The Joe Rogan Experience - #740 - Thaddeus Russell

Episode Date: December 23, 2015

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

Do-do-do. And we're live, ladies and gentlemen, with Thaddeus Russell. Hey. Pretending to be a morning DJ. All right! Hey! How's everything going out there in the wild and wacky world of being a professor? Oh, God.

I gotta leave. Sorry. You gotta leave? I can't do this. You didn't get fired since last time you were here. Not yet. That's good. I'm trying hard, though. I got to leave. Sorry. You got to leave? I can't do this. You didn't get fired since the last time you were here. Not yet. That's good.

I'm trying hard, though. Are you? Being on here sure doesn't help. It doesn't? Did you get any heat at all? Yeah, I did, actually. Really? Yeah.

What did you get heat about? Oh, God. Here we go. I know someone complained about the podcast. One person? Mm-hmm. Well, that's amazing. Someone who was referenced.

Someone who was referenced in the podcast. Not by name, but someone who was referenced. Oh, like one of the people that we complained about? Someone complained to the administration about what we talked about. Oh, my goodness. And what did they say? Nothing was done to me. I don't know.

I was just told that there was a complaint made. So how does that work? Did they have to examine every complaint to make sure that it's a valid complaint? Apparently, they did not in this case. I was told it was a formal complaint, but then nothing, as far as I know, was done about it, so I'm still there, although I'm probably leaving Occidental anyway.

Oh, my goodness. Is this a news flash? Yeah, it is, actually. Breaking news? Yeah. I might be taking a new position at Willamette University in Oregon. Oh.

Are you going to move up there? I'm going to split time between LA and there. Oh, you're glutton for punishment. Yeah, my son's here so I got to... Yeah, that's a long commute. Isn't that well? Two hours in a plane? You know, it's funny. It's like an hour and a half and then it's about the same as what I'm doing now

between the east side of LA and the west side of LA where his mother lives. So actually, it's not that much of a different commute for me. Oh, the traffic now between the east side of la and the west side of la where where his mother lives oh so actually it's not that much of a different commute for me oh the traffic versus the flight yeah yeah i mean i haven't done it yet so we'll see but i'm i think it'll work out wow what an optimistic fellow you are i love oregon though it's awesome yeah it's so beautiful and they have water they they have much water water and they have green plants. Everything's green. It's incredibly green.

Yeah, it's an interesting trade-off. It's like they get a lot of rain, but because of that, the grass is like this vibrant, almost like glowing green. It's like the opposite of LA. Yeah. Everything's alive and lush. Yeah. Yeah. It gets a little dreary though, like when you don't see the sun.

Yeah. I'm worried about like February, February, March, April. But I've heard the summers are great. The summers are amazing. Same in Seattle. Like, I was just in Seattle recently, and it rained three days in a row. And by the time the third day rolled around, we were like, okay, let's get out of here. Exactly.

But it was fun because, you know, I was visiting some friends, and I was with my family. And so I took the kids, and they just love the fact that it's different, you know, because it never rains out here. They're like, yay, you get to go splashing in puddles and running around. But if that's every day, you're like, oh. Like the 90th day in a row, which they've had. I think they had like a foot of rain in the last month. They've had a lot. But last winter, they had like an incredibly dry winter, and it was amazing.

Yeah. No, but I'm looking forward to it because, you know, I love hiking and camping in the mountains and the ocean and all that stuff. That's a great spot to be. Surrounded by it. Yeah. And you say it's Willamette? Willamette. Willamette. In Salem? Yeah. Salem. Which is just south of Portland. Oh, okay. Wow. That's awesome. That's great country up there. Yeah. So, uh, would that, was that part of the, uh, incentive to get you to go there? Well, the deal is my partner or girlfriend got a job as a vice president there. Partner slash girlfriend? Partner, girlfriend.

I don't know. I hate that. There's no good term for it. I know. Your special lady friend. We're not married. Before I was married, I'd call my wife my special lady friend. Oh, yeah?

Sometimes I call her my lady, but I can't do that on the campus. You know what I mean? You get in trouble for that. Yeah, I get totally in trouble, yeah I can't do that on the campus. You know what I mean? You can get in trouble for that. Yeah, I get totally in trouble. How hilarious is that? Well, since you've been here, the social justice warrior crusade has ramped up considerably, including what happened in Yale with that woman who, I guess she sent out a letter saying that you should allow people a certain amount of leeway to be offensive.

Like, we shouldn't restrict what kind of costumes kids can wear, including if they want to wear things that appropriate other cultures and things along those lines. You should give people the opportunity to be offensive, I think is what she said. I guess opening up the door for free expression. The idea is that you're supposed to be learning in these schools. You're supposed to be exploring different ways of thinking and whether or not something is of, is this humorous? Is this valid in our culture? Is it not? Should you be offended? Is it pointless to be offended? Is it silly? Does it offend everyone? If it doesn't

offend people who it's supposed to be culturally appropriating, then what's it on you? So this is opening up this can of worms, right? Yeah, it is. It's a can of worms. It's a very complex issue. I mean, there's a lot to unpack here. So first of all, I don't know if you know, she quit for good. Yes. That professor. I believe her husband did as well, right?

The dean? No, I don't think so. The dean of Silliman College? He didn't? I don't think so. The Dean of Silliman College? I don't think so. Okay, I could be wrong. So yeah, it's been all over the country. It's been very intense at Occidental, by the way. Yeah. And I've been in meetings and I've seen a lot of it there. I've been sort of in the middle of it. It's a complete clusterfuck. There's no doubt about that. I mean, that's my scholarly opinion. It is really, it's gone to the level of being a caricature of political correctness. You know, PCU, the movie, it really often looks like

that. Yeah, it's like a South Park episode almost. Or a South Park episode. It really is to the level of caricature now. And so, you know, obviously, a lot of what the student protesters are saying is hysteria. I mean, they talk as if they're in Alabama in 1960 when they're actually at Yale or Occidental College. And they're among the most privileged people on the planet. Right. Just by being there. And many of their demands are essentially totalitarian, you know, demanding diversity training, mandatory diversity training for all faculty and staff, which, you know, I'm assuming would be teaching me how to think about race and gender and sexuality, right? Telling me what I should say

in my classrooms and not say in my classrooms. At Occidental, the faculty themselves, some of the faculty actually took it upon themselves to propose a mechanism in which students can report microaggressions committed against them by faculty. The students didn't even demand this. How is this happening? I will say, just to be clear here, it hasn't been voted, the faculty hasn't voted for that yet, but it was a significant minority of faculty proposed that. Significant like 30%? Probably around there.

Oh God. I'd say about a third. A mechanism to report microaggressions. Microaggressions meaning like, oh, nice shirt? I could look at you and go, nice shirt. We can be specific because they've actually listed microaggressions in many places, and one of them is asking the question, where are you from? Oh, my God. Oh, my God, that's a microaggression.

Where are you from is one. Wait, where are you from, man? Another one is, what are you? What are you? What are you? Following up with, what are you? What are you? What are you? Following up with what are you really? Well, what are you seems like a good question today because you have to be really careful with gender pronouns.

Indeed. So why can't you just say what are you? What are you doesn't seem offensive at all. You could be a G-J. A G-G. A Z-H-E. I'm not even sure how it's pronounced. But when someone says, what are you?

Like, I think that that's gender neutral. So that's actually, it should be politically correct. Oh, yeah, but it's not race neutral. Oh, okay. It's a question about race, right? But why is it a question about race? What if you're like a mulatto looking, oh, I don't know how to say mulatto. What are you?

I don't think you'll know how to say mulatto anymore. Dude, weren't you from 1971? That's not good? No. I don't think you'll have the same lotto anymore. Dude, weren't you from 1971? It's not good? No. But I don't even believe it shouldn't be mixed race because you're human.

It's all one race. That's been proven scientifically. The question is, what race are you? Which is sort of a silly question and a little bit slightly rude, sure. But it's also scientifically invalid because there's only one race. There might be different ethnicities and different parts bit slightly rude. But it's also like scientifically invalid because there's only one race. There might be different ethnicities and different parts of the world where your ancestors...

And different cultures. Yeah, but it's only one race. Like this idea of what's your race is fucking stupid. Yeah, absolutely. But that's considered to be... That kind of ignorance is considered to be violent. And I mean that violent, hostile racism. Because the refrain is, we are unsafe on this campus.

That's the word that's used. If someone says, what are you? Unsafe. You become unsafe. Yes, and that's not an exaggeration. You're in danger. That is exactly what it said. Guys with hoods and torches.

Yeah, so, right. There's this incredible conflation that goes on, which drives me insane, because certainly there is some racism on campuses. You know, there is some racial insensitivity, no doubt. But they conflate that stuff that goes on at Yale with Ferguson and Baltimore and Birmingham, Alabama in 1956 and South Africa under apartheid, right? It all becomes the same thing, right? It all becomes white supremacy. It's all racism. It's all structural racism.

It's all systemic racism. And so we need to start sort of differentiating here because there's clearly some differences among those. So what are you as one? What are you really is the follow-up, which is like that's where you double down on your racism. What are some other ones that would make me throw up? That would be like a double microaggression. What are some other ones? Where are you from?

What are you? Well, then there's things, you know, there's things that clearly are rude, possibly racist, like you're really smart or you're really articulate to a black person. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. I couldn't be. Why? What if he's really articulate?

What if you're talking to a woman and she's black and she's super articulate and you go, wow, you're really articulate? Or whether you're talking to a white man and he's really articulate and you go, wow, you're really articulate. Or whether you're talking to a white man and he's really articulate and you go, wow, you're really articulate. As I said, it might be racist. But it might just be a compliment. Well, it's just that that's what's often been said. I mean, you have to understand. Right, I do.

Often been said. You know, remember what Joe Biden said about Obama during the election, right? He said, people like him because he's so articulate and well-spoken, right? It's what's classically been said. But why is that racist? That's just true. About model black people. But why is that racist? That's just true.

About model black people. But why is that racist? Because you're comparing him to the former president, George W. Bush, who was totally the opposite of that. Who certainly was not. He was terrible at it. Yeah. So when you get a guy like Obama, he's clearly articulate and intelligent.

Why is that racist at all? Well, again, it's because it's been said about the model black person. Right. But unless you use it in that context unless you say as a black guy he's very articulate right which has been said to on campuses you know and often they'll say things like to a black guy in particular oh you must be an athlete you must be on a sports team um what if they're yoked yeah well what if they're a black guy and they're fucking you know right they could just like lebron james physics major who lifts a lot of weights, though.

Come on, Joe. It could be. But, I mean, why is that a bad thing to say you must be really good moving your body? I mean, wouldn't it annoy you? It would annoy you, wouldn't it? What? If someone asked me if I was an athlete? If you were black and someone said that to you.

Oh, you're here because you must be on the football team. Oh, okay. Well, if it was that. If it was like the insinuation that the only reason why you got into the college was because of your athletic prowess, not your intelligence. That is what it is. These things are not completely groundless. It's not, I said it's mostly

hysteria. I see what you're saying. There is a lot that's legitimate, that's real, that I understand, that I have compassion for. I've never been a black person. I've never been a black college student, but I've always been sure that it must be at least uncomfortable for black people on the on these campuses that are mostly white. Yeah, in some circumstances, for sure. Well, that makes sense. But I mean, it seems like socially that stuff all weeds itself out. Like people realize who the dicks are and you avoid those people.

We're talking about like the word microaggression is suitable for that and that is a microaggression it's so micro it's all like it's just kind of slightly dicky right and so the question is do you have a macro response to a microaggression right in this form of policy which limits freedom of speech which limits academic freedom which erects the surveillance system right essentially which is essentially what they're asking for with microaggressions. Limits humor, too. It certainly limits humor. It eliminates humor.

Well, you know, college campuses, there's no fun being had. I mean, there's no funniness, right? In fact, I was just talking about this with someone the other night. They said, well, you guys crack a lot of jokes. I said, no, no, there are no jokes. There are no jokes. How did that happen? It used to be like Animal House, no?

I mean, I do joke in my classroom, but sort of the space outside the classroom, on campus, sort of in public arenas on campus, no. You've got to be really dour and earnest all the time. Oh, God, that's so tiresome. It certainly is. But that's not life. No. What are they preparing people for? Well, that's so tiresome. It certainly is. But that's not life. What are they preparing people for? Well, that's the thing, right? You know, so, I mean, if you're gonna...

John McWhorter is this brilliant black Columbia linguistics professor. Microaggression. Yeah, right. You had to say black. I did, I'm sorry. To him and everyone. He has said that when he was in college in the 1980s, he heard a few times statements that were clearly racist,

that were even sort of hostile and racist. No doubt about it. But he said, it never occurred to me that I might be damaged by that, that it might hurt me to hear these things. I just assumed that these people were worthless when they said it, that they were like scum on my shoe. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So what's happening now is kids on campuses either have been trained or have trained themselves to feel damaged, devastated is the word actually that's often used, by things like microaggressions. Well, so that what you're doing is you are stating and claiming status as a weak person, right? Someone who can be damaged by the slightest slight, right? So then what happens when you're in the real world where there really are racists, where there really are people who will pull you over for being black, who will throw you in prison for being black, who will shoot you for being black, who will not give you a job for being black, you know, real racism, real structural racism. What do you do then? Well, I think the idea is that they're going to eliminate that by raising people through their

system that never have these thoughts. So we're going to clean up the world. If that were a plan, at least it would be a plan. I don't see that as the plan, though. Well, the professional victim status, that's a real issue because people claiming to be victims when there is no real problem, they're looking for victims. They're looking for things. They're looking for rather looking for things that are targeting them. And I always assume that the reason why people do that is because there's

not enough real problems. Like the real problems have become so minute. Like this is the safest time to live ever. And on campus, I mean, outside of the normal things that you're going to deal with when you have a bunch of young people together and, you know, social interactions and alcohol and all the other crap that happens between human beings when you get them together when they're young and they don't have, even when they're older, you know, you get a group of people together, you're likely to have some disputes. But outside of that, what's the fucking worst thing that's happening to these kids? Nothing.

I actually looked up the statistics because, you know people during when the missouri thing was happening at the university of missouri right yes all these claims about you know nigger being said and you know racist violence in the air and i thought really is that possible so i looked it up i mean there's not there has not been a a racist hate crime on a college campus in the united states in 30 years wow and in fact and that one, which was in the early 30 years ago, was a guy who wasn't a student. He wasn't affiliated with the campus at all, with the college at all, who bombed some dormitory that had black people in it.

So basically, yes, of course, it is an extremely safe place to be for everyone. Don't you think that in those extremely safe environments, sometimes people just go around looking for problems that don't exist? Well, I mean, this has been the case in American colleges for decades. I mean, when I was in college in the 1980s, that's all we did. We needed to fight the devil. We needed to. And then you had to find the devil.

And the problem was he wasn't there, right? The Ku Klux Klan wasn't actually on campus, right? The police weren't even really on campus. You know, you didn't have these terrible sexists and racists on campus, so you had to invent them. And what you did was you invented them in the form of the president of the college often, right? He became the villain that you had to attack, right? And I did that. And that's what's going on now.

So one of the main demands of students at Occidental was the resignation of the president. Why? What did he do wrong? It's a great question, and I haven't actually gotten a specific answer to that. There's no answer? Is he a white guy? Yeah. Well, fuck him.

Well, he embodies privilege. Of course he does. Yeah, right. But everyone at Occidental embodies privilege. Everyone at Yale embodies privilege. Of course. Students and faculty alike. Ask a Filipino peasant what they think of students at Yale, whether they're privileged or not. Yes.

So does it have specific charges? There's a tremendous lack of specificity, which also drives me crazy. I often say, I don't even know what they're talking about. I mean, I don't know what's happened to them. What has he actually done? So there's been a demand for a black studies program at Occidental for decades, like since the 60s. Okay, so that hasn't been instituted.

But, you know, he's only the most recent president who hasn't done that. And, by the way, it's a faculty decision anyway, whether to have a black studies program. You know, other than that, I couldn't even tell you. I really couldn't tell you. So it's a racial charge. Kind of. It's also about the sexual assault stuff.

But the sexual assault stuff was so bizarre. And also lacking in specificity. Well, not only that, they're being sued by the young man who was accused of sexual assault while the woman that he had sex with was not. And the reason why he was accused of being the assa woman that he had sex with was not. Yes. And the reason why he was accused of being the assaulter is because he's a male. Well, they didn't say that. And they were both drinking. But that's the only conclusion you could draw.

Yes. Well, for people who don't know the story, you can Google the story. It's fascinating. We talked about it the last time we were here. But a man and a woman, because they're both over 18, they were going to college there. They got liquored up and decided to hook up, and they exchanged some text messages where she said, do you have condoms? Come on over. And she told her friend, I'm going to have sex, LOL, that kind of thing.

And after they had sex, someone either convinced her or she convinced herself that it was rape because when two people are drinking, the woman cannot consent. It was the only time in the world where you're not responsible for your actions because you've been drinking. If you get in a car and you drink and you drive drunk and plow into people, you can never say, I'm not responsible because I was drunk. You can't say that. But for whatever reason, these social justice warriors have taken it upon themselves to, again, impart victim status only on women that are in these scenarios. So that the man is always the ugly oppressor, the ugly pursuer, the penetrator of the vagina, this evil man.

And so this kid got kicked out of college for having sex while drunk. That's really what it is. Yeah, the most outrageous thing was that the college itself actually officially determined that the sex was consensual. Yeah. But he got expelled. Yeah. And he's suing. He should fucking close that place down and then light it on fire and turn it to Disneyland too. Yeah. I mean, I think a revolution is coming or it's maybe already begun in higher education you know gee how though well i think what we're doing right now i think what you've been doing i think stuff like this i think podcasting i think uh it started with blogs 20 years ago uh now there's all sorts of online

courses i think there's a tremendous demand for learning and i think there are a lot of curious people out there who can't afford to go to college or don't want to go to these nut houses right that are colleges but what is it that's causing these nut houses to flourish this way, where it's so common? It's not an oddity. It's not just Dartmouth, where they stormed into the library or the study hall and started screaming Black Lives Matter while fucking white and black people were going over their work. They're sitting there trying to do their homework, and all these fucking white dorks are running through the hallway

screaming, Black Lives Matter, Black Lives Matter. And I'm watching that, and I'm going, what is this? These people aren't oppressors. They're students. They're fellow students. And you're being shamed if you don't join in. You're being shamed if you don't stop whatever you're doing. What is this? How is this happening?

It's so difficult to unpack. Well, so here's, it actually stems from a sort of sophisticated social theory, which is that discourse can be violence. That discourse is power

and discourse can therefore be violence. Just stay with me. I know. And so if discourse is violence, then any means are necessary to defend oneself from discursive violence. Oh boy. Right. And then on top of that, and I agree with this part, I mean, silence can be discourse too, right? Right. So silence in the case of these kids in the Dartmouth library, right, was violence. If you carry that argument to its logical extreme, which is what obviously is happening here. It's a perversion of French post-structuralism, which made this intervention about 40 years ago about discourse being power and also being violence. So they're kind of running with that idea.

And if you run with it all the way, it becomes totalitarian, right? And then you're back in like Maoist China, because everyone who says the wrong thing or doesn't say the right thing is a criminal, is an enemy, and must be dealt with by any means necessary. Yeah, no, it's bad. It's bad. Now, the good news is that right now, these people don't have much power, right? They aren't right now. These kids aren't running Congress. The bad news is that they will be running America pretty soon. But isn't the good news is that with time and maturity and life experiences, they'll become like you. One would hope.

You were like them. Yes, I was. One would hope. You were like them. Yes, I was. One would hope, and that's probably true to some extent. However, I don't know if you know about this, but there's been some recent polling done of millennials by the Pew Research Organization, and they found that millennials are much more hostile to the principle of free speech than previous generations. Yeah, I saw that the students in Yale, actually, there's a significant majority voted to rescind the First Amendment. Yep. Yeah, no, no.

What is this? What is that, Jamie? Do you know what that one is? That study, I think it was like 39% or something, some insane amount. That's about right. Yeah, I mean, they're really, they favor state regulation of speech. That is so crazy. Not a majority, I don't think, but a hefty minority of millennials do. And a larger portion of them than any other generation. What are 40% of millennials okay with limiting speech defenses to minorities? Hefty minority, there you go.

But do they understand what the state is? So that's really depressing. That's something to be afraid of. Because these are the people, as I said, they have no institutional power now, but they will. They will. These are kids in elite colleges who believe this, right? What do you think those elite colleges do?

They train people to take power. But it's like, if you asked anyone, no one thinks that you should say rude things to minorities. No one thinks you should say offensive things to anybody. No one thinks that. But when you decide what is offensive and what you should and shouldn't say, you limit discourse. You have power over other people's ability to express themselves, and what you do is you create these splinter groups where people get off together and they fucking close the blinds and go, yeah, all right, now it's time to talk about Mexicans. And they get together and they say racist shit and they form groups.

So you can see it in comments sections on the web, right? You can see it in Reddit. You can see it anywhere that there's anonymous users on the internet, right? That's what repression does. I mean, there's like clearly hardcore racism and sexism and misogyny and rape culture in those corners. Yes. It's all anonymous, right? And these are the repressed.

This is the repressed talking. Yes. Right? That's what happens, right? And so, yeah, but it's also, I think it's even worse than this, right? Because as I said the last time I was here, it is inherently conservative what they're calling for, even though it's a sort of a left-wing movement. They're asking for Big Brother, either the college president or the United States government

to protect us from ideas and speech and words. Right? So then what are we interested in? We're interested in those people having the power, having more power. That doesn't sound very left wing or liberatory to me or radical at all. No. And even these ideas, I mean, to stray slightly from this, when people are talking about socialism ideas, about taxing the rich more. Well, where the fuck do you think that money's going?

Exactly. It's going to go to the government. It's going to Bernie Sanders. Yeah. Well, when Bernie Sanders says that, I'm like, Bernie, you're a senator. You understand where this money goes. It goes to him. I mean, it goes to him to control. Well, it's the idea behind you take more money from people and give to the government to make things even. That is fucking crazy talk.

That's not how it works. If you want to encourage charitable donations on a wide scale and encourage some sort of broad-range philanthropism amongst people and figure out some way to institute that voluntarily, that's great. But Joe, we all

know that when you give the government lots of money, it uses it wisely. Oh, that's great. But Joe, we all know that when you give the government lots of money, it uses it wisely. Oh, that's true. I forgot. And it doesn't ever use the money to hurt anyone. No, never. We know that. And they never waste it. You're being silly. Yeah, I'm right. But that actually is sort of this, that is, I mean, it is that absurd. I mean, that's the assumption underneath this is that if we give them more money, they're going to do nice things with it. Yeah. They're going to feed orphans with it. I had a friend who was trying to. No, actually, they're going to drop bombs on orphans. 100%.

Yeah. I mean, you don't get an itemized sheet of where your money went. Like, only $5 worth of bombs. I'm all for that. Itemized taxes, yeah. It would be amazing. Would be amazing, too, if we could link it up online where everybody could take your itemized tax sheets and say, okay, let's just make sure that they used all of our money.

Everybody submit your itemized tax sheets so we can show, oh, we're missing a billion dollars. How weird. How fun would that be? Be like, Afghanistan? No. Yeah. Well, we don't even have any idea where our money goes. It's one of the weirdest things because you give a significant percentage.

If you make more than, what is it, $250,000 a year, you pay 40% plus in taxes. I think that's the number. That's a lot of money. And you don't even get a receipt. Less than in Scandinavia, the taxes. How much they get? For the wealthy. I don't know, but I think it bumps up against 90 in some countries.

90? I think so, yeah. 90% taxes. I think it's around there, yeah. Well, isn't that what Bernie wants to do? Oh, yeah. He wants think it bumps up against 90 in some countries. 90? I think so, yeah. 90% taxes? Yeah, I think it's around there, yeah. Well, isn't that what Bernie wants to do? Oh, yeah. He wants to rock it up to 90? Yeah, he's a Scandinavian social democrat.

Yeah. That's what he wants. Where's all that money going? The problem with that is, like, even if you do that, like, his ideas, as they've been explained to me by people who understand the economy, like, you would have to charge... $18 trillion is the number, yeah. You would have to tax everyone in this country 100% of everything they make, and you still wouldn't have enough is the number, yeah. You would have to tax everyone in this country 100% of everything they make

and you still wouldn't have enough money. Right, yeah. If you liquidated all the assets of all the wealthy, all the 1%, even I think the 2%, you couldn't pay for his stuff. They've done the math. This is not even controversial. He's even admitted this. He's admitted this. So what does he say to that? He admitted it on Bill Maher, actually, just a few, like a couple

months ago. What did he say? He said, well, maybe I guess we'd have to tax the middle class a bit too. Oh, God. Of course you would. Of course you would. It's $18 trillion, what he's calling for. Maybe it would make the society a better society. I mean, I like the idea of free healthcare and maybe free education, but then again,

what we're talking about in that case is public education for everyone. Public education is run by whom? It's run by the government. Do you want – people need to think more clearly about this. Isn't there a way to do free education online with ads the way you have YouTube ads? Totally.

Why wouldn't you do that? I mean, as long as the ads aren't offensive or as long as the ads aren't, you know, some ridiculous propaganda. Well, that's exactly the question that should be raised with Bernie Sanders and his supporters, right? Why do we need a government-run education system? Why do you want, or put it a different way, why do you want that? Right. Because I think there's something else going on here with them. I don't think it's just they want free education for everyone. I do think they're interested in social control. And that's a great way to control the populace is to control their education,

right? For the government to control their education. So when you say they're interested in social control, like to what extent? You'd have to ask them. I mean, I don't know. Why do you have the suspicion? Well, because every socialist has been interested in that. I mean, I used to be a socialist. I hung out with socialists. My parents were revolutionary socialists. I studied them. How many bills did you have to pay before you stopped being a socialist? One. What changed you?

When I looked at my parents' tax returns and saw that they made $11,000 a year in the 1970s, I said, oh, this seems like not much fun to me. Yeah. This seems like not much fun to me. Yeah. So, yeah, there's a longstanding tradition of a desire for social control on the left. There's nothing about that. I mean, going back to the progressives 120 years ago and then the hardcore socialists and the communists. Well, the idea of the right used to be it would leave you alone. The idea of conservatives was that it would leave you alone.

That you, you know, they didn't want you alone. They didn't want big government. They didn't want the government interfering with your life. But then it sort of got confused, and then there became a lot of religious issues involved in the Reagan administration once they started incorporating the religious right into their plans. Like when they started using the religious right in order to get into power and to vote, things started getting really weird because then conservatism wasn't necessarily leave people alone. Then it became about gay rights. It became about gay marriage and all this other weird stuff started getting in there. Right.

Well, yeah, so the right that you're talking about we now call the old right because it no longer exists pretty much. There's a little tiny magazine called the American Conservative where you can find the old right. They call themselves paleo-conservatives now. Paleo-conservatives. That's hilarious. So that's a tiny little faction. But they're interesting, and I sort of like them at least because they're truly conservatives. It's what it used to be.

It used to be about fiscal responsibility. Mostly, yeah. But also leaving people alone. Right. And then what we got was the neoconservatives, right? And so, well, there's two things. The wing you're talking about is the religious right, which came along, and you summarized that really well. But then also the neoconservatives came along, who really were progressives to begin with. And that's, those are the people who have run the United States into Iraq and Afghanistan

and around the world, right? Sort of right wing intellectuals sort of around the Bush administration in particular, who are very aligned with Israel and wanted to protect Israel, but also most importantly, wanted to make the world in America's image, very much committed to that vision, right? And they started off as actually progressives or even socialists, right? And if you think about it, progressivism and socialism is a homogenizing ideology. You're interested in making everyone the same, equality, right?

And if you have cultural sameness, you will reach economic sameness as well. So that's where they come from. That's who took over the Bush administration. To make the world in the image of the United States, you got to invade places. You got to send the army in to take over and teach them how to live properly, to live like Americans. And that's exactly what Iraq was all about, the Iraq war. That's exactly what Afghanistan, the Afghanistan occupation is about. The textbooks being taught to Afghani children right now were written by the United States Army. Whoa. Yeah. It's in the New York

Times. I mean, they published this. I mean, it's the United States Army wrote the history textbooks that are being used in Afghani schools right now. Do they have historians that work for the army? Probably. They hired somebody who was willing to write the proper history for them. Yeah. And then they vet it, make sure it fits their standards. Oh, yeah, I'm sure. According to the Times, there is no mention of the Afghanistan war in those textbooks.

What? Yeah, well, because you don't want to talk about the naughtiness, right? The bad stuff. Yeah, so, I mean, that's pretty naked imperialism, right? I mean, that's really clearly attempting to remake the world in your own image. Well, it's also, like, super dangerous to deny history. Sure. Because then people find out the truth, and then they resent you,

and they become upset, and then they never trust a word you say. Then they become the Taliban. Yes. Exactly. Right the Taliban. Yes. Exactly. Right. Exactly. So, right. It's also self-defeating.

Yeah. Ultimately. Probably. But for a long time, they'll have some control and they'll kill a lot of people in the process. So we started this whole rant of trying to figure out where this all started from. rant of trying to figure out where this all started from. Does it, where this social justice movement on campus, this ridiculous exaggeration of microaggressions and things along those lines, how much of it has to do with social media though? Because it seems like social media, they support each other and then they find like-minded groups, they get confirmation bias,

they all join together in these little message boards and what have you, and little Twitter hashtag groups, and then they feed off of each other and then explain to each other various things. I would say that just makes it louder, but it's always been around. I mean, the stuff I'm seeing on campus now is what I saw in the 1980s. It's just that in the 1980s, it didn't get off campus because there was no Twitter. Oh, okay. In the 1980s, it didn't get off campus because there was no Twitter. Oh, okay.

So like this YouTube video of the students in Yale screaming at the dean. Students at my college, Antioch College in Ohio, took a shit on the desk of the president. They broke into his office at night and took a shit on his desk. And what did he do wrong? And we called him all kinds of stuff. We thought he was the great oppressor because there was no oppressor around. So we had to create one. And what did he do wrong? And we called him all kinds of stuff. You know, we thought he was the great oppressor because there was no oppressor around. So we had to create one, and he was it. Poor guy.

So this Occidental guy that they're trying to kick out, the dean? No, the president. President? What do they want to replace him with? Oh. A trans black woman? That's a great question.

Genderqueer? And that has been raised a few times. So who do you think you're going to get to replace him? Like who is there out there who will be better for you? Right. No one. Do they have at least a list of offenses that he's committed other than not having a black studies class or program?

There's a list of demands. You can go online and see them. Those are demands. They're not necessarily grievances. Right. So it go online and see them. Those are demands. They're not necessarily grievances, right? So it's unclear what the specific grievances are. And who gets to vote on these demands, too? I mean, is it a small, tiny shell group? Well, the faculty has power over curricular issues, and then administrative issues are the president and his offices, basically.

Okay. It's sort of embarrassing to talk about this stuff because it's so ridiculous and I'm a part of it. You know, I feel embarrassed to be associated with it. You know, do you remember that moment when there was the pepper spray incident on, well, I forget what campus it was. UC Davis. UC Davis, thanks. Well, they pepper sprayed those kids that were sitting there peacefully on their knees,

and they were protesting the raising of tuition, and they wouldn't leave. So these cops, this cop pepper sprays them in the face. And then after all the commotion had settled, was it the dean? Was that what it was? The woman who left, and no one said a word as she walked by. It was totally eerily silent. And that was a powerful statement, a real powerful statement. Instead of screaming at her, instead of like, you called the police on this, like, look what's happened, the pepper spray kids, no one said a

word. And this woman walked and she was being escorted to her car and just dead silence. So how do you interpret that? It was just insanely powerful. It was, there was a real, it was like, it was palpable. You could see like,

first of all, it was shame. The whole thing was like shameful. Like what that cop did was shameful. What the kids were doing was pro that's like a legit protest. Like you're charging too much for school. You're raising the rate. That's a legit protest.

And the fact that they were pepper sprayed for doing that by some fucking asshole cop spraying chemicals in the face of these kids. And then this woman leaving in total silence. But that was a response to a real situation. Like something real happened. Something real went down. It was really like a cultural tragedy. I mean real happened, something real went down. It was really like a cultural tragedy. I mean, these microaggressions are real. I mean, I've seen these huge websites

that sort of document specific microaggressions that have happened on all sorts of campuses. And it all sounds believable to me. I think it's all happened. You know, where are you from? What are you? Right. What are you really?

Yeah, it was going to be dicky people. Are you an athlete? I think it's all true. The question is, how should you feel about that? Right. What are you really? Yeah, it was going to be dicky people. Are you an athlete? I think it's all true. The question is, how should you feel about that? Right. And John McWhorter's argument is, his argument is that you have a choice. Right. You can choose to be damaged by that.

And I think these kids really do feel damaged by it. Or you can think, this is a parochial knucklehead who said this. Why should I care what this idiot thinks, right? Which is a quarter's attitude, right? When he was at Rutgers or whatever it was, he was just like, he came across some actual racists who said things to him and he thought they were inferior. And he says, that's what they should be thinking now about people who say these things. You're an idiot, right? They're making themselves damaged. And you're right.

This doesn't rise to the level of your tuition, your scholarship being cut, right? Your financial aid being taken away. It doesn't rise to the level of a cop spraying you in the face with pepper spray, right? Those things are real grievances that have to be dealt with I think in extreme ways it's an interesting that that was the response like in a real situation everybody just just stayed quiet and this this eerie silence as this woman left right that was a real protest like that that like rang out like you watch that video to

this day And it's fucking creepy have you seen it um I don't recall the woman watching. We have seen the video video The pepper spray video is disturbing, but this is really kind of powerful when the woman's leaving and she's being Escorted out no one says a fucking word I mean there's a thousand people out there and no one says a word. That can be effective. I think, I think it was, that protest was effective because there was a video that went out on social media and everyone saw it. Right. Right. But I mean, in the moment, I think it was effective for everyone who was there, including her.

I think, I think fucking shit up is effective too, actually. Oh, look at you, you anarchist. Yeah. Like, in what way? There's no question about it. What way would you like to fuck things up? Well, I think if you look at the history of riots in this country, you see tremendous social progress immediately following them. So you're pro-riot? What's that? UC Davis?

Um, I am not pro-riot. I'm just, uh, but. Sounds like it. Well, maybe. You're gonna get in trouble. Oh yeah. I'm already in trouble. Um, I'm already in trouble. I'm already in hell. No, it's true, though. I mean, if you look at sort of police brutality, right, most riots in this country have been in response to police brutality. And you look at the cities in which riots have happened since the 1930s, you'll see a decline in police brutality in those cities almost across the board, almost in every case. Right. Just in Baltimore recently. Right.

After those riots, those cops were indicted. Now they may get off, but they were indicted, which is a rare thing for cops. Hold on, let's put the headphones on so you can hear this. Because it's kind of crazy. She's leaving, and there's fucking thousands of people there, and no one's saying a word to her. Oh, I do remember this. So creepy.

Just dead quiet. No one's talking. So they're protesting her. Yeah, right. Yeah, well, she was the one who called the cops. Right. On these students and had them pepper sprayed in the face. So she has this long walk of shame.

And people are taking photographs, but no one's saying a word. And it's really intense. If you know the story behind it, it's even more intense. I mean, this lasts for quite a while, and no one says anything. And did she resign, or was she fired? That's a good question. That would be, that's the question to answer, right? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't know. This video got out, and I'm sure this whole scenario was brutally stressful, and it had to cause some form of change. Oh, it definitely did. I mean, I don't know if she suffered, but I know that UC Davis Institute, I think the cop was fired. Oh, yeah. Well, his life was threatened. I mean, that guy's life was absolutely ruined.

Right. And you can be sure that it's less likely for a protester at that campus to get pepper sprayed. Oh, 100%. Especially if you're just sitting there. I mean, that's disgusting. You're supposed to do stuff like that when people are dangerous and violent. You're not supposed to do stuff to kids that are just sitting down. about that. I mean, the cops, the police, LAPD instituted wide ranging reforms. And you can ask anyone who's lived in LA in the 80s and lives here now. It's a huge difference in the way that the

cops deal with black people in this city now. And that was from one video, the Rodney King video, and then the trial and the subsequent acquittal of the officers. And then from then, what we're dealing with is the new wave of these videos. We're seeing over and over again all these videos, evidence of police brutality. And that's probably having an effect on it as well. People are much more aware of what they do and what they don't do. There have been more indictments of cops this year, this last year, than I think ever because of Black Lives Matter and social media. There's no doubt about it. It's very effective. And, you know, you have Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and Martin O'Malley talking

about police brutality constantly now. And that's clearly only because of Black Lives Matter. Bernie Sanders didn't want to talk about it until those kids got on the stage with him in Seattle and shamed him and yelled at him, right? And they were mocked for that too, but they were very effective in doing that. And then so the next day, Bernie Sanders starts talking about police brutality and the criminal justice system. And Hillary Clinton, like a week or two later, starts doing it too. And ever since then, they can't shut up about it. So it's a very effective, disruptive protest. They recognize that it's just a powerful talking point. Well, they're forced to talk about it because they've had these disruptive protests.

Right. So in that sense, you're in favor of those kind of protests? When I'm in solidarity with the cause, yeah. I mean, it's a question of tactics, like what is an effective tactic, right? And there's just no doubt that disruptive protest and in many cases, violent protest in the form of riots has been very effective. and in many cases violent protest in the form of riots, has been very effective. Do you think that the future involves these kind of institutions, these longstanding institutions like Stanford and Harvard and Yale, or do you think that the future is going to be something where people get their education online more likely than not?

Well, I think the future is the university I'm going to start next year. I'm going to Willamette only part-time, but what I'm really doing this coming year is launching what I'm calling a renegade university, which will be an online education set of courses, lectures, and interactive seminars for anyone who's interested in learning about history and political philosophy, current events, looking at things in a new way. And you offer degrees? Not yet. I think most people wouldn't be interested in that. I think this is just for people who are just like you

or just curious about the world, right? There's a huge demand for this in the world, and it's so expensive at colleges now. It's unaffordable for most people now or many people now. And also you have to sort of enter this loony bin, as we know, to learn these things now. So, I mean, I think people are kind of bypassing colleges and universities more and more through online education, through podcasting, through all these other media forms. So that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to offer sort of what I've been teaching in my classes in colleges for 20 years to anyone online for a tiny fraction of the cost, right?

There's, you know, it's much cheaper to do this than for them than to pay tuition at a Yale or Occidental College. Well, that sounds excellent. And I think we're in a unique time now where something like that is very appealing to people because a lot of people are getting, I mean, at the end of the day, education is information, right? That's what it is. You're learning things. You're taking in things. We're educating ourselves constantly. You're constantly educating yourself with articles and books and things, documentaries that you watch.

There's always information that's coming in. It's just the idea is that to get an education, in air quotes, you have to go to a place and you have to follow their rules. And you have to sit in the class with all these other people that are trying to do the same. And you have to somehow or another do it together. Why? That doesn't make sense to me because you don't live your life like that. Your life doesn't involve like you don't go to a place and learn about people. You live and you learn about people.

You know, I think that it's very, it's kind of confining and archaic to have these institutions where you have to go there. And then the whole tenure process and the politics of the staff and the teaching and what can and can't be in the curriculum and who it does and doesn't offend or appeal to? Yeah, it's archaic.

It's actually medieval. I mean, the modern university is based on colleges and universities in the Middle Ages, schools in the Middle Ages. What's the oldest running university today? In the United States, it's Harvard. When was that established? 17th century, I believe. Wow.

I believe. That's hilarious. Yeah. Before the United States. Yeah. Wow. What the fuck was it here? 1636.

I was right. That's insane. That is insane. Good Lord. Yeah, it's based on schools in the Middle Ages. Wow. So it's truly archaic. It's a bizarre place, the modern college.

Yeah. It's a bizarre, bizarre place. There's no other place like it. Some of that's good. I mean, it's nice to have this space where you can talk about ideas. The problem is that's happening less and less in colleges. Isn't it good, though, for a lot of people to get away from their parents, to go someplace, to be around other young kids that are experiencing this sort of new freedom for themselves, and then to be thrust into this sort of pressure cooker of ideas?

Yeah, but do you have to go to college to get that? Well, otherwise, you're stuck with your parents. And then what are you going to do? You're going to get a job to pay your rent. This way, you're in a dorm, you know, you show up, bell rings, go to class. Well, like in the 1960s people just went to San Francisco instead, right? And they just hung out. Oh, that's true.

So go to San Francisco, folks. Denver's the new San Francisco. Well, I mean it, yeah. Wherever it is. I mean, not San Francisco now, obviously, but someplace. Yeah, San Francisco now, you'll be homeless. If you make less than $200,000 a year, you're going to be homeless. Right. Yeah, that's not happening.

That's not a joke either. I know. That place is fucking insane. My parents just moved out of there. Yeah, so, I mean, it's making less and less sense to people. So if you look at, just economically, you look at the price of a degree has gone up and up and up, right? And the value of a degree has gone down and down and down because everyone's got a college degree now. It's like the new high school diploma.

Right, as far as your return, immediate, able to get a job. Diamond dozen, right? So employers are looking at degrees as being less and less valuable. So, you know, that's a clear bubble happening. I mean, that's a real problem economically. And then maybe more importantly, there's all these other ways to learn stuff now. Right. Mostly online. Right. That's cheap or free. Either formal online courses or just listening to podcasts or reading blogs or, you know, or going on Twitter. I've said there's more, and I really mean this, there is more intellectual debate in one hour of Twitter

than there is a four years of college. I mean, there's far more conflict of ideas on social media now than there is in a college classroom because college classrooms are dominated and have been for decades by left liberals. That's the discourse that goes on in there. You don't hear conservative ideas. You don't hear libertarian ideas. You don't even hear some radical left-wing ideas. It's this very narrow discourse that is pretty much only allowed in the college classroom. And that's, to me, the most, the biggest problem with the modern university. There is no diversity of ideas. Everybody's obsessed with diversity of color, skin color, but no one cares about a diversity of ideas, about real debate. I want in my university

to have a real debate about big ideas. I want the best minds from conservatism and liberalism and socialism and libertarianism to have it out. Let's talk about the big ideas and let's go for it and have the best people argue the points on their merits against each other. Why is it that there's such a narrow path of ideas that exist right now in colleges? Why is it just this... Tenure? Yeah.

I mean, so what happened was conservatives basically dominated colleges until the 1960s. And then the 1960s generation of radicals had nowhere to go when they went into their 20s and 30s. So they decided to move into the academy. So they all got PhDs and they became professors, and they've dominated ever since. There's also this system of tenure in universities, which is supposed to protect academic freedom. And what it actually does is it enforces intellectual conformity, right? Because you have a lifetime appointment and you control hiring, right right the faculty controls hiring who are you gonna hire you're gonna hire somebody who agrees with you who says what you think should be said so that's

the problem with tenure right it sort of protects academic freedom but mostly it enforces intellectual conformity that disturbing. It's disturbing because you can... It's a priesthood. Yeah, in a way, right? Right. You're a priest for life. And who are you going to recruit into the priesthood? A true believer. That's what goes on in universities with faculty hiring.

So if you have tenure, there's essentially no way you can get fired unless it's a radical crime? You have to rape a student or you have to be schizophrenic or yeah, I mean, it's almost impossible. That seems kind of ridiculous as well, because like, what if someone starts putting out poor work? Like, here's a perfect example, a guy who has tenure who is at the University of California, Berkeley, that guy who believes that a Duesberg, Peter Duesberg, I've had him on the podcast before, and it was probably

the most hate I ever got. He's got this radical idea that AIDS is not a disease that's caused by HIV, and that HIV is a weak virus, and HIV exists in these people because they already have a compromised immune system,

and that what's really going on is they're taking recreational drugs and partying and depleting their immune system to the point where hiv can actually show up and that hiv is not the cause of aids but it's just the symptom of a depleted immune system he's a fucking professor of of biology at the university of california berkeley and he's widely hated by AIDS researchers, like people who understand HIV at a deeper level, and they think he's a fucking moron. And what he's doing is

dangerous. But meanwhile, he has tenure. So, let him have it out. I mean, he's reviled by the profession. So what's the problem here, right? I mean, let him have it out with his opponents. Let them argue this. But they won't even argue with them though because it's like arguing with a holocaust denier it's like if you if you get on a

dais with a holocaust denier and you start debating them like you're you're giving him merit by just being there i mean i think the market should decide it doesn't decide right meaning the students should decide right broadly speaking the students the student the broad student body people who might go to college, who might take his class should decide, right? They don't get to decide though, because he has tenure. That's the problem. It removes it from market forces. Right, right, right. Whereas if the students decide, but, but you know, the students are trying to get rid of the president of Occidental for no fucking reason at all. The market often does things we don't like.

But the market should be able to do that as well Sure, yeah, so they should be able to kick out what the market does is the market learns, right? So at Occidental they would kick out if they were had their way They would kick out the president and he would be replaced by someone who was just as bad Or some or worse someone like them or slightly better or someone that they would luck out and they would find someone just like them, but that seems impossible. Because the president of a college has to keep the place afloat. Right. Yeah.

So they have fiscal responsibilities they have to take into consideration as well. They have fiscal responsibilities, exactly. Why was tenure created in the first place? What was the idea behind that? To protect academic freedom. Right. To allow us to say what we want in the classroom free from fear of being fired

by the administration. And when was it instituted? It's ancient. That system. But it wasn't really fucked until the 60s? That's when it got fucked? No, it's always been fucked. So, you know, in the 1920s

and 30s and 40s and 50s, schools were dominated by kind of, you know, straight white male elites, right? Wealthy people, right? And they had a very narrow discourse, too. It was just a very different one than we're taught now, right? But they were protected from market forces as well, right? And there was no intellectual diversity there either, right? It was just as bad. It was just a different discourse.

So the problem is tenure, the heart of it. It also, there's just this huge generation, which I belong to, of scholars with PhDs who are very good teachers and very good scholars who can't get jobs now. There's this tremendous overproduction of PhDs in the last 50 years, right? Not enough and not a lot of jobs. We have to have more churn. We have to have more turnover. We have to have people. There's all these people who are much better than tenured professors out there who can't teach

and can't have solid, secure jobs. We have to eliminate tenure to make these places better. So because of tenure, you're getting people that establish that position then like here's a perfect example there was uh one of the people that was talking about the woman in missouri that was calling for muscle melissa click yeah this is her name it was this insane video she's telling some young man he couldn't be there in a public place taking photographs. He's like, actually, I can. And she calls for muscle to get this guy kicked out of there. It's just like insane.

Well, one of the criticisms was by this guy who is a professor. And he said that her mistake was that she did this before she got tenure. You wait until you get tenure and then you shake things up. Like, no, no, no. Her mistake was saying, can I get some muscle to take us to, not only that, the woman, same woman, just a day before was calling for the media to cover this event. And she's a professor of communications. Yes. The whole thing is just insane.

Right. Yes, which is the whole thing is the whole thing is just insane. But it's this detachment from objective reasoning, this complete detachment and this this insistence on staying within this this idea that they're enforcing of safe spaces of intolerance to anyone with opinions other than what they're trying to conform and what they're trying to enforce on these kids. I mean, I would imagine that Melissa Click believed that those students protesting in the tents on that quad were being harmed, had been harmed, and were being harmed, were actively being oppressed by racism on that campus, and they needed to be protected from that harm. Now, what actually happened on the University of Missouri campus, allegedly two people used the word nigger in a six-month period. That's it. And that hasn't even been proven, by the way.

Who were these two people that did it? Well, no one knows. Oh, it's just like it's in the air? Two students claimed no two students claimed that they were called nigger god that's it yeah with no no descriptions of you know and there's that could have happened it could have happened but you know what else could have happened this is a part of the problem. Kids make shit up. Always have. Right. And especially to enforce that victim mentality. Yeah.

Right. So we reward victims. Yeah. Well. That's the cultural problem. There's a recreational victim mentality that's going on. Yeah. Where people are looking for reasons why they were victims.

And in that situation, you got a hunger strike over two people using that word over six months. Yeah. And there's a hunger strike. It's a demand to be treated like a child. Yeah. It's a demand for more paternalism. Right. Protect me.

I'm a victim. Or cleanse this area of all its impure thoughts and reasoning. Right. Make it into like a playpen. Well, make it into a safe space. Yeah, like a playpen. A playpen's a safe space? A brown.

A bouncy house. Yeah, well, a brown, you know about the safe spaces at Brown, right? University. What have they done? Oh, Christina Hoff Summers talked about it on... Yeah, yeah, but I mean for everybody. Oh, I mean, oh, sorry, yeah.

They created a safe space that had like coloring books, I think, for students to go to because if the ideas they heard were too troubling for them. Videos of puppies. And videos of puppies, I guess. Yeah. So she said. These are allegations. Who knows?

But yeah, I believe it to some extent. Yeah. And that was because of a woman who's a feminist coming on to talk about the problems with using incorrect data and biased studies to reinforce ideas that may or may not be true, which she believes damage actual feminism. All right. So before we continue to trash the students too much, I have to say this. All this is true. Everything we've said is completely true.

Right. And I agree with you on all of it. However, I've been teaching for 20 years, four different colleges, elite schools, both coasts. This is a minority of college students we're talking about. This is not most of them. It's a vocal minority. This is not most of them. In fact, it's a fairly small minority. Most of my students, as far as I know, have not been like this at all. In fact, most of them are pretty disdainful of this kind of stuff and just want to learn. Well, I think a lot of kids today also, because of social media,

because they get to watch videos of all this nonsense going on at Yale and all this craziness going on in Missouri, and they get to read blogs about it, and they get to participate in conversations on social media, they're understanding how stupid it all is. They're understanding that you're dealing with a bunch of fucking babies. And so there's probably some pushback in that regard. So what's been, I keep saying, the most troubling thing to me, one of the most troubling things to me is that the faculty have been mostly silent about this.

Well, it seems worse than that. The faculty's trying to enforce some sort of mechanism. Some of them are egging them on, but most, I would say, just aren't saying anything. And I'm talking about tenured senior faculty with lifetime job security are not saying anything. And I know many of them have reservations about what's going on, but they won't talk about it. It's really infuriating. And I can't quite explain it, except that they're just cowards. But it's a terrible thing, right?

I mean, because the ideas these kids are espousing, they've gotten from the classrooms. Right. They've gotten from these faculty. Well, don't you want to take back your ideas or try to teach these kids? Isn't that what we're here for? Yeah. Right? Yeah, discourse can be violent, but that doesn't mean we should eliminate free speech because of it.

Right? Of course. That intervention is not being made by faculty, though. I'm not hearing that being said, not publicly, not on campuses. That's where it gets confusing because if the faculty does have tenure, wouldn't they want to express themselves? Like, you don't have to worry about getting fired. Like, don't you see the problems with this kind of thinking and this kind of enforcing this very rigid idea of what you can and can't say

or who you are and how you behave? But the worst thing that can happen to a white liberal, and I know this, is to be called a racist. That's the worst thing that can happen to you. Hmm. Maybe worse than losing your job. Really? Yeah.

Being called a racist and having people believe it. Oh. That's a terrifying prospect for a white liberal. Terrifying. Hmm. So they'll do anything to avoid that. Being called a sexist wouldn't be so hot either, but being called a racist is worse.

It's worse than being a sexist? I think so. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Where does, like, transph called a racist is worse. It's worse than being a sexist? I think so, yeah. Wow. Yeah. Where does, like, transphobic fall on that list? That's catching up, yeah. That's moving up the list pretty fast.

The transphobic one is weird because there's so few transgender people. Like, the percentage of people that are transgender, it's amazing that that has caught so much steam publicly. Because it's not like you're responding to a real issue that's happening. It's almost like a pet thing to reinforce. The trans movement is interesting. So the trans movement started basically after Stonewall, 1969, 1970s, as part of the gay liberation movement.

And the thrust of that was, after Stonewall, 1969, 1970s, as part of the gay liberation movement. And the thrust of that was, leave us alone, and we don't care what you think about us. We're going to do whatever we want to do. We're going to dress as women or dress as men. We're going to behave however we want. We don't care what you think about us, right? That's a very liberatory movement. I'm a big fan of that, right?

They're my heroes, that generation. And by the way, RuPaul is kind of a descendant of them. This is what he keeps saying over and over again. I don't care if you call me a she or a he. I don't care, he says. I'm going to do whatever I want to do. Are you allowed to say he or is it she? RuPaul says. He doesn't care. He says he? He says he doesn't care. He says you can call me either he or she.

So you can't misgender him? Nope. Good for him. He's free. Her. Exactly. Right. She. She. She. He's free. Her. Exactly. Ji. Ji. Ji. Ji. Ji. Ji.

So now what you see a lot, but not entirely, but a lot among trans people is, you know, they're really concerned about what you and I think about them. That seems to be their primary concern is what we think about them. Again, it's like it's asking for more paternalism. It's giving us more power. Well, asking people to, when you meet someone, immediately ask what are your preferred gender pronouns? Have you seen Steven Crowder did a video where he applied that in real life? No. It's fucking hilarious. He went out. That guy's No.

It's fucking hilarious. He went out. That guy's something. He's something. He went out all over the place and was asking people what their preferred gender pronoun would be. The look that people gave him in the real world, like, what the fuck are you talking about? Over and over and over again, he's asking these people what their preferred gender pronoun would be. How should I refer to you?

Wouldn't it be better if we just didn't care? Yeah. I mean, I don't, I think this idea that a man has a woman inside of him and he really is a man, a woman trapped in a man's body or a man trapped in a woman's body. And you would like to transfer, you know, like this idea that now it's a she, or now it's a he. I really think that you should be able to do whatever you want to do. And I think that even if you're not a woman trapped in a man's body, but if you wake up one day and go, I think it'd be cool to just get an operation and become a woman and start taking female hormones and see if I like it. You should totally be able to do that.

I'm 100% for that. The real problem becomes when you make whatever choices you're doing, you make it a big deal to everyone else. And you start making it so that people have very specific ways they're supposed to address you and talk to you. You change your name to Caitlin. Now you're Kate. You were Bruce for 60 fucking years. But now I have to make a new noise with my face that means you. And if I don't make that new noise with my face, I'm an asshole.

Right. And I'm misgendering, and I'm insensitive and rude. Well, there's a slight possibility that you might be fucking crazy. And if you decide that you're a fox, do I call you a foxkin? Like, what do I do now? I mean, people don't like those comparisons. They don't like them, but those are valid. Like you're doing something, you're having surgery and hormones to become normal.

That alone should make you go, okay, what are we dealing with here? What exactly, are we allowed to discuss this? We are not. And that's where things get tricky. You're not allowed to discuss this, and you have to stay within a very rigid set of rules and Behaviors you don't want to call them crazy though. Do you some of them are crazy? How do you know that? Well, I think some people are crazy I would assume that there's a certain amount of people in this world

Whether it is one percent or one tenth of one percent that are crazy now a certain amount of men who are Cisgendered heterosexual men are fucking crazy a certain amount of men who are cisgendered, heterosexual men are fucking crazy. A certain amount of cisgendered, heterosexual women are fucking crazy. Well, you've got to define crazy. Insane, ridiculous, preposterous. Well, that's been said about people

who get punched in the face for a living. Sure, a lot of them are crazy. That's true, though. But it's true. So my point being, like, when you decide what's normal, what's not normal, what we have to accept and not accept, and what we're allowed to comment on, that's when things get weird. Like, when you're not allowed to comment on certain things because you become insensitive,

but you're putting out this thing in the public. You're making it this big social issue. Right. And you only have one way you're allowed to communicate and look at it. Yeah. I mean, what I really dislike is, as I said, the concern for what I think about you. Right? Rather, you should really be free of that. You should be free of me. Yeah.

But that seemed to be entirely concerned with what I think and what I say. Yes. Again, this is a repudiation of the 1960s and 70s gay liberation movement and the trans liberation movement of that time who that the whole point of that movement was we don't care what you think about us we're going to fuck in the streets we're going to be naked we're going to dress however we want we're going to act however we want we don't care that was true freedom now it's it's about wanting to be treated properly by parents by making us into their parents. Well, it's also sort of reinforcing this new society standards of acceptance,

which I'm 100% in favor of. The idea that it is okay if your dad just decides to become a woman at 60 years old and starts wearing dresses if it makes him feel better, which I'm 100% for. But why shouldn't – I mean, I am a big believer in choice. I'm a big believer in us all being different. Then I wouldn't be in the business of calling people crazy. Well, that's because you're a professor and not a comedian. I'm in the business of calling people crazy when I think they're crazy.

Well, it just doesn't mean a lot. Crazy doesn't mean a lot? It doesn't in my world. Because it's so arbitrary, right? Yes. It's been applied to everyone. It's certainly arbitrary. I'm sure you've been called crazy.

I've been called crazy. Oh, yeah. Everyone's been called crazy. You're definitely crazy. Yeah, well, right. Me too. It depends on your standard. Yeah.

But. So you really want to allow people to do whatever they want. Certainly. Then don't call them crazy. Why does that have any effect on whether or not they do whatever they want?

I'm not saying it's stopping them. Some of my favorite people doing whatever they want are fucking crazy. But don't you want to encourage people to do whatever they want? To be free? I definitely do, but I don't think that calling someone crazy for crazy behavior stops that. And if it does, then maybe you're not free enough. Yeah, again, they should not care too much about what you think. That's my main point here.

But if you're really in favor of making people feel free to make whatever choices they want, then using terms like insane and crazy is not helpful. Well, I could see that point, but also there's a very real possibility that

people with all sorts of dysmorphia issues, whether it is anorexia, whether it's bodybuild of dysmorphia issues, whether it is anorexia, whether it's bodybuilder dysmorphia, where they never can be big enough, that all of these are conditions that are psychological, mental conditions, that you could say, this person's crazy. Like when you see a bodybuilder, and they can't stop getting bigger because they're out of their mind, they look at themselves in the mirror, and they think they're tiny, and so they're 350 fucking pounds, and they're doing steroids and lifting weights 24 hours a day.

You can say that guy's crazy, right? No. What? You can't. You're in this weird PC area now that you have kind of accepted because you go to school and you teach and you're a part of it now. But that's a crazy person. school and you teach and you're a part of it now, but that's a crazy person. We're talking about a man who's a bodybuilder who lifts so much weights that his body is like virtually exploding and they have a dysmorphia where they cover themselves up because they

always look tiny. You don't think that there's a psychological condition there? There's a psychological condition. And doesn't that make you crazy? What does crazy mean? I don't know. I mean, again, doing jujitsu is called crazy. You know, I mean, it's being a professor has been called crazy.

Sure. So why do you have issue with the word crazy then? Because you're pathologizing people's choices. You're saying. I'm pathologizing people's choices if they lift weights until their body explodes. I knew a dude who who literally did that he he was a bodybuilder and he died I think he was like 31 or 32. We used to call him garden hoses because his arms Had veins that were like garden hoses. There were these giant. I mean it was insane You looked at him. You had never seen a human being like him. He would lift weights

He was a white guy like as white as you he would turn fucking purple. I mean, purple. He was just 80% steroids. His body was just overrun. He was out of his mind. He was definitely crazy. Would you call that guy crazy? No. He lifted weights until he died. You don't think that's crazy? What about martial artists? So do you not use crazy at all? Is that what's going on? What about martial artists? Do you use crazy? Do you use the term crazy? I try not to. What's a school shooter?

Is that a crazy person? It's someone I want to avoid. Not crazy, huh? Do you limit speech in your own mind? Are you limiting your own speech? I am censoring myself all the time. You are a little bit with the word crazy. You have a problem with the word crazy.

I do. Why? I do. As I said, I think it pathologizes people's choices i think it contributes to a limitation of freedom crazy contributes to a limitation of and it's been used against all sorts of behaviors that you would absolutely consider to be normal now right but i don't it doesn't affect me not only that you consider normal but that you consider to be preferable like what behaviors? Behaviors.

Like I said, like martial arts. Or driving a fast sports car. Yeah, but it doesn't affect me in a negative way. If you say that I'm crazy because I like to do stand up when I'm high, that's not going to affect me. Well, it's... In a way, you're infantilizing, that's not a word. Infantilizing?

Infantilizing people that you would use that moniker on. Well, what do you gain from calling someone crazy? It's fun. Oh, okay. That's fine. I like calling people crazy. Isn't it? I mean, I'm not...

What do you gain by any adjective? The question is what you want to accomplish. So I'm not moralizing against you using that term. Go ahead. But if you're interested in human freedom, right, and encouraging human freedom, then I would discourage using the term crazy to describe people's choices. Wow. But I use it all the time, and I'm in favor of people's freedom, and I think he's crazy and he's awesome. Like, is that okay?

It's not about being okay or not okay. I'm just saying, again, it's about objectives. What is your objective? If it's maximizing human freedom, that's the word that doesn't reach that objective. Well, the idea behind that would be then somehow or another the word crazy would have a negative impact on the person that you use it on. Well, what you're doing by saying something's crazy is you're saying they should not do this thing. No. Oh, aren't you? Not at all. No. Well, what you're doing by saying something's crazy is you're saying they should not do this thing. No.

Oh, aren't you? Not at all. No. Oh, I thought you were. No. About the muscle, the bodybuilder? I don't give a fuck if he lifts himself to death. If it was my kid, I'd probably try to get him help.

Oh, okay. Well. But it's obviously kind of insane. But you admit that usually it's used in that way, though. It's used as a negative, right? Usually it's, you're saying you should not do that. That's a bad thing to do. You should not ride a motorcycle without a helmet.

That's crazy. It is, but you're going to die anyway. You know, I mean, the way I view crazy is, there's broad ranges of crazy, right? Like there's the crazy guy that walks in the street talking to himself and he's not on a Bluetooth headset. He's just, you know, having internal dialogues externally. That's a crazy person, right?

It's not a crazy person? What is that? See, it's very dangerous because people have been locked up, right, for behaviors that were called crazy that you would never consider to be crazy now. Right. Right? Against their will. All kinds of behaviors have been punished harshly because they were deemed to be crazy or insane or pathological.

So I, you can do whatever you want, but I don't want to be in the business of labeling things, behaviors, choices, other people's choices as those things because I know where it can lead them. It can lead them to lock up. Well, I think we're dealing with a broad definition of the word crazy. Some of them are pejorative and some of them that are actually positive. There's a lot of people that I find to be crazy that I enjoy very much. And there's some of my favorite people.

Well, it's also utterly arbitrary, right? So it becomes basically meaningless. Not necessarily. You're crazy as someone else's normal. Well, if you watch a guy and he's walking a tightrope in between two buildings, 100 stories up, that guy's fucking crazy. I'm not saying that he should go to jail

or anyone should stop his choices, but that is a fucking crazy thing to do. Why? What does that mean, though? What do you think of me? We're playing games here. What are we doing here? You got on this road because of the possibility that someone who is transgender might be crazy,

like that this should be taken into consideration, or the possibility that someone who gets their face tattooed or gets- You're by definition pathologizing something by calling it crazy. You're saying that it's not normal, and basically you're suggesting, at least suggesting, or just straight out saying, that it should not be done. No, not at all. You shouldn't walk on a tightrope. You shouldn't dress as a woman.

You should do whatever you want. Okay. I 100% think that if you really want to lift yourself to death, you should do it. If you really want to walk on a tightrope across two buildings, you should do it. What is not crazy? How does one live? Is there someone who's lived in the world without being crazy? That's a good point.

It sounds like a very boring place. I'm sure there is. This is like a very non-Joe Rogan kind of place to live in, a non-crazy place, don't you think? Maybe like a guy who works at a deli. Just makes sandwiches all day. We should all make sandwiches all day. His sandwiches are fucking crazy. The term, I see what you're saying. But what if he's a trans sandwich maker?

Well, maybe he's crazy. Maybe he's just crazy. Yeah. Maybe he's crazy and a normal sandwich guy. Maybe he's a cisgendered, white, crazy sandwich guy who hears words in his head but doesn't respond to them. I don't know. You just don't like to work crazy. I don't.

Oh, that's a good word. I don't, no. I think it's a bad word. No? No. Go ahead if you get off of a fucking roller coaster ride, you go, holy shit, that was crazy. Do you ever say that? I use it all the time.

I just judge myself harshly using it. I have a shame session, you know, by myself. I see what you're saying, though. What you're saying is you don't want to shame people or in any way affect their choices. And you want to give them the freedom to do whatever they want. And by saying someone might be crazy, you're possibly limiting that. Yes. It's a shaming.

It could be. It can be. Not always, but it often is. There are people with legitimate pathologies that get involved in all sorts of body modification things. There was a guy who got his nose cut off, and he literally turned himself into the Red Skull. Is that what it is? The guy, the Captain America guy? It's fucking terrifying.

He was a handsome guy, but he had his nose cut off. Like the tip of his nose cut off. He had all these bolts put in his head. What's wrong with that? I don't know. It looks awesome. What is wrong with that? Is that guy crazy?

Here he is. Look at that guy. Wow. Wow. Yeah. Well, he seems like a normal guy to me. No, he doesn't. If that guy came home with your daughter, what would you do?

I wouldn't call him crazy because I'm scared of him. Oh, because you are scared of him? Oh, yeah. Yeah, because he's obviously willing to do this to his body. What would he do to you? He had his eyeballs turned black with tattoo ink. I would certainly say it's unusual what he has done. Oh, it's definitely unusual.

Possibly unique. It's really strange. And what's really crazy, if you see what he looked like beforehand, he was a pretty good-looking guy. Man. Yeah. Yeah, that's him beforehand. That is crazy. Thank you.

Yeah. Okay, so where do we draw the line? I'll give you one. No, I don't think it's crazy. Oh, you don't think it's crazy? No, you're kidding. Everything could be called crazy. It's arbitrary. It's meaningless. Having your nose cut off and your face dyed red and your eyeballs tattooed black.

It's a meaningless term. It's meaningless. I don't know if it has a good meaning. I think if, you know... Well, if it helps sort of direct you in your choices, you know, or if it helps describe, direct you in your choices, you know, like, or if it helps describe, like, uh,

if that's your son and he does that and someone says, uh, you see that, I says, boy went fucking crazy. I'm not saying I would be happy if my son did that to his face. Right. But I wouldn't call it crazy.

What would you call it? Awesomely unique. I would call it, I would call it unfortunate for me. Because I wouldn't want to look at him. Well, no. Because that's what

he wants to do. I guess. Does he, though? Maybe he's just crazy. People at home are going, fucking stop. Judge, I just

changed the subject. This will never end. You had 30 minutes on the subject of crazy. I see what stop. Change the subject. This will never end. You had 30 minutes on the subject of crazy. I see what you're saying, though. I do. I really do. I mean, seriously.

Martial arts, come on. Yeah, they're crazy. My God. You know, if you're going to call it. Oh, 100%. Yeah, people call that crazy all the time. And it's why it's illegal in some states. Well, in one.

I mean, it's a reason. It's a cultural reason. Not really. Well, I know the restaurant workers. Well, not only that. It's like martial arts aren't illegal in New states. Well, in one. I mean, it's a reason. It's a cultural reason. Not really. Well, I know the restaurant workers and all that stuff. Well, not only that, martial arts aren't illegal in New York. But you grant that it's considered crazy

by much of the population, and if it weren't, if it were not, it probably would be legal everywhere. No, that's not true. The only reason why it's illegal in New York State is because of corruption.

That's the only reason. Well. Because boxing's not illegal, and kickboxing's not illegal. Neither one of those things are illegal. Those things are brutal and violent, and they are combat sports. So it's not that combat sports are illegal. It is that mixed martial arts is illegal because of the culinary union and their influence, particularly on one politician who is now going to jail,

most likely for the rest of his life, because of corruption, and we're hoping to be getting into Madison Square Garden in April. I know, I know. So you know all this. Yeah, I do. But if the entire New York state population thought that mixed martial arts was totally normal, it would be legal. No, that's not true.

Because the majority would not have the power that it does. But they do. No, because a lot of the population thinks that it's barbaric. Oh, I don't know that. They didn't vote on it. The population has never voted on it. Of course they think. Of course much of the know that. They didn't vote on it. The population's never voted on it. Of course they think. Of course, much of the population.

But they haven't voted on it. The population hasn't voted on it. Well, no, but you do grant that much of the population thinks it's barbaric. There's a large percentage of people that don't like any violent sports, whether it's football, whether it's boxing, whether it's MMA. They think it's animalistic, barbaric. Yeah, it is in a lot of ways. Human cockfighting.

Most of those guys are pussies, though. So I don't listen to them. That's what I hear. Are you allowed to use the word pussy? Oh, my God. You're kidding. People are pussies, but they're not crazy. Wow.

Interesting. I can't even imagine what would happen to me if I used that on a campus. That's true. It's interesting because pussy can be a pejorative, just like dick can be a pejorative, but a very different kind of pejorative. Like dick is a forceful pejorative. Oh, he be a pejorative But a very different kind of pejorative like dick is a forceful pejorative. He's a dick like it's a mean person pussy There's weakness. Yes, right, right, or it can be awesome, right?

I've noticed that people are starting to call women dicks now really haven't you know? Yeah, and assholes the assholes used to be only men now. It's now often women are called asshole I think women have always been And assholes. Assholes used to be only men. Now often women are called assholes. I think women have always been called assholes. I don't think so. I think it was pretty strongly gendered. A lot of men are called cunts these days. Yeah. I know that's one of your favorites.

Oh, I love it. It's a good one. Yeah. I mean, actually, you know, I first heard people using cunt. It was feminists actually in college. Really? Used that. Good for them uh for for other

women in a negative way or like sort of how black people yeah it's kind of like the nigga of like feminists of the 1980s it was it really was yeah that's my cunt that's my that's my cunt over there she's a real cunt. Wow, that's hilarious. That's kind of true, actually. Yeah, I don't think that's done anymore. But I remember in the 80s, at least in my circles, it was definitely common. It's one of my favorite things about going to the UK is how freely they throw that around. I know.

But in a good way. Yeah. Like, yeah, he's a good cunt. Exactly. Yeah, he's a fucking cunt over here. He's a fucking cunt. They love it. They throw it around like a beach ball at a concert.

The UK is like 30 or 40 years behind the US in gender politics, which may be good or bad, but I mean, you know, they're always behind a bit. Like, they still call women girls. That's common there. But do you, yeah,

do you ever say your girlfriend? Where that's not okay in the United States. Do you get corrected when you say my girlfriend? No. But it's corrected when you say my girlfriend? No. But it's hard coming out of my mouth, considering our age. I kind of like it, and I wish I could say girlfriend. You can. You can do whatever you want.

Yeah. Come on, man. Freedom. Isn't this what we're talking about? We're talking about freedom here? I'm working on it. I'm working on it. I'm trying to get out.

You're my avenue out. Am I helping you? Oh, yeah. These kind of conversations? Are you kidding me? Getting in trouble? Totally. No, no. I'm working on it. I'm trying to get out. You're my avenue out. Am I helping you? Oh, yeah. These kind of conversations get in trouble? No, no. Getting in trouble is good, right? Because that forces you out of places you shouldn't be in in the first place. Right.

Well, I certainly think that the boxy confines of ideas that you seem to be forced into when you're a professor at a college, it definitely reinforces this sort of self-censorship. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, I'm always, you have to watch yourself all the time. That seems so exhausting. Yeah. I have, like, a stand-up comedian spirit. I'm not saying I'm as funny, but, like, the spirit of a comedian, but in a professor's body.

So do you, like, arrange certain bits of humor in your curriculum, in your courses that you teach? Do you have, like— I mean, in my teaching, sure. I mean, I think I'm funny sometimes, yeah. And I'm much freer in the classroom because other professors aren't there. Right. But do you have to be careful of children? And because it's not videotaped.

Oh, right, right. Yeah, so it won't get out. I mean, it could, though. It could get out, I mean, but only by word of mouth. Right. It's not videotaped. Oh, right, right. Yeah, so it won't get out. I mean, it could, though. It could get out, I mean, but only by word of mouth. Right. It's not going to be on YouTube. That's such a drag.

It's a real drag. Yeah, so we're going to reinvent it, though. Renegade University. It's coming. Do you worry about that word being kind of douchey? Which one? Renegade.

Oh, uh-oh. Is it douchey? Well, it's a little bit. It's a little bit like I'm a rebel, bro. It's my. Do you worry about that word being kind of douchey? Which one? Renegade. Oh, uh-oh. Is it douchey? Well, it's a little bit. Uh-oh. It's a little bit like I'm a rebel, bro. It's my brand, man. I know Renegade History of the United States, your book. It's my brand.

But the word renegade, like, you know, you're going to, you got a bunch of dudes who are sons of anarchy fans with shitty t-shirts going to show up. Yeah, I've seen that. Yeah, there's been some. Renegades, bro. I have noticed the douche tinge on the renegade. Might be careful with that word. Renegade's a tricky word.

It works for a book, a renegade history of the United States. Okay. But as far as for a whole university? We'll see. I don't know. Maybe just call it crazy university. Crazy U. Well, a friend of mine suggested it should be called fuck U, which I like.

That friend's probably crazy. Yeah. I'm sure he is. So you look at it like it's your brand, like the word Renegade is because of the book? Yeah. I mean, the ideas I'm going to be teaching in the university will be influenced, come out of the book. Do you feel like, though, that it's possible to limit the people that are willing to enroll at Renegade University? Because of just the name?

The moniker? Oh, perhaps. It'll turn off some customers? Perhaps. People that are looking for... You really don't like this name, huh? I don't mind. It wouldn't hold me back. But I just see it could be limiting. I don't know. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe those

are the people I don't want anyway. That's a good point. Yeah, maybe. I know what you mean though. It can't, it has like a Sons of Anarchy. Yeah. It's got a vibe a little bit. Yeah. Somebody might be riding a Harley trying to escape from nothing. Right. I'm a renegade bro. I got a fucking Jolly Roger tattooed on my ass. I don't know. People are strange. They're strange with words.

But not crazy. When you're formulating this university, do you have a plan for launching it and for how you're going to roll out courses? Are you going to create all the courses? Like how are you going to roll out courses? And are you going to create all the courses? Yeah, I mean, it's going to start with sort of standalone lectures that you can download and listen to like podcasts or you can watch the videos of them. And then if there's sufficient interest, I'll have interactive seminars. There's lots of great platforms for that where you can, you know, talk to me and we can have an exchange online.

Do you do a chat or email? And with other students. The exact format we haven't worked out yet. How are you going to have the time to do that? Well, I'm going to stop teaching in these colleges. Oh. That's the idea. So the idea is to completely dedicate all your time to this ultimately. That's what I would like.

Wow. Absolutely, yeah. And will you stay in Oregon if you do that or are you? I don't know. I mean, I'll probably do it both in Oregon and in L.A., both, go back and forth, yeah. So do you have like a five-year plan or a 10-year plan? Like how are you going to roll this out? Who knows?

It's going to roll out next year. If it's successful, it could be for the rest of my life. Wow. I would like it to be. And so how are you structuring this? Like, do you have, like, a gigantic PowerPoint that you've laid out? Or, like, how are you...

Yeah, I mean, there will be some production. There will be some PowerPoint stuff, graphics. You know, I might actually use an old-school whiteboard in the background, depending on what I'm presenting. For videos. Yeah, and videos, right. So be multimedia yeah wow how long you been thinking about this years really yeah I mean I started becoming

disaffected with colleges and universities probably 10 years ago uh after getting fired from Barnard College at Columbia um and then who'd you get fired for did you talk about in the last podcast partly being a white man oh partly because white people. Partly because of my ideas. What ideas? About crazy? It was really both those reasons. Yeah, people just, well, I mean, I say things you're not supposed to say. And the renegade history stuff didn't go over well with a lot of the professoriate.

And they wanted a black woman also for that job. And then this happened to me again at Occidental. I was disqualified from a tenure track job about two years ago because of my race. Because of your race specifically? Yes. That's what they said? I was told behind the scenes, yes. How'd they say it?

We weren't going to hire a white guy. Wow. Yeah. That's so depressing. Yeah, it's very depressing. That's very depressing. It's so depressing. I mean, it's just, I don't know if it's equally depressing that they wouldn't hire a black woman. I think it's probably more depressing they wouldn't hire a black woman for whatever reason,

because there's so many more white men doing your job. But it's not much less depressing. It's pretty depressing. Because it's racist. It is racist. It's also much less depressing. It's pretty depressing. Because it's racist. It is racist. It's also illegal. Yeah. I mean, you can't do it according to the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

But how does that work, though? They do it all the time. They just do it without making it public. What is this recent trend amongst kids where they're saying that white people can't be racist? It's absurd. Excuse me. Black people can't be racist. Yeah, right. Black people can't be racist towards white people absurd. Excuse me. Black people can't be racist. Yeah.

Right. Black people can't be racist towards white people because they don't have any power. Well, and that racism is imposing your own prejudices on other people. And this is like, but they're trying to redefine it. And people are saying, check the Wikipedia for the definition of racism. Like what? Yeah. So racism in its classical sense is the belief that there

are distinct and hierarchical biological races of human beings, right? Yes. Okay. That's racism. Right. It's classical sense, right? Then there's like prejudice and cultural dislike and, you know, but that's, um, so anyone can be racist against anyone else, um there is a point to be made there that some groups have power and some don't so some who are racist can do things about it yes right and some can't right but of course black people can be racist if they think that there are biologically distinct and hierarchical races of human beings which some do i watched tweet this. They just can't put anybody in prison about it. And people were, this was so frustrating. These young kids were saying, he's woke as fuck.

Like, he's woke. He woke. He's awake. He's woke. He woke as fuck. And then people were, like, saying, you know, you're ignorant to people that disagreed. Y'all need to check Wikipedia. Like, what?

Check Wikipedia. This is amazing. Like, they'all need to check Wikipedia. Like, what? Check Wikipedia. This is amazing. Like, they've redefined the term racist. They're saying white people can only, or black people can only be prejudiced. They can't be racist. Black people can be racist. Of course they can. They just can't do much about it.

Well, they can against, I mean, if they are an employer and they don't want to hire Chinese people. Some blacks can. If you're a black guy and you have a business and you don't want to hire Chinese people because you don't like Chinese people, you're a racist. But as a group, they can't do much unless they're in South Africa where they control the government. Right. Then black people can not only be racist, but they can put you in jail if you're the wrong race. I'm struggling for the time to be able to use that term. He's woke as fuck.

The day is coming. You're woke. just the term woke oh these wacky kids today i'm telling you well i just don't understand that there's no benefit in redefining the words of course people can be they can do wrong things, whether they're based on racial prejudices or sociological prejudices or economic or class, whatever the fuck it is. Of course there's prejudices. You know, why redefine them like that? Like, why even waste any time? It seems like there's all this frivolous bantering of what should and shouldn't be used as far as, like, language. of what should and shouldn't be used as far as like language.

Well, racism and sexism and even homophobia are almost meaningless now because they're applied to almost everything. So, you know, saying I don't like Chinese food has been called racist. It's not. You can even say I don't like Chinese people and not necessarily be racist, right? That's just a cultural preference, right? If you say Chinese people are biologically naturally better at math that is racist don't you think if you say i don't like chinese people that's racist you're generalizing it's not necessarily but you're generalizing about a

billion plus people yeah oh sure it's stupid i mean it's ignorant and it's a gross generalization but it's not necessarily a belief that they are biologically distinct. Right. It could be a preference. Yeah. You don't like the way they look. They don't like the food they eat. You don't like the clothes they wear. I'm not into jasmine. Right. I like using forks. I hate silk. All these silk peddlers. What am I even saying?

Yeah, we're going to have to somehow or another get over this as a race. We're going to have to get over ridiculous biases. You mean as a human race? Yeah, as a race. I mean, as a human race. We're going to have to get over the origins of your ancestors and languages that you speak and just be able to appreciate each other for what the fuck we are.

But how's that going to happen? Well, but then again, we don't want to get rid of cultural differences, right? No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying appreciate each other for what we are and just this idea that people can generalize or be racist and that seems to be a

counterproductive idea that i don't understand it's it's it's it's akin to tribalism which is sort of dissipating and nationalism which is also sort of dissipating over time as we integrate with all these other cultures all throughout the world and you have google translate and you can understand what people are saying in other places. But because of the separations of languages and cultures and things like that, you're always going to have people that are wary of people that they don't know or understand. Yeah, I mean, classical racism has declined dramatically in the last 100 years. I mean, until World War II, it was dominant and respectable. I mean, it was taught at Harvard and all the Ivy League schools. It was everyone talked about.

Well, how about interracial couples, like black and white couples? And it was illegal, right? It was illegal for them to get married until the 1960s. Right. And so that was all replaced after World War II, basically, in respectable discourse. Not that racists went away, but in respectable discourse, you couldn't use the N-word anymore, right? But in respectable discourse, you couldn't use the N-word anymore, right? And what it was replaced by is what we call racial liberalism, which is this paternalist stuff we've been talking about that goes on in campuses, which was assimilationist as well.

The idea was we need to get these black people into our institutions to train them to become like us, right? So Brown v. Board of Education, 1954, the integration Supreme Court decision. That was what was said in that decision. We need to get black people into our schools so that we can make them into good citizens, good soldiers, and good workers, right? So that's what these black kids in colleges are dealing with, right? So they're not completely crazy. They have real legitimate grievances. They are there for two reasons. One, to assimilate into the dominant culture, right? To shed their own culture. That's not so cool. And two, and this has been said, this is very explicit, to enrich the experiences of the white students in colleges.

That's hilarious. That's what diversity has been stated as its purpose. So bringing in African students will enrich the American students from Nebraska. That is the argument that has been made explicitly for decades. Oh, God. That white kids benefit from being around other cultures, other peoples, other races. How bizarre. Oh, yeah.

Well, but imagine being the one black kid in this class of 20 people or 30 people, right? And knowing that you're there for that reason. That would make me crazy. It would make you pissed off. Definitely. Well, I think that's actually the source of a lot of the rage that's going on. It gets expressed in all kinds of funky ways that I'm not a fan of, but I do think that's at the heart

of a lot of it. Wow. And that has to be acknowledged. And a lot of the students do say this. I mean, a lot of them, most of them, I think, are aware of that. This tokenism that goes on and assimilationism. And they know they're in that class for that reason. It's kind of disgusting. What are your feelings on transracial people? Oh, like Rachel Dolezal. And the guy who was, until recently, he was in Black Lives Matter and they found that he was white.

Sean King? I don't believe that, actually. You don't believe what? I believe that his father was black. But his mom and his dad he was white. Sean King? Yeah. I don't believe that, actually. You don't believe what? I believe that his father was black. But his mom and his dad are both white. Well, the story is that his mom had an affair with a black man. It's only his story. Wow. And it's unsubstantiated.

I don't know. He refuses to take DNA tests. Well, but you agreed that race is- He's white as fuck. I don't think so. Look at him. I have many times. He's a white guy.

Even he's got the little pencil-thin mustache in order to try to accentuate the possible African-American looks. But you said there's only one human race. There is. It's all a construct. Right, but he's appropriating African-American culture. Oh. That's what I think. That's okay too, right?

Well, there's been stories written about this where they've gone pretty deep into this guy's past, and no one agrees. Not only that, he wrote on when he was a victim of a hate crime back in the day, he wrote his race as white. Like, that's what he wrote on the police report. Like, you're talking about a guy like there's, I don't know. Who knows? I'm just guessing.

Yeah, we can't know. He looks white to me. But let's say he is a Rachel Dolezal type. Right. Okay. Pretty sure. And if race is a social construct, then they're whatever they want to be. Well, we're all Africans, even you, you pasty fuck.

I know. Thank you. We're all. Are you Irish? My pink self. Yeah. What is your Scottish? Scott's Irish. A little Jewish.

Russian. You're African. Welsh. Meanwhile, you're African. I'm totally African. Well, everybody is. It's where the cradle of civilization. So Sean King can be whatever he wants to be. Meanwhile, you're African. I'm totally African, yeah. Well, everybody is. It's where the cradle of civilization is. Right.

So Sean King can be whatever he wants to be. That's what I think. That's what my argument was for Rachel Dolezal. Me too. She wants to spray tan herself and do herself up in a fro. Wasn't it amazing how you had social justice warriors saying that she couldn't do that, but Caitlyn Jenner should be celebrated? Yes.

That's my point. Right. That was my point. That was amazing. It's hilarious. That was an amazing should be celebrated. Yes. That's my point. Right. That was my point. It's hilarious. That was an amazing moment. It's adorable. That contradiction, yeah. Why can't you decide that you more properly identify with people that are African Americans?

But do you think people would get pissed if you appropriated the Polish culture? Those people wouldn't give a fuck. Yeah. My book is full of examples going back 250 years of whites appropriating, in a celebratory way, black culture, loving it, wanting to be black. Many of them have claimed to be black. There was a jazz musician named Mez Mezrow in the 20th century

who he said, he never said he was actually black, but he said, I'm renouncing my whiteness. I'm going to be with black people. He married a black woman. He hung out with black people all the time. Damn. He said he didn't want to be white. He only wanted to be black. Good for him. Fine. Why not? Great. Who gives a fuck? Yeah, exactly. More fun.

I just think that when you make stories up about your past and we find out that's not true, you've created some sort of a fantasy narrative. Yeah, that's not what Mez Mesra some sort of a fantasy narrative. Yeah. That's not what Mez Mesra was doing.

He was always up front about everything. He was like a Jewish guy, I think. And he said, no, I'm just not going to be Jewish anymore. I was Jewish. I'm not anymore. Interesting. Yeah. But Jewish is not really, that's a religion.

Well, again. Jewish is a weird one. Who are you asking? I mean, right. Of course, it's been defined in many ways. It's kind of a race and a religion in a lot of ways. Right. I think we talked about this last time. So the Jews until World War Two were considered to be a separate race, very much so. And there was a debate about whether they were black. Many, many scholars thought they were black.

Wow. Or whether they were sort of an ape, sort of missing link, missing link, or they were just something else entirely. Yeah. But they were definitely not white. What's amazing about Jewish people is how many European Jews have won Nobel Prizes. How many European Jews are brilliant scientists and mathematicians. That's incredible. What an amazing gene pool, the European Jews. Yeah, I mean, it's always been an intellectual culture, right? You know, the rabbis and, you know, studying the texts and Talmud. I mean, it's always been an intellectual culture, you know, the rabbis and, you know, studying the texts and the Talmud.

And, you know, I mean, it's always been a heady intellectual culture. I think that's where it comes from. So that's most likely. Right. Yeah. And that's I think that's why they're also overrepresented in politics, in particular radical politics. If you look at socialism and communism and anarchism, it's just, you know, huge percentages of Jews participating. And I think it's because those are essentially intellectual movements. Right. Socialism and communism and anarchism. It's just, you know, huge percentages of Jews participating.

And I think it's because those are essentially intellectual movements. Right. So, yeah, no, it's an amazing. And stand-up comedy. Oh, yeah. Right. Huge representation in stand-up comedy. That's right.

From the beginning. That's right. I mean, wasn't Lenny Bruce Jewish? Very, very Jewish. The greatest of the greats. I mean, without him, there would be no modern stand-up comedy. It would have taken a lot longer to develop. It's all blacks and Jews. Yeah.

Right? Stand-up comedy. Woody Allen. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Mort Sahl. Sure. Goes on and on, especially that early golden era. Mm-hmm. You know, that generation was Jews-dominated, for sure.

Yeah, it's interesting how many of them were involved in nightclub performing. Right. Isn't it amazing that stand-up comedy is nowhere else really in the world? Oh, it is now. Well, but the U.S. just dominates. I mean, most stand-up comedy, right, is in the United States. Well, I wouldn't say that anymore. Is there a vibrant stand-up culture?

There's a very vibrant. I was in Melbourne, Australia, and they had a vibrant culture. Okay, yeah, I know about that. A lot of local comics. Like Jim Jefferies. Yeah. Well, in Melbourne, Australia, and they had a vibrant culture. A lot of local comics. Yeah, I think he's from Sydney. But he might be from Melbourne. But outside of English-speaking countries? There is.

It's just not as big. Well, America's where it started. That's hard to explain. Yeah. I don't know why that is. Because we got the fuck away from everybody else. And once we got the fuck away from everybody else. And once we got the fuck away from everybody else, we started talking shit. And once we started talking shit, well, they believe that the first modern

stand-up comedian was actually Mark Twain. That Mark Twain used to give these readings, and in these readings, they would be very humorous, and he would essentially be doing a monologue. And it was like a stand-up monologue. And Mark Twain has some still brilliant insightful

and resonating quotes that he wrote hundreds of years ago right what was his what year was late 19th century yeah or a hundred i should say a little more than a hundred yeah a hundred plus years ago um but brilliant brilliant stuff that he created back then and he would go on stage in front of these people and read these things and they would laugh and so he became like a humorous lecturer and That was sort of the beginning of stand-up comedy, but not Jewish Mark Twain not at all. No, not black. Oh, although he was certainly influenced by oh, yeah I mean, I think some other people have said that the first stand-ups were ex-slaves

Hmm. I don't know. I mean, I think some other people have said that the first stand-ups were ex-slaves. Hmm. I don't know. I mean, it's... In vaudeville. It's hard to probably... Because vaudeville is happening when Mark Twain's going on, and there's lots of comedy going on in vaudeville, and that was Jewish and black. I wonder what kind of speeches they would do or what kind of jokes they would tell or if they would do it. I think a lot of it was the emcees. That's one of the things that Lenny Bruce used to do early in the day.

He was sort of an MC for other acts. You would tell a few jokes and then bring up a band and then tell a few jokes and bring up a dancer. They had these variety shows. Variety shows were a big deal back then. The MC would often be a stand-up comedian, and you'd be armed with jokes. It was like the Catskills era,

it was one of the weird things is that they had sort of street jokes, and, like, you would have jokes, and I would, you know, use kind of the same jokes that you would do. So you would be in one place, and I would be in another place, and we might be doing the same jokes, you know? And then Lenny Bruce was, like, the guy that started talking about life, whereas instead of having these jokes, he was trying to explain

why some of the parts of our culture didn't make any sense, why some of the things that we do are preposterous, why there's these hypocritical aspects of our society that should be addressed, and maybe we could live in a better, more happy world if we kind of looked at these more clearly. I think he was the first to do that. So what we think of a stand-up comedy is so broad because there's like Stephen Wright stand-up comedy which is like joke joke joke you

know non sequiturs not not connected and then there's George Carlin which is like he would create sort of a new monologue every year and then he would do that new hour on HBO throw it away and start all over again the next year observational humor is what you're talking about right in some ways but like Jerry Seinfeld's observational but he doesn't have any like deep political insight or social insight or sexual insight whereas Lenny Bruce would yeah it's like he's more restricted in his sir did you ever notice that you he put a sock in the dryer?

Where'd that sock go? It's gone. Like that kind of shit. Like that's observational. There were... I mean, Lenny Bruce wasn't the first political observational comedian, though. I mean, Woody Allen was doing that stuff in the 50s. He wasn't radical like Lenny Bruce.

Lenny Bruce was the first radical, popular, observational humorist, I think. Well, they all credit him as being the originator I don't know if Woody Allen was before me Woody Allen definitely talking about politics in the 50s yeah I would like to see but he was talking about like the presidential races he wasn't talking about daily life she wasn't talking about the way that Lenny Bruce did well Lenny was doing some stuff some stuff that wasn't even funny right like one of the things that he did was he was talking about how they lied

when Jackie Onassis was jumping out of the limousine after JFK got shot, or Jackie Kennedy, and they were saying that she was trying to help him and that she was trying to go for help. Like, she was, and he was like, she was saving her ass. She was trying to get out of that fucking limousine because they shot the president in the head.

His head exploded and she jumped out of that limo. And you're lying to people if you say any differently. And it was just like this weird moment when he was on stage. I've heard the recordings where he's explaining this. Like he's explaining like you're trying to sell a false narrative about an important historical event. And it's going to fuck with people's heads. Like of course she tried to get away. She was trying to get away because they just shot and killed her husband. a false narrative about an important historical event and it's going to fuck with people's heads. Like, of course she tried to get away.

She was trying to get away because they just shot and killed her husband. You know, but that wasn't funny at all. So there was, like, some stuff that he was doing that, like, he sort of, like, he had, like, crossed this boundary, this weird, strange divide into commentary that wasn't even necessarily funny. Yeah, but he's flipping the script, though. I mean, he's turning things upside down even when he's not being funny.

Not necessarily. Towards the end, all he was doing was, like, reporting. You know, towards the end, when he was going crazy, he would just go on stage with his court transcripts and just read from his court transcripts, and people were like, what the fuck is this? He's like, you can watch videos of it. I've watched them.

They're so bizarre. He's going over finite or fine details of his court case. Wasn't he the last comedian to be prosecuted for obscenity? I think Carlin was. I think Carlin was prosecuted after him. Carlin went to jail.

For obscenity? Yeah, he was arrested. I don't know how much he went through the court system in regards to it, but I know for sure he was arrested for it. Martyrs for our freedom. Great, great heroes. Yeah.

Well, if it wasn't for those guys exposing how ridiculous it is. I mean, our culture went through this radical shift, right, from the 50s to the 60s, 60s to the 70s, and they tried to put a cork on it in the 70s, 50s to the 60s, 60s to the 70s, and they tried to put a cork on it in the 70s. And then the sweeping psychedelic legislation that was passed in the 1970s where they fucking made everything Schedule 1 and they started locking down what you can and can't do. There were some big, giant shifts. If you look at the shift in our culture between 1950 and in 1980, I mean, what a crazy fucking 30 years.

Oh, yeah. Whereas opposed to you look at like 1980 to today, not nearly as 85 to 2015. What you get is more information. You know, you get the clothes don't look as stupid, but, you know, no one's wearing Z Cavaricis. I don't know about that i mean i think there's been many revolutions yeah you know in terms of the culture in terms of freedom of speech i think we're saying we're saying things we didn't say five years ago a hundred percent you know one of the big heroes in this he never gets talked about in this way is larry flint had he waged many

many successful court cases on obscenity issues and and he went all the way to the Supreme Court, and he won many of them. And he really opened up a lot of space for speech in the media in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. That's a very interesting point, because no one would, even if they did believe that was true, they would leave that out because he's a pornographer. Oh, yeah. Isn't that funny? Yeah. He wanted me to write the foreword Oh, yeah. Isn't that funny? Yeah. He wanted me to write the foreword to his book. Did you say no?

I did. Not because of who he was, but because the book was not a good book, and I didn't have my name associated with it. It just was not a well-done book. What was the book about? But I had lunch with him. It was a fascinating experience. It's a book about the sex scandals of presidents.

It's not interesting. It's stuff that's just not very important. Sex scandals of presidents? Yeah, like sexual secrets of the presidents. Wasn't Nixon supposed to be gay? They were all supposed to be gay. Really? A lot of them.

I mean, that's a lot. Nixon had like a little dog and a boyfriend. They traveled everywhere. I've never heard of that. Nixon being gay? Yeah, never heard of that. Yeah, somebody wrote a book about it recently. Nixon was definitely crazy.

What? No. He was an unusual man, that's for sure. Yeah, he was definitely unusual. He was a strange, strange character. Fascinating, bizarre man. Did you ever see Hunter S. Thompson's interview where he talked about sharing a limousine ride with Nixon because Nixon wanted to talk to him about football because he knew that Hunter was a football fanatic.

So he said, no talk about politics at all. Deal? And they said, okay. And they got in and they just talked about football. And Nixon apparently knew about first, second round draft picks and guys from obscure colleges. And Nixon was a football fanatic and Hunter and Nixon just shared this limousine ride to the airport and just talked nothing about about nothing but but football then he definitely wasn't gay oh this is when it was just a lot of gay people that like football but this is when hunter was doing fear and loathing on the campaign trail and so I don't think they

understood quite the extent of how deranged Hunter was. They took a chance with him in the fucking limousine with the president. Only in the 70s, right, would that happen? Yeah. That's a total 70s story. Yeah. Well, especially a president like Nixon. He was one of the oddest presidents ever.

It's hard to think of another man even remotely like Nixon. He was one of the oddest presidents ever. It's hard to think of another man even remotely like him. Well, I'm just thinking about sort of establishment figures mixing with countercultural people. You would never see that now. I don't think they kind of knew totally how counterculture Hunter was. It's one of the things in the Gonzo, Fear and Loathing, the Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson. The documentary sort of talked about how when he decided to write that book and he went to the campaign trail, he was on it for a year.

And nobody knew who he was. Whereas, like, all the politicians, they all knew the other writers from all these other places. And Hunter would show up and all these people wanted to take photos with him. And they're like, who is this guy? Is he an astronaut or something? Like, nobody knew who the fuck he was. And then some, because he'd already written Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Hell's Angels, two hugely popular books. But these people had no idea.

They just were so outside of that cultural loop. They kind of let this guy in and didn't know who he was until it was almost too late. Right. But can you imagine the Obama administration not vetting the shit out of someone like that? Oh, no. Yeah. No, I couldn't imagine. I mean, well, I, you know, so what he did was he found Marc Maron. Yes. And went on that podcast. And I, I tweeted at Marc Maron, I said, what would George Carlin say about a stand-up comedian giving a platform, an uncritical platform, to a politician or head of state? And he blocked me. He blocked you? Because of that.

What a pussy. But I really. He blocked you for that question? He did. Wow. That is insane. It's fine. I mean, I just.

No, that's not fine. I would like for him to. That's just a question. I'd like for him to answer the question because it really bothered me. What bothered you about it? That he did that, that he gave this platform. Now, if he had brought him on and asked him hard questions, fine. Right.

But he didn't. It was clearly, you know, Obama, the Obama administration found Marin, knew that he would be safe and they were right. And Marin delivered for them. He just gave him softball questions and didn't challenge him one bit. And basically Obama, I don't know if you listened to it, but just basically gave it

like an hour long speech. That's all it was. And Marin kind of celebrated him and cheered him on. And I thought this is, this is a countercultural, in quotes, comedian, right? Doing this.

That's what countercultural comedians do. I thought that they challenged power. They asked questions challenged power. They asked questions of power. They made power absurd, like Lenny Bruce did, like George Carlin did. This is like the opposite to me of what stand-up comedians should do. I don't necessarily think I would categorize Mark as countercultural. Well, no, but I think he's thought of that way. I don't think he is at all. I think he's absolutely establishment and conservative in that way. But I think he's considered to be,

by many, to be sort of countercultural. I always thought of him as like a guy who looks at himself and kind of mocks himself and mocks. But he's not like, you know, like Doug Stanhope would be much more counterculture, but also degenerate, drunk, and the last person that Obama would sit down with. And if I had him on, I would have to ask him questions about drones. I'd ask him what does it feel like to be a part of a program that has 80-plus percent, depending on who you ask, innocent casualty rates.

Like what is it like to make these decisions knowing that people are going to die? What is it like when you see someone like Edward Snowden come out against the NSA's spying platform, and then you realize that on your own campaign, on the Hope and Change website, you had all these provisions in there to protect and help whistleblowers, whistleblowers who are exposing actual laws that are being broken. Like, how did you make this change? Like, what is your thought process behind that?

Like, what do you think about a guy like Julian Assange? What do you think about someone like Chelsea Manning? What do you think about someone who delivers information to a news source, and that news source exposes things that are absolutely crimes that the United States public hates, that people don't ever want to think of when they think of the American people, when they think of this good, just leader of democracy in the world. You don't want to think about those things.

And this is why Obama will never be in this chair that I'm sitting in right now. He might. He might take a chance. You never know. You just disqualified yourself. I don't know about that because I think those are questions that he probably has answers to. I don't think that he doesn't have answers to those questions.

I think those are very, very complicated subjects. They do not want him being challenged in a freewheeling way for three hours. No way. That's why they chose Marin. Well, also, Marin's not live. He's not live, but he also worked for Air America, and they knew what his politics were. They knew he wasn't going to challenge him. He's super liberal.

In the way that you would, yeah. And he's sort of party line liberal, right? Yeah, I guess, yeah. I just thought, you know, stand-up comedians should never be giving a platform to a politician. Hmm. I'd like to talk to Bernie Sanders. Jimmy Kimmel did that too. Had Obama on and basically made him just

look cool and hip. It just really pisses me off. Does that piss you off more or less than when Jimmy cried for the lion? Oh. When Jimmy cried for Cecil the lion. Oh, he did?

He was very upset that the dentist who he named on his television show who legally killed that lion. By the way, they just made lions, they put them under

some endangered species protection. So now nobody has to worry about that anymore. I don't think you're allowed to be an American. I don't think you're allowed to go over to Africa and kill lions anymore, as far as I know.

I think that's the recent provision. Americans aren't allowed to kill lions? I'm pretty sure. That's what they've just said. But Africans can? Well, you certainly can. Yeah. And, well, not just Africans, but people from other countries.

That's interesting. I don't know how the law works, but it was – there's a – look, I don't think – I don't think – I think certainly that there are animals in this world that are beautiful and should be protected. And I don't think you should really kill things that you're not going to eat. And I don't necessarily understand why anybody would want to go to a place like Africa and kill a lion. But it's incredibly complicated when you look at the reality of what these hunting camps are in Africa, because they have taken these animals that were on the brink of extinction, and they've made them plentiful. And the way they've done that is by fencing in these enormous, like, you know, 100,000, 200,000 acre areas and turn them into these hunting preserves.

And they bred these animals in there. It's kind of fucked up. It's canned hunting. And they have areas where these lions are free roaming, like in Zimbabwe, where this Cecil the lion was killed, where there's part areas where they're preserved, where they're not allowed to hunt, and then areas where they are allowed to hunt. And the money that goes to these hunts is what pays for conservation.

It's super conflicted. What do hunters need? They need animals. Yeah. They need to conserve animals. They are naturally, necessarily conservationists. In that sense, yeah. The Sierra Club and hunters organizations have worked together on many, many things for this reason. But it just seems counterintuitive, productive.

It seems, to me, shooting something that you never planned on eating, unless it's a danger. Like, there's one thing they have to do. Like, they have to shoot a certain amount of coyotes. If cattle ranchers have calves, they have to be very careful because the coyotes will literally pull the calves out of the females as they're giving birth and kill the calves. They have to keep them away if they want to keep a healthy population of cows and sheep and a lot of other animals. That makes sense to me. You have to manage predator populations. But that's not what you're doing when you fly to Africa to go shoot a lion.

You just want to put a head on your wall. There's something kind of creepy about that, and I think that's why people responded the way they did. Yeah, I mean, I've never had a desire to hunt, but I can understand, I suppose, why someone would want to do that. You know, it's a spectacular thing to see a lion's head on your wall, right? And it's quite a trophy. Yeah, I mean, I guess so.

I get it. I guess so. quite a trophy. Yeah, I mean, I guess so. I get it. I guess so. I could see that someone would want that or why someone would want that. I just don't understand it.

I mean, I know you're into eating what you kill. Yeah. But you do understand why, I'm sure you understand why people get a charge out of shooting a giant deer or a large game animal. Yeah, well, you definitely get a charge out of it as well as get the food from it. There's this gigantic experience that's attached to it. But unless you wanted to eat a lion, apparently people eat mountain lion, and it tastes good.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. Mountain lion is supposed to be, I know a guy, and he hunts mountain lions all winter long in Colorado. They do it all legally. He's a guide, and he hunts mountain lions all winter long in Colorado. They do it all legally. He's a guide, and they love mountain lions. I would think they'd be really muscular. They are. And not so good.

But so is a pig. Pigs are really muscular, too. So is elk. Elk are extremely muscular. Deer are very muscular as well. That's one of the reasons why they're so lean. very muscular as well. That's one of the reasons why they're so lean. There's a lot of what they call, there's certain animals that people, they just decide that you're not supposed to hunt or eat them. Charismatic megafauna is how my friend Steve Rinella describes them

as, like bears are one of them. But bears have been eaten by people forever. It's a black bear, especially. They're very delicious, and they're thought of as game animals for a long time. Yeah, I was just thinking about the selective outrage about Cecil, right? That these lions get poached, killed all the time in Africa, don't they? I mean, by Africans and others, right? But when some privileged white dentist from Minnesota does it, then it's this international outrage. Well, it's also because the lion was named, which was one of the more hilarious aspects

of the story. But didn't it turn out he wasn't Cecil? No, it was Cecil. His brother Jericho, they were worried, was killed too. Because people had created this narrative that Jericho is now going to take care of Cecil's babies for him, which is so fucking hilarious. Because first of all, if you don't know anything about lions and how a male becomes the head of a pride, they murder all the cubs.

Okay? That's a fact. So if there are females and they're giving birth to another male's babies, that lion will come in and murder all those babies. So Cecil was a baby murderer, 100%. All of the heads of prides, those are all baby murderers. So if Jericho came along

not only would he not protect Cecil's babies he would fucking kill them with his face okay so they were worried that Jericho had been killed too

and there was a story saying that they believed Jericho had been poached and then they said there was a relief because it turned out that the line that was killed

was not Jericho but was some other no name bitch ass line that nobody cared about because nobody had made a noise that you associate out that the lion that was killed was not Jericho, but was some other no-name bitch-ass lion that nobody cared about because nobody had made a noise that you associate with this fucking lion. Can a lion be a bitch-ass? Yes.

Oh, okay. 100%. If he doesn't have a name. I don't know. Why aren't you Jericho? You don't have a name? Jericho's got a name. Bitch-ass lion.

Well, I don't even know how we got started on this, but, um, the idea was, um, you know, hunting these things. It was Jimmy Camel. That's what it was.

Oh, he cried crying about it. That's just irritating. I'm not, I'm not outraged. I'm outraged by, by standup comedians who have some sort of veneer of countercultural, I don't know, rebel to them.

Just really. Giving a platform to a politician is just... I didn't listen to the Obama interview. I didn't listen to it. It's boring. It sounds like a press conference. Or worse, it sounds like a speech. Because there are no questions that are difficult for him. I'm most offended that Marc Maron blocked you for asking a question like that. Yeah, it was pretty weak.

It was pretty weak. That's not even insulting. Plus, he's my neighbor. Is he really? Yeah, we live in the same neighborhood. Ha, ha. I see him at Trader Joe's. Ha, ha.

Does he know you? No. Well, I don't know. He does now. He better. Guarantee you. He's going to hear this and be upset. Yeah.

I think for a guy like him, it's an opportunity to just sit down with someone who he thinks, because you follow his politics, he's very left-wing, he probably thinks is a great president. If you look at what Obama has done, if you look at the numbers, what he's done economically, as far as job creation, as far as the rebound of the economy, I don't understand all that stuff. But if you look at it, it all looks fairly positive. If you look at the raw numbers, the raw data. Yeah, but he had very little to do with that, with unemployment going down to 5%. I mean, his policies or the Congress's policies had very little effect on that.

What do you think that— That was the economy churning itself. So the economy rebounding like the— Yeah, I mean, most economists, I think, would agree with that, that fiscal policies by the government had negligible effect on that. Most economists believe that, really? I think so. Yeah.

I think very few would give much of their credit to government policies. What about the bailout? Wouldn't that have some sort of a significant impact? Yeah. I mean, it was a catastrophe. I mean, it was, you know was trillions to Wall Street and GM, and what did we get for it? I mean, the recovery didn't happen then. It took many years after that. Wasn't that the plan all along? Was that it was going to be a sort of a trickle down from the

recovery? Yeah. But would we have been better off if we'd let them fail? Many of us think so. Hmm. That's delayed the recovery, right? You bail out these failing institutions that clearly are not working. What would you have asked the president? You're going to get more failing procedures. Well, when something becomes too big to fail, that is a weird statement. Like, what does that mean? Yeah, let them fail.

Let the market work. Yeah, but they're worried about all these people losing all their money, head in the banks, just like the savings and loan crisis in the 80s. But that's what happened anyway. A lot of people certainly did, right? What would you have asked the president if he was there with you? Oh, my God. I mean, all the things you asked him.

Those were great questions. But, yeah, don't expect Mark Maron to be a policy wonk in a situation like that. But like you could ask him things like, how do you feel when you pull the trigger in a drone in Yemen that ends up killing a 16 year old? Right. How does that feel? How do you how do you reconcile your past experience as a student activist at Occidental College, by the way, with now being the head of the biggest killing machine in world history. You know, how do you reconcile your feelings as Barry Obama, who was protesting against apartheid in South Africa, with being the president who murders brown people in Africa?

Right? I mean, that's what he's doing. So I want to know sort of personally. with being the president who murders brown people in Africa, right? I mean, that's what he's doing. So I want to know sort of personally. What in Africa and what are you referring to? Well, there are troops on the ground in Africa doing, you know, murdering people. And there's drones in North Africa murdering people and in the Middle East. And right. So that's what he's doing. These are all brown people he's killing. You know, how do you feel about that, Barack?

Wouldn't you want to know? Also, I would want to know, like, what is it like inside? Like, what is what's the mechanism? Like, what's it like once you get into office? Like, how different is it than what you thought it was when you were running? So one of them, yes, I would love to get into that. One of the main claims it's made about him is that he's actually a peacenik who's forced to do these things by the military industrial establishment. Right. Is that true? I would ask him, do you have any agency as president or are you forced to make these decisions by other people? Right. How do the decisions get made when you, you know, when a drone strike is made? people. Right. How do the decisions get made? When a drone strike is made, is it really you and your advisors making that decision or are you forced to by this thing called a military industrial complex? Is this true what we've been told? That the president actually has no power over foreign policy? I mean, I don't think that's true, but I'd like to hear him say that. And if

it is true that he has no power, then what's the point of having a president, of getting excited about the first black president, about getting excited about any president? If Bernie Sanders gets into office, will he be doing the same thing then? That would be hilarious. Right? Wouldn't it be amazing if Bernie Sanders got in office and just started fucking full-scale drone attacks, cutting down on whistleblowers, and ramped up the NSA spying program? He probably would.

Do you think so? Because what did Obama run on? He ran on, I'm going to end the war in Iraq, and I'm going to be good for civil liberties, and I'm going to roll back all the policies of the Bush administration. Close down Guantanamo Bay. Close down Guantanamo, and what did he do? He actually ramped up all those policies. He extended Bush's policies. Now, when you talk to someone like Sam Harris,

what he believes is that Obama gets into office and is then presented with the reality of the ongoing situation in the Middle East with Islamic terrorism, with radical fundamentalists, and all across the globe that mean to do America harm, and he's presented with this overwhelming evidence that the world is way more fucked than we're being led to believe. Yeah, well, that's to do America harm. And he's presented with this overwhelming evidence that the world is way more fucked than we're being led to believe. Yeah, well, that's Sam Harris's take. I mean, Sam Harris thinks the world is far more dangerous than I do. I mean, he thinks that Islam

is inherently violent, is that jihad is a necessary outgrowth of Islam, that if we don't take action, lethal action against them, that they will come and kill us. So I don't buy that. I know that that's his analysis. I don't think he necessarily thinks you have to take legal action against him. Lethal action. Lethal. Lethal. I said legal.

Lethal action against him. I think he believes that there is a fundamental flaw in the ideology that wants all people who leave the religion killed and that a religion that believes... Well, a religion was founded by a warlord. It's a different style of religion than, say, like Jesus, who was a peacenik. I don't think he necessarily thinks that we need to take lethal action against them. I think that he is more concerned about what they are capable of doing than the average person. So there's no doubt that there are Muslims who do believe that stuff, right?

Right. The question is, why are they targeting the France and the United States has intervened in the Middle East against Arabs and in France against their own Arab and Muslim people in discriminatory, lethal, murderous ways for decades. I think it is blowback. I think that explains why they attacked us specifically. Now, it doesn't explain, obviously, everything those Muslims do in the Middle East. It doesn't explain why they insist on women wearing burqas. It doesn't explain why they shoot gay people. It doesn't explain why they attack other Muslims. But I think it does explain, blowback, I think does explain why they're interested in attacking

us. And that's what needs to be addressed in my view, right? Stop giving them a reason to hate us, right? Take that away. If they continue to fly planes into our buildings after we've withdrawn from the Middle East, then we can talk about their religion and we can talk about them as criminal psychopaths. Fine. But that's not the case yet. Let's remove that reason for them attacking us. Then we can see what happens. Yeah, removing troops from the Middle East is a hot subject, and I would love to hear what the president would say about the consequences of doing that, the vacuum it created and what's going on right now with ISIS. This vacuum that has been created is now filled up

with the most dangerous radical fundamentalist group in recent memory. Yeah. I mean, clearly, I mean, the big heavy weaponry that ISIS is using is all American made. It's weapons that were left by the U.S. military in that region, right? How fucked is that? Right. And what you were saying, like, they created this vacuum, this power vacuum in that area, right, in which these nut bags just easily and quickly filled.

Well, we're seeing that in Libya as well. We're seeing that everywhere you get rid of a dictator. Exactly. You get rid of a dictator and then people line up to see who becomes the next dictator. It's not just getting rid of the dictator. It's getting rid of the government, the structure. Right. There was there was nothing to oppose them. Now, I don't think I think ISIS is going to fall on its own accord. I mean, I don't think these guys can manage a society. You're seeing evidence of people sort of fleeing and leaving, not because they don't like the religion. They just don't like all these rules that ISIS is imposing, Sharia law. I can't imagine they could sustain a society for very long. Well, it should also be pointed out that I think something around the neighborhood of 80 plus percent of the people that are fighting against ISIS are Muslims. Of course. Yeah. And, and almost all of their

victims are Muslim. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So let them, let them hang themselves is my, my position. Pull out entirely. The U.S. President Thaddeus Russell has spoken. There you go. Are you ready? You ready to run? Uh, no. God, no. Are you kidding? A couple years? After you get the renegade history university up and running? I'll be the renegade president, except that's kind of douchey out here. Renegade president, yeah. Do you have any aspirations politically? No, God, no.

But you think so much about it. First of all, I think I'm, I think anyone is far more effective outside the establishment, right? I think I'm, I think anyone is far more effective outside the establishment, right? I think I can actually get more done and change minds and change the culture, which ultimately changes policies simply by talking, by doing this, right? I think we all do that. I think we are much, I think you have far more power than a congressman does.

No doubt about that. How scary. Oh, yeah. I mean, honestly, I mean, I think that take legalization of drugs, right? How fast that's happening now. I'm not going to give you all the credit for it, but clearly you had something to do with that. I mean, you participated in this massive cultural shift, right? I mean, there were many people doing it, but I would say that your voice was one of the loudest.

And I'd give you quite a bit of credit for moving it as fast as it has moved. That's ridiculous. I don't know if that's true. But I don't know. What? Well, I represent a very weird, I represent the jockish guy who also is into psychedelic drugs. I know. I'm the bridge between the meatheads and the potheads.

That's in that sense. So it's got a lot more people that go, i didn't think about it that way and they sort of people that wanted those two groups to be much more clearly defined and i'm letting them know wouldn't it's not and there's a lot of benefits like especially like martial arts like uh one thing that i definitely probably done is turned a lot of people that would never been involved in martial arts onto martial arts and just just by talking about the benefits of it, like praising the benefits of it. I have seen, and I'm not here to kiss your ass, but I have seen evidence of your influence in the drug policy debate. I've seen many people reference it.

I've seen you mentioned. I've seen you're a prominent figure being in favor of legalization. That alone changes people's minds. It's like, oh, if he's for this, maybe it's not such a crazy idea, right? I really do. I mean, you're not the only one. Of course, I think other celebrities have come out too, but you've been very consistent about it. You've really pushed it. And I think you've also activated your base. Guys who were just into martial arts or into smoking pot became political about this issue, I think, in part because of you. And I think my point is that you get a lot more done actually by changing the culture. And the only way to change the culture is being outside of the establishment, right? Congressmen can't lead

cultural shifts. Right. Right right and presidents certainly can't they have to sort of follow what the culture dictates i see what you're saying right you change the culture those guys have to do our bidding well that's one of the things that concerns me the most about the trends that are going on in the schools today because i think that if you really do want to change the culture what you have to change is young people. You have to open the eyes and the minds of young people and to all the possibilities and to the fact that what our culture really is, is just this established pattern that we're all following that doesn't necessarily suit you, help you, or even make sense. But it's got momentum behind it and it's a habit. The schools are a dead end. I mean, people need to really like deal with this fact.

Most American children are trained in schools run by the government. Okay. What is the government going to train those kids to be? Train them to be good American citizens. What are they not going to introduce in those schools as ideas? Anything that challenges the establishment, anything that challenges the status quo in any significant way, right? People are sort of, there's the cognitive dissonance about this. They don't ever sort of address that fact, which is just there, right? These are government schools.

What is the government going to do in schools? What are they going to train those kids to do and be and how to think? But when you say that, who's responsible for the curriculum? Sacramento and California, state capitol, legislators, politicians, Democrats and Republicans, and governors. But educators, right? No. When you get a job as a public school teacher, the curriculum is set for you. And now with the Common Core, it's set nationally. It's a national curriculum.

No, you don't get a choice. I mean, they sneak in. They're certainly their ideas. I have friends who are public high school teachers, and they sneak in their ideas, of course. But they're not supposed to. And the curriculum is handed to them. You're given a textbook. This is what you're going to teach.

These are your lesson plans. These are the topics. Right? You're not going to be able to talk about Lainey Bruce, but you should, right? So you can't have like a creative assignment for a class. You can't come in and say, you know what? My job is to teach history, but I want to give these people a real perspective. Only so much as you can do it on the down low. Sure. Teachers cheat, of course, but they're not supposed to. And you can get fired for it from... I think Lenny Bruce and the history of stand-up comedy should be a central part of any education. I mean, I think that is one of the most important things in modern U.S. history. No doubt about that. Is it mentioned? Never. Never. It's certainly not in

the official curriculum because those guys said bad words and they said naughty things. So the official curriculum, what is the goal behind it? To be the most efficient at educating kids? Or you think they're trying to program children? So the American public school system was modeled after the Prussian system of the 19th century. And early American educators who founded this thing, public schools, Horace Mann and others, said explicitly, this should be a means to train children to be workers. Jesus. This was explicit at the time. It was explicit.

That's disturbing. So it's actually, if you look at the way schools are operated and the format of them, it's like a factory, right? It's like an assembly line. They go from this class to that class to that class. They get trained in this and this and this. And they leave the doors and they go work in a corporation. That's what it's explicitly designed for based on the Prussian system. That's what it's explicitly designed for based on the Prussian system.

So, I mean, that's not explicit anymore because that would turn off a lot of people, but that's what's being done. They're not training them. Why would the government train them to be critical intellectuals? Why would the government train them to think critically about everything? No. They can't. The government can't. No. They can't. The government can't. The government has to have citizens who are law-abiding and who don't question the fundamentals of the society. So do you specifically believe that they set the students up and they set the classes up in that manner, or do you think they do it because they feel like that's the most efficient way to produce the goals that they want to achieve, which is higher GPA, higher SAT scores?

And we have to compete with China and India. Yeah. So it's all internalized. I don't think anybody in these schools is thinking what I just said. So you're not thinking that it's some grand conspiracy? It's just all internalized. It's just like, well, of course they've got to be good in math and engineering because that's how you get a good job and that's how you're a good American. And, you know, I mean, you can talk about Rosa Parks now because she's now safe because we now live in an integrated society, right? But 60 years ago, you didn't talk about her. She was dangerous, right? That had to be sort of inserted.

But now it doesn't challenge the status quo. It doesn't challenge sort of fundamental ideas of the society. Do you think they really sort of fundamental ideas of the society. Do you think they really debate democracy in public schools? No. Should it be debated? Of course. Right? This is a major idea here.

Is that the platform to do it in high school, do you think, debating democracy? I know lots and lots of high school students who would love to have that debate and are not able to in their high school. So what they do is they read books and they listen to podcasts instead. When you talk about the government itself, isn't the idea of a representative government kind of an archaic thing in terms of it was all created back when communication was incredibly difficult? When you wanted a state representative, one of the reasons for it is because no one could get a hold of everyone in the state. You couldn't all get together and speak your mind about something. But now, because of social media and the Internet as we know it now, forget about what the Internet is going to be like 10, 15 years from now,

which is going to be even more intense, but you could express yourself in a way now that just wasn't available before. You don't necessarily need a representative government. And the reason why they have to go to these fucking places like Iowa and campaign there, and it's a big part of the campaign trail, is just because of this weird fucking setup that they have. Yeah, well, the electoral college system, the primaries, the two-party duopoly. Oh, yeah, it's a mess. It's disgusting.

It's basically a monopoly, right? Yes. Because the two parties differ only slightly. Very. Yeah. Just tiny amounts. The most exciting thing that happened in 2008 was not Barack Obama to me. other third party candidates to break down the rules that bar third party candidates,

make it much more difficult for third party candidates to have a viable campaign. I haven't seen that renewed really in any serious way since then, but that's what has to happen. We don't have real choice. You have to have real choice. In Europe, they have real choice. They have parliamentary democracy where there are many, many parties and all sorts of parties are represented in the legislatures, right? You don't have that here. And I think that's why we have such low voter turnout, right? If there was actual choice, if you could actually see yourself represented among the politicians running, I think many more

people would vote. Yeah. I think there's a certain amount of futility that people feel when they look at the two party system and then they see where a guy like Barack Obama arguably at least returns to military policy as conservative as GW. Foreign policy, civil liberties, state surveillance. There's no difference. Whistleblowers. There's no difference. And freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the way they've gone after the press. And then education policy.

So this Common Core that I was talking about, this national curriculum that's now being imposed on all the schools, right? Where did that start? The Bush administration. It was called No Child Left Behind. It's this national curriculum, this idea of homogenizing the culture. The neoconservatives, they invented that fucking thing in the 1960s. It was their idea. Irving Krist crystal came up with

his idea he said we need to have a common core to make all americans similar culturally that became no child left behind in the 19 in in under the bush administration in the 2000s and then what did obama do he just ramped it up he calls it race to the top now gave it more funding uh required schools to follow it more stringently, punished schools for not following it. Now the Common Core is this national homogenizing curriculum. It's a catastrophe. I mean, the idea that a kid in Key West, Florida should have the same education as my son in Los Angeles or a kid in Mississippi, why why shouldn't the parents in those areas have some say over how their children are taught shouldn't there be

some diversity of ideas and cultures in the schools do we all need to have the same common culture I don't think so well there's also an issue and a huge one in the way that teachers are financially compensated for work. The amount of money that teachers make is so small. And the way we look at teachers, we don't look at teachers like if you thought about someone who is educating your child about the ways of the world, influencing them, we all have ideas in our head about really positive and really negative teacher experiences that we had as a child. You know, I have a few really positive ones that to this day, I think back about this guy. Like, I had a science teacher in seventh grade that, for the first time ever, introduced in my mind the idea of infinity and uh i i'd never considered it before he was a really unique guy he uh would grow his own vegetables and bring them

in and and talk in these really passionate ways about what it's like to grow the food that you actually eat and this is you know i didn't i was you know whatever i was 12 or something what are you in your seventh grade? I was a little kid and I was like, what the fuck is this guy going on about? He was talking about what it's like to have food that you grow, to understand the actual process of a seed becoming your food and then to eat it and to bring it into lunch. And, you know, and he was talking about these radishes that he had grown in his garden that he's eating right now. And he was talking about these radishes that he had grown in his garden that he's eating right now.

And then he was trying to explain to us that everything in the entire world, including human beings, is essentially made out of materials that came from a star that exploded. And then we were like, what? And then he was trying to explain that our star is going to explode, that there's only a certain amount of time in every star, and the sun that we, you know, our star, what we call our sun, only has a certain amount of time. And I remember this guy saying this to me,

and there are an infinite number of stars in the galaxy. As far as we know, or the universe, rather, as far as we know, the universe has no end. It goes on and on. So just stop and think about that. How much time it would take light, just light, to get to the nearest solar system outside of ours, and then think about that in terms of how big the galaxy is, with hundreds of billions of stars, each one with their own little planets, and then hundreds of billions of galaxies. And I remember leaving that class just mind fucked at 12 or 13 years old. And it stuck like it stuck with me, like for years, for decades, that one teacher, but that wasn't, that was him. It was his ideas.

This wasn't, this isn't a part of some state sponsored curriculum that he had to follow. No. And it was public school, right? Yeah. Yeah. So he's the exception, right? Yeah. Yeah. And there's no reason he should exist in that system, right? The system has no reason to encourage creativity, to encourage thinking outside one's world like that, right? It must reinforce itself, reinvigorate itself, right?

The system must sustain itself, And it does that by training new workers, new participants, new citizens, new soldiers. But how do they look at it? When they want to justify the core system, how do they promote it? How do they describe it? That it will cause the shitty schools in Mississippi to rise to the level of the good schools in Santa Monica and Manhattan. That it standardizes the curriculum, right? So the argument is that kids in poor areas get worse education in their schools. The curriculum is not as good as in the wealthy areas.

So this standardizes it, raises them all to the same level. But also, very much the argument was made uh that it it helps us compete with india and china so stem is a big part of this right so training kids to be better in stem um is a huge part of the common core explain stem to people don't know what that means science technology engineering and mathematics okay right so if you want to build shit if you want to make superconductors and computers and technology and all that stuff that the Chinese and Indians are doing, and some people in the United States are doing, you have to be good at that. So that was the argument made by Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, and Obama throughout with Race to the Top. We have to standardize the teaching of STEM so that we can compete with India and China.

Is it working? Not really. What are the results? Well, it's just started. It's just been rolled out. It's been about a year or two. Well, I have a friend who's got kids in public school in Manhattan, and he was going crazy about it, like the changes that it's made to what they have to study. Louis C.K. has been railing about it, too.

Yeah. He had a whole Twittering about it, too. Yeah. He had a whole Twitter rant about it. Yeah. His kids are in Manhattan schools, I think. Yeah. My son's in Santa Monica schools, public schools, and he's been dealing with it. So the Common Core as such is not a terrible curriculum. I don't think it's the worst thing in the world.

My argument is that it shouldn't be standardized, right? Right. I think that parents in localities should have some decision over what is taught to their children, right? And I like cultural diversity. I like intellectual diversity, right? I think that parents in locality should have some decision over what is taught to their children, right? And I like cultural diversity. I like intellectual diversity, right? This destroys that. All the kids in the country will think the same way. Not that they're actually going to, but that's what is intended with this. And it'll certainly push them toward thinking in the same way. It's a standardization of thinking. It's the worst thing we can do. Yeah. Standardization of thinking is the idea of conformity on a mass scale like that without

leaving in any room for creativity or any room for exploring the possibilities of the wonders of the unknown of your future. Instead, just trying to create a robot that can compete with China. Yeah. That's what it's about. Race to the top. That's the name of your future. Instead, just trying to create a robot that can compete with China. Yeah, that's what it's about. Race to the top, that's the name of it. Race to the top. To the top of what? The world.

See, I think one of the coolest trends in this country right now is not people that are trying to do that, but rather people that are trying to do their own thing. And what we're getting out of the internet is we're getting a lot more small, independent businesses where people leave their job and say, hey, I'm going to sell blank. I'm going to make my own clocks. I'm going to do this. I'm going to do that.

And I'm going to find something I'm passionate in. And through the internet, there's an avenue where I can pursue this as a career where I don't have to join some gigantic fucking corporation and be a cog in the wheel. I can do something that I actually enjoy. Right. And we're seeing this in like there's this trend in restaurants where they want like raw wood tables and like old style lighting and everything's sort of rustic with metal and wood.

It's almost like there's this longing for something that's not homogenized and pasteurized and mass-produced like we have this longing for things that are they're crafted like we keep seeing these fucking handcrafted sandwiches what does that even mean like you got robots making your fucking sandwiches in some places that i don't know about but that that term handcrafted cocktails and handcraft unit that is a that that's a common thing that you hear over and over again. And it kind of represents this desire that people have to get away from this gigantic system of things. Yeah, that's happening outside the school system. That's happening outside of mainstream politics.

That's happening just in the real world. That's happening among entrepreneurs. That's happening in commerce. That's happening just in the culture generally. That's happening among entrepreneurs. That's happening in commerce. That's happening just in the culture generally. That's happening in technology. That's happening on social media. Where people are pursuing happiness. It's spontaneous.

It's driven by individuals and individual desires, right? Not by standardization, not by a need to compete as a nation against another nation, right? It's a beautiful thing. And, yeah, you're right. I mean, there's much more of that right? It's a beautiful thing. And yeah, you're right. I mean, there's much more of that now. It's a great time to be an entrepreneur. It's a great time to do your own thing, to make a living as I'm trying to do myself, right?

Doing what you're passionate about. Yeah, I was going to bring it back to that. Yeah. So that's, it's kind of unique in the sense that I don't know a lot of other professors that have decided to try to separate from the system and create their own courses. I don't know a lot of other professors that have decided to try to separate from the system and create their own courses. I don't know of any.

So you're a fucking rebel. You're a rebel and a renegade, dude. I haven't heard of any. It's possible. Maybe we should call it that instead. Rebel University. That might be more douchey. I'm picturing dudes with American flag bandanas.

That's not good. That is not the image I want to present. Yeah, no, I've been surprised. I've been researching, and I haven't been able to find anyone It's not good. That is not the image I want to present. Yeah, no, I've been surprised. I've been researching and I haven't been able to find anyone who's done it. I mean, so there is edX, there's Coursera,

there's Udacity, there's these big MOOCs, massive online courses, that are basically, they're just in partnership with universities, right? And so they get professors in those universities

to teach these MOOCs, right? But these people already have jobs. They have tenure usually, right? And so they get professors in those universities to teach these MOOCs, right? But these people already have jobs. They have tenure usually, right? So they don't need to go independent entirely. Yeah, I haven't seen anyone who's gone independent entirely. I mean, I am unusual in that I have a PhD and I've been a professor

and I have a book that's given me a fairly big public platform, right? So there aren't a lot of people like that. There are a lot of people with PhDs and there are a lot of people with big books, but there are very few people with both those things. I'm going to say the thing. Who are also adjuncts, who are not actually tenured. So I'm sort of unique in that position.

I'm going to say the thing that people hate me when I say it. Why don't you start a podcast? I am. See? There you go, Jamie. I am. People get so mad at me. Why are you telling everybody don't you start a podcast? I am. See? There you go, Jamie. I am. People get so mad at me. Why are you telling everybody to make their own fucking podcast?

If I think someone's interesting, I think they should do a podcast. Yeah, I am. Why not? This is, I'm announcing this. I would like to listen to your podcast. Cool, man. Really? Beautiful. Yeah, no, I'm going to roll that out this year, too. Oh, I should probably say, because Jocko sent me a text message today. Jocko Willink is, his podcast is live now. The Jocko sent me a text message today. Jocko Willink, his podcast is live now. The

Jocko podcast just went live on iTunes. So there you go, fuckers. Talk Jocko into a podcast. Podcasting's exploding. It's a beautiful, beautiful thing. Well, it's the freest form of expression available. Oh my God. No one can stop you from just speaking your mind and making errors and corrections and debating things. Like, for instance, where in the world, other than a podcast, can you have a half-hour discussion on the word crazy? Crazy, yeah. I know.

And half-joking the entire time. I know. I mean, it doesn't exist anywhere else. People don't remember or they don't know that not very long ago, there were three TV networks. Oh, I remember that show. And a handful of radio stations and about three national newspapers, and that was it. That's how I grew up. And they all said the same thing.

I remember when Fox came around, everybody was like, what is this? Rupert Murdoch. What is this? Rupert Murdoch, as evil as he may be in some ways, he is primarily responsible for breaking that monopoly and allowing all this stuff to happen now. He's the one who came in and challenged the FCC and got that other band and established Fox. And Fox, people forget, was very, very edgy when it started. It still is in some ways, right? If you look at Fox programming, it's actually far edgier than the other networks, right?

But he had to do that. Yeah, Fox was always thought of as edgy. Totally. The Simpsons, you know, right? But he had to do that. Rupert Murdoch. Fox was always thought of as an edgy. Totally, The Simpsons. Yes, married with children. Yeah, totally. Yeah, so, I mean, Murdoch gets a lot of credit for that. The left will never say that, but they should.

Well, yeah, I mean, someone can be evil and still do good. Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of... I mean, I disagree with many of his politics, of course. But my God, he did a wonderful thing for everyone. I don't think any of them thought the internet was going to be what it is. No, of course not But my God, he did a wonderful thing for everyone. I don't think any of them thought the internet was going to be what it is.

No, of course not. I think nobody saw that coming. No. I remember thinking, oh, I'm never going to buy anything on this thing. Yeah. Maybe I'll read the New York Times on it, but I'm not going to actually buy anything.

You know what I read that's a staggering statistic? 39% of everything that's bought online is bought through Amazon.com. That's amazing. Remember when Amazon was a failure for years? No. Was it? Oh yeah. There was a joke that it should be Amazon.org because there was no profit. Really?

For years Bezos made not a dime. I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure for years he made nothing. That motherfucker's laughing now. When he was only selling books and then he started selling whatever, toothpaste and stuff, and still it wasn't making money. And then I don't know when- Dude, I buy archery products.

Oh, hell yeah. Sure. I buy archery releases and arrows and broadheads. And did you hear what he's rolling out now? What? One hour delivery. You can order something on Amazon and get it delivered in an hour. How is that possible?

I don't know. They're going to set up these Amazon outlets with sprinters. You've got people with wings on their feet. And then the Amazon buttons. You know about the Amazon buttons? You have these stick-on buttons you can put on things, and if you need a replacement, you press it, and now you're assuming it'll show up in an hour.

Yeah. Like laundry detergent. Boom. They're in an hour. Whoa. That's bizarre. But that seems kind of silly, because unless there's something like super critical that you need like this one item only. Like otherwise you're going to need a bunch of shell.

You're going to have a toothpaste button and a fucking toilet paper button, you know? Well, you don't have to have it. But it's kind of weird. Yeah, but good. Yeah. Oh, no, listen. It's great. What I don't like about Amazon is what I hear about the way their employees are treated.

What I don't like about it is I hear about the pressure that they're under and they have to run from one spot to the other and deliver these things and they're yelled at and, you know. Yeah, it's a big high-pressure factory. I mean, those are terrible places to work and always have been. Yeah. Right? But convenience-wise. I'm assuming they're better than the alternatives for those people otherwise they wouldn't work there i guess like sweatshops get a job sweatshops

in vietnam are terrible places but obviously they're better than the alternatives for those people who work in them otherwise they wouldn't work in them it's true i mean it's they have a choice between working in a sweatshop and being in abject poverty you know i'm not saying it's a good thing to work in a sweatshop or in an Amazon factory, but I am saying undoubtedly it's better than what else there is. Right. Whatever happened to that company that was making phones that were supposed to be more ethical? What was the idea behind it? Fair phone?

They called themselves a fair phone, but they fucked up and they only had like 3G. And everybody's like, you know, you can have no slave labor and everyone gets paid a fine wage, but you only get 3G. Right. Fuck you. I want 4G. You can feel really good about yourself, but you won't be able to make a call. Yeah. You won't get any pictures quick.

Right. But they have, there it is. Fairphone. Is it still up? Fair trade phone. Fairphone 2 now shipping. Let's see the statistics and see if it gets 4G LTE yet. Because if it doesn't, they can fuck off.

Because it was very limited. What you're saying is that you prefer to have slaves make your phone. No. That's exactly what you just said. I'm joking. 32 gigabytes of internal storage. You fucking clowns. How are you getting by? How are you getting by with that?

Oh, it's a good five-inch display. Gorilla Glass, I like that. Expandable storage, micro SD slot. But 32 gigabyte internal? Who's making that thing for them, too? I hope it's only fat, privileged white people. You make them work at Fairphone At Yale. At Fairphone. Look, I like how they got a black guy

with a brick phone. What the fuck are you doing? What is that point? Why do you have that guy with a brick? They give the black guy a brick. And he's standing in front of a swamp with people foraging in it. But why are they giving him a brick phone

from a fucking rap video in the 80s? Why does he have that? You're supposed to be selling these Fairphones. Do they have good cameras, too? What's the camera say, Jamie? The statistics. It doesn't say? It doesn't say what the camera is?

How dare they? I can safely say we're boycotting this shit. I just don't know how fair it really is. Where are they getting their minerals? That's what's important because the minerals. Fair trade generally is a scam. Is it? Yeah, it's nonsense.

Really? Well, what does it mean? Like fair trade coffee. Yeah, what does it mean? Well, all right, here's a perfect example. My friend owns Caveman Coffee, and Caveman Coffee is a coffee that we have. It is owned by a family in Columbia. It's a single family, single origin farm. So when you buy it from them, you are literally buying from the farmers. So like they,

they get it from the farmers, they roast it and they sell it. They hire all American labor and they, they sell it in America. So that's like fair trade. Okay. So what's unfair trade? And unfair trade is those people that live in those places where they have the nets, right. That make iPhones and they have the nets that make iPhones. And they have to put fucking nets around the building to keep them from jumping off. Like, that seems unfair that they have to live in these dormitories and that they're so concerned with suicide they put nets all around the, like, that's something you need to fix, right? Yeah. So, again, like, what's the alternative?

I mean, yeah, of course, but like, how is that going to happen? Should we sort of impose it from without? Should Americans fix those factories in China and Vietnam for them? Or should the Chinese and Vietnamese workers work that out? Well, Americans probably shouldn't get their phones made there if the people that are making their phones are being paid. So then you disemploy those people. Do you think those people that are making their phones are being paid. So then you disemploy those people. Do you think those people want to lose their jobs?

But how did they get employed in the first place? Did Americans create this problem by going over there to these slave labor factories and having their phones built there instead of having them built in Ohio? They wouldn't work in those factories if it wasn't better than the alternative. They're making more in those factories, undoubtedly, otherwise they wouldn't be in there. I can see that argument. Then they making more in those factories, undoubtedly, otherwise they wouldn't be in there. I can see that argument. Than they would outside those factories. But the only reason why they are making those phones

in those factories is because they make substantially less than someone who works in America. And if you look at the conditions that they live and work under, they're horrific. Capitalist development sucks in a lot of ways, right? But it's also necessary to get to something much better, right? So our ancestors worked in factories worse than those, right? But it's also necessary to get to something much better, right? So our ancestors worked in factories worse than those, right? But thank God they did because as a society,

we advanced tremendously because of it. So in quotes, Thaddeus Russell says, slave labor is awesome for the future. Right. I thought you were the one who wanted a slave-made phone. I don't. You want maximum slavery. I just think that I would like to, the Fairphone sounds

like an awesome idea. It does sound like, there was another company that had an interesting idea too. They were going to switch things out modularly. So like your screen could be switched out when a new, more improved screen came along, they could switch out your motherboard, switch out all the, it would be like different parts that it was like a segmented sort of a phone. And the idea being that what we're doing is incredibly wasteful. We have this whole unit as a phone and then we get a new one every year and a half, two years, whatever the fuck it is. And you throw the old one out and you get the new one.

What they're saying is, no, instead when they come up with new improvements, like a new and improved camera, you should be able to put that camera section and take the old one out put a new one in sounds good yeah why not i mean all made by slaves but who's making the other um what is that is that the what's it called project aura made by google oh okay interesting okay ara project ara, Google's also got a new interesting thing they're doing with their phones. What's their flagship phone called? Nexus. Nexus. With their Nexus phones, they're not constrained to a carrier.

So, say if you have a Nexus phone, it'll work on Sprint, T-Mobile, whoever's got the signal. And then you just pay Google. You pay Google whatever the fee is that they charge, and they make some sort of deals out with all the carriers. Is that good for us? It's good for you if you want good service. Oh, well, then it's good. Yeah. Then I like it. Yeah, because you're, look, if you're in a place where T-Mobile doesn't work, but you can get, you know, AT&T or Verizon or what have you, you have a Google phone at work. Yeah. If you have one of those Nexus phones.

Has any institution or organization changed human life more dramatically than Google? No. I don't think so. No. They're nuts. It's astonishing. That's a really crazy company.

For the better. I say crazy in a good way. I know. That's a good crazy. You can do that. That's fine. I mean, nothing has advanced human existence more broadly, dramatically, and swiftly than Google, and almost entirely for the good. Yeah, almost entirely.

But if you lived in the Bay Area, you wouldn't know it because they're the devil. Well, they're the devil because the people that are being forced out can't afford the homes anymore. Well, they're the devil because the people that are being forced out can't afford the homes anymore. I have a friend who was an executive at Google for a long time, and she just left recently for another evil corporation. But when they would tell me how much the houses in their neighborhood cost, I was like, this doesn't make any sense. There was a house in their neighborhood that was $14 million, and it was just a fucking house. I mean, it was just a house. It was a house. I know. I was just a house. It was a house.

I know. I used to live there. If that house was in Nebraska, it would cost $200,000. I know. It didn't make any sense. But what are you going to do about it? Nothing. Right.

I mean, what happens is, so San Francisco will no longer be a countercultural center. At all. Not at all, for sure. Nor Manhattan. But those people will move. They'll go somewhere else. Right. They'll establish a new hub.

Your spot. Portland? Well, actually. That's super counterculture. And then Portland's going to become too expensive, and then they'll move somewhere else. Eugene. Yeah, well, where I'm going, Salem.

Just right down the road. Yeah, so, I mean, it just, things move. Things shift, you know? I mean, was San Francisco always a countercultural capital? No, of course not. It started in the 1960s, right? It's only for about two decades was it anything important.

But those two, San Francisco and New York, losing those two, like I had my friend Judah Freelander who was in here a couple weeks ago and he lives in Manhattan.

He was talking to me about how much Manhattan has changed. It's all just bankers now. Totally. It's like it's all stockbroke money. So now the cool people

are in Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City and they move around. That's not a's all stock-broke money. So now the cool people are in Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City. And, you know, they move around. That's not a bad thing, necessarily. I mean, why does Manhattan have to be the place where all the cool shit's happening? It's true. It's a good way of looking at it. But it always has been.

So for a lot of people, nostalgia. Not always, as I said. Right. Only for, really, just our lifetimes. That's it. That's a blip in history. That's true. It's one way of looking at it.

But it's also, I think, in a lot of That's a blip in history. That's true. It's one way of looking at it, but it's also the, I think in a lot of people's eyes, especially in Manhattan, it's being overtaken by the evil side of our civilization. The people that are making money by just moving numbers around and fucking with interest rates and dividends. Yeah. Well, Wall Street is,

I'm not a fan, but partly because, well, tech, I'm a huge fan. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So Google in San Francisco is an entirely different story. Right. Because pretty much all they're doing is great things for us. Yeah, tech is the bright side of prosperity in my eyes.

Phenomenal. Like what's going on in San Francisco, although all these people are being pushed out of their neighborhood, what you're getting is insane innovation. I mean, unbelievably staggering improvements to the quality of life for people that are- And here's what's missed all the time, because people talk about inequality all the time, economic inequality. It's true that there's greater inequality now, but what no one talks about is that the poor live way better than the poor did 10, 20, 30, 50 years ago. And that's largely because of technology, right? There is not a person basically basically, in the United States who doesn't own a cell phone.

That's ridiculous. There's more cell phones than there are people. Yeah. Sub-Saharan Africa. How about that? Yeah. Sub-Saharan Africa, I think it's a majority of people in sub-Saharan Africa own cell phones now. Wow. Right? And, you know, I mean, that's something that was unimaginable just 10 or 20 years ago, right? This incredible magical machine that the very poor own, right? I mean,

that's an incredible advance in the way people live. Huge numbers of poor people live in air conditioned buildings. They didn't in the 1960s and 70s, right? They drive, they own cars or they have access to cars. Most didn't. Most poor people didn't until 20, 30 years ago, right? So it's, we miss this, right? There's this huge advance for everyone. Yes, it's true that the very poor are farther from the very rich now, but if the very poor are living better, and also, by the way, have much more access to power through social media, through the internet, through technology, right, than ever before. you can be poor and have a public voice now right you can certainly be middle class and have a large public voice that wasn't possible before when there was three networks and this kind

of balanced perspective will be available to you at renegade University launching in the spring of 2017 16 16 you think so next year next year well next year's is a couple you mean like by next year a couple months from now like yeah like the middle of next year okay 2016 yeah okay oh i thought you meant like a like a legit year no no no oh no 2016 okay yeah so what are you shooting for the summer yeah like mid middle yeah nice late spring we come back on when it launches totally work it again of course beautiful i'd love to we just went through three hours are you kidding me no it's incredible three hours crazy how do you do it i don't know We'll work it again. Of course, yeah. Beautiful. I'd love to. We just went through three hours. Are you kidding me? No.

That's incredible. Three hours. Crazy. How do you do it? I don't know how we do it. We just keep doing it. Thank you. Really appreciate it, man.

Thank you. You can follow Thaddeus on Twitter, Thaddeus Russell online. Where else? ThaddeusRussell.com. That's it. All the information is there. Thanks, sir. It was fun.

Really enjoyed it. Thank you. Love it. All right, folks. We'll be back tomorrow with Joey Diaz. Until then, see you soon. Thanks, sir. It was fun. Really enjoyed it. Love it. All right, folks. We'll be back tomorrow with Joey Diaz. Until then, see you soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.