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Sept. 23, 2014 - The Joe Rogan Experience

02:54:46

Joe Rogan Experience #553 - Thaddeus Russell

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01:12:30

thaddeus russell

01:37:52

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		Task Tass, check it out!
		The Joe Rogan experience.
		Train by day!
		Joe Rogan Podcast by night!
		All day! - Mr. Russell.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Hey.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you very much for doing this, man.
unidentified		I appreciate it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hey, thank you.
		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...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sure.
		I mean, so there's two kinds of conspiracies.
		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.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it seems like, if you look at the entire situation in the Middle East, it seems like there's no good way to just get out of there.
		It seems like, is there?
		I mean, please tell me.
		I think there's a way to...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, so I'm an out now guy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		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.
		It's perpetual.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So the anti-interventionist argument is simply that pretty much every intervention has a negative consequence.
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So the less, the better.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So my position is let's do none, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But when you have a guy like a Hitler or someone along those lines that's causing genocide and planning to take over the world and...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a crazy example of blowback.
		It seems like it's a perpetual cycle then.
		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what everyone's terrified of with the Islamic State, is that they want to impose Sharia law throughout the rest of the world.
		I mean, that's what everyone's afraid of.
		The religion of America, you know, what we subscribe to, versus the religion of Sharia law.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so I have an answer for that.
unidentified		Okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're into porn in Iran?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They love porn.
		Middle East.
		And Pakistan, Google has announced for several years, Pakistan is the leading country in the world for searches for the word sex.
unidentified		Whoa.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And then, in particular, also interesting, searches for gay sex, like terms, like gay sex terms, like anal sex and man on man or whatever.
		The Middle East is like leading the world in that, right?
		And what they love is they love American nasty pop culture and Western nasty pop culture.
		They love women in bikinis and they love whiskey and they love stupid, you know, they love Jersey Shore and the rest of it.
		Stuff that we look down on and actually what it's doing, my argument is...
		Is that it's subverting the hell out of Sharia law every single day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You say we look down on it, but we obviously create it, support it, and probably consume more of it than anybody else anywhere.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		When I say we, I mean uptight professors.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You and I? No, I mean uptight professors like the ones I deal with, not like normal people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you've been fired from being a little too controversial.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I read an article about you in the Huffington Post that you wrote.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was that all about?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mm-hmm.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But I was sort of frustrated.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Does that become an issue with ego?
		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.
		I'm right, you are wrong.
		I am older, you are younger.
		I am smart, you are dumb.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		All the time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Gross.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
		So what I have to say about that is that we all come at questions through our own ideologies, right?
		I don't think there's any such thing as an objective history or an objective political science.
		I mean, I think we all talk about these things through our own biases and our own lenses, right?
		First of all, I think what we should do is just admit it and be honest about it.
		And that's what I try to do in my classes.
		I try to say, hey, you know what I just told you?
		That's my interpretation.
		That's not the truth.
		I never tell the truth.
		I only tell people what I think.
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And with an argument, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why do you think that is?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why is academia and the left – Sort of inexorably connected.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, so when a lot of left academics are asked this, the answer they give you is, we're smarter.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, so that if you're intelligent and study, you will come to that position.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it because the right is kind of inexorably connected to religion?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because Christianity and the right are pretty much inseparable.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And influence the youth.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And influence the youth, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is one of the things that drives a lot of parents crazy, you know?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm a victim.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Lefty talk.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the I'm a victim stuff is strong and it's very disempowering.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's confusing too because I don't know if you know this case from Occidental College.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Occidental University?
unidentified		Is that what it is?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's where I teach, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you teach?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Occidental College.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Down the road.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Jesus Christ.
		Okay.
		Do you know the story about the two young kids?
		They were freshmen.
		They were going through the hazing thing.
unidentified		Oh.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They both get drunk.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And they have sex.
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And the guy gets expelled for sexual assault.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They're both drunk.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only are they both drunk, but the girl texts her friend, I'm about to go have sex, texts him, do you have a condom?
		He says yes.
		He says, get over there.
		She says, I'm on my way.
		She goes over there, and they decide that it's sexual assault because the girl had been drinking.
		Even though the guy had also been drinking, it's sexual assault.
		The guy gets kicked out of college.
		He's in the middle of a lawsuit.
		I mean, when you're 18 years old, your life is thrown into a turmoil.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he's kicked out of school for having sex while drunk with a girl who was sex while drunk.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So you're about to get me fired.
		Really?
		Again, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for this?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Thanks, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Please, speak out.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I... God.
		So this sexual assault, either, depending on your point of view, epidemic or hysteria, the epicenter of it has been Occidental, where I've taught.
		It started about two years ago.
		This is a long conversation to have.
		Please.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I think it's an important one, though, because it's confusing as hell.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		Boy, okay.
		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?
		I mean, talk about seeking justice.
		That's justice, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's very bizarre also that this idea has come out of what a lot of people believe to be what you would call feminism.
		And what feminism is supposed to push for is equality.
		But not equality when it comes to responsibility for your sexual actions while you're intoxicated.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Definitely.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know, no question about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No question.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		We know people, I know people very closely what's happened to this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, we should also say that getting someone drunk and fucking them because you know they're drunk is gross and it is rape.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or at least getting them loaded to the point where they can't figure out what the fuck is going on.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		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?
		And that has been called victim-blaming.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so you know about this, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's like saying the Rutgers kid that got killed by a bear two days ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Don't run from bears.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, yeah, yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know?
		Is that victim blaming?
		No, it's fucking wise advice if you want to survive a bear attack.
		Don't run.
		They chase.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I don't have a daughter, but I have a son.
		But if I had a daughter, goddamn right, I'm going to tell her not to get blackout drunk at the frat house.
		Yeah.
		And you're going to try to stop me and tell me that's blaming my daughter?
		I don't think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't think guys should get blackout drunk at the frat house either.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Yeah, right.
		It's not good for you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not for anybody.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And people fall off of roofs at frat houses and die from it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There are people that will take advantage of you, and not just sexually.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
andy stumpf ▲ ● ▼		There's vicious people that will do things to you if they think you're passed out.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just not smart.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so feminism, this particular brand of it...
		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?
		How effective is that going to be?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even if it's 1%?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		One out of 100 guys are rapists?
unidentified		No, no, no.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sorry.
		Of the rapes committed, 4% of the rapes?
		I don't know.
		It's something like...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's really hard.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's a very tiny percentage.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's really hard to do statistics with rape, too, because a lot of people don't report rape and they're embarrassed and ashamed and...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		We do have, well, we do have the Bureau of Justice, Department of Justice has conducted pretty massive surveys of women.
		So this is not reported crimes.
		This is just they went and asked women questions about their history with assault.
		And there's been this massive decline in rapes and sexual assault since the 1990s, like more than 60% decline.
		So, also the talk of a rape epidemic and a rape culture now, I think, is overblown.
		I mean, of course there are elements in our culture that are definitely rape cultures, right?
		I mean, there's no doubt, you know, there's little corners here and there, but the dominant culture is not a rape culture.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		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.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I can understand if this is a personal issue.
		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.
		But these guys were just creepy fucking weirdos.
		Like, unden...
		You've never seen this?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've got to play it for you.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because it's beautiful.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's beautiful and it's ridiculousness.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah.
		But here's the thing about that.
		It's like the other message in that is that it's for men to save women.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Excuse me.
		Feminism was about women liberating themselves, right?
		We can't do it for them.
		We cannot do it for them, right?
		So talking to men, talking to those serial rapists about how bad they are and how bad this is, what exactly is that going to accomplish?
		A, and B, it's putting the responsibility on men and it's saying women must be saved, which is like, that is the soul of conservatism, right?
		To say that we must come save our social inferiors, that is like the essence of old school patriarchy and conservatism.
		It is to meet anti-feminist to the bone.
		And that's what no one's talking about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, this idea that the women can't consent because they've had a couple of drinks is a weird issue because clearly there's a scale.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		But it's not rape.
		But they want to call that rape.
		But then there's blackout drunk, which is rape.
unidentified		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And somewhere along the line, it becomes reprehensible.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Three drinks in or four drinks in.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's debatable.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Do you know about the bill in the California legislature that's about to be the law of the land most likely?
unidentified		No.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So yeah, it's probably going to pass.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Anyone.
		Yeah.
		So your girlfriend, boyfriend and girlfriend have a couple drinks laughing and giggling.
		They make out.
		They have sex.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And they don't even put a sort of a threshold on how many drinks it takes.
		So I'm, you know, I'm a serial rapist according to this law.
		We all are, according to this law.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what is intoxication?
		There's intoxication that's the limit of alcohol intoxication when you're driving, which a lot of people are debating is too low.
		That would be legally applied to sex.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, from demons.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Demons are the males.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		But not just demons from sex itself.
		Like, sex is seen as this sort of...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Dangerous, harmful thing.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's sort of set apart from everything else in the world.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's why that...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because it's sex.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That case in Occidental that you raised, I mean...
		So they say, and I've read the whole report, okay, by the college.
		The report says, by the college, this was consensual sex, okay, period.
		And when I read that, I said, okay, case closed.
		Then I read that he gets expelled because they were both drunk.
		You know, I don't know what to say about that other than this is lunacy, but also it's deeply conservative.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's also deeply sexist.
		And deeply sexist.
		How does the guy get expelled and the girl doesn't?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And deeply sexist.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's sexist.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, no, look.
		There were kids that liked each other.
		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?
		What's going on?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I totally agree.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This is a bubble.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This ideology is this weird...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It is a bubble.
		Yeah, I agree.
		I mean, I think it's mostly hysteria.
		However, look, you know, we agree.
		You know, rape happens.
		Acquaintance rape happens.
		Husbands rape wives.
		Boyfriends rape girlfriends all the time, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boyfriends rape boyfriends.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Boyfriends rape...
		Oh, well, you want to talk about prison?
		So you know that men get raped more often than women in this culture.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but they're raped by men, so it's really...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's kind of a moot point.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		How's that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It just shows men are pieces of shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We rape each other.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When there's no women to rape, we just rape.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the rape rates in prison are absolutely horrifying and underreported.
		Yeah.
		No, but so what do we do about it, right?
		And so here's sort of the intrinsic problem with rape, and especially acquaintance rape.
		There's very rarely any evidence.
		There's very rarely eyewitnesses.
		There's very rarely physical evidence.
		Even if there is physical evidence, you can't prove that that bruise proves that this guy raped you.
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So what do you do?
		Right?
		It's a tough question.
		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.
		Now, that's not the ultimate answer.
		That's not going to get rid of all rapists.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it is a least partial solution to help them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Believe me, if I had a daughter, I'd be telling her to do that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I do have daughters.
unidentified		I teach them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Which is the most ridiculous shit ever.
		I mean, the whole idea being that sex is evil.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's really what it comes down to.
		You're not talking about people getting hurt.
		If they decided to get drunk and wrestle, I mean, is that assault?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What is that?
		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Massage.
		Yeah.
		You're selling your body, your hands, you're rubbing people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Is that intimate?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's very different because it's competition.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, but it's extremely intimate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The good analogy is massage because massage feels good.
		No one wants to do it to you.
		You pay them to do it, and that becomes an occupation.
		It's very respected.
		You talk to someone, I'm a massage therapist.
		Oh, that's cool.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, exactly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But there's all sorts of professions where we sell our bodies intimately.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mm-hmm.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You could even argue that's what we're doing now.
		I mean, you know, it's like my body's here, your body's there.
		We're using our minds.
		We're talking.
		This is exploiting our bodies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's been a stretch.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, sorry.
		When I teach, when I teach, I say this.
		Yeah, right?
		I mean, so I'm like, I say to my students, look, I'm standing here.
		I brought my body here.
		You're looking at me.
		You're judging me.
		It's like I'm using my body.
		You're getting paid for this.
		It's every job.
		You're selling your body.
		We draw a line at prostitution for some strange reason.
		But I don't think it's a strange reason.
		I think it's puritanism.
		Yeah, man.
		I think it's because we believe deep down that sex is special.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		In a bad way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you know who Molly Crabapple is?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Very interesting woman.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sex worker activist and journalist.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, her take on it is, you know, completely open-minded.
		She's like, why?
		Why is it bad?
		You know, she's like, I have friends that are sex workers.
		She goes, and it's fine.
		They like it.
		They don't mind.
		They have clients that they enjoy being with, and they get paid for that.
		Like, isn't it better to do that than to do something you don't like?
		And isn't it a good thing to get sex?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Yeah, no, I've worked with and I have friends who are in the sex worker activist sort of movement right now, and she's part of it.
		I don't know her, but she's a part of it.
		And, you know, the more common argument among them is it's not like we all love it.
		What it is for them is it's a job.
		It's a job.
		And some of us like it.
		Like, some of us like our jobs.
		And some of us don't like it.
		But that's it.
		It's just a job for them.
		Like porn stars.
		Ask a porn star.
		If you know anything about the porn industry...
		Porn stars, that's how they think of it.
		When they go to work, it's not like, oh, hell yeah, we're going to party.
		It's just like, oh, okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, every person in the porn industry I've ever known has said this about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's certainly what it becomes.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Once you do it for a while, it becomes a job.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I think you're on to something.
		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		It was definitely sexual assault.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		What?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What demographic groups are likely to be rapists?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That was one of the more amazing things.
		He's a member of a team.
		I think it's either tennis or one of the teams that's supposedly more likely to be full of rapists than others.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And that he was a valedictorian.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he's smart?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he's more likely to be a rapist?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Because I guess they have a sense of entitlement is the idea.
		I don't even know what the argument is, but it was in the press.
		You can look it up.
unidentified		Oh my god, that's crazy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Foundation for Individual Rights and Education, FIRE, awesome organization.
		Everyone should support it.
		They reported that.
		If you look at their website, you can see that, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's terrifying.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yes, it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
		No, it's very damaging.
		God, that's terrifying.
		I've read many, many accounts.
		I've read many accounts of these things where it's like hard to call it rape.
		It's hard to call it rape.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What do you got, Jamie?
		The article.
		Oh, this is...
unidentified		It also says, because he was from a good family.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, there it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because he was from a good family?
		He's more likely...
		In quotes.
		Oh, my God.
		Oh my god.
		He was a valedictorian, he was on a sports team, and was from a good family, so he was most likely a rapist.
		How does someone keep a job when they have that ideology and they promote it to kids?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So this is a colleague of mine, so I'm really kind of...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Constrained here, but yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what, man?
		That's a criminal.
		That person's a terrible person.
		If anyone has said that to a young, influential kid, this is what's more likely if a person's a rapist.
		Did they use force?
		Did they drug you?
		Did they coerce you?
		Did something bad happen to you?
		That makes a person a rapist.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not being from a fucking good family.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like what, all non-rapists come from broken homes?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you're saying?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All non-rapists got Ds?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I think the legal definition's pretty good.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's the use of force or the threat of the use of force.
unidentified		Is that all correct?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		All those accusations that that professor said?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Now, that's just accusations, though.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's so crazy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And we're also, by the way, talking about, I don't know, 10 or 20 people.
unidentified		That is so fucking crazy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and also, you know, one of the most enraging things about it, and I've talked to people who are actually victims of rape about this, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And they are fucking furious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Because it...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It trivializes it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It trivializes what happened to them.
		And it also makes it much harder to report rape.
		It makes it much harder for people to take seriously what happened to them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's an ultimate cry wolf scenario.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, so you've got to be really...
		Disciplined about your definition of sexual assault and rape.
		It's the use of force, the threat of the use of force, or having sex with someone who is incapacitated, and that is it.
		And I think that's good enough.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that is good enough.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And we should enforce like hell that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		In all sorts of ways.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But that's it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, absolutely.
		And I also think that there's an issue with influencing people's ideas of the past, influencing their memory.
		I mean, one of the worst pieces of evidence, you would know this as good as anybody, is eyewitness accounts.
		They're terrible.
		When you ask people, like, I've talked to friends about scenarios that I was involved in.
		I'll go, no, you didn't do that.
		Mike did that.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Don't you remember?
		And they'll go, oh, yeah.
		Fuck.
		Yeah, dude, we were in Chicago.
		We had to go to that.
		We had to do that show.
		Remember?
		Oh, yeah.
unidentified		Fuck.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You were telling a crazy story about Vegas that didn't even happen in Vegas.
		And it wasn't even the guy you were talking about.
		But you were so fucking sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it only happened six months ago.
		I mean, that is so common.
		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.
		I can recall fights from decades ago.
unidentified		I've noticed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Off the top of my head.
		I'm not using any notes.
		But if you ask me to break down day by day what happened yesterday, fuck, it flashes.
		I see, like, snapshots.
		I barely remember what I ate.
		I barely remember where I went first.
		I mean, I have to concentrate and think about it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, there's also subjectivity, right, and interpretation.
		So you and I could watch the exact same thing happen right in front of us right now and have a different interpretation of what happened.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And having someone who's an influential person talk to you about those events will shape your perception of them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So it's really egregious to convince someone that a terrible thing has happened to them when they're not sure that it's happened to them, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Are you sober?
		Is that correct?
		Yes.
		Okay, let's proceed.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm really hesitant about going for motivations in these things when it's about politics.
		People do that to me all the time.
		Oh, you made that argument because you're a racist.
		Oh, you made that argument because you're a man.
		Oh, you made that argument because your mom wasn't good to you, whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Check your privilege, Thaddeus.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, boy.
		Happens all the time.
		So, I... However...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's been shown that men named Thaddeus have a lot of privilege, too, by the way.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, man.
		It means great leader, dude.
		Well, there is this sort of phenomenon that some of us have identified, which we call the white savior complex, which, remember Coney 2012?
unidentified		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, good lord.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So that's like the greatest example of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boy, did that fucking vanish quick.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, for good reason.
		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?
		That was a humanitarian mission, remember?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That was to save the Iraqis.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, not exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So how many Iraqis have died to save them?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Something like a million, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's debatable, but a hell of a lot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's at least 200,000.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It could be as many as a million.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But think about it.
		It's killing them to save them, right?
		Which was what was said about Vietnam.
		So that was kind of this classic line by a general in Vietnam.
		He said, we have to destroy the village in order to save it, right?
		But anyway, so it's that idea.
		It's also this very arrogant paternalistic impulse that a lot of people have, in particular a lot of white people.
		But certainly elite people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fucking white people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know I hate white people.
		I'm glad you're with me on this.
		And I want to talk about Ludacris with you, by the way.
		We've got to talk about Ludacris.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But you're bit on Ludacris.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		You're like, what?
		Okay.
		White people.
		No, it's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So, okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you think that...
unidentified		So the same...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What sort of motivation that people have to do this 2012 Coney thing is the same motivation they have to cry rape?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, to encourage people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So because you need to have a victim, you need to have someone who's suffering, you need to have someone who's oppressed, right, to save them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right?
		So you got to make sure they exist.
		And so you have to create that discourse, that way of thinking about them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And because this young man had a lot going from a good family and a valedictorian.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You also have to have an oppressor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's an oppressor.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		To vanquish.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's obviously privileged.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, how do they justify the boy being responsible, but the girl not being responsible?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		So that's, to me, fundamentally anti-feminist and conservative as hell, right?
		Because it says that a man can make decisions, can have agency when he's drunk, but a woman cannot.
		She's a victim.
		She's going to be a victim.
		So women can't control themselves.
		They can't determine their own lives when they're drunk.
		But men can.
		That's like what Don Draper says on Mad Men about women.
		It's like, oh, well, they're dumb and they can't control themselves when they've had a couple drinks.
		Excuse me, I don't think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You said that just like a chick, by the way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did I? Excuse me, I don't think so.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, good.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I just saved my job then.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you get fired for what you said, the world is really fucked.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's not exactly why I got fired, but we can get into that.
		Which has to do with ludicrous.
		Seriously.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Basically.
		Your bit about ludicrous is actually very, very similar to a big argument I made, which is the reason I got fired.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And what was the argument you made?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so this is about race.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Uh-huh.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		And in your bit, actually, I don't think you do...
		I don't think you...
		Did you connect it to race?
		Did you say it's like, yeah, you didn't, right?
		So that's the difference.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was just about people enjoying themselves.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that there's a lot of music that's just so fucking depressing.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it's just like...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like that Hey There Delilah song.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which was not even apparently about a girl that this guy dated, which is even creepier.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's like a girl that he knew.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So this girl's probably like moving to New York to get the fuck away from this guy.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's writing this song.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Hey there, Delilah.
unidentified		Thank you.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I thought it wasn't, I mean, you didn't say this, but I thought it's not a coincidence that a lot of white rock like that is very depressing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Very emo.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it's depressing.
		You were saying it's depressing and like a downer.
		What we're attracted to is like the melancholy of it, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's depth in being somber.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we think there's depth.
		Yeah, whatever.
		We value that.
		We think, oh, well, he must be a deep person, a deep thinker with real feelings.
unidentified		He's a poet.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He's a human being.
		He's a fully realized human being, a poet.
		He understands.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Complex emotions.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He understands the essence of humanity.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's not having fun and smiling while people are starving.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There are more important things to do than have fun.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But that's not true.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So that's exactly what you're getting at.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So the fact that you compared him, what was it?
		What do they call those?
		Dirty white, single white tees?
		What do they call them?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		White tees?
unidentified		White tees.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		They're white dudes, right?
		And with Ludacris, right, and his celebration of rims, Yeah.
		And barbecues and asses.
		Right.
		I mean, this is my work.
		This is like the core of my work, believe it or not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Perfect.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, when I saw it, I was watching it with my 12-year-old son, your special, and I was like, Toby, did you see that?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He just said what he did.
unidentified		He was like, yeah, I think I get it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I like Ludacris a little bit.
		Is that okay, Dad?
		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're always just naked in the streets.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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?
		Is that just a coincidence?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		A lot of stand-up comedy, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And comedy, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, not really.
		Like, Lenny Bruce is the real godfather of comedy.
		And he's a Jew.
		He was the real god, but he was doing heroin with black jazz singers.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, he's hanging around with a lot of beat poets, and they were hanging around with a lot of jazz singers.
		They were smoking marijuana with a lot of black guys.
		There was a cultural infusion there.
		There was a lot going on, which was one of the reasons why a lot of his subjects, one of his more prominent subjects, had to do with race.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Chitlin Circuit preceded him.
		Moms Mabley preceded him.
		Red Fox, I think, was the same time and I think before him as well.
		So, yeah, I agree with you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But Pryor was the godfather and he came out of Lenny Bruce.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
unidentified		You think so?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He was very, very strongly influenced by him and discussed it in great length.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Pryor said that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he had seen Lenny Bruce several times in The Village.
		Lenny Bruce was the original.
		Pretty much everybody agrees with that when it comes to stand-up comedy history.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And that Pryor was influenced by him?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, everybody was.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, that's fine.
		I still have an argument for that.
		Which Jews, right?
		Yeah, Jews, absolutely.
		Jews and blacks have dominated stand-up forever, right?
		Why, right?
		So here's why blacks have.
		And, you know, so it's not just comedy, and it's a particular kind of comedy, right?
		It's like, it's, you know, it's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Loose fun.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Loose body, right?
		Yeah.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Me too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Because one of the many things he did was, I think he was the first black person to do this in public on a stage.
		He made fun of white people and suggested that they were actually inferior.
		Like, that did not happen before.
		Like, imitating them and putting them down and sort of suggesting, not suggesting, basically saying, yeah, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, they're lame.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They suck.
		Yeah, he has this great bit.
		It's not in live and concert.
		It's in a smaller piece.
		He's like, he said something like, man, white people be doing yoga.
		Niggas be fucking.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And it's like, that sums it up, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And so, um, but, so, slavery.
		Okay.
		Alright.
		Can we do slavery?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Now I'm gonna get fired like four times.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can only fire you once.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And you're gonna get in trouble, too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How can I be in trouble?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, if you agree with me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
		I'm gonna agree with you already.
		How about that?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Cool.
		Alright.
		So here it is.
		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?
		And this is, everyone agrees on this, right?
		It was, like, comically repressive.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What was the cause of all that?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's an awesome question.
		No one can answer.
		I mean, what is the cause of a culture emerging?
		I don't know.
		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.
		They don't fuck and they work.
		- They put- - Pretty simple.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They put skirts over their piano legs.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		White people never could have created that, ever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is absolutely fascinating.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How much has influenced our culture that has come out of the people that were brought over here as slaves?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's just the beginning.
		That's the most obvious one that everyone knows about.
		People make fun of Ebonics, right?
		Remember that?
		When Ebonics was happening?
		This was like 15, 20 years ago.
		It was like this big joke.
		Oh my God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, they were actually teaching it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, actually a friend of mine wrote the book on it.
		Well, so think about how often in a day that you use what used to be called black slang, right?
		We all do, all the time.
		Even like fucking Bob Costas uses it now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bob Costas does?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what did he say?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What did he say?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It wasn't something like dope, but it was something like...
unidentified		I forget.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It was some black singer I heard.
		I was like, God, see, if Bob Costas is saying this, then...
		But no, it's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Cool.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, it was better than that.
		But yeah, cool is one.
		Bad is another one.
		Yeah.
		Oh, but no, there's quantitative studies on this.
		So the number of words that come from black vernacular...
		Is immense in American English.
		Immense.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And so much of it is now perfectly respectable, right?
		All of that, but when those words were invented, fuck, I was like, stupid niggers say that, right?
		Right.
		And now it's like, ah, that's great.
		Yeah, so from the beginning, I called them America's original renegades.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, something like that.
		Yeah, like Switzerland.
		Yeah, something like that.
		Some very homogenous, very, very restrained, you know.
		I mean, hey, the streets are clean, though.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know, but so it's order over spontaneity.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And it totally changes what America is.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because America, we like to think of, is the hub of innovation, the hub of artistic expression and creativity and entertainment.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Ninety percent of the great entertainment that the world has ever created comes from right here.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Take black people out of American entertainment?
unidentified		My God, what are you left with?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Where the fuck would rock...
		I mean, think about Led Zeppelin.
		I mean, it's been shown now that Led Zeppelin pretty much plagiarized a giant chunk of all of their music from old blues songs.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		The Stones are the coolest about that because they were like, from the beginning, they were like, nope, we're playing black music.
		That's what we're doing.
		We're playing the blues.
		That's who our influences are.
		That's what we're about.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and Wild Horses.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, come on.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		All of it, yeah.
		Yeah, I was just watching Keith Richards on Fallon, and he was saying this.
		He was talking about...
		Oh, Chuck Berry.
		He was like, I'm nothing without Chuck Berry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, the Beatles and Chuck Berry had a close relationship, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, there's so many of those early guys.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Little Richard, another beautiful example.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's so many of those early performers that...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That directly influenced the course of rock and roll.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's a black music.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, that is a fascinating point.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So if you look at, so here's the lineage, right?
		I mean, you know this, but just a quick primer review.
		I mean, so it's slave music, right?
		Which has been called various things.
		There were spirituals, but there was also dance music that they invented.
		Then there's ragtime, late 19th century, which everyone agrees gives birth to jazz and blues.
		And then after World War II, it's rock and roll and then rhythm and blues, what was called rhythm and blues.
		And then soul in the 1960s, which gave birth to disco in the 1970s, which gave birth to hip hop.
		And all of that goes straight back to the slaves on the plantations.
		And this culture that I was talking about that was outside of this crazy, repressive white culture.
		So it's this...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fucking white people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so it's this crazy...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Damn it!
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		We gotta get rid of them, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's what I'm saying.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Malcolm X had a point.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Everybody's got a point.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Nah, I don't want to get rid of white people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I want to get rid of whiteness.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Seriously.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We need spray tans.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that what you're saying?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It looks ugly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's orange.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, orange is not good.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Colored, they don't mean orange.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Not on this planet.
unidentified		Not all colors.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Not on this planet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not blue either.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, but Jews, man.
		Lenny Bruce, right?
		So I have four sections in the book on this.
		So on immigrant groups.
		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.
		They were considered to be black.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And that was mostly Irish people doing that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What year was that going on?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		1863, during the Civil War.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so it was...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mass lynchings of black people in New York City?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the New York City draft riots.
unidentified		Wow.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was ugly.
		It was in part resentment against rich people who were paying off others to go to war for them.
		You could do that.
		You could sell your draft.
		You could sell your selection into the army.
unidentified		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Or you could buy it, I mean.
		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.
unidentified		What?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Seriously.
		What?
		Yeah, yeah.
		Books were written.
		Many, many books.
		It was common.
		Commonly believed by the British and by Americans that the Irish were actually apes or the missing link between apes and human beings.
		What?
		Yes, it was commonly believed that they were actually, get this, below African Americans.
		That they were actually genetically inferior to everybody.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That the Irish were the bottom of the barrel.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		The very bottom.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They weren't even human beings to many people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about Native Americans?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I guess they were down there too.
		But yeah, the Irish, yeah, I suppose they were sort of similar to the natives.
		I mean, they weren't compared too often to them, but...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Chimpanzees?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so that's in my book.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so they were called the Irish chimpanzees, yeah.
unidentified		Wow.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm talking about like Harvard professors.
unidentified		What?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, no, this was respectable academic discourse.
		This was like, what, respectable, you know...
		What year is it?
		This is the first half of the 19th century.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is insane.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		This is when the Irish were coming here in big numbers, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So the early 1800s, Harvard professors were referring to Irish people as apes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's fascinating.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, obviously everyone is human, is an ape, but...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		The Irish were below all of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where'd the European Jews fit in?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Bottom.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bottom?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah, totally bottom, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're like the vast majority of Nobel Prize winners.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know, check it out.
		Okay, so Jews?
		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.
		I mean, I'm serious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They gave up dancing?
unidentified		I'm serious.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		They invented tap dance.
		They invented tap dance.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that river dancing shit.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, that's different.
		No, that's Irish-Irish.
		That's Irish-Irish.
		I'm talking about Irish-Americans.
unidentified		Oh, okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Boxing.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Boxing, you know this, and basketball.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Basketball!
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They totally dominated basketball.
		Boxing, the number of world champions, many weight classes were Jews.
		Many dozens of them were top.
		And then basketball, they totally dominated basketball until the 1950s.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That seems to be the boxing thing, though.
		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.
		A lot of Russians.
		A lot of former Soviet Union.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think it's actually cultural.
		Because not every immigrant group does that, right?
		Yeah, but I think it's when...
		So here's the funniest thing about Jews, and Italians, by the way, were the same category as Jews in many ways.
		They dominated a lot of those sports, too.
		What was said about Jews and sports, in particular boxing and basketball, was that they were...
		Naturally gifted athletes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jews.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So the way that people talked about Jews and athleticism then is exactly the way that people talk about blacks and athleticism now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, that's interesting.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Their butts are higher.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
unidentified		Right.
		Right.
		Remember that?
		Jimmy the Greek?
		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fired, saying black people had higher butts.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Because they were trained on the plantation or something?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was about genetic selection and getting the biggest slaves to mate with the...
		Is that true?
		Is that factual?
		I mean, that's a commonly stated thing.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Most historians reject that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There may have been a tiny bit, but no.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would think that that's something you would want to do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you had several generations of slaves, you would want to get the big ones to breed with the big ones.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Genetic breeding.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So why are African Americans so much larger physically?
		Is it a diet issue than African Africans?
		I mean, the type of pro athletes that you see today, like football players, 320 pound college seniors...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Is that really true, though?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, no.
		I know that.
		In comparison to Africa?
		If you look at all people of African descent in the world now and took an average height and weight of them, I don't know.
		How would it compare to people of European descent?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We should probably do a study before we start talking about it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, if you looked at the Nebraska offensive line, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know what I mean?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Like, there's plenty of, especially in America, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Some giant white people, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Giant white people out there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So yeah, you know Malcolm Gladwell, the writer?
		He's a New Yorker.
		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.
		The Jimmy the Greek variety.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That are elite.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How much data do you need to say, I mean, you're going to say that it's all cultural?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah, I mean, because you could be 6'5", 280 and ripped and still suck at basketball, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There have been some.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There have been some.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Show me a white Karl Malone.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, definitely have been Karl Malone's.
		Really?
		Oh, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's no white LeBron.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There's no any other LeBron.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's never been a white Anderson Silva.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's certain levels.
		I mean, George St. Pierre was an amazing fighter, but he was amazing more for his intelligence.
		Very athletic, for sure, but not ridiculously fast.
		Very physically strong, but he was really good at being unpredictable.
		He was really good at the way he would mix up his techniques.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well then, okay, so then how do you explain that Jews and Italians dominated all those sports?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Not long ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's what I'm getting at.
unidentified		Could be access.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Could be access to—they didn't, because Jack Johnson was the great heavyweight champion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, Jack Johnson was the motherfucker that everybody was scared of.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know, but there were more—at the lower weight classes, there were more Jewish champions than blacks in the first half of the time.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But there were littler people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sandy Sadler.
		There was quite a few great black, Neil Griffith.
		Oh, sure.
		There was a lot of great black fighters, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I don't know how much of it is access, how much of it is, you know, access to good trainers.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And now I think the NBA has not won.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not won.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Danny Shays, I think, was the last Jew that I was aware of who played in the NBA. He played about like six or seven years ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In boxing, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's no Jew.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Try to find a Jew.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no.
		I think there's like one guy.
		I saw one guy like about ten years ago.
		I'm always on the lookout.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I grew up with one, Dana Rosenblatt.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He was a New England champion.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dangerous Dana Rosenblatt, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Tough fighter.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		How about in the UFC? Are there any Jews?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's probably a few.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I've never noticed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you'd have to...
		I don't know.
		I don't know.
		It's a good question.
		I'd have to go through the archives.
		But as far as champions, no.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, definitely not.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No champions.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so, yeah.
		I mean, well, so Russians, so you're talking about Russians.
		So, like, are they, you think Russians are naturally genetically superior in athletics?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, some of them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's why they're so good?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Have you ever seen Provodnikov?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yep.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That guy looks like Max Kellerman did the best description of him.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He said they thawed out a caveman, put some boxing gloves on him.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But Provodnikov is sort of my...
		He actually...
		I think he serves my argument better because he's not that talented.
		I mean, he's not like...
		He's talented, but he's not...
		The reason he's so successful is that he can get punched in the head 500 times.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's got brutal power.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		His chin is...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But his chin is endless.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		His chin is very good, but he also has brutal power.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah, yeah.
		But I mean, you don't look at him and say, wow, what a naturally gifted boxer, right?
		Compared to...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not like a Floyd or whoever.
		Well, Floyd Mayweather is very, very skillful.
		He's a craftsman.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's a real professional.
		Right.
		But Provodnikov is very slick, too.
		He's deceptively slick.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He just fucking hits really hard, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's a murderous puncher.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but you don't look at him and think, wow, he's, you know...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but that murderous punching ability is something you just don't...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can't earn.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I agree.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a thing about punching.
		You either can hit hard or you can't hit hard.
		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!
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And you know what it's like?
		It's like throwing a baseball, right?
		It's essentially the same mechanics.
		Same thing with baseball.
		It's hard to teach that.
		Some guys just have an arm, and some guys just don't.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Now, look at those guys who have those arms in Major League Baseball.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Tell me what color they are.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's all white guys.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Pretty much.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Not all.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What the fuck?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		See, man?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now we're confused.
unidentified		Telling you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But there's a difference between boxing power, the punching power, and throwing balls for some reason.
		And I don't know what it is, but...
		I don't know if they're completely connected.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There's something about getting maximum torque.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I just feel like it's similar.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would think so, but it is in some ways.
		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Tyson had short arms, didn't he?
		Tyson had short arms, yeah.
		But he got maximum, but no, but the thing about Tyson, that people don't, talking about boxing, whatever.
		He got maximum leverage with his body, right?
		People miss that.
		They think he was just this huge dude with giant muscles.
		But if you look at the way he threw a hook, he got maximum leverage.
		That's where the power came from.
		There's lots of guys just as big or bigger who can't punch like that.
unidentified		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And also, his speed was ridiculous.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He could throw a 10-punch combination in two seconds.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, literally.
		There's videos of him hitting the bags.
		And you're just like, that's like a lightweight.
		That's a 135-pound guy.
		Meanwhile, he's 220. And he also had giant legs.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And that's where a lot of the power comes from.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you look at Pacquiao's legs, Pacquiao has enormous legs.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, but again, it's the mechanics of it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You could be just that big and punch like a girl.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you also could be...
		I mean, the mechanics, it's not the same with everybody.
		There's guys that are built like Tyson, but for whatever reason, they just can't generate that kind of thing.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Tim Lincecum, the Giants pitcher, he's a great example, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He's like a buck 40 or something.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is he really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And he can fucking throw 90 whatever it is miles per hour.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's a buck 40?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		He looks like he's very small.
		He's very skinny.
		Little wiry guy.
		But they show.
		He gets this incredible torque in his torso across his chest.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, proper mechanics are gigantic when it comes to martial arts.
		It's a huge thing.
		Like, technique is virtually everything.
		But then there's technique amongst gifted athletes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I agree with you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You can't teach bone structure, too.
unidentified		I agree with you.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Bone structure is the big one.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Geometry, body geometry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like George Foreman, he had canned hams for fists.
		They were the biggest fucking hands ever.
		If you saw his hands, he'd make a fist, and you'd go, what the fuck?
		And that was why George Foreman could hit guys on the arms, and their arms would go numb.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It just had this weird mechanical advantage.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the mechanical advantage of bone size and density and shape, the width of the shoulders as well, directly translates to punching power.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's very strange stuff.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I know.
		It's like an alchemy.
		You can't look at a guy and predict it, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, it's genetically variable.
		Like I have a friend, my friend Ian McCall, he's a highly ranked UFC fighter.
		His brother has brutal power.
		He jokes around about it.
		He's like, my brother got the power.
		I don't have any power.
		Like his brother has this brutal knockout power apparently.
		His brother doesn't even fight.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Is his brother the same size, like tiny?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
		I don't know, but that doesn't even matter.
		There's this guy named John Lineker who's a flyweight.
		I know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Tremendous power.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Ridiculous knockout puncher.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's 125 pounds, but he hits way harder than anybody else in the division.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just one of those weird things.
unidentified		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why can he do that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Anyway, but he's white.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's a white guy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's Brazilian, actually.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Lineker is?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Lineker's Brazilian.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he's kind of white.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, the Brazilian...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, you can be white in Brazilian.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, most certainly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But Brazil is such a melting pot.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, they have a tripartite racial structure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Mm-hmm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Japanese, a lot of Japanese influence, a lot of black, a lot of Portuguese, of course, the language being Portuguese.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a very unique and amazing country.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, there it's weird.
		You know, here you're either white or black and that's all there is, but there you can be white.
		I don't know what the name is for the people who are mixed race, but they have a name for it and a category, which is different.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So there's black, there's white, and then there's something else.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a lot going on over there.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's where all, I mean, the real MMA started.
		That's the birth of, I mean, that's, you know, you want to talk culture.
		That's an incredible cultural melting pot.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So there you go.
		How do you explain that?
		Right.
		So why has Brazil become sort of the capital of martial arts?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's arguably not the capital, but it's certainly where it came from as far as high-level mixed martial arts.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Mixed martial arts, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But what's really crazy is it can all be boiled down to one family.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, the Gracis.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, that's the seed of martial arts.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That is the one most important family.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, but why...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But why did it take off like it did in that particular country?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, it didn't until it came to America.
		That's what people don't realize.
		Everybody thought that jiu-jitsu was gigantic in Brazil.
		Everybody in America thought that jiu-jitsu was gigantic in Brazil when it came over here.
		All the Brazilians know Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.
		No, it was a small clan of bad motherfuckers that had figured it out.
		And yeah, they had world championships over there.
		And yes, the level of Jiu-Jitsu was much higher in Brazil than it was anywhere else in the world.
		But it was still a fairly small group in comparison to what it's become today.
		And that happened in 1993 when they came to America and started the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which was started by a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu family.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And won.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Horace Gracie dominated it and his brother started it all off.
		If it wasn't for Horian Gracie, there would have been no Ultimate Fighting Championship.
		If it wasn't for Horian's father, Elio, there would have been no family of champions that could show the world this incredible new style.
		It all came from this one family, which is just amazing.
		If that guy wasn't alive, if there was no Elio Gracie, no Carlos Gracie, and no Maeda.
		Maeda was the guy who came to Brazil, the Japanese guy, who came and taught them judo and jujitsu.
		If it wasn't for those three people, There's no Ultimate Fighting Championship, and mixed martial arts is set back fucking a thousand years.
		I mean, who knows?
		There's more evolution in martial arts since 1993 than there have been in the past thousand years.
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No doubt.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So that's all from three people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which is crazy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, it's from millions of people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's three people started it all off.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Maeda, who teaches Carlos, and Carlos and Elio.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, but the question is, why did that become so popular, right?
		Which I can't answer.
		You asked about the cause of cultures, right?
		It's very hard to nail down the cause of a culture.
		Why do we believe what we believe?
		Why did that particular thing, that sport, become this international phenomenon?
		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, for martial arts, for mixed martial arts, it's pretty simple, because everybody wants to know who's the baddest motherfucker on the planet.
		We always thought it was a boxer, until we saw a boxer getting taken down and just strangled at will, and they were so helpless.
		And we saw, like, James Toney, who's this great fighter, who's, like, one of the best boxers, pound for pound.
		I mean, of our generation.
		James Toney's an outstanding boxer.
		Randy Couture takes him down like it's nothing and just dominates him.
		Like a joke.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like he didn't belong in there.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But see, that's a cultural question, too.
		Why do we like to know who the best badass is?
		Who the biggest badass is?
		What's the most effective martial art?
		Is that cultural?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think that's not just genetic, just a male thing?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That was the founding question of the UFC, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		What is the best, most effective martial art?
unidentified		Yes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so answering that was what the UFC's mission was, right?
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		In a way, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So, but that kind of begs the question, like, why do we give a shit?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's just male dominator chimpanzee DNA that's just still running around inside of our heads.
		You know, why do we want to know who has the biggest dick?
		Why do we want to know who has the biggest yacht?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Not all of us do, Joe, you know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, some of us do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Pretending you don't care.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Some of us don't need to ask.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, listen.
		That's cute.
		I mean, these are questions that are just normal, natural human questions, especially when you're dealing with primates.
		Don't you think?
		I don't know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm always skeptical when people make claims about cultures.
		Well, no.
		No, it's natural determinism.
		You know, it's like tracing it back to something in nature, and I think it's very tricky to do that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Wait, wait, wait.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You think that Americans have gone to war the way we have for some biological reason?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, that's not what I'm saying.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm saying that the momentum of those conflicts is a part of our culture.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, cultural DNA. Yes.
		Okay, yeah, yeah.
		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the momentum...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, not DNA, like as in genetics, but I mean...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Cultural DNA. Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sure.
		The momentum of it.
		Sure.
		The fact that we're all born in a society that watches...
		I mean, how many fucking war movies have there been?
unidentified		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Jesus Christ.
		I mean, every time you turn around, there's some new movie about Americans going and kicking ass in war and fighting battles and killing the Nazis.
		I mean, we've probably made way more movies about Nazis, you know, about killing Nazis.
		I mean, we're still making it.
		What was it, Clinton and Glorious Bastards?
unidentified		Is that what it was?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Tarantino?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I mean, we still...
		A good Nazi-killing movie?
		Fuck yeah, man.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sign us up.
		Well, now it's the Afghans.
		I just watched Lone Survivor, the Marky Mark movie.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Marky Mark.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's going to be Marky Mark forever.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sorry.
		I'm that age, you know.
		He's doing well.
		I can't get over...
		When you're my age, you can't get over that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I say it, too.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I just thought it was funny that you called him Marky Mark.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You have to be our age, right?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you're in your 40s, he's Marky Mark.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm sorry.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sorry, Mr. Wahlberg.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Very good actor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No disrespect.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So now we're killing a lot of Arabs in the movies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		True.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Interesting.
		But the idea being that we have a very warlike society.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, probably arguably the most warlike.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you look at it in terms of history.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I would not argue against that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It kind of has to be.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If there's a hundred plus military bases all throughout the country, or the world rather.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And if you look at casualties, you know, created by American military interventions, right?
		Beginning with the American Revolution, Civil War was a fucking bloodbath.
		The Spanish-American War, which we all forget about, killed tens of thousands of Filipinos.
		World War I, another fucking bloodbath.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's the total number since 1776?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's an awesome question, and I'm surprised I haven't added it up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		More or less than 50 million.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that Americans have killed?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's the hard thing to determine.
		Well, first of all, a lot of these people we don't know about, right?
		Because like Vietnamese, we don't know exactly how many people died under those bombs.
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know, the estimates range from one to two million Vietnamese died in that war, but we don't know.
		I mean, a lot of them were vaporized or just died in the jungle and no one ever found them.
		But it's not a bad...
		I would guess that the United States of America has probably killed more people than anyone else.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about Genghis Khan, though?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, God, we crush him.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah, because first of all, he wasn't using modern weaponry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But do you know how many people he killed?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, but there's no way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How many do you think?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I have no idea, but just Hiroshima alone.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There's no way he killed that many people.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		11% of the population of the world.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		How are they counting that, though?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I have no idea.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, not with weapons.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, some of that could have been disease and dislocation and starvation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They just fucking killed entire populations of cities.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They killed a million people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Direct murder of people?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Wow.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I didn't know this.
		Okay, so fine.
		So we're second.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		11% of the people on the Earth.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		We're the runners-up, then.
		Okay.
		He can be the champion.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He wins in a big way, because they were using fucking arrows.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And bodies that they would light on fire and shoot with catapults.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's impressive.
		With no nuclear bombs and no tanks.
		That's impressive.
		And no fighter jets.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because that was like some complete next-level shit.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but even experts in that field wouldn't be able to answer that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I don't think.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I don't think they can even try.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They'd speculate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's too far away.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Also, for that era, there's so few records, it's really difficult to do history.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, we know some stuff, but we know so much less than we do about the 20th century.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, 1220. You know, what the fuck did they write down?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They do have the secret history of the Mongol race.
		I mean, they wrote their own history.
		But, you know, it's hard.
		History being written by the winners is difficult anyway.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When the winners actually killed 11% of the population.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Who else has left?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		What are they going to say about it, I wonder?
unidentified		Hmm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I mean, they were just unbelievably ruthless.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So was there an ideology driving this?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a good question.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know enough about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I just know what I've heard him talk about.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm just a lowly U.S. historian.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, what's the ideology for what we've done?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Ah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's another question.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, hey.
		So, good question.
		So, I mean...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		God guts, glory, Ram.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, so there's that.
		The John McCain school, right?
		Which is like, defend American honor.
		It's very masculine.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So is it having this ulterior motive, like, justifies the invasion?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, you know, having resources there justifies the invasion?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Some people think that, that they're being dishonest.
		I don't.
		I think they're true believers.
		Not all of them.
		Not all of them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you think Obama's a true believer?
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		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.
		Hillary's the same way.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, how do you reconcile the differences between what he said when he was running for office and what he did when he got into the office?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think he got a lot of pushback.
		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.
		He's definitely wishy for them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is that because he's seen what's happened to his dad?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think it's because he's running for president in a real way, whereas for his dad it was always just a protest.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He wasn't really going to win ever, so he could be pure ideologically.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you think he's playing ball a little bit?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think so.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Who knows, but I guess so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Does he have a chance?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Small one, I'd say.
		Small one.
		It's going to be interesting.
		So what's going to be fascinating, and I hope this happens, is that it's Rand versus Hillary.
		Because on foreign policy, and on drugs, by the way, she's going to be the right-winger, and he's going to be the left-winger.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How weird.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		She sucks on the war on drugs and on foreign policy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		She wants to bomb the fuck out of everybody, and she's all about incarcerating people for drugs.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but she's certainly never said anything otherwise.
		And every time she's been out, and her voting record, if you look at her voting record, it's all for the war on drugs, top to bottom.
		And her fucking husband was like a leader of it.
		Rand, on the other hand, is not perfect on foreign policy, but he's way less interventionist than she is, right?
		Much more hesitant to go abroad with the 82nd Airborne, and he's awesome on drugs.
		You know, he's about legalizing weed tomorrow, and he's probably...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		That's the big fear.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		Well, okay, so, you know, that's an argument for having a powerful defensive military, right?
		That's not what we've ever had.
		We've never had a defensive military.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you would know from studying martial arts that the best defense is a good offense.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I've heard the flip of that, right?
		It's the other way around, too, right?
		Good defense is a good offense.
		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?
		Then we have something to talk about.
		But that's not the way it's ever been used.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		And what would be the argument for...
		I mean, is there an argument for beefing up our presence abroad to prevent peace?
		Or to ensure peace, rather?
		I mean, is there an argument for, like, the McCain School of Thought?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, beefing up our positions in all these different parts of the world just to make sure that, like, an ISIS-type situation could never rise up?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's definitely an argument.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's called Pax Americana, the American Peace.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's always the argument.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Now, I'm not a truther.
		I don't think they actually did fly.
		I don't think the Bush administration was responsible for 9-11.
		No question about it, it served their purposes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, you would know that quote.
		There's a famous quote about any situation that's not capitalized on, any tragic event that's not capitalized on is truly a tragedy.
		There's some military quote about that.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I know that what's been said recently is, never let a good crisis go to waste.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		I don't remember what the, yeah.
		But it's something along those lines.
		That's essentially the idea.
		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...
		You know, those wacky websites.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		They don't need a conspiracy, right?
		They got what they wanted in 9-11 and in Oklahoma City.
		They got the justification, the rationale for a massive ramping up of the U.S. military and the state surveillance apparatus and the rest of it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But what's your take on false flag events that have actually happened?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Like what?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, okay, how about a planned one that didn't happen?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Northwoods.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		What's Northwoods?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I don't even know what that is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You don't know what Operation Northwoods is?
unidentified		No.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Maybe.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
		Operation Northwoods was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, and it was a plan to get people enthusiastic about a war with Cuba.
		They were going to blow up a drone jetliner, blame it on the Cubans.
		They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and bomb Guantanamo Bay.
		And they were going to kill American civilians, and they were going to blame it on Cuba, and it was vetoed by Kennedy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this was the Kennedy-era CIA, which was one of the crazier iterations of the CIA. Yeah, so they had a lot of that shit going on then.
		There was absolutely straight-up closed-door cigar-smoking conspiracies in that CIA, and in other CIAs too.
		That was kind of the peak of that.
		You know, blowing up Castro's cigars and all that shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They wanted to put, like, dynamite inside cigars.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it was those dudes.
		It's that kind of group right then who were part of that.
		Oh, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a hilarious idea, isn't it?
		A real exploding cigar?
		Like, fucking geniuses.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, if you want.
		I mean, it's funny now.
		Thank God they have never tried these things, but they had all kinds of plans like that that were utterly ridiculous to basically get Castro out.
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So, sure.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, and I'm sure right as we speak in the Pentagon, someone's coming up with some secret plan to do something bad to somebody.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, wasn't that an issue with when the Bush administration was leaving, they were trying to plan something against Iran?
		There was some sort of a false flag against Iran that Dick Cheney was accused of being a part of.
		Certainly possible.
		It never came to fruition.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I wouldn't put it past them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But those things can happen.
unidentified		Oh, absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But they're very difficult to organize and pull off.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And on a scale of like 9-11, the amount of people that would have to be involved.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the point is, again, they don't need it, you know?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Like, as you were saying, they've got their culture behind them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's hard to wrap your head around, isn't it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's hard to believe that that's a real strategy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's really depressing and scary, actually.
		I mean, if you look at 1984, that's what that is.
		That book is about endless war.
		That's the theme of that book.
		And it's looking more and more like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You as a student and a professor of history as a guy who's really studied it over and over again, do you see a solution to this sort of a quagmire?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you see a potential road out of this?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		Out now.
		Yeah, tomorrow.
		Today.
		You know, I mean, and that's...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And let everybody over there just blow themselves up.
		Let them figure it out.
		ISIS rise to power.
		They have a fucking hundred billion dollars in nuclear power and just deal with it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, I think every piece of intervention makes it worse for us.
		I do.
		I think that, you know, until we started bombing ISIS, they had no reason to attack us.
		Now they have a good reason to fly planes into our buildings.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Almost easier now than ever before.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's true.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because even scarier, now you have drones, and now you have suitcase nukes, and now you have all this new technology, disbursement of toxins.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So that's a reason not to piss them off.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So that's my out now position, right?
		That's what that leads into.
		It's like, let's...
		If you kick a dog, is it more likely to bite you?
		I think so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The CIA would say, listen, we need to keep these motherfuckers right...
		We're going to put our hand right in their forehead, let them keep swinging.
		That way, if we ever have to pop a cap at them, we'll pull the gun out with our left hand and...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but all of that shit was created by U.S. policy.
		Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA, right?
		I mean, the Mujahideen against the Soviets, he got weapons and training and he was their buddies, right?
unidentified		He...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not only that, they instituted the idea of blowing yourself up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this holy war thing, this jihad as a holy war, it really, that wasn't a part of their culture until the CIA came along and taught them it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, no, for sure, yeah.
		Yeah, it's the whole thing, the whole history of the last 30 or so years in the Middle East.
		All the bad stuff is created by U.S. policy.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's so hard for us to step out and go, well, just let them figure it out on their own.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I understand.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We're like, nope, nope, we gotta be there.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Gotta be there keeping the peace.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Out now, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What would you do about ISIS if you were the president?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		President Russell.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		The people of...
		So, right, so...
		There are very substantial armies surrounding ISIS right now that are not the Americans, right?
		The Kurds have an army.
		Iraq has an army.
		Saudis don't want those dudes around.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And we're a part of this attack on them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not just a United States attack.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Good luck with that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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've heard people say...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Terror.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, yeah.
		I've also heard people say that this is to try to get Americans to not go there.
		And I'm like, that is the last thing that would work for.
		Are you going to kill journalists and cut their heads off?
		We're going to demand action.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They're obviously baiting us into it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But why?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, for the reasons we've been talking about.
		They know that if Americans intervene and start bombing people, they're going to kill some civilians.
		And guess who will be great recruits, recruiting material, the families of those civilians killed?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you think it's a strategy to create martyrs?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Probably.
		We don't know for sure, but it would be a smart one.
		Yeah.
		Makes sense to me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow, what a weird strategy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, to get the U.S. Is it just short-sighted?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it possible that they're just not thinking that far in advance?
unidentified		No.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, I mean, the strategy is to get us to drop bombs on the people of the Middle East, right?
		It's the blowback theory, which tends to cause people to dislike the United States and join groups like ISIS, right?
		So it's a great, as David Petraeus himself said, it's actually a great recruiting tool.
		So U.S. foreign policy interventions in the Middle East has served as the greatest recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and ISIS, of course.
unidentified		Right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You get people to be pissed off and want to kill.
		I mean, what would cause you to join a terrorist group?
		I mean, the only thing that would cause me to do that is if someone dropped a fucking bomb on my family.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
		I'd be not a nice person.
		And I'd be willing to do all kinds of crazy shit I wasn't willing to do prior to that.
		What better way than to get the United States to start doing that?
		Create a whole population of potential recruits.
unidentified		Wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's a fascinating endgame.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They're crazy, but they're not stupid.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's terrifying.
		It's terrifying.
		I remember when I was a boy.
		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Every bomb we drop there perpetuates the war.
		That's my point.
		Because it creates more enemies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or we just fuck so many people up, there's no enemies left.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
		So, right.
		That's one option.
		You can kill all of them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Kill everybody.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Kill all of them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Kill them all, let God sort them out.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that like a Marine t-shirt or something?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So let's do that.
		Let's do that.
		Let's drop many, many, many nuclear bombs all across the Arabian Plain and see what happens.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so there's two options.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Kill them all or get out.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Or do what we're doing and ensure perpetual war.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's how I see it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So defense contractors is what he was talking about.
		He was talking about also research universities who are working with the defense contractors.
		Of course.
		Damn, they love war.
		Sure, Raytheon wants all the wars in the world, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Allegedly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, definitely.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But the question is, are they really running the show?
unidentified		Right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Or to what extent?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		To what extent?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		And forcing people to divulge their sources.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		The worst.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		The ACLU has called him the worst president.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How the fuck does that happen?
		Is that just a guy that's just under pressure once he gets into office?
		Or is that how he was all along?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think it's who he was all along.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he was just bullshitting.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You got everyone.
		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because he's articulate as opposed to Bush, because he's well-educated, because he's black.
		You said black with me.
		You were holding on to black.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I was.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Biting my time there, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Good luck.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so when John McCain is taking the peace position in a debate with you, that should tell you something about who you are.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		For me, it was like...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, he's a warmonger.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He always has been.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Obama.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, always has been.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's incredible.
		Hope and change, man.
		What are you talking about?
		What happened to hope and change?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Restoring America's Leadership, 2007 foreign affairs article.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Everyone should read it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, everyone should, I guess.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's short, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It'll take you five minutes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, it's weird.
		Technology can cut either way, right?
		So it's like, on the one hand, it's very difficult for those large institutions to control their information now, right?
		We can get in there like Snowden did and like WikiLeaks has.
		We can get in there and disperse it and everybody fucking knows what they're up to.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So that's kind of good, I think, for democracy and for freedom and for us and for our privacy and power, etc., against them.
		But, on the other hand, they can use it against us and are all the time, right?
		So they have all these cameras everywhere and all these cities, you know, New York City and London.
		I think, isn't there a camera on every corner in London now?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How about Camden, New Jersey, where they don't even have cops anymore?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
unidentified		They just have cameras.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They replace the cops with cameras, right?
		Exactly.
		So...
		Yeah, and you know, so they're looking at us, and the FBI apparently has this thing where they're looking at us through our webcams on our computers.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Not me, I got tape on mine, bitch.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right, yeah, good move.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		If you want to watch a middle-aged man beat off, you're on your own.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Can't fucking get it from me.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They might even want that information.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Go ahead.
		I beat off the normal stuff.
		You want to ask me?
		I'll show you.
		I'll send you the links.
		But I'm not hiding anything.
		If I was, say if I was a person in a position of influence and I was...
		You know, concerned about my future and my position in the company and they found out that I was only watching tranny porn.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sorry if I said tranny.
		I don't want to say tranny anymore.
		Transgender porn.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Dan Savage of all people got into trouble for using the word tranny.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that hilarious?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Can you believe that shit?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, how about the guy who runs Bravo?
		What is his name?
		Cohen?
		Andy Cohen?
		He got in trouble for saying twink.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I didn't know that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Calling someone a perfect twink.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, you can't say twink.
		There's people out there that are just fucking professional victims, you know?
		And that's what...
		Full circle brings us back to what we were talking about when it came to colleges, and that's one reason why I want to play Dear Woman for you.
		Do you have it?
		Did you pull it up?
		You have to see this, because this is the white knight encapsulated.
		This is the white knight ideology encapsulated in the most ridiculous form.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		My blood pressure is about to go up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No, you're going to love it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's beautiful.
unidentified		Dear Woman.
		We stand before you today as men committed to becoming more conscious in every way.
		We feel deep love, great respect, and a growing sense of worship for the gifts of the feminine.
		We also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present.
		We want to apologize and make amends for those actions today, so that we can move forward together into a new era of co-creation.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't this beautiful?
unidentified		I become more conscious Oh, he's more conscious.
		Isn't he beautiful?
		I know that we all have access to the full spectrum of these energies.
		I also have a growing awareness of the dimension beyond all dualities.
		Free and open like the sky.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like the sky.
unidentified		I commit to owning and stewarding a masculinity that honors and celebrates us as equals.
		I know that in order to truly honor you is a multi-dimensional woman.
		I must stand fully present with myself and own the gifts I have to share with you.
		We can create great miracles together.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh my god.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By nurturing each other in a conscious way.
unidentified		Psychos.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		By treating each other with reverence and respect.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Psychos.
mikki willis ▲ ● ▼		And by worshipping the divinity expressed in the masculine and the feminine energies.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What?
unidentified		As men, our relationship to the feminine has often been unconscious.
		I feel sorrow that women and feminine energy have for so long been subjugated and oppressed.
		Throughout history, men have raped and abused women.
		This goes on for eight minutes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we can stop at any moment now.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh look, they're playing a theatrical version of pain and suffering on the stake.
unidentified		Barred you from religious and political...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, stop right here.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know what it reminds me of a little bit?
		You know Purity Balls?
		You know, where like the girls, the daughters...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They had Jonas bracelets?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They had a Purity bracelet for Jonas Brothers?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		The dad just like embracing his daughter and then pledging...
unidentified		Purity.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There's like a vibe there that reminds me of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and then Will Ferrell did a Funny or Die parody of it.
		That guy reacted to it in a very negative way.
		It was kind of funny.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, was he aggressive and violent about it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He was upset.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He was angry?
		That's a masculine trait.
		Who are these weirdos?
		I've never heard of this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're just losers.
		They're guys that chicks don't want to fuck, so they come up with new strategies.
		This is what I've always said, and this is very unfortunate, but it is reality when it comes to men.
		Men are slimy fucks who are making sperm 24 hours a day, and we want to have sex.
		And here's the deal.
		If we're heterosexual, and ladies, if you see a guy and you don't want to fuck him, don't trust him.
		Because if you don't want to fuck him, chances are a bunch of other girls don't want to fuck him either.
		And so he has to develop tricks in order to stay in the game.
		And one of the best tricks is to separate himself from the pack by saying, Dear woman...
		I recognize the duality.
		You fucking dork.
		I know what you're doing.
		I want to take that guy hunting.
		I want to put him on a fucking, give him a rifle, make him hike up to the top of the hill and find your own food.
		He's lacking in all masculine positive traits.
		He's fucking cowering.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Dear woman, I want to take him to a singles bar.
		Anywhere.
		See how he does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Any woman who's not out of her fucking mind would be creeped out by him in a heartbeat.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		How successful is that?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Completely unsuccessful.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't work at all.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		How many views did it get?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Probably a million, but everyone's mocking it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Just for fun, yeah, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, everyone's just like, what the fuck?
		I've probably seen it 100,000 myself.
		It's fucking preposterous.
		He's a goofball.
		But there's a lot of those goofballs out there that are separating themselves from the herd.
		They see a group of people that are reacting to the douchebags of the world.
		And there are asshole men, frat boys, and fuckheads, and bros that are ruining everything for everybody else.
		And aggressive shitheads.
		And then they see this and they say, I'm going to separate myself from that.
		I'm going to be the guy who only eats fucking vegetable matter.
		And I, you know, I... I don't even use mass-produced deodorant.
		I just rub rocks on my own prints.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And I never watch porn.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Never!
		Never!
		There's a great video on that as well that I watched.
		This guy gave a TED Talk about what's wrong with porn.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think I know who that is.
		There's a guy who teaches at UT Austin.
		Robert Jensen.
		He's the leader of this movement, men's movement against pornography.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What about men doing pornography with men?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a problem with the anti-pornographic movement, is what you were talking about earlier, is that the idea is that sex is bad.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		No one has a problem with it.
		Zero people have a problem with it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Pornography is the most democratic institution in our society.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How does that work?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There is no desire that is not catered to in pornography.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There is no body image that is not sold as an object of desire in pornography.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Little dicks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's no little dick porn.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Alright, there's one.
		Okay, fine.
		No, but if you think about, you know, people, I've heard pornographers say this, you know, what is the thing you hate about your body the most, right?
		You will find people paying for that in pornography.
unidentified		That's probably true, right?
unidentified		To look at that.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure, they exist.
		The question is what to do about them.
		So Sam Harris wants to kill them.
		I mean, he's an interventionist.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you think he wants to kill them?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I don't know exactly what he intends.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you remember the context?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I mean, you have to read the book for yourself.
		And he has sort of backed down from that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Which book was this?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I can't remember.
		It's a very sort of infamous quote from him.
		And, you know, he'd have to speak for himself about what that actually means.
		But there's no question that he's an interventionist, a military intervention.
		He wants military intervention against them.
		That's clear.
		The question is, what would that produce?
		And my argument is it would produce more of them, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Right, right.
		Well, I've always been fascinated by the left's adoption of the term Islamophobia, and that Islamophobia is one thing that is very chic.
		It's in style to call someone out on Islamophobia while mocking Christianity.
		At the same time.
		It's an interesting thing.
		Like, you're allowed to mock Scientology.
		You're allowed to mock Mormonism.
		It's a very valid point of debate, the fact that Mitt Romney was a Mormon.
		He's essentially a cult member.
		His family came from Mexico.
		They fleed to Mexico so that they could have more wives.
		I mean, this is undeniable.
		And it's all fair game and on the table, but Islamophobia is interesting.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		I was in New York in 9-11.
		I don't want that to happen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No doubt about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm looking at it in terms of why is it acceptable to stand up for one religion.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's just because it's been used in such bad ways recently.
		That's all.
		It's been used to justify these terrible wars, right?
		It was used to justify the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria and the rest of it.
		Now, yeah, I agree with you.
		It's hypocritical.
		It's a double standard.
		Yeah, I have nothing good to say about Islam.
		Nothing.
		And I certainly have nothing good to say about that variant of Islam that is practiced by the people in ISIS or Al-Qaeda or the Taliban.
		Yeah, but so what, right?
		It's like, there's people all over the world who have ideas that are abhorrent to me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's such a fascinating debate.
		It's such an interesting take.
		Like, which way do you go?
		Do you go in, hey, let them be crazy over there?
		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's about aggression.
		So it's about who uses aggression.
		So if they aggress against me, hell yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's on.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But they haven't aggressed against me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, wow.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's not good.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, of course not.
		The ISIS argument is that they're an extension of the U.S. military.
		They're an extension of U.S. imperialism is what they say, those reporters.
		I'm not in any way justifying what happened to them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Some of them have been British too, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well, the Brits are intervening too, yeah.
		So, you know, I don't know.
		But I mean, the point is they are, as I said, they're trying to bait us in.
		Which they succeeded in doing.
		Look what we're doing today.
		We're bombing them right now as we speak.
		So what will we get from that?
		Are we going to kill all 30 or 50,000 of the ISIS fighters?
		Are we going to do that?
		The only way to do that is to send in the entire fucking 80-second airborne.
		And more and chase them down on the ground and kill every last one of them, which I don't even think is possible.
		So, you know, and what you're doing is you're creating more anti American hatred in that region, from which they can recruit.
		Endless War, 1984. Fuck.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What's the way this can be fixed?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Get out, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
		It's the only way.
		The Rand Paul way.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whereas Hillary Clinton...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Hell no.
		She wants to chase him to the end of the earth.
		Sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But she's the one who's been in the office.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		She's been there.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		What did Joe Biden just say?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He just said, we're going to chase ISIS to the gates of hell.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whoa.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly where you're going to take us.
		You're right.
		That's exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did he really say that?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he did.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		About two weeks ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I remember when Joe Biden, we used to do Joe Biden night at a comedy club because Joe Biden got caught being a plagiarist.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you remember that?
		Oh, you don't know that.
		Interesting.
		Joe Biden, when he was running for president, I believe...
		Okay, I started stand-up comedy in 1988, so it had to be close on people's minds.
		So somewhere around then, Joe Biden got in trouble.
		He was running for president, and he gave a speech that was a direct rip-off of one of Kennedy's speeches.
		And they said, oh, you know, he has speech writers.
		He didn't even know.
		But, I mean, they didn't even fucking bother changing the words.
		They just plagiarized the shit out of Kennedy.
		And so we used to do Joe Biden Night at Stitch's Comedy Club.
		And what we'd do is, like, I would go up and do one of my friend's acts, and he would go up and do me, and we would do each other's act as a joke.
		And they called it Joe Biden Night.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, my God.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So I was, you know, and he never ran for president again.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		After that.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Because of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because of that.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Because you fucked with him so badly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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?
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I kind of like Biden in the sense that he's not very filtered.
		He doesn't edit much, his thoughts.
		So like what he said about Obama during the race, he's like, well, people like him because he's clean and articulate.
		White people like black guys who are clean and articulate and well-spoken.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And thin.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Seems healthy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So he jogs a lot and stuff.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's not Lil Wayne.
		Yeah, he's safe.
		He's okay.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I thought he was right.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I thought that was correct, and he got into all this shit about it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, there's no doubt.
		We like white people that are clean and articulate as well.
		You've got a Rob Ford guy running for president.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He's done pretty well in his political career.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In Canada.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Canada's a different animal, man.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I guess so.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a totally different animal up there.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm team Ford, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You like him?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, I'm just kidding.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		His brother's running now.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm just kidding.
		I mean, it's just the fact, you know, it's...
		I'm all about individual freedom, you know, and like, if you're smoking crack, I don't care, as long as you run the city correctly, you know?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, why is it okay that he drinks whiskey, but it's not okay if he smokes crack?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, that's the tremendous North American double standard, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, the double standard.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know about all too well, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Sanction drugs.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, come on.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, alcohol compared to weed?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		The destructiveness of alcohol?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, not only that, the self-awareness aspects of it, the blinding you to your actions aspect of alcohol, which is the whole thing.
		Look, everyone's talking about being intoxicated and intoxication leading to rape.
		No one's talking about stoned rape, okay?
		And it's not a coincidence.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even though marijuana is illegal, marijuana is something that I believe probably causes less rape than any other intoxicant you could ever take.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Of course, it makes you less aggressive, of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and there's just one of them.
		I mean, all of the psychedelics, and marijuana is not thought of as a psychedelic, but I think it's very much psychedelic.
		It is, yeah.
		They're all illegal.
		Well, that's sort of changing, too.
		How do you feel about that?
		I mean, it's an interesting thing, seeing the economic aspects of legalization.
		State, not federal.
		Because the states have adopted these new policies in Colorado and Washington State.
		And now other states are looking at it and wondering whether or not they should dive in because of the amount of profit that they're making tax-wise.
		Substantial.
		Substantial money.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So it was some sneaky shit.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And most likely, you know, this wasn't stated, but what else was going to happen?
		They're going to go to your little farm in Arcata, California, and they're going to be like, what is that hippie doing there?
		Right.
		You've got all these guys who are like long-haired, and they're high, and they're not good workers.
		They're going to regulate and say, I'm sorry, this is not up to snuff.
		We're going to have to shut you down.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		He's going to be very clean.
		All his employers are going to be vetted.
		They're not going to be potheads.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He'll be politically connected to all the right people.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And, of course, politically connected.
		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.
		I think that's starting to happen in Colorado.
		I've seen some evidence of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		In what way?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's just that there's sort of a monopolization going on.
		State regulation often leads to the creation of monopolies, right?
		Because it makes it difficult to enter an industry, right?
		If an industry is heavily regulated, you have to meet all these criteria to enter it as a legitimate licensed business.
		It becomes more difficult, right?
		So the existing entity, the large corporation that's already there, gets protected by these regulations.
		It's called regulatory capture, is the concept.
		And so I think that's what's going to happen.
		So I want no regulation.
		None.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just legal.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Just let us grow it and smoke it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When you say decriminalization, do you think that it should be legal to sell things like cocaine and heroin?
		Heroin especially is a tricky one, right?
		Because people associate that with damaged lives and destruction.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So the quick one-word answer to that is Portugal, right?
		So Portugal decriminalized all that shit.
		I mean, there's some regulations there, but they decriminalized all those drugs more than 10 years ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, that is the difference between decriminalization and legalization.
		Legalization, like if you're selling pottery, nobody's going to give you a hard time.
		Anyone can sell pottery.
		But if you get caught with pottery, nobody gives a shit.
		But if you get caught with drugs in a decriminalized state, well, then you don't get in trouble.
		But if you're selling it, it's a different animal.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		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.
		People actually use it less.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Isn't that amazing?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, so there you go.
unidentified		Well, forbidden.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		People want to do things that are forbidden.
		It's a natural impulse of human beings.
		You try to resist and we try to do it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Creation of a taboo creates a desire.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's such a bizarre thing that we have this attachment controlling people's access to consciousness enhancing or altering substances.
		We're completely committed to this idea and we will pitch it as if it's the only logical explanation or the only logical course of business.
		What, are you going to have the streets filled with a bunch of reefer heads?
		Well, you look at what's going on in Colorado, they have the lowest rate of drunk driving accidents ever.
		They have a lower rate of murder than they've ever had before.
		They have lower rates of violent crimes than they had in a decade.
		All these things are happening right in front of everybody's face.
		Right.
		Undeniable aspects of the legalization of cannabis.
		A drug which makes people more peaceful.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it just does.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, it doesn't make everybody more peaceful, but it's pretty fucking good at it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Pretty much, yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And so if we decriminalized heroin tomorrow, are you going to start shooting smack the next day?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I'm an adult.
		The question is, is keeping it from young people, just making it more difficult to get, is that going to keep...
		One kid from becoming a junkie, if it is, is it worth it?
		I see that argument, but I don't think that it jives with human nature.
		And that's why I would say that legalization of all drugs would probably be better.
		And also, when you create laws, when people violate those laws, they become criminals and you put them in jail.
		And that's where things get really fucked up.
		Right.
		Because then you have what we have in this country, which we have privatized prisons.
		And there's not just one.
		We're not talking about one.
		We're talking about many privatized prisons.
		So you have a prison industrial complex along with these laws that has a vested interest in keeping these laws active.
		So then you have unions, like you have the Prison Guards Union, which lobbies to keep these drugs illegal.
		Along with pharmaceutical drug companies, which form a partnership for a drug-free America.
		And my joke was that's like hookers making commercials against strippers.
		Like a partnership for a drug-free America going out against weed is literally like hookers saying strippers are bad.
		They're immoral.
		We're better.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, why do kids smoke cigarettes?
		A lot of it is because there's a taboo on it, right?
		Because it's being bad, it's being rebellious, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's also like, it's cool, man.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, but it's cool because it's bad.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's cool because it's bad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		There's a certain romanticism involved in just ruining your life.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know what I mean?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Self-destructiveness.
		It's sexy.
		It's the rock star self-destructive sexiness.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, he's doing coke.
		He can't keep a job.
		Boss called, you're fired, Wilson.
		Fuck you.
		The guy's a rebel.
		Look at his jacket.
		He's got a fucking fucked up leather jacket.
		He gets on his motorcycle in the rain.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Drives off a cliff.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And then he's an international superstar.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's because we're told all day long to be good and healthy and pure, right?
		There you go.
		There's the puritanism again, right?
		It's actually rejection of that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, it is, right?
		That is so goddamn true.
		That's the best way to create sluts.
		I'm not slut-shaming, by the way.
		When I was a kid, we all knew.
		Catholic girls.
		Exactly!
		I didn't even have to say it!
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		My first girlfriend was one, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fuck yeah, I had one, too.
		Bitch was a freak.
		I say bitch with all due respect.
		She's a nice person.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, this poor girl was so pent up that you would get her alone.
		I mean, I remember I was in the movie theater with her, and I just grabbed her breast, and she started heaving and talking.
		Like, it was like the world was, like, Satan was at her door, prodding her in the ass with a pitchfork.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He was.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, in her eyes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He was at her door, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But isn't it crazy that that is a direct response to suppression?
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		This poor girl was so pent up.
		The way I described her is like...
		She had sex with anybody who asked.
		She was so crazy.
		And she's beautiful.
		But I said that if you put a dick in front of her, it was like rolling a ball of yarn in front of a kitten.
		They couldn't help themselves.
		There's just something about what they did...
		Like, making it all evil and dark in Catholic school.
		They couldn't wait to just get out of that place and run.
		Just run to freedom.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
		Yeah.
		It's a schizophrenic culture we live in.
		It's not just Catholics, right?
		It's sort of Americans generally.
		I mean, we're told...
		Both things simultaneously all day long.
		Sex is bad.
		Watch out.
		Be careful.
		And fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.
		And here's a chicken in a bikini.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Selling cars.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And porn is a bigger industry than the automobile industry.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it's terrible.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And who cares if it goes under?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It must be secret.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, exactly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, remember when it was interesting, the porn people were asking for a bailout.
		It was like sort of a publicity stunt.
		But the reality is that, like, that industry was crippled.
		I mean, that industry had its legs taken out by the internet.
		I mean, there was a guy that used to live in my neighborhood who's a porn producer, and, you know, he was...
		Living high on the hog.
		He had, like, a fat Mercedes, lived in this big-ass house, and his house eventually went up.
		It was bankrupt.
		He went bankrupt, and they sold that bitch.
		They took it from him, foreclosed on it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I knew a major porn producer who just died, actually, recently.
		But he said they were figuring out ways to monetize it.
		And I didn't quite understand it, but the tube channels and all that stuff.
unidentified		Mm-hmm.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They actually figured out a way to get revenue out of that, and I'm not sure how, but anyway, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fucking stealing people's credit card numbers, maybe.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Getting videos of you jacking off to it on those little web cameras.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There you go.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That the FBI is watching.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, let them watch.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How many are they going to watch?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		A lot, apparently.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		300 million people.
		How many FBI people do you got that are keeping an eye on people jerking off?
		You're going to go blind.
		You fucking people are going to be staring at monitors all day.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Can you imagine?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Coke bottle glasses.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They're going to stumble out of that fucking place into the light of day.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I think I'd rather work in a coal mine than have that job.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Similar effects, I'm sure.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Similar effects.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Good Lord.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, what a strange culture.
		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?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I live in hell.
		I mean, yeah.
		I mean, in a way, it's true.
		It's like, God, I don't know.
		Yeah, no, I'm just angry a lot.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Are you?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, seriously.
		Really?
		Yeah, no, I'm sort of angry much of the day, yeah.
		I mean, reading the news, reading people's opinions, reading my colleagues' work, and seeing what they're doing with 19-year-old girls.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, that's what's even crazier.
		It's like, it's...
		Even in college, it's ridiculous.
		I mean, it's like, humans are fucked.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I'm pissed off.
		Yeah, I've been talking to some friends about this.
		It's like, you know, Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living, and actually, I'm beginning to think that it's too painful to live.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Whoa, you're fucking deep in this.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'd rather be ignorant sometimes.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Start drinking, son.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Sometimes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I used to do that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I gave it up.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Irish?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Russell?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Partly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Partly?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Enough.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I see the freckles.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Irish enough.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You got it in you, kid.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		Sure do.
		Sure do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you used to drink to try to avoid reality?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, basically.
		Self-medicate.
		It was like an escape.
		It was totally an escape.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		There it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, or completely getting immersed in all the intricacies of the bullshit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Jesus Christ.
		I don't know.
		I mean, I've been an intellectual my whole life.
		My family's all intellectual.
		It's all we've done is just talk about the world and study the world and talk about it and talk about it.
		And most of it is negative, right?
		It's not like, oh, American foreign policy is great.
		And it's painful and it hurts.
		And so much of it is literally about life and death and people dying.
		And it's...
		Some of that, some of it, man, I have a hard time recovering from.
		So the Michael Brown thing was bad enough in Ferguson.
		I don't know if you saw the video of, I don't know how you pronounce his name, but Kajim Powell, who was killed about two days later.
unidentified		He was the kid.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He was clearly mentally ill.
		He walked up to the cops and he said, shoot me, shoot me.
		They said he had a butter knife or something in his hand.
		And there's a video of them just shooting him dead.
		I cried all night long.
		And I'm still, that was like, what, two months ago, I'm still bothered by that.
		And knowing that that's a fairly common thing for a lot of people in this society.
		And if you live in a particular neighborhood, that's like a normal thing to happen.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, in that case, it's being born into a state of occupation.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You know, I think that there are many of those...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Military state.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's basically a military occupation.
		It is, goddammit.
		And you know what?
		And like the militarization of the police has only accentuated it, but it's been going on for a long time.
		That's why black people have just a very, very different view of police than white people do.
		And it's just something white people have to accept and understand.
		And it's hard to, if you never go to Compton and never see what it's like...
		And you don't get pulled over for simply driving or walking down the street, you know?
		But god damn, man.
		When I saw that video, I was like, okay, I'm giving up politics.
		I'm just, I can't do this anymore.
		It's too upsetting.
		I mean, stuff like war and stuff like police violence, when I see video of it or hear about it, it's just, it devastates me.
		It really does.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's the worst aspects of human beings right in front of you, and it's not in your life.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		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.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, there's certain things.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And like the idea of locking people up for drugs, just putting people in prisons for stuff like that.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		For life!
		There's people in prison right now for life.
		They're never getting out.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, the depth of my feelings about that are just unspeakable.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, I just want to blow them up.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Now, when you talk about not wanting to live, though, do you...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, not wanting to think.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you say...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Not wanting to know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You don't want to be a part of it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, you have to know, though, for what you do for a living, right?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Exactly.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's the problem.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's the conundrum.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's exactly right.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So sometimes I just want to be like a surfer and just smoke weed.
unidentified		Why don't you do that?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And surf, because you can't make any money on it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And also, I'm 49. Like, I can't take...
unidentified		I want it well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You couldn't take a surfing.
		Your body moves well.
		You're moving around normal.
		Any issues?
unidentified		Well, maybe.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, no.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Like, actually, seriously, I wanted...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You wanted to go surfing?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, I wanted to be a kickboxer, actually.
unidentified		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Dude, I trained Muay Thai with Joe Schilling.
unidentified		Yeah?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, you know Joe?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm at his gym, the yard, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And everyone should go to the yard.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's the greatest gym.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Do you train there all the time?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I tore my ACL there three months ago, but until then, yeah, six days a week.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How'd you tear your ACL? Tried to do a flying knee.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And landed funny.
unidentified		Oh, man.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just hitting pads and stuff?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, I was all by myself with a heavy bag, and I just did a flying knee.
		Just stupid.
		It was nothing.
		And I landed.
		A lot of ACLs are just that kind of thing, right?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I tore mine kicking a bag.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I've toured both of them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		That's what it was, kicking a fucking heavy bag, right?
		Well, I actually got loosened up.
		A guy kicked me in the side.
		I'm bad at checking leg kicks.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, so he kicked you the side of the leg.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He loosened me up.
		It loosened like a week before that, and then this thing.
		I think that's what happened.
		But yeah, no, I was like, I wish I could just do this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But as an intellectual, though, aren't you aware of the negative impact of concussions?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You mean the whole brain damage?
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know, no, that's the whole thing.
		I know it's such a bummer.
		And like, I'm just...
		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But you spar.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And do you notice any difference?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, but I've just been more and more worried about it, right?
		It's like I'm just constantly worried about it, and that's the problem.
		Yeah.
		And now I don't know what to do.
		Like, I'm 40-fucking-nine, and I'm, like, going in there, and they want me to fight.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They want you to fight?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They've asked me to fight.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Fight what?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like an amateur bout?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, like a smoker.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Just, like, so they can get press?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		No, just because that's what they do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because that's what they do.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They train fighters.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They train fighters.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They train fighters, yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's one of the big Muay Thai gyms in California.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So, yeah, so smokers or, you know, there's whatever.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		So you're training and they're like, listen, take this to the next place.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		The next place is you have a fight.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, Joe's trainer who he owns the gym with, Mark Camaro, he said, eh, we should get you a fight.
		And I, like, laughed at him.
		I was like, come on, man.
		I'm 40 fucking...
		I mean, the guys, they're all like 25-year-old ripped Korean dudes and stuff.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My friend Steve is almost 60. And he's been my friend since we were...
		I was 15 when I met him.
		And he was an Air Force flight surgeon.
		And he was doing his residency for ophthalmology.
		He's just a wild man.
		He's always been doing something.
		And he's a doctor now in Arizona.
		But he's the reason why I became a stand-up comedian.
		Hmm.
		Because he talked me into doing it when I was young and I was fighting.
		My point being, this guy to this day is ready to take a fight.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		60?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		He's closing in on 60. He'll take a fight tomorrow.
		Wow.
		His problem is he was on the U.S. ski team.
		He's a madman.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, clearly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And he had at least 10 operations on his knees.
		Both of his knees looked like a fish that you filleted and then stitched back together again.
		Because he had his knees done in the 80s when they would take your hamstring.
		The way they would reconstruct your ACL was they would use your hamstring.
		So they would cut you open like a big line on the side.
		Like, I'm sure they did yours probably...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Did they do a PCL? No, I haven't done surgery yet.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You haven't?
unidentified		No, no, no.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's not that bad.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I mean, they tell me it's not that bad.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You did an MRI? Yeah, got an MRI. What did the MRI say?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Partial.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Partial.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How much?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		They didn't tell me.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		They didn't?
unidentified		No.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why didn't they tell you?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Where'd you go?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Kaiser.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Okay, that's no good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		We'll talk afterwards.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay, good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'll hook you up with a real doctor.
unidentified		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I'm not a real doctor, but a doctor that deals with athletes.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		A better doctor.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's what I needed.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		General practitioners are just not going to deal with them.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, no, he's an orthopedist, but yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Even an orthopedist that doesn't deal with real athletes is going to say, oh, you're okay.
		Just walk around and you're going to be fine.
		That means you've got a bum knee for the rest of your life that's ready to give out.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, shit.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Depending upon how much of a partial tear.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I mean, if it's 10% tear, yeah, let it rehab.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I got no percentage from them.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, you need to know.
		And you need a guy who's an expert at reading MRIs.
		I've had two different MRIs done on my back.
		One of them that was shit and one of them that was really clear.
		And it was much different results.
		You know, it's...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm dying, man.
		I gotta get back in there.
		As I was saying, when I'm in the gym, as you know, that's all you think about.
		Everything else goes away.
		ISIS is gone, foreign policy, history is gone, academia, fuck that shit.
unidentified		It's all gone.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm just thinking about that fist coming at my face.
		Or even if I'm just working on a bag.
		It's just beautiful.
		And I just, I wish, I just often wish I could just do that.
		Or like, I want to move to Thailand and do that thing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like go to Phuket?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh my god, and just live there on whatever it is.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		My friend Mark did that.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Five bucks a day.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I mean, you know, I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		He's a financial advisor.
		He went to Thailand.
		He lived there for a month.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and just, and belonged to one of those gyms.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Changed my last name to Fairtex or whatever.
unidentified		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Damn, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You got it bad, huh?
unidentified		Oh, yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		How long were you kickboxing for?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You had this idea.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Well, I started with boxing just like bullshit.
		Well, I took some classes at Church Street Gym in New York when I lived there.
		That was like 10 years ago, but not seriously.
		And then I did like bullshit, cardio, kickboxing.
		Then I joined the yard about two years ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And you just got really into it, huh?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		When I started at the yard, it was like, that's all I wanted to do.
		That's all I was thinking about.
		Dude, so I am the only PhD history professor in this country, I am sure, who has listened to you call 500 fights.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Wow.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		No, I've watched, like, probably a majority of the UFC fights.
		I've watched every single Glory fight.
		I've watched K-1.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's interesting.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I got obsessed with it about two years ago.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It sucks that it gives you brain damage.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Doesn't it?
		Doesn't it?
		We need to fix this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Listen, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's one of the main reasons that I got into stand-up comedy.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Do you feel like you got any?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Oh, yeah.
		I've definitely probably got some.
		Yeah.
		I mean, I don't know.
		I mean, I talk okay.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I was going to say, your brain's doing pretty well.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		For a guy who didn't graduate college, I mean, I'm fairly articulate.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But I've definitely been hit in the head a lot.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		But it was all done by the time I was in my early 20s.
		I stopped.
		But I was worried.
		I'd get headaches.
		I'd lay in bed after sparring.
		I'd get headaches.
		But I was sparring with some murderers.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I've only done kind of moderate sparring, so I haven't really gotten hit hard.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Well, I was fighting, too.
		I fought a lot of Taekwondo tournaments and three kickboxing bouts.
		But the sparring is the more dangerous thing.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Because you'd get concussed and then guys would dust you off and push you right back in there.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Especially back then.
		When I was doing it, it was the late 80s.
		Nobody knew what the fuck was going on with the brain.
		There was no real studies done.
		They knew when people were punch drunk, but they didn't really have a good grasp on traumatic brain injury.
		I have a good friend who's a doctor, and his specialty is traumatic brain injury.
		And he has enlightened me in a way that's absolutely terrifying.
		He's like, you know, you could go waterboarding.
		Not waterboarding.
		Jet skiing.
unidentified		Brr, brr, brr.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Like, what is it when they pull you behind a boat and you're fucking bouncing around?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Water skiing.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Water skiing.
		Yeah, he's like, guys get brain damage from water skiing.
		He's like, no doubt about it.
		He's like, the pituitary gland is very sensitive.
		And when it gets jostled around and banged up, depending upon the individual, look, there's people that box and they're fine.
		And then there's people that get hit a few times and they have all sorts of depression issues.
		Their body stops producing hormones properly.
unidentified		Ugh.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		See?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I don't know, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Traumatic brain injury is no fucking joke.
		And I have had the unfortunate experience of knowing people pre and post.
		I have good friends.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'm sure you do.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That I knew that when they started out, they were fine.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		And now they're not fine.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, this is a question.
		I can't believe I got this opportunity to ask Joe Rogan this.
		Are there UFC fighters or former UFC fighters that you're sure have it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Unquestionable.
		Without a doubt.
		No doubt about it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Like many?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Without a doubt.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Okay.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, if you stay in there long enough, it gets you.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Like you can see it in some of them?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Absolutely.
		Absolutely.
		It's undeniable.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I can think of a couple who are leading suspects.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I would be a real piece of shit if I denied it.
		Yeah.
		I mean, there's a lot of people I'm sure that would like me to not comment on it, but it's one of my only issues with...
		I don't mind broken bones.
		Like, I see when Anderson Silva broke his leg, it was nasty, but I gotta...
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, that's nothing compared...
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I'll trade that for brain injury any day.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I was way more concerned when he got knocked unconscious.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Of course.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		When he got knocked out and then when he came back just a few months later, I was the one guy that was saying he's not going to be the same.
		You've got to be aware.
		That's a guy that got knocked unconscious four months ago.
		He's not going to be the same.
		He's in training already.
		He's sparring already.
		He's not going to be the same guy six months later.
		He's just not.
		There's no way around it.
		It's one of the beautiful things that Manny Pacquiao's trainer.
		Freddie Roach has got trauma related Parkinson's himself.
		Mm-hmm So when he got knocked out by Marquez, Freddie Roach was like, you're not fighting for a year.
		You need to recover.
		Just get that in your head now.
		You want to keep going?
		You're not fighting for a year.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's such a bummer.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It's a huge bummer.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		And then boxing's the worst, clearly.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I don't know about that, man.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Really?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I thought that was pretty established.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I used to think that too, but the reality is it's all about the training.
		And in training, MMA fighters are getting hit in the head a lot.
		I mean, you're not getting hit in the head as much unless you're a guy who only wants to stand up.
		And then you're also dealing with kicks.
		And kicks are a different animal.
		You can kick so much harder than you can punch.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Getting kicked in the head?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		I can probably kick...
		Ten times harder than I can punch.
		You know, I can send a heavy bag flying across the room with a kick.
		If you imagine what that can do to your fucking head, it's terrible.
		I've seen guys get hit in the head in kickboxing matches and they're never the same again.
		I've seen it.
		I've seen it with my own eyes.
		So that's something to think about.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		So, go to the ground.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, learn some jiu-jitsu, man.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Daniele Bolelli, my good friend.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I love that dude.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Our mutual friend.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, I love that dude.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		We're probably going to start.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's the move, man.
		That's the intellectual pursuit.
		Because, first of all, it's far more complex, relies far less on athleticism, and you can do it deep into your old age.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Right.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You know, Elio Gracie was doing it in his fucking 80s.
unidentified		Yeah.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's chess.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
		And as long as you do it with good partners, you can really go at it and be aware that a guy's not going to hurt you.
		Things happen accidentally.
		Knees get twisted, and you fall funny.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But no head injuries.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		No head injuries.
		Very rarely.
		I mean, you can collide heads occasionally, but it's not the goal.
		And getting choked unconscious really has no repercussions.
		It's no big deal.
		You just go, you wake up, and you can actually, guys do it all the time.
		They get choked out, and they go back to rolling moments later.
		I'll get you involved.
		I'll get you in there.
		I'm going to get you a good doctor, too.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		All right, good.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Dude, thank you very much for doing this, man.
		It was a lot of fun.
		Really, really, really enjoyed it.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I love this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Three hours just blew by.
unidentified		Wow!
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Oh, I love this.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that's it.
		And your book, Renegade History of the United States, it's available right now.
		You can get it on Amazon.
		Is it an audiobook as well?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Yep, audio.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Is it you reading it?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Nope.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Goddammit!
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		It's a Shakespearean actor.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		What the fuck?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		I know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Why do they do that?
unidentified		I don't know.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Did they resist you reading it?
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		You'd be perfect at reading it.
unidentified		It's hilarious.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		He does black slave dialect in a Shakespearean reading.
		Son of a bitch.
		That's hilarious.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Son of a bitch.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		But it's still good.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		You should still buy it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Yes, everyone buy it.
		Buy that and buy the book.
		And Thaddeus Russell, you can find him on Twitter.
		And what is your website?
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Thaddeusrussell.com.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		That's it.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		Thank you, sir.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Appreciate it.
unidentified		All right, man.
thaddeus russell ▲ ● ▼		Thank you.
joe rogan ▲ ● ▼		It was very enjoyable.
unidentified		Cool.

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