The Joe Rogan Experience - #1781 - Coleman Hughes

Episode Date: February 21, 2022

Coleman Hughes is a writer and opinion columnist who specializes in issues related to race, public policy, and applied ethics. He's also the host of the "Conversations with Coleman" podcast.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Good to go. All right, Coleman, welcome. Nice to meet you. Great to be here, man. What is X Factor? Is that your podcast?

No, I wish. X Factor, this is a Lauryn Hill shirt. Oh, I've seen you wear that on more than one occasion. You know, I just love this shirt. Oh, okay. It's comfortable. I look good in it. feel good in it thank you you do look good um i'm glad you agree with jamie that golf is a problem what kind of problem motherfucker it's a good problem to have all all he cares about is golf these days there's a lot going on in the golf world you know i just i resent golf because my dad is, and I think he really wanted me to be good.

At least I sensed that, and I never was. It's such an awkward swing. It's a very weird movement. I was watching Tiger Woods swing on YouTube yesterday for whatever strange reason. Interesting. Talking about how good. Look, man, I'm scared. I told you I'm fucking scared of golf.

I can't. I can't do it. I don't have that kind of time. I feel like with every other sport, if you're a pretty athletic person, you cannot embarrass yourself in a short amount of time. Right. With golf, it seems like there's very little correlation between general athleticism and whether you can do this swing. So here's a slow-mo of Tiger Woods. And, you know, what it is is, like, I was looking at the way his body moves,

and then I remember hearing about all the different surgeries he's had on his back. And I'm like, it kind of makes sense. If you look at the amount of torque. Right here is where the torque starts. Let it drive through. Like, this amount of fucking power, it is such a weird movement of the body. And you have to be loose and strong at the same time, right? Yeah, you got to keep your arms stiff,

but your wrists loose, and your hips loose, but your legs stiff. Everything's counterintuitive. A baseball swing is so much more intuitive to me. Maybe that's because i played more baseball growing up but i think it is more naturally with the grain of how the body would just like if a caveman just picked something up yeah club he would swing it more like a baseball bat than like a golf club certainly it makes sense because the golf thing is down low yeah right and

so it has you have to stand sideways and it has to go past your legs yeah i'm trying to find this this guy he's a long drive hitter. He's pretty new to this thing. Jacked he is. He's huge. He's a baseball player, but he's got this very unique swing. He calls it the NOAC swing. He does a giant baseball step.

Happy Gilmore swing. He blasts the ball, too. Oh, my God. Oh, Jesus Christ. But I've tried doing it. It really fucks up your entire swing for everything else you're doing. It's only made for hitting the ball as far as possible, which is, yeah, you can't putt like that. But can you make it accurate and do that?

You can because the long drive thing, you have to hit it within the fairway. You can't just smash it as far as possible and count as far as it went. It has to be within the lines kind of thing. I can't imagine that there isn't some giant linebacker type dude that if you could teach him correctly, they would have immense power. Like, can you imagine if you could teach Francis Ngannou how to drive correctly? That ball might never land. Well, there's a picture of Tyson Fury swinging, which I think he's pretty new to it, and he's a giant person. He's enormous.

It's the same kind of thing. The amount of torque. Yeah. It doesn't look as impressive. You also don't have the other part, which I've been figuring out as I've learned. Swinging as hard as you can doesn't make the ball go as far as it will if you swing nice and soft and hit it in the right spot on the club. That's the same thing with pool. With a break shot in pool, you don't want to hit it as hard as you can.

You want to kind of hit it smooth. It's strange, but that doesn't get out your frustration of hitting a bad shot, which feels good too. I kind of think breaking a club over your leg when you have a bad shot might be very helpful, but it's not etiquette. It's a bit terrible. Why would it be helpful to break a club over your leg? It would feel good to get out that, because some people want to throw the club

or throw a ball when you do bad. Yeah. Because you're frustrated with yourself. It's all about yourself. You can't yell at yourself. There's players that have gotten in trouble for that because they catch it on mic. Right, right, right, yeah.

So, like, how do you deal with that mind game if you could just break something over your leg? I got a theory about why people like Tyson Fury. It's not just because he's awesome, but also because he has back fat. I have no idea who Tyson Fury is. You don't know who Tyson Fury is? No.

Really? He's the heavyweight champion of the world. I don't follow it. You don't know who Tyson Fury is? No. He's one of the most extraordinary heavyweight boxers ever. He's 6'9". He's a gypsy.

And he's a fucking character. They call him the Gypsy King. Wow. He was very fat at one point in time, and then he got pretty thin. But he still, in between fights in particular, he carries a lot of back fat. He does not look quick or particularly strong. Dude, he's amazing. It's interesting.

It's all deceptive. First of all, he's huge. He's so tall. I mean, he's 6'9". And he just has an immense reach. Immense reach all, he's huge. He's so tall. I mean, he's six foot nine and he just has an immense reach, immense reach. And he's very talented. Like it's not just a physical advantage. You know, those gypsies, like, I don't know if you've ever seen any of those documentaries on bare knuckle boxers, bare knuckle boxers in the UK. It's like these gypsies from like Brad Pitt and Snatch. Did you ever see that movie?

You didn't? No. Are you just reading books all the time and just being an intellectual? Like what are you doing with your time? Yeah, I read books. I read articles. I record podcasts. I make songs.

I watch documentaries. I watch Netflix shows. They've done documentaries on these people. Okay. There's a whole culture of Bare Knuckle boxers that live in caravans. They live in these trailers, and they travel around and challenge each other. And because of YouTube, these guys have videos. So they have videos where they're challenging each other like,

Bobby O'Dullivan, you're a fucking bag of shite. I'm going to fucking take you out. And they have these ridiculous YouTube challenge videos where they talk about each other. How do you think they compare to professional boxers if you put them in a ring? It's a different thing when you're doing bare knuckle because you can break your hand so easily. So you have to be a little bit more cautious. There's a thought. Have you ever seen pictures of old-timey boxers?

They stand like this. Put them up, yeah. There's a thought that they were punching like that because they wanted to hit only with these two knuckles in the front. Right. Because it's less likely to break your hands. Right. And, you know, there's also, it's probably they just didn't know any better. Like, they didn't, you know, no one had come along that could punch like Mike Tyson. It had, like, perfect technique.

And so they thought that this is probably the way to do it to like hit each other. But have you seen this documentary One Punch? No. One Punch is a collection of stories of people who have killed someone accidentally with one punch. Oh, wow. Bar fight, single punch. They fall down, hit their head on a curb, the side of a table, and they die.

And it goes through their legal stories, how they got in the fight. And it's just this fascinating recalibration of what you think is possible with a small amount of violence. It's like you never think if you're going to punch someone once that they're going to die. I think that. Maybe you do. I try to tell people that all the time. You're very close to violence. But I think people who aren't close to it don't realize how quickly things can spin out of control.

The thing is the hitting the head. And this is apparently this was in Bob Saget's autopsy. They believe that he blacked out and fell back and hit his head. And that is what caused massive skull fractures in his head. And, you know, some people think like, oh my God, maybe foul play was involved, but apparently there's no way. Apparently the door, you know, he had a key card to get into the door of the hotel. No one had been in it since he had been in there.

No one had left. So he opened the door, he went inside and, you know, he had just done a show. And apparently he just fainted and banged the back of his head. And then there was a video. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Heather McDonald video. The writer Heather McDonald? No, the comedian Heather McDonald.

Have you seen the video of her? No, no. See if you can find that. Well, you definitely can find it. It's everywhere. She's on stage. And it's the craziest video on stage and it's kind of it's the craziest video because people think it's joke she's talking about how many vaccines

she's had she's like i'm double vax i'm boosted i got the shingles vaccine you know and and she right after saying that blacks out on stage falls completely, bangs her head off the ground, which is how people die. So give me some volume on this from the beginning. Did shows, meet and greets. No, no, go from the beginning. Never got COVID clear. No, go from the beginning so I could hear her talking about the vaccines. Here it goes.

Oh, sorry. Trigger warning. I don't mean to brag. I don't care, but i want you to know double vaxxed booster flu shot and i'm gonna be honest i have the shingle shot too and i still get my period what yes traveled went to mexico twice did shows meet and greets never got covid clearly jesus loves me the most seriously so nice so nice Oh, my Lord. Yeah.

So she fractured her skull doing that. Yeah. Poor woman. I mean, but that's just a coincidence. She was talking about the vaccine while that happened. Yeah. They call it instant pharma, which is horrible. But that's the phrase that I keep hearing online. There was a woman on German television.

The same thing happened to her recently. She was talking about vaccine mandates and talking about how important it is to mandate the vaccines, and she blacked out on television while talking about it. Strange. Just coincidence in the timing of when the sentence was said and when she blacked out. Yeah.

Yeah, but the point is falling back like that is fucking super dangerous. And a friend of mine, Kevin James, in fact, Kevin James from the King of Queens, he used to work as a bouncer in a club, in a nightclub. And one of the guys he worked with got into a bar fight. They were telling some drunk that he had to leave, whatever. And a fight broke out. He punches this guy. The guy falls back, bangs his head off the ground, and dead.

And the guy wound up doing time. Like, the bouncer wound up doing time for that. Yeah, the philosophers call this moral luck, right? It's like we both commit the same action. I punch someone, you punch someone. we both commit the same action. I punch someone, you punch someone. One of these person has a prior medical condition or just by pure dumb luck ends up tripping, hitting their head.

So we both did the same exact action. One of us committed homicide. One of us got into a bar fight. That doesn't actually speak to which one of us is a more moral human being. That's pure dumb luck. But the law can treat it as if you're a murderer and you're not, right? That's moral luck.

I think it's a very interesting concept. Texting while driving is another example. I've done it. I don't do it, you know, as a rule, but like I've done it in the past. Almost everyone has, you know. There's someone in the world where the first time they texted and drove they ran over like a five-year-old

yeah law of averages says that must have happened yeah and on the one hand we want to punish those things on the other hand you can't really call that person a moral monster when they're doing something a lot of people are doing and just being getting much luckier with. Yeah. There's an interesting distinction between someone choosing to do something evil versus an evil result. Like if your son dies because someone was texting and driving, it's the most horrible feeling. You'd probably be so furious and you'd want revenge you'd want to punish that person but it's not that they did it on purpose the difference between someone killing your son on purpose that's that's an evil act this is just thoughtless and shit luck and also not

and also not anticipating consequences. And that's why the law recognizes intention as a factor that distinguishes, say, one murder from a worse murder. Yeah. And I think the reason we recognize intention in the law is because clearly all human beings, we have this intuition that it's a different type of person who does a thing on purpose than does it by accident. Uh, one kind of person wishes you harm and probably will keep wishing you harm. The other, the other kind of person at worst was negligent. And I think there is, um, I think that's a very important observation to hold steady throughout our, uh, legal and non-legal judgments of people just in the culture, right? Like people want to eliminate the distinction between,

you know, saying, for instance, a racial slur, directing it at someone and saying the word in quotation marks, right? And I know that you're familiar with the fact that people erase the distinction between those two things. Oh, I'm very familiar. Yeah. I'm not that clueless that I haven't been paying attention to what's going on. Yeah. But the point is the same principle by which we all understand the difference between manslaughter and homicide and so forth should govern the way that we judge people for, should govern the way that we judge people for, you know, words and everything else, right? But certain people want to say intentions don't matter. That just, that can't make sense.

You know, you'd have to throw out our whole legal system, if that were true, or at least overhaul it. And I think that's an important principle to recognize. I think the conversations haven't been had enough, whether it is with someone doing something accidentally and having a horrible result versus doing it intentionally or someone using words versus someone that is actually trying to be racist. And there's definitely a difference in those things. And I think we, as a society, we have rules that we have decided upon. And then when someone violates those rules,

that person is a violator and that person needs to be judged and dealt with because of that. I think we have this sort of moral righteousness when it comes to uttering certain words or doing certain things. And the good thing about the judgment that comes out of that and the inner is conversations. It's like people start having conversations like, what is the difference? Why is it different? Like, what are you allowed to say? What are you not allowed to say and why?

You know, it's interesting with the N-word controversy that happened here. Right when that was happening, I was watching for the first time ever, I'm ashamed to admit, the five-part OJ documentary from ESPN from a while back. It's like it's been on my list to watch for a long time. I finally watched it and you'll remember there's this moment in the trial where uh you know it's now known that there's probably a mark firman n-word tape you know like this this cop that uh collect the glove at the scene has a history of using the n-word as a racial slur, directing it at people and so forth. And Chris Darden for the prosecution, with the jury out of the room, he looks at the judge.

He says, we cannot allow the jury to hear this tape. And here's why. Black people cannot hear the N-word and remain objective. And the jurors, they have to remain objective. So we can't allow them to hear. We can't admit this as evidence. That's fascinating that he's the prosecuting attorney. Prosecuting attorney made that argument. And then the defense, Johnny Cochran came back on the defense and he said, what the hell are you talking about? The idea that a black person can't hear the N-word in any context and remain rational, remain objective, understand the context of it, it's patronizing, it's

condescending, it's racist. I'm ashamed that you made this argument, right? And, you know, regardless of the merits of it, his, Johnny Cochran's view was seen to have sort of won the day among, among people. And they did admit much of, or at least parts of the tape and the jury heard the word. And basically the argument was among progressive people at that time in the nineties was it's condescending and patronizing to say that every, like any example of that word being spoken, just like scrambles black people's minds or something.

And I think there's been a huge sea change in what the progressive argument now is. The progressive argument now is much closer to Chris Darden's point of view that any example of this word being used, whether it's in quotation marks, whether you're talking about the word itself or whether it's being hurled as an insult, it's all the same. It's all so deeply shattering of the inner psyche of a black person. So I think at minimum, we should mark how much has changed there and who was making these arguments back then and who's making them now. And I worry that people are basically circling the wagon on top of that also has been accused of planting evidence. So there's like a two thing going on with Mark Furman. You're dismissing his validity, first of all, because he's doing something illegal.

He's planting evidence. And he might have planted blood too, right't that wasn't didn't they think it was alleged or the people were wondering and then on top of that he might have he might have racist perspectives so like you've got two things going on simultaneously and then also it's like everybody had seen the Rodney King video yes this was a big part of the oj case that a lot of people maybe have um forgotten but when people saw that rodney king video which is really one of the first viral videos and you see rodney king on the ground and these multiple white cops beating him with sticks and And the fact that those cops got off.

For no possible reason. Well, what was the story? That he was running from them and he was on PCP or something like that? What was the story? I don't remember the details, but as it dragged on and they keep beating him more and more senseless, it just becomes more and more obvious that there's no reason that they had to beat him that much, right? Yeah.

Yeah. And they got off. And they got off. And so when OJ got off, everybody was like, well, we got that one. Yeah. It was a thing where they felt like- It was a revenge mindset. Yes.

I think that that's very unhealthy. I have to say, I don't think, I mean, listen, it's a cliche that two wrongs don't make a right, but it's a very, it's a very deep cliche. It's a cliche for a reason. And, um, like the, like the notion that because the cops did something completely unforgivable, horrible to Rodney King and got off for it. And, you know, that did prove all of the wider in, you know, the wider points about the systemic practices of the LAPD. That's all valid. The fact that people couldn't separate those true and important points from this other trial about this, you know, this wealthy former football player that quite clearly killed his wife. You know, I think that we have to insist

that people be able to think two things at once. I mean, that's just one example of it. But, you know, it's possible to acknowledge everything true and valid about the Rodney King case and still say, I'm sorry, OJ is guilty. And there weren't that many people, certainly weren't that many black people at the time, it seems that we're really emphasizing that bright line that we can think two things at once here, folks. And it doesn't make us look good to conflate the two. It's actually not just. Well, there was a real underlying thought that the Los Angeles Police Department was corrupt. And it wasn't just that. It was also the Rampart Division.

And there was allegations that cops that were involved in that were also involved in the killing of Biggie. So there was a lot of shit going on with L.A. cops where there was no internet back then. So we have to remember back in the day, like these discussions were had with people just talking about it at a bar or over the dinner table and no one had like real data to pull from and there was no like real investigative journalism that was being done where you could show it i remember the rolling stone article on biggie's murder it implicated uh rampart i think it was i think they were saying it was rampart cops they i think they even narrowed it down to the specific cops they think had something to do

with the murder. Where there was a bunch of, and they know this was a fact, there was a bunch of rogue cops that were doing murders for hire. They were basically organized criminals that were operating under the gang of the Los Angeles Police Department.

Remember like Colors? Remember the movie Colors? Sean Penn? Penn Ice Cube or Ice-T rather had that song hit song colors it was a song with it was a movie about with Robert Duvall and Sean Penn about corrupt LA cops and so we kind of got it through pop culture we got it through conversations but when we when people saw the rodney king beating and then they saw that those guys got off that was one of the very first sort of like public acknowledgments like there's a real fucking problem with this imagine how many rodney kings there were that just didn't get filmed yeah and this is mean, we now live in an age just in the past 10 years, really, where everyone in America virtually has a fairly high definition camera in their pockets at all times. And some police departments have moved to universal body cams and so forth.

And that's been, I think that's changed incentives, you know, almost more than any law that we pass could. The understanding every cop has that when he or she is policing the public, the public can simply whip out their phones at any time. That has to seep into the consciousness of police officers knowing that they're being watched. the consciousness of police officers knowing that they're being watched. And, you know, that's a double edged sword, though, because on the one hand, it's way harder for a cop to abuse someone now, now that everyone can can film. On the other hand, because everyone has a phone in their pocket, the availability of bad things happening has just skyrocketed. Right. Yeah.

And in a country with over 300 million people, it gives us the impression that horrible things that are actually extremely rare are in fact happening all the time. Just by numbers. Just by numbers. are in fact happening all the time. Just by numbers. Just by numbers. And I mean, the way I think about this is, for instance, if we talk about unarmed civilians getting killed by the cops, unarmed citizens,

if America were exactly the same, but the size of Canada, like, you know, one ninth the population, it would mean that we would have roughly one ninth the interactions between cops and citizens and one ninth of the opportunities for things to go left. And one ninth of the videos of cops killing people unarmed. And it would seem like it were happening a lot less, but in fact, the state of the country would be the same. Right. So like just the fact that we have such a large population makes it feel like lightning strike rarity events are happening all the time. And the media obviously thrives on that. Well, those are the ones that are very popular and those are the ones that, um, people want to share. But there's a lot of those, there's a lot of ones that cops getting attacked too. And people don't seem to care about those. There's a website that I follow,

a Twitter, Instagram page rather called police posts. Go to a police post. There's one that they put up today about this guy responding to a call and this man is at the door and the cop is walking towards the door and the guy is saying hurry up she's choking on her own blood something to that extent. Is it? Yeah play this. No. Do it from the beginning so you can see.

Do it from the beginning because otherwise it's going to fuck it all up. Okay here give me some volume. Alright here we go. So the suspect is saying come come on come on she's choking on her blood come on so the guy's walking towards the door who's all in the house so so as the guy's walking towards the house. 999! 999! I've been shot! 999! As the guy's walking towards the house, the guy's standing in the, you can play it again, the guy's standing in the middle of the door, and he's got no shirt on, and he's saying, come on, you know, she's choking on her own blood.

And as he comes close, the guy just pulls out a gun and just opens fire at point-blank range and lights this cop up. This is a thing that, you know, when you see horrible interactions between cops and civilians, you don't see too many of those. But there's a ton of those. And if you follow— Cops see those, certainly. Well, they're terrified. Do you know how many cops have PTSD? They every day see people get shot, every day see people get run over by cars, like the amount of shock that's in their system.

And then every time they pull a car over and they have tinted windows, they don't know. They don't know what's going on inside that car. They don't know who the driver- There's a point I tried to make during the year of the George Floyd protests and riots. People would often say, well, look at Western Europe, look at Canada, look at all of these places where they have cops. And in certain of these places, the cops don't have guns. Sometimes they do. How come you're not seeing video? How come it's in america that we're seeing videos of cops killing unarmed people right yeah and uh i mean i think there there's a serious conversation to have to be had about the culture of the american police being being seriously flawed uh at the same time the fact that this happens in america means that policing in in America is not the same as policing in the UK and other countries, right? America is a country with more guns than people. And that fact alone

means that when a cop pulls over a suspect in America, as opposed to in almost any other nation or any of other our peer nations, they have a little thought in the back of their mind that is reasonable, which says the thing he's reaching into his pocket for could be a gun, could be a wallet, but it could be a gun. In other countries, cops don't really have to have that thought because it's always a wallet. And that's a systematic difference between policing in America and policing in other nations that makes it harder and makes it a facile comparison to simply say, why isn't this stuff happening in Western Europe? There's that, but then there's also the history of police violence and abusive police officers in America that's different than the history of cops in any other place. And I think that that has to be taken into account too, that there's an enemy perspective that a lot of people have. When they look at the cops, they think of the cops as the

enemy. I don't necessarily know what it's like in Europe, but I've got to think that the polarization between cops and citizens, and a lot of it is broadcast via these cell phone videos. Like the George Floyd incident, it was a girl, a 17-year-old girl, filmed it on her cell phone. It changed the whole world because of that video. Literally changed the landscape of the way people think about racial interactions in America because of one video. There's so many people that think of cops as the enemy because of these videos. And there's so many of these videos. If you look at

the perspective that people had, my parents were hippies in the 60s. And, you know, they grew up during the civil rights movement. And they were around during, you know, marches and protests. And when Muhammad Ali refused to go to fight in Vietnam, they stripped him of his title. And there was there was this understanding of the difference between the way cops treated black people versus cops treated white people, but it wasn't on YouTube. It wasn't available in your... So this data that you're talking about that's disproportionate because there's so many bad ones, even if there's millions and millions of interactions, it only takes one that becomes viral that will change people's opinions.

One Eric Gardner. Right. one that becomes viral that will change people's opinions one eric gardner right you know one george floyd one video that changes people's perspective on how what what goes down between cops and citizens and what is wrong with the cops this this didn't exist before and so when you see videos like this where this guy who's a cop gets shot at and you see these other interactions, we're not getting necessarily a balanced perspective. There's clearly a problem in the way cops deal with all citizens. There's clearly a culture of abusive police officers in some precincts, in some place. 100%. 100%.

I remember, it's fresh in my mind because I saw the OJ documentary, but there was some tape that was released of cops privately talking about black people. And they had some horrible name. I can't remember what it was, but that they thought was hilarious. Right. And it just, it was this, this moment where it was perfectly clear that they saw themselves as one kind of people and they saw the selves that they were, the people they were policing as a totally different set of people, unlike them. Um, and that was almost, you know, psychologically akin to the relationship of, of colonialism in some way. Um, but, but I do want to, I mean, the way the media has portrayed this issue in, in recent years, uh, has been to skew the discussion of shootings so as to only show

the black victims of these kinds of, uh victims of these kinds of killings, right? I wrote a long essay in 2020, and one of the points I was trying to make in that essay was, you know, unarmed white people get killed by the cops every year in circumstances identical to the ones that we see unarmed black people getting killed. That doesn't mean racism doesn't exist. I think the majority of racism almost certainly occurs in the kind of non-deadly interactions and harassments and racial profiling of people. But if we're talking narrowly about killing unarmed civilians, you know, I took as an just as an experiment to show how often this happens. I took a single year. I closed my eyes and picked it at random.

And I picked 2015 and just listed 10 different unarmed white people that got shot by the cops and killed that year. Most of the cops got off. One of them is a six year old kid. Most of the cops got off. One of them is a six-year-old kid. And, you know, these are, you know, like nobody knows these names because it only gets pumped into the national media when it's a black person, which gives the false impression that it only happens to black people. Right. Like everyone knows the name Tony Timpa I found, which is this guy from Dallas in 2017 that was killed on camera with a knee on the top of his neck for 13 minutes and the cops joking the whole time. It was the closest example to a George Floyd that, um, that, that I'm aware of in, in recent American history.

Is this on video? Yeah, it's on YouTube. Really? 13 minutes. These cops have their back. It wasn't the neck. It was the very upper back. But, you know, strangling in the exact same way.

And this poor guy, he's calling out for his mother. He's clearly struggling and in pain. And the cops are joking. They're making jokes. They're like, wake up for school, Tony. Wake up for school. Blah, blah, blah. As he's passing out. They're making jokes about how're like, wake up for school, Tony. Wake up for school. Blah, blah, blah. As he's passing out, they're making jokes about how he's...

And he died. And that was 2017, and he was a white guy. And, you know, nobody, very few people are aware that this even happened because of the color of his skin, right? He wasn't, he didn't fit the narrative that this only ever happens to black people. And I think that that narrative has a cost, which is that we misperceive the problem with these shootings as being only about racist cops. I have no doubt some of these examples, it's like the cop wouldn't have shot if it was a white guy, you know, a white guy reaching into his pants for what looked like a gun,

just it wouldn't have scared the cops so much if he was white. I have no doubt that that has happened. But in this day and age, I think pretty much no cop wants to be the next Derek Chauvin, right? When it comes to shootings, at least, you know, they have to be exercising a pretty unique amount of restraint, at least in the past few years. And I think it's, you know, we have minimized unfairly the role of bad training, the role of bad incentives, how cops almost never get punished for these kinds of things. That's starting to change. I mean, just today, Kim Potter got sentenced to, uh, to, I think, uh, about a year in prison for, uh, uh, for shooting the, the, I forget the guy's name, but what is this case? Uh, Kim Potter, she, she was a female cop. Is that the woman who walked in the wrong apartment? Um, she, she's the one that uh if i recall the details she

thought she was using her taser oh right she says she thought she was using her taser which is i don't know the details of it to judge the plausibility of that excuse but it uh at the very minimum it seems like horrible training it seems like horrible, but I can attest to the fact that people under pressure completely fall apart. And some people under pressure fall apart way worse than others. There's something about adrenaline and fear and physical violence that narrows people's windows of perception and their ability to make rational decisions. They don't know what they're doing. They can't. I remember I was watching a fight, not a professional fight. I was watching a street fight at the comedy store. I was at the, we were like in the front bar area and across the street on the other side, it was the house of Blues. And there was these guys that were arguing and they started fighting.

And one guy literally was, his face was like this. And he had instigated this and he didn't know how to de-escalate. And he was arguing with this guy and like, fuck you and fuck you. And then all of a sudden, he's in a physical confrontation with this guy. And then all of a sudden he's in a physical confrontation with this guy. And you see him literally like in full-blown panic fear. And he's doing this, flailing with his hands. Like he has no idea how to hit someone.

He probably can't know what's happening. And a car, like a bus, pulls in front where I see these guys swinging and a car pulls in front. And as the car passes, I see the guy laid out just completely flatlined and the other guy runs off so he got knocked unconscious and he had no business fighting but he was in this oh oh you could see him in this full panic and me as a person who's been around people fighting their whole I see that I recognize it I'm like this is someone who's probably never done this before

and it's a lot of cops panic Oh fuck. Yeah, they panic man. This has happened before there was a Person in Oakland I believe who did the same exact thing went to reach for their taser pulled out a gun and shot a guy and it's on video and this was at a At a It's not subway. What do they call that that? The BART system in San Francisco? And this person, same thing,

just thought they had the taser and pulled out a gun. So it's not unprecedented. No, yeah. It's people fucking lock up under panic, man. I had this guy, Anthony Barksdale, on my podcast. Anthony Barksdale was the deputy commissioner of the Baltimore Police Department for years and like, I don't know, something like starting in 2007 or something like that. And he was fun fact is that he was the namesake of the character Avon Barksdale on the show The Wire.

Whoever the writers were studying the BPD at that time or studying Baltimore, they took his name, made it into one of the main characters. It's a great show. studying Baltimore. They took his name, made it into one of the main characters. It's a great show. Anyway, Anthony Barksdale is this guy. He's from Baltimore. He grew up in an area of great violence.

He told a story about being a kid on a sports team and a shooting broke out and the coach would hide them in a dumpster to hide them from the bullets. So he grows up, you know, he grew up, he's from the city and he grows up determined to make a change by becoming a cop. And he eventually rises through the ranks, becomes, you know, the commissioner, deputy commissioner. And he just, you know, told all these stories about these tense situations he had got into with subjects that were violent, subjects that were mentally ill. And, you know, one of the biggest assets that he had was that he was very comfortable in physical altercations. He's a black belt in jujitsu and he was able to deescalate so many situations without going for his gun

because he had a kind of confidence and knowledge that he could use his body to subdue and arrest a suspect without hurting them, without hurting himself. And he tried to train. I mean, he couldn't formally through the department require BJJ training, but he would take his people and incentivize them to train in BJJ outside of the official training. The thing about jiu-jitsu that's different than other martial arts is that you do it full blast. The thing about jiu-jitsu that's different than other martial arts is that you do it full blast. Like a lot of martial arts, like sparring is very muted.

Like you're kind of like you're not really supposed to spar full blast in a karate class. You're supposed to control your strikes. And because of that, you don't get to experience the chaos of a real human being trying to take you out. And in Jiu Jitsu, because of the fact that it's grappling, it's unique in that you can go full blast and instead of getting hurt when you get caught in something, you can just tap out and keep going. So if someone catches you in an arm bar, you just tap, you keep going,

and then you get accustomed to a human being resisting with all of their might. So, like, if you're in a situation with a person and all of a sudden it escalates into a street fight, you're so comfortable with this kind of confrontation. You're so comfortable with the kind of physical chaos that's involved in a human being resisting. With the kind of physical chaos that's involved in a human being resisting also There's like a language of the way a body moves that you become very fluid with you understand weight and balance You understand like how to control a person People who don't have any experience in martial arts and they wind up being police officers are fucking dangerous Because they're they're relegated to weapons they're all they have is fear they can scare you or they can shoot you they can tase you or they

get beat you with a club there's they don't have the ability to control you like if i'm around a person who is my size and they have no martial arts training and all of a sudden this person starts getting threatening with me and they start saying they're going to kick my ass or something like that, my thought is, okay, what am I going to do to you? Am I going to hit you or am I going to strangle you? That's what my thought is.

If I know this person doesn't really know how to fight and they're saying crazy or they don't have real experience and they're saying crazy things, my thought is not oh my god i'm in trouble you're calm my thought is allows you to be rational exactly and that is very difficult to acquire that requires decades of training yeah and for a person to achieve a black belt in brazilian jiu-jitsu like it's very rare that someone i mean bj pens the quickest i've

ever heard of he got it in three years That's crazy though. I mean he was training every day hours and hours a day fully obsessed for most people It's like 10 years plus right so that that is it's like most things you acquire a level of ability over thousands of hours and the Level of understanding of what you can and can't do, what the way things work. If you don't have that and you're a police officer, it's like, it's like being a writer and you don't understand language. It's, you know, it really is. It's, you don't have the tools for that job. And, you know, Andrew Yang said it best. He said,

every police officer should be at least a purple belt in jiu-jitsu. I think he's dead right. I think it's a great suggestion. How long would it take to become a purple belt usually? It depends on the amount of time that you put into it and how much drilling you do and also your physical attributes. You know, some people, maybe they started off as like a break dancer or a gymnast and they have a huge advantage. Right. Huge advantage because you

have a real understanding of how your body moves you have like a you you have a you have a comfort level with physical movement and you have this just innate understanding of how to balance yourself and and the strength that's involved in that If you come from a background of gymnastics or you come from a background of dance or acrobatics or anything like that, you have a giant advantage, giant advantage in jujitsu. I would argue if we lived in a rational and wise society, one of the things that would have come out of the racial reckoning in 2020 was some billionaire or groups of very wealthy people creating some kind of fully funded jujitsu training for police officers yeah no why isn't that you'd have to require it you'd have to require it there's carlson grace i mean

what is what is he doing with who's that he's with oh this is this is barksdale yeah this is anthony barksdale on the right there um really really uh just brilliant guy he's now a commentator i don't know if he still is but uh when i had him on he was a commentator on cnn now and he's he's a retired so now he feels he can really speak freely about issues in a way that people who are still police often feel they can't. Carlson Gracie was one of the first guys that ever trained. The first guy I ever trained with, I trained with Luis Herrera at Hicks and Gracie's place, but Carlson Gracie was the second place I ever trained at.

That was in Hollywood in the late 90s. And he was, you know, Carlson Gracie was the second place I ever trained at. That was in Hollywood in the late 90s. And he was, you know, Carlson Gracie was a legend. I mean, he's a guy that was in the early days of no rules fights. He was the cleanup guy. When Elio Gracie lost to certain people, they would send in, I think, Voldemar Santana was the guy. And they send in Carlson Gracie to clean up because he was the badass of the family. They'd come in and fuck people up that, like, Elio couldn't.

Me and my girlfriend, a couple weeks ago, we watched the Rickson Gracie documentary on YouTube. Hickson. Hickson. Yeah, that's right. That's right. Our Portuguese. Right, right. Choke.

Yeah. Choke, yep. It's amazing. Yeah. It's one of the greatest documentaries of all time. Yeah. He was. So good.

And still is. Very unique. Very unique. It's one of the greatest documentaries of all time. He was, and still is, very unique. Very unique. It's an honor to know him. But Hickson was very unique because he had all the things. He had, first of all, his father was Elio Gracie, who was one of the most important figures in the history of martial arts. He was the guy who was a small man. was one of the most important figures in the history of martial arts. He was the guy who was a small man, he only weighed like 147 pounds,

and he was out there having these no rules fights with these big giant guys, and he relied completely on technique and leverage, and developed this system of technique and leverage as applied to the ground game with Carlos Gracie and with a bunch of the other people like Carlson and a few of these other like early jiu-jitsu practitioners so he gave birth or you know he fathered rather Hickson and Hickson was unique in that he grew up with it and also that he was

very physically powerful he was unusual in that he got really obsessed with yoga yeah so he had incredible flexibility he was obsessed with breathing so he had this incredible control of his breath and control of his mind because of that and he would do like cold water immersion where he would get into like that scene in the film where he gets into this freezing glacial river in Japan. And, you know, up to his neck and he's breathing this water. And he was a completely different type of person that changed jujitsu. Yeah. The breathing thing is interesting.

I mean, I remember, you know, my mom was super into Iyengar yoga. She would take me to yoga when I was like three and I would play with my little action figures while they were doing her thing or whatever. And I would watch videos of Iyengar. What is Iyengar yoga? What's the difference? It's a, you know, there's just like different strands of yoga, yoga from different, I don't know what you'd call them, like grandmasters, whatever, is Iyengar and like Vinyasa. I'm probably sounding very ignorant to someone who knows about it, but Iyengar yoga was the one that my mom did.

And it's from this guy, Iyengar. And there's a video of him on YouTube, just like reciting this little poem about the breath. And then he does a demonstration and he exhales for about 60 seconds wow she's like how long can you exhale for it just i mean obviously if you're letting that much air through you can do it for a while but there's no pace slow enough that i could exhale consistently for a full minute it doesn't even seem real and I

you know there's a little part of me that still somehow thinks it's doctored or no it's like do it but like he just does it and it's incredible that level of training I showed you the sensory deprivation tank yeah today that we have here um one of the exercises I do is 30 seconds in 30 seconds out that means I take a breath for 30 seconds exercises I do is 30 seconds in 30 seconds out. That means I take a breath for 30 seconds, a slow breath for 30 seconds. It's very hard to do. I count to 30 as I'm breathing in and then I count to 30 as I'm breathing out. So wait, I just don't understand how, like what's getting trained. Is it your lung capacity is getting trained? Your lung capacity, but also your willingness to tolerate discomfort

ah so it's not just like like here if i'm gonna breathe right so like ready ready set i'll take a deep breath Satsang with Mooji Chh. Holy shit. So I'll do that. And I do that over and over again. And so there's a moment afterwards where you want to go. Right. But you have to resist that. So you have to resist that moment and then again.

And you just do it over and over and over again. And do you notice the time you can do it increasing? I mean, I probably could go longer if i had to go more than 30 seconds but it's fucking hard it's hard to do 30 seconds and 30 seconds out and keep going right but do you notice progress over time since when you started doing this you you notice what your ability is like sometimes there's a thing where your your body says just quit quit now quit now you know and you have to get over that hump that's the cold water thing too that's the thing like a cold water immersion there's a moment where you

get in your body's like let's get the fuck out of here and you have to get past that you have to just accept it and the way you accept it is to concentrate on your breathing like I did a video where I got into a 33 degree ice bath for 20 minutes. And I said, well, let's see how long I could do it. I'll just do it on Instagram. So I made a video. So I posted this video. I just sat this camera up and I got into the thing. And every minute I'm like, one more minute. Let's do one more minute. And I just kept going, one more minute, one more minute. And the whole thing I'm doing, I'm just doing this breathing exercise where I'm just. So by breathing hard like that, one of the things you're doing too is you're tightening up your core. So you're kind of heating yourself up a little bit. You're heating up your muscles by straining and resisting.

And you're resisting the cold plunge. Yeah Yeah this is the video I was talking about. Give me some volume on this. But he says a really cool thing in the beginning actually. That is inhalation. At the beginning he goes, the mind is the king of the breath let me hear that it's actually a really nice little parable is the king of the senses and the breath is the king of the mind yeah that should be that should be my ringtone when people call me up. He's the king of the senses.

There's nothing cooler than like an Indian guru, you know, a yogi. Yeah, that's why Osho is able to get away with all that shit. Because people fall for that shit so easily. Osho's that one thing where, have you ever seen the video where he talks about people being retarded? No. But the people are retarded. You ever heard that? Oh yeah, I have seen that one. You gotta remind me then. I'll send it to Jamie.

It's so not what you would think of when you think of like a guru. You know, like I know I have it in here somewhere, Jamie, but I might have a hard time finding here is the government by the people of the people for the people

but the people are retarded. So let us say, government by the retarded, He's not laughing. for the retarded, of the retarded but the people are retarded yeah that's easy to feel that way sometimes

it is but it's easy to be cynical you know I think the thing about human beings is that you can always find evidence of both. You can find evidence of very interesting, cool, compassionate people that are, you know, very charitable, wonderful to be around, giving, love everybody. And then you can find evidence of cunts. There's people that are just assholes. They don't give a fuck about anybody else but themselves.

They want everybody else to suffer. They want themselves to exceed and to excel. You could find those things, and I think there's more evidence of both of those things now than we've ever had to face before, and it really begs the question, like, what do you do with your time? And it really begs the question like what do you do with your time? Do you immerse your your yourself in? positive people that are thinking about

all aspects of humanity and trying to advance the way they view the world and advance their own perspectives and and enhance their education and and fill their mind up with new ideas or do you just complain do you just bitch about things do you just I mean we're in we were talking before about the Brazilian version of me today before the show where Glenn Greenwald had sent me hip to this guy I don't know his name, but he is a Brazilian podcaster who is very popular. And he likes to do his shows intoxicated, like I do. And apparently, Glenn said that what he said was, he doesn't believe anybody should be deplatformed. And he said, and someone said, like, including Nazis. And he said, yeah, I don't think you should deplatform

Nazis. Which, as we were saying before, was the original position of the ACLU. The ACLU, which a lot of Jewish attorneys, they were saying, no, we shouldn't deplatform Nazis. And this is like 30 years after the Holocaust, right? Fresh in our mind. So for us today, I mean, this is like 1990 imagine if the holocaust was in the 90s and then today in 2022 we're saying no you shouldn't de-platform nazis and so this guy was saying i don't think you should de-platform nazis and you know i don't think you should

de-platform anybody and so a bunch of people started saying he's a Nazi. And he was saying, that's not what I'm saying. And they kicked him off of his platform. YouTube apparently won't let him. He still has a YouTube account, but YouTube won't let him start a new account. And people want him de-platformed off of everything. And whatever platform he was on where he was getting paid for his podcast, he got fired from. Yeah.

What is this guy's name? Bruno. There you are. Ayub? I don't know how to say that. Yeah. Okay. It says it right here. Three years ago, video game streamer Bruno Ayub decided to start a new podcast, Flow,

modeled on the Joe Rogan experience. Okay. He said, man, modeled on the Joe Rogan experience. Okay, he said, man, it'd be really cool if I did that in Brazil since nobody else has. Told the New York Times he interviews comedians, academics, government officials, ufologists, drinking alcohol and smoking weed. It's the exact same show. It's motherfucker. He stole my show. Anyway, his New York rise is due in no small part to model developed by his hero, as he learned last week, aping Rogan comes with a risk.

February 7th conversation, the two members of the Brazilian Congress, Ayub, I hope I'm not saying his name wrong, argued that Brazil should embrace free speech absolutism, including legalizing the currently illegal Nazi party. He said, in my opinion, the radical left has much more space than the radical right. He told his approximately 3.6 million YouTube subscribers. Both should be given space. I am crazier than all of you. I think that a Nazi should have a Nazi party recognized by law.

He added, if someone wants to be anti-Jewish, I think he has the right to be. Ayub woke up Tuesday to thousands of people calling him Nazi on social media, sponsors pulled funding, and the government opened an investigation into the alleged offense of Nazi apologism. And his podcast production company announced they will be severing ties with a 31 year old provocateur. So there you go. I mean, censorship just almost never works, right? Like every one of the major ideas that rule our world right now, right? Let's say the right loves Christianity. The left is, you know, largely secular. Both of those ideas have at different points in history

been highly censored. Yeah. Right. Like Christianity was highly censored at one point. Later it became the law of the Roman empire. Um, atheism through, I mean, has been heavily censored on pain of death for hundreds and hundreds of years. And now it's rather mainstream. I mean, those are big examples of censorship not working in the grand arc of history. But we also have just very recent examples, you know, lab leak. You know, regardless of what you think about it, and I think it's probably true, but regardless of what you think about it, what's clear is that the attempts to brand it as misinformation did not work in terms of getting people not to believe it. It worked for a small amount of time to get people off social media. For how long? About a year?

Yeah. It was enough, though. It was enough that in many people's eyes that became a taboo subject that was very, very difficult to breach. You couldn't discuss it until Trump was out of office. But in the long run, history shows it just never works. And that's even truer nowadays because way back in the day, the Catholic Church didn't like something. They had a decent chance at being able to burn every copy of that book. They did that sometimes. They were like, okay, we burned the very last copy. Maybe someone can reproduce it from memory. Maybe it's going to bubble up somewhere else. But we

really burned the last copy of that book. In those cases, you can sometimes argue censorship kind of works, but even then, nowadays, the internet, you can't burn copies of every book. And there's this attempt now from the right to get books banned from public school libraries, you know, certain books like, you know, Ibram Kendi sort of woke racist books, like anti-racist baby and like all these ridiculous books that I think are crazy too. But I would never say ban them from the public school libraries if that's going to do anything. All it does is it hands that author a PR victory where they get to say, look, they're trying to censor me. I must be right about something, right? And in the age of the internet, your kids are going to be exposed

to all kinds of ideas, no matter what. I think as a culture that we need to have this conversation when it comes to ideas, I think it's a very, very important stand to take that we need to have this conversation when it comes to ideas I think it's a very very important stand to take that we have to engage with almost all ideas I mean I don't think there's a fucking there's an argument for eating babies right there's not if someone makes a baby cookbook. You start saying there's too many people. The roads are crowded. We got to eat babies. There is a famous philosophy paper asking why is it wrong to eat babies? And philosophy students in Ivy League schools will study this paper as a thought experiment.

Like, hold on. Why is it wrong to eat babies? And you go through all the reasons it might be wrong. And the point of the thought experiment is not to justify eating babies. It's to get to what your basic principles are. Like, why are things wrong? And then from there, you build up a worldview. Okay, well, if that's the reason why something is wrong, if it's that suffering, the human suffering is inherently wrong. Now let's apply that principle now that we've worked backwards, build up an idea of what other things are wrong and why, rather than simply taking for granted

that certain things are wrong. I think there's also a thing that's going on in this culture today where people want things now. And when you have a complex idea that has to be debated, when you have a complex idea that has to be debated, like here's one. Why do we still have deeply impoverished neighborhoods that have been in the same state of crime and of gang violence and have been going on? Was that a photograph? What was that?

I did not know. I had mute off, sorry. Oh. He took a screenshot. I mean, why have these communities stayed in the same state without any government intervention? Like, why is that? This is a complex issue that if you wanted to discuss it and you wanted to develop solutions and you wanted to, work work out what it's gonna take a long time and a lot of people are gonna have to contribute and it's going to have to be and because of that it's too

complicated people just leave it alone they'd like Baltimore is Baltimore leave it alone Southside Chicago is fucked up leave it alone and it never gets the kind of attention that other simple things to solve get attention like like this guy this is a simple thing to solve in the eyes of a person who's a censor or the eyes of a person who is uh who's all for de-platforming people fuck him get him off the air solved it we got a real quick solution. It's not a real solution, but it's a quick way to solve something. And I think something like a thought experiment of why you shouldn't eat babies. And if human suffering is the problem, now let's expand. What other

forms of human suffering can we find solutions to that we've ignored? And why are we accepting certain forms of human suffering? Why are we accepting the death penalty when we know that X amount of people who are in jail are unjustly I heard your podcast with Josh Dubin. Josh, that's his name, right? Yeah, that was the Innocence Project. That was really, really amazing. We've done a series of them. And through those podcasts, multiple people have been released. The last one we did, not the current last one, but the one before that, because of that podcast,

two people were released. Yeah, it's amazing. He's amazing. He's done incredible things, but that's a perfect example. It's not fucking easy when he does. I mean, it requires deep thought. He has to have a massive amount of research that he does on each subject. He has to educate people on junk science when it comes to physical evidence.

There's people that have his hair samples at scenes that clearly show the hair has been pulled from someone's head. There is not a hair that has been left behind. So this hair could have been pulled from a cadaver. It could have been pulled from a person that's in jail. And that these things sometimes are planted. Bite mark evidence. He has a whole podcast on the junk science that's involved in prosecuting people and how many people are wrongly convicted. Yeah.

It's fucking complicated. Like there's so many things. Yeah, it's fucking complicated like there's so many things like those whenever we do one of those podcasts We generally spend time talking about general general issues with wrongful convictions And then we'll find like one or two cases and go over those one or two cases and you realize like just this cursory examination of one of the one or two cases takes so much time and so Much heartache is involved in these people's lives. And a lot of them, like they're poor or some of them don't speak English well, and they become patsies and they use them, you know, because a prosecuting attorney needs to have someone, you know, a DA needs to

have someone that they pin the crime on. And once they decide, okay, let's go with Jorge over here. And then boom, they just throw everything they can to try to win the case. Everything, and this is, it's a giant problem with our legal system, and it's a complex problem. It's not a problem that's easily solved. If you have thousands and thousands of people that are wrongly convicted, which we probably do,

there's probably thousands and thousands of people right now that are in penitentiaries, and they're in there for something they did not do. That's a big fucking problem. I mean, that's a giant problem and it's not an easy one. It's not like kick this guy off of Twitter. He said that Nazis should be able to talk. Fuck him. Get rid of his sponsors. We're done. So that kind of censorship, that kind of short term solution to a much larger problem is foolhardy, but I think it's an artifact of the kind of culture that we live in where people want quick, easy solutions to things. And they want to make a thing into a much bigger problem than it really is. What he's saying is not – he's not saying it the best way, but he's probably a little drunk.

And he's probably – speaking from my own personal experience, like how I do a little drunk and he's probably not... speaking from my own personal experience, like how I do a podcast, you get lit and you just start talking. But his idea is sound. His idea is you shouldn't de-platform people. We were talking about Darryl Davis before this podcast as well. And Darryl Davis, who is a guy who is a blues musician who has personally but through his own conversations with people he's gotten more than 200 kkk people and neo-nazis to turn over a completely new life

and to give him their outfits give him their wizard costume or whatever the fuck it is and their nazi outfit and this one man just through having conversations with people and just being this undeniable amazing human has changed the way people think about these racist ideas that they have just by being himself just by not not by censoring people i think that happens a lot that happens more than i mean like daryl dav Davis is amazing and exceptional in many ways. But I think that those kinds of changes of heart are actually far more common than you might suppose. Just kind of observing the tenor of the media in our times. Like I was just talking to my friend, Noam Dorman, who owns a comedy cellar and he's Jewish. He owns a comedy cellar and he's Jewish.

And he has, he said over the years, he's had a lot of Arab people working for him coming from Arab countries where they've never met a Jew and have crazy ideas about Jews, like insane. And, you know, he was like, I would never use that as a reason not to hire somebody, of course. And he's like a very pro-Israel guy too. He's very, very proud of being Jewish, But they become friends and their ideas about Jews change over time as a result of interactions. It's not like, again, as exceptional as Daryl Davis is, it's not, you know, that is that kind of thing is happening by the millions in people's lives in ways that will never make it into the media all the time. And that's another reason why people underestimate others' ability to change their ideas. I mean, there's this, I've heard people argue that, you know, persuasion is actually not a good strategy.

Persuasion just doesn't work. And, you know,'s, that's just not true. You know, what is true is that people very rarely change their opinions in real time on camera, on the shows that you're watching because people, um, myself included have a vested interest in showing that we know what the fuck we're talking about. And, you know, you're, you're actually very unique in this way of, you know, if a guest shows you something and it's a fact you haven't seen and it contradicts your belief, you will often change your belief in real time, right? Like that, no one does that. So people watching the media get this perception that, well, no one's ever changing their mind. Everyone's just set in

their ways. But I think the truth is people are changing their minds all the time in private by listening to podcasts by themselves, by watching stuff by themselves, where they don't pay a reputational price for changing their mind. So just because we rarely see evidence of people changing their minds through persuasion doesn't mean it's not happening all the time. It happens all the time. mean it's not happening all the time it happens all the time it happens through experience and hopefully it happens because the person is capable of recognizing their flaws the real problem comes when someone has a belief that's it's not accurate and you stick to it anyway because you don't want to lose. And that's a giant problem. And in my mind, that's a tremendous weakness.

I don't like finding weakness in me. When I find a weakness in me, I eradicate it. I find it, I go, okay, that's a flaw. That's why I change my opinion in real time because I refuse to support an opinion or a false idea that I have espoused. And I refuse to connect my mind with ideas. I whatever idea whatever fact that I Think is true if that fact turns out to be incorrect I will abandon it immediately if I can as long as I'm long as I'm sure I Think you have to I don't think you're you are your ideas. I think you are this

Thinking entity that is trying to solve as many problems as you can that are around you and that are involved in your life. And as soon as you are willing to commit to an idea that you know is incorrect, you've done yourself a massive disservice in service of your ego, which is the worst fucking thing that you could ever fuel. Like you should never fuel your ego. It exists whether you like it or not. You should try to control it and humble it and to try to keep it, have it the least intrusive factor in your thought process. So the moment the ego gets challenged, you have to be able to accurately assess whether or not the information that you've clung to is valid and if it is not valid you have to

discard it it's very important yes I totally agree and I was reading the coverage of your cancellation like a week ago in the New York Times. And there's one article where they had a little box graphic in between the text sort of providing one of these short summary explainers of the whole situation. And they said, Joe Rogan's brash personality has been part of his appeal as a podcaster. And I haven't seen or heard the word brash in long enough that I looked it up. And it was self-assertive in a rude or overbearing way.

And I thought to myself, is Joe Rogan brash? And I thought to myself, is Joe Rogan brash? It's like, you just gave a spiel about how important it is to say when you're wrong, to admit you have an ego. Have you ever heard a brash or overbearing person? I mean, like the definition of overbearing is the guy that never fucking admits he's wrong. It doesn't listen and blah, blah, blah. It's like the notion that that you could be described as brash.

To me, it betrayed. I was like, they're not even trying to hide the fact that they just fucking hate you. Well, I think they're like hardcore lefties. Right. And hardcore lefties don't know what the fuck to do with me because I look like a Trump supporter. Yeah, yeah. I mean, the fact that you're a bald white guy that's muscly and tattooed does you no favors. And I do cage fighting commentary. I like guns.

I hunt. I bow hunt. Right, right. Yeah. There's a lot of things that don't line up with the fact that I support universal basic income. I support universal health care. My family was poor when I was young. We were on welfare. I'll never forget that. I'll never forget being on food stamps as a kid. I'll never forget wondering if we were going to have enough food to eat. And that, in my mind, the system worked with my family and they provided us with assistance.

And then my parents started making money and we got off of welfare and they started doing really well. And then by the time I was in high school, they were doing great and they had a thriving business. So I got to experience how social systems, social support systems and social safety nets can really be beneficial to families. And I think they're huge. I think they're very, very important. And I fully, fully support that. And I am way more left wing than I, the only things that I think of that I think people could point to that a right-wing with me are gun control like I believe in the Second Amendment because I believe there's times where you're going to have to if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time if the wrong thing happens the wrong person invades your property tries to harm your family you want to be able

to defend yourself we don't live in a world where there's no guns. We don't live in a world where it's even and equal and people are unanimously generous and kind and no one's violent. That's not the reality of the world we live in. And so because the Second Amendment does exist and because we do have gun rights, I don't agree with stripping those rights from people. I don't agree with this idea that the problem is guns. I think the problem is human beings. I think the problem is human beings and human behavior. And I think it's exacerbated by social issues. And I think that really one of the better ways to stop violence in this country is to alleviate it at the bottom floor which is poverty poverty and crime-ridden communities and

I think it's only one of the most frustrating things to me when I look at our culture is like what we were talking about earlier that there's there are these communities that have been largely ignored by charitable ventures like they just don't put enough time or effort into it the government will spend trillions of dollars in Iraq they'll give no bid contracts to halbert and to rebuild shit we blew up but they don't do anything with these impoverished communities so i'm all super left wing in most ways yeah i think so when it comes to these places that have just had intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, intergenerational single parent homes.

Redlining laws. Yeah. I mean, the equilibrium we're at in the country right now seems really dysfunctional to me because basically what you have is you know you have a right-wing media that will they will talk about things like you know the constant drive-by shootings and kids getting caught you know usually black kids getting caught in the crossfire and they'll talk about the insane homicide rate for for young black men which is the number one cause of death for for black men in their 20s but they'll do it in a way where you know it's about political point scoring

right it's like when tucker carlson talks about know, black on black crime and the problem of homicide, you don't get the sense that he's deeply motivated to actually focus on this and rebuild these communities. And, you know, maybe I'm slandering his motives, but I think, you know, one doesn't get it. One gets a sense that the first purpose of raising those points is to point the finger at Democrats, Democrat controlled cities, and, you know, just partisan point scoring, right? And so that's what you have on the right, basically. And what we have on the left is anyone who mentions these problems, right? You mentioned the fact that homicide is the number one cause of death for black men in their 20s and for no other race of men. And you try to tug at people's heartstrings for these stories of,

you know, little girls dressed up in bumblebee costumes for Halloween getting caught in the crossfire, and the wider consequences of growing up in such environments, how it dooms kids to failure and so forth, you know, it's made difficult to acknowledge the reality of the issues and to talk about it in a common sense way without being accused of being a racist right it's like oh you're just talking about black on black crime um if you're white you're a racist if you're black you're an uncle tom and basically we don't want to talk about it unless the cops did it right if the cops if the cops kill a kill a black person we will shut down

everything it's good examples that guy who drove over that crowd of people at the Christmas parade in Wisconsin, and they were saying the accident caused by an SUV. They kept saying that because the perpetrator was a black guy, and the black guy who had just gotten out of jail, who had just gotten out of jail for trying to kill his, I think his kid's mom, his girlfriend, trying to kill her with a car. So he gets arrested, goes to jail, gets out on very low bail. I think it was like, I don't remember how much it was, but thousands of dollars, not much. And then plows over a whole group of people.

And the coverage was bizarre because they were bending over backwards. And the coverage was bizarre because they were bending over backwards. They were doing mental gymnastics to try to not say this black man drove over all these people, this random crowd of people because they didn't want to be accused of being racist or they were woke.

For whatever their reason was, for whatever their ideology was for portraying the story in the way they did, that's how they decided to portray it. To me, the most egregious example of this, and it was a total indictment of the state of our nation on the topic of race and how much race thinking just warps people's morality. It was the Jasmine Barnes case from maybe three or four years ago she was a little girl in in houston uh that was killed she was shot while in in in her mother's car tragically

and at first they saw a guy in a in a pickup truck seeming to flee the scene. And it looked like a white guy. So basically this became, it was right around new year's, maybe 2019, I think. And it became a national manhunt. You had, you know, Sean King raised a hundred thousand dollars to, for any tips on, on who this guy was. They had a police sketch of a guy that kind of looked like you and and you had politicians all across the nation talking about this case New York Times covering it every day and then it turned out about a week later they got a tip they found the guy and it was two black guys and it was a turf, and she got caught in the crossfire. The kind of thing that happens all the time in this country.

So was the guy in the pickup truck just fleeing the scene? It turned out he had some kind of weird story of his own, but he was just a bystander. He was a bystander, innocent bystander. And so they got the two guys that that did it and um there was this you know moment of embarrassment i think among people because what had happened is everyone thought a white guy who looked you you know, like who looked the part, killed this black girl. And they, the reason it got any attention was because people thought it was a racist killing. That's what every, all the politicians were saying. This is white supremacy. He was a neo-Nazi.

It's the narrative spun out of control. And then at the end of it, there was this embarrassing moment of, of acknowledging that actually in this particular case, the human beings that killed this girl happened to be black. And the case would have gotten zero national attention had people known that from the start. Did the national attention continue after they found out that it wasn't a black guy that killed him or did it fizzle out? It fizzled out. and and so you know like if if a if a martian came to our society and was studying it and saw this episode the conclusion that martian would come to is okay interesting the american homo sapiens they seem to care a lot when one of the lighter skinned ones kills one of the darker skinned ones but when one of the darker skinned ones kills one of the darker skinned ones,

it seems they don't care as much. That's interesting. And they would like report it back to their Martian whatever overlords. Yeah. And, you know, viewed from the outside, that's a crazy ethics to have. Like no philosopher would argue for that as, I mean, well, some have historically,

but like no person would argue for that as an orientation towards the importance of skin color. And yet that is the status quo on that subject. And the equilibrium we're at is that people on the left don't want to talk about this and therefore can't really solve it. And people on the right seem to only want to talk about it when it's a point to score against the left in a philosophy that is otherwise usually opposed to any kind of social safety net increases and so forth. So it's a very dysfunctional state we're in as a country, which is one of the reasons it's so hard for us to solve this problem. It's so hard for us to solve this problem. The problem of having two very distinct ideologies is a huge issue, too, because most people, they're kind of in the center of a lot of ideas.

Right. Like most people, like they'll say, well, you have to be disciplined. And, you know, that's part of the problem with a lot of people in this life is that a lot of people are lazy and a lot of people fall victim to a lot of, you know, psychological traps and they, you know, they don't follow through on their life. They don't, they don't develop discipline. They don't, they don't do what they need to do in their life. And this fucks them up. But also what was their childhood like? Like how, what, what kind of modeling did they have when they were young? What kind of abuse did they experience when they were young? How much psychological damage did they have? No one's starting off at the same starting block.

We're starting off at wildly different places in life. The right never wants to acknowledge that for whatever reason. The ideology that comes with that, if it's rigid, if you're just following the doctrine, it's like pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Like, the fuck are you talking about, man? You live in the south side of Chicago, you think you could just pull yourself up by your bootstraps?

You're crazy. Like, if there was a Wild West-type neighborhood for white people, white people shooting people the same way people are getting shot in the south side of Chicago, they would be freaking the fuck out. Can you imagine if there was a place like that? Like, if Tucson, Arizona was just like shootouts in the south side of Chicago, they would be freaking the fuck out. Can you imagine if there was a place like that? Like if Tucson, Arizona was just like shootouts in the street. I'm like, a weekend of gang violence in Chicago is occasionally stunning. Stunning numbers.

Yeah. There can be like 50 people shot in a weekend at its worst. Imagine if that same scenario was playing out in right-wing neighborhoods, in right-wing, all-white neighborhoods, if they were basically like fucking Jesse James in it and just out there shooting each other. We have a very different discussion. What would happen, though?

Would it be more sympathy for them or would it be more law enforcement because there's less guilt involved? It would be something different, that's for sure. Especially if they grew up in good neighborhoods. Imagine if they're like people from good neighborhoods with good education, like middle class, like no excuses. There's always been this like insane galling asymmetry of like

you're caught with a dime bag in the hood. Meanwhile, how many fucking Harvard kids are smoking weed in their dorm rooms? Oh, but even better yet, how about the crack laws? You know, Dr. Carl Hart has outlined this so perfectly because... That's the guy that does heroin, right? Yeah, yeah, he's amazing. He's a fascinating person. But one of the things that he has said, Dr. Hart said,

like, it's the same physiological effect as cocaine. But if you get arrested, completely different sentencing structure. If you get arrested with crack, there's minimum sentences that they have to put you away for. If you get arrested for coke, it's fucking nothing. Yeah. That's probably the most galling example I know of, of a, of a allegedly colorblind law that ends up having a massive disparate impact on people of color. Massive. Um, I'm sure white people do crack too.

I know white people have done crack, but the difference is that has infested and destroyed black communities and they know that. And so to handle the overwhelming amount of crime, instead of addressing it at a root level, they just decide to just put everybody in a cage, which is crazy. So one difficulty with addressing it is, in a way, you made this analogy before of we spend all this money overseas trying to reshape and rebuild other countries, but we don't spend it at home. I think that analogy, it works in more ways than one.

The other way it's useful is that often when we try to spend monies and reshape these countries, you know, in the Middle East, for instance, no matter how much money we spend, it doesn't seem to make a lasting impact. Like we can't just rebuild the culture, rebuild the culture of the country by throwing money at it because it's not that simple. I think that same lesson is another one of the difficulties with creating healthy, vibrant communities out of communities that are intergenerational poverty, intergenerational violence, which is that, okay, we can get a bunch of government bureaucrats and people

outside the community that want to do good and throw a bunch of money at community programs and so forth. But if it doesn't feel like it's coming from credible people in the community, it may have very little impact. You know, role models in general are very important, but they usually have to come from the place you're from in order to matter to you.

Right. Right. Like me as a black guy who grew up privileged in the suburbs in New Jersey, the average inner city kid looking for a role model to have a better life is not really going to be able to look to me just because we're the same skin color and say, well, if he could do it, I could do it. It's not going to work because I'm not from where he's from. from in order to feel like you can actually do something most people need a person that is from where they're from uh has a similar background to them and nevertheless went on to go to college went on to you know make six figures or something he's like when when you see that then it actually can change you for the most part and and um you know i i know this guy, Bob Woodson, who runs the Woodson Center, and the kind of outreach work that he does, it really acknowledges that principle, which is he will find people in the community, former gang members, pastors at churches, and work with them in a way that, you know, they know the community, they feel, you know, their work feels credible,

it actually has a much bigger chance of making a difference. And this is one challenge with getting, you know, government to sort of throw money at the problem is, if they don't understand that principle, I'm often skeptical that interventions are going to work as well as they could. I think that's very accurate. And I think there's an expression from gambling, particularly from playing pool, like guys would try to bet double or nothing. Like they would lose a bunch of games in a row and they'd maybe be down 200 bucks and I'll bet you all of it on one game, double or nothing. And the expression is, you got to get better the same way you got sick. I'm not going to let you win all your money back

that quick. Why would I do that? Because all I can do is if I lose, then I don't have anything. Now I'm back to zero. But if I keep making you bet the same way, it's going to take you hours to win your money back. Like if I've been beating you for five hours and we're playing, you know, a hundred bucks a set and I've got you down six, seven, eight, nine sets and you say, all right, 900 bucks. How about 900 bucks on this game right now? Like, why would I do that? It's going to, I would rather, it's going to take a long time. time. I think that sort of thought process kind of applies to fixing these communities. I don't think you're gonna take a place

that's been fucked since 1910 and make it better in five years. I think it's gonna take generations. But I think it's a valuable thing to invest in. And I think it should be a thing that should be thought of as, I always say it this way, so I'll say it again. If you want to make America great, you should have less losers. How do you have less losers?

By giving people a better path. By making it so that they don't feel like from the beginning they're saddled down with massive amounts of problems. Massive amounts of insurmountable issues in their community in their life in their personal life and and the people that they surround themselves with their friends you've got to invest a lot of time and a lot of money and do it with the goal of transforming these places eventually. How much time is it gonna take? We don't fucking know, because we've never done it before. We've never done it before.

The only thing we've ever done to a neighborhood is wreck it. You know, if you look at the worst neighborhoods, I mean, they've gentrified some places and made them, but all they've really done is like, they've taken rich neighborhoods and expanded them. They didn't take a poor neighborhood and elevate it. It's a different thing. And I think there's a way to do it.

And I think there's a way to do it, but it has to be done in a way like it has to be addressed nationally. It has to be something that's sold to the American people. Like there's a lot of the problems that we have with crime and violence and despair and poverty. They don't have to exist. These things can be where, and they can also be a viable, profitable business for whatever company can come in and fix these things. Because if we have government-funded operations overseas

to fix Iraq, why can't we have government-funded operations to fix Detroit? Like, why can't we do that? I think we can. One challenge to both of them is that politicians are always thinking on their election timeframe. Yeah. So they've only got two, four years, uh, for sure to do something. And the next guy breathing down their neck

is going to run on everything they're doing is wrong. Right. And then say, I'm going to reverse Obamacare as soon as I get in office. Right. Right. And what happens is in the best of cases, you get people that start good programs. Let's say you get past every hurdle of government incompetence and bad luck and lack of funding, and you actually managed to establish a really good program in an inner city neighborhood for poor kids an after-school program that's like tutoring them and they're having fun and it's like pro-social and it's using key leaders in the community and blah blah well then the guy who started that gets beat at some point or the thing just disappears, the program disappears,

and you've made promises to these people that the program will be around. And now it's just ripped. They got used to it, and now you've ripped it out from under them. And it's very difficult. That's another one of the challenges that makes it tough to actually make these things work. The solution to that is perhaps even grosser. The solution to that is long terms as president,

long terms as mayor, long terms as governor. Yeah, I mean, it's not a good solution because there's a reason why we only allow them to have four-year terms and you have to get reelected. But look what they're doing in China. Look what they're doing in Russia. I mean, Putin's been running Russia for a long fucking time.

The CCP's been running China for a long fucking time. And it's not good, but through that... They can commit to projects like concentration camps for Uyghurs and so forth. That's on the dark side of it. And they also can commit to business projects, right? They're so interconnected with corporations that the corporations can't do anything unless it has the best interests of the Chinese people

or the Chinese government, the CCP as a whole. They work hand in glove. And this is something we don't have in America. If we had, and this is not good, I'm not saying you should have, but if you had like a 20-year presidential term or a 10-year presidential term where someone had a long time to get good at the job,

like it's the weirdest job ever because it's the most important job in the world and we have new people do it all the time. It's like you don't know what the fuck you're doing, especially a guy like Trump. No political experience whatsoever. All of a sudden, he's at the helm of... He's the commander in chief of the greatest army the world's ever known because he won a popularity contest and he gets to do this job for four years.

That's nuts. It's a stupid way to handle it, but it might be the best way. Yeah. Well, what's the better way? I know that's the problem. There isn't a better way. I mean, you don't want a dictator, but like any other person, like if you had a person who is a CEO of a corporation, you would want that person to know the ins and the outs of that business. You would want them to be, if you got, like, let's just say Tim Cook at Apple. Tim Cook has been at Apple for a long time. He is a man who's, like, deeply embedded in the business of Apple.

He understands it from his head to his toes. He's aware of all the aspects of you know chip development like I guess the counter-argument would be like Biden has been in politics his whole life like he understands how the Senate works and so forth so that does that not count as experience it kind of does it kind of does but not as being well he actually was vice president for eight years right yeah but he's just that he's not a good example because he's basically a shell. Yeah.

You know, cognitively. Yes. He's like, I just, and the fact that that took a long time for people to admit, that was one of the things that people were saying that I was a Trump supporter during the election because I said I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden. But I didn't vote for either. The reason why I said that is like, I was like, you don't see this? Like, you guys out of your fucking mind? You don't see that this guy can't, he can't vote for either. The reason why I said that is I was like, you don't see this? Are you guys out of your fucking mind? You don't see that this guy can't talk right anymore? Go watch videos of him from 20 years ago.

He was a dummy. He said a lot of silly shit. He lied about a bunch of things. But at least he was articulate. At least he could, like, have you seen the Clarence Thomas hearing where he's talking to Clarence Thomas about natural law? And then Clarence Thomas later is talking about it. He's like, I did not know what the fuck he was talking about. But he's having this thing, you know and I know what we're talking about here.

Other people might not know, but you know and I know what we're talking about. And Clarence Thomas is like, I don't know what the fuck you're talking about, but I'm just going to let you know. That was Biden his whole life. I mean, Obama famously said during the election, he hopes Joe doesn't fuck this up because that's what he did. He would lie about his experience. He would lie about his background

and education. He would lie about his record. He would lie about all kinds of things. He lied about graduating in the top of his class. He lied about having more than one degree. He lied about marching with Mandela. He lied about his arrests recently.

He lied about being arrested the first time I was arrested. When people lie, it's so hard for me to put myself in the position of people that would lie like this. The other one I think of a lot is Joy Reid at MSNBC when she wrote

those homophobic things on her blog in 2008. And she said she got hacked. It's like, I can't, I understand white lies. I understand certain lies, but there's some lies where I struggle to understand what it would feel like to be the person thinking it's a good idea. I think there's people that don't value truth. They don't value honesty.

I think they just want to win. They just want to get past this problem that they're having, and they want to have a solution. What's the best solution? Well, you could say you got hacked. Let's say I got hacked. Let's go with that. And the Biden thing is just I think he just always wanted people to think highly of himself. We used to do this thing at Stitch's Comedy Club in Boston in

the 1980s, in 1988, in fact, and we called it Joe Biden night because Biden got busted plagiarizing other politicians' speeches. I don't know if you remember that. Yeah. Biden ran for president in 88 and his campaign got derailed because he was quoting, I think it was Bobby Kennedy verbatim, verbatim. And then there was someone else, I think it was an English politician and quoting these people verbatim, like just like stealing their speeches. And I think he blamed it on one of his speech writers did it or whatever. But it was such a scandal that we had created Joe Biden night at Stitch's Comedy Club. So like I would go up and I would do your act. Like we would work together every day.

I would know your act. Like I would go up and do your act and you would do my act. That's hilarious. And people would pick a person and they would go up and do their act. And for us it was a howl because like you would see like Kevin Knox going up there doing Steve Sweeney their act. And for us, it was a howl because you would see Kevin Knox going up there doing Steve Sweeney's act. And it was a thing. That's how much he was known of as a goof then.

Wow. So when you say he's been in politics his whole life, yeah, yeah, but that's not the best example. I think Bernie Sanders would be the best example. Right. Because Bernie Sanders, whether you love him or hate him or whatever, you have to admit that the man has principles and he has been behind those principles and he's been incredibly consistent his entire career. Right.

So if a guy like that got into office, then you're talking about a man who does understand the inner workings of the system very deeply, but it's not full shit. And he comes across as the kind of guy that wasn't so hungry to become president. Right. Right. Like he cared more about standing for what he believed in, even if it got him no further. Yeah.

And those are the types of people we actually want to promote. Yeah. The problem is it's a popularity contest. And we found out through Trump, because with Trump, it was the first time that anybody was actually popular entered into the popularity contest. Right.

These other people were amateurs in terms of like manipulation of the public's perception. There were amateurs compared to Trump. Yeah. Trump was the you're fired guy. Like he was all over television. Oh my God. He had great timing. I always felt about him. Like I felt about that bully in high school. That's he's a bully, but he's so funny. He kind of gets away with it and you kind of find yourself laughing at him despite yourself. And despite the fact that, you know, he's just deep down, he's not a good guy.

him despite yourself and despite the fact that you know he's just deep down he's not a good guy. Exactly. Exactly. And you justify him not being a good guy because he's in a dirty business. Yeah. You know. Yeah. He's like the Lance Armstrong of politics. Yeah. Like how did Lance Armstrong win Tour de France? Well he he doped. He did drugs. He did steroids. But everybody else was too. Well OK. You know. You know Trump was a businessman. He did steroids. But everybody else was too. Well, okay. You know, Trump was a businessman. He was lying, cheating, and stealing. But fucking everybody else did too. Yeah.

You know, that was kind of the way we looked at it. He did lie way more often and way more just like. And he was better at it. Yeah. I'll say my favorite thing Trump did, like the only of his trolls that I want to make a case was good for the world and good for the country was when it was 2020 and every institution in the country was releasing a fake statement about how they were systemically racist and were going to do better and they really cared every corporation that only wants your money was releasing this fake corporate woke thing. And Princeton University, the president of Princeton University released a statement saying Princeton University is systemically racist. This racism harms our black students here. And it's the racism is embedded in the structure of the university itself. And then Trump said, all right, well, if you're confessing, I'm going to get the Department

of Education to investigate you and see if you're violating civil rights laws. We have many robust civil rights laws in this country that are specifically put in place so that institutions that get federal funding like Princeton do not violate the civil rights of its students. Of course, it was a completely bullshit investigation. Trump did not expect to find any racism at a hyper-progressive Ivy League school, at least not any racism against black students. It was also a bullshit statement by the president of the university, but it was a perfect strategy for exposing the fundamental insincerity of most people who use this term. It's like, can you imagine if the Pope admitted, publicly confessed that the Catholic Church has this huge institutional pedophilia problem? And then the cop said, thank you for your confession we're

gonna go investigate this hope you cooperate and the pope said oh what do you mean no don't don't investigate us we we didn't really mean it we were just we just meant like pedophilia not like fucking kids it's like that's what the princeton guy does he goes right oh no no no we're not like actually racist we're just like saying that thing that everyone's saying that is that nobody means. So that that was a troll that at minimum, like, no, it was no president should use resources in that way. And it was totally immature. But it did expose a hypocrisy, which is that so many people are ready to condemn themselves as in their institutions as systemically racist, even when they know they've been doing everything in their power for the past decade or maybe sometimes several decades to be as inclusive as possible to black and Hispanic people and to

Asians. And, um, well, to Asians, the Asians, the weird one, right? Especially with Harvard, but there's discrimination allegedly against Asians in Harvard because they do so well. They try to make less of them get in. Yeah. Like they've, they've tailored their, their whole enrollment process so that it favors certain things that they think they can at least limit the amount of Asian people that are, cause they're doing so well. And again, it's not to single out Harvard, really, because the vast majority of elite

schools do this. There's a graph. I want to say it was from The Economist magazine, but there's a graph of California schools and the percentage of Asian students at the school. the percentage of Asian students at the school. And there's one school, Caltech, which has uniquely among California schools in its class not really practiced very much racial rigging, right? And so as the percentage of Asian immigrants increased to this country, you could see the percentage of Asians at Caltech is just rising in tandem, like you might logically expect. Whereas every other school, it's magically just staying flat as more and more Asians pouring into the country. Somehow it's staying at like 14% of your school. It's very strange. I mean, this has been true of elite schools for a hundred years. It's like

Malcolm Gladwell had this amazing essay, I think in the New Yorker, maybe over a decade ago, where he traces the origin of the essay requirements, right? Why do colleges require you to like write essays? Why not just go by the test? Well, that came about because they needed a way of excluding or minimizing the number of Jews. of excluding or minimizing the number of Jews. Jews were the Asians of that era in terms of they were testing very high and getting into these spaces that Protestants, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, really wanted, didn't like them so much and were uncomfortable with them.

And they weren't you know our people in a way and so they introduced essays um you know extracurricular requirements how are the essays supposed to stop jews from getting in because you can read through the lines of who someone is you know if you ask them personal questions about. Oh, so through those essays their Judaism would be exposed and that's how they're discriminating? Really? Wow. What's going on today is like a discriminatory,

it's a discrimination McCarthyism almost. It's like we're looking for discrimination constantly, even though it does exist. It's plenty of discrimination, There's plenty of racism. Sure. Plenty of legitimate homophobia, right? But then we're looking for it everywhere, too. And everyone's trying to make these grand statements

that they're not a part of the problem. And then if you don't do that, silence is violence. And that's an issue, too. That Barry Weiss speech on CNN was so fucking fantastic when Brian Stelter was like, oh my God. See if you can find it, Jamie. Well, it's on my Instagram. If you see Brian Stelter's cherub face

and Barry Weiss on the other side of the screen. But she's basically like calling out how the world's gone mad. And silence is violence is one of the things that she lists in this incredible rant that she goes on. I forgot to ask her. I still haven't asked her whether or not she, here, play this out. Americans who aren't on the hard left or the hard right who feel the world has gone mad. So in what ways has the world gone mad? Well, you know, when you have the chief reporter on the beat of COVID for the New York

Times talking about how questioning or pursuing the question of the lab leak is racist, the world has gone mad. When you're not able to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad. When we're not allowed to say out loud and in public that there are differences between men and women, the world has gone mad. When we're not allowed to acknowledge that rioting is rioting and it is bad, and that silence is not violence, but violence is violence, the world has gone mad. When we're not able to say that Hunter Biden's laptop is a story worth pursuing, the world has gone mad. When in the name of progress, young school children, as young as kindergarten, are being separated

in public schools because of their race, and that is called progress rather than segregation, the world has gone mad. There are dozens of examples that I could share with you and with your viewers. And you often say, you say, allowed. Everyone sort of knows this. You say we're not allowed, we're not not able who's the people stopping the conversation who are they

people let work at networks frankly like the one i'm speaking on right now who try and claim that's perfect perfect they don't exist that's why they hate me they can't talk they have shitty conversations yeah let her talk like they don't that's such a why they hate me. They can't talk. They have shitty conversations. It's like, let her talk. That's such a bad format. It's not even his fault, really. That's the worst format ever, where you're not even in the room with someone.

Everything's at a handicap. You're not in the room with someone. You have a thing in your ear where you're listening to them and they're listening to you. And it's on a delay always. Yeah, it's horrible. How have they not figured out the fucking delay? 2022. I think they not figured out the fucking delay? 2022.

I think they're going to do something where they're transitioning into this CNN Plus thing, which I know they have a show they're going to do with Don Lemon on CNN Plus. CNN Plus is a streaming platform. And I think that when they're no longer saddled down to this format that they have, where you have like seven-minute segments followed by commercial, I think they'll be freer to expand on ideas

and have real conversations, and hopefully the coverage and the content will elevate. And they'll start, it's not like there's a shortage of intelligent articulate people out there there's plenty of them no i mean intelligence is almost never the problem right in the in these scenarios you know it's what it is is nobody has an incentive to be the first person to raise a point on the other side right that's right like i i had this guy uh jeff mauer on my podcast a couple weeks ago and he's he used to be the senior writer for john oliver's uh show and you know like the odds, even if the odds are low

that, you know, people start talking about you, you start, people pass you over for a promotion because they see you as a kind of right-wing guy or something, it's not worth taking the risk. There's a thing that people do where they think you're secretly right-wing, which is hilarious. I've seen that on Twitter before.

People call someone like a fake progressive. They're like, oh yeah, you fake progressive. Like who's aping progressivism? Like who's pretending? Who's out there pretending? Who's pretending to be a Republican when they're really like secretly a liberal? Like what? Is that real? I think some people. Really? I don't know. Are they on like CNN or Fox News or something like that, where they have to be committed to a certain ideology to keep their job?

Yeah, like public people. Public people, I think. I don't know. Do you think it's fake progressives? Do you think there's people out there that are pretending to be progressive? I mean, so what do you think Barack Obama thought about gay marriage in, like, 2008? That's a good point. You know, like, do you think he was really against it in his bones and he had an epiphany? Yeah. That's a good point. Do you think he was really against it in his bones

and he had an epiphany? Yeah, that's a good point. That's a political position, though. As a candidate, I think that's different. Really, it shouldn't be, right? Oh, yeah. But I mean, someone who's a talker, someone who's just a commentator, I think.

Right. But you see it with people just tweeting like they don't even have any skin in the game they're just they're not even players they're just they're like LARPing you know and and people call them a fake progressive yeah progressives are very hard on one another they're so judgmental it's it's interesting it It's like the left has become this censoring, anti-free speech, anti... They have very rigid guidelines or guardrails that you're supposed to stay inside of when you have certain discussions. And it didn't used to be that way. It didn't use to be like Bill Maher is one of the last of the old school liberals who will still call out the left, call out like ridiculous left

wing politics and left wing policies. But there is a backlash happening now and it's getting less and less credible to dismiss it as white supremacy in the alt-right. Just yesterday or the day before, three members of the San Francisco, I think, the Board of Educators or whoever's in charge of education in San Francisco, three of them were recalled by voters largely because the Asian population of San Francisco, which is like 30% of the city or something, really did not like their progressive policies. You know, they were trying to, they were more focused on renaming schools with more progressive people at the head than they were in reopening schools, they got rid of the test that was used to determine which students get into the elite high school

because there were too many Asians, and they made it into a lottery instead of a test. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lottery? They made it into a lottery instead of a test, pushing down the numbers of Asians, increasing the numbers of black and hispanic kids didn't they do something in new york city recently where they eliminated uh advanced classes i'm not sure if they gifted classes or something i'm not sure i'm not sure i know eric adams is tends to be opposed to all those kinds of things um i think

it was before he got in. Maybe it was. Here it is. New York City outlines next steps to replace gifted and talented program. New York City will phase out gifted and talented classes in its schools, opting to end a program that critics say entrenched racial divides in the nation's larger public school system. So this is, I mean, to me, there's this constant slander of standardized

tests as racist, right? Because on average, black kids don't do as well on them as white kids. And for what it's worth, white kids on average don't do as well as Asian kids. And that disparity is seen by people as evidence of structural systemic racism. You know, one point to make is that these tests initially came out, you know, back in the early 20th century as an effort to identify talented kids from underprivileged backgrounds, right? Like, you know, smart kids that the system otherwise wouldn't realize are that smart and bring them into environments with other really smart kids. Like my mom grew up in the South Bronx. She went to like totally really chaotic homes, South Bronx in the 60s,

and she took a test and got into Stuyvesant right and back then Stuyvesant had a very robust percentage of black black and Hispanic kids um and a lot of them came from underprivileged backgrounds and got in because of the test right like the test is not racist and and Eric Adams understands that and and you know he was Eric Adams in New York. He ran on this anti-crime platform. We're going to keep the tests the way they are. We're basically not going to bow to anything progressive. population of New York came to the polls and said, we want that guy. In San Francisco, you know, the people in charge of education are saying, we're getting rid of the test, we're doing all this progressive stuff. One of them basically, I think Allison Collins was her name, she tweeted and I think later deleted something saying, Asians are pretty much like white supremacist adjacent and they're like They're they're using the techniques of white supremacy in order to succeed in our in the country and

They're akin to the house slaves of the past that used to get close to the masters their house enters in other words Whoa, and she tweeted that Asian community mobilized They said, you know, these people discriminate against us. They treat us like foreigners. Fuck them. Let's replace them. And they did. And so the backlash against progressivism, the number one argument people have is it's a racist backlash, right? just an explosion of alt-right, white supremacy, QAnon types that are mobilizing and trying to attack progressives. How do you make that argument make any sense when you have Black and Hispanic people in New York rushing to elect Eric Adams, Asians in San Francisco, a very liberal city,

getting rid of the progressive school board? How many more of these things have to happen before we realize there is a serious and legitimate argument, a good faith argument to be had about all of these progressive positions and you can't just shut people up by calling them racist? There's definitely a serious and real argument against a lot of these progressive positions and you definitely have both things happening. You definitely do have people who are closed-minded who are attacking these things

because they don't want open-minded perspectives. They don't want open-minded perspectives being talked about. And they want to keep the world in a sort of narrow lane. But then they have a lot of people that are particularly in some communities where people are struggling and working hard and they want to be acknowledged for their efforts and they don't want to be boxed in by these crazy type of rules where they're getting rid of gifted classes and they're making a fucking lottery, which is the craziest idea I've ever heard. For people to get into colleges, that's nuts. What is the purpose of working hard? You're supposed to reward people. This idea of a quality of outcome, like Jordan Peterson talks about this a lot, how dangerous it is to have a quality of

outcome. And my perspective has always been that you can't have a quality of outcome unless you have a quality of effort. And then you have to have a quality of opportunity, and those things aren't real. You're going to have obsessed people. You're going to have these folks that figure out a way to be far more successful than other people. That's one of the reasons why we love sports. When you have a guy like a Michael Jordan who's just so obsessed with victory, and you can see it in his eyes, this laser focus and figures out a way to be substantially better

than everybody else. That's magic for us. We love super winners. We love and that's equality of outcome eliminates that. The sports are the great testing ground for effort and all the factors, genetics, intelligence, coaching, technique, the ability to assess problems accurately. The great testing ground for that. And when you're a person who wants to think that a quality of outcome is a possibility, that's what flies in your face. a possibility that that's what flies in your face the philosopher robert nozick famous philosopher used to use this thought experiment about justice and he would basically i think at that time he

used like wilt chamberlain as the example because that was a time but you know if you think about the nba no one really very few people are upset at lebron james you know kobe bryan r.i.p and all you know others for the fact that they make so much money because you can see how much better they are than you at the thing and you know that the process by which they got from A to B is untamperable, right? There is no paying your way into being great in the NBA. There is certainly the luck of genetics, but then there's a lot of genetic great athletes in the world. The ones that make it there, it's like you know sweat equity is what got them there.

And so people have a sense that the process is fair. And when people feel the process is fair, they don't care about whether the result is equal. You take it to most other domains in life, people are not sure the process is fair. And I think that's the key difference between when people look at unequal results and complain and when they look at unequal results and don't. And I think there is far too much a focus on results. What we really care about as human beings is that the process is fair. So we should be focused on making processes fair rather than simply looking at the results as if that's the indicator of fairness. Yeah, and opportunities.

The equality of opportunity, if possible to achieve, would be the most noble goal. Like give people an opportunity to try things. Give people an opportunity to experience things. Give people an opportunity to learn. And that's not the case. You know, there's a giant disparity between good schools and bad schools. And that's not an insurmountable obstacle. That's not something that can't be fixed. That seems like- Difficult to fix though.

Very difficult to fix, but it's not breathing underwater. It's workable. It can be done. You know, things change over long periods of time because the economics of a region change, industries move in, job opportunities open up, things change. But there's certain things in this country that just have been stagnant. There's certain areas that have been stagnant. And when people talk about equality, that's where it's all fucked. It's not all fucked in equality of outcome. It's all fucked in equality of opportunity. Equality of opportunity, though, is, you know, it.

You're never going to fully achieve it. We're never going to fully achieve it for sure. Because so much of what matters in life is an effect of the private domain it's like how were your how did your parents raise you right what kind of loving environment did you come from were you abused right like the fact that i had two parents um you know that were highly focused on my education that were teaching me math and reading me books before I got to kindergarten, um, that, that had high expectations. So if I came home with like, I couldn't, I couldn't just like come home with a B and be congratulated. Right. Like that's the household I grew up in. It's a household, uh,

a lot of, a lot of people grow up in, including many of the Asian families that get their kids into the elite high schools in San Francisco and New York and so forth. You know, it's very difficult to substitute for that because so much of what builds you, your incentives, your personality, what you care about, your values, isn't mediated by policy or by the government, but rather in the home. mediated by policy or by the government, but rather in the home. And it's very difficult for the government to reach into the home and change those variables for the better. Yeah, it's not going to happen. We don't respect the government enough to ever allow them to do that anyway. That's an undeniable aspect of being a person, how your parents treat you, how you are educated in the home, how your parents view problems,

how they handle things. So there was this article in the New York Times from a few years ago that I'll never forget because of, you know, it's one of those articles where you could tell they have a huge problem with people not pointing out common sense points, right? The point of the article was New York's elite high schools have a problem. There's not enough black kids. Asian kids are essentially unfairly in some way dominating these schools. And it talked about one Asian family, and it said many— no, it actually talked about lots of them. It said something like

many Asian families scrimp on essentials like food, like food in order to pay for test prep. That's almost an exact quote from the article. In the next paragraph, it talks about how the Asian kids have some kind of unfair advantage that can't be expected of black and Hispanic kids making these same tests. It's like, wait a minute, wait a minute. The last sentence you just said, they have to eat less food in order to pay for fucking test prep.

And now you're telling me they're privileged? There's a lot of poor Asians in New York. But there is a cognitive dissonance. There is a privilege of poor Asians in New York. But there is a privilege. And there's this cognitive dissonance. There is a privilege in being raised by families that expect a lot from you and put a large emphasis on education. Correct. That is one of the deepest privileges that you can have. Yeah.

And that's what Asian communities have. That's not the kind of privilege leg up that we're giving these Asian families that are like living above cleaners and like. Yeah. Do you know why? That's that thing that they do. There's a thing that happens when progressive people discuss ideas where they won't go any further. Like they won't say, Baltimore. They get to this spot and they just like, assume that everybody who is also subscribing

the same ideology as them will allow them to get away with this sort of like weird cognitive transgression by not exploring this idea. By not recognizing that you just contradicted yourself. You're literally just talking about they're so poor they can't even afford food, but they decide they'll eat less food to have their kids have good preparation for tests. Yeah, let's make it harder for them to get in.

Jesus Christ. The hard work that, I mean, I grew up around a lot of Koreans because I was involved in Taekwondo really early. I was a junior black belt Taekwondo. Oh, really? Actually, as a kid, yeah, yeah. And I always talk about my friend Jung-sik, who was a national champion while he was going through his medical residency. And he was testing, like going through college, and he would put his backpack on filled

with books and run the stairs for exercise sometimes. He was a national champion. He was like, no matter, like he was explaining to me what it was like growing up at his house and like no matter what he did, it wasn't hard enough. It was not, he didn't work

hard enough. Like his father was relentless and that this ethic was pushed into his head at work hard enough. Like his father was relentless and that this ethic was pushed into his head at an early age. Like I always thought that I was lazy. I was so disciplined, but I thought I was lazy and compared to him because compared to a regular person, I was crazy disciplined. But compared to him, I'm like, oh my God, I'm so lazy. Like I literally had, because he was a good friend of mine, I had this guy as an example of this impossible work ethic. And because I wanted to sleep eight hours a day,

I thought I was a lazy piece of shit. That's the power of culture. Yeah, yeah. The power of culture and expectations. Absolutely. You can't fix that. I mean, you're never going to. I mean, that would take for fucking ever.

And also there's an immigrant mentality, like my friend Joey Diaz likes to call it, an immigrant mentality. People who come here from another country specifically to do better. Because they live in a place where they don't like how things are. And they're like, we're going to uproot ourselves and move to a place where we don't understand the fucking language and we're gonna learn the language and the children of those people and the grandchildren of those people they have specific advantages in that there's a drive that's imparted in them i think that i mean that's probably my my most left-wing position is how pro immigration i am i would say like i, I'm probably left of the Democratic Party in terms of how good I think immigration is for this country.

If it's legal, certainly. I mean, we should be able to choose and have a system for who comes here. I'm completely in support of that. But, you know, if we had that, I would be in favor of totally ramping up the number of immigrants we bring here. I think it's our great strength as a nation that people from all over the world want to come here, contribute to our economy, make us competitive, increase our population, help us compete with China as the global dominant power. I think, obviously, so many people are anti-immigration in this country that,

practically speaking, you can't get elected talking how I'm talking. But that is really what I think deep down. I think people are wrong to, to be as resistant to immigration as they are. Um, I think, you know, the kids of immigrants assimilate remarkably well to American culture. They speak English. They are attracted to the freedom that we have here. Like America is an attractive alternative to the rest of the world that's a fact yeah um people want to come here including you know africans you know south asians people of color that are coming to this this allegedly horribly racist society well they see something here that some kind of opportunity here that the rest of the world or at least many places in the world lack.

And I think like we make it too hard for people to come here legally. There are too many loopholes. There's too many ways in which it's just like you hear horror stories of people with, you know, visa problems, people, people that we absolutely want to incentivize to come here, right? Selfishly, right? There's this attitude that immigration is like this gift we're giving to others. No, we're taking, we're like getting one over as a country on the rest of the world by taking people who want to come here in. And I know that's, like I said, that's probably my most left-oriented position is immigration. I completely agree with you.

And I think that to compete, like if you want to compete in anything, you want to be around people that are obsessed, that really want to do well. You want to be around people that are really willing really want to do well you want to be around people that are really willing in to put in the work really willing to come to another place that is another continent come over on a boat or on an airplane or even make your way up across the border those fucking people are driven they're

driven and that's what you want to be around. I mean, that's what everybody should want. If you want to leave, you're stuck in a spot. Like, what should you do? Should you build up your village in Guatemala and make it like New York City? The fuck out of here. You don't have any time for that. You got to get to Manhattan. Right.

You know, like, we should embrace those people because those people, they have the courage. They have the motivation. They have the drive to leave the land of their birth and to try to make it in this ideal of what America is. And some of the most fiercely patriotic people that I've ever met have come here from communist countries. Yeah, totally. have ever met have come here from communist countries. Yeah, totally. My friends that have come here from Russia, my friends that have come here from different Eastern Bloc countries or who have parents that experienced communism, people from Cuba, they are fiercely patriotic, fiercely pro-American. And those are the kind of people that you want to come over here. You want

them to come over here and raise the bar and bring that vibration of vibrancy of someone who wants to excel. You come here because you want to do better for you, you want to do better for your family, and you want to come to America to kick ass. They don't come to America to take a nap. They come to America to kick ass. Or to sap us of our resources. I think a lot of people on the right, they oppose immigration.

They're going to sap us of our resources. I mean, so I think a lot of people on the right, they oppose immigration. I think somewhere in them they feel if we let all these people in from country, like communist countries like China, they're going to turn America communist. They're going to bring be outnumbered by this influx of people from other parts of the world that don't have these values. You're coming from a country that's a dictatorship, no freedom, and people are worried. I get that. The problem with that argument is, first of all, the people who come here come here because they like here. They like what we're doing here. First of all, the people who come here come here because they like here, right?

They like what we're doing here, which means you can't take the average foreigner from a country and expect that that's the person that's coming to America. No, it's not the median person. It's the person that sees something of value here that they don't see in their homeland, right? That's one thing. The second thing is the moment you have kids, these second generation immigrants, they're more fluent in English usually than they are in the language of their parents. And that's a deeper point than just the language. It's not just that the language is some exception to a rule of thumb where they otherwise are more attached to their homeland values. It's that language is a proxy for the fact that they're absorbing American culture primarily because they grew up young here, right?

Yeah. And so I think that argument, I understand why people are afraid of it, but it just hasn't been proven true. Like we just talked about San Francisco. Right. Who is the reason that they voted out hyper progressive school board members? Right. Asian-Americans, many of whom are actually first generation. Right. They were using Chinese ballots. OK. So if you're a conservative that's afraid letting in more people is going to destroy the country, I mean, that's a perfect rejoinder to your concern right there. Well, not only that, but America is unique in the fact that

it is literally a nation of immigrants. The entire country is founded, except unless you're Native American, you've come from somewhere else, whether it's your grandparents or your parents or your great-grandparents. Someone came from somewhere else and built every fucking city here. So to say, we got enough, we're full now,

it betrays the ideals that the entire country was founded on. And there's a lot of people that live in places where maybe they're relying upon a specific industry, and they're worried that someone's going to come here and work for less, and they're going to take away their quality of life. And that's a fear-based perspective. But that can be solved with unions. That can be solved with the way people have a relationship with their employers and that the employers have a relationship with the people in their community. And you can embrace immigrants as being a part of that because you need more skilled people, more

ambitious people. It's good for everybody. The idea that it's not good for everybody is a famine-based perspective. And almost all famine-based perspectives are terrible. Yeah. Because you're just like, oh, what do we do? We've got to prepare for the worst. Abundance perspectives are the best when it comes to advancing a country.

If you want the country to kick ass, you want more people over here that have the desire to kick ass. Who has a desire to kick ass more than someone who leaves their fucking country? Leaves their country. You don't even speak the language that good, and you come over here just because you think you have more opportunity that's us that's America that is as American as it gets that's a fucking eagle holding a gun right that's American right absolutely and and you know you know the other part part of this that's interesting to me is like what are the cultural attitudes of immigrants that come from you know South Asia East Asia, East Asia, South America, Africa?

Are they woke? Fuck no, they're not. Are you kidding? You know, it's the opposite. an argument that's been made by some prominent liberal writers and Democratic advocates is that the way we're going to beat the Republicans is by importing people of color. And they're going to be Democrats by default because Republicans are racist. They're going to run from Republicans. We're going to import people of color and that's how we're going to beat him it's pure numbers game right the lazy assumption here is that immigrants who are people of color are basically going to vote like black americans like like a democratic bloc right rather than be persuadable voters that are voting on

that can easily be persuaded to vote republican right and that have cultural values that are sometimes more aligned with conservatives and liberals on certain issues. And, you know, it's connected to this, this general way in which I think white Americans get skewered for flaws such as racism that are actually universal human flaws right it's like go anywhere in the world you're going to find bigotry um you're gonna find i mean if you zoom out and talk about historical evils genocide slavery right these are things that have been going on since the beginning of recorded history on every inhabited continent, right? There's this great book by Orlando Patterson, who's a Harvard sociologist

called Slavery and Social Death. It's like this 500 page tome on slavery. And it has a database in the back of the book of every known example, a recorded example of slavery since people began writing things down. And it's just immense, right? It's immense. Like the normality of cruelty and dominance and killing throughout human history, it just, it boggles the mind. And one thing I've encountered is that there are people that are extremely parochial in a sense that they almost don't know slavery happened anywhere else in the world, right? Yeah, I've heard that argument made. It's a hilarious argument.

Yeah, I mean, it's extraordinarily ignorant. Especially when you consider the fact that there's literally more slaves today in the world than there were before slavery was abolished in the United States. Is that true? Yeah. I didn't realize there's that many. Yeah, let's see if that's true. Let's make sure that's true.

I'm sure you saw the open markets for slavery in Libya, which is bananas because you're watching slave markets on YouTube. Yeah. And we talk about slavery like it's in the past tense in our heads. You think slavery in the past tense. We abolished it. Well, there's sex slaves that exist today too. There was this big bust in los angeles recently there was like 80 people that were were busted or were freed rather who were sex slaves they were basically being sex trafficked which is fucking bizarre like that there's slaves right there's people that people

have captured and they force them into this sexual servitude yeah how many what is it I didn't catch the specific oh sorry there are more slaves today than before slavery was abolished in the United States in the world there's more slaves today in the world globally I just think that it's it's just not an open market the way it was in the 1700s. Right. But it seems to be. This gets back to your point of people. I Googled that, but this is what popped up. There's slaves in lots of countries, apparently.

Yeah. India's home to the largest number of slaves globally with 8 million. Holy fuck. 8 million? Followed by China with 3.8 million. Pakistan, 3 million. North Korea, 2 million. Nigeria, 3.8 million Pakistan 3 million North Korea 2 million Nigeria 1.3 million Iran 1.2 million Indonesia 1.2 holy fuck Democratic Republic of the Congo 1 million Russia 794,000 slaves that is fucking insane there are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now according to a comprehensive new report

issued by the australia-based walk free walk free foundation this is not some softened by modern standards definition of slavery actual slaves yeah fucking insane. Okay. There's, here's one that says 40 million. So I, I believe 10 to 12 million slaves were taken to the West from Africa and something like 14 million were taken to the Arab world from, from Africa. So this is where that statistic comes from. Yeah, that, that would seem to check out. I mean, so this, this, this goes back to your point about people miscalibrating small problems and large problems right uh you know we had the 1619 project uh in in 2019 which uh you know a series of articles and poems and essays and podcasts designed to retell the American story centering slavery. That's how it was branded, essentially. And they, I mean, they push this rewrite of

history where the colonies revolted against the British in order to preserve slavery, which is not true. And, you know, in general, the general tenor of this, I mean, there was some really good work done in this project, but the general tenor of this was to get people to see American slavery in the smallest, most minute details, right? So there was one article by Matthew Desmond, which tried to argue that Microsoft Excel spreadsheets are very similar and have their root in the kinds of accounting systems that slave masters would use, right? So that you can see the legacy of slavery in an Excel spreadsheet, right? Like that was a serious argument that was made. And I just thought to myself what what the hell is

going on that you're asking me to see slavery in an excel spreadsheet that's how trivial we've gotten like there there's no other society that for any other reason use the concept of like intersecting lines to account for shit like really that that's what passes muster as a connection between our current society and our legacy of slavery meanwhile i'm not aware of a single line in this project that's pulitzer prize winning where they so much as acknowledged that modern slaves still exist, right? Which seems like a moral miscalibration to me. Do you think that what's happening with people with this discrimination against immigration

is a fear that they're, in a sense, bribing people from Central America and South America that are coming up through the border. They're allowing them to come in, and then this is the fear, that they're going to allow them to vote. And the conceit is, we're going to allow you to vote, but remember who got you in here. The Democrats got you in here.

We're the one who've allowed you to come through the border, even though you're illegal and distributed you throughout the country. That's the big fear that I think a lot of Republicans have about particularly what's happening at the South border. Yeah, no, I think that's valid. Having a huge influx of illegal immigration, there's no doubt that the motives of people who want folks to vote. It's like politicians want to win and they left or right. They will often try to rejigger the election laws that they can legally change to give themselves a leg up. Republicans do this. I don't think it works so well.

They try. Democrats do this. And I think that's a valid concern. Like to have a border, to be able to choose to let people in is fundamental. So I definitely wouldn't quibble with that. It's just, you know, if we had that, the level of immigration I would calibrate to, I think would be way higher than most people. Because I really think people far, far overestimate the costs of immigration and far underestimate the benefits. Have you ever seen a documentary a day without Mexicans

No, it's a documentary about Los Angeles like what would happen if there was no Mexicans in Los Angeles Essentially everything would fall apart. Yeah, everything was shut down So if you are like if you're anti Mexican immigration and you live in Los Angeles You should probably move because you're anti LA like right the fucking whole thing is run by immigrants. Right. Miami. Oh, my God. Jesus Christ. Well, Miami is fascinating because it's a lot of Cuban immigrants who are very right-wing.

Yep. I mean, they've experienced the reality of actual socialism, actual communism, actual dictatorships. And they are not interested in that shit. They are very, very pro-democracy pro-united states and they they came over here for a very very good reason and with great cost you know and i think ultimately this thing that they're doing with letting i don't know exactly what is happening that's part of the problem like there's rumors about what's happening versus what's actually happening at the southern border you know the rumors are they're taking people, they're letting, they're processing them, letting them through and then putting them on buses and distributing

them around the country. And then there's also these people that think you shouldn't have to be a United States citizen in order to vote. Well, if you put those two things together, I could see where you're kind of allowing, you know, you see people coming across with Biden-Harris t-shirts on, and you've got to wonder, okay, well, who gave them to them? Like, is this something you get? Is there, like, a guy who's got a stop at the side of the road? Are you guys making it across the border? Get your uniform.

You've got a Biden-Harris t-shirt for you. I mean, if there really is some sort of a concerted effort to bring people over here with the goal of stacking the deck in these Democratic cities and making sure they're not taken over by Republicans because you're going to allow people who are illegal immigrants to vote and the conceit is, since you let them in, they're going to vote for you. That's where things get a little squirrely one i would you know i'm not even so sure they

they would vote for you it's the thing it's like you ask a lot of immigrants what they think about cultural issues about social issues the the and what comes out of their mouths is often the least politically correct, least woke thing you could possibly think of. Right. Which doesn't mean they would vote Republican necessarily. It just means I think they're way more up for grabs than Democrats want to admit. I mean, I remember my favorite New York cab story, having lived in the city for maybe eight years. cab story having lived in the city for maybe eight years i get in i get into a cab with this guy who seems like maybe eastern or southern european like maybe greek or maybe something like that and he's one of these cab drivers that is kind of spiritual kind of wants to talk to you have

like a little bit of a deep conversation has some wisdom and. And so I was, I was in the mood for it. I was like, all right, let's get, let's get deep. We start talking about some stuff, like having a really good conversation, talking about life and talking about where he's from, how old he is. It's like in his fifties or so I've been driving a cab for like 30, a little over 30 years. So I said said what's the biggest thing that's uh changed in this city since you started driving a cab and without skipping a beat he says i picked you up didn't i and we both started laughing out loud because like on the one hand like you know this is one of those comments that if it were written out the next day in the new york times could seem racist to people out of context of the fact that we just had like

a really nice heart-to-heart of a conversation um and a laugh and a laugh about it yeah you know and and he he didn't hesitate he didn't he didn't feel any guilt saying it even though i was black he's just like no whatever um i mean i guess it's just the basic point is oh here's the other other other cab story i have in new york you learn a lot from from riding cabs riding in the cab. The only time I've ever heard a human being say, go back to your country, right? Which is like a cliche of right-wing bigotry, right? Like white guy, right-wing bigotry. Only time I've ever heard a human being say that was a black woman who was my cab driver or maybe my via driver or something and a like an indian cab driver cut her off she rolled down the fucking window said go back to your fucking country

it was like the point being that bigotry and i'm not even sure she's a bigot necessarily right she she was pissed off she had road rage but the the wider point is that bigotry and racism is talked about as if white people invented and perpetuate it and i think that that is that is a deep misunderstanding of its source in human psychology and if pinned on one group of people, it gets under my skin because it's such a deep misunderstanding of actually where hate comes from. And it prevents us from being able to sort of truly understand that bigotry is a human flaw, right? It's a flaw that all people are susceptible to. And in order to really have an honest conversation about it, it can't be a finger pointed at like,

you're all the problem and we're all perfect. That is not a basis on which to start a conversation. And that's how the conversation is being had in a lot of places that that situation is kind of interesting because you could say it's bigotry and it it fits all it checks all the boxes of being bigotry but it also could be hey you're a fucking asshole you drive like a shithead go back to where you're from because we don't like shitheads over here Like you could you could look at it that way and if someone is clearly from another country And they speak with a deep accent are you supposed to ignore that fact when you say get the fuck out of here?

Like it's a way to say get the fuck out of here like stop being a dick like you want to drive like that Go back to where you're from. It's one of those things. She doesn't want to be around people that cut her off. If you come over here and everybody who comes over here starts cutting people off. The thing about the way people drive in other countries, have you ever been to Mexico City? Never. Wild. Wild place. First of all, crazy pollution.

Yeah. Like pollution that gives you a headache. Jesus. You're like, holy fuck. I flew in, and as I was flying in, I couldn't believe it. So I was taking photos from the plane. I was like, this is bananas. I mean, just thick, dark clouds of pollution.

And a red light is just a suggestion. I mean, you don't necessarily have to not go with a red light like the fuck you know like in in LA it's it's very common where like say if a light turns red and someone was about to turn they turn anyway you go fuck it I'm gonna go and they they just go cuz there's no good that's a good LA. Self-centered assholes. And then they clog up the lane. People go, fuck you. They honk.

In Mexico City, that shit is normal. That's what everybody does. People were just, we were, I was in my car. I was in a passenger. I was there for the UFC. And when I was there, there was people just, they were just driving into the intersection. Just cutting each other off. I was like, wah!

And the driver was laughing. We were having a fun laugh about it. How is nobody dying? They're just good at it. Yeah. Like, have you ever seen, like, in other countries where they have these crazy intersections where people just sort of figure things out? I remember going to Machu Picchu when I went to Peru. And you can either hike up or you can drive up on these buses,

and the way you drive up is by circling, just circle, circle, circle, circling up this mountain many times, and the road is narrow, and it's a fucking mountain. You know, like you could just fucking fall off. And they do sometimes. And there's two-way traffic. There's two-way traffic there's two-way traffic because and and you can't see it's it's a it's a it's a very uh steep you know it's like an oval more than a circle it's

not it's not a nice so there's these very steep you can't see around the corner and just you know what every three or four turns there would be another one coming and they'd have to stop right around the corner and i was like oh my god how is this normalized why does this i cannot believe this is normalized here what is this where is this at is it in paris yeah yeah look how these guys are like this scooter is just driving in between cars yeah this is very common in parts of the world. And Paris is probably not nearly as bad as like Beijing or some places in Bangladesh. One word.

Yeah, I mean, people get accustomed to driving around a lot of people and adjusting and making movements. But those fucking scooter people are asking to die. Yeah, it's real common. See if you can find Mexico city. So you can find an intersection in Mexico city. Cause I was blown away. It was, I was laughing. I was laughing hard. The driver was laughing with me because he was like, this is just how it is mirror. Right. It's how it is here. They just, they just drive like that with the, on the topic of the smog and the pollution it's like this is one of those things where

oh let me see that just shows a lot that looks really nice actually this is it's great food's fucking fantastic if you're a fan of mexican food god damn i am i love mexican so much the food in mexico city is off the charts there's so much variety too but we say pollution i was gonna say yeah so you know like i think uh i've always had this lazy assumption that we're sort of living in modernity and i'm we're living outside of the barbarism of the past it's like back in the day they would split your fucking brain in half do these horrible procedures on people they didn't wash their hands um they just you know people lived in filth they like shit in the streets and thank god i live in in this fundamentally different time uh modernity where we've like gotten rid of most of the truly

deranged and barbaric and you know crazy practices of the past but i see like the pollution when we enter a world where it's unthinkable to have that level of pollution in a city they're going to look back at us and say my god God, these people used to live in pollution and do lobotomies on people and they didn't wash their hands. Like that's going to be included in the laundry list of past barbaric practices. And, you know, it makes me question whether my attitude that we are living in this other It makes me question whether my attitude that we are living in this other modern time is even justified because we still have so many things to clean up, so many things to figure out. We do, but statistically speaking, it's never been safer to be a person. That is absolutely true. In terms of medicine and surgeries, it's never been safer in terms of the violent crime, but you're 100% right about pollution. It's a unique

aspect of our society today. A lot of people don't want to admit that, that it's safer and it's better. Yeah, that's a weird one. People don't want to admit it, but it's because they don't want to be in denial that it's still a gigantic problem, that violence is still a problem. But we had a climate scientist on the other day, and he was showing us. There's an area in Indiana, Evansville, Indiana, where there's seven power plants, coal-fired power plants in a 30-mile area. And it's fucking nuts. The amount of particulate in the air, and it covers things like child's swing sets and shit and god and the streets it's like dust just these people are just breathing cold dust and they all

have like lung problems and it's just like it chops years off your life and these poor people are fucked and they're they're in this spot but there's still people today that like you know trump when he was running he would talk about clean coal like that's not clean bro yeah that's a terrible way to make energy it's one of the worst ways in terms of like what it does to the environment in terms of like what it's pumps out into the air but when you see this like which is the most egregious example this one area evansville ind, it was horrible. And they do interviews with these people. They talk about their chest.

They can't breathe very good. I'm like, ugh. This is all so you could use coal for power plants? While we're in a world that has nuclear and has solar and has wind, what the fuck, man? Yeah, and solar and wind have gotten so much cheaper. Yeah, I didn't really realize how much it was. They're as cheap as nuclear now. He was explaining that Texas, half of the grid is powered by solar and wind.

That's amazing. Yeah, pretty insane. Yeah, and it is a gross aspect of our culture, a very gross aspect, that we are still involved in things that pollute rivers and fracking that pollutes underground water and fucks up people's drinking water. We could light it on fire. You ever seen that, what is it, Gasland?

Gasland, right, Jamie? Yeah, Gasland documentary where they light the water on fire as it comes out of a faucet. It's horrible. Yeah, but gas is cheaper, Coleman. It's cheaper that way. God, what's the big deal? A little pollution?

You just move out of that spot. You got a spot now that's going to be fucked for the next 400,000 years or whatever. Yeah. Great. Terrific. I do think there's a limit to the amount of technological progress that we will make. Yeah. Like, I don't think it'll keep going forever or that.

I guess what I'm saying is I feel like I encounter a lot of people that are sort of techno-utopians. Like, we'll be able to figure out anything we can think of now we will eventually make it's possible though but i think there will be a limit there'll be stuff we can think of that we'll never be able to do like what i don't know what i just think that if you like if you assume that humans are not the most intelligent possible beings that could physically exist, compatible with the laws of physics of the universe, which I think is true. Like we're not the most intelligent. It would stand to reason that there are things

it's possible to do. There are things the laws of physics don't rule out that we simply aren't intelligent enough to do. That we aren't intelligent enough to ever figure out. I think that's assuming that we simply aren't intelligent enough to do that like we aren't intelligent enough to ever figure out i think that's assuming that we're not going to merge with technology in a symbiotic way that advances our cognitive ability and i think that's inevitable but what if what if merging with technology is already something we're unable to figure out because we can't conceptually understand consciousness readily enough hmm well consciousness whether we understand it

or not we could still manipulate it the thing about technology and the symbiotic sort of future of humans and technology when you talk to eat if you ever talk to you on no talk to Elon about it he's developing neural ink and neural ink is essentially going to be some sort of an implant that they they they cut a hole in your fucking head and they put wires inside your brain and change the way you interface with information and and he was explaining it to me, and he goes, you're going to be able to talk without words.

And when he says you're going to be able to talk without words, it's not like one of my stoner buddies, bro, you're going to be able to fucking talk without words. I'm like, yeah, maybe someday. But when he says it, he's got a fucking plan. And he's going to start with people that have problems with neurological issues, people that have nerve damage, people that have spinal cord injuries. They're going to replace the ability to move and use some sort of computer-controlled technology that replaces the function of the spinal column.

that replaces the function of the spinal column. Then from there, they're going to move to human beings advancing their cognitive function. They're going to move to changing the way they interface with data. I'm skeptical they'll get there. Why? So last year, I got a cough. It wasn't COVID. Were you sad?

Was I sad that it wasn't COVID? Yeah. A little bit, yeah. I was like, damn. Everybody hopes it's COVID. I just have a fucking cough. Yeah. And I went to the doctor.

It just wasn't going away. And I'm a podcaster. I'm a rapper. I'm a musician. I need my voice voice it wasn't going away you still have a little cough now i do a little bit is that the same cough no it's not the same this cough is from omicron which i had like six weeks ago really yeah but it went it had it for four weeks lingered went away for two weeks so it's a it's a me thing it's not covet it's me

right uh my coughs tend to linger a little bit for a long time. Anyway, I went to the doctor. And the doctor was very kind. He did an x-ray of my chest for free. Just kind of to be nice. I was like, listen, I really need to fucking get rid of this cough. It's been a month. I have no idea what to do.

And he said, you know, it's probably just mild bronchitis. After he saw the x-ray do you want me to prescribe you anything and i was like what do you why are you asking you're the doctor don't that's why i'm coming here is because you're supposed to say the things tell me the things and he's like i don't know man um you can give you some stuff it's probably not going to do anything but and i was like yeah just just give me everything he's like all right antibacterial um steroids uh this other thing so that took everything did nothing robitussin over-the-counter cough medicine you know it turns out that shit does not work for everyone it did nothing for me and then i looked up the meta-analysis studies of robitussin in meta-analysis versus

a placebo has almost no effect do you know that really yes there are meta-analysis compiling studies of robitussin versus placebo that find tiny effect sizes well nyquil used to get you high as fuck did they change it it? I think they did. For sure, right? Yeah, that's what RoboTrip and they had to stop that. There was like a coating in it, I think. Dude, I had NyQuil once. I had NyQuil once in the 90s.

I'll never forget it. I was sick and I took NyQuil and I was laying in my bed and I was as happy as I've ever been in my life. I was like, I feel so loved. I just feel so like one with everything. I was just, I was like, Oh my God, I'm so high. Yeah. I was like this, like, ah, and I'm ever thinking, well, this is why people like NyQuil. I don't think before that time. And I was like in my twenties at the time, I was like, I don't think I've ever really had NyQuil. Right. Like really had it. And especially not as an adult where I could like recognize what's going on.

I was like, I'm so high. Yeah. I mean, NyQuil even now kind of feels good. What is it? It used to be codeine. Yeah, that's what I was just looking up. Dextromethorphan. Yeah.

Right. What was NyQuil in the 90s? Was it codeine? It was fucking strong, though. I mean, bring it back. How come I can't have it now? Assholes. Anyway, my point about bringing up the cough story was there are certain problems.

Okay, let me put it this way. We have intuitions about which are the hard problems and which are the easy problems, right? And sometimes those intuitions are just way off. So it turns out putting a man on the moon was easier than curing the common cough reliably. I wouldn't have guessed that if I were like a human in like 1890. I would have been like, they'll probably cure the cough before they put a guy safely in space.

It turns out we haven't done that. And my guess is that the Neuralink stuff is going to be more like a common cough type of problem, where it's like, we think we're making progress, but it turns out to be so much more difficult than we can even realize. That, you know, it's like 500 years from now and we still haven't gotten it. That's possible. It's also possible that they do it and then they keep expanding on it and they keep innovating and then the competition starts kicking in and other people start developing new sorts

of human brain interfaces and it gets extremely valuable to the point where you cannot compete without it, and it becomes a thing where everybody has, just like everybody has a cell phone now. If they can figure out a way to get people to interface with technology where you can literally share data and information back and forth without talking,

that's an invaluable skill or ability. Whether or not that actually is implemented, I don't know. But Elon has a fucking plan. And that's the smartest guy I've ever talked to. And when he talks about it, he's explaining how it's going to work. He's not pie-in-the-sky shit. No, but I think this goes back to my point about intelligence is often not why people get things wrong it's not that they're not intelligent it's that sometimes

when you're in an industry and you have that hammer everything looks like a nail so it's like the people in tech are going to be the ones to overestimate what tech can do precisely because they're in tech yeah just. Just like the surgeon, the surgeon is going to think you can solve everything with surgery because he's a fucking surgeon. Right. Right. And so it's not that they're unintelligent. It's that, um, sometimes, you know, people tend to overestimate the importance of their industry or the ability of their industry to solve everything. It's a systematic bias I think people have across the board so often people with it on the inside are some sometimes the worst judges of the limits of their own enterprise

That does make sense. However technological innovation seems to be one of the main consistent factors in human civilization and the explosion of technological innovation that's taken place over the last 30 years, and particularly over the last, you know, whatever it has been since the internet was really fully implemented into everyone's household, it's been mind-boggling. And I don't see it slowing down.

And I think that the next logical step is to go from something you carry around to something that's a part of your body. And I think they'll do it first for people with injuries. And then once they, and they already have that. They already have things where they allow people to move a mouse around with their brain. They already have things where people with previously paralyzed hands can now use them. They have those things.

hands can now use them. They have those things. The logical sort of technological innovation, if you extrapolate from where we are now to where we're going, whether it takes 10 years or 50 years or 100 years, I think the symbiotic connection between humans and technology is probably the only way we beat out artificial intelligence. I think the big fear is that someone creates artificial intelligence and that thing becomes sentient. And then that thing creates better artificial intelligence, far superior to ours, and does it very quickly. They find all the flaws that we have and they come up with a new version of us. And that we're not going to be able to compete. And that this sort of silicon-based life form will be far more advanced than us, but without emotions, without all the biological problems that we have, without the desire for breed and ego and all. It won't be programmed with any of those problems.

So we'll just seek advancement and technological innovation for whatever fucking reason. I don't know why. I mean, maybe it would have no motivation to do anything. It would just stop dead in its tracks because it would realize that the existence is futile. But I think the way to stop that is we become symbiotic and we integrate with technology. And that technology advances our capability. And as Elon says, it advances our bandwidth for accessing information. Yeah, I mean, I can't justify this

with much more than a gut feeling, but. Gut feelings are great. Yeah, I mean, gut feelings come from somewhere. They come from, hopefully from years of learning about the world and guessing and being wrong and being right. That's where intuitions come from. But my intuition tells me that this is gonna be

one of those problems that we underestimate the difficulty of by orders of magnitude. It's like how close are we to understanding the brain anywhere close enough? How many neurons are there in the brain again? That's a good question. It's like so many more than you think. Billions, probably trillions, I believe. Yeah, I think it's trillionsions, probably trillions, I believe. Yeah, I think it's trillions.

Is it trillions? I think it is. How close are we to truly? Let's guess. Truly to like. Okay. Oh, God. I'm going to say 3 trillion. No.

I'm going to say 2,999,000,000. No, it's 86 billion. Oh, okay. A close to average, average between 86 and 100. Oh, it's 86 billion. Oh, okay. Close to average between 86 and a lot. Oh, it's not that many. That's Earth when we have optimal population density. How close are we to understanding the brain? It's 86 billion neurons.

Not totally close. The question is- That's an understatement of the century. We're not even like- Yeah. We're not. We're like dipping our toe in to like the pacific ocean it's like the pacific ocean and we like kind of are starting to

understand like maybe what water is yeah i don't know it's like we're at the beginning and i guess my point is a an understanding complete enough to integrate with technology, it's not at all obvious to me that we will ever get there. You know, like we could make progress forever, but it can be like asymptotic progress. Like there's an asymptote here. And it's... What's that word? It's like, well, you know, like in math,

like how a graph can like approach the limit of a thing without ever touching it and get infinitely closer to a line without ever touching it and go on forever like this. So it's like if you imagine we make asymptotic progress, there's this line that because of our intelligence, you know, and our the fundamental fact that we're not wired by evolution to understand the world perfectly. We're wired to evolve and reproduce, basically, on the African savanna, right? And just like every other animal in the world, there's a limit to the things we are able to understand.

Right? That limit for humans is way further than for any other animal, but fundamentally it's not infinite. And again, it would stand to reason there are problems in the world that we may not even be able to understand the problems, much less the solutions. I would say probably consciousness so far is looking like one. But the point is, it's possible we could keep making progress technologically forever.

But it's asymptotic progress in the sense that there's a line here that we keep approaching and it keeps looking like we're making progress because we are, but there's a line we're never going to hit. So it can be both true at the same time that we keep making progress forever and that there is a limit to that progress that's asymptotic and certain things are um be just beyond that line and my my intuition tells me that merging with understanding the brain and understanding you know silicon well enough to merge them is probably beyond that line but but what if that line is akin to the line of human evolution i mean you go back to australia pythagoras and you compare the the line of human evolution. I mean, if you go back to Australopithecus and you compare the frame of those ancient hominids

to a human being, you're not talking about that long ago. In terms of the time of life on Earth or in terms of time of the Earth itself, we're looking at it in terms of our own individual lifetimes, yes. But what if human beings and i believe we probably are continuing to evolve and advance and what if that is being shaped and aided by the access to information that we have because of technology so it almost certainly is well certainly yeah so not just a symbiotic use of technology in terms of like

being integrated into our own brain and our our own neurology but what if it's happening to us because of that information and so we are advancing our capabilities but we're doing it at a biological evolution scale which is like a slower scale what would that look like for evolution to be responding to, slowly to, uh, like digital integration? These little fuckers.

That's what it's going to look like. We're going to have little green men, big heads and little tiny bodies because we're not going to need muscle anymore. We're not going to need manpower and we're probably not going to need genitals, but probably going to figure out a way to breed. That that doesn't sound fun it doesn't have fun but unless it's more fun unless like doing something through some sort of hyper realistic virtual reality simulation type thing is more exciting than doing something biologically like also because like that black episode

Yeah, because everything's covered by black mirror every dystopian idea you have but That's I mean if you look at like the difference between ancient hominids Ancient primates and us well, that's where it's consistent. Our heads are bigger Our bodies are softer, softer you know and it seems like if you keep going in that general direction this is what you get well that would have to be because people with bigger heads are having more children or something like that and yeah like the mutations that some mutation that makes us smarter leads to more offspring but it's not clear to me anymore that there is a connection between like let's say i have a kid that has some crazy series like one in a million mutation that gives him in 300 iqs

is that guy like is he gonna do much better reproduct reproductively than like that's good only if he designs the matrix yeah and then human beings breed not through biological selection. Like this person looks better. They have a better hip-to-waist ratio. You want to have a baby with her. This person's taller and more masculine. You want to have a baby with him. If it gets to the point where that's not how we choose anymore,

then maybe you will select for the people that are the most intelligent that they can manipulate the matrix i had this guy david chalmers on my podcast he's a pretty well-known philosopher and he just wrote a really thick book arguing i'm sure you're familiar with the argument that we're living in a simulation yeah elon believes it yep so he makes this argument david traumas he's a very rigorous guy like he's he's a very logical arguer and he goes through all the objections systematically and um you know it's it's impossible to dismiss the idea that we are. And, you know, my attitude before talking to him about this was,

okay, this is like one of those thought experiments that's like fun to think about, but it wouldn't have any implications for the world. It's like if it's a simulation, it doesn't matter. Like this water still is water. I still feel. And insofar as I ground my ethics in the subjective experience of conscious creatures then it doesn't actually matter whether those creatures are quote-unquote real or digital right that was my attitude before talking to him but then he he came up with some ways in which um it like we should potentially act differently if we are in a simulation, because if we're in a simulation, then they can unplug the simulation. Right.

of our world becomes figuring out why they might unplug the simulation and figuring out how we can get them to not, right? Like how can we signal to the people running this simulation that we really care about our world? We don't care if this is like a science, like we could be in like a middle school or science experiment or something like, ooh oh what would happen if like the chimpanzees like became like more like smarter and then he like you know runs a simulation and that's what we call and the big bang was him like plugging it in or whatever yeah if that's true then is he unplugging the simulation like when school's out? And if so, does it become a project? Like do we need a Manhattan project of people trying to figure out like how to tell them not to? It's kind of crazy. And I don't think we should probably actually spend resources on it.

But like I say that, but then when I actually walk through the argument for it, it's kind of impossible to refute. Well, isn't the simulation possibly like the Internet where there's so many different ways to interface with it and there's so many different points of contact, so many different connections, so many different servers, that it's not like something someone can just hit a switch on? It's something that is almost like a life force of its own. it's something that is almost like a life force of its own i think the internet is slowly but surely becoming almost like a life force of its own a life force of information sure so instead of like thinking like there's some little green man with his hand on the switch going oh these fucking people this chunk and hitting hitting the off switch that it's it's more complex and more

integrated than that. I'm not sure it need be, though. No, definitely doesn't need be. We have video games that are no more than a Switch, and if you unplug them and destroy the video game, it's like if those digital creatures had consciousness, which we don't have any reason to suspect that they do, but we also have no idea why the atoms in this package are conscious and the atoms in this table are not.

Right. We have no theories that make sense logically as to why that is true. We simply assume it's true, and I assume this like everyone does. I'm not going around thinking that everything is conscious, I assume this like everyone does. I'm not going around thinking that everything is conscious. But none of the explanations offered are consistent with our scientific intuitions about everything else. It's fundamentally still a mystery.

Consciousness itself. Yes. Yeah. it that when you put atoms together so as to make this thing we call a brain that it's something there's something it's like to be that collection of atoms wait a minute aren't those the same atoms that like make up your spleen right how come does your spleen have feelings is it is there a point of view on the world from your spleen it's like like, we assume there's not. I certainly hope there's not. But we have no... And if it's the fact that

there's information processing going on with the brain, well, there's lots of things that process information. Computers, are computers conscious? They might be. They might be. And you go through every one of these arguments

that's saying, well, here's the reason why we're conscious and this isn't. Go through every one of these arguments that's saying, well, here's the reason why we're conscious and this isn't. Go through every one. None of them truly make sense. None of them make sense. And it's a mystery. And there's this, my favorite philosopher on this issue is this guy, Colin McGinn. And he has this idea of cognitive closure, which is that, you know, I've kind of been parroting it a little bit in the past half hour or so. Just like every animal has a limit in the things that it is able to understand, humans have that limit. And consciousness is beyond that limit, right? look you take certain animals you put them in front of a mirror and they they cannot they just

don't know that it's them right because the concept of reflection of reflected light is permanently beyond their ability to comprehend it's like they can they can identify the problem like it's a mystery to them like oh this other chicken is like moving weird and then other chickens and like usually I can figure that out but it's just a mystery it's like every every way they might pose the question is beyond chicken intelligence and so they'll never answer it right what column again posits is that there are problems that we stand in relation to, questions we stand in relation to as humans, the same way reflection stands in relation to a very dumb animal.

And that consciousness is one of those problems. And the hallmark of one of those problems is that every way we ask the question, we don't get a satisfying answer. Every experiment we do, it's not just that it comes up inconclusive. It's like we can't wrap our heads around it. And it's probably because we're not equipped to even ask the right questions the same way a chicken is not equipped to understand reflection. That makes a shitload of sense. Yeah. Maybe Osho was right. Listen, man, I really fucking enjoyed this conversation. Yeah, me too. We got to do this again.

Yeah, I would love to. Please tell everybody how they can find you on social media and find your podcast. Yeah, yeah. All your stuff. Yeah, so check out Conversations with Coleman wherever you listen to podcasts. We do videos on YouTube, et cetera.

Follow me on Twitter, at ColdXMan, which is also my rap name. We just released a big music video that was filmed in Ukraine called Blasphemy on YouTube. Check it out. And I have a new song coming out today called Straight A's. And so, yeah, that's pretty much everything.

Conversations with Coleman and Cold X-Man I feel like we could do this for hours and hours and hours but I gotta get the fuck out of here so thank you so much

I really enjoyed it thank you very much I loved it too yeah your time bye everybody