In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack in New York City, comedian Jimmy Burke talks about how close he was to the blast, and how he managed to survive it. He also talks about what it was like to be in the immediate aftermath of the attack, and what he did to make sure everyone else was okay. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and produced by Riley Bray. Special thanks to our sponsor, Caff Monster Energy Drink. Caff is a high-octane, caffeine-fuelled energy drink with twice the caffeine and twice the calories you'd expect from a typical Caff. It's available in Vanilla, Mocha, and Salted Caramel. Enjoy! Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. All rights reserved. Used by permission. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise stated. We do not own the rights to any music used in this podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review and/or share it on Apple Podcasts or other social media platforms. Thank you for any amount you'd like us to use it in the next episode, we'd really appreciate it if you leave a rating and review it. Please be kind and review and review the podcast in the comments section below. Thank you. XOXOXOXO. xoxo. -R.A.R. -- Thank you so much love and support this podcast! -- thank you for all the love, respect, support, and support, support and support -- I appreciate it greatly :) -- R.E. -- Thankyou, R.M. -A.K.A Thank you, RYAN R.S. & AY. Thankyou. -- A.B. & K.A., R.P. & J.M., M.A.. -P.S., P.A -- P.B., C.E., S. , A.J.R., E. & P.S -- & A.M.. -- E.M, S.C. & S.A, E.J., SZN. & C.A . Thankyou -- M.O. & G.
00:00:07.000If I call you terrorist survivor, how much hate do you think I'll get?
00:00:10.000It seems like a nice green light for people to get upset for no reason.
00:00:13.000Well, you know, I think that everybody wants to be If you've not been affected by it, but you were there, you want somehow credit.
00:00:22.000Like I found myself, I was 800 feet exactly away from the blast.
00:00:26.000Because I was at the Gotham Comedy Club, 208, I think West 23rd, and the bomb was at 133. It's hard for me to think of how big 800 feet is.
00:06:06.000Well, the answer is there are two books that were – this has been studied.
00:06:11.000Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
00:06:13.000He won a Nobel Prize for economics and behavioral economics.
00:06:16.000And then in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, there are – and for that matter, Josh Waiskin's book, The Art of Learning.
00:06:24.000All three great books that I recommend to everybody because there are signals a human being and soldiers talk about this when they've experienced a lot of IEDs.
00:06:33.000They get very good, when their life depends on it, at reading signals, the stillness in the air, behavior that they can't explain, but why are those people acting a little bit differently?
00:07:11.000And you can't do a lot else when you're doing that.
00:07:13.000But you can recognize if somebody's running at you screaming with their eyes open and their hands up that they're probably going to do something Physical to you or something you we register these in very quickly the same goes for you know any kind of Situation probably when something's about to happen There may be a change in behavior.
00:07:38.000Why is that bump in that road that wasn't there last time those kinds of things that soldiers talk about so For me, I think this was just simply the idea that I was closed in.
00:10:09.000And then and then something the random can happen and all those plants go out the fucking window.
00:10:14.000Yeah, that's the strangest aspect of it, isn't it?
00:10:16.000The randomness of it that all of a sudden these moments unexpected are introduced into the world and they change everything, you know, and we only see our our side of it.
00:10:28.000Obviously, this is happening all over the world to varying degrees.
00:10:32.000We're just so insulated from this kind of stuff that when a random act like this does happen, it's so shocking.
00:10:39.000But if this was in, you know, the worst aspects or the worst parts of the world...
00:10:46.000They're probably experiencing these kinds of things on a daily basis.
00:11:05.000They were very, very, you know, political commitment in the 20th century wasn't something you could not have, right?
00:11:11.000And they witnessed world wars and nuclear weaponry and all kinds of things, probably influenza that killed 20 million people worldwide, all kinds of stuff.
00:11:39.000And so the idea is to, whatever happens, whatever happens, you can react in a way that, in a form of paralysis, or you can allow it to kind of get you to think, I don't have a lot of time.
00:11:53.000It's such a catch-22 in many ways, because our society has never been safer.
00:11:58.000It's never been easier to exist in the West, at least in America.
00:13:49.000It says, Matt LeBlanc was disgusting on the Emmys red carpet and can leave showbiz now.
00:13:55.000Now, in this person's defense, the author, I have no idea if that is what she actually wrote as her actual title, because I know that editors change things, and they try to make things more inflammatory.
00:14:09.000And it's so much easier to make something more inflammatory when you're an editor and you take someone's work and you add some stuff to it, you add a title to it.
00:14:40.000He goes, I saw the first season, then kind of fell out of touch with it, and I guess that's when she started getting naked, so I need to catch up.
00:16:01.000And it doesn't mean there isn't work to do.
00:16:02.000But please understand that we have come a long way.
00:16:06.000And to not give credit for that is to not give credit to the foot soldiers.
00:16:11.000That did all that work from 1983 until now, many of whom were people of color.
00:16:16.000So when you say, you know, it's things that have never been worse, you're wrong.
00:16:20.000You don't have historical perspective.
00:16:22.000And I'll give you another perspective that New York Times had this interesting editorial.
00:16:25.000And whether this is true or not, but if you define war as countries going to war over territory resources with national armies, five out of six people on this globe are not living in countries at war.
00:16:39.000One in six are in conflict, war-torn areas.
00:16:45.000Those areas go from Nigeria to Pakistan.
00:16:48.000Now, that is a large part of the globe, primarily the Middle East, primarily the Muslim world.
00:16:55.000That area is in strife and at war, and there's a lot of tragedy.
00:16:59.000But please keep in mind that's one in six people in the globe.
00:17:02.000Latin America In the 70s and the 80s, our lifetime, were military dictatorships.
00:17:09.000Nicaragua was a communist dictator, not even a communist dictator, but it was a communist country where there was a huge insurgency, huge wars being fought, insurgencies, lots of death, no democracy whatsoever.
00:17:20.000Latin America has a lot of problems, but let me tell you, at least they are run by civilian governments, as corrupt as they may be.
00:17:27.000So you've got to kind of measure, you've got to measure where progress has been made, give it credit, And then don't let that make you complacent because there's always work to do, but at least give it credit.
00:17:39.000I completely agree with you, but I think you're giving her statement way too much credit.
00:19:07.000But I do think that we live in a time, and there's probably kind of a blowback now, it's interesting, but we do live in a time where people are just way too sensitive, and it's certain loudmouths in the media.
00:19:18.000I mean, when Alec Baldwin wrote an article saying, I think I quit, And it was like he was leaving Hollywood.
00:19:24.000He's done so much for gay rights and he's always been a really liberal guy.
00:19:27.000But he called the guy a cocksucker because the guy ended up taking pictures of him and his wife.
00:19:33.000And I guess they considered that to be homophobic.
00:19:58.000The guy who used to be part of Greenpeace said, look, we got a lot of stuff done.
00:20:02.000But there were a lot of people that weren't willing to let it go.
00:20:04.000And they needed a new cause and a new cause because they were addicted to the power.
00:20:08.000It wasn't so much about saving the whales anymore.
00:20:10.000It was about the fact that they had a sense of identity and they had power and they could really shake things up and cause good people who were involved in doing good work to have to stop and go, huh?
00:21:17.000If Amy Schumer said that next to Brad Pitt, do you- Well, what if he said this?
00:21:23.000What if he had said, I'm not going to watch it, uh, She takes her clothes off and it objectifies women and I refuse to actually...
00:21:29.000I'm afraid I may enjoy it if I watch it.
00:21:31.000And so out of respect for her and her privacy, even though she's taken off her clothes and it's an artistic expression and a great TV show.
00:21:46.000Do you really want to live in a world like that?
00:21:47.000Because I'll tell you something, there are a lot of countries, a lot of countries, like for example Saudi Arabia and a lot of other countries that are not at the forefront of women's rights, that would be outraged and wouldn't let you see that and would censor that.
00:23:45.000It has nothing to do with men objectifying women.
00:23:48.000If he objectifies women, how the fuck did he trick you to the point where you're both with no clothes on, or with clothes on, under the covers?
00:26:10.000And if one of them is involved in some sort of scandal or someone thinks that they're objectifying women and they're effing horrible, they should leave show business, if that catches any momentum, there's horrible things that people have done, right?
00:26:24.000Admittedly horrible that they themselves just fell apart.
00:27:22.000If cocaine was involved, people that are on coke get ridiculously confident and they say ridiculous shit that just does not jive with everyone around them because the other people around them aren't on coke.
00:28:40.000That's like the Mel Gibson thing, too.
00:28:42.000Look, when you get drunk, or you're on blow, or whatever, if you then decide that the Jews are the reason everything sucks, and you start shouting that to a Jewish cop, or that, you know, you hope your girl gets, you know,
00:28:57.000is forced to have sex with 19 black dudes, but using the N-word.
00:29:20.000Because as time goes on and you become older and you meet more people, you realize there are a bunch of variables when it comes to people's behavior and what they do.
00:29:30.000But those variables are usually based on culture, on economics, on the society that they live in, the family they grew up with.
00:29:40.000And you're gonna meet people that you love that fill all of the blanks.
00:30:05.000The whole thing is we are globally one super organism that does not have the ability yet to communicate in real time across the board with each other in an incredibly honest way.
00:30:18.000You can speak a certain amount of languages if you're a fucking super wizard, and you can figure your way through a lot of countries if you know their cultures.
00:30:25.000But they're not necessarily going to understand ours unless they can read our fucking minds.
00:30:28.000We all speak too many different languages.
00:30:32.000We're so used to one way of life that anything, any variations, any breakups in that one way of life throws everything into a fucking tizzy and no one knows what to do about it.
00:30:41.000Whereas the rest of the world is experiencing all sorts of different strife.
00:30:45.000I was watching this show the other day called Uncharted and this guy was...
00:30:49.000I've talked about this before, but it was so harsh to watch.
00:30:54.000His name is Jim Shockey, and he goes to all these really remote villages and stays with the local people.
00:31:00.000And in this one, they were getting killed by crocodiles.
00:33:31.000If you look at the way human beings are, if you draw through lines, even with cultures that have been not exposed to a lot, but there's been a lot of work done.
00:33:40.000Regardless if you're a Highlander in Papua New Guinea or you're a Northern European senator, a member of government, and you've been exposed to a lot, we recognize certain things.
00:33:51.000Most cultures have a tradition of humorous insults.
00:33:55.000Human beings, it seems, innately can tell the difference between joy and disgust and happy and sad.
00:34:05.000We essentially have the same hardware.
00:34:08.000It's why you can't really look at someone's skin or someone's racial features and You know, realize what they're capable of.
00:34:21.000Well, he's black, he couldn't be, because there aren't a lot of scientists.
00:34:23.000You just can't do that, and we all know that.
00:34:25.000So, really, what it is is software, culture, what you have been exposed to, your belief system, what you've been told is true, what you've been told is right, what you've been told is good versus evil.
00:34:40.000That is essentially what motivates people to do good and bad things.
00:34:47.000You know, Freud said that man goes to war because he hates people.
00:34:51.000Or that he has a lot of aggression and hatred.
00:34:54.000There are a lot of other scholars that say maybe not.
00:34:57.000In fact, men don't go to war out of hatred.
00:35:02.000They go to war because they love the country they are defending.
00:35:06.000They go to war under symbols and propaganda.
00:35:09.000They go to war under and for an idea that they are defending because men and countries define themselves along the lines, along certain lines.
00:35:18.000That they are, if you think about any man, we all have a line.
00:35:22.000We all have a line that we're willing to, at least in our mind, that we're willing to defend with our lives.
00:35:27.000Probably at the front door of our house, if somebody's coming in to try to get to our kids, but certainly our country.
00:35:45.000So, it's better sometimes to think to yourself, I wonder what kind of software went into this guy's head, this guy who just did the bombings in New York.
00:35:55.000What kind of software was he exposed to?
00:36:02.000I don't know if compassion is the word, but it might make us more understanding.
00:36:07.000And so, if you understand your enemy or the enemy, which may not be people, but rather an ideology...
00:36:14.000Maybe that's the best way to then fight it.
00:36:17.000I always try to look at perspective as like a large creation that's made with little tiny Lego blocks and with every life experience that I have I try to add a few more Lego blocks and they might not change me radically but over time those Lego blocks can build and become a significant structure something you can see and look at and measure that's cool and every time one of these things happens I always try to think of there's perspective that
00:36:47.000I had when When my kids started walking and talking to them and seeing them go from Coming out of their mother's body to being a little person I could talk to I started realizing okay, it seems like My thought was always that people were static.
00:37:05.000That I meet, you know, Mike McGee, and he's 32 years old.
00:37:11.000He's 32. Mike was a baby at one point in time.
00:37:14.000He came out of his mother's body, a helpless little thing like all of us did.
00:37:17.000And then through all sorts of weirdness, life experiences that are completely random, and people that probably were totally unqualified teaching them things, and growing up with a bunch of other kids that were similar in a lot of ways.
00:37:31.000Similarly getting fucked up by their parents, their upbringing, their religion, and a million different variables, right?
00:37:38.000And then there's all these alpha chimpanzee jockeying positional things that go on.
00:37:44.000In these relationships with kids and kids bully kids and sometimes those kids that are bullied it ruins them for the rest of their life and they just they're devastated for like literally to the grave from some shit that happened when they were 10. So we're we're subject to so many different variables and so many different points of data entry like data can come at us in so many different ways whether it's physical data whether it's just reading the news and trying to understand like why would someone go to a nightclub In Orlando
00:38:49.000But the bottom line is, they're incredibly structured patterns of behavior that you are forced to follow that can be real dangerous if people don't follow them.
00:39:46.000But the important aspect of it is, and this is always what's important, is that most people that are practicing that aren't hurting anybody, right?
00:39:53.000Most people that are practicing Muslims aren't hurting anybody because there's so many of them.
00:39:57.000If they were, if there was a war between Muslims and Christians and it was just spilling out of the streets every day, Jesus Christ, you'd be a bloodbath everywhere.
00:40:32.000We all have aspects of our personalities and our belief systems that are fundamentalists.
00:40:36.000If you ask me about sugar, I'll wax poetic.
00:40:39.000I'll tell you all about the evils of sugar, and I really believe I'm right.
00:40:42.000Now, I have a lot of data and science behind me, but...
00:40:46.000I have all kinds of ideas about why sugar's bad and fat and protein's good for you because I've lived it and I've done it and I'm sure you have your own point of view.
00:40:55.000I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich today.
00:44:17.000If you've ever seen what a wolf does, we came upon a wolf calf that had been killed, not a wolf calf, a moose calf, rather, that had been killed by wolves in Canada when I was there about a year and a half ago.
00:45:47.000Yeah, we were walking down this road, and these crows started circling overhead, and my friend Mike Hawkridge, he's like, let's go see what they're squawking about.
00:45:55.000So you don't want to walk with your dog on trails, then, in wolf territory?
00:48:47.000There's some sort of a biological effect when one goes missing.
00:48:50.000And she can go from four, if it's a healthy population, to like 16. Right?
00:48:55.000So here's one of the ways they know this is a fact, that these wolves are capable of doing this, is that when they introduced wolves to Yellowstone, wolves hadn't been in Yellowstone since they eradicated them, right?
00:49:09.000So these people came across North America, killed all these wolves, and the way they would do it is through using their system of communicating, and using the fact that they're these tight-knit groups.
00:49:22.000And these packs and their families, they stick together.
00:49:25.000So they would kill one wolf, rub its scent all over a carcass, inject the carcass of a horse, they would shoot a horse, inject the horse with strychnine.
00:49:34.000So that way they're killing two birds with one stone.
00:49:36.000They were getting rid of the wild horses, which had become a real problem, and they are still a problem today.
00:49:46.000And the fact that there's thousands, tens of thousands of wild horses in North America right now, to the point where- Tens of thousands of wild horses in America.
00:49:55.000There are people that are advocating for the hunting season of wild horses.
00:50:20.000He gets into, on Ranella's podcast, the mass extinctions that occurred somewhere in the range of the last Ice Age and maybe sometime even before that, some of them, and how little they know about what killed them all.
00:50:37.000What I thought was interesting was that there's speculation that when the buffalo, you know, started to go extinct, they had already started.
00:50:45.000Well, apparently, the Native Americans that were on horseback and were riding and would follow the buffalo.
00:50:53.000They weren't that sustainable with their practices?
00:51:03.000He advocates the possibility, not advocates, but he brings up the possibility that they could have possibly extirpated those animals from their areas just based on rifles and horsebacks without the market meat farm.
00:56:22.000I'm sure you've seen that video, because it was a really interesting video, how wolves change rivers.
00:56:26.000It was about the Yellowstone wolves being reintroduced into Yellowstone and how they've changed the course of the rivers because they've killed deer, which allowed these plants to grow that didn't grow before and changed the course of the rivers.
00:57:26.000Like, if you were over in New Zealand, we're going hunting, and as we're going up the hill, man, what a beautiful countryside, and look at all these animals.
00:57:33.000And then we hear a helicopter fly overhead, and one ridge over, they're just gunning down stags.
00:57:40.000And we go over the top of the hell, and this is like what we'd, you know, we'd romanticize this trip, we're gonna go there, we're gonna live off the land, we're gonna take a stag, thank you stag for giving me your life, your flesh will feed my...
00:57:51.000Meanwhile, there's a fucking helicopter just indiscriminately gunning them down because there's too many of them shitting the grass.
00:57:59.000And they just let them rot up there, man.
00:58:01.000I'd be in there with my knife, taking off a bunch of steak, and that's what we'd be doing.
00:59:37.000I didn't because I talked her out of it.
00:59:39.000I was like, listen, you got to put a fence over your fucking flowers because I think we could get fined like $100,000 or something crazy for your flowers and that's probably not worth it.
00:59:49.000Yeah, you can go to jail, but I know a lady who's...
00:59:52.000Also, I didn't know how to use a crossbow.
01:00:23.000The real reason I didn't do it, I remember, is not because I didn't think I could do it.
01:00:27.000It was more because I figured if I shot the deer with a crossbow or a bow and arrow, it would run.
01:00:34.000And I'd have to track it, and it would run in somebody else's yard, and then they'd find a deer that had a bow and arrow, and then they'd come and find it, and they'd trace it back.
01:00:41.000I heard a story about a rich lady in Malibu that may have done the exact same thing.
01:00:45.000She might have actually shot a fucking deer in her backyard with a crossbow.
01:02:00.000But the problem is, by us not being in nature at all, by not interacting with animals at all, we've allowed these monsters to develop these slaughterhouses, these houses of horror, these factory farm mechanisms.
01:02:17.000Where these cities that don't make any food need so much food on a daily basis that we've completely removed ourselves from the process of growing things.
01:02:28.000It's one of the most important things about being a person is eating healthy food.
01:02:33.000It's one of the most important things.
01:02:34.000If you don't have healthy food, you're not going to be healthy.
01:02:38.000If you eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches like I did today, if you have that all day, every day, for the rest of your life, you're going to have a shitty, short fucking life.
01:03:03.000We have figured out a way to get a lot of protein in people's bodies for cheap.
01:03:07.000And it used to be that meat was something that countries, I remember in a lot of countries that I lived in, we were, like, for example, you would eat meat twice a year.
01:03:44.000We have people that eat, obviously, too much, and then you have lobbying efforts to get as much corn syrup and things like that into people's bodies.
01:04:48.000So we figured out a way to make it really easy to get food.
01:04:51.000The hardest part of life now becomes the easiest part of life.
01:04:54.000Well, I mean, when they talk about why did philosophy, why were the Greeks, you know, able to sit around and think?
01:05:02.000So you had Plato and Socrates and Aristotle.
01:05:05.000Well, you know, William McNeil, I think, wrote this book about the fact that, you know, the Greeks had access to timber, olive oil and wine.
01:05:16.000And they were able to export those things and exchange them for goods that they needed.
01:05:21.000So it meant that they didn't have to live a subsistence lifestyle.
01:05:24.000They also lived in a temperate climate.
01:05:26.000So they didn't have to spend so much time getting ready for the winter.
01:05:29.000They were also super busy buttfucking.
01:05:32.000They were doing a lot of buttfucking as well.
01:05:34.000Before, you know, there were any, probably, diseases.
01:05:37.000Yeah, they didn't have any diseases back then.
01:06:17.000It's just so much easier to be informed, so much easier to improve yourself, so much easier to get feedback, so much easier to communicate with people, to get to know things.
01:07:03.000We're so lucky that we all have things like due process and representative government.
01:07:09.000I don't have to worry about a police force knocking on my door.
01:07:12.000Sometimes you do, I guess, if you've been up to stuff.
01:07:14.000But I don't have to worry about somebody who has more power than me buying a government official who can then knock on my door and put me in jail on trumped-up charges.
01:08:35.000Yeah, they're both fascinating in their own right.
01:08:39.000They're both, you know, guys that we really, really need.
01:08:43.000There's a lot of nutty shit out there.
01:08:45.000Like they came on, or he came on rather, Michael Shermer, one of the things that he wanted to talk about was this increased presence of people that honestly believe that there is some sort of a conspiracy that the earth is flat.
01:08:56.000I can't even get, I don't have the energy.
01:09:47.000He's 14. Listen, Shermer said something great.
01:09:50.000Shermer said, you know, when you have people reaching the same conclusion from independent lines of inquiry, you've got so many different independent lines of inquiry.
01:10:01.000People are doing their own research and they all converge on one conclusion.
01:10:05.000If you are then coming in to say, well, this is my idea, if you're a conspiracy theorist, well, yes, but there's all this unexplained phenomenon.
01:10:13.000That's fine, but, you know, when I ask for evidence, you know what I always get when I say, what are the evidence?
01:11:12.000They're probably just, at the end of the day, they need to belong to a group, and they want to be exclusive.
01:11:19.000It's a little bit like the modern art when Ayn Rand was walking through the Museum of Modern Art, and a bunch of people were kind of clustered around that broom that had been stuffed into a pail, and everybody's like,
01:13:31.000If you were an artist back in the 70s and 80s and you drew portraits or really cool, like, figures, you know, that you could identify with.
01:13:37.000Like, this girl, Alva, an amazing woman.
01:15:34.000And Jackson Pollock was different because not only was he the first guy to start doing that, but he was deliberately creating what other painters were not able to do, which was fractals.
01:16:20.000Because mathematicians had only figured out the Mandelbrot set, I want to say, less than a year before this crop circle appeared with a perfect Mandelbrot set in some wheat field.
01:16:34.000And the idea of this, pull up a Mandelbrot set so you can see.
01:16:38.000There's actually an animated version of the Mandelbrot set, which is really the best way to look at it, because as it goes closer, you can see that it's the same thing on the outside in a smaller scale, and then you go closer than that, and it's the same thing you saw on the outside, but in a much smaller scale, and then it goes on and on.
01:16:54.000Well, that's apparently what Pollock was able to do that other painters have not been able to do.
01:16:59.000Here's the animation of the Mandelbrot set.
01:17:01.000So it's this crazy-looking, weird thing that as you get closer to it and it expands, it starts revealing...
01:17:10.000Yeah, and it starts revealing how bizarre it is.
01:17:13.000Like, as you see all these little things that stick out of these circles, these giant circles and smaller circles, and then even smaller circles that are attached to the giant circle, and each one of those gets infinitely smaller and smaller.
01:17:22.000A pattern that keeps repeating itself.
01:17:25.000You keep going deep into these things, and you find another small circle, and it has smaller circles on it, and you go to it, and it has smaller circles, and it just keeps going on and on and on and on and on.
01:17:37.000So, pull up the crop circle Mandelbrot set.
01:17:40.000And see if you can find the history on it, because I think it was one of those things where they were like, look, someone who's doing these, either the hoaxer is very educated and some sort of a mathematician and understands the proportions in making a reasonably correct Mandelbrot set,
01:18:36.000In Michael Shermer's book, he talks about Thomas Eager, I think, MIT professor, who talks about, yes, jet fuel that burns at 2,700 degrees and steel, you know, doesn't melt.
01:21:13.000When you start going over history, you can get paralyzed by...
01:21:18.000All the possibilities because so many things have been conspired and were pulled off throughout history.
01:21:23.000It's just a common thread throughout history.
01:21:26.000But the problem is when you're looking at things today like towers falling and buildings catching on fire and collapsing and all these conspiracies get thrown around.
01:21:37.000You will lose a massive amount of your life watching YouTube videos and reading websites and getting taken down a rabbit hole.
01:21:45.000643,000 websites, I think, dedicated to the 9-11 conspiracy.
01:22:36.000And, you know, they know what happens.
01:22:39.000And there's this moment now in time, right, where they have this potential to do things that they couldn't do before because the mood of the country has shifted.
01:23:02.000The weapons of mass destruction was all horseshit, right?
01:23:05.000So the whole reason why they did it is, look, okay, we got attacked, but on the good side, we got a fucking nice chance to go to Iraq here.
01:23:12.000Now, the people that are looking at conspiracies, they'll start to add things.
01:23:17.000So they'll start to say, they engineered those attacks so they could go to Iraq.
01:23:43.000I do think there was a group of people that had an agenda that wanted to take out the fourth largest army in the world, Iraq, because Iraq was posed a threat.
01:23:53.000But those people probably got into the decision maker's ear like...
01:24:23.000I think that one of the main reasons after 9-11 was, the idea was, let's go into Iraq to show any other country, like Pakistan or North Korea, that if they think there's any value in giving a weapon of mass destruction to an enemy like Al-Qaeda,
01:24:38.000that it'll be the end of their country.
01:25:07.000So an oil tanker can be on its way to a country, and then that tanker is bought by a broker, and it has to turn course and go back to another place.
01:25:19.000So oil is traded on the open world market.
01:25:22.000So the idea that the United States wanted to control the Iraqi oil is actually bogus, because we lost a shitload of money, and we don't get that oil money.
01:25:32.000We also produce enough of our own oil with fracking and things to...
01:25:57.000Well, we're not in control, but we essentially overthrew their government and then gave control to other people.
01:26:02.000If we decide to take it back, if there was some sort of an event and the United States decided to go in and take it back, It's not like they're going into North Korea.
01:26:10.000It's not like they're going into some established country with a powerful army like Russia.
01:26:15.000You know, they're going into something that we essentially broke down.
01:26:18.000We broke down, created a civil war between two rival factions of Islam, which nobody even predicted.
01:29:05.000They would prop them up because now the minority in that country had to be loyal to the British.
01:29:12.000Because if they weren't, if they chose to now kind of side with any kind of a revolution, side with any kind of an independence movement, The minority also knew that once that was over, the majority that they had been suppressing,
01:29:29.000that they had been given favor over, would then turn on them.
01:29:34.000So that was always a way of dividing and conquering.
01:29:37.000Find who the minority in the country is and go ahead and give them power so that they will have to be loyal to us because their survival will depend on it.
01:29:49.000Well, there's been really bizarre moments in history where leaders have actually contemplated how to keep the population under control in the event that there's no war.
01:29:57.000That's one of the big fears is the event that peace breaks out.
01:30:01.000I mean, it's one of the reasons why they constructed the game of football.
01:30:05.000They made football to deal with the fact that people weren't going to war.
01:30:09.000And you had all these young men that were ready to fucking go out there and kick some ass, and there was no ass to kick.
01:30:23.000And then there was the wars with the British and the wars with the Spanish and all this different shit that went on for how many hundreds of years?
01:31:06.000When you see two men trying to kill each other with their bare hands, there are triggers, visual triggers, the same as like with pornography.
01:31:19.000So, we've covered a lot of ground here, and I want you guys to know that I'm the age of most of your fathers, and I hope you've written down everything I fucking said.
01:33:29.000Like, when people try to dissect humor and pretend that these are actual statements, like you're giving a fucking affidavit in court or something like that.
01:33:35.000Like, people say ridiculous things they don't really mean.
01:33:38.000That's why you laugh at them, because you know they don't really mean it.
01:34:55.000And you know you have to do three more rounds and you know and you're gonna go have to go hard like when it's It's so hard to do when you're in the moment when you're you're heaving and you're looking at the clock and there's still a minute 45 to go and you're And you're just breathing fire trying to pace yourself.
01:35:11.000That's so much more difficult than everything else once you get out everything else is like I The sun's beautiful.
01:35:17.000Vince Lombardi said that fatigue makes cowards of us all.
01:39:06.000I don't think it's a good idea either for a growing mind because I think that weed can tend to...
01:39:11.000I think THC is still a mind-altering substance, just like anything else, and it has its benefits, but I think as you're growing, it feels like it can be, for the most part, for a young mind, a motivation killer.
01:39:26.000It could be I think there's a lot of factors that could Play into the big picture of who you become that it certainly could be one of them to deny that it's not influential I think it's kind of silly and also to really truly understand the effects of its The way THC affects the developing mind is not completely understood,
01:39:51.000There's a lot of studies that have shown that it's actually not bad at all for a woman to be smoking it while her baby's in the womb, which is really contrary to what a lot of people think.
01:40:00.000But whether or not it's beneficial for a young kid, first of all, it's probably...
01:40:08.000If you think of how old you are when you actually are an adult, I mean, we have this number, right?
01:40:28.000Which is probably why we have laws against drinking when you're underage or smoking and all those things.
01:40:34.000But see, in other countries, they have less instances of alcohol abuse per capita because it's not this forbidden taboo thing.
01:40:43.000There's a real argument for that, too, is that kids don't like being told what to do.
01:40:47.000And when you can get away with your friends and someone sneaks a little fucking flask of whiskey and we all sit around drinking in our clubhouse, like, ooh, we're cool.
01:40:56.000But if it was legal and easy to get, we might not be so inclined to do that.
01:43:36.000Because you do need to know the difference.
01:43:38.000You do need to know that when you talk about a strong leader, a strong man in that context, what you're really talking about is a man who thinks he's above the institutions of that country.
01:44:37.000I mean, there's this game that this guy has to play where he has to, you know, say nice things about people that Donald Trump has said nice things about.
01:44:46.000You know, Donald Trump has said that he's a fan of Putin.
01:46:52.000The president has earned $400,000 annual salary along with a $50,000 annual expense account, a $100,000 non-taxable travel account, and a $19,000 for entertainment.
01:47:34.000I don't think that Donald Trump has ever said anything profound or insightful.
01:47:38.000I've never heard him say even anything...
01:47:40.000Substantive about what he would do about major challenges in this country, other than the fact that he would build a wall, very general, good luck with that, and get tough.
01:47:51.000He's going to get tough like a movie guy.
01:47:52.000All demagogues, all demagogues in history always talked about law and order and how we have to get tough, and that is another way of saying, give me more power, give me more guns, I'm going to keep things, I'm going to enforce the law, because apparently our cities are hellholes.
01:50:24.000His father was a huge developer and he'd always follow his father around.
01:50:27.000His father was a giant developer in New York and he inherited essentially not only the money but also the political apparatus, the connections.
01:50:35.000You know, so much of Trump's When he bought so many of those buildings in New York, and I think at the center of his empire is 15 buildings in New York City, he bought those buildings and he got huge tax breaks.
01:52:22.000But there's a bunch of issues with Clinton as well.
01:52:26.000And you look at all the stuff that's attached to her and all the people that think that there's something wrong with her and what she represents.
01:53:43.000What's interesting about Sam Harris is that Sam's model for human behavior, and Sam's model for the way things should work, is that essentially people are rational.
01:53:55.000Because his arguments against religion, if you listen to some of his speeches, are...
01:54:03.000That, you know, Jonathan Haidt, who's a great thinker, and they had a debate, and Jonathan Haidt said to Sam Harris, Sam, your model for human beings is a little bit outdated because you're assuming human minds are rational.
01:55:15.000All right, well, no, I feel like you're...
01:55:16.000When we're talking about just, like, someone generalizing, people do this or people do that, I think people are absolutely capable of better, and I think they're wiser now than they were hundreds of years ago when they believed unbelievably ridiculous things.
01:55:31.000It's such a short amount of time with how far people have come.
01:55:35.000You know, like we were talking about earlier when we first brought up this Matt LeBlanc thing, putting in perspective the steps that have been made and then the progress that has been made.
01:55:47.000It's a strange time because on one hand you do have these really fascinating, really rational people that make some great points and you go, wow, maybe there's hope for us.
01:55:56.000But I think it's like what I said, the little building blocks, these Legos.
01:55:59.000You put a little tiny layer of Legos on with each little experience and each little, the way it gets interpreted by people.
01:56:08.000So our version of what reality is now, it keeps changing and growing and expanding and morphing as opposed to a 1930s movie depiction of reality.
01:56:19.000Of reality, which is really all we have to go on other than history books.
01:56:35.000Moving toward more of a truthful model, at least, for how the world works?
01:56:40.000I think it's so far away, but I think it'll happen quicker than you think, because I think with the exponential expansion of technology, it's going to accelerate all this learning and this understanding.
01:56:50.000I think one of the things that we're feeling really weird about when it comes to the internet is this invasion effect, where it's invading our lives, it's invading people's privacy, it's invading your time, people are getting addicted to checking websites and checking their phone.
01:57:08.000And when I look at that, like the other day I was at this place and all these people were on their phone and I just stopped and I was just looking around and all these people were walking and talking on their phone and holding their phone in front of them.
01:57:53.000They're like, oh my God, we've got to get back to being people.
01:57:55.000Well, there's some weird filter between being a person and then being a person communicating with people only through technology, only through electronics, that you're inseparable.
01:58:53.000Germ theory, remember, is a very new concept.
01:58:58.000Germ theory was don't drink that water because there are germs in there.
01:59:04.000When Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope and was checking his own saliva before he brushed his teeth, he'd look and say, there's all these germs in my mouth.
01:59:13.000And there are these little microbes that you can't see, but I created these lenses and you can see them.
01:59:20.000And then he would clean his mouth out and he'd spit into the slide and he'd say, ah, there are less of those moving things in my mouth.
01:59:29.000People like that were the beginning of the idea that there is something called bacteria.
01:59:35.000Now we're realizing there are good bacteria and bad bacteria.
01:59:40.000But all these sort of developments were there to push us beyond our biology.
01:59:46.000So we didn't have to die of infection anymore because we came up with this idea because Alexander Fleming came up with something called penicillin.
01:59:53.000He had a cold and his snot dripped into a Petri disc that had some mold in it and he realized that the mold had killed the bacteria that was in his nose and he went, wait a minute.
02:00:06.000I'm going to invent something called penicillin, and then antibiotics were born.
02:00:10.000So we have all these giant leaps, this idea that you can't see them but they're germs, so wash your hands.
02:00:17.000And it'll keep things like the bubonic plague maybe at bay, etc., etc.
02:00:21.000And so as we move in this direction of understanding, Of understanding about our own biology, understanding about our own psychology, understanding about, you know, sort of the dangers of certain ideologies and why we should embrace other ideologies.
02:00:38.000Like, for example, I don't know, everybody's of the same moral worth.
02:00:42.000Because something's weird and different, because they're gay, or they wear weird clothing.
02:00:47.000That doesn't mean they should be ostracized.
02:00:49.000In fact, that means they should be included.
02:00:50.000Well, what are we doing here with all this knowledge?
02:00:53.000What we're doing is we're saying, this is a better way to live.
02:00:56.000This is a more comfortable way to live.
02:00:58.000This will allow us to live for a longer period of time, in more comfort.
02:01:40.000You've got ice sheets melting at a rate, you know, I think what is the Los Angeles Basin use is one kilometer Of water a year and Greenland's ice sheet is melting at something like 240 kilometers.
02:01:56.000We're losing, you know, sea levels are going to rise.
02:01:58.000There's this other huge existential threat that's going to affect all of us, maybe push a half a billion people who live on coastlines inland to create a massive amount of, you know, ecological changes on a scale maybe we haven't seen.
02:02:15.000So it's just a very strange thing as we get closer to learning how to live together and learning a better life as we create this neural net where we're getting a better understanding of what it's like to be somebody else, even though their culture, their software is so different.
02:02:29.000It makes us more compassionate, I suppose, as a group of people, right?
02:03:08.000Well, it really does go back to fractals because one of the mindfuck of all mindfucks is that when you go into a person's body, the deeper you go, you hit their cells, you go into their cells, you find subatomic particles blinking out of existence and most of it is air anyway,
02:03:26.000So we don't know because we only have a limited amount of ability to measure these things.
02:03:32.000But it's entirely possible that inside every one of those events, subatomic events, where you're seeing particles blinking in and out of existence, you might be able to go deeper and deeper and deeper and find a whole new universe.
02:03:58.000That's the true nature of infinity, and that's why it's so impossible to grasp, because if there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in this universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, it's entirely possible that all of that could just be one subatomic particle that's in another cell,
02:04:14.000that's in some other person, in some other universe, and that goes on and on.
02:04:20.000I mean, that is the true nature of infinity, that it has no end.
02:04:23.000So it is entirely possible that what we look at as a structure, you look at the universe, like, wow, this amazing, constantly expanding thing, it's so beautiful, and there's so many stars, that it might be a part of a cell that's immeasurable to our little puny eyes and minds.
02:04:39.000Maybe the answer then is surrender, like Socrates and Newton, two of the arguably greatest minds that we, at least in the European tradition, Socrates says, I know more than everybody else because I'm very aware of the fact that I basically know nothing.
02:04:53.000After a lifetime of contemplation, and then Newton said, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, but he kind of likened himself to a kid skipping a rock along the surface of the ocean.
02:06:21.000That's what a lot of people like the Zen sort of that's where archery is and in the art of archery, you know, you learn everything through one thing through deep deep practice and deep immersion into one particular discipline because what it requires to be Expert,
02:06:36.000mastery, like mastery at something, will lead you to a deeper understanding of all things.
02:06:42.000That would be the sort of Zen, Asian mindset, which I've always loved.
02:06:48.000I tend to be interested in a fuckload of things, but there is something to be said about Josh Wayskin's book, The Art of Learning, where he said when he was a chess master, and then he got so into jiu-jitsu, he's Marcelo Garcia's first black belt, and he said, When I was studying jujitsu,
02:07:12.000But what my point was is that so many people's brains work so differently.
02:07:17.000And I wonder if that's all just a part of the mechanism as well, is that in order for this thing to keep moving, it can't be a bunch of farmers.
02:07:25.000What do you mean the way humans interact with each other and the innovation that comes out of that, the communication that comes out of that, the change and the influence that comes out of that.
02:07:35.000Even things as innocuous as a podcast between two dudes that sat down, one of them being a terrorist survivor yourself, maybe smoked a little marijuana and just rambled for two and a half hours.
02:07:46.000I heard the explosion and saw the smoke, yes.
02:07:48.000See, I think that all of the experiences that we all have, the good and the bad, they're influential in some sort of a strange way, and it all seems to be kind of balancing itself out, or at least pushing into a certain direction.
02:08:01.000And that direction seems to be the improvement of the civilization.
02:08:06.000Even the poorly thought out measures, like this woman writing this awful article about Matt LeBlanc, The idea behind it that she's going to get support is because she's saying that someone is doing something, even though it's not true, someone's doing something bad for society and culture.
02:08:22.000This person has a voice of influence and they should never work again because society and culture demands that you behave a certain way or we will take away your livelihood.
02:08:33.000Well, the only way that would work at all, other than you're just a mean person and you're trying to like take people's jobs away and make people poor, the only way it would work is if you're promoting something of merit for the civilization.
02:08:46.000So by saying someone is awful and terrible and this is why they should never work again, like you are in some sort of way, in your lame-minded attempt, you're trying to push culture forward.
02:09:03.000Even when we're looking at dealing with international crises, the reason why we're looking at those crises is we don't want them to blow up in our face.
02:09:10.000We want to push towards a better future.
02:09:17.000Principles and understanding and understanding what the goal is, philosophy, is very important.
02:09:36.000I had an acting teacher one time who said, if you're trying to play Hitler, you're trying to play Stalin.
02:09:40.000As an actor, you can't play him as a monster.
02:09:42.000You've got to play him as a guy who's trying to solve a problem.
02:09:44.000You know, in Hitler's mind, in his twisted mind, he was trying to solve a problem.
02:09:49.000That problem was Jews, gypsies, gays, or anybody who wasn't quote-unquote Aryan.
02:09:55.000And he was going to make, at the end of the day, he was going to make the world a better place.
02:10:01.000That's where I think, and this is where the real work comes in, that's where I think it's so important to be able to articulate for yourself and for others why certain things are better, certain ways of living, certain beliefs,
02:10:17.000certain practices, my God, cultural practices, certain philosophies, politically, for example.
02:10:23.000Are better for the greater good than is this over here.
02:10:27.000And that's where people like Michael Shermer and Sam Harris are doing great work.
02:10:31.000That's where those guys sit around and they articulate for us things that we might intuitively feel or they sway us in a better direction when our emotion takes us in a different direction.
02:10:44.000When our emotion says, let's vote for Trump because he's a guy who at least is quote-unquote getting shit done or he's taking the chessboard and throwing it in the air.
02:10:53.000And then the more sober thinkers who spend time thinking about this say, hey Bri, hey Joe, hey Steve over there, I know you feel this way.
02:11:03.000Let me steer you over here and here's why.
02:11:05.000Because we should be actually, it's not just about trying to solve the problem.
02:11:09.000Let's get to what we're really trying to get to and here's why.
02:11:12.000There's also a lot going on where, like we talked about before, people love to be on a team.
02:12:19.000Revolutions, no matter how small, the idea that you're going to take everything that sort of settled and was there for a reason that sort of became – there's an organic set point sometimes to societies.
02:12:32.000And when you come in and somebody just throws everything out with the bathwater, it doesn't historically have a good – it typically doesn't have a good response.
02:13:07.000A lot of what will define Obama's presidency, I think, and probably in a favorable light, is the fact that he was not willing to take action very often, which is just as important sometimes as taking action.
02:13:22.000Do you think it's possible he could free Edward Snowden?
02:13:26.000Do you think he could exonerate him before he leaves office?
02:13:29.000I'm gonna take heat for this, but personally, I hope he does pardon him.
02:13:54.000A lot of people that were doing something that's unconstitutional, that's not approved, and that the citizens of the United States do not want.
02:14:02.000But that's a good example of emotion, right?
02:14:04.000That's a good example of people that get very emotional at the idea that this guy betrayed our intelligence agency, our military, and things like that.
02:14:28.000And is that worth the influence that these these surveillance methods have on us?
02:14:36.000Like if you know that your phone is being watched and that all those dick pictures that you send are all being collected somewhere and then all those crazy texts you send about the government conspiracies are all being collected somewhere and And potentially could be used against you if you run for office somewhere.
02:14:51.000So if you decide to run for office and you say, you know what, I love New York City.
02:14:55.000It's time New York City had a mayor that people understand.
02:16:43.000The second part, too, the idea that surveillance shouldn't be...
02:16:52.000Well, the fact is that if the government now has control over what I say, and if the government is listening in without my consent, and I'm a private citizen who doesn't commit crimes, Then I'm sorry,
02:17:12.000They won because they changed the way I think, and they changed the way my governor governs me, and they have created anonymity and a power structure That can do whatever the fuck they want to its citizenry.
02:17:38.000It is what Russia does and a lot of other countries.
02:17:40.000So if you want a weaker country, ironically, it is not to give government agencies I don't care who they are.
02:17:49.000I don't care how well-intentioned they are, and a lot of them are well-intentioned.
02:17:52.000They do great work, and they keep us safe.
02:17:54.000You better have transparency, and you better have checks and balances, and you better be following the law, and you better have court orders, etc., etc.
02:18:31.000People having that kind of control and power over other people just as we talked about the beginning of the podcast that starts out about Greenpeace and then after a while becomes about having power I mean people love to have a position of Influence and power and they don't give it up use it.
02:18:47.000Yeah when if that is your life I mean that is what you do.
02:18:50.000I'm a cop I'm a police officer and I'm the law in this town and We love those movies.
02:20:13.000They found it, and then he deleted the Reddit post after they found it, because he had had a certain Reddit handle, and they could bring that Reddit handle, they could connect it back to him.
02:20:24.000Yeah, a lot of that, I suspect, is Hillary not wanting people to see that she was talking about how this was an Islamic fundamentalist movement and Benghazi stuff.
02:20:36.000The Obama administration has this strange edict where they don't really mention that it's Islamic terrorism.
02:22:14.000Everybody drops it and exonerates him.
02:22:16.000I'm not saying you should be punished forever for being careless, but I'm saying that's a significant indicator of someone having a fucked up personality.
02:22:23.000That all you want to do in these talks, you're talking about gender and yourself.
02:22:27.000You fucking killed somebody in traffic, man.
02:22:29.000You should be talking about that life-changing moment all the time.