The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1783 - Ben Burgis

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

00:00:12.000 Cheers, sir.

00:00:13.000 Cheers.

00:00:15.000 Salud.

00:00:18.000 So this is for you.

00:00:20.000 Thank you so much.

00:00:21.000 It's got a little JRE label on the back of it.

00:00:24.000 This is your own in the side, this little thing.

00:00:27.000 Oh, yeah.

00:00:28.000 This is a part of a thing we did with Fight for the Forgotten, which is, I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a charity that my friend Justin Wren put together.

00:00:38.000 They built wells for people in the pygmy population in Uganda and in the Congo as well. 1.00

00:00:47.000 And so they did a thing with Buffalo Trace where we picked out one very specific batch and they literally gave us a barrel of whiskey.

00:00:57.000 So we have one giant bottle and then a bunch of these bottles to give out to guests.

00:01:02.000 So there you go.

00:01:03.000 Nice.

00:01:04.000 Man, this feels strange.

00:01:06.000 I've got to tell you, in the late 90s, I watched news radio all the time, so it feels weird having a drink with you.

00:01:14.000 It feels weird just being me.

00:01:20.000 It's weird for people to feel weird to meet me.

00:01:23.000 So that's odd too.

00:01:25.000 So your book speaks to my heart.

00:01:29.000 Did you bring a copy?

00:01:30.000 I did not.

00:01:31.000 You have a book with you.

00:01:32.000 No, I have a book with me.

00:01:33.000 This is a book by my friend Adolf Reed.

00:01:36.000 So it's about growing up in New Orleans under Jim Crow and kind of how The South and the country has changed and how it hasn't changed.

00:01:46.000 So this is good stuff.

00:01:48.000 Okay, cool.

00:01:48.000 Well, that's a good book, too.

00:01:49.000 But tell everybody about your book.

00:01:51.000 Yeah, so my book is called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, a critique of the contemporary left.

00:01:56.000 And I wrote that a while ago, so that was before we went through this surreal experience where during weeks that the United States and Russia have been closer to the brink of war than they have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

00:02:11.000 Somehow we've had weeks of news cycle about Joe Rogan.

00:02:14.000 I don't know how that happened.

00:02:17.000 Trevor Burrus Yeah, I'm a controversial character apparently.

00:02:19.000 Trevor Burrus Apparently, yeah.

00:02:20.000 And apparently those controversies are the most important thing in the world.

00:02:24.000 Trevor Burrus Well, the most important thing in the world in media is ratings.

00:02:30.000 And unfortunately, outrage is what sells.

00:02:33.000 And if you could be upset at something and so there's like a perfect storm with me.

00:02:38.000 First of all, it was questioning the COVID narrative.

00:02:42.000 And then it was having on doctors who also questioned the COVID narrative.

00:02:46.000 And then it was me getting COVID and recovering very quickly, but taking the wrong medication in their eyes.

00:02:51.000 And then it was, you know, like posting up the brought to you by Pfizer videos and like showing like these, these people like bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies.

00:03:01.000 And then It's all the other things.

00:03:04.000 It's like every clip that we talked about before the podcast, like every clip that I've ever said taken out of context and if you smoosh them all together how horrible it looks.

00:03:13.000 But it's not really that they think it's important. 0.98

00:03:19.000 They don't give a fuck what's important. 0.82

00:03:21.000 They're just trying to stay alive and they're trying to get as many views as possible and they're trying to escape what is this undeniable Yeah, 0.98

00:03:37.000 we were talking about this a little bit before we started and I think what's really – I mean whatever.

00:03:43.000 This is not like a mind-shatteringly original insight or whatever.

00:03:46.000 Lots of people have said this but I think what's really gone on is that the economic collapse of traditional media has meant – That the profit incentive now is just to cater to whoever you have left, right?

00:03:57.000 Yeah.

00:04:14.000 Yeah.

00:04:15.000 Yeah.

00:04:17.000 Yeah.

00:04:29.000 Are getting wrong, right?

00:04:31.000 So, in other words, like, I'm a socialist.

00:04:34.000 I'm a columnist for Jacobin Magazine.

00:04:37.000 Trevor Burrus Are you a straight-up socialist?

00:04:38.000 Are you a democratic socialist?

00:04:40.000 Because I know that you've been represented as a democratic socialist.

00:04:43.000 So, I mean, look, the reason I put democratic in there, right, which I do, but the reason I put democratic in there is because there are obviously countries that have existed that have called themselves socialists, that have You know,

00:04:58.000 not had things that I care about, like, you know, free speech and, you know, multi-party elections.

00:05:02.000 And so I certainly don't want to associate myself with that.

00:05:05.000 But, look, I mean, short term, I care very much about, you know, having, you know, socialized health care, about having, you know, like, tuition-free higher education so people can go to school without having to be in debt for,

00:05:20.000 like, decades, which is obscene.

00:05:23.000 I mean, that's ridiculous.

00:05:25.000 Yeah, I'm with you 100% on both those things. 0.60

00:05:26.000 And I do think that the level of inequality that we get from our current system is indefensible.

00:05:36.000 In other words, that if one person has more than another just because they chose to work harder...

00:05:44.000 Then that's one thing.

00:05:48.000 Person A wants to stay home and watch Netflix and person B wants to work for more hours.

00:05:55.000 Person B should get more money.

00:05:58.000 I am totally fine with that.

00:06:00.000 But what bothers me is when you have these massive inequalities that have huge effects in people's lives that are linked to things that aren't under their control.

00:06:08.000 And I think we have a lot of that too.

00:06:10.000 I would agree with you 100%.

00:06:12.000 My position on this, whenever people push back against the concept of socialism, or when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for president, I was saying that, look at all the things that are technically a socialist concept that we accept,

00:06:29.000 like the fire department.

00:06:31.000 Imagine if you had to have money to get your fire put out.

00:06:35.000 Like, we don't think that.

00:06:37.000 Like, if your house burns down, we call the fire department, they show up.

00:06:40.000 Our taxes fund the fire department.

00:06:43.000 That is essentially a socialist endeavor.

00:06:46.000 I mean, it's a socialist institution.

00:06:48.000 Yeah, it's taken outside of the market.

00:06:52.000 It's provided just as, like, a right that you should have just for being a person, right?

00:06:55.000 You shouldn't have to do anything special to get your house put out if it's on fire.

00:06:59.000 And you also shouldn't have to do anything special to get treatment if you're sick.

00:07:03.000 To go to college in the first place, it seems to me that a lot of people who don't think that there should be a higher minimum wage are the same people who will go turn around and say, oh, if they wanted to make more money, they should go back to school, but then they don't want to pay for that, right?

00:07:18.000 So which one is it, right?

00:07:20.000 Should they be paid more doing what they're doing, or should they go back to school?

00:07:24.000 Because if it's none of the above, then it sounds like you just don't think those people should have good lives, or at least you don't have a plan to help them have good lives.

00:07:32.000 What's fascinating to me, too, is when you look at public school versus public services like the fire department, fire department people get paid well.

00:07:42.000 It's a good job.

00:07:43.000 If you're a member of the fire department, I have friends that are in the fire department.

00:07:46.000 It's good benefits.

00:07:48.000 The hours are cool because you get to work like 24-hour shifts.

00:07:51.000 You sleep there.

00:07:52.000 You work there.

00:07:53.000 My friend Ray was a fireman for years.

00:07:57.000 He would say like he worked like a few days a week and then you know there were long shifts and they weren't always called to fires so sometimes they're just cooking and working out and hanging out around the firehouse but it's a great job it's it's like a a job that people look forward to getting it's it's difficult to get how come that's not the same thing with teachers like what what kind of a world do we live in where teachers don't get paid well i mean i'm not saying fire department people shouldn't be paid well of course they should be paid well They

00:08:27.000 should be paid great. 0.63

00:08:42.000 Like, oh, how come, you know, how come they get summers off or, you know, whatever, you know, or like, don't like that, you know, which, no, it's ridiculous. 1.00

00:08:49.000 It's so stupid. 0.98

00:08:50.000 And they don't, you know, and I guess what gets me is when people see someone like a unionized school teacher who has We're good to go. 1.00

00:09:28.000 But smaller class sizes are things that are – the conditions that they teach in are the same conditions that the kids are learning in.

00:09:37.000 So I think it actually benefits everybody.

00:09:39.000 I think that Finland is supposed to have the best public schools in the world by a lot of metrics, the best school system in the world.

00:09:48.000 They actually don't really have private schools in Finland.

00:09:53.000 It's very strong unions.

00:09:55.000 People are certainly getting a better deal as teachers there than they are here.

00:10:00.000 But so many people think the solution is to...

00:10:04.000 It's to privatize things.

00:10:07.000 That's the solution if there's no other options.

00:10:10.000 I mean, if you're a guy right now and you have a child and you have enough money to put them in a really good school that you have to pay for versus a really shitty school that you get for free, that makes sense.

00:10:21.000 Yeah, I don't blame anybody for making that decision as an individual.

00:10:24.000 But they shouldn't have to make that decision.

00:10:26.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:10:27.000 I think what we should have are excellent public schools so that everybody can just do that.

00:10:32.000 Imagine!

00:10:34.000 Imagine that that's controversial.

00:10:36.000 Literally, one of the most important things for the future of our society is raising children correctly and educating them.

00:10:44.000 By correctly, meaning giving them the opportunity to grow and pursue their interests and find out where they fit in life and have enthusiastic, well-paid teachers, not people that feel like they're being taken advantage of and fucked with and just exhausted all the time.

00:11:00.000 Well, it's weird, too, because a lot of the same people who are hostile to that will say when they're talking about, like, corporate CEOs, like, oh, you can't complain about how much they're paid because they have to be, you know, like, you have to have that as an incentive, or they're not going to give you their best work if they're not being paid,

00:11:16.000 you know, 500 times more, you know, than people who work there.

00:11:20.000 But it's like, wait a second, so why doesn't that logic go for, like, teachers or other public employees that, like, if If they're paid more, then you're going to get a better performance out of them.

00:11:29.000 Why is it only CEOs?

00:11:31.000 Well, we have a very distorted set of values when it comes to what's important.

00:11:36.000 And this is, again, not saying that fire department people are not important.

00:11:41.000 They're fucking hugely important, and I respect them very much.

00:11:43.000 And I'm glad they get paid well. 0.67

00:11:45.000 But I mean, it should be like that with all of what I would think of social services, services for the community that we would gladly pay for for taxes, fixing infrastructures, fixing roads.

00:11:58.000 The problem, I think, with a lot of people is they just don't trust government to handle the money well.

00:12:04.000 They think that you're going to get a lot of bureaucracy.

00:12:05.000 It's going to be bloated.

00:12:06.000 There's going to be a shitload of people that are working.

00:12:08.000 They're not going to resolve it.

00:12:10.000 And it's going to be sort of that...

00:12:11.000 Same situation where if you donate to charities and you find out that like 90% of the money goes to infrastructure and some of those shitty charities where so much money goes to the people that are working there that very little of it goes to the actual charity itself.

00:12:28.000 Of course, that's the private sector, too.

00:12:30.000 Yes, it is.

00:12:31.000 It is with everything.

00:12:32.000 I guess I would just say one thing about the bureaucracy thing, because I know that that's something that's an easy association in lots of people's minds, right?

00:12:39.000 That more government means more bureaucracy.

00:12:42.000 And if you're thinking about people who are petty gatekeepers, who are going to be able to approve or deny something, it's very natural to resent people like that.

00:12:51.000 Yeah.

00:12:51.000 But what I would say is that what situation is actually going to give bureaucrats more power?

00:12:58.000 Is it going to be if you have something like Medicare for All, for example, or just like how public schools already work, right?

00:13:06.000 The K-12, that like every kid...

00:13:08.000 It has to be educated.

00:13:10.000 You don't have to go through a special process.

00:13:12.000 So if it's universal programs, then you don't have what you have with means-tested programs, where there's somebody who's looking over your application and deciding whether or not you qualify and deciding which hoops you have to jump through.

00:13:26.000 And that really seems to me like where bureaucrats are really going to get most of their power.

00:13:32.000 And that's not to say, when I was saying that, I'm not saying that like...

00:13:35.000 There are no legitimate complaints about, like, any of the agencies that do these things.

00:13:40.000 Of course there are, right?

00:13:41.000 Of course.

00:13:41.000 But what I would ask, though, is what the options are, right?

00:13:46.000 Because if you privatize something, then you're still having decisions be made by decision-makers who you don't necessarily – like, might be very distant from you.

00:14:00.000 But the difference is, at least when it's public, then – Theoretically, you can at least elect the people who are overseeing it, whereas if something is subcontracted out to a private corporation, then that's not even true anymore.

00:14:17.000 There's another layer in between you as an ordinary person and control over this institution.

00:14:24.000 If the federal government does anything bad, then we can theoretically get rid of them, although I think there are a lot of very undemocratic things about America's political system that make it way harder to do that.

00:14:35.000 I mean, the fact that we've only got two political parties that are basically allowed to participate at all, the fact— Yeah, you could go on and on.

00:14:42.000 We could go on and on, right?

00:14:44.000 The money that's involved in getting these people elected.

00:14:46.000 Yeah, the money definitely, right?

00:14:48.000 Exorbitant amounts of money from special interest groups.

00:14:51.000 Yeah, no question, right?

00:14:52.000 So, like, I think we've got, like, a little bit of democracy there, not nearly as much as we should, right?

00:15:00.000 But, like, Jeff Bezos isn't up for election by anybody, right?

00:15:05.000 Like, he's just there, right?

00:15:07.000 So, like, if you have...

00:15:09.000 If, for example, you didn't have the public post office, it was just Amazon taking the Amazon trucks and that's it, then now you're talking about an institution that there's no democratic control over.

00:15:26.000 There's a little bit of indirect control in the case of the post office, which, by the way, I would point out that When conservatives talk about bureaucracy and inefficiency and stuff like that, they always bring that up.

00:15:40.000 But if you actually look at polls, 90% of Americans like the post office.

00:15:44.000 The post office is amazing. 0.99

00:15:46.000 They can get a fucking letter across the country for less than a dollar. 1.00

00:15:50.000 How crazy is that? 1.00

00:15:52.000 What does it cost for a stamp?

00:15:54.000 What's it at now?

00:15:55.000 Yeah, it's like, I know it's less than a dollar.

00:15:57.000 It's been a while since I actually, like, I think my wife usually buys the stuff.

00:16:01.000 I just email stuff. 0.98

00:16:02.000 I don't fucking mail shit anymore. 0.99

00:16:04.000 But the fact that you can take a letter from Austin to, like, rural Alaska... 1.00

00:16:09.000 For a buck.

00:16:10.000 For a buck is... 1.00

00:16:11.000 Fucking bonkers. 1.00

00:16:12.000 It's ridiculous and no private company would have the incentive to do that, right? 1.00

00:16:17.000 And I think that that's like one of the things that Bernie Sanders was talking about the two times he ran for president.

00:16:24.000 It's not one of the things that was played up the most.

00:16:28.000 Is postal banking, which is the idea that you could have basic banking services offered at the post office, which they actually do have in some Scandinavian countries.

00:16:39.000 Basic banking services like deposits and withdrawals and stuff like that?

00:16:43.000 Post office?

00:16:44.000 At the post office.

00:16:44.000 Why would you do that?

00:16:45.000 Which is because it's a public institution.

00:16:47.000 It already exists everywhere, right?

00:16:49.000 Their post office is all over the place.

00:16:51.000 So they would sort out money as well as mail?

00:16:54.000 What if the money goes to the wrong places?

00:16:55.000 I get mail from wrong people sometimes.

00:16:59.000 Well, the mail does sometimes go to the wrong places.

00:17:01.000 I would point out if you look at FedEx versus the post office, I don't actually think the failure rate is worse with the USPS. No, we have a problem with the UPS here.

00:17:16.000 Our fucking packages get stolen. 0.99

00:17:18.000 Yeah, and I... They just leave them here, and we're not here, and someone snatched it. 1.00

00:17:24.000 Yeah, well, I don't know if the alternative is they put the thing on the, you know... 0.99

00:17:30.000 Yeah, put the fucking thing on the door, man. 0.99

00:17:31.000 We'll come get it. 1.00

00:17:33.000 We've got a lazy UPS driver.

00:17:35.000 But you're subject...

00:17:36.000 Like, at home, I've got a great guy. 0.99

00:17:37.000 It's like you're subjected to whoever the fuck it is that's running that route. 0.99

00:17:42.000 Yeah, unfortunately. 0.99

00:17:43.000 No, fair enough, right?

00:17:44.000 But what I would just point out is this, that like right now there are a lot of people who for one reason or another can't get a bank account, right?

00:17:52.000 You know, that they have that – I mean the most like extreme case might be like somebody who's like homeless, you know, so they don't have an address.

00:18:00.000 But like even short of that, right, there are people who – For one reason or another, have trouble getting a bank account.

00:18:05.000 So you have all these parasitical check cashing businesses and stuff like that that prey on people like that.

00:18:13.000 And I think having some kind of public alternative would go a long way to helping with that issue.

00:18:19.000 There are countries that already exist.

00:18:21.000 So I think that in the short term, the stuff that makes sense to me is finding ways – where it makes sense, it might not always make sense – but finding ways that you can expand what's not just like you have to find some private corporation to do it for you,

00:18:40.000 but that can be within the sort of – You know, the public sphere.

00:18:47.000 And then, look, I mean, there are things that we'll probably always need, you know, private businesses for.

00:18:53.000 I'm under no illusions about that.

00:18:54.000 You know, if you don't want to have, like, the way grocery stores were in, like, the Soviet Union in 1985 or whatever, you know, you have to have...

00:19:03.000 You know, like, there are certain things, price signals and, you know, firm failure you probably do need to have.

00:19:08.000 But I do think, like, at the sort of outer edges of what I would like, that it would be good if it was a long-term goal to move towards having it be more of a norm that, you know, workers,

00:19:23.000 like, own, like, a lot of private businesses, you know?

00:19:27.000 If you look at the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, that has 80,000 worker members who own that.

00:19:35.000 You have an operating agreement, which is the equivalent of a union contract, but there's no separate boss to negotiate with.

00:19:45.000 You know, might not necessarily directly elect managers because there could be things that are like, you know, technical things that, you know, managers have to do that, like, you want that to be more of a traditional job application.

00:19:55.000 But you can at least elect the people who hire them.

00:19:58.000 And even if I could, like, you know, whatever, like a magical genie would just, like, somehow grant me, you know, that, like, all of my political preferences were satisfied in ways that I don't think they're going to be anytime soon, given all those problems with America's political system we talked about earlier.

00:20:13.000 But, like, Even if that happened, I don't think that every single business should have to be like that.

00:20:19.000 That if you hire a guy to do graphic design for your podcast for 10 hours a week or something, that they have to have voting rights in a cooperative.

00:20:28.000 That would be silly.

00:20:29.000 But I think we could move towards an economy where that was a much more common thing.

00:20:35.000 And I think that would be way better off because the way it is – In the kinds of corporations that dominate the economy right now, where you'll get Amazon workers who are sometimes working at the warehouse and then they have to have a second job at night,

00:20:54.000 and their boss literally has enough money off of that to buy his own spaceship.

00:20:59.000 That strikes me as a level of inequality that's really hard to justify by the principles that we kind of started with.

00:21:07.000 Trevor Burrus Well, what do they pay at Amazon?

00:21:09.000 Are they egregiously underpaid?

00:21:12.000 I don't think that they're egregiously underpaid by the standards of corporate America as a whole.

00:21:18.000 I think it is up to 15 now.

00:21:20.000 I'd have to check the exact numbers.

00:21:23.000 But what I would question is just this, though.

00:21:26.000 Right?

00:21:28.000 When you're dividing up, right, like the revenues that the whole company is making, then you say like there are lots of ways that if you are in a cooperative and people could vote on pay scales, there are lots of things you could do to convince somebody.

00:21:41.000 You mean like employees vote on pay scales?

00:21:43.000 Yeah, like if you have like a worker cooperative, right?

00:21:45.000 Right.

00:21:45.000 But the problem with that is a lot more workers than there are Jeff Bezos's.

00:21:49.000 And if they decide to say like, we should get most of the money.

00:21:53.000 Okay, but what do you think Jeff Bezos is doing?

00:21:57.000 Right now?

00:22:00.000 Coke.

00:22:01.000 He's doing coke and he's banging his girlfriend on a yacht.

00:22:04.000 He's living like a guy who's got $183 billion.

00:22:07.000 Going to space. 0.99

00:22:09.000 Yeah, going to space on a rocket ship that looks like a dick. 0.99

00:22:12.000 He's shooting a giant metal dick up into the heavens. 1.00

00:22:14.000 He's literally trying to fuck space. 1.00

00:22:17.000 Yeah, that's what he's doing. 0.99

00:22:18.000 That's what he's supposed to do when you make that kind of money.

00:22:20.000 My fascination with Jeff Bezos is his transformation from nerd to this muscle-looking guy.

00:22:26.000 He looks like a jiu-jitsu black belt.

00:22:28.000 He looks like a tank. 0.63

00:22:29.000 It's kind of crazy. 0.98

00:22:31.000 He used to have this very respectable, normal wife, and now he's got this bombshell girlfriend.

00:22:36.000 It's kind of hilarious.

00:22:38.000 I love it.

00:22:39.000 I love a good cliche.

00:22:40.000 I really do. 0.84

00:22:41.000 I love the fact they have to take down a bridge because he made a yacht that is so fucking big in order for it to get out of the place where they're making it. 0.99

00:22:50.000 They have to disassemble a fucking bridge. 0.97

00:22:53.000 And he's like, yeah, disassemble the bridge. 1.00

00:22:55.000 Fuck the fuck, man. 1.00

00:22:57.000 Why do you need a yacht so big? 1.00

00:23:00.000 What are you doing?

00:23:01.000 What are you doing?

00:23:02.000 He's just out of control.

00:23:03.000 But that's like – I feel like everyone that gets to that level of wealth seems to go out of control.

00:23:10.000 Yeah.

00:23:10.000 No, it definitely does.

00:23:12.000 It definitely does seem that way, right?

00:23:14.000 And then their kids in many cases start out of control because they grew up their entire lives like having this – Like, level of wealth that makes it easy to get anybody to do whatever you want them to do.

00:23:25.000 That's part of the problem.

00:23:26.000 The other part of the problem is there's no time to be with the kids. 0.99

00:23:30.000 So when you're working and you're the CEO of Amazon, I mean, the fucking hours that guy was putting in is probably insane. 0.98

00:23:37.000 He's probably working when he was working. 0.96

00:23:39.000 He's not the CEO anymore.

00:23:40.000 But he's probably working 16 hours a day. 0.99

00:23:42.000 How the fuck can you instill some sort of sense of normalcy in your children? 0.99

00:23:47.000 When you're never home. 0.99

00:23:48.000 It's not really possible.

00:23:50.000 And so then you compensate with gifts.

00:23:53.000 Yeah, now he's too busy, you know, snoring coke and going into space and all that stuff.

00:23:57.000 And banging his bombshell girlfriend.

00:23:59.000 Woo! 0.99

00:24:00.000 Yeah.

00:24:01.000 I feel what you're saying.

00:24:02.000 Do you think that...

00:24:04.000 Do you have hope?

00:24:07.000 There seems such a polarization in this country.

00:24:09.000 There's people that I completely disagree with on the right that are like, pull yourself up, bury bootstraps, all that stuff.

00:24:15.000 That is nonsense talk.

00:24:17.000 When people talk like that, I'm like, Jesus Christ, man.

00:24:19.000 Not everybody is starting from the same position.

00:24:21.000 It's a crazy disparity.

00:24:23.000 And until we address that as a society, until we look at These impoverished communities that have been impoverished for decades and decades and decades.

00:24:31.000 And if you really want to talk about where my real feelings of socialism lie, my feelings of socialism are there are communities and it's not just inner cities.

00:24:40.000 It's like Appalachia.

00:24:42.000 It's these coal mining towns. 0.99

00:24:44.000 We have to dump money into these places and help these folks. 1.00

00:24:48.000 Because if you don't, you're going to have people that come out of there and they're going to cost you exponentially more money and all the problems they create in their own lives and other people's lives, whether it's crime or whether it's drug addiction or whatever despair that comes out of these horrific starting points that these people are from.

00:25:07.000 That can be fixed.

00:25:08.000 And this is where I'm a bleeding heart.

00:25:10.000 Yeah, I mean, it can be fixed, but it sure hasn't been.

00:25:13.000 It hasn't been even addressed.

00:25:15.000 It's not even addressed. 0.98

00:25:16.000 There's no talk whatsoever about looking at communities like Baltimore and saying, hey, this has been fucked from the beginning. 0.97

00:25:24.000 Like, what do we do? 0.97

00:25:25.000 Like, look at the red line laws they instituted.

00:25:27.000 Look at the fact that the same...

00:25:29.000 What was his name?

00:25:30.000 Woods?

00:25:31.000 What was the cop that we had on?

00:25:34.000 Michael Woods.

00:25:35.000 He was a police officer in Baltimore.

00:25:38.000 Yeah.

00:25:39.000 And he was working there, and one of the things that he noticed was they found an arrest sheet from the 1970s, and it showed all of the same exact crimes that they're dealing with in the current time.

00:25:59.000 It's all in the same areas, and they were all happening.

00:26:03.000 The same thing was going on, all the different arrests for violence and drugs and all this different stuff.

00:26:08.000 And he was like, Jesus Christ, this is not...

00:26:10.000 And he felt this feeling like, I'm in a system that's broken.

00:26:15.000 You're not going to fix this. 0.88

00:26:16.000 You're just going to keep arresting people, and you keep having this systemic inequality in this area that's just been fucked for decades. 0.90

00:26:29.000 Yeah, no, absolutely.

00:26:30.000 I mean, I think that because by the time you're dealing with that on that level, you're treating symptoms.

00:26:35.000 The problem has already happened.

00:26:40.000 And don't get me wrong.

00:26:42.000 I know people commit crimes for all kinds of reasons.

00:26:44.000 I'm not saying it's all economic.

00:26:46.000 But also, I don't see a lot of kids in the suburbs joining gangs.

00:26:50.000 There is a reason for that.

00:26:53.000 The things that really drive up the violent crime rate are things that have a lot to do with poverty and inequality.

00:27:00.000 I think that if you You talked about Appalachia. 0.97

00:27:03.000 I mean, like, the Obama administration's, like, response to, like, all the coal, you know, like, the sort of misery caused by all the coal mines closing was to, you know, just kind of sprinkle the region with a few— Well, how about that learn-to-code bullshit? 0.96

00:27:15.000 Well, that's exactly it, right?

00:27:16.000 Because, like, they put up these technology training centers, so it's essentially telling people to learn to code because, like, yeah, if you're, like, a 50-year-old laid-off coal miner, you'll definitely get the coding job and preference over the 22-year-old kid— You know, who just graduated.

00:27:30.000 It's absurd.

00:27:31.000 And then, like, Trump came in and he said he was going to bring the jobs back, and there are fewer jobs there than ever, right?

00:27:37.000 I mean, I don't think any of these people are serious about helping working-class people either in places like Baltimore or in places like Appalachia.

00:27:47.000 Because, you know, I think the Democrats, increasingly the kind of liberalism that's dominant in the Democratic Party right now, I think isn't really about that.

00:27:55.000 I think that what it's really about is trying to have a more diverse ruling class.

00:28:02.000 I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but I really think a lot of it's just about that.

00:28:07.000 To the extent they're concerned with social justice, what they're concerned about is disparity.

00:28:12.000 That you have more black people than white people who are living in poverty and going through a criminal justice system and all this stuff.

00:28:20.000 And that's absolutely true.

00:28:21.000 Right?

00:28:22.000 And that is completely a result of the fact that up until the 1960s, we literally lived in an apartheid country.

00:28:28.000 That in much of the United States, we had Jim Crow laws on the books.

00:28:34.000 And I think the horrible racial history of the United States is the reason for that. 0.98

00:28:40.000 But what's the goal, right?

00:28:41.000 Is the goal, is what you count as justice having like exactly demographically correct proportions of every group living in poverty and all of that stuff? 0.93

00:28:52.000 It's ridiculous. 0.97

00:28:53.000 I was just going to say, like the Republicans are even worse, right? 0.96

00:28:56.000 I mean like Republicans, when they claim that they're like big populists now, it's like, well, what do you actually want to do?

00:29:00.000 Do you want Medicare for all?

00:29:02.000 Do you want – like they don't support any of that stuff.

00:29:04.000 Right.

00:29:04.000 Well, it's also the positions are weaponized, you know, and there's so much polarism.

00:29:09.000 I think it's very unhealthy to have two positions, a red position and a blue position, because people are so malleable.

00:29:17.000 They're so easily manipulated, and they want to be a part of a tribe.

00:29:20.000 And they'll just subscribe to these ideas, and then they take comfort in the fact there's other people that agree with them, and they get in these Facebook groups, and they just like, you know, talk about stuff that everyone else in their little echo chamber agrees with.

00:29:34.000 And they feel like the whole world should bend to their will.

00:29:37.000 It's a bizarre time.

00:29:39.000 Absolutely.

00:29:43.000 What we were talking about earlier about the fact that the collapse of traditional media means that everybody gets to curate their own little media.

00:29:52.000 That's a problem too, right?

00:29:53.000 It's so easy now to just expose yourself to absolutely nothing all the time except people who I agree with you because, yeah, if there are only a couple million people watching one of the traditional networks at any given night, then what's their profit incentive?

00:30:08.000 Their profit incentive is to relentlessly pander to whatever audience they have left.

00:30:16.000 You know, you scare old conservatives and, you know, whatever.

00:30:20.000 Like, the MSNBC has their own version, like we were talking about.

00:30:22.000 But I think that, like, this is why I try to, like, go out and do debates all the time, because, which, like, some people, and this is one of the things I talk about in the book, right?

00:30:31.000 Some people on the left don't like that, right?

00:30:32.000 They say that, like, if you're...

00:30:35.000 Trevor Burrus If you talk to a bad person basically, they'll say like, oh, you're platforming. 1.00

00:30:40.000 Trevor Burrus That's so stupid. 1.00

00:30:42.000 Trevor Burrus Which is a word I hate so much. 1.00

00:30:44.000 Trevor Burrus I get that more than anybody because people want to say that I'm like a fake liberal because I talk to conservatives and I'm friends with some conservatives. 1.00

00:30:55.000 Like, that is the dumbest fucking thing to ever... 0.99

00:30:57.000 We need to communicate with each other. 1.00

00:30:59.000 We're supposed to be in a community.

00:31:01.000 The community is the human race, first of all, and then the United States, second.

00:31:06.000 We're supposed to be a community.

00:31:08.000 And if there...

00:31:09.000 I have a lot of friends that have completely different perspectives than me.

00:31:13.000 I have a lot of friends that are like...

00:31:14.000 Very Christian.

00:31:15.000 I have friends that are very Muslim.

00:31:17.000 I have friends that have no religious affiliation whatsoever.

00:31:22.000 I have friends that are right-wing and left-wing, and I don't mind all those things.

00:31:28.000 As long as you're not a suppressive person, you're not suppressing people that have an opposite position, Or an opposite perspective?

00:31:34.000 Why not?

00:31:35.000 What are we doing here?

00:31:36.000 Aren't we just talking to each other?

00:31:38.000 Shouldn't we communicate with people?

00:31:40.000 But when I have people on, I'll get all this pushback.

00:31:45.000 Or someone like Ben Shapiro.

00:31:47.000 Ben Shapiro's a lovely guy.

00:31:49.000 Meet him.

00:31:50.000 Get to know him.

00:31:50.000 He's very nice.

00:31:52.000 I don't agree with him a lot.

00:31:53.000 A lot.

00:31:54.000 On a lot of stuff.

00:31:55.000 Yeah, I mean, look, if...

00:31:56.000 But I love the guy.

00:31:57.000 Sure.

00:31:58.000 I mean, look, if Ben Shapiro ever wanted to come on my show and argue with me, I would 100% do that.

00:32:03.000 I bet he'd do it.

00:32:04.000 Okay, well, you know...

00:32:05.000 But he talks really fast, you gotta be careful.

00:32:07.000 Because it's hard to keep up with him. 1.00

00:32:08.000 It's like his fucking brain is on a different RPM. Whenever I talk to him, I try to slow things down. 1.00

00:32:17.000 Slow down, youngster.

00:32:21.000 That's awesome.

00:32:22.000 But he's very enthusiastic.

00:32:23.000 Yeah, I don't agree with him on a lot of things, particularly on gay issues. 0.68

00:32:26.000 He thinks that gay folks, they should just not do it. 0.99

00:32:30.000 Which is ridiculous. 1.00

00:32:32.000 It's the strangest position. 0.97

00:32:34.000 I just don't understand that position.

00:32:35.000 So if you're gay, you have a moral obligation to just be celibate for your entire life? 0.95

00:32:40.000 No, you're supposed to actually engage in heterosexual sex. 0.99

00:32:45.000 Yeah. 0.92

00:32:45.000 Okay. 0.92

00:32:46.000 But what's amazing is that this is where it falls apart, right?

00:32:50.000 Because this is all based on ancient writing.

00:32:52.000 Yeah.

00:32:53.000 Because God said this.

00:32:54.000 Who said God said this? 1.00

00:32:56.000 Who are these fucking people? 1.00

00:32:57.000 And what else did they say God said? 1.00

00:32:59.000 Did they say anything about zombies?

00:33:01.000 Did they say anything about people coming back from the dead?

00:33:03.000 What did God say?

00:33:05.000 I mean, how much did they say that doesn't make sense?

00:33:08.000 Did they say anything about parting oceans?

00:33:10.000 Did anybody lead someone to a place and part a sea?

00:33:15.000 Because that doesn't seem real.

00:33:17.000 Maybe someone was lying.

00:33:18.000 Yeah, right.

00:33:19.000 That's like, yeah.

00:33:22.000 I mean, anybody who knows gay people, right?

00:33:25.000 I have gay friends that are like, you could never tell they're gay.

00:33:29.000 Because they don't, you know, they just seem like a man.

00:33:33.000 And then I have gay friends who are like, oh, no straight guy acts like that. 0.97

00:33:37.000 Yeah, they're like gay from space. 1.00

00:33:38.000 Yes! 1.00

00:33:39.000 Super gay! 0.99

00:33:40.000 When you meet a super gay person, first of all, they enjoy behaving that way. 0.99

00:33:45.000 That is how they like to talk. 0.57

00:33:48.000 Justin Martindale is a great example.

00:33:50.000 My friend Justin. 1.00

00:33:51.000 He's gay as fuck, but he's hilarious. 1.00

00:33:53.000 I mean, he's hilarious with it. 1.00

00:33:55.000 He's a joyful gay person.

00:33:56.000 You wouldn't get confused when you're around him.

00:33:59.000 You wouldn't say, what do you think this guy is? 0.98

00:34:01.000 Like, that guy's gay! 1.00

00:34:03.000 You know, but, like, that's how he is, man. 0.98

00:34:05.000 Yeah, that's how he is. 0.99

00:34:07.000 He's supposed to make a choice to have sex with women. 1.00

00:34:09.000 Like, fuck off. 1.00

00:34:10.000 Yeah, that sounds like a good deal for the woman, too. 1.00

00:34:12.000 Jesus.

00:34:13.000 Poor woman. 1.00

00:34:14.000 He's closing his eyes thinking about beards and shit. 1.00

00:34:18.000 It's so dumb. 1.00

00:34:19.000 Yeah, and I think—and also, I mean, we could talk, too, about, like, okay, so there's the party in the Red Sea stuff. 0.99

00:34:26.000 There's also the, like, slavery in the Bible, right?

00:34:29.000 Like, that's— Oh, God!

00:34:30.000 A ton of it.

00:34:32.000 You know, and then treating women as second-class citizens, condoning slavery. 0.98

00:34:35.000 There's a lot of murder in the Bible for disrespecting people. 1.00

00:34:40.000 Like, how about that one guy when the kids call them bald and they seek the fucking bears to kill all the kids? 1.00

00:34:46.000 Yeah, she bears. 1.00

00:34:46.000 The kids, they killed the bear. 1.00

00:34:48.000 The bears killed the kids because they called him a bald guy. 1.00

00:34:51.000 Like, what the fuck? 1.00

00:34:53.000 Coming from a bald person, let me tell you something. 1.00

00:34:55.000 That's an overreach. 0.99

00:34:59.000 That's a ridiculous—but it's this idea that— You don't think if, like, some kids teased you about that, they would deserve the death penalty? 0.98

00:35:04.000 No. 0.93

00:35:04.000 Listen, I think there's some things that are fascinating about religious traditions that I think they can act as a scaffolding for moral behavior. 0.93

00:35:12.000 And some of the, like, the kindest, nicest people I know are Christians.

00:35:15.000 Mm-hmm.

00:35:15.000 And I think that there's something about that sort of structure, that religious structure.

00:35:20.000 When I was younger, I was much more of what you would say like a traditional agnostic or atheist. 0.97

00:35:26.000 I thought it was dumb. 1.00

00:35:27.000 I thought the religion was dumb. 1.00

00:35:28.000 I don't think it's dumb anymore. 0.99

00:35:30.000 And I think it's greatly beneficial to some people.

00:35:33.000 And I think it does give them a structure.

00:35:35.000 Jordan Peterson said something that really made a lot of sense to me.

00:35:39.000 It's not whether or not I believe in God.

00:35:41.000 He goes, but if you live your life like God exists, you will have a higher quality of life.

00:35:46.000 And it's that if you live your life like you are a part of this enormous community of loving beings that are all connected to this higher power and that you have this moral obligation to be a good person,

00:36:03.000 And that there's great value and benefit in that and that there's a spiritual path to take of a righteous person who's really trying to do good in this world.

00:36:11.000 And I think for a lot of people, religion can act as a scaffolding to substantiate and enforce those kind of positive traits and positive paths of life.

00:36:24.000 And I think there's great benefit in that.

00:36:27.000 I think there's great good in that.

00:36:28.000 Yeah, I mean, look, I'm an atheist, but, you know, but I have tremendous respect for Christians who get what you just described out of it.

00:36:40.000 I have to say there are Christians who get very different things out of it, right?

00:36:43.000 You know, that they want to, like...

00:36:46.000 You know, ban abortion and make gay people go back in the closet and all that stuff, you know, but like, but look, I mean, I think like Cornel West, you know, I think that's a Christian I have immense respect for.

00:36:58.000 Have you ever met him?

00:36:59.000 No, no, I have.

00:37:01.000 He was on like, so I used to do a segment on the Michael Brooks show and I think he was on that at least at least once.

00:37:07.000 I miss that guy.

00:37:08.000 Yeah, he was great.

00:37:10.000 Yeah, he was.

00:37:10.000 He was one of my closest friends for the last couple years before he passed.

00:37:16.000 He was a funny dude too, man.

00:37:18.000 He was a very funny guy.

00:37:20.000 Good impressions?

00:37:21.000 The Nation of Islam, Obama, you know.

00:37:25.000 He was just a really thoughtful, interesting guy who knew a shitload about politics and about socialism.

00:37:33.000 And he was a really good guy to sort of defend these positions of democratic socialism too.

00:37:38.000 Because he didn't seem like a bad person.

00:37:41.000 And even in critiquing other people that disagreed with him, I felt like he did it for the most part pretty reasonably.

00:37:49.000 Yeah, well I think that one thing that he really got and I actually think he helped me to get in the years since I met him is that like a lot of people who agree with his position,

00:38:05.000 with my position don't Think nearly enough about what's going to be appealing to most ordinary people that they have.

00:38:13.000 Because if you're just...

00:38:15.000 Which is one of the reasons I wrote the book.

00:38:18.000 That stuff was starting to drive me crazy.

00:38:20.000 It seems like what a lot of people want to do is be part of an in-group and yell at everybody who isn't already on board with every single thing on a checklist.

00:38:32.000 And that's just not going to...

00:38:35.000 That's just not going to work.

00:38:36.000 If you actually care about this stuff.

00:38:38.000 If you think, yeah, I think that we have a grotesquely unequal society.

00:38:44.000 I think we need to have national healthcare.

00:38:47.000 We need to not fight all these wars around the world.

00:38:50.000 All of that stuff.

00:38:51.000 And you're actually talking about this stuff because you care about it.

00:38:53.000 Which, let's be honest, not everybody does.

00:38:55.000 Some people, politics is like a weird hobby for them.

00:38:58.000 But if you really care about that stuff, I mean,

00:39:15.000 it drives me crazy when I see people who want all the things that – You know, all the things that I want who are instead of trying to, you know, find ways that they can explain this to people who might like,

00:39:34.000 you know, agree with them on some things, disagree with them on some things, like a lot of people, like most people aren't like centrist in the way that the media means when they say centrist, right?

00:39:44.000 Which is like the, you know, whatever...

00:39:53.000 Yeah.

00:39:55.000 Yeah.

00:40:04.000 That they have to do.

00:40:05.000 So they might have political reactions to things.

00:40:07.000 They have political impulses.

00:40:09.000 But, like, they haven't necessarily thought through every single thing, you know, to— They probably don't have the time.

00:40:14.000 Yeah, of course they don't have the time.

00:40:15.000 If you want to get involved deeply into the weeds in politics, you're going to—it's a tremendous amount of hours for years and years and years just to get a base understanding of what's going on.

00:40:27.000 That's why it's so impressive when you talk to someone who really does know a lot about politics. 0.99

00:40:31.000 Whenever I talk to my friend Kyle Kalinske, whenever I talk to him about politics, that motherfucker knows a lot. 0.96

00:40:37.000 So when we had the End of the World podcast when it was the election this past year, when we brought him, I brought him, I go, you're the voice of reason. 0.98

00:40:46.000 You actually understand what's going on here.

00:40:48.000 I think?

00:40:49.000 I think?

00:41:07.000 He's like, this is what's going on.

00:41:08.000 There's a lot of the Republican folks are going to show up and they're going to vote in person.

00:41:12.000 And then the mail-in is going to be overwhelmingly Democratic.

00:41:16.000 And then he's probably going to lose a lot of numbers overnight.

00:41:19.000 And they're like, oh, we went to bed and he was ahead.

00:41:22.000 But then the mail-in...

00:41:24.000 Kyle Kalinske explained it, explained it all on the podcast, clearly called it.

00:41:30.000 And that's because that's a guy who's been really studying politics at a very comprehensive level for a long time.

00:41:39.000 And he can give you the real information about it.

00:41:43.000 Yeah.

00:41:43.000 And most people, like you said, they don't have the time.

00:41:46.000 I mean especially when you're in an increasingly precarious economy where lots of people like might have a couple of jobs and like drive an Uber on the side, you know, like just because they're trying to … How the fuck do you have time? 0.93

00:41:58.000 Yeah, of course.

00:41:59.000 Unless you're just listening to podcasts all the time and, you know, like really educational podcasts on politics.

00:42:05.000 And even then you're going to get a cursory sort of understanding of it.

00:42:09.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:42:10.000 So I mean I think that what you should really be when you approach people to try to convince them of the things that are important to you, like you shouldn't start from a place of do you have all the right positions and all of this stuff.

00:42:28.000 Right, right.

00:42:30.000 Because by definition, look, if everybody agreed with me about all this stuff, we'd be living in a very different country right now, right?

00:42:36.000 So I think that you need to assume...

00:42:40.000 The real question is, does somebody have...

00:42:57.000 I would like you to talk to him, though.

00:43:02.000 I think that would be an interesting conversation.

00:43:03.000 I've never heard him discuss money in terms of wealth and taxes.

00:43:08.000 I wonder what his position is on that.

00:43:10.000 I feel like there's a system that's in place that you would almost be negligent if you didn't take advantage of it.

00:43:18.000 If you're a guy who's making a lot of money and this is how you could pay X amount of taxes, and these are your deductions, and this is the law.

00:43:29.000 You follow the law to a T. And then the rest of it you can give out charitably if you choose to.

00:43:34.000 But I wonder what his position is on all that stuff, when you've got that kind of money.

00:43:40.000 Yeah, I mean, I think that my suspicion is that it starts to look very different, right?

00:43:45.000 Once you get all that cash, right?

00:43:47.000 Right.

00:43:48.000 You know, like, you're going to feel very—it's really hard to convince somebody that, like, who's benefiting that much from the way things are now.

00:43:57.000 Did you see the image of him at the New Year's party with his girlfriend?

00:44:00.000 No.

00:44:01.000 Jamie, help me out.

00:44:03.000 This is so important.

00:44:04.000 Because someone needs to superimpose this with an image of Jeff Bezos from, like, 1989. Like, what he looked like when he started Amazon versus what he looks like now.

00:44:17.000 I mean, when did he start Amazon?

00:44:18.000 It must have been the 90s, right?

00:44:19.000 Because it was an online book thing.

00:44:22.000 Yeah.

00:44:22.000 And he was like this kind of nerdy guy.

00:44:24.000 Now look at him.

00:44:25.000 And look at his girlfriend. 0.99

00:44:26.000 I mean, this is amazing. 1.00

00:44:28.000 He's got fucking... 0.99

00:44:30.000 The hard sunglasses. 1.00

00:44:32.000 In his defense, this was actually a party that was for...

00:44:38.000 It was like a disco theme party.

00:44:40.000 So you're supposed to dress like this.

00:44:42.000 So everybody dressed like that. 0.99

00:44:43.000 They all dressed silly. 0.96

00:44:44.000 It was a fun party. 0.96

00:44:46.000 So he had these glasses that were like heart-shaped lenses.

00:44:49.000 And he's got this bombshell girlfriend who's leaning on him.

00:44:51.000 I love it.

00:44:52.000 I love excess.

00:44:53.000 I love when people are preposterous.

00:44:56.000 Yeah.

00:44:57.000 I love it.

00:44:58.000 No, I mean, fair enough.

00:44:59.000 Like, and again, I don't blame anybody as an individual for like taking it like, like, look, if you're told here are the rules, right, that this is like, that everybody has to function in, like within reason, like if you're not like, You know,

00:45:14.000 doing some things that I do think, you know, Bezos has done, but, like, you know, but if, you know, but there are, like, you know, like, if you're not, like, busting unions and this and that, right, then, like, look.

00:45:23.000 Look at that!

00:45:24.000 Look at it!

00:45:25.000 How's it going?

00:45:26.000 They did it!

00:45:27.000 Someone did it!

00:45:31.000 Look at that. 0.99

00:45:32.000 That's fucking amazing. 0.99

00:45:34.000 That's amazing. 1.00

00:45:35.000 Work hard, folks, and you don't have to be a dork. 0.99

00:45:38.000 Imagine, shave your head, get a bombshell girlfriend. 0.99

00:45:42.000 I love it.

00:45:43.000 Happy days are here.

00:45:45.000 Let's go.

00:45:46.000 That guy's lived different lives.

00:45:48.000 He's lived billions of dollars.

00:45:51.000 Hundreds of billions.

00:45:52.000 Not hundreds of millions, sir.

00:45:53.000 Hundreds of billions.

00:45:55.000 That's outrageous.

00:45:56.000 Yeah, no.

00:45:56.000 I mean he's on track to be the first trillionaire, right?

00:45:58.000 That's what they're saying.

00:45:59.000 Oh, there's trillionaires out there. 0.76

00:46:01.000 Yeah.

00:46:01.000 OK. Are there?

00:46:02.000 Because I thought they were saying like in 2020 they were saying that like at the end of the – OK. No.

00:46:06.000 The trillionaires are all non-public.

00:46:09.000 See, if you think about like the royal families, like they don't have to disclose their wealth.

00:46:13.000 These people that have literally – They own countries.

00:46:19.000 We don't have to name the countries, but I know for a fact, because I have talked to people who are in fact billionaires, who are very wealthy business people that laugh, and they've told me the royal families in some of these countries are worth trillions of dollars, and they don't have to disclose it.

00:46:35.000 So when you get this public list of who the richest people in the world are, that's the richest people publicly.

00:46:41.000 They have to disclose it.

00:46:43.000 They're not oligarchs.

00:46:44.000 They're not people that are literally in charge of the oil, all the oil in a particular part of the world where billions of dollars are coming out every day.

00:46:53.000 Come on.

00:46:54.000 There's a shitload of money involved in that.

00:46:57.000 Yeah.

00:46:57.000 And I mean, the thing is, even if you're not like one of those people, right, like, you know, the non-public trillionaires, you know, from those countries that you're talking about, like, one thing that I think people often don't think about enough when they think about stuff like this is,

00:47:13.000 okay, if you have a system where you're going to get, like, wealth gaps that extreme, right, you know, that you can have people who are trillionaires maybe or who at least have hundreds of billions of dollars Then you're just not going to have political democracy the way that we should have it because the idea that everybody's going to have the same amount of influence on the government is just ridiculous once you get to that level.

00:47:39.000 Because if you work at an Amazon warehouse and you want to call your congressman, you'll be lucky if you have a conversation with an intern.

00:47:46.000 But Jeff Bezos can make a phone call to Biden.

00:47:48.000 Yeah, no, absolutely.

00:47:50.000 And Biden would take the call, right?

00:47:52.000 Because if he told him, right?

00:47:54.000 Listen, bro, take a couple extra Advil and let's have a conversation.

00:47:58.000 I need you to be awake for this one.

00:48:00.000 Yeah, which you might have to for Biden.

00:48:03.000 What happened to the left where somewhere along the line, to get back to your book and the subject we started with, what happened to the left where they are willing to...

00:48:14.000 There's something that happened where they became the side that accepts censorship and even promotes it.

00:48:24.000 And my thought is that something morphed during the time where social media became...

00:48:33.000 It became a tool of a lot of right-wing people.

00:48:37.000 And this is actually, like, pre-Trump, but was certainly accentuated during the Trump administration.

00:48:44.000 It's like people had a chance to anonymously say things through social media that maybe they wouldn't say around the office because, like, say if you have, like, ten people in your office and nine of them are Democrats and you are a Republican.

00:48:59.000 You really have to keep your mouth shut.

00:49:01.000 But when you get on Twitter, you can talk all kinds of crazy shit, or Reddit or whatever, and then all the other people that agree with you, they get attracted to you, and then you form these echo chambers, and then some of them are very aggressive in sort of pushing these ideas out. 0.98

00:49:20.000 And we saw that a lot with like Milo Yiannopoulos, and there was a lot of like these like Very influential online right-wing people that were, you know, they had like cheers from the fans and they had like these throngs of supporters and they silenced those guys. 0.60

00:49:37.000 They pulled those guys off social media and they found out that it was effective to do that.

00:49:41.000 And then it became a thing that they got really into.

00:49:44.000 Where they're into silencing, dissenting opinions, and it's gone so far that they're doing it to left-wing people that step even remotely outside the bounds of the orthodoxy, remotely outside the bounds of what they consider to be the rigid maintaining of this ideology.

00:50:05.000 They step outside of that, they silence people, and they're pulling videos down left and right off of Instagram and TikTok.

00:50:13.000 And Twitter, in some ways, Twitter's less censorship-oriented, even though people think of Twitter as being a very censored place.

00:50:20.000 It's one of the more lenient online platforms. 0.99

00:50:24.000 But what the fuck happened? 0.96

00:50:25.000 Yeah, I mean the Milo case is interesting actually because I think that – I mean I understand that like he got kicked off of Twitter and that was definitely part of it. 0.99

00:50:34.000 But like he was still riding pretty high after that happened.

00:50:37.000 Like I think that in Milo's case – and this is what – when I kind of try to tell people that like the ways that like some people on the left like want to like deal with figures like this, like forget morality for a second.

00:50:50.000 They're just not going to work, right?

00:50:51.000 So like here's what I mean by that, right?

00:50:53.000 That like – But Milo's career was built on people trying to stop him and heckle him and stop him from speaking and all that stuff.

00:51:04.000 My view on that guy is that honestly he wouldn't be that interesting if he just showed up on a college campus and just talked and nobody interrupted him.

00:51:13.000 But, like, that was why, like, because he was like, oh, he's, like, speaking edgy forbidden truths.

00:51:18.000 And, like, you know, it was the dangerous ideas to her.

00:51:21.000 That's what it was called.

00:51:22.000 Like, I think where Milo really got dropped, like, where Milo, like, was really ended, right?

00:51:27.000 And I'm not saying there aren't other cases that are more like what you're talking about.

00:51:30.000 But it seems to me that where Milo was really ended...

00:51:32.000 Was when the right dropped him after the age of consent stuff.

00:51:35.000 Like he was going to speak at CPAC and they canceled that.

00:51:38.000 His book deal got dropped.

00:51:40.000 Trevor Burrus But it wasn't just the right dropping him.

00:51:42.000 I mean that was across the board people dropped him.

00:51:45.000 Well, I mean everybody else had always hated him, right?

00:51:47.000 But then like after that happened, right?

00:51:49.000 But that was just a thing where it felt like it was so unacceptable to so many people that it's very rare that one idea becomes a thing that completely stops all the momentum that someone had.

00:52:06.000 He was a very popular cultural figure and then he vanished.

00:52:10.000 He has essentially been not just deplatformed but removed from the cultural conversation.

00:52:15.000 Yeah.

00:52:16.000 I mean, like a week before that happened, he was on Bill Maher, right?

00:52:19.000 I know.

00:52:20.000 Isn't that wild?

00:52:20.000 Yeah.

00:52:21.000 And Bill Maher was praising him and comparing him to Christopher Hitchens.

00:52:24.000 Christopher Hitchens, yeah, which I do not think Milo Yiannopoulos deserves.

00:52:27.000 But yeah, look, I think that there are a couple things going on there with censorship.

00:52:37.000 I mean, I would push back a little on the idea...

00:52:40.000 You know, that the right isn't, like, plenty pro-censorship in lots of ways?

00:52:44.000 Like, I think they...

00:52:45.000 No, I wouldn't say that.

00:52:46.000 Okay, well, so we disagree on...

00:52:48.000 No, I think that people politically like to silence their opposing, or their opposition.

00:52:54.000 When someone opposes their opposition, I think they like to do that.

00:52:56.000 What I think is, like, the left has traditionally been the ACLU, which those Jewish lawyers...

00:53:04.000 Supported the idea of Nazis being allowed to say whatever they want, because they said that the counter to that, the opposite of that, is the suppressing speech, and it's a terrible, dangerous road to go down.

00:53:15.000 And the answer to bad ideas is not silencing those ideas.

00:53:19.000 It's better ideas.

00:53:20.000 That's my position, and that's an old-school liberal position, but that doesn't exist that much in the left wing of today.

00:53:27.000 Yeah, I mean, that's 100% my position.

00:53:29.000 I think that it's really dangerous that A lot of people, even though most of the stuff you're talking about is driven more by mainstream liberals, that it's not like people running these insanely profitable social media companies.

00:53:48.000 It's not like they want all the stuff I want.

00:53:49.000 But I see way too many people on the left going along with it, and I think it's super short-sighted.

00:53:56.000 How did it happen, though?

00:53:58.000 Do you think it happened by what I'm saying that like they found it was effective for silencing people they felt was problematic so they just adopted these ideas and then they sort of shifted their ethics?

00:54:09.000 I think there's some of that.

00:54:11.000 I think that a lot of it is that a lot of people feel powerless to change the world in any way that actually matters and so they end up Getting sucked into these, like, culture war distractions about who said what in 1995 that we can,

00:54:28.000 like, get mad at them about.

00:54:30.000 You know, whatever, like, just whatever, like, weird nonsense people are arguing about this week, right?

00:54:36.000 The green M&M, you know?

00:54:37.000 And, like, some of this stuff is part of that, right?

00:54:39.000 Like, they have a...

00:54:40.000 That, like, if you don't, like, if you can't actually, you know, change the world, like, create a more equal society or whatever, you can at least get somebody fired.

00:54:48.000 You can at least get somebody kicked off, and then you felt like you've won something.

00:54:51.000 And I think that that's, again, I think it's incredibly dangerous because, like, people who want, for example, you know, Spotify to kick you off, you know, there's a move-on, you know, petition, you know, for them to do that, that, like...

00:55:06.000 What I always want to say is even though – and the thing that really gets me about the calls for censorship is, OK, I think there are principled reasons that free speech is important and we should have open debates about controversial ideas.

00:55:21.000 I think there are ways that we have a better society if we do that.

00:55:26.000 I think it's crazy that anybody who basically agrees with me about politics would support increased corporate censorship, right?

00:55:36.000 Because if you have, like, some social media company, right?

00:55:41.000 You know, that's going to be – like, they're going to have some CEO who's partying like Bezos in that picture.

00:55:48.000 Are they – You know, whose side are they going to take when there are future things where people say that something is misinformation?

00:55:57.000 Right.

00:55:57.000 Exactly.

00:55:58.000 Exactly.

00:55:59.000 And by what definition is it misinformation?

00:56:01.000 Because the problem is that every political argument is to some extent an argument about facts, right?

00:56:11.000 Even though my position was, you know, as like a college, like anti-war activist was that even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, it would still be against the war because, you know, I think the rationale still wouldn't have made sense to me.

00:56:23.000 But like that was like part of what people were arguing about was whether there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

00:56:30.000 And look, if you had social media companies in 2002 in the way that you do now and they had misinformation policies, who would be more likely to get bounds for misinformation?

00:56:40.000 People who said – who agreed with the government, agreed with the New York Times, that there were WMDs or people who thought that like Bush administration officials were conspiring to lie to the public?

00:56:51.000 I think that if there's something that comes out tomorrow about some horrible labor practice at Amazon, who are these companies more likely to side with?

00:57:03.000 People who say, yeah, they did this thing, right?

00:57:06.000 Or the company saying, no, it's a lie.

00:57:09.000 It's misinformation.

00:57:11.000 I think the issue with free speech is always – Who gets to decide?

00:57:19.000 Look, this is the same reason I don't like the CRT laws either because I don't like the idea that there are going to be people who are second guessing what happened in some classroom to say,

00:57:37.000 Was this too close to one of these ideas that we don't like?

00:57:42.000 Did you talk to your students about something that flew a little bit too close to the sun of CRT? By CRT, you're talking about critical race theory.

00:57:54.000 Yeah.

00:57:55.000 And I think that like actual critical race theory, there are parts I agree with.

00:57:58.000 There are parts that I disagree with.

00:57:59.000 But I don't want to live in a – I want to live in the kind of society where when there's like some controversial idea that's out there, you know, like that like people can talk about it and debate about it and like if you can, you know, like you could discuss it with students in a classroom.

00:58:15.000 Like I think ideally the way that education should work, it should foster critical thinking like instead of like this is exactly what you should think.

00:58:22.000 For sure.

00:58:25.000 You know, to think about it more clearly and to argue about it and to, you know, and to decide what they think, right?

00:58:33.000 You know, like, ultimately, if you want people to be citizens in a democracy, right, to the extent that we have one of those, like, that's what you want.

00:58:40.000 Like, that's how you want them to grow up, I hope.

00:58:44.000 Yeah, absolutely.

00:58:45.000 You want discussion.

00:58:46.000 The way you sort out, if you're an observer, the way you sort out who has the better argument is to watch them discuss.

00:58:53.000 You remember the Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley speeches, which is a great documentary.

00:58:59.000 What is it called?

00:59:00.000 Best of Enemies.

00:59:01.000 It's a fantastic documentary where it shows that this is the difference in our culture today versus then.

00:59:08.000 These guys, I believe it was on ABC, these guys had this like really highly rated debate series.

00:59:14.000 I think they did like, how many of them did they do?

00:59:17.000 Six of them or something like that?

00:59:18.000 I don't remember how many, but they did a few, yeah.

00:59:20.000 They did quite a few.

00:59:20.000 So they were going back and forth and William F. Buckley was a famous conservative.

00:59:25.000 Gore Vidal was a famous liberal.

00:59:27.000 And they had these fascinating discussions and they did them on national television.

00:59:33.000 And they became this point of discussion through the entire country and the world, where people sat down and some people took Buckley's side, some people took Gore Vidal's side.

00:59:45.000 And this is how we sort things out.

00:59:48.000 We don't sort things out by silencing people.

00:59:51.000 We don't sort things out by saying you have an unacceptable position because it doesn't fit in with what I'm saying or it causes this or that.

00:59:59.000 It's a dangerous way to set a precedent because you're filtering ideas.

01:00:08.000 You're filtering ideas through your own standards.

01:00:10.000 And I don't think that's good.

01:00:11.000 Because I think it's bad for you, too.

01:00:15.000 It's bad for your ideas. 0.99

01:00:16.000 Because if your ideas can't stand the vetting of an opposing position, then your ideas might suck. 0.92

01:00:23.000 And you maybe should look at them. 0.92

01:00:25.000 Maybe you're lazy and you don't want to go through the...

01:00:28.000 It's a hassle of debate or of serious discourse.

01:00:33.000 But if your ideas can't handle that kind of a discussion, you probably shouldn't have them.

01:00:39.000 You shouldn't adopt them.

01:00:40.000 You shouldn't be holding on to them.

01:00:42.000 That's my position on all this.

01:00:45.000 Whenever someone's trying to silence someone, it's more political than it is anything.

01:00:49.000 It's more this person has an incredible amount of influence, and they don't align up very rigidly with what our ideology is, and they could cause us problems if they discuss certain things in an unorthodox way, and we don't like that.

01:01:05.000 So we're going to silence them, and we're going to pretend that there's something that they're not, and we're going to do that openly, and it's going to be obvious.

01:01:14.000 Yeah, and I think especially, like, look, if you think the status quo is totally fine, that, like, everything is the way that it should be, I can, I guess, understand. 0.99

01:01:22.000 Who the fuck thinks that? 0.97

01:01:24.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:01:25.000 That's a crazy argument.

01:01:26.000 There's not a single person alive that thinks everything's perfect.

01:01:30.000 Right?

01:01:30.000 Is there?

01:01:31.000 I mean, if so, I haven't met them.

01:01:33.000 I never met them.

01:01:34.000 So I don't think you can have that argument.

01:01:37.000 Yeah.

01:01:37.000 So, I mean, if you think that there are things that are really seriously wrong with the society that you live in right now...

01:01:43.000 Have discussions.

01:01:44.000 Then you...

01:01:45.000 Like, the last thing that you want to do is to make it harder to get your ideas about that out there so people can talk about them, people can hear about them, right?

01:01:57.000 Like, I think that if you...

01:01:59.000 If you want to have – in my case, you think that we have way too much economic inequality, I think it's particularly crazy to support more corporate censorship.

01:02:12.000 Because again, who do you think – Who do you think is going to get censored?

01:02:16.000 I mean if there's some Starbucks worker who got fired when they were trying to organize a union and Starbucks says that no, they weren't really fired for that.

01:02:27.000 It was really because they – whatever.

01:02:29.000 They showed up late.

01:02:30.000 They showed up late.

01:02:32.000 I mean OK. So somebody is lying.

01:02:35.000 Right.

01:02:36.000 Do we want Twitter or whatever platform to be making decisions about who's lying and which of these sides is misinformation?

01:02:47.000 I don't, right?

01:02:48.000 Not just because I support free speech, though I do, but also just because I don't trust at all that they're going to take the side that I would want to on that.

01:02:56.000 Of course.

01:02:56.000 It's one of the things that I talked about when I made a video recently when they said that I was saying misinformation.

01:03:03.000 And I was saying, well, look at what used to be misinformation just a few months ago that's now fact.

01:03:10.000 There's like the lab leak theory.

01:03:12.000 The lab leak theory, if you said that before, you'd get kicked off of social media.

01:03:16.000 Now it's on the front cover of Newsweek.

01:03:18.000 The idea that if you get vaccinated, you can still spread COVID and you could still get COVID. That was crazy talk.

01:03:25.000 Rachel Maddow was on television saying, the virus stops with you.

01:03:28.000 You can't spread it.

01:03:29.000 You can't catch it.

01:03:31.000 It stops with you if you're vaccinated.

01:03:32.000 That's not true.

01:03:33.000 We know that's not true.

01:03:34.000 If you said that I think people who are vaccinated can still catch COVID and they can still spread COVID, that would be misinformation.

01:03:41.000 But now, that's accepted as fact.

01:03:44.000 There's a bunch of those.

01:03:45.000 Yeah, I mean, I think in that case, I think that might be less like, you know, people didn't know that and more just kind of Rachel Maddow's an idiot because like if you, you know, because what they always said is like the effort, like, you know, whatever it is, even for like the original version of COVID, 0.54

01:04:01.000 that, you know, wild COVID, whatever they call it, right?

01:04:05.000 Like, you know, whatever 90 something, you know, percent, you know, like rate of effectiveness of like Pfizer.

01:04:11.000 Yeah, but if you read the literature, that's not really even accurate.

01:04:14.000 But this is the thing.

01:04:16.000 Whatever you think the effectiveness rate is, it was never 100%.

01:04:21.000 And if Rachel Maddow thought that it was 100%, that one seems more like an issue of Rachel Maddow not understanding medical science.

01:04:31.000 But again, I don't want- So that would make it misinformation.

01:04:36.000 Right?

01:04:36.000 Yeah.

01:04:36.000 So it's the same thing.

01:04:37.000 That's my point.

01:04:38.000 Yeah, sure.

01:04:39.000 I mean, like, actually, so here's an example I completely agree with.

01:04:41.000 At the beginning of the pandemic, like back in, what was it, like March, you know, 2020, maybe until sometime in April- Right.

01:04:53.000 Right.

01:05:03.000 Even I, at the time, was like, wait a second.

01:05:05.000 That doesn't make sense.

01:05:05.000 Why not?

01:05:06.000 Right?

01:05:06.000 Like, you know, why would that – like, the reasons they were given didn't make sense to me.

01:05:10.000 And then they kind of said – I mean, like, I know some people say this is an oversimplification.

01:05:15.000 But I think if you go back and look at it, this is kind of what they said.

01:05:17.000 Oh, we lied about that so that, like, all the masks wouldn't get bought up.

01:05:21.000 That's not an oversimplification at all.

01:05:23.000 That's exactly what they said.

01:05:24.000 And which is crazy to – like, the thing that's crazy to me is like, okay – If you're going to do that – I don't think you should have done it – but if you're going to do that, like, you have to resign after that, right?

01:05:34.000 Like, once you've, like, shown that you were willing to, like, lie – lie to people.

01:05:39.000 Like, if you think it's important that people trust, you know, medical authorities, which, you know, I mean I can see why.

01:05:45.000 Public health crisis, you know, that you think that was important.

01:05:48.000 Like, what's going to undermine that more?

01:05:50.000 People – random people on the internet saying things that might not be true about it or people going on podcasts who might say things that are wrong or like the CDC admitting that they were lying about something important.

01:06:09.000 That's going to undermine that like crazy and I would not have wanted people who were pointing things like this out at the time that like – Oh, the stated reasons why masks were supposed to be bad didn't really make sense, which they didn't, right?

01:06:22.000 You know, because it was like, well, it's going to encourage people to be reckless.

01:06:25.000 And it's like, well, OK, that's an argument.

01:06:27.000 It's like seatbelts.

01:06:27.000 I don't think that was one that they used, right?

01:06:31.000 But not Fauci.

01:06:32.000 I don't think Fauci used that argument.

01:06:33.000 Yeah, I think the WHO did.

01:06:35.000 I think if you went to their website, I think that's one of the things that they said there at one point.

01:06:40.000 But they'd also say, well, people don't know how to use them properly, so it's going to end up being more dangerous.

01:06:47.000 There were a bunch of things they threw out.

01:06:49.000 None of it quite seemed to add up even at the time.

01:06:54.000 And then again, they came out and said, no, actually, it's not like the science changed when that happened.

01:07:00.000 And I think that I certainly wouldn't have wanted people who were pointing that out to not be able to do that because of some misinformation policy.

01:07:08.000 Trevor Burrus Don't you think that the issue really was that people were afraid?

01:07:11.000 And when people are afraid, then they will support harsher measures to ensure safety.

01:07:17.000 And one of those measures would be to silence people that may be spreading information that could get people in trouble.

01:07:26.000 So they're willing to compromise their values because they think there's a greater good to be had.

01:07:30.000 There's a different time.

01:07:31.000 And that's one of the more dangerous things about a thing like a pandemic.

01:07:34.000 Because people will compromise their positions because they feel like there's a greater good to be achieved.

01:07:40.000 And so we need to silence these people.

01:07:42.000 Like, this was during the presidential campaign.

01:07:44.000 And this is one of the things that I found out that I was really shocked by.

01:07:49.000 The Twitter band, Brett Weinstein, had a thing that he had put together called Unity 2020. And the idea was instead of this rigid two-party system where you have people on the left and people on the right, what if you had like a really reasonable person,

01:08:05.000 a well-balanced person from the right and a really reasonable, well-balanced person from the left and we brought them together?

01:08:11.000 Very popular people and put together like a party and call it like the unity party.

01:08:17.000 And so he made a Twitter page and Twitter banned the page.

01:08:21.000 What was the reason? 0.86

01:08:23.000 Some bullshit reason. 0.99

01:08:24.000 But the reason was they were terrified that these popular podcasters and people were going to take votes away from the left. 0.99

01:08:31.000 Because these people like Weinstein and his wife, they're progressives.

01:08:36.000 I mean they taught at a very progressive university. 0.99

01:08:38.000 A lot of people that are progressive that feel disenfranchised with some of the standards of the Democratic Party, and they weren't really interested in a guy like Biden, who is this career politician who's basically full of shit, and having him be president. 0.98

01:08:53.000 Like, aren't there more reasonable, more attractive alternatives? 0.99

01:08:56.000 So they put together this thing, and Twitter fucking banned it.

01:08:59.000 And I think the reason why they banned it is the same reason why they changed the standards of presidential debates after Ross Perot was in the elections back in the 80s.

01:09:09.000 Was it the 90s?

01:09:10.000 When was that?

01:09:11.000 92 was the first time.

01:09:12.000 And then I think he ran again in the 96. This is exactly the same.

01:09:17.000 They were worried that that can fuck up an election.

01:09:20.000 If you get enough people that say, hey, you guys are making a lot of sense.

01:09:24.000 I'm going to vote Unity 2020. If that becomes a big thing, and the Republicans aren't going to vote Unity 2020, they're going to stick with their base.

01:09:31.000 They're going to stick with their guy.

01:09:32.000 They're Trump people.

01:09:33.000 We've got a guy.

01:09:34.000 He's our winner.

01:09:35.000 And they were worried and concerned, I think, that this Unity 2020 thing, even if it's like 10,000 votes in this place and 5,000 votes— Yeah, it doesn't take that much to— It doesn't take that much to swing elections.

01:09:48.000 No, definitely not.

01:09:50.000 Yeah, I mean, look, I certainly wouldn't have voted for Unity 2020. I think that the Democrats and Republicans are too close together in their positions already, right?

01:09:57.000 There are too many things where they— That they basically agree on that I don't like.

01:10:02.000 But I certainly don't think that you should be banned for Twitter.

01:10:05.000 It's crazy.

01:10:06.000 But that's the thing about these social media platforms is that they've become too big.

01:10:11.000 They have too much influence.

01:10:13.000 It's not as simple as like this is a private business.

01:10:17.000 They can do whatever they want.

01:10:18.000 This private business is the way that people distribute information to billions and billions of people.

01:10:23.000 The idea that Facebook is just a private business is bananas because it literally influences worldwide elections and it comes standard on your phone in many countries.

01:10:33.000 It is the internet to a lot of people in other countries.

01:10:37.000 The idea that that's just a private company is crazy.

01:10:40.000 Trevor Burrus Well, the thing that's particularly crazy to me is like, look, I understand like a conservative or libertarian who would say that, oh, they're a private business.

01:10:48.000 They could do whatever they want because that's what they would say about everything, right?

01:10:51.000 That like private businesses should be able to do what they want and like – and obviously – I'm a socialist.

01:10:58.000 I really disagree with that.

01:10:59.000 But what's crazy to me is when people who are on the left who want there to be lots of restrictions that I agree with on private businesses then turn around and say, oh, this isn't really a free speech issue because it's like a private business.

01:11:16.000 It's like, wait a second, guys.

01:11:17.000 Because it supports their desires.

01:11:20.000 Which one is it, right?

01:11:21.000 Because if you are on the left, and I don't mean if you're a liberal, but if you're a real leftist, then I would say that a lot of the core of your worldview is that you understand that private businesses can have a crazy amount of power over people's lives,

01:11:40.000 and that can be, in certain respects, as dangerous as the power of governments.

01:11:45.000 And of course, The two are not unrelated, right?

01:11:48.000 Because private businesses like we were talking about earlier have a crazy amount of influence over what the government does.

01:11:54.000 So I think wanting private corporations to be more powerful because you think that it's going to silence just the people that you don't like … Trevor Burrus That's the problem.

01:12:05.000 Trevor Burrus It just always seems like you haven't thought this through at all.

01:12:10.000 No, but that's the problem, and this is where I come to you with this.

01:12:13.000 How do we get people on the left to realize that this is a tremendous error?

01:12:20.000 I understand that they think that short-term this is beneficial because they can silence people they disagree with, but to understand that for...

01:12:28.000 I mean, it sounds a little grand, but for the human race, this is a terrible thing to have.

01:12:36.000 It's a terrible thing to have because you're discouraging discourse and it's one of the most important things that we have is the ability to talk things out.

01:12:43.000 The ability to find out how a person thinks and to consider how that person thinks and whether or not that Would apply to you.

01:12:52.000 Can I use these thoughts?

01:12:54.000 Do they have a point that I haven't considered?

01:12:57.000 Is there something about the way they're looking at the world that maybe there is a perspective that I have either ignored or I just haven't been aware of that will enlighten me and change the way I look at things?

01:13:10.000 Maybe I look at a person coming from a different walk of life, from a different part of the world, or different Different education, whatever it is.

01:13:17.000 Let me take in their point of view and see.

01:13:21.000 See if this is helpful.

01:13:23.000 See if I can help.

01:13:24.000 We need more friends than we need enemies.

01:13:27.000 We don't need more enemies.

01:13:28.000 So this silencing people, oh, you're just creating enemies.

01:13:32.000 You're polarizing.

01:13:32.000 We need communication.

01:13:34.000 We need it for most people.

01:13:37.000 Want the same thing.

01:13:38.000 In terms of like, what do you want from life?

01:13:41.000 You want your friends, your family, your loved ones to be happy.

01:13:46.000 You want to be able to pursue your interests and your dreams and your goals.

01:13:51.000 You have these ideas and these projects you want to do, these goals you want to achieve.

01:13:56.000 You want to be able to pursue those. 0.94

01:13:58.000 And you want to not be hampered by bullshit while you're trying to do that. 0.73

01:14:02.000 And you also want to be a good person. 0.94

01:14:04.000 Like, that's universal stuff.

01:14:06.000 Then it comes to, like, well, what is a good person?

01:14:09.000 Like, what should you be allowed to do and what should you not be allowed to do?

01:14:13.000 How do you infringe upon the rights of your neighbors with your ideas?

01:14:16.000 Do you support the community with your ideas?

01:14:19.000 Is it beneficial to people?

01:14:20.000 And these are all where things get weird and then we get ideologically driven into a left or a right category.

01:14:26.000 And I believe that many people that are either on the left or on the right are just looking for a gang.

01:14:34.000 We're good to go.

01:14:54.000 For human beings, there's a great feeling of camaraderie that comes with that.

01:14:59.000 You're part of a tribe.

01:15:00.000 It's very attractive.

01:15:01.000 And that's a problem.

01:15:03.000 Yeah.

01:15:03.000 And I think it's also a problem when, like, how are the tribes being divided up and is it in a way that's going to actually advance the things that you want, right?

01:15:13.000 Yeah.

01:15:15.000 If it's really about like different regions of the country or like for the diminishing number of people who still watch cable news, which cable news channel you watch and basically it's like red team versus blue team culture war stuff,

01:15:34.000 then I guess the question is, are you ever going to get the kinds of systemic changes that would really help people to do a lot of the things you just talked about?

01:15:47.000 For example, lots of people can't spend very much time with their families because they have to work all the time.

01:15:54.000 Lots of people can't do the things they want to do in their life because They can't go to school because – like higher education because they can't afford it or they don't want to be like saddled with decades of debt about it.

01:16:10.000 And so the question is like how are you going to achieve that?

01:16:15.000 And if there's somebody standing in the way, who is it actually, right?

01:16:19.000 Is it somebody who's a member of, you know, the elite who has, like, genuine power, right?

01:16:25.000 And whose interests might not, like, coincide with your interests, right?

01:16:29.000 Because, like, they're, you know, like, if you had a union at your workplace or if you had, like...

01:16:35.000 You know, then their profits would go down or if you tax them more to pay for some of the things we were talking about, you know, like that would be bad for them.

01:16:43.000 Is it them or is it like your uncle who like, you know, whatever, like, you know, voted for Trump or something, right?

01:16:51.000 Like, which one of those people should you get bad about? 0.90

01:16:54.000 And I think that the problem is that a lot of people are trained to just like fixate on this Whatever just passing bullshit is going on in the news cycle, you know? 0.66

01:17:07.000 What are people mad about this minute? 0.66

01:17:10.000 It's going to be something else in 12 hours, right?

01:17:12.000 But there's this sort of constant outrage cycle that I think is fed by the profit incentives of media companies because they have to hold on to the audience they have left.

01:17:22.000 Trevor Burrus Well, also they have advertisers.

01:17:25.000 A lot of those advertisers brought to you by Pfizer.

01:17:28.000 They have these ideas that you have to subscribe to.

01:17:32.000 And if you don't subscribe to those ideas, Then they don't want to support your program.

01:17:37.000 And this is like either a said or unsaid thing.

01:17:42.000 I was listening to this thing where these people were talking about people in positions of power.

01:17:50.000 How do you get these sort of cookie-cutter politicians?

01:17:53.000 Are they told what to do?

01:17:56.000 Or are they the kind of people that will do what they think and say what they think other people want them to say?

01:18:04.000 And I think there's a lot of that.

01:18:07.000 They don't really necessarily have these principled positions.

01:18:11.000 What they're doing is they're saying the thing they think that people want them to say.

01:18:17.000 They're saying the thing they believe people want to hear and that that's going to advance them in their career.

01:18:24.000 We don't have to name the names, but we know these people. 0.99

01:18:27.000 These cookie-cutter type politicians we know are full of shit, but they say things that are the right things to say given the current political or social climate. 0.99

01:18:37.000 Yeah, I mean, look, and they'll also say what they think they have to say, like, at a given point, and then it's, like, completely forgotten six months later sometimes, right? 0.99

01:18:46.000 Like, think about the 2020 election, like, all of those Democrats who some of them said at the beginning of the primaries that they agreed with Bernie about Medicare for All, but even the ones who didn't, right?

01:18:59.000 They would all say, oh, we at least think there should be this public option where everybody should be able to, like, maybe buy into some sort of public health insurance or whatever.

01:19:10.000 I don't know how many Democratic debates there were.

01:19:12.000 It felt like a million.

01:19:13.000 But however many there were, this was always at least 20 minutes of every single one of those.

01:19:19.000 They would go on and on about this.

01:19:20.000 But then somehow now...

01:19:22.000 That's just disappeared, right?

01:19:24.000 Nobody's – like now Biden's president, it still says on his campaign website, you know, that never got taken down, right, that he wants there to be this public health insurance option.

01:19:34.000 Kamala Harris, who said at one point that she agreed with Bernie about Medicare for All, is the vice president.

01:19:38.000 A lot of these other people are, you know, Pete Buttigieg, you know.

01:19:41.000 He said he wanted at least Medicare for all who wanted and like he's in the cabinet.

01:19:45.000 There are all these people who are back to being senators.

01:19:47.000 And it's like, well, that's what they – when they had to position themselves to win that primary, they said that they cared about like all the millions of Americans who don't have healthcare or the like millions more who maybe even do have healthcare.

01:19:59.000 How about they said they were going to decriminalize marijuana and release everybody that was in jail for it?

01:20:03.000 Yeah, when's that happening?

01:20:04.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:20:05.000 It's all bullshit. 1.00

01:20:06.000 It's all bullshit, but that is the sort of stuff that we're talking about, that they don't really believe these things. 1.00

01:20:12.000 They're saying these things because they believe this is what people want to hear, and that gets those people out to the polls. 0.99

01:20:18.000 Let's get those people out to the booths and get them to vote. 0.99

01:20:22.000 And this is, unfortunately, where we find ourselves as a culture, until we can read minds.

01:20:27.000 And Elon Musk, hurry up with that technology.

01:20:30.000 We need to be actually able to read people's minds.

01:20:33.000 Yeah, I don't know that I want Elon to be able to read my mind.

01:20:35.000 You're going to read his mind, too, though.

01:20:37.000 And you're going to see, oh, my God.

01:20:41.000 Why did you write this book?

01:20:42.000 Yeah.

01:20:42.000 I wrote this book because I was pissed off.

01:20:45.000 Like I think more than any other book that I've written, it came out of like intense frustration that I was feeling at that time because I saw a lot of people – I think, like, on paper, you know, they agree with me about,

01:21:00.000 like, most of what I've said tonight, maybe not the, you know, maybe not the free speech part, but, like, you know, most of the rest of it, like, who were doing all of these things that seemed to me like they were either feeding into these absolutely ridiculous sideshows that, like,

01:21:15.000 stop people from actually focusing on these issues that we're talking about, you know, like, you know, the title, right, the title example, you know, canceling comedians, you know, people who would, like, Yeah.

01:21:33.000 Yeah.

01:21:35.000 Yeah.

01:21:56.000 What does that make you look like?

01:22:11.000 I mean it's funny because I think that like when I sort of use that as the example in the title, right? 0.88

01:22:18.000 Like I was kind of trying to come up with like the most ridiculous example that I could come up with, right? 0.55

01:22:22.000 Like, you know, that like people would be like – You know, in terms of, like, ridiculous priorities or sort of people being, like, weird moralistic scolds. 0.67

01:22:30.000 Like, you know, what would be the biggest example?

01:22:33.000 Not getting mad at, like, corporate CEOs who bust unions.

01:22:36.000 Not getting mad at, like, politicians who commit war crimes.

01:22:41.000 But, you know, or, like, maybe you get mad at those people too.

01:22:46.000 But, like, somehow – You know, my friend, I disagree with him about a lot of things.

01:22:51.000 A lot of things.

01:22:51.000 But he is my friend, Dave Smith.

01:22:53.000 You know, I heard him talk about the outrage budget.

01:22:55.000 How dare you disagree with Dave Smith about anything?

01:23:01.000 Well, I'm pretty sure that he disagrees with a whole lot of things you agreed with I said earlier.

01:23:06.000 No, Dave's awesome.

01:23:07.000 I'm just joking.

01:23:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:23:08.000 But no, I mean like – but I think he is a good guy and he's – I mean I've been – I've been on his show several times and – He has well-thought-out perspectives.

01:23:19.000 You may agree or may not agree, but you can see where he's coming from.

01:23:25.000 Yeah, I can see where he's coming from.

01:23:26.000 And the other thing that I really respect about him is that I think that a lot of libertarians, even though they'll agree on paper, like with, yeah, we shouldn't be fighting these wars,

01:23:42.000 we should...

01:23:44.000 There shouldn't be all these people in prison or whatever.

01:23:46.000 It seems like in practice what really gets them excited is like tax cuts, right?

01:23:49.000 And I think that – and I think Dave is genuinely not like that.

01:23:54.000 I think that he actually like devotes – as far as I've ever been able to see, he actually devotes way less time to stuff like that than to like the United States backing this genocidal war in Yemen.

01:24:05.000 That's the big thing with Dave.

01:24:07.000 It's interventionalist foreign policy and the corporate backing of these – Horrible regime change wars.

01:24:15.000 That's the thing that he hates more than anything.

01:24:18.000 And the actual cost of human lives and suffering.

01:24:23.000 You know, he's a deeply compassionate person.

01:24:26.000 He really firmly opposes these things.

01:24:29.000 And he wants to talk about them whenever he can.

01:24:32.000 And it's one of those things where, I mean, he talked on my podcast about how that got him kind of booted off of those political talk shows on cable.

01:24:40.000 Yeah, because nobody wanted to talk about it.

01:24:44.000 It's like whatever culture war thing people are screaming about each other.

01:24:47.000 Whether that UPenn swimmer should be able to compete with women.

01:24:51.000 By the way, I love – the thing that I love most about that example is whatever you think about it, right?

01:24:59.000 I mean, look, if I had to actually think about it, I'd probably say, yeah, whatever.

01:25:03.000 I don't care.

01:25:04.000 But whatever you think about it, the idea that everybody's going to get this excited about something that happens in an Ivy League swim meet, right?

01:25:12.000 It's very odd.

01:25:14.000 Really?

01:25:14.000 That's what you care about?

01:25:15.000 Rich kids swimming?

01:25:17.000 That's not really what I care about.

01:25:19.000 It's not what I want people to care about.

01:25:22.000 But it's a lightning rod for this discussion of what is a woman.

01:25:29.000 This is a new part of the ideology.

01:25:33.000 This is a new discussion.

01:25:35.000 Like, what makes a woman? 1.00

01:25:36.000 Is it biology?

01:25:38.000 Or is it how you identify?

01:25:39.000 Is it how you feel?

01:25:40.000 Or is it your chromosomes?

01:25:42.000 And this, when it comes to sports, sports is where the rubber hits the road.

01:25:47.000 And that's why it's this sort of, it's like, see, we told you there's a difference.

01:25:53.000 When someone's lapping people and they're identifying as female, but they're a biological male and they're destroying the competition. 0.94

01:26:03.000 But when they competed as a biological male, which was just a little while ago, they were not very good.

01:26:09.000 They were okay, but they weren't nowhere near the top ten.

01:26:13.000 And now they're dominant.

01:26:14.000 They're the number one in the country.

01:26:17.000 It's a very interesting discussion of where the rubber meets the road in terms of what defines who you are.

01:26:25.000 And also, are we talking about how you treat a person or are we talking about competition?

01:26:32.000 And so there's a reason why men can't compete with women. 0.99

01:26:36.000 As a biological male who identifies as a biological male, you are not allowed to compete in a women's division. 0.87

01:26:44.000 There's a reason why there's a division between men and women. 0.99

01:26:46.000 So when we make this distinction...

01:26:50.000 What is the criteria that we allow someone to cross that distinction and be a female or be a male?

01:26:56.000 And this is nothing to do with cruelty or bigotry or discrimination.

01:27:00.000 This is just a discussion about what is a woman and what is a man.

01:27:05.000 And sports are a great way to sort that out when it comes to this particular aspect of it, the physical aspect of being a female or a male.

01:27:14.000 Another is birth.

01:27:16.000 You know?

01:27:17.000 Like, can you get pregnant? 0.95

01:27:19.000 Can you give birth?

01:27:19.000 I mean, if there's a competition, like, who's gonna create the most babies?

01:27:23.000 And it's males versus females, and it's people who identify as a female, versus people who are biologically female.

01:27:30.000 Well, the biological females are gonna dominate that competition. 1.00

01:27:33.000 Yeah, well, it's probably a good thing that we don't have giving birth competitions. 0.99

01:27:38.000 I know, right?

01:27:39.000 You know what I'm saying?

01:27:40.000 It's like the rubber meets the road in terms of these ideological discussions, which are valid discussions.

01:27:47.000 They're valid discussions because I've met a lot of trans people that – like I had Blair White on the podcast recently. 0.96

01:27:53.000 I mean when you meet Blair White, there's not a fucking doubt in your mind.

01:27:56.000 Like this is someone who for whatever reason, the nature and genetics of – Yeah, I mean, as far as the actual rules for sports leagues, 0.67

01:28:13.000 I'm sure you know way more about this than I do, but I know different sports have handled it differently in terms of the requirements, that it's not necessarily an absolute thing.

01:28:25.000 You know, trans women can or can't, you know, compete. 1.00

01:28:30.000 Like, sometimes, you know, there are, like, hormone requirements and stuff like that, you know, that there are different ways of trying to speak.

01:28:36.000 Do you know what the hormone requirements are, though?

01:28:38.000 No, I have no idea.

01:28:40.000 No idea, right?

01:28:41.000 The threshold for many sports, it's handled differently in different places.

01:28:46.000 But there's a guy named Derek.

01:28:48.000 He's got a website called...

01:28:49.000 It's a silly name of a website.

01:28:51.000 It's called More Plates, More Dates.

01:28:53.000 It's like something he created a long time ago.

01:28:55.000 But he's...

01:28:57.000 I don't think he necessarily has a degree in chemistry and biochemistry, but he has a deep understanding of it.

01:29:04.000 And the way he was breaking down the amount of available testosterone that a biological female has, like the threshold versus what's acceptable for a trans woman to compete against biological females, and it's substantially more. 0.70

01:29:20.000 Like, it's on the outskirts of physiological normality.

01:29:26.000 Mm-hmm.

01:29:27.000 Yeah, I mean, again, I don't know what, like, if there's a good compromise here that would, like, help, like, you know, that would maintain a reasonable level of fairness, you know, without just saying, like, you know, I think there are, like, legitimately a couple of different values that you have to balance to,

01:29:46.000 like, try to figure that one out.

01:29:47.000 I would say that I think, like, most contexts, like, you know, most of the things that trans people...

01:29:54.000 You know, who are like advocating for, you know, more anti-discrimination laws, et cetera, are talking about are not going to be nearly as hard as like this kind of like edge case about, you know, about sports, right?

01:30:05.000 Yeah, no, I agree with that.

01:30:06.000 You know, because like I think it's mostly like can you be like, you know, like employment and housing, you know, and all of that stuff.

01:30:14.000 And I think it is like I think it is important that, you know, that you have like Do you have civil rights laws that cover everybody?

01:30:22.000 Now, I do think that because of some of the weird dynamics of this particular issue, you're going to get things that are harder calls, like this.

01:30:32.000 Trevor Burrus Like sports.

01:30:32.000 Trevor Burrus Yeah.

01:30:33.000 Again, in terms of what some sports leagues should require in terms of hormones or whatever, I have absolutely no idea, but again, I think that this is not like...

01:30:51.000 In terms of things that I'm going to get mad about on a day-to-day basis.

01:30:57.000 Well, you would if you had a daughter that was competing against that person.

01:31:01.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:31:02.000 Someone who had been training their whole life to be an elite swimmer in a dedicated massive amount of time and someone came around that had a massive biological advantage.

01:31:12.000 Yeah, although, of course, if I had a trans daughter, you know, then I'd want to make sure that whatever the rules were were going to be fair to her, too, which is why, like, again, you know, like what the right sort of exactly where the rules should be set.

01:31:25.000 Do you think if you had a trans daughter and your trans daughter competed as a male for many, many years and was just sort of mediocre and then all of a sudden competed as a woman and started dominating, don't you think you'd feel a little bit of guilt? 0.58

01:31:38.000 I mean, I guess it depends how much she was – how much we're talking about, right?

01:31:46.000 Because I think in that swim meet case, the UPenn thing that you mentioned earlier, if I'm remembering right – and maybe you can correct me on this.

01:31:56.000 What I know about this is like scrolling through Twitter, like what I saw – But, like, I don't think that she even won by that much, did she?

01:32:04.000 Or did she?

01:32:05.000 Giant amount.

01:32:06.000 Giant amount?

01:32:06.000 How much did she win by?

01:32:08.000 I thought she was— Okay, let's find out.

01:32:10.000 She's breaking records.

01:32:11.000 I mean, she's breaking records in multiple meets. 1.00

01:32:15.000 Yeah, I mean, again— I mean, this is—the thing is, like, there's a video of her literally lapping the other female swimmers. 0.99

01:32:22.000 And this is, again, when we're talking before, one of the things we brought up is the Lakota culture has this term.

01:32:32.000 This term is called the Heoka.

01:32:33.000 And the Heoka is the sacred clown.

01:32:36.000 It's a part of their culture where someone makes fun of everything.

01:32:42.000 And it's like a sacred part of their culture where they subject everything to mockery.

01:32:47.000 And anything that can't stand up to mockery, anything that like viciously defends itself against mockery, that's an illegitimate thing.

01:32:55.000 Another thing the Lakota people had was what their version of a transgender person was.

01:33:01.000 It's like true spirit or something?

01:33:03.000 It was also a sacred part of their culture because it was a wise person that understood both genders.

01:33:09.000 And this person you could come to and they had a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man because they essentially were both.

01:33:18.000 And so they had a deep amount of respect for people who are trans in their culture.

01:33:24.000 And I think that's a great way of approaching it.

01:33:29.000 That whenever you have these unique circumstances, someone who is biologically male but clearly is much more of a female, sometimes more of a female than a lot of biological females, who are much more biologically, much more oriented towards male thinking and male behavior.

01:33:48.000 I mean, all of this is good for everybody.

01:33:51.000 It's good for us to accept And it's good for us to learn from these perspectives of these people that have very unique and different but also common in terms of like when you have giant numbers of people like hundreds of millions of people you have quite a few people that have these experiences and we can learn from them and instead of discrimination I don't necessarily think sports is a discrimination,

01:34:19.000 though.

01:34:19.000 That's where it gets weird.

01:34:20.000 Because, again, there's a reason why we make a distinction, why males compete against males and females compete against females.

01:34:25.000 And I think we need to sort that out.

01:34:29.000 But you don't think, like...

01:34:33.000 Do you think that there is some sort of reasonable compromise to be arrived at there, or what's your position?

01:34:37.000 With physical sports, it's a problem, because there's so many benefits to being a biological male.

01:34:43.000 There's so many benefits to the size of the lungs, the size of the heart, the physical strength, the fact that you're gone through puberty, and that's the difference between someone who goes through puberty and maybe someone who doesn't.

01:34:52.000 Right, they transition before that, yeah.

01:34:55.000 And then there's the ethical dilemma about that.

01:34:58.000 Should you do that?

01:34:59.000 Because there's a great deal of people that have not done that and wound up becoming gay men.

01:35:07.000 What's the right choice and who can make that choice?

01:35:10.000 And when do you have the ability to make that choice?

01:35:13.000 Should you be able to make that choice as a child?

01:35:14.000 Should you wait until you're an adult?

01:35:17.000 There's a lot of decisions that we don't allow people to make until they're of grown age, like tattoos.

01:35:23.000 You can't get your face tattooed when you're four, but you can when you're 24. I mean, I'm not saying that they're the same thing, but what I am saying is that we are faced with many dilemmas that require Discussions and compassionate,

01:35:43.000 comprehensive discussions.

01:35:45.000 And the only way you can do that is without censorship.

01:35:48.000 Well, yeah.

01:35:49.000 I mean obviously I completely agree on that.

01:35:51.000 I mean I think that the youth transition thing – again, I think that this is like – this is a little bit of a hard case because I think that – On the one hand, yeah, you're absolutely right.

01:36:03.000 I mean, no sane person thinks that little kids should have complete medical autonomy and just get to do whatever they want.

01:36:10.000 That would be ridiculous.

01:36:12.000 At the same time, not getting a tattoo when you're a kid isn't going to have some really bad effect. 0.80

01:36:20.000 You can just wait and it's fine, right?

01:36:22.000 Whereas with something like this, if you do have that experience that you feel as if you're trapped in the wrong kind of body, which I'd imagine could be incredibly traumatic if that's not dealt with.

01:36:36.000 We can only imagine.

01:36:37.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:36:38.000 I literally don't know, but it sounds like it.

01:36:41.000 Neither one of us know.

01:36:42.000 But I think that, like, then, like, having to go through what, from your perspective, is the wrong puberty, right?

01:36:49.000 I mean, like, the stakes are higher than the tattoo thing, right?

01:36:51.000 Now, what does that mean in terms of, like, what level of medical gatekeeping there should be or, like, what the clinical practices should be?

01:36:58.000 I'm like the last person to say.

01:37:00.000 Yeah, I'm the last person to say too.

01:37:02.000 I just think it has to be something that we can discuss.

01:37:05.000 Sure.

01:37:05.000 The problem is when people want to suppress people's ability to make choices and when people want to suppress people's ability to discuss these things.

01:37:14.000 I don't think that's good for any of us.

01:37:15.000 I mean these are very complicated human issues and by human issues I put them in the same category as a lot of other things that are very messy.

01:37:23.000 They're complicated to talk about.

01:37:24.000 They're human issues and this is one of them.

01:37:29.000 Yeah, no, I mean, it certainly is.

01:37:32.000 And I also think that, again, it goes back to, like, one of the big points in the book, which is that I don't want, like, people who might be...

01:37:42.000 Like, if you've thought about one of these issues we're talking about a lot, right?

01:37:46.000 And you think, like, you have...

01:37:49.000 And you might get very impatient, right, with people who you think are, you know, are wrong about them.

01:37:55.000 You think that they have...

01:37:57.000 They haven't thought about it as much as you, maybe.

01:38:00.000 And you think that they're not sensitive enough to what people might need.

01:38:06.000 Then if you're just sort of writing somebody off, that they're done because they're not...

01:38:13.000 You know, they haven't evolved to exactly where you think they should evolve to yet.

01:38:17.000 I think that that's bad on a human level.

01:38:20.000 That's just a bad way to interact with people.

01:38:22.000 And I also think that it's—I think it's bad politically because, you know, somebody could, like, on some, like, incredibly messy, sensitive issue, right, you know, like they could— You know,

01:38:38.000 like they could land somewhere different from you on that.

01:38:41.000 And I'm not saying that like there isn't a bottom line.

01:38:44.000 Like I think there is a bottom line.

01:38:45.000 I think like non-discrimination laws, stuff like that, right?

01:38:47.000 Like I think that's incredibly important.

01:38:49.000 But I think that if you're writing people off based on that stuff, when it could be that there are all these other things where you could actually get them on board with what you want, right?

01:38:59.000 And instead of saying like, you know, when you – When you said in 2020 that you were probably going to vote for Bernie and there were people who – there were people who freaked out about it and a lot of that was like bad faith.

01:39:14.000 It was like ginned up by supporters of other candidates.

01:39:16.000 But there were people who were like real leftists who were like mad that like Bernie – the Bernie campaign like put out that like video where they were like clipping that.

01:39:28.000 And that seemed crazy to me, right?

01:39:31.000 Like Michael Brooks and I wrote an article for Jacobin about it at the time, and like it just seems to me like, you know, whatever, like...

01:39:42.000 The idea that instead of being like, oh, hey, good.

01:39:45.000 Like, here are all these things we can agree on, right?

01:39:48.000 We think we should have health care.

01:39:50.000 And you're willing to, like, support this.

01:39:52.000 And by the way, like, if you, you know, if you really care about, you know, trans people, I mean, like, I think, you know, Bernie Sanders was probably your guy, right?

01:39:59.000 I mean, like, that they, he's the, you know, he wanted to fund, you know, transition costs as, you know, part of Medicare for all, you know, like that, that would be, that would be the most, you know, pro-trans position.

01:40:08.000 But, like, if you're going to say, you know, Like, you know, somebody, you know, like, if you think, oh, Joe Rogan is wrong about, like, exactly how, like, sports, you know, the sports issue should be, you know, should play out.

01:40:19.000 So I don't care that there are all these other things, right, that he agrees with us about.

01:40:23.000 I don't care if he's willing to support this thing that would be incredibly beneficial.

01:40:27.000 You know, like, we just need to, like, cast him out, right?

01:40:30.000 Say, like, no, we just want nothing to do with you. 0.99

01:40:32.000 Or maybe, like, once you agree with us on 100% of everything and, like, I think that's a stupid and I think it's a self-defeating way to try to do politics. 0.98

01:40:48.000 And I think it's also just a bad way to live your life. 0.99

01:40:52.000 Well, I agree with you that writing people off because they don't share all of your opinions is ridiculous. 0.56

01:40:59.000 And it's not the way you get people to take your position. 0.58

01:41:04.000 It's the opposite.

01:41:05.000 They're going to push back.

01:41:06.000 They're going to push back.

01:41:07.000 You're going to reject people because they don't agree with 100% of your positions.

01:41:11.000 They're going to dig their heels in.

01:41:14.000 That's a natural thing with human beings.

01:41:16.000 They're not going to go, well, I guess it'll change.

01:41:19.000 No, that's not what they do, man. 0.99

01:41:21.000 They fucking dig in. 0.98

01:41:23.000 Yeah, nobody's ever said, like, you know, like, nobody's ever been in, like, an argument on, you know, whatever, Facebook, where, you know, somebody, you know, like, somebody says, you know, somebody says that they're a terrible person and they're, you know, whatever, they're a... 0.99

01:41:40.000 They're a fascist or a Stalinist or whatever it is they're being accused of being, right?

01:41:43.000 And said, oh, you know what?

01:41:45.000 You're right.

01:41:46.000 Good point.

01:41:47.000 Good point.

01:41:47.000 Now I get it, right?

01:41:50.000 That's not actually how you appeal to human beings at all.

01:41:56.000 Anybody who knows...

01:41:57.000 That's something that I think an alien within 10 minutes of interacting with people would recognize is not going to work, right? 1.00

01:42:05.000 I think if you talk to people...

01:42:07.000 Like they're people.

01:42:09.000 Like you're taking what they're saying seriously.

01:42:13.000 Like if you think they're wrong, you can try to explain why you think they're wrong.

01:42:19.000 And you can show them how the things that you want might actually help them.

01:42:24.000 I mean it's not always going to work.

01:42:25.000 There's no guarantee because that's just life.

01:42:27.000 There's no guarantee.

01:42:28.000 But I mean like sometimes it will work and the other thing is just not going to work.

01:42:33.000 Trevor Burrus So what positions did you take in your book that you got pushback from?

01:42:39.000 Oh boy.

01:42:42.000 Well, there were a few.

01:42:44.000 Although I will say most people who got mad at the book didn't read it.

01:42:47.000 Of course!

01:42:48.000 Why would they bother reading it when they could just get mad?

01:42:50.000 Yeah.

01:42:50.000 I mean, there were like...

01:42:51.000 What if I read it and it clouds my judgment?

01:42:54.000 Because now I agree with you on some things. 1.00

01:42:56.000 I'm trying to say fuck you. 1.00

01:42:58.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

01:42:59.000 Like there were so many – like the number of people who got mad about the book before it came out just based on the title or the description.

01:43:05.000 Do you want to have another drink before you talk about this?

01:43:07.000 Oh, yeah.

01:43:07.000 Absolutely.

01:43:08.000 You're out of booze.

01:43:09.000 Yeah.

01:43:09.000 Please.

01:43:10.000 You might need a refill.

01:43:12.000 This is really good.

01:43:13.000 I like the Buffalo Trace.

01:43:14.000 Yeah, that's good stuff.

01:43:17.000 So yeah, the number of people who got mad about it before it came out versus the number after I think is really revealing.

01:43:23.000 Right.

01:43:25.000 That's hilarious.

01:43:27.000 It's literally true.

01:43:28.000 But I think the people who did read it who got mad, which is not most people who read it, but the people who did read it who got mad...

01:43:35.000 I think there were a few things.

01:43:37.000 One of them was about the Andy Ngo incident from 2019. You remember this?

01:43:43.000 The Antifa thing, where they threw milkshakes at him and stuff.

01:43:48.000 And in general, the part of it where I was criticizing Antifa, that I think there are a lot of people who, at least maybe not a lot of people in the world as a whole, but a lot of people within a certain kind of subculture who have I don't know.

01:44:09.000 It's really important that people be using these kinds of street tactics because they think in their heads that it's always like Germany in 1933 and Nazis are about to take over or something, which is delusional.

01:44:23.000 One of the points that I make about that in the book is that if you think about what was actually going on in Germany in the early 30s when you had You know, like Nazis who are like going around and like smashing up like trade union halls and like,

01:44:40.000 you know, and fighting with people and like socialist and communist parties and stuff.

01:44:44.000 Why would any like, you know, why would corporate America have to bother with any of that now, right?

01:44:48.000 They're already winning, you know, just fine, you know, without it, right?

01:44:51.000 Like, so...

01:44:52.000 I don't know what you're saying.

01:44:53.000 Okay.

01:44:53.000 Sorry.

01:44:54.000 Let me back up.

01:44:55.000 Like, try to be clear about this.

01:44:58.000 So I think the idea that fascism is what's on the horizon in America I don't think makes sense because I think that arose under very different circumstances than what we've got right now.

01:45:11.000 I think that the things that fascists were doing in Germany before they took over there, Italy before they took over there, I think the

01:45:45.000 idea that you'd be obsessed with...

01:45:59.000 I think it's a distraction, honestly, from things that actually matter more.

01:46:08.000 And I think that it's really dangerous when people would make excuses for behavior like attacking Andy Ngo because it's – because if you think about that, like the things that – here's the thing that most disturbed me right when that happened,

01:46:25.000 that I would see people who would be defending that.

01:46:41.000 Well, the problem with Antifa is the name.

01:46:57.000 You're calling it Antifa, like anti-fascist.

01:47:01.000 You're like, well, of course.

01:47:02.000 Of course I'm anti-fascist.

01:47:03.000 Who wouldn't be?

01:47:04.000 That's the problem.

01:47:06.000 Let's define fascism.

01:47:08.000 Put up the definition of fascism, and this is part of where the problem lies.

01:47:12.000 When we discuss fascism, whether we're discussing the connection between the corporate interests and the government, or what is the technical definition of what a fascist is?

01:47:26.000 Just Google it.

01:47:28.000 Okay.

01:47:28.000 Yeah, here.

01:47:29.000 Fascism, a form of far-right authoritarian, ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in the early 20th century of Europe.

01:47:44.000 There's other definitions of that, though.

01:47:47.000 That's the Wikipedia definition.

01:47:48.000 The problem with Wikipedia is that sometimes it gets ideologically captured.

01:47:53.000 A political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition.

01:48:08.000 I don't see that in our country.

01:48:10.000 Here's the other one though.

01:48:11.000 A tendency towards or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control.

01:48:19.000 The problem with that is When you're trying to control by violence and street action and throwing milkshakes at people, you're trying to control the way they behave and they think.

01:48:33.000 That's a form of fascism.

01:48:35.000 It's a kind of fascism.

01:48:37.000 What you're doing is...

01:48:39.000 In a sense, you're intimidating people into not opposing your perspective.

01:48:46.000 You have large groups of people.

01:48:48.000 They incite violence. 1.00

01:48:49.000 They lit the fucking apartment building of the Portland mayor. 1.00

01:48:54.000 Portland, one of the great things about it is it's the least fascist place on earth. 0.99

01:48:58.000 It is literally the most open-minded, progressive city on earth.

01:49:05.000 The entire continent of the United States.

01:49:08.000 You don't think Nazis are about to take over Portland? 1.00

01:49:10.000 There's not a fucking chance! 0.99

01:49:11.000 And yet that's the stronghold of Antifa, and that's the place where they find the most fascism they have to combat against. 0.99

01:49:19.000 It's a form of bullying.

01:49:21.000 It's a form of gangs. 0.98

01:49:23.000 They're trying to enforce their ideology, and unfortunately their fucking mayor has let them go so far with it That even he's pushing back now. 0.97

01:49:32.000 He's calling for greater police protection and they're trying to enforce laws now and arrest people. 0.98

01:49:38.000 Because he was being targeted so much that he turned it around and is like, we have to do something about these people.

01:49:44.000 Now you think?

01:49:46.000 Now you think?

01:49:48.000 It's like a gang, man.

01:49:52.000 They're into this ideology, and they're into this whole community of stopping these fascists, and they're looking for them when they don't even exist. 0.99

01:50:01.000 The technical definition of fascism is not running rampant in fucking Portland. 0.98

01:50:08.000 It's just not. 0.97

01:50:08.000 No, no, it's not. 0.97

01:50:10.000 And I think that like if you want to say like there are like far right groups who might commit hate crimes, etc., then like first of all, I actually don't think that a lot of people who do stuff like this would be like just – I'm skeptical that they're really going to be the ones who are going to do something there.

01:50:30.000 Do something there in what way?

01:50:32.000 Oh, that if you have actual fascists who are showing up with guns, right?

01:50:38.000 They're going to run.

01:50:39.000 Yeah.

01:50:40.000 I don't think most people who sign up for stuff like this, this is a point Michael Brooks made to me after the...

01:50:48.000 In Michigan in 2020, there was like some protests at the state capitol over lockdown stuff where like lots and lots of people actually had guns there.

01:50:58.000 He was like, oh, where's Antifa here, right?

01:50:59.000 You know, why not, right?

01:51:02.000 Is that when they were trying to kidnap the governor?

01:51:05.000 That was the FBI-led operation.

01:51:08.000 Yeah.

01:51:08.000 That was before that, but that was related.

01:51:12.000 Same kind of stuff.

01:51:12.000 Yeah, it was the same kind of stuff.

01:51:14.000 So, I mean, the protests were real.

01:51:16.000 The governor plot seems like that was just the equivalent for this stuff.

01:51:20.000 It was ginned up by the FBI. Yeah, it was like one of those cases with the post-9-11 security state where you have some...

01:51:28.000 I don't know. 0.98

01:51:51.000 I think that the one reason why people end up obsessing about marginal far-right groups, like the Proud Boys are not about to march on Washington and install whoever is— Also, that guy, the fucking head of the Proud Boys, 0.93

01:52:07.000 was in the FBI, too. 0.98

01:52:09.000 That's true.

01:52:11.000 That was the craziest thing.

01:52:12.000 When that turned out, there was the one guy who was— What was his name?

01:52:18.000 Enrique something or another?

01:52:19.000 Who turned out to be an FBI informant and he was the head of the Proud Boys.

01:52:23.000 They were always interviewing him on television.

01:52:24.000 Yeah, it's like Gavin McGinnis who started as a LARP. He started literally as a joke.

01:52:31.000 It was based on a Broadway musical.

01:52:34.000 That's why they called it Proud Boys.

01:52:36.000 They were joking around.

01:52:38.000 And then it became a thing.

01:52:39.000 And then a bunch of people, once you created an organization, then a bunch of people can join it.

01:52:43.000 And then they infiltrate it.

01:52:44.000 And then they decide to radicalize it.

01:52:46.000 Yeah.

01:52:46.000 Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant.

01:52:50.000 Like, what in the fuck, man? 0.99

01:52:51.000 Yeah, it's like during the McCarthy period when half of the people at some little local Communist Party meeting would be FBI agents because they were devoting so many resources to trying to... 1.00

01:53:02.000 To stop this very marginal group.

01:53:06.000 So people were upset at you because of the Andy No thing that you didn't think that was...

01:53:12.000 And obviously it's just not a way to treat a person.

01:53:15.000 No, no. 0.89

01:53:17.000 If you ever met Andy, he's this tiny Asian gay man. 1.00

01:53:21.000 The idea that this guy is this jackbooted thug that's there to take down democracy is fucking preposterous. 1.00

01:53:29.000 No, no, it is. 0.99

01:53:30.000 And I think that the...

01:53:32.000 And I think that the problem is when you make an obvious point like, hey, there's absolutely no justification for physically attacking this guy.

01:53:44.000 That that's insane behavior.

01:53:49.000 That this serves no good purpose whatsoever. 0.99

01:53:54.000 That a lot of the things that people said about it at the time when they were trying to justify it turned out to be bullshit, which is also true. 0.79

01:54:05.000 And also, by the way, I don't want to set the precedent that we're going to have street violence where people who... 0.69

01:54:13.000 Somebody decides they don't count as a real journalist and that they're helping bad people or creating dangerous effects or something and they could just attack them.

01:54:23.000 I mean, why...

01:54:26.000 I mean, I'm sure I've written lots of stuff for Jacobin that people would say that about, right?

01:54:31.000 But what is a journalist?

01:54:32.000 This is the other thing.

01:54:33.000 What defines a journalist?

01:54:35.000 How do you decide who is and isn't a journalist?

01:54:38.000 Do you have to be connected to a specific organization?

01:54:42.000 Because there are many people that are connected to specific organizations that are propagandists.

01:54:46.000 Do you have to have a degree in journalism?

01:54:49.000 Because there's many people that have a degree in journalism that are liars. 0.93

01:54:54.000 And they work for gigantic corporations, and they spew out all the nonsense that this corporation wants them to say. 0.87

01:55:01.000 What is a journalist?

01:55:03.000 Do we have a rigid criteria?

01:55:07.000 Couldn't you not be a person who believes in the truth, Yeah.

01:55:30.000 Isn't that journalism?

01:55:31.000 Who decides who's a journalist?

01:55:33.000 Yeah.

01:55:33.000 I mean, certainly nobody at WikiLeaks had a journalism degree, and I'm really glad that that exists.

01:55:39.000 How about Edward Snowden?

01:55:40.000 Sure.

01:55:40.000 Does that count as journalism?

01:55:43.000 Yeah.

01:55:43.000 I've heard people say that Glenn Greenwald's not a journalist.

01:55:46.000 Which is ridiculous. 0.93

01:55:47.000 Preposterous.

01:55:48.000 Because, I mean, he broke – I mean – Whatever you think about Glenn or his politics or any of that stuff, just from a journalism perspective, first with the NSA revelations and then again in Brazil with the material that helped free the former president who was unjustly imprisoned.

01:56:11.000 I mean, that's the most important stuff that journalism can do, right?

01:56:15.000 So if that's not journalism, I don't know why journalism is important.

01:56:21.000 Yeah, what is journalism?

01:56:21.000 Once you go to Stubstack, you're not a journalist anymore?

01:56:24.000 Yeah, and I think that's incredibly dangerous because you could imagine—I mean, look, you don't have to imagine.

01:56:30.000 You could just look at what actually has happened with Julian Assange, right?

01:56:33.000 That, like, the government says, like, you know, that, oh, there's no freedom of the press issue here because that's not really journalism.

01:56:41.000 He's just, like, some kind of, you know, enabler of terrorism, you know, because he did this.

01:56:47.000 That's certainly not a road that I want to go down, but the problem is— As obvious as so many of these points are that like it's – there's absolutely no good justification for physically attacking a noncombatant, like somebody who isn't like going – Right. 0.99

01:57:02.000 And mocking and laughing when you hit him in the head with a fucking milkshake. 0.98

01:57:06.000 Like what was that? 1.00

01:57:08.000 No.

01:57:08.000 It's terrible behavior.

01:57:10.000 So like you make that obvious point.

01:57:12.000 You make the point we're just making about journalism and – And it's like on the face of it, you think, OK, this is like this is all obvious.

01:57:20.000 But the problem is it's that like team like rooting for your team behavior that like you're willing to accept horrible behavior as long as it's enforcing your ideology.

01:57:30.000 Yeah.

01:57:30.000 And then if and then if somebody like me said, you know, says that I think that, you know, like, you know, that that I think this is bad, then, oh, see, so you're not being loyal to the team, right?

01:57:41.000 Like you're siding with Andy Ngo, who's on the other team.

01:57:43.000 And, you know, you're siding against people who are, you know, who are on your team, you know?

01:57:47.000 So, like, they'll just have a reaction to that that's not actually about, like, the thing itself or, like, showing what's wrong with the argument.

01:57:54.000 Yeah, and I should be really clear.

01:57:56.000 I'm not – like, I had Andy Ngo on my podcast and I was skeptical of a lot of things he was saying.

01:58:01.000 One of them, the traumatic brain injury from that.

01:58:04.000 I was like, what kind of brain injury do you have from that?

01:58:06.000 Like, what are you talking about now?

01:58:07.000 Yeah.

01:58:07.000 Yeah, I know originally there was these reports that there was concrete that was mixed in milkshakes somehow.

01:58:13.000 Listen, man, I watched him get hit with that.

01:58:15.000 That's not what gives you brain damage.

01:58:18.000 I know what gives you brain damage. 0.99

01:58:20.000 You've got to get hit. 1.00

01:58:22.000 If that guy got hit with a fucking piece of concrete, he would go down. 1.00

01:58:26.000 He's not just going to take it on the chin and keep walking and get a traumatic brain injury from a milkshake. 1.00

01:58:31.000 It's silly. 0.70

01:58:32.000 Unless there were some other shots that he took that weren't on camera.

01:58:35.000 And I think Andy Ngo, like as somebody – like the issue is not do I like Andy Ngo because I actually don't, right?

01:58:41.000 I mean like I think – What don't you like?

01:58:42.000 So he wrote an article that was – I think it was for Quillette.

01:58:49.000 I'm not sure about that part, right?

01:58:51.000 It might have been somewhere else.

01:58:52.000 But he wrote an article about visiting Britain where he was claiming – Basically, that there were, like, you know, parts of London that were, like, under Sharia law or that, you know, like – and his evidence was that there were,

01:59:07.000 like, no drinking signs that, like – Sid's been pointed out that, like, other, like, non-Muslim neighborhoods, they have the same things, right?

01:59:14.000 Because you're just not allowed to drink in certain places, you know, under generally applicable laws.

01:59:19.000 I think that he's – you know, and I think that probably in general, right?

01:59:23.000 He's a provocateur.

01:59:24.000 Yeah, I think he's a provocateur and I think that he's – I too have a lot of questions about the honesty or at least the commitment to sort of checking things before you go into print with them.

01:59:40.000 And my sense is that his politics are completely different from mine.

01:59:45.000 But none of that matters for this, right?

01:59:47.000 Like none of that is the point, right?

01:59:48.000 I don't want just like – if we're talking about like – Should we have a taboo against physically assaulting journalists?

01:59:58.000 Yeah, physically assaulting people you disagree with.

02:00:00.000 Yeah, we should and it should be anybody.

02:00:03.000 But also I think that it shouldn't depend on whether you think they're honest.

02:00:09.000 It shouldn't depend on any of that stuff.

02:00:10.000 That is not something that should be happening and I think it's a bad door to open up.

02:00:20.000 But I think that that's something in the book that a lot of people – I shouldn't say a lot of people.

02:00:25.000 Most people who got mad at it never cracked it open.

02:00:28.000 But some of the people who did get mad at it because they read it had a problem with that.

02:00:33.000 I think some of the Dave Chappelle stuff in the first chapter because they thought I was defending a transphobe.

02:00:39.000 I think that that was an issue with some people.

02:00:46.000 I think that the stuff later in the book that just in general I think a lot of people who got mad about it sort of misinterpreted the sort of main claim in a crazy way.

02:01:07.000 In other words, they thought that the main thing that I was saying Was that online cancellation is the most important problem in the world or something like that?

02:01:17.000 And that's not what I think.

02:01:20.000 What I think is that this is not a way that you should act towards people, one, because on a human level it's just a toxic way to operate, and two, if you actually want to win people over to ideas that you think are important so you can accomplish something that's important in the real world,

02:01:38.000 then getting bogged down I think there's also a real issue with communicating through social media.

02:01:57.000 It's such a – It's a way of communicating that takes away so much of what it is to be a human.

02:02:08.000 To be a human is to look at a person, to have a conversation with them, look them in the eyes, to talk about things in depth, to recognize their perspective and allow them to talk.

02:02:19.000 There's a sense of camaraderie.

02:02:21.000 You're two human beings expressing ideas.

02:02:25.000 With social media, you're just printing something out, and you're throwing it out into the ether, and then the other person responds, and you don't see each other, you're trying to be biting and nasty, and the way you win is through vitriol. 0.99

02:02:37.000 It's a shitty way to communicate, and one of the best ways to get attention is to be the biggest cunt. 1.00

02:02:42.000 That's how people get attention online, to say the most mean, the most vicious thing that you can, and it's like a fun little game. 0.99

02:02:50.000 Totally.

02:02:51.000 And you get validation for being like the first person to like throw, you know, throwing the first stone, right?

02:02:56.000 And people like support you because they wish they had said it or they don't want to be the person who sticks their neck out, but they'll like it because the, yeah, go get them.

02:03:04.000 Yeah.

02:03:05.000 Go get them, Ben.

02:03:06.000 Yeah, or they just don't like, or they just like, you know, they like the tweet, ha, right, you know, like we got that guy, and then they just never think about it again, or sometimes like if they thought about it in the first place, like I gave, you know, there's a guy who,

02:03:24.000 I am Wendell Potter, you know who this is?

02:03:27.000 No.

02:03:27.000 Okay, so Wendell Potter used to be a health insurance executive, and he would like lobby You know, Congress on behalf of health insurance companies.

02:03:36.000 And then at some point in the past, I think maybe 15 years ago or something, I'm not sure about the timing, he had a crisis of conscience about doing that.

02:03:45.000 And he left the industry.

02:03:48.000 And what he's done since then is he just campaigns for Medicare for All.

02:03:53.000 So this is a really good person.

02:04:00.000 I remember back in spring 2021 maybe, Wendell Potter tweeted out something like the fact that people don't understand how much Medicare for All would help us even during this time when people were losing on health insurance because of economic disruptions.

02:04:22.000 All this stuff shows How many people bought the lies that I used to tell when I was a health insurance executive?

02:04:28.000 And this guy who I'm not going to name because I don't want to shame this guy.

02:04:32.000 That's not the point.

02:04:33.000 This guy quote tweeted that.

02:04:37.000 He just probably saw it on his feed and he didn't really know.

02:04:39.000 He quote tweeted it.

02:04:50.000 And I quote, If the guy who originally tweeted that had literally just clicked on Wendell Potter's name on the top of the tweet, that would have taken him to his profile picture where he would have seen all these names that have for Medicare for all in the title and he would have realized what point he was making when he tweeted that.

02:05:18.000 But why would you do five seconds of research about somebody before denouncing them when you can get that little endorphin rush from, like, you know... 1.00

02:05:26.000 You're a piece of shit on Twitter. 1.00

02:05:28.000 Do you know who Alan Lavinowicz is? 1.00

02:05:30.000 Who's that?

02:05:31.000 He's a writer.

02:05:32.000 He's got a very interesting perspective on this, and he calls Twitter and social media processed information.

02:05:40.000 The same way processed food is bad for you, that processed information, ultra-processed.

02:05:46.000 Where it's down to, instead of having a conversation with someone, it's down to quote tweeting a thing completely out of context and trying to ruin them. 1.00

02:05:53.000 Oh my god, this piece of shit just admitted it. 1.00

02:05:55.000 Like that kind of thing. 1.00

02:05:56.000 That's an example of like ultra-processed information.

02:05:59.000 And when he said that, it was like one of those aha moments.

02:06:02.000 It's like, that's what it is.

02:06:04.000 That is the thing that separates human beings and normal human interaction between social media interaction.

02:06:11.000 It's too easy to do.

02:06:13.000 It's too simple. 0.99

02:06:14.000 It's like basically like fast food or like some sort of processed fucking snack. 1.00

02:06:19.000 It's terrible for you. 1.00

02:06:21.000 It's terrible for your brain and people engage in it easily.

02:06:25.000 Yeah, and much like those other examples, the profit incentives of the companies that run it are All in favor of people doing all this stuff because the more people are doing that, the more minutes per day their eyeballs are on Twitter.

02:06:39.000 Sure, but I think that's almost a simplistic version of it because I don't think they meant that.

02:06:43.000 I don't think they created it in order to get people to do it that way.

02:06:47.000 I think they created it as like when you go back and look at Twitter, what it initially was, it was like you would put at and then your name is like is going to the movies.

02:06:56.000 Like, you would even talk about yourself in the third person.

02:06:59.000 You know, like, at Joe Rogan's going to the gym.

02:07:02.000 Like, that's how people did it.

02:07:03.000 And then slowly but surely, it became a way where people espoused opinions, and then it became Arab Spring, and then, like, it became all sorts of different ways that people expressed themselves.

02:07:13.000 Like, this idea that it started out with this insidious notion...

02:07:17.000 I don't think it necessarily started out with an insidious notion, but I do think that the ways that it's changed over time are ones that...

02:07:26.000 Just the fact that likes and retweets and all that stuff are part of it, I do think it's a kind of feedback mechanism.

02:07:37.000 You know John Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed?

02:07:42.000 Publicly Shamed, yeah.

02:07:43.000 He talks about that at the end.

02:07:45.000 He uses the analogy of...

02:07:48.000 Those electronic speeding signs that will show you as you drive by how fast you're driving and what the speed limit is.

02:07:56.000 And he points out that on paper there's no reason that should work because they're not giving you any information you don't already have.

02:08:02.000 Every car has a speedometer in it that tells you how fast you're driving.

02:08:06.000 A normal low-tech speed sign would tell you what the speed limit is.

02:08:09.000 But just that moment of validation that you get from driving past and see the two numbers come together It actually does seem to get people to drive more slowly and it reduces actions.

02:08:19.000 There are tons of studies about this that show that it does that.

02:08:22.000 And in that case, it's that kind of like immediate feedback loop of validation is a good thing. 1.00

02:08:27.000 But in social media, that kind of immediate feedback loop of validation that like you're going to get 10,000 people who like and retweet because you said somebody is a piece of shit or whatever. 1.00

02:08:39.000 is incredibly toxic. 0.99

02:08:41.000 I think it makes it harder to communicate with people.

02:08:46.000 It makes it harder to even listen to what somebody who disagrees with you thinks for long enough that you could think about how to convince them to try to persuade them of your point of view.

02:08:57.000 And it makes us even more atomized than we are already.

02:09:01.000 If you spend all of your time scrolling Which, again, maybe it wasn't the original intention, but I think that the more time people spend scrolling through their social media feeds, the better it is for the bottom line of these companies.

02:09:16.000 Would you agree with that?

02:09:17.000 Oh, for sure.

02:09:18.000 Yeah, and it's also hugely addictive.

02:09:20.000 With the likes and the retweets and all that stuff, they just made things incredibly addictive.

02:09:25.000 And the numbers.

02:09:26.000 When people look at numbers, they want to look at how many likes they get for something.

02:09:30.000 And then when they find...

02:09:31.000 Certain things that get more likes, they gravitate towards those things.

02:09:35.000 Have you seen the Social Dilemma documentary?

02:09:40.000 I actually haven't seen it, but I know what it is.

02:09:42.000 It's really good.

02:09:44.000 It highlights a terrifying future because they're essentially saying, like, this leads to this massive polarization of these perspectives in this country.

02:09:55.000 It's almost like setting us up for a civil war.

02:09:59.000 Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's going to be a civil war, but I do think that you're going to get a lot of more people who get all of their sort of emotional connection to politics is about, like, getting mad at people who are on the other team and not even getting mad at people with power.

02:10:19.000 Right.

02:10:40.000 And that seems crazy to me because, I mean, especially after 2020, you know, where, like, the, you know, the turnout was ridiculously high on both sides.

02:10:51.000 So, like, you've got, like, 70 however million people that you're just going to, like, write off, right?

02:10:56.000 Like, they're just, like, unredeemable, you know?

02:10:59.000 Basket of deplorables.

02:11:00.000 Yeah, they're just irredeemable deplorables.

02:11:04.000 I don't know how you think that you're going to accomplish anything.

02:11:09.000 They're not thinking like that, though.

02:11:10.000 They're not thinking in this broad perspective.

02:11:14.000 They're not looking at, like, what's best for the human race?

02:11:17.000 What's best for the community of the United States or my city or my country?

02:11:21.000 No, they're not thinking like that.

02:11:22.000 They're just thinking, like, what feels good. 1.00

02:11:24.000 What feels good is, like, fuck you, Trump supporter. 1.00

02:11:26.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

02:11:28.000 Look, I mean one of the reasons I always thought that Bernie Sanders would have won the 2016 election if he'd been the nominee is that there are – I'm not saying all of them.

02:11:41.000 I'm not even saying most of them.

02:11:42.000 But I think there's a chunk of people who voted for Trump in 2016 who absolutely would have voted for Bernie.

02:11:47.000 I think so too.

02:11:48.000 Yeah, I don't have any doubt in my mind.

02:11:50.000 I think there's a lot of people who want a person that has like a legitimate, like a really well thought out perspective that they have been consistent with their entire career.

02:12:03.000 That's Bernie Sanders.

02:12:04.000 And he really does look out for the working person.

02:12:08.000 He really does look out for working families.

02:12:10.000 If you go back and see clips from him from the 1980s, it's all the same stuff.

02:12:15.000 So why comedians?

02:12:17.000 What about comedians that made you?

02:12:20.000 I think that's an example of a larger thing, but I think it's a really interesting example.

02:12:26.000 So I think the larger thing that it's an example of is that when people – this is my claim about why a lot of people on the left get sucked into this, right?

02:12:36.000 When people feel like they have no real power to change anything like big and structural that actually matters.

02:12:45.000 They get sucked into picking fights that they think they can't win.

02:12:49.000 If you can't win the ones that matter, then find a way to care about the stuff that is not going to change the world for better, but you derive some kind of satisfaction from.

02:13:02.000 So if it's like You know, yelling at Dave Chappelle, you know, then, like, that's something that can scratch that itch, you know?

02:13:09.000 If it's Antifa, right?

02:13:11.000 Like, look, the things that actually create, like, misery for working people in the United States are big structural things that can't be solved by punching anybody in the face, right?

02:13:20.000 You know, that's not going to work.

02:13:23.000 But, you know, you can get diverted to finding someone you can punch and, you know, you get, like, that sense of satisfaction.

02:13:33.000 And I think that what the comedy example really shows is the way that people get sucked into this way of viewing the world that's all about individual moralism, right?

02:13:46.000 Is this person a good person or a bad person?

02:13:48.000 Is that person a good person or a bad person?

02:13:50.000 And it becomes just this like constant inventory of the soul.

02:13:55.000 And I think that we're doing that so much that we almost don't even notice that we're doing it.

02:13:59.000 It just almost like goes without saying that like that's how you would interact with this stuff.

02:14:03.000 And so I think that comedy as a form of entertainment and when it's really good as a form of art, as something that can help us kind of look at the world around us at a slightly different angle than we would in the normal course of things because it kind of holds things up in a different way.

02:14:25.000 I think that that can only work.

02:14:28.000 If it's operating in a space where people aren't constantly thinking about like, oh, is this guy a good guy or a bad guy?

02:14:39.000 Is this joke that I'm about to tell something that is morally acceptable or not?

02:14:45.000 If you're in that space, I don't think you're going to be able to do it right.

02:14:56.000 That's an interesting thought that people will attack things that they think that they can have an impact on instead of going after these big impossible problems that seem insurmountable.

02:15:10.000 Yeah.

02:15:11.000 I mean, look, perfect example.

02:15:12.000 Think about the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd.

02:15:16.000 There was this Wave of protests and riots and unrest that was like without precedent in a very, very long time, if ever, right?

02:15:25.000 And all of that was originally about police violence.

02:15:30.000 But how much has actually changed in terms of how policing works in the United States since then?

02:15:39.000 There are some cities that cut budgets for a while.

02:15:41.000 Most of them have put it back.

02:15:43.000 But in terms of things like how easy it is to hold a police officer accountable if they use violence in an unjustified way, I don't think that's gotten much better.

02:15:58.000 Well, it's changed in New York City.

02:16:00.000 In New York City, police officers can be civilly liable now.

02:16:03.000 Yeah, and that's a good step.

02:16:05.000 I don't think it's a complete solution because for one thing, I think a lot of people who are most likely to end up in these situations are not in a good position to afford good legal representation.

02:16:18.000 I know sometimes in a high-profile case, you'll get people doing it pro bono who are good lawyers.

02:16:23.000 But again, I think it's a good step.

02:16:25.000 I don't think it addresses...

02:16:29.000 Yeah.

02:16:43.000 Is, you know, getting, you know, every, you know, corporation in the world to, like, put out some sort of Black Lives Matter thing, right?

02:16:51.000 Like, that's easy because it doesn't cost them anything.

02:16:52.000 Like, why wouldn't they just do that?

02:16:54.000 It's also good for business.

02:16:55.000 Sure, yeah.

02:16:57.000 Work capitalism.

02:16:59.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:17:00.000 I mean, that's the thing.

02:17:01.000 Like, this woke signaling, you know, that your business is a part of the good side and that you should support this business.

02:17:10.000 Yeah.

02:17:10.000 No, absolutely.

02:17:11.000 And again, like it earns them some goodwill.

02:17:14.000 It doesn't cost them anything.

02:17:15.000 Why wouldn't they do that, right?

02:17:16.000 Like that doesn't – that does very little to solve like anything that any of this stuff is supposed to be about.

02:17:24.000 But again, it's easy, right?

02:17:27.000 Or like when people like knocking down statues, which don't get me wrong, I don't think there should be statues of Confederate generals in cities.

02:17:34.000 I mean I don't think that's something we should glorify.

02:17:37.000 But I also saw a lot of like after the really bad statues came down, people started going after gray area statues. 0.99

02:17:45.000 Fucking George Washington statues. 0.99

02:17:46.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:17:46.000 What's interesting about the Civil War statutes is many of them actually came up, they were put up during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. 0.99

02:17:57.000 And they're really cheaply made.

02:17:59.000 They're these shitty responses to the change that was happening in the country. 0.92

02:18:05.000 Yeah, right.

02:18:06.000 So, again, I think that, like, should there be statues to Robert E. Lee?

02:18:13.000 No, I don't think so.

02:18:14.000 But I also think it's revealing that people end up spending this much time on these purely symbolic things, right?

02:18:21.000 You know, like, we've got rid of all the really objectionable statues, and now we'll say, well, how about George Washington?

02:18:26.000 How about whoever, right?

02:18:27.000 Right.

02:18:27.000 And then you search for things that, you know, you can change the name of it, right?

02:18:32.000 You know, like my mom has gotten really into birdwatching in her retirement and she told me that there's like some kind of warbler that's named after a Confederate general that people are like trying to like get that changed.

02:18:44.000 It's like, okay, you're really like, you know...

02:18:46.000 They're digging deep.

02:18:47.000 They're digging deep, right?

02:18:49.000 Warblers.

02:18:49.000 I know, right?

02:18:50.000 It is kind of weird though.

02:18:52.000 You know, like if you had like a Hitler warbler, you're like... 0.99

02:18:55.000 Fucking weed celebrating. 0.99

02:18:57.000 Yeah, no, and like whatever. 1.00

02:18:59.000 What kind of t-shirt is that?

02:19:00.000 Sure, I guess if I were in the... 0.99

02:19:03.000 He had a warbler with a fucking wing up in the air like a Nazi, like, hey! 0.99

02:19:10.000 Hey! 1.00

02:19:11.000 Yeah.

02:19:12.000 But again, why comedians in the title?

02:19:16.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:19:17.000 So I think it's an example that makes it really dramatic because...

02:19:23.000 Comedians don't and really can't exercise political power. 0.51

02:19:28.000 They might influence to a certain extent the way that people think about certain things, but nobody who's doing comedy is making decisions that directly impact politics.

02:19:54.000 It's a symptom of how extreme this kind of moralistic approach to politics is.

02:20:01.000 Can get, right?

02:20:02.000 That like you're this concerned with like constantly, you know, testing, you know, whether somebody is a good person or a bad person or they ever said anything that, you know, that might show them to like to really be a bad person and nothing could ever just be a bad moment,

02:20:17.000 right? 0.99

02:20:18.000 That, you know, that it has to be like this is the moment where you really revealed the How toxic your soul was or something rather than just like you said something stupid because sometimes people say things that are stupid. 0.96

02:20:31.000 I think that that kind of moralism, when it's applied to comedy, I think that that's maybe the most extreme symptom of what I'm talking about because it's one thing even to get mad at somebody because of something they wrote in an editorial. 0.97

02:20:50.000 That they're telling you exactly what they think should happen.

02:20:53.000 If I write something for Jacobin and some people get upset about that, okay, at least it's a Jacobin article.

02:21:01.000 I'm literally saying exactly what I think.

02:21:08.000 So that last Dave Chappelle special at Netflix that people got mad about.

02:21:15.000 And which, by the way, I hadn't even watched, but since I'd written this thing, people kept asking me what I thought, and I finally watched it. 0.88

02:21:22.000 And I thought that the way that it was portrayed as if it were this, like, just festival of transphobic hatred was ridiculous.

02:21:31.000 That, in fact, the overall theme of the special, as far as those issues go, was about him, like, moving towards a place of greater understanding and, you know, and, like...

02:21:41.000 And it's also kind of a love letter to his friend that committed suicide for supporting him.

02:21:46.000 Was attacked for supporting him. 1.00

02:21:48.000 And then she jumped off a fucking building and committed suicide. 1.00

02:21:52.000 This is like an homage to this person's life and this long part of it. 1.00

02:21:56.000 I worked with Dave during the entire time he was piecing that together.

02:22:01.000 Because we started doing shows in Austin like...

02:22:07.000 November of 2020. It might have even been earlier than that.

02:22:11.000 And we were working together while he was putting it together, and he was responding to this idea that he was transphobic.

02:22:21.000 And he was saying, like, this is so crazy.

02:22:23.000 Like, this is who I am, and this is about this person who, when I was accused of being transphobic, this person defended me and was dragged by people There's been some talk of how much of that was creative license because people tried to find what the tweets were.

02:22:41.000 How many of them were DMs? 0.94

02:22:43.000 We don't know.

02:22:44.000 I don't think you could dismiss that.

02:22:45.000 Or how many of them were people who actually knew her personally?

02:22:52.000 It's the highest form of comedy in a lot of ways, because you're trying to take this socially sensitive issue and extract laughs from it, which is very difficult to do, but in no way was it transphobic.

02:23:06.000 In no way was it hurtful or cruel or mean.

02:23:12.000 I mean, actually, he spent a couple minutes of the special explaining why the bathroom laws in North Carolina were cruel.

02:23:18.000 And at the end, when he's talking about his dead friend, one of the crucial moments comes when he's describing their back and forth when he had her open for him.

02:23:30.000 Yes.

02:23:30.000 It's hilarious.

02:23:31.000 Yeah, which is a hilarious thing, but there is this really moving part of it at the end where she tells him, like...

02:23:41.000 I want you to recognize that I'm going through a real human experience.

02:23:44.000 And, like, it really sinks in in that.

02:23:46.000 And the idea that watching this would make somebody more transphobic just seems absurd to me.

02:23:52.000 But what people did, right, is they literally quoted individual sentences that he says in it.

02:23:59.000 Like, there's one point in the special where he says, I'm a TERF. Right?

02:24:03.000 TERF standing for trans-exclusion.

02:24:05.000 Yeah.

02:24:06.000 It's a joke.

02:24:07.000 Yeah.

02:24:07.000 And it's like, okay, but...

02:24:09.000 Literally within like two minutes of him saying, I'm on team turf, he says, I'm not saying that I don't think trans women are women.

02:24:17.000 It's like, well, hold on.

02:24:18.000 If you take both of those literally, those two don't go together.

02:24:24.000 But of course, that's not how comedy works.

02:24:26.000 That's like thinking that somebody who writes a novel, that every sentence of the novel is what they actually personally think is true.

02:24:35.000 Of course.

02:24:36.000 But I think – and I've got to think that a lot of people who write articles like this must understand that on some level, right?

02:24:44.000 That they – that like this is not how comedy works.

02:24:46.000 But I think that sometimes it's like bad faith.

02:24:50.000 They're just being dishonest.

02:24:52.000 There's definitely some of that.

02:24:53.000 But like also I think that – Like, sometimes if you get this invested in, like, making these, like, moral indictments of people over those culture war battles, then you're just not even pausing to think about that.

02:25:08.000 Like, you're just, like, trying to find evidence.

02:25:10.000 Like, you're just, like, sifting through it to, like, find, like—it's like, you know, Freddie DeBoer, the commentator?

02:25:17.000 Yeah.

02:25:17.000 No.

02:25:18.000 Okay.

02:25:18.000 So Freddy DeBoer is a writer.

02:25:21.000 He wrote a really good book about the education system called Cult of Smart.

02:25:26.000 And he has this essay from a few years ago called Planet of Cops, where he says that it seems to him that increasingly everybody in the culture is a cop now, right?

02:25:39.000 What he means by that, and he develops the metaphor.

02:25:41.000 He says things like, Oh, there's a new movie that people are getting excited about.

02:25:46.000 Give me two hours and 500 words and I'll find you your indictments.

02:25:51.000 It's like it's sort of constantly sifting through things to find evidence that people have committed some kind of sin or infraction.

02:26:01.000 And I think that like that's how people are approaching that.

02:26:06.000 Like when they wrote these articles about how – oh my god, did you know that Dave Chappelle said that he was on Team Turf in that special?

02:26:17.000 Yeah.

02:26:18.000 Like, look, there's a mission, right?

02:26:20.000 You know, you got to get those indictments, right?

02:26:22.000 So you just have to sort through all of it until you can find something that, you know, that looks like a smoking gun of evidence.

02:26:30.000 And I think that it's like it's obviously it's a terrible way to write about anything.

02:26:36.000 But I think what's interesting to me about the example of comedy is Is that it's sort of the most absurd possible application of doing that.

02:26:48.000 Because, I mean, just to be, like, simplistic about it for a second, right?

02:26:52.000 Like, if you're saying something in a stand-up special, like, generally speaking, not every sentence, but, like, you're saying it because you think it's funny, right?

02:27:00.000 Which is just a different thing from saying something.

02:27:04.000 Because, like, oh, you know, here is exactly what I think.

02:27:07.000 Right? 0.99

02:27:07.000 It's like the example that we were talking about before the podcast, which I'm not going to do because it's actually in my act now, that someone put a quote that I said in an article about what a piece of shit I am. 0.99

02:27:18.000 I'm like, hey, you've got to put the whole quote because there's like a lot more to that. 0.86

02:27:22.000 And it's clearly joking.

02:27:25.000 But it's that thing that they do is also because someone is getting a disproportionate and exorbitant amount of attention.

02:27:35.000 And when someone is like a Dave Chappelle or myself who's got a disproportionate amount of attention, there's so many people that want to look at that and go, Flaws!

02:27:46.000 Holes!

02:27:47.000 Puppet kegs!

02:27:48.000 Throw rocks!

02:27:49.000 And it's a normal thing to have this sort of reaction.

02:27:55.000 To someone who you feel either their take on things isn't valid or it doesn't align with your own or there's a reason why you're morally superior to them because your position is better.

02:28:11.000 Yeah.

02:28:12.000 No, I think there's a lot of that.

02:28:14.000 And it's also – I mean it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about the BLM protests and the aftermath and all of that stuff.

02:28:23.000 Like if you get somebody – like if – I mean obviously in a case as high profile as like Dave Chappelle, like Netflix isn't going to dump him because like why would they do that?

02:28:33.000 Like that would just be putting like a lot of money on the – Well, not only that but there's no reason to.

02:28:37.000 Right.

02:28:38.000 Right.

02:28:38.000 Here's the thing.

02:28:38.000 It's like if Dave Chappelle was saying all trans people would die, should die, and they're not human, okay, get rid of them.

02:28:46.000 Everybody would agree to that. 1.00

02:28:47.000 You shouldn't put that on your network.

02:28:49.000 But you cannot look at any of the things that he said and rationalize any of these accusations that people have towards him.

02:28:56.000 He is not that guy.

02:28:58.000 He is a lovely guy.

02:29:00.000 If you meet him, he is one of the kindest, nicest, sweetest guys.

02:29:05.000 That's who he really is.

02:29:06.000 And it's really striking, too, because if you remember when all this was going on, there was like a week of the news that was all about how there was going to be this huge walkout of trans employees at Netflix.

02:29:17.000 You remember this?

02:29:18.000 Yeah, they took like a lunch break.

02:29:20.000 There was like five of them.

02:29:21.000 Yeah, there were like five people and it's not even clear that they all worked at Netflix.

02:29:24.000 No, most of them didn't. 0.97

02:29:26.000 And then the one of them that was there, they found a whole bunch of racist shit that she had put on Twitter. 0.99

02:29:33.000 And they're like, hey... 0.99

02:29:35.000 And then not even jokes, just like racist stuff. 0.99

02:29:39.000 It's like, God damn it. 0.99

02:29:41.000 I get what's going on. 1.00

02:29:42.000 These are like, they're humans.

02:29:44.000 Humans are flawed.

02:29:46.000 And, you know, just because they said a thing that was incorrect doesn't mean that they're...

02:29:51.000 Whatever position they have, they can't have a good perspective on something.

02:29:56.000 Yeah, and what kills me about that example is at that very moment that that was going on, right?

02:30:02.000 That there was this like...

02:30:04.000 Super hyped up walkout that got all this attention.

02:30:08.000 There was like two people on their lunch break or whatever.

02:30:10.000 At the same time, there was the John Deere strike going on and that was thousands of people were out on strike to get better wages and working conditions.

02:30:22.000 John Deere, the tractors?

02:30:24.000 Yeah.

02:30:24.000 Yep.

02:30:25.000 Yep.

02:30:25.000 The workers.

02:30:26.000 I've never heard of that.

02:30:26.000 Yeah.

02:30:27.000 Yeah.

02:30:27.000 If you go – I believe you.

02:30:29.000 But, I mean, I've never heard of peep out of that.

02:30:31.000 Yeah.

02:30:31.000 Well, that's the thing, right?

02:30:33.000 So, like, you compare the scale of the two things and then you compare the scale of the coverage.

02:30:38.000 Right.

02:30:38.000 One of them is jokes.

02:30:39.000 But it's also jokes from the greatest living comedian.

02:30:42.000 That's part of the problem.

02:30:44.000 And also a guy who you sort of associate with left-wing values and progressive values, and you want him to fall in line.

02:30:53.000 And I think that's part of the blowback, is that they want to shame him into falling in line with their ideals.

02:31:02.000 And one of the things that he said when we talked about the special, and we did a show together and he did this speech at an arena, and he's like, I am not going to comply with the way you want me to think and want me to behave.

02:31:19.000 That's not what I'm doing.

02:31:21.000 Yeah, and again, like, what's his response going to be realistically?

02:31:25.000 Like, he's just going to... 1.00

02:31:27.000 Keep talking shit. 1.00

02:31:28.000 That's what he's going to do. 1.00

02:31:29.000 Right.

02:31:30.000 It's going to be funnier and funnier.

02:31:31.000 Right.

02:31:32.000 You know, but, like, the idea that, like, saying, like, he's a terrible person, he's a transphobe, like, is going to get him to, like, see things more from your perspective.

02:31:41.000 In fact, he talks about this in the special, right?

02:31:43.000 That, like, he, you know, he has the thing about the woman who, like, followed him out to the parking lot or whatever to, you know, to give him a hard time.

02:31:50.000 And... 1.00

02:31:51.000 The point is that all of that, his reaction was just, fuck you. 1.00

02:31:54.000 Of course it is. 0.99

02:31:56.000 But then actually meeting this trans woman and having the interactions that they had and having that mean something to him, that did way more probably to get him to see things the way that people were yelling at him.

02:32:37.000 I wanted him to see them.

02:32:39.000 Is to get them to say, okay, now I see you're right.

02:32:43.000 Especially if you're distorting their perceptions.

02:32:45.000 They might say the words if they think they have to, but they're not going to think it.

02:32:50.000 Now, when you wrote this book, what inspired you?

02:32:58.000 Yeah, so I think there were a few things that had been going on and it kind of all started to build for a while that I was getting frustrated that a lot of people who I align with on most things were getting sucked into the way I see it in the book,

02:33:19.000 right?

02:33:20.000 That they're like...

02:33:21.000 That these kinds of what I call pathologies of powerlessness, right?

02:33:26.000 Because you know that you can't accomplish things that actually matter, you end up getting sucked into all of this nonsense.

02:33:33.000 You spend all of your time trying to prove yourself to other people you already agree with.

02:33:37.000 You know, and to denounce, you know, people for not agreeing with you in ways that are not going to, you know, lead to a single person getting health care or a single workplace being unionized, you know, any of those things.

02:33:52.000 And I think there were a few examples that, like, were really starting to get to me at the time.

02:33:59.000 So one of them was what happened, I remember in 2019, The Democratic Socialists of America, which is an organization I'm a member of.

02:34:10.000 I think it's flawed but I think it does good stuff.

02:34:13.000 I encourage people to do that.

02:34:15.000 But they had this convention actually in Atlanta where I live and in which I didn't – I mean I was there for like a minute because I was like meeting with my editor but like I didn't go to the thing itself.

02:34:29.000 I kind of hate sitting through meetings like in general in life.

02:34:32.000 But in – But there was this montage of clips that came out afterwards that Tucker Carlson played on Fox News and stuff like that of people announcing all of these bizarre rules that you weren't allowed to clap at the convention because there might be people with rare noise sensitivities and just – Things like this.

02:34:56.000 And of course, you know, the right-wingers who compiled that were cherry-picking the worst, most ridiculous moments from a weekend.

02:35:02.000 Is that the one where this person is like, point of privilege?

02:35:07.000 You were a part of that?

02:35:09.000 I wasn't part of that.

02:35:10.000 You were in that room while that was going down?

02:35:12.000 Yeah, I wasn't in the room at that minute.

02:35:16.000 Come on, man. 0.99

02:35:16.000 That is ridiculous. 0.99

02:35:18.000 It is ridiculous. 0.99

02:35:19.000 And here's what gets me about this, right? 0.96

02:35:21.000 It's like, okay, granted the worst moments are being cherry-picked, But, also, it's not, you know, they're not being made up, right?

02:35:30.000 Like, this stuff actually happened.

02:35:31.000 And, also, it's not even like there was somebody in there with, like, a hidden camera, right, to get this footage, right?

02:35:37.000 They were streaming it to the...

02:35:39.000 Oh, no, they know that. 0.81

02:35:40.000 I mean, it doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous. 0.64

02:35:42.000 And, also, the lady calling everybody comrades. 0.86

02:35:45.000 Like, what?

02:35:47.000 What's going on here?

02:35:48.000 I mean, I think that, like, what's going...

02:35:52.000 Like, what gets me about this is that knowing that this is the face you're showing to the whole world.

02:35:57.000 Right.

02:35:57.000 Right?

02:35:58.000 That, like, anybody in the world who wants to tune in and watch this can do that.

02:36:01.000 You're still doing this stuff, like, was it somebody...

02:36:04.000 Yeah, the point of privilege thing, I think, was...

02:36:06.000 Will you stop using gendered language?

02:36:10.000 Come on, man. 0.98

02:36:10.000 It's hilarious because it just shows, like, what are we fucking concentrating on? 0.98

02:36:16.000 You're mad that people are... 0.98

02:36:17.000 There's chatter because you're easily distracted?

02:36:20.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:36:21.000 How about get the fuck out of here then? 0.96

02:36:22.000 Why are you in a large crowd of people? 0.99

02:36:24.000 What do you do at the movies?

02:36:26.000 What do you do at a bus station? 1.00

02:36:27.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

02:36:29.000 Like, you want everybody to comply? 1.00

02:36:32.000 Yeah.

02:36:32.000 Because you've got some weird tick?

02:36:34.000 Right.

02:36:34.000 And why are people doing that?

02:36:36.000 Because like you said, they can't be, I assume they're not going through their entire lives, right?

02:36:41.000 You know, trying to get people to do this stuff.

02:36:43.000 Maybe they are.

02:36:44.000 Maybe they are.

02:36:45.000 Maybe they're activists at work, too.

02:36:46.000 Maybe they're just really annoying.

02:36:48.000 Yeah, I mean, if so, they're probably winning over a lot of new converts all the time, but by doing that...

02:36:54.000 Was that the most annoying time in that meeting, or were there more annoying times during that conference?

02:36:59.000 Yeah, I mean, the stuff that I saw, which was not that much of it, but the stuff I saw, like the things that made it into that montage were the most annoying things that I saw.

02:37:11.000 But like...

02:37:13.000 I guess what gets me about this is that knowing that everybody in the world can see this, if you're still acting this way, then what that shows me is that you do not care at all.

02:37:27.000 Like how any...

02:37:29.000 You know, a normal person is going to react to seeing this.

02:37:33.000 And I know there are people who get this twisted.

02:37:36.000 When I say normal person, it's like, oh, do you just mean people who are, you know, whatever, right?

02:37:41.000 You know, like, fit some demographics or something.

02:37:43.000 No, when I say normal person, I mean, like...

02:37:47.000 I think?

02:38:05.000 And say, wait a second, what?

02:38:06.000 But I don't even think that's a politics thing.

02:38:08.000 I think it's just a social issue.

02:38:12.000 And I don't think they're thinking at all that everyone's going to see it.

02:38:17.000 I don't think that was even a consideration at all.

02:38:19.000 I think in that moment, they were very self-indulgent, and they had the access to a microphone, and they couldn't wait to yap.

02:38:27.000 And that's part of the problem with people.

02:38:30.000 You just can't wait to, as a person who yaps professionally.

02:38:33.000 I mean, look, that's why I hate...

02:38:34.000 I mean, I said earlier that I hate meetings.

02:38:37.000 This is one of the reasons why, right?

02:38:38.000 That, like, it's always...

02:38:40.000 Every time I've ever had to go to a meeting for anything, you know, there's always...

02:38:44.000 There are always people who talk just because it's important to them that they, like, hear themselves talk.

02:38:51.000 Oh, yeah.

02:38:52.000 It's awful.

02:38:54.000 You know, yeah.

02:38:55.000 That's why it's funny.

02:38:56.000 That's why that video's funny.

02:38:58.000 I mean, that's a version of that.

02:38:59.000 That's, like, the super ultra-progressive version of that.

02:39:03.000 Yeah, and I get that it's funny.

02:39:06.000 It's also like seeing people who are supposedly fighting for all the things that I am act that way is also painful.

02:39:15.000 It's like, what's wrong with you?

02:39:16.000 Why would you do this?

02:39:19.000 Why do you think you need someone there to go, calm down, Francis?

02:39:23.000 Yeah, I think...

02:39:28.000 I think you do, right?

02:39:29.000 And that's part of the problem.

02:39:30.000 That's part of why I wrote the book because I guarantee you, however many hundreds of people were there in that hall, right, you know, where that was happening.

02:39:37.000 There's a lot of eye rolls.

02:39:39.000 There's a lot of eye rolls.

02:39:40.000 There's no way there weren't tons of eye rolls, right?

02:39:42.000 Yeah, I'm sure.

02:39:42.000 Like, I actually think the very limited amount of time that it was around that weekend, I think I heard a few people, you know, do the verbal eye rolls to me, right?

02:39:51.000 Did you know?

02:39:53.000 Point of privilege.

02:39:54.000 By the way, my friends say that sometimes just for a joke.

02:39:57.000 We're having a conversation and they're like, point of privilege!

02:40:00.000 And they'll just spit out something.

02:40:02.000 Yeah, right.

02:40:03.000 And it's like, I think, but the thing is...

02:40:08.000 People – most everybody who's rolling their eyes – I mean I think – I actually think my friend Cale Brooks was there.

02:40:16.000 He might have actually like had a – like I think somebody actually came over to his table and they were – You know, and like told them to like not clap and you know, they're like, what's wrong with you?

02:40:30.000 Why are you clapping?

02:40:31.000 You're ruining life!

02:40:32.000 You know, they actually did have a little thing about that, but they...

02:40:35.000 Are you supposed to do this?

02:40:37.000 Are you supposed to snap fingers?

02:40:37.000 Yeah, I think so.

02:40:39.000 That was a thing you used to do in the jazz days.

02:40:42.000 That was a beatnik thing, right?

02:40:44.000 Yeah, that's...

02:40:46.000 And like, but most people who are going to roll their eyes aren't going to say anything because you don't want to be the guy who says anything. 1.00

02:40:53.000 Right, you don't want to be an asshole. 0.99

02:40:53.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.99

02:40:54.000 You're not there to be an asshole. 1.00

02:40:55.000 Right. 1.00

02:40:55.000 You're there because you actually care about the issues that the organization is about. 1.00

02:41:00.000 You didn't sign up for this so you could spend your time arguing with crazy people about whether clapping is okay.

02:41:06.000 So I think it's a very understandable impulse. 0.84

02:41:08.000 But I think what I started to realize when I was thinking about examples like this is that for a long time, it's not like I didn't know that there were a lot of people who were ridiculous in ways like this or a lot of people who were like, Unhelpfully moralistic,

02:41:24.000 you know, in ways like what I was talking about in the comedy chapter of the book or, you know, who would excuse things that shouldn't be excused, like in the Andy No part.

02:41:33.000 But I think what I always told myself was, look...

02:41:37.000 None of this matters that much. 1.00

02:41:39.000 Like some people, some leftists are idiots, but whatever. 1.00

02:41:41.000 Like in the greater scheme of things, it's not that, you know, like we live in a world where there are, you know, imperialist wars and union busting and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. 1.00

02:41:51.000 This is such a minor irritation than like why spend time talking about it and thinking about it.

02:41:56.000 But then at a certain point, my perspective started to change because I actually think that the fact that there are all of those other issues that are more important is a reason to try to get people to stop acting like this.

02:42:10.000 Because if you actually care about doing something about those bigger issues, then if you look to any working class onlooker who you might be trying to...

02:42:24.000 Like, ideally, you'd want to reach out to, right?

02:42:27.000 If you look like this lunatic who's, like, getting mad at people because they're clapping instead of doing whatever they're supposed to do with their fingers, you know, then they're not going to have anything to do with you. 0.85

02:42:37.000 Who can blame them? 0.99

02:42:37.000 You've got to weed out the freaks. 0.99

02:42:40.000 Yeah, it's like some people just – they can't see the forest for the trees, right?

02:42:45.000 Yeah.

02:42:46.000 They're concentrated on this one thing when what you're trying to accomplish is this – More inclusive view of Socialism and with how socialism could fit into our modern culture and Instead they want they want you to not clap or not talk I know please watch your idle chatter and the noise you make I'm easily distracted like oh my god I Self

02:43:17.000 -indulgence.

02:43:18.000 It's a real problem with any group.

02:43:20.000 And whenever people are trying to be ultra-sensitive and ultra-progressive and ultra-open-minded, you open the door for annoying people.

02:43:28.000 You open the door for people that just need a tremendous amount of attention.

02:43:32.000 Yeah, and there's got to be a way that you can, you know, square the circle of saying, like, okay, look, are there obviously, you know, should there be more accommodations for disabled people in, like, society as a whole than there are?

02:43:48.000 Sure, right?

02:43:49.000 But anything that you could call a disability, should you crank the dial of accommodation up to 11 at all times?

02:43:56.000 No, right?

02:43:58.000 Should you care about not...

02:44:05.000 Right.

02:44:33.000 I think we're good to go.

02:44:48.000 As we've been, like we were talking about earlier, right, in these last weeks while people have been, you know, freaking out about, you know, whatever's going on in the news about, you know, things that Joe Rogan said 15 years ago or about what Whoopi Goldberg said on The View or whatever.

02:45:05.000 We're about to go to war.

02:45:06.000 Yeah, exactly!

02:45:10.000 However slim the chance, the fact that there's the standoff with Russia, that has the potential if that happened.

02:45:19.000 That would be an absolute...

02:45:26.000 Yeah.

02:45:48.000 And I'm not, you know, I'm not sure that—I don't know what's going to happen, but, like, when I see, like, Biden canceling, you know, the meeting with Putin, you know, like, I get— I get nervous and I think that given how destructive that would be,

02:46:04.000 that's got to override almost everything else right now just in terms of how important it is.

02:46:18.000 That we stop acting like this.

02:46:20.000 I don't know why the United States has to have the kind of role in the world where we're negotiating about what happens in Ukraine at all.

02:46:28.000 Why is it important that the United States have this be present in everything that happens?

02:46:35.000 It's a weird role.

02:46:36.000 Everywhere on the planet.

02:46:39.000 You know, when the United States invaded Panama, I think that was totally unjustified.

02:46:44.000 But, you know, like, Gorbachev, you know, wasn't, like, involving himself, you know, in that, right?

02:46:50.000 You know, because the Soviet Union didn't have that role in the world.

02:46:54.000 And I'd rather that we didn't either.

02:46:55.000 I'd rather that, like, instead of having...

02:46:58.000 Like however many hundreds of military bases the United States has all over the entire – like every part of the world right now and constantly fighting these like low-level drone wars that like most Americans have like forgotten that they're even happening.

02:47:15.000 I think that if we redirected the kinds of resources that we spend on having this role in the world to taking care of people's material needs in ways that – it wouldn't fund all of it but it would do a lot.

02:47:31.000 Trevor Burrus It would do a lot.

02:47:33.000 Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed our conversation.

02:47:35.000 Thank you for doing this.

02:47:36.000 It was a lot of fun.

02:47:36.000 Yeah, thank you so much for having me.

02:47:38.000 My pleasure.

02:47:38.000 Thank you for the Buffalo Trish.

02:47:39.000 Enjoy the whiskey.

02:47:41.000 And tell everybody where they can find you on social media and where they can get your stuff.

02:47:46.000 Sure.

02:47:47.000 So I have a show called Give Them an Argument, which you can find on YouTube and all the usual podcast places.

02:47:54.000 I write for Jacobin Magazine.

02:47:56.000 You can find me there.

02:47:59.000 And as far as all the links to everything in this book and other books and everything else, just go to benburgess.com.

02:48:05.000 That's probably the easiest way to find everything.

02:48:06.000 Social media as well.

02:48:08.000 It's on there?

02:48:09.000 Yep.

02:48:09.000 Social media, you know, Twitter's at Ben Burgess, but all the links are on there.

02:48:13.000 All right.

02:48:14.000 All right.

02:48:14.000 Thanks, Brian.

02:48:15.000 Thank you so much.

02:48:15.000 My pleasure.

02:48:16.000 All right.

02:48:16.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 24, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1783 - Ben Burgis

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