:41:33.000He lied about being arrested the first time I was arrested.
01:41:37.000It's so hard for me to put myself in the position of people that would lie like this.
01:41:43.000You know, the other one I think of a lot is Joy Reid at MSNBC when she wrote those homophobic things on her blog in 2008. And she said she got hacked.
01:41:57.000I understand certain lies, but there's some lies where I struggle to understand what it would feel like to be the person thinking, it's a good idea.
01:42:05.000I think there's people that don't value truth.
01:42:42.000Yeah, Biden ran for president in 88, and his campaign got derailed because he was quoting, I think it was Bobby Kennedy, verbatim, and then there was someone else, I think it was an English politician, and quoting these people verbatim,
01:43:45.000Because Bernie Sanders, whether you love him or hate him or whatever, You have to admit that the man has principles, and he has been behind those principles, and he's been incredibly consistent his entire career.
01:43:58.000So if a guy like that got into office, then you're talking about a man who does understand the inner workings of the system very deeply, but is not full shit.
01:44:09.000And he comes across as the kind of guy that wasn't so hungry to become president.
01:44:14.000He cared more about standing for what he believed in, even if it got him no further.
01:44:21.000And those are the types of people we actually want to promote.
01:44:25.000The problem is it's a popularity contest.
01:44:27.000And we found out through Trump, because with Trump it was the first time that anybody who was actually popular entered into the popularity contest.
01:45:38.000I'll say, my favorite thing Trump did...
01:45:41.000Like the only of his trolls that I want to make a case was good for the world and good for the country was when it was 2020 and every institution in the country was releasing a fake statement about how they were systemically racist and were going to do better and they really cared.
01:46:03.000Every corporation that only wants your money was releasing this fake corporate woke thing.
01:46:11.000And Princeton University, the president of Princeton University released a statement saying, Princeton University is systemically racist.
01:46:18.000This racism harms our black students here.
01:46:21.000And the racism is embedded in the structure of the university itself.
01:46:26.000And then Trump said, alright, well, if you're confessing, I'm going to get the Department of Education to investigate you and see if you're violating civil rights laws.
01:46:37.000We have many robust civil rights laws in this country that are specifically put in place so that institutions that get federal funding, like Princeton, Do not violate the civil rights of its students.
01:46:47.000Of course, it was a completely bullshit investigation.
01:46:50.000Trump did not expect to find any racism at, you know, a hyper-progressive Ivy League school, at least not any racism against black students.
01:47:00.000It was also a bullshit statement by the president of the university, but it was a perfect strategy for exposing the fundamental insincerity of most people who use this term.
01:47:12.000It's like, can you imagine if the Pope admitted, publicly confessed that the Catholic Church has this huge institutional pedophilia problem, and then the cop said, thank you for your confession.
01:47:40.000We're just like saying that thing that everyone's saying that nobody means.
01:47:44.000So that was a troll that at minimum...
01:47:49.000No president should use resources in that way, and it was totally immature.
01:47:54.000But it did expose a hypocrisy, which is that so many people are ready to condemn themselves and their institutions as systemically racist, even when they know they've been doing everything in their power for the past decade or maybe sometimes several decades to be as inclusive as possible to Black and Hispanic people and to Asians.
01:48:23.000But there's discrimination, allegedly, against Asians in Harvard because they do so well, they try to make less of them get in.
01:48:32.000They've tailored their whole enrollment process so that it favors certain things that they think they can at least limit the amount of Asian people because they're doing so well.
01:48:46.000And again, it's not to single out Harvard, really, because the vast majority of elite schools do this.
01:48:53.000There's a graph, I want to say it was from The Economist magazine, but there's a graph of California schools and the percentage of Asian students at the school.
01:49:04.000And there's one school, Caltech, which has uniquely among California schools in its class not really practiced very much racial rigging, right?
01:49:16.000And so as the percentage of Asian immigrants increased to this country, you can see the percentage of Asians at Caltech is just rising in tandem, like you might logically expect.
01:49:27.000Whereas every other school, it's magically just staying flat as more and more Asians pouring into the country Somehow it's staying at like 14% of your school.
01:49:38.000I mean, this has been true of elite schools for 100 years.
01:49:42.000It's like Malcolm Gladwell had this amazing essay, I think, in The New Yorker, maybe over a decade ago, where he traces the origin of the essay requirements, right?
01:49:52.000Why do colleges require you to, like, write essays?
01:49:57.000That came about because they needed a way of excluding or minimizing the number of Jews.
01:50:04.000Jews were the Asians of that era in terms of they were testing very high and getting into these spaces that Protestants, you know, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants really wanted,
01:50:20.000didn't like them so much and were uncomfortable with them and they weren't, you know, Our people in a way.
01:50:28.000And so they introduced essays, you know, extracurricular requirements.
01:50:33.000How are the essays supposed to stop Jews from getting in?
01:50:37.000Because you can read through the lines of who someone is, you know, if you ask them personal questions about...
01:50:42.000Oh, so through those essays their Judaism would be exposed and that's how they're discriminating?
01:51:58.000Americans who aren't on the hard left or the hard right, who feel the world has gone mad.
01:52:04.000So in what ways has the world gone mad?
01:52:06.000Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for the New York Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad.
01:52:19.000When you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad.
01:52:26.000When we're not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad, And that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad.
01:52:36.000When we're not able to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad.
01:52:43.000When, in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad.
01:53:41.000How have they not figured out the fucking delay?
01:53:44.0002022. I think they're going to do something where they're transitioning into this CNN Plus thing, which I know they have a show they're going to do with Don Lemon on CNN Plus.
01:53:59.000And I think that When they're no longer saddled down to this format that they have, where you have like seven-minute segments followed by commercial, I think they'll be freer to expand on ideas and have real conversations and hopefully The coverage and the content will elevate.
01:54:22.000It's not like there's a shortage of intelligent, articulate people out there.
01:55:02.000Because, you know, the odds, even if the odds are low that, you know, people start talking about you, you start, people pass you over for a promotion because they see you as a kind of right-wing guy or something, it's not worth taking the risk.
01:55:19.000There's a thing that people do where they think you're secretly right-wing, which is hilarious.
01:57:04.000Bill Maher is one of the last of the old school liberals who will still call out the left, call out ridiculous left-wing politics and left-wing policies.
01:57:15.000But there is a backlash happening now, and it's getting less and less credible to dismiss it as white supremacy and the alt-right.
01:57:25.000Just yesterday or the day before, three members of the San Francisco, I think the Board of Educators or whoever's in charge of education in San Francisco, three of them were recalled by voters largely because the Asian...
01:57:45.000The population of San Francisco, which is like 30% of the city or something, really did not like their progressive policies.
01:57:53.000They were more focused on renaming schools with more progressive people at the head than they were in reopening schools.
01:58:05.000They got rid of the test that was used to determine which students get into the elite high school because there were too many Asians.
01:58:46.000New York City outlines next steps to replace gifted and talented program.
01:58:50.000New York City will phase out gifted and talented classes in its schools, opting to end a program that critics say entrenched racial divides in the nation's larger public school system.
01:59:03.000To me, there's this constant slander of standardized tests as racist, right?
01:59:09.000Because on average, black kids don't do as well on them as white kids.
01:59:13.000And for what it's worth, white kids on average don't do as well as Asian kids.
01:59:18.000And that disparity is seen by people as evidence of structural systemic racism.
01:59:26.000You know, one point to make is that these tests initially came out back in the early 20th century as an effort to identify talented kids from underprivileged backgrounds, right?
01:59:41.000Like, you know, smart kids that the system otherwise wouldn't realize are that smart.
01:59:46.000And bring them into environments with other really smart kids.
02:00:38.000The black and Hispanic population of New York came to the polls and said, we want that guy.
02:00:43.000In San Francisco, you know, the people in charge of education are saying, we're getting rid of the tests.
02:00:50.000We're doing all this progressive stuff.
02:00:52.000One of them basically, I think Allison Collins was her name, she tweeted and I think later deleted something saying Asians are pretty much like white supremacist adjacent and they're like, they're using the techniques of white supremacy in order to succeed in the country and they're akin to the house slaves of the past that used to get close to the masters.
02:01:39.000It's just an explosion of alt-right, white supremacy, QAnon types that are mobilizing and trying to attack progressives.
02:01:51.000How do you make that argument make any sense when you have black and Hispanic people in New York rushing to elect Eric Adams?
02:01:57.000Asians in San Francisco, a very liberal city, getting rid of the progressive school board.
02:02:03.000You know, how many more of these things have to happen before we realize there is a serious and legitimate argument, a good faith argument to be had about all of these progressive positions, and you can't just shut people up by calling them racist.
02:02:16.000There's definitely a serious and real argument against a lot of these progressive positions, and you definitely have both things happening.
02:02:24.000You definitely do have people who are closed-minded who are attacking these things because they don't want open-minded perspectives.
02:02:30.000They don't want open-minded perspectives being talked about, and they want to keep the worlds in a sort of narrow lane.
02:02:39.000But then they have a lot of people that are – particularly in some communities where people are struggling and working hard and they want to be acknowledged for their efforts and they don't want to be boxed in by these crazy type of – Rules where they're getting rid of gifted classes and they're making a fucking lottery,
02:03:00.000which is the craziest idea I've ever heard.
02:03:02.000For people to get into colleges, that's nuts.
02:03:26.000Like, you know, you can't have, you're never going to have, you're going to have obsessed people.
02:03:32.000You're going to have these folks that figure out a way to be far more successful than other people.
02:03:37.000That's one of the reasons why we love sports.
02:03:39.000When you have a guy like a Michael Jordan who's just so obsessed with victory, and you can see it in his eyes, this laser focus, and figures out a way to be substantially better than everybody else.
02:03:55.000And that's equality of outcome eliminates that.
02:04:00.000Sports are the great testing ground for effort and all the factors, genetics, intelligence, coaching, technique, the ability to assess problems accurately.
02:04:11.000They're the great testing ground for that.
02:04:13.000And when you're a person who wants to think that a quality of outcome is a possibility, that's what flies in your face.
02:04:23.000The philosopher Robert Nozick, famous philosopher, used to use this thought experiment about justice.
02:04:30.000And he would basically, I think at that time, he used like Wilt Chamberlain as the example, because that was a time.
02:04:36.000But, you know, if you think about the NBA, Very few people are upset at LeBron James, Kobe Bryant, R.I.P., and others for the fact that they make so much money because you can see how much better they are than you at the thing,
02:04:59.000and you know that the process by which they got from A to B Is untamperable, right?
02:05:06.000There is no paying your way into being great in the NBA. There is certainly the luck of genetics, but then there's a lot of genetic great athletes in the world.
02:05:17.000The ones that make it there, it's like you know sweat equity is what got them there.
02:05:22.000And so people have a sense that the process is fair.
02:05:26.000And when people feel the process is fair, they don't care about whether the result is equal.
02:05:31.000You take it to most other domains in life, people are not sure the process is fair.
02:05:38.000And I think that's the key difference between when people look at unequal results and complain and when they look at unequal results and don't.
02:05:48.000And I think there is far too much a focus on results.
02:05:51.000What we really care about as human beings is that the process is fair.
02:05:55.000So we should be focused on making processes fair rather than simply looking at the results as if that's the indicator of fairness.
02:07:33.000Like, the fact that I had two parents, you know, that were highly focused on my education, that were teaching me math and reading me books before I got to kindergarten, that had high expectations.
02:07:57.000It's a household a lot of people grow up in, including many of the Asian families that get their kids into the elite high schools in San Francisco and New York and so forth.
02:08:09.000It's very difficult to substitute for that because so much of what builds you, your incentives, your personality, what you care about, your values, Isn't mediated by policy or by the government, but rather in the home.
02:08:24.000And it's very difficult for the government to reach into the home and change those variables for the better.
02:09:11.000Asian kids are essentially unfairly in some way Dominating that these schools and it talked about one Asian family and it said Many no actually talked about lots of them.
02:09:24.000It said something like many Asian families scrimp on essentials like food and Like, food.
02:09:34.000That's almost an exact quote from the article.
02:09:36.000In the next paragraph, it talks about how the Asian kids have some kind of unfair advantage that can't be expected of Black and Hispanic kids making these same tests.
02:09:50.000The last sentence, you just said they have to eat less food in order to pay for fucking test prep, and now you're telling me they're privileged?
02:10:00.000There's a lot of poor Asians in New York.
02:10:03.000And there's this cognitive dissonance.
02:10:06.000There is a privilege in being raised by families that expect a lot from you and then put a large emphasis on education.
02:10:12.000That is one of the deepest privileges that you can have.
02:10:15.000Yeah, and that's what Asian communities have.
02:10:17.000That's not the kind of privilege this article is talking about, necessarily.
02:10:20.000They were trying to say there's some kind of systemic leg up that we're giving these Asian families that are living above cleaners and like...
02:10:42.000They get to this like spot and they just like assume that everybody who is also subscribing the same ideology as them will allow them to get away with this sort of like weird cognitive transgression by not exploring this idea.
02:10:59.000By not recognizing that you just contradicted yourself.
02:11:02.000You're literally just talking about they're so poor they can't even afford food, but they decide they'll eat less food to have their kids have good preparation for tests.
02:11:13.000Yeah, let's make it harder for them to get in.
02:11:29.000And I always talk about my friend Junkzik, who was a national champion while he was going through his medical residency.
02:11:38.000And he was testing, like going through college, and he would put his backpack on filled with books and run the stairs for exercise sometimes.
02:12:44.000I mean, you can't, you're never going to, I mean, that would take for fucking ever.
02:12:49.000And also there's an immigrant mentality, like my friend Joey Diaz likes to call it, an immigrant mentality.
02:12:54.000Like people who come here from another country specifically to do better.
02:12:57.000Because they want, they live in a place where they don't like how things are, and they're like, we're going to uproot ourselves and move to a place where we don't understand the fucking language.
02:13:05.000We're going to learn the language and the children of those people and the grandchildren of those people, they have specific advantages in that.
02:13:12.000There's a drive that's imparted in them.
02:13:15.000I think that's probably my most left-wing position is how pro-immigration I am, I would say.
02:13:23.000I'm probably left of the Democratic Party in terms of how good I think immigration is for this country.
02:13:39.000But if we had that, I would be in favor of totally ramping up the number of immigrants we bring here.
02:13:49.000I think it's our great strength as a nation.
02:13:51.000That people from all over the world want to come here, contribute to our economy, make us competitive, increase our population, help us compete with China as the global dominant power.
02:14:07.000I think, obviously, so many people are anti-immigration in this country that, practically speaking, you can't get elected talking how I'm talking.
02:14:17.000But that is really what I think deep down.
02:14:21.000I think people are wrong to be as resistant to immigration as they are.
02:14:27.000I think, you know, the kids of immigrants assimilate remarkably well to American culture.
02:15:16.000There's too many ways in which it's just, like, you hear horror stories of people with, you know, visa problems, people that we absolutely want to incentivize to come here.
02:15:36.000We're like getting one over as a country on the rest of the world by taking people who want to come here in.
02:15:43.000And I know, I mean, I know that's, like I said, that's probably my most left-oriented position is immigration.
02:15:52.000I completely agree with you and I think that to compete, like if you want to compete in anything, you want to be around people that are obsessed, that really want to do well.
02:16:04.000You want to be around people that are really willing to put in the work, really willing to come to another place that is another continent.
02:16:15.000Come over on a boat or on an airplane or even make your way up across the border.
02:16:41.000We should embrace those people because those people...
02:16:45.000They have the courage, they have the motivation, they have the drive to leave the land of their birth and to try to make it in this ideal of what America is.
02:16:57.000And some of the most fiercely patriotic people that I've ever met have come here from communist countries.
02:17:03.000My friends that have come here from Russia, my friends that have come here from different Eastern Bloc countries or who have parents that experienced communism, people from Cuba, they are fiercely patriotic, fiercely pro-American.
02:17:18.000And those are the kind of people that you want to come over here.
02:17:21.000You want them to come over here and raise the bar and bring that vibration of vibrancy of someone who wants to excel.
02:17:30.000You come here because you want to do better for you, you want to do better for your family, and you want to come to America to kick ass.
02:17:36.000They don't come to America to take a nap.
02:17:41.000So I think a lot of people on the right, they oppose immigration.
02:17:44.000I think somewhere in them they feel, if we let all these people in from communist countries like China...
02:17:54.000They're going to turn America communist.
02:17:56.000They're going to bring their values with them.
02:17:59.000And slowly but surely, basically all the values that people on the right hold dear are going to just be outnumbered by this influx of people from other parts of the world that don't have these values.
02:18:10.000You're coming from a country that's a dictatorship, no freedom.
02:18:18.000The problem with that argument is, first of all, the people who come here come here because they like here.
02:18:25.000They like what we're doing here, which means you can't take the average foreigner from a country and expect that that's the person that's coming to America.
02:18:43.000The second thing is, the moment you have kids, these second-generation immigrants, they're more fluent in English, usually, than they are in the language of their parents.
02:18:54.000And that's a deeper point than just the language.
02:18:57.000It's not just that the language is some exception to a rule of thumb where they otherwise are more attached to their homeland values.
02:19:08.000It's that language is a proxy for the fact that they're absorbing American culture primarily because they grew up young here, right?
02:19:29.000Who is the reason that they voted out hyper-progressive school board members, right?
02:19:37.000Asian Americans, many of whom are actually first generation, right?
02:19:41.000They were using Chinese ballots, okay?
02:19:45.000So if you're a conservative that's afraid letting in more people is going to destroy the country, I mean, that's a perfect rejoinder to your concern right there.
02:19:56.000Well, not only that, but America is unique in the fact that it is literally a nation of immigrants.
02:20:03.000The entire country is founded, except unless you're Native American, you've come from somewhere else, whether it's your grandparents or your parents or your great-grandparents.
02:20:15.000Someone came from somewhere else and built every fucking city here.
02:20:20.000So to say, we got enough, we're full now.
02:20:24.000It betrays the ideals that the entire country was founded on.
02:20:29.000And there's a lot of people that live in places where maybe they're relying upon a specific industry and they're worried that someone's going to come here and work for less and they're going to take away their quality of life.
02:20:49.000That can be solved with the way people have a relationship with their employers and that the employers have a relationship with the people in their community.
02:20:59.000And you can embrace immigrants as being a part of that because you need more skilled people, more ambitious people.
02:21:53.000And the other part of this that's interesting to me is what are the cultural attitudes of immigrants that come from South Asia, East Asia, South America, Africa?
02:22:14.000I think there's this lazy assumption that Democrats make, and this is actually an argument that's been made by some prominent liberal writers and Democratic advocates, is that the way we're going to beat the Republicans is by importing people of color And they're going to be Democrats by default because Republicans are racist.
02:22:36.000They're going to run from Republicans.
02:22:38.000We're going to import people of color, and that's how we're going to beat them.
02:22:43.000The lazy assumption here is that immigrants who are people of color are basically going to vote like black Americans, like a Democratic bloc.
02:22:56.000Rather than be persuadable voters that are voting on, that can easily be persuaded to vote Republican, right?
02:23:02.000And that have cultural values that are sometimes more aligned with conservatives than liberals on certain issues.
02:23:10.000It's connected to this general way in which I think white Americans get skewered for flaws such as racism that are actually universal human flaws.
02:23:27.000Go anywhere in the world you're going to find bigotry.
02:23:32.000If you zoom out and talk about historical evils, genocide, slavery, these are things that have been going on since the beginning of recorded history on every inhabited continent.
02:23:47.000There's this great book by Orlando Patterson, who's a Harvard sociologist, called Slavery and Social Death.
02:23:53.000It's like this 500-page tome on slavery.
02:23:57.000And it has a database in the back of the book of every known example, recorded example of slavery since people began writing things down.
02:24:13.000The normality of cruelty and dominance and killing throughout human history, it boggles the mind.
02:24:25.000And one thing I've encountered is that there are people that are extremely parochial in a sense that they almost don't know slavery happened anywhere else in the world.
02:24:43.000Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinarily ignorant.
02:24:46.000Especially when you consider the fact that there's literally more slaves today in the world than there were before slavery was abolished in the United States.
02:26:42.000There are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now, according to a comprehensive new report issued by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.
02:26:53.000This is not some softened by modern standards definition of slavery.
02:27:20.000I mean, so this goes back to your point about people miscalibrating small problems and large problems, right?
02:27:31.000We had the 1619 Project in 2019, which was a series of articles and poems and essays and podcasts designed to retell the American story centering slavery.
02:27:47.000That's how it was branded, essentially.
02:27:51.000I mean, they pushed this rewrite of history where the colonies revolted against the British in order to preserve slavery, which is not true.
02:28:02.000And, you know, in general, the general tenor of this, I mean, there was some really good work done in this project.
02:28:08.000The general tenor of this was to get people to see American slavery in the smallest, most minute details, right?
02:28:18.000So there was one article by Matthew Desmond which tried to argue that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are very similar and have their root in the kinds of accounting systems that slave masters would use,
02:29:06.000That's what passes muster as a connection between our current society and our legacy of slavery.
02:29:13.000Meanwhile, I'm not aware of a single line in this project that's Pulitzer Prize winning where they so much as acknowledged that modern slaves still exist, right?
02:29:26.000Which seems like a moral miscalibration to me.
02:29:33.000Do you think that what's happening with people with this discrimination against immigration is a fear that they're in a sense bribing people from Central America and South America that are coming up through the border?
02:29:51.000They're allowing them to come in, and then this is the fear that they're going to allow them to vote.
02:29:58.000And the concede is, we're going to allow you to vote, but remember who got you in here.
02:30:19.000You know, having a huge influx of illegal immigration, you know, there's no doubt that the motives of people who want folks to vote, it's like politicians want to win.
02:30:34.000And they, left or right, they will often try to rejigger the election laws that they can legally change to give themselves a leg up.
02:31:52.000I mean, they've experienced the reality of actual socialism, actual communism, actual dictatorships, and they are not interested in that shit.
02:32:02.000They are very, very pro-democracy, pro-United States, and they came over here for a very, very good reason, and with great cost.
02:32:20.000There's rumors about what's happening versus what's actually happening at the southern border.
02:32:25.000The rumors are they're taking people, they're processing them, letting them through, and then putting them on buses and distributing them around the country.
02:32:33.000And then there's also these people that think you shouldn't have to be a United States citizen in order to vote.
02:32:39.000Well, if you put those two things together, I could see where you're kind of allowing...
02:32:44.000You see people coming across with Biden-Harris t-shirts on, and you've got to wonder, okay, well, who gave them to them?
02:33:00.000You've got a Biden-Harris t-shirt for you.
02:33:04.000If there really is some sort of a concerted effort to bring people over here with the goal of stacking the deck in these Democratic cities and making sure they're not taken over by Republicans because you're going to allow people who are illegal immigrants to vote,
02:33:21.000and the conceit is, since you let them in, they're going to vote for you.
02:33:24.000That's where things get a little squirrely.
02:33:31.000It's like you ask a lot of immigrants what they think about cultural issues, about social issues.
02:33:40.000And what comes out of their mouths is often...
02:33:44.000The least politically correct, least woke thing you could possibly think of.
02:33:50.000Which doesn't mean they would vote Republican necessarily.
02:33:53.000It just means I think they're way more up for grabs than Democrats want to admit.
02:33:57.000I mean, I remember my favorite New York cab story, having lived in the city for maybe eight years.
02:34:04.000I get into a cab with this guy who seems like maybe Eastern or Southern European, like maybe Greek or maybe something like that.
02:34:15.000And he's one of these cab drivers that is kind of spiritual, kind of wants to talk to you, have like a little bit of a deep conversation, has some wisdom.
02:34:38.000He'd been driving a cab for like 30, a little over 30 years.
02:34:45.000So I said, what's the biggest thing that's changed in this city since you started driving a cab?
02:34:51.000And without skipping a beat, he says, I picked you up, didn't I? And we both started laughing out loud because on the one hand, this is one of those comments that if it were written out the next day in the New York Times could seem racist to people out of context of the fact that we just had a really nice heart-to-heart of a conversation.
02:36:27.000Bigotry and racism is talked about as if white people invented and perpetuate it.
02:36:33.000And I think that is a deep misunderstanding of its source in human psychology.
02:36:39.000And if pinned on one group of people, it gets under my skin because it...
02:36:48.000It's such a deep misunderstanding of actually where hate comes from, and it prevents us from being able to sort of truly understand that bigotry is a human flaw, right?
02:37:03.000It's a flaw that all people are susceptible to, and in order to really have an honest conversation about it, it can't be a finger pointed at, like, You're all the problem, and we're all perfect.
02:37:17.000That is not a basis on which to start a conversation, and that's how the conversation is being had in a lot of places.
02:37:25.000That situation is kind of interesting, because you could say it's bigotry, and it checks all the boxes of being bigotry.
02:37:35.000But it also could be, hey, you're a fucking asshole.
02:41:47.000I think I've always had this lazy assumption that We're sort of living in modernity, and we're living outside of the barbarism of the past.
02:42:00.000It's like, back in the day, they would split your fucking brain in half, do these horrible procedures on people.
02:42:16.000And thank God I live in this fundamentally different time of modernity where we've gotten rid of most of the truly deranged and barbaric and crazy practices of the past.
02:42:38.000When we enter a world where it's unthinkable to have that level of pollution in a city, they're going to look back at us and say, my god, these people used to live in pollution and do lobotomies on people, and they didn't wash their hands.
02:42:52.000That's going to be included in the laundry list of past barbaric practices.
02:42:59.000And, you know, it makes me question whether my attitude that we are living in this other modern time is even justified because we still have so many things to clean up, so many things to figure out.
02:43:11.000We do, but statistically speaking, it's never been safer to be a person.
02:43:31.000People don't want to admit it because they don't want to be in denial that it's still a gigantic problem, that violence is still a problem.
02:43:39.000But we had a climate scientist on the other day, and he was showing us...
02:43:44.000There's an area in Indiana, Evansville, Indiana, where there's seven coal-fired power plants in a 30-mile area, and it's fucking nuts.
02:43:58.000The amount of particulate in the air, and it covers things, like child's swing sets and shit.
02:45:15.000Yeah, and it's, you know, it is a gross aspect of our culture, a very gross aspect, that we're still involved in things that pollute rivers and, you know, fracking that pollutes underground water and fucks up people's drinking water.
02:46:33.000I just think that if you assume that humans are not the most intelligent possible beings that could physically exist, compatible with the laws of physics of the universe, which I think is true, like we're not the most intelligent...
02:46:53.000It would stand to reason that there are things it's possible to do.
02:46:57.000There are things the laws of physics don't rule out that we simply aren't intelligent enough to do.
02:47:04.000That we aren't intelligent enough to ever figure out.
02:47:07.000I think that's assuming that we're not going to merge with technology in a symbiotic way that advances our cognitive ability.
02:47:16.000But what if merging with technology is already something we're unable to figure out because we can't conceptually understand consciousness readily enough?
02:47:47.000He's developing Neuralink, and Neuralink is essentially going to be some sort of an implant that they cut a hole in your fucking head, and they put wires inside your brain and change the way you interface with information.
02:48:04.000And he was explaining to me, he goes, you're going to be able to talk without words.
02:48:09.000And when he says you're gonna be able to talk without words, it's not like one of my stoner buddies.
02:48:13.000Bro, you're gonna be able to fucking talk without words.
02:48:17.000But when he says it, he's got a fucking plan.
02:48:20.000And he's gonna start with people that have problems with neurological issues, people that have nerve damage, people that have spinal cord injuries.
02:48:32.000They're going to replace the ability to move and use some sort of computer-controlled technology that replaces the function of the spinal column.
02:48:44.000Then from there, they're going to move to human beings advancing their cognitive function.
02:48:51.000They're going to move to changing the way they interface with data.
02:52:10.000Anyway, my point about bringing up the cough story was there are certain problems, like, okay, let me put it this way.
02:52:21.000We have intuitions about which are the hard problems and which are the easy problems, right?
02:52:26.000And sometimes those intuitions are just way off.
02:52:29.000So it turns out putting a man on the moon was easier than curing the common cough reliably.
02:52:35.000I wouldn't have guessed that if I were a human in 1890. I would have been like, they'll probably cure the cough before they put a guy safely in space.
02:52:47.000And my guess is that the Neuralink stuff is gonna be more like a common cough type of problem, where it's like, We think we're making progress, but it turns out to be so much more difficult than we can even realize that it's like 500 years from now and we still haven't gotten it.
02:53:08.000It's also possible that they do it and then they keep expanding on it and they keep innovating and then the competition starts kicking in and other people start developing new sorts of human brain interfaces and it gets extremely valuable to the point where you cannot compete without it and it becomes a thing where everybody has,
02:53:31.000just like everybody has a cell phone now.
02:53:33.000If they can figure out a way to get people to interface with technology where you can literally share data and information back and forth without talking, that's an invaluable skill or ability.
02:53:47.000Whether or not that actually is implemented, I don't know, but Elon has a fucking plan.
02:53:52.000And that's the smartest guy I've ever talked to.
02:53:54.000And when he talks about it, he's explaining how it's going to work.
02:54:54.000However, technological innovation seems to be one of the main consistent factors in human civilization.
02:55:01.000And the explosion of technological innovation that's taken place over the last 30 years, and particularly over the last, you know, whatever it has been since the internet was really fully implemented into everyone's household, it's been mind-boggling.
02:55:43.000The logical sort of technological innovation, if you extrapolate from where we are now to where we're going, whether it takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years, I think the symbiotic connection between humans and technology is probably the only way we beat out artificial intelligence.
02:56:02.000I think the big fear is that someone creates artificial intelligence and that thing becomes sentient.
02:56:08.000And then that thing creates better artificial intelligence, far superior to ours, and does it very quickly.
02:56:13.000They find all the flaws that we have and they come up with a new version of us.
02:56:18.000And that we're not going to be able to compete and that this sort of silicon-based life form will be far more advanced than us.
02:56:25.000But without emotions, without all the biological problems that we have, without the desire for breed and ego and all, it won't be programmed with any of those problems.
02:56:33.000So we'll just seek advancement and technological innovation for whatever fucking reason.
02:58:58.000You know in math how a graph can approach the limit of a thing without ever touching it and get infinitely closer to a line without ever touching it and go on forever?
02:59:10.000So, it's like, if you imagine we make asymptotic progress, there's this line that because of our intelligence, you know, and the fundamental fact that we're not wired by evolution to understand the world perfectly, we're wired to evolve and reproduce basically on the African savanna,
02:59:27.000And just like every other animal in the world, there's a limit to the things we are able to understand, right?
02:59:34.000That limit for humans is way further than for any other animal, but fundamentally it's not infinite.
02:59:40.000And again, it would stand to reason there are problems in the world That we may not even be able to understand the problems, much less the solutions.
02:59:51.000I would say probably consciousness so far is looking like one.
02:59:56.000But the point is, it's possible we could keep making progress technologically forever, but it's asymptotic progress in the sense that there's a line here that we keep approaching and it keeps looking like we're making progress because we are.
03:00:10.000But, you know, there's a line we're never going to hit.
03:00:13.000So it can be true at the same time that we keep making progress forever and that there is a limit to that progress that's asymptotic and certain things are just beyond that line.
03:00:26.000And my intuition tells me that merging with understanding the brain and understanding, you know, silicon well enough to merge them is probably beyond that line.
03:00:38.000But what if that line is akin to the line of human evolution?
03:00:42.000I mean, you go back to Australopithecus and you compare the frame of those ancient hominids to a human being.
03:00:51.000You're not talking about that long ago, you know, in terms of like the time of life on Earth or in terms of time of the Earth itself.
03:01:00.000We're looking at it in terms of our own individual lifetimes, yes.
03:01:04.000But what if human beings, and I believe we probably are, continuing to evolve and advance?
03:01:11.000And what if that is being shaped and aided by the access to information that we have because of technology?
03:01:19.000So not just a symbiotic use of technology in terms of being integrated into our own brain and our own neurology, but what if it's happening to us because of that information?
03:01:34.000And so we are advancing our capabilities, but we're doing it at a biological evolution scale, which is like a slower scale.
03:01:41.000What would that look like for evolution to be responding to...
03:02:08.000But unless it's more fun, unless doing something through some sort of hyper-realistic virtual reality simulation type thing is more exciting than doing something biologically.
03:02:26.000Yes, because everything's covered by Black Mirror, every dystopian idea you have.
03:02:31.000But that's, I mean, if you look at the difference between ancient hominids, ancient primates, and us, well, that's where it's consistent.
03:02:40.000Our heads are bigger, our bodies are softer, you know, and it seems like if you keep going in that general direction, this is what you get.
03:02:47.000Well, that would have to be because people with bigger heads are having more children or something like that.
03:03:24.000And then human beings breed not through biological selection.
03:03:30.000Like, this person looks better, they have a better hip to waist ratio, you want to have a baby with her.
03:03:36.000This person's taller and more masculine, you want to have a baby with him.
03:03:39.000If it gets to the point where that's not how we choose anymore, then maybe you will select for the people that are the most intelligent, that they can manipulate the matrix.
03:03:51.000I had this guy, David Chalmers, on my podcast.
03:03:55.000He's a pretty well-known philosopher, and he just wrote a really thick book arguing...
03:04:02.000I'm sure you're familiar with the argument that we're living in a simulation...
03:04:10.000David Chalmers, he's a very rigorous guy.
03:04:12.000He's a very logical arguer and he goes through all the objections systematically.
03:04:21.000It's impossible to dismiss the idea that we are.
03:04:26.000My attitude before talking to him about this was, okay, this is one of those thought experiments that's fun to think about, but it wouldn't have any implications for the world.
03:04:36.000If it's a simulation, it doesn't matter.
03:04:42.000And insofar as I ground my ethics in the subjective experience of conscious creatures, then it doesn't actually matter whether those creatures are quote-unquote real or digital, right?
03:04:53.000That was my attitude before talking to him.
03:04:56.000But then he came up with some ways in which we should potentially act differently if we are in a simulation.
03:05:05.000Because if we're in a simulation, then they can unplug the simulation, right?
03:05:13.000And so if we are in a simulation, then one of the projects of existential risk of our world becomes figuring out why they might unplug the simulation and figuring out how we can get them to not.
03:05:31.000How can we signal to the people running this simulation That we really care about our world.
03:05:38.000We don't care if this is, like, a science...
03:05:40.000Like, we could be in, like, a middle school or science experiment or something, like, ooh, what would happen if, like, the chimpanzees, like, became, like, more, like, smarter?
03:05:49.000And then he, like, you know, runs a simulation, and that's what we call it.
03:05:53.000And the Big Bang was him, like, plugging it in or whatever.
03:06:07.000Do we need a Manhattan project of people trying to figure out how to tell them not to?
03:06:14.000It's kind of crazy, and I don't think we should probably actually spend resources on it, but...
03:06:20.000I say that, but then when I actually walk through the argument for it, it's kind of impossible to refute.
03:06:26.000Well, isn't the simulation possibly like the internet, where there's so many different ways to interface with it, and there's so many different points of contact, so many different connections, so many different servers, that it's not like something someone can just hit a switch on.
03:06:40.000It's something that is almost like a life force of its own.
03:06:44.000I think the internet is slowly but surely becoming almost like a life force of its own, a life force of information.
03:06:50.000So instead of thinking like there's some little green man with his hand on a switch going, oh, these fucking people, and hitting the off switch, that it's more complex and more integrated than that.
03:07:07.000I mean, we have video games that are no more than a Switch, and if you unplug them and destroy the video game, it's like, if those digital creatures had consciousness, which we don't have any reason to suspect that they do,
03:07:22.000but we also have no idea why the atoms in this package are conscious and the atoms in this table are not.
03:07:58.000Like, you know, why is it that when you put atoms together so as to make this thing we call a brain, that there's something it's like to be that collection of atoms?
03:08:12.000Wait a minute, aren't those the same atoms that, like, make up your spleen?
03:08:54.000And there's this, my favorite philosopher on this issue is this guy Colin McGinn.
03:08:59.000And he has this idea of cognitive closure, which is that, you know, I've kind of been parroting it a little bit in the past half hour or so, just like every animal has a limit in the things that it is able to understand,
03:09:16.000Humans have that limit, and consciousness is beyond that limit.
03:09:19.000You take certain animals, you put them in front of a mirror, and they just don't know that it's them.
03:09:30.000Because the concept of reflection, of reflected light, is permanently beyond their ability to comprehend.
03:09:39.000It's like they can identify the problem like it's a mystery to them.
03:09:42.000Like, oh, this other chicken is like moving weird, and then other chickens, and like, usually I can figure that out.
03:09:51.000It's like every, every way they might pose the question is beyond chicken intelligence, and so they'll never answer it, right?
03:10:01.000What Colin McGinn posits is that there are problems That we stand in relation to, questions we stand in relation to as humans, the same way reflection stands in relation to a very dumb animal.
03:10:16.000And that consciousness is one of those problems.
03:10:20.000And the hallmark of one of those problems is that every way we ask the question, we don't get a satisfying answer.
03:10:27.000In every experiment we do, it's not just that it comes up inconclusive.
03:10:30.000It's like we can't wrap our heads around it.
03:10:34.000And it's probably because we're not equipped to even ask the right questions the same way a chicken is not equipped to understand reflection.