July 2, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:02:32
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| You can ride an elephant in Thailand. | ||
| I rode an elephant in Thailand. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| There were actually healthy, happy elephants that were well taken care of because it's an elephant rescue. | ||
| So they're free. | ||
| They're free elephants. | ||
| They wander around. | ||
| They literally came out of the mist in the jungle like a movie. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| And they're treated really, really well. | ||
| So, I didn't like the riding part. | ||
| I thought that was kind of fucked up. | ||
| But they don't give a fuck, man. | ||
| You are literally like a hat to them. | ||
| Yeah, they're huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Strong. | ||
| But they came over and... | ||
| The whole idea was you pay for this experience with the elephants and in that they rehabilitate these elephants and they've released many of them back to the wild. | ||
| That's good stuff. | ||
| Because they don't need to be trained to be able to just eat vegetables and vegetation. | ||
| They just do it. | ||
| So they came over and you were introduced to the elephant that you were going to take care of for the day and then you start feeding it sugarcane and they love you. | ||
| So you're feeding them and you touch them. | ||
| They're super gentle. | ||
| The most gentle creatures. | ||
| And then you actually clean them off. | ||
| You wash them off. | ||
| So there's like this grooming thing. | ||
| And then when you go to get on them, they know you're trying to get on them. | ||
| So they actually lift their leg up like this so that you can step on their leg. | ||
| And then you step on them and you climb on top of them. | ||
| It's difficult. | ||
| It's hard to ride them. | ||
| But they literally don't give a fuck if you're on them. | ||
| Because you're so light to them. | ||
| And then they make their way through the jungle. | ||
| But it was pretty cool. | ||
| That's nuts, man. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty cool. | ||
| It was pretty cool. | ||
| It was um... | ||
| It's humbling, you know, but that's the only way I'd want to be around them other than in the wild. | ||
| Like, I get bummed out at zoos. | ||
| I do too. | ||
| I mean, that's my story, right? | ||
| So I've been yelled at for that. | ||
| That's like the story of 2020 is getting yelled at for everything. | ||
| But I wrote, when I was a kid, you could ride elephants at the zoo. | ||
| And so, I don't know. | ||
| People got mad at you for that? | ||
| I mean, I told the story one time and people like lost their minds on me because I guess it's not okay now. | ||
| It was like a cost of dollars. | ||
| They weren't rehabilitating elephants or doing anything good with it. | ||
| I was like seven, though, so I don't really remember it. | ||
| But it's like times have changed. | ||
| Yeah, but they're mad at you for something you did when you were little, which is funny. | ||
| That's one of the things that's going on now, is people are retroactively getting canceled for things. | ||
| Yeah, like they did when they were kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I mean, it's like everything's a permanent stain on you. | ||
| There's no growth. | ||
| You can't become a better person. | ||
| What do you think that is? | ||
| Like, what is the... | ||
| Desire that people have to do that. | ||
| Like, where's that coming from? | ||
| Well, you know, there's two ways we could talk about it. | ||
| We could talk about the psychological side of it, which is like a moral purity thing that's going bonkers. | ||
| Or we could talk about it in terms of the ideas, the theory that's fueling this. | ||
| And that's all about... | ||
| It has this idea that comes from French philosophy, that words and ideas and thoughts and patterns have traces that don't ever really go away. | ||
| And so if something used to be associated with something bad and we still use the word or even if you pretend that it was the case and you still use the word, then it carries this negative trace. | ||
| So the moral panic and the psychology side of it is fueled by this kind of like stupid idea that words always have to mean kind of what they meant in the first place. | ||
| Are people aware of that though? | ||
| I mean is this just conveniently connected to it or conveniently similar? | ||
| Or do you think that people are actually aware of this concept? | ||
| I don't think most people do. | ||
| So we're generally talking about this woke thing that's happening, right? | ||
| And so you've got to think of woke kind of like a church, right? | ||
| I grew up Catholic, so it's like you've got cultural Catholics. | ||
| They kind of go to church, and maybe they go to confession sometimes, and they don't really do it, but they don't really do it. | ||
| And then you have the hardcores. | ||
| I had a friend in high school that took notes at church. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Serial killer. | ||
| Yeah, it's like, you do what? | ||
| You take notes? | ||
| And then you've got the pastor, and he obviously studies it, or the priests in a Catholic context, and they study it. | ||
| And then you've got the theologians that really study it. | ||
| And so the stuff I'm talking about is like theology level. | ||
| That's like the scholars. | ||
| And then your average person just wants to feel like a good person. | ||
| So you've got like the woke academics, like the seriously, the woke people that are teaching it to kids. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That really teach it as like critical theory, like critical race theory. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So those are the ones that are probably aware of all the nonsense. | ||
| They're making the nonsense, actually. | ||
| I think they pick some of it up from culture, you know, from activist groups or whatever, but then they refine it and turn it into something, and it has this really weird feeling to it. | ||
| Like, you get the impression that it's like they're wrestling with their inner demons, and then, like, writing it down? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Like, this book now, White Fragility, right? | ||
| Robin DiAngelo's book, White Fragility. | ||
| That's the one that Matt Taibbi destroyed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, thank God for Matt Taibbi. | ||
| Yeah, it was so good. | ||
| Thank the baby Jesus and Odin. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's so good though because he's right. | ||
| He's actually right about it. | ||
| So if you read the book, there's all these weird vignettes that she tells, these stories. | ||
| She's like, oh, I went to this potluck for work and I'm walking around. | ||
| I walk up and then I see there's two parties and we're at the park and there's two groups of people. | ||
| One of them's all black and one of them's not. | ||
| And I had this moment of panic that I might have to be in the all black group. | ||
| And it's like, lady, what's going on? | ||
| And then it's like, all white people are racist, is like her conclusion from this. | ||
| And it's like, maybe it's you. | ||
| So she had this panic that she was going to have to party at the park with black people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And she was worried that she was racist because of that, and therefore all white people are racist? | ||
| See, that's what I'm thinking is going on, right? | ||
| So I'm thinking, I've thought this for a number of years, is that a lot of this stuff where you get these woke activists doing their blogs or these scholars writing this stuff down, It's like Sigmund Freud. | ||
| That everybody wants to have sex with their mothers and like your psychology is all how you resolve that problem. | ||
| And it's like maybe you just wanted to have sex with your mother, Sigmund Freud, you know? | ||
| And then now it's everybody's a racist is kind of the vibe of the new thing. | ||
| And there's like this weird religious kind of thing happening around it. | ||
| That's really the thing that gets me, is how similar this is to not just religious ideology, like how rigid it is, but also indoctrination, like religious cults, how they indoctrinate people. | ||
| And one of my friends, Kurt Metzger, a really funny guy who was a Jehovah's Witness when he was younger. | ||
| And so he's really, really, really sensitive to this stuff. | ||
| He's like, I know where this is going. | ||
| This is the same thing that I got when I was in the Jehovah's Witness. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Cult shit. | ||
| It's these rigid ideologies that cannot be challenged. | ||
| You can't in any way veer from the course. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And they set you up, right? | ||
| So every single one of these things sets you up. | ||
| So, for example, one of my favorite examples is these kind of like setups, right? | ||
| Historically, in the book, I talk about... | ||
| Historically, the black feminists came along and they're like, oh, feminism is too white. | ||
| Feminism isn't paying attention to black feminist issues or black women's issues. | ||
| And so then these feminists were like, oh, we have to fix that. | ||
| And they start writing about black issues to the best of their ability. | ||
| And then three years later, the lady writes a paper saying, oh, you're just sticking black things in and it's fake and you're tokenizing it and you're fetishizing it. | ||
| And it's like so you can't do it right. | ||
| That is cult, the indoctrination stuff. | ||
| So it's like you and I could be talking about something like this and you could say something. | ||
| I'm like, don't you think it's a little bit racist? | ||
| And then the next step is like, what are you going to say? | ||
| You're going to say yes or no. | ||
| If you say yes, now you've owned it, right? | ||
| So now you're like racist. | ||
| And so I'm like, well, do you interrogate your racism? | ||
| Do you spend time working on that? | ||
| And so you see you're dragging people into it. | ||
| And if you say no, I can say, well, one of the symptoms – What are you going to say? | ||
| … of participation in systemic racism is an inability to see it if you're white and it's invisible to you. | ||
| And so maybe you need to look harder. | ||
| It seems like you're getting a little defensive. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ooh. | |
| And you start panicking. | ||
| And then you start panicking. | ||
| And when you start to panic, when you start to stress out, they're like – literally, this lady emailed me the other day, this Indian woman. | ||
| I get a lot of – I get an insane number of emails about people. | ||
| No, no, from Canada. | ||
| But an insane number of emails from people who are in different levels of stress with different things that are happening in their lives around this woke explosion that's happened in the last month or so. | ||
| So this lady's like, I had to go through a Brown fragility training at work. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Yeah, brown fragility is a thing now too. | ||
| So it's not even black? | ||
| Now they're working their way down to brown people? | ||
| Yeah, brown people have fragility, white people have fragility. | ||
| Oh my god, those poor people. | ||
| So people who racially were sort of like Switzerland, like Indians... | ||
| Like, in India? | ||
| Like, no one ever thought they were racist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You would never hear about racist Indians. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Maybe Russell Peters would joke around about it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You know Russell, the comedian? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Now you hear about it. | ||
| And what they're doing is that they had... | ||
| What happened was they explained to the ladies... | ||
| Well, not the ladies. | ||
| It was like the whole group. | ||
| It was done in a room, you know, in front of a bunch of people. | ||
| And they explained... | ||
| Because brown people, in general, like it's some kind of block of brownness or whatever, brown people have anti-black racism too, and that upholds white supremacy. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| And then they start just doing this, and it's almost like cold reading, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, like that Edwards guy, whatever that guy's name was on that show. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And so it's like they cold read and they wait for somebody to start looking like they're getting a sweat or something happening. | ||
| And then they say, now what we need to do, now that we've introduced this idea of your brown fragility is we need to – your anti-blackness is we need to interrogate the feelings that came up. | ||
| And so they go one by one through the room. | ||
| And made every single one of them confess their feelings. | ||
| Like, who's not going to participate? | ||
| And here's that double bind. | ||
| Because it gets to you, right? | ||
| And so what do you say? | ||
| You say, well, I don't really know what you're talking about. | ||
| Well, they're going to say you're ignoring it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then if you confess to it, then you're falling in. | ||
| So this is straight up cult indoctrination stuff. | ||
| It really is like those people in Game of Thrones. | ||
| You remember those people that almost took over the crown and kidnapped Cersei? | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's like that sort of pattern, for whatever reason, just seems to reoccur with humans. | ||
| You know, and I think it comes down to our natural religious impulses. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That I think, I mean, you know pretty well from my background, you know, I don't believe in God. | ||
| I'm an atheist. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| Oh, well, you know, we get along. | ||
| And so it's like I still do think that we have certain impulses underneath that lead people to build religious structures around themselves and have religious, you know, thoughts and feelings and want to have spiritual development and all of this. | ||
| And so religions can kind of do one of two things. | ||
| I used to be kind of hard-ass about religion and like tough, angry atheist kind of picture. | ||
| But I thought about it more, which you're not allowed to think about things and change your mind now, but I did. | ||
| And what I realized is that some religions look up. | ||
| They're like looking at God and they're afraid of sin, but they're paying attention to God. | ||
| They're thinking about renewal. | ||
| They're thinking about redemption. | ||
| They're thinking about forgiveness. | ||
| And then some religions look down. | ||
| And all they do is look at the sin, and they focus on the sin, and that's where the witch hunts came from. | ||
| That was when the Calvinists got, like, you know, fire and brimstone, Jonathan Edwards screaming, you know, sinners in the hands of an angry god. | ||
| You're hanging on a spider's thread above the fires of hell, and God should knock you into it because everybody's full of sin. | ||
| Next thing you know, they're killing witches. | ||
| So it's like you start – if you look up, you know – Then religion can be great. | ||
| It can actually lead people, spiritual development, community, so on. | ||
| But if you're looking down, you're going to start obsessing about – if you're obsessing about sin, you're going to start obsessing about everybody else's sin too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Because you're going to want to like – there's this feeling with – again, reading Robin DiAngelo's White Fragility, there's this feeling like – That she doesn't want to feel alone. | ||
| Like she has these struggles and she doesn't want to be alone. | ||
| So she's a white lady? | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Robin DiAngelo is a white lady who goes in and for like $12,000 a pop does these corporate seminars. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Yeah, $12,000 for two hours and teaches – she goes in and tells white people that they're racists and then like interrogates their feelings when they get defensive about it. | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| It's like the biggest corporate training hustle ever. | ||
| And her idea of white fragility, you can't disagree with it. | ||
| There's no way to disagree. | ||
| I've absolutely like rammed it on some people on Twitter who are these Wokies that come and try to trash me. | ||
| And I just say, you know, that looks a little bit like white fragility. | ||
| And I give some reason that's kind of out of the literature. | ||
| And then they're like, I can't have white fragility. | ||
| You know, I'm whatever. | ||
| And it's like, Oh, that's definitely—you're getting defensive. | ||
| Defensive is one of the symptoms of white fragility. | ||
| You just want to deny your complicity in the system of racism that you benefit from, and it's just like you can't get away from it because— Right, that kind of language, like what you just said, is like—that's like a checkmate. | ||
| It's like the kind of stuff like— So the other day, right, Stephen King got dragged into this with the whole trans thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How did he get dragged into that? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| So he's longtime been a supporter of JK Rowling. | ||
| JK Rowling has decided that she's had enough of this, you know, trans rights thing going after the women's issues. | ||
| And so at first, Stephen King stood up for her and she put out a tweet saying, you know, you're such a good friend, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| And then somebody came after him. | ||
| And he's like, trans women are women. | ||
| And it's like, you know, he just caved. | ||
| Like, just immediately caved. | ||
| And it's like, all woke and no play makes Steve a dull boy, you know? | ||
| So he caves. | ||
| And then... | ||
| You get this sense that it's like something out of one of the novels he would have wrote, right? | ||
| Like all of a sudden it's like needful things. | ||
| It's like the whole town's going crazy because of demon possession and you have to get the stuff. | ||
| Trans women are trans women. | ||
| That's what they are. | ||
| I don't see that as being difficult. | ||
| As a matter of fact— I don't think that's difficult and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. | ||
| That's what I say. | ||
| I feel like they're equal to all of us and we're fine. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Like, what's the problem? | ||
| I got dragged into that, if you know, because of a mixed martial arts fighter. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There was a woman... | ||
| Fallon Fox. | ||
|
unidentified
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Mm-hmm. | |
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And I was like, this is my hill. | ||
| I will die on this hill. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that was brutal. | ||
| You're crazy. | ||
| Brutal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Watching the fights were brutal. | ||
| And not skill-wise, either. | ||
| It was just raw strength. | ||
| It was a beatdown. | ||
| If you had someone who has taken steroids for 30 years and then they got off steroids for two, you would absolutely think that person had a massive advantage for being on steroids all those years. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| If they were a woman. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Particularly a man, yes, as well, but particularly if you're a woman and you're on steroids for 30 years and you get off them. | ||
| That's what being a man is. | ||
| It's not just being on steroids for 30 years and then transitioning to no steroids. | ||
| It's also having the physical structure of a man. | ||
| The difference is in the hips, the shoulders, the size of the hands. | ||
| There's a lot going on there. | ||
| There's a lot going on there. | ||
| And this is an area of my own... | ||
| I have very few areas of expertise. | ||
| But beating the fuck out of people is one of my areas of expertise. | ||
| I'm a professional commentator. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So when I see that, I mean, I used to teach martial arts for a living. | ||
| I understand it. | ||
| I understand fighting more than probably understand most things. | ||
| You're crazy if you think there's not a difference between female and male bodies. | ||
| I mean the data are unequivocal about that. | ||
| Yeah, but it was one of those things where I was like, okay, this is one of the rare places where I really, if I go down on this one, like this is not, I can't see trans women just dominating in women's MMA. It's crazy. | ||
| No, I hear you. | ||
| I do not mind That they choose to fight trans women if they know in advance. | ||
| The Fallon Fox issue was she had fought twice as a woman without letting anyone know that she used to be a man for 30 years. | ||
| And I was like, you're crazy. | ||
| You can't just do that if someone wants to fight a trans woman and they're cool with it Like there's a woman who fought in the UFC her name is Ashley Evan Smith and she wound up actually beating found Fox Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's not my way to the UFC, but she's just far more skillful very skillfully Yeah, that's all that was right. | ||
| She's a real UFC caliber fighter That's why she was a like like if I had to choose between like found Fox fought Amanda Nunes Like the greatest woman of all time Amanda Nunes would kill her sure. | ||
| Yeah killer, but absolutely I But it doesn't mean that she's a woman. | ||
| Just because Amanda Nunes... | ||
| Amanda Nunes would probably fuck me up. | ||
| It doesn't mean that I'm a woman. | ||
| If this found Fox guy gets... | ||
| Or woman, rather, gets beat up by Amanda Nunes... | ||
| I really didn't mean to misgender her there. | ||
| But if she gets beat up by Amanda Nunes, it doesn't... | ||
| Invalidate her as a trans woman. | ||
| It doesn't just... | ||
| It says you're not biologically a woman. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this is what sports are about. | ||
| It's about... | ||
| I had a conversation with a guy on this podcast about that. | ||
| And he was like, I don't think that there's that big a difference in biological sex. | ||
| I said, okay, so you're cool with men competing in women's sports? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| As men? | ||
| Yeah, what do you say? | ||
| He didn't know where to go. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing, right? | ||
| So, like, if we look at psychological profiles, for example, sometimes there are... | ||
| The data are always hard to parse with things like this, but there are very slight differences in the two – the male distribution and the female distribution of all the people. | ||
| What does it look like? | ||
| They overlap really close, and there's little variations. | ||
| When you look at – Upper body strength and you look at grip strength, they almost don't overlap. | ||
| Like the very top strongest women just barely cross over the weakest men in terms of grip strength and raw upper body strength. | ||
| That's why women – it's such a big deal when a woman gets to where she can do like 10 pull-ups or something like this. | ||
| Like everybody should throw a party for that. | ||
| It's nothing wrong with them. | ||
| It's nothing to do with their effort or ability or anything. | ||
| It's – Literally, it's a harder climb to get there. | ||
| Except those CrossFit ladies. | ||
| Jesus Christ, I was watching this documentary on these CrossFit ladies. | ||
| This one lady had, her abs were like if someone took turtle shells and just shoved them under her skin. | ||
| They were so thick. | ||
| Everything about her was so thick. | ||
| I mean, you gotta think, what is CrossFit, right? | ||
| CrossFit was like competitive exercise. | ||
| I mean, that's like the whole point of it is like, how do we turn exercise itself into a sport? | ||
| Some of those gals are pretty yoked. | ||
| They are. | ||
| They're super strong. | ||
| I'm friends with actually some rather top athletes, you know, men and women both, that have been pretty significant in CrossFit. | ||
| And in other things. | ||
| And you can get really strong. | ||
| You can get really strong. | ||
| But again... | ||
| You can't get as strong as a man. | ||
| That's why there's men and women's divisions even in CrossFit. | ||
| Even those beastly CrossFit women who are monsters, they can't compete with the male CrossFit athletes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And that's the thing is you're always, when you're looking at competitive people, you're always in that tail end of good at this. | ||
| The people who are already really developed, really good at it. | ||
| And as far as trans women are trans women... | ||
| I feel like we should be using language in a way that increases clarity rather than decreases clarity. | ||
| So, like you said, I mean, it's exactly like you said. | ||
| There's literally nothing wrong in the world with being a trans woman. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| If you want to be that trans woman, I'm happy for you. | ||
| I'll respect your pronouns, the whole thing. | ||
| You know, I'm with you. | ||
| As long as you don't make them up. | ||
| Well, there's a degree. | ||
| I mean, there is a thing where you're forcing somebody to try to do something unnatural. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll say she. | |
| I'll say her. | ||
| I'll say anything female. | ||
| But you can't make up new ones. | ||
| Well, the world's confusing enough as it is. | ||
| And so we should be trying to strive for more clarity, not less. | ||
| So a trans woman is a trans woman. | ||
| And that allows for us to acknowledge what's actually going on in all regards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As opposed to saying trans women are women. | ||
| Woman is a broader category. | ||
| And it therefore confuses the situation. | ||
| And I think that there's almost like a lot of manufactured drama, not just in that issue but in all of this where these definitions are getting blurred out. | ||
| So I mean that's what I do all the time now. | ||
| The last year is like all I've been doing is researching how they misuse words and writing – not trans people specifically but this whole woke ideology or social justice scholarship – And I've been writing an encyclopedia on my website about that. | ||
| And it's just like I've been writing my own encyclopedia. | ||
| And it's a monumental task. | ||
| But it actually is really helping. | ||
| People are emailing me every day and saying, you know, I can't make sense of this until I read your stuff. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| And so it's like I have – I called it Translations from the Wokish, like going off of Tolkien. | ||
| Elvish. | ||
| Elvish, yeah. | ||
| And so I called it Translations from the Wokish. | ||
| It's on my website, New Discourses. | ||
| It's got like a hundred and something done now, a hundred and something terms. | ||
| So it's like, you know, they say the word folks. | ||
| Why do they say folks? | ||
| Why do they say folks? | ||
| I say folks all the time. | ||
| Well, I do too. | ||
| I'm from the South particularly that I have to, right? | ||
| I can't get away from it. | ||
| I just like the way it sounds. | ||
| Well, it's good. | ||
| These folks are crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But they say white folks, black folks, queer folks, lesbian folks. | ||
| And it's like there's this identity folks, right? | ||
| And so the purpose of the encyclopedia was to dig into this terminology and make it clear. | ||
| Again, more clarity, not less. | ||
| So the people can understand where it's coming from. | ||
| So the reason they say folks is the same reason the Germans said folks in the 1930s. | ||
| As it turns out, it's an idea of a group culture, okay? | ||
| So it's the idea of moving a culture into, you know, it's identifying a group of people and saying that they are a folk, that they have a culture. | ||
| And of course, we're most familiar with that, you know, as they say in the original German because somebody picked it up and yelled it a lot. | ||
| There's also this issue that if a culture has been maligned, if they are marginalized, like trans people, then people who are not trans people are automatically thought of as in some way negative or bigoted. | ||
| If you're a straight white male, for instance, you're automatically a piece of shit. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's what this is doing. | ||
| The woke Olympics. | ||
| And I don't think, like we said earlier, like a lot of the guys taking notes at church, they know that. | ||
| But everybody below that doesn't really get it. | ||
| They think this is just about helping people and being fair. | ||
| That's what we would like. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And this actually comes from a place. | ||
| Like, that's kind of what this book is about, is that I've traced that for like, it goes back to actually, I don't want to mislead people and say, oh, this is Marxism. | ||
| You know, you have to whisper Marxism. | ||
| But it is Marx who took the idea and he cooked up this idea called conflict theory. | ||
| He actually took it from other German philosophers and made this – you can't even say what he changed. | ||
| He changed Hegel's idea of what's called – you can't even say this anymore – the master-slave dialectic because those master and slave have traces. | ||
| Even though that's what it was called, you can't talk about it. | ||
| So Marx took the idea of the master-slave dialectic, which was that people who have – Hegel wrote that people have power. | ||
| And then there are people who don't have power. | ||
| The person that's being oppressed by the power understands the oppression, whereas the person who's doing the oppression can't, right? | ||
| Simple enough. | ||
| Marx cooked this up into this idea called conflict theory that says, oh, different groups in society, and he mostly meant rich people versus poor people, are completely separate from one another. | ||
| And there's no idea that they help each other, like that the rich building like Amazon.com and making a super successful business that makes it easier to move products and to – generates more income for the site. | ||
| There's no positive sum story according to Marx. | ||
| It's all conflict. | ||
| And so what Marx's idea was is that the oppressor class is always the enemy of the underclass. | ||
| And this has actually traced down through history. | ||
| It was economics then and then this philosophical school started in Germany at first, moved to Columbia University during the World War II. It's called the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. | ||
| And they moved it into ideology and culture. | ||
| And so the dominant culture, whoever has the most status and power, the elites, which at the time was genuinely like white, straight men for the most part. | ||
| Those people basically brainwash the underclass into not realizing that they should rise up against. | ||
| So you have this whole dynamic of conflict where the oppressor class doesn't realize what it's like to be oppressed. | ||
| The oppressed class constantly can't get away from it. | ||
| That's where you see this phrase now. | ||
| People are being killed in the street every day, which isn't even true, but it doesn't matter because it's a matter of feeling. | ||
| And then the underclass always has to be at war to try to overturn the power above them, which is called hegemony, which comes from this guy, Antonio Gramsci, who is an Italian philosopher who came up with this idea of a long march through the institutions. who is an Italian philosopher who came up with this which I think we're now seeing for sure happening, like take over the institutions from within with this stuff. | ||
| So this stuff all has, like, I mean, we don't have to be dorks, but, I mean, I can do that on my own. | ||
| But this is a very long history. | ||
| This isn't, like, it didn't just pop up in 2014 when Michael Brown got shot. | ||
| Do you think when things happen, like the George Floyd murder, that it just, it opens up a door and this stuff comes through and then the vibration changes? | ||
| Like, it moves to a higher frequency because it's more common. | ||
| That's right, that's right. | ||
| And, I mean, there's a lot going on here, too, right? | ||
| The George Floyd case is actually fairly straightforward because, I mean, 8 minutes and 46 seconds is fucked up. | ||
| There's nothing else to say about it. | ||
| Dude, 20 seconds is fucked up. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Especially if you've got the guy down already. | ||
| Three guys, and how hard is it to put cuffs on the guy? | ||
| George Floyd was a big fella. | ||
| He was a big, strong fella, but there's no reason not just put a knee on the man's back. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And then how long do cuffs take? | ||
| Once the guy's cuffed, you just get him in the fucking car. | ||
| Yeah, let him do what he's going to do in the back of the car. | ||
| I guess they had some sort of animosity, personal animosity. | ||
| That's what I've heard, yeah. | ||
| Which, you know, I would wonder if that would move it to first-degree murder. | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| But what we have now is this culture where video goes viral. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And this is a striking thing. | ||
| So it's really more prominent in – I mean it's pretty clear you can see the video with George Floyd. | ||
| But if you back up to Michael Brown, it's more complicated than Ferguson because, you know, the short video that went viral in the first place was, you know, a few not very many seconds clip of this black guy getting shot by unarmed black guy getting shot by a cop. | ||
| But it doesn't tell the preceding story, which has now come to light that involved, you know, him trying to take the cop's gun and like wrestling with him and charging at him. | ||
| So a more complicated story. | ||
| Do we know that for a fact? | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm scared of that narrative because I don't – I'd heard that narrative but I'm like I would hate to get behind that. | ||
| Sure, sure, sure. | ||
| And that's actually my point. | ||
| That's actually my point. | ||
| So I was sent a video. | ||
| I'm going to skip tracks to a different video because I want to make a point that we live in a – We live in a mediated world now, right? | ||
| A mediated epistemology is what I would call it. | ||
| The media itself, social media, so all of us participating are able to spin narratives around like a 30-second video. | ||
| So the other day, this guy sends me a video on Twitter and I watch it and it's some black guy. | ||
| With a microphone and, you know, like in a radio studio and he's like going, he's like, you know, these white people ain't gonna take it no more! | ||
|
unidentified
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They ain't gonna take it no more! | |
| He's like yelling, he's like, they're gonna rise up! | ||
| You know, and it's obvious what you're watching, you're like, man, this guy's like, these riots are out of control. | ||
| And so I wanted to share it, but it was sent to me on Twitter and I couldn't figure out how, so I looked it up on YouTube. | ||
| And so I had like a 40-second clip sent to me and I'm like, you know, about this riots. | ||
| And I wanted to show it to somebody. | ||
| And so I go and I find it on YouTube and I watch it and it's the same thing in 40 seconds and it ends. | ||
| But the video that I watched is several minutes. | ||
| And then the next thing the guy says is this president is divisive. | ||
| This president is the problem. | ||
| It's so divisive. | ||
| He's causing all this division. | ||
| And it's like, holy shit, he's actually talking about Trump. | ||
| And then I kept watching and he's like, President Obama has got to go at the end. | ||
| And so it depends on which part of that clip you see. | ||
| The story changes completely. | ||
| I watched the 40 seconds and I was like, holy shit, this is the riots. | ||
| And then, oh my God, it's about Trump. | ||
| And then boom, now it's this dude railing about Obama several years ago. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, wow. | |
| And the video was sent to me because it was going crazy with the implication that it was about the riots. | ||
| But it was about Obama. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| So this is like the deal, right? | ||
| What we're seeing isn't always the whole story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we live in this clip culture now, which is a real problem. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we piece together the story we believe based on, you know, our prior assumptions about it. | ||
| Like the Covington case. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Where the kid was just standing there and the Native American guy came up to him with the drum. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And he was smiling in the Native American's face and they got a photo of it and it really looks like this kid's a prick and that he's taunting these Native Americans who are just peacefully banging on their drums. | ||
| Aaron Ross Powell: That's exactly right. | ||
| So we live in this situation now where the – I don't want to say the media like it's this entity because actually in a sense we are all participating. | ||
| These clips that people are loading up on Twitter, that whole context isn't there. | ||
| And you said does it just jack everything up to a higher frequency? | ||
| And absolutely it does because everybody can take that clip and then just upload their story of what they want to have to be true into that clip. | ||
| And it becomes like, it's like, I mean, we're already talking about religion. | ||
| It's like a miracle. | ||
| Like, you know, back in 2000, 3000 years ago, you know, something weird happened. | ||
| And then, you know, people, one person tells another and another and another. | ||
| And it's like, And I swear, you know, an angel came down from the sky and touched him and he was healed and he could walk again. | ||
| You know, so it's like a miracle story but mediated through partially informative video. | ||
| It's almost like, you know, everybody's scared that deepfake is coming where they can basically put your face on whatever porn star or saying some horrible thing that you never said or whatever. | ||
| Yeah, that's definitely coming, right? | ||
| It is the precursor to that because you can cut that clip just right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It means something exactly the opposite or totally different. | ||
| And different groups that want to push a narrative, which is like everybody, latches onto it and runs with it. | ||
| And this, of course, causes crazy polarization. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So that same clip I saw, I don't know that it would be a good example, but, you know, you could take it as the riots and, you know, that black guy's sick of the riots. | ||
| And so the right wing's all over it. | ||
| Like, look at this guy, you know. | ||
| And then, boom, this president's so divisive. | ||
| And now it's the left's story. | ||
| And you cut it right there. | ||
| And the next thing you know, it's President Obama, you know. | ||
| And all of a sudden, it switches sides again. | ||
| And it's also history. | ||
| And then even the thing I watched that was longer was four and a half minutes. | ||
| And then the whole thing is like an hour. | ||
| So what was really the guy's whole point? | ||
| And so we're getting away from being able to understand because, you know, our attention spans are so short. | ||
| You live in Twitter, it's like you have the attention span of like a goldfish, man. | ||
| You can't pay attention to anything. | ||
| We're marinating in dopamine all the time. | ||
| Brain doesn't work right. | ||
| So you don't have time to like parse anything together. | ||
| You see this thing, you're pissed off. | ||
| You're a retweet, you know, snarky comment. | ||
| Don't you think that also just the format of Twitter... | ||
| Itself is just... | ||
| I think it's detrimental to people's mental health. | ||
| Big time. | ||
| Communicating through these small little sentences and little paragraphs of 280 words. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Characters, yeah. | ||
| So it's like 30 words. | ||
| And so this... | ||
| I actually called Twitter a deconstruction machine, which is straight out of this, again, the same critical... | ||
| Postmodern philosophy stuff that I kind of keep circling around. | ||
| Deconstruction is the idea that – it's the same thing as the mediated ideas, that we're going to take a thing apart, make it look absurd, or we're going to show it in a particular light and then pull it apart until you don't really trust its validity anymore. | ||
| And that's specifically its purpose is to make it so that you don't trust the validity of the thing anymore. | ||
| And so anything you put on Twitter, once you get an account of a certain size at least, anything – I have an account that's big enough now, so I experience this regularly. | ||
| It's a 100% chance that some jackass is going to say something that just messes with your head. | ||
| Or somebody's going to take it out of context, or they're going to tell you what they thought you mean, and now that's the thing you mean. | ||
| Or they're going to screenshot it, and it's going to go around. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| I mean, you're famous enough where it obviously happens to you all the time, I'm sure. | ||
| It's like they take something that you say on a podcast or you put on Twitter or your shows or whatever, and they clip it up. | ||
| And then there's like, you know who Joe Rogan is, but then there's like this new Joe Rogan that they created that's out in the universe, right? | ||
| So they take you apart. | ||
| They deconstruct you. | ||
| The real Joe Rogan and your real intentions and your real meaning. | ||
| And then they put it out into the world and there's this new Joe Rogan that does a horrible thing or this new Joe Rogan maybe that's a saint. | ||
| Well, I always tell people too, like, if you have an issue with some of the things that I say, guess what? | ||
| I have an issue with some of the things I say. | ||
|
unidentified
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Me too. | |
| And if you were here with me when I say things and you disagreed, I'd listen to your point. | ||
| I'm not an idealist or an ideologue when it comes to... | ||
| Ideas. | ||
|
unidentified
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And that's the thing. | |
| When it comes to concepts, I'm not married to anything that I say. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we need to be able to talk about it, right? | ||
| So you say a thing and then I'm like... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I think part of the problem is they can't talk about it. | ||
|
unidentified
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No, they can't. | |
| So they have to tweet about it. | ||
| Because they're not in the room and they don't have your attention. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So then they get angry. | ||
| And that's part of the problem with podcasts as well is like, right now, you and I are having a conversation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yep. | |
| But millions of people are listening to this conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And there's a lot of them that wish they could chime in. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And they don't get to. | ||
| So what they do is they get angry and they put some stuff on Twitter. | ||
| I understand the motivation. | ||
| I understand the thought process behind it. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| But I personally can't engage because it's just too unhealthy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So, yeah, I think social media is – Twitter in particular. | ||
| Among social media. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't know. | |
| I don't interact on Facebook anymore, so I don't really know. | ||
| I don't use Facebook at all. | ||
| Oh, that's a mess. | ||
| I just bailed out. | ||
| It just posts from my Instagram to Facebook, but I don't look at it at all. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's just too weird. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Plus, Zuckerberg gives me creeps. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, big time. | ||
| I don't like the way he drinks water. | ||
| I haven't even seen it. | ||
| I don't want to know. | ||
| Like this. | ||
| All I know is that when Zuckerberg sits down and he opens his laptop, you see he's got his little camera covered up, and I'm like, what's up with this? | ||
| He knows something. | ||
| Yeah, he knows he's got a fucking strap on and a dress and all kinds of weird shit. | ||
| So, yeah, I don't do that, but Twitter chews your mind up, man. | ||
| It's made to be bad. | ||
| It's really a bad place, and I really feel bad because I feel like I've kind of uploaded myself into the matrix of Twitter. | ||
| You're on it every day, though. | ||
|
unidentified
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I go to your pages to see what you're arguing with. | |
| Sometimes it's funny. | ||
| Sometimes it's bad. | ||
| Do you get uncomfortable with it? | ||
| No. | ||
| I did in the past. | ||
| So you're getting better at being hard? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you have to. | ||
| You have to harden up. | ||
| You have to realize that it actually doesn't matter. | ||
| That, you know... | ||
| It's kind of like – I made the analogy actually a while back that it's like doing – I mean I've never done a stage show, so don't – I've given talks, but I haven't done like a stage show. | ||
| But you get a heckler in the audience, but really you have like 70,000 of them. | ||
| And when you're doing the show as a comedian, you either interact with the heckler a little bit or you try to flip it on them or whatever or you try to ignore it as long as it's like not too obtrusive. | ||
| And you kind of have to have that same mindset. | ||
| You have to think of Twitter as being on stage. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that the audience, though, like when you do a real show, the audience isn't supposed to yell at you all the time. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But on Twitter, everything you say, they're going to yell at you. | ||
| So you have to just like tune it out. | ||
| I've actually found in the past – I've been trying to figure it out over the last couple of years. | ||
| I found that if I look at my feed, that I follow these people and I look at what they tweet – Whatever. | ||
| And if I look at my direct messages that people send me, whatever. | ||
| But if I look at people replying to me and whether I got likes or retweets, if I pay any attention to that, it drives me nuts. | ||
| So when I stop paying attention to that, like, I only look at it at a, like, you know, all right, I got half an hour. | ||
| I'm going to dick around with it and just have a good time or whatever. | ||
| Fine, because it's in a controlled dose. | ||
| But if you get hooked into that, man, you get pulled into this cycle and it's like... | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| Well, there's a lot of people that are doing it, too. | ||
| I know people that are mentally unwell that are on Twitter 12 hours a day, and they're just constantly arguing with people, and I can just imagine them nervous and sweating and freaking out, reading the at replies and seeing if it's going their way, or people are piling onto them, and then they freak out. | ||
| You know, I think this is actually a big part of how the woke thing mainstreamed. | ||
| Was the internet at first? | ||
| You gotta think. | ||
| When the internet first came out, you know, the kids aren't old enough to even know this, but, you know, we know this. | ||
| When the internet first came out, who was on the internet all the time? | ||
| Who were the first two online people? | ||
| Shut-ins. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| People who were socially awkward, who, if they went out with their friends, it didn't really work out great a lot of times. | ||
| They said awkward stuff. | ||
| It got shut down. | ||
| It wasn't fun for them. | ||
| So it gave them a social outlet where they could fit in. | ||
| And I think that this actually has contributed – like internet social media culture is so strongly built by people, A, who are that way now, and B, by people who are that way when these things were getting set up, that it's all kind of built around – You know, maybe people with personality disorders, people who are just socially awkward, people who don't want to interact with human beings in the normal way. | ||
| But just the whole structure of it, though, even if you're normally, like, a personable human, when you're typing things out and just sending it out there, and, you know, you've got an egg for an avatar, and if someone reads it, you're completely anonymous, and it's just a bizarre way to interact with people. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| It's unnatural. | ||
| And, like, how quick you'll just get rid of people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Like, that guy said—that guy and I have been interacting for, like, two years, you know, here and there. | ||
| I don't really know him. | ||
| He's some dude. | ||
| And then he made one comment, and I'm like, gone. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| To cut out of my life. | ||
| Think of the—like, that's going to translate. | ||
| You know? | ||
| You get in that habit where somebody pisses you off, and you just cut them out of your life. | ||
| Because on Twitter, that's what you would do. | ||
| Yeah, you block them. | ||
| On Facebook, you, like, you unfriend somebody or whatever. | ||
| And, like— I actually have felt that impulse in real life. | ||
| Like, you know, I'm hanging out with somebody and he says some dickheaded comment and I'm just like, yeah, where's my block button? | ||
| How do I remove this person from my life like right now? | ||
| There's no room for nuance and there's no room for, like you said earlier, for growth, for someone to learn, live and learn and get better at it. | ||
| And that's what galls me about this woke stuff because they're like, this is about healing. | ||
| And it's like it's not. | ||
| It's like the least healing thing I've ever heard. | ||
| It's like make everybody walk on eggshells, think they're going to get canceled, get hot takes dropped on. | ||
| That's another thing with social media too, right? | ||
| It's hot takes. | ||
| What's going to go viral? | ||
| It's like that dude totally dunking on that other dude, right? | ||
| And it's not the nuanced analysis. | ||
| It's not the guy who knows what he's talking about or is thoughtful. | ||
| He's just getting tore up in his mentions and freaking out and sweating about it. | ||
| Yeah, it's fast food information. | ||
| But hot takes are critical theory. | ||
| Hot takes are critical theory. | ||
| As a comic, you'll get it. | ||
| Because, like, there are different kinds of comedy, right? | ||
| There's, like, narrative comedy and you're telling a story and it's a funny story and it works. | ||
| But then you have the kind of... | ||
| And you can do this good and bad, right? | ||
| There's a good way and a bad way. | ||
| But you can get on stage and you can be that guy who just kind of... | ||
| Like, you're trying to blow people's mind, but you're just kind of, like, criticizing something. | ||
| I don't want to put down Jerry Seinfeld, because I think he's brilliant. | ||
| He's one of my favorites of all time. | ||
| But, you know, what's the deal with, you know, something? | ||
| He just says something kind of stupid afterwards. | ||
| Or, you know, Gallagher was big with that, with, like, the stupid words. | ||
| You know, it's like, how? | ||
| Now? | ||
| Bo! | ||
| You know, English is stupid. | ||
| You know, that's actually critical theory. | ||
| You don't actually have to know what... | ||
| Made the thing work but you can just tell this kind of like dunking joke on it that kind of gets yucks or whatever. | ||
| And then in comedy, fine. | ||
| We know a good comic from a bad comic. | ||
| We laugh. | ||
| That's the point is to make something funny and everybody bombs. | ||
| But when you start doing that with like people's lives and social philosophy and calling them things like racist and sexist that can ruin their lives, it's a totally different ballgame. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So it's like looking for that place to just be critical becomes a problem. | ||
| Don't you think it's also just because it can be done? | ||
| Like if you gave people a keyboard and if you told them, look, every time you press that Q button, a rocket's going to fly out of the sky and slam into a part of the planet. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| People would hit that button, man. | ||
| Oh, man. | ||
| There would be people like... | ||
| If they just knew, and they don't even have to be there when it hits, because you're essentially like, if you say something mean to someone online, and it really gets them, especially if you're anonymous, you're sending an emotional bomb their way. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And, I mean, I know a lot of 15-year-old guys, because I hung out with several of them, and at times I probably was one who would basically have, like, two little, like, xylophone hammers, just like... | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| I was horrible when I was 15. I don't know what I would do. | ||
| And that's one of the things that I try to tell people when they're interacting with folks on Twitter and getting heated. | ||
| I'm like, that could be a 15-year-old kid laughing his ass off that he got you to respond to him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the bigger you are, the funnier it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| And like, yeah. | ||
| It's just absolutely not a good place. | ||
| It's such not a good place. | ||
| But there's some good to it, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| First of all, if you follow a lot of people, you can get a lot of interesting information, fast-breaking news. | ||
| I swear, it knows the news before it happens. | ||
| Well, I got all my news about Chaz. | ||
| Is it Chaz or is it Chopped now? | ||
| Well, it's over now. | ||
| Is it really over? | ||
| I just saw that this morning. | ||
| Yeah, apparently the cops went in and it took an hour and it was over. | ||
| And they cleaned it up? | ||
| Well, they're cleaning it up. | ||
| I mean, it's a wreck. | ||
| But it was CHAZ and it became CHOP. So Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone is CHAZ. And then CHOP, I think they derived directly from the French Revolution. | ||
| Like, they're going to get guillotines? | ||
| Like, these badasses are going to get guillotines? | ||
| Well, they put a BLT outside of Jeff Bezos' house. | ||
| I saw that. | ||
| What did he do? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Other than make a lot of money? | ||
| Probably. | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| That's all it took? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| He's not a bad guy, is he? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, he's not known as a bad guy. | ||
| It's not like he's not doing terrible things, is he? | ||
| I don't think he is. | ||
| Maybe he's not paying people enough or something? | ||
| I mean, when the COVID hit, he gave everybody a $2 an hour raise across the board right away. | ||
| Did he? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, why do they have a guillotine outside his house? | ||
| Just because he represents capitalism, right? | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| They don't like capitalism, which sucks. | ||
| Again, that's that critical thing. | ||
| Okay, so there's a difference between building a thing and tearing a thing down. | ||
| It's easy to tear. | ||
| I read a poem about this. | ||
| Maybe a lot of people did, I think, when we were in school. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe even you read it. | ||
| I can't quote it. | ||
| There's this poem talking about the builder or something. | ||
| And it's like, or maybe it's the demo guy, but it's like this poem about how easy it is to just knock the bricks down and knock the building down. | ||
| And it's like, this took builders like six months to build and it took me a day to knock it down or whatever. | ||
| It's easy to tear things down. | ||
| And it's easy to do like this kind of hot take complaining thing to tear people down or tear ideas down. | ||
| But it's hard to understand a thing and it's hard to build a thing. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And so that's kind of How we ended up here in the long run. | ||
| Again, I go back to that Frankfurt School to kind of root this in deep philosophy and history. | ||
| They came up with this idea of critical theory that we've talked about now, and they had this other idea, traditional theory, and they said you're supposed to use them together. | ||
| Critical theory was how you complain that things aren't Marxist enough, more or less. | ||
| And then people bomb me for saying that, but it is actually generally true. | ||
| Traditional theory was understanding things. | ||
| It's philosophy. | ||
| It's science. | ||
| It's figuring out how to make airplanes work and figure out how to get the air traffic control so they don't crash into each other, the whole complicated mess. | ||
| And one of these things, you're supposed to use them together, but one of these things is a lot easier. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So what happens when you start kind of getting a lot of half-assed PhDs in the academic world who need something to do? | ||
| You think they're going to do the hard thing versus the easy thing? | ||
| Everybody who did—I mean, I majored in math. | ||
| I'm going to be my little elitist, you know, dorky thing here. | ||
| Everybody who majored in something hard watched people bounce off of their hard major into the easier majors so they could still just get a degree. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you start – like they call this overproduction, cultural overproduction or cultural elite overproduction. | ||
| You start putting too many people into degree programs that they're not going to graduate with an engineering degree. | ||
| It's freaking hard. | ||
| And so what they end up doing is they get these degrees and things that are easy. | ||
| Well, complaining is easy. | ||
| Tearing down is easy. | ||
| Building up is hard. | ||
| So there's this bias that's happened over the last 100 years in academia toward this easier thing, criticism, and away from the harder thing, which is understanding and developing fundamental research and so on. | ||
| And it's basically taken over academia now. | ||
| And that's how we – I think that's actually a lot of how we got here is the easy thing is the easy thing and complaining is cheap. | ||
| Is there pushback against that idea? | ||
| Which part? | ||
| About whether or not these people initially started in difficult studies and then moved their way into like – These soft social... | ||
| It's sort of really... | ||
| I mean, well, that just happens. | ||
| I mean, my best friend in college was, you know, he was going to be a mechanical engineer and then calculus just took care of that. | ||
| He was not going to be a mechanical engineer anymore because he couldn't pass calculus. | ||
| So that, I mean, but he did graduate college with another degree. | ||
| So there is this kind of chopping down to easier degrees. | ||
| But as far as like this anti-intellectualism trend that I was describing, this actually did... | ||
| It was recognized along the way. | ||
| So there's this – one of the guys in the Frankfurt School's name was Herbert Marcuse. | ||
| This is the guy who laid out the idea of repressive tolerance that you have to violently fight against ideas that might cause intolerance to rise up. | ||
| He did that in 1965. What happened in 1967 and 1968? | ||
| Riots following his ideas exactly. | ||
| And so Marcuse was on TV in like 77, right before he died. | ||
| He died I think in the early 80s or late 70s. | ||
| And he complained about his own movement that he started that had got completely anti-intellectual. | ||
| They weren't doing the hard work. | ||
| They weren't doing the right stuff. | ||
| They were just doing the easy stuff. | ||
| And he actually complained on TV that this had happened, that there had been a sliding away from the serious work and toward the easier complaining stuff. | ||
| And so, yeah, I think that it's historically justifiable that that's exactly what happened. | ||
| And of course, you know, I was here before and we talked about those fake papers that Peter and Helen and I wrote. | ||
| Let's tell everybody what those are just because it's an amazing source of enjoyment and entertainment for folks that are looking for something to read. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we don't lose the point real quick. | ||
| We did in less than like 10 months the almost equivalent of a whole academic career in this stuff and we're amateurs. | ||
| And you did it as a joke and it got passed off as real and then actually applauded. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So we wrote 20 fake academic papers in these exact fields, critical race theory, gender studies. | ||
| Peter Boghossian did it with you and Helen Pluckrose. | ||
| Yeah, Pluckrose. | ||
| Pluckrose. | ||
| Yeah, the second most English name ever. | ||
| She wrote cynical theories with you. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, that's a very English name. | |
| It is a very English name. | ||
| So we wrote these papers to try to show that this scholarship is bogus. | ||
| And so we spent just under a year writing crazy stuff. | ||
| Please tell people the dog park one. | ||
| You love them. | ||
| So the dog park paper was actually, I think, kind of the masterpiece of the thing. | ||
| So we wrote this paper. | ||
| Where we claim that we're a feminist researcher who spent 1,000 hours in Portland, Oregon dog parks over the course of one year, never in the heavy rain. | ||
| We put that in the paper, never in the heavy rain, like that's some relevant detail or something. | ||
| So 1,000 hours over a year is already ridiculous. | ||
| That's like six hours a day. | ||
| Every day. | ||
| That's so much time. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And what we said she did was she watched dog humping incidents and tried to determine when they counted as dog rapes and when they didn't. | ||
| What was the name of the paper, though? | ||
| Oh, it was, what was it? | ||
| Queer Performativity and, well, how does it go? | ||
| Because they had all the buzzwords, right? | ||
| Yeah, heteronormative was in there. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| And queer performativity in urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. | ||
| Rape culture and queer performativity, that's what it was, rape culture. | ||
| Yeah, that's what it was. | ||
| Yeah, so we said that she watched these dogfights and dog rapes and all this stuff. | ||
| And we put this crazy stuff in there, like, sometimes they try to break up a dogfight by doing jumping jacks by the dog or singing songs. | ||
| It's just ridiculous. | ||
| And the dogs are pooping on each other. | ||
| We put that in the paper. | ||
| And then we said when there was a dog humping that she would go up and she would inspect the dog's genitals and she inspected 10,000 dogs' genitals and then interrogated the owners about their sexual orientations. | ||
| What she wanted to find out was if straight men would discourage gay dog humping versus straight dog humping and it was different for women and gay men. | ||
| And then we said we're going to pass that data through black feminist criminology, which makes no sense. | ||
| And then we said that the conclusion was that dog parks are petri dishes of canine rape culture and that they are rape condoning spaces just like human nightclubs. | ||
| So human nightclubs are automatically now rape condoning spaces. | ||
| And so the conclusion was that we now have to train men the way that we train dogs with like leashes and shot collars and things in order to get rape culture to go away. | ||
| And they give this an award. | ||
| LAUGHTER And so it's like the bullshit level is just insane. | ||
| What was the award? | ||
| So they had a thing. | ||
| It was their anniversary. | ||
| The journal is the number one feminist geography journal in the world. | ||
| And it was their 25th anniversary edition. | ||
| What's the name of the journal? | ||
| Gender, Place, and Culture. | ||
| And it's the leading feminist geography journal in the world. | ||
| And they had their 25th year. | ||
| So they're on their 25th anniversary. | ||
| And so what they wanted to do was highlight one paper per issue the entire year as being exemplary scholarship in feminist geography. | ||
| And ours was chosen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I can tell you, man, it was the craziest thing ever. | ||
| I remember, I'm almost positive it was May 7th, 2018, I got the email. | ||
| And it's like, I can remember, it was just like, go in the house, I was out doing like yard work or something, and I come in, and I check my email. | ||
| And I just remember like, Gaping at the screen. | ||
| I'm like, this can't be happening. | ||
| Because I thought – I just saw the editor and I'm like, oh, no. | ||
| They figured it out, right? | ||
| And we're going to give it an award. | ||
| And so I end up – I grab – because we're making a documentary about it, right? | ||
| So we got a filmmaker, Mike Naina. | ||
| He's the one that did that three-part documentary of Evergreen that showed everybody how – I mean that's where everybody's Evergreen now. | ||
| And so Mike, it was like, anything that happens, film it. | ||
| So I grab my GoPro and I have this footage and it's like sideways because I didn't even like think about it. | ||
| And I'm just like running outside trying to find my wife. | ||
| I'm like, you aren't going to believe this. | ||
| You aren't going to believe this. | ||
| Oh my gosh. | ||
| You know, there's a really freaking crazy, you know, like it's almost like it's almost like the world slid off of its foundation a little bit when they get that paper and award for me. | ||
| It was just so weird. | ||
| Well, you nailed it. | ||
| We did. | ||
| You really nailed it. | ||
| You came so close. | ||
| To reality, but yet still lived in the world of parody. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But you said all the things that you need. | ||
| It just shows that there's such a high tolerance for bullshit in those air quotes disciplines. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And those air quotes disciplines are now being mainlined into every university, every school, every corporate boardroom. | ||
| How did that happen? | ||
| I mean, we were talking about, you know, the raising the frequency thing when these events happen, but mostly they took over our colleges of education about 1980, and so they've been slowly turning teachers to the project. | ||
| And then in 2002 and 2003, there were a couple of Supreme Court cases that were talking about affirmative action. | ||
| And they said that if you want to do affirmative action, you can do it if it increases diversity and equity and inclusion. | ||
| So they started to build these offices in the university. | ||
| And those university offices started to, like, dictate what you could and couldn't say. | ||
| You could get in trouble or brought up to hearings. | ||
| Even if you don't—even if the hearing finds you innocent, you still had to waste your time going through this humiliating hearing. | ||
| And they're bringing up stuff and all your—you know, how do you—imagine you're, like, in a department, right? | ||
| And you get hauled before the diversity office. | ||
| What are all your colleagues thinking about you now? | ||
| Like, what did he do? | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| So all of a sudden, it starts just pushing everybody to not criticize this stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| Right? | ||
| Self-censorship. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Out of fear. | ||
| Silencing people. | ||
| Getting them to silence themselves, actually. | ||
| And so then they take that lack of criticism and then they can just go crazy with their stuff. | ||
| It's like critical race theory specifically. | ||
| People email me all the time and they say, where are the scholarly criticisms of critical race theory? | ||
| And I actually write back. | ||
| I'm like, you're not allowed to do that. | ||
| Like the most recent ones in law journals, like substantive ones, are from the 1990s. | ||
| So there's nobody criticizing this stuff. | ||
| So when you aren't criticizing it, I mean, scholarship depends on people shooting down your bad ideas. | ||
| You know, when South Park talks about them smelling their own farts or whatever, smelling each other's farts, it literally, it's like, it's that. | ||
| That's what's happening. | ||
| Nobody's ever telling them that they're wrong. | ||
| Nobody's ever allowed to, and you can't criticize it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because if you criticize critical race theory, you must be a racist. | ||
| Now, what was the response to you guys getting an award for that once you revealed that this was all horseshit? | ||
| Oh, she wasn't happy. | ||
| The editor of that journal was not happy. | ||
| She felt, like, betrayed, like, you know... | ||
| Well, she was. | ||
| She was. | ||
| She was. | ||
| But she felt, you know, like, I had been so nice. | ||
| I was so kind to her. | ||
| And she was very kind to me. | ||
| I have to be... | ||
| She was a very nice person. | ||
| Most of these people, that's very important. | ||
| These aren't mostly nice people. | ||
| There are some hustlers, and they take advantage of that situation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because that's what this is really wide open to, is hustlers. | ||
| So she was a nice person, but she's living in that world, and she thought that all that stuff made sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing, is they think this stuff's all real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like they've kind of gone into this mass delusion, where everything's power dynamics, and the power dynamics define how everybody experiences life, and Do you remember when Jordan Peterson was on television on the CBC and he was talking to some professor, I think may or may not have been transgender, who was saying that there's no such thing as biological sex? | ||
| And I can unpack that for you if you'd like and then keep going as if it's just like you made a statement that there's no such thing as biological sex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, that's – I mean that's got a pedigree in academic literature going back to actually at least the early 1990s. | ||
| I had an argument with a professor about it on the show. | ||
| It was like it's not – there's no – I go, so there's no difference between males and females. | ||
| I go, so if you buy a male puppy and they give you a female, do you complain? | ||
| What did he say to that? | ||
| He didn't know what to say. | ||
| You could tell when he was saying the things he was saying that he was knowing that he was going to get support from the people that he works with. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's this thing that you do where you've indoctrinated yourself into this world, or you've been indoctrinated, and now you have to sort of keep up... | ||
| That nonsense talk. | ||
| Do you hit it exactly then earlier? | ||
| Because I don't know if you've ever let the Jehovah's Witness in and talked to them. | ||
| But if you get them to where they have to go off script, sometimes it'll be like two of them. | ||
| They'll look at each other and they can mumble for a minute. | ||
| We'll have to go back and consult about that and we'll come back and talk to you later. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| It's like if they're not on the script, they don't know what to do. | ||
| So you catch them in this thing. | ||
| And that's actually the thing is it's crazy this stuff's taking over right now. | ||
| Mostly it's not because they're just calling people racist and everybody's good intentions are being played upon. | ||
| But if you give it the slightest pushback, they don't know what to do except to call your name. | ||
| Yeah, because in their world, you can say there's no such thing as biological sex. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, I have a friend who works at a very large newspaper and... | ||
| They said they can't say that there are two genders. | ||
| Like, if you say there are two genders, you will literally get thrown out of the office. | ||
| And they're like, we're not exaggerating this. | ||
| I mean, yeah, imagine that. | ||
| I have a friend that works in journalism who's gay and has a gay sensitivity reader to make sure that His writing is gay sensitive enough. | ||
| He's gay. | ||
| He's gay. | ||
| And he has a gay sensitivity reader. | ||
| To make sure his writing is gay enough. | ||
| Can he just check with himself? | ||
| You would think so. | ||
| Yeah, I would imagine. | ||
| You would think so. | ||
| Douglas Murray put something up on his Twitter because someone was describing a gay person as a cisgendered non-heteronormative, like something really crazy. | ||
| And he said, I think there's another word for that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's gay. | ||
| He's a gay person. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| But it was like this super complicated nonsense expression that just meant gay, a gay person. | ||
| That's where, again, there's good comedy and bad comedy. | ||
| That's where George Carlin had that awesome classic bit where he talked about adding syllables and hyphens. | ||
| He's like, World War I, it was shell shock, and now it's post-traumatic stress disorder. | ||
| Eight syllables, one hyphen, he's counting them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| There's this weird language thing happening there with all these, like, he called it desensitizing or sterilizing language. | ||
| And that's what's happening. | ||
| So it takes all that meaning away, right? | ||
| So nobody knows what it means except for the guy preaching it. | ||
| So the guy doing the diversity training, I watched a diversity training. | ||
| Somebody sent me from their job the other day. | ||
| And this woman's, like, just droning on. | ||
| It felt like you're just getting, you know, imagine you're at the job. | ||
| Like, you have to do this for work. | ||
| You don't want to do it. | ||
| And you're just watching this webinar and this lady's just ramrodding like 12-syllable words at you. | ||
| She's like, okay, so we have to talk about microaggressions and there are different kinds of microaggressions. | ||
| There are microassaults. | ||
| And it's just like, what the hell is this? | ||
| Microassaults? | ||
| Microinsults and then micro... | ||
| What's a microassault? | ||
| A microassault is when you do it on purpose. | ||
| Like, but what is a microassault? | ||
| So a micro-assault would be making a small but racially salient comment in the presence of a person of that race. | ||
| Oh, so it's not even an assault assault? | ||
| Not necessarily racist. | ||
| No, it's not an assault. | ||
| No, these people – violence is all words and discursive aggression. | ||
| So a micro-assault can just be an insult? | ||
| They're all insults. | ||
| Micro-everything has to just be like words or standing in the wrong place. | ||
| Oh boy, Jamie just pulled it up here. | ||
| A microsault is an explicit racial derogations? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Look at that expression. | ||
| A microsault is an explicit racial derogations. | ||
| So you've put somebody down on purpose. | ||
| I know, but that's a weird way of describing it. | ||
| An explicit racial derogations, plural. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Who wrote that? | ||
| Which is singular. | ||
| Yeah, that's not right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They need an editor. | ||
| Derogations, plural, characterized primarily by a verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name-calling, there's your hyphen, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory.actions. | ||
| The grammar on that's broken all to pieces. | ||
| It's a mess. | ||
| And that's kzoo.edu. | ||
| Reason.kzoo.edu. | ||
| Nice. | ||
| They didn't even bother editing that motherfucker. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| There's so many of these things that are like for education that are like this. | ||
| And it's like they say stuff like themself. | ||
| And it's just like... | ||
| This is supposed to be for education. | ||
| It's barely literate. | ||
| What is going on? | ||
| Well, that's a problem when you're using they and them as well, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You start using they and them pronouns, which are really supposed to, I mean, for the most part, indicate multiple people. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right, yeah, the singular they. | ||
| You could say, you know, so this guy, you could say, they thought, or they thought they would get away with it. | ||
| I mean, you could say it. | ||
| You could say, but it's hard to use it that way all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's hard to use it intentionally, actually. | ||
| It comes up naturally sometimes, and then it's fine, but it's hard to use intentionally. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If a person wanted to go to the store, they could go. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so there's something, like, kind of totalitarian about making people do things like that that are difficult, like jumping through these little hoops and then holding them to massive account. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's like, I mean, even, like, the Black Lives Matter thing. | ||
| Like, Black Lives Matter is a sentence. | ||
| Is obvious. | ||
| Forcing somebody to say an obvious thing. | ||
| That's a great name because you can't argue with it. | ||
| You also can't argue with it. | ||
| Yeah, of course they matter. | ||
| And of course, I mean, it's so complicated because it's like if somebody asked me, they said, OK, do you support Black Lives Matter? | ||
| James, do you support Black Lives Matter? | ||
| And of course, they're going to try to catch me on this. | ||
| And it's like, which one? | ||
| There's at least five. | ||
| I support one of them and I think the other four are nuts. | ||
| So there's Black Lives Matter. | ||
| All lowercase letters is a sentence. | ||
| You can't disagree with it because it's obvious that black lives actually matter. | ||
| And you shouldn't be forced to say obvious things. | ||
| But what is that? | ||
| That's a call, right? | ||
| They're saying, hey, look, white people... | ||
| People of other races, we have a different experience of this society, and it's bad. | ||
| And we need you to hear us. | ||
| And we want you to care. | ||
| And we want there to be action taken that we can work on together to figure out. | ||
| And who couldn't support that movement? | ||
| I think everybody in the world supports that movement. | ||
| But then you have the official one. | ||
| And their website's full of, like, literally neo-Marxist stuff. | ||
| And they're, like, weird, like, queer feminist something or another. | ||
| Like, seriously, it's all on their About page on the Black Lives Matter website. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's like, that's a lot of baggage, man. | ||
| I don't know if I'm for that. | ||
| And then you have like the training video comes out with the one saying, you know, we're trained Marxists. | ||
| And they are. | ||
| They're trained activists. | ||
| You don't actually have to go along with all of that to agree with the sentence. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Then you have this thing with white people. | ||
| There's like a Black Lives Matter movement that's white people that are like washing black people's feet and like calling them and apologizing and like freaking them out. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I mean, this is actually horrible, too. | ||
| Oh, it's amazing. | ||
| Could you imagine what it's like being like somebody calls you like all your all your white friends start calling you and they're like, by the way, I've always kind of been racist. | ||
| Like you had a relationship with that person. | ||
| And now it's so awkward. | ||
| My favorite one was the white actors that all got together in that black and white film. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| Isn't that amazing? | ||
| That was so, oh my gosh. | ||
| That's so stupid. | ||
| And it was ones in there that I really enjoyed. | ||
| I really enjoyed their work. | ||
| The problem is these motherfuckers haven't worked in months and they want attention. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| They wanted attention and they weren't getting it. | ||
| So they're like, I know how to really juice this up in my favorite. | ||
| Me, me, me, me, me, me. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| Aaron Paul, he broke my heart. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| I saw him in there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The actor, the Breaking Bad guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's amazing. | ||
| I love that dude. | ||
| And then... | ||
| I was like, bro, I wish I would have talked to you before that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| I can tell you how this goes. | ||
| I can tell you what happens next. | ||
| This ain't good, man. | ||
| This ain't good. | ||
| Because guys like me are going to watch it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Let me tell you, we're going to make fun of it. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Get the fuck out of here. | ||
| It was so funny. | ||
| So then there's two more. | ||
| We'll just drop them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Whatever these... | ||
| But I wanted to get back to this if you don't mind. | ||
| When that piece came out and you got the award and then they found out, you said that she was pissed off. | ||
| I got this email from her that was short, but it was like, I'm really hurt that you were deceptive to me. | ||
| It was kind of like that. | ||
| I felt bad, actually. | ||
| Like, I don't – I'm not – I didn't do it to, like, be mean to people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You did it to prove a point. | ||
| Like, I actually – you know, the saying, you know, you play the ball, don't play the man, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So I guess I said it backwards if it's a saying. | ||
| It's don't play the man, play the ball. | ||
| This was about ideas for me. | ||
| Like, that project was about the ideas. | ||
| It was about the scholarship. | ||
| It wasn't about the people. | ||
| And I felt like it was really unfortunate. | ||
| that there were people implicated in it. | ||
| I actually did feel bad for them in almost every case. | ||
| There were a couple of them that actually right pissed me off with some of the stuff they wrote to me. | ||
| So I didn't feel bad about them so much, but that's a human failing. | ||
| I'm not a perfect person. | ||
| When they pissed you off, what did they write? | ||
| Oh, this one woman. | ||
| We wrote a paper about masculinity at Hooters. | ||
| And we said that the only reason guys go there is – I mean besides the obvious wanting to ogle chicks. | ||
| But the main reason was so that they could order – like double meaning in the word order, right? | ||
| Order their food. | ||
| They could order pretty young women around that have to do what they say. | ||
| And, you know, they can patriarchally order – taking their orders is a pun. | ||
| And this one woman wrote like this long review of it and she was like, this paper – remember, it was submitted to a journal called Men and Masculinities. | ||
| It was a paper that was supposed to study the masculinity. | ||
| And she wrote back, this paper talks about men instead of women and victim blames and blah, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| I'm like, oh, you can go to hell. | ||
| You know, basically, I'm like, come on. | ||
| I mean, it was aggravated also because my paper didn't get in because of that. | ||
| It's like, why would a paper about men and masculinity have to be about the women? | ||
| Oh, because feminism, that's why. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And it's like, it's so annoying that, so that aggravated me. | ||
| Most of them, the rest of them, were actually, like, really nice people. | ||
| So... | ||
| I think your feeling is that there's really nice people that get bamboozled into really bad ideas. | ||
| And then when you snuck in these hoax papers, that you're essentially speaking their lingo and they don't even know that they have a lingo. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And so I actually think that what we're looking at with this woke movement, and we've kind of compared it to cult, we've kind of compared it to real, I actually think it's evil. | ||
| And the reason is because exactly what you just said. | ||
| It plays on people's best nature. | ||
| It takes good people and twists them to its purpose. | ||
| And that's horrible. | ||
| Like the whole game is to try to make you a nicer, more caring person. | ||
| So it takes your care and turns it into something literally totalitarian. | ||
| You're not allowed to disagree with it. | ||
| Anything you say, you get branded with these horrible stigmas. | ||
| They try to cancel people. | ||
| And it's like it's literally trying to use people's best, fairest, most just and caring instincts to make them program into this way of thinking. | ||
| cars when they have marches that they just decide to start smashing people's cars and doing things to people's cars whether it's because the people don't agree with what they're saying or they choose someone or they don't like the look of that person but they feel justified in violently attacking them and their car right because they are there to do a good thing that's right yeah that whenever somebody's gonna punish people And think it's the moral thing to do. | ||
| That's where you've got some danger going on. | ||
| And the reason they do that, by the way, is because they think everything happening is violence. | ||
| Like, why does Antifa, by the way, that's the fourth Black Lives Matter movement, is these Antifa agitators starting the riots. | ||
| Why do they feel justified in throwing a brick through a Starbucks? | ||
| Why do they feel justified in starting yelling about targets? | ||
| Why does this keep happening? | ||
| And the reason this is going to sound absolutely insane, but it's actually true, is that they believe that something like Starbucks is a big corporation. | ||
| And when it comes into a neighborhood, it starts taking resources, capitalist resources, money from that neighborhood and then dumping it into a corporation. | ||
| And they see that as a form of violence against the neighborhood. | ||
| So they're justified in using violence to disrupt that by throwing a brick through the window, even though it's probably some franchise owner who's just trying to make a buck, trying to have a job that runs it. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it is. | ||
| That's actually what the theoretical justification is with regard to that aspect of the theory. | ||
| But do these people who are actually doing this know this, that that's why they're doing it? | ||
| Or, I mean, is this written anywhere? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| The Antifa books are crazy. | ||
| They talk about... | ||
| Collection of capital, any kind of racist or sexist or whatever language as they want to determine it being a form of violence. | ||
| They call these things like epistemic violence in some of the literature. | ||
| They call it discursive violence in some of the literature. | ||
| Sometimes they just call it violence. | ||
| In queer theory, calling somebody saying you're a man or a woman is called a violence of categorization. | ||
| So there's all these different types of violence, and they're sort of marinating in this idea that these things that are happening, the way people talk, micro-assault, is a violence. | ||
| And I mean, I even saw a thing somebody sent me today from some university, Indiana maybe, where the person's saying that, you know, we're tearing down these physical monuments, but maybe we need to think about discursive, so verbal monuments. | ||
| And then in the middle of this, which is otherwise... | ||
| Cracked but not violent. | ||
| He actually says something to the effect of that we really need to be prepared to do violence against this violence. | ||
| And so they're marinating in these kinds of thoughts. | ||
| So you get these like – like with Antifa, what are these dudes? | ||
| These dudes are like hopped up, mostly young men trying to put out – I mean there's some women in there too of course. | ||
| But there's a lot of young men who are like doing their young male rage and they're pissed off at society and they've read all these books saying how America sucks and how it hurts all these poor people. | ||
| hurts minorities and so on. | ||
| A lot of people are feeling the sting, frankly, because whatever the Republican policies since Reagan have really kind of like put some squeeze on people. | ||
| Well, it's really amplified now because of COVID, because of the lockdown. | ||
| Oh, yeah, exactly. | ||
| People are out of their minds. | ||
| They're living on Twitter. | ||
| They're living on Twitter and also they're broke. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You're losing your job. | ||
| So they feel justified to loot. | ||
| They feel justified to smash and rob. | ||
| And they don't even have to really intellectualize it or really – like when they're rationalizing this, they don't have to really make cogent points. | ||
| They just have to have like some iconic enemy in their head. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We really should have saw Target getting set on fire when Target got deemed essential and people started making a big deal about Target's essential. | ||
| Why is Target essential? | ||
| Because you need to buy toilet paper, you fuck. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| What's weird is, I mean, it's just weird how quickly it happened. | ||
| And it clearly exacerbated by the lockdowns. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's one of the most amazing, like, combination of events that happens in a perfect storm order. | ||
| And so it's – OK. I'm not – let me start right – and this is already bad, but I'm not a conspiracy theorist. | ||
| I don't actually buy into conspiracies. | ||
| But we are in a situation because of a lot of political currents for the last 50 years where there's a lot of billionaire philanthropist groups, right? | ||
| that generate a lot of money. | ||
| They run a lot of think tanks. | ||
| They run a lot of policy forums and organizations and 501c3s and so on and so forth to study things and do these things. | ||
| The rapidity with which the materials, like the Instagram-ready tracks that you could read and the little videos – The speed and the educational curricula and the guides for here's a bunch of resources for how to remake your business. | ||
| This stuff came out fast. | ||
| So what I think is actually going on is political operative types wait for – I mean the saying is never let a good crisis go to waste, right? | ||
| So they wait for a precipitating event and then they've been making – Easy Digest materials for a long time and paying people like, you know, hey, come work for our forum. | ||
| What we really need to do is look at how we can get books for like anti-racist toddler books, you know, anti-racist kids. | ||
| And so they get people writing these books and they think they're doing it. | ||
| It's not like some, you know, boardroom nasty stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| then these materials are just ready to go out fast and so this we had as you said a perfect storm COVID's pissing like COVID's pissing everybody off the media has everybody pissed off Trump has everybody pissed off it's like impossible to watch any of this and not be just pissed off I have to be careful because I actually start to get frustrated and emotional about it I The amount of being lied to that's just so obvious, you know, through a lot of the news right now at these protests, especially in riots, is just galling. | ||
| Well, the article that I showed you that shows that the COVID kick up, the uptick in cases had nothing to do with Black Lives Matter, but probably had to do with people staying inside. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just gaslighting, man. | ||
| But that's the craziest gaslighting ever. | ||
| So why are you making everybody stay inside then? | ||
| Because that means that the disease is going to get even worse. | ||
| Right. | ||
| If we're being forced to lock in and shut down and stay home, that's going to make the disease worse, according to your article. | ||
| They're like, which way does it go? | ||
| And nobody knows. | ||
| And then you live in this... | ||
| I don't know what's true about... | ||
| COVID at all now. | ||
| It's like you were allowed to go out in, like, groups less than 10, but not if you were protesting, then they could be up to 1,000 or something. | ||
| Oh, it could be multiple thousands. | ||
| It's like, what in the world is going on? | ||
| Once you're protesting, and as long as it's a good cause, everybody could die. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| It's because racism is the real virus, is what they actually said. | ||
| Well, that's a real virus, too. | ||
| But that COVID shit's real. | ||
| Trust me. | ||
| It's a thing. | ||
| I know multiple people that have it right now. | ||
| I also know people who have had it and a couple who do. | ||
| It's not good. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| Not good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, yeah, even young people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, they're still going to this. | ||
| Like, my friends are still going to the hospital because they don't quite know what's wrong with them after having had it. | ||
| Vitamin D, kids. | ||
| Take a shitload of it. | ||
| Very important. | ||
| Get out in the sun. | ||
| It took like 50,000 IU before I flew out here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Good move. | ||
| Yeah, no joke. | ||
| I take 5,000 IU every day. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so do I. Without fail. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| And I take zinc, and I take magnesium, and I take 4,000 milligrams of vitamin C, and I do a 10,000 milligram vitamin C IV every week. | ||
| Holy shit. | ||
| Yeah, I'm not fucking around, son. | ||
| You're not fucking around. | ||
| And I still get nervous. | ||
| Well, you don't want to get the COVID. I'm scared. | ||
| I mean, it's serious. | ||
| It's serious. | ||
| And people are scared. | ||
| And, you know, you can channel that fear. | ||
| You can channel that anger. | ||
| I know. | ||
| And I'm healthy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Imagine if I was obese or had diabetes or... | ||
| Oh, you can't talk about that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Fat shaming? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Fat shaming? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's like fat shaming. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Obesity is not allowed to be talked about as a medical relevant condition. | ||
| That is called medicalizing obesity. | ||
| I love Jon Stewart to death. | ||
| He's amazing. | ||
| But we did a podcast the other day and he actually said, you can be overweight and be healthy. | ||
| And I had to stop him. | ||
| I said, no, you can't. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| That's literally, it shows that you have an issue. | ||
| That's a sign of non-health. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Of not being healthy. | ||
| It's a tax on your body. | ||
| For sure, your body works harder. | ||
| But he's just so nice that he wanted to say it because it's a thing that people like to say and he wanted those people to like him and not come after him. | ||
| It's exactly what we were saying. | ||
| It's using that impulse to be kind, that impulse to be nice, and turning it into something. | ||
| And that narrative that there's nothing to do with health. | ||
| Actually, it's trademarked and everything. | ||
| Health at every size. | ||
| It was a movement. | ||
| Actually, there was a blog I used to follow. | ||
| That's where I first learned about it. | ||
| It was called Dances with Fat. | ||
| And it's this woman who's very overweight who danced around. | ||
| And she's a good dancer, actually. | ||
| She really was. | ||
| And then she tried to run a marathon, and she couldn't run the marathon because she didn't... | ||
| She finished the marathon, but there was a time limit. | ||
| And she finished after the time limit, so it didn't count. | ||
| So she lost her marbles about it and said, you know, the time limits are oppressive and fat exclusionary and all this. | ||
| Like nine hours or something. | ||
| So she then created another blog called Iron Fat, where she was going to do an Iron Man. | ||
| But fat. | ||
| While fat. | ||
| To prove that fat has nothing to do with health. | ||
| Well, the swimming part, she's got down because she can take her time because she's floating. | ||
| That's harsh. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Fat people float. | ||
| Actually, in cold water, they lose a lot of weight, too. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| People who swim in the English Channel actually have to gain weight so they can swim off. | ||
| Oh, that makes sense. | ||
| Because of cold water. | ||
| You actually do almost 20 pounds. | ||
| Oh, it makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, because it's a massive caloric requirement to keep your body warm in that freezing water. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Phelps? | ||
| The Olympic swimmer. | ||
| Oh, yeah, that's right. | ||
| Where he was eating, like, 15,000 calories a day and staying, like, cut. | ||
| Ripped. | ||
| Giant pizzas and shit. | ||
| Yeah, but he's swimming in 68-degree water, 72-degree water for four hours a day or something. | ||
| Makes sense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, yeah, they have this whole thing, though. | ||
| Fat dancing. | ||
| Well, yeah, the Iron Fat Lady. | ||
| They have this whole thing that you can't associate obesity and health at all. | ||
| It's not allowed. | ||
| It's considered... | ||
| It's considered a medicalizing narrative. | ||
| And if we were to come up with, let's say, like you invented tomorrow Joe Rogan's, you know, you're getting a supplement company, and Joe Rogan's weight loss pill, but not like some bullshit. | ||
| Imagine it really worked, right? | ||
| So everybody who takes this pill within the course of a month would get to their ideal body weight, right? | ||
| By pill magic. | ||
| Just imagine. | ||
| They would actually, in fat studies, which is a real, critical fat studies, it's a real thing. | ||
| We wrote a paper about that, too. | ||
| They would call that a fat genocide because you're getting rid of all the fat people. | ||
| But every one of them is healthier. | ||
| Well, you're not getting rid of them. | ||
| They are healthier, but they can always choose to be fat again. | ||
| So that's the problem with this shit is it plays on people's best instincts while giving like the worst possible reading of everything. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like they literally would... | ||
| It takes away personal accountability as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They actually say that in disability studies about people who are deaf. | ||
| If they invented a surgery or whatever that fixed deafness or an implant that could fix deafness for everybody, they say it's a deaf genocide because there'd be no deaf people left. | ||
| Do they really say that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, my God. | ||
| That's so silly. | ||
| And so, I mean, you can see it's just like... | ||
| God, that's so silly. | ||
| Restoring a sense is a genocide on people who are handicapped. | ||
| As somebody who's lost senses, I can tell you, you want them back or you want them to have them if you don't. | ||
| You were saying when you had your head injury that you couldn't taste anything? | ||
| Yeah, so I hit my head really bad in January 2011 and cracked my skull. | ||
| How'd you do it? | ||
| Pull-ups, pull-up bar came apart. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| I was doing those badass ones where you pull up and then touch your feet. | ||
| So I was horizontal, seven feet off the ground, and the pull-up bar came apart. | ||
| And boom, back of the head on concrete. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| Oh, it was bad, man. | ||
| It was bad. | ||
| Like my ears were ringing for like a month. | ||
| I'll tell you this because you fight so you'll understand. | ||
| I hit my head, the back of my head so hard that I deviated my septum. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Nothing hit my nose, but my nostrils aren't the same as they were before ever since. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| So I woke up the next morning. | ||
| I mean, I didn't go to sleep for a long time because I was like, I've got a concussion. | ||
| I'm fucked. | ||
| And so then I get up eventually the next morning after I decide I can sleep because my pupils aren't doing any of the things. | ||
| And I drank my coffee. | ||
| I'm like, man, my coffee tastes... | ||
| Really weird. | ||
| I'm really knocked silly. | ||
| And then I realized sometime during the day I couldn't smell anything and I couldn't taste anything. | ||
| And so then I went through this process for like two years of growing those senses back. | ||
| I actually think you learn to smell and taste things. | ||
| I think that's why kids hate vegetables. | ||
| It's like they haven't learned how to process the taste yet. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Stuff tasted really weird. | ||
| I had phases where my coffee and garlic and grape juice would all taste exactly the same. | ||
| I know a fighter, and he's had a long career, and after one of his fights, he lost his sense of smell. | ||
| It happens. | ||
| Yeah, he was saying that what drove him crazy was he couldn't smell his daughter's hair. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, you would hug his daughter. | ||
| He couldn't smell her. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| Everything's just neutral. | ||
| It's so weird. | ||
| It's really... | ||
| It's depressing. | ||
| I was, like, putting, like, Vicks VapoRub, like, right under my nose, like, smearing it. | ||
| I couldn't smell it. | ||
| I would just kind of burn on the skin. | ||
| And what were doctors saying as far as the... | ||
| They said sometimes it recovers and sometimes it doesn't. | ||
| It's about 5% of back of the head concussions. | ||
| And mine came back, and I think it's mostly back to normal. | ||
| I mean, I learned the hard way about a year ago that I still couldn't smell spoiled milk. | ||
| Oh, you can't smell? | ||
| I can't now, because this is why I think you learn it, because if you can't smell, for me, my experience was that if I couldn't smell or taste something and I just kept forcing myself to have it, before long I could, and then it would start to taste normal. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| But anything that I avoided. | ||
| So when would I ever drink spoiled milk? | ||
| When would I experience spoiled milk? | ||
| So all of a sudden I came home from a trip like last year and I'm like, you know, I busted open the cream from my coffee and I've like poured it in and I'm like, this is a sour coffee. | ||
| It was like a new coffee. | ||
| So I thought it was maybe just like really acidic. | ||
| I was like, this is really kind of gross. | ||
| And I walked by my wife and she was like, what? | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ugh. | |
| Poor that. | ||
| Ugh. | ||
| You know, what is that? | ||
| She could smell it. | ||
| She could smell it. | ||
| Out of my coffee, even. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And then I couldn't smell it. | ||
| But then I started to... | ||
| I actually... | ||
| It's kind of gross, but I actually bought a bottle of milk and just let it go bad. | ||
| Just so you could force yourself to smell it. | ||
| So I practiced smelling it. | ||
| Now I can smell it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You're practicing the smell. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It would come back, yeah. | ||
| And so what the doctor said when I hit my head, though, is that two things are happening. | ||
| One happens in the brain and they don't know what's going on. | ||
| And the other is that the nerve fibers through the ethmoid bone in your nose either can stretch or tear. | ||
| And those have to, if they do, they go dormant and they have to wake back up over time. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So I got lucky, I suppose, because mine seems to be more or less back to normal. | ||
| But a year ago... | ||
| Well, obviously, yeah. | ||
| So you still have an issue. | ||
| So anything that I haven't encountered, I probably won't smell correctly. | ||
| What about farts? | ||
| And what kind of farts are you smelling? | ||
| Smell like regular farts? | ||
| I think I got those covered at this point. | ||
| I have a lot of... | ||
| I practice those, too. | ||
| Yeah, because some farts are different. | ||
| Yeah, that's right. | ||
| Silent, violent. | ||
| Yeah, but what about gases? | ||
| That was a thing, right? | ||
| I couldn't smell smoke for a long time. | ||
| That's scary. | ||
| That was actually properly scary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, man. | |
| When you realize you can't smell smoke, it's scary. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it's like, how are you going to know if your house is on fire? | ||
| I didn't want my wife to leave and go on a trip for a week because if something caught on fire... | ||
| What about cooking gas? | ||
| I couldn't smell that either. | ||
| I can't now. | ||
| I couldn't smell anything. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| Coming home and you don't even know and your house is filled with gas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Have you ever seen what happens to a house when they have a gas explosion? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Actually, somebody emailed me and said that's what they were afraid of in Minneapolis with all these riots that they broke out. | ||
| They were pretty sure some of the fires were going to hit the gas lines. | ||
| And it would have been like in Boston a couple years ago when the gas line was leaking in 50 houses. | ||
| I know a Boston firefighter who told me what it was like to be a firefighter in that mess. | ||
| He's driving to a call. | ||
| And then, you know, people run out in the street and stop, you know, stop the fire truck. | ||
| And they're like, you know, they're yelling, and there's a fire, we can't stop. | ||
| And they're like, there's a fire here. | ||
| And they're like, oh, crap. | ||
| And they start trying to do something about the fire there. | ||
| And then the house over there, boom, you know, flames everywhere, walls blow down and stuff. | ||
| And it was just like, at that point, they were like, is this a terrorist attack? | ||
| What's going on? | ||
| People are freaking out. | ||
| But that's what people in Minneapolis just lived through, apparently, too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like... | ||
| You can't have mayhem. | ||
| It's not good for sleep. | ||
| It's not good for anything. | ||
| I was going to say, it's Jerry Seinfeld. | ||
| It's not good for business. | ||
| It's not good for anybody. | ||
| For Seinfeld. | ||
| I saw a video once of a house that it was after the fact. | ||
| This house had a slow gas leak and then it blew up. | ||
| And I mean, there was nothing left. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| It was crazy. | ||
| It was like it was splinters. | ||
| It's bad, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| Splinters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So yeah, it was a pretty scary town. | ||
| So you couldn't smell gas. | ||
| You couldn't smell gasoline if you're pumping gasoline. | ||
| You couldn't smell it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Oh, this house right here. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| Holy cow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Bro, do that again. | ||
| Rewind that again. | ||
| So this is someone else. | ||
| Let's see what happens. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| See, that's why stuff has to work. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, again, it goes back to what you're saying, how easy it is to tear something down, how hard it is to build it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| All these people that are tearing down these businesses and looting, they haven't built anything. | ||
| I mean, I think about it all the time. | ||
| It's almost like this weird belief that everything just happens by magic or something. | ||
| You can just go fire everybody who knows what they're doing and replace them with people who don't know what they're doing and want to be just diversity. | ||
| And I'm not even going to say they're not competent, but they do want to focus on diversity or whatever the issue of the day is. | ||
| So you're going to fire... | ||
| This super competent guy and then replace him with somebody who at least is going to dedicate some of their time to diversity initiatives. | ||
| What's going to happen is eventually stuff becomes less competitive, stuff becomes less efficient. | ||
| I really feel it when I fly, man. | ||
| And it's not the thing you think. | ||
| I don't think, oh, the planes are going to start dropping out of the sky. | ||
| I started thinking about the air traffic control. | ||
| Like that's complicated, man. | ||
| And if you don't have people that are at the top of their game programming that stuff in those towers, looking at that stuff, but it's everything. | ||
| We actually have a society – when you have an advanced society like we have, you actually have to have people who know what's going on and who are focusing on the job. | ||
| To get it done, to build things. | ||
| And it can't all be – I mean of course we have to pay attention to the human resources issue. | ||
| But this stuff is all about turning everything into the human resources issue. | ||
| And then with like scholarship, I don't even know what to say because they're saying we need to do research justice and like – so that means take … Trevor Burrus Research justice? | ||
| That's what they call it. | ||
| So you have to take – yeah. | ||
| So you have to cite more black scholars and women scholars and indigenous scholars so you don't cite white people or men. | ||
| So you can even out their citation scores so they get more promotions. | ||
| And then you have to take academic departments and you have to start hiring more of – and I don't mean you have to hire identities. | ||
| You have to hire people who think that way because otherwise they don't qualify. | ||
| And then – You start getting rid of the people who don't think that way. | ||
| So you're actually concentrating even in like – I mean somebody just sent me something about chemistry. | ||
| The field of chemistry is like going like full woke. | ||
| And it's like, what the hell does that have to do with chemistry? | ||
| How can chemistry go woke? | ||
| Chemistry is so... | ||
| I mean, that is like one of the more solid disciplines. | ||
| You'll hardly believe it. | ||
| But the truth is that they... | ||
| The woke theory actually believes this. | ||
| It actually believes that science, reason, so on, evidence, civility, meeting schedules, that's all manifestations of one way of knowing things about the world that happens to be made by white people who are Westerners and men and that it encodes that's all manifestations of one way of knowing things about the world that happens to be made by white people who are Westerners and I read an article. | ||
| I'm a mathematician, and I read an article recently about how that has to happen in math. | ||
| So math, we have to get away from it, says, the idea that math is objective, that it tells you something objective about the world. | ||
| And we have to start opening our minds up to other types of mathematics that maybe see things differently and that we should teach that. | ||
| Who wrote that? | ||
| Oh, what's his name? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| There's another one that's very similar that's by a Chinese scholar, Tianan or Antian. | ||
| I get it backwards sometimes. | ||
| That came out in January or something that was saying the same thing, that we need to start questioning whether there's objectivity in math. | ||
| We need to question what math is about. | ||
| And then I see this curriculum last fall. | ||
| It was put into the Seattle schools. | ||
| And you can look that up on Seattle's government education website. | ||
| We need to make math class be like asking kids, how have you seen math be used to uphold oppression? | ||
| How have you seen math be used to break down oppression? | ||
| And then how can we turn math to a more collectivist endeavor instead of individual endeavor? | ||
| And it's like this is what they're teaching in schools at this point. | ||
| So their belief is that objectivity, like actual knowledge, is not possible and that every culture has its own access to it. | ||
| And those cultures, like we talked about conflict theory, are in conflict with one another. | ||
| So science is something that was cooked up by white Western men, and it doesn't let other ways of knowing, they call it, in, specifically so that white Western men can keep the power of getting to define what's scientifically true and what's not. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| How do you argue against that? | ||
| It's so crazy that it's like there's no room for logic or reason. | ||
| It's worse than that because logic and reason become part of the white man's tools. | ||
| The master's tools, they call it. | ||
| Oh, the master. | ||
| Did you hear that in Texas, there's at least one real estate group that's no longer using the term master bedroom? | ||
| I was going to bring that up earlier when we were talking about how words have a trace. | ||
| And that's a key example because the trace is bullshit. | ||
| Do you know where the phrase master bedroom started? | ||
| No. | ||
| 1926 Sears catalog. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| Slavery ended in 1863. 1926 Sears catalog. | ||
| It was never used with anything to do with slavery. | ||
| It's just that people imagine that it might have something to do with slavery because you can't touch the word math. | ||
| Or master, I'm sorry. | ||
| Right. | ||
| What about master locks? | ||
| Oh, it'll come to it. | ||
| It'll come to it. | ||
| They'll have to change. | ||
| All of the tech stuff is they've got like master-slave switches or whatever they call them. | ||
| And systems. | ||
| All that. | ||
| I mean, I'm getting emails from corporations. | ||
| Motherboards. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| All that stuff. | ||
| All that stuff. | ||
| It's all got to get changed. | ||
| Yeah, you can't have master and slave, you assholes. | ||
| And here's why. | ||
| Because they actually believe that language creates oppression. | ||
| That's when I said tearing down discursive monuments. | ||
| That's actually what the guy was talking about. | ||
| So if you change the language, like magic spells, then oppression will go away too. | ||
| If we have no politically incorrect language, oppression can't possibly happen. | ||
| That's literally some Orwell stuff, right? | ||
| The point of 1984 was like they made Newspeak so that people wouldn't be able to have thoughts. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I mean, how brilliant was Orwell? | ||
| Pretty brilliant. | ||
| But amazing that he saw all this kind of coming, but maybe he didn't. | ||
| Maybe he just made it in the – like he took it to some ridiculous place that he never really thought people would go. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean there's been a bunch of people who did that, of course. | ||
| Aldous Huxley talked about it in Brave New World. | ||
| But very famously now people are getting aware of – was it Kurt Vonnegut that wrote Harrison Bergeron? | ||
| So this is a perfect equity society. | ||
| So people who were smarter had to like have headphones and played annoying sounds. | ||
| They couldn't think as good. | ||
| And if they were pretty, they had to wear like a mask so that they wouldn't be as attractive. | ||
| And they tried to make everybody perfectly equal. | ||
| And it's like almost prophetic, you know? | ||
| God. | ||
| That's the problem, right? | ||
| So this idea of like – the idea should be that we have equality. | ||
| Equality of outcome cannot be guaranteed but they want to force it. | ||
| But if you were going to guarantee equality of outcome, right, it would obviously be that you wanted to bring everybody up. | ||
| But they're content when that doesn't work to just chop people down and that's why it's screwed up. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So now we can't use science because science doesn't use emotions. | ||
| You can't use chemistry. | ||
| You can't use chemistry because it doesn't have enough gay people working and it was actually the real argument that I saw. | ||
| But how do you... | ||
| So is it your obligation to convince gay people that chemistry is interesting for them to pursue as a career? | ||
| It's, yeah, I guess. | ||
| Or do you have to prove? | ||
| Hiring quotas will come in. | ||
| But there's no obligation to prove that there's been some sort of suppression of gay people. | ||
| You could just say, like, as a fact, there's less gay people that are involved in this, so it must be suppressed. | ||
| Yeah, that's the systemic... | ||
| Racism idea or systemic homophobia here, that's the idea when they say systemic. | ||
| That's what they mean. | ||
| They say we're going to look at the end. | ||
| Is anything different? | ||
| Then it must have been discrimination somewhere in the system. | ||
| It's like when all the atheist movement stuff back in the day, they had the God of the gaps. | ||
| It's like where did life come from? | ||
| A religious person would be like, well, if you're an atheist, explain where life came from. | ||
| And if you don't know, then it must be God. | ||
| And now it's like if there's different outcomes, explain where it came from. | ||
| It must be racism or sexism. | ||
| What's interesting is that this equality language never makes its way into blue-collar jobs. | ||
| Like, nobody's clamoring for female garbage men or garbage folk. | ||
| It's only for high-status jobs, especially ones that work in cultural production, right? | ||
| So you have faith, you have education, you have journalism, you have media in general. | ||
| It's in scientists and so on, people who get to control knowledge, ideas, and so on. | ||
| Because again, they live in this world where they believe that if they can engineer how people think by what ideas are valid and invalid, then they can make their utopia. | ||
| So it's, I mean, like the idea of inclusion, right? | ||
| So inclusion, like that's good. | ||
| We want to include people. | ||
| We don't want people to feel like left out. | ||
| We don't want people to feel uncomfortable or like they can't be there. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But when you cook the books and decide that anything that disagrees with you makes you feel unwelcome, now all of a sudden nobody is allowed to disagree with you. | ||
| And that's actually what happens. | ||
| And then when you have this idea – you see this in these videos for these universities where you'll have some little student stand up and say, well, this center has too many white people in it taking up space and that makes us feel uncomfortable because we're used to having our space taken up and we have no space of our own. | ||
| And like the most egalitarian – the whole campus, you can be anywhere you want. | ||
| It even justifies segregation. | ||
| You can't have white people around black people too much because that makes them feel unsafe. | ||
| And then the galling part is that, you know what they call that? | ||
| Desegregation. | ||
| They call it desegregating the space. | ||
| Gaslighting! | ||
| It's so gaslighting. | ||
|
unidentified
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God. | |
| Anti-racism is like, let's focus on race all the time. | ||
| Let's read racism and do every interaction. | ||
| That's the anti-racist process. | ||
| It's backwards. | ||
| It's backwards land. | ||
| Well, that's one of the problems with some ideas that promote, air quotes, feminism. | ||
| Is that they treat women as if they can't see things the way that men do, so they need extra attention or extra help or extra assistance. | ||
| My favorite one with that kind of navel-gazing, critical approach... | ||
| So let me preface, just because we have to in this day and age. | ||
| James, do you support feminism? | ||
| Which one? | ||
| Same as Black Lives Matter, right? | ||
| Which one do you mean? | ||
| So that said... | ||
| One of my favorite patterns is a thing happens to everybody and then feminists think it's oppression against women. | ||
| Feminists blame patriarchy. | ||
| So it's like people interrupt. | ||
| And it's like people interrupt women. | ||
| And so that's patriarchy. | ||
| And it's like it actually happens to everybody, man. | ||
| My favorite is mansplaining. | ||
| Mansplaining? | ||
| Oh yeah, we're doing that now. | ||
| My favorite is manspreading, as you will know. | ||
| I'm famously a manspreader, and my profile on Twitter is manspreading to the maximum. | ||
| Is that what you're doing in your profile? | ||
| You're manspreading? | ||
| It's actually funny. | ||
| I was doing a thing in London last October. | ||
| We were doing some talks, and I had one video I did. | ||
| Where I didn't even realize it and I was manspreading like out of control. | ||
| I mean it was like embarrassingly bad. | ||
| I looked at it the first time I saw the video and I'm like... | ||
| Right, but manspreading only matters if you're on a subway or a bus and someone's next to you and you're taking up too much... | ||
| That's the main thing. | ||
| But that's what the problem is with it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But they see the action at all. | ||
| Like you got to train it out of people. | ||
| So anyway, in London I was very... | ||
| I was actually distractedly mindful not to manspread. | ||
| And so I was telling the story to the crowd and I manspread to demonstrate what I meant by manspreading. | ||
| I just did it again. | ||
| And somebody snapped a picture of it while I was doing it and sent it to me. | ||
| And I'm like, that's my profile picture. | ||
| So I'm like in, you know, like a jacket and a tie and I'm manspreading, like laughing or whatever. | ||
| I feel like I read this. | ||
| I don't know if I did or not. | ||
| That men, they're natural. | ||
| The way their legs sit in their hips, it's natural for their legs to splay out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas with women, their hips are built differently. | ||
| That's probably true. | ||
| Can you find that out? | ||
| We also have testicles. | ||
| I don't know how you would Google that. | ||
| Yeah, but... | ||
| I mean, I think you do. | ||
| I know I do. | ||
| I do. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I definitely do. | ||
| Just checking. | ||
| How dare you. | ||
| But you can't... | ||
| I'd rather stand up. | ||
| I mean, if I'm jamming people in like that, I don't mind standing. | ||
| Yeah, totally. | ||
| I hear you. | ||
| Yeah, unless it's a long-ass flight or a long-ass train ride, but I can keep my legs together. | ||
| No, I hear you. | ||
| I'm totally with you. | ||
| But I think it's a natural thing if you sit for your legs to spread out. | ||
| I mean, you're fit. | ||
| I'm fit. | ||
| I actually have bizarrely large legs, and so it's actually very difficult for me to squeeze my legs together. | ||
| Here it goes. | ||
| The overall width of the pelvis is relatively greater in females, and the angle of the femoral neck is more acute. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| These factors could play a role in making a position of sitting with the knees close together less comfortable in men. | ||
| Aha, you fucks. | ||
| I suspect most men would suggest the reason for adopting the more spread posture in sitting would be the avoidance of testicular compression from the thigh muscles. | ||
| The pelvic rotation goes some way to improve compression in both aspects. | ||
| It's funny the way they say it that way. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| They have to say testicular compression. | ||
| Well, that's because it's from masculinist science. | ||
| It's masculinist white western science making this claim. | ||
| And it's from the independent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But when you have big legs, man, it's like... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's like, you know, if I know I'm going to have to walk a long distance, I have to wear the right underwear, I'm going to get chafed on my thighs. | ||
| Yes, me too. | ||
| You have big thighs. | ||
| So there's a science behind man's brain. | ||
| It's like I need those Chuck Norris drop crotch jeans that he had when he used his kicks. | ||
| Dude, those are the best. | ||
| Do you remember those? | ||
| I had a pair of those. | ||
| Hell yeah. | ||
| Chuck Norris action jeans. | ||
| Action jeans, that's right. | ||
| Yes, I had those. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Back when you were doing karate, you know, you were doing Taekwondo, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I did, like, sport karate back then. | ||
| Yeah, those were the pants to have back then. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Everybody had that stuff. | ||
| Yeah, the people with large thighs, man, that's what boxer briefs were invented for. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I can't wear regular shorts. | ||
| Like, if I just wear shorts and boxer briefs, it'll chew my legs up if I work out. | ||
| It kills me, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, and large ladies have that issue, too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're overweight. | ||
| And fat studies would say that that is a problem of body blueprinting and that it's actually a sign that fat phobic society hasn't designed all clothing around that problem. | ||
| They didn't design clothing with fat in mind. | ||
| That was another one of my favorite papers he did was fat bodybuilding. | ||
| That's what I was, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, fat bodybuilding. | ||
| Fat bodybuilding. | ||
| So it turns out Peter has a friend named Richard Baldwin and you should pull Richard Baldwin up. | ||
| Richard Baldwin is a real professional bodybuilder. | ||
| He was like, what was it, Mr. Olympia 1978 or something, right? | ||
| And he's also a history professor. | ||
| So the dude's jacked. | ||
| Even 70-something, he's jacked. | ||
| And so he said we could use his identity to do our papers. | ||
| That's him in the 70s? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that him now? | ||
| He's got a woman in a black t-shirt where it's like he's 71 years old and it's just insane. | ||
| That's back in the day. | ||
| Yeah, the one where he's doing the most muscular pose? | ||
| Right there. | ||
| Bam. | ||
| He's still like that. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| So he let us use his identity. | ||
| That's him older. | ||
| He's still jacked. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| He's 65 there. | ||
| He's fit. | ||
| So we were like, we got to write bodybuilding-themed papers because we have a bodybuilder. | ||
| And so we claim that his, there it is, the black one, related images down there is where he's in the black t-shirt. | ||
| I actually photoshopped a copy of that specific image and put fat bodybuilder on the t-shirt. | ||
| I used to have that picture. | ||
| That's him, like when he was letting us use his identity. | ||
| So there he's in his 70s. | ||
| I think he's like 71 there. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| Yeah, look at those arms. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And yeah, so we wrote this paper, Fat Bodybuilding, saying that bodybuilders are abnormally large. | ||
| Fat people are abnormally large. | ||
| Muscle and fat are just two types of tissue, and it's only fatphobic science that distinguishes their worth. | ||
| And it's a fatphobic society that says one means more than the other. | ||
| So we even had lines like, you know, you have to build a political There's some quote. | ||
| It wasn't our line. | ||
| We quoted somebody that says, it takes time to build a fat body. | ||
| It takes even more time to build a politicized fat body. | ||
| So that was the theme of the paper. | ||
| And so we said that there should be... | ||
| In fact, that professional bodybuilding as a sport needs to add another category. | ||
| There are four categories for each of men and women that they compete in. | ||
| Yeah, apparently. | ||
| Something like bikini and I don't know what they are. | ||
| Whatever they are. | ||
| Yeah, something. | ||
| There are four. | ||
| And I don't remember what they are. | ||
| But... | ||
| They need to add a fifth one in for fat bodybuilding where people of any body shape and size can come in and it can't be competitive because that would be fat shaming. | ||
| And so it has to be just a political performative display rooted in Judith Butler's politics of parody. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| Which we got that idea from reading an actual fat scholar, maybe the leading fat scholar, Charlotte Cooper. | ||
| And Charlotte Cooper is just like totally a nut job activist in the UK, but they hate the Olympics as you might imagine. | ||
| It's the maximally fat-phobic environment. | ||
| Except, is sumo in the Olympics? | ||
| Is it? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| But, they protested the 2000, and she's in London, so they protested the 2012 games, summer games, and what they did is they held in a park, like, Fattylympics is what they literally called it. | ||
| They literally called it that. | ||
| And it was like them playing Dizzy Bat and like yelling about and holding up protest signs about how the Olympics sucks. | ||
| And so we're like, what in the hell is this? | ||
| And so then we decided to write this fat bodybuilding paper based off of the idea of politics of parody, of like making a joke out of the thing. | ||
| So we're going to make a joke out of bodybuilding. | ||
| And we said that competitors can wear the fat-tion, that's their word, not ours, of their choice, which is clothing designed for fat people. | ||
| Fat-tion of the choice. | ||
| So it's really hard, it's really hard to talk about, to explain, to criticize the fat study stuff without, like, it's just so preposterous. | ||
| How do you walk the line of, like, tipping them off? | ||
| Like, because it seems like some of your stuff is so loony that I just, like, how do they not know they're being fucked with? | ||
| Because they're too serious about that. | ||
| They take themselves too seriously. | ||
| So I'll give you an example with that exact paper, right? | ||
| At the end, Pete, you know, is a big sci-fi guy. | ||
| So he's all into Star Trek. | ||
| So we called the last section was fat bodybuilding, the final frontier for fat. | ||
| They went berserk about this. | ||
| They were like, you cannot call it that for two reasons. | ||
| You can't use the word final because it would imply there is an end to fat activism which can never end. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| And you can't use the word frontier because it reminds you of genocides. | ||
| The frontier. | ||
| Like the frontier of the American West? | ||
| It said it evokes imagery of the American West. | ||
| Native American genocide? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| So you can't say the final frontier because frontier the word is poisoned. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, my God. | |
| The final frontier. | ||
| But that's Star Trek. | ||
| I know. | ||
| How are you doing that? | ||
| They're so, like, I mean, smelling their own farts, man. | ||
| They're smelling their own farts all day long. | ||
| It's so freaking bad. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| As you're saying this, I know you're telling the truth, but I can't imagine that this is literally commonplace. | ||
| I mean, it's so hard not to laugh. | ||
| So we talked about health at every size. | ||
| Do you know who made up health at every size? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Who? | |
| Linda Bacon. | ||
| That's her name? | ||
| She's not real. | ||
| She's real. | ||
| It's like, it's just her name. | ||
| It just happens to be. | ||
| That's so crazy, though. | ||
| What a great name. | ||
| It just shows you that the world, like when Andrew Wiener kept sending his dick to girls. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| It's like, come on, man. | ||
| This is too on the nose. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| When I was in grad school, actually, we had to learn about, so there's this thing in probability theory. | ||
| It's named after a mathematician whose last name was Wiener. | ||
| And so it's actually called the Wiener Measure. | ||
| And so we had this Chinese teacher, he was talking about the wiener measure, and we're all laughing, and he had no idea why we were laughing, because his English wasn't great. | ||
| Oh, it was so awkward. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
| But no, it's really weird when stuff like that happens, you know. | ||
| So you have the fat scholar, yeah, Linda Bacon. | ||
| Lindo. | ||
| Formerly Linda. | ||
| Oh, trans. | ||
| Went trans. | ||
| She's trans now. | ||
| Lindo. | ||
| See, health at every size. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| So she wasn't happy enough with body positivity. | ||
| She had to go trans. | ||
| It became real popular. | ||
| Looks like she lost the weight, too. | ||
| That's bad. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, why'd she lose the weight? | ||
| I don't know, but we could wreck her career now. | ||
| Every size. | ||
| Body positivity at every size. | ||
| Body liberation advocate. | ||
| Yeah, liberation is what this is actually the thing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How about this? | |
| Speaker, author, and scientist. | ||
| I'm gonna call shenanigans on that last part. | ||
| She's got a PhD. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's the PhD in? | ||
| I don't know, but it's not math. | ||
| Linda. | ||
| I didn't mean to deadname her. | ||
| I didn't know it had changed. | ||
| Well, you didn't mean it. | ||
| I could be ruined for that. | ||
| Deadnaming her right in the thing says formerly Linda. | ||
| It does. | ||
| They deadnamed her. | ||
| Technically. | ||
| In the book. | ||
| Technically, I think we have to update her book now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which one is it? | ||
| It says Lindo? | ||
| Linda? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| Is that an article? | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| My name, my gender. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, see? | |
| So she, like, formerly Linda, is a part of her website. | ||
| LindoBacon.com. | ||
| Okay, so this is straight out of Queer Theory. | ||
| So Queer Theory actually says that it's politically actionable to make things confusing on purpose, so it doesn't make sense. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| I mean, yeah. | ||
| It's like, literally, if I open the book, I can quote it. | ||
| They say that it's politically actionable to use intentional confusion, like to put contradictions, and in particular, Yves Kovsoski Sedgwick. | ||
| Hold up. | ||
| Look at how this starts off. | ||
| It's hard to be yourself and feel belonging in a culture that is hostile to your existence. | ||
| But first of all, feel belonging. | ||
| It's a very strange way to put it. | ||
| It's hard to be yourself and feel belonging that you belong, I guess, in a culture that is hostile to your existence. | ||
| Which... | ||
| Boy, that's... | ||
| That's a loaded sentence, isn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Oh my God, so much. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, let's see. | ||
| There's probably some really good stuff. | ||
| Flourish in a welcoming world, the welcoming part. | ||
| That's where I said they twist this stuff and it turned into something crazy. | ||
| So you get this real sense, though, in fat studies and in disability studies that they want to be coddled. | ||
| How is she doing fat studies when she's all skinny now? | ||
| He now. | ||
| Yeah, he. | ||
| That's problematic. | ||
| But that's a good thing it's every size. | ||
| Dr. Bacon's mission to galvanize a body positivity movement which celebrates the influence of our multiple intersecting identities. | ||
| To provide the critical thought, inspiring vision, and practical strategies you need to celebrate. | ||
| I feel like we're making fun of this person. | ||
| I told you, but that word critical, that doesn't mean critical thinking. | ||
| That means complaining about in a specific way to achieve liberation. | ||
| And liberation is the thing. | ||
| That's the critical theory of the Frankfurt School that we were talking about all along. | ||
| So what is this person's – what was the issue that you had with what they were teaching? | ||
| Well, I mean this person is like the body positivity person. | ||
| So the body positivity movement – I was actually just bringing up the person's name being Bacon and Fat Studies is kind of funny, but that's rude of me. | ||
| But it's crazy now that it's not... | ||
| But the point is that the body positivity movement is why they deny... | ||
| Science, right? | ||
| So if like a doctor says, we're worried about your weight, you know, you need to do something about it, that actually is not body positivity anymore. | ||
| That's now telling them that they are wrong for who they are. | ||
| So there's this like coddling aspect to it. | ||
| And then this has actually moved into even more, they go even further, like people with letters, I don't need a person with letters after my name to tell me who I am. | ||
| So with like mental illness, a lot of them self-diagnose and they say that somebody with letters after their name shouldn't determine who they are. | ||
| There's this woman that we talk about in the book, Linda XY Brown, I'm sure that's her real initials. | ||
| Like, she didn't cook that up. | ||
| She's got like 12 of the things, but she self-diagnosed herself as autistic. | ||
| And she has this thing, we quoted it in here, and she says that, I guess there's a stim, they call them, for autistic people called flapping, and she doesn't flap. | ||
| Like, it's not one of the things, because she maybe isn't even autistic, who knows, because she won't get diagnosed. | ||
| And then when she says she's in public, she flaps on purpose. | ||
| Like, she acts it. | ||
| She pretends it so that people will recognize her as autistic. | ||
| Because the identity is what's so important because the identity becomes a politics. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| Oh, my goodness. | ||
| I just read the whole freaking book again yesterday. | ||
| But the thing about body positivity is I want people to feel good. | ||
| I do want them to feel good, but I also want them to be... | ||
| Actually aware of what the consequences of eating bad food is. | ||
| If you care about someone, you want them to know what the consequences of their actions. | ||
| It's one of the weird addictions. | ||
| Food addictions is one of the weird addictions where you're supposed to not judge the person by it, and you're also supposed to not offer up any suggestions on how they can fix that, because Then you are not just judging that person, you're condemning them and their choices. | ||
| But it is an addiction. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And there's an issue because wellness means more than your feelings. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And it's actually really... | ||
| I mean, it's like, you know, with addiction medicine, they talk about enablers, right? | ||
| But also with addiction, they talk about hitting rock bottom. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| You have to get to a point where you're so sick of the way you're living that you will make the necessary adjustments to become a healthier person. | ||
| Whether it's gambling, where you lose all your money, or drug addiction, where you almost overdose and die. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, that's rock bottom. | ||
| And for a fat person, it's really got to be that. | ||
| It's going to be like a heart attack scare or something. | ||
| Right, or a doctor telling you, hey, you've got a problem with your weight. | ||
|
unidentified
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It should be. | |
| Yes. | ||
| And then that's not allowed. | ||
| Like right here, she actually says... | ||
| Once I started to get into the territory of diagnosis, once I started playing around with the problem of diagnostic thinking, when it is only left to trained diagnosticians, that allowed me to challenge how all of us must contend with thinking diagnostically. | ||
| And so it says right before that, in fact, I don't believe in giving power to the medical-industrial complex and its monopoly over getting to define and determine who counts and who does not count as autistic. | ||
| Like, doctors aren't allowed. | ||
| And then she's right here writing... | ||
| How do they decide whether or not someone's autistic? | ||
| It's not like... | ||
| I have no idea. | ||
| You could check to see if someone's diabetic. | ||
| I have no idea what the process is. | ||
| But I assume that the people who are the doctors that study it do know. | ||
| It happens if they didn't and we're finding this out. | ||
| Oh no. | ||
| But yeah, here's the flapping thing, right? | ||
| So what is flapping exactly? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm assuming it's like... | ||
| Actually moving in a flappy way? | ||
| Yeah, flapping your arms. | ||
| Like a penguin? | ||
| Maybe, yeah. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Jamie's on the fucking ball as always. | ||
| When a person with autism engages in self-stimulatory behaviors such as rocking, pacing, aligning, or spinning objects, or hand flapping, people around him or her, you asshole, may be confused, offended, or even frightened, also known as stimming. | ||
| These behaviors are often characterized by rigid, repetitive movements and or vocal sounds. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So Lydia X.Y. Brown writes, I, as an autistic person who doesn't instinctually or innately flap my hands or arms, it was never a stem that I developed independently. | ||
| Will deliberately and frequently choose to flap, especially in public, in order to call attention to myself so that other people, whether autistic or not, might identify me as autistic. | ||
| And it's like this stuff is – that's a scholar! | ||
| I mean, we should actually talk about freaking autoethnography, man. | ||
| It's a diary entry that pretends to be sociology. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| Okay, I get it. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| So, I mean... | ||
| How is that going to help disabled people? | ||
| It's not. | ||
| What is disability studies for? | ||
| Right. | ||
| How is that going to help anybody? | ||
| Also, acting. | ||
| What if I decided I self-diagnosed myself, even though I'm a comedian, I say a lot of words I probably shouldn't say in polite company, but I say them all the time. | ||
| What if I self-diagnosed myself as having Tourette's? | ||
| And so that when I'm out in public, I just go, cunt! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cunt! | |
| And I just, like, force myself to do it so that people recognize that I have Tourette's. | ||
| Well, you know, they would accuse you of being it. | ||
| Is that a South Park episode? | ||
| I think it is. | ||
| It must be. | ||
| Until they, like, put him in a hospital or something. | ||
| If you could come up with a funny premise, South Park has an episode on it. | ||
| I wonder what would happen, actually. | ||
| I mean, I'm pretty good at figuring out what theory would do if somebody genuinely did have Tourette's and then part of their tick worked out to be that they said racial slurs. | ||
| Oh, my God. | ||
| Is that like subconscious racism baked into them? | ||
| Like, what would happen? | ||
| I don't actually know what would happen in that case. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, it'd be baked in systemic racism. | ||
| There's like no resolution. | ||
| Cartman's Tourette's. | ||
| Cartman pretends to have Tourette's Syndrome so that he can say whatever he wants without getting in trouble. | ||
| I think I remember this now. | ||
| It eventually leads to trouble and he ends up saying things he would never say. | ||
| The episode's title is a play on the title of Jean-Luc Godard's 1963 film, Le Petit Soldat. | ||
| That's funny. | ||
| Is that soldat or soldat? | ||
| I don't speak French. | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| I remembered something of this the other day. | ||
| Dude, that was 2007! | ||
| Dude, yeah. | ||
| God, they're so ahead of the curve. | ||
| They were so tapped into this stuff. | ||
| Well, if anybody is going to attack woke culture successfully, it will be South Park. | ||
| It will be comedians in general. | ||
| Yes, but South Park in particular, because they have these characters that they could speak through, and these characters don't really resemble people, so you can murder them, you can kill them off every episode, like Kenny, and they have this amazing leeway. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's what it's gonna have to be. | ||
| It's gonna have to be. | ||
| I mean, so that's what I try to do. | ||
| I'm trying to lay down the tracks so that people feel like they can actually get into this. | ||
| Well, I think through what you and Peter and Helen have done through these hoax studies, you've at least highlighted to many people that not only is this a real problem, but it's really hilarious how far they're willing to go And accepts what kind of nonsense you guys are pushing. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And like now it's like taking over everything. | ||
| So like, you know, what do you do? | ||
| What do you do? | ||
| Because it seems like, is there going to be a peak and we're going to hit peak woke and it's going to slide to normalcy? | ||
| I don't know societally, but I actually wrote an article I put on New Discourses the other day that I said that we – people need to be having conversations right now because I'm like kind of getting disowned by friends and family a little bit. | ||
| And the question that I think people need to be asking is where's the line? | ||
| Like because the way people reason is that they'll let themselves slide and then justify it. | ||
| They call it post-hoc rationalization. | ||
| That's John Height's term. | ||
| And they'll let themselves slide and then justify it. | ||
| But if they state their principles up front – because I don't think a lot of people have actually done that and say, OK, I've already defended riots. | ||
| But let's say that they fire all of the department heads or whatever at a university or they fire this or they burn that down or whatever it is. | ||
| Everybody should have a line that says, okay, wait, this is too far. | ||
| And I think individuals need to start figuring out what theirs were so they can tell the story if they've already had it, like you and I have already had that. | ||
| And then other people who haven't, like we need to be talking to our friends and say, you know, I get that you think the woke movement's important and that it's doing good things. | ||
| And, you know, there's some crazy stuff going on and I'm stressed about it. | ||
| Where do you feel like the line is? | ||
| Where do you draw the line and say it's gone too far? | ||
| And you don't even – it's not about getting the answer. | ||
| It's actually about getting them to think about it. | ||
| What's happened so quickly. | ||
| Very quickly. | ||
| And the changes are so radical in what's acceptable and not acceptable and what people are willing to do to people that don't toe the line. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| I mean, utter destruction of life. | ||
| And people who... | ||
| I mean, you're seeing immigrant stories. | ||
| I'm getting emails from people whose marriages, like, interracial marriages are breaking up. | ||
| And they're like, how do I save my husband? | ||
| Well, the all lives matter firing thing is just one of the craziest ones. | ||
| Like, you can't say all... | ||
| Like, if someone says, what do you feel about Black Lives Matter? | ||
| And then you say, all lives matter, you get fired from your job! | ||
| Yep, but... | ||
| You know, it's one of those things where you're being... | ||
| Like, obviously, all lives matter. | ||
| Obviously. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But also, obviously, Black Lives Matter. | ||
| So why are you so compelled to follow the narrative that if you say something that's obviously true, instead of following the narrative, you get fired? | ||
| So because of that, people are willfully self-censoring and they're changing their perspective on things because they don't want to be canceled and they don't want to be fired. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So the question for me is, like, how much of that do you have to see before you start saying something has gone awry? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Something's off. | ||
| This isn't normal. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This isn't how we do business, you know. | ||
| I keep finding myself saying, you know, I'm on the left, really. | ||
| I don't really get on with conservative stuff, and I'm not really, like, patriotic, like, you know, gets. | ||
| And I keep saying to myself, like, this is the United States of America. | ||
| Why is this happening here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's happening everywhere, though. | ||
| Well, it is. | ||
| At least it speaks English and, I think, Spanish now. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Where does this go? | ||
| You're a smart guy. | ||
| Where does this go? | ||
| Do the math. | ||
| We're in a highly nonlinear situation. | ||
| That's my math statement. | ||
| So it's not actually clear because it depends on a lot of factors. | ||
| Like, if we have another police brutality incident against black people in the near term, that's going to be a mess. | ||
| It's going to be a huge mess. | ||
| It's so hard to tell because, like, Trump is the irritant that's driving – like Trump derangement thing is part of what's happening. | ||
| Like properly, people are actually driven crazy by this. | ||
| So what happens with the election tells us a lot. | ||
| I tend to be optimistic in the sense that this movement is so internally contradictory. | ||
| So you got like – I mentioned the trans and queer stuff that's on the Black Lives Matter official about page. | ||
| So there's another hashtag that's trans – Black Trans Lives Matter. | ||
| And so it's like, is there an all black lives matter? | ||
| You know, is that okay to say? | ||
| Because it's the same dynamic, but all of a sudden you can't say all lives matter and answer to black lives matter. | ||
| But can you say all black lives matter and answer to black trans lives matter? | ||
| And so it's like it's internally contradictory, right? | ||
| And then people are actually kind of catching on that something is not fair. | ||
| Like the white fragility game is just bullshit. | ||
| You just can't get around it. | ||
| The systemic thing is something feels unfair about it. | ||
| And Everybody being complicit in racism seems a bit much. | ||
| So there's all these kind of internal contradictions and there's going to be these inside fights. | ||
| And so it's hard to say that it's going to take over. | ||
| On the other hand, we're in the closest thing that we've seen in a long time to the Chinese Cultural Revolution. | ||
| But they did struggle sessions. | ||
| That's these cancel sessions. | ||
| They made people do tearful apologies and make these – they weren't videos. | ||
| It was like China in the 60s. | ||
| But they put them on public – on a stool in public, yelled at them and humiliated them and made them wear a hat with – like a dunce hat or whatever. | ||
| And that's what these cancel sessions – they're actually the same thing as struggle sessions. | ||
| They're just happening on social media. | ||
| It's also signaling to all the other people that haven't been in trouble that this will happen to you if you do not comply. | ||
| And there's some psychological stuff. | ||
| They say, is there a fate worse than death? | ||
| There's some psychological stuff that's floating around out there that says that being completely ostracized from your group and being unable to feel like a good person in your society is so psychologically damaging that it might actually be worse than death. | ||
| And so that's what people are faced with and they're so afraid of it, which is so bad because it's just so transparently bogus and it can't defend itself. | ||
| All it does is call names. | ||
| So it's hard to say where it will go. | ||
| I actually think it will – my prognosis is that it will break itself. | ||
| Break itself. | ||
| It will just – the backlash to it, which can be reasonable and liberal, people are going to wake up and they're going to have peak woke and they're not going to have more woke. | ||
| And it will chew itself up from the inside with these fights between us. | ||
| Here's an example of a fight. | ||
| Here's an example of a fight. | ||
| 1619 Project from The New York Times. | ||
| Nicole Hannah-Jones writes this kind of fake history of the United States saying that we're all about slavery. | ||
| Slavery is everything to do with the United States in every regard from the beginning and still – And then what are they doing now, right? | ||
| So there's this huge intense fight between the black population and the indigenous population for most racially oppressed. | ||
| And they both have a pretty good claim on it, right? | ||
| So that genocide thing was pretty big. | ||
| And then slavery was pretty big. | ||
| And it's complicated. | ||
| So they're fighting for status. | ||
| So you had the indigenous side of that. | ||
| Assert that black people in North America are settlers of color, which is a problem. | ||
| And then you've had Nicole Hannah-Jones try to point out that lots of Native Americans held black slaves. | ||
| So they were slave owners, which is a problem. | ||
| So they're fighting over that infighting for status, for the ultimate victim status. | ||
| And then they've got like that trans thing's coming. | ||
| I saw a video of some black woman the other day yelling about what is this black power fist on the trans flag about? | ||
| That's not, you know... | ||
| That's not what this is supposed to be. | ||
| Black people is not supposed to be. | ||
| White people, trans white people putting their stuff. | ||
| I thought it was really clever that trans people jumped in and had that Black Trans Lives Matter rally. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right. | |
| Because it was like, you might be the only people that can get away with this right now. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| No one else can hop in on that, but Black Trans Lives Matter. | ||
| And there was like hundreds of thousands of people because everybody felt like you had to just keep protesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| So I think it's going to chew itself up inside, but everything that took over is going with it. | ||
| I don't know how long it's going to take the university to not be kind of like, I don't know about that anymore. | ||
| Yeah, when do they say anything like that, particularly if they get so much massive pushback from the people that they're teaching? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, the number of people right now that are saying they want deferrals partly because of the COVID and online classes, they don't want to go back to college. | ||
| And then this stuff's blown out and every college president's like, we're going to be a full anti-racist thing. | ||
| The other thing nobody's factoring in yet is the other backlash, which is going to be law. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Niagara Falls of lawsuits is coming because a bunch of people are – so here's – like imagine you run a business. | ||
| You do run a business. | ||
| So all of a sudden this event happens. | ||
| Everybody is supposed to have their statement. | ||
| There's tons of social pressure to make your statement. | ||
| If you don't make a statement, it's compelled to say, oh, your business didn't say something about Black Lives Matter, so you have to say something one way or the other. | ||
| So everybody's making a statement. | ||
| Everybody's trying to do the thing, and they don't know what to do. | ||
| So I hear from a lot of people that email me about – at their job, they talk to their boss, and the boss is like, well, we have to do something, and there's this. | ||
| There's this program, this anti-racism program, so we have to do something, and that's the thing. | ||
| And we'll just take it up. | ||
| And a lot of people are successfully pushing back on that and saying, look, there are other ways. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| We can actually do other diversity programs than this one. | ||
| And when they realize that, a lot of bosses are saying, huh, yeah, maybe we should think a little harder about this. | ||
| So everybody's acting really fast. | ||
| And there's a clear moral panic going on. | ||
| So people are making bad decisions. | ||
| They're opening themselves up to a lot of future litigation. | ||
| If you're actually having an official statement or policy of your company that says something like that you believe that all white people are complicit in racism or are racists, then you've now called all your white employees racist. | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| That's probably discriminatory. | ||
| But do you think you can actually sue someone for that? | ||
| My point isn't whether or not you can. | ||
| My point is that a lot of people are going to try. | ||
| But I think that the courts are even siding towards being more woke because it's society's... | ||
| Cultural shift has moved in that direction. | ||
| Some yes and some no, and there's a point to that. | ||
| But on the other hand, for example, if you look at the Title IX cases where those mostly boys, but it wasn't always boys, got totally railroaded in kangaroo courts. | ||
| They got accused of sexual misconduct. | ||
| The university ends up expelling them or whatever, the girl with a mattress or whatever that happened. | ||
| And then they're suing in civil court, and they're almost all winning. | ||
| Did that kid, the mattress boy, did he sue? | ||
| I don't know if he did specifically or not, but I do know that there have been a number of civil suits. | ||
| That lady was bringing her mattress on the stage when she accepted her diploma. | ||
| I mean, it's performance art. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just performance art. | ||
| We can't run the world on performance art, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's really strange too is that if you accuse someone of something and it turns out that not be true, you don't really get in trouble for that. | ||
| That's a thing. | ||
| That's a real problem. | ||
| That's a thing. | ||
| Because there's no actual repercussions for being deceptive and ruining someone's life. | ||
| I have a friend who was accused of sexual assault by a woman and it was proven that he didn't do it and nothing ever happened to her. | ||
| He just made some stuff up about him and So we got laws against revenge porn, right? | ||
| You can't film your girlfriend or whatever and then you break up and then you put her on the internet to put her on blast or embarrass her or whatever. | ||
| It's against the law now. | ||
| We made laws about that. | ||
| I mean this doxing stuff or these videos where they're filming people and accusing them of being racist and it blows up their lives. | ||
| There may have to be legislation built around that. | ||
| So the question becomes, will the political will be there? | ||
| That depends on the people and it depends on the politicians. | ||
| I know your lovely state here, California, just the state legislature has voted to take the anti-discrimination language out of the state constitution, which I think is a bold move. | ||
| I think the people get to decide on that in the end, in maybe November. | ||
| What is the anti-discrimination language in the constitution that they're removing? | ||
| Are you going to pull that one up? | ||
| It's like Article 31 or something like that. | ||
| It is unbelievable that they voted to put this up to be pulled out of the Constitution. | ||
| What was their motivation? | ||
| It's like you can't discriminate or favor by race, gender, sex, sexual orientation, so on and so forth. | ||
| Why would they remove that? | ||
| Because equity requires discrimination. | ||
| If you listen to this guy that's blasting all over, Ibram Kendi, how to be anti-racist, he even has a sentence in the book where he says that you have to evaluate everything according to whether it has racist or anti-racist outcomes. | ||
| So if you have discrimination policy that says you cannot discriminate and then that makes it so you don't have equity, then that's actually a racist policy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So they're actually advocating... | ||
| I mean, equity requires... | ||
| They're advocating discrimination? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| But it'll be positive discrimination... | ||
| Well, it might actually be both... | ||
| Discrimination against white males. | ||
| It'll be discrimination for at first. | ||
| Discrimination for minorities. | ||
| So the equivalent of affirmative action and reparations. | ||
| And then they'll add in, possibly, discrimination against if they aren't achieving what they're trying to do. | ||
| Is this clear that this is their motivation? | ||
| Is this... | ||
| I mean, they don't lie about it. | ||
| They just say it all the time, is that if you don't have equal outcomes, then the system must be – I mean, you can see how this is like putting wallpaper over a hole in your wall. | ||
| If the system has unequal outcomes, it must be discrimination, so you're just going to – I mean they say it explicitly. | ||
| And you see this. | ||
| Actually, there's a lawsuit, at least one lawsuit, one in New York City where they were openly discriminating against Asian students. | ||
| Like they were discriminating against Asians to make it because they're academically kicking all the ass. | ||
| And so – They were making it more difficult. | ||
| They would have to have had a higher GPA to get in. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What's going on with that Harvard? | ||
| There's a lawsuit with Harvard with that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I don't know where it's at, though. | ||
| Yeah, that's troubling. | ||
| This is troubling stuff. | ||
| I mean, I say California does this. | ||
| I don't know what happens because it's in violation of the federal laws. | ||
| So, I mean, it's directly against Title VII. Who's pushing for that? | ||
| I mean, all of these kind of hustlers that are getting all famous are pushing for it, but then, again, as your state legislature actually voted amongst themselves to put it up to a vote, all the more reason to move to Texas or something. | ||
| God, it's so spooky. | ||
| It's like, where do they think this shit goes? | ||
| It's like there's no map of the territory. | ||
| There's no, like, if we do this, then, you know, we're going to have this kind of success in the future because, you know, we'll discriminate to the point where we reach some sort of homeostasis. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Some equality. | ||
| There are some scary... | ||
| Judge ruled for Harvard. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| It's on their website. | ||
| So the ruling was last October. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| Politically motivated lawsuit brought by Edward Blum and the organization he created Students for the Fair Admissions wants to remove the consideration of race in college and university admissions. | ||
| What's at stake? | ||
| The ability of colleges and universities across the country to create the diverse communities essential to their educational missions and the success of their students. | ||
| So the problem was that so many of these Asian kids were doing so well that they had a disproportionate number of Asian students and they wanted to balance it out better. | ||
| They want more blacks and Latinos specifically. | ||
| They usually say it, at least in New York City, they actually say it, that it's blacks and Latinos. | ||
| They say it over and over and over again, that Asians and whites and Jews are filling all the spots and blacks and Latinos aren't. | ||
| So what you're actually looking at is they're trying to move to a space where they can put racial quotas in. | ||
| That's so crazy. | ||
| And it hurts people, right? | ||
| So if you take, like with Harvard, Harvard's hard. | ||
| It's a hard school. | ||
| So if you take somebody who's academically not prepared for Harvard and you stick them in Harvard, they're going to underperform. | ||
| And then if you would have stuck them in a school that they actually are, you know, it matches their capabilities, then they're going to excel. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| You can't, like if we went out into the gym and we put some weights on there, right? | ||
| And you're like, all right, Jim, you're going to bench 400 pounds. | ||
| I'm like, no, I'm not. | ||
| But it's like, you know, you wanted to coach me. | ||
| You would say, all right, we found out you can do like 190 or whatever. | ||
| So we're going to push yourself. | ||
| We're going to try 195. You know, within that little bit of a range, you can cause somebody to excel. | ||
| And then within however many months or years, I'm benching 300, 400 pounds. | ||
| You can't just put people in hard mode and then watch them succeed. | ||
| And then, again, I get these emails from people. | ||
| They're telling me their story. | ||
| I get this one from this black guy who said that he never had any of his work corrected. | ||
| And how does he know in his master's program? | ||
| What? | ||
| How does he know? | ||
| In his master's program? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So he started deliberately putting mistakes in to see if they'd correct it. | ||
| And they wouldn't. | ||
| They didn't correct it. | ||
| Like he was putting mistakes in on purpose. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Right? | ||
| So he's getting A's on all these papers that he was writing that were just junk. | ||
| And now he can't get a job because his skills never develop to the point where they're actually competitive. | ||
| So it's like trying to help people by the wrong means hurts them. | ||
| Well, they don't care about the end result, right? | ||
| They don't care about you getting a job. | ||
| They really just care about you graduating and looking good on there. | ||
| It's like I said. | ||
| It's like putting wallpaper over a hole in the wall and considering it fixed. | ||
| It's like, oh, we're just going to fix the numbers on the back end. | ||
| And problem solved, you know? | ||
| If Harvard really wanted to make things equal, they would try to figure out why they're not. | ||
| Based on, you know, like if they have only X amount of white people and X amount of Asian people, like why are there less of this race or nationality than the other? | ||
| And let's put some study into what can be done and use all these brilliant minds to figure out what can be done to make this better. | ||
| So that's the difference between critical theory and traditional theory. | ||
| So you're saying we should use traditional theory, which every reasonable person in the world now... | ||
| Let me give you an idea. | ||
| Like, this systemic thing makes that impossible. | ||
| So imagine – I'll give you an analogy that helps you understand what systemic, say racism or systemic, what this idea really means. | ||
| So imagine like you and I go out for a walk down the sidewalk, right? | ||
| And for whatever reason, You step on, you know, the back end of a broken bottle and you trip and you bump into me and you knock me into the road when you trip and I happen to get hit by a car and I die. | ||
| Okay, so whose fault was that? | ||
| Obviously, usually we'd probably say it's like no fault or whatever. | ||
| But if you start looking at it the way that these scholars do, and this is actually tracking the same argument that's in the book, Being White, Being Good, by Barbara Applebaum about white complicity. | ||
| What happens is you could say, well, it's your fault for tripping, and it's my fault for deciding to walk on the street side versus the inside and walking right next to you instead of sitting in front of you. | ||
| It's the person who drove the car's fault for, you know, maybe they were speeding... | ||
| Maybe they happened to have chose to go at that time. | ||
| Maybe the doctor called and they had to run out of the house. | ||
| So the doctors now got some complicity in the situation. | ||
| The kid who broke the bottle last night after he had a couple of beers, well, it's his fault, so he's complicit. | ||
| But then if you go all the way to this systemic understanding where you're just looking at the back end, the wallpaper over the hole in the wall, it would be saying, well, we live in a culture where people drive cars. | ||
| We live in a culture that supports cars and beer. | ||
| Everybody that supports car culture, everybody who supports the economy that allows people to afford cars, everybody who supports the culture that would allow beer to exist is also somehow complicit. | ||
| That's actually the same argument that the white complicity and racism book makes. | ||
| Everybody – car culture is to blame for me getting hit by that car. | ||
| And so you can see it makes it impossible to figure out where moral responsibility actually lies because it puts it on everybody. | ||
| And it makes it impossible to see what the actual causes are. | ||
| Another story I had from – similar to this was from University of Michigan. | ||
| There's this program called Stride and it's supposed to fix for these disparities. | ||
| So I'm talking to somebody and he's talking about hiring, academic hiring, and he says, OK. The way the Stride program looks at it, for whatever reason, men have twice as many of this as women, whatever the thing is. | ||
| And so Stride says, okay, so if a woman applies, you count the number, if a man and a woman apply, you count the number the man has, you double the number the women have. | ||
| And I said, hang on a second, wait a minute. | ||
| Do you know why that number is different? | ||
| He said, no. | ||
| Nobody knows why it's different. | ||
| It just is. | ||
| So we're just going to double it. | ||
| And I said, but some of that might be discrimination and some of it might not. | ||
| And I would agree with you that we should consider making up for the part that is discrimination. | ||
| So maybe it's half of that is discrimination. | ||
| So you add something, but you don't double it because some of it might be something different and you don't know. | ||
| And he was like, well, what else could it be? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So this systemic thinking prevents you from being able to start thinking of what the real causes, the real problems are. | ||
| So it's again, it's fixing your hole in your wall by just like, let's just put up some wallpaper, you know? | ||
| But systemic thinking right now is very popular. | ||
| It's so hot. | ||
| It's everything. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| They love saying it, too, because it sounds good. | ||
| And it's religious. | ||
| I mean, it's a spiritual thing, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a system. | ||
| It works in mysterious ways. | ||
| And it does in a lot of ways. | ||
| It works. | ||
| I mean, this comes back to, if we look at the book, Michel Foucault's philosophy, power and politics work through everybody constantly by the way that we speak about things, by the way that we think about things. | ||
| So you have this kind of like vague mystical sense of how society works is that it's operating through everybody and everybody's complicit and tied into it. | ||
| Well, I don't have a problem with them being wrong. | ||
| Me either. | ||
| But I do have a problem that this stuff can't be questioned. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that if you even bring it up, you get insulted and, you know, you're probably going to get attacked now. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| You know what else I have a problem with is that they come in and they sell you something like anti-racism or diversity or inclusion or equity, and they don't tell you really what it means. | ||
| It just sounds good, right? | ||
| And so that's why I'm writing that encyclopedia. | ||
| My opinion, you know, I am a firm believer that people should be able to believe what they want. | ||
| They should be able to, within not injuring people or whatever, you know, do what they want. | ||
| You should really, we should have freedom, a lot of freedom. | ||
| And so... | ||
| I think that people, though, should be able to know what they're signing up for. | ||
| And this language is so tricky. | ||
| They've really engineered the language to be so tricky that people think, oh, anti-racism, that sounds really good, so let's do it. | ||
| And it actually – like the definition of it is a lifelong commitment to self-reflection, self-critique, and social activism. | ||
| It's ongoing and – No one has ever done. | ||
| That's actually the definition. | ||
| Isn't that kind of what's wrong with a lot of this woke shit is that we're monkeying around with definitions and language. | ||
| We're changing. | ||
| We're changing language. | ||
| We're screwing with what things actually mean to the point where everything gets very vague and confusing and to challenge it, you're ostracized. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| When you hear like Like Antifa talk about fascism. | ||
| Everybody's a fascist. | ||
| Everybody's a Nazi now. | ||
| What they actually like if you dig in and figure out what the word fascism means, it actually means a functioning society. | ||
| Because it has to have, like, police, it has to have order, it has to have, you know, an economy that functions. | ||
| It means not anarchy. | ||
| Because anything that could lead to a total fascist state equals fascism in the present, according to the way you think about it. | ||
| That comes again from that Herbert Marcuse guy who wrote it explicitly in Repressive Tolerance in 1965. We live in a perpetual state of emergency now that fascism has entered the world. | ||
| So everything that could produce fascism is fascism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| And it's like, I'm sorry, man. | ||
| That's a fucking lunatic. | ||
| It's just not real. | ||
| Yeah, but how does this get corrected if you can't criticize it? | ||
| That's the real issue, right? | ||
| If it's happening at the university level, but it's not being questioned at the university level, so there's no real debate. | ||
| So how does this ever get corrected? | ||
| It seems like it has to get out into the world, and then by then the fire is so big, there's not enough hoses to put it out. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| That's actually kind of the way this has worked is that they've got so many people thinking this way. | ||
| It's hard to put the fires out. | ||
| But the answer is not going to be very palatable. | ||
| The name calling has to lose its credit, not all the way to some degree. | ||
| So like you and I were talking about earlier, was it feminism? | ||
| Was it Black Lives Matter? | ||
| If somebody calls me a racist, if somebody calls me a racist, I don't freak out. | ||
| I stay calm. | ||
| And I say, what do you mean by that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so they say, oh, well, systems, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| No. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I mean, there are definitions that say things like there's only racist and anti-racist. | ||
| There's no such thing as not racist. | ||
| Like, screw you. | ||
| I'm not racist. | ||
| That is crazy. | ||
| Just move on. | ||
| When did anti-racist rear its head? | ||
| That seems a fairly new expression, but it's getting tossed around like a beach ball at a concert. | ||
| It became big just in the last few years off of a couple of these authors like Ibram Kendi and Robin DiAngelo, who dedicate a lot of their work to it. | ||
| DiAngelo's book That's relevant was 2018. And Kendi's was, I think, I think, I have to check 2019 for his How to Be an Anti-Racist. | ||
| He has an older one. | ||
| And this is the same lady that wrote the White Fragility book? | ||
| That is White Fragility I'm talking about. | ||
| Oh, that is from 18. I mean, she has other, yeah, it's 2018. She has other books that are even crazier, like What Does It Mean to Be White? | ||
| Oh, so she's a hustler. | ||
| She's a big-time hustler. | ||
| She has this paper I actually found. | ||
| Somebody sent it to me the other day. | ||
| This is a real paper. | ||
| And it's called something about the racial cray-cray, white neurosis and the racial cray-cray from 2013. Like, you can find it if you Google that name. | ||
| Racial cray-cray. | ||
| Racial cray-cray. | ||
| It's one of the most insane things I've ever read. | ||
| It's got these sections in the paper, introduction or whatever, and then at the beginning of each one, it's like they just make something up, like this weird rant, and then it ends in a poem, and it says that white people and white supremacy cause a racial cray-cray in white people, and then white racial cray-cray causes... | ||
| I want other people to have to live with racial cray-cray so they get racial cray-cray too. | ||
| I'm not making that up. | ||
| That's real. | ||
| Trevor Burrus White supremacy is another one that's getting chucked around quite a bit lately. | ||
| Trevor Burrus It's because they've changed the definition. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Trevor Burrus You know what some things – and so I'm going to point out this is actually from a legislative body – sorry, an administrative body set up by the state legislature of Washington in January called the Equity Task Force. | ||
| And you know what they said was white supremacy coming through their mouths as they said it? | ||
| Keeping a meeting agenda. | ||
| Staying on a schedule. | ||
| There's a 2017 paper by Alison Bailey that talks about- Those specific things? | ||
| Those specific things. | ||
| Keeping a meeting scheduled? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A schedule, an agenda. | ||
| So there's actually something that I read a year or so ago because of the schedule thing that wearing a wristwatch, because that means you care about time and being on time, is white supremacy. | ||
| White supremacy is believing that the society that white people created, which means science, reason, logic, civility, rule of law, democracy, that that's good. | ||
| That's the definition of white supremacy. | ||
| So if somebody calls me a white supremacist, once you know that— Is that all white society? | ||
| Isn't that Egyptian as well? | ||
| I mean, not the way they think about it. | ||
| All they care about is the way that white Western men following the Enlightenment started to use this to oppress people. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| That's – well, watch as white supremacy. | ||
| Watch as a white supremacy. | ||
| So this Alison Bailey woman has this paper where she literally – the point of the paper is to say anything that disagrees is a man – or anything that disagrees is somebody just trying to keep their privilege. | ||
| She calls it privilege-preserving epistemic pushback. | ||
| That's a real term. | ||
| And so in the paper, though, she says that the master's tools in philosophy, which are – that's slavery, right? | ||
| That's white supremacy. | ||
| The master's tools that maintain white supremacy are like philosophical soundness, epistemic adequacy, which means knowing what you're talking about, science, reason. | ||
| Like that's what they think white supremacy is. | ||
| Science is white supremacy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That's why you have to now have to redo chemistry and make chemistry woke. | ||
| And this is being taught in schools, so people are paying money to learn this. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And that legislative entity in Washington, their equity task force, they defined equity. | ||
| When I say equity, you probably have – what do you think? | ||
| You think something like equality, something different, a little bit, something, but you have that vague sense of equality. | ||
| They said it equals disrupt plus dismantle, tear down the system. | ||
| And then they also said the point of this body is to set this up. | ||
| That was their official definition, by the way. | ||
| And the point of this body is to establish this administrative entity for 50 years for the state of Washington. | ||
| Jim, you're hurting my head. | ||
| Dude, I'm telling you. | ||
| I was like – I've been – like I'll tell you the truth. | ||
| Since these riots broke out, I've actually been much calmer. | ||
| For about the last six to eight months, I've been literally having my right eyelid twitch, like constantly, all the time. | ||
| I even had it twitching in my sleep, to where the muscle that causes your eyelid to flutter got cramps. | ||
| It sucked. | ||
| What do you think that's from? | ||
| It was from knowing that this shit was happening and nobody having any way to see it. | ||
| And I was trying to write this website as fast as I could. | ||
| I wrote like 200,000 words on new discourses from Christmas till like the riots broke out. | ||
| It's like I'm trying to tell the world about this. | ||
| At least more people are listening. | ||
| That's what I'm very hopeful about. | ||
| It was a thing that you were talking about a few years ago, and people were like, why are you wasting your time on this nonsense? | ||
| This will never be a factor in the real world. | ||
| Incorrect. | ||
| Incorrect? | ||
| Incorrect. | ||
| That's why we started writing this book, was to explain that to people, because we were getting gaslit. | ||
| I mean, we were getting told by philosophers that we just didn't know what we were talking about. | ||
| And then Helen wasn't going to have that, and she was like, I'll just write a book and tell them. | ||
| Helen's our machine gunner, man. | ||
| I need to meet her. | ||
| Oh, she's great. | ||
| She can't come over here from the UK, right? | ||
| Not now. | ||
| Not with those viruses and stuff. | ||
| Back then she couldn't when we did our first podcast together. | ||
| She could if the virus and health and stuff get associated. | ||
| God, I hope it clears up. | ||
| She's the most perfectly principled and clear person I think I've ever worked with. | ||
| She's a marvel. | ||
| That's a hell of a statement. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, she said that I'm the least sexist person she's ever worked with, which I think is also pretty good. | ||
| Congratulations. | ||
| What did you do to purge your obvious innate? | ||
| I just treat people's ideas as ideas. | ||
| So the reason she said that was because I didn't, like, there's a thing called benevolent sexism where you're too nice to women, and I just don't do it. | ||
| Oh, benevolent sexism. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| You hold doors open and shit like that? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| You piece of shit. | ||
| She could hold the door open herself. | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean... | ||
| What about if you hold doors open for men only? | ||
| I mean... | ||
| Then you seem like a sexist too. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Double bind. | ||
| You're damned if you do, damned if you don't. | ||
| You're double fucked there, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So you have to see race, but if you see race, you're racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| Right, because if you say, I'm only holding doors open for men, they're like, what kind of piece of shit sexist do you? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I don't know, I'm not a sexist, so I don't hold doors open for women because they can do it themselves. | ||
| So here's Helen's example of a perfect double bind, but it's race, it's not sex, but it could work exactly the same. | ||
| She says, imagine that you have a store, and a shopkeeper's there, and a black customer and a white customer are both in the store at the same time, and the shopkeeper goes up to help one person first. | ||
| So if they go, and this is what critical race theory, this is how it would analyze what happens. | ||
| So if the shopkeeper goes to the white person first, it would say that's clear racism, white favoritism, and make the black person wait. | ||
| But if it went to the black person first, it would say it's clear racism because she wanted to get the black person out of the store faster. | ||
| Oh boy. | ||
| That's literally how critical race theory would operate with that because one of the – Damned if you do. | ||
| Well, one of the tenets of critical race theory is that racism is ordinary, not aberrational in the United States society. | ||
| And it is not – the question is no longer did racism take place for that as to be assumed but rather – How did racism manifest in that situation? | ||
| So I mean that's – I quoted Robert D'Angelo for that. | ||
| So the belief is that racism is in literally every interaction and it's up to the critical race theorist. | ||
| That's the critical race theorist's job is to find it even if you have to make it up like master bedroom. | ||
| God. | ||
| I think the master bedroom thing was voluntary. | ||
| I think someone just in that business just said we probably shouldn't say master bedroom. | ||
| It blew up on Twitter about a month ago because I live on Twitter. | ||
| As you know, I've basically neo'd into the Twitter matrix. | ||
| Do you ever take days off? | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I mean, not really lately because it's like if my eyelids are twitching because the world's going to end, man, what are you going to do? | ||
| But if, you know... | ||
| You know, like, Mike, the filmmaker, came to visit, and, like, we went hiking and stuff, and it was days off. | ||
| You know, we were talking about this stuff, but we were out in the woods and, you know, doing normal stuff. | ||
| I try to get out. | ||
| I mean, with the pandemic, I don't really, but I try to get out. | ||
| Like, usually I have my trip to China every year in two weeks, and it's just, you know, no work. | ||
| So, some, but not much, especially right now, man. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's not good to be one of the few people who's actually... | ||
| I'm watching the train wrecking, and everybody's like, what's happening? | ||
| That's the thing, is that you're willing to call it for what it is, which is a very dangerous game right now. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| It's a very dangerous game, because people don't want to hear that. | ||
| I can do it, because I actually know what I'm talking about. | ||
| So when they come back at me, I quote their own literature at them, and usually they don't know their literature as well as I do, because I've read all this crap. | ||
| I've read a lot of it over and over again. | ||
| I've read D'Angelo's book twice. | ||
| I've read, you know... | ||
| This is a heavy burden you've got in your head. | ||
| Oh, dude. | ||
| It's not a good place. | ||
| I mean, I keep trying to tell people, people are like, oh, you're a grifter, you're trying to... | ||
| No, it's actually I want to make myself irrelevant by making this go away, and then I want to retire. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's all I want in life. | ||
| That grifter term gets used really inappropriately all the time. | ||
| Anybody who doesn't disagree with someone is a grifter, particularly if you disagree with someone who has a right-wing philosophy, or excuse me, a left-wing philosophy. | ||
| You don't even have to make money to be a grifter. | ||
| I made zero dollars for the vast majority of the time. | ||
| I make a little on Patreon now, so I can't say it anymore, but I made zero dollars for the majority of the time that I've done this, and people are calling me a grifter because I was getting Twitter followers. | ||
| Like Twitter followers are somehow like value or something. | ||
| There is some value to it. | ||
| I mean you can monetize a little bit or you can like – I guess I could put my dark plans in. | ||
| I don't even know what I would – Do you have dark plans? | ||
| No. | ||
| My whole thing is like I don't want to tell people what to do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like all these people come to me and they're – But you also don't want people telling you what to do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct. | |
| And you see that they're doing this. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| And so it's like people come to me and they're like, how do I live? | ||
| And I'm like, man, I will tell you the truth. | ||
| I actually think I have a pretty good handle on how I live but I don't know your circumstances. | ||
| I don't know how – I don't know your stories. | ||
| I don't know how to tell you what to – I know some principles are good. | ||
| I'm real big on authenticity, real big on authenticity. | ||
| I actually should write something about authenticity that's clear and accessible for people. | ||
| I think people should be authentic. | ||
| I think you should take the time to learn who you are. | ||
| Take the time. | ||
| It's not easy. | ||
| It's not easy, and it's best done through struggle, in my opinion. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It is. | ||
| You have to go wrestle up against some stuff. | ||
| You have to be told where you're failing. | ||
| You have to be told where you suck. | ||
| Yeah, you have to have a discipline. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Usually, there's something about doing a thing that lets you know who you are. | ||
| I mean, it's not for everybody, so I can't say it, but the martial arts have been great for that for me, and they have been for you. | ||
| It works for a lot of people. | ||
| Some people... | ||
| I mean, you don't have to do that, though. | ||
| Running, yoga, anything. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But find a discipline, and it's really... | ||
| Something. | ||
| When you push yourself, you find out... | ||
| You find out where you're going to quit. | ||
| You find out your shortcomings. | ||
| You find out where your demons are, where the skeletons are in your head. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And, you know, ideally it needs to be something that bounces off of reality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You can't, like, if it's just going in reading and writing stuff, that's how you, like, you can go pretty far out into la-la land. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So you need to bounce it off reality. | ||
| I used to say that philosophers need, I used to work a lot in my garden and I would say that I suck at gardening, by the way. | ||
| But philosophers need to get their hands on the soil because you can't lie about it. | ||
| You feel it. | ||
| You smell it. | ||
| It's heavy. | ||
| I'm from Tennessee, so it's like sticky clay. | ||
| You can't get it off you. | ||
| And it's like – and that earth smell is – and it's like wet. | ||
| It's like it's real and you're sweating and it's like – you can't – reality won't lie to you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's where this is so – like my answer to this problem is we need to remember that objective principles work and that we need to defer to reality not lying to us because we can lie to ourselves all day. | ||
| We can lie to ourselves and say that Fallon Fox is exactly the same as the people whose heads she literally beat in and then went on Twitter and bragged about how it was fun to crack that person's skull. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She derived enjoyment from that. | ||
| You can go on Tumblr or Twitter and deconstruct your identity and become a completely different person, but reality doesn't lie to you. | ||
| It never lies to you. | ||
| The only thing that lies is your lived experience, your interpretation of your lived experience of reality. | ||
| So I think that people need to do that. | ||
| Do something hard. | ||
| Try to build a thing. | ||
| And when it falls down, because it will, try again. | ||
| Like I tried getting into blacksmithing for a little while a year or so ago. | ||
| I made a couple of little knives. | ||
| Like really little knives because I only had a little tiny forge. | ||
| So they're like really little, like embarrassingly little. | ||
| But I was just fooling around, you know. | ||
| But the steel doesn't lie. | ||
| And when you drop the steel, like I did one time and it's yellow, whatever it touches catches on fire. | ||
| That doesn't lie either. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So it's like you have to, I think people need more reality. | ||
| Like they need to unplug. | ||
| Yeah, that's a problem with just thinking, right? | ||
| Just thinking and then also expanding and expounding upon those thoughts in front of other people that are also just thinking and you're all doing it together. | ||
| You need some sort of a tangible physical discipline to go along with that that sort of tempers you. | ||
| I think that's exactly right. | ||
| And something that's, you know, a long practice that makes, like, yoga or martial arts or running to, like, get good at it. | ||
| That's really great because, you know, you're going to have pitfalls and you're going to have to learn to struggle and overcome. | ||
| You're going to develop—a little bit of stoicism is going to come with just to get through. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You have to. | ||
| Because it—I mean— You know, I've had matches before where I went on and I was all hot shot or whatever back when I used to do sport karate and some dude just kicked me in the side of the head and I was like unconscious and that's just the end of that. | ||
| You know, and it's like you've got to reassess your cockiness real fast. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Once you get your head kicked so hard you get knocked out. | ||
| Like I didn't even see the kick. | ||
| I just woke up later, you know. | ||
| So it's like... | ||
| Something like that where you're going to have these pitfalls or like I had when I was learning the martial arts I train now, I had a really long period of time where what we called it was a knowledge use gap. | ||
| Like I could do the forms or whatever. | ||
| I could practice the techniques and I could do them what looked to be accurate. | ||
| But when I tried to do them on a person, it didn't work. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Until it works on a person, it doesn't work. | ||
| I even said this on Twitter this morning, is I think we need to have an ethic, like our culture needs to start remembering an ethic that your education, whether it's school or whether it's training or whatever it is, is worth what you can build with it. | ||
| It's not worth anything more than what you can build. | ||
| So if you go to trade school and you end up building some great business empire, Your education was good. | ||
| And if you go to university and get a PhD and do a couple postdocs and all you can do is whine and complain and you can't do anything productive, your education wasn't good. | ||
| And it doesn't see you immediately remove like these weird elite credentialing things from that It's what can you do with it that proves whether or not it was good in the world? | ||
| I think we need to kind of remember it's like a pragmatic thing, right? | ||
| What can you do with this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And some people, they can only teach the same thing that they learned. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that becomes a problem because then you're so indoctrinated in the system and you're just sort of perpetuating the same shit that got you to where you are and just keep making it more and more significant, more and more important in terms of the way you describe it to people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So we look at this stuff that they're trying to do with like education. | ||
| One of the big movements now is to take tests out of our schools. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What's that about? | ||
| Well, they don't want a test that can show that their stuff failed. | ||
| Right? | ||
| They say that's not what they say, but that's what it is. | ||
| They also don't want competition between students. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| In particular, the test scores don't come out equal across all identity groups. | ||
| Therefore, the test must be racist. | ||
| Racist towards Asians. | ||
| Apparently, yeah. | ||
| They're the master race when it comes to school. | ||
| Yeah, we all got to practice our Mandarin if this keeps up. | ||
| Do you have hope? | ||
| I always have hope. | ||
| You do? | ||
| I mean I am actually naively optimistic generally. | ||
| I don't really – you know, it's more like this. | ||
| It's not even that. | ||
| I don't have time for people who are pessimistic whiners. | ||
| Even if this is the fucking end of the world, I'm not going to act like it is. | ||
| I'm not giving up. | ||
| If these people guillotine me in the end, then fine. | ||
| But I'm not – I see no value in saying, oh, it's hopeless. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So I'm an atheist. | ||
| We talked about that. | ||
| I mean, I would have actually said that last year, if I was writing my memoir, I was finding faith. | ||
| I don't have faith in God. | ||
| It didn't happen. | ||
| Sorry, Christian friends. | ||
| It just didn't happen. | ||
| But there is the ability to have faith in that if you do the work and that if you get yourself organized and you put your effort in— On a program that can actually achieve a result that you can. | ||
| Again, jiu-jitsu is a really great example. | ||
| I mean everybody who trains jiu-jitsu gets humbled. | ||
| But the deal is if you go to a qualified jiu-jitsu instructor, whether it's a Gracie, whether it's one of these other – there's lots of them now. | ||
| They're really good. | ||
| They have a program that you can have faith in because it reliably produces black belts who can basically kill everybody, right? | ||
| And so you can have faith. | ||
| Like you're going to go and for years you're going to suck. | ||
| You're going to get choked out. | ||
| You're going to get beat by – you're going to be a purple belt and get choked by a white belt who got a good move on you at some point and you're going to have a bad day afterwards. | ||
| It's going to come up sometimes, or some tricky kid that knows some wrestling is going to throw you, and you're like, how did this happen? | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| But if you have faith in that system, then you can also get there. | ||
| So that qualified faith is there. | ||
| And so I actually think that the principles we've laid down, for example, in our country work. | ||
| Let's defer to the evidence. | ||
| Let's defer to a rule of law knowing that we have a democratic process where we can remake the law as we need to hopefully incrementally and not through some stupid revolution and then that can work. | ||
| So I have to be hopeful because I know the thing can work. | ||
| If we're willing to kind of stand up for it and remember it. | ||
| I'm hoping that with all this looting and the chaos and the smashing things and the riots and the people – like we were talking earlier before the show about this guy who was at a – He was at a protest in Provo, Utah, and he was just trying to honk his horn and get through, and they shot into his car. | ||
| That's madness. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| That's madness. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| And I'm hoping that this stuff is going to alarm people to the point where they start recognizing where this is going. | ||
| That's what I'm saying with Peak Woke. | ||
| Yeah, tearing down. | ||
| Like if that's being – like for me, so much – I mean I was already past peak woke, but like a real moment of wake-up call like this – there have been moments where this stuff has flared up in the past and you're like, oh, it's going to die down. | ||
| But not this. | ||
| Not this time. | ||
| And what it was was watching the media lie, watching the media defend stuff that's just not defensible. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And it's like, okay, so this is a thing. | ||
| I don't actually expect your average citizen to like – I don't expect people to know a damn thing. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| Life is hard. | ||
| You go work your ass off. | ||
| You come home. | ||
| You don't have time to learn everything in the universe. | ||
| But if you have a job in like media or if you're in the government – Or you're like a college – I expect something out of you. | ||
| And I think we all have a right to expect something out of you. | ||
| So when you have some guy in the media yelling that where does it say anywhere for protests to have to be peaceful? | ||
| It's in the First Amendment. | ||
| You actually should probably know that. | ||
| I expect something out of you. | ||
| So we've got to – there's actually a crisis. | ||
| We could call it of expertise if you want. | ||
| There's a crisis of being able to recognize – That people, you know, are being held to an expectation of quality. | ||
| And I think the internet has facilitated it. | ||
| I think the incentives around hot takes go viral, whereas nuanced analysis doesn't go viral. | ||
| That hot take on where does it say that protests have to be peaceful? | ||
| It's like, Jesus Christ, man, what are you talking about? | ||
| And who are you pandering to with this? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's what I'm talking about. | ||
| But even the way he said it was so disingenuous. | ||
| Oh, I know. | ||
| You could tell he was just saying it for the reaction, saying it for the fact that at this time, there's a lot of people that are Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean I hear – I mean I remember Martin Luther King wrote the thing and he said that the riots are the voice of – the utterly voiceless of the frustrated person. | ||
| Of the unheard. | ||
| Of the unheard. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And I get that, man. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| But he also said … He also said … That you—I don't want to misquote him, so we should probably get the exact quote, but there's more to that quote. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It stops—it doesn't stop there. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| And I understand, like, with the COVID, the whole thing, I understand that massive frustration, and I understand this. | ||
| But I expect my journalists, I expect my politicians, I expect my university presidents to be able to make clear— Statements that side with civil society. | ||
| You can even say, I recognize that outburst. | ||
| I acknowledge the outburst. | ||
| The problem is, the anger that they will experience from people that disagree with them is so much stronger than the support that they will experience from people that do agree with them. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| What was the full Martin Luther King quote? | ||
| Was it the riot is the voice of the unheard? | ||
| Is that what it was? | ||
| There's... | ||
| But there's more to it where he's talking about... | ||
| I mean, he's a very nuanced... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| A very nuanced writer. | ||
| But he's talking about the dangers of... | ||
| Speaking of Martin Luther King, you know what I actually think? | ||
| You want to know, like, what's my biggest conspiracy theory? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think that the movie Black Panther was a hoax on woke people. | ||
| What's the movie Black Panther? | ||
| Do you know the movie Black Panther? | ||
| Like, the big... | ||
| The Marvel movie. | ||
| Oh, that one? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That was a hoax? | ||
| I think so. | ||
| Oh, come on. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's a hoax. | ||
| Because first of all, they were all in about it, right? | ||
| They loved it. | ||
| Absolutely loved it. | ||
| They're calling their own stuff like Wakanda. | ||
|
unidentified
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But it was a good movie. | |
| It was a good movie. | ||
| I liked it. | ||
| I actually liked that film. | ||
| So how was it a hoax? | ||
| It was a hoax on woke people, specifically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| See, I'm a master at hoaxes of woke people, as you will know. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The story... | ||
| Actually is an allegory for Martin Luther King versus Malcolm X. So King T'Challa is Martin Luther King and Eric, the bad guy, the fake Black Panther, is Malcolm X. And he gets in power and he starts changing all the rules and he's, you know, there will not be the fight anymore. | ||
| I'm just the king and the whole thing, right? | ||
| And then what happens is they have the big epic fight at the end and the Martin Luther King side wins and then there's the morality tale at the end that tells why. | ||
| So I actually think it was a movie that's an allegory that repudiates radicalism in favor of Martin Luther King's message. | ||
| And then the woke people went nuts for it. | ||
| Did you find that quote? | ||
| The full quote? | ||
| I got sidetracked with Black Panther stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, sorry. | |
| It's a good movie. | ||
| I enjoyed it. | ||
| That part with a car. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. | ||
| And what is it that America has failed to hear? | ||
| It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor – I'm not even allowed to say that in this context – has worsened over the last few years. | ||
| It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. | ||
| It has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. | ||
| And so in a real sense, our nation's summers of riots are caused by our nation's winters of delay. | ||
| And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. | ||
| Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. | ||
| That's where it gets interesting. | ||
| See, I actually agree with that. | ||
| One of the things I've been saying for all along is that I'm actually against the social justice movement, the woke social justice movement, which is formally in the literature called critical social justice. | ||
| I'm against that because I am for social justice. | ||
| Actual. | ||
| Actual social justice. | ||
| If you want to solve those problems that he's talking about, you actually have to understand them. | ||
| You don't put wallpaper over the hole. | ||
| You actually have to understand them. | ||
| And if you just wallpaper over it, that's the delay. | ||
|
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|
Right. | |
| Yes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And so you have to understand, like, what are the actual things contributing to these problems, creating these problems? | ||
| I don't know what the answers are. | ||
| I don't know what's causing them. | ||
| Maybe some of it is prejudice, some of it's discrimination, some of it's cultural discrimination, like not valuing each culture that, you know, cultural values the same way or whatever. | ||
| It's also the echoes of the suppressive past. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| Yeah, definitely. | ||
| You don't just come back from that, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| What's the most – I mean, it's slavery. | ||
| Slavery, yeah. | ||
| The fact that slavery took place 150 years ago. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, even more recently, they're not wrong to bring up things like redlining and white flight and all these things that economically dispossessed. | ||
| That's within living memory. | ||
| Grandpappies and stuff are – that's them. | ||
| So the wealth – when they make the argument about accumulated wealth, what the average accumulated wealth of a white family versus the average accumulated wealth of a black family – There's something there, right? | ||
| We should expect that there's something there and we should be trying to understand that and then trying to figure out actual solutions to those problems, right? | ||
| But like when you take the analysis, say, of the guy who started critical race theory, his name is Derrick Bell, first African-American tenured professor at Harvard, Harvard Law, real pessimistic guy. | ||
| He actually said that the point of – he said that Brown versus Board of Education, which desegregated schools, …was done so that white people could feel better about themselves and then to open up black people to new problems like having to face discrimination in schools, like real pessimistic. | ||
| But in 1992, OK, get your head on 1992. In 1992, he wrote a book called Faces at the Bottom of the Well. | ||
| And what he said is that black society is a face at the bottom of the well and whites – he says right in the first page, even the poorest, most downtrodden, awful situation white person Always knows that they can have status by looking down at the face of the bottom of the wall. | ||
| Okay, I was in 1992. I was impoverishing my parents with Michael Jordan gear, right? | ||
| I'm not looking down to Michael Jordan. | ||
| In 1992... | ||
| Oprah Winfrey, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, these were like the things, right? | ||
| Dave Chappelle is even doing a... | ||
| Like Oprah Winfrey had so much money. | ||
| Don't you think that they're outliers in a sense if you look at the way the culture treats black people in general as an idea? | ||
| But that's not what he said. | ||
| Right. | ||
| He said that all of black society is the face at the bottom of the well. | ||
| But he doesn't mean like entertainers and the tiniest. | ||
| That's how they get you. | ||
| They do mean what they say. | ||
| I have to take – after reading this stuff for so many years, I have to take them at their word. | ||
| And the game that they play is to play off of your – they can't really mean that instinct. | ||
| Derek Bell held the position that desegregating the schools was bad because it just allowed racism to maintain in another direction. | ||
| Derek Bell introduced a concept called interest convergence that says that any time – Any time black people get more rights, it was because it was also in the interests of white people, so it was actually an act of racism. | ||
| So if you become anti-racist, this is literal. | ||
| If you become anti-racist, there's books about this. | ||
| If you become anti-racist according to their demands for you to become anti-racist, that was in your best interest. | ||
| It turns you into a good white, a good white progressive or a good white liberal. | ||
| There are entire books. | ||
| There's a book by Shannon Sullivan, a major scholar, called Good White People that just rails on this. | ||
| Robin DiAngelo says that she thinks that white progressives and white liberals are the worst form of upholding white supremacy. | ||
| The worst form. | ||
| Because they don't believe that they're as racist as they actually are. | ||
| She says, in fact, that she defines a white progressive as somebody who thinks they're less racist or not racist. | ||
| And that's the worst kind of white supremacist. | ||
| So there's no escaping racism in her eyes. | ||
| None. | ||
| It's not a choice between anti-racism and racism. | ||
| It's a choice between anti-racism. | ||
| It's a choice between racists who will admit it and racists who are too fragile to admit it. | ||
| That's actually her theory. | ||
| And then because of this interest convergence thesis of Derrick Bell, which is at the core of critical race theory to this day, anything a white person does, according to the theory, I don't agree with this, anything a white person does To help a black person also raises their own moral standing and is therefore in their own interest and was therefore a racist act. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Whoa. | ||
| There's no getting out of that one. | ||
| So it's like – again, this is supposed to cause healing. | ||
| This is supposed to solve problems. | ||
| It says that the problem – I mean Derek Bell explicitly says on Faces Upon the Well that racism is permanent, that it cannot be fixed. | ||
| So what the hell are – I'm an optimist. | ||
| Why are we doing that? | ||
| Well, that's just one individual, right? | ||
| But did he have a solution that instead of desegregation, what was his alternative? | ||
| Well, his general alternative was to constantly wage a critical war against white people and whiteness. | ||
| Forever. | ||
| The way that they believe that white supremacy and whiteness can be taken out of society is to completely, in a full-on revolution, Remake society from the bottom up. | ||
| That's in their literature all over the place. | ||
| You can't get rid of whiteness until you get rid of all vestiges of white society. | ||
| And that level of revolution is what's inspiring these frickin' riots. | ||
| Do they know about him and his work or is this just a continuation of the idea? | ||
| Who's they? | ||
| The people that are involved in like Antifa. | ||
| Some of them would. | ||
| He's quite famous. | ||
| All of the scholars would. | ||
| Every critical race scholar would. | ||
| He is the founder of critical race theory. | ||
| He is the guy. | ||
| Barack Obama talked very positively about him. | ||
| I was a big fan of Obama still. | ||
| I'm a big fan of Obama, so I'm not like cracking on Obama to say that, but he was a big fan of Derrick Bell's. | ||
| I think maybe even Derrick Bell was one of Obama's teachers, but I don't know that for sure in his law work. | ||
| So again, I don't know that for sure, but they were definitely friends, and he definitely very publicly- He had some weird friends. | ||
| He was friends with one of those guys that was in The Weathermen. | ||
| Well, yeah, that's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're not irrelevant to this either still. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Derek Bell is central to critical race theory. | ||
| He's not just some guy. | ||
| Every scholar would know him. | ||
| Everybody – it's like the guy who's taking notes at church. | ||
| That person knows Derek Bell. | ||
| Derek Bell is that big of a figure. | ||
| Do you see this – Moving in any one particular direction? | ||
| Do you see it, like, with the retaking of Chaz, do you see things, like, dying off? | ||
| Do you see this as being non-sustainable? | ||
| I don't think it's sustainable. | ||
| It takes too much energy. | ||
| What I think it is, okay, so I've described it before pretty publicly as a Trojan horse. | ||
| So you know the story of the Trojan horse, right? | ||
| So they wheel up the horse and what's inside is assassins. | ||
| So they bring it in and they open up from the inside, come out, kill the guards, open the gate, and then the army can come through. | ||
| This is a Trojan horse full of bureaucrats. | ||
| So what they do is they go fill in administrations, and then they fill in HR departments, and then they start making policy changes at those levels so that everybody's stuck playing by their rules. | ||
| In a lot of cases, there aren't necessarily that many of them, and you actually can push them out. | ||
| It's not that many. | ||
| You could actually, in a lot of organizations, you will get sued. | ||
| They will bring a suit, and they'll fire you. | ||
| I get these emails from guys who run businesses. | ||
| I don't know if they're guys, actually, always. | ||
| Some of them aren't. | ||
| But the CEOs in particular, and they say, well, a lot of times they're just people in the office and you know how they are. | ||
| And so they come in and they ask for a promotion and you know they're going to make trouble if you don't give it to them. | ||
| So it's just easier to give it to them and kind of let them do the thing. | ||
| And it's like, We really need to stop getting bullied. | ||
| Do you think that part of this, the movement, and why it's so, like, with Antifa in particular, and the looting and all the craziness in the streets, because people aren't working, so it's like there's so many more people that have the time to do this. | ||
| And so it really refuels, it's like dry wood on a fire. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| I think that's part of it. | ||
| I mean, I think the conditions at the moment are particularly... | ||
| Good for having manifested this to the level that it manifested in reality. | ||
| I'm worried it's going to stoke the fire of racism in a lot of people. | ||
| I mean... | ||
| The people that were on the fence or that were racist that maybe could be coaxed over to a more reasonable position will now be upset. | ||
| I think that... | ||
| I think that's right. | ||
| There's a real fear of it. | ||
| If you just tell people that they're racist no matter what, some of them are just going to accept it. | ||
| But there's no way out. | ||
| Now, I will tell you, I am friends with people from all over the spectrum, right? | ||
| Except woke. | ||
| They've now all written me off. | ||
| And I have some pretty far right wing friends. | ||
| They are not racists by any normal definition of the word. | ||
| But of course, under woke, they have to be because everybody is. | ||
| They are saying things like the word racist doesn't mean anything to me anymore. | ||
| But that doesn't mean I'm going to be racist. | ||
| I'm going to just keep acting the way that I was acting, which is not racist. | ||
| But if somebody calls me racist, it doesn't mean anything to me anymore. | ||
| I'm just going to keep acting the way I was acting. | ||
| I already wasn't racist. | ||
| I'm just going to keep going. | ||
| And they're basically going to try to just step out of the language game. | ||
| I don't think most people will do that, but there will be a contingent, and this is where your fears are valid, where that's going to happen. | ||
| But some of them are going to grab onto that identity and they're going to latch onto it. | ||
| And of course, what does the theory say? | ||
| Critical race theory says that everybody's a racist and is just hiding it under a mask. | ||
| And so if they start acting racist, they're, oh, they were racist all along. | ||
| And they do this to people in their jobs. | ||
| I know people who disagree with woke stuff who have applied for jobs. | ||
| And there's these professional forums and then people set it up and they say, we're going to, you know, he's associated with this or associated with that. | ||
| So we can't hire him, make sure he's not going to get an academic job. | ||
| And I've actually seen screenshots people sent me of the texts where the point is that we make sure he can't get an academic job. | ||
| So he has to take a job with some right wing outlet. | ||
| Then we call him a conservative and he's done. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's like at some point you just realize, oh, this is bullshit. | ||
| And then once you realize it's bullshit, you're sort of free of it. | ||
| Well, what you realize is it actually is a culture war. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| One of my more controversial beliefs right now is that we might actually be in a second civil war already in the sense, though, that it's being fought in information and in culture, not in... | ||
| Not in hot war. | ||
| Which one's the union? | ||
| The liberals, not left and right Democrat, Republican, but the people who believe in what the Constitution is. | ||
| Actual free speech. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Free discourse. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Yeah, but there's not that many of them. | ||
| Or if they are, they're being silent. | ||
| I think there are actually a lot of them, and they're being silenced. | ||
| Silenced is the right word, right? | ||
| They are being silenced. | ||
| They're afraid to speak up, and I know because they email me and tell me things like, I have a fake account that I follow you on Twitter or I come and look at your Twitter but I can't follow you. | ||
| I can't like your stuff. | ||
| I get offers to write things sometimes and then they get taken back because I'm like too controversial or something. | ||
| Where I get really cynical is when I see corporations go woke. | ||
| And I'm like, you guys aren't doing this because you're ethical people. | ||
| You're doing this because this is where the profit is. | ||
| That's where the money is. | ||
| So now we've found my fourth and fifth Black Lives Matter, right? | ||
| So I said there were five. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Number four is the Antifa guys. | ||
| Number five is the woke. | ||
| Woke Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Sorry, corporate. | ||
| Corporate Black Lives Matter. | ||
| Corporate Black Lives Matter is... | ||
| I mean capitalism always wins. | ||
| But they're going to go where they see the least liability and where they see the most likelihood to generate profit. | ||
| I mean I'm not going to say that I don't support capitalism in general but I don't support the exploitation of a movement based in pain and fear to sell t-shirts or shoes or whatever else. | ||
| Yeah, that's what gets really weird. | ||
| And again, this is the cynical part of me, admittedly. | ||
| But I see what they're doing and I don't believe them. | ||
| Anytime a corporation is putting out some sort of a message, I think that they're thinking about their bottom line. | ||
| And I think there's a good side of that and a bad side. | ||
| There's a cynical side and there's also the side that money is one of those neutral things. | ||
| Like Michael Jordan has that documentary just came out recently about him. | ||
| And one of the things they show in that is where he got pushed into some – make a statement about something or another. | ||
| And he quoted – I don't remember the exact quote, but it's like conservatives buy shoes too. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So it's like there's an equalizer there. | ||
| And people are mad at him for that. | ||
| They got really mad at him and they're mad at him again for that. | ||
| But there's an equalizer there, right? | ||
| Money doesn't care what color you are. | ||
| And so there's an equalizer side. | ||
| But corporations are there to make money. | ||
| That's their point. | ||
| And so they're going to go whichever direction seems to work that way. | ||
| What I would urge... | ||
| Any corporation people out there watching right now to consider is that there will be litigation attempted in the other direction. | ||
| And you may be opening yourself up to liability in the attempt to avoid liability. | ||
| So, you know, weigh your options more carefully. | ||
| God damn it, James. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Is there anything else you want to go over before we get out of here? | ||
| I think we're at, like, the three-hour mark, aren't we? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What could we say that would, like, absolutely end both of our careers so we can just... | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you already did it. | |
| So we can go, like, Thelma and Louise into the canyon... | ||
| I don't think it's going to end our careers because I think one of the things that is very important for people like you and people like me now is to be that person who points things out that are logical and reasonable and when you hear your words, you know, well, you're not a bigot. | ||
| You're not a racist. | ||
| You're not a sexist. | ||
| You're not homophobic. | ||
| You're not transphobic. | ||
| You're just a person using logic and you're standing up to this ideology that seems to avoid any and all criticism. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And it does so like a religion. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And that's what's dangerous about it is because we have these religious tendencies. | ||
| We have these fundamentalist, ideological tendencies to adopt a particular pattern of thinking and behavior and to stick with it without deviation because if you do, you'll be ostracized. | ||
| And that's what you're seeing with woke culture. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| So, you know, you bring up religion again and forgiveness too, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You learn from your mistakes. | ||
| This is horrifying me that teenagers are calling each other out and these cancel whatever the hell they're doing. | ||
| It's like, no, you have to be allowed to make mistakes. | ||
| You have to be allowed to mess up and grow from that and then be acknowledged for having gone through that and grown. | ||
| That's so important for people to realize. | ||
| It's key to life. | ||
| It's not even just key to society. | ||
| It's key to life. | ||
| That's a beautiful way to end this. | ||
| Thank you, sir. | ||
| And your book, Cynical Theories, is available right now. | ||
| Helen Pluckrose, the second most English woman's name on the planet. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And the other one is? | ||
| Her daughter. | ||
| What's hers? | ||
| Lucy. | ||
| Lucy Pluckrose. | ||
| That's some seriously Harry Potter type shit. | ||
| And James Lindsay, right there. | ||
| And you can follow James on Twitter. | ||
| I highly recommend it. | ||
| He's one of my best follows. | ||
| I appreciate you very much. | ||
| Thanks, Jeff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you for being here. |
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