Amy Alkon and Joe Rogan dissect mass shootings, linking them to status-seeking behavior tied to ages 23 and 41, marital breakdowns, or job loss, while critiquing media-driven outrage culture—like Kathy Griffin’s Trump Jr. stunt or Cam Newton’s backlash—for amplifying polarization. They debunk outdated dietary myths (e.g., low-fat milk, Ancel Keys’ cholesterol studies) and praise researchers like Gary Taubes for exposing flawed medical advice, calling processed foods "dead protein liquid shit." The conversation turns to racial dynamics, accusing elite schools of excluding Asian students via biased quotas while dismissing "white privilege" as silencing dissent. Rogan defends cultural effort over systemic excuses, framing inequality as a product of freedom rather than oppression. Ultimately, they expose how ideological conformity and media sensationalism distort both science and social discourse, leaving little room for rational debate. [Automatically generated summary]
I mean, these things that happen that sort of just change the whole world, you gotta think that's probably one of the reasons why these psychos do it in the first place, right?
So that everyone...
Talks about them.
It becomes their big fireworks 4th of July grand finale before they leave.
Yeah, there was a very interesting post by a guy named Robert King on Psychology Today, and I guess he's doing research in this, and he talked about it as a way for men to get or chase status, and that he saw two bumps.
I think one was at 23 and one at 41 in terms of the ages that people do this.
And it does tend to be men who have some kind of their marriage breaks up.
They lose their job in their 40s or the young men are just chasing status.
So it's at least some kind of explanation other than, oh, someone just went wild.
They just went crazy, which is not helpful because it doesn't tell us really what we can do to maybe prevent it or look at how do we look for these people who do this.
But actually, I don't think it's weird that it's men because men, if you look at how men and women evolved to get partners, women just have to look hot.
You have to look like you're fertile and young and have good genes.
Which is what we consider beauty.
These what feminists say are arbitrary standards of beauty aren't anything like that.
They're very across cultures, men like women with this hourglass figure, and who have long shiny hair and who are not 72. Because if you had sex with a 72 year old, your genes died out.
Yeah, the feminist thing about arbitrary standards of beauty, as a person who is deeply entrenched in science, that's got to be frustrating, right?
Because you're looking at something that's not accurate.
You're pushing a narrative that's just not accurate.
There's this very...
Take away culture, take away all your personal feelings about human beings, and you look at the mammal, the human mammal, and it's very clear why certain males are gravitating towards certain females and, conversely, why certain females are gravitating towards certain males.
Cam Newton, a pretty popular quarterback, said he got a question from a beat reporter that works for his team and asked him something about a wide receiver's route running.
He said it's surprising that a girl is asking about route running or something like that.
I mean, I'm sure it is that, but isn't it also that we're examining behavior on a much more intense scale than we've ever done before?
And we see things that we don't like, and we're highlighting those things in a much more aggressive way than we've ever done before.
It's almost like...
There's accelerating social evolution that's going on right now and along the way you're getting a lot of bumps and a lot of weird stuff that's happening a lot of social justice warrior stuff and then you got a lot of alt-right stuff on the other side and they're battling it out with each other and it's almost like these intense extremes on this new landscape and people are jockeying for positioning on this new cultural standard playing field.
Well, first of all, with quarterbacks and with any football players, you're dealing with head trauma.
You are 100% dealing with head trauma.
There is an extremely high likelihood that all those guys on the playing field have erratic behavior due to the fact their head's been smashed 150 fucking times a year since they were a kid.
And this thing about it showing up much later where you get terribly mentally ill, people, they make those trade-offs where they think, okay, well, I can get money and fame this way and it's quick and everything like that.
But they don't really realize what the long-term consequences will be.
Well, I think a lot of people when they got into football and even people that got into fighting, they didn't know as much back then when they first entered this sort of journey.
It's bringing back The memories of the 90s and what it was like when that when that thing went down I was with my girlfriend at the time and we were sitting in front of the television holding hands and you know like waiting for the verdict and when When they said not guilty she threw her hands on her face like she had just seen a horrible car accident She's like, oh my god.
Oh my god.
Oh my god and Now today, they're saying, the very doctor that was working with OJ said, if they were going to do that case again today, they would absolutely bring up CTE. Yeah, I think you're right about that.
Yeah, and I suspect if you go back and look at those tapes sort of forensically that you'll see that kind of thing, the shaking.
And also that if you take a look at over football players, how many people have these diseases and mental illness that's related to this head trauma situation?
Well, also, you feel less about yourself, and I think that's as important as anything.
Unless you're a sociopath, when you do something mean to someone, you feel bad about yourself.
You don't judge yourself the same way.
You look at yourself and your own behavior, and you go, well, I'm faulty.
I'm like...
I'm not proud of that.
That's awful.
What I did was a bad thing.
I feel bad about who I am.
And if you just deny that, you're just building up this weird wall of disconnect between you and reality, and you're going to make more and more shitty choices if you do that.
Well, this is one of the main issues that I have today with this right versus left social justice warrior thing that's going on.
It's like people are being so fucking aggressive and so rude.
And so just the way they are trying to silence people from speaking, the way they are describing people and attacking people.
It's a it's a very aggressive way and it's very short-sighted because when you have that sort of Short-sighted aggressive bit what you're doing is like you're yelling shut the fuck up Well when you yell shut the fuck up nobody wants to shut the fuck up, right?
They don't just go okay like you're you're this is a childish way of approaching an issue like the the The more objective, nuanced, more thought-out way of approaching it is to take into consideration how this other person is going to view what you're saying.
The only way to get people to change is to present them some sort of an argument or some sort of an idea that is both Polite and well thought out and and there's no Social issue involved in it like there's no Negative back and forth between you where you're trying to get them and they're trying to get you The only way to get someone to really take into consideration your ideas Is to have them in some way respect you
or like you and as soon as you tell someone shut the fuck up like well, that's out Okay, well that's out.
And now it's just like, you're just gonna win by having more people yell?
Or what are you gonna do?
You're gonna put a ski mask on and break windows?
Like, is that how you're gonna get this done?
You're not.
You're just going to cause an action-reaction.
You're just gonna cause this sort of rubber band effect where you pull it back and then it snaps, and then you've got some sort of ridiculous infighting where people go full tribal and they get one side, goes against the other side, and this is what you're seeing today.
And you're seeing people do it to get attention as well.
You're seeing people do it clearly when they know the cameras are on.
They ramp it up and start, you know, yelling obscenities and being more ridiculous about it.
It's very odd.
It's very odd to watch it play out, you know, because it's so short-sighted.
You know, like shut up or any of these things, these rude approaches.
And so the thing is, when you get somebody, what you do is you provoke somebody's defensiveness.
It's a fight or flight reaction.
You know, this happens to us on an emotional plane as well.
And so you're provoking that whole reaction that's designed to make you get away from a bear.
Yeah.
Or some type of wild animal.
But instead of running and burning off all those biochemicals, it's all pooling in you.
You're filling with hate and rage.
So this is not a state in which you can listen to anyone.
And so the moment you take it up to that area of invoking somebody's hate and defense and rage and all that stuff.
They're so far away from listening, you might as well just crawl under the desk and go read a novel.
It's just so pointless to even engage with them.
And so the people who do want to engage, if you engage on a polite level, maybe, possibly, if someone is just not totally reeled in by confirmation bias, they might listen.
And confirmation bias, of course, is that thing where we believe what we already believe, and then we throw away any disconfirming evidence.
And so, you know, if you recognize these propensities we have to do that, to believe what we believe, to be tribal, to stick to this side, to not listen, to not change our views, then maybe you have a hope of changing your views.
And maybe if you try to listen to other people who, you know, their differing views who are polite and trying to engage on a rational level, You can learn something.
I try to be open-minded.
I try to take criticism.
I try to not reject it out of hand.
Of course, I don't take the criticism that comes from, dear bitch, you ugly whore.
Well, people, when they get in arguments, it becomes a competition.
And that's a big part of the whole insult thing and the part of the shouting down thing.
It's like you're trying to win.
And you're trying to win an argument that very few people ever win.
It's usually like both people walk away just disgusted with a loss.
It's very rare that unless someone is egregiously incorrect and you literally have to shout them down because what they're doing is horrific and you need to point it out to them.
But that's usually not the case.
Well, usually it's disagreement, you know, most of the time.
It's a gross generalization that doesn't do anyone any good, especially when you're talking about someone like Ben Shapiro.
Ben is a very well read, very well thought out, very reasonable, and when you talk to him in person, he's a very kind guy.
There's nothing wrong with him.
He's just conservative, you know, and whether I agree or disagree, and I'm sure I disagree with him on a lot of things, I had a really pleasant time talking to him.
I think he's a very nice guy.
His ideas and his The way he speaks is very well thought out.
He speaks very quickly, and it's intimidating to a lot of people.
His ideas, and the idea that he is this extremely articulate right-wing guy, immediately the best way to silence that is white supremacy, KKK. He's a Nazi.
I'm pretty sure she started her life, I think she was very left-wing at one point in time, and saw a lot of hypocrisy on the left and switched over to the right.
But again, it's like we were talking about before.
She's very tribal.
She's NRA, tribal, pro-gun, Second Amendment, and they dig their fucking heels in and that's it.
Right.
I want the bump stocks.
I want the fucking full auto.
I want magazines, big magazines, no matter what happens.
Well, when you go NRA, though, I mean, the thing is, like, if you're, like, a very outspoken NRA person, and she was famously involved in one of those really aggressive videos about the NRA. Did you see that video?
It was, like, a sort of, like, it was really recently a very controversial video talking about gun ownership, and it was, like, a sort of pro-NRA video that was, like, widely criticized on the left.
And I think the subject of gun ownership and just what happens in these mass tragedies, I mean, it is a conversation that stirs up tribalism, logic.
It's a very complex, and also mental health issues.
I mean, I want to know what was going on with this guy.
I want to know if this Vegas guy, was he on...
Some sort of psych meds?
Because a giant percentage of these people are.
And what's the ramifications of that?
And what is causing this fucked up behavior?
Is it simply what people love to call toxic masculinity manifesting itself in the most horrific form?
Or is there some other factors?
I mean, these disassociative psych meds that they put these people on that allow them to just deal with life in a way where they just don't feel, you know?
Even though it slows me down and I'm on the same dose, 7.5 milligrams, I'm the total lightweight of lightweights.
So the Zoloft I took, because I went to a psychiatrist in New York and they actually tried to give me like lithium and all these other things, like for manic depressive people.
My friend said, you're manic, but you're not depressive.
And basically it was so crazy because all I was, it wasn't some kind of inexplicable, horrible depression.
I didn't have a boyfriend, I didn't have any money and I was bummed.
You know, like, and I took Zoloft, then I realized it just shaved off half my personality.
So I did the really dumb thing you're not supposed to do, which is just I thought, like, fuck this shit, flushed it down the toilet, and then I, like, fell off a cliff emotionally.
See, that's such a just a sort of very one note idea.
And I love the research of this guy, Randy Nessie.
I love him.
He's a psychiatrist and an evolutionary psychologist.
And he talks about Nessie.
It's N-E-S-S-E. And you can go on his website.
He's now at University of Arizona because he was in Michigan.
It's freezing there.
Everybody eventually moves to Arizona, all these professors.
Anyway, so he talks about how depression, you know, the sad feelings, these are adaptive.
And so when something bad happens to you, being sad causes you to slow down.
You have the features of a sad person, which causes other people to gather around you and be empathetic.
Now, if it goes on for too long, you may chase people away.
But this allows you to think about what dumb fucking thing you did that made you get in the state.
And I talk about how emotions are motivational tools.
We think of them as sort of like wallpaper for our head to decorate our life, but they're not.
Emotions, when you're happy, that says, do more of that.
When you're depressed, stop doing that, reflect on it.
And so there are different kinds of depression.
There's a kind that is this medical depression that's inexplicable and that maybe drugs are needed for.
But often, I think that doctors, psychiatrists, my experience was, and my experience listening to other people, because I write this advice column and I get letters from everybody, and I've been doing this for a long time, since the early 90s, is that doctors just say, here's a pill, And a lot of these antidepressants, they've been shown that they don't really work.
And so maybe it's a placebo effect, which actually is a thing, but a lot of times it's people are medicating away this helpful It's part of depression and sadness, which is reflecting and drawing people to you and all of this.
And so this idea of it's a disease, that, you know, it's also used with alcoholism.
It's just this idea, people like to put these things in these neat boxes, and it doesn't really work.
And I think that there are people that do have mental issues that do need medication.
We're not generalizing.
I think just like some people have liver problems, some people have thyroid issues, there are absolutely people that have issues with their brain's ability to produce serotonin.
I mean, it's just a fact.
How many of those people is the real question?
And to generalize completely, let's say, you know, all depression is a disease that should be medicated, or all depression can be cured with exercise.
I don't think it's healthy to go either way.
I know many people that have been in really bad places in their life.
They got on some sort of an SSRI, and then they started feeling better, and then they weaned themselves off, and now their life is in a way better place.
Like a good buddy of mine, he was suicidal.
The really interesting thing is, when he got on medication, he couldn't find the right one.
And that is really so baffling.
So it's science, obviously, right?
You're talking about medicine, you're talking about medication, but there's a lot of guesswork to this whole thing.
You know, I have to say, because I'm writing a big expose now, I didn't intend to do this, but I tried to shove it off on both Nina Teicholtz and Dr. Eads, and they wouldn't bite.
So I'm doing it reading medical research.
I can't even begin to tell you how non-evidence-based Maybe even most of our medical care is.
It's so terrible.
And I'm lucky that I have a psychiatrist now who is really evidence-based and went on for future training, further training, because I had been taking Ritalin, which just made me jumpy.
It's like, it's some kind of like, they make meth out of it.
You know, they have to like sign, you know, I was buying at different pharmacies and hoping I wouldn't get arrested.
You know, meanwhile, I'm just taking it to write, not, you know, do anything.
I don't have a meth lab in my basement.
I don't have a basement.
So that helps.
So this guy said, okay, we're going to change you because I told him I couldn't focus.
He said, you can't take this.
It's making your heart race or whatever.
And he said that this Adderall, what it does that's different, it pushes a little dopamine out into your brain besides being a dopamine reuptake inhibitor, which we hear with serotonin, with antidepressants.
So it regulates that, but it also goes like, squirt, here's a little dopamine.
And the first day I was on that, the first pill I took, it was the best writing day I'd had Really, in 20 years.
It was amazing.
And so I'm still on the same dosage and everything.
But this guy, he gave me my life back because it was torture to write before that.
And that really was a big deal.
And so much of our medical care, if you look at the stuff on diet, Nina Teicholz has been great on this, Gary Taubes.
The Eads, you know, there are other people on this who have shown that, look, don't eat this high-carb, low-fat diet the government recommends.
It will make you sick and fat.
And here, this high-fat, low-carbohydrate diet, for many people, maybe not all because we have individual differences, this seems to be the most healthy diet and also not eating polyunsaturated fatty acids and stuff like that that we know about more and more.
Well, because my cholesterol is like 303. But what I know, and this is from Mike Eads, the doctor who wrote The Protein Power.
He has this great blog where he talks.
He's very evidence-based but explains it very well.
There are these ratios you look at.
What's a ratio of your triglycerides to your HDL? And so basically my ratios, which the doctors at Kaiser don't understand, they are so good that I say that I'm as likely to have a heart attack as I am to be kicked in the knee by a unicorn.
I'm so not in danger of that.
And it's just terrible, though.
They sent me this letter to say, eat a low-fat diet.
Well, isn't that crazy, though, that doctors are doing this?
I mean, I understand that they went to school a long time ago, and I understand that a long time ago, that is what people thought, that if your cholesterol hit a certain point, you needed to take some sort of medication to lower your cholesterol.
But if you eat a healthy diet, and your body is doing well on that healthy diet, you have to take into consideration, what are the What are all the factors involved in health and vitality and the understanding of HDL versus LDL and the balance of triglycerides?
If you're a doctor and you don't understand that and you're giving advice and you're telling people to get on statins, it's fucking disturbing.
Yeah, he did this, quote unquote, research, but he excluded countries that didn't show- What research is this?
It was in the, I think it was in the 50s.
He did this multiple country study where he looked at what people ate and what he did.
It's like this, there's a story from the Holocaust where a guy shot all these bullseyes in the wall and some army person came up to him and said, how did you learn to shoot that way?
He said, it's easy.
I first shot the wall, then I drew the bullseye.
And so that's what Ansel Keys did with his research, and he excluded any countries that didn't fit what he wanted to say, which is eat this diet that we've been eating, our government told us to eat for years, this high-carb, low-fat diet that actually causes you to be just a hungry motherfucker all day.
And so, you know, what I learned from Gary Taubes, who's actually a friend of mine, so I got in early on the low carb thing because I heard while he was writing this, that carbs, so this is potatoes, starchy vegetables, fruits, fruit juice, sugar, these things cause the insulin secretion that puts on fat.
It makes you diabetic and all these things.
And there's some indication that maybe Alzheimer's is diabetes 3, diabetes of the brain.
They need more evidence on that.
But personally, I do not eat sugar.
I eat one tiny little ice cream thing a week, just so I won't feel totally deprived.
But when I eat bacon and stuff all day, steak and green beans drowning in butter, I don't feel deprived.
And it's better for me.
And if you can do that, that's not much of a sacrifice.
Before I stopped eating bread, I went to Starbucks in Culver City, and I would always get the thing that was the regular fatty thing, croissant, whatever.
Yeah, those are great.
I know.
I love all that kind of food.
So good.
I got, by accident, somebody gave me the sugar, the fat-free, whatever.
And after about 20 minutes, I mean, I wanted to bite off somebody's arm in line.
I wanted to kill people in line to catch the counter and get something.
I mean, look what we did to, not we, obviously you and I weren't alive back then, but whoever looked like us that did that to the Native Americans, introducing alcohol to them, and they didn't know what to do with it.
And what happens is, so this professor will do these people, these researchers, they do some research, but they don't totally support it, and then they don't work in a transdisciplinary way.
So you have to support this one's research with that one's research, and this became this big thing.
And I just kept having nightmares about my editor, who's a nice man, chasing me down the street, asking for my advance back with an axe.
Multi-sport, world record holding, Masters 50-plus athlete, nutrition for performance and health, healthcare, not sick care, no medical advice here, and all he does is eat meat.
You know, the boyfriend looks at a saltine, and he gains three pounds, and I'm lucky.
So my family were Eastern European shithole Jews, and, you know, it probably wasn't a lot of food, and, I don't know, somehow my body learned to manage that, having a lot and having not a lot, and it managed it better.
And so he has some really good posts about what you're missing if you're a vegetarian.
People say, oh, I take vitamins.
But can you get the vitamins in the way you need, in the way your body uses them from taking vitamin pills or even from eating, you have to eat a ton of this, you know, I don't know, bean curd or something.
And I don't want to have soy.
That's the problem.
That's the dishonesty about vegetarianism.
And some people knowingly make that tradeoff, but I sure wouldn't.
I'm sorry as much as the bunnies are cute and Well, Chris Kresser was a vegan for a long time, and he had some pretty serious health consequences because of that.
But, you know, that's just him.
Some people are fine with a vegan diet.
And that's one of the most important things to talk about, is that the biodiversity in human beings is very...
There's a broad, broad spectrum of what people need and what people don't need.
Which is why some people, like my friend Brian, his mom can't even touch Brazil nuts.
If she ate a Brazil nut, she'd go into shock and she'd be dead.
This is the individual differences thing that I was talking about before.
And there's this big push to say, oh, men and women are alike and groups are no different from each other.
But, you know, you don't see Jews as NBA basketball stars.
You know, and Jews and people from Northeastern Europe tend to have lactose tolerance in a way other people do not.
So where we are from, where we mainly our evolution took place, that, you know, and I mean, that goes back way, way, way, way back, that that affects us.
Our skills, our abilities, as well as our digestive abilities.
Can you eat this kind of thing?
Can you drink liquor and not be really affected by it?
All those things.
And so that's the stuff that people don't like to look at.
The way we were talking about before, that people like to say, it's just like this.
It's this thing, this is a disease, and it's horrible.
That lack of nuance, that's just so stupid, and it's so sort of anti-solution.
What people like to do, when people do that thing of...
You know, saying things are one way.
It's often in a way to, I think that people try to feel superior.
So that too, because we like to understand things.
So I think it's that.
And then also there's a tendency to want to prosecute people to say, You are a slovenly fat person, and the reason you are heavy is that you did not go to the gym, and I went to the gym, and I am a holy gym-goer, and you are a scummy, terrible couch-sitter.
And that's not the case.
In fact, Hobbs wrote a great piece for New York Magazine about how we think exercise makes us thinner, but it doesn't.
And the reasons you were saying before for doing it for mental health, I try to do that when I'm feeling just my worst.
I make myself get on the bike and do these high-intensity intervals.
Because I know that that'll help me mentally, even though I feel like shit.
That's what Taubes in this piece says, and that's what I see over and over again.
And believe me, we don't want to believe that.
And I think people can lose weight.
Through exercise, but they get hungrier.
That's the problem.
You exercise, you get hungrier, and you replace that.
I don't have all the nuances on this, so everyone should look up that Tubbs piece in New York Magazine, because he's just fantastic and explains it well.
When you start saying that diet is the way to go and that exercise does not make you thin, it's anecdotal.
Because some people, exercise absolutely makes them thin.
I mean, I know a lot of people that have started doing jujitsu and lost 30, 40 pounds.
I know a lot of people that have done that.
And it works, you know, because it's extremely strenuous, extremely rigorous.
You burn off a ton of calories.
You accelerate your metabolism.
Your metabolism starts burning off fat at an unprecedented rate for your body.
And it does work.
But it's like, what kind of exercise are you engaging in?
You know, that's another factor.
Like, are you just doing, like, a long, slow jog with very low intensity?
Or are you doing, like, powerlifting?
Like, there's a lot of evidence that actual weightlifting is way better for burning fat than anything else because when you weightlift, your body makes more muscle.
More muscle consumes more calories.
And if you have the same amount of calorie intake, but now your body has more requirements, it'll start burning off some of that fat.
The other thing to take into consideration, you were talking about lactose intolerance.
One of the things that I read really recently is that a big part of lactose intolerance could be attributed to the homogenization and pasteurization of milk.
And that we're very concerned about diseases, rightly so, and freshness.
But milk's not supposed to be able to sit on a shelf for three weeks.
It's just not supposed to.
You're supposed to get milk, and if you drink it at all, it should be fresh.
And that way it has the enzymes in it.
And that what we're doing by boiling this milk and pasteurizing it and homogenizing it is where you're creating this dead protein liquid shit that your body doesn't know what the fuck to do with.
And then the weirder ones is when you take it and you suck the fat out of it.
Like when you have low fat milk and a lot of people don't even realize that low fat milk has sugar in it.
They literally add sugar to low fat milk to make it palatable.
Yeah, actually, Jeff Volick, that dietary researcher, basically agreed with me when I said to him, so is it basically child abuse to feed your child skim milk?
I mean, here we are, America.
We're a very wealthy country.
People are feeding their children nutrient-free food.
Yeah, I just found this with another medical association in this piece I'm writing.
And it's really terrible because what happens is, so doctors say that you go to an HMO, those doctors, they go by the recommendations of these big associations.
So you've got the big associations telling basically medical fairy tales.
They're continuing to tell the same fairy tale that they've told.
their healthcare decisions on that.
Doctors are.
And then the patients are listening.
They assume, okay, you're wearing a white coat and you went to medical school and I went to school of Google.
I guess I'll listen to you.
And that's really, really damaging.
And this is why I think Nina Teicholz, Dr. Eads, Gary Taubes, all these people who have done this work to put out the real science, they have saved an enormous amount of lives and stopped people from having horrible diseases I really think that they're all heroic because it's been a fight to put that stuff out.
It's been a big battle for them and they have people fighting them all the time.
So a lot of these guys, whether it's an orthopedic surgeon or whatever their specialty is, the idea that these people are the go-to expert on every single area of the body, including nutritional absorption, is ridiculous.
It's just not the case.
And there's a great many people that know more about nutrition, and especially state-of-the-art nutrition, than your doctor does, unfortunately.
I mean, there are obviously some great doctors out there that can give you some, like my doctor, Dr. Gordon, Mark Gordon, who is also an expert in traumatic brain injury.
And, you know, he's a really nuanced guy.
And when I talk to him about cholesterol and all these different factors and LDL and HDL and...
And he can give me a research-based sort of point of view on it because he's doing it himself.
I mean, he's eating this way himself.
He's paying attention to all the latest stuff, but he's got a voracious appetite for that stuff.
There's a lot of people that just don't want to be bothered.
And see, if your doctor discloses that to you, if they say, look, I really know nothing about diet, and I'm going to give you advice because they say that I should give you advice, but really it's not based on anything other than they printed out some sheets here, then okay, because then you're informed.
It's not like your doctor is leading you on with a white coat, but most people are being let on.
Well, it's just, we have this idea, you know, we have this idea that, you know, what do I need to do to be healthy?
Well, you know, maybe I should go on a vegetarian diet.
That'll be healthy.
Well, listen, if you eat fucking cupcakes and burritos and fucking cheese doodles all day, yeah, a vegan diet is going to be amazing for you.
It's going to really do a great job.
The question is, is it optimal?
It might be.
It might be optimal for you, but it might not be optimal for you.
You know, it might be for me.
Maybe it's my thing, you know, but if...
Trying and trial and error becomes really difficult for people because most people have jobs and families and obligations and hobbies and things they like to do.
They don't want to spend time going through PubMed studies and trying to figure out what the fuck is the good thing to eat and the bad thing to eat.
What are the variables?
Is it based on the origin of my ancestors?
Do I have to think about...
You know those ancestral diet people that are really into that?
The great thing is that there is more stuff out there that's written for lay people where people who read the research explain it to people in a way that is very clear and understandable so people can make more of their own decision, I think, than they ever could before.
And the point you made before about the people who are eating the Cheetos and cupcakes diet, well, of course, if you start eating a vegan diet, you're not eating Cheetos and cupcakes, you're going to see an effect, but is that a good effect in terms of your long-term health?
And we see that vegetarians don't have necessary proteins that you get very easily from meat and nutrients.
Well, I can see that because, I mean, I don't think that animal cruelty is a good thing, and I think animals should be humanely slaughtered and kept.
And so I think that that's a really good argument.
I have friends who are vegetarians for that reason who know about eating meat and being a healthier way to have a diet, but they choose to make that trade-off.
And as long as you're making a choice, a reasoned choice, and you know what you're trading off, then I'm fine with that.
Because I'm in an HMO, so I can just switch doctors forever and ever, but I just stay with the doctor and then read stuff myself because I can do that.
That's what I do for a living.
But for other people who aren't in an HMO, people want to find an evidence-based medicine practitioner.
People will say they are.
But then you hear what they suggest and they really aren't.
And that's a really big problem.
It would be great if there were somebody who could make a lot of money maybe doing a site saying, look, I'm this doctor and here's what I look at and think.
And so you could choose because we tried to find one for my boyfriend in Los Angeles and like, well, nobody knows.
Yeah, because you try five, six doctors, you go through them, and these are all doctor appointments, you have to pay for them and everything, and then you find, okay, you don't know anything, right, on to the next.
So the doctor you go to, that seems like a smart, if you're going to spend money, because that guy's probably really expensive.
But if you're going to spend money, you know, a doctor who sees you for 72 minutes and looks at you that way, that seems like a really wise investment in your future.
Even if you're maybe somebody who is not, doesn't have money to burn, that that seems a really smart place to put it.
even if you have to make some sacrifices in other areas.
I mean, one of the things that we've talked about a couple times recently that people keep throwing around is the recent studies that show that people who eat a lot of red meat are more likely to get cancer.
And the issue with these studies is a bunch of issues.
One, they don't differentiate what kind of meat.
They don't differentiate whether or not you eat it with vegetables or whether you eat it with white bread and spaghetti.
You know, and that's huge.
Whether you're eating grass-fed bison or whether you're eating some bullshit burger.
Right.
And you're just saying you eat meat five times a week.
These are called cohort studies, and I call them, if you see that cohort studies or observational or population-based, you know, observational study, I call them leap to conclusions after the fact.
And they're just like the shit of studies, you know, because did the person, you know, like you're saying, what caused this thing that we're seeing?
And you'll see articles like that, that even in, like, really respectable publications that have this really attractive headline, and then you read the actual article itself, you're like, wait, what are you basing this on?
What you said to look at studies, look at the opposite, you know, the opposite point of view.
That's really important to look at.
It's just it's hard to read some of these studies.
I really appreciate researchers who write in clear language.
I think that's more and more important as people can get studies.
There's a site called Sci-Hub where you can get studies that are protected that the journals don't let you get.
And you can find them on professors' websites.
or ways to find these studies if you want to find them.
You can use Google Scholar to look up the thing.
So it's just scholar.google.com.
And then you can start finding these and try to get them through other sources if they are password protected.
Because you don't want to just read the abstract because they can say, the abstract's the part at the top where they tell you what the study's about.
Oh, we had this significant finding and we found this and that.
And you will often, not often, but you will sometimes read a study and you'll see that the thing that they say they found is not what they found.
And that's why it's important to not just be this lazy person who reads only the abstract and the conclusion, but to look at the methodology and see if their stuff's screwed up.
I saw a study done by Harvard professors where they didn't have a control group for their third experiment.
And I thought, did you forget?
I mean, you're at Harvard.
If you guys don't know to put in a control group, you know, come on!
I brought it with me at an evolutionary psychology conference thinking, this will be easy to write a column from because I had a question that kind of matched...
A study in a train station?
Well, no, they did two of the experiments.
The first two experiments were where they played videos or something.
I think it had something to do with cell phones or something.
I can't quite remember.
Oh, was someone trying to borrow a cell phone?
Someone saying, "Can we borrow your cell phone?" I reference both of their work in my book, my next book.
Well, there's a difference between science and then headlines from articles that are written about science by people that might not even necessarily be scientists or really truly understand the science.
They just want to get an article out there that people are going to pay attention to.
And we just thought we'd sit there and people walk past and laugh.
Because I always like making people laugh.
I once went out in an evening dress and a goatee and a mustache.
Just to be funny.
I frightened a child.
And we did this.
And people, it was New York, you know, free.
They lined up around the block.
And they didn't just ask us about their eyelashes or whatever, like, can I get directions to Grand Street?
They were asking us serious questions.
And I thought, holy shit, I better know something.
And so I read through all of psychology.
And when you're not reading psychology in school, you think like, oh, my God, Freud just made shit up.
It was really crazy.
And I discovered this guy, Albert Ellis, who was the father at the same time as Aaron Beck, of cognitive behavioral science.
And then started reading more and more and immersing myself more and more in science and going to scientific conferences.
And then because this thing where I look for people to criticize me so I can get better, I mean, not the people who are like, hey, whore on the internet, but I would ask professors, like, did I get this wrong?
And sometimes they'd say yes.
And so I learn more and more.
and got better and better and incorporated more science.
So now what I do is sort of a synthesis from across science.
So I read a cognitive neuroscience textbook, and I use evolutionary psychology.
I use that as sort of an underpinning theory to everything.
So I look at social science research and say, how would this have made sense in an ancestral environment?
Because if there's no sense to it, then there's something empty and wrong with what they're finding or what they're concluding.
Well, so we're doing this, and just because it was so fun, and we got so much out of it, and I learned this, that basically if you help people, if you do kindness to other people, for other people, you feel really good.
So there's self-interest in being kind, especially to strangers.
And that's what we were doing.
And so we did this for a few years.
And this guy walked by.
He wrote for the New York Times style section.
He did a little teeny piece on us.
And then it got all cut down.
Eric Messenger.
And then because I'm a Garmento Jew, I do like five things well.
But back then, I went to syndicators and they said, yeah, we think you write a really great column, but Ann Landers and Dear Abby of all the real estate, you'll never make any money.
And so I went to an alternative weekly newspaper conference in Montreal.
I stayed in like the Hooker Hotel because I couldn't afford the real hotel.
And I just went around saying like, here are my little samples, here are my little samples.
And so paper started picking up my column.
So I built a business out of doing this, out of free advice.
And then over the years became increasingly science-based.
You know, I had to learn statistics.
I have a book I weep reading under my desk, Biostatistics is the Bare Essentials.
I read a lot of stats websites and try to improve in that area in terms of scientific thinking and understanding statistics so I can be better at assessing studies.
Well, the thing that I do, I just feel like I don't have a right to just give you my opinion.
So before it was a science-based, it was very reason-based.
I always loved critical thinking and reasoning and logic.
And so now, you know, I'll look at somebody's question and I'll sometimes think I know the answer, but I'll always read to see, oh, actually, no, it's this.
I'll read a bunch of papers and I look for what's called the most parsimonious answer, because there can be a bunch of answers to something, but it's like, What is the thing that most closely, narrowly answers this person's question?
And then also there's this thing.
I see advice columns all the time.
They tell someone to do something that nobody would ever do.
So I always have like this sort of bullshit check on there of like, come on, is anybody ever going to do this?
What I'm saying is that I recognize that some people will be too lazy to write stuff down, or they just don't do that.
But what I did is I said, here are the consequences if you do it my way.
Like, it's going to be slower and, you know...
You might not be as successful.
And this way, like, it seems worthwhile.
Like, if I could do this over again, if I had a time machine and go back and say, like, hey, miserable, loser-ish person, here's what you do, and write this down because then it's going to take you, you know, this many years instead of, like, that many years, I would do that now.
And so what I tried to do is persuade people to be smarter than I was, basically.
It's that we don't just think with our mind, that our body is intimately involved.
And there is research that finds you are actually going to remember stuff more if you write it down.
That's why they say in class you should take notes in pen and ink rather than typing.
And so the truth is, I mean, I have lists all over my house.
It's just that self-help book stuff.
You know, genre that I never wrote anything in where they said to write stuff.
But I think that that's very important.
And also for memorization, that that's an important thing, that to write stuff.
When I have, I did a TED Talk and I had to memorize stuff for it.
And I can see where I wrote stuff on the pages.
So I had the type pages, but then I had stuff where I scratched in notes.
And I can picture that still, even now, even though I don't have the greatest memory, I don't think, the places that I wrote notes in this colored ink.
There's something very memorable about that where it isn't with the type page.
You know, if you look at people who are, you know, feel bad, they, you know, about themselves, they sort of hunched down and everything.
There's a different way of standing if you feel good about yourself and good about where you're going and walking, going forward.
I mean, all of these things are very important.
If you're depressed, it really can help to take a walk.
And this is this kind of thing where you have to force yourself.
It's like when I force myself to get on the bike, you know, I want to do anything but that.
But I know that I just have to do it because I'll feel so much better, not just then, but the next day.
It seems to, I see an effect on mood the next day.
You know, with this thing in Vegas, I got very, just in a dark place that day that happened, and I just made myself get on the bike, and it's the time I felt least like that.
And I mean, like, how dumb, because all these people are going through this horrible stuff, and I'm like, oh, I couldn't get on a bicycle anymore.
But it really is, you have your own little world.
That's where you inhabit and you have to take care of it.
And that was what I did to just not, I didn't want to go into a depression.
What happens is you're more efficient if you take breaks.
See, I'm from the family of the Puritan work ethic Jews of like, you know, just beat the horse and have it work for hours.
But that's really inefficient because your brain does background processing while you're doing this, you know, you're washing the dishes or whatever.
And so, but I find that the thing about not having a maid and doing the work yourself, you like clean the baseboard down here or take the little Clorox wipe and do something.
You have these small wins.
So you accomplish something, even though it's just a little tiny thing, you clean your countertop or whatever with bleach, that you've done something.
And where maybe you're writing, it's frustrating, you haven't really accomplished much, you didn't figure out the thing you needed to figure out.
So you have that elevated feeling of having done something that you're talking about.
It's just that if I just walked to the bank, it would feel purposeless and then maybe I wouldn't do it the next time.
How weird.
I know.
I'm a weird girl, what can I say?
But I do that and that's just such a, it sort of alleviates some kind of that pressing feeling of you have of like, there's not a solution, I don't know.
And you're moving, you're doing this thing where you're moving forward.
That's this thing about your brain, not just, we don't just think about solutions, like we can actually move in ways that help your brain be more powerful.
The walking thing, that seems to be one of these ways where you take some pressure off.
I put things on the wall in my shower and I'll correct things.
I also put up things I don't understand to look at them over and over again.
The other thing, too, is people feel bad if they're not instantly...
I'm geniuses at figuring something out.
And what I like to do is go over and over and over things.
So on this thing that I'm writing now, this medical care expose that I'm writing now, the research is really new to me and complicated.
And so what I do is I have a pile of papers.
There's like a step stool in my bathroom.
It's really crazy.
My boyfriend goes in there and he's sort of frightened by the insanity.
But the pile of papers.
So I put them on the bottom stool and then I reread them and I put them on the top.
So there's like a...
An escalator, going back and forth, because when you do it like that, you get sort of a deep understanding that you don't when you just read it at first.
And I know this from writing, that there's an understanding.
I can listen to somebody present their work at a scientific conference and understand it, but can I explain it to you?
And that's a whole different level of understanding, this deeper understanding.
When you're talking about walking too, do you think that walking has an effect also because it's a very mild exercise?
So it's not exhausting you, it's not hard, but you are getting some good circulation because you're forcing your body to pick your legs up and move forward and your heart starts beating and I think it sort of ignites some systems.
Yeah, I think that you're probably right about that.
And you feel just this sense, you know, because you're going forward.
So forward's a metaphor for success and progress and all these things.
And I think that all of that, it sounds kind of silly, but I looked at all this metaphor stuff and I don't think it's so silly.
You know, a success is up.
Moving forward is progress.
And so our bodies are connected.
Our first language as organisms, the little we organisms, they had two things, approach and avoid.
It's like, oh, look, a yummy piece of plankton.
I'll approach that.
Or, uh-oh, that thing's going to eat me and I'll back up.
And those, there's a term called neural reuse by this guy Anderson, and a guy named Dehane said it in a different way, but the idea is that the human emotional system comes out of, or they use the term scaffolded, I don't think they use it right, but it comes out of the approach and avoid mechanisms of tiny organisms.
So going forward, that's approach.
Going backward, receding, that's avoid.
And so if you look at it that way, it makes sense that walking, that going to the bank, I'm going to walk in little tennis shoes and wear those Asian pool man sunglasses.
Well, that doesn't, I think it doesn't protect, I can't remember whether it's UVA or UVB that it doesn't protect against fully.
The kind with the titanium dioxide protects, but also the other problem with these sunblocks is that, you know, do they affect your endocrine system in terrible ways?
But that is an interesting point about affecting your endocrine system that I never really took into consideration.
I've been thinking about sunscreen, you know, because I was reading this thing about the Great Barrier Reef being destroyed by sunscreen, and spray sunscreen in particular.
Swimming that, uh, swimmers that slather themselves in sunscreen are doing their skin a favor, but it might not be so helpful to any nearby coral reefs.
That claim, released in a recent scientific study, sparked global headlines faulting sunscreen for the global decline of these hotbeds of biodiversity.
It's a disturbing idea that something so necessary for protecting humans from skin cancer could be doing so much environmental damage, but what weight should we give this scientific finding?
Not much, it turns out.
The authors of the report, who hail from labs and universities in the US and Israel, found that...
How do you say that?
Oxybenzone?
Oxybenzone.
An active ingredient in some sunscreens that protects against ultra-violent light was present in significant quantities around reefs in Hawaii and the Virgin Islands that were favored by swimmers and divers.
They determined that the chemical has a detrimental effect on the DNA of coral in both its juvenile and adult stages.
The study was published in the journal Archives in Environmental Contamination and Toxicology.
In the lab, the researchers exposed coral to high concentrations of oxybenzone.
Not only did it deform coral larvae by trapping them in their own skeleton, the study found that it was also a factor in coral bleaching.
Terry Hughes, director of the Australian Research Council Center of Excellence Coral Reef Studies at James Cook University, told Mashable Australia he thought the report's findings were inconclusive.
He was paid off.
This particular study was done in a laboratory, so they actually used artificial seawater, he explained.
They put tiny bits into coral in Aquaria and then added some chemicals.
It's not surprising that coral didn't like chemicals thrown at them.
See, this is a good point, and this is something, when you look at studies, this is one of the things I look at.
They call it in vivo or in vitro.
You know, are you looking at stuff, do they pull out some cells and do something to them, and does that replicate or not replicate what happens in the human body?
Are there other things, other reactions going on that are missing from them, you know, when you do that, when you pull it out and just look at it in a Petri dish?
Well, this is the thing that, you know, if you look at studies, this is why it's important to read them over and over like that and to really pick them apart if you want to assess them in any sort of reliable way, because you have to look at those nuances and think, well, wait a second.
I call this thing the leave-the-lab syndrome, where you look at something, they've studied something, you think like...
That's not how it works in real life.
Why are you doing the experiment that way?
That's completely dumb.
And this is stuff, you don't have to be a scientist, but it helps to think scientifically, to think logically, and so it's always good to enhance that thinking so you can look at that and look for the bullshit.
See, what's happened now is we can't make jokes anymore.
I skated with 20 black guys in New York.
Oh, I stopped.
The thing you said about the football thing, I thought, okay, I earn a living writing, and I really can't do a lot else that if I crack my head open, I might not be able to earn a living ever again.
That's the part of Africa that they do that, I believe.
That seems like one of the weirdest...
Sort of habits or behavior patterns that people have ever adopted, where it's one of the weirdest cultural traits that's just passed down from generation to generation.
And the larger the plate in their lip, the more cattle they're worth when they get married.
Well, whenever you see body mutilation, which is essentially what that is, I've read that also being connected.
It's very vague now.
I'm trying to remember it, but I remember it being connected somehow or another to the slave trade and that it made these women less likely to be raped.
And what happened was, for people who don't know, they essentially said, they used to have a day of absence of people of color.
And the idea is it's a very progressive school.
And they said, look, if we have a day where people of color or people of varying ethnic, people who aren't white, essentially, that's what it is, they don't show up, maybe they will be appreciated more, maybe we'll take them into consideration more, their absence will be felt.
So then they decided, let's flip that around and force white people to stay home.
White staff members, white teachers, white students.
And Brett was like, you're out of your mind.
Like, this is racist.
It's one thing that you want to call attention to the value of people of color by not being there.
Which is also arguably not the best way to handle it.
But at least you're not saying to someone that they cannot be there because of the color of their skin.
Which is what you're saying by forcing these people to...
But it's this escalation, this war of ideas, where you're forcing your ideas and you're shouting people down and calling people guilty before they've ever done anything, which is essentially what this is all about.
And, you know, now he's not at the school anymore.
And actually, I would argue that, you know, for people who are of color to make a protest by not going to school for a day after people fought so hard.
I love that little girl, the picture of the girls in Little Rock going to school, you know, where they desegregated the school.
Imagine being a little girl and that's you going with these police officers to school.
So Asians, I mean, I think it has to do something with the culture and the family there.
If you're Asian, I had an Asian assistant before.
She lived at home with her mother, father, and her sisters and her grandma.
Grandma answered the phone.
You didn't speak Korean.
She hung up on you.
But there was a very strong work ethic that you must succeed.
There were very strong family ethics.
It wasn't a single-parent household.
And that's what happens to a lot of these at-risk kids.
I speak at a school.
I created a program to try to help kids make it by showing an example, like saying, look, here I am.
I failed.
Slept on a door in New York on two milk crates.
I'm not from a wealthy family.
You have to be creative.
Apprentice to somebody.
All this stuff.
Kids don't get that.
They don't get that.
If you grew up in a bad neighborhood and your parents don't model that sort of work ethic and the possibility to hope for success, well, why should you think there would be any hope for you and why should you work?
So they say, "Oh, look, all of you Asians, we have too many of these Asian faces here.
It's so terrible.
And so we're not going to admit you.
We're going to take the standards.
Standards for Asians are going to be much higher than for everybody else.
And so if you get this grade point, say it's like a 3.8 and you're Asian, forget it.
You're out.
But if you are this person of this face color that we want, we're going to put you in there even though, you know, you have the same grade point as somebody we're kicking out.
I was thinking, I was nodding, and then I thought, are they?
Oh, that's really interesting.
So what I suspect, and I could be wrong, this is just a guess on my part, is that when you are promoted to a place where maybe you aren't capable of succeeding, that maybe, possibly, you, instead of putting your energy into succeeding, you put your energy into protesting instead of putting your energy into succeeding, you put your energy into protesting and saying the system is terrible and racist and unfair, because that is the way that you become somebody and you have
If you can't get it through the, okay, I'll work hard way, which isn't to say so much.
So people think that when you say that, you're saying, oh, this group of people, they're stupider or worse than other people.
But if you go back to the schools, if you help those kids, this is what they're doing with charter schools.
If you give those kids what they're missing, there isn't...
We're individuals.
You can help people who might have been throwaway people to succeed if they just see, look, it's possible.
And here, how do we put the stability?
Or you're a child of a single mother that comes with it certain...
It comes with certain risks if you grow up in a certain kind of risky neighborhood.
There's a whole area of evolutionary psychology called life history theory that talks about this.
It's called having a fast life history strategy.
It's adaptive if you grow up in a risky, terrible neighborhood where things are unstable, to get pregnant early, if you're a male, to be violent.
All these things that aren't helpful in our modern society, but they're kicked off by that unstable situation.
It's unstable environment where you grow up.
So, okay, if instability is a problem, we can't just say, okay, your single mother should go back in time, get in a time machine and go find a man and marry somebody before she has you.
That's not realistic.
We can't throw away people.
And that's what I see people advocating sometimes.
Like, okay, well, we've got to tell people to not get pregnant without a family structure.
And so because they've done that, you don't punish the kids.
How do we give those kids the stability they lack?
And I think one of the ways is to have people go in from the earliest grades and model what, for example, my parents modeled for me as these suburban, not wealthy, but just sort of middle class suburban people, work hard, do this, do that, and you will be okay.
Well, I think also the problem with the Asian folks in universities is they don't complain.
And the squeaky wheel gets the grease and these people aren't protesting and aren't screaming that it's racist.
What they're doing is they're putting their head down, they're working.
And they're working hard and that's a part of their culture.
You know, I grew up with a lot of Korean kids and they're extremely hard working to the point that I felt like a lazy fuck when I was around them.
And one of my good friends when I was a kid, my friend Jungshik, he was doing his residency for medical school.
He was also competing on the U.S. National Taekwondo team.
He was going to school all day long and then he was training two to three hours a night.
This kid was a fucking maniac.
And I would be around him, and I just felt so lazy.
No matter how hard I worked, it was so lazy.
But he never complained about anything, ever.
And it was the culture.
The culture was to never complain.
Just to work hard and never complain.
And you're seeing that in universities.
You're seeing that with their results.
But you're also seeing that with the fact that even though they're discriminated against, Like, racially discriminated against by universities.
No one's complaining about it, so they continue to do it.
And they do it under the guise of diversity, because so many of these Asian people are so successful in their academic careers, and they're doing so well, and getting into schools, they're pushing them out to try to balance it out.
But that doesn't balance out shit.
What you're doing is you're encouraging this sort of, like, weird way of looking at people.
You know, you're not...
You want...
Equality of outcome, okay?
That's not real.
Equality of opportunity is real.
Equality of outcome is not real.
The equality of outcome happens when everyone works the same amount.
And this is the thing about a free society that people don't like to understand.
But when you have inequality, inequality is, in many ways, because of freedom.
Because you have the freedom to choose to work as much as you want or as little as you want, you're going to have inequality in outcome.
And there's other factors, for sure.
There is absolutely discrimination.
There's sexism.
There's racism.
There's all these different factors that play into account as well.
But there's also effort.
And to deny that and to deny that effort is a factor in outcome is preposterous and it sets up this fantasy land that so many kids live in today while they're protesting Ben Shapiro calling him a fucking Nazi.
That's where it all comes from.
You have these kids that are trying to shut down Republican-speaking on campus by calling them in these blanket statements they're white supremacists and racists.
Like, okay, what about Ben Carson?
He's a fucking Republican, too, and he's black.
There's a lot of people that are black that are Republicans.
This is a preposterous way of looking at the world.
And it's this sort of isolationist view.
And it's weird.
It's weird that they don't see how racist it is to discriminate against Asian people.
And also, you know, if you look at what real diversity is, to me, it's bringing in people who didn't have economic advantage because these are the people who have a hard time.
It doesn't matter if they're black or white.
You know, I know I have a number of black friends who are highly successful.
Some of them are researchers and they grew up in suburban neighborhoods.
They grew up like I did.
They had a family.
Their family was intact.
You know, they didn't need a leg up from anybody because they did what I did, which is work hard.
My mother told me, so I grew up a Jewish kid in a neighborhood with no Jews and they like egged their house and everything like that.
My mother said to me, you know, there are people who hate Jews, so you're going to have to work harder than other people because some people are going to be prejudiced against you and try to keep you out.
So that was a message not, oh, we should whine about this and isn't this terrible, as murderous as my parents can be.
I mean, and if we listen, what I try to do is to look at the other side, you know, the side I don't agree with, like you were talking about this before, where you maybe see things, you see their point, or you look at stuff that you want to agree with.
There was a Nick Kristof thing, a piece on, okay, here's what we have to do with guns.
And I looked at it because we all want, there's this idea of like, do something.
We want to do something, but something is not a good thing to do.
And I looked at his piece wanting to find something in there that would say, yes, we just do these things.
And every single thing in there, it was all meaningless stuff that wouldn't have stopped the guy in Vegas.
And so I looked at that wanting to see something and you see nothing.
And so it's the thing of being honest, being intellectually honest, and honest when your side is full of shit too.
And, you know, when it comes to something like the thing in Vegas, we want to find some sort of solution when it doesn't necessarily exist.
There's so many different factors.
I mean, obviously, the access to weapons is a big one.
It's a huge one.
And to deny that is silly.
To deny that on the right, like the people that are massive Second Amendment proponents.
Look, to deny that the access to weapons has no factor in someone using those weapons is pretty fucking stupid.
I mean, it doesn't make any sense.
But then to say that those weapons should not be accessible to people who are not criminals, that's also weird.
Because you're saying, like, well, if we have laws in this country that allow a person to go and buy a gun for personal safety, And then something like this happens where people get shot and murdered by some crazy person.
And then you take those rights away from the people who have done nothing wrong.
But Australia also has less people than Los Angeles, and it's huge.
It's the size of the United States.
So, you know, there's a discussion to be had, for sure.
And along, you know, the way, we need to discuss access to firearms.
That's a part of that discussion.
But, you know, I talked about it the other day with my friend Alonzo Bowden, and immediately people were making articles saying that we were calling for a police state and confiscation of the guns.
I didn't say that.
No one said that.
But this is the right-wing, you know, Second Amendment proponent, knee-jerk reaction.
To instantaneously demonize anyone who's critical of the guy having access to 23 fucking rifles.
If there's ever been a clear instance that there's a giant problem with someone having access to guns like that, show it to me.
Because this guy broke windows in a hotel and shot 500 fucking people.
If that's not a clear situation where people need to look at it and go, okay, how does this get prevented?
And it doesn't get prevented by burning your head in the sand.
It doesn't get prevented by just going back to the Second Amendment and just yelling it out and stomping your feet and pounding your fist on the table.
You know, SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED! That's not how you prevent your children from getting shot by a fucking psycho.
See, I think what's hard in this, too, is that we don't have any answers.
There's no, well, if it was just mental health or just this or just that, because it's a mystery.
So people are just grasping at things, and everybody's standing their ground, the pro-gun, the anti-gun, and they're saying, see, see, and all the disgusting stuff on Twitter.
And people did try to curb this a bit, the stuff of people using that as a ramp for their own, whatever their views were.
He did a 90 minute interview and is one of the most fucking bizarre interviews I've ever seen in my life.
He's so removed from his brother doing this and he's talking about what a great guy his brother is and how Quirky his brother was and how his brother was just he was eccentric and he was just talking about what his brother would have done and the casino people all knew his brother and to say they didn't know him was crazy.
But this guy seems like a guy trying to act normal.
It is so weird.
I mean there might be like some sort of a mental health issue with the entire family because the dad apparently was a psycho and was a serial bank robber.