The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman

00:00:14.000 Free speech and why you should give a damn, Jonathan Zimmerman.

00:00:18.000 Why should we give a damn?

00:00:20.000 Well, we should give a damn because free speech has been at the heart of every movement for change in this country.

00:00:26.000 Every great warrior against oppression was also a warrior for free speech.

00:00:30.000 But wouldn't it be convenient if we just silence people we disagree with?

00:00:33.000 That seems a lot easier for me.

00:00:34.000 No.

00:00:35.000 It's natural.

00:00:37.000 It is natural, right?

00:00:38.000 And that's why we have to resist it.

00:00:39.000 I get it.

00:00:41.000 Everyone's experienced that. 0.60

00:00:42.000 Everyone's seen somebody or heard somebody they despise and say, God, I just want that person to shut up.

00:00:48.000 And that's why we have to resist it.

00:00:51.000 There's a lot of very intelligent people that disagree with you in this current political climate, unfortunately.

00:00:56.000 I think that was exacerbated by the Trump administration and this desire to stop a lot of the QAnon stuff and the Pizzagate stuff and a lot of these conspiracy theories that people were frustrated that they were taking hold and they were like, how do we stop this?

00:01:11.000 We've got to stop these people from talking.

00:01:13.000 So that's the argument for censorship.

00:01:16.000 That's one of them.

00:01:17.000 And the other argument has to do with race and ethnicity.

00:01:20.000 I mean, the other argument is that it harms minorities.

00:01:23.000 And I think those are different arguments, but sometimes they're connected.

00:01:26.000 So you mean censorship against racism?

00:01:30.000 Correct.

00:01:31.000 Yeah.

00:01:32.000 Or sexism or homophobia or any of those things.

00:01:35.000 Yeah.

00:01:38.000 I think one of the problems that we're dealing with in today's climate is not just that everything is hyper-politicized and people are really very passionate in debating things online, but just the nature of online discourse is so limited.

00:01:51.000 It lends itself to simple sentences, 140 or 280 symbols.

00:01:59.000 It's just not enough.

00:02:00.000 It's not enough characters to express yourself.

00:02:02.000 And then also text.

00:02:04.000 Unless you're writing a book, it's hard to get all your thoughts out.

00:02:07.000 And also, one of the things that people that study communications have taught us is that when we have exchanges online, they tend to be more uncivil.

00:02:15.000 We will type things and text things about somebody or to somebody that we would never, ever say to their face.

00:02:24.000 Of course, yeah.

00:02:26.000 I don't do that.

00:02:27.000 I try really hard to not do that.

00:02:29.000 And I stopped even going back and forth with people on Twitter a few years ago.

00:02:33.000 And now, about a year and a half or so ago, I took it even further.

00:02:38.000 I don't even read my mentions.

00:02:39.000 I don't go in there.

00:02:41.000 I open Twitter up once a day to see if something crazy is happening.

00:02:47.000 Is there any place on fire?

00:02:48.000 Is anybody doing something they shouldn't be doing?

00:02:50.000 What is happening?

00:02:51.000 Well, yeah, I'm an op-ed columnist, and a couple years ago I stopped reading the commentary about the op-eds.

00:02:57.000 You know, generally it's not that well informed.

00:03:01.000 I mean, there are exceptions to that, but generally it's just people shooting from the hip, and often just in a really nasty and derogatory way.

00:03:08.000 It doesn't help.

00:03:09.000 What do you think about social...

00:03:11.000 What is it about social media that lends itself to toxic exchanges?

00:03:15.000 Because it seems to be...

00:03:16.000 I know people that are pretty friendly, positive people in person, When I meet them, they're friendly.

00:03:22.000 They hug me, and then I see them online. 0.99

00:03:24.000 I'm like, you talk so much shit. 1.00

00:03:25.000 Like, why are you doing this? 1.00

00:03:26.000 Yeah, well, I mean, obviously the anonymity is part of it, right?

00:03:30.000 I mean, it's, you know— But they're not even anonymous.

00:03:32.000 I know, but you can trick yourself into thinking that, right?

00:03:36.000 Right.

00:03:36.000 It's you and your keyboard, right, and a bunch of symbols.

00:03:40.000 There is something that's weirdly dehumanizing about it, right?

00:03:44.000 You can trick yourself into thinking that you're not dealing with other human beings.

00:03:48.000 It's just a bunch of text.

00:03:50.000 Right.

00:03:51.000 And that, you know, this idea of don't say something to someone online that you wouldn't say to them to their face, a lot of people don't like that.

00:04:00.000 Like, no, because I don't want to be uncomfortable, but I want to express myself.

00:04:04.000 So if I'm around you, If I said what I really felt, I would feel uncomfortable.

00:04:09.000 I don't like it. 1.00

00:04:10.000 But I don't like what you did or I don't like what you said, so I'm going to be like, fuck you. 1.00

00:04:15.000 And I want to say that online from the safety of my own living room. 1.00

00:04:20.000 Again, I get that, but it's more than a little cowardly, right?

00:04:24.000 It is a lot cowardly, yeah.

00:04:26.000 There's some benefit in being cowardly, too, though.

00:04:29.000 This is that there are people that, for whatever reasons, maybe they're socially awkward, they don't have the courage to say things to someone's face, but maybe that person needs to hear them. 0.99

00:04:39.000 So this is the other perspective, like, in favor of talking shit. 0.98

00:04:44.000 Yeah, well look, again, I'm not against social media. 0.99

00:04:47.000 That would be like being against oxygen now, right?

00:04:50.000 Or air, right?

00:04:51.000 It's part of our life stream, right?

00:04:54.000 I think the question is, you know, how we can use it in ways that help us communicate and understand each other.

00:05:00.000 That should be the question we're asking, right?

00:05:02.000 You know, how can we put it to positive rather than negative uses?

00:05:07.000 Well, free speech is not just being able to express yourself now.

00:05:14.000 Now it's being able to express yourself through these private companies, which is very strange.

00:05:21.000 So now the arbiter of free speech is YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, and it's like, wow, those are the town squares of our world now.

00:05:31.000 Yeah, and you know, when I discuss the free speech question with my students, I often say, look, Anyone in this room is free to make a case for any kind of speech restriction they'd like, provided that they tell me who's going to do the restricting.

00:05:45.000 Yes.

00:05:46.000 All right?

00:05:46.000 And often, it comes down to Jack Dorsey.

00:05:50.000 Well, it's not really Jack.

00:05:51.000 It's really the other people that work with Jack.

00:05:53.000 Yes, right.

00:05:54.000 His company.

00:05:55.000 In defense of Jack, though, he honestly wants Twitter to be wild.

00:05:59.000 Absolutely.

00:06:01.000 He's even proposed a separate Twitter that is completely uncensored, or you can have the moderated Twitter.

00:06:07.000 No, I think that in his public statements, I think he's been admirably ambivalent about this.

00:06:13.000 I like him a lot.

00:06:15.000 I really do.

00:06:15.000 Right.

00:06:16.000 And I think he, before Trump got cut off, which I didn't agree with, I think Dorsey generally had the right idea, which is when we see something posted on Twitter that we think is wrong or horrible, Instead of muzzling it, what we're going to do is we're going to add our two cents,

00:06:33.000 right? 0.98

00:06:33.000 And we're going to put a flag on it saying, by the way, we think this is bullshit, and here's why. 0.98

00:06:37.000 And look, that's a form of free speech as well, right? 0.96

00:06:41.000 Using your free speech to criticize speech that you think is abhorrent is an act of free speech.

00:06:46.000 And I think that seemed to me to be Dorsey's impulse, rather than muzzling people, adding a voice that tries to inform people about what they've seen.

00:06:58.000 Do you think that it's also a function of there's a limited amount of time when you're running an election, right?

00:07:05.000 So like you only have a few months when elections rolling around and there's this person who is like getting all these people riled up and Saying a bunch of crazy shit that may not be true and They have a choice to make like you can let it play out its natural course like the the logical and informed Response to bad speech is always better speech.

00:07:33.000 Like, how do you deal with bad speech?

00:07:36.000 You combat it with debate and more articulate, more well-thought-out, more sensible speech.

00:07:45.000 That's supposed to be so that if a person is on the sidelines and objectively looking into two arguments, they look at that one and go, well, that makes more sense.

00:07:52.000 This guy's trying to rile people up, but he's incorrect, and this is why.

00:07:55.000 But you only have three months.

00:07:57.000 Correct. 0.98

00:07:58.000 And there's a natural time that these things take to play out before you figure out what's bullshit and what's not. 0.96

00:08:03.000 Right.

00:08:04.000 And also, the other thing I'd add, though, is although I agree with the dynamic you just described, in order to pull that off, you need a certain sort of education.

00:08:12.000 Yes.

00:08:12.000 Right?

00:08:12.000 And that's why I think, I mean, you know, one of the things I study is education.

00:08:18.000 And I think that's absolutely a critical part of this discussion, right?

00:08:21.000 To reason and deliberate in the way you were just describing it, that's not a natural act either.

00:08:26.000 We don't kind of the womb doing that, right?

00:08:28.000 We need institutions to teach us how to do that, and they've not done a very good job of it.

00:08:33.000 Yeah, and teaching people how to think about things and how to look at things and analyze things in an objective manner.

00:08:43.000 What's going on?

00:08:45.000 Sorry about that.

00:08:46.000 Is he leaning back?

00:08:46.000 Is that the issue?

00:08:47.000 Not enough volume.

00:08:50.000 Teaching people how to think is not necessary.

00:08:52.000 Critical thinking skills, it's not really highlighted in school, especially in high school.

00:08:58.000 It's not something that you really spend a lot of time Well, unfortunately, I mean, we give rhetorical obeisance to it, but we don't do it nearly enough.

00:09:07.000 And when you interview kids about their high school experience, and you ask them, you know, did you really engage in dialogue about substantive questions where there was real debate?

00:09:17.000 Generally, they say no.

00:09:19.000 Yeah.

00:09:19.000 And the problem with debate is oftentimes you're just trying to win, right?

00:09:22.000 Right.

00:09:22.000 Sometimes people are just very theatrical and very loud and dynamic, or they'll touch upon, like, certain things, like...

00:09:31.000 You know, certain things that they think, like whether or not it's valid to the conversation, they'll add those things to it because there's certain social clout to those subjects.

00:09:41.000 Look, the hardest thing to do as a young person is to figure out what you really think, right?

00:09:46.000 Not what the people around you are saying, your peers or your parents or your teachers, what you really think.

00:09:52.000 And the problem is we haven't actually created educational institutions that help people do that.

00:09:58.000 Right.

00:09:58.000 I mean, what they do is they encourage people to mouth things they've heard from others rather than to come up with like, okay, what do I actually think about this?

00:10:07.000 Right.

00:10:08.000 It also sounds good if you can mouth things that other people have said really well and you can kind of put it in your own words.

00:10:13.000 It sounds smart.

00:10:15.000 And also, I mean, you know, remember, if you're in high school, you're an adolescent.

00:10:20.000 And adolescents, like we know from developmental psychology, they're very attuned to other adolescents, right?

00:10:26.000 I mean, that's what it's about.

00:10:27.000 You know, it's who's cool, who's cute, who's going out with whom, you know?

00:10:31.000 And so I think there's almost a developmental reason that you would try to sort of tailor your opinions to the people around you.

00:10:37.000 But that's not good for you, and it's definitely not good for our democracy.

00:10:40.000 I mean, one way of thinking about all this social media stuff is we're all teenagers now, and we're all doing precisely that, trying to figure out who's cool and who isn't, right?

00:10:50.000 And trying to get on the right side, and as you were saying, to mouth the right things.

00:10:55.000 Yeah.

00:10:56.000 And being with the cool kids.

00:10:58.000 Correct.

00:10:58.000 You want to be at the cool table in the cafeteria.

00:11:00.000 Whoever they are, right?

00:11:02.000 And again, it's not good for you.

00:11:05.000 No, it's not.

00:11:05.000 Or our democracy, more to the point.

00:11:07.000 I was really lucky when I was young, and we were talking about this earlier when you asked about my accent, that I moved around a lot.

00:11:14.000 And I think that was really good.

00:11:16.000 It sucked at the time, because I moved to San Francisco when I was seven, from New Jersey to San Francisco, and then Florida when I was 11, and then when I was 13 we moved to Boston.

00:11:27.000 It was a lot of moving.

00:11:29.000 And because of that I didn't develop this core group of friends that I grew up with.

00:11:35.000 You know, it was a little chaotic, but it forced me to formulate my own opinions about things.

00:11:41.000 You know, I had a very similar upbringing in different places.

00:11:44.000 I actually grew up overseas because my parents were in the Peace Corps, as I was subsequently.

00:11:49.000 And so as an elementary schooler, I lived in India and Iran, and then I lived in New York and in Washington.

00:11:57.000 But like yourself, I mean, for me, except for meeting my wife, that was the formative experience of my life, I would say, living in all those different environments as a really little kid. 0.98

00:12:07.000 Because also when you're little, you don't know how weird the shit you're doing is. 0.98

00:12:11.000 You know, it's just because you just do it. 0.98

00:12:13.000 It's so like in Bangalore, India, my parents sent me to a girl's school.

00:12:16.000 Which took a couple boys in the younger grades because it was the angle of school that was near where we lived.

00:12:21.000 And it was actually a fabulous experience, you know, to be, you know, like one of a couple boys in a whole room full of girls.

00:12:29.000 But nobody told me that that was just bizarre.

00:12:31.000 I just did it.

00:12:33.000 You and that other boy must be like, what are we doing here, man?

00:12:37.000 But, you know, it's funny, Joe, I don't even remember doing that.

00:12:41.000 It's just, you know, like when you're young, you just do what's there.

00:12:44.000 Right.

00:12:45.000 Yeah.

00:12:47.000 And, you know, I lived in Iran in the late 60s when, you know, Tehran was this hugely cosmopolitan place.

00:12:54.000 Completely different than it is now.

00:12:56.000 Totally different.

00:12:57.000 What is that like to have those memories and to see what it's like now?

00:13:01.000 I mean, they just executed an Olympic wrestler for engaging in a political protest.

00:13:07.000 No, it's incredibly depressing.

00:13:09.000 And in some ways, Iran was really an unlikely place for the Islamic Revolution.

00:13:14.000 It's a pluralist place.

00:13:16.000 I mean, it's a crossroads and it has been for 10,000 years.

00:13:20.000 And it's interesting you mention Iran because, you know, when the Pew does these like pro and anti-American surveys where they take like a sample of people in different countries and say, what do you think of America?

00:13:30.000 Except for Israel, the Iranians like us more than any country in the Middle East.

00:13:34.000 Yeah, I've heard that.

00:13:35.000 And you would never get that from the saber rattling that you see in the newspapers.

00:13:39.000 What do you think that is?

00:13:40.000 Well, I think it's because the history of the country is so pluralist.

00:13:44.000 You know, I mean, Iran, everyone conquered it, right? 0.96

00:13:47.000 It's a huge mismatch of ethnicities and historically of religions.

00:13:51.000 You know, it obviously had big Jewish populations, Baha'i populations.

00:13:56.000 Obviously, most of those people have been exiled, right?

00:13:59.000 But that's very recent history.

00:14:00.000 And let's also remember, it's a country of about 80 million people, and over half of them were born well after Khomeini.

00:14:06.000 You know, so, you know, all they know is this corrupt regime that's governed them, and they don't like it.

00:14:13.000 You know, there's a huge amount of dissent in Iran.

00:14:18.000 It's just that I think, I mean, this is a whole other rap, but I think the United States and the rest of the world haven't really figured out how to really harness that dissent.

00:14:29.000 You know, I think, you know, people pick up the newspaper and they imagine Iran as this place of kind of like Islamist ditto heads, and it is not that, not by any measure.

00:14:41.000 Wow.

00:14:41.000 That's got to be so strange to have grown up there and see this gigantic shift and have these memories of what it was like previously when it was this sort of cosmopolitan center.

00:14:54.000 It was.

00:14:55.000 People from all over the world.

00:14:56.000 I went to an international school and I had friends from Hong Kong and South Africa and England, but also we can't romanticize it.

00:15:05.000 I mean, it was a dictatorship.

00:15:07.000 And, you know, in some ways I think my concerns about free speech in some ways stem from that experience as well because I can remember my parents, you know, when they would talk on the phone, they would often sort of say jokingly, hey, you know, we better not go there.

00:15:21.000 We don't know who's listening.

00:15:22.000 Yeah, well, that's everywhere now, though.

00:15:26.000 For different reasons, right?

00:15:27.000 But you know why.

00:15:28.000 Hi, NSA. Well, this is a podcast, so they're definitely listening to this.

00:15:32.000 That's right.

00:15:33.000 But your phone.

00:15:34.000 That's right. 0.90

00:15:35.000 You know, when Edward Snowden had to leave the country and Glenn Greenwald, they published that story about the NSA's, all the shit that he leaked where there was this widespread surveillance on the American public. 0.93

00:15:52.000 Right. 0.91

00:15:53.000 That's really disturbing.

00:15:54.000 It is disturbing.

00:15:55.000 And again, the difference is, thanks to democracy and free speech, you and I can critique that.

00:16:00.000 We may not be able to control it.

00:16:02.000 We may not be able to end it.

00:16:03.000 It's a complicated question, but nobody's going to come in the night for my family or for yours because we're criticizing the NSA. Yeah, we can critique it, but it still exists.

00:16:14.000 Yes, it does.

00:16:15.000 It's very strange.

00:16:16.000 It's like, you know, hey, you can't do that.

00:16:18.000 You shouldn't have done that.

00:16:20.000 Oh, you're still doing it?

00:16:21.000 Oh.

00:16:22.000 Are they still doing it?

00:16:24.000 They are still doing it.

00:16:25.000 Okay.

00:16:25.000 Well, what do we do about that?

00:16:27.000 Well, they're not doing anything with it.

00:16:28.000 Well, right now they're not doing anything with it.

00:16:30.000 Jesus Christ, this is crazy.

00:16:32.000 Well, I forget which comedian made a joke out of this.

00:16:35.000 It all started during Obama, some of the leaks about this.

00:16:38.000 And, you know, I forget who it was, but a comedian said, well, look, you know, I mean, Americans said that they wanted a president that listens to everyone.

00:16:47.000 Here you go.

00:16:48.000 That's funny.

00:16:50.000 That's whoever you are.

00:16:54.000 Yeah.

00:16:55.000 But that is, in a sense, it's encouraging self-censorship.

00:17:00.000 And that's one of the things about privacy that makes privacy so critical, is because if you cannot express yourself without fear of other people listening, then there is a component of self-censorship, which is critical in North Koreans, 0.99

00:17:17.000 the regime's way of keeping people in line, is they have a form of self-censorship.

00:17:23.000 Correct.

00:17:23.000 They have everybody tattle on it, everybody.

00:17:25.000 Right, right, right.

00:17:27.000 And, you know, look, we have forms of that in this country, too.

00:17:30.000 And you've got to be really careful when you talk about it, because it's not North Korea.

00:17:33.000 Right.

00:17:34.000 Of course.

00:17:35.000 But on college campuses, like the ones that I work at, there are forms of self-censorship.

00:17:40.000 They're not enforced by, like, Bad guys with sunglasses and baseball bats, right?

00:17:45.000 It's part of the culture, unfortunately.

00:17:47.000 But, you know, there's now a big survey literature about it that's very upsetting.

00:17:52.000 So, you know, both students and faculty, you ask them, are you saying what you think?

00:17:56.000 And large numbers of them say no.

00:17:58.000 And that includes Democrats and Republicans, men and women, students and faculty.

00:18:03.000 And so it's not North Korea.

00:18:05.000 It never has been, never will be.

00:18:08.000 But those of us who care about free speech should be really upset about it nevertheless.

00:18:11.000 Well, there's certainly rigid ideologies on college campuses, but do they get specific about saying what they really mean or think?

00:18:19.000 Like, what are the key subjects?

00:18:22.000 Well, look, I'll give you an example, and this came up in another book that I wrote.

00:18:26.000 There was a survey done of full-time faculty about 10 years ago, and the question was, do you agree with the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions?

00:18:36.000 And it turned out that 40% of the respondents said no.

00:18:40.000 Now, for the sake of transparency, I should tell you that I'm in the 60%.

00:18:43.000 I think affirmative action has been a net gain for the university.

00:18:46.000 It's a complicated question, but I think it's been a net win.

00:18:50.000 Nevertheless, I was upset by the 40% figure.

00:18:53.000 Not that there were people that disagreed with me.

00:18:55.000 I was upset that I hadn't heard from them.

00:18:57.000 Right?

00:18:58.000 They are biting their tongues.

00:19:00.000 And that can't be good.

00:19:02.000 It can't be good for affirmative action.

00:19:04.000 Right?

00:19:05.000 Which could only benefit from people really...

00:19:07.000 Affirmative action is a complicated question.

00:19:10.000 Right?

00:19:11.000 And, you know, it cuts to a lot of different really, really complex questions.

00:19:15.000 And if we're biting our tongues about it...

00:19:18.000 We won't get to good answers.

00:19:20.000 And so obviously the people that oppose affirmative action are afraid to do so publicly because they don't want to incur the social costs.

00:19:28.000 And that's not good.

00:19:30.000 Yeah, that's unfortunate.

00:19:32.000 And that is a part of what happens today is the pile-on.

00:19:35.000 When someone says something that is not on the list of things you're supposed to think or say, and you can get piled on.

00:19:43.000 Yeah, and then there's guilt by association, right?

00:19:45.000 And it goes like this, right?

00:19:47.000 You know, David Duke is an imperial wizard of the KKK. David Duke obviously opposes affirmative action.

00:19:52.000 You oppose affirmative action.

00:19:54.000 Ergo, you're David Duke.

00:19:56.000 And, of course, there is no ergo, right?

00:19:58.000 I mean, this is like a fallacy that a third grader could see through, but it's all around us.

00:20:04.000 Yeah, that's a real problem with today, guilt by association.

00:20:09.000 Yeah, there's so many complicated questions that you oftentimes feel like you have the answer to, or you have your opinion on it, and then you'll hear a very nuanced perspective from someone who takes a different stance.

00:20:21.000 And if you're open-minded, you go, oh, maybe I haven't considered that point of view.

00:20:25.000 And that's one of the real reasons why it's important that you have free speech and you have debate, because you don't want to get pigeonholed into an idea that maybe somewhere down the line you might find foolish.

00:20:36.000 But you weren't allowed to be exposed to some really good arguments to the contrary.

00:20:40.000 Right.

00:20:41.000 And, you know, I think at the end of the day, for me, this is really a question about learning.

00:20:45.000 I mean, I'm a teacher.

00:20:46.000 That's my vocation, right?

00:20:48.000 How do we learn from each other?

00:20:50.000 And I think that the way we learn from each other is when we're examining as many different sides of a question as we possibly can, right?

00:20:58.000 That's how you learn.

00:21:00.000 Like, how many people learn from someone that they agree with?

00:21:03.000 I don't really remember the last time I did.

00:21:06.000 It's like, oh, Trump, yeah, I hate him too, right?

00:21:09.000 And I do loathe Trump, but I don't learn from somebody that loathes Trump because I already loathe him, right?

00:21:15.000 Some people have some good loathing points, though.

00:21:18.000 They do.

00:21:19.000 You never know, man.

00:21:20.000 No, there are different ways to loathe Trump.

00:21:22.000 I'll acknowledge that.

00:21:23.000 You might find out some facts that you weren't aware of about construction dealings.

00:21:28.000 Right.

00:21:28.000 No, there's plenty to load and there are always new things to learn.

00:21:31.000 But I think just the larger point for me is that I think I'm more likely to learn from a conversation with somebody who actually likes Trump precisely because I don't.

00:21:40.000 Right.

00:21:41.000 Yeah, it's just hard to find rational, intelligent people that are open-minded, that oppose each other.

00:21:50.000 That will sit down and have a conversation where they're not trying to...

00:21:54.000 They're not trying to browbeat each other or bully each other into submission.

00:21:58.000 They're not trying to win the conversation.

00:21:59.000 But they're honestly going, okay, so why do you feel like that?

00:22:04.000 What is it about this that gets you excited?

00:22:07.000 What is it about this that makes you upset?

00:22:09.000 Okay.

00:22:10.000 Well, I looked at it this way.

00:22:11.000 And then I go, huh.

00:22:12.000 Well, I don't think that's right because of this.

00:22:14.000 Then you go, oh, okay.

00:22:15.000 Trying to learn.

00:22:16.000 If you can do that open-mindedly with people that you have opposing viewpoints...

00:22:21.000 I've gotten better at that.

00:22:22.000 That's one of the things that I've really gone out of my way to try to listen to people and try to look at things from their perspective, even if I don't agree with it.

00:22:33.000 Try to just find where they're connecting the dots.

00:22:37.000 Like, how are you doing this?

00:22:38.000 Okay, let me see how you do it.

00:22:40.000 And sometimes it's interesting.

00:22:41.000 Sometimes you can see the logical fallacies that they've fallen into and you go, oh, look at that. 0.98

00:22:46.000 They fucking slipped right on there.

00:22:49.000 Look, I think that's a great ambition, but I think that that's the exception because I think most of our media environment promotes the opposite, right? 0.98

00:22:57.000 I mean, you know, just think of what a news feed is, right?

00:23:02.000 A news feed is the events of the day curated according to your search history and your biases.

00:23:10.000 And what an awful image, like time for your two o'clock feed, right, of all the stuff that we have...

00:23:19.000 Curate it in order to reinforce your biases.

00:23:23.000 That's what it is.

00:23:24.000 There is that.

00:23:25.000 That's where we live.

00:23:26.000 But quite honestly, my news feed is pretty innocuous.

00:23:34.000 My news feed is all like new cars that are coming out and this jujitsu match has been postponed.

00:23:40.000 Yeah, it's not all politics, right?

00:23:42.000 Of course not.

00:23:43.000 I don't care.

00:23:45.000 When I'm looking at things that are interesting to me, I'm looking for distractions and things that are my hobbies.

00:23:55.000 My news feed has professional billiards on it, so I'll get snooker scores or snooker from the UK. When something deep and meaningful, if I'm looking for something, if I'm researching something, then I go look for that.

00:24:12.000 I don't like that stuff in my newsfeed.

00:24:15.000 I figured out a year or two ago, I'm tired of getting freaked out.

00:24:19.000 I don't want to just pick up, like, Jesus, what is he doing now?

00:24:22.000 I don't want to do that every time I pick up my phone.

00:24:24.000 What's happening?

00:24:25.000 What is it?

00:24:26.000 North Korea? 1.00

00:24:26.000 Shit! 1.00

00:24:27.000 I don't want to do that. 1.00

00:24:28.000 It's exhausting.

00:24:29.000 It's exhausting, and I don't think it benefits me.

00:24:31.000 But I do like to be informed.

00:24:33.000 So I, you know, subscribe to Washington Post, and I subscribe to Wall Street Journal and New York Times, and I'll go there, and I'll go on purpose to read.

00:24:44.000 Right, and to read different sources.

00:24:46.000 I mean, I think that's what we have an educated people to do, and that's what our broader media environment discourages.

00:24:51.000 I'm having a hard time finding a good Republican, a right-wing perspective that's a news source, though.

00:24:58.000 Yeah.

00:24:58.000 Do you know one?

00:24:59.000 It's hard.

00:25:00.000 I mean, it's hard.

00:25:01.000 Look, I mean, you know, you mentioned the Wall Street Journal.

00:25:06.000 Fiscally, yeah, but they're a little social justice-y with some of their op-eds.

00:25:11.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a big difference between the news side of that paper and the opinion page.

00:25:17.000 Yeah.

00:25:18.000 But, you know, I think The Wall Street Journal is a really good source, you know?

00:25:23.000 And what I do in the evenings is I just toggle between Fox and MSNBC. Because I know that if I were to watch...

00:25:31.000 Are you schizophrenic? 0.96

00:25:32.000 Yeah, well, my wife thinks so.

00:25:34.000 I mean, the reason, though, is if I watch MSNBC, I'll just see my worldview confirmed.

00:25:38.000 Do you ever read Matt Taibbi's Substack?

00:25:41.000 Yeah.

00:25:42.000 Did you read Rachel Maddow as Bill Reilly?

00:25:44.000 No, I read about it.

00:25:46.000 I haven't read it yet. 0.99

00:25:46.000 It's fucking great. 0.99

00:25:48.000 He made that same point in... 0.99

00:25:50.000 What's it called?

00:25:51.000 Hate Speech?

00:25:52.000 Is that his book?

00:25:53.000 Hate Inc.

00:25:54.000 Hate Inc.

00:25:55.000 is a book that he released last year that's phenomenal.

00:25:57.000 I'm just a giant fan of Matt Taibbi.

00:25:59.000 I think he's...

00:26:00.000 One of the most important journalists today because he's so honest and so open-minded and he's so well-informed.

00:26:07.000 When he goes off on a subject like he has put in the work, like when he went off on savings and loan crisis or when he went on the subprime mortgage business.

00:26:19.000 I actually interviewed him on the podcast about it. 0.99

00:26:21.000 He had to learn all that shit. 1.00

00:26:22.000 He's a journalist. 1.00

00:26:23.000 He's not a finance guy. 0.98

00:26:25.000 So he had to really understand what kind of fuckery these people were involved with and then put it in his beautiful prose so that it dances on the page as you get informed about this fucking criminal behavior that led to this gigantic financial crash that we endured.

00:26:42.000 And yet, at the same time, I mean, look, I think it's great that Substack exists, and it's great that a fellow like that is on it, but the fact that he's on it and that he's not writing for one of our major media companies, that says something troubling about this configuration. 0.85

00:26:57.000 I think he still writes for Rolling Stone.

00:26:58.000 I guess he does.

00:26:59.000 Yeah.

00:27:00.000 He's still a Rolling Stone contributor.

00:27:02.000 But yes.

00:27:03.000 Listen, and I've said this when people say, oh, I can't believe they wrote that about you.

00:27:08.000 That's not true.

00:27:10.000 Clickbait is what you have to do today if you want to stay alive.

00:27:14.000 I don't hate the player.

00:27:16.000 It's the game.

00:27:18.000 The game is, look, no one's buying physical newspapers anymore.

00:27:21.000 So with the absence of sales of physical newspapers, it's all about clicks.

00:27:25.000 Now, if you tell the truth completely in the title, you're going to lose a lot of your business.

00:27:32.000 You have to kind of distort things.

00:27:34.000 Well, I should tell you, I read two print newspapers at the first thing every morning.

00:27:38.000 Good for you.

00:27:39.000 I'm like the last American to do that.

00:27:40.000 Good for you.

00:27:41.000 In fact, The Onion ran a great headline a couple years ago that said, I believe it was, last print subscriber to Boston Globe dies.

00:27:49.000 I used to deliver the Boston Globe.

00:27:51.000 There you go.

00:27:52.000 Yeah.

00:27:53.000 Yeah, I used to deliver to the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and the New York Times.

00:27:57.000 That was my job when I was a young man.

00:28:00.000 I was a paperboy as well.

00:28:01.000 Were you?

00:28:02.000 Yeah, Washington Post.

00:28:03.000 It's a good job for discipline.

00:28:05.000 Gets you up in the morning.

00:28:06.000 Taught me a lot.

00:28:07.000 Yeah, and now, I mean, well, there are a whole bunch of reasons for this, but most of the circulation is done by adults and cars.

00:28:15.000 That's what I did.

00:28:16.000 Oh, you did?

00:28:17.000 Yeah.

00:28:17.000 I had hundreds of houses that I would go to.

00:28:20.000 I could make a good living.

00:28:21.000 Not really, but I could make enough money in a couple hours a day where I didn't really have to have another job.

00:28:26.000 Right.

00:28:26.000 I did the same thing in high school.

00:28:27.000 My friends worked at sporting goods stores and grocery stores, and I got up and delivered the paper, and I made more money than they did.

00:28:33.000 Yeah.

00:28:33.000 You just have to have the ability to get up seven days a week early in the morning.

00:28:37.000 It's a grind.

00:28:40.000 But in the absence of print, of print journalism, where you could just go and buy a paper copy, they lose out so much money.

00:28:48.000 Because it used to be, you know, there was the machines, you put the money in, you pull a paper out.

00:28:52.000 Remember there's an honor system?

00:28:54.000 You open the box and you get all these papers.

00:28:56.000 You're only supposed to take one.

00:28:58.000 You remember those days?

00:28:59.000 That's an interesting time. 0.62

00:29:01.000 That would never happen today, where you could put a quarter in and you open that sucker and you're supposed to take one paper?

00:29:07.000 But see, there are other virtues of it, I think, that we tend to underappreciate.

00:29:12.000 And the reason that I read in print is there's a lot of evidence that you retain more that way than you do on a screen.

00:29:19.000 Why is that?

00:29:20.000 Well, it depends on whom you ask, but the people that study eye tracking say that for whatever reason, when you're reading print, your eye goes all the way across on each line.

00:29:32.000 And on screens, it's less likely to do that.

00:29:34.000 You can't make this up.

00:29:35.000 They call it the F pattern.

00:29:37.000 When the eye trackers look at what you do on a screen, the first line you go all the way across, but then the next one, as in an F, it's a little shorter.

00:29:45.000 Oh, interesting.

00:29:46.000 And when you give people the same text, you know, in print and on a screen, they just retain more in print.

00:29:54.000 And I tell my students this.

00:29:56.000 I say, when you can, print something out.

00:29:57.000 I know you can't always because you will hold on to more.

00:30:01.000 I have a Kindle that has that paper screen.

00:30:04.000 Yeah.

00:30:05.000 How's that?

00:30:05.000 Is that the same?

00:30:06.000 I don't know.

00:30:07.000 I don't know.

00:30:07.000 Because it looks like paper.

00:30:09.000 And look, you know, I think that obviously things are changing so rapidly, right?

00:30:14.000 It may well be that future generations are socialized in a different way and, you know, their eyes do different things.

00:30:21.000 Have you heard of – there's a new product.

00:30:23.000 I've not tried it, but I've seen advertising for it.

00:30:25.000 It's called Remarkable.

00:30:27.000 Oh, I read about it.

00:30:28.000 It's a tablet, but when you write on it, you write it in handwriting, and it can either save it in your handwriting or it puts it into print, and it looks like paper as you're writing on it, but you can have a gigabyte of information on this little tablet,

00:30:49.000 so thousands of pages.

00:30:50.000 You can write books on that.

00:30:53.000 And the pencil apparently has a tactile feel.

00:30:55.000 Do you know anything about it?

00:30:57.000 Do you ever use it?

00:30:57.000 I have one.

00:30:59.000 Did you show it to me?

00:31:00.000 No, just briefly.

00:31:01.000 Like a month ago.

00:31:02.000 A month ago?

00:31:03.000 I got it like a while ago.

00:31:04.000 But you didn't have it set up.

00:31:05.000 Yeah, I just haven't used it.

00:31:07.000 I haven't done anything with it.

00:31:08.000 But that's what I'm saying.

00:31:08.000 You didn't have it set up where I saw you use it.

00:31:10.000 Yeah, I don't use it.

00:31:11.000 Yeah, I just showed it to you.

00:31:13.000 Did you show it to me in the box?

00:31:14.000 Yeah, I just pulled it out.

00:31:15.000 I was like, hey, check out the light.

00:31:16.000 You knew what it was.

00:31:17.000 I was like, yeah, it's remarkable.

00:31:18.000 Why do I not remember that?

00:31:19.000 I don't know, because it was like five minutes.

00:31:21.000 My hard drive is so full.

00:31:23.000 My brain hard drive is something that's not that important, like delete, get it out of there.

00:31:28.000 But I don't use it that much at all.

00:31:29.000 It's just kind of sitting there, like my other iPad that I don't use.

00:31:31.000 I thought about it as a tool for writing jokes.

00:31:35.000 It might be helpful for that.

00:31:36.000 Yeah, because I think there's an app for your phone as well, right?

00:31:39.000 But it's just writing.

00:31:41.000 There's no other apps.

00:31:42.000 It does connect to the internet, but it's just so you can share stuff, I think.

00:31:46.000 But all these things, I think, were so close to these revolutions, it's hard to imagine what they're going to do to the way that we think.

00:31:55.000 Think about something like multitasking.

00:31:59.000 So there was a guy at Stanford named Clifford Nass who died a year or so ago.

00:32:03.000 He was quite young, unfortunately.

00:32:05.000 And Clifford Nass was the guru of multitasking.

00:32:08.000 And what he demonstrated is that multitasking is a hoax and that multitaskers have everyone snookered, including themselves.

00:32:16.000 So they're not liars.

00:32:18.000 They honestly believe that they can do three or four things at the same time with equal efficiency.

00:32:23.000 It's just they can't.

00:32:24.000 They believe it.

00:32:25.000 And so much in the media environment is encouraging us both to multitask and also to believe in multitasking, right, as an article of faith.

00:32:33.000 It just turns out to be untrue.

00:32:35.000 And he did it every which way with, like, different sorts of sporting endeavors and card games and all kinds of different things.

00:32:42.000 He said, you know, do these three things separately and do them together, right?

00:32:46.000 And if you do them one by one, You do them so much better.

00:32:51.000 And this is another message I'm constantly giving to my students.

00:32:54.000 Like, don't believe the multitasking hype.

00:32:56.000 It is a hype.

00:32:57.000 It is not true.

00:32:58.000 You know, turn off everything else and work on one thing and then finish it and then go to the next.

00:33:04.000 And it's hard, right?

00:33:05.000 Because it's hard.

00:33:06.000 That's why it's such a flex when you see a chess master play ten people at the same time and walk around and like, mm-hmm. 1.00

00:33:13.000 Fuck you. 1.00

00:33:14.000 Not today. 1.00

00:33:16.000 Yeah, well, there are exceptions to every rule, right?

00:33:18.000 Those people can multitask.

00:33:20.000 Yes, but are they even multitasking?

00:33:21.000 Because it's still the same endeavor.

00:33:24.000 Correct.

00:33:24.000 The same game.

00:33:25.000 Yeah, they're playing one game.

00:33:27.000 Yeah, I think there's some real truth to that because I think most people that I know that multitask, they do several things.

00:33:36.000 But I don't think they do them quite as good as if they were only doing that one thing.

00:33:41.000 Correct.

00:33:42.000 The interesting thing is they actually believe that they do.

00:33:44.000 And I think that was NASA's point.

00:33:46.000 I mean, that's why it keeps going, right?

00:33:48.000 Is that we haven't gotten the message.

00:33:50.000 Yeah.

00:33:51.000 That's not a good...

00:33:52.000 That's not a good perspective.

00:33:53.000 When you think you're doing something at your best and you're not...

00:33:57.000 Look, we're all great self-saboteurs.

00:34:00.000 We're not good judges of ourselves.

00:34:03.000 We're biased.

00:34:05.000 All of us are.

00:34:06.000 Why is that?

00:34:07.000 Well, you know, Freud said that we're all narcissists at some level, right?

00:34:11.000 And, you know, you want to be the winner, right?

00:34:14.000 You want to be the person who, you know, beats the team at the buzzer and gets the girl and all these other things.

00:34:22.000 And so that makes us incredibly biased judges of ourselves.

00:34:27.000 You know, and we all radically inflate our abilities and our capacities.

00:34:32.000 But what about people that are very self-deprecating and are objective? 1.00

00:34:36.000 Do you think even those people are full of shit? 0.99

00:34:39.000 I wouldn't go that far, you know, but they might think they're even more self-deprecating than they are, right? 1.00

00:34:45.000 Or better at self-deprecation than the next guy.

00:34:48.000 And we're just, we're not good judges of that.

00:34:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:53.000 That's very unfortunate.

00:34:54.000 And there's probably some exercises to make you more objective.

00:35:00.000 Yeah.

00:35:01.000 Getting married has been a good one for me.

00:35:03.000 Oh, there you go.

00:35:04.000 You've got someone around you who's like, no, you don't. 1.00

00:35:07.000 Fuck out of here. 1.00

00:35:07.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:35:08.000 Yeah, I think it's a difficult thing for people to do to face themselves and to face what they do good and what they do bad.

00:35:18.000 One way I've found is to engage in things that don't leave any room for fuckery.

00:35:25.000 Right? 0.93

00:35:26.000 Like martial arts is one of them. 0.92

00:35:27.000 Another one is one of the reasons why I like pool is the balls don't care about your personality. 0.70

00:35:32.000 They don't care about any... 0.97

00:35:34.000 They don't care.

00:35:35.000 Like you either make the ball or you do not make the ball.

00:35:37.000 Like you either can win or you lose.

00:35:40.000 Like it's really simple in that regard.

00:35:42.000 But it's also very complex.

00:35:45.000 It's like you either execute correctly or you don't.

00:35:47.000 And so if you do things like that, like martial arts in particular is a very humbling thing.

00:35:53.000 And I think it's really good in that way that most of the people that I know that are martial artists that are at an elevated state, they're really good.

00:36:01.000 They're really friendly people.

00:36:03.000 They're humble in a lot of ways.

00:36:05.000 And one of the reasons why is because they're humbled all the time. 1.00

00:36:08.000 Yeah, because your ass is getting kicked all the time. 1.00

00:36:10.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:36:10.000 If, you know, the three of us were all black belts and we were training together, we'd all be cranking each other's neck every day. 1.00

00:36:17.000 Like, you'd be tapping me every day, and Jamie would be tapping me, and after a while, you're like— That's not going to happen.

00:36:21.000 You just get used to it.

00:36:23.000 You just accept the fact that someone got you, and you don't— Right.

00:36:27.000 But when you see people that have never lost, I have a friend and we had this conversation and one of the things that we were talking about was the regret of him not doing sports when he was younger.

00:36:39.000 He never learned how to lose.

00:36:42.000 He never learned how to take a loss and just not have it emotionally devastate him.

00:36:48.000 So to this day, even if he's playing a card game, it'll freak him out if he loses. 0.89

00:36:54.000 He won't say anything, but it'll really bother the shit out of him.

00:36:58.000 And some people, they don't have a lot of experience in testing themselves. 0.89

00:37:05.000 So they don't have a lot of faith in their own character and judgment under pressure.

00:37:09.000 That's unfortunate.

00:37:11.000 But it's interesting, Joe, that you prefaced all this with something about what you're good and what you're bad at.

00:37:16.000 Yeah.

00:37:16.000 Because, you know, the other thing I think that psychology has taught us is that actually that's a very bad way to think of yourself.

00:37:24.000 How so?

00:37:24.000 That is, the more you think about whether you're good at something or not, it turns out that generally the worse you do at that.

00:37:31.000 At the thing?

00:37:32.000 That's right.

00:37:33.000 The best thing to do is not to think about it.

00:37:35.000 Right.

00:37:36.000 Because it turns out that when the brain starts to think about what's good and what's bad, it thinks of those in rather static terms.

00:37:43.000 So, like, I'm good at math or I'm not.

00:37:45.000 But maybe that's in the action of the thing.

00:37:48.000 Yeah.

00:37:49.000 But maybe not in reflection of the thing.

00:37:51.000 Right, right.

00:37:51.000 And it can be both.

00:37:53.000 But, you know, in general, the best thing, you know, when a student asks me, like, do you think I'm smart or do you think I'm good at history?

00:37:59.000 I always say, I don't know and I don't care.

00:38:02.000 All I care about is what you've written.

00:38:05.000 Right.

00:38:05.000 That's it.

00:38:06.000 You know?

00:38:06.000 The work.

00:38:07.000 Exactly.

00:38:08.000 This is not like an existential judgment of your soul.

00:38:10.000 And by the way, the more you think about that, the worse you're going to do.

00:38:13.000 So don't do it.

00:38:15.000 Don't do it.

00:38:15.000 Because it makes you think in somewhat static terms.

00:38:18.000 And I remember when my kids were growing up, like, you would often hear, oh, so-and-so is good at this, and so-and-so is good at that, so-and-so is bad at this, so-and-so is bad at that.

00:38:27.000 And they also, they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, right?

00:38:30.000 And that's not good for anyone either.

00:38:33.000 So just don't think about it.

00:38:34.000 Just do it, right?

00:38:36.000 Don't think about whether you're, quote, good at it.

00:38:38.000 Just do it.

00:38:39.000 Just do it, yeah.

00:38:41.000 But also recognize what parts of whatever you're doing that maybe you need to improve upon.

00:38:47.000 Absolutely, right?

00:38:48.000 And, you know, I think you can more easily do that if you're not thinking in these binary good and bad terms, right?

00:38:55.000 Because if you think you're bad at it, like, why would you improve at it?

00:38:58.000 Right.

00:38:58.000 You're bad at it.

00:38:59.000 Right.

00:39:00.000 Yeah.

00:39:00.000 Well, maybe you want to get better at it.

00:39:02.000 Maybe, right?

00:39:03.000 But that involves a belief that I think transcends this idea that people are good and bad at things.

00:39:10.000 But people do develop proficiency at things.

00:39:13.000 No doubt.

00:39:14.000 There's some benefit in giving yourself like a little reward or letting yourself be aware that you've achieved some level of proficiency.

00:39:23.000 So there's a benefit to all this discipline.

00:39:26.000 Without a doubt.

00:39:27.000 And we've all experienced that, right?

00:39:29.000 But I think the key, at least for me, is experiencing the action.

00:39:35.000 Right.

00:39:36.000 You know, experiencing whatever it is, your great billiards game, you know, and you're finally able to hit that incredibly complex shot that you couldn't hit before.

00:39:44.000 Instead of, wow, I'm a great billiards player, like, or I'm not.

00:39:48.000 Right.

00:39:49.000 I hit that shot.

00:39:51.000 Right.

00:39:52.000 So just be more in tune with the action of doing it than your own judgment of your abilities.

00:39:59.000 Exactly.

00:40:00.000 Exactly.

00:40:00.000 Which is not useful.

00:40:02.000 Right.

00:40:02.000 Yeah, that's a good point.

00:40:04.000 It's very Zen, right?

00:40:05.000 Yeah.

00:40:05.000 That's what you're supposed to be.

00:40:07.000 They actually discussed that in Zen of the Art of Archery.

00:40:10.000 Yep.

00:40:10.000 I believe that's in Zen of the Art of Archery.

00:40:13.000 This thought about not concentrating on the result.

00:40:18.000 Yeah.

00:40:18.000 But just like...

00:40:20.000 Just do it.

00:40:21.000 Go through the process.

00:40:22.000 Yeah.

00:40:23.000 You know, understand the process.

00:40:24.000 Concentrate on the process.

00:40:25.000 Yeah.

00:40:26.000 Yeah.

00:40:27.000 Yeah.

00:40:28.000 That's the thing with martial arts. 0.96

00:40:29.000 You know, you don't think while you're doing it that, oh, I'm really good at this.

00:40:34.000 You really...

00:40:34.000 You just think...

00:40:36.000 You don't have time for one.

00:40:37.000 Exactly.

00:40:37.000 You have to just do it.

00:40:39.000 Right.

00:40:40.000 So I'm curious, Joe, since you were describing kind of all these moves growing up, How would you say, if somebody were to ask you, what have been the most important changes in the way you see the world since you were a younger person?

00:40:53.000 Either the political world, the social world, the environment, whatever it is.

00:40:57.000 Like, what would you, if you think, if you compare yourself to your younger self, what would you say have been the most important changes in how you think and how you see the world?

00:41:07.000 I think the single biggest change that I can remember, single biggest shift that I ever had, was having children.

00:41:15.000 Because then I started thinking about everyone as grown-up babies.

00:41:19.000 I used to think of people as being in a static state.

00:41:22.000 Like if I met a guy and he was a 40-year-old guy, I'd be like, oh, there's Mike.

00:41:26.000 He's 40. And then now I go, oh, Mike used to be a baby.

00:41:30.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:41:30.000 And then all the weird shit that happened to Mike in his life and the pros and cons and the failures and successes and the lies and truths and here he is. 0.98

00:41:41.000 That's what made Mike. 0.99

00:41:42.000 That's what made Mike.

00:41:43.000 I have a lot more sympathy and empathy for people because of that. 1.00

00:41:47.000 Because a lot of the people that I see now that are, you know, assholes, if I met an asshole before I'd be like, that guy's just an asshole. 1.00

00:41:54.000 And now I go, oh, you know, that's a baby that, like, came out a bad product. 1.00

00:41:59.000 Like, what went wrong?

00:42:00.000 Well, you think like a historian.

00:42:02.000 I mean, I'm a historian.

00:42:03.000 And, you know, when my kids were younger, they would always get annoyed with me.

00:42:06.000 And they would say, like, Dad, when you meet somebody, why do you always say where are you from?

00:42:10.000 Like, that's so annoying.

00:42:12.000 And the answer is, I'm a historian.

00:42:14.000 That's what interests me, is, you know, what are the communities and what are the experiences that made you who you are?

00:42:21.000 And those things matter.

00:42:28.000 It's a lot.

00:42:29.000 It's everything.

00:42:30.000 We are the culmination of our life's experiences and how we've absorbed them along with our genetics, along with our environment.

00:42:39.000 And environment is a critical factor because it's not just the environment in terms of the city you live in, but the people that you hang around with.

00:42:46.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:47.000 And the fact that you made all those moves and what that involved were different sets of people in different environments.

00:42:53.000 That helped a lot.

00:42:54.000 Hugely important, right?

00:42:56.000 Well, I went from San Francisco to Florida in the 1970s.

00:43:00.000 And that was a big one.

00:43:02.000 Because in San Francisco, we lived right near Lombard Street.

00:43:08.000 It was like the heart of the hippie movement.

00:43:11.000 I saw hippies everywhere.

00:43:13.000 Our next-door neighbors were this gay couple that used to smoke pot and play the bongos with my aunt. 0.91

00:43:18.000 They would all get naked and go next door and play the bongos and smoke pot with this couple. 0.99

00:43:24.000 It was just a different way to live.

00:43:27.000 It was just normal.

00:43:28.000 To be around all these hippies and these long-haired guys.

00:43:33.000 It was a strange place.

00:43:34.000 It was a different place in the 1970s.

00:43:37.000 And then moving to Florida, It was a total different environment.

00:43:43.000 I remember my friend, who was a Cuban kid, and his dad was upset that gay people were getting the right to get married. 0.99

00:43:51.000 So he had a newspaper, he was like, God damn it! 0.98

00:43:53.000 He threw the newspaper down on the table. 0.99

00:43:54.000 He was real upset. 1.00

00:43:55.000 And I remember being 11 going, how fucking dumb is this guy? 1.00

00:43:58.000 He cares whether gay people get married? 1.00

00:44:01.000 Why do you care? 0.96

00:44:02.000 What a weird thing to be upset by. 0.97

00:44:05.000 But I remember thinking that when I was 11, like, wow, Florida's fucking different. 0.88

00:44:09.000 It didn't make any sense to me. 0.91

00:44:11.000 Right, but I would argue that you learned a lot from that, that you wouldn't have learned if you had stayed on Lombard Street.

00:44:16.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:44:17.000 If you live in that environment, you don't know.

00:44:21.000 How other people are.

00:44:23.000 Yeah, you really don't know.

00:44:25.000 It's so different.

00:44:27.000 It's like I remember I was 11 also.

00:44:29.000 I went to school and then I came home and I asked my mom what the N word meant.

00:44:33.000 And she goes, you know what it means.

00:44:35.000 I go, no, I don't know what it means.

00:44:36.000 That's why I'm asking you.

00:44:37.000 What does it mean?

00:44:37.000 She had explained to me.

00:44:38.000 I was like, really?

00:44:40.000 Wow.

00:44:40.000 Like I'd never heard it before.

00:44:41.000 Wow.

00:44:42.000 Yeah.

00:44:42.000 And do you remember how she explained it?

00:44:44.000 Like what her answer was?

00:44:46.000 My mom had me when she was very young.

00:44:48.000 So she was a little dismissive.

00:44:50.000 She was a little like, aren't you grown up yet?

00:44:53.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:44:55.000 So in a lot of ways it's good because it forced me to figure shit out for myself. 0.52

00:44:58.000 But yeah, I remember when I was in a car with my sister. 0.60

00:45:01.000 I was about seven years old and I was asking my mom how babies were made.

00:45:05.000 She's like, you know how babies are made. 1.00

00:45:07.000 That was what my mom always used to say. 0.65

00:45:08.000 You know.

00:45:09.000 I go, no I don't.

00:45:10.000 She goes, I'm going to tell you and you're going to laugh.

00:45:13.000 I'm like, no I'm not.

00:45:14.000 And so she goes, okay. 1.00

00:45:16.000 A man puts his penis in a woman's vagina. 1.00

00:45:19.000 Bah! 1.00

00:45:21.000 I thought it was the funniest thing. 0.99

00:45:23.000 And she wouldn't leave me the fuck alone. 0.98

00:45:24.000 She was like, no, you knew it. 0.99

00:45:26.000 And you were trying to say it so that you would laugh.

00:45:28.000 No, I didn't know.

00:45:29.000 You told me.

00:45:30.000 Now I know.

00:45:31.000 I didn't know.

00:45:32.000 I was seven.

00:45:33.000 And do you remember how she explained the N-word?

00:45:37.000 She said it was a derogatory term for black people.

00:45:39.000 I was like, wow.

00:45:41.000 Mm-hmm.

00:45:42.000 I remember thinking, whoa.

00:45:44.000 So I didn't know what it was.

00:45:45.000 Because I was 11. I guess in San Francisco I hadn't heard it.

00:45:50.000 That's the only thing I could think of.

00:45:52.000 Right.

00:45:52.000 Because where we lived in San Francisco was very diverse.

00:45:55.000 It was like the kids in my class, it was, I don't know, like 60, 40, white and black.

00:46:03.000 And a lot of Asian, too.

00:46:04.000 Not even white, black. 1.00

00:46:07.000 It was like...

00:46:07.000 Yeah.

00:46:08.000 I mean, I'm just making up numbers.

00:46:10.000 It's hard to remember.

00:46:12.000 But I remember there's a lot of different ethnicities in my environment.

00:46:16.000 And we all hung out together on the playground, hung out together.

00:46:20.000 It was normal.

00:46:21.000 Right.

00:46:22.000 It was a really open-minded place, man.

00:46:26.000 In the 1970s, San Francisco, so open-minded.

00:46:29.000 Everybody smoked pot.

00:46:31.000 Everybody hated the war.

00:46:32.000 And I remember when the Vietnam War ended, I was living in San Francisco, and I remember really clearly, because I was a little kid, and I was scared of the war.

00:46:40.000 I was really scared, because my stepfather had not got drafted.

00:46:46.000 He had gotten out of it.

00:46:47.000 They do the lottery, and he didn't get picked.

00:46:49.000 So I was very fortunate that he didn't get picked, but he was really scared of it, because he was of age at the time.

00:46:55.000 And I remember the war ended, and I remember thinking, whew!

00:47:00.000 That's great.

00:47:00.000 They finally figured out that war is bad.

00:47:02.000 Now we're never going to do war again.

00:47:05.000 That's really what I thought.

00:47:06.000 I was a little kid.

00:47:07.000 I remember thinking that.

00:47:09.000 Now, good.

00:47:10.000 I was born at a good time where they figured out no more war.

00:47:14.000 And then Desert Storm happened when I was like 21. And I remember thinking, these fucking dummies. 1.00

00:47:20.000 Like, I thought we figured this out. 1.00

00:47:22.000 I thought we're not going to war anymore. 1.00

00:47:23.000 What is this shit? 1.00

00:47:24.000 Did your biological dad serve in the war in Vietnam? 1.00

00:47:28.000 No.

00:47:28.000 My biological dad, I don't know him.

00:47:31.000 Oh, okay.

00:47:31.000 Yeah, I haven't spoken to him since I was like seven years old.

00:47:35.000 Wow.

00:47:35.000 Yeah.

00:47:36.000 So, does he know that you're Joe Rogan?

00:47:41.000 His name's Joe Rogan, too.

00:47:42.000 Isn't that funny?

00:47:43.000 Wow.

00:47:43.000 Yeah.

00:47:44.000 So he must.

00:47:45.000 He must, yeah.

00:47:46.000 Right.

00:47:46.000 For sure.

00:47:47.000 But you don't know?

00:47:48.000 No.

00:47:49.000 Wow.

00:47:50.000 Yeah.

00:47:50.000 Wow.

00:47:51.000 Wow.

00:47:52.000 And do we know if he has another family?

00:47:55.000 Yeah, he does.

00:47:56.000 He does.

00:47:57.000 Yeah.

00:47:58.000 Yeah.

00:47:59.000 Interesting.

00:48:00.000 Wow.

00:48:01.000 And you don't want to know what he thinks about...

00:48:07.000 No.

00:48:08.000 Joe Rogan?

00:48:09.000 You know what, man?

00:48:10.000 Having kids, I could not imagine not talking to my children.

00:48:16.000 I can't imagine it.

00:48:17.000 I couldn't imagine it.

00:48:19.000 Yeah.

00:48:20.000 So someone not talking to me, I'm like, okay.

00:48:23.000 You know, I don't hate them.

00:48:25.000 Good luck.

00:48:26.000 Enjoy your life.

00:48:27.000 But my stepdad was a really good guy, and it taught me a lot about my relationship with my kids.

00:48:37.000 I know what it feels like to have a biological parent out there, and they don't contact you.

00:48:44.000 They don't reach out to you.

00:48:46.000 They never find you.

00:48:47.000 They don't seek you out.

00:48:50.000 And you grow up like that, going, maybe you'll call me one day.

00:48:53.000 Never do.

00:48:54.000 Maybe he'll try to find me.

00:48:56.000 Never do.

00:48:57.000 It's bad, but it's good.

00:48:59.000 What's good about it?

00:49:00.000 What's good is it makes me understand, as a father, how important the bond between parents and the children are.

00:49:10.000 It means a lot.

00:49:12.000 It means a lot to me.

00:49:13.000 And it's good because it gave me a challenge to understand myself for who I actually am without being under the pressure of achieving an image that a father wanted me to live up to or that, you know, someone else's perspective of who I should be or how I should behave or how I should think about the world.

00:49:32.000 Oh, that's interesting.

00:49:33.000 And I was allowed to think about the world through my own experiences.

00:49:39.000 But didn't your stepdad play that role in some ways?

00:49:42.000 He did, in some ways, yeah.

00:49:43.000 He did.

00:49:44.000 It's different.

00:49:45.000 It's always going to be different, stepdads and kids.

00:49:48.000 It's always going to be, especially if they don't have biological kids of their own, because it's a confusing process that happens to you.

00:49:53.000 Do you have children?

00:49:54.000 I do, yeah.

00:49:55.000 They're adults.

00:49:56.000 So it's a confusing process that happens to you when you have children, when they're babies, and then you see them grow up, and you're like, wow, this is like...

00:50:05.000 This is a different...

00:50:06.000 I have a different life.

00:50:08.000 This life is so different now.

00:50:10.000 It's not just as simple as now there's a baby.

00:50:12.000 It's like you're not the same thing anymore.

00:50:14.000 Now you're a father.

00:50:15.000 Yes.

00:50:16.000 And you have to adjust.

00:50:17.000 You have to adjust the way you think and you have to think of the way you communicate with them.

00:50:21.000 You have to think of like you're helping mold their view of the world and you have to communicate by example.

00:50:27.000 You have to acknowledge mistakes.

00:50:32.000 One of the things I always do is whenever I correct my kids with anything, I always say, listen, I did everything you have done wrong.

00:50:39.000 I did all of it, and I'll tell you what I did.

00:50:43.000 I screwed up everything I've ever done.

00:50:45.000 I made mistakes my whole life.

00:50:48.000 I did things, and I lied to my parents.

00:50:50.000 I did things, and I pretended I didn't.

00:50:54.000 Everything that you've ever done wrong, I've done wrong ten times as bad.

00:50:57.000 So I'm not judging you.

00:50:58.000 This is just a part of being a person.

00:51:01.000 I go way out of my way to explain that.

00:51:04.000 So every time something's wrong, every time something happens, I always go, I did all this.

00:51:09.000 It's interesting you use the term mold because back to our earlier discussion, I think both with parenting and being a teacher, and I'm both, I think the other really hard thing is, you know, how do you also cultivate somebody's autonomy and let them be different from you?

00:51:25.000 Yeah, mold's maybe not the best word, right?

00:51:27.000 You know, but you have to do both, right?

00:51:29.000 Because there are some things you have to indoctrinate.

00:51:32.000 You just do, especially when they're younger.

00:51:34.000 Like, we're not going to have a discussion about whether it's appropriate to take your turn.

00:51:38.000 Or, to take a more pregnant example, to call somebody the N-word, right? 0.85

00:51:42.000 We're not going to debate that, right?

00:51:44.000 We're just going to tell you, like, this is right or wrong.

00:51:46.000 But then things get more complicated, right?

00:51:49.000 Because there's lots of gray in the world as well.

00:51:51.000 And they've got to figure that out for themselves.

00:51:55.000 Yeah, you got to leave room for conversations, too, because sometimes kids just really want to talk to you and try to figure things out with you.

00:52:01.000 Yes.

00:52:02.000 You know, and sometimes that helps the most.

00:52:05.000 Right.

00:52:05.000 Sometimes just, like, you got to get them alone, too.

00:52:07.000 When the two of them are together, sometimes it's like, hey, hey, hey.

00:52:10.000 Yeah.

00:52:10.000 I really love taking one kid and going places with them and just having conversations.

00:52:16.000 Yes, I love that too.

00:52:17.000 And just letting them complain about school.

00:52:19.000 You know what my teacher said?

00:52:20.000 You know, like, wow, that's crazy.

00:52:23.000 Let them talk about...

00:52:26.000 It's interesting when kids are really tuned in to uninspired people.

00:52:31.000 Yeah.

00:52:32.000 When there's an uninspired person telling them what to do or teaching a class.

00:52:36.000 They're really tuned into it.

00:52:38.000 And there's a real lesson in that.

00:52:40.000 Because when kids have enthusiastic teachers, they love those teachers.

00:52:45.000 They want to tell you about it.

00:52:46.000 Oh, Mrs. Wilson, she's the best.

00:52:48.000 She's so much fun. 0.72

00:52:49.000 She gets there.

00:52:50.000 We all love her.

00:52:51.000 And, you know, it's like, it turns out Mrs. Wilson loves her job, right?

00:52:55.000 So when you go there, Mrs. Wilson smiles at everybody and she's like, good job!

00:52:59.000 And she high-fives kids and then everybody's like, I love that lady. 1.00

00:53:03.000 And then there's some people that just want everybody to shut up and they just get mad at you if you didn't do your homework correctly or they, you know.

00:53:11.000 Yep, and they resent you.

00:53:14.000 The Mrs. Wilsons of the world, they don't do that. 0.99

00:53:17.000 They understand that you're growing.

00:53:19.000 And people do that in different ways, at different rates.

00:53:22.000 And they're going to encourage you along the way.

00:53:24.000 But it's hard to find people like that.

00:53:26.000 That requires Herculean patience.

00:53:30.000 You have to be a special kind of person to be that kind of a teacher.

00:53:32.000 Yes, absolutely.

00:53:34.000 But I think there's a great benefit in being around bad teachers, too.

00:53:36.000 And one of the things I was telling my kids, one of my kids had a really bad teacher last year at their old school.

00:53:43.000 And I said, you know, it sounds terrible, but there's a great lesson to be learned in being around a very miserable person like that.

00:53:51.000 Mm-hmm. 0.99

00:53:53.000 You need to be exposed to shitheads. 1.00

00:53:56.000 Shitheads are important. 1.00

00:53:57.000 This teacher would call kids stupid. 1.00

00:54:00.000 You need to be exposed. 1.00

00:54:02.000 I know it seems dumb, but you need to be exposed to people like that. 0.98

00:54:06.000 You need to know that they're real, and it'll help you appreciate the Mrs. Wilsons. 0.94

00:54:10.000 Well, I guess, Joe, you were exposed to somebody like that with your dad.

00:54:15.000 Yeah.

00:54:17.000 How old were you when he took off?

00:54:21.000 Well, my parents split up when I was five and my mom and my stepdad and I and my sister moved to San Francisco when I was seven.

00:54:30.000 Okay.

00:54:31.000 So that was the last time I spoke to them.

00:54:33.000 And how old were you when you stopped hoping that you would talk to him?

00:54:38.000 That's a good question.

00:54:39.000 I don't know.

00:54:40.000 You know, I think once I got really into martial arts, that's all I thought about.

00:54:45.000 And then I sort of buried him with that in my head.

00:54:48.000 But I didn't really even realize it until I started doing psychedelics and smoking pot, thinking how much of an effect it actually had on me.

00:54:57.000 That's when I really thought about it, and I'm like, wow, that really fucked with me when I was a kid, and I was kind of in denial about it.

00:55:03.000 Right, right, which isn't always the best way either.

00:55:06.000 No, I mean, that's a giant problem with poor people, where sons grow up without father figures.

00:55:18.000 They become very angry.

00:55:20.000 You know, it's the angry young man.

00:55:23.000 It's a real issue.

00:55:26.000 And there's this sort of unquenchable anger.

00:55:32.000 Like it's hard to put that fire out.

00:55:34.000 You try to put it out and the cinders are just still there.

00:55:37.000 The embers are still hot.

00:55:39.000 Right.

00:55:40.000 And so was it martial arts that helped you quench the embers?

00:55:45.000 Yeah, 100%.

00:55:46.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:55:48.000 My parents talk about to this day, there's two versions of me.

00:55:51.000 There's the version of me where it's a really angry kid, and then the version of me that was really calm, and it was post-martial arts.

00:55:58.000 Wow.

00:56:00.000 It's a fantastic vehicle for developing human potential.

00:56:05.000 And for me, it was the right one.

00:56:07.000 For some people, it's piano, right?

00:56:09.000 For some people, it's, yeah.

00:56:10.000 Yeah.

00:56:10.000 It could be anything.

00:56:11.000 Painting.

00:56:12.000 Yeah, anything.

00:56:13.000 Anything where you pour yourself into it and then you learn, like you're expressing yourself, like whatever this feeling, this emotion.

00:56:20.000 Energy you have inside of yourself, you express it through your art.

00:56:23.000 And for me, I needed something physical, too.

00:56:27.000 I needed something where I just got my anger out and, you know, hitting a punching bag and just something.

00:56:34.000 There was something...

00:56:35.000 Physical about it, too, but then also the discipline of learning something.

00:56:39.000 And you must have had some good teachers for that, too.

00:56:41.000 Yes.

00:56:41.000 I got very fortunate.

00:56:42.000 Very, very, very fortunate that I ran into an amazing school and amazing teachers.

00:56:48.000 But I think for young people, learning something and getting good at it is so critical because it teaches you that you used to suck at something, but you got better at it through hard work and dedication.

00:56:59.000 Yeah.

00:57:00.000 And that that is applicable to everything.

00:57:02.000 Right. 0.98

00:57:02.000 And back to the earlier discussion, actually, you didn't suck. 0.98

00:57:05.000 You just thought you did. 0.98

00:57:07.000 Yeah.

00:57:07.000 Right?

00:57:08.000 I mean, you know, you had an image of yourself as either incapable or, you know...

00:57:16.000 Inadequate.

00:57:17.000 Right.

00:57:17.000 Yeah.

00:57:18.000 Right.

00:57:18.000 Yeah.

00:57:19.000 Right.

00:57:20.000 And most people do.

00:57:21.000 Yes.

00:57:21.000 Most people growing up in particular, when they're young, they have this, I mean, that's the one thing that young people struggle with, I think more than anything, is insecurity.

00:57:29.000 I think that's also where bullying comes from.

00:57:32.000 That comes from insecurity.

00:57:33.000 I don't think you see very many secure bullies.

00:57:36.000 I'm curious, do your kids do martial arts?

00:57:38.000 They did for a bit.

00:57:40.000 I don't push.

00:57:43.000 I let them beat me up. 0.85

00:57:45.000 I still let them kick me and punch me.

00:57:47.000 Because if they can hurt me, I'm like, if you can hurt a grown man, you actually know how to do it right. 0.84

00:57:52.000 So I teach them how to leg kick and stuff.

00:57:55.000 But they got into other stuff.

00:57:57.000 They got into other sports.

00:57:58.000 They're into sports.

00:58:00.000 I don't think there's a path.

00:58:05.000 Your path is different than her path.

00:58:07.000 Just go have fun.

00:58:09.000 Find things.

00:58:10.000 Something I love about teaching college students is that they're old enough to start understanding the world, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it.

00:58:20.000 And so it's really a magical time.

00:58:22.000 I think, like, 19- and 20-year-old human beings are the most interesting people on the planet.

00:58:27.000 Because they can see things, and they're often very aware of how the world is working, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it.

00:58:36.000 And so they're much more interesting than you or me, or at least than me.

00:58:40.000 Because, you know, the game is sort of up for me.

00:58:43.000 I've made my choices, I've done the things that I do, and that's kind of it.

00:58:47.000 Yeah.

00:58:48.000 That's a good point.

00:58:49.000 There's so much potential, but also so much insecurity.

00:58:52.000 Well, it's scary.

00:58:53.000 Do you remember being a young man and not knowing how it was all going to turn out?

00:58:56.000 Totally.

00:58:57.000 And it is scary.

00:58:58.000 And frankly, it's scarier now.

00:59:00.000 I mean, and I think, you know, look, I went to college in the late 70s and it was a different world.

00:59:05.000 And I never once remember thinking, gee, am I going to be like a burden on my parents?

00:59:12.000 Am I going to be unable to get a job or sustain myself?

00:59:16.000 Right?

00:59:17.000 Because the United States, I mean, it had like a hegemonic role in the world that it does not have now.

00:59:24.000 And, you know, it was just a time of much more national confidence, I think.

00:59:30.000 And, you know, I have a lot of empathy for people in my daughter's generation and in my student's generation because they don't have that same kind of certitude, you know?

00:59:39.000 So I do remember kind of wondering, but I guess I didn't feel the same sense of pressure or fear.

00:59:44.000 Like, I think that because America still ruled the roost, it was easier to think, gee, it's going to work out.

00:59:53.000 But weren't you worried about Russia when you were young and in college?

00:59:57.000 Didn't you worry about the Cold War and all that jazz?

01:00:00.000 Yes and no.

01:00:02.000 I mean, you know, everyone read Failsafe and everyone watched movies about, you know, the Cuban crisis and Red Dawn and all of that.

01:00:10.000 But let's also remember that I'm not that old.

01:00:13.000 And by the time I get to young adulthood, I'm going to turn 60 shortly.

01:00:17.000 You look great.

01:00:19.000 So do you, Joe.

01:00:20.000 Thank you.

01:00:21.000 Yeah, but coming from you, that's quite a compliment.

01:00:24.000 How old are you?

01:00:25.000 53. Almost 54. I'll be 54 in a couple months.

01:00:28.000 All right.

01:00:29.000 Yeah, I mean, you know, look, by the time I get to a young adult, I mean, the Soviet Union is starting to implode.

01:00:34.000 I mean, this is really the twilight of the Cold War, right, is the 1980s, you know.

01:00:40.000 And, you know, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I remember listening to Radio Moscow.

01:00:46.000 Because I was in Nepal, and I had a little shortwave radio, and only two things came in, Voice of America and Radio Moscow.

01:00:53.000 And Voice of America had its issues and its own brand of propaganda, but just listening, even just the sound values of Radio Moscow, it was so hilariously poor.

01:01:03.000 Like, I just remember thinking, you know, this is not, like, we're going to win this struggle.

01:01:08.000 It's really not a struggle at all.

01:01:10.000 That's funny.

01:01:11.000 Yeah.

01:01:12.000 Yeah.

01:01:13.000 Because we had this distorted perception of the powers of the Soviet Union when I was in high school where we thought of them as being just like America, but over there, like in terms of their firepower and their financial means.

01:01:30.000 Right.

01:01:30.000 And that's what Reagan kind of did to them, spent them into a corner.

01:01:35.000 Yeah.

01:01:36.000 Well, that's part of it.

01:01:37.000 And also, I mean, they just didn't do a good job getting things to people, right?

01:01:42.000 I mean, David Reisman, who was one of my favorite authors ever, I mean, during the height of the Cold War, he wrote this great piece where he said, if we want to win this, all we have to do is just fly planes over Russia and just drop nylon.

01:01:56.000 Right?

01:01:57.000 Because we know that women want nylon pantyhose. 1.00

01:02:00.000 You can't get them in Russia.

01:02:02.000 And, you know, again, once they've put those on, right, they're not going to stand for it.

01:02:06.000 And I think, you know, a version of that actually happened.

01:02:09.000 Yeah, well, they realize that communism doesn't provide incentive.

01:02:13.000 And, you know, like, it's not fun to stand online to buy coffee.

01:02:17.000 I mean, like, you know, it isn't.

01:02:19.000 Who wants to do that? 0.99

01:02:21.000 Yeah.

01:02:23.000 There was always this fear hanging over our head in high school, though, of a nuclear war.

01:02:27.000 Yeah, no, I do remember that.

01:02:29.000 And you remember the TV show The Day After.

01:02:31.000 That might have been a little before your time.

01:02:33.000 What is that?

01:02:34.000 Well, it's basically a horrible imagination of a nuclear attack.

01:02:40.000 And there were other novels about that.

01:02:42.000 Alas, Babylon was a bestseller.

01:02:44.000 And it's just kind of what's going to happen after the big one.

01:02:47.000 In Alas, Babylon, by the way, somebody trades a jar of peanut butter for a jaguar.

01:02:52.000 And the reason is you can't get any petrol.

01:02:54.000 You can't get any oil, right?

01:02:55.000 And the guy's really hungry.

01:02:56.000 He's like, take my Jag.

01:02:57.000 You're not going to be able to drive it anyway.

01:02:59.000 Wow.

01:03:00.000 Yeah, and so, you know, I do remember that.

01:03:02.000 And, you know, I also remember, you know, the anti-nuclear movements, you know, and, you know, SANE and the other campaigns around that.

01:03:12.000 You know, Reagan was an interesting figure because, you know, it's true that we often credit him for winning the Cold War.

01:03:22.000 But obviously that victory was a long time in coming.

01:03:27.000 And Reagan also, in his own way, he trivialized it.

01:03:31.000 You know, he would make jokes about, like, when the bombing is going to start.

01:03:35.000 You know, he would say, yeah, the bombing is going to start in five seconds.

01:03:40.000 And everyone was supposed to laugh about that.

01:03:42.000 And we didn't.

01:03:43.000 Yeah.

01:03:44.000 Yeah.

01:03:45.000 Reagan was famous for that one speech that he made in front of the United Nations where he was talking about how quickly we would come together if we were faced with a threat from an alien world.

01:03:55.000 I remember that because I remember all the conspiracy theorists got so jazzed up.

01:04:02.000 Finally, we're going to know the truth.

01:04:04.000 The aliens are coming.

01:04:06.000 That was like crack for them.

01:04:09.000 That's the best.

01:04:10.000 I mean, there is no better distraction for like a giant percentage of the population than to tell them the aliens are coming.

01:04:16.000 Oh, yeah.

01:04:17.000 Yeah.

01:04:18.000 Well, you know, H.L. Mencken, 100 years ago, he had this great quote where he said something like, you know, for every deep social and political problem, there's typically a solution that is simple, attractive, and wrong.

01:04:34.000 And that's what conspiracy theories are, right?

01:04:37.000 They're simple, attractive, and wrong.

01:04:40.000 Many of them are simple, attractive, and wrong.

01:04:42.000 Some of them are surprisingly accurate.

01:04:44.000 That's what's scary.

01:04:46.000 Right.

01:04:46.000 Well, I think, unfortunately, and this is where the history piece comes in, one reason that Americans tend to believe in conspiracy theories is that the government is engaged in conspiracies.

01:04:54.000 Yes, exactly.

01:04:55.000 I mean, like, you know, if you're trying to put, like, LSD on Fidel Castro's Cigar, which the United States did, right?

01:05:05.000 Then let's just say there's a crying wolf problem, and it becomes easier for people to believe that the government is engaged in perfidious conspiracies after the government is engaged in a perfidious conspiracy.

01:05:18.000 There's a fantastic book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill, and it's all about the Manson trials.

01:05:23.000 Yeah.

01:05:23.000 Have you ever read it?

01:05:24.000 Have you ever heard about it?

01:05:25.000 I have not.

01:05:25.000 It's amazing.

01:05:27.000 It's the craziest story because Tom was a neighbor to my friend Greg Fitzsimmons in Venice and he had been working on this book literally for two decades.

01:05:38.000 What happened was he got hired to write a story for a magazine on the anniversary of the Manson murders. 0.80

01:05:44.000 And so he's writing the story, and as he's doing research to write the story, he starts realizing like, holy shit, like there's a lot more to this than I thought.

01:05:51.000 He gets deeper and deeper and deeper into it, and he finds out that the Manson thing was connected to these CIA mind control experiments that they were doing during the 1960s.

01:06:03.000 And Manson had been, for sure, sheltered along the way, released from prison every time he got arrested for something.

01:06:11.000 And they were all saying, this is above my pay grade.

01:06:14.000 We were told to release him.

01:06:16.000 And that he was involved in these—I forget what prison it was, but they were doing these LSD experiments on prisoners.

01:06:25.000 Yes.

01:06:25.000 I mean, this is one of the most horrible chapters.

01:06:27.000 I mean, speaking of conspiracy theories, I mean, you mentioned hallucinogens earlier.

01:06:31.000 I mean, you know— The federal government was involved in, you know, developing and testing these substances during the Cold War.

01:06:37.000 And it was very much about the Cold War.

01:06:39.000 It's interesting you mentioned the Soviet Union because the history there is they first developed them because they thought it was going to be a truth serum.

01:06:46.000 So you capture somebody from the other side and you feed them this.

01:06:50.000 But then when they did these horrible experiments in jails and psychiatric institutes, They found out it was the opposite.

01:06:55.000 And then they started to tout it as something that we would give our agents.

01:06:59.000 So if you ever captured, you dose, and then you would just blabber and say, the eels are in my hovercraft.

01:07:04.000 So, you know, they always had—that's one of the terrible logics about the Cold War, is you could shift on a dime, right?

01:07:12.000 And you could basically make the same plea in the inverse way.

01:07:16.000 So, okay, it's not a truth serum, but now it's something that we can just use so when our agents get caught, they won't tell the truth. 0.98

01:07:22.000 Well, it was also these agents were given autonomy to run these tests and these studies and they did some wild shit.

01:07:29.000 One of them was called Operation Midnight Climax and Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA ran brothels and they would watch through two-way mirrors and they would dose these Johns up and have these poor guys just like tripping on acid and not have any idea what happened and You know, 0.95

01:07:47.000 they would listen to them talk to the prostitutes. 1.00

01:07:49.000 I mean, no, it's an awful chapter.

01:07:51.000 And then, you know, people made pranks, too.

01:07:54.000 You know, you might have read that, like, one day in the 50s, somebody spiked the punch at Langley, like the Christmas punch at a CIA party.

01:08:02.000 Really?

01:08:03.000 And a bunch of agents, like, checked themselves into psychiatric hospitals because nobody told them.

01:08:08.000 It was just like, oh, this is going to be mad.

01:08:11.000 We've got some acid running around.

01:08:12.000 This is going to be zany.

01:08:14.000 Wow, they had some leftover acid from some other creepy experiments.

01:08:18.000 Well, you've been used to doing that to people.

01:08:19.000 You probably think it's funny to do it to your coworkers. 0.98

01:08:21.000 Right, and you're just a sadist.

01:08:24.000 Well, they had a Haight-Ashbury free clinic that the CIA operated for decades, and they closed it down just a couple months after this book came out.

01:08:34.000 They're like, okay, time to close up shop, boys, because this book was so detailed and Tom had spent so much time poring over all of the documents and the data and he had dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's and at the end of it you read the book and you're like, 0.97

01:08:51.000 holy shit! 0.56

01:08:53.000 Right, and I think that's where the history piece is really important. 0.99

01:08:56.000 You know, I mean, conspiracy theory is a huge problem in our society right now.

01:09:00.000 There's no question about it.

01:09:01.000 But again, like...

01:09:02.000 Conspiracies can occasionally be real.

01:09:04.000 And if you don't want people to believe in them, don't do them, right?

01:09:09.000 I mean, you know, that's, you know, don't have secret LSD experiments that go for 20 years.

01:09:13.000 Don't do that.

01:09:14.000 I think they went for 40. Yeah, I know.

01:09:17.000 Maybe even more.

01:09:19.000 When it comes to free speech, What we have now is just we have words that we express and these words convey intent and thought and the way we perceive the world and we each take in the other person's words and the way they're saying them and try to go,

01:09:39.000 okay, I see where you're going with this.

01:09:42.000 One of the things that weirds me out most about the future is all of these sort of symbiotic human electronic things, gadgets that are being proposed, like Neuralink, like Elon Musk's thing, where Elon told me,

01:09:57.000 specifically said, you're going to be able to talk without using your mouth.

01:10:04.000 But wasn't Joe then in the interview where you shared a blunt with him?

01:10:07.000 No, no, no.

01:10:07.000 Okay.

01:10:08.000 That was two before.

01:10:11.000 Okay.

01:10:12.000 Neuralink, I think, was the second interview I did with him or maybe the third.

01:10:15.000 I think it was the third.

01:10:17.000 Not sure.

01:10:18.000 No, I think it was the second.

01:10:20.000 Was it?

01:10:20.000 I think it was the second.

01:10:21.000 The second.

01:10:22.000 Yeah.

01:10:23.000 But when he said, you're going to be able to talk without words.

01:10:28.000 And he was so confident about it.

01:10:30.000 He's like, you're going to be able to talk without words.

01:10:32.000 And if anybody else said that, I'd be like, sure, dude. 0.99

01:10:35.000 But when Elon Musk says that, you're like, fuck, we're going to talk without words? 0.99

01:10:41.000 Immediately I started thinking, well, maybe that would be good. 0.99

01:10:45.000 It's going to be a rough transition, but it was probably a rough transition to go from grunts to language.

01:10:51.000 But you don't want to go back to grunts.

01:10:53.000 No, you don't.

01:10:54.000 So maybe this is how we...

01:10:56.000 Because biology takes so long to catch up.

01:10:59.000 And electronics are so rapid in the technological innovation.

01:11:04.000 Right.

01:11:05.000 So maybe that's how we bypass all of our monkey genetics. 0.99

01:11:10.000 We get someone who's probably a fucking robot to figure out this thing where they cut a hole in your head and put this device in that has all these electrodes into your brain. 0.99

01:11:22.000 And now this monkey's playing Pong with his brain. 0.99

01:11:25.000 Do you know about this now?

01:11:27.000 I think I read something about it.

01:11:29.000 Yeah, this monkey's using Neuralink.

01:11:31.000 Yeah.

01:11:32.000 Yeah.

01:11:33.000 Well, look, you know, I mean...

01:11:35.000 Look at this. 0.96

01:11:36.000 Smartass monkey. 0.98

01:11:37.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:11:38.000 I don't want to play him.

01:11:39.000 I'd be scared.

01:11:40.000 Right, yeah.

01:11:40.000 This monkey's got some skills.

01:11:43.000 Yeah, that looks like one of the early video games.

01:11:46.000 Mm-hmm.

01:11:46.000 It does.

01:11:47.000 Yeah.

01:11:47.000 Yeah, Pong.

01:11:48.000 It looks like Pong. 0.78

01:11:49.000 I had one of those.

01:11:50.000 Yeah.

01:11:50.000 Did you have that?

01:11:51.000 Well, no, but when I was in the Peace Corps, my friends and I would play it with flashlights on the ceiling.

01:11:57.000 Because we were in Nepal, and we were in a place with no electricity or running water.

01:12:02.000 And we found many ways to amuse ourselves.

01:12:05.000 But one was by inventing a beer pong game, which you did with a flashlight on the ceiling.

01:12:09.000 Oh, wow.

01:12:09.000 That had to be bizarre, being in the Peace Corps in Nepal.

01:12:13.000 How long did you do that for?

01:12:15.000 Two and a half years.

01:12:16.000 Wow. 0.99

01:12:17.000 Pull this sucker up a little closer to you. 1.00

01:12:18.000 Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.98

01:12:19.000 Is that good?

01:12:20.000 Yeah, I just want to get it.

01:12:21.000 They're very directional to keep the rest of the noise out.

01:12:24.000 Yeah, yeah, for sure.

01:12:25.000 Yeah, no, I was very lucky like so many other things in my life.

01:12:30.000 I was sent to western Nepal to a place that was about a three-day walk from vehicular traffic at the time.

01:12:39.000 And I was the first white person anyone had ever seen.

01:12:43.000 And some of the kids thought I was a ghost.

01:12:46.000 They called me Bhut, which means ghost in Nepali.

01:12:49.000 And just as a young person, as a young American, to go to a community like that and to really become a part of it.

01:12:58.000 I lived with a family that took me in as one of their own.

01:13:01.000 Oh, wow.

01:13:03.000 I named one of the babies that was born.

01:13:05.000 Really?

01:13:05.000 What name?

01:13:07.000 I gave her the name Santi, which was my favorite female in the Pali name.

01:13:11.000 It means peace.

01:13:12.000 And I just thought it was so cool that there are people walking around whose name is peace.

01:13:16.000 You probably had friends over on Lombard Street in San Francisco that had that name.

01:13:19.000 That's kind of what it reminded me of.

01:13:21.000 But as part of that ritual, I had to do a number of things, including eat rat meat and drink cow urine.

01:13:28.000 What's worse?

01:13:29.000 The cow urine for sure.

01:13:31.000 The rat meat tastes like chicken.

01:13:32.000 It's just like the joke, right?

01:13:33.000 You cook meat, any kind of meat, it's mostly going to taste like chicken.

01:13:38.000 Have you ever seen that there's a sacred temple in India where they feed the rats every day and the rats become very domesticated? 0.77

01:13:48.000 Yeah.

01:13:49.000 And they drink out of the same water as the rats.

01:13:51.000 I've read about it, yeah.

01:13:52.000 It's really wild to watch, man.

01:13:53.000 Yes.

01:13:54.000 Because instead of thinking of rats as being this vermin pest, like we think of them as here, where everyone like, oh my god, it's a rat!

01:14:02.000 And they step on it, and the rats run away from you.

01:14:04.000 In this temple, the rats don't run away from anybody.

01:14:08.000 And these are wild rats.

01:14:09.000 You ever seen it?

01:14:10.000 They've been socialized, yeah.

01:14:11.000 Have you seen it on video?

01:14:12.000 No, I haven't.

01:14:13.000 You need to watch.

01:14:14.000 See if you can find a video of it, because it's very strange.

01:14:16.000 It's really interesting, because these people are eating with the rats, and they're drinking milk that the rats are drinking.

01:14:22.000 It's really crazy.

01:14:23.000 Look at this. 0.95

01:14:25.000 The rats are everywhere with these people.

01:14:27.000 And these are not pets, you know?

01:14:29.000 Yeah.

01:14:30.000 And so they share the milk with these rats and they don't worry about diseases.

01:14:37.000 And look at these rats just hang out and chill.

01:14:41.000 See the rat running around?

01:14:43.000 They don't have any fear of people because they're treated really well.

01:14:46.000 And it's confusing, right?

01:14:48.000 Because it's like, okay, is that the way to do it?

01:14:51.000 I don't think it's the way to do it, but look at what's happening in New York City.

01:14:55.000 Have you seen the documentary on Netflix, Rats?

01:14:58.000 I have not.

01:14:59.000 It's amazing.

01:15:00.000 It's fascinating.

01:15:01.000 And it shows, first of all, what kind of horrific diseases so many rats carry.

01:15:08.000 Yeah.

01:15:08.000 And I mean, among other things, they brought bubonic plague to different parts of the world.

01:15:13.000 Sure, yeah.

01:15:13.000 Through mites.

01:15:14.000 Yeah, fleas.

01:15:15.000 The rats that they found, they found them in New York City, in Philadelphia, and they show like what a complicated society these rats have.

01:15:25.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:15:25.000 Like, they have young, dumb rats test things out for the smart, older, clever rats. 0.99

01:15:30.000 The smart rat's like, yeah, some food over there, kid. 1.00

01:15:32.000 Just go try it out. 0.96

01:15:33.000 And they go over there, and they die, and they're like, aha, poison.

01:15:36.000 Well, I mean, they're intelligent.

01:15:37.000 That's why they've been featured in so many experiments, right?

01:15:40.000 I mean, that's why so many lab psychologists work with rats, right?

01:15:44.000 In Nepal, the reason that you ate a rat was the rat was considered the strongest animal.

01:15:48.000 And you weaned kids on it.

01:15:51.000 Because you want the kid to grow it to be strong.

01:15:54.000 Really?

01:15:54.000 Yeah, and so they would often wean kids, and you just did a tiny little piece.

01:15:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:15:59.000 The cow urine, that was the only time I actually took antibiotics prophylactically, which is something you're not supposed to do.

01:16:06.000 But I just decided that, you know, it was my second year, I didn't want to get ill.

01:16:11.000 Cow urine has some weird pseudo-medicinal purposes over there.

01:16:16.000 I've read that too, yeah.

01:16:17.000 They're using it for people that are suffering from COVID. Yeah, there was this guy from...

01:16:27.000 I'm trying to remember the country.

01:16:28.000 I don't remember. 1.00

01:16:29.000 But he was criticizing how ridiculous this practice is of giving cow urine to these sick people and how ignorant it was. 0.97

01:16:40.000 Well, you know, it's funny you say ignorant because for me, really, what was so important about that experience was just learning how weird I was. 0.97

01:16:47.000 And that is, you know, how weird I was to them, you know, and how many different ways there are to be human, right?

01:16:55.000 And so, you know, I participated in marrying off one of our sisters, right?

01:17:03.000 Because I'm an older brother, a girl's 16, you know, time to get her married.

01:17:07.000 16?

01:17:08.000 Oh, yeah.

01:17:09.000 How old was the dude?

01:17:10.000 Yeah.

01:17:10.000 Well, you know, people would come by and ask for a hand.

01:17:13.000 This is what the process was, and often bring gifts.

01:17:15.000 And I'm there with the other brothers, and a guy would come and leave, and somebody would say to me, well, what did you think of him?

01:17:21.000 And the first time they asked, I said, which means, what does little sister think?

01:17:27.000 And people just cracked up, and I heard about that for two years.

01:17:31.000 I would walk to other parts of the district, and people would say, oh, I heard about you.

01:17:35.000 You're the guy who asked what Bohini thinks.

01:17:37.000 And the point was that wasn't relevant to them.

01:17:40.000 That wasn't what the experience was, right?

01:17:43.000 That wasn't a relevant variable.

01:17:45.000 And, you know, I would explain to them that in my country you actually chose your own spouse.

01:17:51.000 And they would say, well, how do you do that?

01:17:53.000 And I'd say, well, you find somebody that you love, and then they would say, well, then what if you don't love them?

01:18:00.000 And then I'd say, well, there's this thing called divorce, you know?

01:18:04.000 And what I realized was that the way I thought about how all this should work was just so radically different from theirs, and not necessarily better or worse, right?

01:18:14.000 Their system had its own logic.

01:18:16.000 And it was static.

01:18:17.000 It was stable, right?

01:18:18.000 If you don't marry for love, right, you're not going to get divorced because you're out of love, right?

01:18:24.000 That wasn't the purpose of it.

01:18:26.000 The purpose was it was social, it was familial, it had to do with joining communities, you know?

01:18:31.000 And again, I didn't grow up there, so that's not what I do or what I would want to do.

01:18:36.000 But what I learned was how many different ways there are to do.

01:18:40.000 How many different ways there are to be human.

01:18:43.000 And always to resist the automatic assumption that your way is the better way.

01:18:50.000 Because we all do that too.

01:18:52.000 And by the way, I did some of that in Nepal.

01:18:54.000 I mean, you know, one of my other really enduring memories is my best student was of the so-called Kami cast, which is metalworker, which is an untouchable.

01:19:05.000 It's way down there, right?

01:19:06.000 It's not as low as a shoemaker.

01:19:08.000 And, you know, they have a caste system, right?

01:19:11.000 And at the bottom, there are people that are called untouchables because you're literally not supposed to touch them or anything.

01:19:16.000 What?

01:19:17.000 Yes.

01:19:17.000 I mean, that's how, you know, shoemakers especially because they deal with cows.

01:19:23.000 They deal with leather, right? 0.58

01:19:25.000 Oh.

01:19:28.000 Why is that?

01:19:29.000 Well, because the cow is a sacred animal.

01:19:32.000 But you need shoes.

01:19:33.000 Yes, you do.

01:19:34.000 And so the Hindu system evolved to have a caste that did precisely that. 0.90

01:19:41.000 Wow.

01:19:42.000 So did you communicate with those people at all?

01:19:45.000 Oh, sure.

01:19:45.000 What was it like?

01:19:46.000 They must have felt terrible.

01:19:48.000 Well, I mean, here's the story.

01:19:51.000 The metalworking family, I actually went down to their house and I had a meal there.

01:19:57.000 And I come back and I tell my ama, that means mother of my family, and we were chetris, which is way up there.

01:20:03.000 It's not Brahmin, which is the highest. 1.00

01:20:05.000 And that's the priestly caste, but the chetris are second. 1.00

01:20:09.000 You know, they were historically the military caste.

01:20:12.000 She's like, Babu, that means baby, which is what she called me.

01:20:15.000 Babu, you ate rice at a metal worker's house? 0.84

01:20:20.000 Do you know how filthy those people are?

01:20:23.000 You know, what were you thinking?

01:20:24.000 And I'm like, listen, Ama, I just don't believe in caste.

01:20:27.000 You know, I think everyone's the same.

01:20:29.000 And P.S., you know what's going to happen.

01:20:31.000 I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm just incredibly ill.

01:20:34.000 And I just go outside and I'm puking my guts out.

01:20:37.000 Ama can hear me.

01:20:38.000 She comes from the other room and she's like, listen, Babu, you can't say I didn't warn you.

01:20:44.000 And again, it was really useful for me.

01:20:47.000 It's not like I suddenly believe in the caste system because I don't.

01:20:51.000 But I think it's really useful just to have all your assumptions challenged.

01:20:56.000 And that's really what it did for me.

01:20:58.000 And here I was.

01:20:59.000 I'm this American.

01:20:59.000 I'm making this great statement about how all people are equal.

01:21:03.000 Well, you know what?

01:21:04.000 I mean, 20 years earlier in my own country, they had a caste system that went back to the 1600s.

01:21:10.000 And that was the other formative experience of being in Nepal.

01:21:14.000 That was actually the first place that I started to think about American history.

01:21:17.000 When they were talking about the arranged marriage, and when you were saying that in your country people get to choose, what did you think about But what is their, like, how do they explain it to you in a way where it made sense?

01:21:36.000 Did they attempt to?

01:21:38.000 Or did they just say this is how it's always been?

01:21:40.000 Well, you know, I would say that the things that are most commonsensical to us, often we don't have to explain, right?

01:21:47.000 Because they're part of our ether.

01:21:49.000 But I think the logic was this, you know, that you have to create families, right?

01:22:00.000 You have to.

01:22:01.000 Yeah, because you have to perpetuate the species, right?

01:22:06.000 And so, you know, the simplest and the most static way to do that is to have the girls... 0.97

01:22:15.000 Marry guys who have enough wherewithal to take care of them, right? 1.00

01:22:20.000 That can bring you something, right?

01:22:22.000 Because it's a reciprocal arrangement, right?

01:22:25.000 And this is why in rural Nepal at the time, people wanted to have boys, not girls.

01:22:31.000 They used to say, which means the sun stays and the girl goes.

01:22:37.000 Because, of course, the system was also patrilocal, which means that, you know, you go and live in the house of the guy that you've married.

01:22:44.000 Right?

01:22:45.000 So in the house I lived with, the older brothers, they all had wives who lived there.

01:22:49.000 Wow.

01:22:50.000 Right?

01:22:50.000 But when the girls got married, they had to go somewhere else.

01:22:53.000 How bizarre.

01:22:54.000 Yeah.

01:22:55.000 Well, that, again, and it's ironic because, believe it or not, 20 years later, I went back to my village with my older daughter, who was a junior in high school at the time.

01:23:05.000 And the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had cut a tractor road kind of up half into the mountains.

01:23:12.000 And the first guy that I ran into, he just said, hey, where you been?

01:23:17.000 Like, I haven't seen you around.

01:23:19.000 They're like, oh, you brought your daughter.

01:23:21.000 Great.

01:23:21.000 Let's drink rice wine.

01:23:23.000 Basically, somebody had died and somebody had gotten married and somebody had a kid.

01:23:29.000 But the one thing that was really different, and this speaks to globalization, is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the United Arab Emirates to work.

01:23:40.000 And that was ironic, too, because the old story was the son stays and the girl goes, right?

01:23:46.000 A lot of the sons had gone, but they had gone outside of the country.

01:23:49.000 And that's the way so many of these economies work in that part of the world.

01:23:53.000 Did you see if the girl's marriage worked out?

01:23:57.000 Well, again, you know, Joe, it all works out, right?

01:24:01.000 I mean, it works out because it was designed for social reasons, not for personal ones.

01:24:08.000 It's not about what she thinks or about what he thinks.

01:24:13.000 It's about bringing together families, creating communities, bringing up kids.

01:24:20.000 It wasn't about sentiment.

01:24:22.000 Although, as I got closer to people in the community, I found out that after a marriage was arranged, often you did develop feelings for the person.

01:24:32.000 Often.

01:24:33.000 Yeah, it's just that those feelings weren't the foundation of it, right?

01:24:36.000 They weren't what spawned it.

01:24:38.000 They were an offshoot of it.

01:24:39.000 They weren't a cause of it.

01:24:41.000 Did it make you feel uncomfortable that they were doing that?

01:24:43.000 Not in the least.

01:24:44.000 Really?

01:24:45.000 And in fact, I mean, that was when I started to read history because, of course, in most parts of the world, including where we are right now, historically marriage was arranged.

01:24:53.000 But I would imagine that, like, if you have this conversation with a feminist, for instance, they would have a real issue with that. 1.00

01:25:00.000 Absolutely.

01:25:01.000 And also a real issue with your acceptance of it, right?

01:25:03.000 Well, again, I'm not saying that I accept it for me.

01:25:07.000 Right, I understand.

01:25:08.000 Because that wasn't my expectation, you know?

01:25:13.000 But, you know, I think it's worth asking ourselves the degree to which We know we're right.

01:25:21.000 And, you know, I think that at the end of the day, we don't.

01:25:25.000 All of us have opinions.

01:25:26.000 All of us have biases.

01:25:27.000 All of us have learned certain things.

01:25:29.000 But Leonard Hand, who was, you know, a famous jurist and federal court judge, one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that the spirit of liberty, which is really what we're talking about, is the spirit that is not so sure of itself.

01:25:47.000 And I've always loved that, right?

01:25:49.000 So I'm a human being.

01:25:50.000 I have biases, opinions, very strong ones.

01:25:53.000 But I think that the worst human attribute is self-certainty.

01:25:58.000 I think it's the most dangerous one, you know?

01:26:01.000 And for me, the Peace Corps was just a great way to challenge that and just say, okay, look, I'm not going to have an arranged marriage.

01:26:08.000 And by the way, I don't.

01:26:10.000 And I'm not going to marry off my daughters.

01:26:13.000 But in another part of the world, they do that.

01:26:17.000 And that's decreasingly the case, by the way, right?

01:26:19.000 Because these places have modernized.

01:26:20.000 Remember, I was there in a long time.

01:26:21.000 Do they get the internet? 1.00

01:26:21.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:26:23.000 I could just meet a guy I really like. 1.00

01:26:27.000 Exactly, right?

01:26:28.000 And so these, you know, I mean, when we went back to Nepal, my village, it was in a remote place, so it was relatively static, but there had been many other changes.

01:26:36.000 I mean, just think of all these guys going to the UAE to work on construction sites.

01:26:40.000 Those are sad stories, because I know that some of the guys that go to that part of the world, they go with the expectation of getting paid a certain sum of money, and then they take their passport.

01:26:51.000 And then they pay them a fraction of that and they live in squalor.

01:26:54.000 Oh, it's horrible.

01:26:55.000 And I actually went, I mean, this was an amazing experience.

01:26:57.000 I went to teach in the UAE a couple years ago.

01:27:00.000 And it was fun for me because every construction site was full of Nepalis. 1.00

01:27:06.000 And so I would just go up to the construction site and start speaking Nepali because I can still speak it.

01:27:10.000 And freak these guys out.

01:27:12.000 And they would be like, okay, I've got to take you down the block to the next construction site.

01:27:16.000 And I would go there and they would kind of show me and say, okay, say something.

01:27:19.000 And I would.

01:27:19.000 And they would go, ba-ba!

01:27:20.000 Which is what Nepalis do when they're kind of amazed. 0.95

01:27:23.000 But the stories I heard from them about the subject you're describing, it was really sobering.

01:27:27.000 I mean, you know...

01:27:28.000 I found great Nepali food there because, you know, I love Nepali food.

01:27:33.000 What is Nepali food like?

01:27:35.000 It's fairly similar to North Indian, but it's very simple.

01:27:39.000 It's rice and lentils and whatever vegetable is in season.

01:27:42.000 So that's what I ate for two and a half years.

01:27:44.000 Not literally, but, you know, it's, you know, let's just say that, you know, goat is for a very special occasion, like when somebody gets married.

01:27:58.000 This is a subsistence community, and so what I ate for two and a half years was rice, dal, and whatever vegetable was in season.

01:28:06.000 Dal? 1.00

01:28:07.000 Dal is lentils.

01:28:08.000 Okay.

01:28:09.000 There's a sheep called dal. 0.99

01:28:11.000 So I was confused.

01:28:12.000 So anyway, in the UAE, I would eat at this Nepali place and the same guy would serve me every night.

01:28:19.000 And I said, you know, I saw this thing in the newspaper saying that, you know, you have to get a bida that in Nepali that means a holiday, like one day a week or something like that. 0.99

01:28:29.000 And he said to me in Nepali, he said, yeah, and if I bitched about that, they'd just send me home and hire some motherfucker. 0.99

01:28:36.000 I mean, he said this to me in Nepali. 0.97

01:28:38.000 And in the UAE, one of the things I learned is that only 10% of the people are from the UAE. Isn't that amazing? 1.00

01:28:50.000 That's crazy.

01:28:50.000 And the rest of them all imported to work there?

01:28:53.000 Exactly.

01:28:53.000 And here's the other thing about the UAE. There are no naturalized citizens.

01:28:58.000 Really?

01:28:58.000 Yeah, so what that means is you can come and work for us, for sure.

01:29:01.000 But you can never be a citizen.

01:29:02.000 You can't be us, right?

01:29:04.000 We're sitting on a pile, or more specifically a pool of petrol, right?

01:29:09.000 And we are not sharing.

01:29:11.000 Interesting.

01:29:11.000 And so, you know, you can work for us, but you will not be us.

01:29:15.000 Vice did a documentary on the guys who built Dubai, built this very specific area, and they showed how they lived, and it was really disturbing.

01:29:26.000 I'm very sad.

01:29:28.000 You don't have any rights, right?

01:29:30.000 You're there to work.

01:29:31.000 But another thing that really stuck with me, I was teaching.

01:29:34.000 I taught at NYU at the time, and we had a campus there in downtown.

01:29:38.000 Now it's outside of town.

01:29:40.000 But one of the students there told me this really disturbing story that's right on point, which is she's walking home at night, and she thinks that there's this South Asian guy that's kind of following her.

01:29:51.000 But you know how it is.

01:29:53.000 Like, you're not really sure.

01:29:54.000 He seemed a little sketchy, but you don't know.

01:29:56.000 So you sort of turn a corner and see if he turns it.

01:29:59.000 And, you know, she gets to where we had our campus, and she told the guard that she thought that this guy down the street had been following her.

01:30:08.000 And he told me that, like, the police came in 10 minutes and they took him to the airport. 0.98

01:30:13.000 It's just like, you fuck with us in any way? 0.99

01:30:16.000 You raise an eyebrow? 1.00

01:30:18.000 You're out of here, bro.

01:30:20.000 Did she even know if he was for sure?

01:30:22.000 No, and she felt terrible about it.

01:30:23.000 Wow.

01:30:24.000 Maybe he was just going the same direction.

01:30:26.000 Precisely.

01:30:27.000 And she felt awful about it.

01:30:31.000 I think any woman has been in a situation like that.

01:30:34.000 It's iffy.

01:30:35.000 You're not really sure.

01:30:36.000 It seems a little sketchy.

01:30:37.000 And that's what she tried to communicate to the guard.

01:30:40.000 It's like, look, I'm not really sure.

01:30:41.000 But it's like...

01:30:42.000 Hey, you even raise an eyebrow?

01:30:44.000 It's like you have no rights.

01:30:47.000 Oof.

01:30:48.000 That's scary.

01:30:49.000 It's terrifying.

01:30:50.000 It's scary because that can, you know, that can be abused, obviously.

01:30:54.000 Oh, yeah.

01:30:54.000 Yeah, someone can just decide for whatever reason that you've done something that you haven't done and you're on a plane or in a jail.

01:31:01.000 That you're done.

01:31:03.000 You're done.

01:31:05.000 Living in other cultures and recognizing that there's just different styles of living, that human beings can live in different ways, is very eye-opening.

01:31:12.000 Because we're so accustomed to the way people live here.

01:31:16.000 We're so accustomed to it, you know?

01:31:18.000 Yeah.

01:31:18.000 It's like I had Josh Rogan, the journalist, was here the other day, and he was talking about living in Japan, because he was living in Japan at one time and teaching over there.

01:31:30.000 Yeah.

01:31:30.000 And doing, not teaching, excuse me.

01:31:33.000 He was teaching English, right?

01:31:35.000 Wasn't he teaching English as well?

01:31:36.000 Yeah, he taught English and he was working as a journalist there.

01:31:40.000 And he was just talking about how different the culture is.

01:31:44.000 The culture is so different than it is here.

01:31:47.000 And I was saying that my experience is over there.

01:31:50.000 It's almost like Japan seemed to me, Tokyo seemed to me, like if human beings evolved in a completely different dimension...

01:32:01.000 They're human beings, but they evolved in a totally different style of life, but very similar, where they have streets and buildings and neon, but yet they're really polite and orderly and very disciplined.

01:32:16.000 It's like, wow, this is crazy!

01:32:18.000 Yeah.

01:32:19.000 It's weird how there's these different styles of living.

01:32:23.000 Oh, and different gender ideas and norms, for sure. 0.98

01:32:27.000 Yeah.

01:32:29.000 Italy's another one. 1.00

01:32:30.000 I've spent a lot of time vacationing in Italy, and those fucking people just want to relax. 1.00

01:32:35.000 That's all they do. 0.99

01:32:38.000 It's so hard to find a gym there.

01:32:40.000 Where's the gym? 0.98

01:32:41.000 The gym in the hotel was all fucked up. 0.98

01:32:43.000 Nobody uses this gym. 0.99

01:32:45.000 They just want to relax.

01:32:46.000 It's interesting.

01:32:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:32:47.000 And look, again, there's something to be said for that.

01:32:50.000 My wife and I lived for a couple months in Greece about five years ago because my wife had a gig there.

01:32:55.000 And one of the things we learned is that if you went out to dinner with somebody, if they invited you out, Like, book four hours.

01:33:02.000 It's sort of like Joe Rogan show.

01:33:04.000 You know, four hours.

01:33:06.000 Four hours for dinner.

01:33:07.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:33:08.000 Multiple courses, keeps going, wine.

01:33:10.000 You know, and ouzo, whatever.

01:33:12.000 And the Greeks would hang out with mostly physicians, because that's what my wife is. 1.00

01:33:18.000 And several of them have been to the United States, and they said the most barbaric thing about the United States, they thought, was how quickly people ate.

01:33:24.000 And they said, you know, in the United States, we heard somebody say, grab a bite.

01:33:29.000 What is this grab a bite?

01:33:31.000 And they just thought it was barbaric, and it kind of is.

01:33:34.000 It kind of is.

01:33:35.000 Yeah.

01:33:35.000 But if you want to do what we do, that's how you have to live.

01:33:39.000 Right, right.

01:33:40.000 Not necessarily good.

01:33:43.000 Again, I think that's almost asking good or bad, that's almost the wrong question, right?

01:33:47.000 It's like, you know, human beings are irreducibly diverse, and they found so many different ways to be human, you know?

01:33:54.000 And the more of those ways you can expose yourself to, I think actually the more human you become.

01:34:00.000 You just see how many ways there are to cut this pie.

01:34:04.000 Yeah, I think so too.

01:34:05.000 I think there's real value in that.

01:34:07.000 I've been taking my kids overseas since they were two.

01:34:10.000 I think it's real important just to take them around.

01:34:14.000 People speak in different languages.

01:34:15.000 Oh, I mean, you know, as I was saying earlier, except for meeting Susan, my wife, I mean, living as an elementary school kid in Asia, absolutely the central event of my life, you know?

01:34:26.000 And, you know, just one minor example, but it kind of isn't.

01:34:32.000 When we lived in Iran, you know, my dad was the director of the Peace Corps, so we lived in a very, like, nice place.

01:34:38.000 We had servants and things like that because, you know, you're a Westerner living in an Asian place.

01:34:44.000 And one night, the cook, we were watching clips about the Ali-Frazier fight because this was 1969. And the cook says to me in Farsi, in which I was fluent, of course, because when you're a kid,

01:34:59.000 you can learn a language in three weeks.

01:35:01.000 He says, so this guy Ali and this guy Frazier are like, they're from your country, but they don't look like you.

01:35:08.000 What's up with that?

01:35:10.000 And as an eight-year-old in Farsi, I told Mahram, the cook, that African people had been enslaved and brought to the New World.

01:35:19.000 And again, how I even said that or what sense I made of that, I have no idea.

01:35:25.000 But what an incredible privilege that I was even in that situation.

01:35:29.000 And that I had, A, that I knew that and that I was put in this position of having to explain it to this Iranian cook.

01:35:37.000 Who didn't understand it.

01:35:38.000 Well, I mean, who knows what sense he made of it?

01:35:40.000 I mean, really, who knows what sense I made of it?

01:35:42.000 I mean, didn't understand it before you explained it.

01:35:44.000 Right, exactly.

01:35:45.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:35:46.000 Wow.

01:35:47.000 Yeah, growing up like that, that'd be amazing.

01:35:50.000 What do you think?

01:35:52.000 I think the four-hour dinner thing, there's probably some great merit into it.

01:35:56.000 Yeah.

01:35:57.000 There's some great merit to it, rather, if you don't have a demanding job.

01:36:02.000 So then the question is, should you ever have a demanding job?

01:36:06.000 How hard should you work?

01:36:07.000 I mean, look, that's a reasonable question, too.

01:36:09.000 It's a reasonable question.

01:36:10.000 Like, we face that in Greece because, you know, Susan found this kind of funny.

01:36:14.000 When it got super hot in the afternoon, like, at the hospital where she worked, they would just send people home.

01:36:21.000 They'd say, like, it's too hot.

01:36:23.000 And we would just never do that.

01:36:26.000 We're just going to close up shop.

01:36:28.000 It's really hot.

01:36:29.000 Go home and take a siesta.

01:36:31.000 And a lot of our recent experiences have been around medicine because she does a lot of international medicine.

01:36:38.000 And another example that I thought was fascinating, we went to Chile because she was doing a gig at a hospital there.

01:36:44.000 And at noon, all the docs stopped working, and they went to a dining hall, a very well-appointed dining hall, and had a sit-down lunch.

01:36:55.000 Everyone's beeper goes off.

01:36:57.000 And, you know, Susan spent her whole life in teaching hospitals in America. 0.91

01:37:00.000 That doesn't happen.

01:37:02.000 Like, if you get, like, M&Ms for lunch, you're lucky, you know, because it's go, go, go, go, go, go.

01:37:08.000 And the Chileans, you know...

01:37:10.000 Noon to one, man.

01:37:12.000 Like, there are no patients.

01:37:13.000 There's no nothing.

01:37:14.000 And you sit down and have a meal.

01:37:16.000 And it was pretty cool.

01:37:18.000 A friend of mine produces television shows, and he went to Italy to film at the Lamborghini factory.

01:37:26.000 And they just wanted to see, like, what's it like to put together an exotic automobile?

01:37:30.000 Like, what's it like being on the floor?

01:37:32.000 And so he said, they take three-hour lunch breaks.

01:37:36.000 They eat pasta and they sleep. 1.00

01:37:39.000 And he's like, no wonder these goddamn cars are so expensive. 1.00

01:37:42.000 This fucking takes forever to build them. 1.00

01:37:44.000 He was laughing and joking, but he was like, man, the food's incredible. 0.99

01:37:47.000 And he goes, and these people just relax.

01:37:49.000 They don't work all day.

01:37:51.000 Right.

01:37:52.000 And look, there's something to that.

01:37:53.000 I mean, who was the Henry Ford of Lamborghini?

01:37:55.000 There wasn't one, right?

01:37:56.000 I mean, Ford's genius was to make a car as quickly and as cheaply as you could, right?

01:38:01.000 That lots and lots of people could drive, right?

01:38:04.000 And that's not the goal of Lamborghini.

01:38:06.000 I think, if I remember correctly, Lamborghini was created because somebody was working with Ferrari and they're like, you know what, I can do this better.

01:38:18.000 I think they got annoyed at how hard it was to get a Ferrari, too. 0.98

01:38:22.000 And so they're like, I'm just going to make my own one of these fucking things. 0.98

01:38:26.000 I think that's how it started. 0.98

01:38:29.000 And, you know, they've been doing it for almost as long as Ferrari has, too.

01:38:34.000 But it's like the Italians are great for whatever reason. 1.00

01:38:40.000 They have historically been great at food and art.

01:38:45.000 Food and art has been their thing.

01:38:48.000 Not so great at skyscrapers.

01:38:51.000 You know, not so great at...

01:38:53.000 There's a lot of things we're not so great at.

01:38:55.000 Not so great at policing and crime fighting.

01:38:57.000 Right, but art.

01:38:58.000 Yeah.

01:38:59.000 Art and passion.

01:39:00.000 And there's a celebration of leisure and of just...

01:39:07.000 Just being a community, just being around each other and having fun and singing and laughing and dancing.

01:39:14.000 And it seems like they have their own way of living that suits them in a way that I don't know if our way of living suits us.

01:39:22.000 Right.

01:39:23.000 And I think the jury's out, and that's the point.

01:39:25.000 Yeah.

01:39:25.000 We accomplish a lot.

01:39:27.000 Yes, we do. 1.00

01:39:27.000 But we're all fucked up. 1.00

01:39:29.000 Some of us. 1.00

01:39:29.000 That too. 1.00

01:39:30.000 I want to know which country has more, like, antidepressants and SSRIs.

01:39:35.000 Well, you know, I've seen some of that literature, and it turns out, you know, that these international happiness indexes, they kind of confirm the cliché that money really does buy you happiness.

01:39:47.000 We're happy over here?

01:39:48.000 Well, not as happy as the Danes, right? 0.91

01:39:51.000 The Danes are the happiest.

01:39:52.000 The Danes are extremely happy, and when I say money, I'm not just talking about your income, right?

01:39:56.000 Aren't they just happy because they're beautiful?

01:39:58.000 They're so handsome and beautiful women and handsome men.

01:40:00.000 That's part of it, but really what it is is that they have really good health care.

01:40:07.000 All education, including higher education, is free.

01:40:10.000 Right?

01:40:11.000 And it turns out those things make you happy.

01:40:13.000 Sure.

01:40:13.000 Right?

01:40:13.000 And, you know, you shouldn't nostalgize poverty.

01:40:16.000 I think sometimes there's this noble, savage idea that, you know, oh, the people in such and such a country, they're poor, but they're very happy.

01:40:22.000 No, actually, they're not.

01:40:23.000 And what makes you happy is, you know, reliable health care, right?

01:40:27.000 Full employment, right?

01:40:29.000 Full, you know, accessible education.

01:40:33.000 And the people that have those things, the people that live in those countries, are happier.

01:40:37.000 Yeah.

01:40:38.000 Yeah.

01:40:39.000 They don't create as much innovation and they don't create as much world-influencing art, which is interesting.

01:40:50.000 Yeah.

01:40:51.000 Right?

01:40:51.000 So you've got to wonder, is there a benefit to a certain amount of struggle and what's the sweet spot?

01:40:57.000 Yeah.

01:40:57.000 What's the sweet spot of being a young person and having no idea whether or not you're going to have your bills paid, whether you're going to be able to take care of yourself?

01:41:07.000 What's the roadmap?

01:41:08.000 What is your future going to hold?

01:41:10.000 Versus someone who knows they get a stipend from the government, you're always going to have your health care, there's plenty of food, maybe there's a middle ground.

01:41:21.000 I think there absolutely is.

01:41:22.000 And I think that's actually—we're at a juncture right now where we're trying to work that out in the United States.

01:41:26.000 I mean, I think that's what a lot of what we heard Joe Biden talking about in the State of the Union was about.

01:41:31.000 Did you pay attention to that?

01:41:33.000 Some of it, right?

01:41:34.000 You might be the only one.

01:41:36.000 You know what I paid attention to?

01:41:38.000 And I think this is really to your point.

01:41:39.000 The fact that there's been so little what I would call real Republican pushback of a sort of, there's been a little, but of the sort that we saw with the Tea Party in 2008, right?

01:41:51.000 Where you say, no, the state's too big.

01:41:53.000 Like, no, we don't want to provide all those services.

01:41:56.000 It seems to me that, you know, if we had what I would call a real Republican party, We would be having more of that debate.

01:42:04.000 Instead, it seems to be focused mainly on, you know, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and something that's happening at the border, you know?

01:42:12.000 Because I think that there is an interesting or there should be an interesting debate about that.

01:42:16.000 How big do we want the state to be?

01:42:18.000 How many services do we want to provide?

01:42:22.000 What are the costs and benefits of that?

01:42:24.000 I mean, to me, those are the big questions.

01:42:27.000 And I think that there are costs and benefits to that.

01:42:33.000 I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat.

01:42:34.000 I tend to support most forms of state welfare.

01:42:37.000 But that's why I wish we had what I would call more real Republicans of the old variety.

01:42:42.000 Right?

01:42:43.000 Who are kind of making the case for smaller government, right?

01:42:46.000 And making the case for, you know, allowing, you know, more room both to rise and to fall and all of that stuff.

01:42:52.000 Watch dogs of frugality.

01:42:53.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:42:54.000 People who are, you know.

01:42:55.000 Again, that's not my jam, but I think that we should hear that.

01:42:59.000 Yeah, the problem with bigger government is government's not good at anything.

01:43:05.000 So when they do it bigger, it's just more people being incompetent.

01:43:10.000 I mean, I'm not a fan of hiring the private sector to take over important government jobs because I think they would cut corners too and make it the most profitable instead of the most efficient.

01:43:22.000 But it's just...

01:43:26.000 There's no, like, outside...

01:43:28.000 Trump is the Republican Party right now still, it seems like.

01:43:32.000 Unfortunately.

01:43:33.000 They're still hanging their hopes on him winning again in 2024. Yes.

01:43:36.000 And maybe someone will rise between now and then.

01:43:39.000 And, you know, more nonsense about our cities being aflame and the border being a crisis, you know, and both of those are largely invented.

01:43:46.000 We have lots of much more serious stuff to deal with.

01:43:50.000 We do, but the border is kind of a bit of a crisis.

01:43:54.000 Yes and no.

01:43:54.000 I mean, look, it has been for a long time.

01:43:56.000 It's been building for a very long time.

01:43:58.000 But, you know, when those reports come into your newsfeed or mine, here's what they don't tell you.

01:44:03.000 They don't tell you that in the last 10 years, immigration declined to a level that we haven't seen since the 1970s.

01:44:10.000 It doesn't tell you that in the past 10 years, two-thirds of our immigrants have come from Asia, not from Latin America.

01:44:15.000 And they don't tell you that immigrants of all kinds, including undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. 0.97

01:44:22.000 Those are all facts.

01:44:23.000 And everyone should know them, and that should put the crisis in a little bit of a different context.

01:44:28.000 That's probably all very true.

01:44:30.000 The difference between immigration and illegal immigration is when it gets squirrely.

01:44:36.000 Definitely.

01:44:37.000 And that's all worth debating.

01:44:38.000 Right?

01:44:39.000 But we're not going to have that debate if we're just, you know, focused on, you know, oh, you know, there's a caravan that's coming up from Honduras, and oy vey, and maybe George Soros is financing it.

01:44:51.000 I mean, look, the question of, like, how many immigrants should come in, and also, like, what do we do with the people that came in here illegally? 0.99

01:44:57.000 Those are real questions, right?

01:44:59.000 Absolutely.

01:45:00.000 Also, the question is, like, why do you have to have a special skill to be a valid immigrant?

01:45:06.000 Yeah.

01:45:07.000 That's a real good question because there's a lot of poor people that they've been doing labor their whole life, but they want to do better for their family.

01:45:13.000 But you have to be able to provide a service that makes it valuable for you to enter into America.

01:45:19.000 That's right.

01:45:19.000 And I don't know where your ancestors come from, but mine came from Poland, Russia, and Lithuania.

01:45:28.000 Mine were Italy and Ireland.

01:45:29.000 Okay, and you know, they didn't have any of those skills.

01:45:32.000 They couldn't get in now.

01:45:33.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:45:34.000 Or it would be way, way harder.

01:45:36.000 And they got in easy.

01:45:37.000 My grandparents just came in, signed their name, and they were in.

01:45:41.000 I mean, what did you have to do back then?

01:45:43.000 Not much.

01:45:44.000 Yeah, that's right.

01:45:44.000 In the 1920s?

01:45:46.000 What the hell did you have to do?

01:45:47.000 Until 1925. I mean, until they changed the immigration laws.

01:45:49.000 So, you know, my relatives are lucky we got in before 1925 because we restricted it heavily after that and then changed again in the 60s.

01:45:58.000 Yeah.

01:46:00.000 It's unfortunate that the disparity between the United States and these, especially these Latin American countries, these people are coming up and literally walking. 0.88

01:46:10.000 Yeah.

01:46:11.000 It's sad that they don't have a better spot down there. 0.95

01:46:15.000 That's what's fucked up, is that they need to come up here. 0.97

01:46:18.000 That's what's crazy. 0.98

01:46:19.000 Right?

01:46:19.000 And, you know, I think it's fair to say that some of their woes, if you go back in time, also have to do with some terrible decision-making activity by the United States.

01:46:29.000 That's not to say, like, we're to blame for it, right?

01:46:32.000 Because that's way too facile.

01:46:33.000 Right.

01:46:34.000 Right?

01:46:34.000 But the United States does not have a good record of, let's just call it political intervention in that part of the world.

01:46:40.000 No.

01:46:41.000 You know?

01:46:41.000 And so, you know, it's worth—this is where the history piece becomes really important.

01:46:46.000 You know, if you look especially at, you know, a country like Panama or a country like, you know, Nicaragua, right, or Guatemala, you know, you'll see in the past all sorts of American efforts to intervene in the politics of those countries in ways that were fundamentally disruptive to those countries,

01:47:05.000 and that's real.

01:47:05.000 Yeah, and the damage continues from the Reagan administration in Nicaragua.

01:47:10.000 Yeah, and El Salvador.

01:47:12.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:47:12.000 Yeah, I remember all that Oliver North shit when I was a kid. 0.96

01:47:17.000 Yeah. 0.97

01:47:18.000 You know?

01:47:18.000 Yeah, that's like something out of a movie, and a really bad movie, by the way.

01:47:21.000 But a real movie?

01:47:22.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:47:22.000 That shit was really going down. 1.00

01:47:24.000 It's kind of crazy. 1.00

01:47:25.000 Yeah.

01:47:27.000 And the fact that they were using cocaine sales from Los Angeles.

01:47:32.000 I interviewed Freeway Ricky Ross.

01:47:35.000 Do you know who he is?

01:47:35.000 I do.

01:47:36.000 Yeah.

01:47:37.000 The real Rick Ross.

01:47:38.000 Rick Ross came here to the studio.

01:47:40.000 He was at the LA studio.

01:47:41.000 And he's a great guy.

01:47:43.000 And what a story he has.

01:47:45.000 Learned how to read in prison, became a lawyer, and then fought his own case.

01:47:50.000 And realized they had given him double jeopardy.

01:47:53.000 You know, three strikes are out?

01:47:56.000 Not double jeopardy, but three strikes are out.

01:47:58.000 It's supposed to be three separate instances of you being arrested for felonies.

01:48:03.000 Yes, you can't count one instance three times.

01:48:05.000 Exactly, and that's what they did to him, and he successfully argued it and got released.

01:48:11.000 Which is amazing.

01:48:12.000 Yeah.

01:48:13.000 And, you know, now he gives motivational speeches and he was actually a tennis player in Compton, a really good tennis player.

01:48:19.000 Oh, wow.

01:48:20.000 Yeah, before, you know, he became like a big time drug dealer. 0.95

01:48:23.000 But he was like a big time drug dealer, but he was illiterate.

01:48:29.000 Never learned how to read until he went to jail.

01:48:31.000 And learned how to read so that he could become a lawyer to defend himself.

01:48:34.000 That's amazing.

01:48:35.000 It's amazing.

01:48:36.000 Yeah.

01:48:36.000 Amazing.

01:48:37.000 Yeah, it is.

01:48:38.000 But meanwhile, he was getting all that coke and selling all it because they were using him to make money so they could fund the Contras versus the Sandinistas.

01:48:47.000 Yeah, radically.

01:48:48.000 Which is nuts.

01:48:49.000 Radically upset.

01:48:50.000 Nuts.

01:48:50.000 Yeah.

01:48:51.000 Do you play tennis, Joe?

01:48:52.000 No.

01:48:53.000 You don't?

01:48:53.000 Never did?

01:48:54.000 I've played it a couple of times, but no, I'm not a tennis player.

01:48:58.000 Yeah.

01:48:58.000 Why?

01:48:59.000 Do you play tennis?

01:48:59.000 I do.

01:49:00.000 I took it up.

01:49:01.000 I was a basketball player in my youth, but there's a reason that you see people that look like me on tennis courts and not basketball courts.

01:49:07.000 I just started to get hurt.

01:49:08.000 Yeah.

01:49:09.000 I think tennis would get you hurt.

01:49:10.000 It's not a side-to-side movement.

01:49:12.000 Yeah, but it's not a contact sport.

01:49:14.000 What happened with basketball is you're in a small space.

01:49:18.000 Everybody's body's getting wider.

01:49:19.000 They're starting to wear these braces and big pieces of plastic.

01:49:22.000 And inevitably, you're just going to bang into somebody.

01:49:24.000 And you fall down and twist ankles.

01:49:26.000 Yeah, and what's cool about tennis is it's not a contact sport, so you can just keep doing it.

01:49:30.000 And I just, you know, I was getting hurt.

01:49:32.000 It wasn't as fun, and a basketball friend said to me, like, do you play tennis?

01:49:36.000 And I said, well, not since I was 18. Not really.

01:49:38.000 And I went onto the court, and I had, like, the closest thing I'll ever have to a religious experience.

01:49:44.000 Like, the very first time I started hitting, and I was like, okay...

01:49:47.000 Done with basketball.

01:49:48.000 That was a religious experience?

01:49:50.000 Tennis?

01:49:50.000 It was.

01:49:51.000 I mean, it was just because it was just so – it was just dramatic and rapid, right?

01:49:56.000 It was just like I realized it in one moment, you know?

01:50:00.000 But it turns out that it's also complicated.

01:50:05.000 I mean, I'm sure any sport like martial arts is too.

01:50:08.000 It becomes a head game as well.

01:50:11.000 I think actually based on what I've read about you, you would like it.

01:50:14.000 Because it turns out with tennis that unless you're very good, which I'm not and never will be, that almost every point is decided based on who concentrates more.

01:50:24.000 It really is.

01:50:26.000 And that's why, I mean, if you've ever gone to watch somebody like Nadal of Federer play, but what's amazing about it is not just their athleticism, because you can see that in any sport.

01:50:37.000 What's amazing is that there are 19,000 people around them, and they are so locked in.

01:50:44.000 It's just crazy.

01:50:46.000 And that's really what it is.

01:50:47.000 You know, it's just staying in the point and thinking about nothing else.

01:50:52.000 This match is going a long time too, right?

01:50:53.000 They do.

01:50:54.000 Some of them to five hours.

01:50:56.000 Five hours?

01:50:57.000 Oh, some of the ones that are, you know, where it's best of five sets.

01:51:02.000 Do they take snacks?

01:51:03.000 You can get little munchies, but it's not...

01:51:06.000 Like bananas and stuff?

01:51:06.000 Yeah.

01:51:07.000 Oh, definitely.

01:51:08.000 Yeah.

01:51:08.000 But, you know, it's really taught me a lot about how important focus is.

01:51:14.000 You know, I often say to my students, like, for me, that's the only really necessary condition for doing anything.

01:51:21.000 You know, like, I'm not a rocket scientist.

01:51:24.000 You know, I know what my limits are in that realm.

01:51:28.000 What I can do, what I am able to do, is focus.

01:51:31.000 And for me, that is just the absolute necessary condition for anything. 0.94

01:51:35.000 And tennis really teaches you that because, you know, if I start thinking about my grocery list or a newspaper column that I'm writing, I'm fucked, you know? 0.65

01:51:45.000 And I, you know, I'm not in the point anymore. 0.94

01:51:48.000 Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:51:48.000 And, you know, and that's, yeah, yeah.

01:51:53.000 Yeah, I think there's a mental cleansing aspect of a lot of things, a lot of activities.

01:51:58.000 I don't play golf, but it's been described to me that way.

01:52:01.000 Same deal.

01:52:02.000 And tennis, I'm sure.

01:52:04.000 Archery.

01:52:04.000 I do archery.

01:52:05.000 That's one thing.

01:52:06.000 It's like that.

01:52:07.000 The game of pool is like that. 0.99

01:52:09.000 If you're thinking about anything else while you're down there, you'll fuck up.

01:52:12.000 And if you just concentrate on only the game and keep playing it over and over again, it clears your mind of problems.

01:52:20.000 It does.

01:52:20.000 In a weird way.

01:52:21.000 And yet, though, it can also be a source of them because I've also discovered since I've taken up tennis that good begets good and bad begets bad.

01:52:32.000 So, you know, if you're really hitting it well, you can just keep going.

01:52:35.000 But sometimes you're just in a rut and you can't get out.

01:52:40.000 You know exactly what you're doing wrong and you can't stop yourself.

01:52:43.000 And look, writing is like that, too.

01:52:45.000 But what I've discovered with writing is when you get to that dark place, you just stop.

01:52:50.000 Right?

01:52:51.000 And if you come back to it and look at it with new eyes, you'll get out of it.

01:52:55.000 Tennis court, you can't do that. 0.67

01:52:56.000 You just can't say, look, I keep fucking up my backhand. 0.62

01:52:58.000 Let's just stop playing. 0.97

01:52:59.000 Right? 0.98

01:52:59.000 What you have to do is just keep fucking up your backhand, which is super frustrating. 0.98

01:53:05.000 And you know what you're doing and you can't stop it. 0.97

01:53:10.000 And I guess that's just the nature of competition because I think there are many things like that, like writing.

01:53:15.000 But again, I've discovered that it's actually quite simple.

01:53:18.000 Like sometimes you'll just be writing and every word looks terrible and you just don't have it going on.

01:53:23.000 And if you just go outside or do something else and you come back to it, you will be able to do it better. 0.96

01:53:29.000 But if you just sit there and keep trying to mull over it, everything will look like shit because you're just in that rut.

01:53:36.000 Well, there's some people that think that to concentrate on things, you're supposed to do things for a certain amount of time and take five minutes off on a regular basis that you should never just go all the way through. 0.97

01:53:47.000 But then there's other schools of thought where you just keep drinking coffee and keep pounding on those keys.

01:53:53.000 Yeah, and I've done it both ways.

01:53:55.000 It's very ineffable.

01:53:56.000 I mean, the thing about writing is you sort of, you kind of start to understand, if you've done it for a while, why the ancients all talked about, like, muses coming to them, right?

01:54:05.000 You know, if you read, you know, Homer or anybody after that, and they talk about, you know, people who are creating anything, a muse came to them.

01:54:14.000 It does feel that way sometimes, you know?

01:54:16.000 It's just, you know, suddenly you're really inspired, you have a lot to say, you can say it, and then at other times you're You're just pulling teeth.

01:54:25.000 You have an idea, but you just can't find.

01:54:29.000 The muse hasn't come to you.

01:54:30.000 Yeah.

01:54:32.000 But did you ever read Steven Pinker's work?

01:54:34.000 Oh, yeah.

01:54:35.000 Did you ever read The War of Art?

01:54:37.000 Yeah.

01:54:37.000 He's got a really interesting way of talking about the muse.

01:54:41.000 Whether or not the muse is real, if you treat it like it's real and treat it with respect, it'll keep providing you with creative gifts.

01:54:48.000 Right.

01:54:49.000 I mean, the ancients understood that.

01:54:51.000 I mean, they really got that right.

01:54:53.000 No, I'm sorry.

01:54:53.000 Did I say Pinker?

01:54:54.000 I meant Pressfield.

01:54:55.000 Steven Pressfield.

01:54:57.000 Did I say Pinker?

01:54:58.000 You did.

01:54:58.000 I think I did.

01:54:58.000 I meant Pressfield.

01:54:59.000 I was thinking the same.

01:55:01.000 Yeah.

01:55:02.000 That book, War of Art, I bought a stack of them and I would hand them out to people.

01:55:06.000 Like when they would come on the podcast, just because it was so...

01:55:08.000 And it's a small, easy read, but it's all about being a professional and this idea that if you just summon the muse and then show up at the same time every day with the intent to be creative and you're going to put in the work and you're not going to...

01:55:23.000 You know, go watch YouTube videos or Google anything.

01:55:27.000 You're going to really concentrate only on the writing itself.

01:55:30.000 And that the muse will, whether or not it's a real thing.

01:55:34.000 You know, this idea that there's some angelic, creative thing out there that bestows upon you creative gifts.

01:55:42.000 Right.

01:55:43.000 But I think Pressfield's point is that it's useful to think of it in that way.

01:55:47.000 Yes.

01:55:47.000 Right?

01:55:47.000 It gives you a certain kind of faith.

01:55:49.000 Well, that's a lot of people's perspective on religion.

01:55:53.000 That's Jordan Peterson's perspective on God, is that whether or not God exists or not, if you behave like God exists, you'll live a better life.

01:56:03.000 And I'm like, there's some real wisdom in that, because there's something to it.

01:56:08.000 If you really did behave as if some higher power laid out the rules for a better, more...

01:56:18.000 It's just more harmonious world.

01:56:20.000 And if you follow these rules, you'll have a better life.

01:56:23.000 And that this is all, there's a logic to it and a law to it.

01:56:27.000 There is.

01:56:28.000 And yet, I know Peterson's Canadian, but in the United States, I think one of the most important social phenomena of the past 20 years is actually the decline in both, you know, church, synagogue, mosque attendance, and also in the number of people that say they're affiliated with, you know,

01:56:44.000 with a faith.

01:56:45.000 Yeah.

01:56:45.000 By some measures, it's gone down 20%.

01:56:48.000 Which is radical.

01:56:50.000 Over how long?

01:56:50.000 20 years.

01:56:52.000 And I think, again, we're almost too close to that to really take its measure.

01:56:58.000 I think the worst interpretation of it is that what we've done is we've substituted politics for religion.

01:57:08.000 We've made politics into a kind of faith system where it's not necessarily...

01:57:14.000 The blue and the red, they become a sort of religious identity.

01:57:19.000 And we defend them in the same way.

01:57:21.000 I think there's some real truth to that.

01:57:24.000 And I think these things are probably at some level connected.

01:57:27.000 Because I think lots of evolutionary psychologists have tried to make the claim that we are joiners.

01:57:36.000 And that there is an evolutionary logic to faith systems, you know, that they've helped us in all kinds of different ways.

01:57:43.000 And we're always going to have some version of them.

01:57:46.000 You know, and I think the scariest part of now is, for me, is that our political affiliations have become quasi-religious.

01:57:56.000 I don't even think quasi.

01:57:58.000 Maybe flat out, flat out religions. 0.92

01:58:01.000 Pretty much flat out and extremely tribal.

01:58:05.000 And when you think about, if you just analyze the behavior of people on both extremes, whether it's the far left or the far right, They exhibit remarkably similar traits, like pure hatred for the other side,

01:58:21.000 inability to look at the virtues of this opposing ideology, and almost treating it as if the very nature of reality is at stake.

01:58:32.000 Yes, yes.

01:58:32.000 And I have a purchase on it, and you are blind.

01:58:35.000 Yes.

01:58:36.000 Right?

01:58:36.000 You know, God did not shine on you.

01:58:40.000 Which is the Protestants versus the Catholics, you know, in Ireland. 0.93

01:58:44.000 I mean, it's really crazy.

01:58:46.000 Right.

01:58:46.000 That's what they did, you know, when they were blowing each other up with the IRA. I'm curious, Joe, are you a religious believer?

01:58:54.000 I am not a non-believer.

01:58:56.000 I'm not a believer.

01:58:57.000 I don't go to church, but I would not be surprised if there's a lot more to this existence than we're experiencing in a way that you can measure.

01:59:12.000 Did you go to church as a kid?

01:59:14.000 Yeah, I went to Catholic school when I was a little kid.

01:59:16.000 We went to church, but it was when my parents split up and when we went to San Francisco, all that stopped.

01:59:25.000 I just never...

01:59:26.000 Was your stepdad a Catholic also?

01:59:28.000 No.

01:59:28.000 Or just your mom?

01:59:29.000 He was when he was a kid as well.

01:59:31.000 But, you know, it was the 70s.

01:59:33.000 They were just hippies.

01:59:35.000 But, um...

01:59:38.000 I think there's some real benefit to religion for a lot of people, and I didn't used to think that when I was younger. 0.97

01:59:42.000 When I was younger, I was a lot more arrogant about it, and I thought it was for fools.

01:59:45.000 I was like, oh yeah, a guy came back from the dead, and he used to walk on water, whatever. 0.88

01:59:50.000 But now I look at it...

01:59:52.000 First of all, I understand what the Bible actually is now, and it's way more complicated.

01:59:58.000 You know, it's some people trying to make sense of the world thousands and thousands of years ago as interpreted through multiple languages back to England, back to English rather.

02:00:10.000 And in a way that, you know, there's a lot of these ancient languages, like if you go back to ancient Hebrew, Letters doubled as numbers.

02:00:18.000 So there was value in words, right?

02:00:21.000 Somebody told me once that the word love and the word God have the same numerical value.

02:00:27.000 So if you combine the numbers and the letters and it's like...

02:00:31.000 It wasn't as simple as when you get the interpretation to Latin or to Greek or to English, ultimately.

02:00:39.000 You're not interpreting the full meaning in these sentences, that there's some intrinsic value that's lost because the ancient Hebrew version of it was like, it just meant a different thing.

02:00:51.000 Right, and it's been transmuted through a million different histories, right?

02:00:55.000 A million different peoples, right?

02:00:57.000 And ideologies.

02:00:58.000 And in all kinds of ways, right?

02:00:59.000 I mean, heinous and wonderful.

02:01:01.000 You know, when my students tell me they don't like religion or they don't want to mix religion and politics, I'm always like, so we shouldn't have a Martin Luther King Day, right?

02:01:08.000 I mean, what do we think he was, right?

02:01:10.000 What do we think the whole civil rights movement?

02:01:12.000 Of course, you know?

02:01:13.000 But it's funny.

02:01:14.000 I once asked a group of students what King's profession was, and I got hilarious answers.

02:01:19.000 Like, a lot of people thought he was a lawyer, but my favorite one of all was policy experts.

02:01:24.000 It's like, I have a dream that one day, thanks to the earned income tax credit, you know, the poverty rate will decline 2%.

02:01:32.000 But again, I think that speaks to the kind of stigmatization of religion in certain circles in our country, especially elite circles, and this idea that it's this conservative principle or this backwards thing.

02:01:44.000 And obviously, it's been used in those ways.

02:01:46.000 But, you know, I mean, if you think about, like, movements for justice in this country, starting with abolitionism, right, going right straight through civil rights, they were all powered by religion.

02:01:55.000 Yeah, and it's empowering for so many communities to have this place where people go to worship because they've agreed upon certain kind of behavior when they go to these places and in agreeing to work hard to be a better person and to tithe some of your earnings.

02:02:14.000 There's all these different aspects of religion that I think really lends itself to empowering the bond that these people have with each other.

02:02:24.000 And what I find fascinating about it is that bond, that empowering, and also that identity.

02:02:28.000 They can work even if you don't believe in God or even think about them.

02:02:32.000 Yes.

02:02:33.000 I mean, you know, and I feel I'm an example of that.

02:02:35.000 I mean, I'm Jewish, and being Jewish is hugely important to me, the way I see the world, the way I think.

02:02:41.000 But at the same time, I'm not a believer, I don't think.

02:02:45.000 I don't walk around wondering if there's a God, and I rarely go to synagogue.

02:02:50.000 Would you be surprised if there was a God?

02:02:51.000 No.

02:02:52.000 And I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't.

02:02:55.000 I mean, I'll be honest, I just don't give it a lot of thought, you know?

02:02:58.000 What I care about is the world, the world as I can see it, the world as I can know it.

02:03:04.000 And, you know, for me, what's really important about Judaism is the charge that it gives you to try to change that world. 0.84

02:03:11.000 I know this isn't everybody's interpretation of Judaism, but it's mine.

02:03:15.000 So at Passover, you know, what do you say?

02:03:17.000 You say, remember that you were a slave in Egypt.

02:03:21.000 Right?

02:03:22.000 And so that experience, that experience of being a pariah, which has been so central to the Jewish experience, what that does is that enjoins you to ask, okay, who's the pariah now? 0.61

02:03:32.000 Right?

02:03:33.000 It might not be you now, but it's going to be somebody else.

02:03:37.000 And your job as a Jew, whoever it is, your job as a Jew is to seek them out, reach out to them, try to understand them.

02:03:50.000 My archaeologist friends have told me...

02:03:54.000 That, speaking of Passover, there's actually no real archaeological evidence that Jews were enslaved en masse in Egypt.

02:04:03.000 Like that there was a mass population transfer.

02:04:05.000 Like, I grew up thinking that that actually happened.

02:04:08.000 Okay, the stuff with the parting of the Red Sea, okay, there you get into the faith realm.

02:04:11.000 But I thought as a matter of history, right, that that had happened.

02:04:14.000 Apparently, we don't have evidence for it.

02:04:16.000 But, so what?

02:04:18.000 Right.

02:04:18.000 Right?

02:04:18.000 Does that take anything away from the Exodus story?

02:04:22.000 For me, it actually doesn't.

02:04:23.000 You know?

02:04:24.000 I don't feel that I need any proof on this score.

02:04:29.000 Doesn't history get real shaky, though, when they're going back to ancient Egypt?

02:04:33.000 Of course it does.

02:04:34.000 Like, I mean, you know, You have to look at shards of pottery and you have to look at other things.

02:04:38.000 And apparently they found there was some trade, as you might guess, because there were so many different populations that are both in conflict and in movement and all that, right?

02:04:48.000 But, like, I remember somebody told me that Jews, like, built the pyramids.

02:04:53.000 This is not true.

02:04:54.000 I've read that too.

02:04:55.000 Yeah, yeah, you know.

02:04:56.000 But again, you know, so what?

02:04:59.000 You know, there's still, even if that quote didn't happen and the Red Sea didn't part, to me, you know, just the historic experience that Jews have had, you know, and especially their experience as being the pariah, as being the outgroom and fighting back against that.

02:05:16.000 And asserting themselves.

02:05:18.000 You know, that's what I take away from it. 0.98

02:05:21.000 And especially my duty as a Jew to try to make things a little less fucked up, especially for whoever is a slave now. 0.98

02:05:30.000 And by the way, I'm not saying that's how other Jews see it or should. 0.98

02:05:34.000 But for me, it's an example of the power of religion.

02:05:38.000 And it's got nothing to do with God.

02:05:40.000 Right.

02:05:40.000 Like not to me.

02:05:42.000 Yeah, it's guidelines for how to live a moral life.

02:05:49.000 Yeah, guidelines, impulses, perspectives, you know, all that stuff.

02:05:53.000 And I think, you know, we need that.

02:05:55.000 We need those organizing principles as human beings.

02:05:57.000 I think we definitely do, and I think we definitely do benefit from that community gathering place where people agree to worship together.

02:06:06.000 Because even, again, like Pressfield called upon the muse, even if you don't, even if the muse isn't real, if you treat it like it's real, and if you have a place where everybody gets together and they all agree, like, we're going to be better people because of the Lord, and the Lord watches us, and the Lord giveth,

02:06:21.000 and the Lord taketh away, and just think about...

02:06:23.000 All the real positive aspects of some of the religious tenets.

02:06:28.000 Right.

02:06:29.000 And, you know, I also think that in part because we're secularizing, there's perhaps less awareness of all that.

02:06:37.000 And perhaps we should be a little bit more concerned, you know, about the fact that fewer people are affiliated with the religion.

02:06:45.000 You know, again, I don't know what we can necessarily do about that.

02:06:48.000 But there's also a lot of prejudice about it.

02:06:51.000 There's no question, right?

02:06:52.000 I mean, think of, you know, the play Book of Mormon, which, by the way, I think is brilliant.

02:06:57.000 Brilliant.

02:06:57.000 All right?

02:06:58.000 But what if there was on Broadway the Book of the Koran or the Book of the Talmud?

02:07:02.000 Like, can you imagine the shitstorm there would be, right?

02:07:06.000 It's true. 0.98

02:07:06.000 You know, and everybody would be like, oh, I can't believe you're making fun of this world religion. 0.98

02:07:10.000 But with the Book of the Mormons, we're like, ha, ha, ha. 0.60

02:07:12.000 You know, Book of Mormon.

02:07:13.000 Well, first of all, one thing, Mormons have a great sense of humor.

02:07:17.000 Yes.

02:07:17.000 They can take it.

02:07:18.000 They take a joke really well.

02:07:20.000 Second, there's a thing when you know the guy who made the religion.

02:07:24.000 It's a different thing, you know?

02:07:27.000 It's like one thing, like Judaism, you're talking about thousands of years of history.

02:07:30.000 Yeah.

02:07:31.000 Islam, more than a thousand years of history, right? 0.98

02:07:34.000 Right.

02:07:34.000 I mean, that's what's fascinating about the LDS story is it's just quintessentially American.

02:07:39.000 Right, exactly.

02:07:40.000 You know, it's a frontier story, right? 1.00

02:07:44.000 A 14-year-old bullshit artist. 1.00

02:07:46.000 That's what it's about. 1.00

02:07:48.000 A 14-year-old bullshit artist tricked a lot of people, and they kind of know it. 0.99

02:07:51.000 Right. 0.98

02:07:52.000 But at the same time, I mean, the historic ironies are so great because, you know, Republican Mormons in Utah, they're like the most Republican people on earth.

02:08:01.000 And yet, of course, the Republican Party pursued Brigham Young all the way into the Great Salt Basin.

02:08:07.000 I mean, you think that's really where they wanted to go?

02:08:09.000 You think they're like, oh, this seems like a really habitable place.

02:08:12.000 Like, let's live in the Great Salt Basin. 1.00

02:08:14.000 This fucking dead lake. 1.00

02:08:15.000 Exactly. 1.00

02:08:16.000 That was as far as the army, which was led by the Republican Party, was willing to pursue them.

02:08:24.000 You know, the line was that the Mormons, it wasn't just, of course, that they were, you know, they were bigamists or Satanists or whatever, you know, they oppressed women.

02:08:34.000 I like slavery oppressed African-Americans. 1.00

02:08:37.000 I mean, that was one of the arguments. 0.99

02:08:38.000 You know, and the Mormons aren't dumb.

02:08:40.000 Once they create a territory, of course, they enfranchise women before anybody. 1.00

02:08:43.000 And they're like, oh, we're the people?

02:08:45.000 Like, we're the people that oppress women? 1.00

02:08:47.000 Like, do they vote back in Massachusetts?

02:08:49.000 They don't.

02:08:49.000 That's pretty interesting.

02:08:51.000 You know, I mean, back to the Book of the Mormon.

02:08:53.000 I mean, what I think is fascinating how the LDS, you know, establishment handled that.

02:08:57.000 What they did, which I thought was super smart, was they were like, let's not beat them, let's join them.

02:09:02.000 So you go to Broadway and you get your little playbill, and I'm sure you've seen this, like on the second page, there's an ad from the Mormon Church, from LDS, and they're like, okay, you've seen the play, now look at the real thing.

02:09:15.000 I bet they got a lot of people to join too because of that.

02:09:17.000 Didn't Glenn Beck join the Mormons like deep into his 40s? 0.71

02:09:20.000 Here's the thing about Mormons. 0.99

02:09:23.000 I've known quite a few of them and they're some of the nicest fucking people. 0.98

02:09:27.000 And I don't know why, I don't know what they're doing, but they are so friendly and so nice. 0.95

02:09:32.000 Well, look, one of the reasons, there are many, but one is that they have this tradition of mission, right?

02:09:39.000 Yes.

02:09:40.000 And so, at least on the male side, you have to become an elder.

02:09:44.000 You have to go off and evangelize. 0.99

02:09:48.000 And that's not going to work very well if you're a dick, right? 0.99

02:09:52.000 It really isn't. 0.99

02:09:53.000 I mean, I have an old friend and colleague who's a Mormon, and he's not a believer anymore, but he served in Italy.

02:10:00.000 And he told me that doing that was the key to everything he's done ever since because he said, John, if you can sell that, you can do anything, man.

02:10:09.000 That's interesting. 1.00

02:10:10.000 But it's also not going to work if you're a dick. 0.99

02:10:12.000 Or like if you're walking around in jeans and a hoodie, right? 0.99

02:10:15.000 I mean, the Mormons, they do it right, you know?

02:10:17.000 It's like we've all seen them, right?

02:10:20.000 And, you know, you have to be aware.

02:10:25.000 And you have to understand your surroundings and how they're different from what you expect.

02:10:30.000 I mean, it's funny.

02:10:31.000 We mentioned the Peace Corps.

02:10:32.000 My father was a Peace Corps director in both Iran and India.

02:10:35.000 And he once showed me this memo that he sent to Washington just saying, send me more Mormons.

02:10:40.000 Because he said every single Mormon volunteer was fantastic.

02:10:44.000 And the big reason was they had already had that third culture experience, right?

02:10:48.000 They had gone off to, you know, Argentina or Italy or wherever to do the mission.

02:10:52.000 So they had like lived in a place where they were weird and had to learn the language and all that stuff.

02:10:57.000 So they were great volunteers.

02:10:59.000 Wow.

02:11:00.000 Yeah.

02:11:00.000 The craziest story about the Mormon is the Mormon's expansion into Mexico.

02:11:06.000 Yes.

02:11:06.000 And then the fact that there's still these families that have these compounds down in Mexico.

02:11:12.000 Oh, and there was that awful episode a couple years ago where some of them were murdered.

02:11:15.000 Oh, yeah, the Mexico story is.

02:11:17.000 And the Romney family, they had branches down there and all that.

02:11:21.000 It's so crazy.

02:11:22.000 Like back when it didn't matter if you lived in Mexico or the United States because everybody was on horseback, they were like, listen, we'll just go down here and we can have 50 wives.

02:11:32.000 I mean, the other thing for those of us- Let's party.

02:11:34.000 For those of us who are Jews, another sort of interesting aspect of the whole Mormon story is the Mormons tend to be Philo-Semites. 0.91

02:11:40.000 They love us, man.

02:11:42.000 They love Jews.

02:11:43.000 So the first Jewish governor in the United States- His name is Bamberger, and he's the governor of Utah.

02:11:50.000 And he was, you know, the inheritor of kind of the Bamberger, I think it was department stores.

02:11:55.000 You know about the guy who spent all the money to sequence the genome of Native Americans because he wanted to find out if they were the lost tribe of Israel, because that's in the Book of Mormon?

02:12:05.000 Do you know that?

02:12:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:07.000 And look, you know, a lot of it is bizarre, but it's also fascinating, right?

02:12:12.000 And it's funny, on the Jewish-Mormon thing, I mean, the other controversy that's come up in the past couple years, you know how the Mormons can sort of make anybody Mormon, like including well after they're dead.

02:12:21.000 Oh, really?

02:12:22.000 Oh, yeah.

02:12:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:23.000 And so at one point, a couple years ago, they declared that Anne Frank, you know, the Holocaust victim, was a Mormon.

02:12:29.000 And look, each to their own.

02:12:31.000 I mean, I can understand why plenty of my fellow Jews were offended by that.

02:12:35.000 My view was if that's what some Mormon dude wants to think, they can think it.

02:12:39.000 Well, they think they get their own planet when they die.

02:12:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:12:42.000 The whole astrology, like the whole system is totally fascinating.

02:12:47.000 And you can sort of, again, like Anne Frank, you can sort of graduate people into it.

02:12:52.000 How weird.

02:12:53.000 Yeah, but again, it's like...

02:12:56.000 Listen, it works for a lot of them, and they're very nice people, but it does leave them vulnerable.

02:13:01.000 I have a friend, and she left the Mormon church as an adult, and she found herself very susceptible to sort of like... 0.63

02:13:09.000 Healers and yogi type people and she goes, I think what it is is I was so accustomed to just believing in things that didn't necessarily make sense but allowing them to like, oh, okay.

02:13:24.000 She's so gullible.

02:13:26.000 But it was interesting seeing her as an adult trying to make sense of it as to what it was that was leading her to be so susceptible.

02:13:36.000 Yes, and I think for the Mormons, especially, as you were saying, because it's so American and so new, I think there are a lot of tensions between, let's just say, the believers and the historians, right?

02:13:47.000 Because, you know, once you start studying history of anything, it gets complicated, and it's not like what you thought.

02:13:53.000 And, you know, the Mormons were involved in, we think, several massacres of other human beings, including this place called Mountain Meadows. 0.78

02:14:00.000 And it's been very hard for people in the Mormon church, for some of the believers, to accept that.

02:14:05.000 So there's always going to be a tension between faith and history.

02:14:08.000 There almost has to be, I think. 0.93

02:14:11.000 Yeah, well, the thing about history, particularly like history before photographs, is there's a lot of fuckery. 0.88

02:14:19.000 Like, who knows? 0.73

02:14:20.000 History's written by the winners.

02:14:21.000 There's ambiguity.

02:14:22.000 But at the same time, you know, there's conquest.

02:14:28.000 I mean, that's what history is.

02:14:29.000 I mean, we went to Iceland a couple years ago, our family, and somebody there told us that as best we can tell, Iceland is the only place that was never colonized, in the sense that when the Vikings got there, There was literally no one there. 0.64

02:14:44.000 And then, by the way, after that, it became like a whole Game of Thrones shit, which is why Game of Thrones is filmed there.

02:14:49.000 I mean, there was a million conquerors after that, you know. 0.86

02:14:53.000 But when the first Vikings came there, there was nobody there.

02:14:56.000 And apparently, that's sweet genre.

02:14:57.000 Like, that's its own animal.

02:14:58.000 So think about that.

02:14:59.000 Every other place that people move to, there are other human beings there.

02:15:04.000 And that means they clash.

02:15:07.000 It's not the only thing they do.

02:15:08.000 They also mix.

02:15:10.000 But they clash.

02:15:11.000 And one team dominates the other one in some way.

02:15:16.000 That is the story of history.

02:15:18.000 And so once you start digging, you find that nobody's hands are clean.

02:15:27.000 Right?

02:15:27.000 You know, everyone was involved in some kind of act of conquest or domination, almost.

02:15:33.000 Right?

02:15:33.000 So, you know, one of the things that we now do in many elite campuses is, at the beginning of any event, we'll say, now let's remember that we're on Lenape land, right?

02:15:43.000 Or Choctaw land. 0.98

02:15:44.000 You've probably heard these, these sort of new Native American affirmations.

02:15:48.000 And look, I'm a historian.

02:15:50.000 I think it's great that people learn more about the Lenape's or the Choctaws.

02:15:53.000 But I'm also a little bit troubled by this ritual because it does seem to imply that, like, the Lenapees were just there from time immemorial living in some Edenic place instead of, like, conquering whoever it was that was there before the Lenapees.

02:16:07.000 And, of course, that's the native story.

02:16:09.000 They conquered each other.

02:16:11.000 They made tribes.

02:16:12.000 They made empires.

02:16:14.000 One team ruled, sometimes killed the other.

02:16:17.000 And again, I think there should be much more awareness of Native American history, and I think those affirmations are fine, but it would also be useful for us to think about, again, who was there before that team.

02:16:30.000 Yeah.

02:16:30.000 Right?

02:16:31.000 And, you know, those people were conquered, right?

02:16:34.000 They were victims, but they were also at some point conquerors.

02:16:38.000 And almost everybody was.

02:16:41.000 The world was a savage place back then.

02:16:44.000 Yes, it was.

02:16:45.000 It's just how people stayed alive. 0.99

02:16:48.000 You encountered strangers, you killed them. 0.95

02:16:50.000 Yeah.

02:16:51.000 I mean, when was it that when a boat showed up on your shores, it was a good thing?

02:16:56.000 Yeah.

02:16:56.000 I mean, when did that start?

02:16:58.000 I think much more recently than most of us appreciate.

02:17:02.000 For most of human history, when people just randomly showed up in a boat, it was a dangerous time.

02:17:08.000 Definitely.

02:17:08.000 They might be just there to trade, or they might be there to rape and pillage.

02:17:12.000 Yes, conquer you, right? 1.00

02:17:14.000 Yeah.

02:17:14.000 You know, enslave you.

02:17:16.000 Yeah.

02:17:17.000 Put you to work for their project.

02:17:20.000 Right.

02:17:20.000 Yeah, there's no telling.

02:17:23.000 You had to guess.

02:17:25.000 That's right.

02:17:27.000 That's right.

02:17:30.000 I'm fascinated by Native American history and I'm fascinated by how long they must have been living here in that manner before white people showed up and then white people show up and within a few years everyone's dead.

02:17:43.000 Right.

02:17:43.000 And obviously disease is the big reason for that.

02:17:46.000 You know, I think some people imagine that, you know, everyone died in wars and actually many more people died of disease.

02:17:53.000 Ninety percent died from disease.

02:17:55.000 Yeah.

02:17:56.000 I mean, there were certainly a lot of murders.

02:17:59.000 Yeah.

02:17:59.000 But they just had no...

02:18:01.000 I'm listening to this book on tape about Cortez and a lot of the Spanish explorers making it to Native America, or North America, rather, and one of the things they talk about is the Mayan Empire.

02:18:14.000 They have this detailed account of Mayans, and I was thinking, oh, they probably died off from disease, too.

02:18:21.000 I mean, that's probably what killed off the Mayan Empire, because they don't really know.

02:18:24.000 They're really not sure what happened to the Mayans.

02:18:28.000 If the Spaniards are describing their encounters with the Maya, for sure they gave them diseases, right? 1.00

02:18:36.000 They fucking killed everybody else. 0.99

02:18:38.000 I mean, their disease just swept through the Native Americans and there was millions and millions and millions of them all across the country. 1.00

02:18:46.000 Imagine this one, like Chichen Itza.

02:18:48.000 Imagine this one small area with this incredible civilization that had We evolved over who knows how long, built these amazing structures, and then gone.

02:19:00.000 The whole civilization abandoned.

02:19:02.000 No one there.

02:19:04.000 Disease, right?

02:19:06.000 Most likely.

02:19:07.000 I think that was a big part of it.

02:19:08.000 It has to be.

02:19:09.000 To the earlier point, the conquistadors did horrific things in that part of the world.

02:19:15.000 But of course, you know, the people in that part of the world did not horrific things to other people well before the conquistadors got there.

02:19:21.000 You know, I mean, you know, there were forms of human sacrifice in that part of the world.

02:19:25.000 Well, how about, what was the temple that they built?

02:19:27.000 I never can pronounce this correctly, but there was a temple that they, an Aztec temple that they built where at the completion of it, they had a ritual sacrifice where they killed something like 80,000 slaves.

02:19:40.000 Yeah.

02:19:41.000 I don't remember how to say it.

02:19:44.000 How do you say it?

02:19:46.000 Yeah, it begins with a T. Yeah.

02:19:51.000 Say that.

02:19:55.000 Something like that.

02:19:59.000 It's in Mexico City.

02:20:01.000 They don't have a pronunciation?

02:20:05.000 Yes.

02:20:06.000 Well, it was there for 695 years.

02:20:12.000 Wow.

02:20:12.000 Yeah.

02:20:13.000 So when they...

02:20:16.000 When they finished it, when they completed it, they killed everybody.

02:20:20.000 Like, they did it over a weekend.

02:20:22.000 Right. 1.00

02:20:22.000 Just a fucking full-on slaughter fest. 1.00

02:20:25.000 What is the number? 1.00

02:20:26.000 Does it say the number of people that were sacrificed?

02:20:28.000 Because it's something insane.

02:20:30.000 Where I told a friend of mine, he was like, that can't be true.

02:20:32.000 I'm like, let's read it.

02:20:34.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:20:34.000 And he's like, holy shit. 1.00

02:20:36.000 Right. 1.00

02:20:36.000 How long did that take? 1.00

02:20:37.000 Because they're doing it with swords.

02:20:39.000 Yeah. 0.96

02:20:40.000 So they're killing 80,000 people with swords.

02:20:42.000 Yeah.

02:20:43.000 And it's, you know, I mean, this is where things get interesting and complicated and political, right?

02:20:50.000 I mean, look, you know, the story that we told for most of our history in this country was that colonialism was a beneficent thing, right?

02:20:57.000 That was developed to basically civilized savages, right?

02:21:00.000 And that was flawed in a million different ways, and it's great that we've corrected it.

02:21:04.000 But, right, again, we shouldn't congratulate ourselves too quickly or imagine that we've got it right when we just reverse things and say, oh, you know, Columbus and everybody who came after them were just, you know, horrible, evil enslavers, and everybody that they encountered was some sort of innocent victim.

02:21:22.000 You know, that actually patronizes the people they encountered, I think, you know, who had their own complex societies with their own divisions, and yes, often their own brutalities.

02:21:33.000 But there's a politics to all of this.

02:21:35.000 There seems to be no historically utopian civilization that we can call upon to say, this group got it right.

02:21:43.000 Right?

02:21:44.000 It doesn't seem like there is.

02:21:47.000 Right, you know, except the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco.

02:21:51.000 We see what it is.

02:21:52.000 It's like all tribes and all civilizations are made out of people.

02:21:56.000 That's the problem.

02:21:58.000 You know?

02:21:59.000 Warts and all.

02:22:00.000 Yeah.

02:22:01.000 Humans.

02:22:01.000 Humans are weird, weirdly flawed, messy creatures.

02:22:04.000 Yeah.

02:22:05.000 And look, I mean, thank God for that, right?

02:22:08.000 I mean, that's what keeps things interesting.

02:22:09.000 Yes.

02:22:10.000 Well, for us, for us humans.

02:22:11.000 Yeah.

02:22:12.000 But once we become these Neuralink things, what does it say here?

02:22:15.000 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.

02:22:19.000 Yeah.

02:22:19.000 So a long weekend.

02:22:21.000 Ouch. 1.00

02:22:21.000 84,000 fucking people. 1.00

02:22:23.000 That is so crazy. 1.00

02:22:24.000 That is so crazy.

02:22:26.000 Yeah.

02:22:29.000 And so we should be able to find a way to critique what the conquistadors did and the way they overran these societies without nostalgizing or romanticizing what their societies were.

02:22:43.000 Just slaves.

02:22:44.000 Here it says, defeated soldiers were not killed on the battlefield, but captured and returned to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice.

02:22:50.000 The Aztec raiders were convinced that the end of the world was nigh and butchered thousands to appease the gods. 1.00

02:22:57.000 This was a culture obsessed with death.

02:22:59.000 They believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing.

02:23:02.000 When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated, and I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong, because I probably am, It was consecrated in 1487. The Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days.

02:23:14.000 Yeah.

02:23:15.000 Wow.

02:23:18.000 Jesus.

02:23:19.000 How do they keep those people standing still?

02:23:21.000 Yeah, God.

02:23:22.000 84,000.

02:23:23.000 You know, after a while, you think, that guy's tired.

02:23:25.000 When he picks that sword up, I'm going to jack him. 0.97

02:23:28.000 There's no way he's going to be able to kill 40,000 people in a day. 0.99

02:23:31.000 He has to be so tired. 0.87

02:23:33.000 1,000 people every hour with a three-hour break to take him.

02:23:37.000 A thousand people an hour is so many people.

02:23:42.000 There's 60 seconds in a minute.

02:23:44.000 There's 60 minutes in an hour. 1.00

02:23:46.000 How many fucking people you have to kill to kill a thousand an hour? 1.00

02:23:50.000 That's fast. 1.00

02:23:51.000 That's a lot of arrows.

02:23:52.000 I don't think they're using arrows, dude.

02:23:54.000 I know.

02:23:54.000 I was thinking of your thing from yesterday.

02:23:56.000 Your thong.

02:23:58.000 I think they just did it with swords.

02:24:00.000 But it's like, that's one fascinating thing, too, about ancient civilizations.

02:24:04.000 How many of them were obsessed with human ritual sacrifice to appease gods?

02:24:08.000 Because they were so terrified of dying that they felt like, maybe if we just killed this guy, maybe we'll keep living.

02:24:17.000 The gods will smile upon us.

02:24:19.000 Or like the Egyptians, they just imagined that there was a way for them to be immortal, right? 0.81

02:24:23.000 I mean, to live in some tomb or some other thing, you know?

02:24:26.000 What's interesting to me about the Greeks is that they didn't, right? 0.99

02:24:29.000 And that's why they revered the gods.

02:24:31.000 The gods were imperfect too, right?

02:24:33.000 And they had little jealousies and spats.

02:24:35.000 But here's what was not human about them.

02:24:38.000 They lived forever, right?

02:24:40.000 And the Greeks understood like our own greatest imperfection is in fact our mortality.

02:24:44.000 And what differentiated the gods wasn't, you know, that they threw thunderbolts or anything.

02:24:49.000 Really what differentiated them was that, you know, they just went on.

02:24:52.000 And we don't.

02:24:53.000 Yeah.

02:24:54.000 Yeah.

02:24:55.000 Have you ever heard of Brian Murorescu?

02:24:58.000 He's a scholar and an author of a book called The Immortality Key.

02:25:03.000 And he came on this podcast and explained his work that has now become, it's now a point of study at Harvard.

02:25:14.000 And what it is is he explored the history of the ritualized use of psychedelic drugs in ancient Greece.

02:25:22.000 Oh, wow.

02:25:23.000 Yeah.

02:25:25.000 How do you say it?

02:25:27.000 How do you say that word, the mysteries?

02:25:33.000 What is that word?

02:25:35.000 Like the Elysian field thing?

02:25:36.000 No, no, no.

02:25:39.000 Eleusis, right?

02:25:40.000 Eleusis?

02:25:41.000 Eleusinian mysteries?

02:25:42.000 Is that how you say it?

02:25:43.000 Yeah, I don't know.

02:25:45.000 They had these rituals, these ancient rituals in Greece that all of these scholars would go and participate in, and they wrote about them in these very romantic ways, and people were trying to figure out what the hell was...

02:25:55.000 How do you say it?

02:25:57.000 Eleusinian.

02:25:58.000 That's it.

02:25:58.000 So I did say it right.

02:25:59.000 Yeah.

02:26:01.000 It's right here.

02:26:02.000 It says this sanctuary in ancient Greece, the most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece.

02:26:08.000 And he proved by not just examining the contents of these, a lot of their wine and their beer.

02:26:18.000 Had been laced with psychedelics.

02:26:21.000 Like from mushrooms?

02:26:23.000 From different things.

02:26:25.000 And many of them from ergot. 0.57

02:26:27.000 So different forms, which is very similar to LSD. So they would add this stuff to their wine, and then they would have these incredible...

02:26:38.000 Ceremonial rituals and during these ceremonies they would learn things and then they were Discouraged from doing these things by the Roman Emperor and so they would they would then move their ceremonies he found them was in Spain I think,

02:26:55.000 I forget, but he tracked the exact same ritualistic and the same depictions of gods and the same pottery with the same psychedelic laced compounds that you could get.

02:27:10.000 They could get evidence of it and the molecules are still intact.

02:27:15.000 Yeah, amazing, amazing, amazing stuff.

02:27:17.000 I wonder if Sophocles was tripping when he wrote his plays.

02:27:20.000 I mean, that would explain Oedipus.

02:27:22.000 It would explain a lot of things.

02:27:24.000 But just the fact that ancient Greece was, I mean, it was the original source of democracy, right?

02:27:31.000 The original source of so much information that if you go to all the ancient wise people that we respect and revere, how many of them participated in this ritual in ancient Greece?

02:27:46.000 And it's really interesting because it was such a hub of thought.

02:27:50.000 Yes.

02:27:51.000 And such a hub of innovation in terms of societal structure and the way we treated people. 0.84

02:27:57.000 Oh, and I mean, obviously, one of the ways that they maintained democracy was by enslaving certain people to do the shit work, which was a model, actually, that people like Jefferson invoked quite literally. 0.97

02:28:09.000 They said, this is how the Greeks were able to make democracy, is they solve the problem of who's going to do the shit work. 0.99

02:28:15.000 Jesus. 0.99

02:28:16.000 Yeah.

02:28:17.000 That's what's so dark is that people have this ability to dehumanize other people.

02:28:20.000 Yes, they do.

02:28:21.000 And make people, like you were talking about Nepal, the structure where the shoemaker is the lowest form and a literal untouchable. 1.00

02:28:30.000 Yeah.

02:28:31.000 Like you're not allowed to touch them.

02:28:33.000 But look, it's not so foreign to us.

02:28:36.000 What's a whites-only water fountain except for that?

02:28:39.000 And I think sometimes we forget just how close we are chronologically to that.

02:28:44.000 My parents lived in the South for two years when my dad was doing his military service in the late 50s, and it was all that.

02:28:54.000 And my brother was born when all that was happening.

02:28:59.000 I went to the march on Washington in my stroller.

02:29:02.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:29:03.000 Yeah, there's a picture somewhere of me in my stroller.

02:29:05.000 I was sleeping.

02:29:06.000 But my parents went to the March on Washington.

02:29:07.000 That's pretty wild.

02:29:08.000 And you can tell it's the March on Washington.

02:29:10.000 I mean, because there's just a certain...

02:29:12.000 There's a look to the March on Washington.

02:29:14.000 Dude, you've been progressive from the womb.

02:29:16.000 Exactly.

02:29:16.000 You've got OG street cred in the progressive world.

02:29:20.000 But actually, Joe, I don't.

02:29:22.000 I mean, that's one of the reasons I wrote this book is, of course, you're right.

02:29:26.000 I'm a liberal Democrat.

02:29:27.000 But I see free speech as central to that.

02:29:30.000 And the real problem for me on campuses now is that free speech has been coded as conservative.

02:29:36.000 So you're right.

02:29:36.000 It is in my blood.

02:29:37.000 And, you know, come on.

02:29:38.000 I mean, I was in the Peace Corps.

02:29:40.000 I'm Jewish.

02:29:41.000 I have a PhD.

02:29:42.000 I'm like a cartoon of a liberal Democrat.

02:29:44.000 And if you went on to like, you know, Americans for Democratic Action, you took their little tests about what's a Democrat.

02:29:49.000 I mean, you know, pro-gun control, you know, anti-capital punishment, you know, right?

02:29:53.000 Right down the line, each and every one, except I'm a zealot about free speech.

02:29:57.000 And for a whole variety of unfortunate political reasons, that's now been coded as conservative.

02:30:02.000 So at the place I work, there are a lot of people, generally people that don't know me, they've just read things by me, that think I'm a Republican.

02:30:09.000 Wow.

02:30:10.000 And it just cracks me up because, like, why else would you be mouthing off about free speech?

02:30:14.000 Because that's a very conservative idea.

02:30:16.000 That basically lets white people engage in hate speech that hurts minorities. 0.86

02:30:20.000 Isn't that crazy? 0.99

02:30:21.000 It is crazy.

02:30:22.000 But that's where we are.

02:30:23.000 Imagine pigeonholing free speech into that definition.

02:30:29.000 Wow.

02:30:29.000 Well, that's the reason that Cigney Wilkinson, the cartoonist, and I wrote the book, is we wanted to look backwards to remind, really, our younger readers that, you know, Frederick Douglass and Suthi B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, they were all free speech zealots.

02:30:44.000 They had to be.

02:30:45.000 Do you think it's what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, that it's more convenient and there's such a temptation to just silence people that you disagree with?

02:30:57.000 That they've ignored the reality of discourse and that it's so important to work out who's right and it actually strengthens your position on things.

02:31:08.000 It doesn't harm your position and it actually brings more people to your side than it does push them away.

02:31:15.000 Yeah, it does.

02:31:15.000 I mean, bullying people is not a good way to convince them.

02:31:18.000 No.

02:31:19.000 Like, you can bring them to heel, right?

02:31:21.000 And you can get them to say certain words, like mantras.

02:31:24.000 Right.

02:31:25.000 But if you want to persuade them, bullying is not a good system.

02:31:28.000 No.

02:31:30.000 But, you know, it's interesting.

02:31:31.000 You mentioned discourse, and we want to stamp out things that we think are harmful.

02:31:37.000 I mean, I think that that's something else really important that's changed, I think, maybe in the past two decades, is...

02:31:43.000 You know, what I call a kind of psychologizing of politics, whereby if you say something I disagree with, it's not just that I disagree with it or I think it's wrong for the following reasons.

02:31:53.000 It's that you harm me.

02:31:55.000 You know, you microaggressed me.

02:31:57.000 You triggered me.

02:32:01.000 You hurt my soul.

02:32:02.000 Your speech is violence.

02:32:04.000 Exactly.

02:32:05.000 And I think that's a relatively recent vintage.

02:32:08.000 And just like lots of things, I think it has complicated origins and not entirely bad ones.

02:32:12.000 I think part of it comes from greater awareness of mental health.

02:32:15.000 Which I think is overall a plus.

02:32:18.000 But I would argue that this is a place where it's been a minus.

02:32:24.000 That is, the application of the psychological frame to these discussions has ultimately led us to a whole bunch of cul-de-sacs.

02:32:32.000 You know, I often say to my students, look, if you're microaggressed by something I say in class, you tell me you are. 1.00

02:32:38.000 I basically have one thing to say in response.

02:32:41.000 I'm sorry.

02:32:42.000 Like, I didn't want to offend you.

02:32:44.000 But I wouldn't have anything else to say.

02:32:46.000 I wouldn't say you weren't offended because I don't know that.

02:32:49.000 And I wouldn't say you weren't harmed because I can't look into your soul to say that.

02:32:52.000 I think I would just simply say it's not my intention.

02:32:55.000 Right, right, right.

02:32:55.000 But this is a lazy way to communicate.

02:32:58.000 Because you're always a victim and you're always looking to call people out for this and for that.

02:33:04.000 And also, I think, unfortunately, all this rhetoric feeds on itself and it teaches people to feel a certain way.

02:33:11.000 It teaches people to feel a certain harm.

02:33:13.000 And look, I'm not a sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me guy.

02:33:18.000 I think words do hurt, right?

02:33:20.000 But once you make hurt the barometer of what you're going to say and not say or allow and not allow, I mean, forget it.

02:33:28.000 There's also intent.

02:33:30.000 And words are supposed to convey intent.

02:33:32.000 And one of the problems is when you make more and more words, magic words that you can't say, you limit, you do two things.

02:33:41.000 One, you limit discourse because then you have less words that you're allowed to use to form your sentence.

02:33:48.000 And the English language is so nuanced.

02:33:50.000 Words can mean multiple things.

02:33:52.000 And then you're doing that and you're also empowering those words that you can't use.

02:33:57.000 So now when someone uses those words, like, Jesus, did he say that?

02:34:02.000 And the more we add to that pile, the more it gives people that are trying to hurt you weapons.

02:34:09.000 They have more rocks on their side now.

02:34:11.000 And it adds to the stigma, right?

02:34:13.000 And it adds to the sense of fear.

02:34:14.000 Lenny Bruce did a bit about that in the 1960s, remember?

02:34:18.000 And he'd go like, N-word, N-word, N-word, and then he'd say the S-word, and he'd say all these other things.

02:34:21.000 And he'd say, look, you know, if we just keep doing that enough, then the end of the riff was he said, like, no little black kid will come home crying from school because a white boy called him the N-word.

02:34:31.000 Yes.

02:34:31.000 I mean, that was sort of his takeaway.

02:34:33.000 Yes.

02:34:34.000 Like, as we have to try to just kind of deprive these words of their hurt, of their power.

02:34:40.000 And look, there are examples of that in recent history.

02:34:42.000 I mean, think about the term queer, right?

02:34:44.000 Right.

02:34:45.000 I mean, when I was a kid, queer was one of the worst things that you could call somebody, right?

02:34:50.000 And now there are queer studies departments in American universities, right?

02:34:53.000 Right.

02:34:53.000 Because the Lenny Bruce thing kind of worked.

02:34:56.000 Right.

02:34:56.000 Yeah.

02:34:56.000 Right?

02:34:57.000 You kept saying queer, queer, queer, queer, queer, and you gave it a different set of associations, and you defanged it.

02:35:05.000 Right.

02:35:06.000 Right?

02:35:06.000 That is interesting.

02:35:07.000 That's a good example of a word that's evolved and become an acceptable word.

02:35:12.000 Not only that, but like preferred.

02:35:15.000 Yeah.

02:35:15.000 And sometimes it doesn't even mean gay.

02:35:17.000 Yeah.

02:35:17.000 Right?

02:35:18.000 Like, that's where it gets real slippery.

02:35:19.000 It doesn't mean necessarily gay.

02:35:21.000 It means, like, I'm whatever.

02:35:23.000 I'm queer.

02:35:24.000 You know?

02:35:24.000 It's weird.

02:35:25.000 Right.

02:35:26.000 And look, you know, that's good, too.

02:35:28.000 I mean, it's good.

02:35:29.000 I think ambiguity is good.

02:35:30.000 I think we get into our worst places when, again, we're too certain.

02:35:34.000 Too binary. 0.95

02:35:35.000 You know?

02:35:36.000 And yes, it's going to mean different things to different people.

02:35:38.000 It's changing over time.

02:35:40.000 It meant something very different when I was a high school kid than it does today.

02:35:44.000 And that's the good stuff, I think.

02:35:46.000 Dude, we just need to read each other's minds.

02:35:50.000 Yeah, get back to that little Elon Musk thing we're going to insert.

02:35:53.000 Maybe.

02:35:54.000 Maybe that's what's going to get us out of this little game we're playing with language.

02:35:58.000 Because if people are doing that, they're looking to be offended, they're trying hard to be offended, trying to play a game.

02:36:05.000 Instead of trying to just rationally communicate with you, instead of trying to find out how you think and expressing themselves in a...

02:36:12.000 A very polite and maybe even a gentle way, right?

02:36:17.000 Instead of doing that, you're playing a game where you're trying to be offended, looking to be offended, looking to keep someone on the defensive.

02:36:23.000 It's annoying.

02:36:24.000 It's an annoying way to communicate and it becomes much like tennis is a game.

02:36:29.000 It becomes a game, right?

02:36:31.000 It becomes a game that people play verbally.

02:36:33.000 Right.

02:36:34.000 And a cul-de-sac is really what it is, I think, in the sense that it interrupts discussion.

02:36:39.000 You know, when I give this rap to my students about how problematic this whole, like, psychological frame is, they'll often say, like, you're denying our feelings.

02:36:48.000 And I say, no.

02:36:50.000 It's the opposite, actually.

02:36:52.000 I would never deny your feelings, and it's precisely the undeniability of your feelings that makes this such a poor venue for discussion.

02:37:00.000 Like, I can't tell you how you're feeling or how you should feel, right?

02:37:03.000 But what I can tell you is that when your feeling becomes a trump card, right?

02:37:07.000 We're not going to be able to communicate anymore.

02:37:10.000 Right.

02:37:10.000 You know, because, you know, words do offend.

02:37:14.000 They do, right?

02:37:16.000 And, you know, I don't go out of my way to offend people, but I know that because I'm a journalist and a historian, right, that sometimes I'm going to write or say things that will offend people.

02:37:27.000 I think that comes with the territory, you know?

02:37:31.000 And I think if what we decide is that we're never going to offend each other, we're actually never going to learn from each other.

02:37:38.000 Well, especially when you're dealing with people that have this broad range of sensitivities.

02:37:42.000 Like what would offend one person would never offend you.

02:37:45.000 And what would offend me would probably be like horrendous to someone else.

02:37:51.000 Yeah.

02:37:51.000 And look, you know, I mean, there's a story that begins our little book that is right on point involving Mary Beth Tinker, who was the 13-year-old who wore the armband to Warren Harding Middle School in Des Moines in 1965. Armband?

02:38:07.000 Yeah, a black armband to protest the Vietnam War.

02:38:10.000 And she was sent home.

02:38:13.000 And that later became the court case, Tinker v.

02:38:16.000 Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court said that Neither students nor teachers shed their free expression rights at the schoolhouse gate.

02:38:25.000 So she's a great symbol of, there she is, with her black armband.

02:38:31.000 Well, Mary Beth Tinker isn't that much older than I am.

02:38:34.000 You ever hang out with her?

02:38:36.000 He's a good friend.

02:38:37.000 Oh, it's a he now. 1.00

02:38:39.000 No, no, no.

02:38:39.000 She.

02:38:40.000 I thought you said he's a good friend.

02:38:41.000 No, no.

02:38:42.000 Just a terrific person.

02:38:46.000 Do they have peace signs?

02:38:48.000 That's her. 0.88

02:38:48.000 Yeah. 0.88

02:38:49.000 Anyway, she's become a friend and she came up to my class at Penn.

02:38:54.000 And she did her presentation.

02:38:55.000 By the way, she still has the armband, and she, like, puts it on students.

02:39:00.000 And, of course, I'm a historian.

02:39:01.000 I'm like, shouldn't that be in the National Archives?

02:39:04.000 Like, you're just carrying it around?

02:39:05.000 Like, do you also have a copy of the Declaration of Independence in your purse, you know?

02:39:09.000 But it's great, actually.

02:39:10.000 I mean, it's a great teaching tool, and Mary Beth is absolutely fabulous.

02:39:13.000 So she tells her story about getting sent home and, you know, eventually getting the ACLU to represent her and You know, becoming what she is, which is this kind of great symbol and also voice for free speech.

02:39:26.000 And the students take it in and they say, look, you know, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight, right?

02:39:32.000 You were fighting the war in Vietnam. 0.71

02:39:34.000 This Milo Yiannopoulos clown, like this Ann Coulter jokester, like this Ben Shapiro hoaxer, they just hurt people. 0.88

02:39:44.000 Why should we allow them to speak? 0.72

02:39:47.000 And she had a very, I think, important and pointed response.

02:39:51.000 She said, listen, at my middle school, there were kids who had fathers and brothers and uncles.

02:39:58.000 They were fighting and some of them dying in Southeast Asia.

02:40:02.000 You don't think they were hurt?

02:40:05.000 By this snot-nosed kid wearing this symbol saying that their loved one was risking their life for a lie?

02:40:13.000 You don't think that hurt them?

02:40:15.000 If that's what you think, you're not thinking.

02:40:18.000 Of course it hurt them.

02:40:19.000 So once that becomes your barometer, your measure of what's going to be allowed as speech, forget Mary Beth Tinker.

02:40:29.000 Forget anything, because words do hurt, right?

02:40:33.000 That, in part, was the point, right?

02:40:35.000 That was the point of the symbol, right?

02:40:38.000 Again, I'm not saying that Mary Beth intended to hurt anybody, because I can assure you that she didn't.

02:40:43.000 But what I'm saying is it effectively hurt people, right?

02:40:47.000 Because speech, especially challenging speech, does.

02:40:50.000 And the students, they took this in and they said, look, you know, free speech, it's just about who has power and who doesn't.

02:40:58.000 And the people with power, they love to talk about free speech because they've got power.

02:41:03.000 And Mary Beth Tinker is like, hold on, wait a minute.

02:41:06.000 I was a 13-year-old girl.

02:41:08.000 Speech was the only power I had.

02:41:12.000 And that's really our point here, right?

02:41:14.000 Is that, you know, when you start to restrict it in whatever way, formally and informally, right, even with the best of intentions, It's people without power, ultimately, that are going to suffer.

02:41:27.000 You know, it's people at the bottom that are going to get hurt, right?

02:41:32.000 Because they need speech more than anybody else.

02:41:36.000 Before the 1960s, students had no speech rights that the courts or the Constitution was willing to recognize.

02:41:42.000 So, you know, if a student said something in school that the teacher didn't like, they could just send them home.

02:41:48.000 You know?

02:41:50.000 And it's because of Mary Beth Tinker and the other kids who protested that now it's not like that, right?

02:41:56.000 And of course, we can debate the degree to which this should be allowed and should you be able to wear a Confederate flag on your t-shirt or, you know, an anti-abortion symbol.

02:42:05.000 And these are all important things to talk about.

02:42:07.000 But even the reason we're talking about them is because Mary Beth Tinker, who was 13, I think we need to hold on to free speech is...

02:42:33.000 We live in an unequal society like all societies are.

02:42:38.000 And we live in a society with all sorts of unfairness, all sorts of injustice like all societies have.

02:42:45.000 All right?

02:42:45.000 And if you want to do anything about that, you've got to let everyone talk.

02:42:50.000 That's the only way.

02:42:52.000 The only way to make anything better, to right anything wrong, to right any wrong, is to maintain our free speech.

02:43:02.000 Have you ever had a debate with someone who believes that de-platforming is a valid way to...

02:43:08.000 All the time.

02:43:08.000 What do they say?

02:43:10.000 Well, look, I mean, again, I think with the best of intentions, I don't like to question people's motives.

02:43:15.000 And I think the people on the deplatforming side, I think they believe what they believe for good reasons, right?

02:43:23.000 They want to protect certain populations at the school, especially minorities, from some pretty offensive and awful speech.

02:43:33.000 And I understand that.

02:43:35.000 And I respect it to a degree.

02:43:38.000 That is, I respect their goal.

02:43:40.000 But, you know, well, where to start?

02:43:43.000 I mean, A, like, who's going to be so offensive that our minority students can't hear him or her?

02:43:51.000 Who's going to make that call?

02:43:53.000 B, are you sure the minority students are going to be offended?

02:43:56.000 How do you know that?

02:43:57.000 C, aren't you condescending to them just a little if you assume that they can't handle this?

02:44:03.000 All right?

02:44:04.000 And D, even if it is offensive to them, how do you know they'll benefit by being insulated from it?

02:44:10.000 Like, can we find, like, a cognitive psychologist or, you know, anybody who does, like...

02:44:15.000 Behavior therapy, to tell us that the way to help somebody who is afraid or threatened by something is to insulate them from it, that's not how it works.

02:44:25.000 That makes things worse.

02:44:26.000 So, I mean, I know I'm throwing out a lot there, but I think there are many different objections to this.

02:44:31.000 And again, I want to be totally clear, like, I'm not questioning that the deplatforming people want to help.

02:44:37.000 I'm just questioning whether they do.

02:44:39.000 When I was in high school, Barney Frank came to our school and debated some conservative guy with an American flag on his lapel and I think I was probably like 14 or 15 years old and they brought us into this auditorium and Barney Frank just demolished this guy.

02:44:57.000 He was so, so much more clever and interesting and, you know, just made really good points.

02:45:04.000 And it was cool to watch because I got to see one guy's perspective that seemed to me to be...

02:45:13.000 What's a good way to put it? 0.96

02:45:16.000 It seemed like he was bullshitting.

02:45:20.000 But he was bullshitting in a weird, like, he was pretending the world is different than it is, and he was going to trick us kids in this way of saying it that was very, like, almost Hollywood movie-esque.

02:45:34.000 And Barney Frank just dismantled him.

02:45:37.000 And I remember sitting there going, wow, this is interesting, like, listening to these...

02:45:40.000 Like, this guy had his chance, and this guy has his chance.

02:45:44.000 And this guy's got better, more well-formed thoughts.

02:45:48.000 He's more articulate.

02:45:50.000 He's more clever.

02:45:51.000 And I like that guy better.

02:45:53.000 And it's like, that's what you need to see. 0.98

02:45:55.000 And this idea that everything needs to be an echo chamber is fucking crazy.

02:45:59.000 Because then you leave out... 0.94

02:46:01.000 The possibility of these moments where someone does get dismantled.

02:46:05.000 And this is what we said earlier.

02:46:07.000 The answer to bad speech is not deplatforming.

02:46:10.000 It's better speech.

02:46:12.000 So you don't need to take a guy like Milo out of the ecosphere. 0.98

02:46:16.000 You need to have someone debate him who's fucking good. 0.93

02:46:20.000 And you gotta go, hey man, we got a heavy hitter on this side. 1.00

02:46:23.000 We gotta bring somebody in that really knows their shit. 0.99

02:46:27.000 Ben Shapiro has made a career of trouncing people that were not as verbally skilled as him. 0.99

02:46:34.000 If you go and look at his YouTube page, He's fantastic at pointing out logical fallacies and a lot of these, like, really simple, utopian ideas that a lot of these kids bring to him.

02:46:48.000 And he points it out, and he's got a very fast way of talking, and you can't compete with him.

02:46:52.000 He's very articulate.

02:46:53.000 And when he does that, these kids just get battered.

02:46:56.000 I mean, there's, like, dozens and dozens of videos of him doing that.

02:46:59.000 And look, back to Milo and even Ben Shapiro, I mean, you also give these people a lot more power and oxygen when you try to shut them down.

02:47:06.000 And that's, I think, another theme in the history of free speech and censorship, right?

02:47:10.000 One of the great ways to give somebody a bigger microphone is to try to take it away.

02:47:14.000 And we've seen this over and over again.

02:47:16.000 I mean, the anti-slavery movement is a great example of that.

02:47:19.000 I mean, there were gag rules in Congress, like trying to prevent people from bringing in petitions that were anti-slavery petitions.

02:47:25.000 And John Quincy Adams became this huge national hero, by the way, after he was president, right?

02:47:30.000 When he was in Congress, and he was like our most distinguished ex-president ever.

02:47:34.000 He was sort of a leading abolitionist in Congress.

02:47:36.000 Precisely because he violated the gag rule, right?

02:47:39.000 You know, because the gag rule actually gave him more oxygen.

02:47:42.000 The point, the goal of the gag rule, as per the name, was to gag Adams.

02:47:47.000 It had the opposite effect.

02:47:49.000 And censorship almost always does.

02:47:52.000 It's also, there's so much censorship that's just so disingenuous, the reasoning behind it.

02:47:58.000 One of the things about Shapiro is they always call him alt-right.

02:48:02.000 No, he's not.

02:48:03.000 Not even remotely.

02:48:05.000 He's just conservative.

02:48:06.000 He just happens to be a conservative Jew.

02:48:08.000 And if you find out, if you look into it, he was one of the years when he was becoming famous, he was the biggest target for anti-Semitic hate online.

02:48:20.000 The biggest.

02:48:21.000 He can point to actual statistics of social media and show you the numbers.

02:48:27.000 He's not alt-right.

02:48:31.000 He's conservative.

02:48:33.000 If you don't agree with him, There's nothing wrong with disagreeing with him, but form a good argument.

02:48:41.000 Form a good argument.

02:48:42.000 The guy's a master speaker.

02:48:44.000 He's very good at speaking.

02:48:45.000 So get a master speaker on the left and let's do the Barney Frank thing.

02:48:51.000 Duke it out with him in the court of public opinion and let's see what's up.

02:48:55.000 And also, you know, don't try to muzzle him because eventually, A, it won't work, and B, you know, like, don't have so much hubris, right?

02:49:05.000 That's going to be used against you.

02:49:07.000 Like, it has been and it will be.

02:49:09.000 Well, it goes further and further left, what's actually considered hate speech. 0.99

02:49:15.000 Once you get rid of all the real right crazy psychos... 0.99

02:49:19.000 Right? 1.00

02:49:19.000 Then you start moving into, like, more conservative but, like, very reasonable people and, like, fuck them. 1.00

02:49:25.000 It's a moving target. 1.00

02:49:25.000 And then next thing you know, yeah. 1.00

02:49:27.000 It is a moving target.

02:49:28.000 And look, this is why the history piece is important, too.

02:49:30.000 I mean, I'm glad you mentioned Barney Frank.

02:49:31.000 I assume he was your representative at the time.

02:49:33.000 Yes.

02:49:34.000 I think he was.

02:49:35.000 I was a 14-year-old kid.

02:49:36.000 Yeah, he could have been elsewhere in the Boston area.

02:49:39.000 Anyway, Frank's a fascinating figure, important figure in the history of the Democratic Party, but also in the history of gay rights, right?

02:49:45.000 Because one of the first out national figures.

02:49:48.000 Well, I think the gay rights story is really important to this discussion, and here's why.

02:49:53.000 It won't surprise you that because being gay and gay activity was illegal, gay publications were illegal, too.

02:49:59.000 And they were widely censored across this country.

02:50:01.000 And the Supreme Court actually intervened in the 1950s and said that, like, some of these bodybuilding magazines that were popular among especially gay men were protected.

02:50:11.000 You could do them, right?

02:50:13.000 That was the trigger of the gay rights movement in this country.

02:50:18.000 Bodybuilding.

02:50:23.000 Those rulings and the fact that now it was legal for them to engage in this speech, right?

02:50:31.000 I mean, just think about the way all that activity is tabooed, right?

02:50:34.000 It's not surprising that those publications were hugely central in allowing people to connect in every sense, right?

02:50:40.000 Yeah.

02:50:40.000 And so that's a really good example, it seems to me, right, of why speech is so important because, you know, you take it away and then people who are stigmatized and people who are oppressed, right, they won't be able to connect.

02:50:53.000 They won't be able to do the things that they need to do to change this world.

02:50:57.000 Yeah.

02:50:58.000 And that's the gay rights story. 0.52

02:50:59.000 It's about their free speech.

02:51:01.000 Yeah.

02:51:02.000 Yeah, it really is.

02:51:03.000 And that moment, I don't think Barney was out then.

02:51:07.000 Yeah, probably not.

02:51:09.000 And he was competing.

02:51:10.000 Now I remember the guy on the other end was a member of the Moral Majority.

02:51:13.000 Yeah.

02:51:14.000 Do you remember them?

02:51:15.000 Oh, of course.

02:51:15.000 Yeah.

02:51:16.000 That guy was a representative.

02:51:18.000 I remember Barney Frank made fun of him for his American flag on his lapel.

02:51:23.000 Well, it was started by Terry Falwell, Terry Falwell Sr. Oh, was it really?

02:51:26.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:51:27.000 What year was that?

02:51:29.000 It was really, you know, late 70s, early 80s.

02:51:32.000 That was kind of the heyday.

02:51:33.000 And they were influential in helping Reagan get elected.

02:51:36.000 Wow.

02:51:37.000 Well, that was the first time that religion was really used in a political sense, right?

02:51:42.000 It was during the Reagan administration or the Reagan campaign.

02:51:44.000 Again, I wouldn't say the first time, but I would say that Reagan was very successful in weaponizing a certain sort of, you know...

02:51:50.000 Evangelical.

02:51:52.000 Evangelical conservative, right?

02:51:54.000 Let's remember, you know, Jimmy Carter's an evangelical conservative.

02:51:57.000 Right?

02:51:58.000 I'm sorry, he was an evangelical Christian, right?

02:52:01.000 And very openly so, but obviously he interpreted that politically in a different way.

02:52:06.000 Right, right.

02:52:06.000 Yeah.

02:52:08.000 Yeah, I think kids and all of us would be way better off if there was open and free debate and if they didn't pull fire alarms when people that they don't agree with started talking.

02:52:19.000 And it just seems so strange to me that that's controversial to say.

02:52:24.000 In 2021, it seems like there's a missing chunk of progress.

02:52:31.000 With this adoption of safe spaces and trigger warnings and all this shit that everybody thinks is just a part of the program now.

02:52:41.000 And, you know, I would say, actually, I think the worst outcome is the one that we can't really measure, which is just kind of the sort of the spirit of self-censorship that attaches to all this.

02:52:52.000 I mean, when you actually try to look at it and you see how many trigger warnings literally there have been, there haven't been that many.

02:52:58.000 It's just that what you're creating is, again, a spirit of censorship.

02:53:03.000 Like what you were talking about before with people being afraid to talk about affirmative action.

02:53:07.000 Exactly, exactly.

02:53:08.000 But, you know, to the point of trigger warnings, I mean, when I taught at NYU, I taught a very big, big lecture, big sweaty lecture class about the culture wars in American history, including many things we're talking about.

02:53:19.000 And we did a unit about pornography and pornography censorship and regulation and all that.

02:53:24.000 And as part of that unit, I showed a film actually by an NYU colleague called The Price of Pleasure, which is an anti-porn movie.

02:53:31.000 And one of the ways it tries to make its argument is like by including some awful, violent, misogynist clips.

02:53:38.000 And what I would do before I showed that movie is I would just describe in clinical detail what these clips were.

02:53:44.000 And just to tell the students...

02:53:46.000 Where were the clips from?

02:53:46.000 From what year?

02:53:46.000 They were from porn movies, from...

02:53:48.000 This would have been probably the early aughts, something like that.

02:53:53.000 And all sorts of terrible stuff.

02:53:55.000 And look, for all – and I would say to the students – Was that unusual back then, though, to have that kind of – like when did that kind of porn become normal?

02:54:04.000 Well, I think after the internet revolution.

02:54:06.000 I mean, you know, I would say...

02:54:07.000 So somewhere in the late 90s.

02:54:08.000 Yeah, yeah, or maybe even later than that because not everyone had, people didn't have as much access to the internet.

02:54:14.000 I mean, anyway, to the point of triggers, I mean, I would tell the students what it was in and I would say, like, I'm going to show the movie during these times, like, if you don't want to see that, you don't have to come to that, right?

02:54:25.000 And for all practical purposes, that was a trigger warning, right?

02:54:28.000 And I think in some instances that's legitimate.

02:54:31.000 The problem is, of course, is we get this concept creep where we now drag it over everything.

02:54:36.000 So people, I mean, there was an incident a few years ago where, like, kids demanded trigger warnings for bloody movie scenes in a course about horror movies.

02:54:46.000 Oh boy.

02:54:47.000 And I'm like, look, dude, I'm not a bloody movie scene guy either.

02:54:50.000 I get that part.

02:54:52.000 But what I don't get is selecting a course, an elective course, on horror movies, if bloody movie scenes aren't your jam.

02:55:01.000 That I don't get. 0.97

02:55:03.000 It is silly.

02:55:04.000 And there have been all sorts of things like that. 0.69

02:55:06.000 There have been people who have demanded trigger warnings for Downton Abbey.

02:55:09.000 Really? 0.99

02:55:10.000 Because there's bad shit that happens in Downed Abbey, right? 0.99

02:55:12.000 There's like sexual coercion and there's suicide and there's like, I mean, you know, there's like some ugly stuff. 0.99

02:55:17.000 Yeah, you don't get trigger warnings.

02:55:19.000 Just no, no.

02:55:20.000 But trigger warnings for those violent porn movies, that kind of makes sense because you're talking about something that's insanely disturbing.

02:55:26.000 And also, I wonder what happened there.

02:55:31.000 How did we go from, if you go to the ancient nudie films, it was all pretty straightforward.

02:55:37.000 There's men and women kissing and then eventually having sex, right? 0.73

02:55:41.000 And then you go into the 1980s, kind of the same thing.

02:55:44.000 When did the whole violent thing happen?

02:55:47.000 When did that take place?

02:55:49.000 Well, I do think that there were so-called snuff films.

02:55:51.000 There were violent movies.

02:55:52.000 There were snuff films, sure.

02:55:54.000 There absolutely were, including some very horrible things.

02:55:57.000 I think that if we had an evolutionary psychologist here, they would just say, look, it's pretty simple.

02:56:07.000 What happens is the internet creates a demand for variety.

02:56:13.000 Right?

02:56:15.000 Because it presents an infinite number of possibilities.

02:56:21.000 So in the pre-internet days, you can only produce so much material, and it probably has to appeal to a fairly wide spectrum.

02:56:34.000 Once the internet kicks in, you can slice and dice everything to ever narrow audiences.

02:56:44.000 I see what you're saying.

02:56:47.000 Specialists.

02:56:48.000 Exactly.

02:56:49.000 There are going to be people with all kinds of fetishes and all kinds of awful things and you can tailor your product to them.

02:56:58.000 Now, where does that fit in your opinion of free speech? 0.62

02:57:02.000 Well, look, I mean, you know, as an educator and as a parent, I'm troubled by the fact that lots of young men in this country are getting their sexual education from porn.

02:57:14.000 I'm troubled by that, and I'm glad it didn't exist when I was a kid.

02:57:19.000 I mean, to me, the interesting question isn't why 16-year-old boys watch porn.

02:57:24.000 It's why they don't do it, like, 24-7.

02:57:27.000 I mean, I think if it existed when I was a 16-year-old boy, I think I would have been very tempted to do that.

02:57:32.000 And I think it would have fucked me up in a whole number of ways.

02:57:35.000 But that's not a good argument for getting rid of it. 0.96

02:57:40.000 That's an argument for trying to promote a different kind of sexual education. 1.00

02:57:44.000 Right? 0.96

02:57:45.000 Porn is sex ed. 0.98

02:57:47.000 It's just bad sex ed. 0.98

02:57:49.000 You know, it's a way of socializing people, especially young men, to a certain kind of understanding of what sex is or should be.

02:57:59.000 And I think a lot of it is a very narrow and flawed understanding.

02:58:02.000 But the answer to that is not, okay, let's get rid of all the porn, right?

02:58:06.000 The answer to that is for institutions, especially educational institutions, to put forth a different model.

02:58:12.000 But what about when porn stretches off into violence?

02:58:16.000 And then, is that protected?

02:58:20.000 Well, look, I mean, some of it isn't, right?

02:58:22.000 I mean, just by law, right?

02:58:24.000 The stuff involving minors, for example, right?

02:58:26.000 I mean, that's against the law, and I think almost every reasonable person thinks that that's reasonable.

02:58:33.000 Look, Joe, no freedom is truly absolute.

02:58:38.000 No freedom, including free speech, right?

02:58:40.000 You can't call the White House and say that you're going to kill the president.

02:58:45.000 Too late.

02:58:47.000 Is that a restriction on your speech?

02:58:49.000 Well, of course it is.

02:58:50.000 And I think reasonable people think that's a reasonable restriction, right?

02:58:53.000 I can't say to one of my students, I really like that sweater that you're wearing, and if you wear it again, I'll give you an A. Right?

02:59:01.000 Is that a quote restriction on my speech?

02:59:03.000 Of course it is.

02:59:04.000 And by the way, one that I'm happy to abide by, right?

02:59:07.000 So, you know, there is no right of any kind that is absolute, right?

02:59:14.000 I think the only interesting question is, which are the kinds that actually should be restricted?

02:59:20.000 That's where the question lies.

02:59:22.000 That's what I'm saying.

02:59:24.000 Different people have different ideas of what should and shouldn't be okay.

02:59:28.000 They will.

02:59:29.000 And I guess my plea would be, let's have that discussion, right?

02:59:34.000 Let's have a free speech discussion about free speech, right?

02:59:39.000 That is free and unbridled, where the person who's making the plea for having all the porn be allowed is automatically vilified as a misogynist or a woman hater.

02:59:50.000 Although surely some of the consumers of that product are exactly that.

02:59:54.000 Let's actually have that discussion. 0.97

02:59:56.000 So, I mean, in some ways this goes back to Mary Beth Tinker because, you know, when the court ruled that she could wear this armband, the court did not say, you can say whatever the fuck you want in school at any time. 0.98

03:00:08.000 Because that would be mayhem, right? 0.98

03:00:10.000 You can't do it.

03:00:10.000 What they said is, if the school wants to restrict the speech, It has to show that there was a threat of material and substantial disruption to learning.

03:00:25.000 And by the way, in that particular case, in a school district of 18,000, seven kids wore armbands to school.

03:00:32.000 Wow.

03:00:33.000 And there was no...

03:00:39.000 I asked, okay, how many kids were wearing their arms?

03:00:42.000 They said seven.

03:00:43.000 And Marshall said, and what exactly were you afraid of?

03:00:46.000 And apparently then Marshall fell asleep, which in his later years he was known to do.

03:00:51.000 And Mary Beth, who was actually at the hearing, said that's when they knew they had won.

03:00:56.000 That's hilarious.

03:00:57.000 So, I mean, that's a good example, right?

03:00:59.000 You can't stand up in the middle of the class and say, you know, Mr. Jones is the N-word or the F-word, right?

03:01:06.000 You can't do that.

03:01:07.000 And we all understand that, right?

03:01:08.000 But you can wear an armband.

03:01:10.000 And the point is, if the school wants to restrict it, the onus has to be on the school, it has to be on the institution to show why this is necessary.

03:01:20.000 The kid doesn't have to make that plea.

03:01:23.000 The default position should be the kid is a citizen and, by the way, a future voter.

03:01:29.000 And like the court said, your rights don't disappear at the schoolhouse gate.

03:01:34.000 In fact, the school is where you're supposed to learn about those rights.

03:01:37.000 Right?

03:01:37.000 Now, this is not, by the way, a settled question.

03:01:40.000 And you may have read that the Supreme Court just yesterday was hearing a case about this.

03:01:45.000 It's in Mahoney, Pennsylvania, up near Joe Biden, a country near Scranton.

03:01:49.000 And this is one I think you would love, Joe.

03:01:51.000 And I'm surprised you even haven't had the cheerleader on this.

03:01:54.000 The cheerleader case is ringing a bell.

03:01:56.000 Here's what it is very briefly.

03:01:58.000 Fifteen-year-old kid, she tries out for the cheerleading team.

03:02:05.000 She's on the JV. She wants to get to varsity.

03:02:07.000 And she finds out on a Saturday that she wasn't elevated to varsity.

03:02:12.000 When she finds out, she's at a convenience store buying something.

03:02:16.000 She's, I think, with her mom.

03:02:17.000 She couldn't drive at the time.

03:02:19.000 And she Instagrams to her group chat, maybe 200 kids. 1.00

03:02:24.000 Fuck school, fuck cheerleading, fuck everything. 1.00

03:02:27.000 Okay? 1.00

03:02:28.000 And remember, this is just to the kids in her chat.

03:02:30.000 Right, right.

03:02:30.000 But there's another kid on the chat whose mom is like an assistant cheerleading coach.

03:02:35.000 Right.

03:02:36.000 And she shows it to the mom and takes a screenshot of it.

03:02:39.000 And the school, like, suspended her and said she could never be in cheerleading.

03:02:45.000 And there were other disciplinary things, too.

03:02:48.000 And this case has worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and it was heard just yesterday.

03:02:52.000 And, you know, the questions from the justices—I listened to some of them because you can do that now—they were exactly on this question. 0.97

03:02:59.000 They were now—remind me again, like, how this 15-year-old saying, fuck cheer, how is that going to disrupt what you do at school? 0.95

03:03:08.000 Oh, and by the way, do you really want to be monitoring all the chats of all the kids? 0.98

03:03:14.000 Right. 1.00

03:03:16.000 So short-sighted and stupid. 1.00

03:03:18.000 And that's how they're going to learn, like, what democracy is. 1.00

03:03:21.000 Like, you're going to be monitoring all their internet shit and saying if what, like, you know. 1.00

03:03:27.000 You're a tyrant. 1.00

03:03:28.000 It really is. 0.99

03:03:29.000 Yeah.

03:03:30.000 You know, and it'll be interesting to see how the court rules.

03:03:32.000 Because, again, no right is absolute.

03:03:34.000 And we can all imagine things that this kid could have done, even on her phone, in...

03:03:39.000 The convenience store that the school might reasonably sanction.

03:03:42.000 Like, let's suppose she had shared answers to a test that she wasn't supposed to have access to, right?

03:03:49.000 That would disrupt the pedagogical process, right?

03:03:52.000 And it would be reasonable, right, for the school to say, no, no, no, you can't do that, even though you weren't on school property.

03:03:58.000 Right.

03:03:58.000 She's just expressing herself to her friends.

03:04:00.000 And in fuck patois that every teenager uses, right? 0.99

03:04:04.000 I mean, you know, come on. 0.99

03:04:06.000 It's funny.

03:04:07.000 If I was the parent, I'd be like, ah.

03:04:10.000 Whoever that parent is that sent a screenshot, they should be forced to pay all the legal fees for all this.

03:04:15.000 I don't think this can happen.

03:04:16.000 And actually, you know, the school organizations, like the principal's organizations and the superintendent's organization, also the Biden's Department of Education, they rallied around the school.

03:04:26.000 They submitted briefs to allow the school to do this, and their argument is, look, there's all this terrible bullying going on on the net, which is true. 0.99

03:04:34.000 There's sometimes awful racist shit. 0.99

03:04:36.000 We've got to be able to sanction that. 0.99

03:04:38.000 And I think the response, the right response to that is, look, we have anti-harassment laws.

03:04:43.000 We already have those.

03:04:45.000 Right?

03:04:45.000 Yeah.

03:04:45.000 And you can use those carefully if you like.

03:04:49.000 We can't give you a blank check.

03:04:51.000 Right.

03:04:51.000 Like, that's not how America works or should work.

03:04:55.000 Like, we don't just walk around trying to regulate everybody's texts.

03:04:59.000 Especially kids.

03:05:00.000 Oh, come on. 0.87

03:05:01.000 I mean, they're just learning how to use these phones anyway.

03:05:04.000 This is a whole new thing over the last couple decades of kids being able to do this.

03:05:09.000 Exactly.

03:05:10.000 There's no real boundaries and real clear set way of using it correctly.

03:05:14.000 Especially in group chats. 0.99

03:05:16.000 People love saying crazy shit in group chats. 1.00

03:05:18.000 That's one of the funnest things. 1.00

03:05:19.000 Right?

03:05:20.000 Yeah.

03:05:21.000 Listen, man, we just went through three hours, believe it or not.

03:05:24.000 My goodness.

03:05:25.000 And thank you.

03:05:26.000 I really appreciate it.

03:05:27.000 Your book is available now, right?

03:05:29.000 Yeah. 0.62

03:05:29.000 Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn. 0.62

03:05:32.000 Jonathan Zimmerman.

03:05:34.000 And co-authored with Signe Wilkinson, who is, by the way, the first woman in American history to win the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning.

03:05:41.000 Oh, alright.

03:05:42.000 So there's cartoons in here.

03:05:43.000 Yes.

03:05:44.000 She is a giant.

03:05:45.000 I mean, a genius of the craft.

03:05:47.000 Well, listen, I really enjoyed talking to you.

03:05:49.000 Thank you very much.

03:05:50.000 It was really fun.

03:05:50.000 Thank you, Jim.

03:05:51.000 Thank you.

03:05:51.000 Alright.

03:05:52.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 30, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman

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