Feb. 24, 2022 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:48:16
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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! | ||
| Cheers, sir. | ||
|
unidentified
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Cheers. | |
| Salud. | ||
| So this is for you. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| It's got a little JRE label on the back of it. | ||
| This is your own in the side, this little thing. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| This is a part of a thing we did with Fight for the Forgotten, which is, I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a charity that my friend Justin Wren put together. | ||
| They built wells for people in the pygmy population in Uganda and in the Congo as well. | ||
| And so they did a thing with Buffalo Trace where we picked out one very specific batch and they literally gave us a barrel of whiskey. | ||
| So we have one giant bottle and then a bunch of these bottles to give out to guests. | ||
|
unidentified
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So there you go. | |
| Nice. | ||
| Man, this feels strange. | ||
| I've got to tell you, in the late 90s, I watched news radio all the time, so it feels weird having a drink with you. | ||
| It feels weird just being me. | ||
| It's weird for people to feel weird to meet me. | ||
| So that's odd too. | ||
| So your book speaks to my heart. | ||
| Did you bring a copy? | ||
| I did not. | ||
| You have a book with you. | ||
| No, I have a book with me. | ||
| This is a book by my friend Adolf Reed. | ||
| So it's about growing up in New Orleans under Jim Crow and kind of how The South and the country has changed and how it hasn't changed. | ||
| So this is good stuff. | ||
| Okay, cool. | ||
| Well, that's a good book, too. | ||
| But tell everybody about your book. | ||
| Yeah, so my book is called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, a critique of the contemporary left. | ||
| And I wrote that a while ago, so that was before we went through this surreal experience where during weeks that the United States and Russia have been closer to the brink of war than they have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis. | ||
| Somehow we've had weeks of news cycle about Joe Rogan. | ||
| I don't know how that happened. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Yeah, I'm a controversial character apparently. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Apparently, yeah. | ||
| And apparently those controversies are the most important thing in the world. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Well, the most important thing in the world in media is ratings. | ||
| And unfortunately, outrage is what sells. | ||
| And if you could be upset at something and so there's like a perfect storm with me. | ||
| First of all, it was questioning the COVID narrative. | ||
| And then it was having on doctors who also questioned the COVID narrative. | ||
| And then it was me getting COVID and recovering very quickly, but taking the wrong medication in their eyes. | ||
| And then it was, you know, like posting up the brought to you by Pfizer videos and like showing like these, these people like bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies. | ||
| And then It's all the other things. | ||
| It's like every clip that we talked about before the podcast, like every clip that I've ever said taken out of context and if you smoosh them all together how horrible it looks. | ||
| But it's not really that they think it's important. | ||
| They don't give a fuck what's important. | ||
| They're just trying to stay alive and they're trying to get as many views as possible and they're trying to escape what is this undeniable Yeah, we were talking about this a little bit before we started and I think what's really – I mean whatever. | ||
| This is not like a mind-shatteringly original insight or whatever. | ||
| Lots of people have said this but I think what's really gone on is that the economic collapse of traditional media has meant – That the profit incentive now is just to cater to whoever you have left, right? | ||
| So if you have – like if you're on Fox, then like whatever, like a couple million conservative old people are watching at any given time. | ||
| You want to give them the narrative that's going to keep them scared and angry and watching the news. | ||
| If you're on MSNBC, then you spend the entire Trump years talking about Russia because that's what scares their audience. | ||
| And people don't – and one thing that really disturbs me about this, I mean like the book is about all of the things that people – who I basically agree with. | ||
| Are getting wrong, right? | ||
| So, in other words, like, I'm a socialist. | ||
| I'm a columnist for Jacobin Magazine. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Are you a straight-up socialist? | ||
| Are you a democratic socialist? | ||
| Because I know that you've been represented as a democratic socialist. | ||
| So, I mean, look, the reason I put democratic in there, right, which I do, but the reason I put democratic in there is because there are obviously countries that have existed that have called themselves socialists, that have You know, not had things that I care about, like, you know, free speech and, you know, multi-party elections. | ||
| And so I certainly don't want to associate myself with that. | ||
| But, look, I mean, short term, I care very much about, you know, having, you know, socialized health care, about having, you know, like, tuition-free higher education so people can go to school without having to be in debt for, like, decades, which is obscene. | ||
| I mean, that's ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah, I'm with you 100% on both those things. | ||
| And I do think that the level of inequality that we get from our current system is indefensible. | ||
| In other words, that if one person has more than another just because they chose to work harder... | ||
| Then that's one thing. | ||
| Person A wants to stay home and watch Netflix and person B wants to work for more hours. | ||
| Person B should get more money. | ||
| I am totally fine with that. | ||
| But what bothers me is when you have these massive inequalities that have huge effects in people's lives that are linked to things that aren't under their control. | ||
| And I think we have a lot of that too. | ||
| I would agree with you 100%. | ||
| My position on this, whenever people push back against the concept of socialism, or when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for president, I was saying that, look at all the things that are technically a socialist concept that we accept, like the fire department. | ||
| Imagine if you had to have money to get your fire put out. | ||
| Like, we don't think that. | ||
| Like, if your house burns down, we call the fire department, they show up. | ||
| Our taxes fund the fire department. | ||
| That is essentially a socialist endeavor. | ||
| I mean, it's a socialist institution. | ||
| Yeah, it's taken outside of the market. | ||
| It's provided just as, like, a right that you should have just for being a person, right? | ||
| You shouldn't have to do anything special to get your house put out if it's on fire. | ||
| And you also shouldn't have to do anything special to get treatment if you're sick. | ||
| To go to college in the first place, it seems to me that a lot of people who don't think that there should be a higher minimum wage are the same people who will go turn around and say, oh, if they wanted to make more money, they should go back to school, but then they don't want to pay for that, right? | ||
| So which one is it, right? | ||
| Should they be paid more doing what they're doing, or should they go back to school? | ||
| Because if it's none of the above, then it sounds like you just don't think those people should have good lives, or at least you don't have a plan to help them have good lives. | ||
| What's fascinating to me, too, is when you look at public school versus public services like the fire department, fire department people get paid well. | ||
| It's a good job. | ||
| If you're a member of the fire department, I have friends that are in the fire department. | ||
| It's good benefits. | ||
| The hours are cool because you get to work like 24-hour shifts. | ||
| You sleep there. | ||
| You work there. | ||
| My friend Ray was a fireman for years. | ||
| He would say like he worked like a few days a week and then you know there were long shifts and they weren't always called to fires so sometimes they're just cooking and working out and hanging out around the firehouse but it's a great job it's it's like a a job that people look forward to getting it's it's difficult to get how come that's not the same thing with teachers like what what kind of a world do we live in where teachers don't get paid well i mean i'm not saying fire department people shouldn't be paid well of course they should be paid well They | ||
| They should be paid great. | ||
| It's a fucking very risky job. | ||
| It's very valuable to the community. | ||
| But fucking so is teaching. | ||
| How is there such a disparity? | ||
| So is teaching. | ||
| And it's crazy that there are so many people who look at K-12 teachers and say, like, oh, how come they get summers off or whatever, or don't like the – no, it's ridiculous. | ||
| It's so stupid. | ||
| And they don't – and I guess what gets me is when people see someone like a unionized school teacher who has some good benefits, a little bit of job security. | ||
| Not nearly as good as it should be like we've been talking about, right? | ||
| But like – and they say, oh, well, why should they have those things when I don't? | ||
| Instead of saying, well, how can I get those things? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So I could have them too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because it doesn't benefit you as an ordinary person if like somebody who has a job like that is paid less. | ||
| In fact, what it does is it's bad for your kids if they go to public schools because the kinds of things that teachers unions want like smaller class sizes are things that are – like the conditions that they teach in are the same conditions that the kids are learning in. | ||
| So I think it actually benefits everybody. | ||
| I think that Finland is supposed to have the best public schools in the world by a lot of metrics, the best school system in the world. | ||
| They actually don't really have private schools in Finland. | ||
| It's very strong unions. | ||
| People are certainly getting a better deal as teachers there than they are here. | ||
| But so many people think the solution is to... | ||
| It's to privatize things. | ||
| That's the solution if there's no other options. | ||
| I mean, if you're a guy right now and you have a child and you have enough money to put them in a really good school that you have to pay for versus a really shitty school that you get for free, that makes sense. | ||
| Yeah, I don't blame anybody for making that decision as an individual. | ||
| But they shouldn't have to make that decision. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I think what we should have are excellent public schools so that everybody can just do that. | ||
| Imagine! | ||
| Imagine that that's controversial. | ||
| Literally, one of the most important things for the future of our society is raising children correctly and educating them. | ||
| By correctly, meaning giving them the opportunity to grow and pursue their interests and find out where they fit in life and have enthusiastic, well-paid teachers, not people that feel like they're being taken advantage of and fucked with and just exhausted all the time. | ||
| Well, it's weird, too, because a lot of the same people who are hostile to that will say when they're talking about, like, corporate CEOs, like, oh, you can't complain about how much they're paid because they have to be, you know, like, you have to have that as an incentive, or they're not going to give you their best work if they're not being paid, you know, 500 times more, you know, than people who work there. | ||
| But it's like, wait a second, so why doesn't that logic go for, like, teachers or other public employees that, like, if If they're paid more, then you're going to get a better performance out of them. | ||
| Why is it only CEOs? | ||
| Well, we have a very distorted set of values when it comes to what's important. | ||
| And this is, again, not saying that fire department people are not important. | ||
| They're fucking hugely important, and I respect them very much. | ||
| And I'm glad they get paid well. | ||
| But I mean, it should be like that with all of what I would think of social services, services for the community that we would gladly pay for for taxes, fixing infrastructures, fixing roads. | ||
| The problem, I think, with a lot of people is they just don't trust government to handle the money well. | ||
| They think that you're going to get a lot of bureaucracy. | ||
| It's going to be bloated. | ||
| There's going to be a shitload of people that are working. | ||
| They're not going to resolve it. | ||
| And it's going to be sort of that... | ||
| Same situation where if you donate to charities and you find out that like 90% of the money goes to infrastructure and some of those shitty charities where so much money goes to the people that are working there that very little of it goes to the actual charity itself. | ||
| Of course, that's the private sector, too. | ||
| Yes, it is. | ||
| It is with everything. | ||
| I guess I would just say one thing about the bureaucracy thing, because I know that that's something that's an easy association in lots of people's minds, right? | ||
| That more government means more bureaucracy. | ||
| And if you're thinking about people who are petty gatekeepers, who are going to be able to approve or deny something, it's very natural to resent people like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But what I would say is that what situation is actually going to give bureaucrats more power? | ||
| Is it going to be if you have something like Medicare for All, for example, or just like how public schools already work, right? | ||
| The K-12, that like every kid... | ||
| It has to be educated. | ||
| You don't have to go through a special process. | ||
| So if it's universal programs, then you don't have what you have with means-tested programs, where there's somebody who's looking over your application and deciding whether or not you qualify and deciding which hoops you have to jump through. | ||
| And that really seems to me like where bureaucrats are really going to get most of their power. | ||
| And that's not to say, when I was saying that, I'm not saying that like... | ||
| There are no legitimate complaints about, like, any of the agencies that do these things. | ||
| Of course there are, right? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But what I would ask, though, is what the options are, right? | ||
| Because if you privatize something, then you're still having decisions be made by decision-makers who you don't necessarily – like, might be very distant from you. | ||
| But the difference is, at least when it's public, then – Theoretically, you can at least elect the people who are overseeing it, whereas if something is subcontracted out to a private corporation, then that's not even true anymore. | ||
| There's another layer in between you as an ordinary person and control over this institution. | ||
| If the federal government does anything bad, then we can theoretically get rid of them, although I think there are a lot of very undemocratic things about America's political system that make it way harder to do that. | ||
| I mean, the fact that we've only got two political parties that are basically allowed to participate at all, the fact— Yeah, you could go on and on. | ||
| We could go on and on, right? | ||
| The money that's involved in getting these people elected. | ||
| Yeah, the money definitely, right? | ||
| Exorbitant amounts of money from special interest groups. | ||
| Yeah, no question, right? | ||
| So, like, I think we've got, like, a little bit of democracy there, not nearly as much as we should, right? | ||
| But, like, Jeff Bezos isn't up for election by anybody, right? | ||
| Like, he's just there, right? | ||
| So, like, if you have... | ||
| If, for example, you didn't have the public post office, it was just Amazon taking the Amazon trucks and that's it, then now you're talking about an institution that there's no democratic control over. | ||
| There's a little bit of indirect control in the case of the post office, which, by the way, I would point out that When conservatives talk about bureaucracy and inefficiency and stuff like that, they always bring that up. | ||
| But if you actually look at polls, 90% of Americans like the post office. | ||
| The post office is amazing. | ||
| They can get a fucking letter across the country for less than a dollar. | ||
| How crazy is that? | ||
| What does it cost for a stamp? | ||
| What's it at now? | ||
| Yeah, it's like, I know it's less than a dollar. | ||
| It's been a while since I actually, like, I think my wife usually buys the stuff. | ||
| I just email stuff. | ||
| I don't fucking mail shit anymore. | ||
| But the fact that you can take a letter from Austin to, like, rural Alaska... | ||
| For a buck. | ||
| For a buck is... | ||
| Fucking bonkers. | ||
| It's ridiculous and no private company would have the incentive to do that, right? | ||
| And I think that that's like one of the things that Bernie Sanders was talking about the two times he ran for president. | ||
| It's not one of the things that was played up the most. | ||
| Is postal banking, which is the idea that you could have basic banking services offered at the post office, which they actually do have in some Scandinavian countries. | ||
| Basic banking services like deposits and withdrawals and stuff like that? | ||
| Post office? | ||
| At the post office. | ||
| Why would you do that? | ||
| Which is because it's a public institution. | ||
| It already exists everywhere, right? | ||
| Their post office is all over the place. | ||
| So they would sort out money as well as mail? | ||
| What if the money goes to the wrong places? | ||
| I get mail from wrong people sometimes. | ||
| Well, the mail does sometimes go to the wrong places. | ||
| I would point out if you look at FedEx versus the post office, I don't actually think the failure rate is worse with the USPS. No, we have a problem with the UPS here. | ||
| Our fucking packages get stolen. | ||
| Yeah, and I... They just leave them here, and we're not here, and someone snatched it. | ||
| Yeah, well, I don't know if the alternative is they put the thing on the, you know... | ||
| Yeah, put the fucking thing on the door, man. | ||
| We'll come get it. | ||
| We've got a lazy UPS driver. | ||
| But you're subject... | ||
| Like, at home, I've got a great guy. | ||
| It's like you're subjected to whoever the fuck it is that's running that route. | ||
| Yeah, unfortunately. | ||
| No, fair enough, right? | ||
| But what I would just point out is this, that like right now there are a lot of people who for one reason or another can't get a bank account, right? | ||
| You know, that they have that – I mean the most like extreme case might be like somebody who's like homeless, you know, so they don't have an address. | ||
| But like even short of that, right, there are people who – For one reason or another, have trouble getting a bank account. | ||
| So you have all these parasitical check cashing businesses and stuff like that that prey on people like that. | ||
| And I think having some kind of public alternative would go a long way to helping with that issue. | ||
| There are countries that already exist. | ||
| So I think that in the short term, the stuff that makes sense to me is finding ways – where it makes sense, it might not always make sense – but finding ways that you can expand what's not just like you have to find some private corporation to do it for you, but that can be within the sort of – You know, the public sphere. | ||
| And then, look, I mean, there are things that we'll probably always need, you know, private businesses for. | ||
| I'm under no illusions about that. | ||
| You know, if you don't want to have, like, the way grocery stores were in, like, the Soviet Union in 1985 or whatever, you know, you have to have... | ||
| You know, like, there are certain things, price signals and, you know, firm failure you probably do need to have. | ||
| But I do think, like, at the sort of outer edges of what I would like, that it would be good if it was a long-term goal to move towards having it be more of a norm that, you know, workers, like, own, like, a lot of private businesses, you know? | ||
| If you look at the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, that has 80,000 worker members who own that. | ||
| You have an operating agreement, which is the equivalent of a union contract, but there's no separate boss to negotiate with. | ||
| You know, might not necessarily directly elect managers because there could be things that are like, you know, technical things that, you know, managers have to do that, like, you want that to be more of a traditional job application. | ||
| But you can at least elect the people who hire them. | ||
| And even if I could, like, you know, whatever, like a magical genie would just, like, somehow grant me, you know, that, like, all of my political preferences were satisfied in ways that I don't think they're going to be anytime soon, given all those problems with America's political system we talked about earlier. | ||
| But, like, Even if that happened, I don't think that every single business should have to be like that. | ||
| That if you hire a guy to do graphic design for your podcast for 10 hours a week or something, that they have to have voting rights in a cooperative. | ||
| That would be silly. | ||
| But I think we could move towards an economy where that was a much more common thing. | ||
| And I think that would be way better off because the way it is – In the kinds of corporations that dominate the economy right now, where you'll get Amazon workers who are sometimes working at the warehouse and then they have to have a second job at night, and their boss literally has enough money off of that to buy his own spaceship. | ||
| That strikes me as a level of inequality that's really hard to justify by the principles that we kind of started with. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Well, what do they pay at Amazon? | ||
| Are they egregiously underpaid? | ||
| I don't think that they're egregiously underpaid by the standards of corporate America as a whole. | ||
| I think it is up to 15 now. | ||
| I'd have to check the exact numbers. | ||
| But what I would question is just this, though. | ||
| Right? | ||
| When you're dividing up, right, like the revenues that the whole company is making, then you say like there are lots of ways that if you are in a cooperative and people could vote on pay scales, there are lots of things you could do to convince somebody. | ||
| You mean like employees vote on pay scales? | ||
| Yeah, like if you have like a worker cooperative, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the problem with that is a lot more workers than there are Jeff Bezos's. | ||
| And if they decide to say like, we should get most of the money. | ||
| Okay, but what do you think Jeff Bezos is doing? | ||
| Right now? | ||
| Coke. | ||
| He's doing coke and he's banging his girlfriend on a yacht. | ||
| He's living like a guy who's got $183 billion. | ||
| Going to space. | ||
| Yeah, going to space on a rocket ship that looks like a dick. | ||
| He's shooting a giant metal dick up into the heavens. | ||
| He's literally trying to fuck space. | ||
| Yeah, that's what he's doing. | ||
| That's what he's supposed to do when you make that kind of money. | ||
| My fascination with Jeff Bezos is his transformation from nerd to this muscle-looking guy. | ||
| He looks like a jiu-jitsu black belt. | ||
| He looks like a tank. | ||
| It's kind of crazy. | ||
| He used to have this very respectable, normal wife, and now he's got this bombshell girlfriend. | ||
| It's kind of hilarious. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love a good cliche. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I love the fact they have to take down a bridge because he made a yacht that is so fucking big in order for it to get out of the place where they're making it. | ||
| They have to disassemble a fucking bridge. | ||
| And he's like, yeah, disassemble the bridge. | ||
| Fuck the fuck, man. | ||
| Why do you need a yacht so big? | ||
|
unidentified
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What are you doing? | |
| What are you doing? | ||
| He's just out of control. | ||
| But that's like – I feel like everyone that gets to that level of wealth seems to go out of control. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, it definitely does. | ||
| It definitely does seem that way, right? | ||
| And then their kids in many cases start out of control because they grew up their entire lives like having this – Like, level of wealth that makes it easy to get anybody to do whatever you want them to do. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| The other part of the problem is there's no time to be with the kids. | ||
| So when you're working and you're the CEO of Amazon, I mean, the fucking hours that guy was putting in is probably insane. | ||
| He's probably working when he was working. | ||
| He's not the CEO anymore. | ||
| But he's probably working 16 hours a day. | ||
| How the fuck can you instill some sort of sense of normalcy in your children? | ||
| When you're never home. | ||
| It's not really possible. | ||
| And so then you compensate with gifts. | ||
| Yeah, now he's too busy, you know, snoring coke and going into space and all that stuff. | ||
| And banging his bombshell girlfriend. | ||
|
unidentified
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Woo! | |
| Yeah. | ||
| I feel what you're saying. | ||
| Do you think that... | ||
| Do you have hope? | ||
| There seems such a polarization in this country. | ||
| There's people that I completely disagree with on the right that are like, pull yourself up, bury bootstraps, all that stuff. | ||
| That is nonsense talk. | ||
| When people talk like that, I'm like, Jesus Christ, man. | ||
| Not everybody is starting from the same position. | ||
| It's a crazy disparity. | ||
| And until we address that as a society, until we look at These impoverished communities that have been impoverished for decades and decades and decades. | ||
| And if you really want to talk about where my real feelings of socialism lie, my feelings of socialism are there are communities and it's not just inner cities. | ||
| It's like Appalachia. | ||
| It's these coal mining towns. | ||
| We have to dump money into these places and help these folks. | ||
| Because if you don't, you're going to have people that come out of there and they're going to cost you exponentially more money and all the problems they create in their own lives and other people's lives, whether it's crime or whether it's drug addiction or whatever despair that comes out of these horrific starting points that these people are from. | ||
| That can be fixed. | ||
| And this is where I'm a bleeding heart. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it can be fixed, but it sure hasn't been. | ||
| It hasn't been even addressed. | ||
| It's not even addressed. | ||
| There's no talk whatsoever about looking at communities like Baltimore and saying, hey, this has been fucked from the beginning. | ||
| Like, what do we do? | ||
| Like, look at the red line laws they instituted. | ||
| Look at the fact that the same... | ||
| What was his name? | ||
| Woods? | ||
| What was the cop that we had on? | ||
| Michael Woods. | ||
| He was a police officer in Baltimore. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was working there, and one of the things that he noticed was they found an arrest sheet from the 1970s, and it showed all of the same exact crimes that they're dealing with in the current time. | ||
| It's all in the same areas, and they were all happening. | ||
| The same thing was going on, all the different arrests for violence and drugs and all this different stuff. | ||
| And he was like, Jesus Christ, this is not... | ||
| And he felt this feeling like, I'm in a system that's broken. | ||
| You're not going to fix this. | ||
| You're just going to keep arresting people, and you keep having this systemic inequality in this area that's just been fucked for decades. | ||
| Yeah, no, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I think that because by the time you're dealing with that on that level, you're treating symptoms. | ||
| The problem has already happened. | ||
| And don't get me wrong. | ||
| I know people commit crimes for all kinds of reasons. | ||
| I'm not saying it's all economic. | ||
| But also, I don't see a lot of kids in the suburbs joining gangs. | ||
| There is a reason for that. | ||
| The things that really drive up the violent crime rate are things that have a lot to do with poverty and inequality. | ||
| I think that if you You talked about Appalachia. | ||
| I mean, like, the Obama administration's, like, response to, like, all the coal, you know, like, the sort of misery caused by all the coal mines closing was to, you know, just kind of sprinkle the region with a few— Well, how about that learn-to-code bullshit? | ||
| Well, that's exactly it, right? | ||
| Because, like, they put up these technology training centers, so it's essentially telling people to learn to code because, like, yeah, if you're, like, a 50-year-old laid-off coal miner, you'll definitely get the coding job and preference over the 22-year-old kid— You know, who just graduated. | ||
| It's absurd. | ||
| And then, like, Trump came in and he said he was going to bring the jobs back, and there are fewer jobs there than ever, right? | ||
| I mean, I don't think any of these people are serious about helping working-class people either in places like Baltimore or in places like Appalachia. | ||
| Because, you know, I think the Democrats, increasingly the kind of liberalism that's dominant in the Democratic Party right now, I think isn't really about that. | ||
| I think that what it's really about is trying to have a more diverse ruling class. | ||
| I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but I really think a lot of it's just about that. | ||
| To the extent they're concerned with social justice, what they're concerned about is disparity. | ||
| That you have more black people than white people who are living in poverty and going through a criminal justice system and all this stuff. | ||
| And that's absolutely true. | ||
| Right? | ||
| And that is completely a result of the fact that up until the 1960s, we literally lived in an apartheid country. | ||
| That in much of the United States, we had Jim Crow laws on the books. | ||
| And I think the horrible racial history of the United States is the reason for that. | ||
| But what's the goal, right? | ||
| Is the goal, is what you count as justice having like exactly demographically correct proportions of every group living in poverty and all of that stuff? | ||
| It's ridiculous. | ||
| I was just going to say, like the Republicans are even worse, right? | ||
| I mean like Republicans, when they claim that they're like big populists now, it's like, well, what do you actually want to do? | ||
| Do you want Medicare for all? | ||
| Do you want – like they don't support any of that stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, it's also the positions are weaponized, you know, and there's so much polarism. | ||
| I think it's very unhealthy to have two positions, a red position and a blue position, because people are so malleable. | ||
| They're so easily manipulated, and they want to be a part of a tribe. | ||
| And they'll just subscribe to these ideas, and then they take comfort in the fact there's other people that agree with them, and they get in these Facebook groups, and they just like, you know, talk about stuff that everyone else in their little echo chamber agrees with. | ||
| And they feel like the whole world should bend to their will. | ||
| It's a bizarre time. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Absolutely. | |
| What we were talking about earlier about the fact that the collapse of traditional media means that everybody gets to curate their own little media. | ||
| That's a problem too, right? | ||
| It's so easy now to just expose yourself to absolutely nothing all the time except people who I agree with you because, yeah, if there are only a couple million people watching one of the traditional networks at any given night, then what's their profit incentive? | ||
| Their profit incentive is to relentlessly pander to whatever audience they have left. | ||
| You know, you scare old conservatives and, you know, whatever. | ||
| Like, the MSNBC has their own version, like we were talking about. | ||
| But I think that, like, this is why I try to, like, go out and do debates all the time, because, which, like, some people, and this is one of the things I talk about in the book, right? | ||
| Some people on the left don't like that, right? | ||
| They say that, like, if you're... | ||
| Trevor Burrus If you talk to a bad person basically, they'll say like, oh, you're platforming. | ||
| Trevor Burrus That's so stupid. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Which is a word I hate so much. | ||
| Trevor Burrus I get that more than anybody because people want to say that I'm like a fake liberal because I talk to conservatives and I'm friends with some conservatives. | ||
| Like, that is the dumbest fucking thing to ever... | ||
| We need to communicate with each other. | ||
| We're supposed to be in a community. | ||
| The community is the human race, first of all, and then the United States, second. | ||
| We're supposed to be a community. | ||
| And if there... | ||
| I have a lot of friends that have completely different perspectives than me. | ||
| I have a lot of friends that are like... | ||
| Very Christian. | ||
| I have friends that are very Muslim. | ||
| I have friends that have no religious affiliation whatsoever. | ||
| I have friends that are right-wing and left-wing, and I don't mind all those things. | ||
| As long as you're not a suppressive person, you're not suppressing people that have an opposite position, Or an opposite perspective? | ||
| Why not? | ||
| What are we doing here? | ||
| Aren't we just talking to each other? | ||
| Shouldn't we communicate with people? | ||
| But when I have people on, I'll get all this pushback. | ||
| Or someone like Ben Shapiro. | ||
| Ben Shapiro's a lovely guy. | ||
| Meet him. | ||
| Get to know him. | ||
| He's very nice. | ||
| I don't agree with him a lot. | ||
| A lot. | ||
| On a lot of stuff. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, if... | ||
| But I love the guy. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| I mean, look, if Ben Shapiro ever wanted to come on my show and argue with me, I would 100% do that. | ||
| I bet he'd do it. | ||
| Okay, well, you know... | ||
| But he talks really fast, you gotta be careful. | ||
| Because it's hard to keep up with him. | ||
| It's like his fucking brain is on a different RPM. Whenever I talk to him, I try to slow things down. | ||
| Slow down, youngster. | ||
| That's awesome. | ||
| But he's very enthusiastic. | ||
| Yeah, I don't agree with him on a lot of things, particularly on gay issues. | ||
| He thinks that gay folks, they should just not do it. | ||
| Which is ridiculous. | ||
| It's the strangest position. | ||
| I just don't understand that position. | ||
| So if you're gay, you have a moral obligation to just be celibate for your entire life? | ||
| No, you're supposed to actually engage in heterosexual sex. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| But what's amazing is that this is where it falls apart, right? | ||
| Because this is all based on ancient writing. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Because God said this. | ||
| Who said God said this? | ||
| Who are these fucking people? | ||
| And what else did they say God said? | ||
| Did they say anything about zombies? | ||
| Did they say anything about people coming back from the dead? | ||
| What did God say? | ||
| I mean, how much did they say that doesn't make sense? | ||
| Did they say anything about parting oceans? | ||
| Did anybody lead someone to a place and part a sea? | ||
| Because that doesn't seem real. | ||
| Maybe someone was lying. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| That's like, yeah. | ||
| I mean, anybody who knows gay people, right? | ||
| I have gay friends that are like, you could never tell they're gay. | ||
| Because they don't, you know, they just seem like a man. | ||
| And then I have gay friends who are like, oh, no straight guy acts like that. | ||
| Yeah, they're like gay from space. | ||
| Yes! | ||
| Super gay! | ||
| When you meet a super gay person, first of all, they enjoy behaving that way. | ||
| That is how they like to talk. | ||
| Justin Martindale is a great example. | ||
| My friend Justin. | ||
| He's gay as fuck, but he's hilarious. | ||
| I mean, he's hilarious with it. | ||
| He's a joyful gay person. | ||
| You wouldn't get confused when you're around him. | ||
| You wouldn't say, what do you think this guy is? | ||
| Like, that guy's gay! | ||
| You know, but, like, that's how he is, man. | ||
| Yeah, that's how he is. | ||
| He's supposed to make a choice to have sex with women. | ||
| Like, fuck off. | ||
| Yeah, that sounds like a good deal for the woman, too. | ||
| Jesus. | ||
| Poor woman. | ||
| He's closing his eyes thinking about beards and shit. | ||
| It's so dumb. | ||
| Yeah, and I think—and also, I mean, we could talk, too, about, like, okay, so there's the party in the Red Sea stuff. | ||
| There's also the, like, slavery in the Bible, right? | ||
| Like, that's— Oh, God! | ||
| A ton of it. | ||
| You know, and then treating women as second-class citizens, condoning slavery. | ||
| There's a lot of murder in the Bible for disrespecting people. | ||
| Like, how about that one guy when the kids call them bald and they seek the fucking bears to kill all the kids? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, she bears. | |
| The kids, they killed the bear. | ||
| The bears killed the kids because they called him a bald guy. | ||
| Like, what the fuck? | ||
| Coming from a bald person, let me tell you something. | ||
| That's an overreach. | ||
| That's a ridiculous—but it's this idea that— You don't think if, like, some kids teased you about that, they would deserve the death penalty? | ||
| No. | ||
| Listen, I think there's some things that are fascinating about religious traditions that I think they can act as a scaffolding for moral behavior. | ||
| And some of the, like, the kindest, nicest people I know are Christians. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mm-hmm. | |
| And I think that there's something about that sort of structure, that religious structure. | ||
| When I was younger, I was much more of what you would say like a traditional agnostic or atheist. | ||
| I thought it was dumb. | ||
| I thought the religion was dumb. | ||
| I don't think it's dumb anymore. | ||
| And I think it's greatly beneficial to some people. | ||
| And I think it does give them a structure. | ||
| Jordan Peterson said something that really made a lot of sense to me. | ||
| It's not whether or not I believe in God. | ||
| He goes, but if you live your life like God exists, you will have a higher quality of life. | ||
| And it's that if you live your life like you are a part of this enormous community of loving beings that are all connected to this higher power and that you have this moral obligation to be a good person, And that there's great value and benefit in that and that there's a spiritual path to take of a righteous person who's really trying to do good in this world. | ||
| And I think for a lot of people, religion can act as a scaffolding to substantiate and enforce those kind of positive traits and positive paths of life. | ||
| And I think there's great benefit in that. | ||
| I think there's great good in that. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I'm an atheist, but, you know, but I have tremendous respect for Christians who get what you just described out of it. | ||
| I have to say there are Christians who get very different things out of it, right? | ||
| You know, that they want to, like... | ||
| You know, ban abortion and make gay people go back in the closet and all that stuff, you know, but like, but look, I mean, I think like Cornel West, you know, I think that's a Christian I have immense respect for. | ||
| Have you ever met him? | ||
| No, no, I have. | ||
| He was on like, so I used to do a segment on the Michael Brooks show and I think he was on that at least at least once. | ||
| I miss that guy. | ||
| Yeah, he was great. | ||
| Yeah, he was. | ||
| He was one of my closest friends for the last couple years before he passed. | ||
| He was a funny dude too, man. | ||
| He was a very funny guy. | ||
| Good impressions? | ||
| The Nation of Islam, Obama, you know. | ||
| He was just a really thoughtful, interesting guy who knew a shitload about politics and about socialism. | ||
| And he was a really good guy to sort of defend these positions of democratic socialism too. | ||
| Because he didn't seem like a bad person. | ||
| And even in critiquing other people that disagreed with him, I felt like he did it for the most part pretty reasonably. | ||
| Yeah, well I think that one thing that he really got and I actually think he helped me to get in the years since I met him is that like a lot of people who agree with his position, with my position don't Think nearly enough about what's going to be appealing to most ordinary people that they have. | ||
| Because if you're just... | ||
| Which is one of the reasons I wrote the book. | ||
| That stuff was starting to drive me crazy. | ||
| It seems like what a lot of people want to do is be part of an in-group and yell at everybody who isn't already on board with every single thing on a checklist. | ||
| And that's just not going to... | ||
| That's just not going to work. | ||
| If you actually care about this stuff. | ||
| If you think, yeah, I think that we have a grotesquely unequal society. | ||
| I think we need to have national healthcare. | ||
| We need to not fight all these wars around the world. | ||
| All of that stuff. | ||
| And you're actually talking about this stuff because you care about it. | ||
| Which, let's be honest, not everybody does. | ||
| Some people, politics is like a weird hobby for them. | ||
| But if you really care about that stuff, I mean, | ||
| it drives me crazy when I see people who want all the things that – You know, all the things that I want who are instead of trying to, you know, find ways that they can explain this to people who might like, you know, agree with them on some things, disagree with them on some things, like a lot of people, like most people aren't like centrist in the way that the media means when they say centrist, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is like the, you know, whatever socially liberal, fiscally conservative, all that stuff. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like like most people, I think, just have weird combinations of views. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is because, like, if you spend all of your time thinking about politics and tweeting about politics and all that stuff, you're like kind of an unusual person. | ||
| Most people don't do that. | ||
| They have other things. | ||
| That they have to do. | ||
| So they might have political reactions to things. | ||
| They have political impulses. | ||
| But, like, they haven't necessarily thought through every single thing, you know, to— They probably don't have the time. | ||
| Yeah, of course they don't have the time. | ||
| If you want to get involved deeply into the weeds in politics, you're going to—it's a tremendous amount of hours for years and years and years just to get a base understanding of what's going on. | ||
| That's why it's so impressive when you talk to someone who really does know a lot about politics. | ||
| Whenever I talk to my friend Kyle Kalinske, whenever I talk to him about politics, that motherfucker knows a lot. | ||
| So when we had the End of the World podcast when it was the election this past year, when we brought him, I brought him, I go, you're the voice of reason. | ||
| Like you actually understand what's going on here. | ||
| And he called it every step of the way. | ||
| See, all these people that have like these conspiracy theories about Trump, like, oh, the mail-in votes. | ||
| He explained. | ||
| He's like the mail-in votes are going to be majority Democrat votes. | ||
| And he goes, so if you look at Trump getting way ahead in places like Pennsylvania and a couple of these other states, he's like, this is what's going on. | ||
| There's a lot of the Republican folks are going to show up and they're going to vote in person. | ||
| And then the mail-in is going to be overwhelmingly Democratic. | ||
| And then he's probably going to lose a lot of numbers overnight. | ||
|
unidentified
|
And they're like, oh, we went to bed and he was ahead. | |
| But then the mail-in... | ||
| Kyle Kalinske explained it, explained it all on the podcast, clearly called it. | ||
| And that's because that's a guy who's been really studying politics at a very comprehensive level for a long time. | ||
| And he can give you the real information about it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And most people, like you said, they don't have the time. | ||
| I mean especially when you're in an increasingly precarious economy where lots of people like might have a couple of jobs and like drive an Uber on the side, you know, like just because they're trying to … How the fuck do you have time? | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| Unless you're just listening to podcasts all the time and, you know, like really educational podcasts on politics. | ||
| And even then you're going to get a cursory sort of understanding of it. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| So I mean I think that what you should really be when you approach people to try to convince them of the things that are important to you, like you shouldn't start from a place of do you have all the right positions and all of this stuff. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Because by definition, look, if everybody agreed with me about all this stuff, we'd be living in a very different country right now, right? | ||
| So I think that you need to assume... | ||
| The real question is does somebody have values that are just totally incompatible with mine or do they just have economic interests that are going to lead them to like they're never going to agree with me, right? | ||
| Jeff Bezos and I are never going to agree on what tax rates should be for obvious reasons, right? | ||
| Trevor Burrus: I would like you to talk to him though. | ||
| I think that would be an interesting conversation. | ||
| I've never heard him discuss money in terms of wealth and taxes. | ||
| I wonder what his position is on that. | ||
| I feel like there's a system that's in place that you would almost be negligent if you didn't take advantage of it. | ||
| If you're a guy who's making a lot of money and this is how you could pay X amount of taxes, and these are your deductions, and this is the law. | ||
| You follow the law to a T. And then the rest of it you can give out charitably if you choose to. | ||
| But I wonder what his position is on all that stuff, when you've got that kind of money. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think that my suspicion is that it starts to look very different, right? | ||
| Once you get all that cash, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, like, you're going to feel very—it's really hard to convince somebody that, like, who's benefiting that much from the way things are now. | ||
| Did you see the image of him at the New Year's party with his girlfriend? | ||
| No. | ||
| Jamie, help me out. | ||
| This is so important. | ||
| Because someone needs to superimpose this with an image of Jeff Bezos from, like, 1989. Like, what he looked like when he started Amazon versus what he looks like now. | ||
| I mean, when did he start Amazon? | ||
| It must have been the 90s, right? | ||
| Because it was an online book thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he was like this kind of nerdy guy. | ||
| Now look at him. | ||
| And look at his girlfriend. | ||
| I mean, this is amazing. | ||
| He's got fucking... | ||
| The hard sunglasses. | ||
| In his defense, this was actually a party that was for... | ||
| It was like a disco theme party. | ||
| So you're supposed to dress like this. | ||
| So everybody dressed like that. | ||
| They all dressed silly. | ||
| It was a fun party. | ||
| So he had these glasses that were like heart-shaped lenses. | ||
| And he's got this bombshell girlfriend who's leaning on him. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| I love excess. | ||
| I love when people are preposterous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| No, I mean, fair enough. | ||
| Like, and again, I don't blame anybody as an individual for like taking it like, like, look, if you're told here are the rules, right, that this is like, that everybody has to function in, like within reason, like if you're not like, You know, doing some things that I do think, you know, Bezos has done, but, like, you know, but if, you know, but there are, like, you know, like, if you're not, like, busting unions and this and that, right, then, like, look. | ||
| Look at that! | ||
| Look at it! | ||
| How's it going? | ||
| They did it! | ||
| Someone did it! | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| That's fucking amazing. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| Work hard, folks, and you don't have to be a dork. | ||
| Imagine, shave your head, get a bombshell girlfriend. | ||
| I love it. | ||
| Happy days are here. | ||
| Let's go. | ||
| That guy's lived different lives. | ||
| He's lived billions of dollars. | ||
| Hundreds of billions. | ||
| Not hundreds of millions, sir. | ||
| Hundreds of billions. | ||
| That's outrageous. | ||
| Yeah, no. | ||
| I mean he's on track to be the first trillionaire, right? | ||
| That's what they're saying. | ||
| Oh, there's trillionaires out there. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| OK. Are there? | ||
| Because I thought they were saying like in 2020 they were saying that like at the end of the – OK. No. | ||
| The trillionaires are all non-public. | ||
| See, if you think about like the royal families, like they don't have to disclose their wealth. | ||
| These people that have literally – They own countries. | ||
| We don't have to name the countries, but I know for a fact, because I have talked to people who are in fact billionaires, who are very wealthy business people that laugh, and they've told me the royal families in some of these countries are worth trillions of dollars, and they don't have to disclose it. | ||
| So when you get this public list of who the richest people in the world are, that's the richest people publicly. | ||
| They have to disclose it. | ||
| They're not oligarchs. | ||
| They're not people that are literally in charge of the oil, all the oil in a particular part of the world where billions of dollars are coming out every day. | ||
| Come on. | ||
| There's a shitload of money involved in that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I mean, the thing is, even if you're not like one of those people, right, like, you know, the non-public trillionaires, you know, from those countries that you're talking about, like, one thing that I think people often don't think about enough when they think about stuff like this is, | ||
| okay, if you have a system where you're going to get, like, wealth gaps that extreme, right, you know, that you can have people who are trillionaires maybe or who at least have hundreds of billions of dollars Then you're just not going to have political democracy the way that we should have it because the idea that everybody's going to have the same amount of influence on the government is just ridiculous once you get to that level. | ||
| Because if you work at an Amazon warehouse and you want to call your congressman, you'll be lucky if you have a conversation with an intern. | ||
| But Jeff Bezos can make a phone call to Biden. | ||
| Yeah, no, absolutely. | ||
| And Biden would take the call, right? | ||
| Because if he told him, right? | ||
| Listen, bro, take a couple extra Advil and let's have a conversation. | ||
| I need you to be awake for this one. | ||
| Yeah, which you might have to for Biden. | ||
| What happened to the left where somewhere along the line, to get back to your book and the subject we started with, what happened to the left where they are willing to... | ||
| There's something that happened where they became the side that accepts censorship and even promotes it. | ||
| And my thought is that something morphed during the time where social media became... | ||
| It became a tool of a lot of right-wing people. | ||
| And this is actually, like, pre-Trump, but was certainly accentuated during the Trump administration. | ||
| It's like people had a chance to anonymously say things through social media that maybe they wouldn't say around the office because, like, say if you have, like, ten people in your office and nine of them are Democrats and you are a Republican. | ||
| You really have to keep your mouth shut. | ||
| But when you get on Twitter, you can talk all kinds of crazy shit, or Reddit or whatever, and then all the other people that agree with you, they get attracted to you, and then you form these echo chambers, and then some of them are very aggressive in sort of pushing these ideas out. | ||
| And we saw that a lot with like Milo Yiannopoulos, and there was a lot of like these like Very influential online right-wing people that were, you know, they had like cheers from the fans and they had like these throngs of supporters and they silenced those guys. | ||
| They pulled those guys off social media and they found out that it was effective to do that. | ||
| And then it became a thing that they got really into. | ||
| Where they're into silencing, dissenting opinions, and it's gone so far that they're doing it to left-wing people that step even remotely outside the bounds of the orthodoxy, remotely outside the bounds of what they consider to be the rigid maintaining of this ideology. | ||
| They step outside of that, they silence people, and they're pulling videos down left and right off of Instagram and TikTok. | ||
| And Twitter, in some ways, Twitter's less censorship-oriented, even though people think of Twitter as being a very censored place. | ||
| It's one of the more lenient online platforms. | ||
| But what the fuck happened? | ||
| Yeah, I mean the Milo case is interesting actually because I think that – I mean I understand that like he got kicked off of Twitter and that was definitely part of it. | ||
| But like he was still riding pretty high after that happened. | ||
| Like I think that in Milo's case – and this is what – when I kind of try to tell people that like the ways that like some people on the left like want to like deal with figures like this, like forget morality for a second. | ||
| They're just not going to work, right? | ||
| So like here's what I mean by that, right? | ||
| That like – But Milo's career was built on people trying to stop him and heckle him and stop him from speaking and all that stuff. | ||
| My view on that guy is that honestly he wouldn't be that interesting if he just showed up on a college campus and just talked and nobody interrupted him. | ||
| But, like, that was why, like, because he was like, oh, he's, like, speaking edgy forbidden truths. | ||
| And, like, you know, it was the dangerous ideas to her. | ||
| That's what it was called. | ||
| Like, I think where Milo really got dropped, like, where Milo, like, was really ended, right? | ||
| And I'm not saying there aren't other cases that are more like what you're talking about. | ||
| But it seems to me that where Milo was really ended... | ||
| Was when the right dropped him after the age of consent stuff. | ||
| Like he was going to speak at CPAC and they canceled that. | ||
| His book deal got dropped. | ||
| Trevor Burrus But it wasn't just the right dropping him. | ||
| I mean that was across the board people dropped him. | ||
| Well, I mean everybody else had always hated him, right? | ||
| But then like after that happened, right? | ||
| But that was just a thing where it felt like it was so unacceptable to so many people that it's very rare that one idea becomes a thing that completely stops all the momentum that someone had. | ||
| He was a very popular cultural figure and then he vanished. | ||
| He has essentially been not just deplatformed but removed from the cultural conversation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, like a week before that happened, he was on Bill Maher, right? | ||
| I know. | ||
| Isn't that wild? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And Bill Maher was praising him and comparing him to Christopher Hitchens. | ||
| Christopher Hitchens, yeah, which I do not think Milo Yiannopoulos deserves. | ||
| But yeah, look, I think that there are a couple things going on there with censorship. | ||
| I mean, I would push back a little on the idea... | ||
| You know, that the right isn't, like, plenty pro-censorship in lots of ways? | ||
| Like, I think they... | ||
| No, I wouldn't say that. | ||
| Okay, well, so we disagree on... | ||
| No, I think that people politically like to silence their opposing, or their opposition. | ||
| When someone opposes their opposition, I think they like to do that. | ||
| What I think is, like, the left has traditionally been the ACLU, which those Jewish lawyers... | ||
| Supported the idea of Nazis being allowed to say whatever they want, because they said that the counter to that, the opposite of that, is the suppressing speech, and it's a terrible, dangerous road to go down. | ||
| And the answer to bad ideas is not silencing those ideas. | ||
| It's better ideas. | ||
| That's my position, and that's an old-school liberal position, but that doesn't exist that much in the left wing of today. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that's 100% my position. | ||
| I think that it's really dangerous that A lot of people, even though most of the stuff you're talking about is driven more by mainstream liberals, that it's not like people running these insanely profitable social media companies. | ||
| It's not like they want all the stuff I want. | ||
| But I see way too many people on the left going along with it, and I think it's super short-sighted. | ||
| How did it happen, though? | ||
| Do you think it happened by what I'm saying that like they found it was effective for silencing people they felt was problematic so they just adopted these ideas and then they sort of shifted their ethics? | ||
| I think there's some of that. | ||
| I think that a lot of it is that a lot of people feel powerless to change the world in any way that actually matters and so they end up Getting sucked into these, like, culture war distractions about who said what in 1995 that we can, like, get mad at them about. | ||
| You know, whatever, like, just whatever, like, weird nonsense people are arguing about this week, right? | ||
| The green M&M, you know? | ||
| And, like, some of this stuff is part of that, right? | ||
| Like, they have a... | ||
| That, like, if you don't, like, if you can't actually, you know, change the world, like, create a more equal society or whatever, you can at least get somebody fired. | ||
| You can at least get somebody kicked off, and then you felt like you've won something. | ||
| And I think that that's, again, I think it's incredibly dangerous because, like, people who want, for example, you know, Spotify to kick you off, you know, there's a move-on, you know, petition, you know, for them to do that, that, like... | ||
| What I always want to say is even though – and the thing that really gets me about the calls for censorship is, OK, I think there are principled reasons that free speech is important and we should have open debates about controversial ideas. | ||
| I think there are ways that we have a better society if we do that. | ||
| I think it's crazy that anybody who basically agrees with me about politics would support increased corporate censorship, right? | ||
| Because if you have, like, some social media company, right? | ||
| You know, that's going to be – like, they're going to have some CEO who's partying like Bezos in that picture. | ||
| Are they – You know, whose side are they going to take when there are future things where people say that something is misinformation? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And by what definition is it misinformation? | ||
| Because the problem is that every political argument is to some extent an argument about facts, right? | ||
| Even though my position was, you know, as like a college, like anti-war activist was that even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction, it would still be against the war because, you know, I think the rationale still wouldn't have made sense to me. | ||
| But like that was like part of what people were arguing about was whether there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. | ||
| And look, if you had social media companies in 2002 in the way that you do now and they had misinformation policies, who would be more likely to get bounds for misinformation? | ||
| People who said – who agreed with the government, agreed with the New York Times, that there were WMDs or people who thought that like Bush administration officials were conspiring to lie to the public? | ||
| I think that if there's something that comes out tomorrow about some horrible labor practice at Amazon, who are these companies more likely to side with? | ||
| People who say, yeah, they did this thing, right? | ||
| Or the company saying, no, it's a lie. | ||
| It's misinformation. | ||
| I think the issue with free speech is always – Who gets to decide? | ||
| Look, this is the same reason I don't like the CRT laws either because I don't like the idea that there are going to be people who are second guessing what happened in some classroom to say, Was this too close to one of these ideas that we don't like? | ||
| Did you talk to your students about something that flew a little bit too close to the sun of CRT? By CRT, you're talking about critical race theory. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that like actual critical race theory, there are parts I agree with. | ||
| There are parts that I disagree with. | ||
| But I don't want to live in a – I want to live in the kind of society where when there's like some controversial idea that's out there, you know, like that like people can talk about it and debate about it and like if you can, you know, like you could discuss it with students in a classroom. | ||
| Like I think ideally the way that education should work, it should foster critical thinking like instead of like this is exactly what you should think. | ||
|
unidentified
|
For sure. | |
| You know, to think about it more clearly and to argue about it and to, you know, and to decide what they think, right? | ||
| You know, like, ultimately, if you want people to be citizens in a democracy, right, to the extent that we have one of those, like, that's what you want. | ||
| Like, that's how you want them to grow up, I hope. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| You want discussion. | ||
| The way you sort out, if you're an observer, the way you sort out who has the better argument is to watch them discuss. | ||
| You remember the Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley speeches, which is a great documentary. | ||
| What is it called? | ||
| Best of Enemies. | ||
| It's a fantastic documentary where it shows that this is the difference in our culture today versus then. | ||
| These guys, I believe it was on ABC, these guys had this like really highly rated debate series. | ||
| I think they did like, how many of them did they do? | ||
| Six of them or something like that? | ||
| I don't remember how many, but they did a few, yeah. | ||
| They did quite a few. | ||
| So they were going back and forth and William F. Buckley was a famous conservative. | ||
| Gore Vidal was a famous liberal. | ||
| And they had these fascinating discussions and they did them on national television. | ||
| And they became this point of discussion through the entire country and the world, where people sat down and some people took Buckley's side, some people took Gore Vidal's side. | ||
| And this is how we sort things out. | ||
| We don't sort things out by silencing people. | ||
| We don't sort things out by saying you have an unacceptable position because it doesn't fit in with what I'm saying or it causes this or that. | ||
| It's a dangerous way to set a precedent because you're filtering ideas. | ||
| You're filtering ideas through your own standards. | ||
| And I don't think that's good. | ||
| Because I think it's bad for you, too. | ||
| It's bad for your ideas. | ||
| Because if your ideas can't stand the vetting of an opposing position, then your ideas might suck. | ||
| And you maybe should look at them. | ||
| Maybe you're lazy and you don't want to go through the... | ||
| It's a hassle of debate or of serious discourse. | ||
| But if your ideas can't handle that kind of a discussion, you probably shouldn't have them. | ||
| You shouldn't adopt them. | ||
| You shouldn't be holding on to them. | ||
| That's my position on all this. | ||
| Whenever someone's trying to silence someone, it's more political than it is anything. | ||
| It's more this person has an incredible amount of influence, and they don't align up very rigidly with what our ideology is, and they could cause us problems if they discuss certain things in an unorthodox way, and we don't like that. | ||
| So we're going to silence them, and we're going to pretend that there's something that they're not, and we're going to do that openly, and it's going to be obvious. | ||
| Yeah, and I think especially, like, look, if you think the status quo is totally fine, that, like, everything is the way that it should be, I can, I guess, understand. | ||
| Who the fuck thinks that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I don't know. | |
| That's a crazy argument. | ||
| There's not a single person alive that thinks everything's perfect. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Is there? | ||
| I mean, if so, I haven't met them. | ||
| I never met them. | ||
| So I don't think you can have that argument. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, I mean, if you think that there are things that are really seriously wrong with the society that you live in right now... | ||
| Have discussions. | ||
| Then you... | ||
| Like, the last thing that you want to do is to make it harder to get your ideas about that out there so people can talk about them, people can hear about them, right? | ||
| Like, I think that if you... | ||
| If you want to have – in my case, you think that we have way too much economic inequality, I think it's particularly crazy to support more corporate censorship. | ||
| Because again, who do you think – Who do you think is going to get censored? | ||
| I mean if there's some Starbucks worker who got fired when they were trying to organize a union and Starbucks says that no, they weren't really fired for that. | ||
| It was really because they – whatever. | ||
| They showed up late. | ||
| They showed up late. | ||
| I mean OK. So somebody is lying. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Do we want Twitter or whatever platform to be making decisions about who's lying and which of these sides is misinformation? | ||
| I don't, right? | ||
| Not just because I support free speech, though I do, but also just because I don't trust at all that they're going to take the side that I would want to on that. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| It's one of the things that I talked about when I made a video recently when they said that I was saying misinformation. | ||
| And I was saying, well, look at what used to be misinformation just a few months ago that's now fact. | ||
| There's like the lab leak theory. | ||
| The lab leak theory, if you said that before, you'd get kicked off of social media. | ||
| Now it's on the front cover of Newsweek. | ||
| The idea that if you get vaccinated, you can still spread COVID and you could still get COVID. That was crazy talk. | ||
| Rachel Maddow was on television saying, the virus stops with you. | ||
| You can't spread it. | ||
| You can't catch it. | ||
| It stops with you if you're vaccinated. | ||
| That's not true. | ||
| We know that's not true. | ||
| If you said that I think people who are vaccinated can still catch COVID and they can still spread COVID, that would be misinformation. | ||
| But now, that's accepted as fact. | ||
| There's a bunch of those. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I think in that case, I think that might be less like, you know, people didn't know that and more just kind of Rachel Maddow's an idiot because like if you, you know, because what they always said is like the effort, like, you know, whatever it is, even for like the original version of COVID, that, you know, wild COVID, whatever they call it, right? | ||
| Like, you know, whatever 90 something, you know, percent, you know, like rate of effectiveness of like Pfizer. | ||
| Yeah, but if you read the literature, that's not really even accurate. | ||
| But this is the thing. | ||
| Whatever you think the effectiveness rate is, it was never 100%. | ||
| And if Rachel Maddow thought that it was 100%, that one seems more like an issue of Rachel Maddow not understanding medical science. | ||
| But again, I don't want- So that would make it misinformation. | ||
| Right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So it's the same thing. | ||
| That's my point. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| I mean, like, actually, so here's an example I completely agree with. | ||
| At the beginning of the pandemic, like back in, what was it, like March, you know, 2020, maybe until sometime in April- Right. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, and, you know, as we established, I am not some, you know, like there are a lot of things that I would rather spend my time on than like trying to sort through all the COVID stuff. | ||
| But like, even I at the time was like, wait a second. | ||
| That doesn't make sense. | ||
| Why not? | ||
|
unidentified
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Right? | |
| Like, you know, why would that – like, the reasons they were given didn't make sense to me. | ||
| And then they kind of said – I mean, like, I know some people say this is an oversimplification. | ||
| But I think if you go back and look at it, this is kind of what they said. | ||
| Oh, we lied about that so that, like, all the masks wouldn't get bought up. | ||
| That's not an oversimplification at all. | ||
| That's exactly what they said. | ||
| And which is crazy to – like, the thing that's crazy to me is like, okay – If you're going to do that – I don't think you should have done it – but if you're going to do that, like, you have to resign after that, right? | ||
| Like, once you've, like, shown that you were willing to, like, lie – lie to people. | ||
| Like, if you think it's important that people trust, you know, medical authorities, which, you know, I mean I can see why. | ||
| Public health crisis, you know, that you think that was important. | ||
| Like, what's going to undermine that more? | ||
| People – random people on the internet saying things that might not be true about it or people going on podcasts who might say things that are wrong or like the CDC admitting that they were lying about something important. | ||
| That's going to undermine that like crazy and I would not have wanted people who were pointing things like this out at the time that like – Oh, the stated reasons why masks were supposed to be bad didn't really make sense, which they didn't, right? | ||
| You know, because it was like, well, it's going to encourage people to be reckless. | ||
| And it's like, well, OK, that's an argument. | ||
| It's like seatbelts. | ||
| I don't think that was one that they used, right? | ||
| But not Fauci. | ||
| I don't think Fauci used that argument. | ||
| Yeah, I think the WHO did. | ||
| I think if you went to their website, I think that's one of the things that they said there at one point. | ||
| But they'd also say, well, people don't know how to use them properly, so it's going to end up being more dangerous. | ||
| There were a bunch of things they threw out. | ||
| None of it quite seemed to add up even at the time. | ||
| And then again, they came out and said, no, actually, it's not like the science changed when that happened. | ||
| And I think that I certainly wouldn't have wanted people who were pointing that out to not be able to do that because of some misinformation policy. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Don't you think that the issue really was that people were afraid? | ||
| And when people are afraid, then they will support harsher measures to ensure safety. | ||
| And one of those measures would be to silence people that may be spreading information that could get people in trouble. | ||
| So they're willing to compromise their values because they think there's a greater good to be had. | ||
| There's a different time. | ||
| And that's one of the more dangerous things about a thing like a pandemic. | ||
| Because people will compromise their positions because they feel like there's a greater good to be achieved. | ||
| And so we need to silence these people. | ||
| Like, this was during the presidential campaign. | ||
| And this is one of the things that I found out that I was really shocked by. | ||
| The Twitter band, Brett Weinstein, had a thing that he had put together called Unity 2020. And the idea was instead of this rigid two-party system where you have people on the left and people on the right, what if you had like a really reasonable person, a well-balanced person from the right and a really reasonable, well-balanced person from the left and we brought them together? | ||
| Very popular people and put together like a party and call it like the unity party. | ||
| And so he made a Twitter page and Twitter banned the page. | ||
| What was the reason? | ||
| Some bullshit reason. | ||
| But the reason was they were terrified that these popular podcasters and people were going to take votes away from the left. | ||
| Because these people like Weinstein and his wife, they're progressives. | ||
| I mean they taught at a very progressive university. | ||
| A lot of people that are progressive that feel disenfranchised with some of the standards of the Democratic Party, and they weren't really interested in a guy like Biden, who is this career politician who's basically full of shit, and having him be president. | ||
| Like, aren't there more reasonable, more attractive alternatives? | ||
| So they put together this thing, and Twitter fucking banned it. | ||
| And I think the reason why they banned it is the same reason why they changed the standards of presidential debates after Ross Perot was in the elections back in the 80s. | ||
| Was it the 90s? | ||
| When was that? | ||
| 92 was the first time. | ||
| And then I think he ran again in the 96. This is exactly the same. | ||
| They were worried that that can fuck up an election. | ||
| If you get enough people that say, hey, you guys are making a lot of sense. | ||
| I'm going to vote Unity 2020. If that becomes a big thing, and the Republicans aren't going to vote Unity 2020, they're going to stick with their base. | ||
| They're going to stick with their guy. | ||
| They're Trump people. | ||
| We've got a guy. | ||
| He's our winner. | ||
| And they were worried and concerned, I think, that this Unity 2020 thing, even if it's like 10,000 votes in this place and 5,000 votes— Yeah, it doesn't take that much to— It doesn't take that much to swing elections. | ||
| No, definitely not. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, I certainly wouldn't have voted for Unity 2020. I think that the Democrats and Republicans are too close together in their positions already, right? | ||
| There are too many things where they— That they basically agree on that I don't like. | ||
| But I certainly don't think that you should be banned for Twitter. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| But that's the thing about these social media platforms is that they've become too big. | ||
| They have too much influence. | ||
| It's not as simple as like this is a private business. | ||
| They can do whatever they want. | ||
| This private business is the way that people distribute information to billions and billions of people. | ||
| The idea that Facebook is just a private business is bananas because it literally influences worldwide elections and it comes standard on your phone in many countries. | ||
| It is the internet to a lot of people in other countries. | ||
| The idea that that's just a private company is crazy. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Well, the thing that's particularly crazy to me is like, look, I understand like a conservative or libertarian who would say that, oh, they're a private business. | ||
| They could do whatever they want because that's what they would say about everything, right? | ||
| That like private businesses should be able to do what they want and like – and obviously – I'm a socialist. | ||
| I really disagree with that. | ||
| But what's crazy to me is when people who are on the left who want there to be lots of restrictions that I agree with on private businesses then turn around and say, oh, this isn't really a free speech issue because it's like a private business. | ||
| It's like, wait a second, guys. | ||
| Because it supports their desires. | ||
| Which one is it, right? | ||
| Because if you are on the left, and I don't mean if you're a liberal, but if you're a real leftist, then I would say that a lot of the core of your worldview is that you understand that private businesses can have a crazy amount of power over people's lives, and that can be, in certain respects, as dangerous as the power of governments. | ||
| And of course, The two are not unrelated, right? | ||
| Because private businesses like we were talking about earlier have a crazy amount of influence over what the government does. | ||
| So I think wanting private corporations to be more powerful because you think that it's going to silence just the people that you don't like … Trevor Burrus That's the problem. | ||
| Trevor Burrus It just always seems like you haven't thought this through at all. | ||
| No, but that's the problem, and this is where I come to you with this. | ||
| How do we get people on the left to realize that this is a tremendous error? | ||
| I understand that they think that short-term this is beneficial because they can silence people they disagree with, but to understand that for... | ||
| I mean, it sounds a little grand, but for the human race, this is a terrible thing to have. | ||
| It's a terrible thing to have because you're discouraging discourse and it's one of the most important things that we have is the ability to talk things out. | ||
| The ability to find out how a person thinks and to consider how that person thinks and whether or not that Would apply to you. | ||
| Can I use these thoughts? | ||
| Do they have a point that I haven't considered? | ||
| Is there something about the way they're looking at the world that maybe there is a perspective that I have either ignored or I just haven't been aware of that will enlighten me and change the way I look at things? | ||
| Maybe I look at a person coming from a different walk of life, from a different part of the world, or different Different education, whatever it is. | ||
| Let me take in their point of view and see. | ||
| See if this is helpful. | ||
| See if I can help. | ||
| We need more friends than we need enemies. | ||
| We don't need more enemies. | ||
| So this silencing people, oh, you're just creating enemies. | ||
| You're polarizing. | ||
| We need communication. | ||
| We need it for most people. | ||
| Want the same thing. | ||
| In terms of like, what do you want from life? | ||
| You want your friends, your family, your loved ones to be happy. | ||
| You want to be able to pursue your interests and your dreams and your goals. | ||
| You have these ideas and these projects you want to do, these goals you want to achieve. | ||
| You want to be able to pursue those. | ||
| And you want to not be hampered by bullshit while you're trying to do that. | ||
| And you also want to be a good person. | ||
| Like, that's universal stuff. | ||
| Then it comes to, like, well, what is a good person? | ||
| Like, what should you be allowed to do and what should you not be allowed to do? | ||
| How do you infringe upon the rights of your neighbors with your ideas? | ||
| Do you support the community with your ideas? | ||
| Is it beneficial to people? | ||
| And these are all where things get weird and then we get ideologically driven into a left or a right category. | ||
| And I believe that many people that are either on the left or on the right are just looking for a gang. | ||
| They're just looking for a gang to be in. | ||
| And they find it and they just adopt their positions and they adopt this predetermined pattern of thinking and this ideology that they subscribe to because other people on the left do it or other people on the right do it. | ||
| And when you do it, those people on the right are like, yeah, good for you. | ||
| Good for you, Ben. | ||
| You're thinking the right way now. | ||
| You're on our side. | ||
| And there's like for human beings, there's a great feeling of camaraderie that comes with that. | ||
| You're part of a tribe. | ||
| It's very attractive. | ||
| And that's a problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think it's also a problem when, like, how are the tribes being divided up and is it in a way that's going to actually advance the things that you want, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| If it's really about like different regions of the country or like for the diminishing number of people who still watch cable news, which cable news channel you watch and basically it's like red team versus blue team culture war stuff, then I guess the question is, are you ever going to get the kinds of systemic changes that would really help people to do a lot of the things you just talked about? | ||
| For example, lots of people can't spend very much time with their families because they have to work all the time. | ||
| Lots of people can't do the things they want to do in their life because They can't go to school because – like higher education because they can't afford it or they don't want to be like saddled with decades of debt about it. | ||
| And so the question is like how are you going to achieve that? | ||
| And if there's somebody standing in the way, who is it actually, right? | ||
| Is it somebody who's a member of, you know, the elite who has, like, genuine power, right? | ||
| And whose interests might not, like, coincide with your interests, right? | ||
| Because, like, they're, you know, like, if you had a union at your workplace or if you had, like... | ||
| You know, then their profits would go down or if you tax them more to pay for some of the things we were talking about, you know, like that would be bad for them. | ||
| Is it them or is it like your uncle who like, you know, whatever, like, you know, voted for Trump or something, right? | ||
| Like, which one of those people should you get bad about? | ||
| And I think that the problem is that a lot of people are trained to just like fixate on this Whatever just passing bullshit is going on in the news cycle, you know? | ||
| What are people mad about this minute? | ||
| It's going to be something else in 12 hours, right? | ||
| But there's this sort of constant outrage cycle that I think is fed by the profit incentives of media companies because they have to hold on to the audience they have left. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Well, also they have advertisers. | ||
| A lot of those advertisers brought to you by Pfizer. | ||
| They have these ideas that you have to subscribe to. | ||
| And if you don't subscribe to those ideas, Then they don't want to support your program. | ||
| And this is like either a said or unsaid thing. | ||
| I was listening to this thing where these people were talking about people in positions of power. | ||
| How do you get these sort of cookie-cutter politicians? | ||
| Are they told what to do? | ||
| Or are they the kind of people that will do what they think and say what they think other people want them to say? | ||
| And I think there's a lot of that. | ||
| They don't really necessarily have these principled positions. | ||
| What they're doing is they're saying the thing they think that people want them to say. | ||
| They're saying the thing they believe people want to hear and that that's going to advance them in their career. | ||
| We don't have to name the names, but we know these people. | ||
| These cookie-cutter type politicians we know are full of shit, but they say things that are the right things to say given the current political or social climate. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, look, and they'll also say what they think they have to say, like, at a given point, and then it's, like, completely forgotten six months later sometimes, right? | ||
| Like, think about the 2020 election, like, all of those Democrats who some of them said at the beginning of the primaries that they agreed with Bernie about Medicare for All, but even the ones who didn't, right? | ||
| They would all say, oh, we at least think there should be this public option where everybody should be able to, like, maybe buy into some sort of public health insurance or whatever. | ||
| I don't know how many Democratic debates there were. | ||
| It felt like a million. | ||
| But however many there were, this was always at least 20 minutes of every single one of those. | ||
| They would go on and on about this. | ||
| But then somehow now... | ||
| That's just disappeared, right? | ||
| Nobody's – like now Biden's president, it still says on his campaign website, you know, that never got taken down, right, that he wants there to be this public health insurance option. | ||
| Kamala Harris, who said at one point that she agreed with Bernie about Medicare for All, is the vice president. | ||
| A lot of these other people are, you know, Pete Buttigieg, you know. | ||
| He said he wanted at least Medicare for all who wanted and like he's in the cabinet. | ||
| There are all these people who are back to being senators. | ||
| And it's like, well, that's what they – when they had to position themselves to win that primary, they said that they cared about like all the millions of Americans who don't have healthcare or the like millions more who maybe even do have healthcare. | ||
| How about they said they were going to decriminalize marijuana and release everybody that was in jail for it? | ||
| Yeah, when's that happening? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It's all bullshit. | ||
| It's all bullshit, but that is the sort of stuff that we're talking about, that they don't really believe these things. | ||
| They're saying these things because they believe this is what people want to hear, and that gets those people out to the polls. | ||
| Let's get those people out to the booths and get them to vote. | ||
| And this is, unfortunately, where we find ourselves as a culture, until we can read minds. | ||
| And Elon Musk, hurry up with that technology. | ||
| We need to be actually able to read people's minds. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know that I want Elon to be able to read my mind. | ||
| You're going to read his mind, too, though. | ||
| And you're going to see, oh, my God. | ||
| Why did you write this book? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I wrote this book because I was pissed off. | ||
| Like I think more than any other book that I've written, it came out of like intense frustration that I was feeling at that time because I saw a lot of people – I think, like, on paper, you know, they agree with me about, | ||
| like, most of what I've said tonight, maybe not the, you know, maybe not the free speech part, but, like, you know, most of the rest of it, like, who were doing all of these things that seemed to me like they were either feeding into these absolutely ridiculous sideshows that, like, | ||
| stop people from actually focusing on these issues that we're talking about, you know, like, you know, the title, right, the title example, you know, canceling comedians, you know, people who would, like, Yeah. | ||
| special or like an editorial that you're writing for the New York Times about like exactly what you want to happen, right? | ||
| Like every sentence, you know, Dave Chappelle is saying in the stand-up special is literally what he thinks. | ||
| And, you know, and I think that like one, to anybody you're trying to appeal to, to like actually build some kind of like political program to actually accomplish any of the stuff I've talked about, like what does that make you look like? | ||
| That makes you look like an overgrown hall monitor, right? | ||
| Nobody is going to want to follow that person anywhere, nor should they, right? | ||
| Like that they, because that's just incredibly damaging and unappealing. | ||
| And I want I mean it's funny because I think that like when I sort of use that as the example in the title, right? | ||
| Like I was kind of trying to come up with like the most ridiculous example that I could come up with, right? | ||
| Like, you know, that like people would be like – You know, in terms of, like, ridiculous priorities or sort of people being, like, weird moralistic scolds. | ||
| Like, you know, what would be the biggest example? | ||
| Not getting mad at, like, corporate CEOs who bust unions. | ||
| Not getting mad at, like, politicians who commit war crimes. | ||
| But, you know, or, like, maybe you get mad at those people too. | ||
| But, like, somehow – You know, my friend, I disagree with him about a lot of things. | ||
| A lot of things. | ||
| But he is my friend, Dave Smith. | ||
| You know, I heard him talk about the outrage budget. | ||
| How dare you disagree with Dave Smith about anything? | ||
| Well, I'm pretty sure that he disagrees with a whole lot of things you agreed with I said earlier. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, Dave's awesome. | |
| I'm just joking. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah. | |
| But no, I mean like – but I think he is a good guy and he's – I mean I've been – I've been on his show several times and – He has well-thought-out perspectives. | ||
| You may agree or may not agree, but you can see where he's coming from. | ||
| Yeah, I can see where he's coming from. | ||
| And the other thing that I really respect about him is that I think that a lot of libertarians, even though they'll agree on paper, like with, yeah, we shouldn't be fighting these wars, we should... | ||
| There shouldn't be all these people in prison or whatever. | ||
| It seems like in practice what really gets them excited is like tax cuts, right? | ||
| And I think that – and I think Dave is genuinely not like that. | ||
| I think that he actually like devotes – as far as I've ever been able to see, he actually devotes way less time to stuff like that than to like the United States backing this genocidal war in Yemen. | ||
| That's the big thing with Dave. | ||
| It's interventionalist foreign policy and the corporate backing of these – Horrible regime change wars. | ||
| That's the thing that he hates more than anything. | ||
| And the actual cost of human lives and suffering. | ||
| You know, he's a deeply compassionate person. | ||
| He really firmly opposes these things. | ||
| And he wants to talk about them whenever he can. | ||
| And it's one of those things where, I mean, he talked on my podcast about how that got him kind of booted off of those political talk shows on cable. | ||
| Yeah, because nobody wanted to talk about it. | ||
| It's like whatever culture war thing people are screaming about each other. | ||
| Whether that UPenn swimmer should be able to compete with women. | ||
| By the way, I love – the thing that I love most about that example is whatever you think about it, right? | ||
| I mean, look, if I had to actually think about it, I'd probably say, yeah, whatever. | ||
| I don't care. | ||
| But whatever you think about it, the idea that everybody's going to get this excited about something that happens in an Ivy League swim meet, right? | ||
| It's very odd. | ||
| Really? | ||
| That's what you care about? | ||
| Rich kids swimming? | ||
| That's not really what I care about. | ||
| It's not what I want people to care about. | ||
| But it's a lightning rod for this discussion of what is a woman. | ||
| This is a new part of the ideology. | ||
| This is a new discussion. | ||
| Like, what makes a woman? | ||
| Is it biology? | ||
| Or is it how you identify? | ||
| Is it how you feel? | ||
| Or is it your chromosomes? | ||
| And this, when it comes to sports, sports is where the rubber hits the road. | ||
| And that's why it's this sort of, it's like, see, we told you there's a difference. | ||
| When someone's lapping people and they're identifying as female, but they're a biological male and they're destroying the competition. | ||
| But when they competed as a biological male, which was just a little while ago, they were not very good. | ||
| They were okay, but they weren't nowhere near the top ten. | ||
| And now they're dominant. | ||
| They're the number one in the country. | ||
| It's a very interesting discussion of where the rubber meets the road in terms of what defines who you are. | ||
| And also, are we talking about how you treat a person or are we talking about competition? | ||
| And so there's a reason why men can't compete with women. | ||
| As a biological male who identifies as a biological male, you are not allowed to compete in a women's division. | ||
| There's a reason why there's a division between men and women. | ||
| So when we make this distinction... | ||
| What is the criteria that we allow someone to cross that distinction and be a female or be a male? | ||
| And this is nothing to do with cruelty or bigotry or discrimination. | ||
| This is just a discussion about what is a woman and what is a man. | ||
| And sports are a great way to sort that out when it comes to this particular aspect of it, the physical aspect of being a female or a male. | ||
| Another is birth. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like, can you get pregnant? | ||
| Can you give birth? | ||
| I mean, if there's a competition, like, who's gonna create the most babies? | ||
| And it's males versus females, and it's people who identify as a female, versus people who are biologically female. | ||
| Well, the biological females are gonna dominate that competition. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's probably a good thing that we don't have giving birth competitions. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| It's like the rubber meets the road in terms of these ideological discussions, which are valid discussions. | ||
| They're valid discussions because I've met a lot of trans people that – like I had Blair White on the podcast recently. | ||
| I mean when you meet Blair White, there's not a fucking doubt in your mind. | ||
| Like this is someone who for whatever reason, the nature and genetics of – Yeah, I mean, as far as the actual rules for sports leagues, I'm sure you know way more about this than I do, but I know different sports have handled it differently in terms of the requirements, that it's not necessarily an absolute thing. | ||
| You know, trans women can or can't, you know, compete. | ||
| Like, sometimes, you know, there are, like, hormone requirements and stuff like that, you know, that there are different ways of trying to speak. | ||
| Do you know what the hormone requirements are, though? | ||
| No, I have no idea. | ||
| No idea, right? | ||
| The threshold for many sports, it's handled differently in different places. | ||
| But there's a guy named Derek. | ||
| He's got a website called... | ||
| It's a silly name of a website. | ||
| It's called More Plates, More Dates. | ||
| It's like something he created a long time ago. | ||
| But he's... | ||
| I don't think he necessarily has a degree in chemistry and biochemistry, but he has a deep understanding of it. | ||
| And the way he was breaking down the amount of available testosterone that a biological female has, like the threshold versus what's acceptable for a trans woman to compete against biological females, and it's substantially more. | ||
| Like, it's on the outskirts of physiological normality. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, again, I don't know what, like, if there's a good compromise here that would, like, help, like, you know, that would maintain a reasonable level of fairness, you know, without just saying, like, you know, I think there are, like, legitimately a couple of different values that you have to balance to, like, try to figure that one out. | ||
| I would say that I think, like, most contexts, like, you know, most of the things that trans people... | ||
| You know, who are like advocating for, you know, more anti-discrimination laws, et cetera, are talking about are not going to be nearly as hard as like this kind of like edge case about, you know, about sports, right? | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree with that. | ||
| You know, because like I think it's mostly like can you be like, you know, like employment and housing, you know, and all of that stuff. | ||
| And I think it is like I think it is important that, you know, that you have like Do you have civil rights laws that cover everybody? | ||
| Now, I do think that because of some of the weird dynamics of this particular issue, you're going to get things that are harder calls, like this. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Like sports. | ||
| Trevor Burrus Yeah. | ||
| Again, in terms of what some sports leagues should require in terms of hormones or whatever, I have absolutely no idea, but again, I think that this is not like... | ||
| In terms of things that I'm going to get mad about on a day-to-day basis. | ||
| Well, you would if you had a daughter that was competing against that person. | ||
| Yeah, maybe. | ||
| Someone who had been training their whole life to be an elite swimmer in a dedicated massive amount of time and someone came around that had a massive biological advantage. | ||
| Yeah, although, of course, if I had a trans daughter, you know, then I'd want to make sure that whatever the rules were were going to be fair to her, too, which is why, like, again, you know, like what the right sort of exactly where the rules should be set. | ||
| Do you think if you had a trans daughter and your trans daughter competed as a male for many, many years and was just sort of mediocre and then all of a sudden competed as a woman and started dominating, don't you think you'd feel a little bit of guilt? | ||
| I mean, I guess it depends how much she was – how much we're talking about, right? | ||
| Because I think in that swim meet case, the UPenn thing that you mentioned earlier, if I'm remembering right – and maybe you can correct me on this. | ||
| What I know about this is like scrolling through Twitter, like what I saw – But, like, I don't think that she even won by that much, did she? | ||
| Or did she? | ||
| Giant amount. | ||
| Giant amount? | ||
| How much did she win by? | ||
| I thought she was— Okay, let's find out. | ||
| She's breaking records. | ||
| I mean, she's breaking records in multiple meets. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, again— I mean, this is—the thing is, like, there's a video of her literally lapping the other female swimmers. | ||
| And this is, again, when we're talking before, one of the things we brought up is the Lakota culture has this term. | ||
| This term is called the Heoka. | ||
| And the Heoka is the sacred clown. | ||
| It's a part of their culture where someone makes fun of everything. | ||
| And it's like a sacred part of their culture where they subject everything to mockery. | ||
| And anything that can't stand up to mockery, anything that like viciously defends itself against mockery, that's an illegitimate thing. | ||
| Another thing the Lakota people had was what their version of a transgender person was. | ||
| It's like true spirit or something? | ||
| It was also a sacred part of their culture because it was a wise person that understood both genders. | ||
| And this person you could come to and they had a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man because they essentially were both. | ||
| And so they had a deep amount of respect for people who are trans in their culture. | ||
| And I think that's a great way of approaching it. | ||
| That whenever you have these unique circumstances, someone who is biologically male but clearly is much more of a female, sometimes more of a female than a lot of biological females, who are much more biologically, much more oriented towards male thinking and male behavior. | ||
| I mean, all of this is good for everybody. | ||
| It's good for us to accept And it's good for us to learn from these perspectives of these people that have very unique and different but also common in terms of like when you have giant numbers of people like hundreds of millions of people you have quite a few people that have these experiences and we can learn from them and instead of discrimination I don't necessarily think sports is a discrimination, though. | ||
| That's where it gets weird. | ||
| Because, again, there's a reason why we make a distinction, why males compete against males and females compete against females. | ||
| And I think we need to sort that out. | ||
| But you don't think, like... | ||
| Do you think that there is some sort of reasonable compromise to be arrived at there, or what's your position? | ||
| With physical sports, it's a problem, because there's so many benefits to being a biological male. | ||
| There's so many benefits to the size of the lungs, the size of the heart, the physical strength, the fact that you're gone through puberty, and that's the difference between someone who goes through puberty and maybe someone who doesn't. | ||
| Right, they transition before that, yeah. | ||
| And then there's the ethical dilemma about that. | ||
| Should you do that? | ||
| Because there's a great deal of people that have not done that and wound up becoming gay men. | ||
| What's the right choice and who can make that choice? | ||
| And when do you have the ability to make that choice? | ||
| Should you be able to make that choice as a child? | ||
| Should you wait until you're an adult? | ||
| There's a lot of decisions that we don't allow people to make until they're of grown age, like tattoos. | ||
| You can't get your face tattooed when you're four, but you can when you're 24. I mean, I'm not saying that they're the same thing, but what I am saying is that we are faced with many dilemmas that require Discussions and compassionate, comprehensive discussions. | ||
| And the only way you can do that is without censorship. | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| I mean obviously I completely agree on that. | ||
| I mean I think that the youth transition thing – again, I think that this is like – this is a little bit of a hard case because I think that – On the one hand, yeah, you're absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, no sane person thinks that little kids should have complete medical autonomy and just get to do whatever they want. | ||
| That would be ridiculous. | ||
| At the same time, not getting a tattoo when you're a kid isn't going to have some really bad effect. | ||
| You can just wait and it's fine, right? | ||
| Whereas with something like this, if you do have that experience that you feel as if you're trapped in the wrong kind of body, which I'd imagine could be incredibly traumatic if that's not dealt with. | ||
| We can only imagine. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I literally don't know, but it sounds like it. | ||
| Neither one of us know. | ||
| But I think that, like, then, like, having to go through what, from your perspective, is the wrong puberty, right? | ||
| I mean, like, the stakes are higher than the tattoo thing, right? | ||
| Now, what does that mean in terms of, like, what level of medical gatekeeping there should be or, like, what the clinical practices should be? | ||
| I'm like the last person to say. | ||
| Yeah, I'm the last person to say too. | ||
| I just think it has to be something that we can discuss. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| The problem is when people want to suppress people's ability to make choices and when people want to suppress people's ability to discuss these things. | ||
| I don't think that's good for any of us. | ||
| I mean these are very complicated human issues and by human issues I put them in the same category as a lot of other things that are very messy. | ||
| They're complicated to talk about. | ||
| They're human issues and this is one of them. | ||
| Yeah, no, I mean, it certainly is. | ||
| And I also think that, again, it goes back to, like, one of the big points in the book, which is that I don't want, like, people who might be... | ||
| Like, if you've thought about one of these issues we're talking about a lot, right? | ||
| And you think, like, you have... | ||
| And you might get very impatient, right, with people who you think are, you know, are wrong about them. | ||
| You think that they have... | ||
| They haven't thought about it as much as you, maybe. | ||
| And you think that they're not sensitive enough to what people might need. | ||
| Then if you're just sort of writing somebody off, that they're done because they're not... | ||
| You know, they haven't evolved to exactly where you think they should evolve to yet. | ||
| I think that that's bad on a human level. | ||
| That's just a bad way to interact with people. | ||
| And I also think that it's—I think it's bad politically because, you know, somebody could, like, on some, like, incredibly messy, sensitive issue, right, you know, like they could— You know, like they could land somewhere different from you on that. | ||
| And I'm not saying that like there isn't a bottom line. | ||
| Like I think there is a bottom line. | ||
| I think like non-discrimination laws, stuff like that, right? | ||
| Like I think that's incredibly important. | ||
| But I think that if you're writing people off based on that stuff, when it could be that there are all these other things where you could actually get them on board with what you want, right? | ||
| And instead of saying like, you know, when you – When you said in 2020 that you were probably going to vote for Bernie and there were people who – there were people who freaked out about it and a lot of that was like bad faith. | ||
| It was like ginned up by supporters of other candidates. | ||
| But there were people who were like real leftists who were like mad that like Bernie – the Bernie campaign like put out that like video where they were like clipping that. | ||
| And that seemed crazy to me, right? | ||
| Like Michael Brooks and I wrote an article for Jacobin about it at the time, and like it just seems to me like, you know, whatever, like... | ||
| The idea that instead of being like, oh, hey, good. | ||
| Like, here are all these things we can agree on, right? | ||
| We think we should have health care. | ||
| And you're willing to, like, support this. | ||
| And by the way, like, if you, you know, if you really care about, you know, trans people, I mean, like, I think, you know, Bernie Sanders was probably your guy, right? | ||
| I mean, like, that they, he's the, you know, he wanted to fund, you know, transition costs as, you know, part of Medicare for all, you know, like that, that would be, that would be the most, you know, pro-trans position. | ||
| But, like, if you're going to say, you know, Like, you know, somebody, you know, like, if you think, oh, Joe Rogan is wrong about, like, exactly how, like, sports, you know, the sports issue should be, you know, should play out. | ||
| So I don't care that there are all these other things, right, that he agrees with us about. | ||
| I don't care if he's willing to support this thing that would be incredibly beneficial. | ||
| You know, like, we just need to, like, cast him out, right? | ||
| Say, like, no, we just want nothing to do with you. | ||
| Or maybe, like, once you agree with us on 100% of everything and, like, I think that's a stupid and I think it's a self-defeating way to try to do politics. | ||
| And I think it's also just a bad way to live your life. | ||
| Well, I agree with you that writing people off because they don't share all of your opinions is ridiculous. | ||
| And it's not the way you get people to take your position. | ||
| It's the opposite. | ||
| They're going to push back. | ||
| They're going to push back. | ||
| You're going to reject people because they don't agree with 100% of your positions. | ||
| They're going to dig their heels in. | ||
| That's a natural thing with human beings. | ||
| They're not going to go, well, I guess it'll change. | ||
| No, that's not what they do, man. | ||
| They fucking dig in. | ||
| Yeah, nobody's ever said, like, you know, like, nobody's ever been in, like, an argument on, you know, whatever, Facebook, where, you know, somebody, you know, like, somebody says, you know, somebody says that they're a terrible person and they're, you know, whatever, they're a... | ||
| They're a fascist or a Stalinist or whatever it is they're being accused of being, right? | ||
| And said, oh, you know what? | ||
| You're right. | ||
| You're right. | ||
| Good point. | ||
| Now I get it, right? | ||
| That's not actually how you appeal to human beings at all. | ||
| Anybody who knows... | ||
| That's something that I think an alien within 10 minutes of interacting with people would recognize is not going to work, right? | ||
| I think if you talk to people... | ||
| Like they're people. | ||
| Like you're taking what they're saying seriously. | ||
| Like if you think they're wrong, you can try to explain why you think they're wrong. | ||
| And you can show them how the things that you want might actually help them. | ||
| I mean it's not always going to work. | ||
| There's no guarantee because that's just life. | ||
| There's no guarantee. | ||
| But I mean like sometimes it will work and the other thing is just not going to work. | ||
| Trevor Burrus So what positions did you take in your book that you got pushback from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh boy. | |
| Well, there were a few. | ||
| Although I will say most people who got mad at the book didn't read it. | ||
| Of course! | ||
| Why would they bother reading it when they could just get mad? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, there were like... | ||
| What if I read it and it clouds my judgment? | ||
| Because now I agree with you on some things. | ||
| I'm trying to say fuck you. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Like there were so many – like the number of people who got mad about the book before it came out just based on the title or the description. | ||
| Do you want to have another drink before you talk about this? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| You're out of booze. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Please. | ||
| You might need a refill. | ||
| This is really good. | ||
| I like the Buffalo Trace. | ||
| Yeah, that's good stuff. | ||
| So yeah, the number of people who got mad about it before it came out versus the number after I think is really revealing. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
| It's literally true. | ||
| But I think the people who did read it who got mad, which is not most people who read it, but the people who did read it who got mad... | ||
| I think there were a few things. | ||
| One of them was about the Andy Ngo incident from 2019. You remember this? | ||
| The Antifa thing, where they threw milkshakes at him and stuff. | ||
| And in general, the part of it where I was criticizing Antifa, that I think there are a lot of people who, at least maybe not a lot of people in the world as a whole, but a lot of people within a certain kind of subculture who have I don't know. | ||
| It's really important that people be using these kinds of street tactics because they think in their heads that it's always like Germany in 1933 and Nazis are about to take over or something, which is delusional. | ||
| One of the points that I make about that in the book is that if you think about what was actually going on in Germany in the early 30s when you had You know, like Nazis who are like going around and like smashing up like trade union halls and like, you know, and fighting with people and like socialist and communist parties and stuff. | ||
| Why would any like, you know, why would corporate America have to bother with any of that now, right? | ||
| They're already winning, you know, just fine, you know, without it, right? | ||
| Like, so... | ||
| I don't know what you're saying. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Sorry. | ||
| Let me back up. | ||
| Like, try to be clear about this. | ||
| So I think the idea that fascism is what's on the horizon in America I don't think makes sense because I think that arose under very different circumstances than what we've got right now. | ||
| I think that the things that fascists were doing in Germany before they took over there, Italy before they took over there, I think the | ||
| such a radically different situation than the United States now that I think the idea that you'd be obsessed with like street fighting with, you know, with like the few people who like, you know, the Richard Spencer types or whatever just seems – I think that's – I think that makes no sense. | ||
| I think that it's a – I think it's a diversion. | ||
| I mean I think it's a distraction honestly, you know, from things that actually matter And I think that it's really dangerous when people would make excuses for behavior like attacking Andy Ngo because it's – because if you think about that, like the things that – here's the thing that most disturbed me right when that happened, | ||
| happened, that I would see people who would be defending that online who would say, well, you know, he's not like really a journalist, you know, because like whatever they would say about him, right? | ||
| You know, he's like a propagandist or he's like really siding with like the Proud Boys or one of these groups or, you know, whatever. | ||
| And it's like the misinformation thing, right? | ||
| Like who gets to decide, right, what counts as a journalist? | ||
| And I certainly don't want that decision to be made by like individual vigilantes, right? | ||
| Well, the problem with Antifa is the name. | ||
| You're calling it Antifa, like anti-fascist. | ||
| You're like, well, of course. | ||
| Of course I'm anti-fascist. | ||
| Who wouldn't be? | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| Let's define fascism. | ||
| Put up the definition of fascism, and this is part of where the problem lies. | ||
| When we discuss fascism, whether we're discussing the connection between the corporate interests and the government, or what is the technical definition of what a fascist is? | ||
| Just Google it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, here. | ||
| Fascism, a form of far-right authoritarian, ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition, and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in the early 20th century of Europe. | ||
| There's other definitions of that, though. | ||
| That's the Wikipedia definition. | ||
| The problem with Wikipedia is that sometimes it gets ideologically captured. | ||
| A political philosophy, movement or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation and forcible suppression of opposition. | ||
| I don't see that in our country. | ||
| Here's the other one though. | ||
| A tendency towards or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control. | ||
| The problem with that is When you're trying to control by violence and street action and throwing milkshakes at people, you're trying to control the way they behave and they think. | ||
| That's a form of fascism. | ||
| It's a kind of fascism. | ||
| What you're doing is... | ||
| In a sense, you're intimidating people into not opposing your perspective. | ||
| You have large groups of people. | ||
| They incite violence. | ||
| They lit the fucking apartment building of the Portland mayor. | ||
| Portland, one of the great things about it is it's the least fascist place on earth. | ||
| It is literally the most open-minded, progressive city on earth. | ||
| The entire continent of the United States. | ||
| You don't think Nazis are about to take over Portland? | ||
| There's not a fucking chance! | ||
| And yet that's the stronghold of Antifa, and that's the place where they find the most fascism they have to combat against. | ||
| It's a form of bullying. | ||
| It's a form of gangs. | ||
| They're trying to enforce their ideology, and unfortunately their fucking mayor has let them go so far with it That even he's pushing back now. | ||
| He's calling for greater police protection and they're trying to enforce laws now and arrest people. | ||
| Because he was being targeted so much that he turned it around and is like, we have to do something about these people. | ||
| Now you think? | ||
| Now you think? | ||
| It's like a gang, man. | ||
| They're into this ideology, and they're into this whole community of stopping these fascists, and they're looking for them when they don't even exist. | ||
| The technical definition of fascism is not running rampant in fucking Portland. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| No, no, it's not. | ||
| And I think that like if you want to say like there are like far right groups who might commit hate crimes, etc., then like first of all, I actually don't think that a lot of people who do stuff like this would be like just – I'm skeptical that they're really going to be the ones who are going to do something there. | ||
| Do something there in what way? | ||
| Oh, that if you have actual fascists who are showing up with guns, right? | ||
| They're going to run. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think most people who sign up for stuff like this, this is a point Michael Brooks made to me after the... | ||
| In Michigan in 2020, there was like some protests at the state capitol over lockdown stuff where like lots and lots of people actually had guns there. | ||
| He was like, oh, where's Antifa here, right? | ||
| You know, why not, right? | ||
| Is that when they were trying to kidnap the governor? | ||
| That was the FBI-led operation. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That was before that, but that was related. | ||
| Same kind of stuff. | ||
| Yeah, it was the same kind of stuff. | ||
| So, I mean, the protests were real. | ||
| The governor plot seems like that was just the equivalent for this stuff. | ||
| It was ginned up by the FBI. Yeah, it was like one of those cases with the post-9-11 security state where you have some... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I think that the one reason why people end up obsessing about marginal far-right groups, like the Proud Boys are not about to march on Washington and install whoever is— Also, that guy, the fucking head of the Proud Boys, was in the FBI, too. | ||
| That's true. | ||
| That was the craziest thing. | ||
| When that turned out, there was the one guy who was— What was his name? | ||
| Enrique something or another? | ||
| Who turned out to be an FBI informant and he was the head of the Proud Boys. | ||
| They were always interviewing him on television. | ||
| Yeah, it's like Gavin McGinnis who started as a LARP. He started literally as a joke. | ||
| It was based on a Broadway musical. | ||
| That's why they called it Proud Boys. | ||
| They were joking around. | ||
| And then it became a thing. | ||
| And then a bunch of people, once you created an organization, then a bunch of people can join it. | ||
| And then they infiltrate it. | ||
| And then they decide to radicalize it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant. | ||
| Like, what in the fuck, man? | ||
| Yeah, it's like during the McCarthy period when half of the people at some little local Communist Party meeting would be FBI agents because they were devoting so many resources to trying to... | ||
| To stop this very marginal group. | ||
| So people were upset at you because of the Andy No thing that you didn't think that was... | ||
| And obviously it's just not a way to treat a person. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| If you ever met Andy, he's this tiny Asian gay man. | ||
| The idea that this guy is this jackbooted thug that's there to take down democracy is fucking preposterous. | ||
| No, no, it is. | ||
| And I think that the... | ||
| And I think that the problem is when you make an obvious point like, hey, there's absolutely no justification for physically attacking this guy. | ||
| That that's insane behavior. | ||
| That this serves no good purpose whatsoever. | ||
| That a lot of the things that people said about it at the time when they were trying to justify it turned out to be bullshit, which is also true. | ||
| And also, by the way, I don't want to set the precedent that we're going to have street violence where people who... | ||
| Somebody decides they don't count as a real journalist and that they're helping bad people or creating dangerous effects or something and they could just attack them. | ||
| I mean, why... | ||
| I mean, I'm sure I've written lots of stuff for Jacobin that people would say that about, right? | ||
| But what is a journalist? | ||
| This is the other thing. | ||
| What defines a journalist? | ||
| How do you decide who is and isn't a journalist? | ||
| Do you have to be connected to a specific organization? | ||
| Because there are many people that are connected to specific organizations that are propagandists. | ||
| Do you have to have a degree in journalism? | ||
| Because there's many people that have a degree in journalism that are liars. | ||
| And they work for gigantic corporations, and they spew out all the nonsense that this corporation wants them to say. | ||
| What is a journalist? | ||
| Do we have a rigid criteria? | ||
| What is I mean couldn't you not be a person who believes in the truth who decides to dedicate yourself to discussing things and researching things and doing it in a very honest and like doing it as a person in good faith and putting out the information as You've discovered it like isn't that journalism? | ||
| I Who decides who's a journalist? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, certainly nobody at WikiLeaks had a journalism degree, and I'm really glad that that exists. | ||
| How about Edward Snowden? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Does that count as journalism? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've heard people say that Glenn Greenwald's not a journalist. | ||
| Which is ridiculous. | ||
| Preposterous. | ||
| Because, I mean, he broke – I mean – Whatever you think about Glenn or his politics or any of that stuff, just from a journalism perspective, first with the NSA revelations and then again in Brazil with the material that helped free the former president who was unjustly imprisoned. | ||
| I mean, that's the most important stuff that journalism can do, right? | ||
| So if that's not journalism, I don't know why journalism is important. | ||
| Yeah, what is journalism? | ||
| Once you go to Stubstack, you're not a journalist anymore? | ||
| Yeah, and I think that's incredibly dangerous because you could imagine—I mean, look, you don't have to imagine. | ||
| You could just look at what actually has happened with Julian Assange, right? | ||
| That, like, the government says, like, you know, that, oh, there's no freedom of the press issue here because that's not really journalism. | ||
| He's just, like, some kind of, you know, enabler of terrorism, you know, because he did this. | ||
| That's certainly not a road that I want to go down, but the problem is— As obvious as so many of these points are that like it's – there's absolutely no good justification for physically attacking a noncombatant, like somebody who isn't like going – Right. | ||
| And mocking and laughing when you hit him in the head with a fucking milkshake. | ||
| Like what was that? | ||
| No. | ||
| It's terrible behavior. | ||
| So like you make that obvious point. | ||
| You make the point we're just making about journalism and – And it's like on the face of it, you think, OK, this is like this is all obvious. | ||
| But the problem is it's that like team like rooting for your team behavior that like you're willing to accept horrible behavior as long as it's enforcing your ideology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And then if and then if somebody like me said, you know, says that I think that, you know, like, you know, that that I think this is bad, then, oh, see, so you're not being loyal to the team, right? | ||
| Like you're siding with Andy Ngo, who's on the other team. | ||
| And, you know, you're siding against people who are, you know, who are on your team, you know? | ||
| So, like, they'll just have a reaction to that that's not actually about, like, the thing itself or, like, showing what's wrong with the argument. | ||
| Yeah, and I should be really clear. | ||
| I'm not – like, I had Andy Ngo on my podcast and I was skeptical of a lot of things he was saying. | ||
| One of them, the traumatic brain injury from that. | ||
| I was like, what kind of brain injury do you have from that? | ||
| Like, what are you talking about now? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I know originally there was these reports that there was concrete that was mixed in milkshakes somehow. | ||
| Listen, man, I watched him get hit with that. | ||
| That's not what gives you brain damage. | ||
| I know what gives you brain damage. | ||
| You've got to get hit. | ||
| If that guy got hit with a fucking piece of concrete, he would go down. | ||
| He's not just going to take it on the chin and keep walking and get a traumatic brain injury from a milkshake. | ||
| It's silly. | ||
| Unless there were some other shots that he took that weren't on camera. | ||
| And I think Andy Ngo, like as somebody – like the issue is not do I like Andy Ngo because I actually don't, right? | ||
| I mean like I think – What don't you like? | ||
| So he wrote an article that was – I think it was for Quillette. | ||
| I'm not sure about that part, right? | ||
| It might have been somewhere else. | ||
| But he wrote an article about visiting Britain where he was claiming – Basically, that there were, like, you know, parts of London that were, like, under Sharia law or that, you know, like – and his evidence was that there were, like, no drinking signs that, like – Sid's been pointed out that, like, other, like, non-Muslim neighborhoods, they have the same things, right? | ||
| Because you're just not allowed to drink in certain places, you know, under generally applicable laws. | ||
| I think that he's – you know, and I think that probably in general, right? | ||
| He's a provocateur. | ||
| Yeah, I think he's a provocateur and I think that he's – I too have a lot of questions about the honesty or at least the commitment to sort of checking things before you go into print with them. | ||
| And my sense is that his politics are completely different from mine. | ||
| But none of that matters for this, right? | ||
| Like none of that is the point, right? | ||
| I don't want just like – if we're talking about like – Should we have a taboo against physically assaulting journalists? | ||
| Yeah, physically assaulting people you disagree with. | ||
| Yeah, we should and it should be anybody. | ||
| But also I think that it shouldn't depend on whether you think they're honest. | ||
| It shouldn't depend on any of that stuff. | ||
| That is not something that should be happening and I think it's a bad door to open up. | ||
| But I think that that's something in the book that a lot of people – I shouldn't say a lot of people. | ||
| Most people who got mad at it never cracked it open. | ||
| But some of the people who did get mad at it because they read it had a problem with that. | ||
| I think some of the Dave Chappelle stuff in the first chapter because they thought I was defending a transphobe. | ||
| I think that that was an issue with some people. | ||
| I think that the stuff later in the book that just in general I think a lot of people who got mad about it sort of misinterpreted the sort of main claim in a crazy way. | ||
| In other words, they thought that the main thing that I was saying Was that online cancellation is the most important problem in the world or something like that? | ||
| And that's not what I think. | ||
| What I think is that this is not a way that you should act towards people, one, because on a human level it's just a toxic way to operate, and two, if you actually want to win people over to ideas that you think are important so you can accomplish something that's important in the real world, | ||
| then getting bogged down I think there's also a real issue with communicating through social media. | ||
| It's such a – It's a way of communicating that takes away so much of what it is to be a human. | ||
| To be a human is to look at a person, to have a conversation with them, look them in the eyes, to talk about things in depth, to recognize their perspective and allow them to talk. | ||
| There's a sense of camaraderie. | ||
| You're two human beings expressing ideas. | ||
| With social media, you're just printing something out, and you're throwing it out into the ether, and then the other person responds, and you don't see each other, you're trying to be biting and nasty, and the way you win is through vitriol. | ||
| It's a shitty way to communicate, and one of the best ways to get attention is to be the biggest cunt. | ||
| That's how people get attention online, to say the most mean, the most vicious thing that you can, and it's like a fun little game. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And you get validation for being like the first person to like throw, you know, throwing the first stone, right? | ||
| And people like support you because they wish they had said it or they don't want to be the person who sticks their neck out, but they'll like it because the, yeah, go get them. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Go get them, Ben. | ||
| Yeah, or they just don't like, or they just like, you know, they like the tweet, ha, right, you know, like we got that guy, and then they just never think about it again, or sometimes like if they thought about it in the first place, like I gave, you know, there's a guy who, I am Wendell Potter, you know who this is? | ||
| No. | ||
| Okay, so Wendell Potter used to be a health insurance executive, and he would like lobby You know, Congress on behalf of health insurance companies. | ||
| And then at some point in the past, I think maybe 15 years ago or something, I'm not sure about the timing, he had a crisis of conscience about doing that. | ||
| And he left the industry. | ||
| And what he's done since then is he just campaigns for Medicare for All. | ||
| So this is a really good person. | ||
| I remember back in spring 2021 maybe, Wendell Potter tweeted out something like the fact that people don't understand how much Medicare for All would help us even during this time when people were losing on health insurance because of economic disruptions. | ||
| All this stuff shows How many people bought the lies that I used to tell when I was a health insurance executive? | ||
| And this guy who I'm not going to name because I don't want to shame this guy. | ||
| That's not the point. | ||
| This guy quote tweeted that. | ||
| He just probably saw it on his feed and he didn't really know. | ||
| was from he quote tweeted it and said and i quote oh my god this fucking piece of shit actually admitted it uh and that got like 20 000 likes before enough people like told him who wendell potter was that he finally like took down the tweet and what gets me about that example is that if whoever if the guy who originally tweeted that had literally just clicked on wendell potter's name on the top of the tweet that would have taken him to their pro | ||
| you know his profile picture where he would have seen like all these you know like names that like have like for medicare for all the title and he would have realized like what point he was making when he tweeted that But why would you do five seconds of research about somebody before denouncing them when you can get that little endorphin rush from, like, you know... | ||
| You're a piece of shit on Twitter. | ||
| Do you know who Alan Lavinowicz is? | ||
| Who's that? | ||
| He's a writer. | ||
| He's got a very interesting perspective on this, and he calls Twitter and social media processed information. | ||
| The same way processed food is bad for you, that processed information, ultra-processed. | ||
| Where it's down to, instead of having a conversation with someone, it's down to quote tweeting a thing completely out of context and trying to ruin them. | ||
| Oh my god, this piece of shit just admitted it. | ||
| Like that kind of thing. | ||
| That's an example of like ultra-processed information. | ||
| And when he said that, it was like one of those aha moments. | ||
| It's like, that's what it is. | ||
| That is the thing that separates human beings and normal human interaction between social media interaction. | ||
| It's too easy to do. | ||
| It's too simple. | ||
| It's like basically like fast food or like some sort of processed fucking snack. | ||
| It's terrible for you. | ||
| It's terrible for your brain and people engage in it easily. | ||
| Yeah, and much like those other examples, the profit incentives of the companies that run it are All in favor of people doing all this stuff because the more people are doing that, the more minutes per day their eyeballs are on Twitter. | ||
| Sure, but I think that's almost a simplistic version of it because I don't think they meant that. | ||
| I don't think they created it in order to get people to do it that way. | ||
| I think they created it as like when you go back and look at Twitter, what it initially was, it was like you would put at and then your name is like is going to the movies. | ||
| Like, you would even talk about yourself in the third person. | ||
| You know, like, at Joe Rogan's going to the gym. | ||
| Like, that's how people did it. | ||
| And then slowly but surely, it became a way where people espoused opinions, and then it became Arab Spring, and then, like, it became all sorts of different ways that people expressed themselves. | ||
| Like, this idea that it started out with this insidious notion... | ||
| I don't think it necessarily started out with an insidious notion, but I do think that the ways that it's changed over time are ones that... | ||
| Just the fact that likes and retweets and all that stuff are part of it, I do think it's a kind of feedback mechanism. | ||
| You know John Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed? | ||
| Publicly Shamed, yeah. | ||
| He talks about that at the end. | ||
| He uses the analogy of... | ||
| Those electronic speeding signs that will show you as you drive by how fast you're driving and what the speed limit is. | ||
| And he points out that on paper there's no reason that should work because they're not giving you any information you don't already have. | ||
| Every car has a speedometer in it that tells you how fast you're driving. | ||
| A normal low-tech speed sign would tell you what the speed limit is. | ||
| But just that moment of validation that you get from driving past and see the two numbers come together It actually does seem to get people to drive more slowly and it reduces actions. | ||
| There are tons of studies about this that show that it does that. | ||
| And in that case, it's that kind of like immediate feedback loop of validation is a good thing. | ||
| But in social media, that kind of immediate feedback loop of validation that like you're going to get 10,000 people who like and retweet because you said somebody is a piece of shit or whatever. | ||
| is incredibly toxic. | ||
| I think it makes it harder to communicate with people. | ||
| It makes it harder to even listen to what somebody who disagrees with you thinks for long enough that you could think about how to convince them to try to persuade them of your point of view. | ||
| And it makes us even more atomized than we are already. | ||
| If you spend all of your time scrolling Which, again, maybe it wasn't the original intention, but I think that the more time people spend scrolling through their social media feeds, the better it is for the bottom line of these companies. | ||
| Would you agree with that? | ||
| Oh, for sure. | ||
| Yeah, and it's also hugely addictive. | ||
| With the likes and the retweets and all that stuff, they just made things incredibly addictive. | ||
| And the numbers. | ||
| When people look at numbers, they want to look at how many likes they get for something. | ||
| And then when they find... | ||
| Certain things that get more likes, they gravitate towards those things. | ||
| Have you seen the Social Dilemma documentary? | ||
| I actually haven't seen it, but I know what it is. | ||
| It's really good. | ||
| It highlights a terrifying future because they're essentially saying, like, this leads to this massive polarization of these perspectives in this country. | ||
| It's almost like setting us up for a civil war. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't think there's going to be a civil war, but I do think that you're going to get a lot of more people who get all of their sort of emotional connection to politics is about, like, getting mad at people who are on the other team and not even getting mad at people with power. | ||
| Who are on the other team. | ||
| But just like getting mad at whoever, right? | ||
| Like the way that after the 2016 election, something that I felt like I hadn't seen before was the amount of time that people were spending talking about Trump voters, just like ordinary people who voted for Trump. | ||
| And that seems crazy to me because, I mean, especially after 2020, you know, where like the, you know, the turnout was ridiculously high on both sides. | ||
| So, like, you've got, like, 70 however million people that you're just going to, like, write off, right? | ||
| Like, they're just, like, unredeemable, you know? | ||
| Basket of deplorables. | ||
| Yeah, they're just irredeemable deplorables. | ||
| I don't know how you think that you're going to accomplish anything. | ||
| They're not thinking like that, though. | ||
| They're not thinking in this broad perspective. | ||
| They're not looking at, like, what's best for the human race? | ||
| What's best for the community of the United States or my city or my country? | ||
| No, they're not thinking like that. | ||
| They're just thinking, like, what feels good. | ||
| What feels good is, like, fuck you, Trump supporter. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| Look, I mean one of the reasons I always thought that Bernie Sanders would have won the 2016 election if he'd been the nominee is that there are – I'm not saying all of them. | ||
| I'm not even saying most of them. | ||
| But I think there's a chunk of people who voted for Trump in 2016 who absolutely would have voted for Bernie. | ||
| I think so too. | ||
| Yeah, I don't have any doubt in my mind. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people who want a person that has like a legitimate, like a really well thought out perspective that they have been consistent with their entire career. | ||
| That's Bernie Sanders. | ||
| And he really does look out for the working person. | ||
| He really does look out for working families. | ||
| If you go back and see clips from him from the 1980s, it's all the same stuff. | ||
| So why comedians? | ||
| What about comedians that made you? | ||
| I think that's an example of a larger thing, but I think it's a really interesting example. | ||
| So I think the larger thing that it's an example of is that when people – this is my claim about why a lot of people on the left get sucked into this, right? | ||
| When people feel like they have no real power to change anything like big and structural that actually matters. | ||
| They get sucked into picking fights that they think they can't win. | ||
| If you can't win the ones that matter, then find a way to care about the stuff that is not going to change the world for better, but you derive some kind of satisfaction from. | ||
| So if it's like You know, yelling at Dave Chappelle, you know, then, like, that's something that can scratch that itch, you know? | ||
| If it's Antifa, right? | ||
| Like, look, the things that actually create, like, misery for working people in the United States are big structural things that can't be solved by punching anybody in the face, right? | ||
| You know, that's not going to work. | ||
| But, you know, you can get diverted to finding someone you can punch and, you know, you get, like, that sense of satisfaction. | ||
| And I think that what the comedy example really shows is the way that people get sucked into this way of viewing the world that's all about individual moralism, right? | ||
| Is this person a good person or a bad person? | ||
| Is that person a good person or a bad person? | ||
| And it becomes just this like constant inventory of the soul. | ||
| And I think that we're doing that so much that we almost don't even notice that we're doing it. | ||
| It just almost like goes without saying that like that's how you would interact with this stuff. | ||
| And so I think that comedy as a form of entertainment and when it's really good as a form of art, as something that can help us kind of look at the world around us at a slightly different angle than we would in the normal course of things because it kind of holds things up in a different way. | ||
| I think that that can only work. | ||
| If it's operating in a space where people aren't constantly thinking about like, oh, is this guy a good guy or a bad guy? | ||
| Is this joke that I'm about to tell something that is morally acceptable or not? | ||
| If you're in that space, I don't think you're going to be able to do it right. | ||
| That's an interesting thought that people will attack things that they think that they can have an impact on instead of going after these big impossible problems that seem insurmountable. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, look, perfect example. | ||
| Think about the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd. | ||
| There was this Wave of protests and riots and unrest that was like without precedent in a very, very long time, if ever, right? | ||
| And all of that was originally about police violence. | ||
| But how much has actually changed in terms of how policing works in the United States since then? | ||
| There are some cities that cut budgets for a while. | ||
| Most of them have put it back. | ||
| But in terms of things like how easy it is to hold a police officer accountable if they use violence in an unjustified way, I don't think that's gotten much better. | ||
| Well, it's changed in New York City. | ||
| In New York City, police officers can be civilly liable now. | ||
| Yeah, and that's a good step. | ||
| I don't think it's a complete solution because for one thing, I think a lot of people who are most likely to end up in these situations are not in a good position to afford good legal representation. | ||
| I know sometimes in a high-profile case, you'll get people doing it pro bono who are good lawyers. | ||
| But again, I think it's a good step. | ||
| I don't think it addresses... | ||
| It's something I support for sure. | ||
| But here's the thing. | ||
| I think that much more than people like actually changing how police team works in America is a really heavy lift. | ||
| But what's really easy is getting every corporation in the world to like put out some sort of Black Lives Matter thing, right? | ||
| Like, that's easy because it doesn't cost them anything. | ||
| Like, why wouldn't they just do that? | ||
| It's also good for business. | ||
| Sure, yeah. | ||
| Work capitalism. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's the thing. | ||
| Like, this woke signaling, you know, that your business is a part of the good side and that you should support this business. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| And again, like it earns them some goodwill. | ||
| It doesn't cost them anything. | ||
| Why wouldn't they do that, right? | ||
| Like that doesn't – that does very little to solve like anything that any of this stuff is supposed to be about. | ||
| But again, it's easy, right? | ||
| Or like when people like knocking down statues, which don't get me wrong, I don't think there should be statues of Confederate generals in cities. | ||
| I mean I don't think that's something we should glorify. | ||
| But I also saw a lot of like after the really bad statues came down, people started going after gray area statues. | ||
| Fucking George Washington statues. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| What's interesting about the Civil War statutes is many of them actually came up, they were put up during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. | ||
| And they're really cheaply made. | ||
| They're these shitty responses to the change that was happening in the country. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| So, again, I think that, like, should there be statues to Robert E. Lee? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| But I also think it's revealing that people end up spending this much time on these purely symbolic things, right? | ||
| You know, like, we've got rid of all the really objectionable statues, and now we'll say, well, how about George Washington? | ||
| How about whoever, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And then you search for things that, you know, you can change the name of it, right? | ||
| You know, like my mom has gotten really into birdwatching in her retirement and she told me that there's like some kind of warbler that's named after a Confederate general that people are like trying to like get that changed. | ||
| It's like, okay, you're really like, you know... | ||
| They're digging deep. | ||
| They're digging deep, right? | ||
| Warblers. | ||
| I know, right? | ||
| It is kind of weird though. | ||
| You know, like if you had like a Hitler warbler, you're like... | ||
| Fucking weed celebrating. | ||
| Yeah, no, and like whatever. | ||
| What kind of t-shirt is that? | ||
| Sure, I guess if I were in the... | ||
| He had a warbler with a fucking wing up in the air like a Nazi, like, hey! | ||
| Hey! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But again, why comedians in the title? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I think it's an example that makes it really dramatic because... | ||
| Comedians don't and really can't exercise political power. | ||
| They might influence to a certain extent the way that people think about certain things. | ||
| But nobody's – nobody who's doing comedy is making decisions that directly impact people's lives. | ||
| So if you are actually trying to do that, like if you're actually trying to affect real change, this doesn't make any sense. | ||
| What I think it is is it's a symptom of how extreme this kind of moralistic approach to politics is. | ||
| Can get, right? | ||
| That like you're this concerned with like constantly, you know, testing, you know, whether somebody is a good person or a bad person or they ever said anything that, you know, that might show them to like to really be a bad person and nothing could ever just be a bad moment, right? | ||
| That, you know, that it has to be like this is the moment where you really revealed the How toxic your soul was or something rather than just like you said something stupid because sometimes people say things that are stupid. | ||
| I think that that kind of moralism, when it's applied to comedy, I think that that's maybe the most extreme symptom of what I'm talking about because it's one thing even to get mad at somebody because of something they wrote in an editorial. | ||
| That they're telling you exactly what they think should happen. | ||
| If I write something for Jacobin and some people get upset about that, okay, at least it's a Jacobin article. | ||
| article. | ||
| I'm literally saying exactly what I think. | ||
| Right? | ||
| But if you're doing, you know, a – so that last Dave Chappelle special at Netflix that people got mad about – And which, by the way, I hadn't even watched, but since I'd written this thing, people kept asking me what I thought, and I finally watched it. | ||
| And I thought that the way that it was portrayed as if it were this, like, just festival of transphobic hatred was ridiculous. | ||
| That, in fact, the overall theme of the special, as far as those issues go, was about him, like, moving towards a place of greater understanding and, you know, and, like... | ||
| And it's also kind of a love letter to his friend that committed suicide for supporting him. | ||
| Was attacked for supporting him. | ||
| And then she jumped off a fucking building and committed suicide. | ||
| This is like an homage to this person's life and this long part of it. | ||
| I worked with Dave during the entire time he was piecing that together. | ||
| Because we started doing shows in Austin like... | ||
| November of 2020. It might have even been earlier than that. | ||
| And we were working together while he was putting it together, and he was responding to this idea that he was transphobic. | ||
| And he was saying, like, this is so crazy. | ||
| Like, this is who I am, and this is about this person who, when I was accused of being transphobic, this person defended me and was dragged by people There's been some talk of how much of that was creative license because people tried to find what the tweets were. | ||
| How many of them were DMs? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| I don't think you could dismiss that. | ||
| Or how many of them were people who actually knew her personally? | ||
| It's the highest form of comedy in a lot of ways, because you're trying to take this socially sensitive issue and extract laughs from it, which is very difficult to do, but in no way was it transphobic. | ||
| In no way was it hurtful or cruel or mean. | ||
| I mean, actually, he spent a couple minutes of the special explaining why the bathroom laws in North Carolina were cruel. | ||
| And at the end, when he's talking about his dead friend, one of the crucial moments comes when he's describing their back and forth when he had her open for him. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's hilarious. | ||
| Yeah, which is a hilarious thing, but there is this really moving part of it at the end where she tells him, like... | ||
| I want you to recognize that I'm going through a real human experience. | ||
| And, like, it really sinks in in that. | ||
| And the idea that watching this would make somebody more transphobic just seems absurd to me. | ||
| But what people did, right, is they literally quoted individual sentences that he says in it. | ||
| Like, there's one point in the special where he says, I'm a TERF. Right? | ||
| TERF standing for trans-exclusion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a joke. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, okay, but... | ||
| Literally within like two minutes of him saying, I'm on team turf, he says, I'm not saying that I don't think trans women are women. | ||
| It's like, well, hold on. | ||
| If you take both of those literally, those two don't go together. | ||
| But of course, that's not how comedy works. | ||
| That's like thinking that somebody who writes a novel, that every sentence of the novel is what they actually personally think is true. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| But I think – and I've got to think that a lot of people who write articles like this must understand that on some level, right? | ||
| That they – that like this is not how comedy works. | ||
| But I think that sometimes it's like bad faith. | ||
| They're just being dishonest. | ||
| There's definitely some of that. | ||
| But like also I think that – Like, sometimes if you get this invested in, like, making these, like, moral indictments of people over those culture war battles, then you're just not even pausing to think about that. | ||
| Like, you're just, like, trying to find evidence. | ||
| Like, you're just, like, sifting through it to, like, find, like—it's like, you know, Freddie DeBoer, the commentator? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| No. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So Freddy DeBoer is a writer. | ||
| He wrote a really good book about the education system called Cult of Smart. | ||
| And he has this essay from a few years ago called Planet of Cops, where he says that it seems to him that increasingly everybody in the culture is a cop now, right? | ||
| What he means by that, and he develops the metaphor. | ||
| He says things like, Oh, there's a new movie that people are getting excited about. | ||
| Give me two hours and 500 words and I'll find you your indictments. | ||
| It's like it's sort of constantly sifting through things to find evidence that people have committed some kind of sin or infraction. | ||
| And I think that like that's how people are approaching that. | ||
| Like when they wrote these articles about how – oh my god, did you know that Dave Chappelle said that he was on Team Turf in that special? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Like, look, there's a mission, right? | ||
| You know, you got to get those indictments, right? | ||
| So you just have to sort through all of it until you can find something that, you know, that looks like a smoking gun of evidence. | ||
| And I think that it's like it's obviously it's a terrible way to write about anything. | ||
| But I think what's interesting to me about the example of comedy is Is that it's sort of the most absurd possible application of doing that. | ||
| Because, I mean, just to be, like, simplistic about it for a second, right? | ||
| Like, if you're saying something in a stand-up special, like, generally speaking, not every sentence, but, like, you're saying it because you think it's funny, right? | ||
| Which is just a different thing from saying something. | ||
| Because, like, oh, you know, here is exactly what I think. | ||
| Right? | ||
| It's like the example that we were talking about before the podcast, which I'm not going to do because it's actually in my act now, that someone put a quote that I said in an article about what a piece of shit I am. | ||
| I'm like, hey, you've got to put the whole quote because there's like a lot more to that. | ||
| And it's clearly joking. | ||
| But it's that thing that they do is also because someone is getting a disproportionate and exorbitant amount of attention. | ||
| And when someone is like a Dave Chappelle or myself who's got a disproportionate amount of attention, there's so many people that want to look at that and go, Flaws! | ||
| Holes! | ||
| Puppet kegs! | ||
| Throw rocks! | ||
| And it's a normal thing to have this sort of reaction. | ||
| To someone who you feel either their take on things isn't valid or it doesn't align with your own or there's a reason why you're morally superior to them because your position is better. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think there's a lot of that. | ||
| And it's also – I mean it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about the BLM protests and the aftermath and all of that stuff. | ||
| Like if you get somebody – like if – I mean obviously in a case as high profile as like Dave Chappelle, like Netflix isn't going to dump him because like why would they do that? | ||
| Like that would just be putting like a lot of money on the – Well, not only that but there's no reason to. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Here's the thing. | ||
| It's like if Dave Chappelle was saying all trans people would die, should die, and they're not human, okay, get rid of them. | ||
| Everybody would agree to that. | ||
| You shouldn't put that on your network. | ||
| But you cannot look at any of the things that he said and rationalize any of these accusations that people have towards him. | ||
| He is not that guy. | ||
| He is a lovely guy. | ||
| If you meet him, he is one of the kindest, nicest, sweetest guys. | ||
| That's who he really is. | ||
| And it's really striking, too, because if you remember when all this was going on, there was like a week of the news that was all about how there was going to be this huge walkout of trans employees at Netflix. | ||
| You remember this? | ||
| Yeah, they took like a lunch break. | ||
| There was like five of them. | ||
| Yeah, there were like five people and it's not even clear that they all worked at Netflix. | ||
| No, most of them didn't. | ||
| And then the one of them that was there, they found a whole bunch of racist shit that she had put on Twitter. | ||
| And they're like, hey... | ||
| And then not even jokes, just like racist stuff. | ||
| It's like, God damn it. | ||
| I get what's going on. | ||
| These are like, they're humans. | ||
| Humans are flawed. | ||
| And, you know, just because they said a thing that was incorrect doesn't mean that they're... | ||
| Whatever position they have, they can't have a good perspective on something. | ||
| Yeah, and what kills me about that example is at that very moment that that was going on, right? | ||
| That there was this like... | ||
| Super hyped up walkout that got all this attention. | ||
| There was like two people on their lunch break or whatever. | ||
| At the same time, there was the John Deere strike going on and that was thousands of people were out on strike to get better wages and working conditions. | ||
| John Deere, the tractors? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Yep. | ||
| The workers. | ||
| I've never heard of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you go – I believe you. | ||
| But, I mean, I've never heard of peep out of that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's the thing, right? | ||
| So, like, you compare the scale of the two things and then you compare the scale of the coverage. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| One of them is jokes. | ||
| But it's also jokes from the greatest living comedian. | ||
| That's part of the problem. | ||
| And also a guy who you sort of associate with left-wing values and progressive values, and you want him to fall in line. | ||
| And I think that's part of the blowback, is that they want to shame him into falling in line with their ideals. | ||
| And one of the things that he said when we talked about the special, and we did a show together and he did this speech at an arena, and he's like, I am not going to comply with the way you want me to think and want me to behave. | ||
| That's not what I'm doing. | ||
| Yeah, and again, like, what's his response going to be realistically? | ||
| Like, he's just going to... | ||
| Keep talking shit. | ||
| That's what he's going to do. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's going to be funnier and funnier. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, but, like, the idea that, like, saying, like, he's a terrible person, he's a transphobe, like, is going to get him to, like, see things more from your perspective. | ||
| In fact, he talks about this in the special, right? | ||
| That, like, he, you know, he has the thing about the woman who, like, followed him out to the parking lot or whatever to, you know, to give him a hard time. | ||
| And... | ||
| The point is that all of that, his reaction was just, fuck you. | ||
| Of course it is. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, but like then like actually meeting this trans woman and like having this, you know, like like, you know, like, you know, having the interactions that they had and like having that mean something to him. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Like that that like that did way more probably to get him to see things the way that people were yelling at him, wanted him to see them. | ||
| Then like people just like saying, you know, that like because if you say like if somebody wants to like shut you down or silence you or like berate you until you, you know, you stop thinking what you think, then I mean, maybe like if somebody is powerless enough, they'll just shut up because they don't want to deal with it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, but like otherwise, like one thing it's not going to do. | ||
| Is to get them to say, okay, now I see you're right. | ||
| Especially if you're distorting their perceptions. | ||
| They might say the words if they think they have to, but they're not going to think it. | ||
| Now, when you wrote this book, what inspired you? | ||
| Yeah, so I think there were a few things that had been going on and it kind of all started to build for a while that I was getting frustrated that a lot of people who I align with on most things were getting sucked into the way I see it in the book, right? | ||
| That they're like... | ||
| That these kinds of what I call pathologies of powerlessness, right? | ||
| Because you know that you can't accomplish things that actually matter, you end up getting sucked into all of this nonsense. | ||
| You spend all of your time trying to prove yourself to other people you already agree with. | ||
| You know, and to denounce, you know, people for not agreeing with you in ways that are not going to, you know, lead to a single person getting health care or a single workplace being unionized, you know, any of those things. | ||
| And I think there were a few examples that, like, were really starting to get to me at the time. | ||
| So one of them was what happened, I remember in 2019, The Democratic Socialists of America, which is an organization I'm a member of. | ||
| I think it's flawed but I think it does good stuff. | ||
| I encourage people to do that. | ||
| But they had this convention actually in Atlanta where I live and in which I didn't – I mean I was there for like a minute because I was like meeting with my editor but like I didn't go to the thing itself. | ||
| I kind of hate sitting through meetings like in general in life. | ||
| But in – But there was this montage of clips that came out afterwards that Tucker Carlson played on Fox News and stuff like that of people announcing all of these bizarre rules that you weren't allowed to clap at the convention because there might be people with rare noise sensitivities and just – Things like this. | ||
| And of course, you know, the right-wingers who compiled that were cherry-picking the worst, most ridiculous moments from a weekend. | ||
| Is that the one where this person is like, point of privilege? | ||
| You were a part of that? | ||
| I wasn't part of that. | ||
| You were in that room while that was going down? | ||
| Yeah, I wasn't in the room at that minute. | ||
| Come on, man. | ||
| That is ridiculous. | ||
| It is ridiculous. | ||
| And here's what gets me about this, right? | ||
| It's like, okay, granted the worst moments are being cherry-picked, But, also, it's not, you know, they're not being made up, right? | ||
| Like, this stuff actually happened. | ||
| And, also, it's not even like there was somebody in there with, like, a hidden camera, right, to get this footage, right? | ||
| They were streaming it to the... | ||
| Oh, no, they know that. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous. | ||
| And, also, the lady calling everybody comrades. | ||
| Like, what? | ||
| What's going on here? | ||
| I mean, I think that, like, what's going... | ||
| Like, what gets me about this is that knowing that this is the face you're showing to the whole world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Right? | ||
| That, like, anybody in the world who wants to tune in and watch this can do that. | ||
| You're still doing this stuff, like, was it somebody... | ||
| Yeah, the point of privilege thing, I think, was... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Will you stop using gendered language? | |
| Come on, man. | ||
| It's hilarious because it just shows, like, what are we fucking concentrating on? | ||
| You're mad that people are... | ||
| There's chatter because you're easily distracted? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How about get the fuck out of here then? | ||
| Why are you in a large crowd of people? | ||
| What do you do at the movies? | ||
| What do you do at a bus station? | ||
| Shut the fuck up. | ||
| Like, you want everybody to comply? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you've got some weird tick? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And why are people doing that? | ||
| Because like you said, they can't be, I assume they're not going through their entire lives, right? | ||
| You know, trying to get people to do this stuff. | ||
| Maybe they are. | ||
| Maybe they are. | ||
| Maybe they're activists at work, too. | ||
| Maybe they're just really annoying. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, if so, they're probably winning over a lot of new converts all the time, but by doing that... | ||
| Was that the most annoying time in that meeting, or were there more annoying times during that conference? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the stuff that I saw, which was not that much of it, but the stuff I saw, like the things that made it into that montage were the most annoying things that I saw. | ||
| But like... | ||
| I guess what gets me about this is that knowing that everybody in the world can see this, if you're still acting this way, then what that shows me is that you do not care at all. | ||
| Like how any... | ||
| You know, a normal person is going to react to seeing this. | ||
| And I know there are people who get this twisted. | ||
| When I say normal person, it's like, oh, do you just mean people who are, you know, whatever, right? | ||
| You know, like, fit some demographics or something. | ||
| No, when I say normal person, I mean like people who aren't like bathed in this political subculture. | ||
| So like stuff like that starts to seem normal to them, right? | ||
| Like just anybody who's, you know, of any background, any, you know, any race, sexual orientation, whatever, who doesn't like, you know, who doesn't spend all day every day thinking about politics, right, is going to see this and say, wait a second, what? | ||
| But I don't even think that's a politics thing. | ||
| I think it's just a social issue. | ||
| And I don't think they're thinking at all that everyone's going to see it. | ||
| I don't think that was even a consideration at all. | ||
| I think in that moment, they were very self-indulgent, and they had the access to a microphone, and they couldn't wait to yap. | ||
| And that's part of the problem with people. | ||
| You just can't wait to, as a person who yaps professionally. | ||
| I mean, look, that's why I hate... | ||
| I mean, I said earlier that I hate meetings. | ||
| This is one of the reasons why, right? | ||
| That, like, it's always... | ||
| Every time I've ever had to go to a meeting for anything, you know, there's always... | ||
| There are always people who talk just because it's important to them that they, like, hear themselves talk. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| It's awful. | ||
| You know, yeah. | ||
| That's why it's funny. | ||
| That's why that video's funny. | ||
| I mean, that's a version of that. | ||
| That's, like, the super ultra-progressive version of that. | ||
| Yeah, and I get that it's funny. | ||
| It's also like seeing people who are supposedly fighting for all the things that I am act that way is also painful. | ||
| It's like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| Why would you do this? | ||
| Why do you think you need someone there to go, calm down, Francis? | ||
| Yeah, I think... | ||
| I think you do, right? | ||
| And that's part of the problem. | ||
| That's part of why I wrote the book because I guarantee you, however many hundreds of people were there in that hall, right, you know, where that was happening. | ||
| There's a lot of eye rolls. | ||
| There's a lot of eye rolls. | ||
| There's no way there weren't tons of eye rolls, right? | ||
| Yeah, I'm sure. | ||
| Like, I actually think the very limited amount of time that it was around that weekend, I think I heard a few people, you know, do the verbal eye rolls to me, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Did you know? | |
| Point of privilege. | ||
| By the way, my friends say that sometimes just for a joke. | ||
| We're having a conversation and they're like, point of privilege! | ||
| And they'll just spit out something. | ||
| Yeah, right. | ||
| And it's like, I think, but the thing is... | ||
| People – most everybody who's rolling their eyes – I mean I think – I actually think my friend Cale Brooks was there. | ||
| He might have actually like had a – like I think somebody actually came over to his table and they were – You know, and like told them to like not clap and you know, they're like, what's wrong with you? | ||
| Why are you clapping? | ||
| You're ruining life! | ||
| You know, they actually did have a little thing about that, but they... | ||
| Are you supposed to do this? | ||
| Are you supposed to snap fingers? | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That was a thing you used to do in the jazz days. | |
| That was a beatnik thing, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's... | ||
| And like, but most people who are going to roll their eyes aren't going to say anything because you don't want to be the guy who says anything. | ||
| Right, you don't want to be an asshole. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| You're not there to be an asshole. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're there because you actually care about the issues that the organization is about. | ||
| You didn't sign up for this so you could spend your time arguing with crazy people about whether clapping is okay. | ||
| So I think it's a very understandable impulse. | ||
| But I think what I started to realize when I was thinking about examples like this is that for a long time, it's not like I didn't know that there were a lot of people who were ridiculous in ways like this or a lot of people who were like, Unhelpfully moralistic, you know, in ways like what I was talking about in the comedy chapter of the book or, you know, who would excuse things that shouldn't be excused, like in the Andy No part. | ||
| But I think what I always told myself was, look... | ||
| None of this matters that much. | ||
| Like some people, some leftists are idiots, but whatever. | ||
| Like in the greater scheme of things, it's not that, you know, like we live in a world where there are, you know, imperialist wars and union busting and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| This is such a minor irritation than like why spend time talking about it and thinking about it. | ||
| But then at a certain point, my perspective started to change because I actually think that the fact that there are all of those other issues that are more important is a reason to try to get people to stop acting like this. | ||
| Because if you actually care about doing something about those bigger issues, then if you look to any working class onlooker who you might be trying to... | ||
| Like, ideally, you'd want to reach out to, right? | ||
| If you look like this lunatic who's, like, getting mad at people because they're clapping instead of doing whatever they're supposed to do with their fingers, you know, then they're not going to have anything to do with you. | ||
| Who can blame them? | ||
| You've got to weed out the freaks. | ||
| Yeah, it's like some people just – they can't see the forest for the trees, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They're concentrated on this one thing when what you're trying to accomplish is this – More inclusive view of Socialism and with how socialism could fit into our modern culture and Instead they want they want you to not clap or not talk I know please watch your idle chatter and the noise you make I'm easily distracted like oh my god I Self | ||
| -indulgence. | ||
| It's a real problem with any group. | ||
| And whenever people are trying to be ultra-sensitive and ultra-progressive and ultra-open-minded, you open the door for annoying people. | ||
| You open the door for people that just need a tremendous amount of attention. | ||
| Yeah, and there's got to be a way that you can, you know, square the circle of saying, like, okay, look, are there obviously, you know, should there be more accommodations for disabled people in, like, society as a whole than there are? | ||
| Sure, right? | ||
| But anything that you could call a disability, should you crank the dial of accommodation up to 11 at all times? | ||
| No, right? | ||
| Should you care about not... | ||
| against trans people? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Does that mean that like you need to be constantly on guard for like anything that somebody says in a comedy set that could be like interpreted if you look at it in just the right light? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Right. | ||
| And I think that if you think especially that the things that should be the biggest priorities are about the actual distribution of material resources, you know, who has, you know, who has health care, you know, how much inequality do we have? | ||
| You know, how is, you know, like, like, have we like built up the labor movement? | ||
| All, you know, all of these things and trying to get the United States to not have this like kind of imperial world policeman, you know, foreign foreign policy, which, by the way, As we've been, like we were talking about earlier, right, in these last weeks while people have been, you know, freaking out about, you know, whatever's going on in the news about, you know, things that Joe Rogan said 15 years ago or about what Whoopi Goldberg said on The View or whatever. | ||
| We're about to go to war. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, exactly! | |
| However slim the chance, the fact that there's the standoff with Russia, that has the potential if that happened. | ||
| That would be an absolute... | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Even if it stayed conventional, that that that would be like that would be ridiculous. | ||
| And by the way, is one of many, many reasons that I wish Bernie Sanders were president right now, because he put out an article in the guy in the op ed about how important it was to in the Guardian to about how important it was to, you know, negotiate to like stop this, you know, from from from escalating. | ||
| And and I'm not you know, I'm not sure that I don't know what's going to happen. | ||
| But like when I see like Biden canceling, you know, the meeting with Putin, you know, like I get I get nervous. | ||
| And and I think that, like, given how destructive that would be. | ||
| that's got to override almost everything else right now just in terms of how important it is. | ||
| That we stop acting like this. | ||
| I don't know why the United States has to have the kind of role in the world where we're negotiating about what happens in Ukraine at all. | ||
| Why is it important that the United States have this be present in everything that happens? | ||
| It's a weird role. | ||
| Everywhere on the planet. | ||
| You know, when the United States invaded Panama, I think that was totally unjustified. | ||
| But, you know, like, Gorbachev, you know, wasn't, like, involving himself, you know, in that, right? | ||
| You know, because the Soviet Union didn't have that role in the world. | ||
| And I'd rather that we didn't either. | ||
| I'd rather that, like, instead of having... | ||
| Like however many hundreds of military bases the United States has all over the entire – like every part of the world right now and constantly fighting these like low-level drone wars that like most Americans have like forgotten that they're even happening. | ||
| I think that if we redirected the kinds of resources that we spend on having this role in the world to taking care of people's material needs in ways that – it wouldn't fund all of it but it would do a lot. | ||
| Trevor Burrus It would do a lot. | ||
| Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed our conversation. | ||
| Thank you for doing this. | ||
| It was a lot of fun. | ||
| Yeah, thank you so much for having me. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| Thank you for the Buffalo Trish. | ||
| Enjoy the whiskey. | ||
| And tell everybody where they can find you on social media and where they can get your stuff. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| So I have a show called Give Them an Argument, which you can find on YouTube and all the usual podcast places. | ||
| I write for Jacobin Magazine. | ||
| You can find me there. | ||
| And as far as all the links to everything in this book and other books and everything else, just go to benburgess.com. | ||
| That's probably the easiest way to find everything. | ||
| Social media as well. | ||
| It's on there? | ||
| Yep. | ||
| Social media, you know, Twitter's at Ben Burgess, but all the links are on there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. | |
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, Brian. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right. |
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