Thaddeus Russell, PhD and adjunct professor, critiques Occidental College’s overreaction to student protests—mandatory diversity training, microaggression policies, and calls for the president’s resignation—while dismissing such slights as exaggerated compared to systemic racism. He argues tenure enforces intellectual conformity, citing UC Berkeley’s Peter Duesberg, whose HIV denialism persists unchallenged, and warns paternalistic racial liberalism assimilates minorities into dominant culture. Russell’s upcoming Renegade University online platform aims to break the left-liberal media monopoly by fostering real debate, contrasting with the U.S. public school system’s Prussian-style compliance training. Despite Amazon’s labor controversies and Google’s Bay Area backlash, both agree tech has lifted global living standards—from Sub-Saharan Africa’s cell phone boom to air conditioning and cars—while Rogan praises podcasting as the freest medium for unfiltered discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
It's like an hour and a half, and then it's about the same as what I'm doing now between the east side of L.A. and the west side of L.A., where his mother lives.
So actually, it's not that much of a different commute for me.
Well, since you've been here, the social justice warrior crusade has ramped up considerably, including what happened in Yale with that woman who, I guess she sent out a letter saying that you should allow people a certain amount of leeway to be offensive.
Like, we shouldn't restrict...
What kind of costumes kids can wear, including if they want to wear things that appropriate other cultures and things along those lines.
You should give people the opportunity to be offensive, I think is what she said.
I guess opening up the door for free expression.
The idea is that you're supposed to be learning in these schools.
You're supposed to be exploring different ways of thinking and whether or not something is of...
Is this humorous?
Is this valid in our culture?
Is it not?
Should you be offended?
Is it pointless to be offended?
Is it silly?
Does it offend everyone?
If it doesn't offend people who it's supposed to be culturally appropriating, then what's it on you?
And so, you know, obviously a lot of what the student protesters are saying is hysteria.
I mean, they talk as if they're in Alabama in 1960 when they're actually at Yale or Occidental College.
Right.
The most privileged people on the planet, right?
Just by being there.
And many of their demands are essentially totalitarian, you know, demanding diversity training, mandatory diversity training for all faculty and staff, which, you know, I'm assuming would be teaching me how to think about race and gender and sexuality, right?
Telling me what I should say in my classrooms and not say in my classrooms.
That Occidental, the faculty themselves, some of the faculty actually took it upon themselves to propose a mechanism in which students can report microaggressions committed against them by faculty.
The faculty, the students didn't even demand this.
I will say, I will say, just to be clear here, it hasn't been voted, the faculty hasn't voted for that yet, but it was a significant minority of faculty proposed that.
There's this incredible conflation that goes on, which drives me insane, because certainly there is some racism on campuses, you know, there is some racial insensitivity, no doubt, but they conflate that stuff that goes on at Yale.
With Ferguson and Baltimore and Birmingham, Alabama in 1956 and South Africa under apartheid.
It all becomes the same thing.
It all becomes white supremacy.
It's all racism.
It's all structural racism.
It's all systemic racism.
And so we need to start sort of differentiating here because there's clearly some differences among those.
There is a lot that's legitimate, that's real, that I understand, that I have compassion for.
I've never been a black person, I've never been a black college student, but I've always been sure that it must be at least uncomfortable for black people on these campuses that are mostly white.
Right, and so the question is, do you have a macro response to a microaggression, right, in the form of policy, which...
It limits freedom of speech, which limits academic freedom, which erects the surveillance system, which is essentially what they're asking for with microaggressions.
Either have been trained or have trained themselves to feel damaged, devastated is the word actually that's often used, by things like microaggressions.
Well, so what you're doing is you are stating and claiming status as a weak person, right?
Someone who can be damaged by the slightest slight.
So then what happens when you're in the real world where there really are racists, where there really are people who will pull you over for being black, who will throw you in prison for being black, who will shoot you for being black, who will not give you a job for being black?
You know, real racism, real structural racism, what do you do then?
Well, the professional victim status, that's a real issue.
Because people claiming to be victims when there is no real problem, they're looking for victims.
They're looking for things that are...
Targeting them.
And I always assume that the reason why people do that is because there's not enough real problems.
Like, the real problems have become so minute.
Like, this is the safest time to live ever.
And on campus, I mean, outside of the normal things that you're going to deal with when you have a bunch of young people together and, you know, social interactions and alcohol and all the other crap that happens between human beings when you get them together and they're young and they don't have...
Even when they're older, you know, you get a group of people together, you're likely to have some disputes.
But outside of that, what's the fucking worst thing that's happening to these kids?
There has not been a racist hate crime on a college campus in the United States in 30 years.
Wow.
And in fact, in that one, which was in the early 30 years ago, was a guy who wasn't a He wasn't affiliated with the campus at all, with the college at all, who bombed some dormitory that had black people in it.
So basically, yes, of course, it is an extremely safe place to be for everyone.
Well, for people who don't know the story, you can Google the story.
It's fascinating.
We talked about it the last time we were here, but a man and a woman, because they're both over 18, that were going to college there, they got liquored up and decided to hook up, and they exchanged some text messages where she said, do you have condoms?
Come on over.
And she told her friend, I'm going to have sex, lol, that kind of thing.
And after they had sex, someone...
Either convinced her or she convinced herself that it was rape because when two people are drinking, the woman cannot consent.
It was the only time in the world where you're not responsible for your actions because you've been drinking.
If you get in a car and you drink and you drive drunk and plow into people, you can never say, I'm not responsible because I was drunk.
You can't say that.
But for whatever reason, These social justice warriors have taken upon themselves to, again, impart victim status only on women that are in these scenarios.
So that the man is always the ugly oppressor, the ugly pursuer, the penetrator of the vagina, this evil man.
And so this kid got kicked out of college for having sex while drunk.
He should fucking close that place down and then light it on fire and turn it to Disneyland 2. Yeah, I mean, I think a revolution is coming, or it's maybe already begun in higher education.
Well, I think what we're doing right now, I think what you've been doing, I think stuff like this, I think podcasting, I think it started with blogs 20 years ago.
Now there's all sorts of online courses.
I think there's a tremendous demand for learning, and I think there are a lot of curious people out there who can't afford to go to college or don't want to go to these nut houses that are colleges.
But what is it that's causing these nut houses to flourish this way, where it's so common?
It's not an oddity.
It's not just Dartmouth.
Where they stormed into the library or the study hall and started screaming Black Lives Matter while fucking white and black people were going over their work.
They're sitting there trying to do their homework and all these fucking white dorks are running through the hallway screaming Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter.
And I'm watching that and I'm going...
What is this?
These people aren't oppressors.
They're students.
They're fellow students.
And you're being shamed if you don't join in.
You're being shamed if you don't stop whatever you're doing.
One would hope, and that's probably true to some extent.
However, I don't know if you know about this, but there's been some recent polling done of millennials by the Pew Research Organization, and they found that millennials are much more hostile to the principle of free speech than previous generations.
Because as I said the last time I was here, you know, it is inherently conservative what they're calling for, even though it's sort of a left-wing movement.
They're asking for Big Brother, either the college president or the United States government, to protect us from ideas and speech and words, right?
So then what are we interested in?
We're interested in those people having the power, having more power, That doesn't sound very left-wing or liberatory to me.
And even these ideas, I mean, to stray slightly from this, when people are talking about socialism ideas, about taxing the rich more, well, where the fuck do you think that money's going?
If you want to encourage charitable donations on a wide scale and encourage some sort of, like, broad-range philanthropism amongst people and figure out some way to institute that voluntarily, that's great.
Would it be amazing, too, if we could link it up online, where everybody could take your itemized tax sheets and say, okay, let's just make sure that they used all of our money.
The problem with that is, like, even if you do that, like, his ideas, as they've been explained to me by people who understand the economy, like, you would have to charge...
Well, that's exactly the question that should be raised with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, right?
Why do we need a government-run education system?
Or, put it a different way, why do you want that?
Because I think there's something else going on here with them.
I don't think it's just they want free education for everyone.
I do think they're interested in social control, and that's a great way to control the populace, is to control their education, for the government to control their education.
Well, the idea of the right used to be it would leave you alone.
The idea of conservatives was that it would leave you alone.
They didn't want big government.
They didn't want the government interfering with your life.
But then it sort of got confused, and then there became a lot of religious issues involved in the Reagan administration once they started incorporating the religious right into their plans.
When they started using the religious right in order to get into power and to vote, Things started getting really weird, because then conservatism wasn't necessarily leave people alone.
Then it became about gay rights, it became about gay marriage, and all this other weird stuff started getting in there.
So we started this whole rant of trying to figure out where this all started from.
Where this social justice movement on campus, this ridiculous exaggeration of microaggressions and things along those lines, How much of it has to do with social media, though?
Because it seems like social media, they support each other, and then they find like-minded groups, they get confirmation bias, they all join together in these little message boards and what have you, and little Twitter hashtag groups, and then they feed off of each other and then explain to each other various things.
They pepper sprayed those kids that were sitting there peacefully on their knees and they were protesting the raising of tuition and they wouldn't leave.
So these cops, this cop pepper sprays them in the face and then after all the commotion had settled, Was it the dean?
Was that what it was?
The woman who left and no one said a word as she walked by.
It was totally, eerily silent.
And that was a powerful statement, a real powerful statement.
Instead of screaming at her, instead of, like, you called the police on this, like, look what's happened, the pepper spray kids.
No one said a word.
And this woman walked and she was being escorted to her car in just dead silence.
I mean, if you look at sort of police brutality, right?
Most riots in this country have been in response to police brutality.
And you look at the cities in which riots have happened since the 1930s, you'll see a decline in police brutality in those cities almost across the board, almost in every case, right?
Just in Baltimore recently, right?
After those riots, those cops were indicted.
Now they may get off, but they were indicted, which is a rare thing for cops.
But in Los Angeles, it is much safer, even though it's not safe, but it's much safer for black people in dealing with the cops now than it was in the 1980s because of the 1992 riot.
Do you think that the future involves These kind of institutions, these long-standing institutions like Stanford and Harvard and Yale, or do you think that the future is going to be something where people get their education online more likely than not?
Well, I think the future is the university I'm going to start next year.
I'm going to Willamette only part-time, but what I'm really doing this coming year is launching what I'm calling a renegade university, which will be an online education A set of courses, lectures, and interactive seminars for anyone who's interested in learning about history and political philosophy, current events, looking at things in a new way.
I think most people wouldn't be interested in that.
I think this is just for people who are just like you, or just curious about the world.
There's a huge demand for this in the world, and it's so expensive at colleges now.
It's unaffordable for most people now, or many people now.
And also you have to sort of enter this loony bin, as we know, to learn these things now.
So, I mean, I think people are kind of bypassing colleges and universities more and more through online education, through podcasting, through all these other media forums.
So that's what I'm going to do.
I'm going to offer sort of what I've been teaching in my classes in colleges for 20 years to anyone online for a tiny fraction of the cost, right?
It's much cheaper to do this for them than to pay tuition at a Yale or Occidental College.
Well, that sounds excellent, and I think we're in a unique time now where something like that is very appealing to people because a lot of people are getting...
I mean, at the end of the day, education is information, right?
That's what it is.
You're learning things.
You're taking in things, and we're educating ourselves constantly.
You're constantly educating yourself with articles and books and things, documentaries that you watch.
There's always information that's coming in.
It's just the idea is that to get an education, in air quotes, you have to go to a place and you have to follow their rules.
And you have to sit in the class with all these other people that are trying to do the same, and you have to somehow or another do it together.
Why?
That doesn't make sense to me because you don't live your life like that.
You know, your life doesn't involve, like, you know...
You don't go to a place and learn about people.
You live and you learn about people.
I think that it's kind of confining and archaic to have these institutions where you have to go there.
And then the whole tenure process and the politics of the staff and the teaching and what can and can't be in the curriculum and who it does and doesn't offend or appeal to.
Isn't it good, though, for a lot of people to get away from their parents, to go someplace, to be around other young kids that are experiencing this sort of new freedom for themselves, and then to be thrust into this sort of pressure cooker of ideas?
I mean, so what happened was conservatives basically dominated colleges until the 1960s.
And then the 1960s generation of radicals had nowhere to go when they went into their 20s and 30s.
So they decided to move into the academy.
So they all got PhDs and they became professors and they've dominated ever since.
There's also this system of tenure in universities, which is supposed to protect academic freedom, and what it actually does is it enforces intellectual conformity, right?
Because you have a lifetime appointment and you control hiring, right?
The faculty controls hiring.
Who are you going to hire?
You're going to hire somebody who agrees with you, who says what you think should be said.
That seems kind of ridiculous as well, because, like, what if someone starts putting out poor work?
Like, here's a perfect example.
A guy who has tenure, who is at the University of California, Berkeley.
That guy who believes that...
Dewsburg, Peter Dewsburg?
I've had him on the podcast before, and it was probably the most hate I ever got from...
He's got this radical idea that AIDS is not a...
It's not a disease that's caused by HIV and that HIV is a weak virus and HIV exists in these people because they already have a compromised immune system and that what's really going on is they're taking recreational drugs and partying and depleting their immune system to the point where HIV can actually show up.
That HIV is not the cause of AIDS, but it's just the symptom of a depleted immune system.
He's a fucking professor of biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
And he's widely hated by AIDS researchers, like people who understand HIV at a deeper level, and they think he's a fucking moron.
And what he's doing is dangerous, but meanwhile he has tenure.
So what the market does is the market learns, right?
So at Occidental, they would kick out, if they had their way, they would kick out the president and he would be replaced by someone who was just as bad.
But it's this detachment from objective reasoning, this complete detachment and this insistence on staying within this idea that they're enforcing of safe spaces, of intolerance to anyone with opinions other than what they're trying to conform and what they're trying to enforce on these kids.
I mean, I would imagine That Melissa Click believed that those students protesting in the tents on that quad were being harmed, had been harmed, and were being harmed, were actively being oppressed by racism on that campus.
And they needed to be protected from that harm.
Now, what actually happened on the University of Missouri campus?
Allegedly, two people used the word nigger in a six-month period.
Yeah, and that was because of a woman who's a feminist coming on to talk about the problems with using incorrect data and biased studies to reinforce ideas that may or may not be true, which she believes damage actual feminism.
Well, I think a lot of kids today also, because of social media, because they get to watch videos of all this nonsense going on at Yale and all this craziness going on in Missouri, and they get to read blogs about it, and they get to participate in conversations on social media, they're understanding how stupid it all is.
They're understanding that you're dealing with a bunch of fucking babies.
And so there's probably some pushback in that regard.
But that's where it gets confusing, because if the faculty does have tenure, wouldn't they want to express themselves?
Like, you don't have to worry about getting fired.
Like, don't you see the problems with this kind of thinking and this kind of enforcing this very rigid idea of what you can and can't say or who you are and how you behave?
So now what you see a lot, but not entirely, but a lot among trans people is, you know, they're really concerned about what you and I think about them.
That seems to be their primary concern is what we think about them.
Again, it's like it's asking for more paternalism.
Yeah, I mean, I think this idea that a man has a woman inside of him and he really is a woman trapped in a man's body or a man trapped in a woman's body and you would like to transfer...
Like this idea that now it's a she or now it's a he.
I really...
I think that you should be able to do whatever you want to do.
And I think that even if you're not a woman trapped in a man's body, but if you wake up one day and go, I think it'd be cool to just get an operation and become a woman and start taking female hormones and see if I like it.
You should totally be able to do that.
I'm 100% for that.
The real problem It becomes when you make whatever choices you're doing, you make it a big deal to everyone else.
And you start making it so that people have very specific ways they're supposed to address you and talk to you.
You change your name to Caitlyn.
Now you're Kate.
You were Bruce for 60 fucking years.
But now I have to make a new noise with my face that means you.
And if I don't make that new noise in my face, I'm an asshole, and I'm misgendering, and I'm insensitive and rude.
Well, there's a slight possibility that you might be fucking crazy, and if you decide that you're a fox, do I call you a foxkin?
Like, what do I do now?
What if you...
I mean, people don't like those comparisons.
They don't like...
But those are valid.
Like, you're doing something...
You're having surgery and hormones to become normal.
That alone should make you go, okay, what are we dealing with here?
Are we allowed to discuss this?
We are not.
And that's where things get tricky.
You're not allowed to discuss this, and you have to stay within a very rigid set of rules and behaviors.
So my point being, like, when you decide what's normal, what's not normal, what we have to accept and not accept, and what we're allowed to comment on, that's when things get weird.
Like, when you're not allowed to comment on certain things because you become insensitive, but you're putting out this thing in the public.
You're making it this big social issue.
And you only have one way you're allowed to communicate and look at it.
Well, it's also sort of reinforcing this new society standards of acceptance, which I'm 100% in favor of.
The idea that, you know, it is okay if your dad just decides to become a woman at 60 years old and starts wearing dresses if it makes him feel better, which I'm 100% for.
Well, I could see that point, but also there's a very real possibility that people with all sorts of dysmorphia issues, whether it is anorexia, whether it's bodybuilder dysmorphia, where they never can be big enough, that all of these are These are conditions that are psychological, mental conditions that you could say this person's crazy.
Like when you see a bodybuilder and they can't stop getting bigger because they're out of their mind, they look at themselves in the mirror and they think they're tiny, and so they're 350 fucking pounds and they're doing steroids and lifting weights 24 hours a day.
You're in this weird PC area now that you have kind of accepted because you go to school and you teach and you're a part of it now.
But that's a crazy person.
We're talking about a man who's a bodybuilder who lifts so much weight that his body is like virtually exploding and they have a dysmorphia where they cover themselves up because they always look tiny.
You don't think that there's a psychological condition there?
See, it's very dangerous because people have been locked up for behaviors that were called crazy that you would never consider to be crazy now.
Right.
Against their will.
All kinds of behaviors have been punished harshly because they were deemed to be crazy or insane or pathological.
So I, you can do whatever you want, but I don't want to be in the business of labeling things, behaviors, choices, other people's choices as those things, because I know where it can lead them.
What you're saying is you don't want to shame people or in any way affect their choices and you want to give them the freedom to do whatever they want and by saying someone might be crazy, you're possibly limiting that.
The only reason why it's illegal in New York State is because of corruption.
That's the only reason.
Because boxing's not illegal and kickboxing is not illegal.
Neither one of those things are illegal.
Those things are brutal and violent and they are combat sports.
So it's not that combat sports are illegal.
It is that mixed martial arts is illegal because of the culinary union and their influence, particularly on one politician who is now going to jail most likely for the rest of his life because of corruption and we're hoping to be getting into Madison Square Garden in April.
There's a large percentage of people that don't like any violent sports, whether it's football, whether it's boxing, whether it's MMA. They think it's animalistic, barbaric.
Well, I certainly think that the boxy confines of ideas that you seem to be forced into when you're a professor at a college definitely reinforces this sort of self-censorship.
Do you feel like, though, that it's possible to limit the people that are willing to enroll at Renegade University because of just the name, the moniker?
Yeah, I mean, it's going to start with sort of stand-alone lectures that you can download and listen to, like podcasts, or you can watch the videos of them.
And then if there's sufficient interest, I'll have interactive seminars.
Yeah, I mean, there will be some production, there will be some PowerPoint stuff, graphics, you know, I might actually use an old-school whiteboard in the background, depending on what I'm presenting.
Yeah, people just, well, I mean, I say things you're not supposed to say, and the renegade history stuff didn't go over well with a lot of the professoriate And they wanted a black woman also for that job.
And then this happened to me again at Occidental.
I was disqualified from a tenure-track job about two years ago because of my race.
Well, I just don't understand that there's no benefit in redefining the words.
Of course, people can do wrong things, whether they're based on racial prejudices or sociological prejudices or economic or class, whatever the fuck it is.
I mean, as a human race, we're going to have to get over the origins of your ancestors and languages that you speak and just be able to appreciate each other for what the fuck we are.
I'm saying appreciate each other for what we are, and this idea that people can generalize or be racist, that seems to be a counterproductive idea that I don't understand.
It's akin to tribalism.
Which is sort of dissipating and nationalism which is also sort of dissipating over time as we integrate with all these other cultures all throughout the world and you have Google Translate and you can understand what people are saying in other places.
But because of the separations of languages and cultures and things like that, you're always going to have people that are wary of people that they don't know or understand.
And so that was all replaced after World War II, basically, in respectable discourse.
Not that racists went away, but in respectable discourse, you couldn't use the N-word anymore, right?
And what it was replaced by is what we call racial liberalism, which is this paternalist stuff we've been talking about that goes on in campuses, which was assimilationist as well.
The idea was we need to get these black people into our institutions to train them to become like us, right?
So Brown v.
Board of Education, 1954, the integration Supreme Court decision.
That was what was said in that decision.
We need to get black people into our schools so that we can make them into good citizens, good soldiers, and good workers.
Right?
So that's what these black kids in colleges are dealing with, right?
So they're not completely crazy.
They have real legitimate grievances.
They are there for two reasons.
One, to assimilate into the dominant culture, right?
To shed their own culture.
That's not so cool.
And two, and this has been said, this is very explicit, To enrich the experiences of the white students in colleges.
That Mark Twain used to give these readings, and in these readings, they would be very humorous, and he would essentially be doing a monologue, and it was like a stand-up monologue.
And Mark Twain has some still brilliant, insightful, and resonating quotes that he wrote hundreds of years ago, right?
I wonder what kind of speeches they would do or what kind of jokes they would tell or if they would do it.
I think a lot of it was the emcees.
That's one of the things that Lenny Bruce used to do early in the day.
He was sort of an emcee for other acts.
You would tell a few jokes and then bring up a band and then tell a few jokes and bring up a dancer.
They had these variety shows.
Variety shows were a big deal back then and the MC would often be a stand-up comedian and you'd be armed with jokes and it was like the Catskills era was one of the weird things is that they had sort of street jokes and like you would have jokes and I would you know use kind of the same jokes that you would do so you would be in one place and I would be in another place and we might be doing the same jokes you know and then Lenny Bruce was like the guy that started talking about life Whereas instead of having these jokes,
he was trying to explain why some of the parts of our culture didn't make any sense, why some of the things that we do are preposterous, why there's these hypocritical aspects of our society that should be addressed, and maybe we could live in a better, more happy world if we kind of looked at these more clearly.
I think he was the first to do that.
So what we think of as stand-up comedy, It's so broad because there's like Stephen Wright stand-up comedy which is like joke joke joke you know non sequiturs not not connected and then there's George Carlin which is like he would create sort of a new monologue every year and then he would do that new hour on HBO throw it away and start all over again the next year Observational humor is what you're talking about, right?
In some ways, but like Jerry Seinfeld's observational, but he doesn't have any like deep political insight or social insight or sexual insight, whereas Lenny Bruce would.
Lenny was doing some stuff that wasn't even funny.
One of the things that he did was he was talking about how they lied when Jackie Onassis was jumping out of the limousine after JFK got shot, or Jackie Kennedy.
When and they were they were saying that she was trying to help him and that she was trying to go for help But she was hitting he was like she was saving her ass She was trying to get out of that fucking limousine because they shot the president in the head his head exploded and she jumped out of that limo and You're lying to people if you say any differently, and it was like this weird moment When he was on stage, I've heard the recordings where he's explaining this.
Like, he's explaining, like, you're trying to sell a false narrative about an important historical event and it's going to fuck with people's heads.
Like, of course she's trying to get away.
She's trying to get away because they just shot and killed her husband.
You know, but that wasn't funny at all.
So there's, like, some stuff that he was doing that, like, he sort of, like, he had, like, crossed this boundary, this weird, strange divide into commentary that wasn't even necessarily funny.
Well, if it wasn't for those guys exposing how ridiculous...
I mean, our culture went through this radical shift, right?
From the 50s to the 60s, 60s to the 70s, and they tried to put a cork on it in the 70s.
And then the sweeping, psychedelic legislation that was passed in the 1970s, where they fucking made everything Schedule I, and they started locking down What you can and can't do.
There was some big, giant shifts.
If you look at the shift in our culture between 1950 and then 1980, I mean, what a crazy fucking 30 years.
I don't think they kind of knew totally how counterculture Hunter was.
It's one of the things in the Gonzo, Fear and Loathing, the Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, the documentary sort of talked about how when he decided to write that book, And he went to the campaign trail.
He was on it for a year.
And nobody knew who he was.
Whereas all the politicians, they all knew the other writers from all these other places.
And Hunter would show up and all these people wanted to take photos with him.
And they were like, who is this guy?
Is he an astronaut or something?
Nobody knew who the fuck he was.
Because he had already written Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels, two hugely popular books.
But these people had no idea.
They just were so outside of that cultural loop.
They kind of let this guy in and didn't know who he was until it was almost too late.
To be a part of a program that has 80 plus percent, depending on who you ask, innocent casualty rates.
Like, what is it like to make these decisions knowing that people are going to die?
What is it like when you see someone like Edward Snowden come out against the NSA's Spying platform and then you realize that on your own campaign when the hope and change website You had all these provisions in there to protect and and help whistleblowers Whistleblowers who are exposing actual laws that are being broken like what is?
How did you make this change like what is your thought process behind that look?
What do you think about a guy like Julian Assange?
What do you think about someone like Chelsea Manning?
What do you think about someone who delivers?
Information to a news source, and that news source exposes things that are absolutely crimes that the United States public hates, that people don't ever want to think of when they think of the American people, when they think of this good, just leader of democracy in the world.
I think certainly that there are animals in this world that are beautiful and should be protected.
And I don't think you should really kill things that you're not going to eat.
And I don't necessarily understand why anybody would want to go to a place like Africa and kill a lion.
But it's incredibly complicated when you look at the reality of what These hunting camps are in Africa because they have taken these animals that were on the brink of extinction and they've made them plentiful.
And the way they've done that is by fencing in these enormous, like, you know, 100,000, 200,000 acre areas and turn them into these hunting preserves.
And they've bred these animals in there.
It's kind of fucked up.
It's canned hunting.
And they have areas where these lions are free-roaming, like in Zimbabwe, where this Cecil lion was killed, where there's part areas where they're preserved, where they're not allowed to hunt, and then areas where they are allowed to hunt.
And the money that goes to these hunts is what pays for conservation.
It seems, to me, shooting something that you never planned on eating, unless it's a danger.
There's one thing they have to do.
They have to shoot a certain amount of coyotes.
If cattle ranchers have calves, they have to be very careful because the coyotes will literally pull the calves out of the females as they're giving birth and kill the calves.
They have to keep them away if they want to keep a healthy population of cows and sheep and a lot of other animals.
That makes sense to me.
You have to manage predator populations.
That's not what you're doing when you fly to Africa to go shoot a lion.
You just want to put a head on your wall.
There's something kind of creepy about that, and I think that's why people responded the way they did.
His brother Jericho, they were worried, was killed too.
Because people had created this narrative that Jericho was now going to take care of Cecil's babies for him, which is so fucking hilarious.
Because first of all, if you don't know anything about lions and how a male becomes the head of a pride, they murder all the cubs.
That's a fact.
So if there are females and they're giving birth to another male's babies, that lion will come in and murder all those babies.
So Cecil was a baby murderer, 100%.
All of the heads of prides, those are all baby murders.
So if Jericho came along, not only would he not protect Cecil's babies, he would fucking kill them with his face.
Okay, so they were worried that Jericho had been killed too, and there was a story saying that they believed Jericho had been poached.
And then they said there was a relief because it turned out that the lion that was killed was not Jericho, but was some other no-name, bitch-ass lion that nobody cared about because nobody had made a noise that you associate with this fucking lion.
I think for a guy like him, it's an opportunity to just sit down with someone who he thinks...
You know, because you follow his politics.
He's very left-wing.
He probably thinks he's a great president.
If you look at what Obama has done, if you look at the numbers, what he's done economically as far as job creation, as far as the rebound of the economy, I don't understand all that stuff.
But if you look at it, it all looks really positive.
But, yeah, you know, I don't expect, you know, Marc Maron to be a policy wonk in a situation like that.
But, like, you could ask him things like...
How do you feel when you pull the trigger in a drone in Yemen that ends up killing a 16-year-old?
How does that feel?
How do you reconcile...
Your past experience as a student activist at Occidental College, by the way, with now being the head of the biggest killing machine in world history.
How do you reconcile your feelings as Barry Obama, who was protesting against apartheid in South Africa, with being the president who murders brown people in Africa?
Well, there are troops on the ground in Africa doing, you know, murdering people, and there's drones in North Africa murdering people in the Middle East, right?
One of the main claims that's made about him is that he's actually a peacenik who's forced to do these things by the military industrial establishment, right?
Is that true?
I would ask him.
Do you have any agency as president?
Or are you forced to make these decisions by other people?
When a drone strike is made, is it really you and your advisors making that decision, or are you forced to by this thing called a military-industrial complex?
Is this true, what we've been told?
That the president actually has no power over foreign policy?
I mean, I don't think that's true, but I'd like to hear him say that.
And if it is true that he has no power, then what's the point?
Of having a president, of getting excited about the first black president, about getting excited about any president.
If Bernie Sanders gets into office, will he be doing the same thing then?
Wouldn't it be amazing if Bernie Sanders got into office and just started fucking full-scale drone attacks and cutting down on whistleblowers and ramped up the NSA spying program?
Now, when you talk to someone like Sam Harris, what he believes is that Obama gets into office and is then presented with the reality of the ongoing situation in the Middle East with Islamic terrorism, with radical fundamentalists and all across the globe that mean to do America harm.
And he's presented with this overwhelming evidence that the world is way more fucked than we're being led to believe.
I mean, Sam Harris thinks the world is far more dangerous than I do.
I mean, he thinks that Islam is inherently violent, that jihad is a necessary outgrowth of Islam, that if we don't take action, lethal action against them, that they will come and kill us.
I think he believes that there is a fundamental flaw in the ideology that wants all people who leave the religion killed and that a religion that believes...
Well, a religion was founded by a warlord.
It's a different style of religion than, say, like Jesus, who is a peacenik.
I don't think he necessarily thinks that we need to take lethal action against them.
I think that he is more concerned about what they are capable of doing than the average person.
The question is, why are they targeting the French and the United States specifically, right?
And I think that is because, not because of their I think it's largely because France and the United States has intervened in the Middle East against Arabs and in France against their own Arab and Muslim people in discriminatory, lethal, murderous ways for decades.
I think it is blowback.
I think that explains why they attacked us specifically.
It doesn't explain, obviously, everything those Muslims do in the Middle East.
It doesn't explain why they insist on women wearing burqas.
It doesn't explain why they shoot gay people.
It doesn't explain why they attack other Muslims.
But I think it does explain, blowback, I think does explain why they're interested in attacking us.
And that's what needs to be addressed in my view, right?
Stop giving them a reason to hate us.
Take that away.
If they continue to fly planes into our buildings after we've withdrawn from the Middle East, then we can talk about their religion and we can talk about them as criminal psychopaths.
Yeah, removing troops from the Middle East is a hot subject, and I would love to hear what the President would say about the consequences of doing that, the vacuum it created and what's going on right now with ISIS. This vacuum that has been created is now filled up with the most dangerous radical fundamentalist group in recent memory.
And what you were saying, like, they created this vacuum, this power vacuum in that area, right, in which these nut bags just easily and quickly filled.
Well, it should also be pointed out that I think something around the neighborhood of 80 plus percent of the people that are fighting against ISIS are Muslims.
First of all, I think anyone is far more effective outside the establishment, right?
I think I can actually get more done and change minds and change the culture, which ultimately changes policies simply by talking, by doing this, right?
I think we all do that.
I think you have far more power than a congressman does.
I mean, honestly, I mean, I think that Take legalization of drugs, right?
How fast that's happening now.
I'm not going to give you all the credit for it, but clearly you had something to do with that.
I mean, you participated in this massive cultural shift, right?
I mean, there were many people doing it, but I would say that your voice was one of the loudest, and I'd give you quite a bit of credit for moving it as fast as it has moved.
Well, that's one of the things that concerns me the most about the trends that are going on in the schools today, because I think that if you really do want to change the culture, what you have to change is young people.
You have to open the eyes and the minds of young people to all the possibilities, and to the fact that what our culture really is is just this established pattern that we're all following that doesn't necessarily suit you, help you, or even make sense.
But it's got momentum behind it, and it's a habit.
So the American public school system was modeled after the Prussian system of the 19th century, and early American educators who founded this thing, public schools, Horace Mann and others, said explicitly, this should be a means to train children to be workers.
So do you specifically believe that they set the students up and they set the classes up in that manner, or do you think they do it because they feel like that's the most efficient way to produce the goals that they want to achieve, which is higher GPA, higher SAT scores?
It's just like, well, of course they've got to be good in math and engineering because that's how you get a good job and that's how you're a good American.
You can talk about Rosa Parks now, because she's now safe, because we now live in an integrated society, right?
But 60 years ago, you didn't talk about her.
She was dangerous, right?
That had to be sort of inserted.
But now it doesn't challenge the status quo.
It doesn't challenge sort of fundamental ideas of the society.
Do you think they really debate democracy in public schools?
When you talk about the government itself, isn't the idea of a representative government kind of an archaic thing in terms of it was all created back when communication was incredibly difficult?
When you wanted a state representative, one of the reasons for it is because no one could get a hold of everyone in the state.
You couldn't all get together and speak your mind about something, but now, Because of social media and the internet as we know it now, forget about what the internet is going to be like 10-15 years from now, which is going to be even more intense, but you could express yourself in a way now that just wasn't available before.
You don't necessarily need a representative government.
And the reason why they have to go to these fucking places like Iowa and campaign there, and it's a big part of the campaign trail, is just because of this weird fucking setup that they have.
The most exciting thing that happened in 2008 was not Barack Obama to me.
It was Ron Paul and Ralph Nader joined forces with some other third-party candidates to break down the rules that bar third-party candidates, make it much more difficult for third-party candidates to have a viable, I haven't seen that renewed really in any serious way since then.
But that's what has to happen.
We don't have real choice.
You have to have real choice.
In Europe, they have real choice.
They have parliamentary democracy where there are many, many parties and all sorts of parties are represented in the legislatures.
You don't have that here.
And I think that's why we have such low voter turnout.
If there was actual choice, if you could actually see yourself represented among the politicians running, I think many more people would vote.
Yeah, I think there's a certain amount of futility that people feel when they look at the two-party system and then they see where a guy like Barack Obama arguably at least returns to military policy as conservative as GW. Foreign policy.
Well, there's also an issue, and a huge one, in the way that teachers are financially Compensated for work.
The amount of money that teachers make is so small.
And the way we look at teachers, we don't look at teachers like, if you thought about someone who is educating your child about the ways of the world, influencing them, we all have ideas in our head about really positive and really negative teacher experiences that we had as a child.
You know, I have a few really positive ones that to this day, I think back about this guy like, I had a science teacher in seventh grade that, for the first time ever, introduced in my mind the idea of infinity.
And I had never considered it before.
He was a really unique guy.
He would grow his own vegetables and bring them in and talk In these really passionate ways about what it's like to grow the food that you actually eat.
And this is, you know, I was, you know, I was 12 or something.
What are you in seventh grade?
I was a little kid.
And I was like, what the fuck is this guy going on about?
He was talking about...
What it's like to have food, to understand the actual process of a seed becoming your food, and then to eat it and bring it into lunch.
And he was talking about these radishes that he had grown in his garden that he's eating right now.
And then he was trying to explain to us that everything in the entire world, including human beings, is essentially made out of materials that came from a star that exploded.
And then we're like, what?
And then he was trying to explain that our star is going to explode.
That there's only a certain amount of time in every star.
And the sun that we, you know, our star, what we call our sun, only has a certain amount of time.
And I remember this guy saying this to me, and there are an infinite number of stars in the galaxy.
As far as we know, the universe has no end.
It goes on and on.
So just stop and think about that.
How much time it would take light, just light, to get to the nearest solar system outside of ours, and then think about that in terms of how big the galaxy is, with hundreds of billions of stars, each one with their own little planets, And then hundreds of billions of galaxies and I remember leaving that class just mind fucked at 12 or 13 years old and it stuck like it stuck with me like for years for decades that one teacher but that wasn't that was him it
was his ideas this wasn't this isn't a part of some state sponsored curriculum that he had to follow no and it was public school right yeah yeah yeah so he's the exception right yeah yeah and there's no reason he should exist in that system right The system has no reason to encourage creativity, to encourage thinking outside one's world like that, right?
It must reinforce itself, reinvigorate itself, right?
The system must sustain itself and it does that by training.
New workers, new participants, new citizens, new soldiers.
Science, technology, engineering, and mathematics.
So if you want to build shit, if you want to make superconductors and computers and technology and all that stuff that the Chinese and Indians are doing, and some people in the United States are doing...
You have to be good at that.
So that was the argument made by Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, and Obama throughout with Race to the Top.
We have to standardize the teaching of STEM so that we can compete with India and China.
Well, I have a friend who's got kids in public school in Manhattan, and he was going crazy about it, like the changes that it's made to what they have to study.
Standardization of thinking is the idea of conformity on a mass scale like that without leaving in any room for creativity or any room for exploring the possibilities of the wonders of the unknown of your future.
Instead, just trying to create a robot that can compete with China.
See, I think one of the coolest trends in this country right now is not people that are trying to do that, but rather people that are trying to do their own thing.
And what we're getting out of the Internet is we're getting a lot more small, independent businesses where people leave their job and say, hey, I'm going to sell blank.
I'm going to make my own clocks.
I'm going to do this.
I'm going to do that.
And I'm going to find something I'm passionate in.
And through the Internet, there's an avenue where I can pursue this as a career.
Where, you know, I don't have to join some gigantic fucking corporation and be a cog in the wheel.
And we're seeing this in, like, there's this trend in restaurants where they want, like, raw wood tables and, like, old-style lighting and everything's sort of rustic with metal and wood.
It's almost like there's this longing for something that's not homogenized and pasteurized and mass-produced.
Like, we have this longing for things that are crafted.
We keep seeing these fucking handcrafted sandwiches.
What does that even mean?
You got robots making your fucking sandwiches in some places that I don't know about?
But that term, handcrafted cocktails, that's a common thing that you hear over and over again.
And it kind of represents this desire that people have to get away from this gigantic system of things.
So that's, it's kind of unique in the sense that I don't know a lot of other professors that have decided to try to separate from the system and create their own courses.
I've been researching, and I haven't been able to find anyone who's done it.
So there is edX, there's Coursera, there's Udacity, there's these big MOOCs, massive online courses, that are basically, they're just in partnership with universities, right?
And so they get professors in those universities to teach these MOOCs, right?
But these people already have jobs, they have tenure usually, right?
So they don't need to go independent entirely.
Yeah, I haven't seen anyone who's gone independent entirely.
I mean, I am unusual in that I have a PhD and I've been a professor and I have a book that's given me a fairly big public platform, right?
So there aren't a lot of people like that.
There are a lot of people with PhDs and there are a lot of people with big books, but there's very few people with both those things.
What I don't like about Amazon is what I hear about the way their employees are treated.
What I don't like about it is I hear about the pressure that they're under and they have to run from one spot to the other and deliver these things and they're yelled at and, you know.
Sweatshops in Vietnam are terrible places, but obviously they're better than the alternatives for those people who work in them.
Otherwise they wouldn't work in them.
It's true.
I mean, they have a choice between working in a sweatshop and being in abject poverty.
You know, I'm not saying it's a good thing to work in a sweatshop or in an Amazon factory, but I am saying, undoubtedly, it's better than what else there is.
Whatever happened to that company that was making phones that were supposed to be more ethical?
What was the idea behind it?
Fairphone.
They called themselves a Fairphone, but they fucked up and they only had like 3G. And everybody's like, you know, you can have no slave labor and everyone gets paid a fine wage, but you only get 3G. Fuck you!
Did Americans create this problem by going over there to these slave labor factories and having their phones built there instead of having them built in Ohio?
There was another company that had an interesting idea, too.
They were going to switch things out modulately.
So, like, your screen could be switched out when a new, more improved screen came along.
They could switch out your motherboard, switch out all the...
It would be like...
Different parts.
It was like a segmented sort of a phone, and the idea being that what we're doing is incredibly wasteful.
We have this whole unit as a phone, and then we get a new one every year and a half, two years, whatever the fuck it is, and you throw the old one out and you get the new one.
What they're saying is, no, instead, when they come up with new improvements, like a new and improved camera, you should be able to put that camera section and take the old one out and put a new one in.
Yeah, because, look, if you're in a place where T-Mobile doesn't work, but you can get AT&T or Verizon or what have you, you have a Google phone that'll work if you have one of those Nexus phones.
I mean, unbelievably staggering improvements to the quality of life for people that are- And here's what's missed all the time, because people talk about inequality all the time, economic inequality.
It's true that there's greater inequality now, but what no one talks about is that the poor live way better Than the poor did 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago.
And that's largely because of technology, right?
There is not a person, basically, in the United States who doesn't own a cell phone.
And, you know, I mean, that's something that was unimaginable just 10 or 20 years ago, right?
This incredible magical machine that the very poor own, right?
I mean, that's an incredible advance in the way people live.
Huge numbers of poor people live in air-conditioned buildings.
They didn't in the 1960s and 70s, right?
They drive, they own cars or they have access to cars.
Most didn't.
Most poor people didn't until 20, 30 years ago.
Right?
So we miss this, right?
There's this huge advance for everyone.
Yes, it's true that the very poor are farther from the very rich now, but if the very poor are living better, and also, by the way, have much more access to power through social media, through the internet, through technology, right, than ever before.
You can be poor and have a public voice now, right?
You can certainly be middle class and have a large public voice.
That wasn't possible before when there was three networks.