The Joe Rogan Experience - #1241 - Sam Harris

Episode Date: February 7, 2019

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist and author of the New York Times bestsellers, The End of Faith, Letter to a Christian Nation, and The Moral Landscape. He is the host of the podcast “Making Sense" available on Spotify.

Five, four, three, two, one. I was not anticipating the blowback that I received. It was stunning. But what I thought was I was just going to have a conversation with this guy, be fun, see what it's like to run this gigantic network that helps people communicate. You okay, Jamie? I'm good. All right. Helps people communicate and distribute information worldwide. What is it like to start something like that up and have it become what it is? How have you managed to try to keep up with it and what have the headaches been and

apparently people online particularly the people that want to comment about this all they wanted to know about was censorship and that was an issue with me there was a question with me but it became a far it was a far bigger question for people online they felt like that i tossed him softball questions um and that i didn't press him yeah and then i listened to your podcast and uh one thing about jack is very smart guy very nice guy but he talks in a very slow and methodical way and when you ask him a question he takes these routes and if you don't want to jump in and press him like you're in this weird situation where he's not totally answering your question but he's talking about the same subject

that you're talking like for instance you brought up lewis farrakhan right like how is lewis farrakhan and good standing on the platform and someone like you know fill in the blank milo yiannopoulos or laura loomer or whoever it was, they get kicked off. He never got to that. He went around and around and around with you. And he recognized this after the podcast. I received a lot of blowback. He received a lot of blowback.

So I contacted him and he said he would be more than happy to come back on again and address all these things. And I said, okay, what I'd like to do is address specific instances of people being censored. And he said, okay, what I'll do is I'll bring in someone from the company that's in charge of that stuff. So I'm starting to put together a picture of what it's like to be a CEO of something as big. And he's also a CEO of Square. He runs the Cash app. There's a lot of stuff going on there, right?

So he's obviously busy. How much day-to-day involvement does he actually have and who gets censored and why they get censored and how much is he willing to share about that? So we're going to find out in the next follow-up podcast. But I got accused of everything from being a shill to being a cuck to being a... And there's also an issue that you've managed to avoid wisely so of

advertising the cash apps and advertiser on my podcast so because the cash apps and advertisers are on my podcast right the man had you by the throat exactly they think couldn't ask all those great questions that were queued up the reality is uh those are the questions i would have asked now that's hard to say because no one's going to believe it, but those are the questions I would have asked. And I tried not to be too confrontational with the guest, but in hindsight, I probably could have pressed more, particularly on people like Kathy Griffin, calling for doxing for the kid with the MAGA hat on with the Native American. There's quite a few, but I noticed that, well, what was your experience like with it? Yeah. So it's interesting because you and I have, we had different interviews because they were

timed differently. I mean, it's an interesting topic because this opens the door to all the ways in which our podcasts are different. I mean, you stream live. I sit on my podcast for at least a week. So in Jack's case, it was like two weeks before I released it. So I did my interview with him before this flurry of interviews with him came out. I mean, there was a Rolling Stone interview. I think maybe a Huffington Post interview had come out, but basically there was nothing out there. So I had no real examples of how he dealt with these questions. Or how he talked. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, slow talking is not a problem for me because I'm one of the great slow talkers, so we're in a groove there. But I didn't know what his boilerplate was and how he would answer any of these questions. And your podcast came out before mine did, but mine was before the Covington High School Catholic circus happened, right?

So the real missed opportunity for me was just a sheer matter of timing, because the Covington thing puts such a fine point on everything that's wrong with Twitter and the way journalism interacts with it, right? I think it was Farhad Manjoo wrote an op-ed in the New York Times saying, Twitter has destroyed journalism. And it was not a crazy op-ed, in fact, after the Covington thing. And the whole, you know, and Kathy Griffin would have been the perfect example to talk about, but like, you know, why is she still on if she's calling for the doxing, right? But, you know, I think I had a substantially similar interview with him that you did because he's there's two things. One is he's great at sort of pirouetting around the sharp pointed question of, you know, what is the policy and why?

Why are you applying it in this seemingly disparate way? And it seems to skew politically in one direction all the time, right? But I think you also, I mean, I did, and I think you did, naturally, we cut him some slack in that he's the CEO of these two corporations. He can't be expected to actually know what happened in every one of these micro cases. Like, I think I brought up the case of, I think her name is Megan Murphy. I mean, I hadn't even heard of her before. That's the lesbian woman that... She was like a feminist who said sort of the wrong thing in the transgender space. She said something like men are not women, right? And she got banned. For life or temporary?

No, I think it was temporary. But, you know, so I raised it and, you know, he obviously can't know exactly what happened in that case, or at least it would be surprising to me if he knew. So the fact that he doesn't have his finger on each one of these cases and what the rationale was, and he has this sort of generic answer that what you're seeing, you know, in public is not necessarily what we're seeing. In fact, in virtually every actionable case, it's not what we're seeing in private with respect to how these people are opening multiple accounts and doing seemingly nefarious stuff behind the scenes. Now, whether that is true, I don't know. But I mean, I can just say that Jack seemed, one, I liked him and he seemed unusually open to talking about anything I wanted to talk about. And so I saw one allegation that got hurled at you was that, you know, you must have been constrained by, you know, the topics you couldn't touch in advance. You must have had some agreement with him in advance. You know, it didn't happen with me, right?

No, I should address that. There was no discussion whatsoever about what was off limits. There was no nothing. And he asked for no. So in my case, I tell all my guests, and this is the difference between you streaming live and me not, I tell all my guests, listen, if at any point in this interview you put your foot in your mouth or I put my foot in there, we can edit it. I want you to be totally happy with what you say over the next two or three hours. So if you have to take something again, take it again. And,

you know, we'll just hide the seams as we go. Now, that virtually never happens, right? And in Jack's case, there wasn't even a wrinkle like that. So, but, you know, I just, you know, I recognize it's a high wire act for a lot of these people, especially for someone who's running two publicly traded companies, right? And, you know, so when I invited him on, I said, Jack, you know, we were DMing on Twitter. I said, listen, I promise I'm not going to make you smoke a blunt on video. And that got him. So I don't know how you got him. I didn't try to get him to smoke a blunt.

I didn't even think about it. Yeah, we weren't drinking. We were just talking. Maybe it would have been better if we were drinking because it did seem very stiff. I listened to it after the fact, and I mean, I get from their anticipation why it would be disappointing. I just thought it was kind of boring. I thought my podcast with them just wasn't very good. I sometimes do too many podcasts, and when I sometimes do too many podcasts and when i sometimes do too

many podcasts i think i run low on juice and i'm not as uh i don't know i'm not as engaged or i'm not as fired up about it and maybe i just should have i definitely should have prepared more for him but i really thought it was just going to be a conversation about what it's like and i thought that would be really easy to do yeah because it's such a unique position to be running something like twitter but he you know i don't know if he was evasive and because he didn't know the things or because he didn't want to talk about the things but there was things like he didn't know exactly why alex jones was ultimately banned he didn't he couldn't recall or didn't know no is that because he couldn't recall was because he didn't want to talk about it or is it because he didn't remember it i mean i

don't know i mean you'd have to you'd have to be inside his head to get that answer yeah i mean he he's clearly got a a very practiced line that he uses to answer these questions and i mean because i you know i know what it's like to have boilerplate you know i've been a book on a book tour and you're just basically getting asked the same questions again and again and here he's is to answer these questions. And I mean, because I know what it's like to have boilerplate. I've been on a book tour and you're just basically getting asked the same questions again and again. And here he's getting asked fairly pointed questions about

where Twitter's going. And he's got, I don't think this is dishonest. I just think, but it has this amazing ability to close the door to further inquiry because he gives you the full mea culpa right up front. You ask like, well, what's the situation with the seemingly asymmetrical banning of people? And he'll say, yeah, we really, I mean, we've got to get much better

at communicating our process. We're not nearly transparent enough. This whole thing is in disarray and my job is to fix it right so it's like a global you know we're fucked up and we're going to get better i promise you right yeah and that doesn't do any good for the people that are already banned right but there's not a lot to get beyond that in an interview you know yes so it's it worked whether you know i don't think it's nefarious i think it could well be totally honest uh but it does have this this effect of you just keep reaching a certain kind of brick wall that you didn't know was going to be there you know yeah that's i felt that too and i didn't didn't really navigate that very well and that was a big part of the

blowback but then the blowback was accentuated when they found out that he sponsors me right because the catch app is one of his businesses, and it sponsors the podcast. Yeah, yeah. Well, I had a very similar result, and I don't have that problem. So I don't think that diagnoses your situation at all. But it's very interesting. I mean, the difference between the business models under which we run our podcasts and just the different – I mean, just every choice you make and how to produce a podcast, I essentially have made the opposite one, you know, like streaming live like this.

The fact that you're, so this is just all very interesting to me because I'm kind of a reluctant student of digital media now because I've just kind of stumbled into this wild west that, you know, you in large part have invented, right invented right i mean this podcasting space was nothing and now we've got spotify you know buying up and it's like a land grab for audio yeah that we were talking about that before the podcast they just purchased some company was it gim what is it called yeah for some ungodly amount of money yeah like 200 million dollars they're going to spend 500 this year or something and And so it's this – we're all just making this up. And I've just released a meditation app, which is a different business model still. And so now I have these kind of two parallel digital businesses happening in my life.

And it's just very interesting, the decisions you make or are forced to make and the consequences of it. And so like the fact that we're having this conversation live, you don't even have to think about whether you're going to edit this, right? Because it's streaming live and, you know, when we're done, we're going to turn off the mics and walk out of here. And your job is done. With my podcast, that's not the workflow at all. And so I totally envy this approach that you have. But for a variety of reasons, I feel like I can't take it in my life. But it is very different.

It dictates many choices down the line, which, I mean, there's a positive and negative. But the positive is what you hear is what we got and we're done after we turn these mics off. And that's not how I podcast. There's also the visual element of it. And the visual element of it initially was almost like a side effect. I mean, we first started it out visually. But then when it started going to iTunes, the iTunes aspect of it became the focus. The audio version of it rather became the focus.

But then we decided to stream on youtube and put it up on youtube but it was totally not profitable it was just for for a goof like oh we'll have the video up why not some people like video it was one of those things but then you realize ultimately that youtube becomes a viable source of revenue and then it's also the way a lot of people like to watch it you know and they also like to watch it because they can comment under it so that was the other thing that came out of the jack podcast we got into a controversy about comments and about how comments are deleted or how they're shown and hidden and what happens because people were accusing jamie of deleting

all the derogatory comments that we don't touch any we don't we don't delete any of them we don't do anything to them we just leave them up there and it's a mostly assessed pool but i mean even even on a good podcast there's a lot of crazy shit that happens on these things but from what we think and jamie correct me if i'm wrong you think that what's going on is that people are marking other people's posts as spam yeah there's that and then brandon also has the theory that a lot of alt-right people are targeted um by the algorithm that youtube uses like in in one case there was a guy who had a peppy the frog avatar and he said like his his comment immediately went to spam and that the other thing is that the comments are curated

depending upon who is watching it and what account it'll be they'll be different sort of yeah they'll propagate different comments to the top it's not a this you can actually change it if you if you prefer to see the most new comment like from your own personal youtube when you're watching you you as a viewer or user of youtube have to make that actual yeah so that that conspiracy theory just heightened the whole thing right okay now they're deleting negative comments like i look i don't like doing bad podcasts but i will be the first one to tell you when i think a podcast sucked yeah um that podcast was definitely disappointing it wasn't good mine wasn't good it was like i said when i listened to it i was like

god this is kind of boring yeah it just wasn't it wasn't juicy there was nothing he we didn't get a flow it wasn't like he and i were just shooting his shit having a good time well take that one decision so you have decided to make video a main component of this podcast now it's still probably a small percentage of your actual listens not anymore i know it's not anymore it's it's gotten to, it's almost 50-50. Awesome. It's closing in on that. Yeah, it used to be like 90-10, right? Yeah. Okay, so I have it. I don't have a video component. And so I just put audio on YouTube, but I put absolutely no energy into YouTube. I mean, that may one day change. But because I don't,

I don't care what's happening on YouTube, right? So I never see the comments. And whenever I look, it is, as you say, accessible. It's insane. I mean, YouTube just skews massively right. It skews just massively male. And it probably skews very young, too. So you have just like millennial alt-right craziness, right? As I say these sentences, your YouTube page is just blowing up with hate for me right like you got a bunch of you know millennials with their thumbs up their asses just whinging right you know there's a lot of older people too well yeah but i

mean it's got to be younger than than most of of where well first of all i'm not even seeing most comment threads that could possibly respond to anything i put out there now right so i gotta i don't even look at my ad mentions for the most part. I spend maybe five minutes a day looking at what's coming back to me. And you were actually helpful in reformatting my brain on that topic. So because I don't see any of that stuff, I mean, maybe I'm getting a lot of pain for my Dorsey interview, but I don't even know about it, right? And so I don't feel like i have to course correct in response to anything now and in large measure it is a consequence of just this decision that you know i inadvertently made that i'm just i don't have a video component to my podcast at

the moment and so i'm not i'm not spectating on you know the feedback on youtube well the feedback thing is interesting because we were just talking about this before the show That with feedback and comments On YouTube essentially anyone Can comment and if you don't go banning People from the channel which we don't do It's not what we wouldn't do if someone was Totally a piece of shit but We don't so

You essentially have this Open forum so it's like almost like a message Board where people can just sort of comment And it's unlike Twitter in that regard because Twitter just, you know, you get abusive and shitty

on Twitter, they just get rid of you. If you get abusive and shitty on Instagram or on Facebook, they'll just get rid of you. But if you're on YouTube and you're in those comments, you could kind of

get away with more. So I would imagine that people that don't appreciate censorship and want to just just fucking spew out whatever's on their mind that would be the place they would go especially if it's the same product essentially the only thing different and this is a thing where it got confusing with the youtube people versus the audio people with the audio people it's very obvious that

the cash app is a sponsor because it's we say it this podcast is brought to you by the cash app whereas in youtube they're like ah they're hiding the fact that the cash app's a sponsor because it's we say it this podcast is brought to you by the cash app whereas in youtube they're like ah they're hiding the fact that the cash app's a sponsor right we talked about it during the podcast itself but we don't put the ads on youtube we there's ads that youtube puts on but we put the ads on like after the show is over i'll read the ads and we'll insert those into the audio and that will go up to iTunes and RSS feeds and all that stuff So the stuff that's on YouTube it's abbreviated in the sense that especially the live one doesn't have anything So like this has zero ads and then the ones that will be posted on YouTube later It'll have YouTube ads, right? So that's what this so there's a couple of conspiracy theories in that regard

There's also apparently an emerging conspiracy theory about that Jack was trying to pump up Bitcoin because they have some sort of a Bitcoin deal. Have you heard this one? I read that, but from what I saw, it's not higher than it was at any point. It's still right around $3,500. So if there was a pump and dump scheme of some sort then like it should be like provable on a blockchain i guess i don't know yeah i don't understand that but is there any other component to it i don't know i don't know i don't know where that's coming from necessarily i don't even

what did all he said was that well the cash app sells bitcoin so we talked about bitcoin i think because you can you can buy and sell bitcoin through the cash app i should say i think he said something about blockchain technology rendering everything permanent online. Yes, that was something different. But I think that's in regard to comments and to anything. Blog posts, blockchain is essentially going to have everything that's online forever. But there's so many fucking conspiracy theories

about all this stuff. It's fascinating. And as we were talking about earlier with your the way you do yours you used to use patreon and now you use your own website um after the sargon of akkad incident which you nobly stepped back away from patreon now or not so nobly depending on what you think of sargon of akkad yeah yeah, it's not even that. It's, yeah, yeah. Well, even- There's so many misconceptions about what happened there. And I tried to clear them up on my podcast.

But yeah, there's an interesting implication to not taking ads. I think what's happening, and this is much bigger than even podcasting. I think I'd be interested to know what you feel about this. I think I'd be interested to know what you feel about this. You are the quintessence of the successful ad model in podcasting. It's working fantastically well for you and for people like Tim Ferriss and probably Mark Maron. It's kind of like a winner-take-all thing happening in this space where ads are working great. It's kind of like a winner-take-all thing happening in this space where ads are working great. And I am a really – also a highly successful example of the support model.

It's like the PBS model or the NPR model. And what's weird is that I can't – you and I are both surrounded by people who have podcasts, want to have podcasts, and are asking us for advice about how to succeed and how to monetize. And I'm not even in a place where I can recommend my model to anyone else, right? Because it's very hit or miss. I mean, I just happen to have developed an audience that will support my work. And you had developed that audience previously, ironically enough, on YouTube. There's a lot of YouTube debates. Well, yeah, just random people putting my content on their YouTube channels. Yeah, mostly debates, right? Yeah, and as an author. But it was just the podcast grew, and I had this sort of forced choice

where am I going to go the ad route or not? And I found that, I mean, I have two things to say, you know, fairly strongly against ads, but really only one of them applies to me. And I don't think it applies to you or Tim or anyone else. I just felt personally, I couldn't use ads because of such as what my platform is and the kinds of topics I'm engaging. And it just didn't work. I mean, there was nothing highbrow enough where I felt like my credibility wasn't getting subtly undermined by shilling for it. I mean, it could be something that I just legit loved.

I mean, it could have been the Oxford English Dictionary. You know, like, you guys, this is the best dictionary in the world. You guys should use it. I still couldn't do it. And I tried it with, the only thing I took on as a sponsor was Audible. And I did that for some weeks. And then I just, you know, I love Audible. But it just felt wrong.

And so I decided to just experiment with a different business model. And it's working for me, but I don't think it can work for most people. And I view that as a problem. And the thing that I think is interesting is that this is much bigger than podcasting. So you have Facebook on the one hand, which is just a totally free platform where the users don't even realize that they're not the customers. They're the actual product, right? The users are having their attention sold to advertisers, and it's this enormous business. And on the other end of the digital spectrum, you have Netflix, which is just a stark paywall,

right? And there's no way in but to pay the subscription. And Netflix could run ads and get more money if they wanted to, but they're not doing that and presumably won't do that. And I'm hoping, just generally speaking, that the digital future looks much more like Netflix and much less like Facebook. Because I see what ads have done is they've anchored everyone to the illusion of free everyone expects their digital content for free except in places like netflix right so like if when you release a comedy special when you really release your next hour and you sell it to netflix i would imagine there are very few people in in your fan base who are thinking well fuck joe rogan why didn't he just put that out on youtube right why is this on Netflix? They sort of understand that this piece of content

belongs on that shelf and that if they want it, they have to subscribe to Netflix. Whereas if you did something slightly different, but functionally the same, if you put it on Vimeo and charge people $5 or whatever, Vimeo on demand, I think you'd get a lot more pain. People would say, well, fuck you, you greedy bastard. You're already doing great. Just release your stuff. And I view that as a problem. It's like a psychological problem. People have been anchored to the ad subsidized model more or less everywhere, and they expect everything for free. model more or less everywhere and they expect everything for free. And in my world, I'm trying to just continually brook that expectation and push people into a different sense of you get what you pay for. And so the hybrid model I've created for myself is

I'm putting more stuff behind a paywall, right? I mean, so that this is, it's not just pure sponsorship of otherwise free content, but I'm very, personally, I'm very uncomfortable with the idea that if someone actually can't afford it, they can't get access to my content. So I just tell people, if you really can't afford the stuff behind my paywall, or you really can't afford my meditation app,

just send us an email and we'll give it to you for free, right yeah i've heard that i was like this guy's crazy i mean it's actually it's actually in the pricing in the app store for my meditation app it's like there's the pricing and then below that there's if you can't afford this you know here's the here's the email address i think that's fantastic and so that's free yeah i'm splitting it that way but i'm raising prices so it's like it's like a, because I think everything is too cheap in the digital space. I think we're anchored to, I mean, there are people who will spend $5 a day on a cup of coffee every day for the rest of their lives. And yet if you told them this podcast or this app that they say is incredibly valuable to them is going to cost them $5 a month, they feel raped, right? And I completely understand it because I know what it's like

to hit a paywall and think, I can't get my credit card out again. I'm not going to pay for this. I'm going to find this information somewhere else. So we've all been anchored to this thing. And something is going to win in the end. I mean, you know, I think at some point, you know, it's going to look much more like Netflix or much more like Facebook. And I'm, you know, I'm throwing my lot in with the former, but you know, it really is the Wild West. Well, the Netflix thing's different because Netflix has programs that cost a lot of money to create. This podcast is very easy. You're my friend.

I call you up. Hey, you want to do a podcast? You come on over here. I mean, obviously we got to pay for all this equipment, but other than that, it's just and bandwidth and rent and all that stuff. Other than that, it just goes up. Right. Whereas you do a comedy special, it costs hundreds of thousands of dollars.

You have to secure a venue. You have to hire staff. I mean, it's a big deal. Yeah. And that's an easy thing in terms of like bang for their buck, what Netflix will get out of it. If you do a television show, I mean, my God, you need to hire hundreds of people.

There's wardrobe and makeup and set, and there's writers and producers and executives, and everybody has to go over the script with a fine-tooth comb. It's incredibly, incredibly strenuous. There's a lot going on when you create a television, like Stranger Things or something like that. I mean, you have so much special effects. And so to ask for that for free seems to be, to me, seems ridiculous. Well, yeah, but except, I mean, so I'm kind of split.

Again, I'm running on two tracks here. An app is much more like a television show, than a than it is like a podcast but yes but even if it's just a podcast if you want to build something if you want to build a media company like you know like like let's say you were let's say you were asking for support for this otherwise free podcast people don't know what your aspirations are i mean maybe you want to start a podcast network right maybe you have you're trying to build a business. Maybe you have massive payroll expenses. So the expectation that the product should always be free

closes the door to any of those aspirations, if in fact you have them. And it's very interesting psychologically because, so I have, I've created this network of support for my podcast, but I see people do calculations that they would never do in a more transactional space if they were just, let's say, buying my next book, right? So like, for me, offering a free podcast and then saying, if you find this valuable, you can support it, right? That, you know, from the side of being a creator of that content, it feels like the most transparent interaction possible because a person can listen for free for as long as they want to just discover how valuable it is and then they can support it to the degree that they find it valuable. Whereas if I'm selling you a book, you can't even read the book before you buy it, right?

You have to make the decision to buy it and I'm trying to convince you to buy it because it took me all this time to write it and it's transactional. But with a podcast, people make calculations that they would never make when they're just figuring out whether they want to buy something. It's like – and it's really along the lines of what you just described. People say, well, how much does a podcast cost to produce? Right? Like if I knew what you were spending the money on and what it cost you to do this podcast, well, then I would support you. Right?

But they're never saying, how much does it cost to write a book? And if I knew what you were going to spend the money on once I bought this book, then I would know whether or not I wanted to buy it. You either want the book or you don't, right? So the problem with the support model, and this is the problem with Patreon and everything else, is that it engages the sort of the philanthropy charity side of the brain, right? And people are worried about what you're going to do and how much it all costs. Like, how much does this mic cost, right? You know, like, that's a question that someone

is asking. When they're donating. When they're donating. And the problem there is they're not understanding, you know, just the opportunity cost. Like, you know, I have to decide how to spend my time. Am I going to spend 90% of my time on a podcast? Well, that, if so, that closes the door to virtually everything else I can do, right? So it's, you know, it has to become a viable business. And so, I mean, I've recognized now that I'm, you know, to some degree going against the grain of human psychology in asking for support. And now I feel like I'm going to ask much less. I mean, I'm going to tell people what the business model is and, you know, and still remind them of it. But I'm personally, I'm going

to go more and more in the direction of putting stuff behind a paywall. And if people want it, then they can support. And so it's it's a it's kind of it's sort of netflix the ultimate version of it would be if it were netflix that would also let you get it for free if you really couldn't afford it right that i mean that that that's the guilt-free business model that i'm i'm converging on now i like it i like how you're thinking and i like the ethics involved in it and i think it's a great thing. And when you said it on your podcast, I was shocked, but it makes sense coming from you. My thought is I'm in negotiation or in discussions right now, and I talked to you about this too, about building an app. And what I want to do with the app is have a set amount of money that you pay per month if you want to sign up for the app, and you get the podcast with no ads.

So you could either get it from iTunes or whatever, Google Play or Google Podcasts, or you can get it from the app, and if you get it from the app, you pay X amount per month, and you get the podcast with zero ads, and it'll stream live. I'm going to figure out how to do both of those things. My thought going into advertising, when I first did the podcast, I've been doing the podcast now for nine years. When I first started doing it, there was no ads for the longest time. It just cost money. It cost money for bandwidth. It cost money to put it,

but I was doing it for fun and I didn't care. My revenue was coming from other sources. A few years ago, I decided what I was going to do was, because I was getting ad, well, the first ad request was the Facebook, was the Fleshlight, rather, and you were the first person to request to not have the Fleshlight on your podcast, the first podcast that we did. Fucking prima donna, Sam Harris. Well, it made sense. I mean, they were disgusting ads, too.

I mean, we would get ridiculous and and be really silly in those ads it was just the juxtaposition i just just knowing that the mic would go hot and then you know 15 seconds before it would still be ringing in their ears that you know if you want to jack off with this fantastic device you know and here's sam harris neuroscientist and but moral philosopher the fleshlight experienced some pretty significant uh positive impact from that i mean their business went through the roof right because of the podcast i mean they really sold a shitload of fleshlights where they told me like some ungodly number like 50 of the fleshlights they were selling was code word rogan yeah no doubt that's not that i don't want to picture too much the armies of people

using their product you know so word got, and then as the podcast space started expanding, then advertisers tentatively were dipping their toe in. My philosophy, and it still holds. That's like 2006 or 2007? Yeah, Jamie? Probably 2012, 11, 11-ish. The first time I was on here was 2011? Wow.

Basically the end of 2009. You were probably on before. You were probably on around 2010 or 11. There was no other ads other than the Fleshlight with you. Then the Fleshlight dropped off when we started asking for more money. They were like, I think we hit the point of no return. My philosophy getting

into advertisement was I'm going to do whatever the fuck I want to do, 100% and have no impact whatsoever on the content of my podcast. Like whatever advertisers that I choose, whatever advertisers that I make deals with, they have to understand that there's no way I'm changing the content of the podcast. Right. And if I lose them, I lose them.

I don't care. And that was the thought process going in. So I never hit a snag like this Cash App Jack Dorsey thing before, where people think that the reason why I was easy with him was because of the fact that he sponsors the podcast. It's a very obvious um conflict of interest uh right but but people have to realize that if they churn out off your podcast you've got just an endless number of advertisers waiting too many lines yeah so i mean the cash out is not a psychological component it's like there's one way of looking at it that they they buy a lot of ads

they do buy a lot of ads we do have a good relationship with them. But I don't need them. If they went away, I have too many ads. And that sounds gross to say, but it is a fact. I have many more ads than I have spots for ads. So if they went away, it would not hurt me at all financially because I put a limit on how many ads I do per podcast. I also don't ever interrupt a podcast with an ad. I don't do that. And because I don't do on how many ads I do per podcast. I also don't ever interrupt a podcast with an ad. I don't do that. And because I don't do that, that costs me money.

But I just feel like the experience of listening to a podcast unbroken is so much better than listening to a podcast. We'll be right back with this word from Casper Mattresses. It just feels gross. But in the beginning, I'm like, look, you know it just it feels gross but in the beginning i'm like look you know where it is you can fast forward but maybe you're into this stuff maybe you need stamps.com maybe whatever the fuck you need those are the ads they pay a lot of money i'm going to take that money and i'm going to do whatever the fuck i want and if these guys decide oh you smoke pot or you're too controversial or you talk about this or talk about that we're going to drop you okay that's my philosophy and and i've lost ads i've lost sponsors okay i don't care but if i lost the cash app because i was too high hard on jack dorsey or if jack dorsey comes back and i'm

too hard on him in grilling him about these people that have been censored i hope he doesn't but i like him he's a nice guy i want to know what the fuck's going on there. In fact, I'm having Tim Pool come on tomorrow. Tim Pool's an investigative journalist, independent journalist, who used to be with Vice. And he knows a lot about the censorship issue with YouTube, or with Twitter, rather. And he knows about YouTube as well. But with who is censored and why, who removed who's been deplatformed why they've been deplatformed and where are the inconsistencies and you know where why why is it skewing so heavily right where the people on the right are the ones who are getting banned the people on the

left are getting away with a lot of crazy shit so we're gonna we're gonna get into the weeds with that and if the cash app hears that and they decide to drop me as a sponsor i don't care i really don't care This is a major Source of income For me But it's only One source

It's one of the things Of being a stand up Comedian Working for the UFC And having a podcast And I have a podcast With ads on YouTube And having ads

That are on the Regular podcast itself I'm free In a sense To I have plenty of money It's not Whether or not

I'm starving Or worried about Paying my bills I'm free To do a sense. I have plenty of money. It's not whether or not I'm starving or worried about paying my bills. I'm free to do whatever I want to do. Well, also, I should be clear. I don't think, because this can sound totally sanctimonious, and it's not intended that way. I don't think my scruples around reading ads on my podcast apply to you or Tim Ferriss or many other people. I mean, like Tim is the ultimate example. Tim is somebody whose brand on some level is what I'm going to do is I'm going to go out there and find the best shit in the world, you know, the best shirts, the best workout equipment, the best, and I'm going to tell you about it. So I want to know what Tim has found,

right? So if Tim is reading an ad for something you know that is totally brand convergent for him and i think you're very much in a similar situation if you're talking about on it or whatever it is it's your own you own part of on it right yes it's like i should also be clear that i say no to a lot of ads that i don't want like there was one there was a uber for babysitting i was like get the fuck out of here what are you crazy actually so that got recommended to me uh by somebody but uh it sounds it sounds like it sounds like craigslist for babysitting sounds like a disaster waiting to happen there's been a few that i've said no to like quite a few some of them that are just boring i'm like i'm not reading that i'm not selling that that's stupid but also you're a

comic who can send up ads i mean it's like i mean i think bill burr does this where he kind of trashes the ad as he's reading it and he loses something because he lost nature box because he told people to go eat apples yeah yeah really he's like go eat a fucking apple so it's i mean that's totally like and that's something that's a tool you have in your wheelhouse that has effects down the list like it's one reason why you can stream live without really worrying about it, and I feel I can't. At the end of the day, if things go completely haywire on your podcast, you can say, listen, I'm a fucking comic. What do I know? You can just pull the ripcord, and you're fine.

I can't do that. You can't say I'm a moron. You can't say that. I say that yeah so i mean i can and there's certain circumstances where i should but it's like i should avoid those circumstances yes yes um so uh you know i have to prepare more for podcasts and um i feel like i personally i mean it's it's's as much out of concern for my guests as well. Like, I just, you know, this is a high wire act, but I want a net normally so that people feel free to be totally unguarded. Because they know that if we have a spaz attack, we can, you know, even uttering spaz attack will screw some people's careers. Well, we actually had a conversation about a podcast that I talked to you about, one of your podcasts, where you said that you actually started it over.

You started it, and you're like, let's try this again. Let's just start it from scratch. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, maybe I don't think it would be sporting to say which podcast that was. But, yeah, so I had a podcast that went completely into the ditch for the first half hour. I mean, just brutal. that went completely into the ditch for the first half hour.

I mean, just brutal. And I said, listen, there's a good conversation for us to have here, and now I know how badly this can go. So now I know just where the track is that I have to struggle to keep the train on. And so we're going to reboot, we're going to start again, and we'll see what happens. And, you know, the podcast was not perfect and I got some criticism for it, but people didn't understand that we were like,

you know, we had a, you know, we had, I had seen the pit of alligators and didn't want to fall in, right? Well, it made more sense though when you told me that because I'm like, okay, it was heated before you even got to go. Right. Because you'd already gone through a half an hour

of back and forth. Yeah. Yeah. I think people need to understand what it's like to do one of these things too because, you know, you do it so often it becomes pretty – I mean, you're so good at talking. You're such a good orator and you're so articulate that it comes off smooth and easy just having a conversation with someone.

But you're always considering the fact that people are listening to this. You're always saying, how do i get more out of him or her how do i take this and how do i get this person to expand upon this how do i you know how do i make this something make something out of this this is one of the things that i felt with jack because he was talking in this way and we're we're really working hard on fixing all these issues. I'm like, oh, Jesus, I've got to change my gears here and try to figure out – because it's almost like we'd have to restart again every time a question would be answered. He would stop talking, and I'd go, okay, next thing.

It took so long, you forgot what you asked. Well, it's almost like I have to restart the momentum of it. Well, again, I'm totally, I'm that kind of speaker. So, you know, that wasn't a problem. But I didn't know what he talked like. I'd never heard him talk, ever. So hearing him talk there and talking to him live, you know, I mean, some people are fucking effortless. Some people, like, Elon took a while.

Like, we had to start drinking. No, that was brutal. But, I mean, you know how much I tried to micromanage that behind the scenes, right? Yes, and thank you for that. Like, I was all in your grill trying to figure that out. And, you know, you guys basically broke all the rules I thought I laid down. And Elon did it, because Elon tweeted, you know, I'll be on Joe's podcast Thursday night at 9 o'clock or whatever.

Yeah, I was like, oh, no. And so, okay, but you know, I didn't on Joe's podcast Thursday night at 9 o'clock or whatever. Yeah, I was like, oh, no. And so, okay. But you know, I didn't want you guys to go live. Right. I wanted you to both have a chance to say, wait a minute, is smoking a blunt really the thing we want to be doing here? So, you know, you didn't take my advice and it was what it was. Well, we were drunk by the time the weed came out. That was what's interesting to me is we were drinking from the beginning of the podcast we started drinking whiskey we both had two or three glasses of whiskey right before

the weed came out nobody cared the fact that the ceo of tesla was drunk right like no one cared about that i mean he wasn't drunk but he should have been driving i don't i don't know if that was obvious i don't know if they saw that you were drinking it was obvious in the beginning we're pouring the whiskey right i mean it was on the table we had ice we're clinking glasses salute i mean it was very obvious yeah i mean the the problem for me there with that podcast frankly was that i feel like you both got unlucky with just where he was in his life at that moment because it's like because so what that podcast showcased at least for the first i I don't know, 90 minutes, was just how many user interface problems you could have with Elon. He just showed up as kind of fairly weird, right?

He's not always like that by any stretch. I mean, he can give a very loose interview. But you were working. I mean, it was just absolutely heroic work trying to keep that conversation happening in the beginning. But once we got loose, that was good. But it was still, it's like, he was just in a space that he was so massively stressed and so overworked. And just, I mean, he had fires everywhere that had to be put out. And so I just felt, as a friend, I just felt like, okay, this is sort of the wrong time to be put out. And so I just felt, you know, as a friend, I just felt like,

okay, this is sort of the wrong time to be doing this. And so I just felt, you know, it just felt unlucky to me. So, because he's, again, I, you know, I see him in many other moments and he can be, that was actually a circumstance where I was looking at the comments, right? You know, and I was saying, okay, these are people who are basically reading him as somebody who is much stranger than, in fact, he ever is. And I could see why they were doing that because he just seemed in a very stressed space in his life. Well, it was interesting. He was very different when he first got here versus when the mic came on. Right.

What was interesting, he was very different when he first got here versus when the mic came on. Right. When he first got here, he pulls out the fucking blowtorch and starts shooting this flamethrower in the middle of the hallway. And we're laughing. I'm like, he's going to be easy. This is great. And then we sat down and then stiff right off the bat. And I'm just trying to massage it and get him going. Although, honestly, I think that is another consequence of live.

I mean, I'm not arguing that you shouldn't be live because it has a massive advantage for you as well. But it is – there's just a different feeling. Like, you know, if I knew that this was being taped and I could rethink the thing we're about to say about Liam Neeson or whatever it is. Yeah. You know, it's different. Yeah. And so, but. Well, the Liam Neeson story is a perfect example. Let's go there. Yeah, let's go there.

A perfect example of a story where, you know, if you were Liam's friend, you would go, don't tell that one. Don't tell that one. He's like, but I want to be honest. Yeah. Like, don't. Don't. You could be honest with me. I'm not going to judge you if you tell me that someone got raped and you went out with a baseball bat for

a week looking for a black man to beat up to kill to kill i'd be like oh jesus christ man like what the fuck was going through your head at that point in time like that's terrible like yeah like i feel awful about it i can't believe that was me but but it didn't happen nothing happened and now you know people are calling him a racist and they don't want him in movies and well i mean this is this is fascinating to me because again this is a much larger problem with with massive implications we need to think through the whole process of redemption for people in our society right like like we we have to understand what are the criteria for successful apologies and for forgiveness? Because especially, I mean, we're in a world where people are having their reputations destroyed and their careers threatened for tweets they sent as teenagers.

Yes. Right? And, you know, more – this is to Dorsey's point. Things are not disappearing online anymore. And at a certain point, you know, everyone – there's just going to be a 360 kind of panopticon view of everyone's life. You know, there are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there. You know, there are people who have grown up on social media and everything is out there. And, I mean, the irony here for me is that you have, you know, progressives and people on the far left who receive a disclosure like, you know, Liam Neeson.

Let's take his. And they just want, you know, they just want to see him burned alive, right? Let's just do the wicker man on this guy because this is so awful. And yet alongside that, these same people on the left are people who have as a genuine ethical norm the rehabilitation of murderers. You could be somebody who spent 20 years in prison for a crime you admit you committed and there's this norm around redemption and so there's you know there's no way to square those two things well they're constantly holding these two contradictions right i mean here's another one women's rights and support of the hijab i mean yeah what yeah this is what's going on there? How do you do that? You know, don't be Islamophobic, but also support women's rights and gay rights. Yeah.

Okay. I think Eric Weinstein, our mutual friend, calls these the Hilbert problems for social justice warriors. very famous mathematician who at the turn of the 19th century posed a set of problems in mathematics that were just on his list of the most desirable questions, the hardest questions and the most consequential questions to answer. And so Eric, being a mathematician, has flipped that around ironically and said, these are the questions that social justice warriors have to answer. And there are these impossible oppositions of this sort but so the liam neeson thing and you know forgive me if i if there's some detail that has come out that i'm not aware of but my understanding of it is he you know he had a friend who was raped and then he reported this state of mind this murderous state of mind he was in where he was

walking around with i think he calls it a kosh, that's a British word for like a small metal club, right? It's like a blackjack or another term for it, I think. And looking for a black guy to kill, like just hoping someone's going to come out of the woodwork and threaten him so that he could kill this guy in this act of instrumental violence because his friend had been raped by a black guy, right? So it's like any black guy will do. Now that's sort of like the extra horrific wrinkle to the story, right? Now, and he's confessing this as a kind of a symptom of transient mental illness, at least as far as I know. It's like,

he's horrified by the fact that he was in this state of mind, right? Can you imagine, like, Liam Neeson, an actor, I have everything to lose, and although I don't remember at what point in his life he said this happened, can you imagine that I was in this state of mind, right? And this is, as you say, an all too honest disclosure, but it is damn interesting, right? And it is the kind of thing that we should be able to talk about, right? And it's not, and the fact that this is becoming synonymous with racism seems just wrong given how he described, or at least how I've heard this, because he's saying, listen, if this had been an Armenian guy or an Italian or a Japanese guy,

I'd be looking for one of them, right? I mean, what this was, at least on his telling, is the virus of instrumental violence. I mean, the virus of like, I mean, this is how every blood feud ever in human history gets started. It's like someone from your tribe killed my brother, and now what I want to do is kill anyone from your tribe ethically, but that's not racism, right? That's just, that is, we have a word for it. It's instrumental violence. But, you know, yeah, obviously he's getting totally pilloried over this, but we need, we just need to figure out how to talk about how people can redeem themselves once something this unsavory is is revealed about their past whether they reveal it or whether it's just you know found out about them yeah um i mean it is racism though right because he's specifically looking for a black guy i mean i understand that it's a part of the other tribe no but it doesn't suggest

that he has a predisposed that he feels one way or another about black people it's a part of the other tribe. No, but it doesn't suggest that he has a predisposed – That he feels one way or another about black people. It's like if you told me – yeah, I mean, he could have said – again, it could have been an Irish guy, right? Or it could have been – well, I guess he's Irish. Is he Scottish or Irish? It could have been an English guy, right? It could have been like any type, right? It's like the salience of the tribe is what he was reacting to at least in his description i don't know why you wouldn't take him at his word given that he didn't have to say any

of this in the first place right i mean like this is like an amazingly honest and unnecessary disclosure but it's um and i don't think people would think of it as racism if the story simply was, you know, she got raped by a cop and I was just hoping to go kill a cop. Right? Right. You know, the same story. Right. Right. And so, yeah.

But we're so trigger happy in our outrage with respect to anything like that. Why do you think that is? Like, what is going on? Because outrage seems to be more in season than it's ever been in my lifetime. I don't remember outrage being so, just such a, it's recreational. Yeah. There's a- Well, I mean, it's back to Jack.

I mean, it has a lot to do with social media and Twitter in particular. Yeah. There's a – Well, I mean, it's back to Jack. I mean, it has a lot to do with social media and Twitter in particular. Yeah. I mean, you have – like, so, for instance, I missed the whole Covington High School Catholic fiasco. Because you're not on Twitter. I basically was ignoring Twitter. I saw it out of the corner of my eye. Like, man, this is interesting. This is blowing up.

But I was so off Twitter that I had – there was no temptation for a hot take from me, right? And I saw these people just torching their reputations by taking these, like Kathy Griffin, basically calling for the doxing of these kids. Given all that she has suffered from mob behavior online and she's whipping up her own mob, it was just nuts. But it's normal that's what people do it's what the platform is calling out of people but it's also when people have been shamed and they've done something awful then they reinforce their base like that now she's like so heavily hard left because the right wing ran after her like anyone on the right that does anything she's calling for her side to go

after this person like reinforcing that she's a part of that tribe that she's a part of that left wing tribe yeah yeah well it's so obviously everyone has a lot to lose doing this especially in a case where all the facts aren't in and if you just wait at a beat i mean even the new york times got this wrong the new york times writes an article about the kids in the maga hat that that they have to rescind and the so then as the dust is settling and i see these people some people are doubling down some people are issuing public apologies i see somebody who's actually kind of you know branded herself as you know one of my enemies for a reason I can't fathom, but this journalist,

Kara Swisher, who, you know, she works for Recode and Vox now, but she's got a big podcast, and she actually writes for the New York Times now. She's got an opinion piece, a regular column for the New York Times. She's a tech journalist,

and I happen to know she doesn't like me because she's tweeted against, she's said some disparaging things about me on Twitter, and we had an offline conversation about it. But I saw her, she said one of the most vituperative and fairly crazy things in response to the kids initially. And then once more information came out, she walked it back and she basically apologized, you know, on Twitter. And so, so I said, good for you, Kara. I just wanted to, to support this norm of acknowledging that you got something wrong. And I wanted to do it even, I wanted to actually do it for someone who I know really doesn't like me. Like, I mean,

that was an added bonus for me because that, that norm that I think we should support. It's like, we should play fair even with our enemies, right? And yeah, I mean, honestly, I try to play fair even with people who never play fair with me, even someone like Glenn Greenwald or Reza Aslan. I mean, people who have just lied about me endlessly. If I get something wrong about them, I publicly apologize for it. So I did this, and this was at the absolute 11th hour with respect to this scandal online. And when I saw the kind of pain I was getting just for supporting Kara in her walk back of this thing, at a moment when it was obvious she should have walked this back, I got people saying, you know, unsubscribing from your podcast. You are, you know, now I know you're a fucking racist.

You know, it was just pure pain. And I just thought, wow, man, that's, you know, it's like you just touch this thing at its very end, and you're, you know, it's the slime gets on you. So, yeah, it is, it's the medium. We had no opportunity to do this before. It is the medium, and it's also people that don't feel like their opinions are being heard. Like they want their opinion to be heard, and they want it to be heard right now.

And it might not be a very well thought out opinion, but they know that they have the ability to blare it out. And so they just send it out. And the ability to doare it out and so they yeah they just send it out and that that the ability to do that is just intoxicating for folks and they can reach you you talked about this with jack there is a there what makes twitter especially good for this is that everything has the same stature yeah your tweets no bigger than the other tweet that just called you an asshole yeah that's my kurt metzger uh take on it because Kurt Metzger was a hilarious stand-up comedian. He'll write a Facebook blog only.

He only writes on Facebook. He's like, I like how it's set up. He's like, there's a big, it differentiates between me and these fucking idiots who are commenting under there. Although ironically, I hate Facebook. I can't even, I mean, just the graphic design on Facebook, I find so offensive that I can't even look at Facebook.

So I use it as a publishing channel, but I keep threatening in my own mind to just delete the account because I just don't. I've only read the comments three times maybe ever. And every time I read them, it's like, Jesus Christ, it's like YouTube but alive. It's like YouTube but with people with their real names. Right, right. YouTube but alive I don't know it's like YouTube but with people with their real names right it's you know this is a new world that we're living in man and everybody's trying to navigate this thing and figure it out as it goes along and not everybody's doing it well and I think this world is going to get more and more intrusive I think this is just the beginning I think we didn't see

Twitter coming whatever comes after Twitter and this is one of the things that I, before the podcast, I wanted to really talk to Jack about to get his take on what he thinks is next down the line. Because there's going to be something that's more invasive. There's going to be something that is more, whether it's, I think, probably something in the line of augmented reality. There were probably a decade away from something that makes this look like books, look like a fucking cork board at a bookstore. Yeah. Although, strangely, we're living through the golden age of audio here. It's like we went full into video and we're poised to go 3D and VR, and then all of a sudden, audio is king. Well, how about phone calls and texts?

I called you out of the blue once and it was like – What the fuck? What do you do? Why are you calling me? I'm walking through a supermarket. Somebody said on Twitter once, it was hilarious, that FaceTiming me out of nowhere is just like knocking on my door without calling me. And she wrote straight up.

She was angry that somebody FaceTimed her. No, it always feels like an old school move to, like my book agent calls me out of the blue and it's just, it seems so old school. Yeah, it's weird. It is just like a knock on the door. My friend Joey Diaz only calls. Yeah.

Only calls. For years he would scream at you if you text. And then recently within the last two or three years, he started texting occasionally. But he only calls. So I got to tell you, having released this meditation app has given me a sanity check on everything else I'm doing, which is very interesting. Because in releasing the app, it's firewalled from all the other controversial stuff I'm doing. I'm like, I'm not, you know, in the app, I'm not whinging about Trump or, you know, talking about any of the stuff I talk about on my podcast. It's just me trying to teach meditation as a,

largely as an antidote to all of the stuff we're talking about. It's like, we've got this, as Tristan Harris says, we've got this slot machine in our pocket that is continually gaming our attention all day long. And in my view, a meditation app is like the one thing you can have on your smartphone that completely subverts the technology and can get you to actually live a more examined life using the technology, right? But what's been amazing for me personally is that I put it out and it is the only thing that I have put out maybe ever, right? Where it's been received exactly as I've intended, right? There's no controversy. It's just like the people who are finding it useful love it and they say, thank you. And's like they're they're getting exactly what i thought i was putting into it and it's like it made me think what the hell am i doing over here with all of this toxic stuff that has been endlessly maliciously spun against me and misunderstood and

you know it's just i mean i have to i have to do both because there's a lot of important things to talk about that are going to be endlessly spun and maliciously misunderstood. But it's been so refreshing to have one thing. I mean, you must get this with doing your standup or maybe- I don't have a thing. I get shit for everything. Okay. Well, or maybe UFC commentary.

No, they come after me for everything. Well, it has been psychologically, it's been a revelation to have one thing that I can put out that is just received, appreciated, and they got what I intended, and it's just, you know, thank you. It's just like, oh, fuck, that's possible. I had no idea. If I ever knew, I had forgotten that that was possible. Well, a meditation app, it kind of makes sense because the people that are going to flock to that are looking to meditate. They're looking to improve their mind. They're not looking to spew hatred on Facebook.

No. Yeah. Yeah. I thought that after the podcast with Jack, I was like, Jesus Christ, I should just stick to podcasts with comics. Because podcasts with comics, even if you put your foot in your your mouth everybody knows you're just trying to be funny right you know if you do a podcast and and the thing about the podcast with jack it's not even like i said anything bad it's what i didn't say yeah that was upsetting to so many people but that's such a loaded thing and because of that podcast no there's there's negative to it that blow blowback. There's a lot of toxic anger and all that.

But the positive is what I like. The positive that came out of it is me forced to reexamine how I do podcasts, reexamine the significance of each individual guest, and especially someone that comes with as much baggage, without lack of a better term, as Jack, that you've got to think that there's people listening. And there's some questions that you really have to work at. You have to push through.

And even if he's dancing in Pier Wedding, I should have went back to, okay, why is Kathy Griffin on your platform? If doxing is bad, you don't want to dox, you don't want threats of violence. When someone says, I want names, okay, what are you going to do with these fucking names? What are you going to do with them? What are you going to do with a 16-year-old kid and his names? And then when you see the actual video of what actually happened, and there's so many people that are still not walking it back. Still.

No, I know. They're doubling down. A lot of people doubled down. Fuck him. And here's another little piece of insight. My friend Matt lived in D.C. And those hats, those MAGA hats, they're fucking everywhere. people double down fuck him and here's another little piece of insight my friend matt uh lived in dc and those hats those mega hats they're fucking everywhere there's these little where these kids were that area there's these carts that sell these hats so these kids bought those hats

that day it's not like they're these mega kids they're probably just being assholes right they're unsupervised teenage boys their frontal lobe is not fully formed and they're all together feeding off each other like a pack of gremlins yeah i was a teenage boy you were a teenage boy you know how fucking stupid you used to be yeah i mean i was probably way more stupid than you but i was a mess i i had my moments yeah um no i'd be just you get a hundred teenage boys together in a crowd you know on a trip, and you get some native elder drumming in some guy's face. Yeah. It was amazing what didn't happen there.

Right, exactly. No violence. No violence. And the kid, the way he handled it, all he did was smile. Yeah. So, I mean, listen, I'm as biased as anyone against a Catholic school school kid wearing a maga hat yes like you know like given given my backstory it's like yeah i'm totally poised to think this guy's an asshole and is likely always to be an asshole but what people read into an uncomfortable smile right i

mean just like the the the shots of his face with the tweets that said you know this is what white privilege looks like this is you know this is what white privilege looks like this is you know this is this is the everything that's wrong in our society it's just we we have to slow down how about reza wrote have you ever seen a more punchable face come on man you want to punch him yeah because he's smiling calls for violence from the left are so fucking disturbing to me because my parents were hippies when i grew up i always thought of the left and we always i've you know i've been called right way i've never voted anything but democratic in my life except for gary johnson right gary

johnson was the only time i voted independent or whatever the fuck he was libertarian right but that was just because he did my podcast i'll fall for tulsi gabbard because she did my podcast too. But the left was always very considerate, well-read. They were the people that were more open-minded. They were supporting of gay people and minorities. That was the left, and they were nonviolent. They were the people that were protesting Vietnam when I was a kid. Also just supportive of the virtue of speech, free speech and self-criticism, right? The disadvantage of the left against the right has always been, there's this self-scrutiny

and a willingness to wonder whether or not I'm wrong that isn't mirrored if you go far enough right. And there has been, so there's been kind of an asymmetric war between left and right, you know, politically for much of our lifetime. But you go far enough left now and you're meeting a kind of totalitarian resistance to speech.

And it's, yeah, it's very, I mean, I'm just, it'll be interesting to see how the 2020 campaign plays out. I'm certainly worried that we could totally blow it with some leftist SJW uprising. Well, yeah, that would be unfortunate because I think they would just double down the other side. We would be better off with some sort of a reasonable centrist, right? Someone who just made sense. And, you know, one of the things that I liked about Tulsi is that she's a veteran. And, you know, I mean,'s she seems very reasonable to me but except i i haven't followed her um

career closely but it just seems like she's not making the right noises on things like syria and assad yeah i don't know enough about that to comment i don't know enough about assad and the controversy of whether or not he gassed his well that that that is i think uncontroversial i think in terms of what she i mean that that is uncontroversial which in terms of what she is saying about it about him i mean she's capable of putting both feet in her her mouth on that i thought she's what she's saying he's not an enemy of america right so yeah i mean again i'm not close enough to it and but i would you know be very circumspect about endorsing her going forward and we did do a little homework because i think her candidacy is not going to age well that's uh that's my prediction like who makes sense to you

elizabeth warren's fucked now she's the most recent one yeah she's gone the most recent one where she filled out an application she she wrote Native American on it. Yeah. I mean, just having done the DNA test. Yes. Playing that game with Trump. Yeah. That was such a miscalculation.

Well, the fact that she released the data and the data is so clear. Well, it's almost like she had to because otherwise he would call her Pocahontas to the end of time. But then to then have to apologize to Native Americans for having done the – it's just – Well, because the amount of Native American is so – I've been joking around about it that I am like 100 times more African than she is Native American. I'm 1.6% African and she's less than – like way less than 1% Native American, right? But this is the sort of masochistic death spiral that people on the left can get into. It's like the left, I've always said that the left eats its own in a way that the right never does. It's just, we have to find someone

who can stand outside that circular firing squad, right? And it would be someone who's, you know, it would be, in my view, it'd be somebody like a younger Bloomberg, right? I mean, I don't think it's Bloomberg, but like somebody, like a legit businessman who could call bullshit on all of Trump's fake business acumen and who's not ethically compromised, right? But who can get stuff done. Right. And definitely not someone who feels the need to pander to the far left on these identity politics issues.

I think identity politics is really going to be bad for us against Trump because so much of the country, I mean, the crucial sliver of the country, I mean, you just have to ask yourself, who was it who voted for Obama and then, or twice, and then voted for Trump, right? Those people aren't racist, right? Those people are sick of being called racist, right? And the, so what's happening on the left around identity politics and all of these, I mean, it's not that racism isn't a problem. It's not that transgender issues don't have to be worked out. I mean, like all of these i mean it's not that racism isn't a problem it's not that transgender issues don't have to be worked out i mean like all of like all of those are legit concerns but the fact that that's the center of mass politically on the left in in a nationwide election against someone like trump i just think that's a absolute recipe for disaster yeah because the people that subscribe to that ideology don't realize how many people think it's silly.

Yeah. You know, when you're in the oppression Olympics and you're trying to win the gold. And for how many people it's actually misapplied, right? It's like there are many more explanations for voting for Trump in addition to racism. Yes, business. Yeah, like, yes, every racist voted for Trump, addition to racism. Yes, business. Yeah, like, yes, every racist voted for Trump, you know, virtually. So that's fine. Every white supremacist voted for Trump.

But that's not the story about why Trump got elected. It's a long story. There's just much more. I mean, there are people who just have not— What do you think is— Are not thriving in the current economy. You know what I mean? It's just like you've got automation displacing manufacturing jobs.

You've got the consequences of trade and immigration. And you have legitimate concerns about—there are legitimate concerns about immigration that have nothing to do with racism. And so if you're going to score any hesitation over something like open borders as a sign of your xenophobia and racism, you're going to lose virtually everyone who has a sane concern about how you admit the right people into a country. I mean, there are economic concerns and there are social concerns. And yeah, I mean, and you don't have to be Ben Shapiro to share some of those concerns, right? I'm not saying Ben Shapiro is a racist. Obviously, I'm saying he's a conservative and takes a more conservative line on many of these questions than I do. But it's like, you either think,

let's just take immigration as the narrow case, you either think you should be able to know who's coming into the country, or you don't, right? Now, if you think you should just have open borders, there are two problems with that. One is there are many good arguments against that. And two, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's got And that's the Democrats are totally capable of seeming like that, whether in fact that's that's true for most Democrats. What do you think is what's the primary factor? Like what what caused identity politics to reach this boiling point that it's at right now? boiling point that it's at right now. Well, it is, I think, in large measure, what the internet is doing to us. It's not that identity politics hasn't been a feature of politics forever, but there's this siloing effect. There's the effect that groups become more radicalized as groups because the most extreme voices tend to pipe up more, and everyone who's silent, I mean, there's kind of a diffusion of responsibility around countering these

extreme voices. It only takes a small percentage of extreme voices to cow the rest of a group and make the group seem like the extreme voices are speaking for the group. And so I think what we have in both the left and the right, we have a small percentage. I mean, the last poll I saw that tried to get at this question was something like 6% or 8% on the tails that are making it seem like these are, and I think it's more of a problem on the left than on the right, because, I mean, the extreme right is fringe and looks fringe, right?

Like the guys in Charlottesville with their tiki torches, they don't look like they represent the Republican Party or the conservatives in any general sense. They're a symptom of some problem, but it's a smaller problem. It's a minority problem. Whereas on the left, the extreme voices have massive sway in major companies, in tech companies, in journalism, in academia, like the silencing effect and the reputational cost that's being paid by even very powerful people in all these mainstream forums on the left is just – that's not mirrored on the right. And it's – I don't know if I told you this.

I certainly didn't say it on a previous podcast with you. But so I was at dinner with a bunch of Silicon Valley people and we were talking about it. It was at the moment when that Netflix story happened where Jonathan Friedland got fired over using the N-word in a closed-door meeting. And, you know, it was a… Using the N-word in response to my friend Tom segura who you met earlier oh yeah right exactly okay special yeah where he said you can't say retarded anymore and then explained like that you know there's words you can't use anymore and didn't even wasn't using it in a joke like calling someone retarded or saying something's retarded but they were and he was saying that that's like using the N-word around black people.

Yeah, but he used the N-word in this meeting, right? Yes, yes. And he says, like, using the N-word, and just the mere intonation of those syllables was so shocking, right, that he wound up getting fired, right? And again, he was using it in the context of expressing just how careful netflix has to be about speech i mean he was going social justice warrior on himself among social justice warriors and he said this is how worried we have to be and then he gave the magic incantation you can still say retarded which is amazing because it's definitely i mean in his defense you kind of have to say both words you're not

saying the r word right like using the r word is like using the n word around black people and we're getting to some weird fucking weird place with this actually no now i'm realized why i'm confused about why i think i've talked about this because i did a podcast with chelsea handler which hasn't aired i mean i did it months it months ago, um, cause she was doing a documentary on white privilege, I think. And I, I think I'm actually cast as the guy with white privilege in this documentary. That's going to be fun. You have white privilege. So, um, uh, but I, I recorded a podcast with her. So anyway, so we hit this, this point because this had just come out, uh, then, and I think her documentary is probably for netflix so what

was her take on it well she was she was basically i mean she was playing the other side of the net for for this you know and you know not um i mean we'll have to see i mean i think i at least in my own mind i certainly made sense there and she shouldn't have a lot of response to what i was saying but i i haven't heard the audio or seen the video. But the, so anyway, I was at a dinner with a bunch of tech CEOs talking about this problem. And one guy who I won't name, who runs a big company that I, which I won't name, said, listen, you have no idea how deep this goes. I have an HR complaint where there's a guy who identifies as a furry. He thinks he's a cat.

And because we don't provide litter boxes in the bathroom, he's launched an HR complaint. This is real? This was told as a real story, as a counterpoint or in amplification of the story we were talking about at Netflix, right? So it's like this is... And yet this is happening.

People are having to navigate. CEOs of multibillion-dollar companies are having to navigate around this stuff in-house. And the Google thing over James Damore, that was an enormous problem for Google. The wheels were coming off, as far as I can tell, from what I've heard. And how so? Just that there was going to be a Google mutiny over James Damore if he had to be fired. Yeah, yeah.

This was a big deal at Google. That's so insane. And what he wrote was essentially like a B-plus term paper in human biology, right? I mean, it was like you can push back on some of the science, say, but this was not a malicious distortion of the state of the science, right? And this was not calling for discrimination against women. This was just saying, listen, men and women are different

and they've got different interests, right? And this could account for why there's an unequal representation at the level of software development. And so we're're on the left, we're finding it very difficult to even talk about differences between men and women, right? That there's, you know, start with, you know, start with a uterus and then, you know, count from there, right? That is already a taboo conversation to have. And, you know, as we said at the beginning, in talking about Twitter,

that one writer, again, I think her name is Megan Murphy, she got booted for saying men are not women. I mean, that's... So again, politically, I'm very worried that unless we resolve that or just cut through it, we don't stand a chance against Trump in 2020.

I was reading a story about a woman who's on some sort of an LBGT panel, and she's a part of some group, and she was kicked out of it by a man who identifies as a lesbian, and he has a penis. Right. Right. Yeah. Where do we go yeah exactly but ironically so this is a point that i think he has a penis i want to be sure he definitely identifies as a lesbian i might have i might have read a twitter comment about how preposterous that was and said the penis part well there's something that is something that Andrew Sullivan wrote in a recent article on this, is that the transgender thing is at odds with gay rights in a fundamental sense. I mean, you can't balance these equations because gay identity absolutely focuses on the legitimate differences between men and women.

It's like, I'm a man. I like men. I don't like women, that's my situation. But once you change your notion of how gender relates to sex, it begins to erode this claim on the legitimacy of gay identity. Well, the thing is that they're all marginalized, so they stick together. That's the idea, I guess, behind it. Sort of, but I can only imagine what Andrew Sullivan's Twitter feed looks like now

because when he writes these articles, I'm sure he just gets eviscerated by the left. And he's just straight up talking about, this is what gay rights looks like and this is how you can't be a man with a penis who identifies as a lesbian, right? Yeah, but you can't say that. And you also can't say that a man with a penis is not a woman. Because if a man with a penis—

I can say it because I can't be fired. But if you do say it, you will get a certain amount of hate I mean there's people that are saying that men who will not date trans women who still have penises, they're transphobic and this is I mean, have you ever met Jamie Kilstein? So Jamie and I have a checkered history

I don't know if we, maybe you and I have spoken about this, I've never met Jamie but Jamie, when Jamie was social justice warrior number one. He went hard. He went hard on me. Yeah, yeah. He just was dunking on me endlessly in ways that were totally unfair.

I mean, he was just, you know, he was working very hard to become an enemy. And then he had his epiphany. Then the social justice mob came for him over something. Over almost nothing. Right. Over him trying to get laid. I mean, like they were saying he was a creep or something like that, just hitting on girls.

Yeah, well, I missed the details there, but then he sent me very friendly and apologetic emails about just, you know, I'm sorry what I did. And, you know, he wants to do a podcast. I haven't taken him up on it, but, you know, maybe that could be an interesting conversation. He's sincerely apologetic. Yeah. He's a good guy. I mean, he and I had our own issue at one point in time um over a podcast that we did versus uh it was

you remember when the daniel tosh rape controversy like uh do you remember this i know who taught not not a rape joke i should say rape joke um some woman in a crowd he was he was on stage and he wasn't supposed to be there it was at the laugh factory and dom irera put him on stage and uh he goes look i don't have any material what do you guys want to talk about and uh some guy yells out rape and uh that's always helpful and so you know it's like some drunk in a crowd right he goes jesus christ and so daniel tosh's take on it, he's like, okay, what's funny about that? Humiliation, violence. He's berating this guy in trying to do stand-up while he's doing this. And some woman yells out, actually, there's nothing funny about rape.

And he goes, wouldn't it be funny if someone just raped her? Right. And everybody starts laughing. I do remember this. And so this woman wrote a giant blog about it, and she wanted him to apologize about it. And Jamie went after Daniel T tosh as a fellow yes as a fellow comic saying that it's you know like and i was like well she's a heckler the woman heckled like while he was trying to do to stand up and he's like i'm not going to support rape culture and he's like how the

fuck is that rape culture like he's he's clearly making a joke about something she said that was very very patronizing like obviously he doesn't think there's something funny about rape this is he's just trying to work through this ad lib set that he's doing with some guy who yelled out something that this whole crowd has to respond to he can't just ignore the fact that it happened and go how about fire trucks folks why they always read you know he can't do that he's got a he's got a deal with what this guy said and so that's what he tosses out there and everybody laughed by the way but also part of the problem part of his persona persona just a villain he takes it to the edge right yeah yes yeah he's yeah he's edgy comedian

he's funny and you know and jamie and i had this little Tit for tat about it But he's very Honest about his mistakes Like when you talk to him And he's got great insight Because he was that guy You know he was that guy That was going back and forth With people online

All day And checking his mentions Like couldn't walk down the street More than five steps Before he'd pull out his phone And check his mentions To see how people Responding to his latest dunking

Or takedown. It's a toxic thing that people are doing. It's this looking for people that are bad and looking for things that are wrong, looking for wrong speak. It's very toxic. It's toxic for the people that are doing it. It's toxic for the people that are receiving it. It's not a way that human beings would ever communicate in one-on-one.

I mean, I try to communicate with people the same way online as I would if they were right in front of me. I don't always succeed, but I try. That's my goal. My goal is to try to talk to someone as if they were right in front of me. That's clearly not how everybody's handling it. No, no. I think road rage is the best analogy for what's happening on social media. Yeah, I've adopted that. I've adopted that way of looking at it, too.

But the only difference is road rage, you know, there's like a physiological reason for road rage. Because you're in a dangerous situation that you're subliminally taking stock of. You're going fast. Right. You're in a metal machine with a bunch of assholes that are probably looking at their phone, and everybody's going fast, and you could die at any moment if someone goes wrong if you're on a highway like the 405 when you have five lanes going 70 miles an hour it is a fucking miracle that no one dies and every day we do it every day everything's fine yeah well so let's go back to this idea of what the the actual normative response would be

when somebody puts their foot in their mouth or something from their past gets disclosed. I mean, the stupid and indefensible thing they did as a teenager, right? Yeah. You know, like this, you know, you got these guys who are now having their careers destroyed

for having dressed up, you know blackface or in a in a hood for halloween or whatever it was i mean i you know i don't i think i think this that one um politician said he's not even in the in the photo but the photo was on his yearbook page or like whatever you put on your yearbook page in high school right um you find out this thing that you know adult is going to defend right but what is the path back what like what like what is the reboot that what that should be acceptable because we don't even know it seems we don't even know what could conceivably work to rehabilitate somebody's career and yet on this other side we've got people who again are being let out of prison for murders they admit they committed right or rapes

they admit admit they committed and they're rehabilitated and we and these are these are stories we're supposed to feel good about right so we have to figure out how to square this We have to figure out how to square this on the left. And, you know, I don't know. The way I've been thinking about it is that it has to be intelligible how you are different from the person who committed that thing. Right. So, like, if you did something that was, let's say, legit racist when you were 20, and, like, Mark Wahlberg is an example of this. I mean, he was running around just beating people senseless, right?

And for avowed racist motives, I believe, when he was a teenager. Well, the guy lost his eye. Right. Yeah. And I think that was a Vietnamese guy he attacked. But, I mean, he was just doing truly indefensible things now i don't know what

sort of you know pr moment he has had since or how he's apologized for it or but i mean that was a that's a very different time i think if it was if all that stuff was being discovered about him now there may be no way back to well the problem is with this day and age it could be reignited right like even though he's apologized for it and even though that it's been addressed it absolutely could get reignited i mean just me talking about it on your podcast is fucking him over right it could yeah i mean and also people have to recognize that there's some things but you can't retroactively instill today's ideas of what constitutes racism on 1985 so if you were in high school in 1985 and you dressed up as mr t right that you know i don't know if that was

racist back then i never did it but i don't know if that's racist like if you had a bunch of gold chains and you made your hair black and or you made your face black and gave yourself a mohawk he said i'm mr t for ha. Right. And the pictures emerge today. What you did when you went door to door when you were 15 or 12 or whatever you were, knocking on people's doors and everybody was laughing, oh, you're Mr. T. Nobody thought it was racist. Yeah. But today, anything- But let's take the hard case.

Let's say you were racist, right? I had this guy, Christian Picciolini on my podcast once who's an ex-neo-Nazi. He's just legit racist, right? He's got all the tattoos to prove it. And now there are major problems with Christian Picciolini, as I think you know, that I discovered after that podcast. So this is not an endorsement of him. Sorry, Christian. But there's a path back. I mean, so like he's celebrated on the left. He's a former neo-Nazi and he's, you know, I discovered him on Silverman's show on wherever that is, Hulu. And, you know, he's a darling of the left, right? A darling of MSNBC for this redemption story.

So, but what is the, you take someone like any of these politicians who have something in their backstory that is ugly. My feeling is all there has to be is a transparent

and intelligible account of how you are now different, of how you can actually honestly look back on this thing and say, yeah, I am as embarrassed by that as you think I should be, right? That's not like that. That is nothing that does not represent how I view the world at all now. But there's just the spirit of the time on social media, again, especially on the left and to our, you know, total dysfunction politically, is to never accept any of that. I mean, there is no apology good enough. Right.

And, or there's, you know, the most cynical possible interpretation of your apology. the most cynical possible interpretation of your apology. It's like you're just trying to, the only reason why you're apologizing is because you want to save your job. Yes. And that, we have to figure out how to, I mean, we just need some recovery disc

that we can reboot from here because it's just not, this is going someplace terrible. And again, to look at it through the lens narrowly politically of, you know, over the next two years, it's to the massive disadvantage of the left. It certainly is, but I don't see any way to fix that. Like with the current climate and this current attitude where people are engaging in this recreational outrage, it fits the climate. I don't mean, I don't know what would have to happen for people to come to some sort of a realization.

I mean, it would have to happen to them, like it did to Jamie. Like what happened with Jamie Kilstein, they turned on him and he's like, oh my God, this is awful. Like, what? And then he realized. I mean, I don't know what other thing could happen.

Well, I mean, mean what we're the game we're playing is part of it i mean you and i are in a position to take risks that you know even people at the top of journalism can't i mean like megan kelly says one wrong thing and you know it doesn't matter that she's got a 20 million dollar con contract she's just she's fired and when you look at the thing that she said i mean it was just a question yeah i mean she just didn't seem to understand how charged the phrase blackface was right she's just ignorant of that piece of history or something but like you know so she just she just she put her foot in her mouth she gave an apology that was just like you know full-blown

hostage video apology just like you know just like i am so, full-blown hostage video apology. Just like, you know, just like, I am so fucking sorry. You don't even know. Like, here, take a sample of my blood and you'll just see my, you know, test my cortisol. And not good enough. Not good enough. And they let her say the apology, too, which is even more crazy. They let her come back, say the apology, and they go, good. Thanks for doing that.

Get the fuck out of here. So no one's job in that space is secure enough where they can take real risks. But you and I could do an interview with Louis C.K. And just process his coming back into stand-up. And do it in a way where if people didn't like it, you just say, okay, fuck off. This is the conversation we had. And I think modeling that more and more, I mean, I think we have to take those risks and people like us have to take those risks and hope to break this spell by having those conversations in public.

I would hope that we're having some kind of an impact on it, I would hope that we're having some kind of an impact on it, but I feel like we're throwing buckets of cold water into a volcano. I just don't know if it's enough. But we have pretty big buckets. I mean, you have an enormous bucket. I mean, you're reaching more people than the biggest television shows are reaching. People aren't aware of this, but it's just a fact. So I think that's part of it. And then changing the norm somehow of how we engage on social media, I think is another piece. Yeah, I agree. I agree with you. The norm on how we engage on social

media, I think is flavored by two things one the immediacy of it the fact that there's no person in front of you you don't experience their their anger or their fear or their sadness when you say something fucked up but also anonymity and i think anonymity is good in a lot of ways like for whistleblowers people that work in a certain environment where they want to be honest but they would get fired you know with a very restricted environment but they have maybe a controversial opinion they want to have they want to be able to express free speech and they can't they can't unless they do something anonymous and even sometimes people when they do things anonymous they get caught

and they get in trouble like i remember there was a guy on 4chan who was, you know, who would say a bunch of fucked up things like a lot of people do. And people tracked him down and found out who he was and then sent all of these anonymously authored posts to his employer. And he got fired. And this guy was a father and he had children and he was, you know, supporting his family. And now he's struggling to make a living. He's got to try to figure it out because he wrote some things anonymously online on a message board, and he found recreation in saying fucked up things. I don't know what the solution is, but I feel like anonymity, it encourages less hospitable behavior.

Did you hear about the professor at an academic conference getting into an elevator and making just a dad joke? So he gets into a crowded elevator in an academic conference and someone asks what floor and he says, women's lingerie, please. It's like a Dean Martin joke or whatever, right? Someone in the elevator was so offended by that that they lodged a complaint.

And it's been now at least a month or so since I heard the story. So I don't know if he was fired, but he was fighting for his academic life over this complaint process. Over a Dean Martin joke. I mean, just like that, in the fullness of time, that is going to seem like some insane witch panic, right? Like there's no such thing as witches, and yet people are getting burned alive because of the allegations of witchcraft. We're in that kind of situation, and we just have to wake up. Yeah. we just have to wake up. Yeah.

And so... Well, you and I don't teach, and we're not in a university, and we're not in that bubble. I think the people that are in that bubble, and then they escape that bubble, then go to whatever tech company or whatever business, they continue that same bubble-like behavior, and they want everybody to acquiesce. They want everybody around them to behave the way

that they've been programmed to think that everybody is supposed to behave. And you see that now from a lot of young people. You see a lot of young people who are entering into the workforce think that the standards and the norms that they got enforced upon them at Yale or Columbia or wherever they went to school. Like this is how you're supposed to behave. Social justice is important and and this is real, and you have to recognize your privilege. You have to check your privilege, and you have to do this, and you have to do that, and you have to support trans rights.

Call-out culture, too. Yeah, call-out culture is a big one. It's a big part of it, and cancel culture. Everybody wants everybody to lose their job. I mean, this is the way that things change. The way things change is you have to reinforce the fact that there's these new standards, and there has to be severe repercussions for deviating. So very much about control.

I mean, Jordan goes on about this. Jordan Peterson, it's like one of his pet subjects. Yeah, no, that's what launched him. Yeah, that this is where this goes. This is all about control, and that it's a very slippery slope. And when you start telling people what to do and what not to do and that there's like these indefensible, undebatable standards that have to be reinforced and you can't talk about it. And that's what happened with Megyn Kelly. She's like, well, how come?

And they're like, get the fuck out of here. $60 million job. come and they're like get the fuck out of here 60 million dollar job you see again the crucial moment for me is why is it that the apology isn't good enough that this isn't this but what is by all appearances a sincere apology yes like like where the link there is no link to real racism like there's no link to like oh yeah i want to live in a society where black people have it harder than white people right like okay if that if that's who you are if you're a legit racist well then fine we you know we can understand why we want to boycott your business or we want to you know you know you we want nothing to do with you right there should be

massive social pressure against those kinds of noxious political commitments. But if someone misspeaks, or it's an off-color joke, and it's like they weren't trying to offend anyone, and they're just, you know, they wish they could take it back. And that links up with, I mean, did you see, you must have seen the Norm Macdonald? I mean, that was brutal yeah right like it's at what he was you know he knew he couldn't use the word retard right because it's like that that's going to get him in trouble and so i mean it it's hilarious and explain what happened okay so he was he was on howard stern show wasn't he i think i think so he was i could have this wrong but the the gist of this is is right i believe he's on the howard stern, and he was about to use the word retard.

So, okay, we'll walk this back. Now it's coming back to me. He was talking about his friend, the ordeal that Louis C.K. has gone through in this just massive exile experience, right? This massive social shunning. the ordeal that Louis C.K. has gone through in this just massive exile experience, right? This massive social shunning. And he was describing it in a way where he then got accused that he cared more about what Louis C.K. was going through than the women who felt victimized by Louis C.K. And that was not his intention at all, apparently. And so when he went to clarify this,

he was about to say, you'd have to be retarded to think that I cared more about Louis C.K.'s ordeal than the ordeal of these women who felt like their careers got derailed, right? But as the word retard was coming out of his mouth, he tried to course correct. And because he doesn't know what the fuck he's talking about, he says, you'd have to have Down syndrome, right?

Which is worse, right? It's more specific. And that's what it's like. And then you got all these parents with Down syndrome who have kids with Down syndrome who are just, oh, my God. And so now he's just, then he showed up on The View, right, on this apology tour. And I mean, that's just amazing video to see him on The View surrounded by these four women who know he's not a bad guy, right? Like they're trying to, they're just throwing him lifeline after lifeline and he's so beaten down, right? Yeah. lifeline and he's so beaten down right yeah and he's so walking on eggshells and you got whoopie

goldberg you know trying to just just pull him back you know from the lions and um it should be i mean it should be so straightforward like it does is it part of norm's goal to cause pain for parents who have kids with mental disabilities right no right i mean like like like you you could you can look in you can look into this guy's eyes for for 10 seconds and know that this is not the bigot you're worried about right right before of course you know and um and yet people just want him destroyed over I don't know if they still do, but it's like the moment, like it was, you know,

I think it was a real concern that his, his show would get canceled. I mean, like this was, well, it hasn't been picked up for a second season. And one of the things that's, maybe that's part of the problem.

He was, it is part of the problem. He was, he was devastated. I mean, I'm very good friends with Adam Egan. He's a guy that runs the comedy store. He's the talent director at the comedy store

and he's been on Norm's show. He was on Norm's, he was like Norm's sidekick on his show. He's a very good friend with Norm. And Norm really suffered from this in a way that he never suffered from anything in his career in terms of like his own personal feeling. Like he was devastated by it, by the blowback and the

reaction. And he wanted to come on my podcast and talk about it. But Netflix is like, get the fuck out of here. Netflix said, no press. Don't do anything. No press. Okay, so the fact that you can't talk your way out of it, that's the fucking disease. Well, the problem is not that you can't talk your way out of it.

The problem is that they wouldn't even let him attempt to talk your way out of it because I think they realize that Norm's a maniac. And Norm is a maniac in the best sense of the word he's one of my favorite comics and he's hilarious fucking hilarious but he's also completely crazy in the best way possible right norm and i randomly in some strange way randomly were seated next to each other on two separate flights oh yeah just randomly it's crazy like norm again like this crazy. And we had a great time just talking the entire flight. And we were talking about cigarette smoking. Like, yeah, yeah, I used to smoke. I'm so glad I quit.

Fucking terrible for you. You know, yeah, I mean, it's just, but I just always wanted a cigarette and then I'd be gambling. I want a cigarette. But I quit. Fuck cigarettes. Like, how long did you quit? And you're like, oh, I haven't had a cigarette in years. I'm like, like oh that's great

We land at LAX He goes right into a store And buys cigarettes I go what are you doing He goes All that talk of cigarettes I just want one now He was lighting it

On the way out the door He couldn't get out the door He lit it before he You know The automatic door He was before it was opening He was lighting that cigarette I was like you're crazy

But that's Many many comedians are incredibly impulsive and this is norm i mean he just i mean he's got such a he's so off kilter he's got a sort of gary shanley and craig like you don't know what's going to come out of his mouth extemporaneously yes but okay we we have to be let's put this back into the diversity olympics we need some respect for neurodiversity. Yes. There are people who are somewhere on the spectrum toward autism.

There are spectrums we don't even know about. We haven't named. For sure. And everyone is in some weird spot and people misspeak. There has to be a way back to say, that's not what I meant, right? Like, offending people of this type was not my intention. At some level, that has to be good enough, unless, you know, we open your closet and we see that you've got swastikas everywhere, you know? And so I think we have to hold the line here, you know and um so i think we we have to we have to hold the line here you know yeah and very few

people are in a position to be able to do it i mean you know like you know netflix netflix doesn't feel it can do it well netflix is just so terrified of a continual blowback and they just thought like if we're going to save this show the way to save it is to get him to stop talking right he's just going to just take his other foot and take other people's feet and stuff them in his mouth as well i think one thing that might help to illuminate our understanding of how people behave is what you really enjoy talking about and you really definitely changed my way of looking at things um that they're really essentially the concept of free will is a very flawed thing, and that you have to really take into consideration who a person is right now and what has caused

them to be this person right now, and that a lot of us are operating on this really bizarre momentum of our past and our behavior and our genetics and life experiences and all these different variables that really need to be taken into account. This idea that you are autonomous and you are the director of your own life is true to a certain extent, but it's also very complicated, much more complicated than we would like to admit. And when you're talking about something that happened when you were 17, like Brett Kavanaugh or something like that, like, Jesus Christ, you know, you're going to hold a 55-year-old man accountable to something that he did when

he was 17 that wasn't a crime, and you're not exactly sure what happened? This is all very strange. This is very strange stuff. Well, so taking the red pill on free will makes you much more forgiving of a lot of this stuff. Yes. Because you see just, everyone is an open system. No one authored themselves. Right.

No one created themselves. No one can directly regulate the effect of every influence that they had or didn't have. It's like you are the totality of what brought you here. I mean, the universe has sort of just pushed you to this point in time, and the only thing you've got is your brain and its states, and that is based on your genes and the totality of environmental influences you as a system have had working on you up until this moment. And so, the next words that come out of your mouth are part of that process. Now, some people find this

to be a, you know, frankly, demoralizing picture, right? They think, well, okay, well, you're telling me I'm just a robot. But you're a robot that is open, continuously open to influence, to influence of internally based on its own processes. I mean, there's top-down control of executive function in the brain to your emotional life, say, and you're continually open to the influences of culture, right? The culture is this operating system that you're interacting with in each moment, and whatever's getting in can change you in radical ways very quickly. I mean, there's no telling how much you can change on the basis of one new idea coming your way, right? Now, I would argue that that process of

change, I mean, if I say something that changes your view on anything, that's not evidence of free will. That is evidence of just yet more causality. I mean, you don't pick the changes that come your way. If I get you to see something that you didn't see a moment before, you're not responsible for the fact that you didn't see it a moment before, and you're not responsible for the fact that you now see it. It's just like the dominoes just kept falling, right? Right. But it does give you this far more patient sense of, one, just, you know, all the causes and conditions that have created this odious behavior you're now disposed to react to in the world, right? Like, you can—everything on some level is more of a force of nature than it is something that you need to take personally.

It's like if there's a hurricane blowing outside, we don't respond to it the same way we would respond to, you know, Al-Qaeda dropping a bomb on us, right? It might create the same amount of damage. But in the latter case where we have an identifiable agent, right, we feel like, okay, now we're in the presence of human evil and we have to go kill these motherfuckers, right? Now, we may have to kill them, right, because that may be the only way of putting out this, you know, stopping the damage they're committed to causing. And we would kill hurricanes if we could kill

them, right? I mean, we would, you know, we would nullify them. But the feeling we have in both cases is very different. The feeling you have attributing ultimate authorship to a person's behavior is super narrow psychologically and ethically. And it's, you know, the feeling of vengeance, right? Like, you don't, you have a, this feeling of vengeance is so natural to get triggered in response to a person. It's not natural in response to a wild animal who may have done something terrible, right? I mean, like you would, like, I mean, there have been examples of this where people have taken vengeance on animals, and it just looks like a kind of moral dysfunction on the part of the people who did it. I mean, there's a famous picture of an elephant that got hung from a

railroad crane, I think back in the 20s, right, like, the circus elephant escaped, and it ran, you know, it rampaged through the streets, and it trampled, you know, a few people. And the people in the town, I don't know where this was, it was in Baltimore or someplace, were so outraged that they decided to lynch the elephant, right? And yet, there's something uncanny about that sort of misappropriation of agency to an elephant. I mean, what is a mistreated circus elephant going to do when it gets out and is terrified and is trying to get away from people? It's going to trample a few people. So we have a very different set of books we keep ethically for humans. And some of it's understandable, some of it's inevitable, but a lot of it gives us moral illusions that we don't need to have.

And it gives us a kind of just an inability to take stock of all the variables that are actually guiding human behavior and react to them and mitigate them and disincentivize them intelligently. I mean, punishment makes sense not because people really, really deserve at bottom whatever their punishments are. It doesn't make sense in a retributive paradigm. It makes sense if it's the best tool to discourage dangerous behavior, and it works, right? So it's like, you know, if you're going to punish people for things they can't control, well, that's stupid, right? Because as much as you punish them, you're not going to moderate the behavior. So you have to punish people for things that are actually under voluntary control. And it only makes sense if it's the only tool to do the job.

And the moment you have, I mean, I may have brought this up last time we spoke about free will, but this is really the sort of reductio ad absurdum of where most people are on this topic. The moment we really understand human evil at the level of the brain, the moment we understand psychopathy, say, which is, I mean, maybe that's at the level of the brain, the moment we understand psychopathy, say, which is, I mean, maybe that's not the totality of evil, but that's, you know, certainly the center of the bullseye. Once we understand psychopathy as a neurological condition that's governed by genes and environment, and we can actually intrude at the level of the brain to mitigate it. So like psychopathy becomes a disease, right? It becomes an injury syndrome, right?

That we can fix. And let's say it's a very simple fix. Let's say it's a pill, right? Let's say it's just a neurotransmitter imbalance. In the presence of that breakthrough, we will feel very differently about that species of human evil. We will not judge it in the same way.

Because what will happen is you'll give people the pill and they'll say, fuck, I can't believe I was that dangerous asshole. Like, thank you for, like, I'm as horrified by who I was before you cured me as you were, right? And so psychopathy in the presence of a cure for it would look much more like diabetes than it looks like evil in the present case. And people aren't imagining what it would be like to be there, what it would be like to actually fully understand the underlying neurophysiology here and actually have something. I mean, there's no guarantee we'll be able to deal with it in a simple way, but it's certainly possible. And I mean, the classic example is just like the Charles Whitman example, where you have a brain tumor that's causing this aberrant behavior. In that case, everyone sees, okay, this is not evil, this is a brain tumor.

That's the tower shooter guy? Yeah, back in 64, I think. And so, but in the same way that a brain tumor is exculpatory there, I think a full understanding of the underlying neurology would be exculpatory. Again, it doesn't mean you, in the you know before we get there we obviously we have to lock up dangerous people if there's no way to to help them but the more we see the causes the more we view we view this in terms of just sheer bad luck right like like there are there are people who when they're adults are quintessentially evil who we who, when they're adults, are quintessentially evil, and they provoke the greatest feeling of vengeance from us. But if you just walk back their timeline, you recognize that they were four years old at one point, right?

They were the four-year-old who was destined to become this terrible person. Right. It's an unlucky four-year-old. Right. You know, and so at what point, where's the bright line that says, okay, here's the point where it's appropriate to just hate this person and feel no compassion. And on the other side of this line, you should just feel compassion because this person's unlucky. There is no such line. And a complete understanding of this lifeline in scientific terms would obliterate any line you think you have right it would just be this cascade of causation and you know adding randomness to

the picture doesn't help right it's just it's the randomness is just you know somebody's in your brain rolling dice you know influencing your behavior that way well that's that doesn't give you the free will people think they have. to, at least in my view, a far more ethical and tolerant and patient and understanding view of human failings and human frailty. And then at that point, you can just have a conversation about what's pragmatic, what works, what helps people change. Like, this person over here who's doing terrible things, is there something we can do to make him a better person?

Well, if there is, let's do that without all the judgment wouldn't it be amazing if that's how we treated uh these public shaming events like wouldn't wouldn't it be amazing if we gave someone an opportunity to say this is this is what i did this is how awful i feel about this i would never do that again i'm a different person that That was 20 years ago or whatever it was. And have everybody join in. Hey, anyone could be you. Thank you for being honest about who you are now. Thank you for evolving.

Thank you for expressing yourself in a way that maybe other people who have also committed really just unsavory or just unfortunate things in the past, unfortunate acts in the past, they can feel relieved by the fact that you've grown and evolved to become a better person. Oh, yeah, yeah. And that you're a different thing now,

and you are the product of all of your experiences. You're not this one thing. You're not stuck in who you were when you were 16 years old. If you were Marky Mark and you hit that guy with a stick, whatever he did, you're not stuck in that spot forever. It's not a scarlet letter. It's not a mark on your forehead that you keep for life.

Yeah, I mean, the thing about the Liam Neeson incident, which I find so interesting, is that there's a case where, I mean, what he's revealing about himself is pretty amazing, right? It's like he just decided, okay, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission for who I used to be, right? And just volunteered this. And for me, I don't actually understand that state of mind. I mean, there are many aberrant states of mind that I can understand. I certainly understand what it's like to want to harm somebody and to feel vengeance and all that.

But the instrumental violence piece, I don't understand. I've never felt like, okay, this type of person wronged me or someone close to me, so any person of that type will do. But that is such a problem the world over in human history that it is just fascinating ethically for someone of his stature to reveal that about himself. And he put it in terms of honor. I mean, this is what is so dysfunctional about honor culture, right? This is what we see more in the South than anywhere else in the country, and this is what you see basically everywhere you go in the Middle East, and this is what Islam inculcates to a degree that's fairly unmatched in its community this notion of honor is does link up with this tendency to find satisfaction in

instrumental violence like but when you when you try to run that software on my brain that just looks like madness right the idea that any other person will do right of a certain type right that's just you know i i don't that resonates not at all right and so um it's just damn interesting and the fact that the lesson being taken from this seems to be this is this should be the end of your career for having talked about this in the way. And again, you know, apologies if there's some part of the story that I've gotten wrong or I'm not missing or missing, but it seemed to me that he was always counting this in the, the horror and amazement appropriate to the,

to the disclosure. Like he can't believe he was inhabiting this state of, of consciousness. And, you know, it's just an amazing thing to reveal about yourself i mean so yeah and i'm sure he regrets every second of it yeah and that's that's the wrong fucking punch line yeah right you know the the thing that should happen

is someone with a lot to lose should be able to say you know how ugly a human mind can be? This is an experience I had, right? This is who I was. And you know how much I have to live for and how much I have to lose. We have to talk about this kind of mania that can get humming on a human brain, right? We see this every time you open the paper, you see someone in the grip of this kind of thing, right? It even happened to me, right? I think it's an amazing conversation to start. And the fact that the result is just, you know, an auto-defeat is the problem we're trying to fight our way through at this point. it's because there's too many voices i mean there's just so many people that are reacting to it if he's dealing with uh he's not dealing with three or four or five voices he's dealing with millions of people that get to chime in on this yeah and you get a few thousand of those people that are furious at you you know like you were saying like i mean this doesn't doesn't that doesn't work i was just about to say i was going to make a comparison to your podcast with Jack that you're not listening to the, not reading the comments.

But he's getting this gigantic signal from a huge number of people. So this is all over my Google News feed. I saw it on Yahoo. I saw it in all these different publications are talking about Liam Neeson's case. And so then everybody starts chiming in and then the virtue signaling ratio is very high and the anger ratio is very high then the people that think he's secretly still racist and doesn't want to admit it is very high yeah and then there's also the fact that he's a man of wealth and privilege and he's successful

and famous and there's got to be a bunch of jealousy that's attached to that and a bunch of people that want to knock him down because he's at a very high hill. Yeah. There's a lot going on there. It's the numbers. And I don't know. I feel for the guy. Again, I don't know him, but I remember, and again, forgive me if I get this slightly wrong, but isn't it true that his wife, Natasha Richardson, just died in this freak accident?

She was skiing. Skiing accident accident fell and hit her head but yeah but honestly she didn't even fall she wasn't moving when she fell she was standing on a ski slope and fell from a standing position and hit her head on the you know the hard snow obviously and i mean it's just it's all it takes. Yeah, it's brutal. Yeah. So... And on top of that, I believe his cousin or his nephew, nephew or niece, died the same way. Not the same way in terms of fell skiing, but also hit their head and died. Right, wow.

So it's like, Jesus Christ, this guy. And obviously, there's many people out there that experienced far greater tragedies. I'm not trying to quantify it, yeah he's uh you know he he tried to talk about a real thing you know he tried to talk about a real thing and he's he's given some interviews since then where he's you know he said look i'm not a racist i'm just telling you i was in such a fucked up state of mind because of this rape that i was willing to do something irrational and horrible yeah yeah but he didn't't. No, it's interesting. But he didn't. Yeah, exactly.

But again, take it full circle. People, these same people who are calling for his head are prepared to forgive other people who did do that thing. But it's so dependent. I had Mike Tyson on the podcast, and one of the things that I got when I said it was going to happen. Yeah, that was a part of it. That was fascinating. So many people were like, fuck that rapist.

Fuck this guy. Fuck that. All these different things about him. What I wanted to get into him with him was who he was when he was 12 years old, when he was a little boy, when he met Customato and was taught how to box and was fucking hypnotized and this is one of the really important things that came out of that podcast was custom auto who was not just this boxing legend who took in this young kid from the ghetto that didn't have a family but also hypnotized him to hypnotize him to be a destroyer he specifically was saying to him you don't exist the task exists you're going to move forward you're going to bob and weave and rip the body and he was programming this kid to get incredible amounts of positive response from violent acts violent acts in a boxing ring and that's where he got his identity that's where

he got all of his love and so he became this guy and one of the things that i said to him i said did anybody ever teach you how to turn it off and he's like no no he did like i'm no i'm no mike tyson and i was never like that i was never like that. I was never like that. But I was far more violent when I was fighting. Far more violent. Far more prone to violence. My trigger was very short. I was ready.

Thinking about it all the time. I was fighting all the time. I probably had 100 fights. I was ready to go. Like, your brain has it. If you're getting kicked in the face and punched in the face a lot and you're doing it through your developmental period from the time you're 15, for me it was 15, from him it was like 12 or 13.

You have a different way of looking at the world because this is also in the recipes. Yeah. And the recipes are also, you might get knocked the fuck out. You might get head kicked. You might get kicked in the neck with a shin and you know you wake up and your friends are slapping you in the face and putting ice on you this is all real and when you have that the the positive that comes from that when you're a 12 year old boy and you're hypnotized by this great man who's teaching you how to fight and you're getting so

much love you've never gotten love in your life you've never gotten positive feedback and you're getting so much of it from this and then no one's teaching you how to turn it off and you're getting so much love. You've never gotten love in your life. You've never gotten positive feedback. And you're getting so much of it from this. And then no one's teaching you how to turn it off. And you're wondering why this guy grows up to become a fucking maniac and is punching people in the street. He's just crazy and yelling at reporters, I'll fuck you in the ass, white boy,

all that crazy shit that he did. He was a maniac. I mean, no one taught him how to reflect. There was no Sam Harris app for meditation for Mike Tyson in 1986. You know, he was just a maniac. Well, yeah, I mean, one problem we have here is that we don't have a norm around, a good norm around mental health. Yes. And we have like zero norms around mental training, right? So physical training is a very good analogy between meditation as mental training, which sounds just esoteric and woo, right?

So it sounds like new age, you know, specious nonsense to many people. But if you roll back the clock 100 years, physical training made no sense. There were no norms around i mean the only guy lifting a dumbbell was that guy with the handlebar mustache in the leopard you know bikini or whatever he was wearing at the freak show right yeah you know the singlet yeah and now we have a we have a total understanding of the norms around physical training yeah like you're you're there's just you're actually a freak if you don't do some kind of exercise, right?

Well, those, they've even changed and evolved over the last decade or so. Yeah, yeah. It's gotten far more complicated and nuanced. It's continually evolving, but the framework, the paradigm, the fact that there's something to do to get better physically, and that those changes matter, they, You can engage your body intelligently so as to improve it across many different variables, flexibility, strength. That's all totally understood, and now we're just refining the protocol. Specifically the training of attention and how you respond to the uprising of your own negative emotion, right? That is something that has been going on for thousands of years in contemplative, mostly Eastern context. And that's something that, you know, Buddhism really has a lot of, specifically, an asymmetric amount of wisdom to to uh share on and it's um yeah i mean i'm i'm i'm very excited

to be spending more time on it because it's the locus of so much of the fragmentation in our lives now is the smartphone it's like what's happening what the what this thing is doing to us is continually amplifying not only our desire for approval, but the ability to react in a, like, so there's just no reason to hesitate to condemn this thing that you're seeing, like, this upwelling of negative emotion you see, the outrage you feel when you see something on Twitter, right, is it's shortening everybody's fuse, right? It's making road rage more of a kind of a general feature of our lives. And this is all trainable. Like, you can actually learn that when you suddenly feel anger in response to something that seems to have happened in the world, if you just pay attention to the experience of anger, if you just feel the mere physiology of it and get out of your thoughts about it, you notice thought as a process. You let that go.

You're not continuing to have a conversation with yourself about all the reasons why you should be angry or you should attack this person. And you just become interested in anger as a response. The half-life of the emotion is like seconds, right? It's impossible to stay angry for very long if you get out of the story you're telling yourself about why you should be angry. Now, there are certain situations where anger is appropriate, and it's good to have access to that energy. I'm not advocating that everyone just get lobotomized and not react to anything, but until you can actually be mindful, I mean, mindful is the technical word for what this is,

until you can actually get out of the thoughts and just pay attention to, in this case, a negative emotion, you have zero choice. You're going to stay angry for as long as you stay angry for. And people have this experience of being angry for days about things or being angry for hours. There's no way to stay angry for more than moments unless you're just lost in the story. And it becomes a kind of superpower to be able to say, do I need to be angry about this? Or like, how useful is it to stay angry about this? And you can just get off the ride. You can literally like, you know, I see a tweet from somebody who's trying to destroy my

life and i feel this initial you know contraction and i can decide how long i want to feel that way for right and that's an amazing thing to be able to do and it's based on a kind of training that very few people know even exists and that and and so again it's like I'm now the guy in the leopard singlet, right? But it's, you know, more and more we're going to understand that this just has to be part of everybody's toolkit. Well, it would be amazing if they taught kids that in school. If you got to learn that when you're learning math and history. People are doing that.

My wife actually does that. Really? In high school? Six-year-olds. Whoa. You can teach mindfulness to, I mean, in the beginning, what they're learning

is just basic awareness of their inner lives, right? Like just being able to name the emotion they're feeling is an amazing capacity in a six-year-old. Like a six-year-old

is just acting out something, and you're now teaching them to know in that moment that what's pushing them from behind is sadness or anger or embarrassment. Just to be able to have that recursive ability to reflect, that's already a major gain in kids that kid's that age but yeah you can learn it very early actually this was something i was talking about with um stephen fry on on my podcast so stephen was very scared he's he's actually he's adorable he's like like a nice great podcast i really enjoyed that one yeah he's just you're in the presence of just such a nice guy.

It radiates decency. But he was fairly skeptical of just like, why would you ever have to train mindfulness or meditation? I mean, the analogy that came up to me, came up for me on the fly there was that it is actually a lot like learning to read in the sense that none of us remember having gone through the ordeal of learning to read, right? Now, learning to read was a hassle, right? Like that did not come easily to most people. And yet now it's just – now if you look at a page of text in a language you understand, you can't help but decode it, right? It's just effortless. code it, right? It's just effortless. And so, I mean, this is, these kinds of emotional tools and cognitive tools, just the ability to self-regulate emotion by becoming aware of it

as a process, that is something that I think we could teach kids much earlier, and then we would be in the presence of young adults who would naturally have a facility for it where they wouldn't even remember how hard it was to acquire it. Yeah. What I was talking about earlier with Mike Tyson and his coaching and his, I mean, he essentially got mental coaching on how to accomplish one thing, mental coaching on how to have the perfect mindset for one thing, how to kick people's ass. What he didn't have was mental coaching on how to deal with the pressures of life, especially life.

I mean, and almost no one really understands what life is like to be a famous 20-year-old heavyweight champion of the world. I mean, there's no one. It had to be. It's alien. It's got to be alien. I mean, and to ask this kid to manage this state when, you know, you're talking about someone who just six years prior was virtually homeless and had no love in his life at all and was being hypnotized by some madman who is, you know, a boxing wizard who lives in the Catskills. boxing wizard who lives in the Catskills.

And what we were talking about earlier about who you are now versus who you were 20, 30 years ago, when you meet Mike Tyson now, Mike Tyson is the sweetest, nicest, friendliest guy. He's so soft-spoken. He's really kind. He hugs people. He's a really nice guy. And at one point in time, he was the scariest motherfucker on the planet Earth. nice guy you know and at one point in time he was the scariest motherfucker on the planet earth yeah there's actually there's another sort of uncanny valley here and in martial arts training

that that i spent a lot of time in when you're training in martial arts and seeing the the world through this lens of violence and potential violence but you're training in a way that's never really putting your skills to the test so you're're basically, as a young man, you're living with this fundamental uncertainty as to whether or not you actually are capable of anything. So you're training in like fake martial arts, right? Right. Or at least martial arts where most of it is a kind of pantomime of violence and it's not being pressure tested. So it's not like you where you're competing and you know what it's like to kick someone in the head and it actually works, right? It's like this is, you're sparring, but it's all, you have to keep everything safe, right?

Touch. Karate, yeah. Or even if it's full contact, you have headgear and you've got, it's just like you're not, there's still basic uncertainty about what's going to go down on the street if it's in the presence of real violence. And there you're, especially as a teenager, you're in this fairly toxic state of always preparing for violence that still is, in most people's lives, a pretty low order of probability that it's going to occur. And yet it's also backed by this fear of,

the ego fear of, you know, the ego fear of maybe you're just full of shit. Yes. And you're just going to get your ass kicked if this ever happens. And with someone who's a real, obviously someone like Mike Tyson, there shouldn't be any uncertainty about, like, he's got nothing to prove. If he's in a bar and somebody says, you know, what are you looking at? about like he's got nothing to prove he's in a bar and somebody says you know what are you looking at at minimum he doesn't have this fear of like if he if he walks away from that challenge he knows he's walking away not because he was scared maybe he he's going to lose a fist fight

with this guy right he's the best boxer on earth at that moment it's it's that he's he's got way more to lose than the other guy like why does he want to be rolling around in a parking lot with some stranger? So there's this very unhappy place that a lot of martial artists are in, which is they don't actually know what they're capable of, and they're living all the time with this kind of training software running in their heads, and it's a weird space to be in well it's one of the things that's so great about brazilian jiu-jitsu exactly the brazilian jiu-jitsu you i mean you're not getting punched and you're not getting kicked but you are absolutely going full blast and you have a hundred percent confidence once you reach

a certain level that you could do that to an untrained person within its frame you are pressure testing it and you know that it works yes now you don't you know i would argue there people still lose sight of the fact that in reality people people are punching and they're not training a lot of punching or defense and then there are weapons and then there's a guy's friend who can come up and start kicking you in your head so you know it's like like how good an idea was it to pull guard when you know someone else can walk up uh but you know yeah it's within its you know within its purview yeah you're not the you're you're working out all of your illusions and that's yeah that's that's one reason why so many of us find it addictive you know it's just yeah there's that and there's also they're so nice

yeah jujitsu people are so friendly and i think that's one of the reasons why they're so friendly is they're not carrying around all that bullshit that a lot of people carry around including you know there's some grown men that have never been in a fight in their life and they get a couple of beers in them they start talking crazy shit i'm like hey man you don't even know how to fight yeah you know what do you do it's like it's like someone who wants to jump into a nascar race you've never driven a car stop. And they're talking to some guy with cauliflower ear and they don't even know what that means. Right? Yeah. It's, I mean, to be

a human being is complicated. To be a man in the face of altercations with other men is uniquely complicated. The kind of altercations that men get into, the kind of bravado and chest puffing and shit talking and the consequences of those

things. Like you were talking about Liam Neeson, his wife falling down and hitting her head. A friend of mine was working in a bar in Long Island and one of the bouncers got in a fight with some guy and punched the guy and knocked him out. The guy fell back, hit his head off the curb and died. And that happens all the time. When people get knocked out, they hit their head on the ground, they die. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, did when i before i had a podcast i and i was getting my midlife crisis took the form of me getting really back into martial arts again for after a hiatus of maybe 25 years um i had a a lawyer who who focused on kind of self-defense law. I mean, he was constantly dealing with cases where someone is either claiming self-defense

or it's a legit self-defense claim, but they're basically screwed. I mean, they punched someone and that person fell down and hit a fire hydrant and died, right? So they're trying to beat a murder rap, you know? And so I just had him in a blog post, had him walk me,

and I had two people comment, ask questions as well. I had Matt Thornton, who's John Cavanaugh's jiu-jitsu coach, ask questions in this blog post, and I had Rory Miller, who's a self-defense trainer, just to try to flesh out all of the things you should be thinking about when you're the kind of person who is at all preparing for the possible eventuality of violence. Because people who train with guns or own guns or carry knives or do martial arts don't actually understand what happens when you know like they they agree to fight somebody or they like like like unless you unless your mo is and this should be your mo to avoid violence at all virtually any cost right like you're always just trying to leave the premises if there's some sort of challenge that could become violence.

If that's not your MO, you're just wandering into potential situations where you can find yourself in court for having shoved a guy and he, you know, fell into the street and got run over, right? And then now you're the guy who's looking at the prospect of going to prison for, you know, for a murder or, or, or, um, you know, second degree murder. And so anyway, I had him walk me through all of the, the ins and outs of all of that. It was, it was a fascinating conversation because yeah,

there are people who, you know, I mean, there are extreme cases. There are, there are women who have shot their totally crazy husband who's like waving a baseball bat at their heads and they're in prison for years for this, you know, just real miscarriages of justice where like the, like you would think that the, the, the, you know, it would be very easy to prove that she was in fear for her life in this case. And this was, it was a legitimate use of lethal force it's just so hard when no one's there yeah if no one's there i mean if you have eyewitnesses or if you know it's a public thing that happens and there's video of it but you know someone does something to someone

and no one's around you punch someone and they they get knocked out and they die and you say no this guy was threatening to kill me he was chasing me guy was threatening to kill me. He was chasing me. He was threatening to kill me. I was terrified for my life. He lunged towards me. I saw the opening. I took it, and now he's dead. You could go to jail forever. I mean, that's a reality.

I mean, you should absolutely, without a doubt, avoid violence at all costs. But you should also know how to fight. Definitely. I think that's very important. It's very important. It saves you a lot. Definitely. I think that's very important.

It's very important. Yeah. It saves you a lot. But very few people train. So it's like in the curriculum of learning how to fight, training in whatever martial art or arts, there's in most cases very little time spent training avoidance. Yes. Right. And that's a real missing piece because that is the most important thing to train. I mean, it's like you, you know, especially if you have real skills, right?

Especially if you're walking around with a gun, you realize what the problem of, of what, what any altercation can become, right? Like you're not going to get into a shoving match with somebody if you're wearing a gun in your belt, because like if, if that escalates,

you're pulling out your gun and then it's a decision whether to kill somebody. So, you know, and, and, you know, I don't have a ton of experience in this area,

but, you know, for all the firearm training I've done with people, I just get, you know, you know, I know like former SWAT operators who are, you know, just out, they're constantly armed. And these are like the last guys who are going to get involved in anything.

I mean, they used to be cops, but now they don't even feel any burden to police. Like, they're just, they're retired, emphatically retired, right? Because they just recognize how haywire anything can go for them if, you know, any process of conflict gets started. And again, I think this goes back to understanding how to manage your mind you know when the shit hits the fan and things go crazy it's it's very difficult for people to maintain a rational state of mind and things can escalate so quickly things can turn to violence so quickly especially with irrational people or untrained people or people that aren't aware of consequences or maybe can't process it well. But, and the crucial piece, which, you know, many seasoned fighters and, and, you know, professionals don't have, or, you know, I would think many don't

have, is this sort of, this, this valley where your ego concerns are not worked out. It's like when you feel the emotional burden of a loss of face, right? So like if Jocko Willink is in a bar and someone says something, you know, nasty to him or to his wife, Jocko doesn't have anything to prove. Like Jocko knows he's a badass, right? So Jocko knows that he just, it's time to get out of the bar because he doesn't want to deal with this psychopath who doesn't know who he's dealing with. But someone who's not trained like Jocko, right,

could feel that backing down, especially backing down in front of your wife or your girlfriend, that is such an ego blow that the temptation to get into this monkey dance with the other person is just, it's impossible to recover from. It's a very dangerous game. Yeah. Yeah.

And people get into it all the time. And I've seen so many people get into it that just don't, they don't have any cards. They're completely bluffing. Yeah. Yeah. Like, God damn it, man. Just stop doing this. You know, I look, I've been doing martial arts my whole life and I'm terrified of fights. they're completely bluffing yeah yeah god damn it man just stop doing this you know i'm i look

yeah i've been doing martial arts my whole whole life and i'm terrified of fights i see fights just like get the fuck out of here before this goes bad when it goes sideways you know men are just we have thousands of years of awful dna you know we really do we're violent hundreds of thousands was imperatives yeah violence was imperative it was imperative for survival you You know, we really do. Hundreds of thousands. Millions. Yeah. Violence was imperative. It was imperative for survival. You had to be able to react and react quickly.

And you had to know what to do with your genes. You're never going to make it to the next stage. Which is, I mean, this is a controversial thing to say, and I got in trouble, or one of my podcast guests, Gavin DeBecker, the security guru, got in trouble on my podcast talking about the primacy of intuition here. Like our intuitions are actually really good for detecting something that makes us uncomfortable about another person. Right. And this becomes politically incorrect really fast. And this becomes politically incorrect really fast, right? Because it's like if you see a guy on an elevator who makes you uncomfortable, Gavin's advice and I think the real sane advice is just don't get on.

But there are many people who get on just because they want to prove they're not racist, right? And I actually know someone who was in a situation like that and it didn't work out well. And so, I mean, intuition is bad for so many things. We have terrible intuitions are bad for, for these judgments, but they're reliably bad. And we can understand there's a, there's a structure to how bad they are, but for judging people who are dangerous, you know, who give us the, who make, who make the hair stand up on the back of our neck for reasons we can't understand, you know, for where the eye contact was wrong or the, or the, or the, just the, the way they were, you know, I mean, just like a, what's called a witness check, you know, like someone comes up to you and engages you and

then they look to, they just kind of look to check for witnesses, right? Now, like people don't, aren't aware that that's even a thing, right? But that body language is very salient to us. And there are hundreds of things like that that prompt an intuitive response. And these are intuitions that are, from a self-defense point of view are worth listening to. Because the worst case scenario is you wind up being a little rude there. Yeah. Like, sorry, I can't talk.

But people are, you know, people are very dogmatically being kind of trained to ignore those kinds of intuitions. What do you think those intuitions are? Like, what do you think intuitions are? Like, when you meet someone, you go, whoa, this person feels dangerous. Like, what is that? What's happening? Well, there's a lot. I mean, you know, gaze detection is a big one.

I mean, what people do with their eyes is a major variable in just how we feel that, you know, the relationship is going. But it's, and there are micro-expressions that we notice in people that we're not aware of noticing. You know, like it's just, this is not well understood. And we're bad judges of whether someone is telling the truth. I mean, this has been fairly well studied. I mean, there are people who, even people who work for the FBI, are not much better than chance in detecting whether somebody is lying. But we get so much information by body language and being in somebody's presence. And we get it so fast that it's, again, whether we understand it or not, there are evolutionary

reasons why this is so. I mean, if we've evolved for anything as social primates, we have evolved to detect stuff that just is a precursor to violent intent in others. Do you think it's just gaze, or do you think you can sense the energy of someone? There's certain movements that people make when they're thinking about hitting you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's certain, like, there's like a twitchiness to them, like a pulled back, like almost like a spring or a bow. There's like a feeling you get around people that are looking to hit people. Yeah, well, there's, again, all of that's still vision. But there's – I mean, who knows? We're detecting pheromones. We could be detecting people's level of stress.

I mean, just how tuned up they are. But – and this goes beyond – this is beyond just physical violence. This is just, you know, detecting psychopaths who are manipulative. I mean, just detecting – I mean, there are ways to spot people lying. I mean, just, you know, there are tells like, you know, too much information. You know, like people who are giving you superfluous information as a kind of overcorrection. They're anticipating that you're going to doubt their story. And so they're filling in like blanks that you don't even need filled in, right? And there's sort of patterns to that.

And again, we pick up on a lot of this stuff without consciously being aware of what's going on. We just know that that's like not a person I want to spend any more time with, right? But there may be more of a literature on this than I know about, but a lot of this is not well understood. And, I mean, people like Paul Ekman have done a lot of stuff on microexpressions. That goes back probably 30 years at this point. And there are people who are outliers who are great at detecting micro expressions where they really they really just understand what's going on but

it's it's not and what and ai eventually will be if it is not there already will be much better than we are doing this i'm so scared of that yeah i'm so scared of them getting that wrong yeah right micro expressions are funny because they remind me of micro-aggressions, which is one of the weirder social justice warrior things. Like things that used to be just slights where someone was just like slightly rude. Not even slights. Just like, where do you come from? Right. Right.

That's a micro-aggression. You're speaking with an accent. Like, where are you from? Where are your parents from? How dare you? Yeah. How dare you question my authenticity? Yeah.

Yeah, microaggressions, it's weird that that's actually accepted, that this is something they're actually pushing in certain schools, that microaggressions are a real thing. Christina Hoff Summers just wrote something about, or she put something on her Twitter today about a Yale article that was written today, or that was put out today about documenting politically incorrect behavior so that someday in the future when someone is running for Congress or is up for Supreme Court or something like that,

you could go back to their college days and remember when they said something. I mean, one of the examples this woman uses in this post was compared a woman to a large animal, a woman's body to a large animal in a private text message that she should have, oh, I should have screenshot. I should have, yeah. And calls this guy in this article, white boy. This white boy does this. And the white boy with a saccharine smile does that. It's like, which is like overtly racist. Like just the expression. Right. boy with a saccharine smile does that it's like which is like overtly racist like they're just

the the expression like right and the way that she's describing it like as if this evil character slowly makes his way to run the world and he's been engineered since the time he was in college well that's it's going to happen just by just based on just based on everyone's use of the tools. Like, you know, people are not diligently scrubbing their digital history and there may in fact be no way to actually do it, right? And so they're just, they're trailing,

you know, they're not even aware of what they're trailing in social media. So, I mean, maybe that is, that will just be a cure for the problem because at a certain point, we'll be dealing with people who were basically born, they were born on Facebook, right? Like they don't even have a moment. Like they've got their baby picture there

and everything that followed. Right. And then it'll just seem completely untenable. To accuse people of everything. Everyone's guilty. Everyone has said that dumb thing that can be taken the worst possible way. And if they're going to be hung from that, then no one will survive. Well, it seems like that's what we're dealing with right now in a lot of cases.

Yeah. with right now in a lot of cases you know yeah yeah the what i think is really important that what you were saying earlier was that there has to be some sort of path to redeeming themselves that there has to be some accepted way that someone can go about redeeming themselves and we can allow them to re-enter society without constantly bringing it up or judging them by it or always uh attributing their past behavior to who they are right now i mean look at i mean this should be so simple but look at my collaboration with majid nawaz right so like we were on this podcast together yeah majid was scheming to form a global caliphate i mean the the organization he was part of, I mean, he wasn't a jihadist, thankfully, and he wasn't actually blowing people up.

But he was trying to get nuclear weapons in Pakistan into the hands of the worst possible theocrats, right? This was his, Majid with all of his charisma and all of his energy, and it's like, you know, Majid is fantastic. And he used to a utterly nefarious purpose in my world, right? You know, if you know how much that is an issue for me, it's like Majid and I are just buddies now, right? So all I need is a clear path that he took out of the darkness to understand why he's a valid collaborator now. And actually on that point, I've got people breathing down my neck to tell you that, or tell your audience,

this is how powerful you are, Joe Rogan, that a documentary is coming out on our collaboration. And it's out now. It can be found out there. What's it called? Islam and the Future of Tolerance. Nice.

And it's actually, it's not bad. It actually captures the spirit of our collaboration very well. And see it, if only to recognize how awesome Majid is, because Majid is just a superstar. And the scariest thing about the state of public opinion in the Muslim world, from my point of view, is just how hard a job he has to just to have a conversation in that community. I mean, it's just, you know, he's so marginalized and he's so reasonable, you know, but I mean,

to come back to that original point, here's someone who was, whose life was purposed toward what, you know, what I view as, you know, one of the most toxic projects I can think of, right? You know, give the nuclear weapons to the people who want to die as martyrs, right? That's the project, right? Right. And Majid is just an absolutely awesome collaborator now, right? So there's like, we have to, there has to be a path through some sane conversation to a reboot the real the worry though for a lot of folks is that you are not really being honest

about who you are currently you just want an excuse for for to be relieved except it's so clear in some of these cases like it's clear i mean take i mean the norm mcdonald case it's just utterly clear yeah right um and i mean even in may in megan kelly's case utterly clear like like i don't think unless she's got some white supremacist you know side gig that i i'm not aware of she's just like listen i'm clueless clueless. I said, you know, I didn't realize. Well, they were looking for an excuse to get rid of her,

honestly. Right. But I think that even if they weren't, I think that still very likely would have been the end. I mean, it's like even if her show had had better ratings,

still, that could have been an unrecoverable error. What if she was black? Well, no, it doesn't work the other direction. Right.

But if she was black and she said, what's so bad about blackface? Well, I think she could stay work the other direction. Right. The reverse racism thing. And she said, what's so bad about blackface? Well, I think she could stay on the air. That's interesting. I don't know. I mean, it certainly would have been easier, you know? Oh, yeah.

Like, what if Oprah said it? Yeah. What if Oprah's saying, who cares? You want to pretend to be Diana Ross? Because that was the thing was pretending to be Diana Ross for Halloween. Right. Yeah. You want to be Diana Ross for Halloween. Right. Yeah. You want to be Diana Ross?

Yeah. I mean, I got to think they could get away with it. But it's, I mean, it was interesting, the thing that happened with Louis C.K. and Ricky Gervais and Jerry Seinfeld and Chris Rock. Yes. That was, because I remember when that aired, I think it was 2011. And I remember there was nothing around that. Nothing. It was totally fine yeah right they

were using the n-word i mean the problem the thing that was kind of dishonest about the the re-scandalizing uh of it was that in the context of that conversation it was framed by uh the fact that they they really were referencing one of the more famous pieces of comedy in history. And they were referencing Chris Rock's act using the N-word. They're black people and then they're Ns. Yeah. And you, Louis, are an N, right?

Like, you're the only white guy I know who... And then they're... So they're talking in that context. And anyway, yeah, it was interesting how that almost, I mean, that blew back against Ricky. Yeah, that's one of those things, though, where they're just looking for more things to be mad at Louis for. Yeah, but Ricky was also, and I think Chris Rock was getting some pain. Chris took a lot of shit. Yeah, he took a lot of shit for that because he didn't, there was no blowback.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting times. Yes. That's probably a good way to end it yeah we just did three hours yeah it is it is interesting times i mean it's probably the most interesting times of our lives in good ways and bad ways yeah well we're um we're on the front lines of something something and you you know i i don't know if you get enough credit for this, but you have pushed out into this space that no one even knew existed. I honestly didn't even know what a podcast was when... I learned what a podcast was when I got invited to get interviewed on your podcast the first time.

It's awesome what you've created here. Well, thank you. It's all, it's an accident. I just stuck with it. Yeah. Stumbled upon it

and kept going. Well. I'm good at that. Keep it up. Thank you. Thank you. You too. Yeah.

Thanks, man. Sam Harris, ladies and gentlemen. All right. Awesome. all right awesome