Colin Moriarty critiques social media’s outrage culture, comparing it to Black Mirror’s guilt-by-accusation narratives, while debating ethical meat consumption and sustainability—highlighting parallels between factory farming and historical justifications for slavery. They explore ancient transatlantic theories, like Paleo-American contact with Polynesia, and question rigid academic dogmatism, citing the Bondo ape controversy and Dan Flores’ buffalo extinction hypothesis. Moriarty shifts to UBI and Medicare for All, estimating $600B military spending could fund only a quarter of Sanders’ $1.4T plan, and argues college overemphasis fuels debt crises. Defending capitalism as the least flawed system, they dismiss Marxism and white nationalism while clashing on free speech limits, with Rogan praising Moriarty’s three-hour, data-driven centrism as a rare antidote to polarized discourse. [Automatically generated summary]
I have like 4,500 people on Patreon supporting me, and I don't serve ads on anything I do, so I'm just trying to make it organic and see how far I can take it, and then go from there.
I worked at IGN for a long time, the video game site, and my old company, so we had ads, and I have no problem with them, but I was trying to just kind of say, I don't need more than what you're giving me.
This is plenty, and I'm doing fine, and so maybe I'll do ads on future products, but not with this.
I mean, just, if you're enjoying it, I mean, yeah, you could do different products, you could do, I mean, different projects, rather, you could do it different ways.
You know, it's interesting now to try to figure out, like, what's the best way for people to put their stuff out there.
Like, I know a lot of people, like, in the podcast world, some people use SoundCloud, some people use other things, some people just go straight to YouTube.
I mean, there's a lot of experimentation going on now.
Yeah, and I'm always fascinated by that particular thing about how I do a podcast now just on the side called Fireside Chats where I just have random people in to talk about random things.
And similar, but not nearly as good as your show.
And I'm always amazed that people are like, why don't you put this on YouTube?
And I'm like, you just want to stare at a static image on YouTube?
I don't even have it on video.
It's just about how people consume the content.
So maybe a spreadshot approach is probably the smartest idea.
Yeah, like an old text adventure or something like that.
One interesting thing about Facebook that I think is worth noting is that it's typically real people with real names and real pictures, so at least they're putting themselves out there.
Well, you know, I wanted to talk to you about internet controversy because when we had you on the first time, it was kind of just after your whole thing had happened with this.
He had made this one, like, incredibly innocuous tweet.
It was like a day without woman or something like that silence like what was it?
Like I explained to you originally, I feel like it was partially a political hit because of the industry I worked in and all that kind of stuff.
But also, like I was telling you before we started, the more I've had time to think, after all these things happened, I launched a new company, I was working 70 hours a week, I had no bandwidth to really think about what the hell happened.
The more I think about it, the angrier I actually get about how I... I had to go through that and watch other people also kind of go through similar things as the outrage machine just eats people and spits them out as they go along.
When you stop and think about what you actually said and what that actually caused, that actually caused you to stop working with people.
Yeah, like this one silly joke like they don't know you They don't know you know that one joke that one thing that you said is so awful and outrageous that all of our years of collaborating Working together trying to do projects trying to be creative having fun all the conversations we've had about life and about Humans and politics and men and women those are all out the window man.
The only thing that I can think about is that I was at least in a position where it didn't destroy me or whatever.
I actually am doing financially better and feel happier in what I'm doing now, so it kind of backfired on the people that were trying to Do whatever they were doing to me anyway, but I feel for the people that find themselves in similar situations that don't have some sort of internet clout or some sort of community that can rally around them and lift them up, which is what my community did to me, which I'm so appreciative of.
So I just think about how it's just sad.
I don't know that I've ever been so offended by something someone has tweeted or even said that I went out of my way to make it personal and try to destroy them.
I'm not saying people don't do terrible shit.
It happens all the time.
We're seeing that play out, you know, with Harvey Weinstein and all these kinds of things.
Absolutely awful, really awful things.
And I feel like people are kind of being distracted by the shiny object in the corner when they're losing sight of what's important.
Well, today it feels like there's blood in the water.
I mean, it seems like there's so many people going after so many people.
It's just people are running around looking for targets.
The way I imagine, I imagine the internet and people on the internet being an angry mob running through the streets, frothing at the mouth, just looking for somewhere to point their gun.
I mean, that's really what it feels like.
It feels like there's definitely some real targets out there.
There's definitely some...
This Kevin Spacey thing is a...
It's a scary thing.
I mean apparently Rosie O'Donnell started tweeting that he had been doing this forever and that this is the tip of the iceberg and there's a bunch of boys that he went after.
I Don't know what's true.
What's not true.
I'm assuming but that's that's real.
That's a real horrible thing.
That's not a joke It's not someone with an innocuous maybe off-color joke.
I mean this is like real stuff, right?
so I think The good part is all this awful behavior, predatory, evil, you know, all the Harvey Weinstein and whatever else.
There's probably a million other ones, right?
That stuff's going to get exposed.
But it seems like the negative part about it is that people are looking for targets.
He was basically accused of heavily hitting on women that were junior than him.
That were working with him?
Yeah, exactly.
I don't think any of them accused him of sexual assault or anything like that, but apparently he might have rubbed up against some women or did some things that are- But that kind of is sexual assault though, right?
Yeah, I assume so, but I guess what I'm saying is like...
Look, I mean, I want to know about Kevin Spacey type situations or Harvey Weinstein type situations, but I think there's a lot of men that are in that position where they're a boss or they are, you know, the owner of a company and they have these people under them.
And these people behave in a certain way, almost like as if they are royalty.
And I think that's what Harvey Weinstein experienced.
Essentially, he was like the royalty of this enormous movie empire.
And we find that particularly offensive.
He's not just a creep trying to get laid.
He's a guy that was trying to hold that power over people and use it against them.
And then on top of that, he was physically forceful.
So you got your worst case scenarios.
And then you have guys that are just trying to get laid.
And you're like, okay.
How do you...
Are we demonizing aggressive heterosexuality?
Where does this go into sexual assault?
Rubbing up against someone, physically touching them when they don't want you to.
Hmm, that doesn't seem like sexual assault or anything.
It seems like someone just trying to get laid like where does it but then when someone's the boss you go, okay, but then you're not supposed to do that when you're a boss, right?
I was more I was very interested in the in the in the dynamic between what specifically with Harvey Weinstein And his people under him for many decades.
Yeah about I was trying to put myself in this position of like how does this stay quiet for so long even though there's a little rumblings like they talk about Seth MacFarlane's joke at some award show Kevin Spacey, too Yeah, and Family Guy.
So I don't look at the situation now in 2017 on college campuses and all these things as desirable for anyone, because who the hell knows the rules of the landscape now?
I think a lot of it just comes down to mutual respect and all of that, you know?
And they're changing now, like today, at an unprecedented rate.
I think ultimately it's good.
Ultimately, everyone, when you catch people at like a good static state, like a good calm state, and they're not under duress and they're thinking clearly, and you would ask them, like, what's the best way to get along with other people?
Well, treat them fairly.
Treat them kindly.
Have good friends.
Just be nice.
Be nice to everybody.
Everybody would agree to that.
The problem is maybe they want something from you.
Like Colin wants to fuck the girl at the bar, but she's sober and Colin's got gross breath.
You know what I mean?
There's all sorts of extenuating circumstances that make people behave in really fucked up ways.
But the consequences of those circumstances or that behavior was minimized by power.
It was minimized by Like a guy like Harvey Weinstein, he could put these gals in movies.
Or a guy like Kevin Spacey, he was hitting on a 14-year-old and he doesn't know what to say.
All that stuff, that ability to squash, it minimized people.
It reminds me, too, not that I know anything deep about it, but I was just thinking about it in the shower this morning, actually.
It reminds me a lot of...
Michael Jackson, in the sense of, like, what was going on in the early and mid-90s with him and the accusations there.
And I'm like, was this...
I don't know if that's true or false.
I don't know what he's accused of or not.
People kind of, I think, treat him as if he was innocent.
Maybe he is.
I don't know.
But it reminds me of, like, there was, like, telltale signs of some sexual corruption in Hollywood and the music industry and the movie industry and all that some years ago.
That's kind of bubbled back to the surface with some big names.
So I just...
I agree with you.
Like, I just wish...
People just need to be good to each other and act normal and be respectful.
You don't find yourself in these terrible situations.
But then you see this desperation with Harvey Weinstein where you learn that he might have sexually assaulted or even raped a woman who then appears in a movie some years later because the gravity well around him is so strong that they have no choice.
So it's a very sad situation for those women as well.
Yeah, because I thought that was interesting specifically because they apparently had already announced that it was the last season anyway, like in the summer, so they're making it seem like they're reacting to it.
So everyone's just playing the PR game now, you know?
It's like, the problem is, like, what we saw in Charlottesville is like, hey, look, guys, there's real Nazis.
Like, don't call someone a Nazi because they voted for Trump, because they think that, you know, right-wing conservative values are being diminished in this country.
Exactly, in which he actually has the power to fire the person doing the investigation.
So it's...
You know, I'm not saying we're in an ideal situation right now, but people throwing around these words very loosely need to learn a little bit more about Weimar Republic and the Nazis coming to power in 33 and what that actually looks like, what fascism actually looks like in Italy, what it looks like in Germany.
And they have no idea.
Or a lot of some people do, but most don't.
And they're just throwing these words around and they mean something.
So, like, all these kids that are trying to shut down conservative speakers on campus, and then by shutting them down, they're calling them white supremacists, Nazis, and using these things for guys like Ben Shapiro, which I think is, like, patently ridiculous.
Because he quotes statistics about minority crime.
You know, those statistics, I feel like, are pretty misleading in some ways because there's a lot of factors that lead to these people being in these situations where there's high crime rates in these communities and it has nothing to do with, you know, hey, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which is like a really common way of looking at it.
It has to do with the world that they were born into.
Yeah, and they're surrounded by the momentum of crime.
They're surrounded by the momentum of violence and abuse and to just expect them to escape that because there are examples of people that have done it in the past.
Well, you can't apply that sort of logic, I don't think.
I think that's disingenuous.
To call him a Nazi or a white supremacist, I think, is fucking ridiculous.
Yeah, the stab in the back, hyperinflation, you know, like this charismatic man who's in prison for a while writes this manifesto, tries to actually throw a coup in the mid-20s, fails.
Like, all of these, like, what parallel are you talking about?
Yeah.
I just feel like people are playing fast and loose with these words that they mean something.
These words mean something.
So if you're going to call someone a fascist, find the fascist.
And like you said, there are Nazis in American culture, unfortunately.
But fortunately, because of our freedom of expression, they have the right to exist.
And I think that by lumping in anyone that voted for Trump, for instance, as a Nazi, you're just making them look bigger.
That actually just benefits them.
They're irrelevant.
The KKK is irrelevant.
6,000 members, maybe, in a country of 325 million people.
And it is, that kind of badgering and that kind of harassment is real and it's terrible.
No one justifies that, but I'm so sick of the A history.
Like, people suddenly are experts.
It reminds me of on Columbus Day, I tweeted out and it got tweeted a bunch, I thought it was funny, where people were tweeting about Columbus and all this, I'm like, suddenly everyone's an expert now in the age of exploration today.
Now everyone knows everything about the age of exploration, just like everyone knew everything about the rise of Nazism and the Weimar Republic, and just like everyone knew about the, you know, socialism and all.
Well, I posted this flag behind me, and a company called Iron Mountain Designs creates it, and it's a veteran-owned company, and they make these pretty cool flags, very cool flags, made out of metal, but it has a George Washington quote on the back.
And I put it up on Instagram with the photo of the flag, photo of the logo of the company, like three different pictures on Instagram in a row.
You know how you do that, where one post can have three images?
And one of them was a quote from George Washington.
And the number of fucking geniuses, George Washington owned slaves.
Like, yeah, he's an honest man who owned slaves.
And they just kept rattling on about the horrors of George Washington as if, okay.
Yep, he did.
Yeah, but this is a quote by a man who lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago, and this is what he said.
You know, you want to diminish his entire, you know, contribution to human culture because he did something horrible back then when people were doing horrible things.
You're right, he did own slaves, but I think it's a part of a very long conversation about what a human being was, you know, back then.
Yeah, it goes back to the idea of historical relativism, that you can judge them based on a 21st century model, but George Washington died in 1799, so this is a man that didn't even see the 19th century, nonetheless the 20th, nonetheless the 21st, has no idea.
He was a southern planter.
Four of the first five presidents of the United States were southern planters that owned slaves.
This wasn't a totally...
Uncommon things.
So I'm not justifying it.
There were absolutely abolitionists among the founders.
There were absolutely abolitionists during the revolution and black people fought for the for the Continental Army.
But yeah, people judging based on these things, I'm like, that's fine.
But if you want to take that to its natural conclusion, you're going to find lots of problems with lots of people.
Even closer to us in history than than George Washington and what's funny about that is now they really are going after I was reading it just tangentially I didn't see it all but people are starting to now go after George Washington plaques or George Washington statues and I feel kind of bad about that in the sense that I was all for removing The Confederate statues and putting them in places where they made sense.
So take the Jefferson Davis statue, put it in Gettysburg or whatever the case might be, put it in a museum.
I don't think they should be melted down and destroyed.
But people were like, the next logical step is they're going to go after the founders.
So I feel a little bit guilty about that in the sense that...
I don't think we should be celebrating Confederate history, but we should absolutely be celebrating American history, even the complicated American history.
But to try to sweep it under the rug and smash all the statues, like, no, have that statue up so people can understand what the fuck that is.
And if someone is going to celebrate that statue, you know, the South's going to do it again, we're going to rise again, they can do that, you know, if that's their thing.
Yeah, and I think that I agree with you in the sense that it's worth, it just, it happened, we remember it, and it has always, the gray and blue have always been part of our culture since the Civil War ended in 1865, and especially since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Many people don't even know what you're saying.
You know, when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and our occupation of the South ended and then Jim Crow became law and there was, you know, institutional segregation, this was something that was always a complicated point of celebration.
You know, I've always been, you know, I've always been really kind of curious and really more militant about why these people actually got away with what they did.
And I understand, you know, the 10% plan, which, do you know anything about that?
The idea that Lincoln only made, or actually really Andrew Johnson only made 10% of people in the southern states basically pledge allegiance in order for the states to come back in.
They didn't execute anyone that, you know, or even really try them.
You know, Jefferson Davis Stonewall Jackson didn't survive, but Robert E. Lee and all these other guys just got away with it and actually lived pretty prosperous lives afterwards.
So there's always been this really complicated mix of remembrance that these people down there were heroes, and we don't have to support that.
I certainly don't support that, but it goes way further back than our contemporary culture, and we can't just smash it into oblivion and think you're going to remove that.
The heritage of the stars and bars and all that from what happened.
I mean, I remember going to Richmond, Virginia for the first time.
A lot of my family lives down there now, and they have this thing called Monument Row or whatever, where it's like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and all that.
And then they actually put Arthur Ashe at the end to make it seem like it's not racist anymore, which I always thought was weird.
They did that in the 70s or 80s.
Yeah, exactly.
So there's just like a black guy at the end of it.
Yeah, so we have a lot of pro-HIV culture and all that.
But I remember being really confused when I was a kid, being like, why are these statues here?
This doesn't make any sense.
And I agree that they shouldn't be in those places of reverence.
Because beyond the slavery issue, and I agree with you, slavery was the reason the Confederacy...
was founded.
It does go back to states' rights, and it has inherent economic benefits.
But it is, you know, Stephen Douglas, who was the vice president of the Confederacy, literally said that they were founded because of this, so you can take his word for it.
But I was always confused why we were celebrating these people, and why not have these pieces of art?
Because they are pieces of art, but have them in places that make sense, that give context.
So I have no problem with that.
But I was so tragically wrong about the slippery slope that we were finding ourselves on.
Because I thought people would see more that like, yes, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but also an immensely important person to our society.
But people aren't seeing it that way.
And I will fight more vociferously to protect those guys than I did the Confederate officers.
I mean, it is all weird when you're talking about slave ownership.
You know, I did this thing this morning.
My kids' school, they have this great pumpkin day and all the little kids are on stage and they're...
They have this little play that they act out.
One of the things they were talking about, the smell of applewood bacon, and mmm, and everybody's like, oh, the smell of applewood bacon.
And all I could think of, because yesterday we were talking about factory farming and about this Glenn Greenwald article, where this FBI investigation to these two people that stole these pigs from this factory farm revealed this...
Federal cover-up of these horrific conditions in factory farms and I was thinking of like one day we're gonna look at like factory farming And the horrific nature of what they do to these animals, especially pigs.
These really intelligent animals.
They stuff them into these boxes and make them live in their own shit.
And there's little corpses of piglets around them.
It was really hard.
The article in the photos were really hard to look at.
And I was thinking while I was watching this little kid's play today, I was like, one day we're going to look back at this mention of bacon.
And we're gonna think, like, how fucked up were people that they thought it was okay to shove these little animals into these crates and make them live in their own shit just so you could get bacon off of them?
Yeah, it's actually very thought-provoking what you're saying because I've always found the factory farming, not that I'm an expert in it at all, I'm not, but the argument to be really interesting because it's like there's an opportunity cost.
The way we treat these animals means food is very cheap.
Way cheap.
Meat is incredibly cheap in the United States compared to almost anywhere else in the world.
And produce is too.
Because of that, people used to spend a third of their income before World War II on food and now they spend less than a tenth of their money on food.
So there's It's amazing.
So we've made food way cheaper, but you're right, because you could make the same argument for slavery in the sense that, well, look at all the economic benefits.
It kind of turned a blind eye to it, so you actually kind of Kind of changed my mind on it a little bit, because I've always been of the mind where, like, free-range eggs, free-range animals, that's great if you can afford that, but I don't begrudge the poor or middle-class or working-class family from going and buying their ground beef from Vons.
And you're in a system that you didn't design, you didn't create, you're in there, and you're just trying to get by.
I understand that.
But what I'm just saying as a whole, as a culture, to just openly accept factory farming and to not think of it as a horrific ethical and moral injustice.
I mean, it really is.
This is coming from someone who eats meat, right?
Obviously, the vegan argument would be, well, you're complicit in it, and you're also complicit in a bunch of other horrific crimes against animals.
I think that what we're looking at, though, is an awakening and sort of an understanding of our impact.
Like, physically, our impact on this, but mentally, the way we think about things, the way we even think about ourselves.
If you know that your bacon is coming from an animal that was tortured and shoved into a cage, and you buy it anyway.
So I don't think there's anything wrong with that.
There's an economic reality.
I can take the time off.
I can take two weeks off out of the year because I went on two elk hunts.
I've been on four hunts this year and three of them I was successful and one of them I got an axis deer which is also like 100 pounds of meat and so That's most of what I eat.
But most people don't have time to take three weeks off a year.
And you also have to have the time to practice and you have to know people.
It's a lot of good fortune on my side to be able to do something like this.
But it's also a concerted effort and becoming obsessed with the idea behind it of doing that.
It becomes a different thing.
Food is just a different thing.
If you grow tomatoes in your garden, that food becomes a different thing.
But it's interesting because it's the point I made earlier.
You're further along the path of sustainability or further along the path of some sort of righteousness in the way animals are treated and all that kind of stuff than a lot of people are.
So it's a step in the right direction, right?
I just wonder if people, just to play devil's advocate, again, the working class family at the median household income of $40,000 a year, If we got rid of some of these animal practices, which are abhorrent, but if we got rid of them, are they willing to pay $13 or $14 a pound for their beef?
And I think that there's a lot of people that don't even take it into consideration.
I mean, that's probably the biggest problem, that we've made this system, and everybody was born into this system, you know, obviously we didn't create it, but we're born into this system, and it took us until we were probably like, I didn't even know what a factory farm was until I was like 30. I'd never even heard of it.
And then you hear about factory farming, and you go, what is that?
And you go, oh, these animals, they're all stuffed together, and you're like, what?
I remember in the late 90s on TV, like on public access or on like...
I think it was just on public access.
You would see these like guerrilla filming sessions that these guys would go to these farms and like break in and like take all these pictures and it was like for some animal rights activist group or whatever.
And I was always familiar with it.
I just never...
I mean, I'm guilty of saying like I never really...
Thought about it too deeply beyond that, sadly, because I thought about the economic realities of it, where I'm like, this is a terrible thing, and we can fix it, but we just have to have a conversation as a society of what that's going to mean for food, because the exact inverse has happened with produce, where we've figured out ways to really dramatically alter seedlings, and I was just reading about Norman Borlaug, who won a Nobel Peace Prize for what he did to wheat, making wheat.
People look back at the original Earth Day, I think in 1970, and they often talk about some of the prognostications of what's happening to the Earth and all that today.
But a lot of people lost sight of the fact that a lot of what people were talking about then was that we were going to die of famine.
That the Earth's population was growing way too quickly and that they would have these guesses by the late 70s, early 80s.
You can go read it.
It's fascinating.
They would be like, by 1985, like, a billion people are going to die of starvation because we can't feed everyone and all these kinds of things.
That's what they were originally talking about.
about.
So there's been these pioneering heroes in agriculture that have figured it out, that have these high yield crops and all that.
And we're fine with that because obviously crops, flora are different than fauna.
They don't feel, they don't have some sort of connection with them, they don't have a brain.
So I understand the differences are there, but it's funny how these things have totally basically switched sides where now we have these high yield produce, that's great.
We have these high yield ways of getting animal meat, but no good.
And I think that Does it suggest that we have to be more vegan, more vegetarian, all those kinds of things?
I don't know if that's the answer.
I think we have to have a complicated conversation.
And maybe it comes down to this idea of cloning meat or whatever they're doing, like making meat and process these weird chemical processes to make beef that's indistinguishable from real beef.
Because your body doesn't know how to process it correctly, and it sticks to the walls of your colon and starts creating abscesses, and they have to remove your colon and make a new one with stem cells and cut you open like a fish and stitch this new shitter inside of you.
What's interesting too about that is that it's the human condition.
It's not only like the more modern human condition.
I'm reading a book or I just read a book called 1491, which is about the condition of North and South America and Central America before 1491. Before Columbus.
Before Columbus.
So there was Viking contact and stuff.
And they were talking about, you know, which is, I think, well known to a lot of people that the Native Americans, the Paleo Indians, wiped out tons of animals before when there was literally only a few hundred thousand of them, you know, because they were over hunting them.
So, this cycle continues regardless.
You even hear about that in Iceland with the Norse that lived there, where they depleted their very precious woodstock there.
There's no animals.
It's not just modern humans that are challenged by this.
The woolly mammoth and all these animals were wiped out by humans.
There's a lot of people that believe that that had to coincide because the dates coincide with the end of the Ice Age.
And there's a guy that I've had on this podcast several times named Randall Carlson, and he has some very compelling evidence that points to the possibility that it was asteroid impact that wiped out these animals in mass.
And that's one of the reasons why in certain parts of the world you could find mass graveyards of animals that were killed almost instantly.
Well, North America, well, they think that that was the reason why there's this...
It's a fascinating podcast to go back and listen to.
And I had him on with another guy named Michael Shermer, who's a famous skeptic, and Graham Hancock, who's also a proponent of some of his ideas.
And they showed all these images of these deep fissures that were cut into the land that must have been a massive amount of water over a very short period of time.
And he thinks it was probably a large body that slammed into the polar ice caps or slammed into rather the ice caps that are above, you know, North America somewhere around 10,000 years ago at two miles high of ice over much of the surface of it.
And all of a sudden, boom, gone.
And that's what caused the Great Lakes.
I mean, the Great Lakes are essentially these gigantic glaciers that melted.
And there's all sorts of features.
In these various landscapes that he believes point to massive amounts of water that happened over an incredibly short period of time and the explanation for that and the peaks and the rises and the falls in temperature during that time when they do like core samples of the earth, he thinks that that also points to some sort of an impact.
That's what's so frustrating and why I didn't study in college or really super interested in ancient history or even, you know, paleo history and pre-human history and stuff.
It's also hypothetical you'll never really know.
You have to just kind of trust people much smarter than you, that they have these good ideas that sometimes conflict, but you'll never really know the answer.
Here play some of this you get some volume on this Here now right and it probably this would have been a seal or a spillway Free flood club right when the floods hit they ripped through here Lord the valley floor by about 200 feet right right based upon the present depth of the river and the height of the twin system Yeah, yeah.
Now the Twins themselves, I mean, that's a Basalt outcrawl.
Just an interesting insight into agriculture, into just some ideas that kind of cobble together some sort of vision of this place before mainstream European contact.
If you could go in some sort of an invisible bubble and experience the Earth at various stages.
There's two things I would love to see.
I would love to see...
During the Great Pyramids, like when they were in their prime, I would love to see what was Egypt actually like before they burned the Library of Alexandria.
And I would have loved to have seen a native tribe in North America pre-colonization.
And that's the frustrating thing is we'll never really quite know the answer, but it's fun to speculate about.
And I was reading...
I think you'd find interesting.
I was reading about the Easter Islanders and how they...
They have sweet potatoes on the island, which are not indigenous to the island.
And the sweet potato had kind of spread around Polynesia, presumably from South America.
And there's this interesting thing that the word, I don't remember the exact word, but the word that many Polynesians or many Polynesian societies that were separated from each other used for the sweet potato is identical to what they were using on the South American mainland, indicating that the islands might have been populated from the other direction.
They assume that people came down from what is, I guess, Indonesia into Australia and then kind of hopped over to those islands.
But people are suggesting that there must have been contact from Paleo-Americans on those islands because they eat sweet potatoes, which are indigenous to South America, and they call them the same exact thing.
that the societies that were thousands of miles apart had experienced.
And you hear about a lot of this, was there transatlantic contact?
could that and then it gets into crazy like conspiracy theories about the pyramids and stuff but where the Phoenicians come over where there are Egyptian contacts the Chinese come here the Romans I remember that there was this this theory that Romans might have been on the Pacific coast of North America because they found I guess they apparently found some coins Roman coins and they found these jars that I guess were ancient Roman or supposedly ancient Roman anchors for ships Yeah, I've seen that.
Yeah, I mean, the human history is, you know, kind of pieced together by what we find.
And every now and then they find something and they go, oh, okay.
You know, I mean, what's really crazy is that with Native Americans, when the settlers got here, when Europeans got here, they didn't have horses.
But horses actually evolved in North America.
Horses evolved in North America and then by crossing the Bering landmass made their way into Asia and All throughout the rest of the world, even zebras.
But then somehow or another, for some reason, they went extinct in North America.
And, you know, they survived and thrived in Europe, and then they were reintroduced.
Dan Flores, he's a wildlife historian, he maintains that the Native Americans, once they had firearms and the horse, that they would have wiped out the buffalo on their own.
That it had nothing to do with market hunting and all the things that the Europeans did.
Was terrible and it happened quite rapidly, but he maintains that it was it was gonna happen anyway Just just the nature of what kind of an animal it was and that humans were eventually gonna get to them anyway Yeah, I mean that's what we were talking about with the human condition and how things don't seem to change regardless of who you're talking about and I'm always fascinated by these tangential kind of connections between these different societies that we're learning more and more about that the world is Way smaller than I think we thought it was in antiquity and even before that They were talking about how some
Greenland and I guess Newfoundland and New Brunswick and all these kind of had these Indian tribes that definitely probably had extended contact with the Vikings for a long period of time.
And these words kind of find their way to like the St. Lawrence Valley that describe the same things.
And then when the French fur traders come, they find that they're using words that they shouldn't know.
I always tell people, people have gone, you know, over the years, fans of mine have gone to school for history and asked me, should I study history and politics?
And I'm like, you can.
I think you should do what makes you happy.
I think it would be much wiser for you to study pharmacy or chemistry or something.
Yeah, because it's the same thing with archaeology.
I played around with the idea of doing American archaeology, which is a growing movement.
They're digging up Jamestown, all those kinds of things.
And there's just no money in it.
And so I want people to just love history the way I love it and understand it.
And I think a lot of it is because it's not told well.
Yeah.
The stories...
Dates and times are interesting.
I remember them, and I think I have that kind of brain, that kind of right-centered brain where I remember facts and dates, but that's not really what's important about it.
And if people taught...
History more as stories, which I think is what I'm trying to do with my show, then I think that people will enjoy it more.
So I think that's the greatest pleasure of what I do, is people saying, I hate history, or I hated history, or God, I thought it was so boring, but this is so interesting.
Thank you for bringing this to my attention.
And I was like, well, more power to you, and now we can remember what happened.
And these stories are interesting, and they're important.
Confusing dreams where in the middle of the dream you don't realize that it's a dream like I had a dream That I was lying on this couch a couch that actually exists a couch in my house and then I was cold So I grabbed this blanket and I was pulling the blanket over me But the blanket was kind of stuck in the pillows.
So, you know, like, you know Gotta struggle with it to get the blanket over you.
And then I woke up and there's no fucking blanket.
I was like, oh my god Like I dreamt that I was pulling a blanket.
I mean it was so realistic that I would have sworn if I woke up that I had struggled to get that blanket over me while I was taking a nap on the couch.
But there was no fucking blanket.
I was reading and as I was reading I decided I was gonna lie down right here and sleep.
I must have passed out and decided that I was cold and went through this elaborate dream sequence where I pulled a blanket over me.
But I was convinced that I had woken up cold and had to adjust and pulled a blanket over me and went back to sleep.
Yeah, I feel like it's something maybe I should challenge myself to do as well, because I remember, I mean, I've smoked marijuana regularly my whole adult life, and it becomes, some people dip in and out of it, like it's something that you do recreationally, or you want to get stoned before a concert or whatever,
but I always found that it was, as sad as it sounds to some people, I think, that it was almost part of my process in a way, where even in college I was writing a paper, or I was working, or whatever the case might be, I feel like, yeah, let's smoke a joint or something like that.
And I agree.
I get most creative to this day, late at night, if I smoke or do something like that.
I'm writing good stuff.
I'm having good ideas.
I'm writing ideas down.
And then sometimes I come back to them later when I'm not stoned and I can flesh them out more or whatever.
But I agree that there's great creative benefit to it.
And I also feel like I'm really happy that in a very short amount of time, American society has come around to the benefits of marijuana, not only medicinally, but just recreationally.
And the numbers, the polling numbers from the early 2000s to today are radically different.
We're talking about shifts of like 30, 35 points and how people feel about them.
And like you're saying, with anything, moderation is probably key.
I often in my life don't, because it can make me lazy too.
It can get me very interested in music or something like that and I get distracted.
But marijuana, we have a very infantile sort of approach to what marijuana is because of, I think, because of all the prohibition bullshit that people went through.
From the 1930s on, there's this weird propaganda that marijuana is the devil's weed and it's terrible for you.
There's a lot of cultural and societal benefits to achieving those states of mind.
I think they really do make people nicer.
I think it calms you down.
Here's the big one that everybody's worried about, paranoia.
It makes you paranoid.
I don't think that that's a bad thing, necessarily.
I think that paranoia, that feeling of vulnerability, it probably makes you more honestly assess how you interface with the world.
There's a lot of real danger in the world.
And I think that marijuana probably makes you really think about that real danger in a way that you perhaps ignore or put in the back of your head, but it's always there.
It's always there in your subconscious, just sort of grinding away at you, whereas marijuana Brings it to the front, has a light, shines that light on it, goes, hey, maybe you should look at this.
How about the fact that your lungs don't work so good anymore, man?
How many more years you got?
How many more summers do you think you have on this planet?
You know, you got 40, you got 50, you got 60. That's it.
It's fascinating because if it opens up these places in our brain that are creative, that let us write better, that make us funnier with your comedy, for instance, or whatever the case might be, then it makes you kinder, which I agree.
It mellows people out.
Then, of course, it would make sense that it opens up these dark recesses in your brain that hide or shield these things that you don't want to think about.
And I agree that confronting those things is normal.
I think...
Paranoia, I think, is a side effect of marijuana, for sure, but it's about how you harness it, and if you think about it within the parameters that you're talking about, which is that these things exist.
So you're just thinking about it.
It's not a manifestation of something that doesn't exist.
Very easy to ignore but are pretty fucking huge like space Like one of my favorite things to do is a smoke a joint and go out and sit in my backyard Just pull up a lawn chair put my feet up and just stare up at space and just think of how fucking insane it is that there is this In immeasurable view of infinity that's above our head and And we sort of take it for granted.
We barely stare at it.
We barely look at it.
We barely take it into consideration.
It's just a thing that we completely take for granted.
But when I'm high, I can really freak out about it.
One of the things that I like to do...
When I smoke a little pot is get to the base of a hill.
There's something about being in the base of a hill and lying down where you're looking up and you see the hill and then you see the clouds moving over the hill in the background, the blue sky and the clouds.
There's something about that that gives me a more accurate understanding of atmosphere.
This thin layer of protective air that keeps us shielded from radiation, the magnetosphere above it, all this stuff that's above us that's just sort of slowly moving around this giant globe.
There's that view where you're laying back and you're looking up at the clouds rolling over the top of the mountain.
It gives you more of an understanding of the spherical nature of the planet and the fact that it is draped in this atmosphere.
There's just a real weird, trippy, reset sort of a feeling that I get from that.
Life based on the confines of a 13.5 billion year old universe that is expanding at the speed of light is probably that we're not very alone.
But the idea that this planet in just the right place with a moon that protects it from a lot of ancient asteroid and comet collisions with oxygen and water...
It's just so fascinating and I think that we often don't think in a weird way galactically about it or universally about how...
Everything that we experience is based on our experience on this little globe hurtling through space.
I feel like one of the things that I'm bummed about for the time in which we live, you and I, is that I feel like we're in this middle space where some crazy shit's gonna happen in probably 2100 and beyond when we really start.
Yeah, or even if you have 20 years left and they don't give you this radical mathematical equation to build a spaceship, but they're just like, hey, we're here.
And we're 150 light years away and you have to literally take 150 years to send that message.
You know, it will take that long to send the message back and then another 150 years to get the message back and so on and so forth.
Well, this is a very, in terms of resources, this planet's very rich.
Think about it.
What if they're from a planet that's low in water?
We're three-quarters water.
The surface of our planet is mostly water, right?
We have all sorts of weird minerals and who knows how...
I mean, they're rare in our solar system.
What we find on Earth in terms of the biological life is insane, right?
We haven't even found biological life anywhere else in the solar system.
So it could be that this is just the ultimate fucking sweet spot.
I mean, we are in what we call the Goldilocks zone, right?
But then there's also, my thought is always, why would, it's just like, it's such a limited thing to think that biological life as we know it, carbon-based life on the planet Earth that exists between the temperatures of X and Y, you know, and it has a lifespan of, you know, whatever the fuck it is, like, this is the only way life can be.
And that's why they use the term, I guess, life as we know it.
Yeah.
But I'm of the same mind as you.
I think...
With just the mathematical permutations, you know, multiplied by the amount of space covered, even the exoplanets we're finding now, I know a lot of them are gas giants and stuff like that, and they're really close to the star system, but they indicate that maybe we're not all so unique.
And I was reading a thing about Jupiter and Saturn, even in relation to exoplanets being found that are similar to them, that they might have been far closer to the sun when they formed and then were pushed out.
So maybe we're seeing solar systems earlier on in there.
I love space too.
I think it's a super fascinating study.
I wish that I was smarter with math, with physics, and all those kinds of things, because I have a very...
Very limited understanding of that stuff.
Maybe I would have explored that instead, but I don't have that.
Yeah, it started as a mini-series, which is about the Cylons turning on the humans, or I guess the end result of them turning on the humans, and then they expanded into four seasons.
And I like the idea of the, because we're dealing with it tangentially now, the idea of, not that it's unique to that story, but of AI and robots turning on you.
Very smart people are telling us that that's very possible, and so we should probably start listening to them.
I think we're either probably going to be augmented by these creations, and we're going to choose to take on new body parts that function much better than the body parts we have now, or we're essentially laboring to create something that's going to surpass us.
That absolutely could be it.
This idea that it's artificial, too.
It's like, well, it's right there.
It's real.
Like if it's a life form.
Oh, it's artificial life.
No, it's electronic life.
You know, it's something that humans have created, but it's still life.
It doesn't...
Like if you take a plant, right?
You know, I was looking at these plants...
And they splice different plants together, like they splice pistachios into avocados.
They have the base of an avocado tree and pistachios are grown on the outside.
I mean, it seems like they've figured out some way to engineer things in a crude sense, you know, by splicing and grafting and doing all these different weird things to plants.
Well, it's still life, though, right?
It's still alive.
It's functional.
And we think of life as everybody has to have bones or blood or scales or fins.
Says who?
Says who?
Says us in our limited sort of vocabulary and our very limited encyclopedia of variables that we allow to consider life?
Yeah, I think you're right because we have to judge maybe life based on consciousness instead of, not that a planet would have consciousness, but I think that's the kind of the ethical question we're going to start coming up with with machines in the next 20 or 30 years is, are you developing something?
There's actually a great, I don't want to ruin it for you, there's an amazing black mirror that kind of touches on this.
It's called, I think it's called White Christmas.
You should check it out if you have time.
And Jon Hamm's actually the main character in it from Mad Men.
The idea that if something is conscious, even if it's not real, or even if it's only in a computer, what does that mean?
And what if it was trapped there?
What if it didn't have agency over its life, but it was still conscious and stuff like that?
We're messing with things that we don't understand in this regard.
Because even the word consciousness doesn't really have a concrete definition.
So if we're going to implant that into other machines, even if they're just computers, even if they're literally just running on an operating system, then there are definitely going to be ethical questions to ask, I think.
Yeah, but they are talking, exchanging information back and forth in a method that we don't understand.
And they do.
How the fuck do they?
And why have they chosen to talk to each other?
And is this like one...
You know how you have like a science fiction movie?
And in the beginning of the movie, you have these engineers sitting around.
And the engineer's going, Mike?
Mike, come here and look at this real quick.
They're talking to each other.
What do you mean they're talking to each other?
There's a language.
See this?
See, this is an exchange.
Here, and here's the answer, and here's a response to the answer, and here they've agreed upon this, and now they've expanded their sentences like, shut it down.
Just shut it down.
What do we do about this?
Let's let it play out.
No.
No, let's shut it down.
Let's talk about this.
And then they shut it down and it phased to black.
Cut to smash cut like you see a new time to 2034 and it's some dystopian Mad Max fucking world and robot people are running down the street chasing after biological people.
Well, it's interesting because there are different reasons why a robot or a machine might turn on you, right?
I think the Cylons were interesting because they turned because they were enslaved, right?
So there was vengeance, which is a human quality, by the way.
An animal doesn't really understand vengeance.
Chips do.
Yeah, well, I guess about higher primates or whatever might understand a retaliatory kind of thing.
But generally, this is a human quality, right?
Well, it's a primate quality, for sure.
And so there's that.
So there's like this enslavement, retaliation kind of thing going on.
But then there's the very, like, what I always find fascinating, and I think this is more what Skynet was all about in Terminator, although I don't really remember, is the idea that if you look at the landscape of what's happening and you just remove the most inefficient...
part of it it's the human like in other words them acting as they are machines like this this doesn't make any sense this makes our processing slower this particular component needs to be removed so there's a very logical reason why they would go after you too i think it's it is the stuff of sci-fi but like so many things that start in sci-fi it ends up bleeding into into real life and i think it's uh when i see people like stephen hawking bill gates elon musk all talking about this i'm I'm like, these are some of the smartest people that society has ever given us.
And I think we might want to pay attention and have some...
I think what they want is some sort of Congress.
Not American Congress, but some sort of international coalition that agrees this is what we're going to do and this is how far we'll push the boundaries.
And I just don't know that we'll get there before it's...
I don't want to say before it's too late, but before we have a scary situation.
And even from a mechanical situation, what they're doing at Boston Dynamics is fucking horrifying.
And it's so funny because some people have said in the past, if you see them, they're using hockey sticks a lot to beat them or knock something out of their hands and stuff.
And I'm like, these are the videos they're going to show.
They're going to show them in their military camps when they're turning on humanity.
The interesting thing to me about this is, and I don't know if you feel it, but I kind of do, is when they're tripping and falling, I have this feeling of like, yeah, where I'm like, oh, you know what I mean?
It's just like how crazy and what's going to be the issues that we're going to have to confront.
Sentient life.
And also the real question is...
Will it have any motivation to advance?
Like the idea is that the real fear is that these things are gonna be so hyper-intelligent that they're going to be able to create a much better version of themselves fairly quickly.
Like as soon as you give them autonomy and as soon as they're sentient, you're gonna say, okay, make a better one.
Make a better one than you.
And they're gonna go, well, you guys fucked up here.
Like why have all these shitty connections and let's do it this way and let's do it that way.
Let's connect to each other.
You guys are using Wi-Fi version 6. This is weak.
What we need is this new form of Wi-Fi that uses the particles in the atmosphere as transistors and sends back and forth to each other through a highly charged signal.
I'm like, what?
How'd you fucks figure that out and then next thing you know, but they're not gonna have ego They're not gonna have this desire for and this is this is you know a real underlying Aspect the motivation of the human race the desire to recreate and to reproduce like this desire for sex and this desire It's one of the reasons why people accomplish things they don't just accomplish things because They have this desire to see what happens when they put these two things together and what's the result.
They want fame, they want status, they want power, they want money, and they want all these things because they want to be more sexually attractive.
That's a big part of the motivation of men.
You know, it's a weird thing.
I mean, that's one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos doesn't just retire.
Why doesn't Jeff Bezos, when he just became the richest man in the world, how the fuck are you gonna spend 90 billion dollars, Holmes?
Cash out.
Cash out and just chillax forever.
You know, just walk around with a big red wig on so nobody knows who you are and just live like a king.
Like, go wherever you want.
Fuck all this work, man.
You're waking up in the morning, Freaking out about Amazon and making sure everything gets delivered in 30 minutes or less like a fucking pizza.
Instead, just live.
But no, no way.
Jeff Bezos has a fucking supermodel girlfriend now.
He's balling.
He jumps from one gold Lamborghini to the next one.
I mean, you start thinking, I want more.
I want this.
I want that.
Well, what is the motivation to do something like that?
Where is it coming from?
In men, I think a lot of it comes from this need.
I mean, I think if you brought it down to the base level, it's this weird biological need to reproduce or to spread your genes or to stand out as something particularly impressive.
And it was very overlooked because people were like, well, it's on sci-fi, well, it's Battlestar Galactica, but it was like a really well-done science fiction drama.
And then, yeah, Edward James Olmos was in it, too.
And that woman that played Starbuck, what is her name?
It just came my way and, you know, you read the scripts and they were just...
The real problem was that news radio was so good that the curse of being with that talented cast and amazing writing and amazing production and also nobody knew about us.
Like, when we were on the air, like, people that hear about news radio, most of what people heard about was from news radio's reruns.
When we went into syndication and we started playing, that's when people started really getting into news radio.
News radio really found a big audience after it was cancelled, which is ironic.
See that one with me with the white jumpsuit on, Jamie?
See, that's a perfect example of how fucking weird they were.
They did these weird ones where we were on...
Oh, that's not it.
That's not the same one.
That's not the space one.
We did one where we were in space for some reason, but it was the same fucking newsroom, but the newsroom was taking place in space.
They did a lot of weird shit.
They did one where we were completely underwater.
We did a Titanic episode where we literally filmed the show in waist-high water, and we were on a ship, and we wore old-schooly clothes from the Titanic days.
It's just an extremely...
Go to that picture down there.
Go back to that.
Scroll up.
Scroll up with a picture of the cast.
I'm wearing sunglasses over there.
We're at some...
That was when we went to the Emmys after Phil was murdered.
And he's still lost in the Emmys.
And Dave Foley turns to me right after they gave it to the guy from Frasier.
He goes...
What the fuck does he have to do to win?
You know, it was such a morose, hilarious moment where me and Dave were just laughing to each other.
Strange times, man.
It's weird to go back and look at yourself, too, from, you know, whatever it was 20 years ago.
Well, the UFC thing is very strange because whether or not anybody agrees with my opinions on life outside of it, they know that when I'm doing commentary, I am doing my absolute best to honor what's happening inside the Octagon.
And I have a deep knowledge and understanding of what's going on.
Like, this isn't...
Like, do you remember when...
I don't know if you remember this, but Dennis Miller used to do Monday Night Football.
And this was before, I think, I was doing FearFact, or before I was doing the UFC. Or maybe I was doing the post-fight interviews, but I hadn't done the commentary yet.
Either one.
But I was like, you can't force funny into something...
Where people want to watch The Thing.
You can't force funny into Alien, the movie Alien.
It's not supposed to be funny.
The Thing is, this is a dramatic, horrifying science fiction movie.
You don't force funny into something like that.
And that's what I felt like.
Dennis Miller was like, this is just like back when...
You know, he's like one-liner, one-liner.
That's his thing.
That's what he did.
But I never did that.
I always just did commentary.
And if you heard me do commentary, unless something happens that's fucked up inside the octagon and I have to go, what the fuck is this?
And then I go on a rant about something, people would have no idea that I was funny at all.
It's not like a concerted effort to nurture anything.
It's just...
The UFC in specific, first of all, it's about getting out of my own way and honoring what's happening.
You have to kind of honor...
You've got to think, when a guy...
There's a big fight this weekend, right?
TJ Dillashaw is going to fight Cody Garbrandt.
It's probably the biggest bantamweight fight of all time.
When those two guys get into the octagon, you're dealing with the consequences of the history of an entire division, probably the two best champions in that division going at it, the two of the three best champions, Dominic Cruz being the other one, going at it in this historical matchup.
You have a lot of responsibility, and you have to think about it that way.
No, I think it's interesting because I feel like I've actually been challenged in that same way, you know, because I came up as a gaming commentator.
And, you know, Dennis Miller, I think a lot of the reason people were kind of concerned about him, too, was that he would tell political jokes or bring political things in, which was unheard of at the time on Monday Night Football or in the NFL generally, and now it's part and parcel with the NFL. I'm a huge football fan, so I'm bearing witness to it every week.
Yeah.
But I, as a gaming commentator, I've often found some difficulty in keeping out shades of that, shades of politics, and kind of social commentary in what I did as well.
And that certainly alienated some people.
But I also think it engendered, like, wow, this guy's honest and just tells you exactly what he thinks as well.
So I was able to benefit from that, but I also don't have the audience that you have as well.
And I think keeping it structured and separated is wise.
But conservatism to me is simply the idea that government shouldn't be involved where it doesn't need to be involved if there's no justification for it.
Yeah, with the big, you know, sometimes the big 80s glasses and the crazy, I don't know, to each his own.
But I consider myself a conservative simply because I believe that the government is too big.
I think that the government doesn't need to be involved in everything it's involved in.
And I think that the idea of conservatism is simply inconsistent.
I think the conservative position on the global women's right to choose is pro-choice.
I don't think it's pro-life.
I think that the conservative, because it means that the government's not telling you what to do.
Just as the government doesn't have the right to have confiscatory taxes, just like the government doesn't have the right to take your guns, the government doesn't have the right to tell you you can't marry a man if you're a man, and the government doesn't have a right to tell you that you can't have an abortion.
So the true classic sense of conservative ideals versus what we see today where it's sort of a mixture of conservative philosophy but the religious influence.
Right.
There's a tremendous amount of religious influence because, well, from the Reagan days, right?
Yeah, it actually started with like even Nixon in a way.
Nixon did as well.
Yeah, it's the southern strategy and all those kinds of things and the idea that, that The map has changed.
In American politics until, really, the Civil War, parties were coming and going constantly.
The federalists and anti-federalists, by the time James Madison and James Monroe were president, those were antiquated terms.
Those were only five presidents in between Madison and, you know, or Monroe and Washington.
So, you know, we had this churn, the know nothings, free soil, all these kinds of things.
And suddenly the Democrats come out during antebellum America.
Republicanism begins in 1856.
And you have this idea of these parties that just exist still to this day and simply morph constantly into these different things, making me wonder why we don't just have new parties constantly.
But to your point, the reason that conservatism and liberalism aren't these aren't in these neat buckets anymore is because they're tied to these parties and they have to constantly The Republicans under Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt were the original progressives.
They were the ones that wanted land to be set aside for national parks.
They were the ones that freed, obviously, the slaves.
Not so much Teddy Roosevelt as much as Ulysses S. Grant.
And all these kinds of things.
And suddenly everything changes.
And then suddenly everything changes again.
And so on and so forth.
And so none of these words have any definitions anymore.
Which is why I didn't identify with Republicanism.
I consider myself a moderate conservative, but what's conservative about evangelicalism?
What's conservative about even ideas like free trade and stuff like that?
The idea of just having these open markets that destroy your ability to manufacture things, that drive wages down, that do all these kinds of things.
There's nothing conservative about that at all.
To me, I was like, I just have to find my own way forward, so I just consider myself independent.
And I feel like I'm consistent in what I say, because I think you can match them all up.
And I don't think there's any consistency in saying, you can't marry this man, but don't take my gun.
You can't have this polygamous relationship, but we should have prayer in school.
Well, the religious things always seem to me to be compromises to get the support of the religious right.
It seems like they move towards those directions because it sort of reinforces the power that they have behind them because they're the only candidates that are willing to do that, right?
Because the left is not willing to go down that religious road in the sense of a woman's right to choose, in the sense of a lot of things that they get liberals to support them.
It would be antithetical.
They would lose that support.
But do you think that having a guy like Trump in office, that one of the good things about having a guy that's obviously fairly unhinged and ridiculous is that we need to reconsider what it is to be a president.
And this idea that this guy could get into this position by just sort of conning everybody and doing a lot of Make America Great Again speeches and Saying a lot of crazy shit about we're going to build that wall 10 feet higher and all the nutty rhetoric that went on during the camp.
And then seeing him in office and seeing...
Who knows if he's even going to get out of these four years without going to jail, right?
I think what's positive is what we were talking about earlier, that the system works.
That, like, nothing has broken down at all.
In fact, like, we've seen from the circuit courts all the way to the Supreme Court and with Congress that there actually are, these are legitimately viable and independent bodies in the checks and balance system, right?
And this is why I think it's so deeply offensive to, you know, in a way, to be like, well, fascism's alive in America.
And I'm like, it's not.
What fascism would have looked like from a governmental standpoint is Trump's coming in, suspending the Supreme Court, dismissing Congress, and trying all these crazy things that would have happened.
That's what fascism looks like.
What fascism doesn't look like is you passing a travel ban and the Supreme Court saying no, and then you're trying to pass it again, and then the circuits courts say no, you know?
And that's not what fascism looks like.
That's what Republicanism, small r, Republicanism looks like.
And so I think we can glean positive things out of this.
People got mad at me after the election because I was like, the world's not ending.
But I think that once Kellyanne Conway and these other people that engineered the election for him to begin with, after the midterms, which I think are going to be interesting, I think the midterms actually benefit in some ways the Republicans because of the map in the Senate.
But I think that when it becomes clear that he cannot win...
I went to college with this girl who's a lobbyist in Washington.
She's a Democrat and she's pretty well connected.
And I had dinner with her a couple weeks ago and she was like, not only will Trump run again, he'll win.
And this was when everything was going on and all this, and I'm like, I just don't see him subjecting himself to the possibility of losing.
He won once.
And it reminds me of 2004 when Bush won again, but he also won the popular vote.
He beat Kerry, and it kind of legitimized himself.
I think that Trump is going to risk...
Further illegitimizing himself by subjecting himself to, you know, not only a primary, which is gonna happen, which is the death knell for an incumbent.
I think, ask Gerald Ford, ask Jimmy Carter how that went for them when they were primaried because they were so unpopular.
And then he goes in and there's gonna be, if the Democrats are smart, they put someone up that's really good.
And I also think there's gonna be an independent candidate that's gonna screw everything up as well.
And people were very excited and they were like this is this is the reason why we need sort of a good old boy president Because when push comes to shove they know how to get the men in uniform Behind it and just take care of this problem with military might and make America great again and all that kind of horseshit If something like that happens with Trump and Trump you remember how he had that one speech Jamie can you give me another one of these things, please?
We had that one speech Where everybody's like, oh, that was presidential.
He had one presidential speech where he spoke in front of Congress and everyone was clapping and he said a bunch of things.
All you need, all he needs is one event, something that happens, where he steps up and manages it with a reasonable vocabulary.
And does things that people approve of, especially some sort of a catastrophic situation or any sort of a military situation.
If we have to deal with North Korea, if we have to deal with something where there's like real legitimate concerns.
Thanks, buddy.
If that happens and he manages it, people get scared and they don't want change.
I think if that happens, it's entirely likely.
If we have to deal with some sort of a catastrophe, some sort of a tragedy, some sort of an attack or an event, and Donald Trump manages it well, it's entirely likely that he could be president.
But all of this, like the Saturday Night Live satires of him, all the shit that they do is...
Ramping up his mania and it's it's actually bad for all of us You know in that you don't get someone to change by going hey fucking change You know you're a piece of shit like that doesn't make people change it makes people aware that you hate them and depending entirely upon their personality whether they're reflective or introspective how they how they react to that he seems to react to it by By,
like, doubling down and by getting more aggressively defensive and more self-aggrandizing and more self-congratulatory.
He's in a situation where someone needs to lower their rifles, right?
And after he was elected, I thought for sure that smart people in his transition team, and he's not surrounded by dumb people.
He's surrounded by inexperienced political operatives, but he's not surrounded by dumb people.
That someone at some point would have said, like, we can now get down to the act of governing.
And I'm of the mind that if he just started acting more normal...
If he stopped tweeting so much, if he just spoke in a more normal way, did normal things, people would have forgotten a lot of what happened during the campaign.
And he would have been in much better shape to get legislative goals through and stuff like that.
But he can't help himself.
And that's why I think this destructive...
I just don't know that the American people are going to want this again.
I think that he has a base of 30-35% that will be there.
We have this sense that That business people think that he's going to alleviate restrictions, he's going to make things easier, he's going to open up doors, and he's going to do things that some people think are very unpopular.
Like, one of the things he's done is he made it so you can bring back lion trophies now, again, from Africa.
So if people want to go to Africa and shoot lions, you can bring them over.
Day 197 of his presidency, 530 pegged it at just 37%.
No other president in history of moderate polling had an approval rate so dismal on day 197. According to 538's tracker, former President Gerald Ford came close to matching Trump but could have boasted an approval rate of nearly 2.5% points higher.
I think, you know, it's funny because I think with...
There are certain things that I think people don't understand that are unpopular that do need to be done specifically for businesses.
I own a business.
I've owned two of them.
You run your own business with all of your ventures as well.
And it's very hard.
And a lot of people look at...
Just from an administrative paperwork standpoint, taxes, all those kinds of things, it's awful.
And I think a lot of people point at business big and small and they look at them as these ways you can get blood out of a stone and extract as much money out of them as possible and all these kinds of things.
And a lot of people are not sympathetic to it because, no offense, they have no idea what they're talking about.
And I've been watching The West Wing again, which I love.
And one of the things they say in there is that the major difference...
People call us a democracy, but we're not a democracy.
We're a republic.
And the idea is that you vote for people that go make decisions on your behalf.
And sometimes those decisions are going to be unpopular, but some people do know better than others.
And so there are certain things...
I don't necessarily judge a move based only on popularity, because what does society at large know about running a business?
Nothing.
So you have to ask people that understand what it is to run a business and how you can make that easier.
So you can't judge things based on that only.
My major concern with him, though, is that he's so unpopular, even in his own party, and even specifically with the House, that because they are constantly up for re-election, that they haven't had one legislative win in the entire time he's been president.
Well, there's a lot of things in there, but one of the things she was talking about was that they were fully prepared for their transition, which is not a surprise.
She was actually talking about in October, she started taking regular meetings, because they assumed that she was going to win, about how she was going to staff things and the decisions they were going to make in the first 100 days.
And I think you just have something that's over-the-top bravado, right?
And on the other end, ironically for someone with so much bravado, you have someone that just was totally not prepared to win.
Because I don't think anyone inside, except for maybe Kellyanne Conway, was telling...
You realize that he has such a limited understanding of what even his powers are and what even like What was the guy he spoke to?
We said I had a conversation with the president of the US Virgin Islands like hey, you're the president of the US Virgin Islands Yeah, he makes he makes some stupid.
Like, I remember the debates where he didn't know what the nuclear triad was, which is like...
The fuck do you not know what the nuclear triad is?
Where he's speaking around issues that are somewhat basic, that someone that's running for president should know.
And when you multiply that by not being a candidate, but by being the man in the office and then being inundated by the realities of the office, he was just ill-prepared for it.
And part of the reason he won is because he was an outsider.
And part of being an outsider is alienating everyone around you that is an insider.
So he has no one, very few people that are willing to work for him that are capable.
Which is why I think that, you know, there's this idea, I don't know if you've read about it, there's this idea that there's basically a soft coup going on in the American government right now.
Have you talked about, have you heard about this at all?
That General Mattis, who's Secretary of Defense, and then General Kelly, who's the Chief of Staff, are basically running things.
And that...
And it's kind of a scary idea because military coups are, even if they're soft, they're not constitutional, but that people take kind of solace in this because they're like, well, people that are men of honor are kind of making sure nothing crazy happens.
What a lot of people didn't glean out of that was that he was clearly watching Harry Truman videos.
Harry Truman said pretty much the same thing before he dropped a nuclear bomb on Japan.
and there's videos of it where he was like a reign of fury the likes of which the world has never seen or something like that he says and i'm like well you've been someone's been chirping truman quotes in your ear because this sounds awfully familiar to me um but he's been watching tv but uh to me it's like we it's especially precarious because yes a nuclear-armed north korea is not ideal but there's no if you read any foreign policy papers or any any anything out of think tanks there's no good solution out of this
And for him to be so flippant about it, when mutually assured destruction is the one policy that's kept everyone safe for a very long time.
The idea that we will destroy you if you do anything to us and first strike capabilities and all that kind of stuff.
The fact that he's playing with that balance has major geopolitical consequences in Asia, which in turn can bring the Russians in.
Yeah, I mean, at the very least, you're talking about, even if you disabled North Korea's nuclear capabilities, we don't really understand how their ICBMs work.
I was reading something today where they actually had a major collapse at their nuclear site of 200 people dead, like tunnels collapse and stuff like that.
Like they're actually blowing up so many bombs that they're actually weakening their own structures and stuff like that.
You have this situation where, at the very least, even if you disabled them and they couldn't retaliate, Seoul is 35 miles away from the border.
You're going to talk about tens of thousands of people probably dead in a few minutes.
And then you're getting us involved.
Then there's a refugee crisis on the northwest border of North Korea that's funneling into China.
China gets involved.
Russia also shares borders and has interests in Asia, in East Asia.
This isn't something that a man who doesn't understand things needs to be trifling with.
I would love nothing more than to have North Korea taken down a peg.
I don't begrudge you that, but I wonder, again, because of the alienation that went on through the primaries and into the campaign, when you have people that are simply not willing to work for you that are very capable, what do you do?
I don't know.
I think that's why nothing's happening.
That's why when they had the healthcare thing kind of crop up early in the administration, they weren't prepared.
They still have not really released all the details of their tax plan.
It's like, nothing is really...
I'm telling you, Joe, that's the major thing that's a bummer to me is it's just a wasted time.
And again, I don't think anybody has enough time to actually be the president, but I wonder what conversations he's having with the military and how those decisions get made.
I don't really understand the process enough.
To know, like, say, if North Korea does something stupid, what are the decisions?
I think, from what I understand, the way it works is that there's a situation room in the White House.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Advisor meet there to discuss things.
The president comes in when they're ready to present him with things.
They present him, based on the branch that's dealing with it, what's happening, and then they give him You know, what are reasonable responses or, you know, wait and see kind of things or whatever.
And I think that's how it goes down.
And then he tells, you know, the Joint Chiefs to to act on his on his, you know, direction.
Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Friday filed a defamation suit against former New Jersey state legislator Michael Panter following a Facebook post on Tuesday in which Panter detailed alleged sexual harassment by O'Reilly against an unnamed ex-partner of Panter's.
Huh.
Wow.
Panter's claims, based on the conversations with his ex and incidents he said he witnessed were chilling, Panter says that his then-girlfriend's, in quotes, career was largely dependent on staying on O'Reilly's good graces, and that O'Reilly repeatedly asked her out and made sexually charged late-night phone calls to her.
That's his move.
unidentified
He calls you up and says fucked up shitty on the phone.
I think that some people have a short attention span and they don't want long things or whatever, but I think that...
A show like yours, I think, fills a niche.
It's not even a niche, it's a huge show, but fills this need that I think is underrated, that people like long-form things, that they like depth, that they have lots of time to burn when they're driving around or at work and they're bored or they're just cooking food or whatever it is they're doing.
I used to have that argument in my old company where we...
I was like, you guys are just wrong.
Make this show three or four or five minutes long.
I'm like, no, it'll be as long as I want it to be for me to get my word out.
And I was right about that.
And I feel like, so I like the long form stuff.
I like for things to be as long as they need to be.
And to flesh things out and to not corner people, to let them express them and explain themselves and stuff like that.
I think it's good.
That's why your show is so popular.
I'm surprised that people aren't more and more aping the idea of going three, four, five hours if necessary with people.
And also, I'm not connected to something else where I have to worry about what I say.
You know, like I can't get fired if I'm the boss.
I'm my own boss.
You know, so a lot of people don't, they're not in that position, you know, and they really worry about putting their foot in their mouth, which I've definitely done a ton of times, and that that being the end of their career instead of being what it is, just a mistake.
You know, a television show is a more polished, edited...
It might be better for your attention span.
I mean, if this was on TV, just regular TV, maybe it would be a bomb.
You know, maybe it, like, uniquely fits into the weirdness that is the internet.
And that's why it's been successful.
And also, I think it's probably been successful because there was never any attempt at it being successful.
It was never like something where I sat out and go, if I just do this a certain way, it will be financially viable, it will be received well, and I'll use this as a vehicle to further my other endeavors.
There's never any thought process like that.
It's like, hey, it'd be cool to just talk to people.
Hey, you think I can get Anthony Bourdain to come over my house?
You must have, I mean, over doing a thousand episodes, many hundreds of guests, you must learn a lot, like you were saying, a lot about a person, but does your opinion of the person change when you have some interesting interviews with bigger people, for instance, that come on your show, better or worse, like after kind of poking and prodding them for a little while?
But there are so many people that do not want to ever admit fault.
And because of that...
Because you don't want to admit fault, because you don't want to admit that you might have communicated an error or you might have been misled by certain information that you thought was true but turned out to not be, it ruins the way people appreciate your words.
Because you could tell me that you believe, you know, something happened in the past because you read it, because you learned it in school, because it's always been taught that way, but then new information comes out that clearly refutes that.
You've got to come in here and say, well, now I know different.
Boy, I thought this.
Because I know that you really did think that.
I know you were really being honest.
And now I know you're being even more honest because you're saying now we know differently.
That now we know differently is fucking giant, man.
It's huge.
And you see it resisted.
You see it resisted in academia.
You see it because people have been teaching certain things for a certain amount of time and then new evidence comes to light and they don't want to consider it.
You see it resisted at all.
Like I had a conversation once on the radio with this lady who called up and she was telling me that she was a paleontologist.
But if you go above that photo, Jamie, go above that photo to the upper right-hand corner, That's one that they caught walking around on a camera chap.
They're just much, much bigger than regular chimpanzees.
But the point was, it was an incidence of someone just deciding that they had all the information and that they wanted to Just call bullshit on something that they really weren't up to date on it yet.
Yeah, I think pride gets in the way a lot of that.
I try my hardest, and it actually kind of gets to me when my audience or people that watch my stuff say like, oh, Colin didn't admit he was wrong about this, this, or this.
I'm like, I don't know that you're paying very close attention, because I actually take a lot of pride in being wrong about things sometimes and telling you that I'm wrong so you know, so you're not going out into the world...
With misinformation, whether it was about video games back in the day, whether it's about politics or history.
When you're rattling things off, like you were saying, sometimes you get things mixed up and confused.
And I think it's essential to do those kinds of things.
presents an academic stagnance when you don't want to do that.
I certainly, even though I consider myself, again, a moderate conservative, I certainly have been playing around intentionally with really challenging ideas lately to try to, you know, specifically with the universal basic income and Medicare for all, where I'm like, I'm fundamentally, principally probably against these things.
But if you can show me how they work, if I can read some data, we can get some test cases.
I know they're testing UBI in places like Sweden.
Then I want to see what it's all about, because this is so uncomfortable.
This is so out of whack for me that I want to know how it works.
With the $50 per month, it's not going to help shit.
But the $1,000 per month, that gets interesting because then you're not giving anybody enough where they can fuck off because $250 is really not even going to pay for rent and food.
But it'll help you, give you a little bit of a boost.
I think there's a lot of worry about inflation, because you're basically freeing up a ton of money that would otherwise be in banks or not circulating around the market, so it's going to make your dollar less valuable.
I think there's a lot of complicated things economically that people have to deal with with that.
But I feel like, you know, with what you were talking about with healthcare, I think it's an interesting point, because we talk too much about rights.
And we have these rights.
You have a right to not be searched without a warrant.
You have a right to due process.
Free speech.
Those are rights, right?
That are written in the Bill of Rights, in the Constitution, but...
But, privileges.
A 21st century, modern, progressive, wealthy society, what can your privileges of being part of that society be?
And I like when people talk about it in that sense and be like, medical care is the privilege of being part of a society like this.
I'm like, okay, so let's frame the arguments differently.
Because I think it's a more compelling way to say, we've achieved so much.
We're not in the dark ages anymore.
We're not even in the 18th or 19th centuries anymore.
Now we have roads, we have police and fire, we have all these things.
What's to stop us from having the privilege Of having this as well.
And I think just frame it that way and you'll have way more people on board.
So if you're just giving that to some kid and they half ass their education and they don't get kicked out of school and it's free, like, well, hmm.
Maybe that's not the best use of money.
But if someone can demonstrate a real desire to learn, you know, and a real desire to achieve and to discipline themselves into following through with the courses and doing the work.
You maybe then, maybe give someone a semester for free and prove by their performance in that semester, you know, by their effort, their performance, how much work they've done, that, you know, okay, you...
It's very likely that you can get through four years of this university and get out with a bachelor's degree, maybe even move on and continue your education or become a really valuable member of our society and benefit our economy and benefit our civilization because of what you're learning here.
So making an investment in you.
I mean, I think that's a valuable thing for our country, right?
Yeah, I think, to me, and I say this, I guess, from a place of some privilege, because I went to college.
I went to a great college.
And I'm proud of that.
But at the same time, I feel like it's too...
Why don't we emphasize trade schools anymore?
Why don't we emphasize that you don't have to go to college?
You can be an entrepreneur.
You can start a business.
I feel like it's often too...
It's too much focused on, like, an academic...
I'm like, that's good for some people, but I would argue that there's probably too many people going to college, especially for things that we were talking about earlier on that don't really...
Do anything for you.
If you have a chemistry degree or a physics degree or a math degree, you're going to be great.
If you have a history degree, like I did, you have to be very lucky, like I was, or you might have some hard times, you know?
It's just, so the government, the government did this and now they're trying to solve, now Bernie Sanders is running around trying to solve the problem.
I keep asking people, though, because you have these crazy people on Twitter and stuff that have the hammer and sickle and their names and stuff like that.
And I'm like, can anyone tell me one thing that the Soviet Union gave us, like gave the world?
But it seems to be the thing that people go to when they look at some sort of a viable alternative without looking into it deeply.
Marxism, you know?
And that this idea of socialism is going to be a good thing because everybody's going to contribute and capitalism is what's wrong with the world.
And whenever people, they always like to hit up this fucking thing of, you know, the economic inequality, economic inequality, inequality of income, inequality of money.
What people don't seem to get is that when you have true freedom, you're absolutely gonna have inequality.
Because if you have the true freedom to do whatever you want, some people aren't going to do much.
And some people are gonna do a lot.
There's gonna be some Jeff Bezos-type characters out there who just wanna fucking go gangbusters and own half the country.
And then there's going to be people that would really rather just work a little bit and then go play fucking disc golf and smoke pot and listen to records and hang out with their friends and they'd be very happy if they just made an income that was sustainable.
There's a fucking host of different personalities.
There's some people that really enjoy doing art.
And they like to go down to a fucking farmers market and set up shop and sell their artwork.
And that's fine for them.
That's what they want to do.
That's how they want to live their life.
And maybe their dad was a fucking doctor who died at 55 of a heart attack because he was working too hard.
Or, you know, who knows what it is that causes someone to have the ambition or the desires that they have.
But when you have true freedom to pursue whatever you want, that literally breeds inequality.
Because there are going to be people that decide to do more.
And there's going to be people, and whether it's an egalitarian version of this, whether these people are altruistic in their approach, whether they donate an incredible amount to charity, or whether or not they keep it all to themselves.
If you have real freedom, like, that doesn't say you have to donate X amount of your money to this and Y amount of your money to that, if you just give people freedom, You're gonna have inequality.
There's nothing positive about something like communism to me.
Whenever I see that hammer and sickle, and I don't mean this to be me, whenever I see that hammer and sickle on this person's name, I'm like, I'm not really dealing with someone with a full deck, I don't think.
I don't know how you can possibly read Marx and do all these kinds of things, jump deep into history, look at the Soviet Union, look at North Korea, look at Cuba, look at all the failure that's happened all around you.
Then look at the fact that everyone is benefiting from capitalism in some way.
I mean, real capitalism, the worst aspects of capitalism are the diminishing appreciation for the human being and the fact that money is a power over everything and that people just acquire material goods and all those things are true.
They're true at the farthest end of the spectrum of, you know, good to bad, right?
The furthest end of, like, what is the damage that capitalism can do?
Well, you can devalue human life to the point where money becomes more powerful than anything and people can consolidate this money and build these oligarchical family structures and, you know, there's a lot of issues that can happen, but that can happen with anything.
Where people have leverage and power over other people.
It doesn't necessarily mean they have to happen that way.
There's got to be some evidence and some instances of altruistic capitalism, like Bill Gates, for instance.
That guy does a lot of really good things.
And the Bill Gates Foundation that he has started up, I mean, goddamn, he's donated a shitload of money to schools.
Yeah, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whatever they call it, is super influential.
I look at it in the sense of, yes, there are negatives about all of these things, like you were saying, but I also feel like, are you eating today in half the world?
Because that's because of capitalism.
Capitalism, the industrial revolution that got everything going in the last 150 years is all because of the necessity of the chase of the dollar or the pound or whatever the case might be.
The chase for money is not in itself a negative thing.
It's what you're saying, what you do with it.
And the ramifications of what we get because of money is an amazing thing.
I often talk about whether it's good or bad.
When Apple One, the Apple One computer, was being made in the mid-70s, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs used to go to this thing called Homebrew Computer Club in Berkeley.
And people would go there.
There was this real spirit in the 70s amongst tinkerers that they would share their stuff with each other.
That they would be like, this is how I did this.
This is how I programmed this very rudimentary punch card machine.
And they were going with Apple One to this thing.
And Wozniak had really wanted to give it away.
To be like, this revolutionary computer that we are sitting on here, we're just going to give you the tools to make your own.
And Steve Jobs was the one that said like...
We have something here that can become more ubiquitous if we make it into a product that we sell, as opposed to something that stays within the confines of the Berkeley Homebrew Computer Club, where 15 people will enjoy it.
Like, it takes sometimes for things to proliferate, sometimes for things to do good.
There has to be a profit motive, and sometimes you need a Steve Jobs who didn't have the intellect that Wozniak had on a programming perspective, but saw products for what they were, went into Xerox, saw the GUI, saw the mouse, saw the Ethernet cable, knew what to do with these different things.
I love thinking about the iPhone and just the smartphone revolution, and then all of the businesses that are totally based on that thing.
Now, Uber, Lyft, all of these companies that only exist because that product existed, only because someone saw the capital investment necessary to proliferate this thing.
Capitalism is responsible for this intense competition in these smartphones now where there are legitimate contenders to Apple now.
Like Apple just released the iPhone X or the X, whatever the fuck they're going to call it.
But you have legitimate contenders in the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Galaxy S8 and the Google Pixel 2 XL. You have like these three phones that a lot of people compare favorably to the iPhone.
They're going back and forth with this and it's like it's a neck and neck race.
Now it's a matter of whether or not the integration with the operating system is important to you because a lot of people enjoy using a Mac and an Apple computer and you know they want to have the phone.
Seamlessly integrate with the computer, and then a lot of other people use Windows, and they prefer to use an Android phone because of that.
So you're dealing with massive competition now, which is fueling Apple to innovate, fueling Samsung to innovate.
I mean, right now it's just phones, and who knows whether or not it's really important to us, but that could lead to bigger and better things.
No one saw the smartphone coming, and that's really revolutionized the way we exchange information, the way we gather information.
Google's new Pixel XL. You squeeze the side and ask it a question.
There's competition, and there's an incentive, and there's a battle going on between these.
And I think that's the forefront of it, because with laptops, there's competition, but boy, it's kind of stagnant.
It's like, okay, well, how much processing power do you need if you're not rendering video games, if you're not making things, if you're not making movies?
If you're a person that's making CGI or filmed or something like that, then it makes sense.
You could probably use the faster processors and all the power and stuff like that, but...
Really, the competition is in video games and in video and apps and phones and the images these phones can create.
And all of them now have the ability to do portrait mode where they blur the background and bring you into the foreground.
And then the Google Pixel XL has some incredible AI for altering images and making them look cooler and really amazing stuff, man.
And I feel like a lot of the cool stuff that we even dwell on from back in the day, everything had a profit motive.
We were talking about the Age of Exploration.
They didn't want to come here.
The Europeans were just looking for a way to shorten their trade route to Asia.
They didn't care about what was in between.
It was actually super inconvenient that we were here.
There was always money at the end of the tunnel for good things.
That's why the space race is so unique, because it had no...
Everything from Mercury and Gemini through the Apollo missions had no real reason to exist other than that we wanted to best the communists.
There was no financial reason to do it, which is why it's so unique.
And I would even argue to this day, there's technology that NASA's created that we find in our everyday lives, but it's one of those unique places where that's not really true.
But there's also an argument, right, that subsistence living probably makes healthier, happier people, and that all this chasing money and chasing innovation and chasing, you know, technological superiority just leaves us with this hollow feeling, or it doesn't do you any good.
Like, you're seeing a lot of these people that...
There was this guy that we were talking about recently, the guy who, he coded Facebook likes And now your computer is trying to hijack your brain, I think is the name of the article.
Your smartphone is trying to hijack your brain.
And what he was essentially saying is that your brain is not designed to deal with the reward system that's involved in checking likes on Facebook or Instagram or stuff like that.
And that these things, this constant...
Yesterday, we were talking about this.
We were talking about...
I had Jamie Kilstein on.
He was talking about checking his phone, constantly checking Twitter on his phone, arguing back and forth with people, seeing who's supporting him and who's not, and that it becomes this massive, addictive thing, and how unhealthy that is.
There's a lot of things about this technological world that we live in that maybe aren't sustainable or aren't compatible with being a biological human being.
I hate to mention it again, but there's an episode of Black Mirror where there's this one person in this cast where they refuse to get this augment that everyone else has.
I won't ruin it for you anymore.
And it makes them this unique thing because they refuse to partake in the new normal of interconnectivity.
And it's...
Again, it goes back to the beauty of the system that there is choice.
Like you were saying, the bohemian painter that just wants to make $15,000 a year selling some art.
And as long as the system gives you that choice to succeed or fail and no one else is responsible for you, like in base ways, and I'm not saying we're not responsible to bring you to the hospital if you're sick.
I'm not saying any of that.
But we're not responsible to make decisions for you.
We're not responsible to line your pockets with money you did not earn.
Like his form of, Marilyn Manson, his form of creativity just doesn't work.
My brain doesn't make that.
You know, like a tomato tree doesn't make mangoes, you know?
And the freedom to express yourself in your own unique way and the freedom to live your life with your own unique direction That's just one of the greatest things about being an American, is that we have more freedom in that regard than anyone that's ever lived.
Because we have more access to things, we have more access to information, and we have more freedom to choose, to express yourself, to speak out.
And anything that gets in the way from that, including the limiting free speech on campuses, is fucking dangerous in that regard.
Because you think you're helping.
But you're limiting freedom.
You're limiting freedom because it doesn't jive with what's going on in your head.
And that's just not the way it's supposed to work.
I find what's happening on college campuses, I find the stymieing of free speech, this idea, this very primitive notion of almost thought policing as being super unsavory because you have to...
A society needs to be dedicated to protecting its bad elements, as long as those elements aren't illegal.
Right.
So like you don't want to protect the person who is murdering someone, but you might want to protect someone who you want to protect the rights of someone who is espousing really racist shit because you you that's why these protections exist is for their freedom to express those bad ideas.
As long as they don't play out, you don't have to agree with them.
You and I don't agree with those ideas, but you give them oxygen and power when you try to limit them.
I guarantee you that because of the the throwing around of the pejorative Nazism and or as a pejorative Nazism and fascism and kind of giving these people screen time Richard Spencer and all these guys.
I guarantee you that they've gained in her adherence not lost because.
They're gaining more and more oxygen because you're giving it to them.
By trying to stymie them, you're bringing attention to them.
I've said over and over again with Milo Yiannopoulos, going to Berkeley earlier this year and then not being allowed to speak and everyone losing their minds, you just gained Milo Yiannopoulos a bunch of people that had no idea who he was.
The thing that would have hurt him the most is going to a room that was empty.
No one was there to speak, but he has the right to go to that room and speak nonetheless.
I feel like people have tried to force consequences on me, for instance.
They tried to force a consequence that didn't work out the way that they wanted it to, but to try to make a point, to try to illustrate a point.
But you have to let these things, like you said, the marketplace will correct For anything that is untoward, Kevin Spacey is going to be hurting for the rest of his life compared to where he was just five days ago.
Because of the consequences of his actions, right?
So I'm not saying that there shouldn't be consequences.
I don't think a lot of people are saying that at all.
But I feel like it's thought policing, like there are preemptive consequences.
But these consequences should be like, hey, we don't want to do business with you because you and your values don't align with how we look at the world.
And I think that this intense, heated screaming and yelling at each other that you see on Berkeley and Antifa showing up with fucking ninja masks on, throwing Molotov cocktails, this ain't helping anybody.
I'm sure a lot of weird things are supported by the mayor of Berkeley.
But, yeah, it doesn't help any situations.
They look like Cobra officers from G.I. Joe running around, doing their thing, destroying private property.
It doesn't make any sense why you would do this to your own society, to your own community.
It's angst.
It is angst.
It's like, what point are you trying to prove?
And you're seeing this replicate itself a lot.
I know it's an unpopular thing to say, but you can draw a lot of this back to Ferguson, even.
Ferguson seemed...
In some ways, Ferguson is a travesty of justice, right?
But it seemed way worse than it actually was once everything came out.
Once Loretta Lynch, not a very well-known racist, refused to try the person at the federal level, local and state authorities, grand juries refused to try Darren Wilson for what he did to the gentleman there or whatever, and you get the full story, and yet you still have this society or this community in ruins based on some hands up, don't shoot.
The problem is it sounds good to people that want to believe a certain narrative.
And so they repeat it, and then everybody's repeating it, and then you have people doing it on television, and then everybody decides that this is the thing that we're going to say over and over again, regardless of whether or not it's true.
The real travesty of that, too, is that you can literally throw a dart at a map of the United States and find a civil rights infraction that's truly deplorable, that probably deserves the oxygen and the attention, and could be a legitimate rallying cry.
But it goes back to the point you were making before, too.
People don't want to admit they're wrong.
No one wants to admit that a year out from Ferguson, we're much further than that, but even six months out from when it happened, people look back, read through the grand jury stuff, the federal government's take on it, all that kind of stuff, and realize, huh.
Maybe this wasn't the best idea to act like this when we didn't have all the information.
Don't you think that the information is flowing freer and people have more of an understanding than ever before?
I think people are really doubling down on the far right and the far left and the extremism is sort of elevated in that regard.
But I think Overall, I think, you know, people don't like the word centrist, but the people in the center, the people that are more reasonable, are more informed, and there's more communication going on than ever before.
And it's very damaging to people's confidence in universities.
And, you know, like, look at what's happening to Evergreen State financially.
That college is getting devastated.
People are voting to defund it, and they have real issues with enrollment now.
There was a real interesting article that I just read yesterday where the president was talking about what an impact it's taken on his health and his mental health, and he's unable to think correctly now, and he's unable to...
The guy is literally shell-shocked.
I mean, his decision-making skills are very foggy, he's saying.
In a lot of ways, it comes down to the people that pay the bills, in my opinion.
The parents need to not be happy with the product they're getting when they find that their child is now an Antifa member when he comes back for Thanksgiving or for Christmas.
You have to ask yourself, what is happening now?
You know, like, this isn't...
Because people point back to the 60s when there was a very righteous wave of anti-authoritarianism that was born in this very specific climate, you know, and...
I think it's going to take a long time to fix.
I think a lot of it is because of a...
It's a very incestuous...
Academia is very incestuous.
You hire people that agree with you.
You hire people that believe in you.
That's why you find...
What is it?
19 out of 20 people that teach at universities are liberal?
Even if I were a liberal or a Democrat, I'd look at that and be like, that's not...
That's like its own form of social engineering that we've co-opted.
Not only have we co-opted a lot of media, which is why the media hates YouTube and they hate all these things because they can't control that, but now we've co-opted academia.
Your ability to get a degree is going to have to go through these people that you might be diametrically opposed to or at the very least lying to you about a lot of things.
Just 10 years ago, that was certainly not my experience.
So I fear for, you know, which is another reason why I'm like, I don't know if college is the best solution for a lot of even able-minded people.
You know, like where it's like, I don't know what you get from going there now.
If you study a discipline, you probably get out okay.
Again, we were talking about chemistry, physics, math, whatever.
But if you're studying humanity, I don't know, man.
I don't know like what you're getting out of that now.
I don't think you need to scientifically justify it, but I think the scientific justification for this whole gender...
normative kind of thing is actually going to backfire on them pretty badly because they've decided to make something that, you know, if you get a blood test, right, and they can study, study it, you're going to come out as a male, right?
Even if you identify something else, that doesn't mean you can't identify like that.
But if you're going to predicate your whole notion on that, this is science, and it doesn't seem like that might be the case, then you're actually injuring the social movement of people just being accepted for who they are.
And I feel like this is where you start engineering science to fit your narrative.
And I think it's a very, very dangerous thing.
People do the same thing with global warming.
I think global warming is obviously real.
I think the science says that.
I think that it's maybe not as bad, but it's bad.
It's affecting things, making storms worse, sea levels are rising.
But people manipulate that to say, no, everything's fine.
Just hand wave it away.
But it's not true.
And I feel like So I feel like we have to predicate everything on scientific truth when we can, and then give leeway to say like...
The example I used was homosexuality, where there was a theory for a long time that homosexuality wasn't something that was born in you, that it was a choice.
Now we know that that's not true, that it's actually something that's in you.
But even if it was a choice, who cares?
Why predicate it on that if you believe in freedom?