Feb. 7, 2019 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:42:35
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Five, four, three, two... | ||
| Hello, Sam Harris. | ||
| Hey, man. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| Happy to be here. | ||
| I listened to your podcast with Jack. | ||
| Let's just get right into the Jack stuff. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You okay, Jamie? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm good, I'm good. | |
| All right. | ||
| Helps people communicate and distribute information worldwide. | ||
| What is it like to start something like that up and have it become what it is? | ||
| Like, how have you managed to try to keep up with it and what have the headaches been? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Apparently people online, particularly the people that want to comment about this, all they wanted to know about was censorship. | ||
| And that was an issue with me. | ||
| There was a question with me, but it became a far bigger question for people online. | ||
| They felt like that I tossed him softball questions. | ||
| and that I didn't press him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For instance, you brought up Louis Farrakhan. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| He never got to that. | ||
|
unidentified
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He went around and around and around with you. | |
| And he recognized this after the podcast. | ||
| I received a lot of blowback. | ||
| He received a lot of blowback. | ||
| So I contacted him and he said he would be more than happy to come back on again and address all these things. | ||
| And I said, okay, what I'd like to do is address specific instances of people being censored. | ||
| And he said, okay, what I'll do is I'll bring in someone from the company that's in charge of that stuff. | ||
| So I'm starting to put together a picture of what it's like to be a CEO of something as big. | ||
| And he's also a CEO of Square. | ||
| He runs the Cash App. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff going on there, right? | ||
| So he's obviously busy. | ||
| How much day-to-day involvement does he actually have? | ||
| And who gets censored and why they get censored? | ||
| And how much is he willing to share about that? | ||
| So we're going to find out in the next follow-up podcast. | ||
| But I got accused of everything from being a shill to being a cuck to being a... | ||
| And there's also an issue that you've managed to avoid, wisely so, of advertising. | ||
| The cash apps and advertisers are on my podcast. | ||
| So because the cash apps and advertisers are on my podcast... | ||
| The man had you by the throat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| You couldn't ask all those great questions that were queued up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| There's quite a few, but I noticed that... | ||
| Well, what was your experience like with it? | ||
| Yeah, so it's interesting because you and I have... | ||
| We had different interviews because they were timed differently. | ||
| I mean, this is... | ||
| It's an interesting topic because this opens the door to all the ways in which our podcasts are different. | ||
| I mean, you stream live. | ||
| I sit on my podcast for at least a week. | ||
| In Jack's case, it was like two weeks before I released it. | ||
| So I did my interview with him before this flurry of interviews with him came out. | ||
| I mean, there was a Rolling Stone interview. | ||
| I think maybe a Huffington Post interview had come out. | ||
| But basically, there was nothing out there. | ||
| So I had no real examples of how he dealt with these questions. | ||
| Or how he talked. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, I hadn't even heard of her before. | ||
| That's the lesbian woman? | ||
| She was like a feminist who said sort of the wrong thing in the transgender space. | ||
| She said something like men are not women, right? | ||
| And she got banned. | ||
| For life? | ||
| Or a temporary ban? | ||
| No, I think it was temporary. | ||
| But, you know, so I raised it. | ||
| And, you know, he obviously can't know... | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, it didn't happen with me, right? | ||
| No, I should address that. | ||
| There was no discussion whatsoever about what was off limits. | ||
| There was no nothing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And that got him. | ||
| So I don't know how you got him. | ||
| I didn't try to get him to smoke a blunt. | ||
| I didn't even think about it. | ||
| Yeah, we weren't drinking. | ||
| We were just talking. | ||
| Maybe it would have been better if we were drinking, because it did seem very stiff. | ||
| I listened to it after the fact, and... | ||
| I mean, I get from their anticipation why it would be disappointing. | ||
| I just thought it was kind of boring. | ||
| I thought my podcast with them just wasn't very good. | ||
| I sometimes do too many podcasts. | ||
| And when I sometimes do too many podcasts, I think I run low on juice. | ||
| And I'm not as, I don't know, I'm not as engaged or I'm not as fired up about it. | ||
| And maybe I definitely should have prepared more for him. | ||
| But I really thought it was just going to be a conversation about what it's like and I thought that would be really easy to do. | ||
| Because it's such a unique position to be running something like Twitter. | ||
| But I don't know if he was evasive because he didn't know the things or because he didn't want to talk about the things. | ||
| But there was things like he didn't know exactly why Alex Jones was ultimately banned. | ||
| he didn't want to talk about it or is it because he didn't remember it? | ||
| I mean, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, you'd have to be inside his head to get that answer. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I promise you. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But that doesn't do any good for the people that are already banned. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I felt that too. | ||
| And I didn't really navigate that very well. | ||
| And that was a big part of the blowback. | ||
| But then the blowback was accentuated when they found out that he sponsors me. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, we were talking about that before the podcast. | ||
| They just purchased some company. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Gimlet, yeah. | ||
| For some ungodly amount of money. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like $200 million and they're going to spend $500 this year or something. | ||
| And so it's this... | ||
| We're all just making this up. | ||
| And, you know, I've just released a meditation app, which is a different business model still. | ||
| And so now I have these kind of two parallel digital businesses happening in my life. | ||
| And it's just very interesting, the decisions you make or are forced to make and the consequences of it. | ||
| And so, like, the fact that we're having this conversation live, you don't even have to think about whether you're going to edit this, right? | ||
| Because it's streaming live and, you know, when we're done, we're going to turn off the mics and walk out of here. | ||
| And your job is done. | ||
| With my podcast, that's not the workflow at all. | ||
| And I totally envy this approach that you have, but for a variety of reasons, I feel like I can't take it in my life. | ||
| But it is very different. | ||
| It dictates many choices down the line, which... | ||
| I mean, there's a positive and negative, but the positive is... | ||
| What you hear is what we got and we're done after we turn these mics off. | ||
| And that's not how I podcast. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They'll be different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sort of. | |
| Yeah, they'll propagate different comments to the top. | ||
| You can actually change it if you prefer to see the most new comment. | ||
| From your own personal YouTube when you're watching. | ||
| You as a viewer or user of YouTube have to make that actual comment. | ||
| So that conspiracy theory just heightened the whole thing, right? | ||
| Okay, now they're deleting negative comments. | ||
| Look, I don't like doing bad podcasts, but I will be the first one to tell you when I think a podcast sucked. | ||
| That podcast was definitely disappointing. | ||
| It wasn't good. | ||
| Mine wasn't good. | ||
| Like I said, when I listened to it, I was like, God, this is kind of boring. | ||
| It just wasn't juicy. | ||
| We didn't get a flow. | ||
| It wasn't like he and I were just shooting a shit, having a good time. | ||
| Well, take that one decision. | ||
| So you have decided to make video a main component of this podcast. | ||
| It's still probably a small percentage of your actual listens. | ||
| Not anymore. | ||
| No, not anymore. | ||
| It's almost 50-50. | ||
| Awesome. | ||
| It's closing in on that. | ||
| It used to be like 90-10, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so I don't have a video component, and so I just put audio on YouTube, but I put absolutely no energy into YouTube. | ||
| I mean, that may one day change. | ||
| But because I don't, I don't care what's happening on YouTube, right? | ||
| So I never see the comments. | ||
| And whenever I look, it is, as you say, accessible. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| I mean, YouTube just skews massively right. | ||
| It skews just massively male. | ||
| And it probably skews very young, too. | ||
| So you have a millennial alt-right craziness. | ||
| As I say these sentences, your YouTube page is just blowing up with hate for me. | ||
| You've got a bunch of millennials with their thumbs up their asses just whinging. | ||
| There's a lot of older people, too. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So there's a couple of conspiracy theories in that regard. | ||
| There's also apparently an emerging conspiracy theory about that Jack was trying to pump up Bitcoin because they have some sort of a Bitcoin deal. | ||
| Have you heard this one? | ||
| I read that, but from what I saw, it's not higher than it was at any point. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's still right around $3,500. | |
| So if there was a pump and dump scheme of some sort, then it should be provable on a blockchain, I guess. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Yeah, I don't understand that, but is there any other component to it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know where that's coming from, necessarily. | ||
| All he said was that, well, the Cash App sells Bitcoin. | ||
| So we talked about Bitcoin. | ||
| Because you can buy and sell Bitcoin through the Cash App, I should say. | ||
| I think he said something about blockchain technology rendering everything permanent online. | ||
| Yes, that was something different though. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Or not so nobly, depending on what you think of Sargon of Akkad. | ||
| Well, it's not even that. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Well... | ||
| 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. | ||
| And you had developed that audience previously, ironically enough, on YouTube. | ||
| There's a lot of YouTube debates. | ||
| People putting my content on their YouTube channels. | ||
| Mostly debates, right? | ||
| Yeah, and as an author. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I've heard that. | ||
| I was like, this guy's crazy. | ||
| I mean, it's actually in the pricing in the app store for my meditation app. | ||
| It's like, there's the pricing, and then below that there's, if you can't afford this, here's the email address. | ||
| I think that's fantastic. | ||
| And so that's guilt-free. | ||
| Yeah, I'm splitting it that way, but... | ||
| I'm raising prices. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, the Netflix thing is different because Netflix has programs that cost a lot of money to create. | ||
| This podcast is very easy. | ||
| You and my friend will call you up. | ||
| Hey, you want to do a podcast? | ||
| You come on over here. | ||
| Obviously, we've got to pay for all this equipment, but other than that, bandwidth and rent and all that stuff. | ||
| Other than that, it just goes up. | ||
| Whereas you do a comedy special, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. | ||
| You have to secure a venue. | ||
| You have to hire staff. | ||
| I mean, it's a big deal. | ||
| And that's an easy thing in terms of, like, bang for their buck, what Netflix will get out of it. | ||
| If you do a television show, I mean, my God, you need to hire hundreds of people. | ||
| There's wardrobe and makeup and set and there's writers and producers and executives and everybody has to go over the script with a fine-tooth comb. | ||
| It's incredibly, incredibly strenuous. | ||
| There's a lot going on when you create a television, like Stranger Things or something like that. | ||
| I mean, you have so much special effects. | ||
| So, to ask for that for free, to me, seems ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, but except... | ||
| Again, I'm running on two tracks here. | ||
| 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. | ||
| When they're donating. | ||
| When they're donating. | ||
| 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 it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| The first podcast that we did. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Freaking prima donna Sam Harris. | |
| Well, it made sense. | ||
| I mean, they were disgusting ads, too. | ||
| I mean, we would get ridiculous and be really silly in those ads. | ||
| It was just the juxtaposition. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, no doubt. | ||
| I don't want to picture too much of the armies of people using their product, you know? | ||
| So word got around, and then as the podcast space started expanding, then advertisers tentatively were dipping their toe in. | ||
| My philosophy, and it still holds... | ||
| That's like 2006 or 2007? | ||
| Yeah, Jamie. | ||
|
unidentified
|
2012? | |
| The first time I was on here was 2011? | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's a very obvious conflict of interest. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But... | |
| But people have to realize that if they churn off your podcast, you've got just an endless number of advertisers waiting in line. | ||
| I have too many ads. | ||
| Yeah, so... | ||
| I mean, the cash out is a very... | ||
| That's not a psychological component for you. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| 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'm free to do whatever I want to do. | ||
| Well, also, I should be clear. | ||
| 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 should also be clear that I say no to a lot of ads that I don't want. | ||
| There was one, there was an Uber for babysitting. | ||
| I was like, get the fuck out of here. | ||
| What are you, crazy? | ||
| Actually, that got recommended to me by somebody. | ||
| But it sounds like Craigslist for babysitting. | ||
| It sounds like a disaster waiting to happen. | ||
| There's been a few that I've said no to. | ||
| Like, quite a few. | ||
| Some of them that are just boring. | ||
| I'm like, I'm not reading that. | ||
| I'm not selling that. | ||
| That's stupid. | ||
| But also, you're a comic who can send up ads. | ||
| I mean, I think Bill Burr does this, where he kind of trashes the ad as he's reading it. | ||
| And he loses some because of that. | ||
| He lost NatureBox because he told people to go eat apples. | ||
| Yeah, really. | ||
| He's like, go eat a fucking apple. | ||
| And that's a tool you have in your wheelhouse that has effects down the line. | ||
| It's one reason why you can stream live without really worrying about it. | ||
| And I feel I can't. | ||
| At the end of the day, if things go completely haywire on your podcast, you can say, listen, I'm a fucking comic. | ||
| What do I know? | ||
| You can just pull the ripcord and you're fine. | ||
| I can't do that. | ||
| You can't say, I'm a moron. | ||
| You can't say that. | ||
| I say that all the time. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Let's just start from scratch. | ||
| 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! | ||
| It took so long, you forgot what you asked. | ||
| Well, it's almost like I have to restart the momentum of it. | ||
| But... | ||
| Well, again, I'm totally, I'm that kind of a speaker, so, you know, that wasn't a problem. | ||
| But I didn't know what he talked like. | ||
| I'd never heard him talk, ever. | ||
| So hearing him talk there and talking to him live, you know, I mean, some people are fucking effortless. | ||
| Some people, like, Elon took a while. | ||
| Like, we had to start drinking. | ||
| No, that was brutal. | ||
| You know how much I tried to micromanage that behind the scenes. | ||
| I was all in your grill trying to figure that out. | ||
| You guys basically broke all the rules I thought I laid down. | ||
| Elon did it. | ||
| Elon tweeted, be on Joe's podcast Thursday night at 9 o'clock. | ||
| I didn't want you guys to go live. | ||
| I wanted you to both have a chance to say, wait a minute, is smoking a blunt really the thing we want to be doing here? | ||
| So, you know, you didn't take my advice, and it was what it was. | ||
| Well, we were drunk by the time the weed came out. | ||
| What's interesting to me is we were drinking from the beginning of the podcast. | ||
| We started drinking whiskey. | ||
| We both had two or three glasses of whiskey before the weed came out. | ||
| Nobody cared the fact that the CEO of Tesla was drunk. | ||
| Like, no one cared about that. | ||
| I mean, he wasn't drunk, but he should have been driving. | ||
| I don't know if that was obvious. | ||
| I don't know if they saw that you were drinking in the beginning. | ||
| It was obvious. | ||
| We were pouring the whiskey. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, it was on the table. | ||
| We had ice. | ||
| We were clinking glasses. | ||
| Salute. | ||
| I mean, it was very obvious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| 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 once we got loose, that was good. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What was interesting, he was very different when he first got here versus when the mic came on. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When he first got here, he pulls out the fucking blowtorch and starts shooting this flamethrower in the middle of the hallway, and we're laughing. | ||
| I'm like, he's gonna be easy. | ||
| This is great. | ||
| And then we sat down and then stiff right off the bat. | ||
| And I'm just trying to massage it and get him going. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so— Well, the Liam Neeson story is a perfect example. | ||
| Let's go there. | ||
| Yeah, let's go there. | ||
| A perfect example of a story where— If you were Liam's friend, you would go, don't tell that one. | ||
| Don't tell that one. | ||
| He's like, but I want to be honest. | ||
| Don't. | ||
| You could be honest with me. | ||
| I'm not going to judge you. | ||
| If you tell me that someone got raped and you went out with a baseball bat for a week looking for a black man to beat up To kill. | ||
| To kill. | ||
| I'd be like, oh, Jesus Christ, man. | ||
| Like, what the fuck was going through your head at that point in time? | ||
| Like, that's terrible. | ||
| Like, yeah, like, I feel awful about it. | ||
| I can't believe that was me. | ||
| But it didn't happen. | ||
| Nothing happened. | ||
| And now, you know, people are calling him a racist, and they don't want him in movies. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And so there's no way to square those two things. | ||
| Well, they're constantly holding these two contradictions, right? | ||
| I mean, here's another one. | ||
| Women's rights and support of the hijab. | ||
| I mean, what's going on there? | ||
| How do you do that? | ||
| You know, don't be Islamophobic, but also support women's rights and gay rights. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Because he's specifically looking for a black guy. | ||
| I mean, I understand that it's a part of the other tribe. | ||
| No, but it doesn't suggest... | ||
| That he has a predisposed... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Why do you think that is? | ||
| Like, what is going on? | ||
| Because outrage seems to be more in season than it's ever been in my lifetime. | ||
| I don't remember outrage being so—just such a—it's— It's recreational. | ||
| It's back to Jack. | ||
| It has a lot to do with social media and Twitter in particular. | ||
| So, for instance, I missed the whole Covington High School Catholic fiasco. | ||
| Because you're not on Twitter. | ||
| I basically was ignoring Twitter. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was just nuts. | ||
| But it's normal. | ||
| That's what people do. | ||
| It's what the platform is calling out of people. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So, yeah, it is, it's the medium, you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It is the medium. | |
| We had no opportunity to do this before. | ||
| It is the medium, and it's also people that don't feel like their opinions are being heard. | ||
| Like, they want their opinion to be heard, and they want it to be heard right now. | ||
| And it might not be a very well thought out opinion, but they know that they have the ability to blare it out. | ||
| And so they... | ||
| They just send it out. | ||
| The ability to do that is just intoxicating for folks. | ||
| You talked about this with Jack. | ||
| What makes Twitter especially good for this is that everything has the same stature. | ||
| Your tweet's no bigger than the other tweet that just called you an asshole. | ||
| Yeah, that's my Kurt Metzger take on it because Kurt Metzger was a hilarious stand-up comedian. | ||
| He'll write a Facebook blog only. | ||
| He only writes on Facebook. | ||
| He's like, I like how it's set up. | ||
| He's like, there's a big... | ||
| It differentiates between me and these fucking idiots who are commenting under there. | ||
| Although, ironically, I hate Facebook. | ||
| I can't even... | ||
| I mean, just the graphic design on Facebook I find so offensive that I just can't even look at Facebook. | ||
| So I use it as a publishing channel, but I keep threatening in my own mind to just delete the account because I just don't... | ||
| 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? | ||
| Although, strangely, we're living through the golden age of audio here. | ||
| We went full into video and were poised to go 3D and VR, and then all of a sudden, audio is king. | ||
| Well, how about phone calls and texts? | ||
| I called you out of the blue once, and it was like, what the fuck? | ||
| Why are you calling me? | ||
| I'm walking through a supermarket. | ||
| Somebody said on Twitter once, it was hilarious, that FaceTiming me out of nowhere is just like knocking on my door without calling me. | ||
| Straight up. | ||
| Right. | ||
| She was angry that somebody FaceTimed her. | ||
| No, it always feels like an old school move to, like my book agent calls me, you know, out of the blue, and it's just, it seems so old school. | ||
| It is just like a knock on the door. | ||
| My friend Joey Diaz only calls. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Only calls. | ||
| For years, he would scream at you if you text, and then recently, within the last two or three years, he started texting occasionally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But he only calls. | ||
| 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 | ||
|
unidentified
|
as I've intended, right? | |
| I have to do both because there's a lot of important things to talk about that are going to be endlessly spun and maliciously misunderstood. | ||
| But it's been so refreshing to have one thing. | ||
| You must get this with doing your stand-up. | ||
| I don't have a thing. | ||
| I get shit for everything. | ||
| Or maybe UFC commentary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| They come after me for everything. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, a meditation app, it kind of makes sense because the people that are going to flock to that are looking to meditate. | ||
| They're looking to improve their mind. | ||
| They're not looking to spew hatred on Facebook. | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought that after the podcast with Jack, I was like, Jesus Christ, I should just stick to podcasts with comics. | ||
| Because podcasts with comics, even if you put your foot in your mouth, everybody knows you're just trying to be funny. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Still. | ||
| They're doubling down. | ||
| A lot of people double down. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| And here's another little piece of insight. | ||
| My friend Matt lived in D.C. And those hats, those MAGA hats, they're fucking everywhere. | ||
| Where these kids were, that area, there's these carts that sell these hats. | ||
| So these kids bought those hats that day. | ||
| It's not like they're these MAGA kids. | ||
| They're probably just being assholes, right? | ||
| They're unsupervised teenage boys. | ||
| Their frontal lobe is not fully formed. | ||
| And they're all together feeding off each other like a pack of gremlins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was a teenage boy. | ||
| You were a teenage boy. | ||
| You know how fucking stupid you used to be. | ||
| I mean, I was probably way more stupid than you, but I was a mess. | ||
| I had my moments. | ||
| You get a hundred teenage boys together in a crowd on a school trip, and you get some native elder drumming in some guy's face. | ||
| It was amazing what didn't happen there. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| No violence. | ||
| The kid, the way he handled it, all he did was smile. | ||
| Listen, I'm as biased as anyone against a Catholic school kid wearing a MAGA hat. | ||
| Given my backstory, it's like, yeah, I'm totally poised to think this guy's an asshole and is likely always to be an asshole. | ||
| But what people read into an uncomfortable smile, right? | ||
| I mean, just like the shots of his face with the tweets that said, you know, this is what white privilege looks like. | ||
| This is, you know, this is everything that's wrong in our society. | ||
| It's just we have to slow down. | ||
| How about Reza wrote, have you ever seen a more punchable face? | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| You want to punch him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because he's smiling. | ||
| Calls for violence from the left are so fucking disturbing to me because my parents were hippies when I grew up. | ||
| I always thought of the left, and I've been called right-wing. | ||
| I've never voted anything but democratic in my life except for Gary Johnson. | ||
| Gary Johnson was the only time I voted independent, or whatever the fuck he was, libertarian. | ||
| But that was just because he did my podcast. | ||
| I'll fall for Tulsi Gabbard because she did my podcast, too. | ||
| But the... | ||
| The left was always very considerate, well-read. | ||
| They were the people that were more open-minded. | ||
| They were supporting of gay people and minorities. | ||
| That was the left, and they were non-violent. | ||
| They were the people that were protesting Vietnam when I was a kid. | ||
| 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, that would be unfortunate, because I think they would just double down the other side. | ||
| We'd be better off with some sort of a reasonable centrist, right? | ||
| Someone who just made sense. | ||
| And, you know, one of the things that I liked about Tulsi is that she's a veteran. | ||
| And, you know, I mean, like, she seems very reasonable to me, but... | ||
| Except I haven't followed her career closely, but it just seems like she's not making the right noises on things like Syria and Assad and... | ||
| Yeah, I don't know enough about that to comment. | ||
| I don't know enough about Assad and the controversy of whether or not he gassed his... | ||
| Well, that is, I think, uncontroversial. | ||
| In terms of what she... | ||
| I mean, that is uncontroversial. | ||
| In terms of what she is saying about it... | ||
| About him. | ||
| I mean, she's capable of putting both feet in her mouth on that. | ||
| I thought she's... | ||
| She's saying he's not an enemy of America, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Is that what... | |
| 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. | ||
| That's my prediction. | ||
| Who do you like? | ||
| Who makes sense to you? | ||
| Elizabeth Warren's fucked now. | ||
| She's the most recent one. | ||
| The most recent one where she filled out an application and she wrote Native American on it. | ||
| Just having done the DNA test, playing that game with Trump, that was such a miscalculation. | ||
| Well, the fact that she released the data, and the data is so clear. | ||
| Well, it's almost like she had to. | ||
| Because otherwise he would call her Pocahontas to the end of time. | ||
| But then to then have to apologize to Native Americans for having done the... | ||
| Well, because the amount of Native American is so little. | ||
| I've been joking around about it that I am like a hundred times more African than she is Native American. | ||
| I'm 1.6% African. | ||
| And she's way less than 1% Native American, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, because the people that subscribe to that ideology don't realize how many people think it's silly. | ||
| You know, when you're in the oppression Olympics and you're trying to win the gold. | ||
| And for how many people it's actually misapplied, right? | ||
| It's like there are many more explanations for voting for Trump in addition to racism. | ||
| Yes, every racist voted for Trump, you know, virtually. | ||
| So that's fine. | ||
| Every white supremacist voted for Trump. | ||
| But that's not the story about why Trump got elected. | ||
| It's a long story. | ||
| There's just much more. | ||
| I mean, there are people who just have not... | ||
|
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|
What do you think is... | |
| ...are not thriving in the current economy. | ||
| 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. | ||
| What do you think is, what's the primary factor? | ||
| Like what caused identity politics to reach this boiling point that it's at right now? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Special. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where he said, you can't say retarded anymore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then explained, like, that, you know, there's words you can't use anymore. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you can still say retarded, which is amazing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, in his defense, you kind of have to say both words. | ||
| You're not saying the R word. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, using the R word is like using the N word around black people. | ||
| And we're getting to some weird fucking... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Weird place with this. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, boy. | |
| That's going to be fun. | ||
| You have white privilege? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| So – but I recorded a podcast with her. | ||
| So anyway, so we hit this point because this had just come out then and I think her documentary is probably for Netflix. | ||
| So – What was her take on it? | ||
| 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? | ||
| This is real? | ||
| This was told as a real story, as a counterpoint or in amplification of the story we were talking about at Netflix, right? | ||
| So, it's like, this is... | ||
| And yet, this is happening. | ||
| People are having to navigate. | ||
| CEOs of multi-billion dollar companies are having to navigate around this stuff in-house, right? | ||
| And, I mean, the Google thing over James Damore, right? | ||
| I mean, that was an enormous problem for Google. | ||
| The wheels were coming off, as far as I can tell, from what I've heard. | ||
| And how so? | ||
| Just that, like, there was going to be a Google mutiny over James Damore if he had to be fired. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| This was a big deal at Google. | ||
| That's so insane. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Where do we go? | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But ironically, so this is a point that... | ||
| I think he has a penis. | ||
| I want to be sure. | ||
| He definitely identifies as a lesbian. | ||
| I might have read a Twitter comment about how preposterous that was and said the penis part. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, the thing is that they're all marginalized, so they stick together. | ||
| That's the idea, I guess, behind it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but you can't say that. | ||
| And you also can't say that a man with a penis is not a woman. | ||
| I can say it because I can't be fired. | ||
| But if you do say it, you will get a certain amount of hate. | ||
| I mean, there's people that are saying that men who will not date trans women who still have penises, they're transphobic. | ||
| Have you ever met Jamie Kilstein? | ||
| Jamie and I have a checkered history. | ||
| Maybe you and I have spoken about this. | ||
| I've never met Jamie, but when Jamie was social justice warrior, number one, he went hard on me. | ||
| He just was dunking on me endlessly in ways that were totally unfair. | ||
| He was working very hard to become an enemy. | ||
| Then he had his His epiphany, then the social justice mob came for him over something. | ||
| Over almost nothing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Over him trying to get laid. | ||
| I mean, like they were saying he was a creep or something like that. | ||
| Hitting on girls. | ||
| Yeah, well, I miss the details there, but then he sent me very... | ||
| I'm sorry what I did. | ||
| He wants to do a podcast. | ||
| I haven't taken him up on it, but maybe that could be an interesting conversation. | ||
| He's sincerely apologetic. | ||
| He's a good guy. | ||
| I mean, he and I had our own issue at one point in time over a podcast that we did versus... | ||
| You remember when the Daniel Tosh rape controversy... | ||
| Do you remember this? | ||
| I know who Tosh is, but I missed that. | ||
| Not a rape joke. | ||
| I should say rape joke. | ||
| Some woman in a crowd, he was on stage... | ||
| And he wasn't supposed to be there. | ||
| It was at the Laugh Factory. | ||
| And Dom Herrera put him on stage, and he goes, look, I don't have any material. | ||
| What do you guys want to talk about? | ||
| And some guy yells out, rape. | ||
| That's always helpful. | ||
| And so, you know, it's like some drunk in a crowd, right? | ||
| He goes, Jesus Christ. | ||
| And so, Daniel Tosh's take on it, he's like, okay, what's funny about that? | ||
| Humiliation? | ||
| Violence? | ||
| You know, he's like... | ||
| Berating this guy in trying to do stand-up while he's doing this. | ||
| And some woman yells out, actually, there's nothing funny about rape. | ||
| And he goes, wouldn't it be funny if someone just raped her? | ||
| And everybody starts laughing. | ||
| I do remember this. | ||
| And so this woman wrote a giant blog about it, and she wanted him to apologize about it. | ||
| And Jamie went after Daniel Tosh. | ||
| As a fellow comic. | ||
| Yes, as a fellow comic, saying that it's, you know, like, and I was like, well, she's a heckler. | ||
| The woman heckled, like, while he was trying to do stand-up. | ||
| And he's like, I'm not going to support rape culture. | ||
| And he's like, how the fuck is that rape culture? | ||
| He's clearly making a joke about something she said that was very patronizing. | ||
| Obviously, he doesn't think there's something funny about rape. | ||
| He's just trying to work through this ad-lib set that he's doing with some guy who yelled out something that this whole crowd has to respond to. | ||
| He can't just ignore the fact that it happened and go, how about fire trucks, folks? | ||
| Why are they always red? | ||
| You know, he can't do that. | ||
| He's got to deal with what this guy said. | ||
| And so that's what he tosses out there. | ||
| And everybody laughed, by the way. | ||
| But also, isn't part of his persona just... | ||
| A villain. | ||
| He takes it to the edge, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Yeah, he's an edgy comedian. | ||
| He's funny. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's clearly not how everybody's handling it. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I think road rage is the best analogy for what's happening on social media. | ||
| Yeah, I've adopted that. | ||
| I've adopted that way of looking at it, too. | ||
| But the only difference is road rage, you know, there's like a physiological reason for road rage. | ||
| Because you're in a dangerous situation that you're subliminally taking stock of. | ||
|
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You're going fast. | |
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And every day we do it. | ||
| Every day everything's fine. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, the guy lost his eye. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think that was a Vietnamese guy he attacked. | ||
| But, I mean, he was just doing truly indefensible things. | ||
| Now, I don't know what sort of PR moment he has had since or how he's apologized for it. | ||
| But, I mean, that was a very different time. | ||
| I think if all that stuff was being discovered about him now... | ||
| There may be no way back to making movies. | ||
| Well, the problem is, with this day and age, it could be reignited. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like, even though he's apologized for it, and even though that it's been addressed, it absolutely could get reignited. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, just me talking about it on your podcast is fucking him over. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the pictures emerge today. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But today, anything... | ||
| But let's take the hard case. | ||
| Let's say you were racist, right? | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, there is no apology good enough. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| It certainly is, but I don't see any way to fix that. | ||
| Like with the current climate and this current attitude where people are engaging in this recreational outrage, it fits the climate. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what would have to happen for people to come to some sort of a realization. | ||
| I mean, it would have to happen to them, like it did to Jamie. | ||
| Like, what happened with Jamie Kilstein is that they turned on him, and he's like, oh my god, this is awful. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| And then he realized. | ||
| You know, I mean, I don't know what other thing could happen. | ||
| Well, I mean, the game we're playing is part of it. | ||
| I mean, you and I are in a position to take risks that, you know, even people at the top of journalism can't. | ||
| I mean, like Megyn Kelly says one wrong thing and, you know, it doesn't matter that she's got a $20 million contract. | ||
| She's fired. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's part of it. | |
| And when you look at the thing that she said, I mean, it was just a question. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, she just didn't seem to understand how charged the phrase blackface was. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Like, she's just ignorant of that piece of history or something. | ||
| But like, you know, so she just, she put her foot in her mouth. | ||
| She gave an apology that was just like, you know, full-blown hostage video apology. | ||
| Just like, you know, just like, I am so fucking sorry you don't even know. | ||
| Like, here, take a sample of my blood and you'll just see my, you know, test my cortisol. | ||
| Not good enough. | ||
| Not good enough. | ||
| They let her say the apology, too, which is even more crazy. | ||
| They let her come back, say the apology, and they go, good, thanks for doing that. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| So no one's job in that space is secure enough where they can take real risks. | ||
| But you and I could do an interview with Louis C.K., right? | ||
| And just process his coming back into stand-up. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I would hope that we're having some kind of an impact on it, but I feel like we're... | ||
| We're throwing buckets of cold water into a volcano. | ||
| I just don't know if it's enough. | ||
| But we have pretty big buckets. | ||
| I mean, you have an enormous bucket. | ||
| You're reaching more people than the biggest television shows are reaching. | ||
| People aren't aware of this, but it's just a fact. | ||
| So I think that's part of it. | ||
| And then changing the norm somehow of how we engage on social media... | ||
| I think is another piece. | ||
| Yeah, I agree. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Over a Dean Martin joke. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, just like that, in the fullness of time, that is going to seem like some insane witch panic, right? | ||
| Like, there's no such thing as witches, and yet people are getting burned alive because of allegations of witchcraft. | ||
| We're in that kind of situation and we just have to wake up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, that's what launched him. | ||
| Yeah, this is where this goes. | ||
| This is all about control. | ||
| And that it's a very slippery slope. | ||
| 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 | ||
| But what is, by all appearances, a sincere apology? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like where the link, there is no link to real racism. | ||
| Like there's no link to like, oh yeah, I want to live in a society where black people have it harder than white people. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| 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. | ||
| And so... | ||
| It's hilarious, in fact. | ||
| Explain what happened. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| And he's so walking on eggshells. | ||
| And you got Whoopi Goldberg, you know, trying to just pull him back, you know, from the lions. | ||
| And it should be, I mean, it should be so straightforward. | ||
| Like, is it part of Norm's goal to cause pain for parents who have kids with mental disabilities, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| You can look into this guy's eyes for 10 seconds and know that this is not the bigot you're worried about. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And yet people just want him destroyed. | ||
| I don't know if they still do, but the moment, it was... | ||
| I think it was a real concern that his show would get canceled. | ||
| Well, it hasn't been picked up for a second season. | ||
| Maybe that's part of the problem. | ||
| It is part of the problem. | ||
| He was devastated. | ||
| I'm very good friends with Adam Egan. | ||
| He's a guy that runs the Comedy Store. | ||
| He's the talent director at the Comedy Store. | ||
| And he's been on Norm's show. | ||
| He was like Norm's sidekick on a show. | ||
| He's a very good friend with Norm. | ||
| And Norm really suffered from this in a way that he never suffered from anything in his career in terms of his own personal feeling. | ||
| He was devastated by it, by the blowback and the reaction. | ||
| And he wanted to come on my podcast and talk about it, but Netflix was like, get the fuck out of here! | ||
| Netflix said, no press. | ||
| Don't do anything. | ||
| No press. | ||
| The fact that you can't talk your way out of it, that's the fucking disease. | ||
| Well, the problem is not that you can't talk your way out of it. | ||
| The problem is that they wouldn't even let him attempt to talk your way out of it because I think they realize that Norm's a maniac. | ||
| And Norm is a maniac in the best sense of the word. | ||
| He's one of my favorite comics. | ||
| He's hilarious. | ||
| Fucking hilarious. | ||
| But he's also completely crazy in the best way possible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Norm and I randomly, in some strange way, randomly were seated next to each other on two separate flights. | ||
| Just randomly. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| Like, Norm, again? | ||
| Like, this is crazy! | ||
| And we had a great time just talking the entire flight. | ||
| We were talking about cigarette smoking. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I used to smoke. | ||
| I'm so glad I quit. | ||
| Fucking terrible for you. | ||
| You know, yeah, I mean, it's just, but I, you know, I just always wanted a cigarette and then I'd be gambling. | ||
| I want a cigarette, but I quit. | ||
| Fuck cigarettes. | ||
| Like, how long did you quit? | ||
| And you're like, oh, I haven't had a cigarette in years. | ||
| I'm like, oh, that's great. | ||
| We land at LAX. He goes right into a store and buys cigarettes. | ||
| I go, what are you doing? | ||
| He goes, all that talk of cigarettes. | ||
| I just want one now. | ||
| He was lighting it on the way out the door. | ||
| He couldn't get out the door. | ||
| He lit it before he, you know, the automatic door. | ||
| He was, before it was opening, he was lighting that cigarette. | ||
| I was like, you're crazy! | ||
| But that's, many, many comedians are incredibly impulsive. | ||
| And this is Norm. | ||
| I mean, he just... | ||
| Well, he's got such a, he's so off-kilter. | ||
| He's got a sort of Gary Shanley, you don't know what's going to come out of his mouth extemporaneously. | ||
| But, okay, we have to be... | ||
| Let's put this back into the diversity Olympics. | ||
| We need some respect for neurodiversity. | ||
| There are people who are somewhere on the spectrum toward autism. | ||
| There are spectrums we don't even know about. | ||
| We haven't named. | ||
| And everyone is in some weird spot. | ||
| And People misspeak, right? | ||
| There has to be a way back to say, that's not what I meant, right? | ||
| Offending people of this type was not my intention. | ||
| At some level, that has to be good enough, unless we open your closet and we see that you've got swastikas everywhere. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So I think we have to hold the line here, you know? | ||
| And very few people are in a position to be able to do it. | ||
| I mean, you know, like, you know, Netflix doesn't feel they can do it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| And you're not exactly sure what happened? | ||
| This is all very strange. | ||
| This is very strange stuff. | ||
| Well, so taking the red pill on free will makes you much more forgiving of a lot of this stuff. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because you see just everyone is an open system. | ||
| No one authored themselves. | ||
| No one created themselves. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This is a brain tumor. | ||
| That's the tower shooter guy? | ||
| Yeah, back in 64, I think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, and I'm sure he regrets every second of it. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the wrong fucking punchline. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Isn't it because there's too many voices? | ||
| I mean, there's just so many people that are reacting to it. | ||
| If he's dealing with, he's not dealing with three or four or five voices, he's dealing with millions of people that get to chime in on this. | ||
| And you get a few thousand of those people that are furious at you. | ||
| You know, like you were saying, that doesn't work. | ||
| I was just about to say, I was going to make a comparison to your podcast with Jack, that you're not reading the comments. | ||
| But he's getting this gigantic signal from a huge number of people. | ||
| So this is all over my Google News feed. | ||
| I saw it on Yahoo. | ||
| I saw it in all these different... | ||
| Publications are talking about Liam Neeson's case. | ||
| And so then everybody starts chiming in. | ||
| And then the virtue signaling ratio is very high. | ||
| And the anger ratio is very high. | ||
| And the people that think he's secretly still racist and doesn't want to admit it is very high. | ||
| And then there's also the fact that he's a man of wealth and privilege and he's successful and famous. | ||
| And there's got to be a bunch of jealousy that's attached to that and a bunch of people that want to knock him down because he's at a very high hill. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| There's a lot going on there. | ||
| It's the numbers. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I feel for the guy. | ||
| 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? | ||
| She was skiing. | ||
| Skiing accident. | ||
| Fell and hit her. | ||
| But honestly, she wasn't moving when she fell. | ||
| She was standing on a ski slope and fell from a standing position and hit her head on the hard snow, obviously. | ||
| It's all it takes. | ||
| Yeah, it's brutal. | ||
| And on top of that, I believe his cousin or his nephew or niece died the same way. | ||
| Not the same way in terms of fell skiing, but also hit their head and died. | ||
| So it's like, Jesus Christ, this guy. | ||
| And obviously, there's many people out there that experience far greater tragedies. | ||
| I'm not trying to quantify it, but yeah, he tried to talk about a real thing. | ||
| He tried to talk about a real thing, and he's given some interviews since then where he said, look, I'm not a racist. | ||
| I'm just telling you, I was in such a fucked up state of mind because of this rape that I was willing to do something irrational and horrible. | ||
| But he didn't. | ||
| But he didn't. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| But again, take it full circle. | ||
| These same people who are calling for his head are prepared to forgive other people who did do that thing. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was never like that. | ||
| But I was far more violent when I was fighting. | ||
| Far more violent. | ||
| Far more prone to violence. | ||
| My trigger was very short. | ||
| I was ready. | ||
| Just thinking about it all the time. | ||
| I was fighting all the time. | ||
| I fought. | ||
| I probably had a hundred fights. | ||
| I was ready to go. | ||
| Like, your brain has a... | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| He was a maniac. | ||
| I mean, no one taught him how to reflect. | ||
| There was no Sam Harris app for meditation for Mike Tyson in 1986. He was just a maniac. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Yeah, the singlet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And now we have a total understanding of the norms around physical training. | ||
| You're actually a freak if you don't do some kind of exercise, right? | ||
| Well, those have even changed and evolved over the last decade or so. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's gotten far more complicated and nuanced. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it would be amazing if they taught kids that in school. | ||
| If you got to learn that when you're learning math and history... | ||
| People are doing that. | ||
| My wife actually does that. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| In high school? | ||
| Six-year-olds. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa! | |
| You can teach mindfulness to... | ||
| I mean, in the beginning... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Stephen was very – he's actually – he's adorable. | ||
| He's like the nicest guy in the world. | ||
| Great podcast. | ||
| I really enjoyed that one. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, what I was talking about earlier with Mike Tyson and his coaching. | ||
| He essentially got mental coaching on how to accomplish one thing. | ||
| Mental coaching on how to have the perfect mindset for one thing. | ||
| How to kick people's ass. | ||
| What he didn't have was mental coaching on how to deal with the pressures of life, especially life. | ||
| I mean, almost no one really understands what life is like to be a famous 20-year-old heavyweight champion of the world. | ||
| I mean, there's no one. | ||
| It had to be. | ||
| It's alien. | ||
| It's got to be alien. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or at least martial arts where most of it is a kind of pantomime of violence and it's not being pressure tested. | ||
| So it's not like you where you're competing and you know what it's like to kick someone in the head and it actually works, right? | ||
| It's like this is – you're sparring but it's all – you have to keep everything safe, right? | ||
| Karate, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it's one of the things that's so great about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, stop! | ||
| And they're talking to some guy with cauliflower ear and they don't even know what that means, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, to be a human being is complicated. | ||
| To be a man in the face of altercations with other men is uniquely complicated. | ||
| You know, the kind of altercations that men get into, the kind of bravado and chest puffing and shit talking and the consequences of those things. | ||
| Like you were talking about Liam Neeson, his wife falling down and hitting her head. | ||
| A friend of mine was working in a bar in Long Island and one of the bouncers got in a fight with some guy and punched the guy and knocked him out. | ||
| The guy fell back, hit his head off the curb and died. | ||
| And that happens all the time. | ||
| When people get knocked out, they hit their head on the ground, they die. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's just so hard when no one's there. | ||
| 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. | ||
| But you should also know how to fight. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| I think that's very important. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| It saves you a lot. | ||
| But very few people train... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and people get into it all the time, and I've seen so many people get into it that just don't, they don't have any cards. | ||
| They're completely bluffing. | ||
| God damn it, man. | ||
| Just stop doing this. | ||
| Look, I've been doing martial arts my whole life, and I'm terrified of fights. | ||
| I see fights just like, get the fuck out of here before this goes bad. | ||
| When it goes sideways, men are just, we have thousands of years of awful DNA. We really do. | ||
| Hundreds of thousands. | ||
| Millions. | ||
| Violence was imperative. | ||
| It was imperative for survival. | ||
| You had to be able to react and react quickly. | ||
| And you had to know what to do. | ||
| Your genes are never going to make it to the next stage. | ||
| 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 do you think those intuitions are? | ||
| Like what do you think intuitions are? | ||
| Like when you meet someone, you go, whoa, this person feels dangerous. | ||
| Like what is that? | ||
| What's happening? | ||
| Well, there's a lot. | ||
| Gaze detection is a big one. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Do you think it's just gaze, or do you think you can sense the energy of someone? | ||
| There's certain movements that people make when they're thinking about hitting you. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's certain, like, there's, like, a twitchiness to them, like a pulled back, like, almost like a spring or a bow. | ||
| There's, like, a feeling you get around people that are looking to hit people. | ||
| Yeah, well, there's, again, all of that's still vision, but there's, you know, I mean, who knows? | ||
| We're detecting pheromones. | ||
| We could be detecting people's level of stress. | ||
| I mean, just how tuned up they are. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But this goes beyond, this is beyond just physical violence. | ||
| This is just, you know, detecting psychopaths who are, you know, who are manipulative. | ||
| I mean, just detecting, I mean, there are ways to spot people lying. | ||
| You know, I mean, just, you know, there are tells like, you know, too much information, you know. | ||
| You know, like the people who are giving you superfluous information as a kind of overcorrection. | ||
| They're anticipating that you're going to doubt their story, and so they're filling in, like, blanks that you don't even need filled in, right? | ||
| And there are sort of patterns to that, but... | ||
| And again, we pick up on a lot of this stuff without consciously being aware of what's going on. | ||
| We just know that that's, like, not a person I want to spend any more time with, right? | ||
| But, you know, there may be more of a literature on this than I know about, but a lot of this is not well understood. | ||
| And, I mean, people like Paul Ekman have done a lot of stuff on micro-expressions. | ||
| That goes back probably 30 years at this point. | ||
| And there are people who are outliers who are great at detecting micro-expressions where they really just understand what's going on. | ||
| And AI eventually will be, if it isn't there already, will be much better than we are at doing this. | ||
| I'm so scared of that. | ||
| I'm sort of scared of them getting that wrong. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Not even slights. | ||
| Just like, where do you come from? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's a microaggression. | ||
| You're speaking with an accent. | ||
| Where are you from? | ||
| Where are your parents from? | ||
| How dare you. | ||
| How dare you question my authenticity. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, it's going to happen just by... | ||
| Just based on everyone's use of the tools. | ||
| People are not diligently scrubbing their digital history, and there may in fact be no way to actually do it, right? | ||
| And so they're just trailing, they're not even aware of what they're trailing in social media. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe that will just be a cure for the problem, because at a certain point, we'll be dealing with people who were basically born on Facebook. | ||
| They don't even have a moment. | ||
| They've got their baby picture there and everything that followed. | ||
| Then it'll just seem completely untenable. | ||
| To accuse people of everything. | ||
| Everyone's guilty. | ||
| Everyone has said that dumb thing that can be taken the worst possible way. | ||
| And if they're going to be hung from that, then no one will survive. | ||
| Well, it seems like that's what we're dealing with right now in a lot of cases. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It can be found out there. | ||
| What's it called? | ||
| Islam and the Future of Tolerance. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| It's not bad. | ||
| It actually captures the spirit of our collaboration very well. | ||
| And see it if only to recognize how awesome Majid is, because Majid is just a superstar. | ||
| And the scariest thing about the state of public opinion in the Muslim world, from my point of view, is just how... | ||
| How hard a job he has to just to have a conversation in that community. | ||
| I mean, it's just, you know, he's so marginalized. | ||
| And he's so reasonable, you know, but to come back to that original point. | ||
| Here's someone whose life was purposed toward what I view as one of the most toxic projects I can think of, right? | ||
| Give the nuclear weapons to the people who want to die as martyrs, right? | ||
| That's the project, right? | ||
| And Majid is just an absolutely awesome collaborator now, right? | ||
| So there's like... | ||
| We have to—there has to be a path through some sane conversation to a reboot. | ||
| The real—the worry, though, for a lot of folks is that you are not really being honest about who you are currently. | ||
| You just want an excuse for—to be relieved. | ||
| Except it's so clear in some of these cases. | ||
| Like, it's clear—I mean, take—I mean, the Norm Macdonald case is just utterly clear, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, even in Megyn Kelly's case, utterly clear. | ||
| Unless she's got some white supremacist side gig that I'm not aware of, she's just like, listen, I'm clueless. | ||
| I didn't realize. | ||
| Well, they were looking for an excuse to get rid of her, honestly. | ||
| But I think that even if they weren't, I think that still very likely would have been the end. | ||
| I mean, it's like even if her show had better ratings, still that could have been an unrecoverable error. | ||
| What if she was black? | ||
| Well, no, it doesn't work the other direction. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| But if she was black and she said, what's so bad about blackface? | ||
| Do you think she could stay on the air? | ||
| That's interesting. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it certainly would have been easier. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, yeah. | |
| Like, what if Oprah said it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What if Oprah was saying, who cares? | ||
| You want to pretend to be Diana Ross? | ||
| Because that was the thing, was pretending to be Diana Ross for Halloween. | ||
| Right, yeah. | ||
| You want to be Diana Ross? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I got to think they could get away with it, but it's... | ||
| I mean, it was interesting, the thing that happened with Louis C.K. and Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but Ricky was also getting... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I think Chris Rock was getting some pain. | ||
| Chris took a lot of shit. | ||
| Yeah, he took a lot of shit for that. | ||
| Because he didn't... | ||
| There was no blowback. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting times. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's probably a good way to end it. | ||
| We just did three hours. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It is interesting times. | ||
| I mean, it's probably the most interesting times of our lives in good ways and bad ways. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, we're on the front lines of something. | ||
| Something. | ||
| And you, you know, I don't know if you get enough credit for this, but you have like... | ||
| You pushed out into the space that no one even knew existed. | ||
| I honestly didn't even know what a podcast was. | ||
| I learned what a podcast was when I got invited to get interviewed on your podcast the first time. | ||
| It's awesome what you've created here. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| It's an accident. | ||
| I just stuck with it, stumbled upon it, and kept going. | ||
| I'm good at that. | ||
| Keep it up. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| You too. |
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