The Joe Rogan Experience - #1643 - Jonathan Zimmerman

Episode Date: April 30, 2021

Jonathan Zimmerman is a professor of education and history at the University of Pennsylvania and author of "Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn".

Free speech and why you should give a damn, Jonathan Zimmerman. Why should we give a damn? Well, we should give a damn because free speech has been at the heart of every movement for change in this country. Every great warrior against oppression was also a warrior for free speech. But wouldn't it be convenient if we just silenced people we disagree with? That seems a lot easier for me. No. It's natural.

All right? It is natural, right? And that's why we have to resist it. Like, I get it. Like, everyone's experienced that. Everyone's seen somebody or heard somebody they despise and say, God, I just want that person to shut up. Right. And that's why we have to resist it.

There's a lot of very intelligent people that disagree with you in this current political climate, unfortunately. I think that was exacerbated by the Trump administration and this desire to, like, stop a lot of the QAnon stuff and the Pizzagate stuff and a lot of these conspiracy theories that people were frustrated that they were taking hold. And they were like, how do we stop this? We've got to stop these people from talking. So that's the argument for censorship. That's one of them. And the other argument has to do with race and ethnicity. I mean, the other argument is that it harms minorities. And I think those are different arguments, but sometimes they're connected. So you mean censorship against racism? Correct.

Correct. Yeah. Or sexism or homophobia or any of those things. Yeah. dealing with in today's climate is not just that everything is like hyper politicized and people are really very passionate in debating things online but just the nature of online discourse is so limited it lends itself to like simple sentences you know one you know 140 or 280 you know symbols it's just not enough it's not enough characters to express yourself and then also text you know unless you're writing a, it's hard to get all your thoughts out.

And also one of the things that people that study communications have taught us is that when we have exchanges online, they tend to be more uncivil. We will type things and text things about somebody or to somebody that we would never, ever say to their face. Of course. Yeah. I don't do that. I try really hard to not do that. And I stopped, I stopped even going back and forth with people on Twitter a few years ago. And now I take like about a year and a half or so ago, I took it even further. I don't even read my mentions. I don't go in there. You know, I just, and then I just, I open Twitter up like once a day to see if something crazy is happening. Is any place on fire? Is anybody doing something they shouldn't be doing?

Like what is happening? Well, yeah, I'm an op-ed columnist and a couple years ago I stopped reading the commentary about the op-eds. Yeah. Because, you know, generally it's not that well informed. I mean there are exceptions to that. But generally it's just people shooting from the hip and often just in a really nasty and derogatory way. It doesn't help. What do you think about social, what is it about social media that lends itself to toxic exchanges? Because it seems to be, I know people that are pretty friendly, positive people in person.

When I meet them, they're friendly. They hug me and then I see them online. I'm like, you talk so much shit. Like, why are you doing this? Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously the anonymity is part of it, right? I mean, it's, you know, they're not even anonymous. I know. But you can trick yourself into thinking that, right? It's just, it's you and your keyboard, right? And a bunch of symbols. There is something that's weirdly dehumanizing about it, right? You can trick yourself into thinking that you're not dealing with other human beings. It's just a bunch of text. Right. And this idea of don't say something to someone online that you wouldn't say to them, to their face, a lot of people don't like that.

Like, no, because I don't want to be uncomfortable, but I want to express myself. So if I'm around you, if I said what I really felt, I would feel uncomfortable. I don't like it, but I don't like what you did or I don't like what you said. So I'm going to be like, fuck you. And I want to say that online from the safety of my own living room. Again, I get that, but it's more than a little cowardly, right? It is a lot cowardly, yeah. But there's some benefit in being cowardly too, though. This is that there are people that for whatever reasons, maybe they're socially awkward, they don't have the courage to say things to someone's face, but maybe that person needs to hear them.

So this is the other perspective, like in favor of talking shit. Yeah. Well, look, again, I'm not against social media. That would be like being against oxygen now, right? Or air, right? It's part of our lifestream, right? I think the question is, you know, how we can use it in ways that help us communicate and understand each other. That should be the question we're asking, right?

You know, how can we put it to positive rather than negative uses? Well, free speech is not just being able to express yourself now. Now it's being able to express yourself through these private companies, which is very strange. So now the arbiter of free speech is YouTube and Facebook and Twitter. And it's like, wow, like those are the town squares of our world now. Yeah. And, you know, when I discuss the free speech question with my students, I often say, look, anyone in this room is free to make a case for any kind of speech restriction they'd like, provided that they tell me who's going to do the restricting. Yes.

All right. And often it comes down to Jack Dorsey. Well, it's not really Jack. It's really the other people that work with Jack. Yes, right. His company. In defense of Jack, though, he honestly wants Twitter to be wild. Absolutely. He's even proposed a separate Twitter that is completely uncensored or you can have the moderated Twitter. No, I think that, you know, in his public statements, I think he's been admirably ambivalent about this. You know, I mean, I like him a lot.

I really do. Right. And I think he before Trump got cut off, which I didn't agree with, I think Dorsey generally had the right idea, which is when we see something posted on Twitter that we think is, you know, wrong or horrible, instead of muzzling it, what we're going to do is we're going to add our two cents. Right. And we're going to put a flag on it saying, by the way, we think this is bullshit. And here's why. And look, that's a form of free speech as well. Right. Using your free speech to criticize speech that you think is abhorrent is an act of free speech. And I think that seemed to me to be Dorsey's impulse, rather than muzzling people, adding a voice that tries to inform people about what they've seen. Do you think that it's also a function of there's a limited amount of time when you're running an election, right? So like you only time when you're running an election right so like

you only have a few months when elections rolling around and there's this person who is like getting all these people riled up and saying a bunch of crazy shit that may not be true and they have a choice to make like you can let it play out its natural course like the the logical and informed response to bad speech is always better speech like like how do you deal with bad speech you you combat it with debate and more articulate more well thought-out more sensible speech that's supposed to be so that if a person is on the sidelines and objectively looking at the two arguments, they look at that one and go, well, that makes more sense. This guy is trying to rile people up, but he's incorrect, and this

is why. But you only have three months. Correct. And there's a natural time that these things take to play out before you figure out what's bullshit and what's not. Right. And also the other thing I'd add, though, is although I agree with the dynamic you just described, in order to pull that off, you need a certain sort of education. Yes. Right? And that's why I think, I mean, you know, one of the things I study is education. And I think that's absolutely a critical part of this discussion, right? To reason and deliberate in the way you were just describing, that's not a natural act either.

We don't kind of the womb doing that, right? We need institutions to teach us how to do that, and they've not done a very good job of it. Yeah, and teaching people how to think about things and how to look at things and analyze things in an objective manner. What's going on? Sorry, is he leaning back? Is that the issue? Not enough volume. Teaching people how to think is not necessarily critical thinking skills.

It's not really highlighted in school, especially in high school. It's not something that you really spend a lot of time. Well, unfortunately, I mean, we give rhetorical obeisance to it, but we don't do it nearly enough. And when you interview kids about their high school experience and you ask them, you know, did you really engage in dialogue about substantive questions where there was real debate? Generally, they say no. Yeah. And the problem with debate is oftentimes you're just trying to win, right? Right. Sometimes people are just very theatrical and very loud and dynamic, or they'll touch upon certain things that they think, whether or not it's valid to the conversation, they'll add those things to it because there's

certain social clout to those subjects. Definitely. Look, the hardest thing to do as a young person is to figure out what you really think. Right. Right? Not what the people around you are saying, your peers or your parents or your teachers, what you really think. And the problem is we haven't actually created educational institutions that help people do that.

You know? I mean, what they do is they encourage people to mouth things they've heard from others rather than to come up with like, okay, what do I actually think about this? Right. It also sounds good if you can mouth things that other people have said really well and you can kind of put it in your own words. Sure. It sounds smart.

And also, I mean, you know, remember if you're in high school, you're an adolescent. And adolescents, like we know from developmental psychology, they're very attuned to other adolescents, right? I mean, that's what it's about. You know, it's who's cool, who's cute, who's going out with whom, you know? And so I think there's almost a developmental reason that you would try to sort of tailor your opinions to the people around you. But that's not good for you, and it's definitely not good for our democracy. I mean, one way of thinking about all this social media stuff is we're all teenagers now And we're all doing precisely that trying to figure out who's cool

And who isn't right and you're trying to get on the right side and as you were saying to mouth the right things Yeah, and be in with the cool kids correct want to be at the cool table in the cafeteria Whoever they are right you know and yeah, that's it's not good for you No, or our not. Or our democracy, more to the point. I was really lucky when I was young, and we were talking about this earlier when you asked about my accent, that I moved around a lot. And I think that was really good. It sucked at the time because I moved to San Francisco when I was seven from New Jersey to San Francisco, and then Florida when I was 11,

and then when I was 13, we moved to Boston. It was a lot of moving. And because of that, I didn't develop this core group of friends that I grew up with. It was a little chaotic, but it forced me to formulate my own opinions about things. You know, I had a very similar upbringing in different places. I actually grew up overseas because my parents were in the Peace Corps, as I was subsequently.

And so as an elementary schooler, I lived in India and Iran. And then I lived in New York and in Washington. But like yourself, I mean, for me, except for meeting my wife, that was the formative experience of my life, I would say, living in all those different environments as a really little kid. Because also, when you're little, you don't know how weird the shit you're doing is, you know, it's just because you just do it. It's so like in Bangalore, India, my parents sent me to a girls school, which took a couple boys in the younger grades, because it was the Angola school that was near where we lived. And it was actually a fabulous experience,

you know, to be, you know, like one of a couple boys in a whole room full of girls. But nobody told me that that was just bizarre. I just did it. Right. You and that other boy must have been like, what are we doing here, man? Yeah, no. But it's funny, Joe, I don't even remember doing that.

It's just like when you're young, you just do what's there. Right. Yeah. And, you know, I lived in Iran in the late 60s when, you know, Tehran was this hugely cosmopolitan place. I mean, completely different than it is now, right? Totally different, you know. What is that like to have those memories and to see what it's like now where they're, I mean, they just executed an Olympic wrestler for engaging in a political protest. No, it's incredibly depressing. And in some ways, Iran was really an unlikely place for the Islamic revolution. You know, I mean, Iran is a really, it's a pluralist place. I mean, it's a crossroads and it has been for 10,000 years. And it's interesting you mentioned Iran, because, you know, when the Pew does these like pro and anti-American surveys where they take like a sample of people in different countries and say, what do you think of America?

Except for Israel, the Iranians like us more than any country in the Middle East. Yeah, I've heard that. And you would never get that from the saber rattling that you see in the newspapers. What do you think that is? Well, I think it's because the history of the country is so pluralist. You know, I mean, Iran, everyone conquered it, right? It's a huge mismatch of ethnicities and historically of religions. You know, it obviously had big Jewish populations, Baha'i populations.

Obviously, most of those people have been exiled, right? But that's very recent history. And let's also remember it's a country of about 80 million people and over half of them were born well after Khomeini. So all they know is this corrupt regime that's governed them and they don't like it. There's a huge amount of dissent in Iran. It's just that I think, I mean this is a whole other wrap, but I think the United States and the rest of the world haven't really figured out how to really harness that dissent. You know, I think, you know, people pick up the newspaper and they imagine Iran is this place of kind of like Islamists as ditto heads. And it is not that, not by any measure. Wow.

That's got to be so strange to have grown up there and see this gigantic shift and have these memories of what it was like previously. Yeah. When it was this sort of cosmopolitan center. It was. People from all over the world. I went to an international school and I had friends from Hong Kong and South Africa and England. But also we can't romanticize it. I mean, it was a dictatorship. And, you know, in some ways,

I think my concerns about free speech in some ways stem from that experience as well, because I can remember my parents on the, you know, when they would talk on the phone, they would often sort of say jokingly, hey, you know, we better not go there. We don't know who's listening. Yeah, well, that's everywhere now, though.

For different reasons, right? Yeah, NSA. Hi, NSA. Well, this is a podcast, so they're definitely listening to this. That's right. But your phone. That's right. You know, when Edward Snowden had to leave the country and Glenn Greenwald,

they published that story about the NSA's, all the, you know, the shit that he leaked where there was this widespread surveillance on the American public. That's really disturbing. It is disturbing. And again, the difference is thanks to democracy and free speech, you and I can critique that. We may not be able to control it. We may not be able to end it. It's a complicated question, but nobody's going to come in the night for my family or for yours because we're criticizing

the NSA. Yeah. We can critique it, but it still exists. Yes, it does. It's very strange. It's like, hey, you can't do that. You shouldn't have done that. Oh, you're still doing it? Oh, are they still doing it? They are still doing it. Okay. Well, what do we do about that? Well, they're not doing anything with it. Well, right now they're not doing anything with it. Jesus Christ, this is crazy.

Well, I forget which comedian made a joke out of this. It all started during Obama, some of the leaks about this. And, you know, I forget who it was, but a comedian said, well, look, you know, I mean, Americans said that they wanted a president that listens to everyone. Here you go. That's funny. That's whoever you are. Yeah.

But that is, in a sense, it's encouraging self-censorship. And that's one of the things about privacy that makes privacy so critical is because if you cannot express yourself without fear of other people listening, then there is a component of self-censorship, which is critical in North Koreans, the regime's way of keeping people in line is they have a form of self-censorship. Correct. They have everybody tattle on everybody. Right, right, right. And look, we have forms of that in this country too, and you've got to be really careful when you talk about it because it's not North Korea. Right. Right?

Of course. But on college campuses, like the ones that I work at, there are forms of self-censorship. They're not enforced by bad guys with sunglasses and baseball bats, right? It's part of the culture, unfortunately. But, you know, there's now a big survey literature about it that's very upsetting. So, you know, both students and faculty, you ask them, are you saying what you think? And large numbers of them say no. And that includes Democrats and Republicans, men and women, students and faculty. And so it's not North Korea. It never has been, never will be. But those of us who care about free speech should be really upset about it nevertheless. Well, there's certainly rigid ideologies on college campuses, but do they

get specific about saying what they really mean or think? Like, what is it? What are the key subjects? Well, look, I'll give you an example. And this came up in another book that I wrote. There was a survey done of full-time faculty about 10 years ago. And the question was, do you agree with the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions? And it turned out that 40% of the respondents said no. Now, for the sake of transparency, I should tell you that I'm in the 60%. I think affirmative action has been a net gain for the university. It's a complicated question, but I think it's been a net win.

Nevertheless, I was upset by the 40% figure. Not that there were people that disagreed with me. I was upset that I hadn't heard from them, right? They are biting their tongues, and that can't be good. It can't be good for affirmative action, right? Which could only benefit from people really... Affirmative action is a complicated question, right? And it cuts to a lot of different, really, really complex questions. And if we're biting our tongues about it, we won't get to good answers. And so obviously, the people that oppose affirmative action are

afraid to do so publicly because they don't want to incur the social costs. And that's not good. Yeah, that's unfortunate. And that is a part of what happens today is the pile on when someone says something that is not on the list of things you're supposed to think or say. And you can get piled on. Yeah. And then there's guilt by association. Right? And it goes like this, right? You know, David Duke is an imperial wizard of the KKK. David Duke obviously opposes affirmative action.

You oppose affirmative action. Ergo, you're David Duke. And of course, there is no ergo, right? I mean, this is like a fallacy that a third grader could see through, but it's all around us. Yeah, that's a real problem with today, guilt by association. Yeah, there's so many complicated questions that you oftentimes feel like you have the answer to, or you have your opinion on it, and then you'll hear a very nuanced perspective from someone who takes a different stance. And if you're open-minded, you go, oh, maybe I haven't considered that point of view. And that's one of the real reasons why it's important that you have free speech and you have debate because you don't want to get pigeonholed into an idea that maybe somewhere down the line you might find foolish, but you weren't allowed to be exposed to some

really good arguments to the contrary. Right. And, you know, I think at the end of the day, for me, this is really a question about learning. I mean, I'm a teacher. That's my vocation. Right. How do we learn from each other? And I think that the way we learn from each other is when we're examining as many different sides of a question as we possibly can. Right. That's how you learn. Like how many people learn from someone that they agree with? I don't really remember the last time I did. It's like, oh, Trump, yeah, I hate him too. Right? And I do loathe Trump. But I don't learn from somebody that loathes Trump because I already loathe him. Some people have some good loathing points, though. They do.

You never know, man. No, there are different ways to loathe Trump. You might find out some facts that you weren't aware of about like construction dealings. No, there's plenty to loathe and there are always new things to learn. But I think just the larger point for me is that I think I'm more likely to learn from a conversation with somebody who actually likes Trump precisely because I don't. Right. because I don't. Right. Yeah, it's just hard to find rational, intelligent people

that are open-minded, that oppose each other, that will sit down and have a conversation where they're not trying to browbeat each other or bully each other into submission. They're not trying to win the conversation, but they're honestly going, okay, so why do you feel like that? What is it about this that gets you excited? What is it about this that gets you excited?

What is it about this that makes you upset? Okay. Well, I looked at it this way. And then I go, huh, well, I don't think that's right because of this. Then you go, oh, okay. Trying to learn. If you can do that open-mindedly with people that you have opposing viewpoints, I've gotten better at that. viewpoints. I've gotten better at that. That's one of the things that I've really gone out of my way to try to listen to people and try to look at things from their perspective, even if I don't

agree with it. Try to just find where they're connecting the dots. Like, how are you doing this? Okay, let me see how you do it. And sometimes it's interesting. Sometimes you can see the logical fallacies that they've fallen into and you go, oh, look at that. They fucking slipped right on there. Look, I think that's a great ambition, but I think that that's the exception because I think most of our media environment promotes the opposite, right? I mean, you know, just think of what a news feed is, right? A news feed is the events of the day curated according to your search history and your biases. And what an awful image, like time for your 2 o'clock feed, right, of all the stuff that we have curated in order to reinforce your biases.

That's what it is. There is that. That's what it is. There is that. That's where we live. But quite honestly, my news feed is pretty innocuous. My news feed is all like new cars that are coming out and this jujitsu match has been postponed. Yeah, it's not all politics, right? Mine is not politics.

I don't care um when i'm looking at when i'm looking at things that are interesting to me i am only looking at things that find that i'm looking for distractions and things that are my hobbies like i'll my news feed has professional billiards on it so i'll get like snooker scores or snooker from the uk and i you know when something like deep and meaningful, if I'm looking for something, if I'm researching something, then I go look for that. You know, I don't like that stuff in my newsfeed because I don't want, I figured out like a year or two ago, like I'm tired of getting freaked out.

I don't want to just pick up like, Jesus, what is he doing now? I don't want to do that every time I pick up my phone. What's happening? What is it? North Korea? Shit. I don't want to do that. It's exhausting. It's exhausting. And I don't think it benefits me, but I do like to be informed. So I subscribe to Washington Post and I subscribe to Wall Street Journal and New York Times and I'll go there and I'll go on purpose to read. Right. And to read different sources. I mean, I think that's

what we have an educated people to do. And that's what our broader media environment discourages. I'm having a hard time finding a good Republican, a right-wing perspective that's a news source, though. Do you know one? I mean, it's hard. Look, I mean, you know, you mentioned The Wall Street Journal. They're fiscally, yeah, but they're a little social justice-y with some of their op-eds. Yeah, I mean, I think that there's a big difference between the news side of that paper and the opinion page. Yeah. But, you know, I think The Wall Street Journal is a really good source, you know. And what I do in the evenings is I just toggle

between Fox and MSNBC because I know that if I were to watch- Are you schizophrenic? Yeah. Well, my wife thinks so. I mean, the reason though is if I watch MSNBC, I'll just see my worldview confirmed. Do you ever read Matt Taibbi's Substack? Yeah. Did you read Rachel Maddow as Bill O'Reilly? No, I read about it. I haven't read it yet. It's sub stack? Yeah. Did you read Rachel Maddow as Bill Riley? No, I read about it.

I haven't read it yet. It's fucking great. He made that same point in, what's it called? Hate Speech? Is that his book? Hate Inc. Hate Inc is a book that he released last year that's phenomenal. I'm just a giant fan of Matt Taibbi. I think he's one of the most important journalists today because he's so honest and so open-minded and he's so well-informed. When he goes off on a subject, he has put in the work. When he went off on savings and loan crisis or when he went on the subprime mortgage business, he actually interviewed him on the podcast about it. He had to learn all that shit. He's a journalist.

He's not a finance guy. And so he had to really understand what kind of fuckery these people were involved with and then put it in his beautiful prose so that it's like it dances on the page as you get informed about this fucking criminal behavior that led to this gigantic financial crash that we endured. And yet at the same time, I mean look,

I think it's great that Substack exists and it's great that a fellow like that is on it. But the fact that he's on it and that he's not writing for one of our major media companies, that says something troubling about this configuration. I think he still writes for Rolling Stone. I guess he does. Yeah. He's still a Rolling Stone contributor. But yes, it's, listen, and this is, I've said this when people say, oh, I can't believe they wrote that about you. That's not true. Clickbait is what you have to do today if you want to stay alive. I don't hate the player.

It's the game. The game is, look, no one's buying physical newspapers anymore. So with the absence of sales of physical newspapers, it's all about clicks. Now, if you tell the truth completely in the title, you're going to lose a lot of your business. You have to kind of distort things. Well, I should tell you, I read two print newspapers at the first thing every morning. Good for you. I'm like the last American to do that. Good for you.

In fact, The Onion ran a great headline a couple of years ago that said, I believe it was, last print subscriber to Boston Globe dies. I used to deliver the Boston Globe. There you go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I used to deliver the Boston Globe, Boston Herald, and the New York Times. That was my job when I was a young man. I was a paper boy as well. Were you? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Washington Post. It's a good job for discipline. Gets you up in the morning. Taught me a lot. Yeah. And now, I mean, well, there are a whole bunch of reasons for this, but most of the circulation is done by adults in cars.

That's what I did. Oh, you did? Yeah. Oh, I had hundreds of houses that I would go to. I could make a good living. Like, not really, but I could make enough money in a couple hours a day where I didn't really have to have another job. Right. I did the same thing in high school.

You know, my friends worked at, you know, sporting goods stores and grocery stores. And I got up and delivered the paper and I made more money than they did. Yeah. You just have to have the ability to get up seven days a week early in the morning. It's a grind. But in the absence of print, of print journalism where you could just go and buy a paper copy, they lose out so much money. Because it used to be, you know, there was the machines, you put the money in, you pull

a paper out. And remember there's an honor system? Yeah. You open the box and you get all these papers. And you're only supposed to take one. Do you remember those days? That was an interesting time. That would never happen today, where you could put a quarter in and you

open that sucker and you're supposed to take one paper. But see, there are other virtues of it, I think, that we tend to underappreciate. And the reason that I read in print is there's a lot of evidence that you retain more that way than you do on a screen. Why is that? Well, it depends on whom you ask, but the people that study eye tracking say that for whatever reason, when you're reading print, your eye goes all the way across on each line. And on screens, it's less likely to do that. You can't make this up. They call it the F pattern. When the eye trackers look at what you do on a screen, the first line you go all the way across.

But then the next one, as in an F, it's a little shorter. And when you give people the same text, you know, in print and on a screen, they just retain more in print. And I tell my students this. I say, when you can print something out, I know you can't always because you will hold on to more. I have a Kindle that has that paper screen. How's that? Is that the same? I don't know. I have a Kindle that has that paper screen. How's that? Is that the same as – I don't know.

I don't know. Because it looks like paper. And look, you know, I think that obviously things are changing so rapidly, right? It may well be that future generations are socialized in a different way and, you know, their eyes do different things. Have you heard of – there's a new product. I've not tried it, but I've seen advertising for it. It's called Remarkable.

Oh, I read about it. It's a tablet, but when you write on it, you write it in handwriting and it can either save it in your handwriting or it puts it into print and it looks like paper as you're writing on it, but you can have a gigabyte of information on this little tablet. So like thousands of pages. You can write books on that. Yeah. With just this end of the pencil apparently has a tactile feel.

Do you know anything about it? Yeah. You ever use it? I have one. Did you show it to me? No, just briefly, like a month ago. A month ago? I got it like a while ago.

But you didn't have it set up. Yeah, I just haven't used it. I haven't done anything with it. But that's what I'm saying. You didn't have it set up where I saw you use it. Yeah, I don't use it. Yeah, I just showed it to you. Did you show it to me in the box?

Yeah, I just pulled it out. I was like, here, check out the... You knew what it was. I was like, yeah, it's remarkable. Why do I not remember that? I don't know, because it was like five minutes. My hard drive is so full. My brain hard drive is something

that's not that important. Like delete. Get it out of there. But I don't use it that much at all. It's just kind of sitting there like my other iPad that I don't use. I thought about it as a tool for writing jokes. It might be helpful for that. Yeah. Because I think there's an app for your phone as well. Right? But it's just writing. There's

no other apps. It does connect to the internet but it's just so you can share stuff, I think. Yeah. But, you know, all these things, I think, we're so close to these revolutions, it's hard to imagine what they're going to do to the way that we think. Yeah. You know, there was – think about something like multitasking, right? So there was a guy at Stanford named Clifford Nass who died a year or so ago. He was quite young, unfortunately.

And Clifford Nass was the guru of multitasking. And what he demonstrated is that multitasking is a hoax and that multitaskers have everyone snookered, including themselves. So they're not liars. They honestly believe that they can do three or four things at the same time with equal efficiency. It's just they can't. They believe it. And so much in the media environment is encouraging us both to multitask and also to believe in multitasking, right? As an article of faith, it just turns out to be untrue. And he did it every which way with like different sorts of sporting endeavors and card games and all kinds of different things. He said, you know, do these three things separately and do them together, right? And if you do them one by one, you do them so much better.

And this is another message I'm constantly giving to my students. Like, don't believe the multitasking hype. It is a hype. It is not true. You know, turn off everything else and work on one thing and then finish it and then go to the next. And it's hard, right? Because it's hard. That's why it's such a flex when you see a chess master play 10 people at the same time and walk around and like, mm-hmm, fuck you. Not today. Yeah. Well, there are exceptions to every rule, right? Those people can multitask. Yes. But are they even multitasking? Because it's still the same endeavor. Correct. The same game. Yeah, they're playing one game.

Yeah, I think there's some real truth to that because I think most people that I know that multitask, they do several things, but I don't think they do them quite as good as if they were only doing that one thing. Correct. Correct. The interesting thing is they actually believe that they do. And I think that was NASA's point. I mean, that's why it keeps going, right? Is that we haven't gotten the message. Yeah. That's not a good perspective. Like when you think you're doing something at your best and you're not like... Look, we're all great self-saboteurs, you know, and we're all great. We're not good judges of ourselves. We're biased. Right. Right. All of us are. Why is that? Yeah. Well, you know, and we're all great. We're not good judges of ourselves. We're biased. Right. Right. All of us are. Why is that? Yeah. Well, you know, Freud said that we're all narcissists at some level, right? And, you know,

you want to be the winner, right? You want to be the person who, you know, beats the team at the buzzer and gets the girl and all these other things. And so that makes us incredibly biased judges of ourselves. Yeah. You know, and we all radically inflate our abilities and our capacities. But what about people that are very self-deprecating and are objective? Do you think even those people are full of shit? I wouldn't go that far, you know, but they might think they're even more self-deprecating than they are, right? Or better at self-deprecation than the next guy. And we're just, we're not good judges of

that. Yeah. Yeah. That's very unfortunate. And there's probably some exercises to make you more objective. Yeah. Getting married has been a good one for me. Oh, there you go. Got someone around you's like no you don't fuck out yeah yeah yeah i think um it's it's a difficult thing for people to do to face themselves and to face like what they do good and what they do bad and one when one way i've found is to engage in things that don't leave any room for fuckery right like martial arts is one of them another one is one of the reasons why I like pool is the balls don't care about your personality they don't care about any

they don't care like either make the ball or you do not make the ball like you either can win or you lose like it's really simple in that in that regard there's no but but it's also very complex. It's like you either execute correctly or you don't. And so if you do things like that, like martial arts in particular is a very humbling thing. And I think it's really good in that way that most of the people that I know that are martial artists that are at an elevated state, they're really good. They're really friendly people. They're humble in a lot of ways. And one of the reasons why is because they're humbled good they're really friendly people they're humble in a lot of ways and one of the reasons why is because they're humbled all the time yeah because your ass is getting kicked

all yeah if you know the three of us were all black belts and we were uh training together we'd all be cranking each other's neck every day like you'd be tapping me every day and jamie'd be tapping me and after a while you're like that's not gonna happen you just get used to it you just accept the fact that someone got you and you don't. Right. But when you see people that have never lost, I have a friend and we had this conversation and one of the things that we were talking about was the regret of him not doing sports when he was younger.

Because he never learned how to lose. He never learned how to take a loss and just not have it emotionally devastate him. So to this day, like even if he's playing a card game, it'll freak him out if he loses. Like he won't say anything, but it'll really bother the shit out of him. And some people, they don't have a lot of experience in testing themselves. So they don't have a lot of experience in testing themselves. So they don't have a lot of faith in their own character and judgment under pressure. That's unfortunate. But it's interesting, Joe, that you prefaced all this with something about kind of what you're good and what you're bad at.

Because the other thing I think that psychology has taught us is that actually that's a very bad way to think of yourself. How so? That is, the more you think about whether you're good at something or not, it turns out that generally the worse you do it at that. At the thing? That's right. The best thing to do is not to think about it. Right. Because it turns out that when the brain starts to think about what's good and what's bad,

it thinks of those in rather static terms. So like I'm good at math or I'm not. But maybe that's in the action of the thing. Yeah. But maybe not in reflection of the thing. Right. Right. And it can be both. But, you know, in general, the best thing, you know, when a student asks me, like, do you think I'm smart or do you think I'm good at history? I always say, I don't know and I don't care. All I care about is what you've written. That's it. The work.

Exactly. This is not like an existential judgment of your soul. And by the way, the more you think about that, the worse you're going to do. So don't do it. Don't do it. Because it makes you think in somewhat static terms. And I remember when my kids were growing up, like you would often hear, oh, so-and-so is good at this and so-and-so is good at that. So-and-so is bad at this. So-and-so is bad at that. And they also, they tend to be self-fulfilling prophecies, right? You know, and that's not good for anyone either. So just don't think about it. Just do it. Yeah. Right. Don't think about whether you're, quote, good at it.

Just do it. Just do it. Yeah. But also recognize what parts of whatever you're doing that maybe you need to improve upon. Absolutely. Right. And, you know, I think you can more easily do that if you're not thinking in these binary good and bad terms. Right. Because you think you're bad at it. Like, why would you improve at it? Right. You're bad at it. Right. Yeah. Well, maybe you want to get better at it. Maybe. Right. But that involves a belief that I think transcends this idea that people are good and bad at things. But people do develop proficiency at things. No doubt. There's some benefit in giving yourself like a little reward or letting yourself be aware that you've achieved some level of proficiency. So there's a benefit to all this

discipline. Without a doubt, without a doubt. And we've all experienced that, right? But I think the key, at least for me, is experiencing the action, right? You know, experiencing whatever it is, you're a great billiards game, you know, and you're finally able to hit that incredibly complex shot that you couldn't hit before. Instead of, wow, I'm a great billiards player, or I'm not. I hit that shot. Right. Yeah. So just be more in tune with the action of doing it than your own judgment of your abilities.

Exactly, which is not useful. Right. Yeah, that's a good point. It's very zen, right? Yeah. That's what Zen, right? Yeah. That's what you're supposed to be. They actually discuss that in Zen of the Art of Archery. Yep.

There's some, I believe that's in Zen of the Art of Archery, this thought about not concentrating on the result. Yeah. But just like... Just do it. Go through the process. Yeah. Understand the process.

Concentrate on the process. Yeah. Yeah the process. Concentrate on the process. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing with martial arts. You don't think while you're doing it that, oh, I'm really good at this. You just think. You don't have time for one.

Exactly. You have to just do it. Right. Right. So I'm curious, Joe, since you were describing kind of all these moves growing up, how would you say, if somebody were to ask you, what have been the most important changes in the way you see the world since you were a younger person, either the political world, the social world, the environment, whatever it is? Like what would you, if you think, if you compare yourself to your younger self, what would you say have been the most important changes in how you think and how you see the world? I think the single biggest change that I can remember, single biggest shift that I ever had was having children. Because then I started thinking about

everyone as grown up babies. I used to think of people as being in a static state. Like if I met a guy and he was a 40 year old guy, I'd be like, oh, there's Mike. He's 40. And then now I go, oh, Mike used to be a baby. Right. And then all the weird shit that happened to Mike in his life and the pros and cons and the failures and successes and the lies and truths, and here he is. That's what made Mike.

Yes. That's what made Mike. I have a lot more sympathy and empathy for people because of that. Because a lot of the people that I see now that are, you know, assholes, if I met an asshole before, I'd be like, that guy's just an asshole. And now I go, oh, you know, that's a baby that, like, came out a bad product. Like, what went wrong? Well, you think like a historian. I mean, I'm a historian. And, you know, when my kids were younger, they would always get annoyed with me.

And they would say, like, Dad, when you meet somebody, why do you always say, where are you from? Like, that's so annoying. And the answer is, I'm a historian. That's what interests me is, you know, what are the communities and what are the experiences that made you who you are? And those things matter. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a lot. It's everything. You know, we are the culmination of our life's experiences and how we've absorbed them along with our genetics, along with our environment. And environment is a critical factor because it's not just the environment in terms of like the city you live in, but the people that you hang around with. Oh, yeah.

And the fact that you made all those moves and what that involved were different sets of people in different environments. That helped a lot. Hugely important. Well, I went from San Francisco to Florida in the 1970s. And that was a big one because in San Francisco, we lived right near Lombard Street. It was like the heart of the hippie movement. It was all hippies everywhere. Our next door neighbors were this gay couple that used to smoke pot and play the bongos with my aunt. They would all get naked and go next door and play the bongos and smoke pot with this couple.

It was just a different way to live. It was just normal. To be around all these hippies and these long-haired guys. It was a strange place. It was a different place in the 1970s. And then moving to Florida, it was a total different environment. Now I remember my friend who's a Cuban kid,

and his dad was upset that gay people were getting the right to get married. So he had a newspaper. He was like, God damn it. He was like, threw the newspaper down on the table. He was real upset. And I remember being 11 going, how fucking dumb is this guy? He cares for the gay people to get married? Like, why do you care?

What a weird thing to be upset by. But I remember thinking that when I was 11. Like, why do you care? Like, that is, what a weird thing to be upset by. Right. But I remember thinking that when I was 11. Like, wow, Florida's fucking different. Right. It didn't make any sense to me. Right. But, you know, I would argue that you learned a lot from that.

Yes. That you wouldn't have learned if you would have stayed on Lombard Street. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. If you live in that environment, you don't know. How other people are. Yeah. You really don't know. It's just, it's so different

yeah it's like i i remember i was 11 also i went to school and then i came home and i asked my mom what the n-word meant and she she goes you know what it means i go no i don't know what it means that's why i'm asking you what does it mean she had explained to me i was like really wow like i never heard it before wow yeah and do you remember how she explained it like what her answer was my mom had me when she was very young So she was a little dismissive. She was a little like aren't you grown up yet? So in a lot of ways it's good because it forced me to like figure shit out for myself But yeah, like I remember when I was in a car with my sister I was about seven years old and I was asking my mom how babies were made

She's like, you mom how babies were made. She's like, you know how babies are made. That was what my mom always used to say. You know. I go, no, I don't. She goes, I'm going to tell you, and you're going to laugh. I'm like, no, I'm not. And so she goes, okay.

A man puts his penis in a woman's vagina. Bah! I thought it was the funniest thing. And she wouldn't leave me the fuck alone. She was like, you knew it. And you were trying to say it so that you would laugh. No, I didn't know. You told me. Now I know.

I didn't know. I was seven. And do you remember how she explained the N-word? She said it was a derogatory term for black people. I was like, wow. I remember thinking, whoa. So I didn't know what it was. Because I was like, wow. I remember thinking, whoa. So I didn't know what it was. Because I was 11.

I guess in San Francisco I hadn't heard it. That's the only thing I could think of. Because where we lived in San Francisco was very diverse. It was like the kids in my class, it was, I don't know, like 60, 40, white and black. And a lot of Asian, too. Not even white, black. It was like, yeah, I mean, I'm just making up numbers. I was, it's hard to remember, but I remember there's a lot of different ethnicities in my environment and we all hung out together on the playground,

hung out together. It was normal. Right. It was, uh, it was a really open-minded place man in the 1970s san francisco so open-minded everybody smoked pot everybody hated the war and i remember when the vietnam war ended i was living in san francisco and i remember really clearly because i was a little kid i was scared of the war i was really scared uh because my stepfather had they uh you know he had not got drafted he had gotten out of it you know they do the lottery and he didn't get picked so he was very fortunate that he didn't get picked but he was really scared of it because he was of age at the time and I remember though the war ended and I remember thinking that's great they finally figured out that war is bad and now we'll never we're never going to do war again. That's really what I thought. So I was a little kid. I remember thinking that. I was born at a good time where they figured out no more war. And then Desert Storm happened when I was like 21. And I remember thinking, these fucking dummies. I thought we figured this out. I thought we're not going to war anymore. What is this shit?

Did your biological dad serve in the war in vietnam no my my biological dad i don't know him oh okay yeah i haven't spoken to him since i was like seven years old wow yeah so do does he know that you're joe rogan his name's joe rogan too. Isn't that funny? Wow. Yeah. So he must. He must. Yeah. Right. For sure. But you don't know? No.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. Wow. And do we know if he has another family? Yeah, he does. He does. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Wow. And you're not – you don't want to know what he thinks about Joe Rogan? You know what, man? Having kids, I could not imagine not talking to my children. I can't imagine it. I couldn't imagine it. So someone not talking to me, I'm like, okay. You know, I don't hate them.

Good luck. Yeah. Enjoy your life. But my stepdad was a really good guy, and it taught me a lot about my relationship with my kids. Like, you know, I know what it feels like to have a biological parent out there, and they don't contact you. Right. They don't reach out to you. They never find you and they don't contact you. Right. They don't reach out to you. They never find you. They never, they don't seek you out.

They don't. And you grow up like that going, maybe he'll call me one day. Right. And then never do. Maybe he'll try to find me. Never do. It's bad, but it's good.

What's good about it? What's good is it, it makes me understand as a father how important the bond between parents and the children are. It means a lot. It means a lot to me. without being under the pressure of achieving an image that a father wanted me to live up to or that someone else's perspective of who I should be or how I should behave or how I should think about the world. Oh, that's interesting.

And I was allowed to think about the world through my own experiences. But didn't your stepdad play that role in some ways? He did in some ways, yeah. Yeah. He did. It's different. Yes. It's different. Yes. It's always going to be different, stepdads and kids.

It's always going to be, especially if they don't have biological kids of their own, because it's a confusing process that happens to you. Do you have children? I do, yeah. You know what it's like. They're adults. So it's a confusing process that happens to you when you have children, when they're babies, and then you see them grow up, and you're like, like, this is a different, I have a different life.

This life is so different now. It's not just simple as now there's a baby. It's like you're not the same thing anymore. Now you're a father. Yes. And you have to adjust. You have to adjust the way you think and you have to think of the way you communicate with them. You have to think of like you're helping mold their view of the world and you have to communicate by example. You have to, you know, acknowledge mistakes.

You have to, one of the things I always do is whenever I correct my kids with anything, I always say, listen, I did everything you have done wrong. I did all of it. And this is, and I'll tell you what I did. I did. I screwed up everything I've ever done. I'm like, I made mistakes my whole life. I did things and I lied to my parents. I did things and I pretended I didn't. Everything that you've ever done wrong, I've done wrong 10 times as bad. So I'm not judging you.

This is just a part of being a person. I go way out of my way to explain that. So every time something's wrong, every time something happens, I always go, I did all this. It's interesting you use the term mold because back to our earlier discussion, I think both with parenting and being a teacher, and I'm both, I think the other really hard thing is, you know, how do you also cultivate somebody's autonomy and let them be different from you? Yeah, mold's maybe not the best word, right? You know, but you have to do both, right?

Because there are some things you have to indoctrinate. You just do, especially when they're younger. Like we're not going to have a discussion about whether it's appropriate to take your turn or to take a more pregnant example to call somebody the N-word, right? We're not going to debate that, right? We're just going to tell you like this is right or wrong but then things get more complicated right because there's lots of gray in the world as well and they've got to figure that out for themselves yeah you got to leave room for conversations too because sometimes kids just really want to talk to you and try to figure things out with you yes you know and sometimes that helps the most sometimes just

like you got to get them alone too when the two of them are together sometimes it's like hey you gotta get i really love uh taking one kid and going places with them just having conversations i love that too and just letting them complain about school you know my teacher said you know like wow that's crazy and you know you let them you know let them talk about uh it's interesting when kids kids are really tuned into uninspired people when there's an uninspired person telling them what to do or teaching a class like they're really tuned into it and uh there's a real lesson in that because when kids have enthusiastic teachers they love those teachers they want to tell you

about it oh mrs wilson she's the best she's so much fun she gets there we all love her and you know it's like it turns out mrs wilson loves her job right so when you go there yes mrs wilson smiles at everybody and she's like good job and she high-fives kids and right and then everybody's like i love that lady and then there's some people that just want everybody to shut up and they just get mad at you if you didn't do your homework correctly. Yep. And they resent you, right? The Mrs. Wilsons of the world, they don't do that. They understand that you're growing. And people do that in different ways at different rates. And they're going to encourage you along the way. But it's hard to find people like that.

That requires Herculean patience. You have to be a special kind of person to be that kind of a teacher. Yes, absolutely. But I think there's a great benefit in being around bad teachers too. And one of the things I was telling my kids, one of my kids had a really bad teacher last year at their old school. And I said, you know, it sounds terrible, but there's a great lesson to be learned

being around a very miserable person like that. Because you need to be exposed to shitheads. Shitheads are important. This person, this teacher would call kids stupid. You need to be exposed. And I'm like, I know it seems dumb, but you need to be exposed to people like that. You need to know that they're real.

And it'll help you appreciate the Mrs. Wilsons. Well, I guess, I mean, Joe, you were exposed to somebody like that with your dad. Yeah. Right? How old were you when he took off? Well, my parents split up when I was five and my mom and my stepdad and I and my sister moved to San Francisco when I was seven. Okay. So that was the last time I spoke to him. And how old were you when you stopped hoping that you would

talk to him? That's a good question. I don't know. You know I think once I got really into martial arts that's all I thought about. And then I sort of buried him with that in my head. But I didn't really even realize it until I started doing psychedelics and smoking pot, thinking how much of an effect it actually had on me. That's when I really thought about it. And I'm like, wow, that really fucked with me when I was a kid. And I was kind of in denial about it.

Right, right, which isn't always the best way either. No. I mean, that is, that's really, that's a giant problem with poor people that where sons grow up without father figures, they become very angry. You know, that's the angry young man. It's a real, It's a real issue. And we just, there's this sort of unquenchable anger. Like it's hard to put that fire out.

You try to put it out and the cinders are just still there. The embers are still hot. Right. And so was it martial arts that helped you quench the embers? Yeah, 100%. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely.

My parents talk about it to this day. There's two versions of me. There's the version of me where it's this really angry kid, and then the version of me that was really calm. And it was post-martial arts. Wow. Yeah. It's a fantastic vehicle for developing human potential. And for me, it was the right one.

For some people, it's piano, right? For some people, it's, yeah. Yeah. It could be anything. Painting. Yeah, anything. Anything where you pour yourself into it and then you learn, like, you're expressing yourself.

Like, whatever this feeling, this emotion, this energy you have inside of yourself, you express it through your art. Right. And for me me it was i needed something physical too i needed something where i just got my anger out and you know hitting a punching bag and just something there was something right physical about it too but then also the discipline of learning something and you must have had some good teachers for that yes i

got very fortunate very very very fortunate, very fortunate that I ran into an amazing school and amazing teachers. But I think for, for young people learning something and getting good at it is so critical because it teaches you that you used to suck at something, but you got better at it through hard work and dedication and that that is applicable to everything. Right. And back to the earlier discussion, actually, you didn't suck. You just thought you did. Yeah. Right?

Well, it's like— I mean, you know, you had an image of yourself as either incapable or, you know, just— Inadequate. Right. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Right.

And most people do. Yes. You know, most people growing up, in particular, when they're young, they have this, I mean, that's the one thing that young people struggle with, I think, more than anything is insecurity. I think that's also where bullying comes from. That comes from insecurity. I don't think you see very many secure bullies. I'm curious, do your kids do martial arts?

They did for a bit. But, you know, I don't push. I'm not like, I let them beat me up. I still let them kick me and punch me. Like I teach, because if they can hurt me, I'm like, if you can hurt a grown man, like you actually know how to do it right. So I teach them how to leg kick and stuff. But they got into other stuff. They got into other sports.

They're into sports. But, you know, I want them to just, whatever, I don't think there's a path. There's like your path is different than her path. Just go have fun. There is not. Find things. Something I love about teaching college students is that they're old enough to start understanding the world, but they have no idea what their role is going to be in it. And so it's really a magical time.

I think like 19 and 20-year-old human beings are the most interesting people on the planet. Yeah. Because they can see things and they're often very aware of how the world is working. But they have no idea what their role is going to be in it. Right. And so they're much more interesting than you or me or at least than me. Well, they're so – Because, you know, like the game is sort of up for me.

Yeah. Like I've made my choices. I've done the things that I do. And that's kind of it. Yeah. Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah.

There's so much potential, but also so much insecurity. Well, it's scary. Do you remember being a young man and not knowing how it was all going to turn out? Totally. And it is scary. And frankly, it's scarier now. I mean, and I think, you know, look, I went to college in the late 70s, and it was a different world. And I never once remember thinking, gee, am I going to be like a burden on my parents? Am I going to be unable to get a job or sustain myself? Right? Because the United States, I mean,

it had like a hegemonic role in the world that it does not have now. And, you know, like a hegemonic role in the world that it does not have now. And, you know, it was just a time of much more national confidence, I think. And, you know, I have a lot of empathy for people in my daughter's generation and in my students' generation because they don't have that same kind of certitude. You know, so I do remember kind of wondering, but I guess I didn't feel the same sense of pressure or fear. Like I think that because America still ruled the roost, remember kind of wondering, but I guess I didn't feel the same sense of pressure or fear. Like, I think that because America still ruled the roost, it was easier to think, gee, it's going to work out. But weren't you worried about Russia when you were young and in college? Didn't you

worry about the Cold War and all that jazz? You know, yes and no. I mean, you know, everyone read Fail Safe and everyone watched movies about, you know, the Cuban Missile Crisis and Red Dawn and all of that. But let's also remember that I'm not that old. And by the time I get to young adulthood, I'm going to turn 60 shortly. You look great. So do you, Joe. Thank you. Yeah, but coming from you, that's quite a compliment. How old are you? 53. Almost 54. I'll be 54 in a couple months. All right. All right. Yeah, I mean, you know, look, by the time I get to a young adult, I mean, the Soviet Union is starting to implode. I mean,

this is really the twilight of the Cold War, right, is the 1980s, you know. And, you know, when I was a Peace Corps volunteer, I remember listening to Radio Moscow because I was in Nepal and I had a little shortwave radio and only two things came in, Voice of America and Radio Moscow. And Voice of America had its issues and its own brand of propaganda. But just listening, even just the sound values of Radio Moscow, it was so hilariously poor. Like, I just remember thinking, you know, this is not, we're going to win this struggle. It's really not a struggle at all. That's funny. Yeah. We had this distorted perception of the powers of the Soviet Union when I was in high school, where we thought of them as being just like America, but over there, like in terms of their firepower and their financial means.

And that's what Reagan kind of did to them, spent them into a corner. Well, that's part of it. And also, I mean, they just didn't do a good job getting things to people, right? I mean, David Reisman, who was one of my favorite authors ever, I mean, during the height of the Cold War, he wrote this great piece where he said, if we want to win this, all we have to do is just fly planes over Russia and just drop nylon, right?

Because we know the women want nylon pantyhose. You can't get them in Russia. And, you know, again, once they put those on, right, they're not going to stand for it. And I think, you know, a version of that actually happened. Yeah. Well, they realize that communism doesn't provide incentive. And, you know, like it's not fun to stand on line to buy coffee. Right.

I mean, like, you know, it isn't. No. Who wants to do that? Yeah. There was always this fear hanging over our head in high school, though, of a nuclear war. Yeah. No, I do do that. Yeah. There was always this fear hanging over our head in high school, though, of a nuclear war. Yeah, no, I do remember that. And you remember the TV show The Day After, that might have been a little before your time. What is that? Well, it's basically a horrible imagination of a nuclear attack. And there were other novels about that. Alas, Babylon was a

bestseller. And it's just kind of what's going to happen after the big one in Alas Babylon by the way somebody trades a jar of peanut butter for a jaguar and the reason is you can't get any petrol you can't get any oil and the guy's really hungry he's like take my jag you're not going to be able to drive it anyway

and so I do remember that and I also remember the anti-nuclear movements, you know, and, you know, SANE and the other campaigns around that. And, you know, Reagan was an interesting figure because, you know, it's true that we often credit him for winning the Cold War. But obviously that victory was a long time in coming. And Reagan also, in his own way, he trivialized it. You know, he would make jokes about like, when the, you know, the bombing is going to start. You know, he would say, yeah, the bombing is going to start in five seconds. And everyone's supposed to laugh about that, and we didn't. Yeah.

Reagan was famous for that one speech that he made in front of the United Nations where he was talking about how quickly we would come together if we were faced with a threat from an alien world. Yeah. I remember that because I remember all the conspiracy theorists got so jazzed up. They're like, finally, we're going to know the truth. The aliens are coming. That was like crack for them. That's the best. I mean, there is no better distraction for like a giant percentage of the population than to tell them the aliens are coming.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, H.L. Mencken 100 years ago, he had this great quote where he said something like, you know, for every deep social and political problem, there's typically a solution that is simple, attractive, and wrong. And that's what conspiracy theories are, right? They're simple, attractive, and wrong. You know? Many of them are simple, attractive, and wrong. Some of them are surprisingly accurate.

That's what's scary. Right. Many of them are simple, attractive, and wrong. Some of them are surprisingly accurate. That's what's scary. Right. Well, I think, unfortunately, and this is where the history piece comes in, one reason that Americans tend to believe in conspiracy theories is that the government is engaged in conspiracies. Yes. Right? Exactly. I mean, like, you know, if you're trying to put, like, LSD on Fidel Castro's cigar, which the United States did. Yeah.

Right? You know, then it – let's just say there's a crying wolf problem and it becomes easier for people to believe that the government is engaged in perfidious conspiracies after the government is engaged in a perfidious conspiracy. There's a fantastic book called Chaos by Tom O'Neill and it's all about the Manson trials. Have you ever read it? Have you read about it? I have not, yeah. It's amazing.

It's the craziest story because Tom was a neighbor to my friend Greg Fitzsimmons in Venice, and he had been working on this book literally for two decades. What happened was he got hired to write a story for a magazine on the anniversary of the Manson murders. And so he's writing the story, and as he's doing research to write the story, he starts realizing like, holy shit, like there's a lot more to this than I thought. He gets deeper and deeper and deeper into it.

He finds out that the Manson thing was connected to the CIA mind control experiments that they were doing during the 1960s. And Manson had been for sure sheltered along the way, released from prison every time he got arrested for something. And they were all saying, this is above my pay grade. We were told to release him. And that he was involved in these, I forget what prison it was, but they were doing these LSD experiments on prisoners. Yes. I mean, this is one of the most horrible chapters. I mean, speaking of conspiracy theories, I mean, you mentioned hallucinogens earlier. I mean, you know, the federal government was involved in, you know, developing and testing these substances during the Cold War. And it was very much about the Cold

War. It's interesting you mentioned the Soviet Union, because the history there is they first developed them because they thought it was going to be a truth serum. Yes. So you capture somebody from the other side and you feed them this. But then when they did these horrible experiments in jails and psychiatric institutes, they found out it was the opposite. And then they started to tout it as something that we would give our agents. So if you ever captured, you dose and then you would just blabber and say the eels are in my hovercraft. You dose, and then you would just blabber and say, the eels are in my hovercraft.

So, you know, they always had – that's one of the terrible logics about the Cold War is you could shift on a dime, right? And you could basically make the same plea in the inverse way. So, okay, it's not a truth serum, but now it's something that we can just use so when our agents get caught, they won't tell the truth. Well, it was also these agents were given autonomy to run these tests and these studies. And they did some wild shit. And one of them was called Operation Midnight Climax. And Operation Midnight Climax, the CIA ran brothels. And they would watch through two-way mirrors.

And they would dose these johns up and have these poor guys just like tripping on acid and not have any idea what happened and you know they would listen to them talk to the prostitutes it's i mean no it's it's an awful chapter and then you know people made pranks too you know you you might have read that like one day in the 50s somebody spiked the punch at langley like the christmas punch at a cia party and a bunch of agents like checked checked themselves into psychiatric hospitals because nobody told them. It was just like, oh, this is going to be mad. We've got some acid running around. This is going to be zany. Wow.

They had some leftover acid from some other creepy experiments. Well, you've been used to doing that to people. You probably think it's funny to do it to your coworkers. Right. Or you're just a sadist. Well, they had a Haight-Ashbury clinic, a free clinic that they operated, the CIA operated for decades,

and they closed it down just a couple months after this book came out. They're like, okay, time to close up shop, boys, because this book was so detailed, and Tom had spent so much time poring over all of the documents and the data. And he had dotted all his I's and crossed all his T's. And at the end of it, you read the book and you're like, holy shit.

Right. And I think that's where the history piece is really important. You know, I mean, conspiracy theory is a huge problem in our society right now. There's no question about it. But again, like. Conspiracies can occasionally be real. And if you don't want people to believe in them, don't do them. Right?

I mean, you know, don't have secret LSD experiments that go for 20 years. Don't do that. I think they went for 40. Yeah, I know. Maybe even more. When it comes to free speech, what we have now is just we have words that we express and these words convey intent and thought and the way we perceive the world and we each take in the other person's words and the way they're saying them and try to go, okay, I see where you're going with this. One of the things that weirds me out most about the future is all of these sort of symbiotic human electronic things, gadgets that are being proposed, like Neuralink, like Elon Musk's thing, where Elon told me, specifically said, you're going to be able to

talk without using your mouth. But wasn't Joe then in the interview where you shared a blunt with him? No, no, no. Okay. That was two before. Neuralink, I think, was the second interview I did with him or maybe the third. I think it was the third. Not sure. No, I think it was the second.

Was it? I think it was the second. The second. Yeah. But when he said, you're're gonna be able to talk without words uh i meant i was and he was so confident about it's like you're gonna be able to talk without words and if anybody else said that i'd be like sure dude but when elon musk says that you're like fuck we're gonna talk without words like immediately i started thinking well maybe that

would be good. It's going to be a rough transition, but it was probably a rough transition to go from grunts to language. But you don't want to go back to grunts. No, you don't. So maybe this is how we – because biology takes so long to catch up, and electronics are so rapid in the technological innovation. Right. So maybe that's how we bypass all of our monkey genetics. We get someone who's probably a fucking robot to figure out this thing where they cut a hole in your head and put this device in that has all these electrodes into your brain.

And now this monkey's playing Pong with his brain. Do you know about this now? I think I read something about it. Yeah, this monkey's using Neuralink. Yeah, yeah. Well, look, you know, I mean... Look at this. Smart-ass monkey. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I want to play him. I'd be scared. Right, yeah. This monkey's got some skills. Yeah, that looks like one of the early video games. It does. Pong, it looks like pong. I had one of those.

Yeah. Did you have that? Well, no, but when I was in the Peace Corps, my friends and I would play with flashlights on the ceiling because we were in Nepal and we were in a place with no electricity or running water. And we found many ways to amuse ourselves. But one was by inventing a beer pong game, which you did with a flashlight on the ceiling. Oh, wow. Yeah. That had to be bizarre.

People would do that. Being in the Peace Corps in Nepal. Like, how long did you do that for? Two and a half years. Wow. Pull this sucker up a little closer to you. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Is that good? Yeah. I just want to get it—they're very directional to keep the rest of the noise out. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah, no, I was very lucky like so many other things in my life. I was sent to western Nepal to a place that was about a three-day walk from vehicular traffic at the time. And I was the first white person anyone had ever seen. And, you know, some of the kids thought I was a ghost.

They called me boot, which means ghost in Nepali. Wow. And just as a young person, as a young American, to go to a community like that and to really become a part of it. You know, I lived with a family that took me in as one of their own. Oh, wow. And I named one of the babies that was born. Really? What name?

I gave her the name Santi, which was my favorite female Nepali name. It means peace. And I just thought it was so cool that there are people walking around whose name is peace. I mean, that sounds—you probably had friends over on Lombard Street in San Francisco that had that name. That's kind of what it reminded me of. But as part of that ritual, I had to do a number of things, including eat rat meat and drink cow urine. What's worse?

The cow urine for sure. The rat meat tastes like chicken. It's just like the joke, right? You cook meat, any kind of meat, it's mostly going to taste like chicken. Have you ever seen that there's a sacred temple in India where they feed the rats every day and the rats becomes very domesticated. And they drink out of the same water as the rats. I've read about it. It's really wild to watch, man.

Yes. Because instead of thinking of rats as being this vermin pest, like we think of them as here, where everyone like, oh my God, it's a rat. And they step on it and the rats run away from you. In this temple, the rats don't run away from anybody. And these are wild rats. You ever seen it? They've been socialized, yeah. Have you seen it on video?

No, I haven't. You need to watch. See if you can find a video of it because it's very strange. It's really interesting because these people are eating with the rats and they're drinking milk that the rats are drinking. It's really crazy. Look at this. The rats are everywhere with these people.

And these are not pets, you know? Yeah. And so they share the milk with these rats, and they don't worry about diseases. And look at these rats just hang out and chill. It's very strange. See the rat running around? They don't have any fear of people because they're treated really well. And it's confusing straight see the rat running around like they don't have any fear of people because

they're treated really well and it's it's confusing right because it's like okay is that the way to do it like i don't think it's the way to do it but look at what's happening in new york city like new york have you seen the documentary on netflix rats i have not yeah it's amazing it's fascinating and it shows first of, what kind of horrific diseases so many rats carry. Yeah. And I mean, among other things, they brought bubonic plague to different parts of the world. Sure. Yeah. Through mites. Yeah, fleas. The rats that they found, they found them in New York City and Philadelphia. And they show what a complicated society these rats have.

and they show what a complicated society these rats have. Like they have young, dumb rats test things out before the smart, older, clever rats. The smart rats are like, yeah, there's some food over there, kid. Why don't you go try it out? And they go over there and they die, and they're like, aha, poison. Well, I mean, they're intelligent.

That's why they've been featured in so many experiments. Right? I mean, that's why so many lab psychologists work with rats, right? In Nepal, the reason that you ate a rat was the rat was considered the strongest animal. And you weaned kids on it because you want the kid to grow to be strong. Really? Yeah, and so they would often wean kids.

And you just did a tiny little piece. Yeah, yeah. The cow urine, that was the only time I actually took antibiotics prophylactically, which is something you're not supposed to do. But I just decided that, you know, it was my second year. I didn't want to get ill. Cow urine has some weird pseudo medicinal purposes over there. I've read that too, yeah. They're using it for people that are suffering from COVID.

And there was, yeah, there was this like this guy from, I'm trying to remember the country. I don't remember. But he was criticizing like how ridiculous this practice is of giving cow urine to these sick people and how ignorant it was. Well, you know, it's funny you say ignorant because for me, really, what was so important about that experience was just learning how weird I was. And that is, you know, how weird I was to them, you know, and how many different ways there are to be human. Right. And so, you know, I, you know, I participated in marrying off one of our sisters. Right.

Because I'm an older brother. A girl, 16, you know, time to get her married. 16 our sisters, right, because I'm an older brother. Oh, wow. A girl 16, you know, time to get her married. 16. Oh, yeah. How old was the dude? Yeah. Well, you know, people would come by and ask for a hand.

This is what the process was and often bring gifts. And I'm there with the other brothers, and a guy would come and leave, and somebody would say to me, well, what did you think of him? And the first time they asked, I said, boini lai costa laio, which means, what does little sister think? And people just cracked up. And I heard about that for two years. I would walk to other parts of the district and people would say, oh, I heard about you.

You're the guy who asked what boini thinks. And the point was that wasn't relevant to them. That wasn't what the experience was, right? That wasn't a relevant variable. And, you know, I would explain to them that in my country, you actually chose your own spouse. And they would say, well, how do you do that? And I'd say, well, you find somebody that you love. And then they would say, well, then what if you don't love them?

And then I'd say, well, there's this thing called divorce, you know? And what I realized was that the way I thought about how all this should work was just so radically different from theirs and not necessarily better or worse, right? Their system had its own logic and it was static. It was stable, right? If you don't marry for love, right? You're not going to get divorced because you're out of love, right? That wasn't the purpose of it. The purpose was it was social, it was familial, it had to do with joining communities, you know? And again, I didn't grow up there, so that's not what I do or what I would want to do. But what I learned was how many different ways there are to do, you know? How

many different ways there are to be human and always to resist the automatic assumption that your way is the better way, you know, because we all do that, too. And by the way, I did some of that in Nepal. I mean, you know, one of my other really enduring memories is my best student was of the so-called Kami caste, which is metal worker, which is an untouchable. It's way down there, right? It's not as low as a shoemaker. And, you know, they have a cast system, right? And at the bottom, there are people that are called untouchables because you're literally not supposed to touch them or anything. Yes.

I mean, that's how, you know, shoemakers especially because they deal with cows. They deal with leather, right? Oh. And, you leather, right? Oh. And, you know, so— Why is that? Well, because the cow is a sacred animal, right? But you need shoes. Yes, you do, right?

And so the Hindu system evolved to have a caste that did precisely that. Wow. Right? So did you communicate with those people at all? Oh, sure. What was it like? Yeah. They must have felt terrible.

Well, I mean, here's the story. The metalworking family, I actually went down to their house and I had a meal there. And I come back and I tell my ama, that means mother of my family, and we were Chetris, which is way up there. It's not Brahman, which is the highest, and that's the priestly caste. But the Chetris are second. You know, they were historically the military caste. She's like, Babu, that means baby, which is what she called me. Babu, you ate rice at a metal workers house. Do you know how filthy those people are? You know, what were you thinking? And I'm like,

listen, Ama, I just don't believe in caste. You know, I think everyone's the same. And P.S., you know what's going to happen. I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm just incredibly ill. And I just go outside and I'm puking my guts out. Ama can hear me. He comes from the other room and she's like, listen, Babu, you can't say I didn't warn you. You know, I mean, you know. And again, you know, it was really useful for me. It's not like I suddenly believe in the caste system because I don't, right? But I think it's really useful just to have all your assumptions challenged, you know? And that's really what it did for me. And here I was, I'm this American, I'm making this great

statement about how all people are equal. Well, you know what? I mean, 20 years earlier in my own country, they had a caste system, right? That went back to the 1600s. And that was the other formative experience of being in Nepal. That was actually the first place that I started to think about American history. What did you, when they were talking about the arranged marriage, and when you were saying that in your country people get to choose. Yeah. Like, what did you think about, what is their, like, how do they explain it to you in a way where it made sense? Did they attempt to?

Yeah. Or did they just say this is how it's always been? Well, you know, I would say that the things that are most commonsensical to us often we don't have to explain, right, because they're part of our ether. Right. But I think the logic was this, you know, that you have to create families, right? You have to. Yeah, yeah, because you've got to, you know, you have to perpetuate the species. Right. Right. And so, you know, the simplest and the most static way to do that is to have the girls marry guys who can who have enough wherewithal to take care of them.

Right. They can bring you something. Right. Because it's a reciprocal arrangement. Right. right, that can bring you something, right, because it's a reciprocal arrangement, right? And this is why in rural Nepal at the time, people wanted to have boys, not girls. They used to say, which means the son stays and the girl goes. Because, of course, the system was also patrilocal, which means that, you know, you go and live in the house of the guy that you've married, right? So in the house I the guy that you've married. So in the house I live with, the older brothers, they all had wives who lived there. Wow. But when the girls got married, they had to go somewhere else.

How bizarre. Yeah. Well, that, again, and it's ironic because, believe it or not, 20 years later I went back to my village with my older daughter, who was a junior in high school at the time. And the three-day walk had become about a day's walk because they had cut a tractor road kind of up half into the mountains. And the first guy that I ran into, he just said, hey, where you been? Like, I haven't seen you around. They're like, oh, you brought your daughter. Great. Let's drink rice wine. You know, basically, you know, somebody had died and somebody had gotten married and, you know, somebody had a kid.

But the one thing that was really different, and this speaks to globalization, is a lot of the younger men had gone to places like the United Arab Emirates to work, you know. And that was ironic, too, because, you know, the old story was the son stays and the girl goes, right? A lot of the sons had gone, but they had gone outside of the country. And that's the way, you know, so many of these economies work in that part of the world. Did you see if the girl's marriage worked out? Well, again, you know, Joe, it all works out, right? I mean, you know, it works out because it was designed for social reasons,

not for personal ones. You know, it's not about what she thinks or about what he thinks. You know, it's about kind of, you know, bringing together families, creating communities, bringing up kids. It wasn't about sentiment. Although, you know, as I got closer to people in the community, I found out that after a marriage was arranged, often you did develop feelings for the person. Often? Yeah. It's just that those feelings weren't the foundation of it, right? They weren't what spawned it. They were an offshoot of it.

They weren't a cause of it. Did it make you feel uncomfortable that they were doing that? Not in the least. Really? weren't a cause of it. Did it make you feel uncomfortable that they were doing that? Not in the least. Really? And in fact, I mean, that was when I started to read history because, of course, in most parts of the world, including where we are right now, historically marriage was arranged. But I would imagine that, like, if you have this conversation with a feminist, for instance, they would have a real issue with that. Absolutely. And also a real issue with your

acceptance of it, right? Well, again, I'm not saying that I accept it for me. Right, I understand. You know, and because that wasn't my expectation, you know. But, you know, I think it's worth asking ourselves the degree to which we know we're right. Right. And, you know, I think that at the end of the day, we don't. All of us have opinions. All of us have biases. All of us have learned certain things. But Learned Hand, who was, you know, a famous jurist and federal court judge, one of the things he said that's always stuck with me is that the spirit of liberty, which is really what we're talking about, But the spirit of liberty, which is really what we're talking about, is the spirit that is not so sure of itself.

And I've always loved that. Right. So I'm a human being. I have biases, opinions, very strong ones. But I think that the worst human attribute is self-certainty. I think it's the most dangerous one, you know. And for me, the Peace Corps was just a great way to challenge that and just say, OK, look, I'm not going to have an arranged marriage. And by the way, I don't. And I'm not going to marry off my daughters.

But in another part of the world, they do that. And that's decreasingly the case, by the way. Right. Because these places are modernized. Do they get the Internet? What the fuck? I can just meet a guy I really like? Exactly, right? And so these, you know, I mean, when we went back to Nepal, my village, it was in a remote place. So it was relatively static. But there have been many other changes. I mean, just think of all these guys going to the UAE to work on construction sites. Those are sad stories because I know that some of the guys that go to that part of the world, they go with the expectation of getting paid a certain sum of money and then

they take their passport and then they pay them a fraction of that and they live in squalor. Oh, it's horrible. And I actually went, I mean, this was an amazing experience. I went to teach in the UAE a couple of years ago. And it was fun for me because every construction site was full of Nepalis. And so I would just go up to the construction site and start speaking Nepali because I can still speak it and freak these guys out. And they would be like, okay, I've got to take you down the block to the next construction site. And I would go there and they would kind of show me and say, okay, say something. And I would, and they would go, bah, bah, which is what Nepalis do when they're kind of amazed. But the stories I heard from them about the subject you're describing, it was really sobering.

I mean, you know, I found great Nepali food there because, you know, I love Nepali food. There's a Nepali community. What is Nepali food like? It's fairly similar to North Indian, but it's very simple. It's rice and lentils and whatever vegetable is in season. So that's what I ate for two and a half years. lentils and whatever vegetable is in season. So that's what I ate for two and a half years. Not literally, but, you know, it's, you know, let's just say that, you know, goat is for a very special occasion, like when somebody gets married, you know. You know, this is a subsistence

community. And so what I ate for two and a half years was rice, dal, and whatever vegetable was in season. Dal? Dal is lentils. Okay. There's a sheep called dal. So I was confused. So anyway, in the UAE, I would eat at this Nepali place, and the same guy would serve me every night. And I said, you know, I saw this thing in the newspaper saying that, you know, you have to get a bida.

In Nepali, that means a holiday, like one day a week or something like that. And he said to me in Nepali, he said, yeah, and if I bitched about that, they'd just send me home and hire some motherfucker. I mean, he said this to me in Nepali. Wow. You know? And, you know, in the UAE, one of the things I learned is that only 10% of the people are from the UAE. Isn't that amazing? Yeah.

That's crazy. Yeah. And the rest of them all imported to work there? Exactly. And here's the other thing about the UAE. There are no naturalized citizens. Really? So, yeah.

So what that means is you can come and work for us for sure. But you can never be a citizen. You can't be us, right? We're sitting on a pile or, you know, more specifically a pool of petrol, right? And we are not sharing. And so, you know, you can work for us, but you will not be us. Vice did a documentary on the guys who built Dubai. Yeah.

Well, built this very specific area. And they showed how they lived. And it was really disturbing. Really. And again, you don't have any rights, right? You know, you're there to work. But another thing that really stuck with me, I was teaching, I taught at NYU at the time, and we had a campus there in downtown. Now it's outside of town. But one of the students there told me this really disturbing story that's right on point, which is,'s walking home at night and she thinks that there's this South Asian guy that's kind of following her. But you know how it is.

Like you're not really sure. He seemed a little sketchy, but you don't know. So you sort of turn a corner and see if he turns it. And, you know, she gets to where we had our campus and she told the guard that she thought that this guy down the street had been following her. And she told me that, like, the police came in 10 minutes and they took him to the airport. It's just like, you fuck with us in any way, you raise an eyebrow, you're out of here, bro. Did she even know if he was for sure? No, and she felt terrible about it.

Wow. I mean, you know, it's like— Maybe he was just going the same direction. Precisely. I mean, you know, and she felt awful about it because, you know, I mean, look, I think any woman has been in a situation like that. It's iffy. You're not really sure. It seems a little sketchy, you know, and that's what she tried to communicate to the guard.

It's like, look, I'm not really sure, right? But it's like, hey, you even raise an eyebrow? It's like you have no rights. sure right but it's like hey you even raise an eyebrow it's like you have no rights that's scary it's terrifying it's scary because that can you know that can be abused obviously yeah someone can just decide for whatever reason that you've done something that you haven't done and yeah you're on a plane or in a jail that that you're done you're done the living in other cultures and recognizing that there's just different styles of living that human beings can live in different ways is very

eye-opening because we're so accustomed to the way people live here yeah we're so accustomed to it you know yeah it's like um i had uh josh rogan the um journalist, was here the other day, and he was talking about living in Japan because he was living in Japan at one time and teaching over there. Yeah. Or doing – not teaching, excuse me. He was teaching English, right? Wasn't he teaching English as well? Yeah, he was like two years.

Yeah, he taught English and he was working as a journalist there. And he was just talking about how different the culture is. The culture is so different than it is here and i was saying you know that my experience is over there it's almost like japan seemed to me tokyo seemed to me like if human beings evolved in a completely different dimension like they're the same they're human beings but they they devolve it they evolved in a totally different style of life but very similar where they have streets and buildings and neon but yet they're really polite and orderly and very disciplined and it's like wow this is crazy

yeah it's it's weird how there's these different styles of living. Oh, and different gender ideas and norms for sure. Yeah. Italy's another one. I've spent a lot of time vacationing in Italy, and those fucking people just want to relax. That's all they do. It's so hard to find a gym there. Where's a gym?

The gym in the hotel was all fucked up. Nobody uses this gym. They just want to relax. It's interesting. Yeah, yeah. And look, again, there's something to be said for that. I mean, my wife and I lived for a couple months in Greece about five years ago because my wife had a gig there. And one of the things we learned is that if you went out to dinner with somebody, if they invite you out, book four hours.

It's sort of like Joe Rogan's show. Four hours. Four hours for dinner. Yeah, yeah book four hours. It's sort of like Joe Rogan show, you know, four hours. Four hours for dinner. Yeah, yeah. Multiple courses, keeps going. You know, and ouzo, whatever. And the Greeks were hanging out with mostly physicians because that's what my wife is. And several of them had been to the United States and they said the most barbaric thing about the United States, they thought, was how quickly people ate. And they said, you know, in the United States, we heard somebody say, grab a bite. What does this grab a bite? And they just thought it was barbaric. And it kind of is. It kind of is.

Yeah. But if you want to do what we do, that's how you have to live. Right. Right. And, you know, not necessarily good. Again, it's like it's I think that's almost asking good or bad. That's almost the wrong question, right? It's like human beings are irreducibly diverse, and they found so many different ways to be human. And the more of those ways you can expose yourself to, I think actually the more human you become. You just see how many ways there are to cut this pie. Yeah, I think so, too. I think there's real value in that.

I've been taking my kids overseas since they were two. Yeah. Yeah. I just I think it's real important just to take them around. People speak in different languages. Oh, I mean, you know, as I was saying earlier, except for meeting Susan, my wife, I mean, living as an elementary school kid in Asia, absolutely the central event of my life. You know, and, you know, just, I mean, just one minor example, but it kind of isn't. When we lived in Iran, you know, my dad was the director of the Peace Corps, so we lived in a very, like, nice place.

And we had servants and things like that because, you know, you're a Westerner living in an Asian place. things like that, because you're a Westerner living in an Asian place. And one night, the cook, we were watching clips about the Ali-Fraser fight, because this was 1969. And the cook says to me, in Farsi, in which I was fluent, of course, because when you're a kid, you can learn a language in three weeks. He says, so this guy Ali and this guy Frasier, they're from your country, but they don't look like you. What's up with that? And as an eight-year-old in Farsi, I told Mahram, the cook, that African people had been enslaved and brought to the new world. And again, how I even said that or what sense I made of that, I have no idea.

But what an incredible privilege that I was even in that situation. Yeah. And that I had, A, that I knew that and that I was put in this position of having to explain it to this Iranian cook. Who didn't understand it. Well, I mean, who knows what sense he made of it. I mean, really, who knows what sense I made of it. I mean, didn't understand it before you explained it. Right, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Growing up like that,

that'd be amazing. What do you think? I think the four hour dinner thing, there's probably some great merit into it. Yeah. There's some great merit to it rather if you don't have a demanding job. So then the question is, should you ever have a demanding job? How hard should you work? I mean, look, that's a reasonable question too. It's a reasonable question. Like we face that in Greece because Susan found this kind of funny

when it got super hot in the afternoon. Like at the hospital where she worked, they would just send people home. They'd say like, it's too hot. And we would just never do that. You know, we're just going to close up shop. It's really hot. You know, go home and take a siesta. And, you know, a lot of our recent experiences have been around medicine because she does a lot of international medicine. And another example that I thought was fascinating, we went to Chile

because she was doing a gig at a hospital there. And at noon, all the docs stopped working and they went to a dining hall, a very well appointed dining hall, and had a sit down lunch. Everyone's beeper goes off. And, you know, Susan spent her whole life in teaching hospitals in America. That doesn't happen. Like if you get like M&Ms for lunch, you're lucky, you know, because it's go, go, go, go, go, go. And the Chileans, you know, noon to one, man, like there are no patients, there's no nothing. And you sit down and have a meal. And it was pretty cool. Yeah. A friend of mine produces television shows, and he went to Italy to film at the Lamborghini factory. And they just wanted to see what's it like to put together an exotic automobile.

What's it like being on the floor? And so he said, they take three-hour lunch breaks. They eat pasta and they sleep. And he's like, no wonder these goddamn cars are so expensive. This fucking takes forever to build them. He was laughing and joking, but he was like, man, the food's incredible. And he goes, and these people just relax and they don't work all day. Right. And look, there's something to that. I mean, who was the Henry

Ford of Lamborghini? There wasn't one, right? I mean, Ford's genius was to make a car as quickly and as cheaply as you could, right? That lots and lots of people could drive, right? And that's not the goal of Lamborghini. I think if I remember correctly, Lamborghini was created because somebody was working with Ferrari and they're like, you know what? I can do this better. I think they got annoyed at how hard it was to get a Ferrari too. And so they're like, I'm just going to make my own one of these fucking things. I think that's how it started. And they've been doing it for almost as long as Ferrari has too.

Yeah. But it's like the Italians are great for whatever reason. They have historically been great at food and art. Yep. Like food and art has been their thing. Oh, yeah. Not so great at skyscrapers, you know, not so great at, there's a lot of things they're not so great at.

Not so great at policing and crime fighting. Right, but art. Yeah. Art and passion and there's a celebration of leisure and of just being a community, just being around each other and having fun and singing and laughing and dancing. Yeah. And it seems like they have their own way of living that suits them in a way that I don't know if our way of living suits us. Right. And I think the jury's out, and that's the point.

Yeah. We accomplish a lot. Yes, we do. But we're all fucked up. That too. I want to know which country has more antidepressants and SSRIs. Well, I've seen some of that literature, and it turns out that these international happiness indexes, they kind of confirm the cliche that money really does buy you happiness.

We're happy over here? Well, not as happy as the Danes, right? The Danes are the happiest. The Danes are extremely happy. And when I say money, I'm not just talking about your income, right? Aren't they just happy because they're beautiful? They're so handsome and beautiful women. That's part of it.

But really what it is is that they have know, they have really good health care. They have, you know, all education, including higher education, is free. Right? And it turns out those things make you happy. Sure. Right? And, you know, you shouldn't nostalgize poverty. I think sometimes there's this noble savage idea that, you know, oh, the people in such and such a country, they're poor, but they're very happy.

No, actually, they're not. such and such a country. Yeah, they're poor, but they're very happy. No, actually, they're not. And what makes you happy is, you know, reliable health care, right? Full employment, right? Full, you know, accessible education. And the people that have those things, the people that live in those countries are happier. Yeah. Yeah. They don't create as much innovation and they don't create as much like world influencing art which is interesting yeah right so you've got to wonder like is there a benefit to a certain amount of struggle what's the sweet spot right what's the sweet spot of being a young person and having no idea whether or not you're

gonna have your bills paid whether you going to be able to take care of yourself. What is right? What's the roadmap? What is your future going to hold versus someone who knows they get a stipend from the government? You're always going to have your health care. There's plenty of food. Maybe maybe there's a there's a there's a middle ground. I think there absolutely is. And I think that's actually we're at a juncture right now where we're trying to work that out in the United States. I mean I think that's what a lot of what we heard Joe Biden talking about in the State of the Union was about. Did you pay attention to that? Some of it, right?

You might be the only one. You know what I paid attention to? What? And I think this is really to your point. The fact that there's been so little what I would call real Republican pushback of a sort of – there's been a little, but of the sort that we saw with the Tea Party in 2008, right, where you say, no, the state's too big. Like, no, we don't want to provide all those services. It seems to me that, you know, if we had what I would call a real Republican party, we would be having more of that debate. Instead, it seems to be focused mainly on, you know, Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and something that's happening at the border, you know, because I think that there is an interesting or there should be an

interesting debate about that. How big do we want the state to be? How many services do we want to provide? What are the costs and benefits of that? I mean, to me, that's what, I mean, those are the big questions, you know, and I think that, you know, there are costs and benefits to that. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat. I tend to support most forms of state welfare, but that's why I wish we had what I would call more real Republicans of the old variety, right, who are kind of making the case for smaller government, right, and making the case for, you know, allowing, you know, more room both to rise and to fall and all that stuff. Watchdogs of frugality. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. People who are,

you know. Again, that's not my jam, but I think that we should hear that. Yeah, the problem with bigger government is government's not good at anything. So when they do it bigger, it's just more people being incompetent. If you could get, I mean, I'm not a fan of hiring the private sector to take over important government jobs because I think they would cut corners too and make it the most profitable instead of the most efficient. And, you know, instead of the most efficient. But it's it's just there's there's no like outside. Trump is the Republican Party right now. Still, it seems like they're still hanging their hopes on him winning again in 2024. Yes. And maybe someone will rise between now and then. And, you know, more nonsense about our cities being aflame and the border being a crisis, you know, and both of those are largely invented. We have lots of much more serious stuff to deal with.

We do, but the border is kind of a bit of a crisis. I mean, look, I mean, it has been for a long time. It's been building for a very long time. But, you know, when those reports come into your newsfeed or mine, here's what they don't tell you. They don't tell you that in the last 10 years, immigration declined to a level that we haven't seen since the 1970s. It doesn't tell you that in the past 10 years, two-thirds of our immigrants have come from Asia, not from Latin America. And they don't tell you that immigrants of all kinds, including undocumented, are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. Those are all facts. And everyone should know them, and that should put the crisis in a little bit of a different context.

That's probably all very true. The difference between immigration and illegal immigration is when it gets squirrely. Definitely. Definitely. And that's all worth debating, right? Yeah. But we're not going to have that debate if we're just, you know, focused on, you know, oh, you know, there's a caravan that's coming up from Honduras and oy vey and maybe George Soros is financing it. I mean, look, the question of like how many immigrants should come in and also like what do we do with the people that came in here illegally?

Those are real questions, right? Those are real questions, yeah. Absolutely. Also, the question is like why do you have to have a special skill to be a valid immigrant? Yeah. That's a real good question because, like, there's a lot of poor people that they've been doing labor their whole life, but they want to do better for their family. But you have to be able to provide a service that makes it valuable for you to enter into America. That's right.

And I don't know where your ancestors come from, but, you know, mine came from, you know, Poland, Russia, and Lithuania. Mine were Italy and Ireland. Okay. And, you know, they didn't have any of those skills. They couldn't get in now. Yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah. Or it would be way, way harder.

And they got in easy. My grandparents just came in, signed their name, and they were in. I mean, what did you have to do back then? Not much. Yeah. In the 1920s? What the hell did you have to do? Until 1925. I mean, what did you have to do back then? Not much. The 1920s? Well, until 1925. I mean, until they changed the immigration laws. So, you know, my relatives are lucky we got in before 1925 because we restricted it heavily after that and then changed again in the 60s. Yeah. It's unfortunate that the disparity between the United States and these – especially these Latin American countries where these people are coming up and literally walking.

Yeah. It's sad that they don't have a better spot down there. That's what's fucked up is that they need to come up here. Of course it is. That's what's crazy. Right. And, you know, I think it's fair to say that some of their woes, if you go back in time, also have to do with some terrible decision-making activity by the United States. That's not to say, like, we're to blame for it, right, because that's way too facile.

Right. Right. But the United States does not have a good record of, let's just call it political intervention in that part of the world. No. You know? And so, you know, it's worth, this is where the history piece becomes really important, you know. Yeah. You know, if you look especially at, you know, a country like Panama or a country like, you know, Nicaragua, right, or Guatemala, you know, you'll see in the

past all sorts of American efforts to intervene in the politics of those countries in ways that were fundamentally destructive to those countries. And that's real. Yeah. And the damage continues from the Reagan administration in Nicaragua. Yeah. And El Salvador. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I remember all that Oliver North shit when I was a kid. Yeah. You know? Yeah. That's like something out of a movie and a really bad movie, by the way. But a real movie. movie yeah that shit was really going down it's kind of crazy yeah that they were used and the fact that they were using cocaine sales from los angeles i interviewed uh freeway ricky ross do you know who he is i do yeah the real rick ross rick ross came here he was at the la studio yeah and um he's a great guy. And what a story he has. Learned how to read in prison, became a lawyer, and then fought his own case.

And realized they had given him double jeopardy. You know, three strikes, you're out. Yeah. Not double jeopardy, but three strikes, you're out. It's supposed to be three separate instances of you being arrested for felonies. Yes. You can't count one instance three times. Exactly, and that's what they did to him,

and he successfully argued it and got released, which is amazing. Yeah. And now he gives motivational speeches, and he was actually a tennis player in Compton, a really good tennis player. Oh, wow. Yeah, before he became a big-time drug dealer.

But he was like a big-time drug dealer, but he was illiterate. He never learned how to read until he went to jail and learned how to read so that he could become a lawyer to defend himself. That's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah. Amazing. Yeah, it is.

But meanwhile, he was getting all that coke and selling all it because they were using him to make money so they could fund the conscious versus the sandinistas yeah which is nuts radically nuts yeah that was do you play tennis joe no you know never did i've played it a couple of times but no i'm not i'm not a tennis player yeah why do you play tennis i do i took it up you know i was a basketball player in my youth but there's a reason that you see people that look like me on tennis courts and not basketball courts. I just started to get hurt, right?

Yeah. And that's what happens with basketball. I think tennis would get you hurt. There's a lot of side-to-side movement. Yeah, but it's not a contact sport. What happened with basketball is you're in a small space. Everybody's body is getting wider. They're starting to wear these braces and big pieces of plastic, and inevitably, you're just going to bang into somebody. And you fall down and twist ankles. Yeah.

And what's cool about tennis is it's not a contact sport. So you can just keep doing it. And I just, you know, I was getting hurt. It wasn't as fun. And a basketball friend said to me, like, do you play tennis? And I said, well, not since I was 18. Not really. And I went onto the court and I had like the closest thing I'll ever have to a religious experience.

Like the very first time I started hitting and I was like, okay, done with basketball. That was a religious experience? Tennis? It was. I mean, it was just because it was just so – it was just dramatic and rapid, right? It was just like I realized it in one moment, you know. But it turns out that it's also complicated. I mean, I'm sure any sport like martial arts is too. It becomes a head game as well. You know, I think actually based on what I've read about you, you would like it.

Because it turns out with tennis that unless you're very good, which I'm not and never will be, that almost every point is decided based on who concentrates more. It really is. And that's why, I mean, I don't know if you've ever gone to watch somebody like Nadal or Federer play. But what's amazing about it is not just their athleticism, because you can see that in any sport.

What's amazing is that there are 19,000 people around them and they are so locked in. It's just crazy. And that's really what it is. You know, it's just staying in the point and thinking about nothing else. This match is going a long time too, right? They do. Some of them to five hours. Five hours? Oh, some of the, yeah, some of the ones that are, you know, that, you know, where it's best,

best of, you know, best of five sets. Do they take snacks? Yeah. You can get little munchies, but it's not. Like bananas and stuff? Yeah. Oh, definitely. Yeah. Yeah.

But, you know, it's really taught me a lot about how important focus is. You know, I often say to my students, like, for me, that's the only really necessary condition for doing anything. You know, like I'm not a rocket scientist. You know, I know what my limits are in that realm. What I can do, what I am able to do is focus. And for me, that is just the absolute necessary condition for anything. And tennis really teaches you that because, you know, if I start thinking about my grocery list or a newspaper column that I'm writing, I'm fucked, you know. And I, you know, I'm writing, I'm fucked. You know?

And I'm not in the point anymore. Sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's, yeah. Yeah, I think there's a mental cleansing aspect of a lot of things, a lot of activities. I don't play golf, but it's been described to me that way. Same deal. And tennis, I'm sure.

Archery. I do archery. That's one thing. It's like that. The game of pool is like that. Like if you're thinking about anything else while you're down there, you'll fuck up. And if you just concentrate on only the game and keep playing it over and over again, it's like it clears your mind of problems. It does.

In a weird way. And yet, though, it can also be a source of them because I've also discovered since I've taken up tennis that good begets good and bad begets bad. So, you know, if you're really hitting it well, you can just keep going. But sometimes you're just in a rut and you can't get out.

You know exactly what you're doing wrong and you can't stop yourself. And look, writing is like that too. But what I've discovered with writing you can't stop yourself. And look, writing is like that, too. But what I've discovered with writing is when you get to that that like dark place, you just stop. Right. And if you come back to it and look at it with new eyes, you'll get out of it. Right. Tennis court, you can't do that. You just can't say, look, I keep fucking on my backhand.

Let's just stop playing. Right. What you have to do is just keep fucking up your backhand, which is super frustrating. What you have to do is just keep fucking up your backhand, which is super frustrating. But that – and you can't – you know, you know what you're doing and you can't stop it. And I guess that's just the nature of competition because I think there are many things like that, like writing. But again, I've discovered that it's actually quite simple. Like sometimes you'll just be writing and every word looks terrible and you just don't have it going on. And if you just go outside or do something else and you come back to it,

you will be able to do it better. But if you just sit there and keep trying to mull over it, everything will look like shit because you're just in that rut. Well, there's some people that think that to concentrate on things, you're supposed to do things for a certain amount of time and take five minutes off on a regular basis

that you should never just go all the way through. But then there's other schools of thought where you just keep drinking coffee and keep pounding on those keys. Yeah, and I've done it both ways. It's very ineffable. I mean, the thing about writing is you sort of – you kind of start to understand if you've done it for a while why the ancients all talked about like muses coming to them right you know if you read you know Homer or anybody after that and they talk about you know people who are creating anything a muse came to them yeah um it does feel that way sometimes you know it's just you know you're suddenly you're really inspired you have a lot to say you can say it and then at other times you times, you're just pulling teeth.

You have an idea, but you just can't find. The muse hasn't come to you. Yeah. Yeah. But did you ever read Steven Pinker's work? Oh, yeah. Did you ever read The War of Art? Yeah.

Yeah. He's got a really interesting way of talking about the muse, that whether or not the muse is real, if you treat it like it's real and treat it with respect, then it'll keep providing you with creative gifts. Right. I mean, the ancients understood that. I mean, they really got that right. No, I'm sorry.

Did I say Pinker? I meant Pressfield. Steven Pressfield. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Did I say Pinker? You did. I think I did. Yeah, I meant Pressfield.

I was thinking the same. Yeah. That book, War of Art, I bought a stack of them, and I would hand them out to people when they would come on the podcast just because it was so – and it's a small, easy read, but it's all about being a professional and this idea that if you just summon the muse and then show up at the same time every day with the intent to be creative and you're going to put in the work and you're not going to, you know,

go watch YouTube videos or Google anything. You're going to really concentrate only on the writing itself and that the muse will, whether or not it's a real thing. You know, this idea that there's some angelic creative thing out there that bestows upon you creative gifts. Right. But I think Pressfield's point is that it's useful to think of it in that way. Yes. Right. It gives you a certain kind of faith. Right. Well, that's a lot of people's perspective on religion. You know, that's Jordan Peterson's perspective on God is that whether or not God exists or not, if you behave like God exists, you'll live a better life. And I'm like, there's some real wisdom in that

because there's something to it. If you really did behave as if some higher power laid out the rules for a better, just more harmonious world, and if you follow these rules, you'll have a better life. And that this is all, there's a logic to it and a law to it. There is. And yet I know Peterson is Canadian. But in the United States, I think one of the most important social phenomena of the past 20 years is actually the decline in both church, synagogue, and mosque attendance and also in the number of people that say they're affiliated with a faith. Yeah. By some measures, it's gone down 20%, which is radical. Over how long?

20 years. Yeah. And I think, again, we're almost too close to that to really take its measure. I think the worst interpretation of it is that what we've done is we've substituted politics for religion. Yeah. We've made politics into a kind of faith system where it's not necessarily... The blue and the red, they become a sort of religious identity and we defend them in the same way. I think there's some real truth to that. And I think these things are probably at some level connected.

You know, because I think, you know, I think lots of evolutionary psychologists have tried to make the claim that we are joiners. And that there is an evolutionary logic to faith systems, you know, that they've helped us in all kinds of different ways. And we're always going to have some version of them. Hmm, you know, and I think the scariest part of now is for me is that our political affiliations have become quasi religious I don't even think quasi Maybe flat-out flat-out pretty much flat-out and extremely tribal and When you think about if you just analyze the behavior of people on both extremes whether it's the far left or the far right they exhibit remarkably similar traits like

pure hatred for the other side inability to look at the virtues of this opposing ideology, you know, and almost like treating it as if the very nature of reality is at stake. Yes, yes. And I have a purchase on it, and you are blind. Yes. Right? You know, God did not shine on you. Which is the Protestants versus the Catholics, you know, in Ireland.

I mean, it's really crazy. Right. That's what they did when they were blowing each other up with the IRA. I'm curious, Joe, are you a religious believer? I am not a non-believer. I'm not a believer. I don't go to church, but I would not be surprised if there's a lot more to this existence than we're experiencing in a way that you can measure. Did you go to church as a kid? Yeah, I went to Catholic school when I was a little kid. We went to church, but it was when my parents split up and when we went to San Francisco, all that stopped. I just never— Was your stepdad a, all that stopped. I just never... Was your stepdad a Catholic also?

No. Or just your mom? He was when he was a kid as well, but it was the 70s. They were just hippies. But I think there's some real benefit to religion for a lot of people, and I didn't used to think that

when I was younger. When I was younger, I was a lot more arrogant about it, and I thought it was for fools. I was like, oh yeah, a guy came back from the dead, didn't used to think that when I was younger when I was younger I was a lot more arrogant about it and I thought it was for fools I was like oh yeah a guy came back from the dead and he used to walk on water whatever you know but now I look at it and first of all I understand what the Bible actually is now and it's way more complicated you know it's some people trying to make sense of the world thousands and thousands of years ago as interpreted through multiple languages back to England,

back to English rather, and in a way that, you know, there's a lot of these ancient languages. Like if you go back to ancient Hebrew, letters doubled as numbers. So there was value in words, right? Like somebody told me once that the word love and the word God have the same numerical value. So if you combine the numbers and the letters and it's like it wasn't as simple as when you get the interpretation to Latin

or to Greek or to English ultimately. You're not interpreting the full meaning in these sentences, that there's some intrinsic value that's lost because the ancient Hebrew version of it was like it just meant a different thing. Right. And it's been transmuted through a million different histories. Right. A million different peoples. Right. And ideologies. And in all kinds of ways. Right. I mean, heinous and wonderful. You know, when my students tell me they don't like religion or they don't want to mix religion and politics, I'm always like, so we shouldn't have a Martin Luther King Day, right? I mean, what do we think he was, right? What do we think the whole civil rights movement? Of course, you know.

But it's funny. I once asked a group of students what King's profession was, and I got hilarious answers. Like a lot of people thought he was a lawyer, but my favorite one of all was policy expert. lawyer, but my favorite one of all was policy experts. It's like, I have a dream that one day, thanks to the earned income tax credit, you know, the poverty rate will decline 2%. But again, I think that speaks to the kind of stigmatization of religion in certain circles in our country, especially elite circles. And this idea that it's this conservative principle or this backwards thing, and obviously it's been used in those ways. But, you know, I mean, if you think about like movements for justice in this country, starting with abolitionism, right, going right straight through civil rights, they were all powered by religion. place where people go to worship because they've agreed upon certain kind of behavior when they go to these places and in agreeing to work hard to be a better person and to tithe some of your

earnings and all these different aspects of religion that I think really lends itself to empowering the bond that these people have with each other. And what I find fascinating about it is that bond, that empowering, and also that identity. They can work even if you don't believe in God or even think about them. Yes. I mean, you know, and I feel I'm an example of that. I mean, I'm Jewish, and being Jewish is hugely important to me, the way I see the world, the way I think. But at the same time, I'm not a believer. I don't think.

I don't walk around wondering if there's a God. And I rarely go to synagogue. Would you be surprised if there was a God? No. And I wouldn't be surprised if there wasn't. I mean, I'll be honest. I just don't give it a lot of thought, you know. What I care about is the world, the world as I can see it, the world as I can know it.

Right. is the world, the world as I can see it, the world as I can know it. And for me, what's really important about Judaism is the charge that it gives you to try to change that world. I know this isn't everybody's interpretation of Judaism, but it's mine. So at Passover, what do you say?

You say, remember that you were a slave in Egypt, right? And so that experience, that experience of being a pariah, which has been so central to the Jewish experience, what that does is that enjoins you to ask, OK, who's the pariah now? Right. It might not be you now. Right. But it's going to be somebody else. Right. And your job as a Jew, whoever it is, your job as a Jew is to is to seek them out, Your job as a Jew is to seek them out, reach out to them, try to understand them, you know. And, you know, my archaeologist friends have told me that, speaking of Passover, there's actually no real archaeological evidence that Jews were enslaved en masse in Egypt, like that there was a mass population transfer. Like, I grew up thinking that that actually happened.

Okay, the stuff with the parting of the Red Sea, okay, there you get into the faith realm. But I thought as a matter of history, right, that that had happened. Apparently, we don't have evidence for it. But so what? Right. Right? Does that take anything away from the Exodus story? For me, it actually doesn't. I don't feel that I need

any proof on this score. Doesn't history get real shaky though when they're going back to ancient Egypt? Of course it does. You have to look at shards of pottery and you have to look at other things. Apparently, they found there was some trade, as you might guess, because there were so many different populations that are both in conflict and in movement and all that, right? But, like, I remember somebody told me the Jews, like, built the pyramids. This is not true. I've read that.

Right? Yeah, yeah, you know. But again, you know, so what? You know, there's still, even if that quote didn't happen and the Red Sea didn't part, to me, you know, just the historic experience that Jews have had, you know, and especially their experience as being the pariah, as being the outcrop and fighting back against that and asserting themselves. You know, that's what I take away from it. And especially my duty as a Jew to try to make things a little less fucked up, especially for whoever is a slave now. And by the way, I'm not saying that's how other Jews see it or should. But for me, it's an example of the power of religion. And it's got nothing to do

with God. Right. Like not to me. Yeah. It's guidelines for how to live. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Guidelines, guidelines, impulses, perspectives, you know, all that stuff. And I think, you know, we need that. We place where people agree to worship together. Because even, again, like Pressfield called upon the muse, even if you don't, even if the muse isn't real, if you treat it like it's real, and if you have a place where everybody gets together and they all agree, like we're gonna be better people because of the Lord, and the Lord watches us, and the Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away,

and just think about all the real positive aspects of some of the religious tenets. Right. And, you know, I also think that in part because we're secularizing, there's perhaps less awareness of all that. And perhaps we should be a little bit more concerned, you know, about the fact that fewer people are affiliated with the religion. You know, again, I don't know what we can necessarily do about that. But there's also a lot of prejudice about it. There's no question, right?

I mean, think of, you know, the play Book of Mormon, which, by the way, I think is brilliant. Brilliant. All right. But what if there was on Broadway the book of the Koran or the book of the Talmud? Like, can you imagine the shitstorm that would be, right? It's true. You know, and everybody would be like, oh, I can't believe you're making fun of this world original. But with the Book of the Mormons, we're like, ha, ha, ha.

Well, first of all, one thing, Mormons have a great sense of humor. Yes. They can take it. They take a joke really well. Second, there's a thing when you know the guy who made the religion. It's a different thing. You know, it's like thing when you know the guy who made the religion. It's a different thing. You know, it's like one thing, like Judaism, you're talking about thousands of years of history. Islam, more than a thousand years of history, right?

Right. I mean, that's what's fascinating about the LDS story is it's just quintessentially American. Right. Exactly. You know, it's a frontier story, right? You know, and— A 14-year-old bullshit artist. That's what it's about. A 14-year-old bullshit artist tricked a lot of people, and they kind of know it.

Right. But at the same time, I mean, the historic ironies are so great because, you know, Republican Mormons in Utah, they're like the most Republican people on earth. Yeah. And yet, of course, the Republican Party pursued Brigham Young all the way into the Great Salt Basin. I mean, you think that's really where they wanted to go? You think they're like, oh, this seems like a really habitable place, like let's live in the Great Salt Basin.

This fucking dead lake. Exactly. There's some shrimp in that lake and that's it. That was as far as the army, which was led by the Republican Party, was willing to pursue them. The line was that the Mormons, it wasn't just, of course, that they were, you know, they were bigamists or Satanists or whatever.

You know, they oppressed women like slavery oppressed African-Americans. I mean, that was one of the arguments. You know, and the Mormons aren't dumb. Once they create a territory, of course, they enfranchise women before anybody. And they're like, oh, were the people, like, were the people that oppressed women, like, did they vote back in Massachusetts of course, they enfranchise women before anybody. And they're like, oh, were the people that oppressed women, did they vote back in Massachusetts? No, they don't. That's pretty interesting. I mean, back to the Book of the Mormon.

I mean, what I think is fascinating, how the LDS establishment handled that. What they did, which I thought was super smart, was they're like, let's not beat them. Let's join them. So you go to Broadway and you get your little playbill. They're like, let's not beat them. Let's join them. So you go to Broadway and you get your little playbill. And I'm sure you've seen this.

Like on the second page, there's an ad from the Mormon church from LDS. And they're like, okay, you've seen the play. Now look at the real thing. I bet they got a lot of people to join too because of that. Didn't Glenn Beck join the Mormons like deep into his 40s? Here's the thing about Mormons. I've known quite a few of them. And they're some of the nicest fucking people. And I don't know why, I don't know what they're doing,

but they are so friendly and so nice. Well look, one of the reasons, there are many, but one is that they have this tradition of mission, right? Yes. And so, at least on the male side, you have to become an elder. You have to go off and evangelize. And that's not going to work very well if you're a dick, right?

It really isn't. I mean, I have an old friend and colleague who's a Mormon, and he's not a believer anymore, but he served in Italy. And he told me that doing that was the key to everything he's done ever since because he said, John, if you can sell that, you can do anything, man. That's interesting. But it's also not going to work if you're a dick or like if you're walking around in jeans and a hoodie, right? I mean, the Mormons, they do it right. You know, it's like we you've got to, you have to be aware and you have to understand your surroundings and how they're different from what you expect. I mean, it's funny.

We mentioned the Peace Corps. My father was a Peace Corps director in both Iran and India. And he once showed me this memo that he sent to Washington just saying, send me more Mormons because he said every single Mormon volunteer was fantastic. And the big reason was they had already had that third culture experience, right? They had gone off to, you know, Argentina or Italy or wherever to do the mission. So they had like lived in a place where they were weird and had to learn the language and all that stuff. So they were great volunteers. Wow. Yeah. The craziest story about the Mormon is the Mormon's expansion into Mexico.

Yes. And then the fact that there's still these families that have these compounds down in Mexico. Oh, and there was that awful episode a couple years ago where some of them were murdered. Yeah. Oh, yeah. The Mexico story is. And the Romney family. Yes.

I mean, they had branches down there and all that. Yeah. It's so crazy. Like, back when it didn't matter if you lived in Mexico, the United States, because everybody was on horseback. They were like, listen, we'll just go down here. Yeah, we can have 50 wives. I mean, the other thing for those party, for those of us who are Jews, another sort of interesting aspect of the whole Mormon story is the Mormons tend to be philo-Semites. They love us, man. They love Jews. So the first Jewish governor in the United States, his name is Bamberger, and he's the governor of Utah. And he was, you know, the inheritor of kind

of the Bamberger, I think it was department stores. You know about the guy who spent all the money to sequence the genome of Native Americans because he wanted to find out if they were the lost tribe of Israel, because that's in the Book of Mormon. Do you know that? Yeah, yeah. And look, you know, I mean, a lot of it is bizarre, but it's also fascinating, right? And it's funny, on the Jewish Mormon thing, I mean, the other controversy that's come up in the past couple of years, you know how the Mormons can sort of make anybody Mormon, like including well after they're dead. Oh, really?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah. And so at one point, a couple years ago, they declared that Anne Frank, you know, the Holocaust victim, was a Mormon. And look, each to their own. I mean, I can understand why plenty of my fellow Jews were offended by that. My view was if that's what some Mormon dude wants to think, they can think it. Well, they think they get their own planet when they die. Yeah, yeah. The whole eschatology, like the whole system is totally fascinating. And, you know, and you can sort of, you can, again, like Anne Frank, you can sort of graduate people into it.

How weird. Yeah, but, you know, again, it's like. Listen, it works for a lot of them and they're very nice people, but it does leave them vulnerable. I have a friend and she left the Mormon church as an adult and she found herself very susceptible to sort of like healers and yogi type people. And she goes, I think what it is, is I was so accustomed to just believing in things that didn't necessarily make sense, but allowing them to like, oh, okay. She's so gullible. And she, but it was interesting, like seeing her as an adult, trying to make sense of it as to why, what it was that was leading her to be so susceptible. Yes. And I, you know, I think for the Mormons, especially as you were saying,

because it's so American and so new, I think there are a lot of tensions between, let's just say the believers and the historians, right? Because, you know, once you start studying history of anything, it gets complicated, and it's not like what you thought. And, you know, the Mormons were involved in, we think, several massacres of other human beings, including this place called Mountain Meadows. And it's been very hard for people in the Mormon church, for some of the believers to accept that. So there's always going to be a tension between faith and history. There almost has to be, I think.

Yeah, well, the thing about history, particularly like history before photographs, is there's a lot of fuckery. Like, who knows? History is written by the winners. There's ambiguity. But at the same time, you know, there's conquest. I mean, that's what history is written by the winners. There's ambiguity. Oh, wow. But at the same time, you know, there's conquest. I mean, that's what history is. Right. I mean, we went to Iceland a couple years ago, our family, and somebody there told us that as best we can tell, Iceland is the only place that was never colonized.

In the sense that when the Vikings got there, there was literally no one there. And then, by the way, after that, it became like a whole Game of Thrones shit, which is why Game of Thrones is filmed there. I mean, there was a million conquerors after that, you know. But when the first Vikings came there, there was nobody there. And apparently, that's Sui-Zhann-Ri. Like, that's its own animal. So think about that. Every other place that people move to, there are other human beings there.

Right? Yeah. And, you know, that means they clash, right? It's not the only thing they do. They also mix, right? But they clash, and one team dominates the other one in some way. That is the story of history, you know? And so once you start digging, right, you find that, you know, nobody's hands are clean, right? You know, everyone was involved in some kind of act of conquest or domination almost, right? So, you know, one of the things that we now do in many elite campuses is at the beginning of any event, we'll say, now, let's remember that we're on Lenape land, right, or Choctaw land.

You've probably heard these, these sort of new Native American affirmations. And look, I'm a historian. I think it's great that people learn more about the Lenape's or the Choctaws. But I'm also a little bit troubled by this ritual because it does seem to imply that like the Lenape's were just there from time immemorial living in some Edenic place instead of like conquering whoever it was that was there before the Lennepies. And of course, that's the Native story, right? They conquered each other, right? They made tribes, they made empires, right? One team ruled, sometimes killed the other. And again, that's not, I think there should be much more awareness, right, of Native American history. And I think those affirmations are fine, but it'd also be useful for us to think about, again, who was there before

that team, right? And, you know, those people were conquered, right? They were victims, but they were also at some point conquerors. And almost everybody was. Certain, the world was a savage place back then. Yes, it was. The world was a savage place back then. Yes, it was. It's just how people stayed alive. You encountered strangers, you killed them. Yeah. I mean, when was it that when a boat showed up on your shores, it was a good thing? Yeah. I mean, when did that start? I think much more recently than most of us appreciate. For most of human history, when people just randomly showed up in a boat, it was a dangerous time. Definitely.

They might be just there to trade or they might be there to rape and pillage. Yes. Conquer you, right? You know, enslave you. Yeah. Put you to work for their project. Right. Right.

Yeah. There's no telling. You got to guess. That's right. That's right. That's right. Yeah, I'm fascinated by Native American history, and I'm fascinated by how long they must have been living here in that manner before white people showed up. And then white people show up, and within a few years, everyone's dead. Right.

And obviously, disease is the big reason for that. then white people show up and within a few years everyone's dead for the right 90 disease disease is the big reason for that you know i think some people imagine that you know everyone died in wars and actually many more people died of disease 90 died from disease yeah yeah um i mean there were certainly a lot of murders but yeah but they just had no you you know, and I'm listening to this book on tape about Cortez and a lot of the Spanish explorers making it to Native America or North America rather. And one of the things they talk about is the Mayan Empire. They have this detailed account of Mayans. And I was thinking, oh, well, they probably died off from disease too. I mean, that's probably what killed off the Mayan Empire because they don't really know.

They're really not sure what happened to the Mayans. But if the Spaniards are describing their encounters with the Maya, for sure they gave them diseases, right? They fucking killed everybody else. I mean, their disease just swept through the Native Americans and there was millions and millions and millions of them all across the country. Imagine this one, like Chichen Itza.

Imagine this one small area with this incredible civilization that had evolved over who knows how long, built these amazing structures, and then gone. The whole civilization abandoned. Right. No one there.

Right. Disease, right? Yeah, yeah. Most likely. I think that was a big part of it. It whole civilization abandoned. Right. No one there. Right. Disease, right? Yeah, yeah. Most likely. I think that was a big part of it. It has to be. And, I mean, to the earlier point, I mean, you know, the conquistadors did horrific things in that part of the world. Right?

But, of course, you know, the people in that part of the world did not horrific things to other people well before the conquistadors got there. You know, I mean, you know, there were forms of human sacrifice in that part of the world. Well, how about, what was the temple that they built? I never can pronounce this correctly, but there was a temple that they, an Aztec temple that they built where at the completion of it,

they had a ritual sacrifice where they killed something like 80,000 slaves. Yeah. What a temple. I don't remember how to say it. Teotihuacan, how do you say it? Yeah, it begins with a T. Yeah. What a temp... I don't remember how to say it. Teal, teal, con, how do you say it? Yeah, it begins with a T. Yeah.

Yeah. Say that. To note... To note... To note... Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. It's in Mexico City. Does it say how to say it? I don't know. They don't tell you how to... They don't have a pronunciation? Yes. Well, it was there for 695 years.

Wow. Yeah. So when they finished it, when they completed it, they killed everybody. They did it over a weekend. Right. Just a fucking full-on slaughter fest. What is the number? Does it say the number of people that were sacrificed?

Because it's something insane. Where I told a friend of mine, he was like, that can't be true. I'm like, let's read it. And he's like, holy shit. Right. How long did that take? Because they're doing it with swords. Yeah.

So they're killing 80,000 people with swords. And it's, you know, I mean, this is where things get interesting and complicated and political, right? I mean, look, you know, the story that we told for most of our history in this country was that colonialism was a beneficent thing, right? That was developed to basically civilize savages, right? And that was flawed in a million different ways. And it's great that we've corrected it. Right. And that was flawed in a million different ways. And it's great that we've corrected it. But right. Again, we shouldn't congratulate ourselves too quickly or imagine that we've got it right when we just reverse things. Right. And say, oh, you know, Columbus and everybody came after them were just, you know, horrible, evil enslavers. And everybody that they encountered was some sort of innocent victim. Right. was some sort of innocent victim.

You know, that actually patronizes the people they encountered, I think, you know, who had their own complex societies with their own divisions and, yes, often their own brutalities, you know. But it's, you know, there's a politics to all of this. There seems to be no historically utopian civilization that we can call upon and say this group got it right, right? Yeah, yeah. It doesn't seem like there is. Right, you know,

except the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco. Ah. Yeah, yeah. Well, you see, what it is, it's like all tribes and all civilizations are made out of people. That's the problem.

You know? Warts and all. Yeah. Humans. Humans are weird, weirdly flawed, messy creatures. Yeah. And look, I i mean thank god for that right i mean that's what keeps things interesting yes well for us for us humans yeah but uh once we become these neural link things what does it say here 84 000 people were slaughtered in four days

yeah so a long weekend 84 000 fucking people that is people. That is so crazy. That is so crazy. Yeah. And so we should be able to find a way to critique what the conquistadors did and the way they overran these societies without nostalgizing or romanticizing what their societies were. So it's not just slaves. Here it says, defeated soldiers were not killed on the battlefield, but captured and returned to Tenochtitlan for sacrifice. The Aztec raiders were convinced that the end of the world was nigh and butchered thousands to appease the gods. This was a culture obsessed with death.

They believed that human sacrifice was the highest form of karmic healing. When the Great Pyramid of Tenochtitlan was consecrated, and I'm sorry if I'm saying that wrong, because I probably am, was consecrated in 1487, the Aztecs recorded that 84,000 people were slaughtered in four days. Yeah. Wow.

Jesus. How'd they keep those people standing still? Yeah, God. 84,000, you know, after a while you think, that guy's tired, when he picks that sword up, God. 84,000. After a while, you think, that guy's tired. When he picks that sword up, I'm going to jack him. There's no way he's going to be able to kill 40,000 people in a day. He has to be so tired.

1,000 people every hour with a three-hour break to take, you know. An hour. 1,000 people an hour is so many people. Right, and look, here's. But there's 60 seconds in a minute. Yeah. There's 60 minutes in an hour. How many fucking people you have

to kill to kill a thousand in an hour? That's fast. A lot of arrows. I don't think they're using arrows, dude. I was thinking of your thing from yesterday, your thong. I think they just did it with swords. But it's like, that's one fascinating thing, too, about ancient civilizations.

How many of them were obsessed with human ritual sacrifice to appease gods, because they were so terrified of dying that they felt like maybe if we just killed this guy, like maybe we'll keep living. The gods will smile upon us. Yeah. Or like the Egyptians, they just imagined that there was a way for them to be immortal, right? I mean, to live in some tomb or some other thing, you know? What's interesting to me about the Greeks is that they didn't, right? And that's why they revered the gods. The gods were imperfect too, right? And they had little jealousies and spats.

But here's what was not human about them. They lived forever, right? And the Greeks understood, like, our own greatest imperfection is, in fact, our mortality. And what differentiated the gods wasn't, you know,ion is, in fact, our mortality. And what differentiated the gods wasn't, you know, that they threw thunderbolts or anything. Really, what differentiated them was that, you know, they just went on and we don't. Yeah. Yeah.

Have you ever heard of Brian Murorescu? He's a scholar and an author of a book called The Immortality Key. And he came on this podcast and explained his work that has now become, it's now a point of study at Harvard. And what it is is he explored the history of the ritualized use of psychedelic drugs in ancient Greece. Oh, wow. Yeah. How do you say it? It was Eul wow. Yeah. How do you say it? Ulyssidid?

How do you say that word? The mysteries? What is that word? Like the Elysian field thing? No, no, no. I didn't think so. Eleusis, right? Eleusis?

Eleusinian mysteries? Is that how you say it? Yeah. I don't know. They had these rituals, these ancient rituals in Greece that all of these scholars would go and participate in, and they wrote about them in these very romantic ways, and people were trying to figure out what the hell was, how do you say it?

Eleusinian, that's it. So I did say it right. Yeah. So right here it says this sanctuary in ancient Greece, the most famous of the secret religious rites of ancient Greece. And he proved by not just examining the contents of these, a lot of their wine and their beer had been laced with psychedelics. Like from mushrooms?

From different things. And many of them from ergot. So different forms, which is very similar to LSD. So they would add this stuff to their wine and then they would have these incredible ceremonial rituals. And during these ceremonies, they would learn things. And then they were discouraged from doing these things by the Roman emperor. And so they would then move their ceremonies. He found them.

Was it in Spain? I think. I forget. But he tracked the exact same ritualistic and the same depictions of gods and the same pottery with the same psychedelic laced compounds that you could get. They could get evidence of it and the molecules are still intact. Yeah, amazing, amazing, amazing stuff. I wonder if Sophocles was tripping when he wrote his plays.

I mean, that would explain Oedipus. It would explain a lot of things. plays. I mean, that would explain Oedipus. It would explain a lot of things. But just the fact that ancient Greece was, I mean, it was the original source of democracy, right? The original source of so much information that if you go to all the ancient wise people that we respect and revere, how many of them participated in this ritual in ancient Greece? And it's really interesting because it was such a hub of thought, right? And such a hub of innovation in terms of like societal structure and the way we treated people. Oh, and I mean, obviously, one of the ways that they maintained democracy was by enslaving

certain people to do the shit work, right? Which was a model actually that people like Jefferson invoked, you know, quite literally. They said, this is how the Greeks were able to make democracy, is they solve the problem of who's going to do the shit work. Jesus. Yeah. That's what's so dark is that people have this ability to dehumanize other people. Yes, they do.

And make people, like you were talking about Nepal, the structure where the shoemaker is the lowest form and a literal untouchable. Yeah. Like you're not allowed to touch them. But look, it's not so foreign to us. Like what's a whites-only water fountain except for that? Right. Right. And I think sometimes we forget just how close we are chronologically to that. Yes. You know, I mean, my parents lived in the South for two years when my dad was doing his military service in the late 50s. And it was all that. You know, I mean, and my brother was born, you know, when all that was happening. And, you know, I went to the March on Washington in my stroller.

Whoa. Yeah, yeah. There's a picture somewhere of me in my stroller. I was sleeping, but my parents went to the March on Washington. That's pretty wild. And you can tell it's the March on Washington, I mean, because there's just a certain, there's a look to the March on Washington. Dude, you've been progressive from the womb. Exactly. You got OG street cred in the progressive world. But actually, Joe, I don't. I mean, that's one of the reasons I wrote this book is, But actually, Joe, I don't. I mean, that's one of the reasons I wrote this book is, of course, you're right. I'm a liberal Democrat, but I see free speech as central to that. And the real problem for me on campuses now is that free speech has been coded as conservative. So you're right. It is in my blood. And, you know, come on. I mean, I was in the Peace Corps. I'm Jewish. I have a PhD. I'm like a cartoon of a liberal Democrat.

And if you went on to like, Americans for Democratic Action, you took their little tests about what's a Democrat. I mean, pro-gun control, anti-capital punishment, right down the line, each and every one, except I'm a zealot about free speech. And for a whole variety of unfortunate political reasons, that's now been coded as conservative. So at the place I work, there are a lot of people, generally people that don't know me, they've just read things by me, that think I'm a Republican. Wow.

And it just cracks me up because like, why else would you be mouthing off about free speech? Because that's a very conservative idea that basically lets white people engage in hate speech that hurts minorities. Isn't that crazy? It is crazy. But that's where we are. Imagine pigeonholing free speech into that definition. Well, that's the reason that Signe Wilkinson, the cartoonist, and I wrote the book, is we wanted to look backwards to remind really our younger readers

that Frederick Douglass and Suzy B. Anthony and Martin Luther King, they were all free speech zealots. They had to be. Do you think it's what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation, that it's more convenient and there's such a temptation to just silence people that you disagree with, that they've ignored the reality of discourse and that it's so important to work out who's right. And it actually strengthens your position on things. It doesn't harm your position. And it actually brings more people to your side than it does push them away. Yeah, it does. I mean, bullying people is not a good way to convince them. Like you can bring them to heal, right? And you can get them

to say certain words like mantras. But if you want to persuade them, bullying is not a good system. But it's interesting, you mentioned discourse and we want to stamp out things that we think are harmful. I mean, I think that that's something else really important that's changed, I think, maybe in the past two decades is, you know, what I call a kind of psychologizing of politics, whereby if you say something I disagree with, it's not just that I disagree with it, or I think it's wrong for the following reasons. It's that you harm me. You know, you microaggress me. You triggered me. You know, you hurt my soul. Your speech is violence. Exactly. You know, and I think that's of relatively recent vintage.

And just like lots of things, I think it has complicated origins and not entirely bad ones. I think part of it comes from greater awareness of mental health, which I think is overall a plus. Right. But I would argue that this is a place where it's been a minus. a place where it's been a minus. That is, the application of the psychological frame to these discussions has ultimately led us to a whole bunch of cul-de-sacs. You know, I often say to my students, look, if you're microaggressed by something I say in class, you tell me you are. I basically have one thing to say in response. I'm sorry. Like, I didn't want to offend you, but I wouldn't have anything else to say. I wouldn't say you weren't offended because I don't know that. And I wouldn't say

you weren't harmed because I can't look into your soul to say that. I think I would just simply say it's not my intention. Right, right, right. But this is a lazy way to communicate. Well, it's- Because you're always a victim and you're always looking to call people out for this and for that. And it's like- And also, I think, unfortunately, all this rhetoric feeds on itself and it teaches people to feel a certain way. Yeah. Right. It teaches people to feel certain harm. And look, I'm not a sticks and stones will break my bones, but names will never hurt me guy. I think words do hurt. Right. But once you make hurt the barometer of what you're going to say and not say or allow and not allow, I mean, forget it.

There's also intent. And words are supposed to convey intent. And one of the problems is when you make more and more words magic words that you can't say, you do two things. One, you limit discourse because then you have less words that you're allowed to use to form your sentence. And the English language is so nuanced. Words can mean multiple things. And then two, you're doing that and you're also, you're empowering those words that you can't use. So now when someone uses those words, like, Jesus, did he say that? Jesus, did he say that? You know? And the more we add to that pile, the more it gives people that are trying to hurt you weapons. They have more rocks on their side now.

And it adds to the stigma, right? Yeah. And it adds to the sense of fear. Lenny Bruce did a bit about that in the 1960s, remember? And he'd go like, N-word, N-word, N-word. And then he'd say the S-word and he'd say all these other things. And he'd say, look, you know, if we just keep doing that enough, then the end of the riff was, he said, like, no little black kid will come home crying from school because a white boy called him the N word. I mean, that was sort of his takeaway. Like, is we have to try to just kind of deprive these words of their hurt, of their power. And

look, there are examples of that in recent history. I mean, think about the term queer, right? I mean, when I was a kid, queer was one of the worst things that you could call somebody, right? And now there are queer studies departments in American universities, right? Right. Because the Lenny Bruce thing kind of worked, right? You kept saying queer, queer, queer, queer, queer, and you gave it a different set of associations and you defanged it. Right. Right.

That is interesting. That's a good example of a word that's evolved and become an acceptable word. Not only that, but like preferred. And sometimes doesn't even mean gay. Right. Like that's where it gets real slippery. It doesn't mean necessarily gay. It means like, I'm whatever.

I'm queer. You know, it's weird. Right. And look, you know, whatever. I'm queer. You know, it's weird. Right. And look, you know, that's good, too. I mean, it's good. I think ambiguity is good. I think we get into our worst places when, again, we're too certain. Too binary. You know, and yes, it's going to mean different things to different people. It's changing over time. It meant something very different when I was a high school kid than it does today. And that's the good stuff, I think.

I mean, for me, it's the good stuff. Dude, we just need to read each other's minds. Yeah, get back to that little Elon Musk thing we're going to insert. Maybe. Yeah. Maybe that's what's going to get us out of this little game we're playing with language. Because if people are doing that, they're looking to be offended. They're trying hard to be offended, trying to play a game.

Instead of trying to just rationally communicate with you, instead of trying to find out how you think and expressing themselves in a very polite and maybe even a gentle way, instead of doing that, you're playing a game where you're trying to be offended, looking to be offended, looking to keep someone on the defensive. It's annoying. It's annoying.

It's an annoying way to communicate. And it becomes much like tennis is a game. It becomes a game, right? It becomes a game that people play verbally. Right. And a cul-de-sac is really what it is, I think, in the sense that it interrupts discussion. You know, when I give this rap to my students about how problematic this whole like psychological frame is, they'll often say like you're denying our feelings. And I say, well, it's the opposite. Actually, I would never deny your feelings. And it's precisely the undeniability of your feelings that makes this such a poor venue for discussion. Like I can't tell you how you're feeling or how you should feel. But what I can tell you is that when you're feeling becomes a trump card. Right. Yeah. We're not going to be able to communicate anymore. Right. You know, because, you know, words do offend. They do. Right. And, you know, I don't go out of my way to offend people. But I know that because I'm a journalist and a historian. Right. that sometimes I'm going to write or say things that will offend people.

I think that comes with the territory, you know. And I think if what we decide is that we're never going to offend each other, we're actually never going to learn from each other. Well, especially when you're dealing with people that have this broad range of sensitivities. Like what would offend one person would never offend you. And what would offend me would probably be like horrendous to someone else. Yeah. And look, you know, I mean, there's a story that begins our little book that is right on point involving Mary Beth Tinker, who was the 13-year-old who wore the armband to Warren Harding Middle School in Des Moines in 1965.

Armband? Yeah, a black armband to protest the Vietnam War. And he was sent home. And that later became the court case Tinker v. Des Moines, in which the Supreme Court said that neither students nor teachers shed their free expression rights at the schoolhouse gate. So she's a great symbol of, there she is, with her black armband. Well, Mary Beth Tinker isn't that much older than I am. You ever hang out with her?

He's a good friend, actually. Oh, it's a he now? No, no, no, no, she. I thought you said he's a good friend. No, no, Just a terrific person. Do they have peace signs? That's her. Yeah.

Anyway, she's become a friend, and she came up to my class at Penn. And she did her presentation. By the way, she still has the armband, and she puts it on students. And, of course, I'm a historian. I'm like, shouldn't that be in the National Archives? Right, the same armband. Like, you're just carrying it around. Like, do you also have a copy of the Declaration of Independence in your purse? But it's great, actually. I mean, it's a great teaching tool. And Mary Beth is absolutely fabulous.

So she tells her story about getting sent home and eventually getting the ACLU to represent her and becoming what she is, which is this kind of great symbol and also voice for free speech. And the students take it in and they say, look, you know, Ms. Tinker, you were fighting the good fight, right? You were fighting the war in Vietnam. This Milo Yiannopoulos clown, like this Ann Coulter jokester, like this Ben Shapiro hoaxer, they just hurt people. Why should we allow them to speak? And she had a very, I think, important and pointed response. She said, listen, at my middle school, there were kids who had fathers and brothers and uncles. They were fighting and some of them dying in Southeast Asia.

dying in Southeast Asia. You don't think they were hurt by this snot-nosed kid wearing this symbol saying that their loved one was risking their life for a lie? Like, you don't think that hurt them? Like, if that's what you think, like, you're not thinking. Like, of course it hurt them. So once that becomes like your, you know, your barometer, your measure of what's going to be allowed as speech, forget Mary Beth Tinker. You know, forget anything because words do hurt. Right. That in part was the point. Right. That was the point of the symbol.

Right. Again, I'm not saying that Mary Beth intended to hurt anybody because I can assure you that she didn't. But what I'm saying is it effectively hurt people. right? Because speech, especially challenging speech, does. And the students, they took this in and they said, look, free speech, it's just about who has power and who doesn't. And the people with power, they love to talk about free speech because they've got power. And Mary Beth Tinker is like, hold on. Wait a minute. I was a 13-year-old girl.

Speech was the only power I had. And that's really our point here, right, is that, you know, when you start to restrict it in whatever way, formally and informally, right, even with the best of intentions. It's people without power, ultimately, that are going to suffer. You know, it's people at the bottom that are going to get hurt, right? Because they need speech more than anybody else. Before the 1960s, students had no speech rights that the courts or the Constitution was willing to recognize. So, you know, if a student said something in school that the teacher didn't like, they could just send them home, you know. And it's because of Mary Beth Tinker and the other kids who protested that now it's not like that, right? And of course, we can debate the degree to which this should be allowed. And should you be able to wear

a Confederate flag on your T-shirt or, you know, an anti-abortion symbol? And these are all important things to talk about. But even the reason we're talking about them is because Mary Beth Tinker, who was 13, who had no power other than her speech, stood up for her speech. Even though, yes, it hurt people, right, because speech does that. But at the end of the day, you know, that's really the message that I want our young people to get, right, is that the real reason I think we need to hold on to free speech is we live in an unequal society like all societies are. And we live in a society with all sorts of unfairness, all sorts of injustice like all societies have. All right. And if you want to

do anything about that, you got to let everyone talk. That's the only way. The only way to make anything better, to right anything wrong, to right any wrong is to maintain our free speech. Have you ever had a debate with someone who believes that deplatforming is a valid way to- All the time. What do they say? Well, look, I mean, again, I think with the best of intentions, I don't like to question people's motives. And I think the people on the deplatforming side, I think they believe what they believe for good reasons, right? They want to protect certain populations at the school, especially minorities,

from some pretty offensive and awful speech, you know? And I understand that. And I respect it to a degree. That is, I respect their goal. But, you know, well, where to start? I mean, A, like, who's going to be so offensive that our minority students can't hear him or her? Who's going to make that call? B, are you sure the minority students are going to be offended? How do you know that? C, aren't you condescending to them just a little if you assume that they can't handle this? All right. And D, even if it is offensive to them, how do you know they'll benefit by being insulated from it? Like, can we find like a cognitive psychologist or, you know, anybody who does like behavior therapy to tell us that the way to help somebody who is afraid or threatened by something is to insulate them from

it? That's not how it works. That makes things worse. So I mean, I know I'm throwing out a lot there, but I think there are many different objections to this. And again, I want to be totally clear, I'm not questioning that the deplatforming people want to help. I'm just questioning whether they do. When I was in high school, Barney Frank came to our school and debated some conservative

guy with an American flag on his lapel. And I think I was probably like 14 or 15 years old and they brought us into this auditorium and Barney Frank just demolished this guy. He was so much more clever and interesting and, you know, just made really good points. And it was cool to watch because I got to see one guy's perspective that seemed to me to be, what's a good way to put it? It seemed like he was bullshitting. But he was bullshitting in a weird, like, he was pretending the world is different than it is

and he was going to trick us kids into saying in this way of saying it that was very like almost hollywood movie-esque and uh barney frank just dismantled him and i remember sitting there going wow this is interesting like listening he's like this guy had his chance, and then this guy has his chance. And this guy's got better, more well-formed thoughts. He's more articulate. He's more clever. And I like that guy better. And it's like, that's what you need to see. And this idea that everything needs to be an echo chamber is fucking crazy. Because then you leave out the possibility of these moments where someone does get dismantled. And this is what we said earlier.

The answer to bad speech is not deplatforming. It's better speech. So you don't need to take a guy like Milo out of the ecosphere. You need to have someone debate him who's fucking good. And you got to go, hey, man, we got a heavy hitter on this side. We got to bring somebody in that really knows their shit. You know, I mean, Ben Shapiro has made a career of trouncing people that were not as verbally skilled as him. If you go and look at his Instagram or his YouTube page, he's fantastic at pointing out logical fallacies and a lot of these

like really simple utopian ideas that a lot of these kids bring to him and he points it out and he's got a very fast way of talking and you can't compete with him. He's very articulate. And when he does that, these kids just get battered. I mean, there's like dozens and dozens of videos of him doing that. And look back to Milo and even Ben Shapiro. I mean, you also give these people a lot more power and oxygen when you try to shut them down. And that's, I think, another theme in the history of free speech and censorship, right? Yes. One of the great ways to give somebody a bigger microphone is to try to take it away.

And we've seen this over and over again. I mean, the anti-slavery movement is a great example of that. I mean, there were gag rules in Congress like trying to prevent people from bringing in petitions that were anti-slavery petitions. And John Quincy Adams became this huge national hero, by the way, after he was president, right? When he was in Congress, and he was like our most distinguished ex-president ever. He was sort of a leading abolitionist in Congress, precisely because he violated the gag rule, right? Because the gag rule actually gave him more oxygen. The point, the goal of the gag rule, as per the name, was to gag Adams. It had the opposite effect.

And censorship almost always does. And it's also, there's so much censorship that's just so disingenuous. Like the reasoning behind it. Like one of the things about Shapiro is they always call him alt-right. Like, no, he's not. Like not even remotely he's he's just conservative he just happens to be a conservative jew and if you find out if you look into it he was the big of like one of the years when he was uh fame when he was becoming famous he was the

biggest target for anti-semitic hate online the biggest yeah and, he can point to like actual statistics of social media and show you the numbers. It's just, he's not alt-right, you know, he's a conservative and you can't, if you don't agree with him, that's, there's nothing wrong with disagreeing with him, but you form a good argument. Form a good argument. The guy's a master speaker. He's very good at speaking. So get a master speaker on the left and let's do the Barney Frank thing. Duke it out with him in the court of public opinion and let's see what's up. And also, you know, don't try to muzzle him because eventually, A, it won't work. And B, you know, like, don't have so much hubris, right? That's going to be used against you.

Like, it has been and it will be. Well, it goes further and further left. What's actually considered hate speech, it gets, once you get rid of all the real right crazy psychos, right? Then you start moving into, like, more conservative but, like, very reasonable people and, like, fuck them. And then next thing you know, yeah. It is a moving target. And look, this is why the history piece is important too. I mean, I'm glad you mentioned Barney Frank. I assume he was your representative at the time because you were the Newton, right? I think he was. I don't, I was a 14 year old kid. Yeah, he could have been elsewhere, right. Could have been elsewhere in the Boston

area. Anyway, you know, Frank's a fascinating figure, important figure in the history of the Democratic Party, but also in the history of gay rights, right? Because we're the first out, like, national figures. Well, I think the gay rights story is really important to this discussion, and here's why. You know, it won't surprise you that because being gay and gay activity was illegal, gay publications were legal, too. And they were widely censored across this country. And the Supreme Court actually intervened in the 1950s and said that like some of these bodybuilding magazines that were popular among especially gay men were protected. You could do them, right? That was the trigger of the gay rights movement in

this country. Bodybuilding. Right? Well, no, not bodybuilding in particular, but those- Rulings by the fact that, you know, now it was legal for them to engage in the speech. Right. I mean, just think about the way all that activity is tabooed. Right. It's not surprising that those publications were hugely central in allowing people to connect in every sense. Right. And so that's a really good example, it seems to me. Yeah. Right. And so that's a really good example, it seems to me. Right. Of why speech is so important, because, you know, you take it away and then people who are stigmatized and people who are oppressed. Right. They won't be able to connect. They won't be able to do the things that they need to do to change this world. Yeah. And that's the gay rights story. It's about their free speech. Yeah. Yeah, it really is. And that moment, I don't think Barney was out then. Yeah, probably not. And he was competing. Now I remember the guy on the other end was a member of the Moral Majority. Yeah. Do you remember them? Oh, of course. Yeah. That guy was a representative.

I remember Barney Frank made fun of him for his American flag on his lapel. Well, it was started by Cary Falwell, Cary Falwell Sr. Oh, was was started by Jerry Falwell, Jerry Falwell Sr. Oh, was it really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right after. What year was that? It was really, you know, late 70s, early 80s. That was kind of the heyday. And they were influential in helping Reagan get elected. Wow. Well, that was the first time that religion was really used in a political sense, right? It was during the Reagan administration, Reagan campaign. Again, I wouldn't say the first time, but I would say that Reagan was very successful in

weaponizing a certain sort of- Evangelical. Evangelical conservative, right? Let's remember, Jimmy Carter's an evangelical conservative, right? I'm sorry, he was an evangelical Christian, right? And very openly so, but obviously he interpreted that politically in a different way. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah. I think kids and all of us would be way better off if there was open and free debate and if they didn't pull fire alarms when people that they don't agree with started talking. And it just seems so strange to me that that's controversial to say in 2021. It seems like there has been a there's a missing chunk of progress with this adoption of free of safe spaces and trigger warnings and all this shit that everybody thinks is just a part of the program now.

program now. And, you know, I would say, actually, I think the worst outcome is the one that we can't really measure, which is just kind of the sort of the spirit of self-censorship. Yeah, exactly. When you actually try to look at it and you see how many trigger warnings literally there have been, there haven't been that many. It's just that what you're creating is, again, a spirit of censorship. Like what you were talking about before with people being afraid to talk about affirmative action. Exactly, exactly. But, you know, to the point of trigger warnings, I mean, when I taught at NYU, I taught a very big lecture, big sweaty lecture class about the culture wars in American history, including many things we're talking about.

And we did a unit about pornography and pornography censorship and regulation and all that. And as part of that unit, I showed a film actually by an NYU colleague called The Price of Pleasure, which is an anti-porn movie. And one of the ways it tries to make its argument is like by including some awful, violent, misogynist clips. And what I would do before I showed that movie is I would just describe in clinical detail what these clips were. And just to tell the students- Where are the clips from? From what year?

They were from porn movies from, this would have been probably the early aughts, something like that. And all sorts of terrible stuff. And look, for all, and I would say to the students- Was that unusual back then though, to have that kind of, like when did that kind of porn become normal? Well, I think after the internet revolution. I mean, you know, I would say somewhere in the late nineties. Yeah. Yeah. Or maybe even later than

that, because not everyone had, people didn't have as much access to the internet. I mean, anyway, to the point of triggers, I mean, I would tell the students what it was in. And I would say, like, I'm going to show the movie during these times. Like, if you don't want to see that, you don't have to come to that. Right. And for all practical purposes, that was a trigger warning. Right. And I think in some instances, that's legitimate. Yeah. Problem is, of course, is we get this concept creep where we now drag it over everything. Right. So people I mean, there was an incident a few years ago where like kids demanded trigger warnings for bloody movie scenes in a course about horror movies. Oh, boy.

And I'm like, look, dude, I'm not a bloody movie scene guy either. I get that part. Yeah. But what I don't get is selecting a course, an elective course. On horror movies. On horror movies if bloody movie scenes aren't your jam. That's so silly. That I don't get.

It is silly. And there have been all sorts of things like that there have been people who have demanded trigger warnings for Downton Abbey really because there's bad shit that happens in Downton Abbey right there's like sexual coercion and there's suicide and there's like I mean you know there's like some ugly stuff yeah you don't get your warnings just no no but trigger warnings for those violent porn movies that kind of makes sense because you're talking about something that's insanely disturbing. Right.

And also it's like, I wonder what happened there. Like, how did we go from, if you go to the ancient nudie films, it was all pretty straightforward. Just men and women kissing and then eventually having sex. Right? And then you go into the 1980s, kind of the same thing. Like, when did the whole violent thing happen? Like, when did that take place? Well, I do think that there were so-called snuff films. There were violent movies. There were snuff films, sure. There absolutely were, you know, including some very horrible things. I mean, I think, you know, I think that, you know,

if we had an evolutionary psychologist here, they would just say, look, it's pretty simple. What happens is the Internet creates demand for variety, right? Right. Because it presents an infinite number of possibilities. So in the pre-Internet days, right, you know, you can only produce so much material, and it probably has to appeal to a fairly wide spectrum, right? Once the internet kicks in, right, you can slice and dice everything to ever narrow audiences. I see what you're saying. Right? Specialists.

Exactly. They're going to be people with all sorts of, you know, all kinds of fetishes and all kinds of awful things. And you can tailor your product to them. Now, where does that fit in your opinion of free speech? Well, look, I mean, you know, I, as an educator and as a parent, I'm troubled by the fact that lots of young men in this country are getting their sexual education from porn. I'm troubled by that. And I'm glad it didn't exist when I was a kid. I mean, I don't, to me, the interesting question isn't why 16-year-old boys watch porn. It's why they don't do it like 24-7. I mean, I think if it existed when I was a 16-year-old boy, I think I would have been very tempted to do that.

And I think it would have fucked me up in a whole number of ways. But that's not a good argument for getting rid of it. That's an argument for trying to promote a different kind of sexual education. Right? Porn is sex ed. It's just bad sex ed. You know, it's a way of socializing people, especially young men, to a certain kind of understanding of what sex is or should be. And I think a lot of it is a very narrow and flawed understanding. But the answer to that is not, OK, let's get rid of all the porn, right? The answer to that is for our institutions, especially educational institutions, to put forth a different model. But what about when porn stretches off into violence? And then is that protected? Well, look, I mean, some of it isn't,

right? I mean, just by law, right? The stuff involving minors, for example, right? Yes, but that's specifically different, right? I mean, that's against the law, and I think almost every reasonable person thinks that that's reasonable. Look, Joe, no freedom is truly absolute. Right. No freedom, including free speech, right? You can't call the White House and say that you're going to kill the president. Is that a quote? Is that a restriction on your speech? Well, of course it is. And I think reasonable people think that's a reasonable restriction, right? I can't say to one of my

students, I really like that sweater that you're wearing. And if you wear it again, I'll give you an A, right? Is that a quote restriction on my speech? Of course it is. And by the way, one that I'm happy to abide by, right? So, you know, there is no right of any kind that is absolute, right? I think the only interesting question is, which are the kinds that actually should be restricted? That's where the question lies. That's what I'm saying. Like, different people have different ideas of what should and shouldn't be okay. They will. And I guess my plea would be, let's have that discussion.

Let's have a free speech discussion about free speech that is free and unbridled, where the person who's making the plea for having all the porn be allowed is an automatically vilified as a misogynist or a woman hater. Although surely some of the consumers of that product are exactly that. Yeah, let's actually have that discussion. So I mean, in some ways, this goes back to Mary Beth Tinker, because you know, when the court ruled that she could wear this armband, the court did not say you can say whatever the fuck you want in school at any time because that would be mayhem. Right. You can't do it. What they said is if the school wants to restrict the speech, it has to show that there was a threat of material and substantial disruption to learning.

of material and substantial disruption to learning. And by the way, in that particular case, in a school district of 18,000, seven kids wore armbands to school. Wow. And there was no, apparently during, Mary Beth has told me, during the oral argument at one point, Thurgood Marshall asked, okay, how many kids were wearing the armbands? They said seven. And Marshall said, and what exactly were you afraid of? Like, what was going to be, and apparently then Marshall fell asleep,

which in his later years he was known to do. And Mary Beth, who was actually at the hearing, said that's when they knew they had won. That's hilarious. So, I mean, that's a good example, right? Like, you just can't, you can't stand up in the middle of the class and say, you know, Mr. Jones is the N-word or the F-word, right? You can't do that. And we all understand that, right?

But you can wear an armband. And the point is if the school wants to restrict it, the onus has to be on the school. It has to be on the institution to show why this is necessary. Like the kid doesn't have to make that plea, right? The default position should be the kid is a citizen and by the way, a future voter. Right. And like the court said, like you don't like your rights don't disappear at the schoolhouse gate. In fact, the school is where you're supposed to learn about those rights. Right. Now, this is not, by the way, a settled question.

And you may have read that the Supreme Court just yesterday was hearing a case about this. It's in Mahoney, Pennsylvania, up near Joe Biden country near Scranton. question. And you may have read that the Supreme Court just yesterday was hearing a case about this. It's in Mahoney, Pennsylvania, up near Joe Biden country near Scranton. And this is one I think you would love to know. And I'm surprised you even haven't had the cheerleader on this, the cheerleader case that's ringing a bell. Here's what it is very briefly. 15-year-old kid, she tries out for the cheerleading team. She's the jv he wants to get to varsity and she finds out on a saturday that he wasn't elevated to varsity when she finds out she's at a convenience store buying something she's i think with her mom she couldn't drive at the time and she instagrams to her group chat maybe 200 200 kids, fuck school, fuck cheerleading, fuck everything.

Okay. And remember, this is just to the kids in her chat. But there's another kid on the chat whose mom is like an assistant cheerleading coach. And she shows it to the mom and takes a screenshot of it. And the school suspended her and said she could never be in cheerleading. school suspended her and said she could never be in cheerleading. And there were other disciplinary things, too. And this case has worked its way up to the Supreme Court, and it was heard just yesterday. And the questions from the justices, I listened to some of them because you can do that now, they were exactly on this question. They were now, remind me again, how this 15-year-old saying fuck cheer, how is that going to disrupt what you do at school? Oh, and by the way, do you really want to be monitoring all the chats of all the kids?

Right. I mean, that's – So short-sighted and stupid. And that's how they're going to learn like what democracy is? Like you're going to be monitoring all their internet shit and saying if what – Yeah. Like, you know. You're a tyrant. It really is. Like, you're going to be monitoring all their internet shit and saying if what they like, like, you know, you're a tyrant. It really is. Yeah. You know, and it'll be interesting to see how the court rules because again, no right is absolute. And we can all imagine things that this kid could have done even on her phone in the convenience store that the

school might reasonably sanction. Like, let's suppose she had shared answers to a test that she wasn't supposed to have access to, right? That would disrupt the pedagogical process, right? And it would be reasonable, right? For the school to say, no, no, no, you can't do that, even though you weren't on school property. Right. She's just expressing herself to her friends. And in fuck patois that every teenager uses, right? I mean, you know, come on. It's funny. If I was the parent, I'd be like, ah. Whoever that parent is that sent a screenshot, they should be forced to pay all the legal fees for all this. I don't think that's going to happen. And actually, you know, the school organizations, like the principals organizations and the

superintendents organization, also the Biden's Department of Education, they rallied around the school. Like they submitted briefs to allow the school to do this. And their argument is, look, you know, there's all this terrible bullying going on on the net, which is true. There's sometimes awful racist shit. We've got to be able to sanction that. And I think the response, the right response to that is, look, we have anti-harassment laws. Right. We already have those.

Right. And you can use those carefully if you like. to that is, look, we have anti-harassment laws. We already have those, right? Yeah. And you can use those carefully if you like. We can't give you a blank check. Right. Like, that's not how America works or should work. Like, we don't just walk around trying to regulate everybody's texts. Especially kids. Oh, come on.

I mean, they're just learning how to use these phones anyway. This is a whole new thing over the last couple decades of kids being able, come on. I mean, they're just learning how to use these phones anyway. This is a whole new thing over the last couple of decades of kids being able to do this. Exactly. There's no real boundaries and real clear set way of using it correctly. And especially in group chats, people love saying crazy shit in group chats. That's one of the funnest things, right? Yeah. Listen, man, we just went through three hours, believe it or not. My goodness. Right? Yeah.

Listen, man, we just went through three hours, believe it or not. My goodness. And thank you. I really appreciate it. Your book is available now, right? Yeah. Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn, Jonathan Zimmerman. And co-authored with Signe Wilkinson, who is, by the way, the first woman in American history to win the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning. Oh, all right.

So there's cartoons in here. Yes. She is a giant. All right. A genius of the craft. Well, listen, I really enjoyed talking to you. Thank you very much.

It was fun. Thank you, Jim. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.