In this week's episode, the boys discuss the recent events that have happened in the world of social media and politics, and the possibility that we are living in a computer simulation. They also talk about what it means to live in a "utopian" society, and whether or not technology has ever been designed to be a utopia, and why it's a bad thing. Also, Joe's ex-girlfriend is here, and he's not here to talk about it, but he's here to make jokes about it. If you're not a fan of Joe's music, you'll have to listen to this episode to get to the bottom of what's going on with him and his music career, because he's got a lot to say about it! This episode is brought to you by SeatGeek, the podcast where you can get the most authentic and authentic reviews of all things tech-related, and all things related to tech and culture in general. The podcast is produced and edited by Joe Pesci. Music by Joseph McDade. Art: Mackenzie Moore Editor: Will Witwer Music: Hayden Coplen Mixer: Matthew Boll Additional mixing and mastering: Ben Koppel Audio Engineer: Patrick McElroy Technical mixing: Matthew Kuchta Special thanks to: Alex Blumberg Jeff Perla Thanks to: and Mike McLennan for the production of the intro and outro music for this episode, and for the intro music, and thanks to , and , and outtro music, & outro, and by . and our sound design, and our thanks to the excellent sound design by , our editor, . . Thank you for the excellent editing, and thank you to our good friend . , thanks to our sponsor, the good vibes, & thank you , thanks , & , for the amazing to , the wonderful , thank you for your feedback, , so much , we really really appreciate you, and we really appreciate all of our support, we really hope you enjoy the feedback, and you really appreciate the feedback , and we appreciate all the support we can feel the feedback we get back and really appreciate it, thanks back and love you, thank you so much.
00:00:59.000I think having a reality star television...
00:01:03.000Host guy who's this you know media mogul become the president United States is so odd to people that I think It gives us this feeling of instability and that feeling of instability has like a ripple effect and it starts to fuck with all these other aspects of our reality and then these blurbs just start popping up and these weirdness Well,
00:01:26.000it's kind of like, rather than it being a proof that it's a simulation, this is the most reality we've had in a long time, right?
00:01:32.000Like, we've all been living in this, like, pseudo, this theater of stability.
00:01:36.000I'm sure you've talked about hyper-normalization on this podcast before, haven't you?
00:01:50.000It's like a three-hour-long British guy droning on to found footage on BBC. But his basic point is that society is unstable and has been for a very long time.
00:02:34.000Everyone in Russia knew it wasn't working, but it served them more to pretend that it was working.
00:02:41.000And so people got into this willful, sort of voluntary suspension of disbelief, this voluntary cognitive dissonance to say, oh no, everything's good, even though they go to the fucking store, there's no bread.
00:02:54.000Everybody was walking around as if it was real.
00:02:56.000So maybe when somebody like Trump gets elected, this fake realness of like, everything's good, America's awesome, what a wonderful place, a utopic society with all these freedoms, maybe that rips the seam, then Anthony Rumble Johnson retires from MMA. Or something.
00:04:03.000It was like really together, very relaxed, people were nice, there was no war, there was no crime, there was no rape, there was no stealing.
00:04:10.000The best example of that is hippie communes, right?
00:04:13.000They're specifically designed to create a mini utopia and they always fall apart with the guy at the top fucking everybody's wife.
00:04:39.000Yeah, and that's someone who's just really kind.
00:04:42.000Yeah, I mean, people always try to re-engineer society.
00:04:45.000I was reading something today about free housing, that free housing should be a universal right for people, that everyone should have free housing.
00:04:55.000I was reading this while I was taking a shit, so I didn't go into it too deeply.
00:05:00.000But immediately I was thinking, well, who's going to build the housing?
00:05:04.000Like, you can't have a universal right if some people just don't want to build a house, and they don't want to work, and they don't want to do anything, and they want somebody else to build a house for them.
00:05:12.000That's always going to be a possibility.
00:06:00.000We're getting way into the theoretics of taxation and civil responsibility, but the idea that we spend trillions of dollars on a protective military when we've lapped every other military so many times over, we could house every homeless person.
00:06:17.000I mean, there are countries where they don't have homeless people.
00:07:22.000I was thinking about you and the flirtation we were going to be doing.
00:07:27.000I was wondering, because you're bent, I've watched her stand-up since Trump got elected, and you and a lot of the guys at the store are, I always think of the store as like the libertarian intellectual epicenter of comedy, right?
00:07:39.000And then like if you go east, it becomes more and more like socialist, but further east you travel, right?
00:07:45.000And I guess, I don't know, the ha-ha is like the neocons, but at any rate...
00:07:51.000Your bent is like, everything's fucking fine.
00:07:54.000You're making a crisis that doesn't exist.
00:07:57.000And I was wondering, do you still think that?
00:09:48.000Because it was in India, in like Hindu temples, Okinawa, maybe that's Buddhism, Hinduism to Buddhism to karate, something like that.
00:09:56.000I don't know why it was in there, but I remember seeing it a long time ago in a store, like this Okinawan karate book, and there was just like these symbols.
00:11:17.000But isn't it a weird thing like that mustache like it's a there's a certain amount of space it can cover on your lip and it's okay As long as it goes far enough left and right we're like okay, you know I mean the Hitler's haircut and making had a huge comeback That's right and people get in trouble for that haircut.
00:11:35.000I mean I was on the first wave I would say I was in the not the first Reich of hipsters reclaiming that haircut Well, it's like a longer on the side, right?
00:11:45.000Longer on the side, sort of puffy on the top, like you got rockin' right now.
00:11:50.000I've changed since because it got too cool, and I truly am a hipster.
00:11:56.000But I used to have a bit about it, about the dilemma that a Jew has when he's telling a barber what he wants, and the quickest way to describe it is just to say Hitler.
00:12:06.000So you'd be like, yeah, I want something, you know, like a kind of old-timey, kind of like a military cut?
00:12:24.000My point was originally, not really that I had a point, but that when we're chipping away at this thing, like we know that politicians are doing an act.
00:12:32.000We know that they're when, you know, I've always mocked the way they communicate, like the way they give speeches, the long pauses and this very distinct pattern of behavior that's Completely alien to anything other than a political speech like the only way this country survives You know like that kind of yeah strange thing that they do But when we're always like chipping away at that we're always trying to like get to like be real We got get we got to find out what's real and then we get this guy Realer than anyone's ever been.
00:13:02.000Yeah, and we're like, well, fuck this.
00:13:09.000It makes us all feel calm and comfortable to be given a stable lie than to be shown the real truth of how fucked up and unstable everything is.
00:13:17.000I mean, the trailer has this text over just, like, stark footage, and it's so scary.
00:13:33.000And that just always, like, chills down my spine, because it's so true, and everybody knows it, and yet we're all engaged in this willful suspension of disbelief, like, no, no, no, everything's good.
00:14:02.000Like Washington, and it relies on a combustion engine, and then someone comes along and puts an electrical engine in there, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you saying?
00:14:30.000That's the weirdest thing to me about this election is not the president himself, but how many people online who you've never seen politically engaged are now in it like a sports fan.
00:15:30.000Geppettoing evil and you know bombing Iraq and you know Do you want a guy that makes you feel somewhat comfortable and stable who's actually the most evil?
00:15:38.000Like Satan fucker in the world or a guy that makes you feel the evil but isn't as bad Well just seemed way more transparent his motivations I mean Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton and then all sudden Halliburton wants to bomb Iraq you know he does rather he They get these billion dollar,
00:15:55.000multi-billion dollar, no-bid contracts to rebuild what they've bombed.
00:16:00.000And you're like, Jesus Christ, a little kid can connect the dots here.
00:17:11.000And then he flies in, private jet of course, flies into the south of France and his private jet climbs out and then they have to escort him to his gigantic multi hundred million dollar house that floats in the water.
00:17:25.000And you have to keep people from getting on your lawn.
00:17:27.000Essentially, the lawn becomes all the water around your multi-billion dollar house or multi-million dollar house.
00:17:33.000And it's just so that you can show your other billionaire friends, like, look what I got.
00:17:36.000Well, it's also probably fun as fuck to take a floating mansion out there on the south of France.
00:17:54.000There's something more to it than just the acquisition of money, because once you have a billion dollars, you can afford all the things that you need.
00:18:02.000You can't afford all the things, though.
00:18:04.000See, one of these mansions, like, if you look at a mansion, like a crazy...
00:20:18.000We don't know the exact cost of building such monstrosity, but various sources have listed the price of construction even as high as $1.5 billion.
00:20:25.000It's manned by 70 crew members and owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich.
00:20:31.000It contains its own private defense system designed to detect intruders and camera-wielding spectators.
00:21:01.000You can't just be, oh, I'm just politically agnostic.
00:21:05.000Yeah, you'll be straight up drinking arsenic at some point.
00:21:09.000Or they'll just take your company and lock you up.
00:21:11.000I mean, they've done that to a bunch of oligarchs.
00:21:13.000He just takes your company and puts you in the pokey.
00:21:16.000But I wonder, do you think that you can be, that there are, I mean, I guess like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett seem like nice people, but it seems like if you're a billionaire, you're probably like at least a cousin of evil.
00:21:45.000Buffett seems like a good guy, but then you get into what good guy means for a billionaire, right?
00:21:50.000Buffett's good guy is like, I will allow $800 million to go to AIDS in Africa, but I will not allow that same $800 million to go to famine in Somalia.
00:22:01.000So there's a kind of weird moral arbiter thing that happens, which happens to the president, too.
00:22:06.000It's like when people point out that Obama bombed people with drones, I'm a...
00:22:11.000I was pretty disgusted by a lot of things Obama did, but it's like that is part of the morality of being a world leader, is you have to be comfortable with a morality that includes killing innocent people.
00:22:22.000And that's why I would never want to be the leader of anything.
00:24:20.000We're so intelligent that we've created a stratified alpha pyramid that is 300 million big with a parliamentary system and a constitution, but it's still just a bunch of apes running around 2001-ing.
00:24:33.000I mean even like go back to what we're talking about like Bill Gates who's this incredibly What he's done charitably is amazing.
00:24:43.000He does a lot of great stuff with his money.
00:24:46.000I mean, their foundation is really, really beneficial to a lot of people, but everybody knows him as the King Ape of Microsoft.
00:24:55.000I mean, that's how these businesses work.
00:24:58.000Tim Cook, that's the King Ape of Apple.
00:25:01.000You know, we always have a King Ape or a Queen Ape.
00:25:19.000It's a story of something where people wanted something to be true, so they kind of said, yes, we finally have it, and they didn't do any investigating on it until finally somebody actually did.
00:25:33.000I think it might have been the Wall Street Journal that took it down, but...
00:25:37.000It was this woman, Elizabeth something or another.
00:25:39.000She founded this company called Theranos.
00:26:18.000And she was worth, at one point in time, $34 billion because of what this company was assessed as being valued at, which she could have been able to do.
00:26:29.000And it turned out that they started looking into it, and then there was a whistleblower from the company that was saying that she was ignoring all the negatives and concentrating on the positives in these people.
00:26:39.000You know untold tens of thousands and even I think maybe even a million people were put it how many people to find out how many people were tested by this shit But they were all put at risk Because it's like hugely ineffective, like off by like 40-50% negatives and positives and just wasn't right.
00:26:58.000This idea that she was going to bypass this traditional system and they were putting them in like Walgreens and stuff like that and allowing people to get tested and screened for all these diseases and it really wasn't effective.
00:27:09.000She was one of the very rare king, queen chimps, where the matriarchal society was her business, and it just didn't work.
00:27:17.000You're conflating the collapse of the business?
00:27:19.000No, I'm just saying she was the only one that I could think of.
00:27:22.000Well, there have been very effective female world leaders, though.
00:28:54.000Do you really think it's just some ape shit?
00:28:56.000Well, I think there's definitely some women that have more masculine characteristics and enjoy the competition of the boardroom and that kind of stuff more than some women do.
00:29:35.000Well, what it means is that there are systems in place, and maybe there are biological systems, which is what's suggesting it's a primate thing, and maybe there are societal systems.
00:29:44.000Probably the truth is that they're both.
00:29:46.000And I think that a person that really believes in, like, feminism and patriarchy would say that societal systems are the bigger issue.
00:29:55.000But even you can believe in a patriarchy that's biological, but just that there's a barrier to entry that starts in kindergarten.
00:30:05.000In order for a woman to become a CEO, they have to jump every hoop higher than the male that is on the same path.
00:30:14.000Because there are systems, structural systems in place that want to smack that woman down towards like a more, what is perceived of, oh no, do something a little bit more feminine.
00:30:25.000And so they, in order to be, it's this idea that is true with all oppressed people, that in order to be average, you have to be great.
00:30:32.000And I saw that directly with like my mother, who's deaf.
00:30:36.000And in order, I just, the deaf community is so fascinating and weird, but like in order to be what my mother is, which is like, she has a master's degree and she's college educated, you have to try 20 times as hard as an average person that wants to get a master's degree because there's so much insane barrier to entry from day one,
00:30:56.000So I think that's the patriarchy, I don't think is really up for debate.
00:31:00.000I mean, even if you believe just in a biological imperative, men are in charge, and therefore they keep women from getting to positions of being in charge.
00:31:08.000So in order to get up there, in order to be a CEO, you have to be more aggressive, more powerful, more Steve Jobs-y.
00:31:54.000But I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, like, if you look at a woman and say, oh, well, they are biologically predisposed to nurture, then you would say, oh, okay, then it would make sense that all of the great doctors of history would have been women, or it would have been dominated in the same way nursing has.
00:32:10.000Well, not necessarily, because a lot of the great doctors in history, you're talking a lot about science.
00:32:14.000You're talking about the ability to recognize issues before anyone else does and try to, like, formulate some sort of a solution to figure out some biological issue.
00:32:25.000A lot of that is science, and obviously science has been dominated by men for the longest time.
00:33:50.000Because we know, you know, if you're a real progressive, if you're a real caring person, it's like, okay, you're eating murdered animals?
00:33:56.000I mean, I don't think that I am as ardent a meat-eating supporter as you are, but I also am not a...
00:34:06.000There is a moral imperative not to eat meat.
00:34:08.000I fall somewhere in the middle, which is, I mean, I think every thinking person falls in the middle, which is meat probably isn't an obviously immoral thing to eat because we want it.
00:36:05.000It's not you shooting an elk with a fucking bow and arrow.
00:36:09.000It's McDonald's, like, having, like, you know, Cowswitz, you know, them stacked up and, like, they're eating their own shit and we're all, like, just consuming it at the detriment of the global greenhouse gases.
00:36:48.000When you talk about, I don't know if I want to say this on your podcast, but when you talk about environmental effects of meat, it feels the same as when you bring up the settlements in Israel.
00:36:59.000You can have all these great intellectual discussions on, well, actually, well, and then you bring up the environmental, and you just go, I can't defend that.
00:37:21.000We started this whole thing off with trying to figure out why women...
00:37:26.000Gravitate towards certain things and whether or not they'll be suppressed and this is a subject It's almost like racism where if you're not a black person and you start talking about black lives matter people go hey fuckhead You either be ultra supportive or shut the fuck up now you either be an ally or you know get out of the way I hear that there is yeah I hear that and that's kind of representative I think of the way a lot of women feel like the struggle is so pervasive and it's so much a part of their lives and they don't get supported in it and And it's so frustrating,
00:37:54.000especially a woman that is trying to climb the corporate ladder.
00:37:57.000Like, I have a good friend who's a big-time executive.
00:37:59.000She was at Google, and now she's at another one of those big tech companies.
00:38:03.000And she's super, super intelligent, super ambitious, too.
00:38:07.000And she's one of those rare women that, well, her mom's like that, too, so it's kind of interesting.
00:38:13.000It's interesting when you meet her mom, who's this older, super sharp lady.
00:38:16.000But she's just always been like the type of person that enjoys achieving.
00:39:00.000By the way, it's all an intellectual exercise because there's no way that you could strip away all the thousands of years of programming and systemic societal oppression to figure out, oh, if we're on an...
00:39:11.000I always think about, like, if I took 20 kids...
00:39:15.000I used to think about this in terms of gender dysphoria and transgender ideas.
00:39:42.000There is an intersection between meat-eating...
00:39:44.000And systemic feminism, which is really like human beings are this weird concoction of like conscious, like aware, awake, woke boys and girls and little primate...
00:39:59.000Kill the alpha, fuck the woman monkeys.
00:40:04.000And so we're trying to grapple with that constantly.
00:40:08.000Inherent in the notion that you should morally not eat meat is the idea that you are morally superior to an animal that can't discern between the moral correctness of eating meat and...
00:40:34.000There's a bunch of stuff that grows, and there's a bunch of dumb stuff that eats the stuff that grows, and then there's a bunch of mean stuff that eats the dumb stuff.
00:41:25.000It's a bunch of amino acids and there's a lot of vitamins in it.
00:41:28.000And as long as you're not eating too much of anything...
00:41:31.000It's been proven that there's a lot of benefits to eating meat.
00:41:34.000First of all, B12, which really doesn't even exist in a vegan diet unless you're taking in weird algaes or bugs, if some people are willing to eat bugs.
00:41:49.000If you wanted to eat something that's really simple and stupid, if your issue is awareness or if your issue is whether something's sentient, Eat mollusks.
00:42:01.000They're some of the dumbest fucking things on the planet.
00:43:03.000I think they communicate with each other in a way that we don't understand.
00:43:06.000And this is one of the reasons I think this.
00:43:07.000They've done these studies where they played the sound of caterpillars munching on leaves next to an acacia tree, and it changed the way the tree tastes.
00:43:23.000There's certain trees that when an animal's chewing them, the acacia bush is a famous one, when an animal's chewing them upwind, so like something's chewing it and then scent comes downwind to them, they change their flavor profile and become like toxic tasting so that animals will actually starve to death rather than eat them.
00:43:43.000Oh, they change so that the caterpillar won't eat them?
00:45:26.000And that's how they get the nutrients back in the soil.
00:45:28.000There was an interesting article that I tweeted about a year back that everybody got so mad that it's actually impossible to be a vegetarian.
00:45:38.000And this is by someone who is a vegan who is saying this.
00:46:57.000Yeah, and worst case scenario is the scenario.
00:47:00.000Yeah, and I think what also would happen is, these societies that we enjoy, these civilizations like New York City, LA, they got too big before we engineered them.
00:47:12.000Before, rather, we engineered, like, engineered's the wrong word, before we really managed...
00:47:19.000The resources that you need to allocate to in order to feed 20, what do we have?
00:47:24.00025 million people in the greater Los Angeles area?
00:47:36.000So they basically, it all goes in the same place.
00:47:40.000I mean, it all goes to plants, which is, I mean, treatment plants, not plants that feel and make themselves taste bitter, but treatment plants.
00:47:46.000So every shitty, like, you know, Lower East Side hipster and Chinatown Chinese person and, like, Upper East Side, you know, Jew, it all, their little squiggly shits all go to, like, treatment plants.
00:47:57.000Where they treat it and then they're left over with this like pile of fucking, you know, big old New York City shit.
00:48:02.000And they're like, what do we do with this shit?
00:50:41.000Well, I was very fortunate that my mom, although we're on welfare, she worked and got to a point where she didn't have to be on welfare anymore, and then she got off of it.
00:50:59.000And my thing has always been, when it comes to welfare, wouldn't you rather allow a person to take advantage of the system so that some percentage of those people can raise through the ranks and get off of welfare and better themselves and better their lives?
00:51:14.000Wouldn't you rather have that system in place than the system that says, sorry, we're worried about people taking advantage of the system so everybody, including the good people, can go fuck themselves?
00:51:26.000And, you know, I think with my mom's situation, it was also important to send a message that it gives a woman an option to get away from an abusive man.
00:51:42.000They were boyfriend and girlfriend and he was a student and they, you know, we got on welfare and we ate You know, we drank powdered milk and the whole deal.
00:52:26.000I mean, I just, I would rather help people that need the help and allow someone to juke the system than I would live in a stark society that says, I'm sorry, we don't help people here because we're worried that somebody might steal.
00:52:39.000And you know, there's a real issue that's coming up right now with artificial intelligence and automation that's going to remove millions and millions of jobs just by virtue of automated cars.
00:52:56.000Either universal basic income will come and take the place of the income that was stripped away, not because anybody did anything wrong, but because they did everything right and the eventual automated Reality is that there aren't jobs for people.
00:53:10.000There's a job for you and me, but there's not a job for a skilled journeyman worker because there's a fucking machine that can work 24 hours a day.
00:54:24.000It's just about making a lot of people that he knows money and allowing a bunch of people that have lost money that have probably in some way or shape or form contributed to him.
00:54:53.000Yeah, I just think there's something wrong with him, no doubt about that.
00:54:56.000For sure there's something wrong with him.
00:54:58.000Don't you think that in order for someone to put their name up on everything like that, like I was in New York this past weekend, and we drove by this like Trump Rehabilitation Center.
00:55:47.000We'll play it for us, and we'll play the volume.
00:55:50.000Whenever we play a video, the real issue with us seems to be animal attack videos, because those get so many hits that somebody owns them and claims them, and then you get pulled off of Facebook, pulled off of YouTube, we get flagged.
00:56:37.000Trump Steaks are by far the best-tasting, most flavorful beef you've ever had, truly in a league of their own.
00:56:43.000Trump's steaks are five-star gourmet, quality that belong in a very, very select category of restaurant, and are certified Angus beef prime.
00:58:55.000It was this amazing documentary about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and it shows you exactly who they are and why they are the way that they are.
00:59:03.000Hillary Clinton, who cares at this point?
00:59:08.000Basically, he was raised with a father that was extremely harsh, not loving at all.
00:59:12.000And he found this father figure, this guy Ray Cohn, who was this extremely aggressive lawyer in New York, who was big in the McCarthy era.
00:59:23.000He was a big prosecutor in the McCarthy communism trials.
00:59:26.000And Cohn's whole strategy and philosophy was when someone hits you, you hit them back on a level that's so disproportionately out of control that they forget about the thing that you are even talking about.
00:59:38.000So the example of how he got sued for racial discrimination.
00:59:42.000He's getting sued for racial discrimination.
01:00:08.000Basically, they were setting up systems where black people and Latinos wouldn't be allowed into Trump housing through weird coded language or something like that.
01:00:22.000Well, he's definitely a very litigious guy.
01:01:06.000The other argument would be, he's about to become the president, so a person who he's violated, who was willing to let it go when he was just some weird guy selling steaks for the Sharper Image, is now like, I'm not going to let this monster become the president.
01:01:39.000But in this case, the Gloria Allred thing, like, you know, Gloria Allred, like, if I was a woman, and something was going down like that, or I wanted to get paid, That's who I'd go to.
01:02:28.000Like, it costs so much money for you to go to trial and defend yourself.
01:02:32.000Even if you felt like you did nothing wrong, which in this case, you know, I probably wouldn't have even made that claim.
01:02:38.000I mean, the thing about writing a memoir is it's all, like, these, like, wisps of memory, you know, and you're just, like, grabbing at stuff and throwing it in and, like...
01:02:45.000It's almost like you have to write the first one in order to realize, oh, here are the responsible ways to do this.
01:02:49.000You can't just grab memories thinking that all of your memories belong to you because other people are in them.
01:03:10.000Anybody that's been sued is realizing the reality that you could fight for your honor and it'll cost you double the amount for you to just say, here's some money.
01:03:18.000I know a bunch of people that have been sued and settled when they were absolutely 100% innocent.
01:03:23.000And they actually passed a rule at the UFC where you're not allowed to take pictures choking people because of it.
01:03:29.000Because people would ask, like, hey, Chuck Liddell, come choke me.
01:03:32.000And I would take a picture, you put me in a rear naked choke.
01:03:34.000Well, both Chuck Liddell and Matt Hughes were sued.
01:03:37.000Chuck Liddell wound up settling, and he absolutely didn't do anything wrong, but this guy had a picture of him getting choked, and he says, look, this guy hurt me.
01:04:57.000And that was a Republican talking point.
01:04:59.000It's like we have to start with tort reform, tort reform.
01:05:01.000And then all of a sudden, they were all about these meaningless and frivolous lawsuits.
01:05:06.000That's a big talking point in the GOP. And all of a sudden, now Trump is like the most suingest motherfucker that's ever, ever touched anything.
01:05:12.000Would you hear him talk about it during the run for president?
01:05:17.000He was talking about people writing things about you that aren't true.
01:06:37.000Well, so Captain Crunch was one of the first phone freak hackers, and the thing that he did is he found a whistle in a Captain Crunch box, and he found that it had the tonality that if you play it into the phone, like...
01:06:48.000Whatever the tones that the phone was hearing were similar to the dial tones that would connect people to long distance.
01:07:04.000When I was a big raver when I was a kid I was like big time like I spent like most of my teenage years in San Francisco raves and I started going on 16 and Captain Crunch was like 70 and he was at every rave I mean every single rave and he was 70 he was old and it was like funny because he was just doing ecstasy and partying big time no teeth in front of the speakers like speaker freak like you now he was a phone freak then he became a speaker freak So he's blowing his ears out.
01:07:33.000Just like sitting there, full beard, like no teeth, little shorts.
01:07:37.000And I was like 16 and he- There he is.
01:09:20.000I was looking through this section, this horror section of this library, and this guy came up to me and he said, do you like books about monsters?
01:09:59.000I was in a parking lot, actually, in the car, and my grandma went in to go shopping with my brother, and this dude came to the window and was like, do you want to come with me?
01:11:32.000I remember I was a kid, and we were always exploring places to go smoke weed.
01:11:40.000I was like, when you're young, maybe it's different now, now that weed's legal, but when you're young and weed was illegal, it was like you always were looking for these cubbies to smoke weed in.
01:11:49.000And so you'll appreciate this as a Bay Area guy.
01:11:52.000Somebody found this chain link area that you could get over and get onto the BART tracks where you would go.
01:12:01.000I've been in the BART tracks before because I was a graffiti writer when I was a kid.
01:12:05.000But this was like a very narrow, like with just a foot long walkway.
01:12:10.000And somebody said that there was like a room inside of the tunnel that was between Oakland and Contra Costa County.
01:12:17.000That there was this little, I don't know how they knew that, but like a little antechamber.
01:12:20.000We were always like looking for antechambers too.
01:12:22.000Like there was another one that was like a sewer tunnel in Oakland in Rockridge that I could show somebody where it is right now.
01:12:28.000But it's basically you go down and we would bring flashlights and hairspray and lighters so that we could like torch spiders if we saw them.
01:12:34.000And there was a little antechamber there too.
01:13:15.000It was like a one-person walkway to get to the room in the middle of the tunnel.
01:13:19.000Not the sewer tunnel, but now the BART train tunnel.
01:13:22.000And we're on this little one-foot walkway, and...
01:13:27.000I was at the back of the line and we were walking toward the room and of course we would get into the tunnel and we could feel all of a sudden like the air got hot and sucked out of the tunnel and it was like uh oh and you could hear that little like beep [...
01:13:44.000and it was like, it was so close to us, I can't, my memory, I don't know if my memory is accurate, but my memory is that it was like, I mean, as close as this mic is to me, it's just like, foof, [...
01:14:04.000I remember they pulled the, like, the train stopped in the tunnel.
01:14:12.000Maybe that's not an accurate memory, but I feel like, yes, the train stopped and I know that...
01:14:18.000The people at the front of the line screamed, turn around, and like, run.
01:14:23.000But now, all of a sudden, fat Moshe, young fat Moshe, YFM, is at the front of the line, right?
01:14:29.000And it's like a sort of stand-by-me situation, because I'm like, chubby-ass, like, and there's all this wind coming at me, because the wind has all been pushed by the train.
01:14:37.000So I'm like trying to run from the train conductor, and they're screaming, all my friends, like, run, run, run, you fat motherfucker, run!
01:14:45.000It was one of the worst, scariest, craziest experiences.
01:14:49.000And then the train finally pulled off, and we hopped back over, like shaking.
01:15:17.000I've done that not on a train, but on the buses, the AC Transit buses, there was a trick where you could grab the...
01:15:24.000There used to be like a handle on the back of the bus and you put your feet on the bumper and basically ride it like you were an illegal immigrant or something.
01:15:33.000We would just do that for fun from once if you want to take like one stop or whatever it was so scary So it was so stupid.
01:15:39.000It's like the risk of like falling off of that thing was so dumb You were on top of it.
01:15:45.000Oh, just holding on just like yeah Yeah, it's so crazy standing on something and holding on to something but it wasn't a good grip It wasn't you know, and if there was anything that really bumped you not that it would on a train But if it did most likely I would have let go I mean It was fun though.
01:18:57.000But you're sober because of other things?
01:19:00.000No, you know, in reality, I think we talked about this last time, but in reality, it's like, now that I look back, you know, especially writing that book, the book covers all this stuff, all these like wayward youth stories, all these insane, it's called Casher in the Rye, in case anybody wants it.
01:19:14.000But it's like, once I wrote that book, I realized I was a wild kid, just like you, or maybe wilder than when you were really young, but I was a wild kid with a lot of behavioral issues, a lot of mental health stuff going on, not like...
01:19:30.000Not, like, chronic and systemic, but, like, circumstantial, you know?
01:19:35.000And I spent a lot of time thinking of myself as, like, an alcoholic, and I don't know if I even believe that that...
01:19:43.000I don't even know if I believe in that label any longer, but...
01:19:46.000You don't believe in the label alcohol?
01:22:16.000Well, I've had them, but I had them...
01:22:17.000I always say, like, the funny part about taking mind-expanding drugs when you're 12 years old is that there's very little mind upon which to expand, you know?
01:22:25.000You're, like, doing these things that are, like, Ram Dass-esque, like, you know, deep diving into the fractal pool of existential reality, and there's nothing there.
01:23:08.000There's a lot of people that I know that they just go into deep, paranoid fits if they get involved with marijuana in any way, shape, or form.
01:23:39.000I think it's beneficial because I think what you're paranoid of When you're paranoid, unless you're thinking the government's spying on you.
01:23:46.000Like, I know a buddy who was a big-time pothead, and he started thinking that the government was waiting outside of his house with a car, and they were watching him constantly everywhere he went.
01:23:55.000And as soon as he left, they would come out of the bushes.
01:24:04.000Well, that's one of the weird parts of drugs is that, and I don't think that I have this, you obviously don't, but one of the weird things about drugs is if you have latent mental illness and you get into your brain and you pour a chemical on it, it'll unlaten itself, you know?
01:24:18.000The dragon will uncoil and make itself known.
01:24:21.000I don't think that's, I'm not worried about that for me, but I think that is interesting.
01:24:24.000I've seen that a lot, like a dude's like 25 and it's like, oh, I think I'll try, start trying psychedelics or weed and It just goes in there and it's like, oh, you didn't know you had that.
01:24:33.000Not that they wouldn't have had that experience anyway, but it's definitely an incidental onset of mental illness.
01:24:39.000Yeah, there was a study they did about the correlation between marijuana and schizophrenia because a lot of people have tried to connect marijuana schizophrenia and what they found is essentially the numbers are stable.
01:26:13.000It just shows you how much of you is just brain chemistry and how lucky you are.
01:26:20.000In the same way you're lucky not to get kidnapped by a monster at the library, you're also lucky that the monster wasn't living inside your brain.
01:26:40.000I was talking to Michael Irvin once, the football player, and he was describing to me what happens to someone's brain when they're in the womb when the mother experiences violence.
01:26:50.000The mother experiences any sort of violence or really bad neighborhoods or around traumatic situations that it It elevates the fight or flight response in the baby.
01:27:01.000So kids come out of the womb like predetermined to overreact to violent situations or dangerous situations.
01:27:35.000I mean, maybe that's a link to our earlier conversation about the patriarchy.
01:27:41.000I mean, if you can pass on incidental trauma to a child because the mom is experiencing violence, if a woman is living in the infrastructural...
01:27:52.0002,700,000 layers deep of infrastructural oppression, then it stands to figure that a female child is born with a little bit of that trauma, too, and a little bit of DNA-based, like, maybe I won't fight that fight,
01:28:08.000or maybe I won't Maybe I won't be a loud broad or maybe I won't, you know, argue because that's not feminine or, you know what I'm saying?
01:28:16.000And so all of that in, you know, trauma, intergenerational trauma, which has been studied and proven, right, is maybe in every woman that you've ever met.
01:28:28.000I mean, I think all of us have some form of programming.
01:28:31.000I mean, have you ever been around a kid who has an overly oppressive dad, you know, and they're handicapped by it.
01:28:38.000Literally, like, whether it's a boy or a girl, their life is affected by this overbearing person who's constantly engaging in manipulation and control of their reality.
01:29:02.000It seems so stoppable because it's so selfish and so like...
01:29:06.000Obviously the wrong thing to do and you're over here doing the right thing with such ease.
01:29:11.000And what having my brother's mental illness, my younger brother, it made me realize is like you actually have the same thought when there's a mentally ill person.
01:29:19.000It's just with the next reality is like, oh, he really can't.
01:31:58.000Well, shitposting, you know, these are the people that they think of themselves as the people that memed Trump into the White House, right?
01:32:04.000They're kind of like, they're almost like the people that think that the right is the new punk rock.
01:32:19.000So they, you know, they're the people that, like, when I get an anti-Semitic post lobbed at me with, like, a big old nose and, like, a, hey Jew, oy vey, shut him down.
01:32:27.000Like, the, I can't express to you how, like, water off my back that, like, it couldn't bother me less.
01:33:07.000It started in 4chan and it bubbled out to anonymous as an outcropping of the 4chan.
01:33:15.000I wouldn't call them shitposters because they have at least kind of a cogent philosophy.
01:33:20.000Anyway, the shitposters are the people that when you tweet something sincere about how angry you are about Trump, all of a sudden you see 90 cartoons of the most offensive thing that you could possibly imagine.
01:33:32.000You're like, why are they attacking me?
01:33:34.000And it's because they're like looking for people, little whiny bitches like you.
01:33:39.000You know, they're like, oh, we found a little whiny bitch.
01:34:39.000Collateral damage of the digital age, you know, it's just like everybody's indecent now Somehow people think that being indecent is positive and and that if somebody disagrees with you politically Like it's fun and okay to just try to destroy that person emotionally.
01:34:52.000Well, you're not really Communicating with them in front of you.
01:34:55.000Yeah, exactly That that does a huge aspect of being a person is looking at someone while you communicate with you remove that there's consequences to that well Well, yeah, everything, a big problem is othering, and the internet has made othering so simple and easy, you know?
01:35:10.000It's like, I just was watching this documentary, and they were talking about, it was this really good documentary, actually, about, I forget the name of it, but it was about this guy who, he's a black dude that confronts KKK members, like, one-on-one, you know?
01:35:43.000This is a super intense moment in the film, because the whole time you're with the guy, he's so charismatic and brilliant and interesting, and you're like, wow, this guy's...
01:35:57.000So there's a moment in the documentary where the whole time you're in there going, like, this guy's righteous and awesome and cool and de-hooding these people.
01:36:03.000And then he goes and speaks with these Black Lives Matter activists who are...
01:36:15.000He's interesting, but then he goes and he talks to these Black Lives Matter activists, and they're so angry with him.
01:36:22.000They're so not into what he's doing, because they're basically like, we're in the streets fighting for black America, and here you are spending your entire life talking to these racists, and you've only...
01:36:40.000What's even the point of what you're doing?
01:36:42.000But his point is like, I'm making micro-victories.
01:36:46.000I'm converting people one person at a time.
01:36:49.000But there's a bigger conversation, which is really interesting, which is that the person that is closest to you ideologically is more offensive to you when they don't...
01:37:02.000Do what you want them to than the person that's furthest away.
01:37:05.000In other words, when a person calls me Jew online, some dude in the Philippines with like an anime avatar and he puts like anti-semitic stuff, I give a fuck about that.
01:37:16.000But when a person who like seems like they should get it Who seems like they should know better, says some weird anti-Semitic shit or talks about how Kushner is connected to the global Zionism.
01:37:40.000At any rate, there's a story in there where he talks about talking to this person who's like, He lived in an all-white town except one of the Klansmen that was de-hooded talks about he lived in this all-white town and he was raised very racist and that black people were the worst and There was one black family like the Johnson's or whatever and his father told him all black people are the worst They're monkeys.
01:38:02.000They're the worst except the Johnson's the Johnson's are good They're good people and he had this realization that's like tickle in his brain of like Wait, my father hates all the black people except the black family that he's met?
01:38:15.000Like, all black people are bad except the one group that he's actually met?
01:38:20.000And that is like the phenomenon of othering, right?
01:38:34.000Anyway, I think othering is like one of the big problems that we have.
01:38:38.000Well, it's also, I think, what's going on with Black Lives Matter, one of the things that's going on is that they're in the middle of the battle, right?
01:38:44.000So if you're in the middle of the battle, every day you wake up prime for battle.
01:38:47.000You're getting online, you're activating your membership, you're, you know...
01:40:05.000The thing that I learned about cultural appropriation, because for me, I roll my eyes so deeply at the concept of cultural appropriation.
01:40:13.000It's like, oh, so I shouldn't eat burritos anymore?
01:40:16.000Also, I'm always really tickled with the idea of...
01:40:20.000The person saying, oh, you shouldn't wear that tribal gear.
01:40:23.000And then it's like, go to the third world country where the market is and tell the impoverished merchant, oh, I'm sorry, I can't buy this bit of silk from you because it's racist for me to wear it.
01:40:35.000That person's like, please, please buy it and wear it.
01:40:44.000Except then you start to think like...
01:40:47.000Upon reading it, it's like, oh, the thing is, it's not incidental, it's emotional.
01:40:51.000It's like deeper than just like trying to parse out the logic and go, oh, well, I found an example where your thing falls apart.
01:41:00.000It's like, there's an emotional reaction, like when somebody affects, dreads up their hair, even though you can say, but people have been dreading their hair forever.
01:41:32.000Yeah, but why is that okay just because of the word culture?
01:41:34.000Because if that's the case with someone else wearing something that you might find a failure, like what if you're a person that's extremely conservative when it comes to dress and you see a woman in a short skirt and you have pain, should that impose upon that woman's ability to wear that skirt?
01:42:05.000No one is really saying, except the most emotionally kind of inferior, like the person that doesn't have the language to express what they're really saying, almost no one that I read when I was reading these real intellectuals and their concepts of cultural appropriation is saying white people should stop doing this stuff altogether.
01:42:24.000Almost no one, I didn't find one left-wing, woke article that said white people should stop adopting the culture of other, of people of color, right?
01:42:35.000I read a lot of right-wing think pieces that were saying, this is absurd.
01:42:39.000Why are you telling us to stop adopting these cultures?
01:42:42.000Isn't all culture a melting pot and all culture borrowing?
01:42:44.000But not once did I read somebody saying, white people stop this altogether.
01:42:50.000So mostly, and I hope I can articulate this well, because I'm not the best advocate for this position, because like I said, it's one that I struggle with.
01:43:20.000I wish I could find his name, actually, because he deserves it, because he's a really deep thinker about this stuff, was talking about was that we have racism.
01:43:28.000Racism is a huge word that describes everything from a white person, like a Hugging their purse closer to their chest when a black person walks by.
01:44:31.000And I think most of the articles in the stuff that I read about that specific instance are just like basically saying that woman's a lunatic.
01:44:39.000Well, I've heard people, though, enforce it.
01:44:40.000And I know someone who was mad at their friend, is a black girl, was mad at her friend who was a white girl, who had braids.
01:44:58.000You know, there's cornrows on Roman coins, actually, right?
01:45:00.000I mean, it's a crazy thing to call that cultural appropriation, but also saying that a white person shouldn't wear that, that's fucking crazy.
01:45:09.000Because what about a black guy wearing a polo shirt?
01:45:11.000Well, okay, so, okay, there's a good example, right?
01:45:16.000And again, I'm not, like I said, I'm not the greatest advocate for this position.
01:45:19.000I just read so much that made me empathize with the position.
01:45:23.000Not necessarily agree with it, but empathize with where it's coming from.
01:45:25.000So the polo, for example, when you see you as a white dude or me as a white dude, when I see somebody wearing a polo, it's just a polo.
01:45:36.000There's no connection to systemic racism or Elvis Presley stealing the cream of the intellectual musical crop and then never giving back to that community or Or Iggy Azalea coming and adopting a black accent and then just, like, taking all the money and running.
01:45:50.000You know, it has no connection to deeper root systems like these trees have that communicate with each other, like, taste bitter, right?
01:46:00.000And that's why the counterargument doesn't make sense because it's like nobody's upset when they see a black dude in a polo shirt.
01:46:07.000I mean, maybe some weird racist guy is, but mostly not.
01:46:11.000On the other hand, when a person sees a white person affecting a deep part of black culture without any of the baggage that is associated with it, like for example, dreads, right?
01:46:24.000One of the arguments I read a lot is that white people wearing braids and dreads, you get rewarded for it.
01:46:33.000And meanwhile, black women are having a difficult time getting a job because they have black hair, or black people are getting fired from jobs because they have dreads, right?
01:46:41.000So there's these consequences that black people experience because of black shit that white people that are adopting it don't necessarily experience.
01:47:08.000In the U.S. military, there was just a new set of acceptable hairstyles, and almost every one of the unacceptable hairstyles that they put into place was basically black...
01:48:23.000All human interaction should have some base in logic if you're going to communicate with things.
01:48:27.000I don't agree because emotions aren't about logic.
01:48:29.000Right, but should anybody be subject to your own emotions?
01:48:32.000Like, you change your behavior, your dress.
01:48:35.000If you're a person who's completely not racist, but you enjoy the way your hair looks if it's in braids, Should you take into consideration all the people that you're going to run into and they're going to be upset at you over braids even though they're ignorant about the history of braids and cornrows?
01:48:49.000Should you alter or change your behavior?
01:48:51.000Should you accept the fact that you're just going to have a certain amount of cultural appropriation?
01:49:02.000I mean, if you're going to accept the fact there's some sort of an emotional attachment to these things, and that's where the argument comes from, shouldn't you decide or at least contemplate whether or not that emotion is valid?
01:49:13.000Seems to me there's real examples of racism and horrible things.
01:49:17.000Like if you want to, you know, make your eyes squinty and look like a Japanese character from a Bugs Bunny cartoon in, you know, 1940, and then you want to go to a party and people think you're a racist, you should be aware that you're presenting an image that is inherently racist.
01:49:35.000Like that's something that's kind of fucked up and you should be considerate about the way people's emotions are going to fire up looking at your image.
01:49:50.000First of all, I'm not advocating anything.
01:49:52.000I'm just saying I've delved into this topic enough that I've started to understand where people are coming from when they get activated by this stuff.
01:50:01.000I understand too, but I think a big part of it is reinforcement in the community that that's acceptable to be upset at people for cornrows or braids.
01:52:17.000It's like, it's really about like power dynamics.
01:52:19.000It's not really about the appropriation incident, although on some level maybe it is.
01:52:23.000It's really about the power dynamic underneath it.
01:52:25.000Well, I think one of the things that we're seeing in universities in particular is people that are exercising the ability to affect change even if it doesn't make sense.
01:52:35.000Because they have the ability to point out something that they think is incorrect or is unjust and then they attack it and go after it and they see results.
01:52:45.000And by seeing those results, it's almost in a lot of ways kind of attached to the same idea like if you're worth X amount of dollars, why do you still chase money?
01:52:54.000Because you're trying to get the thrill of the accomplishment.
01:52:58.000And there's a certain amount of game going on trying to get that white kid that you don't even know to cut off his dreads.
01:53:03.000Whether or not you know that the Romans wore dreads, whether or not you know that the Greeks wore dreads, the Vikings, all these different people had them, it doesn't matter.
01:53:11.000It's like there's a little tiny white guy and that girl could yell at that white guy and then chase him with a pair of scissors.
01:53:25.000No, but to some degree, like, even you, and I think that you're naturally skeptical towards concepts like cultural appropriation, because, and I am too, because, especially as comedians, it's very easy to see the absurdity.
01:53:36.000It's so stupid, and it's so pointless.
01:53:40.000We can't not adopt each other's cultures.
01:54:13.000Now, I don't have to agree with it, but I can at least say, oh, I get where this is coming from.
01:54:16.000It's coming from historical antecedents of racism and oppression that are connected to hairstyle and all of these musicians that have taken black culture and made money off of it.
01:55:43.000Like, no matter where Jews have lived, no matter how assimilated they've been, You know that the Jews in Berlin were the most assimilated Jews in history?
01:55:51.000They were known for having Christmas trees and eating pork, and they would describe these like Christmas parties where it would only be Jews because the Germans wouldn't go, but it would be all of them celebrating Christmas.
01:56:03.000They were the most assimilated Jews ever, and that was the epicenter of the Nazi movement.
01:57:04.000But do you know the story of Fritz Haber?
01:57:07.000Fritz Haber is one of the most shocking Jewish stories in terms of a Jewish scientist who was a part of World War I on the side of the Germans.
01:57:20.000He also invented the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the environment.
01:57:25.000You know, nitrogen is one of the most important things when it comes to fertilizer.
01:57:28.000We're talking about fertilizing plants.
01:57:30.000And nitrogen is 80% of the air we breathe.
01:57:34.000Most people think the air is oxygen and carbon dioxide.
01:57:38.000And then there's some oxygen and then there's some carbon dioxide that we breathe out that the plants use.
01:57:44.000Fritz Haber figured out a way to extract nitrogen from the actual oxygen, from the actual air around us, and take that nitrogen and use it in the soil as fertilizer.
01:58:14.000He also was the first guy to invent using poison gas, and they used it on the Allied troops in World War I. So he was wanted for crimes against humanity and simultaneously winning the Nobel Prize during World War I. And then when the Nazis took over,
01:58:30.000he created Zyklon A. Zyklon A is a gas that has a very distinct smell, and I think it was a pesticide.
01:58:42.000And they used Zyklon A, the smell was added to it to make people acutely aware that this pesticide was being used because it was very poisonous.
01:58:52.000They changed it to Zyklon B, which is what they used to gas the Jews.
01:58:56.000So this fucking guy created the actual gas that was used in the fucking concentration camps to kill the Jews.
01:59:05.000And they just took the smell out of it.
01:59:08.000That's how they created Zyklon B. Whatever that thing was that they added to Zyklon A to make it smell bad, they took that out for Zyklon B so it was almost odorless.
01:59:16.000And they were killing people left and right with it.
01:59:41.000And he wound up dying, seeking refuge away from Germany.
01:59:45.000He was one of the few scientists that they didn't, one of the few Jews they didn't lock up.
01:59:50.000And he just couldn't tolerate, I mean, he couldn't stand by while these other Jews that he knew were going to the concentration camps and people were being rounded up.
02:00:04.000Think that might have happened like while he was while he was on the run Not sure I'd have to get into that but I mean that would be a crazy realization that I mean it's like that you know the TNT guy the guy that built dynamite like realizing what he'd done to the world I mean how about Oppenheimer, right?
02:02:24.000But that's just, historically speaking, when they call Jews moneylenders, it's not because Jews are like, oh, I'm pernicious and I want to fill this gap.
02:02:31.000It's that nobody else in society would lend people money.
02:02:34.000And so not only were they the creditors that people hated, but they were also the financiers that made the possibility of European greatness occur.
02:02:44.000Because without capital, without funds, you can't build a society.
02:02:48.000So, that is one of the many reasons that people have come to hate the Jews, is that they lent them the money that they needed, and then when it was time to come collecting, they'd be like, fuck this dude.
02:03:00.000So fascinating when you find the root of certain prejudices.
02:03:28.000What happened with Martin Luther, the Reformation and the printing press with Martin Luther was the cracking of the old guard of society and finally made democratization of knowledge available to everybody.
02:03:55.000That's a systemic oppression where the clergy wanted to keep information from the people so that they could keep them stupid and keep them underfoot.
02:04:16.000That was one of the most problematic things about Martin Luther, apparently, was that he was telling people, you're allowed to interpret what this means.
02:05:01.000I mean, they called upon the Pope when Genghis Khan was conquering, like he's going over the steps and conquering Russia.
02:05:09.000They were calling upon the Pope and the army of Rome.
02:05:12.000I mean, that's literally where he had power.
02:05:16.000It's very strange when you look at how that's changed.
02:05:19.000And now it's become this weird cabal of odd older gay men.
02:05:23.000What do you think of that's about, by the way?
02:05:24.000I think you take people's ability to have sex away, and the only people that are going to stay are the people that are creepy and sexually repressed.
02:05:55.000Is it that people are, predators are attracted to a system that is, you know, shrouded in privacy and no sex and they can, you know, they can, I guess the question is like, do you go in there trying to be holy or trying to get away from your sexuality that then bursts out in this aberrant way?
02:06:12.000Or are you an aberrant monster that goes into the clergy to prey on people?
02:06:16.000Well, once it's been established, maybe both.
02:06:19.000But once it's been established, that becomes part of the issue because when you're, you're also indoctrinating young children that do get molested by these priests.
02:06:26.000If you have some altar boys and these priests wind up molesting these kids and they stay in the system, the odds of them turning into molesters themselves is extremely high.
02:07:04.000It's also like a kind of weird dark magic.
02:07:07.000It's like why are there a certain percentage of human beings that do that kind of the weirdest most aberrant thing?
02:07:12.000Do you hear the There's a really interesting Radiolab, I think, episode that's basically about these kids, this kid who realized that he was a pedophile.
02:07:43.000And so the mother tried to find treatment for him, but nobody would treat him because it's such a deep taboo of evil that people are like, I don't want to get involved in that.
02:07:53.000I don't want to treat you and then have you offend and then have it come back on me.
02:08:46.000Like the ultimate iteration of teledildonics is that it cures pedophilia.
02:08:51.000Well, it's the same argument they would use towards anime.
02:08:55.000Anime pedophilia or any sort of CGI-based pedophilia is that if you could look at child porn that's not real and no one's a victim of it and you lock yourself in your room, you could alleviate your desire to have this thing.
02:09:12.000But the problem with that is, man, there's the real argument that that's feeding your desire to do that because that's what happens with men when it comes to regular pornography.
02:09:33.000Like, when it comes to people and thinking, especially, like, sexual things and behavioral things, like, addictive things, people are messy.
02:09:45.000This woman who's worked with teenage sex offenders, like, her whole career.
02:09:50.000And she basically says that we think...
02:09:55.000At least with teenage sex offenders, which is like pedophilia, teenage on younger pedophilia, the cure and recidivism rate is like, it's extremely treatable, right?
02:10:10.000But we look at that phenomenon as once you are that, you are that forever and you will always re-offend and there's no hope and no going back from it.
02:10:18.000And it's not statistically that doesn't hold water.
02:10:22.000And her point is basically like, it is easier for us to think of these people as monsters than to think of them as sick people that could get better.
02:10:30.000If we can just say, like, throw them away, they'll never be better, then we can kind of synthesize it into our brain.
02:10:36.000But in reality, these are, it's messy.
02:10:39.000Yeah, if you even bring that up, what you just said, you're a sympathizer.
02:10:44.000You know that these people are monsters and I think the idea is that you know we're talking about spectrums like they're like say if you get a hundred thousand people right what how many of those hundred thousand people Feel like they were born into the wrong sex.
02:10:58.000You know how many how many of those hundred thousand people have some bizarre sexual attraction to body parts or to Underage people or to older people, you know vulnerable people there's There's a bunch.
02:11:36.000Oh, right, because they used to have different views of it.
02:11:38.000Well, it doesn't make sense that everybody that was like, you know, you go Socrates, Plato, I mean, you go through the line, they were all monsters.
02:11:47.000I've never been able to verify if it's real, but they say the Persians said, a woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, and a melon for ecstasy.
02:14:52.000To me, that's a victimless crime 100%.
02:14:58.000But then you get into the idea of sex slaves.
02:15:01.000You get into the idea of indentured child sex slaves.
02:15:04.000There's actually a crazier argument, not crazier, but even more compelling argument for the moral good of prostitution, which is that there are these prostitutes that only sleep with severely disabled people.
02:15:18.000And I heard this radio special and it was very interesting.
02:15:21.000This guy, he himself was a radio producer but also had Lou Gehrig's disease.
02:15:25.000And he said, it's very similar to pedophiles actually.
02:15:27.000We like to think of disabled people as having no sex drive.
02:15:32.000As when they became disabled, their sex drives were disabled as well.
02:15:36.000And the reason we like to think of it, similarly, we like to think of pedophiles as monsters because that simplifies that, is it's nice for us to think of disabled people like not having horniness because they can't get laid.
02:15:46.000I mean, if we're being frank, there are certain levels of disability that it's very difficult to find a partner.
02:15:52.000You're intense to look at or you're drooling all over yourself.
02:15:55.000But you're still just as horny as every other person.
02:15:58.000So there's this radio special of these sex workers that go and they fuck or jerk off these severely disabled people who are so...
02:16:05.000They are so disabled they can't even masturbate.
02:16:08.000And it's like, I heard that and I was just like, I went from going like, prostitution is something I sort of agree with, to like, these people are heroes.
02:18:05.000I think the woman invented it because her son had cerebral palsy.
02:18:08.000It was one of the best ways to alleviate some of his muscle issues was this intense form of manipulation because he had become so bound up by his disease that she had figured out a way to loosen up the tissue so that he had more range of motion.
02:18:23.000I found some great relief with that stuff, but it's ruthlessly painful.
02:18:31.000It's great in its result, but man, it's brutal.
02:18:34.000I wanted to make one final point about, because I think I figured out how to make my cultural appropriation point.
02:18:41.000I don't want to take us back too far, but I think what we're doing is like, and we came to a good place with it, is like, What we're talking about, it's all about language, right?
02:18:51.000So cultural appropriation, your immediate reaction is, that's absurd.
02:18:55.000And some of the examples people use is absurd.
02:18:57.000But underneath the racism is just, we're talking about racial insensitivity.
02:19:01.000We're talking about being insensitive.
02:19:02.000And if you try to just focus on that, then you can get to the reality of what's happening.
02:19:07.000And the original point I wanted to make was, in this article I read about it, it said that we often get locked on these linguistic barriers The boat that the concept floats in on, the absurd boat.
02:19:19.000So Black Lives Matter is the ultimate example he gave.
02:19:21.000I just thought this was such a fascinating point.
02:19:24.000Black Lives Matter is the name of the organization that is there to fight against police brutality and killing of black kids, right?
02:20:05.000Look, all of it makes sense if what is going on is people are being racist, right?
02:20:11.000If someone is doing something, if racial inappropriation or cultural inappropriation at the heart of it involves racial insensitivity or racist insensitivity.
02:20:27.000Is, and again, racism is a word that doesn't have a lot of use anymore either, because you describe the same phenomenon of you saying to, like, your black friend, like, wow, I didn't expect you to be so articulate.
02:21:28.000And one of the things that's disturbing to people about Trump Right.
02:22:00.000Not giant groups of people that believe in one God versus another God, which is what it's been historically.
02:22:06.000The idea is that as time goes on, and as people like my people, the Italians, become so integrated that you can't be racist about us anymore.
02:22:31.000And I think the Sopranos is probably responsible for a lot of that.
02:22:34.000I was in Italy last year and I was walking home real late at night and I saw this guy.
02:22:40.000He's got his girlfriend up against the car and he's fucking like going off on her and I'm like this little like liberal American boy like is somebody gonna call the police and then I kind of stood there for a while longer and he's screaming in her face and then I just like look for about like two or three minutes I go oh this is just some Italian shit.
02:23:21.000There are parts of how Italian it is that will boggle your mind.
02:23:24.000Like a dude smoking a cigarette on a Vespa with a girl sitting sideways and everything is like the most Italian thing you could ever imagine.
02:24:55.000I thought that would have been fascinating to see where these people just hanging out and all of a sudden lava and ash covered everybody and they'd frozen their tracks and died there.
02:25:48.000When we were in the Coliseum, they were explaining where they had those elevators that would take the animals up from the ground floor and open the floor up and then the animals would pop through and they would do battle with them.
02:26:00.000But they were talking about how they had to raise up the side of the fences because the lower levels were where all the rich people sat.
02:26:23.000I had a friend who bought a boat for like $60,000, and he took it for one ride, crashed it into the pier, put it in the garage for two years, and then sold it for $20,000.
02:26:42.000The cool thing about boats is that when you, like, if you say you have something and you go out, Marina Del Rey, and you just go out into the water, you can kind of go wherever the fuck you want.
02:27:27.000Maybe you should get some poverty, actually.
02:27:28.000That'll give you a little bit more to do with your life.
02:27:30.000Well, you've got to think that the negative aspects of certain societies do create some sort of a rebound effect from those negative aspects.
02:28:16.000Well, also, you know that you made your, well, a lot of people helped you, but you made yourself.
02:28:22.000Whereas if your parents were Trump, you know, or your parents were the Rockefellers or whatever, and they gave you this monthly stipend, you know, fuck, man.
02:28:58.000He doesn't drink and he doesn't do drugs.
02:29:02.000And I think there's gotta be a part of his brain that's pushing down the what have I done and reinforcing, doubling down on the I'm the greatest, I'm the best, I mean, that's why he kept saying about his inauguration numbers, so many people were there, and even when they told him that it wasn't the case,
02:29:20.000Then when he kept parroting, not just parroting to friends, but doing it to the news, doing it to the press, that he got the largest number of electoral college votes, that's crazy.
02:29:59.000You sent bombs to the people that are fighting ISIS to fight those people from doing chemical warfare on their own people, but then we also are fighting ISIS with them, and then it's just the whole thing.
02:30:09.000Yeah, well how about Ron Paul was saying that the chemical attack doesn't make sense, so certain, certain Republicans are actually looking at me, is Ron Paul technically Republicans more of a libertarian than anything, but they're looking at it and saying, like, this, this might not even been real.
02:30:24.000I mean, I just, well, I heard this great thing about how no one in Israel believes that Rabin was killed by Yigdal Amir, the Jewish guy, like, that they, they believe in that.
02:30:35.000Basically, hearing a conspiracy theory that widely believed in a country that isn't my own made me realize how wildly desperate for conspiracy theory everyone is.
02:30:46.000Somehow, the distance where it was like, oh, it's Israel, it's not really me, made me go like, oh, this is so interesting, like...
02:30:53.000It wasn't one hour until they were saying that the chemical attack by Assad was not real.
02:30:58.000Even though Assad has done gas-based chemical attacks on his own people before, and his father did before him, somehow this one was like, no, no, this is fake.
02:32:30.000But what happens if something really goes down and that guy is the figurehead?
02:32:35.000That is the difference between the Roman Empire and this empire, is that the Roman Empire didn't have the power to press a button and destroy, like, half the countries on Earth, and we do.
02:36:10.000So, I hopefully, and by the way, Comedy Central has been, and I was just saying this as a company, man, they've been cool about saying, like, go get weird.
02:37:25.000Yeah, it's called the Hound Tall Discussion Series, and it's basically what led to this TV show on Comedy Central, which was that we get one expert on, and it's in front of a lot.
02:37:34.000What's called the Hound Tall instead of the Town Hall?
02:40:14.000MC Searchers episode it's on there and it is one of the craziest stories you will ever hear in your life Wow, yeah, it's real MC hammer tried to have him killed listen Hey, listen to the story.
02:41:04.000Please don't kill my clients or whatever.
02:41:06.000And so the head of the Crips is like, I will end this hit on third base, but only if you can get me tickets to the Grammys sitting next to Michael Jackson.
02:41:19.000And Russell Simmons is like, oh my god.
02:41:57.000There's a contract on your life, and the only way that you'll live through this trip is if you stay right next to me.
02:42:01.000So they're walking through LA and these Crips are coming up who haven't, because it's like the Crips, you know, they don't have like an infrastructure.