The Joe Rogan Experience - #1228 - Bari Weiss

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Bari Weiss is an American opinion writer and editor. In 2017, Weiss joined The New York Times as a staff editor in the opinion section.

four three two one hello barry hi joe and now we're live thanks for doing this appreciate it thanks for having me it's uh very fortuitous your timing comes right in the middle of this big hubbub about um this uh native american elder and this young boy with one of those stupid fucking red hats on. Yep. Would you have ever imagined that a slogan like make America great again would be so divisive? As somehow or another like that, that would be like make America great again. Sounds like they just want to make things great. Like all positive.

No. And a red hat with white letters. Has there ever been a time like that where an object like a red hat with white letters was so repulsive to half the country? Yes. Well, I mean, some people see it as the equivalent of a white hood. Wow. I don't know about that. They do. I believe they do.

They do. They believe that wearing it, that a 16-year-old wearing that hat sort of carries intense moral weight that surely we know that a 16-year-old is not aware of all the implications of wearing that hat. Yeah, but the problem with that is Kanye wears it. Right. Fair enough. It doesn't really work. I agree. I'm just saying there are people who really make that argument. I get it. I know they do. And people who are paid for their opinions. make that argument. I get it. I know they do. And people who are paid for their opinions.

Well, yeah. Well, there's also people that are calling for this child's name and address. They're calling to dox him and publicly expose him. This is a child. He's 16. Is that what he is? He's 16 years old. And one of the things that was just so amazing about the whole brouhaha around, I mean, it was in a way like this perfect encapsulation of our outrage culture, right? Because people saw a tiny clip of this video and it was like a Rorschach test. You saw in it this morality play of what it looked to be was a group of mostly white kids from Coventry Catholic School. I think it's in Kentucky. And it looked like at first glance that they were smirking and smug and had these sort of shit eating grins on their faces and that they were surrounding this older Native American man. And I have to tell you, I had a visceral

reaction to it. The second I saw it, like so many other people, I was like, this is, you know, where we are in our broken culture and they're bullying this guy and here's the rise of the rise. I had all of those reactions. The challenge of what it means to be a journalist is to not see people as signifiers or as stand-ins just based on their identity. And that's what like 95% of the press corps did. 95% of the press corps did. They sort of leapt to, they leaped to assume that, you know, our visceral reaction was accurate when in fact, when you actually looked at like the two-hour video of the whole interaction, which also included this group of black Israelites or Hebrew Israelites, they called themselves.

It was not that at all. The Native American man had walked up to this group. was not that at all. The Native American man had walked up to this group. The four other guys had been heckling the group beforehand, calling them crackers, calling them Satan, calling the one black kid in the group things that can't even be said. So it was just far more complicated. And what was really, really disheartening is that the initial outrage was enough for the mainstream press to report on it. Like Twitter has kind of become almost an assigning editor for places like the New York Times and the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal. And then when the actual truth of the thing comes out, when we move past the outrage cycle, they have to sort of write the follow-up story to the fake outrage to

begin with. Defending the fake outrage instead of backing up and saying, we made a mistake. Right. Well, some people said that they made a mistake. That's wonderful. That's a good sign. Yes. It really is. One of the things that was so horrifying was that people that are supposed to be adults, you know, people with blue check marks on Twitter, were saying things like, this is the face of white patriarchy, this 16-year-old kid.

Or what Reza Aslan said. Yeah, or Reza Aslan said, have you ever seen a more punchable face? Kathy Griffin was saying, I need names, shame him, dox him. How do these people not understand the implications of that? So what happened over the weekend was that the sleuthy detectives on Twitter found a kid who they thought was the kid in the video, wasn't actually the kid. So there's the actual kid who was doxxed, the family was harassed, everything that we now know happens in these outrage cycles. But then there was another kid who looks suspiciously like him, who was not him at all, whose family, there was an amazing and heartbreaking Twitter thread about it,

whose family was in the middle of a family wedding. And they had to spend their whole weekend fighting off these mobs who were trying to destroy them. And it wasn't even the kid in the video. I mean, that is really horrifying to me, that that's where we are. And the fact that adults who should know better are fomenting this and don't see how thin, like, it sounds heavy, but like the veneer of civilization is, like they're taking a pickaxe to it. It's just, I just found the whole thing to be terrifying. I don't know how you felt. I felt exactly the same way. And I think it's a very unique moment, because it's so public. And it's so it's so prevalent in whether it's Twitter or Facebook, it's everywhere. And it sort of

embodies everything that's wrong with a lack of nuance and with people taking one side versus the other and sticking with it with not confronting their own personal biases with looking at these things through the eyes of this is the enemy i'm on the good side they're on the bad side yes let's get them and also this this distorted idea of what it takes to be violent. Like this idea of this is a punchable person. Like calling for violence. You're hearing a lot of this. Like this is one of the things that troubles me so much about the left.

My parents were hippies. You know, I grew up when I was a little kid. We lived from age of 7 to 11 in San Francisco during the Vietnam War. While the Vietnam War was ending, I was living in the middle of the hippie world. I always felt that people on the left were like these well-read, kind, compassionate people. But somewhere along the line, within the last few years, people on the left are calling for violence. This is very confusing to me. And it's this frivolous social media call for violence. It's not an in-person, be there, boots on the ground call for violence. It's a

very strange call for violence. Punch Nazis. I'm hearing this all the time. Because it's... Right. Because it's... Sorry, go ahead. What I'm going to say is what is a Nazi? Because if you mean punch actual Nazis that are putting Jews into concentration camps, I'm with you.

But when you call a guy with a MAGA hat on, he wears one of those red hats and he's just an asshole, he's a Nazi now? Some guy who maybe is not that educated, wants to be a contrarian, sees all these liberals that are complaining all the time, so he puts this red hat on,

and now he's a white supremacist and a Nazi, and you want to punch him? Like, okay. But that's what a lot of people in very high positions of power in this country, at least in the culture, actually believe. And they don't understand the implications of hollowing out words like that. I know this personally, right? Because I'm called alt-right. I'm called an

apologist for rape culture. I've been called everything. I'm a centrist, okay? I'm a Jewish center-left on most things person who lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan and is super socially liberal on pretty much any issue you want to choose. If I'm alt-right, what words do we have left for people that actually are that? What words do we have left for people who actually are part of a sort of racist blood and soil nativism that's rising in this country and around the world that should terrify people that are using that language in the sloppiest of ways. I really don't think they're seeing the implications of it. I also think that when you're just, you know, your keyboard warrior and you're just tossing this stuff out, so much of it is about signaling to your tribe that you know that this thing

is bad. of it is about signaling to your tribe that you know that this thing is bad. And I really don't think people are understanding the implications of this. And I don't think it's a stretch to imagine something like this happening a week, two weeks, a month, two months from now, and someone actually getting killed. Right. Like Charlottesville. I mean, very, very similar to what happened there. This kind of, I mean, when that guy drove over those protesters, the ramping up of the dialogue on both sides, the rhetoric, the violent talk, it's so disturbing and so unnecessary, especially when it's disingenuous, like calling someone like you alt-right or me. I get called alt-right adjacent. That's when I hear that all the time. Me too.

I go left on everything, basically except guns. There's a few things. Right, and I'm like repeal the Second Amendment. Yeah, I mean, but I do think that there should be some restrictions for gun use, just like I think there should be restrictions for car use. I actually think there should be testing for guns and you should have to go, look, you have to go through a fucking, you have to take driver's ed to get a car license. How come you don't have to do any?

You know, you don't do anything to get a gun. Like you once if you're not a criminal, you just get a gun. Like you don't have to know how to take care of it and clean it and safely handle it. You don't have to know the ethics of use. You don't have to know anything. Oh, no, it's insane. I mean, I just spent six weeks in Australia where they had basically one major massacre 20 years ago. And then I forget who it was.

We could look it up. But, you know, prime minister, conservative, got rid of guns. Yes. Everyone in the country. They think we're insane and psychotic the way that we live. Well, we're definitely weird. definitely weird um the thing also one other thing that that jumped out to me about the the catholic school boy incident it kind of signifies something broader that's happening which is the erasure of the individual which is just i think a horrifying problem in our culture like what actually happened

was a one-hour incident on a random afternoon in January between a group of individuals. Right. But instead in our. Why was everyone there? There was the March for Life. The boys were there for the March for Life. I don't know why the Hebrew Israelites were there, but it's D.C. Like there are crazy protesters all the time, you know, at the Lincoln Memorial and outside of the White House.

And the boys were there for a school event? Is that what it was? They were there for the March for Life as part of their school. And they had like been had free time, I think, and then were converging at the Lincoln Memorial. They didn't have a chaperone? There's no... No, I think the teachers, there was a teacher there. And they had asked the teacher at one point, in order to drown out the heckling of the Hebrew Israelites, I hope I'm getting the name of that group right, could we do a school cheer to kind of ignore them? And they did that. And I think they did that with permission from the teachers. At one point early on, it was rumored

that they were chanting, build the wall, but no one has surfaced any evidence of that whatsoever. Well, that's what I heard from the Native American elder when he was talking about it in a video. He said they were chanting out, build that and maybe they were i just haven't seen anything and i've watched every video it's totally possible they're also 16 right and they're also trying to make their friends laugh and they're assholes and they're just being silly and stupid right and i have to say as like someone who was a total nerd in high school i saw the face of the main kid in that still photograph and that video and like the 14 and 15 year old girl in me was like enraged yeah really like i was like i see the face of so many kids who said the nastiest things to me and who threw friends of mine into

garbage cans like like disgusting bullying was it because the thing is you have to get to the next step if you're a jerk no it was it was yeah oh for sure if he's just standing there it's the hat and he doesn't have the face maybe even still if it's a group but he but my thing is like your initial reaction to something is not the truth. It's your emotional reaction. And anyone who calls themselves a journalist, like your job is to figure out the facts of the case, not to make this into a kind of identitarian morality play. And the fact that so many people in so many publications did just that. And in fact, when the real facts surfaced, just kind of sort of dug their heels in and were basically like, well, he's a stand in for the white patriarchy.

What? That's crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. Like there was an actual BuzzFeed writer that said, it's the look of white patriarchy, his face. You're really going to put that on a 16 year old? Would we like it's just just that's nuts to me well it's cruel um it's a denial of the individual it's very cruel um when you're 16 years old you're basically a baby you don't know what the fuck you're doing you're incredibly susceptible to the influence of your peers you're around a bunch of other boys you're not around girls because you don't go to school with girls because you go to some wacky religious school right that this is you know you want to really be a social justice warrior?

You really want to save the world? How about you do something about the Catholic Church? Everybody wants to go after R. Kelly, which is great, but how about the Catholic Church? How about the number one kid-fucking organization of all time? That's what it is. And I was raised Catholic. I know what it is.

Did anything happen to you? Nothing happened to me. I got lucky. But I know people. I know a bunch of people. I know what it is. Did anything happen to you? Nothing happened to me. I got lucky. But I know people. I know a bunch of people. I know a bunch of people with stories. And this is all over the world. Oh, yeah.

These kids come from that cult. Imagine if that was not the Catholic Church, if it was instead Scientology. We would be going, oh, these kids are a part of a cult. They went there. They're a part of this weird cult that suppresses sexuality amongst its priests and encourages the placement of these pedophile priests in new places in order to get away from whatever crime they've committed in the area where they were initially established. This is what the Catholic Church is, right? And they travel all over the place. But it also is good people. This is where nuance comes into play.

It's good people. There's a bunch of people that are Catholics because they want a better relationship with God or the universe or love or whatever. They feel like it's a good moral framework for their children. They take them there. They believe in the Ten Commandments. They believe in this moral structure for society that's laid down by what they believe is God. There's great people that are involved in the Catholic Church.

But it's also the number one kid fucking organization in the world. It's those two things. Right? So these kids are a part of something that's way worse than smirking at a Native American with a drum. And in my opinion, when I was 16, I was a fool. I was a dumb person. Were you a was a fool. I was a dumb person. Were you a bully? No, I was bullied.

I was little. Because you were small. I was small and I learned martial arts when I was like 15. I mean, I'm sure I was a dick to some people just because I could get away with it. I don't really remember. Most 15-year-old boys and girls are in different ways. People are dicks. You're trying it out.

You don't even know how to talk yet. You're basically just learning words and this kid with this guy beating the drum inches from his face he handled it i believe way better than i would i don't think i would have i don't know you might have walked away i mean i don't think so really no i don't think so not when i was 16 when i was 16 also i was competing i was doing a lot of martial arts events. So maybe I would have kept it together better than I'm thinking I would have. But I definitely was a fucking idiot. And I was 16.

You know, you just don't. And who knows what's going on that day? Who knows? Like if you have anxiety about the future or your girlfriend broke up with you or you failed the test or what else that is like bouncing around inside your head, overwhelming your ability to form reasonable thoughts. Totally. 16. on the center and center left and even the center right's reaction to it was accurate that he was a little asshole that he's a racist homophobic transphobic hates immigrants and every single

thing does that deserve to be news that a 16 year old kid with those views smirked at a native american elder especially considering what he actually did no i I don't think that's news. Not only that. I think it's strange that we're covering it like it is. And because of the internet, the fact that my timeline on Twitter and on Facebook and on everything, this was way bigger news than day whatever it is, 30, 31, of the government shutdown, where people are having to get on bread lines to feed their families. Right. I mean, come on. Here's the thing. It's what people want to talk about. shutdown where people are having to get on bread lines to feed their families right i mean here's the thing is it like but it's people what it's what people want to talk about i think there's

this idea that there's things that are happening right now like the government shutdown and then there's things that are happening right now in terms of our culture shifting and when these things that come up in opposition to what many people believe is a beneficial shift to a more progressive, more responsible culture, when these little hiccups, they get addressed and they get addressed rapidly. And I think it's because people are aware that things are changing in this almost like unprecedented way. If you look back. Unprecedented pace. I agree i agree with that yeah like nothing we've ever there's nothing you could find in the historical record for human beings has ever been what we've experienced over just the past 10 plus years of social um social networks and social media and the ability to spread information very quickly with a youtube video or a tweet or whatever.

The way people are exchanging information is just very different. And because of that, culture is shifting at a hyperspace speed. It's just turbocharged for sure. So I think when something comes up that we think is like, ah, there's one, get it. Exactly. But it's not logical. It's like road rage. You know why you get road rage?

One of the reasons? Because you're going fast. Okay, you're in a car and you're nervous. You're heightened senses. So anything that happens gets magnified. Like someone's, you motherfucker in my lane. Fuck you. Honk, honk.

Because you're already jacked up to eight because you're in a car going 60 miles an hour. Wait, Twitter does that emotionally for us. Twitter is doing that. 100%. Social media is doing that. Life is doing that. So when something like this comes up, this rapid pace of change, which is almost impossible to keep up with, right? With the news cycle and this constant wave of change and information.

So when something comes up, people are road raging on this kid. Totally. That's why we just have to, I mean, there's lots of things to say, but one thing is just continue to insist on truth and facts and not allowing people to be stand-ins for a group. You're not a stand-in for anyone. You're yourself. You answer for yourself. And I just, I find that trend on both sides really really scary it's because people are insecure and you know i think for someone like kathy who's experienced kathy griffin who's experienced that public shaming she's right that amazes me right like she's been publicly shamed herself in the most horrific way has basically had to live underground

and now she's saying shame him name, name him, and dox him? I don't understand that. It reinforces people's idea that they should be more committed to their side, more committed to their team. The only way you're going to get any support, if you have been attacked and isolated and not alone, is to get back deep, deep into the team again. Like, how do you get back deep into the team again?

You've got to be fucking rabid you know and that's part of it it's a it's a natural reaction that people have to sort of signal to everyone else on the team they're all in they're fully committed they don't even care about their fucking career i'm an activist like that kind of shit happens and it's it's people that want love that's what a lot of it is it's they they do recognize that there's something wrong they are reacting to a real thing i'm not denying that but i am saying that the the reason the overwhelming reason the motivation for this kind of overzealous reaction is often the signaling thing so they want to let everybody know totally i'm on the fucking team man i'm all in let's go punch some Nazis. I've talked to people that have said that in real life.

And I'm like, man, you can't punch anybody. You shouldn't punch anybody. They're going to punch you back. Don't punch. First of all, who's a- Or save your punch for a real one. Yeah, a real one. In Poland or in Hungary right now. Right, right.

Yeah, a real one. criminal justice reform, right, which I believe in, is that we shouldn't try kids as adults, and we should forgive, we should have greater generosity and mercy and forgiveness for the crimes of a child, even if they've committed them. Those same people are the ones saying dox him and shame him, generally, politically. Well, you're seeing that now. And this is, again, there's never been a doxing before there was no doxing right how long has doxing been around a decade well like since game gamergate is when it got huge right yeah maybe let's go crazy and say the first doxing was 20 years ago that's a blip right that's so recent so you know this is not a thing that people have really had to balance out in their mind when to do it and when not to do it. They just do it.

I think people have no idea of what that looks like. Right. And unless you've experienced it or watch someone you know experience it, it's like an abstraction because these people are abstractions. They're two-dimensional little puppets. That's exactly what it is. That's exactly what it is. And this extreme lack of empathy, the lack of empathy towards anyone who doesn't share your position.

This is very strange. It's very – it's piss poor thinking and it's everywhere. And everyone wants to feel – like not being a part of one of the tribes is an extremely lonely position and you get called all the bad names because people want you to be a part of their tribe. And people don't want to be called bad names and they want to feel like they're in a name group. Emotionally, I totally get that. Yeah. It kind of sucks being homeless. Well, it's just politically homeless.

Yes. when you got a president that's so polarizing and you have an opposition to him, that's so there's so much momentum in opposing him. And I think this is a giant wedge in between these two sides. And then you have that hat and that hat. If that kid wasn't wearing that hat, I guarantee you'd be like 20% less hate. It would be,

it would be, people would still get mad at him because he was staying. Like I've seen people say when a native elder walks up to you and he's banging his drums, get the fuck out of the way. I saw that. Like, come on. You can't expect that. You can't just beat your drum. First of all, he got right in the kid's face, like inches from the kid's face. Pretty amazing the restraint this kid had to just smile.

Inches from the kid's face. Pretty amazing, the restraint this kid had to just smile. And the idea that you're going to judge this kid. Millions and millions and millions of people are going over this right now. That kid woke up that morning. He had no fucking idea. He was a kid in a cult, okay? He's in a Catholic cult school.

And he's going to some weird thing, some march for life where people are trying to kill babies. We've got to stop them from killing babies. He goes there and there's black Israelites calling them the faggots. There's all these people calling them names. Then all of a sudden this guy's beating a drum in front of his face. We're supposed to dox this kid now because he smirked? That's a crazy

impossible lack of empathy. It's impossible to defend. Like, unless you hate boys, unless you hate all boys, because boys are dumb. Like, 16-year-old boys are almost universally dumb. They all grow up to be men. Some of those men will be your best friend. Some of those men will be amazing.

Some of those men, you'd be so happy to see. When you see them, you give them a big hug. Okay? That's me. that's me. That's me. I was a stupid fucking 16-year-old. And I'm a man now and I try to be as nice as I can to everybody. I go way out of my way

to be a kind person. That could be that kid too. Like what you're doing is not good for anybody. It's not good for society to take this trend and run with it. And this is what people do now you know you dock 16 year olds it turbo charges the right like that's what i think people are not quite understanding that dynamic that if you're someone who you know is frustrated with trump and

is maybe moving to the middle and you know imagine that person it's easy to imagine yeah then you see this and you're like i don't want those people being in charge of me. I don't want those people running the government. I mean, that's the visceral reaction. I just, I don't think they're understanding the implications of what they're doing. I don't think they understand. Maybe they do, maybe they do.

No, there's no mastermind behind this. No, no, I don't mean a mastermind. I don't think they do understand their implications. When you have a spectrum, right, the far right and the far left, they have a very similar reaction as they drive a person to the other side. The person that sees the

far right and sees repulsive racism and bigotry, build that wall, fuck these Mexicans, fuck those little kids, they should have known better, they're all illegals. That of person that pushes people towards progressivism it pushes people towards much more liberal even socialist ideologies like fuck that grossness and the same thing can be said for some like i'm going to send you something jamie this is a real uh poster that antifa is sending um they were putting on um on wall on walls and and fence posts and

shit in uh the pacific northwest and uh it's actually kind of hilarious because it's so stupid i'm gonna see it i'm gonna i'm gonna send it to jamie and jamie's gonna put it up on the screen here but uh it it says uh oops wrong wrong Jamie. Sorry, Jamie Kilstein. Here you go, buddy. Just sent it. It says, when you date a white, it's not all right. And it's like, it's telling people to not date white people. Propagation of whites is propagation of hatred, oppression, homophobia, sexism, transphobia,

racism, and ableism. So are we supposed to sterilize white people? There it is. We can see it up on the big screen, so it's even grosser. Cool, that's awesome. Because it's large. But see, this is the thing. Racism is terrible, right?

So how do you stop racism? Well, racism can only be perpetrated by white people. Oh, well, the problem is white people. We've got to stop white people. Well, now you're racist. Like you're literally being racist to stop. Is this really everywhere? I've never seen this.

Well, the people are finding it and posting it online. Oh my God. And someone sent it to me. I don't know if it's everywhere. It's probably just one asshole, right? But the person exists, right? That person exists

and they think they're a progressive. Do you see the cold civil war that we're in in this country becoming a hot one? i hope not that's why i worry about where does this go where does this go no one knows if we did we you could make a lot of money in the stock market this is this is why i'm concerned especially because i understand violence a lot better than most people do you can't just say go punch punch people. When Reza Aslan says, have you seen a more punchable face? That is so fucking dangerous

because you're almost saying, go punch this kid. I saw someone else, I accidentally favored something. I didn't mean to favor it. I hope you unfavored it. I did. Someone pointed to me, and I'm just lucky that I looked at it because I normally don't even read comments,

but somebody pointed out that I favored a really preposterous tweet that said honest, it said the reply from the school was pathetic and impotent. Name these kids Oh, that's Kathy Griffin. Here's the one that said

this guy said God damn it. I can't find it. He was basically saying no need to, here it is. A face like that never changes. This image will define his life. No one need ever forgive him. This is a person with a blue check mark by their name. No one need ever forgive him.

A face like that defines his life. That is virtual signaling in the most toxic form. It's so, so dangerous to think like that. The idea that... I'm sorry, I was trying to... No, it's okay. The idea that people cannot change and are irredeemable is crazy. Cancel culture.

I was talking about this with Kanye, honestly. We were talking about cancel culture. When was he on the show? We were talking about a person. Oh, okay. On the phone. Okay, Joe. He's going was he on the show? We were talking about a person. Oh, okay. On the phone. Okay, Joel. He's going to be on the show.

Okay, cool. Allegedly. He's a little nervous about it. I'd like to see him with the samurai sword posing in front of that American flag. I think he would go with the Elon Musk gun. Yeah, you're probably right. I looked up that poster. It was first posted over two years ago, and it supposedly is like a troll.

Oh. Yeah. That makes sense. Okay, good. This is the world where it's hard to find what's a troll and what's not. What I was going to say that if I was cynical, I would say that if I was a person who's like far right. Exactly. You'd put that up. Of course.

Just to fuck with these people. I mean, it's basically like some CIA psyops type shit. But we're so through the looking glass here that like that post that I just read you, that's a real post about this guy is unredeemable. No one need ever forgive him. That's just as bad, in my opinion, as that poster saying don't date white people. It's all crazy. You're depressing me. No, don't be depressed.

No, no, no, no. I'm just like, you have to like fight. I have to fight this feeling of despair. You have to, like, I find myself fighting it because the basic, like some basic virtues, right? That used to be normal, right? Like civility, right? Civility has now become, for some people, a code word for like complicity with Nazism. for like complicity with nazism like if you're if you're civil and you believe in civility and you believe in you know treating people decently and with giving them the benefit of the doubt

like that that word itself has become a code or a signal in a negative way empathy like human doubt even saying it i don't know you know i i just these basic virtues seem to have been like swept away and i don't know when they when they got lost well a key ingredient for sure the thing that hardened the epoxy was trump i think these trends these trends are going in that direction anyway but he capitalized on that you know he's a very smart manipulator i mean he knew how to capitalize on that i mean this chant of build that wall it's not an accident that's something that he concentrates on and it's not just that it's uh they're in a political battle right now because if they get

him to back down off the wall then you know he looks like a loser when 2020 comes around he looks less powerful to all his people um there's that for sure but there's also this he's so egregious like everything he's so he's so that guy well he's gotten rid of all the guardrails yeah like he's broken the dam my question like thinking about how we're going to get beyond this is how do we build it back because he's broken something or he's signifying the fact that it was broken one or the other i think that he was both a symptom of something that was broken that we didn't recognize, and now he's further catalyzed that brokenness. Well, I think both sides have to recognize that the other side has some points.

That's one thing. And then I think we also have to treat ourselves like we're all a family and we're all on a big team because that's what we really are. If we really are the United States of America, I mean, what is a country? I mean, if anything, we're supposed to be a team. The idea that we're separated and we're two teams in this one team, the real differences in terms of, like, who gets elected, like how it's going to affect your life involve business,

involve some social policies, involve some things. But the way we interact with each other on a day-to-day doesn't involve that at all. That has to be fixed first. The way we think about each other on a day-to-day basis. There used to be a time where you could have a conservative friend and you could be a liberal and you could be a fucking long-haired hippie guy

and as long as you're a good, hard-working person who didn't let their lawn go crazy, your next-door neighbor who was like a Goldwater Republican, would talk to you. Totally. And you would go, how's it going, Mike? What's going on with the, you know, guys at the force are trying to put together this case and this and that.

And, you know, a professor could live right next to a cop, and they would be friends, and one would be conservative, and one would be liberal, and they would make fun of each other a little bit and rib each other a little bit, and that would be the end of it. That would be it. It wouldn't be this civil war that we're experiencing right now right now just verbal and hopefully it stays that way but it's it's it's confusing it's confusing because there's a lack of a frustrating lack of empathy that when i look at human beings and when i look

at people that aren't seeing what everyone else is seeing or they're not seeing things objectively and they're irrational and overly emotional I always assume there's something else they're running from I always assume when I see someone lashing out and insulting everyone around them I always assume it's not the the people around them it's something internal there's some something maybe some existential angst they're fighting against some realization of the futility of life whatever the fuck it is i mean totally we're finite organisms yes playing this game as if it lasts forever and accumulating stuff as if it's going somewhere with you like it's going to get in that wooden canoe and the god ra is going to take it with you in the afterlife it's nonsense and somehow or another we know this, especially as people get older.

They seem to push it further and further in the back of their mind and they get more and more ideologically based. They're less open-minded. They're less open to nuance. It's very rare to see a 65-year-old guy switch parties. Yeah, that's right. You become calcified. You become that guy.

The uncle. Yeah, that fucking asshole uncle that has a couple of drinks in him and starts talking about the gays and this and that and all the things that are wrong with our culture, the sodomites. People start talking crazy. I've never heard that at a Thanksgiving dinner. Thank God. I haven't either.

Thank God. But I think there's a few things that could help us. One, I think, is just time. Realizing that these stupid fucking blowups over this kid and the discussion that comes afterwards, hopefully some of this will settle down. We're allowed to have disagreements. We're allowed to have opinions about how these kids should have behaved. We're allowed to have ideas in our minds about how you would behave if you were that kid. But I don't think you're allowed to dox him.

I don't think you're allowed to even say that. I don't think you're allowed to say that you want to punch him. I think that's a fool. That needs to become socially unacceptable to do that. Yeah, you need to be checked for that because when someone says things like Reza Aslan, who's punched him? Anybody punch you, buddy?

Who's ever punched you? No idea. You know what being punched feels like? Sam Harris? Would he have punched Reza Aslan? He might. Jordan would probably punch him. Jordan's more of a I'll punch you type of a guy.

I don't think Sam would ever say he would punch somebody. I cannot. I have to say, I cannot imagine ever saying to someone, I will punch him. Jordan's more of a I'll punch you type of a guy. I don't think Sam would ever say he would punch somebody. I cannot. I have to say, I cannot imagine ever saying to someone, I will punch you. I felt the feeling of I'm going to punch you, but I can never imagine typing that. Yeah. I mean, unless you're protecting someone you care about or your own self. Although I did see this amazing video of Buzz Aldrin. Did you see this?

Oh, punching the guy who said he didn't go to. I know that guy. That guy, Bart Seabro, that he punched. I went to dinner with that guy. You know a moon you see this? Oh, punching the guy who said he didn't go to the moon. I know that guy. That guy, Bart Seabro, that he punched. I went to dinner with that guy. You know a moon landing denier? Oh, yeah. I mean, I know you know Alex Jones. I used to be a moon landing denier. I used to believe totally that we never went to the moon. There was a documentary that came on

on Fox. Yes, trust me. No, I didn't Google you hard enough before I came on. In the 1990s, Fox had a show called Conspiracy Theory, Did We Go to the Moon? And they aired it on television, primetime. And they got me hook, line, and sinker. And for years, I believed that we didn't go to the moon.

What changed you? Mostly talking to Neil deGrasse Tyson, but also critical thinking. Also realizing that I was fully committed to that idea without really exploring the possibility whether that idea was incorrect. And that I had taken everything that I saw in that documentary, which is incredibly convincing. And with 100% confirmation bias, I only looked at that and I didn't look at all the contrary evidence. There's some fucked up stuff about the moon landing, unfortunately. And the fucked up stuff is mostly people that were involved in publicity that were doing stupid things with photographs like they had taken a picture of um you're gonna i'm going into uncharted territory here just so you know like you're an expert on

this i've never gone into moon landing denialism so i don't know about it uh was buzz aldrin um who was the guy that was Michael Collins? Michael Collins in Gemini 15. Jamie's like, I've heard this before. He's seen it many times. Pull up that photo. This is what I'm talking about. With the shadow?

No, no, no. It has nothing to do with that. This is a photo that they put out as an official photograph of Michael Collins doing a spacewalk. But what it actually is, is a photo of testing equipment, and they blacked out the background. So he's in this suit that they were doing with testing, and instead, because they really couldn't get good photos in space because no one's out there with him taking his pictures, right? So they lied. They faked it. This is it.

So see, the one on the left, you see the real photograph. him in a studio where they're working on him or warehouse rather or some sort of a testing environment working on how to control these harnesses that you would use when you're on a spacewalk. Okay. Because that thing propels him forward and back and he's learning how to use it. What they did was they just blacked out the background and reversed it and then they sold that as him actually being in space. So this is probably an overzealous publicist.

And there's a bunch of these. There's a bunch of these when it comes to different backgrounds in areas of the moon that are many, many miles apart from each other. It shouldn't be the same background. And more likely than not, what you're dealing with is overzealous publicist because photographs were incredibly difficult to get, I'm sure. Well, the moral of this story to me, thank God, first of all, that you're no longer a moon landing denier,

but also the power of the media and the press. And like you saw one documentary, right? There was a couple after I saw that. I saw quite a few. But that sent you down this rabbit hole. And that, you know, I've been thinking about, did you see that Roku is, I think, deplatformed InfoWars? Yes, instantly, like within a day. But I wanted to ask you a question before we get to that. which people don't know, okay? Like a 15-year-old clicking through their Roku doesn't necessarily

know the difference between CNN and InfoWars and the New York Times and MSNBC and whatever. And of course, some of those other ones have biases, obviously, but InfoWars promotes conspiracy theories. And do I want a 15-year-old kid stumbling into that and thinking that that information is on par on a level with actual facts the problem with conspiracy theories is that some of them are real this is the real problem the problem is you don't know which ones are real but some of them are real um the gulf of tonkin that got us into the vietnam war you're aware of that okay but sandy hook well okay sandy hook for sure happened bunch of kids died and these are horrible these are horrible evil conspiracies the problem is promoted by right

alex jones yes it's horrible without a doubt and you know and i saw the media matters clip that i had never seen before i saw it recently which clip the one that shows every time he brought it up oh i mean it's not just one time oh Oh, I know. He's obsessed with it. Many, many, many times and was saying it was an absolutely fake thing. Has he ever apologized for this? He's backed off of the position now. Because of the lawsuit? I'm sure it's a lot of things.

I'm sure it's the pressure. It has to be a realization that he knows that it really did happen. But there's a giant group of people out there that still believe it didn't happen. And they still confront these parents, uh, even in court. And they call them crisis. No,

I know that the times has done amazing reporting on this. Elizabeth Williamson, my old sick, it's sick. It's twisted. Um, we probably shouldn't, I mean,

we can go into conspiracy theories. I just don't know to go into. It's not a bad thing to go into. Cause it's a thing. Okay. But it's, it's, you know, it's dangerous ground. I'm curious what you think, though. What do you think of Roku taking InfoWars off?

I think we have to decide what is Twitter, what is Facebook, what is YouTube. The position that most people have is these are private companies. They can make their own rules. that most people have is these are private companies they can make their own rules this is just like cbs deciding that if you use uh you know if you drunkenly yell the n-word out at a black police officer that they don't want you as a newscaster anymore what you know yeah that's a public or a private company that can make these distinctions if you uh take a position uh an anti-semitic position publicly they can they can look, we don't want you on the air anymore. And then there's other people that think freedom of speech in this form is so important and that the answer to bad ideas is not stopping those ideas.

It's good ideas. It's good ideas confronting those ideas, and you see it all work itself out. That's the other side of the coin. That's the other side of the coin. That's the other side of the argument. The argument that we should treat, whether it's Twitter or YouTube or any of these social media platforms, as a public utility. And that you should be able to distribute information. The real problem is, with all of this, is that it's very messy. This is a nuanced issue.

There's a lot going on. Because when you do decide to de-platform someone for having an awful position and spreading a false conspiracy about that, most people are going to agree with you. But the question is, does it stop there? And does it move on to you are a person who believes in white nationalism? What does that mean? Well, I believe that black pride is fine, but I also believe white pride is fine. What about those people? Where do we go with them?

Right. Then it gets slippery. What about the alt-right adjacent people? Yeah, alt-right adjacent. I totally get it. What about people that have given the alt-right a platform? Are they a part of the problem now? Should we de-platform them? I mean, this is one of the things that there was a paper that someone had put together, an article.

Is this data in society thing? Yes, hilarious. Where it's like everyone has this very bizarre connection. It's six degrees of Kevin Bacon, basically. Exactly. But they're using it in terms of the way the connections is almost if it's scientific data. Well, they would basically say of you or of some, someone like,

well, they did say of me, they said of you, you're a gateway to the alt, right? Yes. So what I said is Barbara Walters interviewed Castro. Does that make her a communist?

Right. Exactly. What the fuck are you talking about? Exactly. I'm pretty left. Like, just ask me questions. Like,

if you want to know, I'm not going to hide my positions on things from you. I, I'm very open. Obviously, I told people I used to believe the moon landing was fake. I'll tell you all the stupid shit I believed. But the question with this is why do people want that? Because it's simple and easy.

Just get rid of them. Punch them. Punch the Nazis. It's lazy, stupid people thinking, and they're thinking publicly, and they represent a progressive viewpoint with their lazy, stupid thinking. It's not that progressivism and that progressive viewpoints are bad. It's that lazy, stupid thinking and applying a progressive viewpoint is bad. It's not even that socialism is bad. I've been thinking a lot about socialism lately in terms of like,

what is the point? If, if we get to a certain point and then our, our heart, our heart stops beating and we, we die and you, you left behind $18 billion to your kids because you were the ultimate capitalist and you went hog wild.

That's, that's a fool's path. That is a nonsense path. Why did you do that? Why didn't you try to use that money, this insane amount of wealth, and have this massive impact on the populace? Why didn't you try to figure out some way? Well, it would be your choice to. Right.

It wouldn't be your choice to. But what if? And it can be your choice to. Right. It wouldn't be your choice to. But what if. And it can be your choice to be Bill Gates right now. But what if this, Bill Gates is doing that in a lot of ways with some of the money. He's got a lot of fucking money. If he throws a million here or there,

it really ain't shit for him. He's got like $90 billion, whatever it is. But the point is that things like the fire department, we agree. This is a socialist thing, right? We're all chipping in.

We have public utilities. Yes, we have public utilities. We have, you know, people that – parks and recreation, people that are department of fish and wildlife and, you know, the sheriffs that patrol our national forests. We all chip in to pay for these things. We all agree these are important things. Well, one of the things that was so interesting about Australia is that in certain ways, it's a more, you know, it's thought of as sort of a macho culture, maybe more masculine, a little bit more conservative than here generally. And yet, the left has won there on so many of the major issues that we're fighting, we're killing each other over now.

They're very good people. Universal health care. Yeah. Mandatory 401k. It's like an $18 minimum wage. Pensions. Four weeks of vacation a year. I think they get maternity leave as well.

Oh, yeah. It's just like so many of the things that here are up for grabs, they already solved. I think we have to take two things into consideration. One, that they have a small population small and homogenous yes and it's enormous place you're dealing with a place as large as contiguous united states of america but there's only 20 million people oh i'm aware because when they were like it's crowded in that restaurant and i was like you mean i don't have to wait for an hour to get in like they have no they've never seen a crowd of people.

Yeah. They don't know what a real crowd is. And also, I think their culture is less constrained by history because they came, they were essentially prisoners. I mean, it's like several generations removed. Right, the non-indigenous. Exactly. Yeah. But it's not only that they're not indigenous.

No, I mean like the non-indigenous population were prisoners. Yes. Yes. Yeah, well, they were sent there because England didn't want them. And that's literally how the country got founded. Oh, yeah, for like stealing a watch. Like they were low-level crimes. Well, then they sent them to the much better place. Oh, yeah.

Way better. It's amazing. It's on the Gold Coast. You're like, holy shit. It just takes forever to get there. If you were in Manchester and it's raining every day coast you're like holy shit it's stunning it just takes forever to get there if you were in Manchester and it's raining every day and you're like fuck this place

and you know you stole a watch and they shipped you off to the gold coast you'd be like what? what just happened? this is hilarious

you can fish out here it's fucking beautiful they're nice people and I wonder if they're so nice I feel like they are slightly less nice than Canadians

who are way more nice than us. I think that's right. I also think that they have it so good that they're a little complacent, and that makes me concerned because China. Okay, right. That's like the big story there. Yes, yes. I see what you're saying. Yeah.

Yes, yes. I see what you're saying. Yeah. Well, you know, that is to be considered. But I think the United States, first of all, we have this momentum of innovation and of ass kicking and getting things done and creating things that's so different than any other part of the world. If we took that shit down a notch, I think we'd be okay. You know, I i mean i think we definitely do have to worry about china and we you know i've been really trying to closely follow all this huawei stuff where these executives keep getting arrested and you know it's the close relationship between some tech companies and this communist government is very confusing but some people look at over if you talk to people that are chinese natives or who have been to china they almost look at it as a positive there's less resistance it's more even though the censorship is open it's at least you know what you're dealing with over there as opposed to you know the nsa is spying on us oh i don't buy it at all yeah I've seen some people make that argument it's horrifying to me it's weird it's horrifying yeah so I agree with you you do have to worry about China but I think Australia's like ah it's fucking Americans take

care of it that's how they think sort of except like their situation is that they're enormously economic they're enormously dependent on China economically, and they love having that money, but they seem to be a little bit like sleepwalking through history and not, at least some people that I spoke to, but that's the real story in Australia is China. Yeah. Well, I think when you're not a military might, you're not like one of the big players, you're kind of like sitting back watching because what are we going to do? What if Australia decides to ramp up its defense budget by 5,000% over the next 10 years and develop a crazy arsenal of weapons and super soldiers and shoot them all up with steroids and give them exoskeletons and get ready to go to war, start building bunkers and freak the rest of the world out.

I mean, and take this like North Korea with money approach to the world. What do you mean North Korea with money? Well, North Korea is basically like this scary spot that nobody wants to invade, even though we know that there's a military dictatorship there. They have nuclear weapons. Yeah, they have nuclear weapons. They have a madman who's in control. They have people that escape with horrific stories.

And we have a president who talks about them as if they're sort of a normal country. The weird thing is he might be able to sit down with them and actually talk to them. His unconventional approach might actually lead to some sort of communication at least, which is better than nothing, I guess.

I don't mean like in north korea like they take over the country and imprison its people i mean like they're they become kind of dangerous and sketchy and small like north korea is not a military power like in terms of like the way the soviet union is where they could take over the world but they're scary no but they're untouchable and that's scary exactly if australia became that then i think we'd have a totally different attitude about australia yeah no australia yeah we don't yeah australia's just laid back and they're like hey americans will take care of it and then we're over here building fucking walls and shooting missiles um yeah i would imagine it would be really weird to watch us from afar

you know if you were paying attention to world politics they know everything i mean everyone talked to there was like, let's talk about gerrymandering in Virginia. And I'm like, what? Like, what? What are you saying? They obsessively follow what's going on here in a way that I found kind of amazing. Like, genuinely, actually gerrymandering in Virginia. I was like, what? I would move over there.

Don't you have news going on every year? But the answer the answer is sort of no yeah comedians move over there they move over there and become huge in australia shout out to my friend arj barker he's out there he's huge gigantic over there like a lot of people don't know him here in australia he's like like jerry seinfeld huge enormous right sells out huge auditoriums but that's because when a giant American celebrity comes over, they're just going to sell out everything. No. Because that's the only game in town. No? He's not a giant American celebrity. He's an Australian celebrity. Jerry Seinfeld?

No. Oh, I thought we were talking about Jerry Seinfeld. I'm like, uh, Joe, I think you're wrong. I know you're into like alternative media platforms, but I think people know who Seinfeld is. No, Arch Barker i'd never heard of him there you go there you go he's huge in australia when i talk to australians and they're like oh you're standing comedian you know Arj Barker yeah they're gonna be mad at me like adam green she's gonna be pissed right that fucking australian accent's terrible bro it is

bad it's not good i don't even try um but have you been following the women's march stuff at all or no yes yes i have yeah the uh anti-semitic stuff yeah yeah yeah fucking groups you know when you have a group you have a group of people and then you have but that was a little bit to me related to the what happened at the lincoln memorial right where you had these you know the leadership of the women's march which looked looked like a Shepard Fairey poster come to life, like they were just perfect. You had Linda Sarsour in her hijab. when progressives embrace hate. And it was saying, I was super moved by the Women's March as so many other women I know were. But let's look at some of the very troubling ideas and associations that the people who are in charge,

the leadership of the Women's March have. Namely, the worst of the worst was Tamika Mallory, who had been a gun rights activist beforehand. She called Louis Farrakhan the goat, the greatest of all time. She took lots of Instagram pictures. You should check this. But she praised him. It wasn't like a casual acquaintance.

She praised him as the greatest of all time. And yet she was treated to glowing profiles in every women's magazine, her and the rest of the leadership. And I basically said, like, let's look past, you know, the Benetton ad of these leaders and actually look at what they believe. And what they believe, some of them, is extremely disturbing, especially when it comes to Jews. So I write this column and I'm like pilloried for it by the left. So I write this column and I'm like pilloried for it by the left. One of the leaders of the Women's March, this woman, Bob Bland, wrote this letter to the New York Times where she calls me. It was amazing.

I want to find what it was. Oh, she calls me an apologist for the status quo, racist ideology and the white nationalist patriarchy. Because you responded to someone who said the greatest of all time is a man who calls Judaism a gutter religion, who says that we should burn in ovens, and who, by the way, is a misogynist homophobe. Also, the leaders of the Women's March are associating with this guy and had the Nation of Islam Security protecting them. I mean, this is like the most sort of retrograde hate group. And yet for calling them out, I was called all of these things. Why do you think that flies? It's a deep question. I think that part of it is the fact that in intersectional left-wing politics, Jews have been whitewashed. Jews are viewed as sort of the white privileged power and part of the white patriarchy, unless

they genuflect and say, actually, no, we abhor our privilege and all of the other things that you're supposed to say. And there's a blindness to the fact that, first of all, not all Jews are white. Half of the Jews in the state of Israel, for example, are Arab and from Arab countries that they were kicked out of in 1948. I mean, the idea that Jews are white is this canard. Although I'm an Ashkenazi Jew, my family's from Eastern Europe, I have white skin, and I have white privilege, but I don't think of myself as a white person. I think of myself as a Jew, first and foremost. So it's a complicated identity. But I think that it's sort of, it's whitewashed by these people. And I think that anti-Semitism just isn't taken seriously and doesn't rate because people perceive Jews as having privilege and power in this country, which largely they do. But the fact is, is that the actual statistics show that more hate crimes were committed against Jews in the past year than any other minority group. The FBI is like sounding the alarm every other day in Crown Heights and in other parts of Brooklyn. Random Jews who look Jewish, right, who are Hasidic Jews are just beaten up for being Jewish. And yet everyone's ignoring that because they're the imperfect victim.

Well, they're also very isolated. They have their own tribe. They stick with them. They look different. They dress different. Sure. But imagine if any other minority group, someone, I mean, we're outraged when we see, at least I am, and you are when we see a police officer assaulting someone you know what i'm saying is a young black person they don't make a big deal to go into the public about it they keep it almost insulated inside their environment and their community there's also what i was going to say is they these people that are that you you do hear saying anti-Semitic things, they're equating American Jews living in America with the policies of Israel and what Israel is doing with Palestine. And that somehow, if you're an American Jew, even if you're not even political, you're somehow or another complicit with atrocities that are going on between the Jewish people and the Palestinians. Right.

Conflict, any kind of conflict. And this makes it, it reinforces their idea about you being a part of this white privilege group. Yes, but they also strawman it and say, criticism of Israel isn't anti-Semitic. Yes. No one's saying that criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic. I criticize Israel all the time. But there's an obsession on the state of Israel.

Like if you were an alien that landed from outer space, you would think that the greatest oppressor in the world is this tiny state that's the size of New Jersey. These people say nothing about the genocide of Uyghur Muslims in China. They say nothing about any number of… I'm not even aware of that. Oh, there's a genocide going on carried out by the government of china against uighur muslims they're literally being put into concentration camps this is literally the first i've heard of this so uighur is spelled u-i-g-h-u-r where's a what is a good thing to read about the new york times that we've reported on it. It's an enormous story. And it's like the fact that that's getting – that you don't know about it and that people obsessively talk about the state of Israel as if it's – and by the way, the state of Israel does lots of things wrong.

But the idea that it's among the worst human rights tragedies of our time? Are you kidding me? It's insanity. I don't know the reality of what is going on in Gaza. I don't know what is happening with Israel and Palestine. I don't know. So I'm not going to be the person that talks about this. But what I do know- I can send you some stuff to read. What I do know from people that have gone there, like Abby Martin, who came back with some pretty horrific stories, I think there's a lot of terrible shit going on. There's a lot of awful violence and there's a lot of despair on the side of the Palestinians. And I don't know who's to blame for that. But many people blame the Israelis. They blame the Israelis for treating the Palestinians as if they're in this one area of the world that's essentially a large prison. Well, lots to say about this, but I think one of the main problems that we have in the way that Israel is covered is that if you have a camera lens and you're only looking at a tiny piece of land, right? You're only looking at Israel proper, the West Bank and Gaza. Israel, to some extent, is the Goliath in that situation. But if you zoom out your camera just a little, you see that Israel is literally surrounded on all sides by genocidal regimes,

like in the form of Hamas in Gaza, whose charter blames the Jews for fomenting the French revolutions, the Russian revolutions, both world wars, and says that it wants to killames the Jews for fomenting the French revolutions, the Russian revolutions, both world wars, and says that it wants to kill all the Jews. That's the government of Gaza right now. I spoke to a mother who fled Gaza recently, okay, and her family's house was just destroyed. Who was it destroyed by? Hamas, not Israel. You never hear those stories. So I'm just saying it is a very complicated politics. But when you see people obsessively focusing on this one state and the crimes of this one state to the exclusion of actual dictatorships in the world who are killing their own people, you have to be suspicious of that.

You do have to be suspicious. And you do have to be aware of their position in the world surrounded by Arab states. You do have to realize that they are, you know, they're alone out there. You also, I do wonder, what is the motivation for so many people focusing on Jews? What is it? What do you think it is as a Jewish person? What do you think the motivation for this kind of racism and discrimination against Jews? And why is it tolerated? Why can someone like Louis Farrakhan tweet that Jews are termites

and his Twitter account stays up? Well, it's the oldest hatred in the world, right? A lot of it. Is that what it is? No, no, no. You're asking me why is it still with us? It's like the mystery of history. Like that is deep.

I mean, that is something that goes back to the New Testament. Okay. The Jews were blamed in the book of John and Mark. I mean, we could go to Matthew for the death of Jesus. Their role in that story, at least according to some of the books, is that they convince the most powerful empire at the time, the Roman Empire, in the form of the governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, to kill the son of God. That becomes sort of the template for the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory. There's a

confusion about what anti-Semitism is, right? It's not just a hate. It's not just like this hate of a group. Racists perceive themselves as punching down against a group that's lesser. Anti-Semites perceive themselves as punching up against the secret cabal of wily operators who secretly control the levers of power. That is the canard of anti-Semitism. And that begins with this group

that's able somehow to get the Roman Empire to kill Jesus. Now, the Catholic Church disavows this in 1965, which was an enormous historical event. But that template is still there. And you see it play out, right, in who led us into the war in iraq ah it was the jews of the bush administration you can see it play itself out all over the place and right now in the demonology of current contemporary anti-semitism israel has sort of been made into the jew among the nations you're not allowed to say anymore it like the old school anti-semitism right like i grew up in a place where there were some country clubs where Jews couldn't go into them. That, frankly, that's not dangerous. What's dangerous is the kind of antisemitism that says, you know, this one state in the world of all of the almost 200 states,

that's the one that doesn't have the right to exist. That's the one that should be dismantled. That's actually dangerous to Jewish lives right now. It is. It's an unusual group in that it is both a religion and a tribe. Yes. It makes us very hard to understand in the contemporary landscape because we are not just a religion. There's nothing else like it because most Jews that I know do not practice Judaism. Right.

But they consider themselves Jews. Yes, because we were a peoplehood before we were a religion. Religion is a very contemporary modern thing that Jews are sort of slotted into, and it makes us easier to understand. But then our sort of national identity or peoplehood, our tribalism is left out. And that's an essential part of who the Jews are. My friend Ari Shaffir, who's a fantastic stand-up comedian, he's a rabid atheist, but he's also very Jewish. And he has a new hour that he's working on right now that he's going to film called Jew. Really?

And he's an atheist. I want to see it. Yeah, it's great. But he's a perfect example. It is a tribe. It's not just a religion. But it's also because the Jewish religion itself, the emphasis is not on what you believe. The emphasis is on deeds.

It almost doesn't matter what you believe. It matters that you follow halakha, which is Jewish law. It matters your deeds. It matters all these things. So it's possible to be a good Jew and not really think about God that much, which is very strange, I understand, to Christian ears. Right. Or you go full Ben Shapiro, where he's both a good Jew and very much like follows the whole deal. He follows the whole deal. The whole deal.

Why do you think... But I think... Sorry, can I say one more thing? No, please, please. I just find it like kind of astonishing, the blindness to this, because imagine a leader of the Women's March said something like, you know, I think Louis C.K. is the greatest comedian of all time, even though I disavow X, Y, and Z thing that he did. How fast till that person was kicked out of the leadership of the Women's March? It would be like minutes, hours. You think? Yes. I think there are certain things that get people outraged and other much worse things that do not.

And I'm fascinated by why that is. Do you think that if it was a white person that had this opinion about the Jews, that it would be more scrutinized? I think that it is much easier to fight anti-Semitism when it comes in the form of Richard Spencer. Yes. Yes. Because then there's liberal consensus, right? Yes. About him.

And it's also, you have a green light to criticize. Yeah. It's very, you're criticizing a person of color. Exactly. It's much harder when someone like Ilhan Omar, the new freshman senator, sorry, not senator, the new freshman congresswoman from Minnesota, who's like this incredible American dream story, comes here at 12 years old, refugee from Somalia, wears a hijab, is a mother, is the first woman of color representing Minnesota. Like, obviously, I want to cheer her. That's my reaction to her.

And yet she has this tweet that she refused to apologize for where she says, Israel has hypnotized the world. May Allah awaken the world to the evil doings of Israel. I'm sorry, that's a classically anti-Semitic trope, even if she said it unwittingly. And by this point, she should educate herself. So it's much harder to criticize that, but it's an untenable position to say that you can't criticize someone for their ideas because of their identity. It also seems like a road to nowhere. If you're going to say that, that is a very vague thing to say. You should be incredibly specific. If you want to say it's evil, you should say what's evil and then open that up to some sort of a discussion or debate. What is evil? open that up to some sort of a discussion or debate. What is evil? But ascribing supernatural evil powers to a state is very much recalling classic anti-Semitic canards.

Right. So I wrote a piece about this today trying to like explain that to people. Yes. Because she went on CNN saying, I don't know how Jewish Americans could be offended by this, which I think is incredible. Yeah. What do you think, I mean, if you want to be objective, step outside of your Jewish identity, what do you think is wrong with how Israel is dealing with the Palestinian situation? Because this is the big criticism of Israel, the only criticism. Really, that's the big one. The big one is Gaza and Palestine.

So what do you think they're doing wrong? Palestine, meaning the West Bank. Yes. Well, I would say what the untenable position that they're in is that they are occupying another people. That is what is going on in the West Bank. And I've been there many times, met with many Palestinians. I've really educated myself on this. The problem is,

is that, and by the way, it's not all of Palestine. There's, sorry, all the West Bank, there's areas A, B, and C. It's a really, like we'd have to pull up a map. It's a pretty complicated thing. There are places where it's much more autonomous and the PA is in charge and it really varies depending on the area. So the big criticism, right, is that they're occupying another people and that is corrosive to the state of Israel sort of morally, like to occupy another people. On the other hand, what happens if they pull out of the West Bank tomorrow, right? I'm for a two-state solution, ultimately ending the occupation. But if I'm real, I have to be honest about what that would look like well what it looked like in gaza is that now you have a terrorist state lit right at the border which is ruled by hamas it is quite likely that that very same thing could happen in the west bank now let's say actually we actually should pull up a map let's let's say israel does that then like the whole of israel proper is something like we have to look

two miles wide we actually yeah we should look at the the distance between like Tulkarim or like the end of the West Bank and Netanya or Tel Aviv and you see how small that is I mean it's hard to even conceive of it if you're in charge of protecting the security of the people who government of Israel, which, by the way, I'm extremely critical of. And if I lived in Israel, I'd be voting, you know, center left in Israel for sure. But that is what they're facing. And then if you zoom out and you pull up a map of all of the countries around it, I just want, like, look. No, it's okay. Actually, the one you were on was good because it showed if you zoomed out, it had everything. So you have Egypt there, then you have Jordan, which is teetering, then you have Syria, then you have Lebanon and Hezbollah is on the southern border of Lebanon, which is constantly which, you know, so that's the real thing. So when people talk about this fantasy of why can't it just look like America?

Why can't there just be a democratic one state solution? First of all, no one there wants it. They pull people constantly. But the second thing is like, is that really what that's going to look like if we dismantle the state of Israel? Or is it going to look like enormous bloodshed, the likes of which we see in a lot of these countries surrounding it? enormous bloodshed, the likes of which we see in a lot of these countries surrounding it. Like, someone once said to me that if you want to know the word for, you know, a Jew without a military, it's the Yazidis. Okay, it's the Yazidis. It's the people, it's the minorities of the Middle East who have been absolutely destroyed and overrun. And this is like, it's,

I don't think when Americans talk about this part of the world, they fully appreciate the sort of absolutely painful and hard decisions and the grappling with violence, really. You know, what happened to Jamal Khashoggi in that Saudi embassy, that's like normative for this part of the world. So the fact that Israel has somehow, with all of its flaws, managed to eke out a Western-style liberal democracy, frankly, the only place where you and I would feel happy and comfortable living. Like, why are we never talking about that? Well, I think it's very difficult for people to find the forum to discuss it the way you just did and to really lay it out in cold stark reality what is the solution what is the solution i mean is this there is no magic the solution right now is to do everything possible to build up the palestinian economy to for israel to build

relationships like right now it has very, very positive relationships with Egypt, which gave back the Sinai, which it had won in the Six-Day War, I believe, gave it back to Egypt for a cold peace, which it's had. It has a good relationship, of all things, who would have thought with Saudi Arabia because of their common enemy, Iran. I mean, things shift there rapidly. But as for the Palestinians, the solution is to build up the economy, make life better, and support people and movements inside the West Bank that are genuinely nonviolent. And those people exist. It's just, frankly, oftentimes, they're murdered by groups like Hamas and their bodies are dragged through the streets. Oftentimes, they're murdered by groups like Hamas and their bodies are dragged through the streets. If you're accused of being an Israeli collaborator in the West Bank, you know what happens to you? You're lynched.

No one talks about that. No, no one does talk about that. Would you be open to discussing this in this sort of a forum with that woman from the Women's March? Sure. Do you think she would do something like that? I't know i'd be open to it do you think that people like her have ever had a conversation with someone like you who could lay it out i'm not no because i think that first of all many people who talk about this issue have sort of exported american domestic politics to a foreign region of the world, like in a way that this is talked about a lot, it's like the oppressor, the oppressed, the white, the black. No, that's

not what's going on. I don't think people understand when they talk about Israeli Jews, that half of them are Middle Eastern, like half of Israeli Jews are Arab. You know, there's no appreciation of that reality. They think that Israel was just founded, you know, to save the remnant of the Jews who weren't destroyed in the Holocaust. And yeah, it helped for those who survived. But then once the state of Israel was established, there was a mass exodus of the Jews from all of the Arab countries where they had been living as second-class citizens, where they were either self-deported because they were living as second-class citizens or they were expelled. Again, that exodus, that deportation, never talked about.

I'd be happy to talk about this with someone from the Women's March. What is the response currently? What is the current position that most people are taking about that woman and about the Women's March in general because of these things, because of these anti-Semitic statements? I think a lot of people in the past few weeks, thanks in part to Meghan McCain, had five minutes on The View with Tamika Mallory and Bob Bland, and she did an amazing job grilling them on this. Imagine that, The View. The View is what's changed.

But it's amazing i know but she did an amazing job because because frankly because their image was so powerful in the same way that the image of the lincoln memorial was so powerful journalists just sort of accepted it and didn't interrogate them hats 500 000 people on the streets who doesn't want to support that but it's our job to be skeptical and criticize. So I think finally, a lot of people woke up to it. But again, I wrote that column in August 2017, and it took until now. Everything in that column is the thing people are talking about. There was also an amazing 10,000 word expose in Tablet Magazine, a Jewish online magazine

that did a lot of that work. So I think it did reach a tipping point. The thing that is, I see a lot of my friends on the left who are Jewish grappling with is that they so desperately want to be a part of these movements that they're willing to sort of check their identity at the door in order to gain entry. And my thing is, any progressive movement that's asking you to check your Jewish identity at the door, your full Jewish identity, which is acknowledging that we're not just a faith, but we're a people, we're not just people that have matzah ball soup or something bigger than that, that's not a space I want to be a part of. They would never ask that of any other group. Why us?

Well, why? Why do they ask that? That's what the real question is. It doesn't make any sense. Well, no, I think a lot of it goes back to what I was saying before, which is this misunderstanding. If you see the world in an intersectional way, okay, not as intersectionality was originally meant to be, but how it functions in the world. It functions as a caste system.

And the higher you are on the victim scale, at least on the left, and it's reverse on the right, right? On the right, it's like white cisgendered men are at the top. On the left, they're at the bottom. And the Jews are somewhere close down to there, at least in the way that the left, the left, I mean, this part of the left we're talking about, the fringe, at least for now, perceive the Jews to be be the woke left yeah the jews are not the jews don't rate the jews don't have a place in that victim scale because they've achieved so much success because they can pass as white because of any number of things and so i think that that's a huge reason for it which is a huge reason why i think intersectionality is a dead end and why we need to be talking about ideas and not identity, right? Like that is the thing about America that is so

amazing. And like, I know it sounds cheesy, but I really feel it that makes us so special. We are not a country based on blood and soil. We are a country whose national common identity is based on ascribing to a common set of ideas. That is what we're about. And so any politics that's insisting from the left or the right that no, actually what we are is this warring set of groups competing for scarce resources. Absolutely not. To me, those kinds of politics are un-American. I couldn't agree more in terms of identity. I think identity politics and the idea that you belong to a group is so intoxicating, but so dangerous. It's so important to treat people as individuals. It's so important to think of yourself as an individual. And this need to become a part of this group and a signal to that group is a big part of the problem that we're having right now.

And it doesn't mean that you can't have pride. Like, I have tremendous pride, the most, in being a Jew. Like, Jonathan Haidt talks so brilliantly about good identity politics and bad identity politics that good identity politics says, walk with me in my shoes. It's like a big tent sort of thing. It says, come along with me while I explain to you my experience in the world. Bad identity politics says, you can never escape the gender, the racial, the economic lane you were born into, and don't even try and understand me because you couldn't possibly. That's bad identity politics. And I think that that's in force and rising right now in the country.

And I think that that's dangerous. And I've been thinking about it a lot because it's Martin Luther King Day. And he said this like unbelievable thing about I think it's actually in the I had a dream speech, but where he talks about the the promissory note of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. the promissory note of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, right? That these people who wrote it, who were slave owners, didn't even know that in writing it, that every American was going to fall heir to this promissory note. And it's like he saw himself, even in documents that were written by people who would not have seen him as fully human, as a way of sort of using that common set of values, those common documents to like write himself into the story. Like that is an example of inclusive identity politics and like calling on the thing that

we have in common to widen the tent. And I just don't see a lot of that happening these days. I really butchered that. But everyone should look up. No, you didn't. No, I did. If you look up Jonathan Haidt gave a speech, I think you can find the whole text of it at City Journal. But if you just look up Jonathan Haidt, good identity politics, Martin Luther King, he does an amazing job. It's really moving.

His book, The Happiness Hypothesis, I'm in the middle of it right now. It's so good. It's so good. It's so fantastic. It's so crucial for people that want to understand their own personal biases and what's causing it. He's amazing. He's amazing. He was on here last week. I saw it. I thought he was incredible. Yeah, he is. The idea of having pride in something is interesting, right? There's

a lot of people that have pride for their ethnicity although they had nothing to do with with choosing it it's just something that they're born with um i think people get nervous about that kind of pride but i think there should be a set like it would be wonderful if we could keep all of these cultures and yet all appreciate each other as equals it would be wonderful if you could go and eat Ethiopian food one day or Cuban food the next day. And these people exist. Well, you can. That's the beauty of this country. Right now you can. Right now you can. But as we get more and more homogenized, I wonder if you will be able to. Wait, more homogenized or more insistent on you have to stay in your lane? There's both things. I think we're definitely cooking off the bacteria as well.

Homogenization. We're making things safer and easier for everybody. And there's some messiness. There's messiness to cultures exchanging with each other. But it's so exciting. It's very exciting. I have to say, I loved Australia. But when I get off that plane and I land as shitty as they are, JFK or LaGuardia, and I see like every kind of human being on the planet.

And like I walk every day from – I live in Manhattan and I walk to work. Like there and back every day. It just helps me decompress. And the kind of like the diversity of people on the sidewalk of Midtown Manhattan is amazing. I find it to be the most exciting thing in the world. And the fact that we're able to live among such difference and not kill each other is a miracle. What's one of the problems with Los Angeles? Is what?

Driving. We don't have that. Oh, you don't have that? People drive. Yeah. They're isolated. I love it here, but that's why I couldn't live here. Well, no one walks.

Everyone's locked in together in their car. They stay in their neighborhood, and they drive out to go somewhere else, and they don't even interact with each other. On the street, one of the things about the subway and one of the things about walking on the street is everybody's together. Everyone's together. And there's this interesting melting pot of human beings that exist in New York that doesn't exist anywhere else in that form.

Like Boston is so much more white. It's so much more, I mean, there's a lot of ethnicities, but it's not the same. New York is fucking flavorful. There's a lot of shit going on. There's a lot of great parts to it. It's also,

what concerns me is that people in New York are uniquely hostile. And then I always feel like- Are we? Yeah, for sure. Are you experiencing me that way? Not you, you're very nice um but a lot of people that i'm even friends with from new york i'm like you motherfuckers are stacked on top of

each other too much you like you you don't people aren't unique although to be fair i'm from pittsburgh so you might be getting that like midwestern flavor i bet that's exactly what it is pittsburgh's different a little more relaxed less people they have to count each other more and fucking snow gets you. It gets rough out there. It's not like you're not in a city the same way. You've got to drive places. It's different.

That is very Midwest-y. Pittsburgh is very Midwest. Pittsburgh is the best. It's a nice place. I like Pittsburgh. But New York, I love New York, but New York always makes me feel like when you have that many people slammed on top of each other, you're in this completely unnatural environment that literally has never existed in human nature up until a few hundred years ago.

It never happened like that. And now it's unprecedented because there's more and more people there that are just buzzing. And they're putting these buildings up where you've got 100 floors. My friend Jim Norton talks about it all the time because he lives in a building. He goes, I don't know a fucking person in my building. There's aorton talks about it all the time because he lives in a building. He goes, I don't know a fucking person in my buildings. A thousand people in this building. I could never live in a building like that.

I could never live in a high rise building. It freaks me out too much. So what do you, what do you live in? Like a small walk? Yeah. Yeah. Brownstone.

I live in a fifth floor walk up. Yeah. That's a good move. That's a good move. I mean, the walk up sucks, but the, but knowing your neighbor,

like I, yeah. I also think as an intellectual, as an intellectual, like as a person like yourself, I think it's incredibly important to experience this. There's an exchange of cultures and of thought in New York that you just don't get. You don't get on the West Coast. It's also not entertainment based. There's a frivolousness to the thought process out here that's flavored by the desire

for fame. It's unavoidable. But the one thing I'll say is that, yeah, it's important for that. And I find it so energizing, New York, all the reasons you said, but I also have to force myself to get out of the bubble. I go home to Pittsburgh and i hear a lot more oftentimes political and intellectual diversity than i hear sometimes in a week in new york right because everyone's left most people everyone in new york most of my friends are not everyone not everyone in new york just conservative people in new york obviously most it's it's a certainly normative super left-leaning city but then you go to pittsburgh and like it's like oh people believe a lot of things. You know, my mom was the one who told me that Trump was going to win. Whoa. Because she, for her business, we live in like Squirrel Hill, my family, we went, I was bat mitzvahed in the

synagogue that was shot up. So that's where we live in Squirrel Hill in the Jewish neighborhood. But my mom, for her work, has to drive like two or three hours out of the city. And during, you know, the campaign, she would, everyone I knew thought Hillary was going to win, including me. And she called me and said, Barry, you would not believe the homemade signs. There are giant homemade signs on the side of people's houses and barns that are enormous, that took them many hours to make. There's a passion for him that I don't think people are fully appreciating. Like, I didn't see that.

Everyone I knew was voting for Hillary Clinton. Right. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know what it's like for you out here. It's the same. This was, I mean, it's incredible. Not only is it incredibly left-leaning,

but it's also the entertainment aspect of it where people have to signal the fact that they're left so they go out of their way to project this image of being progressive on top of being progressive it's it's almost critical to your job you know you have to you have to show everybody you can out progressive the people around but then in secret do they tell you what they really think because you're like a safe person no no no not those people the people that are like man i don't like her but he's such a piece of shit i'm gonna vote for her anyway that was more common the thing was we like socially people appreciate the the democrats and the left

because they feel like socially in terms of like here's a perfect example when barack obama was a president you know people can criticize his policies and the whistleblower the fact that he cracked down on whistleblowers and the fact that there was more innocence killed by drone strikes and all that stuff is there's certainly some no one's it's an impossible job no one's perfect as a president but what he did do was he represented, first of all, he represented the fact that a minority, an African-American who was born from a single mother, can somehow or another rise to be the president of the United States and be incredibly well-spoken and measured and calm and just seems to know how to carry himself and makes us feel like someone better than us is in a position. And it also, I feel like there was a lot of racism from horrible white people that looked at him in a terrible way and saw this black person trying to destroy America. But way more people that aren't racist go, huh, look at that. You can't have an African-American president. Look at this.

Like, we're getting better. Like, that's how I felt.. Like, we're getting better. Like, that's how I felt. I felt like we're getting better, like culturally, the way we communicate. We don't have that right now. And we didn't have that with her. No. What she represented was the same old thing. The thing that's been fucking you and the reason why your family lost the farm and the

reason why and this donald trump's going to come in here and he's going to clean up the swamp and when he came out with that drain the swamp and you know lock her up build that wall he boiled it down so that the the people that don't have the time or the inclination to really deep dive into their own personal biases to their own objective reasoning and find out what is it? Why do I think the way I think? The people that don't have that thought, all that build that wall shit was perfect. Right.

Line it up. And that's most folks. Most folks don't have the time. Most folks work all day. They're tired. They have a family. They probably have a hobby. They don't have the fucking time.

You are a person who thinks for a living. You think and write for a living. You're constantly involved. Well, one thing I'm seeing, when I ask you about people telling you their secret thought crimes, I am noticing, and in a weird way this gives me kind of a hope, there is a big gap between people's public personas of the politics that they preach and then what they really think and what they'll say around a kitchen table. And a lot of them are experiencing what I call, what I think about as like second woke, like they're seeing the poverty or the flaws in the woke worldview and that there are holes with it, but they're kind of too scared to say that out loud because they know it'll be a loss of friends and social capital and everything else.

But those people talk to me a lot. Those people send me emails a lot. And oftentimes they're people with platforms who don't want to lose their audience. And I find that somewhat hopeful. I find it somewhat hopeful too, but I also- But they got to nut up. Yes. Like come out, nut up. Yes. Like come out.

Like you said that. Nut up. I'm on Rogan. I figured I'd say something like that. That's it. Say nut up. It's a good way – but you're right. The thought process behind nutting up is exactly what they need to do.

And if more people did it, I think you'd realize like, wow, we're kind of surrounded. It's almost like – Well, okay. What I think about my – like I am never the smartest person in any room i'm not brilliant i promise you probably smartest person in this room no no i don't know jamie hasn't talked trust me what makes me the only reason i'm sitting here is that i have like slightly more courage than most people and that i'm willing to say what i think to hell with pissing some people off or losing some friends that weren't really my friends. Most people aren't willing to do that, actually. Well, what I like about your writing

and what I like about talking to you today is that you represent reason and well thought out opinions. And those two things are very rare. Well thought out opinions are way more rare, in my opinion, than what you usually get. What you usually get is a conglomeration of opinions that seem to make sense peripherally or casually. They have a veneer of logic to them. You're like, I'll go with that because I don't have the time because most people don't have the time. Well, going back to Israel, I know we're probably, are we wrapping up? No. Going back to Israel for one second, it's become like a pillar, right?

It's like, okay, if you're on the left, I believe in criminal justice reform, like any number of things. Oh, and by the way, Israel's bad. It became one of those things that most people don't really think about. Right, Right. And like, I think it's really important to think about things issue by issue and not just be like, yep, signing up for this whole slew of policies and views on things when actually some of those things don't go together at all. Well, one thing in the woke left you're not allowed to do is criticize the more repressive aspects of Islam.

You're not allowed to. You don't do it. If you bring up anything becomes Islamophobic. And even if it's homophobic thought, if the ideas are homophobic, or if women have to wear restrictive clothing, all any any of the things that are incredibly commonplace, you are not allowed to criticize those because those fall into a protected category. I remember when I first ran into this in college when we were talking, I was in a conversation with other feminists, and I definitely consider myself a feminist about female genital mutilation. And I encountered for the first time a species that I've come to know well, which is feminists who sort of defend female genital mutilation and i encountered for the first time a species that i've come to know well which is feminists who sort of defend female genital mutilation on the grounds of cultural relativism

who are we to judge and i remember just like i did not get over the shock of that you shouldn't get over the shock i'm not that is fucking terrifying i mean that is look i'm a outspoken rabid critic of circumcision I think it's disgusting I think it's ridiculous It doesn't make any sense But at least your dick still works The idea that Someone tried to equate

Circumcision and female genital mutilation A person on the left did When I talked about it recently Some fucking asshole online I don't remember who it was I didn't even exchange. I just read it and I went, their vagina doesn't work the same way anymore. Do you understand that you can't have an orgasm anymore?

Exactly. You're cutting off a woman's clitoris to not because of cleanliness or any fucking weird logic that they're using today to try to justify circumcision way worse you're you're doing it to try to eliminate pleasure because you don't want the woman to leave it's the same reason why you want to cover her up with some crazy but why are but why doesn't show her skin why are we hearing the women the leaders of the women's marts talk about say i don't know honor killings, female genital mutilation, forced marriage for girls. Children. Children. No, instead they're talking about BDS in Israel.

I don't get it. I'd love to ask someone about that. Also, have you been to Israel? No, I have not. I want to take you. Uh-oh. Say yes. I would go.

Yes. I would go. I would go. I would certainly go. I got to bring Ari, though. He'll translate. Yes. I would go. I would go. I would certainly go. I got to bring Ari, though. He'll translate. Okay. Is that the guy with the Jew?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. He's a good friend. And he loves to travel, too, so he'd be down in a heartbeat. What was I going to say? Oh, why is it that, do you think that, here's a better way to form it. Do you think there's too many things to pay attention to? Yes.

Yeah. Not just worldwide. I feel that myself. Yeah. But even in terms of like left versus right and in these positions, like I often talk to people about gun control. And when people find out that I own guns and that I'm not entirely in favor of Second Amendment being repealed, one thing that drives me crazy is they want to always bring up school shootings, mass shootings, all these different things, which I agree are horrific, terrible occurrence in our culture and is happening in this insanely frequent way. And it doesn't make sense. What people don't want to talk about is that almost all those people are on psych medication almost all of them right now correlation does not equal causation them being on the psych medicine

might be the same reason why they're shooting up schools in the first place they're they're incredibly but the fact that you could be mentally unwell and legally buy a gun is insane. It's insane. That's actually insane. Yeah. Yeah, I know you agree. 100%. Not only do I think that you should – then here's the question. Who is the person to decide?

And this is what the NRA would say and this is what pro-Second Amendment people would say. Who are you to decide whether or not someone is healthy enough or well enough to own a gun? Who are you to decide whether or not someone is healthy enough or well enough to own a gun? And does a person who is on antidepressants or a person who has psychological problems not have the ability to defend themselves if they have never exhibited violence? So here's the problem. A lot of these motherfuckers, they don't exhibit violence until they break, until they pop, and then they go shoot up a school. Sometimes there's threats like Adam Lanza or a couple other ones where the FBI comes and visits them and they talk to them or the guy in Colorado where they knew he was like hanging on by a string. But like the guy in Pittsburgh, you know, he was on that gab, which I think is like a far right or it's definitely used by the far right. It's used by the far right. The problem

is when you have no restriction whatsoever and you have restriction on all these other ones, right? If you say something anti-Semitic or racist on twitter they will ban you if you do it on facebook they'll ban you and gab is committed 100 to free speech i've read things the owners of gab have said about this and that they're they're very steadfast in their support for freedom of speech because they think what i said earlier that the best way to ensure that good ideas get through is to not suppress bad ideas, but to combat them with better ideas. All I was going to say is that the guy who shot up the synagogue in Pittsburgh was saying the most horrific things about the kike infestation in the country.

And you can get away with that on Gab. And that's where the question is, well, should someone like Roku pull Alex Jones? Should they take off, you know, right wing? I think that this is a real question. Like, as someone who finds myself on, you know, making the free speech argument a lot, I think it's something that we really, really have to grapple with.

It really, it's almost like we're dealing with crude tools. Like, we're trying to perform surgery with hatchets like fuck man like how do you get to those people and have that discussion with all those people but this is i mean in terms of there being too much to to talk about and cover that's where i do think that things like the new york times can make a real contribution because we like there are adults in the room deciding what the important news is that you should pay attention to yes in theory at least well no I I wholeheartedly agree you know you're gonna learn about the genocide of the Uyghur

Muslims in the New York Times like if you really read the New York Times every day you're gonna know a lot about the world and you're going to understand that the government shutdown is a bigger deal than what happened at the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. If you're just trolling through Twitter, which is how every person I know, or Twitter or Snapchat or whatever, like my youngest sister, how she gets her news, you're not going to necessarily know that. That's a real problem. I don't know how to solve it um other than tell people to subscribe to newspapers which still have some standards and which still when they make a mistake correct the mistake how many of those are left there's a few yeah um i work at one of them you work at one of them you definitely do i mean look, I said something to someone from the New York Times online after an article that they wrote about a fight.

There was a boxing match between Conor McGregor and Floyd Mayweather. I saw it. It was a great fight. Floyd Mayweather schooled him. But at the end, it said that Conor McGregor's face was swollen and bleeding and he was knocked through the ropes. And I said, you can't say that because everybody saw the fight. That didn't happen in this crazy time where everybody is crying out for fake news. You can't say his face was covered in blood when there was no blood.

You can't say that. Like, don't do that. Was it corrected? It was corrected, which is so rare. But it's actually not like we correct things all the time. Right. But how do you stop it from happening in the first place? It's really hard.

Well, no, the first one is really hard. I mean, it's blood. No, no, no. Blood when it doesn't exist. No, no, no. When I'm sorry, when I'm saying it's really hard, what I mean is journalists just shouldn't make mistakes like that. Right.

But we do. The difference with the New York Times and any number of these other places is that we say we made a mistake and we correct. Well, it's hyperbole. That matters. Yeah, it's purple prose. It's like someone getting ahead of themselves, having a little too much fun. I don't remember that article.

Well, it wasn't. I don't necessarily think it's getting ahead. It's fiction. They applied fiction to an actual sport event, which I thought was bizarre. But they corrected it. They did correct it. Here's what's important. What's important is you can at least get a better version of the facts there than you can anywhere else. Yes. And I guess there's some people in the new media landscape that I see,

and I don't know if it's because they want to sort of gin up their own audiences or what, like nihilistically getting on, like using Trumpist language to describe the press. What they don't see, what they don't, I think what they don't understand is that the loss of trust in the press is a symptom of the loss of trust in lots of public institutions. The WHO, you know, the World Health Organization just came out with this terrifying report, where like one of the top 10 threats to health in I think the country, we should look this up, is people who aren't getting vaccines, people who think vaccines cause autism and are not getting vaccines. The stakes of like loss of trust in public institutions doesn't just mean like you're gonna like hurt the new york times

bottom line it's like a threat to all of our health like quite literally right you know i see these things as being very very connected so when i see people gleefully celebrating like the fake news of the new york times i'm like do you have a better alternative right now you know right that's what i'm thinking not you but no yeah i know i agree i like i don't understand why anyone would celebrate that i think it falls into what we're talking about before that it's a an easily digestible ideology that you can just subscribe to it's a conglomeration of pre-formed opinions and you lock in you start saying fake news and this is and it's also it's exacerbated by this situation that we find ourselves in where people aren't really buying newspapers anymore.

You have to get people to subscribe. I subscribe to several on my phone and on my computer, and that's how I digest things now, or an iPad. When you think about what they have to do to get those clicks, and you see and you see these weird, like, look, this is not a knock on Forbes. I think Forbes is an excellent periodical. They're great. They write some really important stuff. But almost every month, they will write this super click-baity thing about cell phones. Like, it comes with a nasty surprise.

The new Galaxy S10 has a nasty surprise. The new Galaxy S10 has a nasty surprise. And it's so unimaginative. Is it always nasty? Yes, yes. Look, see if you can find how many nasty surprise articles about iPhones and iPads.

I see them about video games and stuff a lot, too. They have like a contributor network that people are just allowed to write articles on. And how they allow that. Remember how many posts used to have that too yeah that fucking stuff is so dangerous because

as soon as people lose their trust that you are unbiased and you're giving them an objective perspective on exactly what's going on as soon as that i mean it might be nothing when it comes to galaxy s10s or whatever the fuck they're talking about this has a nasty surprise but but it it flavors your perspective on news of course it does and these people are fighting for their life journalists and people and contributors to these websites and news and newspapers are fighting for their life because everything is dropping off the revenues are down the revenues are and then like what's what and then like what takes their place? What takes their place? Bloggers? Who's looking at them? Are you sure that they have journalistic ethics and standards that are like what we would expect from –

They don't. They don't. Right. They don't have to. And this brings you to the Infowars thing, right? Yeah, I've just been thinking about that. If he's a journalist. No, he's definitely not a journalist.

There's not a question about that. But this is what people are fighting about. This is the whole shebang. Like if some of that news that you're getting in these traditional venues is fake, it is dangerous. If any of it is clickbaity, if any of it is deceptive. I could not agree with you more. It's fucking dangerous. Especially because we have a president who attacks the press as the end remember like let's not

forget the context we're operating in yes you know we have trump calling us the enemy of the people so crazy like the the lack of understanding of and he's driven some people insane yeah you know for sure they were easy to drive insane though let's be honest there's a lot of dummies out there that's part of the problem it's just it's so easy to prod a certain group and they're like, I'm going to do something about this. This is the danger. This is what you have to worry about. The people that – and again, they're signaling too. They're signaling to the far right.

They're signaling to those people. I know a lot of people like that. Not that it would shoot people, but I know a lot of people that are signalers that like far-right signalers like they'll see things and i've talked to people that i hope trump wins because we got to put a stop to all this nonsense what's the nonsense well it's progressive nonsense the idea of socialists like bernie sanders going to come along and take all your money we're struggling hard working americans we got to put amer first. Put America first. It's just lack of understanding about the complexity of the entire landscape, the entire landscape in terms of economics, the entire landscape in terms of international politics, all of it, all the above. The war machine, the lack of understanding about the military industrial complex, the influence that it has. military-industrial complex, the influence that it has, the lack of understanding about the bankers, about how few people went to jail after the fucking crazy economic collapse

that we just recovered from. What? I mean, have you seen Inside Job? Have you seen that documentary? No. It's an amazing documentary, but it's all about the financial collapse. Pull that up. Find out.

I watched it. It's from 2000. I want to want to say 10 11 but it's so sobering when you have this guy who's an economics a real true economics expert questioning these people who in many cases they're uh economics professors at major universities who give uh advice okay 2010 I was right. Charles Ferguson. That was a gentleman. He did a good job.

I know, it's so sad. He's a good guy. I met him. But he's forever... I just love that movie more than anything. Team America is one of the greatest movies

of all time. It really is. That ideology should rule the world. Yes, yeah. And you know what I love about it more than anything? The whole idea that actors have to save the world.

But just the analogy in the end is so brilliant. The dicks, pussies, and assholes. Yes. I inadvertently saw that movie with my dad and my grandfather, and I will never forget the puppet sex scene watching that next to them. I wonder if you can make that movie today. Yeah, it's so good, but you should never see that. Oh, right, next to your dad. Next to your dad and your grandpa.

No, you should. You could never make that movie today. You. Next to your dad. Next to your dad and your grandpa. No, you should. You could never make that movie. You know what I made a mistake of doing yesterday? I watched Ace Ventura, Peck Detective with my eight-year-old and my ten-year-old. I haven't seen that since it came out. Was it good still? I didn't realize how transphobic that fucking movie is. Is it?

I don't remember. Spoiler alert. The whole premise is that there was a football. You can't spoiler alert Ace Ventura, Peck Detective. I had to spoiler alert it myself because I forgot. The whole premise was that this guy steals a dolphin. And when he steals a dolphin, Ace Ventura finds, because he's a pet detective, finds a tiny ruby that's at the bottom of this dolphin tank that is missing from a Miami Dolphins ring. of this dolphin tank that is missing from a Miami Dolphins ring.

And he finds out through this exhaustive search that the one guy who he couldn't account for his ring was a kicker who fucked up the World Series, or the Super Bowl, rather. Oh, I kind of remember that. Okay. So this guy that they found out is Sean Young in the movie, who's gorgeous. And then in the movie, take that down, please. So in the movie, at the end of it, the reveal is that Sean Young is really this football player who wants to get back at Dan Marino because Dan Marino, he goes psycho because the world hates him because he blew the kick.

So he's a guy pretending to be a woman and Ace Ventura made out with him. And just like everyone, all the cops are throwing up. Everyone's throwing up. Are you kidding? Oh, no, no, no, no. It's off the charts. At the end, he pulls her top off and shows and she has breasts. He was like trying to show that she didn't really have breasts and she did.

And he's like, well, anybody can get those in an afternoon. But what about this? And he pulls her pants down and then he goes by and then everybody sees her and she's got her legs together so you can't see her penis and then from behind you see her junk is pressed up against her butt cheeks because she's tucked her penis and her vagina so the cops all start throwing up and then cops start cleaning cops that made out with her start cleaning their mouth off they start chewing giant wad that's her at the end this is the scene so watch all the cops see that

and he points to the fact that look they all start throwing up look everyone's throwing up Dan Marino's throwing up see how he's cleaning his mouth because he made out with her Tone Loke the dolphins freaking out everyone's freaking out it is so insanely

transphobic so what the left would say is the reason that they're right is that a movie like this won't get made anymore and isn't that a good thing maybe and and should they pull it should it be illegal to have that on itunes of course not i don't know maybe someone on the woke left might disagree with you right now yeah they call you transphobic for defending this horrible cisgendered heteronormative piece of shit movie that's horrible and what's crazy and i guess this is a great thing i mean the remoralization project is working because when i saw that i'm sure is i don't know what year did that come out two ninety five four okay so when i saw that as a yeah i don't know i was born in 84 i can't do math i want to say 93 i want to say it

was before i came to hollywood okay when i saw when i saw that movie i was 10 transphobia was not a thing no no it is a thing yeah that's good yeah well that's what we're talking about what when things are changing so rapidly yes but the but the question is, where are the lines being drawn? And is the Overton window being shrunk too small? How do you feel about them pulling the Dukes of Hazzard off the air for the flag? I don't know about that. You didn't know about that? No.

They pulled the Dukes of Hazzard. Do you understand how many of these there are a day? There's so many. Yeah, so no, I don't know that one. What's that one? This one, they've yanked the Dukes of Hazzard off television forever because the Confederate flag was on the roof of the General Lee. Did not follow this. You didn't know that?

You cannot watch the Dukes of Hazzard anymore. You cannot watch it. It's not on television anymore. It used to be on TV land all the time. Can you get it on Netflix? Fuck no. No chance. They're not going to show that goddamn awful flag.

I didn't follow this. We have a poster in the bathroom over there of Leonard Skinner from like 1970-something. And they have a giant ass- That's Janis Joplin, I thought, in the bathroom. Other bathroom. Is it Janis Joplin? Oh, that's the other bathroom. Yeah.

There's a different bathroom. I like that one. Yeah, that's a great one. That's her mugshot. I love it. Yeah, it's great. But the Leonard Skinner one, they have a giant Confederate flag on stage. Huge, enormous, in the background.

That was their southern pride, this idea of southern pride. It was okay to have that flag. I'm basically for trying, when it comes to the realm of art and movies and books. Leave it alone. Try to leave it alone as much as possible. It's generally a very good strategy. I agree. Don't want to be in the book banning, movie banning, TV banning business.

Or editing. They tried to – well, I think they did successfully, at least in some venues, edit Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn because the n-word was used prolifically you know i mean the guy's name was nigger jim that was the name in in in the book because that's how people talk back then and i think we need to keep that stuff as a time capsule to show how racism was so... Normative. Yes. Yes. It's important. I agree. To show the progress. Like Ace Ventura.

Like for trans people... We need to keep him for history. Ace Ventura. For trans people. And it's amazing that no one's ever brought this up. I mean, I feel like this is something that's never been discussed.

I'm smelling an op-ed coming on from you, Joe Rogan, about the importance... I don't have the time. I got shit to do. I got jokes to write. All right. But this is.

You got an Israel trip that I'm planning. Oh, Barry, what are you doing to me, Barry? You're dragging me over there. No, I'm not dragging you. I'm going to take you on an amazing trip. And then we're going to go to the West Bank and you're going to see all this stuff. And you're going to come away with loving certain parts of it and not liking certain parts of it. And you're going to realize

it's a country just like any other country. Right. But it is a democracy and it's trying to do its best in a really rough neighborhood. And we'll go, like,

I want you to see what the occupation looks like. Like, I think that's something that's really important to see to get a full picture of it. I think you're probably right. I think it is an important thing

for people to see. I think there's a lot of parts of the world that I need to see to really get a grasp. Where are you going next in the world? Do you travel a lot? Yes.

I don't know. I mean, my family and I, we do a European vacation trip, but that doesn't really count. We just lounge. That's just fun. Yeah. I went to Thailand last year. That was fascinating. Oh, cool.

Thailand was fascinating because that was kind of a vacation trip too. But that's such a unique culture because Thailand is run by the king. Like if you even criticize the king, you're fucked. Like you're in real trouble. And his picture is everywhere. Everywhere there's pictures of him and the throne like wearing like super nice clothes and looking good. But the people are so kind. They're so kind.

They're so friendly and they're always smiling and they have, you know, there's a lot of people that you'll run into that have very little yet they don't seem to be having a problem with that.

They wear flip flops. You're on the highway. There's three people on a motorcycle with a baby in a basket and I'm not bullshitting. It's crazy. No helmets.

No helmets. I have a friend that just went to Thailand and she was like... But the people are so nice. They're's crazy. No helmets, obviously. No helmet. I have a friend that just went to Thailand, and she was like. But the people are so nice. They're so nice. They're so kind. It's so unusual.

And, you know, me and my family, we always, whenever we go somewhere, we always have these real long conversations about, like, what was interesting about it for you. Like, what did you think? How old are your kids? Eight and ten, the young ones, and I have a 22-year-old, too. Okay. All girls. Holla.

I'm from four girls. Woo. Yeah, it's in the genes. But what's fascinating to me about it is, first of all, I love exposing these little people to different parts of the world so they get to see, like, what this is like. You know, like, here we are. Like, show them on the map. This is Americaica we're over here but where the fuck it took us 15 hours to get here in a plane that goes 500 plus miles

an hour it's crazy and just to realize like human beings are the same but different we're the same everywhere but there's a different way we choose to interact with each other and one of the things that happens is we fall into their way when we go there like if we go to Italy we say grazie you know we start I try to you try to move your hands a lot we'll just start trying to learn some of the words yeah you know that you know these people use in their culture and then I forget how you say it cups and crab I think that's how you said it it's like like hello and thank good morning yeah and but they all say that and everyone makes a lotus flower with their hands it's so common everywhere

you go people greet you and they do this and it's such a warm friendly peaceful way of greeting each other and so one of the things we talked about i was like you know everybody's like way more friendly and like greeting and this thing about clasping their hands together and they all agree to do it and everyone sort of it's like this unique pattern that people can fall into and people fall into all sorts of patterns they fall into like really aggressive patterns of honking at people on the road and driving real fast and and then they fall into these peaceful patterns and some of it's dictated by culture some of it's dictated by climate some of it's dictated by the economic situation of the world they're in but it's it's such a weird trip to go to different places and see like okay yeah if i lived over here this is how i'd rock it i'd be wearing flip-flops and

shorts and you know i'd get around this way and this is the kind of food that i would eat and totally real spicy because you know you kind of food that I would eat. Totally. And it's real spicy because you kind of have those spices actually protect against bacteria because they're actually antibacterial. Was the food great? Fucking amazing. We took classes.

We learned how to cook over there. So fun. Yeah, it was amazing. It was amazing. But my kid got lit up by bugs. Woo! I think they're called tsetse flies. I think that's what they're called.

I forget what they're called, but my youngest had a horrible allergic reaction to some of the bugs over there. And you think, like, okay, what about, you know, there's fucking diseases that kill people. Malaria has killed more people than anything ever like more people have died from malaria than anything oh i know yeah well that's why gates

made it yeah totally yeah and so you go over there like what we were going to go to africa it's one of the things that we're going to go to but i'm not giving my fucking eight-year-old malaria shots right just no just like those pills give you really bad dreams i've had some friends that dave foley who's like the sweetest guy on the planet earth he was from kids in the hall oh cool he was on news radio with me dave foley was on malaria medication because he was going to visit his kids in uh egypt so he had to take this stuff and he was drinking you're not supposed to drink on it and uh he was he hallucinate she's going crazy he doesn't even remember it he's going crazy yeah yeah taking a reporter's uh microphone or his uh tape recorder away and put it in a drink he was like losing his marbles like i had to protect him

from yelling at a guy i had to like corral him like calm down meanwhile the sweetest kindest nicest guy you would ever meet and meanwhile he was like like super aggro it was crazy it didn't make any sense and it's the medication. Right. He just had a horrible reaction. I've had other friends that had just like horrific, waking up soaked in sweat, evil nightmares, demons chasing them. Like, fuck this medication.

This is too much, man. But my point is, yeah, I'd be down to go to Israel. I think I need to go to... Have you been to that part of the world? No. Okay. Yeah. It's time. I'd be down to go to Israel. I think I need to go to – Have you been to that part of the world? No. Okay, yeah, it's time. I want to go to Giza too. That's the other place I really need to go to.

Okay. I've been obsessed with the pyramids since I was a little kid. Great. It can be one trip. All right. I'm on it. All right. Done.

Let's do it. And you can set up a debate for me and I'm in for that too. I have to pee. I don't know if we're wrapping up. No, no. Go pee. Go pee. Go pee. I don't know. we're wrapping up. Go ahead. No, no. Go pee. Go pee.

I don't know if I'm setting up a few debates. I don't know if I can set that one up. That one seems problematic. Why not? No, no, no. She's hilarious. She's going to drag me to Israel. She's a powerful lady though, right? She's got some

horsepower behind her opinions you gonna come with us uh yeah you gotta take pictures man you're a professional photographer yeah yeah um would you feel nervous where would you feel more nervous going to giza or going to gaza gaza right yeah yeah yeah like shit could pop off at any minute you just don't want to be there when Giza or going to Gaza? Gaza, right? Yeah. Shit could pop off at any minute. You just don't want to be there when it all goes sour. Yeah, a friend of my dad in the 80s, he was on his way, I believe, to Beirut, and he was being tracked.

He found out once he got back, he met Ronald Reagan, and when he met President Reagan, he said, It's nice to meet you. We've been following you. And he's like, excuse me? You've been following me? He's like, yeah, we found out there was a threat after you. I think you fainted on the spot or something like that.

There was a threat. He was just going to deliver hot dogs. His name was Hot Dog Harry. He was trying to help the troops and stuff. What was the threat? They were trying to kill him. Jesus Christ, for delivering hot dogs? At one point a car pulled up next to him and a guy with a gun had it like wrapped to his head. And the cab driver thankfully knew what was happening and took off. And he didn't die.

Why were they going to kill him just for delivering hot dogs? I don't remember the exact situation. They weren't happy he was over there trying to help. Oh, wow. Holy shit. I believe that's how it went down. Fuck. to help oh wow like someone holy shit yeah i believe that's how it went down yeah fuck yeah there's spots in the world that are just so fucked up like you don't want to go because you you hear and you're like i don't want to get caught up in that i don't want to get caught up

in that when i could just stay in burbank you know why would i go and get caught up in that but then there's other parts he goes, man, for your own edification, you should probably go just to understand what it's like. Did you hear about those ladies that were killed in Morocco? Hey, you're back. You shut that door? I'll grab it. It's okay.

We're just talking about going to dangerous places, and it's probably a good idea, but you get scared. And for the most part, you probably shouldn't be scared, but sometimes you should. And we were just talking about those women that were killed in Morocco, those Norwegian hikers. Were they from Norway or Denmark? I forget.

They were hiking in Morocco. It was two women, and they were killed by these. But a woman was just killed in Australia, a 20-year-old Israeli? A good woman killed in New Zealand? Killed by people that were doing it because of the United States' killed in Australia, 20-year-old Israeli, a good woman killed in New Zealand. Killed by people that were doing it because of the United States' involvement in Syria. Oh, my God. And they cut their heads off

and did it on a cell phone camera. And they put it on the internet, and I watched it. Oh, you watched it? Yeah, absolutely. Why would you watch that? You know what? Because I was reading the story,

and the video was there, and I just clicked it, and I shouldn't have. And just to see it, it's just, part of me wants to know that people like that exist. But you know they exist. I know they exist.

But I don't want it to be. An abstract. You know what? I watched the Danny Pearl video. Yeah. I'll never watch another video like that again. Yeah, I saw that one too. I've seen quite a few of them now.

You need to know. I don't want to go there. You know? I mean, it's not worth it to go to a place where that's happening. But you need to know that that's happening, right? In order to have a realistic perspective on world events, you need to know what it is at the worst end of the spectrum. Like, what are the consequences for rabid ideologies? Well, I've thought about that with like what we decide to show and not show after mass shootings here.

Yeah. You know, like I was in Pittsburgh like right after. And I was, you know, because I knew the rabbi who was doing some of the cleanup and because of religious reasons. And it was you were you your bat mitzvah. Was there. That is so crazy. And yeah, my dad knew six of the people who were murdered and um but like it was really crazy to me how locked down

it wasn't like you couldn't take it i was there with a photographer and you couldn't take any pictures at all of anything you know and there's a real lockdown on showing people because you don't want to terrify people. But I've wondered, would it prick people's consciousness about the reality of what gun violence looks like? You know, like the carnage, like the people that I knew that saw it said it looked like a war zone. And would that change public policy? And would that be a positive thing? Or would we just become numb to it like we become numb to everything else? I don't know. That's a very good question. I'm never in favor of suppressing information, even horrific information. I was a big critic of that during the Bush administration when they passed laws on whether or not

you're allowed to show actual coffins just coffins. You weren't allowed to show coffins being flown back. I felt like that was that's a disgrace. If we're going to consider whether or not we want

to be involved we should be able to understand the real consequences and one of the best ways is to not just get information in terms of text text is very difficult for you to conceptualize but when you're seeing american flags covering coffins and you're seeing hundreds of them and you realize these are your neighbors these are your neighbor's children this is this is people that you know, and they're dying over there, and you can't really wrap your head around why they're doing it, whether or not it's right, whether or not we should have been there,

and then whether or not there actually were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, whether or not we're in the business of nation building, whether or not Ron Paul is right, whether or not other people are right. Who's right? The only way we're really going to get a clear picture is to see a picture, to have an actual picture. Yeah. Well, that's why I've thought about this a lot because right now I think in most Americans'

minds, it's like the shooting happens, then it becomes a hashtag, then it becomes a t-shirt, then it becomes a memorial thing, a memorial concert. I mean, it's like actually sickening, like the choreography of it. And I think what's lost is what it looks like. And this rabbi in Pittsburgh who's really amazing described to me what he saw. And I will never forget just the description of what he told me. And I've wondered a lot in the wake of that, and I'll think about it when with the next shooting happens would that have made a difference at all in terms of waking people up what's fucked up as you said when the next shooting happens well that's what's fucked

well we know it will happen yeah we know it will happen yeah um yeah why why because because there are a lot of guns in this country and people have access to those guns who are not only mentally unwell, sometimes they're just evil. They want to kill people and they want to be famous. I mean, for a million reasons. But the fact that we are living in a culture that seems to worship people's freedom to own those weapons more than human life seems crazy to me. It really does. I get what you're saying. The argument against that would be this. Look, the real crazies believe that these things are happening and that they're happening because of the fact the government wants to take away our guns. This is the real crazies. Explain that. I'm not sure crazies. Wait, explain that.

I'm not sure I follow. That they are making these people do these things. The government? That the worst aspects of our society, whatever, you know, fill in the blank with whatever left-wing conspiracy, that, you know, whatever person, whatever boogeyman, George Soros, whatever the fuck the boogeyman is, whatever boogeyman george soros whatever the fucking boogeyman is that the whatever boogeyman or book or cabal of boogie people that they are somehow or another either using the like manchurian candidate type influence whatever the fuck they're doing they're getting people to do this and then even creating false flags where these things didn't happen so they can take away guns.

This is the, I mean, look. But this is like swamp terror. This is like Pizzagate. It is. You're right. It is. It is. It is dumb.

But it's real. It's real in terms of the influence that it has. That people actually do believe that there are these false flag events that they're designing to get your guns. That people are training people to go out and kill a bunch of people so they can take away your guns. So it makes them more rabid about their support of the Second Amendment. And they feel like they're being attacked on all sides. Have you had Michael Schumer on here? Yes, recently. Last week.

The mindset of the conspiracy thinker is totally fascinating to me. It is. Mick West is actually just as good or even better. He runs Metabunk. Okay. He's a fascinating guy. I used to do this show. I did this show for a while on SyFy called Joe Rogan Questions Everything.

And one of the things that we went into was why people believe in chemtrails, why people believe that the heat of jet engines, which causes these artificial clouds when it interacts with condensation in the atmosphere and creates artificial clouds, you see chemtrails. Some people believe that someone's spraying something and that this weather control from these commercial jets, that somehow or another there's this gigantic conspiracy

of all these people involved and that this is in some way they're either doing weather control or they're controlling us or mind control. It depends on who you ask. Clearly. But Mick had a really interesting way of discussing it. And one of the things that he said is this is like the training wheels for conspiracy theory because you see it in the sky.

Like, look, there it is. I don't remember that. Meanwhile, there photographs from world war ii where you can see from the 1940s you can see contrails in the sky that look just like the ones up here but people will say i don't remember those when we were kids and people go yeah yeah i don't and then it starts fueling this paranoid idea that there's this program going on and then there are real programs that the government is considering to combat global warming, where they talked about this in the 70s and the 80s. They talked about reflective particles in the atmosphere. I think they were concerned that the ozone layer was almost the 80s, probably later than that. But even more recently, they've talked about

suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere to protect it. But it'd be very different. But why do people believe conspiracy theories? What is it in the nature of certain people that I'm just so fascinated by it? That's a good question. That's what I was going to ask you. I don't know. When you see it from the outside, when you see something like the most horrific ones, like Sandy sandy hook like sandy hook being a false flag

what would be the motivation for someone saying that what would be the motivation the only thing i can i mean the most plausible i guess would be capturing an audience like getting people to believe in you as some seer behind the veil. Yeah, but that's only the people that are projecting this in terms of, in the media. I'm talking about like an Alex Jones.

Like, why does he say that? My question is, why do other people think it? Why do they look for it? Not a person who's profiting off of it. I think that's, I think the reason people look to conspiracy theories is that the world is deeply chaotic and seems to lack a logic.

And people are desperate for a system of understanding the world. And conspiracy theories often seem to like offer a very, very actually like an incredibly simplistic explanation, which is there's this secret thing. Like there's always a secret thing that is a plan that the public doesn't know about. The real thing is that no one really is at the wheel. Yeah. Yes. The real thing is that, I mean, haven't we learned that from the Trump presidency, right? Like institutions are just made up of people. Like they can fall apart if the people that take them over are irresponsible, crazy, venal, narcissistic, everything that we're seeing in the Trump administration.

But isn't that kind of, it's weirdly, I mean it's both terrifying but also comforting, I think. What's comforting about it? If it's just people, people can also change it. Right. Okay. It's not like there's a secret hand that we need to get to. Okay, what's the solution? Elect better people. That's the hopeful part.

Do you think that this – Such as it is. that's the hopeful part do you think that this such as it is this constant conflict this social conflict that we're involved in right now the woke left

and the alt right and all this jazz that there's the the boiling of it right now will eventually boil down to something more rational because if

it seems like if you if you read Steven Pinker's work and people that study violence and and danger and society over the course of history,

that we're certainly on an upward trend. Even though no one's denying. Right, all the data shows that. Yes, all the data shows that. No one's denying that there's some awful aspects to our culture today and society and crime and violence and fill in the blank. And wealth disparity and yes. Yes, all those things exist.

But there's more understanding of that. There's more awareness of that. And there's certainly a safer world today than was 100, 200 years ago in terms of like your own existence. American city with, you know, all the privileges that I have granted, but unharmed. Yes. That's a miracle in human history. It is. Like there's one day I was at the beach and I was like, oh, I'm just like sitting here in a bathing suit. No one's coming up to me. No one's harassing me.

How many parts of the world could I do that in? Right. You know, like I try and keep that in mind when I'm falling into despair about where we are as a country where I'm like, oh, actually, in a lot of ways, it's still like the best thing of the worst things. It's the best thing in history so far. It's certainly for women. So I try and kind of keep that in mind when I'm losing myself to feelings, to fears that things are going to get worse before they get better, which is what I think. I have all daughters, and I have friends that are women, and I have a lot of friends that are women in the world of stand-up comedy.

And I oftentimes see misogynist shit online that shocks me. And one of the things that shocked me was there's a guy that I follow and he was talking about how his wife, it was like thread on Twitter. Well thought out, very smart guy. He's a lawyer. And I was talking about how his wife's gas tank is always empty.

It's like every time he gets in his wife's car, she's always out of gas. He's like, what the fuck? Why do I always have to get gas for you? And then she explained, she doesn't like to park to get gas because she gets harassed and it creeps her out and um and it's like a man would never think about

that not only men never think about that the messages he was getting from men calling him a cock what making excuse oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah there is no that's not i i mean i i'm an idiot that i didn't think darkly enough because of course it was going to go there. Right. Of course. And he told me direct messages, getting direct messages. People, you know, saying all kinds of crazy shit to him because they, not only are they in denial that this could be a situation where their mother was in or their wife or their daughter. Maybe they don't have a daughter.

Maybe they have a bad relationship with their mother. Maybe they just, they've had so many bad, you know, if a guy's had so many bad interactions with women and he's not very smart and he's just decided that women are evil and you see anything that's like saying, hey guys, maybe we should look at it in terms of like how the woman looks at it. Fuck you. Like that's real. Those guys are real and they're out there.

I was at a gas station the other night at two o'clock in the morning i was coming home from the comedy store and i pulled into this gas station and there was this guy you know they have that bulletproof thing with this thick glass the guy's talking i'm using my credit card and this guy's trying to use his debit card okay and i pull in i get out of my car and i hear hear yelling. And I hear him going, hey, bro, relax. You're not a fucking bank teller, all right? He goes, you're taking this job so seriously. You make $10 an hour.

And the guy says something. There's no money on the card. He's like, fuck you. There's $800 on this card. And his friend from the car is saying something. And I am nervous, OK? Really? Yes.

It's 2 o'clock in the morning, and I'm nervous. And I'm like. Okay. I'm nervous. Yes. It's two o'clock in the morning and I'm nervous. And I'm like, fuck. And I'm like, what if this guy turns any of this aggression on me? What if he decides, I mean, he's a fucking asshole and he's probably drunk or high or something. And it's two o'clock in the morning and it's him. And there's another guy in the car and I'm so nervous. And they're humiliating the guy who works there.

Yes. Yes. And I'm so nervous that I'm thinking of cutting my pump short. I'm thinking of just don't get a full tank. Just get five bucks and get the fuck out of here. You know, don't run out of gas, but let's just get the fuck out of here. We'll get the gas tomorrow during the daylight. And I'm a man.

And I'm looking at these two guys and I'm saying, okay, if some shit goes down, if these guys don't have a weapon, if some shit goes down, I'm going to beat the fuck out of these two guys they look skinny they look like they don't exercise but they're aggressive they're angry they're stupid i'm like god damn it like all my spidey senses are going get out of here go get out of here and like an asshole i decide to stay and pump my gas but when the the these guys are yelling each other i literally went around the front of the car instead of this back way because it was a shorter path for me being exposed to their view. So I'm hiding behind my truck while I'm filling my tank. And I'm a man who could kill these two guys. Right. I honestly thought where this story was going to go is that you were going to go over and tell them to shut up.

I was thinking of going over there, but I didn't want to get shot. And I'm thinking, what if... This is how people die. I know. Now I'm saying... Second amendment joke. Sure. But also, you can get knifed.

You can get hit in the head with a pipe. But isn't that an insane thing that you have to worry that you're going to get shot at a gas station? It is. It is. But it's not just shot. It's just violence in general. Fair enough. And I'm a martial arts expert.

So I'm less worried than most men and certainly way less worried than a woman if i was a woman and i pulled up and i heard that guy going fuck you make ten dollars an hour bro fucking relax i'd be like oh get me the fuck out of here i was on fumes though has raising two daughters made you so much more aware of this stuff 100 yeah and also just raising babies even if there were boys, I realized that people are babies now. I used to think of people as being in a static state. How old are you?

34. I meet you. I go, oh, 34 year old person. This is a 34 year old person. I didn't meet you and think in the past I would have met you and only thought of you as a 34 year old person. Now I look at everyone by default as a baby that's how i process things and it made me way more compassionate way more understanding and way more patient with

people because i now i say okay when i meet this asshole at the gas station two o'clock in the morning that's berating that guy well why is he well because probably his dad's a fucking piece of shit his life probably sucks he's probably dumb dad's a fucking piece of shit. His life probably sucks. He's probably dumb. He's probably been on drugs since he was young. He doesn't have any smart friends. They don't have any money to get gas. It's 2 o'clock in the morning. They're making poor life choices.

There's a lot wrong here. He doesn't have any discipline in his life. He's never gone through any sort of trials and tribulations that taught him about things. He didn't receive life lessons. Probably didn't get a good education. Here we are, and I might have to kick this guy's ass because it's 2 o'clock in the morning and he's threatening. He's loud

and he's probably going to be loud. Other people look at him the wrong way. He's just fucking toxically stupid. But he was a baby. He was a baby at one point in time. So I don't want to go over there. I don't want to create violence. I'm thinking he's just going to drive away and eventually he did. And that poor guy who probably is probably making just a little bit more than ten dollars an hour

is stuck in this fucking cubicle this little glass box with this asshole berating him at two o'clock in the morning but that's a baby that guy was a baby my my my except not acceptance, but my curiosity with socialism. My real curiosity with any socialist ideas is, how do we recognize the fact that some people are dealt the shittiest of shitty hand of cards, and that there's entire sections of cities where everyone has a shit hand of cards, and some make it out through basketball and football and sports and rap music and whatever but that whole spot sucks the whole spot sucks the aberrations the the few that make it out that's not indicative of that this is a good

place and these people just need to pull themselves up by the bootstraps is that some salmon make it up this crazy waterfall and the grizzly bears don't eat them it doesn't mean that the waterfall is safe for salmon and the salmon that get bit are a bunch of pussies it's it's this this is chaos this the fact that we don't address that and that our civilization just plows on with the same stupid path that we've had for decades regardless of the fact that we have an absolute understanding of the complete inequality of the real ghettos of our country, whether it's the south side of Chicago or whether it's Baltimore, wherever it is, we have a real understanding of this. This isn't guesswork.

We really know, and we don't do a goddamn thing about it. That's what makes me want to embrace some aspects of socialism. The fact that I know it's not fair. It's not fair. Look, I didn't have a great childhood, but it wasn't bad. I got through. I'm fine. Nobody shot me.

Nobody raped me. I got through. Like, it could have been way worse. And it is way worse for many, many people. So all these pull yourself up by your bootstraps assholes. The other thing I notice about them is they're rarely really successful. Like, they're really rarely are these pull yourself up by your bootstraps people people who have accomplished anything extraordinary it's just like an idea it's like it's it's it's a it's a

simplistic ideology that they've sort of subscribed to you should have AOC on I would love to we her and I have gone back and forth on Twitter yeah that would be really interesting to listen to plus she's so young I'm so interested in her yeah she's 28 years old I mean that's amazing the whole thing's amazing she's just fascinating you should have her on how about when she was getting a hard time because they found a video

like they thought they were going to get her they found a video of her in college dancing yeah but you know what everyone loved that video. Like, the whole narrative that, like, some random person on Twitter put that video out. Right, but the point is they did it because they thought they were going to shame her. They're idiots. How funny is that?

Yeah, I mean. They thought. It was the most charming thing in the entire world. It was amazing. Anyone who did not love her already fell in love with her. Yeah. That's what it accomplished. And then her response to that was her doing a little dance oh she's a genius she's a social

media genius the question is does she you know do her ideas stand up at all well it'd be interesting to hear her ideas can evolve but what she has that's unique is she's real and she seems to be a really good person she seems to be a good person, whether or not I agree with her tax policy, I'm not an economist. I'm a fucking moron. Okay. I don't know anything about economics. I really don't. I mean, you should have her on with some economists. Like now, I'd rather have her on. I just want to know about her as a person first. Look, my thoughts on politicians is you can hire economists. You could listen to them. You could talk to them. What we really need is people that have the right idea as far as where humans should go, the way we should behave, the way we should treat each other. This overwhelming need for community that we all share. We have to

pull this thing together. And we have to look at each other as a community. And that's lacking. And the people that are polarizing both on the left and the right, they don't want to look at each other as a community. And that's lacking. And the people that are polarizing, both on the left and the right, they don't want to look at it that way. They want to look at people and say, hey, you will never get better, like that 16-year-old kid. No need to ever forgive him. This kind of crazy talk, whether it's from the right or from the left, is what we really need to stomp out. We need to stop. We need to be nicer to each other. We need to figure out that we don't have time.

We're not going to live long. If you're 50 years old and this is your idea of the world, like, fuck, man, you're halfway done and you're an idiot. You're looking at shit completely wrong and you're halfway done with this trip if everything goes perfect. I know we're in an anti-religious period of the world's history, I know we're like in an anti-religious period of the world's history, but like ideas like grace and mercy would go a long way in the culture right now. Yes.

No, I agree. And even if it's just – even if it's really wacky, you know, mindfulness and yoga, even if it's like comes from a sort of fake guru-y place in the beginning which a lot of times it does let's just people have i mean people have deeply religious impulses and that needs to go somewhere and so it's going to politics and doctrinaire politics or it's going to wokefulness or it's going to self-care and wellness. I mean, all these things are astrology. It's like making a comeback. Is it really? Yeah. Are you kidding? Yes.

I am kidding. I mean, I'm not kidding. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. How's astrology making it? People's signs, like, I mean, it's like all religious, like that energy inside of us, I think, is deeply human and needs to go somewhere. I talked to a guy who's a really smart guy

who told me he doesn't do anything until he contacts his astrologer oh my god everyone in la has one yeah not everyone a lot that's not true jamie jamie does not have one no jamie consults the weed leaves um yeah i i don't know what that's about but i do think that people do have this desire for a space daddy a higher power a higher power, something that knows more than you, some grand pattern to follow that leads to harmony. I mean, I think everybody sort of has that thing. Because, again, what we were talking about before, we do realize, if we are being honest, that no one's at the wheel. about before we we do realize if we are being honest that no one's at the wheel that we wake up we're almost like we're in a spaceship and we wake up and you know we were in hypersleep and this thing has been flying for millions of years i'm like wait who the is flying this

do we know who's flying this oh you're not flying it i'm not flying it well i'm gonna we're gonna get together and we're gonna form a group that flies it like okay okay but it's still moves it's still moving while we're trying to figure out who flies it and there's no way to slow it down there's no brakes on this thing i mean we are in an organic spaceship we are we are and we're flying through infinity we're spinning a thousand miles an hour and we're going through space that's real and you're gonna die that's all those things are real all those things sort of make everything else sort of pale in comparison the reality of that is so bizarre and while while we're avoiding those thoughts we're concentrating on these very minor differences that we really have that are really framed by our teams you know the team this team says you got to do this this team says you got to do that i can

tell almost two a point. If you tell me you're pro-life, I go, oh, you vote Republican. Right. And you know everything else about that person. That's crazy. The idea also that you know that you're going to die. And yet there are people who are spending their lives hurling pixels at other people. Pixels?

Like on Twitter. That's hilarious, though. Pixels. i never thought about that way that's crazy yeah like this is your day too this is your one life yep that's how you want to spend it yeah being mean go outside yeah seriously like go outside but it's so intoxicating and it's so new that's also the problem with social media and phones in in a world in which you know people live alone and stare down at their flashy screen and worship it like a god, these networks give you a sense of belonging and community. Yes, and it also gives you something to think about.

If you, you know, I was talking about Jamie Kilstein earlier, who I accidentally almost tweeted or texted. Jamie used to be a heavy-duty social justice. Oh, I know all about him, yeah. And he was describing how he would go after people and then he would be locked onto his phone all day long, look at the responses and completely addicted to it. No matter what he did throughout his day, he was checking his phone every couple minutes

and couldn't help that compulsion. That's a lot of people out there that are locked into this. It's an addiction. Yes, it is an addiction. I've had to get, I mean, like I had a small period of a few months where I had not really been on Twitter. I joined the Times. That sort of thing happened to me. And then I was like, this is horrible.

Like I hate the way this is physically making me feel like I'm nauseous. I'm sweating. Like I, I hate this. this yes i can't do this yeah especially if someone's saying something mean to you oh my god and then you look at it and you're like i should say something back like this is not really intense and then people you see them like formulating like hey man what are you doing i'm in i'm in the middle i'm in mortal combat here mortal online you know you catch yourself like i remember i was at a dinner party once and i was like describing some Twitter fight I was in,

and I was like, oh, my God, I've become one of those people, and I'm not going to allow myself to be that person. Yeah. But you have to fight it. You do have to fight it, and you have to be aware of what it is. You know, like, it feels like something you have to pay attention to. Right, but the beauty is that I get to write for the New York Times. Yeah, that is the beauty.

I'd like to put my energy into that. Yeah. And when you do get criticism from your articles, do you get it in the form of like, what is the... I got a really scary email today. I get emails, I get tweets, I get everything. Everything everyone gets. I get letters in the mail sometimes.

Do you want to talk about it? Like no i mean it's no i mean i can i can i don't think it's so unusual like that's part of you know i write things that people find provocative i expect to provoke a reaction i'm okay with that and it when there are things that are scary, you know, the New York Times is really good about monitoring that. Yeah. But I don't like to be in a field that's getting attacked as an enemy of the people by the president of the United States. Not super excited about that. But it's just so bizarre that the guy, he's so petty that he calls it like the failing New York Times. But it's so irresponsible. so petty that he calls it like the failing new york times but it's so irresponsible like there i'm shocked that there has not been more violence perpetrated on members of the press

i'm really i really am what do you think happens with him i don't know i don't know who can beat him i don't know who can beat him who do you think can beat him that's a good question i don't know hillary can't. I'm so worried. Duh. Yeah, but I'm so worried she's going to run again. She's going to muscle her way to the top. I don't know who can beat him right now. I don't know.

Why do you think that? Right, and the question, right, is like— Because as things keep going further and further south, what about someone who is a centrist Democrat? Doesn't that make more sense that someone who's gonna who's a rational person who's on the right who's gonna look at this person who's maybe uh economically conservative but socially liberal and say this is really yeah unless they run someone on the far left and like on on an identity politics platform that's what scares me yeah that's not gonna work well could it though because i don't think so I don't know because Trump's whole thing was screw the center. I just need to make my base go ape shit crazy for me.

But they're still ape shit crazy and no matter what he does. I know and I'm worried that the left, that the Democrats are going to try and replicate that strategy and be like we just need to make our base go ape shit crazy rather than running someone that can win the center. I see where you're going. someone that can win the center i i see where you're going but i think that this is maybe my liberal bias but i think that people on the left wouldn't fall for that the same way people on the right would i don't think people on the left who saw someone who went ape shit full woke far left i think there's a lot of people in the center be like well i'm not just gonna vote libertarian man i'm gonna vote for gary johnson or some shit okay, so who's in right now? So we have Kamala, Kristen Gillibrand. Monstrous.

Monstrous? Ideas. Ideas. Well, when she was 22, she had... No, she's an Assad toady. What does that mean? She is a... What's a toady?

I think that I used that word correctly. Jamie, can you check what toady means? Like toe in the line? Is that what it means? No, I think it's like a... T-O-A-D-I-E. What does that mean? I think it means what I think it means.

There you go. Toady. Definition of toadies. A person who flatters or defers to others for self-serving reasons. A sycophant. So she's an Assad sycophant. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, that's known about her. What did she say that qualifies her?

I don't remember the details. We probably should say that before we say that about her. We should probably read it, rather. Well, I have read it. No, I mean, we should right now. Oh, yeah. Okay. Just so we say that about her. We should probably read it, rather. Well, I have read it. No, I mean, we should right now. Oh, yeah. Okay. Just so we know what she said.

Look up Tulsi Gabbard. I've had her on here before, and I really enjoy talking to her. I like her a lot. Are you serious? Yeah, I like talking to her. Okay, okay. I like talking to her. I don't know about—

I think she's like the motherlode of bad ideas. Whoa. I'm pretty positive about that, especially on Assad, but maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I'm pretty positive about that, especially on Assad. But maybe I'm wrong. I don't think I'm wrong. Well, my take on her was what she feels is wrong with the current administration and the way things are running and a direction she thinks things can go in. She has very promising ideas. I didn't

know about this. But doesn't she also, did she ever apologize for believing in conversion therapy? I didn't even know she believed in conversion therapy. Am I crazy? Is that real? I'm almost positive this is real. I think her father ran a center for gay people. When you say conversion therapy, you're talking about gay people.

Yes. No, I didn't know that. I never heard that. I did hear something about when she was very young. She was like 22. She had said something about gay marriage and civil unions that she apologized for and said that she evolved. She revealed she met Assadad in syria without informing top democrats i'm telling you she's she said she went on a fact-finding mission in support of peace

for syrian people but characterize u.s backed rebels as terrorists yeah she's i mean hold on i can keep looking but looking, but I just don't have enough time to research everything all at the same time. I can come back on when I know more. Okay, but let's, we can do this another time. Okay. But who do you think stands out for you as someone that would make a good president? Yeah, she once touted working for an anti-gay group that backed conversion therapy. Anyway.

She once touted working for an anti-gay group? She worked for an anti-gay group? She worked for them like she had a job there? What? You know, I'm worried. As a person who's been called alt-right adjacent, I'm worried about labels. No, I understand. But you know what I mean?

Rep Tulsi Gabbard in the early 2000s touted working for her father's anti-gay organization, which mobilized to pass a measure against same-sex marriage in Hawaii and promoted controversial conversion therapy. Yeah. FYI. Conversion therapy is the weirdest shit of all time. There was an article that I read about they were manipulating pleasure. It turned out, I started reading it from a study on rats.

It turned out, I started reading it from a study on rats. They did this thing with rats where they provided, they figured out a way to give rats orgasms. They figured out a way to jazz up the pleasure center of their brains. I love that you're reading this. Okay. And they would do anything to do it. They would shock, they would run up past an area that shocked them. They would do anything to get to this area where they could have these orgasms and they would have them up to 2 000 times a day

they would just nut just all day long and in reading male and female rats yeah yeah just rats just just rats just rats trying to come and so when i was i love that we're in hour three and we're talking about rat orgasms Oh it's amazing The study's amazing My parents are not listening to this Sorry folks No it's okay

Mr. and Mrs. Weiss Time to turn away They did it with a gay man While they were doing this This is in the 1970s There's a couple different studies that they did But one of them they did with this gay guy Where they tried to stimulate certain parts of his brain while they were showing him heterosexual porn.

And they were trying to convert him into being heterosexual. Okay. And apparently they had some meager amount of success with this where he engaged in sexual relationships with women and apparently even enjoyed it. And they did something to literally stimulate a part of his brain that would excite arousal and tried to connect that with heterosexual porn and made him orgasm, made him masturbate to orgasm while they were doing this and showing him straight porn. The idea was they were going to reprogram his mind. How'd that work out? It didn't, but it did.

It did in terms of short term, but it didn't. I mean, it must have been just massively confused. Because obviously sexuality is not just about what makes you have an orgasm. No, it's not. It's also incredibly complex. It's incredibly complex. And one of the things that happens is you can have gay experiences when you're young. If someone does something to you and imprints upon you arousal at a young age with gay experiences, sometimes even heterosexual men will get aroused by certain gay images and gay things because of their past, because of that. Like Chris Ryan's talked about that before. But isn't it also that we're all on a spectrum of sexuality?

It's speculative. Yes, I think so for sure. We all certainly are. But it's also speculative how much of that spectrum is influenced by your environment versus your genes. And this is very taboo for some people to discuss even though it's really fascinating the human sexuality is incredibly fascinating and there's there's some major taboo areas of exploration and when you start looking at like what makes a person gay or straight whether it's nature or, whether it's a combination of those things, whether someone's just radically gay from the womb or whether someone's radically straight from the womb. These studies where they were trying to turn someone with science, they were trying to

turn someone straight. It's crazy. It's very, you couldn't do it today. You'd never be able to do it today in America. I have to look this up. Yeah, I believe it was 71 they did it. Okay, I'll look it up. Yeah, I'll send it to you. it's crazy it's crazy um widely criticized but heavily studied

you know the woman they did it to a woman too uh they they stuck these this woman had a problem with painkillers and so um they figured out a way to wire her brain is this like electric shock therapy or like lobotomy they used fucking dental drills they put holes in their brain they fucking could do whatever they wanted in the 70s now the time that we get high when does this now yeah now's the time we break out the elon musk weed oh my god that was crazy i watched every minute it was nothing we drank whiskey for two hours first sorry when i say crazy i mean like an amazing get like journalist journalistically. It was awesome. No, it was really cool. And I have to thank some of

his friends that I'm friends with that convinced him to do that. That was a fascinating conversation. I thought it was nothing. I thought, so we smoked a little pot. I literally didn't think anything of it. Anything he does is fascinating to people.

That's – Well, what I really wanted to talk to him about was his thought process. Like what's going on? I know something different is going on in his head. Right. You ever talk to someone where – because I have children and I do like to think of people as babies that become what they are. I see them in front of me right now in this constant state of evolution. But sometimes I'll run into someone that's depressingly stupid where I realize, like, God damn, this guy's got a nine-volt brain.

They just do. Some people just do. And no one wants to admit that. And we're not talking about mental retardation or any sort of a disease, Down syndrome or something like that. We're talking about people that are just toxically stupid. And they do exist. Just like some people have big noses some people have little noses so when you were talking to elon musk did you get the sense that you were talking to like a genius what did it feel like i'm a chimp like you're like you're that person yeah i'm not that's exactly what i was gonna say yeah i am that toxically stupid person talking to this guy

really wants to create gigantic power stations in aust in Australia to fix their grid and wants to shoot fucking rockets into space. And they literally let him drill under L.A. They're like, go ahead. What are you going to do? You're going to drill holes? Go ahead. I think people are completely fascinated by him. And they would have watched you.

They would have watched like a silent movie with you and him for two hours. And millions of people would have watched that. I don't know about that. No, I mean. They want to hear him talk for sure. Yeah, they want to hear him talk. But I'm saying like anything he does is completely fascinating to people. Well, he's a legitimate super genius.

I mean, legitimate. Like when he's not full shit. That is his thought process is extraordinary. But one of the things that was really clear from talking to him was that it's uncomfortable that his whole life it's been this tornado of ideas it's i watched it against his head yeah and he he's like you wouldn't want to be me you know like oh jesus i'm like what do you mean man you know he's like it's a it never shuts off right you know and like oh but he wasn't you know he wasn't woe is me.

He was being factual. And he was probably, it's probably like, you know how some people have a ringing in their ears? They have tinnitus. Yes. Rock concerts too many. I think he's got a ringing of ideas. So while you and I are having this conversation, I don't have a fucking thing else going on in my head. There's nothing, there's nothing else back there it's just you and i

talking there's no fucking grand plans i think he's like remapping civilization and trying to make a better yacht you know i'm thinking i want a burger that's what i'm thinking right now um he's he's just you know just like shaquille o'neal is eight feet tall and some people are four feet tall. You know, some people just have a brain. I mean, there's no level playing field when it comes to anything. Of course. Whether it's athletic performance or mental performance. Or who our parents are.

Like you were talking about before. Like I won the lottery when it comes to that. Yes. You know, I'm so aware of that in everything in my life. Right. That like that and everything in my life right but like that made everything possible yeah well that is the real the only saving grace of the concept of white privilege is that we do have to recognize that some people got a really good deal and some people got a really terrible deal but the only reason why white privilege is even something to

consider is that racism is real white privilege is not if the world was barry weiss or but there's all kinds of privilege right like but what i was going to say is if the world was people like you or people like jamie we would never have to worry about racism because it wouldn't even be a consideration jamie's on black twitter every day love jamie what are you doing over there it's just being a producer working um but you know what i'm saying like if it was no racism that concept would be totally irrelevant and what we would be concentrating on is you know who's making the best buildings who's making the best music what what what are the contributions to culture we wouldn't care about if they were coming from asian people

or west indian people we wouldn't care but I think the contribution of the left to make people recognize, I don't know, privilege of all kinds, that's useful. It's actually useful to think about that. What is not useful is to say, because you are X, Y, or Z thing, therefore you're out.

Yes. Therefore you have no stake. And therefore, in fact, you have sort of less of a claim on truth and morality i'm sure you're aware bad of what happened recently with the woman from cnn who was on patriot radio hilarious that was great yeah that was amazing she accused an african-american gentleman who she didn't do her research she didn't google him instead of arguing the idea or discussing these ideas,

she said, because of your white privilege, it's blinding you. And he gave her rope, too. You know, to me, as a person who does jujitsu, he gave her room. He gave her room. Yeah. And she went right into the choke. She just sank the choke in herself. She explained it even further.

He said, I hate to break it to you but i'm black and she must have just felt her whole life all of her intellectual credibility just go fucking blush flush down the toilet like oh my god you just got exposed and this is what people love about preposterous thinking preposterous thinking if it's given enough time it's eventually going to slam into a wall. And that's what we saw. We saw a truck with a fucking brick on the accelerator just slam right into the wall because she thought she had a path that you couldn't stop.

And this is the path. It's like if you're playing chess, but you have one super powerful move. It's not like a rook or a queen. No, it has no rules. It's king i just that's what she did basically she had this super powerful thing and it didn't work and it didn't work because this guy was a part of the very protected class that she was part of and she tried just that way of thinking of just like shortcuts to dismissing people but no one else could pull that off except a black man or a black woman.

Because of who he is, he had the checkmate. He's like, ha ha. And the whole world went, ha ha. Because we've all seen that, but you can't say anything. If I was having this discussion with her and she said, because of your white privilege, I'd have to say, look, okay. You go through the thing. Let's unpack unpack that i fucking hate that word unpack i hate it

because it's always brought it's always brought out by people who really aren't unpacking shit they're just explaining to you how their ideology trumps your ideology and it's almost always like this preposterous way of describing things let Let me unpack that for you. Oh, fuck you. But he didn't have to, he didn't have to say that. He said, I'm black.

And that was the ultimate unpacking. Boom. Whether he's right or she's right. It's like those words, white privilege. Oh, that's, that creates so many fucking headaches.

It does. But you think it's real though? Yes. It is. For sure. It's real because rac. Yes, it's real. It is real. It's real because racists don't target me the way they would target a black person. That's 100% real. It is real. It just gets used in this sloppy way and it gets used to dismiss people.

Yes. And I don't think that's useful. And the real problem is not white privilege. The real problem is racists, actual racists. That's the real problem. And if there was no racist, that white privilege wouldn't be a thing. It's only a thing because of racists, and it's only a thing with racists. Without racists, it doesn't exist.

The problem with African Americans or Asians or any – well, Asians is the real – like, this is a weird one, right? Like the Harvard thing where Asians are denied entry into Harvard with the same standards that white people have. Because of racism. Because of racism. Yes. Because they're good. Because they study so hard and they do so well. But if you look at that lawsuit and the language that the school used to sort of describe them

as like antisocial and robotic and all of these stereotypes. So awful. It's crazy. It's so awful. It's crazy. It's so crazy. People should read Wesley Yang on this. He's a really interesting writer about this. Wesley Yang. You should have him on.

I would love to. He wrote a book of essays called, I think it's actually called The Souls of Yellow Folk this year. I'll connect you to him. He's just interesting on this. I used to teach Taekwondo for a living. Yeah. And I was around a lot of Korean people and

I learned Taekwondo from a Korean man. When I learned and I was around so many Korean people, I was stunned by the work ethic that exists in these families and the humbleness and the just like the

way it was almost expected that you never brag and that you work harder than anybody. And I had a friend who was on the U.S. Taekwondo team to compete in the Olympic Games. He was working on his schoolwork. He was going through his residency, so he's probably working on school work 10 to 12 hours a day. In between classes, he would put his book bag on. He would fill his book bag up with books

and run the stairs at the university, up and down. And then he would come to the gym at night and train. And then he would travel to compete with the world team. And all the meanwhile, he was in college. He was going to medical school. I mean, he had bags under his eyes you could stuff Christmas trees in.

It was fucking insane. This guy was always tired. But the work ethic that he had was just, I didn't have one-tenth of that work ethic. It was impossible to ignore. And he was so spread thin and so tired all the time, but he kept working. And he would talk about his culture and he would talk about his family and what his dad expected of him. He's like, man, in my house like that, you just fucking did it.

There's not like, oh, I feel tired today. Fuck you. Get up. Go to work. But that attitude has allowed so many Asian people that discipline and just this culture of performance and of achievement where it's so cherished that has allowed so many Asian people to excel in academia. And the fact that Harvard somehow or another steps in and says, well, we're going to make it more difficult for you because you work so hard. That is so crazy and so weird. It's so weird that they, as this, I mean, if you think about institutions of higher learning, Harvard is the first one you think about.

It's number one. It's number one. Like, oh, he graduated from Harvard. Oh, whoa. Done. Done. Right? Harvard.

Stage bum. Yeah. Yeah. And to have them so blinded. It's amazing. That they will be racist against the best performers because they're performing too well and there's a disproportionate number of them in the university. So we're going to make it harder. We're going to raise your standards.

Yeah. I just think the actual, like the stereotypes and like the way that they sort of. Fucking crazy. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy. You have him on. I would love to. Yeah. Where is he out of? the length the actual like the stereotypes and like the way that they sort of fucking crazy yeah it's crazy it's crazy you have him on i would love to yeah where is he out of do you know montreal montreal okay i've actually never i'm trying to think if i've ever met him i've never met him but he's he's an interesting writer and he'd be really really good on this better than me especially because i'm fading okay well let's wrap it. We're three hours and 20 minutes in. Are you serious?

Yeah. Dude, there's a time warp in this. Yeah, look. There's no light in here. No, there's 325. Well, there's, look. Clouds. I'm so happy we finally got together and talked.

It was wonderful to have this conversation with you. I really appreciate it. I was very impressed by you. Thanks. And thank you very much. We're going on a trip. Let's do it again. We're going to go on a trip.

We're going to do it. Jamie's coming. He's going to bring his camera. Thank you very much We're going on a trip Let's do it again We're gonna go on a trip We're gonna do it Jamie's coming He's gonna bring his camera Thank you so much Thanks Joe Bye everybody