The Joe Rogan Experience - #1783 - Ben Burgis

Episode Date: February 24, 2022

Ben Burgis is a columnist for Jacobin Magazine, an adjunct philosophy professor at Morehouse College, and the host of the podcast and YouTube show “Give Them An Argument.” He's the author of several books including “Christopher Hitchens: What He Got Right, How He Went Wrong, and Why He Still Matters” and “Canceling Comedians While the World Burns: A Critique of the Contemporary Left.”

the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan podcast by night all day cheers so this is for you thank you so much it's got a little JRE label on the back of it this is your own in the side, this little thing.

Oh, yeah. This is a part of a thing we did with Fight for the Forgotten, which is, I don't know if you know what that is, but it's a charity that my friend Justin Wren put together. They build wells for people in the pygmy population in Uganda and in the Congo as well. And so they did a thing with Buffalo Trace where we picked out one very specific batch, and they literally gave us a barrel of whiskey. So we have one giant bottle and then a bunch of these bottles to give out to guests. So there you go.

Nice. Man, this feels strange. I've got to tell you, in the late 90s, I watched news radio all the time. So it feels weird having a drink with you. Yeah. It feels weird just being me. It's weird for people to feel weird to meet me. So that's odd, too.

So your book speaks to my heart. Did you bring a copy? I did not. You have a book with you. No, I have a book with me. This is a book by my friend Adolph Reed. So it's about growing up in New Orleans under Jim Crow and kind of how the South and the country has changed

and how it hasn't changed. So this is good stuff. Okay, cool. Well, that's a good book, too. But tell everybody about your book. Yeah, so my book is called Canceling Comedians While the World Burns, a Critique of the Contemporary Left. And I wrote that a while ago, so that was before we went through this surreal experience

where during weeks that the United States and Russia have been closer to the brink of war than the Cuban Missile Crisis, you know, than they have been since the Cuban Missile Crisis, somehow we've had weeks of news cycle about Joe Rogan. I don't know how that happened. Trevor Burrus Yeah, I'm a controversial character apparently. Aaron Ross Powell Apparently, yeah. And apparently those controversies are the most important thing in the world. Trevor Burrus Well, the most important thing in the world. Well, the most important thing in the world in media is ratings.

And unfortunately, outrage is what sells. And if you can be upset at something, and so there's like a perfect storm with me. First of all, it was questioning the COVID narrative. And then it was having on doctors who also questioned the COVID narrative. And then it was having on doctors who also questioned the COVID narrative. And then it was me getting COVID and recovering very quickly, but taking the wrong medication in their eyes. And then it was, you know,

like posting up the brought to you by Pfizer videos and like showing like these people like bought and paid for by pharmaceutical companies. And then it's all the other things. It's like every clip that we talked about before the podcast like every clip that i've ever said taken out of context and if you smush them all together how horrible it looks but it's not really it's it's not really that they think it's important it's they don't give a fuck what's important they're just trying to stay alive

and they're trying to get as many views as possible. And they're trying to escape what is this undeniable demise of modern mainstream news. Well, that's the, yeah, we were talking about this a little bit before, before we started. And I think what's really, I mean, whatever This is not like a mind-shatteringly original insight or whatever. Lots of people have said this. But I think what's really gone on is that the economic collapse of traditional media has meant that the profit incentive now is just to cater to whoever you have left, right? If you're on Fox, then like, you know, whatever, like a couple million conservative old people are, you know, watching at a given time. You want to give them the narrative that's going to keep them scared and angry and watching the news. If you're on MSNBC, then, you know, you spend the entire Trump years talking about Russia, you know, because like that's what like that's what scares their audience. Yeah.

And people don't, you know, and one thing that really disturbs me about this, I mean, like the book is about all of the things that people who I basically agree with are getting wrong, right? So in other words, like, I'm a socialist, I'm a columnist for Jacobin magazine, I- Are you a straight up socialist? Are you a democratic socialist? Because I know that you've been represented as a democratic socialist. Yeah. So, I mean, look, the reason I put democratic in there, right, you know, which, you know, which I do. But, you know, the reason I put democratic in there is because there are obviously countries that have existed that have, you know, called themselves socialists that have, you know, not had things that I care about, like, you know, free speech and, you know,

multi-party elections. And so I certainly don't want to associate myself with that but look i mean short term i care very much about you know having you know socialized health care about uh about having you know like tuition free higher education so people can go to school without being having to be in debt for like decades which is obscene i mean that's ridiculous yeah I'm with you 100% of both those things, you know, and, and I do think that like the like the level of inequality that we get from our current system is indefensible that in other words, that if one person has more than another, just because they like chose to work harder then like that's one thing right i could you know like right that you know i would you know person a wants to stay home

and watch netflix and you know person b you know one that wants to work uh for for more hours than like you know person you know person b should get more money i am totally fine with that but what bothers me is when you have these massive inequalities that have huge effects in people's lives that are linked to things that aren't under their control. And I think we have a lot of that too. I would agree with you 100%. My position on this, whenever people push back against the concept of socialism, or when I was supporting Bernie Sanders for president, I was saying that, well, look at all the things that are technically a socialist concept that we accept, like the fire department.

Imagine if you had to have money to get your fire put out. We don't think that. If your house burns down, we call the fire department, they show up. Our taxes fund the fire department. That is essentially a socialist endeavor. I mean it's a socialist institution. Yeah. It's taken outside of the market. It's provided just as like a right that you should have just for being a person. You shouldn't have to do anything special to get your house put out if it's on fire.

And you also shouldn't have to do anything special to get treatment if you're sick, to go to college in the first place. It seems to me that a lot of people who don't think that there should be a higher minimum wage are the same people who will go turn around and say, oh, if they wanted to make more money, they should go back to school. But they don't want to pay for that, right? Right. Exactly. Which one is it, right? Should they be paid more doing what they're doing or should they go back to school? Is it, right?

Like should they be paid more doing what they're doing or should they go back to school? Because if it's none of the above, then it sounds like you just don't think those people should have good lives or at least you don't have a plan to help them have good lives. What's fascinating to me too is when you look at public school versus public services like the fire department, fire department people get paid well. It's a good job. If you're a member of the fire department, I have friends that are in the fire department. It's good benefits. The hours are cool because you get to work like 24-hour shifts.

You sleep there. You work there. My friend Ray was a fireman for years, and he would say he worked like a few days a week. And then there were long shifts, and they weren't always called to fires. So sometimes they're just cooking and working out and hanging out around the firehouse. But it's a great job. It's like a job that people look forward to getting. It's difficult to get.

How come that's not the same thing with teachers? What kind of a fucking world do we live in where teachers don't get paid well? I mean, I'm not saying fire department people shouldn't be paid well. Of course they should be paid well. They should be paid great. It's a fucking very risky job. It's very valuable to the community. But fucking so is teaching. How is there such a disparity? So is teaching. And it's crazy that there are so many people who look at K-12 teachers and say, like, oh, how come, you know, how come they get summers off or, you know, whatever, you know, or, oh, how come, you know, how come they get summers off or, you know, whatever, you know, or like, don't like that, you know, which, no, it's ridiculous.

It's so stupid. And they don't, you know, and I guess what gets me is when people see someone like a unionized school teacher who has some good benefits, a little bit of job security, not nearly as good as it should be, like we've been talking about, right? You know, but like, and they say, oh, well, why should they have those things when I don't instead of saying, well, how can I get those things? Yes. Right. So I could have them too, you know, because it doesn't, you know, it doesn't benefit you,

right, as an ordinary person, if like somebody who has a job like that is paid less. In fact, what it does is it's bad for your kids if they go to public schools because the kinds of things that teachers unions want, like smaller class sizes, are things that are, you know, like the conditions that they teach in are the same conditions that the kids are learning in, right? So I think it actually benefits everybody. Like, I think that Finland is supposed to have the best public schools in the world by a lot of metrics, the best school system in the world. They actually don't really have private schools in Finland. It's very strong unions. People are certainly getting a better deal as teachers there than

they are here. But so many people think the solution is to you know is to privatize things or you know is is to you know that's the solution if there's no other options i mean if you like if you're a guy right now and you have a child and you have enough money to put them in a really good school that you have to pay for versus a really shitty school that you get for free that makes sense yeah i don't blame anybody for making that decision as an individual i mean like what i would they shouldn ask. They shouldn't have to make that decision. Yeah, exactly. I think what we should have are like excellent public schools so that like everybody can just do that. Imagine. I mean, imagine that that's controversial. Like literally one of the most important things for the future of our society is raising children correctly and educating them. By correctly meaning like giving them the opportunity to grow

and pursue their interests and find out where they fit in life and have enthusiastic, well-paid teachers, not people that feel like they're being taken advantage of and fucked with and just exhausted all the time. Well, it's weird too because a lot of the same people who are hostile to that will say when they're talking about like corporate CEOs, like, oh, you can't complain about how much they're paid because they have to be, you know, like like you have to have that as an incentive or they're

not going to give you the best work if they're not being paid, you know, 500 times more than people who work there. But it's like, wait a second. So so why doesn't that logic go for like teachers or other public employees that like if if they're if they're paid more, then you're going to get a better performance out of them? Why is it only CEOs? Well, we have a very distorted set of values when it comes to what's important. And this is, again, not saying that fire department people are not important. They're fucking hugely important. I respect them very much.

And I'm glad they get paid well. But, I mean, they should get – it should be like that with all of what I would think of social services, services for the community that we would gladly pay for for taxes, fixing infrastructures, fixing roads. The problem, I think, with a lot of people is they just don't trust government to handle the money well. They think that you're going to get a lot of bureaucracy. It's going to be bloated. There's going to be a shitload of people that are working. They're not going to resolve it. And it's going to be sort of that same situation where if you donate to charities and then you find out that like 90% of the money goes to infrastructure and, you know,

just some of those shitty charities where so much money goes to the people that are working there that very little of it goes to the actual charity itself. Of course that's the private sector too. It is. It is with everything. I guess I would just say one thing about the bureaucracy thing because I know that that's something that's like an easy association in lots of people's minds. That more government

means more bureaucracy. If you're thinking about people who are like petty gatekeepers who are going to be able to approve or deny something, it's like very natural to like resent people like that. But what I would say is that what situation is actually going to give bureaucrats more power? Is it going to be if you have something like Medicare for all, for example, where or just like how public schools already work, right? The K through 12, that like every kid has to be educated, you know, like you don't have to go through a special process. So if it's universal programs, then you don't have what you have with means-tested programs, where there's somebody who's like looking over your application and deciding whether or not you qualify and deciding which hoops

you have to jump through. And that really seems to me like where bureaucrats are really going to get most of their power. And that's not to say – like when I'm saying that, I'm not saying that like there are no legitimate complaints about like any of the agencies that do these things. Of course there are, right? Of course. But what I would ask though is what the options are, right? So because if you privatize something, then you're still having decisions be made by decision makers who you don't necessarily – like might be very distant from you. But the difference is, at least when it's public, then, you know, theoretically, right,

you can at least elect the people who are, you know, who are overseeing it. Whereas if something is like, subcontracted out to a private corporation, then like, that's not even true anymore, right? Like, there's another layer in between you as like an ordinary person and control over this, this institution. I mean, like, if, you know like if the federal government does anything bad, then we can theoretically get rid of them, although I think there are a lot of very undemocratic things about America's political system that make it way harder to do that. I mean, the fact that we've only got two political parties

that are basically allowed to participate at all, the fact, you know, we could go on and on. The money that's involved in getting these people elected. Yeah, the money definitely, right? Exorbitant amount of money from special interest groups. Yeah, no question, right? So, like, I think it's, I think we've got, like, you know, we've got, like, a little bit of democracy there, not nearly as much as we should, right? But, like, Jeff Bezos isn't up for election by anybody. Right. Like like like like he's just there. Right. So like if you have, you know, like if, for example, you know, you you didn't have like the public post office. Right. It was it was just like Amazon, you know, taking the, you know, like Amazon trucks and that's it.

Then now you're talking about an institution that there's no democratic control over, right? There's some like a little bit of indirect control in the case of the post office, which, by the way, I would point out that like when conservatives talk about bureaucracy and inefficiency and stuff like that, they always bring that up. But like if you actually look at polls, like 90 percent of Americans like the post office. The post office is amazing. They can get a fucking letter across the country for less than a dollar. Right. How crazy is that? Yeah. You could write it.

What does it cost for a stamp? What's it at now? Yeah. I know it's less than a dollar. It's been a while since I actually... I think my wife usually buys the stuff at the post I just email stuff. I don't fucking mail shit anymore. But the fact that you can take a letter from Austin to like rural Alaska …

For a buck. For a buck is … Fucking bonkers. … is ridiculous. And no private company would have the incentive to do that, right? Right. And I think that that's like one of the things that Bernie Sanders was talking about the two times he ran for president. Like one of the things that Bernie Sanders was talking about the two times he ran for president, you know, it's not one of the things that was played up the most, is postal banking, you know, which is the idea that you could have like basic banking services offered at the post office, which they actually do have in some Scandinavian countries.

And that was – Basic banking services like deposits and withdrawals and stuff like that at the post office? At the post office. Why would you do that? Which is because it's a public institution. It already exists everywhere, right? You know, their post office is all over the place. So they would sort out money as well as mail? What if the money goes to the wrong places?

Like the mail sometimes goes – I get mail from wrong people sometimes. Well, the mail does sometimes go to the wrong places. I would point out if you look at like FedEx. Or two wrong people, I should say. You know, FedEx versus the wrong places. I would point out if you look at FedEx versus the post office, I don't actually think the failure rate is worse with the USPS. No, we have a problem with UPS here. Our fucking packages get stolen. Yeah.

They just leave them here and we're not here and someone snatched it. Yeah. Well, I don't know. That's, you know, if the alternative is they put the thing on the, you know. Yeah, put the fucking thing on the door, man. We'll come get it. You got a lazy UPS driver. But you're subject, like at home, I got a great guy. It's like you're subjected to whoever the fuck it is that's running that route, you know, unfortunately. No, fair enough right but uh but what

i would just point out is this that like right now there are a lot of people who for one reason or another they can't get a bank account right you know that they have uh that um i mean the most like extreme case might be like somebody who's who's like homeless you know so they don't have an address but like even short of that right there are people who for one reason or another have trouble getting a bank account so you have all these like parasitical, like cash, you know, check cashing businesses and stuff like that, that like prey on people like that. And I think having some kind of public alternative would like go a long way to helping with that issue. There are countries that already exist, you know. So I think that like in the short term, the stuff that makes sense to me

is finding ways, where it makes sense, it might not always make sense, but finding ways that you can expand what's not just like you have to find some private corporation to do it for you, but that can be within the sort of the public sphere. And then look, I mean there are things that we'll probably always need private businesses for. I'm under no illusions about that. If you don't want to have like the way grocery stores were in like the Soviet Union in 1985 or whatever, you have to have, like there are certain things,

price signals and, you know, firm failure, you probably do need to have. But I do think like at the sort of outer edges of what I would like, that it would be good if it was a long-term goal to move towards having it be more of a norm that, you know, workers like own like a lot of private businesses. If you look at the Mondragon Corporation in Spain, that has like 80,000 worker members who own that. You have the equivalent, like an operating agreement, which is like the equivalent of a union contract, but there's no separate boss to negotiate with. And you might not

necessarily directly elect managers because there could be things that are like you know technical things that you know managers have to do that like you want that to be more of a traditional job application but you can at least elect the people who who hire them and even if i could like you know whatever like a magical genie would just like somehow grant me you know that like all of of my political preferences were satisfied in ways that I don't think they're going to be anytime soon given all those problems with America's political system we talked about earlier. But like even if that happened, I don't think that like every single business should have to be like that. That if you, you know, like hire a guy to, you know, to do like graphic design for your podcast for 10 hours a week or something that they have to have like voting rights and a cooperative like that would be silly.

But I think that you can I think we could move towards an economy where that was like a much more common thing. And I think they'll be way better off because the way it is in like the kinds of corporations that dominate the economy right now, where you'll get Amazon workers who are sometimes working at the warehouse and then they have to have a second job at night. And their boss literally has enough money off of that to buy his own spaceship. That strikes me as a level of inequality that's really hard to justify by the principles that we kind of started with. Well, what do they pay at Amazon? Are they egregiously underpaid? I don't think that they're egregiously underpaid by the standards of like corporate America as a whole.

I think it is up to 15 now. I'd have to check the exact numbers. But I think that the – but like what I would question is just this, though. When you're dividing up the revenues that the whole company is making, then you say there are lots of ways that if you are in a cooperative and people could vote on pay scales, there are lots of things you could do to convince somebody. You mean like employees vote on pay scales? Yeah, like if you have a worker cooperative.

Right. You mean like employees vote on pay scales? Yeah, like if you have a worker cooperative. Right. The problem with that is there are a lot more workers than there are Jeff Bezos's. And if they decide to say, we should get most of the money. Okay, but what do you think Jeff Bezos is doing? Like what's the... Right now? Coke. He's doing coke and he's banging his girlfriend on a yacht.

He's living like a guy who banging his girlfriend on a yacht. He's living like a guy who's got $183 billion. Going to space. Yeah, going to space on a rocket ship that looks like a dick. He's shooting a giant metal dick up into the heavens. He's literally trying to fuck space. Yeah, that's what he's doing. That's what you're supposed to do when you make that kind of money.

My fascination with Jeff Bezos is his transformation from nerd to this muscle-looking guy. He looks like a jiu-jitsu black belt. He looks like a tank. It's kind of crazy. He used to have this very respectable, normal wife, and now he's got this bombshell girlfriend. It's kind of hilarious. I love it. I love a good cliche. I really do.

I love the fact they have to take down a bridge because he made a yacht that is so fucking big in order for it to get out of the place where they're making it they have to disassemble a fucking bridge and he's like yeah disassemble the bridge what the fuck man why do you need a yacht so big they have to what are you doing what are you doing he's just out of control but that's like i feel like everyone that gets to that level of wealth seems to go out of control. Yeah, no. It definitely does. It definitely does seem that way, right?

And then their kids in many cases start out of control because they grew up their entire lives like having this level of wealth that makes it easy to get anybody to do whatever you want. That's part of the problem. The other part of the problem is there's no time to be with the kids. So when you're working and you're the CEO of Amazon, I mean the fucking hours that guy was putting in is probably insane. He's probably working when he was working. He's not CEO anymore, but he's probably working 16 hours a day. How the fuck can you instill some sort of sense of normalcy in your children when you're never home? It's not really possible. And so then you compensate with gifts. Yeah, now he's too busy, you know, snoring coke and going into space and all that stuff.

And banging his bombshell girlfriend. Woo! Yeah, I feel what you're saying. Do you think that... Do you have hope for... I mean, there seems to be such a polarization in this country. There's people that I completely disagree with on the right that are like, pull yourself up, bury bootstraps, all that stuff. Like that is nonsense talk. When people talk like that, I'm like, Jesus Christ, man, not everybody is starting from the same position. It's a crazy disparity. And until we address that as a society, until we look at these impoverished communities that have been impoverished for decades and decades and decades, and if you really want to talk about where my real feelings of socialism

lie, my feelings of socialism are there are communities, and it's not just inner cities, it's like Appalachia, it's these coal mining towns. We have to dump money into these places and help these folks. Because if you don't, you're going to have people that come out of there and they're going to cost you exponentially more money and all the problems they create in their own lives and other people's lives, whether it's crime or whether it's drug addiction or whatever despair that comes out of these horrific starting points that these people are from, that can be fixed. And this is where I'm a bleeding heart.

Yeah, I mean, it can be fixed, but it sure hasn't been. It hasn't been even addressed. It's not even addressed. There's no talk whatsoever about looking at communities like Baltimore and saying, hey, this has been fucked from the beginning. What do we do? Like, look at the red line laws they instituted. Look at the fact that the same, what was his name?

Woods. What was the cop that we had on? Michael Woods. He was on, he was a police officer in Baltimore. Yeah. And he was working there, and one of the things that he noticed was they found a rap, like a, you know, a rest sheet from like the 1970s. Yeah. And it showed all of the same exact crimes that they're dealing with in the current time, all in the same areas.

Mm-hmm. And they were all happening in the, like the same thing was going on on all the different arrests for violence and drugs and all this different stuff and he was like jesus christ this is not like and he felt this feeling like i'm i'm in a system that's broken like you're not going to fix this like you're just going to keep arresting people and you you keep having this you know the systemic equality inequality in this area that's just been fucked for decades. Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think that because by the time you're dealing with it on that level, you're treating symptoms. Like it's already – the problem has already happened.

And don't get me wrong. I know people commit crimes for all kinds of reasons. I'm not saying it's all economic. But like also I don't see a lot of like kids in the suburbs joining gangs, right? Like there is a reason for that, right? The things that like really drive up the violent crime rate are things that have a lot to do with poverty and inequality. And I think that if you – you talked about Appalachia. I mean like the Obama administration's like response to like all the coal – you know, like the sort of misery caused by all the coal mines closing was to just kind of sprinkle the region with a few … Well, how about that learn to code bullshit?

Well, that's exactly it, right? Because like they put up these technology training centers. So it's essentially telling people to learn to code because like, yeah, if you're like a 50-year-old laid-off coal miner, you'll definitely get the coding job and preference over the 22-year-old kid who just graduated. It's absurd. And then like Trump came in and he said he was going to bring the jobs back and there are fewer jobs there than ever, right? I mean, I don't think any of these people are serious about helping working class people either in places like Baltimore or in places like Appalachia. Because I think the Democrats increasingly, the kind of liberalism that's dominant in the Democratic Party right now, I think isn't really about that.

I think that what it's really about is trying to have like a more diverse ruling class. Like I know that sounds like an oversimplification, but I really think a lot of it's just about that, right? You know, that like, what they, like, to the extent they're concerned with social justice, what they're concerned about is disparity, you know, that you have more black people than white people who are, you know, living in poverty and going through a criminal justice system and all this stuff. And that's absolutely true, right? And that is completely a result of the fact that, you fact that up until the 1960s, we literally lived in an apartheid country. In much of the United States, we had Jim Crow laws on the books. And I think the horrible racial history of the goal – is what you count as justice having like exactly demographically correct proportions of every group living in poverty and being like all of that stuff? It's ridiculous.

I was just going to say like the Republicans are even worse, right? I mean like Republicans, when they claim that they're like big populace now, it's like, well, what do you actually want to do? Do you want – do you want – they don't support any of that stuff. Well, it's also their positions are weaponized, you know, and there's so much polar. I think it's very unhealthy to have two positions, a red position and a blue position, because people are so malleable. They're so easily manipulated and they want to be a part of a tribe. And they'll just subscribe to these ideas. And then they take comfort in the fact there's

other people that agree with them so they get in these facebook groups and they they just like you know talk about stuff that everyone else in their little echo chamber agrees with and and they feel like the whole world should bend to their will and it's just yeah i mean that's a bizarre time absolutely i mean that i mean we um you know what we were talking about earlier about the fact that the collapse of traditional media means that everybody gets to curate their own little media. That's a problem too, right? It's so easy now to just like expose yourself to absolutely nothing all the time except people who agree with you because, yeah, if there are only a couple million people watching like one of the traditional networks in a given night, then what's their profit incentive? Their profit incentive is to like relentlessly pander to whatever audience they have left.

So if you're Fox, you scare old conservatives and whatever. Like the MSNBC has their own version like we're talking about. But I think that like this is why I try to like go out and do debates all the time because – which like some people – and this is one of the things I talk about in the book, right? Some people on the left don't like that, right? They say that like if you're – like if you talk to a bad person basically, right? They'll say like, oh, you're platforming. Yeah. That person. That's so stupid.

Which is a word I hate so much. But they have – but … I get that more than anybody because i i you know people want to say that i'm like a fake liberal because i talk to conservatives and i'm friends with some conservatives like that is the dumbest fucking thing to ever you we need to communicate with each other we're supposed to be in a community the community is the human race, first of all, and then the United States, second. We're supposed to be a community. And I have a lot of friends that have completely different perspectives than me. I have a lot of friends that are very Christian. I have friends that are very Muslim. I have friends that have no religious affiliation whatsoever. I have friends

that are right wing and left wing. And I don't mind all those things. As long as you're not a suppressive person, you're not suppressing people that have an opposite position or an opposite perspective. Like, why not? What are we doing here? Aren't we just talking to each other? Shouldn't we communicate with people? But when I have people on, I'll get all this pushback like or someone

like ben shapiro ben shapiro's a lovely guy meet him get to know him he's very nice i don't agree with him a lot a lot on a lot of stuff yeah i mean look if if i love the guy sure i mean look if if you know ben shapiro ever wanted to like come on my show and argue with me i would i would 100% do that i bet he could okay Okay, well, you know. But he talks really fast. You got to be careful because it's hard to keep up with him. It's like his fucking brain is on a different RPM.

Whenever I talk to him, I try to slow things down. Slow down, youngster. That's awesome. But he's very enthusiastic. Yeah, I don't agree with him on a lot of things, particularly on gay issues. He thinks that gay folks shouldn't just – they should just not do it. Which is ridiculous.

It's the strangest position. I just don't understand that position. So like if you're gay, you have like a moral obligation to just be celibate for your entire life? No, you're supposed to actually engage in heterosexual sex. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But what's amazing is that this is where it falls apart, right? Because this is all based on ancient

writing. Yeah. Because God said this? Who said God said this? Who are these fucking people? And what else did they say God said? Did they say anything about zombies? Did they say anything about people coming back from the dead? What did God say? I mean, how much did they say that doesn't make sense? Did they say anything about zombies? They didn't say anything about people coming back from the dead? Like, what did God say? I mean, how much did they say that doesn't make sense?

Did they say anything about parting oceans? And, like, did anybody, like, lead someone to a place and part a sea? Because that doesn't seem real. Maybe someone was lying. Yeah, right. That's like, yeah. I mean, anybody who knows gay people, right? Like I have gay friends that are like, you could never tell they're gay because they

don't, you know, they just seem like a man. And then I have gay friends like, oh, no straight guy acts like that. Yeah. They're like gay from space, right? Yes. Super gay. Like when you meet a super gay person that, first of all, they enjoy behaving that way. That is how they like to talk.

That's how they like. Justin Martindale is a great example. My friend Justin. He's gay as fuck, but he's hilarious. I mean, he's hilarious with it. He's a joyful gay person. You wouldn't get confused when you're around him. You wouldn't say, what do you think this guy is?

That guy's gay. But that's how he is, man. This idea that this is, he's supposed to make a choice to have sex with women, like fuck off. Yeah, that sounds like a good deal for the woman too, Jesus. Yeah. Poor woman, he's closing his eyes,

thinking about beards and shit. It's so dumb. Yeah, and I think, and also, I mean, we could talk too about like, okay, so there's the part in the Red Sea stuff. There's also the like slavery in the Bible, right? Like that's – Oh, God.

Like a ton of it. And then treating women as second-class citizens, condoning slavery. There's a lot of murder in the Bible for disrespecting people. Like how about that – the one guy when the kids called him bald and they sent the fucking kids they killed the bear because they called them a bald guy like what the fuck coming from a bald person let me tell you something that's an overreach that's a ridiculous but it's this idea that you don't think if like some kids teased you about that they deserve the death penalty no listen i think there's some idea that – You don't think if like some kids teased you about that they would deserve the death penalty? Listen, I think there's some things that are fascinating about religious traditions that I think they can act as a scaffolding for moral behavior. And some of the like the kindest, nicest people I know are Christians.

And I think that there's something about that sort of structure, that religious structure. When I was younger, I was much more of what you would say like a traditional like agnostic or atheist like I thought it was dumb I thought the religion was dumb I don't think it's dumb anymore and I think it's greatly beneficial to some people and I think it does give them a structure and if you Jordan Peterson said something that really made a lot of sense to me he said it's not whether or not I believe in God he goes but if you live your life like God exists, you will have a higher quality of life. And it's that if you live your life like you are a part of this enormous community of loving beings that are all connected to this higher power

and that you have this like moral obligation to be a good person and that there's great value and benefit in that. And then there's a spiritual path to take of a righteous person who's really trying to do good in this world. And I think for a lot of people, religion can act as a scaffolding to substantiate and enforce those kind of positive traits and positive paths of life. And I think there's great benefit in that. I think there's great good in that. Yeah. I mean, look, I'm an atheist, but, you know, but I have tremendous respect for Christians who get what you just described out of it. I have to say there are Christians who get very different things out of it, right? You know, that they want to like, you know, ban abortion and make gay people go back in the closet and all that stuff, you know, but like, but look, I mean, I think like Cornel West, you know,

I think that's a Christian I have immense respect for. Have you ever met him? No, no, I have. He was on, like, so I used to do a segment on the Michael Brooks show and I think he was on that at least at least once. I miss that guy. Yeah, he was great. Yeah, he was. He was he was he was one of my my closest friends for the last couple of years before he before he passed. That was a funny dude, too, man. He was a funny, very funny guy. What he would do, good impressions, the like Nation of Islam, Obama. guy when he would do good impressions the like nation of islam obama and you know he was just a really thoughtful interesting guy who knew a shitload about politics and you know and about

socialism and he was a really good guy to sort of defend these positions of democratic socialism too because he didn't seem like a bad person you know like when and even in critiquing other people that this this disagreed with them i felt like he did it for the most part pretty reasonably yeah well i think that one thing that he really got and i actually think he helped me to get you know since in the you know in the year since i met him is that um like a lot of people who who agree with his position, with my position, don't think nearly enough about what's going to be appealing to like most ordinary people that they have. Because like if you're just – which is one of the reasons I wrote the book, that like that stuff was starting to drive me crazy. crazy, you know, that like, it seems like what a lot of people want to do is be part of an in group and like yell at everybody who doesn't, you know, who isn't like already on board with like every

single thing on a checklist. And that's just not gonna, that's just not gonna work, right? I mean, that's like, like, if you actually care about this stuff, right? Like, if you think, yeah, I think that we have like a grotesquely unequal society, I think that, you know, I think we need to have national health care. We need to not fight all these wars around the world, all of that stuff. And like you're actually talking about this stuff because you care about it, which let's be honest, not everybody does. I mean, some people, politics is like a weird hobby for them. that stuff, then you want to present that in a way that's going to appeal to ordinary people who haven't read everything that you've read, who aren't like necessarily don't have all the same like subculture, you know, sensibilities that you have. So like, yeah, I mean, it drives me,

it drives me crazy when I see people who want all the things that I want who are instead of trying to find ways that they can explain this to people who might agree with them on some things, disagree with them on some things. Most people aren't centrist in the way that the media means when they say centrist, which is like the whatever, socially liberal, fiscally conservative, all that stuff, right? You know, like most people, I think, just have weird combinations of views, right? Which is because like if you spend all of your time thinking about politics and tweeting about politics and all that stuff, you're like kind of an unusual person. Most people don't do that. They have other things that they have to do so they might have political reactions to things they have political impulses

but like they haven't necessarily thought through every single thing you know to probably don't have the time yeah of course if you want to get involved deeply into the weeds and politics you're gonna it's tremendous amount of hours for years and years and years just to get a base understanding of what's going on. That's why it's so impressive when you talk to someone who really does know a lot about politics. Like whenever I talked to like my friend Kyle Kalinsky, whenever I talked to him about politics,

like that motherfucker knows a lot. Like, so when we had the end of the world podcast, when it was the election, um, this past year, when we brought him, I brought him on, I go like, you're the voice of reason. Like we brought him, I brought him on.

I go, you're the voice of reason. You actually understand what's going on here. And he called it every step of the way. See, all these people that have these conspiracy theories about Trump, like, oh, the mail-in votes. He explained. He's like, the mail-in votes are going to be majority Democrat votes. And he goes, so if you look at Trump getting way ahead in places like Pennsylvania and a couple of these other states, he's like, this is what's going on. There's a lot

of the Republican folks are going to show up and they're going to vote in person. And then the mail-in is going to be overwhelmingly Democratic. And then he's probably going to lose a lot of numbers overnight. And they're like, oh, we went to bed and he was ahead. But then he's like, We went to bed and he was ahead. But then the – he's like, Kyle Klinsky explained it. Explained it all on the podcast. Clearly called it. Just called – and that's because that's a guy who's been like really studying politics at a very comprehensive level for a long time. And he can give you the real information about it.

Yeah. And most people, like you said, they don't have the time. I mean especially when you're in an increasingly precarious economy where lots of people might have a couple of jobs and drive an Uber on the side just because they're trying to – How the fuck do you have time? Yeah, of course. Unless you're just listening to podcasts all the time and really educational podcasts really educational podcasts on on politics like and even then you're going to get a cursory sort of understanding of it yeah absolutely so i mean i think that what you know what you should really be when you approach people to to try to convince

them of the things that are that are important to you like you shouldn't start from a place of do you you know do you have all the like right, you know, do you have all the right positions and like all of this stuff? Because, you know, by definition, look, if everybody, you know, if everybody agreed with me about all this stuff, we'd be living in a very different country right now. Right. You know, like, like, so, so I think that you need to assume the real question, like, is, does somebody have values that are just totally incompatible with mine? Or do they just have economic interests that are going to lead them to like they're never going to agree with me, right? Like Jeff Bezos and I are never going to agree on what tax rates should be for obvious reasons, right?

I would like you to talk to him though. I think that would be an interesting conversation. I've never heard him discuss money in terms of like wealth and taxes. I wonder what his position is on that. I feel like there's a system that's in place that you would almost be negligent if you didn't take advantage of it. If you're a guy who's making a lot of money and this is how you could pay x amount of taxes and this is like these are your deductions and this is like the law you follow the law to a t and then the rest of it you can give out charitably if you choose to but like i wonder what his position is on all

that stuff like when you've got that kind of money yeah i mean i think that my suspicion is that it starts to look very different, right? You know, once you get all that cash, right? Right. You know, like you're going to, you know, like you're going to feel very it's really hard to convince somebody that like who's benefiting that much from the way things are now. Do you see the image of him at the New Year's party with his girlfriend? No. Jamie, help me out. This is so important because someone needs to superimpose this with an image of Jeff Bezos from like 1989. Like what he looked like when he started Amazon

versus what he looks like now. I mean, when did he start Amazon? It must have been the 90s, right? Because it was an online book thing. Yeah. And he was like this kind of nerdy guy. Now look at him. And look at like this kind of nerdy guy. Now look at him.

And look at his girlfriend. I mean, this is amazing. Look, he's got fucking... The heart sunglasses. In his defense, this was actually a party that was for... It was like a disco theme party. So you're supposed to dress like this. So everybody dressed like that. They all dressed silly.

It was a fun party. So he had these glasses dress like this. So everybody dressed like that. They all dressed silly. It was a fun party. So he had these glasses that were like heart-shaped lenses and he's got this bombshell girlfriend who's leaning on him. I love it. I love excess. I love when people are preposterous. Yeah. I love it. No, I mean, fair enough.

And again, I don't blame anybody as an individual for taking it. Look, if you're told here are the rules, right, that this is like – that everybody has to function in, like within reason, like if you're not like doing some things that I do think Bezos has done but like – but there are like – like if you're not like busting unions and this and that, right, then like – look, if you –

Trevor Burrus Look at that. you just look at how it started how's it going they did it someone did it look at that that's fucking amazing that's amazing work hard folks and you don't have to be a dork imagine shave your head get a bombshell girlfriend whoo i love it Happy days are here. Yeah. Let's go. That guy's lived different lives. He's lived

billions of dollars hundreds of billions not hundreds of millions sir hundreds of billions. That's outrageous. Yeah. No I mean he's on track

to be the first trillionaire right. That's what they say. Oh there's trillionaires out there. Yeah. OK. Are there because I thought

they were saying like in 2020 they were saying that like at the end of the. OK. No. The trillionaires are there. Yeah. Okay. Are there? Because I thought they were saying like in 2020, they were saying that like at the end of the – okay. No. The trillionaires are all non-public. Okay. See, if you think about like the royal families, they don't have to disclose their wealth. These people that have literally – they own countries. Yeah.

I mean, if you think – I mean, we don't have to name the countries. But there I know for a fact because I have talked to people who are, in fact, billionaires, who are very wealthy business people that laugh. And they've told me the royal families in some of these countries are worth trillions of dollars, and they don't have to disclose it. So when you get this public list of who the richest people in the world are, that's the richest people publicly. They have to disclose it. They're not oligarchs. They're not people that are literally in charge of the oil, all the oil in a particular part of the world where billions of dollars are coming out every day. Come on. There's a shitload of money involved in

that. Yeah. And I mean, the thing is, even if you're not one of those people, right, like, you know, the non-public trillionaires, you know, from those countries that you're talking about. Like one thing that I think people often don't think about enough when they think about stuff like this is, OK, if you have a system where you're going to get like wealth gaps that extreme, right, you know, that you can have people who are trillionaires maybe or who at least have hundreds of billions of dollars. going to have people who are trillionaires maybe or who at least have hundreds of billions of dollars, then you're just not going to have political democracy the way that we should have it because the idea that everybody's going to have the same amount of influence on the government is just ridiculous once you get to that level. Because if you work at an Amazon warehouse and you want to call your congressman, you'll be lucky if you have a conversation with an intern. But Jeff Bezos can make a phone call to Biden.

Yeah. No, absolutely. And Biden would take the call. Because if he told him, right? Listen, bro, take a couple extra Advil and let's have a conversation. I need to be awake for this one. Yeah. Yeah.

Which you might have to for Biden. What happened to the left where somewhere along the line, this needs to get back to your book and the subject we started with, what happened to the left where they are willing to – there's something that happened where they became the side that accepts censorship and even promotes it. And my thought is that something morphed during the time where social media became a tool of a lot of right-wing people. And this is actually like pre-Trump, but was certainly accentuated during the Trump administration. pre-Trump, but was certainly accentuated during the Trump administration. It's like people had a chance to anonymously say things through social media that maybe they wouldn't say around the office because, like, say if you have, like, 10 people in your office and nine of them are Democrats and you're a Republican, you really have to keep your mouth shut, right? But when you get on Twitter, you can talk all kinds of crazy shit or Reddit or whatever. And then all the other people that agree with you, they get attracted to you. And

then you form these echo chambers. And then some of them are very aggressive in sort of pushing these ideas out. And we saw that a lot with Milo Yiannnopoulos and there was a lot of like these like very influential online right-wing people that were You know They had like cheers from the fans and they had like these throngs of supporters and they silenced those guys They pulled those guys off social media and they found out that it was effective to do that And then it became a thing that they got really into, where they're into silencing, dissenting opinions. And it's gone so far that they're doing it to left-wing people that step even remotely outside of the bounds of the orthodoxy, remotely outside of the bounds of

what they consider to be the rigid maintaining of this ideology. They step outside of that. They silence people. And they're pulling videos down left and right off of Instagram and TikTok and Twitter in some ways. Twitter is like less censorship oriented even though people think of Twitter as being like a very censored place. It's one of the more lenient online platforms. But what the fuck happened yeah i mean the milo case is interesting actually because i think that um i mean i understand that

like he got kicked off of twitter and that was definitely part of it but like uh he was still riding pretty high after that happened like i think that in milo's case and this is what you know when i you know kind of try to tell people that like the ways that like some people on the left like want to like deal with figures like this, like forget morality for a second. They're just not going to work, right? So like here's what I mean by that, right? That like Milo's career was built on people trying to like stop him and heckle him and stop him from speaking and all that stuff. know, stop him and heckle him and, you know, stop him from speaking and all that stuff, you know, that like my view on that guy is that honestly, you know, he wouldn't be that interesting if he just showed up on a college campus and like just talked and nobody, you

know, nobody interrupted him. But like that was why like because he was like, oh, he's like speaking edgy forbidden truths and like, you know, it was the dangerous ideas to her. That's what it was called. Like I think where Milo really got – like where Milo like was really ended, right? And I'm not saying there aren't other cases. They're more like what you're talking about. But it seems to me that where Milo was really ended was when the right dropped him after the age of consent stuff. Like he was going

to speak at CPAC and they canceled that. His book deal got dropped. But it wasn't just the right dropping him. I mean that was across the board people dropped him. Well, I mean everybody else had always hated him, right? But then like after that happened, right? That was just a thing where it felt like it was so unacceptable to so many people that it was – it's very rare that one idea becomes a thing that completely stops all the momentum that someone had. Like he was a very popular cultural figure.

And then he vanished. Yeah. He's essentially been not just deplatformed but removed from the cultural conversation. Yeah. I mean like a week before that happened, he was on Bill Maher, right? You know, that's so – I know. Isn't that wild?

Yeah. And Bill Maher was praising him and comparing him to Christopher Hitchens. Christopher Hitchens. Which I – It's wild. Do not think Milo Yiannopoulos deserves. But yeah, look, I think that there are a couple things going on there with censorship. I mean I would push back a little on the idea that the right isn't like plenty pro-censorship in lots of ways. Like I think they are. I wouldn't say that.

Okay. So we disagree on – No, I think that people politically like to silence their opposing, their opposition. When someone opposes their position, I think they like to do that. What I think is like the left has traditionally been the ACLU, which those Jewish lawyers supported the idea of Nazis being allowed to say whatever they want, because they said that the counter to that, the opposite of that, is the suppressing speech, and it's a terrible, dangerous road to go down. And the answer to bad ideas is not silencing those ideas.

It's better ideas. That's my position, and that's an old-school liberal position, but that doesn't exist that much in the left wing of today. Yeah, I mean, that's 100% my position and that's an old school liberal position. But that doesn't exist that much in the left wing of today. mainstream liberals, that it's not like whatever, people running these insanely profitable social media companies. It's not like they want all the stuff I want. But I see way too many people on the left going along with it. And I think it's super short-sighted. How did it happen, though? Do you think it happened by what I'm saying, that they found it was effective for silencing people they felt was problematic? So they just adopted these ideas and then they sort of shifted their their their ethics i think there's some of that i think that i think that a lot of it is that a lot of people feel powerless to change the world in any way that actually matters and so they end up getting sucked into

these like culture war distractions about who said what in 1995 that we can like get mad at them about. You know, whatever – like just whatever like weird nonsense people are arguing about this week, right? The green M&M, you know, and like some of this stuff is part of that, right? Like they have a – that like if you don't – like if you can't actually, you know, change the world, like create a more equal society or whatever, you can at actually change the world, create a more equal society or whatever, you can at least get somebody fired. You can at least get somebody kicked off and then you felt like you've won something.

And I think that that's, again, I think it's incredibly dangerous because people who want, for example, Spotify to kick you off, there's a move on petition for them to do that, that what I always say is even though and the thing that really gets me about the calls for censorship is, OK, I think there are principled reasons that, you know, free speech is important and we should have like open, you know, open debates about controversial ideas. I think there are ways that we have a better society if we do that. It's about controversial ideas.

I think there are ways that we have a better society if we do that. But also I think it's crazy that anybody who basically agrees with me about politics would support increased corporate censorship, right? You know, that's going to be owned, you know, like they're going to have, you know, some CEO who's partying like Bezos in that, you know, in that picture, you know, like is, are they, you know, whose side are they going to take when there are future things where people say that something is misinformation? Right, exactly. You know, because like... Exactly. And by what definition is it misinformation? Because the problem is that every political argument is to some extent an argument about facts, right? Like in 2002, even though my position was, you know, as like a college, like anti-war activist was that even if Saddam Hussein did have weapons of mass destruction and still be against the war, because, you know, I think the rationale still wouldn't have made sense to me. But like that was was part of what people were arguing about,

was whether there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. And look, if you had social media companies in 2002 in the way that you do now and they had misinformation policies, who would be more likely to get bounced for misinformation? People who said – who agreed with the government, agreed with the New York Times, said there were WMDs, or people who thought that Bush administration officials were conspiring to lie to the public. And I think that who's going to, if there's something that comes out tomorrow about some horrible labor practice at Amazon, who are these companies more likely to side with, right? You know, people who say, yeah, they did this thing, right?

Or the company saying, no, it's a lie, it's misinformation. And I think the issue with free speech is always who gets to decide, right? And I think this is the same reason – I mean, look, this is the same reason I don't like – you know, I don't like the CRT laws either, right? Because I don't like the idea that there are going to be people who are second-guessing what happened in some classroom to say, like, was this too close to one of these ideas that we don't like, right? Did you talk to your students about something that, like, flew a little bit too close to the sun of CRT? And that makes me nervous. By CRT, you're talking about critical race theory.

Oh, yeah, sorry. Critical race theory. Yeah, and I think that, like, actual critical race theory, there are parts I agree with. There are parts that I disagree with. But I don't want to live in a – I want to live in the kind of society where when there's like some controversial idea that's out there, you know, like that like people can talk about it and debate about it and like if you can, you know, like you can discuss it with students in a classroom. Like I think ideally the way that education should work, it should foster critical thinking like instead of like this is exactly what you should think. For sure. You know, you should be encouraging students to like, you know, to think about it more clearly and to argue about it and to, you know, and to decide and to decide what they think. Right. You know, like ultimately, if you want people to be citizens in a democracy, right, to the extent that we have one of those, like that's that's what you want.

Like that's that's how you want them to grow up, I hope. Yeah, absolutely. You want discussion. The way you sort out, if you're an observer, the way you sort out who has the better argument is to watch them discuss. You remember the Gore Vidal and William F. Buckley speeches, which is a great documentary. What is it called? Best of Enemies. Best of Enemies.

It's a fantastic documentary where it shows that, I mean, this is the difference in our culture today versus then. These guys, I believe it was on ABC, these guys had this like really highly rated debate series. I think they did like, how many of them did they do? Six of them or something like that? I don't remember how many, but they did a few. They did quite a few. So they were going back and forth. And William F. Buckley was a famous conservative. Gore Vidal was a famous liberal. And they had these fascinating discussions and they did them on national television. And they became this point of discussion through the entire country in the world where people sat down and, you know, some people took Buckley's side, some people took Gore Vidal's side.

And this is how we sort things out. We don't sort things out by silencing people. We don't sort things out by saying you have an unacceptable position because it doesn't fit in with what I'm saying or it causes this or that. And it's a dangerous way to set a precedent because you're filtering ideas. You're filtering ideas through your own standards. And I don't think that's good because I think it's bad for you too. It's bad for your ideas because your ideas can't stand the vetting of an opposing position.

Then your ideas might suck and you maybe should look at them it's what maybe you're lazy and you don't want to go through the the hassle of debate or of like serious discourse But if your ideas can't handle that kind of a discussion you probably shouldn't have them You shouldn't adopt them. You shouldn't be holding on to them That's my position on all this and I think this whatever someone's trying to silence someone, it's more political than it is anything. It's more, this person has an incredible amount of influence and they don't align up very rigidly with what our ideology is.

And they could cause us problems if they discuss certain things in an unorthodox way. And we don't like that. So we're going to silence them and we're going to pretend that there's something that they're not. And we're going to do that openly. And it's going to be obvious. Yeah. And I think especially like, look, if you think the status quo is totally fine, that

like everything is the way that it should be, I can, I guess, understand. Who the fuck thinks that? I don't know. That's a crazy argument. Right. There's not a single person alive that thinks everything's perfect. Right?

Is there? I mean, if so, I haven't met them. I never met them. So I don't think you can have that argument. Yeah. So, I mean, if you think that there are things that are really seriously wrong with the society that you live in right now.

Have discussions. Then you, like, the last thing that you want to do is to make it harder to get your ideas about that out there so people can talk about them. People can hear about them, right? Like I think that if you want to have – like in my case, you think that, like, we have, you know, we have way too much economic inequality. I think it's particularly crazy to support, like, more corporate censorship. Because, again, who do you think is going to get censored, right? Like, if it's, you know, I mean, if there's some Starbucks worker who's, like, you know,

got fired when they're trying to organize a union and Starbucks says that, no, they weren't really fired for that. It was really, you know, because they, you know, whatever. They showed up late. They showed up late. I mean, OK, so somebody is lying. Right. Do we want, you know, Twitter or whatever platform to be making decisions about like who's lying and like, oh, which of these sides is misinformation? I don't, right?

Like not just because like I support free speech, though I do, but also just because like I don't trust at all, right? You know, that they're going to take the side that I would want to on that. Of course. And so one of the things that I talked about when I made a video recently when they said that I was saying misinformation. And I was saying, well, look at what used to be misinformation just a few months ago that's now fact. There's like the lab leak theory. The lab leak theory, if you said that before,

you'd get kicked off of social media. Now it's on the front cover of Newsweek. The idea that if you get vaccinated, you can still spread COVID and you could still get COVID. That was crazy talk. Rachel Maddow was on television saying, the virus stops with you. You can still spread COVID and you could still get COVID. That was crazy talk. Rachel Maddow was on television saying the virus stops with you. You can't spread it. You can't catch it. It stops with you if you're vaccinated. That's not true. We know that's not true. So that was, if you said that I think people who are vaccinated can still catch COVID and they can still spread

COVID, that would be misinformation. But now that's accepted as fact. There's a bunch of those. Yeah. I mean, I think in that case, I think that might be less like, you know, people didn't know that and more just kind of Rachel Maddow's an idiot because like, if you, you know, because what they always said is like the effort, like, you know, whatever it is, even for like the original version of COVID that, you know, wild COVID, whatever they call it, right? They like, you know, whatever 90 something, you know, percent, you know, like a rate of effectiveness of like Pfizer. Yeah. But if you read the literature, that's not really even accurate. I mean, you know, but this is the thing, like whatever you think the effectiveness rate is, right? Like it was never a hundred percent. And if, and if like Rachel Maddow thought that it was

a hundred percent, that's like, that one seems more like an issue of like Rachel Maddow not understanding, you know, medical science. But again, I don't I don't know. So that would make it misinformation. Right. Yeah. It's the same thing. That's my point. Yeah, sure. I mean, like, actually. So here's an example I completely agree with at the beginning of the pandemic, like, was it like March, you know, 2020, maybe until sometime in April, Fauci, the CDC, everybody was saying don't wear a mask. Right.

You know, and, you know, as we established, I am not some, you know, like there are a lot of things that I would rather spend my time on than like trying to sort through all the COVID stuff. But like even I at the time was like, wait a second, that doesn't make sense. Why not? Right. Like, you know what? Why would that like the reasons they were given didn't make sense to me. And then they kind of said, I mean, like I know some people say this is an oversimplification, but I think if you go back and look at it, this is kind of what they said.

Oh, we lied about that so that like all the masks wouldn't get, you know, get bought up. That's not an oversimplification at all. That's exactly what they said. And which is crazy to like the thing that's crazy to me is like okay if you're going to do that I don't think you should have done it but if you're going to do that like you have to resign after that

right? Like once you've shown that you were willing to like lie lie to people like if you think it's important that people trust you know medical authorities which you know I mean I can see why public health crisis you know that you think it's important that people trust medical authorities, which I mean I can see why, public health crisis, that you think that was important. Yeah. Like what's going to undermine that more, right?

People – random people on the internet like saying things that might not be true about it or people going on podcasts who might say things that are wrong or like the CDC like admitting that they were lying about something important. That's going to undermine that. That's going to undermine that like crazy. And I would not have wanted people who are pointing things like this out at the time that like, oh, the stated reasons why masks were supposed to be bad didn't really make sense, which they didn't, right? You know, because it was like, well, it's going to encourage people to be reckless. And it's like, well, OK, that's an argument against

like seatbelts, right? I don't think that was the – That was one that they used, right? No, but not Fauci. I don't think Fauci used that argument. Yeah, I think the WHO did – like I think those – like if you go into their website, I think that's one of the things that they said there at one point. But they'd also say, well, people don't know how to use them properly. So like they're going to like end up – it's going to end up being more dangerous.

There were a bunch of things they threw out. None of it quite seemed to add up even at the time. And then again, then they came out and said, no, actually, like it's not like the science changed when that happened. And I think that I certainly wouldn't have wanted people who are pointing that out to not be able to do that because of some misinformation policy. Don't you think that the issue really was that people were afraid? And when people are afraid, then they will support harsher measures to ensure safety. And one of those measures would be to silence people that may be spreading information that could get people in trouble so they're willing to compromise their values because they think there's a greater good to be

had like there's a different time and that's one of the more dangerous things about a thing like a pandemic because people will compromise their positions because they feel like there's a greater good to be achieved and so we need to silence these people like this was during the presidential campaign and this is one of the things that I found out that I was really shocked by. The Twitter band, Brett Weinstein, had a thing that he had put together called Unity 2020. And the idea was instead of this rigid two-party system where you have people on the left and people of the right, what if you had a really reasonable person, a well balanced person from the right and a really reasonable, well balanced person from the left

and we brought them together, very popular people and put together a party and called it the Unity Party. And so he made a Twitter page and Twitter banned the page. What was the reason they gave? Some bullshit reason, but the reason was they were terrified that these popular podcasters and people were going to take votes away from the left.

Because these people like Weinstein and his wife are, they're progressives. I mean, they taught at a very progressive university. A lot of people that are progressive that feel disenfranchised with some of the standards of the Democratic Party and they weren't really interested in a guy like biden who's this career politician who's basically full of shit and having him be president like aren't there more reasonable more attractive alternatives

so they put together this thing and twitter fucking banned it and i think the reason why they banned it is the same reason why they changed the standards of presidential debates after Ross Perot was in the elections back in the 80s. Was it the 90s? When was that? 92 was the first time. And then I think he ran again in the 96. This is exactly the same. They were worried that that can fuck up an election.

If you get enough people that say, hey, you guys are making a lot of sense. I'm going to vote unity 2020. If that becomes a big thing, like, and the Republicans aren't going to vote unity 2020, they're going to stick with their base. They're going to stick with their guy. They're Trump people. We've got a guy. He's our winner. And they were worried and concerned, I think, that this unity 2020 thing, even if it's like 10,000 votes in this place and 5,000 votes. Yeah, it doesn't take that much to- It doesn't take that much to swing elections. No, definitely not. Yeah, I mean, look, I certainly wouldn't have voted for you to 2020.

I think that the Democrats and Republicans are too close together in their positions already, right? There are too many things that they basically agree on that I don't like, but I certainly don't think that you should be banned for Twitter. It's crazy. But that's the thing about these social media platforms is that they basically agree on that I don't like. But I certainly don't think that you should be banned for Twitter. It's crazy. But that's the thing about these social media platforms is that they've become too big. They have too much influence. It's not as simple as like this is a private business. They can do whatever they want.

This private business is the way that people distribute information to billions and billions of people. The idea that Facebook is just a private business is bananas because it literally influences worldwide elections and it comes standard on your phone in many countries. It is the internet to a lot of people in other countries. The idea that that's just a private company is crazy. Well, the thing that's particularly crazy to me is like, look, I understand like a conservative or libertarian who would say that, oh, they're a private business.

They can do whatever they want because that's what they would say about everything, right? You know, that like private businesses should be able to do what they want and like – and obviously, you know, I'm a socialist. I really disagree with with, right, on private businesses, then turn around and say, oh, this isn't really a free speech issue because it's like a private business. It's like, wait a second, guys. Because it supports their desires. Which one is it, right? Which one is it, right? I mean like as – because if you are on the left and I don't mean like if you're a liberal but like if you're a real leftist, then I would say that a lot of the core of like your worldview is that you understand that private businesses can have a crazy amount of power over people's lives.

And that can be in certain respects as dangerous as the power of governments. And of course, the two are not unrelated, right? Because private businesses, like we were talking about earlier, have a crazy amount of influence over what the government does. So I think wanting private corporations to be more powerful because you think that it's going to silence just the people that you don't like. That's the problem. Seems like it just always seems like you haven't thought this through at all. No, but that's the problem, and this is where I come to you with this. How do we get people on the left to realize that this is a tremendous error? And that is not just – I understand that they think that short term, this is beneficial because they can silence

people they disagree with. But to understand that for, I mean, it sounds a little grand, but for the human race, this is a terrible thing to have. This is a terrible thing to have because you're discouraging discourse. And it's one of the most important things that we have is the ability to talk things out, the ability to find out how a person thinks and to consider how that person thinks and whether or not that would apply to you. Can I use these thoughts? Is that they have a point that I haven't considered?

Is there something about the way they're looking at the world that maybe there is a perspective that I have either ignored or I just haven't been aware of that will enlighten me and change the way I look at things. Maybe I look at a person coming from a different walk of life, from a different part of the world or different education, whatever it is. Let me take in their point of view and see if this is helpful. See if I can help. We need more friends than we need enemies. We don't need more enemies. So this silencing people,

oh, you're just creating enemies. You're polarizing. We need communication. Most people want the same thing in terms of like, what do you want from life? You want your friends, your family, your loved ones to be happy.

You want to be able to pursue your interests and your dreams and your goals. You have these ideas and these projects you want to do, these goals you want to achieve. You want to be able to pursue those. And you want to not be hampered by bullshit while you're trying to do that. And you also want to be a good person. That's universal stuff. Then it comes to, well, what is a good person? Like, what should you be allowed to do? What should you not be allowed to do? How do you infringe upon the rights of your neighbors with your ideas? Do you support the community with your ideas? Is it beneficial to people? And these are all where things get weird. And then we get ideologically

driven into a left or right category. And I believe that many people that are either on the left or on the right are just looking for a gang. They're just looking for a gang to be in. And they find it and they just adopt their positions and they adopt this predetermined pattern of thinking and this ideology that they subscribe to because other people on the left do it or other people on the right do it. And when you do it, those people on the right are like, yeah, good for you. Good for you, Ben. You're thinking the right way now. You're on our side.

And there's like for human beings, there's a great feeling of camaraderie that comes with that. You're part of a tribe. It's very attractive. And that's a problem. Yeah. And I think it's also a problem when like, how are the tribes being divided up and is it in a way that's going to actually advance the things that you want? Right. Like if, um, if it's really about like different

regions of the country or like, you know, for the diminishing number of people who still watch cable news, which cable news channel you watch. And basically it's like red team versus blue team culture war stuff. Then I guess the question is are you ever going to get the kinds of systemic changes that would really help people to do a lot of the things you just talked about, right? Like have like, you know, be able to, you know, for example, like lots of people can't spend very much time with their families, you know, because they have to work all the time, you know, lots of people can't do the things they want to do in their life because, you know, they can't go to school, you know, because, you know, like higher education, because, you know, they can't, you know, they can't afford it or they don't want to be like saddled with decades, you know,

of debt about it. And so the question is like, how are you going to achieve those things? And if you're, if there's somebody standing in the way, who is it actually, right? Is it somebody who's a member of, you know, the elite who has like genuine power, right? And whose interests might not like coincide with your interests, right? Because like they're – you know, like if you had a union at your workplace or if you had like – you know, then their profits would go down. Or if you tax them more to pay for some of the things we were talking about, you know, like that would be bad for them. things we were talking about, you know, like that, you know, like that would be bad for them. Is it them or is it like your uncle who like, you know, whatever, like, like, you know, voted for Trump or something, right? Like, like is, is which, which one of those people should,

should you get mad about? And I think that the problem is that a lot of people are trained to just like fixate on this, whatever just passing bullshit is going on in the news cycle you know that like what are people mad about this minute you know it's it's gonna be something else in 12 hours right you know but like there's the sort of constant outrage cycle that i think is fed by the profit incentives of media companies because they have to hold on to the audience they have left well also they have advertisers yeah a to the audience they have left. Well, also they have advertisers. Yeah. A lot of those advertisers brought to you by Pfizer.

They have these ideas that you have to subscribe to. And if you don't subscribe to those ideas, then they don't want to support your program. And this is like either a said or unsaid thing. It's like I was listening to this thing where these people were talking about people in positions of power. Like, how do you get these sort of cookie cutter politicians? Are they told what to do? Or are they the kind of people that will do what they think and say what they think other people want them to say. And I think there's a lot of that. There's a lot of, they don't really necessarily have these principled positions.

What they're doing is they're saying the thing they think that people want them to say. They're saying the thing they believe people want to hear and that that's going to advance them in their career. And they're these, you know, we don't have to name the names, but we know these people, these cookie-cutter type politicians we know are full of shit, but they say things that are the right things to say given the current political or social climate. Yeah, I mean, look, and they'll also say what they think they have to say at a given point, and then it's, like, completely forgotten six months later sometimes, right?

Right. Like, think about the 2020 election. Like, all of those Democrats who some of them said at the beginning of the primaries that they agreed with Bernie about Medicare for all. But even the ones who didn't, right, they would all say, oh, we at least think there should be this public option where everybody should be able to like maybe buy into some sort of public health insurance or whatever. And that was like the entire debate. There were like a hundred, you know, whatever. I don't know how many democratic debates there were. It felt like a million, but they have like however many there were, this was always at least like 20 minutes of like every single one of those. Like they would go on and on about this, but then like somehow now that's just disappeared, right? Nobody's like, like,

like now Biden's president, it still says on his campaign website, you know, that, that never got taken down, right. That he wants there to be this public health insurance option. Kamala Harris, who said at one point that she agreed with Bernie about Medicare for all is the vice president. A lot of these other people are, you know, Pete Buttigieg, you know, said he wanted at least Medicare for all who wanted. And like, he who want it, and he's in the cabinet. There are all these people who are back to being senators. And it's like, well, that's what they – when they had to position themselves to win that primary, they said that they cared about all the millions of Americans who don't have health care or the millions more who maybe even do have health care. How about they said they were going to decriminalize marijuana and release everybody that was in jail for it?

Yeah, when's that happening? Exactly. It's all bullshit. It's all bullshit, but that is the sort of stuff that we're talking about, that they don't really believe these things. They're saying these things because they believe this is what people want to hear, and that gets those people out to the polls. That gets those people out to the booths and gets them to vote. And this is, unfortunately, where we find ourselves as a culture until we can read minds. And Elon Musk, hurry up with that technology.

We need to be actually able to read people's minds. So bring it back to you. I don't know that I want Elon to be able to read my mind. You're going to read his mind too though. And you're going to see, oh my God. Why did you write this book? Yeah. I wrote this book because I was pissed off.

Why did you write this book? Yeah. I wrote this book because I was pissed off. Like I think more than any other book that I've written, it came out of like intense frustration that I was feeling at that time because I saw a lot of people who I think like on paper, you know, they agree with me about like most of what I've said tonight, maybe not the, you know, maybe not the free speech part, but like, you know, most of the rest of it, like who were doing all of these things that seemed to me like they were either feeding into these absolutely ridiculous sideshows that like stop people from actually focusing on these issues that we're talking about, you know, like, you know, the title, right, the title example, you know, canceling comedians, you know, people who would like freak out, you know, about like what Dave Chappelle says in a stand-up special as if like the things that you say in a stand-up special or like an editorial that you're writing for the New York Times about like exactly what you want to happen, right? Like every sentence, you know, Dave Chappelle has said in a stand-up special is literally what he thinks. Dave Chappelle has said in the stand-up special is literally what he thinks.

And I think that, like, one, to anybody you're trying to appeal to, to actually build some kind of political program to actually accomplish any of the stuff I've talked about, what does that make you look like? That makes you look like an overgrown hall monitor, right? Nobody is going to want to follow that person anywhere, nor should they. Right. Like that they because because that's that's just incredibly damaging and unappealing. And and I wanted like I mean, it's funny because I think that like when I sort of use that as the example in the title. Right. Like I was kind of trying to come up with like the most ridiculous example that I could come up with, right? Like, you know, that like people would be like, you know, in terms of like ridiculous priorities or sort of people being like weird moralistic scolds. Like, you know, what would be the biggest example? Not getting mad at like corporate CEOs who bust unions, not getting, you know, not getting

mad at like, you know, politicians who commit war crimes. But, you know, or, you know, like maybe you get mad at those people too. But like somehow my friend – I disagree with him about a lot of things, a lot of things. But he is my friend, Dave Smith. I heard him talk about the outrage budget. Trevor Burrus How dare you disagree with Dave Smith about anything? Jason Kuznicki Well, I'm pretty sure that he disagrees with

a whole lot of things you agreed with earlier. No, Dave's awesome. I'm just joking. But no, I mean like – but I think he is a good guy and he's – I mean I've been on his show several times and … He has well thought out perspectives. Yeah, he has – You may agree or may not agree but you can see where he's coming from. Yeah, I can see where he's coming from.

And the other thing that I really respect about him is that I think that a lot of libertarians, even though they'll agree on paper, like with, yeah, we shouldn't be fighting these wars. There shouldn't be all these people in prison or whatever. It seems like in practice, what really gets them excited is tax cuts, right? And I think Dave is genuinely not like that. I think that he actually devotes, as far as I've ever been able to see, he actually devotes way less time to stuff like that than to the United States backing this genocidal Saudi war in Yemen. That's the big thing with Dave. It's interventionist foreign policy and the corporate backing of these horrible regime

change wars. That's the thing that he hates more than anything. And the actual cost of human lives and suffering. He's a deeply compassionate person. He really firmly opposes these things. And he wants to talk about them whenever he can. And it's one of those things where, I mean, he talked on my podcast about how that got him kind of booted off of those political talk shows on cable.

Yeah, because nobody wants to hear about dead kids in Yemen. Exactly. What they want to hear about is like whatever culture war thing people are screaming about each other. Whether that UPenn swimmer should be able to compete with women. Yeah, which would – by the way, I love – the thing that I love most about that example is whatever you think about it, right? Like and I – I mean look, if I had to like actually think about it, I'd probably say, yeah, whatever. Let them – I don't care, right? But like whatever you think about it, like the idea that everybody is going to get this excited about something that happens in an Ivy League swim meet, right? It's very odd.

Like it's like really that's what you care about? Like rich kids like swimming? Like that's not really what I care about, right? Like it's not what I want people to care about. So I mean what I was – But it's also – but it's a lightning rod for this discussion of like, what is a woman? Yeah. And this is a new part of the ideology.

This is a new discussion. Like, what makes a woman? Is it biology? Or is it how you identify? Is it how you feel? Or is it your chromosomes? And this, when it comes to sports, sports is where the rubber hits the road. And that's why it's this sort of, it's like, see, we told you there's a difference.

When someone's lapping people and they're identifying as female, but they're a biological male and they're destroying the competition. But when they competed as a biological male, which was just a little while ago, they were not very good. They were okay, but they weren't nowhere near the top 10. And now they're dominant. They're the number one in the country. Like this is a – it's a very interesting discussion of where the rubber meets the road

in terms like what defines who you are. And also, are we talking about how you treat a person or are we talking about competition? And so there's a reason why men can't compete with women. As a biological male who identifies as a biological male, you are not allowed to compete in a women's division. There's a reason why there's a division between men and women. So when we make this distinction, what is the criteria that we allow someone to cross that distinction

and be a female or be a male? And this has nothing to do with cruelty or bigotry or discrimination. This is just a discussion about what is a woman and what is a man. And sports are a great way to sort that out when it comes to this particular aspect of it, the physical aspect of being a female or a male. Another is birth. You know, like can you get pregnant? Can you give birth? I mean, if there's a competition, like who's going to create the most babies?

if there's a competition like who's going to create the most babies and it's males versus females and it's people who identify versus as a female versus people who are biologically female well the biological females are going to dominate that competition yeah well it's you know probably a good thing that we don't have uh giving birth competitions but i know right you know what i'm saying it's like it's where the rubber meets the road in terms of these ideological discussions, which are valid discussions. They're valid discussions because I've met a lot of trans people that – like I had Blair White on the podcast recently. I mean when you meet Blair White, there's not a fucking doubt in your mind. Like this is someone who for whatever reason, the nature and genetics has given the wrong sex to a person that is distinctly female. Yeah. I mean, as far as like the actual rules for like sports leagues, I know, I'm sure you know

way more about this than I do, but like I have a, I know different like sports have handled it differently in terms of the requirements that like it's not necessarily an absolute thing like you know trans you know trans women can or can't you know compete like sometimes you know there are like hormone requirements and stuff like that you know that there are there are different ways of trying to see what the hormone requirements are though. No I have no idea right. The thresholds for many sports's handled differently in different places. But there's a guy named Derek. He's got a website called, it's a silly name of a website, it's called More Plates, More Dates.

It's like something he created a long time ago. But he's, he doesn't, I don't think he necessarily has a degree in chemistry and biochemistry, but he has a deep understanding of it. a degree in chemistry and biochemistry, but he has a deep understanding of it. And the way he was breaking down the amount of available testosterone that a biological female

has, like the threshold versus what's acceptable for a trans woman to compete against biological females, and it's substantially more. Like, it's on the outskirts of physiological normality yeah i mean again i don't i don't know what like if there's a good compromise here that would like help like um you know that

would maintain a reasonable level of fairness you know yeah i don't know what you know without just saying like you know i think there are like legitimately a couple different you know covered a couple of different – a couple of different values that you have to balance to like try to figure that one out. I would say that I think like most context, like most of the things that trans people who are like advocating for more anti-discrimination laws, et cetera, are talking about are not going to be nearly as hard as like this kind of like edge case about sports, right? Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Right. Yeah. No, I agree with that. about are not going to be nearly as hard as like this kind of like edge case about sports,

right? Yeah, no, I agree with that. Because like I think it's mostly like can you be like employment and housing and all of that stuff. And I think it is – like I think it is important that you have – that you have civil rights laws that cover everybody. Now, I do think that because of some of the weird dynamics of this particular issue, right? Like you're going to get things that are harder calls, right? Like this.

Trevor Burrus Like sports. Jason Kuznicki Yeah. Again, I just – like in terms of like what some sports league should require in terms of hormones or whatever, like I have absolutely no idea. But again, I think that it's – this is not like in terms of things that I'm going to get like mad about, right, on a day-to-day basis, right? Well, you would if you had a daughter that was competing against that person. Yeah, maybe. Someone who had been training their whole life to be an elite swimmer and had dedicated a massive amount of time and someone came around

that had a massive biological advantage. Yeah, although, of course, if I had a trans daughter, then I'd want to make sure that whatever the rules were were going to be fair to her too, which is why, again, what the right,

exactly where the rules should be set. Do you think if you had a trans daughter and your trans daughter competed as a male for many, many years and was just sort of mediocre and then all of a sudden competed as a woman and started dominating, don't you think you'd feel a little bit of guilt? I mean, I guess it depends how much like how much she was, you know, like how much we're talking about, right? Because like I think in that swim meet case, the UPenn thing that you mentioned earlier, if I'm remembering right, like and maybe you can correct me on this. Like what I know about this is like scrolling through Twitter, you know, like what I saw. But like I don't think that she even won by that much, did she? Or did she? Giant amount.

Giant amount? How much did she win by? I thought she was. Okay, let's find out. She's breaking records. I mean, she's breaking records in multiple meets. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I mean, again.

I mean, this is the thing. It's like there's a video of her literally lapping the other female swimmers. And this is, again, when we're talking before, one of the things we brought up is the Lakota culture has this term, and this term is called the Heoka. And the Heoka is the sacred clown. It's a part of their culture where someone makes fun of everything, and it's like a sacred part of their culture

where they subject everything to mockery. And anything that can't stand up to mockery, anything that like viciously defends itself against mockery, that's an illegitimate thing. Another thing that Lakota people had was what their version of a transgender person was. It's like two-spirit or something. It was also a sacred part of their culture because it was a wise person that understood both genders. And this person you could come to,

and they had a deeper understanding of what it means to be a woman and what it means to be a man because they essentially were both. And so they had a deep amount of respect for people who were trans in their culture. And I think that's a great way of approaching it, that whenever you have these unique circumstances,

someone who is biologically male but clearly is much more of a female, sometimes more of a female than a lot of biological females who are much more biologically, much more oriented towards male thinking and male behavior. I mean, all of this is good for everybody. It's good for us to accept and it's good for us to learn from these perspectives of these people that have very unique and different, but also common in terms of like when you have giant numbers of people, like hundreds of millions of people, you have quite a few people that have these

experiences and we can learn from them. And instead of discrimination, and I don't necessarily think sports is a discrimination though. That's where it gets weird because like there's, again, there's a reason why we make a distinction why males compete against males and females compete against females. And I think we need to sort that out. And the, but you don't, you don't think like, um, like, do you think that there is some sort of reasonable compromise to be arrived at there or what's your position with physical sports? It's a problem because there's so many benefits to being a biological male. There's so many

benefits to the size of the lungs, the size of the heart, the physical strength, the fact that you're going through puberty, and that's the difference between someone who goes through puberty and maybe someone who doesn't. Right, they transition before they die. And then there's the ethical dilemma about that. Should you do that? Because there's a great deal of people that have not done that and wound up becoming gay men. And so is that what, like,

what's the right choice and who can make that choice? And when do you have the ability to make that choice? Should you be able to make that choice as a child? Should you wait till you're an adult? You know, we, we, we, there's a lot of decisions that we don't allow people to make until they're of grown age, like tattoos. You can't get your face tattooed when you're four, but you can when you're 24. You know, it's, I mean, I'm not saying that they're the same thing, but what I am saying is that we are faced with many dilemmas that require discussions and compassionate, comprehensive discussions. And the only way you can do that is without censorship.

Well, yeah. I mean, obviously, I completely agree on that. I mean, I think that the youth transition thing, again, I think that this is a little bit of a hard case because I think that on the one hand, yeah, you're absolutely right. I mean, the idea like no sane person that like little kids should have complete medical autonomy and just like get to like do whatever they want. That would be ridiculous. But at the same time, like not getting a tattoo when you're a kid isn't going to like have some like really bad effect. You can just wait and it's fine, right?

bad effect you can just wait and it's fine right like whereas like with something like this if you do have that experience that you know that you're that you feel as if you're like trapped in the wrong you know kind of body uh which you know i'd imagine could be like incredibly traumatic if that's not dealt with we can only imagine you know yeah exactly like i i literally don't know but it sounds like it neither one of us know but But I think that like then like having to go through what from your perspective is the wrong puberty, right? I mean like the stakes are higher, the tattoo thing, right? Now what does that mean in terms of like what level of medical gatekeeping there should be or like what the clinical practices should be? I'm like the last person to say. Yeah, I'm the last person to say too.

I just think it has to be something that we can discuss. Sure. The problem is when people want to suppress people's ability to make choices and when people want to suppress people's ability to discuss these things. I don't think that's good for any of us. I mean, these are very complicated human issues and by human issues, I put them in the same category as a lot of other things that are very messy. They're complicated to talk about. They're human issues, you know, and this is one of them. Yeah, no, I mean, it's, it's certainly, it certainly is. And I also think that, again, it goes back to like one of the big points in the book, which is that I don't want like people who might be like, if you've thought about one of these issues we're talking about a lot, right? Like, and you, if you've thought about one of these issues, we're talking about a lot, right? Like, and you, and you, you think like you have, um, and you might get very impatient,

right? With people who, who you think are, you know, are wrong about them. You think that they, they have, you know, they haven't thought about it as much as you may be, uh, then, and, you know, you think that they're not like sensitive enough to enough to, like, what people might need, then, like, if you're just sort of writing somebody off, right, you know, that, like, they're done because they're not, like, you know, they haven't evolved to exactly where you think they should evolve to yet, I think that that's bad on a human level. That's just a bad way to interact with people. level. That's just a bad way to interact with people. And I also think that it's – I think it's bad politically because, you know, somebody could like on some like incredibly messy sensitive

issue, right, you know, like they could, you know, like they could land somewhere different from you on that. And I'm not saying that like there isn't a bottom line. Like I think there is a bottom line. I think like non-discrimination laws, stuff like that, right? Like I think that's incredibly important. But I think that if you're writing people off based on that stuff, when it could be that there are all these other things where you could actually get them on board with what you want, right? And instead of saying like, you said in 2020 that you were probably going to vote for Bernie and there were people who – there were people who freaked out about it. And a lot of that was like bad faith. It was like ginned up by supporters of other candidates. But there were people who were like real leftists who were like mad that like Bernie – that Bernie campaign like put out that like video where they were like mad that like Bernie, the Bernie campaign, like put out that like video where they were like,

you know, clipping that. And that, and that seemed crazy to me, right? Like, like Michael, Michael Brooks and I wrote an article for Jack,

but about it at the, at the time. And like, like it just seems to me like, you know, whatever, like the idea that instead of being like, Oh,

Hey, good. Like here are all these things we can agree on right we think we should have health care and you're willing to like support this and by the way like if you you know if you really care about you know trans people i mean like i think you know birdie sanders was probably your guy right it made like that they he's the you know he wanted to fund you know transition costs as you know part of medic to fund, you know, transition costs as part of Medicare for all, you know, like that. That would be that would be the most pro transposition. But like if you're going to say like, you know, somebody like if you think, oh, Joe Rogan is wrong about like exactly how like sports, you know, the sports issue should be, you know, should play out. So I don't care that there are all these other things, right, that he that he agrees with us about.

I don't care if he's willing to support this thing. It would be incredibly beneficial. You know, like we just need to like cast him out, right? Say like no, we just want nothing to do with you. Or maybe like once you agree with us on 100% of everything and like, you know, repent, right? You know, then maybe we'll have something to do with you. So I think that that's – I think that's a stupid and I think it's a self-defeating way to try to do politics. And I think it's also just a bad way to live your life.

Well, I agree with you that writing people off because they don't share all of your opinions is ridiculous. And it's not the way you get people to take your position. It's the opposite. They're going to push back. They're going to push back. You're going to reject people because they don't agree with 100% of your positions. They're going to dig their heels in. That's a natural thing with human beings. They're not going to go, well, I guess I'll change.

No, that's not what they do, man. They fucking dig in. That's not what they do, man. They fucking dig in. Yeah. Nobody's ever said – like nobody's ever been in like an argument on whatever, Facebook, where somebody says that they're a terrible person and they're whatever. They're a fascist or a Stalinist or whatever it is they're being accused of being and said, oh, you know what? You're right. You're right. Good point. Good point. Good point. Right. You know, now I get it. Right. You know, like that's, that's not actually how you, how you appeal to, you know, to human beings at all. I mean, like anybody who knows,

like, that's like, that's something that like, I think an alien within like 10 minutes of interacting with people would recognize is not going to work, right? I mean, like, I think if you talk to people, like their people, like you, you know, like you're taking what they're saying seriously, like if you, if you think they're wrong, you can like try to explain why you're thinking you think they're wrong. And you can show them how the things that you want might actually help them. I mean it's not always going to work. There's no guarantee because that's just life. There's no guarantee.

But I mean like sometimes it will work and the other things just not going to work. So what positions did you take in your book that you got pushed back from? Oh boy. So – Oh boy. Well, there were a few. Although I will say most people who got mad

at the book didn't read it like most people of course why would they bother reading it when they could just get mad yeah I mean there were like

what if I read it and it clouds my judgment because now I agree with you on some things I'm trying to say fuck you yeah exactly like there were

there were so many like the number of people who got mad about the book before it came out just based on the title or the description do you want description have another drink before you talk about this oh yeah absolutely yeah please you might need to refill this is really good buffalo trees yeah it's good stuff um so yeah the number of people who got mad about it before it came out versus the number after i think is really revealing. But – That's hilarious.

I mean it's literally true. But I think the people who did read it who got mad, which is not most people who read it. But the people who did read it who got mad, I think there were a few things. One of them was about the Andy Ngo incident from 2019. You remember this? The Antifa thing when they threw milkshakes at him and stuff? That they – and in general, the part of it where I was criticizing Antifa, that they – that like I think that they – I think there are a lot of people who at least – maybe not a lot of people in the world as a whole, but a lot of people within a certain kind of subculture who have, you know, convinced themselves that, that like, I don't know, it's really important that people be using these kinds of like, you know, street tactics to like,

because they think in their heads that it's always like Germany in 1933. And like, you know, Nazis are about to take over or something, which is delusional, but they, you know, I think if you, you know, one of the points that I make about that in the book is that if you think about like what was actually going on in, you know, Germany in the early 30s when you had, you know, like Nazis who were like going around and like smashing up like trade union halls and like, you know, and fighting with people and like socialist and communist parties and stuff. Why would corporate America have to bother with any of that now? They're already winning just fine without it, right? I don't know what you're saying.

Okay. Sorry. Let me back up. Try to be clear about this. So I think the idea that fascism is what's on the horizon in America, I don't think makes sense because I think that arose under very different circumstances than what we've got right now. I think that the role that like the things that fascists were doing in like Germany before they took over there,

Italy before they took over there, were in response to the perception that the system was under threat and there would be like maybe even like communist revolution. And this was like the only thing that, you know, the only thing that like, you know, the wealthy elites could kind of turn to to stop that from happening, you know, would be like allying with, you know, German business interests, aligned with Hitler. And that's just such a radically different situation than the United States now that I think the idea that you'd be obsessed

with street fighting with the few people who like the Richard Spencer types or whatever just seems, I think that makes no sense. I think that it's a diversion. I mean, I think it's a distraction, honestly, from things that makes no sense. I think that it's a – I think it's a diversion. I mean I think it's a distraction honestly from things that actually matter more. And I think that it's really dangerous when people would make excuses for behavior like attacking Andy Ngo because it's – because if you think about that, like the things that – here the thing that most disturbed me right when that happened, that I would see people who would be defending that online who would say, well, you know, he's not like really a journalist, you know, because like whatever they would say about him. Right. You know, he's like a propagandist or he's like really siding with like the Proud Boys or one of these groups or, you know, whatever. And it's like the misinformation thing, right?

Like who gets to decide what counts as a journalist? And I certainly don't want that decision to be made by like individual vigilantes. The problem with Antifa is the name. You're calling it Antifa, like anti-fascist. You're like, well, of course. Of course I'm anti-fascist. Who wouldn't be? That's the problem. But like, well, of course. Of course I'm anti-fascist. Right, who wouldn't be? That's the problem.

But let's define fascism. Put up the definition of fascism. And this is part of where the problem lies. Like when we discuss fascism, whether we're discussing the connection between the corporate interests and the government or like what is the technical definition of what a fascist is. Where would you put it? Just Google it. Fascism, a form of far-right authoritarian ultra-nationalism characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition,

and strong regimentation of society and the economy that rose to prominence in the early 20th century of Europe. There's other definitions of that, though. That's the Wikipedia definition. The problem with Wikipedia is sometimes it gets ideologically captured. A political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition.

I don't see that in our country. Here's the other one, though. A tendency towards or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control. The problem with that is when you're trying to control by violence and street action and throwing milkshakes at people, you're trying to control the way they behave and they think. That's a form of fascism. It's a kind of fascism. What you're doing is, in a sense, you're intimidating people into not opposing your perspective. You have large groups of people.

They incite violence. They lit the fucking apartment building of the Portland mayor. Portland, one of the great things about it is it's the least fascist place on earth. It is literally the most open-minded, progressive city on the entire continent of the United States. You don't think Nazis are about to take over Portland? There's not a fucking chance. And yet that's the stronghold of

Antifa and that's the place where they find the most fascism they have to combat against. It's a form of bullying. It's a form of gangs. They're trying to enforce their ideology. And unfortunately, their fucking mayor has let them go so far with it that even he's pushing back now. He's calling for greater police protection.

And they're trying to enforce laws now and arrest people. Because he was being targeted so much that he turned it around and is like, we have to do something about these people. Like, now you think? Now you think? Like, it's like a gang, man. It's like they get – they're into this ideology and they're into this whole community of, like, stopping these fascists. And they're looking for them when they don't even exist. The technical definition of fascism is not running rampant in fucking portland it's just not no no it's not and i think that like if you want to say like uh there

are like far-right groups who might commit hate crimes etc then like first of all i actually don't think that a lot of people who do stuff like this would be like just I'm skeptical that like they're really gonna be the ones who are who are gonna you know do something there but like if do something there in what way oh that like that like that like if you have like actual fascists who are like showing up with guns right you know that they're gonna run yeah yeah like I don't think I don't think most people who sign up for stuff like this – this is a point Michael Brooks made to me. Like after the – in Michigan in 2020, there was like some protests at the state capitol over lockdown stuff where like lots and lots of people actually had guns there.

He was like, oh, where's Antifa here, right? You know, why not, right? Is that when they were trying to kidnap the governor? That was the FBI-led operation. That was before that, but that was related. Same kind of stuff? Yeah, it was the same kind of stuff. So, I mean, the protests were real.

The governor plot seems like that was just the equivalent for this stuff. It was ginned up by the FBI. Yeah, it was like one of those cases like with the post 9-11 security state where you have some like, you know, mentally ill Muslim loner who like the FBI spends like two years convincing them, you know, to join their fake terror plot. They finally say yes and they arrest them, you know, like it seems like way too close to that for comfort. But I guess the thing that might connect to some of what we were talking about earlier about Antifa is I think that the one reason why people end up like obsessing with like about like marginal far right groups like the Proud Boys are not about to like, you know, march on Washington and like, you know, and install, you know,

whoever. Also, that guy, the fucking head of the Proud Boys, was in the FBI, too. That's true. That was the craziest thing. When that turned out, there was the one guy who was, what was his name? Enrique something or another, who turned out to be an FBI informant, and he was the head of the Proud Boys. They were always interviewing him on television.

Yeah, it's like— After Gavin McGinnis, who started it as a LARP. He started it literally as a joke. Like, it was based on a Broadway musical. That's why they called it Proud Boys. They were joking around. And then it became a thing. And then a bunch of people—once you created an organization,

then a bunch of people can join it, and then they infiltrate it, and then they decide to radicalize it. Yeah. Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio was an FBI informant. Like, what in the fuck, man? Yeah, it's like during the McCarthy period when like half of the people at like some like little local communist party meeting would be FBI agents because they were devoting so many resources to like trying to stop this like very marginal, you know, this very marginal group, you know. So people were upset at you because of the Andy Ngo thing that you didn't think that

was, I mean, and obviously it's just not a way to treat a person. No, no. You beat him up and he's the, if you ever met Andy, he's this tiny Asian gay man. Yeah, right. The idea that this guy is this jackbooted thug that's there to take down democracy is fucking preposterous. No, it is. And I think that the

problem is when you make an obvious point like, hey, there's absolutely no justification for physically attacking this guy. That that's no justification for like physically attacking this guy you know that they uh that like uh that

that's that that's insane behavior that like this is um this serves no good purpose you know whatsoever that like a lot of the things that people said about at the time when they're trying to justify it where you know turned out to be bullshit which is also true uh that also, you know, and also, by the way, I don't want to set the precedent that like we're going to have street violence where people who like, you know, somebody decides they don't count as a real journalist and that they're like helping bad people or creating dangerous effects or something and they could just attack them. Like, I mean, why, you know, I mean, I'm sure I've, you know, I'm sure I've written lots of stuff for Jacobin that people would say that about, right?

What is a journalist? This is the other thing. Like, what defines a journalist? Like, how do you decide who is and isn't a journalist? Do you have to be connected to a specific organization? Because there are many people that are connected to specific organizations that are propagandists. Do you have to have a degree in journalism? Because there's many people that have a degree in journalism

that are liars, and they work for gigantic corporations, and they spew out all the nonsense that this corporation wants them to say. Like, what is a journalist? No, absolutely. Do we have a rigid criteria for what is i mean couldn't you not be a person who believes in the truth who decides to dedicate yourself to discussing things and researching things and doing it in a very honest and like

doing it as a person in good faith and putting out the information as you've discovered it. Like, isn't that journalism? Like who decides who's a journalist? Yeah. I mean, certainly nobody at WikiLeaks had a journalism degree and I'm really glad that that exists. How about Edward Snowden? Does that count as Yeah. I've heard people say that Glenn Greenwald's not a journalist. Which is ridiculous. Preposterous. Because, I mean, he broke, I mean, whatever you think about Glenn or his politics or any of that stuff, I mean, just from a journalism perspective, like first with the NSA revelations and then again in Brazil with, you know, with the material that like helped free the former president, you know, who was unjustly imprisoned.

Like that that's, I mean, that's the most important stuff that journalism can do, right? So if that's not journalism, you know, if that's not journalism, right? Like, I don't know why journalism is important. Once you go to Stubstack, you're not a journalist anymore. Yeah. And I think that the, and I think that's incredibly dangerous because you could imagine, I mean, look, you don't have to imagine.

You could just look at what actually has happened with Julian Assange, right? That, you know, like the government says, like, you know, that, oh, there's no freedom of the press issue here because that's not really journalism. He's just like some kind of, you know, enabler of terrorism, you know because he he did this uh that's certainly not a road that i want to go down but

the problem is you as obvious as so many of these points are that like it's there's absolutely no good justification for physically attacking a non-combatant you know like somebody who isn't like going right like uh mocking and laughing when you hit him in the head with a fucking milkshake like what it was that no it's you know it's terrible behavior you so like you make that obvious point you make the point we're just making about journalism and it's it's like on the face of it you think okay this is like this is all obvious but the problem is it's that like team like rooting for your team behavior that like … You're willing to accept horrible behavior as long as it's enforcing your ideology.

Yeah. And then if somebody like me says that I think that – like that I think this is bad, then, oh, see, so you're not being loyal to the team, right? Like you're siding with Andy Ngo who's on the other team and you're s're you're siding against people who are you know who are on your team you know so like they'll just have a reaction to that that's not actually about like the thing itself or like showing what's wrong with the argument yeah and i mean i should be really clear i'm not like i had andy no on my podcast and i was skeptical of a lot of things he was saying one of them that he had traumatic brain injury from that i was like what kind of brain injury do you have from that like what are you talking about man yeah i know originally they like there was these reports that there was like concrete that

was like mixed to the milkshake somehow listen man i watched him get hit with that that's like that's not what gives you brain damage i know what gives you brain damage yeah but you gotta get you gotta get hit like if that guy got hit with a fucking piece of concrete, he would go down. He's not just going to take it on the chin and keep walking and get a traumatic brain injury from a milkshake. Yeah. It's silly. No, and look – Unless there were some other shots that he took that weren't on camera.

And I think Andy Ngo, like as somebody – like the issue is not do I like Andy Ngo because I actually don't, right? I mean like I think – What don't you like? know because I actually don't right I mean like I think what don't you like so he wrote an article that was I think it was for Quillette I'm not sure about that part right it might have been somewhere else but he wrote an article about visiting Britain where he was claiming basically that there were like you know parts of London that were like under Sharia law or that, you know, like, and his evidence was that there were like no drinking signs that like it's since been pointed out that like other like non-Muslim neighborhoods, they have the same things, right? Because you're just not allowed to drink in

certain places, you know, under generally applicable laws. I think that he's, you know, and I think that probably in general, right? Like- He's a provocateur. Yeah. I think he's a provocateur and I think that he's – I too have a lot of questions about the honesty or at least the commitment to sort of checking things before you go into print with them. And my sense is that his politics are completely different from mine. But none of that matters for this. None of that is the point. I don't want just – if we're talking about should we have a taboo against physically assaulting journalists.

Yeah, physically assaulting people you disagree with. Then like, yeah, we should, and it should be anybody. Right. You know, but like, also I think that, you know, it shouldn't depend on whether you think they're honest. It shouldn't depend on any of that stuff. Right. You know, that that's, that, that should, is not something that should be happening. And I think it's a bad door to, uh, I think it's a bad door to open up. And, but I, you know, I think that that's something in the book that people, a lot of people, I shouldn't say a lot of people, most people who got mad at it never cracked it open. But like, you know, but like a lot of some of the people who did get mad at it, you know, because they read it, had a problem with that. I think some of the Dave Chappelle stuff in the first chapter, because, you know, they thought I was like defending a transphobe. You know, like I think that that was, you know, that that was an issue with some people.

think that that was, you know, that that was an issue with some people. They, you know, trying to, you know, I think that the stuff in later in the, you know, in the book, that just in general, I think a lot of people who got mad about it, sort of misinterpreted the sort of main claim in a crazy way, right? That like, you know, in other words, that they thought that the main thing that I was saying was that like online cancellation is like the most important part of problem in the world or, you know, something like that. And that's not what I think. You know, what I think is that this is not a way that you should act towards people, one, because on a human level, it's just a toxic way to operate. in all of this kind of online shit throwing and trying to get people fired and all of that stuff for all the reasons that we're talking about. I think it's like the worst, most counterproductive thing you could do. I think there's also a real issue with

communicating through social media. It's a way of communicating that takes away so much of what it is to be a human. To be a human is to look at a person, to have a conversation with them, look them in the eyes, to talk about things in depth, to recognize their perspective and allow them to talk so you give them, there's a sense of camaraderie. You're two human beings expressing ideas. With social media, you're just printing something out and you're throwing it out into the ether and then the other person responds and then you don't see each other you don't you're trying to be biting and nasty and

you know the way you win is through vitriol it's a shitty way to communicate and one of the best ways to get attention is to be the biggest cunt like that's that's how people get attention online to say the most mean the most vicious thing that you can and yeah it's like a fun little game totally and you get validation for being like the first person to like throw you know throwing the first stone right like and people like support you because they wish they had said it or they don't want to be the person who sticks their neck out, but they'll like it because the, yeah, go get them. Yeah. Go get them, Ben. Yeah.

Or they just don't like, or, or they just like, you know, they like the tweet, ha, right. You know, like we got that guy and then they just never think about it again. Or sometimes like if they thought about it in the first place, like, like I gave, um, you know, there's a, uh, there's a guy who, um, I am Wendell Potter. You know who this is? No. Okay. So Wendell Potter used to be a health insurance executive, uh, and he would like lobby, you know, Congress on behalf of health insurance companies.

And then at some point in the past, like, I think like maybe 15 years ago or something, I'm not sure about the timing. He, uh, he decided, you know, like he had a crisis of conscience about doing that. And he he decided, you know, like he had a crisis of conscience about doing that. And he he he left the industry and he you know, he started like what he'd done since then is he just campaigns for Medicare for all. Right. So this is this is a this is a really good person. And he had I remember back in this this was like spring 2021 maybe. Wendell Potter tweeted out something like the fact that people don't understand how much Medicare for all would help us even during this time when people are losing health insurance because of economic disruptions. All this stuff shows how many people bought the

lies that I used to tell, you know, when I was a health insurance executive. And this guy who I'm not going to name because I don't want to like, you know, shame this guy. That's not the point. Right. You know, but like is this guy quote tweeted that. Right. Like he just probably saw it on his feed and, you know, he didn't really know his problem.

He quote tweeted it and said, and I quote, oh, my God, this fucking piece of shit actually admitted it. He quote tweeted it and said, and I quote, oh, my God, this fucking piece of shit actually admitted it. And that got like 20,000 likes before enough people like told him who Wendell Potter's name on the top of the tweet. That would have taken him to their, you know, his profile picture where he would have seen like all these, you know, like names that like have like for Medicare for all the title. And he would have realized like what point he was making when he tweeted that. But why would you do five seconds of research about somebody before denouncing them when you can get that little endorphin rush from like, you know, you're a piece of shit on Twitter. Do you know who Alan Levinovitz is?

Who's that? He's a writer. He's got a very interesting perspective on this. And he calls Twitter and social media processed information. The same way processed food is bad for you that processed information ultra processed where it's down to instead of having a conversation with someone it's down to quote tweeting a thing completely out of context and trying to ruin with them oh my god this piece of shit just admitted it like that kind of thing that's an example of like ultra processed information and when he said

that it was like one of those aha moments where it's like, that's what it is. That is the thing that separates human beings and normal human interaction between social media interaction. It's too easy to do. It's too simple. It's like basically like fast food or like some sort of processed fucking snack. It's terrible for you. It's terrible for your brain. And people engage in it easily. Yeah. It's terrible for you. It's terrible for your brain and people engaging it easily. Yeah, and much like those other examples, the profit incentives of the companies that run it are all in favor of people doing all this stuff because the more people are doing that, the more minutes per day their eyeballs are on Twitter.

Sure, but I think that's almost a simplistic version of it because I don't think they meant that. I don't think they created it in order to get people to do it that way. I think they created it as, like, when you go back and look at Twitter, what it initially was, it was like you would put at and then your name is like is going to the movies. Like you would even talk about yourself in the third person. You know, like at Joe Rogan's going to the gym. Like that's how people did it. And then slowly but surely it became a way where people espoused opinions.

And then it became Arab Spring. And then, like, it became all sorts of different ways that people express themselves. Like, this idea that it started out with this insidious notion. I don't think it necessarily started out with an insidious notion. But I do think that the ways that it's changed over time are ones that – like just the fact that like likes and retweets and all of that stuff are part of it. I do think it's a kind of feedback mechanism. Like you know John Ronson's book, So You've Been Publicly Shamed. He talks about that at the end. He uses the analogy of those electronic speeding signs that'll show you

as you drive by how fast you're driving and what the speed limit is. He points out that on paper, there's no reason that should work because they're not giving you any information you don't already have. Every car has a speedometer in it that tells you how fast you're driving. A normal low-tech speed sign would tell you what the speed

limit is. But just that moment of validation that you get from driving past and see the two numbers come together actually does seem to get people to drive more slowly and it reduces actions. There are tons of studies about this that show that it does that. And in that case, it's that kind of like immediate feedback loop of validation is a good thing. And in that case, it's that kind of like immediate feedback loop of validation is a good thing. But in social media, that kind of immediate feedback loop of validation that like you're going to get, you know, 10,000 people who, you know, like and retweet, you know, because you said, you know, you said somebody is a piece of shit or, you know, whatever, is incredibly toxic. I think it makes it harder for, you know,

harder to communicate with people. It makes it harder to even listen to what somebody who disagrees with you thinks for long enough that you could think about how to convince them to try to persuade them of your point of view. And it makes us even more atomized than we are already, right? If you, like if you spend all of your time scrolling, which again, maybe it wasn't the original intention, but I think that like the more time people spend scrolling through their social media feeds, right, you know, the better it is

for the bottom line of these companies. Would you agree with that? Oh, for sure. Yeah, and it's also hugely addictive. With the likes and the retweets and all that stuff, they just made things incredibly addictive. And the numbers. When people look at numbers, they want to look at how many likes they get for something. And then when they find certain things that get more likes, they gravitate towards those things. You've seen the Social Dilemma documentary?

I actually haven't seen it, but I know what it is. It's really good. It's really good. It highlights a terrifying future because they're essentially saying like this leads to like this massive polarization of these perspectives in this country. And it's like it's like almost like setting us up for a civil war. I don't think there's going to be a civil war, but I do think that you're going to get a lot of more people who get all of their sort of emotional connection to politics is about like getting mad at people who are on the other team and not even getting mad at people with power who are on the other team. Right. the other team. But just like getting mad at whoever, right? Like the way that after the 2016 election, something that I felt like I hadn't seen before was the amount of time that people were spending talking about Trump voters, just like ordinary people who voted for Trump. And that seems crazy to me because, I mean especially after 2020 where like the turnout was ridiculously high on both sides. So like you've got like 70 however million people that you're just going to like write off, right?

Like they're just like unredeemable – Basket of deplorables. Yeah, they're just irredeemable deplorables. Like I don't know how you think that you're going to accomplish anything right like like if you if they're not thinking like that though yeah they're not thinking in this like broad perspective they're not like looking at like what's best for the human race what's best for the community of the united states or my city or my my country no they're not thinking like that. They're just thinking like what feels good. What feels good is like, fuck you, Trump supporter.

Yeah, no, exactly. Like, not like, look, I mean, one of the, you know, like one of the reasons I always thought that Bernie Sanders would have won the 2016 election if he'd been the nominee is that there are, I'm not saying all of them, I'm not even saying most of them, but I think there's a chunk of people who voted for Trump in 2016 who absolutely would have voted for Bernie I think so, too. Yeah, I don't have any doubt in my mind I think there's a lot of people who want a person that has like a legitimate Like a really well thought-out

Perspective that they have been consistent with their entire career That's Bernie Sanders like and he really does look out for the working person. He really does look out for working families. And if you go back and like see clips from him from like the 1980s, right? It's all the same stuff. So this, why, why comedians? Like what about comedians that made you? Yeah.

So, I mean, I think that's an example of a larger thing, but I think it's a really interesting example. Right. So I think the larger thing that it's an example of is that when people this is my claim about why a lot of people on the left get sucked into this. Right. You know, when people feel like they have no real power to change anything like big and structural that actually matters. They get sucked into picking fights that they think they can't win. If you can't win the ones that matter, then find a way to care about the stuff that is not going to change the world for better, but you derive some kind of satisfaction from. So if it's like yelling at know, yelling at Dave Chappelle, you know, then like that's something that can scratch that itch. You know, if it's Antifa, right?

Like, look, the things that actually create like misery for working people in the United States are big structural things that can't be solved by punching anybody in the face, right? You know, that's not going to work. face, right? You know, that's not going to work. But, you know, you can get diverted to, you know, to finding someone you, you know, you can punch and, you know, you get like that sense of satisfaction. And I think that what the comedy example really shows is the way that people get sucked into this way of view in the world that's all about individual moralism, right? Is this person a good person or a bad person?

Is that person a good person or a bad person? And it becomes just this like constant inventory of the soul. And I think that we're doing that so much that we almost don't even notice that we're doing it. It just almost like goes without saying that like that's how you would interact with this stuff. goes without saying that like that's how you would interact with this stuff and so i think that comedy you know uh as a form of entertainment and when it's really good as a form of art you know as as something that can you know help us kind of look at you know look at the world around us at a

slightly different angle you know than than we would in the normal course of things you know because it kind of holds things up in a you know know, in a different way. I think that that can only work if it's operating in a space where people aren't constantly thinking about like, oh, is this, you know, is this guy a good guy or a bad guy? Is this joke that I'm about to tell, you know, like something that is morally acceptable or not, right? You know, like, if you're in that space, I don't think you're going to be able to, I don't think you're going to be able to do it right. That's an interesting thought that people will attack things that they think that they can have an impact on instead of going after these big impossible problems that seem insurmountable. Yeah. I mean, look, perfect example. Think about

the summer of 2020 after the murder of George Floyd, there was this wave of protests and riots and unrest that was like without precedent in a very, very long time, if ever, right? And all of that was originally about police violence. But how much has actually changed in terms of how policing works in the United States since then? There were some cities that cut budgets for a while. Most of them have put it back. They, you know, but in terms of things like how easy it is to hold a police officer accountable, you know, if they, you know, if they use violence in an unjustified way, I don't think that's gotten much better. Well, it's changed in New York City. In New York City, police officers can be civilly liable now.

Yeah, and that's a good step. You know, I think that I think that I don't think it's a complete solution because for one thing, I think a lot of people who are most likely to end up these situations are not in a good position to afford, you know, good civil, you know, good legal representation. I know sometimes in a high profile case, you'll get people doing it pro bono, you know, who are good lawyers. But, you know, again, I think it's a good step. I don't I don't think I don't think it addresses most of the problem, but I think it's it's something I support for sure. But here's the thing. I think that much more than people like, you know, actually changing how police works in America is really heavy lift. But what's really easy is, you know, getting really easy is getting every corporation in the world to put out some sort of Black Lives Matter thing.

That's easy because it doesn't cost them anything. Why wouldn't they just do that? It's also good for business. Sure, yeah. Work capitalism. Yeah, yeah. I mean that's the thing. Like this woke signaling that your business is a part of the good side and that you should support this business.

Yeah. No, absolutely. And again, like it doesn't – like it earns them some goodwill. It doesn't cost them anything. Why wouldn't they do that, right? Like that doesn't – that does very little to solve like anything that any of this stuff is supposed to be about. But again, it's easy, right? Or like when people like knocking down statues,

which don't get me wrong, I don't think there should be statues of Confederate generals in cities. I mean, I don't think that's something we should glorify. But I also saw a lot of like after the really bad statues came down, people started going after gray area statues. Fucking George Washington statues. What's interesting about the Civil War statues is many of them actually came up. They were put up during the civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s.

And they're really cheaply made. They're these shitty responses to the change that was happening in the country. Yeah, Right. So, again, I think that like should you have like should there be statues to Robert E. Lee? No, I don't think so. But I also think it's revealing that people end up getting spending this much time on these purely symbolic things. Right. You know, like we've got rid of all the the really objectionable statues and now we'll say, well, how about George Washington? How about whoever, right? And then you search for things that, you know, you can change the name of it, right? You know, like my mom has gotten really into bird watching in her retirement and she told me that there's like some kind of warbler

that's named after a Confederate general that people were like trying to like get that changed. It's like, okay, you're really like, you know. They're like you know they're digging deep they're digging deep right warblers i know right this is kind of weird though you know like if you had like a hitler warbler fucking weed celebrating yeah no and like whatever i mean i guess a t-shirt is that sure i guess if i were if i were in the He had a warbler with a fucking wing up in the air like a Nazi like, hey, hey. Trevor Burrus Yeah.

Trevor Burrus Yeah. But again, why did you – why comedians in the title and like – Trevor Burrus Yeah, yeah. So I think that – I think – because I think it's an example that makes it really dramatic because comedians don't and really can't exercise political power. They might influence to a certain extent the way that people think about certain things. But nobody's – nobody who's doing comedy is making decisions directly directly impact people's lives. So so if you were actually trying to to do that, you know, like if you're actually trying to affect real change, this doesn't make any sense. What I think it is, is it's a symptom of how extreme this kind of moralistic approach to politics can get.

to politics can get, right? That like you're this concerned with like constantly, you know, testing, you know, whether somebody is a good person or a bad person or they ever said anything that, you know, that might show them to like to really be a bad person and nothing could ever just be a bad moment, right? That, you know, that it has to be like this is the moment where you really revealed the, you know, how toxic your soul was or something, you know, rather than just like you said something stupid because sometimes people say things that are stupid. extreme symptom of what I'm talking about because it's one thing even to get mad at somebody because like of something they wrote like in an editorial, right? That they're telling you like exactly what they think should happen, you know, that like if I, you know, if I write, you know,

if I write something for Jacobin and, you know, some people get upset about that, okay, at least it's a Jacobin article. I'm literally saying exactly what I think, right? But if you're doing, you know, a, a, a, like, so, so that last Dave, Dave Chappelle special at Netflix, you know, that, that people, people got mad about. And, which by the way, I, I, you know, hadn't even watched, but since I'd written this thing, you know, people kept asking me what I thought and I finally watched it. And I thought that the way that it was portrayed as if it were this like just festival of transphobic hatred was ridiculous. That in fact, the overall theme of the special, as far as those issues go, was about him like moving towards a place of greater understanding and, you know, and like.

And it's also kind of a love letter to his friend that committed suicide for supporting him, was attacked for supporting him, and then she jumped off a fucking building and committed suicide. This is like an homage to this person's life and this long part of it. I worked with Dave during the entire time he was piecing that together because we started doing shows in Austin like November of 2020. I mean, it might've even been earlier than that. And we were working together while he was putting it together and he was responding to this idea that he was transphobic. And he was saying like, this is so crazy. Like this this is who I am and this is about this person Who when I was accused of being transphobic this person defended me and was dragged by people There's been some talk of whether or not like how much of that was creative license because like people have tried to find

What the tweets were? How many of them were DMS like we don't know I mean I don't think you could dismiss that. How many of them were DMs? Like we don't know. I mean, I don't think you could dismiss that. Or how many of them were people who actually knew her personally but then committed suicide? And like this is like trying to make – it's the highest form of comedy in a lot of ways because you're trying to take this like socially sensitive issue and extract laughs from it, which is very difficult to do.

But in no way was it transphobic. In no way was it hurtful or cruel or mean. Well, I mean, actually, he spent a couple minutes in the special explaining why the bathroom laws in North Carolina were cruel. And at the end, when he's talking about his dead friend like one of the crucial moments comes when he's describing they're like back and forth you know when he he had her open for him and yes and it's hilarious yeah which is a hilarious thing but there is this like really moving part of it right at the at the end where you know he you know she she tells him you know like uh i want you to recognize that i'm going through a real human experience. Yes.

And like it really sinks in in that. And the idea that watching this would make somebody more transphobic just seems absurd to me. But what people did, right, is they literally quoted individual sentences that he says in it. Like there's one point in the special where he says, I'm a TERF, right? TERF standing for trans exclusionary. Yeah. Radical. Yeah.

And it's like, OK, but literally within like two minutes of him saying, I'm on team TERF, he says, I'm not saying that I don't think trans women are women. It's like, well, hold on. Right. Like, you know, if you take both of those literally, right, those two don't go together. Right. But of course, that's not how comedy works. That's like thinking that like somebody who writes a novel that like every sentence of the novel is like what they actually personally think is true.

But I think – and I've got to think that a lot of people who write articles like this must understand that on some level, right? That they, that like, this is not how comedy works. But I think that, you know, sometimes it's like bad faith there, you know, they're just being dishonest. I, there's definitely some of that, but like, also I think that like, sometimes if you get this invested in like making these like moral indictments of people over those culture war battles, then you're just not even pausing to think about that. Like you're just like trying to find evidence. Like you're just like sifting through it to like find like – it's like, you know,

Freddie DeBoer, the commentator? OK. So Freddie DeBoer is a writer. He wrote a really good book about the education system called Cult of Smart. And he has this essay from a few years ago called Planet of Cops, where he says that it seems to him that increasingly everybody in the culture is a cop now, right? What he means by that. And he develops the metaphor. He says things like, oh, there's a new movie that people are getting excited about. You know, well, give me, you know, give me two hours and 500 words and I'll find you your indictments.

Right. You know, that it's like that sort of constantly sifting through things to like find evidence that people have have committed some kind of sin or or or infraction. And and I think that like that's how people are approaching that. Like when they wrote these articles, you know, about, you know, how, oh my God, did you know that Dave Chappelle said that he was on team turf, you know, in that special. Like, look, there's a mission, right? You know, you gotta get those indictments, right right so you just have to sort through all all of it until you can find something that you know that looks like a a smoking gun of of evidence and and i think that it's like it's a obviously it's a terrible way to write about anything but i think what what's interesting to me about the example of comedy is that it's sort of the most absurd possible application of doing that. Because, I mean, just to be simplistic about it for a second, right?

Like if you're saying something in a stand-up special, like generally speaking, not every sentence, but like you're saying it because you think it's funny, right? That's which is just a different thing from saying something because like, oh, you know, here is exactly what I think. Right. It's like the example that we were talking about before the podcast, which I'm not going to do because it's actually in my act now that someone put a quote that I said. Oh, yeah. What a piece of shit. And I'm like, hey, you've got to put the whole quote.

There's like a lot more to that. And it's clearly joking. whole quote because there's like a lot more to that and it's clearly joking but it's that thing that they do is also because someone is getting a disproportionate and exorbitant amount of attention and when someone is like a dave chappelle or myself who's got a disproportionate amount of attention there's so many people that want to look at that and go flaws holes pep keg throw rocks like and it's a normal thing to have this sort of reaction to someone who you feel either their take on things isn't valid or it's not this it doesn't align with your own or there's a reason why you're morally superior to them because your position is better.

Yeah. No, I think there's a lot of that. And it's also – I mean it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier about the BLM protests and the aftermath and all of that stuff. you know BLM protests in the aftermath and all that stuff like If you get somebody like if I mean obviously in a case as high profile It's like Dave Chappelle like Netflix isn't gonna dump him because like why would they do that? Like that would just be putting like a lot of money on the well Not only that but there's no reason to right here's the thing It's like if Dave Chappelle was saying all trans people would die should die and you know, we they're not human

Okay, yeah, get rid of them right everybody would agree to that like you shouldn't put that on your network but you cannot look at any of the things that he said and rationalize any of these accusations that people have towards him he is not that guy he is a lovely guy if you meet him he was one of the kindest nicest sweetest guys. That's who he really is. And it's really striking, too, because if you remember when all this was going on, there was like a week of the news that was all about how there was going to be this huge walkout of trans employees at Netflix. You remember this?

Yeah, they took like a lunch break. It was like five of them. Yeah, there were like five people, and it's not even clear that they all worked at Netflix. No, most of them didn't. And then the one of them that was there, they found a whole bunch of racist shit that she had put on Twitter. And they're like, hey. And then not even jokes, just like racist stuff. It's like, god damn it. I get what's going on.

These are like, they're humans. Humans are flawed. And, you know, just because they said a thing that was incorrect doesn't mean, that there was this like super hyped up, you know, walkout that like got all this attention. There was like, you know, two people on their lunch break or whatever. Like at the same time, there was the John Deere strike going on. And that was, you know, thousands of people, you know, were out on strike for to, you know, to get better, you know, wages and working conditions. John Deere, the tractors?

Yeah. Yep. Yep. The workers. I've heard of the tractors? Yeah. Yep. Yep. The workers. I've heard of that. Yeah. Yeah. If you go-

I believe you. But I mean, I've never heard a peep out of that. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, right? So you compare the scale of the two things, and then you compare the scale of the coverage. Right. One of them is jokes. Yeah.

But it's also jokes from the greatest living comedian. That's part of the problem. But it's also jokes from the greatest living comedian. That's part of the problem. And also a guy who you sort of associate with left-wing values and progressive values, and you want him to fall in line. And I think that's part of the blowback is that they want to shame him into falling in line with their ideals. falling in line with their ideals. And one of the things that he said, like when we talked about the special, and this is – we did a show together and he did this speech at an arena.

And he's like, I am not going to comply with the way you want me to think and want me to behave. That's not what I'm doing. Yeah. And again, like what's his response going to be realistically like he's he's just gonna um like keep talking shit that's what he's gonna do right i mean it's gonna be funnier and funnier right you know but like he like the idea that like saying like he's a terrible person he's a transphobe like is gonna get him to like see things more from your perspective in fact he talks about this in the special right that like he you know he has the thing about the woman who like followed him out to the parking lot or

whatever to, you know, to give him a hard time. And the point is that like all of that, like his reaction was just fuck you. Right. You know, like, of course it is. Right. You know, but like, then like actually meeting this trans woman and like having this, you know, like, like, you know, like, you know, having the interactions that they had and like having that mean something to him. Right. Like that, that, um, like that did way more probably to get him to see things the way that people were yelling at him, wanted him to see them. Then like people just like saying, you know, that like, cause if, if you say like, if somebody

wants to like shut you down or silence you or, berate you until you, you know, you stop thinking what you think, then, I mean, maybe, like, if somebody's powerless enough, they'll just shut up because they don't want to deal with it, right? You know, but, like, otherwise, like, one thing it's not going to do is to get them to say, okay, now I see you're right. Right. Especially if you're distorting their perceptions. They might say the words if they think they have to, right, but they now I see you're right. Right. Especially if you're distorting their perceptions. They might say the words if they think they have to, right, but they're not going to think it. Right. Now, when you wrote this book, what inspired you?

Yeah. So I think there were a few things that had been going on and it kind of all started to build for a while that I was getting frustrated that a lot of people who I align with on most things were getting sucked into the way I see it in the book, right? That these kinds of what I call pathologies of powerlessness, right? You know, that you're – because you know that you can't accomplish getting health care or a single workplace being unionized, any of those things. And I think there were a few examples that were really starting to get to me at the time. One of them was what happened, I remember in 2019, the Democratic Socialists of America, which is an organization I'm a member of. I think it's flawed, but I think it does good stuff.

I encourage people to do that. But they had this convention actually in Atlanta where I live and in which I didn't – I mean I was there for like a minute because I was like meeting with my editor but like I didn't go to the thing itself. I kind of hate sitting through meetings like in general in life. or Carlson, you know, played on Fox News and stuff like that, of people announcing all of these bizarre like rules that like you weren't allowed to like clap at the convention because there might be people with like rare noise sensitivities and just things like this. And of course, you know, they're like right wingers who compiled that were cherry picking like the worst, most ridiculous moments from a weekend. But is that the one where this person is like point of privilege?

Is that you were a part of that? I wasn't part of that. But you were in that room while that was going down? Yeah, I wasn't in the room at that minute. Come on, man. That is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. And here's what gets me about this, right?

It's like, OK, granted, the worst moments are being cherry picked. here's what gets me about this, right? It's like, okay, granted the worst moments are being cherry picked, but also it's not, you know, they're not being made up, right? Like this stuff actually happened. And also it's not even like there was somebody in there with like a hidden camera, right,

to get this footage, right? They were streaming it to the- Oh no, they know that. I mean, it doesn't mean it's not still ridiculous. And also the lady calling everybody comrades. Yeah, I mean- Like what't mean it's not still ridiculous. And also the lady calling everybody comrades. Yeah. Like, what? What's going on here?

I mean, I think that, like, what's going – like, what gets me about this is that knowing that this is the face you're showing to the whole world. Right. Right? That, like, anybody in the world who wants to tune in and watch this can do that. You're still doing this stuff like, was it somebody? Yeah, the point of privilege thing, I think, was. Will you stop using gendered language? Come on, man. It's hilarious because it just shows, like, what are we fucking concentrating on?

You're mad that people are, there's chatter because you're easily distracted? How about get the fuck out of here then? Why are you in a large crowd of people? What do you do at the movies? What do you do at a bus station? get the fuck out of here then? Why are you in a large crowd of people? What do you do at the movies? What do you do at a bus station? Shut the fuck up. Like, you want everybody to comply? Because you've got some weird tick?

Right, and why are people doing that? Because like you said, they can't be, I assume they're not going through their entire lives, right, you know, trying to get people to do this stuff. Maybe they are. Maybe they are. Maybe they're activists at work too maybe they're just really annoying yeah i mean if so if so they're probably winning over a lot of new converts all the time but they uh but uh you know by doing that was that the most annoying time in that meeting or were there more annoying times during

that conference yeah i mean uh the stuff uh the stuff that i saw you know which was which was not you know which was not that much of it but the stuff I saw, the things that made it into that montage were the most annoying things that I saw. But I guess what gets me about this is that knowing that everybody in the world can see this, if you're still acting this way, right? way, right, then what that shows me is that you do not care at all, like how any, you know, normal person is going to react to seeing this. And I know there are people who get this twisted when I say normal person, all I, you know, it's like, oh, do you just mean people who are, you know, whatever, right. You know, like fit some demographics or something. No, when I say normal person, I mean like people who aren't like bathed in this political subculture.

So like stuff like that starts to seem normal to them, right? Like just anybody who's, you know, of any background, any, you know, any race, sexual orientation, whatever, who doesn't like, you know, who doesn't spend all day every day thinking about politics, right? Is going to see this and say, wait a second, what what but i don't even think that's a politics thing i think it's just a social issue it's and i don't think they're thinking at all that everyone's going to see it

i don't think that was even a consideration at all i think in that moment they were very self-indulgent and they had the access to a microphone and they couldn't wait to yap. And that's part of the problem with people. You just can't wait to – as a person who yaps professionally. I mean, look, that's why I hate – I mean, I said earlier that I hate meetings. This is one of the reasons why, right? every every time i've ever had to go to a meeting for anything you know there's always there are always people who talk just because it's important to them that they like hear themselves talk oh yeah like it's awful um you know that's why it's funny that's why that video is funny i mean that's a version of that that's like the the super ultra progressive version of

that yeah and it's uh and you and I get that it's funny. It's also like seeing people who are supposedly fighting for all the things that I am like act that way is also like painful. It's like what's wrong with you, right? Like why would you do this, right? Don't you think you need someone there to go, calm down, Francis? Yeah. I mean that's – I think you do, right? And that's part of the problem.

That's part of why I wrote the book because I guarantee you however many hundreds of people that were there in that hall, right, where that was happening. There's a lot of eye rolls. There's a lot of eye rolls. There's no way there weren't tons of eye rolls. Yeah, I think I heard a few people do the verbal eye rolls to me. Point of privilege. By the way, my friends say that sometimes just for a joke. We're having a conversation.

They're like, point of privilege. And they'll just spit out something. Yeah, right. And it's like – I think – but the thing is people – most everybody who's rolling their eyes – I mean I think – I actually think my friend Cale Brooks was there. He might have actually like had a – like I think somebody actually came over to his table and they were, you know, and like told him to like not clap. And, you know, they were like, what's, what's, what's wrong with you? Why are you clapping? You're ruining life.

You know, they actually did have a little thing about that, but they. Are you supposed to do this? Are you supposed to snap fingers? Yeah, I think so. That was a thing you used to do in the jazz days. That was like a beatnik thing, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I used to do it in the jazz days. That was like a beatnik thing, right? Yeah. But most people who are going to roll their eyes aren't going to say anything because you don't want to be the guy who's saying it. Right, you don't want to be an asshole. Yeah, exactly. You're not there to be an asshole. Right. You're there because you actually care about the issues that the organization is about.

You didn't sign up for this so you could spend your time arguing with crazy people about whether clapping is okay. So I think it's a very understandable impulse. But I think what I started to realize when I was thinking about examples like this is that for a long time, like, it's not like I didn't know that there were a lot of people who were ridiculous in ways like this or a lot of people who were like unhelpfully moralistic, you know, in ways like what I was talking about in the comedy chapter of the book or, you know, who would excuse things that shouldn't be excused, like in the Andy Noggin part. But I think what I always told myself was, look, none of this matters that much. Like some people, some leftists are idiots, but whatever, like in the greater scheme of things, it's not that, you know, like we live in a world where there are, you know, imperialist wars and union busting and et cetera,

et cetera, et cetera. This is such a minor irritation than like why spend time talking about it and thinking about it. But then at a certain point, my perspective started to change because I actually think that the fact that there are all of those other issues that are more important is a reason to try to get people to stop acting like this. Because if you actually care about doing something about those bigger issues, then if you look to like any, like just, you know, working class onlooker, you know, who you might be trying to, you know, who like ideally you'd want to reach out to. Right. Right. If you look like this lunatic who's like getting mad at people because they're clapping instead of doing whatever they're supposed to do with their fingers, you know, then they're not going to have anything to do with you. And who can blame them? Got to weed out the freaks.

Yeah. It's like some people just they can't see the forest for the trees, right? Yeah. That's – they're concentrated on this one thing when what you're trying to accomplish is this more inclusive view of socialism and how socialism could fit into our modern culture. And instead, they want you to not clap or not talk. Please watch your idle chatter and the noise you make. I'm easily distracted. Like, oh, my God. Self-indulgence. It's like it's a real problem with any group.

And whenever people are trying to be, like, ultra-sensitive and ultra-progressive and ultra-open open-minded you open the door for annoying people you open the door for people that just need a tremendous amount of attention yeah and there's there's got to be a way that you can you know square the circle of saying like okay look uh are there obviously you know should there be more accommodations for disabled people and like society as a whole than there are? Sure. Right. But anything you could call a disability should like you crank the dial of accommodation up to 11 like at like all times. You know, no. Right. Like like like should should you should you care about like, you know, not, you know, discriminating against trans people? Absolutely, yes.

Does that mean that you need to be constantly on guard for anything that somebody says in a comedy set that could be interpreted if you look at it in just the right light? No. Especially that the things that should be the biggest priorities are about the actual distribution of material resources. Who has health care? How much inequality do we have? Have we built up the labor movement? All of these things and trying to get the United States to not have this like kind of imperial world policeman, you know, foreign foreign policy, which, by the way, as we've been like in these we're talking about earlier, right in these last weeks, while people have been, you know, freaking out about, you know, whatever's going on in the news about, you know, things that Joe Rogan said 15 years ago or about what Whoopi Goldberg said on The View or whatever, like— We're about to go to war. Yeah, exactly, right?

Like, this is, you know, I mean, however slim the chance, like, the fact that there's the standoff with Russia that, like, that has the potential if that happened, right? I mean, that would be an absolute, like, human catastrophe, right, even if it stayed conventional. That would be, like, that would be ridiculous. And, by the way, is one of many, many reasons that I wish Bernie Sanders were president right now because he put out an article in the op-ed about how important it was to, in the Guardian, about how important it was to, you know, negotiate to like stop this, you know, from from from escalating. And I'm not you know, I'm not sure that I don't know what's going to happen. But like when I see like Biden canceling, you know, the meeting with Putin, you know, like I get I get nervous. And and I think that like given how destructive that would be, right, like that's got to be – you know, like that's got to override almost everything else right now just in terms of like how important it is that we stop acting like this.

I don't know why the United States has to have the kind of role in the world where we're negotiating about what happens in Ukraine at all, right? Like why is it important that the United States have this – be like present in everything that happens. It's a weird role. Everywhere on the planet. Yeah. That when the United States invaded Panama, I think that was totally unjustified. You know, when the United States invaded Panama, I think that was totally unjustified. But, you know, like the Gorbachev, you know, wasn't like involving himself, you know, in that, right?

You know, because the Soviet Union didn't have that role in the world. And I'd rather that we didn't either. military bases the United States has all over the entire – like every part of the world right now and constantly fighting these like low-level drone wars that like most Americans have like forgotten that they're even happening in distant countries. I think that if we redirected the kinds of resources that we spend on having this role in the world to taking care of people's material needs in ways that, you know, it wouldn't fund all of it, but it would do a lot. It would do a lot. Well, listen, man, I really enjoyed our conversation.

Thank you for doing this. It was a lot of fun. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. My pleasure. Thank you for the Buffalo trip. Enjoy the whiskey. And tell everybody where they can find you on social media and where they can get your stuff.

Sure. So I have a show called Give Them an Argument, which you can find on YouTube and all the usual podcast places. I write for Jacobin Magazine. You can find me there. And as far as all the links to everything in this book and other books and everything else, just go to benburgess.com. That's probably the easiest way to find everything. Social else, just go to benburgess.com. That's probably the easiest way to find everything. Social media as well.

It's on there. Yep. Social media, you know, Twitter's at Ben Burgess, but all the links are on there. All right. All right. Thanks, Brent. Thank you so much. My pleasure. All right.

Bye, everybody. Thank you.