July 13, 2021 - The Joe Rogan Experience
03:03:04
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Hello Jesse. | ||
| Hey man, how's it going? | ||
| Nice to meet you. | ||
| I've read your tweets multiple times. | ||
| I'm sorry to hear that. | ||
| You're a tweeter, man. | ||
| You're out there. | ||
| You're out there wading through the swamp. | ||
| I want to learn from you how to stay out of that shit. | ||
| It destroys me. | ||
| It's not for everybody to stay off. | ||
| I think for some people it's a very useful tool. | ||
| It's very useful. | ||
| That's how I found about you. | ||
| I found out about you through Twitter. | ||
| It's great for promotion. | ||
| It's great for getting your ideas out there, but... | ||
| It's not great for rational, kind discourse between other, you know, compassionate human beings. | ||
| There's very little of that going on there. | ||
| It's a lot of like, it's like being in a mental health institute. | ||
| Well, I was going to say, I think it, I know people from real life who, I don't know for sure, but I think like being on Twitter is exacerbating their mental illness. | ||
|
unidentified
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100%. | |
| I think that's how bad it is, yeah. | ||
| And during the pandemic, that was highlighted. | ||
| Oh my god. | ||
| You have nothing else to do. | ||
| You're just online in this crazy, it's like a middle school cafeteria, but more sociopathic. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| Yeah, it's just, it's so bad for people. | ||
| And you see them unraveling as the days go on. | ||
| You just want to go like, go run. | ||
| Leave your phone at home and go for a run. | ||
| Here's what I don't get about your ability to stay off is I have, you know, one, a millionth the notoriety of you. | ||
| Some people hate me, but no, you know. | ||
| I have trouble not checking in on what people are saying about me. | ||
| And that's what fucks you up. | ||
| Because then you go down the spiral and you pretend that this angry 15-year-old in Ohio who's talking shit about you, that you can convince him you're a good guy. | ||
| And that's crazy because he's not trying to have a conversation. | ||
| But I find I can't stay away from those fights with the angry 15-year-old in Ohio. | ||
| Or angry 45-year-old in Manhattan. | ||
| Maybe more often than that. | ||
| It's just people, man. | ||
| It's a bad way for humans to communicate. | ||
| And I think one of the things that happens on Twitter that's really kind of strange is that the bullied become the bullies. | ||
| It's like you get a lot of people that had a really rough time in high school and socially, and now they found this circle of people that agree with them, and they're all... | ||
| For lack of a better term, they have mental health problems because there's no doubt they're filled with anxiety and chaos and they're on there all day long and they're just arguing and attacking people. | ||
| There's some people that I follow and I don't follow them. | ||
| What I do is I bookmark their page and I go back to it because I just don't... | ||
| I don't want to get into it, but occasionally I'll go and see, like, okay, let's look at this science project. | ||
| And I'll just see, oh, look at this, we have 10 hours of tweeting today. | ||
| And it's 10 hours of slinging mud and being shitty and calling for people to be deplatformed. | ||
| It's a terrible way to live your life. | ||
| Well, and what's weird is during those 10 hours, all they've received was approval for that behavior. | ||
| So it gives you a completely warped view of... | ||
| Until they don't. | ||
| There's this one lady that I follow. | ||
| She's an academic and she's a fucking loony. | ||
| And they came for her. | ||
| And boy, when they came for her, it was wild watching her scramble and trying to placate. | ||
| Trying to calm them down and seeing that it didn't matter. | ||
| You could look at the bulk of her tweets and what she does as an academic. | ||
| She's not a bad person. | ||
| She's just loony. | ||
| She's just a loony progressive who thinks that the only way to make change in this world is to attack people. | ||
| And to, you know, vehemently dismiss anyone who disagrees with you as either a racist or a Nazi or alt-right or including people that are clearly none of those things. | ||
| What I'm fascinated by is these communities where You constantly have to look over your shoulders because if you say the wrong thing once, you're basically out of the community. | ||
| And this isn't just on the left. | ||
| This actually happened on the right with Trump, where people who didn't support Trump, it was like, bye. | ||
| It doesn't matter. | ||
| You've been a good conservative 20 years. | ||
| So there was a sort of socialist lefty writer in New York who had done a lot of good stuff. | ||
| She wrote a Times piece about how she met Barry Weiss. | ||
| And how they got along. | ||
| And she's like, I thought I would hate Barry Weiss. | ||
| I like Barry Weiss. | ||
| And she was basically ousted just for refusing to say Barry Weiss was like, you know, Hitler's daughter or something. | ||
| It's like the standards. | ||
| How is Barry Weiss? | ||
| I mean, look, Barry Weiss and I have disagreed about things. | ||
| She's a wonderful person. | ||
| She's a sweetheart. | ||
| She's very smart. | ||
| She's interesting. | ||
| She's a great writer. | ||
| There's nothing wrong with her. | ||
| People disagree about shit. | ||
| Like, her and I had a... | ||
| We have pretty significant disagreement about Tulsi Gabbard. | ||
| I love her to death. | ||
| I think she's great. | ||
| I don't understand why people want to make demons out of just humans with normal human flaws. | ||
| Well, the thing to keep in mind, I think a lot of people make the mistake of saying like, oh, it's just Twitter. | ||
| Why do you talk about it so much? | ||
| Why do you care? | ||
| But like every, basically every mainstream journalist and a significant proportion of like big name academics, they're on Twitter every day. | ||
| And they're looking around to see who responds to what. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Any journalist right now who says that Twitter is not setting the terms of the agenda and what we cover and how we cover it, I think is diluted or lying. | ||
| It's disingenuous. | ||
| It's clearly affecting them. | ||
| If they're on Twitter and they're paying attention to their at mentions, it's having an effect. | ||
| It just does. | ||
| The thing about Barry that people have the hardest time with, I guess, is her pro-Israel stance, right? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| It's a combination of things. | ||
| I think it's partly that, but I think... | ||
| People get most mad... | ||
| Like, people got mad at me because I wrote stuff for, like, liberal-ish The Atlantic, New York Magazine that they really disagreed with. | ||
| They're not going to bother with people who write for the National Review because, like, they're conservatives. | ||
| They're a different tribe. | ||
| With Barry, there was this assumption that she's, like, in our house fucking shit up. | ||
| Even though she's not, she's by no means, like, a far-right... | ||
| She's, like, a centrist, heterodox, whatever. | ||
| She's just rational. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, and I have disagreements with her, too, but it's just I've never understood the... | ||
| Of all the people to focus that much anger on, I've never quite gotten it to be honest. | ||
| You were saying, we were talking about this before and we agreed to stop talking about it until we got on the podcast, that there was, I guess there's a clip going around from my podcast from years back where it was Charles Johnson on the podcast where he was saying something about a gene. | ||
| What is the clip? | ||
| Because I haven't seen the clip. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just someone told me about it, but again, I don't pay attention to anything. | ||
| So people were recirculating a clip where Johnson was saying that... | ||
| People are going to take this clip out of context. | ||
| He was saying, I'm not saying, that there's a gene called MAOA associated with aggression and that black people have more of it. | ||
| And I saw this on my Twitter feed and I hit up a friend of mine, a buddy. | ||
| I met him once in real life in Helsinki. | ||
| His name is Amir Sariazlan. | ||
| He's like a genetics researcher. | ||
| Great follower on Twitter. | ||
| He studies genetics. | ||
| I was like, what's this deal? | ||
| They call it the warrior gene. | ||
| The idea is if you have this gene or some variant of it, you're more aggressive. | ||
| And he basically explained there's this interesting recent history of genetics where people thought there was like a gay gene and a liberal gene and a warrior gene. | ||
| These are called candidate gene studies. | ||
| Like what happens if you have this gene versus not have this gene? | ||
| At the time Johnson made this claim, there had been this like Pretty shitty media coverage about the idea of a warrior gene. | ||
| Do you know that guy John Horgan, the science writer? | ||
| No. | ||
| Very smart guy. | ||
| He wrote a book on sort of rational mysticism, like how to understand mystical experiences in scientific light. | ||
| Back in the day, maybe 10 years ago, he did a piece for Scientific American People Should Look Up. | ||
| John Horgan on the warrior gene, basically debunking it. | ||
| But what my boy Amir told me is that it's not just that these studies are bad, the candidate gene studies. | ||
| Genetics research has moved in a whole different direction. | ||
| They do genome-wide association studies. | ||
| They realize, for various reasons, these studies, saying there's a gay gene, a liberal gene, a warrior gene, They didn't replicate. | ||
| And they think genetics is much more complicated. | ||
| So they've moved toward like examining entire regions of our genome and trying to understand it that way. | ||
| So the short version is what Johnson was saying is just sort of wrong and a misunderstanding. | ||
| And this entire area of genetics is like sort of been debunked. | ||
| Like we don't really look for candidate genes anymore. | ||
| We look for whole regions. | ||
| Were people looking for it back when he said it? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| He was responding to sort of like just bad pop science, basically. | ||
| Bad pop science from 2015? | ||
| From, I think, 2011, but yeah. | ||
| Well, when was the podcast I did with him? | ||
| The clip was 2015, yeah. | ||
| He was one of those guys that I didn't know anything about until I had him on. | ||
| And then when I had him on, there was things like that where I was like, wait, what? | ||
| There was a whole group of people. | ||
| And also, I should just say, when I was doing the podcast back then, I didn't sort of understand the impact that it had. | ||
| I thought I was just having conversations with people, because it wasn't nearly as popular back then. | ||
| So if I had a podcast with someone whose opinions that I completely disagreed with, I'd have them on anyway. | ||
| I'd just like, see, let's see where this goes. | ||
| This just made me be interesting. | ||
| Maybe a weird conversation to have a conversation with someone who's got a polar opposite view of life than I do. | ||
| You know, it was a much smaller platform back then. | ||
| And so I didn't think of it as a responsibility or like I didn't think, you know, there's a thought now that you shouldn't put people on. | ||
| You're elevating their platform. | ||
| But I still kind of disagree with that because I think. | ||
| There's a real value in having people on that have different views than you. | ||
| Even if you don't agree with them, there's a value in figuring out where they're wrong. | ||
| There's a value in figuring out if maybe there's a hole in your logic, like whatever it is. | ||
| With him, there was a lot of those guys. | ||
| I don't even know if that was like, was that pre-Milo or post-Milo I had? | ||
| There was a bunch of these guys that had realized there was a movement online. | ||
| And in a lot of ways, what's really interesting is, I'm very anti-censorship. | ||
| However, there's no denying. | ||
| I shouldn't even say however. | ||
| I'm very anti-censorship. | ||
| I think it's a terrible way to behave. | ||
| I think it's a terrible way to sort out the truth, to just silence people and remove people from platforms. | ||
| And the idea that Twitter and Facebook and YouTube are just private companies and they can do whatever they want. | ||
| I think it's bigger than that now. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I think this is a legitimate modern-day free speech issue to the point where there's a real argument to be made that if you're not on these platforms, you're not just diminished. | ||
| They've silenced you in a way that changes the narrative. | ||
| You don't get to see the other person's point of view. | ||
| Even people that are incredibly polarizing, like Trump, it's fucking amazing that they can just remove the 45th President of the United States from everything. | ||
| And he can't even communicate anymore. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I mean, you could say it's because of the Capitol attack, you could say it's because of a lot of things, and I get your perspective, but I do not agree with silencing him. | ||
| I just don't think... | ||
| You know, they just didn't want him to win again. | ||
| But my point was, Back then, all these alt-right guys were catching a lot of steam. | ||
| They had a lot of momentum on their side. | ||
| Milo, who is a very charismatic, very articulate, humorous guy. | ||
| So he would do these interviews. | ||
| The right loved him. | ||
| He would go on all these different talk shows, and he would make fun of everything. | ||
| Even Bill Maher loved him. | ||
| And it was interesting, right? | ||
| And then there was a lot of these guys that came along that would parrot alt-right talking points. | ||
| And it's like, if you pay attention to online forums, when they're left alone, like Reddit's a great example, they had to close down the Donald, right? | ||
| Reddit decided this is just too nuts. | ||
| It's too nuts. | ||
| It's too much. | ||
| They just... | ||
| I don't agree with that either. | ||
| But they stepped in because... | ||
| Shitposting is a real thing, right? | ||
| And people love saying things they're not supposed to say, and they love riling people up. | ||
| Now, when you're a person, whether it's Charles Johnson or someone else, that finds this avenue where you can get a lot of attention, By stirring shit and saying things and maybe you don't even agree with but saying things that are gonna rile up people on the left and get a bunch of shit posters and Hardcore right-wing people online to love you people lean in towards that and there was a lot of that going on I think that's where Gavin McGinnis went south. | ||
| That's where Milo went south a lot of these guys and then once the wave of Censorship came in and those guys started getting deplatformed. | ||
| You see, it really did have a massive impact on the culture. | ||
| Because there was a movement, man. | ||
| It was a big movement. | ||
| And they essentially threw water on that movement. | ||
| Do you... | ||
| I actually want to press you on one thing because my impulse as a journalist is to ask you questions. | ||
| So most of your critics, the shit they say about who you platform, I find ridiculous because often you're platforming people who are already popular. | ||
| And I'm with you in that if someone is already a big figure, they're a big figure. | ||
| All the best we can do is interrogate their beliefs. | ||
| A couple times where I'm more sympathetic to your critics, one was like Johnson, although then I saw you go back and forth with him on Twitter about this black gene violence bullshit. | ||
| Did I? Yeah, briefly. | ||
| I didn't even know he was going to, you know, obviously I didn't know anything about him. | ||
| I don't even know why I had him on. | ||
| I think maybe he wrote one thing that I thought was humorous or something. | ||
| I don't remember because it was so long ago. | ||
| But to me, there's a big difference between like, you know, later on, we're surely going to talk about like rapid onset gender dysphoria. | ||
| And like Abigail Schreier wrote a big bestselling book. | ||
| You can't deny that's part of the conversation. | ||
| I think it's crazy people try whether you agree with her or not. | ||
| You can't shut that down. | ||
| To me, that's like one subset of conversation where I'm like, you have to have those conversations. | ||
| The one area where I sort of agree with your critics is I know you might not want to talk about this guy, but when you had Alex Jones on, and there's this conspiracy theory about the governor of Virginia harvesting organs from fetuses. | ||
| When did he say that? | ||
| He did on your show. | ||
| Which one? | ||
| I think the 2019 one. | ||
| It was the 9... | ||
| 9-11? | ||
| This is when Eddie came in talking about that voice. | ||
| He had that character voice. | ||
| He's talking about all the little babies. | ||
| He's talking the southern voice. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what he was talking about, but I'll try to find the clues. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Let's see if we can find that, because that is... | ||
| Again, with Alex, I never know what the fuck he's going to say. | ||
| Right, but that's what I'm saying. | ||
| So, like, to me, the difference there is he's targeting, like... | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| Your listeners mostly understand he's an entertainer, but if 1% of them believe this is true, you could see that causing trouble. | ||
| I think he's just an entertainer. | ||
| Do you think he believes that stuff? | ||
| He believes a lot of it, yes. | ||
| And he's right about many things, and he's wrong about many things. | ||
| What percentage of his craziest sounding beliefs do you think he himself believes in? | ||
| Well, the crazy sounding ones, the problem with some of the crazy sounding ones, they turned out to be true. | ||
| Because he was telling me about Epstein fucking a decade ago. | ||
| Well, let me tell you, this is nuts, man. | ||
| Like a decade ago, he's like, well, what they do is they compromise all these elites, they take them, they bring them to this island, they have them fuck these underage girls and they film it. | ||
| And I was like, what? | ||
| That is so crazy. | ||
| They got an island. | ||
| And then it turns out to be true. | ||
| Well, the island's true. | ||
| Listen, man. | ||
| It's fucking true. | ||
| There's a lot of evidence that it's true. | ||
| There's a lot of testimony from a lot of different people. | ||
| Whether or not they fucked them, they were there. | ||
| And whether or not they really have film of them fucking them, it is very bizarre that you have these high-level people in both science, celebrities, politicians, and they fly to this fucking island where this convicted pedophile has this weird spot where he takes people. | ||
| This is my point. | ||
| Like, Alex told me about this a long time ago. | ||
| And it sounded like Looney Tune talk. | ||
| You know, he was talking to me about human monkey chimeras that they were working on a long time ago. | ||
| Sounds like loony shit. | ||
| I saw it on the news. | ||
| I mean, there's a science paper published about human, see if you can find the chimeras, the human monkey chimeras. | ||
| They worked in embryos. | ||
| I'm trying to watch Alex Jones's mouth. | ||
| I'm trying to read his lips on the other clip. | ||
| Oh, Jamie's editing in real time. | ||
| But the human chimeras, they said that they had only done it in embryonic form. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| First monkey-human embryos reignite debate over hybrid animals. | ||
| This is something that Alex was telling me about. | ||
| You should interview one of the human monkey chimers. | ||
| I don't think they actually are viable. | ||
| They don't bring them to life. | ||
| But Alex was telling me about this years ago. | ||
| That they do these things for genetic experiments. | ||
| It's completely unethical. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| Nobody would ever have funded it. | ||
| But they don't do it publicly. | ||
| And then they tell you once they've already done all the research, then they come out with it. | ||
| There's been a shit ton of these wacky things. | ||
| He's one of those guys where he tells me things and I just go, huh. | ||
| Okay, well how do I do... | ||
| So the last podcast that I did with him and Tim Dillon, I fact-checked everything. | ||
| I found the part. | ||
| You found it? | ||
| Okay, good. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Here we go. | ||
| Type in... | ||
| Governor of Virginia talks about post-birth abortion and watched the unedited three-minute video. | ||
| How do you call it abortion if it's already been born? | ||
| Well, that's what Trump said. | ||
| He said a month ago when this first broke, he said, and see, the left is so compartmentalized. | ||
| I'm not saying you're the left, but mainstream media, whatever. | ||
| We're so censored now. | ||
| They're making their move right now. | ||
| Who's they? | ||
| The globalists, technocracy, the mad scientists, the guys that want to learn the secrets of the universe, probably already have them. | ||
| So what you're saying is a lot of this censorship, a lot of this is about... | ||
| Joe, I will give one million... | ||
| I don't have ten million. | ||
| I will give, before God and country, to Jamie's... | ||
| I'm not kidding. | ||
| I will give one million dollars to your charity of choice. | ||
| No, no, listen to me. | ||
| This is serious, Jamie. | ||
| You need to come out for the children. | ||
| I will give you $1 million. | ||
| What the fuck have I done? | ||
| It's okay. | ||
| If you can prove that I'm making up that the governor said we keep babies alive after they're born, we keep them comfortable. | ||
| And then it turns out he's an organ harvesting thing, and that's what they're doing. | ||
| So they keep babies alive. | ||
| Don't go to Snopes. | ||
| Go to the governor. | ||
| Go to the governor of Virginia. | ||
| That's why they went ahead and burned him for the blackface that they were using to blackmail him. | ||
| They already had that on him. | ||
| Now, what did he say? | ||
| He was saying that they kept them comfortable after birth? | ||
| Did he actually say that? | ||
| Did the governor actually say that? | ||
| I think there was a clip where he said something like that, for sure. | ||
| It's a misunderstanding. | ||
| The governor talked about this like crazy unlikely situation where a fetus is still alive. | ||
| What would you do then? | ||
| And he said we would keep it comfortable and if the mother wanted to revive it, we would. | ||
| He didn't say we're going to kill it. | ||
| And to jump from that, which was a very specific question, answer to a very specific question, to... | ||
| The state of governor is harvesting fetal organs. | ||
| Okay, let me ask you this. | ||
| If he's saying they keep it comfortable and if the mother wanted to revive it, they would, that is a ethical landmine, isn't it? | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
| You're talking about a fetus that's like barely, yeah. | ||
| I understand, but if they do harvest organs from that fetus, is that real? | ||
| No, as far as I can tell, that part is completely made up. | ||
| How can you? | ||
| Yeah, I think a lot of what he does is he takes some little sliver of truth and he, either because he may get up or has an overactive imagination, that becomes a grand conspiracy theory where the state of Virginia... | ||
| Anyway, that... | ||
| But you would understand why just that statement alone would freak people the fuck out. | ||
| Like there's a choice that the mother can make to keep the baby alive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| If she wanted it to be revived, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, it's a matter of- Is that what he said? | ||
| Is that his words? | ||
| We shouldn't say this unless we know his actual words. | ||
| And maybe he misspoke, right? | ||
| I mean, a lot of these guys are old. | ||
| They misspeak a lot and they're under pressure. | ||
| You have to recognize that too. | ||
| Like, look at Biden. | ||
| I mean, we give Biden more free passes than any president in the history of presidents. | ||
| And he's only been a president for seven months. | ||
| We give him all these free passes because we know he misspeaks, because we know he's compromised. | ||
| So let's hear what it says. | ||
|
unidentified
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Other restrictions now in place. | |
| And she was pressed by a Republican delegate about whether her bill would permit an abortion, even as a woman is essentially dilating, ready to give birth. | ||
| And she answered that it would permit an abortion at that stage of labor. | ||
| Do you support her measure and explain her answer? | ||
| Yeah, you know, I wasn't there, Julie, and I certainly can't speak for Delegate Tran, but I will tell you, one, first thing I would say, this is why decisions such as this should be made by providers, physicians, and the mothers and fathers that are involved. | ||
|
unidentified
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Usurping law. | |
| Jamie, I didn't mean to interrupt. | ||
| Back it up in 10 seconds. | ||
| Notice he's usurping law. | ||
| Their whole plan is bioethics. | ||
| I'll explain in a minute. | ||
| Let's let him talk. | ||
| It's only two minutes. | ||
| Mothers and fathers that are involved. | ||
| There are, you know, when we talk about third trimester abortions, these are done with the consent of, obviously, the mother, with the consent of the physicians, more than one physician, by the way. | ||
| And it's done in cases where there may be severe deformities. | ||
| There may be a fetus that's non-viable. | ||
| So in this particular example, if a mother is in labor, I can tell you exactly what would happen. | ||
| The infant would be delivered. | ||
| The infant would be kept comfortable. | ||
| The infant would be resuscitated if that's what the mother and the family desired. | ||
| And then a discussion would ensue between the physicians and the mother. | ||
| So I think this was really blown out of proportion. | ||
| But again, we want the government not to be involved in these types of decisions. | ||
| We want the decision to be made by the The mothers and their providers. | ||
| And this is why, Julie, that legislators, most of whom are men by the way, shouldn't be telling a woman what she should and shouldn't be doing with her body. | ||
|
unidentified
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And do you think multiple physicians should have to weigh in as is currently required? | |
| She's trying to lift that requirement. | ||
| Well, I think it's always good to get a second opinion and for at least two providers to be involved in that decision because these decisions shouldn't be taken lightly. | ||
| And so, you know, I would certainly support more than one provider. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Can I break in for a minute? | ||
| Yeah, please. | ||
| Wow, that's a weird thing that she just kind of let him say. | ||
| A weird outlying situation where the abortion is in the context of a non-viable fetus. | ||
| Well, that was different. | ||
| What are you saying is the deformities and non-viable fetuses? | ||
| But the thing about deformities is there's a lot of human beings with deformities. | ||
| We have to decide whether or not it's okay if you give birth. | ||
| The way he phrased it was very concerning, wasn't it to you? | ||
| No, because I think he phrased it poorly, but I think he's talking about you would only have an abortion that late in the case of the fetus not being viable in the first place. | ||
| And then he did not answer the question. | ||
| Well, he's talking about a weird situation where then the fetus was surviving outside the womb. | ||
| Think about Jones's idea that this is part of a conspiracy to harvest baby organs. | ||
| How far that is from what he's talking about. | ||
| No, listen, I completely agree with that. | ||
| I think what this is, is it's an abortion rights discussion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think abortion is, it's one of those conversations that are, it's an incredibly human conversation in that there's There's clearly, there's times when abortion disturbs almost everybody. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| That's what the polling shows. | ||
| Very few people are absolutists on it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's a very human thing. | ||
| When you're talking about a bundle of cells in the very early stages, it seems like most people would support abortion. | ||
| But when you get to third trimester, you get to what they're talking about, what this is... | ||
| Basically, she's ready to give birth. | ||
| That's when people get super uncomfortable with it and that's when you run into people that take this whole discussion and turn it into what you're saying, which is like you're making this loony conspiracy about harvesting organs. | ||
| And I think if you're Alex Jones or if you're, like, an anti-abortion figure, like, you want to pull the conversation in that direction. | ||
| You want people debating, like, basically babies being aborted, even though most abortions take place in different contexts. | ||
| But if you're a guy who's looking for—see, the thing about Alex is he's balls deep in this stuff all day long. | ||
| That's all he does. | ||
| All he does is research government corruption, research false flag events, research CIA operations in Nicaragua and Panama. | ||
| That's his day. | ||
| So he's paranoid already, and then on top of it, he's getting real data in of real conspiracies. | ||
| What do you think the line is for having someone like him or Johnson on now that your show is super big and you have a huge platform? | ||
| It's a different line. | ||
| It's a different line. | ||
| And that's one of the reasons why the last time I had Alex on, I fact-checked everything he said. | ||
| I go, pause. | ||
| I go, I want to research this. | ||
| But unfortunately, a lot of it was true. | ||
| One of them was the Associated Press report on children catching polio from the polio vaccine that they were giving these kids in Africa. | ||
| It was like this cover of, and I was like, that's not real. | ||
| And then he brings out this article, and you're reading this article about children getting vaccines in Africa and these vaccines giving them polio. | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like those kind of things. | ||
| When he says those things, I want to go stop. | ||
| That can't be real. | ||
| And then it turns out to actually be real. | ||
| So I want to talk about my book, and this is a good segue, because one of the main things I write about is how to know whether to trust experts. | ||
| And so to me, with someone like Jones, The Sandy Hook thing is such a fuck-up that from then on I'm going to be very skeptical. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| Yeah, 100%. | ||
| And he admits it was a fuck-up. | ||
| He was in a very bad place in his life. | ||
| He was drinking heavily and I think he was going crazy. | ||
| You know, and he brought himself back, and he's had mental health issues. | ||
| He also had, like, a significant head injury when he was a kid. | ||
| He was in a fight. | ||
| People, like, beating the shit out of him, right? | ||
| Someone beat him up and slammed him on his head on the concrete, and, like, significant head injury. | ||
| Like, he's been fucked up from that since high school. | ||
| Did you listen to, like, John Ronson's reporting on his childhood? | ||
| I did, but John Ronson said that he got all his teeth knocked out, and Alex is like, no, I'll show you an x-ray. | ||
| I never got my teeth knocked out. | ||
| They're all his teeth. | ||
| So there's some of that that's not true. | ||
| Also, Ronson was with him in Bohemian Grove. | ||
| Ronson, they set that up. | ||
| In the early, it was like... | ||
| Well, they were friends, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Look, Alex is a polarizing figure, but the people that know him, like how I know him, they think he's an entertaining, fun guy to be around who knows a lot of crazy shit. | ||
| The problem is he's so polarizing that saying that opens you up to so much criticism that everybody immediately wants to push back. | ||
| Well, okay. | ||
| So if the question to me, would I want to go drinking with Alex Jones, the answer would be absolutely. | ||
| I can set that up. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| I've been Austin. | ||
| I struggle with this platforming stuff. | ||
| He's one of the few people where I would have some qualms about it. | ||
| He needs He needs someone with him. | ||
| He needs guardrails, basically. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| He needs someone like me. | ||
| I'm not going to do it, Alex. | ||
| No. | ||
| But he needs someone who's like, hold on, let's see if that's true. | ||
| And if you just leave him on his show and he's ranting and raving and he's there all day and he's drinking two bottles of tequila, it's going to be a wild-ass crazy show and he's not even going to remember half the shit he said. | ||
| But if you can rein him in, he has a lot of fucking information about false flag events, a lot of information about, like, people think he's a right-wing guy. | ||
| When I met him, he got arrested for going after George W. Bush and saying he was perpetrating crimes against humanity. | ||
| Well, he's sort of, like, anti-establishment. | ||
| He's not left or right. | ||
| Exactly, in many ways. | ||
| I mean, he has some right-wing views, but he has a lot of left-wing views, particularly on gay people, on racial issues, on things along those lines. | ||
| He's very open-minded. | ||
| He's a weird guy in that way. | ||
| People characterize him incorrectly. | ||
| But I see what you're saying. | ||
| And the Sandy Hook thing, obviously, it's indefensible. | ||
| But even he thinks it's indefensible. | ||
| What do you do when someone does something like that? | ||
| Do you dismiss him forever? | ||
| It's like one of those things. | ||
| Yeah, it's tricky. | ||
| The thing is, like, he's... | ||
| You know, people worry about people influencing folks. | ||
| And for most people that see Alex on, like, the Andrew Schultz show or Michael Malice's show, they just think he's a really entertaining, crazy guy to listen to, and they enjoy it. | ||
| They really enjoy listening to him. | ||
| For most intelligent people, he's not going to persuade them one way or the other, other than maybe get them to look into things. | ||
| Maybe get him to read into things. | ||
| But that's my issue. | ||
| When he's ranting about the moon landing or chemicals turning frogs gay or whatever. | ||
| Interdimensional child molesters? | ||
| What about that one? | ||
| I'm very scared of them. | ||
| We need to protect our children. | ||
| The frogs turning gay, he basically is It's like a kernel of truth. | ||
| He's joking around about it, but there are pesticides that fuck with the gender of amphibians. | ||
| It's the kernel of truth. | ||
| It's phthalates. | ||
| I mean, that's something that Dr. Shanna Swan wrote about. | ||
| What was the name of that book again? | ||
| Sorry, we keep forgetting the name of the book, but it's a fantastic book about the way it's affecting human beings. | ||
| A radical drop in testosterone levels, a radical increase in miscarriages. | ||
| This is Countdown. | ||
| Dr. Shanna H. Swan, How Our Modern World is Threatening Sperm Counts, Altering Male and Female Reproductive Development, and Impairing the Future of the Human Race. | ||
| This is a terrifying conversation that I had with her. | ||
| I don't know if you listened to that one, but it's really good. | ||
| And it's just... | ||
| She's a scientist, and it's all just about phthalates and pesticides and the effect they have on human reproductive systems, but also on frogs. | ||
| Pesticides really do have a radical impact on frogs and amphibians. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Could we talk about my book for a minute? | ||
| Can we talk about anything you want? | ||
| Sweet. | ||
| Actually, I brought you guys both coffee. | ||
| Did you bring a book? | ||
| Read a book. | ||
| But do you see what I'm saying? | ||
| This Alex Jones conversation is probably one of the biggest ones that I have with people where they're like, why? | ||
| Like, why do you have that guy? | ||
| First of all, I've been friends with that guy for 20 years. | ||
| I've known him forever. | ||
| Isn't there a risk that that... | ||
| There's a risk of bias there, if you're being honest. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's harder for you to let him go. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| I'm telling you, you're going to drink with him. | ||
| How many days are you in town for? | ||
| I'm here till Thursday. | ||
| Oh, what are you doing tomorrow night? | ||
| During the day, I'm going tubing with my girlfriend and her parents. | ||
| So at night, I can then take them and meet Alex Jones. | ||
| We'll make something happen. | ||
| Could Alex Jones meet us on the river tubing? | ||
| Alex Jones has shit to do. | ||
| He's got to uncover Illuminati theories. | ||
| A two-dimensional child molesters. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interdimensional. | ||
| I think I disagree with you on this, but it's one of those things where I want to make sure my own... | ||
| But what do you disagree with? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think he's one of the few people where I would only... | ||
| I'm in favor of platforming almost everyone. | ||
| Platforming is a fucked up conversation. | ||
| 99% of the time I agree with you. | ||
| But you're in a unique situation because you have so many listeners and 1% of your listeners is fucking 30,000 people. | ||
| And if they now think the governor of Virginia is harvesting baby organs that I'm using causing harm, which is what people say about my work. | ||
| It causes harm. | ||
| I think it's a tricky conversation. | ||
| It is a tricky conversation. | ||
| That particular clip is a real problem because it's, you know, to draw the conclusion that he drew, my conclusion that I drew from that is like, Jesus Christ, that is such a weird area of discussion, | ||
| like whether or not you should revive a fetus once it's been born and to decide to revive or not revive based on whether or not it's Deformed or whatever the issue is that it has physically, whatever ailment or... | ||
| It's like I took in college a course on bioethics and that shit is really heavy and doctors have to make really difficult decisions. | ||
| I think the real problem was him having that conversation on the radio and probably unprepared. | ||
| He probably didn't know that that was going to be one of the things he talked about. | ||
| And the way he discussed it I think an issue like that is something that you really should sit down and write out your actual thoughts and think about those, solidify them. | ||
| Well, so I felt a little bad for Jamie because I was trying to imagine if I had to fact check him in real time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, and that's sort of what I do for a living. | ||
| I fact check stuff. | ||
| That would be really hard. | ||
| It would take two hours to fully trace that rumor and what's true, what's false. | ||
| It's just not, maybe it's not a good, for sort of a straight-to-tape, basically, live show. | ||
| Not only that, we're drunk. | ||
| And high. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And Eddie Bravo's on there, who believes in some wacky shit that even Alex doesn't believe in. | ||
| Oh, so he's even more out there than Alex. | ||
| Oh, he gets out there. | ||
| I'm trying to think what's more out there than interdimensional child molesters. | ||
|
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Flat Earth? | |
| Flat Earth? | ||
| I'm trying to think which of those two. | ||
| Interdimensional child molesters, flat earth. | ||
| Which is more likely to be true? | ||
| It's tough. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know how... | ||
| How do you mention that? | ||
| Yeah, they're both right up there. | ||
| He's informed me of some real things, though. | ||
| One of them, I didn't know about the widespread use of agent provocateurs throughout history. | ||
| I really wasn't aware of that. | ||
| I wasn't aware of that the government has an actual strategy that they use to break up peaceful protests by bringing in people who cause violence. | ||
| And it's happened forever. | ||
| And they used it for the World Trade Organization in, was it 99? | ||
| Whatever it was. | ||
| And Alex detailed that in depth. | ||
| And he showed through news reports. | ||
| He showed through stories in the news. | ||
| And he showed through video clips how these masked people came in and took this peaceful protest. | ||
| And they just started randomly breaking windows and tipping over mailboxes and doing all this crazy shit. | ||
| And how they were ultimately let go. | ||
| And how they were all wearing government-issued boots and... | ||
| The cops never arrested them or they allowed them to hide out in a building together and then they all made some sort of a negotiation and released them. | ||
| But I think that fuels conspiracy theorists is that the shit even just our government has done over the years has been so weird that I don't blame people. | ||
| Not even weird. | ||
| The secret bombing of Cambodia. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| That's like superhero villain shit. | ||
| Well, how about the Gulf of Tonkin incident? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| The goddess into Vietnam. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| How about Operation Northwoods, signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy? | ||
| They were going to blow up a fucking jetliner and blame it on Cuba. | ||
| They were going to have a drone jetliner, say it was filled with people, you know, this is, what was this, 61 or something like that? | ||
| And then they were going to use Cuban friendlies, armed Cuban friendlies, to attack Guantanamo Bay. | ||
| And they were going to use this as impetus to go to war with Cuba. | ||
| It's crazy shit. | ||
| And that's real. | ||
| I mean, this is all available through the Freedom of Information Act. | ||
| You can read the Operation Northwood's documents. | ||
| This is a plan they had. | ||
| I mean, this was going to cost American lives because they wanted to gather some sort of motivation from the American people. | ||
| They wanted to get the American people involved to the point where they were willing to go to war with Cuba. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| When you think that that is actually our government in 1961 or whenever it was, 62, whatever it was. | ||
| It was before Kennedy got killed. | ||
| He got killed in 63, right? | ||
| So whatever happened from then, those people weren't prosecuted. | ||
| They weren't brought in front of Congress and explain yourself. | ||
| There's often no accountability. | ||
| My position on that kind of shit is, if that's how it was then, what is the difference between then and now? | ||
| Well, everything evolves. | ||
| They get better at things. | ||
| They get more sophisticated. | ||
| You got a book in there? | ||
| I heard you got a book. | ||
| Yeah, that's so weird. | ||
| Jesse, did you write a book? | ||
| The Quick Fix? | ||
| It's a very douchey thing to do. | ||
| This is for Jamie, if you want a copy. | ||
| This is your book about psychological things, right? | ||
| Explain your book. | ||
| Yeah, it's The Quick Fix, Why Fad Psychology Can't Cure Social Lose. | ||
| That's a good sign that I had to look at the book to remember what it's called. | ||
| I was a science editor at New York Magazine. | ||
| I wrote about psychology, basically. | ||
| And every day we get press releases from Harvard, from Yale, from University of Pennsylvania that psychologists are figuring out amazing stuff about how to fix the world. | ||
| How to fix racism, how to fix the educational system. | ||
| And a lot of these, when I looked into them more, there's like nothing there. | ||
| There's no actual result there. | ||
| And people spend, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars on these ideas that don't really do anything. | ||
| Have you ever taken the, you know, the implicit association test? | ||
| No. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Do you know implicit bias? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So this is a test. | ||
| You sit at a computer. | ||
| It tells you how unconsciously racist you are. | ||
| So anyone listening to this who's done a diversity training recently at work has probably heard of the implicit association test. | ||
| Since 1998, leading psychologists are like, this test will measure your unconscious racism, racism you're not even aware of. | ||
| And this leaks into the real world and makes you do racist stuff. | ||
| And we end up spending millions of dollars on it. | ||
| Every school embraces it. | ||
| Every company embraces it. | ||
| Except, whoops, there's nothing there. | ||
| It doesn't actually measure anything. | ||
| So I'm really interested in those instances where like the most, and maybe this is why I should drink with Alex Jones, where the most important experts in the world tell us shit and it's just, it's not true. | ||
| How much has to do, when the spreading of this kind of information, how much of it has to do with clickbait? | ||
| One of the things that's disturbed me over the last decade or so is that journalism, even journalism at its highest levels, without naming any names, but like fabled institutions, are resorting to clickbait. | ||
| You know, my friend Kurt Metzger said something about the New York Times once. | ||
| He said it's like a fat girl's Tumblr blog now. | ||
| And I'm like, that is such a fucked up thing to say. | ||
| But what he was saying was that there's stories that are written in there that are not what you associate with the New York Times of old. | ||
| I still read the New York Times. | ||
| I still love it. | ||
|
unidentified
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Me too. | |
| I think it's great. | ||
| I mean, I think people are always looking for flaws in any institution, right? | ||
| Especially a fabled one in times of chaos like we are today. | ||
| Part of us wants to see them collapse. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Yeah, people do. | ||
| But I still think they're the best. | ||
| And I think there's something about having a reputation to uphold. | ||
| That does force people to the highest standards. | ||
| But those standards are different. | ||
| It's very difficult to find unbiased, objective news with a clean headline today. | ||
| Because people aren't buying the newspaper like they were. | ||
| It's mostly clicking things online. | ||
| And there's a lot of these that rely on subscription services. | ||
| You know, they rely on someone coming along and saying, you know what? | ||
| I value your journalism so much, I'm going to give you some money. | ||
| And then you have to justify the articles. | ||
| Like, you know, there's ads on these articles in a lot of times. | ||
| And you've got to get people to click on them. | ||
| So you have maybe a title to that article that's not totally accurate or bends the truth a little bit or it's inflammatory. | ||
| Well, everyone gets more desperate because they just need to keep feeding the beast. | ||
| So I think the key difference is, like, I would imagine... | ||
| You know, I never got to be a science writer or editor in 1990. But back then, journalism was healthy. | ||
| And I bet you could be a writer. | ||
| You know, it's still hard work. | ||
| But you publish three articles a week, four articles a week. | ||
| When I was editing Science of Us, that was the sort of behavioral science site at New York Magazine. | ||
| I forget what it was. | ||
| I think we had to publish like 15 to 20 things a week. | ||
| That's a lot. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| When Harvard sends you a press release, we have this amazing new study. | ||
| We're like... | ||
| Great. | ||
| Write it up. | ||
| We don't call the researcher. | ||
| We don't read it closely. | ||
| Oftentimes we read the press release, but not the study itself. | ||
| And it's sort of like... | ||
| The press releases often... | ||
| They don't quite lie, but they leave out a lot of details. | ||
| And so 2010 was sort of the peak when the stuff in my book in psychology, like the worst psychology, was being published. | ||
| 2010 was also when things got really, really click-baity, I think. | ||
| What happened in 2010 that the worst psychology got published? | ||
| This is where it gets complicated, but certain areas of research, so one of them is called social priming, and that's the idea that if I flash an American flag before your eyes for 300 milliseconds, you'll get way more patriotic. | ||
| It sounds like voodoo magic, but for a while people really believed these results, and the reason they believed them is because there's all these ways you can fuck up statistically, and you publish stuff that appears to be true but isn't false. | ||
| Let's say I asked you off the bat, take the top psychology journals around. | ||
| What percentage of the findings in them would you say could be replicated later on if you run it back? | ||
| Oh, I have no idea. | ||
| It's about a 50%. | ||
| There's a coin flip chance that anything you read in the top psychology journals, some people think it's higher, some think it's lower. | ||
| Have you ever read the stuff that Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay and Peter Boghossian put out? | ||
| I've read some of their stuff, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, where they published these sort of satirical... | ||
| The satirical scientific papers that actually got accepted. | ||
| The dog rape. | ||
| Dog rape. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it had the most... | ||
| See if you can find the title of their dog, because it had to do with homosexuality. | ||
| But meanwhile, they were getting lauded for these things. | ||
| They were getting applauded for fat bodybuilding. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Where they were joking around about how bad academia has gotten, and they made these farcical papers, and some of them won awards. | ||
| A lot of the problems they are concerned with, it's not just sort of like the wacky Marxist geography. | ||
| It's like some of the top psychology papers in the country. | ||
| It's tricky because I want people to trust experts. | ||
| I want people to trust science. | ||
| But a lot of scientists themselves don't know what they're doing. | ||
| It makes it complicated. | ||
| A lot of scientists don't know what they're doing. | ||
| How so? | ||
| So, it's hard to explain this without getting into some statistics. | ||
| I'm not good at statistics, but basically, people realize that the statistical test people do to decide if something is significant. | ||
| Meaning, we're pretty sure Joe Rogan comes out with a pill to cure the common cold. | ||
| We give 50 people that pill, we give 50 people a placebo. | ||
| The people who take the pill do better. | ||
| The cold goes away. | ||
| At a certain threshold, you're like, this is a real result. | ||
| This isn't just random statistical noise. | ||
| And it turns out there's lots of ways to fool yourself into thinking the pill works when it doesn't. | ||
| And that's basically what psychologists realized. | ||
| And that led them to understand that arguably most of what they publish is garbage basically. | ||
| Do you know what a nocebo is? | ||
| One of my favorite stories was a guy who was involved in a test where they were doing a study where they gave one group an SSRI and the other group they gave a placebo. | ||
| This guy, for whatever reason, took a shitload of pills and ran to the hospital with an elevated pulse, high blood pressure, holding this pill bottle, freaking out, thinking he's dying, telling them that he fucked up and he took the whole bottle of pills and he's going to die. | ||
| They contact the physician. | ||
| The physician comes down and informs him that he was a part of the control group. | ||
| And he had taken a placebo. | ||
| Within minutes, his heart rate drops down to normal. | ||
| His blood pressure drops down to normal. | ||
| And he's fine. | ||
| So this guy who was convinced he was going to die had just completely done it to himself. | ||
| He had decided that he had taken some sort of fucking poison or something. | ||
| You know, some horrible medication. | ||
| And far exceeding the dose you're supposed to take. | ||
| I remember being 19 and smoking weed with my roommate out of a Gatorade bottle that you poke the hole in and I'd be like, oh man, I'm so fucked up. | ||
| You have no idea. | ||
| We're so influenced by what we think substances are going to do to us. | ||
| It has a profound effect on us. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But that probably did get you high. | ||
| This was very sort of swaggy Massachusetts weed. | ||
| It's still got THC in it. | ||
| This was pretty weak, I think. | ||
| Yeah, but if you were a kid, how old were you? | ||
| I was like 18 or 19. Maybe I was high. | ||
| I'm sure you were high. | ||
| Even schwaggy THC weak weed from Massachusetts will still get you fucked up. | ||
| There was another point I got a little too high and I fled the dorm room. | ||
| My roommate called me and I was convinced he was sitting with the police trying to lure me back there to arrest me for smoking weed. | ||
| Sounds like decent weed. | ||
| Yeah, maybe it was actually. | ||
| I shouldn't have denigrated the swaggy Massachusetts weed. | ||
| Listen, I've had some swaggy Pennsylvania weed and it freaked me out. | ||
| Human reactions to rape culture and queer performity at urban dog parks in Portland, Oregon. | ||
| That's the paper. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they published this in Gender Place and Cultural, a Journal of Feminist Geography, and Helen Wilson, and it got applauded. | ||
| Yeah, it won an award, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they were saying, this is amazing scholarship, this is incredible work. | ||
| But it just goes to show you... | ||
| Academia is in a weird place, man. | ||
| It's always been in a weird place, but it's in an exceptionally weird place today with the climate of our culture because these people, a lot of them that are teaching these courses, a lot of them that are professors, they went from being a student and living in this world to then getting a job at the university to becoming a professor. | ||
| So they've never been out there in the regular world outside of this insulated bubble of academia. | ||
| The same thing is happening in journalism because especially as like more and more of us come from upper middle class, like good college settings, we all have the same beliefs. | ||
| We're all not really tolerant of people with different beliefs and it's turning journalism into a shit show actually. | ||
| It's really depressing because like what's the point of being a journalist or an academic if you're not going to be open minded and actually interrogate the world a little bit? | ||
| It's just so important to have objective, unbiased versions of the truth. | ||
| And to not have that in a reliable source, I mean, like I said, I think the New York Times is the best. | ||
| I think Washington Post is excellent, too. | ||
| There's a lot of good newspapers still that I think do the best job that we currently have available. | ||
| But I would like something that's bulletproof. | ||
| I would like something that doesn't have any opinion pieces that are preposterous. | ||
| It's hard to get that. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| I often get emails from people that are like, you know, I don't trust The Times anymore. | ||
| What should I do? | ||
| It's like, no, you should mostly trust The Times. | ||
| You should realize that, like, they're a human institution. | ||
| I don't think if we went back in time to 1970, The Times would be bulletproof then. | ||
| They published garbage then, too. | ||
| I do think it's getting worse. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| Well, I think the worst is television. | ||
| Television news is the most... | ||
| It's unwatchable. | ||
| It's the most nutty. | ||
| And that's why things like, you know... | ||
| What is Crystal and Sager's new show called? | ||
| Breaking Points that used to be rising on the hill. | ||
| That show is so good because they don't have to listen to anybody. | ||
| They're not a part of some giant system. | ||
| And now that they're doing their own independent show, they're even more so. | ||
| And they have opinions and they don't necessarily agree with each other, but they're not beholden to any institution. | ||
| They're not vetted. | ||
| There's no filter that they have to go through, some corporate filter when they discuss these important issues. | ||
| So, a little more than a year ago, I started the podcast I sort of do for a living now, Blocked and Reported, with Katie Herzog. | ||
| Your listeners should all harass her on Twitter. | ||
| Harass her? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Just Katie Herzog. | ||
| It seems like we get along, but she's mean to me on the show a lot, so I should go after her comeuppance. | ||
| I noticed that because she worked at a place called The Stranger in Seattle. | ||
| I worked for New York Magazine. | ||
| I left under good terms just to write the book. | ||
| But once we got in our own bubble and we realized that no one who mattered could get pissed off at us and we didn't have to answer to editors, I don't know. | ||
| It just made the conversation much more free-flowing. | ||
| We could talk about what we want to talk about. | ||
| It's the biggest difference in the world when you're not... | ||
| Looking over your shoulder, or it's not just the bosses who are the problem. | ||
| It's like, is your 25-year-old colleague going to be very sensitive about what you said and report you to HR? And go to human resources. | ||
| Yeah, which is, I think, have you had Jonathan Haidt on before? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| In 2015, I got lunch with him, and we talked about our agreements, our disagreements. | ||
| I thought he was overreacting to the crazy college shit. | ||
| I was like, these are crazy college kids. | ||
| They'll get to the real world. | ||
| They'll have to hold down a job. | ||
| The craziness will go away. | ||
| When did you apologize? | ||
| I apologize to him. | ||
| Last year on Twitter. | ||
| I did. | ||
| Ready-made answer for that. | ||
| If he didn't see it, John, I apologize. | ||
| We disagree on this or that, but it's absolutely the case that in journalism, that shit has infiltrated some newsrooms. | ||
| It makes it very hard to do journalism. | ||
| Well, it's also infiltrated corporations in a massively disingenuous way because they've recognized that the wind is blowing in that direction, so they'll put up a rainbow flag. | ||
| Wait, are you saying Halliburton isn't committed to social justice? | ||
| You said that. | ||
| I didn't say that. | ||
| I don't know who your sponsors are. | ||
| I shouldn't say that. | ||
| Are you saying the Kill Cliff CBD energy drink is in pro-LGBT? Well, they actually are. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| It tastes... | ||
| It's very pineapple. | ||
| I like it. | ||
| That's mine. | ||
| That's my flavor. | ||
| This is yours? | ||
| Yeah, it's got my face on it. | ||
| I didn't even notice that. | ||
| Oh, shit. | ||
| There you are. | ||
| That's me, bro. | ||
| It's a jalapeno pineapple. | ||
| Is this you on an acid trip with Alex Jones? | ||
| I don't think Alex does acid. | ||
| He doesn't need to. | ||
| There's no way. | ||
| Alex doesn't do acid. | ||
| I mean, he probably has. | ||
| His brain just produces it. | ||
| He gets high. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're going to like him. | ||
| You're going to not like him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Are we really going to meet? | |
| I know. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| This is going to be a disaster. | ||
| No, that's one of my goals is to get people to understand why I like him. | ||
| I think people have seen him on other shows and they get it now. | ||
| But again, you're right. | ||
| The Sandy Hook thing just freaks people the fuck out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And rightly so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| He's in that weird position because of something like that. | ||
| It's like, how do you bounce back from that if you ever do? | ||
| The cancel culture of today is such a beat-up term. | ||
| I don't even like saying it. | ||
| Me neither. | ||
| We need a better term, but then that term would get corrupted. | ||
| Yeah, it's for sure been corrupted, as has woke, as has many, many terms. | ||
| What we have now is a bunch of people who have this ability to gather up crowds to go after people and try to hurt people's feelings. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's really that old adage that hurt people hurt people. | ||
| It really is that. | ||
| Because most of these people, like I said, I study multiple people. | ||
| I literally have a file where I follow people that I think are the most unhinged. | ||
| And I don't have any personal relationship with them. | ||
| I don't have any beef with them. | ||
| I don't even have interactions with them. | ||
| I just watch them just like a rabid dog, just barking at all the other dogs in the dog park. | ||
| You're sitting at your laptop and you're like, oh, that's going in the file. | ||
| The thing is, some of them are brilliant people in their chosen field. | ||
| They're actually successful at the thing that they do, but they're just mentally unwell. | ||
| When I say mentally unwell, what I mean is they're not emotionally balanced. | ||
| They're not comfortable, happy people. | ||
| And I think we should encourage compassion and we should encourage decency and kindness to people. | ||
| And they're not doing that. | ||
| They think they're on the right side. | ||
| So because they think they're on the right side, it justifies being a really shitty person. | ||
| So I was the one who brought up the connection to mental health. | ||
| And I do think there's some mentally ill people who get, you know, Twitter makes it worse. | ||
| But I think that's like sort of, I'm worried that's like too easy now because I'm... | ||
| I don't know if you remember this. | ||
| You might have talked about this on the show. | ||
| There was a moment last year when all the public health researchers were like, those far-right protesters getting together to protest mass and lockdown, that's so dangerous. | ||
| You can't get together. | ||
| There's a pandemic. | ||
| Then the next week, George Floyd happened, and then there's BLM protests. | ||
| You can do BLM protests. | ||
| So it's like the same people flipping it. | ||
| That kind of behavior, that's not mental illness. | ||
| That's just like you want the positive approval. | ||
| You want to stay in the good graces of your tribe. | ||
| So I think it's a little bit of both. | ||
| Well, again, we're going back to confirmation bias. | ||
| This was a conversation that I was having with a friend of mine who was pro the George Floyd protests, and I said, listen, I'm 100% pro people protesting. | ||
| I go, if they're just protesting, as soon as it gets violent and the chaos, that bothers me. | ||
| But it is kind of crazy that all of a sudden we're okay with people screaming shoulder to shoulder with each other. | ||
| The whole idea is that this stuff is airborne. | ||
| And, you know, his take on it was, like, there's no significant evidence that proves that it's spreading. | ||
| I go, that is horseshit, man. | ||
| I go, if you look at the fucking jumps, there's a big jump in infections post, like, there's like 10 days after these protests. | ||
| There's always a big jump. | ||
| I go, it doesn't mean you shouldn't be able to protest. | ||
| It means we should have a real discussion. | ||
| Yeah, that's all you want is a discussion. | ||
| Yes, about freedom and about what you should and shouldn't be able to do, and then what exactly we're doing with these protests. | ||
| I do think the combined effect of the lockdowns on everyone's mental health, I just think we're going to see that for a long time. | ||
| They've destroyed everybody. | ||
| Well, it shifted our country in a very bad way, I think. | ||
| I really do think it did. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people that were already unbalanced and kind of mentally unwell, and that pushed them over the edge. | ||
| And we've got to figure out how to bring people back. | ||
| And I don't know how to do that. | ||
| I mean, I remember a time where it didn't seem like there was this gigantic gap. | ||
| Between people on the left and people on the right and even people in the center. | ||
| It's people that are angry if you're a centrist. | ||
| It's just a different state of mind. | ||
| It's like if you're not on my side, you're on the wrong side now. | ||
| I always thought that because of the internet, we're going to get more access to information, so we're going to have more access to the truth, and people are going to be able to debate things and find out exactly what's up. | ||
| In the 90s, the tech bros, they wrote these utopian essays about the end of ignorance or whatever. | ||
| It turned out the opposite happened. | ||
| I don't think it's the opposite because I think a lot of people do have that approach. | ||
| There's a lot of people. | ||
| But for most people, they don't have the time. | ||
| Most people are tired. | ||
| They work all day. | ||
| They're usually not that healthy. | ||
| They don't eat well and they're tired. | ||
| And then they have either a family or they have friends. | ||
| Maybe they have a husband or a wife. | ||
| Children, mortgage problems, neighbors, this, that, plumbing, fucking electrical, there's a power failure, there's a lot of shit. | ||
| Interdimensional child molesters. | ||
| All those things. | ||
| There's a lot of shit that people have to deal with. | ||
| They don't have the time to develop a very nuanced, objective, purely... | ||
| It's a purely honest view of what they're looking at. | ||
| So they find these conglomerations of people that have adopted these predetermined patterns of behavior and these opinions, this conglomeration of opinions, and they just adopt those. | ||
| And then they repeat the things that they think they need to say in order to be in the good graces of that group. | ||
| Do you know the concept of the exhausted majority? | ||
| No. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I forget who – it's either this political scientist in Arizona or these polling guys. | ||
| People can Google it. | ||
| The idea is like 20 percent of us are screaming at one another on Twitter, Facebook, whatever. | ||
| Most of the country is just exhausted and hates talking about politics because things have gotten so heated that – They don't want to say the wrong thing on Facebook. | ||
| So it's sort of like the sort of controversial concept of like the silent majority. | ||
| But I think there is a silent majority of people who want nothing to do with the present political discourse. | ||
| And to me, that sort of explains how like... | ||
| People like me from Brooklyn were all Liz Warren or Bernie Sanders and I was sort of divided between the two and then Joe Biden just runs away with it because most people are not online. | ||
| Liz Warren didn't drive you nuts, the Native American stuff? | ||
| No, I just think all politicians are flawed one way or another. | ||
| But that's such a heavy lie. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The fact that she got into Harvard with that, right? | ||
| I think it helped her get in, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I didn't view it as disqualifying. | ||
| She wrote Native American as her ethnicity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I'm 200 times more African than she is Native American. | ||
| How African are you? | ||
| 1.6%. | ||
| Oh, you did the test? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's pretty crazy. | ||
| Imagine me putting African under my job application. | ||
| Actually, what number is she? | ||
| Let's make sure that's correct. | ||
| What percentage Native American is she? | ||
| It's something crazy low. | ||
| Maybe I should view that as disqualifying. | ||
| I liked a lot of the other stuff she did. | ||
| Some of her professors from college have said some pretty wild shit about her, about how unbridled her ambition was. | ||
| Oh, really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of her professors, a woman, I forget the thing, but she just didn't have nice things to say about her. | ||
| But, I mean, that's the kind of people that get into politics. | ||
| That's what I'm saying. | ||
| Like, what person who can get that close to being president hasn't done some shit that is bad? | ||
| Although I guess Bernie didn't really have any skeletons. | ||
| That's the thing I always say about the guy. | ||
| You can disagree with him, but he's been remarkably consistent. | ||
| What do you got there? | ||
| Trying to find the DNA analysis. | ||
| In the article I was looking through from NPR, the Cherokee Association says that the DNA test doesn't matter. | ||
| Well, they want you to be accepted in the tribe. | ||
| That's a different thing. | ||
| You could have the tiniest fraction of DNA, but they're not going to accept you as one of theirs. | ||
| But that's not really what we're talking about. | ||
| We're talking about how much Native Americans actually has in her genetics. | ||
| Whether or not the Cherokee Association accepts her is kind of a different argument. | ||
| The DNL found the vast majority. | ||
| This doesn't say. | ||
| It just says the vast majority of her lineage is European ancestry. | ||
| It doesn't say how much the thing is. | ||
| But there was. | ||
| I know for sure they did release the numbers. | ||
| It doesn't have the numbers. | ||
| It just says rights to results or strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual's pedigree, likely in the range of six to ten generations ago. | ||
| There was an actual paper that got published or an article. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I clicked that link. | |
| It's not active. | ||
| Well, I don't know if that's the one. | ||
| I know, but that's on her website that says it would be the PDF of the report. | ||
| It's not active. | ||
| They pulled it. | ||
| Can you imagine you're running for president and you have to post your DNA online about how Native Americans are? | ||
| Well, it's because she got a job that was a very lucrative job by saying that she's Native American. | ||
| And she didn't say a small fraction. | ||
| She said she's Native American. | ||
| In her defense, I have a friend who thought he was Native American. | ||
| That was always his family thing. | ||
| And then they did a test on him and found out he had zero. | ||
| Here's the best number I've found. | ||
| 1,024th. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As low as that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, what percentage is that? | ||
| What is one out of 1,000? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| .1, I think. | ||
| .1. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, am I really 200 times more? | ||
| It might be more of that. | ||
| It might be more, right? | ||
| I'm 1.6. | ||
| Joe, we're all... | ||
| I'm almost 2 out of 100. We're all African if you go back far enough. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, that's the dumbest thing about all of it, right? | ||
| Like, the only reason why people... | ||
| I got this conversation with a friend of mine who was explaining to me different eyes. | ||
| We're talking about that guy who decided he was Korean. | ||
| No, he didn't decide. | ||
| He transitioned to Korean. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Well, he made a decision. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, but this is the thing where a long time ago, this was how we looked at people that transitioned to different genders. | ||
| Now we accept that. | ||
| But when it comes to race, we're like, cut the shit. | ||
| No, that's where we draw the line. | ||
| For now. | ||
| In 2021, you can't just become Korean. | ||
| But this guy decided to become Korean. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And my friend was talking to me about this and he was saying it's kind of crazy that this guy got his eyes done to look more Korean where Koreans get their eyes done to look more European at a really frightening rate. | ||
| Like it's one of the most popular plastic surgeries in all of Korea is to get your eyes done. | ||
| It seems like every culture has some exotic other... | ||
| Like in India, they have skin whitening cream. | ||
| Everyone wants to be a little bit different. | ||
| You see Sammy Sosa now? | ||
| No. | ||
| Bro, Sammy Sosa is pale like a ghost. | ||
| Really? | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's nuts. | |
| That's so weird. | ||
| Sammy Sosa decided that he wanted to be whiter and he started whitening his skin. | ||
| That's so sad, man. | ||
| It's like a bleach. | ||
| When I was in Thailand, they have billboards for skin whitening creams, and I was like, this is nuts, man. | ||
| That's depressing. | ||
| It is depressing because the people look beautiful, and it also fucks with your ability to stay outside. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| There's a reason why these folks have so much melanin in their skin. | ||
| They have this beautiful climate, and your body's protecting itself from the sun. | ||
| I was just thinking about what you said about everything being ultra-polarized, no one could get along. | ||
| The guy to me that did the best job of bridging that stuff, and I listened to your interview with him when I was prepping for this, was Anthony Bourdain. | ||
| He went to these cultures that really did have views that he would view as horrible, about women or gay people or whatever, and he intentionally didn't focus on that. | ||
| He focused on food and where you live. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I obviously didn't know him at all, but his death really hit me hard because I just think that's really hard to do and we need way more people like that and we don't have any. | ||
| Yeah, that one hit me hard. | ||
| That was one of the roughest ones. | ||
| I didn't know he was that depressed. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| I knew that he was a complicated guy, but I actually got a text message from my friend Maynard, the lead singer of Tool. | ||
| He's a jiu-jitsu practitioner, and Bourdain's a jiu-jitsu practitioner, too. | ||
| And the two of them, I thought it was really cool that they both got into jiu-jitsu and they're finding all this... | ||
| Benefit from it emotionally and physically. | ||
| Bourdain got into it in his late 50s, and all of a sudden he got ripped. | ||
| He had addictive personalities. | ||
| It was terrible when he was doing heroin, but amazing for jiu-jitsu. | ||
| Because all of a sudden, this guy is super dedicated. | ||
| He's training every day. | ||
| And so Maynard was like, I think I want to have a celebrity jiu-jitsu match with Anthony Bourdain. | ||
| Do you think he could hook that up? | ||
| I go, I'll ask him, man. | ||
| Just joking around. | ||
| And then I get this phone call or this text message when I was in Chicago from Maynard saying, I guess we won't be having that celebrity jiu-jitsu match. | ||
| That's how you found out. | ||
| That's how I found out. | ||
| I woke up in the morning and I looked at my phone and I was like, what does that mean? | ||
| Fuck. | ||
| And then I Google Anthony Bourdain and I'm like, oh my god. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It just... | ||
| That was one of the ones where you just go, God damn it, I wish I was there. | ||
| I wish I was there with him. | ||
| I would say, listen, this will pass, man. | ||
| You are loved. | ||
| You are a beloved person. | ||
| Well, I mean, that's the thing a lot of people don't realize about suicide, because I've written a little bit about this, is it's a much more impulsive thing than people often realize. | ||
| And it is that question of like... | ||
| If someone can be... | ||
| That's why suicide hotlines are so important. | ||
| Can you talk someone off that emotional cliff in the moment? | ||
| Because if you can... | ||
| Yeah, you could probably turn them around and stop a lot of pain. | ||
| It's so fucking sad. | ||
| It's so fucking sad. | ||
| And for him, he had so much to offer. | ||
| His perspective was so unique and so passionate. | ||
| And I just feel real fortunate to have met him and known him and got to hang out with him a bunch of times. | ||
| It was... | ||
| It's just when someone, at least he left behind a lot. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He left behind a lot of his work. | ||
| He left behind a lot of his writing. | ||
| His writing was brilliant and his show was brilliant. | ||
| When you're just a normal person watching a celebrity, you can never tell how much of it is an act. | ||
| In his case, he was at the very least, he really convincingly just seemed like he was just a great guy. | ||
| I couldn't imagine anyone disliking him based on the personality of the show. | ||
| People could definitely dislike him. | ||
| He was polarized. | ||
| If he didn't like you, he talked a lot of shit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, did he? | |
| Yeah, he talked a lot of shit about the Dave Matthews band and shit like that. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Because he was just humorous. | ||
| He was a comic, basically. | ||
| Well, yeah, but... | ||
| Because he wasn't a comic, but he was. | ||
| You know, like, we talked about... | ||
| Like, he started doing these live performances where he would go in front of a whole theater. | ||
| He was just getting into that when he was on the show, right? | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And he loved it. | ||
| And we talked a lot about, like... | ||
| How to do it and how often you should turn over material and what the approach is. | ||
| He would come to see comedy a lot. | ||
| He came to a bunch of my shows and we talked about, this is a bummer, man. | ||
| He was so unique. | ||
| I wanted to see him get older. | ||
| I wanted to see his perspective. | ||
| But that motherfucker partied hard, dude. | ||
| Hard! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I partied with him a few times, but the hardest I ever partied with him, we were in Montana, and we were, for his show, we went pheasant hunting. | ||
| I saw that! | ||
| You guys went, yeah, yeah. | ||
| And then afterwards, he cooked for us, which was amazing. | ||
| We cooked pheasant, and I think they had grouse, and we had some steaks, and... | ||
| And then we sat by the fire and drank whiskey and smoked weed. | ||
| And we got barbecued. | ||
| And that guy just kept going. | ||
| He just kept going. | ||
| I'm like, how can one possibly drink anymore? | ||
| Like, we're so fucked up. | ||
| And he's like, who's got the bottle? | ||
| I'm like, fucking let's go. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was just going and just couldn't stop hitting the pipe and smoking more weed and drinking more alcohol and we were under the stars. | ||
| It was pretty wild. | ||
| It was fun. | ||
| But I just got to see like some people, you know, he had like a real issue with heroin and never became sober. | ||
| He just sort of transitioned it into booze and partying that way. | ||
| But man, when you talk food with that guy, when you talk culture with that guy, he had a passion for... | ||
| I mean, it was literally like the dream job for him. | ||
| That gig, whether it was No Reservations or whether it was... | ||
| What was the new show called? | ||
| Parts Unknown? | ||
| He just had this love of exploring the way people get together. | ||
| When you sit with him and watch him talk to people while they're eating and talk about food, the fucking guy would just light up. | ||
| He loved it. | ||
| This is a subject we don't need to get into. | ||
| In parts I don't know much about it, but I was so impressed, honestly, that he went to the Gaza Strip. | ||
| When he has that platform, he goes to a part of the world most Americans know nothing about that doesn't really get attention. | ||
| That says something about a guy, that he would choose to use his platform in that way. | ||
| I was really impressed by that. | ||
| Yeah, he was an impressive guy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There's a few friends that I have that I can't really believe they're my friend. | ||
| So when I'm around him, I get a little nervous. | ||
| Starstruck? | ||
| Yeah, even when he was my friend, I was still starstruck around him. | ||
| Just because I admired him so much. | ||
| And because I was a big fan of his show. | ||
| I was a big fan of No Reservations before I ever met him as a person. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| For some reason, your mention of Dave Matthews Band made me remember, I think we went to the same high school. | ||
| You and I did? | ||
| Newton North, right? | ||
| I went to Newton South. | ||
| Oh, you were in South. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You snooty, snooty South. | ||
| It was like upper-upper class versus upper-middle class. | ||
| Well, I lived in Newton Upper Falls, which is like a very blue-collar town, but I was lucky that I was in the school district. | ||
| It was a good school to go to. | ||
| Yeah, you were only there like a couple of years though, right? | ||
| No, all through high school. | ||
| All four years in high school, yeah. | ||
| That must have been weird, though, because you arrived there without friends, basically. | ||
| You had to start from scratch. | ||
| In high school. | ||
| But I did that my whole life, unfortunately or fortunately. | ||
| I think ultimately fortunately. | ||
| Because I moved from New Jersey to San Francisco when I was 7. We stayed in San Francisco from age 7 to 11. And then we moved to Florida from 11 to 13. 13 to 24, I lived in Boston, then New York, then LA. No, Texas. | ||
| Do you think that makes it like contributed to your, I don't know, you jump between a lot of different subjects, like your different interests? | ||
| I think what it did do is it forced me to form my own opinions about things. | ||
| Also, I never felt protected. | ||
| I never felt like I had a group of friends that I could count on. | ||
| So I had to do everything myself. | ||
| You're always sort of like on your toes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Exactly. | |
| And I would always be the new kid. | ||
| And that's also how I got into martial arts because I was like, God damn, I'm so tired of people picking on me. | ||
| It was very scary to not have friends and to be in the school. | ||
| And also I was a short kid, so I was worried these guys were going to beat me up. | ||
| So I got involved in martial arts, which also tremendously helped my ability to see and think of things for myself because I had gone through some very... | ||
| You know, competitions are dangerous and scary, and the stress level's so high, and if you can get through them on the other end, you have this incredible feeling of accomplishment. | ||
| Win, lose, or draw. | ||
| At least I did it. | ||
| I faced it. | ||
| I went out there and I did this terrifying thing and competed, and that's all I did for six years of my life. | ||
| My co-host was pressuring me to talk about our podcast as much as possible. | ||
| Oh, you guys have a podcast? | ||
| What's it called again? | ||
| Did you hear that I wrote a book? | ||
| You have a book. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The Quick Fix. | ||
| I'm not trying to mention it enough. | ||
| The Quick Fix. | ||
| I like this. | ||
| Very smart. | ||
| Wait, who wrote this? | ||
| Oh shit, it was me. | ||
| Jesse Single. | ||
| I like the orange cover. | ||
| It's very smart. | ||
| Katie, my co-host on Blocked and Reported. | ||
| Check it out. | ||
| She suggested that I ask you to break my arm on air as like a viral incident. | ||
| She doesn't like you. | ||
| Harass Katie Herzog on Twitter. | ||
| Don't do it. | ||
| Don't say anything. | ||
| Have you had to deal with that where someone comes up on your show and then they complain that your listeners harass them? | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| But I tell them, get off Twitter. | ||
| People use that as an... | ||
| There's this thing where you'll criticize someone and the person will be like, oh no, I'm being harassed. | ||
| And it's like, no, it's criticism. | ||
| Yeah, that's unfortunate that that is a real point of contention because that's not what it is. | ||
| When you're on a show, you're putting yourself out there publicly. | ||
| You're out there expressing your views. | ||
| And if people don't agree with your views and they at-mention you and don't agree with your views, that's not harassment. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| Now, if they fucking dox you, and they start harassing your kids, or harassing your wife, or harassing your boss, that's where it gets gross when people don't like someone's opinion, and then they contact someone's boss, and then they... | ||
| Dude, trying to get people fired is now the first thing you do when you disagree with someone. | ||
| I hate that shit. | ||
| Well, it comes back to them, though. | ||
| It always comes back around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| It does. | ||
| Dustin Poirier, a guy who fought this weekend, he had a great quote. | ||
| He said, karma isn't a bitch. | ||
| He said, it's a mirror. | ||
| That's good. | ||
|
unidentified
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I like that. | |
| It's a great quote. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if that's his, but when he said it, I was like, damn. | ||
| That's... | ||
| These people that go after people, when the mob comes for them, man, it's wild. | ||
| It's wild to see them panic and flail. | ||
| It's like, what do you think you've been doing to all these other people you've been attacking? | ||
| Katie had like, after she left the stranger, I mean she got laid off because they laid off everyone, but she had like co-workers just openly talking shit about her online just to raise their own social capital. | ||
| And I hate that. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's a middle school cafeteria. | ||
| It doesn't work. | ||
| It makes you think of that person as a low-level mind. | ||
| Like, that person has a low-level mind. | ||
| They have a low emotional IQ. I dismiss their perspectives and things. | ||
| When someone does that and attacks someone openly like that, I go, oh, you're just petty. | ||
| You're just a shitty person. | ||
| Right, but they're swimming in likes and retweets. | ||
| They're getting validated for it. | ||
| But people who aren't shitty can see that. | ||
| They get it. | ||
| And also, even if they like it because they're worried about you coming after them or they want to make sure that they're on the right side of the mob, they're going to know that that's who you are. | ||
| You don't have to be like that. | ||
| If you disagree with someone, you could do so in a kind way. | ||
| We've got to emphasize that. | ||
| Moving forward as a culture, in order to figure out The right way to have discussions about things where they actually get productive, where you actually have real conversations where maybe you might learn something about the way other people view things. | ||
| A lot of people have developed all these derailing tactics where they'll be like... | ||
| It's not just disagreement. | ||
| It's your view is harmful or your view is almost violent. | ||
| And again, I understand there's always going to be like 20 year olds on Tumblr who say that, but seeing other journalists adopt that. | ||
| You had Matt Iglesias on. | ||
| He left Vox in part because one of his colleagues felt unsafe because he signed the Harper's free speech letter. | ||
| I mean, you feel unsafe because you're calling- Unsafe. | ||
| Yeah, that's not good. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| You should quit if you feel unsafe. | ||
| If you feel unsafe, you should check yourself into a mental health institute and figure out what's wrong with you. | ||
| There's journalists in Syria and Iraq. | ||
| They're unsafe. | ||
| I just hate that. | ||
|
unidentified
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They're really unsafe. | |
| Well, it's also people, once in a while, people are like, wow, it's so brave to speak your mind. | ||
| It's like, it's not really. | ||
| Critics of Putin are brave. | ||
| Yeah, that's what I'm saying. | ||
| The downside, okay, people will be mad at me on Twitter. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| I mean, that's- Jamal Khashoggi was brave. | ||
| Yes, exactly. | ||
| This is not... | ||
| What you're doing is nonsense. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But these people, they... | ||
| Here's a great statement that someone said that I've repeated before, so I apologize. | ||
| The worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you, even if it's nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So the problem with a lot of these people is they live in this coddled world where... | ||
| You know, not a lot's going on. | ||
| And so I feel unsafe because he signed this letter. | ||
| And then other people will, like, they don't want to step in and say, hey, grow the fuck up. | ||
| You feel unsafe? | ||
| But that's the thing. | ||
| There's always going to be people trying to, like, leverage their sense they're being victimized. | ||
| Other people need to, they don't need to do it publicly, but just quietly be like, we're going to disagree. | ||
| Your colleague might sign a letter you don't like. | ||
| It's not the end of the world. | ||
| But they'll attack you for that. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| I feel unsafe because Jesse doesn't agree with me about me being unsafe. | ||
| It's weaponized victimhood. | ||
| It's really fucking depressing. | ||
| I'm glad I have a foot out the door of mainstream journalism. | ||
| It's way better this way, unfortunately. | ||
| Well, I think mainstream journalism is shooting itself in the foot. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Because of this. | ||
| Because of this attitude. | ||
| And I don't know how it turns it around. | ||
| Unfortunately, because I think mainstream journalism has been insanely important throughout the history. | ||
| It still is, frankly. | ||
| Yes, it's been insanely important, continues to be, but it's more dismissed now than at any other time in my life. | ||
| Like, this whole fake news shit, like saying fake... | ||
| Like, Jesus Christ, if someone sends me an article, then I go, ah, it's on CNN. Like... | ||
| I have a hesitancy to retweet something that's on CNN. No, it's the exact same thing with me where it's like five years ago, I would say controversy blows up. | ||
| Washington Post writes an article about it. | ||
| I'm like, I can trust the Washington Post to get the basic details right. | ||
| And I'm not saying like every journalist at the Washington Post is bad. | ||
| I still enjoy their coverage, but I need to now double check to make sure the Washington Post isn't passing along misinformation. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That's really depressing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's hard today too, right? | ||
| Because there's so much fucking information. | ||
| There's so many stories. | ||
| We're not designed for this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you've talked about this. | ||
| It's fucked up. | ||
| It is. | ||
| And it feels like... | ||
| And I think that's also reinforcing this idea of these echo chambers that people fall into because it's easier that way. | ||
| Because we really aren't designed for this influx of information. | ||
| And it's hard. | ||
| When there's a subject that comes up that's controversial and having an... | ||
| A perspective that's outside of the mainstream can be – it's dangerous to your social status. | ||
| It's dangerous to your friend group. | ||
| It's dangerous to – I know people that don't talk to their friends anymore because their friends had different political perspectives than they do. | ||
| And it's just – it's a weird time for that. | ||
| And the window of what's considered mainstream is getting narrower and narrower. | ||
| We should talk about the trans kids stuff. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is like a thing. | ||
| Actually, I might run to the bathroom real quick. | ||
|
unidentified
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Go ahead. | |
| Go to the bathroom. | ||
| You guys need anything from the kitchen? | ||
| No, we're good. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| I'll be right back. | ||
| If you want anything, go grab it. | ||
| Thanks, man. | ||
| All right. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| I'm still nervous about talking about this subject. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's a rough one. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| I think there's a certain amount of cancellations you get just for being here. | ||
| With some dorks. | ||
| The response when Bernie came on here was like one of those moments where I... My gradual loss of faith in mainstream journalism, there's been a step process. | ||
| Well, that was coordinated. | ||
| It was coordinated because they didn't want Bernie to win. | ||
| It's really simple. | ||
| So you think it was like Hillary people? | ||
| 100%. | ||
| They connected Bernie to me. | ||
| They took jokes out of context and they connected Bernie to being a person who supports someone who has abhorrent views. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| They did it because they didn't want Bernie to win. | ||
| If I had done the exact same conversation with the exact same endorsement of Biden or whoever they wanted at the time, they would have applauded it and they would have amplified it. | ||
| They didn't want Bernie to win. | ||
| It was really clear and simple. | ||
| Because you got people that are progressives that were the ones who were attacking that. | ||
| That was not coming from the right. | ||
| It was coming from the left. | ||
| They don't want that guy to win, ever. | ||
| They don't want that guy. | ||
| You can't control him, that's the thing. | ||
| The shit they say about him is so disconnected from anything he's ever done. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But that's what they do. | ||
| I mean, it just shows you that this game of politics, it's not a clean game. | ||
| It's a game of influence, it's a game of lobbyists and special interest groups and massive amounts of money, and it's been dirty forever. | ||
| It's a dirty fucking game. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Alright, so I want to talk about the trans kid stuff. | ||
| This is an issue I've... | ||
| It's sort of what made me a little bit controversial. | ||
| I read a few articles about you in preparation for this, and some of them were horrific. | ||
| I can't believe you would platform a bigot like me. | ||
| I'm really disappointed. | ||
| The way they wrote about you was just such horseshit. | ||
| It was just... | ||
| The way they distorted your views and distorted your positions on things, because I had to go back and read what you originally said, and then go back and read the article again, and it was... | ||
| But this is the thing. | ||
| I think part of this... | ||
| I think there's two things going on. | ||
| One, part of it is going back to what I said before, that a lot of these people were treated horribly. | ||
| They were bullied when they were younger. | ||
| And now they have a chance to be the bully and they're doing that. | ||
| You know, it's almost like they feel like they have to get back. | ||
| They have to get people back. | ||
| There's that. | ||
| But then there's also, there's a very real moment in society today where, and many parts of this are good, where trans people are accepted and not just accepted, they're applauded in a way that's never happened where trans people are accepted and not just accepted, they're applauded in a way that's never happened So anything that goes against that narrative is immediately attacked, even if you're talking about children making life-changing decisions. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, let me give the brief, not to be too pedantic, but I think knowing the literature we have and what the research says is important. | ||
| And I can do that quickly. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So basically, there's a... | ||
| Alright, so you have puberty blockers. | ||
| You go on puberty blockers because that prevents your secondary sex characteristics from developing. | ||
| And for people with gender dysphoria, that can be painful. | ||
| If you feel like a girl and you develop an Adam's apple and facial hair... | ||
| It exacerbates your dysphoria. | ||
| And then after you've been on blockers, you can go on cross-sex hormones. | ||
| That means if you're a natal male, you'll develop some female features and vice versa, blah, blah, blah. | ||
| There's a Dutch clinic in Amsterdam that pioneered this idea of using puberty blockers for this. | ||
| We'd always had puberty blockers because if a girl goes through puberty at seven, That's not good. | ||
| We want to delay that at least a few years. | ||
| And they figured out a protocol and they did some research. | ||
| This is one of the only gender clinics in the world that does good, rich, long-term data. | ||
| And we desperately need long-term data. | ||
| They found that for kids who were gender dysphoric from a very young age, four or five, and Abigail Schreier has talked about some of this, Their view was that gender dysphoria usually goes away in time. | ||
| Usually, it often means you're going to be gay. | ||
| So if it's a boy who likes to wear girls' clothing and say I'm a girl, oftentimes it'll grow up to be a gay male, sometimes it'll grow up to be a trans woman. | ||
| In this clinic's view, if you get to the edge of puberty, puberty starts, and your gender dysphoria has not gone away, It's probably not going to go away ever. | ||
| And you should go on puberty blockers and you should go on hormones. | ||
| So this clinic, the Dutch clinic as it's called, they have a lot of research showing that among their kids, the kids who go through this protocol, they end up well. | ||
| They have good mental health. | ||
| They're doing well as young adults. | ||
| And that tells us something, which is that in some cases we might want kids to go through this. | ||
| This does not tell us that like any kid who feels gender dysphoric or says they want blockers and hormones should go on them. | ||
| And what's happening now is it—and this is not just something Abigail Schreier says. | ||
| This is something clinicians themselves say, is kids are coming out as trans at 13 or 14, much later than they used to. | ||
| And we don't know if the same logic applies or the same research applies to a kid who comes out at 12 and 13 versus a kid who comes out at 5 and has been gender dysphoric for 7 years. | ||
| So what I find incredibly disturbing right now is— These treatments, I'm really in favor of kids who need them getting them. | ||
| I'm opposed to all the Republican laws attempting to ban them. | ||
| I don't want a fucking Tennessee state legislator getting between a doctor and a patient. | ||
| I feel very strongly about that. | ||
| I'll defend that view. | ||
| But it's like a really big deal to put a kid on puberty blockers. | ||
| It's a really big deal. | ||
| You're interfering with the natural process. | ||
| It's a really big deal to put them on cross-sex hormones because those are even less reversible. | ||
| People say blockers are reversible. | ||
| No, they've actually changed their stance on that. | ||
| Yes, the National Health Service in the UK has changed it. | ||
| There's at least some debate there. | ||
| I don't think any journalist or medical group should say there's no debate that it's going to alter your development. | ||
| Yeah, the question is if you then go on cross-sex hormones, do you get whatever you lost back? | ||
| You definitely won't. | ||
| I'd say we don't know. | ||
| Well, how could you? | ||
| How could you know or how could you get it back? | ||
| If you're going through a developmental process that depends upon your body having testosterone and you deny your body testosterone at a normal level for multiple years while you're in puberty and while you're growing, you're not getting that back. | ||
| Well, the theory is you get something similar back by going on estrogen. | ||
| Something similar back... | ||
| Yeah, no, I'm saying we don't know if it's equivalent, but I'm saying... | ||
| No, no, no, no. | ||
| We're getting confused here. | ||
| When you are a natal male, and then you go on hormone blockers, and you go through puberty on hormone blockers, and then you decide that you're going to detransition, for sure your developmental cycle is going to be altered forever. | ||
| Oh, if you detransition. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the theory is... | ||
| If you decide to go back to being a male, you're not going to be the same person who you would have been if you had testosterone through the whole process. | ||
| That's absolutely true. | ||
| The theory is if the kids are well assessed and they go through the Dutch protocol where they felt that way since they were three, they're probably not going to change their mind. | ||
| We don't see the thing is like it's it's changing the mind is like what does that mean? | ||
| You know, it's it's like you can't have There's not a set. | ||
| It's not like you're on fire. | ||
| No, you're not on fire You know I'm saying like it's not a one or a zero. | ||
| It's not you you This is it's such a giant deal Like when you say that someone's changing their mind you have to say okay, what are the influences and Like, what is around this child that's making this child? | ||
| Is this just coming from the child's being? | ||
| And this is how they feel? | ||
| It's how they've always felt? | ||
| Do they have people around them that are telling them that this would be the right thing to do for them? | ||
| Like, people are very malleable. | ||
| They're incredibly malleable. | ||
| Yeah, but traditionally this is something that manifests at two or three years old and often in such a deep-seated way. | ||
| I think there's a subset of kids who just are always going to feel that way. | ||
| Yes, for sure. | ||
| And we have some evidence that the hormones they receive in utero are a little bit different. | ||
| No, we agree. | ||
| We agree that there's a subset. | ||
| The question is... | ||
| When can you decide to make that leap? | ||
| Should you not be an adult with a fully formed brain before you decide to make that life-changing decision? | ||
| I mean someone had a joke on Twitter that you don't let a six-year-old decide their outfit. | ||
| Why would you let them decide their gender? | ||
| So, the reason I disagree on that is I think for kids who from a very young age feel that way, it's not going to go away. | ||
| The evidence we have suggests it's not going to go away. | ||
| But it might not go away. | ||
| I think... | ||
| But you know what I'm saying? | ||
| The evidence that we have is people that have already transitioned. | ||
| The evidence about people transitioning, it's like... | ||
| There's such an alarmingly high suicide rate, and then you have to think, like, why is that suicide rate so high? | ||
| It's like in the 40%, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Not 40%. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Does it get inflated? | ||
| It is a very high suicidal ideation rate. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Everyone agrees with that. | ||
| The question of how high and which studies are good and bad. | ||
| And this is part of the reason we have to be careful about it. | ||
| Both because we don't want to deny kids relief from dysphoria who might be suicidal and, which gets talked about less... | ||
| You don't want to put a kid on a massive dose of exogenous hormones when they're suicidal. | ||
| That's not a good idea either. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Imagine if, and this is a real imagine, because people that are trans, that support trans people, these are their people, right? | ||
| This is how they feel about it, and they see a child, and in that child that is trans, they see themselves, and they want to support that. | ||
| What if there was a method What if there's a genetic method, whatever, that cured dysphoria? | ||
| Cured it. | ||
| And you would just accept your biological sex. | ||
| Do you think people would be supportive of that? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| They would view it, they would use the term genocide. | ||
| It's sort of similar like if you said there was like a cure for autism or something. | ||
| I think it's very sensitive and it's viewed as an identity rather than like a... | ||
| Do you think that if there's a cure for autism that people wouldn't embrace that cure? | ||
| No, I think some people would, but I think other people would say that you're sort of, in an ableist way, destroying an element of humanity that would otherwise produce amazing things, even if they're neuroatypical. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You're on Twitter a lot. | ||
| I am on Twitter a lot. | ||
| It's obvious. | ||
| No, and I think there's- I mean, the idea that, like, look, obviously some things- I mean, Elon has said that he is on the spectrum, right? | ||
| He said he's got Asperger's. | ||
| Obviously, it's been insanely beneficial, whatever the fuck he's got. | ||
| Yeah, it can bring benefits being on the spectrum. | ||
| Massive. | ||
| Massive benefits. | ||
| So are you opposed to kids, and I ask this as someone who thinks this needs to be an open discussion, but do you basically think kids should never go on blockers? | ||
| Are there cases where you'd be comfortable with it? | ||
| It's such a loaded question. | ||
| And you would have to say, well, what are those cases? | ||
| And who are those people? | ||
| And how do you make that decision? | ||
| But how do you make that decision? | ||
| And who makes that decision? | ||
| Is it the parents? | ||
| Is it the child? | ||
| Because in some places, children as young as 10... | ||
| There was a ruling recently... | ||
| I think they were saying that as early as 10 years old, if the parents disagree with the child affirming its gender identity, that the parents will no longer have custody of the children. | ||
| Meaning the state can come in? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is just... | ||
| There's so much legal shit that's attached to all this stuff. | ||
| And then there's parents that were, you know, there's a guy who went to jail in Canada because he refused to call his biological daughter a he. | ||
| He kept calling her a she and they arrested him. | ||
| What about for you? | ||
| That sounds crazy though, right? | ||
| It does. | ||
| I don't think that's anything we should gloss over. | ||
| No, no, I just don't know the details about it so I wouldn't want to. | ||
| We could find it. | ||
| Jamie. | ||
| The guy got arrested in Canada because he refused to... | ||
| He was misgendering his now son. | ||
| He kept calling him a her and they arrested him. | ||
|
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But Canada's a fucking wacky place. | |
| It really is. | ||
| No, but I want to press on this. | ||
| Two-year-olds who, from the time they could talk, insist they're not the sex people think they are. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| BC father arrested held in jail for repeatedly violating court orders over child's gender transition therapy. | ||
| He's alleged to have revealed information about his child's mental health, medical status, and treatments and gave information that could reveal the family's identity. | ||
| Canada, I think, has more weird laws about what you can disclose and stuff like that. | ||
| That's different, though. | ||
| This is not as simple as him not saying that she's a he or, you know, that he is a he. | ||
| He was speaking publicly about it. | ||
| So this seems like they arrested him because he was speaking publicly about it. | ||
| I mean, I still think that he should obviously still be able to speak publicly about stuff. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So two years old? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think a two-year-old has any idea what's going on. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| Do you have children? | ||
| No. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Two-year-olds, they don't have any idea what's going on. | ||
| But I'm not saying a two-year-old who says that once. | ||
| I'm saying a two-year-old who, from the time they could talk, has insisted this about themselves, and then you get to 10 or 11 in the onset of puberty, and they've consistently identified the other way that whole span. | ||
| Is that even a think? | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| So when I talk about the Dutch protocol, this is traditionally what gender dysphoric kids have been like. | ||
| And this is what Schreier talks about in her book. | ||
| From two to four, they're very dysphoric and it never goes away. | ||
| I don't want to force a kid who's identified as a girl since age two or three or four to go through male puberty. | ||
| Those are the cases I'm more comfortable with. | ||
| That makes more sense. | ||
| We could be assured that this was never going to change and that this is just how that child is and that they're never going to vary. | ||
| But what if what you were saying before, if they go through puberty and they just become a gay man? | ||
| Yeah, but I'm saying, so the research the Dutch clinic has and this Canadian clinic has, and this is all controversial, people will disagree with it, suggests that the longer a kid is dysphoric as a child. | ||
| But isn't this a gender transition clinic? | ||
| No, but these are clinics that, in my view, took a careful approach, and they were conservative about it, and they did not go willy-nilly into this. | ||
| Is this under dispute? | ||
| Do other people disagree with this? | ||
| On that, no. | ||
| If anything, they get criticized for being—one of them was shut down. | ||
| I wrote a piece about it. | ||
| It was shut down because he was viewed as too conservative. | ||
| Too conservative in their approach to gender transition? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they shut him down? | ||
| Yeah, they basically—there were false rumors about him spread, and the clinic was shut down. | ||
| This is just—this is in Holland? | ||
| No, this is the Canadian, the Toronto one. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| Ken Zucker, yeah. | ||
| Okay, but the other study that you were talking about? | ||
| Amsterdam, yeah. | ||
| Amsterdam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's one of those things where I guess it depends entirely upon the case and the situation, right? | ||
| I mean, that's really what it depends upon. | ||
| It's going to be very different in one case than it will be in another case. | ||
| But there's clearly people that are trans. | ||
| It's clear. | ||
| It's really clear. | ||
| Yeah, and some of them have felt that way since kids. | ||
| That's why, yeah. | ||
| The thing is, like, to make that decision that's going to affect them for the rest of their life while they're two is like, man, are you sure? | ||
| Well, but, okay, so you're not making that decision at two. | ||
| You're not making any medical decisions. | ||
| You're doing hormone blockers. | ||
| At two? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| When are you doing it? | ||
| When puberty starts. | ||
| Okay, so before puberty. | ||
| You had a guest on who I disagree with a lot of stuff. | ||
| He said the one thing I thought you got wrong was you said kids had hormonal interventions at like four or five. | ||
| They never do. | ||
| When do they start doing it? | ||
| When puberty starts is basically when. | ||
| So 11, 12? | ||
| Yeah, 10, 11. It depends. | ||
| Even then. | ||
| So I'm off by a few years, but doesn't that seem crazy that an 11-year-old can decide their fate for the rest of their life? | ||
| To me, whether or not it sounds crazy depends on if this kid has felt that way in a stable way since age two. | ||
| My view is that's better. | ||
| You know what I think? | ||
| I think guys like you and I having this discussion is insane. | ||
| The amount of data that there's available that people like you and I are trying to figure out whether it's right or wrong, whether you agree with this or not agree with this, there's not enough information. | ||
| But who is doing these studies? | ||
| No one. | ||
| Hardly anyone. | ||
| How long has this been discussed and debated? | ||
| What's the data? | ||
| So the Dutch clinic, their data suggests these kids do pretty well, but these are the kids I'm talking about. | ||
| From a very young age, they're dysphoric. | ||
| What are the numbers? | ||
| How many kids have they done this with? | ||
| Oh, I mean hundreds at this point. | ||
| And they have a diagnostic approach that's pretty conservative. | ||
| The data we have for kids who come out later as teenagers, we have no data. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| When you say the data we have for kids who come out as teenagers, how do we not know that they haven't felt like this their whole life? | ||
| They live in a conservative household. | ||
| They haven't been able to express themselves. | ||
| They feel suppressed. | ||
| And then finally they hit their rebellious teen years and they go, hey, you know what the problem is? | ||
| I should have been a boy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So my view is that's happening with some of them. | ||
| I think in some cases it could be something they repressed for a while or they didn't have the language. | ||
| I basically think like the cases like Abigail Schreier writes about, I've seen some of them. | ||
| It obviously happens sometimes. | ||
| We're operating in such a vacuum of data. | ||
| We have no idea how often the sort of social contagion thing happens, how often suppressing it for a while happens. | ||
| The social contagion thing is very contentious, right? | ||
| Incredibly. | ||
| This is the kind of thing we're talking about, like how journalism is dysfunctional right now. | ||
| If you even suggest this ever happen, I got put on a list of A sensible anti-LGBT bigots by GLAAD. I'm on a list, like an enemies list, because I've written about this in a way that doesn't entirely discount that possibility because I've talked to kids who've said it happened to them. | ||
| Well, people have detransitioned. | ||
| Yeah, and they've said this happened to me. | ||
| Yeah, it's not, I mean... | ||
| It's not made up. | ||
| No. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| And to devalue their experiences and to only value the experiences of the people that have happily transitioned, to me, It's horrible. | ||
|
unidentified
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It is. | |
| And you can do both. | ||
| You can do both. | ||
| You can do both. | ||
| We need to also acknowledge that there's 20-year-olds who transitioned and are thriving. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| We do. | ||
| So last week I wrote a long post. | ||
| There's a website called Science-Based Medicine. | ||
| And it's like you talked with Colin Wright about how skeptic communities and atheist communities have gotten a little bit corrupted by ideology. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| These guys ran this really bad article basically telling everyone. | ||
| And what pisses me off the most is parents reading this. | ||
| They're saying the evidence we have on blockers is good. | ||
| The evidence we have on hormones for kids is good. | ||
| We don't have good evidence on any of this. | ||
| And I feel badly for parents of kids trying to work through this issue in the absence of any good evidence because they are basically, in some cases, effectively being lied to. | ||
| If you're a journalist and you say, we have really solid evidence on this, that's not true. | ||
| And Multiple governments in Europe have looked into the evidence and they've all come away saying we don't have enough here. | ||
| So I just think we need to be pretty conservative about this issue until we know more, which we don't yet. | ||
| What do you think the motivation for people to write articles where they pretend that there's a lot of evidence? | ||
| What do you think the motivation is? | ||
| I'm not prepared to make the direct comparison to like the satanic sex abuse panic, but people want to protect kids. | ||
| And occasionally we have these like moral panics of like all these parents are hurting their kids. | ||
| All these day care providers are hurting their kids. | ||
| You know, for understandable reasons, humans go crazy about kids sometimes. | ||
| And I think there's a subset of kids who are really trans and need access to these hormones. | ||
| There's a subset of kids where there's other mental health stuff going on. | ||
| And I've quoted some of the top clinicians in the country, including the head of the United States Professional Association for Transgender Health, Erica Anderson. | ||
| She's trans herself. | ||
| She'd be a great guest. | ||
| I know people always tell you who you should have on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| She herself has seen situations that really worry her because the clinicians themselves are not following the rules they're supposed to follow before they give kids blockers or hormones. | ||
| And that could have really dire consequences. | ||
| So what's the solution to all this? | ||
| Because this is essentially over the last couple decades, and more so over the last decade, this is coming to the forefront of the public consciousness. | ||
| This is a topic that is discussed constantly. | ||
| And now with the introduction of Olympic athletes, now we have the first female weightlifter from New Zealand who was on the team that was a male. | ||
| And we have all these questions about this kind of stuff. | ||
| Like, this is... | ||
| It's been around forever. | ||
| Like, who was it? | ||
| Renee Richards? | ||
| Is that who it was? | ||
| The tennis player? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, we've had trans people for a long time, but it hasn't been, like, a primary discussion. | ||
| I mean, a primary subject of conversation when it comes to, like, the use of bathrooms, you know, sports. | ||
| Like, the things, the discussions that we're having today on them, it's like everything's escalated. | ||
| I think the first thing to realize is that A, trans people have been treated horribly over the years, and B, in 99% of incidents, like, situations, there's not much to discuss. | ||
| People should be treated the way they want to be treated. | ||
| There's a small subset of issues that you've talked about on the show, and one of them is kids. | ||
| It's obviously different. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If you put a 10-year-old on puberty blockers and then hormones, you are changing their body forever. | ||
| And you're doing that with a kid who's not... | ||
| It's different. | ||
| If it's 25, like 25-year-olds need to make their own decisions about their own lives. | ||
| There's a different set of ethical issues that need to be discussed openly. | ||
| And it disturbs the hell out of me... | ||
| Not just the treatment I've received, but the treatment other people have received just for trying to say this is actually a complicated issue. | ||
| It needs to be treated, it needs to be reported on the way science reporters report on other issues. | ||
| So, you know, this piece I wrote about... | ||
| A website like Science Based Medicine, in most other contexts, they're the go-to for the skeptical, careful, rigorous look at this issue. | ||
| Watching websites like that just sort of blow in the breeze and take the right position so that people don't get mad at them disturbs me. | ||
| And I'm worried about what we're going to say 10 or 20 years from now about what we're doing now. | ||
| Things like this, if you're a generalist, like I'm not sure what the background of the people from science-based medicine is, but I would imagine that anything like this, that you're going to cover a complex, nuanced, multifaceted subject that has broad implications for our society, for children, for adults, for fucking corporations, for everybody. | ||
| You gotta know a lot. | ||
| This is not something you can have a cursory examination of, and I think that there's a real motivation that a lot of people online have, is to give in to the crowd. | ||
| Like, whatever the crowd wants, placate them, say what they want you to say, express yourself in a way that you think is going to be well received by the orthodoxy. | ||
| I think what makes it more complicated is that if a journalist came to me and was like, I want to write about youth transition, I could give them a list of sources to get quotes from. | ||
| Some of them would say there's no issues here, the data's great. | ||
| Some of them would say kids should never transition. | ||
| Some would be in the middle. | ||
| So you can cherry pick. | ||
| And these guys, in my view, cherry pick. | ||
| They only consulted sources that told them what they wanted to hear and that would shield them from a lot of criticism online. | ||
| I think that's a dangerous way to go approach a genuine scientific controversy. | ||
| I think when you're writing an article like that, you've got to come to this conclusion somewhere along the line. | ||
| This is so nuanced. | ||
| It really is, yeah. | ||
| But even saying it's nuanced gets you put on the fucking enemies list. | ||
| Well, it's stupid because for some people it's not nuanced. | ||
| Here's the thing about nuance. | ||
| We're talking about millions of humans, right? | ||
| When you have millions of humans, you have a great variety of different circumstances. | ||
| Different personalities and different mindsets and different biology. | ||
| People vary. | ||
| We vary widely. | ||
| Now, if you could get one person and that one person, you could talk to that one person and get a real clear understanding of who they are, you'd have less nuance. | ||
| You'd have an understanding of who they are, and you have an understanding of why this is so important to them, and then you can make a clear-cut distinction. | ||
| But I think that has to be done in an objective way across the board. | ||
| I mean, with examining this kind of an issue, it's very complex. | ||
| It's very complex. | ||
| And if you're not a trans person and you're talking to someone or talking about things like trans people, I think we all have to recognize that we don't even understand what that feels like. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a gap there. | ||
| There's like an experiential gap. | ||
| And that's why I think anyone who writes about this issue, like I've interviewed trans people, and if you do, you come away feeling like this wasn't a choice for them. | ||
| This wasn't some flippant thing like, oh, I'm going to try being a chick for a while. | ||
| It's like, to me, when it comes to adults, you'd sort of have to be an asshole to be like, I don't think this person should be able to transition. | ||
| It's so important to them. | ||
| Well, you can tattoo your eyeballs, right? | ||
| You can do whatever the fuck you want, right? | ||
| You can literally do anything you want. | ||
| You can split your tongue down the middle. | ||
| Why wouldn't you be able to change your gender? | ||
| Like, you should be able to do whatever you want. | ||
| I hope there's going to come a point in time where what we think of when we say transitioning... | ||
| Can be done at a chromosomal or a genetic level. | ||
| You told Debra So that. | ||
| I was listening to that. | ||
| I think it would be amazing. | ||
| How good would it feel for these people to physically become an actual woman with ovaries, with a vagina, with a womb? | ||
| The whole deal. | ||
| I feel like if I could take a pill and be a woman for two days, that would be fascinating. | ||
| How many guys would you fuck? | ||
| That's actually an interesting question. | ||
| You would do that. | ||
| If you had a chance to see what it was like to be a woman, you'd do it. | ||
| I would let my wife fuck me. | ||
| With a strap-on, you mean? | ||
| No, no, with her actual penis. | ||
| I was like, you gotta be a man for two days. | ||
| Oh, you switch it. | ||
| Yeah, you get to be me for two days, and I get to be you for two days. | ||
| That'd be a good reality show. | ||
| Gender swap. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I bet I'd suck a lot of dick those two days. | |
| Jamie, how much dick would you suck, be honest? | ||
| Depends. | ||
| I haven't been thinking about this, I don't know. | ||
| It's a pretty intellectual question. | ||
| I bet she'd make me. | ||
| I think it would be incredible just to be a woman for a couple days would be incredible just to get a perspective of what it feels like to have those hormones rushing through your body. | ||
| Just to feel like to want to wear those weird shoes and to be into purses and just to look at things, you know, like serious issues from a woman's perspective versus a male's perspective because... | ||
| You know, we try to be understanding and try to, like, have open communication, have conversations with each other and figure out how you feel, how I feel, but there is no way a man understands what it's like. | ||
| No, you can't intellectualize it. | ||
| No. | ||
| You had Carol Hoeven on, and she talked about hormones, and I think there's been really interesting stuff written about trans people who transition, who are like, I live my whole life as a man, here's what it's like to be a woman, here's what it's like to be a man. | ||
| That shit's fascinating. | ||
| If there was a totally reversible way to experience that, I would totally do it. | ||
| I have spoken to quite a few female to male trans people, and one of the things that you come out of that with is that there's an understanding of the impact of testosterone that they just really did not know. | ||
| They thought that men were just dicks because it's easy to be a dick, and then they go, oh, this is just- No, we're literally poisoned by a hormone in our brains. | ||
| That's forced people to go to war and forced people to try to conquer resources. | ||
| Dude, I want to conquer resources so badly. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| What's your favorite resource to conquer? | ||
| I was going to make a Settlers of Catan joke, but I think you're... | ||
| I'm a nerd. | ||
| I'm on a show listened to by jocks, so I think it would go over their heads. | ||
| Are these shows listened to by jocks, you think? | ||
| I think you have a pretty jockish eye. | ||
| Well, maybe both. | ||
| It's a wide range of humans because there's a wide range of guests. | ||
| So I think there's some people that, like, when I have on an MMA fighter, their eyes glaze over and they just fast forward through that one, skip it, and go to the next one. | ||
| My eyes would glaze over, but in the Carol Hoeven interview, you talked about that in a way that made me want to, like, fucking... | ||
| Yeah, that was Rose Namajunas. | ||
| The preparation for a fight. | ||
| Also that woman, Rose Namajunas, who's not even remotely brutish in any way. | ||
| She's a sweetheart of a person. | ||
| But she, like, becomes a beast in the... | ||
| She just becomes a... | ||
| She's a fighter. | ||
| But she's not in any way manly. | ||
| She has zero man... | ||
| She's just brave and courageous. | ||
| And the way I describe fighting is high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences. | ||
| And that's what people don't understand that have never engaged in it or trained in it. | ||
| You don't know what it really is. | ||
| And this idea that all MMA is is just people beating the fuck out of each other. | ||
| That is some of it. | ||
| It is that way for some people, but that's... | ||
| It's just like... | ||
| I think we would all be better off if we had an understanding of all the different types of people there are out there. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| I was very... | ||
| I mean, I'll always be nerdy and awkward, but until age 10, I like... | ||
| Video games, really nerdy stuff. | ||
| And I... Yeah. | ||
| like cavemen and whoever's strongest wins I think actually especially in football because people associate that with just being strong but it's so um tactically rich and when you understand what makes you know New England so Tom Brady a brilliant quarterback yeah you have to think so quickly and and I when I was listening to talk about MMA it seemed like there's some similarity there of like having to assess the situation so quickly in a way no one else could yeah that's that there's a lot of that to it it's | ||
| It's also a way of living your life in this really exciting, dangerous way that's so appealing to some people. | ||
| And I don't know, I mean, we're talking about the warrior gene and all the various genes. | ||
| I don't know what it is about people that leads some people to want to take risks. | ||
| One of my daughters is a big risk taker. | ||
| She's always been like that. | ||
| She was little. | ||
| She wanted to go on the highest monkey bar. | ||
| She's just a risk-taking kid. | ||
| She has that thing that makes her want that thrill, and some people want to do rock climbing, and they want to do hang gliding, and they want to do all that kind of wild shit. | ||
| And I don't know what that is. | ||
| But I do know that we also need computer coders. | ||
| We also need people that are studying philosophy. | ||
| And sometimes they're the same people. | ||
| There's a lot of people that actually study philosophy that are also martial artists, which is kind of interesting. | ||
| And one of them is John Donaher. | ||
| One of the most brilliant people I've ever spoken to ever in my life who is the greatest jiu-jitsu coach alive who was a professor at Columbia. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He was a philosophy professor. | ||
| I could never... | ||
| I play a little basketball and I run. | ||
| I can never get into lifting or any strength training. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe that's a genetic thing, but it's not supposed to be pleasant, right? | ||
| Have you done it? | ||
| When I was in high school, I went with my friends. | ||
| How old are you now? | ||
| 37. You should try it. | ||
| Here's the reason. | ||
| As you get older... | ||
| My body's gonna like melt into lard basically, right? | ||
| There's no way around it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| As you get older, your body deteriorates without weightlifting. | ||
| Like it's really, it's considerable. | ||
| It's like, it's similar to, you know what happens when you get in a cast? | ||
| Have you ever had a broken bone? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| The atrophy basically. | ||
| That's what your whole body's doing. | ||
| My body's already doing it because I treat it so poorly. | ||
| But if you just strength trained twice a week, just lifted weights twice, the quality of your life would improve dramatically. | ||
| For how much time are we talking? | ||
| Half hour? | ||
| 40 minutes? | ||
| That's all you need. | ||
| Can I check Twitter on my phone while we do it? | ||
| You can check in between sets for sure. | ||
| Because cardiovascular exercise is really important for heart health and also good for your emotional health. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Cardiovascular exercise for me is a gigantic cure. | ||
| Not cure. | ||
| It's a remedy for any time I'm feeling like shit. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| If I feel depressed or if I'm just down or just too many things are bothering me, I just do a good cardio session. | ||
| And it doesn't have to be anything crazy. | ||
| Just a good session on a bike or an elliptical machine or a stair machine or something like that. | ||
| During the pandemic especially. | ||
| There are moments where going for a three-mile run even just felt life-saving. | ||
| If I couldn't do this, I would go crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's just good for you because I think a lot of the anxiety that people have is... | ||
| There's tension and anxiety that exists in the human body that is a remnant of the past and it's a part of the fact that whenever you face stress thousands and thousands of years ago, that stress most likely came in the form of violence. | ||
| It came in the form of a predator trying to eat you or a neighboring tribe that was trying to attack your village and so our sense of stress Is directly connected to physical exercise and adrenaline and anxiety. | ||
| If you could just burn that off, you have a much healthier perspective on what the actual problem is, and it allows you to look at things with a clear view. | ||
| But what makes us such an interesting species is, like, we can accommodate both, like, the big burly guy who could, like, take down the mammoth, but then there's, like, the dealmaker who could, like, convincingly be like, oh, you should give me some of the meat, we'll give them some of the meat. | ||
| There's, like, these sort of schemers, and we have room for all these different types of people. | ||
| Well, tool creation. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| I mean, tool creation is a direct result of creativity. | ||
| You could be, like, this puny little guy, but you make the best spear in the tribe, and then you get status from it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, the apex of that is Oppenheimer. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Destroyer of worlds. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, a direct student of Einstein. | ||
| And he goes on to quote the Bhagavad Gita when he's blowing up a fucking, punching a hole through space and time. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, and then above Oppenheimer, you have podcasters. | ||
| The highest of the high. | ||
| How are they the highest of the high? | ||
| What the fuck are you saying? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Hmm. | ||
| People creating things, it's really fascinating what the human animal is, right? | ||
| Because we are, we share the same space as all the other creatures, but we're the only ones that alter our environment in this radical, significant way. | ||
| And we can balance out any perceived or all differences in physical strength, in status, and we can do it with a tool, like a gun. | ||
| That's one of the scariest things about gun violence. | ||
| You could just, this person, I don't like them anymore, bang, now they go away. | ||
| I mean, you basically, with a finger, like the easiest thing, like I took my kids to the gun range, because we're in Texas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's what we do out here. | ||
| Wait, that's where we are? | ||
| Right now? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| You wrote a book. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| And you're on a podcast. | ||
| I'm Jewish. | ||
| Are they allowed in Texas? | ||
| Yes! | ||
| There's a lot of them here. | ||
| L'chaim. | ||
| L'chaim. | ||
| Especially here in Austin. | ||
| There's a ton of them. | ||
| But the... | ||
| I see the headline now, Joe Rogan says there's too many Jews in Austin. | ||
| I didn't say there's too many. | ||
| I love Jewish people. | ||
| How dare you, sir? | ||
| My point is, my 11-year-old, I was teaching her how to shoot a pistol safely. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| So she is holding this gun by herself, and she pulls the trigger. | ||
| Boom! | ||
| Boom! | ||
| And she's holding onto this gun and hitting this target. | ||
| She's 11. How much power does she have in that little finger? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That little finger can annihilate the biggest human being alive. | ||
| Bang, bang, bang, and then they're dead. | ||
| That's the weirdest shift in power, the weirdest ability. | ||
| There's not an animal on the planet that has anything remotely similar. | ||
| I have an internet friend. | ||
| I've known him forever. | ||
| He's sort of a prepper type. | ||
| He runs a prepping website, and he lives 40 minutes from here. | ||
| And I'm going to his house on Wednesday, and we're shooting. | ||
| Other than skeet shooting at camp, I've never shot a gun. | ||
| Skeet shooting is fun. | ||
| Yeah, but that's like a little puny. | ||
| That's not like bullshooting, right? | ||
| It's a light shotgun. | ||
| This guy has a gun range in his backyard that he's going to set up for us. | ||
| That's so Texas. | ||
| It is. | ||
| Do you think if you had to gun to head and you had to choose either humans are going to destroy the planet or we're going to find some technological fix and clean up the mess, which do you think is more likely? | ||
| I think it's more likely we fix it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, I do. | ||
| Because I think if you look at the trends over time, right, if you read any of Pinker's work or if you look at just the charts and statistics about violence and murder and rape and all the horrible things that people are capable of, it's way less prevalent now than it was thousands of years ago. | ||
| It's moving in that direction. | ||
| The problem, I was going to say, the problem is that we could literally annihilate the entire planet with one wrong event, right? | ||
| We have that ability that, because of Oppenheimer and everybody after him, that we can literally nuke the planet multiple times over. | ||
| That's what scares me, is a mistake. | ||
| Or what really scares me more than anything is natural disasters. | ||
| I was going to say, I think there's these runaway climate change scenarios where it's supposed to be 2 degrees, but our models aren't accurate, and then it's 7 degrees, and that just destroys everything. | ||
| I was in Vegas yesterday, and it was 117 degrees. | ||
| It broke a record. | ||
| But it's a dry heat, though. | ||
| Oh, it's so nice. | ||
| Dude, it's like the inside of my fucking sauna. | ||
| 117 degrees is bizarre. | ||
| We got off the plane and I was like, wow, this is wild. | ||
| And it gets worse, right? | ||
| What if it gets to 125, 132? | ||
| What if it gets to an intolerable place where you can't go outside? | ||
| You'll die. | ||
| There was an article that I read yesterday about Lake Mead. | ||
| Is it Lake Mead? | ||
| They're worried that they're going to have to limit water to people because it's like... | ||
| It's a water supply to all these different areas. | ||
| And they showed in the images the water line where it normally is. | ||
| It looks like a tub. | ||
| You know how a tub has like... | ||
| Grime or whatever, yeah. | ||
| It's like fucking 30 feet lower than it should be. | ||
| It's crazy when you look at it. | ||
| I find that shit overwhelming. | ||
| And my response, as a journalist, my response should be like, I should understand the shit and write about it. | ||
| Yeah, here it is. | ||
| Oh, Jesus, that's so fucking depressing. | ||
| This is the Hoover Dam, but either way, you get a chance to see what it looked like in Lake Mead. | ||
| That's what I looked at. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's nuts, man. | ||
| I mean, that's a lot more than 30 feet. | ||
| That's really high. | ||
| The line where the water used to be. | ||
| Lake Mead hits lowest water levels in history amid severe drought in the West. | ||
| This is on ABC News and it's worth, if you're listening to this only, it's worth Googling just to look at the bit. | ||
| Or use DuckDuckGo like I do. | ||
| What's the other one, Boingo? | ||
| I get upset when I can't find something on Google, and then I go to DuckDuckGo and I find it like that, and I'm like, what are you doing? | ||
| Are you guys curating data in a way where you're hiding shit? | ||
| I'm enamored with this idea that the kind of features a species needs to take over a whole planet and tame it the way we do... | ||
| You also, like, you have the seeds of your own destruction and that everyone wants to think that, like, species get to a certain point and they send spaceships out and they colonize other planets. | ||
| But, like, what if the entire universe is just littered with, like, dead civilizations that destroyed themselves? | ||
| Because I think I'm less optimistic than you and I sort of, I worry we're headed in that direction. | ||
| Well, one thing that we can look at, and there's nothing to do with self-destruction, we can look at the history of species on this planet, and 90-whatever percent of them that ever existed are gone. | ||
| Yeah, dude. | ||
| They just phased out. | ||
| I always find it weird that we're trying to stop that from happening, too. | ||
| They're like, no, not the dodo bird. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Joe Rogan calls for extinction of dodo. | ||
| Re-extinction, yeah. | ||
| Re-extinction. | ||
| It's not that I think that they should die off, but I think that we have this sort of reluctance to let anything die off anymore. | ||
| So the natural process, like say if human beings didn't exist, even if we're looking at, you know, how long have humans been here? | ||
| Half a million years. | ||
| Go back a million years. | ||
| Things are still dying off. | ||
| They just didn't make it. | ||
| It was a shit design. | ||
| It's like the Yugo. | ||
| They just didn't make it. | ||
| Whatever these species are. | ||
| But now that we're alive, we think of ourselves as the curators of the Earth, and we don't want anything to die off on our watch. | ||
| This is the difference between... | ||
| People have done hallucinogens. | ||
| And people like me who are too neurotic to do them. | ||
| Why are you too neurotic to do hallucinogens? | ||
| I've had fucking panic attacks from smoking weed. | ||
| I'd like to do them. | ||
| Because you smoke too much weed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you think I should do... | ||
| I asked Sam Harris the same thing. | ||
| Because I need that... | ||
| I want to reach that point where I'm less scared of death and less tied up in my own very fleeting existence. | ||
| And I want to be like, maybe humans won't be around forever, whatever. | ||
| Well, they're not going to be around forever. | ||
| No, I know we're not, but I'm scared of that and I want to be less scared of that. | ||
| But I feel like... | ||
| I've done like half doses of shrooms and it was great, but it wasn't- What's a half dose? | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| I just, whatever I was supposed to take, I took half of it. | ||
| I laughed my ass off with my friends. | ||
| It was great. | ||
| Oh, so that's a psychedelic. | ||
| That's a good example of, that's probably more than a microdose because a microdose is- Yeah, it was a micro. | ||
| Microdose is essentially, you take it to, it's like the threshold of perception, like right when you can understand that you're on that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's when you're like, oh, I think I'm on it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| But you still can function normally and behave better and actually have better visual acuity. | ||
| There's some benefits to that. | ||
| But a good little tiny dose of mushrooms is what I always recommend to someone who's scared because it makes you relax. | ||
| It alleviates anxiety, you feel better, and you feel very loving. | ||
| Dude, both times I did it was with high school friends at their bachelor weekends. | ||
| It had all the effects weed is supposed to have. | ||
| Everything was hilarious. | ||
| This won't be funny after, but we came up with a sitcom called Shrewmates. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's about roommates who are on shrooms at the time. | |
| It was hilarious. | ||
| Dude, it's a good name. | ||
| It made me laugh. | ||
| That's a good name. | ||
| You got paranoid from weed. | ||
| I've been paranoid from weed. | ||
| No, no, not paranoid. | ||
| Panic attack. | ||
| Feeling existence wasn't real. | ||
| Totally dissociated. | ||
| Yeah, you got too high, buddy. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| So I just need to dose that shit a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, you need a hit. | ||
| This is weed. | ||
| Ready? | ||
| No, that's on a vape pen. | ||
| This was in 2005. It was a vape pen? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no, no. | |
| I'm saying these days you can take one hit from a vape pen and you're good. | ||
| Just take a hit of a joint. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| This was really weak. | ||
| I think that was my problem. | ||
| This was not good weed, so I felt like I had to smoke a lot of it. | ||
| Oh, well, never smoke a lot of it if you don't smoke a lot. | ||
| The thing about weed is you develop a tolerance, but if you don't develop a tolerance, if you don't have a tolerance and you try to smoke a half a joint with somebody, you're going to go into the grave. | ||
| I mean, figuratively. | ||
| It's not going to kill you, but you're going to feel like you're dead or you want to be dead or you want to stop existing. | ||
| So for a neurotic Jew who had a panic attack from weed and did a half dose of shrooms, what's the next hard drug I should try? | ||
| Well... | ||
| I don't think you should try anything. | ||
| I'm not going to give you any recommendations. | ||
| Dr. Joe. | ||
| Dr. Joe is out. | ||
| I've left the building. | ||
| But me, fellow human being, I always say just a little bit of mushrooms. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I think a little bit of mushrooms is nice. | ||
| It always makes me feel like I have an enhanced perspective. | ||
| It makes me feel so friendly. | ||
| I just want everybody to be happy. | ||
| That's how I felt during the Shrewmates night. | ||
| I think we have a real chance of fixing culture if mushrooms become prevalent and legal. | ||
| Get the head of Hamas together with the Israeli president. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Dose them both. | ||
| Well, it's going to take more than that. | ||
| You're going to have to dose the entire population. | ||
| And it's not going to be a dose thing. | ||
| It's going to be a long, slow hike out of hell. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Because people have to change their perceptions on every aspect of the way they think about each other and look at each other and treat each other. | ||
| But... | ||
| That's what a lot of people think the history of religion really was about. | ||
| It was about primitive people discovering psychedelics. | ||
| They eat the wrong mushroom and then they build a belief system around it? | ||
| They eat mushrooms and then they hide these psychedelics in religious stories. | ||
| Do you ever read John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom on the Cross? | ||
| I have not. | ||
| It's an amazing book. | ||
| I don't know if it's accurate, but John Marco Allegro was a biblical scholar and a linguist And he also was an ordained minister, and he was the only one on the Dead Sea Scrolls translation group. | ||
| There was a bunch of scholars that were translating the Dead Sea Scrolls, and he was the only one that was agnostic. | ||
| Because as a theologian, as he was studying religions and looking at the histories of these things, He started realizing that so many of these were connected by more and more ancient stories, and he started becoming very skeptical and became agnostic. | ||
| But all the other people in the group were very religious. | ||
| But he was still an ordained minister. | ||
| And he got to a point where he studied it for 14 years and he wrote a book. | ||
| And this book was The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. | ||
| And I believe the book was bought up by the Catholic Church. | ||
| And then I bought some copies of it that were used online. | ||
| But then a guy named Jan Ervin released it. | ||
| He republished it and released it. | ||
| So you can get it now. | ||
| But it's a fascinating book. | ||
| And in this book, he said basically all of Christianity was most likely about psychedelic mushroom rituals and fertility rituals. | ||
| That fertility rituals were a gigantic part because, you know, infant mortality was very high. | ||
| I mean, you got an infection, you died, you broke your leg, you died, you're likely to die. | ||
| Most people didn't live very long, just because of injuries and sickness. | ||
| And he traced the word Christ back to an ancient Sumerian word that means a mushroom coated in God's semen. | ||
| So this is when they thought, we're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of years ago, right? | ||
| So when it rained, these mushrooms would just appear out of the ground and then they would eat them and trip balls. | ||
| And they would think that God literally came out of the sky and that this is how you would get in touch with God by eating these things. | ||
| Imagine if you're a primitive person with no science, no written language, I mean, they told these stories just through oral tradition for over a thousand years before anybody wrote them down, right? | ||
| And you're eating these things and tripping balls. | ||
| It gets deep because there's so many things connected to this theory that John Marco Allegro had. | ||
| It's very bizarre when you follow it. | ||
| One of the things was Christmas. | ||
| The Christmas trees, pine trees, underneath these pine trees, you always have these shiny packages, right? | ||
| Well, there's a mycorrhizal relationship between coniferous trees and a mushroom called the Amanita muscaria. | ||
| This Amanita muscaria mushroom was worshipped all throughout human history. | ||
| In fact, it was very closely connected to Santa Claus and to elves. | ||
| But when you trip balls, you can see elves. | ||
| That's what's fucked up. | ||
| So this mushroom looks like Santa Claus. | ||
| It's red and white, and it grows underneath Christmas trees, underneath pine trees. | ||
| Is that why all these Scandinavian cultures have elven mythology? | ||
| Yes, yes, because they were all tripping balls. | ||
| It gets even worse. | ||
| When you take the mushrooms, the way you dry them out is you hang them from the leaves of the tree so they dry in the sun, which is literally the decorations on Christmas trees. | ||
| That's fucking crazy. | ||
| Oh my god, dude. | ||
| There's many, many articles written about the connection between... | ||
| Also, Santa Claus came down the chimney. | ||
| Well, the shamans in Siberia, once they tried to outlaw these shamanic rituals and outlaw these psychedelic practices, the way they would come into people's houses, on snowdrifts, they would hop down through the chimney. | ||
| They would drop the mushrooms down and hop down through the chimney because they were trying to avoid the local law instead of going in through the door. | ||
| I mean, this is even more basic than what you're saying, but so much of the Bible is just fucking trippy. | ||
| Talking snake, plague of locusts. | ||
| How about the, well, we could tell you more about that, but how about the reindeer, right? | ||
| Santa has these reindeer and they're flying, right? | ||
| Well, reindeer are incredibly attracted to the Amanita muscaria mushroom, so much so that shamans who have these psychedelic rituals have pointed out that when they go outside of their tent or outside of their hut to take a piss, That the reindeer will knock them over to get to the piss because the piss has the smell of these psychedelic mushrooms in them. | ||
| And the way people extra trip, one of the things they do is they piss into a glass while they're tripping because some of the psychedelics get filtered through the body and it winds up in the urine and then they drink the urine and blast off into orbit. | ||
| They get even higher than they were before. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild shit. | ||
| So this is like an ancient practice of drinking your own piss while you're tripping balls on mushrooms, and it's connected to these fucking reindeer, which are caribou. | ||
| And caribou are always eating these Amanita muscaria mushrooms. | ||
| They thrive on them. | ||
| That's fucking crazy. | ||
| It's a wild connection between Santa Claus and flying reindeer, right? | ||
| This shaman who's dressed in red and white, who looks like the mushroom, and all the... | ||
| Have you ever seen old Christmas cards? | ||
| They all have mushrooms in them. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Find some old Christmas cards. | ||
| These old Christmas cards all have this one mushroom. | ||
| It's a very specific mushroom, too. | ||
| But it's a controversial mushroom, because I've tried that mushroom before, too, and it didn't really do much. | ||
| Psilocybin will knock your fucking socks off. | ||
| But the Amanita Miscaria, like, look at these. | ||
| Oh my god! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All of these old Christmas cards, all of these old Christmas decorations, they all had mushroom iconography in it. | ||
| Like, look at that one right there that your cursor is above. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| How crazy is that shit, man? | ||
| It's like right in plain sight, too. | ||
| It's not even true. | ||
| I mean, they look like Santa Claus. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I mean, Santa is red and white. | ||
| The mushroom is red and white. | ||
| Look at that picture on the right. | ||
| Now, look at that. | ||
| I mean, it's kind of fucking crazy. | ||
| But there's hundreds and hundreds of ancient, or at least old, drawings and Christmas cards deep into the early 20th century. | ||
| Well, because his hat is so distinctive. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| And you don't see that anywhere else, and it so clearly matches onto the cap of the mushroom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes! | |
| It's nuts, man. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| And how about these fucking elves? | ||
| Like, why are there elves associated with Christmas? | ||
| Well, elves are associated with mushroom use. | ||
| But the thing is, and this is me being honest, most people that have taken Amanita muscaria, the only person I know that's had a real legitimate trip in it was Paul Stamets. | ||
| But Paul, he's... | ||
| He's probably the most well-versed mycologist alive. | ||
| I was watching some of the stories he told. | ||
| The way he can distinguish these fucking thousands of mushrooms. | ||
| He's brilliant. | ||
| Brilliant guy. | ||
| So he's the best to discuss this. | ||
| This is a controversial theory, right? | ||
| But look. | ||
| Look at all those images. | ||
| I accept it as true. | ||
| Why not? | ||
| There's no downside here. | ||
| It's pretty nuts. | ||
| It's pretty nuts. | ||
| Well, the burning bush, you know, with Moses in the burning bush, they now think, scholars out of Israel think, thanks to University of Tel Aviv, I forget which school it was, there's a working hypothesis that this was a story about someone with the acacia bush. | ||
| The acacia tree is rich in dimethyltryptamine. | ||
| You smoke dimethyltryptamine, you experience some higher power. | ||
| It's the most potent of all psychedelics. | ||
| Well, burning bush and you meet God. | ||
| I mean, it's not hard to make that connection. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| Let's see if you can find that. | ||
| The University of Tel Aviv. | ||
| I think it's Tel Aviv. | ||
| See, this is... | ||
| When we were in Hebrew school, there was so much casual genocide because God would just wipe out this tribe or that tribe. | ||
| If we'd learned about shit like this, it would have been much more useful and interesting. | ||
| God did some wild shit. | ||
| How about Elisha and the fucking, the she-bear that killed all the kids, making fun of them for being bald? | ||
| Dude, the whole, like, Jacob, like, he's about to, someone about to kill their own kid, but then God stays his home. | ||
| Ah, gotcha! | ||
| I was just kidding, yeah. | ||
| You just made that one up? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The she-bear one? | ||
| No, no, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| Which one? | ||
| Oh, God, you're just kidding, God. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| Like, yeah. | ||
| Well, there's a few of those stories where God's testing you and tempting you. | ||
| But that's the thing, it's treated as... | ||
| Is it Isaac's about to kill Jacob, right? | ||
| That idea that your faith should lead you to be willing to murder your child. | ||
| To throw all your own moral intuitions to the wind. | ||
| Because this voice in the sky tells you to. | ||
| Even when I was like 13, I think my classmates felt the same way. | ||
| We were like, this is fucked up. | ||
| Like God's kind of an asshole. | ||
| Well, John Marco Allegro's belief was that all of the stories that were in the Bible were all designed to hide these rituals. | ||
| And that, you know, like even the apple in Adam and Eve, that the apple represented the Amanita muscaria mushroom. | ||
| And that God did not want Eve to eat the apple because if she did, she would have an understanding of him and of God. | ||
| There's so much wild shit to it. | ||
| And the idea was that they wrote all these things down in parables and in these stories with this cryptic meaning to it to hide it from the Romans when they were being conquered. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, because their religious police were sort of being outlawed. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| It's wild shit, man. | ||
| You know, it sounds crazy. | ||
| All of it sounds crazy. | ||
| But what's not crazy is that psychedelic mushrooms exist. | ||
| They're real and they're prevalent. | ||
| They're everywhere. | ||
| Well, so the thing I feel like I'm missing out on by being, I think, too neurotic and fucked up to do these drugs is like you achieve these states where you've done a lot of stuff. | ||
| You can't explain that state to other people. | ||
| No, you can't. | ||
| But you learn something that stays with you permanently. | ||
| That's what I'm a little bit... | ||
| I don't know if it's permanent. | ||
| For me, it feels like semi-permanent. | ||
| I feel like it's like a fading tattoo and you need to get it touched up every now and then. | ||
| I think it's definitely steered me in a completely different direction and changed my perspective forever. | ||
| But sometimes I forget how much it's changed, and then I have to trip again. | ||
| And then when I trip again, I go, oh yeah. | ||
| And then it just gives me a massive refresher course that knocks me right back on track. | ||
| But what is it that fades? | ||
| Because from my point of view... | ||
| A close relative of mine did acid and experienced ego death. | ||
| And he was like, yeah, from then on I just didn't fear death in the same way. | ||
| That seems like a permanent switch that you're flipping. | ||
| What aspect of it fades over time? | ||
| Well, for sure I have a different perspective than I had before I did anything. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| That's permanent. | ||
| My perspective is different. | ||
| And people who know me... | ||
| Have said that I'm a different human being. | ||
| If you know me from 2000 versus me from 2021, I'm a different person. | ||
| Like less aggressive? | ||
| I just see things in a different way. | ||
| I'm more open-minded. | ||
| I'm more open to ideas. | ||
| When you experienced the DMT realm... | ||
| You're like, okay, well how the fuck is this real? | ||
| You can just get there in 30 seconds? | ||
| So this just exists around us all the time? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| But what I mean by fades is sometimes you just get busy. | ||
| Life gets busy. | ||
| You have bills. | ||
| I basically have three jobs. | ||
| I'm a comedian. | ||
| I do the UFC commentary and I do this. | ||
| It's a lot of things. | ||
| There's a lot of stuff going on. | ||
| You get caught up in these things, and I'm trying to do my best at all these things, so it requires work. | ||
| I have to think, so I'm constantly involved in what I'm doing, and you can get caught up in stuff, you know, to the point where you forget that you are You literally are not even you. | ||
| There's more bacteria cells in your body than there are human cells. | ||
| You are a part of this gigantic super organism known as the human race, and each individual, it benefits them to think of themselves as being unique and alone, and looking out for themselves. | ||
| But in the reality, that couldn't be further from the truth. | ||
| So there's so many things that you just get lost with. | ||
| Where you just get caught up in the trappings of everyday life and what psychedelics do, it just resets that whole thing and you get a chance to see things from a completely different perspective. | ||
| All that other stuff is bullshit. | ||
| Here's like the fundamental truth about stuff even if you can't express it with words. | ||
| Well, you also recognize that no matter what is happening in your life, no matter what good stuff, like with your career, if you don't have love And friendship. | ||
| If you don't have friendship and love and people around you aren't happy as well, then your life is not going to be good. | ||
| You know what really disappointed me? | ||
| Are you looking for this? | ||
| I'll have some more of that, sure. | ||
| What sort of fucked me up a little bit is between September of last year and April of this year, I was just dealing with some heavy family shit. | ||
| We talked about it on podcasts. | ||
| Details aren't important. | ||
| But I... I'm dealing with this horrible shit. | ||
| It's traumatic. | ||
| It's like the worst shit I've dealt with. | ||
| This will somehow make me different or better. | ||
| Weirdly, what happened was it pushed me the other way. | ||
| I get more concerned about Twitter bullshit or petty career bullshit. | ||
| And maybe this is where psychedelics come in. | ||
| Yeah, but you're looking for a distraction. | ||
| That's why you get more connected to Twitter bullshit because you're looking for a distraction. | ||
| You're looking for something that alleviates the pressure of Of this thing and you have this fucking complaint device in your pocket 24-7. | ||
| But you don't think psychedelics are a way of just like, they're not a distraction. | ||
| There's something more profound than that? | ||
| I think they can be more profound. | ||
| They certainly can also be a distraction. | ||
| I think psychedelics are like any kind of tool. | ||
| It's like a hammer. | ||
| This is the way I always describe marijuana as well. | ||
| You could build a house with it, or you could just hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. | ||
| They're tools. | ||
| And psychedelics, it's all about intent. | ||
| It's all about set and setting. | ||
| And I think you really should, when you use them, you should use them with an intent to try to work through some issues. | ||
| And if you have some things that bother you, for you, you have this acceptance of your anxiety. | ||
| You have this acceptance of who you are and the fact that you just have this anxiety level. | ||
| I think you could work on that. | ||
| And I think you can help alleviate some of that anxiety. | ||
| And I don't think... | ||
| I think it's a little bit of your identity. | ||
| Oh, definitely. | ||
| Yeah, but I think the positive qualities that you have and the positive aspects of who you are, I don't think they're going to be negatively affected by an alleviation of anxiety. | ||
| I think it's going to be an enhancement of your perspective. | ||
| But that requires a certain level of trust because I'd like to... | ||
| I don't think it's just psychedelics. | ||
| I'm not even talking about that. | ||
| Just in general? | ||
| Yeah, just working through that and looking and trying to shift your perspective on things. | ||
| Even if you never did with a psychedelic for the rest of your life, I think for you, really, what I would recommend to you, and I'm obviously not a doctor or a counselor, I would say exercise, like regular routine exercise. | ||
| I do, because I run and play basketball. | ||
| How often? | ||
| Five to six times a week. | ||
| Do you really? | ||
| You run five to six times a week? | ||
| Well, between running and basketball, yeah. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And you get exhausted five to six times a week? | ||
| I'm not exhausted. | ||
| I don't get exhausted running three miles. | ||
| That's just my routine. | ||
| You think I should do more? | ||
| Maybe just ramp it up, yeah. | ||
| Maybe whatever you're doing, you're not doing enough. | ||
| I guess, like... | ||
| What I'm skeptical of is – okay, let's say – so there's these studies where like – That's just one thing, obviously. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| But I think a mindset adjustment would be advantageous as well. | ||
| I could use that. | ||
| But there's these early studies of like LSD where you take LSD in like a clinical setting with a guide. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And people like – the early evidence, which might not hold up, is like people's depression is basically cured. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| I guess my worry is if I did that, I would just, instead of like having this luminous experience where I put all this shit in perspective and put the puzzle pieces together, it would just like be a meteor hitting the whole board and the pieces fly everywhere and it would get worse because I just don't trust my ability to like work through these issues maybe. | ||
| Yeah, I think you're saying that based on not having that experience, though. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| I think if you had that experience, it would enhance you. | ||
| You're a smart guy. | ||
| I think you would get through it. | ||
| I don't think it'd be a problem. | ||
| I think it would be beneficial. | ||
| For some people it's not. | ||
| I mean, there's bad trips. | ||
| Bad trips are real. | ||
| Well, bad trips most of the time. | ||
| Most of the time what's going on, and this is obviously debatable and there's a lot of nuance involved in this as well, but what bad trips are for the most part, most people think is your ego trying to control the experience. | ||
| Because when you're on a psychedelic, it's like trying to grab the rail to stop the rollercoaster. | ||
| But Michael Pollan, in his book, he's like, the whole point is you can't do that. | ||
| You need to let the experience guide you. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| You need to let the experience guide you. | ||
| You need to learn how to let go. | ||
| And for a lot of people, they have a hard time letting go. | ||
| But the forced letting go of psychedelics. | ||
| One of the things that McKenna said, he said, one of the beautiful things about psychedelics is you don't have to believe in them. | ||
| He's like, they're real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No matter what. | |
| Well, the experience is forced upon you. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You can't. | ||
| Once you eat the mushrooms and then you wait, you don't have to believe in it. | ||
| It doesn't need you to believe in it. | ||
| It's like, it's coming. | ||
| And there's a certain beauty to that, that letting go, that we all cling to so many aspects of our life. | ||
| And that's what you were saying earlier about reading things that people are saying about you on Twitter. | ||
| That's along the same lines, right? | ||
| Trying to control things or figure things out. | ||
| Trying to control something you can't control, which is a microcosm for the whole existing and dying thing. | ||
| You can't control it. | ||
| Can't control any of it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I think it's a very valuable tool, but I think we are left without an operating manual because of the prohibition, because of the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970. We could have had such good data on this if they hadn't passed those shitty fucking laws. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, my God, man. | ||
| I mean, you've got to realize it's been 51 years since they've been illegal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 1970, everything became illegal, which is nuts. | ||
| I mean, they made illegal what Brian Murorescu, his work on this book, The Immortality Key, which I brought up with Michael Pollan and some other people. | ||
| It's this amazing book on ancient Greece and how these scholars... | ||
| That were responsible for the birth of democracy and the structure of modern society. | ||
| They were tripping balls. | ||
| They were all tripping. | ||
| They were all taking ergot. | ||
| They were all taking a form of LSD. And they were probably taking a bunch of other shit, too. | ||
| And they were mixing it in wine. | ||
| And people would travel from all over the world to attend these rituals and come back with these amazing stories of enlightenment and of the way they thought about everything adjusting and changing and the connection with the gods and the spirit world. | ||
| This is all a part of human history and these fucking stiff cunts wearing stupid shiny shoes and ties, they took it away from us in the Nixon administration. | ||
| Fucking Nixon. | ||
| You know, these people that wanted everything to be shut down. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They wanted to, you know, fucking stop these hippies! | ||
|
unidentified
|
We gotta stop them! | |
| I'm not a crook! | ||
| Like, these are the type of people that fucked us. | ||
| This is what happened. | ||
| Did you see that shit about the dude in Texas? | ||
| He's facing 40 years in prison for voting? | ||
| Oh yeah, he voted while he was on parole, right? | ||
| I have his name because I want to forget it. | ||
| Hervis Rogers, yeah. | ||
| I just wanted to bring this up because he made me so fucking pissed. | ||
| Dude, votes on parole not knowing that's illegal. | ||
| They need to make a point about illegal voting so they fucking... | ||
| Yeah, I think he's facing 35 years, right? | ||
| Isn't that what it is? | ||
| And he's got multiple counts too, right? | ||
| There's more than one count? | ||
| Well, he did his time for burglary. | ||
| He got out on parole. | ||
| He waited in line seven hours Super Tuesday to vote. | ||
| And they're trying to throw him in jail for it. | ||
| How about just count his vote and tell him don't do that again? | ||
| Leave the fucking guy alone. | ||
| He did his time. | ||
| This is why I do think the left is becoming more punitive. | ||
| But I also think just humans in general. | ||
| We always try to find ways to throw one another in jail, get one another fired. | ||
| I think that's where psychedelics can help us. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| Because with psychedelics, you do recognize that other people are... | ||
| Look, you are me. | ||
| You're just living a different life. | ||
| If you lived my life and you were in my body and you went through all the experiences that I had, you would be me. | ||
| We don't vary as much as we like to think each other do. | ||
| What we are is we are spirits that are going through these—we're consciousness. | ||
| Let's put it in a non-woo-woo way. | ||
| We're consciousness that's going through a different biological vehicle with different life experiences, and we are trying to navigate our way while trying to be happy and trying not to get hurt. | ||
| We're trying not to get hurt by life or get hurt by other people. | ||
| And it's all fundamentally weird and terrifying. | ||
| It's terrifying to everybody. | ||
| It's weird. | ||
| Yeah, even to the most calm and confident and accomplished person, it's terrifying. | ||
| And for me, I find that no matter how accomplished I get, if... | ||
| I don't ever feel like it's fine. | ||
| I don't ever feel like it's okay. | ||
| I never feel like everything's great now. | ||
| There's like this idea that we have you're gonna like hit this retirement point or this I've made it point you're gonna sail off in the sunset. | ||
| That's I'm telling you right now that place is not real. | ||
| No, I mean we're in different situations, but I've I've been lucky I've had like a really good year and I'm like I don't know. | ||
| You're stable. | ||
| You're financially stable. | ||
| I'm in better position than 99% journalists. | ||
| I'm very lucky, but it does not change that fundamental Thing of who you are and what it's like to navigate consciousness at all. | ||
| It really doesn't. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And of course, anyone who's struggling financially thinks we're douchebags for saying that. | ||
| But it's just the truth. | ||
| It's just the truth. | ||
| You know, struggling financially is horrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| And I remember very clearly, I got a development deal, which is what happens. | ||
| They come along and they say, hey, we want to try to do a TV show with you. | ||
| And we'll give you a bunch of money. | ||
| For me, they gave me, I think it was $100,000. | ||
| And all of a sudden, I had money. | ||
| That was like your first big pot of money? | ||
| Yeah, but it was like this. | ||
| Like a weight. | ||
| You know that expression, a weight lifted off your shoulders? | ||
| I literally felt that. | ||
| Because before then, I was fucking poor, not knowing exactly how I was going to eat poor. | ||
| And to have that lifted off my shoulders like that, I remember thinking very clearly, like, oh, this is extremely valuable. | ||
| This is extremely valuable because as long as you can maintain this state where you're not worried about your bills, it allows you clarity. | ||
| It gives you a perspective. | ||
| But it doesn't alleviate you from the existential angst of being a fucking human being. | ||
| No, there's a point at which you can stop worrying about it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But then it's sort of diminishing returns after that. | ||
| You stop worrying about money, but you still worry about life. | ||
| Like, life has other things. | ||
| Like, if you don't have to concentrate on money anymore, your bills are paid, you know, your rent is paid, you're okay, you don't have to think about that. | ||
| It doesn't make the universe less weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Or consciousness less weird. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| It's all crazy. | ||
| It's all fucked up. | ||
| How about that Richard Branson guy just fucking shooting himself off into space and people are so mad at him? | ||
| I said on Twitter, I feel like my invite got lost in the mail. | ||
| I should have been on my ship. | ||
| Would you have gone? | ||
| No. | ||
| I wouldn't have gone. | ||
| I'm too anxious. | ||
| Fuck him. | ||
| Also, when you... | ||
| Imagine if he died. | ||
| You go? | ||
|
unidentified
|
You go? | |
| Jamie doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| Richard Branson, if you're listening, Jamie will join you on your next voyage. | ||
| Jamie's the least part alien. | ||
| Jamie's immune to edibles. | ||
| He and Eddie gotta go. | ||
| Yeah, Eddie should go. | ||
| I gotta go with him. | ||
| Eddie would think it's a hologram. | ||
| It's a hologram! | ||
| That's why I... Imagine if you took Eddie up into space and he still didn't believe that the Earth was round. | ||
| We're both going to have a camera and a non-edited pun. | ||
| Bro, they trick you with a hologram. | ||
| You don't even understand. | ||
| Imagine if he's right. | ||
| That would be fucking crazy. | ||
| That's why there's no good video from the fucking thing. | ||
| Imagine if we get up there and Eddie's right all along and I've got to eat crow. | ||
| We've got to go higher. | ||
| Sorry, Eddie. | ||
| The earth's flat. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, imagine if you died right next to Richard Branson, like, you dumb motherfucker. | ||
| Make me go up in your stupid rocket ship and blow up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's how I want to go. | |
| On a fucking rocket ship. | ||
| Elon Musk has a ticket to ride on Richard Branson's space plane. | ||
| Do you trust it? | ||
| I don't know if I trust it. | ||
| Like, those things... | ||
| They blow up a lot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
They blow up. | |
| 1% is too big for you. | ||
| Elon's blow up. | ||
| They've blown up a few times, right? | ||
| On the launch pad and trying to land. | ||
| I still don't understand how airplanes work, like how they're safe, so I'm not fucking getting on this issue. | ||
| Well, Elon was explaining to me that the blow-ups and the failure was actually built in into the equation of the way they're designing these things. | ||
| There's going to be failure because they're trying to test the tolerances and figure things out. | ||
| That's the whole idea of tests. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Is that some of them are going to fail. | ||
| So it wasn't disturbing to him at all when these rockets are blowing up. | ||
| He's like, now we know why it blew up and we'll fix that. | ||
| And now this one won't blow up and then we'll fix that. | ||
| I know, but he's not going to come on and be like, wow, yeah, we're fucked. | ||
| But he wouldn't. | ||
| No, no, no, no, no. | ||
| He would. | ||
| He would. | ||
| A hundred percent. | ||
| That guy does not lie. | ||
| He is not interested in lying. | ||
| You can say whatever you want about Elon Musk. | ||
| He might be wildly eccentric and maybe even stretch too thin because he has so many different projects he works on constantly. | ||
| That guy is not a liar by any stretch of the imagination. | ||
| He's discussing the way they've designed this protocol for engineering these rockets that they knew that they were going to have failures. | ||
| It's part of the process, I guess. | ||
| I mean, it made sense, right? | ||
| Like, how the fuck else are you going to build a rocket? | ||
| You've got to test it. | ||
| You've got to test them. | ||
| They're going to blow up. | ||
| And when they blow up, it's spectacular. | ||
| It's beautiful. | ||
| They're filled with rocket juice, you know? | ||
| I'm not interested though, man. | ||
| I mean, not until they got that shit down, you know, down to a science. | ||
| I would do it if it was like airline level safety. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah, like that, yeah. | ||
| But until then, fuck off. | ||
| I'll let other people do it. | ||
| What am I going to do? | ||
| I'm going to get up and then go down? | ||
| Yeah, it is round. | ||
| It's just like the video. | ||
| Fuck you. | ||
| I'm staying right here. | ||
| And then the other thing that freaks me out if you get into real space, like orbit, is space junk. | ||
| Just fucking taking you out. | ||
| Some Russian satellite from 1965. Some random Chinese bolt hits you in the forehead going 500,000 miles an hour or whatever the fuck it's going on. | ||
| I think there's not, but is there a chance they accidentally go too far? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm like, oh, we've got to go around twice before we can come back. | |
| No food for a couple weeks. | ||
| We're going to have to eat each other. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Who the fuck knows? | ||
| I would hate to see Richard Branson blow up in space because that would set back space travel. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| I don't know how long they planned it in advance, but he only went like 50 miles, right? | ||
| Is that the idea? | ||
| The edge of space. | ||
| So it's very disputed, like, what it is. | ||
| Like, was it even dark where he was at? | ||
| I saw a picture. | ||
| It looked like half. | ||
| Half dark, half Earth. | ||
| I bet you gotta go dark. | ||
| And then it turns upside down so they can see. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| I mean, you know what I'm saying? | ||
| Like, you can't go camping during the day. | ||
| But they did. | ||
| Oh, I slept during the day. | ||
| No, that's not camping. | ||
| They did race. | ||
| It's supposed to be in the woods at night. | ||
| To hurry up and beat Jeff Bezos, who's going next week. | ||
| He's supposed to go next Tuesday or Wednesday or something. | ||
| He must be so mad. | ||
| Imagine if he dies. | ||
| Because he just handed over the CEO of his company. | ||
| He's not the CEO anymore. | ||
| His wife married a science teacher. | ||
| Then he gets in that rocket and fucking blows up. | ||
| Is he going to deep space? | ||
| Is he going out-out? | ||
| I kind of think it's the same thing, but instead of going like a roller coaster on a plane, they're going up in a balloon and then come back down. | ||
| In a balloon? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jeff Bezos is going in a balloon? | ||
| I take that back, but they come down in a parachute. | ||
| A parachute? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I was picturing something like that in my head. | ||
| See, Elon's got a way better system. | ||
| His rocket is actually going to land. | ||
| He's got it down. | ||
| That's better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Don't listen to any of the advice I gave you. | ||
| Please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, I take it as medical advice, Dr. Joe. | |
| Be careful. | ||
| I will. | ||
| Any other things we should talk about before we get out of here? | ||
| Your book, The Quick Fix? | ||
| The Quick Fix? | ||
| Yeah, no, I should be more of a whore. | ||
| I have a newsletter, jessiesingle.substack.com. | ||
| I do think your listeners should check out our podcast. | ||
| I say that as an unbiased observer, blocked and reported. | ||
| You should have my co-host on so she can talk shit about me. | ||
| We'll talk a lot of shit about you. | ||
| She has an interesting theory about lesbians going extinct. | ||
| What? | ||
| She thinks they're going extinct. | ||
| She does. | ||
| She should talk to lesbians about that. | ||
| Well, she's tried to. | ||
| They've rejected her. | ||
| They've blocked and reported her. | ||
| What? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because she said that? | ||
| Because she said they're going to extinct? | ||
| It's very controversial. | ||
| They deny their own extinction. | ||
| Boy. | ||
| What other psychological fads are in this that we should discuss before we wrap this up? | ||
| There's a really fucked up story basically about the army adopting this anti-PTSD program that didn't work, that they spent like half a billion dollars on. | ||
| There's stuff about grit, making kids more gritty. | ||
| That doesn't work. | ||
| It's a little bit of a bummer of a book, but it also will tell readers how to be better judges of scientific claims. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Do these psychological fads, they don't work or they just don't work on everybody? | ||
| Do they work on some people? | ||
| It depends. | ||
| How much of what we see on social media is there's all these influencers that are really into motivating people. | ||
| That's a big thing, right? | ||
| Yeah, mostly they just don't really work on the average person or the average person they're supposed to work on, so they're pretty... | ||
| Because in order for something to work, there's got to be a real fundamental shift in how you view things. | ||
| Yeah, and most of these ideas just aren't up to that task, basically. | ||
| But isn't that the case with, like, weight loss, too? | ||
| Because some people, it works. | ||
| Like, some people that are, like, hundreds of pounds overweight, they just reach this point where they're like, fuck this. | ||
| I'm going to do something about it. | ||
| And they're going to make a change. | ||
| And then they do. | ||
| Why is that funny? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I have many thoughts on, actually, the weight loss thing. | ||
| Do you? | ||
| I need to take another leak really quick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, okay. | |
| You over-imbibe me. | ||
| I'll be right back, though. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| The weight loss season. | ||
| This will be our last edit, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| I guarantee you. | ||
| You guys are good. | ||
| We'll be right back. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, we're good. | ||
| Good, thanks. | ||
| These kids and their weak blouders. | ||
| Since we'll take it out. | ||
| I was digging through that thing about the burning bush. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The guy who the claim is made to, he wrote an article 13 years ago that said, I never said Moses was stoned when he saw God. | ||
| What'd he say? | ||
| I tried to read through it to see exactly what he says, because this guy is a linguist, and he went and studied ayahuasca and stuff in ancient... | ||
| He says, words such as trip and high misrepresent my work on psychoactive plants. | ||
| Okay, the Guardian. | ||
| Okay, so this is, I think, this is the Guardian. | ||
| He said, Moses saw God because he was stoned. | ||
| That's a different... | ||
| This is the guy that the claims are coming. | ||
| I found all those studies and then I googled his name to see what was popping up. | ||
| And this popped up like three weeks after those articles came out back a long time ago. | ||
| So how did they misrepresent it? | ||
| What did he say? | ||
| He said that they might have done ayahuasca, but there's no proof that that bush is in the area. | ||
| But the acacia bush is in the area. | ||
| That's the thing I was just reading. | ||
| There's two bushes they think it is, and one maybe can be found in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| The other one, which would be the one that would lead to that, is in the area. | ||
| Was that where it was in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| That's what I'm digging through this article, which is from, you know, it's a little more recent. | ||
| There are different interpretations as to why God chose a burning bush as a way to get Moses' attention. | ||
| One theory says that Moses was worried that Egypt was going to completely destroy the Jews. | ||
| God showed him the magical bush to say that just as the bush is burning but isn't consumed, Egypt may cause the Jews to suffer, but they won't be destroyed. | ||
| The thing right up here is where it started. | ||
| This word that they got it from is used twice in the Torah. | ||
| Once they think it's a pun, the other time they think it meant bush. | ||
| It says Sneh, S-N-E-H, is a Hebrew pun on Sinai, the place where the bush was burning. | ||
| Most commentators say that S-N-E-H, Sneh, is a very lowly thorn bush. | ||
| The Catholics in St. Catherine's Monaster at the base of Mount Sinai... | ||
| Claim to have the actual bush growing in their courtyard. | ||
| The bush is a bramble rubus sanctus. | ||
| Just as Moses had to remove his sandals in the presence of the bush, the monks at the monastery require visitors to remove their shoes before coming into the presence of the bush. | ||
| How weird. | ||
| Imagine if they really do have the actual bush that Moses saw. | ||
| That says that that bush... | ||
| Doesn't have DMP in it. | ||
| Correct, yeah. | ||
| Wait, do they know the actual species of bushes? | ||
| No, apparently there's a lot of questions. | ||
| They think that even the burning bush might have represented the idea that they were... | ||
| That Egypt was trying to kill the Jews, but they wouldn't be able to. | ||
| I feel like he was even saying that they may have done some sort of ceremony. | ||
| It's just the way that they're interpreting it, maybe not that way. | ||
| Well, it's also you have to recognize that you're talking about something that was translated... | ||
| In multiple different languages, and you lose a lot of the meaning, right? | ||
| Like, one of the things about Marco Allegro's work was the Dead Sea Scrolls were the only version of the Bible that was in Aramaic, and it's so old that it's written on animal skins, and the way they did the deciphering, they had to use DNA tests to match up the animal skins to make sure that they had the skins from the same animal, so that they knew that the piece of skin was See all these broken pieces? | ||
| So in order to figure out which piece goes in which pile, you have to do DNA tests on the pieces. | ||
| It's all wild shit, man. | ||
| I thought the whole Old Testament was Sumerian? | ||
| The Dead Sea Scrolls is not the Old Testament. | ||
| The Dead Sea Scrolls they found in a cave in Qumran. | ||
| So they found these animal skins that have writing on them in this cave in Qumran. | ||
| And these guys work for fucking... | ||
| 14-plus years to try to decipher these things. | ||
| Have you ever seen the Dead Sea Scrolls? | ||
| Yeah, no, I've seen four of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's fucking cool as shit. | |
| It's huge, like, sort of academic controversy about the providence, basically. | ||
| It's an academic puzzle. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| And there's some very similar stories in the Dead Sea Scrolls that do exist in the Bible, but they're much wilder. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like, some of the stories in there are really, like, supernatural. | ||
| I went through the same sort of angry atheist phase as a lot of people. | ||
| And it is true that the idea that we're supposed to extract moral meaning from these stories that are honestly mostly just about God smiting this or that tribe. | ||
| They're cool stories, but the idea that we're supposed to take them to inspire the way we live is a little bit silly. | ||
| Well, especially when you think of the ruthlessness of God's approach. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's what I'm saying. | |
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you're supposed to go to hell for a lot of stuff. | ||
| Eating shellfish is like fucking... | ||
| Have you had fried oysters, dude? | ||
| They're pretty good. | ||
| Clam chowder? | ||
| Yeah, come on, God. | ||
| Well, I mean, I think a lot of that stuff, including pork, like eating an animal that chews its cud that has a cloven hoof, you're not supposed to eat that, is, I think it had to do with diseases. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Red Tide, trichinosis for pork, Red Tide for shellfish. | ||
| Well, there's this idea that, like, disgust and our fear of germs drives so much of human culture, and I'm pretty sympathetic to that. | ||
| Yes. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, and I bet a lot of the ancient laws of how to behave and what to do and rituals were related to, like, how about the ritual that a lot of the Muslim world has of, you know, you wash your hand, you wash your ass with your left hand. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You always touch everything with your right hand, and your left hand is what you wash your ass with. | ||
| Yeah, and they have a whole thing with shoes, because shoes are dirt. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And back in the ancient times, you were probably walking through, like, literal shit and sewage. | ||
| Yeah, literal sewage, yes, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's a lot of the ancient religious texts that it's logical if you try to trace it back. | ||
| But what I was getting at is like ancient Hebrew is, it's a weird language, right? | ||
| Where it's not just letters. | ||
| Like the letters have numerical value. | ||
| They're numbers too, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, it's wild. | ||
| So try translating that to Latin and then to English or to Greek and then to English. | ||
| Have you heard of the Bible Code? | ||
| What is that, like Da Vinci Code? | ||
| No, I had a late great uncle. | ||
| This came out maybe around 2000. I think it was a book called The Bible Code. | ||
| And it claimed that if you use that thing where letters can be letters or numbers, it like foretold the future of predicted events. | ||
| And it was completely off because it was this thing where like, of course, if you can interpret letters as letters or numbers, you can construct some story. | ||
| But people were very convinced that the Torah, which had been, of course, translated Numerous times if I could tell the future. | ||
| It was very weird stuff. | ||
| It's so wild though that ancient Hebrew had that distinction where it was part numbers and part letters and that there was numerical value to the words. | ||
| The words had a value to them. | ||
| It's a really weird language. | ||
| But it's fucking cool. | ||
| Oh, it's very cool. | ||
| That's the coolest idea for a language ever, that your language is encoded with numerical value in the words and the letters double as numbers. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't, I don't, I'm not religious, I don't really identify with being Jewish, but this idea that you're saying the same prayers that your family, your ancestors were saying 1,500 years ago is kind of amazing and not a lot of people can say that. | ||
| What I've always admired about Jews is that it's a tribe. | ||
| It's like a tightly knit tribe. | ||
| And even the ones who aren't religious, they're really into being a tribal Jew. | ||
| It depends, though. | ||
| So, like, where I live in Brooklyn, you have the Hasidic Jews a couple miles away. | ||
| They're, like, they're very insular. | ||
| They reject modernity. | ||
| And what's sort of weird and awkward about being Jewish is, like, I feel less kinship with them than I do with, like, a secular Muslim. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| They're having so many kids that they're the ones making sure Jews continue to propagate, because they also don't intermarry. | ||
| So there's not a lot of Jews left, and everyone's always fucking trying to kill us. | ||
| They don't intermarry? | ||
| Oh, absolutely not. | ||
| You mean with other people outside of the Jews? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| When I say intermarry, I think of Jews marrying Jews. | ||
| Yeah, sorry. | ||
| So they only intramarry. | ||
| They only marry other classes. | ||
| And I'm overgeneralizing a little bit, but it's just weird. | ||
| We have this secular Jews have a complicated relationship with them because we, frankly, we look down a little bit on how traditional they are and how insular. | ||
| I'm sure they look down on us because we're, you know, corrupted and fallen, but they're the ones sort of keeping the numbers up because a lot of us are intermarrying or not having a lot of kids. | ||
| It's just, it's weird being a member of a group that could literally go extinct. | ||
| Well, there's a big population of them in Los Angeles, too. | ||
| I know New York has the biggest population, right? | ||
| I think so, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was weird during the pandemic that they were getting attacked for having group gatherings and, you know, that they were trying to force them to comply with these pandemic rules. | ||
| And they're like, we're not even in your fucking world. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| But the problem was they would have these weddings with thousands of people with lots of dancing and chanting and singing. | ||
| And it's like, that's going to spread to the rest of the city. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm sure it did. | ||
| Yeah, their outfits and everything are crazy too, right? | ||
| The Orthodox Jews, we'd see them all the time in Los Angeles with the curls and the things that hang from their belt. | ||
| And some of their kids don't speak English. | ||
| They speak Yiddish. | ||
| The whole point is to... | ||
| I think... | ||
| Some other sects, including Mormons and even more so the Amish, the whole point is to make your kids dependent on the tribe so they can't leave. | ||
| So if you only speak Yiddish and broken English, and again, I'm going to generalize it a little bit. | ||
| Some of them do speak English, but it's just like a very interesting, not modern way of going about life. | ||
| Yeah, very interesting and very not modern. | ||
| And it's kind of wild to think how long they can keep that up. | ||
| You know, I've been reading this book. | ||
| I started reading it again, Empire of the Summer Moon. | ||
| It's about the Comanche Indians and the settlers that tried to make it across the plains and that they encountered these Comanches and it was like a massive deterrent for so long. | ||
| But one of the things the book focuses on is how up until the 1600s, until the Europeans came here, they didn't even have horses. | ||
| And they lived this way. | ||
| The way they lived for who knows how many thousands of years had not varied. | ||
| But then so much of the European world and the Asian world had gone so far beyond that in terms of civilization and culture. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Technologically, yeah. | |
| Yeah, but they had this very tight way of living that never varied. | ||
| But one of the fascinating things was oftentimes, whether it was prospectors or sometimes children were kidnapped and they became a part of the tribe, and then they would get re-kidnapped decades later, and they never wanted to go back to society. | ||
| They always wanted to go back to the tribe. | ||
| They never were like, thank you. | ||
| Oh my God, this is so much better. | ||
| They hated it. | ||
| They hated the modern way of life. | ||
| They were so in tuned with chasing the buffalo down on the plains and sleeping in tents. | ||
| Well, and it's that whole question of, so evolution carved us a certain way. | ||
| And, you know, we're very thankful we have antibiotics and phones to keep in touch with our loved ones. | ||
| But at a certain point, you get so far from our Ancestral past that it introduces, I mean, even just like the social media thing. | ||
| It used to be the feedback you got from your tribe mattered because they're your tribe. | ||
| If your tribe is fucking random people thousands of miles from you, it feels like it matters because of these deep-seated tendencies we have, but it doesn't, and it hurts you. | ||
| Or in someone like my case, my tribe, like on Twitter, I think I have 7 million people. | ||
| What the fuck is that? | ||
| How is that possible? | ||
| That doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And if you want the feedback of 7 million people, you're going to go mad, you know? | ||
| And I think there's also a thing that happens if you can spend some time alone in nature, where there's like, it's almost like a... | ||
| It's like there's a void that you didn't even know you had. | ||
| And then you're like, oh, this is so nice. | ||
| This feels so good. | ||
| It feels so normal. | ||
| Because your body wants to be around these bountiful, natural environments where you're around a lake and mountains and you see birds fly overhead and deer bouncing by. | ||
| Your body has a connection to that that's very, very primal. | ||
| When you get on the plane in JFK and you get off in like, well, LA's really urban, but LA or like Tucson or Phoenix, any place where it's just a totally different landscape and the fucking mountains ringing everything, it does something to you. | ||
| Like, we're supposed to be in these more wild places. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| One of my favorite places when I lived there was Boulder, Colorado. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| So crazy. | ||
| And I would just look at the mountains and go, this is like the best natural art that you could ever be around. | ||
| And it's around you all the time. | ||
| And it enriches your perspective on earth. | ||
| It's like living in a phenomenal art gallery. | ||
| Five years ago, most of my best friends lived with me in New York City. | ||
| The West Coast stole them. | ||
| And I get it. | ||
| Because once you move out there and you see what's there, it's hard to go back. | ||
| I love New York in certain ways, but when you can drive an hour to these incredible mountains... | ||
| I think one thing that the pandemic taught a lot of us is you don't need to work locally. | ||
| No, you don't at all. | ||
| You could definitely be remote and get a lot of the shit done, especially someone like you that's a journalist and a writer. | ||
| I don't need to be anywhere. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of cool. | ||
| I have a lot of friends that they just move to the woods and they move to mountain towns and they move to the beach and... | ||
| You were in L.A. before this, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| What was the L.A. to Austin shift like? | ||
| Because they're such different cities, I feel like. | ||
| It was easy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, really? | |
| It was easy. | ||
| Yeah, it was so nice. | ||
| I love it here. | ||
| People are so much friendlier than in L.A. The thing that got me is there's a real tangible feeling of not being bothered by people. | ||
| In the sense that there's too many of them. | ||
| When you're on the 405 in LA and it's 3 in the afternoon and you just see a fucking sea of red brake lights in front of you that goes on for hours, you're like, shit. | ||
| I used to do gigs in San Diego and I would have to leave my house at noon. | ||
| It's a 90-minute ride, man. | ||
| I have an 8 p.m. | ||
| show. | ||
| I got to leave at noon because I might be in my car for five fucking hours. | ||
| Like, really? | ||
| That grinds on you after a while. | ||
| Oh, it's terrible. | ||
| But it's just you devalue human beings. | ||
| You start thinking of human beings as being a nuisance. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Whereas here, there's like a million people in Austin and a million in the surrounding area. | ||
| And their traffic is a joke. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Like, oh, traffic's so bad. | ||
| Shut your mouth. | ||
| I don't even know what the fuck traffic is. | ||
| Traffic in New York is bad. | ||
| Traffic in LA is bad. | ||
| This traffic is silly. | ||
| I hate that thing of if you live in New York and you're like, I'm driving somewhere, you just have no idea if it's going to take you three hours or six hours. | ||
| There's too many humans. | ||
| And if anything goes sideways, you're fucked. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| If anything goes sideways and you've got to get out of town, you're fucked. | ||
| I literally bought an apocalypse vehicle when I lived in L.A. Because I kept having this reoccurring anxiety of earthquakes or of shit going down. | ||
| I was stockpiling water. | ||
| I was thinking about things because I started collecting freeze-dried food because I was like, no one's got a handle on these earthquakes. | ||
| No one's got a handle on things going south. | ||
| And I had been evacuated from my house three times over the last 10 years just from fires. | ||
| That's the other thing about California, and I know this from my friends who live there, it seems like at any given moment half the state is on fire. | ||
| How do you get used to that? | ||
| You don't. | ||
| You live in this constant state of hoping it doesn't happen tomorrow, and then you wake up, okay, no fire today, great. | ||
| It's just different. | ||
| For me, the only thing that was keeping me there was doing comedy, but it's easy to do comedy here, and it's easy to do the podcast here. | ||
| Look, we're doing it. | ||
| That's such a privilege to be able to just like... | ||
| I brought my mic here. | ||
| I'll record an episode after this. | ||
| I can write my newsletter from anywhere. | ||
| That's so nice not to have to rely on an office. | ||
| Yeah, and this city is fucking wonderful. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| People are so nice. | ||
| It's so friendly and it's artistic and the live music scene's amazing, man. | ||
| Live music scene. | ||
| Fucking Gary Clark Jr. owns a club here. | ||
| You go down 6th Street and at any given time you'll hear this band like, who are these guys? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know? | ||
| And there's randomly awesome. | ||
| Oh, randomly awesome musicians and artists. | ||
| There's a lot of galleries here, and there's a lot of comedy here, too, now. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| It's just a beautiful place, and the food's off the charts. | ||
| Well, I'm kicking myself because I'm fucking vegetarian, which should be, like, illegal here, given the barbecue. | ||
| Nah, there's plenty of good vegan food here, man. | ||
| There's plenty of good vegan food here. | ||
| There's a lot. | ||
| I went to Torchy's and, like, Deli Taco. | ||
| They both had great breakfast tacos, but... | ||
| Are you vegetarian for health reasons, like... | ||
| A little bit of both. | ||
| Honestly, when I was like 26, I read the Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer because an ex had recommended it. | ||
| She was vegetarian. | ||
| I just found it compelling. | ||
| I think if I lived in a country with like, I'm going to sound very douchey in Brooklyn here, but if I lived in a country that had a different approach to eating meat, like the kill your own food type thing, I don't have an inherent moral problem with it, but I think the way we do it in the States is fairly fucked up. | ||
| It's very fucked up. | ||
| The factory farming aspect of it is disgusting. | ||
| It's a lot of suffering. | ||
| Not just the factory farming, but how about these ag-gag laws? | ||
| Yeah, oh my god. | ||
| You can't film the... | ||
| Those are a horrific, moral, disgusting outrage. | ||
| The idea that if you're working somewhere and you see what everyone would think of as a horrific act against animals, you can't film that. | ||
| But that's why, like, the whole, again, not to go back to the endless topic of cancel culture, but I do think liberals are becoming more liberal, but conservatives are always fucking trying to ban something, trying to ban filming the factory farm, trying to ban, you know, not standing for the place. | ||
| We're assuming that it's conservatives that did that, but I think it's capitalists. | ||
| I don't really buy whether or not liberals are more or less conservative when it comes to fiscally. | ||
| I think there's a lot of social dynamics and posturing that a lot of corporations take up, but when you look at what Google does... | ||
| Well, I was going to say liberals want to give more power to Google and YouTube. | ||
| Which is crazy. | ||
| You want YouTube and fucking Facebook deciding what's true and what's not. | ||
| But the problem is what they do with their money. | ||
| What they do with their money is very conservative. | ||
| Like, they're doing a lot of the same things that big corporations do with their money. | ||
| To maximize their profits, to avoid taxes. | ||
| This is not like this completely liberal, altruistic endeavor. | ||
| No, but the whole... | ||
| There's like a lot of sort of... | ||
| There's a materialist or heterodox leftist. | ||
| There's a guy, Benjamin Burgess, Freddie DeBoer. | ||
| Their whole point is like what this comes down to is money. | ||
| When we talk about racism, we're not talking about like some mystical force in the air or some feeling people have. | ||
| We're talking about like pockets of people who are cut off from opportunity and what matters is fucking money. | ||
| And I think that's been lost because so much of liberal discourse is like talking about people in the right way or expressing the right feelings. | ||
| Money sort of decides everything. | ||
| And I think we've sort of lost sight of that. | ||
| Well, we lost an opportunity to address, during the pandemic, there was this massive push to address the fact that businesses were losing money, and so the government had to stimulate these businesses to maintain the quality of life, right? | ||
| My position on that was, why didn't the government also address the fact that you have these disproportionately fucked up communities that have stayed this way for decades? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this also radically affects the quality of life for the people that live there, like failing corporations. | ||
| Like the idea that Detroit and Baltimore and South Side of Chicago, all these places, that's just how they are. | ||
| That's just how they are. | ||
| It's unfixable. | ||
| Fucking nuts. | ||
| It's nuts. | ||
| And we went way out of our way to make sure the corporations stayed healthy, but we didn't ever address the fact that there's people in this life that, without a doubt, people in this country, there's certain people that are born into a situation that is not fair. | ||
| Yeah, but this is my whole thing. | ||
| This is why, like, if you write about cancel culture, you've, like, been canceled, fucking big air quotes, people are like, no, you should be a conservative now. | ||
| Conservatives are against cancellation. | ||
| What motivates me more than anything is that we're the richest country on earth, but a huge number of people are just fucking, have no chance whatsoever. | ||
| They don't have a chance to go to, like, a Newton public school. | ||
| And, um... | ||
| I think that should be the story. | ||
| And that's why Bernie Sanders did well. | ||
| That was basically the only thing he talked about. | ||
| He did not get distracted by culture war bullshit. | ||
| That's where Elizabeth Warren went off the rails. | ||
| She's like suddenly trying to talk like a woke person, which she isn't. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, that's one of the reasons why I'm suspicious of her. | ||
| I'm suspicious of her, yeah. | ||
| I'm not suspicious of Bernie because he's so fucking consistent. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the other thing is you're going to become a conservative. | ||
| Well then, okay, now you're tribal. | ||
| Can't you just be someone who's politically homeless? | ||
| Why do you have to be on this other side now? | ||
| Now you have to say, I'm a God-fearing Christian and Donald Trump was brought here by Jesus. | ||
| I met Trump this past weekend. | ||
| Where? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Shook his hand. | |
| He has regular sized hands by the way. | ||
| They're not tiny? | ||
| The media, they're full of shit. | ||
| You sure he wasn't wearing fake hands? | ||
| He might have been wearing fake hands. | ||
| He's a clever fella. | ||
| Very slapstick. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Put on his fake hair and fake hands. | ||
| Where'd you meet him? | ||
| At the UFC. What was he like? | ||
| Came over to me when I was working. | ||
| I had my headphones on and I said, hey, how you doing man? | ||
| Nice meeting you. | ||
| Shook his hand and got a video of it. | ||
| It's kind of hilarious. | ||
| He's like, you do a tremendous job. | ||
| Amazing job. | ||
| Good job. | ||
| And then he said that Daniel Cormier was next to me who was a former light heavyweight champion and the former heavyweight champion. | ||
| He goes, I do not want to fight this guy. | ||
| I do not want to fight this guy. | ||
| This guy was president. | ||
| I should have got a selfie with him. | ||
| Fuck! | ||
| Missed opportunity. | ||
| What are you going to do? | ||
| It was weird. | ||
| It was very weird. | ||
| When he walked in, though, I'm telling you, man, they cheered the fuck out of him. | ||
| Oh, he has, like, a fucking... | ||
| Some dead-enders who really want to see him be president again one way or another. | ||
| Well, there's that, and then there's, you know... | ||
| There's a lot of people that just do not like the current administration. | ||
| They just think it's this weird, floppy fish of administration that just doesn't seem... | ||
| I have my qualms with Biden, but two days from now, all these families are getting $300 per kid put in their bank account. | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| Yeah, and that's exactly the kind of... | ||
| That's nice. | ||
| I would love to focus more on that than on who said the wrong thing about trans kids. | ||
| At the end of the day, that's what it comes down to. | ||
| That's going to help millions of families. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's going to help people. | |
| Yes. | ||
| And I wish more of our politics focused on who we should give money to and why. | ||
| I think that's important. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The problem is there's such a rabid appetite for bullshit. | ||
| Oh my god, yeah. | ||
| And that's part of what the media focuses on. | ||
| The conservative media is just as guilty. | ||
| If the conservative media has an opportunity with Biden to really take the high road and to show that what the liberal media did with Trump, they're not going to do with Biden, and just judge him on policy. | ||
| But they don't do that. | ||
| They don't do that. | ||
| Although, Biden's interesting because like... | ||
| Okay, with Bernie Sanders, he's on the record being like, I'm basically a socialist. | ||
| So it's easy to like- Democratic socialists. | ||
| Democratic socialists, yes. | ||
| That is an important distinction. | ||
| Biden, there's nothing there. | ||
| They tried to paint him as like a radical. | ||
| You look at him, you're like, this guy, the guy who passed the crime bill is a fucking radical. | ||
| It just doesn't work. | ||
| Nothing really sticks to him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just wish he was younger. | ||
| You're not excited about Kamala? | ||
| She's not going to make it. | ||
| I'm so worried that they're going to put all their chips on her and she's just unpopular. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| People don't like her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's not going to work. | ||
| That's a bad one. | ||
| I mean, unless they have some designs for it. | ||
| Unless there's some fucking secret room somewhere where they're going to reinvent her. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, I mean, the wackier things have happened before. | ||
| They basically reinvented Biden, right? | ||
| Yeah, you wouldn't have thought he'd be the guy for the moment, but he was. | ||
| How about they reinvented her, and the person who was tearing him down was the lady who was his fucking vice president now. | ||
| That's so funny. | ||
| Which is nuts. | ||
| Yeah, that intense moment about the segregation stuff, and then she's the veep. | ||
| That's crazy. | ||
| Yeah, well, not just that, but the sexual assault stuff, right? | ||
| I mean, she said she believed that woman. | ||
| And then the crazy thing is when she's on Colbert, she's like, it was a debate! | ||
| Did you see that? | ||
| And laughing. | ||
| The laughing thing. | ||
| Someone's got to talk to her about that. | ||
| And go, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. | ||
| When you get uncomfortable, you can't just pretend that it's all silly and funny and laugh. | ||
| You've got to have an actual answer for this. | ||
| This is the big leagues. | ||
| You're at the fucking biggest of the big leagues. | ||
| You have to have some sort of... | ||
| More than that. | ||
| You have to have a perspective. | ||
| You have to be able to adjust it. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Quick fix. | ||
| Quick fix. | ||
| Jesse, thank you very much, man. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| One more time, your podcast? | ||
| Blocked and reported. | ||
| And it's on everywhere? | ||
| Everything? | ||
| Yeah, everything. | ||
| Harass Katie Herzog. | ||
| Make sure to harass her. | ||
| Don't harass young Katie. | ||
| No, don't let someone harass her. | ||
| I'd love to have Katie in here, too. | ||
| Please do. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| Thank you, brother. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Appreciate it. | |
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It's been very fun. |
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