Bryan Callen recounts the 2016 Chelsea bombing’s surreal aftermath from the Gotham Comedy Club, where an off-duty cop thwarted a soldier raid, and debates whether his pre-blast unease was intuition or paranoia. They mock media outrage over Matt LeBlanc’s joke about Emilia Clarke, contrasting it with global crises like terrorism and ideological extremism, while touching on Putin’s authoritarianism—cited by Kasparov—and Trump’s rise as entertainment over governance. Callen’s stand-up gigs, from San Jose to Ottawa’s Algonquin, bookend a discussion on food systems, hunting ethics, and geopolitical chaos, questioning whether civilization’s progress justifies its contradictions. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, the answer is there are two books that were – this has been studied.
Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman.
He won a Nobel Prize for economics and behavioral economics.
And then in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Blink, there are – and for that matter, Josh Waiskin's book, The Art of Learning.
All three great books that I recommend to everybody because there are signals a human being and soldiers talk about this when they've experienced a lot of IEDs.
They get very good, when their life depends on it, at reading signals, the stillness in the air, behavior that they can't explain, but why are those people acting a little bit differently?
Why are the women not out?
Why are the women not out?
Why can't I see any women out?
Why is it just men?
Why are the windows being shut right now?
They pick up on all these little signals.
And in Blink and in Thinking Fast and Slow, there are things we pick up on very quickly.
We just have...
Pattern recognition.
There are other things that take a long time to think about, right?
So a math problem like 48 times 36 would take a long time.
It's a slow process.
And you can't do a lot else when you're doing that.
But you can recognize if somebody's running at you screaming with their eyes open and their hands up that they're probably going to do something Physical to you or something you we register these in very quickly the same goes for you know any kind of Situation probably when something's about to happen There may be a change in behavior.
There may be This doesn't look right.
Why does that road?
Why is that bump in that road that wasn't there last time those kinds of things that soldiers talk about so For me, I think this was just simply the idea that I was closed in.
Everything was really great.
And I felt like I have coffee running to my body.
I'm on a caffeine high.
I did my yoga.
I feel good.
This is too good to be true.
I'm going to turn around in case a bomb goes off and blows my head off.
That's more just paranoia.
But in this case, after the bomb, I ran and I said to Jimmy, I said, come back inside.
Come back inside.
There could be a second bomb.
And he said, yeah, you're right.
And so we ran back inside, and they go, you're on.
And now I go, but there was a bomb.
And they go, what?
And I said, a bomb went off.
And they go, you know, full house, sold out house.
So I run on stage, and the real worry was my cousins were coming to see the show.
And I thought that they were, you know, right there.
So I had to kind of get myself together and do stand-up.
And my heart was beating fast, but it was more depression.
It was less the fear and more depression at the world we live in, that sound.
So I did stand up and then halfway through, or three-quarters of the way through, an off-duty cop who works there walked on stage.
Because he stopped the soldiers that came in with the machine guns.
Yeah, that's the strangest aspect of it, isn't it?
The randomness of it that all of a sudden these moments unexpected are introduced into the world and they change everything, you know, and we only see our our side of it.
Obviously, this is happening all over the world to varying degrees.
We're just so insulated from this kind of stuff that when a random act like this does happen, it's so shocking.
But if this was in, you know, the worst aspects or the worst parts of the world...
They're probably experiencing these kinds of things on a daily basis.
And not only that, if you look at the great artistic expressions, like look at Picasso.
Take a look at what he lived through.
Look at the world that those people lived through.
Giacometti, who, you know, he made these sculptures of, it looks like people who have been through a Holocaust, through a nuclear Holocaust.
They were very, very, you know, political commitment in the 20th century.
It wasn't something you could not have, right?
And they witnessed world wars and nuclear weaponry and all kinds of things, probably influenza that killed 20 million people worldwide, all kinds of stuff.
And they let it inform their...
Look, you talk to World War II veterans.
I've talked to old guys.
I said, what was it like when you came back?
They said, you're just more serious and there's more of an urgency to get things done.
And so the idea is to, whatever happens, whatever happens, you can react in a way that, in a form of paralysis, or you can allow it to kind of get you to think, I don't have a lot of time.
It says, Matt LeBlanc was disgusting on the Emmys red carpet and can leave showbiz now.
Now, in this person's defense, the author, I have no idea if that is what she actually wrote as her actual title, because I know that editors change things, and they try to make things more inflammatory.
And it's so much easier to make something more inflammatory when you're an editor and you take someone's work and you add some stuff to it, you add a title to it.
Who knows if that's what happened.
Just to clarify, because that is a possibility.
So this is what he says.
He's on the red carpet with the woman from Game of Thrones, Emilia Clarke, who plays Khaleesi, right?
She called him, he shares some of his characters, disgusting characteristics, like objectifying women.
So that's, what is her name, the woman who said that?
It's unbelievable.
So her name is Lauren Holter.
I wonder, really, with people like this, you're right, I wonder what their historical perspective is on things.
We've come a long way.
Fucking way.
And I mean in women's rights.
And, you know, Obama had a great speech that I listened to.
Listened to it.
In 2016, he gave it to Howard College, which is a black college.
And yes, yes, there are race issues.
Obama said, yeah, I'm going to say some controversial things.
We're all way better off.
And oh, by the way, so are race relations.
When I graduated in 1983, it was a lot harder.
And there are more opportunities.
And to not give that credit.
To not suggest that we are better off.
It doesn't mean you get complacent.
And it doesn't mean there isn't work to do.
But please understand that we have come a long way.
And to not give credit for that is to not give credit to the foot soldiers.
That did all that work from 1983 until now, many of whom were people of color.
So when you say, you know, it's things that have never been worse, you're wrong.
You don't have historical perspective.
And I'll give you another perspective that New York Times had this interesting editorial.
And whether this is true or not, but if you define war as countries going to war over territory resources with national armies, five out of six people on this globe are not living in countries at war.
One in six are in conflict, war-torn areas.
Those areas go from Nigeria to Pakistan.
Now, that is a large part of the globe, primarily the Middle East, primarily the Muslim world.
That area is in strife and at war, and there's a lot of tragedy.
But please keep in mind that's one in six people in the globe.
Latin America In the 70s and the 80s, our lifetime, were military dictatorships.
Nicaragua was a communist dictator, not even a communist dictator, but it was a communist country where there was a huge insurgency, huge wars being fought, insurgencies, lots of death, no democracy whatsoever.
Latin America has a lot of problems, but let me tell you, at least they are run by civilian governments, as corrupt as they may be.
That's big progress.
So you've got to kind of measure, you've got to measure where progress has been made, give it credit, And then don't let that make you complacent because there's always work to do, but at least give it credit.
But I do think that we live in a time, and there's probably kind of a blowback now, it's interesting, but we do live in a time where people are just way too sensitive, and it's certain loudmouths in the media.
I mean, when Alec Baldwin wrote an article saying, I think I quit, And it was like he was leaving Hollywood.
He's done so much for gay rights and he's always been a really liberal guy.
But he called the guy a cocksucker because the guy ended up taking pictures of him and his wife.
And I guess they considered that to be homophobic.
And he got just lambasted by...
The sort of lunatic fringe.
But it was really bad.
And it hurt his feelings.
And he was like, you guys are pointing your guns at the wrong enemy.
I'm not your enemy.
I'm your advocate.
But you're so caught up on your power trip.
It's what happens to any group.
Greenpeace is a good example.
The guy who used to be part of Greenpeace said, look, we got a lot of stuff done.
But there were a lot of people that weren't willing to let it go.
And they needed a new cause and a new cause because they were addicted to the power.
It wasn't so much about saving the whales anymore.
It was about the fact that they had a sense of identity and they had power and they could really shake things up and cause good people who were involved in doing good work to have to stop and go, huh?
That's what a lot of people are doing by writing blogs, whether they realize it or not.
That's what they're doing.
You're trying to claim your own space by jumping in and trying to get a reaction.
And in that case, that Matt LeBlanc case, it's one of the most obvious, blatant, and bizarre.
Really, if that captivates a moment of your time, other than laughing or not laughing, a moment.
First of all, let's break down what he's saying He needs to catch up because she started getting naked Are we supposed to pretend that we don't like looking at her naked is that is so a man Standing next to a woman who has been paid to be naked on a television show Is he supposed to pretend that that's not an enjoyable thing to look at how I get I get confused because if a woman Is standing next to a man and says the exact same thing I guarantee you, no one gives a fuck.
What if he had said, I'm not going to watch it, uh, She takes her clothes off and it objectifies women and I refuse to actually...
I'm afraid I may enjoy it if I watch it.
And so out of respect for her and her privacy, even though she's taken off her clothes and it's an artistic expression and a great TV show.
I don't approve...
Because I don't think women should take their clothes off.
Now you're puritanical.
Do you really want to live in a world like that?
Because I'll tell you something, there are a lot of countries, a lot of countries, like for example Saudi Arabia and a lot of other countries that are not at the forefront of women's rights, that would be outraged and wouldn't let you see that and would censor that.
And if one of them is involved in some sort of scandal or someone thinks that they're objectifying women and they're effing horrible, they should leave show business, if that catches any momentum, there's horrible things that people have done, right?
Admittedly horrible that they themselves just fell apart.
Like Kramer, right?
Perfect example.
That was a career killer.
That killed that guy.
From then on, he is not the same guy.
That was a monster, whopper, awful thing that went down.
Now, this is a complete rumor, but this is what I had heard, was that cocaine was involved.
Now, if that's true, it may not have been, and if it wasn't, I apologize.
Legal shit out of the way.
If cocaine was involved, people that are on coke get ridiculously confident and they say ridiculous shit that just does not jive with everyone around them because the other people around them aren't on coke.
They're not on coke in...
Especially, if you're on coke, it seems like you're all about yourself.
It seems like it becomes a very sort of a selfish, isolated little sort of environment protecting you.
But I'm saying he thought he could get away with that.
He thought he could talk like that And who knows what they had said to him?
I don't know You know the whole thing was him getting frustrated the fact that he's really just not a very good comic Right, and he was getting heckled never saying you're not funny.
This isn't funny Yeah, the when someone tells you you're not funny and I've had it happen to me I've had someone tell me I'm not funny when I was bombing and you agree with them exactly There's nothing you can do.
You agree with them.
And so I think what Kramer was trying to do is hurt their feelings.
And that was how he thought he could hurt their feelings.
If you said, Kramer, if you think that because people have more melanin in their skin, they should be blah, blah, blah.
I don't think that's...
How he thinks.
I don't think he's that dumb, and I don't think...
But, again, again, that's a...
That's like the Mel Gibson thing, too.
Look, when you get drunk, or you're on blow, or whatever, if you then decide that the Jews are the reason everything sucks, and you start shouting that to a Jewish cop, or that, you know, you hope your girl gets, you know, is forced to have sex with 19 black dudes, but using the N-word.
Yeah, I don't...
I've never really had those kinds of...
This is kind of mean, man.
It's also kind of like...
It's also...
What's the other word?
It's blatantly fucking racist speech.
You live in a world where you just can't say that shit, man.
Because as time goes on and you become older and you meet more people, you realize there are a bunch of variables when it comes to people's behavior and what they do.
But those variables are usually based on culture, on economics, on the society that they live in, the family they grew up with.
And you're gonna meet people that you love that fill all of the blanks.
Asian, Caucasian, European.
You're gonna meet people you love that are all in there.
Because they're just extraordinary people.
And you're going to meet people that are fucking cunts.
And they're going to be in all those things, too.
There's just no way around that, folks.
And if you start siding on one gender or one race or one patch of dirt, you're fucking missing the whole thing.
The whole thing is we are globally one super organism that does not have the ability yet to communicate in real time across the board with each other in an incredibly honest way.
We can't really do that yet.
You can speak a certain amount of languages if you're a fucking super wizard, and you can figure your way through a lot of countries if you know their cultures.
But they're not necessarily going to understand ours unless they can read our fucking minds.
We all speak too many different languages.
We live in too many different places.
We're so used to one way of life that anything, any variations, any breakups in that one way of life throws everything into a fucking tizzy and no one knows what to do about it.
Whereas the rest of the world is experiencing all sorts of different strife.
I was watching this show the other day called Uncharted and this guy was...
I've talked about this before, but it was so harsh to watch.
His name is Jim Shockey, and he goes to all these really remote villages and stays with the local people.
And in this one, they were getting killed by crocodiles.
So when this guy, you find this guy who fucking bombed people in Chelsea...
And you want him to die or you want him to go to jail forever and I hope he suffers and all that.
There's another way to look at things which might be not only more helpful, but might lead us to better solutions.
And I don't know if this is true, but there's a good way to look at human beings.
We all have the same hardware.
There's been a lot of science, a lot of work on this.
We basically have the same hardware.
If you look at the way human beings are, if you draw through lines, even with cultures that have been not exposed to a lot, but there's been a lot of work done.
Regardless if you're a Highlander in Papua New Guinea or you're a Northern European senator, a member of government, and you've been exposed to a lot, we recognize certain things.
Most cultures have a tradition of humorous insults.
Human beings, it seems, innately can tell the difference between joy and disgust and happy and sad.
We essentially have the same hardware.
It's why you can't really look at someone's skin or someone's racial features and You know, realize what they're capable of.
Could that guy be a scientist?
Well, he's black, he couldn't be, because there aren't a lot of scientists.
You just can't do that, and we all know that.
So, really, what it is is software, culture, what you have been exposed to, your belief system, what you've been told is true, what you've been told is right, what you've been told is good versus evil.
That is essentially what motivates people to do good and bad things.
You know, Freud said that man goes to war because he hates people.
Or that he has a lot of aggression and hatred.
There are a lot of other scholars that say maybe not.
In fact, men don't go to war out of hatred.
They go to war out of love.
They go to war because they love the country they are defending.
They go to war under symbols and propaganda.
They go to war under and for an idea that they are defending because men and countries define themselves along the lines, along certain lines.
That they are, if you think about any man, we all have a line.
We all have a line that we're willing to, at least in our mind, that we're willing to defend with our lives.
Probably at the front door of our house, if somebody's coming in to try to get to our kids, but certainly our country.
This country is very nationalistic.
If you start talking about, you know, Americans get very nationalistic.
If you start, you know, making fun of the flag, there it is.
Look at that flag.
So, it's better sometimes to think to yourself, I wonder what kind of software went into this guy's head, this guy who just did the bombings in New York.
What kind of software was he exposed to?
Obviously, it wasn't good software.
And it might make us...
I don't know if compassion is the word, but it might make us more understanding.
And so, if you understand your enemy or the enemy, which may not be people, but rather an ideology...
I always try to look at perspective as like a large creation that's made with little tiny Lego blocks and with every life experience that I have I try to add a few more Lego blocks and they might not change me radically but over time those Lego blocks can build and become a significant structure something you can see and look at and measure that's cool and every time one of these things happens I always try to think of there's perspective that
I had when When my kids started walking and talking to them and seeing them go from Coming out of their mother's body to being a little person I could talk to I started realizing okay, it seems like My thought was always that people were static.
That I meet, you know, Mike McGee, and he's 32 years old.
Hey, Mike, how are you?
Nice to meet you.
This is Mike McGee.
He's 32. Mike was a baby at one point in time.
He came out of his mother's body, a helpless little thing like all of us did.
And then through all sorts of weirdness, life experiences that are completely random, and people that probably were totally unqualified teaching them things, and growing up with a bunch of other kids that were similar in a lot of ways.
Similarly getting fucked up by their parents, their upbringing, their religion, and a million different variables, right?
And then there's all these alpha chimpanzee jockeying positional things that go on.
In these relationships with kids and kids bully kids and sometimes those kids that are bullied it ruins them for the rest of their life and they just they're devastated for like literally to the grave from some shit that happened when they were 10. So we're we're subject to so many different variables and so many different points of data entry like data can come at us in so many different ways whether it's physical data whether it's just reading the news and trying to understand like why would someone go to a nightclub In Orlando
and just start shooting gay people.
Why would someone drive a truck in France and just drive over those people?
Why would someone do that?
That was a baby at one point in time.
Something has led to that.
And we have to look at all the things that influence us.
All of them.
Whether it's behavioral things, whether it's things that were beaten into you by just life's hard lessons.
And then the big one that nobody wants to discuss.
But the bottom line is, they're incredibly structured patterns of behavior that you are forced to follow that can be real dangerous if people don't follow them.
And nobody wants to admit that.
Nobody wants to admit that when you leave this pattern of behavior, you're supposed to be killed.
No one wants to admit if you vary from this pattern of behavior and do no one any harm, like homosexuals, you're to be killed.
I mean, there's some really, and you know, oh, this Islamophobia on this show has got to stop.
Most people that are practicing Muslims aren't hurting anybody because there's so many of them.
If they were, if there was a war between Muslims and Christians and it was just spilling out of the streets every day, Jesus Christ, you'd be a bloodbath everywhere.
Somebody who thinks they have the truth with a capital T, which is called a fundamentalist.
We're all fundamentalists.
We all have aspects of our personalities and our belief systems that are fundamentalists.
If you ask me about sugar, I'll wax poetic.
I'll tell you all about the evils of sugar, and I really believe I'm right.
Now, I have a lot of data and science behind me, but...
I have all kinds of ideas about why sugar's bad and fat and protein's good for you because I've lived it and I've done it and I'm sure you have your own point of view.
If you've ever seen what a wolf does, we came upon a wolf calf that had been killed, not a wolf calf, a moose calf, rather, that had been killed by wolves in Canada when I was there about a year and a half ago.
Actually, it's two years ago now.
And it was really weird because I didn't expect to see all the hair.
Yeah, we were walking down this road, and these crows started circling overhead, and my friend Mike Hawkridge, he's like, let's go see what they're squawking about.
There's some sort of a biological effect when one goes missing.
And she can go from four, if it's a healthy population, to like 16. Right?
So here's one of the ways they know this is a fact, that these wolves are capable of doing this, is that when they introduced wolves to Yellowstone, wolves hadn't been in Yellowstone since they eradicated them, right?
So these people came across North America, killed all these wolves, and the way they would do it is through using their system of communicating, and using the fact that they're these tight-knit groups.
And these packs and their families, they stick together.
So they would kill one wolf, rub its scent all over a carcass, inject the carcass of a horse, they would shoot a horse, inject the horse with strychnine.
So that way they're killing two birds with one stone.
They were getting rid of the wild horses, which had become a real problem, and they are still a problem today.
And the fact that there's thousands, tens of thousands of wild horses in North America right now, to the point where- Tens of thousands of wild horses in America.
There are people that are advocating for the hunting season of wild horses.
He gets into, on Ranella's podcast, the mass extinctions that occurred somewhere in the range of the last Ice Age and maybe sometime even before that, some of them, and how little they know about what killed them all.
He advocates the possibility, not advocates, but he brings up the possibility that they could have possibly extirpated those animals from their areas just based on rifles and horsebacks without the market meat farm.
And they have to do it or those things will overpopulate.
So it's like either that or...
I'm sure you've seen that video, because it was a really interesting video, how wolves change rivers.
It was about the Yellowstone wolves being reintroduced into Yellowstone and how they've changed the course of the rivers because they've killed deer, which allowed these plants to grow that didn't grow before and changed the course of the rivers.
Really interesting stuff about the reintroduction of wolves.
but it's essentially what biologists were trying to do by reintroducing wolves was introduce a natural ecosystem because this is how it's supposed to be there's not supposed to be like the hunters get upset because all of a sudden these elk herds are devastated and there's like 50% of them but in many ways it's kind of like a selfish feeling because I although I side with them and I understand what they're saying I don't want wolves to be a problem with people but they are They're a part of that whole thing.
They were there when the elk were there.
There's never elk without the wolf.
And when there are elk without the wolf, you get what you got in New Zealand.
You got people flying overhead with helicopters, gunning them down, just letting the meat run.
Like, if you were over in New Zealand, we're going hunting, and as we're going up the hill, man, what a beautiful countryside, and look at all these animals.
And then we hear a helicopter fly overhead, and one ridge over, they're just gunning down stags.
Yeah.
And we go over the top of the hell, and this is like what we'd, you know, we'd romanticize this trip, we're gonna go there, we're gonna live off the land, we're gonna take a stag, thank you stag for giving me your life, your flesh will feed my...
Meanwhile, there's a fucking helicopter just indiscriminately gunning them down because there's too many of them shitting the grass.
I was like, listen, you got to put a fence over your fucking flowers because I think we could get fined like $100,000 or something crazy for your flowers and that's probably not worth it.
The real reason I didn't do it, I remember, is not because I didn't think I could do it.
It was more because I figured if I shot the deer with a crossbow or a bow and arrow, it would run.
And I'd have to track it, and it would run in somebody else's yard, and then they'd find a deer that had a bow and arrow, and then they'd come and find it, and they'd trace it back.
But the problem is, by us not being in nature at all, by not interacting with animals at all, we've allowed these monsters to develop these slaughterhouses, these houses of horror, these factory farm mechanisms.
Like, we've really fucked up.
We've gotten so big.
Where these cities that don't make any food need so much food on a daily basis that we've completely removed ourselves from the process of growing things.
It's one of the most important things about being a person is eating healthy food.
It's one of the most important things.
If you don't have healthy food, you're not going to be healthy.
It's really that simple.
If you eat peanut butter and jelly sandwiches like I did today, if you have that all day, every day, for the rest of your life, you're going to have a shitty, short fucking life.
You're not going to make it.
There's not enough nutrients in that.
We don't think about it, man.
We're so busy with stocks and with marriage and with fucking, I want to get, well, we're thinking about making an addition on the house.
We have figured out a way to get a lot of protein in people's bodies for cheap.
And it used to be that meat was something that countries, I remember in a lot of countries that I lived in, we were, like, for example, you would eat meat twice a year.
The Bedouin We're good to go.
We've given ourselves a food problem.
It's just the pendulum.
We have people that eat, obviously, too much, and then you have lobbying efforts to get as much corn syrup and things like that into people's bodies.
It's...
It's an interesting thing.
I think you're right, though.
We've gotten away from a lot of the stuff that just is easy to do to make yourself healthy.
It's just so much easier to be informed, so much easier to improve yourself, so much easier to get feedback, so much easier to communicate with people, to get to know things.
A lot of countries, you couldn't say that because you don't know who's running control and who's got the government in their pocket.
But we're really lucky in this country that we have institutions we can trust, like a police force we can trust.
Overall, I know there's certain corrupts.
The FBI, there are the courts, there's objective law.
Those things are...
We're so lucky that we all have things like due process and representative government.
I don't have to worry about a police force knocking on my door.
Sometimes you do, I guess, if you've been up to stuff.
But I don't have to worry about somebody who has more power than me buying a government official who can then knock on my door and put me in jail on trumped-up charges.
Are there examples of that?
Maybe.
But for the most part, I live in a country where that's not the case.
Yeah, they're both fascinating in their own right.
They're both, you know, guys that we really, really need.
There's a lot of nutty shit out there.
Like they came on, or he came on rather, Michael Shermer, one of the things that he wanted to talk about was this increased presence of people that honestly believe that there is some sort of a conspiracy that the earth is flat.
Shermer said, you know, when you have people reaching the same conclusion from independent lines of inquiry, you've got so many different independent lines of inquiry.
People are doing their own research and they all converge on one conclusion.
If you are then coming in to say, well, this is my idea, if you're a conspiracy theorist, well, yes, but there's all this unexplained phenomenon.
That's fine, but, you know, when I ask for evidence, you know what I always get when I say, what are the evidence?
They're probably just, at the end of the day, they need to belong to a group, and they want to be exclusive.
It's a little bit like the modern art when Ayn Rand was walking through the Museum of Modern Art, and a bunch of people were kind of clustered around that broom that had been stuffed into a pail, and everybody's like, that's so interesting.
And it was really expensive.
Then they went in and there was just three light bulbs that had been strung together, hanging.
And Ann Ren went, wait a minute, I know what the fuck is going on here.
These people are all trying to belong to an exclusive group.
And they're not really even looking at this art.
They just want to be, you know, part of the cool kids that get it.
You don't get it because you're not sophisticated.
He was doing something actually much more deliberate than that.
So you ready for my Jackson Pollock education here?
I believe Jackson Pollock was painting fractals.
I think that there was a...
So a fractal would be, if you look at the coastline of a country, and then you look at the micro...
What is it?
The micro sort of...
Lines in that particular, they mimic the larger picture, the larger coastline.
That would be a fractal, I believe.
And Jackson Pollock was different because not only was he the first guy to start doing that, but he was deliberately creating what other painters were not able to do, which was fractals.
Please...
Please, somebody tell me that I'm right about that.
The best way to describe fractals is it's a geometric pattern that as you get closer to it, you see...
If you look at it from a distance, you see a very particular shape.
The Mandelbrot set is a perfect example of an amazing fractal.
And it was one of the ones that the really nutty people used as proof that crop circles were from extraterrestrials.
Oh.
Because mathematicians had only figured out the Mandelbrot set, I want to say, less than a year before this crop circle appeared with a perfect Mandelbrot set in some wheat field.
And the idea of this, pull up a Mandelbrot set so you can see.
There's actually an animated version of the Mandelbrot set, which is really the best way to look at it, because as it goes closer, you can see that it's the same thing on the outside in a smaller scale, and then you go closer than that, and it's the same thing you saw on the outside, but in a much smaller scale, and then it goes on and on.
Like, as you see all these little things that stick out of these circles, these giant circles and smaller circles, and then even smaller circles that are attached to the giant circle, and each one of those gets infinitely smaller and smaller.
You keep going deep into these things, and you find another small circle, and it has smaller circles on it, and you go to it, and it has smaller circles, and it just keeps going on and on and on and on and on.
And see if you can find the history on it, because I think it was one of those things where they were like, look, someone who's doing these, either the hoaxer is very educated and some sort of a mathematician and understands the proportions in making a reasonably correct Mandelbrot set, or it's aliens.
In Michael Shermer's book, he talks about Thomas Eager, I think, MIT professor, who talks about, yes, jet fuel that burns at 2,700 degrees and steel, you know, doesn't melt.
I can't remember.
No, jet fuel burns at...
1,200 degrees and the steel, the structural steel in the World Trade Center doesn't melt until it's 2,700 degrees.
And so you're right.
The jet fuel may have gotten up to 1,400 degrees.
Here's the thing.
At 1,200 degrees or 1,400 degrees, steel loses 50% of its integrity, structural steel.
And the steel, and this was this guy from MIT, who's an actual, you know, He's a professor of engineering when it comes to metallurgy.
And when you're at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, you know some shit when you're a professor.
The real problem with conspiracy theories is that some of them are true.
That's the real problem.
When you start going over history, you can get paralyzed by...
All the possibilities because so many things have been conspired and were pulled off throughout history.
It's just a common thread throughout history.
But the problem is when you're looking at things today like towers falling and buildings catching on fire and collapsing and all these conspiracies get thrown around.
You will lose a massive amount of your life watching YouTube videos and reading websites and getting taken down a rabbit hole.
But, again, it's one of those things where people don't want to see both sides of it.
They don't want to see both sides of it.
I feel like, for sure, there was some incompetency.
For sure.
There was some failure to understand the threat, whether that was an intelligence failure.
It was.
Whatever it was, there was some failure and that allowed that whole thing to happen.
Now, when anything happens throughout history, there's two primary things that happen when something goes down.
Number one is people capitalize on it.
If there's an enormous event There's something that happens.
We get attacked.
And, you know, they know what happens.
And there's this moment now in time, right, where they have this potential to do things that they couldn't do before because the mood of the country has shifted.
The mood is on revenge.
The mood is on preventative measures.
And then you can do things like go to Iraq and invade Iraq.
That's 100% fact.
That is why they did that.
They did not do that because they thought Iraq was going to attack us.
There's no evidence whatsoever.
The weapons of mass destruction was all horseshit, right?
So the whole reason why they did it is, look, okay, we got attacked, but on the good side, we got a fucking nice chance to go to Iraq here.
Now, the people that are looking at conspiracies, they'll start to add things.
So they'll start to say, they engineered those attacks so they could go to Iraq.
Events and momentum are probably the reason a lot of things happen.
People do have agendas.
I do think there was a group of people that had an agenda that wanted to take out the fourth largest army in the world, Iraq, because Iraq was posed a threat.
But those people probably got into the decision maker's ear like...
George W. Bush, not a very wise guy.
And, you know, so there were people that influenced, I think, the invasion of Iraq who were smarter than the decision makers.
I think that one of the main reasons after 9-11 was, the idea was, let's go into Iraq to show any other country, like Pakistan or North Korea, that if they think there's any value in giving a weapon of mass destruction to an enemy like Al-Qaeda, that it'll be the end of their country.
But oil, no, because that doesn't hold water because oil, there's money in a war effort, but oil is a commodity traded on the open market.
So if you actually look at the way oil is traded, there's a tanker with oil.
And it's a commodity.
So an oil tanker can be on its way to a country, and then that tanker is bought by a broker, and it has to turn course and go back to another place.
So oil is traded on the open world market.
So the idea that the United States wanted to control the Iraqi oil is actually bogus, because we lost a shitload of money, and we don't get that oil money.
We also produce enough of our own oil with fracking and things to...
Well, we're not in control, but we essentially overthrew their government and then gave control to other people.
If we decide to take it back, if there was some sort of an event and the United States decided to go in and take it back, It's not like they're going into North Korea.
It's not like they're going into some established country with a powerful army like Russia.
You know, they're going into something that we essentially broke down.
We broke down, created a civil war between two rival factions of Islam, which nobody even predicted.
Well, I did.
You knew about the area a lot more than a lot of people that were talking about it because you grew up there.
So then you have other countries that have less of an interest in keeping that country stable.
So they foster conflict by supporting criminal networks, by supporting other vested interests in those countries.
Keep those countries in turmoil.
And then you have a real problem.
And the biggest issue with, you know, if you wanted to get into a conspiracy, my God, the Iraq invasion in 2003 was good for Iran.
It made Iran a bigger player.
Probably made Russia more influential.
And certainly made the Shia in Iraq the people that finally had some power and had control of oil over the Sunni minority.
Remember what the British...
The British used to always do this, right?
The British would go into, for example, in Syria and things like that.
The Alawites in Syria are...
The Alawites are a minority.
That's what Bashar al-Assad is.
And I believe the Alawites are Shia, where the majority of the country is Sunni, I believe.
It might be the other way around.
But the British always would go into a country when they would take over a colonized country, and they'd find a minority.
And they would give that minority a lot of power.
And here is the genius of that.
They would prop them up because now the minority in that country had to be loyal to the British.
Because if they weren't, if they chose to now kind of side with any kind of a revolution, side with any kind of an independence movement, The minority also knew that once that was over, the majority that they had been suppressing, that they had been given favor over, would then turn on them.
Do you understand?
So that was always a way of dividing and conquering.
Find who the minority in the country is and go ahead and give them power so that they will have to be loyal to us because their survival will depend on it.
Well, there's been really bizarre moments in history where leaders have actually contemplated how to keep the population under control in the event that there's no war.
That's one of the big fears is the event that peace breaks out.
I mean, it's one of the reasons why they constructed the game of football.
They made football to deal with the fact that people weren't going to war.
And you had all these young men that were ready to fucking go out there and kick some ass, and there was no ass to kick.
They had conquered America.
They had wiped out all the Native Americans and put them into reservations.
So that was a sort of unspoken war.
And then there was the wars with the British and the wars with the Spanish and all this different shit that went on for how many hundreds of years?
So, we've covered a lot of ground here, and I want you guys to know that I'm the age of most of your fathers, and I hope you've written down everything I fucking said.
I think the world's perspective is a lot like my Lego pile that I was talking about.
Little tiny Legos get put on all the time.
And sometimes we have to take Legos off.
Sometimes, like, we've created areas of protection where we don't really need any protection.
The big one being humor.
Like, when people try to dissect humor and pretend that these are actual statements, like you're giving a fucking affidavit in court or something like that.
Like, people say ridiculous things they don't really mean.
That's why you laugh at them, because you know they don't really mean it.
And on top of the endorphin thing, it's also like just a release of stress.
And working out is so difficult sometimes that when it is over, you have the struggle of a peak training session.
Say if you're doing rounds in a bag, right?
And you know you're going to do seven rounds in a bag.
And you hit that fourth round and you are fucking exhausted.
Yeah.
And you know you have to do three more rounds and you know and you're gonna go have to go hard like when it's It's so hard to do when you're in the moment when you're you're heaving and you're looking at the clock and there's still a minute 45 to go and you're And you're just breathing fire trying to pace yourself.
That's so much more difficult than everything else once you get out everything else is like I The sun's beautiful.
I don't think it's a good idea either for a growing mind because I think that weed can tend to...
I think THC is still a mind-altering substance, just like anything else, and it has its benefits, but I think as you're growing, it feels like it can be, for the most part, for a young mind, a motivation killer.
It could be I think there's a lot of factors that could Play into the big picture of who you become that it certainly could be one of them to deny that it's not influential I think it's kind of silly and also to really truly understand the effects of its The way THC affects the developing mind is not completely understood, and it's definitely under debate.
There's a lot of studies that have shown that it's actually not bad at all for a woman to be smoking it while her baby's in the womb, which is really contrary to what a lot of people think.
But whether or not it's beneficial for a young kid, first of all, it's probably...
If you think of how old you are when you actually are an adult, I mean, we have this number, right?
But see, in other countries, they have less instances of alcohol abuse per capita because it's not this forbidden taboo thing.
There's a real argument for that, too, is that kids don't like being told what to do.
And when you can get away with your friends and someone sneaks a little fucking flask of whiskey and we all sit around drinking in our clubhouse, like, ooh, we're cool.
But if it was legal and easy to get, we might not be so inclined to do that.
He said to Governor Pence, Trump's running mate, Trump's running mate said, he's a strong leader, you can't deny it, he's a strong leader.
And Gary Kasparov said, Mr. Pence, Governor Pence saying...
Vladimir Putin is a strong leader is like saying arsenic is a strong drink.
Your country should be ashamed of you.
I couldn't agree more.
Because you do need to know the difference.
You do need to know that when you talk about a strong leader, a strong man in that context, what you're really talking about is a man who thinks he's above the institutions of that country.
He's above the rule of law.
You are at his whim.
And what do strong men do?
I'll create security as long as you give me all your money.
I'll create security as long as you give me all your freedom.
I'll create security as long as you say nothing bad about me.
What was that, Dan Carlin, my favorite quote?
The Romans created a wasteland and called it peace.
I think that there's also this game that that Pence guy has to play.
I mean, he's been playing the small-time politics game.
Now he's going global.
I mean, there's this game that this guy has to play where he has to, you know, say nice things about people that Donald Trump has said nice things about.
You know, Donald Trump has said that he's a fan of Putin.
The president has earned $400,000 annual salary along with a $50,000 annual expense account, a $100,000 non-taxable travel account, and a $19,000 for entertainment.
I think Sam Harris on your podcast did a great job of describing Donald Trump.
He said, I don't know if he's ever said anything.
And I've listened to everything he said.
I mean, I try to listen to his speeches.
I try to listen to his interviews.
And I agree with him.
I don't think that Donald Trump has ever said anything profound or insightful.
I've never heard him say even anything...
Substantive about what he would do about major challenges in this country, other than the fact that he would build a wall, very general, good luck with that, and get tough.
All demagogues, all demagogues in history always talked about law and order and how we have to get tough, and that is another way of saying, give me more power, give me more guns, I'm going to keep things, I'm going to enforce the law, because apparently our cities are hellholes.
But that's not true.
It's not true.
The cities have become places where a lot of people go and have never been safer in the history of this country, New York City, etc.
So, you know, this guy, he's got lots of sensationalist things to say, but there's very little substance.
His father was a huge developer and he'd always follow his father around.
His father was a giant developer in New York and he inherited essentially not only the money but also the political apparatus, the connections.
You know, so much of Trump's When he bought so many of those buildings in New York, and I think at the center of his empire is 15 buildings in New York City, he bought those buildings and he got huge tax breaks.
Again, I don't begrudge that.
Developers work deals with the city and they get big tax breaks.
But remember, a lot of those deals came from deep inside political connections and connections to construction companies, many of which were owned by gangsters.
That's just the way you do business in New York City.
Again, I don't criticize that.
But please don't act as though you weren't using the political system and greasing the political palms to get and make and hold on to your money.
What's interesting about Sam Harris is that Sam's model for human behavior, and Sam's model for the way things should work, is that essentially people are rational.
Because his arguments against religion, if you listen to some of his speeches, are...
Listen to how irrational this is.
The problem is...
That, you know, Jonathan Haidt, who's a great thinker, and they had a debate, and Jonathan Haidt said to Sam Harris, Sam, your model for human beings is a little bit outdated because you're assuming human minds are rational.
Human beings are intuitive.
We are emotional.
And in fact, we're emotional and we will create rationality around those impulses and those emotions.
So even he has his limitations on how human beings work, and I'm sure we'd be criticizing his point of view as well, but I agree with you.
When we're talking about just, like, someone generalizing, people do this or people do that, I think people are absolutely capable of better, and I think they're wiser now than they were hundreds of years ago when they believed unbelievably ridiculous things.
It's not that long.
It's such a short amount of time with how far people have come.
You know, like we were talking about earlier when we first brought up this Matt LeBlanc thing, putting in perspective the steps that have been made and then the progress that has been made.
It's just a strange time.
It's a strange time because on one hand you do have these really fascinating, really rational people that make some great points and you go, wow, maybe there's hope for us.
But I think it's like what I said, the little building blocks, these Legos.
You put a little tiny layer of Legos on with each little experience and each little, the way it gets interpreted by people.
And they add up to things.
So our version of what reality is now, it keeps changing and growing and expanding and morphing as opposed to a 1930s movie depiction of reality.
Of reality, which is really all we have to go on other than history books.
I think it's so far away, but I think it'll happen quicker than you think, because I think with the exponential expansion of technology, it's going to accelerate all this learning and this understanding.
I think one of the things that we're feeling really weird about when it comes to the internet is this invasion effect, where it's invading our lives, it's invading people's privacy, it's invading your time, people are getting addicted to checking websites and checking their phone.
It's got this sort of invasive thing.
And when I look at that, like the other day I was at this place and all these people were on their phone and I just stopped and I was just looking around and all these people were walking and talking on their phone and holding their phone in front of them.
I'm like, this is a takeover.
This is a takeover.
Like if that was an alien, like it looks cute because it's glass and it's beautiful and it sits in your pocket.
But if there was like an alien that came and landed in your ear and demanded as much time as your phone demands...
Like we would think, oh my God, human beings, their minds are being taken over by this being.
If something just climbed up on top of your face and just started talking and you're like, hey man, I got to my dance.
And you're like sitting there with these aliens on your ear all day.
People would freak out.
They're like, oh my God, we've got to get back to being people.
Well, there's some weird filter between being a person and then being a person communicating with people only through technology, only through electronics, that you're inseparable.
Human beings are pushing toward their version of immortality.
Everybody wants to live forever, right?
Everybody wants to live forever.
Germ theory.
Germ theory was a radical theory.
Germ theory, remember, is a very new concept.
Germ theory was don't drink that water because there are germs in there.
When Leeuwenhoek invented the microscope and was checking his own saliva before he brushed his teeth, he'd look and say, there's all these germs in my mouth.
And there are these little microbes that you can't see, but I created these lenses and you can see them.
And then he would clean his mouth out and he'd spit into the slide and he'd say, ah, there are less of those moving things in my mouth.
That was the beginning.
People like that were the beginning of the idea that there is something called bacteria.
Now we're realizing there are good bacteria and bad bacteria.
But all these sort of developments were there to push us beyond our biology.
So we didn't have to die of infection anymore because we came up with this idea because Alexander Fleming came up with something called penicillin.
He had a cold and his snot dripped into a Petri disc that had some mold in it and he realized that the mold had killed the bacteria that was in his nose and he went, wait a minute.
I'm going to invent something called penicillin, and then antibiotics were born.
So we have all these giant leaps, this idea that you can't see them but they're germs, so wash your hands.
What?
And it'll keep things like the bubonic plague maybe at bay, etc., etc.
And so as we move in this direction of understanding, Of understanding about our own biology, understanding about our own psychology, understanding about, you know, sort of the dangers of certain ideologies and why we should embrace other ideologies.
Like, for example, I don't know, everybody's of the same moral worth.
Because something's weird and different, because they're gay, or they wear weird clothing.
That doesn't mean they should be ostracized.
In fact, that means they should be included.
Well, what are we doing here with all this knowledge?
What we're doing is we're saying, this is a better way to live.
This is a more comfortable way to live.
This will allow us to live for a longer period of time, in more comfort.
But, why?
Why?
Is it so we can come up with better movies, books, ideas?
It starts to get to a point where you're like, what are we doing this for?
Is it just for our entertainment?
And then does that mean that we are chasing more sensation?
It might be sensory sensation.
Or is the idea to achieve a higher level of understanding?
And then there are problems that we really have trouble with, which is something like climate change.
Climate change is real.
You've got ice sheets melting at a rate, you know, I think what is the Los Angeles Basin use is one kilometer Of water a year and Greenland's ice sheet is melting at something like 240 kilometers.
I mean, something crazy.
We're losing, you know, sea levels are going to rise.
There's this other huge existential threat that's going to affect all of us, maybe push a half a billion people who live on coastlines inland to create a massive amount of, you know, ecological changes on a scale maybe we haven't seen.
So it's just a very strange thing as we get closer to learning how to live together and learning a better life as we create this neural net where we're getting a better understanding of what it's like to be somebody else, even though their culture, their software is so different.
It makes us more compassionate, I suppose, as a group of people, right?
We can have a language for it.
At least we're trying.
At least we know that's important.
At least we know things like racism, even though it exists, is kind of a bad idea for a lot of reasons.
Yes, we're getting closer to this goal, but then I feel like there's this giant tidal wave behind us.
Well, it really does go back to fractals because one of the mindfuck of all mindfucks is that when you go into a person's body, the deeper you go, you hit their cells, you go into their cells, you find subatomic particles blinking out of existence and most of it is air anyway, which is a lot like what?
So we don't know because we only have a limited amount of ability to measure these things.
But it's entirely possible that inside every one of those events, subatomic events, where you're seeing particles blinking in and out of existence, you might be able to go deeper and deeper and deeper and find a whole new universe.
That's the true nature of infinity, and that's why it's so impossible to grasp, because if there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in this universe, each with hundreds of billions of stars, it's entirely possible that all of that could just be one subatomic particle that's in another cell, that's in some other person, in some other universe, and that goes on and on.
I mean, that is the true nature of infinity, that it has no end.
So it is entirely possible that what we look at as a structure, you look at the universe, like, wow, this amazing, constantly expanding thing, it's so beautiful, and there's so many stars, that it might be a part of a cell that's immeasurable to our little puny eyes and minds.
Maybe the answer then is surrender, like Socrates and Newton, two of the arguably greatest minds that we, at least in the European tradition, Socrates says, I know more than everybody else because I'm very aware of the fact that I basically know nothing.
After a lifetime of contemplation, and then Newton said, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, but he kind of likened himself to a kid skipping a rock along the surface of the ocean.
That's what a lot of people like the Zen sort of that's where archery is and in the art of archery, you know, you learn everything through one thing through deep deep practice and deep immersion into one particular discipline because what it requires to be Expert, mastery, like mastery at something, will lead you to a deeper understanding of all things.
That would be the sort of Zen, Asian mindset, which I've always loved.
I tend to be interested in a fuckload of things, but there is something to be said about Josh Wayskin's book, The Art of Learning, where he said when he was a chess master, and then he got so into jiu-jitsu, he's Marcelo Garcia's first black belt, and he said, When I was studying jujitsu, I was getting better at chess.
When I was doing chess, I was getting better at jujitsu.
But what my point was is that so many people's brains work so differently.
And I wonder if that's all just a part of the mechanism as well, is that in order for this thing to keep moving, it can't be a bunch of farmers.
What do you mean the way humans interact with each other and the innovation that comes out of that, the communication that comes out of that, the change and the influence that comes out of that.
Even things as innocuous as a podcast between two dudes that sat down, one of them being a terrorist survivor yourself, maybe smoked a little marijuana and just rambled for two and a half hours.
See, I think that all of the experiences that we all have, the good and the bad, they're influential in some sort of a strange way, and it all seems to be kind of balancing itself out, or at least pushing into a certain direction.
And that direction seems to be the improvement of the civilization.
Even the poorly thought out measures, like this woman writing this awful article about Matt LeBlanc, The idea behind it that she's going to get support is because she's saying that someone is doing something, even though it's not true, someone's doing something bad for society and culture.
This person has a voice of influence and they should never work again because society and culture demands that you behave a certain way or we will take away your livelihood.
No more jokes.
Well, the only way that would work at all, other than you're just a mean person and you're trying to like take people's jobs away and make people poor, the only way it would work is if you're promoting something of merit for the civilization.
So by saying someone is awful and terrible and this is why they should never work again, like you are in some sort of way, in your lame-minded attempt, you're trying to push culture forward.
Even when we're looking at dealing with international crises, the reason why we're looking at those crises is we don't want them to blow up in our face.
Principles and understanding and understanding what the goal is, philosophy, is very important.
And I'll give you an example.
You've got to be very careful of giving people a pass.
I'm not saying you are, but of giving people a pass in the notion that they're trying to solve a problem.
Because the means don't justify the ends.
Plenty of examples.
I had an acting teacher one time who said, if you're trying to play Hitler, you're trying to play Stalin.
As an actor, you can't play him as a monster.
You've got to play him as a guy who's trying to solve a problem.
You know, in Hitler's mind, in his twisted mind, he was trying to solve a problem.
That problem was Jews, gypsies, gays, or anybody who wasn't quote-unquote Aryan.
And he was going to make, at the end of the day, he was going to make the world a better place.
That's where I think, and this is where the real work comes in, that's where I think it's so important to be able to articulate for yourself and for others why certain things are better, certain ways of living, certain beliefs, certain practices, my God, cultural practices, certain philosophies, politically, for example.
Are better for the greater good than is this over here.
And that's where people like Michael Shermer and Sam Harris are doing great work.
That's where those guys sit around and they articulate for us things that we might intuitively feel or they sway us in a better direction when our emotion takes us in a different direction.
When our emotion says, let's vote for Trump because he's a guy who at least is quote-unquote getting shit done or he's taking the chessboard and throwing it in the air.
And then the more sober thinkers who spend time thinking about this say, hey Bri, hey Joe, hey Steve over there, I know you feel this way.
Let me steer you over here and here's why.
Because we should be actually, it's not just about trying to solve the problem.
Let's get to what we're really trying to get to and here's why.
Revolutions, no matter how small, the idea that you're going to take everything that sort of settled and was there for a reason that sort of became – there's an organic set point sometimes to societies.
And when you come in and somebody just throws everything out with the bathwater, it doesn't historically have a good – it typically doesn't have a good response.
I would even argue also his prudence, his inaction.
He was very careful.
A lot of what will define Obama's presidency, I think, and probably in a favorable light, is the fact that he was not willing to take action very often, which is just as important sometimes as taking action.
That's a good example of people that get very emotional at the idea that this guy betrayed our intelligence agency, our military, and things like that.
And is that worth the influence that these these surveillance methods have on us?
Like if you know that your phone is being watched and that all those dick pictures that you send are all being collected somewhere and then all those crazy texts you send about the government conspiracies are all being collected somewhere and And potentially could be used against you if you run for office somewhere.
So if you decide to run for office and you say, you know what, I love New York City.
It's time New York City had a mayor that people understand.
I'm going to run for you.
I know I'm just an actor, but I'm going to...
And then all of a sudden they pull you into a room and say, hey, Brian.
The second part, too, the idea that surveillance shouldn't be...
Well, the fact is that if the government now has control over what I say, and if the government is listening in without my consent, and I'm a private citizen who doesn't commit crimes, Then I'm sorry, but the terrorists have won.
They won because they changed the way I think, and they changed the way my governor governs me, and they have created anonymity and a power structure That can do whatever the fuck they want to its citizenry.
That is un-American.
That is anti-constitutional.
That is not the country I want to live in.
It's not, most importantly, what makes this country great.
It is the opposite.
It is what Russia does and a lot of other countries.
So if you want a weaker country, ironically, it is not to give government agencies I don't care who they are.
I don't care how well-intentioned they are, and a lot of them are well-intentioned.
They do great work, and they keep us safe.
You better have transparency, and you better have checks and balances, and you better be following the law, and you better have court orders, etc., etc.
I want all those systems in place.
You know what?
It might be cumbersome.
It might be a pain in the ass.
It might even make us a little less safe sometimes.
But I'll take it.
I'll fucking take that over giving any government agency power over my private affairs and letting them listen in specifically.
People having that kind of control and power over other people just as we talked about the beginning of the podcast that starts out about Greenpeace and then after a while becomes about having power I mean people love to have a position of Influence and power and they don't give it up use it.
Yeah when if that is your life I mean that is what you do.
I'm a cop I'm a police officer and I'm the law in this town and We love those movies.
They found it, and then he deleted the Reddit post after they found it, because he had had a certain Reddit handle, and they could bring that Reddit handle, they could connect it back to him.
Yeah, a lot of that, I suspect, is Hillary not wanting people to see that she was talking about how this was an Islamic fundamentalist movement and Benghazi stuff.
The Obama administration has this strange edict where they don't really mention that it's Islamic terrorism.
I'm not saying you should be punished forever for being careless, but I'm saying that's a significant indicator of someone having a fucked up personality.
That all you want to do in these talks, you're talking about gender and yourself.
You fucking killed somebody in traffic, man.
You should be talking about that life-changing moment all the time.