April 2, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:16:59
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
|
unidentified
|
Joe Rogan Podcast! | |
| Check it out! | ||
| The Joe Rogan Experience! | ||
| Train by day! | ||
| Joe Rogan Podcast by night! | ||
| All day! All day! | ||
| All day! | ||
| I don't know another... | ||
| Sherefinize? | ||
| Salute. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Lachaim? | |
| Mazel Tov, Lachaim, Nostroviev. | ||
| What's the other one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Skoll. | |
| What's Skoll? | ||
| Skoll, I don't know. | ||
| Is that Swedish, German, something. | ||
| Is that a Viking one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh. | ||
| Or... | ||
| Use your microphone, fella. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know how to say it. | |
| What is that one? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The Irish one. | |
| Oh, I don't know that one. | ||
| I don't know that either. | ||
| Jamie's throwing extra ones in there. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| What's up, brother? | ||
| How are you? | ||
| Well, how are you? | ||
| You look like a businessman. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Are you a businessman? | ||
| I'm trying to be one. | ||
| I thought you were a professional clubhouse guest. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| The thing is... | ||
| It's the only platform that I have more followers on than you because you're only there once, I think. | ||
| Yeah, one and done. | ||
| One and done, yeah. | ||
| It's just like podcasting for people who don't have a podcast. | ||
| Well, the interesting question is, do you think that it has any ability to figure out a way of killing podcasting? | ||
| Because that's what they think. | ||
| They're crazy. | ||
| No, impossible. | ||
| Because the beautiful thing about podcasting is that you're capturing a conversation, and it's uninterrupted. | ||
| The thing that happened with your brother should have put the nail in the coffin in that format. | ||
| Oh, you mean the struggle session? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| The fact that someone can come in and kick everyone off that disagrees with them, take over the room, and that they did it just because they decided... | ||
| What was the reason why they gave her the option to kick everybody out and gave her administrative power or whatever it is? | ||
| I think she'd been historically oppressed or something. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I guess. | |
| - Yes, I don't know. - Well, from what I understand, the conversation before she came on was very clumsy. | ||
| That's what everybody was saying. | ||
| It was like that it left an opening for someone like her to come and go, "Shut the fuck up, get out of here." But the way she treated your brother, and the way she-- - I did not listen to this, by the way. | ||
| You shouldn't. | ||
| It'll infuriate you. | ||
| He said he's an evolutionary biologist. | ||
| Yeah, that's enough. | ||
| And these kids were like, oh, you're into eugenics. | ||
| You believe in eugenics. | ||
| He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| And they basically just steamrolled him, called him a racist and cut him off. | ||
| It was very infuriating. | ||
| They didn't want to have a conversation with him. | ||
| They wanted to belittle him. | ||
| They wanted him to proclaim that he's anti-racist. | ||
| I've seen this movie before. | ||
| Yeah, it's not good. | ||
| But it's just the fact that that can happen in the platform. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| When you're doing something like that, when someone can come in and just kick all the other people out that they don't agree with? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| Like, you can just join in a conversation that's already rolling. | ||
| Well, of course he could have left. | ||
| He just doesn't want to back down. | ||
| He was trying to make sense. | ||
| He was trying to express himself. | ||
| He's always trying to make sense. | ||
| I know. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's a real problem. | |
| We've got to fix that. | ||
| But I mean, the clubhouse thing seems like a fun social thing to do. | ||
| Like, I enjoyed doing it with Tim Dillon because Tim was in here with me and we were yucking it up and goofing on it. | ||
| And then your brother jumped in on the conversation and Naval was in the conversation. | ||
| That's where it gets more interesting, which is the serendipity that's possible. | ||
| Because normally the logistics of getting us all in one place... | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's difficult, it's expensive, nobody really is up for it because... | ||
| It's probably not as high quality as a point-to-point conversation, but the serendipity of saying, oh, okay, I saw two people I never thought would be in the same room, and then 12 other people. | ||
| At first, I think that's exciting, but then the danger of it is that they're going to burn through the novelty effects. | ||
| You're going to have seen all these people collide. | ||
| Well, maybe. | ||
| It's almost like chess moves. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Combinatorics are in their favor. | ||
| You know how the pieces move, but there's an insane number of possibilities that could take place. | ||
| True, but I do think that there's a weird way in which you're always in danger of setting up too many different ways into the same basic source that's the value. | ||
| And so you can say, okay, I've got a website, I've got a substack, I've got a podcast, I've got a book. | ||
| How many ideas do you have? | ||
| That's kind of the issue. | ||
| One of the things that I think makes you dominant is that you have an insane breath. | ||
| And most people are really not that capable of going outside of a few issues. | ||
| Well, I'm not capable of it either. | ||
| I'm just curious. | ||
| I'm not scared of having conversations that are way over my head. | ||
| I just think the clubhouse thing, they've got to work out what happened. | ||
| They've got to work that out so that doesn't happen. | ||
| The flaw is in letting someone come in and then kicking other people out so they can't communicate anymore. | ||
| You could do that. | ||
| The moderator privilege there is something that you shouldn't give out like candy because that's what opens it up to... | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| Why would you want to give out... | ||
| People are weak. | ||
| But why does anybody want to be the moderator? | ||
| That's not good. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| There's an actual status and caste system of people who need more going on in their lives. | ||
| Like, I was called up on stage. | ||
| I was made a moderator. | ||
| And then you realize that for people whose lives have gone online due to COVID... Meaning has been scarce. | ||
| And so in a weird way, this is what's proxying for meaning. | ||
| Because the human mind will just attach meaning to any kind of distinction like that. | ||
| For a lot of comics, it's replaced performing. | ||
| So they're not going up at night, but they're going in the clubhouse every night. | ||
| Lea Lamar, for example, is really active. | ||
| And what I told her was, pioneer something new. | ||
| Don't try to do something old. | ||
| Figure out what this new thing is better at, and be the first. | ||
| Well, she has a lot of people on that, right? | ||
| Yeah, a lot. | ||
| A lot more than she has on other platforms. | ||
| I think she's doing really well and she's doing a lot of stuff. | ||
| And what I hope is that she'll pioneer something genuinely new. | ||
| For example, Radio Drama was dying when I was a kid. | ||
| There was the CBS Radio Mystery Hour or something. | ||
| We used to listen to that when we'd drive up to... | ||
| I used to love those. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They were cool. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's gone. | ||
| You know, with a bunch of people acting out voices. | ||
| E.G. Marshall was the host of those things. | ||
| And it was like a throwback to Orson Welles and that stuff. | ||
| Wouldn't it be cool to get some retro thing? | ||
| Because the idea behind Clubhouse is to take Discord and subtract functionality from it, and that's the product. | ||
| It's got less functionality than Discord. | ||
| And that causes you to say, okay, well, I can't text you. | ||
| How am I going to work around all these constraints? | ||
| And it's like, you know, a great wine is only supposedly grown when you frustrate the vines. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what I hear. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| How do they frustrate the vines? | ||
| That if you give the vines perfect soil and climate and all this stuff, they'll produce much fruitier stuff and it won't be perfectly optimized for fermenting into wine. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Look, there's a lot of BS in wine, so I don't want to say 100%, but this is definitely something you'll hear. | ||
| Have you seen the documentary Sour Grapes? | ||
| No. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Tell me. | ||
| You have to watch it. | ||
| Are you a wine guy? | ||
| No. | ||
| I like wine. | ||
| I actually love wine. | ||
| I don't know a fucking damn thing about it. | ||
| I just go, that's good. | ||
| And I take pictures of it on my phone when I like it, and then I buy that wine later. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck's going on. | ||
| I'm as clueless- You know that really nobody does? | ||
| Almost nobody. | ||
| That's what the documentary's about. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| The documentary's amazing. | ||
| And it's about this guy who got in with all these real rich wine connoisseurs. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Including a friend of mine who's in the film. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this guy realized that there is only a limited amount of rare wine, like 1974, blah, blah, blah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, right, right. | |
| So this dude decides he is going to fake this wine. | ||
| And so he makes these labels. | ||
| And apparently this gentleman who's featured in this film, who wound up getting arrested, and he's in jail right now in Colorado. | ||
| And apparently they're detaining him. | ||
| They're about to deport him. | ||
| Because he's about to get out of jail. | ||
| They're going to deport him back to Indonesia, which is where he's from. | ||
| But he... | ||
| I think it's Indonesia. | ||
| He had an amazing palate. | ||
| He was a real legitimate wine collector. | ||
| And then somewhere along the line, he realized that buying and selling wine was good because he was kind of quartering the market on a lot of wines. | ||
| He was spending a ton of money. | ||
| He realized, you know what? | ||
| I can fake these wines. | ||
| I understand what these wines are. | ||
| So he started mixing wines together and he developed all these formulas of how to mix cheaper wines and he would sell them. | ||
| As like these super rare, you know, 1970-whatever wines. | ||
| But where he fucked up is, spoiler alert, one of the Koch brothers bought like $4 million worth of wine from him. | ||
| And one of his friends started, he had a friend who's an investigator of wine. | ||
| Apparently that's a thing. | ||
| Wine investigator. | ||
| The guy who really understands wine was telling him, like he bought bottles from Thomas Jefferson. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Like from the 1700s. | ||
| Chateau de Chem of Jefferson, I think, is still drinkable. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Well, there's this one particular kind of sauterne, which comes from the Semillon grape in the Bordeaux region, and it's made from this noble rot, so you get the grapes to sort of have this disease that concentrates the sugar, and I believe that Chateau de Chame, It's like weirdly drinkable beyond... | ||
| Hundreds of years? | ||
| Yeah, crazy. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| That's wild. | ||
| Because this guy just... | ||
| The Koch brother, he just had this stuff and just had it on display. | ||
| I mean, he has this immense... | ||
| I mean, it's worth fucking untold amounts of money. | ||
| What are you going to do with that money, right? | ||
| He just has an insane wine collection, millions and millions of dollars, but he has four million dollars of fake wine. | ||
| And he realized it as they were going through his collection, like that there was magnums from a year where they didn't make magnums. | ||
| Oh, that's bad. | ||
| A gentleman from France got involved. | ||
| France, I should say. | ||
| He got involved. | ||
| And he is an actual winemaker. | ||
| And his wine was being plagiarized. | ||
| They were faking his wine. | ||
| And so he came in and saw the counterfeit wines. | ||
| Even in the auctions, like he was pointing out in the auction booklet, like, these are fake wines. | ||
| Like, we did not have this wine in this year. | ||
| The label is incorrect. | ||
| This is incorrect. | ||
| And then, you know, there were some misspellings on some of the labels. | ||
| And this guy made fucking millions of dollars in wine and sold thousands and thousands of bottles. | ||
| And so initially they thought he was doing it all himself. | ||
| In his apartment. | ||
| But then when they realized the sheer volume of the fake wine this guy sold and put out there, that there had to be other people involved. | ||
| But he was the only one that went down for it. | ||
| And they think maybe his brothers in Indonesia were also involved in this scheme somehow. | ||
| But they feel like there's thousands and thousands of bottles of this stuff still in circulation and still being sold. | ||
| There was an auction that was... | ||
| They were selling this guy's wine. | ||
| I believe his name is Rudy. | ||
| They were selling his wines at a Christie's auction long after he had been exposed. | ||
| And so these guys on these wine connoisseur email lists, they're emailing each other back and forth. | ||
| And, hey, Rudy's wines are being sold here. | ||
| This is bullshit. | ||
| This is fake. | ||
| And then they have these experts come in and test the stuff. | ||
| But what's crazy is one guy in the film is like, this is one of the real bottles that Rudy sold me. | ||
| Because Rudy was selling real wine before he started selling bullshit wine. | ||
| He's like, this is one of the real bottles. | ||
| Like, try it. | ||
| And the guy tries it and he's like, oh yeah, this is really good. | ||
| And then another guy gets a hold of it and he goes, when did you open this? | ||
| And he goes, what, a couple hours ago? | ||
| He's like... | ||
| He tasted it. | ||
| He goes, this is bullshit. | ||
| This is not real. | ||
| He goes, this doesn't have the vivacity. | ||
| It doesn't have the flavor. | ||
| This is not... | ||
| I've tasted this wine. | ||
| This is not the wine. | ||
| Because apparently, and I don't understand this at all, the palate of a wine connoisseur is this thing where they can literally... | ||
| You can give them a flight of wines, and they can tell you... | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is Petit Shiraz from Blah Blah Blah. | |
| And I don't, again, I'm so out of my wheelhouse here. | ||
| I like Buffalo Trace whiskey. | ||
| I'm with you there, sir. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| I know this tastes good. | ||
| But, okay, well, first of all, should we try to drink this in the weird wine way? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, this is American. | ||
| We don't fuck around here. | ||
| It's got a buffalo with testicles on the label, son. | ||
| Look at that, right there. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| This is older than America, by the way. | ||
| You know this? | ||
| This company? | ||
| Buffalo Trace, they started making whiskey in 1773. It's literally three years older than America itself. | ||
| So the thing that I did not understand, I think, about wine is that if you're trying to taste your wine, you can't possibly get at what's this high-end stuff because it's only your nose that can determine these differences. | ||
| That nobody's got enough stuff going on in their tongue to tell great wine. | ||
| So you've got this thing called the retronasal passage in the back of your mouth. | ||
| Can I get a graph, Jamie? | ||
| Retro nasal passage. | ||
| Yeah, where do we pull this up? | ||
| Can I get a graphic? | ||
| And so this whole thing about burbling, where you turn your mouth into a bong, right? | ||
| Oh, yeah? | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| How do you do it? | ||
| And they smell it? | ||
| Well, you're getting this fountain with air coming up, and then you're opening the back of your... | ||
| You're opening your retronasal passage. | ||
| You do get a little bit of a smell. | ||
| Right, and that's where the magic happens. | ||
| So the weird thing is somebody buys really expensive wine, and then they try to taste it. | ||
| Ah, here we go. | ||
| There we go. | ||
| That's for beer. | ||
| Well, it's for anything. | ||
| I know, but it's interesting. | ||
| Once you get addicted to... | ||
| Smelling shit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Maybe that's like dudes are into smelling feet, like that's what's going on. | ||
| You're not trapping me in that conversation. | ||
| No, we had a guy at Kill Tony who was really into feet. | ||
| He was fucking hilarious. | ||
| Were you there, Jamie, that night? | ||
| I killed Tony recently at Anton's, and this kid went up. | ||
| He was really funny. | ||
| He was a funny comic, but he was really funny. | ||
| He was talking about how he's really into girls' feet. | ||
| He was completely unapologetic, and he was hilarious. | ||
| He was just talking about how he likes to smell girls' feet. | ||
| You notice how everybody else's attraction is weird, and whatever your thing is, it's like, yeah, I don't know. | ||
| I'm just into that. | ||
| What was funny? | ||
| I mean, it was definitely weird because it's unusual that someone would be... | ||
| I don't think it's unusual that guys are in a feat. | ||
| I think it's a lot more usual than you think. | ||
| But I think what is unusual is that he was so open about expressing the fact that he was in defeat in front of a group of strangers in a one-minute set on Kill Tony. | ||
| Do you know how Kill Tony works? | ||
| Not really. | ||
| Kill Tony is the foundation. | ||
| It was one of the foundations in Los Angeles, and I think it's going to be the foundation in Austin of the open mic community. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Because it gives a comic one minute. | ||
| Tony Hinchcliffe developed a show, and him and Brian Redband, they do it together, and Tony has a hat. | ||
| They shake the hat up, or a bucket. | ||
| They reach in the bucket, and they pull out a name. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Random. | ||
| And then that person doesn't know if they're going to perform or not. | ||
| There's maybe 30 people that throw their names in and maybe five get to perform. | ||
| And Tony pulls that name out, calls the guy or girl or non-binary folk, and they come running onto the stage and they do one minute of stand-up. | ||
| Got it. | ||
| And this guy did one minute of stand-up about how he gets hard-ons because of feet. | ||
| And it was just hilarious. | ||
| But he was talking about the smell of feet. | ||
| And a girl got on stage and took her shoe off and he smelled her foot. | ||
| It was preposterous. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But it gives these comics an opportunity to... | ||
| At that night, I think it was me and Adam Eget that night. | ||
| But it's like Donnell Rawlings has been on. | ||
| You name Dom Irera as a favorite guest. | ||
| Great comics are on it all the time. | ||
| So there's a professional... | ||
| and talks to the comics. | ||
| The comic does a set, and then we'll ask them. | ||
| I've done it a bunch of times. | ||
| We'll ask them questions, like, how long have you been doing comedy? | ||
| Like, where'd you start? | ||
| What town did you start out in? | ||
| And then they tell, what are you doing now for money? | ||
| And they have great stories, and it's fun, because you get a chance to see the beginnings. | ||
| And some of those comics have gone on, like Allie McCrofsky, who has opened up for me in fucking arenas. | ||
| She started out on Kill Tony. | ||
| Yeah, and so it's like you could develop a legitimate professional career from this, but it's like a really good path for these amateurs to get like one minute of stage time. | ||
| So they hone this one minute, hoping they're going to get called onto the stage. | ||
| And usually like, if you're a halfway decent comic and you've been doing it, you know, six months, a year, you probably have a minute. | ||
| You probably have a minute where you could get up there and rock it for a minute. | ||
| Some of them are terrible, but some of them are really funny. | ||
| What's the best way to get people opened up almost instantly with no foreplay? | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| There's a different way for you than it would be for Jamie, than it would be for me. | ||
| I've seen it be different for you on different nights. | ||
| Yeah, it's always different. | ||
| It's a living thing. | ||
| The audience is a living thing. | ||
| It depends entirely upon what's happened before you went on stage. | ||
| It depends entirely on what time of night it is. | ||
| There's a lot going on. | ||
| I'm always a little freaked out when I see you at the store because... | ||
| I don't associate, like, I got to know you before I ever got to see you be funny in front of a crowd. | ||
| And it was just like, holy shit, you can do that? | ||
| And it's a different persona. | ||
| Like, you can clearly see that a different mind has clicked in. | ||
| It's like the I know kung fu moment. | ||
| It is like that, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's like, if you saw me do kung fu, you'd think that too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you know kung fu? | |
| I don't really know any kung fu, but, you know, it's a thing, you know? | ||
| You've got to know how to do it. | ||
| Then you've got to, when you do it, you've got to treat that audience like, you know, you've got to bring the good shit. | ||
| You've got to come with the good jokes. | ||
| It's like when I saw Steven Seagal playing blues guitar at the first time, I was just like, what? | ||
| Is he good? | ||
|
unidentified
|
He... | |
| I don't want to say anything negative, but I've seen parts of it that have been really, really pretty good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I'm... | ||
| I'm trying to figure out what happened to the guitar and what happened to COVID changing the world of guitar because everybody was indoors. | ||
| COVID changed the world of guitar? | ||
| Lots of people had time on their hands and no one could socialize. | ||
| And the amps have gotten wildly better. | ||
| In the last year? | ||
| I bought a modeling amp for $250 that changed my life from Positive Grid called the Spark Amp. | ||
| We were talking about it with Jamie. | ||
| And it is... | ||
| A replica of, like, all the gear that real guys have that hobbyists, like, don't even know what it is. | ||
| I can play with it, and it'll model all of these setups. | ||
| So suddenly, like, I'm smarter. | ||
| And then, you know, this weird thing I was telling Jamie about... | ||
| This had to have been developed long in advance before COVID. Yes, but I think a $250 item that just blows your mind may be relatively new. | ||
| And I think there's one coming from... | ||
| Oh, with neural DSP. So there's like competing. | ||
| And Jamie was talking about the Helix. | ||
| So there's like this collection of these things. | ||
| And I hadn't spent $300 on my rig for 30 years or something. | ||
| And I did this. | ||
| And suddenly, a little bit more magic was, like, available to me. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| And then I put a brief clip of myself playing on Instagram, and I got contacted by, like, some of the greatest guitarists in the effing world. | ||
| When Tosin Abasi and Joe Robinson and Ryan Roxy, who's the guitarist for, like, Alice Cooper, contact you, and they're like, This is you jamming. | ||
| Give me some of this. | ||
| Give me some of this, Jamie. | ||
| You jamming to Glenn Beck? | ||
|
unidentified
|
back? | |
| Is that what it says? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That wasn't actually the one that... | |
| That's pretty fucking good. | ||
| And you're doing that without a pick. | ||
| If there's another one... | ||
| Yeah, that one. | ||
| Is that one bad? | ||
| I didn't know you were supposed to... | ||
| Yeah, you... | ||
| That was the one that did it, I think. | ||
| Apparently you're supposed to use a pick, but I didn't know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Basically I'm playing air guitar with a real guitar. | |
| That's really good, dude. | ||
| Well, that's the amp and the fact that somebody set up my strat. | ||
| What do you mean that you didn't know you're supposed to play with a pitch? | ||
| Dude, I don't know what I'm doing. | ||
| I don't know what I'm doing. | ||
| How'd you learn how to do this? | ||
| I hang out in a room alone. | ||
| It's sort of dark and lonely. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| When did you learn this? | ||
| This is part of the thing. | ||
| I do a bunch of things that I don't do with other people, right? | ||
| I just learn shit on my own. | ||
| Right, but when did you learn this? | ||
| How long ago? | ||
| I don't even know. | ||
| Some of it in the last year. | ||
| But when did you start playing guitar? | ||
| You're being cool. | ||
| No, I've had a guitar. | ||
| I don't like it. | ||
| I'm going to call you out on this. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't like it. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I've had a guitar since I was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go after yourself. | |
| I've had a guitar since I was 15, but I don't know when. | ||
| Okay, so you've been playing forever, but you're self-taught. | ||
| Yeah, and then you have these plateaus where suddenly you take your head out of your ass. | ||
| Well, Hendrix was self-taught. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Almost all of the really great people. | ||
| Stevie Ray Vaughan, I believe, was self-taught. | ||
| Albert King was self-taught. | ||
| All of these guys were on the next level. | ||
| Where are they going to learn it from? | ||
| Who creates a Danny Gatton or a Roy Buchanan? | ||
| Nobody knows. | ||
| I don't know who those guys are, but I'll trust you. | ||
| They'll blow your mind. | ||
| Will they? | ||
| I wonder how Gary learned. | ||
| Gary Clark Jr.? | ||
| Psycho. | ||
| What does it say? | ||
| Self-taught, bitch! | ||
| Woo! | ||
| So I can't do that stuff, but the point that I'm starting to come to is I realize when different communities behave differently, there are angry, jealous communities and there are open-hearted, we're glad to have you on board communities. | ||
| And I could not believe the quality of the people who reached out to me to give me encouragement for whatever stupid... | ||
| And this thing... | ||
| I don't know how to hold a pick. | ||
| I don't know how to do this stuff with a pick. | ||
| I just can't... | ||
| I think as long as the sound is good, they don't care. | ||
| Is that correct? | ||
| I think more than that. | ||
| I think that the idea is that there's this one of us thing. | ||
| Like, okay... | ||
| I can see that he's spent time in the trenches trying to figure out what we do, and most people don't care, and he does. | ||
| And so the idea is, I did a guitar podcast recently, and I just expected this other thing, which is like... | ||
| What do you mean by you did a guitar podcast? | ||
| Ryan Roxy, for Alice Cooper, says, I want you on the podcast as a fellow guitarist. | ||
| Oh, his podcast. | ||
| And so, like, Joe Satriani, you know, was sitting in that chair, and then here I am saying, like... | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, but in part, when people are, like, fans of... | ||
| I mean, you do comedy, you do acting, you do jujitsu, you do so many different things that you know that there's some things that you don't do at the same level as other things. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| When people see that you're taking an interest, like if I found out that you were a road racing bicyclist or something like that, people would be like, wow, Joe's one of us. | ||
| They're happy to have you on board. | ||
| I feel what you're saying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Especially like weird, esoteric things, you know, weird... | ||
| Like mandolin, for example. | ||
| Whenever I do something on mandolin, you know, I have all these people, oh, I'm one of those people, too. | ||
| I have a mandolin. | ||
| It's probably pretty rare, right? | ||
| How many people are playing mandolin? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It was competitive with the guitar in the late 1800s, I think, and then the guitar sort of just blew it out of the water. | ||
| But there's a new thing called octave mandolin, which is down an entire octave, so it doesn't have that kind of really bright, tinny sound. | ||
| So I'm going to pursue the octave mandolin and see whether... | ||
| Is there any benefit in a kid learning how to play the recorder? | ||
| It seems like they're just fucking with those kids when they give them a recorder. | ||
| Well, look, there's some cool stuff from, like, Telamon, if you're really into... | ||
| Right, but, like, no one plays professional recorder, right? | ||
| Can you get chicks with a recorder? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| I don't know if you can. | ||
| You would get those chicks anyway. | ||
| Well, you know, the scene with Belushi and the guitar. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| You have to be very careful what you play. | ||
| I know, we all do. | ||
| I love that scene. | ||
| It's so real. | ||
| It's so real. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Yeah, it's so real. | ||
| I've been at a party where a guy busts out a guitar and starts singing, and you're like, oh my god, who are you? | ||
| What have you done? | ||
| Well, what are the skills that you would want to acquire at this show? | ||
| I think music would be really interesting to learn. | ||
| Either play the piano or play the guitar. | ||
| I just don't have the time. | ||
| I don't have the time to do the things that I already do. | ||
| How about hyper-accelerating one of those things? | ||
| Like getting somebody who understands your brain. | ||
| Because you're a great learner. | ||
| I'm good at listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You have a beginner's mindset a lot. | |
| Yeah, well, I think I do a lot of things from scratch. | ||
| I think that's how I got good at jiu-jitsu is listening. | ||
| I didn't get good at jiu-jitsu because I figured it out myself. | ||
| I get good because my friend Eddie Bravo is a great coach, and my original instructor Jean-Jacques Machado is a great coach, and I just listen to them. | ||
| What made Eddie a great jiu-jitsu intellectual? | ||
| Eddie thinks way outside the box. | ||
| Way, way, way outside the box. | ||
| And he's just real creative. | ||
| Because he's a musician. | ||
| That's what he does outside of jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Yeah, he's done comedy, too. | ||
| He was always really funny. | ||
| And I tried to get him to do comedy way back in the day. | ||
| And he did a few open mics, but it was just too harrowing for him. | ||
| But then when he started doing a lot of seminars and got really comfortable teaching, because he became a jiu-jitsu instructor and started teaching for a living, then he got much more comfortable in front of large groups of people, and then he started doing stand-up again within the last five or six years or so, something like that. | ||
| He's very funny. | ||
| He's just a funny guy. | ||
| Me and him hang out. | ||
| We fucking laugh so hard. | ||
| He's like, other than Joey Diaz, I probably laugh harder with Eddie Bravo than anybody that I know. | ||
| But he thinks different than people. | ||
| And sometimes it's a problem where he starts entertaining some ideas that are completely preposterous, and he goes deep with them because he's figured out a way with jiu-jitsu to take ideas that a lot of people didn't think were good and figured out a way to tap people out with those ideas. | ||
| He took some ideas and he said, no, you just gotta... | ||
| For instance, here's a perfect example. | ||
| There's certain kicks that if you just showed someone it, they would say, well, that's not practical. | ||
| You're not gonna be able to do that. | ||
| The problem is you just haven't reached a proficiency like maybe a Stephen Wonderboy Thompson or something like that where it will become practical. | ||
| A specific kick is like a spinning wheel kick. | ||
| It's a wild, cool-looking kick. | ||
| It looks great in a Bruce Lee movie, right? | ||
| Wonderboy Thompson, he's a famous mixed martial arts fighter. | ||
| He pulls that off in fights because he's a 57-0 kickboxer and one of the best strikers that's ever competed in mixed martial arts. | ||
| So his proficiency in striking is so elite that he can do things that if you just taught... | ||
| Some people would say... | ||
| That's impractical. | ||
| That'll never work in a fight. | ||
| But it will work in a fight if you reach the highest level of proficiency. | ||
| And Eddie had that same mindset with jiu-jitsu techniques, and he figured out a way to make some techniques that a lot of people thought were impractical, not just possible, but really very... | ||
| And repeatable. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Not just repeatable, but high percentage. | ||
| Especially if someone is in a situation where they don't understand what's happening. | ||
| So they don't understand what's in danger or where the counters are or where you're trapped. | ||
| He's just real creative. | ||
| But again, he gets tripped up. | ||
| He starts believing some wacky shit. | ||
| But then he gets out of it. | ||
| He'll let things go after a while. | ||
| But it's because he entertains ideas. | ||
| Because he doesn't trust mainstream thought. | ||
| So mainstream thought, whether it's in jujitsu or mainstream thought, whether it's in economics or whatever. | ||
| Aren't we all struggling with this a little bit? | ||
| There's no part of the mainstream that looks at all credible to me anymore. | ||
| Well, it's real wacky now, right? | ||
| And here's a wacky one. | ||
| Where the New York Times is... | ||
| They're debunking this idea that the Wuhan lab may have been the source of COVID. When all these different people are talking about it... | ||
| We've been on this for forever. | ||
| We have been on it forever. | ||
| What is extraordinary is the New York Times is still saying debunked claims with no evidence whatsoever. | ||
| You know, Sagar and Jetty from Rising and The Hill had this whole piece about it on his YouTube channel. | ||
| I love what they're doing. | ||
| They're the best. | ||
| They're the best. | ||
| Well, he's got two channels. | ||
| Have you been on either? | ||
| Well, I've only had him on here and Crystal together. | ||
| But what I liked about... | ||
| What you guys did right at the beginning of that where they explained what happens... | ||
| I didn't mean to cut you off. | ||
| That's okay. | ||
| What happens in the cycle when your team wins and your team loses and how they've both broken out of that and they've thrown that away. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That was 10 minutes that I needed to hear. | ||
| I thought the three of you guys broke really new ground. | ||
| They're what we need. | ||
| There's a reasonable person on the left and a reasonable person on the right, and they're both committed to honesty above all. | ||
| They might have different philosophical perspectives. | ||
| I think they're coming together. | ||
| I think Crystal's coming towards Sagar because she's seeing the rot on the left. | ||
| What my hope is is that she's going to be... | ||
| A credible progressive who's rejecting all this nonsense progressivism. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| She's very smart, and so is he, and the two of them together are wonderful. | ||
| What were you going to say before I cut you off? | ||
| What I was going to say is, they were talking about how the New York Times is talking about this... | ||
| I forget who they were quoting, who was entertaining this idea. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Redfield. | |
| The CDC guy? | ||
| That's right, the CDC guy. | ||
| That he was entertaining this idea, this... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| What they do, it's a weird move. | ||
| We should tell people exactly what they're saying. | ||
| Okay, the former head of the CDC is saying that it's more probable than not. | ||
| He's not saying it's absolute. | ||
| He's saying it's more probable than not that it escaped from a lab. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And he details it, and he actually predates it. | ||
| He goes deep into September and October, he believes, it might have emanated around that time and started spreading. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The reason why is... | ||
| And it all makes total sense. | ||
| This is a very unusual laboratory. | ||
| The laboratory had been cited in 2018 for safety protocol violations. | ||
| The laboratory works on the exact same kinds of coronaviruses that... | ||
| Cause this worldwide pandemic on bats. | ||
| They work on bat coronaviruses. | ||
| And this is one of two level four labs that are in this area. | ||
| So this whole thing is so, it's so much more likely that it emanated from the lab. | ||
| But the problem is the narrative was Donald Trump is racist. | ||
| Donald Trump calls it the China virus. | ||
| Donald Trump says it came from a lab. | ||
| It can't have come from a lab because Donald Trump's always wrong. | ||
| That's one possibility. | ||
| I'm worried about something beyond that. | ||
| What are you worried about? | ||
| The way that they make this move is that they synonymize the lab leak hypothesis with a synthetic virus engineered from scratch. | ||
| So in other words, the idea of maybe somebody growing horseshoe bat coronavirus in human lung tissue to accelerate natural selection, because we don't know how to engineer it, but if you let natural selection engineer it, You can accelerate that. | ||
| Instead of saying, we don't know what to make of accelerated natural selection in a lab leaking, they try to make this move, which is like, there's no sign that this was engineered in a lab. | ||
| Okay, well, you changed what the hypothesis is in order to say what you're saying to protect your future credibility. | ||
| And the thing that I'm really freaking out about, you've been talking about it, Brett's been talking about it, I've been talking about it, all sorts of people have been talking about this one for a year. | ||
| I increasingly think that none of these organizations think that they owe us any kind of truth. | ||
| That when they get caught, it's just like, yeah, of course we had to say that. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| You know, like this Time Magazine article about, of course we fortified the election. | ||
| You what? | ||
| Oh yeah, we fortified it. | ||
| Trump was right about a conspiracy. | ||
| Who was quoting that? | ||
| Who were they quoting that said they fortified the election? | ||
| There was apparently some entire group under one guy with hundreds of activists who told their people, don't riot in the streets, have a dance party instead. | ||
| I would highly recommend Time Magazine. | ||
| I read the blurb about the fortifying, and I was like, hmm, that's a disturbing quote, but what does it mean? | ||
| What are they trying to mean? | ||
| The claim of the article is, we went right up to the door meddling with the election, but all we cared about was free and fair. | ||
| And we had a huge conspiracy. | ||
| So Donald Trump wasn't wrong. | ||
| There was a huge conspiracy. | ||
| But we are so committed to democracy that even though we hate Donald Trump with a passion that won't let go 24-7, we still would never do anything against an election. | ||
| The problem is with a guy like Trump, you can almost justify some horrible horseshit. | ||
| If you claim that you have to fight all enemies, foreign and domestic, and you claim that he's a Russian asset, You're pretty much saying that you have to do something drastic. | ||
| And so the number of things that people claim is what the problem is because they're not all compatible. | ||
| And what I'm trying to get at more broadly is over and over I see the same move, which is deny, deny, deny, we get caught. | ||
| Yeah, limited hangout. | ||
| Yeah, we did that shit. | ||
| That's the kind of stuff we do because we have to do it. | ||
| But I don't think they're saying they got caught. | ||
| I think they're saying that what we did was make sure the election was fair. | ||
| It was... | ||
| I think the concept of a limited hangout where you know that something is too big to hold back, so you push a part of it into the public, not all of it, that's the limited, and you let the public think, okay, well now you know the truth, and it stops there. | ||
| And then they stop asking questions because they've got a new toy to play with. | ||
| Have you been paying attention to the border crisis shit? | ||
| Where it's not bad when Democrats do it? | ||
| It's not bad when Democrats do it, and it's even worse than when Trump was doing it, but it's still not bad. | ||
| It's bad. | ||
| I don't know how to be a logical Democrat anymore. | ||
| No, I don't know how to do it either. | ||
| I'm politically homeless. | ||
| I'm politically homeless now. | ||
| And these people have done it because it's a low IQ movement or it's a low integrity movement or it's a low IQ movement. | ||
| It can't be high IQ, high integrity. | ||
| You and I had a conversation on this very podcast and I said that I would vote for Trump before I would vote for Biden. | ||
| I remember that. | ||
| And people got mad at me. | ||
| I didn't wind up voting for either one. | ||
| I voted for Joe Jorgensen because I'm like, this is almost like a protest vote. | ||
| Yeah, I did the same. | ||
| But my point was exactly what we're experiencing right now. | ||
| The guy does press conferences and they're like something out of a fucking macabre movie. | ||
| I feel like I'm terrified. | ||
| It's like Grandpa's at the wheel and he's not on his medication. | ||
| This is nuts, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I know. | |
| It's nuts here. | ||
| And then now they're calling it – they're not calling it the Biden administration anymore. | ||
| They're calling it the Biden-Harris administration, which to me is like letting you know that there's only a matter of time before it's President Harris. | ||
| You remember when you said this thing to this kid in Florida? | ||
| I'm a – didn't say caretaker president, but – I'm just sort of here to warm the seat. | ||
| You're the future. | ||
| You're just thinking like, okay, you're the oldest president in American history by a long shot. | ||
| Why do we need a transitional? | ||
| I'm a transitional. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| Bernie's older than him, right? | ||
| Jimmy Carter's still in the game. | ||
| Jimmy Carter's still in the game because he could do a second term? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He's a thousand years old. | ||
| He just got over cancer. | ||
| I'm hoping that I'm joking. | ||
| You're joking. | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| But Bernie is lucid. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| I believe Bernie is at least Biden's age. | ||
| Am I correct? | ||
| Or is he older? | ||
| Older. | ||
| He's older. | ||
| But very lucid. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| When he talks, he talks clearly, and apparently he said he's going to run again, which is kind of crazy. | ||
| So what is he going to do? | ||
| How is that going to work? | ||
| Is he going to go independent? | ||
| Why can't we have anyone younger than us? | ||
| I'm 55. I could vote for Tulsi. | ||
| Yes, I could vote for Tulsi. | ||
| You know who I think has a shot is the fucking governor of Florida. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I think he has a shot. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Maybe this is going to depress me too much. | ||
| Maybe it will. | ||
| I mean, I don't know what you have to do to run the country correctly. | ||
| What you can't do is what Trump did, is say, fuck you, to the people that don't agree with you. | ||
| He didn't unite people. | ||
| He was like, I'm doing it, and I'm kicking ass, and you're coming with me, and everybody's like... | ||
| Yeah! | ||
| All the Trumpsters were like, yeah! | ||
| But everybody else was like, ah, this motherfucker! | ||
| He riled them up. | ||
| He made them angry. | ||
| He made them furious. | ||
| I understand, but we can't have any solution that could work, so we have to select from this menu of the unworkable people. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true. | ||
| It's just what we have at the moment. | ||
| It's like you go to a restaurant and you're like, well, all they ever have is a hamburger. | ||
| That's just what's on the menu currently. | ||
| Like, you know, another manager can take over this restaurant and they can expand the menu. | ||
| I was in Cambridge, Massachusetts for almost 20 years and there was Cafe Algiers and had soup of the day. | ||
| And we always used to ask because every single day for 20 years was lentil soup. | ||
| Every day? | ||
| Every day, soup of the day was lentil soup. | ||
| Well, Cambridge is a mess. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, Cambridge is a crazy place. | ||
| You're from Massachusetts. | ||
| Yeah, I used to do Catch a Rising Star. | ||
| Oh, right. | ||
| That was like the weirdest place to perform. | ||
| That was the beginning of the PC movement. | ||
| It was like the PC movement in the 80s was like the first warning shots of wokeness, what we're experiencing now. | ||
| Actually, if you go back to Clint Eastwood in one of the Dirty Harry movies, it's a really interesting scene where he's told that he has to approve new candidates for the force for detective, and there's a female candidate, and he's not happy. | ||
| But the reason he's not happy is super subtle. | ||
| He asks, how fast can you run the hundred? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Like, his thing is not about male versus female. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Performance. | |
| Right. | ||
| It's like, don't touch the requirements. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's how people feel about the military. | ||
| They're lowering standards of military physical tests to enable more women to get involved. | ||
| Or out of shape people. | ||
| That's what I want. | ||
| I want more septage. | ||
| No ageism in the special forces. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Well, Tim Kennedy had a post about this recently because there was someone who was hired by the Pentagon for some sort of diversity role, and they just let him go because they found out that he had some posts that were very questionable on social media about Hitler and Trump, and so they got rid of him. | ||
| Tim Kennedy's point was there's no room for the concept of diversity with trained killers. | ||
| Our job is killing people. | ||
| There's no room for woke politics or political correctness. | ||
| We're there to get shit done. | ||
| What are you doing, Jamie? | ||
| You got something for us? | ||
| Oh, it's like, our job is to get shit done and kill bad people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Like, there's no room for diversity. | ||
| You know, we don't need to send a fucking South Pacific trans man in to do the job because it would make everybody look good in the newspaper. | ||
| Like, you get the best killer for the job, and they're the ones who complete the task. | ||
| Well, but... | ||
| So the idea is no relaxation of standards. | ||
| Ruthless requirements. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's what BUDS is, right? | ||
| When they choose SEALs, it's a ruthless elimination of anybody that's going to quit. | ||
| And you need that. | ||
| You can't lighten that up at all, because then you won't have SEALs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You'll have some fake thing that you've created some... | ||
| It's like fight training or marathon running. | ||
| You can't say... | ||
| You know, like, you don't have to run the full 26 miles because, you know, you're a this or a that. | ||
| You know, like, no, you gotta fucking... | ||
| This is the standard. | ||
| This is what it is. | ||
| The person who wins, wins. | ||
| Like, that's how it goes. | ||
| It's like, you gotta get under three hours or whatever the fuck they can do it now. | ||
| Isn't there a guy who can do it in two hours? | ||
| Isn't there a dude? | ||
| Isn't that the new... | ||
| Who can do what in two hours? | ||
| The marathon. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| Yeah, the new... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| They made a way for him to break it. | ||
| With some funky shoes, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
They did a lot of work to get it to happen, but it did happen. | |
| And he's a beast. | ||
| On top of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Correct, yes. | |
| You can't lighten standards, man. | ||
| You can't discourage competition because the people that you would like to see succeed aren't succeeding. | ||
| There's a place for everybody. | ||
| Life is a giant spectrum of activities and disciplines and things that people are enjoying. | ||
| You can't decide that you don't have enough of these people and this, so you're going to change what it is. | ||
| There's not enough light people in basketball. | ||
| We're going to slow it down. | ||
| And what are you going to do? | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| You can't do that. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| It is what it is. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| The problem is if you say that, you're a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or something. | ||
| Why don't you just agree that we're all of those things, pay the fine and get on with it. | ||
| But we're not. | ||
| We're none of those things. | ||
| We're just humans. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| I think that the thing that I don't want to do is I don't want to pay the tax every day. | ||
| Of course, Joe, I'm not saying this. | ||
| That's what they want you to do. | ||
| The people that are woke, what it is, is a forced compliance to an ideology. | ||
| And they'll bully you into compliance. | ||
| Before they will hear your terms, they will bully you into compliance. | ||
| And that's what happened with your brother in Clubhouse. | ||
| They bullied him into a specific conversation before they allowed him to speak. | ||
| Islam, for example, has a lot of overhead. | ||
| In the name of all of the compassionate, the merciful, and Muhammad, peace be upon him. | ||
| But they just write PBUH, so they only use up four characters, so they don't have to do the whole thing. | ||
| But what I'm trying to say is, we should be able to say something like PBUH about the whole thing that we have to say every time we want to have an opinion, because it's just too expensive. | ||
| The overhead is killing us. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| Like all usual caveats. | ||
| All I want to say is, all usual caveats. | ||
| And then I want to abbreviate that so I can go, all usual caveats. | ||
| And then I can get on with what I'm saying. | ||
| My hope is that the Outrage Olympics will be exhausting for people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And they'll eventually come out on the other end and realize that what's important is just be nice. | ||
| Just be nice and be a good person. | ||
| And stop bullshitting people. | ||
| How long is this taking? | ||
| I mean, the late 60s were over very quickly. | ||
| Well, the problem is it's weaponized. | ||
| I know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| Like, accusations are weaponized, and anytime something happens, you can politicize that event and use it to... | ||
| But it's so effing boring. | ||
| I can't stand how boring it is. | ||
| It's not just boring. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| It's dangerous. | ||
| Well, this is the thing, right? | ||
| It's these twin... | ||
| People talk about this in terms of, like, combat. | ||
| You know, dangerous and boring. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| And it's much more dangerous the more bored you get because mostly nothing's happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's the thing that, you know, I wrote an entire article about this with Kayfabe, which is that in order to get wrestling to be exciting, you had to move away from actual wrestling. | ||
| And that's the origin of professional wrestling. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Is that matches would last too long and then mostly nothing would happen and then somebody would be crippled for life. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wasn't a good business model. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just we're at a weird time where people are pushing narratives and then other people are joining in because that narrative fits along with their ideology, even though they know there's some horseshit to what that narrative is. | ||
| A good example is, are you aware of that 65-year-old woman that got beaten up in New York City? | ||
| It's a sad story. | ||
| Because this guy, it's all caught on security camera. | ||
| There's this guy, he's kicking, he kicks this 65-year-old woman down and kicks her when she's down, stomps her, and just, it's horrific. | ||
| And there's these three guys, at least two guys, that are watching and they do nothing. | ||
| They're inside the building and they're watching. | ||
| Like this carjacking video where the guy's just filming and doing nothing. | ||
| Yeah, but anyway, this guy is kicking this woman while these two guys watch. | ||
| And then de Blasio goes on TV and he blames it on Trump. | ||
| He blames it on the White House and the current administration because it was an Asian woman. | ||
| But what it was... | ||
| Was a guy who was released from prison who had stabbed his mother to death. | ||
| So the guy was criminally insane. | ||
| And because of these liberal ideas about rehabilitation and murder, this guy had only done, I think he'd only done like 10 or 12 years in jail for stabbing his mom to death. | ||
| And so they let him go, and what does he do? | ||
| He finds some woman and kicks the shit out of her. | ||
| Now, here's where it gets weird. | ||
| Did he kick the shit out of her because she was Asian, because he was aware of the propaganda against Asian people that de Blasio believes was influenced by Donald Trump's portrayal of the virus as being the Chinese virus? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| But the point is, the reason why that guy did that is because he's criminally insane. | ||
| It's not because of Donald Trump. | ||
| The reason why that guy did that is because he shouldn't have been on the street. | ||
| But they're forcing us to talk about it over and over. | ||
| The more we have to debunk this stuff, It's just a fire hose of debunkable stuff, and everything takes a half an hour to explain what somebody screwed up in four seconds. | ||
| But I think it's good to talk about. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| And then people realize, like, okay, why would he say that? | ||
| Well, because he's a bad mayor. | ||
| He's a bad mayor. | ||
| He's bad at his job. | ||
| You saw the video that he put out about how we have to bring back New York City with culture? | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| You want to see the craziest fucking thing you've ever seen in your life? | ||
| Jamie, find that. | ||
| It's on my Twitter page. | ||
| It seems like a sketch from SNL back when SNL was funny. | ||
| SNL's still funny sometimes. | ||
| I shouldn't have said that. | ||
| It goes for periods where it is and then it isn't. | ||
| Well, it's hard to do 90 minutes of live shit every week. | ||
| But the point is, it seems like a sketch. | ||
| It seems like a parody. | ||
| Here's what it seems like. | ||
| It seems like a scene in a Coen Brothers movie where a mayor is out of his fucking mind. | ||
| Go full screen and give me some volume. | ||
| Because this is fucking completely crazy. | ||
| Watch this. | ||
| You're not going to believe this. | ||
| So, people just listening. | ||
|
unidentified
|
There's people dancing. | |
| Completely out of sync. | ||
| And we're gonna do that. | ||
| We're gonna really bring back the heart and soul of New York City. | ||
| We need our arts and culture back, and we need people to see it and feel it, to participate in it, to know that that essence of New York City has not been defeated by the coronavirus, but will come back strong in 2021. Month after month in 2021, as you see the city come back to life, culture will lead the way. | ||
| If you saw the video of this, you would know how fucking preposterous this is. | ||
| And then this guy is talking about they're doing... | ||
| I mean, they got the lispiest, most Hispanic gentleman they could find to speak about this, hashtag open culture. | ||
| And so listen to this music. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's... | |
| It's fucking terrible. | ||
| And what are these people doing? | ||
| What is this dance? | ||
| So they're spending money on this. | ||
| So the city's falling apart. | ||
| Restaurants are disappearing left and right. | ||
| Small businesses are disappearing left and right. | ||
| 90% of all the moving trucks are going out of New York City. | ||
| And this is his solution to this. | ||
| Because these people don't have any respect for business. | ||
| They somehow or another think this money falls out of trees. | ||
| And that you just need to redistribute this money. | ||
| Because the rich people, they have too much of it. | ||
| So redistribute this money. | ||
| And the way we're going to redistribute it, we're going to open up culture. | ||
| We're going to bring back dance. | ||
| Like, what the fuck is that? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| Imagine that you are the mayor of one of the biggest cities on planet Earth, and that's your solution. | ||
| Like, this is a big video that you put together, and you have these people dancing and doing all this... | ||
| It's so uncoordinated. | ||
| The music is so bad. | ||
| It seems like a sketch. | ||
| This is what you're dealing with. | ||
| And this is the same guy that was saying that Donald Trump was responsible for this criminally insane person who kicked the shit out of this poor old lady. | ||
| I can't. | ||
| I listen to this stuff, Joe, and I just despair. | ||
| I know what we're capable of. | ||
| I know how amazing we are as human beings. | ||
| And I watched this stuff. | ||
| Like, imagine you had Palobolis, right? | ||
| You ever seen Palobolis? | ||
| What's Palobolis? | ||
| Can I say this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jamie, pull that up. | ||
| Pull up Palopolis, Jamie. | ||
| Seems like an old Greek guy that I'm not aware of. | ||
| Yeah, one of the great dance philosophers of all time. | ||
| Palopolis? | ||
| Palopolis. | ||
| Jamie, you're not aware of it either? | ||
| Good, I don't feel any alone. | ||
| I know what you're saying, that it's terrible. | ||
| Even if you're going to make a wrong point... | ||
| You're in New York City. | ||
| How much great dance is there? | ||
| I've seen stuff on the subway using the poles and everything that's available that will blow my mind. | ||
| Guaranteed. | ||
| They could have had break dancers out there. | ||
| They could have had hip hop guys out there doing like stance elements guys. | ||
| And it would have been amazing. | ||
| What do you got? | ||
| You got something crazy? | ||
| Why smiling? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm not sure what I'm looking up. | |
| Palabolous dance? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| That's all right. | ||
| Palabolous dance. | ||
| Is this Palabolous? | ||
| There he goes. | ||
| We are Palabolous. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So these are talented dancers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is difficult. | ||
| Yeah, it's really... | ||
| Unbelievably difficult. | ||
| It's unbelievably gorgeous, beautiful, difficult. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If you saw that as an example... | ||
| That can blow your mind very quickly. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| No, I'm not against dance. | ||
| I got your point. | ||
| But that thing was nonsense. | ||
| But here's what I think. | ||
| It's almost better when it's irrefutable. | ||
| When the nonsense like de Blasio's video or him saying that this guy who got out of jail recently for stabbing his mother to death, that the reason why he kicked the shit out of this Asian lady was because of Donald Trump. | ||
| This guy might not have even known Donald Trump was a thing. | ||
| Did you see my graph from Google Ngrams, which was diversity and inclusion usage versus most qualified? | ||
| And they cross in 2017, and most qualified is going down, and diversity and inclusion is going through the roof. | ||
| We can talk about this, but... | ||
| I want to know every cool thing that you know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And this, it's just dumb. | |
| It is just dumb. | ||
| And it's corroding my soul. | ||
| But it's happening. | ||
| I'm getting worse. | ||
| It's like playing tennis with people who can't play tennis. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And you used to be really good at tennis. | ||
| And now, when you fight people, do you want to fight people who suck? | ||
| No, you certainly don't. | ||
| You're going to get injured. | ||
| Well, worse than that, you're going to get a false sense of your abilities. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah, and you're also going to degrade, like all sorts of bad things. | ||
| Jamie's got something else going on. | ||
|
unidentified
|
When I was looking this up, this is what I was seeing, that he blames the parole system. | |
| State parole system. | ||
| Oh, well, he's right about that. | ||
| But what I saw him was saying that it was Donald Trump. | ||
| Am I incorrect here? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I tried to find even him blaming Trump for it and wasn't seeing that. | |
| Well, he was blaming what happened in D.C. That's what he was saying. | ||
| And someone had a video exposing that it was not supposed to. | ||
| If that's true, he's correct here. | ||
| He blames the state parole system? | ||
| Well, then I take it back. | ||
| Because he's absolutely right with that. | ||
| There's no way that guy should have been let out. | ||
| Maybe he had one statement on it, and now today he's released a different one? | ||
| Because he wasn't standing in front of these flags like this. | ||
| It was a different scene, I believe. | ||
| And you saw that carjacking in D.C. I did. | ||
| I'll take this back then, because he's definitely correct. | ||
| There's no way that guy should have been on parole. | ||
| That guy murdered his fucking mother. | ||
| And then he attacked that lady in Midtown. | ||
| So maybe I'm wrong. | ||
| Maybe I got duped. | ||
| Because I watched a whole video where they were explaining what was... | ||
| I forget. | ||
| I don't even remember who was hosting the video. | ||
| But they were talking about how wrong his perspective is. | ||
| On that. | ||
| Hey. | ||
| But I did see the guy that got his car carjacked and then died. | ||
| I just despaired. | ||
| The fact that the girl... | ||
| That's not incorrect, I guess. | ||
| This is for an older thing, though. | ||
| This is from 2016, where he's blaming Trump and hate speech for rising hate crimes. | ||
| No, that was a different one. | ||
| Well, I don't think he necessarily said Trump. | ||
| He was just talking about... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I'm not sure. | ||
| But the point is, he's right. | ||
| He's right. | ||
| It is the parole system that did that. | ||
| But this carjacking... | ||
| My perspective on the carjacking is different because they're a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old kid. | ||
| They're children. | ||
| Can I freshen you? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about... | ||
| It's a really unfortunate situation where you have these young kids that stole this Uber driver's car and he tried to stop that from happening and wound up dying. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| If you've never seen the video, please don't watch it. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| Well, the hardest part for me is where the girl says my phone is in the car. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the guy is dead. | ||
| Nobody cares about the guy thrown from the car. | ||
| No. | ||
| The troops or the National Guard doesn't seem to care. | ||
| The girls don't seem to care. | ||
| I don't think the National Guard at that moment necessarily knew what happened. | ||
| Well, it was very confusing. | ||
| But, you know, she practically trips over the guy trying to get to her phone in the car. | ||
| No, it's awful. | ||
| It's certainly awful. | ||
| Joe, my soul is corroding from all this stuff. | ||
| I'm watching this and I'm internalizing it. | ||
| And I know I'm supposed to sort of take a step back. | ||
| I am so worried about the degradation of who we are because we can't figure out how to say no mas. | ||
| I think this is different. | ||
| See, I'm not in any way exonerating those young girls who stole that car and killed that guy. | ||
| But I think the National Guard people that pulled up on the scene, I don't think they knew what happened. | ||
| I don't think they had any... | ||
| There's no way they could have known these girls stole that car. | ||
| It's a confusing situation. | ||
| This guy's dead. | ||
| The car's flipped over. | ||
| The girls are in shock. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The girls saying, where's my phone? | ||
| I know. | ||
| I don't blame the guard. | ||
| The guard guys probably are horrified once they realize that these girls had stole this guy's car. | ||
| And I don't... | ||
| If you're a 13-year-old kid and you steal a car and all of a sudden a guy's dead, you're probably... | ||
| Your whole life is probably like... | ||
| Yeah, but what I'm worried about is... | ||
| You probably have no idea what the fuck just happened. | ||
| I'm worried about something I'm calling video game mode. | ||
| Which is the more I stare at my screen and then I have to context switch between my screen and real life, my screen and real life. | ||
| The more real life feels like my screen, the more I can't tell the difference. | ||
| And it's not that I'm dumb. | ||
| It's that my evolutionary programming doesn't know anything about this screen. | ||
| I know what you're saying. | ||
| And my concern is, is that we don't feel our own life and our own interest anymore. | ||
| Like, we don't realize what we're doing. | ||
| We imagine that we are characters in a video game. | ||
| There's always a restart. | ||
| There's always some exploit that you can use to start again. | ||
| And I'm increasingly feeling like reality... | ||
| It's slipping away from us because the phone, it's a little bit like what happened with porn. | ||
| We thought that porn was going to habituate us to non-standard sexual practices, and to an extent it did. | ||
| But I don't think what we really understood is that it was going to rewire us so that it was very difficult to get aroused about anything because it changes your hedonic thresholds. | ||
| I think the same thing is true for real life versus the phone. | ||
| The phone is in some sense so much more intense for most people that that environment starts to blot out the feeling of being fully alive. | ||
| So you think that the reason why they were so desensitized... | ||
| I can't say that because it's shock. | ||
| It's a crazy situation. | ||
| It's the first few seconds. | ||
| Fog can be the explanation. | ||
| However, I increasingly see people... | ||
| Like the Capitol Hill thing on January 6th. | ||
| Very clearly that woman was, you know, dealing with a loaded pistol, right? | ||
| And you see the guy who's holding the gun take the finger and bring it inside the trigger guard and then he goes back out because he's like pointing it at her. | ||
| He understands what he's doing. | ||
| It's like, please don't advance. | ||
| And she has an idea that somehow she's protected because she's part of this romantic story in her own mind. | ||
| Yeah, I see what you're saying. | ||
| I really believe that the Viking and Trump and all of this stuff, people don't feel fully alive. | ||
| They don't realize that we are actually attacking the Capitol building of the United States of America. | ||
| That they didn't realize what they were doing while they were doing it. | ||
| I don't think that's true. | ||
| We're in a sort of live-action role-playing, and I believe that sometimes people probably go into combat that way. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I think those people genuinely thought that they were patriots, and I also think a lot of them are genuinely not bright. | ||
| There's a lot of those guys that I saw being interviewed where they were talking about why they were doing it. | ||
| I watched people snap out. | ||
| A lot of people were like, the moment that I realized I was too far in and then such and such. | ||
| You get caught up in the crowd. | ||
| You get caught up in the narrative. | ||
| But also I watched people, particularly that guy with the buffalo hat on that got interviewed. | ||
| That's a dumb guy. | ||
| He's a dumb guy who is good at stringing words together with QAnon themes. | ||
| The guy smiling with the podium, with the lectern. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There was a lot of that going on. | ||
| These are men, mostly. | ||
| There's a few women. | ||
| But men who are unexceptional, that think they're exceptional because they're tied into a thing that they believe is like a movement to free... | ||
| I think they just believe democracy is being served in some strange fucking way. | ||
| Look, there were two narratives. | ||
| There was a narrative called Stop the Steal and there was a narrative called Certify the Election. | ||
| And they avoided themselves as long as they possibly could. | ||
| And I was watching them and I did a tweet storm on January 4th because I could see January 6th was going to be the arc point. | ||
| Very often, when you say Twitter isn't real life, It really isn't up until it arcs, and then you get a spark across it, and then holy shit. | ||
| Then it becomes like real life. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| It is real life, right? | ||
| And so there are these twin narrative problems where you've got these two incompatible worldviews and these stories, and they avoid each other, like two guys circling each other. | ||
| I'm going to fuck you up. | ||
| But both of them know that once we actually engage, it's pretty unpredictable what's about to happen. | ||
| That's what I think you could see coming for January 6th. | ||
| It had to happen that way in a weird way because the narratives had avoided each other for the maximal length of time because nobody wanted to have this out. | ||
| And then it was impossible to stop the two from arcing. | ||
| And the plates got too close together. | ||
| That's what I really believe. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| So what you're saying is that you think that there's two worlds that aren't communicating with each other, and both of them believe wholeheartedly in what they're doing without listening to whatever might be reasonable that's coming from the other side, and then they collide. | ||
| And there's no way of squaring the circle. | ||
| At some point, there will be a Donald Trump presidency or a Joe Biden presidency. | ||
| And once you realize that your story has collapsed, it's like a doomsday cult. | ||
| You say it's going to end on such and such a day, and then it doesn't. | ||
| And then what happens to the cult? | ||
| Because everybody had the same concept. | ||
| I think that if you listen to the audio from the Jim Jones, Jonestown Massacre, it's very clear that they got caught up in a story that they couldn't get out of. | ||
| That's what happens in all cults, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Exactly. | ||
| And the story becomes, the software that you're running, like there's this one woman named Hyacinth who hid under her bed and survived, you know? | ||
| Survived? | ||
| Jonestown. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| You know, her sister perished. | ||
| And somehow she ran a program that was different than the program, because you have the recordings. | ||
| People know that they're going to their death. | ||
| They know the software is telling them that this is the right thing. | ||
| It's a revolutionary suicide. | ||
| And I saw this with people, you know, I was trying to tell people, because I didn't believe the election was necessarily free and fair, but I also didn't believe that it was stolen in the way that Donald Trump was saying it was stolen. | ||
| I feel the exact same way. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you know, I was watching people who couldn't negotiate, they couldn't keep their footing. | ||
| They're also struggling to find the common ground with their team. | ||
| Exactly right. | ||
| I was going to say the same thing. | ||
| People who feel comfortable being alone are in a different situation than people who say, well, I have to pick a team constantly. | ||
| And the greatest thing that has ever happened to me is the ability to stand alone for some periods of time. | ||
| I do need a family. | ||
| I need To be a part of something, but there are times when there is no team that represents reality. | ||
| We all need people. | ||
| We all do. | ||
| I hate to admit it, but you're right. | ||
| Yeah, we all need loved ones and friends, and people don't operate well. | ||
| That's why when you're in prison, the worst thing they could do to you in prison is to leave you alone. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're in a fucking cement building filled with rapists and murderers. | ||
| The worst shit they can do is leave you alone. | ||
| It's a really interesting point. | ||
| Strange. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We are very social animals, but the ones that can go the longest in solitude and just think by themselves, there's a great benefit to that. | ||
| I was forced into it because when I was a kid, we moved around a lot. | ||
| We moved when I was 7 to San Francisco. | ||
| When I was 11, we moved to Florida. | ||
| When I was 13, we moved to Boston. | ||
| I was forced to form my own opinions about things because I didn't have a steady group of friends where we all agreed on a certain narrative. | ||
| That's a real problem with people in this country, agreeing on a certain narrative where you know socially That you have a contract you have to uphold. | ||
| You're socially... | ||
| You're intertwined with this narrative. | ||
| And you can't think outside the box. | ||
| If you say, hey guys, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. | ||
| Let's look at this logically. | ||
| What the fuck is wrong with you? | ||
| And then you've got a real problem. | ||
| Because people want compliance. | ||
| This is what's going on with wokeness. | ||
| A lot of what wokeness is, is these... | ||
| Socially low-status people who are gaining power by enforcing this narrative and attacking people who don't enforce the narrative. | ||
| They're bullying people who don't enforce the narrative. | ||
| You know the phrase, hurt people hurt people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All the time. | ||
| Well, people have been bullied. | ||
| They tend to bully people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No kidding. | |
| And a lot of fucking dorks when, you know, they've been pushed around in high school and college and socially they've been very awkward. | ||
| My God, they get on that goddamn computer and they attack. | ||
| And they love to attack. | ||
| Well, Tim Ferriss tried to do bigoteer and other people tried cry bullies. | ||
| What's a bigoteer? | ||
| Bigoteer is somebody who traffics. | ||
| That's what he called it? | ||
| Oh, that's a great phrase. | ||
| It's a great phrase. | ||
| Tim's good. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But cry bully is another one and hurt people hurt people. | ||
| All of these things get at this concept. | ||
| And I do think that this issue about what does it take to be alone for a long time? | ||
| And then the part of the problem is those of us who are very good at being alone for a long time can overstay. | ||
| You can overstay Bill and then you're, next thing you know, you're Ted Kaczynski. | ||
| Well, mathematician. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Speaking of which, I asked you for this date, April 1st. | ||
| This is a favor to me. | ||
| Yeah, why? | ||
| I want you to have this. | ||
| What is this nonsense? | ||
| You give me a stack of papers. | ||
| You know I don't like reading. | ||
| You're not going to be able to read it. | ||
| Oh, this is your unity theory? | ||
| This is the first copy that got to version 1.0. | ||
| I want you to have it. | ||
| Listen, you lost me. | ||
| There's all these equations in here. | ||
| Jamie, take this and make something out of it. | ||
| What is this? | ||
| I believe, and this is the hardest part, How do you have time to do this while you're still in Clubhouse? | ||
| I'm not really in Clubhouse. | ||
| It's a bot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That low-quality stuff, I push it. | |
| This is... | ||
| Something that I've been uncomfortable about sharing. | ||
| I've been in what I call the ice cave for about 37 years. | ||
| And I shared a little bit of it in 2013. And I shared a little bit of it last year, April 1st. | ||
| And I am coming to grips with a story. | ||
| And in part, you don't know this, but you've been playing a large role in my thinking about this. | ||
| Well, that's a problem. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I reviewed this weird episode of you at the store when you took a break for seven years. | ||
| And I looked at the courage that you had to have to do something unfunny in a funny context. | ||
| I think it was an incredibly difficult situation. | ||
| And I think I've been running from a similar situation my whole life. | ||
| I don't want to face certain unpleasant facts That are out of keeping with the joy that I feel, with the love, with the creativity that I feel. | ||
| And I don't want to let certain kinds of negativity take over my life. | ||
| And then I have this other thing, which is I legitimately believe that if we are not very careful, theoretical physics is coming to an end. | ||
| And I believe it is our only hope for getting outside the solar system. | ||
| When you have Elon on and he talks about Mars or bust and all this kind of stuff. | ||
| I cannot understand how mankind has gotten to the point where we are not spending our efforts trying to figure out how to spread out so that we don't self-extinguish on one, two, or three rocks. | ||
| It just doesn't make any sense to me. | ||
| And the best hope we have is to go beyond Einstein. | ||
| And we're losing the belief That we're capable of it. | ||
| We're so worried about the professional norms and humiliation and what's going to happen if we say something and what our colleagues are going to say and all of this stuff that we're self-censoring and we're silencing ourselves because we'd rather be in good standing on the Titanic than risk saying, holy shit, we're in an iceberg field. | ||
| Let's think about how we're going to survive this. | ||
| I've been being a pussy about this. | ||
| Well, what is it? | ||
| Explain what it is. | ||
| What is this thing that you handed me? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| It is... | ||
| Okay, this is the hardest thing for me to say because I have to not hedge it. | ||
| I think it's the theory of everything. | ||
| And what do you mean by that? | ||
| There is a moment where you have to say this, I believe, about a radical departure. | ||
| And you don't want to say it because you want to hedge it. | ||
| It is... | ||
| Jamie, if you could bring that up. | ||
| And you go a little bit, maybe two pages in. | ||
| Is this available online so someone can peruse it? | ||
| In fact, okay, right there on the left... | ||
| Go down that table. | ||
| You see where it says X4? Yes. | ||
| X4 is four parameters. | ||
| It could be salty, sweet, sour, bitter. | ||
| It could be low, treble, medium, bass, and volume. | ||
| And the question that I took from Einstein was, can we generate the world? | ||
| Everything from something as innocuous is four parameters. | ||
| And if you think about a fertilized egg, somebody can hand you a picture of an embryo in in vitro fertilization. | ||
| You're like, well, that's your child-to-be. | ||
| You're like, get the fuck out. | ||
| Well, that fertilized egg somehow self-assembles into something that you cannot even imagine. | ||
| And that's a mystery. | ||
| The question is, in some sense, can four parameters Bootstrap itself. | ||
| Jamie, if you go to the first picture of the two hands, the Escher sketch. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That is this weird paradox. | ||
| Can a piece of paper effectively will two hands into drawing each other into existence? | ||
| That's what I believe makes the theory of everything so difficult. | ||
| I don't think it's the... | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| Piece of paper didn't will two hands into drawing themselves into existence. | ||
| The point is... | ||
| Someone had an idea. | ||
| M.C. Escher had an idea of what Douglas Hofstetter called a strange loop. | ||
| And it's a depiction of something that can't happen, but in some sense at least was conceived of as being able to happen. | ||
| And so that's what I tried to give you, which is I am scared to do this thing. | ||
| I've been avoiding this for... | ||
| Let me ask you this. | ||
| What's been the criticism of this? | ||
| Because people have criticized it, right? | ||
| In one year, I've seen one actual critique. | ||
| Only one? | ||
| Only one. | ||
| Is that because you haven't looked for other ones? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| I think two guys... | ||
| I think it's two guys. | ||
| One of them is anonymous, and I refuse to deal with an anonymous coward who critiques me. | ||
| Came up with three basic criticisms, and they'll have more because there'll be errors in this. | ||
| But two of the criticisms are inferential. | ||
| They imagine that I'm doing something that I'm not doing. | ||
| One of the criticisms is valid but it's something that I would have brought up anyway. | ||
| The most astounding thing about their so-called paper is that it shows that what I put out a year ago in a lecture on YouTube is understandable. | ||
| In other words, they got from the lecture what the basic setup of this theory is. | ||
| I want you to boil this down so that someone who doesn't understand physics at all will understand this in a way that they could maybe even explain to someone else. | ||
| Go to pullthatupjamie.com. | ||
| Try pull that up, Jamie.com. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Collection of videos in support of geometric unity. | ||
| Epic troll. | ||
| Who put that up? | ||
| Go to the bottom of this. | ||
| There is a team of people Brooke Dallas, Brandon Stone, Boku, a mysterious German who does amazing graphics, Tim, the mirthless swagman from Australia, Aardvark, and Nick, who have been, let's just go up to the top. | ||
| So, for example, dramatizing Einstein's, the greatest insight of the 20th century, arguably, click on the one on the left and blow it up. | ||
| Einstein took a curvature tensor, which has three components, called vial traceless Ricci and Ricci scalar, snapped the vial off and readjusted the vial scalar to get it to live in a space not called curvature, but metrics. | ||
| That is saying that curvature influences how we measure length and angle. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is an Einsteinian metric for two dimensions. | ||
| You can have it. | ||
| He gave me something that looks like hedge clippers. | ||
| Well, it's two rulers. | ||
| There are hair ties on the two rulers and a protractor. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| So there are three dimensions of ruler, two dimensions of ruler, and one dimension of protractor. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Now, the idea is Einstein took curvature and fed it back into the space of rulers and protractors to say how the rulers and protractors would warp so that we can actually define gravity. | ||
| Now, that's... | ||
| That is a visual depiction of the Einstein field equations, which if I wrote them down would mean nothing to you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And the key point is that Einstein figured out you had to get rid of a component called the vial curvature and readjust the Ricci scalar to put it into the space of rulers and protractors, which I bought from Amazon, strangely enough. | ||
| And people, you see, I don't think in symbols. | ||
| I think in pictures. | ||
| Now, the insight of geometric unity, if you'll go zoom out, Is that if you do the smaller neck, like we had a huge bottle to get it into metrics. | ||
| There's another space. | ||
| People are listening to this, you know. | ||
| They're not just seeing it. | ||
| Very few people are seeing it. | ||
| Maybe like 30%. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| This conversation's a problem. | ||
| Because people are tuning out right now, guaranteed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Well, if you go to pull that up, Jamie, look, there's no way in which I can talk about tensor analysis, curvature tensors, the theory of everything. | ||
| I understand, but I want you to boil this down. | ||
| You're not boiling it down at all. | ||
| Why did you do this, and what are you trying to accomplish with this? | ||
| Well, first of all, what I'm trying to do is to say, we don't have to talk about this. | ||
| This is just something I wanted to do on your show as a thank you, because you've been huge for me. | ||
| And the courage to take the slings and arrows that are going to come at me as I put this online, which is what I'm going to do today. | ||
| Today? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this hasn't been online before? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| So the people that are going to do it in front of us, live? | ||
| Oh my goodness. | ||
| It's going down. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So this says launch GU. Boom. | ||
| People can now, and this is going to debut tomorrow because we don't release today. | ||
| But it's April Fool's, and they can download this as of tomorrow when they see this. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And they can peruse it, and there are going to be all sorts of problems and errors, but it's a complete story of who we are, what this place is. | ||
| It's my guess. | ||
| The universe. | ||
| Life. | ||
| Everything. | ||
| What made you want to do this? | ||
| What made me want to study the problem? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Tell me, Joe, when you ask why as a kid, what happens if you keep asking? | ||
| You either end up in theoretical physics or an insane asylum, right? | ||
| Or you just keep asking questions. | ||
| No, no, you stopped somewhere. | ||
| You stopped somewhere. | ||
| If you don't end up in theoretical physics, it means you stopped at some point asking why. | ||
| And so I just didn't stop. | ||
| And the issue of, like, we are here and we're looking at all these crazy things you have arrayed in front of us. | ||
| These things are understandable, but they're locked in a system of symbols. | ||
| So if I put a page of this stuff in front of you, you may go as they say, my eyes glaze over. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So for example, the light in this room It's tied to something called a U1 principal bundle. | ||
| But you're not going to understand what a U1 principal bundle is. | ||
| However, I got your present. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| That is a U1 principal bundle. | ||
| It's a water wiggle. | ||
| But remember the time I showed you the hop vibration and you're like, what the fuck is that? | ||
| That was a U1 bundle over the two-dimensional sphere, which was the Earth. | ||
| This is a U1 bundle over the one-dimensional sphere, alias the circle. | ||
| And as you do that fidget toy, you're spinning that circle over and over again. | ||
| So this is an actual model of a gauge theoretic concept that somehow nobody in the history has ever mentioned to me that you can buy U1 principal bundles from Amazon for under $10. | ||
| And I could, if we had the opportunity- I don't know what the fuck you just said. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| Do you know what he said? | ||
| Look, I can show you on video, but then we're not on video, right? | ||
| 30% of the people are watching. | ||
| Maybe more at the end of the month. | ||
| But they can go to pullthatupjamie.com. | ||
| They can watch these videos. | ||
| And what I'm going to do over time is to show people visually without symbols. | ||
| In other words, if I say Ramanian metric, they're not going to know what I'm talking about. | ||
| If I hand them rulers and protractors and a video of it, I don't know about the symbols, but I can follow an actual concrete thing. | ||
| That thing, that water wiggle, the idea that that's a U1 principle bundle, that is one of the deepest things we only figured out in the 1970s that the light in this room comes from effectively seeing the world as having a water wiggle structure on top of it. | ||
| Now, I'm not expecting on this show... | ||
| I don't know what that means. | ||
| The light comes from having a water wiggle structure on top of it? | ||
| You can rotate these, right? | ||
| If I squish a water wiggle and it goes around, that is called a G-action. | ||
| G is the group of symmetries. | ||
| I'm taking the symmetries of a donut, and I'm playing with this thing, and it's going out of my hand. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is the structure that gauge theories, which we've talked about before, which Lawrence Krauss has been on your problem. | ||
| What's a gauge theory, man? | ||
| It's just so mumbo-jumbo. | ||
| Yeah, he had a hard time describing it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| If we spent an afternoon with a water wiggle, Or those videos, which we can't do because of your audience, I understand that. | ||
| You could understand what a gauge theory is because you'd never see a symbol. | ||
| There would never be a symbol between you and understanding why there's light in this room. | ||
| The light in this room comes from a water wiggle structure about a circle that nobody's ever seen that is at every point in space and time, which is one of the great discoveries that we've made that nobody seems to care about. | ||
| So how is it a water wiggle structure? | ||
| Because there's a circle At every point that we can't perceive... | ||
| Circle everywhere. | ||
| In space. | ||
| In space. | ||
| Above space. | ||
| That we can rotate. | ||
| A circle how big? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| Okay, but this circle somehow or another does what? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Rotates. | |
| Rotates. | ||
| And there is a four-dimensional cross-section. | ||
| Like, this is three dimensions here and one dimension of time because our conversation is progressing. | ||
| That's four dimensions. | ||
| That four dimensions... | ||
| It forms a cross-section to that water-wiggly structure that we didn't know about because it's invisible. | ||
| And that's what photons are all about. | ||
| And how do we know about that water-wiggly structure? | ||
| We know about that water wiggle structure because we wrote down the equations called Maxwell's equations that unified all sorts of things that have to do with photons. | ||
| Magnetism, electricity, x-rays, radio waves. | ||
| All of that stuff got subsumed into really one equation called Maxwell's equation. | ||
| That equation presupposes a circle out of nowhere. | ||
| We didn't know that there was a circle, but we wrote down equations and the equations told us, hey, numbnuts, there's a circle that rotates just the way this water wiggle rotates at every point in space-time that you can't see it because that's the only way those equations make sense. | ||
| Now you'll hear people, like you'll have Sean Carroll on, who want to talk about the multiverse, right? | ||
| Or Neil deGrasse Tyson will want to tell you how big the universe is. | ||
| And somehow people don't want to tell you, there's a circle around so we can see each other. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| It's not fascinating. | ||
| Well, it's very complicated, and even the way you're explaining it to me is not resonating. | ||
| Well, I can show it to you on a video, but I don't want to ruin the show. | ||
| So part of the problem is... | ||
| But I'm not sure that the video would even show it. | ||
| Do you understand what he's saying? | ||
| A little, but not really, no. | ||
| In essence, the photons that we see are the levels from which we measure a derivative, which is rise over run above a level. | ||
| The level that we see is the photon, in essence. | ||
| And the thing that we're differentiating is the electron. | ||
| So electrons are like functions. | ||
| And photons are like horizontal levels from which we measure rise over run to take the derivative. | ||
| And then the idea that we have partial differential equations is how photons zing off of me and hit your eye and we see each other. | ||
| That world of waves colliding, like everything in this place, is waves in collision with each other, waves interacting. | ||
| The story of us is the story of interacting waves and the waves obey partial differential equations. | ||
| So the fact that you have derivatives, which allow you to define the derivative in partial differential equations, differentials are derivatives, are determined by levels, which is on this page of videos we've made for you guys. | ||
| And those things allow you to define the equations for waves which we are. | ||
| So when you talk about the theory of everything, what you're actually saying is, tell me about a medium, waves in the medium, and rules for how waves behave moving around in the medium. | ||
| That's what a theory is. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's what this is. | ||
| It's a theory in which four dimensions births some elaborate crazy setup, which has interacting waves that look like electrons, up quarks, down quarks, protons, neutrons. | ||
| Gamma radiation, beta radiation, alpha particles. | ||
| That's the story of us. | ||
| And how did all that weird shit get into our world to form, like everything in here is made up of upquarks, downquarks, and electrons held together by force particles. | ||
| It's like an incredibly economical statement about, look at all the diverse shit here. | ||
| That's what this is about. | ||
| And what I believe is, is that we'll never have, we'll never take the time. | ||
| It's like, let's spend a day talking about this shit and do it at a blackboard and do it with videos. | ||
| Like we spent hundreds of hours making these videos to show you what these concepts are. | ||
| Now, I understand the constraints of the show and I'm totally fine with that. | ||
| But the point is, I believe that with artists and with imagination, we can actually show you What these structures are. | ||
| I can draw lines with pens and show you what a derivative is on a water wiggle. | ||
| And you can say, okay, you're doing calculus on a water wiggle, and there's a water wiggle-like structure in the world, which I never heard about, and that's what gives me light electromagnetism, all the stuff I know and love, that keeps electrons bound to protons and hydrogen atoms. | ||
| That weird world of waves interacting with each other according to derivative equations, where the derivatives are determined from levels called gauge potentials, is visualizable with videos that we've been making. | ||
| And the hope is that this is for experts, and they're going to have their day, and they're going to piss all over it, and they're going to be angry and mean, and that's going to happen. | ||
| But at the end of that process, hopefully, the ideas herein contained Could change the world. | ||
| It's the first time I've ever seen somebody tell a complete story about how did this place fill up with all this crazy stuff, assuming almost nothing to begin with. | ||
| It's like a fertilized egg hypothesis. | ||
| Show me a minimal amount I can assume and drag out falling in love on a park bench in early May. | ||
| That's how crazy the story has to be. | ||
| When you have a fertilized egg and it becomes your child, The story of development, of how something births itself, is what this is a story about. | ||
| And that literally can explain falling in love on a park bench in May? | ||
| We can't get there. | ||
| But if we're materialists, we believe that there's nothing other than protons, neutrons, electrons, gluons holding these things together. | ||
| Are you a materialist? | ||
| If I say this, I believe about this. | ||
| I have to wrestle with the problem that there's not a lot of room for magic. | ||
| But isn't magic subjective? | ||
| Isn't the idea of magic just our own personal experience? | ||
| Because everything is magic, if you've never experienced it, if it didn't exist. | ||
| You know, there was this guy, Paul Dirac, who's really Einstein's only rival in the 20th century. | ||
| And in 1963, he wrote this article in Scientific American where he said something insane. | ||
| And he said, Schrodinger was led into error because he put too much weight on the particulars of agreement with experiment with his equations. | ||
| And he was missing something called spin. | ||
| But the essence of his idea was so beautiful that if he'd embraced beauty rather than the scientific method, he would have gotten farther quicker. | ||
| And almost everyone who tries this crashes on the rocks. | ||
| Everybody who tries to throw away the scientific method in service of beauty Almost cracks up. | ||
| And the exception is the three guys who really wrote down physical laws that govern everything else that we know about the world. | ||
| But why do you have to throw out the scientific method in service of beauty? | ||
| Couldn't it just be a part of the equation of life itself? | ||
| It's a human. | ||
| And that it exists inside the experience of human beings? | ||
| Ultimately, humans can't throw out the scientific method. | ||
| Scientific method is the last word. | ||
| Right, but why would you in the service of beauty? | ||
| I don't understand why the two are mutually exclusive. | ||
| Because if I say something early, and there's the slightest problem with what I say, That is the instance of what I'm saying. | ||
| I have an idea, which is, you know, I've got it. | ||
| We're going to sell skulls to Native Americans, right? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's an instance of an idea. | ||
| Right. | ||
| The general idea might be, let's go into business and sell things. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| The initial instance of every great idea about the world... | ||
| has always been wrong. | ||
| Always? | ||
| Yeah, well I think, let's take the 20th century. | ||
| Start with 1900. Einstein gets it wrong initially. | ||
| His first equation is wrong. | ||
| Dirac, who gives us the equation for matter, so Einstein does gravity. | ||
| Dirac tells us that the proton and the electron Which are oppositely charged are antiparticles of each other. | ||
| And Heisenberg says, you're an idiot. | ||
| The proton is enormous. | ||
| The electron is tiny. | ||
| They'd have to be of the same mass. | ||
| Then Dirac gave us this theory of matter. | ||
| We couldn't compute with it for almost 20 years because everything blew up in our face. | ||
| These are the instances, the instantiations of great ideas. | ||
| The instances of great ideas are almost always flawed. | ||
| And Yang and Mills, who came up with the generalization of the light equation, Maxwell's equations, didn't have mass in their equation. | ||
| So they couldn't suppress something called beta decay, which is a kind of radioactivity. | ||
| And the world would be taken over by beta decay if you couldn't make certain particles massive. | ||
| Every time we try one of these things, our first few instantiations are usually wrong. | ||
| And what Dirac was giving us, and which we didn't understand, is he's saying... | ||
| At the beginning, don't take the training wheels off. | ||
| The training wheels are like beauty. | ||
| Look for internal coherence. | ||
| Look for some kinds of symmetry. | ||
| Look for some deep idea. | ||
| And don't immediately run to say, is there an error? | ||
| Is there an agreement with experiment? | ||
| Because those things will have to wait for the mature instantiation rather than the first instantiation. | ||
| Let me pause right here. | ||
| What do you mean by beauty? | ||
| What do you mean by magic? | ||
| These are subjective concepts that are only with human beings. | ||
| Dogs don't see beauty, or if they do, they don't express it. | ||
| Like, dogs don't see flowers and become perplexed. | ||
| They don't stare at a mountain and sit down and take a deep breath and sigh. | ||
| I don't, first of all, agree with that. | ||
| Dogs stare at the sky and sigh? | ||
| Dogs look at flowers and go, this is fucking amazing? | ||
| Certainly dogs are very focused on smell. | ||
| The olfactory sense of what is fascinating to a dog is not highly subjective. | ||
| Right, but we're talking about beauty, right? | ||
| Yes, I'm talking about beauty. | ||
| I'm talking about- Beautiful smells, is that what you're talking about? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I don't think we can imagine what a dog smells, right? | ||
| Because their sense of smell is- So far beyond. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Multitudes. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I mean, they can smell cancer. | ||
| Dogs? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, okay, but if, for example- Right, but we're cutting hairs here. | ||
| What I'm saying is the human being's subjective experience of beauty is very unique to us. | ||
| You're going to say that, but if I go into any culture and I go- Ha, ha, ha. | ||
| Every culture has that interval. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wise men say, oh, heave, oh. | |
| Okay. | ||
| Okay, that is universal. | ||
| Okay, that's not beauty though, right? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's art. | ||
| It's a different thing. | ||
| We're talking about a different thing now. | ||
| When you let your vocal cord vibrate, implied in that thing, you may say I'm singing the note C, but you're not. | ||
| There's an entire chord called the overtone series. | ||
| And that sounds good to every culture because it's not about you or me. | ||
| It's about our throat. | ||
| It's about the one-dimensional nature of a vibrating column always produces that same every chord. | ||
| Well, music resonates specifically with human beings. | ||
| But can we agree that music is... | ||
| People are always going to want to say it's totally subjective. | ||
| It is. | ||
| It's not totally subjective. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, it's at least partially subjective. | ||
| It's partially subjective. | ||
| Some people don't like jazz at all. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| Some people live for it. | ||
| So it's subjective, right? | ||
| Some people hate rap music. | ||
| Some people love it. | ||
| Some people hate metal. | ||
| Some people love it. | ||
| Some people hate country. | ||
| Some people love it. | ||
| It's as subjective as taste in food. | ||
| No. | ||
| How so? | ||
| Well, first of all, your bitter response is in general protective of you. | ||
| Some people enjoy bitter foods. | ||
| I was going to say that you have to usually learn which foods are safe, and then you have an acquired taste. | ||
| Very often, bitter foods are acquired taste. | ||
| Culture has already figured out which foods are safe, for the most part. | ||
| But it's local. | ||
| You know that that thing, like if you were going to eat Cabrales cheese, which has maggots infested in it, if you come from Spain, you understand that Cabrales is safe. | ||
| So you call it a delicacy because it's some stupid stuff that you happen to have local information to know that it's safe. | ||
| This is Brett Weinstein 101. Sure, but even in Spain, there's people that find it detestable. | ||
| But my point to you is that what we are hiding behind the universals It is true that we all have subjective components, but it is not the case that you and I will have a conversation about a whole lot of love. | ||
| And we will have an idea, like, that is just the best song. | ||
| And you'll know that you have to say, okay, well, I understand that some people don't like it. | ||
| But then, when you get drunk, you're going to say, how can you not like Whole Lotta Love? | ||
| Yeah, but I mean, you would say that, but you know. | ||
| You say that, but you're joking. | ||
| Like, when I say, how can someone not like Elton John? | ||
| I get it. | ||
| I get that you don't like Elton John. | ||
| I fucking love Elton John. | ||
| But some people, they hear, Saturday night... | ||
| They don't want to hear that shit. | ||
| Stop, stop, stop. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They don't want to hear it. | ||
| They don't like Elton John. | ||
| It's subjective. | ||
| There is a non-subjective component to music. | ||
| You can focus on the fact that there's- What is non-subjective about it? | ||
| Well, I just told you. | ||
| But you're not correct. | ||
| If people don't like it, and some people do like it, that is the essence of subjectivity. | ||
| Do you remember what you said to me about Gary Clark Jr. when you introduced me to him at the store? | ||
| My personal opinion, probably? | ||
| You were talking personally. | ||
| It's one of the baddest motherfuckers alive? | ||
| You just said, this is the greatest guitarist. | ||
| Alive? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In my opinion. | ||
| That's my opinion. | ||
| You didn't say in my opinion. | ||
| Yeah, but that's my opinion, clearly. | ||
| And I don't necessarily think that he is necessarily the greatest guitarist alive. | ||
| To me. | ||
| When I listen... | ||
| But he's objectively... | ||
| If I listen to Numb, or I listen to Bright Lights... | ||
| He's objectively amazing? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But it's not objectively. | ||
| Because some people don't think he's good at all. | ||
| They don't like that kind of sound. | ||
| Some people like weird sounds, man. | ||
| I don't necessarily love putting on Art Tatum as a pianist. | ||
| You cannot sit me down to watch Art Tatum and say, that is not amazing. | ||
| Okay, but if you don't enjoy it, it's subjective. | ||
| I may not enjoy it. | ||
| But it's subjective. | ||
| You might say that that is a guy who's very good at doing a thing that I don't enjoy doing. | ||
| Listen, man, you're splitting hairs. | ||
| You either enjoy something or you don't. | ||
| That is the essence of subjectivity. | ||
| You either think it's good or you don't. | ||
| Just because you know that some people enjoy it doesn't mean it's objective. | ||
| That it's great. | ||
| You don't enjoy it. | ||
| It doesn't have to be your thing. | ||
| The first thing is, can I recognize something? | ||
| Like the millennial whoop. | ||
| You know about the millennial whoop? | ||
| No. | ||
| This thing, 535, right? | ||
| There's this thing that all these millennial songs have in it. | ||
| Now, I don't necessarily enjoy that, but I can recognize it. | ||
| So the first step is, is it objectively recognizable? | ||
| Can I train myself- Right, you're talking about a sound that you know exists. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But that doesn't mean you like it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So if you don't like it, it's subjective. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Just like food, just like movies, just like clothing. | ||
| There's a lot of things that people enjoy that other people don't enjoy. | ||
| Let me ask you a question. | ||
| Do you think statistically we just all had a high probability of thinking The Godfather was a great film? | ||
| I know that some people don't like that film. | ||
| They don't like violent pictures. | ||
| They don't like tension. | ||
| They don't like mafia. | ||
| They don't like the portrayal of Italian-Americans. | ||
| They don't like movies that are from that era. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because they're slower. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| But it's a subjective film. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's not... | |
| Joe, I have a different belief structure. | ||
| I believe that we're hiding behind subjectivity. | ||
| I believe that what we've figured out is that there's a subjective component to everything, okay? | ||
| And you're absolutely right about this. | ||
| But you're overcomplicating people's tastes, people's likes and dislikes. | ||
| They're real, right? | ||
| Some people like pop music. | ||
| Some people like Beethoven. | ||
| That is the nature of subjectivity. | ||
| What I'm trying to say is that what you were saying is true. | ||
| We have different likes. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's a really far downstream process of can we recognize what's going on? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| What's our association with it? | ||
| If you were tortured to the most beautiful music in the world, you're probably not going to love it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| If you watch Clockwork Orange and you got really screwed up about it. | ||
| Well, I think that's what they did to Manuel Noriega when they were trying to get him to leave Panama. | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I remember that. | |
| They played the same song over and over and over again. | ||
| It's probably a great song, too. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| The first 12,000 times you hear it. | ||
| But that's not what I'm trying to say. | ||
| What I'm trying to say is that there is a huge component about what we like and what we don't like that's subjective. | ||
| And there's a huge component about what we like and we don't like that's subjective. | ||
| We've all been taught the same move, which is back off claims of objectivity. | ||
| Every one of us. | ||
| Myself included. | ||
| Back off claims of objectivity? | ||
| I don't agree with that at all. | ||
| We've been told to back off claims of... | ||
| If I say to you, Charlie Parker is objectively one of the greatest jazz musicians of all time, You will have a negative reaction. | ||
| No, I won't. | ||
| In general? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I've listened to Charlie Parker. | ||
| He's brilliant. | ||
| To you? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, and somebody else doesn't like him. | ||
| Yeah, but you asked me. | ||
| You said I will have an objection to that. | ||
| I won't. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| So, who are the people that... | ||
| Now I'm really confused, because before I thought you were telling me... | ||
| That these things were subjective. | ||
| And what I'm trying to say is you are willing to accept these things. | ||
| No, you said me personally. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So you personally believe that Charlie Parker is an objectively great jazz musician? | ||
| I believe, personally, Charlie Parker is a great jazz musician. | ||
| To you, I see. | ||
| So you objectively believe that you subjectively think... | ||
| The problem is we're conflating objectivity and subjectivity here. | ||
| We're getting into this weird area. | ||
| It's subjective whether or not I enjoy it. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| If you say, is this person really good at something that I have no interest in? | ||
| Like, are they a really good badminton player? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I watch them, and they win. | ||
| I'm like, yeah, that guy's really good. | ||
| I don't give a fuck about badminton. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| If badminton just vanished, I couldn't care less. | ||
| Yeah, but even there, I heard old basketball guys ask about Steph Curry. | ||
| Isn't he amazing? | ||
| Like, I don't know what he's doing. | ||
| He's doing a bunch of three-point shots. | ||
| I played in the paint. | ||
| That's basketball. | ||
| I don't know what he does. | ||
| This is not my game. | ||
| But you get that from fighting. | ||
| You get that from high jumping. | ||
| You get it from hard bat table tennis. | ||
| It's subjective. | ||
| I'm not sure who's making whose point now, objectively or subject. | ||
| It's subjective whether or not you like that style of basketball. | ||
| So we're in agreement. | ||
| Some people like brawls. | ||
| Some people like Floyd Mayweather because he's super technical and he's clever defensively. | ||
| I totally agree with this at the level of... | ||
| There's a whole bunch of process that happens and at the end you say, I like it, I don't like it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And there's no way to tell because if you like something, I can make you hate it by associating it with something negative. | ||
| Well, let's look at the Webster definition of objectivity versus subjectivity. | ||
| Bring that up. | ||
| Let's pull that up. | ||
| The Webster definition of objectivity and the Webster definition of subjectivity. | ||
| And let's look at this and see if we're talking about the same fucking things here. | ||
| Because I think we're getting a little bit into the weeds here. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| That's the Jamie Hum. | ||
| Build suspense. | ||
| What's that? | ||
| As I'm typing it in, there's a brown.edu dissertation about this. | ||
| No, just whatever. | ||
| Whatever the definition of objectivity. | ||
| See what we get. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Okay, here we go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's right. | |
| Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions, objective of a person or their judgment, not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in consideration of expressing and representing facts. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, objective. | ||
| It's not influenced by personal feelings or opinions in considering and representing facts. | ||
| So you can say, objectively, someone is a very talented guitarist because you see how complicated their movements are and how they're hitting the strings. | ||
| But you could say, subjectively, I don't enjoy that music. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| Now, pull up subjective, just so we're clear about that. | ||
| Subjective definition. | ||
| Based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So personal feelings and opinions and how you feel about something is subjective. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if I say to you, is Eddie Van Halen objectively a talented guitarist? | ||
| He's clearly a talented guitarist. | ||
| I didn't say clearly. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think objectively. | ||
| And somebody else says, in 2021, the next move in the conversation is, actually, I don't think he's a talented guitarist. | ||
| I've heard him. | ||
| I find talent is really about playing with feeling. | ||
| And all of these crazy moves and the tapping and the whines and the squeals, to me, that's not talent. | ||
| That motherfucker's never listened to Running With The Devil. | ||
| Now you're... | ||
| Play running with the devil. | ||
| You're on both sides of this. | ||
| Yeah, but running with the devil is like, the fucking movements and the way he plays guitar, he's clearly got amazing ability with the guitar. | ||
| Now, subjectively, you could say, I think that music's trash. | ||
| Somebody else is going to make the claim in 2021. I think you're on my side of the issue and you're still... | ||
| This is very interesting. | ||
| I think we're crossing over on both sides. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| I think what you're now saying is expressing the tension of our moment. | ||
| The tension of our moment is that as soon as somebody says that something is objective... | ||
| Somebody will say, actually, to me, your definition of that isn't how I define it, and therefore I reclaim the subjectivity of it. | ||
| I can turn Andrei Segovia or Eddie Van Halen or Jimmy Page or any of these people into not a good guitarist by redefining what a talented guitarist is. | ||
| Is if I redefine the concept of talent on a guitar and I say talent on a guitar is somebody who can convince me of emotions that they're playing with and I didn't feel anything. | ||
| Maybe the problem is the word talent. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| You say if someone is objectively proficient about the guitar. | ||
| Is Jimi Hendrix proficient? | ||
| He was incredibly sloppy in a weird way. | ||
| His timing actually varies. | ||
| It's not incredibly rigorous. | ||
| But the end result was subjectively amazing. | ||
| I know people who say, what is this noise? | ||
| Who the fuck are those people? | ||
| Not that he couldn't, but what if he couldn't read music? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Does that make it any less... | |
| Well, no, no, no. | ||
| I don't think Joe and I would polarize on that. | ||
| I'm just saying, like, if you're throwing him into another situation, he'd be like, okay, play with these guys, and then he can't. | ||
| Well, I think then, academically, he wouldn't be as proficient, like, in terms of, like, if he had to write the music down and teach it, maybe. | ||
| I think if you took somebody like, do you know who Guthrie Govan is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Guthrie Govan is arguably the great guitarist of our age, and one of his tricks is you tell him a guitarist and he will play in that person's style in and of what he does on his own. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So effectively, he can mimic anyone's style. | ||
| So he has a proficiency of technique. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| If anyone is a good guitarist, Guthrie Govan can represent that person's guitar in a way that if you were blindfolded, You would say, boy, B.B. King is having a great day. | ||
| Okay, I see what you're saying. | ||
| And so that would be a proof that Guthrie Govan is, like it's a Turing test basically, that Guthrie Govan can emulate any guitarist. | ||
| So if you believe anyone is objectively talented, then Guthrie Govan is objectively talented. | ||
| That's the thing about guitar, is that it is an instrument with six strings, but people can make radically different noises with those six strings. | ||
| Tosin Abbas's is not six-string. | ||
| Narciso Yep's is not six-string. | ||
| Even that... | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| I'm just trying to say... | ||
| We can also do those double guitars and some of those wacky rock and roll guys do. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Those are always sort of dorky and sort of cool. | ||
| What are those? | ||
| What's that called? | ||
| The double guitar? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, usually it's a 12-string and a 6-string so that you get these sort of resonant... | ||
| So it's 18 total. | ||
| So which one's 12? | ||
| And I don't think all of the strings are doubled on a 12-string, so I think it's only some. | ||
| I'm not exactly sure. | ||
| But those things are based on the idea that you're trying not to switch guitars in the middle of a song when you're trying to do two things. | ||
| Or Stanley Jordan will tap on two guitars simultaneously with his fingers as if he's playing the piano, which is insane. | ||
| Well, Hendrix used to play Star Spangled Banner with his teeth. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, nobody teaches you that. | |
| Who used to do that? | ||
| I mean, maybe someone will teach you that after he did it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you seen that movie August Rush? | |
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Robin Williams is in it. | |
| It's about a little kid, proficient, whatever, but it doesn't matter. | ||
| The style of guitar he's playing, he's slapping the guitar. | ||
| It's tuned in in a very strange way. | ||
| It's hard to recreate, but he's doing these, like what he's saying, he's like tapping on a piano. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'll show you what he's doing. | |
| The kid's acting, but someone was actually playing it. | ||
| It's not guitar playing like you're used to seeing. | ||
| Put it up, put it up. | ||
| Never heard of it. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's a different thing, right? | ||
| You can, like, there's people, like Gary Clark is a perfect example. | ||
| Like I said, like Gary Clark, I'm pretty sure I played this for you, when Suzanne Santo and Gary Clark and Ben Jaffe were, they did this show in downtown LA and they played Midnight Rider. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Gary Clark attached his sound to To that classic Allman Brothers song, Midnight Rider. | ||
| And it was fucking amazing. | ||
| Because you could clear. | ||
| If you just tuned into it, you go, oh, that's Gary Clark. | ||
| There's a style of sound that Gary creates that's uniquely him. | ||
| Stevie Ray Vaughan is another example. | ||
| There's a style of sound that Stevie Ray Vaughan created that was uniquely him. | ||
| This little clip, this kid's finding out how to play a guitar. | ||
| This is a little too much. | ||
| It's like movie magic, but this is what I'm talking about. | ||
| He's not strumming it like you're used to seeing or hearing. | ||
| He's almost playing the bongos. | ||
| Using the reverb of the room, adding into what he's doing. | ||
| Oh, that's pretty badass. | ||
| This is called August Rush. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, this movie. | |
| It's an interesting movie. | ||
| Watch it if you want to. | ||
| It's been out for a while. | ||
| Just a very strange thing you're doing. | ||
| Robin Williams is one of those guys that when I see him I get sad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a very good movie he's acting in that people if you didn't know it was in it. | ||
| I met him once. | ||
| It's the weirdest story. | ||
| Unfortunately, I've told it already, so forgive me if you've heard this. | ||
| But I was at the Improv. | ||
| I did a show at the Improv. | ||
| Then afterwards, there was a line of people taking pictures of people saying hi after the show. | ||
| And this dude with glasses and this thick white beard and baseball hat was in line. | ||
| And he was telling me how great the show was. | ||
| He really enjoyed it. | ||
| He talked to me about specific bits. | ||
| I'm like, oh, thank you. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Glad you enjoyed it. | ||
| And then in the middle of talking to this guy, I go, Holy shit, this is Robin Williams. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| He was just in line. | ||
| I didn't even know it was him. | ||
| He had this crazy white beard. | ||
| I didn't know it was him. | ||
| I had no idea it was him until in the middle of talking, I realized it was him. | ||
| He waited in line by himself. | ||
| There was all these people. | ||
| No one noticed it was him. | ||
| What a compliment to you, sir. | ||
| It was wild. | ||
| It was really weird. | ||
| It was right before I did Triggered. | ||
| It was like I was tightening up my act. | ||
| It was like getting... | ||
| I was getting everything together. | ||
| I think it was around then. | ||
| I'm pretty sure it was in that. | ||
| But it was... | ||
| I was in the middle of about to do a special. | ||
| So everything was very tight. | ||
| And I remember seeing him going... | ||
| In the middle of the conversation going... | ||
| Holy shit! | ||
| This is Robin Williams. | ||
| I saw him when I was in like high school. | ||
| In an L.A. comedy club. | ||
| The Improv. | ||
| And... | ||
| There were two guys in LA, I can't remember the other guy, who, the thing about them was that you were just convinced that their brains were 12,000 times faster than anybody else you'd ever met. | ||
| Like that they were just in a weird way smarter. | ||
| And Robin Williams' Free Association, it was like being on a Nantucket sleigh ride of the mind, and comedy was how it expressed itself, but it wasn't about comedy. | ||
| It was about just like having thoughts interact with each other and you had to justify them by turning every thought into a joke that's influencing every other thought. | ||
| It was like almost like excusing madness that was purposeful and pointful and amazing to watch. | ||
| Unfortunately, he repurposed some other people's material. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| Yeah, he was known for that. | ||
| And I think that was part of the manic nature of this style was that sometimes he would come across a subject because he was freeballing and he would just use material that he knew of. | ||
| Well, my guess is that the speeds he was at, he probably couldn't slow down to ask, where did that thought come from? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Or maybe the ends justified the means, and then what he really was doing was just trying to put on the best performance that he could, and he had this idea that he knew wasn't necessarily his. | ||
| He cut checks to a lot of people. | ||
| There was a lot of issues. | ||
| I know Kinnison and him had a big squabble because of it, and I'm pretty sure he cut a check for Kinnison, and he cut checks for other guys that were at the store. | ||
| Because he had to, not because he... | ||
| Do the material on TV. So let me ask you a question about this. | ||
| I guess I was reviewing that night in your life, and I was looking at the fact that it wasn't that funny when you went up and you said what had to be said. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And... | |
| I think about comics... | ||
| That dined at the comedy store when I left. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was painful for me to watch in a way because it was both... | ||
| Courageous, but that's you know that that was a weird situation where I was called back on stage by Carlos Mencia That wasn't there wasn't like I know I made a statement. | ||
| I had already done my set I already didn't stand up and then I went back because he called me out That you know like the me leaving the Comedy Store was not even my idea. | ||
| It was like they banned me and In the story, didn't you... | ||
| No, I don't think so, Joe. | ||
| I think at some level, you threw your hat into the ring, and you almost certainly knew. | ||
| They said, why don't you take a break or take some time off or some soft... | ||
| Yes, and then I said, there's no fucking way I'm going to do that. | ||
| I'll never come back. | ||
| I think what you did is you obligated yourself into a role... | ||
| Where you actually had to stand up for something. | ||
| And the thing that I'm wrestling with, because I reviewed this whole story a few times, is this question about, like I look at your energy, and you're such a positive person in my life. | ||
| And I look at that energy, and you were trying to take care of somebody like Ari. | ||
| It wasn't just Aria. | ||
| It was creativity in general. | ||
| It was the concept that there was a guy who was more successful than everybody else who would just suck up everybody else's material and profit off of it. | ||
| It was also that nobody else was saying. | ||
| It was also that they knew it was happening. | ||
| Everybody was talking about it and there was a silence. | ||
| Bill Burr told me a story where he was performing there and he said to the guy that was a manager, the guy that I had the issue with, he said, fuck, I don't want to go on stage. | ||
| Fucking Carlos is here. | ||
| He goes, oh, don't worry, he doesn't steal from guys like you. | ||
| He only steals from the younger guys. | ||
| And he goes, what the fuck did you just say? | ||
| So you know he steals from the younger guys? | ||
| He goes, that's not what I said. | ||
| He goes, that's what you just fucking said. | ||
| It's exactly what you just said. | ||
| And it doesn't feel that way. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| You know what, man? | ||
| It was a time before accountability with the internet. | ||
| The internet came along. | ||
| And by the time that, when that instance happened, people recognized, oh, there's legitimate accountability for doing things along those lines. | ||
| This is from 1964. Obama has passed his general exams which indicates that on academic grounds he is entitled to stay around here and write his thesis. | ||
| However, they are going to try to cook something up to ease him out. | ||
| All three, that is all three Harvard people, will have to agree on this, however. | ||
| They are planning on telling him that they will not give him any money and that he had better return to Kenya and prepare his thesis at home, which means he will never get his PhD. | ||
| Remember when they said, take a break to you? | ||
| This is my alma mater. | ||
| This is the thing I've been, you know, there's this whole story about what happened in my early life and why I don't talk about it publicly. | ||
| And this is why this is interacting with your story about joke thievery, because it's weird for a comic not to turn that into a joke. | ||
| And it wasn't funny to you. | ||
| In around, I don't know, 1988, 1989, Harvard University told me, to remain in good standing in this program, you cannot live in Massachusetts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Why? | |
| And I said, what? | ||
| How can you tell me where I can live and where I can't live? | ||
| It wasn't until somebody FOIA'd Barack Obama's father in his file, and I read the story, that I realized that Harvard has a program for how it gets rid of people it wants to get rid of who are in good standing. | ||
| It makes them move. | ||
| It makes them move so that they can't complete their thesis. | ||
| Why did they want to do that with you? | ||
| Probably because I'm as learning disabled as the day is long. | ||
| Probably because I took an unpopular stance that the equations that people were working with called the Donaldson theory self-dual equations were not the right equations to be working with and that we had somehow been assuming that they were highly peculiar to dimension four and that The difficulty of the equations, which was what was giving us all these great results, I had effectively gotten on the wrong side. | ||
| I proposed some equations that I was told were insufficiently nonlinear, never mind what that means, that in 1994, effectively the same equations took over the entire field. | ||
| Whatever it was, and this is like part of the idea of reclaiming your own story, It was so crazy that a university would tell me what state I could live in. | ||
| Can I stop you there? | ||
| So the people that are telling you this, they're operating on a pre-existing solution to deal with people that they find undesirable or problematic. | ||
| If you fall afoul of them... | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's written somewhere or something? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Or it's like people maintain, for example, one way of... | ||
| Getting rid of a tenured professor that's known is that you ask the person to report on their research and you load them up with teaching and you give them a lousy office. | ||
| And then eventually they'll just quit because you make their life hell. | ||
| So people know that there are these kind of secret, quiet ways to do the undoable. | ||
| Can I ask you this? | ||
| What did you think about Cornel West being denied tenure from Harvard? | ||
| First of all, I thought, I assumed he already had it. | ||
| I mean, Cornel West is this loved intellectual. | ||
| When I found out they denied him tenure, I was like, what? | ||
| How do you deny Cornel West tenure? | ||
| Like, what is that? | ||
| What did you think about that? | ||
| I, first of all, am not knowledgeable in that area. | ||
| I think of him as a very bright superstar of some sort of part academic, part social crossover, high impact human being. | ||
| I was there when Larry Summers was president of Harvard, when he went out and said, effectively, too many people are using the Harvard label. | ||
| And we're going to be reining it in and going back to hard rigor and basics. | ||
| Let me tell you what people don't understand about Harvard. | ||
| Harvard is two separate structures fused together. | ||
| One is about power and one is about achievement. | ||
| And the two of them are interlinked in a way that cannot be separated. | ||
| Without the achievement, Harvard wouldn't have this kind of glowing reputation that causes us to sort of ooh and ah over it historically. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Without the power, it wouldn't be able to attract the money and it wouldn't be able to constantly position itself. | ||
| So through achievement, It gets enough cachet to wield power. | ||
| Through the power, it gets the resources to buy achievement. | ||
| And this sort of thing is not understood. | ||
| And I've been on both sides of this thing. | ||
| Like, one of the things that happened was that the Boskin Commission in 1996 tried to figure out how to cut Social Security and raise taxes without getting caught. | ||
| Because that's the third rail of politics. | ||
| And what they said is, if we change the CPI, the Consumer Price Index, the way we measure inflation, because tax brackets are indexed and because entitlement payments for Social Security and Medicare are indexed, if we claim that inflation is overstated by 1.1 percentage points, we will gain a trillion dollars in savings. | ||
| And the public won't be able to object to it because we're going to be just adjusting a dial. | ||
| We're going to say that this dial was broken and we got some technocrats to fix it. | ||
| So they figured out we want to get a trillion dollars over 10 years. | ||
| They backed out. | ||
| That would require 1.1% overstatement. | ||
| They broke into two teams. | ||
| One team came up with 0.5. | ||
| One team came up with 0.6. | ||
| 0.5 plus 0.6 equals 1.1. | ||
| Totally fictitious. | ||
| They got a proposal for a trillion dollars that they were going to steal, effectively, from Social Security. | ||
| And they described this action publicly? | ||
| Robert Gordon, who was one of the five Boskin commissioners, Jamie, could you bring up something called Boskin Wild vs. | ||
| Mild? | ||
| They brag about these things. | ||
| Power wants to explain just how powerful it is. | ||
| And you remember the scene in the big short where they're talking to these guys in Florida and saying, why are they confessing? | ||
| And somebody says, they're not confessing, they're bragging. | ||
| It's a question of what are you proud that you're able to do? | ||
| So, until Robert Gordon... | ||
| Did this PowerPoint presentation. | ||
| We did not understand what happened to the work that I did with my wife in economics, which is that we were trying to show how you could actually compute the Consumer Price Index objectively using gauge theory. | ||
| The same year, they were trying to figure out how do we steal a trillion dollars over 10 years by doing funny games with the gauge called inflation. | ||
| Do you find the wild versus the mild? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I did. | |
| It's just loading a PDF and it's like taking me... | ||
| I bailed. | ||
| So this thing... | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| If you go to... | ||
| Go about five or six slides in. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We'll see how that works. | |
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
|
One, two, three. | |
| Keep going. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Let me find the word somehow. | ||
| Keep going? | ||
| Okay, Dale said 1.1% implies 1 trillion in Social Security savings over 10 years. | ||
| Somehow, our separate efforts came up with the 1.1% bias number. | ||
| In other words, They came up with the target, which is, let's save a trillion dollars. | ||
| And then they came up with, we have to say it's overstated by 1.1. | ||
| We then broke into two groups and somehow, key word, we put the numbers together and we got the target. | ||
| This is academic malpractice in the absolute extreme. | ||
| When Harvard was doing that, it was acting in its power capacity. | ||
| And the way they did it was they buried What I think is probably the best work in 25 to 50 years in mathematical economics that happened in the Harvard Economics Department, which is a second so-called marginal revolution where we changed the calculus underneath all of economic theory. | ||
| So how does something like this happen? | ||
| Is there a concerted effort? | ||
| Did they get together and they have this idea this is how we're going to do it? | ||
| There's a five-person commission behind closed doors That meets at the cousin's house of somebody on the commission in Florida. | ||
| And in another presentation... | ||
| Fucking Florida. | ||
| Florida man. | ||
| In another presentation they say, we solved this at the kitchen table of my cousin's house in Florida. | ||
| And you're just thinking like, Okay, so it's five guys, Bob Packwood and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat and a Republican, got together, picked five economists who were willing to play the dirty game. | ||
| The dirty game broke into two teams. | ||
| They knew exactly what they had to do. | ||
| They found the results to put them together, to put in front of Congress, to put in front of the National Academy. | ||
| And were they ever held accountable for this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| There's an entire book called The Physics of Wall Street, in which my wife and I are Chapter 10 and the epilogue. | ||
| Which it talks about, they made Weinstein and Milani go away. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So what I'm trying to talk to you about is, like, this experience for me. | ||
| I've never talked about this with anyone. | ||
| I've never... | ||
| I mean, I've talked to tons of people privately. | ||
| This is going to go out into the world. | ||
| I was... | ||
| You know this question, like, what has Eric Weinstein ever done? | ||
| I did... | ||
| That. | ||
| I did the marginal revolution using gauge theory. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| That question is Tim Dillon joking around. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| He never created the Rotato. | ||
| He was just joking. | ||
| He was fucking around. | ||
| That was the funny part about it. | ||
| He was joking. | ||
| But he's saying that because he knows you're brilliant. | ||
| I love him too. | ||
| Do you understand the only reason why he can say that? | ||
| If you were a loser, he couldn't say that. | ||
| Joe, you don't need to make me feel good about myself. | ||
| I know, but you brought it up again. | ||
| No, I'm saying something completely different. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I actually have been scared of this question. | ||
| What question? | ||
| Tim's question taken seriously. | ||
| Who's going to take it seriously? | ||
| I'm taking it seriously. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You're in a weird world. | ||
| Here's your weird world. | ||
| You're in a world of serious intellectual people. | ||
| You're damn straight. | ||
| You're also hanging out with Tim Dillon and me. | ||
| And I love it. | ||
| But the problem is you're conflating these two things. | ||
| Joe, I'm not that angry at Tim Dillon. | ||
| Not that angry? | ||
| Did you hear that? | ||
| You heard the word that? | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| You're not that angry at Carlos Mencia. | ||
| I'm not angry at him at all. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm not angry at Tim Dillon at all. | ||
| I'm sad for Tim Dillon. | ||
| It should be sad for Tim. | ||
| He's one of the most important comedians of our time. | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| It gave me a moment to reflect. | ||
| And I realized something, which is I don't want to talk about this shit publicly. | ||
| I don't want to say Dale Jorgensen is the guy who buried One of the most important innovations in economic theory. | ||
| But yet you just did. | ||
| I just did. | ||
| And that's what I've just done. | ||
| I realized by reviewing your history and revealing you're seven years away from the store, I don't want to be associated with Dale Jorgensen. | ||
| I don't care about him. | ||
| I want to be associated with gauge-theoretic economics. | ||
| I see what you're saying. | ||
| And what I realized is I don't want to be associated with the shit that happened over something called the Cyberg-Witten equations. | ||
| What I just handed you, one of the reasons I've held it back is that it very clearly gives an alternate definition, alternate motivation and derivation of the equations that revolutionized gauge theory, which is what I was thinking about in around 1987, 1988. And I've lived afraid of my own story because it's such an ugly story. | ||
| The story of a guy who was not allowed to attend his own thesis defense to any academician. | ||
| You hear, like, what do you mean you weren't allowed to? | ||
| You present your thesis. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I was not allowed in the room of my own thesis defense. | ||
| So this is why Harvard wanted you to move out of state? | ||
| Harvard and I got into a thing. | ||
| Because of that? | ||
| Because of a conflict. | ||
| Because also of this. | ||
| Because of geometric unity. | ||
| Because I said, I want to do physics. | ||
| And I have an idea about how physics goes. | ||
| And to be brutally honest, I was technically underpowered. | ||
| I am technically underpowered. | ||
| I was conceptually amazing. | ||
| I was very creative, very generative. | ||
| Tons and tons of great ideas, I think. | ||
| I'm being honest on both fronts. | ||
| Technically underpowered. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I couldn't accept myself in this world of like, you know, if you play classical music, everybody's technically brilliant. | ||
| There's no technically weak people in classical music. | ||
| I was like a guy, it was like John Lee Hooker in the orchestra of, you know, the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra on one string and a guitar playing with some weird syncopated rhythm. | ||
| Boom, boom, boom, boom. | ||
| Gonna shoot you right down. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Mom said, let that, daddy said, let that boy boogie woogie. | ||
| It's in him and it's got to come out. | ||
| That thing, I'm scared of. | ||
| Why are you scared of it? | ||
| Because it's my history. | ||
| Because I don't want to go back into it. | ||
| I don't want to go back to being the guy begging Dale Jorgensen, oh, pretty pleased with sugar and top, let me innovate your entire field. | ||
| I don't want to go back to the Harvard department and say the words Clifford Taubes. | ||
| You had Gary Taubes on your program. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Clifford Taubes was the guy who told me I had to move out of state. | ||
| Was he related to Gary? | ||
| Yeah, he was his brother. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was the guy who held the secret seminar. | ||
| And the thing is, is that I'm not against the person in the story. | ||
| I don't want to be involved with him. | ||
| I want him to go and be successful and have a good career. | ||
| But my story... | ||
| When I put forward those equations, and he said they're insufficiently nonlinear, and he said self-duality doesn't have anything to do with spinners, because if it did, Nigel Hitchens would have told us. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| Nigel would have told us. | ||
| He didn't say Hitchens. | ||
| He was wrong. | ||
| And then when I gave him the opportunity, he didn't say, you know what, Eric Weinstein brought these equations up, and I told him no. | ||
| And that thing is like something I've held open the door. | ||
| He's now in his mid-60s. | ||
| I was like, you really couldn't just say, maybe I screwed up? | ||
| You should go kick his ass. | ||
| No. | ||
| Why? | ||
| I'm joking. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Well, but wait a second, Joe. | ||
| I'm such a dick. | ||
| Such a dick. | ||
| I had to! | ||
| Come and bring some levity into this. | ||
| I thought you were going to cry 30 seconds ago. | ||
| Do you have a tissue? | ||
| No. | ||
| Somewhere. | ||
| Yeah, it was over there. | ||
| But this is the thing. | ||
| What I realized through Tim, it wasn't a question of being angry at Tim, really. | ||
| I've been running away from my own story. | ||
| Just the way I don't like you associated with... | ||
| I haven't mentioned the guy who was the joke thief in this entire time. | ||
| Yeah, I understand what you're saying. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like, why are you and he entangled in a story? | ||
| Because he has nothing to do with your life. | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| It doesn't bother me that I'm entangled with him. | ||
| What bothers me that I'm entangled with this stuff? | ||
| Um, I know what you're saying. | ||
| Because I want to be joyous. | ||
| I want to produce positive things that uplift us, that give us a hope of breaking, like, the Einsteinian speed limit. | ||
| You know, if this is wrong, I want to know. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| I think it's right. | ||
| I think with all my flaws and all my failings and being 25 years out of the field, I believe that this story is going to be fixed by people who are trying to shoot it down. | ||
| They're going to say, holy shit. | ||
| I think there's something here. | ||
| Well, now we're going to know, right? | ||
| I think I'm hoping. | ||
| You released it today? | ||
|
unidentified
|
On geometricunity.org. | |
| And go to pullthatupjamie.com and you can watch all the videos that we didn't show you. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Pull that up. | ||
| I'm a little conflicted with that. | ||
| Are you? | ||
|
unidentified
|
We can talk afterwards. | |
| You should have thought of it first, Jamie. | ||
| No, he's got a shirt that says pull that shit up. | ||
| I have a one on the way too. | ||
| What is it? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't talk about it yet. | |
| It's going to be a surprise. | ||
| And what website would that be? | ||
| Jamie Vernon? | ||
| YoungJamie.com? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, correct. | |
| Available there. | ||
| The Breakout Star. | ||
| We were at dinner yesterday. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Eating barbecue. | ||
| And I asked Jamie a question and the fucking waiter goes, Holy shit, it's Jamie! | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| Jamie, do you get recognized a lot? | ||
| He fucking panicked. | ||
| When he saw Jamie, he panicked. | ||
| Holy shit, it's Jamie! | ||
| That's good. | ||
| It was kind of hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm big in the server world. | |
| It was funny, though. | ||
| It was an interesting moment. | ||
| I'm pretty sure that was the first table that dude ever waited on, too. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It seemed like it, for sure. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He told us he was a trainee. | ||
| And I'm pretty sure. | ||
| If it wasn't his first table, it was definitely his first ten. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, he was a little perplexed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He'll make it. | |
| But seeing Jamie, it was fucking hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Do you hate being famous? | |
| If I hated it, it would be pretty fucking stupid that I continue to pursue fame. | ||
| I don't hate it. | ||
| Do you pursue fame? | ||
| Well, I mean, I'm doing this thing that makes you famous. | ||
| I mean, I'm not pursuing fame, but it's an after effect of the thing that I do. | ||
| I think that there's no way to go through life trying to do what you're doing without getting famous as a byproduct. | ||
| You could get marginally famous and stay alive and feed yourself and do well, but you wouldn't impact as many people. | ||
| You wouldn't have the ability to impact as many people. | ||
| You wouldn't have the ability to get the guests you get. | ||
| You wouldn't have the conversation. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| It's like I would like to pretend that I'm so smart that I figured this out in advance, but I didn't. | ||
| It was just all luck. | ||
| It was all... | ||
| This job of being a podcaster mixed in with my mental illness. | ||
| Comedy. | ||
| Well, it's a comedy too, but it's also, I'm an obsessive person. | ||
| When I find things, I obsess on them. | ||
| You do get good at them. | ||
| My main problem is that there's too many things I'm obsessed with. | ||
| When people tell me they're bored, I just go, geez, that's crazy. | ||
| That's like someone telling me they breathe underwater. | ||
| I'm like, I don't know what you're saying. | ||
| I have so many interests. | ||
| I wish I had multiple lives to lead simultaneously. | ||
| Then I would pursue each thing that I'm fascinated with. | ||
| Single-minded determination. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So I stumbled... | ||
| I almost... | ||
| I mean, I don't really believe this, but I almost believe this, that this thing found me. | ||
| That it's almost like there was like a... | ||
| I totally understand what that means. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like... | |
| Like an attractor. | ||
| And like how... | ||
| You ever see... | ||
| When neurons... | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, trying to find each other. | ||
| Yeah, it's fascinating. | ||
| And they speed it up. | ||
| I think Freedman, I think Lex Freedman had it on his Instagram. | ||
| These neurons are... | ||
| They don't see, right? | ||
| No, they just send stuff out chemically. | ||
| Yeah, some way they find this thing. | ||
| And I feel... | ||
| There it is. | ||
| That is Lex. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And there's something that I feel like about life, that if you just open, if you don't bullshit yourself, and you're willing to take risks, those things find you, or you find them, and then once you get going, the easiest part is once you've already started, just continuing. | ||
| The hardest part is getting going with everything. | ||
| The hardest part is showing up for the first class. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| The easiest part is showing up for the thousandth one. | ||
| I'm backing away from fame. | ||
| How are you doing that? | ||
| By being on this show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Clubhouse. | |
| By being on Clubhouse? | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Well, Clubhouse was... | ||
| Hey. | ||
| Smart guy. | ||
| You got busted. | ||
| Fucking Jamie. | ||
| Jamie, it was a closed app. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's fine. | |
| I know. | ||
| I get it. | ||
| Fucking million people follow you, bitch. | ||
| Two. | ||
| What are you talking about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
2.8. | |
| What, you piker? | ||
| I think I have 4,000. | ||
| Yeah, because you showed up once at 700,000. | ||
| I might not even have 4,000. | ||
| Joe, the issue was I tried doing something. | ||
| I haven't even checked. | ||
| I tried doing it and it got big. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And that was an accident in a weird way. | ||
| No, you're good at it. | ||
| You're good at talking. | ||
| People like hearing you. | ||
| But I love it. | ||
| And I love a large part of being famous. | ||
| You should be on only with Tim Dillon. | ||
| Just you and him together. | ||
| Should we have an OnlyFans page together? | ||
| No, just you guys only on Clubhouse. | ||
| And you have to be in the same room together. | ||
| We've done a bunch of rooms together. | ||
| I'm sure, but only in the same room room. | ||
| Like, where you have to look at him. | ||
| Why do I fly to Austin to try to be serious with Joe? | ||
| Listen, you can be serious for a little bit. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I'm struggling with it. | ||
| And I was wondering whether or not... | ||
| Because, you know, in a weird way, you very clearly scope your life. | ||
| Like, this and not that. | ||
| I'm going to do this publicly, and then I'm going to retreat into my own little world. | ||
| I just have instincts. | ||
| And my instincts are... | ||
| There's a great benefit for me personally to do this podcast and to talk to interesting people and to have these conversations and I've most certainly been educated beyond my wildest dreams in the 11 years that I've done it. | ||
| I've learned so much about just the broadest spectrum of ideas. | ||
| You're going to claim you're not doing it for the world because the world has been changed. | ||
| I'm not doing it for the world. | ||
| I'm not. | ||
| I'm doing it for my personal edification. | ||
| I'm doing it because I enjoy it. | ||
| I'm doing it for the money. | ||
| I'm doing it because I do think that there's a benefit to it. | ||
| I love that you said that, by the way. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| I'm doing it for all those things. | ||
| And the money... | ||
| The reason why I'm doing it for the money is because there's a lot of freedom in money. | ||
| The trappings of money... | ||
| People get crazy. | ||
| They start buying fucking diamond-encrusted watches and shit and bigger houses. | ||
| It's freedom. | ||
| Freedom is the biggest thing. | ||
| And security. | ||
| I would buy bodyguards and assistants and lawyers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's very valuable. | ||
| The freedom aspect of it is very valuable. | ||
| But... | ||
| But when you reach a certain number, then why are you still doing it? | ||
| Well, I'm still doing it because I enjoy it. | ||
| I do enjoy it. | ||
| There's not a day that I do this where I go, fuck, I've got to go to work. | ||
| Not a single day. | ||
| Partially, it's because I pick all the guests. | ||
| There's no one that's a guest that I don't want to be on. | ||
| You have an easy time saying no. | ||
| I just don't answer. | ||
| I know, I know. | ||
| I don't say no, I just don't say yes. | ||
| I just don't, you know, there's a filter system, right? | ||
| So, like, when I send my guy people to go contact that I don't know, and then the people that I do know, I contact. | ||
| So it's like half of them get booked by me on my phone, and half of them I get someone to contact for me. | ||
| And I'm like, hey, I read this guy's book. | ||
| He's really interesting. | ||
| Can you get a hold of him? | ||
| Or, hey, I saw this guy's documentary. | ||
| This is crazy shit. | ||
| This is the best part of the fame thing. | ||
| The best part of the fame thing is getting your call answered. | ||
| I desperately wanted to talk to P.J. O'Rourke. | ||
| I don't know if you've talked to him or read his book. | ||
| No, I have not, but I know he is. | ||
| Unbelievable writer. | ||
| I just think he's one of the greatest writers in the English language, full stop. | ||
| And I told my producer, can you get me PJ at work? | ||
| And he's like, okay, he's booked. | ||
| I'm just like, holy crap. | ||
| Yeah, you got him. | ||
| I got him. | ||
| And it was meaningful to me that... | ||
| I've read so much of his stuff. | ||
| I've gone over and over. | ||
| How did he make that sentence sing like that? | ||
| Just tell me how that sentence happened. | ||
| Probably the third or fourth draft. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I think actually what it was in part was that he imitated so many people's styles initially that he became very adept at... | ||
| Like, pulling from the great grab bag of tricks that everyone had used. | ||
| And then he built his own voice. | ||
| Yeah, that's the benefit to reading as well as writing, right? | ||
| Like, all the great writers read a lot. | ||
| Are you a great reader? | ||
| I do more books on tape than I do reading, but I've been reading more lately. | ||
| And when you write comedy, is writing comedy a great exercise for you? | ||
| Does it feel good relative to doing comedy? | ||
| Writing is very important. | ||
| There's a lot of bits that I come up with that I would not have come up with if I didn't just sit alone with a computer. | ||
| It's very important for me. | ||
| Some of my best bits that I've ever done, closing bits, signature bits, have come from writing. | ||
| And how much do substances break into new space? | ||
| The space was always there to be broken into, but it wouldn't be so easy to find it. | ||
| I think there's multiple variables that are at play. | ||
| And I think performing is a big one. | ||
| And lately, I haven't been doing that much of that because of the pandemic and trying to be responsible and not do that many shows, you know, and certainly not do shows without people being COVID tested, right? | ||
| And I'm hoping that as we come out of this, and it seems like we're coming out of this, it'll be easier. | ||
| And I'm also buying a club in town. | ||
| So once that happens, I'll be doing the same thing there with COVID testing everybody and trying to get the ball. | ||
| So there's that, right? | ||
| But then there's also you have to think a lot. | ||
| You can't just perform. | ||
| Because if you do, like one of the things that comics fell trapped to in the early days, not the early, you know, last 10, 20 years, was they would do a lot of jokes about being a comic on the road. | ||
| Hotel rooms... | ||
| Airplane travel, that kind of shit. | ||
| It's the problem of right what you know. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| That's a problem. | ||
| And I think you have to experience life and you have to think. | ||
| And you have to experience different mindsets. | ||
| You have to experience different subject matters that you're contemplating and puzzling, you're puzzled about. | ||
| You have to perform a lot. | ||
| You have to write. | ||
| I think you have to write too. | ||
| I don't think you can just perform a lot. | ||
| Some people can. | ||
| Some people just write in their head and they go on stage and they continue to craft these ideas and some of the best comics alive. | ||
| But I think they would have more to choose from if they just sat in front of the computer and forced themselves to write. | ||
| And some guys will say... | ||
| I don't like it because then my material seems like I wrote it. | ||
| It comes out like a script. | ||
| And I understand that. | ||
| But I think the workaround for that is what I've done. | ||
| And I've talked to a few other comics that do the same thing. | ||
| Felicia Michaels, she said she does it this way too. | ||
| I write essays. | ||
| I just write on a subject. | ||
| If I'm going to write on getting drunk, the perils of getting drunk, the pros and the cons and what feels good and what feels bad and what's good about it, what's bad about it, what do I hate about it, what do I love about it. | ||
| And then out of this, I might write 3,000, 4,000 words. | ||
| But out of it, I might have one paragraph that comes across, that becomes... | ||
| That's it. | ||
| So the idea is that the essay is weirdly the throwaway because the product... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So this is fascinating to me because my guess is that somebody else would publish the essay and we'd be saying, wow... | ||
| I read this thing Joe wrote in The Atlantic. | ||
| It wouldn't be terribly funny. | ||
| I would change it. | ||
| If I was going to do that, I would write it as an essay. | ||
| But the essay is essentially for a one-person audience. | ||
| That person's me. | ||
| And then I smoke a joint, and then I go over it, and then I go, oh, that's it, right there. | ||
| So one of the things that I learned from sort of studying, when you do a bit and I see it multiple times, I learn about when you find the rhetorical formulation, That allows you to get closer to the truth without paying the outsized price. | ||
| Somehow that unleashes comedy magic. | ||
| I remember you had something about getting high and having kids. | ||
| And it was a very difficult issue because obviously people do get high and they do have kids. | ||
| And then we have this idea, you know, it's like being sexy leads to kids, but sex and kids have to be kept apart. | ||
| All of these are weird ways in which normal adult behavior and children are incompatible. | ||
| And so there was like a William Tell Act, in some sense, that had to be How am I going to talk about two things that are not supposed to coalesce, but obviously they coalesce in people? | ||
| How do I find the skill? | ||
| And that's sort of what I wonder about when you hone a bit, is that you can get closer and closer to the truth because you find the formulation that actually works without blowing up in your face. | ||
| It's like, I can throw this grenade and wait to the point where it's maximally effective without losing a hand. | ||
| Well, the beautiful thing is sometimes you lose hands. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's not... | |
| That's the beautiful thing. | ||
| You try it out and you lose a hand. | ||
| And then you go, well, that fucking sucks. | ||
| And you come back tomorrow with a new approach. | ||
| Okay, well then it wasn't really losing a hand because it was in a comp. | ||
| Then if you're Michael Richards and somebody's got a phone up, then you're not losing a hand, you're losing a career. | ||
| Yeah, that's a different situation. | ||
| He's on coke, you know? | ||
| But the difference is, also, he wasn't really a comic. | ||
| Like, that was a disaster. | ||
| That was just... | ||
| The difference is, you have an idea, and you're not exactly sure how this idea is going to best be expressed to a group of strangers. | ||
| Well, this is what I love about the idea of the store and the experimental thing. | ||
| And when you and I got together and had the conversation about David Burns, how did CBGBs work for punk, and you said... | ||
| This is the same thing as the store for comedy. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| We were in the back bar, the secret bar that non-comedians are not supposed to even go into unless you know somebody. | ||
| What bar? | ||
| But that weird thing about, like, I keep thinking about it. | ||
| Why don't we have a secret bar for math and physics? | ||
| You're remembering it incorrectly, though. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Can I just tell you that? | ||
| You were the one who equated it to CBGBs. | ||
| Because I don't really know that much about CBGBs. | ||
| You said this is essentially what CBGBs is. | ||
| It wasn't me. | ||
| I came up, yes. | ||
| But then you said, this is exactly right. | ||
| And so I was trying to be... | ||
| Well, when you were there, I mean, like, fucking Bill Burr was walking in, Chappelle was out there. | ||
| It was like... | ||
| That's how it is there. | ||
| That's, well, how it was there. | ||
| Now it's a fucking ghost house. | ||
| Now it's boarded up. | ||
| Well, but you're going to do something here, right? | ||
| Are you going to turn to Austin? | ||
| I mean, because you're basically hoovering up everybody I like and moving them to Austin. | ||
| I've hoovered up a lot of good people. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| I even got Brian Holtzman to move out here. | ||
| The idea is to throw up the bat signal and to let all of them know that they can be free here. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That this is a place where I'm... | ||
| As opposed to every other person who opens up a comedy club. | ||
| Every other person who opens up a comedy club opens up a comedy club to make money. | ||
| They say, I'm going to have these comedians, you know, I'm going to make X percentage of the door, and they're going to make this, and I'm going to make a good living. | ||
| I'm not saying that at all. | ||
| My idea is to break even. | ||
| If I can break even, I'm happy. | ||
| I just want to make it the most comfortable place for comedians. | ||
| And I want to support the art form. | ||
| You said the store ultimately is a venue for people doing creative shit. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And you said don't fetishize the fact that it's a particular kind of magic. | ||
| There may be magic, but... | ||
| Ultimately, it's a facilitator of magic. | ||
| The magic was Mitzi Shore. | ||
| Mitzi Shore let us be who we were. | ||
| She would cackle, you know, call it the island of misfit toys, and she would go, ah, the inmates are running the asylum. | ||
| That was her thing. | ||
| She loved it. | ||
| She loved the fact that she let these crazy people just go nuts on her stage. | ||
| Then why did she let you leave for seven years? | ||
| She wasn't in good health. | ||
| She didn't. | ||
| She got weak. | ||
| She gave me a spot that night. | ||
| I know. | ||
| The night that I got banned, she gave me a spot. | ||
| I called her. | ||
| I told her what was going on with the video. | ||
| And she goes, well, I'll just keep away from them. | ||
| And she said to me, what time do you want to go up? | ||
| I go, what time do you want me to go up? | ||
| She goes, how about 1030? | ||
| And I go, okay. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| She loved me back. | ||
| It's the last time I talked to her. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Can I bring somebody up on the show because it's hugely at scale named Isadora Singer? | ||
| Jamie, can you show somebody named Isadora Singer, I-S-A-D-O-R-E-S-I-N-G-E-R, who's my version in some sense of this guy who saved my ass? | ||
| Who the fuck's up, dude? | ||
| This guy is one of the greatest human beings, and the privilege of coming to this show, he is one half of the Attia-Singer Index Theorem, a courageous guy, brilliant beyond words, who changed the entire face of mathematical physics. | ||
| And a human being who I had a falling out with over the National Academy of Sciences a I hate mushrooms more than anything in this world. | ||
| I ate a plate of steamed, sautéed mushrooms. | ||
| Why do you hate mushrooms? | ||
| I can't stand my gag. | ||
| And his wife, Rosemary, is a wonderful gourmet chef, and she made a plate of it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| You ever had morels? | ||
| Dude, I can barely get down Four Sigmatic. | ||
| Do you know what morels look like? | ||
| No, tell me. | ||
| Morels are like, they're almost like meat. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| They're like... | ||
| I've tried that with shiitake. | ||
| People say these things, but... | ||
| Shiitake's good too. | ||
| I ate a huge plate for this guy. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Without showing any discomfort. | ||
| When I got to the bottom, I thought I was going to throw up at this table. | ||
| Why mushrooms? | ||
| I can't stand mushrooms. | ||
| Fucking mushrooms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck them. | |
| I hate them. | ||
| I hate them. | ||
| What do you love? | ||
| Everything. | ||
| Come on, what do you love? | ||
| Salmon? | ||
| I love Parmesan cheese. | ||
| I love salmon. | ||
| I love noodle kugel. | ||
| I love... | ||
| Grits? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I love pozole. | ||
| You're cool with grits? | ||
| You're not cool with mushrooms? | ||
| Fuck mushrooms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Okay. | ||
| But the thing is, I just lost this guy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Very aggressive. | |
| I'm not going to see him again. | ||
| Two years ago, I went to Massachusetts to try to see him. | ||
| And... | ||
| You know this idea that Mitzi stood up for you and she was just in bad health and all this? | ||
| Well this guy stood up for me and saved my ass and I never got a chance. | ||
| To resolve my, you know, like you say, I didn't see this person again. | ||
| I didn't see this guy again. | ||
| And I have so much love for him. | ||
| I don't understand what happened. | ||
| You're not explaining this very well. | ||
| He was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, like the very top. | ||
| He was a head of the committee called COSIPUP, which is the Holy of Holies. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And I discovered that the National Academy of Sciences had faked a shortage of scientists and engineers They did a secret study where they looked at supply and demand and decided that the price of American scientists and engineers was going to hit six figures. | ||
| And they subtracted the demand curves and they said let's fake a demographic supply crisis where we wouldn't have enough scientists. | ||
| They got us to pass the 1990 Immigration Act, which came with H-1B. And I told Iz this. | ||
| And it put him in a position where the thing that he loved, which was the system, because he was the guy who made the system work, He was like Harriet Tubman. | ||
| He would do things. | ||
| He saved me. | ||
| He saved me. | ||
| He loved the system. | ||
| And then I had to show him that the system had gotten so corrupted that we were going to give it all away to China. | ||
| We were going to allow the Chinese to populate our labs and put a proctoscope in the entire university system, which is where we do our research, so they would get the benefits of totalitarianism and the benefits of our freedom. | ||
| They'd learn all the stuff we were doing with our freedom, and then they'd go implement and execute with totalitarianism. | ||
| And Iz was so angry at me that I had found the study in 1986 done with the National Science Foundation and the National Academy to fake a fake shortage of scientists and engineers to pass the 1990 Immigration Act that led to H-1B. That he and I got to a point where we couldn't talk to each other. | ||
| What was his rationale for faking it? | ||
| He didn't want to fake it. | ||
| He understood what I said, but the point was that he had attached himself to the system. | ||
| He was what made the system great. | ||
| The system used to be much better. | ||
| Did he recognize your dilemma? | ||
| Is love me. | ||
| Is fucking love me. | ||
| Right, but did he recognize your dilemma? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| We got to a point where the world divided us. | ||
| I was his postdoc. | ||
| I was his postdoc. | ||
| And we weren't just post-doc. | ||
| It wasn't just a formal relationship. | ||
| I'd go up to his office and we'd talk about jazz and love and children and heartbreak and all sorts of stuff. | ||
| And he believed in this that I showed you, okay? | ||
| He had so much confidence that when I came to Cambridge, shit out of luck, when Harvard was trying to asphyxiate me, he stood up for me and gathered the entire creme de la creme of the MIT math physics world To hear what I had to say because he believed. | ||
| And then he made sure that I got an NSF postdoc and that I got a postdoc at MIT and he repaired my story, right? | ||
| And I love this guy. | ||
| I love this guy so much. | ||
| And he was at my wedding and I never got a chance to say goodbye to him. | ||
| And the New York Times did an obituary And the New York Times hasn't talked to me for like eight years almost, something like that. | ||
| And I looked at the obituary to hear about his singer and like I'm the major quote because they were still talking to me and they do the obituary so many years in front. | ||
| I've met a tiny number of people who will be remembered a thousand years from now. | ||
| This is one of like three people I can say for sure, if people are still talking a thousand years from now, they're going to remember him because he did this wonderful thing, the Atiyah Singer Index Theorem. | ||
| It's just so foundational. | ||
| You can't even imagine how beautiful this thing is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And, you know, it was shocking. | |
| It was shocking to remember that I had been enough part of the system that I could be respectable, that I could be trusted to say something about this great man who just passed at, like, I don't know, 96. And I never got a chance to, like, say goodbye or repair the relationship. | ||
| And, you know, I was in touch with his daughter who writes for the New York Times. | ||
| Iz had a cabinet. | ||
| And if you said something really brilliant, like really fucking brilliant, he'd often go to the cabinet and say, you know, it's funny. | ||
| I haven't thought about that for N years. | ||
| And he'd pull out a piece of paper, and there was your brilliant idea, which he didn't even think to publish, because it wasn't ready yet. | ||
| And on the one hand, you were just devastated, like, holy shit, you had that thought? | ||
| And on the other hand, you were like, I had a thought that is singer-hit, you know? | ||
| It's like, there's this level, like if Carlin might maybe, you know, for some comics, or Lenny Bruce, or Richard Pryor, or Dave Chappelle, or somebody like that. | ||
| There are these relationships where people are just at such an incredible level that you can't even believe that some human being has ascended. | ||
| And the period of time that I spent with him taught me more about what the human mind is capable of than just about anything. | ||
| He's the smartest, most brilliant man I've ever had the pleasure to know really, really well. | ||
| I still don't understand the falling out. | ||
| He didn't want to give up on the idea that the National Academy was good. | ||
| It was locked in. | ||
| Well, sometimes things can be good and flawed, right? | ||
| But for him to actually take what I was saying, that the National Academy was acting against the American interest by narrowly saying we need to make American scientists and engineers cheaper, that we need to flood the market, we need to interfere in the wage mechanism, we need to allow China first look at everything we do, The concept that the problem was the National Academy when he was the National Academy. | ||
| I still don't understand. | ||
| What was the motivation of the National Academy to do that? | ||
| In the Reagan administration, for the first time, they appointed somebody to come in from industry rather than academics to head the National Science Foundation, a guy named Eric Block. | ||
| And I think he came from IBM? Not sure. | ||
| Eric Bloch took a sort of green eyeshade view of the world, like, holy shit, we're going to have to overpay for American scientists and engineers. | ||
| How do we avoid having to pay six figures for new PhDs? | ||
| How do we avoid letting the genius of the market solve the problem of supply and demand? | ||
| Because there's no such thing as a labor shortage in a market economy long term, right? | ||
| The wage mechanism will rise and you'll get as many people as you want. | ||
| And when Eric Bloch did this, he went through a guy named Peter House, and they picked an economist named Miles Boylan, whose name I've never said, who in 1986 wrote a study that said, here's how expensive it's going to be to pay for scientists and engineers who are American in the future. | ||
| And I had deduced from first principles that they had done a competent economic study and that they had faked economics. | ||
| An incompetent demographic study by subtracting a demand curve. | ||
| So they hid the competence and pretended that they were incompetent to pass the Immigration Act of 1990, which brought us the H-1B, which brought us huge numbers of Chinese graduate students who currently staff our labs and who we're addicted to. | ||
| And this gives China the benefit, a first look at the benefits of freedom and the benefits of the ability to execute with an iron fist. | ||
| The idea that I was telling Isidore, you don't understand. | ||
| Your organization is doing the wrong thing. | ||
| You have to stand up against your own organization. | ||
| What was his response? | ||
| How dare you? | ||
| But did you show him the data? | ||
| He was on a trip to Washington DC and he said, prepare a report for me on what you're saying. | ||
| And I sent him the secret study that I had uncovered. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And he said, how dare you? | ||
| It was too cognitively dissonant. | ||
| You're picking on the one thing that I don't want to talk about because- Did he say that? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| He said you're picking on the one thing I don't want to talk about? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| You, Joe. | ||
| You're picking on his low... | ||
| I love this guy. | ||
| He made a bad call. | ||
| The great Isidore Singer made one bad call. | ||
| Did you have a conversation with him about this? | ||
| I tried. | ||
| He wouldn't talk to you. | ||
| So this guy who you loved and he loved you and you had long conversations with him? | ||
| I'm sure he loved me. | ||
| He just stopped communicating with you. | ||
| We couldn't get past the idea that something called Kosapup... | ||
| The Committee on Public Policy had gone in a direction that was long-term deleterious to the United States. | ||
| He was a patriot. | ||
| He had stood up for Star Wars under Reagan at great cost to himself. | ||
| He was a guy who loved his country. | ||
| He loved science, the National Academy. | ||
| He had courage like you wouldn't believe. | ||
| So essentially, he had a blind spot. | ||
| He had a blind spot. | ||
| And that blind spot didn't allow him to even entertain. | ||
| He didn't understand that it was changing. | ||
| Everything was changing. | ||
| And the thing that he loved, which was the system, which had been, you know, the thing that put us on the moon, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| The thing that won World War II. Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Was stabbing America in the back. | ||
| The National Academy of Sciences, something called the Government University Industry Research Roundtable, and something called the Policy Research and Analysis Division of NSF, the two main science groups, National Academy and National Science Foundation, teamed up against American science for the benefit of employers to make sure that they would never have to pay market prices. | ||
| And fuck these people. | ||
| They gave away our advantage, our geopolitical strategic advantage, And they spun an entire story about we need the best and the brightest, but it was all about money. | ||
| And this guy, Miles Boylan, who's an economist, who's I believe sort of semi-retired from NSF, is the name I've held back. | ||
| Like I'm saying names that I don't normally say in public. | ||
| I lost somebody I cared so much about over this issue. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Because I told is the National Academy of Sciences has gone bad. | ||
| They've had me there four times to tell them that I've caught them. | ||
| There's no record. | ||
| At some point they had a reporter from Science Magazine and I spoke and there's no record that I said anything. | ||
| I got a standing ovation at a conference for talking about the fact that I had caught them in this In this conspiracy against American scientists. | ||
| And I learned about what happens when, like, you're going and you say, can you please report this? | ||
| It's like suddenly your voice vanishes. | ||
| And I said, you know, Iz, they've had me there four times. | ||
| They've asked me four times to tell them how I've caught them. | ||
| And it was too much for him. | ||
| He couldn't come to grips. | ||
| And like, I don't want to be talking about that. | ||
| I want to be talking about the Atiyah Singer Index theorem or Ray Singer torsion or any of the beautiful things, the BPST instanton, all the wonder that Is Singer brought into the world. | ||
| I want to talk about him saving my career if I'd wanted one. | ||
| This was the thing that didn't go that way. | ||
| It was me saying, you know the thing that you loved? | ||
| It's gone bad. | ||
| It's gone bad because of economics. | ||
| Because of economics. | ||
| Because this thing I talk about, embedded growth obligations. | ||
| When the growth ran out, people became sociopathic. | ||
| I looked what you did with the store, where the guy who was the booker It was the bad actor, right? | ||
| And then you said, well, that's the thing about the story. | ||
| Nothing ever made sense about the story. | ||
| That was what was great about the story. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| You want to know what I love? | ||
| I love this country and I love our science establishment. | ||
| I love our universities. | ||
| And there's nowhere to stand because they've been acting bad for so long. | ||
| They've been so corrupt in terms of shepherding the research enterprise. | ||
| And I caught them. | ||
| And they knew that I caught them. | ||
| And they invited me back to tell them over and over again how I caught them. | ||
| What was their response to you explaining how you caught them? | ||
| They hired a guy, well, they invited a guy named Sherwin Rosen who said, scientists are like cattle. | ||
| You breed them, you birth them, you feed them, you slaughter them, you repeat the cycle. | ||
| Who really said that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Economist from University of Chicago. | ||
| And I was supposed to respond to this. | ||
| Because scientists are not economically minded so you can take advantage of them because they're thinking about data. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Because we're all vulnerable. | ||
| Because we all believe in the best and the brightest and we're heads down in our work. | ||
| Wait, wait a second. | ||
| I got up and I said, Sherwin, very interesting that you think scientists are like cattle. | ||
| Let me tell you a different story about economists And then I went through what I'd unearthed, okay? | ||
| And I brought a room that was in an academic conference to a standing ovation. | ||
| That never happens for an academic conference. | ||
| Because people wanted to hear the truth. | ||
| And Sherwin Rosen You know, went off to the airport and said that was the most impudent young man I've ever talked to. | ||
| And then I got invited to the COSAPUP committee. | ||
| And the COSAPUP committee said, you know, Eric, the problem with your model is scientists are not in any way motivated by money. | ||
| They only care about the truth, and that's why all of your models don't work. | ||
| And I said, great news, because I have a friend who's got a wife who's eight months pregnant being paid $14,000 a year. | ||
| So I'm going to open my briefcase, and we're going to use the tool called Revealed Preference, and we're going to go around, given that you're all doing very, very well in your lives, and we're going to open up the briefcase, and we're going to allow you to put in an IOU for how much money you don't care about to help the struggling young topologist and his wife. | ||
| And I looked at each member of the COSPOP committee, and I got to one of them. | ||
| He said, okay, Eric, you've made your point. | ||
| And one of them said, well, who did this dastardly thing? | ||
| And I said, the Government University Industry Research Roundtable. | ||
| And all eyes turned to this woman. | ||
| I think her name was Mary Ellen Fox. | ||
| She said, well, Mary Ellen's the head of that. | ||
| So then Mary Ellen invited me. | ||
| So then I gave this talk again and again and again and again, right? | ||
| And they wanted to know, how much do you know? | ||
| How much do you know? | ||
| And then there's no record that any of this happened. | ||
| And one of the reasons I don't talk about this is not that I don't have the goods. | ||
| It's that I don't want to ruin the beauty of who we are and what we do. | ||
| I keep waiting for these people to retire and stop ruining our universities and stop ruining the next generation of kids and stop charging people so much that they have to effectively go into gray area prostitution in order to pay off their student loans. | ||
| I keep saying, when are we going to get rid of this class of people that ran everything into the ground? | ||
| I've now given up. | ||
| And that was one of the things that I did by reviewing what you did with joke thievery, as I realized that you said, joke thievery isn't actually funny. | ||
| There are things that aren't funny. | ||
| And these things that I'm talking about, about burying careers, about destroying people, about interfering with the wage mechanism, about giving away our advantage to our geopolitical rivals, are not funny. | ||
| And they're not cute. | ||
| And I've realized that this is the thing that I'm unwilling to talk about. | ||
| I don't want to get into the ugliness of going up against the National Academy of Sciences and saying, what the hell is wrong with you people? | ||
| But now I've decided I'm going whole hog and I'm going to be who I am. | ||
| One of the things that I'm worried with when it comes to woke culture is not that people think the way they think, because I think a lot of young people think that way. | ||
| A lot of young people have socialist, Marxist ideas, because it seems like it's a good thing to think of, you know? | ||
| And then, you know, woke ideology, at least... | ||
| On the surface, it seems to be spreading what you would call social justice, which seems to be a positive thing, right? | ||
| On the surface. | ||
| What my concern really is, and I think what's highlighted what you were just expressing about these Chinese scientists... | ||
| My real concern is, and I think this is probably actually happening right now, is the way that people are expressing things online is not entirely organic. | ||
| I think it's partially organic. | ||
| But I think it's influenced by foreign entities. | ||
| I think it's influenced pretty considerably. | ||
| I think there's a lot of elevating and escalating a lot of the rhetoric. | ||
| Incentivizing. | ||
| They're hacking our openness as a system. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I agree with this. | ||
| Accelerating the rhetoric and pushing the narrative. | ||
| The thing about this woke ideology that we were talking about before with this forced compliance is that people feel compelled to agree with everything. | ||
| They feel compelled to go along with whatever the ideology is proposing. | ||
| I think a bad actor can insert almost like bad code into an operating system. | ||
| Like a virus into an operating system and accentuate or advance things past the point that just a few years ago would be considered preposterous. | ||
| And I think that this woke ideology, the way it permeates through academia and the way it doesn't allow for reasonable debate, it doesn't allow for uncomfortable ideas, and it enforces things like safe spaces and And trigger warnings and all this shit that's just not supposed to have anything to do with learning and growing and exploring ideas. | ||
| That we are empowering what are essentially our economic enemies and our political enemies. | ||
| We're empowering other countries. | ||
| I think these things are all connected. | ||
| And I think the economic motivation that allowed those people to essentially... | ||
| You know, they essentially cut the Achilles heel of science by making it so that these scientists could only earn a certain amount of money and disincentivizing people who are economically... | ||
| I want to make scientists reasonably middle class or better. | ||
| I want men and women who are raising families... | ||
| I want them not to have to worry about money so they can pursue science. | ||
| Yes, I want gay couples to be able to raise kids, but I want them in the same state. | ||
| I know people who are two states away who think that they have jobs close to each other. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| What do you mean? | ||
| Like somebody will have a job in Arizona and somebody will have a job in Wyoming. | ||
| They think they have jobs. | ||
| What do you mean by that? | ||
| Jobs are so scarce that married couples will live in different states. | ||
| Oh, scientists. | ||
| Scientists. | ||
| Okay, I see what you're saying. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I interviewed investigators for the American Society of Cell Biology, and principal investigators who were at the top of the bio pile say, we're supposed to not have children because we have to show that we're serious. | ||
| Oh, Jesus. | ||
| One claim was, we make people wait to get tenure into their late 30s and early 40s because some percentage of females discover that motherhood is as interesting as science. | ||
| I unearthed so much crazy stuff. | ||
| People talking about the joys of slave labor. | ||
| What? | ||
| You would talk to somebody and say, look, you know, you can say what you want about best and the brightest, but really what I enjoy is having a slave labor force. | ||
| Americans don't actually listen to directions. | ||
| Who the fuck said that? | ||
| A particular PI. I don't understand what that means. | ||
| What do they mean by that? | ||
| Somebody is trying to say the system is broken and trying to tell me in an anonymous interview. | ||
| I worked for the American Society of Cell Biology through the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Sloan Foundation. | ||
| And I interviewed, I think it was like 25 leading, called Principal Investigators in Biology. | ||
| And these people told me the most hair-raising things about the nature of biological research. | ||
| Okay? | ||
| And I thought, why are you telling me all these things? | ||
| What does that have to do with slave labor? | ||
| That the PIs, the heads of labs, need an army of people to do exactly what they say in order to be competitive to win grants and get prizes and publish papers. | ||
| And they described it as slave labor? | ||
| Yes, slave labor. | ||
| They're basically talking about undergraduates? | ||
| Nope. | ||
| What are they talking about? | ||
| Graduate students. | ||
| Graduate students? | ||
| Graduate students aren't students. | ||
| They're a labor force. | ||
| They're minimally students. | ||
| Postdocs and graduate students are a labor force. | ||
| So the idea is that they provide a service, but ultimately it will lead to them being PhDs and... | ||
| Yes, but very often what they're really doing, the foreign ones, are very often trying to immigrate. | ||
| And so the idea is that the way into the country is that I'm going to contribute N years of labor at a very high level, at a very low price, pretending that I'm not a worker, that I'm a graduate student, China, for example, will get the ability to look at what we're doing because their people are in our labs. | ||
| The PI gets low-cost labor to carry out the research. | ||
| And the system is based on the idea that pliant labor is in an abundant supply. | ||
| So I forget, like a quarter of PhDs went to China, something like that. | ||
| And we talk about them as students. | ||
| So the whole thing is like people want to unionize. | ||
| How can you have a union of students? | ||
| They're students. | ||
| Well, really, they're a cryptic labor force. | ||
| The work that's getting done is being done by the students who are really not students. | ||
| You're a student probably for the first year or two of graduate school. | ||
| Then you're a worker. | ||
| So the whole thing is completely corrupt. | ||
| It's cryptic. | ||
| There's like a system called fringe rates. | ||
| There's a system called overhead. | ||
| It's funny money through and through. | ||
| And this whole thing is organized so that senior principal investigators, PIs, can run their careers with these labor forces. | ||
| And then they take pictures and they say, look at our lab and how wonderfully international it is. | ||
| But what they're really selling is immigration. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Whoa. | |
| Right? | ||
| So this is why the National Academy and I... This is fucking heavy. | ||
| No kidding. | ||
| But the point is that we just gave away our technical advantage Because we couldn't get the money to pay for our own labor because we actually have the best and brightest people right here in the States. | ||
| So these people learn as graduate students on these projects and then take that information and go back overseas. | ||
| Or they stay here and they have a very strong tie because very often our professors, in order to remain competitive, have to take on this kind of science knows no boundaries. | ||
| Well, if science knows no boundaries, why are our tax dollars supporting it? | ||
| So this is how you get to a situation like where the World Health Organization refuses to say the name Taiwan. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because they're so economically... | ||
| And our people are not... | ||
| I have this quote, which is very difficult for people, but it says, the idealism of every age is the cover story of its greatest thefts. | ||
| And one of the greatest threats is science is international. | ||
| Science is international. | ||
| A result that's true about a virus is true in one place and true in another, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Same thing about a theorem. | ||
| But we maintain a national science program in part to give us advantage. | ||
| Economic advantage, military advantage. | ||
| We've got all the smartest people on retainer. | ||
| And they're squandering that. | ||
| And what we've done... | ||
| You see, I want China to say, shit, we're cut off from the benefits of freedom. | ||
| We're going to have to free up our own people. | ||
| If we want top-tier science, we can't do this totalitarian stuff anymore. | ||
| The same way they've sort of opened up their economy to a version of capitalism. | ||
| A version. | ||
| To encourage competition. | ||
| And I want to say, look, I don't want to fear you. | ||
| I want you to be more open to your people with their middle fingers up telling you to go fuck yourselves. | ||
| And in order to get that freedom, remember Tiananmen Square and the Statue of Liberty and all that kind of stuff? | ||
| In order to get that, we can't give them the benefits of both systems. | ||
| What we've done is we've given them the benefits of freedom by taking all the stuff that they can see that we're doing, and then they have all the benefits of command and control. | ||
| So they execute like crazy and they listen through their people here. | ||
| And then they build, you know, programs where people go back and forth. | ||
| And so what we're doing is we have a group of people who are so idealistic. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I can't see these boundaries. | |
| I can't believe you're bringing up the specter of nationalism. | ||
| Okay, well, this is the idealism is the cover story of a theft. | ||
| The theft is Is that we have the greatest educational system. | ||
| We train the best people. | ||
| We have high schools in New York that have won more Nobel Prizes in science than all of China. | ||
| And we are destroying ourselves lying that Americans can't do science. | ||
| I see your complaint, but what can be done about it? | ||
| Well, one thing is, is that if I have a friend who has a ridiculously large podcast, I can go on about once a year, and I can say crazy shit, and then maybe, maybe, somebody will write about this. | ||
| Good luck finding that. | ||
| I know. | ||
| Joe? | ||
| That's a pie in the sky right there. | ||
| I don't know what to do about it, but what I've been trying to do is... | ||
| You made a very good point. | ||
| It's really interesting because I didn't know it worked that way. | ||
| And the way you describe graduate students is essentially almost like indentured servants. | ||
| Well, this is the thing about, this is why Iz and I lost our friendship, is that I tried to say, let's think about what's really going on. | ||
| And he looked at it and he's just like, I can't go there. | ||
| In fact, he said to me at some point, it's like, I'm not saying you're wrong. | ||
| I'm just saying, I can't. | ||
| Because he's too embedded into the system. | ||
| Because he, look, this is a guy who made the system run. | ||
| If you're proud of our universities, if you're proud of our government, if you're proud of journalism in a previous era, this was the kind of a guy who would break the sons of bitches who would do bad things. | ||
| He cleared stuff out of people's way. | ||
| He knew who was naughty and who was nice, and he made sure that his people survived. | ||
| There's another thing, though. | ||
| It's like rebellion is a young man's endeavor. | ||
| At a certain point in time, a man gets settled into his life and his position and who he is, and, you know, it's hard to... | ||
| I'm not bitching about him. | ||
| I understand exactly why he did what he did. | ||
| I know you're not. | ||
| But it, you know... | ||
| I think what you said is very important. | ||
| There's a lot of shit you said that I don't understand at all. | ||
| I just let you talk. | ||
| I don't know why you got hair ties on your fucking thing here. | ||
| Because those are one degree of freedom as you push them up and down. | ||
| Remember three degrees of freedom? | ||
| I opened up a can of worms. | ||
| You should check out pullthatupjamie.com You should stay off Clubhouse. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| I have been largely staying off Clubhouse. | ||
| So do I have a regular gig here Monday, Wednesday, and Friday? | ||
| When are you coming back? | ||
| Anytime, brother. | ||
| You've got to get out of LA, though, before it implodes. | ||
| They're falling apart. | ||
| They killed their gang unit today. | ||
| You know that? | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm waiting to get the Lex Fridman invitation. | ||
| He's already moved here. | ||
| He moved here today. | ||
| No, I know, because you invited him. | ||
| You haven't told me to move here. | ||
| You want to move here? | ||
| No. | ||
| You should move here. | ||
| Should I? Everybody should move here. | ||
| It's awesome. | ||
| But then nobody should move here, because there's too many people already. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Traffic is already so hard. | ||
| Dude, sometimes it takes five extra minutes to get where you have to go. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Oh my god, that's terrible, Joe. | ||
| Traffic here is so cute. | ||
| They're like, the traffic is crazy. | ||
| You need to go to Orange County at three o'clock in the afternoon. | ||
| Just take that fucking suicide drive. | ||
| So who have you got to move here? | ||
| You got Suzanne to move here. | ||
| You got Lex to move here. | ||
| Did you do Elon? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| No, Elon was fed up. | ||
| No. | ||
| No, Elon and I didn't even talk about it. | ||
| We both kind of came to the same conclusion organically. | ||
| I think Holtzman probably moved here because of me. | ||
| Is Tim Dillon? | ||
| Tim Dillon moved here because of me for sure. | ||
| He thought about suing me because when he moved here, the ice storm hit. | ||
| Tom Segura definitely moved here because of me. | ||
| There's more. | ||
| They're coming. | ||
| There's waves. | ||
| Once the club opens, then the full wave. | ||
| Then I'm going to do scholarships. | ||
| I'm going to do whatever the fuck I can to get people here. | ||
| I have a plan. | ||
| It's a weird plan, but it throbs in my head like a weird sound that only a dog can hear. | ||
| I have an idea. | ||
| What's the plan? | ||
| The plan is to turn this into the hub of stand-up comedy. | ||
| There's a lot of logic behind it. | ||
| One of the big pieces of logic is that there's no reason for us to be in Hollywood. | ||
| The only reason for us to be in Hollywood is we were always chasing sitcoms before. | ||
| But now if a comic gets a sitcom, it costs you money. | ||
| It's a loser. | ||
| It's a loser in comparison to a podcast. | ||
| And you've got a bunch of suits around you telling you what to do. | ||
| Hey, hey, easy on the suits, brother. | ||
| I have a couple of those. | ||
| But it's like... | ||
| I've done it. | ||
| So it's, you know, I can be at this moment in my life, this stage of my life, I can be a reasonable spokesperson in that I really am just doing this for the art form. | ||
| And then I really do love the art form still. | ||
| And I think that we, for somehow, because of economics, we've been embedded in Hollywood in terms of like acting, like actors and, you know, and television shows. | ||
| But we are as far from actors as a creative endeavor can be. | ||
| Comics are as real as you can get. | ||
| There's no acting. | ||
| We are the writers, we produce it. | ||
| Science, music, and comedy. | ||
| Those are the great signs of intelligence. | ||
| Well, it's an underappreciated art form. | ||
| Because you guys are all broken. | ||
| It's a little bit of that, but it's also because it seems normal. | ||
| It seems like you're just talking. | ||
| It's like if I see Gary Clark playing guitar, I go, oh, I definitely can't do that. | ||
| But if I see someone talking, I go, well, I can talk. | ||
| He's just talking. | ||
| He makes some good points, but I can make some good points. | ||
| The instrument is the instrument that everyone uses all day long, every day. | ||
| So it gives off the illusion that the art form of communication, of comedy, it gives off this illusion that it's not that big of a deal. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But to people that do it, the guys like the Tim Dillons, Giannis Pappas, he's another guy I got to move here. | ||
| He comes here next week. | ||
| There's more coming. | ||
| But the guys who are really doing it, they understand. | ||
| And they understand that I am really in it for the art form. | ||
| Genuinely. | ||
| This is going to be Mecca. | ||
| I want it to be. | ||
| I think it can be. | ||
| And I think it can be for the good of the art form. | ||
| Because I think if I can provide a base, like a real home base, where they know... | ||
| Every comedy club that we've ever had, even though they've been great... | ||
| They've been run with an economic motivation. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is not going to be run with that. | ||
| You can afford not to do it. | ||
| Yeah, I just want to break even. | ||
| That would be my goal. | ||
| But if it doesn't break even, I'm okay with that, too. | ||
| I just want it to be right. | ||
| I want to set it up right. | ||
| And once I set it up right, I want everybody to grow. | ||
| And it's like a gym. | ||
| If you have a bunch of killers in the gym, you get better. | ||
| You get better by... | ||
| Does the music scene here... | ||
| It enhances it, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| People are in that, they've got that muscle pretty strong. | ||
| Well, it's tight here. | ||
| It's real good. | ||
| It's a real good scene. | ||
| And, you know, Gary also helped me move here, too, because when Gary Clark Jr. Is Gary here? | ||
| Yeah, he moves here. | ||
| He lives here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shit. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| He was here before me, though. | ||
| He was living in LA, and he and I were talking, and he moved back. | ||
| And I go, why'd you move back? | ||
| He's like, man, I just was not fucking feeling Hollywood, man. | ||
| He's like, it's just not me. | ||
| I'm from Texas. | ||
| He goes, I'm a simple dude. | ||
| I like brisket and Cadillacs and guitars. | ||
| I mean, that comes forth in his music, the purity of his music. | ||
| And that made sense to me, and that was before the pandemic. | ||
| That was before it. | ||
| Well, Texas Blues, by the way, is its own sub-thing of the blues. | ||
| I mean, whether it's, I don't know. | ||
| That place Stubbs, where Chappelle and I were playing? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Steve Ray Vaughn used to go there and work for food. | ||
| They used to feed him. | ||
| That's how he would go out there and play and they would feed him in the early days of his career. | ||
| I did not know you were a big SRV guy. | ||
| I'm a huge SRV guy. | ||
| I used to work out to his music all the time. | ||
| Are you an Albert King guy? | ||
| I've heard his music, yeah. | ||
| I think of Stevie Ray Vaughan as really some major insight on top of a few select voices. | ||
| I mean, huge amounts of new stuff, but really... | ||
| The amount drawn from Albert King was pretty amazing. | ||
| Well, you know, blues all comes from a bunch of different sources, but they all feed off of each other, right? | ||
| You go all the way back to Robert Johnson, and it's like... | ||
| That's one of my favorite stories of all time, is that he was so good, everybody thought he sold his soul. | ||
| And if you go listen to it now, you go, no, he's just good. | ||
| Oh, I don't know. | ||
| It's like two records only, right? | ||
| Yeah, I believe so. | ||
| And... | ||
| It's brilliant. | ||
| But the number of songs, the number of standards that he came up with, even minor ones, like Hellhounds on My Trail and Sweet Home Chicago. | ||
| He was clearly, especially for the time, like, what year are we talking about with Robert Johnson? | ||
| 20s, 30s? | ||
| Yeah, so he was clearly on another level. | ||
| But there's always a LeBron James, you know? | ||
| There's always some person that's just like... | ||
| Okay, I think that B.B. King and Albert King, it's sort of hard for us to understand. | ||
| What about Freddie King? | ||
| Freddie King is super important, but I think that the issue of bending notes that B.B. and Albert did, and their particular boxes next to each other on the guitar neck... | ||
| One of them we associate with Albert, which has got meaner and more minor. | ||
| And the BB box, weirdly, is all about this major minor alteration through bending. | ||
| You don't hit a note by playing the note. | ||
| You hit a note underneath and you move up into it. | ||
| And so it's this vocal articulation and particular kinds of vibrato. | ||
| And the weird thing about super technical players, like the most, like a John Petrucci or something, is you say, well, who do you revere? | ||
| And they'll say, B.B. King. | ||
| And you're like, huh? | ||
| He played super slow. | ||
| Well, yeah, but with five or six notes, it'll just break your heart infinitely. | ||
| You won't care. | ||
| You'll just stay there. | ||
| And it's sort of this idea of really deep musicianship that... | ||
| It took me a lot longer to appreciate Albert because Albert was gritty. | ||
| It was much more idiosyncratic. | ||
| He played flying V upside down and backwards, the gauge of the string. | ||
| Everything was like really weird. | ||
| And he knew that he was doing everything quote wrong. | ||
| But I think Stevie Ray Vaughan really just said, okay, this guy has said so much and I'm going to prove it. | ||
| And I'm going to prove it by building my legacy on top. | ||
| Of what this guy contributed. | ||
| I'm going to show you how brilliant this guy was. | ||
| It changed my mind. | ||
| I think that's one of the interesting things about any genre, is that people piggyback on the work of others. | ||
| It's clearly the case with comedy. | ||
| Who would you say are your greatest influences? | ||
| Well, everybody comes from Lenny Bruce. | ||
| Everybody. | ||
| All of us. | ||
| Lenny Bruce kicked open the door. | ||
| He's the Robert Johnson. | ||
| He's the guy who started it all off. | ||
| But it's hard because comedy is not... | ||
| It's hard to listen to Lenny Bruce today. | ||
| You listen to Pryor today. | ||
| I think Pryor took what Lenny Bruce was doing and made it a lot funnier. | ||
| Pryor figured out a way to just be more vulnerable and more self-deprecating and personal. | ||
| He figured out a way to just be more honest. | ||
| Not that Lenny Bruce wasn't honest, but it just wasn't as exposed as Pryor was. | ||
| Pryor still to this day is hilarious. | ||
| He's one of the few guys that it resonates today. | ||
| You go and listen to old Pryor, it's still really funny. | ||
| Whereas Lenny Bruce is like, you've got to kind of put yourself in the times of Lenny Bruce. | ||
| You've got to put yourself in the 50s and 60s and try to imagine what it was like to be in this incredibly suppressed... | ||
| I think so much of what I believe was important about the 50s is that jazz and comedy and a few of these things, like maybe beat poetry, were so dependent on the oppression of the normies... | ||
| Right? | ||
| There were these just islands of magic. | ||
| And they were so oppressed that things that are standard to us today were just revolutionary to them. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, is that I listen for what these guys were doing, and I think about there were these... | ||
| Math and physics seminars in the Soviet Union that we did not understand were entirely dependent upon the fact that everything in the Soviet Union sucked. | ||
| And so that you could go to these places and say, here's an island of transcendence in a sea of shit, right? | ||
| And so in a weird way, I think the U.S. had this, and I don't know if I mentioned this to you before, at some point they held San Francisco Home Movie Night at the Castro Theater and I went. | ||
| And they asked everyone to send their old home movies of San Francisco. | ||
| And people were filing out of Candlestick Park or something in 1962. And I noticed that half the people looked like modern human beings and half of them had that glazed look that you'd have with a formal hat on your head and like a suit jacket that you associate with photographs from like an earlier time. | ||
| And so it was like you were looking at cardboard cutouts and modern human beings simultaneously. | ||
| So a melding of the times. | ||
| Yeah, that there was some transitional thing. | ||
| Like if you ever watch Albert Einstein, everybody's in a suit and tie and he's in a sweatshirt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you're thinking like, wait, you were in a sweatshirt when everyone else was doing something else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There is sort of almost no trace of this. | ||
| And George Thorogood was the guy who said, when I saw the Beatles on Ed Sullivan, He said, it was the first time I saw young people having fun in public on TV. Like, just not performatively. | ||
| They were just having a blast. | ||
| And I didn't realize the extent to which this was the oppression that animated the Lenny Bruce milieu. | ||
| And, you know, if you were going to see Lenny Tristano or, you know, Dizzy Gillespie or Bud Powell, you know, like, if you just think about the beginning of Howl, you know, this thing about I've seen the best minds of my generation, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| People are seeking something authentic and real, and the hippies aren't yet. | ||
| You know, we just lost Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the great last beat poet of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco. | ||
| I don't know how he lasted this long, over 100, I think. | ||
| I think we forget about the beats as important to that time. | ||
| Well, I think people are being suppressed in a different way now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I agree. | |
| They're being suppressed by people that purport to be intellectually open-minded and progressive. | ||
| And it's not necessarily true. | ||
| And there's a suppression on the other side of that. | ||
| And unfortunately, a lot of people are embracing, like, far right-wing ideology to combat that because they feel pushed into a corner. | ||
| And there's a different kind of pressure. | ||
| But it's always pressure to get people to conform. | ||
| Pressure to get people to comply. | ||
| It's always pressure to get people to accept an ideology or a way of life that they don't like. | ||
| A comedian takes the opposite angle. | ||
| The pressure to think for yourself. | ||
| That's what we do. | ||
| That's the job. | ||
| But why is it the thing that you said to me that really still resonates is you said, for a while we couldn't figure out how to tell jokes. | ||
| I really remember this. | ||
| You were saying we would go to college campuses and it wouldn't work. | ||
| And then we gradually realized how you had to tell a joke and then it became the golden age of comedy. | ||
| This is a conversation you and I had. | ||
| I think what's going on right now is a good thing for comedy because comedy has become radioactive and certain words are forbidden but that just makes it so that you have to figure out a more clever way to describe things in a way that resonates with people better in a way where While also being funny, you're figuring out a way to let these people know you're a good person. | ||
| You're a good person, but you're talking shit. | ||
| So what confuses me is, I would imagine that our comedy right now and our music right now would be as good as they've been for a long time. | ||
| And I think our comedy is pretty amazing. | ||
| And I think our music is not hitting the same heights. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| I don't know that. | ||
| If you just look at musical complexity, there's been all these recent studies about what is the... | ||
| Maybe music needs some repression. | ||
| I think repression ultimately, look at what happened in the 60s. | ||
| It was responsible. | ||
| It came out of the repression of the 50s. | ||
| I think that's real. | ||
| I think we need an opponent. | ||
| We need an antagonist and a protagonist. | ||
| We need a yin and a yang. | ||
| What people don't understand about my reaction to WAP is... | ||
| Do you have a reaction to WAP? Oh yeah, for sure. | ||
| Just say wit-ass pussy. | ||
| Can you say that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Say that for me. | |
| Say it for me. | ||
| Wit-ass pussy. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Did you see how he went off mic? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What? | |
| Right on. | ||
| My reaction is the same as my reaction to Lil Nas X. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Giving Satan a lap dance. | ||
| Like, you go, girl. | ||
| That's my reaction. | ||
| Same reaction. | ||
| My reaction is you're screwing up the repression angle. | ||
| If you want to say something like wet-ass pussy, you want to do it in a way that you're frustrating it and making it difficult, so you have to work for it. | ||
| Just saying it. | ||
| Yeah, but you can say it. | ||
| It's just like it's a wave, man. | ||
| It's coming in. | ||
| It's going out. | ||
| It's splashing against the rocks. | ||
| You kids and your waves. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| It's chaos. | ||
| I hate it. | ||
| Mr. Weinstein. | ||
| Get off my lawn. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I got to wrap this up. | ||
| I love you. | ||
| Thank you for being here. | ||
| You have an open invitation. | ||
| You know this? | ||
| You're the best. | ||
| Next time, no hair ties. | ||
| I don't know what the fuck's going on with that. | ||
| Check out. | ||
| Check out Eric on Clubhouse. | ||
| He's there 24-7. | ||
| Stop it. | ||
| And you get a great podcast, too. | ||
| Tell everybody where they can get that. | ||
| They'll figure it out. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| The portal. | ||
| The portal. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
|
unidentified
|
The portal. | |
| You got it on... | ||
| Is it on YouTube? | ||
| It's on YouTube. | ||
| I should be... | ||
| Do you have images? | ||
| I'm going to go back to... | ||
| Do you have video on YouTube? | ||
| I've got talkies. | ||
| No, but I mean, I know mostly you do audio, right? | ||
| I had been avoiding the studio. | ||
| I didn't like the idea of doing... | ||
| I don't like Skype interviews much. | ||
| Right, I don't either. | ||
| So I tried to wait it out in part. | ||
| I'm going to go back to doing real interviews and... | ||
| Just vaccinate people. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Tell them to wear three masks. | ||
| Who gives a fuck? | ||
| Get in studio, you freaks. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I love you, buddy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. |
Export Selection