The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1241 - Sam Harris

00:00:00.000 Five, four, three, two...

00:00:04.000 Hello, Sam Harris.

00:00:05.000 Hey, man.

00:00:06.000 Good to see you.

00:00:06.000 Happy to be here.

00:00:07.000 I listened to your podcast with Jack.

00:00:09.000 Let's just get right into the Jack stuff.

00:00:12.000 Because I listened to your podcast with Jack, and I found something very...

00:00:15.000 When I did my podcast with Jack, first of all, I was not anticipating the blowback that I received.

00:00:20.000 It was stunning.

00:00:22.000 But...

00:00:25.000 What I thought was, I was just going to have a conversation with this guy, be fun, see what it's like to run this gigantic network that helps people communicate.

00:00:33.000 You okay, Jamie?

00:00:34.000 I'm good, I'm good.

00:00:35.000 Helps people communicate and distribute information worldwide.

00:00:35.000 All right.

00:00:39.000 What is it like to start something like that up and have it become what it is?

00:00:42.000 Like, how have you managed to try to keep up with it and what have the headaches been?

00:00:45.000 Right.

00:00:46.000 Apparently people online, particularly the people that want to comment about this, all they wanted to know about was censorship.

00:00:52.000 And that was an issue with me.

00:00:55.000 There was a question with me, but it became a far bigger question for people online.

00:00:59.000 They felt like that I tossed him softball questions.

00:01:03.000 And that I didn't press him.

00:01:31.000 Right.

00:01:32.000 Right.

00:01:35.000 Right.

00:01:43.000 He never got to that.

00:01:44.000 He went around and around and around with you.

00:01:48.000 And he recognized this after the podcast.

00:01:52.000 I received a lot of blowback.

00:01:54.000 He received a lot of blowback.

00:01:55.000 So I contacted him and he said he would be more than happy to come back on again and address all these things.

00:02:01.000 And I said, okay, what I'd like to do is address specific instances of people being censored.

00:02:05.000 And he said, okay, what I'll do is I'll bring in someone from the company that's in charge of that stuff.

00:02:11.000 So I'm starting to put together a picture of what it's like to be a CEO of something as big.

00:02:17.000 And he's also a CEO of Square.

00:02:19.000 He runs the Cash App.

00:02:21.000 There's a lot of stuff going on there, right?

00:02:22.000 So he's obviously busy.

00:02:24.000 How much day-to-day involvement does he actually have?

00:02:27.000 And who gets censored and why they get censored?

00:02:29.000 And how much is he willing to share about that?

00:02:31.000 So we're going to find out in the next follow-up podcast. 0.93

00:02:35.000 But I got accused of everything from being a shill to being a cuck to being a...

00:02:41.000 And there's also an issue that you've managed to avoid, wisely so, of advertising. 0.88

00:02:46.000 The cash apps and advertisers are on my podcast.

00:02:48.000 So because the cash apps and advertisers are on my podcast...

00:02:51.000 The man had you by the throat.

00:02:53.000 Exactly.

00:02:53.000 You couldn't ask all those great questions that were queued up.

00:02:55.000 The reality is, those are the questions I would have asked.

00:02:59.000 Now, that's hard to say, because no one's going to believe it.

00:03:01.000 But those are the questions I would have asked.

00:03:03.000 And I tried not to be too confrontational with a guest.

00:03:08.000 But in hindsight, I probably could have pressed more, particularly on people like Kathy Griffin, calling for doxing for the kid with the MAGA hat on with the Native American. 0.75

00:03:18.000 There's quite a few, but I noticed that...

00:03:22.000 Well, what was your experience like with it?

00:03:24.000 Yeah, so it's interesting because you and I have...

00:03:27.000 We had different interviews because they were timed differently.

00:03:30.000 I mean, this is...

00:03:32.000 It's an interesting topic because this opens the door to all the ways in which our podcasts are different.

00:03:36.000 I mean, you stream live.

00:03:37.000 I sit on my podcast for at least a week.

00:03:40.000 In Jack's case, it was like two weeks before I released it.

00:03:43.000 So I did my interview with him before this flurry of interviews with him came out.

00:03:49.000 I mean, there was a Rolling Stone interview.

00:03:52.000 I think maybe a Huffington Post interview had come out.

00:03:55.000 But basically, there was nothing out there.

00:03:56.000 So I had no real examples of how he dealt with these questions.

00:04:00.000 Or how he talked.

00:04:01.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:04:02.000 Well, I mean, slow talking is not a problem for me because I'm one of the great slow talkers, so we're in a groove there.

00:04:08.000 But I didn't know what his boilerplate was and how he would answer any of these questions.

00:04:18.000 And your podcast came out before, mine did, but mine was before the Covington High School Catholic circus happened, right?

00:04:27.000 So the real missed opportunity for me was just a sheer matter of timing.

00:04:32.000 Because the Covington thing...

00:04:40.000 We're good to go.

00:05:17.000 I think I'm going to go.

00:05:19.000 And it seems to skew politically in one direction all the time, right?

00:05:25.000 But, you know, I think you also, you know, I did, and I think you did, naturally, we cut him some slack in that he's the CEO of these two corporations.

00:05:35.000 He can't be expected to actually know what happened in every one of these micro cases.

00:05:40.000 Like, I think I brought up the case of I think her name is Megan Murphy. 0.96

00:05:44.000 I mean, I hadn't even heard of her before.

00:05:46.000 That's the lesbian woman? 1.00

00:05:47.000 She was like a feminist who said sort of the wrong thing in the transgender space. 1.00

00:05:53.000 She said something like men are not women, right?

00:05:55.000 And she got banned.

00:05:56.000 For life?

00:05:57.000 Or a temporary ban?

00:05:58.000 No, I think it was temporary.

00:05:59.000 But, you know, so I raised it.

00:06:01.000 And, you know, he obviously can't know...

00:06:05.000 I think we're good to go.

00:06:12.000 I think we're good to go.

00:06:33.000 Yeah.

00:06:50.000 You know, you must have been constrained by, you know, the topics you couldn't touch in advance.

00:06:54.000 You must have had some agreement with him in advance.

00:06:57.000 You know, it didn't happen with me, right?

00:06:59.000 No, I should address that.

00:07:00.000 There was no discussion whatsoever about what was off limits.

00:07:03.000 There was no nothing.

00:07:05.000 And he asked for no—so in my case, I tell all my guests—and this is the difference between you streaming live and me not— I tell all my guests, listen, if at any point in this interview you put your foot in your mouth or I put my foot in there, we can edit it.

00:07:18.000 I want you to be totally happy with what you say over the next two or three hours.

00:07:25.000 So if you have to take something again, take it again, and we'll just hide the seams as we go.

00:07:31.000 That virtually never happens, right?

00:07:33.000 And in Jack's case, there wasn't even a wrinkle like that.

00:07:37.000 But I recognize it's a high wire act for a lot of these people, especially for someone who's running two publicly traded companies, right?

00:07:47.000 So when I invited him on, I said, Jack, we were DMing on Twitter, and I said, listen, I promise I'm not going to make you smoke a blunt on video.

00:07:54.000 And that got him.

00:07:56.000 So I don't know how you got him.

00:07:57.000 I didn't try to get him to smoke a blunt.

00:07:59.000 I didn't even think about it.

00:08:01.000 Yeah, we weren't drinking.

00:08:02.000 We were just talking.

00:08:03.000 Maybe it would have been better if we were drinking, because it did seem very stiff.

00:08:06.000 I listened to it after the fact, and...

00:08:10.000 I mean, I get from their anticipation why it would be disappointing.

00:08:15.000 I just thought it was kind of boring.

00:08:17.000 I thought my podcast with them just wasn't very good.

00:08:19.000 I sometimes do too many podcasts.

00:08:22.000 And when I sometimes do too many podcasts, I think I run low on juice.

00:08:27.000 And I'm not as, I don't know, I'm not as engaged or I'm not as fired up about it.

00:08:33.000 And maybe I definitely should have prepared more for him.

00:08:37.000 But I really thought it was just going to be a conversation about what it's like and I thought that would be really easy to do.

00:08:42.000 Because it's such a unique position to be running something like Twitter.

00:08:46.000 But I don't know if he was evasive because he didn't know the things or because he didn't want to talk about the things.

00:08:53.000 But there was things like he didn't know exactly why Alex Jones was ultimately banned.

00:09:03.000 I mean, you'd have to be inside his head to get that answer.

00:09:29.000 Fairly pointed questions about where Twitter's going.

00:09:34.000 I don't think this is dishonest, but it has this amazing ability to close the door to further inquiry because he gives you the full mea culpa right up front.

00:09:46.000 You ask, what's the situation with the seemingly asymmetrical banning of people?

00:09:52.000 And he'll say, you know, yeah, we really, I mean, we've got to get much better at communicating our process.

00:09:56.000 We're not nearly transparent enough.

00:09:58.000 This whole thing is in disarray.

00:10:00.000 And my job is to fix it.

00:10:01.000 Right? 0.99

00:10:02.000 So it's like a global, you know, we're fucked up and we're going to get better. 0.99

00:10:05.000 I promise you. 0.99

00:10:06.000 Right?

00:10:07.000 But that doesn't do any good for the people that are already banned.

00:10:10.000 Right.

00:10:10.000 But there's not a lot to get beyond that in an interview.

00:10:13.000 Yes.

00:10:14.000 So it's, you know, I don't think it's nefarious.

00:10:17.000 I think it could well be...

00:10:27.000 Yeah, I felt that too.

00:10:29.000 And I didn't really navigate that very well.

00:10:33.000 And that was a big part of the blowback.

00:10:35.000 But then the blowback was accentuated when they found out that he sponsors me.

00:10:39.000 Right.

00:10:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:10:45.000 Well, I had a very similar result, and I don't have that problem.

00:10:48.000 So I don't think that diagnoses your situation at all.

00:10:52.000 But it's very interesting.

00:10:53.000 I mean, the difference between the business models under which we run our podcasts and just every choice you make in how to produce a podcast— I essentially have made the opposite one, you know, like streaming live like this.

00:11:09.000 The fact that you're...

00:11:10.000 So this is just all very interesting to me because I'm kind of a reluctant student of digital media now because I've just kind of stumbled into this Wild West that, you know, you in large part have invented, right?

00:11:21.000 I mean, this podcasting space was nothing.

00:11:24.000 And now we've got Spotify, you know, buying up, you know, it's like a land grab for audio.

00:11:28.000 Yeah, we were talking about that before the podcast.

00:11:30.000 They just purchased some company.

00:11:32.000 What is it?

00:11:33.000 What is it called?

00:11:34.000 Gimlet, yeah.

00:11:35.000 For some ungodly amount of money.

00:11:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:11:38.000 Like $200 million and they're going to spend $500 this year or something.

00:11:41.000 And so it's this...

00:11:43.000 We're all just making this up.

00:11:45.000 Yeah.

00:12:13.000 And your job is done.

00:12:14.000 With my podcast, that's not the workflow at all.

00:12:17.000 And I totally envy this approach that you have, but for a variety of reasons, I feel like I can't take it in my life.

00:12:27.000 But it is very different.

00:12:28.000 It dictates many choices down the line, which...

00:12:33.000 I mean, there's a positive and negative, but the positive is...

00:12:40.000 What you hear is what we got and we're done after we turn these mics off.

00:12:44.000 And that's not how I podcast.

00:12:46.000 There's also the visual element of it, and the visual element of it initially was almost like a side effect.

00:12:52.000 I mean, we first started it out visually, but then when it started going to iTunes, the iTunes aspect of it became the focus.

00:12:59.000 The audio version of it, rather, became the focus.

00:13:02.000 But then we decided to stream on YouTube and put it up on YouTube, but it was totally not profitable.

00:13:09.000 It was just for a goof.

00:13:10.000 Like, oh, we'll have the video up.

00:13:12.000 Some people like video.

00:13:12.000 Why not?

00:13:13.000 It was one of those things.

00:13:14.000 But then you realize, ultimately, that YouTube becomes a viable source of revenue, and then it's also the way a lot of people like to watch it.

00:13:23.000 And they also like to watch it because they can comment under it.

00:13:26.000 So that was the other thing that came out of the Jack podcast.

00:13:28.000 We got into a controversy about comments and about how comments are deleted or how they're shown and hidden and what happens.

00:13:37.000 Because people were accusing Jamie of deleting all the derogatory comments.

00:13:42.000 We don't touch any.

00:13:43.000 We don't delete any of them.

00:13:45.000 We don't do anything to them.

00:13:47.000 We just leave them up there, and it's mostly a cesspool. 0.98

00:13:51.000 Even on a good podcast, there's a lot of crazy shit that happens on these things.

00:13:55.000 But from what we think, and Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong, you think that what's going on is that people are marking other people's posts as spam, There's that. 0.76

00:14:04.000 And then Brandon also has the theory that a lot of alt-right people are targeted by the algorithm that YouTube uses.

00:14:12.000 Like in one case, there was a guy who had a Pepe the Frog avatar, and he said his comment immediately went to spam.

00:14:19.000 And the other thing is that the comments are curated depending upon who is watching it and what account.

00:14:27.000 They'll be different.

00:14:29.000 Sort of.

00:14:30.000 Yeah, they'll propagate different comments to the top.

00:14:33.000 You can actually change it if you prefer to see the most new comment.

00:14:37.000 From your own personal YouTube when you're watching.

00:14:40.000 You as a viewer or user of YouTube have to make that actual comment.

00:14:44.000 So that conspiracy theory just heightened the whole thing, right?

00:14:48.000 Okay, now they're deleting negative comments.

00:14:50.000 Look, I don't like doing bad podcasts, but I will be the first one to tell you when I think a podcast sucked.

00:14:56.000 That podcast was definitely disappointing.

00:14:58.000 It wasn't good.

00:14:59.000 Mine wasn't good.

00:15:00.000 Like I said, when I listened to it, I was like, God, this is kind of boring.

00:15:03.000 It just wasn't juicy.

00:15:05.000 We didn't get a flow. 0.99

00:15:08.000 It wasn't like he and I were just shooting a shit, having a good time. 0.99

00:15:11.000 Well, take that one decision. 0.91

00:15:12.000 So you have decided to make video a main component of this podcast.

00:15:16.000 It's still probably a small percentage of your actual listens.

00:15:20.000 Not anymore.

00:15:21.000 No, not anymore.

00:15:22.000 It's almost 50-50.

00:15:24.000 Awesome.

00:15:25.000 It's closing in on that.

00:15:26.000 It used to be like 90-10, right?

00:15:27.000 Yeah.

00:15:28.000 Okay, so I don't have a video component, and so I just put audio on YouTube, but I put absolutely no energy into YouTube.

00:15:35.000 I mean, that may one day change.

00:15:37.000 But because I don't, I don't care what's happening on YouTube, right?

00:15:41.000 So I never see the comments.

00:15:42.000 And whenever I look, it is, as you say, accessible.

00:15:45.000 It's insane.

00:15:45.000 I mean, YouTube just skews massively right.

00:15:48.000 It skews just massively male.

00:15:53.000 And it probably skews very young, too.

00:15:56.000 So you have a millennial alt-right craziness.

00:15:59.000 As I say these sentences, your YouTube page is just blowing up with hate for me. 1.00

00:16:04.000 You've got a bunch of millennials with their thumbs up their asses just whinging. 1.00

00:16:08.000 There's a lot of older people, too. 0.98

00:16:10.000 Well, yeah, but it's got to be younger than most of where...

00:16:13.000 Well, first of all, I'm not even seeing most comment threads that could possibly respond to anything I put out there now.

00:16:19.000 So I don't even look at my ad mentions for the most part.

00:16:22.000 I spend maybe five minutes a day looking at what's coming back to me.

00:16:26.000 And you were actually helpful in reformatting my brain on that topic.

00:16:31.000 So because I don't see any of that stuff...

00:16:35.000 I mean, maybe I'm getting a lot of pain for my Dorsey interview, but I don't even know about it, right?

00:16:39.000 And so I'm not having – I don't feel like I have to course correct in response to anything now.

00:16:45.000 And in large measure, it is a consequence of just this decision that I inadvertently made that I'm just – I don't have a video component to my podcast at the moment.

00:16:54.000 And so I'm not – I'm not spectating on the feedback on YouTube. 0.97

00:16:58.000 Well, the feedback thing is interesting because we were just talking about this before the show, that with feedback and comments on YouTube, essentially anyone can comment, and if you don't go banning people from the channel, which we don't do, it's not what we wouldn't do if someone was Totally a piece of shit, 0.95

00:17:14.000 but we don't. 0.88

00:17:16.000 So you essentially have this open forum.

00:17:19.000 So it's almost like a message board where people can just sort of comment.

00:17:22.000 And it's unlike Twitter in that regard, because Twitter just, you know, you get abusive and shitty on Twitter, they just get rid of you. 0.58

00:17:28.000 If you get abusive and shitty on Instagram or on Facebook, they'll just get rid of you.

00:17:33.000 But if you're on Twitter, I think?

00:17:55.000 With the audio people, it's very obvious that the Cash App is a sponsor because we say it.

00:18:00.000 This podcast is brought to you by the Cash App.

00:18:02.000 Whereas in YouTube, they're hiding the fact that the Cash App is a sponsor.

00:18:06.000 We talked about it during the podcast itself, but we don't put the ads on YouTube.

00:18:13.000 There's ads that YouTube puts on, but we put the ads on, like after the show is over, I'll read the ads and we'll insert those into the audio and that will go up to iTunes and RSS feeds and all that stuff.

00:18:24.000 So the stuff that's on YouTube, it's abbreviated in the sense that, especially the live one doesn't have anything.

00:18:31.000 So like this has zero ads.

00:18:32.000 And then the ones that'll be posted on YouTube later, it'll have YouTube ads.

00:18:36.000 Right.

00:18:37.000 So there's a couple of conspiracy theories in that regard.

00:18:40.000 There's also apparently an emerging conspiracy theory about that Jack was trying to pump up Bitcoin because they have some sort of a Bitcoin deal.

00:18:50.000 Have you heard this one?

00:18:51.000 I read that, but from what I saw, it's not higher than it was at any point.

00:18:56.000 It's still right around $3,500.

00:18:57.000 So if there was a pump and dump scheme of some sort, then it should be provable on a blockchain, I guess.

00:19:04.000 I don't know.

00:19:04.000 Yeah, I don't understand that, but is there any other component to it?

00:19:07.000 I don't know.

00:19:08.000 I don't know where that's coming from, necessarily.

00:19:10.000 All he said was that, well, the Cash App sells Bitcoin.

00:19:14.000 So we talked about Bitcoin.

00:19:16.000 Because you can buy and sell Bitcoin through the Cash App, I should say.

00:19:20.000 I think he said something about blockchain technology rendering everything permanent online.

00:19:24.000 Yes, that was something different though.

00:19:26.000 But I think that's in regard to comments and to anything.

00:19:30.000 Blog posts, blockchain is essentially going to have everything that's online forever. 0.96

00:19:35.000 But there's so many fucking conspiracy theories about all this stuff. 0.66

00:19:40.000 It's fascinating. 0.84

00:19:41.000 And as, you know, we were talking about earlier, with the way you do yours, you used to use Patreon, and now you use your own website after the Sargon of Akkad incident, which you nobly stepped back away from Patreon.

00:19:55.000 Or not so nobly, depending on what you think of Sargon of Akkad.

00:19:59.000 Well, it's not even that.

00:20:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:01.000 Well...

00:20:02.000 There's so many misconceptions about what happened there, and I tried to clear them up on my podcast, but yeah, there's an interesting implication to not taking ads.

00:20:14.000 I think what's happening, and this is much bigger than even podcasting, I think I'd be interested to know what you feel about this.

00:20:21.000 You are the quintessence of the successful ad model in podcasting.

00:20:30.000 It's working fantastically well for you and for people like Tim Ferriss and probably Marc Maron.

00:20:38.000 It's kind of like a winner-take-all thing happening in this space where ads are working great.

00:20:42.000 And I am also a highly successful example of the support model.

00:20:51.000 It's like the PBS model or the NPR model.

00:20:54.000 And what's weird is that you and I are both surrounded by people who have podcasts, want to have podcasts, and are asking us for advice about how to succeed and how to monetize.

00:21:06.000 I'm not even in a place where I can recommend my model to anyone else, right?

00:21:11.000 Because it's very hit or miss.

00:21:14.000 I just happen to have developed an audience that will support my work.

00:21:18.000 And you had developed that audience previously, ironically enough, on YouTube.

00:21:21.000 There's a lot of YouTube debates.

00:21:24.000 People putting my content on their YouTube channels.

00:21:29.000 Mostly debates, right?

00:21:30.000 Yeah, and as an author.

00:21:32.000 But it was just the podcast grew and I had this sort of forced choice where am I going to go the ad route or not?

00:21:42.000 And I found that – I mean I have two things to – I think?

00:22:12.000 Right.

00:22:17.000 Right.

00:22:18.000 Right.

00:22:28.000 I love Audible, but it just felt wrong, and so I decided to just experiment with a different business model.

00:22:34.000 And it's working for me, but I don't think it can work for most people, and I view that as a problem.

00:22:43.000 And the thing that I... I think is interesting.

00:22:47.000 This is much bigger than podcasting.

00:22:49.000 So you have Facebook, on the one hand, which is just a totally free platform where the users don't even realize that they're not the customers.

00:23:01.000 They're the actual product, right?

00:23:03.000 The users are having their attention sold to advertisers, and it's this enormous business.

00:23:09.000 And on the other end of the digital spectrum, you have Netflix, which is just a stark paywall, right?

00:23:15.000 And there's no way in but to pay the subscription.

00:23:19.000 And Netflix could run ads and get more money if they wanted to, but they're not doing that and presumably won't do that.

00:23:28.000 And I'm hoping, just generally speaking, that the digital future looks much more like Netflix and much less like Facebook.

00:23:36.000 Because I see what ads have done is they've anchored everyone to the illusion of free.

00:23:43.000 Everyone expects their digital content for free, except in places like Netflix.

00:23:48.000 So when you release a comedy special, when you release your next hour, and you sell it to Netflix... 0.99

00:23:55.000 I would imagine there are very few people in your fan base who are thinking, well, fuck Joe Rogan. 0.95

00:24:00.000 Why didn't he just put that out on YouTube? 0.98

00:24:02.000 Why is this on Netflix?

00:24:04.000 They sort of understand that this piece of content belongs on that shelf and that if they want it, they have to subscribe to Netflix.

00:24:12.000 Whereas if you did something...

00:24:15.000 Slightly different, but functionally the same.

00:24:17.000 If you put it on Vimeo and charge people $5 or whatever, Vimeo on demand, I think you'd get a lot more pain, right? 1.00

00:24:25.000 People would say, well, fuck you, you greedy bastard. 1.00

00:24:27.000 If you're already doing great, just release your stuff, right? 1.00

00:24:30.000 Yeah.

00:24:32.000 I view that as a problem.

00:24:33.000 It's like a psychological problem.

00:24:35.000 People have been anchored to the ad-subsidized model more or less everywhere, and they expect everything for free.

00:24:41.000 And in my world, I'm trying to just continually brook that expectation and push people into a different sense of you get what you pay for.

00:24:54.000 So the hybrid model I've created for myself is I'm putting more stuff behind a paywall, right?

00:25:01.000 So this is not just pure sponsorship of otherwise free content.

00:25:06.000 But personally, I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that if someone actually can't afford it, they can't get access to my content.

00:25:14.000 So I just tell people, if you really can't afford the stuff behind my paywall, or you really can't afford my meditation app, just send us an email and we'll give it to you for free.

00:25:23.000 Yeah, I've heard that.

00:25:24.000 I was like, this guy's crazy.

00:25:25.000 I mean, it's actually in the pricing in the app store for my meditation app.

00:25:30.000 It's like, there's the pricing, and then below that there's, if you can't afford this, here's the email address.

00:25:35.000 I think that's fantastic.

00:25:36.000 And so that's guilt-free.

00:25:38.000 Yeah, I'm splitting it that way, but...

00:25:40.000 I'm raising prices.

00:25:42.000 Because I think everything is too cheap in the digital space.

00:25:46.000 I think we're anchored to...

00:25:48.000 I mean, there are people who will spend $5 a day on a cup of coffee every day for the rest of their lives.

00:25:55.000 And yet, if you told them this podcast or this app that they say is incredibly valuable to them is going to cost them $5 a month, They feel raped, right?

00:26:07.000 And I completely understand it because I know what it's like to hit a paywall and think, I can't get my credit card out again.

00:26:15.000 I'm not going to pay for this.

00:26:16.000 I'm going to find this information somewhere else.

00:26:18.000 So we've all been anchored to this thing and something is going to win in the end.

00:26:25.000 I think at some point...

00:26:29.000 It's going to look much more like Netflix or much more like Facebook.

00:26:33.000 I'm throwing my lot in with the former, but it really is the Wild West.

00:26:37.000 Well, the Netflix thing is different because Netflix has programs that cost a lot of money to create.

00:26:42.000 This podcast is very easy.

00:26:44.000 You and my friend will call you up.

00:26:45.000 Hey, you want to do a podcast?

00:26:46.000 You come on over here.

00:26:47.000 Obviously, we've got to pay for all this equipment, but other than that, bandwidth and rent and all that stuff.

00:26:52.000 Other than that, it just goes up.

00:26:54.000 Whereas you do a comedy special, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

00:26:57.000 You have to secure a venue.

00:26:58.000 You have to hire staff.

00:27:00.000 I mean, it's a big deal.

00:27:02.000 And that's an easy thing in terms of, like, bang for their buck, what Netflix will get out of it.

00:27:08.000 If you do a television show, I mean, my God, you need to hire hundreds of people.

00:27:13.000 There's wardrobe and makeup and set and there's writers and producers and executives and everybody has to go over the script with a fine-tooth comb.

00:27:21.000 It's incredibly, incredibly strenuous.

00:27:23.000 There's a lot going on when you create a television, like Stranger Things or something like that.

00:27:27.000 I mean, you have so much special effects. 0.80

00:27:29.000 So, to ask for that for free, to me, seems ridiculous.

00:27:34.000 Yeah, but except...

00:27:36.000 Again, I'm running on two tracks here.

00:27:40.000 An app is much more like a television show, surprisingly, than it is like a podcast.

00:27:45.000 But even if it's just a podcast...

00:27:48.000 If you want to build something, if you want to build a media company, like let's say you were asking for support for this otherwise free podcast, people don't know what your aspirations are.

00:28:00.000 I mean, maybe you want to start a podcast network, right?

00:28:02.000 Maybe you're trying to build a business.

00:28:05.000 Maybe you have massive payroll expenses.

00:28:10.000 So the expectation that the product should always be free closes the door to any of those aspirations if, in fact, you have them.

00:28:22.000 It's very interesting psychologically because I've created this network of support for my podcast.

00:28:28.000 But I see people do calculations that they would never do in a more transactional space if they were just, let's say, buying my next book.

00:28:37.000 For me, offering a free podcast and then saying, if you find this valuable, you can support it.

00:28:47.000 From the side of being a creator of that content, it feels like the most transparent interaction possible because A person can listen for free for as long as they want to just discover how valuable it is and then they can support it to the degree that they find it valuable.

00:29:02.000 Whereas if I'm selling you a book, you can't even read the book before you buy it.

00:29:07.000 You have to make the decision to buy it and I'm trying to convince you to buy it because it took me all this time to write it and it's transactional.

00:29:19.000 But with a podcast, people...

00:29:27.000 Yeah, I think.

00:29:47.000 Right.

00:29:53.000 Right.

00:29:55.000 Right.

00:30:01.000 It engages the sort of the philanthropy charity side of the brain, right?

00:30:05.000 And people are worried about what you're going to do and how much it all costs.

00:30:09.000 Like, how much does this mic cost, right?

00:30:10.000 You know, like, that's a question that someone is asking.

00:30:13.000 When they're donating.

00:30:14.000 When they're donating.

00:30:15.000 And the problem there is they're not understanding, you know...

00:30:20.000 Just the opportunity cost.

00:30:22.000 I have to decide how to spend my time.

00:30:24.000 Am I going to spend 90% of my time on a podcast?

00:30:27.000 Well, if so, that closes the door to virtually everything else I can do.

00:30:33.000 It has to become a viable business.

00:30:36.000 I've recognized now that I'm...

00:30:40.000 To some degree, going against the grain of human psychology in asking for support.

00:30:45.000 Now I feel like I'm going to ask much less.

00:30:48.000 I'm going to tell people what the business model is and remind them of it.

00:30:54.000 Personally, I'm going to go more and more in the direction of putting stuff behind a paywall I mean,

00:31:13.000 that's the guilt-free business model that I'm converging on now.

00:31:17.000 I like it.

00:31:18.000 I like how you're thinking and I like the ethics involved in it and I think it's a great thing and when you said it on your podcast I was shocked but it makes sense coming from you.

00:31:27.000 My thought is I'm in negotiation or in discussions right now and I talked to you about this too about building an app and what I want to do with the app is have a set amount of money that you pay per month if you want to sign up for the app and you get the podcast with no ads.

00:31:44.000 Right.

00:31:44.000 So you could either get it from iTunes or whatever you Google Play or Google Podcasts, or you can get it from the app.

00:31:51.000 And if you get it from the app, you pay X amount per month and you get the podcast with zero ads.

00:31:55.000 And it'll stream live.

00:31:56.000 I'm going to figure out how to do both of those things.

00:31:59.000 My thought going into advertising, when I first did the podcast, I've been doing the podcast now for nine years.

00:32:06.000 When I first started doing it, there was no ads for the longest time.

00:32:09.000 It just cost money.

00:32:10.000 It cost money for bandwidth.

00:32:12.000 It cost money to put up.

00:32:13.000 But I was doing it for fun, and I didn't care.

00:32:15.000 My revenue was coming from other sources.

00:32:17.000 A few years ago, I decided what I was going to do was, because I was getting ad, well, the first ad request was Facebook, was the fleshlight, rather, and you were the first person to request to not have the fleshlight on your podcast.

00:32:32.000 The first podcast that we did.

00:32:34.000 Freaking prima donna Sam Harris.

00:32:37.000 Well, it made sense. 0.97

00:32:38.000 I mean, they were disgusting ads, too. 0.99

00:32:40.000 I mean, we would get ridiculous and be really silly in those ads. 0.99

00:32:44.000 It was just the juxtaposition. 0.94

00:32:45.000 Just knowing that the mic would go hot and then 15 seconds before it would still be ringing in their ears, you know, if you want to jack off with this fantastic device.

00:32:53.000 And here's Sam Harris, neuroscientist and moral philosopher.

00:32:57.000 But the fleshlight experienced some pretty significant positive impact from that.

00:33:03.000 I mean, their business went through the roof because of the podcast.

00:33:06.000 I mean, they really sold a shitload of fleshlights, where they told me, like, some ungodly number, like 50% of the fleshlights they were selling was code word Rogan.

00:33:14.000 Yeah, no doubt.

00:33:16.000 I don't want to picture too much of the armies of people using their product, you know?

00:33:21.000 So word got around, and then as the podcast space started expanding, then advertisers tentatively were dipping their toe in.

00:33:30.000 My philosophy, and it still holds...

00:33:32.000 That's like 2006 or 2007?

00:33:35.000 Yeah, Jamie.

00:33:40.000 2012?

00:33:40.000 The first time I was on here was 2011?

00:33:44.000 Wow.

00:33:44.000 It started basically at the end of 2009. You were probably on around 2010 or 2011. There was no other ads other than The Fleshlight, though, with you.

00:33:54.000 And then the flashlight dropped off when we started asking for more money.

00:33:57.000 They're like, eh, I think we hit the point of no return. 0.89

00:33:59.000 But my philosophy getting into advertisement was, I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.

00:34:06.000 100% and have no impact whatsoever on the content of my podcast.

00:34:13.000 Like, whatever advertisers that I choose, whatever advertisers that I choose, Yeah.

00:34:44.000 Conflict of interest.

00:34:45.000 Right.

00:34:46.000 But...

00:34:47.000 But people have to realize that if they churn off your podcast, you've got just an endless number of advertisers waiting in line.

00:34:54.000 I have too many ads.

00:34:54.000 Yeah, so...

00:34:55.000 I mean, the cash out is a very...

00:34:56.000 That's not a psychological component for you.

00:34:57.000 It's like...

00:34:57.000 There's one way of looking at it that they buy a lot of ads.

00:35:01.000 They do buy a lot of ads.

00:35:02.000 We do have a good relationship with them.

00:35:04.000 But...

00:35:05.000 I don't need them.

00:35:07.000 If they went away, I have too many ads.

00:35:09.000 And that sounds gross to say, but it is a fact.

00:35:12.000 I have many more ads than I have spots for ads.

00:35:15.000 So if they went away, it would not hurt me at all financially because I put a limit on how many ads I do per podcast.

00:35:21.000 I also don't ever interrupt a podcast with an ad.

00:35:24.000 I don't do that.

00:35:25.000 And because I don't do that, that costs me money.

00:35:27.000 But I just feel like the experience of listening to a podcast unbroken is so much better Than listening to a podcast.

00:35:37.000 We'll be right back.

00:35:37.000 This word from Casper Mattresses, you know, it just feels gross.

00:35:42.000 But in the beginning, I'm like, look, you know where it is.

00:35:44.000 You can fast forward.

00:35:46.000 But maybe you're into this stuff.

00:35:47.000 Maybe you need stamps.com. 0.99

00:35:49.000 Maybe whatever the fuck you need. 0.99

00:35:50.000 Those are the ads. 1.00

00:35:51.000 They pay a lot of money. 0.99

00:35:52.000 I'm going to take that money and I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want. 0.99

00:35:55.000 And if these guys decide, oh, you smoke pot or you're too controversial or you talk about this or talk about that, we're going to drop you. 0.99

00:36:02.000 Okay.

00:36:03.000 That's my philosophy.

00:36:04.000 And I've lost ads.

00:36:06.000 I've lost sponsors.

00:36:07.000 Okay.

00:36:08.000 I don't care.

00:36:09.000 But if I lost the cash app because I was too hard on Jack Dorsey, or if Jack Dorsey comes back and I'm too hard on him and grilling him about these people that have been censored, I hope he doesn't, but I like him.

00:36:20.000 He's a nice guy. 0.96

00:36:21.000 I want to know what the fuck's going on there. 0.97

00:36:22.000 In fact, I'm having Tim Pool come on tomorrow. 0.99

00:36:25.000 Tim Pool's an investigative journalist, independent journalist who used to be with Vice.

00:36:31.000 And he knows a lot about the censorship issue with YouTube, or with Twitter rather.

00:36:37.000 And he knows about YouTube as well. 0.98

00:36:38.000 But with who is censored and why, who is removed, who's been deplatformed, why they've been deplatformed, and where are the inconsistencies, and why is it skewing so heavily right, where the people on the right are the ones who are getting banned, the people on the left are getting away with a lot of crazy shit. 0.68

00:36:55.000 So we're going to get into the weeds with that.

00:36:57.000 And if the Cash App hears that and they decide to drop me as a sponsor, I don't care.

00:37:02.000 I really don't care.

00:37:03.000 This is a major source of income for me, but it's only one source.

00:37:07.000 It's one of the things of being a stand-up comedian, working for the UFC, and having a podcast, and I have a podcast with ads on YouTube, and having ads that are on the regular podcast itself.

00:37:17.000 I'm free, in a sense.

00:37:20.000 I have plenty of money.

00:37:21.000 It's not whether or not I'm starving or worried about paying my bills.

00:37:25.000 I'm free to do whatever I want to do.

00:37:27.000 Well, also, I should be clear.

00:37:28.000 I don't think, because this can sound totally sanctimonious and it's not intended that way, I don't think my scruples around reading ads on my podcast apply to you or Tim Ferriss or many other people.

00:37:43.000 I mean, Tim is the ultimate example.

00:37:44.000 Tim is somebody whose brand on some level is... 0.96

00:37:49.000 What I'm going to do is I'm going to go out there and find the best shit in the world, the best shirts, the best workout equipment, and I'm going to tell you about it. 0.91

00:37:56.000 So I want to know what Tim has found. 0.96

00:37:58.000 So if Tim is reading an ad for something, that is totally brand convergent for him.

00:38:04.000 And I think you're very much in a similar situation.

00:38:06.000 If you're talking about Onnit or whatever it is, it's your own part of Onnit, right?

00:38:10.000 I should also be clear that I say no to a lot of ads that I don't want.

00:38:14.000 There was one, there was an Uber for babysitting. 0.99

00:38:17.000 I was like, get the fuck out of here. 1.00

00:38:19.000 What are you, crazy? 1.00

00:38:20.000 Actually, that got recommended to me by somebody. 0.99

00:38:22.000 But it sounds like Craigslist for babysitting.

00:38:25.000 It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

00:38:27.000 There's been a few that I've said no to.

00:38:29.000 Like, quite a few.

00:38:30.000 Some of them that are just boring.

00:38:32.000 I'm like, I'm not reading that.

00:38:33.000 I'm not selling that. 1.00

00:38:34.000 That's stupid. 0.99

00:38:34.000 But also, you're a comic who can send up ads. 0.99

00:38:38.000 I mean, I think Bill Burr does this, where he kind of trashes the ad as he's reading it.

00:38:42.000 And he loses some because of that.

00:38:44.000 He lost NatureBox because he told people to go eat apples.

00:38:46.000 Yeah, really. 1.00

00:38:48.000 He's like, go eat a fucking apple. 0.99

00:38:52.000 And that's a tool you have in your wheelhouse that has effects down the line. 0.99

00:38:58.000 It's one reason why you can stream live without really worrying about it.

00:39:03.000 And I feel I can't. 0.98

00:39:05.000 At the end of the day, if things go completely haywire on your podcast, you can say, listen, I'm a fucking comic. 0.99

00:39:12.000 What do I know? 0.99

00:39:13.000 You can just pull the ripcord and you're fine.

00:39:18.000 I can't do that. 1.00

00:39:20.000 You can't say, I'm a moron. 1.00

00:39:21.000 You can't say that. 1.00

00:39:23.000 I say that all the time.

00:39:25.000 I can, and there's certain circumstances where I should, but I should avoid those circumstances.

00:39:32.000 I have to prepare more for podcasts, and I feel like I personally...

00:39:41.000 It's as much out of concern for my guests as well.

00:39:45.000 This is a high-wire act, but I want a net normally so that people feel free...

00:39:52.000 To be totally unguarded, because they know that if we have a spaz attack, we can, you know, even uttering spaz attack will screw some people's careers, right? 0.96

00:40:00.000 Well, we actually had a conversation about a podcast that I talked to you about, one of your podcasts, where you said that you actually started it over.

00:40:06.000 You started it, and you're like, let's try this again.

00:40:09.000 Let's just start from scratch.

00:40:10.000 I don't think it would be sporting to say which podcast that was.

00:40:16.000 I had a podcast that went completely into the ditch for the first half hour.

00:40:22.000 I mean, just brutal.

00:40:23.000 I said, listen, there's a good conversation for us to have here.

00:40:28.000 And now I know how badly this can go, all right?

00:40:31.000 So, like, now I know just where the track is.

00:40:33.000 I have to struggle to keep the train on.

00:40:35.000 And so we're going to reboot.

00:40:37.000 We're going to start again.

00:40:38.000 And we'll see what happens.

00:40:39.000 And, you know, the podcast was not perfect.

00:40:43.000 And I got some criticism for it.

00:40:45.000 But people didn't understand that we were like, you know, we had a, you know, we had, I had seen the pit of alligators and didn't want to fall in, right, you know?

00:40:54.000 Well, it made more sense, though, when you told me that, because I'm like, okay, it was heated before you even got to go, because you'd already gone through a half an hour of back and forth.

00:41:03.000 I think people need to understand what it's like to do one of these things, too, because, you know, you do it so often, it becomes pretty, and you're so good at talking.

00:41:14.000 You're such a good orator and you're so articulate that it comes off smooth and easy just having a conversation with someone, but you're always considering the fact that people are listening to this.

00:41:23.000 You're always saying, how do I get more out of him or her?

00:41:27.000 How do I take this and how do I get this person to expand upon this?

00:41:32.000 How do I make this something, make something out of this?

00:41:36.000 This is one of the things that I felt with Jack.

00:41:38.000 Because he was talking in this way, and we're really working hard on fixing all these issues.

00:41:44.000 I'm like, oh, Jesus.

00:41:44.000 I've got to change my gears here and try to figure out...

00:41:48.000 Because it's almost like we'd have to restart again every time a question would be answered.

00:41:54.000 He would stop talking, and I'd go, okay, next thing!

00:41:58.000 It took so long, you forgot what you asked.

00:41:59.000 Well, it's almost like I have to restart the momentum of it.

00:42:02.000 But...

00:42:03.000 Well, again, I'm totally, I'm that kind of a speaker, so, you know, that wasn't a problem.

00:42:08.000 But I didn't know what he talked like.

00:42:10.000 I'd never heard him talk, ever. 0.97

00:42:11.000 So hearing him talk there and talking to him live, you know, I mean, some people are fucking effortless. 0.65

00:42:18.000 Some people, like, Elon took a while. 0.83

00:42:20.000 Like, we had to start drinking.

00:42:22.000 No, that was brutal.

00:42:24.000 You know how much I tried to micromanage that behind the scenes.

00:42:27.000 I was all in your grill trying to figure that out.

00:42:32.000 You guys basically broke all the rules I thought I laid down.

00:42:37.000 Elon did it.

00:42:37.000 Elon tweeted, be on Joe's podcast Thursday night at 9 o'clock.

00:42:43.000 I didn't want you guys to go live.

00:42:45.000 I wanted you to both have a chance to say, wait a minute, is smoking a blunt really the thing we want to be doing here?

00:42:53.000 So, you know, you didn't take my advice, and it was what it was.

00:42:56.000 Well, we were drunk by the time the weed came out.

00:42:59.000 What's interesting to me is we were drinking from the beginning of the podcast.

00:43:03.000 We started drinking whiskey.

00:43:04.000 We both had two or three glasses of whiskey before the weed came out.

00:43:08.000 Nobody cared the fact that the CEO of Tesla was drunk.

00:43:11.000 Like, no one cared about that.

00:43:13.000 I mean, he wasn't drunk, but he should have been driving.

00:43:15.000 I don't know if that was obvious.

00:43:16.000 I don't know if they saw that you were drinking in the beginning.

00:43:19.000 It was obvious.

00:43:20.000 We were pouring the whiskey.

00:43:21.000 Right.

00:43:22.000 I mean, it was on the table.

00:43:23.000 We had ice.

00:43:23.000 We were clinking glasses.

00:43:25.000 Salute.

00:43:25.000 I mean, it was very obvious.

00:43:27.000 Yeah.

00:43:27.000 I mean, the problem for me there with that podcast, frankly, was that I feel like you both got unlucky with just where he was in his life at that moment.

00:43:37.000 So what that podcast showcased, at least for the first...

00:43:47.000 I think?

00:44:05.000 But once we got loose, that was good.

00:44:07.000 But it was still – it's like he was just in a space that he was so massively stressed and so overworked and just – I mean, he had fires everywhere that had to be put out.

00:44:21.000 So I just felt, you know, as a friend, I just felt like, okay, this is sort of the wrong time to be doing this.

00:44:26.000 And so I just felt, you know, it just felt unlucky to me.

00:44:29.000 So because he's, again, I see him in many other moments and he can be...

00:44:39.000 That was actually a circumstance where I was looking at the comments, right?

00:44:43.000 And I was saying, okay, these are people who are basically reading him as somebody who is much stranger than, in fact, he ever is.

00:44:52.000 And I could see why they were doing that, because he just seemed in a very stressed space in his life.

00:44:57.000 What was interesting, he was very different when he first got here versus when the mic came on.

00:45:02.000 Right. 0.97

00:45:02.000 When he first got here, he pulls out the fucking blowtorch and starts shooting this flamethrower in the middle of the hallway, and we're laughing. 0.97

00:45:11.000 I'm like, he's gonna be easy. 0.99

00:45:13.000 This is great.

00:45:13.000 And then we sat down and then stiff right off the bat.

00:45:17.000 And I'm just trying to massage it and get him going.

00:45:22.000 Honestly, I think that is another consequence of live.

00:45:26.000 I'm not arguing that you shouldn't be live because it has a massive advantage for you as well.

00:45:33.000 It is—there's just a different feeling.

00:45:35.000 Like, you know, if I knew that this was being taped and I could rethink the thing we're about to say about Liam Neeson or whatever it is, you know, it's different.

00:45:43.000 And so— Well, the Liam Neeson story is a perfect example.

00:45:48.000 Let's go there.

00:45:48.000 Yeah, let's go there.

00:45:50.000 A perfect example of a story where— If you were Liam's friend, you would go, don't tell that one.

00:45:57.000 Don't tell that one.

00:45:58.000 He's like, but I want to be honest.

00:46:00.000 Don't.

00:46:01.000 You could be honest with me.

00:46:02.000 I'm not going to judge you. 1.00

00:46:03.000 If you tell me that someone got raped and you went out with a baseball bat for a week looking for a black man to beat up To kill. 1.00

00:46:12.000 To kill. 1.00

00:46:12.000 I'd be like, oh, Jesus Christ, man. 1.00

00:46:15.000 Like, what the fuck was going through your head at that point in time? 1.00

00:46:17.000 Like, that's terrible. 0.99

00:46:18.000 Like, yeah, like, I feel awful about it.

00:46:20.000 I can't believe that was me.

00:46:21.000 But it didn't happen.

00:46:23.000 Nothing happened.

00:46:23.000 And now, you know, people are calling him a racist, and they don't want him in movies.

00:46:28.000 Well, this is fascinating to me because, again, this is a much larger problem with massive implications.

00:46:34.000 We need to think through the whole process of redemption for people in our society.

00:46:42.000 We have to understand what are the criteria for successful apologies and for forgiveness.

00:46:54.000 We're in a world where people are having their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent as teenagers.

00:47:05.000 This is to Dorsey's point.

00:47:08.000 Things are not disappearing online anymore.

00:47:10.000 At a certain point, there's just going to be a 360 panopticon view of everyone's life.

00:47:18.000 There are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there.

00:47:24.000 I mean, the irony here for me is that you have progressives and people on the far left who receive a disclosure like Liam Neeson, let's take his, and they just want to see him burned alive,

00:47:41.000 right?

00:47:42.000 Let's just do the wicker man on this guy because this is so awful.

00:47:46.000 Yes.

00:48:08.000 So there's no way to square those two things.

00:48:11.000 Well, they're constantly holding these two contradictions, right?

00:48:14.000 I mean, here's another one.

00:48:15.000 Women's rights and support of the hijab.

00:48:17.000 I mean, what's going on there?

00:48:20.000 How do you do that?

00:48:22.000 You know, don't be Islamophobic, but also support women's rights and gay rights.

00:48:27.000 Okay.

00:48:28.000 I think Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend, calls these the Hilbert problems for social justice warriors.

00:48:36.000 David Hilbert was a very famous mathematician who, at the turn of the 19th century, posed a set of problems in mathematics that were just the...

00:48:59.000 I think I'm going to go.

00:49:16.000 I think?

00:49:37.000 I think?

00:49:56.000 Now, and he's confessing this as a kind of a symptom of transient mental illness, at least as far as I know.

00:50:03.000 It's like he's horrified by the fact that he was in this state of mind, right?

00:50:07.000 Can you imagine?

00:50:08.000 Like I, you know, Liam Neeson, an actor, I have everything to lose, although I don't remember at what point in his life he said this happened.

00:50:16.000 Can you imagine that I was in this state of mind, right?

00:50:20.000 And this is...

00:50:21.000 I think?

00:50:38.000 It seems just wrong, given how he described her, at least how I've heard this, because he's saying, listen, if this had been an Armenian guy or an Italian or a Japanese guy, I'd be looking for one of them, right?

00:50:56.000 The virus of instrumental violence.

00:51:01.000 This is how every blood feud in human history gets started. 1.00

00:51:06.000 Someone from your tribe killed my brother, and now what I want to do is kill anyone from your tribe. 1.00

00:51:13.000 It doesn't matter who. 0.99

00:51:16.000 That's clearly as toxic as it gets ethically, but That's not racism, right?

00:51:24.000 That's just—that is—we have a word for it.

00:51:27.000 It's instrumental violence.

00:51:30.000 But, you know, yeah, obviously he's getting totally pilloried over this.

00:51:34.000 But we need— Yeah, I mean,

00:51:52.000 it is racism, though, right? 0.87

00:51:54.000 Because he's specifically looking for a black guy.

00:51:57.000 I mean, I understand that it's a part of the other tribe.

00:51:59.000 No, but it doesn't suggest...

00:52:01.000 That he has a predisposed...

00:52:03.000 That he feels one way or another about black people.

00:52:05.000 It's like, if you told me...

00:52:10.000 Yeah, I mean, he could have said, again, it could have been an Irish guy, right?

00:52:16.000 Or it could have been, well, I guess he's Irish.

00:52:18.000 Is he Scottish or Irish?

00:52:19.000 It could have been an English guy, right?

00:52:21.000 It could have been, like, any type, right?

00:52:23.000 It's like the salience of the tribe is what he was reacting to, at least in his description.

00:52:29.000 I don't know why you wouldn't take him at his word, given that he didn't have to say any of this in the first place, right?

00:52:35.000 I mean, like, this is an amazingly honest and unnecessary disclosure.

00:52:42.000 Right.

00:52:51.000 Right.

00:52:52.000 Right.

00:52:53.000 Right.

00:52:56.000 And so, yeah.

00:52:58.000 But we're so trigger-happy in our outrage with respect to anything like that.

00:53:04.000 Why do you think that is?

00:53:05.000 Like, what is going on?

00:53:06.000 Because outrage seems to be more in season than it's ever been in my lifetime.

00:53:10.000 I don't remember outrage being so—just such a—it's— It's recreational.

00:53:20.000 It's back to Jack.

00:53:21.000 It has a lot to do with social media and Twitter in particular.

00:53:27.000 So, for instance, I missed the whole Covington High School Catholic fiasco.

00:53:32.000 Because you're not on Twitter.

00:53:33.000 I basically was ignoring Twitter.

00:53:34.000 I saw it out of the corner of my eye, like, man, this is interesting.

00:53:38.000 This is blowing up.

00:53:39.000 But I was so off Twitter that there was no temptation for a hot take from me, right?

00:53:46.000 And I saw these people just torching their reputations by taking these, like Kathy Griffin, basically calling for the doxing of these kids, you know, given all that she has suffered, you know, from mob behavior online, and she's, you know, whipping up her own mob. 0.89

00:54:01.000 It was just nuts.

00:54:02.000 But it's normal.

00:54:03.000 That's what people do.

00:54:04.000 It's what the platform is calling out of people.

00:54:06.000 But it's also when people have been shamed and they've done something awful, then they reinforce their base.

00:54:13.000 Now she's so heavily hard left because the right wing ran after her. 1.00

00:54:19.000 Anyone on the right that does anything, she's calling for her side to go after this person, reinforcing that she's a part of that tribe, that she's a part of that left wing tribe.

00:54:29.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:54:30.000 Well, it's – so, obviously, everyone has a lot to lose doing this, especially in a case where all the facts aren't in, and if you just wait at a beat – I mean, even the New York Times got this wrong.

00:54:42.000 The New York Times writes an article about the kids in the MAGA hat that they have to rescind.

00:54:46.000 And the – so then, as the dust is settling – And I see these people.

00:54:53.000 Some people are doubling down.

00:54:54.000 Some people are issuing public apologies.

00:54:57.000 I see somebody who's actually kind of, you know, branded herself as, you know, one of my enemies for a reason I can't fathom.

00:55:04.000 But this journalist, Kara Swisher, who, you know, she works for Recode and Vox now.

00:55:13.000 But she's got a big podcast and she actually writes for The New York Times now.

00:55:16.000 She's got an opinion piece, a regular column for The New York Times.

00:55:19.000 She's a tech journalist and I happen to know she doesn't like me because she's tweeted against – she's said some disparaging things about me on Twitter and we had an offline conversation about it.

00:55:32.000 But I saw her – she said one of the most vituperative and fairly crazy things in response to the kids initially.

00:55:40.000 Well, good for her.

00:55:57.000 For someone who I know really doesn't like me.

00:55:59.000 Like, I mean, that was an added bonus for me because that's another norm that I think we should support.

00:56:04.000 It's like, we should play fair even with our enemies, right?

00:56:08.000 And, yeah, I mean, honestly, you know, I try to play fair even with people who never play fair with me.

00:56:13.000 Even someone like, you know, Glenn Greenwald or Ray Zaslan.

00:56:16.000 I mean, people who have just, you know, lied about me endlessly.

00:56:19.000 If I get something wrong about them, I publicly apologize for it.

00:56:24.000 So I did this, and this was at the absolute 11th hour with respect to this scandal online. 0.99

00:56:33.000 When I saw the kind of pain I was getting just for supporting Kara in her walk back of this thing, at a moment when it was obvious she should have walked this back, I got people saying, unsubscribing from your podcast, now I know you're a fucking racist. 0.99

00:56:49.000 It was just pure pain. 0.97

00:56:52.000 And I just thought, wow, man, that's, you know, it's like, you just touch this thing at its very end, and you're, you know, it's, the slime gets on you.

00:57:02.000 So, yeah, it is, it's the medium, you know.

00:57:05.000 It is the medium.

00:57:05.000 We had no opportunity to do this before.

00:57:07.000 It is the medium, and it's also people that don't feel like their opinions are being heard.

00:57:12.000 Like, they want their opinion to be heard, and they want it to be heard right now.

00:57:15.000 And it might not be a very well thought out opinion, but they know that they have the ability to blare it out.

00:57:20.000 And so they...

00:57:22.000 They just send it out.

00:57:23.000 The ability to do that is just intoxicating for folks.

00:57:28.000 You talked about this with Jack.

00:57:32.000 What makes Twitter especially good for this is that everything has the same stature. 1.00

00:57:36.000 Your tweet's no bigger than the other tweet that just called you an asshole. 0.99

00:57:40.000 Yeah, that's my Kurt Metzger take on it because Kurt Metzger was a hilarious stand-up comedian. 0.99

00:57:45.000 He'll write a Facebook blog only.

00:57:47.000 He only writes on Facebook.

00:57:49.000 He's like, I like how it's set up.

00:57:51.000 He's like, there's a big... 1.00

00:57:52.000 It differentiates between me and these fucking idiots who are commenting under there. 1.00

00:57:58.000 Although, ironically, I hate Facebook. 1.00

00:58:00.000 I can't even...

00:58:00.000 I mean, just the graphic design on Facebook I find so offensive that I just can't even look at Facebook.

00:58:06.000 So I use it as a publishing channel, but I keep threatening in my own mind to just delete the account because I just don't...

00:58:12.000 I've only read the comments three times maybe ever, and every time I read them, it's like, Jesus Christ, it's like YouTube but alive.

00:58:20.000 It's like YouTube, but with people with their real names.

00:58:24.000 This is a new world that we're living in, man.

00:58:28.000 And everybody's trying to navigate this thing and figure it out as it goes along.

00:58:32.000 And not everybody's doing it well.

00:58:34.000 And I think this world is going to get more and more intrusive.

00:58:38.000 I think this is just the beginning.

00:58:39.000 I think we didn't see Twitter coming.

00:58:41.000 Whatever comes after Twitter, and this is one of the things that I... Before the podcast, I wanted to really talk to Jack about to get his take on what he thinks is next down the line.

00:58:50.000 Because there's going to be something that's more invasive.

00:58:52.000 There's going to be something that is more, whether it's, I think, probably something in the line of augmented reality.

00:58:57.000 There were probably a decade away from something that makes this look like books. 0.96

00:59:03.000 Look like, you know, a fucking corkboard at a bookstore, you know? 0.91

00:59:07.000 Although, strangely, we're living through the golden age of audio here. 0.98

00:59:11.000 We went full into video and were poised to go 3D and VR, and then all of a sudden, audio is king.

00:59:21.000 Well, how about phone calls and texts? 0.99

00:59:23.000 I called you out of the blue once, and it was like, what the fuck? 0.98

00:59:27.000 Why are you calling me? 0.99

00:59:28.000 I'm walking through a supermarket.

00:59:31.000 Somebody said on Twitter once, it was hilarious, that FaceTiming me out of nowhere is just like knocking on my door without calling me.

00:59:41.000 Straight up.

00:59:43.000 Right.

00:59:44.000 She was angry that somebody FaceTimed her.

00:59:46.000 No, it always feels like an old school move to, like my book agent calls me, you know, out of the blue, and it's just, it seems so old school.

00:59:54.000 It is just like a knock on the door.

00:59:55.000 My friend Joey Diaz only calls.

00:59:57.000 Yeah.

00:59:58.000 Only calls.

00:59:58.000 For years, he would scream at you if you text, and then recently, within the last two or three years, he started texting occasionally.

01:00:05.000 Right.

01:00:05.000 But he only calls.

01:00:07.000 I've got to tell you, having released this meditation app has given me a sanity check on everything else I'm doing, which is very interesting.

01:00:17.000 In releasing the app, it's firewalled from all the other controversial stuff I'm doing.

01:00:23.000 In the app, I'm not whinging about Trump or talking about any of the stuff I talk about on my podcast.

01:00:29.000 It's just me trying to teach meditation largely as an antidote to all of the stuff we're talking about.

01:00:37.000 We've got this, as Tristan Harris says, we've got this slot machine in our pocket that is continually gaming our attention all day long.

01:00:44.000 And, you know, in my view, a meditation app is like the one thing you can have on your smartphone that completely subverts the technology and can get you to actually live a more examined life using the technology, right?

01:00:59.000 But what's been amazing for me personally is that I put it out and it is the only thing that I have put out maybe ever, right, where it's been received and Exactly

01:01:36.000 as I've intended, right?

01:01:36.000 I have to do both because there's a lot of important things to talk about that are going to be endlessly spun and maliciously misunderstood.

01:01:44.000 But it's been so refreshing to have one thing.

01:01:48.000 You must get this with doing your stand-up.

01:01:52.000 I don't have a thing. 0.99

01:01:53.000 I get shit for everything. 0.98

01:01:55.000 Or maybe UFC commentary. 0.99

01:01:58.000 No!

01:01:58.000 They come after me for everything.

01:02:00.000 Well, psychologically, it's been a revelation to have one thing that I can put out that is just received, appreciated, and they got what I intended, and it's just, you know, thank you. 0.99

01:02:16.000 It's just like, oh, fuck, that's possible. 0.99

01:02:18.000 I had no idea. 1.00

01:02:20.000 If I ever knew, I had forgotten that that was possible.

01:02:24.000 Well, a meditation app, it kind of makes sense because the people that are going to flock to that are looking to meditate.

01:02:28.000 They're looking to improve their mind.

01:02:29.000 They're not looking to spew hatred on Facebook.

01:02:32.000 No.

01:02:32.000 Yeah.

01:02:34.000 I thought that after the podcast with Jack, I was like, Jesus Christ, I should just stick to podcasts with comics.

01:02:39.000 Because podcasts with comics, even if you put your foot in your mouth, everybody knows you're just trying to be funny.

01:02:43.000 Right.

01:02:44.000 If you do a podcast, and the thing about the podcast with Jack, it's not even like I said anything bad.

01:02:49.000 It's what I didn't say that was upsetting to so many people.

01:02:53.000 But that's such a loaded thing.

01:02:55.000 And because of that podcast, now there's negative to it, that blowback.

01:03:00.000 There's a lot of toxic anger and all that.

01:03:03.000 But the positive is what I like.

01:03:06.000 The positive that came out of it is me forced to re-examine how I do podcasts, re-examine the significance of each individual guest, and especially someone that comes with as much baggage, without lack of a better term, as Jack.

01:03:21.000 That you're, you know, you've got to think that there's people listening.

01:03:25.000 And there's some questions that you really have to work at.

01:03:28.000 You have to push through.

01:03:30.000 And even if he's dancing and pirouetting, I should have went back to, okay, why is Kathy Griffin on your platform? 0.60

01:03:36.000 Like if doxing is bad, you don't want to dox, you don't want threats of violence.

01:03:40.000 When someone says, I want names. 0.99

01:03:43.000 Okay, what are you going to do with these fucking names? 0.99

01:03:44.000 What are you going to do with them? 1.00

01:03:45.000 What are you going to do with a 16-year-old kid and his names?

01:03:47.000 And then when you see the actual video of what actually happened, and there's so many people that are still not walking it back.

01:03:56.000 Still.

01:03:56.000 They're doubling down.

01:03:57.000 A lot of people double down. 1.00

01:03:58.000 Fuck him. 1.00

01:03:59.000 And here's another little piece of insight. 1.00

01:04:02.000 My friend Matt lived in D.C. And those hats, those MAGA hats, they're fucking everywhere. 0.98

01:04:08.000 Where these kids were, that area, there's these carts that sell these hats. 0.98

01:04:12.000 So these kids bought those hats that day.

01:04:15.000 It's not like they're these MAGA kids. 1.00

01:04:17.000 They're probably just being assholes, right? 1.00

01:04:19.000 They're unsupervised teenage boys. 1.00

01:04:21.000 Their frontal lobe is not fully formed.

01:04:24.000 And they're all together feeding off each other like a pack of gremlins.

01:04:27.000 Yeah.

01:04:27.000 I was a teenage boy.

01:04:28.000 You were a teenage boy. 1.00

01:04:29.000 You know how fucking stupid you used to be. 1.00

01:04:31.000 I mean, I was probably way more stupid than you, but I was a mess. 1.00

01:04:35.000 I had my moments. 1.00

01:04:37.000 You get a hundred teenage boys together in a crowd on a school trip, and you get some native elder drumming in some guy's face.

01:04:48.000 It was amazing what didn't happen there.

01:04:50.000 Exactly.

01:04:51.000 No violence.

01:04:52.000 The kid, the way he handled it, all he did was smile.

01:04:56.000 Listen, I'm as biased as anyone against a Catholic school kid wearing a MAGA hat. 1.00

01:05:03.000 Given my backstory, it's like, yeah, I'm totally poised to think this guy's an asshole and is likely always to be an asshole. 1.00

01:05:11.000 But what people read into an uncomfortable smile, right? 1.00

01:05:15.000 I mean, just like the shots of his face with the tweets that said, you know, this is what white privilege looks like.

01:05:23.000 This is, you know, this is everything that's wrong in our society.

01:05:26.000 It's just we have to slow down.

01:05:29.000 How about Reza wrote, have you ever seen a more punchable face?

01:05:32.000 Come on, man. 0.98

01:05:33.000 You want to punch him? 0.98

01:05:34.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:05:34.000 Because he's smiling. 0.99

01:05:37.000 Calls for violence from the left are so fucking disturbing to me because my parents were hippies when I grew up. 0.98

01:05:44.000 I always thought of the left, and I've been called right-wing. 0.99

01:05:48.000 I've never voted anything but democratic in my life except for Gary Johnson. 0.98

01:05:51.000 Gary Johnson was the only time I voted independent, or whatever the fuck he was, libertarian. 0.92

01:05:55.000 But that was just because he did my podcast. 0.95

01:05:57.000 I'll fall for Tulsi Gabbard because she did my podcast, too. 0.99

01:06:01.000 But the...

01:06:02.000 The left was always very considerate, well-read.

01:06:07.000 They were the people that were more open-minded.

01:06:10.000 They were supporting of gay people and minorities.

01:06:14.000 That was the left, and they were non-violent.

01:06:15.000 They were the people that were protesting Vietnam when I was a kid.

01:06:18.000 Also, just supportive of the virtue of speech, free speech, and self-criticism.

01:06:24.000 The disadvantage of the left against the right has always been there's this I think?

01:06:48.000 You go far enough left now and you're meeting a kind of totalitarian resistance to speech.

01:06:59.000 It'll be interesting to see how the 2020 campaign plays out.

01:07:03.000 I'm certainly worried that we could totally blow it with some leftist SJW uprising.

01:07:11.000 Yeah, that would be unfortunate, because I think they would just double down the other side.

01:07:14.000 We'd be better off with some sort of a reasonable centrist, right?

01:07:17.000 Someone who just made sense.

01:07:18.000 And, you know, one of the things that I liked about Tulsi is that she's a veteran.

01:07:22.000 And, you know, I mean, like, she seems very reasonable to me, but...

01:07:26.000 Except I haven't followed her career closely, but it just seems like she's not making the right noises on things like Syria and Assad and...

01:07:36.000 Yeah, I don't know enough about that to comment.

01:07:38.000 I don't know enough about Assad and the controversy of whether or not he gassed his...

01:07:42.000 Well, that is, I think, uncontroversial.

01:07:45.000 In terms of what she... 0.75

01:07:46.000 I mean, that is uncontroversial.

01:07:48.000 In terms of what she is saying about it...

01:07:51.000 About him.

01:07:51.000 I mean, she's capable of putting both feet in her mouth on that.

01:07:55.000 I thought she's... 1.00

01:07:56.000 She's saying he's not an enemy of America, right?

01:07:58.000 Is that what...

01:07:58.000 Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not close enough to it, but I would, you know, be very circumspect about endorsing her going forward and do a little homework because I think her candidacy is not going to age well.

01:08:12.000 That's my prediction.

01:08:15.000 Who do you like?

01:08:16.000 Who makes sense to you? 1.00

01:08:18.000 Elizabeth Warren's fucked now. 1.00

01:08:19.000 She's the most recent one. 1.00

01:08:21.000 The most recent one where she filled out an application and she wrote Native American on it.

01:08:25.000 Just having done the DNA test, playing that game with Trump, that was such a miscalculation.

01:08:32.000 Well, the fact that she released the data, and the data is so clear.

01:08:35.000 Well, it's almost like she had to.

01:08:38.000 Because otherwise he would call her Pocahontas to the end of time.

01:08:40.000 But then to then have to apologize to Native Americans for having done the... 1.00

01:08:45.000 Well, because the amount of Native American is so little. 0.99

01:08:48.000 I've been joking around about it that I am like a hundred times more African than she is Native American.

01:08:53.000 I'm 1.6% African.

01:08:56.000 And she's way less than 1% Native American, right? 0.99

01:08:59.000 But this is the sort of masochistic death spiral that people on the left can get into.

01:09:06.000 I've always said that the left eats its own in a way that the right never does.

01:09:12.000 We have to find someone who can stand outside that circular firing squad, right?

01:09:20.000 And it would be someone who's...

01:09:24.000 You know, it would be, in my view, it would be somebody like a younger Bloomberg, right? 0.87

01:09:29.000 I mean, I don't think it's Bloomberg, but like somebody, like a legit businessman who could call bullshit on all of Trump's fake business acumen and who's not ethically compromised, right? 0.67

01:09:41.000 But who can get stuff done. 0.81

01:09:43.000 Right.

01:09:44.000 Right.

01:09:45.000 And definitely not someone who feels the need to pander to the far left on these identity politics issues.

01:09:53.000 I think identity politics is really going to be bad for us against Trump because so much of the country, the crucial sliver of the country, you just have to ask yourself, who was it who voted for Obama in We're good to go.

01:10:34.000 In a nationwide election against someone like Trump, I just think that's an absolute recipe for disaster. 0.61

01:10:42.000 Yeah, because the people that subscribe to that ideology don't realize how many people think it's silly.

01:10:47.000 You know, when you're in the oppression Olympics and you're trying to win the gold.

01:10:51.000 And for how many people it's actually misapplied, right?

01:10:54.000 It's like there are many more explanations for voting for Trump in addition to racism.

01:11:03.000 Yes, every racist voted for Trump, you know, virtually.

01:11:07.000 So that's fine. 0.99

01:11:08.000 Every white supremacist voted for Trump.

01:11:10.000 But that's not the story about why Trump got elected.

01:11:16.000 It's a long story.

01:11:17.000 There's just much more.

01:11:19.000 I mean, there are people who just have not...

01:11:21.000 What do you think is...

01:11:24.000 ...are not thriving in the current economy.

01:11:27.000 You know, I mean, it's just like you got automation...

01:11:29.000 Displacing manufacturing jobs, you've got the consequences of trade and immigration, and you have legitimate concerns about immigration that have nothing to do with racism.

01:11:43.000 And so if you're going to score any hesitation over something like open borders as a sign of your xenophobia and racism, You're going to lose virtually everyone who has a sane concern about how you admit the right people into a country.

01:12:02.000 There are economic concerns and there are social concerns.

01:12:08.000 You don't have to be Ben Shapiro to share some of those concerns.

01:12:12.000 I'm not saying Ben Shapiro is a racist.

01:12:13.000 Obviously, I'm saying he's a conservative.

01:12:15.000 And, you know, takes a more conservative line on many of these questions than I do.

01:12:20.000 But, you know, it's like, you either think, let me just take immigration as the narrow case, you either think you should be able to know who's coming into the country, or you don't, right?

01:12:33.000 Now, if you think you should just have open borders, there are two problems with that.

01:12:39.000 One is there are many good arguments against that.

01:12:42.000 And two, Yeah.

01:12:57.000 Yeah.

01:13:10.000 What do you think is, what's the primary factor?

01:13:14.000 Like what caused identity politics to reach this boiling point that it's at right now?

01:13:21.000 Well, it is, I think, in large measure what the internet is doing to us.

01:13:26.000 It's not that identity politics hasn't been a feature of politics forever, but there's this siloing effect.

01:13:34.000 There's the effect that groups become more radicalized as groups because the most extreme voices exist.

01:13:46.000 And everyone who's silent, there's kind of a diffusion of responsibility around countering these extreme voices.

01:13:55.000 It only takes a small percentage of extreme voices to cow the rest of a group and make the group seem like the extreme voices are speaking for the group.

01:14:08.000 Right.

01:14:09.000 You know, and so I think what we have on both the left and the right, we have a small percentage.

01:14:15.000 I mean, you know, the last poll I saw that tried to get at this question was something like, you know, six or eight percent on the tails that are making it seem like these are – and I think it's more of a problem on the left than on the right because, I mean, the extreme right – We're good to go.

01:14:55.000 Have massive sway in major companies, in tech companies, in journalism, in academia.

01:15:02.000 The silencing effect and the reputational cost that's being paid by even very powerful people in all these mainstream forums on the left is just...

01:15:14.000 That's not mirrored on the right.

01:15:18.000 I don't know if I told you this.

01:15:22.000 I certainly didn't say it on a previous podcast with you, but I was at dinner with a bunch of Silicon Valley people and we were talking about it.

01:15:30.000 It was at the moment when that Netflix story happened where Jonathan Friedland got fired over using the N-word in a closed-door meeting and it was a Using the N-word in response to my friend Tom Segura, who you met earlier.

01:15:45.000 Oh, yeah.

01:15:45.000 Right, exactly.

01:15:46.000 Special.

01:15:47.000 Yeah.

01:15:48.000 Where he said, you can't say retarded anymore.

01:15:51.000 Yeah.

01:15:51.000 And then explained, like, that, you know, there's words you can't use anymore.

01:15:55.000 Right. 0.94

01:15:55.000 And didn't even, wasn't using it in a joke, like calling someone retarded or saying something's retarded, but they were, and he was saying that that's like using the N-word around black people. 0.94

01:16:04.000 Yeah, but he used the N-word in this meeting, right? 0.77

01:16:06.000 Yes, yes.

01:16:11.000 Yeah.

01:16:33.000 And then he gave the magic incantation. 0.62

01:16:36.000 But you can still say retarded, which is amazing. 1.00

01:16:38.000 Exactly.

01:16:39.000 I mean, in his defense, you kind of have to say both words.

01:16:43.000 You're not saying the R word.

01:16:45.000 Right. 0.73

01:16:45.000 Like, using the R word is like using the N word around black people. 0.73

01:16:48.000 And we're getting to some weird fucking... 1.00

01:16:50.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:16:51.000 Weird place with this.

01:16:53.000 Actually, now I realize why I'm confused about why I think I've talked about this because I did a podcast with Chelsea Handler, which hasn't aired.

01:17:00.000 I did it months ago because she was doing a documentary on white privilege, I think, and I think I'm actually cast as the guy with white privilege in this documentary.

01:17:09.000 Oh, boy.

01:17:09.000 That's going to be fun.

01:17:10.000 You have white privilege?

01:17:11.000 So – but I recorded a podcast with her.

01:17:11.000 Yeah.

01:17:11.000 Nice.

01:17:15.000 So anyway, so we hit this point because this had just come out then and I think her documentary is probably for Netflix.

01:17:22.000 So – What was her take on it?

01:17:24.000 Well, she was basically – I mean she was playing the other side of the net for this and not – I mean, we'll have to see.

01:17:33.000 I mean, I think I, at least in my own mind, I certainly made sense there, and she didn't have a lot of response to what I was saying, but I haven't heard the audio or seen the video.

01:17:43.000 But the...

01:17:48.000 So anyway, I was at a dinner with a bunch of tech CEOs talking about this problem.

01:17:54.000 And one guy who I won't name, who runs a big company, which I won't name, said, listen, you have no idea how deep this goes.

01:18:04.000 I have an HR complaint where there's a guy who...

01:18:10.000 Identifies as a furry, right?

01:18:12.000 He thinks he's a cat, and because we don't provide litter boxes in the bathroom, right, he's launched an HR complaint, right?

01:18:21.000 This is real?

01:18:21.000 This was told as a real story, as a counterpoint or in amplification of the story we were talking about at Netflix, right?

01:18:30.000 So, it's like, this is...

01:18:34.000 And yet, this is happening.

01:18:36.000 People are having to navigate.

01:18:38.000 CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies are having to navigate around this stuff in-house, right?

01:18:44.000 And, I mean, the Google thing over James Damore, right?

01:18:47.000 I mean, that was an enormous problem for Google.

01:18:51.000 The wheels were coming off, as far as I can tell, from what I've heard.

01:18:57.000 And how so?

01:18:58.000 Just that, like, there was going to be a Google mutiny over James Damore if he had to be fired.

01:19:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:06.000 This was a big deal at Google.

01:19:09.000 That's so insane.

01:19:10.000 And what he wrote was essentially like a B-plus term paper in human biology, right?

01:19:16.000 And it was like, you can...

01:19:20.000 You can push back on some of the science, say, but like this was not a malicious distortion of the state of the science, right?

01:19:27.000 And this was not calling for discrimination against women.

01:19:31.000 This was just saying, listen, men and women are different and they've got different interests, right?

01:19:34.000 And this could account for why there's an unequal representation at the level of software development.

01:19:41.000 And On the left, we're finding it very difficult to even talk about differences between men and women.

01:19:53.000 Start with a uterus and then count from there. 0.94

01:19:56.000 That is already a taboo.

01:20:06.000 Yeah.

01:20:17.000 Unless we resolve that or just cut through it, we don't stand a chance against Trump in 2020. I was reading a story about a woman who's on some sort of an LBGT panel, and she's a part of some group,

01:20:33.000 and she was kicked out of it by a man who identifies as a lesbian, and he has a penis. 0.99

01:20:41.000 Right. 1.00

01:20:43.000 Right.

01:20:43.000 Yeah.

01:20:44.000 Yeah.

01:20:46.000 Where do we go?

01:20:47.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:20:48.000 But ironically, so this is a point that... 1.00

01:20:51.000 I think he has a penis. 1.00

01:20:52.000 I want to be sure. 1.00

01:20:53.000 He definitely identifies as a lesbian. 0.99

01:20:55.000 I might have read a Twitter comment about how preposterous that was and said the penis part. 0.85

01:20:59.000 Well, this is something that Andrew Sullivan wrote in a recent article on this, is that The transgender thing is at odds with gay rights in a fundamental sense.

01:21:11.000 I mean, you can't balance these equations because gay identity absolutely focuses on the legitimate differences between men and women. 0.99

01:21:20.000 It's like, I'm a man.

01:21:22.000 I like men.

01:21:23.000 I don't like women. 1.00

01:21:24.000 That's my situation.

01:21:25.000 But once you change your notion of how gender relates to sex...

01:21:33.000 It begins to erode this claim on the legitimacy of gay identity.

01:21:40.000 Well, the thing is that they're all marginalized, so they stick together.

01:21:43.000 That's the idea, I guess, behind it.

01:21:45.000 Sort of, but I can only imagine what Andrew Sullivan's Twitter feed looks like now, because when he writes these articles, I'm sure he just gets eviscerated.

01:22:07.000 Yeah, but you can't say that. 0.99

01:22:09.000 And you also can't say that a man with a penis is not a woman. 0.99

01:22:15.000 I can say it because I can't be fired. 0.99

01:22:19.000 But if you do say it, you will get a certain amount of hate. 0.98

01:22:22.000 I mean, there's people that are saying that men who will not date trans women who still have penises, they're transphobic. 0.87

01:22:30.000 Have you ever met Jamie Kilstein? 0.96

01:22:34.000 Jamie and I have a checkered history.

01:22:37.000 Maybe you and I have spoken about this.

01:22:39.000 I've never met Jamie, but when Jamie was social justice warrior, number one, he went hard on me.

01:22:46.000 He just was dunking on me endlessly in ways that were totally unfair.

01:22:53.000 He was working very hard to become an enemy.

01:23:00.000 Then he had his His epiphany, then the social justice mob came for him over something.

01:23:07.000 Over almost nothing.

01:23:08.000 Right.

01:23:09.000 Over him trying to get laid. 0.52

01:23:11.000 I mean, like they were saying he was a creep or something like that. 0.99

01:23:14.000 Hitting on girls.

01:23:15.000 Yeah, well, I miss the details there, but then he sent me very...

01:23:25.000 I'm sorry what I did.

01:23:27.000 He wants to do a podcast.

01:23:29.000 I haven't taken him up on it, but maybe that could be an interesting conversation.

01:23:34.000 He's sincerely apologetic.

01:23:35.000 He's a good guy.

01:23:37.000 I mean, he and I had our own issue at one point in time over a podcast that we did versus...

01:23:45.000 You remember when the Daniel Tosh rape controversy...

01:23:50.000 Do you remember this?

01:23:51.000 I know who Tosh is, but I missed that.

01:23:52.000 Not a rape joke. 0.73

01:23:53.000 I should say rape joke. 1.00

01:23:55.000 Some woman in a crowd, he was on stage...

01:24:00.000 And he wasn't supposed to be there.

01:24:01.000 It was at the Laugh Factory.

01:24:02.000 And Dom Herrera put him on stage, and he goes, look, I don't have any material.

01:24:06.000 What do you guys want to talk about? 0.67

01:24:08.000 And some guy yells out, rape.

01:24:12.000 That's always helpful. 0.63

01:24:13.000 And so, you know, it's like some drunk in a crowd, right?

01:24:16.000 He goes, Jesus Christ.

01:24:17.000 And so, Daniel Tosh's take on it, he's like, okay, what's funny about that?

01:24:22.000 Humiliation?

01:24:23.000 Violence?

01:24:24.000 You know, he's like...

01:24:26.000 Berating this guy in trying to do stand-up while he's doing this.

01:24:29.000 And some woman yells out, actually, there's nothing funny about rape. 1.00

01:24:33.000 And he goes, wouldn't it be funny if someone just raped her? 0.98

01:24:36.000 And everybody starts laughing. 0.98

01:24:38.000 I do remember this.

01:24:39.000 And so this woman wrote a giant blog about it, and she wanted him to apologize about it. 0.92

01:24:42.000 And Jamie went after Daniel Tosh.

01:24:45.000 As a fellow comic.

01:24:46.000 Yes, as a fellow comic, saying that it's, you know, like, and I was like, well, she's a heckler.

01:24:51.000 The woman heckled, like, while he was trying to do stand-up.

01:24:54.000 And he's like, I'm not going to support rape culture. 0.99

01:24:57.000 And he's like, how the fuck is that rape culture? 0.99

01:24:59.000 He's clearly making a joke about something she said that was very patronizing. 0.99

01:25:06.000 Obviously, he doesn't think there's something funny about rape.

01:25:08.000 He's just trying to work through this ad-lib set that he's doing with some guy who yelled out something that this whole crowd has to respond to.

01:25:17.000 He can't just ignore the fact that it happened and go, how about fire trucks, folks?

01:25:22.000 Why are they always red?

01:25:23.000 You know, he can't do that.

01:25:24.000 He's got to deal with what this guy said.

01:25:26.000 And so that's what he tosses out there.

01:25:28.000 And everybody laughed, by the way.

01:25:29.000 But also, isn't part of his persona just...

01:25:32.000 A villain.

01:25:33.000 He takes it to the edge, right?

01:25:34.000 Yes.

01:25:35.000 Yeah, he's an edgy comedian.

01:25:37.000 He's funny.

01:25:38.000 And, you know, Jamie and I had this little...

01:25:41.000 I think?

01:26:02.000 Or a takedown.

01:26:04.000 It's a toxic thing that people are doing.

01:26:07.000 It's this looking for people that are bad and looking for things that are wrong, looking for wrong speak.

01:26:15.000 It's very toxic.

01:26:16.000 It's toxic for the people that are doing it.

01:26:18.000 It's toxic for the people that are receiving it.

01:26:20.000 It's not a way that human beings would ever communicate in one-on-one.

01:26:24.000 I mean, I try to communicate with people The same way online as I would if they were right in front of me.

01:26:31.000 I don't want to succeed, but I try.

01:26:33.000 That's my goal.

01:26:33.000 My goal is to try to talk to someone as if they were right in front of me.

01:26:36.000 That's clearly not how everybody's handling it.

01:26:38.000 No, no.

01:26:38.000 I think road rage is the best analogy for what's happening on social media.

01:26:42.000 Yeah, I've adopted that.

01:26:43.000 I've adopted that way of looking at it, too.

01:26:45.000 But the only difference is road rage, you know, there's like a physiological reason for road rage.

01:26:51.000 Because you're in a dangerous situation that you're subliminally taking stock of.

01:26:55.000 You're going fast.

01:26:55.000 Right.

01:26:56.000 You're in a metal machine with a bunch of assholes that are probably looking at their phone and everybody's going fast and you could die at any moment if someone goes wrong. 0.99

01:27:04.000 If you're on a highway like the 405 and you have five lanes going 70 miles an hour, it is a fucking miracle that no one dies. 0.99

01:27:11.000 And every day we do it. 0.96

01:27:12.000 Every day everything's fine.

01:27:14.000 Yeah.

01:27:15.000 Well, so, let's go back to this idea of what the actual normative response would be when somebody puts their foot in their mouth or something from their past gets disclosed. 1.00

01:27:28.000 I mean, the stupid... 1.00

01:27:30.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:27:50.000 That one politician said he's not even in the photo, but the photo was on his yearbook page or like whatever you put on your yearbook page in high school, right?

01:28:00.000 You find out this thing that no adult is going to defend, right?

01:28:05.000 But what is the path back?

01:28:08.000 What is the reboot that should be acceptable?

01:28:11.000 Because we don't even know – it seems we don't even know what – I don't know.

01:28:45.000 The way I've been thinking about it is that it has to be intelligible how you are different from the person who committed that thing.

01:28:54.000 If you did something that was, let's say, legit racist when you were 20, and Mark Wahlberg is an example of this.

01:29:03.000 He was running around just beating people senseless and for avowed racist motives, I believe.

01:29:11.000 Well, the guy lost his eye.

01:29:13.000 Right.

01:29:15.000 I think that was a Vietnamese guy he attacked.

01:29:19.000 But, I mean, he was just doing truly indefensible things.

01:29:24.000 Now, I don't know what sort of PR moment he has had since or how he's apologized for it.

01:29:30.000 But, I mean, that was a very different time.

01:29:33.000 I think if all that stuff was being discovered about him now...

01:29:37.000 There may be no way back to making movies.

01:29:39.000 Well, the problem is, with this day and age, it could be reignited.

01:29:43.000 Right.

01:29:43.000 Like, even though he's apologized for it, and even though that it's been addressed, it absolutely could get reignited.

01:29:49.000 Yeah, I mean, just me talking about it on your podcast is fucking him over. 0.96

01:29:52.000 Right. 0.76

01:29:52.000 Yeah, I mean, and also people have to recognize that there's some things, but you can't retroactively instill today's ideas of what constitutes racism on 1985. So if you were in high school in 1985 and you dressed up as Mr. T... Right. 0.76

01:30:09.000 You know, I don't know if that was racist back then.

01:30:12.000 I never did it, but I don't know if that's racist.

01:30:14.000 Like, if you had a bunch of gold chains and you made your hair black, or you made your face black and gave yourself a mohawk and you said, I'm Mr. T for Halloween.

01:30:21.000 Right.

01:30:21.000 And the pictures emerge today.

01:30:24.000 What you did when you went door to door when you were 15 or 12 or whatever you were, knocking on people's doors and everybody was laughing, oh, you're Mr. T. Nobody thought it was racist.

01:30:34.000 Yeah.

01:30:34.000 But today, anything...

01:30:36.000 But let's take the hard case.

01:30:37.000 Let's say you were racist, right?

01:30:39.000 I had this guy, Christian Picciolini, on my podcast once who's an ex-neo-Nazi. 0.95

01:30:44.000 He's just legit racist, right? 0.88

01:30:46.000 He's got all the tattoos to prove it. 0.88

01:30:48.000 Now, there are major problems with Christian Picciolini, as I think you know, that I discovered after that podcast.

01:30:56.000 So this is not an endorsement of him.

01:30:58.000 Sorry, Christian. 1.00

01:30:59.000 But the...

01:31:02.000 There's a path back.

01:31:04.000 I mean, so like he's celebrated on the left.

01:31:06.000 He's a former neo-Nazi and he's, you know, I discovered him on Silverman's show on wherever that is, Hulu.

01:31:16.000 And, you know, he's a darling of the left, right?

01:31:20.000 A darling of MSNBC for this redemption story.

01:31:24.000 So, but what is the...

01:31:25.000 You take someone like any of these politicians who have...

01:31:30.000 Something in their backstory that is ugly.

01:31:34.000 My feeling is, all there has to be is a transparent and intelligible account of how you are now different, of how you can actually honestly look back on this thing and say, yeah, I am as embarrassed by that as you think I should be,

01:31:51.000 right?

01:31:51.000 That's not like, that is nothing that does not represent how I view the world at all now.

01:31:57.000 But...

01:32:00.000 The spirit of the time on social media, again, especially on the left and to our total dysfunction politically, is to never accept any of that.

01:32:11.000 I mean, there is no apology good enough.

01:32:13.000 Right.

01:32:17.000 Or there's the most cynical possible interpretation of your apology.

01:32:23.000 It's like you're just trying to – the only reason why you're apologizing is because you want to save your job, right?

01:32:29.000 And that – we have to figure out how to – I mean, we just need some – Recovery disk that we can reboot from here because it's just not – this is going someplace terrible.

01:32:42.000 And again, to look at it through the lens narrowly politically over the next two years, it's to the massive disadvantage of the left.

01:32:51.000 It certainly is, but I don't see any way to fix that.

01:32:55.000 Like with the current climate and this current attitude where people are engaging in this recreational outrage, it fits the climate.

01:33:02.000 I mean, I don't know what would have to happen for people to come to some sort of a realization.

01:33:07.000 I mean, it would have to happen to them, like it did to Jamie.

01:33:10.000 Like, what happened with Jamie Kilstein is that they turned on him, and he's like, oh my god, this is awful.

01:33:15.000 Like, what?

01:33:16.000 And then he realized.

01:33:18.000 You know, I mean, I don't know what other thing could happen.

01:33:22.000 Well, I mean, the game we're playing...

01:33:41.000 It's part of it.

01:33:41.000 And when you look at the thing that she said, I mean, it was just a question.

01:33:45.000 Yeah.

01:33:45.000 I mean, she just didn't seem to understand how charged the phrase blackface was.

01:33:50.000 Right. 0.93

01:33:50.000 Like, she's just ignorant of that piece of history or something. 0.93

01:33:53.000 But like, you know, so she just, she put her foot in her mouth. 0.97

01:33:56.000 She gave an apology that was just like, you know, full-blown hostage video apology.

01:34:01.000 Just like, you know, just like, I am so fucking sorry you don't even know.

01:34:05.000 Like, here, take a sample of my blood and you'll just see my, you know, test my cortisol. 0.64

01:34:09.000 Not good enough.

01:34:10.000 Not good enough.

01:34:12.000 They let her say the apology, too, which is even more crazy.

01:34:16.000 They let her come back, say the apology, and they go, good, thanks for doing that. 0.99

01:34:19.000 Get the fuck out of here. 0.80

01:34:21.000 So no one's job in that space is secure enough where they can take real risks. 0.97

01:34:27.000 But you and I could do an interview with Louis C.K., right?

01:34:33.000 And just process his coming back into stand-up.

01:34:38.000 Yes. 1.00

01:34:38.000 And do it in a way where if people didn't like it, you just say, okay, fuck off, right? 1.00

01:34:42.000 This is the conversation we had. 0.98

01:34:43.000 And I think modeling that more and more, I mean, I think we have to take those risks and people like us have to take those risks and hope to break this spell by having those conversations in public.

01:34:58.000 I would hope that we're having some kind of an impact on it, but I feel like we're...

01:35:03.000 We're throwing buckets of cold water into a volcano.

01:35:08.000 I just don't know if it's enough.

01:35:11.000 But we have pretty big buckets.

01:35:13.000 I mean, you have an enormous bucket.

01:35:14.000 You're reaching more people than the biggest television shows are reaching.

01:35:19.000 People aren't aware of this, but it's just a fact.

01:35:24.000 So I think that's part of it.

01:35:26.000 And then changing the norm somehow of how we engage on social media...

01:35:32.000 I think is another piece.

01:35:34.000 Yeah, I agree.

01:35:35.000 I agree with you.

01:35:36.000 The norm on how we engage on social media, I think, is flavored by two things.

01:35:40.000 One, the immediacy of it, the fact that there's no person in front of you. 0.97

01:35:45.000 You don't experience their anger or their fear or their sadness when you say something fucked up. 0.86

01:35:53.000 Also, anonymity.

01:35:54.000 And I think anonymity is good in a lot of ways, like for whistleblowers, people that work in a certain environment where they want to be honest, but they would get fired, you know, with a very restricted environment, but they have maybe a controversial opinion.

01:36:08.000 They want to be able to express free speech.

01:36:11.000 And they can't.

01:36:12.000 They can't unless they do something anonymous.

01:36:14.000 And even sometimes people, when they do things anonymous, they get caught.

01:36:18.000 And they get in trouble. 0.87

01:36:19.000 I remember there was a guy on 4chan who would say a bunch of fucked up things like a lot of people do.

01:36:25.000 And people tracked him down and found out who he was and then sent all of these anonymously authored posts to his employer and he got fired. 0.53

01:36:35.000 And this guy was a father and he had children and he was supporting his family and now he's struggling to make a living.

01:36:41.000 He's got to try to figure out...

01:36:42.000 because he wrote some things anonymously online on a message board. 0.97

01:36:46.000 And he found recreation in saying fucked up things.

01:36:49.000 You know, I don't know what the solution is, but I feel like anonymity, it encourages less hospitable behavior. 0.94

01:37:01.000 Did you hear about the professor at an academic conference getting into an elevator and making just a dad joke?

01:37:09.000 So he gets into a crowded elevator in an academic conference, and someone asks what floor, and he says, women's lingerie, please.

01:37:16.000 It's like a Dean Martin joke or whatever, right?

01:37:19.000 Someone in the elevator was so offended by that that they lodged a complaint, and it's been now at least a month or so since I heard the story, so I don't know if he was fired, but he was fighting for his academic life over this complaint process.

01:37:36.000 Over a Dean Martin joke.

01:37:38.000 Yeah.

01:37:39.000 I mean, just like that, in the fullness of time, that is going to seem like some insane witch panic, right?

01:37:48.000 Like, there's no such thing as witches, and yet people are getting burned alive because of allegations of witchcraft.

01:37:55.000 We're in that kind of situation and we just have to wake up.

01:38:02.000 Well, you and I don't teach and we're not in a university and we're not in that bubble.

01:38:08.000 I think the people that are in that bubble and then they escape that bubble and then go to whatever tech company or whatever business, they continue that same bubble-like behavior and they want everybody to acquiesce.

01:38:19.000 They want everybody around them to behave the way That they've been programmed to think that everybody is supposed to behave.

01:38:25.000 And you see that now from a lot of young people.

01:38:28.000 You see a lot of young people who are entering into the workforce think that the standards and the norms that they got enforced upon them at Yale or Columbia or wherever they went to school, that this is how you're supposed to behave.

01:38:42.000 Social justice is important and this is real and you have to recognize your privilege.

01:38:47.000 You have to check your privilege and you have to do this and you have to do that and you have to support trans rights and you have to call out Call-out culture is a big one. 0.80

01:38:54.000 It's a big part of it.

01:38:55.000 And cancel culture.

01:38:57.000 Everybody wants everybody to lose their job.

01:39:01.000 This is the way that things change.

01:39:03.000 The way things change is you have to reinforce the fact that there's these new standards and there has to be severe repercussions for deviating.

01:39:11.000 It's very much about control.

01:39:12.000 I mean, Jordan goes on about this.

01:39:14.000 Jordan Peterson, it's like one of his pet subjects.

01:39:17.000 Yeah, that's what launched him.

01:39:19.000 Yeah, this is where this goes.

01:39:20.000 This is all about control.

01:39:22.000 And that it's a very slippery slope.

01:39:24.000 And when you start telling people what to do and what not to do, and that there's like these...

01:39:31.000 We're good to go.

01:39:47.000 Why is it that the apology isn't good enough?

01:39:51.000 But what is, by all appearances, a sincere apology?

01:39:55.000 Yes.

01:39:55.000 Like where the link, there is no link to real racism.

01:40:00.000 Like there's no link to like, oh yeah, I want to live in a society where black people have it harder than white people. 0.86

01:40:05.000 Right. 0.99

01:40:05.000 Like, okay, if that's who you are, if you're a legit racist, well then fine. 0.99

01:40:09.000 We can understand why we want to boycott your business or we want to, you know... 0.98

01:40:14.000 We want nothing to do with you, right?

01:40:30.000 You know, they wish they could take it back.

01:40:32.000 And that links up with...

01:40:34.000 I mean, did you see...

01:40:35.000 You must have seen the Norm Macdonald bit.

01:40:39.000 I mean, that was brutal, right?

01:40:41.000 He knew he couldn't use the word retard, right?

01:40:46.000 Because it's like that's going to get him in trouble.

01:40:48.000 And so...

01:40:51.000 It's hilarious, in fact.

01:40:52.000 Explain what happened.

01:40:53.000 Okay, so he was on Howard Stern's show, wasn't he?

01:40:55.000 I think.

01:40:57.000 I could have this wrong, but the gist of this is right.

01:41:01.000 I believe he's on Howard Stern's show, and he was about to use the word retard.

01:41:07.000 So, okay, we'll walk this back.

01:41:09.000 Now it's coming back to me.

01:41:12.000 He was...

01:41:13.000 We're good to go.

01:41:33.000 That he cared more about what Louis C.K. was going through than the women who felt victimized by Louis C.K. And that was not his intention at all, apparently.

01:41:43.000 And so when he went to clarify this, he was about to say, you'd have to be retarded to think that I cared more about Louis C.K.'s ordeal than the ordeal of these women who felt like their careers got derailed, right? 0.87

01:41:57.000 But as the word retarded was coming out of his mouth...

01:42:08.000 We're good to go.

01:42:17.000 And so now he's just – then he showed up on The View, right, on this apology tour.

01:42:27.000 And I mean that's just amazing video to see him on The View surrounded by these four women who know he's not a bad guy, right?

01:42:35.000 Like they're trying to – they're throwing him lifeline after lifeline and he's so beaten down, right?

01:42:40.000 Yeah.

01:42:40.000 And he's so walking on eggshells.

01:42:42.000 And you got Whoopi Goldberg, you know, trying to just pull him back, you know, from the lions.

01:42:49.000 And it should be, I mean, it should be so straightforward.

01:42:55.000 Like, is it part of Norm's goal to cause pain for parents who have kids with mental disabilities, right?

01:43:05.000 No.

01:43:07.000 You can look into this guy's eyes for 10 seconds and know that this is not the bigot you're worried about.

01:43:15.000 Right.

01:43:15.000 Of course.

01:43:17.000 And yet people just want him destroyed.

01:43:22.000 I don't know if they still do, but the moment, it was...

01:43:26.000 I think it was a real concern that his show would get canceled.

01:43:30.000 Well, it hasn't been picked up for a second season.

01:43:34.000 Maybe that's part of the problem.

01:43:36.000 It is part of the problem.

01:43:37.000 He was devastated.

01:43:39.000 I'm very good friends with Adam Egan.

01:43:41.000 He's a guy that runs the Comedy Store.

01:43:42.000 He's the talent director at the Comedy Store.

01:43:44.000 And he's been on Norm's show.

01:43:46.000 He was like Norm's sidekick on a show.

01:43:49.000 He's a very good friend with Norm.

01:43:51.000 And Norm really suffered from this in a way that he never suffered from anything in his career in terms of his own personal feeling.

01:43:57.000 He was devastated by it, by the blowback and the reaction. 0.99

01:44:00.000 And he wanted to come on my podcast and talk about it, but Netflix was like, get the fuck out of here! 0.90

01:44:06.000 Netflix said, no press. 0.94

01:44:07.000 Don't do anything.

01:44:08.000 No press. 1.00

01:44:10.000 The fact that you can't talk your way out of it, that's the fucking disease. 0.99

01:44:15.000 Well, the problem is not that you can't talk your way out of it. 1.00

01:44:17.000 The problem is that they wouldn't even let him attempt to talk your way out of it because I think they realize that Norm's a maniac. 0.86

01:44:22.000 And Norm is a maniac in the best sense of the word.

01:44:25.000 He's one of my favorite comics.

01:44:26.000 He's hilarious. 0.95

01:44:27.000 Fucking hilarious. 0.99

01:44:27.000 But he's also completely crazy in the best way possible. 0.99

01:44:31.000 Right.

01:44:31.000 Norm and I randomly, in some strange way, randomly were seated next to each other on two separate flights.

01:44:37.000 Just randomly.

01:44:38.000 It's crazy!

01:44:39.000 Like, Norm, again?

01:44:40.000 Like, this is crazy!

01:44:41.000 And we had a great time just talking the entire flight.

01:44:46.000 We were talking about cigarette smoking.

01:44:48.000 Yeah, yeah, I used to smoke.

01:44:50.000 I'm so glad I quit. 0.99

01:44:51.000 Fucking terrible for you. 0.97

01:44:52.000 You know, yeah, I mean, it's just, but I, you know, I just always wanted a cigarette and then I'd be gambling. 0.99

01:44:56.000 I want a cigarette, but I quit. 1.00

01:44:58.000 Fuck cigarettes. 1.00

01:44:59.000 Like, how long did you quit? 1.00

01:45:00.000 And you're like, oh, I haven't had a cigarette in years.

01:45:02.000 I'm like, oh, that's great.

01:45:03.000 We land at LAX. He goes right into a store and buys cigarettes.

01:45:06.000 I go, what are you doing?

01:45:07.000 He goes, all that talk of cigarettes.

01:45:09.000 I just want one now.

01:45:10.000 He was lighting it on the way out the door.

01:45:12.000 He couldn't get out the door.

01:45:13.000 He lit it before he, you know, the automatic door.

01:45:17.000 He was, before it was opening, he was lighting that cigarette. 0.99

01:45:20.000 I was like, you're crazy!

01:45:21.000 But that's, many, many comedians are incredibly impulsive. 0.95

01:45:24.000 And this is Norm.

01:45:25.000 I mean, he just...

01:45:27.000 Well, he's got such a, he's so off-kilter.

01:45:29.000 He's got a sort of Gary Shanley, you don't know what's going to come out of his mouth extemporaneously.

01:45:34.000 But, okay, we have to be...

01:45:37.000 Let's put this back into the diversity Olympics.

01:45:41.000 We need some respect for neurodiversity.

01:45:45.000 There are people who are somewhere on the spectrum toward autism.

01:45:49.000 There are spectrums we don't even know about.

01:45:52.000 We haven't named.

01:45:54.000 And everyone is in some weird spot.

01:45:57.000 And People misspeak, right?

01:45:59.000 There has to be a way back to say, that's not what I meant, right?

01:46:06.000 Offending people of this type was not my intention.

01:46:11.000 At some level, that has to be good enough, unless we open your closet and we see that you've got swastikas everywhere.

01:46:18.000 Right.

01:46:21.000 So I think we have to hold the line here, you know?

01:46:26.000 And very few people are in a position to be able to do it.

01:46:30.000 I mean, you know, like, you know, Netflix doesn't feel they can do it.

01:46:34.000 Well, Netflix is just so terrified of a continual blowback.

01:46:39.000 And they just thought, like, if we're going to save this show, the way to save it is to get them to stop talking.

01:46:43.000 Because he's just going to take his other foot and take other people's feet and stuff them in his mouth as well.

01:46:47.000 I think one thing that might help to illuminate our understanding of how people behave is what you really enjoy talking about, and you really definitely changed my way of looking at things.

01:46:59.000 That they're really essentially, the concept of free will is a very flawed thing and that you have to really take into consideration who a person is right now and what has caused them to be this person right now and that a lot of us are operating on this really bizarre momentum of our past and our behavior and our genetics and life experiences and all these different variables.

01:47:21.000 That really need to be taken into account.

01:47:22.000 This idea that you are autonomous and you are the director of your own life is true to a certain extent, but it's also very complicated, much more complicated than we would like to admit.

01:47:33.000 And when you're talking about something that happened when you were 17, like Brett Kavanaugh or something like that, Jesus Christ, you're going to hold a 55-year-old man accountable to something that he did when he was 17 that wasn't a crime?

01:47:55.000 Yeah.

01:48:07.000 No one authored themselves.

01:48:23.000 What brought you here?

01:48:24.000 I mean, the universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time, and the only thing you've got is your brain and its states, and that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you as a system have had working on you up until this moment.

01:48:45.000 And so the next words that come out of your mouth are part of that process.

01:48:50.000 Now, some people find this to be a frankly...

01:48:57.000 Demoralizing picture, right?

01:48:59.000 They think, well, okay, well, you're telling me I'm just a robot, but you're a robot that is open, continuously open to influence, to influence of, you know, kind of internally based on its own processes.

01:49:10.000 I mean, there's like, there's top-down control of, you know, executive function in the brain to your, you know, your emotional life, say, and you're continually open to the influences of culture, right?

01:49:23.000 The culture is this operating system that you're interacting with in each moment, and whatever's getting in can change you in radical ways very quickly.

01:49:32.000 I mean, there's no telling how much you can change on the basis of one new idea coming your way, right?

01:49:38.000 Now, I would argue that that process of change— That's not evidence of free will.

01:49:47.000 That is evidence of just yet more causality.

01:49:50.000 I mean, you don't pick the changes that come your way.

01:49:52.000 If I get you to see something that you didn't see a moment before, you're not responsible for the fact that you didn't see it a moment before and you're not responsible for the fact that you now see it.

01:50:01.000 It's just like the dominoes just kept falling, right?

01:50:05.000 But it does give you this far more patient sense of...

01:50:14.000 One, just, you know, all the causes and conditions that have created this odious behavior you're now disposed to react to in the world, right?

01:50:27.000 Everything on some level is more of a force of nature, right?

01:50:30.000 I think? 1.00

01:50:52.000 We feel like, okay, now we're in the presence of human evil, and we have to go kill these motherfuckers, right? 1.00

01:50:57.000 Now, we may have to kill them, right? 1.00

01:50:59.000 Because that may be the only way of putting out this, you know, stopping the damage they're committed to causing. 1.00

01:51:08.000 And we would kill hurricanes if we could kill them, right? 0.99

01:51:10.000 I mean, we would... 0.99

01:51:12.000 But the feeling we have in both cases is very different.

01:51:16.000 The feeling you have attributing ultimate authorship to a person's behavior is super narrow psychologically and ethically, and it's the feeling of vengeance.

01:51:33.000 This feeling of vengeance is so natural to get triggered in response to a person It's not natural in response to a wild animal who may have done something terrible, right?

01:51:59.000 I think?

01:52:14.000 We're so outraged that they've decided to lynch the elephant, right?

01:52:19.000 And yet, there's something uncanny about that sort of misappropriation of agency to an elephant.

01:52:25.000 What is a mistreated circus elephant going to do when it gets out and is terrified and is trying to get away from people?

01:52:30.000 It's going to trample a few people.

01:52:32.000 So, we have a very different set of books we keep ethically for humans, and Some of it's understandable, some of it's inevitable, but a lot of it gives us moral illusions that we don't need to have, and it gives us a kind of just an inability to take stock of all the variables that are actually guiding human behavior and react to them and mitigate them and disincentivize them intelligently.

01:52:59.000 I mean, punishment makes sense.

01:53:01.000 Not because people really, really deserve at bottom whatever their punishments are.

01:53:07.000 It doesn't make sense in a retributive paradigm.

01:53:10.000 It makes sense if it's the best tool to discourage dangerous behavior and it works, right? 0.99

01:53:22.000 So it's like if you're going to punish people for things they can't control, Well, that's stupid, right? 0.89

01:53:28.000 Because as much as you punish them, you're not going to moderate the behavior. 0.88

01:53:33.000 So you have to punish people for things that are actually under voluntary control.

01:53:38.000 And it only makes sense if...

01:53:44.000 It's the only tool to do the job, and the moment you had, I mean, I may have brought this up last time we spoke about free will, but this is really the sort of reductio ad absurdum of where most people are on this topic.

01:53:58.000 The moment we really understand human evil at the level of the brain, the moment we understand psychopathy, say, which is, I mean, maybe that's not the totality of evil, but that's, you know, certainly center of the bullseye.

01:54:10.000 Once we understand psychopathy as a neurological condition that's governed by genes and environment, and we can actually intrude at the level of the brain to mitigate it.

01:54:21.000 Psychopathy becomes a disease.

01:54:22.000 It becomes an injury syndrome that we can fix.

01:54:27.000 And let's say it's a very simple fix.

01:54:30.000 Let's say it's a pill.

01:54:31.000 Let's say it's just a neurotransmitter imbalance.

01:54:34.000 In the presence of that breakthrough, we will feel very differently about that species of human evil.

01:54:41.000 We will not judge it in the same way. 1.00

01:54:43.000 Because what will happen is, you'll give people the pill, and they'll say, fuck, I can't believe I was that dangerous asshole. 1.00

01:54:50.000 Like, thank you for... 1.00

01:54:51.000 Like, I'm as horrified by who I was before you cured me as you were, right?

01:54:58.000 And...

01:55:01.000 So, psychopathy in the presence of a cure for it would look much more like diabetes than it looks like evil in the present case.

01:55:07.000 And people aren't imagining what it would be like to be there, what it would be like to actually fully understand the underlying neurophysiology here and actually have something.

01:55:18.000 I mean, there's no guarantee we'll be able to deal with it in a simple way, but it's certainly possible.

01:55:26.000 And, I mean, the classic example is just like the Charles Whitman example where, you know, you have a brain tumor that's causing this aberrant behavior.

01:55:33.000 In that case, everyone sees, okay, this is not evil.

01:55:38.000 This is a brain tumor.

01:55:39.000 That's the tower shooter guy?

01:55:40.000 Yeah, back in 64, I think.

01:55:44.000 Yeah.

01:55:47.000 But in the same way that a brain tumor is exculpatory there, I think a full understanding of the underlying neurology would be exculpatory.

01:55:58.000 Again, it doesn't mean you...

01:56:00.000 In the meantime, before we get there, obviously we have to lock up dangerous people if there's no way to help them.

01:56:06.000 But the more we see the causes...

01:56:10.000 I think?

01:56:29.000 We're good to go.

01:57:01.000 I think?

01:57:09.000 And, you know, adding randomness to the picture doesn't help, right?

01:57:13.000 Randomness is just, you know, somebody's in your brain rolling dice, you know, influencing your behavior that way.

01:57:17.000 Well, that doesn't give you the free will people think they have.

01:57:20.000 So, ironically, there is what seems...

01:57:28.000 On some level, deflationary of the gravitas of the human spirit for people opens the door to, at least in my view, a far more ethical and tolerant and patient and understanding view of human beings.

01:57:59.000 Yeah.

01:58:06.000 Wouldn't it be amazing if that's how we treated these public shaming events?

01:58:11.000 Wouldn't it be amazing if we gave someone an opportunity to say, this is what I did.

01:58:17.000 This is how awful I feel about this.

01:58:20.000 I would never do that again.

01:58:21.000 I'm a different person.

01:58:22.000 That was 20 years ago or whatever it was.

01:58:29.000 Thank you for being honest about who you are now.

01:58:32.000 Thank you for evolving.

01:58:33.000 Thank you for expressing yourself in a way that maybe other people who have also committed really Just unsavory or just unfortunate things in the past, unfortunate acts in the past, they can feel relieved by the fact that you've grown and evolved to become a better person and that you're a different thing now and you are the product of all of your experiences.

01:58:54.000 You're not this one thing.

01:58:55.000 You're not stuck.

01:59:07.000 Yeah, I mean, the thing about the Liam Neeson incident, which I find so interesting, is that there's a case where I mean, what he's revealing about himself is pretty amazing, right?

01:59:22.000 It's like he just decided, okay, we need a truth and reconciliation commission for who I used to be, right?

01:59:31.000 And just volunteered this.

01:59:35.000 And for me, like, you know...

01:59:49.000 Yeah.

01:59:50.000 Yeah.

02:00:05.000 Yes.

02:00:25.000 More in the South than anywhere else in the country, and this is what you see basically everywhere you go in the Middle East. 0.97

02:00:32.000 This is what Islam inculcates to a degree that's fairly unmatched in its community. 1.00

02:00:39.000 This notion of honor does link up with this tendency to find satisfaction in instrumental violence.

02:00:49.000 But when you try to run that software on my brain, that just looks like madness.

02:00:55.000 The idea that any other person will do, right, of a certain type, that's just, you know, I don't, that resonates not at all, right?

02:01:06.000 And so, it's just damn interesting.

02:01:10.000 And the fact that the lesson being taken from this seems to be This should be the end of your career for having talked about this.

02:01:22.000 And again, apologies if there's some part of the story that I've gotten wrong or I'm missing.

02:01:28.000 But it seemed to me that he was always couching this in the horror and amazement appropriate to the disclosure.

02:01:37.000 Like, he can't believe he was inhabiting this state of consciousness.

02:01:41.000 And, you know, it's just an amazing thing to reveal about yourself.

02:01:45.000 So...

02:01:46.000 Yeah, and I'm sure he regrets every second of it. 0.99

02:01:48.000 Yeah, and that's the wrong fucking punchline. 0.99

02:01:51.000 The thing that should happen is someone with a lot to lose should be able to say, you know how ugly a human mind can be? 0.99

02:02:02.000 This is an experience I had.

02:02:04.000 This is who I was.

02:02:06.000 And you know how much I have to live for and how much I have to lose.

02:02:10.000 We have to talk about...

02:02:12.000 This kind of mania that can get humming on a human brain, right?

02:02:16.000 We see this every time you open the paper, you see someone in the grip of this kind of thing, right?

02:02:21.000 It even happened to me, right?

02:02:23.000 I think it's an amazing conversation to start, and the fact that the result is just, you know, an auto-defe is the problem we're trying to fight our way through at this point.

02:02:37.000 Isn't it because there's too many voices?

02:02:39.000 I mean, there's just so many people that are reacting to it.

02:02:42.000 If he's dealing with, he's not dealing with three or four or five voices, he's dealing with millions of people that get to chime in on this.

02:02:50.000 And you get a few thousand of those people that are furious at you.

02:02:54.000 You know, like you were saying, that doesn't work.

02:02:59.000 I was just about to say, I was going to make a comparison to your podcast with Jack, that you're not reading the comments.

02:03:05.000 But he's getting this gigantic signal from a huge number of people.

02:03:12.000 So this is all over my Google News feed.

02:03:15.000 I saw it on Yahoo.

02:03:16.000 I saw it in all these different...

02:03:19.000 Publications are talking about Liam Neeson's case.

02:03:22.000 And so then everybody starts chiming in.

02:03:25.000 And then the virtue signaling ratio is very high.

02:03:27.000 And the anger ratio is very high.

02:03:29.000 And the people that think he's secretly still racist and doesn't want to admit it is very high.

02:03:33.000 And then there's also the fact that he's a man of wealth and privilege and he's successful and famous.

02:03:37.000 And there's got to be a bunch of jealousy that's attached to that and a bunch of people that want to knock him down because he's at a very high hill.

02:03:43.000 Yeah.

02:03:43.000 There's a lot going on there.

02:03:45.000 It's the numbers.

02:03:47.000 I don't know.

02:03:49.000 I feel for the guy.

02:03:50.000 Again, I don't know him, but I remember, again, forgive me if I get this slightly wrong, but isn't it true that his wife, Natasha Richardson, just died in this freak accident?

02:04:02.000 She was skiing.

02:04:02.000 Skiing accident.

02:04:03.000 Fell and hit her.

02:04:04.000 But honestly, she wasn't moving when she fell.

02:04:09.000 She was standing on a ski slope and fell from a standing position and hit her head on the hard snow, obviously.

02:04:18.000 It's all it takes.

02:04:19.000 Yeah, it's brutal.

02:04:22.000 And on top of that, I believe his cousin or his nephew or niece died the same way.

02:04:29.000 Not the same way in terms of fell skiing, but also hit their head and died.

02:04:33.000 So it's like, Jesus Christ, this guy.

02:04:36.000 And obviously, there's many people out there that experience far greater tragedies.

02:04:39.000 I'm not trying to quantify it, but yeah, he tried to talk about a real thing.

02:04:46.000 He tried to talk about a real thing, and he's given some interviews since then where he said, look, I'm not a racist. 0.96

02:04:53.000 I'm just telling you, I was in such a fucked up state of mind because of this rape that I was willing to do something irrational and horrible. 0.98

02:05:01.000 But he didn't. 0.99

02:05:02.000 But he didn't.

02:05:03.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:05:04.000 But again, take it full circle.

02:05:07.000 These same people who are calling for his head are prepared to forgive other people who did do that thing. 0.96

02:05:14.000 It's all it's so dependent like I had Mike Tyson on the podcast and one of the things that I got when I said it was so many people like fuck that Rapist fuck this guy fuck that all these different things about him what I wanted to get into him with him was Who he was when he was 12 years old when he was a little boy when he met custom motto and was taught out a box and was fucking hypnotized and And this is one of the really important things that came out of that podcast was Custom Otto, 0.98

02:05:42.000 who was not just this boxing legend who took in this young kid from the ghetto that didn't have a family, but also hypnotized him. 0.98

02:05:50.000 Hypnotized him to be a destroyer.

02:05:52.000 Specifically was saying to him, you don't exist.

02:05:54.000 The task exists.

02:05:55.000 You're going to move forward.

02:05:56.000 You're going to bob and weave and rip the body. 0.99

02:05:58.000 And he was programming this kid to get incredible amounts of positive response from violent acts.

02:06:06.000 Violent acts in a boxing ring.

02:06:07.000 And that's where he got his identity.

02:06:08.000 That's where he got all of his love.

02:06:10.000 And so he became this guy.

02:06:12.000 And one of the things that I said to him, I said, did anybody ever teach you how to turn it off?

02:06:16.000 And he's like, no.

02:06:18.000 No, he did.

02:06:18.000 Like, I'm no Mike Tyson, and I was never like that.

02:06:22.000 I was never like that.

02:06:23.000 But I was far more violent when I was fighting.

02:06:26.000 Far more violent.

02:06:27.000 Far more prone to violence.

02:06:29.000 My trigger was very short.

02:06:31.000 I was ready.

02:06:32.000 Just thinking about it all the time.

02:06:34.000 I was fighting all the time.

02:06:35.000 I fought.

02:06:35.000 I probably had a hundred fights.

02:06:37.000 I was ready to go. 0.99

02:06:39.000 Like, your brain has a... 0.54

02:06:41.000 If you're getting kicked in the face and punched in the face a lot, and you're doing it through your developmental period from the time you're 15...

02:06:48.000 For me, it was 15. From him, it was like 12 or 13. You have a different way of looking at the world.

02:06:54.000 Because this is also in the recipes.

02:06:56.000 And the recipes are also... 0.98

02:06:57.000 You might get knocked the fuck out. 1.00

02:06:59.000 You might get head kicked. 1.00

02:07:00.000 You might get kicked in the neck with a shin. 0.97

02:07:03.000 And you wake up and your friends are slapping you in the face and putting ice on you. 0.71

02:07:06.000 This is all real.

02:07:07.000 And when you have that...

02:07:10.000 The positive that comes from that when you're a 12-year-old boy and you're hypnotized by this great man who's teaching you how to fight and you're getting so much love.

02:07:19.000 You've never gotten love in your life.

02:07:20.000 You've never gotten positive feedback.

02:07:22.000 And you're getting so much of it from this.

02:07:24.000 And then no one's teaching you how to turn it off. 0.99

02:07:26.000 And you're wondering why this guy grows up to become a fucking maniac and is punching people in the street. 1.00

02:07:31.000 He's just crazy and yelling at reporters, I'll fuck you in the ass, white boy, all that crazy shit that he did. 1.00

02:07:37.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:07:37.000 He was a maniac. 1.00

02:07:38.000 I mean, no one taught him how to reflect.

02:07:41.000 There was no Sam Harris app for meditation for Mike Tyson in 1986. He was just a maniac. 0.95

02:07:48.000 Well, yeah, I mean, one problem we have here is that we don't have a norm around, a good norm around mental health. 0.73

02:07:58.000 And we have, like, zero norms around mental training, right?

02:08:01.000 So, I mean, so physical training is a very good analogy between meditation as mental training, which sounds just esoteric and woo, right?

02:08:12.000 So it sounds like New Age, you know, specious nonsense to many people.

02:08:16.000 But if you roll back the clock a hundred years, Physical training made no sense.

02:08:21.000 There were no norms around it.

02:08:22.000 I mean, the only guy lifting a dumbbell was that guy with the handlebar mustache in the leopard, you know, bikini or whatever he was wearing at the freak show, right?

02:08:30.000 Yeah, the singlet.

02:08:31.000 Yeah.

02:08:32.000 And now we have a total understanding of the norms around physical training.

02:08:39.000 You're actually a freak if you don't do some kind of exercise, right?

02:08:43.000 Well, those have even changed and evolved over the last decade or so.

02:08:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:08:47.000 It's gotten far more complicated and nuanced.

02:08:50.000 It's continually evolving, but the framework, the paradigm, the fact that there's something to do to get better physically, and that those changes matter, you can engage your body intelligently so as to improve it across many different variables,

02:09:07.000 flexibility, strength.

02:09:10.000 That's all totally understood and now we're just refining the protocol.

02:09:14.000 With mental training, and specifically the training of attention and how you respond to the uprising of your own negative emotion, That is something that has been going on for thousands of years in contemplative,

02:09:33.000 mostly Eastern context.

02:09:34.000 And that's something that, you know, Buddhism really has a lot of, specifically, an asymmetric amount of wisdom to share on.

02:09:43.000 And it's, yeah, I mean, I'm very excited to be spending more time on it because it's Yeah.

02:09:54.000 Yeah.

02:10:07.000 The ability to react in a—so there's just no reason to hesitate to condemn this thing that you're seeing.

02:10:16.000 This upwelling of negative emotion you see, the outrage you feel when you see something on Twitter, right, is— It's shortening everybody's fuse.

02:10:28.000 It's making road rage more of a general feature of our lives.

02:10:34.000 This is all trainable.

02:10:36.000 You can actually learn that when you suddenly feel anger in response to something that seems to have happened in the world, if you just pay attention to the experience of anger, if you just feel the mere physiology of it,

02:10:54.000 I think?

02:11:14.000 It's impossible to stay angry for very long if you get out of the story you're telling yourself about why you should be angry.

02:11:20.000 Now, there are certain situations where anger is appropriate and it's good to have access to that energy.

02:11:27.000 I'm not advocating that everyone just get lobotomized and not react to anything, but...

02:11:33.000 Until you can actually be mindful—I mean, mindful is the technical word for what this is—until you can actually get out of the thoughts and just pay attention to, in this case, a negative emotion— We're good to go.

02:12:11.000 Right.

02:12:15.000 Right.

02:12:32.000 And that's an amazing thing to be able to do, and it's based on a kind of training that very few people know even exists.

02:12:40.000 And so, again, it's like I'm now the guy in the leopard singlet, right?

02:12:45.000 But it's more and more we're going to understand that this just has to be part of everybody's toolkit.

02:12:53.000 Well, it would be amazing if they taught kids that in school.

02:12:56.000 If you got to learn that when you're learning math and history...

02:12:59.000 People are doing that.

02:13:00.000 My wife actually does that. 1.00

02:13:01.000 Really?

02:13:01.000 In high school?

02:13:03.000 Six-year-olds.

02:13:04.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:13:05.000 You can teach mindfulness to...

02:13:08.000 I mean, in the beginning...

02:13:10.000 What they're learning is just basic awareness of their inner lives.

02:13:14.000 Just being able to name the emotion they're feeling is an amazing capacity in a six-year-old.

02:13:21.000 A six-year-old is just acting out something, and you're now teaching them to know in that moment that what's pushing them from behind is sadness or anger or embarrassment.

02:13:34.000 Just to have that recursive ability to reflect...

02:13:40.000 That's already a major gain in kids that age.

02:13:44.000 But yeah, you can learn it very early.

02:13:46.000 Actually, this was something I was talking about with Stephen Fry on my podcast.

02:13:51.000 Stephen was very – he's actually – he's adorable.

02:13:56.000 He's like the nicest guy in the world.

02:13:57.000 Great podcast.

02:13:57.000 I really enjoyed that one.

02:13:59.000 Yeah, he's just – you're in the presence of just such a nice guy.

02:14:03.000 It radiates decency.

02:14:07.000 But he was fairly skeptical of just like, why would you ever have to train mindfulness or meditation?

02:14:12.000 I mean, the analogy that came up to me, came up for me on the fly there, was that it is actually a lot like learning to read in the sense that None of us remember having gone through the ordeal of learning to read.

02:14:27.000 Learning to read was a hassle.

02:14:29.000 That did not come easily to most people.

02:14:32.000 And yet now if you look at a page of text in a language you understand, you can't help but decode it.

02:14:38.000 It's just effortless.

02:14:40.000 And so these kinds of emotional tools and cognitive tools, just the ability to self-regulate emotion by becoming aware of it as a process, That is something that I think we could teach kids much earlier,

02:14:56.000 and then we would be in the presence of young adults who would naturally have a facility for it where they wouldn't even remember how hard it was to acquire it.

02:15:08.000 Yeah, what I was talking about earlier with Mike Tyson and his coaching.

02:15:14.000 He essentially got mental coaching on how to accomplish one thing.

02:15:19.000 Mental coaching on how to have the perfect mindset for one thing. 1.00

02:15:22.000 How to kick people's ass. 0.99

02:15:25.000 What he didn't have was mental coaching on how to deal with the pressures of life, especially life. 1.00

02:15:30.000 I mean, almost no one really understands what life is like to be a famous 20-year-old heavyweight champion of the world.

02:15:37.000 I mean, there's no one.

02:15:38.000 It had to be.

02:15:39.000 It's alien.

02:15:40.000 It's got to be alien.

02:15:41.000 To ask this kid to manage this state when you're talking about someone who just six years prior was virtually homeless and had no love in his life at all and was being hypnotized by some madman who's a boxing wizard who lives in the Catskills.

02:16:00.000 And what we were talking about earlier about who you are now versus who you were 20, 30 years ago, when you meet Mike Tyson now, Mike Tyson is the sweetest, nicest, friendliest guy.

02:16:13.000 He's so soft-spoken.

02:16:14.000 He's really kind.

02:16:16.000 He hugs people.

02:16:17.000 He's a really nice guy. 0.99

02:16:18.000 And at one point in time, he was the scariest motherfucker on the planet Earth. 0.98

02:16:23.000 Yeah, there's actually another sort of uncanny valley here in martial arts training that I spent a lot of time in. 0.97

02:16:29.000 When you're training in martial arts and seeing the world through this lens of violence and potential violence, but you're training in a way that's never really putting your skills to the test.

02:16:42.000 So you're basically, as a young man...

02:16:45.000 You're living with this fundamental uncertainty as to whether or not you actually are capable of anything.

02:16:50.000 So you're training in like fake martial arts, right?

02:16:52.000 Right.

02:16:53.000 Or at least martial arts where most of it is a kind of pantomime of violence and it's not being pressure tested.

02:16:59.000 So it's not like you where you're competing and you know what it's like to kick someone in the head and it actually works, right?

02:17:03.000 It's like this is – you're sparring but it's all – you have to keep everything safe, right?

02:17:08.000 Karate, yeah.

02:17:10.000 Or even if it's full contact, you have headgear and you've got...

02:17:12.000 It's just like you're not...

02:17:13.000 There's still basic uncertainty about what's going to go down on the street if it's in the presence of real violence.

02:17:21.000 And there you're...

02:17:22.000 Especially as a teenager...

02:17:25.000 You're in this fairly toxic state of always preparing for violence that still is, in most people's lives, a pretty low order of probability that it's going to occur, and yet it's also backed by this fear of, 1.00

02:17:42.000 you know, the ego fear of maybe you're just full of shit, and you're just going to get your ass kicked if this ever happens. 0.99

02:17:50.000 With someone like Mike Tyson, there shouldn't be any uncertainty. 1.00

02:17:58.000 He's got nothing to prove.

02:17:59.000 If he's in a bar and somebody says, what are you looking at?

02:18:02.000 At minimum, he doesn't have this fear of, if he walks away from that challenge, he knows he's walking away, not because he was scared maybe he's going to lose a fistfight with this guy.

02:18:14.000 He's the best boxer on earth at that moment.

02:18:16.000 It's that he's got way more to lose than the other guy.

02:18:20.000 Why does he want to be rolling around in a parking lot with some stranger?

02:18:24.000 So there's this very unhappy place that a lot of martial artists are in, which is they don't actually know what they're capable of, and they're living all the time with this kind of training software running in their heads,

02:18:42.000 and it's a weird space to be in.

02:18:46.000 Well, it's one of the things that's so great about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu.

02:19:02.000 You are pressure testing it and you know that it works.

02:19:04.000 I would argue there people still lose sight of the fact that in reality people are punching and they're not training a lot of punching or defense and then there are weapons and then there's a guy's friend who can come up and start kicking you in your head.

02:19:18.000 It's like how good an idea was it to pull guard when someone else can walk up.

02:19:24.000 But, you know, yeah, it's within its purview, yeah, you're working out all of your illusions, and that's one reason why so many of us find it addictive.

02:19:36.000 Yeah, there's that, and there's also, they're so nice.

02:19:38.000 Jiu-jitsu people are so friendly. 0.98

02:19:40.000 And I think that's one of the reasons why they're so friendly is they're not carrying around all that bullshit that a lot of people carry around, including, you know, there's some grown men that have never been in a fight in their life and they get a couple of beers in them and they start talking crazy shit. 0.97

02:19:52.000 I'm like, hey man, you don't even know how to fight. 0.97

02:19:55.000 It's like someone who wants to jump into a NASCAR race who's never driven a car.

02:20:00.000 Like, stop!

02:20:01.000 And they're talking to some guy with cauliflower ear and they don't even know what that means, right?

02:20:04.000 Yeah.

02:20:05.000 Yeah.

02:20:06.000 I mean, to be a human being is complicated.

02:20:09.000 To be a man in the face of altercations with other men is uniquely complicated. 0.90

02:20:15.000 You know, the kind of altercations that men get into, the kind of bravado and chest puffing and shit talking and the consequences of those things. 0.97

02:20:23.000 Like you were talking about Liam Neeson, his wife falling down and hitting her head. 0.86

02:20:27.000 A friend of mine was working in a bar in Long Island and one of the bouncers got in a fight with some guy and punched the guy and knocked him out.

02:20:35.000 The guy fell back, hit his head off the curb and died.

02:20:38.000 And that happens all the time.

02:20:40.000 When people get knocked out, they hit their head on the ground, they die.

02:20:43.000 Yeah.

02:20:43.000 Actually, before I had a podcast, my midlife crisis took the form of me getting really back into martial arts again after a hiatus of maybe 25 years.

02:20:55.000 I had a lawyer who focused on self-defense law.

02:21:02.000 He was constantly dealing with cases where someone is either claiming self-defense or is a legit self-defense claim. 0.92

02:21:09.000 But they're basically screwed. 0.85

02:21:10.000 I mean, they punched someone and that person fell down and hit a fire hydrant and died, right? 0.99

02:21:14.000 So they're trying to beat a murder rap, you know?

02:21:18.000 And so I just had him in a blog post, had him walk me and I had a bunch of...

02:21:24.000 I had two people comment, ask questions as well.

02:21:27.000 I had Matt Thornton, who's John Cavanaugh's jujitsu coach, Yeah.

02:21:50.000 Is at all preparing for the possible eventuality of violence?

02:21:55.000 Because people who train with guns or own guns or carry knives or do martial arts don't actually understand what happens when they agree to fight somebody.

02:22:12.000 Unless your M.O. is, and this should be your M.O., To avoid violence at virtually any cost, right?

02:22:19.000 You're always just trying to leave the premises if there's some sort of challenge that could become violence.

02:22:25.000 If that's not your MO, you're just wandering into potential situations where you can find yourself in court for having shoved a guy and he fell into the street and got run over, right?

02:22:37.000 And then now you're the guy who's looking at the prospect of going to prison for a...

02:22:43.000 Murder or, you know, second-degree murder.

02:22:48.000 And so anyway, I had him walk me through all of the ins and outs of all that.

02:22:53.000 It was a fascinating conversation because, yeah, there are people who, you know, I mean, there are extreme cases.

02:22:58.000 There are women who have shot their totally crazy husband who's like waving a baseball bat at their heads.

02:23:05.000 And they're in prison for years for this.

02:23:09.000 Just real miscarriages of justice where you would think that it would be very easy to prove that she was in fear for her life in this case and this was a legitimate use of lethal force.

02:23:22.000 It's just so hard when no one's there.

02:23:25.000 I mean, if you have eyewitnesses or if it's a public thing that happens and there's video of it, but, you know, Someone does something to someone and no one's around and you punch someone and they get knocked out and they die and you say, no, this guy was threatening to kill me.

02:23:40.000 He was chasing me.

02:23:42.000 He was threatening to kill me.

02:23:43.000 I was terrified for my life.

02:23:44.000 He lunged towards me.

02:23:46.000 I saw the opening.

02:23:46.000 I took it and now he's dead.

02:23:48.000 You could go to jail forever.

02:23:50.000 I mean, that's a reality.

02:23:51.000 I mean, you should absolutely, without a doubt, avoid violence at all costs.

02:23:56.000 But you should also know how to fight.

02:23:58.000 Definitely.

02:23:58.000 I think that's very important.

02:24:00.000 It's very important.

02:24:01.000 It saves you a lot.

02:24:02.000 But very few people train...

02:24:04.000 So it's like, in the curriculum of learning how to fight, training in whatever martial art or arts...

02:24:12.000 There's, in most cases, very little time spent training avoidance, right?

02:24:18.000 And that's a real missing piece, because that is the most important thing to train.

02:24:24.000 I mean, it's like you, you know, especially if you have real skills, right?

02:24:29.000 Especially if you're walking around armed, right?

02:24:31.000 I mean, the one interesting psychological corrective that Conceal Carry does for many people is that Once you're walking around with a gun, you realize the problem of what any altercation can become.

02:24:48.000 You're not going to get into a shoving match with somebody if you're wearing a gun in your belt because if that escalates, you're pulling out your gun and then it's a decision of whether to kill somebody.

02:25:00.000 I don't have a ton of experience in this area, but for all the firearm training I've done with people, I just get, you know, I know like former SWAT operators who are, you know, just out, they're constantly armed and These are like the last guys who are going to get involved in anything.

02:25:23.000 I mean, they used to be cops, but now they don't even feel any burden to police anything.

02:25:29.000 They're retired, emphatically retired, right?

02:25:33.000 Because they just recognize how haywire anything can go for them if any process of conflict gets started.

02:25:40.000 And again, I think this goes back to understanding how to manage your mind. 0.98

02:25:44.000 When the shit hits the fan and things go crazy, it's very difficult for people to maintain a rational state of mind. 0.99

02:25:53.000 And things can escalate so quickly. 0.99

02:25:56.000 Things can turn to violence so quickly, especially with irrational people or untrained people or people that aren't aware of consequences or maybe can't process it well.

02:26:05.000 And the crucial piece, which many seasoned fighters and professionals don't have, or I would think many don't have, is this valley where your ego concerns are not worked out.

02:26:25.000 It's like when you feel the emotional burden of a loss of face...

02:26:30.000 So if Jocko Willink is in a bar and someone says something nasty to him or to his wife, Jocko doesn't have anything to prove.

02:26:41.000 Jocko knows he's a badass.

02:26:42.000 So Jocko knows that it's time to get out of the bar because he doesn't want to deal with this psychopath who doesn't know who he's dealing with.

02:26:50.000 But someone who's not trained like Jocko...

02:27:10.000 It's a very dangerous game.

02:27:13.000 Yeah, and people get into it all the time, and I've seen so many people get into it that just don't, they don't have any cards.

02:27:18.000 They're completely bluffing. 0.99

02:27:20.000 God damn it, man. 1.00

02:27:21.000 Just stop doing this. 1.00

02:27:23.000 Look, I've been doing martial arts my whole life, and I'm terrified of fights. 0.98

02:27:27.000 I see fights just like, get the fuck out of here before this goes bad. 0.96

02:27:31.000 When it goes sideways, men are just, we have thousands of years of awful DNA. We really do. 0.98

02:27:40.000 Hundreds of thousands.

02:27:42.000 Millions.

02:27:43.000 Violence was imperative.

02:27:45.000 It was imperative for survival.

02:27:46.000 You had to be able to react and react quickly.

02:27:49.000 And you had to know what to do.

02:27:51.000 Your genes are never going to make it to the next stage.

02:27:54.000 This is a controversial thing to say, and I got in trouble, or one of my podcast guests, Gavin DeBecker, the security guru, got in trouble on my podcast, talking about the primacy of intuition here.

02:28:09.000 Are intuitions...

02:28:11.000 We're good to go.

02:28:39.000 I actually know someone who was in a situation like that, and it didn't work out well.

02:28:46.000 Intuition is bad for so many things.

02:28:49.000 We have terrible intuitions for statistics and probability theory.

02:28:55.000 Whole careers and Nobel Prizes have been won on people like Danny Kahneman have shown us how it's not only that our intuitions are bad for these judgments, but they're reliably bad.

02:29:10.000 And we can understand there's a structure to how bad they are.

02:29:14.000 But for judging people who are dangerous, who make the hair stand up on the back of our neck for reasons we can't understand, where the eye contact was wrong or just the way they were—I mean,

02:29:31.000 just like a— What's called a witness check, you know?

02:29:34.000 Yeah.

02:29:50.000 Is very salient to us.

02:29:52.000 And there are hundreds of things like that that we immediately feel, that prompt, you know, an intuitive response.

02:30:02.000 And these are intuitions that are, you know, from a self-defense point of view, are worth listening to.

02:30:06.000 Because the worst case scenario is you wind up being a little rude there.

02:30:10.000 Like, sorry, you know, I can't talk.

02:30:15.000 But people are, you know, people are very dogmatically being kind of trained to ignore those kinds of intuitions.

02:30:24.000 What do you think those intuitions are?

02:30:25.000 Like what do you think intuitions are?

02:30:26.000 Like when you meet someone, you go, whoa, this person feels dangerous.

02:30:29.000 Like what is that?

02:30:30.000 What's happening?

02:30:31.000 Well, there's a lot.

02:30:34.000 Gaze detection is a big one.

02:30:36.000 What people do with their eyes is a major variable in just how we feel that the relationship is going.

02:30:45.000 But it's...

02:30:49.000 And there are micro-expressions that we notice in people that we're not aware of noticing.

02:30:54.000 This is not well understood.

02:30:59.000 And we're bad judges of whether someone is telling the truth.

02:31:03.000 This has been fairly well studied.

02:31:05.000 Even people who work for the FBI are not much better than chance in detecting whether somebody is lying.

02:31:12.000 But we get so much information I think we're good to go.

02:31:43.000 Do you think it's just gaze or do you think you can sense the energy of someone?

02:31:48.000 There's certain movements that people make when they're thinking about hitting you.

02:31:51.000 Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:31:52.000 There's certain, like, there's, like, a twitchiness to them, like a pulled back, like, almost like a spring or a bow.

02:31:57.000 There's, like, a feeling you get around people that are looking to hit people.

02:32:00.000 Yeah, well, there's, again, all of that's still vision, but there's, you know, I mean, who knows?

02:32:04.000 We're detecting pheromones.

02:32:06.000 We could be detecting people's level of stress.

02:32:09.000 I mean, just how tuned up they are.

02:32:10.000 Yeah.

02:32:11.000 But this goes beyond, this is beyond just...

02:32:18.000 We're good to go.

02:32:27.000 I mean, just, you know, they're tells, like, you know, too much information.

02:32:31.000 You know, like the people who are giving you superfluous information as a kind of overcorrection.

02:32:39.000 They're anticipating that you're going to doubt their story, and so they're filling in, like, blanks that you don't even need filled in, right?

02:32:45.000 And there are sort of patterns to that, but...

02:32:51.000 And again, we pick up on a lot of this stuff without consciously being aware of what's going on.

02:32:57.000 We just know that that's, like, not a person I want to spend any more time with, right?

02:33:02.000 But, you know, there may be more of a literature on this than I know about, but a lot of this is not well understood.

02:33:10.000 And, I mean, people like Paul Ekman have done a lot of stuff on micro-expressions.

02:33:17.000 That goes back probably 30 years at this point.

02:33:21.000 And there are people who are outliers who are great at detecting micro-expressions where they really just understand what's going on.

02:33:30.000 And AI eventually will be, if it isn't there already, will be much better than we are at doing this.

02:33:36.000 I'm so scared of that.

02:33:37.000 I'm sort of scared of them getting that wrong.

02:33:41.000 Microexpressions are funny because they remind me of microaggressions, which is one of the weirder social justice warrior things, like things that used to be just slights where someone was just like slightly rooted.

02:33:52.000 Not even slights.

02:33:53.000 Just like, where do you come from?

02:33:54.000 Right.

02:33:55.000 That's a microaggression.

02:33:56.000 You're speaking with an accent.

02:33:58.000 Where are you from?

02:33:59.000 Where are your parents from?

02:34:00.000 How dare you.

02:34:01.000 How dare you question my authenticity.

02:34:04.000 Yeah, microaggressions, it's weird that that's actually accepted, that this is something they're actually pushing in certain schools, that microaggressions are a real thing.

02:34:14.000 Christina Hoff Summers just wrote something about, or she put something on her Twitter today about a Yale article that was written today.

02:34:23.000 That was put out today about documenting politically incorrect behavior so that someday in the future when someone is running for Congress or is up for Supreme Court or something like that, you could go back to their college days and remember when they said something.

02:34:38.000 I mean, one of the examples this woman uses in this post was compared a woman to a large animal, a woman's body to a large animal in a private text message that she should have, oh, I should have screenshot.

02:34:50.000 I should have, yeah.

02:34:51.000 And calls this guy in this article, white boy.

02:34:56.000 This white boy does this, and the white boy with a saccharine smile does that.

02:35:00.000 Which is, like, overtly racist.

02:35:02.000 Like, just the expression.

02:35:04.000 And the way that she's describing it.

02:35:07.000 Like, as if this evil character slowly makes his way to run the world, and he's been engineered since the time he was in college.

02:35:16.000 Well, it's going to happen just by...

02:35:21.000 Just based on everyone's use of the tools.

02:35:24.000 People are not diligently scrubbing their digital history, and there may in fact be no way to actually do it, right?

02:35:34.000 And so they're just trailing, they're not even aware of what they're trailing in social media.

02:35:39.000 Right.

02:35:41.000 Maybe that will just be a cure for the problem, because at a certain point, we'll be dealing with people who were basically born on Facebook.

02:35:52.000 They don't even have a moment.

02:35:54.000 They've got their baby picture there and everything that followed.

02:36:00.000 Then it'll just seem completely untenable.

02:36:03.000 To accuse people of everything.

02:36:04.000 Everyone's guilty. 0.94

02:36:05.000 Everyone has said that dumb thing that can be taken the worst possible way. 0.94

02:36:11.000 And if they're going to be hung from that, then no one will survive. 0.96

02:36:16.000 Well, it seems like that's what we're dealing with right now in a lot of cases.

02:36:20.000 Yeah.

02:36:22.000 Yeah, what I think is really important that what you were saying earlier was that there has to be some sort of path to redeeming themselves.

02:36:30.000 That there has to be some accepted way that someone can go about redeeming themselves and we can allow them to re-enter society without constantly bringing it up or judging them by it or always attributing their past behavior to who they are right now.

02:36:45.000 I mean, this should be so simple, but look at my collaboration with Majid Nawaz, right?

02:36:51.000 We were on this podcast together.

02:36:54.000 Majid was scheming to form a global caliphate.

02:36:58.000 I mean, the organization he was part of, I mean, he wasn't a jihadist, thankfully, and he wasn't actually blowing people up.

02:37:04.000 But he was trying to get nuclear weapons in Pakistan into the hands of the worst possible theocrats, right? 0.88

02:37:13.000 This was his...

02:37:14.000 Majid, with all of his charisma and all of his energy, and it's like, you know, Majid is fantastic.

02:37:20.000 And he used to a utterly nefarious purpose in my world, right?

02:37:25.000 You know, if you know how much that is an issue for me, it's like, and Majid and I are just buddies now, right?

02:37:32.000 So...

02:37:34.000 All I need is a clear path that he took out of the darkness to understand why he's a valid collaborator now.

02:37:41.000 Actually, on that point, I've got people breathing down my neck to tell you or tell your audience, this is how powerful you are, Joe Rogan, that a documentary is coming out on our collaboration, and it's out now.

02:37:53.000 It can be found out there.

02:37:54.000 What's it called?

02:37:55.000 Islam and the Future of Tolerance.

02:37:56.000 Nice.

02:37:58.000 It's not bad.

02:37:59.000 It actually captures the spirit of our collaboration very well.

02:38:03.000 And see it if only to recognize how awesome Majid is, because Majid is just a superstar.

02:38:10.000 And the scariest thing about the state of public opinion in the Muslim world, from my point of view, is just how... 1.00

02:38:18.000 How hard a job he has to just to have a conversation in that community.

02:38:23.000 I mean, it's just, you know, he's so marginalized.

02:38:27.000 And he's so reasonable, you know, but to come back to that original point.

02:38:33.000 Here's someone whose life was purposed toward what I view as one of the most toxic projects I can think of, right?

02:38:46.000 Give the nuclear weapons to the people who want to die as martyrs, right? 0.92

02:38:51.000 That's the project, right?

02:38:53.000 And Majid is just an absolutely awesome collaborator now, right?

02:38:59.000 So there's like...

02:38:59.000 We have to—there has to be a path through some sane conversation to a reboot.

02:39:07.000 The real—the worry, though, for a lot of folks is that you are not really being honest about who you are currently.

02:39:15.000 You just want an excuse for—to be relieved.

02:39:19.000 Except it's so clear in some of these cases.

02:39:21.000 Like, it's clear—I mean, take—I mean, the Norm Macdonald case is just utterly clear, right?

02:39:26.000 Yeah.

02:39:28.000 I mean, even in Megyn Kelly's case, utterly clear.

02:39:33.000 Unless she's got some white supremacist side gig that I'm not aware of, she's just like, listen, I'm clueless.

02:39:42.000 I didn't realize.

02:39:44.000 Well, they were looking for an excuse to get rid of her, honestly.

02:39:46.000 But I think that even if they weren't, I think that still very likely would have been the end.

02:39:50.000 I mean, it's like even if her show had better ratings, still that could have been an unrecoverable error.

02:39:56.000 What if she was black? 0.80

02:39:58.000 Well, no, it doesn't work the other direction. 0.98

02:40:00.000 Right.

02:40:00.000 But if she was black and she said, what's so bad about blackface?

02:40:04.000 Do you think she could stay on the air?

02:40:06.000 That's interesting.

02:40:08.000 I don't know.

02:40:09.000 I mean, it certainly would have been easier.

02:40:12.000 Oh, yeah.

02:40:13.000 Like, what if Oprah said it?

02:40:14.000 Yeah.

02:40:14.000 What if Oprah was saying, who cares?

02:40:17.000 You want to pretend to be Diana Ross? 1.00

02:40:18.000 Because that was the thing, was pretending to be Diana Ross for Halloween. 0.97

02:40:22.000 Right, yeah.

02:40:23.000 You want to be Diana Ross? 0.99

02:40:24.000 Yeah, I mean, I got to think they could get away with it, but it's...

02:40:28.000 I mean, it was interesting, the thing that happened with Louis C.K. and Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock.

02:40:34.000 Yes, yes.

02:40:35.000 Because I remember when that aired, I think it was 2011, and I remember there was nothing around that.

02:40:42.000 Nothing.

02:40:42.000 It was totally fine, right?

02:40:44.000 They were using the N-word.

02:40:45.000 I mean, the problem...

02:40:48.000 The thing that was kind of dishonest about the re-scandalizing of it was that in the context of that conversation, it was framed by the fact that they really were referencing one of the more famous pieces of comedy in history.

02:41:06.000 They were referencing Chris Rock's act Yeah,

02:41:27.000 that's one of those things, though, where they're just looking for more things to be mad at Louis for.

02:41:33.000 Yeah, but Ricky was also getting...

02:41:35.000 Yes.

02:41:36.000 And I think Chris Rock was getting some pain. 1.00

02:41:38.000 Chris took a lot of shit. 1.00

02:41:38.000 Yeah, he took a lot of shit for that. 1.00

02:41:40.000 Because he didn't... 1.00

02:41:41.000 There was no blowback.

02:41:42.000 Yeah.

02:41:44.000 Interesting times.

02:41:46.000 Yes.

02:41:46.000 That's probably a good way to end it.

02:41:48.000 We just did three hours.

02:41:50.000 Yeah.

02:41:50.000 It is interesting times.

02:41:52.000 I mean, it's probably the most interesting times of our lives in good ways and bad ways.

02:41:56.000 Yeah.

02:41:57.000 Well, we're on the front lines of something.

02:42:00.000 Something.

02:42:00.000 And you, you know, I don't know if you get enough credit for this, but you have like...

02:42:06.000 You pushed out into the space that no one even knew existed.

02:42:11.000 I honestly didn't even know what a podcast was.

02:42:17.000 I learned what a podcast was when I got invited to get interviewed on your podcast the first time.

02:42:22.000 It's awesome what you've created here.

02:42:25.000 Well, thank you.

02:42:26.000 It's an accident.

02:42:27.000 I just stuck with it, stumbled upon it, and kept going.

02:42:32.000 I'm good at that.

02:42:33.000 Keep it up.

02:42:33.000 Thank you.

02:42:34.000 Thank you.

02:42:35.000 You too.

02:42:36.000 Sam Harris, ladies and gentlemen.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 07, 2019

Joe Rogan Experience #1241 - Sam Harris

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