Melissa Chen critiques Singapore’s draconian drug laws—like the 2015 execution of an Australian citizen for carrying 28 grams—and its neoliberal authoritarianism under Lee Kuan Yew, contrasting it with U.S. free speech but questioning China’s state-controlled economic growth and suppression of dissent, from Huawei’s backdoors to Hollywood’s censorship. She warns of a looming Cold War, citing military expansion in the South China Sea and alliances with Russia/Pakistan, while her non-profit, Ideas Beyond Borders, fights ideological suppression by translating censored works into Arabic. Rogan and Chen debate media polarization—Chen’s past clickbait amplification vs. Eric Trump’s ignored GOP incident—and digital discourse’s loss of nuance, from Peter Boghossian’s "grievance studies" hoax to cancel culture’s classist hypocrisy, arguing that real dialogue, not outrage, drives progress. [Automatically generated summary]
The founding prime minister, Mr. Lee Kuan Yew, was probably one of the world's most famous modern statesmen.
He was resolute, like, you know, weeded out corruption.
He was kind of like very, very tight controls on free speech, but very much sort of neoliberal economic policies.
So it attracted a lot of foreign investment, right?
Because the highest income tax bracket is like maybe 13%.
It's very low.
There's almost no welfare, at least in the sense of how we understand welfare.
But it's a hybrid system, so there's a lot of zero capital gains taxes, zero state taxes, very easy to set up a business.
So he managed to attract a lot of foreign businesses to set up their multinational corporation headquarters in Asia, because the other alternative would be maybe China.
But China would probably end up stealing all your corporate secrets, your intellectual property.
But Singapore was billed as this is the country that protects rule of law.
Also English.
He kind of made everybody speak English.
It was the working language.
So if you wanted to set up business in Asia, that was your place to go.
If you want to attract investment, you have to say, okay, what's in my region and how can I have a competitive advantage?
So that was how Singapore really developed and just gained a lot of traction as a state.
Yeah, I try to play both sides, but the problem is like, you know, I think today there's a bit of a, if you're a girl and you're kind of funny, there's a bit of a sense that people really take you that seriously.
No, it's a really, well, it's kind of right up your alley.
You know, it's an organization that really tries to promote pluralistic thinking and, you know, basically exporting ideas to part of the world that it's often censored.
And you have narratives that are just not, you know, not exposed to, people are not exposed to the Middle East.
So, you know, we thought, you know, we spent like, what, $8 trillion on the war on terror?
And what was the result?
We marched in and said, okay, we're going to bring freedom and democracy to people.
But if there were no cultural institutions to kind of nudge people to understand why they should value freedom and democracy, is it really a surprise that it failed to take root there?
So that's what we basically, the organizations call Ideas Beyond Borders.
And it's kind of self-explanatory.
We basically acquire the rights to books that are not available there, translate them into Arabic for free, and then we just load it up on the library site.
Anyone can basically access that, download it.
And we do Wikipedia, too.
So like 10% of all Wikipedia is in Arabic, English Wikipedia.
And so we basically try to, you know, like, for example, George Orwell doesn't exist in Arabic, right?
So like, if you look it up, would you even understand what the word Orwellian means?
Some people are immune to THC. Some people get withdrawals too.
I've talked to people that get actual physical withdrawals from marijuana.
I used to be really skeptical about that, but these are people that I actually trust.
And they're like, wow, I would, you know, when they would go on tour, like if they have to go places and they didn't have pot, they'd get, literally, they'd get shaky, they'd feel weird, and then they realize, like, oh, this is, my body's withdrawing from THC. Apparently it's very rare, but common enough so that it's in the literature.
They really, they've documented people that have, like, a physical response to withdrawing from marijuana.
I just think it's part of the human spirit, you know, that if you say you can't have something, there's an old Arabic proverb, that which is prohibited is always wanted.
And whatever you kind of like, you just drive it underground if you try to ban it.
It's the whole spirit of punk rock, of like, F you to the system.
And that just lies in almost every human heart.
We actually see that with our books, for example.
A lot of books are actually transmitted on these telegram groups in Arabic.
Books that Sam Harris writes, Richard Dawkins, these kinds of ideas that are really super censored in the Middle East.
So that's kind of the gap that we're trying to plug right now.
It's that since books are not available in that language, I think there's this crazy statistic.
More books are translated between English and Spanish in one year than English and Arabic in a thousand years.
So I think the statistic when we first started, 10% of English Wikipedia was actually in Arabic, which means that every time, like, for example, let's say you're like, oh, Jamie, go Google this, right?
And you expect an answer.
It's just at the tip of our fingertips.
It's so baked into modern life now, we don't even, like, think twice about it.
But imagine if, like, you live in, I don't know, Saudi Arabia, and like, okay, let's just Google it.
10 out of every 10 times, one time, there's no answer.
Because the page doesn't exist, or, you know, it just, the word feminism doesn't exist in Arabic.
So you can't look it up, or secularism doesn't exist.
How do you expect people to break out of their mindset, of their indoctrination?
We're not saying this is a top-down thing.
You have to read this.
I just want to live in a world where being ignorant is a choice for everyone.
Because it's a choice for us.
Let's say right now you're dumb and basically you spend your nights watching The Bachelor or whatever it is.
And, you know, just the sort of like habits of a free mind are not really cultivated.
And also when you're taught, I mean, growing up, not to question things.
And in part, I understand because I think when you grow up in an Asian household with, like, you know, tiger parents, there's this sense of, like, you don't question my authority, you know.
So it permeates culture from a very, very young age.
And imagine, like, if you kind of grow up in that environment, you're going to internalize all those things.
And that's why it kind of, you know, It follows you over time.
So when you were in school, you're taught no questions.
It's not like here where it is like, there's no such thing as a stupid question, Chad.
But I understand what you're saying and that must be really interesting for you to go from this one fairly restrictive environment to a fairly open environment.
And did that shift that happened in you and being exposed to all these different ideas, did that spark this desire to help other people sort of expand their ideas and what they're exposed to?
I was that kid who was just like, you know, excuse me, but why do the dinosaurs, why is it in the Bible that the dinosaurs and human beings walked, you know, basically like days apart when like we know from science that, you know, it was millions of years and fossils.
But in class, it's just, you know, there's no culture of dialectics, of having dialogue and refining your positions.
It's that it comes from authority, right?
This is a very Confucian culture.
So it's like, well, I am your teacher, so it is the way it is.
And, okay, that's one level of it.
And if you, say, grow up in the Middle East, asking a question could be death, right?
If you even remotely, like, say in Saudi Arabia especially, remotely reveal that you might be having atheistic thoughts, that's death.
So it's like we're talking about different scales and degrees of censorship and consequences for that.
And I think when I met my co-founder, Faisal, I was like, okay, I guess I had issues with the country I grew up in.
But for him, it was – he ended up almost being killed by al-Qaeda for just like starting a blog talking about the importance of secularism and countering violent extremism.
Well, because when the US invaded Baghdad, and he was living in Baghdad at the time, and Al-Qaeda took over his neighborhood, once there was a void, Saddam was ousted, right?
And he was kind of like...
You know, roaming around and kind of telling the U.S. Army certain things.
Like, okay, you know, this is where Al-Qaeda is.
This is a cell.
My friend here has been radicalized.
And Al-Qaeda knew.
They put him on a hit list, you know, because he was not sympathetic to their cause.
And so he ended up on a death list.
His brother was killed.
Just horrible story.
Bridget actually recently interviewed him on her podcast.
And I get the sense that like, oh shit, like the consequence of saying what you think there is like, at least in my case, it was just like, hey, maybe I might go to jail in Singapore.
I think it's hard for people in America to really grasp what that environment must be like because we're so accustomed to this idea of freedom of speech and it's so ingrained.
I think, you know, as long as America still can celebrate Mavericks and not just tolerate them, but actually celebrate them, we're going to be fine, right?
The thing is that if it exists the way it exists in other parts of the world, it can exist like that here.
Like, the worst cases...
Of human behavior when you see, you know, any form of dictatorship or control or propaganda or controlled by the state or by industry, that stuff that you see in other countries is human beings in 2020. I mean, we would like to think that our Constitution, Bill of Rights, and all of our ideals and what this country was founded on is going to keep it from deteriorating like that, and most likely it will.
But the reality is, those people in Iraq are human beings in 2020, and they are living in a completely different way than we're living right now, on the same timeline, because things did not go well there, and they're stuck in this horrible situation.
Where they are controlled by these religious fanatics and they are stuck and there's not a lot that they can do other than escape.
And, you know, right now also like with the rise of China, they're also, you know, starting to use like basically some form of like electronic tyranny, right?
They're able to just really censor the internet in a way that's been unprecedented.
You can't access Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter.
None of these things that you and I can just open on our apps can be accessed in China.
So the way they just control information and now exporting those same tools to other authoritarian countries around the world, that part to me is dangerous because I think both Faisal and I came to America with this like, all right, this is the place that we can finally be ourselves and think for ourselves, right?
And we're starting to see that the whole world seems to be kind of going in the other direction.
So there was a shift in China and the shift was it was initially a completely communist society and now capitalism, at least in a monetary sense, is embraced.
So there's this giant shift in what China actually is, which corresponds to this huge growth.
Is it possible that in the future this shift could move on to other aspects of Chinese culture like discourse or the way they view the government or even some form of democracy?
But the way China has behaved now, you know, they call it socialism with Chinese characteristics.
That's the official name of this long-drawn game to, you know, institute market reforms, usher in riches for the middle class, lift a lot of people out of poverty.
But in a very controlled way, in a way that's like...
See, that's the thing about Asian culture that people don't understand.
It's that the...
There's a fundamental difference between the China dream and the American dream, right?
And Xi Jinping has outlined what he thinks is the China dream.
It's basically a top-down way.
It's a goal.
It's a national goal.
And basically what they're trying to say is that, okay, we're going to lift a lot of people out of poverty, but your generation has to make sacrifices.
It's not about the individual.
It's about building a strong China and implicitly also about, you know, ensuring that the CCP stays in power, the Chinese Communist Party stays in power.
But it's that you might have to give up, you know, personal sacrifices for the sake of China versus the American dream is bottom up.
It's about...
You're right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
And if you achieve a certain level of happiness, if you achieve, you know, it's all like, it's bottom up.
It's not centralized and it's not something that the Chinese government is kind of trying to stuff down your throat.
And China's willing to play the long game.
It is still a Leninist Marxist government.
Xi Jinping still believes in all of that.
That's why it's still so totalitarian.
But they know that the way to gain power in the world is to get rich.
And they did it on the back of trade with other countries through very unfair practices, actually, in many cases.
I think there are a lot of estimates of how much they've actually stolen from the United States in terms of intellectual property, corporate espionage, now even academia is being infected.
Huawei is really another apparatus of the main party, the government.
I really think that Huawei, with respect to the next era of the digital world, is the next Sputnik.
It is the Sputnik issue of our time.
We should be doing everything we can to not allow Huawei to have this big market share.
And the person who started it was somebody that had a lot of party connections to the general or something.
And they really operate in a way that's very opaque.
And anyone doing business in China will have to have connections to the government, especially when you're that big.
And because it's a government that has such totalitarian control over everything, You can expect that whatever information or that they would have to answer to the government, whatever the government wants.
If you're willing to put your privacy in the hands of an entity like that, you know, go ahead.
But know also that the Chinese government has enacted all these mass surveillance policies.
It's interesting because I think the Democrats were a lot more protectionist when it came to trade.
The Republicans and the Libertarians are always like, free trade, free trade, everything.
Globalize the world.
It was the whole Thomas Friedman position when he wrote about it in Lexus and the Olive Tree, that if we globalize the world, that you lift a lot of people out of poverty, your economic pie grows, but your politics shrink.
That was the idea, right?
No two countries that have McDonald's would fight a war or something like that.
That was his theory.
And in the case of China, obviously that didn't happen.
The part about the politics changing.
There was this quote by a Tiananmen protester.
He said, if the free world doesn't change China, China will change the free world.
Yeah, explain that because that was shocking to me because the way they were capitulating to China, I was, you know, I was a little stunned because it was so open.
So, Daryl Morey, who is the GM of the Houston Rockets, he tweeted out basically a little picture that showed that he supported the Hong Kong protesters.
And the Hong Kong protesters have been at it since July of last year, 2019. They have been protesting the incursion of Chinese control into their supposedly autonomous region.
China promised them that there would be two systems, one country, two systems after the handover in 1997 from the British to China.
They've slowly kind of eroded that in many ways.
And their freedoms have been kind of, you know, diminishing over time.
The straw that broke the camel's back was actually this policy that they passed, this law they passed that said that anyone can be extradited to China for trials, basically.
It was after a case that happened, a criminal case.
And the Hong Kong people knew that this law, if it goes in effect, basically gives the Chinese government legal right to Disappear or kidnap anyone and bring them for trial in some sort of kangaroo or show trial in China.
And that has happened.
So booksellers, it's always the booksellers in Hong Kong have been kidnapped because they were publishing these insider accounts like Dirty Secrets of the CCP whenever there was a leak.
Because the Chinese Communist Party is huge.
The Politburo is huge.
And so there was a bookseller called Causeway Books.
And they were publishing all these accounts from within the Chinese Communist Party.
And the owner of that bookshop one day just disappeared.
And he ended up in China.
It was basically a forced kidnapping.
And he was released.
I think he did his jail time.
And now he's setting up another bookshop in Taiwan.
But that law...
Basically, it would just have allowed China to do that legally this time.
So the Hong Kong youth were up in arms.
They were tired of all the ways that their way of life had changed since the British handed it over.
And in a way, they were kind of pining for the good old times, the good old times when they were under an English colonial master, which was one of those moments for anyone on the left.
And so Daryl Morey tweeted this out.
And of course, you know how big the China market is for the NBA, right?
Like all these players have contracts with them.
In fact, the Houston Rockets had a lot of contracts with the Chinese CCTV for broadcasts.
They also had like merchandising opportunities, sneakers that were made there.
And that caused a huge, huge outcry in China.
They were just like, oh, he's disrespecting us.
And they were able to force him to basically make a groveling tweet that said, oh, I'm sorry for hurting the feelings of The Chinese people.
And then like all the other, some NBA players actually came out and, you know, kind of took the side of the Chinese government.
Like, oh wait, who are we to, you know, they kind of like did this backpedal thing when they're so strong on other forms of activism here.
Like the NBA when it came to the North Carolina, the bathroom bill, you remember?
Like the transgender bathroom bill?
They were always on the side of the woke.
But then when it came to the China-Hong Kong issue, they stood with the biggest, the oppressor.
And then I think the recent, the Top Gun, the movie that's coming out with Tom Cruise too, partially financed by China, and they have these, like his jacket, people noticed that there was a patch that was like missing, and it turns out like that patch, it was like a, for some reason China was just triggered by it, and it was gone.
Well, I knew some people at Google while that was going on, and their position was, if we don't do this, they're going to copy our search engine and just steal all the intellectual property.
Or we can work with them and provide a censored version of Google.
And I remember sitting there going, this is almost like legalizing drugs.
Like, it's messy.
There's no good way here.
They both suck.
It sucks if they steal the intellectual copyright, if they steal the ideas and create their own version of Google.
It also sucks if Google goes over there and self-censors.
But I think also that if there's also an argument that if it was Google, at least maybe they have one tentacle in China, and so therefore it might be able to change things or keep a pulse, you know, have their pulse on something.
I think reciprocity is a good policy to abide by, right?
So if China can influence us, if you want, because the Chinese, they always use their market as like, we'll shut you out of our market if you don't do this.
Well, we should be doing the same, which I think is what Trump had tried to do with the tariffs.
We're going to shut you out of our market.
We're going to penalize you unless you open up some things.
There have been unfair trade practices for a while.
It's hard for us to understand what's really going on because the news will show this anecdotal story of a farmer who's upset because he's losing money because of Trump's tariffs, and then people go, oh, tariffs bad.
I think to have a really comprehensive view of it, it's going to take a lot of studying.
You're going to have to dive deep and really try to understand the economics behind it all, and I think most people aren't willing to do that.
If people got information, if there were ways to resist the encroaching tyranny, especially digital tyranny, in all forms, so it's not just mass surveillance, all this AI stuff, they're sort of collecting people's facial scans.
It's such a dystopian nightmare.
It feels like it's a science fiction film, frankly.
If, I don't know, unless the revolution kind of comes from within and enough people woke up, maybe it can be averted.
But otherwise, we're just going to, you know, it's going to be headed towards this weird bipolar world where there's a new axis and a new allies.
Yeah, when I landed in Logan and we were taking that drive to, you know, like at the time I was going to be living in Cambridge, we went by under these like highways.
I'm like, it's rusting.
This was kind of like just slightly before the big dig was done.
And the infrastructure was kind of broken.
The potholes, your health care, what the hell is up with that?
So it was a step back in material comforts for me.
And in Singapore, you know, if you grew up even middle class, like the 50th percentile family can afford a domestic helper.
So many Singaporean kids, in fact, 90 percent of all the kids I know growing up all grew up with maids.
Picking up after them, doing their laundry, everything.
Well, that's why wages are on average low in Singapore.
They're not that high.
The United States practices what you call efficiency wages, which is, you know, they kind of pay people a little bit more to extract a better performance, right?
You know, I tweeted maybe like last week saying something like, especially now we're in like political debate season.
I'm so tired of this whole left-right argument, like small government, no, big government, government's a problem, government's a solution.
It's about effective government.
And I think that's something that the Singapore government had really perfected.
It's effective governance.
It's not about the size.
I don't care whether this is a policy that came from the right or the left.
It's what works.
People respond to incentives, right?
And if you want to encourage a certain kind of behavior, there's carrots and sticks to basically encourage that behavior.
And so there are things that the government would do in a way that just would never fly here.
We treasure civil liberties too much in a way, which I personally came here for that reason.
But I'll give you a good example.
Social cohesion is engineered in Singapore.
So it's a very, very multicultural, multi-ethnic society.
You have Malay Muslims, Indians, Hindus, Chinese who are Buddhists, Christians, and, you know, Caucasians all living on an island city-state that's about 5 million in terms of population.
And how the government manages this multicultural project is that 80% of people actually live in public housing.
That's very high.
It's like a socialist thing, right?
Public housing that the government builds for you.
And each block has to mimic the racial demographics of the whole country.
So you don't have ghettos.
So you imagine like a housing state that basically mirrors like, okay, if the total makeup of the country is 60% Chinese, 20% Malay Muslims, it has to follow.
So you can't have basically an area like Birmingham in the UK where all the Muslim immigrants or something like Dearborn, Michigan or Minnesota with all the Somali immigrants.
You are forced to integrate.
It's a way to force people to integrate and have neighbors that are just not your own kind.
And that's how they've created this national identity that's very strong.
It's like everybody would love if the country, if all of our neighborhoods were integrated and everybody just got along with everybody.
I think I've always felt like that's one of the things that New York has a large advantage over Los Angeles is interaction.
People are constantly on the subway and walking on the streets with everybody of all different classes, all different backgrounds and I think that's really good.
Let me explain to people who he is if you didn't listen to the podcast that I did with him.
Daryl Davis is a musician and he was doing some shows at this country western bar and met some people from the Klan and through just communicating with them and being friendly with them over a period of many months he got them to quit.
They quit the Klan on their own.
He didn't even request it and then over the course of several years he's gotten more than 200 people to leave the Klan Leave neo-Nazi organizations and they give him their robes and their flags and he brought them all in here.
And he quit just from Daryl being this really friendly, articulate, brilliant guy who clearly didn't fit their narrative of what they thought, their racist depiction of what a black man is.
But they were kind of like a secular, so the mythicists believed that Jesus Christ was, like, he didn't really exist as a historical figure.
That's what a mythicist is.
But in any case, it's a secular group that put on a conference, and they've been doing that for years.
And they had, alongside people like Sargon of Akkad, Count Dankula, the guy who taught his pug to do the salute.
So these people all came for a conference, and so was Daryl Davis.
It was a bunch of people, but on the political spectrum, basically.
And it was about promoting discourse, civil dialogue, that kind of thing.
Andy Ngo was there as well.
Basically because, you know, when the conference was happening and Tifa kind of found out about it, they started protesting the conference.
They called the venue to basically, you know, get it canceled.
They said it was a neo-Nazi rally, Klan rally.
Ironically, you know, the greatest irony was that Daryl Davis was there, and he got tainted as well.
So I started calling this the political one-drop rule, where it's like kind of what happened to you.
If you are associating or talking to somebody that—or just a whole range of people, like normal distribution of people— You will be tainted by the most right-wing person that you're in orbit with.
That's just how it goes.
And that's what happened to Daryl.
So when we had the after-party to the conference, and Tifa was gathered outside the bar, the Pittman, New Jersey people, because Tim Pool was there too, the Pittman, New Jersey police had to station themselves outside of the bar, and they were kind of protecting this event.
It's ridiculous because You know, yes, you might find Sargon's politics objectionable, but why is everybody who's associated, you know, with the conference also lumped in with this?
And why is the response that this needs police protection?
No, this desire to shut down speech is very dangerous, and it's very stupid.
It's childish, and it's this thing that it gets...
It just gets reinforced in that culture, the culture of either Antifa or people that support Antifa.
They don't understand the consequences of shutting down speech.
You think you're just going to shut down speech and de-platform people that have marginally offensive views?
And the problem with that is, first of all, you close the door for them to be influenced in a positive way or for other people to learn from them being influenced in a positive way.
And second of all, the way to shut down ideas is not Stop the person from talking.
It's to combat those ideas with better ideas.
And then everyone around them gets to see the discourse.
When you have these debates online and people discuss these things online, it benefits millions of people.
When you shut that down, it benefits nobody but your cause.
And your cause is probably incorrect.
Your ideas are probably wrong.
In the case of Daryl Davis, you're definitely wrong.
He's not a Nazi.
So if you're shutting that down and saying these people are Nazis, well, you're wrong and you're censoring people that are trying to get to the bottom of things.
And getting to the bottom of things means discussing things and trying to figure out tenable solutions or comfortable middle ground.
That takes forever.
This is not like you have Christina Hoff Summers and she has this discussion and they pull fire alarms and yell that she's a Nazi.
She's a feminist.
You guys are crazy.
Everyone has to comply with woke ideology 100% with no deviance whatsoever and everyone has to take an impossible to pass purity test.
Why are you not concerned about the other way, right?
It kind of reminds me of—because I grew up pretty evangelical.
My mom was very religious.
It was that she tried to— It's that, okay, if you're a good Christian, you might get corrupted by bad ideas, so we have to ban, I don't know, like Harry Potter books are banned in my household.
It's like we had to ban all these because it encouraged witchcraft.
It's like, this is satanic, this is evil, and it has taken on this religious dimension, this liturgical dimension, because they're always so concerned that the corruption is just going, like, they're going to drift to the right.
I think they have an infantile perspective on ideas, and they're worried about people being indoctrinated.
They're worried about, but they're not worried.
Look, if you have someone talking And this person is preaching some ridiculous thing and someone starts becoming indoctrinated and gravitates towards that.
The real problem is that these people that are being indoctrinated are gullible and they're foolish.
That's the real problem.
And in your eyes, they're going in the incorrect way.
Do you really think that God thinks that homosexuality is some sort of a carnal sin and terrible?
If so, God made everything.
Why did he make homosexuals?
Please explain that.
What kind of a weirdo is God?
That he gives people this urge to be gay, but then he tells them, fight that urge.
And then he makes this comparison that's like murder.
Sometimes you want to murder people.
I'm like, okay.
I think that's different, because you don't want to murder people all day, every day.
I know a lot of gay dudes who want to fuck dudes all the time.
It's like God did a crazy thing to their system.
And for you to believe in God, but have a problem with that, to me, is ridiculous.
So now we're banking on these really ancient words that were written by people with no grasp of science, no understanding of biology, no understanding of the culture of the world, no understanding of the sheer number of these people and taking into perspective that you're literally dealing with I don't know what percentage of the population is gay, but it's a significant percentage.
So you're saying all of them are frying in hell.
Do you know how dumb that is?
That's really fucking dumb.
Like if they're your neighbors and they're just happy and loving, what do you care?
The goal should be a cohesive society where people are comfortably being around each other with all their differences and just nice.
It doesn't matter if you're gay or straight or trans or black or white or Asian or fucking whatever.
It shouldn't matter.
The individual should matter.
And the way we interact with each other, that should matter.
And we have to take into consideration that if you're going to live your life by these things that were written down thousands of years ago before people had any of these understandings of all the subtle nuances of humanity and all the differences that people have and now the biological understandings of why they have these differences, well, you're dealing with ignorance.
You're applying these ancient ignorant rules to a modern world where we have a vastly expanded understanding of human beings.
You can get married at a drive-thru movie theater.
I mean, that's really what it's like.
You can get married anywhere.
It's so dumb.
It's so ridiculous.
I feel like at this stage of civilization, we have to figure out what stuff we're going to abandon from the old days and what stuff we're going to keep.
And we've already abandoned a lot of things, right?
In Christianity, if you leave, they don't kill you anymore.
They got rid of some of the things during the Enlightenment.
They changed a lot of the aspects of Christianity that we associate today with more repressive religions.
Yeah, I'm a huge fan of the Enlightenment in general.
In fact, Stephen Pinker wrote that book, Enlightenment Now.
That was the first book we chose to translate into Arabic.
And then it became the...
Like, recently, there were a lot of protests in the Middle East, and we started distributing that book.
It was actually...
The person who was coordinating some of the protests that was telling us, we want to give this book out to the people, because a lot of these youth, they're really...
Jaded by theocrats in the region, by authoritarianism.
And they're like, you know what?
You know what our religion had never gone through?
Not the Reformation.
We don't want the Reformation.
We want the Enlightenment.
Because Enlightenment was what could constrain Christianity in a way.
One of the greatest intellectual achievements of Europe came out of there, right?
This idea of the social contract, of, you know, eroding monarchy, absolute monarchy, separating church and state, all these wonderful innovations and ideas came out of the Enlightenment.
And it was, you know, promoted this idea of, like, maybe people should be free to have their own conscience and think differently.
And that's something that really, really is needed in the Middle East.
Well, I think the way that your organization is going about it is probably the best way to get books translated, get ideas translated to people that maybe weren't ever exposed to these concepts before.
So, you know, pluralism, I see that as, you know, that's what we're doing, promoting pluralism, this idea that you can have all these competing narratives.
And so you asked me what my culture, you know, like when I came to America, like how, what was my experience just moving here?
Yes, it was very freeing and liberating because I felt like I went to a place that was pluralistic, that tolerated all the weirdos.
And then, maybe in like 2014, you know, things started to change, at least on campus.
When pluralism wasn't tolerated, you started to see the rise of this sort of more intolerant, you have to kind of kowtow to this intersectionality and critical race theory.
So that was an interesting experience and I think was ultimately very detrimental to the actual project of liberalism.
What you're claiming to be preaching, your ideology is actually working against it ultimately behind the scenes and you just can't seem to see the pattern where it's going.
You can't stop people from discussing things and say that you support free speech.
That's not free speech.
One of my favorite things with Ben, with Ben Shapiro, is watching him talk to those people.
He is one of the best at taking questions and just decimating these social justice warriors.
He's great at it because he's logical and very intelligent.
So when these kids are saying these things that they just learned last month in their gender studies class and they're yelling it at him and he breaks it down.
It's just one of my favorite things.
But those kind of discussions are important, first of all, so that these kids realize that, hey, there is this brilliant right-wing guy that can decimate your argument really quickly.
He talks quickly, too.
He'll smash your argument.
He's very smart.
And so you need to know that your argument sucks.
It's like having bad kung fu.
You know, you're running around the world thinking you're going to kick everybody's ass because you've never really been tested.
And everybody who you're training with says your kung fu is amazing.
And then you go into a gym where someone doesn't believe in your kung fu and fucks you up.
That's one of the culture shock things for me when I first moved to America.
It was that, you know, I think a lot of American kids were told, like, participation trophy culture, a lot of them were told that they were the best, like, you know, like, Tommy, like, you know, there's nothing you can do.
Tommy, you're amazing.
Yeah, you're just, like, so amazing.
And I'm like, do these people?
It's like American Idol, you know?
We used to get the seasons in Singapore, too.
And it's like, these people can't sing.
And that's actually why they're putting them on.
They're awful.
And nobody told them, like, are you telling me that, like, they've been telling their friends, oh, I'm practicing, I'm going on American Idol.
Did nobody tell them that, bro, like, you should just be singing in the shower?
That's the undiscussed racism in academics, is the way Asian people are treated when they're applying for major universities, particularly for Harvard.
Like, they literally, you have to score higher if you're Asian, because there's so many Asian people that get in, they made it more difficult.
Um, you know, I don't know if it was done specifically for that, but I think Harvard has a, again, monocultures suck in general.
So, you know, if you're gonna, even for me, like, I was coming to study in America, like, you know, 10,000 miles away, right, from the place I grew up.
I don't really want to go to school without a lot of Asians.
Because I could have just stayed there, frankly.
But I was looking for something that wasn't a monoculture.
You have to just expand your mind, right?
So at the end of the day, the issue with Harvard is that it was taking federal money.
And if you see Harvard as a stepping stone to a career, to a future...
It is unfair.
It is kind of unfair if they were penalizing you based on race.
That's the hard part to prove.
Whether or not this was personality or race or some sort of other thing that they were selecting for that happened to correlate with race.
So is it possible that they were just trying to enhance the way people communicate on campus, and so they sort of emphasized personality and emphasized social interactions, and in doing so, they penalized Asians without being aware of it?
People are very uncomfortable to talk about differences in group outcome because we have to kind of make everybody the same or else there must be some sort of systematic thing.
But I think that Asians, because they're so hardworking and because they don't complain, people get away with this stuff, where they get away with discrimination against them.
He's done enough to make people notice, but I think the African-American community is not happy about some issues that He talks really well, and he's handsome, and he's a veteran.
Well, I mean, he also aligns himself with people at Cornel West, who is brilliant and has some amazing ideas about that and looks at it from an accurate and educated perspective.
I think a lot of the wokeness is a sign of a cultural shift in the right direction.
Less racism.
Less homophobia.
Fill in the blank.
All the things that trouble us about evil behavior.
And even greed.
Corporate greed.
All these things that trouble us about the influence that money has on politics.
And Bernie clearly stands against all that stuff.
And I think that when you see this woke stuff, even though it goes amok, you have to look at it on a spectrum.
It's like the crazy Antifa people who demand 100% compliance with woke ideology or they'll hit you in the head with a bike lock versus people who want single mothers to be able to have free education and free healthcare and give them the economic support that they have to raise their family.
And hopefully give their children a chance at achieving a successful, comfortable life in this world, versus suppress them, versus keep them in this fucked up system that just throws them in the meat grinder with everybody else.
Treat this country like a community.
Like, try to do our best to help the people that are in a disenfranchised position, because there's so many.
try to do our best to in some way Economically uplift all these deeply impoverished sections of our country That's those are the good aspects of woke ideology See all woke ideology isn't just the you need 78 different gender pronouns And you know have to comply with actually fringe probably it is fringe, but it's also fringe right?
There's nothing wrong with being conservative fiscally.
There's nothing wrong with being conservative in the way you dress or the way you behave.
It's like when you go far right, then things get ugly.
The outside edges on both parties are the mess.
Most people, reasonable people, if they could have conversations with folks, Even if they disagreed on certain things, they'd find themselves somewhere in a comfortable Discussion where you could at least sort through the ideas and try to figure out why you think the way you think and why I think the way I think, how we disagree, and are you right or am I wrong?
Like, I want to know, you know, and most people don't.
These kind of conversations, like trying to figure out if the person who opposes your philosophy or your perspective is right and you're wrong, it's very uncomfortable for people.
You know, we need more people that – and the thing is if you – like people have gotten mad at me for having people on the podcast that are far-right people, particularly in the far past, like many years ago.
And one of the things that's hilarious is when they said his show has had this person, that person, this person, that person, all the negatives.
Yeah.
And you're talking about 1,500-plus episodes.
And you'll list like five or six in a row as if that defines the show. - Well, like I said, this is another example of the political one-trot rule.
It's been very comforting for me to see how many left-wing, intelligent, well-read, educated people actually enjoy watching the UFC. I've talked to so many of them, like, you're a fan!
Like, oh, alright!
And then they want to have these conversations with me about fights and about this matchup and that matchup.
I'm like, wow!
This is really interesting.
Like people that you would never have associated with being a fan.
The reason is, what happened is, in the 1950s, when American GIs were in the Philippines, they introduced pool to the Philippines, and they started playing under really bad conditions, because it's very moist outside, humidity, the tables roll really slowly, and so they developed a lot of really good skills under bad conditions, and then they would go to good conditions.
And they also have a gambling culture.
So there's a lot of gambling involved in pool.
And pools everywhere.
They have all these outside cafes with terrible pool tables.
And these people just got really, really good at pool.
And to this day, some of the best players in the world come from the Philippines.
Like when guys would see guys in tournaments and they would have to play a guy from the Philippines, they'd be like, oh, fuck.
Some of the best reporting that the New York Times really does is on the international stuff.
They've sent journalists into these areas in Xinjiang to see what's up.
They will be surveilled by government officials and things like that.
Or even the ISIS files where this reporter, New York Times reporter, Rukmini, had gone into Baghdad and she just went in and collected all these documents by herself.
And then they came back and they analyzed it and they reverse engineered how ISIS was running their entire operation.
This is really good journalism.
And when you kind of focus on the shit that's going on in other parts of the world, it gives you a lot of perspective.
You realize that a lot of woke stuff is actually very America-centric.
And if you had zoomed out, you would see that this wasn't a problem.
The thermostat issue of thermostats, office temperatures being sexist, for example, because they're too cold for women, that's not a problem when you have seen how the women in Iran, what they have to deal with.
And if we just did a rotation in the newspapers where everybody from the lifestyle or culture desk has to do a stint in Saudi Arabia, something reporting from the – like maybe they'll just – maybe they'll have some perspective on this.
I don't know if you have to be an insider or an outsider.
I think you have to have financial freedom so that you don't worry about someone taking away your ability to make a living so you suppress your own thoughts.
A lot of things have to be aligned circumstantially to have financial freedom in the first place.
But a lot of that does come from even working within the institution.
A lot of people who have, you know, huge financial back.
And that's why somebody, I think it was Sarah Hader, who tweeted something like, the one thing that's not really talked about is the classist implications of cancel culture.
Because it's going to affect the lower class more drastically.
If you don't have the money, if they're cancelled, there's a huge class implication to this.
I think we should not give the right legitimate reasons to be complaining about disparate coverage, right?
So one of the things that Eric Trump tweeted yesterday was, which I didn't even know happened, like apparently a van was driven into a GOP tent or something at one of the primaries.
And it got no coverage.
I didn't even see it until...
I don't know.
But there was a story about this.
And Eric Trump basically tweeted saying that, imagine if the labels were turned.
I'm so wary of sort of dogpiling on this stuff now.
I think when I first started on Twitter, too, I was always inflaming or retweeting something that was like, oh, look at this super woke person that's on the fringe.
And I'm like, no, no, maybe I shouldn't.
You know, amplify that signal.
Maybe this really is a French in that, you know, I'm just kind of making it seem like it's a bigger issue.
Because I notice I fall into that trap sometimes.
Like, there was this one story that came out, I think, when Apple released the new iPhone, there was like, New York Post was like, you know, iPhone 10X or something was cited as, was criticized as being sexist.
And apparently because the phone was kind of big, they expanded the dimensions, and so it doesn't fit into women's hands as neatly as the old version did.
And then I was like, so I tweeted that angrily, like, yeah, of course, everything's sexist again, like checks, notes, iPhone's sexist.
And then I realized I was kind of part of the problem, because when I looked into this whole issue, it was literally just like two Twitter egg accounts.
And so an article was written based on what somebody who's anonymous said on Twitter that it was sexist.
So I used to say the same thing, because, you know, you would see medical journals reporting cancer rates are going up, and it's like, cancer rate, is that really the case?
Are we having more and more, you know, incidences of cancer?
Or is it that our detection methods have gotten better?
Like, diagnostics have gotten better, and we're just able to catch it at a much earlier stage, so it's kind of inflating the case number.
And, you know, it seems, it seems, I'm so, you know, buoyed by the fact that in the last few months, it seems like mainstream culture, even comedy is starting to push back.
You have more and more people who are saying, okay, okay, enough of this stuff.
Sam Kinison, one of his greatest bits ever, was making fun of people starving in Africa.
Yep.
It was a bit about those television late-night commercials where you're sitting at home, cooking, eating your dinner, and Sam Kinison's bit is a real classic.
You know, it's like, would you help?
Would you please help?
unidentified
And he's like, why don't you help?
You're right next to him.
And he goes, why don't you, instead of sending him money or sending him food, he goes, send him something like me.
Send him someone who's going to go down there and go, hey, we just drove 5,000 miles with your food and we realized we wouldn't have world hunger if you people would move where the food is!
Theories are like – theories are – you probably could – You could do a post-mortem on a joke, and you could accurately dissect why it worked.
I don't think you could predict how a joke will work, because too many jokes are dependent upon the personality, the irreverence of the perspective, cultural context, time, yes, timing.
The personality of the person doing it is giant.
Kennison always had this little smile and this devious smirk and he could get away with more fucked up shit because that was his brand.
That wouldn't work with Stephen Wright.
Stephen Wright who has this sort of absurdist perspective and non sequitur one-liners.
If he had a joke like that, it wouldn't work.
But with Kinison, with the yelling and the anger, and he was fat and ugly, and he's always angry.
That's like, you know, we talk about marriage and getting divorced.
You felt bad for him, right?
If Brad Pitt was out there screaming about getting divorced, he'd be like, that beautiful fuck.
He should shut his mouth.
He's beautiful.
But Kinison is like five feet tall and fat and balding, and he's got a beret on.
He's the best version of it because all he is is a musician who is a very eloquent and articulate person who had the patience to sit down with people that believe in a really fucking stupid thing.
And just through his mere existence and who he is as a person, he changed the way they thought.
Yeah, it's almost like you're creating intellectual false flags.
You're propping up any divergence from this rigid ideology, some horrible fucking thing that needs to be attacked and squashed and poisoned and lit on fire.
The best way to communicate with someone is never yelling at them and screaming at them.
The best way is to listen.
Listen to their ideas and wear them out with logic.
Wear them out with long conversations.
Like, the best way for two people who have A separate view of the world.
Put those separate views of the world together.
Sit down.
You tell me your view of the world.
And particularly if we can keep it in a narrow scope, we're both educated about what we're talking about and we're not talking about something when the other person has really no data to draw from.
Have a conversation.
Sit down.
Talk her through.
It's possible.
We can get back to doing that.
The problem is we're so accustomed over the last 10 years to communicating digitally.
We're so accustomed to blaring our ideas out and then checking to see who agrees every five seconds, checking our likes and checking our comments.
This is a non-social way of interacting through social media.
Social revolves cues.
People sitting apart from each other, looking into each other's eyes, being in the same space as each other.
That's how humans are designed to communicate.
That's how we evolved to communicate.
So we're basically spending the vast majority of our time debating issues in an unnatural way.
It allows you – I think Steven Pinker once wrote about this.
It was like the difference between common knowledge and shared knowledge.
Common knowledge is like we both know something to be true.
But shared knowledge is that we know – I know that you know that I know something.
So it's recursive.
And that creates a very different environment.
Like, you know, imagine if you are the one lone atheist in Saudi Arabia, and there was no way for you to reach other people.
You would think you're completely by yourself, that you're the only one that thinks different.
But in a world where you can reach out and you can read other perspectives, all of a sudden you realize that, wait, I know that.
I'm not alone.
I know that you know that I know that I'm...
And it changes how you feel in terms of just ideologically, just safety.
And it creates real change.
One of my favorite quotes of all time was in this manifesto written...
I can't remember the name now, but it was about a free internet.
And he said, the problem is that we cannot separate the air that makes wings beat from the air that chokes.
I was like, it's so poetic because you remember these cases of these girls that were escaping Saudi Arabia and then she got locked up in Thailand and she was saying, I'm trying to escape from my father.
I don't want to wear the hijab anymore.
I want to break out.
My family would kill me if they find out I'm, you know...
I don't want this arranged marriage or whatever.
And the only reason she can reach the outside world and that activists, you know, lawyers heard her story and could help her and she got asylum in Canada is because of social media.
So it's like the more we want to regulate these things, the more we're making it hard for a lot of these people who live in still close societies because the only way to get in is through the internet.
Especially if you've actually turned the light on them.
Everybody's flawed.
And especially if you only highlight those flaws outside of the context of whatever the fuck they were talking about and the conversations they were having and what was going on.
You could make a very distorted perception of someone by just snipping and piecing together.
They still are, because a lot of those things, you get through your Google News feed, and you have to click through to the paywall if you want to read it, but the initial titles, which gets you to click the link, and then you realize it's paywall.
You don't just sign up without reading anything.
You go there because there's an article that's interesting to you.
Listen, I gotta wrap this up, but I appreciate what you're doing.
I think it's wonderful, this idea that you're getting these books to these people and converting it, converting the languages so that they can understand some of these great works.