The Joe Rogan Experience - #553 - Thaddeus Russell

Episode Date: September 23, 2014

Thaddeus Russell is an adjunct professor of American Studies at Occidental College, and also the author of "A Renegade History of The United States".

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Mr. Russell. Hey. Thank you very much for doing this, man. I appreciate it. Hey, thank you. We were saying right before the podcast got started, it's always a weird thing when people sit down.

It's like you don't want to talk too much because there's so much to say on the air. You don't want to get it out before you get to air. But I was saying it's appropriate having you on today because we're just now going to war with Syria. Right. just now going to war with syria right and uh we were uh we were just talking about how bizarre this isis thing is and how it's just american people said you know we don't want to go to war with syria it was this big thing and obama was on television everybody just openly rejected it left and right it was pretty much the american public was like we're done with war like we want to get out of afghanistan we don't want this ir out of Afghanistan. We don't want this Iraq thing anymore.

We don't want to go to Syria. And so everything just sort of calmed down, and then all of a sudden ISIS rose up from the ashes. And this ISIS thing, different names, ISIS. I've seen it, ISIL. Right. Yeah. And like I was saying, I don't like to to get conspiracy oriented because it's so easy to do

but if you wanted to you would say well this is obviously they've come up with a mechanism to get us into syria yeah sure i mean so there's two kinds of conspiracies there's an open conspiracy and then there's a closed conspiracy right so i think this is sort of an open conspiracy a lot of people are saying both left and right by the way, that ISIS was really a creation of American foreign policy. Not that there were a bunch of dudes sitting in a room in the White House with cigars and saying, hey, we need to create this monster in order to sort of impose American will abroad. But that through many, many conscious decisions over many years in the Middle East, through direct interventions militarily and otherwise, they created the conditions for this bunch of psychopathic 20-year-olds with RPGs and swords beheading people, right? So, you know, creating

a vacuum in Iraq, right, by going to war there, by removing the dictator who was at least holding control over the people and were people like this, funding the rebels in Syria. And also, more importantly, a lot of people miss this, you know, what's one of the things that's been happening, if you look at it just from a material standpoint, over the last 12 years, at least, is that the United States has been flooding that area with weapons, right? So and if you look at there's a great piece, I think it was in The Guardian a few weeks ago, ISIS is using American made weapons, right, that have been coming into that region, mostly into Iraq, but elsewhere for just decades, right?

So it's just, it creates this situation where sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, sort of an open conspiracy, because you could certainly say that American foreign policymakers, and all of them really, and that's Bush and that's Obama and that's all of them,, and that's Bush, and that's Obama, and that's all of them really want to have an American presence, a military strong, a military presence around the world, and in particular, in the Middle East, where all the oil is. So, you know, it's not, I'm not saying it was deliberate that they, it wasn't a deliberate choice to create this beast that's called ISIS, but it certainly serves their purposes.

And it seems like if you look at the entire situation in the Middle East, it seems like there's no good way to just get out of there. It seems like, is there? I mean, please tell me. Do you think there's a way to... Yeah, I mean, so I me. I mean, there's a way to. too, but out now. And I think history proves that was the correct answer to that, right? I think that if the United States had left immediately in 1964, 65, name a year, name a time, it would have been a better thing for everyone. Now, communism would have, the communists would have taken control of Vietnam, but they did anyway, right? And so what we had was instead of about 2 million people, mostly civilians, die, right? We would have had far fewer. We would have had the same outcome, essentially, but with far fewer. And and then also and we got to talk about blowback right so you know

the the carpet bombing of not just vietnam but several countries during that war caused untold numbers of people to hate our fucking guts right america's guts and that you know uh that's blowback, right? They didn't come and fly airplanes into our buildings. But you know, it was anti American in many ways. And it also served and here's very important thing. It served the interests of the goddamn communists, right? Because it's because the communists could say, look at these barbarians coming here and killing our children and women, right? You should support us, we will protect you from them. So it actually played into the hands of the communists. And the very same thing is happening and has been

happening in the Middle East for many, many years. David Petraeus, of all people, said before the Senate about three years ago, he said, US funding of Israel in particular, US funding of all these corrupt regimes in the Middle East, and our interventions is the number one recruiting tool for Al Qaeda, right? And it's the number one recruiting tool for al-Qaeda, right? And it's the number one recruiting tool for ISIS. They say, look, here's these infidels who have been invading us and killing our people and taking control of our resources for decades, right? We will fight back for you, right? And so it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy if you want to maintain a presence there, which they do, the United States does. You keep creating your own enemies to fight against.

It's perpetual. So what could be – is there anything that can be done to mitigate the disastrous effects of us pulling out and creating this power vacuum? Is there anything that can be done? I mean, once we're already there, we can't go back in time. We can't stop the Iraq invasion. It would be nice if we could. Pretty much no one thinks it's a good idea now. Today, in hindsight, everyone thinks it was a terrible idea.

The only good that came out of it was getting Saddam Hussein out, getting rid of his psychopathic sons. But now look at all the shit you have there, and you have a million people dead. Right. So the anti-interventionist argument is simply that pretty much every intervention has a negative consequence right so the less the better right so my position is let's do none right but when you have a guy like a hitler or someone along those lines that's causing genocide and planning to take over the world and so but so so for hitler right there's a large stream of thought among historians a very respectable stream of thought, that the Nazis rose to power out of conditions created by the Allies after World War I. So that, you know, extracting all these resources through forced payments from the Germans as reparations after World War I really laid the groundwork for the rise of this totalitarian who said,

hey, look what those Westerners did to us. They decimated this country. They shamed us. They brought us into shame and degradation. We need a strong, powerful leader. We need discipline. We need order. We need to get rid of these foreign influences like Jews, who were considered to be foreign, right, in essence, because they were a nationalist people, and the communists who had allegiance to no state, right? And so many people have argued, not just wacko conspiracy theorists, that it was actually American and Western foreign policy in the early 20th century that really made the rise of Nazism possible. Like, that's the greatest, possibly the greatest example of blowback in human history. That's a crazy example of blowback.

It seems like it's a perpetual cycle then. It seems like everything we've ever done in the past has led us to do more things in the future to combat the blowback from the things we've done in the past. Yeah. So, I mean, if you look at, but if you look at the history of foreign policy, and by the way, that's the book I'm working on now. So this is a very appropriate topic for me. now. So this is a very appropriate topic for me. You know, you will see beginning really, even in the early 19th, in the early 18th century, with, or not sorry, late 18th century, with some of the founding fathers, but certainly through the 19th century, and certainly through the 20th century, one continuous thread among policymakers, which is we must change the world

in our image, right? I mean, that's been bipartisan. It's been the left. It's been the right. It's been, I mean, the liberals and the conservatives. It's been the Democrats and the Republicans for centuries now. We must have America abroad. Now, not everyone agreed with that. There were people in the Senate who were sort of isolationists or anti-interventionists, but that's been a pretty, there's been a near consensus among American politicians for about two centuries that we should expand what is great about America. And unfortunately, that has meant killing a lot of people. Well, that's what everyone's terrified of with the Islamic State is that they want to impose Sharia law throughout the rest of the world. I mean, that's what everyone's afraid of. The religion of America, you know, what we subscribe to versus the religion of Sharia law. Yeah.

So I have an answer for that. Okay. Yeah. So good luck, motherfuckers, imposing Sharia law on the whole world. Right. And so a lot of what my work is on now, and I'm not the only one who's done this, is to look at what's actually going on, you know, in places like Tehran and in places like Riyadh and in places like Cairo. What are the, what are sort of ordinary folks, Iranians and Egyptians and Saudis actually doing all day long? And you can figure it out really quickly by simply looking at the skyline in those cities. And what you'll see

is you'll see these big apartment buildings, these big cinder block apartment buildings. And on top of those apartment buildings are dozens, sometimes hundreds of satellite dishes, which are streaming in Fox, The Simpsons, porn like you wouldn't believe. They're into porn in Iran? They love porn.

Middle East and And Pakistan, Google has announced for several years, Pakistan is the leading country in the world for searches for the word sex. Whoa. And then,

in particular, also interesting, searches for gay sex, like terms, like gay sex terms, like anal sex and man on man or whatever.

The Middle East is like leading the world in that right and they what they love is they love american nasty pop culture and western nasty pop culture they love they love women in bikinis and they love whiskey and they love stupid you know they love jersey shore and the rest of it stuff that we look down on and actually what it's doing my argument is is that it's subverting the hell out of Sharia law every single day. But you say we look down on it, but we obviously create it, support it, and probably consume more of it than anybody else anywhere. When I say we, I mean uptight professors.

You and I? No, I mean uptight professors like the ones I deal with, not like normal people. Well, you've been fired from being a little too controversial. Yeah. I read an article about you in the Huffington a little too controversial. Yeah. I read an article about you in the Huffington Post that you wrote. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What was that all about? Well, I mean, so I, you know, I was trained at Columbia University.

I got my PhD there in American history and sort of found that like historians in general, but in particular the historians I was being trained by, you know, they consider themselves to be left wing and radical. But there was a real limitation on that. And one of the limitations was that they had a real disdain for what normal people do all day long, like what they're doing in Riyadh and Tehran. They had a real disdain for sort of the normal activities of working class, ordinary folks. Like they thought that what people watched on TV was retarded and should not be studied and shouldn't, they shouldn't be doing it. It wasn't, that's not real history. That's not what's really going on. What you should be studying is the Senate and you should be

studying sort of economics and you should be studying foreign policy. And what I found was, you know, first of all, that's what of course most Americans do is they consume that kind of stuff much more than they do political speeches. Right. And more importantly, kind of in that popular culture and in particular, the stuff that we most look down on, what you'll find is stuff like sex and freedom and drugs and drinking and freedom and people doing what they want to do. Sort of opposed to and against kind of our Puritan tradition, right? So that America has always been split between its Puritanism, which is really powerful still, in particular, in our formal culture, like in politics and what they tell us in schools, right? And, and, and hedonism, which is what we get in popular culture, right? So it's

this, we're this very weird schizophrenic culture, right? There's this conflict between the two. And what I found was that people who call themselves left-wing and radical are actually really wedded to the puritanical side, that they, they're really about people being disciplined and controlled and working hard and the work ethic and all that stuff. And I, and I know you, you've talked about, I've heard you talk about the work ethic on here and elsewhere, but we can get into what that actually means, because there's also confusion about what that means. But I was sort of frustrated. I was like, first of all, yo, I'm walking the streets of New York City, went to Columbia, and nobody looks like these people in my history books, including Rosa Parks, who's on your wall here, and Martin Luther King, who had

a lot, and we can talk about this, this is a big part of my book, a lot, those people were extremely conservative culturally, extremely conservative culturally, and looked down upon and scolded black people for black culture, for things like jazz and rock and roll. Martin Luther King was opposed to rock and roll, called it the devil's music. People don't know this. Yeah. So, so I started looking at that. I started looking at these new heroes and the new social history, you know, these left-wing activists and people like Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King and feminist suffragists and all that. And I found that, like, they actually agreed with the Puritans about things like sex and work, that sex is terrible and work is awesome and virtuous. So I got very frustrated. I started writing my lectures and my classes at Barnard College, which is the women's college affiliated with Columbia.

I started looking at American history through that lens. I started looking at American history through the lens of this conflict, this eternal conflict between discipline and order and community and nation on one hand and Puritanism. And on the other hand, popular culture and sex and freedom and desire. And I found this whole new way of telling the story. And I found all these people on one side, sort of just behaving on their own, doing the things they wanted to do, that were violating these puritanical principles. People like prostitutes, people like drunks, people like criminals, people like gays, people like slaves who were dancing when you weren't supposed to dance. And on the other hand, all these guardians of the moral order who weren't

just the founding fathers and the generals and the inventors, but it was people like abolitionists who were opposed to slavery, but they were opposed to slavery for funky reasons we can talk about. And suffragists who wanted women to be really just as upstanding as men and to not drink and not have sex, etc. And so I gave lectures, I was given the introduction to American history course at Columbia, because they didn't know what I was up to. And because it's a weird thing, it's one of the strangest industries, there's no oversight over what you're doing in your classrooms, no one ever comes and watches what you say. It's a very strange thing in higher education. Professors, 99% of the time, just go into the classroom and their colleagues have no idea what they're saying.

Does that become an issue with ego? Because I find that anytime when you get one person that gets to communicate to a large group of people and they have to listen to you, especially if parts of their future rely upon you like their your grades your your gpa you know it's important to pass this class and so this person has this position of power and influence it's very unusual sure and because of that a lot of times people they that they get into that position of being a professor they push their ideology in a very rigid and inflexible way. I'm right, you are wrong. I am older, you are younger, I am smart, you are dumb. Absolutely. All the time.

Gross. I agree. So what I have to say about that is that we all come at questions through our own ideologies, right? I don't think there's any such thing as an objective history or an objective political science. I mean, I think we all talk about these things through our own biases and our own lenses, right? First of all, I think what we should do is just admit it and be honest about it. And that's what I try to do in my classes. I try to say, hey, you know what I just told you? That's my interpretation. That's not the truth. I never tell the truth. I only tell people what I think and and with an argument right

right um and the second thing is and this is what this is the real problem i think in higher education which makes me makes me crazy every single day is that right now higher ed in particular in the social sciences and humanities is on lockdown by the academic left okay and i come out of the left and i'm left-wing in a lot of ways. And in some ways I'm not, but what I hate is that there's just almost no variety of discourse on college campuses that pretty much, there's been studies done. I mean, like 95% of English and history professors voted for Obama, right? I mean, that tells you right there that there's not a whole lot of debate going on. Why do you think that is? Why, Why is academia and the left sort of inexorably connected? Yeah, well, so when a lot of left academics are asked this,

the answer they give you is, we're smarter. Right. Right, so that if you're intelligent and study, you will come to that position. Now, is it because the right is kind of inexorably connected to religion? Because Christianity and the right are pretty much inseparable. Well, but even libertarians who are atheists get run out of the house. You can't get a job as a libertarian. Wow. No, I mean, so it's all historical, right? So if you look at the history of higher education,

and a lot of people forget this, you know, higher education in this country is only about two centuries old and as a major mass institution. I mean, the right wing conservatives controlled the joint until the 1960s, right? So what was being taught at Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Cal and UCLA was things like capitalism is awesome, and black people are inferior and women should be in the home. I mean, it was conservatives had that whole place on lockdown. There was a monoculture on the campuses. Then what comes along is the 1960s and all those movements, all those social movements. So the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, feminist movement, et cetera, et cetera. And what happened was those people, because their movements either sort of succeeded and they were considered to be done or they couldn't succeed, they couldn't really create a radical revolution, the kind that they wanted.

The only place they found that they could go and have a job was colleges as professors. So they en masse, though that generation, the new left of the 1960s, went into graduate school, and they all became professors, and that's who's been basically teaching college for the last 50 years. So I'm of the generation that was trained by them, and so there's some changes going on, but basically, even most people my age, I'm in my 40s, but in my generation, most of us are still sort of influenced by that generation. So it was this very concerted, not a conspiracy, but it was a pretty deliberate attempt. In some ways, it was conscious to take over the university. That was the only place we could have this radical discourse and get paid for it and have a career.

And influence the youth. And influence the youth. Which is one of the things that drives a lot of parents crazy. Maybe parents that have different ideologies send their kid off to school and the kid comes back with some really white privilege, male privilege, all this lefty talk. Yeah, the I'm a victim stuff is strong

and it's very disempowering. Oh, yeah. It's confusing, too, because I don't know if you know this case from Occidental College. Occidental University? this case um it is from occidental college occidental university is that where i teach man is that what yeah occidental college oh down the road okay jesus christ okay do you know the story about the uh the two young kids uh they were freshmen they were going through the hazing thing oh they both get drunk yes and they have sex and

the guy yes gets expelled yes gets expelled for sexual assault. They're both drunk. Not only are they both drunk, but the girl texts her friend, I'm about to go have sex. Texts him, do you have a condom? He says yes. He says get over there. She says I'm on my way. She goes over there and they decide that it's sexual assault because the girl had been drinking.

Even though the guy had also been drinking. It's sexual assault. The guy gets kicked out of college. he's in the middle of a lawsuit i mean in when you're 18 years old your life is thrown into a turmoil yeah i mean he's kicked out of school for having sex while drunk with a girl who was sex while drunk yeah so you're about to get me fired again again yeah thanks for this thanks man um please speak out yeah no i god so this this sexual assault either depending on your point of view epidemic or hysteria the epicenter of it has been occidental where i've taught uh it started about two years ago we get this is a long conversation to have

please i think it's an important one though because it's confusing as hell okay boy okay so what happened was in 2010 or 2011, the United States Department of Education sent a letter to every university and college in the country that receives federal aid of some kind, which is basically all of them, right? Because of student loans. Those are backed by the federal government. want to continue receiving federal aid for your students, you must adjudicate every case, every accusation, every accusation of sexual assault on your campus among students. Okay. Which means you have to have like basically a tribunal of staff and maybe students, but usually it's staff and faculty, right? So it's a panel of like three or four English professors and the dean of students and the facilities guy or whoever,

maybe some students, asking, you know, adjudicating this case. So the woman says, well, we were both drunk and whatever. She tells her story and he tells his story and says, I absolutely did not rape him. She says he absolutely did rape me. Because there's no witnesses almost ever in these cases, right? What can they then do to decide who's responsible here? Or is there someone who's responsible? And what they do is, and I've talked to people who have been on these boards, the only thing you can do is ask about their sexual

histories. So you have English professors asking 19 year olds, how many times they've had sex in the last year? What kinds of sex with whom? How did they feel about it? And then asking the guy the same things, right? And then from that information, and usually it's only that, because that's all you got in most cases, right? With acquaintance rape, it's two people in a room, a dark room, then with the door closed, almost always, there's no evidence, right? There's no physical evidence, no witnesses, then with the door closed almost always. There's no evidence, right? There's no physical evidence. There's no witnesses usually. From that, they determine responsibility.

So that's basically what happened in this case. And the other thing that's, so that's a nightmare in a lot of ways, right? I mean, talk about seeking, that's justice, right? It's very bizarre also that this idea has come out of what a lot of people believe to be what what you would call feminism yeah and what feminism is supposed to push for is equality right but not equality when it comes to responsibility for your sexual actions while you're intoxicated right so one of

the things that's that's been infuriating for a lot of people and a lot of feminists by the way is that you know in response to and uh acquaintance rape definitely fucking happens definitely you know no question about it no question we know people i know people very closely what's happened to them not only that we should also say that getting someone drunk and fucking them because you know they're drunk sure is gross and it is rape sure yeah um or at least getting them loaded to the point where they can't figure out what the fuck is going on. Right. So one of the one of one answer that's been proffered by many people, many feminists, including has been to say, hey, don't get blackout drunk at the frat house on Friday night to women. Right. And that has been called victim blaming. Right. OK, so you know about this. Right.

right okay so you know about this right so right now if you were to leave it at that right say that is the sole answer to this problem you know tell women not to get drunk at the frat house on friday night maybe that is victim blaming but that's not what any of us are saying right well that's like saying don't the rutgers kid that got killed by a bear two days ago don't run from bears exactly yeah yeah you know yeah is that victim blaming no it's it's fucking wise advice if you want to survive a bear attack don't run they chase yeah uh i don't have a daughter but i have a son but you know if i had a daughter goddamn right i'm gonna tell her not to get blackout drunk at the frat house yeah you know yeah you're gonna try to stop me and tell me that's that's blaming my daughter um i don't think so i don't think guys should get blackout

drunk at the frat house sure yeah right it's not good for you and bad things and people fall off of roofs at frat houses and die from it yeah there are people that will take advantage of you and not just sexually they'll sure there's vicious people that will do things to you if they think you're passed out absolutely it's just not smart yeah so feminism um this particular brand of it um one of the things that's not talked about much, and I try to talk about this, is that it takes agency away from women. Right. So it's like it's basically saying that women are helpless before these rapists, you know, and what we all we can do is moralize against the rapists and tell them they're bad. Now, many of those feminists have agreed that it's a very, very tiny percentage of men who are rapists and that most rapes are committed by something like 4% of men or something like that or less than 4%. So what are you going to do?

You're going to tell those guys, those serial rapists, most of them are serial rapists, that they're bad and they shouldn't rape? How effective is that going to be? Even if it's 1%, 1 out of 100 guys are rapists, most of them are serial rapists, that they're bad and they shouldn't rape. How effective is that going to be? It's really less, even if it's 1%, 1 out of 100 guys are rapists. No, no, no. Sorry. It's of the rapes committed, 4, what is it? It's 4%, 4% of the rape. I don't know. It's something like- It's really hard. It's a very tiny percentage. It's really hard to do statistics with rape too, because a lot of people don't report

rape and they're embarrassed and ashamed and we do have well we do have uh the bureau of justice a department of justice has conducted uh pretty massive surveys of women so this is not reported crimes this is just they went and asked women questions about their history with assault and there's been this massive decline in rapes and sexual assault since the 1990s, like more than 60% decline. So also the talk of a rape epidemic and a rape culture now, I think is overblown. I mean, of course, there are elements in our culture that are definitely rape cultures, right? I mean, there's no doubt, you know, there's little corners here and there, but the dominant culture is not a rape culture.

Right. And my issue is that the people that are crying out for this, especially the men, they're so it's so suspect. It's so white nighty, like the whole thing about it. It's these really emo feminist men who just look like they're just clamoring for female acceptance and love and appreciation and they're just going way out of their way to talk about this and i can understand if this is a personal issue i can understand that anybody would be concerned that a human being would take advantage of another human being but to make it your primary concern to make it like this this thing that you focus and concentrate on on a regular basis all the time it's like a almost like a rape fetish yeah rape or victimization fetish and this this apologizing

do you remember that video that came out uh dear women it was one of the most horrific videos ever it was widely mocked but it was these like really fucked up socially retarded men who made this video where they were apologizing for all the things that women had to endure for men but these guys were just creepy fucking weirdos like undone you've never seen this no i gotta play it for you okay because it's beautiful sure it's beautiful and it's ridiculous so yeah so but here's the thing about that you know it's like the the mess the other message in that is that it's for men to save women. Right. Exactly. Excuse me. Feminist, feminism was about women liberating themselves, right? We can't do it for them. We cannot do it for them. Right.

So talking to men, talking to those serial rapists about how bad they are and how bad this is, what exactly is that going to accomplish? A and B, it's putting it's putting the responsibility on men and it's saying women must be saved, which is like, right, that is the soul of conservatism. Right. To say that we must come save this, our social inferiors. That is like the essence of old school patriarchy and conservatism it is to meet anti-feminist to the bone and that's what no one's talking about yeah this well this idea that the women can't consent because they've had a couple of drinks is is a weird issue because there is clearly there's a scale yeah there's a couple drinks where you're getting silly and you do you mean you might fuck somebody in a regretful way like say i shouldn't have slept with that guy but it's not rape but they want to call that rape

but then there's blackout drunk which is right sure and somewhere along the line it becomes reprehensible absolutely whether it's three drinks in or four drinks in i mean you could it's debatable sure um do you know about the bill in the in the california legislature that's about to be the law of the land most likely? No. So, yeah, it's probably going to pass so that it's applied to all state schools in California, which defines sexual assault and rape in many ways that completely put all of us in the category of rapist because it includes it includes having sex with someone when they're intoxicated anyone yeah so so your girlfriend boyfriend girlfriend have a couple drinks laughing and giggling they make out they have sex yeah and they don't even

they don't even put a um a sort of a threshold on how many drinks it takes so i'm you know i'm a serial rapist according to this law we all are according to this law and what is intoxication there's intoxication that's the limit of alcohol intoxication when you're driving which a lot of people are debating is too low that that would be legally applied to sex right so there's another thing that's very you see i one of the things i do is i sort of try to expose how conservative a lot of the left is because they don't even realize it this is this is really conservative right so it's like it's micromanaging our sex lives um and you know it's saying that sex that the state must come in and protect us from each other and it must the state

must come in or the college administration must protect women from these from sex well from demons yeah demons are the males absolutely no but not just demons from sex. Well, from demons. Yeah, yeah. The demons are the males. Absolutely. The males are demons. But not just demons from sex itself. Like, sex is seen as this sort of dangerous, harmful thing. It's sort of set apart from everything else in the world. Well, especially then if you say,

even if it's consensual and you're conscious and you're awake and you enjoy it and you have fun, if you're intoxicated, it is rape. Yeah, that's why that... Because it's sex. That case in occidental that you raised i mean so they say and i've read the whole report okay by the college the report says by the college this was consensual sex okay period and when i read that i said okay case closed then i read that he gets expelled because they were both drunk you know i don't know what to say about that other than this is lunacy,

but it's also deeply conservative. It's also deeply sexist. And deeply sexist. How does the guy get expelled and the girl doesn't? And deeply sexist, exactly, right. That's sexist. I agree. I mean, look, no one got hurt.

There were kids that liked each other. They were attracted to each other and they had sex they were communicating with each other back and forth through text it wasn't like she didn't like this guy it wasn't like yeah she was most certainly drunk but she also was saying to her friend i'm gonna go have sex with this guy right the fact that that's not an open and shut case it exposes the lunacy of this ideology that if exposed to the the vast majority of intelligent adult americans they would just they would put their foot down and go wait wait what the fuck did you just say what's going on i totally agree this is a bubble this ideology is this weird it

is a bubble yeah i agree it's i mean it's i think it's mostly hysteria um however look you know we agree you know rape happens acquaintance rape happens yes husbands rape wives yes boyfriends rape uh girlfriends all the time right it's very boyfriends rape boyfriends boyfriends oh well you want to talk about prison so you know that men get raped more often than women in this culture yeah but they're raped by men so it's really it's a kind of a moot point how's that just shows men are pieces of shit oh yeah each other well sure when there's no women to rape we just rape yeah the rape rates in prison are absolutely It's kind of a moot point. How's that? It just shows men are pieces of shit. Oh, yeah. We rape each other. Well, sure. When there's no women to rape, we just rape. Yeah, the rape rates in prison are absolutely horrifying and underreported.

Yeah. No, but so what do we do about it, right? And so here's sort of the intrinsic problem with rape, and especially acquaintance rape. There's very rarely any evidence. There's very rarely eyewitnesses. There's very rarely physical evidence. Even if there is physical evidence, you can't prove that that bruise proves that this guy raped you, right? So what do you do, right?

It's a tough question. And I understand that that's what people are kind of trying to struggle with and are trying to come up with these new devices to stop it from happening. I think the devices they're coming up with are terrible. But what do we do? So one thing, I mean, you've got to keep working on the criminal justice system. You've got to get cops to, like, process those rape kits more efficiently, which they're not doing in many states. There's a lot of rape kits that are sitting on shelves that have never been processed. And you've got to make, you know, cops just better at this, which is what feminists have been doing.

My mother in the 1960s, that was one of the things she did as a feminist in Berkeley. She pushed hard. She protested against the police force in the Bay Area, police forces in the Bay Area to take rape seriously, which cops didn't do for forever until then. So that's one thing. And the other thing is, you'll like this. I mean, I've been, I say jujitsu, man, seriously. I mean, like, and the inability to throw an elbow. I mean, and there's a group called insight, which is women of women of color against violence who have been doing this. They have, they have martial arts classes. They have martial arts schools. They organize together and they kick the shit out of men who try to attack them.

Now that's not the ultimate answer. That's not going to, that's not going to get rid of all rapists, but it is a, a, a, but at least partial solution. Believe you, them believe me if i had a daughter yeah i'd be telling her to do that yeah i do have daughters i teach yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah i mean it's it's one of those weird subjects too where if you discuss it you become a rape apologist you become i mean you're not even allowed to deviate from the the ideology if you deviate from it in any way shape or form you it's it's you know it's

a very strict dogma yeah i mean you this is non-consensual because she can't consent because she's had a drink even if the guy has i've even seen it written that ladies like a feminist wrote this blog saying women don't have sex with your man if he's drunk because he can't consent, which is the most ridiculous shit ever. I mean, it's just the whole idea being that sex is evil. And that's really what it comes down to. You're not talking about people getting hurt. If they decided to get drunk and wrestle, I mean, is that assault?

What is that? If they both decide, you know, if a guy and a girl, you know, take martial arts together and the guy and the if a guy and a girl, you know, take martial arts together and the guy, you know, and the girl are drinking and the girl wants to wrestle, is she not allowed to consent that she actually wants to wrestle because she's been drinking? It's only applied to sexuality. Yep. It's not applied to driving.

If you're driving under the influence, you are absolutely, totally responsible. If you're smashed, no one says, hey, she couldn't consent to driving because she was drunk. You're responsible for your actions entirely, except sexually. Yep. This comes back to what I started talking about, which is the cultural roots of our country, which is Puritanism. So, right? I mean, if you look at Puritans, people in Plymouth Rock, you know, that's one of the things they talked about, ad nauseum, that sex is the devil's work, that it is this special thing that is evil and harmful and damaging and must be controlled more than anything else. ways to the very present and i would say that a lot of what's going on in this sexual assault discourse stuff that we're talking about uh you see it there too that it's that's what's going on

that there's this belief that you know if i had sex that i didn't really feel good about with my boyfriend or not we were really drunk and i woke up and i was like uh don't like this dude and this was not okay it's like i think people are trained to think that they're damaged that this is a really terrible thing that happened to them right um i don't know about that i mean it's a crazy thing and this goes to prostitution this is why prostitution is illegal right it's like we sell our bodies for money all the time you know that's what massage yeah you know you're selling your body fucking mma is that intimate you know is that intimate right i mean that's jiu-jitsu is different because it's competition well but it's extremely

intimate but well the good analogy is massage because massage feels good no one wants to do it to you you pay them to do it and that becomes an occupation it's very respected yeah you know you talk to someone i'm a massage therapist oh that's cool sure exactly yeah but there's all sorts of professions where you know we sell our bodies intimately. You could even argue that's what we're doing now. I mean, you know, it's like my body's here, your body's there. We're using our minds. We're talking.

This is exploiting our bodies. It's a bit of a stretch. Okay, sorry. When I teach, when I teach, I say this. Yeah, right? I mean, so I'm like, I say to my students, look, I'm standing here. I brought my body here. You're looking at me.

You're judging me. It's like I'm using my body. You're getting paid for this. It's every job. You're selling your body. We draw a line at prostitution for some strange reason. But I don't think it's a strange reason. I think it's puritanism.

Yeah, man. I think it's because we believe deep down that sex is special. Yeah. In a bad way. Do you know who Molly Crabapple is? Yeah, sure. Very interesting woman. Yeah, sex worker activist and journalist

yeah sure well her her her take on it is you know completely open-minded she's like why why is it bad you know she's like i have friends that are sex workers she goes sure and it's fine like what they like it they don't mind they have clients that they enjoy being with and they get paid for that right like isn't it better to do that than to do something you don't like and isn't it a good thing to get sex right yeah no i have i've worked with and i have friends who are in the sex worker activist uh sort of movement right now she's part of i don't know her but she's a part of it and you know the more common argument among them is it's not like we all love it right what it is for them is it's a job right it's a job and some of us like it like some of us like our jobs and some of us are don't like it um and but that's it it's just a job for them

like porn stars ask ask a porn star if you know anything about the porn industry porn stars that's how they think of it when they go to work it's not like oh hell yeah we're gonna party it's just like oh okay right gotta get up at nine o'clock and i go to the set and i'm gonna be there for three hours and we're gonna have lunch at noon and you know and they come home right i mean that's every every person in the porn industry i've ever known has said this about certainly what it becomes yeah once you do it for a while it becomes a job right yeah i i think you're on to something i definitely think you're on to something when it comes to the puritan roots of this idea that sex is evil and that kids you know away from their houses for the first time at 18 years of age having sex in a dorm room sure there's also the

thing that happens too where the people that you communicate with after the fact can tell you what a horrible thing has happened to you and they do it with like this rabid intention and that was one of the parts of the story that i found quite fascinating like the the friends of the guy versus the friends of the girl like what their their take on it was you know and that the girl came over she was drunk the guy's friend saw her and they go yeah they were both fucked up they mean he had drank a half of a bottle of vodka and she drank countless beers or whatever but the girl's friends were like it was definitely rape it was definitely sexual assault yeah well yeah it's even worse than that and now i'm really going

to get fired um one of the things that happens and it happened in this case from what we can tell of the from the evidence is that um so the average reporting time for sexual assault on campuses is close to a year after the alleged assault. It's hundreds of days. It's close to, it's something at two or 300 days is the average time it takes people to report these things. And we have lots of testimony of those people, those women saying that, well, I didn't really, I didn't know at first what it was. I didn't feel good about it, but I didn't know what it was. And then my professor started talking to me. And that's what happened in this case.

We know pretty sure, we're pretty sure that a particular professor there not only convinced her that it was rape, but also did a demographic profiling of the guy and said, well, he belongs to these particular demographic groups who are likely to be rapists. Yeah. What demographic groups are likely to be rapists? That was one of the more amazing things. He's a member of a team. I think it's either tennis or one of the, I don't know, one of the teams that's supposedly more likely to be full of rapists than others. Oh my God.

And that he was a valedictorian. What? Yeah. So he's smart? So he's more likely to be a rapist? Because I guess they have a sense of entitlement is the idea i don't know i don't even know what the argument is but that was it was in the press you can look it up oh my god that's crazy foundation for individual rights and education fire awesome organization everyone should support it they

reported that if you look at their website you can see you can see that yeah that's terrifying yes it is you could be that boy who's become a valedictorian because you've struggled through high school and kicked ass and tried to get great grades and done your work and studied and under the supervision of your parents and tutors and what have you and you're looking forward to having this great career and someone has looked at that hard work and said oh he's most likely a rapist yeah yeah no it's it's very damaging um god that's terrifying i've read i've read many many accounts i've made many read many accounts of these things where it's like hard to call it rape it's hard to call it rape what do you got jamie the the article oh this is uh because he was from

a good family oh there it is because he was from a good family. There it is because he was from a good family He's more likely that in quotes. Oh my god. Oh My god, he was a back to valedictorian. He was on a sports team and was from a good family So he's most likely a rapist How does someone keep a job when they have that that ideology and they promoted to kids? So this is a colleague of mine. so I'm really kind of constrained here. You know what, man? That's a criminal.

That person's a terrible person. If anyone has said that to a young, influential kid, this is what's more likely if a person's a rapist. Did they use force? Did they drug you? Did they coerce you? Did something bad happen to you? That makes a person a rapist did they use force did they drug you did they coerce you did something bad happen to you that makes a person a rapist yes not being from a fucking good family yes like what all non-rapists come from the broken homes is that what you're saying yeah no i know all non-rapists got d's

yeah i think the legal definition is pretty good you know it's the it's the use of force or the threat of the use of force is that all correct all those accusations that that professor said i mean is that that professor ever come out and and confirmed these these statements her claims that that that men like that are more likely to be rapists hell of course not how could she okay so so this is just i mean that's it's absurd yeah it's i think i don't know what it? I can only guess where it comes from. I think that the men at Occidental who have been accused of sexual assault over the last few years, I think, I'm guessing, belong to those categories. Now, that's just accusations, though. That's so crazy. And we're also, by the way, talking about, I don't know, 10 or 20 people.

That is so fucking crazy yeah and it's but one of the and also you know one of the one of the most enraging things about it and i you know i've talked to people who were actually victims of rape about this right and they are fucking furious i'm sure because it it it it trivializes it trivializes what happened to them And it also makes it much harder to report rape. It makes it much harder for people to take seriously what happened to them. It's an ultimate cry wolf scenario. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, so you've got to be really disciplined about your definition of sexual assault and rape. It's the use of force, the threat of the use of force, or having sex with someone who is incapacitated. And that is it. And I think that's good enough. Yeah, that is good enough. And I also think. And we should enforce like hell that. Absolutely.

You know, and in all sorts of ways. Yeah. Right. So, but that's it. Yeah, absolutely. And I also think that there's an issue with influencing people's ideas of the past, influencing their memory. I mean, one of the worst pieces of evidence, you would know this as good as anybody, is eyewitness accounts. They're terrible.

When you ask people, like I've talked to friends about scenarios that I was involved in, and they'll give you a take on it, and go and i'll go no you didn't do that mike did that right don't you remember and they'll go oh yeah fuck yeah dude we were in chicago we had to go to that we had to do that show remember oh yeah fuck right you were telling a crazy story about vegas that didn't even happen in vegas and it wasn't even the guy you were talking about but you were so fucking sure right and it only happened six months ago. I mean, that is so common. And I'm not trivializing traumatic incidences that really get etched into people's consciousness. But there is a reality that eyewitness accounts are very difficult to corroborate because people, their memories suck. Human memory, and I've said this on this podcast many times, my memory is dog shit.

But it's really good. Like memory is dog shit but it's really good like for a person it's really good like i can pull things out of the past i'm like my mma documentary uh my mma uh memory rather it's fantastic i can recall fights from i've noticed decades ago like off the top of my head i'm not using any notes i can just sure but if you you ask me to break down day by day what happened yesterday right fuck it's a flashes it's like i see like snapshots i barely remember what i ate i barely remember where i went first i mean i have to concentrate and think about it right well there's also subjectivity right and interpretation so you and i could watch the exact same thing

happen right in front of us right now and have a different interpretation of what happened. And having someone who's an influential person talk to you about those events will shape your perception of them. So it's really egregious to convince someone that a terrible thing has happened to them when they're not sure that it's happened to them, right? What is the vested interest in making sure that this person decides a terrible thing has happened? I mean, are you dealing with people that don't like men? Are you dealing with people that don't like young boys? Are you dealing with people that don't like masculine sexuality and they're trying to suppress it in any form possible?

So to mute or neuter men in this way, to make it so they're terrified to have sex with someone unless they have written consent during various stages of the sexual act i would like to record on record that we're about to have sex and you are sober are you sober is that correct yes okay let's proceed yeah i i really i'm really hesitant about going for motivations in these things when it's about politics because people do that to me all the time right oh you made that argument because you're a racist oh you made that argument because you're a man oh you made that argument because your mom wasn't good to you whatever um check

your privilege that is oh boy happens all the time um so i um however it's been shown that men named thaddeus have a lot of privilege too by the way sure man it means great leader dude uh um well there is this there is this sort of phenomenon that some of us have identified which we call the white savior complex um which you remember coney 2012 yes okay oh good lord so that's like the greatest example of that boy did that fucking vanish quick yeah well for good. But that's kind of like the greatest example of that. A really awesome writer named Teju Cole. I'm not sure how he pronounces his name that way, but it's T-E-J-U Cole, an amazing writer. He's actually a fiction writer, but he talked about the Kony 2012 and the white savior complex.

Which, you know, and a lot of my work is on this. It's mostly white people, almost all elite people. It is almost entirely Western, European, and American people who take it upon themselves to save their social inferiors, right? And they want to go out and find them, first of all, find these poor, sad people in the world, wherever they may be, whether it's in the ghetto in Compton or whether it's in Rwanda or wherever, and go save them and change their lives and uplift them and make them more like us. It's sort of the – it is the psychological and cultural core of imperialism. And to me, it has led to the deaths of millions of people. So, you know, what did Coney 12 result in? It literally resulted in, I think, 500 US servicemen being on the ground shooting people. Now, you could say

that was necessary to save those kids from that guy. And just so just so happens, historically, it almost never ends at that, right? It almost always ends in something else, a bigger war, bigger shooting war erupts because of this. And now we need to conquer the whole country, as in Iraq, right? That was a humanitarian because of this. And now we need to conquer the whole country as in Iraq. Right. That was a humanitarian mission. Remember? That was to save the Iraqis.

Yeah. Uh-huh. Yeah. Not exactly. Yeah. So how many Iraqis have died to save them? Something like a million, right? Yeah.

It's debatable, but a hell of a lot. It's at least 200,000. It could be as many as a million. But think about it. It's to killing them to save them. Right. Which was what was said about Vietnam. So that was kind of this classic line by a general in Vietnam.

He said, we have to destroy the village in order to save it, right? But anyway, so it's that idea. It's also this very arrogant paternalistic impulse that a lot of people have, in particular a lot of white people, but certainly elite people. Fucking white people. I know I hate white people. But certainly elite people. Fucking white people. I know I hate white people. I'm glad you're with me on this. And I want to talk about Ludacris with you, by the way.

We've got to talk about Ludacris. Okay. Yeah. But you're a bit on Ludacris. Oh, okay. Yeah. You're like, what? What was that?

Okay. White people. No, it's true. So, okay. So, you think that, so, the same sort of motivation that people have to do this 2012 coney thing is the same motivation they have to cry rape well to encourage people to to so because you need to have a victim you need to have someone who's suffering you need to have someone who's oppressed right to save them right so you gotta got to make sure they exist. And so you have to create that discourse, that way of thinking about them.

And because this young man had a lot going from a good family and a valedictorian. You also have to have an oppressor. He's an oppressor. To vanquish. Right. He's obviously privileged. Yeah, so Coney was the oppressor who had to be vanquished to save the kids there. Right.

Yeah, I think it's this. I think. I don't want to speak for her. Of think. I don't want to speak for her. Of course. I don't want to speak for what's going on in her mind, but I do think it does line up with Kony 2012. That you have to create an oppressor, you have to create a victim in order to save them

so that you become the knight, the white knight. Well, how do they justify the boy being responsible but the girl not being responsible? Yeah, so that's to, fundamentally anti-feminist and conservative as hell, right? Because it says that a man can make decisions, can have agency when he's drunk, but a woman cannot. She's a victim. She's going to be a victim. So women can't control themselves. They can't determine their own lives when they're drunk. But men can, right? That's like what fucking Don...

Incredibly sexist. That's like what Don Draper says on Mad Men about women, right? It's like, oh, well, you know, they're just, they're dumb, and they can't control themselves when they've had a couple drinks. Excuse me, I don't think so. I mean, you know, I think there's... You said that just like a chick, by the way. Did I?

Excuse me, I don't think so. Oh, yeah you know, I think there's... You said that just like a chick, by the way. Did I? Excuse me, I don't think so. Oh, yeah. Oh, good. I just saved my job then. Well, if you get fired for what you said, the world is really fucked. I mean, the academic world is truly fucked. Well, that's not exactly why I got fired, but I mean, we can get into that. Yeah.

Which has to do with ludicrous. Seriously. Really? Yeah. I mean, not... Yeah, basically. Basically. I know what you're saying. We can get into that, yeah, which has to do with ludicrous, seriously. Really? Yeah. I mean, not, yeah, basically. Okay. Your bit about ludicrous is actually, is very, very similar to a big argument I made, which is the reason I got fired.

And what was the argument you made? Okay, so this is about race. Uh-huh. Okay. And in your bit, actually, I don't think you do, I don't think you, did you connect it to race? Did you say it's like, yeah, you didn't, right? So that's the difference. Yeah. It was just about people enjoying themselves yeah and that there's there's a lot of music that's just so depressing right and it's just like like uh like

that hey there delilah song yeah yeah which was not even apparently about a girl that this guy dated which is even creepy really yeah it's like a girl that he knew so this girl's probably like moving in New York to get the away from this guy right he's writing this song he there did I well yeah I thought it wasn't I mean you didn't say this but I thought it's not a coincidence that a lot of white rock like that is very depressing very email yeah but it's depressing you were saying it's depressing and like a downer. What we're attracted to is like the melancholy of it, right? And then- There's depth.

There's depth in being somber. He's deep. He thinks a lot. Yeah, we think there's depth in it. Yeah, whatever. We value that. We think, oh, well, he must be a deep person, a deep thinker with real feelings. He's a poet.

He's a human being. He's a fully realized human being, a poet. Yes. He understands- Complex emotions. He understands the essence of humanity. feelings he's a poet he's a human being he's a fully realized human being a poet yes he understands complex he understands the essence of human humanity he's not having fun and smiling because people are starving yeah exactly exactly they're more important things to do than have fun yeah but that's not so that's exactly what you're getting yeah so like so so the fact that you compared him and what was it what do they call those dirty white single white tea what do they call the white white teas yeah they're white dudes right and then and with ludicrous right

and his celebration of rims yeah and barbecues and asses right um i mean this is this is my work this is this is like the core of my work believe it or not perfect so um yeah when i saw it god's work i was watching it with my 12 year old son you son, your special, and I was like, Toby, did you see that? He just said what he was like, yeah, I think I get it. I like ludicrous a little bit. Is that okay, Dad? No, it's, yeah, it's so much of American culture from the beginning has been defined in that way so like you know white people have sort of prided themselves on being you know very serious and upright and disciplined and controlled and uh and therefore they should be the president right or the ceo

or you know the professor right um and they are the good puritans right they invented the shit and they adhered to it more than others not perfectly of course but they adhered to it more than others and they always took that as a source of pride right yeah man we're so repressed yeah we don't we don't run around naked and fucking in the bushes and you know we don't we work hard you know we believe that work is a good thing and as opposed to those other people right those other people we brought here from africa who didn't have those ideas right who they're always just naked who dance they dance and they they don't think that work in itself is godly that's the protestant work ethic by the way it's not not work as a means to an end which makes sense to all of us you got to get shit you got to work hard the protestant or puritan work ethic is war and this is what they said work in itself is good no

matter what you get for it you don't get if you don't get paid at all if you don't make anything out of it it's still you should work right that's what they've always said right so you get valorized for just working hard even if you get nothing for it so that's been kind of this kind of to me and a lot of historians it's been kind of like the central cultural split in our in our in our country for 400 500 years um between those two and you kind of nailed it in that bit and i was kind of stunned i was like oh my god he sort of gets although you didn't you didn't connect it to race um but the roots of it and this is in my book this is what i do with it you know i try to find the roots of it i'm like how did this happen that black people created jazz

and rock and roll is that just a coincidence a lot of stand-up comedy too and comedy right so richard yeah not really. Like, Lenny Bruce is the real godfather of comedy. He's the... And he's a Jew. He was the real god... But he was doing heroin with black jazz singers. Exactly.

I mean, he's hanging around with a lot of beat poets, and they were hanging around with a lot of jazz singers. They were smoking marijuana with a lot of black guys. It was a cultural infusion there. There was a lot going on, which was one of the reasons why a lot of his subjects, one of his more prominent subjects, had to do with race. Chitlin Circuit preceded him. Moms Mabley preceded him.

Red Fox, I think, was the same time, and I think before him as well. So, yeah, I agree with you. But Pryor was the god so prior and he came out of lenny bruce yeah yeah you think so yeah he very very strongly influenced by him and discussed it in great did he really great length really prior said that he had seen lenny bruce several times in the village and there was a lenny bruce was the original this is pretty pretty much everybody agrees with that when it comes to stand-up comedy and that prior was influenced by him yeah okay yeah everybody was well okay that's fine i still have an argument for that which jews right yeah jews absolutely jews and blacks have dominated stand-up forever

right you know um um why right so here's so here's why blacks have and you know so it's it's not just comedy and it's particular kind of comedy right it's like it's you know, so it's not just comedy and it's a particular kind of comedy, right? It's like, you know, it's very- Loose fun. Loose body. Right. You know, saying things you're not supposed to say in polite company, you know, talking about fucking in the 1950s and 60s when you definitely weren't supposed to do it then. Right.

And taking drugs, you know, and like making light of that. That was not okay. Lenny was the martyr for that, right? He went to jail for that shit, right? But he didn't really talk about it on stage prior really talk prior then fire and just blew it oh yeah yeah prayers is my major influence people when people ask me like at academic conferences like so is your major influence I'm like well Michelle Foucault

and Richard Pryor and they're like what it's true though it's absolutely true when I saw live in concert yes 13 12 or 12 years old i first of all fell out of my chair in the theater and i was like that changed my life me too because he one of the things one of the many things he did was i think he was the first person to do this first black person to do this in public on a stage he made fun of white people and suggested that they were actually inferior like that did not happen before like imitating them and putting them down and sort of suggesting not suggesting basically saying yeah man yeah they're late they're they suck yeah he has this great bit it's not in live in concert it's in a smaller piece um he's like he said something like uh man white people white people are doing white people be doing yoga niggas be fucking right and

it's like that sums it up right and so um but so slavery okay all right can we do slavery sure okay now i'm gonna get fired like four times you can only fire you once and you're gonna get in trouble too how can i be in trouble well if you agree with me okay i'm gonna agree with you already how about that cool all right so here it is so yeah you got to understand like so yeah you got to understand like puritanism and american culture uh from plymouth rock all the way through the 19th century first okay which was unbelievably repressive okay and this is everyone agrees on this right it was like comically repressive right uh this first surgeon general the united states benjamin rush wrote these books about how masturbation caused blindness and death and epilepsy there were just like medical journals

were full of this shit about how sex was terrible and would kill you and cause paralysis and all this stuff the one of the fastest growing industries in the early 19th century right after the united states was founded was for devices to stop people from masturbating. So like chain mail mitts for men and these hobbles that kept women's legs together. Whoa. That had a lock and key and then chastity belts. Everybody knows about that.

All these devices. It was just this amazingly comically repressive culture around sex and then also around work. So the Puritan work ethic, that work is good no matter what you get for it. And you're doing the devil's work if you're not working, was in like five-year-old children's textbooks. Kindergarteners were taught that playing with their toys was the devil's work. And they were taught to be useful in their lives and to find a profession and a vocation when they're in kindergarten,

right? And it just suffused the whole society. So like every political leader, every business leader, and certainly all the religious leaders, everybody, and novels that were written, poetry, it's just all about work all the time to be godly and never have sex, even in marriage. There was even a lot of talk through the 19th century about even having sex with your wife was dangerous at best. Like you did it because you had to procreate to make more Americans, but that was it. Like you got to be really careful.

You can't let it get out of hand beyond that. You got to just, yeah. So this is, and historians all agree on this. It was just a phenomenal. So this is Victorianism, right? This is like when Puritanism moves into Victorianism, right? What was the cause of all that? That's an awesome question.

No one can answer. I mean, what is the cause of a culture emerging? I don't know. I mean, one thing, one of the more common, one of the most common explanations is industrial capitalism, right? So this is also the time of the first factories, you know, and this is the time when people are moving from the farms into cities and working in sort of industrial capitalist formats. Right. Where they're sitting at a table and there's a division of labor and you put together the the machinery or the shoe piece by piece. So that required or, you know, that requires a lot of discipline. Right. It requires getting people to stop drinking and stop fornicating and to be committed to work is a good thing.

I'm not sure that's – I mean, that's a decent explanation. I'm not sure if that really explains it entirely. First of all, because it kind of pre-exists it. The Puritans were way before all that happened. And they were talking about that for centuries before there was industrial capitalism. But it was this crazy repressive culture that Americans lived in. It's funny for us to look at now the things that they were saying at the time and doing at the time. But it was just hard to imagine living like that.

Okay. So that was kind of and that was also considered to be what white people do. You know, that's it was totally racialized. Right. So it's like white good Americans, white meaning white people do that. They don't fuck and they work. Pretty simple. Skirts over their piano legs yeah and also i mean that kind of extended to dancing so there's i have a whole section in my book on dancing and so like it was terrible to dance to dance in american

culture if you're a white person um leisure was bad it was all bad so that's how that's where everyone lived and then along come these people from this other place called West Africa where none of these ideas existed. Like the Protestant work ethic was like, what are you talking about?

It just, that's a purely Northern European and American invention. You know, very few people in world history have subscribed to that idea. So the West Africans come over here. They also believed in moving your body

as a good thing. You know, it was a beautiful thing to them moving it in sensual ways dancing and otherwise they didn't believe that sex outside of marriage was wicked it was going to destroy your life especially for women they thought that women who had sex outside of marriage were fine that it was no problem they come over here and then as slaves, they have zero, of course, incentive to internalize, to adopt this white person's culture, right? Not only that, they're sort of physically barred from it, right? So citizenship, they're not given citizenship, right? And that's not good because you don't get to vote and you don't get equal protection under the law and all those good things that come with citizenship. What people miss about it is that in this cult, in here and

everywhere, citizenship is also a cultural thing, right? You're considered a good American if you do particular things, right? And in that case, it meant putting your body in a walking prison, right? That's what a good citizen did, a good white person. So slaves were here. They brought elements of this West African culture that thought that sex was okay and that work was a means to an end and that was it. And they had no incentive to adopt this insane repressive culture that the white people were all about. And so they developed their own, which wasn't West African and it wasn't American. It was this new thing called Africa, which we now call African American culture. And that is what gave us jazz, man. You know, because what is jazz? Jazz is the music of improvisation. It's the music, it's been called the music of freedom. You take this musical structure and then the soloist does

what he wants for a moment. He goes out of the structure and is free. He's liberated from the structure and then comes back into it. It's the music of improvisation and freedom. I don't think it's a coincidence that people who were separated from that ridiculously repressive culture created that music. White people never could have created that, ever. That is absolutely fascinating. How much has influenced our culture that has come out of the people that were brought over here as slaves? Oh, that's just the beginning. That's the most obvious one that everyone knows about. People make fun of Ebonics, right?

Remember that? When Ebonics was happening, this was like 15, 20 years ago. It was like this big joke. Oh, my God. Well, they were actually teaching it. Well, yeah. Actually, a friend of mine is uh wrote the book on it and um well so think about how often in a day that you use what used to be called black

slang right we all do all the time even professor even like fucking bob costas uses it now like bob costas yeah what do i hear what do you say say something like what did he say it wasn't something like dope but it was something like i forget it was some black saying i've heard like god see if you if bob costas is saying this then but no it's um they're cool we've done no not no it was better than that uh but yeah cool is one bad bad is another one yeah um yeah oh but no we've there's quantitative studies on this so the number of words that come from black vernacular is immense in american english immense i'm sure and so much of it is not perfectly respectable right um all of that when but when those words were invented fuck that was like stupid niggers say that right i mean you

know and now it's like that's great um yeah so from the beginning, I call them America's original renegades. From the beginning, black working class culture has been the main, not the only, but the main counterpoint to this Puritanism that's been with us ever since. That's absolutely fascinating. It's a very interesting scenario to picture what America would have been like had there been no slaves had the african-american culture not sort of you know what it would be sweden i mean safe pretty safe i mean something like that yeah like switzerland yeah something like that some very homogenous very very uh restrained you know i mean hey the streets are clean though right you know but so it's order over spontaneity right it's um and it's so it totally changes what america is oh yeah because america we like to

think of is the hub of innovation the hub of artistic expression and creativity and entertainment 90 of the great entertainment that the world has ever created comes from right here take black people out of American entertainment my god what are you left with what are you left with yeah

where the fuck would where would rock I mean think about Led Zeppelin I mean it's been shown now that Led Zeppelin pretty much plagiarized a giant chunk of all of their music

from old blues songs blues yep yeah the Stones are the coolest about that. Cause they were like from the beginning and they were like, Nope, we're playing black music.

That's what we're doing. We're playing the blues. That's who our influences are. That's what we're about. Yeah. Wild horses. I mean, come on.

All of it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I was just watching Keith Richards on, on Fallon and he was saying this, he was talking about, oh, Chuck Berry. He was like,

yeah, I'm nothing without Chuck Berry. Yeah. Yeah. So. Well, the Beatles and Chuck berry had a close relationship too that absolutely i mean there's so many of those early guys little richard another beautiful example sure there's so many of those early performers that directly influence the course of rock and roll absolutely it's a black music wow that is a fascinating point so if you look at so here's the lineage right i mean you know this but just a quick

primer review i mean it's so it's it's slave music right which has been called various things there were spirituals but there was also dance music that they invented uh then there's ragtime late 19th century which everyone agrees gave gives birth to jazz and blues and then after world war ii it's it's uh rock and roll and then rhythm and what was called rhythm and blues and then soul in the 1960s which gave birth to disco in the 1970s which gave birth to hip-hop so and all that it goes straight back to the slaves on the plantations. Wow. And this culture that I was talking about that was outside of this crazy, repressive white culture. Fucking white people. Yeah, so it's this crazy idea.

Damn it. We got to get rid of them, man. That's what I'm saying. Malcolm X had a point. Everybody's got a point. No, I don't want to get rid of white people. I want to get rid of whiteness. Yeah.

Seriously. We need spray tans. Is that what you're saying? No, no. It looks ugly. It's orange orange um yeah orange is not good yeah colored they don't mean orange yeah exactly right not on this planet not on this planet not blue either so oh but jews man lenny bruce right so i have four sections in the book on this so on immigrant immigrant groups, and I look at Irish immigrants, Italian immigrants, and Jewish immigrants. And one of the things that blows

people away, they don't know this. Most people don't know this. When all three of those groups first got here, so the Irish was early 19th century, Italians and Jews was late 19th, early 20th century. When they came here in large numbers for the first time, they were not considered white. So people who look just like me, white as hell, and not only just not time, they were not considered white. So people who look just like me, white as hell, were, and not only just not white, they were considered, the Irish were considered to be Negroes. They were considered to be black. Really? Yeah, because they came with this culture that was nowhere near white Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture that we've been talking about. So the Irish were known as the greatest dancers on earth, even better than blacks. They invented tap dancing with blacks in New York City. Um,

they could give a fuck about working except how much it, you know, got them in terms of wages. They believed in drinking, uh, beginning at 8am and continuing all the way through the day during work. Um, they lived when they got here here they lived with and around blacks because they were poor so in the city in new york and philadelphia boston they lived in black neighborhoods and often you see a lot of cohabitation and you see a lot of what's called miscegenation blacks and whites having sex together procreating a lot of yeah so they were called they were called white niggers it was very common and a lot of discrimination against them because of that. And also there's very little evidence of racism among Irish Americans during that period, which is weird now because if you think about it,

I mean, Irish Americans for the last hundred or so years have kind of been, unfortunately, the leaders in many ways of white American racism. But then there's very little evidence of it. And then what happened was they were like, wait, we'd like to get the vote. I mean, they were getting the vote, but not in mass. We'd like to get political power. We'd like to be treated. We'd like to get good jobs, be treated like these white Americans. So there was this very deliberate conscious effort by Irish American immigrant group leaders and church leaders to do several things. One of them was to distance themselves from blacks, so they moved out of the neighborhoods, to enter the army and serve in the Mexican-American War

and the Civil War to prove that they were good white American civilians and soldiers. They entered politics. They became Democratic Party politicians, again, proving that they were committed to the country. And most of all, everyone knows this, they became cops. So Irish Americans moved into the police forces in huge numbers, especially in New York and Philadelphia during this period, and fire departments. And they became racists.

So there were these big anti-black riots called the New York City Draft Riots in 1863, which was just this huge pogrom lynching, mass lynching of blacks in the streets of New York City. And that was mostly Irish people doing that. What year was that going on? 1863, during the Civil War. Yeah, so it was... Mass lynchings of black people in New York City? Yeah, the New York City draft riots. Wow.

Yeah, it was ugly. It was, in part, resentment against rich people who were paying off others to go to war for them you could do that you could sell your draft you could sell your selection into the army real or you could buy it i mean um so yeah you could pay someone to go to war in your place is what i'm trying to say um so it was resentment against that but it actually sort of very quickly turned toward blacks because it was a good wide belief that the war was for on behalf of blacks right to free them so the irish were kind of pissed off at the rich people who were you know uh not going to war when they should have been and it was but then it very quickly turned to

an anti-black mass lynching because they were blaming these guys for this war that a lot of these irish guys were volunteering to go fight in. Um, so, but anyway, so they, so if you look at social scientists in the early 19th century, when the Irish are coming in big numbers, they're like, they're Negroid, they're really from Africa or they're chimpanzees.

There was a lot of theory among social scientists and so-called scientists that the Irish were actually apes. Seriously. Like books. Yeah. Yeah. Books were written many, many many books it was common commonly believed by by the british and by americans that the irish were actually apes or the missing link between apes and human beings yeah and they were actually yes it was commonly

believed that they were actually get this below african americans that they were actually genetically inferior to everybody that the ir Irish were the bottom of the barrel. The very bottom. They weren't even human beings to many people. What about Native Americans? Yeah, I guess they were down there too. But yeah, the Irish, yeah, I suppose. They were sort of similar to the natives.

I mean, they weren't compared too often to them. Chimpanzees. Yeah, so that's in my book. Yeah, so they were called the Irish chimpanzees, yeah. Wow. And I'm talking about like Harvard professors. What? Oh yeah.

No, and this was, this was respectable academic discourse. This was like what respectable, you know, what years? This isn't all, this is the first half of the 19th century.

That is insane. This is when the Irish are coming here in big numbers. Right. So the early 1800s. Yeah. And it was partly. Harvard professors were referring to irish people as apes yep that's fascinating well obviously everyone's humans and ape but well yeah no but still they

still are apes is what they're saying so then so but then they go through this they go through this really aggressive process of what's called assimilation right they became they try to assimilate into the dominant white culture um and here's this amazing thing so by the end of the 19th century just as less like less than a hundred years they're all the social scientists they're doing all these taxonomies of the world's races right and they're ranking them and really yeah oh yeah this is this is what my people professors were doing then man it was hilarious and so they would rank all these races and including in europe they had races in europe they divided europe into three races there were the northern europeans who were the best ones and

the middle europeans that were okay and then there were the southern europeans who sucked and who should be you know ditch diggers the irish were below all of that where the european jews fit in bottom absolutely bottom oh yeah totally bottom yeah they were also like some of the like the vast majority of nobel prize winners i know check it out okay so jews well let me finish the irish thing and i'll get to the jews because it's totally linked within less than 100 years these social scientists and all these professors etc and political leaders um moved the irish from chimp to nordic which was the top of the chain that was the northern european that was called the white man par excellence so they because they were cops and firefighters and

politicians and generals and they hated blacks and they were living out apart from blacks and they gave up dancing i mean i'm serious they gave up i'm serious if you look at if you look at priests irish priests through the 19th century that's one of the things they were very concerned about was that irish were dancing too much they invented tap dance they invented tap dance which is river dancing shit well yeah that's different no no that's irish irish that's irish i'm talking about irish americans oh yeah no they invented tap the tap dance which is so much which is like the base of so much of vernacular dance now. The Jews.

There was a prominent social scientist named Arthur Abernathy who wrote a book, which was very typical of the time in 1906, I believe. The title of which was The Jew is a Negro. So the same thing was done with the Jews. When they got here, and they got here a little later than the Irish, in large numbers, sort of late 19th century. Same thing. They were known for their musical ability, right? Jews became very famous in jazz, right?

They sort of co-founded jazz in many ways. A lot of them are gangsters. That's not okay, right? Meyerland. Yeah, the Jewish mob was almost as big as the Italian mob when they got here. at jazz in many ways a lot of them are gangsters that's not okay right Meyerland it's very yeah oh yeah the Jewish mob was as big almost as big as the Italian mob when they got here um and you know they were very considered to be very sensual of the body you know animalistic and check this out this is people when I tell my students as they do not believe me but it's many historians

have written about this Jewss dominated dominated two sports in the first half of the 20th century boxing you know this and basketball basketball that they totally dominated basketball boxing the number of world champions many weight classes were jews yeah many dozens of them were top and and then and then basketball they totally dominated basketball until the 1950s that seems to be the boxing thing though and in fighting it seems to be an economic position thing that when people come over and they're immigrants and they're at the bottom of the economic food chain like right now you're seeing an influx of russian champions right yeah right a lot of r. A lot of former Soviet Union.

I think it's actually cultural. I think, because not every immigrant group does that, right? Italians, Irish. So when they get, yeah. But I think it's when, so here's the thing that was,

here's the funniest thing about Jews, and Italians, by the way, were the same category as Jews in many ways. They dominated a lot of those sports, too. what was said about jews and sports in particular boxing and and basketball was that they were naturally gifted athletes jews yeah so the way that the way that people talked about jews and athleticism then is exactly the way that people talk about blacks and athleticism now.

Wow, that's interesting. It's hilarious to look at sports writers in the 1920s, 30s, and 40s talk about Jewish basketball players and how they're naturally gifted and they can jump higher and they're faster and they're trickier. Their butts are higher. Yeah, right. Remember that? Yeah. Jimmy DeGreed.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, right, right. He fired the same black people that had higher butts. Because they were trained on the plantation or something to uh well he was genetic it was about genetic selection getting the biggest slaves to mate with the yeah is that true is that factual i mean that's a commonly stated no no most most historians reject that really there may have been a tiny bit but no um i would think that that's something you would want to do if you have several generations of slaves however get the big ones to breed with the big ones well so this isn't my book

too but but many historians have said well if so to if you're if you're gonna be selectively breeding people meaning forcing them to have sex with people when they don't want to or whatever right um they're not going to work very well for you you know they're not going to and so it's a very tricky thing being a slave master right because there's no incentive whatsoever to work the only thing the only incentive to work as a slave is to avoid the lash to avoid the whip so what slaves did typically was they worked just enough to not get whipped, right? And not one bit more. So if you're doing other things to make them want to work even less, they will, right? And there's not much you can do about it, right? Because you can't whip a slave to death. If you whip a slave

to death, then you have zero labor, right? So there's, masters are always trying to strike this delicate balance between, about getting the maximum output from slaves who had zero incentive to work with, with wages, with a wage economy, right? We all have incentive. We work like shit,

you know, just to get the money. Right. But there wasn't, there wasn't that under slavery. So slave masters actually oddly had this disadvantage in a way. Um, but anyway,

so no, most, most historians have not found much evidence of genetic manipulation like that. Genetic breeding. So why are African-Americans so much larger physically? Is it a diet issue than African-Africans? I mean, the type of pro athletes that you see today, like football players, 320-pound college seniors. Is that really true though well no no i

mean no no i know that but i mean if you look at comparison to africa if you look at all of all people of african descent in the world now and took an average height and weight of them i don't know how how would it compare to people of european descent we should probably do a study before we start i mean if you looked at the nebraska offensive line right i mean yeah you know what i mean like there's plenty of especially in america right some giant white people too giant white people out there yeah there's but there's like a certain athleticism that's associated with the giant black people that's not associated with the giant white people who are more lumbering right ever running backs they're never so yeah so you know malcolm gladwell the writer he's in

new york yeah so he's argued this and he's a black Canadian and he's actually said in the New Yorker, which was amazing. And he got in a lot of trouble for it. He's like, no, yeah, actually, we are genetically better at sports. That's why we're faster for it. Oh, because that's connected to sort of old fashioned scientific racism. The Jimmy, the Greek. Right. But how when you look at all the African-American basketball players that are elite, all the African-American football players that are elite, all the African-American boxers that are elite, how much data do you need to say, I mean, you're going to say that it's all cultural?

Well, yeah, I mean, because you could be 6'5", 280 and ripped and still suck at basketball, right? could be 6'5", 280 and ripped and still suck at basketball, right? You can, but the guys that are really good at it all seem to be African American and they can do things like, show me a white guy that moves like Michael Jordan and I'll sit down. There have been some. There have been some. No. Show me a white Karl Malone.

Oh, definitely have been Karl Malones. White Karl Malones. Oh, sure. Okay. Big power. There's no white LeBone. Oh, definitely have been Karl Malones. Really? Oh, sure. There's no white LeBron. There's no LeBron. That's my next one. There's no any other LeBron. There's never been a white Anderson Silva.

That's true. That's true. There's certain levels. I mean, George St. Pierre was an amazing fighter, but he was amazing more for his intelligence. Very athletic, for sure, but not ridiculously fast. Very physically strong, but he was really good at being unpredictable. He was really good at the way he would mix up his techniques.

Right. Well, then, okay. So, then how do you explain that Jews and Italians dominated all those sports? I don't know. Not long ago. Well, that's what I'm getting at. Could be access to, they didn't because Jack Johnson was the great heavyweight champion. I mean, Jack Johnson was the motherfucker that everybody was scared of.

I know, but there were more, the lower weight classes, there were more Jewish champions than blacks in the first half of the 20th century. But there were littler people. Yeah. Well, but I mean, I'm saying, but they were considered to be and they were awesome so supposedly naturally gifted athletes well i mean there's still there were some great black fighters as well as sandy sadler there was quite a few great black i mean griffith there was a lot of great black fighters too sure i don. I don't know. I mean, I don't know how much of it is access, how much of it is, you know, access to good trainers. Yeah. So, at one point, I think it was in the 1940s, something like six or seven out of the top ten scorers in the professional basketball league at the time were Jewish.

Wow. I know. And now I think the NBA has not won. Not won. Danny Shays, I think, was the last Jew that I was aware of who played in the NBA. He played about like six or seven years ago. In boxing, too. I mean, try to find a Jew.

Yeah, no. I think there's like one guy. I saw one guy like about 10 years ago. I'm always on the lookout. I grew up with one, Dana Rosenblatt. He was a New England champion. Huh. Really? Dangerous Dana Rosenblatt. He was a New England champion. Huh. Really? Dangerous Dana Rosenblatt.

Yeah. Tough fighter. Jewish kid. How about in the UFC? Are there any Jews? I don't think so. There's probably a few. I've never noticed.

Yeah. You'd have to, I don't know. I don't know. It's a good question. I'd have to go through the archives. But as far as champions, no. No. Definitely not.

No champions. Right. Hmm. Yeah. Yeah. So, no. No, definitely not. No champions. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, so, yeah. I mean, well, so Russians, so you're talking about Russians. So, like, are they, you think Russians are naturally,

genetically superior in athletics? Well, some of them. That's why they're so good? Have you ever seen Provodnikov? Yep. That guy looks like, Max Kellerman did the best description of him. He said they thawed out a caveman, put some boxing gloves on him.

But Provodnikov is sort of my, he actually, I think he serves my argument better because he's not that talented. I mean, he's talented, but the reason he's so successful is that he can get punched in the head 500 times. He's got brutal power. His chin is endless. His chin is very good, but He's got brutal power. His chin is endless. His chin is very good, but he also has brutal power. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you don't look at him and say, wow, what a naturally gifted boxer, right?

Compared to... Not like a Floyd or whoever. Floyd Mayweather is very, very skillful. He's a craftsman. He's a real professional. But Provodnikov is very slick, too. He's deceptively slick. Sure.

He just fucking hits really hard too. Yeah, yeah. It's a murderous puncher. Yeah, but you don't look at him and think, wow, he's, you know, he's like. Yeah, but that murderous punching ability is something you just don't,

you can't earn. I agree. There's a thing about punching. You either can hit hard or you can't hit hard. You could take a guy and teach him till the cows come home or you could find some guy who's working construction somewhere and he could

punch a bag and you just go Jesus Christ and you know what it's like it's like throwing a baseball right it's the same it's essentially the same mechanics yeah and right same thing with baseball you can't really teach it's hard to teach that like some guys just have an arm mm-hmm right and some guys just don't right now look at those guys who have those arms, right? And some guys just don't. Now, look at those guys who have those arms in Major League Baseball. Tell me what color they are. It's all white guys.

Pretty much. What the fuck? See, man? Now we're confused. But there's a difference between boxing power, the punching power, and throwing balls for some reason. And I don't know what it is, but I don't know if they're completely connected. There's something about getting maximum torque. I mean, I just feel like it's similar.

I would think so, but, well, it is in some ways. There's a guy named Takanori Gomi who was a very good pitcher in Japan, and he became a knockout fighter as an MMA fighter, and he throws punches a lot like the way a guy throws a fastball. He's always out of balance. He throws everything behind his shot. Yeah, it's similar mechanics, I would say, in a lot of ways. But I think, well, boxing, I think you can get away with having shorter arms, whereas pitchers seems to be like that's a big factor in the mechanical advantage of longer frames.

Yeah, Tyson had short arms, advantage of yeah tyson had short arms frames yeah short arms yeah but he got maximum but no but think about tyson that people don't talking about boxing whatever he got maximum leverage with his body right people miss that they think he's just this huge dude with giant muscles but if you look at the way he threw a hook he got maximum leverage that's what that's where the power came from there's lots of guys just as bigger bigger who can't punch like that right and also his speed was ridiculous he could throw a 10 punch combination in two seconds sure like literally you there's there's videos of him hitting the bags like right and you're just like that's like a lightweight that's 135 pound guy meanwhile he's 220 and he also had giant legs and that's where

a lot of the power comes from like if you look at pacquiao's legs pacquiao has enormous legs but again it's the it's the mechanics of it you could be just that big and punch like a girl well you also could be you know i mean the mechanics it's not the same with everybody there's guys that are built like tyson but for whatever reason they just can't generate that kind of power tim lincecum the giants pitcher he's a great example right he's like a buck 40 or something is he really? He can fucking throw 90 whatever it is miles per hour. He's a buck 40? I don't know.

He looks like he's very small. He's very skinny. Little wiry guy. But they show he gets this incredible torque in his torso across his chest. Well, proper mechanics are gigantic when it comes to martial arts. It's a huge thing. Technique is virtually everything. But then there's technique amongst gifted athletes.

But yeah, I guess, so getting that particular leverage and mastering that, having that mechanics is something that's not really always, you can't really teach it is what we're getting at, right? You can't teach bone structure too. I agree with you. Well, yeah. Bone structure is the big one.

Geometry, body geometry. Like George Foreman. He had canned hams for fists. They were the biggest fucking hands ever. If you saw his hands, he'd make a fist. You'd go, what the fuck? And that was why George Foreman could hit guys on the arms, and their arms would go numb.

Right. He just had this weird mechanical advantage. It's true. Yeah, the mechanical advantage of bone size and density and shape, the width of the shoulders as well, directly translates to punching power. It's very strange stuff. Yeah, I know. It's like an alchemy.

You can't necessarily, you can't look at a guy and predict it, right? Not only that, it's genetically variable. Like I have a friend, my friend Ian McCall, he's a highly ranked UFC fighter. His brother has brutal power. He jokes around about it. He's like, my brother got the power. I don't have any power. Like his brother has this brutal knockout power apparently.

His brother doesn't even fight. Is his brother the same size, like tiny? I don't know. I don't know. But he's just, that doesn't even matter. There's this guy named John Lineker who's a flyweight. I know. Tremendous power. Ridiculous knockout puncher right he's 125 pounds but he hits way harder

than anybody else in the division it's just one of those weird things like why does why can he do that i don't know i know that's yeah anyway but he's white he's a white guy he's brazilian actually lineker is lineker's brazilian okay yeah so he's kind of white yeah right you know the brazilian you can be white and brazilian oh most certainly but brazil is such a melting pot yeah well they have a they have a tripartite racial structure japanese a lot of japanese influence there's a lot of black a lot of portuguese of course the language being portuguese that's a very unique and amazing well. Well, there it's weird. Here you're either white or black, and that's all there is.

But there you can be white. I don't know what the name is for the people who are mixed race, but they have a name for it and a category, which is different. Yeah, I don't know. So there's black, there's white, and then there's something else. There's a lot going on over there. There is. I mean, that's where all the real MMA started.

That's the birth of, I mean, you want to talk culture. That's an incredible cultural melting mean, the real MMA started. That's the birth of, I mean, that's, you know, you want to talk culture. That's an incredible cultural melting pot. So there you go. How do you explain that? Right. So why is Brazil become sort of the capital of martial arts? Well, it's arguably not the capital, but it's certainly where it came from as far as like high level mixed martial arts. But what's really crazy is it can all be boiled down to one family the graces yeah it's i mean that's the fucking that's the seed of

martial arts that is the one the most important family right but why but why did it take off like it did in that in that particular country right it sort of hardened until it came to america that's what people don't realize brazil like everybody thought that jiu-jitsu was gigantic in brazil like everyone in america thought that jiu-jitsu was gigantic in brazil when it came over here like oh the all the brazilians know brazilian jiu-jitsu like no it was a small clan of bad motherfuckers that had figured it out and yeah they had world championships over there and yes the level of jiu-jitsu was much higher in brazil than it was anywhere else in the world but it was still a fairly small group in comparison to what it's become today right and that happened in 1993 when they came to america

and started the ultimate fighting championship which was started by a brazilian jiu-jitsu family and won yeah yeah right hoist gracie dominated it, and his brother started it all off. If it wasn't for Horian Gracie, there would have been no Ultimate Fighting Championship. If it wasn't for Horian's father, Elio, there would have been no family of champions that could show the world this incredible new style. It all came from this one family, which is just amazing. If that guy wasn't alive, if there was no Elio Gracie, no Carlos Gracie, and no Maeda. Maeda was the guy who came to brazil the japanese guy who came and taught them judo and jujitsu if it wasn't for those three people

there's no ultimate fighting championship and mixed martial arts is set back fucking a thousand years i mean who knows there's more evolution in martial arts since 1993 than there have been in the past thousand years oh yeah no doubt so that's all from three people yeah well it's crazy no it's from millions of people but it's three people started it all off maeda who teaches carlos and carlos and ilio sure but like the question is why did that become so popular right that's which i can't answer culture is hard that you it's you asked about the cause of cultures right it's very hard to nail down the cause of a culture. Why do we believe what we believe?

Why did that particular thing, that sport, become this international phenomenon? I don't know. Well, for martial arts, for mixed martial arts, it's pretty simple. Because everybody wants to know who's the baddest motherfucker on the planet. We always thought it was a boxer until we saw a boxer getting taken down and just strangled at will and they were so helpless right and we saw like james tony who's this great fighter who's like one of the best boxers pound for pound i mean of our generation james tony's an outstanding boxer randy couture

takes him down like it's nothing and just dominates him. Like a joke. Right. Like he didn't belong in there. But see, that's a cultural question too. Why do we like to know who the best badass is? Who the biggest badass is? What's the most effective martial art? Is that cultural?

Do you think that's not just genetic, just a male thing? That was the founding question of the UFC, right? What is the best, most effective martial art? Yeah. So answering that was what the UFC's mission was, right? Right. In a way, right?

So, but like that kind of begs the question, like, why do we give a shit? It's just male dominator, chimpanzee DNA. Okay. It's just still running around inside of our heads.

Well, you know, why do we, why do we want to know who has the biggest dick? Why do we want to know who has the biggest yacht? Not all of us do, Joe, you know.

Well, some of us do. Pretending you don't care. some of us don't need to ask well listen that's cute i mean these are questions that are just they're just normal natural human questions especially when you're dealing with primates don't you think is that not a good enough i'm always skeptical when people make uh claims about coasters well no it's not no it's a natural determinism you know it's like tracing it back to something in nature and i think it's very tricky to do that well it's also we live in an incredibly warlike society and we are running on the momentum of many many wars and our dominance over these wars i mean our victories world war one world war two not so much vietnam but all this other the the military

industrial complex which has sort of infiltrated the entire world with military bases i mean that that's our dna it's one of the reasons why canadians are so much different than us wait wait wait you think that americans have gone to war the way we have for some biological reason? No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that the momentum of those conflicts is a part of our culture. Oh, cultural DNA. Yes. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sure. I mean, the momentum, yeah, not DNA, like as in genetics, but I mean. Cultural DNA. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, sure. The momentum of it. Sure. The fact that we're all born in a society that watches. like as in genetics but i mean cultural dna yeah i mean sure the momentum of it just that the fact

that we're all born in a society that watches i mean how many fucking war movies have there been jesus christ i mean every time you turn around there's some new movie about americans going and kicking ass in war and fighting battles and killing the nazis i mean we probably made a way more movies about nazis you know, about killing Nazis. I mean, we're still making it. What was it, Clinton and Glorious Bastards? Is that what it was? Yeah.

Tarantino? Yeah. I mean, we still, a good Nazi killing movie? Fuck yeah, man. Sign us up. Well, now it's the Afghans. I just watched Luke Survivor. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The Marky Mark movie. Marky Mark. He's going to be Marky Mark forever. Sorry. I'm that age. He's doing well. I can't get over it. When you're my age, you can't get over that. I say it, too. I just thought it was funny that you called him Marky Mark. He's going to be Marky Mark forever. Sorry. I'm that age. He's doing well. I can't get over when you're my age

you can't get over that. I say it too. I just thought it was funny that you called him Marky Mark. You have to be our age, right? Yeah. If you're in your 40s he's Marky Mark.

Yeah. I'm sorry. Remember the Calvin Klein ads. I'm sorry Mr. Wahlberg. I'm sorry. He's a very good actor. No disrespect. He is.

But he's Marky Mark. So now we're killing a lot of Arabs in the movies. Right. True. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting.

But the idea being that we have a very warlike society absolutely i mean the probably arguably the most warlike if you look at in terms of like history i would not argue against that yeah it kind of has to be if there's a hundred plus military bases all throughout the country if you look at the world the world? And if you look at casualties created by American military interventions, right? Beginning with the American Revolution, Civil War was a fucking bloodbath. Spanish-American War, which we all forget about, killed tens of thousands of Filipinos. World War I, another fucking bloodbath. Right.

World War II. What's the total number since the 1776 awesome question and i should i'm surprised i haven't added it up but um more or less than 50 million oh that americans have killed yeah well that's the hard thing to determine well first of all a lot of these people we don't know about right because like vietnamese we don't know exactly how many people died under those bombs right uh you know the estimates range from one to two million Vietnamese died in that war, but we don't know. I mean, a lot of them were vaporized. So or just died in the jungle and no one ever found them. So but it's not a bad. I would guess that the US, the United States of

America has probably killed more people than anyone else. What about Genghis Khan? Oh, God, we crush him. Really? Oh, yeah. Because because first of all he wasn't using modern weaponry but do you know how many people he killed? no but I can't there's no way how many do you think? I have no idea but just Hiroshima alone

there's no way he killed that many people they believe that during Genghis Khan's lifetime between the time he was born and the time you know his direct lineage died between depending on who you ask 20 and 70 million people.

11% of the population of the world. How are they counting that, though? I have no idea. Yeah, not with weapons. I mean, some of that could have been disease and dislocation

and starvation. They just fucking killed entire populations of cities. They killed a million people. Direct murder of people? They had so many bodies stacked up that the Khwarizmian Shah had sent this scout team to go check out Jin China.

They had gotten there after the Mongols had already invaded. And getting close, they had abandoned their mission because the roads were so covered in dead bodies and decay that people were getting sick and dying. The roads were filled with mud, and the mud was actually the decaying bodies and made the roads unstable. They saw a pile of bones in the distance that they thought was a snow-covered mountain. And as they got closer, they realized it was bones. Okay. Dan Carlin's Hardcore History does a five-part piece on the wrath of the Khans. So much so that there was a recent study that showed that they did core samples

that the carbon footprint of Earth changed during his lifetime because he killed so many people. Wow, I didn't know this. Okay, so fine, so we're second. 11% of the people on the Earth. We're the runners-up then, okay. He can be the champion.

He wins in a big way because they were using fucking arrows. Yeah, exactly. And bodies that they would light on fire and shoot with catapults. Yeah, that's impressive. With no nuclear bombs and no tanks. Yeah. That's impressive.

And no, you know, fighter jets. But yeah, but the reason for bringing that up is I wish you had known more about Genghis Khan because I would ask, well, how does a culture become that warlike? Right. Because that was like some complete next level shit yeah but even experts in that field wouldn't be able to answer that right right i mean i don't think i don't think they can even try it speculates too far also there's for that era there's so few records it's really difficult to do history right i mean we know some stuff but

it's we know so much less than we do about the 20th century right right yeah 12 20 you know what the fuck did they write down exactly right yeah they do have the 20th century right right yeah 1220 you know what the fuck did they write down exactly right yeah they do have the secret history of the mongol race i mean they wrote their own history but you know right it's hard history being written by the winners is difficult anyway exactly when the winners actually killed 11 of the population exactly who else is left what are they going to say about it i wonder well they were saying in carlin's work he was talking about how that's there's a great argument about iraq and that baghdad literally never recovered from genghis khan invading in the 1200s

like that was the the muslim people the the islamic people were the head, the front of the line when it came to science and philosophy. And it was just a completely different idea of the Islamic culture than we look at today. But Genghis Khan, they sacked Baghdad and killed everyone, killed the entire town. They were the original double-tap missile. Not only they would kill the entire town, they would go away and then come back several days later and kill anybody who had been hiding. I mean, they're just unbelievably ruthless. So was there an ideology driving this? That's a good question.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know enough about it. I just know what I've heard him talk about. Yeah. I'm just a lowly U.S. historian. We don't do that. Well, what's the ideology for what we've done?

Ah. Well, that's another question. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, hey. So good question. So, I mean. God guts glory ram. Yeah. Well, so there's that the john mccain school right which is like defend american honor it's

very masculine right they wronged us so we gotta go fucking avenge ourselves i mean i do think that's like that's kind of like the base of the republican party you know i think that that's why they want to go abroad they don't it's not even ideological. It's sort of this primal masculine urge to defend one's family and honor. That's one reason we've gone and killed people. Then the other is economic, which everyone knows about. The war was for oil or natural resources or strategic advantage against our enemies. And then the third, which is what I talk a lot about, is this humanitarian shit, right? Which is like, we need to go out and save the world. We

need to go out and make people be like us. And I think that drives actually a lot more foreign policy than we give it credit for. Especially now, especially with the Obama administration. So if you look at people inside of his administration, like Samantha Power and Susan Rice, and even Obama himself, and even Joe Biden, they really come from that kind of thinking about, you know, they're like community organizers or people who did go out into the ghettos to like uplift these poor people. Right. That's right. That's who they are. So they've and they've said this. You ask them or read them what they have to say. They say we need to go and save the Libyans. So that means we got to bomb Libya. We need to save the Syrians. So we got to bomb Syria. We got to save, and they're big on Africa. Susan Rice and Samantha Power have been calling for basically invading Africa for a long, long time to stop another Rwanda from happening, to stop another genocide from happening. It's this very, it's this incredible thing that's that americans and the british really kind of created and perfected over the last 120 or so years the british were all about this right

uh south africa was all about you know it was about taking the goods down there the diamonds and the minerals and all that shit but it was also about uplifting the savages and all of africa so is it having this ulterior motive, like, justifies the invasion? Like, you know, having resources there justifies the invasion? Right. Some people think that, that they're being dishonest. I don't. I think they're true believers.

Not all of them. Not all of them. But you think Obama's a true believer? Yeah. Oh, yeah. And if you read his stuff, a lot of people don't know this, but, like, if you read, he has an article in 2007 when he was just starting to run for president in Foreign Affairs Journal. He says, America needs to be the world's leader. And he says, for that, to do that, we need to increase the military dramatically.

We need to have more Marines, more Army soldiers, the whole nine yards. He called for increasing the military budget. People don't realize this, in 2007. And he said, because we need to lead the world. We need to be everywhere in the world. Hillary's the same way. Well, how do you reconcile the differences between what he said when he was running for office and what he did when he got into the office? I think he got a lot of pushback.

You know, I think a lot of people, both in Congress and sort of in the public generally, have been less and less interested in war for a lot of good reasons. And one of the interesting things is it's been, as you said, it's been less and less interested in war for a lot of good reasons. And one of the interesting things is it's been, as you said, it's been left and right, you know, it's been people on the left and the right have been less and less interested in the war. So for the first time in decades, we have several, many Republican politicians who are basically anti-war, you know, and, and powerfully and loudly anti-war like Rand Paul. He's sort of like how the libertarian bend kind of kind of although most libertarians hate his guts because he's he's kind of he's kind of diverged he's a little wishy he's

definitely wishy for them yeah is that because he's like seen what's happened to his dad i think it's because he's running for president in a real way whereas for his dad it was always just a protest right right he wasn't really going to win ever so he could be pure ideologically so you think he's playing ball a little bit i think so who knows but does he have a chance small one i'd say small one it's going to be interesting so what's what's going to be fascinating and i hope this happens is that it's rand versus hillary because on foreign policy and on a lot and on drugs by the way uh she's gonna be the right winger and he's gonna be the left winger she how weird she sucks on the war on drugs and on foreign policy she wants to bomb the fuck out of everybody and she's all about incarcerating people

for drugs really yeah she's but she's certainly never said anything otherwise um and every time she's been out and she's her voting record if you look at her voting record it's all for the war on drugs top to bottom and her fucking husband was like a leader of it rand on the other hand is not perfect on foreign policy but he's way less interventionist than she is right much more hesitant to go abroad with the 82nd airborne and he's awesome on drugs you know he's about legalizing weed tomorrow and he's probably soft even on the powders. The big fear that everyone has with the idea of a non-interventionalist foreign policy is that some big evil government will build up. Without us being there to smack them down, some ISIS-type scenario will get completely out of control and you know start killing americans abroad and launching attacks that's the big fear right well okay so you know that's an argument for having a

powerful defensive military right that's not what we've ever had we've never had a defensive military well you would know from studying martial arts that the best defense is a good offense you can also i've heard the other, I've heard the flip of that, right? It's the other way around too, right? Good defense is a good offense. Well, I mean, the point is that the U.S. military historically has never been used defensively, really. It's never, ever, even in World War II. I mean, it's hard to even argue that Pearl Harbor was, you know, it was, first of all, a lot of people have said that the Japanese were forced to attack Pearl Harbor, but certainly apart from World War

II, I mean, the U.S. military has never been used truly in defense of us. And that's what people need to come to grips with. So, you know, if you want to talk about changing that pattern, you know, and creating a military that is truly defensive and changing the culture so that we are interested in our military only as a defensive mechanism means, right, then we have something to talk about. But that's not the way it's ever been used. Right. And what would be the argument for, I mean, is there an argument for beefing up our presence abroad to prevent peace or to ensure peace, rather? I mean, is there an argument for like the McCain School of Thought, like beefing up our positions in all these different parts of the world just to make sure that like an ISIS type situation could never rise up. Yeah, there's definitely an argument.

It's called Pax Americana, the American peace. A great example of that argument was a document written by a think tank in 2000, 99 or 2000. You may have heard of this. Project for a New American Century. Okay, was a think tank in Washington, DC, which was full of people who ended up in the Bush administration. Neoconservatives. And in that document, it's called Rebuilding America's Defense, as you can Google it, it's online. In that document, they call for a massive buildup of the US military. They called for a massive deployment of troops and bases and aircraft carriers all across the world. And they said that that is necessary to maintain world order, American dominance, and they said peace.

dominance and they said peace and one of the scariest things about that document is that in it and everyone should look at this it says this is in 2000 it says we can't convince congress or the american people to go for this program to spend way more money on our defense on our military and and build these bases all over the world and send aircraft carriers everywhere, unless, they said in the document, unless there is a precipitating event like Pearl Harbor. Yeah. That's always the argument. Now, I'm not a truther. I don't think they actually did fly. I don't think the Bush administration was responsible for 9-11, but no question about it.

It served their purposes. Well, you would know that quote. no question about it it's served their purposes well you would know that quote there's a famous quote about any um situation that's not capitalized on any tragic event that's not capitalized on is truly a tragedy yeah there's some military quote about that never let it well i know that what's been said recently has never let a good crisis go to waste yeah right that's there i don't remember what the yeah but it's something along those lines that's essentially what the idea and that's there i don't remember what the yeah but it's something along those lines that's essentially what the idea and that's what i've had a problem with a lot of people that say that oh the government planned it look how they capitalized on it man just because somebody

capitalized on something doesn't mean they planned it it's just it's much more likely they saw an opening to pass through like that's also been the argument about ok City. When Oklahoma City, there's a radical sweep of legislation that went through, that couldn't go through, anti-terrorism type legislation post-Oklahoma City. Well, they planned Oklahoma City. They blew up that building and they blamed it on Timothy McVeigh in order to push this. No fertilizer. There's all these compelling arguments about it that are really confusing as fuck. Because you get trapped down that rabbit hole of you know those wacky websites yeah they don't need a conspiracy right they got what they wanted in 9-11 and in oklahoma city they got the

justification the rationale for a massive ramping up of the u.s military and the state surveillance apparatus and the rest of it. But what's your take on false flag events that have actually happened? Like what? Well, okay, let's have a planned one that didn't happen. Northwoods. What's Northwoods? I don't even know what that is.

You don't know what Operation Northwoods is? Maybe. Wow. Operation Northwoods was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1962, and it was a plan to get people enthusiastic about a war with Cuba. They were going to blow up a drone jetliner, blame it on the Cubans. They were going to arm Cuban friendlies and bomb Guantanamo Bay. And they were going to kill American civilians. And they were going to blame it on Cuba.

And that was going to get us – it was vetoed by Kennedy. And they were going to blame it on Cuba. And that was going to get us. It was vetoed by Kennedy. Yeah. This was the Kennedy era CIA, which was one of the crazier iterations of the CIA. Yeah. So they had a lot of that shit going on then. There was absolutely straight up closed door cigar smoking conspiracies in that CIA and in other CIAs too.

That was kind of the peak of that, you know, blowing up Castro's cigars and all that shit. Right. Yeah. They wanted to put like dynamite inside yeah it was those dudes it's that kind of group right then who were part of that so oh sure hilarious idea isn't it a real exploding cigar like fucking geniuses yeah if you want it's a really fun i mean it's funny now thank god they weren't six they have never tried these things but they had all kinds of plans like that that were utterly ridiculous um to get to basically to get Castro out. So, sure.

I mean, and I'm sure right as we speak in the Pentagon, someone's coming up with some secret plan to do something bad to somebody. Well, wasn't that an issue with when the Bush administration was leaving? They were trying to plan something against Iran. There was some sort of a false flag against iran that dick cheney was accused of being a part of certainly never came to fruition i wouldn't put it past them yeah but those those things can happen but they're very difficult to organize and pull off absolutely and on a scale of like 9-11 the amount of people that would have to be involved yeah the point is again they don't need it you know like they got that as you were saying they've got their culture behind them well it's also the idea about something like isis like why

would you cause a false flag when you could just leave a bunch of weapons lying around a bunch of assholes suit up and get crazy and then shoot them down exactly exactly yeah that's that's hard to wrap your head around isn't it that's that's hard to believe that that's a real a real strategy yeah it's really depressing and scary actually i mean if you look in 1984 that's hard to believe that that's a real strategy. Yeah. It's really depressing and scary, actually. I mean, if you look at 1984, that's what that is. That book is about endless war. That's the theme of that book. And it's looking more and more like that. You as a student and a professor of history, as a guy who's really studied it over and over again, do you see a solution to this sort of a quagmire do you see a potential road out of this

yeah out now that's yeah tomorrow today you know i mean and that's and let everybody over there just blow themselves up let them figure it out isis rise to power they have a fucking 100 billion dollars in nuclear power and just just deal with, I mean, I think every piece of intervention makes it worse for us. I do. I think that, you know, until we started bombing ISIS, they had no reason to attack us. Now they have a good reason to fly planes into our buildings. It also seems to me that as technology improves

and as our ability to kill people easier and quicker improves, it gets weirder and weirder when you're willing to engage in war. improves it gets weirder and weirder when you're willing to engage in war like post hiroshima it became this fact that nuclear power and nuclear arsenals existed and it can be done but it hasn't been done since it's like it's so atrocious and it kills so many civilians and it's so non-surgical that we we decide we're not going to do that anymore but it's always there we're pointing them at the soviet union the soviet union's pointing them at us everyone during your your high school years in my high school years we were terrified of being attacked by russia and we're going to mutually assured self-destruction was the only thing keeping all

this from happening but as technology gets better it's it's almost easier for people to cause mass destruction almost easier now than ever before that's true because even scarier when you're you're you now you have drones and now you have suitcase nukes and now you have all this new technology disbursement of toxins and absolutely so here's you know that's the reason not to piss them off yeah so that's my out now position right that's what that leads into it's like let's if you kick a dog is it more likely to bite you i think so the cia would say no listen we need to keep these motherfuckers right we're going to put our hand right in their forehead let them keep swinging that way if we ever have to pop a cap at them we'll pull the gun out with our left

hand yeah but all of that shit was created by u.s policy osama bin laden was trained by the cia right i mean the mujahideen against the soviets that he got weapons and training and he was their All of that shit was created by U.S. policy. Osama bin Laden was trained by the CIA, right? I mean, Mujahideen against the Soviets. He got weapons and training, and he was their buddies, right? Not only that, they instituted the idea of blowing yourself up. I mean, this holy war thing, this jihad as a holy war, it really, that wasn't a part of their culture until the CIA came along and taught them it. Yeah, no, for sure.

Yeah. Yeah. It's the whole thing, the whole history of the last 30 or so years in the Middle East. That's all. All the bad stuff is created by U.S. policy. But it's so hard for us to step out and go, well, let's just let them figure it out on their own. Yeah, I understand. We're like, nope, nope.

We got to be there. No. Got to be there keeping the peace. Out now, man. What would you do about ISIS if you were the president? President Russell. The people of, so, right. So there are very substantial armies surrounding ISIS right now that are not the Americans, right?

The Kurds have an army. Iraq has an army. Saudis don't want those dudes around. And we're a part of this attack on them. It's not just the United States attack. But ISIS is maybe 20 to 30,000 19 to 20-year-old dudes. Is that really what it is? Something like that.

I've never seen an estimate more than 30,000. They're a bunch of fucking teenage lunatics, you know, basically. I mean, that's the core of them. And then in terms of like the hardcore membership, the estimates I've seen are more like 10,000. What are they going to do against the Kurdish army, the Iraqi army, and the Saudis? I don't see it. So yeah, good luck, dudes. And also on top of that, as I was saying earlier, good luck trying to impose Sharia on a whole population that's streaming The Simpsons through its satellite dishes. Good luck with that.

streaming the Simpsons through its satellite dishes. Good luck with that. But when you see these guys getting their heads cut off on television, that, to me, the big production of taking people, especially taking people that don't deserve it, that's one of the weird ones to me. That's like, what could be gained out of cutting someone's head? I've heard people say... Terror.

Well, yeah. I've also heard people say terror well yeah i've also heard people say that this is to try to get americans to not go there and i'm like that is the last thing oh of course not that would work for you're gonna kill journalists and cut their heads off we're gonna demand action they're obviously baiting us into it but why uh well for the reasons we've been talking about they know that if americans intervene and start bombing people they're going to kill some civilians and guess who who will be uh great recruits recruiting material the families of those civilians killed so you think it's a the strategy to create martyrs probably we don't know for sure but i put that it would be a smart one yeah

makes sense to me what a weird strategy well no to get the u.s short-sighted is it possible that they just they're just not thinking that far in advance? No, I mean, the strategy is to get us to drop bombs on the people of the Middle East, right, which tends to, it's the blowback theory, which tends to cause people to dislike the United States and join groups like ISIS, right? So it's a great, as David Petraeus himself said, it's a great, it's actually a great recruiting tool. So US foreign policy interventions in the Middle East has served as the greatest recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and ISIS, of course. Right. You get people to be pissed off and want to, I mean, what would cause you to join a terrorist group?

I mean, the only thing that would cause me to do that is if someone dropped a fucking bomb on my family. Right. Right. You know, I'd be, I'd be not a nice person. Right. And I'd be willing to do all kinds of crazy shit I wasn't willing to do prior to that, right? What better way than to get the United States to start doing that, create a whole population of potential recruits? Wow.

That's a fascinating endgame. They're crazy, but they're not stupid. That's terrifying. It's just, it's terrifying when, I remember when I was a boy. it's it's terrifying when i remember when i was a boy i i think i was probably like seven somewhere around then when the vietnam war ended between seven and ten something like that i was living in san francisco so it was between seven and ten and um the war ended and i remember thinking to myself as a young boy they're done with war beautiful this is good i really remember thinking that like like people figured out that war is terrible and we'll never go to war again.

And then when we invaded Iraq, after Iraq invaded Kuwait, I think I was probably 21. And I remember thinking, I can't fucking believe we're at war again. I thought we were done. I thought people had realized that war is ridiculous and we would never go to war again. I thought people had realized that war is ridiculous and we would never go to war again. And that was just the tip of the iceberg in comparison to this insanity that's happened post 9-11. The post 9-11 insanity is just this perpetual war, the culture of war. Every bomb we drop there perpetuates the war.

That's my point. Because it creates more enemies. Or we just fuck so many people up, there's no enemies right so right that's one option you can kill all of them kill everybody kill all of them okay kill them all let god sort them out isn't that like a marine t-shirt or something so let's do that let's do that let's drop many many many nuclear bombs all across the arabian plain and see what happens yeah so. So there's two options. Kill them all or get out. Yes.

Or do what we're doing and ensure perpetual war. Yeah, that's how I see it. Do you buy into the conspiracies like the Eisenhower conspiracy when he was leaving office, when he was saying beware of the military and industrial complex, there's a machine that wants to go to war. Do you buy that they look at this perpetual war as a constant profit source um so defense contractors is what he was talking about and he was talking about also research universities who are in working with the defense contractors of course damn they love war sure raytheon wants all the wars in the world, right? Allegedly.

No, definitely. But the question is, are they really running the show? Right. Or to what extent? To what extent? Yeah, now we know that if you look at Hillary Clinton's list of donors, it's like she's been called the senator from Lockheed Martin because she gets so many donations from him.

And is she the only one? Of course not. But, you know, they have other interests. They have constituents. They have all sorts of competing interests. I think the defense contractors have some power, just like the Israeli lobby has some power. But I actually, at the end of the day, I think that they're autonomous and I think they have their own motives. And I think a lot of them are, especially with people like Hillary and Obama and others, and the neocons under Bush had an ideological motivation, which was Pax Americana, which was a world order controlled by us or controlled by them, I should say.

They had this whole section on whistleblowers about helping whistleblowers alert the American people to crime and to things that are going on that are unconstitutional. And then it's all been removed from the website. And now you see how horrible he's been on not just whistleblowers but on the on people, forcing people to divulge their sources. The worst. Yeah. The ACLU has called him the worst president. How the fuck does that happen? Is that just a guy that's just under pressure once he gets into office?

Or is that how he was all along? I think it's who he was all along. So he was just bullshitting. So in 2007, 2008, when he's running for president, I felt like I was on an island in a sea of crazy people because I was reading what he was writing. I was listening to his speeches. I read the Democratic Party's platform for 2008. And in it, it was all about the military-industrial complex. It was all about expanding American power and control abroad. It was about increasing the

military budget, increasing the number of Marines and army soldiers. It was about not repealing the Patriot Act. It was about a very powerful state, nation state that controlled not just people abroad, but people here. Dude has always been about that always he's always been he's always been a nationalist first um an american nationalist first and everything else is second and so yeah i was sort of listening to these people talk about him being a peace candidate and someone who would eliminate the patriot act and someone who would you know never spy on americans and i'm like no look at who he was when he was running he He was saying this publicly. He wasn't keeping it secret. It's just people wanted to see something else in him for various reasons.

Because he's articulate as opposed to Bush, because he's well-educated, because he's black. You said black with me. You were holding on to black. I was. Biting my time there yeah well i you know one of the most disturbing moments of the debates to me was when him and mccain were going at it and uh mccain corrected him about afghanistan and mccain you know we were talking about like just going in afghanistan and sending in troops and he's like hold on do you know what the fuck you're talking about essentially mccain was like have you been afghanistan do you know what it's like there like that that place is run the same way

it was run when alexander the great was around right it's really not that much different it's incredibly difficult terrain really hard to get anywhere people can hide anywhere yeah it's essentially you have one city in the entire country you got kabul and then you got warlords warlords that control small groups of people and they're scattered throughout the country right good luck yeah so when John McCain is taking the peace position in a debate with you yeah yeah I should tell you something about who you are yeah for me was like no he's a warmonger he always has been Obama yeah yeah always has been oh that's incredible oh yeah hope and change man what are talking about? What happened to hope and change?

Restoring America's Leadership, 2007 Foreign Affairs article. Everyone should read it. Yeah, everyone should, I guess. It's short, too. It'll take you five minutes. What do you think about the WikiLeaks stuff and the Edward Snowden stuff and all this new, the digital age that we live in is very fascinating to me in that there's just a certain amount of impossibility in controlling data when you get to like a large organization like the united states military no matter how how well they put up their firewalls no matter how good

they guard their data you're still dealing with human beings and young human beings by the way yeah it's weird technology can cut either way right so it beings, by the way. Yeah, it's weird. Technology can cut either way, right? So it's like it's on the one hand, it's very difficult for those large institutions to control their information now, right? We can get in there like Snowden did and like WikiLeaks has. We can get in there and disperse it and everybody fucking knows what they're up to. So that's kind of good, I think, for democracy and for freedom and for us and for our privacy and power, et cetera, against them. But on the other hand, they can use it against us and are all the time, right?

So they have all these cameras everywhere and all these cities, you know, New York City and London. I think London, isn't there a camera on every corner in London now? How about Camden, New Jersey, where they don't even have cops anymore? Exactly. They replaced the cops with cameras. Right, exactly. So, yeah, and, you know um so they're looking at us and the fbi apparently has this thing where they're looking at us through our

webcams um on our computers i got tape on mine bitch right yeah good good move i just want to watch a middle-aged man beat off you're on your own can't fucking get it from me they might even want that information let's just go ahead i beat off the normal stuff you want to ask me i'll show you i'll send you the links but but i'm not a you know i'm not hiding anything if i was like say if i was a person in a position of influence and i was you know concerned about my future and my position in the company and they found out that i was only watching tranny porn exactly sorry if Sorry, I said tranny. You're not allowed to say tranny anymore.

Yeah, right. Transgender porn. Yeah, Dan Savage, of all people, got into trouble for using the word tranny. Isn't that hilarious? Can you believe that shit? Well, how about the guy who runs Bravo? What is his name?

Cohen, Andy Cohen? He got in trouble for saying twink. Oh, I didn't know that. Calling someone a perfect twink. Right. Like, you can't say twink. There's people out there that are just fucking professional victims, you know, know that. Calling someone a perfect twink. Right. Like, you can't say twink. There's people out there that are just fucking professional victims.

Mm-hmm. You know? And that's what Full Circle brings us back to what we were talking about when it came to colleges. And that's one of the reasons why I want to play Dear Woman for you. Ah! Do you have it? Yep.

Did you pull it up? You have to see this. Okay. Because this is the white knight encapsulated. This is the white knight ideology encapsulated in the most ridiculous form. My blood pressure is about to go up. No, you're going to love it. Okay.

It's beautiful. Dear woman, we stand before you today as men committed to becoming more conscious in every way. We feel deep love, great respect, and a growing sense of worship for the gifts of the feminine. Great respect and a growing sense of worship for the gifts of the feminine We also feel deep sorrow about the destructive actions of the unconscious masculine in the past and present We want to apologize and make amends for those actions today so that we can move forward together into a new era of co-creation Isn't this beautiful? As I become's more conscious. Isn't he beautiful? Full spectrum.

Like the sky. the sky I commit to owning this car ding a masculinity that honors and celebrates us as equals I know it's a truly honor you as a multi-dimensional woman I must stand fully present with myself whoa and own the gifts I have to share with you we can create great miracles together oh my god by nurturing each other in a conscious way. By treating each other with reverence and respect. And by worshiping the divinity expressed in the masculine and the feminine energies. What? As men our relationship to the feminine has often been unconscious. I feel sorrow that women and feminine energy have for so long been subjugated and oppressed.

Throughout history, men have raped and abused. This goes on for eight minutes. Yeah, we can stop at any moment now. Oh, look, they're playing a theatrical version of a woman on the stake. Barred you from religious and political office. Okay, stop right here. You know what it reminds me of a little bit? You know, purity balls? Yes. You know what it reminds me of a little bit? You know purity balls?

Yes. You know, where like the girls, the daughters. The Jonas bracelets. They had a purity bracelet for Jonas Brothers. The dad just like embracing his daughter and then pledging purity. It's something. There's like a vibe there that reminds me of that. Yeah, and then Will Ferrell did a Funny or Die parody of it.

That this guy fucking, that guy reacted to it in a very negative way. It was kind of funny. Oh, was he aggressive and violent about it? He was upset. Was he upset? He was mocking. He was angry? That's a masculine trait.

He was saying. Who are these weirdos? I've never heard of this. They're fucking weirdos. They're just losers. They're guys that chicks don't want to fuck, so they come up with new strategies. This is what I've always said, and this is very unfortunate but it is is reality when it comes to men men are slimy fucks who are making sperm 24 hours a day and we want to have sex and here's the deal if we're heterosexual and ladies if you see a guy

and you don't want to fuck them don't trust them because if you don't want to fuck them chances are a bunch of other girls don't want to fuck them either and so he has to develop tricks in order to stay in the game. And one of the best tricks is to separate himself from the pack by saying, dear woman, I recognize the duality. Yeah. You fucking dork. I know what you're doing. I want to take that guy hunting.

I want to put him on a fucking, give him a rifle, make him hike up to the top of the hill and find your own food. He's lacking in all masculine positive traits he's fucking cowering i'd rather be a woman i want to take him to a singles bar see anywhere see how he does but any woman who's not out of her fucking mind that's the question in a heartbeat how successful is that yeah completely unsuccessful doesn't work at all how many views did it get well probably a million, but everyone's mocking it. Just for fun, yeah, right?

Yeah, everyone's just like, what the fuck? I've probably seen 100,000 myself. It's fucking preposterous. He's a goofball. But there's a lot of those goofballs out there that are separating themselves from the herd. They see a group of people that are reacting to the douchebags of the world. And there are asshole men and frat boys and fuckheads and bros that are ruining to the douchebags of the world and there are asshole men frat boys and fuckheads and bros that are ruining everything for everybody else and aggressive shitheads and

then they see this and they say i'm going to separate myself from that i'm going to be the guy only eats fucking vegetable matter and i you know i i don't even use a mass-produced deodorant i just rub rocks and never watch porn never never yeah there's a great video on that as well yeah that i watched this guy gave a ted talk about what's wrong with porn i think i know who the um spanish accent oh no there's a guy who teaches a text uh tech ut austin yeah does this yeah he's kind of robert jensen he's the leader of this movement against men's movement against pornography right well how what about men doing pornography with men there's a problem with the anti-pornographic movement is what you were talking about earlier is that the idea is that

sex is bad oh yeah and sex is not bad and right no one is trying to stop gay porn here's the thing unless you're unless you're some sort of a fucking churchgoer right and you think that homosexuality is evil there's no movement to stop gay guys from making gay porn no men are out there going we need to stop these gay men from abusing each other in gay porn no they like fucking each other they do it for fun they enjoy the shit out of it and guys like dan savage he'll openly talk about how he i mean he was on the podcast just going off about how he watches gay porn sure no no one has a problem with it zero people have a problem with it pornography is the most democratic institution in our society how's that work there is no desire that is not catered to in pornography there is no body image that is not sold as an object of

desire in pornography little dicks There's no little dick porn. All right, there's one. Okay, fine. No, but if you think about, you know, people, I've heard pornographers say this, you know, what is the thing you hate about your body the most, right? You will find people paying for that in pornography. It's probably true, right?

To look at that, yeah. Well, that's the thing about having the reach that you have with the internet. It's like you'll find a group of people out there. And that's one of the weird things about any really crazy ideology. You'll find a bunch of people that agree with you on your adoption of Sharia law. And then they'll gravitate to you like a magnet. You know, Sam Harris turned me on to this

video with a terrifying video of these guys and i believe they were in norway or one of those countries that's like really open to uh various religions coming there and there's these guys they're doing this muslim uh they're doing this speech and they're talking about the idea of radical muslim they're laughing at people calling things radical Muslims. And in the video, he starts saying, how many of you agree with what it says in the Quran about the way homosexuals should be treated? Everybody raises their hand. That homosexuals should be stoned, and that whatever it says, whatever God's law is, would be the very best way to handle the situation. And they all raise their hand.

And he's like, are you radical?'re not radical you're just Muslims and he's like laughing at it thinking that I mean the way Harris described to me he's like this guy is saying something that he said he has so much confidence in it he's like saying it almost like you would say the best way to stop tooth decay is brushing your teeth like something everybody knows. And he's saying it like that confident. But he's talking about stoning homosexuals. He's talking, you know, I mean, it's incredible.

He's talking about women being able to vote. He's talking about women, you know, having second class citizenship status. That this is just how it is in the Quran. And they're all agreeing with him. And it's an unbelievable video to watch. Because you watch it You realize like wow there are people like that out there, and they're all you know They're all praising Allah and in this video, and they're all joining together in this and it's just a large group of thousands of people and they're

They found themselves just that They found people like them. They put this video, and they took this video and put it online. And I think the title of the video is, It's Not Radical Islam. Right. Sure, they exist. The question is what to do about them. So Sam Harris wants to kill them. I mean, he's an interventionist.

Do you think he wants to kill them? Well, he certainly has said things that sound like that. I mean, he's a big interventionist. he wants to kill them well he certainly has said things that sound like that i mean he's he's a big interventionist um he you know he's there's a moment in his book where he it looks like he's advocating nuclear assault on people in the middle east and he has sort of backed away from that um i don't know exactly what he intends but do you remember the context well he says that you know if if you have you know x million people who are committed to this fanatical, genocidal jihad, then the nuclear option might make sense. I mean, you have to read the book for yourself.

And he has sort of backed down from that. Which book was this? I can't remember. One of those. It's a very sort of infamous quote from him. And, you know, he'd have to speak for himself about what that actually means. But there's no question that he's an interventionist, a military interventionist. He wants military intervention against them.

That's clear. The question is, what would that produce? And my argument is it would produce more of them. Right? Right, right. Well, I've always been fascinated by the left's adoption of the term islamophobia and that islamophobia is one thing that is very um it's very chic it's in style to call someone out on islamophobia while mocking christianity at the same time it's it's it's an

interesting thing like you're allowed to mock scient, you're allowed to mock Scientology. You're allowed to mock Mormonism. It's a very valid point of debate. The fact that Mitt Romney was a Mormon. He's essentially a cult member. His family came from Mexico. They fleed to Mexico so that they could have more wives. I mean, this is undeniable.

Right. And it's all fair game and on the table. But Islamophobia is interesting. Well, it's just that,'s all fair game and on the table but islamophobia is is interesting well it's just that i mean i'm not a fan of that but it is that islamophobia has particular political applications right now right whereas the mormons are safe in utah no one's talking about invading utah and killing the mormons right um yeah i, I look if I if if if they ever came over here and tried to convert Los Angeles into Sharia, you know, Sharia regime, give me a fucking AK-47, you know, and I'll shoot him in the head myself. My point is going out there and stopping them from doing it to other people is simply going to create more of them. And more importantly, it's going to actually cause them to wish harm on me, to do harm to me. I was in New York in 9-11. I don't want that to happen.

No doubt about it. I'm looking at it in the terms of why is it acceptable to stand up for one religion and that religion- It's just because it's been used in such bad ways recently. That's all. It's been used to justify these terrible wars right it was used to justify the war in iraq and afghanistan and syria and the rest of it now yeah i agree with you it's hypocritical it's a double standard um um yeah i have nothing good to say about islam nothing and i certainly have nothing good to say about that variant of islam that is practiced by the people in isis or al-qaeda or the taliban um yeah but so what right it's like right there's all the people all over the world who have ideas that are abhorrent to me that's such a it's such a fascinating debate it's such an interesting take like which way do you go do you go in hey let them be crazy over

there yeah or do you say listen be crazy over there? Yeah. Or do you say, listen, that crazy over there is going to eventually come over here. We've got to figure out a way to plan ahead or we're going to run into a bad situation that's going to be out of control. It's about aggression. So it's about who uses aggression. Right. So if they aggress against me, hell yeah. It's on.

And so you feel like these. But they haven't aggressed against me. The few people that have been killed over there, the few reporters that have been snatched up and had their heads cut off on video. Like this is such a small amount. Yeah. I mean, I mean, well, it's not good. No, of course not. The ISIS argument is that they're an extension of the U.S. military. They're an extension of U.S. imperialism is what they say.

Those reporters. I'm not in any way justifying what happened to them. Some of them have been British too, right? Yeah. Well, the Brits are intervening too, yeah. So, you know, I don't know. But, I mean, the point is they are, as I said, they're trying to bait us in, which they succeeded in doing. Look what we're doing today.

We're bombing them right now as we speak. And so what will we get from that? Are we going to kill all kill all 30 or 50 000 of the isis fighters are we gonna do that the only way to do that is descend in the entire fucking 82nd airborne and more and chase them down on the ground and kill every last one of them which i don't even think is possible so you know and what you're doing is you're creating more anti-American hatred in that region from which they can recruit. Endless War, 1984. Fuck.

What's the way that this can be fixed? Get out, man. That's it. Yeah. It's the only way. Yeah. The Rand Paul way. Yeah.

Whereas Hillary Clinton. Hell no. She wants to chase him to the end of the earth. Sure. But she's the one who's been in the office. She's been there. What did Joe Biden just say? He just said, we're going to chase ISIS to the gates of hell.

Whoa. And I'm like, yeah, that's exactly where you're going to take us. You're right. That's exactly. Did he really say that? Yeah, he did. About two weeks ago. He's a silly boy.

I remember when Joe Biden, we used to do Joe Biden night at a comedy club because Joe Biden got caught being a plagiarist. Oh, yeah? Do you remember that? Oh, you don't know that interesting joe biden when he was running for president i believe i okay i started stand-up comedy in 1988 so it had to be close on people's minds so somewhere around then joe biden got in trouble he was running for president and uh he gave a speech that was a direct ripoff of one of kennedy's speeches

and uh they said oh you know he has speech writers he didn't even know but i mean they didn't even fucking bother changing the words they just plagiarized the shit out of kennedy and so we used to do joe biden night at stitches comedy club and uh what we do is like uh i would go up and do one of my friends acts and he would go up and do me and we would do each other's act as a joke and they called it joe biden night oh my god so i was you know and he never ran for president again after that because of that because of that because you fucked with him so badly no because of that because everyone knew that i mean there was like because i remember it i i guarantee you other folks that are in the know especially politically in the parties they

know like that's a big skeleton in his closet like look dude you could be vice president no one's gonna dig too deep but if you ever get to be president why did you plagiarize fucking kennedy man yeah i kind of like biden in the way in the sense that he's he's uh not very filtered right he doesn't edit much his thoughts so like like what he said about Obama during the race, he's like, well, people like him because he's clean and articulate. White people like black guys who are clean and articulate and well-spoken. And thin. Yeah.

And seems healthy. Yeah, exactly. He jogs a lot and stuff. Yeah, he's not Lil Wayne. Yeah, he's safe. He's okay. I thought he was right. I thought that was correct and he into all this shit about it.

Well, there's no doubt. We like white people that are clean and articulate as well. I mean, you've got a Rob Ford guy running for president. He's done pretty well in his political career, you know. In Canada. Yeah. Canada's a different animal, man. I guess so. It's a totally different animal up there.

I'm Team Ford, man. You like him? Well, no, I'm just kidding. What's his brother's running now? I'm just kidding. I mean, it's just the fact you know it's i'm all about individual freedom you know and like if you're if you're smoking crack i don't care as long as you run the city correctly you know yeah why is it okay that he drinks whiskey but it's not okay if he smokes exactly there you go yeah i mean that well that's the tremendous north american double standard right

yeah the double standard. Which you know about all too well, right? Sanctioned drugs. Yeah, come on. I mean, alcohol compared to weed? Yeah. The destructiveness of alcohol? Well, not only that, the self-awareness aspects of it, the blinding you to your actions aspect of alcohol, which is the whole thing.

Look, everyone's talking about being intoxicated and intoxication leading to rape. No one's talking about stoned rape, okay? And it's not a coincidence. Even though marijuana is illegal, marijuana is something that I believe probably causes less rape than any other intoxicant you could ever take. Absolutely. It makes you paranoid and self-aware and sensitive, and you're also more aware of other people's feelings. Oh, yeah. It's probably the least likely to rape drug voted ever.

Of course. Of course. It makes you less aggressive. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And there's just one of them.

I mean, all of the psychedelics, and marijuana is not thought of as a psychedelic, but I think it's very much psychedelic. It is. Yeah. They're all illegal. Well, that's sort of changing, what you know what do you how do you feel about that i mean it's an interesting thing seeing the economic aspects of legalization state not federal because the states have adopted these new policies in california in colorado rather and washington state and now other states are looking at it and wondering whether or not they should dive in because of the amount of profit that they're making tax wise yeah i am substantial substantial

money so i'm for total decriminalization legalization tomorrow of all drugs period okay so um but i actually voted against was it 17 uh in california prop 17 um because if you read it it was and a lot of people were saying this it was written by this guy in oakland who was going to be the new corporate chieftain of the weed industry and it was written in a way that was going to make it very difficult for the mom and pops in humble to exist to survive to compete to compete yeah because it was going to be full of regulations right so the state was going to regulate the shit out of it so it's some sneaky shit and most likely you know what this wasn't stated but what else is going to happen they're going to go to your little farm in arcata california and they're going to be like what is that hippie doing there

right he's what you got all these guys who were like long-haired and they're they're high and they're you know they're not good workers it's you know they're going to regulate and say i'm sorry this is not this is not up to snuff we're going to have to shut you down the guy who's going to run the walmart of weed in the oak that giant oakland warehouse he was going to establish in the east bay up there oh he's going to be fine because he's going to be super regulated he's going to be very clean all his employers are going to be vetted they're not going to be potheads He'll be politically connected to all the right people. And of course, politically connected. So a lot of the Humboldt growers were opposed to that

proposition for that reason, because they saw it forcing them out and handing the reins over to the big, and these big corporate entities and pharmaceuticals. So the prediction was, and I thought it was right, that the big pharmaceutical companies were going to move in and take over and make it into a big corporate industry. And I think that's starting to happen in Colorado. I've seen some evidence of that. In what way? It's just that there's sort of a monopolization going on.

State regulation often leads to the creation of monopolies, right, because it makes it difficult to enter an industry, right? Because it makes it difficult to enter an industry, right? If it's something, if an industry is heavily regulated, you have to meet all these criteria to enter it as a legitimate licensed business, it becomes more difficult, right? So the existing entity, the large corporation that's already there gets protected by these regulations. It's called a regulatory capture is the concept. And so I think that's what's going to happen. Um, so I, I want no regulation, none, just legal. Yeah. Just let us,

let us grow it and smoke it. When you say decriminalization, do you think that it should be legal to sell things like cocaine and heroin? And heroin especially is a tricky one, right? Because people associate that with damaged lives and destruction. And so the, the,

the quick one word answer to that is portugal right so portugal decriminalized all that shit i mean there's some regulations there but they decriminalized all those drugs uh more than 10 years ago well that is the difference between decriminalization and legalization legalization like if you're selling pottery nobody's going to give you a hard time anyone can sell pottery but if you get caught with pottery nobody gives a shit but if you get caught with pottery nobody gives a shit but if you get caught with drugs in the decriminalized state well then you don't get in trouble right but if you're selling it yeah it's a different animal yeah i want i want the state to have nothing to do

with it at all so if you but anyway so in in portugal a great study was done by glenn glenn greenwald and the cato institute about three or four years ago looking at the 10 years of decriminalization decriminalization in Portugal. And what they found was decrease in the number of HIV cases, not surprising, decrease in the number of the decrease in the addiction rate, which is amazing, and a decrease in usage. People actually use it less. Isn't that amazing? Yeah. So there you go.

People want to do things that are forbidden. It's a natural impulse of human beings. You try to resist and we try to do it creation of a taboo creates a desire yeah it's a that's such a bizarre thing that we have this attachment controlling people's access to consciousness enhancing or or altering substances yeah we're completely committed to this idea and we will we will pitch it as if it's the only logical explanation or the only logical course of business. Like, you know, what are you going to have the streets filled with a bunch of reefer heads? Well, you look at what's going on in Colorado, they have like the lowest rate of drunk driving accidents ever. They have a lower rate of

murder than they've ever had before. They have lower rates of violent crimes than they had in a decade. Right. Like, all these things are happening, like, right in front of everybody's face. Right. Undeniable aspects of the legalization of cannabis, a drug which makes people more peaceful. That's right. I mean, it just does. That's right.

I mean, it does make everybody more peaceful, but it's pretty fucking good at it. Pretty much, yeah. And so if we decriminalized heroin tomorrow, are you going to start shooting smack the next day? But I'm an adult. The question is, is keeping it from young people, just making it more difficult to get, is that going to keep one kid from becoming a junkie? If it is, is it worth it? I see that argument, but I don't think that it jives with human nature.

And that's why I would say that legalization of all drugs would probably be better. And also you're creating, when you create laws, when people violate those laws, they become criminals and you put them in jail. And that's where things get really fucked up. Right. Because then you have what we have in this country,

which we have privatized prisons. And then there's not just one. It's not, we're not talking about one. country, which we have privatized prisons. And there's not just one. We're not talking about one. We're talking about many privatized prisons. So you have a prison industrial complex along with these laws that has a vested interest in keeping these laws active. You have the prison guards union, which lobbies to keep these drugs legal or illegal, rather, along with pharmaceutical drug companies, which form a partnership for a drug-free America. And my joke was it's like hookers making commercials against strippers. Like a partnership for a drug-free America going out against weed is literally like hookers saying strippers are bad. You know, like they're immoral.

Like, we're better like it's yeah why do kids smoke cigarettes a lot of it is because there's a taboo on it right because it's being bad it's being rebellious right it's also like it's cool man yeah but it's cool because it's bad it's cool because it's bad well it's also there's a there's a certain romanticism involved in just ruining your life you know yeah you know I mean fucking self-destructive ranking and it's sexy yeah it's the rock star self-destructive sexiness yeah he's doing coke he's fucking gets up but you can't keep a job right boss call you're fired Wilson fuck you right guys are rebel look at his jacket he's got a fucking fucked up leather jacket

he gets on his motorcycle in the rain you know it's like this drives off a cliff and every and he's and then he's like international superstar yeah yeah i mean in those those movies those little shitty arnold schwarzenegger cop movies like there's always a scene where he's like his his breakfast is like he pours a fucking couple slices of pizza into a blender. You know what I mean? It's like there's something about self-destruction about people that are drinking whiskey first thing in the morning that we find romantic. Well, it's because we're told all day long to be good and healthy and pure, right?

There you go. There's the Puritanism again, right? It's actually rejection of that. Oh, it is, right? Yeah. That is so goddamn true that's the best way to create sluts i'm not slut shaming by the way um when i was a kid we all knew catholic exactly i didn't even have to say it my first girlfriend was one yeah fuck yeah i had one

too yeah bitch was a freak i say bitch with all due respect it's a nice person yeah sure yeah i mean this poor girl was so pent up that you would get her alone i mean i remember i was in the movie theater with her i just grabbed her breast and she started heaving and talking like it was like the world was like like satan was at her door prodding her in the ass with a piece he was in her eyes was at her door. But isn't it crazy that that is a direct response to suppression? Mm-hmm. This poor girl was so pent up. The way I described her is like, she had sex with anybody who asked.

She was so crazy. And she's beautiful. But I said that if you put a dick in front of her, it was like rolling a ball of yarn in front of a kitten. They couldn't help themselves. There's just something about what they did, making it all evil and dark in Catholic school. They couldn't wait to just get out of that place and run, just run to freedom. Sure. Yeah, it's a schizophrenic culture we live in.

It's not just Catholics, right? It's sort of Americans generally. I mean, we're told both things simultaneously all day long. Sex is bad. Watch out. Be careful. And fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck. And here's a chicken in a bikini.

Selling cars. And porn is a bigger industry than the automobile industry. But it's terrible. Yeah. But it's terrible. And who cares if it goes under? And it must be secret. Yeah.

Yeah. Exactly. Well, remember when it was interesting, the porn people were asking for a bailout. It was like sort of a publicity stunt. Yeah. But the reality is that, like, that industry was crippled. I mean, that industry had its legs taken out by the internet. I mean, there was a guy that used to live in my neighborhood who's a porn producer.

And, you know, he was living high on the hog he had like a fat mercedes lived in his big ass house and and they his house eventually went up it was bankrupt he went bankrupt and they they fucking they sold that bitch they took it from him yeah closed on it i knew a major porn producer who just died actually recently um but he um he said they were figuring out ways to monetize it. And I didn't quite understand it, but the tube channels and all that stuff, he said they actually figured out a way to get revenue out of that, and I'm not sure how, but anyway.

Fucking stealing people's credit card numbers. Maybe. Yeah, I don't know. Getting videos of you jacking off to it on those little web cameras. There you go. That the FBI is watching. Yeah, let them watch. How many are they going to watch?

A lot, apparently. 300 million people. How many FBI people do you got that are keeping an eye on people jerking off? You're going to go blind. You're fucking people are going to be staring at monitors all day. Can you imagine? Coke bottle glasses.

They're going to stumble out of that fucking place into the light of day. I think I'd rather work in a coal mine than have that job. Similar effects, I'm sure. Similar effects. Good Lord. Yeah, what a strange culture. Now, you're a grown adult with children and a college professor,

and you're faced with all these contradictions and this ridiculous way we're living our life in this society. How frustrating is it for you to see things so clearly, but yet see this schizophrenic bizarre society that you're forced to exist in i live in hell i mean yeah i mean in a way it's true it's like i god i don't know yeah no i'm just angry a lot are you yeah seriously yeah no i'm sort of angry much of the day. Yeah. I mean, reading the news, reading people's opinions, reading my colleagues work and seeing what they're doing with 19 year old girls. Yeah, I mean, that's what's even crazier. It's like it's it's it's even in college. It's ridiculous. I mean, it's like humans are fucked.

pissed off i yeah i've been talking to some friends about this it's like you know um socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living and actually i'm beginning to think that it's too painful to live you know i just whoa you're fucking deep in this i'd rather be ignorant sometimes really start drinking son sometimes i used to do that do you yeah i gave it up irish russell partly partly yeah enough i see the freckles irish enough you got it in your kid oh yeah sure do sure do so you used to drink to try to avoid reality um yeah basically just to self-medicate yeah yeah it was like an escape it was totally an escape do you think there's a certain amount of paying attention to the world that may perhaps be detrimental to the individual like there's there's

there's a certain there's a certain gauntlet they all we all have to sort of run to live our lives regulations that we have to follow as preposterous as they may be but i've often often wondered there's like this struggle between trying to think about how much should i just concentrate on enjoying my time here and being nice to people doing what I can to just enjoy my time there's your ludicrous bit yeah there it is yeah yeah or completely getting immersed in all the intricacies of the the bullshit I don't know Jesus Christ I don't know I mean I've been an intellectual my whole life my family's all intellectual it's all we've done is just talk about the world and study the

world and talk about it and talk about it and get and most of it is negative right it's not like oh it's you know foreign of course american foreign policy is great you know um and it's painful and it hurts and it's like some of and so much of it is literally about life and death and people dying and it's some of that some of it um man i have a hard time recovering from. So the Michael Brown thing was bad enough in Ferguson. I don't know if you saw the video of, I don't know how you pronounced his name, but Kajim Powell, who was killed about two days later. He was the kid. He was clearly mentally ill.

He walked up to the cops and he said, shoot me, shoot me. They said he had a butter knife or something in his hand. And there's a video of them just shooting him dead. I cried all night long and i'm still that was like what two months ago i'm still bothered by that you know and knowing that that's a fairly common thing for a lot of people in this society you know that and if you live in a particular neighborhood that's like a normal thing to happen well are those particular neighborhoods in some way sort of like a microcosm for the issues of the world that it's very

difficult to overcome momentum and the momentum of a terrible neighborhood a crime-ridden neighborhood sure born into poverty and born into the momentum of all these unemployed people on welfare well in that case it's being born into a state of occupation you know yeah i think that there are many of those military states it's basically a military occupation it is god damn it and you know what and like the military is militarization of the police has only accentuated it, but it's been going on for a long time. That's why black people have just a very, very different view of police than white people do. And it's just something white people have to accept and understand. And it's hard to, if you never go to Compton and never see what it's like, um, and you don't get pulled over for simply driving or walking down the street, you know, but God damn, man.

I just, I, when I saw that video, I was like, okay was like okay i'm giving up politics i'm just i can't do this anymore it's too upsetting i mean stuff like war and stuff like police violence when i see video of it or hear about it it's just it devastates me it really does it's the worst aspects of human beings right in front of you and it's not in your life your life you're going where you're going you're talking to students you you're doing your thing, and then you immerse yourself through the internet or whatever, the media, you're getting this vision of the worst parts of humans. Yeah, there's certain things.

And like the idea of locking people up for drugs, just putting people in prisons for stuff like that. For life. There's people in prison right now for life. They're never getting out i can't even i mean the depth of my feelings about that are just unspeakable i mean i just want to blow them up yeah now when you talk about not wanting to live though do you no not wanting to think but you say not wanting to know you don't want to be a part of it you like do you mean what you you have to know though for what you do for a living right exactly

that's the problem that's the conundrum that's exactly right yeah so sometimes i just want to be like a surfer and just smoke weed why you do that and surf because you can't make any money on it and also i'm not i mean like i'm 49 like i can't take it but can you like i want it well you couldn't take a surfing your body moves well you're moving around normal yeah any issues well maybe no no like actually seriously i wanted you wanted to know i wanted to be a kickboxer actually like really yeah dude i trained muay thai with joe schilling yeah oh no joe yeah i'm at his gym the yard yeah yeah and everyone should go to the yard it's the greatest gym uh but train there all the time? I tore my ACL there three months ago.

But until then, yeah, six days a week. How did you tear your ACL? Tried to do a flying knee and landed funny. Oh, man. I know. Just hitting pads and stuff? No. I was all by myself with a heavy bag.

And I just did a flying knee. Just stupid. It was nothing. And I landed. A lot of ACLs are just that kind of thing, right? I tore mine kicking a bag. Yeah. I tore both of them. That's what what it was kicking a fucking heavy bag right i was like well actually got loosened up a guy kicked me in the side i'm bad at checking leg kicks oh so he kicked you the side he loosened me up it loosened like a week before that and then this thing i think

that's what happened but yeah no i was like i wish i could just do this. Really? Oh, yeah. But as an intellectual, though, aren't you aware of the negative impact of concussions? You mean the whole brain damage? Yeah. I know. No, that's the whole thing. I know it's such a bummer. And, like, I'm just... I know.

But you spar. Yeah. And do you notice any difference? Well, no, but I've just been more and more worried about it, right? It's like I'm just constantly worried about it. And that's the problem. Yeah. And now I don't know what to do.

Like, I'm 40 fucking nine, and I'm, like, going in there, and they want me to fight. They want you to fight? They've asked me to fight. Really? Yeah. Fight what? Like an amateur bout? Yeah, like a smoker.

Just, like, so they can get press? No, just because that's what they do. Because that's what they do. They train fighters. They train fighters. They train fighters, yeah. Of course. It's one of the big Muay Thai gyms in California. Yeah. So, smokers smokers or you know there's

whatever so you're training and they're like listen take this to the next place yeah joe's trainer who he owns the gym with mark camaro he said yeah we should get you a fight and i like laughed at him because i was like come on man i'm 40 fucking i mean the guys they're all like 25 year old ripped korean dudes and stuff and i um my My friend Steve is almost 60, and he's been my friend since we were – I was 15 when I met him, and he was an Air Force flight surgeon, and he was doing his residency for ophthalmology. He's just a wild man. He's always been doing something, and he's a doctor now in Arizona.

But he's the reason why I became a stand-up comedian, because he talked me into doing it when I was young and I was fighting. thing and he's a doctor now in arizona but he's the reason why i became a stand-up comedian because he he talked me into doing it when i was young and i was fighting my point being this guy to this day is ready to take a fight 60 in his oh yeah he's closing in on 60 he'll take a fight tomorrow his problem is he was on the u.s ski team he's a madman okay yeah clearly and he had at least 10 operations on his knees both of his knees look looked like a fish that you filleted and then stitched back together again. Because he had his knees done in the 80s when they would take your hamstring. The way they would reconstruct your ACL was they would use your hamstring.

So they would cut you open like a big line on the side. I'm sure they did yours probably. Did they do a PCL? No, I haven't done surgery yet. You haven't? No, no, no. It's not that bad. I mean, they tell me it's not that bad yeah you did an mri yeah what the mri said partial partial how much they didn't tell me they didn't know why didn't they tell you i don't know where'd you go kaiser well okay that's no good yeah we'll talk afterwards okay good i'll hook you up with a real doctor okay no not i'm not a real doctor but a doctor

a better doctor yeah that's what i needed doctor, but a doctor that deals with athletes. A better doctor. That's what I needed. General practitioners are just not going to deal with that. Well, no, he's an orthopedist. Even an orthopedist that doesn't deal with real athletes is going to say, oh, you're okay. Just walk around and you're going to be fine. That means you've got a bum knee for the rest of your life that's ready to give out. Oh, shit.

Depending upon how much of a partial tear. I mean, if it's 10% tear, yeah, let it rehab. I got no percentage from them. Yeah need to know okay and you need a guy who's an expert at reading mris i've had two different mris down on my back one of them that was shit and one of them that was really clear and it was much different results you know it's i'm dying man i gotta get back in there because i was as i was saying like when i'm in the gym you know as you know you that's all you think about right it's everything else goes away isis is gone foreign policy history's gone academia fuck that shit's all gone i'm just thinking about that that fist

coming at my face right or even if i'm just working on the bag it's all it's just beautiful and i just i wish i just often wish i could just do that or like i want to move to thailand and do that thing really like go to Phuket? Oh, my God. And just live there on whatever it is. My friend Mark did that. He's in his 50s. Five bucks a day.

Yeah. I mean, you know, I know. He's a financial advisor. Yeah. And he went to Thailand. He lived there for a month. Yeah. And belonged to one of those gyms.

Changed my last name to Fairtex or whatever. Damn, man. You got it bad, huh? Oh, yeah. How long were you kickboxing for? You had this idea. I've been, been well i started with boxing just like bullshit well i took it i took some classes at church uh church street gym in new york when i lived there and then that was like 10 years ago and then but not seriously and then i did like bullshit cardio kick then i joined the yard about two years ago

and then i just got really into it when i I started at the yard, it was like, that's all I wanted to do. That's all I was thinking about. Dude, so I am the only PhD history professor in this country, I am sure, who has listened to you call 500 fights. Wow. Oh, yeah. No, I've watched probably a majority of the UFC fights. I've watched every single glory fight. I've watched K-1.

Yeah. That's interesting. I got obsessed with it about two years ago. It sucks that it gives you brain damage. Doesn't it? Doesn't it? We need to fix this. Listen, man.

It's one of the main reasons that I got into stand-up comedy. Do you feel like you got any? Oh, yeah. I've definitely probably got some. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I mean, I talk okay. I was going to say, your brain's doing pretty well.

For a guy who didn't graduate college, I mean, I'm fairly fairly articulate um but i definitely been hitting the head a lot yeah you know but it was all done by the time i was in my early 20s okay i stopped but i was worried i'd get headaches i'd lay in bed after sparring i get headaches but i was sparring with some murderers yeah i've only done kind of moderate sparring so I haven't really gotten hit hard. Well, I was fighting, too. I fought... Yeah, that's a different story. A lot of Taekwondo tournaments and three kickboxing bouts.

Yeah. But the sparring is the more dangerous thing. I know. Because you'd get concussed, and then guys would dust you off and push you right back in there. Right. Especially back then.

When I was doing it, it was the late 80s. Nobody knew what the fuck was going on with the brain there was no real studies done they knew when people were punch drunk but they didn't really have a good grasp on traumatic brain injury right i have a good friend who's a doctor and his specialty is traumatic brain injury and he has enlightened me in a way that's absolutely terrifying he's like you know you could go waterboarding you know like not waterboarding a jet skiing like uh what is it when they pull you behind a boat and you're fucking bouncing around water skiing water skiing yeah he's like guys get brain damage what from

water skiing he's like no doubt about it he's like the pituitary gland is very sensitive and it's when it gets jostled around and banged up, depending upon the individual, look, there's people that box and that are fine. And then there's people that they get hit a few times, and they have all sorts of depression issues. Their body stops producing hormones properly. See? I don't know, man.

Traumatic brain injury is no fucking joke. And I have had the unfortunate experience of knowing people pre and post i have good friends i'm sure you did that i knew that that when they started out they were fine and now they're not fine yeah can i this is a question i can't believe i get this opportunity to ask joe rogan this do you are there ufc fighters or former ufc fighters that you're sure have it unquestionable okay without a doubt yeah No doubt about it. Like many? Without a doubt.

Okay. Yeah, if you stay in there long enough, it gets you. Like you can see it in some of them? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's undeniable. I can think of a couple who are leading suspects.

I would be a real piece of shit if I denied it. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of people, I'm sure, that would like me to not comment on it, but it's one of my only issues with... I don't mind broken bones. I see when Anderson Silva broke his leg, it was nasty, but I got to... Oh, that's nothing compared...

Yeah. I'll trade that for brain injury any day. I was way more concerned when he got knocked unconscious. Of course. When he got knocked out, and then when he came back just a few months later, I was the one guy that was saying, he's not going to be the same. You've got to be aware. That's a guy that got knocked unconscious four months ago.

He's not going to be the same. He's in training already. He's sparring already. He's not going to be the same guy six months later. He's just not. There's no way around it yeah it's one of the beautiful things that that um manny pacquiao's trainer um freddie roach has got trauma-related parkinson's himself so when he got knocked out by marquez freddie roach was like you're not fighting for a year like you just just you need

to recover like just just get that in your head now you want to keep going you're not fighting for a year it's such a bummer it's a huge boxing's the worst clearly yeah i don't know about that man really i thought that was pretty established i used to think that too but the reality is it's all about the training and in training mma fighters are getting hit in the head a lot i mean you're not getting hit in the head as much unless you're a guy who only wants to stand up and then you're also dealing with kicks and kicks are a different animal you can kick so much harder yep than you can punch getting kicked in the head i can probably kick 10 times harder than i can punch of course you know i can send a heavy bag flying across the room with a kick if you imagine what that can do to your fucking head it's terrible i've seen guys

get hit in the head in kickboxing matches, and they're never the same again. I've seen it. I've seen it with my own eyes. So that's something to think about. So go to the ground. Yeah, learn some jiu-jitsu, man. Daniele Bolelli, my good friend.

Yeah, I love that dude. Our mutual friend. Yeah, I love that dude. We're probably going to start. That's the move, man. That's the intellectual pursuit. Because first of all, it's far more complex, relies far less on athleticism, and you can do it deep into your old age. Right.

You know, Elio Gracie was doing it in his fucking 80s. Yeah. It's chess. Yeah. And as long as you do it with good partners, you can really go at it and be aware that a guy's not going to hurt you. You know, things happen accidentally. Knees get twisted and you fall funny. But no head injuries.

No head injuries. Very rarely. I mean, you can collide heads occasionally, but it's not the goal. And getting choked unconscious really has no repercussions. It's no big deal. You just go. You wake up. And you can actually.

Guys do it all the time. They get choked out and they go back to rolling moments later. I'll get you involved. I'll get you in there. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to get you a good doctor, too. All right. Good. Dude, thank you very much for doing this, man. It was a lot of fun. Wow. Really, really enjoyed it. I'll get you involved. I'll get you in there. I'm going to get you a good doctor too. All right, good.

Dude, thank you very much for doing this, man. It was a lot of fun. Really, really, really enjoyed it. We just, three hours just blew by. Wow, I love this. Yeah, that's it. And your book,

Renegade History of the United States, it's available right now. You can get it on Amazon. Is it an audio book as well? Yep, audio. Is it you reading it? Nope.

God damn it. It's a Shakespearean actor. What the fuck? I know. Why do they do that? I don't know. Did they resist you reading it? You'd be perfect God damn it. It's a Shakespearean actor. What the fuck? I know. Why do they do that? I don't know. Did they resist you reading it? You'd be perfect at reading it. It's hilarious.

He does like black, like slave dialect in a Shakespearean. Son of a bitch. Like a Shakespearean reading. That's hilarious. Son of a bitch. But it's still good. You should still buy it. Yes, everyone buy it.

Buy that and buy the book. And Thaddeus Russell, you can find him on Twitter. And what is your website? ThaddeusRussell.com. That's it. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. All right, man. Thank you. That was find him on Twitter. And what is your website? ThaddeusRussell.com. That's it. Thank you, sir. Appreciate it. Thank you.

It was very enjoyable. Cool. And I have to piss so badly.