Sam Harris and Joe Rogan critique Twitter’s evasive moderation—Jack Dorsey dodged specifics like Louis Farrakhan’s status or Kathy Griffin’s doxing call, leaving users to suspect bias. Harris’s pre-recorded interview missed the Covington High controversy, exposing gaps in accountability, while Rogan’s live format struggles with sponsorship conflicts. Both note social media’s "witch panic" mentality: old tweets (e.g., Megan Murphy’s firing) or youthful actions (like MAGA-hat incidents) trigger disproportionate outrage, ignoring context or intent. Harris compares it to road rage—smartphones amplify impulsive reactions without empathy—while Rogan links it to Mike Tyson’s trauma-driven violence. Mindfulness, they argue, should be taught early like reading, but martial arts training often fails to prepare for real conflict. Redemption hinges on transparency (e.g., Majid Nawaz’s shift), yet platforms and critics rarely allow it, leaving public discourse fractured. Rogan calls it a pivotal moment for media evolution. [Automatically generated summary]
Because I listened to your podcast with Jack, and I found something very...
When I did my podcast with Jack, first of all, I was not anticipating the blowback that I received.
It was stunning.
But...
What I thought was, I was just going to have a conversation with this guy, be fun, see what it's like to run this gigantic network that helps people communicate.
And then I listened to your podcast, and one thing about Jack is, very smart guy, very nice guy, but he talks in a very slow and methodical way.
And when you ask him a question, he takes these routes, and if you don't want to jump in and press him, you're in this weird situation where he's not totally answering your question, but he's talking about the same subject that you're talking about.
Like, how is Louis Farrakhan a good standing on the platform, and someone like, you know, fill in the blank, Milo Yiannopoulos or Laura Loomer or whoever it was, they get kicked off.
The reality is, those are the questions I would have asked.
Now, that's hard to say, because no one's going to believe it.
But those are the questions I would have asked.
And I tried not to be too confrontational with a guest.
But in hindsight, I probably could have pressed more, particularly on people like Kathy Griffin, calling for doxing for the kid with the MAGA hat on with the Native American.
Well, I mean, slow talking is not a problem for me because I'm one of the great slow talkers, so we're in a groove there.
But I didn't know what his boilerplate was and how he would answer any of these questions.
And your podcast came out before, mine did, but mine was before the Covington High School Catholic circus happened, right?
So the real missed opportunity for me was just a sheer matter of timing.
Because the Covington thing puts such a fine point on everything that's wrong with Twitter and the way journalism interacts with it.
I think it was Farhad Manju wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying Twitter has destroyed journalism.
And it was not a crazy op-ed, in fact, after the Covington thing.
And then Kathy Griffin would have been the perfect example to talk about, like, why is she still on if she's calling for the doxing, right?
But, you know, I think I had a substantially similar interview with him that you did because he's – there's two things.
One is he's great at sort of pirouetting around the sharp-pointed question of, you know, what is the policy and why are you applying it in this seemingly disparate way?
And it seems to skew politically in one direction all the time, right?
But, you know, I think you also, you know, I did, and I think you did, naturally, we cut him some slack in that he's the CEO of these two corporations.
He can't be expected to actually know what happened in every one of these micro cases.
Like, I think I brought up the case of I think her name is Megan Murphy.
on each one of these cases and what the rationale was.
And he has this sort of generic answer that what you're seeing in public is not necessarily what we're seeing.
In fact, in virtually every actionable case is not what we're seeing in private with respect to how these people are opening multiple accounts and doing seemingly nefarious stuff behind the scenes.
Now, whether that is true, I don't know.
But I mean, I can just say that Jack seemed, one, I liked him and he seemed unusually open to talking about anything I wanted to talk about.
And so I saw one allegation that got hurled at you was that...
You know, you must have been constrained by, you know, the topics you couldn't touch in advance.
You must have had some agreement with him in advance.
And he asked for no—so in my case, I tell all my guests—and this is the difference between you streaming live and me not— I tell all my guests, listen, if at any point in this interview you put your foot in your mouth or I put my foot in there, we can edit it.
I want you to be totally happy with what you say over the next two or three hours.
So if you have to take something again, take it again, and we'll just hide the seams as we go.
That virtually never happens, right?
And in Jack's case, there wasn't even a wrinkle like that.
But I recognize it's a high wire act for a lot of these people, especially for someone who's running two publicly traded companies, right?
So when I invited him on, I said, Jack, we were DMing on Twitter, and I said, listen, I promise I'm not going to make you smoke a blunt on video.
I mean, he's clearly got a very practiced line that he uses to answer these questions.
And I mean, because I know what it's like to have Boilerplate.
I've been on a book tour and you're just basically getting asked the same questions again and again.
And here he's getting asked fairly pointed questions about where Twitter's going and he's I don't think this is dishonest, but it has this amazing ability to close the door to further inquiry because he gives you the full mea culpa right up front.
You ask, what's the situation with the seemingly asymmetrical banning of people?
And he'll say, you know, yeah, we really, I mean, we've got to get much better at communicating our process.
We're not nearly transparent enough.
This whole thing is in disarray.
And my job is to fix it.
Right?
So it's like a global, you know, we're fucked up and we're going to get better.
But there's not a lot to get beyond that in an interview.
Yes.
So it's, you know, I don't think it's nefarious.
I think it could well be totally honest, but it does have this effect of you just keep reaching a certain kind of brick wall that you didn't know was going to be there.
Well, I had a very similar result, and I don't have that problem.
So I don't think that diagnoses your situation at all.
But it's very interesting.
I mean, the difference between the business models under which we run our podcasts and just every choice you make in how to produce a podcast— I essentially have made the opposite one, you know, like streaming live like this.
The fact that you're...
So this is just all very interesting to me because I'm kind of a reluctant student of digital media now because I've just kind of stumbled into this Wild West that, you know, you in large part have invented, right?
I mean, this podcasting space was nothing.
And now we've got Spotify, you know, buying up, you know, it's like a land grab for audio.
There's also the visual element of it, and the visual element of it initially was almost like a side effect.
I mean, we first started it out visually, but then when it started going to iTunes, the iTunes aspect of it became the focus.
The audio version of it, rather, became the focus.
But then we decided to stream on YouTube and put it up on YouTube, but it was totally not profitable.
It was just for a goof.
Like, oh, we'll have the video up.
Why not?
Some people like video.
It was one of those things.
But then you realize, ultimately, that YouTube becomes a viable source of revenue, and then it's also the way a lot of people like to watch it.
And they also like to watch it because they can comment under it.
So that was the other thing that came out of the Jack podcast.
We got into a controversy about comments and about how comments are deleted or how they're shown and hidden and what happens.
Because people were accusing Jamie of deleting all the derogatory comments.
We don't touch any.
We don't delete any of them.
We don't do anything to them.
We just leave them up there, and it's mostly a cesspool.
Even on a good podcast, there's a lot of crazy shit that happens on these things.
But from what we think, and Jamie, correct me if I'm wrong, you think that what's going on is that people are marking other people's posts as spam, There's that.
And then Brandon also has the theory that a lot of alt-right people are targeted by the algorithm that YouTube uses.
Like in one case, there was a guy who had a Pepe the Frog avatar, and he said his comment immediately went to spam.
And the other thing is that the comments are curated depending upon who is watching it and what account.
Well, yeah, but it's got to be younger than most of where...
Well, first of all, I'm not even seeing most comment threads that could possibly respond to anything I put out there now.
So I don't even look at my ad mentions for the most part.
I spend maybe five minutes a day looking at what's coming back to me.
And you were actually helpful in reformatting my brain on that topic.
So because I don't see any of that stuff...
I mean, maybe I'm getting a lot of pain for my Dorsey interview, but I don't even know about it, right?
And so I'm not having – I don't feel like I have to course correct in response to anything now.
And in large measure, it is a consequence of just this decision that I inadvertently made that I'm just – I don't have a video component to my podcast at the moment.
And so I'm not – I'm not spectating on the feedback on YouTube.
Well, the feedback thing is interesting because we were just talking about this before the show, that with feedback and comments on YouTube, essentially anyone can comment, and if you don't go banning people from the channel, which we don't do, it's not what we wouldn't do if someone was Totally a piece of shit, but we don't.
So you essentially have this open forum.
So it's almost like a message board where people can just sort of comment.
And it's unlike Twitter in that regard, because Twitter just, you know, you get abusive and shitty on Twitter, they just get rid of you.
If you get abusive and shitty on Instagram or on Facebook, they'll just get rid of you.
But if you're on Twitter, I think?
With the audio people, it's very obvious that the Cash App is a sponsor because we say it.
This podcast is brought to you by the Cash App.
Whereas in YouTube, they're hiding the fact that the Cash App is a sponsor.
We talked about it during the podcast itself, but we don't put the ads on YouTube.
There's ads that YouTube puts on, but we put the ads on, like after the show is over, I'll read the ads and we'll insert those into the audio and that will go up to iTunes and RSS feeds and all that stuff.
So the stuff that's on YouTube, it's abbreviated in the sense that, especially the live one doesn't have anything.
So like this has zero ads.
And then the ones that'll be posted on YouTube later, it'll have YouTube ads.
But I think that's in regard to comments and to anything.
Blog posts, blockchain is essentially going to have everything that's online forever.
But there's so many fucking conspiracy theories about all this stuff.
It's fascinating.
And as, you know, we were talking about earlier, with the way you do yours, you used to use Patreon, and now you use your own website after the Sargon of Akkad incident, which you nobly stepped back away from Patreon.
There's so many misconceptions about what happened there, and I tried to clear them up on my podcast, but yeah, there's an interesting implication to not taking ads.
I think what's happening, and this is much bigger than even podcasting, I think I'd be interested to know what you feel about this.
You are the quintessence of the successful ad model in podcasting.
It's working fantastically well for you and for people like Tim Ferriss and probably Marc Maron.
It's kind of like a winner-take-all thing happening in this space where ads are working great.
And I am also a highly successful example of the support model.
It's like the PBS model or the NPR model.
And what's weird is that you and I are both surrounded by people who have podcasts, want to have podcasts, and are asking us for advice about how to succeed and how to monetize.
I'm not even in a place where I can recommend my model to anyone else, right?
Because it's very hit or miss.
I just happen to have developed an audience that will support my work.
But it was just the podcast grew and I had this sort of forced choice where am I going to go the ad route or not?
And I found that I have two things to say fairly strongly against ads, but really only one of them applies to me, and I don't think it applies to you or Tim or anyone else.
I just felt personally I couldn't use ads because of what my platform is and the kinds of topics I'm engaging, and it just didn't work.
I mean there was nothing highbrow enough where I felt like my credibility wasn't getting subtly undermined by Schillingford.
I mean it could be something that I just legit loved.
I mean it could have been the Oxford English Dictionary.
You know, like you guys – this is the best dictionary in the world.
You guys should use it.
I still couldn't do it, and I tried it with – the only thing I took on as a sponsor was Audible, and I did that for some weeks, and then I just – I love Audible, but it just felt wrong, and so I decided to just experiment with a different business model.
And it's working for me, but I don't think it can work for most people, and I view that as a problem.
And the thing that I... I think is interesting.
This is much bigger than podcasting.
So you have Facebook, on the one hand, which is just a totally free platform where the users don't even realize that they're not the customers.
They're the actual product, right?
The users are having their attention sold to advertisers, and it's this enormous business.
And on the other end of the digital spectrum, you have Netflix, which is just a stark paywall, right?
And there's no way in but to pay the subscription.
And Netflix could run ads and get more money if they wanted to, but they're not doing that and presumably won't do that.
And I'm hoping, just generally speaking, that the digital future looks much more like Netflix and much less like Facebook.
Because I see what ads have done is they've anchored everyone to the illusion of free.
Everyone expects their digital content for free, except in places like Netflix.
So when you release a comedy special, when you release your next hour, and you sell it to Netflix...
I would imagine there are very few people in your fan base who are thinking, well, fuck Joe Rogan.
Why didn't he just put that out on YouTube?
Why is this on Netflix?
They sort of understand that this piece of content belongs on that shelf and that if they want it, they have to subscribe to Netflix.
Whereas if you did something...
Slightly different, but functionally the same.
If you put it on Vimeo and charge people $5 or whatever, Vimeo on demand, I think you'd get a lot more pain, right?
People would say, well, fuck you, you greedy bastard.
If you're already doing great, just release your stuff, right?
Yeah.
I view that as a problem.
It's like a psychological problem.
People have been anchored to the ad-subsidized model more or less everywhere, and they expect everything for free.
And in my world, I'm trying to just continually brook that expectation and push people into a different sense of you get what you pay for.
So the hybrid model I've created for myself is I'm putting more stuff behind a paywall, right?
So this is not just pure sponsorship of otherwise free content.
But personally, I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that if someone actually can't afford it, they can't get access to my content.
So I just tell people, if you really can't afford the stuff behind my paywall, or you really can't afford my meditation app, just send us an email and we'll give it to you for free.
Because I think everything is too cheap in the digital space.
I think we're anchored to...
I mean, there are people who will spend $5 a day on a cup of coffee every day for the rest of their lives.
And yet, if you told them this podcast or this app that they say is incredibly valuable to them is going to cost them $5 a month, They feel raped, right?
And I completely understand it because I know what it's like to hit a paywall and think, I can't get my credit card out again.
I'm not going to pay for this.
I'm going to find this information somewhere else.
So we've all been anchored to this thing and something is going to win in the end.
I think at some point...
It's going to look much more like Netflix or much more like Facebook.
I'm throwing my lot in with the former, but it really is the Wild West.
An app is much more like a television show, surprisingly, than it is like a podcast.
But even if it's just a podcast...
If you want to build something, if you want to build a media company, like let's say you were asking for support for this otherwise free podcast, people don't know what your aspirations are.
I mean, maybe you want to start a podcast network, right?
Maybe you're trying to build a business.
Maybe you have massive payroll expenses.
So the expectation that the product should always be free closes the door to any of those aspirations if, in fact, you have them.
It's very interesting psychologically because I've created this network of support for my podcast.
But I see people do calculations that they would never do in a more transactional space if they were just, let's say, buying my next book.
For me, offering a free podcast and then saying, if you find this valuable, you can support it.
From the side of being a creator of that content, it feels like the most transparent interaction possible because A person can listen for free for as long as they want to just discover how valuable it is and then they can support it to the degree that they find it valuable.
Whereas if I'm selling you a book, you can't even read the book before you buy it.
You have to make the decision to buy it and I'm trying to convince you to buy it because it took me all this time to write it and it's transactional.
But with a podcast, people make calculations that they would never make when they're just figuring out whether they want to buy something.
It's like – and it's really along the lines of what you just described.
People say, well, how much does a podcast cost to produce?
Like if I knew what you were spending the money on and what it cost you to do this podcast, well, then I would support you.
But they're never saying how much does it cost to write a book and if I knew what you were going to spend – spend the money on once I bought this book, then I would know whether or not I wanted to buy it.
You either want the book or you don't, right?
So the problem with the support model, and this is the problem with Patreon and everything else, is that...
It engages the sort of the philanthropy charity side of the brain, right?
And people are worried about what you're going to do and how much it all costs.
Like, how much does this mic cost, right?
You know, like, that's a question that someone is asking.
And the problem there is they're not understanding, you know...
Just the opportunity cost.
I have to decide how to spend my time.
Am I going to spend 90% of my time on a podcast?
Well, if so, that closes the door to virtually everything else I can do.
It has to become a viable business.
I've recognized now that I'm...
To some degree, going against the grain of human psychology in asking for support.
Now I feel like I'm going to ask much less.
I'm going to tell people what the business model is and remind them of it.
Personally, I'm going to go more and more in the direction of putting stuff behind a paywall I mean, that's the guilt-free business model that I'm converging on now.
I like how you're thinking and I like the ethics involved in it and I think it's a great thing and when you said it on your podcast I was shocked but it makes sense coming from you.
My thought is I'm in negotiation or in discussions right now and I talked to you about this too about building an app and what I want to do with the app is have a set amount of money that you pay per month if you want to sign up for the app and you get the podcast with no ads.
So you could either get it from iTunes or whatever you Google Play or Google Podcasts, or you can get it from the app.
And if you get it from the app, you pay X amount per month and you get the podcast with zero ads.
And it'll stream live.
I'm going to figure out how to do both of those things.
My thought going into advertising, when I first did the podcast, I've been doing the podcast now for nine years.
When I first started doing it, there was no ads for the longest time.
It just cost money.
It cost money for bandwidth.
It cost money to put up.
But I was doing it for fun, and I didn't care.
My revenue was coming from other sources.
A few years ago, I decided what I was going to do was, because I was getting ad, well, the first ad request was Facebook, was the fleshlight, rather, and you were the first person to request to not have the fleshlight on your podcast.
Just knowing that the mic would go hot and then 15 seconds before it would still be ringing in their ears, you know, if you want to jack off with this fantastic device.
And here's Sam Harris, neuroscientist and moral philosopher.
But the fleshlight experienced some pretty significant positive impact from that.
I mean, their business went through the roof because of the podcast.
I mean, they really sold a shitload of fleshlights, where they told me, like, some ungodly number, like 50% of the fleshlights they were selling was code word Rogan.
It started basically at the end of 2009. You were probably on around 2010 or 2011. There was no other ads other than The Fleshlight, though, with you.
And then the flashlight dropped off when we started asking for more money.
They're like, eh, I think we hit the point of no return.
But my philosophy getting into advertisement was, I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do.
100% and have no impact whatsoever on the content of my podcast.
Like whatever advertisers that I choose, whatever advertisers that I make deals with, they have to understand that there's no way I'm changing the content of the podcast.
And if I lose them, I lose them.
I don't care.
And that was the thought process going in.
So I never hit a snag like this Cash App Jack Dorsey thing before where people think that the reason why I was easy with him was because of the fact that he sponsors the podcast.
There's one way of looking at it that they buy a lot of ads.
They do buy a lot of ads.
We do have a good relationship with them.
But...
I don't need them.
If they went away, I have too many ads.
And that sounds gross to say, but it is a fact.
I have many more ads than I have spots for ads.
So if they went away, it would not hurt me at all financially because I put a limit on how many ads I do per podcast.
I also don't ever interrupt a podcast with an ad.
I don't do that.
And because I don't do that, that costs me money.
But I just feel like the experience of listening to a podcast unbroken is so much better Than listening to a podcast.
We'll be right back.
This word from Casper Mattresses, you know, it just feels gross.
But in the beginning, I'm like, look, you know where it is.
You can fast forward.
But maybe you're into this stuff.
Maybe you need stamps.com.
Maybe whatever the fuck you need.
Those are the ads.
They pay a lot of money.
I'm going to take that money and I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want.
And if these guys decide, oh, you smoke pot or you're too controversial or you talk about this or talk about that, we're going to drop you.
Okay.
That's my philosophy.
And I've lost ads.
I've lost sponsors.
Okay.
I don't care.
But if I lost the cash app because I was too hard on Jack Dorsey, or if Jack Dorsey comes back and I'm too hard on him and grilling him about these people that have been censored, I hope he doesn't, but I like him.
He's a nice guy.
I want to know what the fuck's going on there.
In fact, I'm having Tim Pool come on tomorrow.
Tim Pool's an investigative journalist, independent journalist who used to be with Vice.
And he knows a lot about the censorship issue with YouTube, or with Twitter rather.
And he knows about YouTube as well.
But with who is censored and why, who is removed, who's been deplatformed, why they've been deplatformed, and where are the inconsistencies, and why is it skewing so heavily right, where the people on the right are the ones who are getting banned, the people on the left are getting away with a lot of crazy shit.
So we're going to get into the weeds with that.
And if the Cash App hears that and they decide to drop me as a sponsor, I don't care.
I really don't care.
This is a major source of income for me, but it's only one source.
It's one of the things of being a stand-up comedian, working for the UFC, and having a podcast, and I have a podcast with ads on YouTube, and having ads that are on the regular podcast itself.
I'm free, in a sense.
I have plenty of money.
It's not whether or not I'm starving or worried about paying my bills.
I don't think, because this can sound totally sanctimonious and it's not intended that way, I don't think my scruples around reading ads on my podcast apply to you or Tim Ferriss or many other people.
I mean, Tim is the ultimate example.
Tim is somebody whose brand on some level is...
What I'm going to do is I'm going to go out there and find the best shit in the world, the best shirts, the best workout equipment, and I'm going to tell you about it.
So I want to know what Tim has found.
So if Tim is reading an ad for something, that is totally brand convergent for him.
And I think you're very much in a similar situation.
If you're talking about Onnit or whatever it is, it's your own part of Onnit, right?
I can, and there's certain circumstances where I should, but I should avoid those circumstances.
I have to prepare more for podcasts, and I feel like I personally...
It's as much out of concern for my guests as well.
This is a high-wire act, but I want a net normally so that people feel free...
To be totally unguarded, because they know that if we have a spaz attack, we can, you know, even uttering spaz attack will screw some people's careers, right?
Well, we actually had a conversation about a podcast that I talked to you about, one of your podcasts, where you said that you actually started it over.
You started it, and you're like, let's try this again.
I don't think it would be sporting to say which podcast that was.
I had a podcast that went completely into the ditch for the first half hour.
I mean, just brutal.
I said, listen, there's a good conversation for us to have here.
And now I know how badly this can go, all right?
So, like, now I know just where the track is.
I have to struggle to keep the train on.
And so we're going to reboot.
We're going to start again.
And we'll see what happens.
And, you know, the podcast was not perfect.
And I got some criticism for it.
But people didn't understand that we were like, you know, we had a, you know, we had, I had seen the pit of alligators and didn't want to fall in, right, you know?
Well, it made more sense, though, when you told me that, because I'm like, okay, it was heated before you even got to go, because you'd already gone through a half an hour of back and forth.
I think people need to understand what it's like to do one of these things, too, because, you know, you do it so often, it becomes pretty, and you're so good at talking.
You're such a good orator and you're so articulate that it comes off smooth and easy just having a conversation with someone, but you're always considering the fact that people are listening to this.
You're always saying, how do I get more out of him or her?
How do I take this and how do I get this person to expand upon this?
How do I make this something, make something out of this?
This is one of the things that I felt with Jack.
Because he was talking in this way, and we're really working hard on fixing all these issues.
I'm like, oh, Jesus.
I've got to change my gears here and try to figure out...
Because it's almost like we'd have to restart again every time a question would be answered.
He would stop talking, and I'd go, okay, next thing!
I mean, the problem for me there with that podcast, frankly, was that I feel like you both got unlucky with just where he was in his life at that moment.
So what that podcast showcased, at least for the first, I don't know, 90 minutes, was just how many user interface problems you could have with Elon, right?
Like he just showed up as kind of fairly weird, right?
He's not always like that by any stretch.
I mean, he can give a very loose interview.
But you were working.
I mean, it was just absolutely heroic work trying to keep that conversation happening in the beginning.
But it was still – it's like he was just in a space that he was so massively stressed and so overworked and just – I mean, he had fires everywhere that had to be put out.
So I just felt, you know, as a friend, I just felt like, okay, this is sort of the wrong time to be doing this.
And so I just felt, you know, it just felt unlucky to me.
So because he's, again, I see him in many other moments and he can be...
That was actually a circumstance where I was looking at the comments, right?
And I was saying, okay, these are people who are basically reading him as somebody who is much stranger than, in fact, he ever is.
And I could see why they were doing that, because he just seemed in a very stressed space in his life.
Honestly, I think that is another consequence of live.
I'm not arguing that you shouldn't be live because it has a massive advantage for you as well.
It is—there's just a different feeling.
Like, you know, if I knew that this was being taped and I could rethink the thing we're about to say about Liam Neeson or whatever it is, you know, it's different.
Well, this is fascinating to me because, again, this is a much larger problem with massive implications.
We need to think through the whole process of redemption for people in our society.
We have to understand what are the criteria for successful apologies and for forgiveness.
We're in a world where people are having their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent as teenagers.
This is to Dorsey's point.
Things are not disappearing online anymore.
At a certain point, there's just going to be a 360 panopticon view of everyone's life.
There are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there.
I mean, the irony here for me is that you have progressives and people on the far left who receive a disclosure like Liam Neeson, let's take his, and they just want to see him burned alive, right?
Let's just do the wicker man on this guy because this is so awful.
And yet, alongside that, these same people on the left are people who have as a genuine ethical norm the rehabilitation of murderers.
You could be somebody who spent 20 years in prison for a crime you admit you committed, and there's this norm around redemption.
I think Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend, calls these the Hilbert problems for social justice warriors.
I mean, David Hilbert was a very famous mathematician who, at the turn of the 19th century, posed a set of problems in mathematics that were just on his list of the most desirable questions, the hardest questions and the most consequential questions to answer.
And so Eric, being a mathematician, has flipped that around ironically and said, these are the questions that social justice warriors have to answer.
And there are these impossible oppositions of this sort.
And there are these impossible oppositions of this sort.
But so the Liam Neeson thing, and forgive me if there's some detail that has come out that I'm not aware of, but my understanding of it is he had a friend who was raped.
And then he reported this state of mind, this murderous state of mind he was in where he was walking around with – he calls it a kosh.
That's a British word for like a small metal club, right?
It was like a blackjack or like another term for it, I think.
And looking for a black guy to kill, like hoping someone's going to come out of the woodwork and threaten him so that he could kill this guy in this act of instrumental violence because his friend had been raped by a black guy.
So it's like any black guy will do.
Now that's sort of like the extra horrific wrinkle to the story, right?
Now – and he's confessing this as a kind of a symptom of transient mental illness, at least as far as I know.
It's like he's horrified by the fact that he was in this state of mind, right?
Can you imagine?
Like I, you know, Liam Neeson, an actor, I have everything to lose, although I don't remember at what point in his life he said this happened.
Can you imagine that I was in this state of mind, right?
And this is, as you say, an all-too-honest disclosure, but it is damn interesting, right?
And it is the kind of thing that we should be able to talk about, right?
And the fact that this is becoming synonymous with racism seems just wrong, given how he described, or at least how I've heard this.
Because he's saying, listen, if this had been an Armenian guy or an Italian or a Japanese guy, I'd be looking for one of them, right?
I mean, what this was, at least on his telling, is...
The virus of instrumental violence.
This is how every blood feud in human history gets started.
Someone from your tribe killed my brother, and now what I want to do is kill anyone from your tribe.
It doesn't matter who.
That's clearly as toxic as it gets ethically, but That's not racism, right?
That's just—that is—we have a word for it.
It's instrumental violence.
But, you know, yeah, obviously he's getting totally pilloried over this.
But we need— Yeah, I mean, it is racism, though, right?
That he feels one way or another about black people.
It's like, if you told me...
Yeah, I mean, he could have said, again, it could have been an Irish guy, right?
Or it could have been, well, I guess he's Irish.
Is he Scottish or Irish?
It could have been an English guy, right?
It could have been, like, any type, right?
It's like the salience of the tribe is what he was reacting to, at least in his description.
I don't know why you wouldn't take him at his word, given that he didn't have to say any of this in the first place, right?
I mean, like, this is an amazingly honest and unnecessary disclosure.
I don't think people would think of it as racism if the story simply was, you know, she got raped by a cop and I was just hoping to go kill a cop, right?
Right.
Right.
And so, yeah.
But we're so trigger-happy in our outrage with respect to anything like that.
I saw it out of the corner of my eye, like, man, this is interesting.
This is blowing up.
But I was so off Twitter that there was no temptation for a hot take from me, right?
And I saw these people just torching their reputations by taking these, like Kathy Griffin, basically calling for the doxing of these kids, you know, given all that she has suffered, you know, from mob behavior online, and she's, you know, whipping up her own mob.
But it's also when people have been shamed and they've done something awful, then they reinforce their base.
Now she's so heavily hard left because the right wing ran after her.
Anyone on the right that does anything, she's calling for her side to go after this person, reinforcing that she's a part of that tribe, that she's a part of that left wing tribe.
Well, it's – so, obviously, everyone has a lot to lose doing this, especially in a case where all the facts aren't in, and if you just wait at a beat – I mean, even the New York Times got this wrong.
The New York Times writes an article about the kids in the MAGA hat that they have to rescind.
And the – so then, as the dust is settling – And I see these people.
Some people are doubling down.
Some people are issuing public apologies.
I see somebody who's actually kind of, you know, branded herself as, you know, one of my enemies for a reason I can't fathom.
But this journalist, Kara Swisher, who, you know, she works for Recode and Vox now.
But she's got a big podcast and she actually writes for The New York Times now.
She's got an opinion piece, a regular column for The New York Times.
She's a tech journalist and I happen to know she doesn't like me because she's tweeted against – she's said some disparaging things about me on Twitter and we had an offline conversation about it.
But I saw her – she said one of the most vituperative and fairly crazy things in response to the kids initially.
came out, she walked it back and she basically apologized on Twitter.
And so I said, good for you, Kara.
I just wanted to support this norm of acknowledging that you got something wrong.
And I wanted to do it even – I wanted to actually do it for someone who I know really Like, I mean, that was an added bonus for me because that's another norm that I think we should support.
It's like, we should play fair even with our enemies, right?
And, yeah, I mean, honestly, you know, I try to play fair even with people who never play fair with me.
Even someone like, you know, Glenn Greenwald or Ray Zaslan.
I mean, people who have just, you know, lied about me endlessly.
If I get something wrong about them, I publicly apologize for it.
So I did this, and this was at the absolute 11th hour with respect to this scandal online.
When I saw the kind of pain I was getting just for supporting Kara in her walk back of this thing, at a moment when it was obvious she should have walked this back, I got people saying, unsubscribing from your podcast, now I know you're a fucking racist.
It was just pure pain.
And I just thought, wow, man, that's, you know, it's like, you just touch this thing at its very end, and you're, you know, it's, the slime gets on you.
I've only read the comments three times maybe ever, and every time I read them, it's like, Jesus Christ, it's like YouTube but alive.
It's like YouTube, but with people with their real names.
This is a new world that we're living in, man.
And everybody's trying to navigate this thing and figure it out as it goes along.
And not everybody's doing it well.
And I think this world is going to get more and more intrusive.
I think this is just the beginning.
I think we didn't see Twitter coming.
Whatever comes after Twitter, and this is one of the things that I... Before the podcast, I wanted to really talk to Jack about to get his take on what he thinks is next down the line.
Because there's going to be something that's more invasive.
There's going to be something that is more, whether it's, I think, probably something in the line of augmented reality.
There were probably a decade away from something that makes this look like books.
Look like, you know, a fucking corkboard at a bookstore, you know?
I've got to tell you, having released this meditation app has given me a sanity check on everything else I'm doing, which is very interesting.
In releasing the app, it's firewalled from all the other controversial stuff I'm doing.
In the app, I'm not whinging about Trump or talking about any of the stuff I talk about on my podcast.
It's just me trying to teach meditation largely as an antidote to all of the stuff we're talking about.
We've got this, as Tristan Harris says, we've got this slot machine in our pocket that is continually gaming our attention all day long.
And, you know, in my view, a meditation app is like the one thing you can have on your smartphone that completely subverts the technology and can get you to actually live a more examined life using the technology, right?
But what's been amazing for me personally is that I put it out and it is the only thing that I have put out maybe ever, right, where it's been received and Exactly
Well, psychologically, it's been a revelation to have one thing that I can put out that is just received, appreciated, and they got what I intended, and it's just, you know, thank you.
It's just like, oh, fuck, that's possible.
I had no idea.
If I ever knew, I had forgotten that that was possible.
If you do a podcast, and the thing about the podcast with Jack, it's not even like I said anything bad.
It's what I didn't say that was upsetting to so many people.
But that's such a loaded thing.
And because of that podcast, now there's negative to it, that blowback.
There's a lot of toxic anger and all that.
But the positive is what I like.
The positive that came out of it is me forced to re-examine how I do podcasts, re-examine the significance of each individual guest, and especially someone that comes with as much baggage, without lack of a better term, as Jack.
That you're, you know, you've got to think that there's people listening.
And there's some questions that you really have to work at.
You have to push through.
And even if he's dancing and pirouetting, I should have went back to, okay, why is Kathy Griffin on your platform?
Like if doxing is bad, you don't want to dox, you don't want threats of violence.
When someone says, I want names.
Okay, what are you going to do with these fucking names?
What are you going to do with them?
What are you going to do with a 16-year-old kid and his names?
And then when you see the actual video of what actually happened, and there's so many people that are still not walking it back.
Also, just supportive of the virtue of speech, free speech, and self-criticism.
The disadvantage of the left against the right has always been there's this self-scrutiny and willingness to wonder whether or not I'm wrong that isn't mirrored if you go far enough right.
And it has there has been so there's been kind of an asymmetric war between left and right politically from for much of our lifetime.
But you go far enough left now and you're you're meeting a kind of totalitarian resistance to speech.
And it's yeah, it's very I mean, I'm just.
It'll be interesting to see how the 2020 campaign plays out.
I'm certainly worried that we could totally blow it with some leftist SJW uprising.
Yeah, I mean, again, I'm not close enough to it, but I would, you know, be very circumspect about endorsing her going forward and do a little homework because I think her candidacy is not going to age well.
But this is the sort of masochistic death spiral that people on the left can get into.
I've always said that the left eats its own in a way that the right never does.
We have to find someone who can stand outside that circular firing squad, right?
And it would be someone who's...
You know, it would be, in my view, it would be somebody like a younger Bloomberg, right?
I mean, I don't think it's Bloomberg, but like somebody, like a legit businessman who could call bullshit on all of Trump's fake business acumen and who's not ethically compromised, right?
But who can get stuff done.
Right.
Right.
And definitely not someone who feels the need to pander to the far left on these identity politics issues.
I think identity politics is really going to be bad for us against Trump because so much of the country, the crucial sliver of the country, you just have to ask yourself, who was it who voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump?
Those people aren't racist.
Those people are sick of being called racist.
So what's happening on the left around identity politics and all of these, I mean, it's not that racism isn't a problem.
It's not that transgender issues don't have to be worked out.
I mean, like all of those are legit concerns.
But the fact that that's the center of mass politically on the left in a nationwide election against someone like Trump, I just think that's an absolute recipe for disaster.
You know, I mean, it's just like you got automation...
Displacing manufacturing jobs, you've got the consequences of trade and immigration, and you have legitimate concerns about immigration that have nothing to do with racism.
And so if you're going to score any hesitation over something like open borders as a sign of your xenophobia and racism, You're going to lose virtually everyone who has a sane concern about how you admit the right people into a country.
There are economic concerns and there are social concerns.
You don't have to be Ben Shapiro to share some of those concerns.
I'm not saying Ben Shapiro is a racist.
Obviously, I'm saying he's a conservative.
And, you know, takes a more conservative line on many of these questions than I do.
But, you know, it's like, you either think, let me just take immigration as the narrow case, you either think you should be able to know who's coming into the country, or you don't, right?
Now, if you think you should just have open borders, there are two problems with that.
One is there are many good arguments against that.
And two, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's got to be something like 95% of Americans would be terrified at that prospect.
So if any of your platform is essentially saying a concern about immigration is synonymous with racism, you have a platform that's going to alienate most people.
And the Democrats are totally capable of seeming like that, whether in fact that's true for most Democrats.
Well, it is, I think, in large measure what the internet is doing to us.
It's not that identity politics hasn't been a feature of politics forever, but there's this siloing effect.
There's the effect that groups become more radicalized as groups because the most extreme voices exist.
And everyone who's silent, there's kind of a diffusion of responsibility around countering these extreme voices.
It only takes a small percentage of extreme voices to cow the rest of a group and make the group seem like the extreme voices are speaking for the group.
You know, and so I think what we have on both the left and the right, we have a small percentage.
I mean, you know, the last poll I saw that tried to get at this question was something like, you know, six or eight percent on the tails that are making it seem like these are – I think it's more of a problem on the left than on the right because, I mean, the extreme right is fringe and looks fringe, right?
Like the guys in Charlottesville with their tiki torches, they don't look like they represent the Republican Party or the conservatives in any general sense.
They're a symptom of some problem, but it's a smaller problem.
It's a minority problem.
Whereas on the left, the extreme voices have massive sway in major companies, in tech companies, in journalism, in academia – The silencing effect and the reputational cost that's being paid by even very powerful people in all these mainstream forums on the left is just...
That's not mirrored on the right.
I don't know if I told you this.
I certainly didn't say it on a previous podcast with you, but I was at dinner with a bunch of Silicon Valley people and we were talking about it.
It was at the moment when that Netflix story happened where Jonathan Friedland got fired over using the N-word in a closed-door meeting and it was a Using the N-word in response to my friend Tom Segura, who you met earlier.
And didn't even, wasn't using it in a joke, like calling someone retarded or saying something's retarded, but they were, and he was saying that that's like using the N-word around black people.
Yeah, but he used the N-word in this meeting, right?
And it's like using the N-word and just the mere intonation of those syllables was so shocking that he wound up getting fired.
And again, he was using it in the context of expressing just how careful Netflix has to be about speech.
I mean, he was going social justice warrior on himself among social justice warriors and he said, "This is how worried we have to be." And then he gave the magic incantation.
Actually, now I realize why I'm confused about why I think I've talked about this because I did a podcast with Chelsea Handler, which hasn't aired.
I did it months ago because she was doing a documentary on white privilege, I think, and I think I'm actually cast as the guy with white privilege in this documentary.
Well, she was basically – I mean she was playing the other side of the net for this and not – I mean, we'll have to see.
I mean, I think I, at least in my own mind, I certainly made sense there, and she didn't have a lot of response to what I was saying, but I haven't heard the audio or seen the video.
But the...
So anyway, I was at a dinner with a bunch of tech CEOs talking about this problem.
And one guy who I won't name, who runs a big company, which I won't name, said, listen, you have no idea how deep this goes.
I have an HR complaint where there's a guy who...
Identifies as a furry, right?
He thinks he's a cat, and because we don't provide litter boxes in the bathroom, right, he's launched an HR complaint, right?
And what he wrote was essentially like a B-plus term paper in human biology, right?
And it was like, you can...
You can push back on some of the science, say, but like this was not a malicious distortion of the state of the science, right?
And this was not calling for discrimination against women.
This was just saying, listen, men and women are different and they've got different interests, right?
And this could account for why there's an unequal representation at the level of software development.
And On the left, we're finding it very difficult to even talk about differences between men and women.
Start with a uterus and then count from there.
That is already a taboo conversation to have.
And as we said at the beginning in talking about Twitter, that one writer – again, I think her name is Megan Murphy – she got booted for saying men are not women.
So politically, I'm very worried that – Unless we resolve that or just cut through it, we don't stand a chance against Trump in 2020. I was reading a story about a woman who's on some sort of an LBGT panel, and she's a part of some group, and she was kicked out of it by a man who identifies as a lesbian, and he has a penis.
Well, this is something that Andrew Sullivan wrote in a recent article on this, is that The transgender thing is at odds with gay rights in a fundamental sense.
I mean, you can't balance these equations because gay identity absolutely focuses on the legitimate differences between men and women.
It's like, I'm a man.
I like men.
I don't like women.
That's my situation.
But once you change your notion of how gender relates to sex...
It begins to erode this claim on the legitimacy of gay identity.
Sort of, but I can only imagine what Andrew Sullivan's Twitter feed looks like now because when he writes these articles, I'm sure he just gets eviscerated by the left.
And he's just straight up talking about this is what gay rights looks like and this is how you can't be a man with a penis who identifies as a lesbian.
And, you know, Jamie and I had this little tit for tat about it, but he's very honest about his mistakes.
Like when you talk to him, and he's got great insight because he was that guy.
You know, he was that guy that was going back and forth with people online all day and checking his mentions.
Like couldn't walk down the street more than five steps before he'd pull out his phone and check his mentions to see how people were responding to his latest dunking or takedown or, you know.
It's a toxic thing that people are doing.
It's this looking for people that are bad and looking for things that are wrong, looking for wrong speak.
It's very toxic.
It's toxic for the people that are doing it.
It's toxic for the people that are receiving it.
It's not a way that human beings would ever communicate in one-on-one.
I mean, I try to communicate with people The same way online as I would if they were right in front of me.
I don't want to succeed, but I try.
That's my goal.
My goal is to try to talk to someone as if they were right in front of me.
You're in a metal machine with a bunch of assholes that are probably looking at their phone and everybody's going fast and you could die at any moment if someone goes wrong.
If you're on a highway like the 405 and you have five lanes going 70 miles an hour, it is a fucking miracle that no one dies.
Well, so, let's go back to this idea of what the actual normative response would be when somebody puts their foot in their mouth or something from their past gets disclosed.
I mean, the stupid...
an indefensible thing they did as a teenager, right?
You know, you know, like this, you know, you got these guys who are now, um, having their careers destroyed for having dressed up, you know, in, in blackface or in a, in a hood for Halloween or whatever it was.
I mean, I, you know, I don't, I think, I think this, that one, um, politician said he's not even in the, in the photo, but the photo was on his yearbook page or like whatever you put on your yearbook page in high school.
Right.
You find out this thing that no adult is going to defend, right?
But what is the path back?
What is the reboot that should be acceptable?
Because we don't even know – it seems we don't even know what – I don't know.
The way I've been thinking about it is that it has to be intelligible how you are different from the person who committed that thing.
If you did something that was, let's say, legit racist when you were 20, and Mark Wahlberg is an example of this.
He was running around just beating people senseless and for avowed racist motives, I believe.
Yeah, I mean, and also people have to recognize that there's some things, but you can't retroactively instill today's ideas of what constitutes racism on 1985. So if you were in high school in 1985 and you dressed up as Mr. T... Right.
You know, I don't know if that was racist back then.
I never did it, but I don't know if that's racist.
Like, if you had a bunch of gold chains and you made your hair black, or you made your face black and gave yourself a mohawk and you said, I'm Mr. T for Halloween.
What you did when you went door to door when you were 15 or 12 or whatever you were, knocking on people's doors and everybody was laughing, oh, you're Mr. T. Nobody thought it was racist.
I had this guy, Christian Picciolini, on my podcast once who's an ex-neo-Nazi.
He's just legit racist, right?
He's got all the tattoos to prove it.
Now, there are major problems with Christian Picciolini, as I think you know, that I discovered after that podcast.
So this is not an endorsement of him.
Sorry, Christian.
But the...
There's a path back.
I mean, so like he's celebrated on the left.
He's a former neo-Nazi and he's, you know, I discovered him on Silverman's show on wherever that is, Hulu.
And, you know, he's a darling of the left, right?
A darling of MSNBC for this redemption story.
So, but what is the...
You take someone like any of these politicians who have...
Something in their backstory that is ugly.
My feeling is, all there has to be is a transparent and intelligible account of how you are now different, of how you can actually honestly look back on this thing and say, yeah, I am as embarrassed by that as you think I should be, right?
That's not like, that is nothing that does not represent how I view the world at all now.
But...
The spirit of the time on social media, again, especially on the left and to our total dysfunction politically, is to never accept any of that.
Or there's the most cynical possible interpretation of your apology.
It's like you're just trying to – the only reason why you're apologizing is because you want to save your job, right?
And that – we have to figure out how to – I mean, we just need some – Recovery disk that we can reboot from here because it's just not – this is going someplace terrible.
And again, to look at it through the lens narrowly politically over the next two years, it's to the massive disadvantage of the left.
And do it in a way where if people didn't like it, you just say, okay, fuck off, right?
This is the conversation we had.
And I think modeling that more and more, I mean, I think we have to take those risks and people like us have to take those risks and hope to break this spell by having those conversations in public.
The norm on how we engage on social media, I think, is flavored by two things.
One, the immediacy of it, the fact that there's no person in front of you.
You don't experience their anger or their fear or their sadness when you say something fucked up.
Also, anonymity.
And I think anonymity is good in a lot of ways, like for whistleblowers, people that work in a certain environment where they want to be honest, but they would get fired, you know, with a very restricted environment, but they have maybe a controversial opinion.
They want to be able to express free speech.
And they can't.
They can't unless they do something anonymous.
And even sometimes people, when they do things anonymous, they get caught.
And they get in trouble.
I remember there was a guy on 4chan who would say a bunch of fucked up things like a lot of people do.
And people tracked him down and found out who he was and then sent all of these anonymously authored posts to his employer and he got fired.
And this guy was a father and he had children and he was supporting his family and now he's struggling to make a living.
He's got to try to figure out...
because he wrote some things anonymously online on a message board.
And he found recreation in saying fucked up things.
You know, I don't know what the solution is, but I feel like anonymity, it encourages less hospitable behavior.
Did you hear about the professor at an academic conference getting into an elevator and making just a dad joke?
So he gets into a crowded elevator in an academic conference, and someone asks what floor, and he says, women's lingerie, please.
It's like a Dean Martin joke or whatever, right?
Someone in the elevator was so offended by that that they lodged a complaint, and it's been now at least a month or so since I heard the story, so I don't know if he was fired, but he was fighting for his academic life over this complaint process.
Well, you and I don't teach and we're not in a university and we're not in that bubble.
I think the people that are in that bubble and then they escape that bubble and then go to whatever tech company or whatever business, they continue that same bubble-like behavior and they want everybody to acquiesce.
They want everybody around them to behave the way That they've been programmed to think that everybody is supposed to behave.
And you see that now from a lot of young people.
You see a lot of young people who are entering into the workforce think that the standards and the norms that they got enforced upon them at Yale or Columbia or wherever they went to school, that this is how you're supposed to behave.
Social justice is important and this is real and you have to recognize your privilege.
You have to check your privilege and you have to do this and you have to do that and you have to support trans rights and you have to call out Call-out culture is a big one.
It's a big part of it.
And cancel culture.
Everybody wants everybody to lose their job.
This is the way that things change.
The way things change is you have to reinforce the fact that there's these new standards and there has to be severe repercussions for deviating.
It's very much about control.
I mean, Jordan goes on about this.
Jordan Peterson, it's like one of his pet subjects.
and when you start telling people what to do and what not to do and that there's like these these indefensible undebatable standards that have to be reinforced and you can't talk about it like and that's what happened with meghan kelly she's like well how come and they're like get the fuck out of here 60 million dollar job again the crucial moment for me is why is it that the apology isn't good enough that this isn't this
Like, okay, if that's who you are, if you're a legit racist, well then fine.
We can understand why we want to boycott your business or we want to, you know...
We want nothing to do with you.
There should be massive social pressure against those kinds of noxious political commitments.
But if someone misspeaks or it's an off-color joke and it's like they weren't trying to offend anyone and they're just – they wish they could take it back – And that links up with...
I mean, did you see...
You must have seen the Norm Macdonald bit.
I mean, that was brutal, right?
He knew he couldn't use the word retard, right?
Because it's like that's going to get him in trouble.
Okay, so he was on Howard Stern's show, wasn't he?
I think.
I could have this wrong, but the gist of this is right.
I believe he's on Howard Stern's show, and he was about to use the word retard.
So, okay, we'll walk this back.
Now it's coming back to me.
He was talking about his friend, the ordeal that Louis C.K. has gone through in this just massive exile experience, right?
This massive social shunning.
And he was describing it in a way where he then got accused that he cared more about what Louis C.K. was going through than the women who felt victimized by Louis C.K.
And that was not his intention at all, apparently.
And so when he went to clarify this, he was about to say, you'd have to be retarded to think that I cared more about Louis C.K.'s ordeal than the ordeal of these women who felt like their careers got derailed, right?
But as the word retard was coming out of his mouth, he tried to course correct.
And because he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, he says, you'd have to have Down syndrome.
Right.
Which is worse.
Right.
It's more specific.
And it's like, and then you got all these parents with Down syndrome who have kids with Down syndrome who are just, oh, my God.
And so now he's just he's then he was he showed up on The View.
Right.
With this this on this apology tour.
And I mean that's just amazing video to see him on The View surrounded by these four women who know he's not a bad guy, right?
Like they're trying to – they're throwing him lifeline after lifeline and he's so beaten down, right?
Well, Netflix is just so terrified of a continual blowback.
And they just thought, like, if we're going to save this show, the way to save it is to get them to stop talking.
Because he's just going to take his other foot and take other people's feet and stuff them in his mouth as well.
I think one thing that might help to illuminate our understanding of how people behave is what you really enjoy talking about, and you really definitely changed my way of looking at things.
That they're really essentially, the concept of free will is a very flawed thing and that you have to really take into consideration who a person is right now and what has caused them to be this person right now and that a lot of us are operating on this really bizarre momentum of our past and our behavior and our genetics and life experiences and all these different variables.
That really need to be taken into account.
This idea that you are autonomous and you are the director of your own life is true to a certain extent, but it's also very complicated, much more complicated than we would like to admit.
And when you're talking about something that happened when you were 17, like Brett Kavanaugh or something like that, like, Jesus Christ, you know, you're going to hold a 55-year-old man accountable to something that he did when he was 17 that wasn't a crime?
No one can directly regulate the effect of every influence that they had or didn't have.
You are the totality of what brought you here.
I mean, the universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time, and the only thing you've got is your brain and its states, and that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you as a system have had working on you up until this moment.
And so the next words that come out of your mouth are part of that process.
Now, some people find this to be a frankly...
Demoralizing picture, right?
They think, well, okay, well, you're telling me I'm just a robot, but you're a robot that is open, continuously open to influence, to influence of, you know, kind of internally based on its own processes.
I mean, there's like, there's top-down control of, you know, executive function in the brain to your, you know, your emotional life, say, and you're continually open to the influences of culture, right?
The culture is this operating system that you're interacting with in each moment, and whatever's getting in can change you in radical ways very quickly.
I mean, there's no telling how much you can change on the basis of one new idea coming your way, right?
Now, I would argue that that process of change— That's not evidence of free will.
That is evidence of just yet more causality.
I mean, you don't pick the changes that come your way.
If I get you to see something that you didn't see a moment before, you're not responsible for the fact that you didn't see it a moment before and you're not responsible for the fact that you now see it.
It's just like the dominoes just kept falling, right?
But it does give you this far more patient sense of...
One, just, you know, all the causes and conditions that have created this odious behavior you're now disposed to react to in the world, right?
Everything on some level is more of a force of nature than it is something that you need to take personally.
It's like if there's a hurricane blowing outside, we don't respond to it the same way we would respond to, you know, Al-Qaeda dropping a bomb on us, right?
It might create the same amount of damage.
But in the latter case where we have an identifiable agent, right, we feel like, okay, now we're in the presence of human evil and we have to go kill these motherfuckers, right?
Now, we may have to kill them, right?
Because that may be the only way of putting out this, you know, stopping the damage they're committed to causing.
And we would kill hurricanes if we could kill them, right?
I mean, we would...
But the feeling we have in both cases is very different.
The feeling you have attributing ultimate authorship to a person's behavior is super narrow psychologically and ethically, and it's the feeling of vengeance.
This feeling of vengeance is so natural to get triggered in response to a person.
It's not natural in response to a wild animal who may have done something terrible, right?
I mean, there have been examples of this where people have taken vengeance on animals, and it just looks like a kind of moral dysfunction on the part of the people who did it.
I mean, there's a famous picture of an elephant that got hung from a railroad crane, I think, back in the 20s, right?
So the circus elephant escaped, and it rampaged through the streets, and it trampled a few people.
And the people in the town—I don't know where this was.
It was Baltimore or someplace—were so outraged that they decided to lynch the elephant, right?
And yet, there's something uncanny about that sort of misappropriation of agency to an elephant.
What is a mistreated circus elephant going to do when it gets out and is terrified and is trying to get away from people?
It's going to trample a few people.
So, we have a very different set of books we keep ethically for humans, and Some of it's understandable, some of it's inevitable, but a lot of it gives us moral illusions that we don't need to have, and it gives us a kind of just an inability to take stock of all the variables that are actually guiding human behavior and react to them and mitigate them and disincentivize them intelligently.
I mean, punishment makes sense.
Not because people really, really deserve at bottom whatever their punishments are.
It doesn't make sense in a retributive paradigm.
It makes sense if it's the best tool to discourage dangerous behavior and it works, right?
So it's like if you're going to punish people for things they can't control, Well, that's stupid, right?
Because as much as you punish them, you're not going to moderate the behavior.
So you have to punish people for things that are actually under voluntary control.
And it only makes sense if...
It's the only tool to do the job, and the moment you had, I mean, I may have brought this up last time we spoke about free will, but this is really the sort of reductio ad absurdum of where most people are on this topic.
The moment we really understand human evil at the level of the brain, the moment we understand psychopathy, say, which is, I mean, maybe that's not the totality of evil, but that's, you know, certainly center of the bullseye.
Once we understand psychopathy as a neurological condition that's governed by genes and environment, and we can actually intrude at the level of the brain to mitigate it.
Psychopathy becomes a disease.
It becomes an injury syndrome that we can fix.
And let's say it's a very simple fix.
Let's say it's a pill.
Let's say it's just a neurotransmitter imbalance.
In the presence of that breakthrough, we will feel very differently about that species of human evil.
We will not judge it in the same way.
Because what will happen is, you'll give people the pill, and they'll say, fuck, I can't believe I was that dangerous asshole.
Like, thank you for...
Like, I'm as horrified by who I was before you cured me as you were, right?
And...
So, psychopathy in the presence of a cure for it would look much more like diabetes than it looks like evil in the present case.
And people aren't imagining what it would be like to be there, what it would be like to actually fully understand the underlying neurophysiology here and actually have something.
I mean, there's no guarantee we'll be able to deal with it in a simple way, but it's certainly possible.
And, I mean, the classic example is just like the Charles Whitman example where, you know, you have a brain tumor that's causing this aberrant behavior.
In that case, everyone sees, okay, this is not evil.
But in the same way that a brain tumor is exculpatory there, I think a full understanding of the underlying neurology would be exculpatory.
Again, it doesn't mean you...
In the meantime, before we get there, obviously we have to lock up dangerous people if there's no way to help them.
But the more we see the causes, the more we view this in terms of just sheer bad luck, right?
Like there are people who, when they're adults, are quintessentially evil, and they provoke the greatest feeling of vengeance from us.
But if you just walk back their timeline, you recognize that they were four years old at one point, right?
They were the four-year-old who was destined to become this terrible person.
It's an unlucky four-year-old.
So at what point, where's the bright line that says, okay, here's the point where it's appropriate to just hate this person and feel no compassion?
And on the other side of this line, you should just feel compassion because this person's unlucky.
There is no such line.
And a complete understanding of this lifeline in scientific terms would obliterate any line you think you have, right?
It would just be this cascade of causation.
And, you know, adding randomness to the picture doesn't help, right?
Randomness is just, you know, somebody's in your brain rolling dice, you know, influencing your behavior that way.
Well, that doesn't give you the free will people think they have.
So, ironically, there is what seems...
on some level deflationary of the gravitas of the human spirit for people opens the door to, at least in my view, a far more ethical and tolerant and patient and understanding view of human failings a far more ethical and tolerant and patient and understanding view of human And then at that point you can just have a conversation about what's pragmatic, what works, what helps people change.
Like, this person over here who's doing terrible things, is there something we can do to make him a better person?
Well, if there is, let's do that without all the judgment.
Wouldn't it be amazing if that's how we treated these public shaming events?
Wouldn't it be amazing if we gave someone an opportunity to say, this is what I did.
This is how awful I feel about this.
I would never do that again.
I'm a different person.
person that was 20 years ago or whatever it was and and have everybody join in hey um anyone could be you thank you for being honest about who you are now thank you for being honest about who Thank you for evolving.
Thank you for expressing yourself in a way that maybe other people who have also committed really Just unsavory or just unfortunate things in the past, unfortunate acts in the past, they can feel relieved by the fact that you've grown and evolved to become a better person and that you're a different thing now and you are the product of all of your experiences.
You're not this one thing.
thing you're not stuck in who you were when you were 16 years old if you were Marky Mark and you hit that guy with a stick whatever you know whatever he did you know you're not stuck in that spot forever these don't mark it's not a scarlet letter it's not a mark on your forehead that you keep for life yeah I mean the thing about the Liam Neeson incident which I find so interesting is that there's a case where I mean what he's revealing about himself is is pretty amazing right it's
It's like he just decided, okay, we need a truth and reconciliation commission for who I used to be, right?
And just volunteered this.
And for me, like, you know, I don't actually understand that state of mind.
I mean, there are many aberrant states of mind that I can understand.
I certainly understand what it's like to want to harm somebody and, you know, to feel vengeance and all that.
Instrumental violence piece, I don't understand.
I've never felt like, okay, this type of person wronged me or someone close to me, so any person of that type will do.
But that is such a problem the world over in human history that it is just fascinating ethically for someone of his stature to reveal that about himself.
And he put it in terms of honor.
I mean, this is what is so dysfunctional about honor culture, right?
This is what we see...
More in the South than anywhere else in the country, and this is what you see basically everywhere you go in the Middle East.
This is what Islam inculcates to a degree that's fairly unmatched in its community.
This notion of honor does link up with this tendency to find satisfaction in instrumental violence.
But when you try to run that software on my brain, that just looks like madness.
The idea that any other person will do, right, of a certain type, that's just, you know, I don't, that resonates not at all, right?
And so, it's just damn interesting.
And the fact that the lesson being taken from this seems to be This should be the end of your career for having talked about this.
And again, apologies if there's some part of the story that I've gotten wrong or I'm missing.
But it seemed to me that he was always couching this in the horror and amazement appropriate to the disclosure.
Like, he can't believe he was inhabiting this state of consciousness.
And, you know, it's just an amazing thing to reveal about yourself.
The thing that should happen is someone with a lot to lose should be able to say, you know how ugly a human mind can be?
This is an experience I had.
This is who I was.
And you know how much I have to live for and how much I have to lose.
We have to talk about...
This kind of mania that can get humming on a human brain, right?
We see this every time you open the paper, you see someone in the grip of this kind of thing, right?
It even happened to me, right?
I think it's an amazing conversation to start, and the fact that the result is just, you know, an auto-defe is the problem we're trying to fight our way through at this point.
Again, I don't know him, but I remember, again, forgive me if I get this slightly wrong, but isn't it true that his wife, Natasha Richardson, just died in this freak accident?
It's all it's so dependent like I had Mike Tyson on the podcast and one of the things that I got when I said it was so many people like fuck that Rapist fuck this guy fuck that all these different things about him what I wanted to get into him with him was Who he was when he was 12 years old when he was a little boy when he met custom motto and was taught out a box and was fucking hypnotized and And this is one of the really important things that came out of that podcast was Custom Otto,
who was not just this boxing legend who took in this young kid from the ghetto that didn't have a family, but also hypnotized him.
Hypnotized him to be a destroyer.
Specifically was saying to him, you don't exist.
The task exists.
You're going to move forward.
You're going to bob and weave and rip the body.
And he was programming this kid to get incredible amounts of positive response from violent acts.
Violent acts in a boxing ring.
And that's where he got his identity.
That's where he got all of his love.
And so he became this guy.
And one of the things that I said to him, I said, did anybody ever teach you how to turn it off?
And he's like, no.
No, he did.
Like, I'm no Mike Tyson, and I was never like that.
If you're getting kicked in the face and punched in the face a lot, and you're doing it through your developmental period from the time you're 15...
For me, it was 15. From him, it was like 12 or 13. You have a different way of looking at the world.
Because this is also in the recipes.
And the recipes are also...
You might get knocked the fuck out.
You might get head kicked.
You might get kicked in the neck with a shin.
And you wake up and your friends are slapping you in the face and putting ice on you.
This is all real.
And when you have that...
The positive that comes from that when you're a 12-year-old boy and you're hypnotized by this great man who's teaching you how to fight and you're getting so much love.
You've never gotten love in your life.
You've never gotten positive feedback.
And you're getting so much of it from this.
And then no one's teaching you how to turn it off.
And you're wondering why this guy grows up to become a fucking maniac and is punching people in the street.
He's just crazy and yelling at reporters, I'll fuck you in the ass, white boy, all that crazy shit that he did.
Well, yeah, I mean, one problem we have here is that we don't have a norm around, a good norm around mental health.
And we have, like, zero norms around mental training, right?
So, I mean, so physical training is a very good analogy between meditation as mental training, which sounds just esoteric and woo, right?
So it sounds like New Age, you know, specious nonsense to many people.
But if you roll back the clock a hundred years, Physical training made no sense.
There were no norms around it.
I mean, the only guy lifting a dumbbell was that guy with the handlebar mustache in the leopard, you know, bikini or whatever he was wearing at the freak show, right?
It's continually evolving, but the framework, the paradigm, the fact that there's something to do to get better physically, and that those changes matter, you can engage your body intelligently so as to improve it across many different variables, flexibility, strength.
That's all totally understood and now we're just refining the protocol.
With mental training, and specifically the training of attention and how you respond to the uprising of your own negative emotion, That is something that has been going on for thousands of years in contemplative, mostly Eastern context.
And that's something that, you know, Buddhism really has a lot of, specifically, an asymmetric amount of wisdom to share on.
And it's, yeah, I mean, I'm very excited to be spending more time on it because it's Yeah.
out is the smartphone.
It's like, what this thing is doing to us is continually amplifying not only our desire for approval, but the ability to react in a...
So there's just no reason to hesitate to condemn this thing that you're seeing.
This upwelling of negative emotion you see, the outrage you feel when you see something on Twitter, right, is— It's shortening everybody's fuse.
It's making road rage more of a general feature of our lives.
This is all trainable.
Like you can actually learn that when you suddenly feel anger in response to something that seems to have happened in the world, if you just pay attention to the experience of anger, if you just feel the mere physiology of it and get out of your thoughts if you just feel the mere physiology of it and get out You notice thought as a process.
You let that go.
You're not continuing to have a conversation with yourself about all the reasons why you should be angry or you should attack this person.
And you just become interested in anger as a response.
The half-life of the emotion is like seconds.
It's impossible to stay angry for very long if you get out of the story you're telling yourself about why you should be angry.
Now, there are certain situations where anger is appropriate and it's good to have access to that energy.
I'm not advocating that everyone just get lobotomized and not react to anything, but...
until you can actually be mindful, I mean, mindful is the technical word for what this is, until you can actually get out of the thoughts and just pay attention to, in this case, a negative emotion, you have zero choice.
You're going to stay angry for as long as you stay angry for.
And people have this experience of being angry for days about things or being angry for hours.
There's no way to stay angry for more than moments unless you're just lost in the story.
And it becomes a kind of superpower to be able to say, do I need to be angry about this?
Or like, how useful is it to stay angry about this?
And you can just get off the ride.
You can literally, like, you know, I see a tweet from somebody who's trying to destroy my life, and I feel this initial, you know, contraction, and I can decide how long I want to feel that way for, right?
And that's an amazing thing to be able to do.
And it's based on a kind of training that very few people know even exists.
And so, again, it's like I'm now the guy in the leopard singlet, right?
But it's more and more we're going to understand that this just has to be part of everybody's toolkit.
What they're learning is just basic awareness of their inner lives.
Just being able to name the emotion they're feeling is an amazing capacity in a six-year-old.
A six-year-old is just acting out something, and you're now teaching them to know in that moment that what's pushing them from behind is sadness or anger or embarrassment.
Just to have that recursive ability to reflect...
That's already a major gain in kids that age.
But yeah, you can learn it very early.
Actually, this was something I was talking about with Stephen Fry on my podcast.
Yeah, he's just – you're in the presence of just such a nice guy.
It radiates decency.
But he was fairly skeptical of just like, why would you ever have to train mindfulness or meditation?
I mean, the analogy that came up to me, came up for me on the fly there, was that it is actually a lot like learning to read in the sense that None of us remember having gone through the ordeal of learning to read.
Learning to read was a hassle.
That did not come easily to most people.
And yet now if you look at a page of text in a language you understand, you can't help but decode it.
It's just effortless.
And so these kinds of emotional tools and cognitive tools, just the ability to self-regulate emotion by becoming aware of it as a process, That is something that I think we could teach kids much earlier, and then we would be in the presence of young adults who would naturally have a facility for it where they wouldn't even remember how hard it was to acquire it.
To ask this kid to manage this state when you're talking about someone who just six years prior was virtually homeless and had no love in his life at all and was being hypnotized by some madman who's a boxing wizard who lives in the Catskills.
And what we were talking about earlier about who you are now versus who you were 20, 30 years ago, when you meet Mike Tyson now, Mike Tyson is the sweetest, nicest, friendliest guy.
He's so soft-spoken.
He's really kind.
He hugs people.
He's a really nice guy.
And at one point in time, he was the scariest motherfucker on the planet Earth.
Yeah, there's actually another sort of uncanny valley here in martial arts training that I spent a lot of time in.
When you're training in martial arts and seeing the world through this lens of violence and potential violence, but you're training in a way that's never really putting your skills to the test.
So you're basically, as a young man...
You're living with this fundamental uncertainty as to whether or not you actually are capable of anything.
So you're training in like fake martial arts, right?
Or even if it's full contact, you have headgear and you've got...
It's just like you're not...
There's still basic uncertainty about what's going to go down on the street if it's in the presence of real violence.
And there you're...
Especially as a teenager...
You're in this fairly toxic state of always preparing for violence that still is, in most people's lives, a pretty low order of probability that it's going to occur, and yet it's also backed by this fear of, you know, the ego fear of maybe you're just full of shit, and you're just going to get your ass kicked if this ever happens.
With someone like Mike Tyson, there shouldn't be any uncertainty.
He's got nothing to prove.
If he's in a bar and somebody says, what are you looking at?
At minimum, he doesn't have this fear of, if he walks away from that challenge, he knows he's walking away, not because he was scared maybe he's going to lose a fistfight with this guy.
He's the best boxer on earth at that moment.
It's that he's got way more to lose than the other guy.
Why does he want to be rolling around in a parking lot with some stranger?
So there's this very unhappy place that a lot of martial artists are in, which is they don't actually know what they're capable of, and they're living all the time with this kind of training software running in their heads, and it's a weird space to be in.
The Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I mean, you're not getting punched and you're not getting kicked, but you are absolutely going full blast and you have 100% confidence once you reach a certain level that you could do that to an untrained person.
Within its frame, you are pressure testing it and you know that it works.
I would argue there people still lose sight of the fact that in reality people are punching and they're not training a lot of punching or defense and then there are weapons and then there's a guy's friend who can come up and start kicking you in your head.
It's like how good an idea was it to pull guard when someone else can walk up.
But, you know, yeah, it's within its purview, yeah, you're working out all of your illusions, and that's one reason why so many of us find it addictive.
Yeah, there's that, and there's also, they're so nice.
Jiu-jitsu people are so friendly.
And I think that's one of the reasons why they're so friendly is they're not carrying around all that bullshit that a lot of people carry around, including, you know, there's some grown men that have never been in a fight in their life and they get a couple of beers in them and they start talking crazy shit.
I'm like, hey man, you don't even know how to fight.
It's like someone who wants to jump into a NASCAR race who's never driven a car.
Actually, before I had a podcast, my midlife crisis took the form of me getting really back into martial arts again after a hiatus of maybe 25 years.
I had a lawyer who focused on self-defense law.
He was constantly dealing with cases where someone is either claiming self-defense or is a legit self-defense claim.
But they're basically screwed.
I mean, they punched someone and that person fell down and hit a fire hydrant and died, right?
So they're trying to beat a murder rap, you know?
And so I just had him in a blog post, had him walk me and I had a bunch of...
I had two people comment, ask questions as well.
I had Matt Thornton, who's John Kavanaugh's jiu-jitsu coach, ask questions in this blog post.
And I had Rory Miller, who's a self-defense trainer, just to try to flesh out all of the things you should be thinking about when you're the kind of person who is at all preparing for the possible eventuality of violence.
Because people who train with guns or own guns or carry knives or do martial arts don't actually understand what happens when they agree to fight somebody.
Unless your M.O. is, and this should be your M.O., To avoid violence at virtually any cost, right?
You're always just trying to leave the premises if there's some sort of challenge that could become violence.
If that's not your MO, you're just wandering into potential situations where you can find yourself in court for having shoved a guy and he fell into the street and got run over, right?
And then now you're the guy who's looking at the prospect of going to prison for a...
Murder or, you know, second-degree murder.
And so anyway, I had him walk me through all of the ins and outs of all that.
It was a fascinating conversation because, yeah, there are people who, you know, I mean, there are extreme cases.
There are women who have shot their totally crazy husband who's like waving a baseball bat at their heads.
And they're in prison for years for this.
Just real miscarriages of justice where you would think that it would be very easy to prove that she was in fear for her life in this case and this was a legitimate use of lethal force.
I mean, if you have eyewitnesses or if it's a public thing that happens and there's video of it, but, you know, Someone does something to someone and no one's around and you punch someone and they get knocked out and they die and you say, no, this guy was threatening to kill me.
He was chasing me.
He was threatening to kill me.
I was terrified for my life.
He lunged towards me.
I saw the opening.
I took it and now he's dead.
You could go to jail forever.
I mean, that's a reality.
I mean, you should absolutely, without a doubt, avoid violence at all costs.
So it's like, in the curriculum of learning how to fight, training in whatever martial art or arts...
There's, in most cases, very little time spent training avoidance, right?
And that's a real missing piece, because that is the most important thing to train.
I mean, it's like you, you know, especially if you have real skills, right?
Especially if you're walking around armed, right?
I mean, the one interesting psychological corrective that Conceal Carry does for many people is that Once you're walking around with a gun, you realize the problem of what any altercation can become.
You're not going to get into a shoving match with somebody if you're wearing a gun in your belt because if that escalates, you're pulling out your gun and then it's a decision of whether to kill somebody.
I don't have a ton of experience in this area, but for all the firearm training I've done with people, I just get, you know, I know like former SWAT operators who are, you know, just out, they're constantly armed and These are like the last guys who are going to get involved in anything.
I mean, they used to be cops, but now they don't even feel any burden to police anything.
They're retired, emphatically retired, right?
Because they just recognize how haywire anything can go for them if any process of conflict gets started.
And again, I think this goes back to understanding how to manage your mind.
When the shit hits the fan and things go crazy, it's very difficult for people to maintain a rational state of mind.
And things can escalate so quickly.
Things can turn to violence so quickly, especially with irrational people or untrained people or people that aren't aware of consequences or maybe can't process it well.
And the crucial piece, which many seasoned fighters and professionals don't have, or I would think many don't have, is this valley where your ego concerns are not worked out.
It's like when you feel the emotional burden of a loss of face...
So if Jocko Willink is in a bar and someone says something nasty to him or to his wife, Jocko doesn't have anything to prove.
Jocko knows he's a badass.
So Jocko knows that it's time to get out of the bar because he doesn't want to deal with this psychopath who doesn't know who he's dealing with.
But someone who's not trained like Jocko, right, could feel that backing down, especially backing down in front of your wife or your girlfriend, that is such an ego blow that the temptation to get into this monkey dance with the other person is just – it's impossible that is such an ego blow that the temptation to get into this It's a very dangerous game.
This is a controversial thing to say, and I got in trouble, or one of my podcast guests, Gavin DeBecker, the security guru, got in trouble on my podcast, talking about the primacy of intuition here.
Our intuitions are actually really good for detecting something that makes us uncomfortable about another person, right?
And this becomes politically incorrect really fast, right?
Because it's like if you see a guy on an elevator who makes you uncomfortable, Gavin's advice and I think the real sane advice is just don't get on.
But there are many people who get on just because they want to prove they're not racist, right?
Right.
And I actually know someone who was in a situation like that and it didn't work out well.
And so...
Intuition is bad for so many things.
We have terrible intuitions for statistics and probability theory.
Whole careers and Nobel Prizes have been won on people like Danny Kahneman have shown us how it's not only that our intuitions are bad for these judgments, but they're reliably bad.
And we can understand there's a structure to how bad they are.
But for judging people who are dangerous, who make the hair stand up on the back of our neck for reasons we can't understand, where the eye contact was wrong or just the way they were—I mean, just like a— What's called a witness check, you know?
You know, like someone comes up to you and engages you, and then they look to – they just kind of look to check for witnesses, right?
Now, like people don't – aren't aware that that's even a thing, right?
But when – like that body language is very salient to us.
And there are hundreds of things like that that we immediately feel, that prompt, you know, an intuitive response.
And these are intuitions that are, you know, from a self-defense point of view, are worth listening to.
Because the worst case scenario is you wind up being a little rude there.
Like, sorry, you know, I can't talk.
But people are, you know, people are very dogmatically being kind of trained to ignore those kinds of intuitions.
What people do with their eyes is a major variable in just how we feel that the relationship is going.
But it's...
And there are micro-expressions that we notice in people that we're not aware of noticing.
This is not well understood.
And we're bad judges of whether someone is telling the truth.
This has been fairly well studied.
Even people who work for the FBI are not much better than chance in detecting whether somebody is lying.
But we get so much information by body language and being in somebody's presence, and we get it so fast that it's, again, whether we understand it or not, there are evolutionary reasons why whether we understand it or not, there are evolutionary reasons why this is
I mean, if we've evolved for anything as social primates, we have evolved to detect stuff that just is a precursor to violent intent in others, right?
Microexpressions are funny because they remind me of microaggressions, which is one of the weirder social justice warrior things, like things that used to be just slights where someone was just like slightly rooted.
Yeah, microaggressions, it's weird that that's actually accepted, that this is something they're actually pushing in certain schools, that microaggressions are a real thing.
Christina Hoff Summers just wrote something about, or she put something on her Twitter today about a Yale article that was written today.
That was put out today about documenting politically incorrect behavior so that someday in the future when someone is running for Congress or is up for Supreme Court or something like that, you could go back to their college days and remember when they said something.
I mean, one of the examples this woman uses in this post was compared a woman to a large animal, a woman's body to a large animal in a private text message that she should have, oh, I should have screenshot.
I should have, yeah.
And calls this guy in this article, white boy.
This white boy does this, and the white boy with a saccharine smile does that.
Which is, like, overtly racist.
Like, just the expression.
And the way that she's describing it.
Like, as if this evil character slowly makes his way to run the world, and he's been engineered since the time he was in college.
Yeah, what I think is really important that what you were saying earlier was that there has to be some sort of path to redeeming themselves.
That there has to be some accepted way that someone can go about redeeming themselves and we can allow them to re-enter society without constantly bringing it up or judging them by it or always attributing their past behavior to who they are right now.
I mean, this should be so simple, but look at my collaboration with Majid Nawaz, right?
We were on this podcast together.
Majid was scheming to form a global caliphate.
I mean, the organization he was part of, I mean, he wasn't a jihadist, thankfully, and he wasn't actually blowing people up.
But he was trying to get nuclear weapons in Pakistan into the hands of the worst possible theocrats, right?
This was his...
Majid, with all of his charisma and all of his energy, and it's like, you know, Majid is fantastic.
And he used to a utterly nefarious purpose in my world, right?
You know, if you know how much that is an issue for me, it's like, and Majid and I are just buddies now, right?
So...
All I need is a clear path that he took out of the darkness to understand why he's a valid collaborator now.
Actually, on that point, I've got people breathing down my neck to tell you or tell your audience, this is how powerful you are, Joe Rogan, that a documentary is coming out on our collaboration, and it's out now.
Because I remember when that aired, I think it was 2011, and I remember there was nothing around that.
Nothing.
It was totally fine, right?
They were using the N-word.
I mean, the problem...
The thing that was kind of dishonest about the re-scandalizing of it was that in the context of that conversation, it was framed by the fact that they really were referencing one of the more famous pieces of comedy in history.
They were referencing Chris Rock's act Yeah, that's one of those things, though, where they're just looking for more things to be mad at Louis for.