Trevor Burrus joins me to talk about his new book, "Canceling Comedians: While the World Burns," and why he thinks the modern left is a bunch of idiots. We also talk about how much he's paid for his book, and how he doesn't care what people think about it. And we talk about why the media loves to hate on Joe Rogan and why they don't give a fuck about anything other than ratings. And we get into a lot of other stuff too, too, including the fact that he's a socialist, which is a weird thing to say for a guy who grew up in New Orleans in the late 90s and early 2000s, but that's a whole other thing. And he's also a writer and columnist for Jacobin Magazine, which means he's probably not a good thing, but it's not a bad thing, right? Cheers, Salud! Cheers! Joe and Salud. Cheers to you, and Cheers. -Joe Rogan (Music: Fair Weather Fans) Music: "In Need of a Savior (feat. Andrea Thomas) - "Goodbye Outer Space" by Jeffree Stars - "Good Morning America" by Fountains of Wayne (ft. John Singleton) - "The Good Fight" by The Good Fight by The Badger Crew -- "Solo" by Scott Holmes - and "I'm Too Effing Highlighted" by Ian McKamey is out of New York Magazine (featuring the late, great, great singer and songwriter and actor and songwriting and singer-songwriter, Bobby Lord . in honor of the late John Rocha ( ) and the late great John McElroy ( ) in this episode of his new album, "I Can't Get Over It" by the excellent song "I Don't Know What's Wrong With This" by Sully and I Can't Have It ( ) on , and & from the excellent album "No More Than This Is It? and , which is out in the new album "Feat. by the band "I've Got It Like That" by , , "I'll See You, I'm Too Bad" by my good friend and I'm Not Good Enough by You,
00:00:28.000This is a part of a thing we did with Fight for the Forgotten, which is, I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a charity that my friend Justin Wren put together.
00:00:38.000They built wells for people in the pygmy population in Uganda and in the Congo as well.
00:00:47.000And so they did a thing with Buffalo Trace where we picked out one very specific batch and they literally gave us a barrel of whiskey.
00:00:57.000So we have one giant bottle and then a bunch of these bottles to give out to guests.
00:01:51.000Yeah, so my book is called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, a critique of the contemporary left.
00:01:56.000And I wrote that a while ago, so that was before we went through this surreal experience where during weeks that the United States and Russia have been closer to the brink of war than they have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.
00:02:11.000Somehow we've had weeks of news cycle about Joe Rogan.
00:02:20.000And apparently those controversies are the most important thing in the world.
00:02:24.000Trevor Burrus Well, the most important thing in the world in media is ratings.
00:02:30.000And unfortunately, outrage is what sells.
00:02:33.000And if you could be upset at something and so there's like a perfect storm with me.
00:02:38.000First of all, it was questioning the COVID narrative.
00:02:42.000And then it was having on doctors who also questioned the COVID narrative.
00:02:46.000And then it was me getting COVID and recovering very quickly, but taking the wrong medication in their eyes.
00:02:51.000And then it was, you know, like posting up the brought to you by Pfizer videos and like showing like these, these people like bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies.
00:03:04.000It's like every clip that we talked about before the podcast, like every clip that I've ever said taken out of context and if you smoosh them all together how horrible it looks.
00:03:13.000But it's not really that they think it's important.
00:03:19.000They don't give a fuck what's important.
00:03:21.000They're just trying to stay alive and they're trying to get as many views as possible and they're trying to escape what is this undeniable Yeah,
00:03:37.000we were talking about this a little bit before we started and I think what's really – I mean whatever.
00:03:43.000This is not like a mind-shatteringly original insight or whatever.
00:03:46.000Lots of people have said this but I think what's really gone on is that the economic collapse of traditional media has meant – That the profit incentive now is just to cater to whoever you have left, right?
00:04:40.000Because I know that you've been represented as a democratic socialist.
00:04:43.000So, I mean, look, the reason I put democratic in there, right, which I do, but the reason I put democratic in there is because there are obviously countries that have existed that have called themselves socialists, that have You know,
00:04:58.000not had things that I care about, like, you know, free speech and, you know, multi-party elections.
00:05:02.000And so I certainly don't want to associate myself with that.
00:05:05.000But, look, I mean, short term, I care very much about, you know, having, you know, socialized health care, about having, you know, like, tuition-free higher education so people can go to school without having to be in debt for,
00:06:00.000But what bothers me is when you have these massive inequalities that have huge effects in people's lives that are linked to things that aren't under their control.
00:06:08.000And I think we have a lot of that too.
00:06:12.000My position on this, whenever people push back against the concept of socialism, or when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for president, I was saying that, look at all the things that are technically a socialist concept that we accept,
00:06:48.000Yeah, it's taken outside of the market.
00:06:52.000It's provided just as, like, a right that you should have just for being a person, right?
00:06:55.000You shouldn't have to do anything special to get your house put out if it's on fire.
00:06:59.000And you also shouldn't have to do anything special to get treatment if you're sick.
00:07:03.000To go to college in the first place, it seems to me that a lot of people who don't think that there should be a higher minimum wage are the same people who will go turn around and say, oh, if they wanted to make more money, they should go back to school, but then they don't want to pay for that, right?
00:07:20.000Should they be paid more doing what they're doing, or should they go back to school?
00:07:24.000Because if it's none of the above, then it sounds like you just don't think those people should have good lives, or at least you don't have a plan to help them have good lives.
00:07:32.000What's fascinating to me, too, is when you look at public school versus public services like the fire department, fire department people get paid well.
00:07:53.000My friend Ray was a fireman for years.
00:07:57.000He would say like he worked like a few days a week and then you know there were long shifts and they weren't always called to fires so sometimes they're just cooking and working out and hanging out around the firehouse but it's a great job it's it's like a a job that people look forward to getting it's it's difficult to get how come that's not the same thing with teachers like what what kind of a world do we live in where teachers don't get paid well i mean i'm not saying fire department people shouldn't be paid well of course they should be paid well They
00:08:42.000Like, oh, how come, you know, how come they get summers off or, you know, whatever, you know, or like, don't like that, you know, which, no, it's ridiculous.
00:10:07.000That's the solution if there's no other options.
00:10:10.000I mean, if you're a guy right now and you have a child and you have enough money to put them in a really good school that you have to pay for versus a really shitty school that you get for free, that makes sense.
00:10:21.000Yeah, I don't blame anybody for making that decision as an individual.
00:10:24.000But they shouldn't have to make that decision.
00:10:36.000Literally, one of the most important things for the future of our society is raising children correctly and educating them.
00:10:44.000By correctly, meaning giving them the opportunity to grow and pursue their interests and find out where they fit in life and have enthusiastic, well-paid teachers, not people that feel like they're being taken advantage of and fucked with and just exhausted all the time.
00:11:00.000Well, it's weird, too, because a lot of the same people who are hostile to that will say when they're talking about, like, corporate CEOs, like, oh, you can't complain about how much they're paid because they have to be, you know, like, you have to have that as an incentive, or they're not going to give you their best work if they're not being paid,
00:11:16.000you know, 500 times more, you know, than people who work there.
00:11:20.000But it's like, wait a second, so why doesn't that logic go for, like, teachers or other public employees that, like, if If they're paid more, then you're going to get a better performance out of them.
00:11:45.000But I mean, it should be like that with all of what I would think of social services, services for the community that we would gladly pay for for taxes, fixing infrastructures, fixing roads.
00:11:58.000The problem, I think, with a lot of people is they just don't trust government to handle the money well.
00:12:04.000They think that you're going to get a lot of bureaucracy.
00:12:11.000Same situation where if you donate to charities and you find out that like 90% of the money goes to infrastructure and some of those shitty charities where so much money goes to the people that are working there that very little of it goes to the actual charity itself.
00:12:28.000Of course, that's the private sector, too.
00:12:32.000I guess I would just say one thing about the bureaucracy thing, because I know that that's something that's an easy association in lots of people's minds, right?
00:12:39.000That more government means more bureaucracy.
00:12:42.000And if you're thinking about people who are petty gatekeepers, who are going to be able to approve or deny something, it's very natural to resent people like that.
00:13:10.000You don't have to go through a special process.
00:13:12.000So if it's universal programs, then you don't have what you have with means-tested programs, where there's somebody who's looking over your application and deciding whether or not you qualify and deciding which hoops you have to jump through.
00:13:26.000And that really seems to me like where bureaucrats are really going to get most of their power.
00:13:32.000And that's not to say, when I was saying that, I'm not saying that like...
00:13:35.000There are no legitimate complaints about, like, any of the agencies that do these things.
00:13:41.000But what I would ask, though, is what the options are, right?
00:13:46.000Because if you privatize something, then you're still having decisions be made by decision-makers who you don't necessarily – like, might be very distant from you.
00:14:00.000But the difference is, at least when it's public, then – Theoretically, you can at least elect the people who are overseeing it, whereas if something is subcontracted out to a private corporation, then that's not even true anymore.
00:14:17.000There's another layer in between you as an ordinary person and control over this institution.
00:14:24.000If the federal government does anything bad, then we can theoretically get rid of them, although I think there are a lot of very undemocratic things about America's political system that make it way harder to do that.
00:14:35.000I mean, the fact that we've only got two political parties that are basically allowed to participate at all, the fact— Yeah, you could go on and on.
00:15:09.000If, for example, you didn't have the public post office, it was just Amazon taking the Amazon trucks and that's it, then now you're talking about an institution that there's no democratic control over.
00:15:26.000There's a little bit of indirect control in the case of the post office, which, by the way, I would point out that When conservatives talk about bureaucracy and inefficiency and stuff like that, they always bring that up.
00:15:40.000But if you actually look at polls, 90% of Americans like the post office.
00:16:12.000It's ridiculous and no private company would have the incentive to do that, right?
00:16:17.000And I think that that's like one of the things that Bernie Sanders was talking about the two times he ran for president.
00:16:24.000It's not one of the things that was played up the most.
00:16:28.000Is postal banking, which is the idea that you could have basic banking services offered at the post office, which they actually do have in some Scandinavian countries.
00:16:39.000Basic banking services like deposits and withdrawals and stuff like that?
00:16:49.000Their post office is all over the place.
00:16:51.000So they would sort out money as well as mail?
00:16:54.000What if the money goes to the wrong places?
00:16:55.000I get mail from wrong people sometimes.
00:16:59.000Well, the mail does sometimes go to the wrong places.
00:17:01.000I would point out if you look at FedEx versus the post office, I don't actually think the failure rate is worse with the USPS. No, we have a problem with the UPS here.
00:17:44.000But what I would just point out is this, that like right now there are a lot of people who for one reason or another can't get a bank account, right?
00:17:52.000You know, that they have that – I mean the most like extreme case might be like somebody who's like homeless, you know, so they don't have an address.
00:18:00.000But like even short of that, right, there are people who – For one reason or another, have trouble getting a bank account.
00:18:05.000So you have all these parasitical check cashing businesses and stuff like that that prey on people like that.
00:18:13.000And I think having some kind of public alternative would go a long way to helping with that issue.
00:18:19.000There are countries that already exist.
00:18:21.000So I think that in the short term, the stuff that makes sense to me is finding ways – where it makes sense, it might not always make sense – but finding ways that you can expand what's not just like you have to find some private corporation to do it for you,
00:18:40.000but that can be within the sort of – You know, the public sphere.
00:18:47.000And then, look, I mean, there are things that we'll probably always need, you know, private businesses for.
00:18:54.000You know, if you don't want to have, like, the way grocery stores were in, like, the Soviet Union in 1985 or whatever, you know, you have to have...
00:19:03.000You know, like, there are certain things, price signals and, you know, firm failure you probably do need to have.
00:19:08.000But I do think, like, at the sort of outer edges of what I would like, that it would be good if it was a long-term goal to move towards having it be more of a norm that, you know, workers,
00:19:23.000like, own, like, a lot of private businesses, you know?
00:19:27.000If you look at the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, that has 80,000 worker members who own that.
00:19:35.000You have an operating agreement, which is the equivalent of a union contract, but there's no separate boss to negotiate with.
00:19:45.000You know, might not necessarily directly elect managers because there could be things that are like, you know, technical things that, you know, managers have to do that, like, you want that to be more of a traditional job application.
00:19:55.000But you can at least elect the people who hire them.
00:19:58.000And even if I could, like, you know, whatever, like a magical genie would just, like, somehow grant me, you know, that, like, all of my political preferences were satisfied in ways that I don't think they're going to be anytime soon, given all those problems with America's political system we talked about earlier.
00:20:13.000But, like, Even if that happened, I don't think that every single business should have to be like that.
00:20:19.000That if you hire a guy to do graphic design for your podcast for 10 hours a week or something, that they have to have voting rights in a cooperative.
00:20:29.000But I think we could move towards an economy where that was a much more common thing.
00:20:35.000And I think that would be way better off because the way it is – In the kinds of corporations that dominate the economy right now, where you'll get Amazon workers who are sometimes working at the warehouse and then they have to have a second job at night,
00:20:54.000and their boss literally has enough money off of that to buy his own spaceship.
00:20:59.000That strikes me as a level of inequality that's really hard to justify by the principles that we kind of started with.
00:21:07.000Trevor Burrus Well, what do they pay at Amazon?
00:21:28.000When you're dividing up, right, like the revenues that the whole company is making, then you say like there are lots of ways that if you are in a cooperative and people could vote on pay scales, there are lots of things you could do to convince somebody.
00:21:41.000You mean like employees vote on pay scales?
00:21:43.000Yeah, like if you have like a worker cooperative, right?
00:22:41.000I love the fact they have to take down a bridge because he made a yacht that is so fucking big in order for it to get out of the place where they're making it.
00:22:50.000They have to disassemble a fucking bridge.
00:22:53.000And he's like, yeah, disassemble the bridge.
00:23:12.000It definitely does seem that way, right?
00:23:14.000And then their kids in many cases start out of control because they grew up their entire lives like having this – Like, level of wealth that makes it easy to get anybody to do whatever you want them to do.
00:24:23.000And until we address that as a society, until we look at These impoverished communities that have been impoverished for decades and decades and decades.
00:24:31.000And if you really want to talk about where my real feelings of socialism lie, my feelings of socialism are there are communities and it's not just inner cities.
00:24:44.000We have to dump money into these places and help these folks.
00:24:48.000Because if you don't, you're going to have people that come out of there and they're going to cost you exponentially more money and all the problems they create in their own lives and other people's lives, whether it's crime or whether it's drug addiction or whatever despair that comes out of these horrific starting points that these people are from.
00:25:39.000And he was working there, and one of the things that he noticed was they found an arrest sheet from the 1970s, and it showed all of the same exact crimes that they're dealing with in the current time.
00:25:59.000It's all in the same areas, and they were all happening.
00:26:03.000The same thing was going on, all the different arrests for violence and drugs and all this different stuff.
00:26:08.000And he was like, Jesus Christ, this is not...
00:26:10.000And he felt this feeling like, I'm in a system that's broken.
00:26:53.000The things that really drive up the violent crime rate are things that have a lot to do with poverty and inequality.
00:27:00.000I think that if you You talked about Appalachia.
00:27:03.000I mean, like, the Obama administration's, like, response to, like, all the coal, you know, like, the sort of misery caused by all the coal mines closing was to, you know, just kind of sprinkle the region with a few— Well, how about that learn-to-code bullshit?
00:27:16.000Because, like, they put up these technology training centers, so it's essentially telling people to learn to code because, like, yeah, if you're, like, a 50-year-old laid-off coal miner, you'll definitely get the coding job and preference over the 22-year-old kid— You know, who just graduated.
00:27:31.000And then, like, Trump came in and he said he was going to bring the jobs back, and there are fewer jobs there than ever, right?
00:27:37.000I mean, I don't think any of these people are serious about helping working-class people either in places like Baltimore or in places like Appalachia.
00:27:47.000Because, you know, I think the Democrats, increasingly the kind of liberalism that's dominant in the Democratic Party right now, I think isn't really about that.
00:27:55.000I think that what it's really about is trying to have a more diverse ruling class.
00:28:02.000I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but I really think a lot of it's just about that.
00:28:07.000To the extent they're concerned with social justice, what they're concerned about is disparity.
00:28:12.000That you have more black people than white people who are living in poverty and going through a criminal justice system and all this stuff.
00:28:41.000Is the goal, is what you count as justice having like exactly demographically correct proportions of every group living in poverty and all of that stuff?
00:29:04.000Well, it's also the positions are weaponized, you know, and there's so much polarism.
00:29:09.000I think it's very unhealthy to have two positions, a red position and a blue position, because people are so malleable.
00:29:17.000They're so easily manipulated, and they want to be a part of a tribe.
00:29:20.000And they'll just subscribe to these ideas, and then they take comfort in the fact there's other people that agree with them, and they get in these Facebook groups, and they just like, you know, talk about stuff that everyone else in their little echo chamber agrees with.
00:29:34.000And they feel like the whole world should bend to their will.
00:29:43.000What we were talking about earlier about the fact that the collapse of traditional media means that everybody gets to curate their own little media.
00:29:53.000It's so easy now to just expose yourself to absolutely nothing all the time except people who I agree with you because, yeah, if there are only a couple million people watching one of the traditional networks at any given night, then what's their profit incentive?
00:30:08.000Their profit incentive is to relentlessly pander to whatever audience they have left.
00:30:16.000You know, you scare old conservatives and, you know, whatever.
00:30:20.000Like, the MSNBC has their own version, like we were talking about.
00:30:22.000But I think that, like, this is why I try to, like, go out and do debates all the time, because, which, like, some people, and this is one of the things I talk about in the book, right?
00:30:31.000Some people on the left don't like that, right?
00:30:42.000Trevor Burrus Which is a word I hate so much.
00:30:44.000Trevor Burrus I get that more than anybody because people want to say that I'm like a fake liberal because I talk to conservatives and I'm friends with some conservatives.
00:30:55.000Like, that is the dumbest fucking thing to ever...
00:30:57.000We need to communicate with each other.
00:34:59.000That's a ridiculous—but it's this idea that— You don't think if, like, some kids teased you about that, they would deserve the death penalty?
00:35:04.000Listen, I think there's some things that are fascinating about religious traditions that I think they can act as a scaffolding for moral behavior.
00:35:12.000And some of the, like, the kindest, nicest people I know are Christians.
00:35:30.000And I think it's greatly beneficial to some people.
00:35:33.000And I think it does give them a structure.
00:35:35.000Jordan Peterson said something that really made a lot of sense to me.
00:35:39.000It's not whether or not I believe in God.
00:35:41.000He goes, but if you live your life like God exists, you will have a higher quality of life.
00:35:46.000And it's that if you live your life like you are a part of this enormous community of loving beings that are all connected to this higher power and that you have this moral obligation to be a good person,
00:36:03.000And that there's great value and benefit in that and that there's a spiritual path to take of a righteous person who's really trying to do good in this world.
00:36:11.000And I think for a lot of people, religion can act as a scaffolding to substantiate and enforce those kind of positive traits and positive paths of life.
00:36:24.000And I think there's great benefit in that.
00:36:46.000You know, ban abortion and make gay people go back in the closet and all that stuff, you know, but like, but look, I mean, I think like Cornel West, you know, I think that's a Christian I have immense respect for.
00:37:25.000He was just a really thoughtful, interesting guy who knew a shitload about politics and about socialism.
00:37:33.000And he was a really good guy to sort of defend these positions of democratic socialism too.
00:37:38.000Because he didn't seem like a bad person.
00:37:41.000And even in critiquing other people that disagreed with him, I felt like he did it for the most part pretty reasonably.
00:37:49.000Yeah, well I think that one thing that he really got and I actually think he helped me to get in the years since I met him is that like a lot of people who agree with his position,
00:38:05.000with my position don't Think nearly enough about what's going to be appealing to most ordinary people that they have.
00:38:15.000Which is one of the reasons I wrote the book.
00:38:18.000That stuff was starting to drive me crazy.
00:38:20.000It seems like what a lot of people want to do is be part of an in-group and yell at everybody who isn't already on board with every single thing on a checklist.
00:38:51.000And you're actually talking about this stuff because you care about it.
00:38:53.000Which, let's be honest, not everybody does.
00:38:55.000Some people, politics is like a weird hobby for them.
00:38:58.000But if you really care about that stuff, I mean,
00:39:15.000it drives me crazy when I see people who want all the things that – You know, all the things that I want who are instead of trying to, you know, find ways that they can explain this to people who might like,
00:39:34.000you know, agree with them on some things, disagree with them on some things, like a lot of people, like most people aren't like centrist in the way that the media means when they say centrist, right?
00:39:44.000Which is like the, you know, whatever...
00:40:09.000But, like, they haven't necessarily thought through every single thing, you know, to— They probably don't have the time.
00:40:14.000Yeah, of course they don't have the time.
00:40:15.000If you want to get involved deeply into the weeds in politics, you're going to—it's a tremendous amount of hours for years and years and years just to get a base understanding of what's going on.
00:40:27.000That's why it's so impressive when you talk to someone who really does know a lot about politics.
00:40:31.000Whenever I talk to my friend Kyle Kalinske, whenever I talk to him about politics, that motherfucker knows a lot.
00:40:37.000So when we had the End of the World podcast when it was the election this past year, when we brought him, I brought him, I go, you're the voice of reason.
00:40:46.000You actually understand what's going on here.
00:41:43.000And most people, like you said, they don't have the time.
00:41:46.000I mean especially when you're in an increasingly precarious economy where lots of people like might have a couple of jobs and like drive an Uber on the side, you know, like just because they're trying to … How the fuck do you have time?
00:42:10.000So I mean I think that what you should really be when you approach people to try to convince them of the things that are important to you, like you shouldn't start from a place of do you have all the right positions and all of this stuff.
00:42:30.000Because by definition, look, if everybody agreed with me about all this stuff, we'd be living in a very different country right now, right?
00:42:40.000The real question is, does somebody have...
00:42:57.000I would like you to talk to him, though.
00:43:02.000I think that would be an interesting conversation.
00:43:03.000I've never heard him discuss money in terms of wealth and taxes.
00:43:08.000I wonder what his position is on that.
00:43:10.000I feel like there's a system that's in place that you would almost be negligent if you didn't take advantage of it.
00:43:18.000If you're a guy who's making a lot of money and this is how you could pay X amount of taxes, and these are your deductions, and this is the law.
00:43:29.000You follow the law to a T. And then the rest of it you can give out charitably if you choose to.
00:43:34.000But I wonder what his position is on all that stuff, when you've got that kind of money.
00:43:40.000Yeah, I mean, I think that my suspicion is that it starts to look very different, right?
00:43:48.000You know, like, you're going to feel very—it's really hard to convince somebody that, like, who's benefiting that much from the way things are now.
00:43:57.000Did you see the image of him at the New Year's party with his girlfriend?
00:44:04.000Because someone needs to superimpose this with an image of Jeff Bezos from, like, 1989. Like, what he looked like when he started Amazon versus what he looks like now.
00:44:59.000Like, and again, I don't blame anybody as an individual for like taking it like, like, look, if you're told here are the rules, right, that this is like, that everybody has to function in, like within reason, like if you're not like, You know,
00:45:14.000doing some things that I do think, you know, Bezos has done, but, like, you know, but if, you know, but there are, like, you know, like, if you're not, like, busting unions and this and that, right, then, like, look.
00:46:09.000See, if you think about like the royal families, like they don't have to disclose their wealth.
00:46:13.000These people that have literally – They own countries.
00:46:19.000We don't have to name the countries, but I know for a fact, because I have talked to people who are in fact billionaires, who are very wealthy business people that laugh, and they've told me the royal families in some of these countries are worth trillions of dollars, and they don't have to disclose it.
00:46:35.000So when you get this public list of who the richest people in the world are, that's the richest people publicly.
00:46:44.000They're not people that are literally in charge of the oil, all the oil in a particular part of the world where billions of dollars are coming out every day.
00:46:57.000And I mean, the thing is, even if you're not like one of those people, right, like, you know, the non-public trillionaires, you know, from those countries that you're talking about, like, one thing that I think people often don't think about enough when they think about stuff like this is,
00:47:13.000okay, if you have a system where you're going to get, like, wealth gaps that extreme, right, you know, that you can have people who are trillionaires maybe or who at least have hundreds of billions of dollars Then you're just not going to have political democracy the way that we should have it because the idea that everybody's going to have the same amount of influence on the government is just ridiculous once you get to that level.
00:47:39.000Because if you work at an Amazon warehouse and you want to call your congressman, you'll be lucky if you have a conversation with an intern.
00:47:46.000But Jeff Bezos can make a phone call to Biden.
00:48:00.000Yeah, which you might have to for Biden.
00:48:03.000What happened to the left where somewhere along the line, to get back to your book and the subject we started with, what happened to the left where they are willing to...
00:48:14.000There's something that happened where they became the side that accepts censorship and even promotes it.
00:48:24.000And my thought is that something morphed during the time where social media became...
00:48:33.000It became a tool of a lot of right-wing people.
00:48:37.000And this is actually, like, pre-Trump, but was certainly accentuated during the Trump administration.
00:48:44.000It's like people had a chance to anonymously say things through social media that maybe they wouldn't say around the office because, like, say if you have, like, ten people in your office and nine of them are Democrats and you are a Republican.
00:48:59.000You really have to keep your mouth shut.
00:49:01.000But when you get on Twitter, you can talk all kinds of crazy shit, or Reddit or whatever, and then all the other people that agree with you, they get attracted to you, and then you form these echo chambers, and then some of them are very aggressive in sort of pushing these ideas out.
00:49:20.000And we saw that a lot with like Milo Yiannopoulos, and there was a lot of like these like Very influential online right-wing people that were, you know, they had like cheers from the fans and they had like these throngs of supporters and they silenced those guys.
00:49:37.000They pulled those guys off social media and they found out that it was effective to do that.
00:49:41.000And then it became a thing that they got really into.
00:49:44.000Where they're into silencing, dissenting opinions, and it's gone so far that they're doing it to left-wing people that step even remotely outside the bounds of the orthodoxy, remotely outside the bounds of what they consider to be the rigid maintaining of this ideology.
00:50:05.000They step outside of that, they silence people, and they're pulling videos down left and right off of Instagram and TikTok.
00:50:13.000And Twitter, in some ways, Twitter's less censorship-oriented, even though people think of Twitter as being a very censored place.
00:50:20.000It's one of the more lenient online platforms.
00:50:25.000Yeah, I mean the Milo case is interesting actually because I think that – I mean I understand that like he got kicked off of Twitter and that was definitely part of it.
00:50:34.000But like he was still riding pretty high after that happened.
00:50:37.000Like I think that in Milo's case – and this is what – when I kind of try to tell people that like the ways that like some people on the left like want to like deal with figures like this, like forget morality for a second.
00:50:50.000They're just not going to work, right?
00:50:51.000So like here's what I mean by that, right?
00:50:53.000That like – But Milo's career was built on people trying to stop him and heckle him and stop him from speaking and all that stuff.
00:51:04.000My view on that guy is that honestly he wouldn't be that interesting if he just showed up on a college campus and just talked and nobody interrupted him.
00:51:13.000But, like, that was why, like, because he was like, oh, he's, like, speaking edgy forbidden truths.
00:51:18.000And, like, you know, it was the dangerous ideas to her.
00:51:40.000Trevor Burrus But it wasn't just the right dropping him.
00:51:42.000I mean that was across the board people dropped him.
00:51:45.000Well, I mean everybody else had always hated him, right?
00:51:47.000But then like after that happened, right?
00:51:49.000But that was just a thing where it felt like it was so unacceptable to so many people that it's very rare that one idea becomes a thing that completely stops all the momentum that someone had.
00:52:06.000He was a very popular cultural figure and then he vanished.
00:52:10.000He has essentially been not just deplatformed but removed from the cultural conversation.
00:52:48.000No, I think that people politically like to silence their opposing, or their opposition.
00:52:54.000When someone opposes their opposition, I think they like to do that.
00:52:56.000What I think is, like, the left has traditionally been the ACLU, which those Jewish lawyers...
00:53:04.000Supported the idea of Nazis being allowed to say whatever they want, because they said that the counter to that, the opposite of that, is the suppressing speech, and it's a terrible, dangerous road to go down.
00:53:15.000And the answer to bad ideas is not silencing those ideas.
00:53:20.000That's my position, and that's an old-school liberal position, but that doesn't exist that much in the left wing of today.
00:53:27.000Yeah, I mean, that's 100% my position.
00:53:29.000I think that it's really dangerous that A lot of people, even though most of the stuff you're talking about is driven more by mainstream liberals, that it's not like people running these insanely profitable social media companies.
00:53:48.000It's not like they want all the stuff I want.
00:53:49.000But I see way too many people on the left going along with it, and I think it's super short-sighted.
00:53:58.000Do you think it happened by what I'm saying that like they found it was effective for silencing people they felt was problematic so they just adopted these ideas and then they sort of shifted their ethics?
00:54:11.000I think that a lot of it is that a lot of people feel powerless to change the world in any way that actually matters and so they end up Getting sucked into these, like, culture war distractions about who said what in 1995 that we can,
00:54:40.000That, like, if you don't, like, if you can't actually, you know, change the world, like, create a more equal society or whatever, you can at least get somebody fired.
00:54:48.000You can at least get somebody kicked off, and then you felt like you've won something.
00:54:51.000And I think that that's, again, I think it's incredibly dangerous because, like, people who want, for example, you know, Spotify to kick you off, you know, there's a move-on, you know, petition, you know, for them to do that, that, like...
00:55:06.000What I always want to say is even though – and the thing that really gets me about the calls for censorship is, OK, I think there are principled reasons that free speech is important and we should have open debates about controversial ideas.
00:55:21.000I think there are ways that we have a better society if we do that.
00:55:26.000I think it's crazy that anybody who basically agrees with me about politics would support increased corporate censorship, right?
00:55:36.000Because if you have, like, some social media company, right?
00:55:41.000You know, that's going to be – like, they're going to have some CEO who's partying like Bezos in that picture.
00:55:48.000Are they – You know, whose side are they going to take when there are future things where people say that something is misinformation?
00:55:59.000And by what definition is it misinformation?
00:56:01.000Because the problem is that every political argument is to some extent an argument about facts, right?
00:56:11.000Even though my position was, you know, as like a college, like anti-war activist was that even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, it would still be against the war because, you know, I think the rationale still wouldn't have made sense to me.
00:56:23.000But like that was like part of what people were arguing about was whether there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
00:56:30.000And look, if you had social media companies in 2002 in the way that you do now and they had misinformation policies, who would be more likely to get bounds for misinformation?
00:56:40.000People who said – who agreed with the government, agreed with the New York Times, that there were WMDs or people who thought that like Bush administration officials were conspiring to lie to the public?
00:56:51.000I think that if there's something that comes out tomorrow about some horrible labor practice at Amazon, who are these companies more likely to side with?
00:57:03.000People who say, yeah, they did this thing, right?
00:57:06.000Or the company saying, no, it's a lie.
00:57:11.000I think the issue with free speech is always – Who gets to decide?
00:57:19.000Look, this is the same reason I don't like the CRT laws either because I don't like the idea that there are going to be people who are second guessing what happened in some classroom to say,
00:57:37.000Was this too close to one of these ideas that we don't like?
00:57:42.000Did you talk to your students about something that flew a little bit too close to the sun of CRT? By CRT, you're talking about critical race theory.
00:57:59.000But I don't want to live in a – I want to live in the kind of society where when there's like some controversial idea that's out there, you know, like that like people can talk about it and debate about it and like if you can, you know, like you could discuss it with students in a classroom.
00:58:15.000Like I think ideally the way that education should work, it should foster critical thinking like instead of like this is exactly what you should think.
00:58:25.000You know, to think about it more clearly and to argue about it and to, you know, and to decide what they think, right?
00:58:33.000You know, like, ultimately, if you want people to be citizens in a democracy, right, to the extent that we have one of those, like, that's what you want.
00:58:40.000Like, that's how you want them to grow up, I hope.
00:59:27.000And they had these fascinating discussions and they did them on national television.
00:59:33.000And they became this point of discussion through the entire country and the world, where people sat down and some people took Buckley's side, some people took Gore Vidal's side.
00:59:48.000We don't sort things out by silencing people.
00:59:51.000We don't sort things out by saying you have an unacceptable position because it doesn't fit in with what I'm saying or it causes this or that.
00:59:59.000It's a dangerous way to set a precedent because you're filtering ideas.
01:00:08.000You're filtering ideas through your own standards.
01:00:45.000Whenever someone's trying to silence someone, it's more political than it is anything.
01:00:49.000It's more this person has an incredible amount of influence, and they don't align up very rigidly with what our ideology is, and they could cause us problems if they discuss certain things in an unorthodox way, and we don't like that.
01:01:05.000So we're going to silence them, and we're going to pretend that there's something that they're not, and we're going to do that openly, and it's going to be obvious.
01:01:14.000Yeah, and I think especially, like, look, if you think the status quo is totally fine, that, like, everything is the way that it should be, I can, I guess, understand.
01:01:45.000Like, the last thing that you want to do is to make it harder to get your ideas about that out there so people can talk about them, people can hear about them, right?
01:01:59.000If you want to have – in my case, you think that we have way too much economic inequality, I think it's particularly crazy to support more corporate censorship.
01:02:12.000Because again, who do you think – Who do you think is going to get censored?
01:02:16.000I mean if there's some Starbucks worker who got fired when they were trying to organize a union and Starbucks says that no, they weren't really fired for that.
01:02:27.000It was really because they – whatever.
01:02:48.000Not just because I support free speech, though I do, but also just because I don't trust at all that they're going to take the side that I would want to on that.
01:03:45.000Yeah, I mean, I think in that case, I think that might be less like, you know, people didn't know that and more just kind of Rachel Maddow's an idiot because like if you, you know, because what they always said is like the effort, like, you know, whatever it is, even for like the original version of COVID,
01:04:01.000that, you know, wild COVID, whatever they call it, right?
01:04:05.000Like, you know, whatever 90 something, you know, percent, you know, like rate of effectiveness of like Pfizer.
01:04:11.000Yeah, but if you read the literature, that's not really even accurate.
01:05:24.000And which is crazy to – like, the thing that's crazy to me is like, okay – If you're going to do that – I don't think you should have done it – but if you're going to do that, like, you have to resign after that, right?
01:05:34.000Like, once you've, like, shown that you were willing to, like, lie – lie to people.
01:05:39.000Like, if you think it's important that people trust, you know, medical authorities, which, you know, I mean I can see why.
01:05:45.000Public health crisis, you know, that you think that was important.
01:05:48.000Like, what's going to undermine that more?
01:05:50.000People – random people on the internet saying things that might not be true about it or people going on podcasts who might say things that are wrong or like the CDC admitting that they were lying about something important.
01:06:09.000That's going to undermine that like crazy and I would not have wanted people who were pointing things like this out at the time that like – Oh, the stated reasons why masks were supposed to be bad didn't really make sense, which they didn't, right?
01:06:22.000You know, because it was like, well, it's going to encourage people to be reckless.
01:06:25.000And it's like, well, OK, that's an argument.
01:06:35.000I think if you went to their website, I think that's one of the things that they said there at one point.
01:06:40.000But they'd also say, well, people don't know how to use them properly, so it's going to end up being more dangerous.
01:06:47.000There were a bunch of things they threw out.
01:06:49.000None of it quite seemed to add up even at the time.
01:06:54.000And then again, they came out and said, no, actually, it's not like the science changed when that happened.
01:07:00.000And I think that I certainly wouldn't have wanted people who were pointing that out to not be able to do that because of some misinformation policy.
01:07:08.000Trevor Burrus Don't you think that the issue really was that people were afraid?
01:07:11.000And when people are afraid, then they will support harsher measures to ensure safety.
01:07:17.000And one of those measures would be to silence people that may be spreading information that could get people in trouble.
01:07:26.000So they're willing to compromise their values because they think there's a greater good to be had.
01:07:31.000And that's one of the more dangerous things about a thing like a pandemic.
01:07:34.000Because people will compromise their positions because they feel like there's a greater good to be achieved.
01:07:40.000And so we need to silence these people.
01:07:42.000Like, this was during the presidential campaign.
01:07:44.000And this is one of the things that I found out that I was really shocked by.
01:07:49.000The Twitter band, Brett Weinstein, had a thing that he had put together called Unity 2020. And the idea was instead of this rigid two-party system where you have people on the left and people on the right, what if you had like a really reasonable person,
01:08:05.000a well-balanced person from the right and a really reasonable, well-balanced person from the left and we brought them together?
01:08:11.000Very popular people and put together like a party and call it like the unity party.
01:08:17.000And so he made a Twitter page and Twitter banned the page.
01:08:24.000But the reason was they were terrified that these popular podcasters and people were going to take votes away from the left.
01:08:31.000Because these people like Weinstein and his wife, they're progressives.
01:08:36.000I mean they taught at a very progressive university.
01:08:38.000A lot of people that are progressive that feel disenfranchised with some of the standards of the Democratic Party, and they weren't really interested in a guy like Biden, who is this career politician who's basically full of shit, and having him be president.
01:08:53.000Like, aren't there more reasonable, more attractive alternatives?
01:08:56.000So they put together this thing, and Twitter fucking banned it.
01:08:59.000And I think the reason why they banned it is the same reason why they changed the standards of presidential debates after Ross Perot was in the elections back in the 80s.
01:09:12.000And then I think he ran again in the 96. This is exactly the same.
01:09:17.000They were worried that that can fuck up an election.
01:09:20.000If you get enough people that say, hey, you guys are making a lot of sense.
01:09:24.000I'm going to vote Unity 2020. If that becomes a big thing, and the Republicans aren't going to vote Unity 2020, they're going to stick with their base.
01:09:31.000They're going to stick with their guy.
01:09:35.000And they were worried and concerned, I think, that this Unity 2020 thing, even if it's like 10,000 votes in this place and 5,000 votes— Yeah, it doesn't take that much to— It doesn't take that much to swing elections.
01:09:50.000Yeah, I mean, look, I certainly wouldn't have voted for Unity 2020. I think that the Democrats and Republicans are too close together in their positions already, right?
01:09:57.000There are too many things where they— That they basically agree on that I don't like.
01:10:02.000But I certainly don't think that you should be banned for Twitter.
01:10:18.000This private business is the way that people distribute information to billions and billions of people.
01:10:23.000The idea that Facebook is just a private business is bananas because it literally influences worldwide elections and it comes standard on your phone in many countries.
01:10:33.000It is the internet to a lot of people in other countries.
01:10:37.000The idea that that's just a private company is crazy.
01:10:40.000Trevor Burrus Well, the thing that's particularly crazy to me is like, look, I understand like a conservative or libertarian who would say that, oh, they're a private business.
01:10:48.000They could do whatever they want because that's what they would say about everything, right?
01:10:51.000That like private businesses should be able to do what they want and like – and obviously – I'm a socialist.
01:10:59.000But what's crazy to me is when people who are on the left who want there to be lots of restrictions that I agree with on private businesses then turn around and say, oh, this isn't really a free speech issue because it's like a private business.
01:11:21.000Because if you are on the left, and I don't mean if you're a liberal, but if you're a real leftist, then I would say that a lot of the core of your worldview is that you understand that private businesses can have a crazy amount of power over people's lives,
01:11:40.000and that can be, in certain respects, as dangerous as the power of governments.
01:11:45.000And of course, The two are not unrelated, right?
01:11:48.000Because private businesses like we were talking about earlier have a crazy amount of influence over what the government does.
01:11:54.000So I think wanting private corporations to be more powerful because you think that it's going to silence just the people that you don't like … Trevor Burrus That's the problem.
01:12:05.000Trevor Burrus It just always seems like you haven't thought this through at all.
01:12:10.000No, but that's the problem, and this is where I come to you with this.
01:12:13.000How do we get people on the left to realize that this is a tremendous error?
01:12:20.000I understand that they think that short-term this is beneficial because they can silence people they disagree with, but to understand that for...
01:12:28.000I mean, it sounds a little grand, but for the human race, this is a terrible thing to have.
01:12:36.000It's a terrible thing to have because you're discouraging discourse and it's one of the most important things that we have is the ability to talk things out.
01:12:43.000The ability to find out how a person thinks and to consider how that person thinks and whether or not that Would apply to you.
01:12:54.000Do they have a point that I haven't considered?
01:12:57.000Is there something about the way they're looking at the world that maybe there is a perspective that I have either ignored or I just haven't been aware of that will enlighten me and change the way I look at things?
01:13:10.000Maybe I look at a person coming from a different walk of life, from a different part of the world, or different Different education, whatever it is.
01:13:17.000Let me take in their point of view and see.
01:15:03.000And I think it's also a problem when, like, how are the tribes being divided up and is it in a way that's going to actually advance the things that you want, right?
01:15:15.000If it's really about like different regions of the country or like for the diminishing number of people who still watch cable news, which cable news channel you watch and basically it's like red team versus blue team culture war stuff,
01:15:34.000then I guess the question is, are you ever going to get the kinds of systemic changes that would really help people to do a lot of the things you just talked about?
01:15:47.000For example, lots of people can't spend very much time with their families because they have to work all the time.
01:15:54.000Lots of people can't do the things they want to do in their life because They can't go to school because – like higher education because they can't afford it or they don't want to be like saddled with decades of debt about it.
01:16:10.000And so the question is like how are you going to achieve that?
01:16:15.000And if there's somebody standing in the way, who is it actually, right?
01:16:19.000Is it somebody who's a member of, you know, the elite who has, like, genuine power, right?
01:16:25.000And whose interests might not, like, coincide with your interests, right?
01:16:29.000Because, like, they're, you know, like, if you had a union at your workplace or if you had, like...
01:16:35.000You know, then their profits would go down or if you tax them more to pay for some of the things we were talking about, you know, like that would be bad for them.
01:16:43.000Is it them or is it like your uncle who like, you know, whatever, like, you know, voted for Trump or something, right?
01:16:51.000Like, which one of those people should you get bad about?
01:16:54.000And I think that the problem is that a lot of people are trained to just like fixate on this Whatever just passing bullshit is going on in the news cycle, you know?
01:17:07.000What are people mad about this minute?
01:17:10.000It's going to be something else in 12 hours, right?
01:17:12.000But there's this sort of constant outrage cycle that I think is fed by the profit incentives of media companies because they have to hold on to the audience they have left.
01:17:22.000Trevor Burrus Well, also they have advertisers.
01:17:25.000A lot of those advertisers brought to you by Pfizer.
01:17:28.000They have these ideas that you have to subscribe to.
01:17:32.000And if you don't subscribe to those ideas, Then they don't want to support your program.
01:17:37.000And this is like either a said or unsaid thing.
01:17:42.000I was listening to this thing where these people were talking about people in positions of power.
01:17:50.000How do you get these sort of cookie-cutter politicians?
01:18:07.000They don't really necessarily have these principled positions.
01:18:11.000What they're doing is they're saying the thing they think that people want them to say.
01:18:17.000They're saying the thing they believe people want to hear and that that's going to advance them in their career.
01:18:24.000We don't have to name the names, but we know these people.
01:18:27.000These cookie-cutter type politicians we know are full of shit, but they say things that are the right things to say given the current political or social climate.
01:18:37.000Yeah, I mean, look, and they'll also say what they think they have to say, like, at a given point, and then it's, like, completely forgotten six months later sometimes, right?
01:18:46.000Like, think about the 2020 election, like, all of those Democrats who some of them said at the beginning of the primaries that they agreed with Bernie about Medicare for All, but even the ones who didn't, right?
01:18:59.000They would all say, oh, we at least think there should be this public option where everybody should be able to, like, maybe buy into some sort of public health insurance or whatever.
01:19:10.000I don't know how many Democratic debates there were.
01:19:24.000Nobody's – like now Biden's president, it still says on his campaign website, you know, that never got taken down, right, that he wants there to be this public health insurance option.
01:19:34.000Kamala Harris, who said at one point that she agreed with Bernie about Medicare for All, is the vice president.
01:19:38.000A lot of these other people are, you know, Pete Buttigieg, you know.
01:19:41.000He said he wanted at least Medicare for all who wanted and like he's in the cabinet.
01:19:45.000There are all these people who are back to being senators.
01:19:47.000And it's like, well, that's what they – when they had to position themselves to win that primary, they said that they cared about like all the millions of Americans who don't have healthcare or the like millions more who maybe even do have healthcare.
01:19:59.000How about they said they were going to decriminalize marijuana and release everybody that was in jail for it?
01:20:42.000I wrote this book because I was pissed off.
01:20:45.000Like I think more than any other book that I've written, it came out of like intense frustration that I was feeling at that time because I saw a lot of people – I think, like, on paper, you know, they agree with me about,
01:21:00.000like, most of what I've said tonight, maybe not the, you know, maybe not the free speech part, but, like, you know, most of the rest of it, like, who were doing all of these things that seemed to me like they were either feeding into these absolutely ridiculous sideshows that, like,
01:21:15.000stop people from actually focusing on these issues that we're talking about, you know, like, you know, the title, right, the title example, you know, canceling comedians, you know, people who would, like, Yeah.
01:22:11.000I mean it's funny because I think that like when I sort of use that as the example in the title, right?
01:22:18.000Like I was kind of trying to come up with like the most ridiculous example that I could come up with, right?
01:22:22.000Like, you know, that like people would be like – You know, in terms of, like, ridiculous priorities or sort of people being, like, weird moralistic scolds.
01:22:30.000Like, you know, what would be the biggest example?
01:22:33.000Not getting mad at, like, corporate CEOs who bust unions.
01:22:36.000Not getting mad at, like, politicians who commit war crimes.
01:22:41.000But, you know, or, like, maybe you get mad at those people too.
01:22:46.000But, like, somehow – You know, my friend, I disagree with him about a lot of things.
01:23:08.000But no, I mean like – but I think he is a good guy and he's – I mean I've been – I've been on his show several times and – He has well-thought-out perspectives.
01:23:19.000You may agree or may not agree, but you can see where he's coming from.
01:23:25.000Yeah, I can see where he's coming from.
01:23:26.000And the other thing that I really respect about him is that I think that a lot of libertarians, even though they'll agree on paper, like with, yeah, we shouldn't be fighting these wars,
01:23:44.000There shouldn't be all these people in prison or whatever.
01:23:46.000It seems like in practice what really gets them excited is like tax cuts, right?
01:23:49.000And I think that – and I think Dave is genuinely not like that.
01:23:54.000I think that he actually like devotes – as far as I've ever been able to see, he actually devotes way less time to stuff like that than to like the United States backing this genocidal war in Yemen.
01:24:07.000It's interventionalist foreign policy and the corporate backing of these – Horrible regime change wars.
01:24:15.000That's the thing that he hates more than anything.
01:24:18.000And the actual cost of human lives and suffering.
01:24:23.000You know, he's a deeply compassionate person.
01:24:26.000He really firmly opposes these things.
01:24:29.000And he wants to talk about them whenever he can.
01:24:32.000And it's one of those things where, I mean, he talked on my podcast about how that got him kind of booted off of those political talk shows on cable.
01:24:40.000Yeah, because nobody wanted to talk about it.
01:24:44.000It's like whatever culture war thing people are screaming about each other.
01:24:47.000Whether that UPenn swimmer should be able to compete with women.
01:24:51.000By the way, I love – the thing that I love most about that example is whatever you think about it, right?
01:24:59.000I mean, look, if I had to actually think about it, I'd probably say, yeah, whatever.
01:25:04.000But whatever you think about it, the idea that everybody's going to get this excited about something that happens in an Ivy League swim meet, right?
01:26:50.000What is the criteria that we allow someone to cross that distinction and be a female or be a male?
01:26:56.000And this is nothing to do with cruelty or bigotry or discrimination.
01:27:00.000This is just a discussion about what is a woman and what is a man.
01:27:05.000And sports are a great way to sort that out when it comes to this particular aspect of it, the physical aspect of being a female or a male.
01:27:40.000It's like the rubber meets the road in terms of these ideological discussions, which are valid discussions.
01:27:47.000They're valid discussions because I've met a lot of trans people that – like I had Blair White on the podcast recently.
01:27:53.000I mean when you meet Blair White, there's not a fucking doubt in your mind.
01:27:56.000Like this is someone who for whatever reason, the nature and genetics of – Yeah, I mean, as far as the actual rules for sports leagues,
01:28:13.000I'm sure you know way more about this than I do, but I know different sports have handled it differently in terms of the requirements, that it's not necessarily an absolute thing.
01:28:25.000You know, trans women can or can't, you know, compete.
01:28:30.000Like, sometimes, you know, there are, like, hormone requirements and stuff like that, you know, that there are different ways of trying to speak.
01:28:36.000Do you know what the hormone requirements are, though?
01:28:57.000I don't think he necessarily has a degree in chemistry and biochemistry, but he has a deep understanding of it.
01:29:04.000And the way he was breaking down the amount of available testosterone that a biological female has, like the threshold versus what's acceptable for a trans woman to compete against biological females, and it's substantially more.
01:29:20.000Like, it's on the outskirts of physiological normality.
01:29:27.000Yeah, I mean, again, I don't know what, like, if there's a good compromise here that would, like, help, like, you know, that would maintain a reasonable level of fairness, you know, without just saying, like, you know, I think there are, like, legitimately a couple of different values that you have to balance to,
01:29:47.000I would say that I think, like, most contexts, like, you know, most of the things that trans people...
01:29:54.000You know, who are like advocating for, you know, more anti-discrimination laws, et cetera, are talking about are not going to be nearly as hard as like this kind of like edge case about, you know, about sports, right?
01:30:06.000You know, because like I think it's mostly like can you be like, you know, like employment and housing, you know, and all of that stuff.
01:30:14.000And I think it is like I think it is important that, you know, that you have like Do you have civil rights laws that cover everybody?
01:30:22.000Now, I do think that because of some of the weird dynamics of this particular issue, you're going to get things that are harder calls, like this.
01:30:33.000Again, in terms of what some sports leagues should require in terms of hormones or whatever, I have absolutely no idea, but again, I think that this is not like...
01:30:51.000In terms of things that I'm going to get mad about on a day-to-day basis.
01:30:57.000Well, you would if you had a daughter that was competing against that person.
01:31:02.000Someone who had been training their whole life to be an elite swimmer in a dedicated massive amount of time and someone came around that had a massive biological advantage.
01:31:12.000Yeah, although, of course, if I had a trans daughter, you know, then I'd want to make sure that whatever the rules were were going to be fair to her, too, which is why, like, again, you know, like what the right sort of exactly where the rules should be set.
01:31:25.000Do you think if you had a trans daughter and your trans daughter competed as a male for many, many years and was just sort of mediocre and then all of a sudden competed as a woman and started dominating, don't you think you'd feel a little bit of guilt?
01:31:38.000I mean, I guess it depends how much she was – how much we're talking about, right?
01:31:46.000Because I think in that swim meet case, the UPenn thing that you mentioned earlier, if I'm remembering right – and maybe you can correct me on this.
01:31:56.000What I know about this is like scrolling through Twitter, like what I saw – But, like, I don't think that she even won by that much, did she?
01:33:03.000It was also a sacred part of their culture because it was a wise person that understood both genders.
01:33:09.000And this person you could come to and they had a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man because they essentially were both.
01:33:18.000And so they had a deep amount of respect for people who are trans in their culture.
01:33:24.000And I think that's a great way of approaching it.
01:33:29.000That whenever you have these unique circumstances, someone who is biologically male but clearly is much more of a female, sometimes more of a female than a lot of biological females, who are much more biologically, much more oriented towards male thinking and male behavior.
01:33:48.000I mean, all of this is good for everybody.
01:33:51.000It's good for us to accept And it's good for us to learn from these perspectives of these people that have very unique and different but also common in terms of like when you have giant numbers of people like hundreds of millions of people you have quite a few people that have these experiences and we can learn from them and instead of discrimination I don't necessarily think sports is a discrimination,
01:34:33.000Do you think that there is some sort of reasonable compromise to be arrived at there, or what's your position?
01:34:37.000With physical sports, it's a problem, because there's so many benefits to being a biological male.
01:34:43.000There's so many benefits to the size of the lungs, the size of the heart, the physical strength, the fact that you're gone through puberty, and that's the difference between someone who goes through puberty and maybe someone who doesn't.
01:34:52.000Right, they transition before that, yeah.
01:34:55.000And then there's the ethical dilemma about that.
01:34:59.000Because there's a great deal of people that have not done that and wound up becoming gay men.
01:35:07.000What's the right choice and who can make that choice?
01:35:10.000And when do you have the ability to make that choice?
01:35:13.000Should you be able to make that choice as a child?
01:35:14.000Should you wait until you're an adult?
01:35:17.000There's a lot of decisions that we don't allow people to make until they're of grown age, like tattoos.
01:35:23.000You can't get your face tattooed when you're four, but you can when you're 24. I mean, I'm not saying that they're the same thing, but what I am saying is that we are faced with many dilemmas that require Discussions and compassionate,
01:35:49.000I mean obviously I completely agree on that.
01:35:51.000I mean I think that the youth transition thing – again, I think that this is like – this is a little bit of a hard case because I think that – On the one hand, yeah, you're absolutely right.
01:36:03.000I mean, no sane person thinks that little kids should have complete medical autonomy and just get to do whatever they want.
01:36:12.000At the same time, not getting a tattoo when you're a kid isn't going to have some really bad effect.
01:36:20.000You can just wait and it's fine, right?
01:36:22.000Whereas with something like this, if you do have that experience that you feel as if you're trapped in the wrong kind of body, which I'd imagine could be incredibly traumatic if that's not dealt with.
01:36:42.000But I think that, like, then, like, having to go through what, from your perspective, is the wrong puberty, right?
01:36:49.000I mean, like, the stakes are higher than the tattoo thing, right?
01:36:51.000Now, what does that mean in terms of, like, what level of medical gatekeeping there should be or, like, what the clinical practices should be?
01:37:05.000The problem is when people want to suppress people's ability to make choices and when people want to suppress people's ability to discuss these things.
01:37:14.000I don't think that's good for any of us.
01:37:15.000I mean these are very complicated human issues and by human issues I put them in the same category as a lot of other things that are very messy.
01:37:32.000And I also think that, again, it goes back to, like, one of the big points in the book, which is that I don't want, like, people who might be...
01:37:42.000Like, if you've thought about one of these issues we're talking about a lot, right?
01:37:57.000They haven't thought about it as much as you, maybe.
01:38:00.000And you think that they're not sensitive enough to what people might need.
01:38:06.000Then if you're just sort of writing somebody off, that they're done because they're not...
01:38:13.000You know, they haven't evolved to exactly where you think they should evolve to yet.
01:38:17.000I think that that's bad on a human level.
01:38:20.000That's just a bad way to interact with people.
01:38:22.000And I also think that it's—I think it's bad politically because, you know, somebody could, like, on some, like, incredibly messy, sensitive issue, right, you know, like they could— You know,
01:38:38.000like they could land somewhere different from you on that.
01:38:41.000And I'm not saying that like there isn't a bottom line.
01:38:45.000I think like non-discrimination laws, stuff like that, right?
01:38:47.000Like I think that's incredibly important.
01:38:49.000But I think that if you're writing people off based on that stuff, when it could be that there are all these other things where you could actually get them on board with what you want, right?
01:38:59.000And instead of saying like, you know, when you – When you said in 2020 that you were probably going to vote for Bernie and there were people who – there were people who freaked out about it and a lot of that was like bad faith.
01:39:14.000It was like ginned up by supporters of other candidates.
01:39:16.000But there were people who were like real leftists who were like mad that like Bernie – the Bernie campaign like put out that like video where they were like clipping that.
01:39:31.000Like Michael Brooks and I wrote an article for Jacobin about it at the time, and like it just seems to me like, you know, whatever, like...
01:39:42.000The idea that instead of being like, oh, hey, good.
01:39:45.000Like, here are all these things we can agree on, right?
01:39:50.000And you're willing to, like, support this.
01:39:52.000And by the way, like, if you, you know, if you really care about, you know, trans people, I mean, like, I think, you know, Bernie Sanders was probably your guy, right?
01:39:59.000I mean, like, that they, he's the, you know, he wanted to fund, you know, transition costs as, you know, part of Medicare for all, you know, like that, that would be, that would be the most, you know, pro-trans position.
01:40:08.000But, like, if you're going to say, you know, Like, you know, somebody, you know, like, if you think, oh, Joe Rogan is wrong about, like, exactly how, like, sports, you know, the sports issue should be, you know, should play out.
01:40:19.000So I don't care that there are all these other things, right, that he agrees with us about.
01:40:23.000I don't care if he's willing to support this thing that would be incredibly beneficial.
01:40:27.000You know, like, we just need to, like, cast him out, right?
01:40:30.000Say, like, no, we just want nothing to do with you.
01:40:32.000Or maybe, like, once you agree with us on 100% of everything and, like, I think that's a stupid and I think it's a self-defeating way to try to do politics.
01:40:48.000And I think it's also just a bad way to live your life.
01:40:52.000Well, I agree with you that writing people off because they don't share all of your opinions is ridiculous.
01:40:59.000And it's not the way you get people to take your position.
01:41:23.000Yeah, nobody's ever said, like, you know, like, nobody's ever been in, like, an argument on, you know, whatever, Facebook, where, you know, somebody, you know, like, somebody says, you know, somebody says that they're a terrible person and they're, you know, whatever, they're a...
01:41:40.000They're a fascist or a Stalinist or whatever it is they're being accused of being, right?
01:42:59.000Like there were so many – like the number of people who got mad about the book before it came out just based on the title or the description.
01:43:05.000Do you want to have another drink before you talk about this?
01:43:37.000One of them was about the Andy Ngo incident from 2019. You remember this?
01:43:43.000The Antifa thing, where they threw milkshakes at him and stuff.
01:43:48.000And in general, the part of it where I was criticizing Antifa, that I think there are a lot of people who, at least maybe not a lot of people in the world as a whole, but a lot of people within a certain kind of subculture who have I don't know.
01:44:09.000It's really important that people be using these kinds of street tactics because they think in their heads that it's always like Germany in 1933 and Nazis are about to take over or something, which is delusional.
01:44:23.000One of the points that I make about that in the book is that if you think about what was actually going on in Germany in the early 30s when you had You know, like Nazis who are like going around and like smashing up like trade union halls and like,
01:44:40.000you know, and fighting with people and like socialist and communist parties and stuff.
01:44:44.000Why would any like, you know, why would corporate America have to bother with any of that now, right?
01:44:48.000They're already winning, you know, just fine, you know, without it, right?
01:44:58.000So I think the idea that fascism is what's on the horizon in America I don't think makes sense because I think that arose under very different circumstances than what we've got right now.
01:45:11.000I think that the things that fascists were doing in Germany before they took over there, Italy before they took over there, I think the
01:45:59.000I think it's a distraction, honestly, from things that actually matter more.
01:46:08.000And I think that it's really dangerous when people would make excuses for behavior like attacking Andy Ngo because it's – because if you think about that, like the things that – here's the thing that most disturbed me right when that happened,
01:46:25.000that I would see people who would be defending that.
01:46:41.000Well, the problem with Antifa is the name.
01:46:57.000You're calling it Antifa, like anti-fascist.
01:47:08.000Put up the definition of fascism, and this is part of where the problem lies.
01:47:12.000When we discuss fascism, whether we're discussing the connection between the corporate interests and the government, or what is the technical definition of what a fascist is?
01:47:29.000Fascism, a form of far-right authoritarian, ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in the early 20th century of Europe.
01:47:44.000There's other definitions of that, though.
01:47:48.000The problem with Wikipedia is that sometimes it gets ideologically captured.
01:47:53.000A political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.
01:48:11.000A tendency towards or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.
01:48:19.000The problem with that is When you're trying to control by violence and street action and throwing milkshakes at people, you're trying to control the way they behave and they think.
01:49:23.000They're trying to enforce their ideology, and unfortunately their fucking mayor has let them go so far with it That even he's pushing back now.
01:49:32.000He's calling for greater police protection and they're trying to enforce laws now and arrest people.
01:49:38.000Because he was being targeted so much that he turned it around and is like, we have to do something about these people.
01:49:52.000They're into this ideology, and they're into this whole community of stopping these fascists, and they're looking for them when they don't even exist.
01:50:01.000The technical definition of fascism is not running rampant in fucking Portland.
01:50:10.000And I think that like if you want to say like there are like far right groups who might commit hate crimes, etc., then like first of all, I actually don't think that a lot of people who do stuff like this would be like just – I'm skeptical that they're really going to be the ones who are going to do something there.
01:50:40.000I don't think most people who sign up for stuff like this, this is a point Michael Brooks made to me after the...
01:50:48.000In Michigan in 2020, there was like some protests at the state capitol over lockdown stuff where like lots and lots of people actually had guns there.
01:50:58.000He was like, oh, where's Antifa here, right?
01:51:51.000I think that the one reason why people end up obsessing about marginal far-right groups, like the Proud Boys are not about to march on Washington and install whoever is— Also, that guy, the fucking head of the Proud Boys,
01:52:51.000Yeah, it's like during the McCarthy period when half of the people at some little local Communist Party meeting would be FBI agents because they were devoting so many resources to trying to...
01:53:32.000And I think that the problem is when you make an obvious point like, hey, there's absolutely no justification for physically attacking this guy.
01:53:49.000That this serves no good purpose whatsoever.
01:53:54.000That a lot of the things that people said about it at the time when they were trying to justify it turned out to be bullshit, which is also true.
01:54:05.000And also, by the way, I don't want to set the precedent that we're going to have street violence where people who...
01:54:13.000Somebody decides they don't count as a real journalist and that they're helping bad people or creating dangerous effects or something and they could just attack them.
01:55:48.000Because, I mean, he broke – I mean – Whatever you think about Glenn or his politics or any of that stuff, just from a journalism perspective, first with the NSA revelations and then again in Brazil with the material that helped free the former president who was unjustly imprisoned.
01:56:11.000I mean, that's the most important stuff that journalism can do, right?
01:56:15.000So if that's not journalism, I don't know why journalism is important.
01:56:21.000Once you go to Stubstack, you're not a journalist anymore?
01:56:24.000Yeah, and I think that's incredibly dangerous because you could imagine—I mean, look, you don't have to imagine.
01:56:30.000You could just look at what actually has happened with Julian Assange, right?
01:56:33.000That, like, the government says, like, you know, that, oh, there's no freedom of the press issue here because that's not really journalism.
01:56:41.000He's just, like, some kind of, you know, enabler of terrorism, you know, because he did this.
01:56:47.000That's certainly not a road that I want to go down, but the problem is— As obvious as so many of these points are that like it's – there's absolutely no good justification for physically attacking a noncombatant, like somebody who isn't like going – Right.
01:57:02.000And mocking and laughing when you hit him in the head with a fucking milkshake.
01:57:12.000You make the point we're just making about journalism and – And it's like on the face of it, you think, OK, this is like this is all obvious.
01:57:20.000But the problem is it's that like team like rooting for your team behavior that like you're willing to accept horrible behavior as long as it's enforcing your ideology.
01:57:30.000And then if and then if somebody like me said, you know, says that I think that, you know, like, you know, that that I think this is bad, then, oh, see, so you're not being loyal to the team, right?
01:57:41.000Like you're siding with Andy Ngo, who's on the other team.
01:57:43.000And, you know, you're siding against people who are, you know, who are on your team, you know?
01:57:47.000So, like, they'll just have a reaction to that that's not actually about, like, the thing itself or, like, showing what's wrong with the argument.
01:58:52.000But he wrote an article about visiting Britain where he was claiming – Basically, that there were, like, you know, parts of London that were, like, under Sharia law or that, you know, like – and his evidence was that there were,
01:59:07.000like, no drinking signs that, like – Sid's been pointed out that, like, other, like, non-Muslim neighborhoods, they have the same things, right?
01:59:14.000Because you're just not allowed to drink in certain places, you know, under generally applicable laws.
01:59:19.000I think that he's – you know, and I think that probably in general, right?
01:59:24.000Yeah, I think he's a provocateur and I think that he's – I too have a lot of questions about the honesty or at least the commitment to sort of checking things before you go into print with them.
01:59:40.000And my sense is that his politics are completely different from mine.
01:59:45.000But none of that matters for this, right?
01:59:47.000Like none of that is the point, right?
01:59:48.000I don't want just like – if we're talking about like – Should we have a taboo against physically assaulting journalists?
01:59:58.000Yeah, physically assaulting people you disagree with.
02:00:00.000Yeah, we should and it should be anybody.
02:00:03.000But also I think that it shouldn't depend on whether you think they're honest.
02:00:09.000It shouldn't depend on any of that stuff.
02:00:10.000That is not something that should be happening and I think it's a bad door to open up.
02:00:20.000But I think that that's something in the book that a lot of people – I shouldn't say a lot of people.
02:00:25.000Most people who got mad at it never cracked it open.
02:00:28.000But some of the people who did get mad at it because they read it had a problem with that.
02:00:33.000I think some of the Dave Chappelle stuff in the first chapter because they thought I was defending a transphobe.
02:00:39.000I think that that was an issue with some people.
02:00:46.000I think that the stuff later in the book that just in general I think a lot of people who got mad about it sort of misinterpreted the sort of main claim in a crazy way.
02:01:07.000In other words, they thought that the main thing that I was saying Was that online cancellation is the most important problem in the world or something like that?
02:01:20.000What I think is that this is not a way that you should act towards people, one, because on a human level it's just a toxic way to operate, and two, if you actually want to win people over to ideas that you think are important so you can accomplish something that's important in the real world,
02:01:38.000then getting bogged down I think there's also a real issue with communicating through social media.
02:01:57.000It's such a – It's a way of communicating that takes away so much of what it is to be a human.
02:02:08.000To be a human is to look at a person, to have a conversation with them, look them in the eyes, to talk about things in depth, to recognize their perspective and allow them to talk.
02:02:21.000You're two human beings expressing ideas.
02:02:25.000With social media, you're just printing something out, and you're throwing it out into the ether, and then the other person responds, and you don't see each other, you're trying to be biting and nasty, and the way you win is through vitriol.
02:02:37.000It's a shitty way to communicate, and one of the best ways to get attention is to be the biggest cunt.
02:02:42.000That's how people get attention online, to say the most mean, the most vicious thing that you can, and it's like a fun little game.
02:02:51.000And you get validation for being like the first person to like throw, you know, throwing the first stone, right?
02:02:56.000And people like support you because they wish they had said it or they don't want to be the person who sticks their neck out, but they'll like it because the, yeah, go get them.
02:03:06.000Yeah, or they just don't like, or they just like, you know, they like the tweet, ha, right, you know, like we got that guy, and then they just never think about it again, or sometimes like if they thought about it in the first place, like I gave, you know, there's a guy who,
02:03:24.000I am Wendell Potter, you know who this is?
02:03:27.000Okay, so Wendell Potter used to be a health insurance executive, and he would like lobby You know, Congress on behalf of health insurance companies.
02:03:36.000And then at some point in the past, I think maybe 15 years ago or something, I'm not sure about the timing, he had a crisis of conscience about doing that.
02:04:00.000I remember back in spring 2021 maybe, Wendell Potter tweeted out something like the fact that people don't understand how much Medicare for All would help us even during this time when people were losing on health insurance because of economic disruptions.
02:04:22.000All this stuff shows How many people bought the lies that I used to tell when I was a health insurance executive?
02:04:28.000And this guy who I'm not going to name because I don't want to shame this guy.
02:04:50.000And I quote, If the guy who originally tweeted that had literally just clicked on Wendell Potter's name on the top of the tweet, that would have taken him to his profile picture where he would have seen all these names that have for Medicare for all in the title and he would have realized what point he was making when he tweeted that.
02:05:18.000But why would you do five seconds of research about somebody before denouncing them when you can get that little endorphin rush from, like, you know...
02:05:32.000He's got a very interesting perspective on this, and he calls Twitter and social media processed information.
02:05:40.000The same way processed food is bad for you, that processed information, ultra-processed.
02:05:46.000Where it's down to, instead of having a conversation with someone, it's down to quote tweeting a thing completely out of context and trying to ruin them.
02:05:53.000Oh my god, this piece of shit just admitted it.
02:06:21.000It's terrible for your brain and people engage in it easily.
02:06:25.000Yeah, and much like those other examples, the profit incentives of the companies that run it are All in favor of people doing all this stuff because the more people are doing that, the more minutes per day their eyeballs are on Twitter.
02:06:39.000Sure, but I think that's almost a simplistic version of it because I don't think they meant that.
02:06:43.000I don't think they created it in order to get people to do it that way.
02:06:47.000I think they created it as like when you go back and look at Twitter, what it initially was, it was like you would put at and then your name is like is going to the movies.
02:06:56.000Like, you would even talk about yourself in the third person.
02:06:59.000You know, like, at Joe Rogan's going to the gym.
02:07:03.000And then slowly but surely, it became a way where people espoused opinions, and then it became Arab Spring, and then, like, it became all sorts of different ways that people expressed themselves.
02:07:13.000Like, this idea that it started out with this insidious notion...
02:07:17.000I don't think it necessarily started out with an insidious notion, but I do think that the ways that it's changed over time are ones that...
02:07:26.000Just the fact that likes and retweets and all that stuff are part of it, I do think it's a kind of feedback mechanism.
02:07:37.000You know John Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed?
02:07:48.000Those electronic speeding signs that will show you as you drive by how fast you're driving and what the speed limit is.
02:07:56.000And he points out that on paper there's no reason that should work because they're not giving you any information you don't already have.
02:08:02.000Every car has a speedometer in it that tells you how fast you're driving.
02:08:06.000A normal low-tech speed sign would tell you what the speed limit is.
02:08:09.000But just that moment of validation that you get from driving past and see the two numbers come together It actually does seem to get people to drive more slowly and it reduces actions.
02:08:19.000There are tons of studies about this that show that it does that.
02:08:22.000And in that case, it's that kind of like immediate feedback loop of validation is a good thing.
02:08:27.000But in social media, that kind of immediate feedback loop of validation that like you're going to get 10,000 people who like and retweet because you said somebody is a piece of shit or whatever.
02:08:41.000I think it makes it harder to communicate with people.
02:08:46.000It makes it harder to even listen to what somebody who disagrees with you thinks for long enough that you could think about how to convince them to try to persuade them of your point of view.
02:08:57.000And it makes us even more atomized than we are already.
02:09:01.000If you spend all of your time scrolling Which, again, maybe it wasn't the original intention, but I think that the more time people spend scrolling through their social media feeds, the better it is for the bottom line of these companies.
02:09:44.000It highlights a terrifying future because they're essentially saying, like, this leads to this massive polarization of these perspectives in this country.
02:09:55.000It's almost like setting us up for a civil war.
02:09:59.000Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's going to be a civil war, but I do think that you're going to get a lot of more people who get all of their sort of emotional connection to politics is about, like, getting mad at people who are on the other team and not even getting mad at people with power.
02:10:40.000And that seems crazy to me because, I mean, especially after 2020, you know, where, like, the, you know, the turnout was ridiculously high on both sides.
02:10:51.000So, like, you've got, like, 70 however million people that you're just going to, like, write off, right?
02:10:56.000Like, they're just, like, unredeemable, you know?
02:11:28.000Look, I mean one of the reasons I always thought that Bernie Sanders would have won the 2016 election if he'd been the nominee is that there are – I'm not saying all of them.
02:11:48.000Yeah, I don't have any doubt in my mind.
02:11:50.000I think there's a lot of people who want a person that has like a legitimate, like a really well thought out perspective that they have been consistent with their entire career.
02:12:20.000I think that's an example of a larger thing, but I think it's a really interesting example.
02:12:26.000So I think the larger thing that it's an example of is that when people – this is my claim about why a lot of people on the left get sucked into this, right?
02:12:36.000When people feel like they have no real power to change anything like big and structural that actually matters.
02:12:45.000They get sucked into picking fights that they think they can't win.
02:12:49.000If you can't win the ones that matter, then find a way to care about the stuff that is not going to change the world for better, but you derive some kind of satisfaction from.
02:13:02.000So if it's like You know, yelling at Dave Chappelle, you know, then, like, that's something that can scratch that itch, you know?
02:13:11.000Like, look, the things that actually create, like, misery for working people in the United States are big structural things that can't be solved by punching anybody in the face, right?
02:13:23.000But, you know, you can get diverted to finding someone you can punch and, you know, you get, like, that sense of satisfaction.
02:13:33.000And I think that what the comedy example really shows is the way that people get sucked into this way of viewing the world that's all about individual moralism, right?
02:13:46.000Is this person a good person or a bad person?
02:13:48.000Is that person a good person or a bad person?
02:13:50.000And it becomes just this like constant inventory of the soul.
02:13:55.000And I think that we're doing that so much that we almost don't even notice that we're doing it.
02:13:59.000It just almost like goes without saying that like that's how you would interact with this stuff.
02:14:03.000And so I think that comedy as a form of entertainment and when it's really good as a form of art, as something that can help us kind of look at the world around us at a slightly different angle than we would in the normal course of things because it kind of holds things up in a different way.
02:14:28.000If it's operating in a space where people aren't constantly thinking about like, oh, is this guy a good guy or a bad guy?
02:14:39.000Is this joke that I'm about to tell something that is morally acceptable or not?
02:14:45.000If you're in that space, I don't think you're going to be able to do it right.
02:14:56.000That's an interesting thought that people will attack things that they think that they can have an impact on instead of going after these big impossible problems that seem insurmountable.
02:15:43.000But in terms of things like how easy it is to hold a police officer accountable if they use violence in an unjustified way, I don't think that's gotten much better.
02:16:05.000I don't think it's a complete solution because for one thing, I think a lot of people who are most likely to end up in these situations are not in a good position to afford good legal representation.
02:16:18.000I know sometimes in a high-profile case, you'll get people doing it pro bono who are good lawyers.
02:17:27.000Or like when people like knocking down statues, which don't get me wrong, I don't think there should be statues of Confederate generals in cities.
02:17:34.000I mean I don't think that's something we should glorify.
02:17:37.000But I also saw a lot of like after the really bad statues came down, people started going after gray area statues.
02:17:46.000What's interesting about the Civil War statutes is many of them actually came up, they were put up during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s.
02:18:27.000And then you search for things that, you know, you can change the name of it, right?
02:18:32.000You know, like my mom has gotten really into birdwatching in her retirement and she told me that there's like some kind of warbler that's named after a Confederate general that people are like trying to like get that changed.
02:18:44.000It's like, okay, you're really like, you know...
02:19:17.000So I think it's an example that makes it really dramatic because...
02:19:23.000Comedians don't and really can't exercise political power.
02:19:28.000They might influence to a certain extent the way that people think about certain things, but nobody who's doing comedy is making decisions that directly impact politics.
02:19:54.000It's a symptom of how extreme this kind of moralistic approach to politics is.
02:20:02.000That like you're this concerned with like constantly, you know, testing, you know, whether somebody is a good person or a bad person or they ever said anything that, you know, that might show them to like to really be a bad person and nothing could ever just be a bad moment,
02:20:18.000That, you know, that it has to be like this is the moment where you really revealed the How toxic your soul was or something rather than just like you said something stupid because sometimes people say things that are stupid.
02:20:31.000I think that that kind of moralism, when it's applied to comedy, I think that that's maybe the most extreme symptom of what I'm talking about because it's one thing even to get mad at somebody because of something they wrote in an editorial.
02:20:50.000That they're telling you exactly what they think should happen.
02:20:53.000If I write something for Jacobin and some people get upset about that, okay, at least it's a Jacobin article.
02:21:01.000I'm literally saying exactly what I think.
02:21:08.000So that last Dave Chappelle special at Netflix that people got mad about.
02:21:15.000And which, by the way, I hadn't even watched, but since I'd written this thing, people kept asking me what I thought, and I finally watched it.
02:21:22.000And I thought that the way that it was portrayed as if it were this, like, just festival of transphobic hatred was ridiculous.
02:21:31.000That, in fact, the overall theme of the special, as far as those issues go, was about him, like, moving towards a place of greater understanding and, you know, and, like...
02:21:41.000And it's also kind of a love letter to his friend that committed suicide for supporting him.
02:21:48.000And then she jumped off a fucking building and committed suicide.
02:21:52.000This is like an homage to this person's life and this long part of it.
02:21:56.000I worked with Dave during the entire time he was piecing that together.
02:22:01.000Because we started doing shows in Austin like...
02:22:07.000November of 2020. It might have even been earlier than that.
02:22:11.000And we were working together while he was putting it together, and he was responding to this idea that he was transphobic.
02:22:21.000And he was saying, like, this is so crazy.
02:22:23.000Like, this is who I am, and this is about this person who, when I was accused of being transphobic, this person defended me and was dragged by people There's been some talk of how much of that was creative license because people tried to find what the tweets were.
02:22:45.000Or how many of them were people who actually knew her personally?
02:22:52.000It's the highest form of comedy in a lot of ways, because you're trying to take this socially sensitive issue and extract laughs from it, which is very difficult to do, but in no way was it transphobic.
02:23:06.000In no way was it hurtful or cruel or mean.
02:23:12.000I mean, actually, he spent a couple minutes of the special explaining why the bathroom laws in North Carolina were cruel.
02:23:18.000And at the end, when he's talking about his dead friend, one of the crucial moments comes when he's describing their back and forth when he had her open for him.
02:24:53.000But like also I think that – Like, sometimes if you get this invested in, like, making these, like, moral indictments of people over those culture war battles, then you're just not even pausing to think about that.
02:25:08.000Like, you're just, like, trying to find evidence.
02:25:10.000Like, you're just, like, sifting through it to, like, find, like—it's like, you know, Freddie DeBoer, the commentator?
02:25:21.000He wrote a really good book about the education system called Cult of Smart.
02:25:26.000And he has this essay from a few years ago called Planet of Cops, where he says that it seems to him that increasingly everybody in the culture is a cop now, right?
02:25:39.000What he means by that, and he develops the metaphor.
02:25:41.000He says things like, Oh, there's a new movie that people are getting excited about.
02:25:46.000Give me two hours and 500 words and I'll find you your indictments.
02:25:51.000It's like it's sort of constantly sifting through things to find evidence that people have committed some kind of sin or infraction.
02:26:01.000And I think that like that's how people are approaching that.
02:26:06.000Like when they wrote these articles about how – oh my god, did you know that Dave Chappelle said that he was on Team Turf in that special?
02:26:20.000You know, you got to get those indictments, right?
02:26:22.000So you just have to sort through all of it until you can find something that, you know, that looks like a smoking gun of evidence.
02:26:30.000And I think that it's like it's obviously it's a terrible way to write about anything.
02:26:36.000But I think what's interesting to me about the example of comedy is Is that it's sort of the most absurd possible application of doing that.
02:26:48.000Because, I mean, just to be, like, simplistic about it for a second, right?
02:26:52.000Like, if you're saying something in a stand-up special, like, generally speaking, not every sentence, but, like, you're saying it because you think it's funny, right?
02:27:00.000Which is just a different thing from saying something.
02:27:04.000Because, like, oh, you know, here is exactly what I think.
02:27:07.000It's like the example that we were talking about before the podcast, which I'm not going to do because it's actually in my act now, that someone put a quote that I said in an article about what a piece of shit I am.
02:27:18.000I'm like, hey, you've got to put the whole quote because there's like a lot more to that.
02:27:25.000But it's that thing that they do is also because someone is getting a disproportionate and exorbitant amount of attention.
02:27:35.000And when someone is like a Dave Chappelle or myself who's got a disproportionate amount of attention, there's so many people that want to look at that and go, Flaws!
02:27:49.000And it's a normal thing to have this sort of reaction.
02:27:55.000To someone who you feel either their take on things isn't valid or it doesn't align with your own or there's a reason why you're morally superior to them because your position is better.
02:28:14.000And it's also – I mean it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about the BLM protests and the aftermath and all of that stuff.
02:28:23.000Like if you get somebody – like if – I mean obviously in a case as high profile as like Dave Chappelle, like Netflix isn't going to dump him because like why would they do that?
02:28:33.000Like that would just be putting like a lot of money on the – Well, not only that but there's no reason to.
02:29:06.000And it's really striking, too, because if you remember when all this was going on, there was like a week of the news that was all about how there was going to be this huge walkout of trans employees at Netflix.
02:30:04.000Super hyped up walkout that got all this attention.
02:30:08.000There was like two people on their lunch break or whatever.
02:30:10.000At the same time, there was the John Deere strike going on and that was thousands of people were out on strike to get better wages and working conditions.
02:30:44.000And also a guy who you sort of associate with left-wing values and progressive values, and you want him to fall in line.
02:30:53.000And I think that's part of the blowback, is that they want to shame him into falling in line with their ideals.
02:31:02.000And one of the things that he said when we talked about the special, and we did a show together and he did this speech at an arena, and he's like, I am not going to comply with the way you want me to think and want me to behave.
02:31:32.000You know, but, like, the idea that, like, saying, like, he's a terrible person, he's a transphobe, like, is going to get him to, like, see things more from your perspective.
02:31:41.000In fact, he talks about this in the special, right?
02:31:43.000That, like, he, you know, he has the thing about the woman who, like, followed him out to the parking lot or whatever to, you know, to give him a hard time.
02:31:56.000But then actually meeting this trans woman and having the interactions that they had and having that mean something to him, that did way more probably to get him to see things the way that people were yelling at him.
02:32:39.000Is to get them to say, okay, now I see you're right.
02:32:43.000Especially if you're distorting their perceptions.
02:32:45.000They might say the words if they think they have to, but they're not going to think it.
02:32:50.000Now, when you wrote this book, what inspired you?
02:32:58.000Yeah, so I think there were a few things that had been going on and it kind of all started to build for a while that I was getting frustrated that a lot of people who I align with on most things were getting sucked into the way I see it in the book,
02:33:21.000That these kinds of what I call pathologies of powerlessness, right?
02:33:26.000Because you know that you can't accomplish things that actually matter, you end up getting sucked into all of this nonsense.
02:33:33.000You spend all of your time trying to prove yourself to other people you already agree with.
02:33:37.000You know, and to denounce, you know, people for not agreeing with you in ways that are not going to, you know, lead to a single person getting health care or a single workplace being unionized, you know, any of those things.
02:33:52.000And I think there were a few examples that, like, were really starting to get to me at the time.
02:33:59.000So one of them was what happened, I remember in 2019, The Democratic Socialists of America, which is an organization I'm a member of.
02:34:10.000I think it's flawed but I think it does good stuff.
02:34:15.000But they had this convention actually in Atlanta where I live and in which I didn't – I mean I was there for like a minute because I was like meeting with my editor but like I didn't go to the thing itself.
02:34:29.000I kind of hate sitting through meetings like in general in life.
02:34:32.000But in – But there was this montage of clips that came out afterwards that Tucker Carlson played on Fox News and stuff like that of people announcing all of these bizarre rules that you weren't allowed to clap at the convention because there might be people with rare noise sensitivities and just – Things like this.
02:34:56.000And of course, you know, the right-wingers who compiled that were cherry-picking the worst, most ridiculous moments from a weekend.
02:35:02.000Is that the one where this person is like, point of privilege?
02:36:48.000Yeah, I mean, if so, they're probably winning over a lot of new converts all the time, but by doing that...
02:36:54.000Was that the most annoying time in that meeting, or were there more annoying times during that conference?
02:36:59.000Yeah, I mean, the stuff that I saw, which was not that much of it, but the stuff I saw, like the things that made it into that montage were the most annoying things that I saw.
02:37:13.000I guess what gets me about this is that knowing that everybody in the world can see this, if you're still acting this way, then what that shows me is that you do not care at all.
02:39:30.000That's part of why I wrote the book because I guarantee you, however many hundreds of people were there in that hall, right, you know, where that was happening.
02:39:42.000Like, I actually think the very limited amount of time that it was around that weekend, I think I heard a few people, you know, do the verbal eye rolls to me, right?
02:40:03.000And it's like, I think, but the thing is...
02:40:08.000People – most everybody who's rolling their eyes – I mean I think – I actually think my friend Cale Brooks was there.
02:40:16.000He might have actually like had a – like I think somebody actually came over to his table and they were – You know, and like told them to like not clap and you know, they're like, what's wrong with you?
02:40:46.000And like, but most people who are going to roll their eyes aren't going to say anything because you don't want to be the guy who says anything.
02:40:53.000Right, you don't want to be an asshole.
02:40:55.000You're there because you actually care about the issues that the organization is about.
02:41:00.000You didn't sign up for this so you could spend your time arguing with crazy people about whether clapping is okay.
02:41:06.000So I think it's a very understandable impulse.
02:41:08.000But I think what I started to realize when I was thinking about examples like this is that for a long time, it's not like I didn't know that there were a lot of people who were ridiculous in ways like this or a lot of people who were like, Unhelpfully moralistic,
02:41:24.000you know, in ways like what I was talking about in the comedy chapter of the book or, you know, who would excuse things that shouldn't be excused, like in the Andy No part.
02:41:33.000But I think what I always told myself was, look...
02:41:39.000Like some people, some leftists are idiots, but whatever.
02:41:41.000Like in the greater scheme of things, it's not that, you know, like we live in a world where there are, you know, imperialist wars and union busting and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
02:41:51.000This is such a minor irritation than like why spend time talking about it and thinking about it.
02:41:56.000But then at a certain point, my perspective started to change because I actually think that the fact that there are all of those other issues that are more important is a reason to try to get people to stop acting like this.
02:42:10.000Because if you actually care about doing something about those bigger issues, then if you look to any working class onlooker who you might be trying to...
02:42:24.000Like, ideally, you'd want to reach out to, right?
02:42:27.000If you look like this lunatic who's, like, getting mad at people because they're clapping instead of doing whatever they're supposed to do with their fingers, you know, then they're not going to have anything to do with you.
02:42:46.000They're concentrated on this one thing when what you're trying to accomplish is this – More inclusive view of Socialism and with how socialism could fit into our modern culture and Instead they want they want you to not clap or not talk I know please watch your idle chatter and the noise you make I'm easily distracted like oh my god I Self
02:43:20.000And whenever people are trying to be ultra-sensitive and ultra-progressive and ultra-open-minded, you open the door for annoying people.
02:43:28.000You open the door for people that just need a tremendous amount of attention.
02:43:32.000Yeah, and there's got to be a way that you can, you know, square the circle of saying, like, okay, look, are there obviously, you know, should there be more accommodations for disabled people in, like, society as a whole than there are?
02:44:48.000As we've been, like we were talking about earlier, right, in these last weeks while people have been, you know, freaking out about, you know, whatever's going on in the news about, you know, things that Joe Rogan said 15 years ago or about what Whoopi Goldberg said on The View or whatever.
02:45:48.000And I'm not, you know, I'm not sure that—I don't know what's going to happen, but, like, when I see, like, Biden canceling, you know, the meeting with Putin, you know, like, I get— I get nervous and I think that given how destructive that would be,
02:46:04.000that's got to override almost everything else right now just in terms of how important it is.
02:46:55.000I'd rather that, like, instead of having...
02:46:58.000Like however many hundreds of military bases the United States has all over the entire – like every part of the world right now and constantly fighting these like low-level drone wars that like most Americans have like forgotten that they're even happening.
02:47:15.000I think that if we redirected the kinds of resources that we spend on having this role in the world to taking care of people's material needs in ways that – it wouldn't fund all of it but it would do a lot.