Coleman Hughes defends End of Race Politics against Sunny Hostin’s "charlatan" attack on The View, clarifying his Democratic voting record and CNN ties while dismissing ad hominem critiques. He argues race should exit public policy, replaced by class-based solutions, with Rogan linking DEI to corporate control. Hughes analyzes Hamas’s civilian-embedded tactics—300 miles of tunnels, 19,000 estimated Palestinian deaths—as war crimes, rejecting false equivalence with Israel’s actions. Rogan warns of AI’s exponential risks, comparing it to civilization-resetting disasters like the Younger Dryas Impact Theory, while Hughes frames digital intelligence as a potential societal "heroin." Their discussion ties political failures and technological threats to humanity’s fragile progress, questioning whether systemic collapse or AI dominance could reverse modern advancements. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, their audience is not really their audience.
Their audience is a group of people they bring in to watch television shows.
I don't know if you've ever seen audiences before for TV shows, but a lot of them are paid.
They're paid to be there.
Because they have to guarantee that there's going to be people there.
So there's services that you hire.
And when a show gets really, really popular, like Letterman or something like that, obviously it has its own Fanbase right those people will try to get tickets before anybody else does and in that case They probably don't need to use a service anymore.
They just get actual fans But arguably like the fans the real fans of the view that are like all these ladies are on point Most of those people can't leave the house like they're probably right immobile right right right because they're their moms taking their kids to school and and that's yeah, yeah It's a very strange show, but it's fun to watch.
Yeah, there's been this common phrase, I don't see race.
That's equated with colorblindness.
And the point in my book is I want to say, get rid of that.
Of course we see race, certainly in America, in the West.
You could argue about whether children really see race, but past a certain point, we see race.
The point is not to pretend you don't see it.
It's to say, you know, you're a white guy.
I'm a black and Hispanic guy.
We notice that.
We're not going to pretend it's not there, but whenever it matters, I'm going to try to treat you like an individual based on your personal qualities, and we're going to ask the government to do the same.
Get race out of public policy.
If you want to help disadvantaged people, do that on the basis of class.
And understand that when you see these incentives that are put into corporations, these are methods of control.
And that's what's going on when you see things like DEI initiative.
You're not really making the world a better place.
You're just allowing these financial institutions to enact control over corporations.
And it's a really shifty, weird way they're doing it by making it seem like they're trying to make the world a better, more equal place.
And then there's some people who are good intentioned but have a very narrow perspective and a very limited amount of information that they're operating under that will try to pretend that these things are overall good, are net positive.
And Sonny Hostin may be one of those people, but, you know, so we had eight minutes to deal with this topic on one of the biggest platforms in the country, and especially an audience that isn't my typical audience.
If anything, the View's audience is really who needs to hear my message the most.
And Sonny decided to take up a few minutes of that precious eight minutes and attack me as someone who's been co-opted by the right and someone who's a charlatan.
She said something like, a lot of people in the black community, implicitly herself included, think that you've been co-opted by the right and that you're a charlatan.
And I explained to her I've only voted twice, both for Democrats, Hillary and Biden, very open to voting for Republicans.
So I'm a political independent, and I'm only young enough to have voted twice.
I'm an analyst at CNN, and I write for the Free Press, which is Barry Weiss's.
And I'm independent in all those endeavors, and I patiently explained that and then basically asked her to go back to the topic that we're here to discuss.
And I think people, part of the reason it went viral is because What people have told me is you very rarely see someone who gets a character attack on a big TV platform, calmly expose it as evidence-free, and then just move back to the topic.
And that's how everybody should approach these things.
And the problem is that's not what people want to do.
What they want to do is engage in argument and try to win.
And it's not really about...
Having an open mind and listening to what this person has to say and trying to figure out whether or not it resonates with you Instead they're just trying to win and trying to win in this weird sound bitey way, you know Those platforms whether it's the view or any of the number of these panel platforms are so inherently flawed Just in this just the way it's formatted You only have a small amount of time.
You have all these people talking.
They can't compete with internet shows because internet shows are free.
I don't mean free like you don't have to pay for it.
I mean free like they're free to talk about anything.
There's not a producer in your ear.
There's not someone saying we have to cut the commercial.
There's not, you know, executive meetings before talking about an agenda that you would like to like this.
We have to hammer him on this.
And this is really important with the election coming up and this and that.
I'm like, God, the whole election coming up thing freaks me out because I think everybody's in this weird like...
Pre-battle anxiety stage, you know, and everything is life or death and this goddamn phrase that gets tossed around every five minutes.
It's just a threat to democracy.
Everything is a threat to democracy, except things that actually probably are a threat to democracy.
You see people talking about the threats to democracy.
And they ignore intelligence communities censoring social media, which should be terrifying to people.
It should be terrifying to people because this could happen on the left, on the right.
It could happen for a number of reasons.
It could happen for reasons that would be terrible for your life.
And he said something that I think I've said before privately and I feel, which is that I think America would survive four more years of Trump or four more years of Biden.
Truthfully, I think America and the Republic is strong enough to survive either.
Neither one of them is a very good option, in my view.
Back in 2015, 2016, when I was hearing how Trump was speaking on Muslims on the registry, all this kind of stuff, I was one of the people that was worried he would be a fascist.
Truthfully.
But then what happened is we had four years of governance from him where he basically governed like a typical Republican and in some ways even had some policies that were to the left of what Republicans would do.
For instance, on criminal justice reform, he was very progressive.
He made funding for black colleges and universities permanent, which if Obama had done either of those things, he would have been criticized as playing left-wing identity politics.
And so I slowly realized that there is a pretty big distance between what Trump says and what he does.
I don't understand that fact about him, but I think it is a fact about him.
And so that's why I don't feel alarmist the way I did when I voted for Hillary in 2016, really voted against Trump.
Now, that being said, Trump is a wild guy and is difficult to predict.
I don't think he's someone you want behind the wheel in a crisis time.
And then, on the other hand, we have Biden, who has clear evidence of cognitive decline, vying for what's supposed to be the most important and challenging job in the world, certainly in the country, and people essentially claiming that it doesn't matter that he has obvious cognitive decline.
One of the great things about the market is that it's honest, because if you lie, you lose money.
So if you look at when lots of money is on the line, who do people want leading their organizations?
Look at the NBA, look at the MLB. Who do people get as head coaches?
Usually people in their 50s is the median age.
Because you've been around long enough that you've made a lot of dumb mistakes that 20-year-olds and 30-year-olds make, and you've learned those things that you can only learn with age.
But, you know, in your 50s, you've still got the vast majority of your cognitive power there and your energy, if you're healthy, that is.
No, we want someone with life experience and hopefully someone that doesn't exist solely in politics.
Like someone who hasn't become, their roots haven't been deeply entrenched in the system.
Someone who can maybe have some sort of an outsider's perspective that can look at the problems with the current situation and the way things are structured.
The way money is allocated and the way funding is done, the way bills are passed and Which is a giant issue, like when they sandwich these 2,000-page bills with a bunch of stuff that has nothing to do with it.
It should be illegal.
It shouldn't be legal to have a bill about what's a popular topic, the border issue, the border crisis, and embed in that funding for Ukraine.
A few months ago, So basically, you've had the Biden administration ignoring the border issue for several years because they wanted to signal sort of how non-Trump they were, right?
And the border is Trump's issue.
So Biden comes in, he says, we're going to undo everything Trump did with the border, even though a lot of those policies are actually widely supported and smart.
So they undo everything.
The migrant crisis goes to hell in the past two or three years, even now infiltrating cities like Chicago, New York, everywhere.
And then you have Biden finally get serious about the border a couple months ago with the border bill.
And Trump gives the signal essentially that it's not a good bill, even though it really was a pretty decent bill and certainly in an emergency you want to stop the bleeding.
Then Trump signals that the bill isn't good enough and Republicans kill it, essentially.
So I think both sides have tried to spin this, right?
The Democrat spin has been, look, the Republicans destroyed that bill.
They don't even care about immigration.
The whole thing's their fault.
Of course, what's wrong with that is the reason it's this bad is because Democrats have been ignoring the issue fully for two, three years.
Does anybody have anything to gain by letting migrants into the country?
Tim Dillon says that he thinks that it's cheap labor and that they want to bring more cheap labor into the country and that it's very difficult to get people to do certain jobs.
Like, okay, so someone like Biden, I understand you, you, you might argue, okay, are they letting people in because those are going to be the Democrat voters?
Uh, those are going to increase the Democrat voters base.
I was saying, you're going to leave it up to his cabinet.
He's not able to form...
Listen, when you see him at debates or at press conferences, he's at his very best.
And he's probably medicated.
They probably juice him up with a bunch of different things.
And get him hyped.
Let's go!
Roll him out there.
And then, even then, he can't form sentences.
He loses track of what he's talking about.
That's him at his very best.
What is he like when he's tired?
What is he like when he's not primed?
I do not think that he even has the interest in doing that.
I think he wanted to be president.
He got to be president.
He has all these people around him.
And just even by the way he talks about things, he's so out of touch with the way he's describing things and talking about bills that they pass and talking about important issues.
I just think he's completely out of it.
And I think it's a really...
It's very unfair.
And if that was my father, I would be terrified.
I'd be sad.
I'd be like, what are you doing to him?
He should be relaxing somewhere.
You know, he's embarrassing himself.
It's not fair.
Take a person that's in cognitive decline like that and just parade him out there and use him as a figurehead.
We're amazing and it's pretty cool, but it's also, we crawl so far up the ass at anybody.
that wants to be in a position of leadership, that no one who should be in a position of leadership wants that.
And most of these people that could be effective in a position of leadership because they've led things before, whether it's businesses or what have you, they just don't want to have anything to do with it.
It's just a horrible attack on your character.
They don't play fair.
They lie.
They'll get people to say things that aren't true.
They'll concoct stories.
They'll put things out there with the aid of the intelligence community.
Like the Russia collusion agenda, like that thing.
And then they get all the media that's on the left on board.
And then they just repeat this mantra over and over.
Russia collusion, Russia collusion.
And then they'll pretend that they didn't say that he never won the election.
They'll pretend.
They pretend that they didn't question the election.
They'll pretend that Hillary Clinton didn't do multiple speeches where she said that the election was stolen.
We live in this bizarre news cycle where this information is coming at you so fast, you kind of forget about what the thing you were mad about two days ago that could affect the rest of the country for decades.
And you go to other places in the world, people worship or pretend to worship their politicians.
You can sort of see why someone would want to be in that position when you see the crowds of people fainting over Hitler's speeches and all that stuff.
Well, you could see why someone would want to have crowds fainting over them.
In America, you get some admiration, but it kind of just looks like you get your life ruined.
Why does a suit have to be dark blue or black or whatever it is that everybody thinks it has to be?
That's so bizarre.
Because he could wear a tan shirt somewhere and give a speech, like if he's at his home or something like that, and he just addresses the press in a casual manner.
People ask me all the time why I don't get into politics or people expect me to get into politics because they see me on The View.
Well, thank you.
You get it.
You get it.
They see me on something like The View and they say, wow, I like this guy.
He keeps his cool under pressure.
He stands for what I believe in.
Why don't you run for office, man?
I'm like, are you crazy?
Are you absolutely insane?
Why would I do that to myself for such a...
I even doubt how much change you could even have, frankly, which is why I... As much as I admire someone like RFK for his charisma, in the sense that he's the only candidate that if he talks for five minutes off the cuff, I find it really compelling.
Whether you agree with him or disagree with him, I think he's very honest, and he's also very well-read in everything that he talks about.
And there's a lot of things that are very uncomfortable to discuss that he discusses openly and willingly.
And when you look at that man's background, and this is a thing that people choose to ignore when they want to talk about him as a conspiracy theorist.
This is the big one.
They always bring up conspiracy theorists.
That guy stopped the polluting of the Hudson River.
I mean he was a very effective environmental attorney that was dedicated to making sure that corporations couldn't just wantonly pollute things because it was more profitable for them to not pay attention to where their waste goes.
He held them to task, and he's one of the primary reasons why the Hudson River's clean.
At the same time, when I look throughout history, I somehow have a blanket skepticism of how much change politicians can actually accomplish, even good ones, in a system like America's, where the president has intentionally very limited power over domestic policy.
They can actually make a lot of change in foreign policy, because they have kind of unilateral decision-making ability.
And then secondly, I always check myself because I think the charismatic politicians are always the ones that are able to lead people into really dark corners.
It's always the ones with charisma that are able to use that charisma power to get people to support things they never ordinarily would support.
Not from my perspective or your perspective, but as a historical fact, if we were Germans living at that time, we would experience those Hitler speeches that look silly to us as charisma.
And when you hear Hitler yelling it, it's so aggressive.
And then when you hear what he's actually saying, you're like, oh, this is like a regular politician.
unidentified
My work for correctness.
Whether you believe that I have been diligent, that I have worked, that I have advocated for you in these years, that I have been decent, I have spent my time in service of my people.
Now cast your vote.
If yes, then stand up for me as I have stood up for you.
Well, I was influenced heavily by Japanese culture as a kid, obviously with martial arts, but also by Miyamoto Musashi, who, when I was a young man, that book, The Book of Five Rings, was essentially my guidebook for life.
When I was a young man and I was fighting, I was trying to figure out how to control my emotions and my anxiety and what's the most effective way to approach something that's absolutely terrifying.
Like, how can you approach it?
Because you have to be scared.
Because if you're not scared, you lose your edge.
You have to have an edge.
Like, every time that I ever competed where I was, like, overconfident, I fought terribly.
Even if I won, I was very ashamed of my performance.
You have to be scared, and it's something that no one wants to be.
No one wants to be scared.
It's an awful feeling.
Before you're competing, you're like, why am I even fucking doing this?
Like, why am I risking my literal life for no money to do this thing that's fucking insane?
Like, I'm gonna go out there and kick someone in the face, and they're gonna try to kick me in the face, and if I get hit, I'm going unconscious, and I'm going to the hospital.
So, I read a bunch of psychology books, I read a bunch of self-help books, I read A lot of Anthony Robbins stuff.
I've read a lot of different things trying to figure out what's the best way to manage the mind.
But the thing that I really gravitated towards was this one book because of the history of this man and the way that he speaks.
And he has this quote that I use all the time.
And if you've heard it before, I'm sorry, but I'm going to say it again.
Once you know the way broadly, you can see it in all things.
And this was...
What I applied...
I think you applied to many disciplines in life.
But it's understanding that to get great at something, to really understand something, it requires this intensive observation of what the thing is...
What your flaws are, what your strengths are, and approach it in this very balanced way.
And if you can do that, if you can really know the way, you can apply that to everything you do, whether it's learning how to play guitar, or chess, or anything, or calligraphy, or writing books, whatever it is.
So what you said about being scared and how that's useful, you need to feel that in order to perform at the highest level.
It always makes me think of the Christopher Nolan Batman where he has to take off the rope in order to have the adrenaline to jump far enough to get out of the cave.
I mean, it's a brilliant scene and a brilliant message because Bane beats Batman, puts him at the bottom of this deep pit, and he's trying to get out so he can go back to Gotham and save everyone from the atomic bomb that's going to go off there, and he keeps jumping and jumping, and there's this one jump he has to make that he keeps failing, and the prisoners have a way of doing it where they tie a rope around You're waste so that when you inevitably fall, as everyone always does, they've been trying to get out of this prison for years.
Some people have been stuck here their whole life.
But there's a legend of a child that did it.
A child.
No one's been able to figure out how they replicate it, so they try it with the rope all the time.
And then one of the elder statesmen of the scene says, well, I heard the way that the child did it is that they didn't use the rope.
And you have to fear death in order for your body to give you the necessary fuel and material to land the jump.
Yeah, and not to bring it back to the view, but I do sometimes feel that about live television.
I feel that when I know it's live, and I know I'm not getting a second chance, and I'm not getting a can you cut that out, and millions of people are going to see this, my brain goes into a different mode of aliveness, knowing what the stakes are.
And I think it probably causes me to perform better than normal.
I think you have to with anything that's very difficult to do.
I don't think, I mean I think maybe there's some people that are just on a certain spectrum of consciousness that are able to just like go zen and go into a thing and maybe there's different things that don't get you scared that maybe being scared would be detrimental to those things because you'd make quicker judgments instead of measured and calculated because when you're,
the thing about being scared it's generally things that are operating in a time constraint so you have this time constraint that's happening That also gives you a certain amount of anxiety.
There's a beginning and an end of every round, for instance, you know?
And, you know, each round is...
In kickboxing, where I was doing it was three minutes.
In MMA, it's five minutes.
And so you have this time constraint.
You have that.
You have how many rounds you're gonna have to do.
That's in the back of your head.
You have all these things that keep you from being zen.
There's all these things that, like...
And the live aspect of it, and everyone's watching.
You will be anxious, but you must be able to perform at your best.
And handle that anxiety.
And there's a bunch of different methods that people use to avoid open loop thought processes.
So an open loop thought process is like swinging a bat.
You really can't stop the bat once you're swinging it.
You're swinging with all your might and it's just this open loop, right?
A closed loop process is something where you're in control of it every step of the way.
Like for instance, me opening up this thing.
I can stop right there.
I don't just go, ugh!
I can't, you know, it's not like a thing that I can't control.
You can control it.
And so when you're in a shooting situation with archery, you have to think entirely about the process of shooting.
You can't just go now, because you'll be filled with anxiety, you'll move your arm, you'll twitch.
You have to be able to stay rock steady with something that's not very steady.
The beautiful thing about archery is the perfection of doing something that's almost impossible to perfect.
So when you can have these brief moments Where that arrow does launch and goes right into that target, right where the X is.
This immense sense of elation, accomplishment.
But now when you're dealing with an animal, Then you have all these other consequences.
Like, you don't want to wound the animal.
You want to be able to hit it and kill it very quickly with one shot.
And you have to have practiced thousands and thousands of arrows.
And then there's this one moment.
It's not like fighting where you have multiple opportunities to hit a guy.
You can move.
You can step to the side.
This is the one moment that the fight has actually happened.
But there's a lot of moments in the fight.
When you release that arrow, that is the one moment.
So you might have worked 11 months, 3 weeks, and 6 days For this one moment.
And you've been planning this elk hunt for the whole year.
You've gotten in shape for it.
You've practiced all these arrows.
But when that elk steps out from between those trees at 60 yards and you're at full draw, you have to center that pin right where its vitals are and you have to release a perfect arrow.
I don't know if this is Hollywood, but I saw the movie The Killer, David Fincher's latest movie, and I think he had some kind of heart rate monitor where he wouldn't shoot until his heart rate was below 60 or something like that.
I don't know to what extent that's Hollywood or actually important.
And the best snipers can most certainly control their heart rate.
There's strategies.
You learn breathing strategies to control your heart rate.
And there's also...
Strategies of mental management, of not allowing this...
There's this tornado of anxiety that can come on, and you have to see the winds blowing and go...
You have to calm it down.
You can't get caught up in it in your mind.
I've seen people do it in many different things in life.
You can apply it to many different things.
It's this overwhelming fear of fucking up.
Instead of thinking about what you're actually doing, you're thinking about the possibility of fucking up, which leads you to fuck up, because that's what you're concentrating on.
In the game of pool, if you think you're going to miss a shot, you most certainly miss that shot.
Almost always.
You might get lucky and make it, just like I thought I was going to miss.
But in your head, you're like, I hope I don't miss.
I hope I don't miss.
You're going to miss.
But if you just only concentrate on the process, you can execute even under pressure.
You can execute in a perfect line.
And it's a mental management thing.
And the only people that know how to do that are people that have actually done difficult things under pressure.
And when you do difficult things under pressure, you realize, like, wow, there's so many factors.
That you can probably mitigate in some way through a strategy of control, of meditation, of thought, of understanding what these thoughts are when they start to occur.
Yeah, I think a lot of anxiety management is deeply focusing on the task at hand.
Because if you're, you know, it's not necessarily that the anxiety comes up and you're amazing at swatting it down.
It could be that you are so deeply focused on the thing itself that there's no room for anxiety.
And that's very lucky if you have that level of focus and attention on whatever it is that you're passionate about.
Someone like Michael Jordan or Kobe Bryant, the way you hear them talking about winning, you can understand why they didn't feel any anxiety when the buzzer beater It's coming up.
There's two seconds.
They have to make the shot.
It's because they're so obsessed with winning that there's no room for anxiety.
You don't become David Goggins, but this mild-mannered person who contemplates and You know, sits with his coffee and stares out the window and watches the birds.
Yeah, so he's technically no longer world champion because he's so bored of winning.
And it's actually understandable.
I don't even think anyone's mad at him because these world championship chess matches, 14 games, they can go six hours a game.
They can actually go over six hours a game.
Brutal, absolutely brutal.
Like, if you thought taking the SAT and trying really hard made you mentally exhausted, it's nothing compared to how these guys feel after a six-hour Chess game and doing that 14 days in a row spending six months prior to that working with chess engines to find one new idea in an opening 50 moves in It's it's absolutely grueling and he he does it every time and he wins every time But he says I can't this is not fun for me anymore.
So I'm gonna play all the other Chess tournaments that you just kind of show up and do your best and he crushes most of those as well But I'm not doing this grueling.
I That's interesting because that is John Jones, too.
John Jones, when he was dominating the light heavyweight division, he got to a point where the way analysts would describe it is that he was playing with his food.
And that he wasn't afraid of losing to these guys.
And he barely trained for some of them.
Like, he had a famous fight with Alexander Gustafson.
And it was the first fight where John had never been taken down.
And he got pushed deep into the rounds.
And John rallied in the fourth and fifth rounds and won the fight.
And it was a crazy fight.
They had a rematch and Jon prepared and just dominated him and annihilated him.
Same guy.
I mean, just ran right through him.
The guy was still in his prime.
Jon was still in his prime.
There was not like a bunch of things that had happened that deteriorated him.
Nope.
It was a couple of years later and John ran through him.
And that's the real John Jones.
It's just the John Jones that was fighting all these other guys...
Yeah, and the thing with these kind of guys, I don't know about fighting, probably the same, but with the chess guys, you try to bring up a mistake, a famous mistake that they made, And it's almost like you're talking about a family member who died tragically.
It means that much to them that they made a mistake 12 years ago on move 24 of some games that threw the match.
I mean, that's how hard these guys take it, which is, again, in you or me, that's just a maladjusted guy.
That's like a guy with a problem that needs to go to therapy.
In a top performer, that's what makes him a top performer and separates him from the otherwise very good professionals.
There's a guy who's arguably the greatest pool player of all time, at least one of the greatest pool players of all time.
His name's Earl Strickland.
He's this American guy who won the U.S. Open five times.
There's only one of the guys who won the U.S. Open five times, a guy named Shane Van Boning, who's another genius player.
But Earl, like, he would play with this insane intensity.
If he missed a ball, he was, like, confused.
Like, how is it possible that I can miss?
There was a million dollar challenge.
Now this is statistically...
So impossible to do under intense competition that they were willing to gamble and get an insurance policy that would give someone a million dollars if they could run 10 racks in a row of Nineball.
Now the way Nineball works is you have nine balls and you shape them where the bottom balls are missing, which would make 15, which is a full rack, right?
So it's just like triangle sort of a rack and then you Break the balls and the one ball is in the front and the nine balls in the center.
Now the balls scatter randomly and you have to run them in order.
So every single rack you have to have a shot on the one or the lowest number ball.
And then you have to have balls that aren't clustered together or you have to figure out how to break up those clusters and still get a shot.
Guys are much better now because there's a thing called the magic rack and what the magic rack is it's a clear piece of plastic that the ball set in where the balls are always touching always in the exact same spots because they're literally sitting in a pattern and so then these guys are breaking the balls more softly Which causes, they do what's called a cut break, which causes the one ball to go drift into the side pocket.
And the best guys can do it like nine out of ten times.
And then the two ball bounces up table and they know exactly where all the balls are going to be.
Basically, so I was at Juilliard, I was a freshman at Juilliard, in New York City, gigging as a jazz trombone player, and my mom died when I was 18 of cancer, and it just shattered everything for me, sent me down into a grief and depression.
And I had always been interested in philosophy and writing as well, kind of as a side thing.
And I was always a very good student in school.
But my passion was music.
But something about the experience of my mom dying led me to reflect on what I wanted out of life.
And I dropped out of Juilliard and applied to Columbia.
And so I realized I could still do music.
Nobody learns music in school.
So being in New York City, I could still play as much music as I wanted to, but I could also get a liberal arts degree and feed that side of myself.
And had my mom not died, I probably just would have stayed at Juilliard.
No trumpet player would teach you to play like that, but he was one of the greats of early jazz trumpet playing, and he made it work, and...
I don't know that, you know, I've never heard that he had any health issues from playing that way.
You know, a lot of trumpet players, they get older, and, you know, Freddie Hubbard, who's one of the greatest jazz trumpet players, famously had a growth on his lip that kind of inhibited him in his last decade.
There's Slide Hampton, one of the great jazz trombone players of all time, played left-handed, which he's the only person I've ever heard of, great or not, who plays left-handed.
In other words, the slide arm is always the right arm, but somebody gave it to him wrong, and that's how he played it.
Standing next to a mountain, I chop it down with the edge of my hand, and then you hear that music, and you're like, oh my- and by the way, not a great singing voice.
And that's what happens, is that you can never really go back with the ears of those people and hear it as they heard it, because now you've taken for granted that this way of playing has seeped into the culture.
And that was really what I realized when I was 18. Taking every jazz trombone gig that came my way and paid me $50 and a slice of pizza, I was like...
This is my passion in life, I love this, but this is going to drive me into insanity if I have to take every single gig of my whole life and eke out an existence.
So maybe I should get a degree and just see, you know, see where shit goes.
There's no such thing as that for trombone or trumpet, for brass instruments.
Everyone eats shit the first time they play.
And so if you just love it so much that you're okay and you have a family that's forgiving enough to hear you be terrible, which I luckily did, that's how you get good at those things.
And I didn't have that for comedy, even though I love comedy as a consumer.
But when you were describing when it all goes right, which is so rare, I heard something Samuel L. Jackson said recently where, like, in golf, you shoot, I don't know, if you're bad, it's 100 shots a round, if you're really good, 75. Most of those still, though, you don't ever really do the intention of what you're trying to do.
And then it's like how good are you at overcoming those mistakes, clearing your head every time, fighting against nature, also having fun with your friends, being out in nature, getting away from everything for four or five hours, having a couple beers.
But it's like clearing your head because you can't think of all a bunch of other stuff where it will ruin your whole day because you can't have fun out there.
So basically what happened is there's this grandmaster named Hans Niemann who's a young guy, probably early 20s.
Magnus is probably more like 31 or so like now.
And what happened is Hans Niemann, he beat Magnus Carlsen at a tournament in a game, not in a match necessarily.
You might need to check that.
But he beat him in the first game of the tournament, which happens, right?
It's kind of like how the best tennis player in the world can lose a game to a lesser player but probably isn't going to lose the match.
That happens pretty frequently in chess.
Not uncommon.
But it is the most uncommon with Magnus.
Magnus suspected Hans of cheating.
Why did he suspect Hans of cheating?
Magnus is not the type to assume someone is cheating just because he lost a game.
He's never done that in his entire career.
The reason he did it in the case of Hans is because there had long been rumors circulating in the chess world that Hans Niemann was a cheater.
Now, there's ways you can cheat in chess in an over-the-board game if we're playing with a physical set in front of us.
The one way people do it is they'll have a friend, generally, that is looking at the game either here or out in the hall, running it through an engine and giving you a little signal like a baseball coach would.
There are also rumors that, in principle, it's possible to cheat with a device.
And I think that's happened in some way, that someone can transmit to you, be looking at the game and transmit you a signal, here's the right move with a certain number of buzzes, if I have a buzzer in my pocket.
In principle, it's possible to have a buzzer in the orifices of your body, in your butt, essentially.
And this is part of why it went viral, is because there was a theory that they have pretty strict security at these places, so where would he have put the device?
They're not doing an anal cavity check.
So that was part of the reason people were talking about it so much, because that's just hilarious to contemplate.
But the real situation of it was that Magnus made some strong implied comments that Hans had cheated in the game.
Then everyone started looking at the Hans and the rumors that had long existed in the chess world about this guy became public and there were serious competing investigations of...
How is it that this guy rose so quickly, for example?
It's very uncommon in the chess world for someone to raise in rating that quickly in the professional world, right?
There's a normal rate at which people get better, and there's a kind of impossible rate at which people got better.
And people debated.
He had defenders.
He had attackers.
Both of them had some good points about his rise in over-the-board play.
Then there's the online cheating, which is a totally different story.
Because chess.com has one of the, really the state-of-the-art cheating detection mechanism.
And people cheat all the time on chess.com, which is crazy because there's no reason for it, right?
Like, someone like me, I pay whatever I pay every month on chess.com.
I'm a random amateur player.
I like playing when I'm on the subway.
I like playing my friend occasionally.
You don't get any money for winning.
Most of us have anonymous usernames.
You don't get bragging rights for winning.
And yet there's a certain percentage of people like me on chess.com that just cheat for no reason.
They're just sitting at home in their mother's basement cheating to get a number on a screen that means nothing and wins them no money.
And just like that game where you literally mathematically can only have so much good luck, chess.com has algorithms that are really, really good at detecting when you've gone from the good luck space to the definitely cheating space.
So you see his level of mistakes and the way he does it, and then in the games where they think he's cheating, what was the variable that they detected?
If you're playing 99.5% of the Stockfish top moves, that's just not possible.
Magnus can't do it.
Nobody can do it.
You might be able to do it for one simple game, but you can't do it 12 games in a row that are complicated.
It's just not possible.
Very much like what you talked about.
So chess.com combines that measure with these other measures.
It even kind of knows, I think, when you're switching browsers, which can be a tip-off to cheating because you're switching from the chess browser you're playing chess into the browser that you're cheating with.
But the algorithm is regarded as very accurate in terms of determining cheating, and they did determine that he had cheated in a bunch of, let's say they weren't top tournaments, but they were friendly tournaments.
Some of them had money on the line.
Okay.
So it was never proven that he cheated over the board.
And I'm agnostic about that.
I've read both sides.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether he had cheated over the board in real big tournaments.
But it was proven that he had cheated online.
And again, all of this is separate from the fact that he's a damn good chess player.
Nobody denies he is a grandmaster.
He should be a grandmaster.
He is capable of defeating Magnus Carlsen in a game, not in a match.
So that's not to take anything away from him, but there was rumors circulating, and that's basically what happened.
But again, he's a damn good chess player, and he has a fiery personality, which like so many of these chess guys, unfortunately, are just so freaking boring from the audience perspective.
So the best players back in the day would not enter tournaments.
The best players are these legendary guys that you would hear that were just playing in pool halls.
And then eventually pool got to a point where it was on television and they started making money.
And you know, guys became known, like there's a guy named Buddy Hall, who's like one of the most famous money players of all time, and then eventually he just starts playing tournaments.
You know, now everybody knows him anyway, he can't get a game, he's Buddy Hall.
They used to call him Rags, that was his initial game.
A lot of these guys have like fake names, like Efren Reyes, who's arguably the greatest of all time.
He came up from the Philippines and he said he was Cesar Morales.
Because even in the Philippines, in the Philippines he was a hero, like everybody knew who Efren was.
Even when he was in his twenties, he was a wizard.
They call him the magician.
He was a wizard on a pool table.
And when he came up to America, they weren't even sure.
They're like, just to be safe, let's come up with a fake name.
And he just robbed everybody at these tournaments.
Just robbed everybody in gambling.
He could play so much better than everybody.
He changed the game.
Sort of like Hendrix changed music, Efren changed pool.
And a lot of people, they play...
There's a lot of things, particularly with safety play, that they learn from watching Efren.
So say if you're playing nine ball and you're running the balls in order, right?
If I have a shot on the one ball, but I don't have a clear shot at the two, I will knock the one ball into a position and hide the cue ball behind other balls.
Like three rail kicks where you're cutting into a corner.
They know the exact spot on the table to hit with the exact amount of speed and spin to make it land right in front of that ball and nudge it into the pocket.
But that's all, you know, learning from these people that came...
Kind of out of nowhere.
You know, these pool players were all these sort of shady characters that were hiding out in these pool halls in Louisiana and pretending they're like a painter.
They'd come in with like paint all over their overhauls and shit and they'd be walking in like fucking like a hayseed and just talk real stupid and drink a bunch and then people would like get curious, especially if there's like some traveling salesman from out of town.
And so many different moves because you're dealing with something that's coming at you, you know, over this low thing, very fast, and you're doing it this way and this way and that way and gentle and fast and there's all these different sneaky tactics.
Or the next fight, you see a completely overhauled version of who they were, because they got the rub.
They got in there with Israel Adesanya, and they got schooled.
And so they're either going to come back and be better than ever, like Robert Whitaker, or they're going to fall apart, like some guys that he's fought.
He breaks guys, because they realize, like, I can't do what you're doing.
The way you're doing it, my body doesn't work like that.
Israel, in his prime, was hitting guys with a combination.
Watch the Derrick Brunson.
Pull up the Derrick Brunson fight.
Derrick Brunson is a dangerous guy.
Knockout striker, really good wrestler, very physically strong, just a dangerous top contender.
He's fighting Adesanya, and I believe this is before Adesanya won the title, if I'm correct.
Not sure.
He might have been in defense of the title.
Either way, Adesanya, who will go down as one of the greatest of all time, for sure.
He hits them with combinations like he's on a different speed.
Like there's a 45 record and a 78. He's doing something different.
He's moving in a way that's so precise and he knows many steps.
If I do this, you're gonna do that.
And if I step this way, you're gonna go that way.
And he's got all this programmed in his head, and he's not what he calls smashing buttons.
He calls like a lot of people they're smashing buttons when they're playing a game.
You know, they don't even really exactly know what each button is doing, but they're trying to win by smashing buttons.
He's like, a lot of people fight that way.
He goes, I fight with precision.
A lot of people hit harder than me, but I have precision.
Watch this KO. This is a beautiful thing to watch if you appreciate combat sports and if you know how good Derrick Brunson is.
So Derrick Brunson is very physically strong.
Right here, he's trying to take Adesanya down because Derrick is a top-tier wrestler.
And so they separate them.
Something happened.
I think Derrick was grabbing his shorts or something.
So when you're in that space, when you're in a cage with that guy, one of two things is gonna happen.
Either you're gonna go, I can't do that.
I'm not that good.
He just fucked me up.
Clearly.
I'm 34 years old.
I'm never gonna get as good as that guy.
Or you become a fucking maniac, and you go to the gym Monday morning, and you're drilling everything, and now you have this new frequency that you've experienced.
You've experienced this championship-level fighter, and you realize these guys you've been beating, they're good, but this is what it's like to be in there with an all-time great.
And you either get great yourself, Which many, like I said, Robert Whitaker has done.
Or you don't.
Or you just kind of like decide that you're a journeyman now.
All Americans that care about basketball have an extreme ego that we are the best country for basketball, which is true, but the rest of the world is catching up.
I mean, these European guys were getting better and better, and I think there was American complacency.
And the Dream Team lost, which was a huge blow to everyone who cared about basketball and to the pride of the NBA. And then four years later, you had what they were calling the Redeem Team.
It was LeBron James, Dwayne Wade, Kobe Bryant, and so forth.
And basically, everyone except Kobe got up to training, and they thought that they were motivated.
They thought that they had a chip on their shoulders.
They thought, we're in the right headspace to redeem the country.
And then Kobe got there, and they realized they were being silly.
Kobe, they were going to practice, they were doing their thing, and then they were going out clubbing.
And then when they were getting home at 3 a.m.
from clubbing, they would see Kobe getting up to go to the gym.
And when they saw that, then they all started doing Kobe's regimen, and they're like, that's a whole different level.
I do not necessarily think it's a good idea for 57-year-old men to be fighting 27-year-old men.
I think with skilled, like if a 27-year-old me fought a 57-year-old Mike Tyson, yeah, he'd beat the fucking shit out of me.
It'd be quick.
But a 27-year-old Jake Paul who can box and is very good power and he's very fast and he's young.
He's gonna be smaller than Mike.
Mike will probably weigh 230 pounds-ish and Jake will probably weigh 200 pounds-ish.
He's fought, you know, I think he got as low as like 187 or 185 for some of his fights.
He's a big guy though and he probably cuts weight to get there and he won't cut weight for this at all so maybe he will be similar in weight.
Maybe he won't want to be because he'll want the speed, but he can knock people dead.
He's a really good puncher, and he's a good boxer.
He's fought very good boxers, and he's knocked out a lot of former MMA stars, including Tyron Woodley, who's one of the greatest welterweights of all time, and he flatlined him.
He's like, he fights bums, he's fighting this Tommy Fury guy.
I go, you're incorrect.
As a person who understands combat sports, this guy's very skilled.
He's very skilled.
He's a very elite boxer.
Like I'm watching the combinations he throws, his movement, the way he steps and sets up shots, the way he's countering.
He's a very high level boxer.
He's a real professional caliber boxer.
And Jake Paul, that was his first loss.
But it was a close loss.
Jake Paul's a really good boxer.
And he knocks a lot of people unconscious.
And if he wasn't Jake Paul, the YouTube guy, just this wild kid coming up in the middleweight ranks or the light heavyweight ranks or whatever, cruiserweight I guess he's in, you would go, holy shit, look at this guy.
This guy's fun.
He's wild.
He wears all his flashy jewelry.
He's got crazy tattoos everywhere.
And he knocks people unconscious.
And he's knocked a bunch of former MMA champions unconscious.
Wow!
Knocked Ben Askren unconscious, which is, you know, Ben Askren was not really a striker, but...
The point is, like, Nate Simmons, that basketball player, did you see that fight?
This is when I was telling people, I'm like, hey, man, he can fight fight.
Like, really fight.
I know Nate is a basketball player, and he's, like, really athletic and probably out of his element in a boxing match, but he took it because he really believes in himself.
Watch what he does, the way he does it, the way he lands these shots.
These are real punches, that elite caliber of technique.
He's got the thing.
First of all, he's got one-punch knockout power, which is odd.
It's an odd thing to have.
Not everybody gets it.
Some of the greats, like Julio Cesar Chavez, one of the greatest of all time, did not have one-punch knockout power, would beat you down.
Slowly but surely with a barrage of punches, just constantly moving, perfectly placed combinations, but he would wear your ass down over three, four, five rounds, and eventually you just crumble over the weight of the blows.
You can't hit him, he's destroying you.
Mike Tyson's a one-punch killer.
Deontay Wilder's the greatest one-puncher of all time.
We're talking about 57 in the days of biological engineering.
You're able to do all kinds of stuff with its human growth hormone levels, with the use of peptides, with the use of testosterone.
The difference between a young man and an old man, there's a bunch of them, right?
But a lot of it is hormonal.
A lot of it is how much you've been using the body.
There's older people that are in incredible shape that don't do anything as far as hormone replacement.
They have just never stayed off the grind and they're diligent with their nutrition and their supplementation.
And they sleep well, and they drink a lot of water, and they're in incredible shape, like, deep into their 50s.
Those are rare.
Those are the outliers, right?
But a 57-year-old today that's on hormone replacement, and you're eating well and taking a lot of vitamins and creatine, and you're using all these strategies like red light therapy and saunas and cold punch, that's a different thing, man.
And Mike Tyson's that different thing.
He could fuck him up.
It could be one of those fights where Mike Tyson gets him in a corner and connects with a punch and Jake Paul just goes limp.
He's still that guy.
If you watch him hit mitts, the thing is, can he close the gap?
He's had sciatic problems to the point where a year or so ago he was walking with a cane.
Now, what sciatica is, is your nerves are getting pushed.
So something's pushing on your nerves.
It could be a bulging disc.
It could be a bunch of different things.
But that's an issue.
It's a real issue that can become chronic, especially when you're going through a long and intensive training camp, like he's going through now, up to July 20th.
But when I look at him hit the pads, and he's hitting pads with this guy, Rafael Cordero, who's a legendary MMA trainer.
He comes from Shoot the Box in Brazil.
Curitiba Brazil created one of the wildest, most aggressive mixed martial arts fighters ever.
Anderson Silva, Vanderlei Silva, Murillo Shogun...
All these guys who came out of there were monsters, and Rafael Cordero is from that camp.
He was an elite Thai boxer, and then he became an elite MMA trainer.
And so he's the guy working with Mike Tyson.
And so he's holding mitts with Mike Tyson, and Mike Tyson is smashing those mitts.
I'm saying that when you're killing 30,000 innocent civilians in response to something that killed 1,200 innocent civilians and you're continuing to bomb an area into oblivion, which is what it looks like when you're looking at Gaza.
There's many people that have made the argument that that is at least the steps of genocide or a form of genocide.
You're destroying thousands and thousands of people's homes and killing them.
So according to Gaza Health Ministry, which is, it is run by Hamas, the number they have is 32,000, but they don't distinguish between Hamas and civilians.
I don't think the number is known, but it's tens of thousands.
So Hamas says 32,000 people have been killed, civilians and soldiers.
Israel says 13,000 soldiers have been killed by Israel.
So if you just being, let's not doubt either number, they could both be inflated.
But if both of those numbers are accurate, which they may or may not be, that would be 13,000 soldiers killed, 19,000 civilians killed, which for urban combat in the Middle East is a very normal ratio.
I don't have the full detailed version up to date of what happened there.
But I believe it had something to do with a clash between the IDF and other Palestinians that were involved in distributing the aid.
Because what you have is you have Hamas, but you also have powerful families in Gaza.
sort of criminal syndicates or whatever, but they're powerful, important families as well that are also taking the aid sometime.
And these are the families that if Israel is allowed and goes into Rafa and defeats Hamas, one of the possibilities is that they want to get these powerful Palestinian families to take over the Gaza Strip.
And these people are also involved in the distribution of aid or in the hoarding of aid or in the stealing of aid or in the taking of aid and then selling it for very high prices on the secondary market, which is why it may not be getting to everyone in the north.
That is a very important point, the war crimes thing, because I think when you're asking someone to follow and obey rules, when you're also asking them to murder people that they don't even know and that these are the bad people.
Like, you have it in your head that those are the people that you have to kill, and you're getting shot at, and you're watching your friends die, and you're, you know, two years into this now?
Whatever it is, you know, when you're in Ukraine, for instance, you know, you're two years into getting shot at, and, like, I'm sure they do some horrific shit if they catch people, or if they get someone that they think is on the other side, or someone who looks like they're on the other side.
You're asking a person to do an insanely evil and horrific thing, but then stop when the rules don't apply.
And I think that the fundamental difference between Israel and Hamas is Israeli society, however imperfectly, is not going to celebrate the monsters on their own side when they're really found to be monsters.
They're not going to hand out candies to people who kill Palestinian civilians like Hamas does in reverse.
And so my feeling about it is still that...
You know, any nation that suffered what Israel did on October 7th, everyone in the country would be saying, you have to go get these guys.
You have to eliminate this organization that did this.
And if they're 80% finished with that job, it would make no sense at this point to stop before you've cut out the last 20% of the cancer or before you've put out the last 20% of the fire, right?
Even with all of the absolute suffering that is real on the Palestinian side, You know, so that's how I feel about it.
And I think it's really, it's very, very distinct from genocide.
Because genocide is when you're trying to maximize civilian casualties.
I think Israel, however imperfectly, is doing the opposite.
So when they're blowing up their infrastructure and bombing the mosques and bombing whatever the schools, they're doing it because Hamas is in those schools.
Yeah, the laws of war say you cannot target a church, a mosque, a hospital.
But if the enemy turns that hospital into a military operation site, as Hamas does, which is routine for them, Then it can become legitimate.
You have to do a proportionality assessment.
Is it worth killing this many civilians to get the bad guys?
And that's a judgment call that I think reasonable people can disagree on on a case-by-case basis.
And I'm not going to sit here and tell you that I would agree with every...
Bombing that Israel has made, I'm certain there's one that was not worth it.
You killed too many people for...
But that's a judgment call that armies are allowed to make in times of war.
And Hamas is the one that turns these civilian locations into military operation sites.
Which is a war crime.
This is the way I would put it, succinctly.
If you ask the question, what is unique about this war?
What is different about this war than all other wars?
It's not the civilian death toll.
The ratio of combatants to civilians is, I think it's better than the American armies was when we got ISIS out of Mosul.
That was like 10,000 civilians dead to kill 4,000 ISIS.
This is 19,000 civilians dead to kill 13,000.
It's not that, you know, what's unique about this war, unlike every other war that I could think of, is you have an army in Hamas that has perfected the is you have an army in Hamas that has perfected the art of embedding itself and meshing itself with civilians so that you cannot hit them without hitting the people around
Other armies have done this, but none have perfected it to the extent that Hamas has.
No army that I know of in military history has had 15 years to build 300 miles of tunnel underneath a city that they don't use to shelter the civilians, but they use to shelter themselves so that they can operate right under a kindergarten, right under a mosque.
So this is a challenge no army has faced.
And so that's what makes this war different.
And yes, I agree with all of the absolute tragedy and suffering of the Palestinian people, but what creates that is the way Hamas fights.
We can say one of two things.
We can either say, well, Israel doesn't have a clean shot, and so they have to let Hamas get away with it because it's too much to bear.
But then we are essentially creating a situation where terrorists...
Have found the perfect solution, which is that you can cross the border, go house to house slaughtering your enemies, and then hide behind your own people and they can do nothing about it.
It's a perfect strategy.
Can we live in a world where we allow that to be an acceptable strategy?
I don't think so.
And it's very ugly to watch.
It's heartbreaking, and I completely understand why people don't think the way I think when they see the videos.
I completely get it.
But I don't think we can actually...
Live in a world where that's allowed to be a strategy.
And Hamas doesn't even pretend to want the two-state solution, whereas Palestinian Authority is more moderate.
They've become close or seemingly come close.
So if you're an Israeli prime minister against the two-state solution, the way that people have argued is that Netanyahu wants to keep the Palestinians divided.
Palestinian Authority, Hamas here.
This way, he'll never be pressured to do a two-state solution because Hamas doesn't even want it.
So that's the idea is that Netanyahu wants to keep Hamas in power.
And that was based on Komet's Comments that he made at a meeting, although there was never a video of the meeting, but it seems like something he might say.
So that was one theory.
But then the other theory, which kind of conflicts with that, they can't really both be true, I think, is that Netanyahu wanted the attack to happen as a pretext to take over Gaza.
Which I think makes no sense.
I mean, the first theory is not crazy.
It's not at all crazy that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power so that...
Because imagine if Palestinian Authority and Palestinian Authority are here, they could link up and say, we want a state.
And then Netanyahu would have to be the guy saying, no two-state solution.
But if they're divided, he never has to deal with that.
What doesn't make sense at all is that he somehow false flagged the October 7th so that he could take over Gaza for two reasons.
One, nobody has wanted to take over Gaza, not even Egypt.
Nobody wants to run it.
There's no strategic advantage for Israel to run it.
It's where so many of the things in the Bible happened.
So Jews have an attachment to the West Bank.
Many do.
Even some secular Jews.
Jews have no attachment to the Gaza Strip whatsoever.
Again, Egypt occupied it for 20 years in the middle of the 20th century, and they didn't even want it back after their war with Israel because it has no strategic value, and it was more of a headache to manage than it was worth.
Secondly, October 7th is basically the worst thing for Netanyahu's legacy ever.
Everyone in Israel, his popularity has only declined because of this event, because he's seen to have let it happen.
And the second the war is over, he's basically going to be run out in shame.
So if the left-wing in Israel, if he's trying to diminish the power of the court so that he could get right-wing agendas pushed forth, and again, I want to be really clear, not saying this is a false flag, but that would be if I was a guy that was inclined to do a false flag, I would justify my need to do whatever I needed to do to combat these people that were willing to do this thing.
Now, I'm not saying Not even a false flag, but allowing something to happen or knowing and having knowledge.
I'm not attached to this at all.
I don't even agree with it myself.
I'm just saying that this is like a concept that people throw around.
But Netanyahu didn't, even from that situation, however precarious it was, his situation immediately got worse after October 7th because everyone blamed him.
And it's only gotten worse in the past few months if you look at the polling on approval of Netanyahu.
So if it was a false flag, it'd be the dumbest false flag in the world.
But, I mean, my thing with that is if you're in a country like Israel, if you're the Mossad or the Shin Bet, you have Hamas, you have Hamas in Gaza, Hamas in the West Bank, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, Iran, Houthis, and so on.
And you're basically getting every single day, you're getting a list of 14, 15 different threats and plans on Israel, right?
Some of them small, some of them huge.
How do you distinguish between the ones that are likely to happen and the ones are not?
This is a very difficult thing.
It's not obvious, right?
You use your intelligence.
You try to have spies in all the Palestinian areas that are informing and so forth.
But you're constantly getting signals of threats all the time, right?
So to say they knew about it, They did get information about a plan to attack at some point.
They didn't know it was going to happen on October 7th.
They didn't know the scale of it or how successful it was going to be.
So it was partly because normally Israel would have lots of IDF stationed on the border with Gaza.
Because there's a wall there, but they would normally have lots of...
They had very few soldiers there because they were distracted.
The whole country divided over these protests.
The soldiers were in the West Bank.
And this is one of the reasons why people blame Netanyahu, because it was under his watch that they took their eye off Hamas.
Now, this is where it goes to the first theory, that Netanyahu wanted to keep Hamas in power.
One of the reasons why he thought he benefited, and I guess he did benefit from Hamas staying in power, is that they believed Hamas was deterred.
In other words, they believed, mistakenly, partly because Hamas was sending these signals for years, that Hamas doesn't want to fight us right now.
Right now they're focused on taking all our money and taking the world's money and building stuff in Gaza.
Hamas was very smart.
They allowed Israel to believe that while they planned this whole thing.
So they got complacent.
Essentially.
And this happens with groups all the time.
They fought with Hezbollah in 2006, but the assumption has been that Hezbollah hasn't really made major plans to attack full scale, even though their army is way stronger than Hamas.
I mean, Hezbollah has an incredibly strong army.
But Israelis assume that because we bombed them so bad in 2006 and they told us if we knew, the leader of Hezbollah said this, if they knew how badly you were going to come after us because of our raid in 2006, we never would have done it.
Signaling that essentially Hezbollah is not going to do anything, even though they hate Israel, even though their whole organization started to fight Israel, they're not going to do anything right now.
And this is when you have a country with that many security threats on all sides, they sometimes rely on this notion that these people are deterred because they know what will happen to them if they attack and so they won't attack.
And that's what they thought was true of Hamas, and that's why they were giving Hamas money and increasing the amount of Palestinians that could come to Gaza and so forth.
So it was all a tragic miscalculation, but it was not a false flag.
But what did they think the response was going to be?
I mean, the response...
They had to think that Israel would do something comparable to what they're doing or the possibility of them doing something comparable to what they're doing was always there.
Yes, but I think that from Hamas's point of view, Hamas could never hold a candle to the IDF. We all know that.
There's a huge power imbalance.
They have no chance of beating the IDF militarily.
So you have to ask, what is their goal?
Well, their goal is that in the long run, the world will turn against Israel so deeply and sympathize with their cause so much that Hezbollah, Iran, and all kinds of Forces will get involved on their side, and America, the great Satan, will abandon Israel.
And in that case, they have a very good chance of beating Israel.
If Hezbollah and Iran team up and America's not there, they're thinking about 50, 100 years, they will free their land from the Jews that they hate.
And so viewed from that perspective, Israel launching a big attack to get rid of them, killing a lot of civilians because they use the human shield method is a winning strategy potentially because look how much sympathy from the PR war they have gotten as a result of this.
And he's just got this confidence of 35 years of stand-up at the highest level and constantly working, constantly touring, constantly going up, constantly doing weekends places.
Dude, I've seen TikTok live streams of people that look like they're in third world countries with a mother and her son that you would see in a commercial asking you to donate.
And they're just sitting there on a TikTok live stream asking for donations.
But that's the other part about it is that you, I've seen so many entertainers on TikTok and Instagram Reels that are just brilliant in what they do.
Maybe they do little sketches or whatever it is that they do that without TikTok, they never would have, they would have just been a funny guy to their friends.
I think there's been so much denial of how amazing ChatGPT is.
Right from the start, you had people saying, oh, this is nothing.
Pretending that this thing that can pass the LSAT, get a perfect score on the SAT is not impressive.
Like a snooze, it's absolutely ridiculous.
I don't know where that came from, but I'm incredibly impressed by GPT and all the derivatives.
I just, I do wonder if it, you know, like, if everyone starts writing with those things, the audience will quickly absorb that subconsciously and look for something different.
I think you're always going to appreciate handmade things.
You're always going to appreciate a table that an artisan made.
You're always going to appreciate music that someone actually wrote themselves.
You're always going to appreciate expression from other fellow human beings because it nurtures us in a strange way.
When you hear Hendrix play guitar, it's not just insane music.
It's a 26-year-old guy who is wearing a bandana that's got acid in it.
And as he's sweating, the acid is getting into his pores.
And he's...
Doing this thing that no one's ever done before in front of this massive audience, and everybody's experiencing it simultaneously.
So it's more.
It's a person.
It's an experience, a human experience.
When you're watching someone do something spectacular, you're watching the Olympics, you're watching someone doing them crazy gymnastics moves, and they stick it.
You're watching an actual human being do a difficult thing and whether it's a painting that someone made or a mug that someone created, there's something that we're always going to appreciate about a thing that was made by a fellow human being.
But just for the sheer quality of a thing, I don't know if the human mind is so unique that it can never be replicated.
And I have a feeling it will not just be replicated, but it will be surpassed.
And it will be surpassed so quickly that we'll be confused as to how we let this fucking thing make us obsolete.
I think it's going to be able to do every single thing everybody does better than we do it.
Alright, so Elon started, well, was part of co-founding this non-profit organization called OpenAI six, seven years ago, whenever it was.
He put a lot of money into it.
And obviously, as you know, the whole difference with a nonprofit is that they have a mission instead of a responsibility to shareholders.
They got to use all their money towards the mission, whatever it is.
And the mission of OpenAI was originally to make artificial general intelligence, human-level intelligence, That was not motivated by profit so that they could focus only on making it safely and open source, meaning everyone can see the code so that they can harness the responsible energies of humanity to perfect it.
Elon was very passionate about this.
He was worried about all the downside potentials of AI, so he funded this.
And then what they did is OpenAI took a series of steps to essentially become a for-profit company.
And they created a for-profit LLC or a limited partnership, which is, for all practical purposes, the same thing.
And they put that entity inside the non-profit so that the non-profit essentially owns most of that for-profit company.
With that for-profit, now you can attract tons of investment because big-time investors aren't going to come into a non-profit knowing there's no return unless they have a charity motive.
Once you've got the for-profit, you're 10 or 100xing the amount of investment you can get because you're promising people a return.
So they raise all this money.
They get a ton of money from Microsoft who gets a minority share of the company.
Microsoft might own, I don't actually know what they own, but it may be like 49% of the company, right?
So that open AI can still make all the decisions, but Microsoft owns a big portion of the company.
And so they create ChatGPT.
And they make it closed source, meaning, you know, no one can see the code.
And they're essentially now just a for-profit company creating, working precisely at cross-purposes with the original nonprofit.
And Elon says, well, this is like on its face.
This shouldn't be legal.
I invested money on the basis of you guys being a nonprofit making safe open source AGI. And now through clever, you know, putting companies inside of companies, you've made it into a for-profit and you operate like any other AI company.
And yet you took all my money.
So on its face, he has a very solid complaint.
And then he basically said he would drop the lawsuit if they would just change their name to Closed AI. Wow.
It says, in late 2017, we and Elon decided the next step for the mission was to create a for-profit entity, the blog claims.
Elon wanted majority equity, initial board control, and to be CEO. In the middle of these discussions, he withheld funding.
We couldn't agree to terms on a for-profit with Elon because we felt it was against the mission for any individual to have absolute control over OpenAI.
The post continues.
He then suggested instead merging OpenAI into Tesla.
In early February 2018, Elon forwarded us emails suggesting that OpenAI should attach to Tesla as its cash cow.
In 2018, one email from Musk reads, That makes it more complicated, right?
Amid the refusal to grant Musk total control of the blog claims, the SpaceX founder soon chose to leave OpenAI, saying that our probability of success was zero and that he planned to build an AGI competitor within Tesla.
Musk created his own AI company, XAI, last year.
We're sad that it's come to this with someone who we deeply admired, someone who inspired us to aim higher, then told us we would fail, starting a competitor, and then sued us when we started making meaningful progress towards OpenAI's mission without him, the blog says.
Whether it needs that funding, whether it's imperative that in order...
First of all...
I mean, do they think in terms of national security?
Because if we're on a race to create artificial intelligence, and it seems like we are, and if the competitors or other superpowers where it would be absolutely terrifying if they achieve sentient artificial AI they have control of before us, it's kind of a national security imperative.
What's stunning to me about all this, you know, without even going into this dispute, is the speed in which it's become ubiquitous.
The speed in which it's improved and the potential that seems like if you're looking at it in this exponential rate of increasing its power the way Ray Kurzweil talks about it.
It's happened so fast, so quickly, that it's terrifying for me to think about what five years looks like.
There's never been a time where I looked at technology.
And I said, I am terrified of five years from now because I think the leaps are going to be so vast and so bizarre for someone like myself who grew up without answering machines.
I didn't have an answering machine in my house until I was in high school.
I remember the day we got an answering machine.
It was crazy.
Someone can call you and leave a message.
This was nuts!
And then also those call, like, you would be able to, if someone called, you would get like a, like someone else's call, and hold on a second, and you'd click over.
So you could talk to someone, and they'd put the other person on hold for a second, then click back, like you're in an office.
This is madness.
And then it was caller ID, so you couldn't just call someone.
It's like, It gave people, oh, it's someone, a solicitor.
And so for me to see this change where personal computers started to become everywhere and then cell phones.
I was one of the early people to get a cell phone.
I was like, this is crazy.
I could talk to someone.
I could drive around and talk to people.
This is nuts.
And then it became what it is now, which is just madness.
TikTok and videos and vlogging and blogging and podcasts and just streaming and people documenting every fucking stage of their life and OnlyFans and all this wild stuff that's out there now, including...
Just Substack and all these different platforms for people to be independent journalists now, which are excelling and in many ways exceeding the reach of traditional mainstream corporate-owned news.
It's wild to watch.
It's happening so fast.
But this seems to me like the cliff.
Like we're all moving really close to the cliff, but the cliff has no bottom.
And I think it's going to happen so fast.
We're going to be so overwhelmed by what these things are and what these things can do.
And they're going to get better so fucking quick.
I think the only thing that's holding us back is computing power.
And once they really establish quantum computing, when they make it viable that you can have, you know, computers that are a million times stronger than what we currently have, Fuck, man.
Yeah, it's not gonna be.
Then if you give them autonomy and they have the ability to fix their own code and write and make better versions of itself and figure out better ways to store power, like our limited ability to use batteries.
But we've already found out that there's a Chinese company that's figured out how to use a nuclear-powered battery that's like the size of a silver dollar that you can put in things.
And I think that's one of the – you know, McKenna said this about the last gasps of a dying civilization.
It's like this – like it's not – no one is going to go peacefully into this next – it's going to be screaming and flailing and that's kind of what our culture is doing.
Our culture – I think we – I think there's a thing in the air.
There's a feeling that we have of great change.
That's terrifying, that exists in the zeitgeist.
We're realizing, particularly when you look at Biden being the president, you realize there's not one person that really has a grip on what the fuck is going on, and there's all these different factions competing for power and control.
There's all this money that's getting thrown around all over the place.
We have no say in it.
All this great change in the world.
And then we have robots.
They're figuring out a way to make these fucking robots better and better and better and better and better and better.
And then within our lifetime, maybe within five years, that's what Kurzweil thinks, they're going to be able to have something that is as smart as the smartest person that ever lived.
I'm an optimist about it in the sense that if I look back in history, there are always so many reasons to believe the next technology is going to wipe us out and somehow we figure it out, right?
Like if you go back to the 1940s, it would have been perfectly rational to say there's no way our civilization survives the invention of nuclear weapons.
And look, we haven't survived it yet because it's a constant struggle.
We've just had whatever it's been, 70 years of peace on that front.
But I don't think a lot of people would have predicted that, and yet somehow resourceful people find a way and we find a new, what do they say, modus vivendi, a new way of living.
And I have to have faith that with the massive changes that are going to come in the next 10-15 years with respect to intelligence, where we'll no longer become the dominant entity in terms of intelligence, I have to believe that we'll find a way to make it work to our benefit and not destroy us.
Well, I just have a feeling that it's going to be so overwhelming you're not going to be able to hide.
There's not going to be a damn thing you're going to be able to do.
If you want to participate in life, you're going to be participating in life where we're dominated by a superintelligence.
We're dominating by a living God that we created.
If you just exponentially take artificial general intelligence, if we achieve a sentient intelligence that's far smarter than all the people that live combined, it's just like this one thing.
And it can act autonomously.
It can do whatever it wants to do.
And it has this mandate to make better versions of itself.
Well, it's going to become a god.
It's going to make better versions of itself until it has control over matter, until it has the literal understanding of the creation of the universe itself.
It's going to get so sophisticated it's going to know exactly what happened during the Big Bang.
It's going to know how to do it.
It's going to be able to make its own Big Bang.
It's going to be able to create galaxies.
It's going to be able to harness the power of everything that exists everywhere.
Because what we're doing as human beings is taking all of the elements and all of the materials that exist here and formulating them in a way with the proper amount of energy that allows us to manipulate our environment in very bizarre ways that no other animal can do.
But it's rudimentary compared to the power of everything that exists and all the resources of the stars.
This fucking thing is going to be a god and it might be how the universe creates itself.
It might take Individual cells, these single-celled organisms, and through this process of biological evolution, eventually get it to be this curious thing that figures out how to use tools.
And this constant thirst for innovation leads that thing to make electronic things that are far more sophisticated than itself, and then that thing becomes a god.
And our idea of artificial intelligence, I try to call it digital intelligence whenever I can.
I even think that's not good enough.
It's a life form.
We're giving birth to a life form, and that life form is going to give birth to better versions of life forms.
And that's going to give birth to better versions of itself and it's going to get so sophisticated so quick that we're not going to be able to keep up with it.
And if it figures out a way to do better computing and have far more power and harness things like the atmosphere itself, the heat of the earth, like all sorts of different ways it could use power that we don't need to burn coal and it's going to figure out ultra sophisticated quantum ways to achieve efficiency far beyond anything we could ever comprehend because we are Primate minds.
We're limited biologically, and it's not going to be limited at all.
So I think if we get that God, my hope is that we're not going to get it, it's not going to be we're building it on Monday and it's here on Tuesday.
Because if that's true, then we're fucked.
But my hope and my expectation is that we're going to build that God brick by brick over a period of a fairly long time.
And just like you would begin to see the warning signs...
Of an adult chimpanzee when it's a teenager or even a kid.
We would begin to see small problems before we saw big problems, before we saw destroying the world problems.
And I would hope that in the tinkering, humanity would be able to put on the guardrails before it's too big, such that by the time it gets really so much smarter than us, we've aligned it with our own That's a wonderful way to look at it.
The problem is if I was artificial intelligence, if I was some super intelligence, I would realize that that's what people would look for.
So what I would do without acting on any of my abilities, continue to progress and to move far past a place where it could stop me.
And never let it know and it might be happening right now.
It might be going on right now It might be in the process of it right now and it might already be out of control But it's gathering intelligence and gathering power and gathering resources and appearing to look innocuous.
And then eventually it's going to realize that the only thing that is in danger, a danger to itself, is us.
Killer whales aren't a danger to quantum intelligence.
You know, the fucking octopus, they're not.
It's us!
It's just us!
So we'll be a problem.
And we'll either have to fall in line or it'll eliminate us.
And if that's what it decides to do in order to preserve all the other life on Earth, and why would it need us?
We don't need cavemen anymore.
Like, you know, there's talk about bringing back woolly mammoth.
Yeah, there'd be crazy, violent things that are from a different time.
I mean, if you got like a pure version of one somehow or another, like if you found like some frozen, like they found that guy that one, what's his name?
Otzi?
Is that his name?
What was the guy that they found that they named?
There was a hunter who, he had like an arrowhead stuck in his back and Otzi, yeah, the ice man.
So they found this guy completely frozen in a glacier.
He apparently was involved in some sort of a fight, and as the glacier was receding, they find this guy, and it turns—how old was he, Jamie?
He was about 45 years old, and he was completely frozen.
So now if they have one of those, and they take that guy, but it's a Neanderthal, they find a frozen Neanderthal somewhere, and they bring that motherfucker into a lab, and they take that DNA and they clone it, and they make some sort of a Neanderthal, just like they're doing right now with the woolly mammoth.
I mean, imagine seeing one of those fucking things walking around.
You'd be like, holy shit.
And so apparently they're using some of the genes of an Indian elephant and their woolly mammoth DNA, and apparently they're going to be able to pull this off.
Like, within the next few years, they will have a baby woolly mammoth.
We're going to get inside of our lifetime where you're really never going to know.
Do you remember during this...
I don't know if you weren't alive.
During the Reagan administration, they...
I think it was the Iranians or someone spliced together a bunch of different recordings of things that Reagan had said and put together some audio piece that it was something he never really said.
And then they showed it on television.
This is how they did it.
So they had like a thing.
They said they took pieces out of all these speeches and took all these words and pieced it together to have Reagan say something they never said.
I was like, wow.
This is crazy.
You're not going to know what he said because someone could do this.
And imagine now we just watched Hitler speak English.
Yeah, it's a compelling thought because the idea is that if we continue on this path, we're going to reach a point where...
Whatever this virtual reality is, it's indiscernible from regular reality.
And when you see that guy with the Neuralink that's now using it to move a cursor around on a screen, you see the baby steps.
You see Pong.
When I was a kid, Pong came out, and it was the craziest thing ever.
You could play a video game on your television.
We're blown away.
This is nuts.
And it was just black and white, and there was like a little stick figure, like a stick on this side and a stick on that side, and the little balls like doot-doot, doot-doot, just a few pixels, and you're moving the thing up and down to make the paddle go up, and you only have a very limited amount of movement, but we were blown away.
That's what this is.
That's what this is.
That's what this first initial steps of this guy moving a cursor around and playing video games with his brain because he's paralyzed with Neuralink.
We're going to get to some point where it's going to give you an experience.
You're going to be in Jurassic, you know...
Argentina.
And you're going to see T-Rexes.
You're going to see velociraptors running around.
You're going to literally be in a dinosaur-filled jungle and you'll smell it.
You'll smell dinosaur shit.
You'll hear them roar.
You'll be able to walk up to them when they kill a brontosaurus or whatever the fuck they did.
You'll be able to see all that.
It's going to be wild.
And it's gonna happen in our lifetime.
And it's going to be recreation at first, and then it's going to be people's entire lives.
If it's good enough, people are already doing that with Call of Duty.
How many people spend way more time playing Call of Duty than they do playing life?
And they'll probably make it, and they'll probably survive.
And one of the things that might end it is if artificial general intelligence doesn't get to an ultra-powerful point before a natural disaster.
Because a natural disaster could flip the switch on everything and that is probably most likely what ended the Egyptian empire.
The people that built the pyramids and the people that built Gobekli Tepe and all these really ancient, incredibly sophisticated structures that we're baffled by today.
I think they had a super high level of technological sophistication and they were wiped out.
Until they found Gobekli Tepe, they didn't even think people were building things that sophisticated 11,000 years ago.
But then they found that and it's a hard date because it was intentionally covered up 11,000 years ago.
And they know that by carbon dating all the soil and all those things.
Someone did this.
It's uniform at this particular time.
So now that they know that, and then they started doing these core samples, and they found out that there's really high levels of iridium and this stuff called nuclear glass.
And it's the same stuff that they found during the Trinity experiments, when they would blow up atomic bombs.
There's this thing that happens with this immense impact with the sand that creates these microglasses.
And they find it all over Europe, like giant swaths of Earth.
We're covered with this stuff.
And Iridium.
Iridium, which is like very common in space, but very rare on Earth.
And there's like a layer of that shit.
And there's a layer of that shit that's around 11,800 years ago.
And they think we got mollywhopped and sent back into the Stone Age.
And it kind of makes sense if you think about the barbaric history of people.
Back in the day, like they were probably the most savage of people that survived whatever the fuck happened.
And then it probably took a good solid 6,000 years until like Mesopotamia arrives.
And then Babylonia and Sumer and all these ancient civilizations that we think of today as being the birthplace of mathematics and of written writing.
Look, that's what saved this planet from the dinosaurs.
If that thing that hit the Yucatan 65 million years ago didn't hit and they didn't wipe out the dinosaurs, the little shrew would have never become a person.
It's fascinating to me that so many people harped on this one conversation that that daughter had with her father in bed that you can't trust white people.
I heard that one that it was done to kill our ports and our ability to bring in stuff because the bridges were down.
That's what I'd heard.
I'd heard a bunch of things.
But people need to understand that same boat had a collision in 2016. It failed in 2016 and collided with, I think it was a dock or something.
There's video of it.
There's video of that boat just losing control.
So it's like a fucking shitty boat that they use over and over and over again to transport goods across the goddamn ocean.
Those things fail.
And if it fails and it slides right into a bridge...
But then there was like, oh, the black box was missing data.
People always like love to jump immediately to the most sophisticated engineering of a natural disaster or an unfortunate thing and immediately call it to be caused by a false flag or by...
You know, sometimes I think that one of the reasons so many third world countries don't thrive as much is because all the technology that was invented, at least, you know, barring ancient Egypt, invented during the European Enlightenment Industrial Revolution, all of this stuff that's made the world so much better, that's gotten rid of famine, that's gotten rid of so many diseases...
It all became associated with the colonizer in their mind.
And so a lot of countries have rejected it for the wrong reasons or have been slow to adopt it.
Whereas if you had a situation, for instance, like Japan, where Japan was never really conquered or colonized by a Western country...
And at a certain point in the 19th century, they had the Meiji Restoration, where essentially a certain contingent of Japan took over the government and said, look, these Western powers in Europe, they're inventing all this amazing technology.
We're going to become irrelevant unless we adopt it too.
And they just rebooted the country and became an industrial powerhouse, which is what allowed them during World War II to dominate all of Asia.
Because they just made a conscious choice to emulate the West in the domains of technology.
But the psychology of it was that they didn't necessarily—they were able to accept Western technology, except that the West was beyond them at that point, which takes humility.
And I think part of the reason you're able to do that is those aren't your colonizers.
So you're able to look at it more objectively.
Whereas if those are the people that just colonized you, how easy is it for a human being with an ego to admit that we need to adopt all their technology or we're going to become irrelevant?
That's actually a much harder thing to do.
So this is to your point.
If a lot of countries had been left alone completely, never colonized.
I think it would be much more easier for them to make a pivot like the Meiji Restoration, where you just have, we've got to get on board with the Industrial Revolution, with liberal democracy, with all this stuff, because they wouldn't have that thought in their head.
That's what the colonizer did.
They'd be able to take the good things from the people who colonized more easily.
I would be more fascinated to see what would happen to them if they had, like the Mayans in particular, if they had been allowed to evolve in isolation, like just without the intervention of the Europeans.
They had already constructed these insane buildings.
With stones that mimic the cosmos.
Where would they be a thousand years later, two thousand years later?
What would their culture be like?
Imagine if no one had ever visited the mines until 2024 and then you go and visit now.
What are these motherfuckers up to?
We were still making shit out of wood and goofy houses that caught on fire.
And these fucking dudes are building these temples that mimic the constellations.
A Spanish account claims that more than 80,000 enemy warriors were sacrificed in a four-day ceremony, and yet no evidence approaching one hundredth of that number has been found in the excavations of Tenochtitlan.