Moshe Kasher and Joe Rogan debate societal fragility, comparing Trump’s rise to the Soviet collapse and questioning systemic rights like free housing. They explore automation’s job displacement, with Kasher advocating universal basic income amid AI advancements. Cultural appropriation clashes—Rogan dismisses hair-style restrictions while Kasher ties debates to racial insensitivity—before diving into antisemitism’s historical roots, from medieval usury laws to Fritz Haber’s dual legacy. Kasher’s Comedy Central show, Problem, blends expert talks with comedic reactions, premiering April 18th after Tosh.0, offering deeper, unfiltered discourse in an era of shrinking attention spans. [Automatically generated summary]
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?
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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...
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.