Thaddeus Russell critiques U.S. foreign policy, arguing Syria’s ISIS rise stemmed from Iraq’s destabilization and weapon proliferation, while humanitarian interventions like Libya bombings backfire, creating enemies. He contrasts white rock’s melancholy with African American culture’s spontaneity, tracing jazz’s roots to enslaved improvisation outside Protestant work ethic repression. Decriminalizing drugs—like Portugal’s model—cuts HIV and addiction rates, but U.S. militarism and puritanical sex policies distort reality, fueling exploitation and ideological performativity. Russell’s ACL tear and Muay Thai past mirror broader societal trauma, from police violence to war, while Rogan shifts focus to safer combat sports like jiu-jitsu. Their debate underscores how interventionism and cultural dogma often worsen the very problems they claim to solve. [Automatically generated summary]
We were saying right before the podcast got started, it's always a weird thing when people sit down.
It's like you don't want to talk too much because there's so much to say on the air.
You don't want to get it out before you get to air.
But I was saying it's appropriate having you on today because we're just now going to war.
with Syria and we were just talking about how bizarre this ISIS thing is and how it's just American people said you know we don't want to go to war with Syria it was this big thing and Obama was on television everybody just openly rejected it left and right it was pretty much the American public was like we're done with war like we want to get out of Afghanistan we don't want this Iraq thing anymore we don't want to go to Syria and so everything just sort of calmed down And then all of a sudden,
ISIS rose up from the ashes.
And this ISIS thing, different names, ISIS, I've seen it, ISIL. And like I was saying, I don't like to get conspiracy-oriented because it's so easy to do.
But if you wanted to, you would say, well, this is obviously...
There's an open conspiracy, and then there's a closed conspiracy, right?
So I think this is sort of an open conspiracy.
A lot of people are saying, both left and right, by the way, that ISIS was really a creation of American foreign policy.
There were a bunch of dudes sitting in a room in the White House with cigars and saying, hey, we need to create this monster in order to sort of impose American will abroad.
But that through many, many conscious decisions over many years in the Middle East through direct interventions militarily and otherwise, they created the conditions for this bunch of psychopathic 20 year olds with RPGs and swords beheading people, right?
So, you know, creating a vacuum in Iraq, right, by going to war there, by removing the dictator who was at least holding control over the people and over people like this, funding the rebels in Syria, and also, more importantly, a lot of people miss this, you know, one of the things that's been happening, if you look at it just from a material standpoint over the last 12 years at least, is that the United States has been flooding that area with weapons, right?
So if you look at, there's a great piece, I think it was in The Guardian a few weeks ago, ISIS is using American-made weapons, right, that have been coming into that region, mostly into Iraq, but elsewhere for just decades, right?
So it's just, it creates this, it creates a situation where it's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sort of an open conspiracy, because you could certainly say that American foreign policymakers And all of them, really, and that's Bush, and that's Obama, and that's all of them, really want to have an American presence, a military strong, a military presence around the world, and in particular in the Middle East where all the oil is.
So, you know, I'm not saying it was deliberate, it wasn't a deliberate choice to create this beast that's called ISIS, but it certainly serves their purposes.
I mean, I think that was the answer in Vietnam, right?
That's what the anti-Vietnam War called for for many, many years was out now.
Not a gradual withdrawal, which is what the politicians called for because that's the, quote, responsible thing to do, but out now.
And I think history proves that was the correct answer to that, right?
I think that if the United States had left immediately in 1964, 65, name a year, name a time, it would have been a better thing for everyone.
Now, communism...
The communists would have taken control of Vietnam, but they did anyway, right?
And so what we had was instead of about two million people, mostly civilians, die, right?
We would have had far fewer.
We would have had the same outcome, essentially, but with far fewer.
And then also, and we've got to talk about blowback, right?
So, you know, the carpet bombing of not just Vietnam, but several countries during that war caused untold numbers of people to hate our fucking guts, right?
America's guts.
And that, you know...
That's blowback, right?
They didn't come and fly airplanes into our buildings, but, you know, it was anti-American in many ways.
And it also served, and here's a very important thing, it served the interests of the goddamn communists, right?
Because the communists could say, look at these barbarians coming here and killing our children and women, right?
You should support us.
We will protect you from them.
So it actually played into the hands of the communists.
And the very same thing is happening and has been happening in the Middle East for many, many years.
David Petraeus, of all people, said before the Senate about three years ago, he said, U.S. funding of Israel in particular, U.S. funding of all these corrupt regimes in the Middle East and our interventions is the number one recruiting tool for al-Qaeda, right?
And it's the number one recruiting tool for ISIS. They say, look, here's these infidels who have been invading us and killing our people and taking control of our resources for decades, right?
We will fight back for you, right?
And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you want to maintain a presence there, which they do, the United States does, you keep creating your own enemies to fight against.
So what could be, is there anything that can be done to mitigate the disastrous effects of us pulling out and creating this power vacuum.
Is there anything that can be done?
I mean, once we're already there, we can't go back in time.
We can't stop the Iraq invasion.
It would be nice if we could.
Pretty much no one thinks it's a good idea now.
Today, in hindsight, everyone thinks it was a terrible idea.
The only good that came out of it was getting Saddam Hussein out, getting rid of his psychopathic sons, but Now look at all the shit you have there, and you have a million people dead.
So for Hitler, right, there's a large stream of thought among historians that...
Very respectable stream of thought that the Nazis rose to power out of conditions created by the Allies after World War I. So that, you know, extracting all these resources through forced payments from the Germans as reparations after World War I really laid the groundwork for the rise of this totalitarian who said, hey, look what those Westerners did to us.
They decimated this country.
They shamed us.
They brought us into shame and degradation.
We need a strong, powerful leader.
We need discipline.
We need order.
We need to get rid of these foreign influences, like Jews, who were considered to be foreign, right?
In essence, because they were a nationless people.
And the communists who had allegiance to no state, right?
And so many people have argued, not just wacko conspiracy theorists, that it was actually American and Western foreign policy in the early 20th century that really made the rise of Nazism possible.
Like that's the greatest, possibly the greatest example of blowback in human history.
It seems like everything we've ever done in the past has led us to do more things in the future to combat the blowback from the things we've done in the past.
Yeah, so I mean if you look at – but if you look at the history of foreign policy – and by the way, that's the book I'm working on now.
So this is a very appropriate topic for me.
You know, you will see beginning really even in the early 18th century – Sorry, late 18th century with some of the founding fathers, but certainly through the 19th century and certainly through the 20th century, one continuous thread among policymakers, which is we must change the world in our image, right?
I mean, that's been bipartisan.
It's been the left.
It's been the right.
I mean, the liberals and the conservatives.
It's been the Democrats and the Republicans for centuries now.
We must have America abroad.
Now, not everyone agreed with that.
There were people in the Senate who were sort of isolationists or anti-interventionists.
But there's been a near consensus among American politicians for about two centuries that we should expand what is great about America.
And unfortunately, that has meant killing a lot of people.
Yeah, so good luck, motherfuckers, imposing Sharia law on the whole world, right?
And so a lot of what my work is on now, and I'm not the only one who's done this, is to look at what's actually going on, you know, in places like Tehran, and in places like Riyadh, and in places like Cairo.
What are sort of ordinary folks, Iranians and Egyptians and Saudis, actually doing all day long?
And you can figure it out really quickly by simply looking at the skyline in those cities.
And what you'll see is you'll see these big apartment buildings, these big cinder block apartment buildings.
And on top of those apartment buildings are dozens, sometimes hundreds of satellite dishes, which are streaming in Fox, The Simpsons, porn like you wouldn't believe.
Well, I mean, so I was trained at Columbia University, got my PhD there in American history, and sort of found that historians in general, but in particular the historians I was being trained by, You know, they consider themselves to be left-wing and radical, but there was a real limitation on that.
And one of the limitations was that they had a real disdain for what normal people do all day long, like what they're doing in Riyadh and Tehran.
They had a real disdain for sort of the normal activities of working class ordinary folks.
Like they thought that what people watched on TV was retarded and should not be studied and they shouldn't be doing it.
That's not real history.
That's not what's really going on.
What you should be studying is the Senate and you should be studying sort of economics and you should be studying foreign policy.
And what I found was, you know, first of all, that's what, of course, most Americans do is they consume that kind of stuff much more than they do political speeches, right?
And more importantly, kind of in that popular culture, and in particular the stuff that we most look down on, what you'll find is stuff like sex and freedom and drugs and drinking and freedom and people doing what they want to do, sort of opposed to and against kind of our Puritan tradition, right?
So that America has always been split together.
Between its puritanism, which is really powerful still, in particular in our formal culture, like in politics and what they tell us in schools, right?
And hedonism, which is what we get in popular culture, right?
So it's this very weird schizophrenic culture, right?
There's this conflict between the two.
And what I found was that people who call themselves left-wing and radical are actually really wedded to the puritanical side.
That they're really about people being disciplined and controlled and working hard and the work ethic and all that stuff.
And I know you've talked about, I've heard you talk about the work ethic on here and elsewhere, but we can get into what that actually means because there's also confusion about what that means.
I was like, first of all, yo, I'm walking the streets of New York City, went to Columbia, and nobody looks like these people in my history books, including Rosa Parks, who's on your wall here, and Martin Luther King, who wrote a lot, and we can talk about this.
This is a big part of my book.
Those people were extremely conservative culturally, extremely conservative culturally.
And looked down upon and scolded black people for black culture.
For things like jazz and rock and roll.
Martin Luther King was opposed to rock and roll.
Called it the devil's music.
People don't know this.
So I started looking at that.
I started looking at these new heroes and the new social history.
You know, these left-wing activists and people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.
And feminist suffragists and all that.
And I found that they actually agreed with...
The Puritans about things like sex and work.
That sex is terrible and work is awesome and virtuous.
So I got very frustrated.
I started writing my lectures and my classes at Barnard College, which is the women's college affiliated with Columbia.
I started looking at American history through that lens.
I started looking at American history through the lens of this conflict, this eternal conflict, between discipline and order and community and nation on one hand and Puritanism.
And on the other hand, popular culture and sex and freedom and desire.
And I found this whole new way of telling the story.
And I found all these people on one side sort of just behaving on their own, doing the things they wanted to do, that were violating these puritanical principles.
People like prostitutes, people like drunks, people like criminals, people like gays, people like slaves who were dancing when you weren't supposed to dance.
And on the other hand, all these guardians of the moral order who weren't just the founding fathers and the generals and the inventors, but it was people like abolitionists who were opposed to slavery, but they were opposed to slavery for funky reasons we can talk about, and suffragists who wanted women to be just as upstanding as men and to not drink and not have sex, etc.
And so I gave lectures.
I was given the Introduction to American History course at Columbia because they didn't know what I was up to.
And because it's a weird thing, it's one of the strangest industries.
There's no oversight over what you're doing in your classrooms.
No one ever comes and watches what you say.
It's a very strange thing in higher education.
Professors 99% of the time just go into the classroom and their colleagues have no idea what they're saying.
Because I find that anytime when you get one person that gets to communicate to a large group of people and they have to listen to you, especially if parts of their future rely upon you, like your grades, your GPA, it's important to pass this class.
And so this person has this position of power and influence that's very unusual.
And because of that, a lot of times...
People, they get into that position of being a professor, they push their ideology in a very rigid and inflexible way.
And the second thing is, and this is the real problem, I think, in higher education, which makes me crazy every single day, is that right now, higher ed, in particular in the social sciences and humanities, is on lockdown by the academic left.
And I come out of the left, and I'm left-wing in a lot of ways, and in some ways I'm not.
But what I hate is that there's just almost no variety of discourse on college campuses that pretty much – there's been studies done.
I mean like 95 percent of English and history professors voted for Obama, right?
I mean that tells you right there that there's not a whole lot of debate going on.
Well, but even libertarians who are atheists get run out of the house.
You can't get a job as a libertarian.
Wow.
No, I mean, so it's all historical, right?
So if you look at the history of higher education, and a lot of people forget this, you know, higher education in this country is only about two centuries old, and as a major mass institution.
I mean, the right-wing conservatives controlled the joint until the 1960s, right?
So what was being taught at Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Cal and UCLA was...
It was things like capitalism is awesome and black people are inferior and women should be in the home.
I mean, conservatives had that whole place on lockdown.
There was a monoculture on the campuses.
Then what comes along is the 1960s and all those movements, all those social movements.
So the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, feminist movement, etc., etc.
And what happened was those people, because their movements either sort of succeeded and they were considered to be done, or they were Couldn't succeed.
They couldn't really create a revolution, the kind that they wanted.
The only place they found that they could go and have a job was colleges as professors.
So en masse, that generation, the new left of the 1960s, went into graduate school and they all became professors.
And that's who's been basically teaching college for the last 50 years.
So I'm of the generation that was trained by them.
And so there's some changes going on, but And basically, even most people my age, I'm in my 40s, but in my generation, most of us are still sort of influenced by that generation.
So it was this very concerted, not a conspiracy, but it was a pretty deliberate attempt, in some ways it was conscious, to take over the university.
That was the only place we could have this radical discourse and get paid for it and have a career, right?
Maybe parents that have a different ideology and send the kid off to school and the kid comes back with like some really, you know, white privilege, male privilege.
So what happened was in 2010 or 2011, the United States Department of Education sent a letter to every university and college in the country that receives federal aid of some kind, which is basically all of them, right, because of student loans.
Those are backed by the federal government.
And said, if you want to continue receiving federal aid for your students, you must adjudicate every student.
Every accusation of sexual assault on your campus among students.
Which means you have to have basically a tribunal of staff and maybe students, but usually it's staff and faculty.
So it's a panel of three or four English professors and the dean of students and the facilities guy or whoever, maybe some students.
Asking, you know, adjudicating this case.
So the woman says, well, we were both drunk and whatever.
She tells her story and he tells his story and says, I absolutely did not rape him.
She says he absolutely did rape me because there's no witnesses almost ever in these cases, right?
What can they then do to decide who's responsible here?
Or is there someone who's responsible?
And what they do is, and I've talked to people who have been on these boards, the only thing you can do is ask about their sexual histories.
So you have English professors asking 19-year-olds how many times they've had sex in the last year, what kinds of sex, with whom, how did they feel about it, and then asking the guy the same things, right?
And then from that information, and usually it's only that, because that's all you got in most cases, right, with acquaintance rape.
It's two people in a room, a dark room, and with the door closed, almost always.
There's no evidence, right?
There's no physical evidence.
There's no witnesses, usually.
From that, they determine responsibility.
So that's basically what happened in this case.
And the other thing is, so that's a nightmare in a lot of ways, right?
So one of the things that's been infuriating for a lot of people, and a lot of feminists, by the way, Is that, you know, in response to, and acquaintance rape definitely fucking happens.
So one answer that's been proffered by many people, many feminists including, has been to say, hey, don't get blackout drunk at the frat house on Friday night to women, right?
Now, if you were to leave it at that, right, say that is the sole answer to this problem, you know, tell women not to get drunk at the frat house on Friday night, maybe that is victim blaming, but that's not what any of us are saying, right?
One of the things that's not talked about much, and I try to talk about this, is that it takes agency away from women, right?
So it's basically saying that women are helpless before these rapists, you know?
And all we can do...
Is moralize against the rapists and tell them they're bad.
Now, many of those feminists have agreed that it's a very, very tiny percentage of men who are rapists and that most rapes are committed by something like 4% of men or something like that, or less than 4%.
So what are you going to do?
Are you going to tell those guys, those serial rapists?
Most of them are serial rapists that they're bad and they shouldn't rape?
And my issue is that the people that are crying out for this, especially the men, It's so suspect.
It's so white-nighty.
Like, the whole thing about it.
It's these really emo, feminist men who just look like they're just clamoring for female acceptance and love and appreciation, and they're just going way out of their way to talk about this.
I can understand that anybody would be concerned that a human being would take advantage of another human being.
But to make it your primary concern, to make it like this thing that you focus and concentrate on on a regular basis all the time, it's almost like a rape fetish.
A rape or victimization fetish.
And this apologizing.
Do you remember that video that came out?
Dear Women.
It was one of the most horrific videos ever.
It was widely mocked.
But it was these, like, really fucked up, socially retarded men who made this video where they were apologizing for all the things that women had to endure for men.
There's a couple drinks where you're getting silly and you do, I mean, you might fuck somebody in a regretful way, like say, ah, I shouldn't have slept with that guy.
So that it's applied to all state schools in California, which defines sexual assault and rape in many ways that completely put all of us in the category of rapist because it includes having sex with someone when they're intoxicated.
So there's another thing that's very, you see, one of the things I do is I sort of try to expose how conservative a lot of the left is, because they don't even realize it.
This is really conservative, right?
So it's like, it's micromanaging our sex lives.
And, you know, it's saying that sex, that the state must come in and protect us from each other.
And the state must come in, or the college administration must protect women from sex.
Well, especially then, if you say, even if it's consensual, and you're conscious, and you're awake, and you enjoy it, and you have fun, if you're intoxicated, it is rape.
They were attracted to each other and they had sex.
They were communicating with each other back and forth through text.
It wasn't like she didn't like this guy.
It wasn't like, yeah, she was most certainly drunk, but she also was saying to her friend, I'm going to go have sex with this guy.
The fact that that's not an open and shut case, it exposes the lunacy of this ideology that if exposed to the vast majority of intelligent adult Americans, they would put their foot down and go, wait, wait, what the fuck did you just say?
And I understand that that's what people are kind of trying to struggle with and are trying to come up with these new devices to stop it from happening.
I think the devices they're coming up with are terrible.
But what do we do?
So one thing, I mean, you've got to keep working on the criminal justice system.
You've got to get cops to, like...
Process those rape kits more efficiently, which they're not doing in many states.
There's a lot of rape kits that are sitting on shelves that have never been processed.
And you've got to make cops just better at this, which is what feminists have been doing.
My mother, in the 1960s, that was one of the things she did as a feminist in Berkeley.
She pushed hard.
She protested against the police force in the Bay Area, police forces in the Bay Area, to take rape seriously, which cops didn't do forever until then.
So that's one thing.
And the other thing is...
You'll like this.
I mean, I've been, I say jujitsu, man.
Seriously.
I mean, like, and ability to throw an elbow.
I mean, and there's a group called Insight, which is women of color against violence, who have been doing this.
They have martial arts classes.
They have martial arts schools.
They organize together, and they kick the shit out of men who try to attack them.
Yeah, I mean, it's one of those weird subjects, too, where if you discuss it, you become a rape apologist, you become...
I mean, you're not even allowed to deviate from the ideology.
If you deviate from it in any way, shape, or form, It's a very strict dogma.
I mean, this is non-consensual because she can't consent because she's had a drink.
I've even seen it written that ladies, like a feminist, wrote this blog saying, women don't have sex with your man if he's drunk because he can't consent.
We both decide, you know, if a guy and a girl take martial arts together and the guy and the girl are drinking and the girl wants to wrestle, is she not allowed to consent that she actually wants to wrestle because she's been drinking?
It's only applied to sexuality.
It's not applied to driving.
If you're driving under the influence, you are absolutely, totally responsible.
If you're smashed, no one says, hey, she couldn't consent to driving because she was drunk.
You're responsible for your actions entirely, except sexually.
This comes back to what I started talking about, which is the cultural roots of our country, which is Puritanism.
So, right?
I mean, if you look at Puritans, people in Plymouth Rock, you know, that's one of the things they talked about ad nauseum, that sex is the devil's work.
That it is this special thing that is evil and harmful and damaging and must be controlled more than anything else.
And that is run through our culture in various ways to the very present.
And I would say that a lot of what's going on in this sexual assault discourse stuff that we're talking about, you see it there too.
That that's what's going on.
That there's this belief that, you know, if I had sex that I didn't really feel good about with my boyfriend or not, and we were really drunk and I woke up and I was like, ugh, I don't like this dude and this was not okay...
It's like, I think people are trained to think that they're damaged.
That this is a really terrible thing that happened to them.
I don't know about that.
I mean, it's a crazy thing.
And this goes to prostitution.
This is why prostitution is illegal, right?
It's like, we sell our bodies for money all the time.
Got to get up at 9 o'clock, and I go to the set, and I'm going to be there for three hours, and we're going to have lunch at noon, and they come home, right?
I mean, every person in the porn industry I've ever known has said this about it.
I definitely think you're on to something when it comes to the Puritan roots of this idea that sex is evil and that kids, you know, away from their houses for the first time at 18 years of age having sex in a dorm room.
There's also the thing that happens, too, where the people that you communicate with after the fact can tell you what a horrible thing has happened to you.
And they do it with, like, this rabid intention.
And that was one of the parts of the story that I found quite fascinating.
Like, the friends of the guy versus the friends of the girl.
Like, what their take on it was.
You know?
And that the girl came over, she was drunk, the guy's friend saw her.
And they'll go, yeah, they were both fucked up.
I mean, he had drank a half of a bottle of vodka, and she drank countless beers or whatever.
But the girl's friends were like, well, it was definitely rape.
Well, yeah, it's even worse than that, and now I'm really going to get fired.
One of the things that happens, and it happened in this case from what we can tell from the evidence, is that the average reporting time for sexual assault on campuses is close to a year after the alleged assault.
It's hundreds of days.
It's something at 200 or 300 days is the average time it takes people to report these things.
And we have lots of testimony of those people, those women, saying that, well, I didn't know at first what it was.
I didn't feel good about it, but I didn't know what it was.
And then my professor started talking to me.
And that's what happened in this case.
We're pretty sure that a particular professor...
There.
Not only convinced her that it was rape, but also did a demographic profiling of the guy and said, well, he belongs to these particular demographic groups who are likely to be rapists.
That you could be that boy who's become a valedictorian because you've struggled through high school and kicked ass and tried to get great grades and done your work and studied and under the supervision of your parents and tutors and what have you, and you're looking forward to having this great career, and someone has looked at that hard work and said, oh, he's most likely a rapist.
that professor ever come out and and and confirmed these these statements her claims that that that that men like that are more likely to be racist help of course not how could she okay so so this is just absurd I can only guess where it comes from.
I think that the men at Occidental who have been accused of sexual assault over the last few years, I think, I'm guessing, belong to those categories.
And I'm not trivializing traumatic incidences that really get etched into people's consciousness, but there is a reality that eyewitness accounts are very difficult to corroborate because people, their memories suck.
Human memory, and I've said this on this podcast many times, my memory is dog shit.
But it's really good.
Like, for a person, it's really good.
Like, I can pull things out of the past.
Like, my MMA documentary, my MMA memory, rather, it's fantastic.
What is the vested interest in making sure that this person decides a terrible thing has happened?
I mean, is...
Are you dealing with people that don't like men?
Are you dealing with people that don't like young boys?
Are you dealing with people that don't like masculine sexuality and they're trying to suppress it in any form possible to mute or neuter men in this way?
To make it so they're terrified to have sex with someone unless they have written consent during various stages of the sexual act?
I would like to record on record that we're about to have sex and you are sober.
But that's kind of like the greatest example of that.
A really awesome writer named Teju Cole.
I'm not sure how he pronounces his name that way, but it's T-E-J-U Cole, an amazing writer.
He's actually a fiction writer, but he talked about the Coney 2012 and the white savior complex.
Which, you know, and this is a lot of my work is on this.
It's mostly white people, almost all elite people.
It is almost entirely Western, European, and American people who take it upon themselves to save their social inferiors, right?
And they want to go out and find them, first of all, find these poor, sad people in the world, wherever they may be, whether it's in the ghetto in Compton or Or whether it's in Rwanda, or wherever, and go save them and change their lives and uplift them and make them more like us.
It's sort of the, it is the psychological and cultural core of imperialism.
And to me, it has led to the deaths of millions of people.
So, you know, what did Coney 12 result in?
It literally resulted in, I think, 500 US servicemen being on the ground shooting people.
Now, you could say that was necessary to save those kids from that guy.
And just so happens, historically, it almost never ends at that, right?
It almost always ends in something else.
A bigger war, bigger shooting war erupts because of this.
And now we need to conquer the whole country, as in Iraq, right?
Yeah, so Coney was the oppressor who had to be vanquished to save the kids there.
Right.
Yeah, I think it's this.
I think.
I don't want to speak for her.
I don't want to speak for what's going on in her mind, but I do think it does line up with Coney 2012. That you have to create an oppressor, you have to create a victim in order to save them, so that you become the knight, the white knight.
No, it's, yeah, it's, so much of American culture from the beginning has been defined in that way.
So, like, you know, white people have sort of prided themselves on being, you know, very serious and upright and disciplined and controlled and And therefore they should be the president, right?
Or the CEO or, you know, the professor, right?
And they are the good Puritans, right?
They invented the shit and they adhered to it more than others.
Not perfectly, of course, but they adhered to it more than others.
And they always took that as a source of pride, right?
Yeah, man, we're so repressed.
Yeah, we don't run around naked and fucking in the bushes.
And, you know, we work hard.
You know, we believe that work is a good thing.
Yeah.
As opposed to those other people, right?
Those other people we brought here from Africa who didn't have those ideas, right?
They dance, and they don't think that work in itself is godly.
That's the Protestant work ethic, by the way.
It's not work as a means to an end, which makes sense to all of us.
To get shit, you've got to work hard.
The Protestant or Puritan work ethic is, and this is what they said, work in itself is good, no matter what you get for it.
If you don't get paid at all, if you don't make anything out of it, it's still you should work, right?
That's what they've always said, right?
So you get valorized for just working hard, even if you get nothing for it.
So that's been kind of this, to me and a lot of historians, it's been kind of like the central cultural split in our country for 400, 500 years between those two.
And you kind of nailed it in that bit, and I was kind of stunned.
I was like, oh my God, he sort of gets it.
Although you didn't connect it to race.
But the roots of it, and this is in my book, this is what I do with it, you know, I try to find the roots of it.
I'm like, how did this happen that black people created jazz and rock and roll?
You know, saying things you're not supposed to say in polite company, you know, talking about fucking in the 1950s and 60s when you definitely weren't supposed to do it then.
right taking drugs you know and like making light of that that was not okay right Lenny Lenny was the martyr for that right he went to jail for that shit right so he didn't really talk about it on stage prior really talked prior to Pryor then just blew it up.
Pryor is my major influence.
People ask me at academic conferences, "So who's your major influence?" I'm like, "Well, Michel Foucault and Richard Pryor." And they're like, "What?" It's true, though.
It's absolutely true.
When I saw Live in Concert when I was 12 years old, I, first of all, fell out of my chair in the theater, and I was like, that changed my life.
So, yeah, you got to understand, like, Puritanism and American culture from Plymouth Rock all the way through the 19th century first, okay, which was unbelievably repressive, okay?
This first surgeon general of the United States, Benjamin Rush, wrote these books about how masturbation caused blindness and death and epilepsy.
There were just, like, medical journals were full of this shit about how sex was terrible and would kill you and cause paralysis and all this stuff.
One of the fastest growing industries in the early 19th century, right after the United States was founded, was for devices to stop people from masturbating.
So, like, chain mail mitts for men.
And these hobbles that kept women's legs together, that had a lock and key, and then chastity belts, everybody knows about that.
It was just this amazingly comically repressive culture around sex, and then also around work.
So the Puritan work ethic, that work is good no matter what you get for it, and you're doing the devil's work if you're not working, was in five-year-old children's textbooks.
Kindergarteners were taught that playing with their toys was the devil's work.
And they were taught to be useful in their lives and then to find a profession and a vocation when they're in kindergarten, right?
And it just suffused the whole society.
So like every political leader, every business leader, and certainly all the religious leaders, everybody, and novels that were written, poetry, it's just all about work all the time to be godly and never have sex, even in marriage.
There was even a lot of talk through the 19th century about even having sex with your wife was dangerous at best.
Like you did it because you had to to procreate to make more Americans.
But that was it.
Like you got to be really careful.
You can't let it get out of hand beyond that.
You got to just – yeah.
So this is – and historians all agree on this.
It was just a phenomenal – so this is Victorianism, right?
This is like when Puritanism moves into Victorianism, right?
I mean, one thing, one of the more common, one of the most common explanations is industrial capitalism, right?
So this is also the time of the first factories, you know, and this is the time when people are moving from the farms into cities and working in sort of industrial capitalist formats, right, where they're sitting at a table and there's a division of labor and you put together the machinery or the shoe piece by piece and da-da-da.
So that required, you know, that requires a lot of discipline, right?
It requires getting people to stop drinking and stop fornicating and to, you know, be committed to work is a good thing.
I'm not sure that's, I mean, that's a decent explanation.
I'm not sure if that really explains it entirely.
First of all, because it kind of pre-exists it.
You know, the Puritans were way before all that happened.
there was industrial capitalism, but it was this crazy repressive culture that Americans lived in.
It's funny for us to look at now, the things that they were saying at the time and doing at the time, but it was just, it's hard to imagine living like that.
- Hmm.
- Okay, so that was kind of, and that was also considered to be what white people do.
You know, it was totally racialized, right?
So it's like white, good Americans, white meaning white people do that.
And also, I mean, that kind of extended to dancing.
So I have a whole section in my book on dancing.
And so, like, it was terrible to dance in American culture, if you're a white person.
Leisure was bad.
It was all bad.
So that's where everyone lived.
And then along come these people from this other place called West Africa, where none of these ideas existed.
Like, The Protestant work ethic was like, what are you talking about?
That's a purely Northern European and American invention.
Very few people in world history have subscribed to that idea.
So the West Africans come over here.
They also believed in moving your body as a good thing.
It was a beautiful thing to them, moving it in sensual ways, dancing and otherwise.
They didn't believe that sex outside of marriage was wicked.
It was going to destroy your life, especially for women.
They thought that women who had sex outside of marriage were fine, that it was no problem.
They come over here, and then, as slaves, they have zero, of course, incentive to internalize, to adopt this white person's culture, right?
Not only that, they're sort of physically barred from it, right?
So citizenship, they're not given citizenship, right?
And that's not good, because you don't get to vote, and you don't get equal protection under the law, and all those good things that come with citizenship.
What people miss about it is that, here and everywhere, citizenship is also a cultural thing, right?
You're considered a good American if you do particular things.
And in that case, it meant putting your body in a walking prison.
That's what a good citizen did, a good white person.
So slaves were here.
They brought elements of this West African culture that thought that sex was okay and that work was a means to an end and that was it.
And they had no incentive to adopt this insane repressive culture that the white people were all about.
And so they developed their own, which wasn't West African, and it wasn't American.
It was this new thing, which we now call African American culture.
And that is what gave us jazz, man.
Because what is jazz?
Jazz is the music of improvisation.
It's been called the music of freedom.
You take this musical structure, and then the soloist does what he wants for a moment.
He goes out of the structure and is free.
He's liberated from the structure and then comes back into it.
It's the music of improvisation and freedom.
I don't think it's a coincidence.
The people who were separated from that ridiculously repressive culture created that music.
from the beginning black working-class culture has been the main not the only but the main counterpoint to this puritanism that's been with us ever since that's absolutely fascinating it's a very interesting scenario to picture what America would have been like had there been no slaves had the African American culture not sort of you know what it would be Sweden I mean Pretty safe.
And I look at Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, and Jewish immigrants.
And one of the things that blows people away, they don't know this.
Most people don't know this.
When all three of those groups first got here, so the Irish was early 19th century, Italians and Jews was late 19th, early 20th century, when they came here in large numbers for the first time, they were not considered white immigrants.
So people who look just like me, white as hell, and not only just not white, the Irish were considered to be Negroes.
Yeah, because they came with this culture that was nowhere near white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that we've been talking about.
So the Irish were known as the greatest dancers on earth, even better than blacks.
They invented tap dancing with blacks in New York City.
They could give a fuck about working, except how much it got them in terms of wages.
They believed in drinking beginning at 8 a.m.
and continuing all the way through the day during work.
When they got here, they lived with and around blacks because they were poor.
So in New York and Philadelphia, Boston, they lived in black neighborhoods.
And often you see a lot of cohabitation and you see a lot of what's called miscegenation, blacks and whites having sex together, procreating.
So they were called white niggers.
It was very common and a lot of discrimination against them because of that.
And also there's very little evidence of racism among Irish Americans during that period, which is weird now because if you think about it, I mean, Irish Americans for the last hundred or so years have kind of been, unfortunately, the leaders in many ways of white American racism.
But then there's very little evidence of it.
And then what happened was they were like, wait, We'd like to get the vote.
I mean, they were getting the vote, but not in mass.
We'd like to get political power.
We'd like to be treated.
We'd like to get good jobs, be treated like these white Americans.
So it was this very deliberate conscious effort by Irish American immigrant group leaders and church leaders.
To do several things.
One of them was to distance themselves from blacks, so they moved out of the neighborhoods.
to enter the army and serve in the Mexican-American War and the Civil War to prove that they were good white American civilians and soldiers.
They entered politics, they became Democratic Party politicians, again proving that they were committed to the country.
And most of all, everyone knows this, they became cops.
So Irish Americans moved into the police forces in huge numbers, especially in New York and Philadelphia during this period, and fire departments.
And they became racists.
So there were these big anti-black riots called the New York City Draft Riots in 1863, which was just this huge pogrom lynching, mass lynching of blacks in the streets of New York City.
So yeah, you could pay someone to go to war in your place, is what I'm trying to say.
So it was resentment against that, but it actually sort of very quickly turned toward blacks because it was a good, wide belief that the war was on behalf of blacks, right, to free them.
So the Irish were kind of pissed off at the rich people who were, you know, not going to war when they should have been.
But then it very quickly turned to an anti-black mass lynching because they were blaming these guys for this war that a lot of these Irish guys were volunteering to go fight in.
Yeah.
But anyway, so if you look at social scientists in the early 19th century when the Irish were coming in big numbers, they're like, they're Negroid, they're really from Africa, or they're chimpanzees.
There was a lot of theory among social scientists and so-called scientists that the Irish were actually apes.
Well, yeah, no, but they still are apes, is what they're saying.
But then they go through this really aggressive process of what's called assimilation, right?
They tried to assimilate into the dominant white culture.
And here's this amazing thing.
So by the end of the 19th century, just like less than 100 years, all the social scientists, they're doing all these taxonomies of the world's races, right?
And they're ranking them.
Really?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
This is what my people, professors, were doing then, man.
It was hilarious.
And so they would rank all these races and including in Europe.
They had races in Europe.
They divided Europe into three races.
There were the Northern Europeans who were the best ones and the Middle Europeans that were okay.
And then there were the Southern Europeans who sucked and who should be, you know, ditch diggers.
Well, let me finish the Irish thing, and I'll get to the Jews because it's totally linked.
Within less than 100 years, these social scientists and all these professors, etc., and political leaders, moved the Irish from Chimp to Nordic, which was the top of the chain.
That was the Northern European that was called the white man par excellence.
So they, because they were cops and firefighters and politicians and generals, and they hated blacks, and they were living apart from blacks, and they gave up dancing.
If you look at priests, Irish priests, through the 19th century, that's one of the things they were very concerned about, was that Irish were dancing too much.
No, they invented tap to tap dance, which is like the base of so much of vernacular dance now.
The Jews.
There was a prominent social scientist named Arthur Abernathy who wrote a book which was very typical of the time in 1906, I believe, the title of which was, The Jew is a Negro.
So the same thing was done with the Jews when they got here, and they got here a little later than the Irish, in large numbers, sort of late 19th century.
Same thing.
They were known for their musical ability, right?
Jews became very famous in jazz, right?
They sort of co-founded jazz in many ways.
A lot of them are gangsters.
That's not okay, right?
Yeah, the Jewish mob was almost as big as the Italian mob when they got here.
And, you know, they were considered to be very sensual of the body, you know, animalistic.
And check this out.
This is, people, when I tell my students this, they do not believe me, but it's, many historians have written about this.
Jews dominated, dominated two sports in the first half of the 20th century.
In fighting, it seems to be an economic position thing.
When people come over and they're immigrants and they're at the bottom of the economic food chain, right now you're seeing an influx of Russian champions.
It's hilarious to look at sports writers in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s talk about Jewish basketball players and how they're naturally gifted and they can jump higher and they're faster and they're trickier.
Well, so this is in my book, too, but many historians have said, well, if you're going to be selectively breeding people, meaning forcing them to have sex with people when they don't want to or whatever, right, they're not going to work very well for you.
So it's a very tricky thing being a slave master, right?
Because there's no incentive whatsoever to work.
The only incentive to work as a slave is to avoid the lash, to avoid the whip.
So what slaves did, typically, was they worked just enough to not get whipped, right?
And not one bit more.
So if you're doing other things to make them want to work even less, they will, right?
And there's not much you can do about it, right?
Because you can't whip a slave to death.
If you whip a slave to death, then you have zero labor, right?
So masters were always trying to strike this delicate balance about getting the maximum output from slaves who had zero incentive to work.
With wages, with a wage economy, right?
We all have incentive.
We work like shit, you know, just to get the money, right?
But there wasn't that under slavery.
So slave masters actually oddly had this disadvantage in a way.
But anyway, so no, most historians have not found much evidence of genetic manipulation like that.
Yeah, but there's like a certain athleticism that's associated with the giant black people that's not associated with the giant white people who are more lumbering and never running backs.
Yeah, so he's argued this and he's a black Canadian and he's actually said in the New Yorker, which was amazing, and he got in a lot of trouble for it.
He's like, no, yeah, actually we are genetically better at sports.
That's why we're faster.
How could he get in trouble for it?
Oh, because that's connected to sort of old-fashioned scientific racism.
But when you look at all the African-American basketball players that are elite, all the African-American football players that are elite, all the African-American boxers.
You can, but the guys that are really good at it all seem to be African-American, and they can do things like, show me a white guy that moves like Michael Jordan and I'll sit down.
Yeah, well, but I mean, I'm saying, but they were considered to be—and they were awesome, supposedly naturally gifted athletes— Well, I mean, there's still, there were some great black fighters as well.
Yeah, so at one point, I think it was in the 1940s, something like six or seven out of the top ten scorers in the professional basketball league at the time were Jewish.
You could take a guy and teach him till the cows come home, or you could find some guy who's working construction somewhere, and he could punch a bag and you just go, Jesus Christ!
There's a guy named Takanori Gomi who's a very good pitcher in Japan, and he became a knockout fighter as an MMA fighter, and he throws punches a lot like the way a guy throws a fastball.
He's always out of balance.
He throws everything behind his shots.
Yeah, it's similar mechanics, I would say, in a lot of ways.
But I think, well, you know, boxing, I think you can get away with having shorter arms, whereas pitchers seems to be, like, that's a big factor in the mechanical advantage of the longer frames.
But yeah, I guess, so getting that particular leverage and mastering that, having that mechanics is something that's not really always, you can't really teach it is what we're getting at, right?
Well, also, we live in an incredibly war-like society, and we are running on the momentum of many, many wars and our dominance over these wars.
I mean, our victories, World War I, World War II, not so much Vietnam, but all this other, the military-industrial complex, which has sort of infiltrated the entire world with military bases.
I mean, that's our DNA. It's one of the reasons why Canadians are so much different than us.
They believe that during James Caan's lifetime, between the time he was born and the time his direct lineage died, between, depending on who you ask, 20 and 70 million people died.
They had so many bodies stacked up that the Khwarezmian Shah had sent this scout team to go check out Jin China.
They had gotten there after the Mongols had already invaded...
And getting close, they had abandoned their mission because the roads were so covered in dead bodies and decay that people were getting sick and dying.
The roads were filled with mud, and the mud was actually the decaying bodies and made the roads unstable.
They saw a pile of bones in the distance that they thought was a snow-covered mountain.
And as they got closer, they realized it was bones.
Dan Carlin's Hardcore History does a five-part piece on the Wrath of the Khans.
So much so that there was a recent study that showed that they did core samples that the carbon footprint of Earth changed during his lifetime because he killed so many people.
Yeah, but the reason for bringing that up is I wish you had known more about Genghis Khan, because I would ask, well, how does a culture become that warlike?
Because that was like some complete next-level shit.
Well, they were saying in Carlin's work he was talking about how there's a great argument about Iraq and that Baghdad literally never recovered from Genghis Khan invading in the 1200s.
Like, that was the Muslim people, the Islamic people were at the head, the front of the line when it came to science and philosophy and it was just a completely different idea of the Islamic culture than we look at today.
But Genghis Khan, they sacked Baghdad and killed everyone.
Killed the entire town.
They were the original double-tap missile.
Not only did they kill the entire town, they would go away and then come back several days later and kill anybody who had been hiding.
They wronged us, so we gotta go fucking avenge ourselves.
I mean, I do think that's like, that's kind of like the base of the Republican Party.
You know, I think that that's why they want to go abroad.
They don't, it's not really even ideological.
It's sort of this primal masculine urge to defend one's family and honor.
That's one reason we've gone and killed people.
Then the other is economic, right, which everyone knows about, you know, the war was for oil, right, or natural resources or, you know, strategic advantage against our enemies, right?
And then the third, which is what I talk a lot about, is this humanitarian shit, right?
Which is like, we need to go out and save the world.
We need to go out and make people be like us.
And I think that drives actually a lot more foreign policy than we give it credit for.
Especially now, especially with the Obama administration.
So if you look at people inside of his administration, like Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and even Obama himself, and even Joe Biden, they really come from that kind of thinking about You know, they're like community organizers.
They're people who did go out into the ghettos to uplift these poor people, right?
That's who they are.
And they've said this.
If you ask them or read them what they have to say, they say, we need to go and save the Libyans.
So that means we've got to bomb Libya.
We need to save the Syrians.
So we've got to bomb Syria.
We've got to save—and they're big on Africa.
Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been calling for basically invading Africa for a long, long time.
To stop another Rwanda from happening, to stop another genocide from happening.
It's this incredible thing that Americans and the British really kind of created and perfected over the last 120 or so years.
The British were all about this, right?
South Africa was all about, you know, it was about taking the goods down there, the diamonds and the minerals and all that shit, but it was also about uplifting the savages and all of Africa.
And if you read his stuff, a lot of people don't know this, but, like, if you read his article in 2007 when he was just starting to run for president in Foreign Affairs Journal, he says, America needs to be the world's leader.
And he says, for that, to do that, we need to increase the military dramatically.
We need to have more Marines, more Army soldiers, the whole nine yards.
He called for increasing the military budget.
People don't realize this, in 2007. And he said, because we need to lead the world, we need to be everywhere in the world.
You know, I think a lot of people both in Congress and sort of in the public generally have been less and less interested in war for a lot of good reasons.
And one of the interesting things is it's been, as you said, it's been left and right.
You know, it's been people on the left and the right have been less and less interested in the war.
So for the first time in decades, we have He's a little wishy.
The big fear that everyone has with the idea of a non-interventional foreign policy is that some big evil government will build up.
Without us being there to smack them down, some ISIS-type scenario will get completely out of control and start killing Americans abroad and start launching attacks.
Well, I mean, the point is that the US military historically has never been used defensively, really.
It's never ever, even in World War II. I mean, it's hard to even argue that Pearl Harbor was, you know, it was first of all, a lot of people have said that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor, but...
But certainly apart from World War II, the U.S. military has never been used truly in defense of us.
And that's what people need to come to grips with.
So if you want to talk about changing that pattern and creating a military that is truly defensive and changing the culture so that we...
Are interested in our military only as a defensive mechanism, means, right?
A great example of that argument was a document written by a think tank in 2000, 99 or 2000. You may have heard of this.
A project for a new American century.
It was a think tank in Washington, D.C., which was full of people who ended up in the Bush administration.
Neoconservatives.
And in that document, it's called Rebuilding America's Defenses.
You can Google it.
It's online.
In that document, they call for a massive buildup of the US military.
They called for a massive deployment of troops and bases and aircraft carriers all across the world.
And they said that that is necessary to maintain world order, American dominance, and they said peace.
And one of the scariest things about that document is that in it, and everyone should look at this, it says, this is in 2000. It says, we can't convince Congress or the American people to go for this program, to spend way more money on our defense, on our military, and build these bases all over the world and send aircraft carriers everywhere, unless, they said in the document, unless there is a precipitating event like Pearl Harbor.
And that's what I've had a problem with a lot of people that say that, oh, the government planned it.
Look how they capitalized on it.
Man, just because somebody capitalized on something doesn't mean they planned it.
It's much more likely they saw an opening to pass through.
Like, that's also been the argument about Oklahoma City.
When Oklahoma City, there's a radical sweep of legislation that went through, that couldn't go through, anti-terrorism type legislation post-Oklahoma City.
And like, well, they planned Oklahoma City, they blew up that building, and they blamed it on Timothy McVeigh in order to push this, and no fertilizer.
I mean, there's all these compelling arguments about it that are really confusing as fuck.
Because you get trapped down that rabbit hole of...
Well, it's also the idea about something like ISIS. Like, why would you call us a false flag when you could just leave a bunch of weapons lying around, let a bunch of assholes suit up and get crazy, and then shoot them down.
It also seems to me that as technology improves and as our ability to kill people easier and quicker improves, it gets weirder and weirder when you're willing to engage in war.
Like post-Hiroshima, it became this fact that nuclear power and nuclear arsenals existed.
And it can be done, but it hasn't been done since.
It's like it's so atrocious, and it kills so many civilians, and it's so non-surgical that we decide we're not going to do that anymore.
But it's always there.
We're pointing them at the Soviet Union.
The Soviet Union's pointing them at us.
Everyone during your high school years and my high school years, we were terrified of being attacked by Russia.
And we were going to mutually assured self-destruction was the only thing keeping all this from happening.
But as technology gets better, It's almost easier for people to cause mass destruction.
Yeah, but ISIS is maybe 20,000 to 30,000 19 to 20-year-old dudes with- Is that really what it is?
Something like that.
I've never seen an estimate more than 30,000.
They're a bunch of fucking teenage lunatics, you know, basically.
I mean, that's the core of them.
And then in terms of, like, the hardcore membership, the estimates I've seen are more like 10,000.
What are they going to do against the Kurdish army, the Iraqi army, and the Saudis?
I don't see it.
So, yeah, good luck, dudes.
And also, on top of that, as I was saying earlier, good luck trying to impose Sharia on a whole population that's streaming the Simpsons through its satellite dishes.
But when you see these guys getting their heads cut off on television, that, to me, the big production of taking people, especially taking people that don't deserve it, that's one of the weird ones to me.
What could be gained out of cutting someone's head?
I think I was probably 7, somewhere around then, when the Vietnam War ended, between 7 and 10, something like that.
I was living in San Francisco, so it was between 7 and 10. And the war ended, and I remember thinking to myself as a young boy, they're done with war.
Beautiful.
This is good.
I really remember thinking that.
People figured out that war is terrible, and we'll never go to war again.
And then when we invaded Iraq, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I think I was probably 21. And I remember thinking, I can't fucking believe we're at war again.
Like, I thought we were done.
I thought people had realized that war is ridiculous and we would never go to war again.
And that was just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to this insanity that's happened post 9-11.
The post 9-11 insanity is just this perpetual war, the culture of war.
Do you buy into the conspiracies like the Eisenhower conspiracy when he was leaving office, when he was saying, beware of the military and industrial complex.
There's a machine that wants to go to war.
Do you buy that they look at this perpetual war as a constant profit source?
Yeah, now we know that if you look at Hillary Clinton's list of donors, it's like she's been called the senator from Lockheed Martin because she gets so many donations from him.
And is she the only one?
Of course not.
But, you know, they have other interests.
They have constituents.
They have all sorts of competing interests.
I think the defense contractors have some power, just like the Israeli lobby has some power.
But actually, at the end of the day, I think they're autonomous, and I think they have their own motives.
And I think a lot of them are, especially with people like Hillary and Obama and others, and the neocons under Bush, had an ideological motivation, which was Pax Americana, which was a world order controlled by us, or controlled by them, I should say.
When you see the difference between the way Obama was, like the Hope website, Hope and Change, whatever the fuck it was, when they had this whole section on whistleblowers about helping whistleblowers alert the American people to crime.
And to things that are going on that are unconstitutional.
And then it's all been removed from the website.
And now you see how horrible he's been on not just whistleblowers, but on the press.
So in 2007, 2008, when he's running for president, I was I felt like I was on an island in a sea of crazy people because I was reading what he was writing.
I was listening to his speeches.
I read the Democratic Party's platform for 2008.
And in it, it was all about the military industrial complex.
It was all about expanding American power and control abroad.
It was about increasing the military budget, increasing the number of Marines and Army soldiers.
It was about not repealing the Patriot Act.
It was about a very powerful state, nation state, that controlled not just people abroad, but people here.
Dude has always been about that.
Always.
He's always been a nationalist first, an American nationalist first, and everything else is second.
Yeah, I was sort of listening to these people talk about him being a peace candidate and someone who would eliminate the Patriot Act and someone who would, you know, never spy on Americans.
And I'm like, no, look at who he was when he was running.
He was saying this publicly.
He wasn't keeping it secret.
It just people wanted to see something else in him for various reasons.
Well, you know, one of the most disturbing moments of the debates, to me, was when him and McCain were going at it, and McCain corrected him about Afghanistan.
And McCain, you know, we were talking about, like, just going into Afghanistan and sending in troops, and he's like, hold on, do you know what the fuck you're talking about?
Essentially, McCain was like, have you been to Afghanistan?
Do you know what it's like there?
Like, that place is run the same way it was run when Alexander the Great was around.
It's really not that much different.
It's incredibly difficult terrain, really hard to get.
Anywhere.
People can hide anywhere.
Essentially, you have one city in the entire country.
You got Kabul, and then you got warlords.
Warlords that control small groups of people, and they're scattered throughout the country.
What do you think about, like, the WikiLeaks stuff and the Edward Snowden stuff and all this new, the digital age that we live in is very fascinating to me in that there is just a certain amount of...
There's impossibility in controlling data when you get to a large organization like the United States military.
No matter how well they put up their firewalls, no matter how good they guard their data, you're still dealing with human beings and young human beings, by the way.
And sex is not bad, and no one is trying to stop gay porn.
Here's the thing, unless you're some sort of a fucking churchgoer, and you think that homosexuality is evil, there's no movement to stop gay guys from making gay porn.
No men are out there going, we need to stop these gay men from abusing each other in gay porn.
No, they like fucking each other.
They do it for fun.
They enjoy the shit out of it.
And guys like Dan Savage, he'll openly talk about how he...
I mean, he was on the podcast just going off about how he watches gay porn.
Well, that's the thing about having the reach that you have with the internet.
It's like, you'll find a group of people out there.
And that's one of the weird things about...
Any, like, really crazy ideology.
You'll find a bunch of people that agree with you on your adoption of Sharia law.
And then they'll gravitate to you like a magnet.
You know, Sam Harris turned me on to this video.
It's a terrifying video of these guys.
and I believe they were in Norway or one of those countries that's like really open to various religions coming there and there's these guys are doing this Muslim, they're doing this speech and they're talking about the idea of radical Muslim.
They're laughing at people calling things radical Muslims.
And in the video he starts saying, "How many of you agree with what it says in the Quran about the way homosexuals should be treated?
Everybody raises their hand.
That homosexuals should be stoned and that whatever it says, whatever God's law is, would be the very best way to handle a situation.
And they all raise their hand.
And he's like, are you radical?
You're not radical.
You're just Muslims.
And he's like laughing at it, thinking that, I mean, the way Harris described it to me, he's like, this guy is saying something That he has so much confidence in it.
He's like saying it almost like you would say, the best way to stop tooth decay is brushing your teeth.
Like something everybody knows.
And he's saying it like that confident.
But he's talking about stoning homosexuals.
He's talking, you know, I mean, it's incredible.
He's talking about women being able to vote.
He's talking about women, you know, having second class citizenship status.
But this is just how it is in the Quran.
And they're all agreeing with him.
And it's an unbelievable video to watch.
Because you watch it, you realize, like, wow, there are people like that out there.
And they're all praising Allah in this video, and they're all joining together in this.
And it's just a large group of thousands of people.
And they found themselves.
They found people like them.
They put this video, and they took this video and put it online.
And I think the title of the video is, It's Not Radical Islam.
Well, he certainly has said things that sound like that.
I mean, he's a big interventionist.
There's a moment in his book where it looks like he's advocating nuclear assault on people in the Middle East, and he has sort of backed away from that.
Well, he says that, you know, if you have, you know, X million people who are committed to this fanatical, genocidal jihad, then the nuclear option might make sense.
Well, it's just that, I mean, I'm not a fan of that, but it is that Islamophobia has particular political applications right now, whereas the Mormons are safe in Utah.
No one's talking about invading Utah and killing the Mormons, right?
Yeah, I mean, look, if they ever came over here and tried to convert Los Angeles into Sharia regime, give me a fucking AK-47, you know, and I'll shoot him in the head myself.
My point is going out there and stopping them from doing it to other people is simply going to create more of them.
And more importantly, it's going to actually cause them to wish harm on me, to do harm to me.
Or do you say, listen, that crazy over there is going to eventually come over here We've got to figure out a way to plan ahead or we're going to run into a bad situation that's going to be out of control.
The few people that have been killed over there, the few reporters that have been snatched up and had their heads cut off on video, it's such a small amount.
No, because everyone knew that there was like, because I remember it, I guarantee you other folks that are in the know, especially politically in the parties, they know.
Like, that's a big skeleton in this closet.
Like, look, dude, you could be vice president.
No one's going to dig too deep.
But if you ever get to be president, they're like, why did you plagiarize fucking Kennedy, man?
It makes you paranoid and self-aware and sensitive and you're also more aware of other people's feelings and it's probably the least likely to rape drug voted ever.
So I'm for total decriminalization, legalization tomorrow of all drugs, period.
But I actually voted against, was it 17 in California, Prop 17?
Mm-hmm.
Because if you read it, it was, and a lot of people were saying this, it was written by this guy in Oakland, who was going to be the new corporate chieftain of the weed industry.
And it was written in a way that was going to make it very difficult for the mom and pops in Humboldt to exist, to survive.
Really?
Yeah, because it was going to be full of regulations, right?
So the state was going to regulate the shit out of it.
The guy who's going to run the Walmart of weed in that giant Oakland warehouse he was going to establish in the East Bay up there, oh, he's going to be fine because he's going to be super regulated.
So a lot of the Humboldt growers were opposed to that proposition for that reason because they saw it forcing them out and handing the reins over to these big corporate entities and pharmaceuticals.
So the prediction was, and I thought it was right, that the big pharmaceutical companies were going to move in and take over and make it into a big corporate industry.
Yeah, I want the state to have nothing to do with it at all.
But anyway, in Portugal, a great study was done by Glenn Greenwald and the Cato Institute about three or four years ago.
Looking at the 10 years of decriminalization in Portugal, and what they found was a decrease in the number of HIV cases, not surprising, a decrease in the addiction rate, which is amazing, and a decrease in usage.
Yeah, I mean, in those movies, those shitty Arnold Schwarzenegger cop movies, there's always a scene where his breakfast is like he pours a fucking couple slices of pizza into a blender.
You know what I mean?
There's something about self-destruction, about people that are drinking whiskey first thing in the morning that we find romantic.
Now, you're a grown adult with children and a college professor, and you're faced with all these contradictions and this ridiculous way we're living our life in this society.
How frustrating is it for you to see things so clearly, but yet see this schizophrenic, bizarre society that you're forced to exist in?
Do you think there's a certain amount of paying attention to the world that may perhaps be detrimental to the individual?
There's a certain gauntlet we all have to sort of run to live our lives, regulations that we have to follow as preposterous as they may be.
But I've often wondered, there's like this struggle between trying to think about how much should I just concentrate on enjoying my time here There's your ludicrous bit.
Well, aren't those particular neighborhoods in some way sort of like a microcosm for the issues of the world that it's very difficult to overcome momentum?
And the momentum of a terrible neighborhood, a crime-ridden neighborhood, it's Born into poverty and born into the momentum of all these unemployed people on welfare.
It's the worst aspects of human beings right in front of you, and it's not in your life.
Your life, you're going where you're going, you're talking to students, you're doing your thing, and then you immerse yourself through the internet or whatever, the media, you're getting this vision of the worst parts of humans.