The Joe Rogan Experience - #1032 - Colin Moriarty

Episode Date: October 31, 2017

Colin Moriarty is the co-founder of Kinda Funny and creator of Colin’s Last Stand, a series of videos about history and politics. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCe3Dpne2qWldzpuiOd9hPLw

3, 2, 1 around the space. Thank you. Very cool. Thank you. I'm very excited for you. I'm excited too. I bet. Thanks, man. Appreciate it. Jamie's moving shit around. What happened? Oh, I was out of line. So welcome. And how's Collins Live Stand going? It's good. It's fun. It's, you know, I always describe it. It's not big. It's just got its little, you know, slice of the internet and it's attracted, you know, videos do 20, 30, 40, 50,000 views. And I have a... That's a good spot. That's a good place to be. Yeah, I'm happy with it. And, you know, I have like 4,500 people on Patreon supporting me.

And I don't serve ads on anything I do. So I'm just trying to make it organic and see how far I can take it and then go from there. Sam Harris does his entire podcast that way. He doesn't have any ads, which I think is amazing. Yeah, it's cool. Like, I have no... You know, I worked at IGN for a long time, the video game site, and my old company. So we had ads, and I have no problem with them.

But I was trying to just kind of say, I don't need more than what you're giving me. This is plenty, and I'm doing fine. And so maybe I'll do ads on future products, but not with this. Well, yeah. I mean, why not, right? I mean, just if you're enjoying it. I mean, yeah, you could do different products. do I mean different projects rather you could do it different ways Yep

Yeah It's it's it's interesting now to try to figure out like what's the best way for people to put their stuff out there Like I know a lot of people like in the podcast world some people use SoundCloud some people use other things Some people just go straight to YouTube. I mean, it's there's a lot of experimentation going on now Yeah, and I I'm always fascinated by that particular thing about how I do a podcast now just on the side Called fireside chats where I just have random people in to talk about random things and similar, but not nearly as good as your show and

I Am always amazed that people are like why don't you put this on YouTube and I'm like you just want to stare at a static Image on YouTube. There's like not why don't you put this on YouTube? And I'm like, you just want to stare at a static image on YouTube. There's like not, I don't even have it on video. People just, it's just about how people consume the content. So maybe like a spreadshot approach is probably the smartest idea. Well, if you could hire someone to do images that represent the conversation, maybe that would be a reason to have it on YouTube.

But I hear you. Yeah. It's people just get excited about a platform. They get locked into a platform and then they just digest everything in that platform, whether it's Snapchat or Instagram or YouTube. And it's weird. Jamie and I have been talking about this a lot lately, about what makes it through. How did YouTube become the only one where people upload videos?

That seems insane. That seems so straightforward. You have it so people can upload videos. You put ads on those videos, and that's it. I mean, it seems like there would be hundreds of those sites. Yeah, I think they were just first, and it was kind of like a, it was like ubiquitous quickly. So I find that with a lot of like social media too.

Like you think about, like Snapchat's really like faltering now because Instagram has basically stolen its entire platform and it's all about like kind of this, these little monopolies that exist. Monopolies for pictures, monopolies for video, monopoly for, you know, um, interacting with friends and family on Facebook and stuff like that. There's no thing about it. There's no Facebook competitor. Yeah, no, no. I mean, Facebook seems to me to be a more indulgent medium, though. It seems like I read some, like sometimes I'll see people's Facebook posts and I just see the first paragraph and then I'll see how long it goes. I'm like, fuck reading that. Just keep moving. This is too much. Yeah, it's like I find my girlfriend just deactivated her Facebook account.

And I was like, I don't find so much utility in it anymore. You know, especially after the election, I'm like, everyone hates each other on here. And it's not fun. I already have Twitter for that. You know, but like you're saying on Twitter, you can't go on and on and on and on about how much you hate Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. So it was, there was like no way to retreat. I find that I don't even use Facebook that much anymore. I use it because my Instagram posts directly to Twitter and to Facebook. That's how I use it. And, but it's interesting that it shows that and the amount of people that engage like my Facebook as a fraction of what everything else has. And I

think it's because I don't use it. Yeah. I think, I think algorithmically, the more you use it, probably the more it massages you to the top of a person's feed or whatever. Cause that's, what's annoying about Facebook is you can't put anything in order. You have no idea what you've seen already. I was just talking to someone the other day. I only have like 700 friends on there or whatever. A lot of people from college that I might have had a class with or something. And I'm like, why do the same 15 people just show up?

And I don't even interact with these people. So I feel like I'm missing a ton of stuff. And I still find Twitter is the most useful for me. People love Facebook, though, for arguing. They fucking love it, man. I've gone over some political arguments that people have on Facebook. And it's like, Jesus, how do you have the time for this? Don't you people have other things you enjoy?

Yeah. No. There's something about that sort of tit for tat verbal exchange, like trying to one up someone and trying to make a better point. And it's I feel like it's replaced sport for people, you know, for some folks, I feel like it's a game and sort of what, in some sort of a way, like a text based video game or something. Yeah. Like an old text adventure or something like that. Yeah. I, what I find in the one interesting, interesting thing about Facebook that I think is, is worth noting is that it's typically real people with real names and real pictures. So at least they're putting themselves out there.

Yeah. As opposed to Twitter, kind of the anonymous nature of that. So I respect that for the most part on Facebook. But again, I agree with you. It's like no one's winning this argument. It's just a repetitive, how many times am I going to see the same thing over and over again? I've kind of just withdrawn from that entirely. Yeah.

Well, you know, I wanted to talk to you about internet controversy because when we had you on the first time, it was kind of just after your whole thing had happened with this. You'd made this one, like, incredibly innocuous tweet. It was like a day without women or something like that. Yeah. Silence. Like, what was the tweet?

It was a peace and quiet hashtag a day without a woman. Yeah. I mean. Which is like an Al Bundy joke. Yeah. And but the thing is, like, if that happened today, nobody would give a shit. It's weird. It's like then it was it was a boiling controversy, like the first bubbles of just social media

outrage. It seems like you were one of the first bubbles. Right. Well, like I explained to you originally, I feel like it was partially a political hit because of the industry I worked in and all that kind of stuff. But also, like I was telling you before we started, the more I've had time to think, after all these things happened, I launched a new company. I was working 70 hours a week.

I had no bandwidth to really think about what the hell happened. The more I think about it, the angrier I actually get about how I had to go through that and watch other people also kind of go through similar things as the outrage machine just eats people and spits them out as they go along. When you stop and think about what you actually said and what that actually caused, that actually caused you to stop working with people. Yeah. Like this one silly joke. Like they don't know you. They don't know you. No, that one joke, that one thing know you they don't know you know that one joke

that one thing that you said is so awful and outrageous that all of our years of collaborating working together trying to do projects trying to be creative having fun all the conversations we've had about life and about humans and politics and men and women. Those are all out the window, man. You made a joke that I find marginally offensive. Maybe on a certain day, marginally offensive. I don't even think it's offensive. If it was a woman, if a woman said that, like a day of peace and quiet, a day without men, I would go, ha.

Yeah. That's what I would go. I'd go, ha. Yeah. And I'd keep moving. And move on with your life? The idea that like, oh, I got to get this lady fired. She's a terrible person

The only thing that I can think about is that I was at least in a position where it didn't destroy me or whatever Yeah, like I was actually I'm doing you know financially better and feel happier and what I'm doing now So it didn't it kind of backfired on the people that were trying to do whatever they were doing to me anyway But I feel for the people that find themselves in similar situations that don't have, and I don't, you know, like some, some sort of internet clout or some sort of community that can, can rally around them and lift them up, which is what my community did to me, which I'm so appreciative of. So I just think about how it's just sad. Like, I, I don't know that I've ever been so offended by something someone has tweeted or even said that I like went out of my way to, to make it

personal and try to destroy them. I'm not saying people don't do terrible shit happens all the time. We're seeing that play out, you know, with Harvey Weinstein and all these kinds of things are absolutely awful, really awful things. Right. And I feel like people are kind of like being distracted by the shiny object in the corner when they're losing sight of what's important. Well, today it feels like there's blood in the water. You know, I mean, it just, it seems like there's so many people going after so many people. It's just people are running around looking for targets. The way I imagine, I imagine like the internet and people on the internet being like an angry

mob running to the streets, frothing at the mouth, just looking for somewhere to point their gun. I mean, that's really what it feels like. It feels like there's definitely some real targets out there. There's definitely some. This Kevin Spacey thing is a scary thing. I mean, apparently, Rosie O'Donnell started tweeting that he had been doing this forever and that this is the tip of the iceberg and there's a bunch of boys that he went after.

I don't know what's true, what's not true. I'm assuming. But that's real. That's a real horrible's true, what's not true. I'm assuming, but that's, that's real. That's a real horrible thing. That's not a joke. It's not someone with an innocuous, maybe off color joke. I mean, this is like real stuff. So I think the, the good part is all this awful behavior and predatory evil, you know the harvey weinstein and whatever else there's probably a million other ones right that stuff's going to get exposed but it seems like the the negative part about it is that people are looking for targets they just you know yeah and that well

that's what kind of scares me i was telling i don't know if you're a black mirror fan but i was i've only watched one episode but i loved it it. Okay, yeah. I highly recommend you. You'll get lost in it. I watched two episodes. I love that show. And what's going on now reminds me a little bit of a Black Mirror episode where it's like people, like you said, are targeting others. And I feel like accusations are part of the process, are part of due process, really.

That starts with the accusation. But I feel like people aren't... And I'm not defending anything that anyone's done, but I feel like everyone just assumes guilt no matter what. And it scares me because now we're getting to the point where anyone can accuse someone of anything at all, and they're automatically guilty and they're automatically shamed. And I'm like, but aren't you curious what's true? Maybe half or 75% of this is true, but certainly not all of this is true. Certainly not all of these accusations are true. The one thing that I was interested in is um mark halperin who the the political writer

who was accused of things last week he didn't i didn't hear this one um there's too many to keep up with yeah no it's happening a lot mark halperin is a as a famous political writer he wrote um game change and double down those famous books about 2008 and 2012 um with john heileman who's his partner he was on msnbc and all this stuff. And he was accused of some sexual harassment when he was at ABC News in the early 2000s. And he came out and was basically like, I'm sorry for my behavior and all that kind of stuff. And what I thought was interesting about it

was that he was like, not all of these accusations are true. But he kind of just then went on and apologized and did all this. But I'm interested in, are you going to contest any of this? What is true and what isn't true? Why aren't of this? What is true and what isn't true? Why aren't we interested in what is true and what isn't true?

Clearly you are a scumbag in some way, but I am also curious in, are you going to defend yourself? Are we in a situation where no one can defend themselves from these terrible accusations? And it reminds me of Black Mirror a lot. What were the accusations? He was basically accused of heavily hitting on women that were junior than him.

That were working with him? Yeah, exactly. Somewhere. I don't think any of them accused him of sexual assault or anything like that, but apparently he might have rubbed up against some women or did some things that are- But that kind of is sexual assault, though, right? Yeah. I assume so, but I guess what I'm saying is-

If a guy rubs his dick on somebody, that's essentially sexual assault. Sure. I mean more like, I don't think they're accusing him of raping them or something like something like something We're absolutely horrifying horrific, you know And I'm like well clearly, you know, I liked him a lot and I'm like well, I can't I don't I you know You're clearly not a good person But I was also just interested in that in that that dynamic of his statement where I was like, but but what isn't true? I'm curious. What isn't true? Why't true. It almost suggests that everything is true.

But then you just never know any situation. So I just kind of reserve judgment until more information is known about all these people. And I don't want to jump in on it because I don't... I don't even want to know. I mean, unless it's people that are in my world. I mean, at a certain point in time. Look, I mean, I want to know about Kevin Spacey type situations

or Harvey Weinstein type situations. But I think there's a lot of men that are in the position where they're a boss or they are, you know, the owner of a company and they have these people under them. And these people behave in a certain way, like almost like as if they are royalty. You know, and I think that's what Harvey Weinstein experienced. I mean, essentially, he was like the royalty of this enormous movie empire. And we find that particularly offensive. He's not just a creep trying to get laid. He's a guy that was trying to hold that power over people and use it against them.

And then on top of that, he was physically force forceful so you got like your worst-case scenarios and then you have like guys that are just trying to get laid you're like okay hmm how do you what are we are we demonizing aggressive heterosexuality like where does this go like where does this go into sexual assault like rubbing up against someone physically touching them when they don't want you to well that's sexual assault sure but hitting on someone right hmm that doesn't seem like sexual assault or anything it seems like someone just trying to get laid like where does it but then when someone's the boss you go okay but then you're not supposed

to do that when you're a boss right i i was more i was very interested in the in the in the dynamic between with specifically with harvey weinstein um and his people under him for many decades yeah about i was trying to put myself in this position of like how does this stay quiet for so long even though there's little rumblings like they talk about seth mcfarland's joke at some award show kevin spacey too yeah and family guy family guy like a little kid was running away from, locked in Kevin Spacey's basement. It's amazing that this stuff is kind of like an open secret, but still doesn't seep out or really. And it makes you think about the power dynamics and how fearful people are in these positions.

Because it's easy. My initial instinct was like, why didn't anyone say anything? It was similar to Bill Cosby's thing. I'm like, why didn't anyone say anything? But then you realize people were saying things. They were being given hush money. They were being shut up. But these are really, really bad people. But I agree with you that I've never been an aggressive flirter, as it were. I've always been very passive with women because I never really believed in myself that much and

all that. But I've known people that have been very flirtatious and, and, you know, um, and all of that. And I'm like, I wonder what is the line there now? And, and is it okay to, to, to be flirtatious, to call a woman beautiful at a bar or to do something like that as opposed to, you know, kind of, if a girl likes you, that's the thing. Like if, if you meet a girl at a bar and the girl's like, Colin is a really cool guy. God, I'm so into him. And Colin's like, you're really beautiful. And she's like, oh my God, thank you. And then next thing you know, you guys are hanging out or you meet a girl at a bar. She has nothing. She doesn't want to have anything to do with you. She's sober. You're drinking. Your breath smells and you're

like, you're really beautiful. And you're like, ew, gross. Get the fuck away from me. You know, it could be exactly the same attempt, but the person's just not into you Well, you become a creep right exactly. So I know I'm I don't I don't look at the situation now in 2017 with you know On college campuses and all these things as desirable for anyone because who the hell knows the rules of the landscape, you know now I think a lot of it just comes to down to mutual respect and all of that, you know Well, you know what? I think it, man? I really think we're shifting, like, culturally. I think this is a big, gigantic shift, almost like an earthquake of consciousness.

I think that over the course of human history, we have slowly but surely become better to each other. You know, like we were playing, we had a photograph that we put up yesterday of an ad from 1911. It was a gum ad and it was instructing a man how to go about kissing a woman. And a lot of it was like, do not ask

permission, look in her eyes, gaze dreamily. It was really weird. Instructing him how to grab her face, how to lean down to kiss her. It was really weird. Wow. Instructing him how to grab her face, how to lean down to kiss her. It was very, very bizarre. I was like, if you tried to put that ad out today, you would be fucking skewered publicly.

Yeah, I would say so. They would come after you. But there's the ad right there. Do you know how to kiss a girl? Then learn. Stand facing her. Do not tell her your intentions. Do not ask permission Stand facing her. Do not tell her your intentions. Do not ask permission to kiss her.

We went over this whole thing yesterday, so I won't go over it again. What's the name of the gum again? Common Sense... What is it? Common Sense Gum Company. The Common Sense Gum Company from 1911. And I think what's happening right now is this, like, a really big shift. And I think the's happening right now is this like a really big shift.

And I think the beneficiaries of this big shift are going to be the next generation of kids that are growing up. They're probably not going to have to deal with nearly as much shit. I think, and I'm absolutely not giving Bill Cosby any sort of fucking excuse at all. But I think that in Bill Cosby's day, think a lot of men did that I think it was really common I mean I don't think they thought anything of it just like you ever watch like an old Clint Eastwood movie when they slap women they just used to beat the shit out of women in those movies times have changed it and they're changing now like today at an unprecedented rate I think ultimately is good um ultimately everyone when you you catch people at like a good static state like a good

calm state and you if you they're not under duress and they're thinking clearly and you would ask them like what what's the best way to get along with other people what's about won't treat them fairly treat them kindly you know have good friends. Just be nice. Be nice to everybody. Everybody would agree to that. The problem is maybe they want something from you.

Like, Colin wants to fuck the girl at the bar, but she's sober and Colin's got gross breath and he's, you know, like, you know what I mean? Right, exactly. There's all sorts of extenuating circumstances that make people behave in really fucked up ways. Right. But the consequences of those circumstances

or that behavior was, was minimized by power, right? It was minimized by, you know, like a guy like Harvey Weinstein, they could put these gals in movies, you know, or a guy like Kevin Spacey who's hitting on a 14 year old and he doesn't know what to say, you know, all that stuff, that, that, that ability to squash, it was, it minimized people, you know, it reminds me too, not that I know deeply anything deep about it, but I was just thinking about it in the shower this morning. Actually, it reminds me a lot of Michael Jackson in the sense of like,

what was going on in the early and mid nineties with him and the accusations there. And I'm like, was this, I don't know if that's true or false. I don't know what he's accused of or not. People kind of, I think, treat him as if he was innocent and maybe he is, I don't know. But it reminds me of like, there was like telltale signs of some of some sexual corruption in in hollywood in the music industry in the movie industry and all that some years ago um that's kind of bubbled back to the surface with some big names so i just i agree with you

like i just wish um people just need to be good to each other and like act normal and these guys and and and be respectful and these things you don't find yourself in these terrible situations, but then you see this desperation with Harvey Weinstein, where you, you learn that he might've sexually assaulted or even raped the woman who then appears in a movie some years later because he, he, the gravity well around him is so strong that they have no choice.

So it's a very sad situation for those women as well. You know, it's a sad situation for humanity, right? It's like, those women as well you know it's a sad situation for humanity right it's like there's just certain things that people were able to to get away with you know like the cosby thing to me is probably number one that's the number one worst one ever because he represented this sort of like really moral very ethical you know like doesn't doesn't swear on stage

Like he's the last one that you would expect to be What you know he's described been described as the number one serial rapist of all time and you like wait How is that? How is that possible it's incredible. It's it's it's it's just a crazy Unfortunate sad situation it ruins his whole legacy. Yeah You know? You know, like, who could ever... I haven't seen the Cosby show. I don't even know if it's syndicated anymore

since all the accusations came out. But who could watch that now and just look past that? Like, I certainly could. Especially because a lot of that's contemporaneous to that show. Is it still on the air? Well, I don't... I assume that they got, you know, their stuff pulled.

Their syndication pulled. I would assume, right? What about Fat Albert? That would be weird, too, if that was still on the air. Yeah, again, contemporaneous to a lot of his accusations. There's some cases. What about fat Albert? I'll be weird. Yeah Yeah again again contemporaneous to a lot of his accusations going back to to What was that original show that he did in the 60s by right? Yeah, that was the first one, right? Yeah So it's it's like I think a lot of it a lot of that's like 50 years worth accusations like holy shit Yeah, Hollywood was a different animal back then is a different animal when people didn't have a voice, you know?

But do you, because you have some, you have a connection. You were on TV and you do, you know, do you hear rumblings like this? I mean, I'm not asking you to be specific, but do you hear? Well, I haven't been on TV in a long time, but I did hear the Cosby thing way back in the 90s. I heard that when I was on the set of News Radio. I remember people talking about it. And I had heard the Kevin Spacey thing, too. But, you know, you don't know.

It's not like, well, you should have gone to the press. Like, with what information? Like, someone accused Rosie O'Donnell, because Rosie O'Donnell was talking about Kevin Spacey. She's like, you're a sicko. Everyone knew you were a sicko. And so someone said, hold on a second. So you're saying that you knew that he was like this and you didn't do anything about it and she and she said well there was always rumors but no one

had any evidence right now until this actor came forth is he an actor or a director I think he's a Broadway actor it's Broadway yeah it's fuck the whole thing's fucked he was in television show though. He was a Broadway actor with Kevin Spacey in 19 whatever the hell it was when when this happened 30 years ago What do you think about the whole misdirection thing in his statement to about being like crazy weird right sneaky? Yeah, not good Yeah, I think very very Transparent very transparent deflecting now. I live my life as gay man. Hey fuckface. Nobody asked you right? Did you try to rape a kid?

Yeah, it was very weird. I don't know why he decided to do that. Well, I think he's probably panicking. You know? I mean, and ultimately, he probably should be. Yeah, I would assume so, especially because maybe there are more accusations. And then the whole weird thing with Netflix with House of Cards, where they were like, this is going to be the last season.

Now apparently they stopped production. Oh, so they they stopped it completely. So Jamie was saying oh interesting Yeah, like this morning. I'll show up load up Okay Yeah Cuz I thought that was interesting specifically because they had apparently already announced that it was the last season anyway like in the summer So they're making it seem like they're reacting to it. So everyone's just playing the PR game now, you know, I wonder yeah I don't know because they made an announcement pretty quickly Maybe they made an announcement sort of just to let everybody know, you know? I wonder. Yeah, I don't know. Because they made an announcement pretty quickly. Maybe they made an announcement sort of just to let everybody know, you know, yeah, it

is the last season, but... Okay, here it goes. Production on Netflix series suspended indefinitely following Kevin Spacey allegations. Is it allegation or S? Is this plural? Yeah, is there a second or third allegation I might have missed it I'm sure he has a Gore Vidal movie

that they're filming as well which will be interesting it's an interesting guy yeah yeah oh man did you know it's a great fucking film um Gore Vidal and um who's the super conservative guy William F. Buckley did a series of debates in 1960,

I want to say 68, and they televised them. And it was like a huge boom to whatever network it was, ABC, I believe it was. And they made a documentary about these two going back and forth with each other. It's brilliant.

It's amazing. And it's so interesting to see back and forth with each other. It's brilliant. It's amazing. And it's so interesting to see their minds interacting with each other. Wasn't that the debate series where William F. Buckley said something super homophobic? Yeah, yeah. To call them, called them some- I think he called them a faggot. Like yeah, on like network television. Yeah, and he said he would he would knock him out. He'd said something like you'll stay plastered or something like that.

I forget his statement, but Gore Vidal said something to William F. Buckley that really pushed his button. I don't remember what he said to him. Because I remember watching it and being like, oh my God. But it was devastating to William F. Buckley. It was pretty much the end of his being taken seriously because people realize well

He's kind of a fool and his ego and his mind is just not within his control And just got out of hand and and Gore Vidal just sort of sat there while he said it, you know, right? Yeah, Gore Vidal is an interesting my exposure to him and initially was like he wrote I think some Historical fiction about some various things it now listen you queer stop call me a me a crypto-Nazi or I'll sock you in your goddamn face and you'll stay plastered. Whoa. Yeah, it's like incredible to... Listen, you queer, stop calling me a crypto-Nazi.

Whoa. I'm concerned the only pro or crypto-Nazi I can think of is yourself. Some people were calling each other Nazis even way back after, you know, right after World War II. Yeah, it's a weird one, right? It's like, the problem is, like, what we saw in Charlottesville is like, hey, look, guys, there's real Nazis. Like, don't call someone a Nazi because they voted for Trump.

Right. Because they think that right-wing conservative values are being diminished in this country. Don't call them a Nazi for that. It just bothers me. The same thing with the word fascist, where I'm like, you don't even really understand what these words mean, a lot of you.

These words aren't only loaded, they have definitions. It's like when everyone says, we live in a fascist state in America today, and I'm like, I don't think so. The courts seem to be working fine. The Congress doesn't do anything, but it's there. Well, if you lived in a fascist state, then there wouldn't be an investigation against Trump right now. Exactly. Leading to indictments. Exactly. In which he actually has the power to fire the person doing the investigation. So it's,

it's, you know, I'm not saying we're in an ideal situation right now, but people throwing around these words very loosely need to learn a little bit more about Weimar Republic and the Nazis coming to power in 33 and what that actually looks like, what fascism actually looks like in Italy, what it looks like in Germany. And they have no idea or a lot of some people do, but most don't. And they're and they're just throwing these words around and they mean something. Well, there's a lot of confusion today in terms of like why free speech is important. And one of the reasons why free speech is important is because you don't get to decide

what is correct. It has to be debated. You know, um, there was a, I forget who it's, who, who said that it was really recent. We talked about it yesterday. Um, oh, it was that guy that the Yale professor that was on Sam Harris's show. He had a perfect statement about, um, the guy who got in trouble for his wife with the, the Greek fellow. His wife had defended offensive Halloween costumes, and the kids went crazy and addressed him in public. He said the answer to hate speech is not no speech, it's better speech.

And that's such a great statement. Yeah, that's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. So like all these kids that are trying to shut down conservative speakers on campus, and then by shutting them down, they're calling them white supremacists, Nazis and using these things for guys like Ben Shapiro, which I think is like patently ridiculous. Yeah. The Jewish man is the Nazi. The Jewish man is the Nazi. That's interesting. And a white supremacist as well, which is just like because he quotes statistics about minority crime.

You know, those statistics I feel like are pretty misleading in some ways because there's a lot of factors that lead to these people being in these situations where there's high crime rates in these communities, and it has nothing to do with, you know, hey, you need to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, which is like a really common way of looking at it. Right. It has to do with the world that they were born into. Yes socioeconomically It's a different a different world. Yeah, and they're surrounded by the momentum of crime. They're surrounded by the momentum of

violence and abuse and to just expect them to escape that because There are examples of people that have done in the past. Well, you can't apply that that sort of logic I don't think I think that's disingenuous. But to call him a Nazi or a white supremacist, I think is fucking ridiculous. Well, that's just such a... It's just used pejoratively without historical context.

It's exactly what it is because it reminds me a little bit... It's different in the context, but it reminds me a little bit of when Bernie Sanders was running in the primary and people would be like, look at what socialism has given you. And look at the roads. And I'm like, this is, look at what socialism has given you. Right. And look at the roads. And I'm like, the roads are not that roads aren't socialist.

The military is not socialist. Street lights aren't socialist. The government spending money is not what socialism means. So if that's what you think the definition means, then you're wrong. And the same thing with, with now Nazism and fascism, like look at all the parallels between Nazi Germany and the United States. And I'm like, I couldn't, I'm a student of history. I'm not, I don't know everything, but I don't see literally one parallel

between the United States right now and Nazi Germany, not even one. So we're not coming off a war we lost. We're not, you know, a devastated and humiliated nation. Yeah. The stab in the back, hyperinflation, uh, you know, like this charismatic man who's in prison for a while, writes this manifesto, tries to actually throw a coup in the mid-20s, fails. Like all of these. Like what parallel are you talking about? You know, and so I just feel like people are playing fast and loose with these words that they mean something. These words mean something.

So if you're going to call someone a fascist, find the fascist. And like you said, there are Nazis in American culture, unfortunately, but fortunately, because of our freedom of expression, they have the right to exist. in American culture, unfortunately, but fortunately, because of our freedom of expression, they have the right to exist. And I think that by lumping in anyone that voted for Trump, for instance, as a Nazi, you're just making them look bigger. That actually just benefits them. They're irrelevant. The KKK is irrelevant.

6,000 members, maybe, in a country of 325 million people. How many people identify as neo-Nazi, really? Maybe 10,000 or less, you know? When you're thinking about 350 million people it's a very small number it's it's it's my it's it's infinitesimal it's my it's actually irrelevant completely irrelevant but if you're a black guy and they're all coming after you on your facebook page then it looks then it looks real and then and and and it is that kind of badgering and that kind of harassment is real and it's terrible no one justifies that but i i'm so sick of the a

history like the the like people suddenly are experts. It reminds me of on Columbus Day. I tweeted out and it got tweeted a bunch. I thought it was funny where people were tweeting about Columbus and all this. I'm like, suddenly everyone's an expert now in the age of exploration today. Now everyone knows everything about the age of exploration. Just like everyone knew everything about the rise of Nazism and the Weimar Republic. And just like everyone knew about the socialism and all.

I'm like Republican, just like everyone knew about socialism and all. I'm like, stop. Well, I posted this flag behind me. And there's a company called Iron Mountain Designs creates it. And it's a veteran-owned company. And they make these pretty cool flags, very cool flags, made out of metal. But it has a George Washington quote on the back. And I put it up on Instagram with a photo of the flag, photo of the logo of the company, like three different pictures on Instagram in a row.

You know how you do that where one post can have three images? And one of them was a quote from George Washington. And the number of fucking geniuses, George Washington owned slaves. Like, yeah, he's an honest man who owned slaves. And they just kept rattling on about the horrors of George Washington as if, okay, yep, he did. Yeah, there's a lot. But this is a quote by a man who lived hundreds and hundreds of years ago. And this is what he said. You know, you want to diminish his entire, you know, contribution to human culture, because he did something horrible back then when people were doing horrible things.

You're, you're right. He did own slaves, but I think it's a part of a very long conversation about what a human being was, you know, back then. Yeah. It's, it's, it goes back to the idea of historical relativism that like, you can't, you can judge them based on a 21st century model, but George Washington died in 1799. So this is a man that didn't even see the 19th century, nonetheless, the 20th, nonetheless, the 21st has no idea what that was. He was a Southern planter for the first five presidents of the United States were Southern planters that own slaves. It's not, this wasn't a totally uncommon thing, so I'm not justifying it. There were absolutely abolitionists among the founders. There were absolutely abolitionists during the revolution

and, and black people fought for the, for Continental Army. But yeah, people judging based on these things, I'm like, that's fine. But if you want to take that to its natural conclusion, you're going to find lots of problems with lots of people even closer to us in history than George Washington. And what's funny about that is now they really are going after, I was reading it just tangentially, I didn't see it all, but people are starting to now go after George Washington plaques or George Washington statues. And I feel kind of bad about that in the sense that I was all for removing the Confederate statues and putting them in places where they made sense. So take the Jefferson Davis statue, put it in Gettysburg or whatever the case might be, put it in a museum. I don't think they should

be melted down and destroyed. But people were like, the next logical step is they're going to go after the founders. And I was like, no way. No one's going to let that happen and I was wrong you know now they went after him immediately so so I feel a little bit guilty about that in the sense that you know I don't think we should be celebrating Confederate history but we should absolutely be celebrating American history even even complicated American even if it's not

celebrating it it's recognizing it and understanding it I mean the Confederate War the Civil War rather did happen. It's a real historical fact, and it should be studied. And if you don't study it, you don't get a comprehensive understanding of all the pieces that were in place when it did happen. And, you know, it's just as bad as the people that are saying, you know, the Civil War was about economics. No.

No, it wasn't. That was part of what it was about. It wasn't just about economics. It was also about keeping slaves. Right. That's a fact. Yeah, no, it wasn't. That was part of what it was about. It wasn't just about economics. It was also about keeping slaves. That's a fact. So like to diminish that, it's like, that's not good either. But to try to sweep it under the rug and smash all the statues, like, no, have that statue up so people can understand what the fuck that is. And if someone is going to celebrate that statue, you know, the South's going to do it again. We're going to rise again. They can do that. You know, if that's, if that's their thing, they can do that. I mean, we can't stop them from thinking stupid. Yeah. And I think that I agree with you in the sense that it's, it's worth, it just, it happened or we remember it and it has

always the Graham, the Graham blue have always been part of our culture since, since the civil war ended in 1865. And especially since Reconstruction ended in 1877. Many people don't even know what you're saying. The gray and blue? Yeah. The uniforms of the different sides. You know, when Reconstruction ended in 1877 and our occupation of the South ended, and then Jim Crow became law and there was institutional segregation, this was something that was always a complicated point of celebration. You know, I've always been, you know, I've always been really kind of curious and really more militant about why these people actually got away with what they did. And I understand,

you know, the 10% plan, which do you know anything about that? The idea that Lincoln only made or actually really Andrew Johnson only made 10% of people in the southern states, basically a pledge allegiance in order for the states to come back in. They didn't execute anyone that, you know, or even really try them. You know, Jefferson Davis, Stonewall Jackson didn't survive. But Robert E. Lee and all these other guys just got away with it and actually lived pretty prosperous lives afterwards. So there's always been this really complicated mix of of remembrance that these people down there were heroes. And we don't have to support that.

I certainly don't support that. But it goes way further back than our contemporary culture and we can't just smash it into oblivion and think that you're going to remove that, the heritage of the stars and bars and all of that from what happened. I think that the problem is people think that you're celebrating the Confederate army when you have a statue up and in some ways you kind of, it seems like you are, right? Because the statue is 15 feet tall and he's got a sword in his hand and he's on a horse and he's marching forward. And you know,

people look at it as if that's celebrating something that's a horrible part of human culture. It is. I mean, I remember going to Richmond, Virginia for the first time. I, my family,

a lot of my family lives down there now and they have this thing called monument row or whatever, where it's just a, it's like Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee and all that. And then they actually put Arthur Ash at the end to make it seem like it's not racist anymore, which I always thought was weird. They did that in like the 70s or 80s.

Yeah, exactly. So there's just like a black guy at the end of it. It's like, this isn't racist at all. And it's a bonus that he died of AIDS. Yeah. So everyone, so everyone, yeah. So we have a lot of, you know, pro HIV, HIV culture and all that. But, you know, I remember being really confused when I was a kid, being like, why are these statues here?

This doesn't make any sense. And I agree that they shouldn't be in those places of reverence. Because beyond the slavery issue, and I agree with you, slavery was the reason the Confederacy was founded. It does go back to states' rights, and it has inherent economic benefits. was founded. It does go back to states' rights, and it has inherent economic benefits. But it is, you know, Stephen Douglas, who was the vice president of the Confederacy, literally said that they were founded because of this, so you can take his word for it. But I was always confused why we were celebrating these people, and why not have these pieces of art? Because they are pieces of art, but have them in places that make sense, that give context. So I have no problem with that.

But I was so tragically wrong about the slippery slope that we were finding ourselves on because I thought people would see more that like, yes, Thomas Jefferson was a complicated man, but also an immensely important person to our society. But people aren't seeing it that way. And I will fight more vociferously to protect those guys than I did the Confederate officers. Yeah, for sure. Even though those guys did own slaves too, right? I mean, it is, it is all weird when you're talking about slave ownership. You know, I did this thing this morning, my kids' school, they have this great pumpkin day and all the little kids are on stage and they're, they have this little plate, they act out. And one of the things they were talking about,

the smell of applewood bacon and, and everybody's like, oh, the smell of applewood bacon. And all I could think of, because yesterday we were talking about factory farming and about this Glenn Greenwald article, where this FBI investigation to these two people that stole these pigs from this factory farm revealed this federal cover up of these horrific conditions in factory farms. And I was thinking of like, one day we're going to look at like factory farming and the horrific nature of what they do to these animals, especially pigs. These really intelligent animals. And they stuff them into these boxes and make them live in their own shit. And there's little corpses of piglets around them.

It was really hard. The article in the photo is really hard to look at. And I was thinking while I was watching this little kid's play today, I was like, one day we're going to look back at like this mention of bacon and we're going to think like how fucked up were people that they thought it was okay to shove these little animals into these crates and make them live in their own shit just so you could get bacon off of them. But we've just sort of accepted that. It's a part of our culture. And it's not a valid comparison to slavery, but it's also, it's not an ideal way for a conscious

and evolving species like the human race to behave. It's not a good way for us to rationalize. And I was looking at that today, and I was thinking, how many more of these things? I mean, I think we're seeing that with things like the Harvey Weinstein allegations, and this outrage is coming forth. I think we're seeing it with a lot of the aspects of our society that's getting exposed in a way that never got exposed before. But I think we're also seeing it, in my mind, we're seeing it with this talk of bacon. I was like, you know, look, bacon is delicious.

Absolutely. But where the fuck's that bacon coming from? You know, are you making sure you're getting free range bacon from, you know, very moral and ethical farming practices or are you just getting bacon? Yeah, it's actually very thought-provoking what you're saying because I've always found the factory farming not that I'm an expert in it at all I'm not but the argument to be really interesting because it's like there's a Opportunity cost the way we treat these animals means food is very cheap Yeah, way cheaper meat is incredibly cheap in the United States compared to almost anywhere else in the world

Yeah, way cheaper meat is incredibly cheap in the United States compared to almost anywhere else in the world And produces too because of that people used to spend a third of their income before World War two on food and now they spend Less than a tenth of their money on food. So there's amazing So there's an interest like so we've made food way cheaper But you're right because you could make the same argument for slavery in the sense that like well Look at all the economic benefits of it, you know, it kind of turn a blind eye to it. So you actually kind of like not, you kind of changed my mind on it a little bit. Cause I've always been of the mind where like free range eggs, free range animals, that's great if you can afford that. But I don't begrudge the poor or middle class or working class family from going and buying

their ground beef from Vons. Yeah. Well, if you're poor, you got to get by, you know, there's that, right. And you're, you're in a system that you didn't design, you didn't create, you're just, you're in there and you're just trying to get by. you know there's that right and you're you're in a system that you didn't design you didn't create you're just you're in there and you're just trying to get by i understand that but what i'm just saying like as a whole as a culture to to just openly accept factory farming and to not think of it as a horrific ethical and moral injustice i mean it really is you know this is coming from someone who eats meat right so? So obviously, the vegan argument would be, well, you're complicit in it. And you're also complicit in a bunch of other horrific crimes against animals. I think that what we're looking at,

though, is an awakening and sort of an understanding of our impact, like physically our impact on this, but mentally, the way we think about things the way we even think about ourselves if you know that your bacon is coming from an animal that was tortured and shoved into a cage and you buy it anyway like oh you know how what does that do to your mind yeah it's interesting it's it's sort of a it's a conundrum you know like what you you obviously hunt and stuff like that but when when you buy meat, do you go out of your way to make sure that it's... I buy almost no meat.

So you, all the meat you eat is typically something. Now, it's taken a few years to do it, but now, I mean, I shot two elk this year and elk is, you know, they're close to a thousand pounds. So you're just swimming in meat. Of hundreds of pounds of meat. I have two commercial freezers here. I have two in my garage at home. I give meat out to my friends.

I eat elk four nights a week. And when I go out to dinner, though, I do eat steak. If I go out to dinner at some restaurant, I don't ask where I came from. So in that way, I'm a hypocrite. No, not necessarily. I mean, I think striving is important, right? You can't always be perfect.

But being better, I think. If everyone was better, as opposed to being perfect, then the situation would be better. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. There's an economic reality. I can take the time off. I can take two weeks off out of the year because I went on two elk hunts. I've been on four hunts this year, and three of them I was successful. And one of them I got an axis deer, which is also like 100 pounds of meat.

And so that's most of what I eat. But most people don't have time to take three weeks off a year. And you also have to have the time to practice, and you have to know people. There's a lot of good fortune on my side to be able to do something like this. But it's also a concerted effort and becoming obsessed with the idea behind it of doing that, you know? Yeah.

It becomes a different thing. It becomes, like, food is just a different thing. I mean, if you grow tomatoes in your garden, that food becomes a different thing. Yeah, it's like almost spiritual in a way. Like, you get a connection to it. It's an overused word. Spiritual is kind of a word that's sort of been hijacked.

Sure. But yeah. Like Nazism? Yeah, like Nazism. There's a lot of words that have been hijacked. The word spirituality is really hijacked by morons. You know, someone says, I'm really spiritual. I see unfortunate tattoos and wooden beads and nutty talk.

You know, Reiki healers. Was that what they're calling them, Reiki? I don't know. Yeah. You know, those people that think they could heal you by rubbing their hands above your skin without touching you. Yeah. Is that Reiki?

Is that what they call it? Yeah. But yeah, there's a completion of the cycle in lieu of a better word. There's like, I grow food in my backyard and I grow plants and vegetables. And when I eat them, it just feels like some sort of a completion. Like it feels good.

Whereas it just feels like a good salad if I get it at a store. Right. Well, it's interesting. You're almost subsistence living in a way because you're hunting your own meat. And yeah, you're growing some of your own produce. It's pretty store. Right. Well, it's a, you're, it's interesting. You're almost subsistence living in a way because you're hunting your own meat and yeah, you're growing some of your own produce. It's pretty cool. Yeah. But I, I wonder, um, I need the, I need the grid for electricity. Right. You know what I mean? Someone's got to build the bows and the arrows I buy from a

manufacturer. You're not whittling the wood yet yourself. Very strict tolerances. It's, it's sort of subsistence, but it, but there's all these companies that are involved behind creating the materials that you use to. So it's like capitalism slash subsistence. But it's interesting because it's the point I made earlier. You're further along the path of sustainability or further along the path of some sort of righteousness in the way animals are treated and all that kind of stuff than a lot of people are. So it's a step in the right direction, right? I just wonder if people just to play devil's advocate, again, the working class family that at the median household income of $40,000 a year, if they, if we got rid of some of these animal practices, which are

abhorrent, but if we got rid of them, you know, are they willing to pay 13 or $14 a pound for their beef? They probably couldn't afford it. And that's a real problem i mean it's absolutely a real problem and i think that um there's a lot of people that don't don't they don't even take it into consideration i mean that's that's that's probably the biggest problem that we've we've made this system and everybody was born into this system you know obviously we didn't create it but we're we're born into the system and took us until we were probably like i didn't even know what a factory farm was until I was like 30. I'd never even heard of it. And then you hear about factory farming.

You go, what is that? And all these animals, they're all stuffed together. And you're like, what? I thought farms were like animals roamed around. Like, I don't know. I never even thought about it. Yeah, it's horrific. I remember in the late 90s on TV, like on public access or on like, I think it was just on public access.

You would see these like guerrilla filming sessions that these guys would go to these farms and like break in and like take all these pictures. And it was like for some animal rights activist group or whatever. And I was always familiar with it. I just never, I mean, I'm guilty of saying like, I never really thought about it too deeply beyond that, sadly, because I was just, I thought about the economic realities of it where I'm like that this is a terrible thing and we can fix it but we just have to have a conversation as a society of what that's going to mean for food because the exact inverse has happened with produce where we've figured out ways to really dramatically alter seedlings and

and what you know I was just reading about Norman Borlaug who won a Nobel Peace Prize for what he did to wheat, making wheat. Golden wheat. I'm sorry? Golden wheat. I think that's what it is. Yeah, like where the- Higher protein. Yeah, and like a higher yield, but the stock wouldn't collapse and all that.

And he's apparently responsible for, you know, like there used to be these doomsday prophecies in the 60s and 70s. People forget that Earth Day- I'm thinking of golden rice. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm thinking of a different thing. Sorry. It's okay. There was this-

People look back at the original Earth Day, I'm thinking of golden rice. Oh, I'm sorry. Different thing. Sorry. It's okay. People look back at the original Earth Day, I think in 1970, and they often talk about some of the prognostications of what's happening to the Earth and all that today. But a lot of people lost sight of the fact that a lot of what people were talking about then was that we were going to die of famine. That the Earth's population

was growing way too quickly and that they would have these guesses by the late 70s, early 80s. You can go read it. It's fascinating. They would be would be like by 1985 like billion people are going to die of starvation because we can't feed everyone and all these kinds of things that's what they were originally talking about so there's been these pioneering heroes in agriculture that have figured it out that have have these high yield crops and all that and we're fine with that because obviously crops flora are different than fauna they don't you know they don't feel they don't have you know they don't have some sort of connection

with them, they don't have a brain. So I understand the differences are there, but it's funny how these things have totally basically switched sides, where now we have these high-yield produce, that's great. We have these high-yield ways of getting animal meat, but no good. And I think that they're different things, but does it suggest that we have to be more vegan, more vegetarian, all those kinds of things? I don't know if that's the answer. I think we have to have a complicated conversation. And maybe it comes down to this idea of cloning meat or whatever they're doing, like making meat and process these weird chemical processes to make beef that's indistinguishable from

real beef. I mean, that's fine. If it tastes good, I'm good. I think that's probably what's going to happen. I think it's probably going to be like these headless cows that you could just grow in a lab and just slice chunks off of them or something. I mean, I don't know how they're doing this meat thing. I don't really know either. And I'm sure it brings up a whole new slew of bioethical questions too, but not just that also probably health issues is probably, I mean, who's going

to be the first person to live 10 years off of that bio meat before they figure out it causes some inoperable colon cancer, right? Cause your body doesn't know how to process it correctly and it sticks to the walls of your colon and starts creating abscesses and they have to remove your colon and make a new one with stem cells and cut you open like a fish and stitch this new shitter inside of you. Yeah, who's going to be the guinea pig? Someone will be, as always. I don't know.

And again, not everybody can go hunt wild animals. And if you did, there would be no more wild animals. I mean, that's really what the great market hunting of the early 19th century. That's in the 18th century as well, I think. I think when they started that. I think they started in the 1700s. They started hunting buffalo and antelope. And by the time, the early 1900s, it was almost

like completely wiped out. We had almost no animals left because it was market hunting. It wasn't people hunting like for their own personal use. They didn't have refrigerators back then. Remember? So you had to get meat and it didn't last very long and they had to get a new supply of it constantly. And they would just go out, and they would take these guys that were from the war, and they didn't have jobs. So this was their job now. They would go out and hunt antelope and elk and deer and then sell that meat at the market. What's interesting, too, about that is that it's the human condition. It's not only like the more modern human condition.

I'm reading a book, or I just read a book called 1491, which is about the condition of the, of North and South America and Central America before before Columbus. So there was Viking contact and stuff, but, um, and they were talking about, you know, which is, I think, well known to a lot of people that, that the native Americans, the paleo Indians wiped out tons of animals before when there was literally only a few hundred thousand of them, you know, know, because they were over hunting them. So this cycle continues, you know, regardless. And you even hear about that in Iceland with the Norse that lived there where they like depleted their very precious woodstock there. There's no animals.

You know, a lot of, it's not just modern humans that are challenged by this. A lot of, you know, the woolly mammoth and all of these animals were wiped out by humans. Yeah. That's very controversial controversial by the way that, that is, um, there's a lot of people that believe that that had to coincide because the dates coincide with the end of the ice age. And there's a guy that I've had on this podcast several times named Randall Carlson, and he has some very compelling evidence that points to the possibility that it was asteroidal impact that, that wiped out these animals en masse.

And that's one of the reasons why in certain parts of the world you could find mass graveyards of animals that were killed almost instantly. And this was 10,000 years ago or so? Yeah. Interesting. 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. They think there was two possible large impacts that happened. So they weren't bolides. They actually struck the—so they weren't like the Tunguska event

with an explosion they actually hit? They think it struck the ice sheet above North America. Oh, interesting. So there would be no evidence. Right.

Well, North America, well, they think that that was the reason why there's this, it's a fascinating podcast to go back and listen to. And he, I had him on

with another guy named Michael Shermer who was a famous skeptic and Graham Hancock who's also a proponent of some of his ideas. And they showed all these images of like these deep fissures that were cut into the land that must have been a massive amount of water over a very short period of time. And he thinks it was probably a large body that slammed into the polar ice caps or slammed into

rather the ice caps that are above. You know, North America, somewhere around 10,000 years ago, at two miles high of ice over much of the surface of it. And all of a sudden, boom, gone. And that's what caused the Great Lakes. I mean, the Great Lakes are essentially these gigantic glaciers that melted. And there's all sorts of features in these various landscapes that he believes point to massive amounts of water that happened over an incredibly short period of time

and the explanation for that and the peaks and the rises and the falls in temperature during that time when they do like a core samples of the earth he thinks that that also points to some sort of an impact that's fascinating fascinating. Yeah, it coincides. Randall Carlson. Randall Carlson, I remember that. He's been studying this his whole life. He had an idea once when he was on acid. He went and looked at over this gigantic canyon when he was on acid,

and he had this idea that this all happened because of water. He was trying to piece it together and then became fascinated and started studying it and then got really into asteroidal impacts. And he's a wealth of knowledge, really, really fascinating guy to talk to. That's fascinating. I love that stuff, man. Well, that's what's so frustrating and why I didn't study in college or really super interested in ancient history or even, you know, paleo history and pre-human history and stuff because it's all so hypothetical you'll never really know. You have to just kind of trust people much smarter than you that they have these good ideas that sometimes conflict,

but you'll never really know the answer. It's so frustrating to me. Well, those ideas definitely do conflict here. This is the area that he looked over. Here, play some of this so you get some volume on this. You know, it probably was a lake, something on the size of what we're seeing here now. Right, right.

And it probably, this would have then been a sill or a spillway for the pre-flood Columbia. Right. When the floods hit, they ripped through here and just lowered the valley floor by about 200 feet. Right, right. Based upon the present depth of the river and the height of the twin systems. Yeah. Yeah. Now, the twins themselves, I mean, that's a basalt outcrop.

Yes. But has that been sculpted by the flood, or is that? Yeah. And had the flood continued for, let's say, you know, another few days, a week, or whatever, they would not exist and they would have been literally washed away. They're quite deep. It's a long, long, detailed thing. I mean, he's talked about it on the podcast for hours and hours. I've had him on several times, and there's still a lot of information to cover.

Because this guy's been studying this his whole life. I'm going to look into that. That sounds interesting to me. It's absolutely positive that humans had an impact on woolly mammoths and a lot of other animals. But there's a lot of people that are very, very hesitant to blame the entire eradication of these animals on people. Yeah, I don't know enough about it. I do recommend the book, though, just an interesting insight into 1491, it's called. Just an interesting insight into agriculture, into just some ideas that kind of cobble together some sort of vision of this place before mainstream European contact.

This is one of the few places that I would, I mean, if you had a time machine, I've always thought about this. Like if you could go in some sort of an invisible bubble and experience the earth at various stages. There's two things I would love to see. the earth at various stages. There's two things I would love to see. I would love to see during the Great Pyramids, like when they were in their prime, I would love to see what was Egypt actually like before they burned the Library of Alexandria.

And I would love to have seen a native tribe in North America pre-colonization. Right. It would be fascinating. And that's the frustrating thing is we'll never really quite know the answer, but's it's fun to speculate about and i was reading interesting i think you'd find interesting i was reading about the easter islanders um and how they have they have sweet potatoes on the island which are not indigenous to the island and and they the sweet potato had kind of spread around polynesia presumably from south america

and there's this interesting thing that the name the I don't remember the exact word, but the word that many Polynesians or many Polynesian societies that were separated from each other used for the sweet potato is identical to what they were using on the South American mainland, indicating that the islands might have been populated from the other direction. They assume that people came down from what is, I guess, Indonesia into Australia and then kind of hopped over to those islands. But people are suggesting that there must have been contact from paleo-Americans on those islands because they eat sweet potatoes, which are indigenous to South America, and they call them the same exact thing that

the societies that were thousands of miles apart had experienced. And you hear about a lot of this. Was there transatlantic contact? Yeah. Could that... And then it gets into crazy conspiracy theories about the pyramids and stuff, but where the Phoenicians come over, where there's Egyptian contact, the Chinese come here, the Romans.

I remember that there was this theory that Romans might have been on the Pacific coast of North America because they found... I guess they apparently found some coins, Roman coins, and they found, um, these jars that I guess were ancient Roman or supposedly ancient Roman anchors for ships. I've seen that. That was, that was, these are recent discoveries, right? I think so. Over the last 10 years, maybe. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the human history is, it's, you know, kind of pieced together by what we find. And every now and then they find something, they go, oh, okay. You know, I mean, what's really crazy is that with Native Americans, when the settlers got here, when Europeans got here, they didn't have horses.

But horses actually evolved in North America. Horses actually evolved in North America. Horses evolved in North America. And then by crossing the Bering landmass, made their way into Asia and all throughout the rest of the world. Even zebras. They originally started in North America. It's wild. But then somehow or another, for some reason, they went extinct in North America. And they survived and thrived in Europe.

And then they were reintroduced. And Dan Flores, he's a wildlife historian, he maintains that the Native Americans, once they had firearms and the horse, that they would have wiped out the buffalo on their own. That it had nothing to do with, like, market hunting and all the things that the Europeans did. It was terrible and it happened quite rapidly. But he maintains that it was going to happen anyway. Just the nature of what kind of an animal it was. And that humans were eventually going to get to them anyway. Yeah.

I mean, that's what we were talking about with the human condition and how things don't seem to change. Regardless of who you're talking about. And I'm always fascinated by these tangential kind of connections between these different societies that we're learning more and more about. That the world is way smaller than I think we thought it was in antiquity and even before that. They were talking about how some Greenland and I guess Newfoundland and New Brunswick and all of these kind of had these Indian tribes that definitely probably had extended contact with the Vikings for a long period of time. And, and these words kind of find their way to like the St. Lawrence Valley that described the same things. And then when the French fur traders come, they find that they're using words that they shouldn't know. And it's, it's super fascinating. Like the, the, these, these brilliant scholars that kind of put these things together for us, you know, to read about. It is amazing. You know, I mean, and just think of how much we don't know.

I mean, God, to be able to go back 6,000 years ago and just be a fly on the wall in some ancient civilization and see how they interacted with each other. Oh, it would have been awesome. It would have been awesome. Because you even read about there were these great, there's outside of St. Louis, I think, it's like Cahokia or something like that.

It was this massive Native American metropolis in North America. We often think about Central and South America as having these, you know, Aztec, Inca, all these major cities. But there were major mound cities in North America that were populated by maybe 25, 30,000 people. And they were wiped out before we even got here or before our European ancestors got here. And it's so, God, you're right, because it would just be so interesting to see how do they live? How do they farm?

What was their commerce like? You know, what was their languages like? Did they have written records that didn't survive? And I don't know. But again, that ties back in that Venn diagram of frustration because you'll never really know. There's a ranch up in central California that I go to sometimes called Tohon Ranch.

And there's these stone circles that are carved in rocks. So they have these massive rocks and then there's like these concave like dugouts where they would make bread. So you're looking at places where they would grind grain into these rocks and these holes are, you know, who knows how long they existed. Who knows how long ago these subsistence farmers or subsistence people lived there and did this. And so you're stepping over these rocks and staring down. There's some getty images of them. Those holes were carved by the Native Americans, and they were done over fucking years and years of grinding stones into the stone.

And what's interesting is a lot of the ancient Egyptians, I went to see the mummy exhibit at the Natural History Museum or the Science Museum. Which one is it in California? Anyway, they had a museum exhibit on mummies and they said all their teeth were ground down and it's because when they would make their bread and they would grind stone into stone, it would create sand

and that sand would be in the bread. Interesting. So they'd be eating this gritty, sandy bread and that's what they ate and they'll just chew their fucking teeth away to nothing. That's fascinating. Yeah. It's, it's, it's this marriage of archeology and anthropology and sociology even that gives, I'm always disconcerted that more people don't find this fascinating. Right. Well, you're a real student of history.

I mean, you really love history. I do. I love it. I mean, I thought that was a really interesting subject when you and I were talking the first time you you and you're a young guy, but you embrace it. You know, I think it's fascinating. Someone has to do it. It's not it's not practical. I always tell people people have gone, you know, over the years, fans of mine have gone to school for history and asked me, should I study history and politics? And I'm like, you can. I think you should do what makes you happy. I think it would be much wiser for you to study pharmacy or chemistry or something. There's not a lot of money in history. Yeah, there's not. I mean, I remember when I was about to start grad school when I got my job in the gaming industry and I left.

And I remember professors being like 50% of all history PhDs will never find a job in the field. 50%. Yeah, because it's the same thing with archaeology. I played around with the idea of doing American archaeology, which is a growing movement. They're digging up Jamestown. They're, you know, all those kinds of things. And there's just no money in it, you know? Um, and so I, I try to just, I want people to just love history, like the way I love it and understand it. And I think a lot of it is because it's not told well, uh, it's not the stories dates and times are interesting. I remember them. And I think I have that kind of brain that right, that kind of right centered brain where like I remember facts and

dates, but that's not really what's important about it. And if people taught history more as stories, then, and which I think is what I'm trying to do with my show, then I think that people will enjoy it more. So I think that's like the greatest pleasure of what I do is people saying like, I hate history or I hated history or God, I thought it was so boring, but this is such, this is so interesting. Thank you for, you know, bringing this to my attention. And I was like, well, you know, more power to you. And now we can remember what happened. And these stories are interesting and they're important. They are important. And how many people are taking advantage of that? How many people are passing these stories around? I

mean, how many Dan Carlins are there in the world? Yeah, not, not many. And pretty much no one of his skill. Yeah. Hey, Jamie, can you get me one of them cavemans, please? And another one of these jammies. You want a caveman coffee? You want to get jazzed up? I'm okay, thank you. I don't drink coffee. You don't drink coffee at all? I just don't like, I have no problem with it. I just don't drink it. You just don't like the taste? Yeah. You don't like getting jacked? Oh, no, I don't mind getting, I don't mind getting, yeah. I could use some energy, but no, I'm good. Thank you. I always feel like I'm missing out on something Yeah, like because people really love it. Like my girlfriend's the same way my dad super coffee connoisseur. Really? Yeah, he loves it He loves coffee and like I feel like that with cigarettes sometimes I know cigarettes are terrible for you And I think they smell gross but I see people taking a big drag of the cigarette and they seem so satisfied and excited by it

I'm like, maybe I'm missing something. Yeah, I always see people outside of work in my neighborhood. You kind of get to know the characters in your neighborhood, right? And they're always standing outside smoking, you know, having a little me time. I'll tell you what, though. I smoked one of Tony Hinchcliffe cigarettes before a show once. I think I've done it twice now. And it's a real cognitive booster. I mean, it really does stimulate you in a very strange way.

Thank you, sir. Do you think you're better after having it? I don't know. What's better? I don't know. Sometimes you're not better stimulated, especially doing stand-up. Sometimes you're better balanced and calm. But mentally, it definitely stimulates you in some sort of weird way.

I was like, ooh, this is like a different sort of feeling. It's like, have you ever smoked a cigar? Yeah. Yeah, you get high off cigars. Yeah, I can only smoke half of it or I actually start to get like almost nauseous. Yeah, you get high. Like the nicotine in a fat stogie definitely gets you high. There's something to it.

It makes me think about these old timers. People still do it, but my friend growing up, his grandpa would always, that smell reminds me of him because he'd always just sit on the porch and smoke, but it just chain smoke like cigars. And I'm like, how are you not? Animals. Different people. It's incredible.

But yeah, how is, you were doing the sober thing for the sober October, right? Yeah, I'm still doing it. So today's the last day. How do you feel? Today's the last day. I'm nervous, nervous to smoke pot again. Yeah. I'll tell you that.

I haven't gotten more than like two days without smoking pot in 15 years. So I don't even. It's weird. I'll tell you that. I haven't gotten more than like two days without smoking pot in 15 years. So I don't even know. It's weird. I'll tell you the big change is your sleep. I have radical dreams. Really? Yeah. Radical, really realistic, confusing dreams

where in the middle of the dream, you don't realize that it's a dream. Like I had a dream that I was lying on this couch, a couch that actually exists a couch in my house and then i was cold so i grabbed this blanket and i was pulling the blanket over me but the blanket was kind of stuck in the pillows so you know like something like you know like gotta struggle with it to get the blanket over you and then i woke up and there's no fucking blanket i was like oh my god like i dreamt that I was pulling a blanket. I mean it was so

Realistic that I would have sworn if I woke up that I had struggled to get that blanket over me while I was taking a Nap on the couch, but there was no fucking blanket. I was reading and as I was reading I decided I was gonna lie down right here and sleep and I going to lie down right here and sleep. And I must have passed out and decided that I was cold and went through this elaborate dream sequence where I pulled a blanket over me, but I was convinced that I had woken up cold and had to adjust and pull the blanket over me and went back to sleep. It's mainly very vivid. Fucking super vivid, but there was no blanket anywhere near me. When I woke up, I mean, there's just fucking couch pillow that's it no blanket on the ground not like i could have gotten up and put it over

there and sleepwalked there's no fucking blanket but in my mind if you had asked me like uh did you wake up and pull a blanket over yeah yeah i did yeah i remember no i don't remember shit it's fake are you so are you looking forward to not doing this anymore or are you kind of like or do you want to keep doing it? Are the pros outweighing the cons? I think there are real creative benefits to marijuana. I do too. There's states that I think you achieve when you smoke pot that are unattainable without pot.

I think pot makes me more introspective. It makes me nicer. It makes me calmer. It makes me have a better sense and understanding of like the importance and value of community. It makes me more sensitive to the things that I'm saying. You know, I don't think pot's bad. No, I don't either. It's always good to take time away from anything just to get a better baseline.

Sure. Just to bring yourself back down to neutral. Yeah, I feel like it's something maybe I should challenge myself to do as well. Because I remember, I mean, I've smoked marijuana regularly my whole adult life. And it becomes, some people dip in and out of it. Like it's something that you do recreationally or you want to get stoned before a concert or whatever. But I always found that it was, as sad as it sounds to some people dip in and out of it. Like it's something that you do recreationally or you want to get stoned before a concert or whatever. But I always found that it was as sad as it sounds to some people, I think that it was almost part of my process in a way

where even in college, I was writing a paper or I was working or whatever the case might be. You know, I feel like, yeah, let's smoke a joint or something like that. And I agree, like I get most creative to this day, late at night, when if I smoke or do something like that. And I agree. I get most creative to this day, late at night, if I smoke or do something like that. I'm writing good stuff. I'm having good ideas.

I'm writing ideas down. And then sometimes I come back to them later when I'm not stoned and I can flesh them out more or whatever. But I agree that there's great creative benefit to it. And I also feel like I'm really happy that in a very short amount of time, American society has come around to the benefits of marijuana, not only medicinally, but just recreationally. And the numbers, the polling numbers from the early 2000s to today are

radically different. We're talking about shifts of like 30, 35 points and how people feel about them. And like you're saying, with anything, moderation is probably key. I often in my life don't, because it can make me lazy too. It can get me very interested in music or something like that and I get distracted. So in my general day to day I don't smoke until I'm done with the administrative shit I need to do. I'm done. I've gone to the grocery

store. I've done all these things. Okay, now it's time for me to relax. Do your grunt work. Exactly. But do you have a specific joint or something strand ready that you want to smoke when to get back into it are you going to ease back into it are you gonna are you gonna oh pull it just says jamie just pulled something okay pulls of find supportive legal weed at an all-time high that's great no i just i'm just gonna just smoke

some pot i'm gonna do it tomorrow with own benjamin we're doing a podcast together so i'm gonna get high for the first time on air nice Nice. So that'll be interesting for the audience. Yeah. It should be interesting for me too. Yeah. I'm a little nervous because I know it's going to hit me like a goddamn freight train. I bet my tolerance is down to zero. But that's going to be fun for you because now you'll, you'll, you know, cause I do feel like there's a plateau obviously. Oh, for sure. Yeah. Like heavy duty, hardcore daytime stoners, you know, they don't, they don't feel anything. Yeah. It's almost like a, it's almost like sustaining some sort of feeling, but you're

not, you can never reach that, that feeling again, which is again, why moderation is important. And it's the same thing alcoholics frankly feel and other people abuse things. So, but marijuana, we have a very infantile sort of approach to what marijuana is because of, I think because of the, all the prohibition bullshit that people went through from the 1930s on, there's this weird propaganda that marijuana is the devil's weed and it's terrible for you. There's a lot of cultural and societal benefits to achieving those states of mind. I think they really do make people nicer. I think it calms you down. Here's the big one that everybody's worried about. Paranoia. It makes you paranoid. I don't think that that's,

I don't think that that's a bad thing necessarily. I think that paranoia, that feeling of vulnerability, it probably makes you more honestly assess how you interface with the world. You know, there's a lot of real danger in the world. You know, and I think that marijuana probably makes you really think about that real danger in a way that you perhaps ignore or put in the back of your head, but it's always there. It's always there in your subconscious, just sort of grinding away at you, whereas marijuana brings it to the front, has a light, shines that light on it, goes, hey, maybe you should look at this. How about the fact that your lungs don't work so good anymore, man?

How many more years you got? How many more summers do you think you have on this planet? You know, you got 40, you got 50, you got 60. That's it. If you're lucky, if you're lucky, you got 60. But you're right. It's fascinating because if it opens up these places in our brain that are creative, that let us write better, that make us funnier and you know with your comedy for instance or whatever the case might be

then you know and it makes you kinder which i agree it makes me a mellows people out then of course it would make sense that it opens up these dark recesses in your brain that hide or shield these things that you don't want to think about and i agree that confronting those things is normal i think uh paranoia i think is a side effect of marijuana for sure, but it's about how you harness it. And if you think about it within the terms that in the parameters that you're talking about it, which is that these things exist. So you're just thinking about, it's not like you're, it's not a manifestation of something that doesn't exist. No. And it makes you aware of some things that are very easy to ignore, but are pretty

fucking huge, like space. Like my, one of my favorite things to do is to smoke a joint and go out and sit in my backyard, just pull up a lawn chair, put my feet up, and just stare up at space, and just think of how fucking insane it is that there is this immeasurable view of infinity that's above our head. And we sort of take it for granted and we barely stare at it. We barely look at it. We barely take it into consideration. It's just, it's just a thing that we completely take for granted.

But when I'm high, I can really freak out about it. I can get to one of the things that I like to do when I smoke a little pot is get to the base of a hill. There's something about being in the base of a hill and lying down where you're looking up and you see the hill and then you see the clouds moving over the hill in the background, the blue sky and the clouds. There's something about that that gives me a more accurate understanding of atmosphere, of this thin layer of protective air that keeps us shielded from radiation the magnetosphere above it all this stuff that that's above us that's just sort of like slowly moving around this just this giant globe there's that there's that view where you're

laying back and you're looking up at the clouds rolling over the top of the mountain. It gives you more of an understanding of the spherical nature of the planet and the fact that it is draped in this atmosphere. There's just a real weird, trippy reset sort of a feeling that I get from that. We're on a convertible spaceship. Yeah, it is remarkable. we're on like a convertible spaceship. Yeah, it is remarkable. It brings like memories forward of like that rare earth hypothesis,

the idea that we might not necessarily be alone, but this is so unique that maybe it's worth, you know, what was it, that Harvard professor that did the mathematical equation of how if we're alone or not. Fermi paradox? Yeah, like where he gives kind of numbers to various things. And the suggestion there is that we probably, life based on the confines of a 13.5 billion year old universe that is expanding at the speed of light is probably that we're not very alone. But the idea that like this planet with just this, and just the right place with a moon that protects it from a lot of, know ancient asteroid and comet collisions that um with oxygen and water it's just so fascinating and i think that we often don't think uh like in a weird way galactically about or universally about like how everything that we

experience is based on our experience on this little globe hurtling through space yeah as temporary life forms it's yeah and i I like it because it removes this. To me, I'm an atheist. I don't believe in God. And I feel like that's liberating in a sense. I don't mind if people have faith. I come from a family of Catholics and they don't agree with me. But you almost let go and just be like, we're here.

We have a finite amount of time. It's probably a mistake that we're here or some sort of just random occurrence. And it's liberating because you use the time you have to do what you want to do And then you're gone ashes to ashes And a lot of people look at ashes to ashes as like this dark thing And I'm like, it's kind of nice It's kind of interesting, you know Like what's here is gone

What will be is made from what you were, you know Well, people are absolutely terrified of the idea that they're not going to be around to experience something. You know, it's weird because everybody's afraid to die, but no one's afraid to sleep. That's deep and it's true. I mean, I hope that I get to see things. I feel like one of the things that I'm bummed about for the time in which we live, you and I, is that I feel like we're in this middle space where some crazy shit's going to happen in probably, you know, 2100 and beyond when we really start exploring space. Crazy shit's happening right now. I think we're at the embryonic state of crazy things happening.

We might, you know, think about how far we've come even in the last 15 years. So who knows? But the idea of traveling to other star systems, the idea of meeting life, oh man, imagine how frustrated you would be if a contact-like situation, Jodie Foster, Carl Sagan-like situation happened. While you're on your deathbed. Yeah, or even if you have 20 years left and they don't give you this radical

mathematical equation to build a spaceship, but they're just like, hey, we're here. And we're 150 light years away and you have to literally take 150 years to send that message. It will take that long to send the message back and then another 150 years to get the message back and so on and so forth what if they're all like putin's russian mob but in space you know what i mean yeah this idea that they're going to be some sort of altruistic beautiful alien race that's gotten past war and what if it's like a

race of harvey weinstein's out in the universe is predatory. They're going to come here and mouth fuck us all. I mean, who knows why they would care about us. And also there's this assumption that they would treat us better than the way we treat monkeys that we find in the Congo, because we don't treat primates very well. Well, it is funny how, that's true, we don't treat almost anything very well, except for our dogs and our cats but the the um it is funny to think about this kind of these kind of thought experiments that people do astronomers and and you know whatever about what what would be the why would they come and what would be the nature of them and what is their you know why are

they taking initiative to contact us and it's interesting that a lot of people do settle on the they if they're going through this trouble, they're not coming here to fuck with you. That's silly. But I think, why not? I don't know. Why would you make an assumption based on human understanding of anything what they're going to do? Well, this is a very, in terms of resources, this planet's very rich. I mean, think about it.

What if they're from a planet that's low in water? We're three-quarters water. The surface of our planet is mostly water, right? We have all sorts of weird minerals and who knows how. I mean, they're rare in our solar system. What we find on Earth in terms of the biological life is insane, right? We haven't even found biological life anywhere else in the solar system. So it could be that this is just the ultimate fucking sweet spot.

I mean, we are in what we call the Goldilocks zone. Right. Right. But then there's also my thought is always why it's just like it's such a limited thing to think that biological life, as we know it, carbon based life on the planet Earth that exists between the temperatures of X and Y, and it has a lifespan of whatever the fuck it is. That is the only way life can be. Why? Yeah, no, I never bought that. I always was confused by that.

Why can't a species breathe ammonia? And that's why they use the term, I guess, life as we know it. But I'm of the same mind as you. I think with just the mathematical permutations, you know, multiplied by the amount of space covered, even the exoplanets we're finding now, I know a lot of them are gas giants and stuff like that. And they're really close to the star system, but they indicate that maybe we're not all so unique. And I was reading a thing about Jupiter and Saturn, even in relation to exoplanets being found that are similar to them, that they might have been far closer to the sun when they formed and then were pushed out.

Um, so maybe we're seeing solar systems earlier on in their, in their life cycle. And, and there's a lot of, I love space too. Like I, I think it's a super fascinating, um, study. I wish that I was smarter with math, with physics and all those kinds of things. Cause I have a very, very limited understanding of that stuff. You know, like the, that maybe I would have explored that instead, but I don't have that. My brain doesn't work like that.

You know, I can't do calculus. Are you a fan of science fiction? Yes. Do you like, did you like the Battlestar Galactica series? Loved it. Fucking great, right? It's awesome. One of the most underrated series ever.

It was awesome. I agree with you. The new one. Yeah, yeah, the one from 2004. Yeah. Yeah, I loved it because I think it married really well sci-fi, believable sci-fi, with the problems we're encountering maybe with AI now with the Cylons. And then a religious aspect, a monotheistic, polytheistic cultures kind of clashing. There's a lot of depth to that that I think people don't see because they're turned off by the setting.

But I think a lot of people just missed it because it was a retake of, what was it, 1970s show? Yeah, it was like 79, 1980, something like that, yeah. It was a retake of that show that seemed to be, at the time, to be a Star Wars ripoff, you know? It was like, there was like your Luke Skywalker character that was Starbuck, you know? There was all this stuff to it that people like ah that's a fake stormtrooper

This show sucks. Yeah, I it was a movie. Yeah, it was a show rather Yeah, it was yeah It started as a like a mini series which is about the Cylons turning on the humans and then or I guess the end result Of them turning on the humans and then and then they expanded into four seasons I think I think the show is amazing and the new show was it only four seasons yeah I think it was 2000 yeah I think it was 2004 to 2009 or something like that bring it back come on fuckers Netflix get on it come on I know it's canceling house of cards give us some Battlestar Galactica yeah Battlestar was great I thought that they

told the arc really well fascinating I thought the acting was pretty good yeah and I like the idea of the because we're dealing with it tangentially now, the idea of, not that it's unique to that story, but of AI and robots turning on you. Yeah. Very smart people are telling us that that's very possible, and so we should probably start listening to them. Well, it is possible. Of course it's possible.

I think we could be a new life form. I mean, I really do believe that. I think we're either probably going to be augmented by these creations, and we're going to choose to take on new body parts that function much better than the body parts we have now, or we're essentially laboring to create something that's going to surpass us. That absolutely could be it. This idea that it's artificial, too. It's like, well, it's right there. It's real. Like if it's a life form. idea that it's artificial too. It's like, well, it's right there.

It's real. Like if it's a life form. Oh, it's artificial life. No, it's electronic life. You know, it's something that humans have created, but it's still life. It doesn't, like if you take a plant, right? You know, I was looking at these plants and they splice different plants together. Like they splice pistachios into avocados.

They have like the base of an avocado tree and pistachios are grown on the outside. I'm like, what the fuck? That's wild. I didn't know you could do that. Yeah, me neither. Yeah, well, is that artificial? What is that?

Seems like it's artificial life. Right. I mean, it seems like they've figured out some way to engineer things in a crude sense, you know, by splicing and grafting and doing all these different weird things to plants. Well, it's still life though, right? It's still alive.

It's functional. And we think of life as everybody has to have bones or blood or scales or fins. Says who? Says who? Says us and our limited sort of vocabulary and our very, very limited encyclopedia of variables that we allow to consider life? start coming up with with machines in the next 20 or 30 years is are you developing something there's actually a great i don't want to ruin it for you there's an amazing black mirror that kind of touches on this it's called uh i think it's called white christmas uh you should check it out if you have time okay um and uh john ham's actually the main character in it um from madman

and uh it the idea that like if something is conscious even if it's not real or even if it's only in a computer um what does that mean and what if the what if it was trapped, even if it's not real or even if it's only in a computer, what does that mean? And what if it was trapped there? What if it didn't have agency over its life, but it was still conscious and stuff like that? We're messing with things that we don't understand in this regard. Because even the word consciousness doesn't really have a concrete definition because we don't even know what it is. We are conscious. My dog's conscious.

But are they self-conscious? And at what level of consciousness and that's what makes us human right um so if we're going to implant that into other machines even if they're just computers even if they're literally just running on an operating system then then there are there are definitely any ethical questions to ask i think do you did you see that um google situation they had where the two computers were communicating each other into a with a language that they invented themselves. I read about it. Yeah, I read a little bit about that,

but I don't know too much about it. Yeah, they shut it down. They're like, what? Yeah, it's horrifying, right? It's happening so much quicker than... Yeah, it's hard. I mean, we envision these things as like Skynet or the Cylons or something like that,

but I think it's gonna be much more quaint. Yeah, well, that's what... They were very stunned by this. And I saw somebody trying to diminish it, trying to diminish it, and he was like, well, it's just ones and zeros. It's just like what they're doing,

they're communicating ones and zeros. I go, yeah, but they are talking, exchanging information back and forth in a method that we don't understand. And they do. How the fuck do they? And why have they chosen to talk to each other?

And is this like one, you know how you have like a science fiction movie and in the beginning of the movie, you have these engineers sitting around and the engineers going, Mike, Mike, come here and look at this real quick. They're talking to each other. What do you mean they're talking to each other? Well, there's a language. This is, see this? See, this is an exchange here and here's answer, and here's a response to the answer.

And here they've agreed upon this, and now they've expanded their sentences like, shut it down. Just shut it down. Just, well, what do we do about this? Let's let it play out. No. No, let's shut it down. Let's talk about this. And then they shut it down, and it phased to black.

Cut to smash cut, like you see a new time, 2034. Right. smash cut like you see a new time 2034 and it's some dystopian Mad Max fucking world and robot people are running down the street chasing after biological people wanting to use them for fuel

it's interesting because there are different there are different reasons why a robot or a machine might turn on you I think the Cylons were interesting because they turned because they were enslaved there was vengeance which is a human quality, by the way. An animal doesn't really understand vengeance, but a robot do. Yeah. Well, I guess about higher primates or whatever might understand a retaliatory kind of thing.

But generally, this is a human quality. Right. And what's a primate? Primate primate quality. And so there's that. But so there's like this enslavement retaliation kind of thing going on. But then there's the very like what I always find fascinating. I think this is more what Skynet was all about in Terminator, although I don't really remember, is the idea that if you look at if you look at the landscape of what's happening and you and you just remove the most inefficient part of it, it's the human. Like, in other words them acting as they are machines like this this doesn't make any sense this makes our processing slower this particular component needs to be removed so there's a very logical reason why they would go

after you too i think it's it is the stuff of sci-fi but like so many things that start in sci-fi it ends up bleeding into into real life and i think it's uh when i see people like stephen hawking bill gates elon Elon Musk all talking about this. I'm like, these are some of the smartest people that society has ever given us. Yeah. And I think we might want to pay attention and have some. I think what they want is some sort of Congress, not not American Congress, but some sort of international coalition that agrees. This is what we're going to do. And this is how far we'll push the boundaries. Because and I just don't know that we'll get there before.

I want to say before it's too late, but before we have a scary situation. I mean, and even from a mechanical situation, what they're doing at Boston Dynamics is fucking horrifying. It's so crazy. I look at the videos and I'm like, what the, and they're, it's so funny because some people had said in the past, like if you see them, like they're, they're using hockey sticks a lot to like beat them or like take, like knock something out of their hands and stuff. And I'm like, these are the videos they're going to show.

They're going to show them in their in their military camps when they're turning on humanity yes yeah there's so many different versions of them they have them look like they look like cheetahs they have them that look like dogs i mean here's they look like people like insanity yeah and these guys are just constantly working on these things too and constantly improve where is Boston dynamics is it? I think it's in Cambridge. I think a lot of people I think a lot of people at MIT might migrate there and I think Google owned them, but I think they've divested if I remember correctly that is so wild Yeah, and the ones where they like knock them over. Yes, and like they get up. Yeah, they can't yeah

like cuz it's gyroscope is going, I guess. And it's. Yeah. Gyroscopes are fascinating. You know, just something that can sort of self balance. This is the stuff they're going to show them in like the, to hype them up in their propaganda. Yeah. God. It's fucking amazing.

It is. It is amazing. I mean, these are, these are so smart, these people that managed to do this. I know, but don't you want to pull them aside and go, hey, man, what's the fucking end game here? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, like they're always playing with- You want to make a robot you can't kick over? Come on, dude.

It brings up ideas, how will we fight wars in the future? What are we doing with this? 100%, yeah. Especially if we fight some war with some sort of a primitive culture. I like how they have them balanced with all these packs. It's incredible. Highlight clip of all the times they've abused a robot.

Is that what this is? Oh my god. Yeah, the robot general right now has this playing behind him and as he's talking, he's like, remember what they've done to your ancestors. Well, they're saying abuse, but they're checking tolerances. You know, the robots need to relax this is how we made you so awesome you dumb fucks you stupid pricks you can't even walk on ice now the interesting thing the interesting thing to me about this is and i don't know if you feel it but i kind of do is

like when they're tripping and falling i have have this feeling of like, yeah, where I'm like, oh. You know what I mean? Look at this poor guy. Yeah, you feel bad for him. Yeah, like, oh. This guy, he can't even kick this one over. Wow, that thing is stout. Yeah, I mean, so they have multiple different models.

The video name is funny, by the way, Jamie. It's literally named every time Boston Dynamics has abused a robot. It's not abuse, you dummies. It's fucking testing. This is how they find out. But look at that nerd that's kicking it over. Go back to that guy. Oh, that thing sucks.

Go back to that one guy that was kicking it. Look at him. He looks like he's just, I'm going to get back at everybody. Go back. Go back to him so you can see him do it. Watch him, you fucking piece of shit. He looks like he always wanted to kick somebody. He's projecting.

Even with his little tiny short steps, it seems awkward before he kicks it. I'm going to kick it now. Look at this one. Oh, it's bouncing on one leg, and they're hitting it with a 20-pound medicine ball. Wow. Yeah, we're in for a weird hundred years yes and that's what i'm saying i hope that we get to see some because i think it's gonna get

fucking crazy yeah no there's no doubt it is there's no doubt it is it's just like how crazy and what's going to be the issues that we're gonna have to confront sentient life and and also the real question is will it have any motivation to advance like the idea is that the real fear is? That these things are going to be so hyper intelligent that they're going to be able to create a much better version of themselves fairly quickly like as soon as you give them autonomy and as soon as they're sentient you're gonna say okay Make a better one make a better one than you and then well you're going to go, well, you guys fucked up here. Why do you have all these shitty connections? And let's do it this way and let's do it that way.

And let's connect to each other. You guys are using Wi-Fi version 6. This is weak. What we need is this new form of Wi-Fi that uses the particles in the atmosphere as transistors and sends back and forth to each other through a highly charged signal. I'm like, what? How'd you fucks figure that out? And then next thing you know.

But they're not going to have ego. They're not going to have this desire for. And this is a real underlying aspect of the motivation of the human race. The desire to recreate and to reproduce like this desire for sex and this desire to, it's, it's one of the reasons why people accomplish things. They don't just accomplish things because they have this desire to see what happens when they put these two things together and what's the result they want. They want fame. They want status. They want power. They want money.

And they want all these things because they want to be more sexually attractive. That's a big part of the motivation of men. It's a weird thing. I mean, that's one of the reasons why Jeff Bezos doesn't just retire. Why doesn't Jeff Bezos, when he just became the richest man in the world, how the fuck are you going to gonna spend 90 billion dollars homes? Cash out right cash out and just chillax forever You know just walk around with a big red wig on so nobody knows who you are and just live like a king

I go wherever you want fuck all this work man You're waking up in the morning freaking out about Amazon and making sure everything gets delivered in 30 minutes or less like a fucking pizza. Instead, just live. But no, no way. Jeff Bezos has a fucking supermodel girlfriend now. He's balling every way he jumps from one gold Lamborghini to the next one. I mean, you start thinking, I want more. I want this. I want that. Well, what is the motivation to do something like that? Where's it coming from? In men, I think a lot of it comes from this need i mean i think if you could brought it down to the base level it's this weird biological need to reproduce or to spread your genes or to be to stand out as something particularly impressive you're peacocking for for females right in a lot of ways right yeah it's it's there is there he is looking i'm stud i know it is amazing to me where i'm like i dream every day about how i can retire females in a lot of ways. Right. Yeah, it's, there is. There he is. Look at him, stud.

I know. It is amazing to me where I'm like, I dream every day about how I can retire as quickly as possible. And these guys that have the means to do it don't. But there is an internal drive with guys. I mean, you don't found a company like Amazon unless there's something special about you. And I don't mean that as a derogatory thing either. Like there's something about a person. Ironic is it was originally founded to sell books sell books it just it was a very simple site have you ever seen the original amazon site

yeah you can go to the wayback machine right and look at all that yeah it's just a really simple site to sell books and i remember when amazon started selling other things i was like what are they doing that they sell books why are you selling like fucking kids toys right yeah they moved into music and then they started expanding from there. It's funny though, you brought up the robots making better versions of themselves. I mean, that's, not to be nerdy

about it, but that's exactly what happens in Battlestar. What comes back to fight the humans is not what left. Right, right, right. Because they just were like, we're not good enough. We can make ourselves better. They made those killer ones that look like people. Right, yeah, the numbers, whatever they call them. Yeah, and you can fuck them. And even the centurions look better, like are more effective, which is their soldiers.

And there's that one episode about the raiders, which is their ships. They have these autonomous ships that are alive, that are fighter ships. Yeah. And one of them is named Scar, and he keeps having these experiences, like he's really a good fighter pilot or whatever, but he's alive. And it's like, it's really good fucking show. God damn it.

Come on, Netflix, bring it back. If you guys out there, you have such a great audience that would, Oh my God, you go check it out. The numbers will spike on Netflix.

They'll see it. And then they'll be like, Oh, maybe we'll be if, if folks, if you haven't seen it, I'm telling you it is a, and I think it was sci-fi that made it right.

It was like a, it was like sci-fi is like coming to kind of like, it was a legitimate thing that they did. And it was very overlooked because people are like, well, it's on sci-fi. Well, it's Battlestar Galactica, but it was like a really well done science fiction drama. And then, yeah, Edward James Olmos was in it too. And that woman that played Starbuck, what is her name? Katie Sackhoff. Yeah, she was fucking great. Yeah, she was great. in it too and that woman uh that played starbuck what is her name katie's katie sack off yeah she

was fucking great yeah she was great there was a lot of great actors uh a lot of great interesting characters in there yeah um you know uh even characters that really made you not like them like um uh what's the not gata he's the guy the guy to the the guy to the to the right next to her uh the professor yeah like he you really hate. Yeah, you hate a lot of people. Gaius Baltar. Yeah, there was a lot of people that you hated, but God damn, it was a good show. Yeah, it was great. And a lot of these, I don't see many of these people in anything today.

I mean, obviously, James Edward Olmos is a famous actor, but otherwise, I don't see them sprinkling anywhere. Not that I watch a lot of things. Yeah, I know, man. I always wonder about that. When you see someone's in some gigantic hit show and then they kind of vanish, you know, like where, where'd you go? Yeah.

Maybe, maybe they wanted to go do something else or maybe they can't get, you know, I would assume that they all could kind of write their own, their own way. You think that, but I think that also people get pigeonholed into a character. You know, there's certain characters where you, you see someone and they're on the Sopranos and from then on they're Christopher Maltesante forever. Is that his name? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, that's who he is.

Right. Right? Forever. And it's hard to break out of that for a lot of people. Sure. The one person that managed to get out of there was the wife. I can't think of her name. Edie Falco.

Edie Falco, yeah. She was obviously big before that, too, in some things. But she did Nurse Jackie and all those kinds of things. Some people managed to break out of that. But you're right. When you were on news radio and stuff, did you find, when you went to casting or anything like that? Well, I never really acted again.

So, yeah, I guess you found your way into Fear Factor and stuff like that, but you never even tried to do anything after that. I was offered some stuff that was terrible. There were some sitcoms that just came my way and you read the scripts and they were just... The real problem was that news radio was so good. There were some sitcoms that just came my way. And you read the scripts and they were just awesome. The real problem was that news radio was so good that the curse of being with that talented cast and amazing writing and amazing production. And also nobody knew about us. When we were on the air, people that hear about news radio, most of what people heard about was from news radio's reruns.

When we went into syndication and we started playing, that's when people started really getting into news radio. News radio really found a big audience after it was canceled, which is ironic. Yeah, it's unfortunate. But it was good because the show didn't have anybody fucking with it very much. It was a weird show in that regard. It was not a hit. didn't have anybody fucking with it very much. Like we didn't, we, we, it would, it was a weird show in that regard. It was not a hit. Like that show was not a hit show while I was on the air.

I was like, my friend Lou Morton, who was one of the writers, he would wear a different t-shirt. He would come down to the table reads and a different t-shirt with a number on it based on what our rankings was in the ratings. And he came down once and it said number 88. I go, fuck dude, we're number 88. I go, fuck, dude, we're number 88. And he was like, yeah.

And I was like, oh my God, we're getting canceled. And he started thinking, fuck, why did I get that lease on that apartment? I'm doomed now. My sister Dana was a big fan of the show. I remember when it was on. Because I'm the youngest by far of all my siblings. And so I think it's a little surreal that I'm on the show actually,

uh, for her, but I, I, yeah, I think it's still on syndication. I feel like I've seen it, um,

or maybe, maybe not, maybe in like those deep channels, maybe like, maybe not. I'm trying to think some things. What does that one down there? Oh,

the space one. Like, see, that's an, see the one with me with the white jumpsuit on Jamie. See, that's a perfect example of how fucking weird they were. They,

they did these weird ones where we were on oh that's not it that's not the same one that's not the space one we did one where we were in space for some reason but it was the same it was the same fucking newsroom but the newsroom was taking place in space it's just they did a lot of weird shit they did one where we're completely underwater um we did like a titanic episode where we we literally filmed the show in waist-high water and we're on a ship and we wore like old-schooly clothes like from people that you know from the titanic days it's just extremely go to that picture down there go back to that that scroll up scroll up with a picture of the cast

and i'm wearing sunglasses over there we're at some that's uh that was when we went to the um the emmys after phil was murdered and uh he still lost in the emmys and dave foley turns to me right after they gave it to the guy from fraser. He goes, what the fuck does he have to do to win? It was such a morose, hilarious moment where me and Dave were just laughing to each other. It's just strange times, man. It's weird to go back and look at yourself, too, from whatever it was 20 years ago. It's just strange. Do you have any interest in ever doing something like this again?

No, never. No. I have no desire. It's a lot of work. This is so easy. I'm so fucking spoiled. Come down. Sit down with people like you.

Have a nice conversation. Talk. Talk about interesting things that are happening right now. It's fun. And not that that wasn't fun. It was really fun. But it's somebody else's thing right now it's fun you know um and not that that wasn't fun it was really fun but it's somebody else's thing and it's a lot of work you know like it took a lot away from uh my stand-up it took a lot away from doing other things you know when i started doing uh i started doing ufc commentary back then too in 97 it was when news radio was on the air I was actually the

interviewer the post-fight interviewer and um they would say to me they would treat me literally like I was going off to do porn they were like why are you doing this like you're gonna fly to Alabama to work for a cage fighting organization you're a fucked up person I was like this is the sport of the future I know you saw crazy you saw something a lot of people didn't, I think so. Good for you. Yeah. I don't know why, man. Well, honestly, I probably didn't really see something. I just saw what I liked and I, for whatever reason, good or bad, there's me 1997 for whatever reason good or bad i've always 100 trusted my instincts like i when i when i like something i go well i gotta go do that because it's what i've always done right it's what's led me through my life like if i went back and i looked at my my decision to get obsessed

with martial arts or my decision to quit all that and get obsessed with stand-up comedy. My decision for the, I mean, all the decisions that I've made have all been insanely impulsive, passion-driven, derided by everyone around me. Like, what? You're going to do what?

But they ultimately all worked. Well, your story is so interesting to me because you have legitimately large pieces of your audience that know you for totally different things. The guys that watch UFC and see you kind of do, you know, in that sphere. And then you have the guys that, you know, watch the show or listen to the show. And you have obviously people that love you as a stand-up comic. And then obviously the crossover between all of those. So you've managed to create like three different viable lives that all intermix.

It's pretty cool well the the ufc thing is is very strange because whether or not anybody uh agrees with my opinions on life outside of it they know that when i'm doing commentary i am doing my absolute best to honor what's happening inside the octagon and i have a deep knowledge and understanding of what's going on like this isn't like do you remember when i don't know if you remember this but dennis miller used to do monday night yeah i do remember that yeah people fucking hated yeah it was it was yeah i remember yeah they were so mad they were so mad at him and this was before i think i was doing fear fat or before i was doing um the u the UFC or maybe I was doing the post fight interviews

But I hadn't done the commentary yet either one, but I was like you can't force funny into something Where people want to watch the thing you know like you can't force funny into Like Alien the movie Alien right like it's not supposed to be funny the thing is this is a dramatic horrifying science fiction movie you don't force funny into something like that and that's what I felt like Dennis Miller's like this is just like back when sure sure sure I had a pop up on it you know he's like one line or one right or like that's his thing you know that's what he did but I never did that I always just did commentary. And if you heard me do commentary, unless something happens that's fucked up inside the Octagon and I have to go, what the fuck is this? And then I go on a rant about something, people would have no idea that I was funny at all.

Right. Well, and that's kind of nurturing those different audiences, right? But I never thought about it that way. It's not like a concerted effort to nurture anything. Right. It's just the UFC in specific is about, first of all, it's about getting out of my own way and honoring what's happening. That's like you have to kind of honor.

You've got to think when a guy, like there's a big fight this weekend, right? TJ Dillashaw is going to fight Cody Garbrandt. It's probably the biggest bantamweight fight of all time. When those two guys get into the octagon, you're dealing with the consequences of the history of an entire division, probably the two best champions in that division going at it, the two of the three best champions, Dominic Cruz being the other one, going at it in this historical matchup. You have a lot of responsibility and you have to think about it that way. It's not about you at all. Going at it in this historical matchup. You have a lot of responsibility. And you have to think about it that way.

It's not about you at all. Right. No, I think it's interesting because I feel like I've actually been challenged in that same way. Because I came up as a gaming commentator. And Dennis Miller, I think a lot of the reason people were kind of concerned about him, too, was that he would tell political jokes or bring political things in, which was unheard of at the time on Monday Night Football or on football and the NFL generally. And now it's part and parcel with the NFL. I'm a huge football fan, so I'm bearing witness to it every week. But I, as a gaming commentator, I've often found some difficulty in keeping out shades of that, shades of politics and kind of social commentary and what I did as well and

that alien that certainly alienated some people but I also think it engendered um like wow this guy's honest and just tells you exactly what he thinks as well so I was I was able to benefit from that but I also don't have the audience that that you have as well and I think keeping it structured and separated is is wise you know I mean it is sometimes but it's also sometimes wise to just be yourself and that way you never have to worry if people like you for who you are You know if you pretend to be someone else like that's like, okay I hate to bring him up again, but Cosby is one of the grossest parts about it We had it in our head that this guy was this squeaky clean

You know middle America Perfect example of this ethical moral guy.. I mean, while I was a fucking rapist, you know, when you you're around something like that, you appreciate someone who's just themselves, you know? I mean, obviously you don't appreciate him if himself is a rapist, right? Maybe a bad example, but, but what do you define yourself as? Do you think of yourself as a libertarian? Are you a Republican? No, I was a Republican. I left the party after Trump won the

nomination. You're like, enough. Well, because I can't. I couldn't stand him. I consider myself a moderate conservative. Don't you think it's interesting that Trump was a Democrat his whole life? Yes. I think he's just an opportunist, and I think the Republicans wanted to just win

um but i also think he had 17 people in that field or 16 other people in that field and he was winning uh you know primaries and caucuses with 35 of the vote so um and then he obviously i i have no problem with the electoral college but he didn't win the popular vote and so i i so to me i was like i i identify as conservative i feel like the word libertarian has been totally bastardized like the we were talking about words that don't mean anything anymore, where people almost look at libertarianism as like anarchy. And, and to me, I'm like, I'm a social libertarian. I always call myself a social libertarian. I believe that drugs should be decriminalized. I think that, you know, obviously this, the state shouldn't be really involved in litigating who's

getting married. I think if you want to have a polygamous relationship and everyone's cool with that, that's fine. All that kind of stuff. Prostitution should be legal. I think all that is true. But from a governmental standpoint, I think that the government has a place. I think that the government can do positive things that only the government can do. And so I'm also a protectionist and stuff. So I also don't believe in a lot of libertarian mantra. A lot of people call me a libertarian, but I don't, I don't, I haven't called myself that in a long time. What makes you lean towards conservatism? Uh, conservatism to me is simply, um, uh, the idea that government shouldn't be involved where it doesn't need to be involved if there's no justification for it. So, right. So if someone looked at you, they wouldn't think conservative.

You got an earring, you got tattoos, you're a young guy. You look like not a looked at you they wouldn't think conservative you got an earring you got tattoos you're a young guy yeah like not a hipster i wouldn't say a hipster but you're millennial-esque yeah i mean i am what it was funny i was listening to some guy talking about me on one of his political shows and he's like and he presents as hip and i'm like i know he's never called me yeah i present his hip and he told me i had a lot of bad ideas too but the but the uh i was like i've never no one's ever called me hip before um but yeah is that even a thing anymore hipster hipster yeah i don't know is there hip i guess i mean i guess i don't i don't even really understand exactly i you know a hipster when you see one but i still can't really tell you what it what it means you can see some of them man for sure you see them coming yeah but the big you know sometimes the

big 80s glasses and the crazy i don't know know, to each his own. But I consider myself a conservative simply because I believe that the government is too big. I think that the government doesn't need to be involved in everything it's involved in. And I think that the idea of conservatism is simply inconsistent. I think the conservative position on the what will women's right to choose is pro-choice. I don't think it's pro-life. I think that the conservative, because it means that the government's not telling you what to do. Just as the government doesn't have the right to have confiscatory taxes, just like the government doesn't have the right to take your guns. The government doesn't have the right to tell you you can't

marry a man if you're a man. And the government doesn't have a right to tell you that you can't have an abortion. So the true classic sense of conservative ideals versus what we see today, where it's a sort of a mixture of conservative philosophy, but the religious influence. Right. There's a tremendous amount of religious influence because, well, from the Reagan days, right? When Reagan sort of courted the religious right. Yeah. It actually started with like even Nixon in a way.

Nixon did as well. Yeah. It's the Southern strategy and all those kinds of things. And the idea that, you know, the map has changed. In American politics until really the Civil War, parties were coming and going constantly. Like the parties were, you know, the Federals and Anti-Federals were, by the time James Madison and James Monroe were president, those were antiquated terms. Those were only five presidents in between Madison and, you know, or Monroe and Washington. So, you know, we had this churn, the know nothings, free soil, all these kinds of things. And suddenly the Democrats come

out during antebellum America, republicanism begins in 1856. And you have this idea of these parties that just exist still to this day and simply morph constantly into these different things, making me wonder why we don't just have new parties constantly. But to your point, the reason that conservatism and liberalism aren't these aren't in these neat buckets anymore is because they're tied to these parties and they have to constantly justify themselves. The Republicans under Ulysses S. Grant and Teddy Roosevelt were the original progressives. They were the ones that wanted land to be set aside for national parks. They were the ones that freed, obviously, the slaves and, you know, not so much Teddy Roosevelt as much as Ulysses S. Grant and all these kinds of things. And suddenly everything

changes and then suddenly everything changes again and so on and so forth. And so none of these words have any definitions anymore, which is why I didn't identify with republicanism anymore because I was like, I consider myself a moderate conservative, but what's conservative about evangelicalism? What's conservative about even ideas like free trade and stuff like that? Like the idea of just having these open markets that destroy your ability to manufacture things, that drive wages down, that do all these kinds of things. There's nothing conservative about that at all. And so to me, I was like, I just have to find my own way forward. So I just consider myself independent. And I feel like I'm consistent in what I say, because I think you

can match them all up. And I don't think there's any consistency in saying, uh, you can't marry this man, uh, but don't take my gun. You can't, uh, have this polygamous relationship. Um, you know, but, uh, we should have prayer in school. It's like, it doesn't, these things don't make sense to me, you know, like you have to be consistent. Well, the religious things always seem to me to be compromises to get the support of the religious right. It seems like they move towards those directions because it sort of reinforces the power

that they have behind them because they're the only candidates that are willing to do that, right? Because the left is not willing to go down that religious road in the sense of a woman's right to choose in the sense of a lot of things that they get liberals to support them, it would be antithetical.

They would lose that support. But do you think that a guy like having a guy like Trump in office, that one of the good things about having a guy that's obviously fairly unhinged and ridiculous, is that we need to reconsider what it is to be a president. And this idea that this guy could get into this position by just sort of conning everybody and doing a lot of Make America Great Again speeches and saying a lot of crazy shit about we're going to build that wall 10 feet higher and all the nutty rhetoric that went on during the campaign. And then seeing him in office and seeing,

who knows if he's even going to get out of these four years without going to jail right i mean i don't know i mean i i think that there's i think you can glean positive and obviously negative things out of trump's administration so far right what do you glean positive i think what's positive is what we were talking about earlier that the system works that like nothing has broken broken down at all in fact like we've seen from the circuit courts all the way to the supreme court and with congress that there actually are these are legitimately um viable and independent bodies in the in the checks and balance system right that and this is why i think it's so deeply offensive to to to you know in a way to be like well fascism is alive in america and i'm like it's not it's not what fascism would have looked like from

a governmental standpoint is trump's coming in, suspending the Supreme court, dismissing Congress and trying all these crazy things that would have happened. That's what fascism looks like. What fascism doesn't look like is you passing a travel ban and the Supreme court saying no. And then you're trying to pass it again. And then the circuits courts say no, you know, and that's not what fascism looks like.'s what republicanism small our republicanism looks like Yeah And so I think we can glean positive things out of this that people got mad at me after the election because I was like the World's not ending. I actually tweeted it that night people were losing their minds. I'm like

It's gonna be fine. Well people are super emotional They were but understand what we've survived understand when we've had elections like what has happened right we had an election in survived. Understand when we've had elections, like what has happened, right? We had an election in 1860 and really even in 1856 and 1852 when things started to really start to fall apart. And we had one in 1864 during the Civil War. We had an election in 1932 during the Depression. We had an election in 1944 when we were fighting the Nazis and the Japanese at the same time. We can survive this. No one came in and said like, we don't need an election now or untoward things were happening. We still went through the rigors of our system every four years everything stood up everything was fine and that the suggestion that donald trump is going to

be the guy that the confederates didn't do it the nazis didn't do it the japanese didn't do it nothing did it donald trump's going to be the one that destroys the american republic it's absurd and so i and so i i so I take that as a positive. But what I take as a negative is we're just wasting time. It's just time wasted. It's good theater. It's entertaining. But it's not funny because they've not gotten anything done.

And I want tax cuts. I think that's great. I want some reasonable things happening that the Congress can pass with Trump to sign. But I think these are just wasted four years. And so that's not funny at all. It's just it's it's making the problems worse. A lot of wheel spinning. Exactly. We have deep problems. Twenty trillion dollars in debt, a massive deficit. We're spending six hundred billion dollars on our military. Six hundred billion dollars on our military. It's nuts. It's insane. We have to start asking ourselves questions of geopolitics.

Do we need to be in Japan anymore? Do we need to have these bases in Poland? insane we have to start asking ourselves questions of geopolitics do we need to be in japan anymore do we need to have these bases in poland do we need to you know we have a lot like but we we can't get past this buffoon that's our president in order to like start asking ourselves deep questions so we just have to punt until a normal person's in there again and i think we'll get a normal i think he'll survive his term but i think i don't think he'll run again i'm i'm of the mind that he won't run again. Really? He's already ran for re-election. He's already filed. Well, yeah, he's filing and he's raising money.

But I think that once Kellyanne Conway and these other people that engineered the election for him to begin with, after the midterms, which I think are going to be interesting, I think the midterms actually benefit in some ways the Republicans because of the map in the Senate. But I think that when it becomes clear that he cannot win. You really don't think he will win again? It's interesting because I'm good friends. I went to college with this girl who's a lobbyist in Washington. She's a Democrat and she's pretty well connected. And I had dinner with her a couple of weeks ago and she was like, not only will Trump run again,

he'll win. And this was when everything was going on and all this. And I'm like, I just don't see him subjecting himself to the possibility of losing. He won once, you know, and it reminds me of 2004 when Bush won again, but he also won the popular vote. You know, he beat Kerry and it kind of legitimized himself. I think that Trump is going to risk further illegitimizing himself by subjecting himself to, you know, not only a primary, which is going to happen, which is the death knell for an incumbent. I think ask Gerald Ford, ask Jimmy Carter how that went for them when they were primaried because they were so unpopular. And then he goes in and there's going to be, if the Democrats are smart,

they put someone up that's really good. And I also think there's going to be an independent candidate that's going to screw everything up as well. I think he has a very, very high likelihood of running again. And I think he could absolutely could win again. Do you think he'll win the primary? Because I'm not even sure he would get through the primary.

I don't know. I mean, it all depends on what happens over the next three years. Obviously, I'm in no way, shape, or form a political expert. But I think that we've got a lot of dummies in this country, and all we need is momentum. All you need is one event, some big thing to happen where Donald Trump solves a problem. Do you remember how happy people were with George Bush directly after World War, not

World War, after September 11th? Yeah. Right after September 11th. And he made a bunch of speeches and said a bunch of things and his approval rating shot. 90% or something like that. It shot up. And people were very excited. And they were like, this is the reason why we need sort of a good old boy president.

very excited and they were like this is this is the reason why we need sort of a good old boy president because when push comes to shove they know how to get the men in uniform behind it and just take care of this problem with military might and make America great again and all that kind of horseshit if something like that happens with Trump and Trump you remember how you had that one speech Jamie can you give me another one of these things, please? We had that one speech where everybody's like, oh, that was presidential. He had one presidential speech where he spoke in front of Congress and everyone was clapping and he said a bunch of things like, all you need, all he needs is one event, something that happens where he steps up and manages it with a reasonable vocabulary

and does things that people approve of, especially some sort of a catastrophic situation or any sort of a military situation. If we have to deal with North Korea, if we have to deal with something where there's like real legitimate concerns. Thanks, buddy. If that happens and he manages it, people get scared and they don't want change. I think if that happens, it's entirely likely.

If we have to deal with some sort of a catastrophe, some sort of a tragedy, some sort of an attack or an event, and Donald Trump manages it well, it's entirely likely that he could be president. Sure. There could be a moment like that. I wouldn't throw anything past him specifically because I and many other people were so wrong about his ability to win to begin with. I thought, I just didn't, I thought he would do, I kept saying he's going to do better and get more votes than people thought, but I didn't think he had a prayer of winning, but there are certain things you can look at where it's like, well, it's, it's about 50,000 votes along with three States that

he even won at all. The vote was suppressed pretty, and I'm not saying he was, it was actively suppressed. People just weren't enthusiastic about this. So people weren't out there to vote. They now people see the consequences of not voting. I don't think that, I don't think that it's like the, I guess what I'm saying is that the, the, the prognostication that like, this is the end of the world, right? Like that Donald Trump being president, we've had terrible presence, you know, like we've had really bad presence. He's the worst. Um, yeah, in some sense he's really bad presidents. But he's the worst. Yeah, in some sense. I'll say that he's the most incompetent.

We've had some presidents that were just in shitty situations that they couldn't manage. Long time ago. Yeah, I would say Hoover's probably the last one. And James Buchanan, obviously, was an awful president. In 1857, the state started to secede when he was president. And he couldn't do anything about it. So we've had really dire, serious situations under presidents that were not that were in over their heads. But there also is no footage of them.

There's no film. You have to really go back and read history to understand the consequences of their actions. We're seeing all this play out in real time. We're seeing the poverty of his vocabulary, the way he communicates in the press, the way he pats himself on the back. Like the other day he said he has one of the great memories of all time. And like he says things that are just preposterous. The one about him being an Ivy League, I went to an Ivy League school, I'm intelligent. I'm like, I don't, I'm one of the guys that says like, I don't think he's dumb at all. I don't, I don't think he's stupid.

I just think he's in over his head. Did you ever see him in the 90s talk about running for president? You ever see that video footage? Yeah. I think it was on Charlie Rose or something like that. Starting in 88, he started talking about it. Yeah. Yeah, all the way there.

And when you go back and listen to that, like, first of all, did something happen to his brain? Like, why is he so clunky now? Like, why are his sentences so poorly formed? I don't know. And why is his speech pattern so shitty now? That's what you've wonder about like old dudes They get to a certain age especially guys like him who don't exercise don't eat well right yes KFC bucket And oh, he's got a big fat gut and just right like how well are his neurons firing you know yes?

He's he's see if you can find that video of him back from you got it like watch this Listen to this. I think that if you had to do it again i'm not sure you could i went through a period of two years that was truly tough in what way well you know you have parents and you have people that adore you and you have people that for 15 years nothing went wrong and then all of sudden, the world seems to be coming to an end. I mean, it just seems to be coming. And it's just, it was just sort of an incredible experience for me.

This is him humbled, talking about going bankrupt. I'd like to hear him talk about running for president, though. My father wouldn't have been in a position to bail me out, but he certainly helped. And, you know, morally. It's the whole interview. It's like an hour long.

Oh, okay. My mother was great. I have a sister who's a federal judge. You mean to try to find that particular victim? She's very, very... You mean to find that particular person? No, no, no. Just listen to his speech pattern here. I never knew as to loyalty whether or not she'd be there or wouldn't be there. And she was there in spades.

Other people were there. But, you know, the incredible thing is you can't really tell. You can't really tell who's going to be there, who's not. I would have bet my life on certain people. I would have said, politically speaking, that somebody that you know, Andrew Stein, would have been there. And he wasn't. I would have said that other people. Wasn't there for what?

He wasn't there in terms of, for 15 years I supported Andrew Stein, supported him. I never asked him for a thing. years I supported Andrew Stein. Supported him. I never asked him for a thing. When I needed a vote on Riverside South, until the very end, when everybody else was on board, Andrew was not there. And I was really surprised at that. Now, ultimately,

he was there. But it shouldn't have been so difficult. It really shouldn't have been so difficult. But here comes one of the things they say about you, is that there are ticks within you of vindictiveness about that. And you're vindictiveness about that. And you're not going to forget that. And part of the Trump style is that at some point you're going to try to get Stein back.

Well, I don't think I'm going to try and get Stein back. I'm just disappointed. I'm disappointed in other people. And I'm not disappointed in some. I mean, there have been people that have been disappointed. My point is, he seems like a much more reasonable person. Yeah, cogent. Yeah. Yeah. Itgent like yeah. Yeah it

Could be age. Maybe he's going maybe he's seen a little senile. I have no idea also I think and this is something I've been really Battling not battling but bouncing around in my head a lot lately is that I think this This hate of him the the constant insults, the attacks on him, the constant, I mean, he blocks people on Twitter all the time. And now people are suing him to say that he can't block them on Twitter anymore. People are being very petulant about that. But all of this, like the Saturday Night Live satires of him, all the shit that they do is ramping up his mania. And it's actually bad for all of us.

You know, in that you don't get someone to change by going, hey, fucking change. You know, you're a piece of shit. Like, that doesn't make people change. It makes people aware that you hate them. And depending entirely upon their personality, whether or not they're reflective or introspective, how they react to that. or introspective, how they react to that. He seems to react to it by doubling down and by getting more aggressively defensive and more self-aggrandizing and more self-congratulatory.

He seems to get more Trump. It's almost like he's the Hulk. You ever see when they shoot the Hulk, he gets bigger? Right, right. Yeah, he definitely, he doesn't deal with, he's in a situation where someone needs to lower their rifles, right? And after he was elected, I thought for sure that smart people in his transition team, and he's not surrounded by dumb people.

He's surrounded by inexperienced political operatives, but he's not surrounded by dumb people that someone at some point would have said, like, we can now get down to the act of governing. And I'm of the mind that if he just started acting more normal, if he stopped tweeting so much, if he just spoke in a more normal in a more normal way, did normal things, people would have forgotten a lot of what happened during the campaign. And he would have been in much better shape to get legislative goals through and stuff like that.

But he he can't help himself. No. And that's why I think this destructive... I just don't know that the American people are going to want this again. I think that he has a base of 30, 35% that will be there. But isn't that what Obama had at his lowest? For... Approval ratings?

Yeah, in his second term, I think he was down to that. I think his lowest approval ratings were higher than Trump's lowest, but he's in the neighborhood. Yeah, I'm not even saying, because approval ratings are fickle. You can do all sorts of shit to manipulate those numbers. And Trump would, interestingly and rightfully, maybe say, look at the economy. It's doing great. Look at the stock market. It's doing great. But the economy was on this it's sort of deceptive right right the

economy was on an upward trend right and again it's all sort of caught that wave right there is a real belief by business people that Donald Trump is going to make things easier for them because of his nature fuck Jamie what happened newsweek had a play those motherfuckers with their ads. We have this sense that business people think that he's going to alleviate restrictions. He's going to make things easier. He's going to open up doors. And he's going to do things that some people think are very unpopular. One of the things he's done is he made it so you can bring back lion trophies now.

Again, from Africa. So if people want to go to Africa and shoot lions you can bring them over. Which is bizarre. No other president. What is this? Trump's approval rating is bad. Day 197 of his presidency

530 pegged at just 37%. No other president in history of moderate polling had an approval rate so dismal on day one 197 according to 538's tracker former president gerald ford came close to matching trump but could uh have boasted an approval rate of near 2.5 points higher it wouldn't be super surprising to have obama fall into that high 30s or low 40s in his second term because that's when they don't care anymore. Yeah.

And that's when they really start to take initiative and do certain things. I saw his approval rate. I didn't see it below like 47%. Obama? Yeah. Hmm. He must have been lower. Oh, is this? Disapproval is a little different than approval.

Oh, disapproval? That's true. Yeah. Okay. Oh, there's a disapproval rating? Yeah. Do you disapprove or do you approve? Well, yeah, because you can be neutral on that.

Right. So if there's a disapproval rating of 50%, it doesn't mean there's an approval rating of 50%. Correct. Right. Okay. Yeah. Do you disapprove or do you approve? Well, yeah, because you can be neutral on that. So if there's a disapproval rating of 50%, it doesn't mean it's an approval rating of 50%. Correct. I think, you know, it's funny because I think with there are certain things that I think people don't understand

that are unpopular that do need to be done specifically for businesses. I own a business I've owned two of them. You run your own business with all of your ventures as well. And it's very hard. And a lot of people look at, just from an administrative paperwork standpoint, taxes, all those kinds of things.

It's awful. And I think a lot of people point at business big and small and they look at them as these ways you can get blood out of a stone and extract as much money out of them as possible and all these kinds of things. And a lot of people are not sympathetic to it because, no offense, they have no idea

what they're talking about. And I've been watching The West Wing again, which I love. I love that show. Never watched it. Oh, it's fantastic. You'd probably love it. You should check it out. It's just a great show.

And one of the things they say in there is that the major difference, we are, people call us a democracy, but we're not a democracy. We're a republic. And the idea is that you send, you vote for people that go make decisions on your behalf. And sometimes those decisions are going to be unpopular, but some people do know better than others. And so there are certain things I don't necessarily judge a move based only on popularity, because what does, what does society at large know about running a business? Nothing. So you have to ask people that understand what it is to run a business and how you can make that easier.

So we can't judge things based on that only. My major concern with him though, is that he's so unpopular, even in his own party and even specifically with the house that because they are constantly up for reelection that, you know, it's, it, they haven't had one legislative like win in, in, in the entire time he's been president. Doesn't he not have all the positions fully staffed as well? Yeah, there, there are things, and that's not uncommon either. Sometimes things go for years without being staffed or whatever. I think part of the problem is-

That seems so crazy. Like, how the fuck do you take office without all the pieces in place? Because they, I, who knows? The conspiracy theories run deep on this one, but I don't think he thought he was going to win, and I'm not even sure he wanted to win. And I don't think that they had a real transition. Like, you know, I read Hillary Clinton's book, What Happened, which is an interesting book. You read the whole thing?

Yep. You okay? Yeah, I'm okay. Jesus, what happened? Well, because I'd be interested. Were you high? Part of the time, yeah. Laying in the bathtub reading.

That seems like something you would have to be high to read. But I wanted her perspective, right? Like, I think it's just interesting. What was it? Well, there's a lot of things in there. But one of the things she was talking about was that she had they were fully prepared for their transition so you're dealing which is not a surprise like she was actually talking about in october she started taking regular meetings because they assumed that she was going to win about how she was going to staff things and the decisions they

were going to make in the first 100 days and i think you just have something that's like over the top bravado right and on the other, ironically for someone with so much bravado, you have someone that just was totally not prepared to win because I don't think anyone inside except for maybe Kellyanne Conway was telling- Well, do you think that's the case or do you think he was just concentrating entirely on winning and then figure it out once he gets in there? Maybe, but you should, I mean, it could be anything. The definitive book on this has not been written yet, unfortunately.

And actually Mark Halperin was writing that book, and now he's finished with that. But, I mean, you realize that he has such a limited understanding of what even his powers are. Like, what was the guy he spoke to? Where he said, I had a conversation with the president of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Like, hey, dude, you're the president of the U.S. Virgin Islands. Yeah, he makes some stupid mistakes. He doesn't, I mean, I remember during the debates. Puerto Rico.

Yeah, that was, there's some moments like that where I'm like, you're funny. But unfortunately, the situation. Doesn't call for being funny all the time. Yeah, it's not humorous. It's not a humorous situation. And I feel like specifically with, in terms of governance, I think he just, like, I remember the debates where he didn't know what the nuclear triad was, which is like, right. The fuck do you not know what the nuclear triad is?

You know, and where he's speaking around issues that are are somewhat basic. Right. And that's someone that's running for president should know. And when you multiply that by not being a candidate, but by being the man in the office and then being inundated by the realities of the office, he was just ill prepared for it. And he part of the reason he won is because he was an outsider. And part of being an outsider is alienating everyone around you that is an insider. So he has no one, very few people that are willing to work for him that are capable, which is why I think that there's this idea, I don't know if you read about it, there's this idea that there's basically a soft coup going on in the American government right now. Have you

talked about, have you heard about this at all? That General Mattis, who's Secretary of Defense, and then General Kelly, who's the Chief of Staff, are basically running things. And that, and it's kind of a scary idea because military coups are, even if they're soft, they're not constitutional. But that people take kind of solace in this because they're like, well, people that are men of honor are kind of making sure nothing crazy happens. Right. And'm like but again this is such a waste of time we want a soft coup or is that just he has given over the reins to the military for the first time ever because most of the time the president is in charge and the military has to come to the president for

direction and for guidance and for approval. Whereas Donald Trump has kind of said, look, you people know what to do better than anybody. Do what you got to do. It could be that. I mean, yeah, it could be voluntary, but it's still its own sort of coup because that's not what you're supposed to do. It's not what you're supposed to do. Now, I trust the military. The American military is not the-

Don't you trust them better than him, though? Yes, absolutely. Well, that's what I was going to say was that typically a military coup in history is a super negative connotation. Egyptians, Libyans, whatever the case I was going to say was that typically a military coup in history is a super negative connotation. Egyptians, Libyans, whatever the case might be, it always turns out bad. But we have honors like an honor driven military, I think, in the United States, above all others, that will take care of things and hand it over if necessary. But but the interesting thing that people have been writing and talking about is like what happens if you if you want something crazy done and they just don't do it? We've never we've never had a situation like that. Like what if, what if, you know, what's going on in,

on the Korean peninsula, for instance, very dangerous situation, very dangerous situation. What if he goes to escalate it? And they're like, we're not doing that. You know, that's actually the first time that we know in recorded history where, where the military is not responding to the, to the civilian government. Um, so there's So it opens all these hypothetical interesting things to think about, but things that haven't come to pass yet. Yeah, I mean, he hasn't requested anything completely bizarre yet, but he's said some completely bizarre shit about, you know, I mean, he's essentially violated the United Nations code

or how you communicate with other governments, right? I mean he said he's threatened them What was the what a terrible horrible things fire and fury? Yeah fire and fury, which is funny It's it's a it's a well a lot of people didn't glean out of that was that he was clearly watching true Harry Truman videos Harry Truman said this pretty much the same thing before he dropped the nuclear bomb on Japan And there's videos of it where he was like a rain of fury, the likes of which the world has never seen or something like that. He says, and I'm like,

well, well you've been, someone's been tripping Truman quotes in your ear because this sounds awfully familiar to me. But he's been watching TV. But to me it's like we, it's especially precarious because yes, a nuclear armed North Korea is not ideal,

but there's no, if you read any foreign policy papers or any, any, anything out of think tanks, there's no good solution out of this. And for him to be so flippant about it, when mutually assured destruction is the one policy that's kept everyone safe for a very long time, the idea that we will destroy you if you do anything to us, and first-strike capabilities and all that kind of stuff, the fact that he's playing with that balance has major geopolitical consequences in Asia, which in turn can bring the Russians in, obviously the Chinese. Not a good situation. It's got a very comic book sensibility to it. That, you know, you go and drop some nukes on North Korea and everything's solved. Problem solved.

No, you just started a gigantic chain of events that could lead to a bomb blowing off in a major American city or more. Yeah. I mean, at the very least, you're talking about, even if you disabled North Korea's nuclear capabilities, we don't really understand how their ICBMs work. I was reading something today where they actually had a major collapse at their nuclear site of 200 people dead, like tunnels collapsed and stuff like that. Like they're actually blowing up so many bombs that they're actually weakening their own

structures and stuff like that. You have this situation where where at the very least, even if you disabled them and they couldn't retaliate, Seoul is 35 miles away from the border. You're going to talk about tens of thousands of people probably dead in a few minutes. And then you're getting us involved. Then there's a refugee crisis on the northwest border of North Korea that's funneling into China. China gets involved. Russia also shares borders and has interests in Asia, in East Asia. This isn't something that a man who doesn't understand things needs to be trifling with. You know, and it's, you know, I would love nothing more than to have North Korea taken down a peg. How do you think he communicates with the military?

I mean, first of all, how does he have the time to do everything he's doing? Because he doesn't. I mean, I'll answer it before I even ask him. No human has the time to be the president. It's one of the problems of being president. I mean, what you were talking about earlier, how you have businesses and you run things and how complicated and difficult it is. And those things are nothing. No, nothing compared to being the president. Nothing. And he's got to deal with the economic situation. He's got to deal with the military. He's got to deal with immigration. He's trying to build a fucking wall to Mexico.

He's trying to bring jobs back to America. And he's playing golf 150 times. Oh, he's played golf 72 times. Cost to taxpayer, $76,236,013, at least. What is this website? I didn't know trumpgolfcount.com oh god 72 visits to golf clubs

since inauguration which confirmed golfing on at least 33 visits god damn see our frequently asked questions for answers

to frequently asked questions and our complete data table for the list of Trump's outings. It's hilarious. No, I mean, it's the most complicated and all-encompassing jobs imaginable.

Yeah, and he's out golfing. Yeah, he's out. I mean, you've got to have rest and relaxation. I don't begrudge you that. But I wonder, again, because of the alienation that went on through the primaries and into the campaign, when you have people that are simply not willing to work for you that are very capable, um what do you do i don't know i think that that's why nothing's happening that's why when they had the health care thing you know uh kind of crop up early in the in the administration they weren't prepared when they don't have it they still have not really released

all the details of their tax plan it's like what are you guys like nothing is really happening it's just that's i'm telling you joe that's the major thing that's a bummer to me is it's just a wasted time it's just wasted time we do not have time you, Joe, that's the major thing that's a bummer to me is it's just a wasted time. It's just wasted time. We do not have time. Yeah. You know? Well, and again, I don't think anybody has enough time to actually be the president, but I wonder like what conversations he's having with the military and what, how those decisions get made. I don't really understand the process enough to know, like, say if North Korea does something stupid, what, what, what are the decisions and who, who brings those decisions to the president? Who brings the suggestions?

Who lays out the possibilities? And how does that go? I think from what I understand, the way it works is that there's a situation room in the White House. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and the National Security Advisor meet there to discuss things. The president comes in when they're ready to present him with things. They present him based on the branch that's dealing with it. What's happening, and then they give him you know What are reasonable responses or you know wait and see kind of things or whatever?

And I think that's how it goes down and then he tells you know the Joint Chiefs to to act on his on his you know Direction that's a great name for a room to the situation room With Wolf Blitzer your situation room. Yeah, how is he calling him his own to the situation room with wolf blitzer your situation room yeah how is he calling him his own show the situation i don't know he got away he's getting away with it though fucking rude i know he's getting away with the wolf blitzer is an interesting character a lot of these guys on cable news are interesting people to me especially now well they're because they're the the there's always been partisans we were talking about william f buckley and corbett al before right but there's no pretenses now about anything like like no matter who you're watching i don't i couldn't

even tell you like a person who doesn't have an ideal an open ideological bent anymore and has some sort of um some sort of it's kind of like a means to an end for them to get their information out there the way they want to there's no like walter cronkite's anymore right no completely objective journalists yeah which i would love i would love that but i don't i don't really that's why i don't really trust anything the media says anymore it's not only trump it's no like Walter Cronkite's anymore. Right. No completely objective journalists. Yeah. Which I would love. I would love that. But I don't, I don't really, that's why I don't really trust anything the media says anymore. It's not only Trump. It's just like, there's always an agenda. Yeah. There's no one who's delivering it all with a straight face. Everyone has an editorial bent to it.

And that's fine. But I wish that it, when the only places you can really go to get straight up news now are the wires. It's kind of like a little lonely, you know, go to AP and Reuters and then that's pretty much it. What about the internet? Is anybody doing a good job of disseminating objective news on the internet? I don't think so. Not anyone that I've seen.

I mean, it seems like there's an opening for that. If someone could figure it out. There is, but I don't, the thing is, is that the sad thing is, I don't know if there's even an audience for it. You know, like I think that people like you and I, that might want a more objective stance to make up your own, you know, i used to watch bbc world news on pbs in college because it was like this very outsider kind of like you know a 40 000 foot view of what was going on and i feel like we don't even really have that anymore and i feel like

there's the reason that those people don't exist is because there's no there's no money there yeah it seems like the big money's in preaching to the choir. Absolutely. And that's why what I was trying to do is like I take a lot of honor that I get fired on from every angle, which means that I'm doing something right. It's not like only the left-wing people that don't like me. It's not only the right-wing people that don't like me. It's like everybody has some problem with me, which makes me feel like maybe I'm somewhere in the middle. But I don't know if I have an agenda. I guess I do. But I have a point of view.

I'm somewhere in the middle, but I don't know if I have an agenda. I guess I do, but I have a point of view. Fox News, to me, is the most fascinating of all the news networks, because CNN seems almost like they're weighted down by rules and restrictions in a certain sense, whereas Fox News, you got Hannity, who's just fucking completely unhinged. You had Bill O'Reilly. He's trying to fuck everything that moves. I mean, didn't that guy have like nine different sexual harassment lawsuits. He settled one of them for 35 million $35,000,000 what the fuck did he do?

I can't imagine how much money he really has from his books and stuff if he can even fork that much money over you know Cuz I was him right that wasn't even Fox. I don't think I don't even think I was Riley files five million dollar defamation suit over harassment claims O'Reilly files $5 million defamation suit over harassment claims. He's trying to get some of it back. Yeah, it's... Go back to that. Let me read the text underneath it, please. Former Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Friday filed a defamation suit against former New

Jersey state legislator Michael Panter following a Facebook post on Tuesday in which Panter detailed alleged sexual harassment by O'Reilly against an unnamed ex-partner of Panter, following a Facebook post on Tuesday in which Panter detailed alleged sexual harassment by O'Reilly against an unnamed ex-partner of Panter's. Huh. Wow. Panter's claims, based on the conversations with his ex and the incidents he said he witnessed, were chilling. Panter says that his then-girlfriend's, in quotes, career was largely dependent on staying

on O'Reilly's good graces, And then O'Reilly repeatedly asked her out and made sexually charged late night phone calls to her. That's his move. He calls you up and says fucked up shit to you on the phone. What a freak. It's crazy, man. He must have been doing this, like sort of the Harvey Weinstein sort of thing.

Like he must have been doing that forever. That was his thing. He would call chicks up yeah what are you wearing i was about to call reagan got him on speed dial come over and watch me jerk off it's it's it's totally bizarre like the power money it gives you some sort of presumed veil against things it does but it's also the fox news thing it's so sexually charged like i have a whole bit about the way the men and the women dress on Fox News Because those women dress like they're going out on a hot date, and they're talking about like important issues, right?

Yeah, they're little dresses and all and they're always seem to be sitting at the edges of the table Mm-hmm, you know so you could see their legs right? Yeah, that's it was always very transparent to me I'm I my thought was always like well These are old conservative men that are watching this and you grab them any way you can, I guess. Look at that. Chaka chaka boing boing. Newt Gingrich is feeling it. Just holding on to his 70-year-old wood. Oh, I wish

I had enough power to stick it in any of these gals. Do you think Newt Gingrich gets some hot tail? He's got a young, fairly young wife. He probably did. Wasn't he a girl above in the underwear? A known Flanderer? Yeah, a little of this, a little of that. Sexiest ladies of Fox News, that's what it is.

Yeah. It's interesting. Well, it's interesting, too, that somebody needed to talk to Megyn Kelly. Like, what the fuck was she thinking, jumping ship and going over to NBC? Yeah, she's like dying over there, apparently. Well, of course she's dying. You're the ice queen. You're supposed to be shouting down the liberals, mocking everybody, and telling everybody that Santa Claus is white. That's your

thing. Yeah, she's apparently like I keep reading about her, about how people won't book on her show. No. And she's bringing everyone down. She's not stupid, but she's pressured. And when people are under pressure, they falter. Especially people who are not used to that kind of pressure.

She's used to people liking her. Well, I always thought she was brilliant on Fox, like the way she would communicate with people. She's very sharp, but she just seems so uncomfortable and under pressure and nervous and awkward. Like, did you see the thing with Will and Grace? Oh yeah. Where they had that exchange with a guy if he became gay because he liked the character that was like, what? Oh, that's right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, and she had some other awkward. There was a couple early on where there was a pretty awkward exchanges between her. I heard Jane Fonda. Jane Fonda, that's right. That's what it was. She asked Jane Fonda about getting plastic surgery. And Jane Fonda just said, are we really going to go there?

And then she went. I like to talk about this movie. This is what I like about this movie she basically just steamrolled her I feel we were talking about typecasting before right about how people and I feel like she's just she can't get away from what she was well it's also like that's a clunky stupid thing to do to try to talk about plastic surgery when someone's

promoting a movie she's just trying to get sound bites she's like it means calculated effort to get sound bites of the people who put up YouTube clips. Do you give a lot of interviews or ever give interviews? Or have you had bad experiences with that? Like talking to people? Yeah.

I'm saying you being the talk, like the sound on your own show. I don't do those anymore, man. Yeah. I don't do them. I feel like that's an incredibly ineffective way to communicate. I feel like you're doing yourself a massive disservice to talk for five minutes to someone that you don't even know. Right. I mean, if I want to talk to someone, I want to talk to them for hours.

And let's do it live so that you can't edit it. Right, right. Fuck it. We'll do it live. You know, I think that if you really want to communicate ideas, that's not the way to do it. It's the way to jump off little sound clips and sound bites and then we'll be right back. Then you go to commercial and it's like

what are we living in the 50s? This is a stupid way to do it. You guys need to revamp your whole system. This system sucks. This is a shitty way to communicate with people. Why are we even talking like this? You're sitting over there. I'm sitting over here and we're looking at each other sideways. How come you're

at a desk and I'm on a couch? Why do you have a desk? What are you writing books? What the fuck are you doing over there in that desk? The whole thing is just Jack Parr. It's Johnny Carson. It's just like this old school dumb way of conducting these interviews. You have a band

here. Well, let's let the band play us out. It's like capital S show. It's fucking dumb. I don't like it. I think the guy who does it the best is Jimmy Kimmel. I think Jimmy Fallon does it pretty good too. You know, he's got, he makes it fun. He's got a lot of like fun things that he does on it. You know, Seth Meyers does a good job of making it fun as well. And he has some really good points on his show,

but I just think ultimately, I can't barely express myself in five minutes and seven minutes, and especially in front of a crowd. You're sitting there in front of a crowd, and you want to talk about important things or funny things. Joey, I understand that you don't like the zoo. Tell us why you don't like the zoo.

Well, it's a fucking animal prison, and I think it's fucked up. Beep, beep, beep, beep. I can't even say all those words, you know? Yeah, I feel like there's a... I think that some people have a short attention span. They don't want long things or whatever. But I think that a show like yours fills a niche. It's not even a niche.

It's a huge show. But fills this need that I think is underrated that people like long form things that they like depth that they have lots of time to burn when they're driving around or at work and they're bored or they're just cooking food or whatever there is they're doing i used to have that argument in my old company where we i was like you guys are just wrong when you know make the show three or four or five minutes wrong like no it'll be as long as i want it to be right for me to get my word out and i was right about that and and i feel like so i like the long form stuff i like for things to be as long as I want it to be for me to get my word out. And I was right about that. And I feel like, so I like the long form stuff. I like for things to be as long as they need to be, you know, um, and to flesh things out

and to not corner people, to let them express them and explain themselves and stuff like that. I think it's good. That's why your show is so popular, you know? And I'm, I'm not, you know, I'm surprised that people aren't kind of more, more and more and more aping the idea of doing, doing going three four or five hours if necessary with people You know some people don't want to do it. You know I'm a uniquely blabbermouth type person I can just keep talking about things forever and also

I'm not connected to something else where I have to worry about what I say You know like I can't get fired if I'm the boss on my own boss You know so a lot of people don't they're not in that position You know and they they really worry about Putting their foot in their mouth which I've definitely done a ton of times and that that being the end of their career instead of Being what it is just a mistake right you know and I think For people to really get a sense of who you truly are You know you get a sense of who someone is over three hours

You really get a sense of who someone is over three hours, over 1,200 podcasts, whatever the fuck we've done. What are we on? 1,020 or something like that? 1,032. 1,032. Plus Fight Companions. A lot of fucking shows. People get a sense of who you are.

It's just different. It's a different kind of thing. A television show is a more polished, edited. It might be better for your attention span. I mean, if this was on TV, just regular TV, maybe it would be a bomb. You know, maybe it like uniquely fits into the weirdness that is the Internet. That's why it's been successful. And also I think it's probably been successful because there was never any attempt at it being successful.

I think it's probably been successful because it was never, there was never any attempt at it being successful. You know, it was, it was never like something where I sat out and go, if I just do this a certain way, it will be financially viable. It will be received well. And I'll use this as a vehicle to further my other endeavors. There's never any thought process like that. It's like, Hey, it'd be cool to just talk to people. Hey, you think I can get Anthony Bourdain to come over my house?

Yeah. Okay. He's sitting right there. Let's give him some beers. Let's like, hey, it'd be cool to just talk to people. Hey, you think I can get Anthony Bourdain to come over my house? Yeah, look at him. He's sitting right there. Let's give him some beers. Let's have talks. And that's where it all came from. It just came organically. Yeah, that's the beauty of it. And I think that shines through with your show and some other people. You can tell when someone's putting it on. I mean, I can. I'm sure you can.

Well, you think, you like to hope you can. I'm sure, well, Bill Cosby. Yeah, he probably would have fooled both of us. Well, you think, you like to hope you can. Yeah. I'm sure, well, Bill Cosby. Yeah, he probably would have fooled both of us. Maybe. Maybe not, though. Yeah, who knows? Maybe not.

Make me know. And he never had, that's part of the thing. Like, he might have fooled both of us if he was on The Tonight Show. But if he was sitting across the room from us for three hours just talking shit, you know, maybe not. You know? You never really got to see that. Right. You must have, I mean, over doing a thousand episodes many hundreds of guests you must you must learn uh a lot like you were saying a lot

about a person but does your opinion of the person change when you have some interesting interviews with with bigger people for instance that come on your show better or worse like after kind of poking and prodding them for a little while yeah well you i think you date a chunk right whenever you're talking to people. And you see some sort of patterns and deflection and communication and openness. And some people really impress you with their honesty or with their thoughtfulness or objectivity. Objectivity is a rare one, man. That's a particularly rare thing where so many people are so married to their ideas. And I try very hard not to be,

I'm certainly not perfect at it, but I try very hard to not be married to my ideas. And if I'm wrong, I really go out of my way to say, wow, I was definitely wrong about that. Like I thought that was this, but it's not, it's that. And this is, this is how we know. And here's the proof now. And here's the studies that have come out. Wow. Fucking that threw me for a loop. But you have to, now and here's the studies that have come out wow fucking that threw me for a loop but you have to you have to do that yeah absolutely but there are so many people that do not want to ever admit fault and because of that because you don't want to admit fault because you you don't want to admit that you might have communicated an error or you might have been misled by certain information that you thought was true but turned out to not be, it ruins the way people appreciate your words.

Because you could tell me that you believe something happened in the past because you read it, because you learned it in school, because it's always been taught that way. But then new information comes out that clearly refutes that. You've got to come in here and say, well, now I know different. But I thought this. Because I know that you really did think that. I know you were really being honest. And now I know you're being even more honest because you're saying now we know differently.

That now we know differently is fucking giant, man. It's huge. And you see it resisted. You see it resisted in academia. You see it because people have been teaching certain things for a certain amount of time and then new evidence comes to light and they don't want to consider it. You see it resisted in academia. You see it because people have been teaching certain things for a certain amount of time and then new evidence comes to light and they don't want to consider it. You see it resisted. Like I had a conversation once on the radio with this lady who called up.

And she was telling me that she was a paleontologist. Who studies monkeys? A biologist? Would it be a biologist? Yeah, like some sort of... Some sort of a biologist would it be a biologist yeah like some sort of some sort of a biologist yeah and she said you know i have my phd because i was talking about the uh bondo ape which is a a very particularly large species in the congo and i was going over all these different things about this ape and it was on the opie and anth show. And this lady called up and she goes,

you are just talking about pseudoscience and cryptozoology. You don't know what you're talking about. And I go, no, I'm reciting an article that was in National Geographic. This is all new information. And I go, you know, she said she was a professor. And I go, when did you study? When did you learn? I go, how much time do you spend paying attention to the newest,

latest information? Because clearly you're wrong. They have skulls. They have videos of these animals. They have photographs of them. They have camera trap photos. They have DNA on them. They have a crest in their head like a gorilla. And when I get obsessed with things, I have an ability to rattle off information. I started to rattle off information to this lady. And she never says, no, you're wrong. I mean, she never says, well, I guess I was wrong. I'm going on old information. She starts laughing and mocking me.

I go, are you better than these scientists that are in National Geographic that are putting out these photographs that are spending years in the Congo? Carl Amon, the Swiss wildlife photographer, that spent years in the Congo photographing these creatures. They nest on the ground like gorillas. They're a particularly large species of chimpanzee. So I started rattling off information. And the lady's like, you don't know what you're talking about. I go, you're not fucking saying anything. You're not saying anything because you know you don't have the latest information.

That kind of shit drives me nuts. When someone doesn't really know but pretends they know and is presented with information and isn't willing to accept it. You know, you gotta be willing to accept information. This lady called up to try to like, to puff out her chest. Like,

she has the information. Like, she's a professor. Like, she knows. But I she's a, she's a professor. Like she knows, but I'm not saying I'm not in the woods studying. I'm reading all these fucking biologists who are there. This is amazing. New discovery. I mean, there's a fucking giant chimp that lives in the Congo.

There's photos of this thing walking around on two legs. It's six feet tall. I mean, there's a huge chimpanzee. It's far bigger than any other chimps They have two different types of chimps. They have a treat they call them tree beaters and and ground something I forget the the Term they use but these larger chimps literally sleep on the ground. They don't give a fuck

Nothing comes near them and though. Oh They come what they call them, leopard eaters? But they have video of them, one of them literally eating a leopard. And they don't know if it killed it. They don't know if it found it dead. But like if these motherfuckers can kill leopards, but if you think about how strong a regular chimpanzee is, you know, a regular 150-pound chimpanzee is supposed to be as strong as a 500 pound man

Lion killers, that's what they call them These these are huge chimpanzees see if you can pull up a photograph of some of these fuckers but they have these one that these two guys shot at a At an airport at a small airport in the Congo and there's these two guys standing holding this carcass the right hand side third down Far right hand side third down far right hand side third down third down. That's it. Bam. That's it. Go large on that Look at the size of that fucking thing That's a chimp It looks like a goddamn boy. Look at the size of his balls. I

Mean that is a fucking huge chimpanzee. That's one that they found that they'd shot. They took photographs of. But if you go above that photo, Jamie, go above that photo to the upper right-hand corner, that's one that they caught walking around on a camera chap. They're just much, much bigger than regular chimpanzees. That's wild.

Yeah, it's incredible. No pun intended. But the point was, this is just, it was an incidence of someone just deciding that they had all the information and that they wanted to just call bullshit on something that they really weren't up to date on it yet. Yeah, I think pride gets in the way a lot of that. I try my hardest, and it actually kind of gets to me when my audience or people that watch my stuff say like oh colin didn't admit he was wrong about this this or this i'm like i don't know that you're

paying very close attention because i actually take a lot of pride in being wrong about things sometimes and telling you that i'm wrong so you know so you're not going out into the world with misinformation whether it was about video games back in the day whether it's about politics or history i get i get when you're rattling things off like you were saying like when you're rattling things off sometimes you get things mixed up and confused for sure i fuck things up like i don't even realize it while i'm saying it then i'm saying the wrong word or yeah someone's name wrong it happens and and i i think that it's i think it's essential to to do those kinds of things and it it's a it represents an academic stagnance when you don't want to do that i i

certainly um even though i consider myself, again, a moderate conservative, I certainly have been playing around intentionally with really challenging ideas lately to try to, you know, specifically with the universal basic income and Medicare for all, where I'm like, I'm fundamentally, principally probably against these things. But if you can show me how they work, if I can read some data, we can get some test cases. I know they're testing UBI in places like Sweden. Then I want to see what it's all about because this is so uncomfortable. This is so out of whack for me that I want to know how it works.

I'm with you on that one, by the way. Yeah, that's an interesting one. And I believe they're testing it in some place in the United States. Are they? Yeah. I think somewhere in the United States is going to test universal basic income. See if we can find that. But this is fairly recent, like over the last few days.

It's just fascinating to kind of get out of your... I've been dealing with this idea of rights versus privileges, and how we call a lot of things rights, but they're not rights. There's no right to medical care. There's no right to that. But the idea of... And I hate when people are like, it's a right to... Basic human right. Yeah, it's not. You have a right to... You're inalienable rights of life and I hate when people are like, it's a right to, you're not. Basic human right.

Yeah, it's not. You have a right to, you're inalienable rights of life and liberty and stuff like that. Those are rights. You don't have a right to force someone to do something for you. Exactly. Which is essentially what you're forcing a doctor to work on you if you don't have the money to pay for it. Exactly. But I think as a culture, we should probably put that in terms of like, what are we going to do for our citizens?

Well, we're definitely going to provide fire protection. We're definitely going to provide police. We should definitely provide medical, too. I just think it should be, there should be a safety net to keep people healthy if they don't have money. Sure. I think that it's a totally valid thing to say. Oh, what do we have here? Here it is.

Where is this? They've randomly selected 3,000 individuals across two U.S. states to participate in the study. 1,000 receive $1,000 per month for up to five years, and 2,000 will receive $50 per month. Hmm. What is that? It's the control for the experiment. To serve as a control group for comparison. With the $50 per month, it's not going to help shit.

But the $1,000 per month, that gets interesting. Because then you're not giving anybody enough where they can fuck off. Because $250 is really not even going to pay for rent and food. But it'll help you, give you a little bit of a boost. Yeah, it could be good for the economy. I think that there's a lot of worry about inflation. Because you're basically freeing up a ton of money that would otherwise be in banks or not circulating around the market, so it's going to make your dollar less valuable.

I think there's a lot of complicated things economically that people have to deal with with that. But I feel like, you know, with what you were talking about with healthcare, I think it's an interesting point because we talk too much about rights. And we have these rights. You have a right to not be searched without a warrant.

You have a right to due process. It's free speech. Those are rights, right, that are written in the Bill of rights in the constitution but but privileges a 21st century modern progressive wealthy society what can your privileges of being part of that society be and i like when people talk about it in that sense and be like medical care is a part of is the privilege of being part of a society like this i'm like okay so let's frame the art let's frame the arguments differently because i think it's a more compelling way to say

we've achieved so much. We're not in the dark ages anymore. We're not even in the 18th or 19th centuries anymore. Now we have roads, we have police and fire, we have all these things. What's to stop us from having the privilege of having this as well? And I think it's just, just frame it that way

and you'll have way more people on board. And it's a very compelling argument for why we shouldn't spend $800 billion on the military. Like maybe if you had some of that money freed up, you could take care of a lot of things at home. You could. Medical care, Medicare for all is expensive. It's extremely expensive. You could actually,

as far as I understand, you could I think tax, or I'm sorry, you could remove military spending completely and pay for only like a fourth of it. So it's a really radically... Really? Yeah, I think... So $800 billion a year would only pay for a fourth?

I think it's $600 billion a year of military spending right now, but I think it's... Jamie, do you mind? I hate to ask you to do something, but do you mind looking to see how much the Medicare for All thing costs? I think it's something like $1.5 trillion a year or something like that, or $2 trillion a year or something like that. Holy shit. And so these are things... But you have to have rational conversations.

That's why I have no respect for Bernie Sanders because you can just throw things out there. Bernie Sanders. Yeah, $1.4 trillion. So you could literally – Sanders' last Medicare for all plan cost nearly $1.4 trillion. So I'm a little off. So it's a little less than half. So you could –

He's a character. Well, it's easy to go around promising things to people Like the funny thing is Like free college right Nothing's free but free college it's like well Your 401k is going to get taxed for that If you're a middle class family And you're making transactions

Wall street transactions broker transactions With your 401k you're going to pay that tax It's easy to say medicare for all by raising taxes But everyone's taxes go up 2.2% Well I think there's also a real Concern with kids fucking off with that tax. It's easy to say Medicare for all by raising taxes, but everyone's taxes go up 2.2%. I think there's also a real concern with kids fucking off with that education. If an education costs...

What is a per year cost of a very good university today? Not even like an Ivy League university. Probably $20,000, $25,000 a year. That's a lot of money. If you're just giving that to some kid and they half ask their education and they don't get kicked out of school and it's free, like, well, hmm. Maybe that's not the best use of money.

But if someone can demonstrate a real desire to learn and a real desire to achieve and to discipline themselves and to following through with the courses and doing the work, following through with the courses and doing the work, you maybe then maybe give someone a semester for free and prove by their performance in that semester, you know, by their effort, their performance, how much work they've done that, you know, OK, you it's very likely that you can get through four years of this university and get out with a bachelor's degree, maybe even move on and continue your education or become a really valuable member of our society and benefit our economy and benefit our civilization because of what you're learning here. So making an investment in you. I mean, I think that's a valuable thing for our country, right? Have more educated, less ignorant people. Have less losers, right?

more educated, less ignorant people have less losers, right? Yeah, I think to me, and I say this, I guess, from a place of some privilege, because I went to college, I went to a great college, and I'm proud of that. But at the same time, I feel like it's too, why don't we emphasize trade schools anymore? Why don't we emphasize that you don't have to go to college? You can be an entrepreneur, you can start a business. I feel like it's often too much focused on an academic path. And I'm like, that's good for some people. But I would argue that there's probably too many people going to college,

especially for things that we were talking about earlier on that don't really do anything for you. If you have a chemistry degree or a physics degree or a math degree, you're going to be great. If you have a history degree like I did, you have to be very lucky like I was. Or you might have some hard times. Or you find something else to do. Exactly.

You'll benefit just from the discipline that you learned while you were in school. Right, exactly. It's proof that you can accomplish something. But I wish that there was more drive to say, we need plumbers. We need electricians. We need... And you know what? Two things.

Some of the stupidest people I've ever met went to college. Some of the smartest people I've ever met didn't go to college. And some of the people that I know that are doing the best economically are in trades. And they don't have a degree. They're electricians. They build houses. They do those kinds of things. Auto repair.

Exactly. These are essential. And these things aren't going away either. So I feel like, you know, I look at someone like a mechanic. I look at a plumber or something like that. I'm like, man, that's really impressive. Because I don't know what the hell you're doing, you know, but you, you, you know, how to wire this house, you know, how to, to lay the plumbing, you know, how to do all these kinds

of things. That's a vital service. And so exactly. So I feel like there's almost this, like, got to go to college, got to go to college. I'm like, no, you don't. And, and the other thing that I think is really relevant is that I paid for my college and now suddenly, and I'm paying loans out the ass for my college degree still. And I have to now pay for someone else's college. Like, and that I did what I had to do. And I don't really feel like it's fair that I had to owe 60 or $70,000 in loans that I've paid back, but someone, and then I have to pay taxes, extra taxes for someone else to go to college as well. It kind of frustrates me. And specifically because the only reason college is so expensive

is because the government is involved in the loans. Right. You know? Subsidizing. Yeah, they subsidize the loans. Anyone can get a loan. If you were in a college and you knew that anyone that came to you could just go get a Stafford loan, right, you would jack prices up in two seconds.

Of course you would. Make the loans more rare and even raise interest rates on those loans and watch what happens to the cost of college It will plummet because they can't justify the cost anymore The government made this problem now the government trying to and this is what I'm talking about the government's now trying to solve a problem It Matt it totally manufactured on its own. When did that all begin? I don't know I think I don't know for sure I think in the 70s it began and then I think it really got out of control in the 90s, you know

Because I went to Northeastern and my mom actually think it really got out of control in the 90s you know because i went to northeastern and my mom actually uh worked there so i didn't even pay tuition i only paid room and board tuition at northeastern is like 45 000 or something a year you know now i know people that went to college that had to pay out have those loans strapped to them you have two kids in college holy shit it's incredible like holy shit and dude i don't i don't know what i was you know when you're 17 or 18 years old i remember my dad uh my dad's uh my dad's a new york city firefighter very you know serious guy right and i remember him sitting down and being like i'm taking these loans out for you i'm co-signing on them and him kind of looking at me in the eye and being like you will not default on these loans

you know like he's like i know you don't understand anything ferocious yeah like being like because you're 17 or 18 years old being like i don't know't know what the fuck it's going. I'm going to college I'm gonna you know I'm gonna you know do whatever I'm gonna do look at that We yeah, so it really got out of control What is that 80s yeah, so like in the mid early to mid 80s is when it got out of control And then the 90s the spike and separation now look at well. It goes to 2009 but in 2009 It's just through the fucking room It's just so the government the government did this and now they're trying to solve now Bernie Sanders is running around trying to solve the problem it's like, Bernie Sanders!

And speaking of age and stuff like the Democrat, he's absolutely going to try to run again. I think so. He's so old. He'll be 80. His head is leaning forward like someone's got to teach him to stand up straight. Yeah, he's got, he's just got that bookish kind of, you know. But he's got this thing going on where his head is like

slowly making its way down to his sternum. You know, like he's collapsing like an accordion. Like Bernie, this is really bad for you. That's the thing. That's my look. He would have won, I think, if he went up against Trump. I think he would have done much better than Hillary. It's a brand of populism that would have been.

So I think something like 10% of people that voted for him in the primary voted for Trump. So that's a compelling number that suggests what you say is right. But my whole, the X factor in this is the oppo research. And you got a little bit of taste of what research? Oppo opposition research that they never used on Bernie Sanders because they didn't have to. And the Republicans have all sorts of stuff on him. And it's not even,

it's not, he went, you know, like little things that resonate with older people, right? So like they went, him and Jane Sanders went on their honeymoon to the Soviet Union. It's weird. That's really weird, right? Fucking Russians. People that are 20 or 25 don't care about that. People that are 40, 45, 50 care a lot about that, right?

Yeah. Because he went to a communist country to explore the great benefits of the fucking red flag. Yeah. Of which there are none. Just like Lee Harvey Oswald. Well, they have cool domes in their building. Very unique buildings in Moscow. Good architecture.

I keep asking people, though, because you have these crazy people on Twitter and stuff that have the hammer and sickle and their names and stuff like that. And I'm like, can anyone tell me one thing that the Soviet Union gave us, gave the world? Just one thing that anyone cares about. Yeah. That's Russian. That's not even Soviet, right? Oh, right.

Tetris came from the Soviet Union. Did it? The game? Yeah. That might be the most, right? Oh, right. Tetris came from the Soviet Union. Did it? The game? Yeah, that might be the most important thing. Good God, damn game. Communism is so morally and intellectually bankrupt. It's incredible to me that anyone would even argue it. You know, it's just as morally and intellectually bankrupt as the far right.

But it seems to be the thing that people go to when they look at some sort of a viable alternative without looking into it deeply. Marxism, you know, and that this idea of socialism is going to be a good thing because everybody's going to contribute and capitalism is what's wrong with the world. I'm like, ooh. And whenever people, they always like to hit up this fucking thing of, you know, the economic inequality, economic inequality, inequality of income, inequality of money. But what people don't seem to get is that when you have true freedom, you're absolutely going to have inequality. Because if you have the true freedom to do whatever you want, some people aren't going to do

much. And some people are going to do a lot. There's going to be some Jeff Bezos types characters out there who just want to fucking go gangbusters and own half the country and then there's gonna be people that would really rather just work a little bit and then go play fucking disc golf and Smoke pot and listen to records and hang out with their friends and they'd be very happy if just they just made an income That was sustainable. There's a fucking host of different personalities. There's some people that really enjoy doing art and they like to go down to a fucking farmer's market and set up shop and sell their artwork. And that's fine for them. That's what they want to do. That's how they want to live their life. And maybe their dad was a fucking doctor who died at 55 of a heart

attack because he was working too hard. Or who knows what it is that causes someone to have the ambition or the desires that they have. But when you have true freedom to pursue whatever you want, that literally breeds inequality because there are going to be people that decide to do more. And there's going to be people, and whether it's an egalitarian version of this, whether these people are altruistic in their approach, whether they donate an incredible amount to charity, or whether or not they keep it all to themselves. If you have real freedom, like that doesn't say you have to donate X amount of your money to this and Y amount of your money to that. If you just give people freedom, you're going to have inequality because people are

unequal in their efforts. They're unequal in their desires. people are in equal in their efforts. They're in equal in their desires. They're in equal in their focus. They're in equal in their discipline. You're, and they're in equal in their capabilities. Yep. That's the major thing, right? That people don't want to talk about anymore. I often, I asked, it's kind of a rough thing to say, but I've had conversations with people where I'm like, when did people stop saying like, wow, that kid's just dumb. It's like, you know what I mean? Like, like, like I remember even growing up in the 80s and early 90s where like, it's like some dumb, you know, like there's nothing wrong with them. They don't, you know, they don't have a disability or anything like that, but it's just like, this kid

doesn't really have the capability of going, he's going to do something else with his life. Now it's like, everyone can do anything at any given time. And I'm like, no, you work, you have some innate quality to you, but you work, you study, you toil, you do those kinds of things. Not everything is delivered on a platter to everyone. And I almost resent that, you know, because some people really work very hard and some people don't work hard at all. And then like you're saying, the outcome should be equal. I don't think so.

There's some people that are tall. There's some people that are short and there's some people that have brains that are made out of dog shit. And there's not much you can do about that. There is absolutely a broad spectrum of human intelligence, of awareness. And, you know, how much of that is the environment they grew up in? How much of that is their education? How much of that is their raw genetics?

Who knows? And there's environmental factors that fuck people up, right? Like, there's real arguments that living around toxic waste is very damaging to your IQ. You know, there's a lot going on with human beings, and it's not fair. But here, when you play cards, if you get four aces and I get one, two, and a bunch of fucking random numbers, that's not fair either. But I have to figure out a way to win with this hand or get by. And if it truly is a competition and you've got a shitty hand, you've got to do your best. Do your best with the hand you've got.

If you are a dwarf and you want to be a basketball player, you're going to have to let that go. You can't do that. You know what else you can't do? You can't fly. You can't breathe underwater. You can't see through walls. You can't run a million miles an hour. Okay, those are the things you can't do.

So let's figure out what you can do and find something that you can be passionate about. Right. And I think capitalism as an economic system is the only one that accommodates all this. Yes. Right? Exactly. It's such a trite thing, but it's the least imperfect of all the systems. Right?

Right. There's nothing positive about something like communism to me. I think whenever I see that hammer and sickle, and I don't mean this to be mean, whenever I see that hammer and sickle on a person's name, I'm like, I'm not really dealing with someone with a full deck, I don't think. I don't know how you can possibly read Marx and do all these kinds of things,

jump deep into history, look at the Soviet Union, look at North Korea, look at Cuba, look at all of the failure that's happened all around you. Then look at the fact that everyone is benefiting from capitalism in some way. They're just doing it wrong. Yeah, it's not real communism. It's not real socialism. It's not real socialism.

That's always the answer. I mean, real capitalism, the worst aspects of capitalism are the diminishing appreciation for the human being and the fact that money is a power over everything and that people just acquire material goods and all those things are true. But they're true at the farthest end of the spectrum of good to bad, right? The furthest end of like what is the damage that capitalism can do? Well, you can devalue human life to the point where money becomes more powerful than anything and people can consolidate this money and build these oligarchical family structures. And there's a lot of issues that can happen, but that can happen with anything

where people have leverage and power over other people. It doesn't necessarily mean they have to happen that way. There's got to be some evidence and some instances of altruistic capitalism, like Bill Gates, for instance. That guy does a lot of really good things. And the Bill Gates Foundation that he has started up, I mean, god damn, he's donated a shitload of money to schools.

Half of his money will go to charity. I mean, that's a good example. Another good example is Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett is, I believe, donating almost all of his money to charities. I mean, and these are guys that are wildly successful. I mean, you're talking billions and billions of dollars in wealth attained entirely through capitalism. So you have your bad examples, but you also have good examples. I mean, what Bill Gates has done, I mean,

really incredibly impressive when you stop and think about it. Yeah. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, whatever they call it, is like super influential. I look at it in the sense of, yes, there are negatives about all of these things like you were saying, but I also feel like, are you eating today in half the world? Because that's because of capitalism. Are you, you know, like capitalism, the industrial revolution that got, you know, that got everything going in the last 150 years is all because of the necessity of the chase of the dollar or the pound or whatever the case might be. Like the, the chase for money is not in itself a negative thing. It's, it's what you're saying, what you do with it and the ramifications of what we get because of money,

you know, is an amazing thing. I often talk about, um, whether it's good or bad is, you know, when Apple won, the Apple one computer was being made in the mid seventies. Um, you know, Steve Wozniak and Steve jobs used to go to this thing called Homebrew Computer Club in Berkeley. And people would go there. There was this real spirit in the 70s amongst tinkerers that they would share their stuff with each other,

that they would be like, this is how I did this. This is how I programmed this very rudimentary punch card machine. And they were going with Apple I to this thing. And Wozniak had really wanted to give it away, to be like, this revolutionary computer that we are sitting on here,

we're just going to give you the tools to make your own. Steve Jobs was the one that said, we have something here that can become more ubiquitous if we make it into a product that we sell. As opposed to something that stays within the confines of the Berkeley homebrew computer club where 15 people will enjoy it. We can market

this bad boy. And so it takes sometimes a person. The number, it costs. Yeah. $666.66. 4K of RAM, rather. It's amazing. 4K.

That's amazing. So you know what I'm saying? It takes sometimes for things to proliferate, sometimes for things to do good. There has to be a profit motive. And sometimes you need a Steve Jobs who didn't have the intellect that Wozniak had on a programming perspective But saw products for what they were went into Xerox saw the GUI saw the mouse saw the Ethernet cable

Knew what to do with these different things. That's the beauty of capitalism to me, you know Yeah, that's one incentive for him to pursue these goals exactly and we all benefit Look at yeah, look at our smartphones ten years ago that we'd had no idea what these things were gonna become right and look at the Economy they opened up ten years ago. we had no idea what these things were going to become. And look at the economy they opened up. Ten years ago, you were psyched if your phone flipped open. Yeah, you could do that thing with the wrist where it opened without you. Yeah, Kirk out, slap it shut. Do you remember the Matrix phone when it came out?

Like it shot open and no one could ever get one. And now I feel like a lot of people wanted one. Do you remember that at all? What's a Matrix phone? When the Matrix came out, the first one, they all had a cell phone. It was made by Sony. And the bottom of it shot out instead of flipping open. You hit a little button and it checked it out.

Come on. Really? It never was released for consumer use. Why not? Capitalism wasn't ready. Late capitalism wasn't ready for that phone. Bernie Sanders released it for free for everybody. I think he's a unique character because he's an anti-establishment character.

He's interesting. Well, that goes back to the point you were making. That's why he came up is because you said he could maybe be Trump. I think the shared populist message could be a reason why that happened. A version of it might have finally came out, I guess. How does it work? I'm confused. This shot out and it just covered up the thing instead of flipping open.

Oh, like you press a button and it slides down? Yeah, I mean, when they were running and Trinity was running, she would just do it, and they were like, we need an operator. Oh, that's hilarious. Isn't it crazy that we thought that was the shit? It's not even that long ago. That's what's so funny about it. Yeah. Well, I had a BlackBerry.

I thought it was a wizard. Those things were super technological, too. I had a BlackBerry.berry is that it it slides open oh it has a screen on the bottom isn't that funny they never thought you would ever be able to type on a screen like that's just ridiculous get the fuck out of here with that you need buttons man i had one of them bitches i had one of those with the keyboard i love that thing it's great then send emails i never did but you but you could. But you could. You could if you wanted to. I send half

my emails on my phone now. I love thinking about the iPhone and just the smartphone revolution and then all of the businesses that are totally based on that thing now. Uber, Lyft, all these companies that only exist because that product existed, only

because someone saw the capital investment necessary to proliferate this thing. And I think it's amazing. It is. It is. Communism doesn't give you that. Exactly. Communism gives you famine. Capitalism is responsible for this intense competition in these smartphones now, where

there are legitimate contenders to Apple now. Like Apple just released the iPhone X or the X, whatever the fuck they're going to call it. But you have legitimate contenders in the Samsung Galaxy Note 8, the Galaxy S8, and the Google Pixel 2 XL. You have like these three phones that a lot of people compare favorably to the iPhone. They're going back and forth with this. And it's like, it's a neck and neck race.

Now it's a matter of whether or not the integration with the operating system is important to you, because a lot of people enjoy using a Mac and an Apple computer. And they want to have the phone seamlessly integrate with the computer. And then a lot of other people use Windows, and they prefer to use an Android phone because of that. So you're dealing with massive competition now, which is fueling Apple to innovate, fueling Samsung to innovate. I mean, right now it's just phones and who knows whether or not it's really important to us, but that could lead to bigger and better things. No one saw the smartphone coming and that's really revolutionized the way

we exchange information, the way we gather information. Google's new Pixel XL, you squeeze the side and ask it a question. Like, that's how quick the assistant comes in. Yeah, that's wild. So you squeeze the side and you say, tell me who Colin Moriarty is. Bam. It shows you instantaneously. He's a sexist. He's a pig.

He made a joke and he should die. What is that, Jamie? Foldable screens that are headed out probably in the next couple of years. That's the next thing. What the fuck, man? It's crazy. It's a beautiful thing. It's going to be like that slap wrist thing where you're talking about with the fucking tape measures.

And as you know, Korean company LG is doing this for altruistic reasons. They're not doing it to make any money. They don't see any money in the foldable screen. They're doing it to support Bernie Sanders. Yeah, he's going to support his neck with one of those phones. He's going to get one of them bitches, just shove it under to keep his head above. When I get a phone call, I look down. I think we're in an incredible time when it comes to this competition, though.

And you're right. That only exists if people have profit. Yep. It only exists if people have some sort of a, there's competition and there's an incentive and, you know, there's a battle going on between these. And I think that's the forefront of it because with laptops, I mean, there's competition, but boy, it's kind of stagnant. You know, it's like, okay, well, how much processing power do you need if you're not

rendering video games, if you're not making things, if you're not making movies, if you're a person that's making CGI or films or something like that, then it makes sense. You could probably use the faster processors and all the power and stuff like that. But really, the competition is in video games and in video and apps and phones and the images these phones can create. And all of them now have the ability to do portrait mode where they blur the background and bring you

into the foreground. And then the Google Pixel XL has some incredible AI for altering images and making them look cooler. It's really amazing stuff, man. Yeah, it's awesome. And I feel like a lot of the cool stuff that we even dwell on from back in the day, everything had a profit motive. Especially, we were talking about the age of exploration. They didn't want to come here. europeans were just looking for a way to shorten their trade route to asia they didn't care about what was in between it was actually super inconvenient that we were here you know like there was always money at the end of the tunnel for like good things that's why that's what the space rate that why the space race is so

unique because it had no you know like uh everything from like mercury and gemini through the apollo missions had like no real reason to exist other than that we wanted to best the communists there was no financial reason to do it which is why it's so unique and and I would even argue to this day like there's technology that NASA's created that we find in in our everyday lives but it's like one of those unique places where that's not really true but there's also argument right that subsistence living probably makes healthier happier people and then all this chasing money and chasing innovation and chasing technological superiority just leaves us with this hollow feeling where it doesn't do you any good. Like you're seeing a lot of these people that – there was this guy that we were talking about recently,

the guy who – he coded Facebook likes and now he – your computer is trying to hijack your brain, I think is the name of the article. Your computer is trying to hijack your brain. I think is the name of the article. Your smartphone is trying to hijack your brain. And what he was essentially saying is that your brain is not designed to deal with the reward system that's involved in checking likes on Facebook or Instagram or stuff like that. And that these things, these, this constant, And that these things, this constant, like yesterday we were talking about this. We were talking about, I had Jamie Kilstein on. He was talking about checking his phone, like constantly checking Twitter on his phone and arguing back and forth with people, seeing who's supporting him and who's not. And that it becomes this like massive addictive thing. And how unhealthy that is, you know?

And how unhealthy that is, you know? It's like there's a lot of things about this technological world that we live in that maybe aren't sustainable or aren't compatible with being a biological human being. I agree. I hate to mention it again, but there's an episode of Black Mirror where there's this one person in this cast where they refuse to get this augment that everyone else has. I won't ruin it for you anymore. And it makes them this unique thing because they refuse to partake in the new normal of interconnectivity. And, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's, again, it goes back to the beauty of the system that there is choice. Like you were saying the Bohemian painter that just wants to make $15,000 a year selling some art. That's the beauty of choice. Yeah, exactly. And, and as long as the system gives you that choice to succeed or

fail and no one else is responsible for you, like in, in, in base ways. And I'm not saying we're not responsible to bring you to the hospital if you're sick. I'm not saying any of that, but we're not responsible to make decisions for you. We're not responsible to line your pockets with money you did not earn. Then that's fine with me. That's also one of the awful things about communism that people very rarely discuss. You're assigned a job. You're assigned what you do if you live in Cuba.

I mean, there's very little wiggle room as to what you can and can't do if you were living in the communist Soviet Union. There's very little – you don't have a whole lot of decision-making capabilities. And that's just not how human beings operate at their best. We operate at our best when we're free. You are uniquely you. You're not me. I'm not you. I don't know how your brain works.

And there's people out there like – I don't know. Here's an example, Beck, that are so weird and so different from me. But he's capable of creating weird fucking funky music because he's so different, because he's so interesting. Right. Like his form of, Marilyn Manson, his form of creativity just doesn't work. My brain doesn't make that. You know, like a tomato tree doesn't make mangoes, you know, and we're, we're, are the freedom to express yourself in your own unique way and the freedom to live your life with your own unique direction. That's just one of the greatest things about being an American is that we have more freedom in that regard than anyone that's ever lived because we have more access to things.

We have more access to information and we have more freedom to choose to express yourself, to speak out. from that, including the limiting free speech on campuses is fucking dangerous in that regard because you think you're helping, but you're limiting freedom. You're limiting freedom because it doesn't jive with what's going on in your head. And that's just not the way it's supposed to work. Yeah, absolutely. I agree with you. I find what's happening on college campuses, I find the stymieing of free speech, this idea, this very primitive idea that we are, this primitive notion of almost thought policing as being super unsavory because you have to protect, you have to, a society needs to be dedicated to protecting its bad elements as long as those elements aren't illegal, right?

So like you don't want to protect the person who is murdering someone, but you might want to protect someone who, you might want to protect the rights of someone who is espousing really racist shit because you, you, that's why these protections exist is for their freedom to express those bad ideas as long as they don't play out you don't have to agree with them you and i don't agree with those ideas but you give them oxygen and power when you try to limit them i i i guarantee you that because of the the the throwing around of the pejorative nazism and or as a pejorative nazism and fascism and kind of giving these people screen time, Richard Spencer and all these guys, I guarantee you that they've gained adherence and not lost

because they're gaining more and more oxygen because you're giving it to them. By trying to stymie them, you're bringing attention to them. I said over and over again with Milo Yiannopoulos going to Berkeley earlier this year and then not being allowed to speak and everyone losing their minds. You just gained Milo Yiannopoulos a bunch of people that had no idea who he was. The thing that would have hurt him the most is going to a room that was empty, that no one was there to speak, but he has the right to go to that room and speak nonetheless. Well, what's interesting is what's kind of silenced him is his own words. I mean, what fucked him up is his own conversations,

his ability to freely speak about pedophilia. Right. It goes back to the give the person enough rope and they'll do the job for you. You know, like you don't have to, you know, you don't have to do it. You don't have to force a square peg into a round hole. I think in a lot of ways, Milo is a provocateur. And what he's trying to do is trying to push buttons and get attention and doing all those things. But in literally doing that and just ranting and raving,

he tripped over his own dick. The publishing company removes the book. He leaves Breitbart. This is essentially where all this came from. I think what people kind of conflate is there's room and necessity for consequences for your actions. No one's saying that there's no consequences for your actions. But these consequences seem to be taking place in the marketplace of free ideas.

Right. You can't, I feel like people have tried to force consequences on me, for instance, right? They tried to force a consequence that didn't work out the way that they wanted it to, but to try to make a point, right? To try to illustrate a point. But you have to let these things, like you said, the marketplace will correct for anything that is untoward. Kevin Spacey is going to be hurting

for the rest of his life compared to where he was just five days ago because the consequences of his actions, right? Right, exactly. So I'm not saying that there shouldn't be consequences.

I don't think a lot of people are saying that at all. But I feel like it's almost, it's thought policing, like there are preemptive consequences. But these consequences should be like, hey, we don't want

to do business with you because you and your values don't align with how we look at The world right you but you're free to do your own thing. Yeah, absolutely I yeah, and that's why I'm saying like you just We're giving we're giving unsavory far right and far left elements way too much oxygen and way too much power in our society They don't represent anyone like when you really when you walk through your life How many people do you know that ascribe to Marxism? How many people do you know that ascribe to Marxism?

How many people do you know that ascribe to white nationalism? I've never met in my own 33 years on this planet in interacting with a ton of different people. I'm not sure I've ever actually met a white nationalist. So why are we acting like this is a like a massive component of American polity when it's not? It's probably a few thousand people. It's ridiculous. Three hundred and fifty million that live here. Just lob off the ends of the spectrum,

the far ends of the spectrum. Just lob them off. They're not welcome in polite society. They can do whatever they want. Everyone else, I bet, has 90% agreement on most issues. And I think that this intense, heated screaming and yelling at each other that you see on Berkeley and Antifa showing up with fucking ninja masks on, throwing Molotov cocktails,

this ain't helping anybody. No, Antifa... This just ramps up the other side. Antifa showing up with fucking ninja masks on, throwing Molotov cocktails. This ain't helping anybody. No, Antifa. This just ramps up the other side. Antifa, these guys are losers, right? How dare you? They're supported by the mayor of Berkeley. Yeah. I'm sure a lot of weird things are supported by the mayor of Berkeley.

But yeah, it doesn't help any situations. They look like they're like Cobra officers from G.I. Joe running around doing their thing, destroying private property. It doesn't make any sense why you would do this to your own society, to your own community. It's angst. It is angst. It's like, what point are you trying to prove? And you're seeing this replicate itself a lot. I know it's an unpopular thing to say, but you can draw a lot of this back to Ferguson even.

In some ways, Ferguson is a travesty of justice right but it seemed way worse than it actually was once everything came out once right once loretta lynch not a very well-known racist refused to try the person at the federal level local and state authorities uh grand juries refused to try darren wilson for what he did uh to the to the gentleman there or whatever and you and you get the full story and yet you still have this society or this community in ruins, based on some hands up, don't shoot, never happened. Right, never happened.

But literally never happened. But this is the rallying cry, this destroyed city is the rallying cry. The problem is it sounds good to people that want to believe a certain narrative. And so they repeat it, and then everybody's repeating it, and then you have people doing it on television, and then everybody decides that this is the thing that we're going to say over and over again, regardless of whether or not it's true. The real travesty of that, too, is that you can literally throw a dart at a map of the

United States and find a civil rights thing that's truly a civil rights infraction that's truly deplorable, that probably deserves the oxygen and the attention and could be a legitimate rallying cry. But it goes back to the point you were making before, too. People don't want to admit they're wrong. No one wants to admit that like a year out from Ferguson, we're much further than that, but even six months out from when it happened, people look back, read through the grand jury stuff, the federal government's take on it, all that kind of stuff, and realize, huh,

maybe this wasn't the best idea to act like this when we didn't have all the information. Don't you think that the information is flowing freer and people have more of an understanding than ever before? I think people are really doubling down on the far right and the far left. And the extremism is sort of elevated in that regard. But I think overall, I think, you know, people don't like the word centrist, but the people in the center, the people that are more reasonable are more informed and more, there's more communication going on than ever before and in that sense I'm very hopeful. I am hopeful too. I I like how centrism has become this dirty like unspoken word

It's it's but that's only again from the far fringes that feel like they're losing because they are losing if your idea is predicated on Race if like your idea of supremacy or superiority is a predicate on that you're a moron right and and no one does no one has to talk to you about that and you don't deserve to be part of the the rational adult conversation foolish notion if your idea on the left is that you have to stymie free speech that free speech is this antiquated thing I tweeted out a video last

week of a kid at the University of Utah saying that the retweeted it oh thank you of saying the yeah like the I don't think it's like a valid document yeah I don't think it's about yeah no there. Yeah. I don't think it's about, yeah, no, there's nothing valid about the bill of rights. You moron. You know, there's nothing like if your idea is, is Marxism and this weird economic engineering and all this kind of stuff, you are also a moron. And, and I'm not afraid to tell you that, you know, you have to have, you have to be academically limited to look at either of those ideas on this, on this, on those spectrums and think that you have a good idea. Usually a collection of ideas, not from the fringes, but a collection of left,

right, liberal, conservative, usually is probably what's right. No one in the mainstream of American politics or mainstream of Western politics has a monopoly on right or a monopoly on good ideas. There are great things that Republicans believe and there are great things that Democrats believe. There are terrible ideas on both sides The only thing I see on the extremes is just a complete dearth of good ideas It's just all bad ideas. It's just all terrible ideas And so why are we even paying attention to them they can stick and scream and shout all they want

But we're giving them too much time on on You know the news we're giving them too much time even Even I do it. Even I fall prey to that. Because it's fun. Watch that little fucker on TV saying that I don't think the Bill of Rights is like a valid document. Yeah, that's very radical, man. The reason, by the way, you're allowed to speak at all, right? I know he probably also thinks this is a fascist country. I know that when the Nazis took over in early 1933, the first thing they did was let everyone say whatever they want. So you can see the mirror images of the United States and fascist Germany.

I mean, it's everywhere if you listen to them. He's 18. He's a little kid. Yeah, he has a lot of learning to do. Maybe he'll look back one day at that video and go, oh my God, I was fucking stupid. Yeah, I'm sure he does. He looks so pompous and proud of himself. God, nobody put a fucking camera on me when I was 18

and asked me how the world should work. Absolutely. We've all said and done of himself. Dude, thank God nobody put a fucking camera on me when I was 18 and asked me how the world should work. Absolutely. We've all said and done stupid things. Yeah. And he's too young to maybe realize what's happening. But colleges are breeding this sort of thing. And I know that people say it's overdrawn and it's not as bad as it is.

And I'm like, I think it is specifically because when I was in college, I only graduated 10 years ago in May. This wasn't happening. Yeah. And you're seeing it in Evergreen State, Brett Weinstein. I never saw anything like this in my life. And I never heard about this in other colleges in Boston, a pretty liberal place. So this is a newer phenomenon and it's destructive.

It's corrosive. And it's very damaging to people's confidence in universities. And look what's happening to Evergreen State financially. That college is getting devastated. People are voting to defund it. And they have real issues with enrollment now. The guy who's running, there was a real interesting article that I just read yesterday where the president was talking about what an impact it's taken on his health and his mental health.

And he's unable to think correctly now. And he's unable to like, the guy is like literally shell shocked. I mean, he just, his decision-making skills are very foggy. He's saying these, this is what happens when you let petulant,

ignorant children think that they run up a, an establishment of higher learning when they're there to under, when you, when I entered college, I went under the knowledge that I didn't know anything. How do you turn this around, though? I don't know. Like, I really feel like it comes down in a lot of ways. It comes down to the people that pay the bills, in my opinion, like the parents need to not be happy with the product they're getting when they find that their child is now an Antifa member when he went when he comes

back for Thanksgiving or for Christmas. You have to ask yourself like what is happening yeah you know like this isn't because people point back to the 60s when there was a very righteous wave of um anti-authoritarianism that was born in this in this this this very specific climate you know and i think it's going to take a long time to fix i think a lot of it is because of a, it's a very incestuous, academia is very incestuous. You hire people that agree with you. You hire people that believe in you. That's why you find, what is it?

Like 19 out of 20 people that teach at universities are liberal. Yeah. I'm sorry. Like that's insane. Yeah. You know, like that, that's not right. That like, even if I, if I were a liberal or a Democrat, I'd look at that and be like, that's not,

that's like its own form of social engineering that we we've co-opted. Not only have we co-opted a lot of media, which is why the media hates YouTube and they hate all these things because they can't control that. But now we've co-opted academia. Your ability to get a degree is going to have to go through these people that are you might be diametrically opposed to or at the very least lying to you about a lot of things. And just 10 years ago, that was certainly not my experience. So I fear for the, you know, which is another reason why I'm like, I don't know if college is the best solution for a lot of even able-minded people, you know, like where it's like, I don't know what you get from going there now. Um, if you, if you study a discipline, you probably get out. Okay. Again, we were talking about chemistry, physics, math, whatever, but if you're studying humanity, right. I don't know, man. I't know man i don't know like what you're getting out of that now and i studied

humanity i had a lot of liberal professors i had a lot of conservative professors i wonder what that mix is like now and you get different history based on that yeah i get kids uh send me tweets all the time of uh photos of something that their professor is uh showing in class like someone just sent me something the other day it was a photograph of a overhead projection and uh it said something about science being a social construct and he's like this is the kind of shit i'm learning in school oh i think i saw that i think i did you you retweeted you retweeted that yeah i saw that pop up on my feed and everybody was like what in the fuck is how is this guy a goddamn professor well this is the whole thing with like you know even i mean the way this

is manifesting itself most is with transgender, you know, the transgender issue. Yes. Which I made a video about this where I'm like, I don't know that the science is really even important. If a person wants to say that they're a woman and they were born a man, I don't really care. Who cares? It doesn't matter. I don't think you need to scientifically justify it, but I think the scientific justification for this whole gender

normative kind of thing is actually going to backfire on them pretty badly because they've decided to make something that, you know, if you get a blood test, right. And they can study, study it, you're going to come out as a male, right? Even if you identify something else, it doesn't mean you can't identify like that. But if you're going to predicate your whole notion on that, this is science. And it doesn't seem like that might be the case. Then you're actually injuring the social movement of people just being accepted for who they are. And I feel like this is, this is like where you start engineering science to, to fit your narrative.

And I think it's a very, very dangerous thing. People, people do the same thing with global warming. I think global warming is obviously real. You know, I think the science says that. I think that it's probably maybe not as bad, but it's, but it's bad. It's, it's affecting things, making storms worse, sea levels are rising, but people manipulate that to say like, no, everything's fine. Just hand wave it away. But it's not true, you know? And I feel like, so I feel like we have to predicate everything on scientific truth when

we can, and then give leeway to say like, I, the example I use was a homosexuality where there was a theory for a long time that homosexuality wasn't something that was born in you, that it was a choice. Now we know that that's not true, that it's actually something that's in you. But even if it was a choice, who cares? Why predicate it on that if you believe in freedom? Exactly. So with the transgender thing, it's like, I don't know that you're even attacking this from the right

angle. You should be attacking it from a social acceptance angle. Which again goes back to the idea of like, I think that's actually the conservative stance. But people would argue with me on that. Colin, we got to do this more often. Yeah. I enjoyed this, man.

Thank you. I did too. Thank you for having me back. It's a great honor. Two hours and 20 minutes, man. Three hours and 20 minutes, right? Three hours and 20 minutes. Great.

Well, I thank you. Thank you so much. It was a great honor for you to ask me back. I appreciate it. Thank you so much, man. And congratulations on the space. Thanks, buddy. Tell people where they can watch your show.

Oh, youtube.com slash CollinsLastStand And I'm often on Twitter at NoTaxation Bam See you tomorrow fuckers Thanks guys Cool that was fun Thank you