Pete Dominick, former Sirius XM host, critiques corporate media’s manufactured divisions and lack of transparency, comparing it to cable news’ conflict-driven ratings game while questioning political tribalism’s role in polarization. He advocates for systemic reforms—like universal pre-K, healthcare, and drug regulation—to reduce violence and inequality, citing Japan’s gun safety and Scandinavia’s work-life balance as models. Dominick dismisses ideological censorship (e.g., Twitter’s TERF backlash) but regrets his own combative online habits, preferring Rogan’s curiosity-driven dialogue. Both agree society must prioritize mental health funding, climate adaptation, and equitable infrastructure over performative outrage or punitive measures like demonizing migrants fleeing failed crops in Central America. [Automatically generated summary]
If they did, I think I'd probably be in pretty good shape.
I mean, like...
It's a long story, but the show I was doing was pretty special.
It was really helping people, and we were enlightening.
It's kind of like what you do here.
I mean, that's why I love what you do here.
People learn, they get enlightened, they get entertained.
You make people better, better people.
Through this show.
The contribution that you make, that's what I was doing.
We were three hours every day talking about issues, talking about struggles that people are having, and it was rewarding and challenging and satisfying, and I had total editorial control, so, you know, I can't, I really can't complain.
If you're a network, you have to have a million people listening or watching to keep the ratings up to sell advertising.
You're only making just so much money.
If you launch your own thing the way you have and so many other people have, you're gambling with everything, which is what I'm doing now with podcasting, which is really an original thing to do, and a very difficult way to make money.
But if you do, if you're good, then you control it all.
They control all of the, in our case, in media's case, the promotion, the marketing, the legal.
They hire producers to work for you and so on.
And so there's a certain level of comfort there.
But at the same time, you've got to answer to these people.
You've got to deal with these people.
And frankly, you know you're more talented than a lot of the people that you're working with.
And you have all these ideas and these inspirations, and they're either going to say yes or no to them, and when you're on your own, you just put the wheels on them and go.
Well, I remember last time I went to Sirius offices, went to the studios, I was upstairs, and I was like, there's too much money here.
This costs too much money.
There's too many people here.
You see these fucking people wearing suits?
I'm like, what does that guy do?
I guarantee you, he doesn't do fuck all.
That guy doesn't have anything to do with whether or not this show's any good.
And all you have to do is press a button and get it out there.
So there's all these people making decisions about, well, we got marketing and this and that, and we're going to make sure we hit the right demographic.
I've worked at CNN, I worked at MSNBC, I worked at Fox.
I feel like that's corporate media or corporate America, where you have to wonder how much work and how much value each person is bringing to whatever their job is.
Oh, Dude, then you have to think about selling yourself.
For people listening to this podcast regularly, I'm sorry, I apologize for repeating myself, but the way I look at everything, and this is something I've done over the last, really cultivated over the last 10 years, but really specifically focused on over the last couple years.
Is I look at thinking as bandwidth.
Say if you have a hundred units of thinking, whatever the fuck you're involved in to have this negotiation or sell yourself to this and sell yourself to that and talk about this and pitch your ideas to this person and that person, that's taking away time that you could be working on your other shit.
Yeah, I don't have any time for that.
I have zero time.
I allocate zero bandwidth for selling myself, zero bandwidth for doing other people's shit.
Conan Smith, he's one of the few guys I met in this business that I really always liked.
And he didn't seem like he's part of this business.
But he'd always be like, what's next?
And I'd always say, tomorrow's show, because every three-hour live show, we talked about everything, from tax policy to depression to environmentalism to anything, politics, parenting.
And so it was really challenging to do that and to prepare for all these interviews with these smart people.
And then I wanted to go home and be with my girls.
Like, I had an amazing work-life balance, and I feel like most people never find that.
They never understand it.
I found it, and I kept it for a really long time, which is what's scary, to not have that.
I've been working my ass off since the day I left...
Sirius XM went right into a meeting and have been on the phone ever since.
Reached out to you and everybody I know.
I said, hey, what can I do?
But it's not balance.
I haven't seen my girls.
I haven't seen my garden.
So I'm excited to hopefully get back to that, to some semblance of that.
But most people don't have that.
And I think finding...
Because you get so ambitious, especially as a guy, I feel like, if you're a breadwinner especially, it's just work, work, work, support your family.
If you've got a family, there's ego, there's money, and you just keep going.
But then you realize there's got to be enough.
In my opinion, you have to have an idea of enough.
much comedy as I could but that that definitely fell by the wayside because the show it was up at 4:30 in the morning I was you know done by 2:00 and then it was I turned it off well the good thing is you can do your show if you do a podcast you could do it from wherever you live right you can do it You can either rent an office space or you can do it in your fucking garage.
You can do it anywhere.
Especially when your kids are at school, you can do it.
You can do it on your terms.
You could bank a couple of them, do two or three in a day, and then take days off.
But the most important thing, I think, is that you stay independent.
We were just talking about that out there.
Because there's going to be a bunch of bozos that want you to join their network.
That's why I... When I say I'm not that good at it, it's because I feel like it's a distraction.
It seems like a very...
As a creative person, it's interesting.
It's an interesting outlet, and there's a lot of creative people who are great on Twitter, but I don't think in terms of what's a great tweet, or I should tweet right now, or put this up on Facebook.
You know, comics, artists...
Do this because they love to create.
They love to perform.
They don't love to promote what they're doing.
Nobody really likes that.
Some people do, and some people are great at it.
But it's usually not why you get into it.
At the same time, if you don't do it, I mean, there's a lot of great comics who don't promote themselves.
And there's a lot of bad comics, if we're talking about comedians, any performer, who are great at promoting themselves.
Because they spend so much time promoting and they're trying to get famous and trying to get successful as opposed to doing the work, writing the jokes, performing.
I don't want to disparage SiriusXM, not because they gave me a good, you know, exit deal, I guess, but because it almost seems inauthentic because they gave me five contracts, which created an amazing life and amazing community.
Like, I'm so grateful to what I had there.
But yes, certainly...
The problem, I suppose, is you're behind this firewall.
Like this morning, one of my best friends lives in Australia.
And he's like, yeah, I listen to Joe Rogan.
I listen to Rachel Maddow's podcast.
They don't have MSNBC there.
They can't get Sirius XM necessarily.
You can't, I guess, online.
The point is, if you're behind that, you're mostly in the car.
And I think what I'm trying to say is it's skewed to like 50, 60-year-old affluent men who are in cars, which...
I was psyched to have every one of them, but I would love to have a lot of young people.
I'm staying out here with my cousin, and his son is 18, and he found out I was doing the Joe Rogan show, and he's flipping out, but he didn't know what I did at SiriusXM.
I hate to say this because I'm thankful that Sirius put on Howard and Opie and Anthony and all these comics they had on over the years, but you're better off without it.
It's not where the future is.
The future is not in satellite radio.
It's just not.
It sucks.
You go under tunnels, it cuts out.
I mean, it's dumb.
It's a fucking dumb way.
I mean, you can download an entire three-hour show in seconds.
If you have a podcast, you get it on Spotify or whatever, you download the whole fucking thing right before a plane ride in the airport.
Right.
You're in the airport and you can go, oh hey, this new Artie Lang podcast.
Beep.
Download it.
While you're fucking waiting for your gate to be called, you have the podcast, you get on the three-hour flight, you listen to the whole goddamn thing.
What's interesting is going, I'm really curious to see what you think, but going from live radio and constant interaction with callers, which I love.
You can do that.
To podcasting and just being there alone with the mic and No, you can do that.
I'm told I can.
I'm told I can go live.
I haven't figured it out yet.
I got a great group of people that are working with me.
Amazing people have come out of the crowd.
The greatest thing has been how people have shown up.
Like people from my life, like 15 years ago, 20 years ago, phone just ringing, text just coming in, I know I haven't taught you, and saying kind of just what you're saying, you're better off, you know, one door closes, but more importantly, just people talking about how you change their life and how they can't wait to see what you do next is an amazing, amazing feeling. just people talking about how you change their life and Like if you do that with one person, your cup is full.
To have an audience of people doing that for 12 years, it's overwhelming joy and satisfaction to be able to look at my daughters and be like, No matter what happens next, what I got to do there and what I did do there on so many tough issues and helped so many people, that's it, man.
And I appreciate you saying that, and I'm on that same wavelength, and I'm a guy who thrives in these situations.
I've taken advantage of every room I've been in.
I've never been the best comic.
I've never been the best at anything, but I've always been gritty.
I've always worked as hard, if not harder, than anybody.
And now it's interesting because I've never been in this type of situation with a family.
You know, that's different when you're single and you're young.
But I was working that hard and making no excuses and back then doing no drugs, not drinking, everything.
It was just about my career and being a good person.
I thought if I was a good person, that mattered.
And come to find out, being a good person was the best form of currency.
Everybody competing and trying to kill other people in our business or in any other business, to me, I have no interest in that and no attraction to those people.
All I want to do is help people, not think, just for purposes of altruism, not to be virtuous, just because, same reason you are.
Being kind is the way to be.
Not putting a knife in someone's back.
And when the show ended, it was amazing because people started tweeting things that I had done that I never...
I thought it would become public.
They were private things.
They weren't for...
And it was just like days and days of people...
I used to do a segment every week called Stand Up with a Veteran for veterans.
Like him, I got a big, a vast network, and technology has gotten so much better in terms of getting guests, but, I mean, I just, you gotta wonder how it's all going to work, and how do you, if you're gonna go live, there's just so many things it seems to be thinking about, how it's gonna...
I think that one of the things, I've been listening to your podcast for years, but not every episode, not religiously, but since I lost my job, I was like, let me just start listening to Rogan.
And what's really interesting about you, in my opinion, is you are the perfect example of somebody that everybody wants to put into a box.
And you can't.
It's what's wrong with everything in our country and our conversation.
It's whatever people think that you are...
Everybody that I tell that I'm doing this show, they have an opinion of you.
And when I listen to your show...
And here's the main takeaway I get from your conversations is that you try to find the positivity in everything.
You're like the most positive guy.
Whatever you think about any issue or any idea, any opinion you have, you're always being so positive and so helpful.
And it has been, honestly, in this like trying time, the other thing my dad just I get fired, my dad had a heart attack, and then a week later, he's on blood thinners, and he faints and bounces his face off a counter, rips his eye open, goes into surgery.
Now he can't see out of his eye, and he's a ski instructor and a cyclist, and he's a race car driving instructor, and so I'm dealing with that, dealing with my job, dealing with my family, listening to you, and you And a handful of other people just bringing as much positivity to every scenario and situation.
And that's my nature too.
But some days, it doesn't matter who you are.
You've got to peel yourself off the ground.
But I can't let my daughter see me sweat either.
Let them see me vulnerable, but they're not going to see me sweat.
I feel like one cool opportunity is to travel to different places and find the most interesting, articulate people and do gigs there, do stand-up at night, spend a couple days there interviewing the most interesting people in whatever town that you're in.
Because as I told you, I'm thinking very seriously now about also running for Congress.
And I was talking to his, I think, deputy chief of staff, a guy named Ari Ravenhoff, great guy.
And I was telling him, I was doing your show.
And he told me that after Bernie Sanders did your show, everybody was recognizing him.
I'm like, really?
Like, he reached a whole different demographic talking to you than he ever had before.
Because he's mostly on those cable news shows.
He's mostly on terrestrial or, you know, radio radio.
But when you do these, what do you even call this now?
Non-traditional, alternative media?
Might as well be mainstream, but the point is, when you have a long conversation with Bernie Sanders, and he's not like up there, you know what we have to do, all that shit is annoying.
You've heard it before.
He sits down and has a real conversation with you, and everybody's like, oh man, that guy's making a lot of good points.
Well, one of the things about something like cable talk shows or news shows or any of these political arenas is that there's a lack of real interaction with the general public in terms of real conversations with people.
You have a host who's wearing makeup, who's got spotlights on him, and there's a microphone in front of him, and he's talking to his other people, and there's cameras pointed at them, and no one really feels like this is not a normal way of people talking.
I used to be on with that guy, the most pleasant guy in the world.
But what he's doing, it's a North Korean situation.
Lou Dobbs, it's like state media.
Every night, it doesn't matter...
You know, he shall not be questioned kind of guy.
Worship the president.
It's like, what are you doing?
That's not even...
But that's the...
I once got into this long, drawn-out argument with Chris Cuomo, who I like a lot.
But I was talking to him about, you know, listen, man, the difference between TV and radio, it's simple.
On radio, you can have a long-form, you can have a 20-minute to 2-hour conversation, and it's real, and you get a lot done.
On TV, you can have a 5-minute conversation.
There's so many guests that you have on your show, that I have on my show, they're way more, they have the ability to be thoughtful and nuanced and make points.
They can't do that on cable, and now he's doing a radio show, so good for him.
Well, that's what I was getting at, is that this separation between the people and then the just unnatural environment that they're in, no one can relate to it.
What they can relate to is two people just talking to each other.
They can't relate to it, Joe, but they also think, because they're conditioned to, that if it's on a network, this person must be an authority and must be intelligent.
But I'm here to tell everybody.
I was talking about credit default swaps in the financial industry.
I have an associate's degree and came up in the New York City comedy clubs.
Like, I really didn't have any business talking about that.
But the thing is, I could sound really smart for three and a half minutes on anything.
Get me to minute five.
I can't go that deep on certain issues.
And I shouldn't be an authority on it.
But just because I'm on cable news with a jacket and a shirt and I'm this guy, people are like, oh, okay, well, I'll believe this guy.
Yeah, and then also the interjection of commercials every seven minutes.
The things that they're doing on debates is the same thing they're doing on these other cable talk shows where they're trying to encapsulate these things into these very quick five-minute sound bites.
And you can come in thinking so often one idea about the issue.
And you leave thinking something completely different because you have these very smart people debating with an excellent moderator who doesn't let any bullshit, and you really learn a lot.
No commercial breaks, and you can, you know, listen to it.
It's like if you want to get to know someone, it's a one-on-one.
Because even with three people, there's moments where you have something to say, and then someone interjects something else, and then you lose your point, and then you don't express it.
And then the other person's talking, and you don't know when to talk, and then you find yourself being a little bit more assertive in the way you're talking because you're trying to get your point across.
You feel like I'm not talking enough.
And then if there's four people, you're fucked.
The most ridiculous thing they ever do is when they have those seven people panels and one person just starts fucking chiming in and screaming out loud and they talk over people.
Right, but it's a bullshit game because as you said earlier, the reason why Kamala Harris or anybody else takes a step backwards is because one stupid moment.
I mean, you can also talk just about the ego of the people who are running for these offices.
And they don't seem to have an understanding of the idea of ego and what it means and how they should try to separate from it while using it.
Like, once you get into politics, much less entertainment, and you get really well-known and famous, you start believing things about yourself that aren't even remotely true.
But in the New York State Democratic Party, there's always been all kinds of issues.
So I met with a whole bunch of really smart people about running for New York 17, which is the district that I live in.
Like, the day after I lost my gig at Sirius, the woman who had been representing that district for 33 years announced that she was retiring.
And I was like, well...
I got nothing going on.
And I've always thought about running for office.
And let me seriously consider it.
I reached out to a whole bunch of people from all different walks of life.
Congressmen that were in office, that had been out of office, campaign coordinators.
I talked to Chris Cuomo.
I talked to a whole bunch of people.
But there's...
One person told me that if you want to win, regardless of your party affiliation, you have to, there's a certain special interest group that you had to promise you wouldn't interfere with and make sure they got an envelope of cash.
And I'm like, well, I'm not doing that.
I will tell everybody and everywhere I go about that.
Do you think, I agree with you overall, but I mean for politicians, for me to run for office, and you see some stand-up bit I did, and then my opponent's playing that out of context.
So there was actually all the allegations, but the photo, you know, perception, politics is perception.
And and whatever people see, it's different than what they hear and what they believe.
And so that's the point.
That photo was harmless, but it looked bad, just like any joke I said or anything that I've said out of context.
So I just feel like and then I thought that, you know, I they could destroy me in any future earning potential that I could have.
I just the second episode of my podcast, I interviewed Tim Ryan, you know, he is.
He was running for president because I was asking, what does it take?
And it's first of all, you got to run.
You got to raise a million dollars from people and individuals you don't like.
You don't want to be affiliated with, but you have to.
You've got to make them promises.
The whole system is so filled and corrupted with money in almost every district and every state, regardless of the office.
How does a person, I'm a fairly affluent guy, I'm a white straight guy, whatever, but I don't know how I can afford to apply for a job for a year and pay my mortgage.
So I want to do it if it looks feasible and if I don't have to take care of my family, my parents, not to mention pay my bills.
But you have to be an independently wealthy person, which sucks because it makes it much harder for regular people, there's plenty of exceptions, to run for office.
In the few instances where someone did make up a source or even plagiarize, which are the two worst things you can do as a journalist, they never work again.
Or they don't work for a very long time.
You know, Johan Hari...
He's been on your show.
He's been on my show.
He was accused of some, I think it was plagiarism, and it took him a really long time to win his integrity back.
And that kind of thing, the point is, that kind of thing ruins you.
And so I wouldn't come here and do that even though I don't I wouldn't call myself a journalist, but I would want, because of what you're saying, because you're smart, I'm very skeptical too of people and their source and what their interests are, and a lot of people really want me to run for Congress for a lot of different reasons, but mainly because they think I can tap my network of wealthy people and, you know, they can make money.
Because you could be the healthiest 75-year-old in the world, did everything right, and then shit can just shut down because you're 75. Your body's just old.
Yes, I have a chief, but not a president of 330 million people that is an outsized influence and a bully pulpit, and then we have this reverence for them.
And this defense of them, or this attacking of their every move, their every character, and it's just such an easy thing to dunk on them, and it's just tiresome to me.
It's unhealthy for our souls every single day, especially, like, the thing that you miss about pre-Trump, whoever it was, Republican or Democrat, like, remember when you used to have weekends?
I don't have any experience with what happens when you die.
I really have no idea.
It would be very interesting if there was some sort of dimensional travel thing that happens to the spirit or the soul or whatever this concept of consciousness is.
I... Yeah, I have an example of, I mean, I'm sure you have a billion of them, I didn't mean to cut you off, but when my daughter was like three years old, we're visiting family, people I don't really know, my wife's family, and his five-year-old son goes over, my daughter's just looking up at the TV, this little three-year-old girl, and he comes over and he just clocks her, knocks her over.
And we're all like, oh my god, what?
And the dad comes over and just starts beating the shit out of his five-year-old.
And I just start screaming.
I'm like, that's why he did it!
That's why he did it!
You learn what you live.
And children learn what they live.
But what you're saying, when you train, when you exercise, are there feelings, are there emotions coming out?
When I'm running or doing yoga or anything I'm doing, it's strenuous.
I just had this conversation with Ben Westhoff, who's on here before you, and the way I described it is I think that a human body has a certain amount of physical requirements.
Your body's a system, and this system is designed through nature and natural selection and...
Hundreds of thousands of years of being human beings to have issues that come up and to be physically prepared to deal with those issues, whether it's a neighboring tribe invades you or an animal's trying to attack you or you're just trying to hunt and gather food.
All those things are built into our system and it takes tens of thousands of years for that DNA to shift and change and become something different.
So we have a certain amount of physical requirements that we're just born with and it's different with every person.
Some people have less, some people have more.
I tend to be on the high side.
And I'm a different person when I exercise.
I'm a different person when I get time to sleep correctly and eat correctly and exercise.
I'm different.
And I like that person better.
That's a nicer person.
I like that guy better.
So I try to be that guy as much as I can.
But I have a million different people living inside my brain all the time, bouncing around, fighting for dominance.
That's another nice thing, not having to be live every day and not having to know every single step of everything going on, because you realize that you're a very small minority of people.
Because, well, I get very emotional when someone pings a truth.
That's what happens to me.
I'm like, Jesus, I can't believe he just said that.
My brother, who's my moral compass, my older brother, is this radical, like, ridiculous, radically different person.
He's like...
I said just what you said right before I came over here because the problem with you running is that do you really buy in to this corrupt system?
And I think because I'm such an optimist and such a positive thinking person, I've convinced myself and that I do know a lot of people in Congress, know them personally and intimately and I know a lot of people that work in government that I really admire.
But the system, it's not the people as much as the system, but I also think that the way, I don't want to talk about it in a way that exonerates the public.
Like, we have to not be apathetic.
That's what my show's always been about.
It wasn't always a confusing title, Stand Up, because I'm a comic, but it meant stand up for something.
It meant care about something.
You don't have to be a full-time activist, but don't be...
Don't be apathetic.
The United States of apathy.
We can't sit here and blame the systems that we are complicit in.
And they said, no, we're going to, you're ours now, now behave.
Because they had so much more power and leverage.
And then human beings stood up.
Now they're doing it in Chile.
And now they're doing it in Iraq.
People are protesting and they're getting shot.
The greatest thing that I was ever a part of in media was probably, well, there was a lot of good things, but CNN and SiriusXM's coverage of the Egyptian revolution.
Same thing in Iran and the Green Revolution in 2009. What's interesting to me about this whole Hong Kong thing is that they're being introduced to the government of China over the last few decades.
That this was something they were separated from.
And then all of a sudden they become property of China again, essentially, right?
And so then you're seeing this thing where they become accustomed to the British way of things, the original Hong Kong way of doing things, and then things shift over.
It's a really unique moment of protest because it's very rare that you see the actual government of a country shift the way it has in Hong Kong.
I think if you studied the British colonization of the world, there would be a lot of that.
I think that's what we're talking about, literally, because it was Britain.
And then, I can't speak to the specifics of the history of that, but what you're bringing up is a fascinating question that I'd love to get to the bottom of, and there's probably a billion people who would be so good on it.
This is what my brother and a lot of people who I respect and admire, but maybe I'm not courageous enough to challenge our system more, want to see here for something.
And the other thing is the resistance to what you're saying.
Resistance is toxic, too, because people think, no, it's important that you take a side.
It's important that we de-platform Nazis.
They say things like that, and you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, who's a fucking Nazi?
Stop!
Look, they're real Nazis.
And the problem is you start calling everybody a Nazi, and then one day you meet a real one, and you ran out of words.
You fucking cried wolf.
These aren't Nazis.
And when people feel like you're treating them unfairly or talking shit about them, and this is a problem we have both in the right and the left, they fucking double down.
They dig their heels in, and they go, fuck that other group.
And watching it is so sad, and being a part of it, When we are is the problem and trying to have the answer to that the solution to that is to try to listen to each other and to try to understand because I completely agree with you that they if they don't feel respected you've lost them completely on we can't people enjoy it like a team like when the Celtics win people get pumped when the Republicans win people get pumped you know it's like when the Democrats win people
get pumped it's their team I had a friend of mine, a comic, who said, you know, we gotta win the House, because if we win the House, we win the White House.
I'm like, what are you talking about?
What is we?
What is we?
Are we in this?
Are you running for something that I don't know about?
And then one day, he got knocked out by this guy Mike McCallum, the body snatcher.
He was another world champion, a bad motherfucker, and he hit him with a left hook to the body and a left hook to the head, knocked him out cold, flat on his back.
I couldn't believe it.
He was my favorite boxer, and he just got knocked out, and I felt so bad.
I couldn't take it.
I put my running shoes on, and I ran out of the house, and I ran for like a fucking mile.
And I was just so worked up.
I was probably like 17, I think, somewhere around then.
16, 17, I don't remember.
Maybe a little later.
18 at the latest.
I turned around and walked home.
I ran like a mile and a half, a mile, whatever.
I turned around.
I just walked home.
I am never going to get upset about someone I don't even know losing like that.
But that was a team thing.
I was on Team Curry.
And people really literally do that with fighters.
I feel like I have a litmus test that I feel like I fall victim to the criticism that you're laying out on the planet, on environmental stuff.
Like I feel so panicky and so anxious about that.
And I care so much about it.
For me, it is religious.
It's a spiritual connection to nature that it brings me so much joy to be in it and around it and professing it.
And to see us destroy it by the way we're living.
I'm one of those people that feels guilty about I rail against single-use plastic, which is why I want to advocate for you guys to get a big tank and everybody has thermos.
When you look at that Hong Kong thing, I don't think we need a revolution.
I think we need a resolution.
I think we need to relax and come to this understanding that most of the stuff we fight about is because we're tricked into this tribal way of thinking.
I don't mean tricked by some overlords.
I mean tricked by your own biology.
We have a natural inclination to form teams.
And we have a natural...
Because there's only two real ones.
I mean, you could be one of them fucking dudes who's only into independent music and you always vote Green Party.
But for the most part, there's two parties, right?
When it comes to, like, national politics.
And when we think about...
Whoever the fuck's going to win, whether we think about what the real important thing is the economy or protecting our borders, or you think the real important thing is the environment and stopping global warming.
We've got to do something to engineer biodegradable plastics and make them mandatory.
Whatever thing becomes your side, and you can make arguments for both sides.
The problem is people then subscribe to whatever Ideas are in that party.
But when you said, we're doing well, or relax, we're doing well, I react to that with working with and advocating for all these anti-poverty organizations.
And I think one of the ways that you help it is by having these conversations.
So people listen, and then it resonates with them.
And maybe it only resonates to a certain degree.
And maybe they slip away from it a week later when they're drinking and hanging out with their friends.
Or they're not exposed to the ideas very often.
And when they do, it's not as effective as it would be if they were around people that were like-minded.
But that's just having these conversations, you know, you're affecting, like right now, we're affecting a lot of different people's thinking, right?
They're listening to this and they go, a lot of interactions could have been different on both sides, depending upon what you did.
Like sometimes you run into someone and they're douchey, but if you just turn around a little bit, say, it's all right, brother, you know, I'm just here.
And then they relax and they go, oh, he's okay.
But if you ramped it up and they ramped it up more, you can go, that guy's a piece of shit, right?
Well, yeah, he acted like a piece of shit, but maybe part of the way he acted like a piece of shit was the way you dealt with his initial weirdness.
Because sometimes people are just fucking weird, and sometimes people come off douchey.
He killed a guy when he was 18, went to prison, served 19 years, and got out and wrote a book.
And redemption.
How did he get there to murdering somebody?
And how did he become the man that he was?
That's...
The way to measure a man.
And so he did the worst thing.
So when you say you have this idea about any number of issues from race to energy issues to guns to abortion to feminism to all the stuff it's like well Where did he start?
Who were his role models?
You know, there's so much data about the zip code that you're born into in this country determines where you'll be when you're 18. And it's so accurate.
It's so hard to get out of certain places.
I heard you and someone talking about that.
It was Dakota Meyer, who was amazing.
I loved that whole interview.
It was fascinating.
Really interesting guy.
Yeah, he was awesome.
And nothing but respect for that guy.
But talking about America as, like, this place where it's the greatest place to get ahead, like, it's not.
I'm with you if you're talking about impoverished neighborhoods that have a history of crime and violence, because they don't fix that and it doesn't change, and it's really hard to get ahead if you're not...
But in other places, if you're in a nice city and you're in a nice neighborhood, it is difficult.
But compared to the rest of the world, it's far, far easier.
That's how I determined, by the way, in a thoughtful conversation, not only are you a liberal, not are you a liberal or conservative, you know, pro- or anti-government, it's how do you think we should spend our tax money?
Where should we spend it around the world and domestically and in terms of, and it's like, we have this huge defense budget with these weapons that will never be used, and Russia beat us with Facebook, and North Korea hacked into Sony.
Let me ask you this when it comes to defense, because that's always an interesting subject.
There's two arguments, right?
There's this pro-military argument that is you have to have a certain amount of military might all over the world.
We have to be the world's policemen because if we're not, someone else will.
And we are protecting America by doing this and we fight them over there so that we can be free over here, right?
That's the pro-argument.
The anti-argument would be you could do everything that you need to do to protect us with less money.
And you could take that money and inject it into these inner cities that are impoverished and crime-ridden, and you could, in my words, that's why I always like to say, if you want to make America greater, what's the best way to do that?
Well, have less losers.
Have less people that are losing the game because they've got a shitty roll of the dice and the bad hand of cards when they're young.
Good luck with trying to figure out how to kill terrorists and do it live on television while the president's watching from the fucking Oval Office or whatever really happened.
I'm just happy people enjoy it, but the conversations that we're not having, we're not having enough of, is face-to-face, one-on-one like this.
Everyone's distracted.
You can't get to know people over soundbites.
You definitely can't get to know them through text messages or little tiny snippets of a conversation that they're going to have before they cut to commercial.
I mean, it's the idea that Facebook and your social media is what you want people to think you're doing.
Here's my family in the Bahamas.
But if you had a video of me melting down, just smoking weed and feeling my heart thumping and sweating because I'm having a panic attack, that's your internet history.
It's interesting as hell, but it's terrifying because the idea, like, I always get so worried, especially that one, because it's like trail running's my favorite way to run.
There's this amazing organization, Children of Nature Network.
Everybody should discover and support and look up the work of Richard Louv, who's just written a new book about relationships, you'll love it, with animals and humans.
And he wrote a book called Last Child in the Woods that is my Bible, changed my life.
And kids are afraid to go outside because there's ticks, there's Lyme disease, there's parents afraid that there's kidnapping.
And also, it has to do with how you interact with those people.
And we've all been guilty of being loaded up in one way or another, interacting with someone, and it doesn't go as well as it could have gone if you were in a better place when you met that person.
Do you buy into the argument that the more westernized or the more advanced society gets, the population actually starts to decrease?
Because there are certain cities that they point to where that's on the trend.
I think Tokyo is one of them.
But the idea is that as people, as a civilization advances, people decide to pursue careers before having children and less and less people have children.
And that there's some sort of a direct correlation with the amount of children people have versus the amount of technological advancement is around them and the amount of education and the level of the city.
You could have examples of people who came from absolutely nothing and had a gentle heart defect and overcame it to become, you know, a CEO of a McDonald's and then have to step down because they had an affair.
Yeah, I mean, a lot of it, and nothing, but certainly I have nothing, but I look at someone who's started a business and ran a business from a dry cleaning store to whatever they're doing.
My dad owned an insurance agency in Syracuse, New York.
That's what my dad did.
And my mom was a public school teacher, and it's like, so I saw the public and private sector.
The idea of someone coming along, the millions of years of life on this planet, and the hundreds of thousands of years of being humans, and the 300 whatever almost years of the United States.
If someone said, we're going to start a new country now, and we found a new spot in New Zealand or Greenland or something, be like, fuck you.
The idea that somehow addressing your PTSD as a combat veteran is somehow seen as weak.
It's like, no, if you're taking on your worst nightmares, that's strength.
And by the way, how do we measure strength?
I mean, it's always about what you can lift, not the pain you can endure, which is why I think if you're measuring strength by gender, women can endure more pain.
So that's one measure of strength.
But more importantly, that's whatever you overcame in life.
That's the measurement of strength, not how you can force yourself.
I mean, I'm a small guy, so that's a small guy mentality.
I talk my way out of every, you know, my dad's like, just, when you walk into that class, you make friends with the biggest kid in the class, and I've done that my whole life.
I think for some people, they have a bad chemical makeup.
I mean, this is just a fact, just like some people have thyroid cancer, right?
Some people have, there's a missing link.
There's something wrong with the way their brain's firing, and this is just a biological issue, because we're, you know, we're not, There's situational depression.
So these medications, like right now, dealing with my career transition and thinking about running for Congress, dealing with my dad, that to me is not a reason to take an antidepressant.
No, you work.
Now you just hit it hard, and you do what you do, and you don't make excuses, and you just work.
I have a family member who did everything, including heroin, and it's so great to hear Artie on the show, because I called up Artie when he was doing heroin to ask him how serious it was.
He goes, let me ask you two questions.
I go, alright.
And he goes, does he have a good life, either a job or kids or anything?
He happens to be one of the most talentedly funny people that he just can't fail because everybody wants to be around him and be with him and see him perform.
Drugs in this country, whether they be antidepressants or the opiates, that's something we should come together around as well.
And we're medicating, you know, I think far too much.
I'd love for you to talk to my friend, Dr. Aaron Carroll, who's written so many, writes for the New York Times, he's got an amazing YouTube channel, beg you to have him on the show because he talks, He's a research expert, and there's so much to talk with him about in terms of all this stuff, supplements, fasting, and nutrition, and you absolutely love him.
To pretend that your brain works like my brain and that I know for sure that if I was inside your head I would be thinking the way I think out here, it's impossible.
Sitting in a car, you've got to try to offset that if that's something you have to deal with because it's really hard.
I think that having right now in America, in many communities, there are not enough resources for the people that are living there in terms of healthy food and access to education and healthcare.
If someone was in that situation, if they're a parent in Newtown, I think a lot of those parents...
I mean...
This guy who was killed in the Charleston church shooting, I don't say these maniac's names into microphones, but the white supremacist wanted to start the Civil War, shot all those black people, Obama went down there and sang Amazing Grace.
It's lovely.
Remember that when we were to recover from horrible disasters with the president singing Amazing Grace?
And we're, you know, the greatest role models of actual, you know, Christians behaving Christian, by the way.
And I think that you can forgive.
I think that that doesn't have to be a religious tenet.
I think that you can forgive and you can rehabilitate.
But I won't buy, you know, in the hypothetical situation, obviously I would, by the way, I would defend my, I would kill anybody who ever threatened my family.
The most horrific shit is when you find out that the DA withheld information that would lead to the exoneration of someone or that they're unjustly incarcerated.
That's one of the most horrific injustices in this country, and obviously it's got a racial component to it, and it's horrible, and the justice system is obviously, that's a really interesting thing to talk about, and constitutional law is a fascinating thing for people studying.
This idea that we argue about the Second Amendment, like, let's let constitutional lawyers, I think, discuss a lot of those things, and we should all understand that and be curious about it, but I would, our Constitution is also silly.
Like, let's remake everything.
Like, let's have that conversation.
There's so much better that we can do.
Have a serious conversation about what kind of guns and bullets people can have.
Not that they can have them or that they can't have...
Like, that's the conversation.
That's where we should be right now.
Everything gets regulated.
Everything...
There are trade-offs in healthcare.
There are trade-offs in everything, but Americans now are so divided, they want everything that they want.
That compromise is something that we don't do as Americans, much less in government.
That's preposterous.
The Democrats that demand purity or anybody that is doing that, you don't agree with me, you're wrong.
Hold on!
That's not...
You don't have any relationships with people in your real life like that.
Like, my wife and I don't agree on a lot of stuff.
What I'm saying about the gun thing, the most fucked up part about the messiness of the gun thing is that even if you made guns illegal, even if you said you can't have any bullets, you'll all go to jail, there's so many guns.
You're not getting them all.
It's not possible.
There's more guns than there are people, which means there's more than 300 and what, 30 million guns in this country alone?
I mean, I don't think it necessarily makes sense that people would act out in a certain way that's horrific because of video game, But if they were already inclined to violence to begin with, maybe they already had a fucking short circuit, and then they get desensitized to violence in movies and violence in video games, does that have an impact on them?
I don't think that there's much past the conversation about accessibility to guns that can fire that many rounds that quickly, killing that many people.
I don't think we have to get rid of those somehow.
So if you wanted to do that without changing the Second Amendment, like you just have a buyback where you just offer people the opportunity to make some money by giving their guns up.
Like when you read it, it's so interesting because we're going back in time trying to figure out how people in 1776 thought about guns and whether or not that applies to us.
Because if it doesn't apply to us, we have to think on 1789. If it doesn't apply to us, we have to think, well, then who gets to decide?
unidentified
We get to decide as a society on any of these things.
One of the reasons why it's so interesting to read these things We have, for whatever reason, when things get written into stone or carved into stone or written onto a document, like the First Amendment, like the freedom of expression, we have it.
And the whole gun thing is a racket to make money.
That's what that is.
It's a way...
You sell fear.
Like, are you...
I mean, home invasion...
Is any family's worst fear?
But it doesn't happen very much, nor does kidnapping, nor do a lot of these crimes that our generation of parents is helicopter parents terrified of everything, not letting their kids go outside.
I have a Chevy Volt since 2012. I have solar panels.
I'm trying to be the change I want to see in the world.
If I'm coming off as...
I'm a complete hypocrite in all of it.
I eat meat and I do all kinds of things.
I think having a thoughtful conversation about guns and why they're a huge part of our culture and not another culture, the way that other cultures and countries regulate their weapons, the problems that they have.
Our problem, sure, we should talk about mental health, but...
The problem with that conversation that people don't want to have is everything costs money.
Really recently, Trudeau announced something that was going to severely limit, this is very recent, severely limit the type of firearms you could have, including things that can have multiple rounds in chambers and certain types of guns that are used right now as hunting rifles, since there was a big pushback about that.
Why certain ammunition has destroyed the inside of the body and unsurvivable.
I think public health officials have argued, certainly pediatricians all argued, this idea that you can't ask a parent if they have a gun in the house because the gun lobby...
Is against that because they're building this conspiracy that the government is going to track your gun?
That's terrible.
Your pediatrician has to ask you, do you have a pool?
Where do you keep the poison?
Where are the guns?
Because God forbid, you're not responsible enough or educated enough to know that that kid might accidentally get that gun, and it happens all the time.
There's a rule against that.
Yeah, public health officials and doctors and physicians are pretty much on the same case with this issue.
These guns and mental health, I think, experts too.
I don't know.
Maybe there's a large disagreement.
And if there is, I'm happy to be wrong about this or any dumb shit I've said.
What you're saying is that these public health officials would be able to make these guns less lethal by banning certain types of ammunition because it's destroying people and checking to see if the parents know if they have a gun or where the gun is or how it's treated, how it's locked up.
What I'm saying to you is that I think it's disingenuous to say that public health officials have an answer to why we're having so much mass violence.
I don't think anybody has an answer.
I think we're terrified.
And I think we could say it's, if they didn't have guns, they wouldn't be able to do it.
And you're right.
And I could say if these people weren't mentally handicapped or filled with, I shouldn't say handicapped, mentally compromised, filled with all kinds of demons.
I think a lot of people, I don't know, maybe this is their culture, maybe this is a specific instance, the type of people that would get a job at Microsoft.
Go back to the gun argument, argue for the four-hour work week and any other type of benefits that civilized nations around the world, especially in Scandinavia, have.
Studying that culture is really interesting and what they do.
And you realize that there's any number of things that you can do to help people.
I mean, they've done studies where they've taken cameras and they put them on opposite ends of the street and they can tell by how fast people walk and they can tell by how many syllables they say in a minute exactly the number of people that are in that city.
There's a direct correlation between large groups of people and hostile behavior, fast thinking, moving quickly, talking quickly, being impatient.
All those things contribute to a less healthy society.
When you deal with a small country that has less people, you have less of that.
But it still doesn't change the idea, even if we disagreed on that, that looking at how other nations' societies – neighborhoods, by the way, forget about that.
Don't make it about America.
What's this city over here doing?
What's this community doing over here?
Mayors are working together really well.
Really effectively to solve problems in cities.
They have these unions all the time, these coming together.
And they're doing a lot of good work.
Communities can copy other communities, but if you look at...
We so often talk about our national system, and that's generally what we're talking about with many of these issues here.
You look at Scandinavia, people are happier there.
And I'm happy when someone like Boyan Slott comes around that has a real legitimate solution that could be implemented at large scale and could eventually be a gigantic solution.
Not only that, but a source of resources.
We could take this plastic and this plastic, instead of being a detriment, can be used to work at certain things.
Maybe the money could be used from the sale of that plastic and it would go to charitable causes.
Maybe it could actually be a positive net benefit to the earth.
Well, I study a lot of ancient history, and I'm really interested in these civilizations that they find, like when, you know, like, for some reason, like a storm takes away some water and moves to a different place.
They find some structure underneath the water they didn't know existed before, and you realize, like, oh, Jesus, there was a city here at one point in time.
This happened several times throughout history.
Yeah, I mean, that's a good one.
That's a volcano one.
But there's a bunch of these...
Places that used to be, like, during the time of the Bering Land Bridge, right?
The water was much lower, and that was only, like, what was that?
But it's about the history of wildlife and Native Americans and what changed and that these people who migrated here from Siberia, how long it took them to do it, and that it wasn't even migration.
We think of it as migration, but it wasn't.
They were just following food.
And it was a slow process over thousands of years.
But we think of it as like they're going across a bridge.
There's something about a campfire and you're staring up at the night sky and you're cooking dinner with your friends and just knowing around for miles, man.
But there was something about the people that you would run into along the way.
It was disturbing.
They didn't have enough contact with people.
You know how people get rickets and they get scurvy when they don't get vitamin C? Well, people get some weird shit when they don't meet enough people.
When you're just out there in the woods with your uncle and your cousin and that's it for your whole life and then all of a sudden you're 24, listen to me.
Okay, but it shows the consequences of these young kids that are getting involved in these screens.
You think that's any different with us as adults to be indoctrinated into this world of social media and constantly on our screens?
They're showing a direct correlation, particularly with...
Young girls are very vulnerable because of the pressures of social media, people talking shit about each other, isolation, bullying, and you're seeing a big uptick in self-harm, big uptick in suicide.
That smartphones, who every fucking kid who's 11 years old and up now has a smartphone, and every kid that you're looking at from before had a giant decrease in suicide.
I don't know if going to the woods is going to help it.
It's going to make you feel a little bit better while you're in the woods.
But I don't think it's going to, overall, there's a problem having these goddamn devices where you're constantly addicted and checking it, and you're getting these little dopamine hits.
Yep, Jonathan Haidt wrote that with, I think, or he wrote a book about that with Lenore Skenazy, who also advocated that this is the problem with, you know, parents being worried about their kids too much.
I think it only connects to processors because I don't think they could really measure innovation that well because things come along like splitting the atom.
There's things that come along that just fucking throw a monkey wrench.
I don't know if there's a benefit that we're not quite aware of.
Because I think one of the things that's happening is people are way more aware of virtually everything.
We can complain all day that we have less freedom in terms of our ability to joke around about things, and people are more restrictive with language, and all these things are true.
But isn't it interesting that this is something that's happening, right?
So there's a pushback.
So we're feeling this rejection of certain types of words that we always like to use.
We're feeling this rejection with certain behaviors that a lot of, specifically, men took advantage of.
We're seeing this giant change.
Well, why are we seeing this thing?
This giant shift is because of social media and these technologies that we're talking about that create problems.
So the question is, will this ship right itself?
Are these corrections eventually going to lead to a better society?
Are we going to be more understanding of each other once we get over these initial growing pains, which is what we're going through right now as a culture, as a society, getting accustomed to these devices?
And these devices and the connectivity that they have.
Are we going to get more responsible with them?
Are we going to be nicer to each other through it?
We're going to recognize as we get older that, hey, you know, being shitty to someone on social media is just like being shitty to someone in person.
Yeah, it's a really important set of questions you just asked about social media's effect on us.
I would pinpoint one just for people to watch this Intelligence Square debate that you would love, because given your conversation that you have with people, is, I think it was, the motion was, is Twitter specifically good for democracy or does it create democracy?
And I was on the side of, yeah, it does, and I would cite examples like Egypt and even China and different places where people, and Iran, where people use Twitter to rise up.
But the argument was, It's worse because on Twitter, a lie travels so fast, so rapidly, and it's so believable that it creates more damage about things that didn't happen and conspiracy theory than it also, you know, it's a little of both, obviously, in terms of it creating democracy.
You would think more speech...
On Twitter, it's equal, creates more democracy.
How could you argue with that?
Until you hear the other argument, which is fascinating about how much disinformation travels and how effective it is.
Now, imagine you're a truck driver, and imagine that's all you've ever been, and you're 60 years old, and all of a sudden, they come along and say, hey man, we have these self-driving electric trucks that never crashed into anything.
We don't need you anymore.
And you don't have any skills.
You don't have any other way to make a living.
The angst that you feel right now, imagine that squared.
And so my experience, it's only relative to me, but you have to widen your perspective to understand some people are struggling to just get toilet paper.
And understanding that, and your point though about the truck driver, his skill set is narrow.
And maybe his education, his grit, maybe he doesn't know how to network.
He doesn't know how to use the internet.
But he did a valuable job, and if he's going to lose his job at 63, I don't want to live in a society that worked hard, a guy who worked hard his whole life, and by the way, he's paying more as a percentage of his taxes as a truck driver than most of these guys in the financial industry, which is a complete injustice.
You know, tax on your work, how much work you're doing.
This guy should not have to go struggle and learn a new job.
But I think we should have all possible options on the table because what's happened in our lifetime from 1994 with, you know, give or take a few years, which is the invention of the...
Commercial version of the internet, right?
With all those AOL and all those things that people used.
It basically all started sort of blossoming around 1994 with mass use.
She's a woman who's a TERF. I've talked about her too many times this week.
Trans, exclusionary, radical feminist.
And she doesn't think that trans women...
I hope I'm not paraphrasing here.
She don't think she doesn't think that they should vote and speak on women's issues and that real that women are women who are biologically women and then you have a trans woman who dominates women's issues.
She thinks it's fucked up and her this is her perspective.
but only social media companies have the power to decide whether or not a person gets to express themselves to an unlimited amount of people like that.
Well, it's an interesting- And if you tell them that based on your ideology, which most people don't agree with, based on your ideology, they have said enough that something that merits you taking away their ability to express themselves, then I think you open up a real discussion, much like the Second Amendment discussion about the First Amendment, that what are we doing here?
What is this?
And what is free speech?
And is this a town hall?
And Jack Dorsey from Twitter believes it's a town hall.
He thinks everyone should have the ability to express themselves.
But that, like everything, is fucking complicated and messy.
Nadine Strawson, who I think used to be something at the ACLU, wrote a book about speech and about how in Germany you're not allowed to fly the swastika and they have censorship on speech.
And that it's not effective for any of the outcomes that it's intended for.
This lady was really into guys shitting in her mouth.
She was speaking in German and they were translating it to English.
She was talking about all of her experiences and when the first time a guy did it and what kind of diet she likes a guy to follow when he shits in her mouth.
And I'm like, okay, this is not pleasant.
I'm not enjoying this, but honestly.
And this is kind of a dumb thing to talk about, right?
I think when you talk about how to communicate on your podcast, it's often one of the best things you do.
I've learned a lot from it.
I've been listening to you talk about trying to understand people and listen to people you don't disagree with, and I'm just sitting there beating myself up.
I'm like, I've got to be better at that.
And the idea that I would get, you know, that I was too argumentative today, it's like, oh man, I'm sorry.
Some people pretend they don't, but it's really because they're bored with what they have to do all day, so they don't want to think.
But if you have some time and you're a curious person, you like to hear other people thinking too, and you like to hear someone who's thinking either in a way like, oh, I would think about that too, or in a way like you hadn't considered.
Like, oh, this guy's making me think.
Or this woman's got an idea that I never considered.
Or this guy's got a solution that I never thought was possible.
I try to measure – I think measuring intelligence is one great definition I've heard is by how good the questions are.
Like, are you curious?
I've tried to instill and engender my daughter's sense of curiosity about everything rather than saying, you're going to do it because I'm your father and I said so.
Like, I'm going to explain to you why that's – and try to, you know, create critical thinking skills.
That's how I measure intelligence.
How good are your questions?
You're really curious.
I mean, that's why the art of the interview, learning something, which is what I'm definitely trying to...
That's what I did for 12 years in SiriusXM.
That's what I want to do with the podcast.
Getting people who are a billion times smarter than me.