Speaker | Time | Text |
---|---|---|
Wish I was really that excited. | ||
Yes! | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Hello, Moshe. | ||
What's happening, Joe? | ||
I'm good. | ||
unidentified
|
How are you? | |
These are sporty sunglasses. | ||
I like those. | ||
Oh, thanks. | ||
Well, glasses, glasses, not sunglasses. | ||
This is how I look. | ||
They fit your face well. | ||
Thanks, man. | ||
unidentified
|
I like it. | |
It's a good choice. | ||
Joe's been flirting with me since I arrived. | ||
A little bit. | ||
unidentified
|
Casual. | |
Nothing weird. | ||
Just the way you button that shirt all the way up to the top. | ||
That little top button. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The jean jacket, that Jay Leno's garage look. | ||
Yeah, I just came from Jay Leno's podcast. | ||
So, we were just talking about the fights. | ||
I stopped you before we actually talked. | ||
We were just feeling like this is more evidence that we are living in a computer simulation. | ||
Like, everything is getting weirder. | ||
Politics is the most bizarre... | ||
I mean, everything is falling apart, and it's like the Matrix programmers can't keep up with the code. | ||
Do you think that maybe, like, when one or two things go weird, like the election... | ||
I think the election... | ||
I think having a reality star television... | ||
Host guy who's this you know media mogul become the president United States is so odd to people that I think It gives us this feeling of instability and that feeling of instability has like a ripple effect and it starts to fuck with all these other aspects of our reality and then these blurbs just start popping up and these weirdness Well, it's kind of like, rather than it being a proof that it's a simulation, this is the most reality we've had in a long time, right? | ||
Like, we've all been living in this, like, pseudo, this theater of stability. | ||
I'm sure you've talked about hyper-normalization on this podcast before, haven't you? | ||
I think we have. | ||
The documentary... | ||
It's real good if people haven't caught up to it yet. | ||
It's on YouTube in its entirety. | ||
It's dense. | ||
It's not a light, fun documentary. | ||
It's like a three-hour-long British guy droning on to found footage on BBC. But his basic point is that society is unstable and has been for a very long time. | ||
Greenland is melting. | ||
We have nukes that can destroy us at any point. | ||
And there is no way... | ||
For the leaders to actually run a functional, stable society. | ||
So what they do instead is they put up this artifice of stability. | ||
Meanwhile, shit is fucking collapsing behind the set. | ||
And basically, the prove-out example he uses is the Soviet Union. | ||
The Soviet Union stopped working almost immediately. | ||
They tried this utopic, communistic, beautiful society and everything fell apart immediately. | ||
Everybody knew it fell apart. | ||
Everyone in Russia knew it wasn't working, but it served them more to pretend that it was working. | ||
And so people got into this willful, sort of voluntary suspension of disbelief, this voluntary cognitive dissonance to say, oh no, everything's good, even though they go to the fucking store, there's no bread. | ||
Everybody was walking around as if it was real. | ||
So maybe when somebody like Trump gets elected, this fake realness of like, everything's good, America's awesome, what a wonderful place, a utopic society with all these freedoms, maybe that rips the seam, then Anthony Rumble Johnson retires from MMA. Or something. | ||
Wow. | ||
Where do you go with that? | ||
I think... | ||
There's always been problems with society, right? | ||
I mean, if you go back to ancient Rome, you know, have you ever visited the Colosseum? | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
Fascinating, right? | ||
Crazy, yeah. | ||
And when you think about it, that's only, you know, you're only talking about a thousand, two thousand years ago, right? | ||
Like, when did... | ||
When did it all start in Rome? | ||
Well, Rome was around for 2,000 years, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
I mean, they were like 10 times as long as this American superpower has existed. | ||
So, yeah, and they were... | ||
But the thing is, they didn't have the technology to strip mine the world the way we do. | ||
Technology has now caught up... | ||
Human evil, or whatever it is, or human avarice, has always been probably equal, right? | ||
But my point was that there's never been, like, any example of a society, a true utopian society. | ||
That's true. | ||
It was like really together, very relaxed, people were nice, there was no war, there was no crime, there was no rape, there was no stealing. | ||
The best example of that is hippie communes, right? | ||
They're specifically designed to create a mini utopia and they always fall apart with the guy at the top fucking everybody's wife. | ||
Yes! | ||
Every time. | ||
It's never not happened. | ||
A friend of mine's ex-girlfriend grew up in one of those, and she was so fucked up because of it. | ||
They're always fucked up. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The best you'll ever get out of a girl that grew up in one of those communes is like, um, there were some really good parts. | ||
That's as good as you can get. | ||
Yeah, and that's someone who's just really kind. | ||
Yeah, I mean, people always try to re-engineer society. | ||
I was reading something today about free housing, that free housing should be a universal right for people, that everyone should have free housing. | ||
I was reading this while I was taking a shit, so I didn't go into it too deeply. | ||
But immediately I was thinking, well, who's going to build the housing? | ||
Like, how's that a right? | ||
Like, you can't have a universal right if some people just don't want to build a house, and they don't want to work, and they don't want to do anything, and they want somebody else to build a house for them. | ||
That's always going to be a possibility. | ||
Sure, yeah, right. | ||
I mean, I guess, right, but what are rights? | ||
Rights are completely constructed, right? | ||
I mean, sure. | ||
Well, the right to be left alone, that should be a right. | ||
The right to privacy. | ||
Right, but a lion or an ape has no rights. | ||
It's just an ape getting eaten and fucked by its neighbor. | ||
Right. | ||
So we decided what rights are. | ||
So the same idea that says anything is a right, you could also say, yeah, housing is a right, if society deems that that's true, I guess. | ||
Or if society has the resources. | ||
We do have the resources. | ||
Right. | ||
That's true. | ||
Right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
I would imagine we have the rights, or the resources, rather, to house everybody. | ||
Not in the best way. | ||
Not in a sweet apartment, but... | ||
I mean, just a roof over your head? | ||
Warmth? | ||
Yeah, I think the idea that we... | ||
We're getting way into the theoretics of taxation and civil responsibility, but the idea that we spend trillions of dollars on a protective military when we've lapped every other military so many times over, we could house every homeless person. | ||
I mean, there are countries where they don't have homeless people. | ||
They just don't. | ||
I've been to Israel and it's like people who are homeless in Israel are homeless because they're crazy and want to be homeless. | ||
My brother was just in one of those super white countries. | ||
Switzerland? | ||
I think it was Switzerland. | ||
And everybody was like, yeah, we don't have... | ||
I mean, this is crazy when he told me. | ||
He was like, what's society like here? | ||
They're like, it's cool. | ||
You know, we don't have poverty, so that's cool. | ||
They don't have poor people. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's not a part of their society. | ||
Is that Switzerland? | ||
Is that what that is? | ||
I think it was Switzerland. | ||
They have, you know, they've figured out a way to make money on the back of it. | ||
I believe Denmark's kind of like that, too. | ||
Yeah, I mean, Northern Europe, they've done something right, I think. | ||
Well, I think they're also dealing with a very small population of people that have existed for a long time in the same place. | ||
Right. | ||
And you kind of normalize, like... | ||
And they've never conquered. | ||
They're not conquerors. | ||
You know, they're not spreading their resources thin across the globe, making battleships and shit. | ||
Right. | ||
I was thinking about you on the way over here. | ||
I think this is connected. | ||
I was thinking about you and the flirtation we were going to be doing. | ||
I was wondering, because you're bent, I've watched her stand-up since Trump got elected, and you and a lot of the guys at the store are, I always think of the store as like the libertarian intellectual epicenter of comedy, right? | ||
And then like if you go east, it becomes more and more like socialist, but further east you travel, right? | ||
And I guess, I don't know, the ha-ha is like the neocons, but at any rate... | ||
Your bent is like, everything's fucking fine. | ||
You're making a crisis that doesn't exist. | ||
And I was wondering, do you still think that? | ||
It's not necessarily really my bent. | ||
unidentified
|
It's the way the bit works. | |
Now that's a real comedian. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Well, actually, I believe it's... | ||
This is one of the things that I say on stage, like I say, like, a lot of the stuff I say is fucked up. | ||
So if I say anything that you don't agree with, I don't agree with a lot of shit I say. | ||
But it's funnier than what I agree with. | ||
Like, some of the things I say, I'm clearly fucking around. | ||
And some of the things I say, it's like, where is he? | ||
Is he on the fence on this? | ||
Like, what's... | ||
But what a lot of it is is just to set up this idea that the whole system has always been preposterous. | ||
Totally. | ||
It's just that, like, it's weird. | ||
It's almost our fault, right? | ||
Because you take a guy like a Clinton or a guy like an Obama who's fairly successful at the job and people are just... | ||
Constantly trying to find chinks in the armor. | ||
Constantly trying to find cracks in who he is. | ||
And it was Clinton, and obviously it was the philandering. | ||
With Obama, it was... | ||
There was a chink the size of a pussy. | ||
Chink sounds like a weird word to use, even if you're not using it in a racist way. | ||
It's like the word niggardly. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
You remember when that dude got in trouble for saying niggardly? | ||
Yeah. | ||
And they were like, you can't say that word. | ||
It's like, but it's not even etymologically connected to the N-word. | ||
And people were like, we don't care. | ||
It's spelled differently. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Not the same root word. | ||
They're like, eh, just don't use it. | ||
But I feel that way about swastikas. | ||
Do you know those hippie swastikas and the Indian swastikas? | ||
Yes. | ||
And all these hippies and, like, you know, Buddhists are always like, yes, it's a different swastika. | ||
It's a special swastika. | ||
It's the good swastika. | ||
It's like the good witch and the bad witch from The Wizard of Oz. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
And I'm like, all right, that's cool, Buddhists, but I think you should just abandon the good swastika. | ||
You got other shit you could do. | ||
It was a symbol used in Okinawan karate. | ||
Oh, really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Actually... | |
It's made its rounds, right? | ||
Because it was in India, in like Hindu temples, Okinawa, maybe that's Buddhism, Hinduism to Buddhism to karate, something like that. | ||
I don't know why it was in there, but I remember seeing it a long time ago in a store, like this Okinawan karate book, and there was just like these symbols. | ||
And I was like, this is bizarre. | ||
Like a swastika is a part of karate? | ||
It might have been reversed. | ||
You know, sometimes they do it the opposite way. | ||
But yeah, that symbol's gone. | ||
You gotta let that go. | ||
Yeah, let's just abandon that one. | ||
You can walk away from that one. | ||
You got other symbols. | ||
It's like a lot like the Hitler mustache. | ||
Like, there's no need. | ||
You gotta let it go. | ||
I mean, look, chaplains suffered, but Mr. Miyagi was like, you know, wax on, wax off, put that swastika on your shoulder. | ||
unidentified
|
Isn't it funny that you could just stretch that bitch just a little bit and you're okay? | |
If you just trim it just slightly... | ||
Oh, you're talking about the mustache? | ||
Yeah, as long as it's not the actual Hitler. | ||
If you just stretch it slightly towards the corner of your mouth, you just keep going. | ||
Just bring that bitch back like this and you're okay. | ||
I thought you were being so vulgar for a second and that you just had the most like... | ||
Pornographic thought ever. | ||
unidentified
|
Isn't it crazy if you just stretch that bitch just a little bit, you're just, you're okay. | |
Just stretch it, stretch it. | ||
But his mouth? | ||
I was thinking about a pussy, I guess. | ||
Oh, no, no, no. | ||
Wow, that's weird that you just went there. | ||
We're talking about Hitler's mustache. | ||
Well, I get turned on when I think about the Nazis. | ||
I got a real, like, some of the synapses in my Jewish brain got crossed. | ||
You should call that, that's your next special, a mouth-fucking Hitler. | ||
Stretching Hitler's mouth. | ||
But isn't it a weird thing like that mustache like it's a there's a certain amount of space it can cover on your lip and it's okay As long as it goes far enough left and right we're like okay, you know I mean the Hitler's haircut and making had a huge comeback That's right and people get in trouble for that haircut. | ||
I was the first guy. | ||
I mean I was on the first wave I would say I was in the not the first Reich of hipsters reclaiming that haircut Well, it's like a longer on the side, right? | ||
Longer on the side, sort of puffy on the top, like you got rockin' right now. | ||
I've changed since because it got too cool, and I truly am a hipster. | ||
I follow where the trends go. | ||
But I used to have a bit about it, about the dilemma that a Jew has when he's telling a barber what he wants, and the quickest way to describe it is just to say Hitler. | ||
So you'd be like, yeah, I want something, you know, like a kind of old-timey, kind of like a military cut? | ||
Like a, Hitler! | ||
Make me look like Hitler! | ||
The destroyer of my people! | ||
Make me look like him! | ||
And then the tag was, as my grandparents turned over in their shallow, unmarked graves. | ||
Anyway. | ||
Whoa. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's dark, dude. | ||
Yeah, it was dark. | ||
My point was originally, not really that I had a point, but that when we're chipping away at this thing, like we know that politicians are doing an act. | ||
We know that they're when, you know, I've always mocked the way they communicate, like the way they give speeches, the long pauses and this very distinct pattern of behavior that's Completely alien to anything other than a political speech like the only way this country survives You know like that kind of yeah strange thing that they do But when we're always like chipping away at that we're always trying to like get to like be real We got get we got to find out what's real and then we get this guy Realer than anyone's ever been. | ||
Yeah, and we're like, well, fuck this. | ||
This is crazy. | ||
And it scares us. | ||
That's the point of that documentary. | ||
We like to be lied to. | ||
It makes us all feel calm and comfortable to be given a stable lie than to be shown the real truth of how fucked up and unstable everything is. | ||
I mean, the trailer has this text over just, like, stark footage, and it's so scary. | ||
The words are, politicians lie to us. | ||
We know they lie. | ||
They know we know they lie. | ||
They just don't care. | ||
And that just always, like, chills down my spine, because it's so true, and everybody knows it, and yet we're all engaged in this willful suspension of disbelief, like, no, no, no, everything's good. | ||
No, no. | ||
America's both the greatest country on earth and it needs to be made great again. | ||
We're all in this weird... | ||
We're unclear on what we're even arguing for. | ||
It's almost like what Trump's done is put a totally new engine in the heart of the car. | ||
It's like if you have an old car... | ||
Like Washington, and it relies on a combustion engine, and then someone comes along and puts an electrical engine in there, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, what are you saying? | ||
You don't need Congress anymore? | ||
You don't need the Senate? | ||
You don't need this? | ||
You don't need that? | ||
You don't need the cronies? | ||
You don't need the lobbyists? | ||
Because now you have this whole new system? | ||
And you don't need to pretend to talk like that. | ||
Even more importantly, you don't need to do the theatrics anymore. | ||
You can be the real terrible person you always were. | ||
Everybody goes along with it. | ||
That's the weirdest thing to me about this election is not the president himself, but how many people online who you've never seen politically engaged are now in it like a sports fan. | ||
I do understand. | ||
Well, to the people that hate Trump, I understand. | ||
Because what it did was it disrupted our programming on such a profound level that people... | ||
I was talking to somebody last night that said that it was much more disturbing when Trump got elected than 9-11 was to them. | ||
And I understand that sentiment because 9-11 was a terrible event. | ||
This feels like a terrible new... | ||
Chapter in American history. | ||
But 9-11 happened while Bush was in office and Dick Cheney was the vice president. | ||
He was one of the scariest guys to ever have power. | ||
No doubt. | ||
And that is the question. | ||
I mean, I think the best point that you're making is like Dick Cheney's pretending that he's stable. | ||
Well, meanwhile, he's like... | ||
Geppettoing evil and you know bombing Iraq and you know Do you want a guy that makes you feel somewhat comfortable and stable who's actually the most evil? | ||
Like Satan fucker in the world or a guy that makes you feel the evil but isn't as bad Well just seemed way more transparent his motivations I mean Cheney was the CEO of Halliburton and then all sudden Halliburton wants to bomb Iraq you know he does rather he They get these billion dollar, multi-billion dollar, no-bid contracts to rebuild what they've bombed. | ||
And you're like, Jesus Christ, a little kid can connect the dots here. | ||
This is insane. | ||
I always just wonder, how much money do you want? | ||
I never quite get it. | ||
It just seems too simple to me to go, oh no, they just wanted money. | ||
But they all had a lot of money. | ||
You want to talk to a big businessman? | ||
No. | ||
You know what it is, man? | ||
It's the deal. | ||
It's all about the deal. | ||
It's all about closing deals, making deals, closing deals, and winning. | ||
That's what it's all about. | ||
That's like saying to someone that loves video games, why are you playing video games? | ||
Why are you playing them? | ||
You've already played two. | ||
You've played it. | ||
You've got the game. | ||
You know how to play a game. | ||
Right. | ||
Why keep playing? | ||
Because they're getting a little juice out of it every time they're doing it. | ||
They're closing deals. | ||
They're buying a new yacht. | ||
I've got an amazing, amazing new yacht. | ||
The biggest yacht ever. | ||
It's the most wonderful yacht. | ||
This yacht. | ||
You'll see this yacht. | ||
It's amazing. | ||
Wait till you see it. | ||
It's incredible. | ||
The biggest yacht. | ||
That's Trump in a nutshell, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Would you want the biggest yacht? | ||
No. | ||
I wouldn't either. | ||
Well, I know a guy who has one. | ||
It's a giant target. | ||
You have to have these military guys that guard this fucking thing. | ||
Because what they'll do is they'll travel this yacht without him. | ||
Just like south of France. | ||
And then he flies in, private jet of course, flies into the south of France and his private jet climbs out and then they have to escort him to his gigantic multi hundred million dollar house that floats in the water. | ||
And you have to keep people from getting on your lawn. | ||
Essentially, the lawn becomes all the water around your multi-billion dollar house or multi-million dollar house. | ||
And it's just so that you can show your other billionaire friends, like, look what I got. | ||
Well, it's also probably fun as fuck to take a floating mansion out there on the south of France. | ||
But I guess it's just... | ||
Why else have the money? | ||
I mean, why not? | ||
If you're ballin' and you enjoy all that stuff, like, I guess they just want more. | ||
They just keep going. | ||
There's something more to it than just the acquisition of money, because once you have a billion dollars, you can afford all the things that you need. | ||
You can't afford all the things, though. | ||
See, one of these mansions, like, if you look at a mansion, like a crazy... | ||
Fucking Hamptons mansion. | ||
You know, you could get one of those for like $50 million, right? | ||
$50 million is $100 million before taxes, right? | ||
Taxes, expenses, sales tax. | ||
You have to earn profit of $100 million to get the $50 million mansion. | ||
And then that's not shit compared to some of these yachts. | ||
Like, a yacht can go for half a billion. | ||
Like, they have yachts. | ||
Like, what's the most expensive yacht? | ||
We've covered this before. | ||
Wasn't it like a billion? | ||
I think it's a billion. | ||
A billion dollars for a boat. | ||
A billion dollars. | ||
A billion dollar boat. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And then what? | ||
Well, you have to have a jet. | ||
Think about how empty you feel inside when you sit the first night in your billion dollar boat. | ||
Depends on how much coke you're doing. | ||
You might feel totally full. | ||
Full of Viagra, Coke. | ||
Just like Slovenian hookers. | ||
Yeah, you're probably doing... | ||
You have three phone calls going at the same time, doing deals. | ||
And that is why I 100% believe the reports of... | ||
Look at that. | ||
Streets of Monaco, $1 billion. | ||
That is crazy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's a castle on a boat that floats in the water. | ||
It's insane. | ||
Yeah, that's a battleship. | ||
That's an aircraft carrier. | ||
Well, it's really like a city. | ||
I mean, look how it's designed. | ||
I mean, look, the outside of it, it all looks like this amazing block. | ||
And what, this is theoretical that they will build for someone if they give them a billion dollars? | ||
Let's see. | ||
The difference between a yacht and number three, which is $650 million, is triple the cost. | ||
What does a billion buy you? | ||
Well, nothing yet. | ||
This one's still in construction. | ||
The design, a fantastic yacht, unlike the traditional model. | ||
So this is probably the most—so it's a replica of casinos and the Monaco Grand Prix track. | ||
It's so funny to me that you spend a billion dollars on something and it looks that fucking gaudy and disgusting. | ||
Like, there's nothing about that that looks cool other than it's billion-ness. | ||
Yeah, that's the only way it looks cool because it's mimicking Monaco. | ||
But the number two one is how much that one, Jamie? | ||
That's 450 million to 1.2 billion. | ||
I'm sorry. | ||
Anybody with a billion-dollar yacht should be murdered. | ||
I don't think I'm going out on a limb by saying that. | ||
They should be killed. | ||
Okay. | ||
It cost a billion dollars. | ||
unidentified
|
Maybe. | |
We don't know the exact cost of building such monstrosity, but various sources have listed the price of construction even as high as $1.5 billion. | ||
It's manned by 70 crew members and owned by Russian billionaire Roman Abramovich. | ||
It contains its own private defense system designed to detect intruders and camera-wielding spectators. | ||
Wow. | ||
It's got a laser to kill tourists. | ||
Yeah, look at that. | ||
It uses modern light technology to block the cameras. | ||
It's room for 24 guests, two helipads, and has its own private submarine. | ||
Yeah, by the time you get the private submarine money, something's gone very right and very wrong in your life. | ||
Especially if you're a Russian billionaire, you have to be in bed with Putin. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
You have to. | ||
Yeah. | ||
You can't just be, oh, I'm just politically agnostic. | ||
Yeah, you'll be straight up drinking arsenic at some point. | ||
Or they'll just take your company and lock you up. | ||
I mean, they've done that to a bunch of oligarchs. | ||
He just takes your company and puts you in the pokey. | ||
But I wonder, do you think that you can be, that there are, I mean, I guess like Bill Gates and Warren Buffett seem like nice people, but it seems like if you're a billionaire, you're probably like at least a cousin of evil. | ||
Like you've done something terrible. | ||
Is that true though? | ||
I mean, there's got to be a way to be an ethical billionaire. | ||
If there's a way to make a million dollars ethically, which we believe there is, there's got to be a way to make a billion. | ||
I mean, it's just a matter of... | ||
Keeping going, I guess. | ||
Buffett seems like a good guy, but then you get into what good guy means for a billionaire, right? | ||
Buffett's good guy is like, I will allow $800 million to go to AIDS in Africa, but I will not allow that same $800 million to go to famine in Somalia. | ||
So there's a kind of weird moral arbiter thing that happens, which happens to the president, too. | ||
It's like when people point out that Obama bombed people with drones, I'm a... | ||
I was pretty disgusted by a lot of things Obama did, but it's like that is part of the morality of being a world leader, is you have to be comfortable with a morality that includes killing innocent people. | ||
And that's why I would never want to be the leader of anything. | ||
Only one reason why. | ||
There's a ton of reasons why you'd never want to do that job. | ||
Yeah, the worst. | ||
But I, you know, there's this idea that people love the president, which also like really kind of blows my mind. | ||
Why do we love our president? | ||
They don't love the president in every country. | ||
There was a super disturbing video that a guy I know took where he was at the inauguration, and Trump is coming up the stairs. | ||
And as Trump is coming up the stairs, all supporters, right? | ||
This is the heart of his love. | ||
And as he's coming up the stairs, people are clapping and applauding. | ||
And this guy next to this guy I know who's holding the camera says, Thank you, Mr. Trump. | ||
You are a godsend. | ||
Thank you, sir. | ||
Thank you very much. | ||
And he barely acknowledges that guy, of course. | ||
And just because there's a hundred million people around. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wanders up the stairs and goes through the room and all these people are following him with the camera on him. | ||
I think that's what a guy like that wants. | ||
He wants somebody to say that to him. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
He wants to be that guy. | ||
I understand actually being Trump in that situation and wanting people to worship you. | ||
I can get there. | ||
I'm a comedian. | ||
That's close enough to a desperate ego where you laugh at me. | ||
It's similar to worship me. | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
But why do we worship politicians? | ||
I can't wrap my brain around it. | ||
Like Gore Vidal said that he called it the uniquely American religion of worshipping the president. | ||
Well, I think it goes back to the fact that we've never had a king. | ||
So our president is a different thing. | ||
And I think the idea to have the one alpha is just some ancient primate. | ||
I think it's some apeshit. | ||
Yeah, 100%. | ||
It only makes sense. | ||
There's always an alpha chimp. | ||
There's an alpha gorilla. | ||
And these hierarchies exist in the primitive versions of us. | ||
Why wouldn't they exist in the most advanced? | ||
That's really interesting. | ||
I never thought about it like that. | ||
We're so intelligent that we've created a stratified alpha pyramid that is 300 million big with a parliamentary system and a constitution, but it's still just a bunch of apes running around 2001-ing. | ||
I mean even like go back to what we're talking about like Bill Gates who's this incredibly What he's done charitably is amazing. | ||
He does a lot of great stuff with his money. | ||
I mean, their foundation is really, really beneficial to a lot of people, but everybody knows him as the King Ape of Microsoft. | ||
I mean, that's how these businesses work. | ||
Tim Cook, that's the King Ape of Apple. | ||
You know, we always have a King Ape or a Queen Ape. | ||
Very rarely a Queen Ape, but... | ||
When we have it, it doesn't seem to work out. | ||
That Theranos chick was a big queen ape, but it didn't work out because it turned out she was a fraud. | ||
Who's Theranos? | ||
You don't know that story? | ||
No. | ||
Oh, it's amazing. | ||
It's an amazing story. | ||
It's a story of something where people wanted something to be true, so they kind of said, yes, we finally have it, and they didn't do any investigating on it until finally somebody actually did. | ||
I think it might have been the Wall Street Journal that took it down, but... | ||
It was this woman, Elizabeth something or another. | ||
She founded this company called Theranos. | ||
There she is. | ||
Elizabeth Holmes. | ||
And she dressed like Steve Jobs. | ||
She wore a black turtleneck, black stuff. | ||
She acted like she was this super genius character. | ||
And when she was 19, she left college to start this company called Theranos. | ||
And Theranos is a company that... | ||
Would do this very cheap and effective blood scan. | ||
Like they would take a drop of your blood, like prick your blood. | ||
And test you for all sorts of different diseases. | ||
And it turns out it doesn't work at all. | ||
It's just a black box? | ||
No, but just like hugely ineffective. | ||
And she was worth, at one point in time, $34 billion because of what this company was assessed as being valued at, which she could have been able to do. | ||
And it turned out that they started looking into it, and then there was a whistleblower from the company that was saying that she was ignoring all the negatives and concentrating on the positives in these people. | ||
You know untold tens of thousands and even I think maybe even a million people were put it how many people to find out how many people were tested by this shit But they were all put at risk Because it's like hugely ineffective, like off by like 40-50% negatives and positives and just wasn't right. | ||
It was wrong all the time. | ||
This idea that she was going to bypass this traditional system and they were putting them in like Walgreens and stuff like that and allowing people to get tested and screened for all these diseases and it really wasn't effective. | ||
She was one of the very rare king, queen chimps, where the matriarchal society was her business, and it just didn't work. | ||
You're conflating the collapse of the business? | ||
No, I'm just saying she was the only one that I could think of. | ||
Well, there have been very effective female world leaders, though. | ||
Sure. | ||
Top chimp. | ||
Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Merkel. | ||
What's the woman that got blown up in... | ||
Some very effective women. | ||
You're like, what's the woman that got blown up? | ||
Who am I thinking of? | ||
unidentified
|
The... | |
Who was killed? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
She's famous. | ||
God damn it. | ||
Her name's at the tip of my tongue. | ||
Early morning podcasts. | ||
Motherfucker. | ||
Day after travel. | ||
Too stupid! | ||
What country? | ||
I don't remember. | ||
One of them Middle Eastern ones. | ||
They killed a woman? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I don't remember. | ||
You know what I'm talking about, Jamie? | ||
God damn it. | ||
Well, call the line right now if you know what woman got blown up. | ||
It's a famous story because it happened in our lifetime. | ||
Jamie will find it. | ||
Goddammit, her name's at the tip of my tongue. | ||
This is driving me fucking crazy. | ||
She's like blown up like right next to her limo. | ||
Anyway, it's just... | ||
Yeah, Margaret Thatcher is a good example, I guess. | ||
But companies... | ||
We were talking about Bill Gates and stuff like that. | ||
You never see that, right? | ||
Oh, at the top of... | ||
What? | ||
Carly Fiorino? | ||
Who's that? | ||
She was the head of... | ||
The Republican... | ||
One of the Republican people that ran for president, and she was the Hewlett Packard, I want to say? | ||
She was CEO. Something like that. | ||
Yahoo, maybe? | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
What do you think it is? | ||
Do you really think it's just some ape shit? | ||
Well, I think there's definitely some women that have more masculine characteristics and enjoy the competition of the boardroom and that kind of stuff more than some women do. | ||
But I think that, uh, thank you. | ||
Hey, yes, right, right, right. | ||
What country was that? | ||
Pakistan. | ||
Pakistan, right. | ||
I was going to say Pakistan, but I didn't want to fuck it up. | ||
Yeah, I don't know. | ||
I mean, what is a masculine characteristic? | ||
What's a feminine characteristic? | ||
Obviously, there's massive variations. | ||
In both genders. | ||
But why are almost all leaders? | ||
It's the patriarchy, man. | ||
I mean, it is the patriarchy. | ||
I think it is. | ||
What does that mean, though? | ||
Well, what it means is that there are systems in place, and maybe there are biological systems, which is what's suggesting it's a primate thing, and maybe there are societal systems. | ||
Probably the truth is that they're both. | ||
And I think that a person that really believes in, like, feminism and patriarchy would say that societal systems are the bigger issue. | ||
But even you can believe in a patriarchy that's biological, but just that there's a barrier to entry that starts in kindergarten. | ||
It starts in child rearing. | ||
In order for a woman to become a CEO, they have to jump every hoop higher than the male that is on the same path. | ||
Because there are systems, structural systems in place that want to smack that woman down towards like a more, what is perceived of, oh no, do something a little bit more feminine. | ||
And so they, in order to be, it's this idea that is true with all oppressed people, that in order to be average, you have to be great. | ||
And I saw that directly with like my mother, who's deaf. | ||
And in order, I just, the deaf community is so fascinating and weird, but like in order to be what my mother is, which is like, she has a master's degree and she's college educated, you have to try 20 times as hard as an average person that wants to get a master's degree because there's so much insane barrier to entry from day one, from the first day you're born. | ||
So I think that's the patriarchy, I don't think is really up for debate. | ||
I mean, even if you believe just in a biological imperative, men are in charge, and therefore they keep women from getting to positions of being in charge. | ||
So in order to get up there, in order to be a CEO, you have to be more aggressive, more powerful, more Steve Jobs-y. | ||
You got to put more turtlenecks on. | ||
Right, but is that the actual system that's in place, or are there far more men who want to do that job? | ||
But why would there be more men that want to do that job? | ||
It's a good question. | ||
Is it natural? | ||
I mean, is it natural for women to gravitate towards nursing and physicians and healthcare? | ||
Because that is overwhelmingly run by women. | ||
But then why are they, for example, why don't they gravitate towards being a doctor? | ||
A lot of women do. | ||
Yes, yeah, but being a doctor is largely and historically dominated by men. | ||
But I don't think that's the case anymore. | ||
It might not be anymore. | ||
But I mean, I guess what I'm saying is, like, if you look at a woman and say, oh, well, they are biologically predisposed to nurture, then you would say, oh, okay, then it would make sense that all of the great doctors of history would have been women, or it would have been dominated in the same way nursing has. | ||
Well, not necessarily, because a lot of the great doctors in history, you're talking a lot about science. | ||
You're talking about the ability to recognize issues before anyone else does and try to, like, formulate some sort of a solution to figure out some biological issue. | ||
A lot of that is science, and obviously science has been dominated by men for the longest time. | ||
The real questions are why, right? | ||
And for sure there's been some sexism, right? | ||
For sure there's been some oppressing of women's ideas and their ambitions entering into certain fields. | ||
And there's old boys clubs where they don't want women around because you can't talk about pussy. | ||
Right. | ||
You can't talk about mustaches. | ||
Little Hitler pussies, you know. | ||
I mean, there's a certain amount of freedom that men enjoy when they're around only other men. | ||
And that's in place because they're the alphas of society. | ||
And so, like, the freedom that we desire as men, and I'm not, look, I'm like a woke boy, like lefty, but I still am a man. | ||
Woke boy? | ||
Well, you know, like, I consider myself a political progressive, you know? | ||
unidentified
|
Right. | |
And I do believe in... | ||
Do you ever say I'm so woke? | ||
I mean, ironically, I will. | ||
Hashtag woke. | ||
Hashtag stay woke all day every day. | ||
Hashtag I eat meat. | ||
No, that's yours. | ||
Hashtag I eat meat? | ||
You always hashtag things I eat meat. | ||
Oh, sometimes. | ||
I don't always. | ||
I think I may have. | ||
When you have like a seared elk. | ||
I enjoy watching your elk Instagrams. | ||
Oh, thanks, man. | ||
Do you eat meat? | ||
Yeah, I eat meat. | ||
Yeah, I eat meat. | ||
That's a weird one, right? | ||
Meat? | ||
No, it's a weird thing, like admitting. | ||
Like, you gotta go, um... | ||
Because we know, you know, if you're a real progressive, if you're a real caring person, it's like, okay, you're eating murdered animals? | ||
I mean, I don't think that I am as ardent a meat-eating supporter as you are, but I also am not a... | ||
There is a moral imperative not to eat meat. | ||
I fall somewhere in the middle, which is, I mean, I think every thinking person falls in the middle, which is meat probably isn't an obviously immoral thing to eat because we want it. | ||
We are but animals and we want meat. | ||
Why does a lion eat meat and we shouldn't? | ||
Well, we're not a carnivore. | ||
But we are an omnivore, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
I believe that, but there's a lot of people that say we're not. | ||
That's the big argument, you know? | ||
I have this weird... | ||
That we're herbivores. | ||
Yeah, it's odd to say that we're herbivores because we're not. | ||
No, we're not. | ||
It's like McDonald's. | ||
Look, it's McDonald's, right? | ||
Well, it's not just that. | ||
I mean, not that we can get away with eating it, but that our face is designed for it. | ||
Right, right. | ||
Yeah, for a Big Mac, actually. | ||
Perfectly. | ||
Actually, have you heard about the new Big Mac? | ||
No. | ||
There's a new hamburger at McDonald's. | ||
It's a Big Mac, but if you don't want all that food, they've taken out one bun and one patty. | ||
So it's just a cheeseburger. | ||
But they're calling it the Mac Jr. This is the kind of pernicious... | ||
Really? | ||
Yeah, it's the Mac Jr. It's a fucking cheeseburger. | ||
So that's what they're calling it? | ||
That's so stupid. | ||
There it is. | ||
Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
The Mac Jr. All the flavor, one less layer. | ||
So it has the same amount of patties? | ||
Is that two patties? | ||
No. | ||
No, it's not. | ||
It's one less patty, one less bun. | ||
It's a fucking cheeseburger. | ||
And they're like, oh, no, no, no. | ||
But it comes with our special sauce. | ||
Oh, so it's a bad cheeseburger. | ||
I used to have a joke that actresses are like Big Macs. | ||
They never look as good as their pictures. | ||
It's like, when was the last time you saw a Big Mac like that? | ||
Like, god damn, that looks great. | ||
Wait, what about the third Big Mac? | ||
The Grand Mac? | ||
Oh, they're going deep. | ||
What's in the Grand Mac? | ||
For those that didn't think the Big Mac was big enough. | ||
It's a 100% beef patty. | ||
It weighs a third of a pound. | ||
Two slices. | ||
Well, now this is the problem with me. | ||
unidentified
|
Melty? | |
Two slices of melty. | ||
Melty American cheese. | ||
What does that mean? | ||
It's like, well, it's not real cheese, so we call it melty. | ||
It's melty American cheese! | ||
It's melty American cheese. | ||
It's all one word. | ||
Melty American cheese. | ||
unidentified
|
Stay woke. | |
Stay melty. | ||
Because it's not really cheese at all. | ||
Hashtag I eat melty. | ||
I mean, it's... | ||
This is the problem with meat. | ||
It's not you shooting an elk with a fucking bow and arrow. | ||
It's McDonald's, like, having, like, you know, Cowswitz, you know, them stacked up and, like, they're eating their own shit and we're all, like, just consuming it at the detriment of the global greenhouse gases. | ||
I mean, if only... | ||
If everybody hunted the way you hunt... | ||
Then there would be no moral question about meat to me. | ||
There'd also be no elk. | ||
And a lot of people would starve. | ||
We wouldn't make it. | ||
Well, we don't need meat. | ||
No, we don't need it. | ||
That's what I think the weird argument about veganism from a moralistic perspective can be. | ||
If you talk about it from an environmental perspective, it's very, very difficult. | ||
I always say, like... | ||
When you talk about, I don't know if I want to say this on your podcast, but when you talk about environmental effects of meat, it feels the same as when you bring up the settlements in Israel. | ||
You can have all these great intellectual discussions on, well, actually, well, and then you bring up the environmental, and you just go, I can't defend that. | ||
There's no defense there. | ||
I feel the same way with the settlements in Israel. | ||
It's like, I can make an impassioned plea for Israel, and then when you bring up the settlements, I'm like, yeah, I got nothing. | ||
Once you start bulldozing people. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
Yeah, I don't know. | ||
I'm not sure. | ||
Running them over with tanks. | ||
We started this whole thing off with trying to figure out why women... | ||
Gravitate towards certain things and whether or not they'll be suppressed and this is a subject It's almost like racism where if you're not a black person and you start talking about black lives matter people go hey fuckhead You either be ultra supportive or shut the fuck up now you either be an ally or you know get out of the way I hear that there is yeah I hear that and that's kind of representative I think of the way a lot of women feel like the struggle is so pervasive and it's so much a part of their lives and they don't get supported in it and And it's so frustrating, | ||
especially a woman that is trying to climb the corporate ladder. | ||
Like, I have a good friend who's a big-time executive. | ||
She was at Google, and now she's at another one of those big tech companies. | ||
And she's super, super intelligent, super ambitious, too. | ||
And she's one of those rare women that, well, her mom's like that, too, so it's kind of interesting. | ||
It's interesting when you meet her mom, who's this older, super sharp lady. | ||
But she's just always been like the type of person that enjoys achieving. | ||
This is like her mindset. | ||
She enjoys it. | ||
She likes achieving, problem solving. | ||
She likes getting deals done. | ||
And she's a very nice person. | ||
It's not like she's some ruthless monster who does it, you know, forsaking all things for profit. | ||
But there's not a lot of women like that. | ||
It's not that many. | ||
So if you look at the great pool of humans, how much of it is them being held back or how much of it is them being really rare? | ||
So few people like that. | ||
If you get 100 women in the room, is one of them like my friend? | ||
I don't know. | ||
But the question always is, why would there be so few women that are like that? | ||
There's no way... | ||
By the way, it's all an intellectual exercise because there's no way that you could strip away all the thousands of years of programming and systemic societal oppression to figure out, oh, if we're on an... | ||
I always think about, like, if I took 20 kids... | ||
I used to think about this in terms of gender dysphoria and transgender ideas. | ||
Like, if you were to take... | ||
50 kids, 50 boys and 50 girls and go put them on a colony on the moon where they were raised by robots with no reference to their gender. | ||
What things would you find that were true about the women back home that were true of the women up there? | ||
Like if you could somehow strip away society altogether, then what would be left over? | ||
What truly is male? | ||
What truly is female? | ||
And I think there's actually a... | ||
There is an intersection between meat-eating... | ||
And systemic feminism, which is really like human beings are this weird concoction of like conscious, like aware, awake, woke boys and girls and little primate... | ||
Kill the alpha, fuck the woman monkeys. | ||
And so we're trying to grapple with that constantly. | ||
Inherent in the notion that you should morally not eat meat is the idea that you are morally superior to an animal that can't discern between the moral correctness of eating meat and... | ||
You know what I'm saying? | ||
If you're just an animal, any dog will eat anything you put in front of it. | ||
Well, there's also an intellectual argument, right? | ||
Like, if you leave these animals alone to their own devices, what do they do? | ||
Well, they slaughter each other. | ||
I mean, that's what they do. | ||
This is what it is. | ||
There's a bunch of stuff that grows, and there's a bunch of dumb stuff that eats the stuff that grows, and then there's a bunch of mean stuff that eats the dumb stuff. | ||
And that's nature. | ||
I mean, that really is the whole thing. | ||
And mean stuff that eats other mean stuff. | ||
There's mean stuff that eats bigger mean stuff and smaller mean stuff. | ||
And then if you step in and you take some of those dumb things that are eating the grass, you feel better. | ||
It's healthy. | ||
Your body performs better. | ||
And that's just a fact. | ||
I mean, there's a lot of people that want to say that meat-eating is bad for you. | ||
It is absolutely not. | ||
It's just not. | ||
What's bad for you is sedentary lifestyle. | ||
What's bad for you is sugar. | ||
What's bad for you is simple carbohydrates in high quantities. | ||
There's a lot of things that are bad for you. | ||
Processed foods are bad for you. | ||
Preservatives are very bad for you. | ||
There's a lot of things. | ||
Carcinogens, all those things are bad for you. | ||
But just meat is protein and water. | ||
I mean, that's really what it is. | ||
It's a bunch of amino acids and there's a lot of vitamins in it. | ||
And as long as you're not eating too much of anything... | ||
It's been proven that there's a lot of benefits to eating meat. | ||
First of all, B12, which really doesn't even exist in a vegan diet unless you're taking in weird algaes or bugs, if some people are willing to eat bugs. | ||
Bugs are the future, right? | ||
Yep. | ||
We're all going to be eating crickets. | ||
But it's a weird thing. | ||
There's distinctions of life. | ||
If you wanted to eat something that's really simple and stupid, if your issue is awareness or if your issue is whether something's sentient, Eat mollusks. | ||
They're some of the dumbest fucking things on the planet. | ||
Dumber even than plants. | ||
Like, plants communicate with each other. | ||
It's been proven. | ||
Michael Pollan had some amazing work about it. | ||
Not only that they have... | ||
Not only that it's been proven that they communicate with each other, but they also produce human neurotransmitters. | ||
They produce serotonin. | ||
There's some arguments that they actually allocate resources to support other plants in the community. | ||
Are you talking about those root systems or whatever? | ||
Yeah, they have a mycorrhizal relationship with different funguses. | ||
There are some trees where if you go into it, there's a group of elves making cookies. | ||
Yeah, man. | ||
E.L. Fudge. | ||
unidentified
|
I heard that's responsible for a lot of forest fires. | |
That's right. | ||
All those kilns. | ||
All those cookie ovens, man. | ||
But one of those elves actually made it really far. | ||
He's actually the Attorney General of our country. | ||
unidentified
|
What's his name? | |
Jeff Sessions. | ||
He's an elf? | ||
He was an E.L. Fudge guy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Wow. | ||
Which one was he? | ||
Was he either sleepy or dopey? | ||
He was like a junior elf. | ||
I think plants talk. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
I think they communicate with each other in a way that we don't understand. | ||
And this is one of the reasons I think this. | ||
They've done these studies where they played the sound of caterpillars munching on leaves next to an acacia tree, and it changed the way the tree tastes. | ||
There's certain trees that when an animal's chewing them, the acacia bush is a famous one, when an animal's chewing them upwind, so like something's chewing it and then scent comes downwind to them, they change their flavor profile and become like toxic tasting so that animals will actually starve to death rather than eat them. | ||
Oh, they change so that the caterpillar won't eat them? | ||
To discourage predation. | ||
Wow, that's wild. | ||
They do it based on sound. | ||
Like, they'll do it based on the smell, but also sound. | ||
Plants respond defensively to the sound of caterpillars eating their leaves. | ||
So they produce these poisons. | ||
So they taste like shit, so that no one eats them. | ||
And it literally will cause... | ||
They figured this out from giraffes. | ||
That's not evidence of sentience. | ||
Well, it's evidence of some sort of communication. | ||
Because one plant way up there is communicating with the other plants that are nowhere near. | ||
Oh, that's interesting. | ||
Okay, so all of the trees in the network will start tasting like shit. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
There's some sort of a network. | ||
Again, the Michael Pollan book, I forget which book it was, where he goes into depth about this. | ||
But there's quite a few different scientific papers that have been done on plant intelligence. | ||
Intelligence, and it's a fairly new and emerging field. | ||
And it's a very disturbing field to people that are vegan. | ||
Right. | ||
Because they like to pretend that, okay, what we're doing is causing no harm. | ||
That's not true, okay? | ||
Everyone causes harm. | ||
Life eats life. | ||
And one of the weird things that people do where they have no problem eating when they're vegan, I'm just gonna eat vegetables. | ||
Well, large-scale agriculture is one of the most devastating things. | ||
That can happen to the ground that those plants are planted on. | ||
If you see a field and it's like a thousand acres of corn, that is so not normal. | ||
I mean, that is just so weird. | ||
And even if it's totally organic, you're displacing all this wildlife to do that. | ||
You're changing that environment entirely. | ||
And you're stripping nutrients from the soil. | ||
Are we like running toward a cliff? | ||
Yeah, and the way to put the nutrients back is use dead things. | ||
Right. | ||
Use fish or dead animals. | ||
And that's how they get the nutrients back in the soil. | ||
There was an interesting article that I tweeted about a year back that everybody got so mad that it's actually impossible to be a vegetarian. | ||
And this is by someone who is a vegan who is saying this. | ||
What are they saying? | ||
They were talking about every animal, like every plant. | ||
Like, devours living things in order to stay alive. | ||
And you are devouring the nutrients from those living things. | ||
Like, by eating these plants, you're eating something. | ||
There it is. | ||
It's actually impossible to be a vegetarian. | ||
It's a fascinating read. | ||
Because it's written by a vegan. | ||
And it's a weird argument. | ||
But you realize, like, oh, there's this connection that's inexorable. | ||
Like, it's not like these plants just live only on water. | ||
But isn't the... | ||
I mean, here's the idea that brings us back to this feminism idea and what's structural and what isn't. | ||
Isn't the idea that if you are... | ||
If you believe that humanity has a moral... | ||
It's incumbent upon humanity to be morally forthright. | ||
You know, to be more than an animal. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Then you have to reckon with, what's the way that I can do the least harm in the world? | ||
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
I'm not saying I do that. | ||
I'm saying that's the moral and intellectual idea of how to deal with systemic oppression, how to deal with a low-impact diet. | ||
I think there's no question that hunting elk is... | ||
In the framework of, if I'm God, in the acceptability range, right? | ||
But then, factory farming and, you know... | ||
Worst case scenario. | ||
Yeah, and worst case scenario is the scenario. | ||
Yeah, and I think what also would happen is, these societies that we enjoy, these civilizations like New York City, LA, they got too big before we engineered them. | ||
Before, rather, we engineered, like, engineered's the wrong word, before we really managed... | ||
The resources that you need to allocate to in order to feed 20, what do we have? | ||
25 million people in the greater Los Angeles area? | ||
Think about all that shit. | ||
Yeah, it's a lot of shitting. | ||
That's so much shit. | ||
What do you do with the shit? | ||
Do you ever hear the story about New York City shit? | ||
No, where's it go? | ||
Pretty fascinating. | ||
So they basically, it all goes in the same place. | ||
I mean, it all goes to plants, which is, I mean, treatment plants, not plants that feel and make themselves taste bitter, but treatment plants. | ||
So every shitty, like, you know, Lower East Side hipster and Chinatown Chinese person and, like, Upper East Side, you know, Jew, it all, their little squiggly shits all go to, like, treatment plants. | ||
Where they treat it and then they're left over with this like pile of fucking, you know, big old New York City shit. | ||
And they're like, what do we do with this shit? | ||
They don't have farmlands nearby. | ||
And so they basically, because a lot of it goes to fertilizer, so they started trying to take it out on the free market. | ||
You can sell shit on the free market. | ||
Oh my god, is that real? | ||
Yeah, you sell it to farms. | ||
And the funny part is that all these Kansas and Indiana and real down-home corn husky type of places were like, we're good. | ||
We don't want that big city, city slicker shit to fertilize our community. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
Basically, the stigma of New York Yankees was too big for them to accept the shit. | ||
Wow, not even for free? | ||
Yeah, they wouldn't take it. | ||
You can't even take it for free, and they buy cow shit. | ||
But isn't cow shit way better because it's all grass? | ||
Well, cow shit, I don't know if it's better. | ||
I'm not a shit expert. | ||
I just dabble in shit. | ||
You're not a shit expert? | ||
No, I dabble in shit. | ||
But you know so much. | ||
I mean, I smell like it, and I think about it a lot. | ||
I talk a lot of it. | ||
That's right. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
Shit's crazy, though. | ||
When you think about how much shit... | ||
It has to go somewhere. | ||
And all the garbage. | ||
When you order stuff... | ||
I was getting ready for Burning Man this year. | ||
And I went to Target to buy pillows. | ||
And I bought pillows, brand new pillows, for $4. | ||
And I was just like, this is great! | ||
I'm tossing pillows! | ||
Fresh pillows! | ||
And then my wife was like... | ||
The fact that there are $4 pillows is systemically connected to society's collapse on some level. | ||
There's no way to make a $4 pillow and not have the earth suffering at some point. | ||
Just how do you do that? | ||
And all the garbage. | ||
And I can go to Burning Man and sleep on it for a week and be like, this is dusty. | ||
Toss it into a landfill. | ||
Where is this stuff going? | ||
Isn't the argument that places like Target and Walmart especially are subsidized? | ||
Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
They definitely are. | ||
In one way, shape, or form, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Whether it's through welfare or through food stamps or through... | ||
Actually, not welfare, right? | ||
They have to have a certain wage. | ||
You mean to... | ||
Yeah, in order to support... | ||
How much do you have to make to qualify for welfare? | ||
Oh, I think you... | ||
I grew up on welfare, actually. | ||
Me too. | ||
Did you really? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Do you like that about yourself? | ||
I find a great deal of pride in that. | ||
I just said it. | ||
I just blurted it out there. | ||
Like, yeah, me too, bro. | ||
I do feel like connective. | ||
Almost nothing makes me more angry than a person who's never interacted with real poor people talking about the lazy people on welfare. | ||
Right. | ||
Well, I was very fortunate that my mom, although we're on welfare, she worked and got to a point where she didn't have to be on welfare anymore, and then she got off of it. | ||
Same with me. | ||
So it made me realize, oh, this actually can work. | ||
It can help people that are super poor. | ||
We had food stamps, the whole deal. | ||
And my thing has always been, when it comes to welfare, wouldn't you rather allow a person to take advantage of the system so that some percentage of those people can raise through the ranks and get off of welfare and better themselves and better their lives? | ||
Wouldn't you rather have that system in place than the system that says, sorry, we're worried about people taking advantage of the system so everybody, including the good people, can go fuck themselves? | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
Which society do you want to live in? | ||
Yes, certainly a former. | ||
And, you know, I think with my mom's situation, it was also important to send a message that it gives a woman an option to get away from an abusive man. | ||
Yeah. | ||
My mom left my dad and my stepdad didn't have any money. | ||
They weren't married at the time. | ||
They were boyfriend and girlfriend and he was a student and they, you know, we got on welfare and we ate You know, we drank powdered milk and the whole deal. | ||
It's a very similar situation. | ||
Very similar. | ||
My mom left my dad when I was one and came out here. | ||
She's a disabled woman. | ||
It's like everything was stacked against her. | ||
And, you know, so we were raised on food stamps and welfare. | ||
Jews on welfare. | ||
Very rare. | ||
Very rare. | ||
It definitely, if you have a society that's a caring society, it certainly serves its function. | ||
What people are worried about is the same thing they're worried about when they're talking about free housing. | ||
I was just going to say, we can bring it all the way back. | ||
Yeah, you're worried about people that come along that juke the system that don't want to work, that are lazy. | ||
Who cares? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Let them juke. | ||
Wouldn't you? | ||
I mean, I just, I would rather help people that need the help and allow someone to juke the system than I would live in a stark society that says, I'm sorry, we don't help people here because we're worried that somebody might steal. | ||
A hundred percent. | ||
And you know, there's a real issue that's coming up right now with artificial intelligence and automation that's going to remove millions and millions of jobs just by virtue of automated cars. | ||
We're done. | ||
And so people are talking very seriously about universal basic income. | ||
It is either inevitable. | ||
There are two inevitabilities. | ||
Either universal basic income will come and take the place of the income that was stripped away, not because anybody did anything wrong, but because they did everything right and the eventual automated Reality is that there aren't jobs for people. | ||
There's a job for you and me, but there's not a job for a skilled journeyman worker because there's a fucking machine that can work 24 hours a day. | ||
Or a truck driver. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
The truck drivers, they're first. | ||
They're the shock troops. | ||
That's why this whole thing with Trump saving coal jobs, it's like, I hate to say it, but coal jobs don't matter. | ||
And I know it's like this Hollywood comedian Jew going, Look, coal jobs don't matter. | ||
And I know if you're a coal miner listening to this, the coal job matters to you more than anything else. | ||
Do you know how few coal jobs there are? | ||
Very few. | ||
Very few. | ||
There's like 75,000 overall coal jobs, and there's some insane new energy. | ||
There's a half a million new energy jobs just in California alone. | ||
Exactly. | ||
I might have made those numbers up. | ||
But it's big. | ||
And everybody focuses on the, you know, that's what a human being does. | ||
They focus on the day-to-day. | ||
They focus on the sun going up and down. | ||
They don't focus on the year going by, right? | ||
It's like, you go, oh, but my job is gone. | ||
I want my job back. | ||
But it's like, your job doesn't matter. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Entire coal industry employs fewer people than Arby's. | ||
Holy shit. | ||
Imagine if he was talking about Arby's though. | ||
But I think what he's doing is sort of like this giant pro-business push. | ||
Transparent. | ||
It's so transparent. | ||
It's obvious. | ||
It's just about making a lot of people that he knows money and allowing a bunch of people that have lost money that have probably in some way or shape or form contributed to him. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And also, he's not an idiot. | ||
I mean, he might be. | ||
But he also won the election by about the amount of people that work for Arby's. | ||
Do you think he's an idiot? | ||
Definitely not an idiot. | ||
He's probably got some kind of high IQ that is overshadowed by a severe personality disorder. | ||
Yeah, and what do you think that is? | ||
Narcissistic. | ||
Yeah, I just think there's something wrong with him, no doubt about that. | ||
For sure there's something wrong with him. | ||
Don't you think that in order for someone to put their name up on everything like that, like I was in New York this past weekend, and we drove by this like Trump Rehabilitation Center. | ||
Like a Trump Rehabilitation Center. | ||
It was like this real shitty old building. | ||
Yeah, what they do is they put a crack rock in front of you and a pussy, and they say, which one do you want to grab? | ||
They just keep diverting you to the pussy. | ||
And then further down the line, it was Trump Lynx. | ||
We were driving on this road and it said Trump Lynx, like this golf course. | ||
Oh, it was golf. | ||
You know about the Trump Steaks. | ||
Steaks? | ||
Oh, have you never seen this commercial? | ||
It's really funny. | ||
The Trump Steak commercial is like... | ||
Oh, you gotta love it. | ||
It's so beautiful. | ||
No, really? | ||
Can you play video on here? | ||
Is it illegal or something? | ||
It's so funny. | ||
We'll play it for us, and we'll play the volume. | ||
Whenever we play a video, the real issue with us seems to be animal attack videos, because those get so many hits that somebody owns them and claims them, and then you get pulled off of Facebook, pulled off of YouTube, we get flagged. | ||
Yeah, Trump Stakes is like hilarious. | ||
I mean, look, Trump's not a fool. | ||
Trump is a, well, he is a fool, but he's not stupid. | ||
Here we go. | ||
Trump Stakes, the world's greatest stakes. | ||
Give me some volume, young Jamie. | ||
When it comes to great steaks, I've just raised the steaks. | ||
The Sharper Image is one of my favorite stores with fantastic products of all kinds. | ||
That's why I'm thrilled they agree with me. | ||
Trump Steaks are the world's greatest steaks, and I mean that in every sense of the word. | ||
And the Sharper Image is the only store where you can buy them. | ||
That's where I buy my meat. | ||
Trump Steaks are by far the best-tasting, most flavorful beef you've ever had, truly in a league of their own. | ||
Trump's steaks are five-star gourmet, quality that belong in a very, very select category of restaurant, and are certified Angus beef prime. | ||
There's nothing better than that. | ||
Of all of the beef produced in America, less than one percent qualifies for that category. | ||
It's the best of the best. | ||
Until now, you could only enjoy steaks of this quality in one of my resort restaurants or America's finest steakhouses. | ||
But now, that's changed. | ||
Today, through the sharper image, you can enjoy the world's greatest steaks in your own home with family, friends, anytime. | ||
Trump's steaks are aged to perfection to provide the ultimate in tenderness and flavor. | ||
unidentified
|
If you like your steaks, you'll absolutely love Trump steaks. | |
Treat yourself to the very, very best life has to offer. | ||
And as a gift, Trump steaks are the best you can give. | ||
One bite and you'll know exactly what I'm talking about. | ||
And believe me, I understand steaks. | ||
It's my favorite food. | ||
And these are the best. | ||
That was kind of endearing back when he was just a businessman. | ||
It's like, oh, that wacky businessman guy. | ||
Here he is. | ||
It's the Trump guy. | ||
It's like there's a guy in India that used to dress all in gold. | ||
I know the guy you're talking about. | ||
There's something funny about it. | ||
He's a character. | ||
Oh, it's the Trump guy. | ||
Puts his name on everything. | ||
But then you become president. | ||
What made you kind of cute? | ||
Is what makes you terrifying. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, that's the president. | ||
The steak guy is talking about steaks in the exact same way that he's talking about governmental policy. | ||
How the fuck does Sharper Image, they sell back massagers. | ||
How are they selling the best steaks in the world? | ||
There's no place I would rather get my meat than the Sharper Image. | ||
I go to Brookstone or Sharper Image. | ||
That's my butcher. | ||
Not only that, whoever wrote that, that's in need of a second draft, sir. | ||
That's a terrible act. | ||
Why is it so good? | ||
Tell me what they eat. | ||
I would push back and say Donald Trump's not a big second draft guy. | ||
He's just like, I'm going to say I'm really good and know a lot about it, and let's do this. | ||
He's right up there with L. Ron Hubbard when it comes to second drafts. | ||
Did you watch The Choice on Frontline during the election? | ||
No. | ||
It was this amazing documentary about Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and it shows you exactly who they are and why they are the way that they are. | ||
Hillary Clinton, who cares at this point? | ||
It was so interesting. | ||
Basically, he was raised with a father that was extremely harsh, not loving at all. | ||
And he found this father figure, this guy Ray Cohn, who was this extremely aggressive lawyer in New York, who was big in the McCarthy era. | ||
He was a big prosecutor in the McCarthy communism trials. | ||
And Cohn's whole strategy and philosophy was when someone hits you, you hit them back on a level that's so disproportionately out of control that they forget about the thing that you are even talking about. | ||
So the example of how he got sued for racial discrimination. | ||
He's getting sued for racial discrimination. | ||
That's a bad thing. | ||
Remember that? | ||
And he sued the people that were suing him for $25 million in, like, 1970. So it's like, now the story is, oh... | ||
A $25 million suit. | ||
Donald Trump suing some poor kid for $25 million. | ||
No one's talking about the original thing anymore. | ||
They're only looking at this flashy, insane P.T. Barnum level lawsuit. | ||
The racial discrimination thing was in regards to housing, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
Basically, they were setting up systems where black people and Latinos wouldn't be allowed into Trump housing through weird coded language or something like that. | ||
Well, he's definitely a very litigious guy. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Which is fascinating that this woman who's suing him for sexual harassing or groping or... | ||
What is she? | ||
What is the exact... | ||
It's a Gloria Allred thing. | ||
Oh, I don't know the suit that you're talking about. | ||
You don't know that scene? | ||
Are they still going? | ||
No, this is the thing. | ||
He just claimed immunity because he's the president. | ||
Like, this woman was suing him before, like, she was one of the ones that sued him once he became president, or once he was running. | ||
She came out, like, one of the last few that came out. | ||
And Gloria Allred was behind her, and everybody goes, oh, I see this coming. | ||
Once Gloria Allred's in your corner, you're like, oh, I see what's going on here. | ||
Someone's trying to get paid. | ||
But, okay, someone's trying to get paid. | ||
Trump claims immunity from an apprentice contestant's lawsuit. | ||
Somebody's trying to get paid. | ||
That's a fair... | ||
I can see that argument. | ||
The other argument would be, he's about to become the president, so a person who he's violated, who was willing to let it go when he was just some weird guy selling steaks for the Sharper Image, is now like, I'm not going to let this monster become the president. | ||
Well, you could look at it that way. | ||
But what did he do? | ||
Oh, I have no idea. | ||
But her claim, she's been pretty open about her claim, he made a pass at her. | ||
Yeah, right. | ||
That's really it. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
So it's not really, like, what it constitutes, it's not, you're not talking about something monstrous. | ||
No, I'm not talking about it. | ||
But in this case, the Gloria Allred thing, like, you know, Gloria Allred, like, if I was a woman, and something was going down like that, or I wanted to get paid, That's who I'd go to. | ||
That's her thing, right? | ||
There was some article written about how many cases of hers actually go to trial and how many get settled. | ||
She's a settlement person. | ||
You ever been sued? | ||
No. | ||
You? | ||
Yeah, close. | ||
What about? | ||
A line in my book. | ||
unidentified
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Oh. | |
And it is... | ||
You realize immediately that... | ||
It was a stupid line. | ||
And one that if I had had hindsight, I just never would have put it in. | ||
And the person was right to be upset. | ||
And... | ||
But then you realize very quickly that this is poker. | ||
We're just playing poker. | ||
Like, it costs so much money for you to go to trial and defend yourself. | ||
Even if you felt like you did nothing wrong, which in this case, you know, I probably wouldn't have even made that claim. | ||
I mean, the thing about writing a memoir is it's all, like, these, like, wisps of memory, you know, and you're just, like, grabbing at stuff and throwing it in and, like... | ||
It's almost like you have to write the first one in order to realize, oh, here are the responsible ways to do this. | ||
You can't just grab memories thinking that all of your memories belong to you because other people are in them. | ||
You know what I'm saying? | ||
So, anyway... | ||
Basically, it's like you could defend yourself. | ||
Maybe you have a defense. | ||
It would cost you $200,000. | ||
Or you could settle. | ||
That's why I no longer buy this idea that if you settle, that's an implication of guilt. | ||
That's complete bullshit. | ||
Anybody that's been sued is realizing the reality that you could fight for your honor and it'll cost you double the amount for you to just say, here's some money. | ||
I know a bunch of people that have been sued and settled when they were absolutely 100% innocent. | ||
And they actually passed a rule at the UFC where you're not allowed to take pictures choking people because of it. | ||
Because people would ask, like, hey, Chuck Liddell, come choke me. | ||
And I would take a picture, you put me in a rear naked choke. | ||
Well, both Chuck Liddell and Matt Hughes were sued. | ||
Chuck Liddell wound up settling, and he absolutely didn't do anything wrong, but this guy had a picture of him getting choked, and he says, look, this guy hurt me. | ||
He's a killer. | ||
He hurt me. | ||
Here's the picture. | ||
Oh, pretty cut and dry here. | ||
And the other one was Matt Hughes. | ||
Same thing. | ||
This guy wanted Matt Hughes to choke him, so Matt Hughes choked him, and this guy wound up suing him. | ||
Then they do an investigation on the guy, and they go into it, and they find out that this guy is a corrupt cop. | ||
So the guy winds up going to jail. | ||
For being a corrupt cop. | ||
Hilarious. | ||
He started this whole cascade that eventually wound up with him being in jail. | ||
Yeah, I mean people are... | ||
Litigiousness is a monster of our age. | ||
Because it works. | ||
Yeah, it works really well. | ||
A company that I'm part of got sued recently. | ||
Some weird, funky patent lawsuit. | ||
Like, oh, what do we do here? | ||
And it was one of those things where if you settle, you get this amount. | ||
You know, you give them this amount. | ||
If you go to trial, it's going to cost you in legal fees three times that, even if you win. | ||
What's Chuck Liddell supposed to do? | ||
Yeah. | ||
You know, okay, Chuck, you could defend yourself and maybe win. | ||
You could spend $250,000 and maybe win, even though you're right. | ||
Or you could... | ||
Write this guy a check for $20,000 and never think about it again. | ||
It's like, I get that. | ||
What's weird about Trump being so litigious is that the Republicans were the ones that made it almost impossible to sue people. | ||
That's their whole thing. | ||
You saw that Hot Coffee documentary? | ||
Yes. | ||
So fucking good, right? | ||
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
And that was a Republican talking point. | ||
It's like we have to start with tort reform, tort reform. | ||
And then all of a sudden, they were all about these meaningless and frivolous lawsuits. | ||
That's a big talking point in the GOP. And all of a sudden, now Trump is like the most suingest motherfucker that's ever, ever touched anything. | ||
Would you hear him talk about it during the run for president? | ||
He was talking about people writing things about you that aren't true. | ||
And we're going to change the laws. | ||
We're going to change the laws so we can go after those people. | ||
Is Harvey Fierstein or Trump that you're doing right now? | ||
That was Trump. | ||
It's just not good. | ||
No, Harvey Fierstein. | ||
Maybe that was too deep of a cut. | ||
I was trying to... | ||
Nobody won. | ||
That would be more like this! | ||
Yeah, there you go. | ||
I just don't do a good Trump. | ||
There's some noises I can't make. | ||
I just can't make that noise. | ||
That speaks well to your spirit. | ||
Good for you. | ||
unidentified
|
Does it? | |
That you can't find that. | ||
But I can do Mike Tyson. | ||
You're good at Tyson? | ||
I can do it pretty good. | ||
Oh, that's good. | ||
It's not difficult. | ||
I got Stephen Hawking and I got the movie phone guy. | ||
Those are the two. | ||
That's it. | ||
That's all I got. | ||
Welcome to movie phone. | ||
People don't even know what movie phone is anymore. | ||
I know. | ||
There's no point. | ||
Yeah, one of my impressions is defunct. | ||
He goes, Hello and welcome to movie phone. | ||
Brought to you by 106.1 KMEL Jams. | ||
If you know the name of the movie you'd like to see, press one now. | ||
Yeah, that used to be the thing. | ||
That's how we found out where the movies are played and what the times were. | ||
Phones used to be so connected to the internet. | ||
You ever study hacking? | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like all of the original hackers, like these really scary hackers. | ||
Yeah, the phone freaks. | ||
What they were doing was not even interesting anymore. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Like Captain Crunch, you know about that guy? | ||
Yes. | ||
Interesting dude. | ||
I knew that dude. | ||
Really? | ||
When I was a little boy. | ||
Well, explain who he is. | ||
Well, so Captain Crunch was one of the first phone freak hackers, and the thing that he did is he found a whistle in a Captain Crunch box, and he found that it had the tonality that if you play it into the phone, like... | ||
Whatever the tones that the phone was hearing were similar to the dial tones that would connect people to long distance. | ||
So he could get free long distance. | ||
Now kids, this is when long distance cost money. | ||
Yeah, I remember that. | ||
He was one of the first dudes that was doing that. | ||
He was a legend. | ||
So I met him. | ||
When I was a big raver when I was a kid I was like big time like I spent like most of my teenage years in San Francisco raves and I started going on 16 and Captain Crunch was like 70 and he was at every rave I mean every single rave and he was 70 he was old and it was like funny because he was just doing ecstasy and partying big time no teeth in front of the speakers like speaker freak like you now he was a phone freak then he became a speaker freak So he's blowing his ears out. | ||
Just like sitting there, full beard, like no teeth, little shorts. | ||
And I was like 16 and he- There he is. | ||
There he is, yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
He said to me- It looks like a guy who does a lot of ecstasy. | ||
Oh yeah, he's done it all. | ||
So that dude was like, do you need a job to me? | ||
Because I was a cute young boy. | ||
You want to fuck you, you think? | ||
I don't know if he wanted to fuck me. | ||
I've been sued before, so I have no opinion on that. | ||
But I do know that he said... | ||
I do know that he... | ||
I was like, hell yeah, I want a job. | ||
And he's like, great. | ||
It starts with a bodywork session at my house in Mill Valley. | ||
And I was like, I'm good. | ||
I'm good, Crunch. | ||
Who has to deliver the bodywork? | ||
He's the guy. | ||
I mean, basically it was... | ||
It starts with a bodywork session. | ||
You ever had a job like that? | ||
You meet them at a rave. | ||
They're a 70-year-old man you meet at a rave. | ||
They do a bodywork session. | ||
That sounds normal. | ||
I don't understand what you're... | ||
No, it's legit. | ||
What are you going on about? | ||
How weird. | ||
That was a hard pass from me. | ||
Hard pass. | ||
How many people said yes to that? | ||
I guess that's one of those pitches, you know... | ||
Yeah, or try it enough times. | ||
You throw it at 100 people, and every now and then... | ||
Yeah, it's like... | ||
Over the bleachers! | ||
I'm sure he's thinking in baseball metaphors. | ||
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
I wonder. | ||
That's a weird fucking choice. | ||
That was very interesting. | ||
To me, thank God, I was, like, aware enough that it was very transparent. | ||
Maybe if he'd... | ||
You know, when you're young, sometimes things that are very transparent are not transparent at all. | ||
You're like... | ||
Oh, okay. | ||
Cool. | ||
I guess I'll do that. | ||
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
Yeah. | ||
I almost got, when I was maybe seven or eight, probably eight, I almost got scooped up by a child molester because of that. | ||
I almost did, too. | ||
What happened with you? | ||
I want to hear yours. | ||
I was in a library. | ||
I used to like monster books. | ||
I was really into monsters. | ||
I was really into, like, Dracula. | ||
The guy's like, hey, kid, you like monsters? | ||
Well, I was, yeah. | ||
unidentified
|
Right? | |
Yeah. | ||
I was looking through this section, this horror section of this library, and this guy came up to me and he said, do you like books about monsters? | ||
I said, yeah, yeah. | ||
And he goes, I've got some really good ones in my car. | ||
Do you want to see them? | ||
I was like, okay. | ||
I was like eight. | ||
I was a total latchkey kid. | ||
My parents just opened the door and just out I went. | ||
They worked. | ||
You get home from school. | ||
And you basically were at the mercy of society. | ||
And I lived in San Francisco, so it's like... | ||
Is that where you're from? | ||
I was born in New Jersey, and we moved to San Francisco when I was seven. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
We have a lot of parallels. | ||
Interesting. | ||
I'm from Oakland. | ||
Do you know that? | ||
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
But same thing. | ||
I was in a parking lot, actually, in the car, and my grandma went in to go shopping with my brother, and this dude came to the window and was like, do you want to come with me? | ||
I'll give you a bicycle. | ||
And thank God I'm Jewish, because I was like, okay, I'll take the bicycle, but I don't actually ride a bike. | ||
I need training wheels. | ||
Actually, my brother needs a bike, too. | ||
I swear to God, I started negotiating with the guy. | ||
I was trying to get more bicycle for my bucks. | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
And then by the time I was done talking to the guy, my grandma came out and chased the guy away. | ||
So, if it wasn't for these negotiation skills, I'd be in a sex dungeon right now. | ||
Yeah, you were annoying. | ||
You annoyed the guy away from you. | ||
That's hilarious. | ||
Even a child molester's like, you know what? | ||
Forget it. | ||
You can keep it. | ||
I was on my way out the door with this guy. | ||
unidentified
|
Crazy. | |
And the lady who worked the counter at the library, the librarian, screamed at, Joseph, you get away from that man. | ||
He just got out of jail. | ||
Jesus. | ||
And the guy ran. | ||
He ran. | ||
And I started crying. | ||
Crying, just crying and crying. | ||
The Joe Rogan experience could have been so different. | ||
Yeah, man. | ||
Probably could have been dead. | ||
Yeah, it's insane. | ||
I mean, who knows? | ||
If the guy just got out of jail, he probably didn't want to go back to jail again. | ||
Dude, yeah, those little minutes and seconds between you and, like, the most dastardly thing. | ||
Well, not only that, this is 1970-whatever it was. | ||
Like, good luck catching that guy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Have you ever almost died? | ||
I don't think so. | ||
What's the most dangerous thing you've ever done? | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Fight? | ||
Yeah, fight. | ||
You can die in a fight. | ||
Drive safe? | ||
Or drive unsafe? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I remember I was a kid, and we were always exploring places to go smoke weed. | ||
I was like, when you're young, maybe it's different now, now that weed's legal, but when you're young and weed was illegal, it was like you always were looking for these cubbies to smoke weed in. | ||
And so you'll appreciate this as a Bay Area guy. | ||
Somebody found this chain link area that you could get over and get onto the BART tracks where you would go. | ||
I've been in the BART tracks before because I was a graffiti writer when I was a kid. | ||
And so we would sneak down there. | ||
But this was like a very narrow, like with just a foot long walkway. | ||
And somebody said that there was like a room inside of the tunnel that was between Oakland and Contra Costa County. | ||
That there was this little, I don't know how they knew that, but like a little antechamber. | ||
We were always like looking for antechambers too. | ||
Like there was another one that was like a sewer tunnel in Oakland in Rockridge that I could show somebody where it is right now. | ||
But it's basically you go down and we would bring flashlights and hairspray and lighters so that we could like torch spiders if we saw them. | ||
And there was a little antechamber there too. | ||
What is an antechamber? | ||
Like a little room inside of a tunnel. | ||
I don't know why it was there, but there was this little sewer room in there that this guy Frohawk lived in. | ||
And he was like a black punk rocker. | ||
He lived there? | ||
He did. | ||
He lived on a lawn, like a pool folding chair down there. | ||
I slept there one night, actually. | ||
But anyway, do you not relate to that? | ||
You and your friends are always looking for a weird place to do ill. | ||
Explore. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
Kids love to do that kind of shit. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So we were in there, and I was like... | ||
I was kind of chubby when I was a kid. | ||
So they made me go at the back... | ||
It was like a one-person walkway to get to the room in the middle of the tunnel. | ||
Not the sewer tunnel, but now the BART train tunnel. | ||
And we're on this little one foot like walkway. | ||
And I was at the back of the line and we were walking toward the room. | ||
And of course, we would get into the tunnel and we could feel all of a sudden like the air got hot and sucked out of the tunnel. | ||
And it was like, oh, and you could hear that little like beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. | ||
And the train was coming. | ||
And it was like it was so close to us. | ||
I can't my memory. | ||
I don't know if my memory is accurate, but my memory is that it was like, I mean, this as close as this mic is to me, just like, foof, foof, foof, foof, foof. | ||
And we were all like up against the wall. | ||
And then the funny part was that we all stopped. | ||
And then the train stopped. | ||
I remember they pulled the like the train stopped in the tunnel. | ||
Maybe they saw us or something. | ||
And somehow it stopped. | ||
I don't know. | ||
Maybe that's not an accurate memory, but I feel like, yes, the train stopped and I know that... | ||
The people at the front of the line screamed, turn around, and like, run. | ||
But now, all of a sudden, fat Moshe, young fat Moshe, YFM, is at the front of the line, right? | ||
And it's like a sort of stand-by-me situation, because I'm like, chubby-ass, like, and there's all this wind coming at me, because the wind has all been pushed by the train. | ||
So I'm like trying to run from the train conductor, and they're screaming, all my friends, like, run, run, run, you fat motherfucker, run! | ||
It was one of the worst, scariest, craziest experiences. | ||
And then the train finally pulled off, and we hopped back over, like shaking. | ||
We smoked weed just in public. | ||
We're like, fuck it. | ||
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We don't need to explore. | |
We don't need to go to the caverns. | ||
Me and a buddy of mine in high school hopped on the back of the T in Boston. | ||
You know, the public transport. | ||
It's a train, essentially. | ||
It stopped and we jumped onto the tracks and climbed onto the back and rode it. | ||
We train surfed. | ||
I've done that not on a train, but on the buses, the AC Transit buses, there was a trick where you could grab the... | ||
There used to be like a handle on the back of the bus and you put your feet on the bumper and basically ride it like you were an illegal immigrant or something. | ||
We would just do that for fun from once if you want to take like one stop or whatever it was so scary So it was so stupid. | ||
It's like the risk of like falling off of that thing was so dumb You were on top of it. | ||
No, we were on the back. | ||
Oh, just holding on just like yeah Yeah, it's so crazy standing on something and holding on to something but it wasn't a good grip It wasn't you know, and if there was anything that really bumped you not that it would on a train But if it did most likely I would have let go I mean It was fun though. | ||
Being young was very fun. | ||
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Stupid. | |
Being stupid was fun. | ||
It's just amazing when you think about how many times things like that happened. | ||
You go, oh yeah, there was that time. | ||
Like you asked me, did I do anything dangerous? | ||
I'm like, hmm, let me think. | ||
And you have to go over these things. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Like you did a lot of stupid shit. | ||
A lot of climbing things you shouldn't have climbed. | ||
Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We started a fire once in a warehouse. | ||
I remember once we found this chemical in a... | ||
Somebody broke into a car and found all this chemical. | ||
I don't know what it was, but it was some volatile, flammable chemical. | ||
And there was this cement slide at the elementary school in the neighborhood that we lived in. | ||
And so we poured the chemical down the slide and lit it on fire. | ||
unidentified
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Oh, Jesus Christ. | |
Not familiar with the concept of explosives. | ||
But there was a wall of flame. | ||
I don't know what it was, but it was so big that we were... | ||
I think we were on acid. | ||
And we were in the... | ||
After this big old wall of sliding flame, like... | ||
We were chilling out in this place, the grassy field, up above there. | ||
And the cops came. | ||
And they were like, we've heard reports that there's someone playing with a flamethrower. | ||
I remember we just laughed so much at these cops. | ||
Anyway, that was a good memory. | ||
Well, we were lighting bottle rockets in this field, and one of the bottle rockets ignited some grass. | ||
And I stomped on some of the grass, but then it started out real small, like a laptop-sized fire, you know? | ||
Stomped on it, but it just kept going. | ||
It's going left and right, and then you try to circle around, but then the side of it gets bigger, and then you can't catch it. | ||
And then it got to the point where we're like, oh fuck, I can't do this. | ||
I can't stomp this out. | ||
And then it's whoosh, and then it became a fire. | ||
That's scary. | ||
Yeah, we were like 13. And we ran, and we got to the street. | ||
Right when we got to the street, just dumb luck, a cop was there. | ||
We just gave it up right away. | ||
We accidentally started a fire. | ||
And the cop was like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
And we ran. | ||
And we ran. | ||
And then the fire truck came. | ||
And then we assessed it the next day. | ||
We went by. | ||
We didn't go anywhere near it. | ||
We were just hoping and praying. | ||
Like, to this day my parents don't know I did it. | ||
But hoping and praying that nobody died and that, you know, we didn't go to jail. | ||
So we didn't tell anybody about it. | ||
And then we went the next day and it was just this massive surface area of fire. | ||
Everything was black, this enormous field, like several football fields sized. | ||
That's really scary. | ||
I remember that we were once... | ||
Out in, we were all in mushrooms. | ||
I remember this. | ||
This is all when I'm like 13, by the way. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
I mean, that's the problem. | ||
That's why I got sober so young. | ||
You're a bad example, though, for someone who uses drugs as like, well, if you do drugs, it fucks your brain up. | ||
Because look, you're very smart. | ||
Did a lot of acid, did a lot of mushrooms. | ||
Yeah, I loved it. | ||
Dude, I loved it. | ||
We talked about it last time I was here, how much I fondly remember psychedelics. | ||
Anyway. | ||
But you're sober because of other things? | ||
No, you know, in reality, I think we talked about this last time, but in reality, it's like, now that I look back, you know, especially writing that book, the book covers all this stuff, all these like wayward youth stories, all these insane, it's called Casher in the Rye, in case anybody wants it. | ||
I'm very proud of it. | ||
But it's like, once I wrote that book, I realized I was a wild kid, just like you, or maybe wilder than when you were really young, but I was a wild kid with a lot of behavioral issues, a lot of mental health stuff going on, not like... | ||
Not, like, chronic and systemic, but, like, circumstantial, you know? | ||
And I spent a lot of time thinking of myself as, like, an alcoholic, and I don't know if I even believe that that... | ||
I don't even know if I believe in that label any longer, but... | ||
You don't believe in the label alcohol? | ||
Let's talk about this afterwards. | ||
I mean, well, basically, I don't know... | ||
Basically... | ||
It has nothing to do... | ||
People always want to ask you that. | ||
I go, oh, I got sober when I was 15. They go, oh, crazy, what were you doing? | ||
And it's like, then the answer is always very embarrassing. | ||
It's like, nothing. | ||
Acid, pot, drinking. | ||
And now I realize, like, it's not really embarrassing, because the only reason it's embarrassing is because I've been, like... | ||
I want to say heroin. | ||
So the people will go, oh, I acknowledge that that's legitimate. | ||
But I don't have that story. | ||
That's not the truth. | ||
The truth is, really, the question is, why did you get sober? | ||
And the answer probably would be because I was a juvenile delinquent, and that was the way out that I found at the time. | ||
And I probably could take mushrooms now and be fine. | ||
But I don't know. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
That's really interesting. | ||
So, do you ever think about exploring it? | ||
Definitely. | ||
Yeah. | ||
We did talk about this last time. | ||
Definitely I do. | ||
But what keeps you from doing that? | ||
Is it this distinction that you have where you're a sober person? | ||
For sure there's that membrane. | ||
I think about that a lot. | ||
This membrane. | ||
You are either you are or you are not. | ||
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Right. | |
And that's part of it. | ||
Part of it is a harm reduction best practices type of thing. | ||
It's like everything's good. | ||
I know a lot of drug addicts. | ||
I know a lot of people that use drugs and have great experiences, right? | ||
But I know a lot of people that got sober and thought, oh, I'll try again, and then they're all fucked up. | ||
Right. | ||
I don't necessarily think that would be me, but I do know that. | ||
And finally, I just, yeah, I guess I worry about just habituating. | ||
But, I mean, it hasn't affected you. | ||
It seems to have affected you in the opposite way. | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
You're better. | ||
But everybody's different. | ||
Yeah, everybody is different. | ||
And what I... I'm not doing coke. | ||
I'm not doing meth. | ||
There's no argument for meth or coke. | ||
I mean, maybe even... | ||
I mean, there's no argument for meth, period. | ||
That just doesn't... | ||
It doesn't... | ||
It's not going to expand your mind. | ||
Although I guess there's an argument for Adderall. | ||
Yes. | ||
If you want to sit down and write a script over a weekend, there is an argument to be made for that. | ||
Might be a bullshit script about cleaning. | ||
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Yeah. | |
A script about organizing your underwear based on color. | ||
Drugs are weird, man. | ||
I mean, I'm a big drug advocate. | ||
Big time. | ||
I'm not... | ||
I think that they're powerful and necessary. | ||
And I want... | ||
I want... | ||
Psychedelic experiences. | ||
Well, I've had them, but I had them... | ||
I always say, like, the funny part about taking mind-expanding drugs when you're 12 years old is that there's very little mind upon which to expand, you know? | ||
You're, like, doing these things that are, like, Ram Dass-esque, like, you know, deep diving into the fractal pool of existential reality, and there's nothing there. | ||
You're just, like... | ||
It's a weird experience. | ||
Like, you're having these freak-outs, and you know your mind is bursting open, but, uh... | ||
I certainly wish, I would like the experience of trying that with an adult brain. | ||
Maybe it would be worse. | ||
Maybe, but I doubt it. | ||
I don't know. | ||
I mean, I think that what drugs do, what any drug does, is it alters your brain chemistry, right? | ||
And everybody's brain chemistry is different. | ||
So some people could use a cup of coffee. | ||
Right. | ||
And some people, it freaks them out. | ||
And some people could use some pot. | ||
And some people just... | ||
There's a lot of people that I know that they just go into deep, paranoid fits if they get involved with marijuana in any way, shape, or form. | ||
Right. | ||
Whereas I kind of like that self-exploratory and examination aspect of it because I think... | ||
I think it's far too easy to be cocky. | ||
It's far too easy to not be introspective or that paranoid feeling. | ||
I think it just it forces your brain to examine all these perhaps uncomfortable truths. | ||
You're saying you like the paranoia aspect of weed. | ||
I think it's beneficial. | ||
That's really interesting. | ||
I've never heard that before. | ||
I think it's beneficial because I think what you're paranoid of When you're paranoid, unless you're thinking the government's spying on you. | ||
Like, I know a buddy who was a big-time pothead, and he started thinking that the government was waiting outside of his house with a car, and they were watching him constantly everywhere he went. | ||
And as soon as he left, they would come out of the bushes. | ||
Like, he got a little crazy. | ||
Right. | ||
But I think he had his own issues. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And he was also dealing with his dad was dying. | ||
There was a lot going on. | ||
Well, that's one of the weird parts of drugs is that, and I don't think that I have this, you obviously don't, but one of the weird things about drugs is if you have latent mental illness and you get into your brain and you pour a chemical on it, it'll unlaten itself, you know? | ||
The dragon will uncoil and make itself known. | ||
I don't think that's, I'm not worried about that for me, but I think that is interesting. | ||
I've seen that a lot, like a dude's like 25 and it's like, oh, I think I'll try, start trying psychedelics or weed and It just goes in there and it's like, oh, you didn't know you had that. | ||
Not that they wouldn't have had that experience anyway, but it's definitely an incidental onset of mental illness. | ||
Yeah, there was a study they did about the correlation between marijuana and schizophrenia because a lot of people have tried to connect marijuana schizophrenia and what they found is essentially the numbers are stable. | ||
It's 1%. | ||
It's 1% across the board. | ||
So it's 1% that Yeah. | ||
Yeah. | ||
That's the scariest thing. | ||
I have a brother who's schizophrenic. | ||
And it's like the scariest thing ever. | ||
Regular kid. | ||
Totally regular, sweet person. | ||
And then all of a sudden one day it was like, are you okay? | ||
And then a couple years later it's like, oh, you are done. | ||
Your brain is cooked. | ||
And what happens? | ||
Well, he was in New York, so I didn't see the entire uncoiling, but it's basically, you know, it starts weird and gets weirder. | ||
And then at a certain point, you're like, oh, you're a different human being. | ||
Like, you just, you know, giggling to himself, smirking, weird outbursts, just scary, scary stuff. | ||
And it's like your brain turns on you. | ||
And there's no... | ||
I mean, it happened around when my dad died, so sometimes I think to myself, like, oh, maybe that was it. | ||
Maybe, you know, in the same way you pour weed on it, maybe you pour trauma on it, because trauma is a brain chemistry buster, too. | ||
100%. | ||
And so, I think that probably, like, popped the scab open or whatever that was in his brain, but... | ||
Yeah, a year later it was like, oh, you're a different person. | ||
You don't have the same personality. | ||
It just shows you how much of you is just brain chemistry and how lucky you are. | ||
In the same way you're lucky not to get kidnapped by a monster at the library, you're also lucky that the monster wasn't living inside your brain. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Me too. | ||
Well, there's all sorts of different kinds of mental illnesses, you know? | ||
I'm sure I've got a few. | ||
It's like whether or not they're beneficial. | ||
That's the other thing. | ||
I was talking to Michael Irvin once, the football player, and he was describing to me what happens to someone's brain when they're in the womb when the mother experiences violence. | ||
The mother experiences any sort of violence or really bad neighborhoods or around traumatic situations that it It elevates the fight or flight response in the baby. | ||
So kids come out of the womb like predetermined to overreact to violent situations or dangerous situations. | ||
I definitely think I have that. | ||
That's interesting. | ||
I ramp up way too quick. | ||
I calm myself, and I'm very aware of it, so I control it, and I know what it is. | ||
But if something goes on, I hit red line immediately, where it goes from zero to 100 miles an hour in a second. | ||
And that's not usually manageable. | ||
Right. | ||
I mean, maybe that's a link to our earlier conversation about the patriarchy. | ||
I mean, if you can pass on incidental trauma to a child because the mom is experiencing violence, if a woman is living in the infrastructural... | ||
2,700,000 layers deep of infrastructural oppression, then it stands to figure that a female child is born with a little bit of that trauma, too, and a little bit of DNA-based, like, maybe I won't fight that fight, or maybe I won't Maybe I won't be a loud broad or maybe I won't, you know, argue because that's not feminine or, you know what I'm saying? | ||
And so all of that in, you know, trauma, intergenerational trauma, which has been studied and proven, right, is maybe in every woman that you've ever met. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, no doubt about it. | ||
I mean, I think all of us have some form of programming. | ||
I mean, have you ever been around a kid who has an overly oppressive dad, you know, and they're handicapped by it. | ||
Literally, like, whether it's a boy or a girl, their life is affected by this overbearing person who's constantly engaging in manipulation and control of their reality. | ||
Yep. | ||
That's what you get when you... | ||
You ever had a... | ||
I'm sure you've had a friend that's a drug addict. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The most tempting thought in the world when you have a friend that's a drug addict is just like, why don't you just stop? | ||
Just stop doing that. | ||
Stop it. | ||
It seems so stoppable because it's so selfish and so like... | ||
Obviously the wrong thing to do and you're over here doing the right thing with such ease. | ||
And what having my brother's mental illness, my younger brother, it made me realize is like you actually have the same thought when there's a mentally ill person. | ||
It's just with the next reality is like, oh, he really can't. | ||
It makes everything clearer, right? | ||
Like sickness, cancer, you don't say to the person, stop, because you're just like, oh, you can't. | ||
Mental illness, you say stop, but then you realize you can't. | ||
Drug addiction, which is kind of a mental illness, you say stop, and it seems seductive to believe that they could stop. | ||
And if you could really be compassionate and say, oh, he can't, that's like compassion nirvana. | ||
And you can take it to another place, too, with gambling. | ||
It's really the same thing. | ||
It's a manipulation of human neurochemistry. | ||
Somehow or another, betting money on things gives you that charge that you can't escape the grip of it. | ||
There's a lot of people that are really, really addicted to gambling. | ||
I've seen it. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
Which is really crazy that the government has fucking legalized gambling everywhere at gas stations. | ||
Right. | ||
Those goddamn scratch tickets are nothing more than legalized gambling. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Lottery, legalized gambling. | ||
You're not anti-gambling, though. | ||
I mean, I'm for it. | ||
I enjoy it. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, I don't do it a lot, but before I worked for the UFC, I used to bet on fights all the time. | ||
Oh, really? | ||
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
But you don't have the bug. | ||
No. | ||
No, I don't have the bug. | ||
I used to enjoy betting on pool, too. | ||
I used to play pool a lot, and I would gamble on pool games. | ||
But it just made it more thrilling. | ||
I never got addicted to it. | ||
But you do... | ||
You run the risk. | ||
You run the risk. | ||
You run the risk of getting caught up in it. | ||
Maybe to a lesser extent than someone who has an issue. | ||
Right. | ||
People seem to have inherent issues with it. | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
Just like it gets you. | ||
Filipino. | ||
unidentified
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Ooh. | |
They love playing pool and gambling. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, I shouldn't... | ||
But the Filipino culture... | ||
I got a race theory. | ||
Okay, thank you, Joe, because now it's time for me to bring up my grand race theory. | ||
Okay. | ||
Okay, the Filipinos... | ||
No, I don't have anything. | ||
Filipinos are some of the best pool players in the world. | ||
Is that right? | ||
Yeah, and it all happened after the war. | ||
After the war, GIs went to the Philippines and they introduced pool. | ||
Interesting. | ||
And, you know, it doesn't cost a lot. | ||
All you need is a table. | ||
There's a lot of outdoor tables in Manila and a lot of the islands. | ||
There's thousands of islands. | ||
I don't know if you've ever been. | ||
Yeah. | ||
No, I've never been, but I know how... | ||
It seems like a contiguous country, and it just so isn't. | ||
Like, culturally, too. | ||
Like, from one to the next. | ||
Like, there's Muslim extremists here, and Catholics here. | ||
By the way, they're like weird alt-right people, too. | ||
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Are they really? | |
I get, like... | ||
You know, I'm kind of in the muck of the internet sometimes, you know? | ||
And I'm kind of, like, trying to shake up some of these alt-right trees, you know? | ||
What do you mean? | ||
I don't know. | ||
I just like getting into it, you know? | ||
How do you get into it? | ||
I, like, you know, I post, and then people shitpost me, and then I kind of, like, go back and forth. | ||
You know, the shitpost... | ||
Jamie had explained shitposting to me. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Explain shitposting to people. | ||
Well, shitposting, you know, these are the people that they think of themselves as the people that memed Trump into the White House, right? | ||
They're kind of like, they're almost like the people that think that the right is the new punk rock. | ||
That's who they are. | ||
They're down to, like, get in and they think that the disruption of society is inherently good. | ||
Or they don't care and they just want to fuck shit up. | ||
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Right. | |
So they, you know, they're the people that, like, when I get an anti-Semitic post lobbed at me with, like, a big old nose and, like, a, hey Jew, oy vey, shut him down. | ||
Like, the, I can't express to you how, like, water off my back that, like, it couldn't bother me less. | ||
You know what I mean? | ||
Like, because I just know that it's probably, like, an Asian kid or, like, you know, a black kid. | ||
It's, like, it's not even actual anti-Semitism. | ||
It's, like, a computer person going, let's just fuck with somebody. | ||
This is the attack. | ||
If you were going to play chess, rook to king, whatever. | ||
It's less thought out than that. | ||
It's just messy and chaotic. | ||
What's the most offensive, most insane, most wild, crazy attack that I can make? | ||
There's a weird philosophy. | ||
Kind of anarchistic philosophy to it. | ||
It started in 4chan and it bubbled out to anonymous as an outcropping of the 4chan. | ||
I wouldn't call them shitposters because they have at least kind of a cogent philosophy. | ||
Anyway, the shitposters are the people that when you tweet something sincere about how angry you are about Trump, all of a sudden you see 90 cartoons of the most offensive thing that you could possibly imagine. | ||
You're like, why are they attacking me? | ||
And it's because they're like looking for people, little whiny bitches like you. | ||
You know, they're like, oh, we found a little whiny bitch. | ||
Come this way. | ||
And then all of a sudden, it's just a tidal wave of these things. | ||
Well, if you call them, if you say their name, that's where it gets really strange. | ||
It's like what Amy Schumer has done. | ||
Exactly. | ||
I looked at some posts that she made recently about some magazine cover that she was on. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It showed up in my feed, and then I read the comments. | ||
I was like, Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah. | ||
If she was a ship... | ||
It would be so filled with rats, you'd have to light it on fire. | ||
Right. | ||
Yeah, it is like rats and barnacles, too, because it's just like all of a sudden they're just like... | ||
Yeah, but barnacles could be on a cool ship. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And you get in there and there's a lot of people drinking and having a good time and barnacles on the outside. | ||
This is rats because it's everywhere. | ||
It's in the pantry. | ||
It's in every aspect of it. | ||
It is a part of the new landscape that we live. | ||
This digital landscape is filled with... | ||
I mean, in a way, I don't like them, obviously. | ||
They're not nice. | ||
And I think decency is a sad... | ||
Collateral damage of the digital age, you know, it's just like everybody's indecent now Somehow people think that being indecent is positive and and that if somebody disagrees with you politically Like it's fun and okay to just try to destroy that person emotionally. | ||
Well, you're not really Communicating with them in front of you. | ||
Yeah, exactly That that does a huge aspect of being a person is looking at someone while you communicate with you remove that there's consequences to that well Well, yeah, everything, a big problem is othering, and the internet has made othering so simple and easy, you know? | ||
It's like, I just was watching this documentary, and they were talking about, it was this really good documentary, actually, about, I forget the name of it, but it was about this guy who, he's a black dude that confronts KKK members, like, one-on-one, you know? | ||
And he, like, talks to them. | ||
Yeah, and converts them. | ||
He converts them, and he's, like, he's de-hooded, like, 24 Klansmen or whatever. | ||
And there was a story. | ||
Or hooded them, as it were. | ||
Da Hood. | ||
Come this way. | ||
There's actually a very intense... | ||
Have you seen the documentary? | ||
No, I haven't, but I've heard of it. | ||
This is a super intense moment in the film, because the whole time you're with the guy, he's so charismatic and brilliant and interesting, and you're like, wow, this guy's... | ||
What's the name of it? | ||
This guy's righteous. | ||
Can you look it up? | ||
Sorry, I can find it. | ||
What's his name? | ||
He's really fascinating. | ||
unidentified
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That's right, we'll find it. | |
Jamie will find it. | ||
What's the moment? | ||
So there's a moment in the documentary where the whole time you're in there going, like, this guy's righteous and awesome and cool and de-hooding these people. | ||
And then he goes and speaks with these Black Lives Matter activists who are... | ||
Oh, yeah, accidental courtesy. | ||
That's right. | ||
Daryl Davis and race in America. | ||
And... | ||
He's interesting, but then he goes and he talks to these Black Lives Matter activists, and they're so angry with him. | ||
They're so not into what he's doing, because they're basically like, we're in the streets fighting for black America, and here you are spending your entire life talking to these racists, and you've only... | ||
You've only de-hooded 24 of them. | ||
But it's also... | ||
So there's a point that they're making. | ||
It's like, what are you even doing? | ||
What's even the point of what you're doing? | ||
But his point is like, I'm making micro-victories. | ||
I'm converting people one person at a time. | ||
But there's a bigger conversation, which is really interesting, which is that the person that is closest to you ideologically is more offensive to you when they don't... | ||
Do what you want them to than the person that's furthest away. | ||
In other words, when a person calls me Jew online, some dude in the Philippines with like an anime avatar and he puts like anti-semitic stuff, I give a fuck about that. | ||
That's not real. | ||
That's not real to me. | ||
But when a person who like seems like they should get it Who seems like they should know better, says some weird anti-Semitic shit or talks about how Kushner is connected to the global Zionism. | ||
That's when it bothers me more. | ||
Does that make sense? | ||
Yeah, no, it does. | ||
It does. | ||
Because you think they should know better and they're ruining the cause because they're connected to your ideology. | ||
Exactly. | ||
At any rate, there's a story in there where he talks about talking to this person who's like, He lived in an all-white town except one of the Klansmen that was de-hooded talks about he lived in this all-white town and he was raised very racist and that black people were the worst and There was one black family like the Johnson's or whatever and his father told him all black people are the worst They're monkeys. | ||
They're the worst except the Johnson's the Johnson's are good They're good people and he had this realization that's like tickle in his brain of like Wait, my father hates all the black people except the black family that he's met? | ||
Like, all black people are bad except the one group that he's actually met? | ||
And that is like the phenomenon of othering, right? | ||
It's like, oh, black people are bad. | ||
Muslims are bad. | ||
But actually, my friend Tom, the Muslim, he's nice. | ||
But Muslims want to kill me. | ||
But Tom over here, he's a good dude. | ||
Anyway, I think othering is like one of the big problems that we have. | ||
Well, it's also, I think, what's going on with Black Lives Matter, one of the things that's going on is that they're in the middle of the battle, right? | ||
So if you're in the middle of the battle, every day you wake up prime for battle. | ||
You're getting online, you're activating your membership, you're, you know... | ||
Organizing, doing whatever. | ||
And then this guy comes along and he's doing something totally different. | ||
He's out there talking to the Klansmen. | ||
You go, fuck those people, man. | ||
What are you doing? | ||
Right, totally. | ||
For my show, my Comedy Central show, we're doing like, we just did a cultural appropriation episode. | ||
And I was studying, so I was studying, I was like deep in the cultural appropriation. | ||
I was reading so much shit about it. | ||
But one of the more interesting things it said about Black Lives Matter, it's kind of connected to this. | ||
Is that one thing that happens with cultural appropriation and things in general is that people seize on language. | ||
We're in like a crazy language war right now, right? | ||
Like so many of the phrases that we use are so charged with secondary and tertiary meaning that they don't even mean anything anymore. | ||
Like white privilege is a concept that the moment you bring it up, there's so many levels of eye roll that it's like, I don't even think it's a useful phrase anymore. | ||
Because it's like the moment you say white privilege, then a person, the white person who you're saying is privileged is going like, fuck you. | ||
And the minute someone's saying fuck you, the conversation has ended. | ||
So the thing they said about Black Lives Matter was... | ||
Also a lot of silly people use that expression. | ||
That's the weird baggage that it has. | ||
The thing that I learned about cultural appropriation, because for me, I roll my eyes so deeply at the concept of cultural appropriation. | ||
It's like, oh, so I shouldn't eat burritos anymore? | ||
Also, I'm always really tickled with the idea of... | ||
The person saying, oh, you shouldn't wear that tribal gear. | ||
And then it's like, go to the third world country where the market is and tell the impoverished merchant, oh, I'm sorry, I can't buy this bit of silk from you because it's racist for me to wear it. | ||
That person's like, please, please buy it and wear it. | ||
Or, you know what I'm saying? | ||
Or the family that's like, oh, it would be a great honor if you would wear this sari or whatever. | ||
So it's a big eye roll. | ||
Except then you start to think like... | ||
Upon reading it, it's like, oh, the thing is, it's not incidental, it's emotional. | ||
It's like deeper than just like trying to parse out the logic and go, oh, well, I found an example where your thing falls apart. | ||
It's like it's emotion. | ||
There's an emotional reaction. | ||
Like when when somebody, you know, affects, you know, dreads up their hair, even though you can say but people have been dreading their hair in other cultures for a million years. | ||
Vikings had dreads. | ||
And that is true. | ||
It doesn't matter because the person that's in front of you, that's a black person that's going, I have pain when I'm I have this pain that I'm looking at, you know, a person that's affecting my culture without any of the negative parts. | ||
right so you can wear the hair and you can have Yeah, but why is that okay just because of the word culture? | ||
Because if that's the case with someone else wearing something that you might find a failure, like what if you're a person that's extremely conservative when it comes to dress and you see a woman in a short skirt and you have pain, should that impose upon that woman's ability to wear that skirt? | ||
No, definitely. | ||
And I'm not making a case that anybody's pain ought to be automatically adopted as a behavioral standard. | ||
That's not really what I learned from this whole discussion. | ||
It's not really about going... | ||
No one is really saying, except the most emotionally kind of inferior, like the person that doesn't have the language to express what they're really saying, almost no one that I read when I was reading these real intellectuals and their concepts of cultural appropriation is saying white people should stop doing this stuff altogether. | ||
Almost no one, I didn't find one left-wing, woke article that said white people should stop adopting the culture of other, of people of color, right? | ||
I read a lot of right-wing think pieces that were saying, this is absurd. | ||
Why are you telling us to stop adopting these cultures? | ||
Isn't all culture a melting pot and all culture borrowing? | ||
But not once did I read somebody saying, white people stop this altogether. | ||
But what did you read? | ||
So mostly, and I hope I can articulate this well, because I'm not the best advocate for this position, because like I said, it's one that I struggle with. | ||
It's dubious. | ||
It's dubious and difficult. | ||
And there are ridiculous parts of the cultural appropriation argument. | ||
But one thing that, like, it's all connected to historical trauma. | ||
It's all deeper. | ||
Like, basically, let's see if I can articulate this well. | ||
What this one person... | ||
I wish I could find his name, actually, because he deserves it, because he's a really deep thinker about this stuff, was talking about was that we have racism. | ||
Racism is a huge word that describes everything from a white person, like a Hugging their purse closer to their chest when a black person walks by. | ||
Or even like a weird like... | ||
Just the smallest little racial weirdness. | ||
All the way to lighting a cross on somebody's lawn. | ||
To murdering someone. | ||
Like that's all encompassed in racism. | ||
So they started trying to like parse it out. | ||
People are going... | ||
When you call someone a racist, right? | ||
They go, I'm not a racist. | ||
You're calling me a monster. | ||
And then somebody will go... | ||
Oh no, I meant like... | ||
A systemically racist, you need more specific examples. | ||
So, cultural appropriation is one. | ||
White privilege is another. | ||
Right, but still, go back to cultural appropriation. | ||
You said that no one was saying, don't do it. | ||
Right. | ||
So, what are they doing when they're trying to chop someone's dreads off? | ||
Okay, I don't know about the... | ||
I mean, what example? | ||
You mean the San Francisco State example where the girl attacked the guy? | ||
I mean, that girl was just inarticulately expressing some insanity. | ||
I don't think that's defensible. | ||
And I think most of the articles in the stuff that I read about that specific instance are just like basically saying that woman's a lunatic. | ||
Well, I've heard people, though, enforce it. | ||
And I know someone who was mad at their friend, is a black girl, was mad at her friend who was a white girl, who had braids. | ||
She had, like, cornrows. | ||
And she was mad because she was saying that it's cultural appropriation. | ||
I said, do you know about Bo Derek? | ||
Right, right. | ||
Like, she was one of the first people to ever have cornrows. | ||
Or the Romans. | ||
You know, there's cornrows on Roman coins, actually, right? | ||
I mean, it's a crazy thing to call that cultural appropriation, but also saying that a white person shouldn't wear that, that's fucking crazy. | ||
Because what about a black guy wearing a polo shirt? | ||
Well, okay, so, okay, there's a good example, right? | ||
And again, I'm not, like I said, I'm not the greatest advocate for this position. | ||
I just read so much that made me empathize with the position. | ||
Not necessarily agree with it, but empathize with where it's coming from. | ||
So the polo, for example, when you see you as a white dude or me as a white dude, when I see somebody wearing a polo, it's just a polo. | ||
It has no historical antecedent. | ||
It has no historical baggage to it. | ||
There's no connection to systemic racism or Elvis Presley stealing the cream of the intellectual musical crop and then never giving back to that community or Or Iggy Azalea coming and adopting a black accent and then just, like, taking all the money and running. | ||
You know, it has no connection to deeper root systems like these trees have that communicate with each other, like, taste bitter, right? | ||
So all it is is a polo. | ||
It's just a guy wearing a polo. | ||
And that's why the counterargument doesn't make sense because it's like nobody's upset when they see a black dude in a polo shirt. | ||
I mean, maybe some weird racist guy is, but mostly not. | ||
On the other hand, when a person sees a white person affecting a deep part of black culture without any of the baggage that is associated with it, like for example, dreads, right? | ||
One of the arguments I read a lot is that white people wearing braids and dreads, you get rewarded for it. | ||
You look cool. | ||
You look awesome. | ||
And meanwhile, black women are having a difficult time getting a job because they have black hair, or black people are getting fired from jobs because they have dreads, right? | ||
So there's these consequences that black people experience because of black shit that white people that are adopting it don't necessarily experience. | ||
I don't think that's true at all. | ||
I think if you were working in an office and some white dude had dreads, he'd be highly suspicious of his behavior. | ||
Well, for example, You'd be like, this guy's kind of a dork. | ||
I hear what you're saying. | ||
I want to hire him. | ||
There's a guy who had hair like you, and right next to him is some stinky white dude with them stinky dreads, because dreads stink. | ||
Okay, take dreads out, let's say. | ||
That's a good example that you used. | ||
In the U.S. military, there was just a new set of acceptable hairstyles, and almost every one of the unacceptable hairstyles that they put into place was basically black... | ||
Hair. | ||
Like what? | ||
Braids. | ||
Wearing your hair natural. | ||
What natural? | ||
unidentified
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What do you mean? | |
I mean, I would have to pull up... | ||
Like an afro? | ||
Yeah. | ||
A short afro? | ||
Yeah, I mean... | ||
You're not allowed to do that? | ||
You'd have to pull up the article to give the specific examples. | ||
But basically, there are a million different examples like that. | ||
And like I said, I'm not... | ||
I'm not necessarily an advocate for heed and honor the call of the appropriation accuser. | ||
I'm more now realizing that there's just a lot of deep, emotional, weird trauma underneath every accusation of appropriation. | ||
It's not that I think, therefore, white girls shouldn't wear braids. | ||
It's that I think I understand more where the person that is upset is coming from. | ||
It's just from a compassion perspective. | ||
No, I get that. | ||
I get that. | ||
It just logically doesn't jive. | ||
It's not about logic. | ||
Yeah, but it should be. | ||
All human interaction should have some base in logic if you're going to communicate with things. | ||
I don't agree because emotions aren't about logic. | ||
Right, but should anybody be subject to your own emotions? | ||
Like, you change your behavior, your dress. | ||
If you're a person who's completely not racist, but you enjoy the way your hair looks if it's in braids, Should you take into consideration all the people that you're going to run into and they're going to be upset at you over braids even though they're ignorant about the history of braids and cornrows? | ||
Should you alter or change your behavior? | ||
Should you accept the fact that you're just going to have a certain amount of cultural appropriation? | ||
Well, let me ask you this. | ||
I don't have an answer to that question. | ||
I don't think so. | ||
Isn't that an important part of this? | ||
I mean, if you're going to accept the fact there's some sort of an emotional attachment to these things, and that's where the argument comes from, shouldn't you decide or at least contemplate whether or not that emotion is valid? | ||
It doesn't seem to be. | ||
Seems to me there's real examples of racism and horrible things. | ||
Like if you want to, you know, make your eyes squinty and look like a Japanese character from a Bugs Bunny cartoon in, you know, 1940, and then you want to go to a party and people think you're a racist, you should be aware that you're presenting an image that is inherently racist. | ||
Like that's something that's kind of fucked up and you should be considerate about the way people's emotions are going to fire up looking at your image. | ||
That's what I'm saying. | ||
Yeah, but that's a different thing than braids. | ||
Oh, but that's what I'm... | ||
I'm not advocating... | ||
First of all, I'm not advocating anything. | ||
I'm just saying I've delved into this topic enough that I've started to understand where people are coming from when they get activated by this stuff. | ||
I understand too, but I think a big part of it is reinforcement in the community that that's acceptable to be upset at people for cornrows or braids. | ||
I actually don't disagree with you. | ||
I think you're right about that. | ||
And yet, I think it also is connected to a legitimate emotional reality that's happening. | ||
For example, by the way, logic is very important. | ||
And I would say logic is more important than emotion when it comes to communication. | ||
But because something is more important, it doesn't negate the importance of the other thing. | ||
Well, it certainly doesn't solve the situation just by clearly using logic. | ||
You might get a certain percentage of the people that agree with you because of logic, but that's more rare than it is common. | ||
Right. | ||
It's like, would you feel comfortable going to a Native American powwow, you know, with a headdress on? | ||
Not even a powwow. | ||
There's a powwow next door, you can see it, and you're at a music festival. | ||
Would you wear an Indian headdress? | ||
No, I wouldn't. | ||
But the reason why you can't... | ||
And the reason why you shouldn't or the reason why it's an issue is because the people are marginalized. | ||
Let me take my own people. | ||
I'm Italian. | ||
And my people, for the longest time, there was a lot of anti-Italian racism. | ||
My grandfather used to talk to me about it, what it was like coming off the boat. | ||
But then somewhere along the line, it became acceptable for Italians in American culture where it's not real racism. | ||
It doesn't stick. | ||
Italian stuff. | ||
You can call us a guinea to our face. | ||
We will laugh. | ||
No one cares. | ||
You can make meatballs and spaghetti all day long. | ||
Nobody gives a shit. | ||
Nobody accuses you of, you know, you have a pizza party. | ||
Nobody thinks it's cultural appropriation. | ||
But try having a taco party. | ||
Try having Taco Tuesdays. | ||
People get pissed at you. | ||
Why? | ||
Because Mexicans still experience real racism in this country, whereas Italians largely just don't. | ||
Right. | ||
And like Taco Tuesday is an example of something that's like, who fucking cares? | ||
That's not important. | ||
But wearing a sombrero is offensive to a lot of people. | ||
That's as deep as most people go. | ||
That's dumb. | ||
What are you talking about? | ||
A candida taco? | ||
I mean, that's dumb. | ||
And it is dumb. | ||
But if you kind of like get under the dumb, which is the name of my... | ||
My third special. | ||
So it's Mouthfucking... | ||
Get Under the Dumb? | ||
It's live in Oakland, Mouthfucking Hitler, and then Get Under the Dumb. | ||
But if you get under the first, like the most epidermal layer of like flashy insanity and go like, what's really happening here? | ||
It's like, oh, it's just what you're saying. | ||
Actually, you're more woke than you let on, Jim. | ||
unidentified
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Interesting. | |
It's like, it's really about like power dynamics. | ||
It's not really about the appropriation incident, although on some level maybe it is. | ||
It's really about the power dynamic underneath it. | ||
Well, I think one of the things that we're seeing in universities in particular is people that are exercising the ability to affect change even if it doesn't make sense. | ||
Because they have the ability to point out something that they think is incorrect or is unjust and then they attack it and go after it and they see results. | ||
And by seeing those results, it's almost in a lot of ways kind of attached to the same idea like if you're worth X amount of dollars, why do you still chase money? | ||
Because you're trying to get the thrill of the accomplishment. | ||
There's the game that's going on. | ||
And there's a certain amount of game going on trying to get that white kid that you don't even know to cut off his dreads. | ||
Whether or not you know that the Romans wore dreads, whether or not you know that the Greeks wore dreads, the Vikings, all these different people had them, it doesn't matter. | ||
It's like there's a little tiny white guy and that girl could yell at that white guy and then chase him with a pair of scissors. | ||
Yeah, exactly. | ||
It's the incidents are the absurdity, but the current, the conceptual current is somewhat valid. | ||
I mean, to some degree... | ||
Yeah, I'm sorry. | ||
No, but to some degree, like, even you, and I think that you're naturally skeptical towards concepts like cultural appropriation, because, and I am too, because, especially as comedians, it's very easy to see the absurdity. | ||
It's so stupid, and it's so pointless. | ||
We can't not adopt each other's cultures. | ||
That won't ever happen. | ||
But even we go, okay, but I wouldn't wear a sombrero to a Mexican club. | ||
I wouldn't walk into a club like, oh, hey, what's up? | ||
So if you say, okay, it's almost pornography, right? | ||
I know it when I see it. | ||
I know it's offensive when I feel it. | ||
So if you kind of expand further and go, okay, even the absurd examples, I kind of understand... | ||
I'm going to try to understand... | ||
For me, I'm going to try to understand where people are coming from with that. | ||
Then I can kind of contextualize it. | ||
Now, I don't have to agree with it, but I can at least say, oh, I get where this is coming from. | ||
It's coming from historical antecedents of racism and oppression that are connected to hairstyle and all of these musicians that have taken black culture and made money off of it. | ||
There's all this, like... | ||
Deeper, sedimentary layers of emotionality. | ||
I don't have to heed it and change accordingly, but I would be foolish to ignore it. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
Yeah, that completely makes sense. | ||
And also, I get it from a point of view of a person who comes from a culture that used to be maligned and isn't anymore. | ||
I'm from a culture that used to be maligned, and then I thought wasn't anymore, and then very recently things have gotten weird again. | ||
Yeah, and it's really easy to say that Jews are responsible for a large part of the problem in the world today. | ||
I've seen it a lot lately. | ||
I'm like, this used to be really inappropriate thinking and talking just 20 years ago. | ||
It used to be very taboo, and it is not anymore. | ||
And it's weird. | ||
It's very weird. | ||
It's definitely... | ||
You know, I don't take anti-Semitism... | ||
Antisemitism is like the closest I come to believing in magic because it's like... | ||
I'm not a big mystical guy, but like, antisemitism has never gone away. | ||
It just has... | ||
And I can see if you're an antisemite, you're going... | ||
The evil of the Jews is the closest I come to believing in magic because they just never stop being evil. | ||
Like, I just don't understand how this never goes away. | ||
It never goes away. | ||
It's so fucking weird. | ||
Like, no matter where Jews have lived, no matter how assimilated they've been, You know that the Jews in Berlin were the most assimilated Jews in history? | ||
They were known for having Christmas trees and eating pork, and they would describe these like Christmas parties where it would only be Jews because the Germans wouldn't go, but it would be all of them celebrating Christmas. | ||
They were the most assimilated Jews ever, and that was the epicenter of the Nazi movement. | ||
Yeah. | ||
So it follows the Jews. | ||
And I mean, I know that I'm sure at least one of your listeners is like, no, the Jews follow it. | ||
But it's like, it's crazy. | ||
It just won't go away. | ||
It's a virus that won't ever, ever die down. | ||
Well, I think there's a bunch of problems. | ||
With this anti-Semitic thing going on. | ||
And one of them is the accomplishments of the Jews are very disproportionate, especially European Jews. | ||
If you look at European Jews and Nobel Prize winners, it's fucking staggering. | ||
unidentified
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It's insane. | |
European Jews who are intellectuals, chess champions, a bunch of... | ||
There's a select gene pool, especially, particularly European Jews. | ||
Yeah, we also have bigger dicks. | ||
Nobody talks about that. | ||
I don't think that's true. | ||
You don't think? | ||
No. | ||
I thought it was Jews and then... | ||
unidentified
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No? | |
Okay. | ||
Giant people. | ||
Samoans, probably huge hogs. | ||
But do you know the story of Fritz Haber? | ||
Fritz Haber is one of the most shocking Jewish stories in terms of a Jewish scientist who was a part of World War I on the side of the Germans. | ||
He also invented the Haber method of extracting nitrogen from the environment. | ||
You know, nitrogen is one of the most important things when it comes to fertilizer. | ||
We're talking about fertilizing plants. | ||
And nitrogen is 80% of the air we breathe. | ||
Most people think the air is oxygen and carbon dioxide. | ||
It's mostly nitrogen. | ||
And then there's some oxygen and then there's some carbon dioxide that we breathe out that the plants use. | ||
Fritz Haber figured out a way to extract nitrogen from the actual oxygen, from the actual air around us, and take that nitrogen and use it in the soil as fertilizer. | ||
And he won a Nobel Prize for that. | ||
And 50% of the nitrogen in most people's bodies came from the Haber Method. | ||
This is from You know, the early 1900s, this guy figured this out. | ||
It's still being used today. | ||
He also was the first guy to invent using poison gas, and they used it on the Allied troops in World War I. So he was wanted for crimes against humanity and simultaneously winning the Nobel Prize during World War I. And then when the Nazis took over, he created Zyklon A. Zyklon A is a gas that has a very distinct smell, and I think it was a pesticide. | ||
And they used Zyklon A, the smell was added to it to make people acutely aware that this pesticide was being used because it was very poisonous. | ||
They changed it to Zyklon B, which is what they used to gas the Jews. | ||
So this fucking guy created the actual gas that was used in the fucking concentration camps to kill the Jews. | ||
And they just took the smell out of it. | ||
That's how they created Zyklon B. Whatever that thing was that they added to Zyklon A to make it smell bad, they took that out for Zyklon B so it was almost odorless. | ||
And they were killing people left and right with it. | ||
And he was forced out of the country. | ||
I mean, it's a crazy, crazy story. | ||
I mean, when he was going to the front line to help implement his gas on the Allied troops, his wife shot herself in front of him. | ||
And he left his kid behind with his dying wife to go to war. | ||
It's fucking crazy. | ||
The story's crazy. | ||
And he wound up dying, seeking refuge away from Germany. | ||
He was one of the few scientists that they didn't, one of the few Jews they didn't lock up. | ||
And he just couldn't tolerate, I mean, he couldn't stand by while these other Jews that he knew were going to the concentration camps and people were being rounded up. | ||
Did he know? | ||
Did he know that Zyklon B? Yeah. | ||
Think that might have happened like while he was while he was on the run Not sure I'd have to get into that but I mean that would be a crazy realization that I mean it's like that you know the TNT guy the guy that built dynamite like realizing what he'd done to the world I mean how about Oppenheimer, right? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, Oppenheimer is quoting the Bhagavad Gita. | ||
We played that on the podcast last week. | ||
I am become death. | ||
Destroyer of worlds. | ||
Fuck, man. | ||
Speaking of billionaires being evil, I mean, to have that quote is like... | ||
That's a big yikes moment. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
So, I mean, I think there's that, is that Jews have been almost genetically smart for so long. | ||
There's a reason for that, you know? | ||
What is it? | ||
It's that, basically, in the whole of the Dark Ages, the Dark Ages are characterized by people being illiterate. | ||
They were in the dark and only the clergy could read. | ||
That the Jews were a 98% literate people. | ||
And that is literally the reason. | ||
It actually comes all the way back to systemic oppression, right? | ||
In the same way that there are barriers... | ||
You know, if you're deaf or if you're black or if you're a woman, there are barriers you have to jump past. | ||
If you are given an advantage, I mean, it's all evolution, right? | ||
Then you're going to leap forward. | ||
And so when you have a history of 500 years where no one in Europe reads except for the Jews and the clergy, well, no shit. | ||
They ended up, you know, being at the front lines of, you know, of Nobel Prize winning in science and intellectualism, not because they're smarter, obviously, but because they just were reading that whole time. | ||
And there's a reason for the idea of Jewish greed, too, is that you know about this is that, you know, Jesus said something about usury. | ||
Basically, Catholics were not OK with lending money at interest at an interest rate that was against the rules. | ||
unidentified
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Right. | |
And so you're not going to lend people money for no interest. | ||
That's just not how it works. | ||
And then there were some people that weren't subject to the rules of Christian anti-usury laws, and those were the Jews. | ||
And so the Jews would lend you money at an interest rate. | ||
But who do you hate more than anybody on earth? | ||
Who's the person you wish were dead? | ||
Your creditor. | ||
The banker that is going to foreclose on your home and is going to... | ||
Now, I'm not saying that's good or bad. | ||
I also hate the banker. | ||
But that's just, historically speaking, when they call Jews moneylenders, it's not because Jews are like, oh, I'm pernicious and I want to fill this gap. | ||
It's that nobody else in society would lend people money. | ||
And so not only were they the creditors that people hated, but they were also the financiers that made the possibility of European greatness occur. | ||
Because without capital, without funds, you can't build a society. | ||
So, that is one of the many reasons that people have come to hate the Jews, is that they lent them the money that they needed, and then when it was time to come collecting, they'd be like, fuck this dude. | ||
So fascinating when you find the root of certain prejudices. | ||
Oh yeah. | ||
Yeah, for sure. | ||
That's a good one. | ||
Those two are very good ones. | ||
Especially the one about being literate. | ||
I mean, absolutely that makes sense. | ||
I mean, it wasn't until like the 1400s with Martin Luther that they just started translating the Bible into a phonetic alphabet. | ||
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Right. | |
Where people could read it? | ||
I mean, stop and think about that. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
What happened with Martin Luther, the Reformation and the printing press with Martin Luther was the cracking of the old guard of society and finally made democratization of knowledge available to everybody. | ||
And, you know... | ||
Everybody was at a disadvantage, a historical disadvantage. | ||
And the same thing is you can see that truth in other systems. | ||
That's a system of oppression, too. | ||
Yeah, sure. | ||
That's a systemic oppression where the clergy wanted to keep information from the people so that they could keep them stupid and keep them underfoot. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And those people, there was a patriarchy there, too, except that the patriarch was God or Papa, the Pope, right? | ||
Well, it was really the... | ||
The clergy, more than it was God. | ||
God wasn't really enforcing any of these laws. | ||
But the literal patriarch, the Pope. | ||
That was one of the most problematic things about Martin Luther, apparently, was that he was telling people, you're allowed to interpret what this means. | ||
Right. | ||
You don't have to accept anybody else's interpretation because they're just men as well. | ||
Right. | ||
These are just human beings interpreting the Word of God. | ||
So if you interpret it to be a different thing, you're allowed to do that. | ||
And they'd be like, what in the fuck is this guy saying? | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, think about how seductive that must have been for the church. | ||
Like, oh, we can just keep the information from everybody and just tell them anything we want. | ||
Well, back then also, the Pope had women. | ||
The Pope was allowed to fuck. | ||
All the clergy fucked. | ||
They were rock stars. | ||
They weren't what we think of now as these creepy dudes and molest children. | ||
Right. | ||
No, they were fucking... | ||
They were... | ||
These were people that had armies. | ||
I mean, they called upon the Pope when Genghis Khan was conquering, like he's going over the steps and conquering Russia. | ||
They were calling upon the Pope and the army of Rome. | ||
I mean, that's literally where he had power. | ||
It's very strange when you look at how that's changed. | ||
And now it's become this weird cabal of odd older gay men. | ||
What do you think of that's about, by the way? | ||
I think you take people's ability to have sex away, and the only people that are going to stay are the people that are creepy and sexually repressed. | ||
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Right. | |
And there's a few that hang in there, and they say, well, you know, maybe I can just go without sex. | ||
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Right. | |
And they get weirded out, and then sex becomes this horrible taboo thing. | ||
And, of course, when sex becomes a horrible taboo thing, then people gravitate towards sex. | ||
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Right. | |
As soon as you take the ability of people to have sex away from people, they want to have sex more than they want anything in life. | ||
Right. | ||
It's like, or is the opposite true? | ||
Is it that people are, predators are attracted to a system that is, you know, shrouded in privacy and no sex and they can, you know, they can, I guess the question is like, do you go in there trying to be holy or trying to get away from your sexuality that then bursts out in this aberrant way? | ||
Or are you an aberrant monster that goes into the clergy to prey on people? | ||
Well, once it's been established, maybe both. | ||
Right. | ||
But once it's been established, that becomes part of the issue because when you're, you're also indoctrinating young children that do get molested by these priests. | ||
If you have some altar boys and these priests wind up molesting these kids and they stay in the system, the odds of them turning into molesters themselves is extremely high. | ||
Right. | ||
What do you think, why do you think people molest children? | ||
Boy, I think there's probably a whole host of reasons for that. | ||
Psychological reasons, but I think that a big part of it was being molested themselves. | ||
There's some enormous percentage of people who have been molested who turned to become the very thing that victimized them. | ||
It's almost like they want to get back It's crazy. | ||
It's insane. | ||
It's also like a kind of weird dark magic. | ||
It's like why are there a certain percentage of human beings that do that kind of the weirdest most aberrant thing? | ||
Do you hear the There's a really interesting Radiolab, I think, episode that's basically about these kids, this kid who realized that he was a pedophile. | ||
Like, that's what he wanted. | ||
Whoa. | ||
And he never offended. | ||
Is it a recent one? | ||
It's a few years. | ||
No, it's old. | ||
But he realized he had never offended. | ||
And so he went to his mother and was like, there's something wrong with me. | ||
Like, I'm a pedophile or whatever. | ||
It's like a teenager. | ||
And so the mother tried to find treatment for him, but nobody would treat him because it's such a deep taboo of evil that people are like, I don't want to get involved in that. | ||
I don't want to treat you and then have you offend and then have it come back on me. | ||
So basically, he never offended. | ||
He had these desires and he couldn't get help. | ||
And he started this organization for other people like him. | ||
It's like a support group of pedophiles that have never offended. | ||
If you've offended, you're not eligible for membership in this group. | ||
And you can help each other. | ||
It's pretty deep in the annals of the weird dark web or whatever. | ||
I don't know where they find each other. | ||
But it's pretty crazy. | ||
Have you seen the, there's a whole market that's being developed where they're going to make like artificial children. | ||
Oh my god. | ||
Like a sex doll, like a child sex doll. | ||
And there's this argument that that would prevent people from becoming pederasts. | ||
Wow, that is crazy. | ||
Like the ultimate iteration of teledildonics is that it cures pedophilia. | ||
Well, it's the same argument they would use towards anime. | ||
Anime pedophilia or any sort of CGI-based pedophilia is that if you could look at child porn that's not real and no one's a victim of it and you lock yourself in your room, you could alleviate your desire to have this thing. | ||
Maybe that's true. | ||
But the problem with that is, man, there's the real argument that that's feeding your desire to do that because that's what happens with men when it comes to regular pornography. | ||
That's just what I was going to say. | ||
That would only hold true if it wasn't for the fact that you, if you didn't see something in porn and go, I've got to try that. | ||
Well, I think the problem is we're looking for a solution. | ||
Like, you know, oh, there's a fire. | ||
Throw water on it. | ||
There's no... | ||
Like, when it comes to people and thinking, especially, like, sexual things and behavioral things, like, addictive things, people are messy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
There's a crazy TED Talk. | ||
I think it's a TED Talk out there. | ||
This woman who's worked with teenage sex offenders, like, her whole career. | ||
And she basically says that we think... | ||
At least with teenage sex offenders, which is like pedophilia, teenage on younger pedophilia, the cure and recidivism rate is like, it's extremely treatable, right? | ||
Like it's very, very treatable. | ||
But we look at that phenomenon as once you are that, you are that forever and you will always re-offend and there's no hope and no going back from it. | ||
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Hmm. | |
And it's not statistically that doesn't hold water. | ||
And her point is basically like, it is easier for us to think of these people as monsters than to think of them as sick people that could get better. | ||
If we can just say, like, throw them away, they'll never be better, then we can kind of synthesize it into our brain. | ||
But in reality, these are, it's messy. | ||
Yeah, if you even bring that up, what you just said, you're a sympathizer. | ||
Right. | ||
You know that these people are monsters and I think the idea is that you know we're talking about spectrums like they're like say if you get a hundred thousand people right what how many of those hundred thousand people Feel like they were born into the wrong sex. | ||
You know how many how many of those hundred thousand people have some bizarre sexual attraction to body parts or to Underage people or to older people, you know vulnerable people there's There's a bunch. | ||
And what causes those things? | ||
There's a host of different reasons. | ||
But it's so messy and so complicated for people to defend, especially to defend pedophilia in any way. | ||
Yeah, it's radioactive. | ||
Yeah, you want to kill those people. | ||
That's it. | ||
The solution is kill them. | ||
Kill them. | ||
Black and white. | ||
Kill them. | ||
It makes sense. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Everybody in this makes, every player in this story makes sense. | ||
You know where it doesn't make sense? | ||
History. | ||
Oh, right, because they used to have different views of it. | ||
Well, it doesn't make sense that everybody that was like, you know, you go Socrates, Plato, I mean, you go through the line, they were all monsters. | ||
There's a quote. | ||
I've never been able to verify if it's real, but they say the Persians said, a woman for duty, a boy for pleasure, and a melon for ecstasy. | ||
Whoa, why a melon? | ||
Fuck a melon, I guess. | ||
Do they fuck the melon? | ||
I mean, I think it's a... | ||
Do they eat it because it tastes good? | ||
That's ecstasy? | ||
Because they live in the desert? | ||
I'm pretty sure they fuck the melon. | ||
Jesus, why would you fuck a melon? | ||
It's hard on the outside. | ||
I think they would chafe your dick. | ||
That doesn't seem like a good move unless you, like, bevel the edges. | ||
That's my fourth special. | ||
Don't fuck the melon. | ||
Don't fuck the melon. | ||
Bevel the edges. | ||
A melon for ecstasy. | ||
A melon for ecstasy. | ||
Oh, wow. | ||
That's so strange. | ||
Yeah, I mean, that's what people have said that have gone over to Afghanistan, too, right? | ||
A lot of soldiers have said that it runs rampant over there. | ||
Right. | ||
Child sex abuse. | ||
Can child dolls keep pedophiles from offending? | ||
One man thinks so. | ||
He's been manufacturing them for clients for more than 10 years. | ||
Is there any images of these things? | ||
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Yeah. | |
Is it weird? | ||
I'm not going to show it online, but I can show you guys if you want. | ||
Yeah, show it. | ||
No thank you. | ||
You don't want to see? | ||
No, I'll see. | ||
I just want to be on record saying no thank you. | ||
Scroll up. | ||
I have to go to the website. | ||
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It's a Japanese website. | |
I had to translate it. | ||
Jeez, here we go. | ||
Oh, boy. | ||
English. | ||
Gotta get a Tor browser. | ||
Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
Boy, I don't know about this. | ||
Okay, alright. | ||
Wow, that's weird. | ||
They're fucked up, man. | ||
You just got racist as fuck. | ||
Forget about your culture. | ||
You mean the dolls. | ||
Or you mean the Japanese. | ||
Wait, what did I do? | ||
You said they're fucked up. | ||
They are. | ||
Do you mean the Japanese? | ||
Or do you mean the dolls? | ||
Oh, no, I meant the dolls. | ||
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I'm silently judging. | |
Not so silently. | ||
Dude, this is really wild, man. | ||
Let's turn this off, especially as a guy with daughters. | ||
I don't have any daughters. | ||
Can you throw it back up, actually? | ||
Throw it back up. | ||
I don't have a son either. | ||
You got any boys? | ||
Do you have any melons? | ||
Any young butts? | ||
You're going to throw some melons up there? | ||
It's what we're looking at. | ||
They look like they're about 10. It looks like maybe younger even. | ||
That was disturbing. | ||
Man, and the idea is that somehow or another that's going to be able to stop people from molesting kids by fucking that rubber doll. | ||
Or is it going to charge up their desires even further? | ||
Yeah, that's a crazy... | ||
I don't know. | ||
I have no way to... | ||
I wouldn't want to fuck a doll, by the way. | ||
Well, that's the number one argument against prostitution. | ||
The number one argument that I've ever heard against it. | ||
Because I feel like a grown woman should be allowed... | ||
Like, there's all sorts of levels of prostitution. | ||
Like, here's the level. | ||
Here's an acceptable level. | ||
A woman who likes to give massages, say if you're a woman and you're a massage therapist and you have a select group of clients and you enjoy giving those men massages, you're giving them some physical pleasure with their body. | ||
You could have the same sort of deal with a bunch of people. | ||
And give them sex right sure and that's all it is. | ||
It's just in you like them. | ||
They're your friends you hug them They give you some money and you thank you. | ||
I'll see you next Tuesday. | ||
You're gonna keep your Tuesday appointment Yeah, I'll see you Tuesday. | ||
The guy looks forward to Tuesday sees her on Tuesday. | ||
They get together She you know, she gives him a back rub. | ||
She lights some candles. | ||
They have sex. | ||
He gives her money. | ||
That's to me That's a victimless crime 100% but But then you get into the idea of sex slaves. | ||
You get into the idea of indentured child sex slaves. | ||
There's actually a crazier argument, not crazier, but even more compelling argument for the moral good of prostitution, which is that there are these prostitutes that only sleep with severely disabled people. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And I heard this radio special and it was very interesting. | ||
This guy, he himself was a radio producer but also had Lou Gehrig's disease. | ||
And he said, it's very similar to pedophiles actually. | ||
We like to think of disabled people as having no sex drive. | ||
As when they became disabled, their sex drives were disabled as well. | ||
And the reason we like to think of it, similarly, we like to think of pedophiles as monsters because that simplifies that, is it's nice for us to think of disabled people like not having horniness because they can't get laid. | ||
I mean, if we're being frank, there are certain levels of disability that it's very difficult to find a partner. | ||
You're intense to look at or you're drooling all over yourself. | ||
But you're still just as horny as every other person. | ||
So there's this radio special of these sex workers that go and they fuck or jerk off these severely disabled people who are so... | ||
They are so disabled they can't even masturbate. | ||
And it's like, I heard that and I was just like, I went from going like, prostitution is something I sort of agree with, to like, these people are heroes. | ||
These are like miracle workers. | ||
Yeah, I mean, it's not a whole lot different than massaging those people. | ||
You know, one of the key, I don't know if you've ever heard of Rolfing? | ||
Sure, yeah. | ||
It's one of the best therapies for injuries to recover. | ||
It breaks up fascia and it's really brutal. | ||
Deep tissue massage that doesn't feel good at all. | ||
It's very painful. | ||
They massage the inside of your mouth and your nose, too. | ||
Do they? | ||
There's like a Rolf 10, and one of the 10 different treatments, and one of the 10 is the soft palate of your mouth and inside your nose. | ||
Wow. | ||
It's real intense. | ||
Why do they do that? | ||
I don't know. | ||
Some theory. | ||
I don't know if I'm going to fucking just go on a theory and let you stick a rod up my nose. | ||
No, it's their fingers. | ||
Oh, come on. | ||
You're not even supposed to pick your nose, man. | ||
Dude, I don't know. | ||
You're talking to a guy who's had nasal surgery because my nose was broken so many times. | ||
I had deviated septum surgery where they went in and they had to cut parts of my nose out that calcified. | ||
Oh, Jesus. | ||
They're going in this gal's nose. | ||
Oh, it's so intense. | ||
I hate it. | ||
Seventh hour structural integration nose work for insight. | ||
Exp... | ||
Yo, that is crazy. | ||
Yeah, I think that's some asshole that wants to stick their finger up your nose. | ||
That doesn't make any sense. | ||
Nasal doctors tell you not to pick your nose. | ||
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Yeah, right. | |
It can cause infections. | ||
It's very close to the bloodstream. | ||
The skin is very thin on the inside of your nose. | ||
That's why picking your nose is dangerous because you can get infections. | ||
An infection goes right to your bloodstream. | ||
It's right close to your brain. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Oh, so Rolfing. | ||
So what they do is Ida Rolf, the woman who invented Rolfing. | ||
I think that's her name. | ||
No, it's the dog from the Muppets. | ||
I don't think that's the same. | ||
Rolf the dog. | ||
I don't think that's the same. | ||
The piano player? | ||
No. | ||
It's not the same Rolf? | ||
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No, no. | |
I thought it was that guy. | ||
All right, go ahead. | ||
I think the woman invented it because her son had cerebral palsy. | ||
It was one of the best ways to alleviate some of his muscle issues was this intense form of manipulation because he had become so bound up by his disease that she had figured out a way to loosen up the tissue so that he had more range of motion. | ||
I found some great relief with that stuff, but it's ruthlessly painful. | ||
Yeah, I've had some rolfing done too. | ||
It's nice, but it's also awful. | ||
It's great in its result, but man, it's brutal. | ||
I wanted to make one final point about, because I think I figured out how to make my cultural appropriation point. | ||
I don't want to take us back too far, but I think what we're doing is like, and we came to a good place with it, is like, What we're talking about, it's all about language, right? | ||
So cultural appropriation, your immediate reaction is, that's absurd. | ||
And some of the examples people use is absurd. | ||
But underneath the racism is just, we're talking about racial insensitivity. | ||
We're talking about being insensitive. | ||
And if you try to just focus on that, then you can get to the reality of what's happening. | ||
And the original point I wanted to make was, in this article I read about it, it said that we often get locked on these linguistic barriers The boat that the concept floats in on, the absurd boat. | ||
So Black Lives Matter is the ultimate example he gave. | ||
I just thought this was such a fascinating point. | ||
Black Lives Matter is the name of the organization that is there to fight against police brutality and killing of black kids, right? | ||
And people react to the words, right? | ||
So people go, what are you talking about? | ||
Black Lives Matter. | ||
All Lives Matter. | ||
Blue Lives Matter. | ||
And... | ||
Basically, if you don't acknowledge that it's Black Lives Matter 2, which is really obvious, right? | ||
You're fighting about the words Black Lives Matter where we haven't been talking. | ||
You've left the foundation principle behind like a long time ago, which is police brutality. | ||
No one's even talking about police brutality anymore. | ||
Now they're just talking about the language that you chose to call your group. | ||
So at any rate, I think that was the thing I was trying to say. | ||
No, that makes sense. | ||
Look, all of it makes sense if what is going on is people are being racist, right? | ||
If someone is doing something, if racial inappropriation or cultural inappropriation at the heart of it involves racial insensitivity or racist insensitivity. | ||
But there's difference, right? | ||
Racist, theoretically racist... | ||
Is, and again, racism is a word that doesn't have a lot of use anymore either, because you describe the same phenomenon of you saying to, like, your black friend, like, wow, I didn't expect you to be so articulate. | ||
You mean well, right? | ||
You mean, you're trying to be polite. | ||
Or, I don't like black people. | ||
They're bad. | ||
These are the same, it's the same word to describe both of those things, right? | ||
Right. | ||
So, insensitivity is not overt and aggressive racism, I think. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
It's insensitive. | ||
It's insensitive racism. | ||
Like, you're not being sensitive to the possibility that you're saying something offensive. | ||
Or just doing something boorishly dumb. | ||
Now, I agree with you that logic's more important than that. | ||
But I think, you know, the more aware we can all be about how to not be a dick... | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's like people want to say, you know, you could never have All in the Family on TV today. | ||
Could you imagine? | ||
People would go crazy. | ||
Well, yeah, that's because we moved past that. | ||
I mean, that's what's going on. | ||
What's going on is there's a process. | ||
And one of the things is disturbing to people about Trump and what's disturbing to people about this new Freedom to mock Jews or to point at them as the root of all evil And then it's much more open than it's been before is it we thought we got through that and then slowly but surely the demonization of individual groups and in terms of you know, like who are the bad guys and who are the good guys and instead having it been boiled down to activities and behaviors and individual human beings like who are the bad guys and who are the good guys and instead having it been boiled down to activities | ||
Believe in one God versus another God, which is what it's been historically The idea is that as time goes on, and as people like my people, the Italians, become so integrated that you can't be racist about us anymore. | ||
It doesn't work. | ||
I mean, it really doesn't work. | ||
It's one of the best examples of it. | ||
Totally. | ||
It's fascinating because there's so many things that are there still and you're like, they don't have any charge or power any longer. | ||
Not only that, there's so much gross behavior by Italians. | ||
It just goes unchecked. | ||
And I think the Sopranos is probably responsible for a lot of that. | ||
I was in Italy last year and I was walking home real late at night and I saw this guy. | ||
He's got his girlfriend up against the car and he's fucking like going off on her and I'm like this little like liberal American boy like is somebody gonna call the police and then I kind of stood there for a while longer and he's screaming in her face and then I just like look for about like two or three minutes I go oh this is just some Italian shit. | ||
I just walked home. | ||
Like, realize, like, oh, there's nothing happening here. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
That's what they used to do, you know? | ||
And they still do it over there. | ||
When I was over there, my driver, we had this cab driver, and this motherfucker was a cartoon. | ||
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Oh, yeah. | |
He was driving, and driving like a maniac, and then he would pause, oh, mama mia, look at this girl's ass. | ||
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No. | |
No, Italy is so Italian. | ||
There are parts of how Italian it is that will boggle your mind. | ||
Like a dude smoking a cigarette on a Vespa with a girl sitting sideways and everything is like the most Italian thing you could ever imagine. | ||
Yeah, it's funny. | ||
Because I went there with my family and my wife was like, oh, so this is where you get your shit from. | ||
You're from a group of eight people. | ||
Italy's the best. | ||
Yeah. | ||
The best place. | ||
It's fun. | ||
We went to the Malfi Coast. | ||
God, it's pretty. | ||
And Malfi's incredible. | ||
So good. | ||
So pretty it doesn't even look real. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's insane. | ||
I mean, Italy's like a jewel box. | ||
It's just everything. | ||
And the further into it you go, the more pretty it gets. | ||
I heard Sicily is really beautiful too. | ||
I never went. | ||
I haven't even either. | ||
I went up to Tuscany and I drove all through there and me and Natasha found like this bath cities. | ||
These like cities where the Romans would come to bathe and it was like, you know how every Italian city has like a town square? | ||
This had a town pool. | ||
In the center of it. | ||
And it was so cool and weird. | ||
There was this big old mound of sulfuric residue. | ||
This soft white mountain. | ||
It's called Faso Bianco. | ||
And it's this big white mountain of soft, chalky, sulfuric residue. | ||
The soda water has been falling on it for so long that it's carved these pools into it. | ||
And they're like little hot tubs that you can get into on this mountain. | ||
Italy's... | ||
Bananas. | ||
Wow. | ||
We wanted to go to, what's the place where the volcano went off and everybody died? | ||
Stromboli? | ||
Oh, Pompeii. | ||
Pompeii, yeah. | ||
We wanted to go to Pompeii. | ||
We never got around to it. | ||
I thought that would have been fascinating to see where these people just hanging out and all of a sudden lava and ash covered everybody and they'd frozen their tracks and died there. | ||
Pompeii is a wild place for sure. | ||
Yeah. | ||
It's also interesting to go to Europe because you realize how old everything is. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Like, oh, this culture's been around for thousands of years here. | ||
Well, it brings us back to the beginning, which is the Roman Empire. | ||
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Yeah. | |
And it's just like, you look at the kind of like residue of the hugest society that has ever existed. | ||
I mean, the Colosseum, they killed so many animals for sport, they put... | ||
Certain animals out of business. | ||
Like, they extincted some animals. | ||
Really? | ||
Yes. | ||
Like, which ones? | ||
I don't know. | ||
They don't have them anymore. | ||
But, like, certain, like, kinds of animals that they would import and import and import and they're just like, yeah, we killed them all. | ||
It's just for sport. | ||
Not for any other reason. | ||
When we were in the Coliseum, they were explaining where they had those elevators that would take the animals up from the ground floor and open the floor up and then the animals would pop through and they would do battle with them. | ||
But they were talking about how they had to raise up the side of the fences because the lower levels were where all the rich people sat. | ||
Hilarious. | ||
And they were getting jacked by lions. | ||
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The best. | |
Like the lions figured out how to jump up and get the people that were at the top. | ||
Fuck yeah, we need to get some lions back to get those billionaires with their yachts and just eat them. | ||
Yeah, how much money do you have to have to put 1.5 billion of it into a boat? | ||
That's so crazy. | ||
I had a friend who bought a boat for like $60,000, and he took it for one ride, crashed it into the pier, put it in the garage for two years, and then sold it for $20,000. | ||
So he took a $40,000 boat ride. | ||
Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah, that's what they say. | ||
It's a hole in the water where you pour money into it. | ||
Right. | ||
But if you like to fish... | ||
The cool thing about boats is that when you, like, if you say you have something and you go out, Marina Del Rey, and you just go out into the water, you can kind of go wherever the fuck you want. | ||
Like, there's no road. | ||
Right. | ||
But you can go wherever, but, you know, it's all water. | ||
So you can go left and right, and as long as you don't hit an island, you can kind of do whatever the fuck you want. | ||
Did you see that Maiden Voyage documentary? | ||
What was that? | ||
It's about this, like, 14-year-old or 16-year-old girl that sails around the world by herself. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
I heard about that. | ||
So good. | ||
I heard about it. | ||
So interesting. | ||
Who the fuck are her parents? | ||
I mean, there are some Northern European, Danish, like, permissive-ass white people. | ||
White people that don't have poverty. | ||
That's right. | ||
Go around the world. | ||
What happens when you don't have poverty? | ||
Make sure you call when you land. | ||
Maybe you should get some poverty, actually. | ||
That'll give you a little bit more to do with your life. | ||
Well, you've got to think that the negative aspects of certain societies do create some sort of a rebound effect from those negative aspects. | ||
No shit! | ||
They didn't make rock and roll in Sweden. | ||
That's right. | ||
They didn't make hip-hop in fucking Denmark. | ||
That's right. | ||
They didn't make all these, like, you know, vaudeville and stand-up comedy. | ||
I mean, this all came from people of oppression, and that's why... | ||
Think about yourself. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I mean, think about, like, you growing up with a deaf mom, being poor, and all that craziness that you went through when you were a kid. | ||
Like, that kind of... | ||
All that... | ||
It pushes something through. | ||
It's totally true. | ||
I wouldn't go back and have been raised rich with normal parents. | ||
Not for a million dollars. | ||
No way. | ||
No, not now. | ||
Once you've already done it. | ||
But I wouldn't have wanted it to have been done in a different way. | ||
I like the trauma. | ||
Well, also, you know that you made your, well, a lot of people helped you, but you made yourself. | ||
Whereas if your parents were Trump, you know, or your parents were the Rockefellers or whatever, and they gave you this monthly stipend, you know, fuck, man. | ||
Who are you then? | ||
Who is Trump? | ||
He's the same version. | ||
He started from nothing. | ||
I mean, he started from... | ||
Two million dollars. | ||
From two million bucks from his father, who was one of the richest people in upstate New York. | ||
And now, who is he? | ||
What is he like when the lights are off? | ||
I wish I could have a fucking feed of Trump's brain when the lights go down. | ||
That's probably chaos. | ||
What is he thinking? | ||
Is he like, I'm killing it? | ||
Or is he like, what have I done? | ||
I think there's gotta be both. | ||
He doesn't drink and he doesn't do drugs. | ||
And I think there's gotta be a part of his brain that's pushing down the what have I done and reinforcing, doubling down on the I'm the greatest, I'm the best, I mean, that's why he kept saying about his inauguration numbers, so many people were there, and even when they told him that it wasn't the case, he fought it. | ||
Then when he kept parroting, not just parroting to friends, but doing it to the news, doing it to the press, that he got the largest number of electoral college votes, that's crazy. | ||
It's psychedelic narcissism. | ||
It's so far out there, it starts to seem like... | ||
Whoa, you're bending reality. | ||
And it actually is bending reality. | ||
He's done a fascinating job of just making people not know what's real anymore. | ||
And no one knows what's real anymore. | ||
And Syria is the ultimate example because it's unclear what is real there. | ||
No one knows what the right thing to do is. | ||
Who are we attacking and why? | ||
What are we trying to stop? | ||
You sent bombs to the people that are fighting ISIS to fight those people from doing chemical warfare on their own people, but then we also are fighting ISIS with them, and then it's just the whole thing. | ||
You're just like, I give up. | ||
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Yeah. | |
Yeah, well how about Ron Paul was saying that the chemical attack doesn't make sense, so certain, certain Republicans are actually looking at me, is Ron Paul technically Republicans more of a libertarian than anything, but they're looking at it and saying, like, this, this might not even been real. | ||
I mean, I just, well, I heard this great thing about how no one in Israel believes that Rabin was killed by Yigdal Amir, the Jewish guy, like, that they, they believe in that. | ||
Basically, hearing a conspiracy theory that widely believed in a country that isn't my own made me realize how wildly desperate for conspiracy theory everyone is. | ||
Somehow, the distance where it was like, oh, it's Israel, it's not really me, made me go like, oh, this is so interesting, like... | ||
Everybody wants to believe. | ||
It wasn't one hour until they were saying that the chemical attack by Assad was not real. | ||
Even though Assad has done gas-based chemical attacks on his own people before, and his father did before him, somehow this one was like, no, no, this is fake. | ||
It might be fake. | ||
That's what's so crazy and mind-bending. | ||
It might be fake. | ||
And yet, I don't buy any conspiracy theories anymore, because I know how desperate people are to believe them. | ||
Well, this was the same scenario that led Obama to make that speech saying that we need to go into Syria. | ||
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Right. | |
And the whole American people went, fuck that, because we were deep in the Iraq War, deep in the Afghanistan War. | ||
And that was when, I think that was 2013 or 14, but Trump made quotes. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
That he tweeted, like, what does the U.S. have to gain for going into Syria? | ||
We should be America first. | ||
And then winds up acting almost instantaneously. | ||
Yeah, I know. | ||
When it happens. | ||
But people keep dropping these, like, you said this bombs at Trump's feet, like he cares about intellectual coherence or hypocrisy. | ||
He doesn't care. | ||
He's a fucking rat trapped. | ||
He's trapped in a corner of a maze and he's going like... | ||
What the fuck do I do? | ||
Oh, I'll just do this. | ||
It's so transparent. | ||
Like, 35% approval rating. | ||
Everything is... | ||
You're collapsing under your own weight. | ||
You have the House and the Senate, and you can't get anything done. | ||
No one likes you. | ||
You're the worst. | ||
So what do you do? | ||
You fucking make something explode. | ||
It's just such a terrible recipe if something actually goes wrong. | ||
Oh, yeah. | ||
Like, Syria is a minor issue. | ||
No one died. | ||
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Totally. | |
They bombed some airfields. | ||
They ruined some, you know, some ground. | ||
I agree. | ||
Ruined some airships, some planes. | ||
But what happens if something really goes down and that guy is the figurehead? | ||
That is the difference between the Roman Empire and this empire, is that the Roman Empire didn't have the power to press a button and destroy, like, half the countries on Earth, and we do. | ||
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So that's the scary part. | |
Come to the Comedy Store this Saturday night! | ||
Yeah, let's wrap it up with depressing. | ||
Want to wrap it up with depressing? | ||
I'm doing a show on Comedy Central I should probably mention. | ||
Yeah, you briefly mentioned it earlier, but tell everybody what it is. | ||
April 18th we debut. | ||
It's called Problematic. | ||
Problematic? | ||
Yeah, I'm excited about it. | ||
Why do you call it problematic and why you look like Hitler? | ||
Because it's problematic. | ||
That doesn't even look like you. | ||
What a weird photo. | ||
You don't think? | ||
I think I look cute. | ||
You do look cute. | ||
Thank you. | ||
But you look like you're 19 years old and you still live with your mom. | ||
Yeah. | ||
I still live with my deaf mom. | ||
I'm still... | ||
Running in BART trains. | ||
Basically, it's a theme. | ||
Every week is a theme of some of the undercurrents of society. | ||
We're not talking politics. | ||
We're talking about the tectonic plates underneath them. | ||
So cultural appropriation, how the internet's changing our brain, the dark web, all these kind of like... | ||
A lot of the fun stuff that you like to go to, too. | ||
Just these big, big concepts, big ideas. | ||
And it's a talk show where... | ||
Oh, and the other cool thing is it's very Donahue. | ||
So we go out into the audience. | ||
Oh, nice. | ||
Let people ask questions and get up and say their piece. | ||
So you do it in front of a live crowd? | ||
Yeah, in front of a live audience. | ||
And so some of it's done in the field and then you bring it back and show it to the audience? | ||
Yeah, and so this week we're doing how technology is changing us. | ||
We have this guy Nick Carr that wrote The Shallows On and it's a couple of comedians to make it fun and funny. | ||
Basically, every week is a different topic, and we ask a question, and hopefully we get to the bottom of it. | ||
You should come on sometime, Joe. | ||
I would love to. | ||
What do you want me to do? | ||
I don't know yet. | ||
What do you think you would... | ||
Yeah, I'll send you all the topics and we'll... | ||
Yeah, we'll figure something out. | ||
Yeah, cool. | ||
Yeah, it's perfect for people that like this show because it's like real conversations. | ||
It's not like... | ||
It's an actual... | ||
I think people are desperate for that. | ||
Yes. | ||
I think you are actually kind of ahead of the curve on the real conversation thing, but I think people are like... | ||
Podcasts in general are... | ||
I think it's so interesting that we are simultaneously like... | ||
Making technology and entertainment shorter and shorter and shorter and shorter. | ||
And there's things like your show where they're like two hour episodes. | ||
It's like at the same time people are driven to distraction. | ||
They're desperate to get some depth. | ||
And hopefully that's what we'll find. | ||
Well, it just fills a different void that's available in entertainment, especially when people are driving. | ||
Like, if you're driving for long periods of time, which a lot of people listening to this right now are doing. | ||
Hi, everybody. | ||
How you doing, drivers? | ||
Tune in! | ||
If you're on a plane flight and it's going to take you 14 hours, you downloaded a bunch of podcasts. | ||
That stuff is the best. | ||
It's like you could just sit there and chill. | ||
And it allows you to enrich your mind because you listen to these conversations and you feel like you're there. | ||
Yep. | ||
And you also know this is like the thinnest sort of organization available. | ||
It's like as bare bones as it gets. | ||
This is lean. | ||
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Yeah. | |
But that's part of its beauty. | ||
And that's the difference between making a show and podcasting. | ||
Podcasting is awesome because you can find the kernel in like minute 48. You're like, oh, I found what that episode was about. | ||
Yeah, like we've done a couple of times in this conversation, go back to things and see how they're connected. | ||
We don't have an executive standing over our shoulder telling us to hit all the data points. | ||
Right. | ||
So, I hopefully, and by the way, Comedy Central has been, and I was just saying this as a company, man, they've been cool about saying, like, go get weird. | ||
They kind of have to now. | ||
Yes, I totally agree. | ||
They're locked into this spot like, oh my god, everyone's going away. | ||
There's no one left on television. | ||
Exactly. | ||
And they have South Park, which is the best, and then they have Tosh, which is a monster, and they don't have much else. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
They got another period. | ||
My lovely wife's show. | ||
What is that? | ||
Oh, you've never seen it? | ||
It's really funny. | ||
Is it on right now? | ||
It's on, yeah. | ||
It'll be its third season this summer. | ||
I wrote and produced that show for the last few years. | ||
It's been on for more than a year? | ||
Yeah, it'll be third season. | ||
I mean, there's too much TV, Joe. | ||
There is too much TV. It used to be when a comic had a show. | ||
It was a big deal. | ||
I know. | ||
It's crazy. | ||
A comic getting his own show is now a comic doing Comedy Central Presents or Premium Bland. | ||
It's like the same equivalent. | ||
And the young comics are so funny because they think they deserve a show. | ||
Really? | ||
This used to be me thinking I deserve to go to Montreal. | ||
It's like them thinking, where's my network show? | ||
Fuck you! | ||
That's so weird. | ||
It's weird. | ||
What a weird time, man. | ||
It definitely is. | ||
It is a weird time. | ||
But you have a podcast too, right? | ||
I do, yeah. | ||
I do a podcast. | ||
You still need to come on, too. | ||
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I'll do it. | |
Yeah, it's called the Hound Tall Discussion Series, and it's basically what led to this TV show on Comedy Central, which was that we get one expert on, and it's in front of a lot. | ||
What's called the Hound Tall instead of the Town Hall? | ||
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Yeah. | |
A little play on words? | ||
Yeah, a little play on words. | ||
Do you expect people to remember that? | ||
No, ill-advised, bad name. | ||
I'm willing to admit that. | ||
You know, about three episodes in, I said to the listeners, I was like, I'm willing to change this name. | ||
I'm thinking it's stupid. | ||
They all were like, no, we like it now. | ||
Oh, well, don't listen to them in the first place. | ||
They're the ones who are willing to listen to it with a crazy name. | ||
So, we basically get an expert on, and we have that person try to give a talk in his field of expertise while comics riff over it. | ||
Oh. | ||
So, it's like Mystery Science Theater meets a TED talk, kind of. | ||
Oh, that's cool. | ||
Yeah. | ||
Nice. | ||
So that's kind of what led to the TV shows. | ||
Every week is a different topic, and this is every episode is a different topic. | ||
So you enjoyed doing this Comedy Central thing. | ||
It was fun. | ||
Yeah, it's fun. | ||
I'm into, like you are, I'm into big ideas and big conversations. | ||
It's harder to have big conversations in bite-sized, you know... | ||
Is it half? | ||
Half hour? | ||
Half hour. | ||
I'd like it to get to be an hour. | ||
If all goes well, I'd like that to happen. | ||
Yeah, especially, I mean, you're dealing with things like cultural appropriation. | ||
I know. | ||
Just the opposing sides are going to take more than 15 minutes. | ||
Exactly. | ||
It's electric. | ||
The full tapings have been really fun and electric, and then you have to squeeze them into 22 minutes. | ||
So we're going to be releasing a bunch of extended stuff. | ||
We had MC Search on. | ||
It was really a great conversation. | ||
We had MC Search on to talk cultural appropriation. | ||
Did he keep it real? | ||
So real. | ||
Did he keep it really real? | ||
I mean, is this a bit? | ||
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Yeah. | |
MC Search used to have the worst talk show in the history of the known universe, and it was so bad. | ||
They would play clips of it on Opie and Anthony, and clips of him talking about, we're going to keep it real, y'all. | ||
But this conversation I had with Search was so... | ||
First of all, I love Search, and he was so... | ||
Our conversation about appropriation... | ||
I used to love him third base. | ||
Yeah, yeah. | ||
He's like the original guy. | ||
Yeah. | ||
And we were talking with like a 1981 white rapper about cultural appropriation. | ||
It was like a really cool, really awesome... | ||
Well, he appropriated the whole deal. | ||
He got a black wife and the whole deal. | ||
He went deep. | ||
Yeah, he went deep. | ||
He went deep. | ||
He said something so funny in this interview. | ||
I was like... | ||
Asking, is it different when white people appropriate? | ||
Just what we were talking about. | ||
Is it different when black people appropriate versus when white people appropriate? | ||
And he goes, he thinks for a second, he goes, well, white people as a whole... | ||
Are the devils of society. | ||
It was like an atomic bomb. | ||
I did not think you were about to say that. | ||
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Well, he's white. | |
I mean, it was just so bizarre. | ||
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Yeah. | |
But anyway. | ||
So every week is a different topic. | ||
Is he a smart guy? | ||
I think he's a very smart guy. | ||
One of the best storytellers I've ever met. | ||
Really? | ||
You gotta hear his story about how MC Hammer tried to have him killed. | ||
It's one of the greatest stories. | ||
unidentified
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What? | |
It's one of the greatest stories of all time. | ||
Is that real? | ||
Oh, it's amazing. | ||
It's on my old podcast that I did with Neil Brennan, The Champs. | ||
His episode... | ||
MC Searchers episode it's on there and it is one of the craziest stories you will ever hear in your life Wow, yeah, it's real MC hammer tried to have him killed listen Hey, listen to the story. | ||
I mean yes. | ||
You want me to tell you the story? | ||
I can tell you a version a quick version. | ||
Okay, basically He did an a song where they dissed MC Emmer's mom, right? | ||
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Oh, Jesus. | |
For some lyrical reason. | ||
I mean, it didn't even. | ||
And MC Hammer got angry and called the head of the Crips in L.A. to put a contract out on their life, right? | ||
Oh, my God. | ||
So Russell Simmons hears about it, right? | ||
And third base is in a flight from New York to California. | ||
And Russell Simmons hears about it and is like, oh, my God, they're going to kill third base, right? | ||
And so he calls the head of the Crips and is like, you have to take this, you have to dead this contract plan. | ||
Please don't kill my clients or whatever. | ||
And so the head of the Crips is like, I will end this hit on third base, but only if you can get me tickets to the Grammys sitting next to Michael Jackson. | ||
And Russell Simmons is like, oh my god. | ||
Okay. | ||
And then he calls Michael Jackson through some crazy series of events and somehow gets to Michael Jackson. | ||
And Michael Jackson says, okay, I'll let him sit next to me if blah blah blah happens. | ||
I don't know what it was. | ||
Some other weird twist. | ||
Bring some robot fuck kid dolls to my house. | ||
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Go to the future, find these fuck kids, bring them back. | |
And then third base... | ||
By the way, they have no idea. | ||
They're in the air. | ||
They're flying while all this weird machinations are happening. | ||
They land, and meeting them at the gate is a crip, a high-level lieutenant crip, right? | ||
And he's like, stay with me. | ||
There's a contract on your life, and the only way that you'll live through this trip is if you stay right next to me. | ||
So they're walking through LA and these Crips are coming up who haven't, because it's like the Crips, you know, they don't have like an infrastructure. | ||
No internet back then. | ||
Exactly. | ||
So these Crips like roll up and the lieutenant will be like, hey, Crippy Crip, you know, hand sign, stand down. | ||
And the Crip will be like about to kill him and then would go, oh, thank God. | ||
Search, I'm a big fan, man. | ||
Right on. | ||
Oh my God. | ||
Jesus Christ. | ||
Yeah, it's a crazy ass story. | ||
unidentified
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Wow. | |
Wow, MC Hammer jumps the gun, huh? | ||
Got a little crazy there. | ||
I mean, indeed. | ||
I don't know if it's true, but I know that he told that story. | ||
Wow. | ||
Anyway. | ||
Let's leave it at that. | ||
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Cool. | |
So when does your show start? | ||
April 18th, 10 p.m., after Tosh, The Monster. | ||
Oh, soon. | ||
That's next... | ||
Yeah, next Thursday. | ||
Thursday? | ||
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Thursday? | |
Yep, next Thursday is our first episode. | ||
Oh, right after Tosh. | ||
It's a sweet spot, too. | ||
Ooh, they're banking on Moshe. | ||
I hope so. | ||
I'm banking on me, too. | ||
Well, thanks, brother. | ||
Let's do this more often. | ||
I'll do yours next. | ||
Yes, please, please. | ||
Thanks, Joe. | ||
That was awesome. | ||
Bye, everybody. |