April 27, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:52:05
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I'm not interested. | ||
| Five. | ||
| Four. | ||
| Three. | ||
| Two. | ||
| One. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| We're live, Thaddeus Russell. | ||
| You're going no headphones. | ||
| You're radical. | ||
| Well, you knew that. | ||
| Dude, I'll take the headphones off with you. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| Bring it. | ||
| It's on. | ||
| I feel better. | ||
| I feel liberated. | ||
| I know what the real sound is. | ||
| Dude, you look slim and healthy. | ||
| What have you been doing? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I got back in the gym and I'm doing boxing and kickboxing still. | ||
| You look active. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, you know, I'm in Oregon a lot, so the meth is awesome up there. | ||
| Oh, they do have good speed. | ||
| It's great for weight control. | ||
| I would think that Oregon would be more of like a calm down type of state as far as drugs. | ||
| I was just there for 420. I know. | ||
| Yeah, I emailed you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love it up there, man. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I would live there. | ||
| The winter is so goddamn depressing, but I would still do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| This winter has been just ridiculous. | ||
| It's rained for nine months straight. | ||
| There were like 500 inches in my county this winter. | ||
| But beautiful green. | ||
| Oh God, it's so lush. | ||
| When you get out of the PDX airport, you smell pine trees. | ||
| As soon as you walk out of the airport. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, it's amazing. | ||
| And after being in L.A., which is just basically like this giant desiccated turd, I mean, it's like, it's so nice. | ||
| Yeah, that would be like the best place to live. | ||
| Like, if you had a place there and a place here, you go back and forth. | ||
| You deal with total dry and total wet. | ||
| That's what I'm doing. | ||
| It'll kind of balance itself. | ||
| I think you nailed it, Mr. Russell. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| I think you've nailed it. | ||
| I'm commuting every week, and people say, don't you get sick of this? | ||
| I actually love it so far. | ||
| So far, yeah. | ||
| So my son is here. | ||
| He goes to school here. | ||
| In fact, he goes to school right near where we're sitting. | ||
| And so I have an apartment here and then a house in Salem, Oregon, and I love it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's great. | |
| Going back and forth. | ||
| I'm kind of like a shark. | ||
| I need to keep moving. | ||
| I feel claustrophobic and like the world is passing me by if I'm sitting in one place too long. | ||
| Have you always been like that? | ||
| I'm digging it. | ||
| Yeah, always. | ||
| I always need to be doing something and moving. | ||
| I am literally claustrophobic. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever done an isolation take? | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Can't do it? | ||
| When you talk about that, I'm like- You freak out? | ||
| That's my worst nightmare. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| And I'm also a little bit afraid of the dark. | ||
| I knew you were going to laugh at that. | ||
| You're going to call me a girl again? | ||
| No! | ||
| There's nothing wrong with being a girl, by the way. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| We'll get into that, Joe. | ||
| We'll get into that. | ||
| No, I mean, like, pitch black. | ||
| That freaks me out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| When you can't see anything, I can't stand that. | ||
| I don't mind a very dark room, as long as I can see something. | ||
| But if it's pitch black, I freak the fuck out. | ||
| You know what freaks me out? | ||
| Night vision goggles. | ||
| Well, that's what I want, right? | ||
| Then I'm cool. | ||
| No, they just seem so weird. | ||
| You put them on, you feel like you're in a horror movie. | ||
| Or you're in one of those scenes in one of those stupid Ghostbuster shows where they're down in the basement and they always have night vision on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you tried them on? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah, I have some. | ||
| Of course you do. | ||
| Of course you do. | ||
| For, like, nighttime boar hunting or whatever it is you do. | ||
| That is one of the reasons why they use them. | ||
| Yeah, but actually, for them, it's scopes. | ||
| They have night vision scopes where you see the infrared version of the pigs moving around. | ||
| It's very weird to look through them. | ||
| But people often mistake other things for pigs, like deer and dogs. | ||
| I like that idea. | ||
| I haven't tried them on, but I like that idea. | ||
| So, spelunking is definitely out for me. | ||
| Claustrophobic and afraid of the dark. | ||
| What is spelunking again? | ||
| Caving. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The idea of being in a tight, one of those tight little caves you have to squeeze your body through in the pitch dark and then your headlamp goes out. | ||
| I was just listening to a podcast about this family that owns a ranch in Texas and they had these small caves that these kids would explore in. | ||
| And then they allowed some cavers, some local cave explorers, to go and check it out. | ||
| And they crawled through this really small three-foot diameter hole, literally crawled through it, and found two football field-sized caves inside, and then found out that there's literally miles of cave systems inside. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, it's incredible. | ||
| I wish I weren't terrified of it. | ||
| Because I love all that other stuff in the outdoors, you know, backpacking and camping and hiking. | ||
| I do all that. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| But going underground is the worst thing. | ||
| Do you only backpack and camp when it's a full moon? | ||
| Uh, no. | ||
| I'm cool with the stars. | ||
| That's good enough. | ||
| Good enough? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Headlamps? | ||
| Like I said, only pitch black when you can't see your hand in front of your face. | ||
| That freaks me out. | ||
| And I don't understand why other people don't freak out about that. | ||
| Like, I'll wake up in a hotel room and I forgot to, or there's no light at all on for whatever reason, I'll freak out because I don't know where I am. | ||
| See, look what I'm already admitting to millions of people. | ||
| I just got here, man. | ||
| It's okay, man. | ||
| I'm already like a girl. | ||
| You're opening up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're opening up. | |
| You keep saying girl as if it's like a weak thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's very problematic. | |
| That scarred me the first time I was here. | ||
| You called me a girl. | ||
| It stuck with me. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I don't even remember doing it. | ||
| No, you just said you sounded like a girl just then. | ||
| Really? | ||
| What did I say about it? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| It's probably something really good. | ||
| Pretty girlish. | ||
| Pretty... | ||
| So, up in Portland, the Portland area, what are you doing up there? | ||
| You're teaching, right? | ||
| So, my girlfriend, who I live with, is a vice president at Willamette University. | ||
| And I teach part-time, just for the hell of it, at Willamette. | ||
| But mostly I'm developing all these other things. | ||
| And I'm mostly just enjoying Oregon. | ||
| Because, man, you can afford a hell of a house in Salem, Oregon, for what you were paying in L.A., let me tell you. | ||
| So we're just living a lot better. | ||
| First time in my life I've been in a house that I enjoyed being in. | ||
| Oh, that's nice. | ||
| Yeah, and so it's great, and it's given me a base to do these projects, my new podcast, and Renegade University, and write my book. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| I have my own studio in the house, and I have my own office in the house, so it's kind of the command center up there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Nice, nice. | |
| Yeah, so it's been pretty awesome lately. | ||
| I think it's fascinating how some places, like some cities, have like a mindset. | ||
| There's like a feel that you get from the city. | ||
| And I like the feel that you get from Portland. | ||
| I mean, it's like a, it's a aware city. | ||
| You know, and it's not a dumb city, but it's a small city. | ||
| They're aware. | ||
| You mean like woke? | ||
| They're woke? | ||
| They're woke as fuck. | ||
| Yeah, but it's like a white, it's like a white woke. | ||
| White woke. | ||
| Whatever white woke is. | ||
| They're a little pretentious. | ||
| I think somewhere along the line, Portland became a place that pretentious people gravitated to because they wanted to identify, like, I'm white and I have dreadlocks. | ||
| Here I am. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But they make really good food. | ||
| Those pretentious people? | ||
| Their food carts are out of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And coffee? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They make great food and those food trucks are out of this world. | ||
| Totally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| Portland is a great city. | ||
| Except, have you noticed they hid all the black people? | ||
| There's four or five of them. | ||
| I've only seen three so far. | ||
| They track them, like mountain lions. | ||
| I keep waiting to come across the cage where they keep them in one corner of the city, because then it's amazing, especially in the core of Portland, the main part. | ||
| You do not see any black people. | ||
| You don't see Mexicans. | ||
| You don't see Japanese people. | ||
| It is just white people, dudes with beards. | ||
| That's like a Pacific Northwest selling coffee. | ||
| You definitely see more black people in Seattle. | ||
| Seattle is pretty diverse. | ||
| Not fully, but a lot of Asian folks. | ||
| Portland? | ||
| Not even Latinos and Asians. | ||
| I'm like, how do you do that on the West Coast? | ||
| Where do you put all those people if you're on the West Coast? | ||
| They just pass by. | ||
| They just go, let's keep going. | ||
| Vancouver's right up the street. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's just keep going. | |
| Hey, you, you took a wrong turn. | ||
| Keep going. | ||
| Just keep walking. | ||
| Let's just keep going. | ||
| Go north. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, it's a small city. | ||
| I mean, I don't think Portland has more than a million people, right? | ||
| Does it? | ||
| Nah, I think it's like half a million. | ||
| Is it really? | ||
| I think something like that. | ||
| Yeah, it's small. | ||
| No, it... | ||
| The lack of diversity actually is the only problem I have with it. | ||
| And it's a fairly big problem. | ||
| That's an issue. | ||
| But otherwise, it's the best city in America. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| It's my favorite city in America. | ||
| Yeah, I should say. | ||
| It's pretty goddamn good. | ||
| Lawrence Krauss lives there. | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| So there you go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's two of us. | ||
| Two cool people. | ||
| Two cool smart people. | ||
| I don't live in Portland, right? | ||
| I live in Salem, which is an hour south. | ||
| But we're still in Portland a lot, so it's kind of... | ||
| Is that because of the University of Willamette? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And because it's way cheaper to live there. | ||
| And it's also really beautifully centrally located. | ||
| So we're an hour and 10 minutes from the coast, which is gorgeous. | ||
| Have you been to the Oregon coast? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| And then we're an hour and a quarter from the Cascade Mountains on the other side. | ||
| And then all around Salem is the Willamette Valley, which is like Napa Valley and Sonoma County meet Vermont. | ||
| It is so beautiful. | ||
| Just incredibly beautiful farmland all around there. | ||
| They make a lot of wine up there, too. | ||
| Incredible wine. | ||
| The Pinot Noir is the best in the world. | ||
| Yeah, but it's really pretty just driving through there. | ||
| So, man, it's... | ||
| Yeah, I'm telling you. | ||
| Also, Salem has Mexicans, so we do have a little diversity. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Because of all the farm workers. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| There's a... | ||
| Substantial population of Latinos. | ||
| Do you have legit Mexican food in Salem? | ||
| We're working on it. | ||
| We're working on it. | ||
| I mean, Salem has been like a dumpy town for a long, long time until just recently. | ||
| And now it's starting to pick up. | ||
| We've got some stuff going on. | ||
| And now we've got a good MMA gym there and a boxing gym just opened. | ||
| In Salem? | ||
| Legitimate. | ||
| Yeah, like Team Quest people, former Team Quest people. | ||
| What was the trainers? | ||
| Nick Gilardi. | ||
| He actually came up with Chael and Randy Couture. | ||
| He was trained as a wrestler by them when they were doing wrestling only, when he was a kid. | ||
| And then he became a champion wrestler, and then they went into fighting. | ||
| And he was like, okay, I'll do that with you. | ||
| And he's a major sort of Northwest MMA fighter. | ||
| Now he's like coach of the year in the Northwest. | ||
| Oh, great. | ||
| He's my coach. | ||
| We have a little—it's really good, MMA gym in— In Salem called Impact. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| Impact Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| So your knee is, we were talking about this before the podcast, your knee feels like... | ||
| It's good enough. | ||
| I really would love to start grappling. | ||
| I never have. | ||
| And I'm scared of it because of all the, especially the takedowns and the leg locks and all that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So I don't know. | ||
| But I'm still doing just stand-up boxing and Muay Thai kickboxing. | ||
| Have you ever done any yoga? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes, it's great for me. | ||
| Do you do it now? | ||
| I don't know if it's going to help my knee. | ||
| It will definitely help your knee. | ||
| I guess so. | ||
| I mean, stretching it helps. | ||
| Just strengthening. | ||
| And strengthening. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, just holding static positions, like static yoga positions, for your back and for your knees and your feet. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I'm a broken record with this shit, so I'll stop right here. | ||
| No, I love it. | ||
| People listening to this podcast are like, Jesus, he's going to fucking talk about yoga again! | ||
| I love it, yeah. | ||
| So we don't have to talk about that anymore. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I'm all about that. | ||
| Why are you drinking Gatorade, man? | ||
| Because I'm a... | ||
| This is not good for you. | ||
| It's got sugar in it. | ||
| This is terrible for you. | ||
| You might as well be drinking it. | ||
| Because I get dry mouth around you. | ||
| You scare me. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| I'm just kidding. | ||
| You're scared of the dark. | ||
| You're scared of memes. | ||
| I'm scared of a lot of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're scary. | |
| Look at you. | ||
| Mr. Muscles. | ||
| Listen, now that you're all leaned out, you're scared of muscle people? | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So Salem's, it's an interesting place. | ||
| It's a truly sort of like, it's Trump country. | ||
| It's like the heart of Trump country. | ||
| It's dudes with beards who are not hipsters, who drive pickup trucks for real and have a lot of guns. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They don't give a fuck, basically. | ||
| And it's not really a socially conservative place. | ||
| It's more of a kind of a libertarian thing. | ||
| It's basically, this is my land, don't mess with me. | ||
| Well, Trump was the libertarian option. | ||
| Kind of. | ||
| Most libertarians hated him. | ||
| Well, they would be better off with someone who's an actual libertarian, like Ron Paul-type character. | ||
| He's the only reason libertarians were attracted. | ||
| Well, there's two reasons. | ||
| But the main one was that they were attracted to him because during the campaign, at least, he was saying things that sounded like he was a non interventionist in foreign policy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's why I was at least interested in him. | ||
| I thought there was a possibility there. | ||
| Of course, he would like, you know, for 30 minutes, he would talk like Ron Paul about foreign policy. | ||
| And then the last 30 minutes of his speech, he would sound like an old Republican about how he wanted to bomb the shit out of people. | ||
| So, who knows? | ||
| But now, of course, I think what's happened is that the generals have taken over. | ||
| I think the establishment has just taken over. | ||
| Well, it seems like there's no way one person can run every single facet of being the president. | ||
| And especially not him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he's got a hundred different businesses worldwide that are constantly ongoing right now. | ||
| Well, he doesn't know anything about the world. | ||
| So, of course, he's going to rely on experts. | ||
| And he also, we all knew this all along, he loves generals. | ||
| He loves that thing. | ||
| And it's pretty clear that Mattis came in there and just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Took over his mind, and he said, okay, yeah, I guess I was right about all that shit. | ||
| Let's go kill some people. | ||
| Well, he's essentially said, I'm going to get out of their way and let the military do their job. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And, like, I know guys that are, like, re-enlisting because they're pumped. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| They think that the military, like Tim Kennedy, a UFC fighter. | ||
| He's re-enlisted? | ||
| Re-enlisted because he believes that the UFC, or the UFC, he believes that the military now has the backing and the support from the president and that this is going to be great and they can do their job now. | ||
| Does Tim Kennedy want to serve in combat? | ||
| Does he really want? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Really? | ||
| He wants to go kill and possibly die. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| He's doing that right now. | ||
| Because he believes in the cause. | ||
| He's back over there. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where? | ||
| Which part? | ||
| You haven't talked to him about it. | ||
| ISIS? What does he want to do? | ||
| Yes, he wants to kill ISIS. He's about ISIS. Oh, dude, he gives his address out to ISIS. Puts his address on the internet and says, fuck ISIS. Come get me. | ||
| I'd love to talk to Tim Kennedy. | ||
| Yeah, it's a long conversation, though. | ||
| I bet. | ||
| You would want six hours. | ||
| That's fine. | ||
| I'll do it. | ||
| You would want to take pee breaks and drink water and just get into this from top to bottom. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| Because you don't want the smoothed-out CNN seven-minute presentation in between two talking heads on either side. | ||
| You don't want that. | ||
| You want the long-form, who is Tim Kennedy and why does Tim Kennedy feel this way and military experience. | ||
| That's my podcast. | ||
| That's what I'm doing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Unregistered podcast. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| And it's kind of a... | ||
| Yeah, that's precisely what we do. | ||
| I'm interested in people's personal histories and how it's connected to their current ideas, right? | ||
| The roots of their political ideas, where do they come from? | ||
| So it requires people who are self-aware about themselves, and a lot of people aren't. | ||
| But so far, my guests are people who really have a sense of the connections between what happened in their childhood and their early development. | ||
| And what they're thinking now. | ||
| It's a really interesting thing if you can get people to do that, to connect those things, to weave them together. | ||
| So, I mean, Tim Kennedy might know where his ideas about serving in the military come from, other than, you know, my dad did it or whatever it was. | ||
| But that's what I'm interested in doing. | ||
| And this form, like what you're doing here, the long form, I love it. | ||
| It's so much better. | ||
| I think this is why I've... | ||
| You know, a lot of people who know me, I'd say most of the people who know me, know me from my podcast appearances here and elsewhere. | ||
| I've been on a lot of podcasts. | ||
| And I just, I'm just more comfortable with it. | ||
| I just think it's the best way to go. | ||
| I hate being on cable news where it's like, you know, two minutes or 30 seconds and get this complicated idea out right then. | ||
| And that's it. | ||
| And even radio. | ||
| I've done a lot of radio, which just sucks. | ||
| You know, it's the same thing. | ||
| 20 seconds, soundbites. | ||
| Even 20-minute interviews I always find frustrating, either as an interviewer or as a guest. | ||
| Even hour-long interviews. | ||
| Oh, totally. | ||
| I did an interview with Ron Miscavige. | ||
| He's the father of David Miscavige. | ||
| And we only did an hour and a half. | ||
| And I was like, man, if we did like three or four hours, I'd probably get deeper and deeper into this dude and find out... | ||
| Yeah, that's what you do. | ||
| I mean, so you go kind of, you're always going in and out of people's personal histories and their psychology and then into their ideas and into big abstract stuff and then history and philosophy and science, right? | ||
| You're going in and always back and forth and in and out, connecting those things, weaving them together. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| I think it's the only way to go. | ||
| You get the deepest understanding of people. | ||
| And it sort of makes it impossible to do what most people do, which is just put people in a little box and throw them away. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Dismiss them. | ||
| Oh, he's a libertarian. | ||
| Oh, he's a socialist. | ||
| Oh, he's a whatever. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, you know, he's Joe Rogan. | ||
| Oh, he's the UFC guy. | ||
| Gone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I'm sure people do that to you all the time. | ||
| Or he's Joe Rogan, the masculine, macho dude. | ||
| Not interested. | ||
| Bye. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Everyone's so complex. | ||
| Most people are. | ||
| And most people are not the same person who they were if you're pulling a quote from them from two years ago or five years ago or whatever. | ||
| Oh, exactly. | ||
| They're just not that person anymore. | ||
| Everybody evolves. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And you can box someone into some sort of a corner by like... | ||
| Not to defend him, but the grab-em-by-the-pussy speech from 2005. Great example. | ||
| You're boxing a guy in a corner who's trying to make another guy laugh on a bus, and he's just being gross. | ||
| Great example. | ||
| And then you take that and go, is this the guy you want for president? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, we could talk about that a lot. | ||
| I mean, I'm with you on that one. | ||
| I heard you talking about that the other day. | ||
| Yeah, Trump, I have a lot to say about that. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| So anyway, I think the podcasting thing, it's changing the game and it's so great. | ||
| Well, it gives people something to do while they're doing other stuff. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I think we're like 90% audio only downloads versus YouTube somewhere around. | ||
| So most people are either listening during their commute or while they're at the gym or a lot of people even at work. | ||
| They put on headphones while they're doing mindless bullshit. | ||
| But I think what it does is it humanizes people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Not the full humanity of a person, of course, but you get much more of who they are really and the complexities of them. | ||
| And so people talk about how we are all being siloed now because of the internet, right? | ||
| That we just go to the websites that agree with us. | ||
| There's a lot of that for sure. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| But I actually think the overall effect is just the opposite. | ||
| I actually think that we have much deeper understandings of people who are not like us because of things like this, right? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Because of the podcasts and because there's just much more exposure to people's ideas and personalities. | ||
| And there's more people talking in public, by the way. | ||
| I mean, just imagine that, right? | ||
| Like in the 1970s and 1980s, when you and I were growing up, there were three broadcast networks that all said the same thing on the news shows. | ||
| There were three that all said the same thing because the FCC wouldn't allow any competitors to come into the market. | ||
| I mean, they just wouldn't allow it. | ||
| And Rupert Murdoch broke that open, right? | ||
| And then since then, it's just been flooded. | ||
| So now we have how many channels, how many networks, and now podcasts. | ||
| So when I was coming up as an academic in the 90s, if your book didn't get reviewed in the New York Times, or if you were an author of any kind, and your book didn't get reviewed in the New York Times, you were not going to make a living as a writer. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| You had to get reviewed in the New York Times, and it had to be a positive review. | ||
| That was the only gatekeeper to success as an author. | ||
| Now, the New York Times is one of, you know, a hundred different places or a thousand different places that matter when you're writing books. | ||
| My book, Renegade History of the United States, was ignored entirely by the New York Times, and I know why, but it didn't really matter. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Oh, because it says all the things you're not supposed to say if you're a good liberal, left liberal, bi-coastal elite person from university. | ||
| Like? | ||
| Like Martin Luther King was a conservative and hated black culture. | ||
| Did he really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he was a very conservative person culturally, and he was basically an opponent of black culture. | ||
| He was opposed to rock and roll. | ||
| He didn't even mention jazz until late into his career, and only once he thought black people should sing classical music, European classical music, or gospel. | ||
| You know, very respectable, very Christian, very good citizen kind of stuff. | ||
| And he hated the flamboyant black preachers who were Whooping and hollering in their churches and speaking in black dialect. | ||
| He wanted all black people to speak correct American English. | ||
| He was opposed to a lot of dancing that was going on. | ||
| Just all the stuff that we love in black culture, Martin Luther King was opposed to. | ||
| It wasn't because he was just an uptight puritanical prick. | ||
| It was because of his strategy and his objective, which was to seek full citizenship, right? | ||
| And he understood, right? | ||
| In a way, it wasn't his fault entirely. | ||
| You have to prove yourself always in this country, historically, that you are just like white people to get all the good stuff, to get the vote, to get equal protection under the law. | ||
| So that's what his mission was. | ||
| Assimilation. | ||
| Assimilation has always been the ticket to full citizenship. | ||
| Man, it's just... | ||
| It sucks that that's even a thought, that the only way to achieve quote-unquote full citizenship is to ignore all the things that make black culture special, like comedy, like jazz, like rap, like just slang, just all the cool shit that black people have figured out, like the things to say that white people have ruined, like bro. | ||
| Bro used to be like a cool thing that black people say to each other, and now it's like an insult for a dummy, like a frat dummy's a bro now. | ||
| Well, just think about America now if black people had never been here. | ||
| What would it be like? | ||
| I'm not sure I'd want to live here. | ||
| We wouldn't even have blues. | ||
| So, like, what kind of music will we have? | ||
| Blues is the roots of all pop music. | ||
| All pop music comes out of blues. | ||
| Everything that's pop music that's not European classical music comes from black people. | ||
| I mean, the original roots, basically. | ||
| Of course, whites were involved in it. | ||
| You know, of course, all that music. | ||
| But all that stuff, the roots of it are in the slaves. | ||
| Well, even European rock. | ||
| Like Led Zeppelin. | ||
| Well, they borrowed it. | ||
| They stole a shitload. | ||
| Ask the Beatles. | ||
| They talked about the Stones. | ||
| Of course, the Stones. | ||
| They talked about it all the time. | ||
| They were like, you know, we are not the Rolling Stones without muddy waters. | ||
| Of course, Elvis. | ||
| Elvis said it too. | ||
| Yeah, all of that sort of stemmed from black. | ||
| It's fascinating when you really think about that. | ||
| So that's the whole history of... | ||
| That's African-American history, actually, is ordinary black people Who aren't interested in being just like white people and doing their thing, you know, since slavery, just doing their thing and being called niggers by whites. | ||
| And also, and this is what people don't know, civil rights leaders since slavery, like black political leaders who wanted citizenship, attacking them for their culture just as harshly as the Ku Klux Klan did. | ||
| And I'm not exaggerating. | ||
| If you look at what Frederick Douglass said about slave culture If you look at what W.E.B. Du Bois sometimes said about slave culture and black culture, then Martin Luther King, A. Philip Randolph, Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, all the way through, they are saying the harshest, nastiest things about black, working class, popular culture. | ||
| You could imagine. | ||
| But again, it was for this reason. | ||
| They wanted to convince whites that we are just like them. | ||
| So they'll let us in. | ||
| They'll let us sit at the table of America. | ||
| They'll give us the vote. | ||
| We can then become president. | ||
| And so, guess what happened? | ||
| They finally... | ||
| A guy came along who was black-looking. | ||
| But who lived in this perfect nuclear Christian family, wife, two kids, didn't drink, didn't do drugs. | ||
| He smoked, but he stopped smoking pretty quickly, right? | ||
| Very dignified, spoke perfect English, right? | ||
| And guess what happened? | ||
| He became our first black president. | ||
| So Obama is absolutely... | ||
| The apotheosis is a good academic word. | ||
| He's the pinnacle. | ||
| He's the full achievement of that long attempt by civil rights leaders, black political leaders, to assimilate blacks. | ||
| And they won in that way. | ||
| They got a president, but what else did they win? | ||
| Right? | ||
| In doing that, not much. | ||
| I mean, race relations now, are they better now? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Do black people still say stuff in their hip-hop songs that is not respectable, even more than ever? | ||
| I don't think black people are thinking, when they're doing their hip-hop songs, they're not thinking that they're representing all black people. | ||
| They're thinking they're representing their vision. | ||
| They're representing what they see on the street, what they see in their neighborhoods. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's always going to be the case, right? | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| People who actually are from those neighborhoods, where there really aren't any white people, if they're from the projects or they're from... | ||
| You know, these poor black neighborhoods that are famous, right? | ||
| I mean, by and large, and we know this from what they say in their art, you know, don't give a shit about what white people think about them, right? | ||
| They're not interested in citizenship. | ||
| They're not interested in being good Americans. | ||
| They're doing their thing, as you just said. | ||
| I mean, they're interested in representing, seems to me, they're interested in representing their aspirations. | ||
| And they're interested in having a good time, which sounds trivial to a lot of people, but it's actually revolutionary, right? | ||
| If you're interested only in having a good time and pleasure and succeeding and achieving things for yourself, that's actually not American because you're not interested in America. | ||
| You're interested in yourself. | ||
| So that's a person who's very unlikely to volunteer like Tim Kennedy to go serve in the military, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's very unlikely that that person will become a cop. | ||
| It's unlikely that that person will obey the laws, will obey the actual laws and then the cultural laws. | ||
| They're not going to be good Americans. | ||
| They're out for themselves. | ||
| And I think that's actually always historically, for more than 200 years, provided this alternative for white people. | ||
| We've always looked at that with this sort of split lens. | ||
| Part of us says, God damn, look at those primitive black people. | ||
| They're doing the bad stuff. | ||
| We're not like them. | ||
| We're better than that. | ||
| And always simultaneously, most or many white people have looked at it and said, hmm, that looks more fun than what we're doing. | ||
| Maybe we'll do that for a while. | ||
| Well, certainly young white suburban kids that grow up in these safe sheltered environments always adopt that sort of radical, badass, black rapper sort of listening to their music, wearing their pants low, like sagging, doing all that stuff, co-opting various aspects of black culture that seem to be dangerous. | ||
| You know who you just described? | ||
| Who? | ||
| My son. | ||
| Oh no! | ||
| No, don't say oh no, it's good. | ||
| Is he sagging? | ||
| I'm saying, I'm pro-wiga. | ||
| Your son sags? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does he sag? | |
| No, they don't sag anymore. | ||
| The new thing is these ripped jeans. | ||
| That's the hip-hop style. | ||
| Oh, they ripped their jeans. | ||
| I'm so behind the times. | ||
| They're kind of like fitted. | ||
| They don't sag, but they're like just shredded. | ||
| Almost like an 80s look. | ||
| And I said to my son, I said, you know... | ||
| Back in the 80s, we laughed at those jeans, but for a totally different reason. | ||
| And now that's the coolest thing that black people wear. | ||
| So he's doing all that. | ||
| He is fully immersed. | ||
| He studies rap lyrics. | ||
| He knows all that stuff. | ||
| How old is he? | ||
| He's making beats. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He's 15. Get him into martial arts quick. | |
| See, why? | ||
| Does he train? | ||
| No, he refused. | ||
| Really? | ||
| I tried to get him in there a couple times. | ||
| Good for discipline. | ||
| He met Joe Schilling, and I think that scared him. | ||
| Scared him? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Scared me when I met Joe. | ||
| Joe's a scary dude. | ||
| That was my first gym, and I walked in the first day, and I had never done anything like that. | ||
| And I walked in, and there was Joe, and I was like, okay, if people like that are going to be doing this, I'm not having any part of this, because he was just terrifying. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But when you get to know him, he's a teddy bear. | ||
| He's awesome. | ||
| Big ol' sweetheart. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
| Great coach. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love Joe. | ||
| So I just think for a young boy, like, it's a great way to sort your head out. | ||
| I think life is so... | ||
| If I didn't find martial arts when I was that age, who the fuck knows what would happen to me? | ||
| I started when I was... | ||
| I was just thinking about this. | ||
| I started when I was 41. Wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's amazing. | |
| I took my first boxing lesson when I was 41. Wow. | ||
| How's your double jab? | ||
| Church Street. | ||
| Really good. | ||
| Can you hook off the jab? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Hell, yeah. | ||
| And you started at 41? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hell, yeah. | |
| You got some speed to it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pop, pop. | |
| Yeah, I got a good jab. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| I'm told this. | ||
| What are you a tall guy? | ||
| I got some holes in my game. | ||
| What do you think about Klitschko Joshua this weekend? | ||
| It's a big fight. | ||
| Boring? | ||
| Those guys are boring. | ||
| Joshua's got nice power. | ||
| Joshua is not boring. | ||
| He's got great power. | ||
| His technique's okay. | ||
| He's not great. | ||
| I think Klitschko's got a nice jab. | ||
| He's a gold medalist in the Olympics. | ||
| The Klitschko's put people to sleep, Joe. | ||
| This is why the heavyweight In the heavyweight division, no one cares about it, right? | ||
| Put people to sleep the other way by being boring. | ||
| Yeah, being boring. | ||
| You don't mean by knocking them out. | ||
| But Joshua puts people to sleep the right way. | ||
| Joshua knocks people out, which is fun to watch, and I'm into that, but it's not... | ||
| I just love technique. | ||
| I'm a student of it. | ||
| So you're like a Lomachenko guy. | ||
| So thank you for bringing him up. | ||
| Vasily Lomachenko is the best. | ||
| Thank you for bringing him up. | ||
| We've got to talk about this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
God! | |
| Forget my career, podcast, history, fuck all that shit. | ||
| People who don't know, please go online right now and Google Vasily Lomachenko. | ||
| He might be the best boxer that's ever lived. | ||
| He might be. | ||
| I was worried that we were going to fight about this, but I think we're on the same page here. | ||
| He's on such another level with his footwork and movement. | ||
| I just can't come up with a comparable... | ||
| I mean, there's been some amazing boxers way back to Sugar Ray Robinson and Willie Pep and all those guys paved the way, but I feel like every Everything evolves, right? | ||
| Every combat sport, even art and music evolves to the current state it's at now, which you get the best of the best right now and you go, wow, they've learned from Ali and Sugary Leonard and Roy Jones and Bernard Hopkins. | ||
| And Lomachenko is, in my eyes, is the best. | ||
| The way he moves is insane. | ||
| And he's super aggressive. | ||
| He's not like... | ||
| Floyd Mayweather, who is arguably the best ever, you know, multiple-time world champion in multiple divisions, 49-0, only been like hit solid maybe seven, eight times his whole career. | ||
| I saw him once when he got a little rocked by Shane Mosley. | ||
| Shane Mosley, yeah. | ||
| Once. | ||
| And then Maidana cracked him once. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But that's like over the course of this spectacular career. | |
| But... | ||
| Much more defensive oriented, brilliantly defensive, very economical with his approach, but brittle hands, hurts his hands, breaks his hands a lot. | ||
| Not a lot of power. | ||
| Lomachenko is on you like glue, stands right in front of you and you can't hit him. | ||
| And he's going left and he's going right and he's in and he's out and you don't know where the fuck he is and he's lighting you up. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Here's why Vasily Lomachenko is now the number one pound-for-pound fighter in boxing. | ||
| What's that in? | ||
| Forbes? | ||
| Damn, Forbes. | ||
| So technically he can't be because his record. | ||
| He hasn't really been tested. | ||
| He's got eight fights? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I'm with you completely. | ||
| I'm just saying technically he doesn't have enough fights. | ||
| I don't give a fuck. | ||
| To be number one. | ||
| I know. | ||
| He's the best. | ||
| So let me just say, so here's my history with Lomachenko. | ||
| So, like, I forget, it was like four or five years ago, I thought Gary Russell Jr. was the greatest thing since sliced bread, and I still think he's just phenomenal. | ||
| He's a very good fighter. | ||
| Incredibly fast. | ||
| The fastest hand since Roy Jones, easily. | ||
| And maybe even faster. | ||
| Just, and technically just perfect. | ||
| I thought he was unbeatable. | ||
| I thought he was the next thing. | ||
| And he's still a great, great, great fighter. | ||
| I love him. | ||
| He fought Lomachenko, and I was like, who's this Russian dude? | ||
| I didn't even know he was Ukrainian. | ||
| Never heard of him. | ||
| And he tore, he took Russell apart. | ||
| Here's a highlight reel. | ||
| Look, he stands right in front of people, man. | ||
| He just has such brilliant movement, man. | ||
| I mean, he's like the perfect example of, like, new wave. | ||
| Like, this stage. | ||
| So that right there? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Sidestep movement. | ||
| Yeah, he does this. | ||
| It's a hop, actually. | ||
| He hops inside, and he'll throw a body shot off of it when he gets inside on you. | ||
| But he's basically standing at your side. | ||
| Boom, right there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did it again. | |
| Well, he's not like a brutal puncher. | ||
| Or hop in. | ||
| And you know the funny thing? | ||
| So I've been hopping around gyms lately, boxing gyms. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| He did it like three times in a row. | ||
| Genius. | ||
| And here's how I know. | ||
| Here's why I think that he is the next Ali, which is that just in the last year, every boxing gym I've gone to, people have taught Lomachenko's moves, like as a standard part of classes. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Meaning that he's changing the game. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's kind of what you were saying. | ||
| Well, you know, Mike Tyson did a lot of that, too, by the way. | ||
| Yeah, but people can't ever punch as hard as Mike Tyson. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can actually do some of this stuff. | ||
| Of course, he's a phenomenal athlete, Lomachenko is. | ||
| And not everyone can do this. | ||
| But there are some things here that you can do that have never been done before. | ||
| Like, in particular, that little hop step. | ||
| I had a coach call it the Lomachenko jump or something. | ||
| But you can do that. | ||
| You can just step in like that really quickly. | ||
| But people, for some reason, just never did it. | ||
| Well, Tyson did do it. | ||
| Tyson learned it from Customato. | ||
| Customato was teaching this way back in the fucking 50s. | ||
| But his style was... | ||
| Mike Tyson's style was so much different because he was throwing howitzers at you. | ||
| Lomachenko is not knocking anybody out with one punch. | ||
| He's hitting you with multiple barrage of punches. | ||
| They dropped him with a liver shot. | ||
| But the thing about what Lomachenko is doing with this steady barrage is very similar to what I've always said about Jiu Jitsu. | ||
| If you want to really learn Jiu Jitsu, learn Jiu Jitsu from a small man. | ||
| Because small men can't use strength and weight and all the physical advantages. | ||
| They have to use perfect technique. | ||
| So if you deal with guys like Eddie Bravo or Hoyler Gracie or Barrett Yoshida, like the really little guys are the guys who have this stellar technique. | ||
| Because they don't have the physical strength. | ||
| With Lomachenko, you've seen the same thing. | ||
| He's not a one-punch guy. | ||
| He doesn't have some Tommy Hearns knockout ability or Mike Tyson-type power. | ||
| So he's forced to have this brilliant movement and footwork, which is complete next level. | ||
| The footwork, I think, is the best of all time. | ||
| And now he's, you know, literally embracing the whole idea of him being in the Matrix. | ||
| He has Matrix shorts on now. | ||
| See, I like the Matrix comparison. | ||
| I think of him as the Nightcrawler. | ||
| Like, you know, he's just teleporting around you. | ||
| Nightcrawler from X-Men? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, X-Men. | |
| He just, like, shows up suddenly right next to you, right? | ||
| Oh, it's genius. | ||
| He disappears and shows up right next to you in a different location. | ||
| I mean, just right there, that little movement and the anticipation of the counter and already being two, three steps ahead of you. | ||
| That last fight against Sosa, have you seen that? | ||
| Yeah, I saw that. | ||
| That was even better. | ||
| He improved. | ||
| I was like, this is getting crazy. | ||
| He's so amazing. | ||
| Everyone should watch him. | ||
| He's on another level, man. | ||
| He's on a complete another level. | ||
| There's a guy like him in kickboxing. | ||
| Who? | ||
| Giorgio Petrosian. | ||
| Have you ever seen Giorgio Petrosian fight? | ||
| Yeah, he's the best, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, I love Petrosian. | ||
| He's some next-level shit, too. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| But he did lose one fight by knockout a couple years ago. | ||
| Yeah, badly. | ||
| Andy Ristie. | ||
| Andy Ristie. | ||
| By Daniel Elunga, is that who it was? | ||
| No, Andy Ristie. | ||
| Andy Ristie, that's who it was, yeah. | ||
| Well, Ristie's a brutal knockout puncher. | ||
| He knocked out Van Ristmelen, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Same year, I think. | ||
| Well, it's one of those things where a guy like Andy Ristie has so much power, if he catches a human being on the chin, you're fucked. | ||
| Yeah, not perfect technique, but man. | ||
| But nasty, nasty power. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wanted to talk about Jermaine Durandamy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Talk about her. | |
| I mean, because it's funny that we're talking about fighting. | ||
| I'm so happy. | ||
| It's all I want to do. | ||
| Well, this podcast really, you know, I don't know. | ||
| It's not real format to it. | ||
| We've all noticed, Joe. | ||
| Millions of us have noticed. | ||
| That's what is great about it. | ||
| What was I going to say? | ||
| No, I mean, it's funny. | ||
| I think the first time I was on here a couple of years ago, I said at the end that I wanted to be a surfer deep down, you know, like I love what I do and being a historian and all this stuff. | ||
| But deep down, I wanted to be a surfer. | ||
| Now, I don't want to be a surfer. | ||
| I want to be a boxing coach. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I really do. | ||
| Well, a lot of people that are intellectuals, a lot of people that live almost like a sedentary lifestyle because you're constantly in front of books or computer screens, they long for this sense of adventure. | ||
| I want to be a backpacker. | ||
| I want to go to Nepal. | ||
| Most academics, and maybe this is one of the reasons I had to leave that profession, or I'm trying to leave that profession, is that I've always been a physical person, too. | ||
| I've always been just in touch with my body in various ways. | ||
| I've always been into sports, playing them. | ||
| Doing stuff. | ||
| Most academics, I'd say, or at least a lot of them, seem to be completely cut off from their bodies. | ||
| They just don't care what's below the neck. | ||
| They don't care what they wear. | ||
| They don't care how they feel. | ||
| They certainly don't care how they look, many of them. | ||
| They don't talk about the body. | ||
| They don't talk about things like this ever. | ||
| Well, they look down on it. | ||
| Yeah, that's the problem is the looking down on it. | ||
| I think that's very short-sighted. | ||
| Like this conversation right now we had about boxing, if you just took that clip that last 10 minutes and you put that in front of, and you sent that to every historian in the country, I mean, my reputation would be done. | ||
| No! | ||
| I mean, it's already pretty much done. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Are you serious? | ||
| Why wouldn't I? I mean, they just think that you're a guy who appreciates boxing. | ||
| I love talking to people who aren't from that world when I tell them about these things and they're like, oh, of course that couldn't be. | ||
| No, it's that bad. | ||
| Well, what a silly world that is then. | ||
| It's that bad. | ||
| They would think less of me. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But yeah, no, I want to be a boxing coach. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if I can really make it happen professionally, but, you know, at least on the side, you know. | ||
| We'd have to have a couple fights, don't you think? | ||
| That's what I'm wondering. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I certainly can't coach pros. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But I mean, I'm talking about people sort of like at my level. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Classes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, people who spar. | ||
| Maybe some amateur fighters. | ||
| I mean, I'm working like a little bit with a guy in my gym who's trying to be an amateur boxer now. | ||
| But I'm not his coach. | ||
| I'm just saying. | ||
| I'm sort of like trying to coach. | ||
| Because he's brand new to the sport. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I just love it. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love teaching. | ||
| I love teaching. | ||
| And that's the thing about academia that I've always just loved. | ||
| And that's why I entered it. | ||
| Because I just felt like it was just natural for me, teaching people things. | ||
| Teaching is fun, man. | ||
| If you're good at it, but most people are not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So when you teach jujitsu, what you're doing is, and this goes for anything if you're teaching how to fix a bike, you're taking all these complex ideas, and this is what you're a master at, You take all these really complex ideas and you package them. | ||
| You break them down into little bite-sized components and then hand them over to the person. | ||
| You give them so that they can consume it and understand it instead of just saying, oh, that's a Japanese necktie. | ||
| Go ahead, do it. | ||
| Which is what you'll see a lot of teachers do. | ||
| Here's how you do a Japanese necktie. | ||
| No, go ahead, do it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| But you're like, okay, no, the elbow goes here. | ||
| I mean, a lot of jujitsu instructors do this too, of course, but like, you know, the elbow goes right here, an inch down there, and then the knees here, and then the right. | ||
| And so it's, but it's just like what I do. | ||
| I mean, you take these really complex, abstract concepts, you know, that, and you give them back to people who are completely new to them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You have to, you have to package it. | ||
| Not dumb it down, but distill it, right? | ||
| You have to like bring the essential components down and get rid of all the extraneous stuff and then just hand it over to them in this very clear, simple way. | ||
| And then you can give them the next part and then you connect that and then you connect that and next thing you know, they have this new radical concept of Martin Luther King or they can do a Japanese necktie. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's what separates someone who's a really good teacher versus someone who has maybe some real skill at something but isn't good at communicating. | ||
| Like breaking it down into a system, like a step-by-step progression system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, my coach I was talking about in Salem, Nick Gilardi. | ||
| I've got to give him a shout-out because he's awesome. | ||
| Powerful Nick. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| I said powerful Nick. | ||
| Yeah, he is. | ||
| Shut up. | ||
| He's one of the best coaches I've ever seen because he's really a coach's coach. | ||
| Like, he really cares about coaching and teaching. | ||
| He really cares about teaching. | ||
| And that's what he does. | ||
| Like, he'll stop. | ||
| Well, he said he was a Team Quest guy. | ||
| Yeah, he comes up. | ||
| So, Robert Follis, who's also an awesome coach. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| He started out with them, and now he's an extreme couture now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's worked with a lot of, like, top-level guys. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's when the sport was being invented, basically. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, so he was at the beginning of that as a kid. | ||
| Dan Henderson, Matt Lindland, Randy Couture. | ||
| I don't think it's about his context. | ||
| I think it's about who he is as a person, just like me. | ||
| No one trained me to be a teacher. | ||
| When I entered college, I had no idea I was going to be a teacher. | ||
| But I remember sitting in these college classes that kind of weren't very good. | ||
| And I remember that I spent a lot of my time thinking about how I would teach this differently than this guy was teaching it. | ||
| And then I realized, oh wait, I'm actually studying the teaching more than the subject itself. | ||
| How to communicate these ideas I was studying more than the subject itself. | ||
| And then I just, it dawned on me finally, it's like, oh, well, that means you probably should be a teacher. | ||
| And when I finally started doing it in graduate school at Columbia, I was teaching, you know, philosophy, actually. | ||
| And yeah, I just, I've loved it. | ||
| It was just my passion. | ||
| Do you find that when you teach things that it helps you better understand them, too, because you go over them from a real fundamental perspective? | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| Precisely, right. | ||
| So you don't – and that was the first thing I learned when I started teaching was that I thought I knew Plato really well, you know, until I started – until I knew that I had to teach him the next day. | ||
| And I was like, oh, wait a minute. | ||
| I didn't quite actually get that connection there between those two ideas in his book, you know. | ||
| Yeah, you have to. | ||
| I tell my students this all the time. | ||
| I said, you need to be so comfortable with this text that you can teach it to your roommate who's never read it before. | ||
| What that means is you have to think all the way through the ideas. | ||
| You have to go with your mind all the way through the ideas and then come back. | ||
| It's like martial arts or anything else. | ||
| You have to actually do the Japanese necktie all the way through and come back all the way through it, and then you can teach it. | ||
| All the way through my competitive Taekwondo career, I taught. | ||
| I taught at Boston University. | ||
| I taught my own school. | ||
| I taught classes. | ||
| I taught the entire time. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| And it helped me tremendously. | ||
| It helped me understand it. | ||
| And I didn't realize how much it helped me until I started doing jujitsu and I watched other people who started teaching jujitsu just jump ahead by leaps and bounds from where they were. | ||
| A good example is my friend Brent. | ||
| He was like a purple belt, and he was always at like a certain level, kind of a static level. | ||
| And then, not static, but you know, improving, but nothing crazy. | ||
| He was like everybody else, right? | ||
| Jiu-Jitsu's hard, takes a long time to get better. | ||
| And you're around other people that are also getting better, so it's hard to really measure. | ||
| But then, he started teaching. | ||
| And like teaching full-time and then all of a sudden I would roll with him and I'd be in great danger. | ||
| I'd be like Jesus and I had a conversation with him once after training with him like dude I don't know what the fuck you're doing but your game has jumped like four or five steps ahead. | ||
| I feel like I'm the same as I was six, seven months ago, and he was like years ahead. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he said it was all just teaching. | ||
| And I remember now that that was the first time I really felt confident as an intellectual, you know, as a... | ||
| When you were teaching the subjects? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| At once I had taught them, it was like, oh, now I actually feel... | ||
| I was always... | ||
| I mean, everybody's racked with insecurity, especially in graduate school, about these things. | ||
| You know, everybody feels like an imposter. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because all of us have 500 books that everyone else has read, that you should have read, that we haven't read. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I came from this little dipshit college in Ohio, and I was a C student in high school, so I had extra insecurity, but... | ||
| Once I started teaching it and forcing myself to, as you said, learn the thing all the way through it and master it, and then teaching it, that's when I felt, oh, yeah, I belong here. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I really do have some solid understanding of Plato now, and I really can do this thing. | ||
| You know, it's interesting that you're saying that, because that's a big issue with comedians, too. | ||
| And, like, as they're becoming successful, especially, they feel like frauds. | ||
| Like, everybody I know says that. | ||
| I've said it. | ||
| Everybody I know that sort of, like, started to make it, like, as they're, like, starting to headline and go on the road places and do television sets and things along those lines, you feel like a fraud. | ||
| When you're successful. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You feel like a fraud. | ||
| Because you'll look at yourself and then you'll look at Dave Chappelle or someone else, Chris Rock, and you're like, I'm a fucking fraud. | ||
| I'm a fraud. | ||
| I'm not that guy. | ||
| I'm a fraud. | ||
| I'm not Richard Jenny. | ||
| I'm a fraud. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| And then it takes a long time before you feel comfortable enough to say, I know what I'm doing. | ||
| In academia, it's called the charlatan syndrome. | ||
| We all feel like we're charlatans. | ||
| I think it exists in everything, in everything difficult. | ||
| I'm not surprised. | ||
| And I think it's also probably a hallmark of someone who cares. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| That's what makes you better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think every academic has that, but I think those who do are the ones who are interesting and get better. | ||
| Well, I think the worst would be the opposite. | ||
| Someone who's like super confident way before their time. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I mean. | ||
| Yeah, they're gonna suck. | ||
| There's a lot of that too though, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a lot of weirdness in academia, man. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| I can't imagine the stuff that you guys go through politically. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Because just you saying that you couldn't talk about boxing. | ||
| Because you would be thought of as a fool. | ||
| So that's the thing. | ||
| I know you're really interested in this, and I am too. | ||
| And there are some misconceptions. | ||
| Well, I shouldn't say they're misconceptions. | ||
| I would say that there's a distortion of what's going on. | ||
| And this is not to say... | ||
| It's actually to say that it's worse than you think it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| So what most people who are outside of academia think is going on is not quite what's going on. | ||
| What do you think we think? | ||
| It's something worse. | ||
| Well, I know because I've heard you and lots and lots of other people talk about it. | ||
| And it's not your fault at all because you're not there and all you do is get the media reports about it. | ||
| So I think what most people... | ||
| Well, I get it from Gad Saad and Jordan Peterson, too, who are professors. | ||
| And if you listen to them, actually, they themselves will talk about it a little differently. | ||
| But people still consume it differently because the news is all about the crazy thing that the 18-year-old said at Wesleyan or whatever. | ||
| But it's not the 18-year-old. | ||
| It's the 45-year-old that's teaching them. | ||
| And then sometimes the 45-year-old... | ||
| Yeah, okay, but here's the, so that stuff, that really sort of loony stuff, you know, that you hear coming out or protest, you know, people saying that they are gonna die because you said a word, that happens. | ||
| It does. | ||
| It's all true. | ||
| It's all there. | ||
| I've seen it, but I've seen it maybe at most one time a year in the colleges where I've been, maybe, not even, less than that, okay? | ||
| And if it were just that, that's not actually a big deal. | ||
| It's much worse than that. | ||
| What's worse is that there is a self-censorship going on that's universal and profound, constant, omnipresent. | ||
| Like, for instance, I never talk about my love for boxing around academics, or I'm very careful if I do, but it's not even that. | ||
| It's that we know that there are certain things that can't be said on a college campus. | ||
| And so we just don't say them. | ||
| Therefore, there's no need to police us. | ||
| There's no need to yell at us and scream at us and protest. | ||
| And what's the motivation? | ||
| For which? | ||
| For the people that are holding back on thoughts that maybe they would normally express, but they don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, here's what I think it is. | ||
| For the senior faculty who have tenure, meaning lifetime appointments, cowardice. | ||
| That's all it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| I think they're cowards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you are an adjunct like me with no job security, or if you're an assistant professor up for tenure, and if you don't get tenure, you have no career, I don't blame them. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| That's what I've done, too. | ||
| I've policed myself, because you have to to stay in the game. | ||
| If you have tenure, lifetime appointment, you're a senior professor, you make the decisions there on curriculum, hiring, and firing, and tenure. | ||
| The faculty make those decisions. | ||
| And you don't challenge these crazy ideas in any way. | ||
| Or if you police yourself, you stop yourself from saying things that you think are right, that you believe in. | ||
| You're a coward. | ||
| I'm sorry. | ||
| Those people are cowards. | ||
| I've seen it. | ||
| It's just overrun by cowards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I mean this. | ||
| They are very. | ||
| So here's the thing. | ||
| I can't prove this. | ||
| This is just I'm just saying this is this is my belief. | ||
| But I think it's pretty well informed because I've been around these people a long time. | ||
| And in part, I share this. | ||
| The I think the worst fear of all those people is being called a racist or a sexist publicly. | ||
| I think that is their version of being in a cave crawling on their bellies in the pitch black. | ||
| I think that's their worst fear. | ||
| And it's not entirely irrational, right? | ||
| You will be publicly shamed. | ||
| The whole campus will think you're a racist, even if you're not. | ||
| You might even make the media. | ||
| And then the whole world thinks you're a racist for a minute. | ||
| But you're not going to lose your job if you have tenure, unless you actually did say something that's truly racist. | ||
| It's just cowardice. | ||
| I think that's what we need. | ||
| We need those professors, the ones with the power. | ||
| And I'm talking about they have absolute power on these campuses, right? | ||
| These aren't even like politicians who have to go up for a vote. | ||
| They're there forever, unless they basically kill somebody. | ||
| They need to stand up now. | ||
| I'm not going to say what I want. | ||
| In my classrooms. | ||
| And on Twitter. | ||
| Because people have been punished for that, too. | ||
| Well, they're trying to get him to stop doing his YouTube lectures. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Which is fascinating. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| Because they're very measured. | ||
| They're long form. | ||
| He gets to expand on his thoughts as much as he likes. | ||
| He's very, very informed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Again, I have major disagreements. | ||
| What is the disagreements? | ||
| Gender and postmodernism, I think he's completely off, but, you know. | ||
| How so on gender? | ||
| So he, and I know you agree with him on this, I think. | ||
| Well, maybe, I don't know. | ||
| I'm not sure, but, you know, it's this idea that there just are two genders, that's it, and they're attached to biology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I don't think that. | |
| Good, okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| He seems to think that. | ||
| I think there's a spectrum of humans in every single aspect of being a person. | ||
| I should say I heard your conversation with him, and I could see, and this was interesting to me, it was exciting, because I could actually see you moving in a direction that I found to be much more interesting than his, which is closer to mine, which is, yeah, that it's fluid. | ||
| Well, there's feminine men, there's masculine women. | ||
| Go to Thailand. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| Go to Thailand. | ||
| In fact, here we go, merging all these topics together, one of the top Muay Thai fighters recently, I don't know if she's still fighting, is a ladyboy in Thailand, you know? | ||
| Well, once she got the operation, her performance dropped off pretty radically. | ||
| But that's just a lack of testosterone. | ||
| And I know your thing about Fallon Fox. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I agree with you there. | ||
| So here's the thing. | ||
| It's a different story. | ||
| I totally agree with you on that particular thing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whether she should have been allowed to fight Well, it's not that she should have been allowed to fight. | |
| I think she should be allowed to fight. | ||
| Women? | ||
| As long as the women know that she used to be a man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fine too. | |
| The problem was, for the first two fights, she didn't disclose it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because she said it was a medical procedure and she didn't have to give up the personal details of her medical procedure. | ||
| I say that's bullshit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| I say, well, you're dealing with a chromosomal issue. | ||
| You're dealing with the fact that you have a different bone structure. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Different mechanical advantages. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And 30 years of testosterone in your body. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's just not the same. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But as long as someone knows, look, I'm fine with Jermaine Durandamy. | ||
| She knocked out a man. | ||
| I don't know if you ever saw that fight. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Do you think she's juiced? | ||
| She's not juiced, is she? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| She's just fucking badass. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Awesome. | |
| Yeah, she's just awesome. | ||
| She's just fucking badass. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if she's taken anything in her entire career. | ||
| It would just be pure speculation. | ||
| She doesn't look like she has, but that doesn't mean anything either. | ||
| But she's so fucking badass and so technical and so tough that she's fought men, but she knew they were a man going in, she made a decision, just like I think you should be allowed to skydive, just like I think you should be allowed to ride bulls. | ||
| I don't think it's smart, but you should be able to do whatever the fuck you want to do. | ||
| I'm all for freedom of expression, of participation in any sort of dangerous activity. | ||
| My issue, 100%, was that people are trying to pretend that there's no advantage whatsoever. | ||
| And that's crazy. | ||
| That's silly. | ||
| So the thing is, within that framework, within the rules we are operating in, right? | ||
| Whether it's in fighting or whether it's in this particular society. | ||
| Or the wrestling girl in Texas. | ||
| Yeah, I read all about that too. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's a particular rule. | ||
| You are agreeing to play a particular game, right? | ||
| And you're just breaking the rules. | ||
| That's all. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I mean, you have a body. | |
| They're letting them break the rules. | ||
| And I think a lot of it is people worried about being called transphobic or homophobic or in any way prejudiced, where they're allowing certain people to compete. | ||
| Like this woman in Australia, the trans woman in Australia that just broke all these world records in weightlifting because she was a fucking man her whole life. | ||
| It all of a sudden became a woman. | ||
| It's just killing everybody and weightlifting. | ||
| And then there's the runners in, I think they're from Kenya or South Africa. | ||
| No, the one from South Africa in particular. | ||
| I forget her name. | ||
| What do you mean the one that's like a hermaphrodite? | ||
| Well, I don't know what she is, but she's broken every record by like, you know, huge, insane amounts. | ||
| I think she's just a woman with an abnormally large amount of testosterone. | ||
| I think they've actually done chromosomes. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| When I saw her in the Olympics, it just jumped out at me. | ||
| Pull that up because I'm pretty sure that that woman actually has been tested, and then there was a real issue behind it, and she felt terrible about it because it was just the way she was born. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well, again, the spectrum. | ||
| Look, there's men that have tremendous amounts of testosterone, and there's men that have almost none. | ||
| That's actually the major point we need to talk about. | ||
| You're totally on the right track there. | ||
| I totally agree with that. | ||
| That's the most important thing, which is that there's a spectrum, right? | ||
| 50% of the world is male and 50% is female. | ||
| Nonsense. | ||
| Right, thank you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's black and white. | |
| Nonsense. | ||
| I say to my students, I say, okay, there's 7 billion people in the world. | ||
| Okay, imagine in your mind lining all of them up, you know, naked in front of you. | ||
| How many sexes do you see? | ||
| This is what I want you to do. | ||
| Get a picture of Yoel Romero and put it next to a picture of Andy Dick. | ||
| Tell me they're the same thing. | ||
| Tell me this is even. | ||
| They're both men. | ||
| Tell me it's even. | ||
| It's nonsense. | ||
| I mean, it's chaos. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's like, have you ever heard a guy on the street say, man, that's a lot of women? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that suggests there are women who are less women to them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sort of. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| There's a spectrum. | ||
| And there's also a spectrum in sizes. | ||
| I mean, that's why there's weight classes. | ||
| So let me ask you this. | ||
| Okay, so let's push it a little further. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, so far, you're doing very well. | ||
| Oh, in your eyes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Some people are screaming at their fucking computer right now. | ||
| Oh, believe me, I know. | ||
| Fucking commies. | ||
| Believe me, I know. | ||
| Robin's going homo. | ||
| So that's... | ||
| Well, no, I think you already are. | ||
| I think you already went all the way, actually. | ||
| I mean, so what... | ||
| There's two things. | ||
| There's the Jordan Peterson view. | ||
| I don't think he has that view. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hang on. | |
| Let me put it out there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What I think he's saying, which is that gender is fixed and biologically determined. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he does believe that. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| That's what I would call sort of the traditional conservative conventional view. | ||
| Those are both men. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Or not. | ||
| Or, you know what? | ||
| Or, like, there's more than two categories in the world, right? | ||
| And so Andy Dick would be one, and Yul Romero would be another. | ||
| And where would you put me there? | ||
| I mean, I'm neither one of those guys. | ||
| You're in the middle there. | ||
| I'm neither one of them. | ||
| Well, see, the deal is both of them can procreate with women. | ||
| Okay, so technically they're both male. | ||
| But a whole lot of people who are called men cannot procreate with women. | ||
| A whole lot. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| You mean trans women? | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Trans men? | ||
| They can't. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| So they don't develop sperm? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Is that really common? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Weren't you tested when you were trying to get pregnant? | ||
| No, I just knocked her up, dude. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| Well, maybe I wasn't either. | ||
| But anyway, it certainly was a thing. | ||
| Just shot them in there and watched the fireworks. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| See, there you go. | ||
| See, you're more of a man. | ||
| You've just proven, yet again, that you're more of a man. | ||
| There's the woman. | ||
| Yeah, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Well, when you... | ||
| Yeah, that's not a great picture. | ||
| It doesn't give you a sense of how... | ||
| It does, though. | ||
| Look at the thighs and the bulge. | ||
| Yeah, but she... | ||
| Look at the bulge. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well... | |
| Three times as high as most women. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Okay, so... | ||
| Reports leaked out. | ||
| That doesn't really mean anything, no. | ||
| I don't think she's ever really been tested. | ||
| I believe she has. | ||
| See if she's been tested. | ||
| What does the test say? | ||
| But it leaked. | ||
| She was subjected to sex verification test after she won the world championships in Germany, and what does it say? | ||
| Yeah, leaked. | ||
| The results were supposed to be confidential, but reports leaked out that she had testosterone levels three times as high as most women. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Other intimate details about her anatomy were also reported. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Semea became targeted... | ||
| Semenya? | ||
| Semenya? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How brutal. | ||
| Your first name is... | ||
| The first part of your name is semen. | ||
| Seaman-ya became targeted with abuse on social media. | ||
| But what does it say? | ||
| So is it saying that she's a hermaphrodite? | ||
| Because they were talking about her... | ||
| You know what this is? | ||
| The clitoral size, maybe? | ||
| It's the equivalent of pretty much every article written about Trump by the New York Times. | ||
| Why? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| A report was leaked by, you know, senior officials said, where's the actual evidence of any of this stuff? | ||
| I don't see it. | ||
| Yeah, what is it? | ||
| It doesn't say anything. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| So, she passed the test. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| She must have passed the test. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| I think... | ||
| My name is Seaman. | ||
| That's brutal. | ||
| If I were a woman athlete, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I would want rules established... | ||
| It's like I would want rules established defining the physical characteristics of any of my potential opponents, right? | ||
| So it could be whatever, bone density, muscle mass, you know, testosterone levels, you name it. | ||
| You could probably speak to this better than I could, but I'm sure there's all sorts of ways you could actually define that pretty precisely. | ||
| And you can test those things, and you can say, okay, you get to be in this. | ||
| It's like weight classes in fighting. | ||
| It's no different, really, right? | ||
| I mean, you're not allowed to fight someone who's 30 pounds lighter than you are. | ||
| And so you could do that in any sport. | ||
| You could say, right, if you're above a certain height or above a certain weight or have this much muscle or that much testosterone, you're not allowed in this category. | ||
| And there's nothing wrong with that. | ||
| There's nothing sexist about that. | ||
| There's nothing anti-trans about that. | ||
| It's just a different category. | ||
| But that's all that matters, right? | ||
| The problem was that Fallon Fox had, as you said, more muscle, more testosterone, all these physical characteristics that were fundamentally different than all of the other women fighting in that category in that particular game. | ||
| That's all you gotta do. | ||
| Well, the problem is that you can do damage to the person. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It's not as simple as playing basketball against someone who had more testosterone. | ||
| Yeah, it's terrible to do that. | ||
| But there's also a type of thinking that's involved in discussing this where you have to follow a line of thinking. | ||
| And if you don't follow a line of thinking, you're transphobic, you're a hateful person, you're a bigot. | ||
| And that line of thinking is not science-based. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| When you talk to board-certified endocrinologists, when they talk about trans people, One of the things that they talk about is the fact that when you take estrogen, it actually maintains bone density. | ||
| It's the reason why they give estrogen to women who have osteoporosis. | ||
| So this idea that your bone density decreases when you go from being a man to a woman, it's bullshit. | ||
| You're taking testosterone, your bone density is going to stay the same or get thicker. | ||
| But if you're taking estrogen, your bone density is also going to maintain. | ||
| It's going to help you maintain. | ||
| So when you remove the body's ability to produce testosterone There was a whole article in Bloody Elbow, MMA, by this board-certified endocrinologist, Dr. Ramona Krutzik, and what she did different than everything else, all these other articles, is she's not a gender reassignment surgeon, okay? | ||
| All these other people that are commenting on this have a vested interest in it being completely neutral. | ||
| There's all these people that are trans people that are commenting on it, and they're doing it from a very biased perspective. | ||
| Because we're not talking about mountain biking, which there was a woman who used to be a man who dominated mountain biking, and it became a giant issue with people. | ||
| They first supported her, and then she was winning by such enormous margins. | ||
| They were like, well, what the fuck? | ||
| Same as the woman in Australia that's the weightlifter. | ||
| This is different. | ||
| This is fighting. | ||
| And I think fighting, uniquely... | ||
| Fallon Fox almost killed that woman. | ||
| She beat the shit out of a few girls. | ||
| But then she lost to Ashley Evans-Smith, who is a biological female. | ||
| You know, so you can beat someone like that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| But again, Ronda Rousey would probably beat the fuck out of most 135 pound men in the world that she meets. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| You know, it's just a matter of skill level. | ||
| It's no different than PED, like banning PEDs. | ||
| We want to do that, don't we? | ||
| It's the same thing. | ||
| It's altering the body's chemistry, its abilities, right? | ||
| And so you don't want to compete against someone who has that difference. | ||
| Unless you know, right? | ||
| Unless you know. | ||
| Or unless you're allowed to do the same thing, then it's all fair. | ||
| But you couldn't. | ||
| The woman would have to take testosterone and balance it out, and then you'd have to find out how would you balance out 30 years of your body naturally producing testosterone, increasing your ligament strength, increasing your tendon strength. | ||
| The mechanical advantages of male hips are very different when it comes to kicking, when it comes to certain types of movement. | ||
| Women's hips go out and then their legs kind of come in at an angle, and it's not the best for kicking. | ||
| It's not the best for a lot of different activities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I would just say that a trans woman is absolutely, in my view, a woman. | ||
| Fine. | ||
| That's their identity, and I respect that, however they want to identify. | ||
| Because the category of woman, as you said, is so fluid. | ||
| I'm not going to say there's any absolute about that either, that it can change, and it comes from her ideas, but still, I respect that, and I'll call you a woman, I'll treat you like a woman. | ||
| But that means we have to change the sports, right? | ||
| And we have to have just different categories. | ||
| Instead of woman sports and man sports, we need to have, and woman and man categories in those sports, we need to have different categories that are about people's physical composition. | ||
| What you're made up of, right? | ||
| So just like weight classes and PEDs, there's no difference to me. | ||
| Well, or there could be the argument that a person, a trans woman, is a woman. | ||
| But when you're talking about athletic competition, you're talking about a very biological thing. | ||
| I'm saying if you take... | ||
| You might have to say that someone has to be a biological female to compete against females. | ||
| But I'm saying if you take the gender out of the sport, right? | ||
| If you stop calling these gendered names, then it's definitely not a trans issue. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| It's just about what your body's made up of. | ||
| So, for instance... | ||
| So, instead of just weight classes... | ||
| Like, Jermaine Durandamy is pro... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Well, Ronda Rousey, more likely, is probably made up, just physically, more like closer to a man, closer to Yoel Romero than Andy Dick. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| She's gonna find us, and she's gonna find you. | ||
| Gosh, I hope so. | ||
| Someone likes to be hit. | ||
| Yeah, really. | ||
| Choked out real fast. | ||
| Yeah, so that means I would just say there should be a category in the sport for people who are made up of that composition, and that could be people that the society identifies as men or who identify as women or whatever. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| That's a slippery slope. | ||
| Why? | ||
| There's a lot of work there. | ||
| How would you define it? | ||
| What parameters would you use? | ||
| Bone density? | ||
| Well, you know, a lot of African-American women have similar bone density to white males. | ||
| So does that mean you should be able to fight black chicks? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It depends, right? | ||
| So, well, no, actually, they kind of are doing it. | ||
| Anna Wolf might fuck you up. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| I'm not messing with Anna Wolf. | ||
| Even though she's, like, what, 60 years old? | ||
| She could still crush me. | ||
| She's probably 50. She could crush me. | ||
| No, but, I mean, they are doing it. | ||
| In fact, we just saw this with, what's her name? | ||
| Castor Samania? | ||
| Oh, what are they doing with her? | ||
| Well, it's the thing about testosterone levels. | ||
| But what are they doing? | ||
| Are they making her... | ||
| No, there's a number for testosterone that you have to be below, right, to compete in that sport as a woman. | ||
| So that's what I'm talking about. | ||
| Just add more categories, not just testosterone. | ||
| You have to have... | ||
| That's what this says. | ||
| If your testosterone goes above a certain level, you're not allowed to compete as a woman. | ||
| So I'm saying, have that category and add more categories like that. | ||
| And don't call it woman and men. | ||
| Just say it's category X. You get to compete in this category if your testosterone... | ||
| Yeah, but do you see what they're saying though? | ||
| But it's so ridiculously loose. | ||
| It's saying a female with hypo-androgynism who is recognized as a female in law shall be eligible to compete in women's competition in athletics provided that she has androgen levels below the male range. | ||
| Like, all you have to do is just be like a couple notches below the male range, which is... | ||
| Way above! | ||
| But I'm saying, that's all objectively determined. | ||
| You can do that. | ||
| They're trying to get her to take suppression medication or... | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is all proving my point. | ||
| These are objectively determined. | ||
| So they're making her tone it down. | ||
| We have numbers, right? | ||
| We say, if you hit this number for this category, you don't get to compete here. | ||
| But this is so rare. | ||
| I mean, she has a disease, essentially, where she produces too much testosterone. | ||
| But it would apply to trans people, is what I'm saying. | ||
| But would it? | ||
| Because even so, you're still dealing with the mechanical advantages of the male frame, the wider shoulders, especially when it comes to hitting. | ||
| We could do that, too. | ||
| We do it with weight. | ||
| We do it with weight already. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| Height? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Boy, a lot of work there. | ||
| In fact, I've thought about that. | ||
| Have you? | ||
| Well, look, I'm sure you have, too. | ||
| Like, in weight classes, right? | ||
| Like, I have a huge advantage. | ||
| I always use it. | ||
| I'm 6'1", 165, and I have really long arms. | ||
| So, like, most of the time, people can't get inside my jab. | ||
| Like, I just put it out there. | ||
| And it's just a thing. | ||
| I often feel like this isn't really fair, in a way. | ||
| You know, I don't have to be as good as they are. | ||
| I can be looser. | ||
| And it's true for a lot of fighters. | ||
| But once they get inside on you, they have an advantage. | ||
| Like Mike Tyson used that advantage of being 5'10 on a lot of fighters. | ||
| I don't know if it was an advantage. | ||
| I think he just was really good at overcoming it. | ||
| I think there's an advantage in fighting and having shorter arms and being lower. | ||
| He did the peekaboo past the jab. | ||
| He maximized the style. | ||
| Really, really well. | ||
| He did that thing. | ||
| As did Rocky Marciano. | ||
| And then he had a really good way of slipping the jab and moving constantly until he was inside on you and then he would crush you with his huge left hook. | ||
| But once he's there, he doesn't have an advantage on you. | ||
| He's just there and he's Mike Tyson. | ||
| But you don't think it's harder for a guy with long-ass spider arms to punch a guy who is in tight on you with short arms and is throwing shots to the body like Tyson would do? | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think there's advantages, as long as you're physically competent, there's advantages in particular movements and positions to all sorts of different body styles. | ||
| It's very true in jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Guys with long arms and long legs in jiu-jitsu have massive advantages with chokes. | ||
| You guys can get darses and guillotines and triangles easier, but you can also get armbar easier. | ||
| There's mechanical advantages in arm barring you. | ||
| There's some weird advantages to being like a Husamar Paul Harris, stocky, short guy. | ||
| Well, how about basketball? | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Oh, it's all advantages in Utah, right? | ||
| And in fact, there are leagues, actually there might be professional leagues, which are six feet and under leagues. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Many leagues. | ||
| Many people. | ||
| This is very common because most people are under six feet tall, right? | ||
| So who could never play in the NBA, even though they're amazing basketball players, but they just don't have the arm length and they don't have the height and all that. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| So we just need more divisions. | ||
| The UFC should have like, you know, welterweight should be, there should be heights within it too. | ||
| Isaiah Thomas was only 5'9"? | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is a current Isaiah Thomas. | |
| He's a really good player for the number one East team in the East. | ||
| He's fantastic. | ||
| There's a lot of guys that are under six foot, though. | ||
| He's a great, great player. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They're around six foot. | |
| They get listed higher, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They cheat. | |
| Interesting. | ||
| So he's sort of the exception that proves the rule. | ||
| He's 5'9", but he's really successful. | ||
| Well, you remember Muggsy Bogues? | ||
| Yeah, he's 5'3". | ||
| Wasn't he like 5'6", or something like that? | ||
| 5'3". | ||
| 5'3"? | ||
| Muggsy was 5'3", and dunked. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, he didn't dunk. | |
| Yes, he did. | ||
| 5'7". | ||
| No, I'm pretty sure... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Muggsy never... | |
| Pull it up, Jamie. | ||
| Jamie's going to jack you in this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is my wheelhouse. | |
| You're in Jamie's wheelhouse in a big way right now. | ||
| I'm pretty sure he dunked. | ||
| Okay, Muggsy Bogues dunk. | ||
| It may not have been a super clean dunk, but it was a dunk. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| Let's see if he dunked. | ||
| We'll go with a video. | ||
| That's my life goal, was to say, pull it up, Jamie. | ||
| Okay, this is about Webb. | ||
| Does it have a video of him dunking? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't think so. | |
| I've never seen it in my entire life. | ||
| You're going to want to Google Muggsy Bogues dunk. | ||
| Yeah, I would have seen it in my life. | ||
| Google Muggsy Bogues dunk. | ||
| He did Google that. | ||
| Boom, right there. | ||
| Crazy Muggsy Bogues dunk, Jamie. | ||
| Number two on Google. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I've never ever seen this in my entire life. | |
| Dude, he just flew through. | ||
| That's in a video game. | ||
| That's probably not real. | ||
| But he really did. | ||
| I promise you. | ||
| My memory is that it wasn't a clean, super clean dunk, but he did get the ball above the rim with his hand on it. | ||
| We're gonna get to the bottom of this, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Jamie will get to the bottom of this. | ||
| This is pretty essential. | ||
| If we don't solve this, This is a failure of a podcast. | ||
| There's a big difference, I think, between team sports where you could have an advantage of having a Spud Webb or a Muggsy Bogues, a very mobile, agile kind of guy who can set plays up versus a guy like Shaq, big giant guy who can get in the way of things. | ||
| I think there's all sorts of advantages and disadvantages of size. | ||
| When you're talking about individuals against individuals, that's where things get weird. | ||
| And then when you're talking about combat sports, that's where people have just... | ||
| There's some people that just have these tremendous advantages. | ||
| You know what Paul Daly is? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Ridiculous power. | ||
| Like, almost unfair. | ||
| Like, he hits guys and just obliterates them. | ||
| Yeah, but you know that's not just strength. | ||
| It's technique. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's also geometry. | ||
| Body geometry. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A lot of skinny dudes like me have power. | ||
| Some, yeah. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| A lot, right? | ||
| And a lot of big... | ||
| Tommy Hearns is the best example, right? | ||
| There's a bunch of them. | ||
| But he's also like this wide, and then his waist is like this, and this angle just... | ||
| I've thought it's... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Torque. | |
| I've actually thought it's shoulder width. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| Yeah, you get that torque. | ||
| And the waist like this. | ||
| So the shoulder is like that torque. | ||
| Yep, exactly. | ||
| I mean, it's just crazy. | ||
| You have more to swing that way. | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Wide shoulders. | ||
| Rotate around the spine. | ||
| Oftentimes equate, especially when they learn striking sports at an early age, they learn how to develop that snap and fluidity to their strikes. | ||
| And a lot of muscle-bound guys don't. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Or if they do, they have it for like 30 seconds. | |
| I want you to go talk to Dana and get this going. | ||
| We need height. | ||
| We need testosterone, you know, divisions. | ||
| It's too complicated. | ||
| Testosterone level divisions. | ||
| We're not going to have that. | ||
| Estrogen level divisions. | ||
| I think we are literally one generation away from being able to use CRISPR and all these new genetic engineering tools to make people whatever style of person you want. | ||
| I think you're gonna be able to develop six foot four super athletes that look like Anthony Joshua or Vitaly Klitschko or Vladimir Klitschko. | ||
| You're gonna be able to make those now. | ||
| What I would give for bionic knees, right? | ||
| Your knees are fucked up. | ||
| They're okay. | ||
| They're problematic. | ||
| I can function fine, but they could go out at any time. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If you never had to worry about that, you never had to worry. | ||
| Can you imagine? | ||
| Well, if you could just redo it. | ||
| But I'm telling you what we were talking about before the podcast, what they're doing now with stem cells, with soft tissue injuries, it's tremendous. | ||
| I mean, it's really amazing. | ||
| It's never happened before. | ||
| What they're able to do to people that have meniscus injuries is literally shoot stem cells in there and you regenerate meniscus tissue. | ||
| I mean, that's just never happened before. | ||
| And I think that this is baby steps. | ||
| I think what we're at right now is really, really young. | ||
| I think 20, 30 years from now, because 20 years ago, they didn't really use it at all. | ||
| 20 years from now, I think it's going to be insane. | ||
| They're going to be able to... | ||
| I mean, they regenerated a woman's bladder using her skin tissue. | ||
| They built her a bladder. | ||
| She had bladder cancer. | ||
| They built her a bladder and then reinstalled it in her body. | ||
| Now she has a functional bladder that came out of her own body that they regenerated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think they're going to be able to do that with tendons and ligaments and all sorts of tissue. | ||
| I believe it. | ||
| And hopefully, this is really promising, they're going to be able to do that with brain tissue. | ||
| So people that have had brain injuries, people that have had CTE, they're hopefully going to be able to use some of these therapies to regenerate brain tissue. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's huge. | ||
| Neuroregenesis is like, that's... | ||
| That's the promised land. | ||
| God bless them. | ||
| I don't know anything about science. | ||
| I'm just a complete idiot when it comes to math and science, but man, just go for it. | ||
| And by the way, as far as universities, I am the harshest critics of universities generally, but mostly what I'm talking about is actually the humanities and social sciences when I do that. | ||
| What goes on in the biology building, the chemistry building, the physics building? | ||
| I don't know, but I know that what comes out of them is a better life for me and all of us. | ||
| They're making the stuff that you're talking about, and so go for it. | ||
| Renegade universities, we're not going to do no science. | ||
| We're going to let Harvard and MIT keep going. | ||
| Have at it, guys, because you're doing great stuff. | ||
| I have no critique of that. | ||
| As far as I know, there's nothing going on there that's wrong. | ||
| It's just the humanities and social sciences that are utterly corrupt. | ||
| Well, we got way off the track here. | ||
| What we were talking about initially was Jordan Peterson, what you disagree with him when it comes to gender and what you agree with him when it comes to the suppression of expression of professors and people worried about being called racist and sexist and anything else stifling free speech. | ||
| So what he's facing is even worse than what goes on in the United States in a sense in that it's now legal persecution. | ||
| He is actually, you know, it's against the law to not use these gender pronouns in your class, which is, that's suppression of speech, that's suppression of academic freedom. | ||
| It's a complete violation of those things, in fact, and that's totalitarian. | ||
| I mean, there's nothing... | ||
| No two ways around it. | ||
| My uncle, Canada has these laws, right? | ||
| They have a Human Rights Commission, I think it's called, or Human Something Commission? | ||
| Yeah, Human Rights Council. | ||
| Council, and it's like this body of people who sit there and decide who should have a website or not. | ||
| And my uncle, this actually happened to him about 10 years ago, he was accused of being a Holocaust denier. | ||
| Because, and I don't even know exactly what he was saying on there, but he's a Ukrainian, and I think he was sort of just defending these Ukrainians who were accused of being Nazis during the World War II. I don't know. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| Even if he were a Holocaust denier, he should have his website, right? | ||
| The Canadian, you go to that URL, it's shut down, and in fact, they put a banner now. | ||
| It says, this is now, like, controlled by the Canadian government or something. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, they have no free speech in Canada. | ||
| I mean, there's no sort of doctrine, legal or otherwise, in Canada of free speech. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| And that's what Jordan Peterson's facing. | ||
| It's because he's Canadian. | ||
| This would not happen in the United States until, of course, you know, the sociologists take control and then they will have these laws. | ||
| But we don't have them here. | ||
| So he actually could go to prison. | ||
| That's what's happening. | ||
| He could go to prison for not saying zur in his class. | ||
| There was an article that Vice published that someone linked to me today about this that I did not read yet because I announced that Jordan is going to be returning to the podcast and someone was saying that his interpretation of these laws is greatly exaggerated. | ||
| See if you can find that. | ||
| It's a very recent Vice article. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it's illegal and illegal means you can go to prison ultimately. | ||
| I don't think Jordan's And I don't think he would exaggerate. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I looked into this. | ||
| That matters a lot to me. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I am 100% in solidarity with him on that. | ||
| And he's completely right that the state, no one should be telling him what to say in his classroom. | ||
| And certainly he shouldn't be going to prison for it or being threatened in any way legally. | ||
| Even if it's just a fine. | ||
| A fine, right? | ||
| People don't understand this. | ||
| It's incredible how people don't understand that everything the state does is enforced by the threat of ultimate violence. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So my mother even said this recently. | ||
| She said, oh, it doesn't. | ||
| There's no violence with parking tickets. | ||
| They just send you a fine. | ||
| I said, oh, really? | ||
| So if you get the fine and you don't pay it, What happens? | ||
| Oh, we get another notice. | ||
| And then another notice, right, Mom? | ||
| And then another notice. | ||
| And then finally, what happens? | ||
| Corinne Gaines, this black woman in Maryland a couple years ago, this is exactly what happened. | ||
| She got a bunch of traffic tickets and she refused to pay them. | ||
| And ultimately, what happened? | ||
| The SWAT team came to her house and she pulled a gun and they shot her in the head. | ||
| That was over traffic fines. | ||
| Okay, that's what happens. | ||
| That's what it means to make something illegal. | ||
| At the end of the day, for it to be meaningful as a law, the state has to use lethal violence to enforce it. | ||
| Or the potential for lethal violence. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| In other words, if you don't pay your taxes, even if it's, you know, $100 in taxes, ultimately, otherwise the law is meaningless, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| They have to put you in prison or kill you. | ||
| Well, that was what was most offensive about that Sandra Bland case, when you got to hear the interaction between her and the cop. | ||
| She did nothing wrong, and this cop is dragging her out of the car, and then ultimately she died, and they don't know how she died. | ||
| She was pissed off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
She talked back because he pulled her over. | |
| Right. | ||
| Because she was being disrespectful. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But she wasn't. | ||
| If you listen to the actual recording, she just wasn't following him to the, like, she wasn't treating him with respect that he felt he deserved. | ||
| Hold on there. | ||
| I think she was being disrespectful, and that's why she's my hero. | ||
| I mean, because... | ||
| Really? | ||
| You think she was disrespectful? | ||
| That's why she's a hero. | ||
| But I don't think she was. | ||
| Because you shouldn't respect that authority. | ||
| I mean, it's dangerous. | ||
| That's why she's a martyr. | ||
| I wouldn't recommend it to people. | ||
| I wouldn't tell my son to do that. | ||
| But he deserved no respect. | ||
| The law, enforcing that law in that way, treating her in that way in that moment, deserved no respect whatsoever. | ||
| And that's, to me, why she's the hero. | ||
| Not that she was a victim. | ||
| She was a victim. | ||
| But to me, what was great about her was that she said, no, I'm not going to put up my cigarette. | ||
| And why did you pull me over for this? | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| You have no reason to pull me over and do this to me right now. | ||
| I'm on my way to someplace. | ||
| I'm trying to get someplace. | ||
| What was she getting pulled over for? | ||
| I think it was a... | ||
| Was it a taillight or something? | ||
| No, she didn't turn. | ||
| I think it was a turn signal. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It was something really trivial. | ||
| Well, I don't think he has the right to tell her to put out her cigarette. | ||
| So, like, that's not a disrespectful thing. | ||
| I think he's overstepping his boundaries. | ||
| They do. | ||
| They do? | ||
| In your car? | ||
| She's smoking a cigarette in her car. | ||
| They have the right, and I think in some... | ||
| Municipalities the obligation, because you are supposed to... | ||
| Here's the thing, Joe. | ||
| I mean, this is the other thing that the law rests upon. | ||
| It rests upon us respecting legal authorities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If we don't, there ain't no law. | ||
| Yeah, but there's no legal authority for you to stop you from doing a lawful act. | ||
| Like, if she has a cigarette lit in her car, when she gets pulled over, the cop says, pull your cigarette out. | ||
| What he's doing is just controlling her. | ||
| I don't think that's a law. | ||
| They give them latitude. | ||
| They give the cops latitude in determining who is obeying their orders and not. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I'm not defending this. | ||
| I'm saying this is the problem. | ||
| I'm saying that in court, I would bet you anything, he would say that showed that she wasn't listening to me. | ||
| She wasn't obeying my orders. | ||
| I think he told her to put her hands on the car or something, and she had the cigarette in her hand. | ||
| So she had to take the cigarette out of her hand to do what he was asking... | ||
| In other words, I'm saying that's all worthy of disrespect. | ||
| I'm not defending it at all, right? | ||
| The other thing, though, about this, and this is something I've been working on lately, and I've been doing some work with some people at Freethink Media about this, but is, I think, and I've changed my mind about this. | ||
| This has been a new thing for me. | ||
| I've thought about race my whole life, basically, really, really hard, and this is I've changed my mind about this. | ||
| When things like that happen, Sandra Bland, Mike Brown, Eric Garner, even Walter Scott, the guy who was shot in the back in South Carolina... | ||
| Is that the guy where they planted the... | ||
| The taser? | ||
| Well, that's again... | ||
| Hold on there. | ||
| So I, like everyone in the country pretty much, saw those things and thought, A, that's horrific. | ||
| And B, that's racist. | ||
| And what people do, overwhelmingly, is they focus on what they believe is the racism of the cop, the individual. | ||
| That that's what caused those cops to shoot those guns in those moments. | ||
| I think that's a mistake. | ||
| For one thing, we will never know why they chose to pull the trigger in that moment. | ||
| We will never know that it was racist. | ||
| There's no way to prove that. | ||
| There's no way to demonstrate it. | ||
| And there's nothing we can do about it. | ||
| What can you do to change people's ideas about race or black people? | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Certainly not anytime soon. | ||
| What all those cops were doing in all those instances, and this is why they got off, they were following the law, and they were following police procedure, which actually obligated them to do those things. | ||
| So Walter Scott, and believe me, I was convinced that was a racist cop, that that was clearly a bad killing. | ||
| And it was a bad killing, but not for the reasons that people are talking about. | ||
| I have no way to know whether that cop was racist, and that's why he did that. | ||
| But we do know, and people have done work on this, that it is very reasonable to assume that he was doing in that moment what he was obligated to do by law, which is, if you look at the video carefully, He very well could have thought that Scott was still holding his taser because Scott grabbed the taser and then dropped it immediately. | ||
| But if you look at where the cop is looking, he may not have seen that. | ||
| We're talking about a different thing then because I'm talking about the cop that shot the guy and then dropped the taser near his body. | ||
| We're talking about the same thing. | ||
| So the guy grabbed the taser before that? | ||
| Here's what happened. | ||
| Walter Scott grabs his taser. | ||
| He grabbed the cop's taser. | ||
| I thought he just ran. | ||
| No. | ||
| Pulled the taser out of his holster and had it for a second and then started to run and as he's like turning to run he drops it immediately and he's running away and he gets you know a good whatever 10-20 yards away and the cop shoots him in the back. | ||
| So according to South Carolina police procedure and according to Supreme Court decisions The cop not only had the right, but the obligation to use lethal force because he could have believed in that moment that Scott still held the taser in his hand. | ||
| If a person takes a police officer's weapon, police are obligated to use lethal force to stop them. | ||
| So if you look, there's a documentary about this. | ||
| It's called Frame. | ||
| I forget the number. | ||
| I think it's 394. You might be able to find it, Jamie. | ||
| And it's plausible. | ||
| It's not definite that this is what happened, but it is plausible. | ||
| The way the cop was looking, he may not have seen that the taser was on the ground. | ||
| I'm super confused because I thought that the cop dropped the taser. | ||
| No, no, hold on. | ||
| Let me finish. | ||
| So Scott's running away, 20 yards, shoots him in the back. | ||
| Then the cop walks over to him. | ||
| During that time, he does see that the taser's on the ground next to him, next to the cop. | ||
| He picks up the taser, the cop does, walks over and drops it on the ground next to Scott momentarily and then picks it back up. | ||
| So who knows what was going on there. | ||
| He may have been, and sure he may have been trying to cover himself in that moment, but actually he didn't need to. | ||
| That cop, you know what happened with that trial? | ||
| It's a hung jury. | ||
| He's free. | ||
| Because of this. | ||
| Because, I'm sure, we don't know for sure, but I know this was the argument made by the cop's lawyer, was that it is totally reasonable to assume that That he believed he had reason to shoot him legally. | ||
| So that's one part of that story, which is that the law is the problem, not the cop. | ||
| Stop focusing on that cop. | ||
| You'll never find out. | ||
| You'll never be able to prove that he did it because he's a racist. | ||
| And even if we did, what's that going to get us? | ||
| That's not going to save anybody the next time this happens, right? | ||
| But what will save people is if we change those laws. | ||
| Here's the worst law that really made the whole thing happen in the first place that no one's talking about. | ||
| The whole thing started when Scott was driving through North Charleston, right? | ||
| The cop, I think it was a suspended license plate or something, or a taillight, taillight, I think it was a taillight, something trivial, pulls him over. | ||
| At that time, Scott was in arrears on child support payments. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| You go to prison if you get behind on your child support payments. | ||
| And he had been, I think, put in jail a few times in his life for this. | ||
| You get put in prison, and there's a whole bunch of men right now as we speak in prison for that very reason. | ||
| And these child support payments, by the way, are set by judges often in a system that massively favors the women, the mothers. | ||
| That whole system, you've never been divorced, right? | ||
| I have. | ||
| You know, as soon as you enter it, you see right away that the whole thing is stacked against us. | ||
| And this is, you know, it's just, look into it if you don't believe me. | ||
| I believe you. | ||
| I know many friends have been divorced. | ||
| As easy on me as you could be. | ||
| But nonetheless, I ended up paying a lot more child support than she really deserved. | ||
| And very, but not a lot. | ||
| I mean, but it was, but a lot of men. | ||
| Oh, in fact, you do have a friend this happened to, I think, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, you go into these courtrooms, and it's basically down to a judge. | ||
| I have a friend who has to pay alimony for the rest of his life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was married for 12 years. | ||
| He's been divorced for 14. He still has to pay his ex-wife. | ||
| He's married to a new woman. | ||
| He has a new family. | ||
| He didn't even have kids with this woman. | ||
| He has to pay her forever. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| So she dies. | ||
| Imagine if they had kids. | ||
| He fucked her so hard she can't work anymore. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| That's a crazy law. | ||
| There's a lot to say about that. | ||
| That's a crazy law. | ||
| When there's kids involved, forget about it. | ||
| That's a very sexist law, by the way, because that law is implying that this woman is incapable of making it on her own. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| By definition, it's anti-feminist. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's anti-feminist and it's sexist and it's patriarchal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It is totally patriarchal. | ||
| Women who support it, they're supporting it because they don't like men. | ||
| I mean, that literally is what it is. | ||
| Well, who knows? | ||
| Well, listen, if you're supporting a woman never having to work again because she married a guy for a certain amount of time, like, relationships come and go. | ||
| People get tired of each other. | ||
| People have the right to change. | ||
| You shouldn't be financially obligated to take care of someone for the rest of their life just because you were married at one point in time. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| I completely agree. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Especially in today's day and age, where my friend is 54, I think he is now, he could live to be 100. So what the fuck? | ||
| He's got to pay for her for another 46 years? | ||
| That's insanity. | ||
| It's phenomenal. | ||
| Yeah, but again, I agree with you completely. | ||
| But what you said just then about it being sexist, that's a radical concept that hasn't even, I think, registered with most people. | ||
| And if many people heard it, they would think you are a sexist yourself for saying it. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| It is inescapable. | ||
| That that's what's going on. | ||
| Sexism against men is very common. | ||
| It's sexism against women, too. | ||
| That's what we're also saying. | ||
| And that's the radical part of this, right? | ||
| It's actually patriarchal in the most fundamental sense, which is that the court is saying that the man should be the provider. | ||
| I'm going to tell you a story. | ||
| There's a woman in Florida who is a bit in my act that I'm doing now. | ||
| It's a true story. | ||
| There's a woman in Florida who was a cop. | ||
| She was 25 years old. | ||
| She pretended to be a high school student. | ||
| And she's an attractive woman, made friends with his boy. | ||
| He thought it was his girlfriend. | ||
| And she talked him into selling her pot and then she arrested him. | ||
| That only works when you have a 17-year-old boy and a 25-year-old woman. | ||
| If you had a 25-year-old man throwing dick at your 17-year-old daughter and then he gets her to sell him pot and then he arrests her, there would be people lining the fucking street with torches to kill that guy. | ||
| But people are sexist against boys. | ||
| They feel that boy should just keep it in his pants. | ||
| That boy should know better. | ||
| And you know, as well as I know, when you're 17 years old, you are a baffled bag of hormones with a boner, just running through the world, trying to figure out what the fuck's going on, and you're 12 months away from being an adult. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| It's craziness. | ||
| And to think that this young boy You should be able to think clearly in that moment while this 25-year-old woman is manipulating him. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| But they allowed it, and this kid has a felony on his fucking record right now. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| This is the root of the issue with feminism that is current feminism. | ||
| It's current incarnation. | ||
| I am a feminist, by the way. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| We can define that. | ||
| Leave now, sir. | ||
| How about just being egalitarian? | ||
| Well, yeah, so... | ||
| Son of a bitch. | ||
| Well, that's... | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm not that either. | ||
| I'm not an egalitarian. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're not? | |
| No. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| Too many topics at once. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sorry. | |
| Go ahead. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| We go off a lot of branches here. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Where was I going? | ||
| Oh, this... | ||
| So what you did was you identified... | ||
| And I think actually I talked about this the first time I was here, which is that, you know, this is what's to me at the heart of... | ||
| This is the... | ||
| Appalling irony at the heart of contemporary feminism as practiced by self-defined feminists. | ||
| Many, not all, guys, I'm not saying all feminists are like this, but I'd say certainly it's the dominant strain right now, which is that it is at its heart patriarchal. | ||
| Which it treats women as vulnerable, weak, powerless, incapable of making their own way in this world. | ||
| And it treats men as the, not just, forget about the men. | ||
| Forget about how they treat men. | ||
| It's how they treat women that's sexist. | ||
| It says that they need protection from the state, which is run by, usually, men. | ||
| But it's also this other institution. | ||
| Or, you know, college presidents. | ||
| We need to protect these women from 19-year-old boys who want to have sex with them. | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| They're constantly calling for women to be protected by these institutions, the state, by men. | ||
| It is patriarchal and sexist, right? | ||
| At the heart of it. | ||
| And same thing with family court and divorce law and all that stuff. | ||
| That's how they get treated. | ||
| They get treated like they're the ones who need to be taken care of by a man. | ||
| It's like 1950s sexism. | ||
| It's like Mad Men sexism. | ||
| That's what most feminists are calling for now. | ||
| Well, I disagree when you're talking about child rearing, because I think that Child support should be absolutely mandatory, and it's very important. | ||
| And if a woman is the only one raising the kids on her own, not only does she need the money for food and housing, but also probably for someone to babysit her kids. | ||
| There's a lot of factors involved. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| If the man's not in the scene, he owes money, for sure. | ||
| He has a responsibility. | ||
| And as a father, at the very least, that's what you should be doing, is contributing financially. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| I totally agree. | ||
| I'm not opposed to paying child support. | ||
| My problem is alimony. | ||
| Alimony is weird. | ||
| Yeah, that makes no sense at all. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Well, it's I don't think it's a bad thing if someone like say how about this say Let's turn around say you had a wife who's wealthy and She was taking care of you while you're going through school and she promised that she was going to fund you all the way through your PhD program She was gonna give you money. | ||
| So you didn't have to worry about anything but your education and And then once you got out, then you guys could share income. | ||
| But somewhere along the way, she decided she was done with you, and then you're fucked, but you're in the middle of this program that you have to pay for. | ||
| I don't think it's unreasonable to say that she should give you until you could figure your own system out. | ||
| So you don't have to quit your PhD program and go get a job somewhere and get an apartment and a car. | ||
| I don't think that's unreasonable. | ||
| What's unreasonable is saying that because you guys were together for a certain amount of time, she has to pay you for the rest of your life. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| That's insanity. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And that's current. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| That's sexist. | ||
| But should that be legal, though? | ||
| Should that be legally enforced? | ||
| Should courts be deciding how long the alimony is paid? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| That's crazy. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| How has that happened? | ||
| Like, what's the motivation behind that for the courts to succumb or to give in to this? | ||
| I just explained it to you. | ||
| It's sexism. | ||
| It's patriarchy. | ||
| And the feminists are playing along with it. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| It's this idea that women can't make... | ||
| I mean, aren't there a lot of men involved in those courts? | ||
| I mean, why are they allowing all this to happen? | ||
| Yeah, and most of them think basically like feminists, or at least they are expected to behave and make decisions like feminists. | ||
| Feminism has become dominant in that way in our culture. | ||
| But this has been going on for decades. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| These laws have existed long before feminism was prevalent in our culture. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| It went from sexist patriarchy, those laws. | ||
| Oh, I see what you're saying. | ||
| So feminism is basically continuing that stuff in its name. | ||
| Piggyback on it and just switching up the definition. | ||
| Let me say really loud and clear, there have always been feminists who hate this stuff as much as you and I do. | ||
| Camille Paglia type feminists. | ||
| Many of them, okay? | ||
| And they have been loud and clear about this for a long, long time, and I love them, and they're my heroes, and I've learned from them. | ||
| I've learned these things from them, okay? | ||
| But the ones who really are powerful and dominant in the media, the ones we hear from, the public intellectuals, the academics, government leaders, The people who end up in the White House, you know, Obama's staff in HHS, Health and Human Services, and the Department of Education, became very clear to me that all these sexual assault laws and rules that came out of there, they were coming right out of colleges. | ||
| And they were really of that. | ||
| They were of the sort of college feminist movement. | ||
| They were the ones who set that letter in 2011 that made it basically mandatory for colleges to set up these kangaroo courts for sexual assault cases. | ||
| All the nonsense you and I talked about here a couple years ago. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Anybody interested, review those earlier podcasts about... | ||
| Your college, Occidental. | ||
| Well, yeah, there's many colleges. | ||
| And, you know, there's a whole backlash now, right? | ||
| There's a huge... | ||
| It's all turning back. | ||
| And I knew it was going to happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Now they're completely being decimated. | ||
| There's hundreds or maybe even thousands of men who are suing in court, and many of them are winning right now for good reason, because there was no due process, because they weren't allowed to, you know, ask questions. | ||
| Well, that poor boy, the mattress boy, where that girl put a fucking mattress on her back and dragged her on campus, and then... | ||
| Took her graduation speech with a mattress. | ||
| They went on stage with a mattress. | ||
| I mean, the whole thing was so fucking crazy. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's this fantastic sex worker activist named Christine Pereira, who's in Vegas. | ||
| She tweeted something like, when that happened, she said, fuck you, mattress girl. | ||
| For those of us who have really been raped, you're a fucking disgrace. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh. | |
| She went off. | ||
| It was something like that, yeah, and it was... | ||
| Yeah, but that girl seems pretty crazy, that mattress girl. | ||
| Yeah, that was an extreme example. | ||
| But that boy is suing that school, luckily. | ||
| Yeah, they're all suing, and many of them are winning, and I don't know what happened in those cases. | ||
| I don't even know what happened to Mattress Girl, for sure. | ||
| I know that there's all kinds of evidence that sure looks like it didn't happen the way she said it did, but I don't know for sure, and I never will. | ||
| We will never know. | ||
| You can't know. | ||
| But what we do know, for absolute sure, is that there's been terrible or no due process in those cases, right? | ||
| And so that's the problem. | ||
| I mean, that basically the accuser gets to win every time. | ||
| Imagine if that was our legal system writ large, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Joe, you stole a million dollars from me yesterday. | ||
| All right, put him in jail. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's basically what's happened. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, it got so crazy that even Rolling Stone printed a false rape case, that gang rape case, the UVA case. | ||
| Astonishing. | ||
| Which is just, how did a company that's been in the journalism business, as long as they've been, how did they fuck that up? | ||
| Yeah, that was the turning point, I think, when that came out that it was completely made up. | ||
| I think since then, it's started to turn. | ||
| Do you think that's good that things like that happen so that you realize why it's important to have checks and balances and that people, it reaffirms this idea of real journalism is important to have your facts in order, to have checks and double check things and make sure you know what the fuck you're printing. | ||
| I think it's good for society. | ||
| I think it's terrible for John Doe. | ||
| All the John Doe's out there, all those men who were accused and expelled and had their names ruined and their careers ruined, college careers destroyed and all that stuff, right? | ||
| But yes. | ||
| And also, even if you're exonerated, the emotional turmoil that you go through, there's no way they can reward you for that or compensate you for that, rather. | ||
| But that whole thing, as I said before, is part of this sort of ironic feminist patriarchy ideology, right? | ||
| Which is, you know, we need protection. | ||
| We can't say no to men. | ||
| We can't stop them by saying no. | ||
| We need help just there. | ||
| We need the college president to save us or the cops or someone. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Well, then there's also this thing where two people are drinking, and if the two people are drinking, the girl is getting raped. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Whereas the guy's not getting raped. | ||
| Because women are incapable of controlling themselves when they're drunk. | ||
| It's sexist as hell. | ||
| Exactly, because the man's drunk too, but somehow or another it doesn't matter, even if they're both sending texts back and forth, do you have condoms, like the Occidental case. | ||
| It's patriarchal. | ||
| Women are... | ||
| Children. | ||
| They're daughters. | ||
| They need to be taken care of by dad. | ||
| And the sons are men. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Even though they're just the same age and they're boys. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| They have full agency. | ||
| It's sexist. | ||
| The women are daughters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is sexist. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Gender, Jordan Peterson. | ||
| So I'm completely absolutely with him. | ||
| When it comes to that. | ||
| When it comes to policing of language. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But he, as I said, I could be wrong about this, but it sounded to me, and I've listened to him on your show, and I've listened to him elsewhere, and a lot of people have pointed him to me and vice versa because they think we agree on these things and we don't, which is that he thinks, seems to me, that gender is biologically determined. | ||
| That there are two genders, they're fixed in nature, and that's the end of that discussion. | ||
| I don't know if he's ever said that. | ||
| I really don't think he has. | ||
| I really don't think he has. | ||
| I think he's said that when it comes to gender identity, that he doesn't believe that we need more pronouns. | ||
| No, he thinks it's just wrong if you think you're a woman when you were born with a penis. | ||
| It's just sort of absolutely wrong. | ||
| I think you would have to find him saying that before you can say that. | ||
| I'm really glad to hear you say that, because I wasn't sure where you stood on that. | ||
| No, I mean, look, man. | ||
| That's a big deal. | ||
| I think it can get super weird when, okay, how about Rachel Dolezal? | ||
| She identifies as being black. | ||
| Great, yeah. | ||
| She's transracial. | ||
| How do you feel about that? | ||
| I think she's correct. | ||
| Not, now hang on, let me tell you what correct means there. | ||
| Not in an absolute way, right? | ||
| Not in a scientific, objective way, but it's just as true as anything else. | ||
| Meaning that, because, so race... | ||
| And here comes Sam Harris now, and I'm sure Jordan Peterson's in this boat, too. | ||
| But I know Sam Harris is, because I just heard him talking about this with Charles Murray. | ||
| He believes there are races of people. | ||
| He thinks that race is a real thing. | ||
| He's definitely subtle about it and nuanced. | ||
| He says, you know, the divisions between races and the lines are blurry. | ||
| But he believes there's a biological basis to race. | ||
| He's very clear about that. | ||
| And that is... | ||
| To me, absurd and completely unscientific, and it's easily disprovable according to his own standards and by scientific standards. | ||
| You see a black guy from Kenya, you see a Chinese guy from China. | ||
| What's the difference? | ||
| No difference? | ||
| Well, here's the answer. | ||
| You tell me, right? | ||
| Which is that, so historically, the differences between them have changed. | ||
| That we, people, human beings, have said different things, have created different categories, and filled those categories with different characteristics. | ||
| Over the centuries, those have changed constantly, right? | ||
| And my first time I was on here, we had a long discussion about what's in my book, Renegade History on Immigrants. | ||
| The Irish and the Italians and the Jews, when they got here to the United States, here and in Europe, they were largely considered to be Negroes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now, they're as white as anybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, what are they? | ||
| At that time, in the early 20th century, it was not like, when I say common belief, I mean it was taught in schools, the following. | ||
| Taught at Harvard, the following. | ||
| That Europeans were made up of three distinct races. | ||
| There were the Nordics in Northern Europe. | ||
| The Alpines in Central Europe and the Mediterranean in Southern Europe. | ||
| And they were very different biologically. | ||
| The Nordics were rational, intelligent, disciplined. | ||
| They were the ones who made civilization. | ||
| They should run the country. | ||
| The Alpines were okay. | ||
| They could be decent farmers, but they're never going to do algebra, and they certainly can't run a government. | ||
| The Mediterranean's were basically either like Negroes or really close, and therefore should be slaves or just peasants. | ||
| That's my people. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| Yeah, maybe you're talking about a long time ago. | ||
| No, we're talking about 100 years ago, which historically... | ||
| That's a long time ago, if you're holding your breath. | ||
| But you know, you love ancient history. | ||
| I mean, if you look at the whole sweep of human history, that's five minutes ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It is. | ||
| But it's still a long time in terms of how we address it today. | ||
| But if you address it today, if you're looking at someone from China, or you're looking at a dark black man from Kenya, there's something different about them. | ||
| Do you think it's just melanin? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Of course there's something different about them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Many different things. | ||
| So where do you draw the line around races, though? | ||
| So take all the people in Kenya. | ||
| Which ones are Kenyans and which ones? | ||
| Are they all Kenyans and what makes them Kenyan? | ||
| Or are they all Africans? | ||
| Are they all black? | ||
| Like DNA test on someone and find out where their origins are. | ||
| You can find out how much Irish you have in you, how much South African. | ||
| You can do all that. | ||
| You can go all the way back to your family lineage through genes. | ||
| I get that. | ||
| Totally fine. | ||
| Well, if you want to go all the way back, we're all African. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| That's another way to disprove this whole thing, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But is it disproving it because, I mean, these branches- It's not disproving it. | ||
| Sorry, that's a bad word to use here. | ||
| It is calling it out as a fiction, as a social construct, which is that these lines have been drawn all the time in all kinds of different ways over the centuries by human beings who just look at all the people in the world. | ||
| They line up the seven billion people, right, in their mind, and they draw lines. | ||
| They say, oh, these people over here, this side, those are the Negroes. | ||
| And over here, these are the Mongoloids. | ||
| And over here, these are the Asiatics. | ||
| And over here, these are the Nordics. | ||
| And over here are the Aryans and the Jews. | ||
| And those change all the time. | ||
| But these are just categories we invent, right? | ||
| So who's black? | ||
| Is Jimi Hendrix black? | ||
| Well, Jimi Hendrix has a mixed background, right? | ||
| I mean, wasn't his mother white and his father was black? | ||
| Joe, what's his race? | ||
| Is he black or white? | ||
| It's a good question. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Got a lot in him. | ||
| But there's a big difference between someone like Jimi Hendrix and someone that is like very, very dark. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Comes from a specific part of the world where everyone around them is very, very dark. | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| They have very obvious and repeatable characteristics. | ||
| Let's do that. | ||
| So the Congo. | ||
| These knives come from the Congo. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Okay, the people there? | ||
| They're pygmies, actually. | ||
| I mean, that's an even more specific group. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Just West Africa. | |
| We can even do West Africans. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Where the Western slaves, American slaves, come from. | ||
| And just across the continent, not even that far away, there's Somalia. | ||
| You know what Somalians look like? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Ethiopians. | ||
| Think about them and how they look and think about how West Africans look. | ||
| Are they the same race? | ||
| Well, very different physical characteristics. | ||
| Very dark. | ||
| Somalis look different than everybody, clearly. | ||
| You know a Somali immediately. | ||
| Same continent, same pigmentation, basically. | ||
| Very thin. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Their facial structure, very different. | ||
| Why are they black? | ||
| Why are they the same race? | ||
| Is that the same race? | ||
| We're talking about Somalians. | ||
| Would you consider Somalians the same as Ethiopians or as the same as Egyptians, which is also Africa? | ||
| My thing is, let's get rid of these categories. | ||
| These are all silly, made-up categories. | ||
| They're all arbitrary. | ||
| Lines have been drawn between groups of people arbitrarily over the centuries. | ||
| So you're arguing against something that Sam Harris said. | ||
| So what did Sam Harris say specifically? | ||
| Well, it's not just him. | ||
| It's a lot of people. | ||
| So you don't agree that there is any race at all? | ||
| I'm just saying it's a fiction. | ||
| It's made up. | ||
| Well, is it a fiction or is it a way we're trying to define the variations between human groups? | ||
| Because there are variations. | ||
| Oh, that's definitely what it's been about. | ||
| That's definitely been the motivation. | ||
| And think about what the consequences have been. | ||
| It's never been good. | ||
| Just because there's consequences for variations or recognizing variations doesn't mean you should stop recognizing actual variations. | ||
| But they always make claims right after that. | ||
| They don't have to, though. | ||
| That's a straw man, isn't it? | ||
| You don't have to make a claim that Chinese people are different because they look different. | ||
| No, but then it's just... | ||
| But you can say, well, this is what a Chinese person... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Generally, they have these very stringent characteristics. | ||
| They don't have blonde hair. | ||
| They don't have blue eyes. | ||
| They're not tall and skinny. | ||
| They look like Chinese people. | ||
| Sure, but then again, Chinese people all look the same. | ||
| I mean, there's... | ||
| You don't have to say that. | ||
| Right, but again... | ||
| But there's clear characteristics. | ||
| The difference between a Chinese person and a black person is very clear. | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Well, an ethnic Kenyan, someone who lives in Kenya, who was born and raised multiple generations deep, and their parents are Kenyan, their grandparents are Kenyan, there's a very big difference between them and someone who lives in Shanghai, who was born in Shanghai, their parents are born in Shanghai, they go all the way back, you know, many, many generations of being pure Chinese. | ||
| Right, but there are infinite variations, even among people who have lived only in Shanghai. | ||
| But what do you want to call those variations? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| But you're talking about something that's clearly identifiable. | ||
| Are you just going to ignore it? | ||
| I would say that, of course, there are genes that run in families, and I completely agree that genes determine, in large part, how we look fine. | ||
| So you can certainly say, this person is likely, because of their genes, connected to that person last generation, to that generation, to this family lineage. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, what does that give you? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| I mean, the thing is that people have taken that and they've said, oh, well, these particular characteristics, right? | ||
| Human beings, we were talking about complexity in human beings at the beginning of this, right? | ||
| People are infinitely complex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right? | ||
| Okay, so the thing is, what people have done historically is they've just picked certain characteristics among people and said, ah, that is what determines your race. | ||
| Is the issue the word race? | ||
| Is maybe the issue, like, there are obvious physical characteristics, the difference between, like, someone who is a Mongol versus someone who is Brazilian versus someone who is... | ||
| There's some pretty obvious physical characteristics for... | ||
| Geographic areas. | ||
| Would you agree? | ||
| Or common physical characteristics for some geographic areas? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| You could say, on average, people in China are shorter than people in Polynesia. | ||
| Well, here's a place where you could do it. | ||
| Canada. | ||
| Like, try to find a Canadian. | ||
| Like, you don't know what a Canadian looks like. | ||
| They could be English, they could be American, they could be anything. | ||
| I was trying to entertain your strongest argument. | ||
| Okay, so, like, China, right? | ||
| You could certainly say that people in China are, on average, on average, shorter than people in Polynesia. | ||
| Well, they look different on average. | ||
| That's one way in which they look different. | ||
| You're talking about physiognomy, facial features? | ||
| That, bone structure, Polynesians tend to be really stout people. | ||
| I suppose you could say the width of their eyes is narrower or whatever on average. | ||
| Whatever, sure. | ||
| Okay, so what? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| I mean, what did we... | ||
| Okay, so they are likely to be in lineage from that part of the world? | ||
| Fine. | ||
| That's cool. | ||
| I got no problem with that. | ||
| But what else do you want to say? | ||
| The thing is, Joe, no one stops there. | ||
| They always go on to that. | ||
| They always go on from there and they start to make all these other claims. | ||
| Oh, well, that race is really good at math. | ||
| They can do the coding for Google better than other people can. | ||
| Whatever, right? | ||
| They are more scrupulous. | ||
| Smoke cigarettes more. | ||
| Whatever it is. | ||
| You know, they used to be accused of being more easily addicted to opium. | ||
| You name it, right? | ||
| Things change. | ||
| But that's the problem, is that once you start there, people have used those differences for other reasons almost always, which are nefarious and injurious and have done terrible things to people. | ||
| Your problem is recognizing those characteristics and those differences and calling it a race, and then attaching all sorts of other claims to this category. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what Sam and Charles Murray... | ||
| This is Charles Murray's thing, although it's actually... | ||
| It's only a small part of his work, and he gets accused of it being central, and it's not. | ||
| But anyway, he does still nonetheless believe this, and so does Sam Harris, and so does other people. | ||
| That there are differences in IQ among races. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, on the surface level, they are completely correct. | ||
| There's no question. | ||
| Meaning that IQ scores among people that we identify as African American have been lower than among the people we define as white American. | ||
| Totally true. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Totally true and they are right that that is suppressed that we are not allowed to even talk about that data Which is there and it's I have no problem with that. | ||
| I'm sure that's true Here's the thing though How do we define african-american and how do we define white first? | ||
| That's the first problem those as you know Definitions have changed over time. | ||
| So, Jews used to be in the African-American group, and Italians used to be in the African-American group. | ||
| Well, no, no, they were never called African-American stuff. | ||
| Yeah, they were. | ||
| They were called Negroes. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yes, they were. | ||
| Jews were called Negroes? | ||
| There was a book written, this is in my book, Renegade History. | ||
| In 1911, there was a book written by a scholar, and this was one of many, the title of which, his name was Arthur Abernethy, the title of which was, The Jew is a Negro. | ||
| That's the title of it. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| This was common. | ||
| This is what year? | ||
| This is all through the late 19th and early 20th centuries, from about the 1880s when the Jews started coming over in big numbers, from the 1880s into the 1940s. | ||
| I'm saying this is what was taught in college classrooms, that Jews were of a different race, and there was some difference of opinion about whether they were black or whether they were just some other kind of inferior race, but they certainly weren't white. | ||
| That was widely agreed upon until World War II, basically. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So, how do we define African-American? | ||
| Is Jimi Hendrix African-American? | ||
| Well, you're talking, there's a big difference, isn't there, in the term African-American versus Negro, right? | ||
| No, it's the same thing. | ||
| It's just a different name for the same category. | ||
| Yeah, but it's from Africa. | ||
| They knew that these Jews weren't from Africa. | ||
| So, the one-drop rule? | ||
| It's just a continent. | ||
| Oh, no, no. | ||
| They believe that the genes, and they're right about this, right? | ||
| The genes came from Africa. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's, you know, and they're right, but so do all of our genes, right? | ||
| Right, all of them. | ||
| So that was part of their claim, and that they were from, you know, part of Europe that was a bit closer to Africa. | ||
| And this is what they said about Italians, in particular Sicilians, right? | ||
| They were like, hey, look where it is. | ||
| That's why these people, you know, are fucking all the time and having babies and are lazy and can't work and fight in bars and get drunk and... | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, how do we define these terms? | ||
| What does white mean? | ||
| That's totally changed. | ||
| But how much of it is, right, the real question is how much of it is cultural? | ||
| So there's that. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| And then, and then, IQ. Well, I think it does measure something. | ||
| I think it's real. | ||
| I do. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think there is something called, this is a G factor, which it tests, it measures. | ||
| G factor is this thing that was invented, this concept. | ||
| It's a category, but it's a real category in the world we operate in, which is your ability to do rational thinking, reasoning, like math. | ||
| Like writing scholarly essays, you know? | ||
| I'm sure my G-factor is higher, sort of, than other people's, although I'm terrible at math, so that's yet another problematic wrinkle for these people. | ||
| But yeah, I believe that IQ measures that stuff, that kind of thing. | ||
| But is that what intelligence is and only is? | ||
| Clearly no. | ||
| No. | ||
| There's a lot of variables that IQ doesn't test for. | ||
| What do you think IQ tests tests, right? | ||
| They test all kinds of intelligence? | ||
| Do they test emotional intelligence? | ||
| Do they test the intelligence of Jimi Hendrix? | ||
| Do you think he was great at calculus? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I sort of doubt it. | ||
| Was he smart? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Was he intelligent? | ||
| Clearly. | ||
| In different ways. | ||
| He was clever with a guitar, that's for sure. | ||
| So then how do you define intelligence? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, creativity is unquestionably some sort of measurement or expression of intelligence. | ||
| We separate that off, though, and we always have as a society. | ||
| We shouldn't. | ||
| That's why you don't do well unless you're really, really, really good. | ||
| If you're just creative in the way we define that and not intelligent in the way IQ tests define it. | ||
| So it's all problematic. | ||
| And all it does is ask questions. | ||
| It just keeps raising new questions. | ||
| It never has answers. | ||
| And so the attempt to... | ||
| There's this thing that goes on where certain people just need to keep finding racial differences that are innate, biological, fixed, that can't be changed. | ||
| And it's like, first of all, you've never done this because it's so fluid and you're never really answering it. | ||
| And then What if you did finally prove it? | ||
| What are we going to do with that information? | ||
| Well, we just recognize that there are variables, like when we're talking about Polynesian people. | ||
| We're talking about people from Tonga, very stout, strong people. | ||
| Samoans tend to be very stout, strong people. | ||
| I mean, that's a characteristic, actually a positive characteristic, that's attributed to people from that area. | ||
| Do you ignore that? | ||
| Like, how do you address that? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| I would say that people from Polynesia are more likely, men from Polynesia are more likely to be offensive linemen in the NFL. So your issue is calling it a race itself. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then attributing other things to it. | ||
| All I'm saying is guys from there tend to be bigger. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| No doubt about it. | ||
| But so what? | ||
| That's the end of it. | ||
| Is there a part of the world where people are generally thought to be dumb? | ||
| Yeah, Africa. | ||
| The continent we've been talking about. | ||
| That's the history of this country. | ||
| That's the history of Europe. | ||
| That's the history of the modern world is the belief that people from Africa are dumber than whites. | ||
| Well, isn't the problem with that, that Africa is also where the pyramids were created? | ||
| That's what justified slavery. | ||
| That's what justified colonialism. | ||
| That's what has justified all sorts of things, right? | ||
| So that's the problem here, is that these attempts to define people by race and, by the way, by gender, have done nothing but terrible things. | ||
| Nothing but terrible things. | ||
| And you can't do it anyway. | ||
| It's scientific bullshit. | ||
| It's total superstition. | ||
| It's utterly arbitrary. | ||
| The lines are always being redrawn by the people who do this stuff. | ||
| So why are you still doing it, guys? | ||
| Where do you draw the goddamn line? | ||
| All the people in Africa are black? | ||
| Really? | ||
| Egyptians are the same race as people from the Congo? | ||
| As the people from South Africa? | ||
| As the people from Somalia? | ||
| I mean, how are they the same race? | ||
| Because it's pigment? | ||
| Skin pigment? | ||
| Is that the only determination? | ||
| Well, it's a fascinating thing when you call people African Americans or call them Italian Americans, because Italy isn't actually a country, whereas Africa's a continent. | ||
| Fantastic point. | ||
| It's weird to call people continent Americans. | ||
| Who's an Italian, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because guess what? | ||
| Italy didn't even exist until the 19th century. | ||
| I mean, it was just a bunch of city-states until then. | ||
| And there was no such thing as an Italian. | ||
| People who lived there didn't call themselves Italian. | ||
| It wasn't a concept. | ||
| It wasn't a name. | ||
| It was nothing. | ||
| And then they made it into this nation-state that they called Italy. | ||
| And ever since then... | ||
| Every sorry, but every dipshit Italian-American is like really proud that I'm Italian. | ||
| Well that dude that has no meaning really in the deepest history. | ||
| It has some meaning, sure, but they talk about it as if it's like rooted in nature, like it's biological. | ||
|
unidentified
|
People love it. | |
| They love being a part of that stupid team. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Sopranos. | ||
| I blame the Sopranos. | ||
| It's tribalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's tribalism. | ||
| It is tribalism. | ||
| And it's stupid and if it were just stupid I wouldn't care. | ||
| It's that, as I said, it just leads to bad stuff, and it has historically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Let's get over it. | |
| So is this a popular opinion, the idea that there are no races? | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So, you know, I'm Mr. Anti-Academic Academic, but this is where academics have actually done their best work, I think. | ||
| And this is my second disagreement with Jordan Peterson. | ||
| He thinks that all the stuff in college campuses that's crazy is because of postmodernism, and he doesn't understand postmodernism. | ||
| What's going on in college campuses is people making all sorts of truth claims about things like race and gender, right? | ||
| I'm black, therefore I will always be this, that, and the other thing. | ||
| You're white, therefore you are this, that, and the other thing no matter what, right? | ||
| That is actually old, modernist, scientific racist thinking. | ||
| That's what these old racist, geneticists, eugenicists thought back in the day. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| Again, SJWs are actually really, really conservative and ultimately racist. | ||
| The social justice warriors, folks. | ||
| I thought your listeners must know that. | ||
| Some people don't know the abbreviations. | ||
| I just assumed that was a shorthand to use. | ||
| So postmodernism. | ||
| This is where Jordan Peterson makes me want to throw chairs when he talks about this. | ||
| It comes out of French philosophy in the 1960s and 70s and 80s. | ||
| Michel Foucault is the most famous example of a French postmodernist. | ||
| And they get dumped on all the time. | ||
| But the central argument that was made by Foucault and postmodernists was that none of these things are... | ||
| Biologically determined. | ||
| That there is no natural essence to anything. | ||
| That everything is a social construct. | ||
| Which means that we now are free to choose our own destiny as individuals, right? | ||
| Prior to that, prior to the 1960s and 70s, it was the dominant belief That if you were born a woman, you were going to be a wife and a mother. | ||
| And if you weren't, you were doing something unnatural. | ||
| That if you were black, you could never be the head of a business or the president. | ||
| You could never do math, whatever. | ||
| If you were white, you should do all those things. | ||
| Everybody's destiny was determined at birth. | ||
| And everyone believed that. | ||
| Most people believed that. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So postmodernists came along and said, guess what? | ||
| You know what we found looking at history? | ||
| We found just what I said. | ||
| I just gave you the whole postmodern argument right there. | ||
| We looked at history and we saw, first of all, that all these categories have changed over time, which tells us that they're just inventions. | ||
| They're just inventions that get reinvented all the time. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And second of all, they have served the purposes of ruling elites, because they get to put people in their boxes and control them more easily, right? | ||
| Oh, those people over there, those are black, therefore they should be our slaves. | ||
| So it's okay for us to have them as slaves. | ||
| Those women over there, we don't want them, you know, working for NASA, so we will have a rule against women working for NASA, whatever it is, right? | ||
| So postmodernists said, None of this is biological. | ||
| None of this is inevitable. | ||
| You are now free to do what you want as an individual. | ||
| It was a liberating moment. | ||
| It has become the dominant way of thinking in academia. | ||
| And I have to say, in my view, it is the supreme achievement of academics. | ||
| Ever. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| But it's huge. | ||
| Huge. | ||
| So if you think about it, look how the world has changed, and particularly in the United States since then, right? | ||
| We no longer generally have those ideas. | ||
| At least we don't operate as such. | ||
| So black people are allowed, mostly, into places they weren't before. | ||
| Women are allowed, very much so, into places they weren't allowed before. | ||
| The whole world has changed, and I think principally from that idea, So that doesn't mean... | ||
| Now, the problem is that these social justice warriors, so-called, on campuses have used some of that language and taken a shit on it. | ||
| So the trans movement, for instance, right, that started from postmodernism. | ||
| That whole idea, right, is that, you know, if you were born with a penis, you're a man and you should do X, Y, and Z with your life, right? | ||
| The trans movement needed that, needed postmodernism to make that intervention and say, no, that's not true, right? | ||
| You can actually be a woman because woman is an invention. | ||
| It's a social construct. | ||
| What much of the trans movement now is doing, which makes me so sad, is that they're saying that I am biologically, essentially, naturally, you know, in my core, a woman, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| No one is. | ||
| No one is. | ||
| You can't... | ||
| The whole point of this movement used to be that you get to choose your gender or choose not to be a gender. | ||
| You get to move around. | ||
| Your destiny is not determined for you. | ||
| What a lot of the trans movement now is doing, there's a good word, reifying. | ||
| They're making these ideas, these abstractions real again. | ||
| They're making these claims... | ||
| That are similar to Sam Harris's claims and to old racist claims and to old sexist claims that if you're born a particular way biologically, this is who you are. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because you've heard a lot of trans people say this, right? | ||
| I was born a woman. | ||
| That's what they often say. | ||
| What I'm saying is no one was born anything. | ||
| You're losing me in a huge way. | ||
| Why? | ||
| You don't think that women, that some women are born women and some, you don't think you're born a man? | ||
| No. | ||
| What are you born? | ||
| Why are you a man? | ||
| For all sorts of reasons. | ||
| For all sorts of reasons. | ||
| None of them being biological. | ||
| We just decided. | ||
| None of them being the XY chromosome. | ||
| None of them being you have testicles. | ||
| None of them being you have a penis. | ||
| None of them being the fact that you generally gravitate towards male activities like boxing, kickboxing, aggressive things. | ||
| We just went through this whole thing. | ||
| No, you didn't. | ||
| Yoel Romero and Andy Dick. | ||
| Yeah, but you. | ||
| Why are they both men? | ||
| But you. | ||
| You. | ||
| You're a man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We're not talking about the broad spectrum of masculine behavior. | ||
| We're talking about no one is born a man. | ||
| You're not born a man. | ||
| I'm not born a man. | ||
| I'm saying that, no. | ||
| I think we're getting silly. | ||
| Hold on here. | ||
| I think it's the category of man becomes meaningless. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does it? | |
| Yeah, we just did this, man. | ||
| No, we didn't. | ||
| We definitely didn't do this. | ||
| Yoel Romero and Andy Dick are both- It's a broad category. | ||
| Lines get blurry at the ends of the spectrum, and I think they cross over. | ||
| The male-female lines do cross over when you get to that Kenyan runner in Andy Dick. | ||
| Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. | ||
| It's so broad that it becomes, to me, pretty damn meaningless. | ||
| Well, the numbers. | ||
| Are incredibly small at those crossover marks. | ||
| You're talking about a very, very small percentage of the population. | ||
| Neither Andy Dick nor Yoel Romero are trans people, right? | ||
| Andy might be. | ||
| They are so different, though, physically in every way. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| But we both put them in this silly category called, man, what the hell does that mean anymore? | ||
| Andy has children. | ||
| He made them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that mean anymore? | |
| He impregnated different women and got babies from them. | ||
| And there's a lot of people called men who don't and can't. | ||
| Can't. | ||
| Okay, yeah, but that's rare. | ||
| They were born that way, by the way. | ||
| But that's pretty rare. | ||
| Not that rare. | ||
| Oh, it's very rare. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| Most men, when they have sex with a woman and they put sperm in their body, they can make a baby. | ||
| So that's one characteristic. | ||
| But hold on a second. | ||
| You're making it as if it's a really common thing. | ||
| When you're talking about a small fraction of the men can't make babies. | ||
| An incredibly small fraction. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| The vast majority of males with the XY chromosome who have penises are capable of impregnating a female with an XX chromosome. | ||
| The male was born a male, the female was born a female. | ||
| So what do you mean that you aren't born a man or you aren't born a female? | ||
| So there are many, many characteristics that we assign to the category of man. | ||
| Many of them. | ||
| That's one characteristic. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So why? | ||
| Why is that characteristic in the man category? | ||
| If, in particular, that there are some men who don't share that characteristic. | ||
| But which ones don't? | ||
| That's the aberration. | ||
| The aberration is the ones that don't. | ||
| Why is it an aberration? | ||
| Because they can't get a woman pregnant. | ||
| They don't produce sperm. | ||
| You're talking about very, very rare cases. | ||
| Yeah, same for race. | ||
| Same thing happens with sickle cell anemia, right? | ||
| This is what everybody invokes when they want to claim that race is real. | ||
| Only black people get sickle cell anemia. | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| The numbers there are about the same as the number of men who are infertile. | ||
| Why, then, are people with sickle cell anemia definitely black? | ||
| Why is that definitely a black thing? | ||
| Same thing. | ||
| It's, you know, again, why are we... | ||
| There's all these characteristics. | ||
| Why do we draw this line called man around... | ||
| All those different people. | ||
| Well, why do we do it with animals? | ||
| When you have a male dog and a female dog, isn't there a male dog and a female dog? | ||
| You don't believe there's a male dog and a female dog? | ||
| I'm just saying it's inventions. | ||
| Now, hold on. | ||
| But it's not an invention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| No, it is. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But it's not an invention. | ||
| One of them has a penis and testicles. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a male. | |
| The thing we see, we call it a penis. | ||
| Sure, I get it. | ||
| No, I get it. | ||
| And that's the world I live in. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| So I operate in this way, by the way. | ||
| A dog penis? | ||
| You and I would agree on all the things in the world that are dogs. | ||
| I'm not going to walk around and be like, oh no, that's not a dog. | ||
| So with humans, you're making a distinction that there are certain feelings and the way you interface with the world that may be more or less masculine or feminine. | ||
| But it does apply to dogs, my point here, which is that we did draw a line, right? | ||
| Do all dogs look alike? | ||
| My God, there's a huge variation there, too. | ||
| We're not talking about race, though. | ||
| We're talking about gender, right? | ||
| Either way, it doesn't matter. | ||
| It's the same principle. | ||
| Okay, let's just say Dobermans. | ||
| Male Dobermans and female Dobermans, right? | ||
| You go to buy a male Doberman and the guy gives you a female Doberman and he goes, oh, but she identifies with being a male. | ||
| It's just an invention, man. | ||
| This is a male. | ||
| She's a male. | ||
| You can't disrespect her by saying she's not a male. | ||
| You would say that guy's crazy and you'd want your money back. | ||
| Are there any two females who are identical? | ||
| Two female what? | ||
| Anything. | ||
| I mean, if you have a really good breeder, you can get pretty goddamn close if you're talking about dogs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| There are no two organisms that are identical. | ||
| Certainly not. | ||
| They're not identical down to the hair. | ||
| You've got no technicality, but you can still categorize them as XY or XX chromosomes. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| And I'm not saying we shouldn't categorize anything ever because we must do that to live in this world. | ||
| What are you saying? | ||
| What I am saying is we should probably stop Applying certain categories to human beings in the ways we have done. | ||
| Like how so? | ||
| How so with male and female? | ||
| Because there are certain inventions, certain social constructs that do nothing but bad things, that do no good, and they're only social constructs, like race and gender. | ||
| Well, tell me how race and gender... | ||
| I'm not worried about Dobermans too much. | ||
| Especially gender definition. | ||
| Let's look at gender definition and tell me how it's only bad. | ||
| Why is it only bad to define men as men and women as women? | ||
| Because, well, if you say it's about making the biological claim, the biological connection there. | ||
| Well, making a definition, like saying a guy who is born a guy who gravitates towards male activities, likes females, all those things, by saying that that's a man, that this is a born man, and you're saying, no, no one is. | ||
| So if you're saying if those characteristics are naturally determined, Then all of us guys who don't do those things are unnatural. | ||
| Which things are those? | ||
| Be attracted to women? | ||
| Whatever it is that you characterize as being male, right? | ||
| But that's so common with males. | ||
| What is? | ||
| Being attracted to women, engaging in sex with women. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Have you heard of gay people? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| It's a small percentage of the population of men. | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Is it 1%? | ||
| Is it 10%? | ||
| I mean, it's certainly a lot of people, isn't it? | ||
| Well, it's a lot of people when you think about the 350 million people we have living in America. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Take all the men. | ||
| Let's do this. | ||
| Take all the men who are straight-up homosexual, always have been. | ||
| But you can classify them as gay men. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Hold on. | ||
| So just take that, whatever that is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If it's 1 or 2 or 5 or 10 percent, whatever it is. | ||
| Only been homosexual 100 percent, never been attracted to a woman, period. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, fine. | ||
| That's still a really significant number. | ||
| I'm not done. | ||
| Hang on. | ||
| Then take the men who don't identify as homosexual, have had sex with women, have been attracted to women, but have fucked men. | ||
| Prisoners. | ||
| Pretty damn big number there. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| How many guys do you think that are attracted to women but still fuck men? | ||
| So Kinsey, the Kinsey study, in the 1940s and 50s, found that it was, I think, 30%. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 30% of men fuck men? | ||
| Reached orgasm in a sexual experience with another man, yes. | ||
| 30%? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It was a very large number. | ||
| Kinsey was hanging out with freaks. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| That's what I think. | ||
| There were different numbers for women and men, but they were both very significant percentages. | ||
| Not majorities, but very significant percentages. | ||
| Well, I don't know how to say that. | ||
| I have personally known many men who you would consider straight, who identify as straight, who have done something with men. | ||
| Either given him a blowjob, gotten a blowjob, had full-on sex, jerked each other off. | ||
| Jesus, you're hanging out with weird crowds. | ||
| I'm surprised this is news to you. | ||
| Well, it's news in that even if they did do that, you're talking about individual sexual acts between people who are male or female, right? | ||
| You're still talking about a man. | ||
| So talk about a man that's having sex with other men. | ||
| You're defining it such in that way. | ||
| You're literally saying a guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, you are. | |
| No, you are saying you know guys who've sucked other guys dicks. | ||
| A guy who's done it to a guy. | ||
| You're saying a man do it to a man. | ||
| Gotcha. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| I gotcha. | ||
| No, I'm saying that people who are identified as men. | ||
| You didn't say that though, did you? | ||
| That's what I meant. | ||
| People who are identified as men by society have done these things that society considers to be unnatural for men. | ||
| But when they were doing that, weren't they a man doing it to a man? | ||
| And look what happened to those guys, historically. | ||
| Not so much recently, but still today, but certainly historically. | ||
| Listen, we can't keep going back to a hundred plus years from now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm talking about... | |
| Let's talk about, like, right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I am. | |
| You're still talking about a man who's having a sexual exchange with another man. | ||
| Like, you can be sexually attracted to another man. | ||
| It doesn't mean that you're both not men. | ||
| So do you think homosexual men are men? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure! | |
| Why? | ||
| Because they're male. | ||
| They have a penis. | ||
| They have XY chromosomes. | ||
| They can get a woman pregnant if they wanted to. | ||
| They can donate their sperm to their lesbian pals and they can all have babies together. | ||
| So then you just eliminated one of the characteristics that you previously said was male. | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| Most men, most are attracted to women, but a good percentage of them are gay. | ||
| This is not like complicated stuff. | ||
| They're still men. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't know where to go from here. | ||
| I mean, I think I've made the argument. | ||
| It's funny, because I thought you were totally with me for like an hour and a half, and now it's like, I feel like you're not there. | ||
| I don't know what to say. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You're definitely not there with that. | |
| I think there's a giant spectrum of people, but to say that a guy isn't born a man, or a woman isn't born a woman, I think is disingenuous. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Uh-huh. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's where the... | ||
| So, okay. | ||
| Thailand. | ||
| Thailand, I think in India, and I think there's several Polynesian countries, there's several countries where there is a legal and cultural and social category that is neither man nor woman, nor male nor female. | ||
| Like in Thailand, the ladyboys, right? | ||
| And there's other countries too have this. | ||
| You can look it up. | ||
| It's easy to find. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Right? | ||
| Okay? | ||
| You know about this, maybe. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| Okay. | ||
| What about that? | ||
| What about those people? | ||
| There's that too! | ||
| I think there's that too! | ||
| I'm saying people can be born a man, people can be born a woman, or you can get these Andy Dick, Yoel Romero weird variations. | ||
| But Joe, take the ladyboys from Thailand and move them here to this country now. | ||
| How will they be considered? | ||
| What do you mean, how will they be considered? | ||
| Americans don't have those categories. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We have only two. | ||
| Don't you think there's a lot of variables in Thailand also that you're dealing with, like, really young sex workers? | ||
| There's a lot of weird shit that goes on in Thailand, a lot of abuse. | ||
| So is the ladyboy category real or not? | ||
| It's certainly real, as the trans category is real. | ||
| So there, they consider that real, and here we do not. | ||
| But if a trans category is real, and I think you agree it's real, and I agree it's real, right? | ||
| Trans people, I mean, there's absolutely people that feel like they're born in the wrong gender, right? | ||
| So why isn't a man real? | ||
| Why isn't a woman real? | ||
| They're real too. | ||
| If you want to say they're all equally real, I'm down. | ||
| I'm there, we're good. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's just that those categories have no absolute, you know, biological meaning. | ||
| There's not meaning that they're fluid. | ||
| They're, you know, basically arbitrary. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| I mean, that we invent them. | ||
| I'm not saying it's useless. | ||
| I'm not saying we should never have any categories. | ||
| I'm just saying that those categories have changed and they change everything. | ||
| Depending on where you are in the world. | ||
| That's why I'm disagreeing with you. | ||
| You kind of did say that a man isn't born a man and that a woman isn't born a woman. | ||
| And for sure, a lot of them are. | ||
| For sure, a lot of people that have your stereotypical classic female characteristics were born female. | ||
| And for sure, there's a lot of men who have classic stereotypical male behavior and patterns and desires. | ||
| They're born men. | ||
| And then there's trans people. | ||
| And then there's asexual people that also need to be considered. | ||
| There's people that just don't have any desire to fuck anybody. | ||
| They don't want to. | ||
| They don't want to be a man or a woman. | ||
| They can call themselves queer. | ||
| They can call themselves whatever they want. | ||
| They don't want to be a female. | ||
| They don't want to be a male. | ||
| They just want to be human. | ||
| Here's the deal. | ||
| Let's make a deal. | ||
| If that's what you have to say about it, and you want to not get in the way of people doing those things and making those decisions for themselves and let them do what they want to do, I am totally with you. | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| Well, for sure, I don't want to get in the way of anybody making... | ||
| I don't want to get in the way of furries. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| If you really identify with being a giant squirrel... | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| And that's really what matters. | ||
| I'm just saying that claims... | ||
| And I want to end it here. | ||
| Claims about these essential characteristics that it's biologically determined, right, you know, are the things that reinforce getting in the way. | ||
| Laws, policies, cultures, ideas, norms that get in the way of people doing what they want to do with their own lives. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah, for sure with some people. | ||
| The variables are so extreme and the spectrum is so broad. | ||
| So after I was on your show the first time, got a whole bunch of comments from people calling me a fag and a pussy and a sissy and a this and that. | ||
| You can't read those. | ||
| Why are you reading those? | ||
| Feminizing me and it's not your fault for calling me a girl. | ||
| But you can't read those. | ||
| Oh, no, I know. | ||
| It's whatever. | ||
| No, I mean, people came to Twitter and whatever. | ||
| Yeah, you don't read those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no, I know. | |
| I stopped. | ||
| I learned. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I stopped. | ||
| I don't do it anymore. | ||
| It didn't matter. | ||
| I didn't care. | ||
| This didn't bother me at all. | ||
| I just thought it was interesting, actually. | ||
| So, in other words, and a lot of what they were really saying, and some of them elaborated on this, was that I was, you know, not really man enough. | ||
| I was less of a man for whatever reason. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| It was funny. | ||
| But it really proves my point is that, you know, these things are very fluid. | ||
| So they kind of were kicking me out of the category of man. | ||
| And I was like, cool. | ||
| I think they were just insulting you to try to get awry from him. | ||
| I don't think you can make a rational argument dealing with internet trolls. | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| I'm saying it's just one example of what goes on, generally, which is that we do this all the time, right? | ||
| Yeah, but they're not even human. | ||
| Like, when someone's interacting with you like that, it's lacking all of the characteristics of human interaction. | ||
| You're not there with a person, you're not looking at them. | ||
| If someone was in front of you like that, oh, you're a fag, you'd be like, oh my god, I'm in danger. | ||
| This is a crazy person. | ||
| I might have to defend myself against this person, because if someone is treating me that way, insulting me, looking me in the eye, we are so close to violence. | ||
| Anything can happen here. | ||
| This is a person that's not rational. | ||
| It is amazing, isn't it? | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| I was just talking to my son as we were driving over here, because he read all the comments when I was on your shows. | ||
| And he was like, it was so funny. | ||
| I was like, Toby, don't read that shit, man. | ||
| He just thinks it's funny. | ||
| But it is remarkable how many people do that, right? | ||
| And it's not just that they have these thoughts about you, it's that they go out of their way to write it in public to do something to you. | ||
| They want to hurt your feelings. | ||
| Yes, that they'll go out of their way. | ||
| They want to make you react. | ||
| They'll actually sit down. | ||
| That's what boggles my mind, is that someone will actually take the time and energy to sit there and write. | ||
| This thing on YouTube or whatever, you know, about, you know, this or that about me. | ||
| It's phenomenal. | ||
| Well, sometimes people have good points. | ||
| I mean, sometimes they're not, even when they're insulting you, sometimes they're making points while they're insulting you. | ||
| It's just hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a weird way of interacting with people that didn't exist. | ||
| I mean, there was never a time in our past where you could, with real time, instantaneously, send something to someone and then they read it right away and they could be rude and all they are is a Twitter egg with a bunch of numbers and letters and they call you a homo. | ||
| It's the real downside of the internet, which otherwise is a miraculous boon to humanity. | ||
| I feel like it's an adolescent stage. | ||
| I feel like we are finding our way through this... | ||
| Inescapable new technology, this connection that we're sharing, which is just... | ||
| Well, it's one of the reasons why I think it's important to have one-on-one conversations with people. | ||
| And one of the things that I've noticed from doing this podcast is how many interesting people there are out there in the world, like yourself, that I could talk to, but also how bad most people are in the world with just talking to each other. | ||
| We don't ever have long conversations. | ||
| Everybody's checking their fucking phone. | ||
| Everybody's watching a television. | ||
| I worry about that because I'm very pro-technology and all this stuff, but that does worry me. | ||
| When I go into a restaurant and I see people sitting at the same table all looking at their phones. | ||
| Oh yeah, like seven people. | ||
| It's depressing. | ||
| You'll see like a group of seven all along their phone. | ||
| And I have wondered about the quality of conversation generally. | ||
| It erodes. | ||
| Just what you're saying. | ||
| I've been wondering and I'm thinking it might actually be... | ||
| I definitely think it is. | ||
| I find myself continually disappointed with very smart people that I meet that don't have real conversation. | ||
| They talk over people. | ||
| They're not listening. | ||
| They're not responding to what you're saying. | ||
| They're waiting for you to stop talking so they can talk. | ||
| And it's like this self-centered sort of way of interacting with each other that seems more prevalent than not. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm used to that because I'm around academics a lot. | ||
| Because they're used to lecturing and they're the smartest person in the room. | ||
| And so all their job is to do is to tell us what's true, right? | ||
| So they're very comfortable with that. | ||
| I was always amazed when I'd watch these really important, famous professors at Columbia, you know, give these lectures to a hall of 500 people. | ||
| And it seemed to me they didn't even know that... | ||
| There were other people in the room, the way they were talking. | ||
| Like, it didn't matter what the reactions were, whether people were asleep, whether they were reading the newspaper. | ||
| They just didn't care. | ||
| They just kept going. | ||
| They kept talking, talking, talking for two hours. | ||
| Straight ahead. | ||
| You know, I just, I can't do that. | ||
| I'm the exact opposite. | ||
| I panic if I feel like the person I'm talking to isn't listening to me. | ||
| That's good. | ||
| I panic. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so when I see, if I'm lecturing to 200 students, I see one kid kind of just get a little distracted, I freak. | ||
| And I feel like I have to up my game right then, and I have to go directly address them. | ||
| That means you care. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, whatever it is, I care in a particular way. | ||
| I mean, it's another form of narcissism, I suppose, but I do think that's what makes me a good teacher, because I have to have interaction. | ||
| Well, you want to connect. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I need to know what you're hearing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I need to know what you're hearing from me. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| And then we can really talk. | ||
| And then I also am really curious. | ||
| I'm just a curious person. | ||
| And I want to know what you're thinking. | ||
| And let's do this. | ||
| And then let's have that chemistry that happened just now, which got hot. | ||
| But that's where life is. | ||
| That's where real personal relationships are. | ||
| Yeah, comics kind of do the same thing, too, because they're used to being the one who's talking on stage, or if they do a podcast, they're used to being the one who's talking all the time. | ||
| But the ones who do crowd work, right? | ||
| Amazing, if you think about it. | ||
| You know, the ones who interact have a whole part of their act where it's crowd work. | ||
| But even most comics, I mean... | ||
| They definitely have interaction with the crowd. | ||
| It happens a lot. | ||
| I mean, you're dealing with people drinking alcohol in a social environment, and it's dark out, and it's nighttime, and they're having fun, and they're laughing. | ||
| And especially when you're talking about controversial opinions and subjects, people always chime in and stuff. | ||
| I mean, all the comics talk about, you know, you feel the room, you feel the reaction. | ||
| And you feel it. | ||
| So that is interaction. | ||
| I'm talking about these professors and their tweed jackets at Columbia. | ||
| I swear to God, it didn't matter what was happening in the... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a certain amount of arrogance that I'm sure you must get after being a professor. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| It's a particular narcissism. | ||
| They live entirely in their heads, right? | ||
| They just sit in their study and read books, and then they go out and then give a lecture, and then they come back and read the book. | ||
| It's a weird narcissism. | ||
| I can't But do they interact with other professors and go over their work together? | ||
| You know, I am stereotyping and generalizing. | ||
| This is not everybody, but I did see this a lot, and I still do. | ||
| Yeah, there's some interactions, but again, it's mostly through, you know, you write a paper, and then you send it out to the journal, and then some other professor reviews it anonymously often and sends it back. | ||
| It's all very weird, passive-aggressive shit, too. | ||
| Like, that's the other thing about academia I can't stand, is that they are allergic to direct conflict. | ||
| Like the argument you and I just had, that's pretty much not allowed. | ||
| Except through writing. | ||
| They'll do it through writing, but they won't do it head-to-head. | ||
| Well, that's a real problem because it takes too long to work out an idea that way. | ||
| Yeah, like real debate. | ||
| See, when I went to college, I had this idea that it would be the really smart people, like professors, like more than one, would be in a room, and they would have, you know, one major issue, and they would debate it, that there would be argument, right? | ||
| There would be a conflict of ideas about an idea. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's not that. | ||
| It's never that. | ||
| I have been in and around college campuses for 32 years. | ||
| I have never really seen a head-to-head debate like you and I just had. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Person to person. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Here and there a little bit, but not like that. | ||
| Not where we were really, really going at it. | ||
| I don't think I've ever seen that. | ||
| I mean that. | ||
| And I mean among faculty. | ||
| Some students do, but faculty don't. | ||
| They're scared of it. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| There's a problem with cowardice. | ||
| And one of the real tragedies with that is that, as I said, there's no real conflict of ideas, which is reinforced by the tenure system, the accreditation system. | ||
| It's this monolith where there's one... | ||
| And this is why you get these uniformity of ideas on campuses. | ||
| It's all this monolith that actually has its head at the federal government. | ||
| Do you know about the accreditation system? | ||
| It's the mafia. | ||
| People don't even know this. | ||
| To get accredited as a college or university in this country, you have to be accredited by an agency that is authorized by the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. The Secretary of Education has to authorize your existence as a legitimate, legal college or university. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So Renegade University, people were asking me. | ||
| Some people wanted college credit, and I was like, oh, let me look into this. | ||
| And so I did. | ||
| And I quickly found out that it's the fucking mafia that I couldn't get accredited because they have all these standards. | ||
| You have to have a particular number of buildings, a particular number of professors. | ||
| You have to have a library with a particular number of books in it. | ||
| You have to have a gym. | ||
| You have to have dorm. | ||
| All these things. | ||
| And if you don't have those things, you're not in. | ||
| You don't get that. | ||
| You don't get college credit. | ||
| So what if you did? | ||
| What's the number? | ||
| So if I gave you five credits for taking one of my courses, no other college and university would recognize it. | ||
| If you wanted to transfer, like you wanted to go to graduate school or go somewhere else. | ||
| No employers would look at it and see that it's not an accredited university where you got those credits from. | ||
| So how do those degree mills, how do they do it? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's two different systems that the Department of Education controls. | ||
| One is for the so-called elite prestigious schools. | ||
| Those are regional accreditation agencies, again, all authorized by the Department of Education. | ||
| And the for-profit colleges, there's a separate accreditation system called the National Accreditation System, and that's also controlled by the Department of Education. | ||
| But everybody knows within it that if you get accredited by one of the national accreditation systems, you're a bullshit for-profit. | ||
| So those credits, you can't transfer them to Harvard or Occidental or any of the elite, so-called elite schools. | ||
| So they're completely kept separate. | ||
| But if you get a degree from Phoenix University... | ||
| You can get 5,000 degrees from Phoenix University. | ||
| My degree is I can't take anywhere. | ||
| And I'm talking about even community colleges won't accept those credits. | ||
| Huh. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| It's the mafia. | ||
| So think about that, right? | ||
| The Department of Education, one person, federal government, decides who is in, who's out. | ||
| And then inside that system, there's tenure, lifetime appointment. | ||
| Those people control the curriculum, what is taught. | ||
| They also control who's hired and fired. | ||
| Faculty control all the hiring and firing of faculty and tenure. | ||
| They ultimately control that, basically. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And they're there forever, like dons in the mafia. | ||
| Seriously. | ||
| So you wonder why, when you walk into any college classroom in this country, you hear basically the same shit being said in sociology classes and history classes? | ||
| That's why. | ||
| It's astonishing. | ||
| And I didn't even know the full extent of it until I started Renegade University and people started asking me about this. | ||
| If someone allowed you to come along, if Donald Trump said, Thaddeus, I love your work, what could you do to fix that? | ||
| What would you offer as an alternative? | ||
| We have to change it. | ||
| No, there's nothing I can do. | ||
| I mean, meaning if he wanted credit, like college credit, right now there's really nothing I can do. | ||
| I can certainly give him a certificate and maybe an employer will, you know, think it's meaningful because my name's on it. | ||
| Is it less and less valuable to have a degree today? | ||
| I'm saying I'm just completely outside the system, right? | ||
| Right, I understand. | ||
| Yeah, but like if you admired me and my work, right, and you saw and he had a certificate Saying, this guy's great and he took my course. | ||
| He was an employer. | ||
| It would actually help, sure. | ||
| And then in that case, it would be meaningful, my credits. | ||
| I'm just saying that's completely outside. | ||
| It means nothing inside the system of the thousands and thousands of colleges and universities and for most employers, right? | ||
| Most employers abide by this. | ||
| They think that if you're not accredited, you're bullshit. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we have to change it. | ||
| And Betsy DeVos, for whatever her problems are, seems to be the first Secretary of Education maybe we've ever had who could be willing to challenge this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Yeah, because she's about deregulation and privatization and all this stuff. | ||
| And choice, school choice. | ||
| And we need a movement right now, before she's gone, to get her to abolish the national accreditation system. | ||
| It's with a stroke of a pen, I think. | ||
| And maybe a congressional act. | ||
| Probably takes a congressional act, too. | ||
| But she herself, I think, could disaccredit. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| She could disaccredit all those agencies right now. | ||
| So you think there's just this inherent bottleneck that it's existed for so long and that these people have been in charge of saying what is true and what's not true, what should be taught and not taught? | ||
| It's a monopoly. | ||
| It's a monopoly ultimately controlled by the federal government. | ||
| And that it's also not universally agreed that they're correct. | ||
| Correct in what way? | ||
| Correct in what they're teaching. | ||
| It's not like there's an absolute standard for what needs to be taught if someone wants to get a degree in English. | ||
| No, no, there are. | ||
| I mean, there are absolute standards. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| You have to have this, that, and the other thing on your college campus to be accredited. | ||
| No, that's not what I mean. | ||
| I mean, in terms of what constitutes a master's degree in literature, right? | ||
| Is there an absolute standard? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they're pretty absolute. | ||
| I mean, the accreditation agencies mostly agree on those things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So why couldn't you just reproduce that in an environment where you're being taught by someone who obviously has a mastery of that particular subject? | ||
| Guess what, Joe? | ||
| That's what I'm doing. | ||
| That's what we're doing. | ||
| It's happening. | ||
| It's not just me. | ||
| I'm one of the pioneers, but it's happening. | ||
| How many other people are doing what you're doing? | ||
| A handful. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| But it's becoming a new... | ||
| Jordan Peterson is actually looking into doing this as well. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I hope so. | |
| When I heard him talking about that on your show, I said, go for it, man. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, his grant was... | ||
| You know what he said? | ||
| He was... | ||
| And there's no criticism at all. | ||
| I didn't know this either until recently. | ||
| He had this idea. | ||
| What was it about accreditation? | ||
| He thought it was possible somehow to get accredited, but it's not. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| We have to start an entirely separate parallel system. | ||
| Is it a different issue in Canada? | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| That could be. | ||
| That could be. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe he can be credited in Canada. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| But anyway, regardless, I am all for him doing that. | ||
| I hope he does. | ||
| Well, he was recently denied a grant for the first time in his academic career. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm sure. | |
| I'm sure. | ||
| They're not playing around. | ||
| They're not playing around. | ||
| No, they want him to toe the line. | ||
| This is their castle. | ||
| This is their castle. | ||
| They're not going to let the knaves in. | ||
| Well, what's interesting is because of social media and because of coming on podcasts like mine and his YouTube presence, he's actually got a large movement of people that are interested in his ideas. | ||
| He had a disastrous fucking conversation with Sam Harris. | ||
| I heard it. | ||
| I did. | ||
| What in the fuck was that all about? | ||
| Well, he's holding on to God. | ||
| Well, the first one wasn't even that. | ||
| It was about truth. | ||
| That was God, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Was it? | |
| Yeah, because Jordan... | ||
| He's religious, and he believes in God. | ||
| Well, he's religious. | ||
| So he wants to hold on to this idea about... | ||
| What is truth being valuable for humankind versus what is truth like one plus one equals two? | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Moral truth. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Moral truth versus actual truth. | ||
| I was kind of on neither side in that one. | ||
| It was so verbose. | ||
| There was too many words. | ||
| It was tough. | ||
| Like, you guys gotta fucking edit this down. | ||
| That was tough. | ||
| Well, Jordan had to boil it down. | ||
| And they did a way better podcast the second time. | ||
| Did you hear the second one? | ||
| No. | ||
| Much, much better. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Much more concise, much clearer. | ||
| But again, I think there was a certain amount of heel digging on both sides. | ||
| They dug their heels in, they stood their ground on this one really preposterous issue, which was like, you know, you're listening to this, like, Jesus fucking Christ, guys, you're just talking about truth for an hour and a half. | ||
| Like, what is truth? | ||
| Here's what's true. | ||
| Fire burns paper. | ||
| That's fucking true. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Like, take a piece of paper, light it on fire. | ||
| Joe, stop. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| You're going to make me go again. | ||
| I don't want to have this conversation. | ||
| No, it's really important, but let's leave it there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so I did agree with them, Sam and Jordan, that it is really important. | ||
| I just disagree with them about what's going on. | ||
| But anyway. | ||
| The definition of the word true. | ||
| But you know what? | ||
| They should have had more leeway on both sides with that. | ||
| Anyway, here's the thing. | ||
| He's a fascinating guy. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| I have major disagreements with Sam Jordan, but they're still heroic and I'm totally with them because they are doing this. | ||
| I mean, Sam's not doing it formally, but he's essentially part of this movement. | ||
| You're part of this movement. | ||
| You know what the election was about? | ||
| It was about a civil war in this country that's been going on for a long time that finally came to a head in November. | ||
| Which is a war between the people who went to college and the elite colleges in particular and who are of that culture that's created in those colleges and those who are not of that culture. | ||
| That's what that that's what that election was about. | ||
| I think there is this schism between those two groups in this country and that finally the people who are not of the elite college culture won something and it caused the elites to freak completely out. | ||
| So if you look at like I was looking at the top podcast because, you know, I just started a podcast and it did get ranked and so I'm excited, but I'm looking at it a lot and like you can really see it clearly. | ||
| Just look at the top 200 podcasts right now. | ||
| It's like 60 to 70% are like NPR. Cookie cutter, same shit. | ||
| Coastal, elite, liberal, bland, you know, you know what it is. | ||
| Tone of voice, what they say, who their guests are, all the same. | ||
| You know exactly what it is, right? | ||
| It's dominated by that, but then there's you in there. | ||
| You're not that. | ||
| There's Sam Harris, who's sort of that, but not really. | ||
| There's Dan Carlin. | ||
| There's another one, right? | ||
| He's part of this movement. | ||
| He doesn't have a school, but he's teaching people history. | ||
| Oh, fuck yeah. | ||
| He's teaching people history. | ||
| A lot of people history. | ||
| More people than any Harvard professor will ever teach. | ||
| I would argue more than any historian ever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Way more. | |
| Way more. | ||
| He gets millions of downloads. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Way more. | |
| What history lecture is anybody, in the numbers like millions, producing? | ||
| Is he a serious historian? | ||
| I've listened to him. | ||
| I'm a professionally trained historian. | ||
| Ivy League PhD. | ||
| Hell yeah, he is. | ||
| You know, I don't agree with everything, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| He's doing serious academic, professional, important history, and he is changing the landscape. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| He's on there. | ||
| So there's some of us. | ||
| There's some of us. | ||
| We're making it happen. | ||
| But you can just see it's such a divide. | ||
| There's just such a divide between who's on your podcast and who's on the NPR podcast. | ||
| It's hardly any crossover. | ||
| Yeah, but that's just my choice. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Interesting. | |
| I could call those people. | ||
| There's a lot of people that I get that are on those NPR podcasts. | ||
| That's my point, is that there's sort of two different cultures that's happening right now. | ||
| There's just that culture. | ||
| And this is kind of a problem my girlfriend and I have, because she's of that culture. | ||
| Most of the people I know are NPR types. | ||
| That's what they want to hear. | ||
| It's comforting, it's soothing, whatever. | ||
| It makes them feel good. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But they're really, that's who they are fundamentally. | ||
| It's like their identity. | ||
| And then, you know, when they hear your podcast or my podcast or anyone's, it's like punk rock to an 80-year-old. | ||
| It's just hard. | ||
| It's just a different culture. | ||
| It's like a different language, different way of behaving, different ideas are questioned, different questions are asked. | ||
| And there's this resentment, too, because the elites, the NPR types, I believe, have basically looked, not basically, they have looked down their noses at those who didn't go to college, who don't speak the way we speak, who don't talk about these ideas, who aren't aware of these ideas, right? | ||
| Working class people, like people in Salem, I know, right? | ||
| People who, oh, you know, Meryl Streep said it best, right, about MMA, right? | ||
| That was it right there. | ||
| They clearly see all those people outside this elite bi-coastal culture as doing bad stuff, inferior stuff, and they shouldn't be allowed to run things. | ||
| Well, what she said was so inherently ridiculous and also ignorant because she was also claiming that if you take out the immigrants, you're left with MMA. MMA is 80% immigrants. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Like, literally. | ||
| What she said was stupid, ignorant, and, more importantly, I think, classist in that way, right? | ||
| It's like, you're not smart enough. | ||
| You're not good enough. | ||
| She's so wrong. | ||
| Like, there's a lot of Americans that engage in MMA, for sure. | ||
| But... | ||
| There's so many great fighters that are immigrants. | ||
| I mean, a massive, massive amount. | ||
| It's not a small amount. | ||
| So she was saying, take out all the immigrants you left with MMA. That is so dumb. | ||
| Yeah, you know what those people do with the immigrants who do things like MMA? They ignore them. | ||
| They pretend they don't exist. | ||
| They pretend they don't exist. | ||
| It doesn't fit the narrow narrative they're trying to promote. | ||
| What they want is the immigrant, who also very much exists, they want the undocumented mom with the kid who got stopped at the border and sent back, who breaks my heart too. | ||
| Yeah, my two. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| But they want them only to be what? | ||
| Victims. | ||
| What's the solution to that? | ||
| That they can save. | ||
| What is the solution to illegal immigration in this country? | ||
| Do you just let everybody in? | ||
| I'm an open borders guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Open borders. | ||
| Just let anybody in who wants to come in. | ||
| Speaking of inventions and social constructs that have done great harm to humanity. | ||
| Borders. | ||
| Borders. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I agree that eventually that's going to be a thing of the past. | ||
| I think it'll be looked back, when we look back at history, it'll be thought of as one of the most barbaric ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Can you imagine? | ||
| It's barbaric in the way that, like, it used to be that you had a tribe and then you invaded another tribe, or they invaded you, and you had to put up a fence and guard your border. | ||
| And then these things became like larger communities, these communities became cities, became countries, became And then, you know, go back a few thousand years, you're dealing with these countries invading other countries. | ||
| And so you have these immigration policies, especially now, where we have border patrols and this idea that you have to have your paperwork, you have to have passports and numbers, and otherwise you were born in the wrong patch of dirt, sir. | ||
| If you were just born 30 miles north, you could have been in Texas, but you're in Juarez, you fuck, so you stay over here. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| Speaking of social constructions and social constructions that have changed over time, right? | ||
| Damn, telling a Mexican they can't come here? | ||
| Are you crazy? | ||
| Like, this was Mexico five minutes ago, you assholes. | ||
| Who the fuck are you? | ||
| I mean, it's astonishing the arrogance of Americans who think that Mexicans have no place here. | ||
| I mean, there weren't no white people here a long time ago. | ||
| Well, not only that, I mean, you just got lucky. | ||
| You were born into this, like, economically promising area where, you know, you got better opportunities. | ||
| And you're looking at these people that were born in a shit spot, and you're like, well, you're in that shit spot forever. | ||
| You can't come over here and take my good spot. | ||
| It also works against us, right? | ||
| Because then it becomes harder for us to travel elsewhere. | ||
| Because then they have borders. | ||
| They don't like Americans because of what we do to them. | ||
| When I go to Mexico, you know, I just, like... | ||
| I love it there. | ||
| And I keep thinking, man, it's amazing that you're treating me this well. | ||
| Because Mexicans are so kind, generally, you know, when you're down there. | ||
| I'm like, God, you should hate Americans. | ||
| What we've done to them in terms of the border, immigration, and the drug war. | ||
| I mean, the deaths, the poverty that we've inflicted on them through these laws. | ||
| For shitty policy. | ||
| My God. | ||
| I mean, they have every reason to hate our guts and they don't. | ||
| Yeah, well, no, Mexicans overall are very kind people. | ||
| My parents live in Mexico. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't know that. | ||
| Yeah, I love Mexico. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I love it. | |
| I go to Mexico all the time. | ||
| Incredible place. | ||
| I try to go... | ||
| It's one of my favorite places to go on vacation, for sure. | ||
| And I know a lot of people... | ||
| I have a lot of friends here. | ||
| They're scared. | ||
| They're scared of Mexico. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| They think Mexico is all gang violence and all that. | ||
| I'm like, read about Chicago. | ||
| You're not scared to go to Chicago. | ||
| Chicago is fucking murders every day. | ||
| That's a good point. | ||
| Trump, Chicago, Mexico, violence. | ||
| You know what he was saying about these illegal immigrants being violent and criminals and stuff? | ||
| He wasn't wrong entirely. | ||
| Here's what people are ignoring, that it's true that the cartels have moved into the Midwest. | ||
| You know about this? | ||
| In particular, Chicago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I have heard of that. | |
| El Chapo and others, too. | ||
| They have moved into the Midwest. | ||
| They're in Kentucky. | ||
| Do a Google search for, like, Mexican cartel and pick, like, a town in Kentucky and Ohio, Indiana. | ||
| They're all over the Midwest. | ||
| And they're competing. | ||
| They're kicking out the old gangs. | ||
| And that's why there's all this violence on the streets. | ||
| A lot of those black kids in Chicago who are shooting each other are working for one of those cartels, basically. | ||
| So Trump was right about that, but he's totally wrong about the answer to it. | ||
| And what liberals do in response to it is even worse, which is pretend it's not happening. | ||
| Yeah, no, people are killing each other. | ||
| But why? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because drugs are illegal. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because drugs are illegal, and we want them to be illegal. | ||
| We vote for those laws. | ||
| Well, I met a guy in Chicago who was a cop, and he explained it to me in great detail. | ||
| And he said essentially what happened is they moved in and they arrested a lot of these drug lords, these local people that were in charge of whatever areas, and they were running whatever criminal organization. | ||
| They arrest them, and they created a power vacuum. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And the way he was saying, he's like, it's no different than when we remove a dictator in some foreign country. | ||
| Bad people move in, and then it creates violence. | ||
| You get ISIS. Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, so, but you don't hear people talking about this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| That's what's going on. | ||
| Yes, the cartels are here. | ||
| Yes, Trump- Because drugs are illegal. | ||
| Trump is too goddamn dumb to make the full point, and he's also beholden to these asshole Republicans like Jeff Sessions, who thinks that marijuana is dangerous. | ||
| He wants to bring back just saying no. | ||
| So he's not saying, he has no idea, or at least he's not saying what the actual cause is, right? | ||
| And liberals are sort of abetting him by ignoring it, by saying, oh no, there is no violence. | ||
| It's like, no, fuckers, there is tremendous violence, and the cause is your laws against drugs. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So the answer is really simple. | ||
| Legalize drugs. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But because our government is just a fight between this moron, Trump, and these morons, the Democrats, who refuse to address this stuff, there's no discussion about it. | ||
| But if you do legalize drugs, how do you do that? | ||
| Like, say if the United States just decided we're going to decriminalize all drugs, and that's not good enough because someone's going to sell them, right? | ||
| You can't just decriminalize them. | ||
| But that just keeps people from getting arrested, which is a great step, a good move in the right direction. | ||
| There's some insane number of people in America that are in prison right now for nonviolent drug offenses. | ||
| It's a nutty number. | ||
| That's a side note, but a really important one. | ||
| There is now a debate among academics who study this stuff. | ||
| And a lot of academics who are actually more or less on the right side of this are arguing that the drug war and making drugs illegal is not the major cause of mass incarceration. | ||
| Because the number, the percentage of people, it is big, but it's something like 10% who are nonviolent drug offenders who are prosecuted and convicted of just drug offenses. | ||
| That is a relatively small number. | ||
| But what they're not taking into account is... | ||
| All of the other crimes that stem from drugs being illegal, right? | ||
| All the murders, all the assaults. | ||
| Take all the homicides in this country, right? | ||
| I want to see a number, but I'm sure it's really high, of how many were committed by a gang member, okay? | ||
| And how many of the gangs in the United States basically started by selling drugs? | ||
| Right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| Homicides, assault, gangs, drugs. | ||
| There is larceny, theft, people who are hooked on drugs, who are broke, in large part because drug prices are so high. | ||
| Why are they so high? | ||
| Because they're illegal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They have to get them on the black market, always raises prices. | ||
| So they're forced to steal because they're poor people. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So a huge percentage, and they don't track this because... | ||
| The convictions are, you know, if it's a junkie who steals from somebody to score, they don't count that as a drug crime. | ||
| They count it as just larceny. | ||
| So we don't know. | ||
| But I am sure, and this is what social scientists need to do right now, is start to make that, do that work and find out exactly how many people are in prison for some reason related to the fact that drugs are illegal. | ||
| And I'll bet you it's a huge number. | ||
| Yeah, I bet you're right. | ||
| It's also like these gangs, if they don't sell drugs, they have no other method of income. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| Unless they're just knocking over trucks filled with equipment and then reselling it. | ||
| Like, what are they doing? | ||
| They have no income. | ||
| They have no power. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, the mafia in the 1920s was enormously powerful. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Hugely powerful. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because of this... | ||
| Prohibition. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| So that's... | ||
| You take away... | ||
| I've said this to people, like, what was... | ||
| The great Netflix series was about him, the huge drug lord. | ||
|
unidentified
|
13? | |
| No, in Columbia. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Narcos. | ||
| What was his name? | ||
| Escobar. | ||
| Escobar, yeah. | ||
| So, Escobar. | ||
| So, make drugs. | ||
| If drugs were legal, how many people did Escobar kill? | ||
| None. | ||
| Or two or one or something, right? | ||
| I mean, he killed thousands of people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if they're legal, here's the deal. | ||
| Like, who's profiting off of those, right? | ||
| That's where it gets really slippery. | ||
| If you make drugs legal, and then there's got to be, like, right now, the people that are selling them are criminals, right? | ||
| If you make it legal, they're going to still sell them. | ||
| Like, they're just gonna sell them legally? | ||
| Like, how do you make this transition between drugs being legal and then people being able to sell them? | ||
| Like, how does that work? | ||
| Like, how do you do that in an orderly way? | ||
| How do you preserve sanity and humanity and civilization? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| 1933, they ended prohibition. | ||
| Yeah, but alcohol was something that... | ||
| Well, you know what they did, though? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| They regulated it heavily, which created new problems. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it caused the state to be all up in our business in all sorts of ways. | ||
| So, like, you had to get licensed to sell alcohol, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And what that meant was an inspector from the state came to your bar or your restaurant or whatever, And looked around and asked you questions and checked on who you were hiring, who worked there, who your customers were, what kinds of customers. | ||
| And if you didn't fit all the rules of, you know, polite society, or, and this was true, great histories have been done about this, if you had the homosexuals coming into your bar. | ||
| Oh, drunk homos. | ||
| You don't want that. | ||
| Or the prostitutes. | ||
| Or the prostitutes coming into your bar. | ||
| Or even women who were a little bit loose with their morality, you didn't get a license. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Loose women could stop you from getting a bar license? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Boy. | ||
| I know. | ||
| What kind of world we live in. | ||
| I'm telling you. | ||
| So, just decriminalize, we will be fine. | ||
| But if you just decriminalize, who's selling it? | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's still going to be illegal to sell. | ||
| No. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Decriminalization doesn't mean legalization in terms of, like, profitability. | ||
| Like Mexico. | ||
| Do you know that all drugs essentially are decriminalized in Mexico, including mushrooms, acid? | ||
| Yeah, so those definitions change according to the industry, which is a pain in the ass. | ||
| But so sometimes decrim means just no laws at all, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| None. | ||
| But legalization usually means, not always, but usually means regulations. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Taxing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Taxing. | ||
| So like with weed. | ||
| Weed got legalized. | ||
| Well, that's where the money comes in. | ||
| Weed got legalized and it's heavily regulated, etc. | ||
| But it's not that heavily regulated in Colorado. | ||
| It's pretty easy to get. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I thought it was. | ||
| Well, the regulation comes in the banking. | ||
| The banking's weird, because the federal government still has it classified as a Schedule I substance, and it's illegal, so there's a huge issue with people having to accept cash only, so they hired a bunch of seals and mercs and all these fucking guys that would've probably worked for mercenary organizations. | ||
| Now they're fucking carrying around drug money from people selling pot, and then they have to take it to the bank and put it in safe deposit boxes and deposit it into these accounts. | ||
| Weird ways. | ||
| It's very fucking, it's really problematic. | ||
| And that keeps a lot of people out of the market. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it's good because it hires soldiers. | ||
| You know, give them something peaceful to do. | ||
| It's an employment program. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| That's what we need. | ||
| More hired killers. | ||
| Isn't it true that they... | ||
| Give them jobs. | ||
| You don't want them not having jobs. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Once you teach people how to kill people, be nice to them. | ||
| I certainly would rather them do that than killing Iraqis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought they also disallowed people with prior felonies from participating in the industry. | ||
| Is that true in Colorado? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I've seen this and that meant it's all white. | ||
| I do not know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, there's a lot of black people that don't have felonies, you racist bastard. | |
| How dare you? | ||
| Did you hear what he said? | ||
| Dude, that was a complete Huffington Post item I just gave you. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And you called it racist. | ||
| Wow, I don't know what to do now. | ||
| It's more a salon. | ||
| It's kind of a salon.com. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| Alright, man. | ||
| We just did three hours. | ||
| Damn, no way. | ||
| We flew by. | ||
| Look, it's 4.30. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Time flies when you're having fun. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, totally. | |
| Tell everybody what your podcast is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Tell everybody where they can get it. | ||
| Cool. | ||
| Yeah, I got a few things going on, but yeah, the Unregistered with Thaddeus Russell, the podcast. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And what else? | |
| It's at thaddeusrussell.com. | ||
| There's a page for the podcast. | ||
| It's on iTunes. | ||
| I believe it's top 50. It's top 50 in news and politics right now. | ||
| And then I got Renegade University. | ||
| I got an event coming up in Massachusetts in August, Joe's Old Stomping Grounds. | ||
| Salem, Massachusetts, August 4th through 6th. | ||
| What are you doing out there? | ||
| It's a weekend. | ||
| Besides burning witches. | ||
| That's all they do out there. | ||
| Whole weekend seminar. | ||
| I'm talking about history and theory and politics. | ||
| Oh, beautiful. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I've already sold out the VIPs, but there's more. | ||
| The general admission is still on sale. | ||
| And then I'm doing that with a great group, which I meant to mention, School Sucks Project, who is actually one of the very first pioneers of this whole movement I was talking about to just overthrow the whole educational system and replace it with actual thought and ideas and debate. | ||
| Who's running this? | ||
| His name's Brett Vinat. | ||
| Great guy. | ||
| He's just running a podcast. | ||
| He was a teacher? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| In New Hampshire. | ||
| And he just, he was too smart for that system and got sick of it. | ||
| And he left and said, I'm just going to do a podcast. | ||
| He had no platform, you know, not a celebrity at all. | ||
| And it grew and grew and grew. | ||
| And he's got this huge following. | ||
| Connect me to him. | ||
| I'll have him on. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| I'd love to have him on. | ||
| Brett is amazing. | ||
| And he's got this big following and he's had me on the show a lot. | ||
| So he and I are co-producing Renegade University and School Sucks Project are co-producing, presenting this weekend in Salem on August 4th through the 6th. | ||
| So you can go to School Sucks Project website or ThaddeusRussell.com website to get all the details and buy the tickets there. | ||
| And then I have a seminar actually in L.A. just with me, just 20 people for four weeks talking about Renegade History of the United States. | ||
| Four weeks? | ||
| Four nights. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| Over four weeks. | ||
| Oh, it's one night. | ||
| Thursday night for four weeks. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Right here in L.A., west side, renegade history of the United States, just with me and 20 people. | ||
| And that's on my web. | ||
| And that starts next Thursday. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| And then, yeah, my website's got a bunch of stuff. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| I'm busy, man. | ||
| I'm really busy. | ||
| Good. | ||
| But all in good ways. | ||
| Sounds awesome. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Alright, stop getting hit in the head. | ||
| Okay, I'll try. | ||
| Don't be sparring with people. | ||
| I'll be smarter next time. | ||
| Alright, beautiful. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Appreciate it, man. | ||
| Daddy, it's Russell, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| We'll be back tomorrow with Everlast from the House of Pain. |
Export Selection