The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #740 - Thaddeus Russell

00:00:00.000 Do, do, do.

00:00:09.000 And we're live, ladies and gentlemen, with Thaddeus Russell.

00:00:12.000 Hey.

00:00:12.000 Pretending to be a morning DJ. Alright!

00:00:15.000 Hey! 0.99

00:00:16.000 How's everything going out there in the wild and wacky world of being a professor?

00:00:19.000 Oh, God.

00:00:20.000 I gotta leave.

00:00:21.000 Sorry.

00:00:21.000 You gotta leave?

00:00:22.000 I can't do this.

00:00:23.000 You didn't get fired since the last time you were here.

00:00:25.000 Not yet.

00:00:25.000 That's good.

00:00:26.000 I'm trying hard, though.

00:00:27.000 Are you?

00:00:29.000 Being on here sure doesn't help.

00:00:30.000 It doesn't?

00:00:31.000 Did you get any heat at all?

00:00:32.000 Yeah, I did, actually.

00:00:32.000 Really?

00:00:33.000 Yeah.

00:00:33.000 What'd you get heat about?

00:00:34.000 Oh, God.

00:00:35.000 Here we go.

00:00:37.000 I know someone complained about the podcast.

00:00:40.000 One person?

00:00:41.000 Mm-hmm.

00:00:41.000 Well, that's amazing.

00:00:42.000 Someone who was referenced.

00:00:43.000 Someone who was referenced in the podcast.

00:00:44.000 Not by name, but someone who was referenced.

00:00:45.000 Oh, like one of the people that we complained about?

00:00:47.000 Someone complained to the administration about what we talked about.

00:00:50.000 Oh, my goodness.

00:00:51.000 And what did they say?

00:00:52.000 Nothing was done to me, but I don't know.

00:00:54.000 I was just told that there was a complaint made.

00:00:56.000 So how does that work?

00:00:58.000 Do they have to examine every complaint for...

00:01:02.000 To make sure that it's a valid complaint?

00:01:04.000 Apparently they did not, in this case, yeah.

00:01:05.000 I was told it was a formal complaint, but then nothing, as far as I know, was done about it, so I'm still there.

00:01:10.000 Although, I'm probably leaving Occidental anyway.

00:01:13.000 Oh my goodness.

00:01:14.000 Is this a news flash?

00:01:16.000 Yeah, it is actually.

00:01:17.000 Breaking news?

00:01:18.000 Yeah.

00:01:18.000 I might be taking a new position at Willamette University in Oregon.

00:01:23.000 Oh.

00:01:24.000 Are you going to move up there?

00:01:25.000 I'm going to split time between L.A. and there.

00:01:27.000 Oh, you're a glutton for punishment. 0.83

00:01:28.000 Yeah, my son's here, so I've got to...

00:01:31.000 Yeah, that's a long commute, man.

00:01:33.000 Isn't that well, actually?

00:01:34.000 Two hours and a plane?

00:01:35.000 You know, it's funny.

00:01:36.000 It's like an hour and a half, and then it's about the same as what I'm doing now between the east side of L.A. and the west side of L.A., where his mother lives.

00:01:44.000 So actually, it's not that much of a different commute for me.

00:01:47.000 Oh, the traffic versus the flight.

00:01:49.000 Yeah.

00:01:49.000 I mean, I haven't done it yet, so we'll see, but I think it'll work out.

00:01:54.000 Wow.

00:01:54.000 What an optimistic fellow you are.

00:01:56.000 I love Oregon, though.

00:01:57.000 It's awesome.

00:01:58.000 It's so beautiful out there.

00:01:59.000 And they have water.

00:02:00.000 They have much water.

00:02:02.000 They have water and they have green plants.

00:02:04.000 Everything's green.

00:02:05.000 It's incredibly green.

00:02:05.000 Yeah, it's an interesting trade-off.

00:02:08.000 It's like they get a lot of rain, but because of that, the grass is like this vibrant, almost like glowing green.

00:02:15.000 It's like the opposite of L.A. Yeah.

00:02:17.000 Everything's alive and lush.

00:02:18.000 Yeah.

00:02:19.000 It gets a little dreary, though, when you don't see the sun.

00:02:22.000 I'm worried about February, March, April, but I've heard the summers are great.

00:02:27.000 The summers are amazing.

00:02:28.000 Same in Seattle.

00:02:29.000 I was just in Seattle recently, and it rained three days in a row.

00:02:32.000 And by the time the third day rolled around, we were like, okay, let's get out of here.

00:02:36.000 But it was fun, because I was visiting some friends, and I was with my family.

00:02:42.000 Took the kids, and they just love the fact that it's different, you know, because it never rains out here.

00:02:46.000 They're like, yay!

00:02:47.000 You get to go splashing in puddles and running around.

00:02:50.000 But if that's every day, you're like, oh.

00:02:53.000 Like the 90th day in a row, which they've had.

00:02:55.000 I think they had like a foot of rain in the last month.

00:02:58.000 They've had a lot.

00:02:59.000 But last winter, they had an incredibly dry winter, and it was amazing.

00:03:03.000 Yeah.

00:03:03.000 No, but I'm looking forward to it, because I love hiking and camping in the mountains and the ocean and all that stuff.

00:03:09.000 That's a great spot to be.

00:03:10.000 Surrounded by it, yeah.

00:03:11.000 And you say it's Willamette?

00:03:12.000 Willamette.

00:03:13.000 Willamette, that's how you say it?

00:03:13.000 In Salem.

00:03:14.000 Yeah.

00:03:14.000 In Salem.

00:03:15.000 Which is just south of Portland.

00:03:16.000 Oh, okay.

00:03:17.000 Wow, that's awesome.

00:03:18.000 That's great country up there.

00:03:19.000 Yeah.

00:03:19.000 So was that part of the incentive to get you to go there?

00:03:23.000 The location?

00:03:24.000 Well, the deal is my partner girlfriend got a job as a vice president there. 0.64

00:03:29.000 Partner slash girlfriend?

00:03:30.000 Partner girlfriend.

00:03:30.000 I don't know.

00:03:31.000 I hate that.

00:03:31.000 There's no good term for it.

00:03:32.000 I know.

00:03:33.000 Your special lady friend is what I used to use. 1.00

00:03:35.000 We're not married, you know.

00:03:36.000 Before I was married, I'd call my wife my special lady friend.

00:03:39.000 Oh, yeah?

00:03:39.000 Yeah.

00:03:40.000 Sometimes I call her my lady, but I can't do that on the campus, you know what I mean?

00:03:43.000 You can get in trouble for that.

00:03:44.000 I get totally in trouble, yeah.

00:03:45.000 How hilarious is that?

00:03:46.000 Yeah.

00:03:47.000 Well, since you've been here, the social justice warrior crusade has ramped up considerably, including what happened in Yale with that woman who, I guess she sent out a letter saying that you should allow people a certain amount of leeway to be offensive.

00:04:06.000 Like, we shouldn't restrict...

00:04:09.000 What kind of costumes kids can wear, including if they want to wear things that appropriate other cultures and things along those lines.

00:04:17.000 You should give people the opportunity to be offensive, I think is what she said.

00:04:20.000 I guess opening up the door for free expression.

00:04:24.000 The idea is that you're supposed to be learning in these schools.

00:04:26.000 You're supposed to be exploring different ways of thinking and whether or not something is of...

00:04:32.000 Is this humorous?

00:04:34.000 Is this valid in our culture?

00:04:36.000 Is it not?

00:04:37.000 Should you be offended?

00:04:38.000 Is it pointless to be offended? 0.82

00:04:39.000 Is it silly?

00:04:40.000 Does it offend everyone?

00:04:42.000 If it doesn't offend people who it's supposed to be culturally appropriating, then what's it on you?

00:04:48.000 So this is opening up this can of worms, right?

00:04:50.000 Yeah, it is.

00:04:51.000 It's a can of worms.

00:04:52.000 It's a very complex issue.

00:04:54.000 I mean, there's a lot to unpack here.

00:04:56.000 So first of all, I don't know if you know, she quit for good.

00:04:58.000 Yes.

00:04:58.000 That professor.

00:04:59.000 I believe her husband did as well, right?

00:05:01.000 The dean?

00:05:02.000 No, I don't think so.

00:05:02.000 The dean of Silliman College?

00:05:03.000 He didn't?

00:05:03.000 I don't think so.

00:05:04.000 Okay.

00:05:04.000 I could be wrong.

00:05:07.000 So, yeah, it's been all over the country.

00:05:10.000 It's been very intense at Occidental, by the way.

00:05:12.000 Yeah.

00:05:12.000 And I've been in meetings and I've seen a lot of it there.

00:05:14.000 I've been sort of in the middle of it. 0.99

00:05:17.000 It's a complete clusterfuck. 0.99

00:05:19.000 There's no doubt about that. 1.00

00:05:20.000 I mean, that's my scholarly opinion.

00:05:23.000 It's gone to the level of being a caricature of political correctness.

00:05:29.000 You know, PCU, the movie, have you ever seen that?

00:05:30.000 It really often looks like that.

00:05:33.000 Yeah, it's like a South Park episode almost.

00:05:35.000 Yeah, or a South Park episode.

00:05:35.000 It really is to the level of caricature now.

00:05:39.000 And so, you know, obviously a lot of what the student protesters are saying is hysteria.

00:05:46.000 I mean, they talk as if they're in Alabama in 1960 when they're actually at Yale or Occidental College.

00:05:52.000 Right.

00:05:54.000 The most privileged people on the planet, right?

00:05:57.000 Just by being there.

00:05:59.000 And many of their demands are essentially totalitarian, you know, demanding diversity training, mandatory diversity training for all faculty and staff, which, you know, I'm assuming would be teaching me how to think about race and gender and sexuality,

00:06:15.000 right?

00:06:15.000 Telling me what I should say in my classrooms and not say in my classrooms.

00:06:20.000 That Occidental, the faculty themselves, some of the faculty actually took it upon themselves to propose a mechanism in which students can report microaggressions committed against them by faculty.

00:06:35.000 The faculty, the students didn't even demand this.

00:06:39.000 How is this happening?

00:06:41.000 I will say, I will say, just to be clear here, it hasn't been voted, the faculty hasn't voted for that yet, but it was a significant minority of faculty proposed that.

00:06:51.000 Significant, like 30%?

00:06:52.000 Probably around there.

00:06:54.000 Oh god!

00:06:54.000 I'd say about a third.

00:06:55.000 A mechanism to report microaggressions.

00:06:59.000 Microaggressions meaning like a nice shirt?

00:07:02.000 I could look at you and go, Nice shirt.

00:07:05.000 We can be specific, because they've actually listed microaggressions in many places, and one of them is asking the question, where are you from?

00:07:12.000 Oh my god!

00:07:14.000 Oh my god, that's a microaggression.

00:07:16.000 Where are you from is one.

00:07:17.000 Wait, where are you from, man?

00:07:19.000 Another one is, what are you?

00:07:21.000 What are you?

00:07:22.000 What are you?

00:07:24.000 Following up with, what are you really?

00:07:27.000 Well, what are you seems like a good question today, because you have to be really careful with gender pronouns.

00:07:33.000 Indeed.

00:07:34.000 So why can't you just say, what are you?

00:07:36.000 What are you doesn't seem offensive at all.

00:07:37.000 You could be a Z-H-E. I'm not even sure how it's pronounced.

00:07:43.000 But when someone says, what are you, I think that that's gender neutral.

00:07:48.000 So that actually should be politically correct.

00:07:50.000 Oh yeah, but it's not race neutral.

00:07:52.000 Oh, okay.

00:07:53.000 It's a question about race, right?

00:07:54.000 But why is it a question about race?

00:07:56.000 What if you're like a mulatto looking... 1.00

00:07:58.000 I'm not allowed to say mulatto.

00:07:59.000 What are you?

00:07:59.000 I don't think you're allowed to say mulatto anymore.

00:08:01.000 Dude, weren't you from 1971?

00:08:02.000 It's not good?

00:08:04.000 No.

00:08:06.000 But I don't even believe it shouldn't be mixed race because you're human.

00:08:12.000 You know, it's all one race.

00:08:13.000 That's been proven scientifically.

00:08:15.000 The question is, what race are you? 0.92

00:08:18.000 Which is sort of a silly question and a little bit... 0.97

00:08:20.000 Well, it's a terrible question. 0.89

00:08:21.000 And slightly rude, sure.

00:08:22.000 But it's also, like, scientifically invalid.

00:08:24.000 Yeah, of course.

00:08:24.000 Because there's only one race.

00:08:26.000 Exactly.

00:08:26.000 There might be different ethnicities in different parts of the world where your ancestors...

00:08:31.000 And different cultures, certainly.

00:08:32.000 Yeah, but...

00:08:32.000 It's only one race.

00:08:34.000 Like, this idea of what's your race is fucking stupid. 1.00

00:08:36.000 Yeah, absolutely. 1.00

00:08:37.000 But that's considered to be, that kind of ignorance is considered to be violent, and I mean that violent, hostile racism.

00:08:46.000 Because the refrain is, we are unsafe on this campus.

00:08:51.000 That's the word that's used.

00:08:53.000 If someone says, what are you?

00:08:54.000 Unsafe.

00:08:55.000 You become unsafe.

00:08:56.000 Yes.

00:08:56.000 And that's not an exaggeration.

00:08:57.000 You're in danger.

00:08:58.000 That is exactly what it said.

00:08:59.000 Guys with hoods and torches.

00:09:02.000 There's this incredible conflation that goes on, which drives me insane, because certainly there is some racism on campuses, you know, there is some racial insensitivity, no doubt, but they conflate that stuff that goes on at Yale.

00:09:18.000 With Ferguson and Baltimore and Birmingham, Alabama in 1956 and South Africa under apartheid.

00:09:26.000 It all becomes the same thing.

00:09:29.000 It all becomes white supremacy. 0.63

00:09:30.000 It's all racism.

00:09:31.000 It's all structural racism.

00:09:32.000 It's all systemic racism.

00:09:34.000 And so we need to start sort of differentiating here because there's clearly some differences among those.

00:09:40.000 So what are you is one, what are you really is the follow-up, which is like that's where you double down on your racism.

00:09:48.000 What are some other ones that would make me throw up?

00:09:50.000 That would be like a double microaggression.

00:09:52.000 What are some other ones?

00:09:56.000 Where are you from?

00:09:56.000 What are you?

00:09:58.000 Well, then there's things, you know, there's things that clearly are... 0.98

00:10:04.000 Rude, possibly racist, like, you're really smart or you're really articulate to a black person. 0.96

00:10:11.000 Wait a minute. 0.99

00:10:12.000 Wait a minute.

00:10:14.000 Why?

00:10:14.000 What if he's really articulate?

00:10:16.000 What if you're talking to a woman and she's black and she's super articulate and you go, wow, you're really articulate.

00:10:21.000 Or whether you're talking to a white man and he's really articulate and you go, wow, you're really articulate.

00:10:27.000 As I said, it might be racist.

00:10:29.000 But it might just be a compliment.

00:10:30.000 Well, it's just that that's what's often been said.

00:10:32.000 I mean, you have to understand.

00:10:33.000 Right, I do.

00:10:34.000 Often been said.

00:10:35.000 You know, remember what Joe Biden said about Obama during the election, right?

00:10:38.000 He said, people like him because he's so articulate and well-spoken, right?

00:10:41.000 It's what's classically been said.

00:10:43.000 But why is that racist?

00:10:44.000 That's just true.

00:10:45.000 About model black people.

00:10:46.000 But why is that racist?

00:10:46.000 Because you're comparing him to the former president, George W. Bush, who was totally the opposite of that.

00:10:50.000 Who certainly was not.

00:10:51.000 He was terrible at it.

00:10:52.000 So when you get a guy like Obama, he's clearly articulate and intelligent.

00:10:56.000 Why is that racist at all?

00:10:57.000 Well, again, it's because it's been said about the model black person.

00:11:01.000 Right.

00:11:02.000 But unless you use it in that context, unless you say as a black guy, he's very articulate.

00:11:06.000 Right.

00:11:07.000 Which has been said to you on campuses, you know, and often they'll say things like to a black guy in particular, oh, you must be an athlete.

00:11:15.000 You must be on a sports team.

00:11:17.000 What if they're yoked? 1.00

00:11:18.000 What if they're a black guy and they're fucking, you know, built like LeBron James? 1.00

00:11:24.000 They could be a physics major who lifts a lot of weights, though. 1.00

00:11:26.000 Come on, Joe.

00:11:26.000 It could be, but I mean, why is that a bad thing to say you must be really good moving your body?

00:11:33.000 These fucking kids. 1.00

00:11:34.000 Wouldn't it annoy you? 1.00

00:11:34.000 It would annoy you, wouldn't it? 1.00

00:11:36.000 What?

00:11:36.000 If somebody asked me if I was an athlete?

00:11:37.000 If you were black and someone said that to you.

00:11:39.000 Oh, you're here because you must be on the football team. 0.73

00:11:42.000 Oh, okay.

00:11:42.000 Well, if it was that.

00:11:43.000 If it was like the insinuation that the only reason why you got into the college was because of your athletic prowess, not your intelligence.

00:11:48.000 That is what it is.

00:11:49.000 Yeah.

00:11:50.000 Okay, yeah.

00:11:50.000 These things are not completely groundless.

00:11:52.000 It's not.

00:11:52.000 I said it's mostly hysteria.

00:11:54.000 I see what you're saying.

00:11:55.000 There is a lot that's legitimate, that's real, that I understand, that I have compassion for.

00:12:00.000 I've never been a black person, I've never been a black college student, but I've always been sure that it must be at least uncomfortable for black people on these campuses that are mostly white.

00:12:08.000 Yeah, in some circumstances, for sure.

00:12:11.000 Well, that makes sense, but, I mean, it seems like socially that stuff all weeds itself out. 0.97

00:12:15.000 Like, people realize who the dicks are, and you avoid those people. 0.68

00:12:19.000 We're talking about, like, the word microaggression is suitable for that, and that is a microaggression. 0.97

00:12:26.000 It's so micro.

00:12:27.000 It's all, like, it's just kind of slightly dicky.

00:12:30.000 Right, and so the question is, do you have a macro response to a microaggression, right, in the form of policy, which...

00:12:37.000 It limits freedom of speech, which limits academic freedom, which erects the surveillance system, which is essentially what they're asking for with microaggressions.

00:12:47.000 Limits humor, too.

00:12:48.000 It certainly limits humor.

00:12:49.000 It eliminates—well, you know, college campuses, there's no fun being had.

00:12:54.000 I mean, there's no—and no funniness, right?

00:12:56.000 Yeah.

00:12:57.000 In fact, I was just talking about this with someone the other night.

00:12:59.000 They said, well, you guys crack a lot of jokes.

00:13:02.000 I said, no, no, there are no jokes.

00:13:03.000 Yeah.

00:13:04.000 How did that happen?

00:13:06.000 It used to be like Animal House, no?

00:13:07.000 I mean, I do joke in my classroom, but sort of the space outside the classroom, on campus, sort of in public arenas on campus, no.

00:13:17.000 You've got to be really dour and earnest all the time.

00:13:20.000 Oh, God, that's so tiresome.

00:13:22.000 It certainly is.

00:13:24.000 But that's not life.

00:13:25.000 No.

00:13:26.000 What are they preparing people for?

00:13:27.000 Well, that's the thing, right?

00:13:29.000 You know, so, I mean, if you're going to...

00:13:32.000 John McWhorter is this brilliant black Columbia linguistics professor.

00:13:37.000 Microaggression.

00:13:38.000 Yeah, right. 0.96

00:13:39.000 You had to say black.

00:13:39.000 I did.

00:13:40.000 I'm sorry.

00:13:41.000 To him and everyone.

00:13:44.000 He has said that when he was in college in the 1980s, he heard a few times statements that were clearly racist.

00:13:52.000 That were even sort of hostile and racist.

00:13:54.000 No doubt about it.

00:13:55.000 But he said, it never occurred to me that I might be damaged by that.

00:14:00.000 That it might hurt me to hear these things.

00:14:03.000 I just assumed that these people were worthless when they said it.

00:14:06.000 As you should. 1.00

00:14:08.000 That they were like scum on my shoe. 0.99

00:14:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:14:09.000 Exactly. 0.99

00:14:09.000 Right. 0.99

00:14:10.000 So what's happening now is kids on campuses...

00:14:15.000 Either have been trained or have trained themselves to feel damaged, devastated is the word actually that's often used, by things like microaggressions.

00:14:26.000 Well, so what you're doing is you are stating and claiming status as a weak person, right?

00:14:35.000 Someone who can be damaged by the slightest slight. 0.96

00:14:39.000 So then what happens when you're in the real world where there really are racists, where there really are people who will pull you over for being black, who will throw you in prison for being black, who will shoot you for being black, who will not give you a job for being black? 0.52

00:14:52.000 You know, real racism, real structural racism, what do you do then?

00:14:55.000 Well, I think the idea is that they're going to eliminate that by raising people through their system that never have these thoughts.

00:15:04.000 So we're going to clean up the world.

00:15:07.000 If that were a plan, at least it would be a plan.

00:15:10.000 I don't see that as the plan, though.

00:15:12.000 Well, the professional victim status, that's a real issue.

00:15:16.000 Because people claiming to be victims when there is no real problem, they're looking for victims.

00:15:22.000 They're looking for things that are...

00:15:26.000 Targeting them.

00:15:27.000 And I always assume that the reason why people do that is because there's not enough real problems.

00:15:32.000 Like, the real problems have become so minute.

00:15:35.000 Like, this is the safest time to live ever.

00:15:37.000 And on campus, I mean, outside of the normal things that you're going to deal with when you have a bunch of young people together and, you know, social interactions and alcohol and all the other crap that happens between human beings when you get them together and they're young and they don't have...

00:15:54.000 Even when they're older, you know, you get a group of people together, you're likely to have some disputes. 0.88

00:15:59.000 But outside of that, what's the fucking worst thing that's happening to these kids? 0.95

00:16:02.000 Nothing. 0.96

00:16:03.000 I actually looked up the statistics, because, you know, people, during when the Missouri thing was happening, at the University of Missouri, right?

00:16:09.000 Yes.

00:16:09.000 There was all these claims about, you know, nigger being said and, you know, Right.

00:16:29.000 Was a guy who wasn't a student. 0.97

00:16:31.000 He wasn't affiliated with the campus at all, with the college at all, who bombed some dormitory that had black people in it.

00:16:36.000 So basically, yes, of course, it is an extremely safe place to be for everyone.

00:16:41.000 Don't you think that in those extremely safe environments, sometimes people just go around looking for problems that don't exist?

00:16:47.000 Well, I mean, this has been the case in American colleges for decades.

00:16:53.000 I mean, when I was in college in the 1980s, that's all we did.

00:16:55.000 We needed to fight the devil.

00:16:57.000 And then...

00:16:58.000 Then you had to find the devil.

00:17:00.000 And the problem was he wasn't there, right?

00:17:01.000 The Ku Klux Klan wasn't actually on campus, right?

00:17:04.000 The police weren't even really on campus. 0.91

00:17:06.000 You know, you didn't have these terrible sexists and racists on campus, so you had to invent them.

00:17:12.000 And what you did was you invented them in the form of the president of the college often, right? 0.86

00:17:16.000 He became the villain that you had to attack, right?

00:17:19.000 And I did that.

00:17:21.000 And that's what's going on now.

00:17:22.000 So one of the main demands of students at Occidental was the resignation of the president.

00:17:26.000 Why?

00:17:27.000 What did he do wrong?

00:17:29.000 It's a great question.

00:17:30.000 And I haven't actually gotten a specific answer to that.

00:17:33.000 There's no answer?

00:17:34.000 Is he a white guy?

00:17:35.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:17:36.000 Well, fuck him. 1.00

00:17:36.000 Well, he embodies privilege. 1.00

00:17:38.000 Of course he does.

00:17:39.000 Yeah, right.

00:17:40.000 But everyone at Occidental embodies privilege.

00:17:42.000 Everyone at Yale embodies privilege, right?

00:17:45.000 Of course.

00:17:45.000 Students and faculty alike.

00:17:47.000 Ask a Filipino peasant what they think of students at Yale, whether they're privileged or not, right? 1.00

00:17:53.000 Yes.

00:17:55.000 Do they have specific charges?

00:17:58.000 There's a tremendous lack of specificity, which also drives me crazy.

00:18:02.000 I often say, I don't even know what they're talking about.

00:18:05.000 I mean, I don't know what's happened to them.

00:18:07.000 What has he actually done?

00:18:09.000 So there's been a demand for a black studies program at Occidental for decades, like since the 60s.

00:18:13.000 Okay, so that hasn't been instituted.

00:18:15.000 But, you know, he's only the most recent president who hasn't done that.

00:18:17.000 And by the way, it's a faculty decision anyway, whether to have a black studies program.

00:18:22.000 You know, other than that, I couldn't even tell you.

00:18:24.000 I really couldn't tell you.

00:18:26.000 It's a racial charge.

00:18:28.000 Kind of.

00:18:28.000 It's also about the sexual assault stuff.

00:18:31.000 But the sexual assault stuff was so bizarre.

00:18:34.000 And also lacking in specificity.

00:18:37.000 Well, not only that, they're being sued by the young man who was accused of sexual assault while the woman that he had sex with was not.

00:18:44.000 And the reason why he was accused of being the assaulter is because he's a male.

00:18:49.000 Well, they didn't say that.

00:18:49.000 And they were both drinking.

00:18:50.000 But that's it.

00:18:51.000 That's the only conclusion you could draw, yes.

00:18:52.000 Well, for people who don't know the story, you can Google the story.

00:18:55.000 It's fascinating.

00:18:56.000 We talked about it the last time we were here, but a man and a woman, because they're both over 18, that were going to college there, they got liquored up and decided to hook up, and they exchanged some text messages where she said, do you have condoms?

00:19:10.000 Come on over. 0.67

00:19:11.000 And she told her friend, I'm going to have sex, lol, that kind of thing. 0.99

00:19:15.000 And after they had sex, someone... 0.98

00:19:17.000 Either convinced her or she convinced herself that it was rape because when two people are drinking, the woman cannot consent. 0.74

00:19:26.000 It was the only time in the world where you're not responsible for your actions because you've been drinking.

00:19:31.000 If you get in a car and you drink and you drive drunk and plow into people, you can never say, I'm not responsible because I was drunk.

00:19:38.000 You can't say that.

00:19:39.000 But for whatever reason, These social justice warriors have taken upon themselves to, again, impart victim status only on women that are in these scenarios. 0.99

00:19:50.000 So that the man is always the ugly oppressor, the ugly pursuer, the penetrator of the vagina, this evil man. 0.99

00:19:58.000 And so this kid got kicked out of college for having sex while drunk. 1.00

00:20:01.000 That's really what it is. 0.54

00:20:02.000 Yeah, the most outrageous thing was that the college itself actually officially determined that the sex was consensual.

00:20:07.000 Yeah.

00:20:08.000 But he got expelled.

00:20:09.000 Yeah.

00:20:10.000 And he's suing. 0.99

00:20:11.000 He should fucking close that place down and then light it on fire and turn it to Disneyland 2. Yeah, I mean, I think a revolution is coming, or it's maybe already begun in higher education. 0.98

00:20:23.000 Gee, how, though?

00:20:24.000 Well, I think what we're doing right now, I think what you've been doing, I think stuff like this, I think podcasting, I think it started with blogs 20 years ago.

00:20:32.000 Now there's all sorts of online courses.

00:20:35.000 I think there's a tremendous demand for learning, and I think there are a lot of curious people out there who can't afford to go to college or don't want to go to these nut houses that are colleges.

00:20:44.000 But what is it that's causing these nut houses to flourish this way, where it's so common? 0.98

00:20:50.000 It's not an oddity.

00:20:52.000 It's not just Dartmouth. 0.99

00:20:54.000 Where they stormed into the library or the study hall and started screaming Black Lives Matter while fucking white and black people were going over their work. 1.00

00:21:03.000 They're sitting there trying to do their homework and all these fucking white dorks are running through the hallway screaming Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. 1.00

00:21:11.000 And I'm watching that and I'm going... 1.00

00:21:12.000 What is this?

00:21:14.000 These people aren't oppressors.

00:21:16.000 They're students.

00:21:17.000 They're fellow students.

00:21:18.000 And you're being shamed if you don't join in.

00:21:21.000 You're being shamed if you don't stop whatever you're doing.

00:21:25.000 What is this?

00:21:26.000 How is this happening?

00:21:28.000 It's so difficult to unpack.

00:21:31.000 It actually stems from a sort of sophisticated social theory, which is that discourse...

00:21:40.000 Can be violence.

00:21:41.000 That discourse is power and discourse can therefore be violence.

00:21:44.000 Just stay with me.

00:21:45.000 I know.

00:21:47.000 And so if discourse is violence, then any means are necessary to defend oneself from discursive violence.

00:21:55.000 Oh, boy.

00:21:56.000 Right?

00:21:56.000 And then on top of that, and I agree with this part, I mean, silence can be discourse too, right?

00:22:01.000 Mm-hmm.

00:22:02.000 Right.

00:22:02.000 So silence in the case of these kids in the Dartmouth library, right, was violence.

00:22:06.000 If you carry that argument to its logical extreme, which is what obviously is happening here.

00:22:12.000 It's a perversion of French post-structuralism, which made this intervention about 40 years ago about discourse being power and also being violence.

00:22:20.000 So they're kind of running with that idea.

00:22:22.000 And if you run with it all the way, it becomes totalitarian, right?

00:22:27.000 And then you're back in like Maoist China.

00:22:29.000 Because everyone who says the wrong thing or doesn't say the right thing Yeah, no, it's bad.

00:22:43.000 It's bad.

00:22:44.000 Now, the good news is that right now, these people don't have much power, right?

00:22:50.000 Right now, these kids aren't running Congress.

00:22:53.000 The bad news is that they will be running America pretty soon.

00:22:58.000 But isn't the good news is that with time and maturity and life experiences, they'll become like you?

00:23:04.000 One would hope.

00:23:04.000 You were like them.

00:23:05.000 Yes, I was.

00:23:06.000 One would hope, and that's probably true to some extent.

00:23:09.000 However, I don't know if you know about this, but there's been some recent polling done of millennials by the Pew Research Organization, and they found that millennials are much more hostile to the principle of free speech than previous generations.

00:23:23.000 Yeah, I saw that the students in Yale, actually, there's a significant majority, voted to rescind the First Amendment.

00:23:32.000 Yep.

00:23:33.000 Yeah, no, no.

00:23:34.000 What is that, Jamie?

00:23:36.000 Do you know what that one is, that study?

00:23:38.000 I think it was like 39% or some insane amount.

00:23:42.000 Yeah, that's about right.

00:23:43.000 Yeah, I mean, they're really, they favor state regulation of speech.

00:23:48.000 That is so crazy.

00:23:50.000 Not a majority, I don't think, but a hefty minority of millennials do.

00:23:54.000 And a larger portion of them than any other generation. 0.82

00:23:57.000 What are 40% of millennials okay with limiting speech defenses to minorities?

00:24:03.000 Hefty minority, there you go. 0.98

00:24:04.000 But do they understand what the state is?

00:24:08.000 So that's really depressing.

00:24:09.000 That's something to be afraid of.

00:24:11.000 Because these are the people, as I said, they have no institutional power now, but they will.

00:24:16.000 They will.

00:24:17.000 These are kids in elite colleges who believe this, right?

00:24:20.000 What do you think those elite colleges do?

00:24:22.000 They train people to take power.

00:24:25.000 Yeah, but it's like if you asked anyone, no one thinks that you should say rude things to minorities.

00:24:31.000 No one thinks you should say offensive things to anybody.

00:24:34.000 No one thinks that.

00:24:35.000 But when you decide what is offensive and what you should and shouldn't say, you limit discourse.

00:24:42.000 You have power over other people's ability to express themselves. 0.90

00:24:46.000 And what you do is you create these splinter groups where people get off together and they fucking close the blinds and go, Exactly. 0.99

00:24:55.000 And they get together and they say racist shit and they form groups. 1.00

00:24:58.000 Right. 1.00

00:24:59.000 So you can see it, like, in comment sections on the web, right?

00:25:03.000 You can see it in Reddit, right?

00:25:04.000 You can see it anywhere that there's anonymous users on the internet, right?

00:25:08.000 That's what repression does.

00:25:10.000 I mean, there's, like, clearly hardcore racism and sexism and misogyny and rape culture in those corners.

00:25:15.000 Yes.

00:25:16.000 It's all anonymous, right?

00:25:17.000 And these are the repressed.

00:25:18.000 This is the repressed talking.

00:25:20.000 Yes.

00:25:20.000 Right?

00:25:20.000 That's what happens, right?

00:25:21.000 And so, yeah, but...

00:25:25.000 I think it's even worse than this, right?

00:25:26.000 Because as I said the last time I was here, you know, it is inherently conservative what they're calling for, even though it's sort of a left-wing movement.

00:25:34.000 They're asking for Big Brother, either the college president or the United States government, to protect us from ideas and speech and words, right?

00:25:46.000 So then what are we interested in?

00:25:49.000 We're interested in those people having the power, having more power, That doesn't sound very left-wing or liberatory to me.

00:25:55.000 No.

00:25:56.000 Or radical at all.

00:25:57.000 No. 0.98

00:25:57.000 And even these ideas, I mean, to stray slightly from this, when people are talking about socialism ideas, about taxing the rich more, well, where the fuck do you think that money's going? 0.98

00:26:08.000 Exactly. 0.94

00:26:08.000 It's going to go to the government. 0.94

00:26:09.000 It's going to Bernie Sanders.

00:26:10.000 Yeah.

00:26:11.000 When Bernie Sanders says that, I'm like, Bernie, you're a senator.

00:26:16.000 You understand where this money goes.

00:26:18.000 It goes to him.

00:26:19.000 I mean, it goes to him to control.

00:26:20.000 Well, it's the idea behind you take more money from people and give to the government to make things even. 0.99

00:26:26.000 That is fucking crazy talk. 0.99

00:26:28.000 Mm-hmm. 1.00

00:26:28.000 That's not how it works. 1.00

00:26:29.000 Right.

00:26:30.000 If you want to encourage charitable donations on a wide scale and encourage some sort of, like, broad-range philanthropism amongst people and figure out some way to institute that voluntarily, that's great.

00:26:43.000 But, Joe, we all know that when you give the government lots of money, it uses it wisely.

00:26:47.000 Oh, that's true.

00:26:48.000 I forgot.

00:26:48.000 And it doesn't ever use the money to hurt anyone.

00:26:50.000 No, never.

00:26:51.000 We know that.

00:26:52.000 And they never waste it. 1.00

00:26:52.000 You're being silly. 1.00

00:26:53.000 Yeah, I'm right. 0.99

00:26:54.000 But that actually is sort of this, that is, I mean, it is that absurd.

00:26:58.000 I mean, that's the assumption underneath this, is that if we give them more money, they're going to do nice things with it.

00:27:02.000 Yeah.

00:27:02.000 They're going to feed orphans with it.

00:27:04.000 I had a friend who was trying to... 0.86

00:27:05.000 No, actually, they're going to drop bombs on orphans. 0.95

00:27:08.000 100%. 0.99

00:27:08.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:27:08.000 I mean, you don't get an itemized sheet of where your money went. 0.99

00:27:14.000 Like, only $5 went to bombs.

00:27:17.000 I'm all for that.

00:27:18.000 Itemized taxes, yeah.

00:27:19.000 It would be amazing.

00:27:20.000 Can you imagine?

00:27:20.000 Would it be amazing, too, if we could link it up online, where everybody could take your itemized tax sheets and say, okay, let's just make sure that they used all of our money.

00:27:28.000 I'm all for that.

00:27:28.000 Everybody submit your itemized tax sheets so we can show, oh, we're missing a billion dollars.

00:27:34.000 How weird.

00:27:34.000 Where'd that go?

00:27:35.000 How fun would that be to be like, Afghanistan? 1.00

00:27:36.000 No.

00:27:37.000 Yeah.

00:27:37.000 Well, we don't even have any idea where our money goes.

00:27:40.000 It's one of the weirdest things.

00:27:41.000 Because you give a significant percentage.

00:27:43.000 If you make more than, what is it, $250,000 a year, you pay 40% plus in taxes.

00:27:50.000 I think that's the number.

00:27:51.000 That's a lot of money!

00:27:52.000 And you don't even get a receipt.

00:27:55.000 Less than in Scandinavia.

00:27:57.000 The taxes.

00:27:58.000 How much do they get?

00:27:59.000 For the wealthy.

00:28:00.000 I don't know, but I think it bumps up against 90 in some countries.

00:28:03.000 90?

00:28:03.000 I think so, yeah.

00:28:04.000 90% taxes.

00:28:05.000 Yeah, I think it's around there, yeah.

00:28:06.000 Well, isn't that what Bernie wants to do?

00:28:07.000 He wants to rock it up to 90?

00:28:08.000 Yeah, he's a Scandinavian social democrat.

00:28:10.000 Yeah, that's what he wants.

00:28:11.000 Where's all that money going?

00:28:12.000 The problem with that is, like, even if you do that, like, his ideas, as they've been explained to me by people who understand the economy, like, you would have to charge...

00:28:21.000 $18 trillion is the number, yeah.

00:28:22.000 You would have to tax...

00:28:25.000 Everyone in this country, 100% of everything they make, and you still wouldn't have enough money.

00:28:29.000 Right, yeah.

00:28:29.000 If you liquidated all the assets of all the wealthy, all the 1%, even, I think, the 2%, you couldn't pay for his stuff.

00:28:37.000 They've done the math.

00:28:38.000 This is not even controversial.

00:28:39.000 Like, he's even admitted this.

00:28:40.000 He's admitted this.

00:28:40.000 So what does he say to that?

00:28:41.000 He admitted it on Bill Maher, actually, just a few, like, a couple months ago.

00:28:44.000 What did he say?

00:28:45.000 He said, well, maybe I guess we'd have to tax the middle class a bit, too.

00:28:48.000 Something like that.

00:28:48.000 Oh, God.

00:28:49.000 Of course you would.

00:28:50.000 Of course you would.

00:28:50.000 It's $18 trillion, what he's calling for.

00:28:53.000 Maybe it would make the society a better society.

00:28:56.000 I mean, I like the idea of free healthcare and maybe free education.

00:28:59.000 But then again, what we're talking about in that case is public education for everyone.

00:29:05.000 Public education is run by whom?

00:29:07.000 It's run by the government.

00:29:09.000 People need to think more clearly about this.

00:29:13.000 Isn't there a way to do free education online with ads?

00:29:17.000 Totally.

00:29:18.000 The way you have YouTube ads?

00:29:20.000 Totally.

00:29:20.000 Why wouldn't you do that?

00:29:21.000 I mean, as long as the ads aren't offensive or as long as the ads aren't, you know, some ridiculous propaganda.

00:29:27.000 Well, that's exactly the question that should be raised with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, right?

00:29:30.000 Why do we need a government-run education system? 0.97

00:29:34.000 Or, put it a different way, why do you want that?

00:29:37.000 Because I think there's something else going on here with them.

00:29:39.000 I don't think it's just they want free education for everyone.

00:29:42.000 I do think they're interested in social control, and that's a great way to control the populace, is to control their education, for the government to control their education.

00:29:51.000 So when you say they're interested in social control, to what extent?

00:29:56.000 You'd have to ask them.

00:29:57.000 I mean, I don't know.

00:29:58.000 Why do you have the suspicion?

00:29:59.000 Well, because every socialist has been interested in that.

00:30:02.000 I mean, I used to be a socialist.

00:30:03.000 I hung out with socialists.

00:30:04.000 My parents were revolutionary socialists.

00:30:06.000 I studied them.

00:30:07.000 How many bills did you have to pay before you stopped being a socialist?

00:30:10.000 One.

00:30:13.000 What changed you?

00:30:14.000 When I looked at my parents' tax returns and saw that they made $11,000 a year in the 1970s, I said, oh, this seems like not much fun to me.

00:30:23.000 So, yeah, there's a long-standing tradition of a desire for social control on the left.

00:30:31.000 There's nothing about that.

00:30:32.000 I mean, going back to the progressives 120 years ago, and then the hardcore socialists and the communists.

00:30:36.000 Well, the idea of the right used to be it would leave you alone.

00:30:40.000 The idea of conservatives was that it would leave you alone.

00:30:44.000 They didn't want big government.

00:30:46.000 They didn't want the government interfering with your life.

00:30:50.000 But then it sort of got confused, and then there became a lot of religious issues involved in the Reagan administration once they started incorporating the religious right into their plans.

00:31:04.000 When they started using the religious right in order to get into power and to vote, Things started getting really weird, because then conservatism wasn't necessarily leave people alone.

00:31:15.000 Then it became about gay rights, it became about gay marriage, and all this other weird stuff started getting in there.

00:31:21.000 Right.

00:31:22.000 Well, yeah, so the right that you're talking about we now call the old right, because it no longer exists, pretty much.

00:31:29.000 There's a little tiny magazine called The American Conservative where you can find the old right.

00:31:33.000 They call themselves paleoconservatives now.

00:31:35.000 Paleo-conservative.

00:31:36.000 That's hilarious.

00:31:37.000 So that's a tiny little faction, but they're interesting, and I sort of like them, at least because they're truly conservatives.

00:31:44.000 That's what it used to be.

00:31:45.000 It used to be about fiscal responsibility.

00:31:47.000 Mostly, yeah.

00:31:48.000 But also leaving people alone.

00:31:51.000 Right.

00:31:51.000 And then what we got was the neoconservatives, right?

00:31:55.000 And so, well, there's two things.

00:31:56.000 The wing you're talking about is the religious right, which came along, and you...

00:31:59.000 I've summarized that really well, but then also the neoconservatives came along, who really were progressives to begin with.

00:32:05.000 And those are the people who have run the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan and around the world, right?

00:32:12.000 Sort of right-wing intellectuals, sort of around the Bush administration in particular.

00:32:18.000 Who are very aligned with Israel and wanted to protect Israel, but also most importantly wanted to make the world in America's image.

00:32:25.000 Very much committed to that vision, right?

00:32:28.000 And they started off as actually progressives or even socialists, right?

00:32:31.000 And if you think about it, progressivism and socialism is a homogenizing ideology.

00:32:37.000 You're interested in making everyone the same.

00:32:40.000 Equality, right?

00:32:41.000 And if you have cultural sameness, you will reach economic sameness as well.

00:32:47.000 So that's where they come from.

00:32:49.000 That's who took over the Bush administration.

00:32:51.000 To make the world in the image of the United States, you got to invade places. 0.81

00:32:55.000 You got to send the army in to take over.

00:32:58.000 And teach them how to live properly, to live like Americans. 0.97

00:33:01.000 And that's exactly what Iraq was all about, the Iraq War. 0.87

00:33:03.000 That's exactly what Afghanistan and the Afghanistan occupation is about.

00:33:07.000 The textbooks being taught to Afghani children right now were written by the United States Army.

00:33:14.000 Whoa.

00:33:14.000 Yeah.

00:33:15.000 It's in the New York Times.

00:33:16.000 I mean, they published this.

00:33:17.000 I mean, it's the United States Army wrote the history textbooks that are being used in Afghani schools right now.

00:33:23.000 Do they have historians that work for the army?

00:33:26.000 Probably.

00:33:27.000 They hired somebody who was willing to write the proper history for them.

00:33:31.000 Yeah.

00:33:31.000 And then they vet it, make sure it fits their standards.

00:33:34.000 Oh, yeah, I'm sure.

00:33:36.000 According to the Times, there is no mention of the Afghanistan war.

00:33:42.000 In those textbooks.

00:33:43.000 What?

00:33:44.000 Yeah, well, because you don't want to talk about the naughtiness, right?

00:33:47.000 The bad stuff.

00:33:49.000 Yeah.

00:33:49.000 So, I mean, that's pretty naked imperialism, right?

00:33:53.000 I mean, that's really clearly attempting to remake the world in your own image.

00:33:56.000 Well, it's also, like, super dangerous to deny history.

00:33:59.000 Sure.

00:33:59.000 Because then people find out the truth, and then they resent you, and they become upset, and then they never trust a word you say.

00:34:03.000 Then they become the Taliban. 0.71

00:34:04.000 Yes.

00:34:05.000 Exactly.

00:34:05.000 Right.

00:34:06.000 Exactly.

00:34:06.000 So, right.

00:34:07.000 It's also self-defeating.

00:34:09.000 Yeah.

00:34:09.000 Ultimately.

00:34:10.000 Probably. 0.97

00:34:11.000 But for a long time, they'll have some control, and they'll kill a lot of people in the process.

00:34:17.000 So we started this whole rant of trying to figure out where this all started from.

00:34:24.000 Where this social justice movement on campus, this ridiculous exaggeration of microaggressions and things along those lines, How much of it has to do with social media, though?

00:34:35.000 Because it seems like social media, they support each other, and then they find like-minded groups, they get confirmation bias, they all join together in these little message boards and what have you, and little Twitter hashtag groups, and then they feed off of each other and then explain to each other various things.

00:34:52.000 I would say that just makes it louder, but it's always been around.

00:34:55.000 I mean, the stuff I'm seeing on campus now is what I saw in the 1980s.

00:34:58.000 It's just that in the 1980s, it didn't get off campus because there was no Twitter.

00:35:02.000 Oh, okay.

00:35:03.000 So, like, this YouTube video of the students in Yale screaming at the dean. 0.99

00:35:11.000 Students at my college, Antioch College in Ohio, took a shit on the desk of the president. 1.00

00:35:18.000 They broke into his office at night and took a shit on his desk. 1.00

00:35:21.000 What did he do wrong? 0.99

00:35:22.000 And we called him all kinds of stuff.

00:35:23.000 You know, we thought he was the great oppressor because there was no oppressor around.

00:35:26.000 So we had to create one and he was it.

00:35:28.000 Poor guy.

00:35:29.000 So this Occidental guy that they're trying to kick out, the dean?

00:35:34.000 No, the president.

00:35:35.000 What do they want to replace him with?

00:35:38.000 Oh. 0.91

00:35:38.000 A trans black woman. 0.91

00:35:41.000 That's a great question.

00:35:42.000 Gender queer. 0.83

00:35:43.000 That has been raised a few times.

00:35:44.000 So who do you think you're going to get to replace him?

00:35:46.000 Like, who is there out there who will be better for you?

00:35:49.000 Right.

00:35:50.000 No one.

00:35:50.000 Do they have at least a list of offenses that he's committed?

00:35:54.000 Other than not having a black studies class?

00:35:57.000 Or program?

00:35:58.000 Um...

00:36:01.000 There's a list of demands.

00:36:02.000 You can go online and see them.

00:36:03.000 Those are demands.

00:36:04.000 They're not necessarily grievances, right?

00:36:07.000 So it's unclear what the specific grievances are.

00:36:10.000 And who gets to vote on these demands, too?

00:36:12.000 I mean, is it a small, tiny shell group?

00:36:14.000 Well, the faculty has power over curricular issues, and then administrative issues are the president and his offices, basically.

00:36:23.000 Okay.

00:36:25.000 It... 0.71

00:36:27.000 It's sort of embarrassing to talk about this stuff because it's so ridiculous and I'm a part of it. 0.70

00:36:32.000 I feel embarrassed to be associated with it. 0.60

00:36:34.000 You know, do you remember that moment when there was the pepper spray incident on, I forget what campus it was?

00:36:41.000 UC Davis.

00:36:41.000 UC Davis, thanks.

00:36:42.000 They pepper sprayed those kids that were sitting there peacefully on their knees and they were protesting the raising of tuition and they wouldn't leave.

00:36:52.000 So these cops, this cop pepper sprays them in the face and then after all the commotion had settled, Was it the dean?

00:36:59.000 Was that what it was?

00:36:59.000 The woman who left and no one said a word as she walked by.

00:37:04.000 It was totally, eerily silent.

00:37:06.000 And that was a powerful statement, a real powerful statement.

00:37:11.000 Instead of screaming at her, instead of, like, you called the police on this, like, look what's happened, the pepper spray kids.

00:37:18.000 No one said a word.

00:37:19.000 And this woman walked and she was being escorted to her car in just dead silence.

00:37:24.000 So how do you interpret that?

00:37:25.000 It was just insanely powerful.

00:37:27.000 It was palpable.

00:37:30.000 You could see.

00:37:30.000 First of all, it was shame.

00:37:32.000 The whole thing was shameful.

00:37:34.000 What that cop did was shameful.

00:37:36.000 What the kids were doing was...

00:37:38.000 That's like a legit protest.

00:37:40.000 Like, you're charging too much for school, you're raising the rate.

00:37:42.000 That's a legit protest. 1.00

00:37:43.000 And the fact that they were pepper sprayed for doing that by some fucking asshole cop spraying chemicals in the face of these kids. 1.00

00:37:53.000 And then this woman leaving In total silence. 1.00

00:37:58.000 But that was a response to a real situation.

00:38:02.000 Like something real happened.

00:38:04.000 Something real went down.

00:38:05.000 It was really like a cultural tragedy.

00:38:07.000 I mean, these microaggressions are real.

00:38:09.000 I mean, I've seen these huge websites that sort of document specific microaggressions that have happened on all sorts of campuses.

00:38:16.000 It all sounds believable to me.

00:38:17.000 I think it's all happened.

00:38:19.000 Where are you from?

00:38:20.000 What are you?

00:38:21.000 What are you really? 0.97

00:38:22.000 It was going to be dicky people.

00:38:23.000 Are you an athlete?

00:38:24.000 I think it's all true.

00:38:26.000 The question is, how should you feel about that?

00:38:29.000 And John McWhorter's argument is, His argument is that you have a choice.

00:38:36.000 You can choose to be damaged by that, and I think these kids really do feel damaged by it.

00:38:41.000 Or you can think, this is a parochial knucklehead who said this. 1.00

00:38:47.000 Why should I care what this idiot thinks? 1.00

00:38:50.000 Which is a Gorder's attitude when he was at Rutgers or whatever it was. 1.00

00:38:53.000 He came across some actual racists who said things to him, and he thought they were inferior.

00:39:00.000 And he says that's what they should be thinking now about people who say these things. 1.00

00:39:03.000 You're an idiot, right? 1.00

00:39:06.000 They're making themselves damaged. 1.00

00:39:09.000 And you're right.

00:39:11.000 This doesn't rise to the level of your tuition, your scholarship being cut, right?

00:39:16.000 Your financial aid being taken away.

00:39:18.000 It doesn't rise to the level of a cop spraying you in the face with pepper spray, right?

00:39:23.000 Those things are real grievances that have to be dealt with, I think, in extreme ways.

00:39:29.000 But isn't it interesting that that was the response?

00:39:31.000 In a real situation, everybody just stayed quiet in this eerie silence as this woman left.

00:39:40.000 That was a real protest.

00:39:42.000 That rang out. 0.99

00:39:43.000 You watch that video to this day, and it's fucking creepy. 0.98

00:39:46.000 Have you seen it? 0.98

00:39:47.000 I don't recall the woman walking away.

00:39:49.000 I've seen the video of the pepper spray, yeah.

00:39:51.000 The pepper spray video is disturbing, but this is really kind of powerful. 0.99

00:39:55.000 When the woman's leaving and she's being escorted out, no one says a fucking word. 0.97

00:40:01.000 I mean, there's a thousand people out there and no one says a word. 0.99

00:40:04.000 That can be effective.

00:40:05.000 I think that process was effective because there was a video that went out on social media and everyone saw it, right?

00:40:11.000 Right, but I mean, in the moment, I think it was effective for everyone who was there, including her.

00:40:15.000 I think... 0.99

00:40:17.000 I think fucking shit up is effective, too, actually. 1.00

00:40:19.000 Oh, look at you, you anarchist. 1.00

00:40:21.000 Yeah.

00:40:21.000 In what way?

00:40:22.000 There's no question about it.

00:40:23.000 What way would you like to fuck things up? 0.78

00:40:24.000 Well, I think if you look at the history of riots in this country, you see tremendous social progress immediately following them.

00:40:30.000 So you're pro-riot?

00:40:32.000 What's that?

00:40:33.000 UC Davis?

00:40:35.000 Um...

00:40:36.000 I am not pro-riot.

00:40:38.000 I'm just, uh, but...

00:40:40.000 Sounds like it.

00:40:41.000 Well, maybe.

00:40:41.000 You're gonna get in trouble.

00:40:42.000 Yeah, I'm already in trouble. 0.94

00:40:44.000 I'm already in hell.

00:40:45.000 Uh...

00:40:46.000 No, it's true, though.

00:40:47.000 I mean, if you look at sort of police brutality, right?

00:40:49.000 Most riots in this country have been in response to police brutality.

00:40:52.000 And you look at the cities in which riots have happened since the 1930s, you'll see a decline in police brutality in those cities almost across the board, almost in every case, right?

00:40:59.000 Just in Baltimore recently, right?

00:41:01.000 After those riots, those cops were indicted.

00:41:03.000 Now they may get off, but they were indicted, which is a rare thing for cops.

00:41:07.000 Hold on, let's put the headphones on so you can hear this.

00:41:11.000 Because it's kind of crazy. 0.97

00:41:19.000 She's leaving, and there's fucking thousands of people there, and no one's saying a word to her. 0.98

00:41:29.000 Oh, I do remember this. 0.98

00:41:31.000 So creepy.

00:41:32.000 Just dead quiet.

00:41:34.000 No one's talking.

00:41:35.000 So they're protesting her.

00:41:36.000 Mm-hmm.

00:41:36.000 Yeah, right.

00:41:37.000 Yeah, well, she was the one who called the cops on these students and had them pepper sprayed in the face. 1.00

00:41:42.000 So she has this long walk of shame... 0.51

00:41:47.000 And people are taking photographs, but no one's saying a word.

00:41:51.000 And it's really intense.

00:41:54.000 If you know the story behind it, it's even more intense.

00:41:57.000 I mean, this lasts for quite a while, and no one says anything.

00:42:00.000 And did she resign, or was she fired? 0.98

00:42:03.000 That's a good question.

00:42:04.000 That's the question to answer, right?

00:42:07.000 Yeah, I don't know.

00:42:08.000 I don't know.

00:42:09.000 This video got out, and I'm sure...

00:42:12.000 This whole scenario was brutally stressful, and it had to cause some form of change.

00:42:19.000 Oh, it definitely did.

00:42:20.000 I mean, I don't know if she suffered, but I know that UC Davis Institute, I think the cop was fired.

00:42:27.000 Oh, yeah.

00:42:27.000 Well, his life was threatened.

00:42:29.000 I mean, that guy's life was absolutely ruined.

00:42:31.000 Right, and you can be sure that it's less likely for a protester at that campus to get pepper sprayed.

00:42:36.000 Oh, 100%.

00:42:37.000 Especially if you're just sitting there. 0.98

00:42:38.000 I mean, that's disgusting.

00:42:40.000 You're supposed to do stuff like that when people are dangerous and violent.

00:42:44.000 You're not supposed to do stuff to kids that are just sitting down.

00:42:47.000 But in Los Angeles, it is much safer, even though it's not safe, but it's much safer for black people in dealing with the cops now than it was in the 1980s because of the 1992 riot.

00:42:58.000 Mm-hmm.

00:42:59.000 There's no doubt about that.

00:43:00.000 I mean, the cops, the police, LAPD, instituted wide-ranging reforms.

00:43:04.000 And you can ask anyone who lived in L.A. in the 80s and lives here now.

00:43:08.000 It's a huge difference in the way that the cops deal with black people in this city now.

00:43:13.000 And that was from one video, the Rodney King video, and then the trial, and the subsequent acquittal of the officers.

00:43:19.000 And then from then...

00:43:21.000 What we're dealing with is the new wave of these videos.

00:43:24.000 We're seeing over and over again all these videos, evidence of police brutality, and that's probably having an effect on it as well.

00:43:31.000 People are much more aware of what they do and what they don't do.

00:43:34.000 There have been more indictments of cops this year, this last year, than I think ever because of Black Lives Matter and social media.

00:43:42.000 There's no doubt about it, right?

00:43:43.000 It's very effective.

00:43:44.000 And, you know, you have Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley talking about police brutality constantly now.

00:43:52.000 And that's clearly only because of Black Lives Matter. 0.80

00:43:55.000 Bernie Sanders didn't want to talk about it until those kids got on the stage with him in Seattle and shamed him and yelled at him, right?

00:44:00.000 And they were mocked for that too, but they were very effective in doing that.

00:44:03.000 And then so the next day, Bernie Sanders starts talking about police brutality and the criminal justice system.

00:44:08.000 And Hillary Clinton, like a week or two later, starts doing it too.

00:44:11.000 And ever since then, they can't shut up about it.

00:44:14.000 So it's a very effective disruptive protest.

00:44:17.000 So they recognize that it's just a powerful talking point.

00:44:21.000 Well, they're forced to talk about it because they've had these disruptive protests.

00:44:24.000 Right.

00:44:25.000 So in that sense, you're in favor of those kind of protests.

00:44:29.000 When I'm in solidarity with the cause, yeah.

00:44:33.000 I mean, it's a question of tactics.

00:44:34.000 Like, what is an effective tactic, right?

00:44:36.000 And there's just no doubt that disruptive protest and in many cases violent protest in the form of riots has been very effective.

00:44:44.000 Do you think that the future involves These kind of institutions, these long-standing institutions like Stanford and Harvard and Yale, or do you think that the future is going to be something where people get their education online more likely than not?

00:45:01.000 Well, I think the future is the university I'm going to start next year.

00:45:07.000 I'm going to Willamette only part-time, but what I'm really doing this coming year is launching what I'm calling a renegade university, which will be an online education A set of courses, lectures, and interactive seminars for anyone who's interested in learning about history and political philosophy, current events,

00:45:23.000 looking at things in a new way.

00:45:25.000 And you offer degrees?

00:45:27.000 Not yet.

00:45:27.000 I think most people wouldn't be interested in that.

00:45:30.000 I think this is just for people who are just like you, or just curious about the world.

00:45:34.000 There's a huge demand for this in the world, and it's so expensive at colleges now.

00:45:39.000 It's unaffordable for most people now, or many people now.

00:45:43.000 And also you have to sort of enter this loony bin, as we know, to learn these things now.

00:45:48.000 So, I mean, I think people are kind of bypassing colleges and universities more and more through online education, through podcasting, through all these other media forums.

00:45:57.000 So that's what I'm going to do.

00:45:59.000 I'm going to offer sort of what I've been teaching in my classes in colleges for 20 years to anyone online for a tiny fraction of the cost, right?

00:46:08.000 It's much cheaper to do this for them than to pay tuition at a Yale or Occidental College.

00:46:15.000 Well, that sounds excellent, and I think we're in a unique time now where something like that is very appealing to people because a lot of people are getting...

00:46:24.000 I mean, at the end of the day, education is information, right?

00:46:27.000 That's what it is.

00:46:27.000 You're learning things.

00:46:29.000 You're taking in things, and we're educating ourselves constantly.

00:46:32.000 You're constantly educating yourself with articles and books and things, documentaries that you watch.

00:46:37.000 There's always information that's coming in.

00:46:39.000 It's just the idea is that to get an education, in air quotes, you have to go to a place and you have to follow their rules.

00:46:47.000 And you have to sit in the class with all these other people that are trying to do the same, and you have to somehow or another do it together.

00:46:53.000 Why?

00:46:54.000 That doesn't make sense to me because you don't live your life like that.

00:46:56.000 You know, your life doesn't involve, like, you know...

00:47:00.000 You don't go to a place and learn about people.

00:47:04.000 You live and you learn about people.

00:47:06.000 I think that it's kind of confining and archaic to have these institutions where you have to go there.

00:47:17.000 And then the whole tenure process and the politics of the staff and the teaching and what can and can't be in the curriculum and who it does and doesn't offend or appeal to.

00:47:30.000 Yeah, it's archaic.

00:47:31.000 It's actually medieval.

00:47:32.000 I mean, the modern university is based on colleges and universities in the Middle Ages, schools in the Middle Ages.

00:47:38.000 What's the oldest running university today?

00:47:41.000 In the United States, it's Harvard.

00:47:43.000 When was that established?

00:47:48.000 17th century, I believe.

00:47:49.000 Wow.

00:47:50.000 I believe.

00:47:51.000 That's hilarious.

00:47:52.000 Yeah.

00:47:53.000 Before the United States?

00:47:55.000 Yeah.

00:47:55.000 Wow.

00:47:56.000 What the fuck was it here? 1.00

00:47:57.000 Wow. 0.99

00:47:59.000 1636. I was right.

00:48:00.000 That's insane.

00:48:02.000 That is insane.

00:48:04.000 Good Lord.

00:48:07.000 Yeah, it's based on schools in the Middle Ages.

00:48:11.000 Wow.

00:48:12.000 So it's truly archaic.

00:48:13.000 It's a bizarre place, the modern college.

00:48:16.000 Yeah.

00:48:16.000 It's a bizarre, bizarre place.

00:48:17.000 There's no other place like it.

00:48:19.000 Some of that's good.

00:48:20.000 I mean, it's nice to have this space where you can talk about ideas.

00:48:23.000 The problem is that's happening less and less in colleges.

00:48:26.000 Isn't it good, though, for a lot of people to get away from their parents, to go someplace, to be around other young kids that are experiencing this sort of new freedom for themselves, and then to be thrust into this sort of pressure cooker of ideas?

00:48:40.000 Yeah, but do you have to go to college to get that?

00:48:42.000 Well, otherwise you're stuck with your parents, and then what are you going to do?

00:48:45.000 You're going to get a job to pay your rent.

00:48:46.000 This way, you're in a dorm, you know, you show up, bell rings, go to class.

00:48:52.000 Well, like in the 1960s, people just went to San Francisco instead, right?

00:48:56.000 And they just hung out.

00:48:57.000 Oh, that's true.

00:48:57.000 Yeah.

00:48:58.000 So go to San Francisco, folks.

00:49:00.000 Denver's the new San Francisco.

00:49:02.000 Well, I mean it.

00:49:02.000 Yeah.

00:49:03.000 Wherever it is.

00:49:04.000 I mean, not San Francisco now, obviously, but someplace.

00:49:06.000 Yeah.

00:49:06.000 San Francisco now, you'll be homeless.

00:49:08.000 If you make less than $200,000 a year, you're going to be homeless.

00:49:12.000 Right.

00:49:12.000 Yeah.

00:49:12.000 That's not happening.

00:49:13.000 That's not a joke either, man.

00:49:14.000 I know. 1.00

00:49:15.000 That place is fucking insane. 0.99

00:49:16.000 My parents just moved out of there. 0.99

00:49:18.000 Yeah.

00:49:19.000 Yeah.

00:49:19.000 So, I mean, it's making less and less sense to people.

00:49:23.000 So if you look at just economically, you look at the price of a degree has gone up and up and up, right?

00:49:29.000 And the value of a degree has gone down and down and down because everyone's got a college degree now.

00:49:34.000 It's like the new high school diploma.

00:49:36.000 Right.

00:49:36.000 As far as your return, immediate, able to get a job.

00:49:39.000 Dime and dozen, right?

00:49:40.000 So employers are looking at degrees as being less and less valuable.

00:49:44.000 So, you know, that's a clear bubble happening.

00:49:47.000 I mean, that's a real problem economically.

00:49:49.000 And then, maybe more importantly, there's all these other ways to learn stuff now, right?

00:49:55.000 Mostly online, right?

00:49:56.000 That's cheap or free.

00:49:58.000 Either formal online courses, or just listening to podcasts, or reading blogs, or going on Twitter.

00:50:04.000 I've said there's more, and I really mean this, there is more intellectual debate in one hour of Twitter than there is of four years of college.

00:50:14.000 I mean, there's far more conflict of ideas on social media now than there is in a college classroom.

00:50:21.000 Because college classrooms are dominated and have been for decades by left liberals.

00:50:26.000 That's the discourse that goes on in there.

00:50:28.000 You don't hear conservative ideas.

00:50:29.000 You don't hear libertarian ideas.

00:50:31.000 You don't even hear some radical left-wing ideas.

00:50:34.000 It's this very narrow discourse that is pretty much only allowed in the college classroom.

00:50:41.000 And that's, to me, The biggest problem with the modern university.

00:50:46.000 There is no diversity of ideas.

00:50:49.000 Everybody's obsessed with diversity of color, skin color, but no one cares about a diversity of ideas, about real debate.

00:50:57.000 I want...

00:50:58.000 In my university to have a real debate about big ideas.

00:51:04.000 I want the best minds from conservatism and liberalism and socialism and libertarianism to have it out.

00:51:10.000 So let's talk about the big ideas and let's go for it and have the best people argue the points on their merits against each other.

00:51:19.000 Why is it that there's such a narrow path Of ideas that exist right now in colleges.

00:51:27.000 Why is it just this- Tenure.

00:51:29.000 Tenure?

00:51:30.000 Yeah.

00:51:30.000 I mean, so what happened was conservatives basically dominated colleges until the 1960s.

00:51:36.000 And then the 1960s generation of radicals had nowhere to go when they went into their 20s and 30s.

00:51:44.000 So they decided to move into the academy.

00:51:46.000 So they all got PhDs and they became professors and they've dominated ever since.

00:51:52.000 There's also this system of tenure in universities, which is supposed to protect academic freedom, and what it actually does is it enforces intellectual conformity, right?

00:52:01.000 Because you have a lifetime appointment and you control hiring, right?

00:52:05.000 The faculty controls hiring.

00:52:07.000 Who are you going to hire?

00:52:09.000 You're going to hire somebody who agrees with you, who says what you think should be said.

00:52:12.000 Wow.

00:52:13.000 So that's the problem with tenure, right?

00:52:16.000 It sort of protects academic freedom, but mostly it enforces intellectual conformity.

00:52:23.000 That's disturbing.

00:52:24.000 It's disturbing because you...

00:52:26.000 It's a priesthood.

00:52:27.000 Yeah, in a way, right?

00:52:29.000 Right.

00:52:29.000 You're a priest for life.

00:52:31.000 And who are you going to recruit into the priesthood?

00:52:34.000 A true believer.

00:52:36.000 That's what goes on in universities with faculty hiring.

00:52:39.000 So if you have tenure, there's essentially no way you can get fired unless it's a radical crime? 0.93

00:52:43.000 You have to rape a student or you have to be schizophrenic or, yeah, I mean, it's almost impossible. 0.92

00:52:48.000 That seems kind of ridiculous as well, because, like, what if someone starts putting out poor work? 0.99

00:52:53.000 Like, here's a perfect example.

00:52:55.000 A guy who has tenure, who is at the University of California, Berkeley.

00:52:58.000 That guy who believes that...

00:53:02.000 Dewsburg, Peter Dewsburg?

00:53:03.000 I've had him on the podcast before, and it was probably the most hate I ever got from...

00:53:08.000 He's got this radical idea that AIDS is not a...

00:53:13.000 It's not a disease that's caused by HIV and that HIV is a weak virus and HIV exists in these people because they already have a compromised immune system and that what's really going on is they're taking recreational drugs and partying and depleting their immune system to the point where HIV can actually show up.

00:53:32.000 That HIV is not the cause of AIDS, but it's just the symptom of a depleted immune system. 0.84

00:53:38.000 He's a fucking professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley. 1.00

00:53:42.000 And he's widely hated by AIDS researchers, like people who understand HIV at a deeper level, and they think he's a fucking moron. 1.00

00:53:51.000 And what he's doing is dangerous, but meanwhile he has tenure. 0.99

00:53:54.000 So let him have it out.

00:53:56.000 I mean, he's reviled by the profession, so what's the problem here, right?

00:53:59.000 I mean, let him have it out with his opponents.

00:54:03.000 Let them argue this.

00:54:04.000 But they won't even argue with him, though, because it's like arguing with a Holocaust denier.

00:54:08.000 It's like if you get on a dais with a Holocaust denier and you start debating him, you're giving him merit by just being there.

00:54:17.000 I mean, I think the market should decide.

00:54:19.000 It doesn't decide, meaning the students should decide, right?

00:54:23.000 Broadly speaking, the students, the broad student body, people who might go to college, who might take his class, should decide, right?

00:54:28.000 They don't get to decide, though, because he has tenure.

00:54:30.000 That's the problem.

00:54:31.000 It removes it from market forces.

00:54:33.000 Right, right, right.

00:54:34.000 Whereas if the students decide... 0.98

00:54:36.000 But, you know, the students are trying to get rid of the president of Occidental for no fucking reason at all.

00:54:42.000 The market often does things we don't like. 0.90

00:54:45.000 But the market should be able to do that as well.

00:54:48.000 Sure.

00:54:49.000 Yeah.

00:54:49.000 So what the market does is the market learns, right?

00:54:53.000 So at Occidental, they would kick out, if they had their way, they would kick out the president and he would be replaced by someone who was just as bad.

00:54:59.000 Or worse.

00:55:01.000 Someone like them.

00:55:02.000 Or slightly better.

00:55:03.000 Someone that they want.

00:55:04.000 Maybe they would luck out and they would find someone just like them, but that seems impossible.

00:55:08.000 Because the president of a college has to keep the place afloat.

00:55:13.000 Right.

00:55:13.000 Yeah, so they have fiscal responsibilities and they have to take into consideration as well.

00:55:17.000 They have fiscal responsibilities, exactly.

00:55:18.000 Why was tenure created in the first place?

00:55:21.000 What was the idea behind that?

00:55:21.000 To protect academic freedom, right?

00:55:23.000 To allow us to say what we want in the classroom, free from fear of being fired by the administration.

00:55:29.000 And when was it instituted?

00:55:32.000 It's ancient, that system. 0.97

00:55:36.000 But it wasn't really fucked until the 60s? 1.00

00:55:39.000 No, it's always been fucked. 1.00

00:55:41.000 It's always been fucked. 1.00

00:55:41.000 So, you know, in the 1920s and 30s and 40s and 50s, Schools were dominated by kind of, you know, straight, white, male elites, right? 1.00

00:55:52.000 Wealthy people, right?

00:55:53.000 And they had a very narrow discourse, too.

00:55:55.000 It was just a very different one than we're taught now, right?

00:55:57.000 But they were protected from market forces as well, right?

00:56:00.000 And there was no intellectual diversity there either, right?

00:56:03.000 It was just as bad.

00:56:04.000 It was just a different discourse.

00:56:07.000 So the problem is tenure, the heart of it, you know?

00:56:12.000 It also, you know, there's just this huge...

00:56:16.000 Generation, which I belong to, of scholars with PhDs who are very good teachers and very good scholars who can't get jobs now.

00:56:23.000 There's this tremendous overproduction of PhDs in the last 50 years, right?

00:56:27.000 Not enough and not a lot of jobs.

00:56:29.000 We have to have more churn. 0.82

00:56:31.000 We have to have more turnover.

00:56:32.000 We have to have people.

00:56:33.000 There's all these people who are much better than tenured professors out there who can't teach and can't have solid, secure jobs.

00:56:40.000 We have to eliminate tenure to make these places better. 0.99

00:56:44.000 So, because of tenure, you're getting people that establish that position.

00:56:49.000 Here's a perfect example.

00:56:51.000 There was one of the people that was talking about the woman in Missouri that was calling for muscle.

00:56:58.000 Melissa Click.

00:56:59.000 Yeah.

00:57:00.000 It was this insane video.

00:57:03.000 She's telling some young man he couldn't be there in a public place taking photographs.

00:57:07.000 He's like, actually, I can.

00:57:08.000 And she calls for muscle to get this guy kicked out of there. 1.00

00:57:12.000 It's just like...

00:57:14.000 Insane.

00:57:14.000 Well, one of the criticisms was by this guy who is a professor, and he said that her mistake was that she did this before she got tenure.

00:57:23.000 You wait until you get tenure, and then you shake things up.

00:57:26.000 Like, no, no, no.

00:57:27.000 Her mistake was saying, can I get some muscle to take us to...

00:57:32.000 Not only that, the woman, same woman, just a day before, was calling for the media to cover this event.

00:57:38.000 And she's a professor of communications.

00:57:40.000 Yes.

00:57:40.000 The whole thing is just insane.

00:57:44.000 But it's this detachment from objective reasoning, this complete detachment and this insistence on staying within this idea that they're enforcing of safe spaces, of intolerance to anyone with opinions other than what they're trying to conform and what they're trying to enforce on these kids.

00:58:09.000 I mean, I would imagine That Melissa Click believed that those students protesting in the tents on that quad were being harmed, had been harmed, and were being harmed, were actively being oppressed by racism on that campus.

00:58:23.000 And they needed to be protected from that harm.

00:58:26.000 Now, what actually happened on the University of Missouri campus?

00:58:30.000 Allegedly, two people used the word nigger in a six-month period.

00:58:34.000 That's it.

00:58:36.000 And that hasn't even been proven, by the way.

00:58:39.000 Who are these two people that did it?

00:58:41.000 Well, no one knows.

00:58:43.000 Oh, it's just like it's in the air?

00:58:44.000 Two students claimed...

00:58:46.000 No, two students claimed that they were called nigger.

00:58:49.000 God, that's it?

00:58:51.000 Yeah, with no descriptions of...

00:58:55.000 You know, that could have happened.

00:58:57.000 It could have happened.

00:58:58.000 But you know what else could have happened?

00:59:00.000 This is a part of the problem. 1.00

00:59:01.000 Kids make shit up. 1.00

00:59:03.000 Always have. 1.00

00:59:04.000 Especially to enforce that victim mentality.

00:59:07.000 Yeah, right.

00:59:07.000 So we reward victims.

00:59:11.000 That's the cultural problem.

00:59:12.000 There's a recreational victim mentality that's going on, where people are looking for reasons why they were victims.

00:59:19.000 And in that situation, you got a hunger strike over two people using that word over six months, and there's a hunger strike.

00:59:29.000 It's a demand to be treated like a child.

00:59:31.000 It's a demand for more paternalism, right?

00:59:35.000 Protect me.

00:59:36.000 I'm a victim.

00:59:37.000 Or, you know, cleanse this area of all its impure thoughts and reasoning.

00:59:43.000 Right.

00:59:44.000 Make it into, like, a playpen.

00:59:45.000 Well, make it into a safe space.

00:59:48.000 Yeah, like Playpen.

00:59:49.000 Playpen's a safe space?

00:59:50.000 A bouncy house.

00:59:52.000 Yeah, well at Brown, you know about the safe spaces at Brown, right?

00:59:54.000 University.

00:59:55.000 What have they done?

00:59:56.000 Oh, Christina Hoff Summers talked about it on Pocket, right?

00:59:59.000 Yeah, but I mean for everybody.

01:00:00.000 Oh, sorry, yeah.

01:00:02.000 They created a safe space that had like coloring books, I think, for students to go to because if the ideas they heard were too troubling for them.

01:00:09.000 Videos of puppies.

01:00:11.000 And videos of puppies, I guess, yeah.

01:00:12.000 So she said...

01:00:13.000 These are allegations.

01:00:13.000 Who knows?

01:00:14.000 But yeah, I believe it to some extent.

01:00:16.000 Yeah, and that was because of a woman who's a feminist coming on to talk about the problems with using incorrect data and biased studies to reinforce ideas that may or may not be true, which she believes damage actual feminism. 1.00

01:00:31.000 All right.

01:00:31.000 So before we continue to trash the students too much, I have to say this.

01:00:36.000 All this is true.

01:00:37.000 Everything we've said is completely true.

01:00:38.000 Right.

01:00:39.000 And I agree with you on all of it.

01:00:40.000 However...

01:00:42.000 I've been teaching for 20 years, four different colleges, elite schools, both coasts.

01:00:48.000 This is a minority of college students we're talking about.

01:00:50.000 This is not most of them.

01:00:52.000 It's a vocal minority.

01:00:53.000 This is not most of them.

01:00:54.000 In fact, it's a fairly small minority.

01:00:57.000 Most of my students, as far as I know, have not been like this at all.

01:01:00.000 In fact, most of them are pretty disdainful of this kind of stuff and just want to learn.

01:01:05.000 Well, I think a lot of kids today also, because of social media, because they get to watch videos of all this nonsense going on at Yale and all this craziness going on in Missouri, and they get to read blogs about it, and they get to participate in conversations on social media, 0.99

01:01:21.000 they're understanding how stupid it all is. 1.00

01:01:23.000 They're understanding that you're dealing with a bunch of fucking babies. 1.00

01:01:25.000 And so there's probably some pushback in that regard. 1.00

01:01:28.000 So what's been...

01:01:30.000 I keep saying the most troubling thing to me...

01:01:34.000 One of the most troubling things to me is that the faculty have been mostly silent about this.

01:01:39.000 Well, it seems worse than that.

01:01:41.000 The faculty is trying to enforce some sort of mechanism.

01:01:44.000 Some of them are egging them on, but most, I would say, just aren't saying anything.

01:01:49.000 And I'm talking about tenured senior faculty with lifetime job security are not saying anything.

01:01:55.000 And I know many of them have reservations about what's going on, but they won't talk about it.

01:02:00.000 It's really infuriating. 0.99

01:02:03.000 And I can't quite explain it, except that they're just cowards. 0.99

01:02:07.000 But it's a terrible thing, right? 0.96

01:02:09.000 Because the ideas these kids are espousing, they've gotten from the classrooms.

01:02:14.000 They've gotten from these faculty.

01:02:16.000 Well, don't you want to take back your ideas or try to teach these kids?

01:02:20.000 Isn't that what we're here for?

01:02:22.000 Yeah.

01:02:22.000 Right?

01:02:23.000 Yeah, discourse can be violent, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate free speech because of it.

01:02:29.000 Right?

01:02:30.000 Of course.

01:02:30.000 That intervention is not being made by faculty, though.

01:02:32.000 I'm not hearing that being said, not publicly, not on campuses.

01:02:36.000 But that's where it gets confusing, because if the faculty does have tenure, wouldn't they want to express themselves?

01:02:41.000 Like, you don't have to worry about getting fired.

01:02:43.000 Like, don't you see the problems with this kind of thinking and this kind of enforcing this very rigid idea of what you can and can't say or who you are and how you behave?

01:02:54.000 But the worst thing that can happen to a white liberal And I know this, is to be called a racist.

01:03:00.000 That's the worst thing that can happen to you.

01:03:03.000 Maybe worse than losing your job.

01:03:05.000 Really?

01:03:05.000 Yeah.

01:03:06.000 Being called a racist and having people believe it.

01:03:09.000 That's a terrifying prospect for a white liberal.

01:03:14.000 Terrifying.

01:03:15.000 So they'll do anything to avoid that.

01:03:19.000 Being called a sexist wouldn't be so hot either, but being called a racist is the worst.

01:03:22.000 It's worse than being a sexist?

01:03:24.000 I think so.

01:03:24.000 Yeah.

01:03:24.000 Wow.

01:03:25.000 Yeah.

01:03:25.000 Where's like transphobic fall on that list?

01:03:28.000 That's catching up.

01:03:29.000 Yeah.

01:03:31.000 That's moving up the list pretty fast.

01:03:33.000 The transphobic one is weird because there's so few transgender people.

01:03:36.000 The percentage of people that are transgender.

01:03:38.000 It's amazing that that has caught so much steam publicly.

01:03:42.000 Because it's not like you're responding to a real issue that's happening.

01:03:47.000 It's almost like a pet thing to reinforce.

01:03:53.000 The trans movement is interesting.

01:03:56.000 The trans movement started... 0.95

01:03:59.000 Basically after Stonewall, 1969, 1970s as part of the gay liberation movement.

01:04:04.000 And the thrust of that was, leave us alone and we don't care what you think about us.

01:04:12.000 We're going to do whatever we want to do.

01:04:13.000 We're going to dress as women or dress as men. 0.98

01:04:15.000 We're going to behave however we want.

01:04:16.000 We don't care what you think about us.

01:04:18.000 That's a very liberatory movement.

01:04:21.000 I'm a big fan of that.

01:04:22.000 They're my heroes, that generation.

01:04:24.000 And by the way, RuPaul is kind of a descendant of them.

01:04:27.000 This is what he keeps saying over and over again.

01:04:28.000 I don't care if you call me a she or a he.

01:04:30.000 I don't care, he says.

01:04:31.000 I'm going to do whatever I want to do.

01:04:33.000 Are you allowed to say he or is it she?

01:04:34.000 RuPaul says.

01:04:35.000 He doesn't care.

01:04:36.000 He says he doesn't care.

01:04:38.000 He says you can call me either he or she.

01:04:40.000 So you can't misgender him.

01:04:41.000 Nope.

01:04:41.000 Good for him.

01:04:42.000 He's free.

01:04:43.000 Her.

01:04:43.000 Whatever.

01:04:44.000 Right.

01:04:45.000 She. 0.93

01:04:46.000 She. 0.93

01:04:48.000 So now what you see a lot, but not entirely, but a lot among trans people is, you know, they're really concerned about what you and I think about them.

01:04:57.000 That seems to be their primary concern is what we think about them.

01:05:02.000 Again, it's like it's asking for more paternalism.

01:05:05.000 It's giving us more power.

01:05:07.000 Well, asking people to, when you meet someone...

01:05:12.000 Immediately ask, what are your preferred gender pronouns?

01:05:16.000 Have you seen Steven Crowder did a video where he applied that in real life?

01:05:20.000 No. 0.98

01:05:20.000 It's fucking hilarious. 0.98

01:05:22.000 That guy's something. 0.99

01:05:25.000 He's something.

01:05:26.000 He went out all over the place and was asking people what their preferred gender pronoun would be. 1.00

01:05:33.000 The look that people gave him in the real world, like, what the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

01:05:37.000 Over and over and over again he's asking these people what their preferred gender pronoun would be. 0.98

01:05:41.000 How should I refer to you?

01:05:44.000 Wouldn't it be better if we just didn't care?

01:05:46.000 Yeah, I mean, I think this idea that a man has a woman inside of him and he really is a woman trapped in a man's body or a man trapped in a woman's body and you would like to transfer... 0.57

01:06:01.000 Like this idea that now it's a she or now it's a he. 0.97

01:06:04.000 I really...

01:06:05.000 I think that you should be able to do whatever you want to do.

01:06:07.000 And I think that even if you're not a woman trapped in a man's body, but if you wake up one day and go, I think it'd be cool to just get an operation and become a woman and start taking female hormones and see if I like it. 0.88

01:06:18.000 You should totally be able to do that.

01:06:20.000 I'm 100% for that.

01:06:21.000 The real problem It becomes when you make whatever choices you're doing, you make it a big deal to everyone else.

01:06:30.000 And you start making it so that people have very specific ways they're supposed to address you and talk to you.

01:06:36.000 You change your name to Caitlyn.

01:06:37.000 Now you're Kate. 1.00

01:06:39.000 You were Bruce for 60 fucking years. 0.99

01:06:41.000 But now I have to make a new noise with my face that means you. 1.00

01:06:44.000 And if I don't make that new noise in my face, I'm an asshole, and I'm misgendering, and I'm insensitive and rude. 1.00

01:06:50.000 Well, there's a slight possibility that you might be fucking crazy, and if you decide that you're a fox, do I call you a foxkin? 1.00

01:06:58.000 Like, what do I do now? 1.00

01:06:59.000 What if you...

01:07:01.000 I mean, people don't like those comparisons.

01:07:03.000 They don't like...

01:07:04.000 But those are valid.

01:07:05.000 Like, you're doing something...

01:07:08.000 You're having surgery and hormones to become normal.

01:07:12.000 That alone should make you go, okay, what are we dealing with here?

01:07:16.000 Are we allowed to discuss this?

01:07:18.000 We are not.

01:07:19.000 And that's where things get tricky.

01:07:20.000 You're not allowed to discuss this, and you have to stay within a very rigid set of rules and behaviors.

01:07:28.000 You don't want to call them crazy, though, do you? 0.94

01:07:29.000 Some of them are crazy. 0.97

01:07:30.000 How do you know that? 1.00

01:07:31.000 Well, I think some people are crazy. 0.97

01:07:34.000 I would assume that there's a certain amount of people in this world, whether it is 1% or one-tenth of 1%, that are crazy. 1.00

01:07:41.000 Now, a certain amount of men who are cisgendered, heterosexual men are fucking crazy. 1.00

01:07:47.000 A certain amount of cisgendered, heterosexual women are fucking crazy. 1.00

01:07:51.000 Well, you've got to define crazy. 1.00

01:07:53.000 Insane, ridiculous, preposterous. 0.99

01:07:56.000 Well, that's been said about people who get punched in the face for a living. 1.00

01:07:59.000 Sure, a lot of them are crazy. 0.98

01:08:00.000 That's true, though. 0.99

01:08:01.000 But it's true.

01:08:02.000 So my point being, like, when you decide what's normal, what's not normal, what we have to accept and not accept, and what we're allowed to comment on, that's when things get weird.

01:08:10.000 Like, when you're not allowed to comment on certain things because you become insensitive, but you're putting out this thing in the public.

01:08:17.000 You're making it this big social issue.

01:08:19.000 And you only have one way you're allowed to communicate and look at it.

01:08:23.000 Yeah, I mean, what I really dislike is, as I said, the concern for what I think about you.

01:08:28.000 Right.

01:08:29.000 Rather, you should really be free of that.

01:08:32.000 You should be free of me.

01:08:33.000 Yeah.

01:08:34.000 But they seem to be entirely concerned with what I think and what I say.

01:08:38.000 Yes.

01:08:39.000 Again, this is a repudiation of the 1960s and 70s gay liberation movement and the trans liberation movement of that time.

01:08:45.000 The whole point of that movement was, we don't care what you think about us. 0.99

01:08:50.000 We're going to fuck in the streets. 1.00

01:08:51.000 We're going to be naked. 1.00

01:08:52.000 We're going to dress however we want.

01:08:53.000 We're going to act however we want.

01:08:56.000 We don't care.

01:08:57.000 That was true freedom.

01:08:58.000 Now it's about wanting to be treated properly by parents, by making us into their parents.

01:09:05.000 Well, it's also sort of reinforcing this new society standards of acceptance, which I'm 100% in favor of.

01:09:12.000 The idea that, you know, it is okay if your dad just decides to become a woman at 60 years old and starts wearing dresses if it makes him feel better, which I'm 100% for.

01:09:22.000 Right.

01:09:23.000 But why shouldn't...

01:09:23.000 I mean...

01:09:25.000 I'm a big believer in choice.

01:09:27.000 I'm a big believer in us all being different.

01:09:30.000 Then I wouldn't be in the business of calling people crazy.

01:09:32.000 Well, that's because you're a professor and not a comedian. 0.90

01:09:36.000 I'm in the business of calling people crazy when I think they're crazy.

01:09:39.000 Well, it just doesn't mean a lot.

01:09:41.000 Crazy doesn't mean a lot?

01:09:42.000 It does in my world.

01:09:43.000 Because it's so arbitrary, right?

01:09:45.000 Yes.

01:09:45.000 It's been applied to everyone.

01:09:47.000 It's certainly arbitrary. 0.86

01:09:47.000 I'm sure you've been called crazy. 0.86

01:09:49.000 I've been called crazy. 0.89

01:09:50.000 Oh, yeah. 0.66

01:09:50.000 Everyone's been called crazy. 0.66

01:09:51.000 Well, you're definitely crazy. 1.00

01:09:51.000 Yeah, well, right. 1.00

01:09:52.000 Me too.

01:09:53.000 It depends on your standard.

01:09:54.000 So if you really want to allow people to do whatever they want, then don't call them crazy.

01:10:01.000 Why does that have any effect on whether or not they do whatever they want?

01:10:04.000 Oh, I'm not saying it's stopping them. 1.00

01:10:05.000 Some of my favorite people doing whatever they want are fucking crazy. 0.96

01:10:08.000 But don't you want to encourage people to do whatever they want? 0.99

01:10:11.000 To be free?

01:10:12.000 I definitely do, but I don't think that calling someone crazy for crazy behavior stops that.

01:10:17.000 And if it does, then maybe you're not free enough.

01:10:21.000 Yeah, again, they should not care too much about what you think.

01:10:24.000 That's my main point here.

01:10:26.000 But if you're really in favor of making people feel free to make whatever choices they want, then using terms like insane and crazy is not helpful.

01:10:36.000 Right.

01:10:37.000 Well, I could see that point, but also there's a very real possibility that people with all sorts of dysmorphia issues, whether it is anorexia, whether it's bodybuilder dysmorphia, where they never can be big enough, that all of these are These are conditions that are psychological,

01:10:55.000 mental conditions that you could say this person's crazy.

01:10:58.000 Like when you see a bodybuilder and they can't stop getting bigger because they're out of their mind, they look at themselves in the mirror and they think they're tiny, and so they're 350 fucking pounds and they're doing steroids and lifting weights 24 hours a day. 0.99

01:11:10.000 You can say that guy's crazy, right? 0.98

01:11:12.000 No. 0.88

01:11:13.000 What?

01:11:14.000 You can't.

01:11:15.000 You're in this weird PC area now that you have kind of accepted because you go to school and you teach and you're a part of it now. 0.96

01:11:23.000 But that's a crazy person.

01:11:24.000 We're talking about a man who's a bodybuilder who lifts so much weight that his body is like virtually exploding and they have a dysmorphia where they cover themselves up because they always look tiny.

01:11:37.000 You don't think that there's a psychological condition there?

01:11:39.000 There's a psychological condition. 0.98

01:11:41.000 And doesn't that make you crazy?

01:11:43.000 What does crazy mean?

01:11:46.000 We're getting semantics here.

01:11:48.000 Doing jujitsu is called crazy.

01:11:50.000 Being a professor has been called crazy.

01:11:53.000 So why do you have issue with the word crazy then?

01:11:57.000 Because you're pathologizing people's choices.

01:12:00.000 I'm pathologizing people's choices if they lift weights until their body explodes.

01:12:05.000 I knew a dude who literally did that.

01:12:07.000 He was a bodybuilder and he died.

01:12:10.000 I think he was like 31 or 32. We used to call them garden hoses because his arms...

01:12:16.000 Had veins that were like garden hoses.

01:12:18.000 They were these giant veins.

01:12:19.000 I mean, it was insane.

01:12:20.000 You looked at him.

01:12:21.000 You had never seen a human being like him.

01:12:23.000 He would lift weights. 0.74

01:12:24.000 He was a white guy, like as white as you. 1.00

01:12:25.000 He would turn fucking purple. 1.00

01:12:27.000 I mean, purple. 0.99

01:12:28.000 He was just 80% steroids.

01:12:31.000 His body was just overrun.

01:12:32.000 He was out of his mind. 0.99

01:12:33.000 He was definitely crazy. 0.83

01:12:35.000 Would you call that guy crazy? 0.75

01:12:37.000 No.

01:12:37.000 He lifted weights until he died.

01:12:39.000 You don't think that's crazy?

01:12:40.000 What about martial artists?

01:12:41.000 So do you not use crazy at all?

01:12:43.000 Is that what's going on?

01:12:43.000 What about martial artists?

01:12:44.000 Do you use crazy?

01:12:45.000 Do you use the term crazy?

01:12:46.000 I try not to.

01:12:47.000 What's a school shooter?

01:12:48.000 Is that a crazy person? 0.56

01:12:49.000 Someone I want to avoid.

01:12:51.000 Not crazy, huh?

01:12:52.000 Do you limit speech in your own mind?

01:12:54.000 Are you limiting your own speech?

01:12:56.000 I am censoring myself all the time. 0.95

01:12:58.000 You are a little bit with the word crazy.

01:12:59.000 You have a problem with the word crazy.

01:13:00.000 I do.

01:13:01.000 Why?

01:13:01.000 I do.

01:13:02.000 As I said, I think it pathologizes people's choices.

01:13:06.000 I think it contributes to a limitation of freedom.

01:13:09.000 Crazy contributes to a limitation of freedom.

01:13:11.000 And it's been used against all sorts of behaviors that you would absolutely consider to be normal now.

01:13:18.000 Right, but it doesn't affect me.

01:13:20.000 Not only that you consider normal, but that you consider to be preferable.

01:13:23.000 Like what?

01:13:24.000 Behaviors.

01:13:25.000 Like I said, like martial arts.

01:13:28.000 Or driving a fast sports car.

01:13:30.000 Yeah, but it doesn't affect me in a negative way.

01:13:32.000 Like, if you say that I'm crazy because I like to do stand-up when I'm high, that's not going to affect me.

01:13:39.000 Well...

01:13:40.000 Well, it's...

01:13:42.000 In a way, you're infantile...

01:13:44.000 You're infantilizing.

01:13:46.000 That's not a word.

01:13:47.000 Infantilizing?

01:13:48.000 Infantilizing.

01:13:53.000 What do you gain from calling someone crazy?

01:14:10.000 Right?

01:14:11.000 And encouraging human freedom, then I would discourage using the term crazy to describe people's choices.

01:14:16.000 Wow.

01:14:17.000 But I use it all the time, and I'm in favor of people's freedom, and I think he's crazy and he's awesome.

01:14:24.000 Like, is that okay?

01:14:26.000 It's not about being okay or not okay.

01:14:28.000 I'm just saying, again, it's about objectives.

01:14:29.000 What is your objective?

01:14:31.000 If it's maximizing human freedom, that's the word that doesn't reach that objective.

01:14:35.000 Well, the idea behind that would be then somehow or another the word crazy would have a negative impact on the person that you use it on.

01:14:41.000 Well, what you're doing by saying something's crazy is you're saying they should not do this thing.

01:14:44.000 No.

01:14:45.000 Oh, not at all.

01:14:46.000 No.

01:14:46.000 Oh, I thought you were.

01:14:47.000 No.

01:14:47.000 About the muscle, the bodybuilder?

01:14:50.000 I don't give a fuck if he lifts himself to death. 0.99

01:14:52.000 If it was my kid, I'd probably try to get him help. 0.99

01:14:54.000 Oh, okay.

01:14:55.000 Well...

01:14:58.000 Usually it's used in that way, though.

01:14:59.000 It's used as a negative, right?

01:15:01.000 Usually you're saying you should not do that.

01:15:04.000 That's a bad thing to do.

01:15:05.000 You should not ride a motorcycle without a helmet.

01:15:08.000 That's crazy!

01:15:10.000 It is, but you're going to die anyway. 1.00

01:15:13.000 Then I'm with you. 1.00

01:15:14.000 The way I view crazy is...

01:15:17.000 There's broad ranges of crazy, right?

01:15:19.000 There's the crazy guy that walks in the street talking to himself, and he's not on a Bluetooth headset.

01:15:24.000 He's just having internal dialogues externally. 0.97

01:15:28.000 That's a crazy person, right? 0.85

01:15:30.000 No.

01:15:30.000 It's not a crazy person?

01:15:31.000 No.

01:15:34.000 What is that?

01:15:36.000 See, it's very dangerous because people have been locked up for behaviors that were called crazy that you would never consider to be crazy now.

01:15:46.000 Right.

01:15:47.000 Against their will.

01:15:49.000 All kinds of behaviors have been punished harshly because they were deemed to be crazy or insane or pathological.

01:15:59.000 So I, you can do whatever you want, but I don't want to be in the business of labeling things, behaviors, choices, other people's choices as those things, because I know where it can lead them.

01:16:09.000 It can lead them to lock up.

01:16:11.000 Well, I think we're dealing with a broad definition of the word crazy, and some of them are pejorative, and some of them that are actually positive.

01:16:18.000 There's a lot of people that I find to be crazy that I enjoy very much, and there's some of my favorite people.

01:16:23.000 Well, it's also utterly arbitrary.

01:16:25.000 Yes.

01:16:26.000 So it becomes basically meaningless.

01:16:27.000 Not necessarily. 0.93

01:16:28.000 You're crazy as someone else's normal. 1.00

01:16:31.000 Well, if you watch a guy and he's walking a tightrope in between two buildings a hundred stories up, that guy's fucking crazy. 1.00

01:16:38.000 I'm not saying that he should go to jail or anyone should stop his choices, but that is a fucking crazy thing to do. 0.99

01:16:45.000 Why? 0.93

01:16:45.000 What does that mean, though? 0.93

01:16:47.000 What do you think of me?

01:16:47.000 We're playing games here.

01:16:48.000 Like, what are we doing here? 1.00

01:16:49.000 You got on this road because of the possibility that someone who is transgender might be crazy. 1.00

01:16:57.000 Like, this should be taken into consideration. 0.98

01:17:00.000 Or the possibility that someone who gets their face tattooed...

01:17:03.000 You're, by definition, pathologizing something by calling it crazy.

01:17:06.000 You're saying that it's not normal, and basically you're suggesting, at least suggesting, or just straight out saying, that it should not be done.

01:17:13.000 No, not at all.

01:17:14.000 You shouldn't walk on a tightrope, you shouldn't dress as a woman. 1.00

01:17:17.000 You should do whatever you want.

01:17:18.000 I 100% think that if you really want to lift yourself to death, you should do it.

01:17:22.000 If you really want to walk on a tightrope across two buildings, you should do it.

01:17:26.000 What is not crazy?

01:17:27.000 Is there someone who's lived in the world without being crazy?

01:17:31.000 That's a good point.

01:17:33.000 Sounds like a very boring place.

01:17:35.000 I'm sure there is.

01:17:36.000 This is like a very non-Joe Rogan kind of place to live in.

01:17:38.000 A non-crazy place, don't you think?

01:17:40.000 Maybe like a guy who works at a deli.

01:17:42.000 He just makes sandwiches all day.

01:17:44.000 We should all make sandwiches all day. 1.00

01:17:45.000 His sandwiches are fucking crazy! 1.00

01:17:48.000 I see what you're saying. 1.00

01:17:49.000 But what if he's a trans sandwich maker? 1.00

01:17:52.000 Well, maybe he's crazy. 1.00

01:17:55.000 Maybe he's just crazy. 1.00

01:17:57.000 Maybe he's crazy and a normal sandwich guy. 1.00

01:17:59.000 Maybe he's a cisgendered, white, crazy sandwich guy who hears words in his head but doesn't respond to them. 1.00

01:18:07.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:18:09.000 You just don't like to work crazy.

01:18:10.000 I don't.

01:18:11.000 Oh, that's a good word.

01:18:12.000 I don't.

01:18:12.000 No.

01:18:12.000 I think it's a bad word.

01:18:13.000 No?

01:18:13.000 No.

01:18:14.000 Go ahead. 1.00

01:18:15.000 If you get off of a fucking rollercoaster ride, you go, holy shit, that was crazy. 1.00

01:18:19.000 Do you ever say that? 1.00

01:18:20.000 I use it all the time.

01:18:22.000 I just judge myself harshly.

01:18:27.000 I have a shame session, you know, by myself.

01:18:30.000 I see what you're saying though.

01:18:31.000 What you're saying is you don't want to shame people or in any way affect their choices and you want to give them the freedom to do whatever they want and by saying someone might be crazy, you're possibly limiting that.

01:18:46.000 Yes.

01:18:47.000 It's a shaming.

01:18:48.000 It could be.

01:18:49.000 It can be.

01:18:49.000 Not always, but it often is.

01:18:50.000 There also are people with, like, legitimate pathologies that get involved in all sorts of body modification things.

01:18:57.000 Like, there was a guy who got his nose cut off, and he literally turned himself into the Red Skull.

01:19:04.000 Is that what it is?

01:19:04.000 The guy, the Captain America guy?

01:19:05.000 It's fucking terrifying. 0.98

01:19:06.000 He was a handsome guy. 0.99

01:19:07.000 But he had his nose cut off.

01:19:09.000 Like, the tip of his nose cut off.

01:19:11.000 He had all these bolts put in his head.

01:19:14.000 What's wrong with that?

01:19:15.000 No, it looks awesome.

01:19:17.000 What is wrong with that? 0.81

01:19:18.000 Is that guy crazy? 0.99

01:19:19.000 There he is. 0.99

01:19:20.000 Look at that guy.

01:19:21.000 Wow.

01:19:22.000 Wow.

01:19:22.000 Yeah.

01:19:23.000 Well, he seems like a normal guy to me.

01:19:26.000 No, he doesn't.

01:19:28.000 If that guy came home with your daughter, what would you do?

01:19:30.000 I wouldn't call him crazy because I'm scared of him.

01:19:34.000 Oh, because you are scared of him?

01:19:35.000 Oh, yeah.

01:19:36.000 Yeah, because he's obviously willing to do this to his body.

01:19:38.000 What would he do to you?

01:19:39.000 He had his eyeballs turned black with tattoo ink.

01:19:42.000 I would certainly say it's unusual what he has done.

01:19:45.000 Oh, it's definitely unusual.

01:19:48.000 Possibly unique.

01:19:49.000 It's really strange.

01:19:50.000 And what's really crazy, if you see what he looked like beforehand, he was a pretty good-looking guy.

01:19:56.000 Man.

01:19:57.000 Yeah.

01:19:57.000 Yeah, that's him beforehand.

01:19:59.000 That is crazy.

01:20:00.000 Thank you.

01:20:02.000 I'll give you one.

01:20:02.000 So where do we draw the line?

01:20:03.000 I'll give you one.

01:20:04.000 No, I don't think it's crazy.

01:20:05.000 Oh, you don't think it's crazy?

01:20:06.000 No.

01:20:06.000 You're kidding.

01:20:07.000 Everything could be called crazy.

01:20:08.000 It's arbitrary.

01:20:08.000 It's meaningless.

01:20:09.000 Having your nose cut off and your face dyed red and your eyeballs tattooed black.

01:20:13.000 It's a meaningless term.

01:20:14.000 It's meaningless.

01:20:15.000 I don't think it has a good meaning.

01:20:17.000 I think if, you know...

01:20:19.000 Well, if it helps sort of direct you in your choices, you know, like...

01:20:24.000 Or if it helps describe. 0.98

01:20:25.000 Like, if that's your son, and he does that, and someone says, you see Thaddeus' boy went fucking crazy. 0.98

01:20:32.000 I'm not saying I would be happy if my son did that to his face. 0.98

01:20:36.000 Right.

01:20:37.000 But I wouldn't call it crazy.

01:20:38.000 What would you call it?

01:20:41.000 Awesomely unique?

01:20:41.000 I would call it...

01:20:44.000 I would call it unfortunate for me.

01:20:46.000 Because I wouldn't want to look at him.

01:20:48.000 Well, no.

01:20:49.000 Because that's what he wants to do.

01:20:50.000 I guess.

01:20:51.000 Does he, though? 1.00

01:20:52.000 Maybe he's just crazy. 1.00

01:20:57.000 People at home are going, fucking stop! 1.00

01:21:01.000 Change the subject! 1.00

01:21:02.000 You had 30 minutes on the subject of crazy!

01:21:07.000 I see what you're saying, though.

01:21:09.000 I do.

01:21:10.000 I really do.

01:21:11.000 I mean, seriously.

01:21:12.000 Martial arts?

01:21:12.000 Come on.

01:21:13.000 Yeah, they're crazy. 0.99

01:21:14.000 My God.

01:21:14.000 You know, if you're going to call...

01:21:15.000 Oh, 100%.

01:21:16.000 Yeah, people call that crazy all the time.

01:21:18.000 And it's why it's illegal in some states.

01:21:21.000 Well, only one.

01:21:22.000 I mean, it's a reason.

01:21:23.000 It's a cultural reason.

01:21:24.000 Not really.

01:21:24.000 Well, I know the restaurant workers.

01:21:26.000 Well, not only that.

01:21:27.000 Martial arts aren't illegal in New York.

01:21:29.000 But you grant that it's considered crazy by much of the population.

01:21:33.000 And if it weren't, if it were not, it probably would be legal everywhere.

01:21:36.000 Sure.

01:21:37.000 No, that's not true.

01:21:38.000 The only reason why it's illegal in New York State is because of corruption.

01:21:42.000 That's the only reason.

01:21:43.000 Because boxing's not illegal and kickboxing is not illegal.

01:21:46.000 Neither one of those things are illegal.

01:21:47.000 Those things are brutal and violent and they are combat sports.

01:21:51.000 So it's not that combat sports are illegal.

01:21:53.000 It is that mixed martial arts is illegal because of the culinary union and their influence, particularly on one politician who is now going to jail most likely for the rest of his life because of corruption and we're hoping to be getting into Madison Square Garden in April.

01:22:07.000 I know.

01:22:07.000 So you know all this.

01:22:08.000 Yeah, I do.

01:22:08.000 But if the entire New York state population thought that mixed martial arts was totally normal, it would be legal.

01:22:15.000 No, that's not true.

01:22:15.000 Because the Q&A union would not have the power that it does.

01:22:18.000 But they do.

01:22:19.000 No, because a lot of the population thinks that it's barbaric.

01:22:21.000 Oh, I don't know that.

01:22:22.000 They didn't vote on it.

01:22:23.000 The population's never voted on it.

01:22:25.000 Of course they think.

01:22:25.000 Of course much of the population.

01:22:26.000 But they haven't voted on it.

01:22:28.000 The population hasn't voted on it.

01:22:29.000 Well, no, but you do grant that much of the population thinks it's barbaric.

01:22:33.000 There's a large percentage of people that don't like any violent sports, whether it's football, whether it's boxing, whether it's MMA. They think it's animalistic, barbaric.

01:22:41.000 Yeah, it is in a lot of ways.

01:22:42.000 Human cockfighting. 1.00

01:22:43.000 Most of those guys are pussies, though, so I don't listen to them. 1.00

01:22:45.000 That's what I hear. 1.00

01:22:47.000 Are you allowed to use the word pussy? 1.00

01:22:48.000 You don't use crazy. 1.00

01:22:50.000 Are you kidding? 1.00

01:22:50.000 People are pussies, but they're not crazy. 1.00

01:22:52.000 Wow. 1.00

01:22:52.000 Interesting. 1.00

01:22:52.000 I can't even imagine what would happen to me if I used that on a campus. 1.00

01:22:56.000 That's true. 1.00

01:22:58.000 It's interesting because pussy can be a pejorative, just like dick can be a pejorative, but a very different kind of pejorative. 1.00

01:23:05.000 Like dick is a forceful pejorative. 1.00

01:23:07.000 Oh, he's a dick. 1.00

01:23:08.000 Like it's a mean person. 1.00

01:23:09.000 Pussy, there's weakness. 1.00

01:23:11.000 Yes. 1.00

01:23:11.000 Right. 1.00

01:23:12.000 Or it can be awesome.

01:23:13.000 Right. 1.00

01:23:15.000 I've noticed that people are starting to call women dicks now. 0.99

01:23:18.000 Really? 0.99

01:23:19.000 Haven't you?

01:23:19.000 No.

01:23:20.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:23:20.000 And assholes. 1.00

01:23:21.000 Assholes used to be only men. 1.00

01:23:23.000 Now often women are called assholes. 1.00

01:23:25.000 I think women have always been called assholes. 1.00

01:23:28.000 I don't think so. 1.00

01:23:29.000 I think it was pretty strongly gendered. 0.98

01:23:31.000 A lot of men are called cunts these days. 0.98

01:23:32.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:23:33.000 I know that's one of your favorites.

01:23:34.000 Oh, I love it.

01:23:35.000 That's a good one. 0.99

01:23:36.000 Yeah, I mean, actually, you know, I first heard people using cunt. 0.99

01:23:41.000 It was feminists, actually, in college. 1.00

01:23:44.000 Really?

01:23:44.000 Used that.

01:23:45.000 Good for them.

01:23:46.000 For other women. 0.69

01:23:48.000 In a negative way?

01:23:49.000 Or, like, sort of how black people... 0.97

01:23:51.000 Yeah, it's kind of like the nigga of, like, feminists of the 1980s. 1.00

01:23:55.000 It was. 0.95

01:23:56.000 It really was. 1.00

01:23:56.000 What's up, cunt? 1.00

01:23:57.000 That's my cunt. 1.00

01:23:59.000 That's my cunt over there. 1.00

01:24:02.000 She's a real cunt. 1.00

01:24:04.000 Wow, that's hilarious. 1.00

01:24:05.000 That's kind of true, actually.

01:24:06.000 Yeah, I don't think that's done anymore, but I remember in the 80s, at least in my circles, it was definitely common.

01:24:11.000 It's one of my favorite things about going to the UK is how freely they throw that around.

01:24:16.000 I know.

01:24:16.000 But in a good way.

01:24:17.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:24:17.000 Like, hey, he's a good cunt. 1.00

01:24:19.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:24:19.000 Hey, it's a fucking cunt. 1.00

01:24:20.000 Hey, it's a fucking cunt. 1.00

01:24:22.000 They love it. 1.00

01:24:23.000 They throw it around like a beach ball at a concert.

01:24:25.000 The UK is like 30 or 40 years behind the US in gender politics.

01:24:29.000 Yeah.

01:24:30.000 Which may be good or bad, but I mean, you know, they're always behind a bit.

01:24:33.000 Like, they still call women girls.

01:24:36.000 That's common there.

01:24:37.000 But do you ever say your girlfriend?

01:24:39.000 Well, that's not okay in the United States.

01:24:41.000 Do you get corrected when you say my girlfriend?

01:24:45.000 No.

01:24:46.000 But it's hard coming out of my mouth, considering our age.

01:24:52.000 I kind of like it, and I wish I could say girlfriend.

01:24:54.000 You can.

01:24:55.000 You can do whatever you want.

01:24:56.000 Yeah.

01:24:57.000 Come on, man.

01:24:58.000 Freedom.

01:24:58.000 I'm trying to be free.

01:24:59.000 I'm working on it.

01:25:01.000 I'm working on it.

01:25:01.000 I'm trying to get out.

01:25:03.000 You're my avenue out.

01:25:04.000 Am I helping you with these kind of conversations?

01:25:07.000 Are you kidding me?

01:25:07.000 Get in trouble?

01:25:08.000 Totally.

01:25:08.000 No, no.

01:25:09.000 Getting in trouble is good, right?

01:25:10.000 Because that forces you out of places you shouldn't be in in the first place.

01:25:12.000 Right.

01:25:13.000 Well, I certainly think that the boxy confines of ideas that you seem to be forced into when you're a professor at a college definitely reinforces this sort of self-censorship.

01:25:26.000 Oh, yeah.

01:25:27.000 Oh, yeah.

01:25:28.000 You have to watch yourself all the time.

01:25:30.000 That seems so exhausting.

01:25:32.000 Yeah.

01:25:32.000 I have, like, a stand-up comedian's spirit.

01:25:35.000 I'm not saying I'm as funny, but, like, the spirit of a comedian, but in a professor's body.

01:25:39.000 So do you, like, arrange certain bits of humor in your curriculum, in your courses that you teach?

01:25:49.000 Do you have, like...

01:25:49.000 I mean, in my teaching, sure.

01:25:51.000 I mean, I think I'm funny sometimes, yeah.

01:25:53.000 And I'm much freer in the classroom, because other professors aren't there.

01:25:57.000 Yeah.

01:25:58.000 Right.

01:25:59.000 But do you have to be careful of children?

01:26:00.000 And because it's not videotaped.

01:26:02.000 Oh, right, right.

01:26:03.000 Yeah, so it won't get out.

01:26:04.000 It could, though.

01:26:05.000 It could get out, I mean, but only by word of mouth.

01:26:07.000 Right.

01:26:08.000 It's not going to be on YouTube.

01:26:12.000 That's such a drag.

01:26:14.000 It's a real drag.

01:26:15.000 Yeah, so we're going to reinvent it, though.

01:26:18.000 Renegade University.

01:26:19.000 It's coming.

01:26:20.000 Do you worry about that word being kind of douchey?

01:26:23.000 Which one?

01:26:24.000 Renegade.

01:26:24.000 Oh, uh-oh.

01:26:25.000 Is it douchey?

01:26:26.000 Well, it's a little bit.

01:26:27.000 Uh-oh.

01:26:27.000 It's a little bit like I'm a rebel bro.

01:26:28.000 It's my brand, man.

01:26:29.000 I know Renegade History of the United States, your book.

01:26:31.000 It's my brand.

01:26:32.000 But the word renegade, like, you know, you're going to have a bunch of dudes who are Sons of Anarchy fans with shitty t-shirts going to show up. 0.72

01:26:40.000 Yeah, I've seen that. 1.00

01:26:40.000 Fuck renegades, bro. 1.00

01:26:42.000 I have noticed the douche tinge on the renegade. 1.00

01:26:45.000 You might be careful with that.

01:26:46.000 That word.

01:26:47.000 Renegade's a tricky word.

01:26:48.000 It works for a book, a renegade history of the United States.

01:26:52.000 But as far as for a whole university, let's see.

01:26:56.000 Maybe just call it Crazy University. 0.99

01:26:59.000 Crazy you. 1.00

01:27:00.000 Well, a friend of mine suggested it should be called Fuck You, which I like. 1.00

01:27:04.000 That friend's probably crazy. 1.00

01:27:05.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:27:09.000 I'm sure he is.

01:27:10.000 So you look at it like it's your brand, like the word renegade is because of the book?

01:27:15.000 Yeah.

01:27:15.000 I mean, the ideas I'm going to be teaching in the university will be influenced, come out of the book.

01:27:20.000 Do you feel like, though, that it's possible to limit the people that are willing to enroll at Renegade University because of just the name, the moniker?

01:27:28.000 Oh, perhaps.

01:27:30.000 That'll turn off some customers?

01:27:32.000 Perhaps.

01:27:33.000 People that are looking for...

01:27:34.000 You really don't like this name, huh?

01:27:35.000 I don't mind.

01:27:36.000 It wouldn't hold me back.

01:27:37.000 But I just see it could be limiting.

01:27:40.000 Yeah.

01:27:41.000 I don't know.

01:27:41.000 We'll see.

01:27:42.000 We'll see.

01:27:43.000 Maybe those are the people I don't want anyway.

01:27:45.000 That's a good point.

01:27:46.000 Yeah, maybe.

01:27:47.000 I know what you mean, though.

01:27:48.000 It has like a Sons of Manarchy kind of vibe a little bit.

01:27:53.000 Yeah, like somebody might be riding a Harley trying to escape from nothing.

01:27:58.000 Right.

01:27:59.000 You know, I'm a renegade, bro. 1.00

01:28:02.000 I got a fucking Jolly Roger tattooed on my ass. 1.00

01:28:05.000 I don't know. 1.00

01:28:06.000 It's just people are strange.

01:28:08.000 They're strange with words.

01:28:09.000 But not crazy.

01:28:11.000 When you're formulating this university, do you have a plan for launching it and for how you're going to roll out courses?

01:28:21.000 Are you going to create all the courses?

01:28:25.000 Yeah, I mean, it's going to start with sort of stand-alone lectures that you can download and listen to, like podcasts, or you can watch the videos of them.

01:28:33.000 And then if there's sufficient interest, I'll have interactive seminars.

01:28:37.000 There's lots of great platforms for that.

01:28:40.000 Where you can, you know, talk to me.

01:28:41.000 And we can have an exchange online.

01:28:43.000 Do you do a chat or email?

01:28:45.000 And with other students.

01:28:46.000 The exact format we haven't worked out yet.

01:28:48.000 How are you going to have the time to do that?

01:28:50.000 Well, I'm going to stop teaching in these colleges.

01:28:53.000 Oh.

01:28:53.000 That's the idea.

01:28:54.000 So the idea is to completely dedicate all your time to this ultimately.

01:28:58.000 That's what I would like.

01:28:59.000 Wow.

01:28:59.000 Absolutely, yeah.

01:29:00.000 And will you stay in Oregon if you do that?

01:29:03.000 I don't know.

01:29:04.000 I mean, I'll probably do it both in Oregon and in L.A. Both.

01:29:08.000 Go back and forth.

01:29:11.000 So is it like a five-year plan or a ten-year plan?

01:29:14.000 How do you kind of roll this out?

01:29:16.000 Who knows?

01:29:17.000 It's going to roll out next year.

01:29:18.000 If it's successful, it could be for the rest of my life.

01:29:21.000 Wow.

01:29:21.000 I would like it to be.

01:29:22.000 And so how are you structuring this?

01:29:25.000 Do you have a gigantic PowerPoint that you've laid out?

01:29:30.000 How are you...

01:29:32.000 Yeah, I mean, there will be some production, there will be some PowerPoint stuff, graphics, you know, I might actually use an old-school whiteboard in the background, depending on what I'm presenting.

01:29:42.000 For videos?

01:29:42.000 Yeah, and videos, right.

01:29:44.000 So, be multimedia, yeah.

01:29:46.000 Wow.

01:29:47.000 How long have you been thinking about this?

01:29:48.000 Years.

01:29:49.000 Really?

01:29:49.000 Yeah.

01:29:49.000 I mean, I started becoming disaffected with colleges and universities probably ten years ago after getting fired from Barnard College at Columbia.

01:29:59.000 Who did you get fired for?

01:30:01.000 Did you talk about it in the last podcast?

01:30:02.000 Partly being a white man, partly because of my ideas.

01:30:06.000 What ideas?

01:30:07.000 About crazy?

01:30:08.000 There's really both those reasons.

01:30:09.000 Yeah, people just, well, I mean, I say things you're not supposed to say, and the renegade history stuff didn't go over well with a lot of the professoriate And they wanted a black woman also for that job. 0.96

01:30:22.000 And then this happened to me again at Occidental.

01:30:24.000 I was disqualified from a tenure-track job about two years ago because of my race.

01:30:29.000 Because of your race specifically?

01:30:31.000 That's what they said?

01:30:32.000 I was told behind the scenes, yes.

01:30:35.000 How'd they say it?

01:30:37.000 We weren't going to hire a white guy.

01:30:39.000 Wow. 0.96

01:30:41.000 That's so depressing.

01:30:43.000 Yeah, it's very depressing.

01:30:44.000 It's so depressing.

01:30:45.000 I mean, it's just... 0.99

01:30:47.000 I don't know if it's equally depressing that they wouldn't hire a black woman.

01:30:52.000 I think it's probably more depressing they wouldn't hire a black woman for whatever reason, because there's so many more white men doing your job.

01:30:58.000 But it's not much less depressing. 0.81

01:31:03.000 It's pretty depressing. 0.73

01:31:04.000 Because it's racist.

01:31:04.000 It is racist.

01:31:05.000 It is.

01:31:05.000 It's also illegal.

01:31:07.000 Yeah.

01:31:07.000 I mean, you can't do it according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but they do it all the time.

01:31:11.000 They just do it without, you know, without making it public.

01:31:15.000 What is this recent trend amongst kids where they're saying that white people can't be racist? 0.79

01:31:21.000 It's absurd.

01:31:22.000 Excuse me. 0.99

01:31:23.000 Black people can't be racist. 0.99

01:31:24.000 Yeah, right. 0.99

01:31:25.000 Black people can't be racist towards white people because they don't have any power. 0.67

01:31:29.000 And that racism is imposing your own prejudices on other people. 0.58

01:31:34.000 But they're trying to redefine it.

01:31:37.000 And people are saying, check the Wikipedia for the definition of racism.

01:31:41.000 Like, what?

01:31:42.000 So racism, in its classical sense, is the belief that there are distinct and hierarchical biological races of human beings, right?

01:31:52.000 Yes.

01:31:53.000 Okay, that's racism in its classical sense, right?

01:31:56.000 Then there's, like, prejudice and cultural dislike, and, you know, but that's...

01:32:01.000 So anyone can be racist against anyone else, right?

01:32:04.000 There is a point to be made there that some groups have power and some don't.

01:32:10.000 So some who are racist can do things about it, and some can't.

01:32:15.000 But of course black people can be racist if they think that there are biologically distinct and hierarchical races of human beings, which some do. 0.93

01:32:22.000 I watched some white rapper They just can't put anybody in prison about it.

01:32:26.000 And people were, this was so frustrating. 0.99

01:32:29.000 These young kids were saying, he's woke as fuck. 0.99

01:32:31.000 Like, he's woke. 1.00

01:32:32.000 He woke.

01:32:33.000 He's awake.

01:32:34.000 He's woke. 1.00

01:32:35.000 He woke as fuck. 1.00

01:32:36.000 And then people were, like, saying, you know, you're ignorant to people that disagreed. 1.00

01:32:41.000 Y'all need to check Wikipedia.

01:32:43.000 Like, what?

01:32:44.000 Check Wikipedia.

01:32:45.000 This is amazing.

01:32:46.000 Like, they've redefined the term racist.

01:32:50.000 They're saying white people can only, or black people can only be prejudiced.

01:32:53.000 They can't be racist. 0.98

01:32:54.000 Black people can be racist, they just can't do much about it. 1.00

01:32:58.000 Well, they can against, I mean, if they are an employer and they don't want to hire Chinese people. 0.99

01:33:02.000 Some blacks can. 0.98

01:33:03.000 If you're a black guy and you have a business and you don't want to hire Chinese people because you don't like Chinese people, you're a racist. 0.96

01:33:07.000 But as a group, they can't do much unless they're in South Africa, where they control the government. 0.96

01:33:12.000 Right. 0.96

01:33:13.000 Then black people can not only be racist, but they can put you in jail if you're the wrong race. 1.00

01:33:18.000 I'm struggling for the time to be able to use that term, he's woke as fuck. 1.00

01:33:23.000 The day is coming. 0.99

01:33:24.000 You're woke.

01:33:26.000 Just the term woke.

01:33:30.000 Oh, these wacky kids today.

01:33:32.000 I'm telling you.

01:33:34.000 Well, I just don't understand that there's no benefit in redefining the words. 0.96

01:33:39.000 Of course, people can do wrong things, whether they're based on racial prejudices or sociological prejudices or economic or class, whatever the fuck it is. 0.67

01:33:50.000 Of course, there's prejudices. 0.68

01:33:52.000 Why redefine them like that?

01:33:54.000 Why even waste any time?

01:33:55.000 It seems like there's all this frivolous, I don't like Chinese food has been called racist.

01:34:14.000 It's not.

01:34:17.000 I don't like Chinese people and not necessarily be racist, right? 0.99

01:34:20.000 That's just a cultural preference, right? 0.71

01:34:23.000 If you say Chinese people are biologically, naturally better at math, that is racist.

01:34:30.000 Don't you think if you say I don't like Chinese people, that's racist?

01:34:33.000 You're generalizing.

01:34:34.000 It could be, but it's not necessarily.

01:34:36.000 But you're generalizing about a billion-plus people.

01:34:40.000 Yeah.

01:34:40.000 Oh, sure.

01:34:40.000 It's stupid.

01:34:41.000 I mean, it's ignorant, and it's a gross generalization, but it's not necessarily a belief that they are biologically distinct. 1.00

01:34:48.000 Right. 0.91

01:34:48.000 It could be a preference. 0.91

01:34:49.000 Yeah.

01:34:50.000 You don't like the way they look, they don't like the food they eat, whatever the clothes they wear, whatever it is.

01:34:56.000 I'm not into jasmine.

01:34:58.000 Right.

01:34:59.000 Whatever.

01:35:00.000 I like using forks.

01:35:01.000 I hate silk.

01:35:02.000 All these silk peddlers. 1.00

01:35:04.000 What am I even saying?

01:35:06.000 Yeah, we're going to have to somehow or another get over this as a race. 0.96

01:35:12.000 We're going to have to get over ridiculous biases. 0.88

01:35:14.000 You mean as a human race? 0.98

01:35:15.000 Yeah, as a race. 0.99

01:35:16.000 I mean, as a human race, we're going to have to get over the origins of your ancestors and languages that you speak and just be able to appreciate each other for what the fuck we are. 0.98

01:35:29.000 But how's that going to happen? 0.90

01:35:30.000 Well, but then again, we don't want to get rid of cultural differences, right? 0.57

01:35:33.000 No!

01:35:34.000 No, that's not what I'm saying.

01:35:35.000 I'm saying appreciate each other for what we are, and this idea that people can generalize or be racist, that seems to be a counterproductive idea that I don't understand.

01:35:48.000 It's akin to tribalism.

01:35:50.000 Which is sort of dissipating and nationalism which is also sort of dissipating over time as we integrate with all these other cultures all throughout the world and you have Google Translate and you can understand what people are saying in other places.

01:36:04.000 But because of the separations of languages and cultures and things like that, you're always going to have people that are wary of people that they don't know or understand.

01:36:14.000 Yeah, I mean, classical racism has declined dramatically in the last hundred years.

01:36:19.000 I mean, until World War II, it was dominant and respectable.

01:36:22.000 I mean, it was taught at Harvard and all the Ivy League schools.

01:36:25.000 It was everyone talked about.

01:36:26.000 Well, how about interracial couples, like black and white couples?

01:36:30.000 And it was illegal, right.

01:36:31.000 It was illegal for them to get married until the 1960s.

01:36:33.000 So common.

01:36:33.000 Right.

01:36:33.000 And so that was all replaced after World War II, basically, in respectable discourse.

01:36:38.000 Not that racists went away, but in respectable discourse, you couldn't use the N-word anymore, right?

01:36:44.000 And what it was replaced by is what we call racial liberalism, which is this paternalist stuff we've been talking about that goes on in campuses, which was assimilationist as well.

01:36:54.000 The idea was we need to get these black people into our institutions to train them to become like us, right? 1.00

01:36:59.000 So Brown v. 0.71

01:36:59.000 Board of Education, 1954, the integration Supreme Court decision. 0.71

01:37:03.000 That was what was said in that decision.

01:37:05.000 We need to get black people into our schools so that we can make them into good citizens, good soldiers, and good workers.

01:37:12.000 Right? 0.98

01:37:13.000 So that's what these black kids in colleges are dealing with, right? 0.97

01:37:16.000 So they're not completely crazy. 0.97

01:37:18.000 They have real legitimate grievances.

01:37:19.000 They are there for two reasons.

01:37:22.000 One, to assimilate into the dominant culture, right?

01:37:25.000 To shed their own culture. 0.97

01:37:27.000 That's not so cool.

01:37:28.000 And two, and this has been said, this is very explicit, To enrich the experiences of the white students in colleges.

01:37:35.000 That's hilarious.

01:37:36.000 That's what diversity has been stated as its purpose.

01:37:38.000 So bringing in African students will enrich the American students from Nebraska.

01:37:43.000 That is the argument that has been made explicitly for decades.

01:37:47.000 Oh God.

01:37:47.000 That white kids benefit from being around other cultures, other peoples, other races.

01:37:52.000 How bizarre. 0.85

01:37:54.000 Oh yeah.

01:37:54.000 Well, but imagine being the one black kid in this class of 20 people or what, 30 people, right?

01:38:01.000 And knowing that you're there for that reason. 0.93

01:38:04.000 That would make me crazy.

01:38:05.000 It would make you pissed off.

01:38:07.000 Definitely.

01:38:08.000 Well, I think that's actually the source of a lot of the rage that's going on.

01:38:11.000 It gets expressed in all kinds of funky ways that I'm not a fan of, but I do think that's at the heart of a lot of it.

01:38:17.000 Oh, wow.

01:38:19.000 And that has to be acknowledged.

01:38:20.000 And a lot of the students do say this.

01:38:22.000 I mean, a lot of them, most of them, I think, are aware of that.

01:38:24.000 This tokenism that goes on, and assimilationism, and they know they're in that class for that reason. 0.86

01:38:30.000 It's kind of disgusting.

01:38:31.000 What are your feelings on transracial people? 0.95

01:38:34.000 Oh, like Rachel Dolezal. 1.00

01:38:36.000 And the guy who was, until recently, he was in Black Lives Matter and they found that he was white.

01:38:41.000 I don't believe that, actually.

01:38:42.000 I don't believe what? 0.89

01:38:43.000 I believe that his father was black.

01:38:44.000 But his mom and his dad are both white. 0.98

01:38:47.000 Well, the story is that his mom had an affair with a black man. 0.96

01:38:50.000 It's only his story. 0.94

01:38:51.000 And it's unsubstantiated.

01:38:52.000 I don't know.

01:38:53.000 He refuses to take DNA tests.

01:38:55.000 Well, but you agreed that race is... 1.00

01:38:57.000 He's white as fuck. 1.00

01:38:58.000 I don't think so. 1.00

01:38:58.000 Look at him. 1.00

01:38:59.000 I have many times.

01:39:00.000 It's a white guy.

01:39:01.000 I don't know.

01:39:02.000 Even he's got the little pencil-thin mustache in order to try to accentuate the possible African-American looks. 0.96

01:39:10.000 But you said there's only one human race.

01:39:12.000 There is.

01:39:12.000 It's all a construct.

01:39:14.000 Right, but he's appropriating African-American culture.

01:39:17.000 Oh.

01:39:17.000 That's what I think.

01:39:18.000 That's okay, too, right?

01:39:19.000 Well, there's been stories written about this, where they've gone pretty deep into this guy's past, and no one agrees.

01:39:26.000 Not only that, he wrote on, when he was a victim of a hate crime back in the day, he wrote his race as white.

01:39:33.000 Like, that's what he wrote on the police report.

01:39:34.000 Like, you're talking about a guy like there's...

01:39:36.000 I don't know.

01:39:37.000 Who knows?

01:39:37.000 I'm just guessing.

01:39:38.000 Yeah, we can't know.

01:39:40.000 And...

01:39:40.000 He looks white to me.

01:39:41.000 But let's say he is a Rachel Dolezal type.

01:39:43.000 Right.

01:39:43.000 Okay.

01:39:44.000 Pretty sure.

01:39:44.000 And if race is a social construct, then they're whatever they want to be.

01:39:48.000 Well, we're all Africans. 1.00

01:39:49.000 Even you, you pasty fuck. 1.00

01:39:51.000 I know. 1.00

01:39:51.000 Thank you. 1.00

01:39:53.000 We're all, are you Irish?

01:39:55.000 My pink self.

01:39:55.000 Yeah.

01:39:56.000 What is your Scottish?

01:39:58.000 A little Jewish, Russian, Welsh.

01:40:00.000 You're African. 1.00

01:40:01.000 Meanwhile, you're African. 1.00

01:40:02.000 I'm totally African, yeah.

01:40:03.000 Well, everybody is.

01:40:03.000 It's where the cradle of civilization is.

01:40:05.000 Right, so Sean King can be whatever he wants to be.

01:40:07.000 That's what I think.

01:40:08.000 That's what my argument was for Rachel Dolezal.

01:40:10.000 Me too.

01:40:11.000 She wants to spray tan herself and do herself up in a fro. 0.99

01:40:15.000 Wasn't it amazing how you had social justice warriors saying that she couldn't do that, but Caitlyn Jenner should be celebrated?

01:40:24.000 Yes, that's my point.

01:40:25.000 That was my point.

01:40:26.000 It's hilarious.

01:40:27.000 That was an amazing moment.

01:40:28.000 It's adorable.

01:40:29.000 That contradiction, yeah.

01:40:30.000 Why can't you decide that you more...

01:40:33.000 I don't want to properly identify with people that are African Americans. 1.00

01:40:37.000 But do you think people would get pissed if you appropriated the Polish culture? 0.99

01:40:41.000 Those people wouldn't give a fuck. 0.99

01:40:42.000 Yeah, my book is full of examples going back 250 years of whites appropriating, in a celebratory way, black culture, loving it, wanting to be black. 1.00

01:40:52.000 Many of them have claimed to be black.

01:40:55.000 A musician named Mez Mesrau in the 20th century who he said, he never said he was actually black, but he said, I'm renouncing my whiteness. 0.95

01:41:03.000 I'm going to be with black people. 0.97

01:41:04.000 He married a black woman. 0.99

01:41:05.000 He hung out with black people all the time. 1.00

01:41:07.000 Damn. 1.00

01:41:07.000 He said he didn't want to be white. 1.00

01:41:09.000 He only wanted to be black. 0.99

01:41:10.000 Good for him. 0.95

01:41:10.000 Fine. 0.95

01:41:11.000 Why not? 1.00

01:41:11.000 Who does a fuck? 1.00

01:41:12.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

01:41:13.000 More fun.

01:41:13.000 I just think that when you make stories up about your past and we find out that's not true, you've created some sort of a fantasy narrative.

01:41:24.000 Yeah.

01:41:25.000 Yeah, that's not what Ms. Mesra was doing. 1.00

01:41:27.000 He was always up front about everything.

01:41:28.000 He was like a Jewish guy, I think.

01:41:30.000 And he said, no, I'm just not going to be Jewish anymore.

01:41:32.000 I was Jewish.

01:41:33.000 I'm not anymore.

01:41:34.000 Interesting.

01:41:35.000 Yeah, but Jewish is not really a religion.

01:41:39.000 Well, again... 0.71

01:41:40.000 Jewish is a weird one, though, right? 1.00

01:41:41.000 Who are you asking?

01:41:42.000 I mean, right, of course, it's been defined in many ways.

01:41:44.000 It's kind of a race and a religion in a lot of ways.

01:41:46.000 Right.

01:41:46.000 I think we talked about this last time.

01:41:48.000 So the Jews, until World War II, were considered to be a separate race, very much so. 0.99

01:41:53.000 And there was a debate about whether they were black.

01:41:55.000 Many scholars thought they were black.

01:41:57.000 Wow. 0.68

01:41:58.000 Or whether they were sort of an ape, sort of missing link kind of species.

01:42:01.000 Ah, missing link.

01:42:02.000 Or they were just something else entirely.

01:42:04.000 Yeah, but they were definitely not whites. 0.54

01:42:06.000 What's amazing about Jewish people is how many European Jews have won Nobel Prizes.

01:42:11.000 How many European Jews are brilliant scientists and mathematicians.

01:42:16.000 That's incredible.

01:42:17.000 What an amazing gene pool, the European Jews.

01:42:21.000 Yeah, I mean, it's always been an intellectual culture, right?

01:42:23.000 You know, the rabbis and, you know, studying the texts and the Talmud.

01:42:27.000 I mean, it's always been a heady intellectual culture.

01:42:29.000 And I think that's where it comes from.

01:42:31.000 Most likely, right?

01:42:32.000 Yeah, and I think that's why they're also overrepresented in politics, in particular radical politics.

01:42:38.000 If you look at socialism and communism and anarchism, it's just, you know, huge percentages of Jews participating.

01:42:44.000 And I think it's because they're essentially intellectual movements.

01:42:48.000 Right.

01:42:49.000 So, yeah, no, it's an amazing...

01:42:51.000 And stand-up comedy.

01:42:53.000 Oh, yeah, right.

01:42:54.000 Huge representation of stand-up comedy.

01:42:56.000 That's right.

01:42:57.000 From the beginning.

01:42:58.000 Yeah.

01:42:58.000 That's right.

01:42:59.000 I mean, wasn't Lenny Bruce Jewish?

01:43:01.000 Very, very Jewish. 0.98

01:43:02.000 The greatest of the greats.

01:43:03.000 I mean, he was, without him, there would be no modern stand-up comedy, or it would have taken a lot longer to develop.

01:43:07.000 It's all blacks and Jews. 1.00

01:43:09.000 Yeah.

01:43:09.000 Right?

01:43:09.000 Stand-up comedy, yeah.

01:43:11.000 Woody Allen.

01:43:11.000 Mm-hmm.

01:43:12.000 Yeah.

01:43:12.000 Mort Sahl.

01:43:13.000 Sure.

01:43:14.000 Goes on and on, especially that early golden era.

01:43:17.000 Mm-hmm.

01:43:17.000 You know, that generation was, Jews dominated, for sure.

01:43:22.000 Yeah, it's interesting how many of them were involved in nightclub performing.

01:43:26.000 Right.

01:43:26.000 You know?

01:43:27.000 Isn't it amazing that stand-up comedy is nowhere else, really, in the world?

01:43:32.000 Oh, it is now.

01:43:33.000 Well, but the U.S. just dominates.

01:43:35.000 I mean, most stand-up comedy, right, is in the United States.

01:43:38.000 Well, I wouldn't say that anymore.

01:43:39.000 Is there a vibrant stand-up culture elsewhere?

01:43:42.000 I was in Melbourne, Australia, and they had a vibrant culture.

01:43:45.000 A lot of local comics.

01:43:47.000 Well, yeah, I think he's from Sydney.

01:43:49.000 But he might be from Melbourne.

01:43:52.000 But outside of English-speaking countries?

01:43:54.000 Is there much of one?

01:43:55.000 There is.

01:43:56.000 It's just not as big.

01:43:57.000 Yeah.

01:43:58.000 Well, America's where it started. 0.64

01:43:59.000 That's hard to explain.

01:44:00.000 Yeah.

01:44:01.000 I don't know why that is. 0.93

01:44:02.000 Because we got the fuck away from everybody else. 1.00

01:44:04.000 And once we got the fuck away from everybody else, we started talking shit. 1.00

01:44:06.000 And once we started talking shit, well, they believe that the first modern stand-up comedian was actually Mark Twain. 1.00

01:44:12.000 Right. 0.99

01:44:12.000 That Mark Twain used to give these readings, and in these readings, they would be very humorous, and he would essentially be doing a monologue, and it was like a stand-up monologue. 0.99

01:44:22.000 And Mark Twain has some still brilliant, insightful, and resonating quotes that he wrote hundreds of years ago, right?

01:44:30.000 What year was Twain?

01:44:32.000 Late 19th century, yeah.

01:44:33.000 Or a hundred, I should say.

01:44:35.000 A little more than a hundred, yeah.

01:44:36.000 Yeah, a hundred plus years ago.

01:44:38.000 But brilliant, brilliant stuff that he created back then.

01:44:42.000 And he would go on stage in front of these people and read these things and they would laugh.

01:44:46.000 And so he became like a humorous lecturer.

01:44:50.000 And that was sort of the beginning of stand-up comedy.

01:44:53.000 But not Jewish. 1.00

01:44:54.000 No.

01:44:55.000 Mark Twain.

01:44:55.000 Not at all.

01:44:56.000 No, not at all. 0.88

01:44:57.000 And not black. 0.98

01:44:57.000 Oh, although he was certainly influenced by... 0.98

01:45:00.000 Oh, yeah.

01:45:00.000 I mean, I think some other people have said that the first stand-ups were ex-slaves.

01:45:04.000 Hmm.

01:45:05.000 I don't know.

01:45:06.000 And vaudeville.

01:45:08.000 It's hard to probably...

01:45:09.000 Because vaudeville is happening when Mark Twain's going on, and there's lots of comedy going on in vaudeville, and that was Jewish and black. 1.00

01:45:14.000 I wonder what kind of speeches they would do or what kind of jokes they would tell or if they would do it.

01:45:20.000 I think a lot of it was the emcees.

01:45:22.000 That's one of the things that Lenny Bruce used to do early in the day.

01:45:25.000 He was sort of an emcee for other acts.

01:45:29.000 You would tell a few jokes and then bring up a band and then tell a few jokes and bring up a dancer.

01:45:34.000 They had these variety shows.

01:45:36.000 Variety shows were a big deal back then and the MC would often be a stand-up comedian and you'd be armed with jokes and it was like the Catskills era was one of the weird things is that they had sort of street jokes and like you would have jokes and I would you know use kind of the same jokes that you would do so you would be in one place and I would be in another place and we might be doing the same jokes you know and then Lenny Bruce was like the guy that started talking about life Whereas instead of having these jokes,

01:46:05.000 he was trying to explain why some of the parts of our culture didn't make any sense, why some of the things that we do are preposterous, why there's these hypocritical aspects of our society that should be addressed, and maybe we could live in a better, more happy world if we kind of looked at these more clearly.

01:46:23.000 I think he was the first to do that.

01:46:25.000 So what we think of as stand-up comedy, It's so broad because there's like Stephen Wright stand-up comedy which is like joke joke joke you know non sequiturs not not connected and then there's George Carlin which is like he would create sort of a new monologue every year and then he would do that new hour on HBO throw it away and start all over again the next year Observational humor is what you're talking about,

01:46:49.000 right?

01:46:49.000 In some ways, but like Jerry Seinfeld's observational, but he doesn't have any like deep political insight or social insight or sexual insight, whereas Lenny Bruce would.

01:46:59.000 Yeah.

01:47:00.000 It's like he's more restricted in his...

01:47:02.000 Did you ever notice that he put a sock in the dryer, where'd that sock go?

01:47:06.000 It's gone. 1.00

01:47:07.000 Like that kind of shit. 1.00

01:47:08.000 Like that's observational. 0.99

01:47:10.000 Lenny Bruce wasn't the first political observational comedian, though.

01:47:14.000 I mean, Woody Allen was doing that stuff in the 50s.

01:47:17.000 He wasn't radical like Lenny Bruce.

01:47:18.000 Lenny Bruce was the first radical, popular, observational humorist, I think.

01:47:23.000 Well, they all credit him as being the originator.

01:47:25.000 I don't know if Woody Allen was before Lenny Bruce.

01:47:28.000 Woody Allen was definitely talking about politics in the 50s.

01:47:30.000 Yeah, I would like to see.

01:47:32.000 But he was talking about the presidential races.

01:47:33.000 He wasn't talking about daily life.

01:47:35.000 He wasn't talking about race the way that Lenny Bruce did.

01:47:38.000 Lenny was doing some stuff that wasn't even funny.

01:47:41.000 One of the things that he did was he was talking about how they lied when Jackie Onassis was jumping out of the limousine after JFK got shot, or Jackie Kennedy. 0.97

01:47:53.000 When and they were they were saying that she was trying to help him and that she was trying to go for help But she was hitting he was like she was saving her ass She was trying to get out of that fucking limousine because they shot the president in the head his head exploded and she jumped out of that limo and You're lying to people if you say any differently, 0.85

01:48:11.000 and it was like this weird moment When he was on stage, I've heard the recordings where he's explaining this. 0.99

01:48:16.000 Like, he's explaining, like, you're trying to sell a false narrative about an important historical event and it's going to fuck with people's heads. 0.97

01:48:24.000 Like, of course she's trying to get away. 0.99

01:48:26.000 She's trying to get away because they just shot and killed her husband.

01:48:29.000 You know, but that wasn't funny at all.

01:48:31.000 So there's, like, some stuff that he was doing that, like, he sort of, like, he had, like, crossed this boundary, this weird, strange divide into commentary that wasn't even necessarily funny.

01:48:42.000 Yeah, but he's flipping the script, though.

01:48:44.000 I mean, he's turning things upside down, even when he's not being funny.

01:48:47.000 Not necessarily.

01:48:48.000 Towards the end, all he was doing was reporting.

01:48:50.000 Towards the end, when he was going crazy, he would just go on stage with his court transcripts and just read from his court transcripts. 0.99

01:48:57.000 And people were like, what the fuck is this? 0.97

01:48:58.000 You can watch videos of it. 0.99

01:49:00.000 I've watched them.

01:49:01.000 They're so bizarre.

01:49:02.000 He's going over fine details of his court case.

01:49:09.000 Wasn't he the last comedian to be prosecuted for obscenity?

01:49:12.000 I think Carlin was.

01:49:13.000 I think Carlin was prosecuted after him.

01:49:15.000 Oh, yeah.

01:49:15.000 Really?

01:49:16.000 Carlin went to jail.

01:49:17.000 For obscenity?

01:49:18.000 Yeah, he was arrested.

01:49:19.000 Huh.

01:49:19.000 Yeah.

01:49:20.000 I don't know how much he went through the court system in regards to it, but I know for sure he was arrested for it.

01:49:27.000 Martyrs for our freedom.

01:49:28.000 Hmm.

01:49:30.000 Great, great heroes.

01:49:32.000 Yeah. 0.96

01:49:32.000 Well, if it wasn't for those guys exposing how ridiculous... 0.96

01:49:36.000 I mean, our culture went through this radical shift, right? 0.84

01:49:39.000 From the 50s to the 60s, 60s to the 70s, and they tried to put a cork on it in the 70s.

01:49:44.000 And then the sweeping, psychedelic legislation that was passed in the 1970s, where they fucking made everything Schedule I, and they started locking down What you can and can't do.

01:49:57.000 There was some big, giant shifts. 0.95

01:50:00.000 If you look at the shift in our culture between 1950 and then 1980, I mean, what a crazy fucking 30 years. 0.97

01:50:07.000 Oh, yeah. 0.57

01:50:07.000 Whereas opposed to you look at, like, 1980 to today, not nearly as... 0.57

01:50:13.000 85 to 2015, what you get is more information. 0.90

01:50:18.000 You know, you get the clothes don't look as stupid, but, you know, no one's wearing Z Cavaricis and...

01:50:23.000 I don't know about that. 0.95

01:50:24.000 I mean, I think there's been many revolutions in terms of the culture, in terms of freedom of speech.

01:50:30.000 I think we're saying things we didn't say five years ago.

01:50:32.000 A hundred percent.

01:50:34.000 A hundred percent.

01:50:35.000 You know, one of the big heroes in this, he never gets talked about in this way, is Larry Flint.

01:50:39.000 He waged many successful court cases on obscenity issues, and he went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he won many of them.

01:50:49.000 And he really opened up a lot of space.

01:50:52.000 For speech in the media in the 70s 80s and 90s.

01:50:55.000 That's a very interesting point is no one would even if they did believe that was true They would leave that out because he's a pornographer, right?

01:51:03.000 Oh, yeah.

01:51:04.000 Yeah, not funny.

01:51:05.000 Yeah, he wanted me to write the foreword to his book.

01:51:08.000 Did you say no?

01:51:09.000 I did Not because of who he was, but because the book was not a good book, and I didn't have my name associated with it.

01:51:15.000 It just was not a well-done book.

01:51:16.000 What was the book about?

01:51:17.000 But I had lunch with him.

01:51:18.000 It was a fascinating experience.

01:51:21.000 It's a book about the sex scandals of presidents.

01:51:25.000 It's not interesting.

01:51:27.000 It's stuff that's just not very important.

01:51:29.000 Sex scandals of presidents?

01:51:31.000 Yeah, like sexual secrets of the presidents. 1.00

01:51:34.000 Wasn't Nixon supposed to be gay? 1.00

01:51:35.000 Eh, they were all supposed to be gay. 0.99

01:51:36.000 Really? 0.99

01:51:37.000 Eh, a lot of them.

01:51:38.000 I mean, that's a lot of...

01:51:39.000 But Nixon had like a little dog and a boyfriend.

01:51:41.000 They traveled everywhere.

01:51:42.000 I've never heard of that.

01:51:42.000 Nixon being gay?

01:51:43.000 Yeah, never heard of that?

01:51:44.000 Yeah, somebody wrote a book about it recently.

01:51:46.000 Nixon was definitely crazy, but he wasn't...

01:51:49.000 What? 0.95

01:51:49.000 Yeah, no. 0.95

01:51:50.000 He was an unusual man, that's for sure.

01:51:53.000 Yeah, he was definitely unusual.

01:51:55.000 He was a fascinating, strange character.

01:51:57.000 Fascinating, bizarre man.

01:51:58.000 Yeah.

01:51:58.000 Did you ever see Hunter S. Thompson's interview where he talked about sharing a limousine ride with Nixon?

01:52:05.000 Because Nixon wanted to talk to him about football.

01:52:07.000 Because he knew that Hunter was a football fanatic.

01:52:10.000 So he said, no talk about politics at all.

01:52:13.000 Deal?

01:52:13.000 And they said, okay.

01:52:14.000 And they got in and they just talked about football.

01:52:16.000 And Nixon apparently knew about first, second round draft picks and guys from obscure colleges.

01:52:21.000 And Nixon was a football fanatic.

01:52:23.000 And Hunter and Nixon just shared this conversation.

01:52:25.000 Limousine ride to the airport and just talk nothing about nothing but football.

01:52:31.000 Then he definitely wasn't gay.

01:52:32.000 I don't know.

01:52:34.000 There's a lot of gay people that like football.

01:52:36.000 But this was when Hunter was doing Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail.

01:52:40.000 And so I don't think they understood quite the extent of how deranged Hunter was. 0.99

01:52:47.000 They took a chance with him in the fucking limousine with the president. 0.99

01:52:53.000 Only in the 70s, right? 1.00

01:52:55.000 Would that happen?

01:52:55.000 Yeah.

01:52:56.000 That's a total 70s story.

01:52:58.000 Yeah.

01:52:58.000 Well, especially a president like Nixon.

01:53:01.000 He was one of the oddest presidents ever.

01:53:05.000 It's hard to think of another man even remotely like him.

01:53:09.000 Well, I'm just thinking about establishment figures mixing with countercultural people.

01:53:13.000 You would never see that now.

01:53:15.000 I don't think they kind of knew totally how counterculture Hunter was.

01:53:19.000 It's one of the things in the Gonzo, Fear and Loathing, the Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, the documentary sort of talked about how when he decided to write that book, And he went to the campaign trail.

01:53:34.000 He was on it for a year.

01:53:36.000 And nobody knew who he was.

01:53:37.000 Whereas all the politicians, they all knew the other writers from all these other places.

01:53:43.000 And Hunter would show up and all these people wanted to take photos with him.

01:53:46.000 And they were like, who is this guy?

01:53:47.000 Is he an astronaut or something? 0.99

01:53:48.000 Nobody knew who the fuck he was. 0.99

01:53:51.000 Because he had already written Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels, two hugely popular books. 0.99

01:53:56.000 But these people had no idea.

01:53:58.000 They just were so outside of that cultural loop.

01:54:01.000 They kind of let this guy in and didn't know who he was until it was almost too late.

01:54:05.000 Right. 0.99

01:54:05.000 But can you imagine the Obama administration not vetting the shit out of someone like that? 0.99

01:54:09.000 Oh, no. 0.99

01:54:09.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:54:10.000 No, I couldn't imagine.

01:54:11.000 I mean, well, you know, so what he did was he found Marc Maron.

01:54:18.000 Yes.

01:54:19.000 And went on that podcast.

01:54:21.000 I tweeted at Marc Maron.

01:54:22.000 I said, what would George Carlin say about a stand-up comedian giving a platform, an uncritical platform, to a politician or head of state?

01:54:32.000 And he blocked me.

01:54:33.000 He blocked you?

01:54:34.000 Because of that. 1.00

01:54:35.000 What a pussy. 1.00

01:54:36.000 But I really... 1.00

01:54:37.000 He blocked you for that question?

01:54:39.000 He did.

01:54:39.000 Wow.

01:54:40.000 That is insane.

01:54:41.000 It's fine.

01:54:42.000 I mean, I just...

01:54:42.000 No, that's not fine.

01:54:43.000 I would like for him to...

01:54:44.000 That's just a question.

01:54:44.000 I'd like for him to answer the question because it really bothered me.

01:54:47.000 What bothered you about it?

01:54:48.000 That he did that, that he gave this platform.

01:54:50.000 Now, if he had brought him on and asked him hard questions, fine.

01:54:53.000 Right.

01:54:53.000 But he didn't.

01:54:53.000 It was clearly, you know, Obama, the Obama administration found Marin, knew that he would be safe, and they were right.

01:55:01.000 And Marin delivered for them. 0.78

01:55:03.000 He just gave him softball questions and didn't challenge him one bit.

01:55:06.000 And basically, Obama, I don't know if you listened to it, but just basically gave like an hour-long speech.

01:55:10.000 That's all it was.

01:55:11.000 And Marin kind of celebrated him and cheered him on.

01:55:14.000 And I thought, this is a countercultural, in quotes, comedian, right, doing this.

01:55:21.000 That's what countercultural comedians do?

01:55:22.000 I thought that they challenged power.

01:55:24.000 They asked questions of power.

01:55:26.000 They made power absurd, like Lenny Bruce did, like George Carlin did.

01:55:29.000 This is like the opposite to me of what stand-up comedians should do.

01:55:32.000 I don't necessarily think I would categorize Mark as countercultural.

01:55:36.000 Well, no, but I think he's thought of that way.

01:55:38.000 I don't think he is at all.

01:55:39.000 I think he's absolutely establishment and conservative in that way.

01:55:42.000 But I think he's considered to be by many to be sort of countercultural.

01:55:46.000 I always thought of him as like a guy who looks at himself and kind of mocks himself and mocks, but he's not like...

01:55:54.000 Doug Stanhope would be much more counterculture, but also degenerate drunk and the last person that Obama would sit down with.

01:56:03.000 If I had him on, I would have to ask him questions about drones.

01:56:06.000 I'd ask him, what does it feel like to...

01:56:09.000 Me too.

01:56:09.000 To be a part of a program that has 80 plus percent, depending on who you ask, innocent casualty rates.

01:56:18.000 Like, what is it like to make these decisions knowing that people are going to die?

01:56:22.000 What is it like when you see someone like Edward Snowden come out against the NSA's Spying platform and then you realize that on your own campaign when the hope and change website You had all these provisions in there to protect and and help whistleblowers Whistleblowers who are exposing actual laws that are being broken like what is?

01:56:45.000 How did you make this change like what is your thought process behind that look?

01:56:49.000 What do you think about a guy like Julian Assange?

01:56:51.000 What do you think about someone like Chelsea Manning? 1.00

01:56:53.000 What do you think about someone who delivers?

01:56:55.000 Information to a news source, and that news source exposes things that are absolutely crimes that the United States public hates, that people don't ever want to think of when they think of the American people, when they think of this good, just leader of democracy in the world.

01:57:12.000 You don't want to think about those things.

01:57:14.000 And this is why Obama will never be in this chair that I'm sitting in right now.

01:57:17.000 He might.

01:57:18.000 He might take a chance.

01:57:19.000 You never know.

01:57:19.000 You just disqualified yourself.

01:57:21.000 I don't know about that because I think those are questions that he probably has answers to.

01:57:24.000 I don't think that he doesn't have answers to those questions.

01:57:26.000 I think those are very, very complicated subjects.

01:57:29.000 They do not want him being challenged in a freewheeling way for three hours.

01:57:33.000 No way.

01:57:33.000 That's why they chose Maren.

01:57:34.000 Well, also, Maren's not live.

01:57:37.000 He's not live, but he also worked for Air America, and they knew what his politics were.

01:57:40.000 They knew he wasn't going to challenge him.

01:57:42.000 He's super liberal.

01:57:42.000 In the way that you would, yeah.

01:57:43.000 And he's sort of party-line liberal, right?

01:57:46.000 Yeah, I guess, yeah.

01:57:47.000 I just thought, you know, stand-up comedians should never be giving a platform to a politician.

01:57:52.000 Hmm.

01:57:53.000 I'd like to talk to Bernie Sanders.

01:57:54.000 Jimmy Kimmel did that too, had Obama on, basically made him just look cool and hip.

01:57:58.000 It just really pisses me off.

01:58:01.000 Does that piss you off more or less than when Jimmy cried for the lion?

01:58:06.000 Oh.

01:58:06.000 I didn't know he cried.

01:58:08.000 He was very upset that the dentist who he named on his television show who legally killed that lion.

01:58:14.000 By the way, they just made lions, they put them under some endangered species protection.

01:58:19.000 So now nobody has to worry about that anymore.

01:58:21.000 I don't think you're allowed to be an American. 1.00

01:58:23.000 I don't think you're allowed to go over to Africa and kill lions anymore, as far as I know.

01:58:27.000 I think that's the recent provision.

01:58:29.000 Americans aren't allowed to kill lions? 0.94

01:58:31.000 I'm pretty sure. 0.90

01:58:33.000 But Africans can? 1.00

01:58:34.000 Well, you certainly can.

01:58:36.000 Well, not just Africans, but people from other countries.

01:58:39.000 That's interesting.

01:58:40.000 I don't know how the law works, but there's a...

01:58:42.000 Look, I don't think...

01:58:45.000 I don't think...

01:58:51.000 I think certainly that there are animals in this world that are beautiful and should be protected.

01:58:57.000 And I don't think you should really kill things that you're not going to eat.

01:59:00.000 And I don't necessarily understand why anybody would want to go to a place like Africa and kill a lion.

01:59:06.000 But it's incredibly complicated when you look at the reality of what These hunting camps are in Africa because they have taken these animals that were on the brink of extinction and they've made them plentiful.

01:59:18.000 And the way they've done that is by fencing in these enormous, like, you know, 100,000, 200,000 acre areas and turn them into these hunting preserves.

01:59:28.000 And they've bred these animals in there. 0.99

01:59:30.000 It's kind of fucked up. 0.99

01:59:31.000 It's canned hunting. 0.99

01:59:32.000 And they have areas where these lions are free-roaming, like in Zimbabwe, where this Cecil lion was killed, where there's part areas where they're preserved, where they're not allowed to hunt, and then areas where they are allowed to hunt.

01:59:45.000 And the money that goes to these hunts is what pays for conservation.

01:59:50.000 It's super conflicted.

01:59:53.000 What do hunters need?

01:59:54.000 They need animals.

01:59:55.000 They need to conserve animals.

01:59:56.000 They are naturally necessarily conservationists.

01:59:59.000 In that sense, yeah.

02:00:01.000 The Sierra Club and hundreds of organizations have worked together on many, many things for this reason.

02:00:05.000 But it just seems counterintuitive, productive.

02:00:08.000 It seems, to me, shooting something that you never planned on eating, unless it's a danger.

02:00:14.000 There's one thing they have to do.

02:00:15.000 They have to shoot a certain amount of coyotes.

02:00:17.000 If cattle ranchers have calves, they have to be very careful because the coyotes will literally pull the calves out of the females as they're giving birth and kill the calves.

02:00:27.000 They have to keep them away if they want to keep a healthy population of cows and sheep and a lot of other animals.

02:00:34.000 That makes sense to me.

02:00:35.000 You have to manage predator populations.

02:00:40.000 That's not what you're doing when you fly to Africa to go shoot a lion.

02:00:43.000 You just want to put a head on your wall.

02:00:45.000 There's something kind of creepy about that, and I think that's why people responded the way they did.

02:00:49.000 Yeah, I mean, I've never had a desire to hunt, but I can understand, I suppose, why someone would want to do that.

02:00:55.000 You know, it's a spectacular thing to see a lion's head on your wall, right?

02:00:59.000 And it's quite a trophy.

02:01:01.000 Yeah, I mean, I guess so.

02:01:02.000 I get it.

02:01:03.000 I guess so.

02:01:05.000 I... I could see that someone would want that or why someone would want that.

02:01:10.000 I just don't understand it.

02:01:11.000 I mean, I know you're into eating what you kill.

02:01:13.000 Yeah.

02:01:14.000 But you do understand why, I'm sure you understand why people get a charge out of shooting a giant deer or a large game animal.

02:01:22.000 Yeah, well you definitely get a charge out of it as well as get the food from it.

02:01:26.000 There's this gigantic experience that's attached to it.

02:01:32.000 But unless you wanted to eat a lion, apparently people eat mountain lion and it tastes good.

02:01:38.000 Oh yeah?

02:01:38.000 Yeah, mountain lion is supposed to be...

02:01:40.000 I know a guy and he hunts mountain lions all winter long in Colorado.

02:01:44.000 They do it all legally.

02:01:45.000 He's a guide and they love mountain lions.

02:01:48.000 I would think they'd be really muscular.

02:01:49.000 They are.

02:01:50.000 And not so good. 0.99

02:01:51.000 But so is a pig. 0.97

02:01:52.000 Pigs are really muscular too. 0.66

02:01:54.000 So is elk.

02:01:56.000 Elk is extremely muscular.

02:01:59.000 Deer are very muscular as well.

02:02:01.000 That's one of the reasons why they're so lean.

02:02:05.000 There's a lot of what they call...

02:02:08.000 There's certain animals that people...

02:02:13.000 We're good to go.

02:02:17.000 We're good to go.

02:02:32.000 Yeah, I was just thinking about the selective outrage about Cecil, right?

02:02:36.000 These lions get poached, killed all the time in Africa, don't they?

02:02:40.000 I mean, by Africans and others, right?

02:02:42.000 But when some privileged white dentist from Minnesota does it, then it's this international outrage.

02:02:48.000 Well, it's also because the lion was named, which was one of the more hilarious aspects of the story.

02:02:52.000 But didn't it turn out he wasn't Cecil?

02:02:53.000 No, it was Cecil.

02:02:54.000 His brother Jericho, they were worried, was killed too. 0.92

02:02:57.000 Because people had created this narrative that Jericho was now going to take care of Cecil's babies for him, which is so fucking hilarious. 0.76

02:03:02.000 Because first of all, if you don't know anything about lions and how a male becomes the head of a pride, they murder all the cubs. 0.84

02:03:10.000 That's a fact.

02:03:11.000 So if there are females and they're giving birth to another male's babies, that lion will come in and murder all those babies. 0.99

02:03:18.000 So Cecil was a baby murderer, 100%. 0.95

02:03:20.000 All of the heads of prides, those are all baby murders. 1.00

02:03:24.000 So if Jericho came along, not only would he not protect Cecil's babies, he would fucking kill them with his face. 0.99

02:03:30.000 Okay, so they were worried that Jericho had been killed too, and there was a story saying that they believed Jericho had been poached. 1.00

02:03:36.000 And then they said there was a relief because it turned out that the lion that was killed was not Jericho, but was some other no-name, bitch-ass lion that nobody cared about because nobody had made a noise that you associate with this fucking lion. 1.00

02:03:50.000 Can a lion be a bitch-ass? 1.00

02:03:51.000 Yes, 100%. 0.99

02:03:54.000 If he doesn't have a name.

02:03:55.000 I don't know.

02:03:56.000 Why aren't you Jericho?

02:03:57.000 You don't even have a name?

02:03:58.000 Jericho's got a name. 1.00

02:04:00.000 Bitch-ass lion. 0.99

02:04:01.000 Well, I don't even know how we got started on this, but the idea was, you know, hunting these things. 0.99

02:04:10.000 It was Jimmy Camel.

02:04:11.000 That's what it was.

02:04:12.000 Oh, he cried.

02:04:13.000 Jimmy Camel crying about it.

02:04:14.000 Yeah, he was upset.

02:04:14.000 That's just irritating.

02:04:15.000 I'm not outraged.

02:04:16.000 I'm outraged by stand-up comedians.

02:04:19.000 Who have some sort of veneer of countercultural, I don't know, rebel to them.

02:04:27.000 Giving a platform to a politician is just...

02:04:29.000 I didn't listen to the Obama interview.

02:04:31.000 It's boring.

02:04:32.000 It sounds like a press conference.

02:04:34.000 Or worse, it sounds like a speech.

02:04:36.000 Because there are no questions that are difficult for him.

02:04:39.000 I'm most offended that Marc Maron blocked you for asking a question like that.

02:04:42.000 Yeah, it was pretty weak.

02:04:44.000 It was pretty weak.

02:04:46.000 That's not even insulting.

02:04:47.000 Plus, he's my neighbor.

02:04:48.000 Is he really?

02:04:49.000 Yeah, we live in the same neighborhood.

02:04:50.000 I see him at Trader Joe's.

02:04:53.000 Does he know you?

02:04:54.000 No.

02:04:54.000 Well, I don't know.

02:04:55.000 He does now.

02:04:56.000 He better.

02:04:57.000 I guarantee you.

02:04:58.000 He's going to hear this and be upset.

02:05:02.000 I think for a guy like him, it's an opportunity to just sit down with someone who he thinks...

02:05:08.000 You know, because you follow his politics.

02:05:09.000 He's very left-wing.

02:05:10.000 He probably thinks he's a great president.

02:05:13.000 If you look at what Obama has done, if you look at the numbers, what he's done economically as far as job creation, as far as the rebound of the economy, I don't understand all that stuff.

02:05:23.000 But if you look at it, it all looks really positive.

02:05:25.000 If you look at the raw numbers, the raw data.

02:05:27.000 Yeah, but he had very little to do with that, with unemployment going down to 5%.

02:05:31.000 I mean, his policies or the Congress's policies had very little effect on that.

02:05:37.000 What do you think that- That was the economy churning itself.

02:05:40.000 So the economy rebounding like the- Yeah.

02:05:42.000 I mean, most economists I think would agree with that, that fiscal policies by the government had negligible effect on that.

02:05:50.000 Most economists believe that, really?

02:05:52.000 Yeah, they would too.

02:05:52.000 I think very few would give much of their credit to government policies.

02:05:59.000 What about the bailout?

02:06:00.000 Wouldn't that have some sort of a significant impact?

02:06:03.000 Yeah, I mean, it was a catastrophe.

02:06:05.000 I mean, it was, you know, trillions to Wall Street and GM, and what did we get for it?

02:06:10.000 I mean, the recovery didn't happen then.

02:06:12.000 It took many years after that.

02:06:14.000 Wasn't that the plan all along?

02:06:15.000 Was it going to be sort of a trickle down from the recovery?

02:06:20.000 Yeah, but would we have been better off if we'd let them fail?

02:06:23.000 Many of us think so.

02:06:25.000 That it delayed the recovery, right?

02:06:28.000 You bail out these failing institutions that clearly are not working.

02:06:31.000 What would you have asked the president?

02:06:33.000 You're going to get more failing procedures.

02:06:37.000 Well, when something becomes too big to fail, that is a weird statement.

02:06:41.000 What does that mean?

02:06:42.000 Yeah, let them fail.

02:06:44.000 Let the market work.

02:06:45.000 Yeah, but they're worried about all these people losing all their money ahead in the banks, just like the savings and loan crisis in the 80s.

02:06:51.000 But that's what happened anyway.

02:06:52.000 Yeah.

02:06:52.000 A lot of people certainly did, right?

02:06:54.000 Yeah.

02:06:54.000 What would you have asked the president if he was there with you?

02:06:56.000 Oh, my God.

02:06:57.000 I mean, all the things you asked him.

02:06:58.000 Those were great questions.

02:06:59.000 But, yeah, you know, I don't expect, you know, Marc Maron to be a policy wonk in a situation like that.

02:07:06.000 But, like, you could ask him things like...

02:07:08.000 How do you feel when you pull the trigger in a drone in Yemen that ends up killing a 16-year-old?

02:07:15.000 How does that feel?

02:07:16.000 How do you reconcile...

02:07:19.000 Your past experience as a student activist at Occidental College, by the way, with now being the head of the biggest killing machine in world history. 0.95

02:07:30.000 How do you reconcile your feelings as Barry Obama, who was protesting against apartheid in South Africa, with being the president who murders brown people in Africa? 0.93

02:07:45.000 Right? 0.97

02:07:45.000 I mean, that's what he's doing. 0.97

02:07:46.000 So I want to know sort of personally...

02:07:49.000 What in Africa, and what are you referring to?

02:07:52.000 Well, there are troops on the ground in Africa doing, you know, murdering people, and there's drones in North Africa murdering people in the Middle East, right?

02:08:02.000 So that's what he's doing. 0.98

02:08:03.000 These are all brown people he's killing. 1.00

02:08:07.000 You know, how do you feel about that, Barak? 0.95

02:08:09.000 Wouldn't you want to know, also, I would want to know, what is it like inside?

02:08:16.000 What's the mechanism?

02:08:17.000 What's it like once you get into office?

02:08:20.000 How different is it than what you thought it was when you were running?

02:08:24.000 Yes, I would love to get into that.

02:08:26.000 One of the main claims that's made about him is that he's actually a peacenik who's forced to do these things by the military industrial establishment, right?

02:08:33.000 Is that true?

02:08:34.000 I would ask him.

02:08:35.000 Do you have any agency as president?

02:08:37.000 Or are you forced to make these decisions by other people?

02:08:40.000 Right.

02:08:40.000 How do the decisions get made?

02:08:42.000 When a drone strike is made, is it really you and your advisors making that decision, or are you forced to by this thing called a military-industrial complex?

02:08:50.000 Is this true, what we've been told?

02:08:52.000 That the president actually has no power over foreign policy?

02:08:56.000 I mean, I don't think that's true, but I'd like to hear him say that.

02:08:59.000 And if it is true that he has no power, then what's the point?

02:09:02.000 Of having a president, of getting excited about the first black president, about getting excited about any president.

02:09:08.000 If Bernie Sanders gets into office, will he be doing the same thing then?

02:09:12.000 That would be hilarious. 0.85

02:09:13.000 Wouldn't it be amazing if Bernie Sanders got into office and just started fucking full-scale drone attacks and cutting down on whistleblowers and ramped up the NSA spying program? 0.95

02:09:23.000 He probably would. 0.92

02:09:24.000 Do you think so?

02:09:25.000 Because what did Obama run on?

02:09:26.000 He ran on, I'm going to end the war in Iraq, and I'm going to...

02:09:33.000 Be good for civil liberties and, right, I'm gonna roll back all the policies of the Bush administration.

02:09:39.000 Closed down Guantanamo Bay.

02:09:40.000 Closed down Guantanamo and what did he do?

02:09:41.000 He actually ramped up all those policies.

02:09:43.000 He extended Bush's policies.

02:09:45.000 Now, when you talk to someone like Sam Harris, what he believes is that Obama gets into office and is then presented with the reality of the ongoing situation in the Middle East with Islamic terrorism, with radical fundamentalists and all across the globe that mean to do America harm. 0.98

02:10:02.000 And he's presented with this overwhelming evidence that the world is way more fucked than we're being led to believe. 0.99

02:10:07.000 Mm-hmm. 0.99

02:10:08.000 Yeah, well, that's Sam Harris's take.

02:10:09.000 I mean, Sam Harris thinks the world is far more dangerous than I do.

02:10:12.000 I mean, he thinks that Islam is inherently violent, that jihad is a necessary outgrowth of Islam, that if we don't take action, lethal action against them, that they will come and kill us.

02:10:25.000 I don't buy that.

02:10:26.000 I know that that's his analysis.

02:10:28.000 I don't think he necessarily thinks you have to take legal action against him.

02:10:31.000 I think he...

02:10:31.000 Lethal.

02:10:32.000 Lethal action.

02:10:32.000 Lethal.

02:10:32.000 I said legal.

02:10:34.000 Lethal action against him.

02:10:35.000 I think he believes that there is a fundamental flaw in the ideology that wants all people who leave the religion killed and that a religion that believes...

02:10:47.000 Well, a religion was founded by a warlord.

02:10:49.000 It's a different style of religion than, say, like Jesus, who is a peacenik.

02:10:55.000 I don't think he necessarily thinks that we need to take lethal action against them.

02:10:59.000 I think that he is more concerned about what they are capable of doing than the average person.

02:11:06.000 So there's no doubt that there are Muslims who do believe that stuff, right?

02:11:10.000 Right.

02:11:10.000 The question is, why are they targeting the French and the United States specifically, right?

02:11:17.000 And I think that is because, not because of their I think it's largely because France and the United States has intervened in the Middle East against Arabs and in France against their own Arab and Muslim people in discriminatory,

02:11:33.000 lethal, murderous ways for decades.

02:11:37.000 I think it is blowback.

02:11:39.000 I think that explains why they attacked us specifically.

02:11:43.000 It doesn't explain, obviously, everything those Muslims do in the Middle East.

02:11:47.000 It doesn't explain why they insist on women wearing burqas. 0.99

02:11:50.000 It doesn't explain why they shoot gay people. 0.95

02:11:53.000 It doesn't explain why they attack other Muslims. 0.87

02:11:56.000 But I think it does explain, blowback, I think does explain why they're interested in attacking us.

02:12:00.000 And that's what needs to be addressed in my view, right?

02:12:04.000 Stop giving them a reason to hate us.

02:12:06.000 Take that away. 0.98

02:12:08.000 If they continue to fly planes into our buildings after we've withdrawn from the Middle East, then we can talk about their religion and we can talk about them as criminal psychopaths. 0.98

02:12:16.000 Fine.

02:12:17.000 But that's not the case yet.

02:12:18.000 Let's remove that reason for them attacking us.

02:12:21.000 Then we can see what happens.

02:12:24.000 Yeah, removing troops from the Middle East is a hot subject, and I would love to hear what the President would say about the consequences of doing that, the vacuum it created and what's going on right now with ISIS. This vacuum that has been created is now filled up with the most dangerous radical fundamentalist group in recent memory.

02:12:46.000 Yeah.

02:12:46.000 I mean, clearly, I mean, the big heavy weaponry that ISIS is using is all American made.

02:12:51.000 It's weapons that were left by the US military in that region, right? 0.98

02:12:54.000 How fucked is that? 0.98

02:12:55.000 Right. 0.99

02:12:56.000 And what you were saying, like, they created this vacuum, this power vacuum in that area, right, in which these nut bags just easily and quickly filled.

02:13:04.000 Well, we're seeing that in Libya as well.

02:13:06.000 We're seeing that everywhere you get rid of a dictator.

02:13:07.000 Exactly.

02:13:08.000 You get rid of a dictator and then people line up to see who becomes the next dictator.

02:13:12.000 It's not just getting rid of the dictator.

02:13:13.000 It's getting rid of the government, the structure, right?

02:13:17.000 There was nothing to oppose them.

02:13:19.000 Now, I don't think ISIS is going to fall on its own accord.

02:13:22.000 I mean, I don't think these guys can manage a society.

02:13:24.000 You're seeing evidence of people sort of fleeing and leaving, not because they don't like the religion.

02:13:30.000 They just don't like all these rules that ISIS is imposing.

02:13:33.000 Mm-hmm.

02:13:33.000 It's Sharia law.

02:13:35.000 I can't imagine they could sustain a society for very long.

02:13:39.000 Well, it should also be pointed out that I think something around the neighborhood of 80 plus percent of the people that are fighting against ISIS are Muslims.

02:13:47.000 Of course.

02:13:47.000 Yeah.

02:13:48.000 And almost all of their victims are Muslim.

02:13:50.000 Yeah.

02:13:51.000 Right. 0.99

02:13:51.000 Yeah, so let them hang themselves is my position. 0.99

02:13:58.000 Pull out entirely.

02:13:59.000 President Thaddeus Russell has spoken.

02:14:02.000 There you go.

02:14:03.000 Are you ready?

02:14:03.000 Are you ready to run?

02:14:04.000 No, God no, are you kidding?

02:14:05.000 A couple years?

02:14:06.000 After you get the renegade history university up and running?

02:14:09.000 Be the renegade president, except that's kind of douchey I hear.

02:14:12.000 Renegade president, yeah.

02:14:13.000 Do you have any aspirations politically?

02:14:15.000 No, God no.

02:14:16.000 No?

02:14:16.000 But you think so much about it.

02:14:19.000 First of all, I think anyone is far more effective outside the establishment, right?

02:14:25.000 I think I can actually get more done and change minds and change the culture, which ultimately changes policies simply by talking, by doing this, right?

02:14:33.000 I think we all do that.

02:14:34.000 I think you have far more power than a congressman does.

02:14:38.000 No doubt about that.

02:14:39.000 How scary.

02:14:40.000 Oh, yeah.

02:14:41.000 I mean, honestly, I mean, I think that Take legalization of drugs, right?

02:14:47.000 How fast that's happening now.

02:14:50.000 I'm not going to give you all the credit for it, but clearly you had something to do with that.

02:14:53.000 I mean, you participated in this massive cultural shift, right?

02:14:57.000 I mean, there were many people doing it, but I would say that your voice was one of the loudest, and I'd give you quite a bit of credit for moving it as fast as it has moved. 0.92

02:15:04.000 That's ridiculous.

02:15:05.000 I don't know if that's true, but I don't know. 0.96

02:15:07.000 Well, I represent a very weird, I represent the jockish guy Who also is into psychedelic drugs.

02:15:15.000 I know.

02:15:15.000 I'm the bridge between the meatheads and the potheads.

02:15:19.000 In that sense.

02:15:20.000 So it's got a lot more people that go, oh, I didn't think about it that way.

02:15:26.000 People that wanted those two groups to be much more clearly defined, and I'm letting them know, it's not.

02:15:32.000 And there's a lot of benefits, especially martial arts.

02:15:36.000 One thing that I definitely have probably done is turned a lot of people that would have never been involved in martial arts onto martial arts. 0.98

02:15:49.000 I'm not here to kiss your ass, but I have seen evidence of your influence in the drug policy debate. 0.97

02:15:57.000 I've seen many people reference it. 0.99

02:15:59.000 I've seen you mentioned.

02:16:01.000 You're a prominent figure.

02:16:03.000 Being in favor of legalization, that alone changes people's minds.

02:16:08.000 It's like, oh, if he's for this, maybe it's not such a crazy idea, right?

02:16:12.000 I really do.

02:16:13.000 I mean, you're not the only one.

02:16:14.000 Of course, I think other celebrities have come out too, but you've been very consistent about it.

02:16:19.000 You've really pushed it.

02:16:20.000 And I think you've also activated your base.

02:16:22.000 Guys who were just into martial arts or into smoking pot became political about this issue, I think, in part because of you.

02:16:31.000 And I think my point is that Right.

02:16:44.000 Right.

02:16:53.000 Well, that's one of the things that concerns me the most about the trends that are going on in the schools today, because I think that if you really do want to change the culture, what you have to change is young people. 1.00

02:17:03.000 You have to open the eyes and the minds of young people to all the possibilities, and to the fact that what our culture really is is just this established pattern that we're all following that doesn't necessarily suit you, help you, or even make sense.

02:17:18.000 But it's got momentum behind it, and it's a habit.

02:17:22.000 The schools are a dead end.

02:17:23.000 I mean, people need to really, like, deal with this fact.

02:17:30.000 Most American children are trained in schools run by the government, okay?

02:17:37.000 What is the government going to train those kids to be?

02:17:40.000 Train them to be good American citizens.

02:17:43.000 What are they not going to introduce in those schools as ideas?

02:17:46.000 Anything that challenges the establishment.

02:17:48.000 Anything that challenges the status quo in any significant way, right?

02:17:54.000 There's a cognitive dissonance about this.

02:17:56.000 They don't ever sort of address that fact, which is just there.

02:18:00.000 These are government schools.

02:18:01.000 What is a government going to do in schools?

02:18:04.000 What are they going to train those kids to do and be and how to think?

02:18:07.000 But when you say that, who's responsible for the curriculum?

02:18:11.000 Sacramento in California, state capitol, legislators.

02:18:16.000 Politicians.

02:18:17.000 Democrats and Republicans.

02:18:18.000 But educators, right?

02:18:20.000 No.

02:18:21.000 When you get a job as a public school teacher, the curriculum is set for you.

02:18:24.000 And now, with the Common Core, it's set nationally.

02:18:27.000 It's a national curriculum.

02:18:30.000 No, you don't get a choice.

02:18:31.000 I mean, they sneak in certainly their ideas.

02:18:34.000 I have friends who are public high school teachers and they sneak in their ideas, of course, but they're not supposed to.

02:18:39.000 And the curriculum is handed to them.

02:18:41.000 You're given a textbook.

02:18:42.000 This is what you're going to teach.

02:18:43.000 These are your lesson plans.

02:18:45.000 These are the topics, right?

02:18:47.000 You're not going to be able to talk about Lenny Bruce.

02:18:50.000 But you should, right?

02:18:51.000 So you can't have a creative assignment for a class.

02:18:54.000 You can't come in and say, you know what, my job is to teach history, but I want to give these people a real perspective.

02:19:01.000 Only so much as you can do it on the down low.

02:19:04.000 Sure.

02:19:04.000 Teachers cheat, of course, but they're not supposed to.

02:19:07.000 And you can get fired for it from...

02:19:10.000 I think Lenny Bruce and the history of stand-up comedy should be a central part of any education.

02:19:16.000 I mean, I think that is one of the most important things in modern U.S. history.

02:19:20.000 No doubt about that.

02:19:22.000 Is it mentioned?

02:19:23.000 Never.

02:19:24.000 Never.

02:19:25.000 Certainly not in the official curriculum, because those guys said bad words and they said naughty things.

02:19:30.000 So the official curriculum, what is the goal behind it?

02:19:33.000 To be the most efficient at educating kids, or you think they're trying to program children?

02:19:38.000 So the American public school system was modeled after the Prussian system of the 19th century, and early American educators who founded this thing, public schools, Horace Mann and others, said explicitly, this should be a means to train children to be workers.

02:19:57.000 Jesus.

02:19:58.000 This was explicit at the time.

02:20:00.000 It was explicit.

02:20:01.000 That's disturbing.

02:20:02.000 So it's actually, if you look at the way schools are operated and the format of them, it's like a factory, right?

02:20:08.000 It's like an assembly line.

02:20:08.000 They go from this class to that class to that class.

02:20:11.000 They get trained in this and this and this.

02:20:14.000 And they leave the doors and they go work in a corporation.

02:20:20.000 That's what it's explicitly designed for, based on the Prussian system.

02:20:25.000 So, I mean, that's not explicit anymore because that would turn off a lot of people, but that's what's being done.

02:20:30.000 They're not training them.

02:20:32.000 Why would the government train them to be critical intellectuals?

02:20:36.000 Why would the government train them to think critically about everything?

02:20:40.000 No.

02:20:42.000 They can't.

02:20:43.000 The government can't.

02:20:44.000 The government has to have citizens who are law-abiding and who don't question the fundamentals of the society.

02:20:52.000 So do you specifically believe that they set the students up and they set the classes up in that manner, or do you think they do it because they feel like that's the most efficient way to produce the goals that they want to achieve, which is higher GPA, higher SAT scores?

02:21:09.000 And we have to compete with China and India.

02:21:11.000 Yeah.

02:21:12.000 So it's all internalized.

02:21:13.000 I don't think anybody in these schools is thinking what I just said.

02:21:16.000 You're not thinking that it's some grand conspiracy.

02:21:17.000 It's just all internalized.

02:21:18.000 It's just like, well, of course they've got to be good in math and engineering because that's how you get a good job and that's how you're a good American.

02:21:25.000 You can talk about Rosa Parks now, because she's now safe, because we now live in an integrated society, right?

02:21:32.000 But 60 years ago, you didn't talk about her.

02:21:34.000 She was dangerous, right?

02:21:35.000 That had to be sort of inserted.

02:21:39.000 But now it doesn't challenge the status quo.

02:21:41.000 It doesn't challenge sort of fundamental ideas of the society.

02:21:44.000 Do you think they really debate democracy in public schools?

02:21:48.000 No.

02:21:49.000 I think?

02:22:09.000 When you talk about the government itself, isn't the idea of a representative government kind of an archaic thing in terms of it was all created back when communication was incredibly difficult?

02:22:19.000 When you wanted a state representative, one of the reasons for it is because no one could get a hold of everyone in the state.

02:22:28.000 You couldn't all get together and speak your mind about something, but now, Because of social media and the internet as we know it now, forget about what the internet is going to be like 10-15 years from now, which is going to be even more intense, but you could express yourself in a way now that just wasn't available before.

02:22:45.000 You don't necessarily need a representative government. 0.96

02:22:48.000 And the reason why they have to go to these fucking places like Iowa and campaign there, and it's a big part of the campaign trail, is just because of this weird fucking setup that they have. 0.97

02:23:00.000 Yeah, well, the electoral college system, the primaries, the two-party duopoly. 0.99

02:23:04.000 Oh, yeah, it's a mess. 0.97

02:23:05.000 It's disgusting.

02:23:05.000 It's basically a monopoly, right?

02:23:07.000 Because the two parties differ only slightly.

02:23:10.000 Very.

02:23:10.000 Yeah.

02:23:10.000 Just tiny amounts.

02:23:12.000 The most exciting thing that happened in 2008 was not Barack Obama to me.

02:23:15.000 It was Ron Paul and Ralph Nader joined forces with some other third-party candidates to break down the rules that bar third-party candidates, make it much more difficult for third-party candidates to have a viable, I haven't seen that renewed really in any serious way since then.

02:23:36.000 But that's what has to happen.

02:23:37.000 We don't have real choice.

02:23:38.000 You have to have real choice.

02:23:39.000 In Europe, they have real choice.

02:23:40.000 They have parliamentary democracy where there are many, many parties and all sorts of parties are represented in the legislatures.

02:23:47.000 You don't have that here.

02:23:49.000 And I think that's why we have such low voter turnout.

02:23:52.000 If there was actual choice, if you could actually see yourself represented among the politicians running, I think many more people would vote.

02:24:00.000 Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of futility that people feel when they look at the two-party system and then they see where a guy like Barack Obama arguably at least returns to military policy as conservative as GW. Foreign policy.

02:24:16.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:24:40.000 They invented that fucking thing in the 1960s. 1.00

02:24:43.000 It was their idea. 1.00

02:24:44.000 Irving Kristol came up with this idea.

02:24:46.000 He said, we need to have a common core to make all Americans similar culturally.

02:24:50.000 That became No Child Left Behind under the Bush administration in the 2000s.

02:24:56.000 And then what did Obama do?

02:24:57.000 He just ramped it up.

02:24:58.000 He called it Race to the Top now, gave it more funding.

02:25:10.000 It's a catastrophe.

02:25:12.000 I mean, the idea that a kid in Key West, Florida should have the same education as my son in Los Angeles, or a kid in Mississippi, right?

02:25:23.000 Why?

02:25:25.000 Why shouldn't the parents in those areas have some say over how their children are taught?

02:25:30.000 Shouldn't there be some diversity of ideas and cultures in the schools?

02:25:34.000 Do we all need to have the same common culture?

02:25:38.000 I don't think so.

02:25:39.000 Well, there's also an issue, and a huge one, in the way that teachers are financially Compensated for work.

02:25:50.000 The amount of money that teachers make is so small.

02:25:54.000 And the way we look at teachers, we don't look at teachers like, if you thought about someone who is educating your child about the ways of the world, influencing them, we all have ideas in our head about really positive and really negative teacher experiences that we had as a child.

02:26:13.000 You know, I have a few really positive ones that to this day, I think back about this guy like, I had a science teacher in seventh grade that, for the first time ever, introduced in my mind the idea of infinity.

02:26:26.000 And I had never considered it before.

02:26:28.000 He was a really unique guy.

02:26:29.000 He would grow his own vegetables and bring them in and talk In these really passionate ways about what it's like to grow the food that you actually eat.

02:26:39.000 And this is, you know, I was, you know, I was 12 or something.

02:26:43.000 What are you in seventh grade?

02:26:45.000 I was a little kid. 1.00

02:26:46.000 And I was like, what the fuck is this guy going on about? 0.99

02:26:48.000 He was talking about... 0.99

02:26:51.000 What it's like to have food, to understand the actual process of a seed becoming your food, and then to eat it and bring it into lunch.

02:27:00.000 And he was talking about these radishes that he had grown in his garden that he's eating right now.

02:27:06.000 And then he was trying to explain to us that everything in the entire world, including human beings, is essentially made out of materials that came from a star that exploded.

02:27:18.000 And then we're like, what?

02:27:19.000 And then he was trying to explain that our star is going to explode.

02:27:24.000 That there's only a certain amount of time in every star.

02:27:27.000 And the sun that we, you know, our star, what we call our sun, only has a certain amount of time.

02:27:33.000 And I remember this guy saying this to me, and there are an infinite number of stars in the galaxy.

02:27:39.000 As far as we know, the universe has no end.

02:27:44.000 It goes on and on.

02:27:45.000 So just stop and think about that.

02:27:47.000 How much time it would take light, just light, to get to the nearest solar system outside of ours, and then think about that in terms of how big the galaxy is, with hundreds of billions of stars, each one with their own little planets, And then hundreds of billions of galaxies and I remember leaving that class just mind fucked at 12 or 13 years old and it stuck like it stuck with me like for years for decades that one teacher but that wasn't that was him it

02:28:17.000 was his ideas this wasn't this isn't a part of some state sponsored curriculum that he had to follow no and it was public school right yeah yeah yeah so he's the exception right yeah yeah and there's no reason he should exist in that system right The system has no reason to encourage creativity,

02:28:34.000 to encourage thinking outside one's world like that, right?

02:28:37.000 It must reinforce itself, reinvigorate itself, right?

02:28:42.000 The system must sustain itself and it does that by training.

02:28:46.000 New workers, new participants, new citizens, new soldiers.

02:28:49.000 But how do they look at it?

02:28:50.000 When they want to justify the core system, how do they promote it?

02:28:55.000 How do they describe it?

02:28:58.000 That it will cause the shitty schools in Mississippi to rise to the level of the good schools in Santa Monica and Manhattan. 0.98

02:29:07.000 That it standardizes the curriculum, right? 0.91

02:29:10.000 So the argument is that kids in poor areas get worse education in their schools, right?

02:29:15.000 The curriculum is not as good as in the wealthy areas.

02:29:18.000 So this standardizes it, raises them all to the same level.

02:29:22.000 But also, very much the argument was made that it helps us compete with India and China.

02:29:29.000 So STEM is a big part of this.

02:29:32.000 So training kids to be better in STEM is a huge part of the Common Core.

02:29:38.000 Explain STEM to people who don't know what that means.

02:29:39.000 Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. 0.97

02:29:42.000 So if you want to build shit, if you want to make superconductors and computers and technology and all that stuff that the Chinese and Indians are doing, and some people in the United States are doing... 0.98

02:29:52.000 You have to be good at that. 0.99

02:29:53.000 So that was the argument made by Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, and Obama throughout with Race to the Top.

02:30:00.000 We have to standardize the teaching of STEM so that we can compete with India and China. 1.00

02:30:06.000 Is it working?

02:30:08.000 Not really.

02:30:09.000 What are the results?

02:30:10.000 I mean, well, it's just started.

02:30:11.000 It's just been rolled out.

02:30:12.000 It's been about a year or two.

02:30:13.000 Well, I have a friend who's got kids in public school in Manhattan, and he was going crazy about it, like the changes that it's made to what they have to study.

02:30:22.000 Louis C.K. has been railing about it, too, yeah.

02:30:25.000 He had a whole Twitter rant about it.

02:30:27.000 Yeah, his kids are in Manhattan schools, I think.

02:30:29.000 Yeah, my son's in Santa Monica schools, public schools, and he's been dealing with it.

02:30:33.000 So the Common Core as such is not a terrible curriculum.

02:30:36.000 I don't think it's the worst thing in the world.

02:30:38.000 My argument is that it shouldn't be standardized, right?

02:30:40.000 I think that parents in locality should have some decision over what is taught to their children, right?

02:30:45.000 And I like cultural diversity.

02:30:47.000 I like intellectual diversity, right?

02:30:48.000 This destroys that.

02:30:51.000 All the kids in the country will think the same way.

02:30:53.000 Not that they're actually going to, but that's what is intended with this.

02:30:57.000 And it'll certainly push them toward thinking in the same way.

02:31:01.000 It's a standardization of thinking.

02:31:04.000 It's the worst thing we can do.

02:31:05.000 Yeah.

02:31:06.000 Standardization of thinking is the idea of conformity on a mass scale like that without leaving in any room for creativity or any room for exploring the possibilities of the wonders of the unknown of your future.

02:31:21.000 Instead, just trying to create a robot that can compete with China.

02:31:25.000 Yeah.

02:31:25.000 That's what it's about.

02:31:26.000 Race to the top.

02:31:27.000 That's the name of it.

02:31:28.000 Race to the top of what?

02:31:30.000 The world.

02:31:32.000 See, I think one of the coolest trends in this country right now is not people that are trying to do that, but rather people that are trying to do their own thing.

02:31:42.000 And what we're getting out of the Internet is we're getting a lot more small, independent businesses where people leave their job and say, hey, I'm going to sell blank.

02:31:53.000 I'm going to make my own clocks.

02:31:54.000 I'm going to do this.

02:31:55.000 I'm going to do that.

02:31:55.000 And I'm going to find something I'm passionate in.

02:31:58.000 And through the Internet, there's an avenue where I can pursue this as a career. 0.97

02:32:02.000 Where, you know, I don't have to join some gigantic fucking corporation and be a cog in the wheel. 0.97

02:32:06.000 I can do something that I actually enjoy. 0.98

02:32:08.000 Right.

02:32:09.000 And we're seeing this in, like, there's this trend in restaurants where they want, like, raw wood tables and, like, old-style lighting and everything's sort of rustic with metal and wood.

02:32:21.000 It's almost like there's this longing for something that's not homogenized and pasteurized and mass-produced.

02:32:27.000 Like, we have this longing for things that are crafted. 0.99

02:32:31.000 We keep seeing these fucking handcrafted sandwiches. 0.99

02:32:35.000 What does that even mean? 1.00

02:32:36.000 You got robots making your fucking sandwiches in some places that I don't know about? 0.99

02:32:40.000 But that term, handcrafted cocktails, that's a common thing that you hear over and over again. 0.99

02:32:48.000 And it kind of represents this desire that people have to get away from this gigantic system of things.

02:32:54.000 Yeah, that's happening outside the school system.

02:32:56.000 Yeah.

02:32:57.000 That's happening outside of mainstream politics, right?

02:33:00.000 That's happening just in the real world.

02:33:02.000 That's happening among entrepreneurs.

02:33:03.000 That's happening in commerce.

02:33:05.000 That's happening just in the culture generally.

02:33:07.000 That's happening in technology.

02:33:08.000 That's happening on social media.

02:33:10.000 Where people are pursuing happiness.

02:33:12.000 It's spontaneous.

02:33:13.000 It's driven by individuals and individual desires, right?

02:33:18.000 Not by standardization, not by a need to compete as a nation against another nation, right?

02:33:23.000 It's a beautiful thing.

02:33:24.000 And yeah, you're right.

02:33:25.000 I mean, there's much more of that now.

02:33:27.000 It's a great time to be an entrepreneur.

02:33:29.000 It's a great time to do your own thing, to make a living, as I'm trying to do myself, right?

02:33:34.000 Doing what you're passionate about.

02:33:35.000 Yeah, I was going to bring it back to that.

02:33:37.000 Yeah.

02:33:37.000 So that's, it's kind of unique in the sense that I don't know a lot of other professors that have decided to try to separate from the system and create their own courses.

02:33:47.000 I don't know of any. 0.99

02:33:48.000 So you're a fucking rebel. 1.00

02:33:50.000 You're a rebel and a renegade, dude. 1.00

02:33:51.000 I haven't heard of any.

02:33:52.000 It's possible.

02:33:53.000 Maybe we should call it that instead.

02:33:54.000 Rebel University.

02:33:55.000 That might be more douchey here.

02:33:58.000 I'm picturing dudes with American flag bandanas.

02:34:01.000 That's not good.

02:34:01.000 That is not the image I want to present.

02:34:05.000 Yeah, no, I've been surprised.

02:34:06.000 I've been researching, and I haven't been able to find anyone who's done it.

02:34:10.000 So there is edX, there's Coursera, there's Udacity, there's these big MOOCs, massive online courses, that are basically, they're just in partnership with universities, right?

02:34:21.000 And so they get professors in those universities to teach these MOOCs, right?

02:34:25.000 But these people already have jobs, they have tenure usually, right?

02:34:28.000 So they don't need to go independent entirely.

02:34:31.000 Yeah, I haven't seen anyone who's gone independent entirely.

02:34:33.000 I mean, I am unusual in that I have a PhD and I've been a professor and I have a book that's given me a fairly big public platform, right?

02:34:44.000 So there aren't a lot of people like that.

02:34:47.000 There are a lot of people with PhDs and there are a lot of people with big books, but there's very few people with both those things.

02:34:52.000 I'm going to say the thing.

02:34:53.000 Who are also adjuncts, who are not actually tenured, right?

02:34:55.000 So I'm sort of unique in that position.

02:34:57.000 Right.

02:34:58.000 I'm gonna say the thing that people hate me when I say it.

02:35:00.000 Okay.

02:35:00.000 Why don't you start a podcast?

02:35:01.000 I am.

02:35:02.000 See?

02:35:03.000 There you go, Jamie.

02:35:04.000 I am.

02:35:06.000 People get so mad at me. 0.99

02:35:07.000 Why are you telling everybody to make their own fucking podcast? 0.98

02:35:09.000 If I think someone's interesting, I think they should do a podcast. 0.99

02:35:12.000 Yeah, I am.

02:35:13.000 Why not?

02:35:14.000 This is, I'm announcing this.

02:35:15.000 I would like to listen to your podcast.

02:35:16.000 For the first time.

02:35:16.000 Cool, man.

02:35:16.000 Really?

02:35:17.000 Beautiful.

02:35:17.000 Yeah, no, I'm going to roll that out this year, too.

02:35:19.000 Oh, I should probably say, because Jocko sent me a text message today, Jocko Willink, his podcast is live now.

02:35:27.000 The Jocko podcast just went live on iTunes. 1.00

02:35:30.000 So there you go, fuckers. 1.00

02:35:31.000 Yep. 1.00

02:35:32.000 Talk Jocko into a podcast.

02:35:34.000 Yeah.

02:35:34.000 Podcasting's exploding.

02:35:35.000 It's a beautiful, beautiful thing.

02:35:37.000 Well, it's the freest form of expression available.

02:35:40.000 Oh, my God.

02:35:40.000 You know, no one can stop you from just speaking your mind and making errors and corrections and debating things.

02:35:46.000 Like, for instance, where in the world, other than a podcast, can you have a half-hour discussion on the word crazy?

02:35:51.000 Crazy, yeah.

02:35:52.000 I know.

02:35:52.000 And half-joking the entire time.

02:35:55.000 I know.

02:35:55.000 I mean, it doesn't exist anywhere else.

02:35:57.000 People don't remember, or they don't know, that not very long ago, there were three TV networks. 0.99

02:36:05.000 Oh, I remember that shit. 0.98

02:36:06.000 And a handful of radio stations, and about three national newspapers, and that was it. 1.00

02:36:12.000 That's how I grew up?

02:36:12.000 And they all said the same thing.

02:36:14.000 I remember when Fox came around and everybody was like, what is this?

02:36:17.000 Rupert Murdoch, as evil as he may be in some ways, he is primarily responsible for breaking that monopoly and allowing all this stuff to happen now.

02:36:27.000 He's the one who came in and challenged the FCC. And got that other band and established Fox.

02:36:32.000 And Fox, people forget, was very, very edgy when it started.

02:36:36.000 It still is in some ways, right?

02:36:37.000 If you look at Fox programming, it's actually far edgier than the other networks, right?

02:36:42.000 But he had to do that.

02:36:44.000 Yeah, Fox was always thought of as edgy.

02:36:46.000 Totally.

02:36:46.000 The Simpsons, you know, right?

02:36:47.000 Yes.

02:36:48.000 Married with children.

02:36:48.000 Yeah, totally.

02:36:49.000 Yeah.

02:36:49.000 So, I mean, Murdoch gets a lot of credit for that.

02:36:52.000 The left will never say that, but they should.

02:36:54.000 Well, yeah, I mean, someone can be evil and still do good.

02:36:58.000 Absolutely.

02:36:58.000 I mean, there's a lot of- I mean, I disagree with many of his politics, of course.

02:37:01.000 But my God, he did a wonderful thing for everyone.

02:37:04.000 I don't think any of them thought the internet was going to be what it is.

02:37:07.000 No, of course not.

02:37:08.000 I think nobody saw that coming.

02:37:09.000 I remember thinking, oh, I'm never going to buy anything on this thing.

02:37:13.000 Yeah.

02:37:14.000 Maybe I'll read the New York Times on it, but I'm not going to actually buy anything.

02:37:18.000 You know what I read that's a staggering statistic?

02:37:20.000 39% of everything that's bought online is bought through Amazon.com.

02:37:25.000 Yeah.

02:37:25.000 I know.

02:37:26.000 That's amazing.

02:37:27.000 Remember when Amazon was a failure for years?

02:37:30.000 No.

02:37:30.000 Was it?

02:37:31.000 Oh, yeah.

02:37:31.000 There was a joke that it should be Amazon.org because there was no profit.

02:37:34.000 Really?

02:37:35.000 Yeah.

02:37:35.000 Oh, yeah.

02:37:35.000 For years, Bezos made not a dime, I'm pretty sure.

02:37:38.000 Damn. 0.99

02:37:38.000 Pretty sure for years he made nothing. 0.99

02:37:39.000 That motherfucker's laughing now. 1.00

02:37:41.000 When he was only... 1.00

02:37:42.000 When he was only selling books, and then he started selling whatever toothpaste and stuff, and still it wasn't making money.

02:37:47.000 Dude, I buy archery products.

02:37:49.000 Oh, hell, sure.

02:37:50.000 I buy archery releases and arrows and broadheads.

02:37:53.000 And did you hear what he's rolling out now?

02:37:55.000 What?

02:37:55.000 One hour delivery.

02:37:58.000 You can order something on Amazon and get it delivered in an hour.

02:38:02.000 How is that possible?

02:38:03.000 I don't know.

02:38:03.000 They're going to set up these Amazon outlets with sprinters.

02:38:06.000 They're going to have people with wings on their feet. 0.93

02:38:07.000 And then the Amazon buttons.

02:38:09.000 You know about the Amazon buttons?

02:38:10.000 You have these stick-on buttons you can put on things.

02:38:13.000 And if you need a replacement, you press it.

02:38:15.000 And now you're assuming it'll show up in an hour.

02:38:18.000 Like laundry detergent.

02:38:19.000 Boom.

02:38:20.000 They're in an hour.

02:38:20.000 Whoa.

02:38:21.000 That's bizarre.

02:38:22.000 But that seems like...

02:38:24.000 It's kind of silly because unless there's something super critical that you need this one item only.

02:38:31.000 Otherwise, you're going to need a bunch of shell. 0.99

02:38:32.000 You're going to have a toothpaste button and a fucking toilet paper button. 0.99

02:38:35.000 You don't have to have it. 0.99

02:38:37.000 But it's kind of weird.

02:38:40.000 Yeah.

02:38:41.000 But good.

02:38:42.000 Yeah.

02:38:42.000 Oh, no, listen.

02:38:43.000 It's great.

02:38:43.000 What I don't like about Amazon is what I hear about the way their employees are treated.

02:38:47.000 What I don't like about it is I hear about the pressure that they're under and they have to run from one spot to the other and deliver these things and they're yelled at and, you know.

02:38:54.000 Yeah, it's a big, high-pressure factory.

02:38:57.000 I mean, those are terrible places to work and always have been.

02:39:00.000 Yeah.

02:39:00.000 Right?

02:39:01.000 But...

02:39:02.000 Convenience-wise.

02:39:03.000 I'm assuming they're better than the alternatives for those people.

02:39:06.000 Otherwise they wouldn't work there.

02:39:07.000 I guess.

02:39:08.000 Isn't it hard to get a job?

02:39:10.000 Sweatshops in Vietnam are terrible places, but obviously they're better than the alternatives for those people who work in them. 1.00

02:39:15.000 Otherwise they wouldn't work in them.

02:39:16.000 It's true.

02:39:16.000 I mean, they have a choice between working in a sweatshop and being in abject poverty.

02:39:20.000 You know, I'm not saying it's a good thing to work in a sweatshop or in an Amazon factory, but I am saying, undoubtedly, it's better than what else there is.

02:39:28.000 Right.

02:39:29.000 Whatever happened to that company that was making phones that were supposed to be more ethical?

02:39:36.000 What was the idea behind it?

02:39:38.000 Fairphone.

02:39:39.000 They called themselves a Fairphone, but they fucked up and they only had like 3G. And everybody's like, you know, you can have no slave labor and everyone gets paid a fine wage, but you only get 3G. Fuck you! 0.93

02:39:50.000 I want 4G! You can feel really good about yourself, but you won't be able to make a call. 1.00

02:39:54.000 Yeah, you won't get any pictures quick.

02:39:56.000 But there it is, Fairphone.

02:39:58.000 Is it still up?

02:39:59.000 Fairtrade phone.

02:40:01.000 Fairphone 2 now shipping.

02:40:02.000 Let's see the statistics.

02:40:03.000 Let's see if it gets 4G LTE yet. 1.00

02:40:05.000 Because if it doesn't, they can fuck off. 1.00

02:40:11.000 Because it was very limited. 1.00

02:40:14.000 What you're saying is that you prefer to have slaves make your phone.

02:40:17.000 No.

02:40:17.000 That's exactly what you just said.

02:40:18.000 I'm joking.

02:40:20.000 32 gigabytes of internal storage. 1.00

02:40:22.000 You fucking clowns. 1.00

02:40:24.000 How you getting... 1.00

02:40:27.000 How you getting by with that?

02:40:29.000 Oh, it's a good 5-inch display.

02:40:30.000 Gorilla Glass.

02:40:31.000 I like that.

02:40:32.000 Expandable storage.

02:40:33.000 Micro SD slot.

02:40:34.000 But 32 gigabyte internal?

02:40:36.000 Who's making that thing for them, too? 0.99

02:40:39.000 I hope it's only fat, privileged white people. 0.99

02:40:42.000 You make them work the fair... 0.99

02:40:44.000 At Yale.

02:40:44.000 At Fairphone.

02:40:45.000 I like how they got a black guy with a brick phone. 1.00

02:40:49.000 What the fuck are you doing? 1.00

02:40:51.000 What is that point? 1.00

02:40:52.000 Why do you have that guy with a brick? 0.95

02:40:54.000 They give the black guy a brick. 0.61

02:40:55.000 And he's standing in front of a swamp with people foraging. 0.99

02:40:58.000 But why are they giving him a brick phone from a fucking rap video in the 80s? 0.98

02:41:03.000 Why does he have that? 0.99

02:41:04.000 You're supposed to be selling these Fairphones.

02:41:06.000 Do they have good cameras too?

02:41:08.000 What's the camera say, Jamie?

02:41:11.000 The statistics.

02:41:15.000 Doesn't say?

02:41:16.000 Doesn't say what the camera is?

02:41:18.000 How dare they? 1.00

02:41:18.000 So, I can safely say we're boycotting this shit. 1.00

02:41:21.000 Well, I just don't know how fair it really is. 0.99

02:41:24.000 Like, where are they getting their minerals?

02:41:25.000 That's what's important, because the minerals...

02:41:28.000 Fair trade, generally, is a scam.

02:41:30.000 Is it?

02:41:30.000 Yeah, it's nonsense.

02:41:31.000 Really?

02:41:32.000 Well, what does it mean?

02:41:32.000 Like, fair trade coffee.

02:41:34.000 Yeah, what does it mean?

02:41:35.000 Well, alright, here's a perfect example.

02:41:37.000 My friend owns Caveman Coffee, and Caveman Coffee is a coffee that we have.

02:41:40.000 It is owned by a family in Colombia.

02:41:42.000 It's a single-family, single-origin farm.

02:41:45.000 So when you buy it from them, you are literally buying from the farmers.

02:41:49.000 So, like, they get it from the farmers, they roast it, and they sell it.

02:41:52.000 They hire all American labor, and they sell it in America. 0.94

02:41:56.000 So that's, like, fair trade.

02:41:58.000 Okay.

02:41:58.000 So what's unfair trade?

02:41:59.000 And unfair trade is those people that live in those places where they have the nets that make iPhones. 0.99

02:42:05.000 Right. 0.98

02:42:06.000 And they have to put fucking nets around the building to keep them from jumping off? 0.99

02:42:09.000 Like, that seems unfair that they have to live in these dormitories and that they're so concerned with suicide they put nets all around the... 0.99

02:42:16.000 Like, that's...

02:42:18.000 That's something you need to fix, right?

02:42:22.000 Yeah...

02:42:23.000 So again, like, what's the alternative?

02:42:25.000 I mean, yeah, of course, but like, how is that going to happen?

02:42:27.000 Should we sort of impose it from without? 0.99

02:42:29.000 Should Americans fix those factories in China and Vietnam for them? 0.82

02:42:34.000 Or should the Chinese and Vietnamese workers work that out? 0.85

02:42:38.000 Well, Americans probably shouldn't get their phones made there if the people that are making their phones are being paid.

02:42:45.000 So then you disemploy those people.

02:42:46.000 Do you think those people want to lose their jobs?

02:42:48.000 But how did they get employed in the first place?

02:42:50.000 Did Americans create this problem by going over there to these slave labor factories and having their phones built there instead of having them built in Ohio? 0.96

02:42:56.000 They wouldn't work in those factories if it wasn't better than the alternative.

02:43:00.000 They're making more in those factories, undoubtedly, otherwise they wouldn't be in there.

02:43:04.000 I can see that argument.

02:43:05.000 Than they would outside those factories.

02:43:07.000 But the only reason why they're making those phones in those factories is because they make substantially less than someone who works in America.

02:43:14.000 And if you look at the conditions that they live and work under, they're horrific.

02:43:18.000 Capitalist development sucks in a lot of ways, right?

02:43:21.000 But it's also necessary to get to something much better, right? 0.88

02:43:24.000 So our ancestors worked in factories worse than those, right?

02:43:27.000 But thank God they did, because as a society, we advance tremendously because of it.

02:43:32.000 So, in quotes, Thaddeus Russell says, slave labor is awesome for the future. 0.86

02:43:36.000 Right.

02:43:37.000 I thought you were the one who wanted a slave-made phone.

02:43:41.000 I don't.

02:43:43.000 You want maximum slavery.

02:43:44.000 I just think that I would like to...

02:43:46.000 Fairphone sounds like an awesome idea.

02:43:48.000 It does sound like...

02:43:48.000 There was another company that had an interesting idea, too.

02:43:51.000 They were going to switch things out modulately.

02:43:53.000 So, like, your screen could be switched out when a new, more improved screen came along.

02:43:58.000 They could switch out your motherboard, switch out all the...

02:44:01.000 It would be like...

02:44:02.000 Different parts.

02:44:03.000 It was like a segmented sort of a phone, and the idea being that what we're doing is incredibly wasteful.

02:44:09.000 We have this whole unit as a phone, and then we get a new one every year and a half, two years, whatever the fuck it is, and you throw the old one out and you get the new one.

02:44:17.000 What they're saying is, no, instead, when they come up with new improvements, like a new and improved camera, you should be able to put that camera section and take the old one out and put a new one in.

02:44:26.000 Sounds good.

02:44:27.000 Yeah.

02:44:27.000 Why not?

02:44:28.000 But all made by slaves.

02:44:32.000 What is that?

02:44:34.000 What's it called?

02:44:35.000 Project Aura?

02:44:36.000 Made by Google.

02:44:37.000 Oh, okay.

02:44:38.000 Interesting.

02:44:39.000 Okay.

02:44:40.000 A-R-A. Project A-R-A. Well, Google's also got a new interesting thing they're doing with their phones.

02:44:47.000 What's their flagship phone called?

02:44:49.000 Nexus.

02:44:50.000 Nexus.

02:44:50.000 With their Nexus phones, they're not constrained to a carrier.

02:44:56.000 So, say if you have a Nexus phone, it'll work on Sprint, T-Mobile, whoever's got the signal.

02:45:02.000 And then you just pay Google.

02:45:05.000 You pay Google whatever the fee is that they charge, and they make some sort of deals out with all the carriers.

02:45:11.000 Is that good for us?

02:45:12.000 It's good for you if you want good service.

02:45:14.000 Oh, well, then it's good.

02:45:15.000 Yeah, then I like it.

02:45:16.000 Yeah, because, look, if you're in a place where T-Mobile doesn't work, but you can get AT&T or Verizon or what have you, you have a Google phone that'll work if you have one of those Nexus phones.

02:45:26.000 Has any institution or organization changed human life more dramatically than Google?

02:45:32.000 No.

02:45:32.000 I don't think so.

02:45:33.000 No. 1.00

02:45:33.000 They're nuts. 1.00

02:45:35.000 It's astonishing. 1.00

02:45:36.000 That's a really crazy company.

02:45:38.000 For the better.

02:45:38.000 I say crazy in a good way.

02:45:39.000 I know.

02:45:40.000 You can do that.

02:45:41.000 That's fine.

02:45:42.000 I mean, nothing has advanced human existence more broadly, dramatically, and swiftly than Google and almost entirely for the good.

02:45:54.000 Yeah, almost entirely.

02:45:55.000 But if you lived in the Bay Area, you wouldn't know it because they're the devil.

02:46:00.000 Well, they're the devil because the people that are being forced out can't afford the homes anymore.

02:46:04.000 I have a friend who was an executive at Google for a long time, and she just left recently for another evil corporation.

02:46:11.000 But when they would tell me how much the houses in their neighborhood cost, I said, this doesn't make any sense. 0.99

02:46:19.000 There was a house in their neighborhood that was $14 million, and it was just a fucking house. 0.99

02:46:23.000 I mean, it was just a house. 0.99

02:46:25.000 It was a house.

02:46:25.000 I know.

02:46:26.000 I used to live there.

02:46:26.000 If that house was in Nebraska, it would cost 200 grand.

02:46:28.000 I know.

02:46:28.000 It didn't make any sense.

02:46:29.000 But what are you going to do about it?

02:46:31.000 Nothing.

02:46:31.000 Right.

02:46:32.000 I mean, what happens is, so San Francisco will no longer be a countercultural center.

02:46:37.000 At all.

02:46:37.000 Not at all, for sure.

02:46:39.000 Nor Manhattan.

02:46:40.000 But those people will move.

02:46:41.000 They'll go somewhere else.

02:46:42.000 They'll establish a new hub.

02:46:43.000 Portland.

02:46:44.000 Your spot.

02:46:45.000 Portland.

02:46:46.000 Well, actually...

02:46:46.000 That's super counterculture.

02:46:48.000 And then Portland's going to become too expensive, and then they'll move somewhere else.

02:46:50.000 Eugene.

02:46:51.000 Yeah.

02:46:51.000 Well, where I'm going, Salem.

02:46:52.000 Yeah.

02:46:54.000 Which is right down the road.

02:46:55.000 Yeah.

02:46:55.000 So, I mean, it just...

02:46:56.000 Things move.

02:46:57.000 Things shift, you know?

02:46:58.000 I mean, it's...

02:46:58.000 Was San Francisco always a countercultural capital?

02:47:01.000 No, of course not.

02:47:02.000 It started in the 1960s, right?

02:47:04.000 It's only for about two decades was it anything important.

02:47:08.000 But...

02:47:08.000 Those two, San Francisco and New York, losing those two.

02:47:11.000 I had my friend Judah Freelander who was in here a couple weeks ago, and he lives in Manhattan.

02:47:16.000 He was talking to me about how much Manhattan has changed.

02:47:18.000 It's all just bankers now.

02:47:20.000 It's all stockbroket money.

02:47:22.000 So now the cool people are in Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City.

02:47:26.000 They move around.

02:47:27.000 That's not a bad thing, necessarily. 0.74

02:47:28.000 Why does Manhattan have to be the place where all the cool shit's happening? 0.89

02:47:33.000 It's true. 0.98

02:47:33.000 It's a good way of looking at it. 0.98

02:47:34.000 But it always has been.

02:47:36.000 So for a lot of people, nostalgia...

02:47:37.000 Not always, as I said.

02:47:38.000 Right.

02:47:38.000 Only for, really, just our lifetimes.

02:47:40.000 That's it.

02:47:41.000 That's a blip in history.

02:47:42.000 That's true.

02:47:43.000 It's one way of looking at it.

02:47:44.000 But it's also, I think, in a lot of people's eyes, especially in Manhattan, it's being overtaken by the evil side of our civilization.

02:47:52.000 The people that are making money by just moving numbers around and... 0.98

02:47:56.000 Fucking with interest rates and dividends. 0.98

02:47:59.000 Well, Wall Street is... 1.00

02:48:01.000 I'm not a fan.

02:48:02.000 Tech.

02:48:03.000 Partly because, well, tech, I'm a huge fan.

02:48:06.000 Yeah, that's what I'm saying.

02:48:07.000 So Google in San Francisco is an entirely different story.

02:48:09.000 Right.

02:48:09.000 Because pretty much all they're doing is great things.

02:48:11.000 Yeah, tech is the bright side of prosperity in my eyes.

02:48:15.000 What's going on in San Francisco, although all these people are being pushed out of their neighborhood, what you're getting is insane innovation.

02:48:22.000 I mean, unbelievably staggering improvements to the quality of life for people that are- And here's what's missed all the time, because people talk about inequality all the time, economic inequality.

02:48:31.000 It's true that there's greater inequality now, but what no one talks about is that the poor live way better Than the poor did 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago.

02:48:41.000 And that's largely because of technology, right?

02:48:43.000 There is not a person, basically, in the United States who doesn't own a cell phone. 0.96

02:48:47.000 That's ridiculous.

02:48:48.000 There's more cell phones than there are people. 0.90

02:48:49.000 Yeah.

02:48:50.000 Sub-Saharan Africa.

02:48:50.000 How about that?

02:48:51.000 Yeah.

02:48:51.000 Sub-Saharan Africa.

02:48:52.000 I think it's a majority of people in Sub-Saharan Africa own cell phones now.

02:48:56.000 Wow.

02:48:56.000 Right?

02:48:57.000 And, you know, I mean, that's something that was unimaginable just 10 or 20 years ago, right?

02:49:01.000 This incredible magical machine that the very poor own, right?

02:49:06.000 I mean, that's an incredible advance in the way people live.

02:49:10.000 Huge numbers of poor people live in air-conditioned buildings.

02:49:13.000 They didn't in the 1960s and 70s, right?

02:49:16.000 They drive, they own cars or they have access to cars.

02:49:18.000 Most didn't.

02:49:19.000 Most poor people didn't until 20, 30 years ago.

02:49:22.000 Right?

02:49:23.000 So we miss this, right?

02:49:25.000 There's this huge advance for everyone.

02:49:27.000 Yes, it's true that the very poor are farther from the very rich now, but if the very poor are living better, and also, by the way, have much more access to power through social media, through the internet, through technology, right, than ever before.

02:49:43.000 You can be poor and have a public voice now, right?

02:49:47.000 You can certainly be middle class and have a large public voice.

02:49:50.000 That wasn't possible before when there was three networks.

02:49:53.000 And this kind of balanced perspective will be available to you at Renegade University, launching in the spring of 2017. 16. 16. You think so?

02:50:02.000 Next year.

02:50:03.000 Next year.

02:50:03.000 Well, next year is a couple...

02:50:04.000 You mean, like, by next year, a couple months from now?

02:50:07.000 Like, yeah.

02:50:08.000 Like, middle of next year.

02:50:09.000 2016. Oh, okay.

02:50:10.000 Oh, I thought you meant, like, a legit year.

02:50:13.000 No, no, no.

02:50:14.000 Oh.

02:50:14.000 No, 2016. Okay.

02:50:15.000 So what are you shooting for?

02:50:16.000 The summer?

02:50:17.000 Yeah, like mid, middle, yeah.

02:50:18.000 Nice.

02:50:19.000 Late spring, summer.

02:50:19.000 Will you come back on when it launches?

02:50:21.000 Totally.

02:50:21.000 We'll work it again.

02:50:22.000 Of course, yeah.

02:50:22.000 Beautiful.

02:50:22.000 I'd love to.

02:50:23.000 We just went through three hours.

02:50:24.000 Are you kidding me?

02:50:25.000 No.

02:50:25.000 It's incredible.

02:50:25.000 Three hours.

02:50:26.000 Crazy.

02:50:27.000 How do you do it? 0.92

02:50:27.000 I don't know how we do it. 0.92

02:50:28.000 We just keep doing it.

02:50:30.000 Thank you.

02:50:31.000 Really appreciate it, man.

02:50:32.000 Thank you.

02:50:32.000 You can follow Thaddeus on Twitter, Thaddeus Russell, online, where else?

02:50:37.000 ThaddeusRussell.com.

02:50:39.000 That's it.

02:50:39.000 All the information is there.

02:50:40.000 Thank you, sir.

02:50:40.000 It was fun.

02:50:41.000 Really enjoyed it.

02:50:42.000 Love it.

02:50:42.000 All right, folks.

02:50:43.000 We'll be back tomorrow with Joey Diaz.

02:50:45.000 Until then, see you soon.

02:50:45.000 Bye-bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - December 23, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #740 - Thaddeus Russell

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